A Softer, Stronger Touch
New Start with Old Hearts
“People say I love you all the time - when they say, ‘take an umbrella, it’s raining,’ or ‘hurry back,’ or even ‘watch out, you’ll break your neck.’ There are hundreds of ways of wording it - you just have to listen for it, my dear.”— John Patrick
“Once you’ve taken a few punches and realize you’re not made of glass, you don’t feel alive unless you’re pushing yourself as far as you can go.”— Matt Buckner, Green Street Hooligans (2005)
It’s important to recognise that Barbie (2023) criticises both the patriarchy AND the matriarchy. Yes, the Ken’s are just accessories to the Barbies. Yes, they don’t have any say in the government they live under. That’s the point, you’re supposed to feel awful, you’re supposed to want the Kens to have their own agency, you’re supposed to want equality. The Barbie movie explicitly states that the way Barbie treats Ken is wrong, so much so that once he finds a safe space for his masculinity and individual identity he’s so excited to share it with the other Kens.
But they go overboard and replace a matriarchy with a patriarchy and now the same issue exists but in reverse. That’s the POINT!! THATS THE POINT!!! Barbie is not anti-men it’s pro equality PLEASE understand this
(via raymusterio)
“In Irish when you talk about emotion, you don’t say, ‘I am sad’. You’d say, ‘sadness is on me’ ‘tá bron orm’.
And I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while.
Something else will be on me another time, and that’s a good thing to recognise.”
—Pádraig Ó Tuama