I just want to yell so many good things about Britney Spears. Look at this parenting right here; rather than just twist their arms and tell the ‘smile or no McFlurry on the drive home’ she’s checking if her little boys are comfortable with the cameras and attention and if not, no problem baby boy, you go chill. And I have no problem with her staying to get more pictures, especially not when her other adorable kid wants to. I mean, it’s her job up to a point. And we all know for a fact she probably watched the film with both the little bugs in her lap anyway.
Considering what she dealt with and went through in front of paps….god, I love her.
people can say what they want about her supposed meltdown, but frankly, that entire ‘episode’ always made perfect sense to me. she and i are of an age, and no matter how young or old i was, i always understood perfectly why she did it, and thought it was utter bullshit that a court could order what they did, instead of reprimanding the many, many people that felt so entitled to her that they drove her to extremes just to get 5 seconds of peace.
and now seeing this kind of thing? she has just gotten more awesome.
i remember reading how she got herself a tutor so she could help her kids with their homework. not got THEM a tutor, but she got herself one because she wanted to be the one helping them. that’s a+++ parenting right there ok?
This makes me so happy :’)
She got a court order because she was, by her own admission, raising her kids like her mother raised her. The judge sent her to therapy and parenting classes to work out all of the horrible stage-mother bullshit she had to live through. I mean, she thought it was normal to give her kids cough syrup and whiskey so they’d sleep, because it’s what her mother gave her to knock her out when she got rowdy.
I think Britney is a great role model for adult abused children and is living proof that you are not trapped in the cycle of abuse.
The purest 90s kid experience is being so happy for Britney Spears in her new life
Terfs: wombyn are their ovaries!!! Ovaries make a wombybybynnn. Accept that u are a womynbdgnn you have ovaries !!!!
Me, a trans man on the danger list for ovarian cancer and is going to get them removed in the distant or near future:
not for long
You’re still female whether you have ovaries or not lmao
You heard it here first folks!! Females are females regardless of whether or not they have ovaries, so trans women are women regardless of their lack them. Well said 🙂
As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?
I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.
Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.“ He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot–although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF–and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.
Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)
I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship–barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real–and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work–to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).
What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.
I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not–and I know how snobbish this sounds–particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”–there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome–it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.
But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)
