S01.E06: Belly of the Beast

[tennisgurl]

31 minutes ago, film noire said:

If so, it's an interesting/ugly twist; Jennifer murders a sex worker (the motivation for which is so murky and off - hope they clarify that)

Yeah, when your serial killing people to empower women, your first question probably shouldn't be "what would Jack the Ripper do?"

[gigiann]

Just a word of caution:. Don't watch this show when your high!   Or maybe you should.

[Arcey]

On 07/04/2018 at 4:16 AM, AngelKitty said:

I never thought she was white. Actually when she started taking off her clothes and make up, I thought she was going to reveal she was a man.

I also thought she was going to reveal a penis. (Well, not exactly "reveal" - this is only AMC after all.)

Question about Kalliope House: the front door is painted red with peeling paint a couple of times in the ep, and when Verena is talking to Dominic at the end, it's a beautiful glass door. Where is the red door?

[voiceover]

Okay: I finally remembered what the whole Julia:Reveal! had pinged in the recesses of my Movie Memory:

Years ago, while that film was all the buzz, RuPaul complained that the Big Reveal in The Crying Game was hardly a surprise: "Now, if *Miranda Richardson*['s character] had a dick..."

[BooBear]

21 hours ago, icemiser69 said:

The dudes aren't faking it.  I have no clue if any of the women are getting anything out of it or not.

I was referring to the distress of it. Any rough behavior is in theory... consensual acting.  So the deep point they were making that the pretty people were being treated badly, well, not necessarily because it is acting. 

[film noire]

On 7/6/2018 at 7:13 AM, BooBear said:

Again maybe this is 1999 dating from the book but a woman like Julia in her natural state is all the rage in fashion right now.

That didn't feel dated to me  -- black women still face issues wearing natural hair (the Eleventh Circuit Court ruled in 2016 -- and refused to revisit the ruling in 2017 -- that a black woman wearing locks could be fired for that reason alone; her hairstyle).  Add in the demands high end beauty makes on all women -- the weird uniformity of almost everyone having sleek hair, a slender body bound by spanx so it doesn't ripple or move, and always perfect make-up based on "luminous" skin --  and Julia feeling forced to dress to fit that norm makes sense to me.  If Julia were a fashion influencer, the conformity wouldn't make sense to me, but as the keeper of the beauty closet, I buy it.

Quote

Yeah, when your serial killing people to empower women, your first question probably shouldn't be "what would Jack the Ripper do?"

Ha! (and ouch ; )

A study done of PornHub users showed that women search at a higher rate for violent porn than men do:

"While men still search for significantly more porn than women, search rates for these more extreme types of sexual content are at least twice as common among women than men...Those statistics make for fairly surprising reading, but are the facts Dr Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist, discovered when he was given complete access to PornHub's search and views data for his upcoming book. "If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women," he writes."

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/bm9w7v/why-are-so-many-women-searching-for-ultra-violent-porn

Maybe there's a twist coming to the porn room? (I doubt it, but it would be interesting if they upended the initial perception  - a second layer of reveal).

Edited July 8, 2018 by film noire

[Miles]

That video collage seemed far fetched, so I looked at the hottest pornhub videos for research purposes (yes really, the porn I usually watch doesn't have any women in it). Not even in 10% of the videos were the women treated roughly.

It also seems to be implied by the show that women being treated roughly in porn is some indication of misogony, when it's just that some men and women get off on it. There is also a lot of gay porn where one of the men is treated roughly. I'm usually not very much into that kind of porn, so I don't watch it, but I also don't assume missandry because of it.

I get a bit infurirated how these "progressive" writers kink shame to the max and think they are so great for it. They are so progressive, they are oppressive.

[Butless]

On 7/8/2018 at 1:22 PM, film noire said:

That didn't feel dated to me  -- black women still face issues wearing natural hair (the Eleventh Circuit Court ruled in 2016 -- and refused to revisit the ruling in 2017 -- that a black woman wearing locks could be fired for that reason alone; her hairstyle).  Add in the demands high end beauty makes on all women -- the weird uniformity of almost everyone having sleek hair, a slender body bound by spanx so it doesn't ripple or move, and always perfect make-up based on "luminous" skin --  and Julia feeling forced to dress to fit that norm makes sense to me.  If Julia were a fashion influencer, the conformity wouldn't make sense to me, but as the keeper of the beauty closet, I buy it.

Ha! (and ouch ; )

A study done of PornHub users showed that women search at a higher rate for violent porn than men do:

"While men still search for significantly more porn than women, search rates for these more extreme types of sexual content are at least twice as common among women than men...Those statistics make for fairly surprising reading, but are the facts Dr Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist, discovered when he was given complete access to PornHub's search and views data for his upcoming book. "If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women," he writes."

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/bm9w7v/why-are-so-many-women-searching-for-ultra-violent-porn

Maybe there's a twist coming to the porn room? (I doubt it, but it would be interesting if they upended the initial perception  - a second layer of reveal).

 

I took the purpose of the Julia reveal , to show how much artifice a woman has to layer on, to be acceptable in the outside world. No one would have thought that the character of Julia had  had her breasts removed prior to that. I thought it was a true and surprising reveal.  It's something mastectomy patients are sort of culturally forced into doing, to make other people comfortable, too; wearing fake breasts.  And of course the aspect of a black woman conforming to white beauty standards. That's also cultural and, frankly, forced on people to conform to. Everyone wants to be accepted and desired. I dont understand the confusion here, with thinking Julia was a man, etc?   Unless maybe people are so inured to this, that theyre blind to the burden of artifice that women are expected to undergo, and so they completely miss it?

 

Honestly? My first reaction to those results were, I'll give them credit when they are done by women, because men on a whole are biased when it comes to porn; to an alarming degree. In even spaces where women feel safe, as soon as something critical of porn comes up in a topic or just conversation, men will swoop in and bitch about censorship , and generally have an alarmist and hysterical quality to their posts about it. As if the big, bad women want to take their porn away.

Second reaction is, how was this testing done ?

How do they determine their subjects and results? Because a lot of men pose as women online (for various reasons), and Im thinking its at a higher rate on a porn site.   Still men on a porn site will outnumber women, by a large margin (and some women may be pretending to be men on there , too).   So statistically, I wonder how sound these results actually are. 

There is also the question of how they are defining and scoring violent acts?  There is a lot of misleading marketing in porn.  I've read about a lot of women who found some of the popular bdsm made porn enjoyable because they  say they know its all consensual, with the women giving interviews before and after the sex scenes, to reiterate that it was consensual and they liked it. But even some of these companies have had sex workers allege abuse. One of the top porn stars, James Deen, has been accused of sexual battery and rape , by multiple women, in multiple venues--onset and off. It's a sticky matter (no pun :)), trying to parse all this stuff, and Im not certain that a researcher can just wade into this in the shallow end and get honest results.

 

Third, internalized misogyny is strong. If you  grow up learning that you cannot be sexual, then the onus of desire is put upon the man to act. If you grow up seeing sex mixed with violence against women, this is not only acceptable as the norm, it is instructive, and it is what you would sexually imprint on, if youre a girl.

There is also the question of , Why are women looking up violent porn? It might not be solely out of enjoyment. It might be a way to deal with past sexual trauma; it may be to confirm their worst fears about men. Etc.

I would like to see more,  and recent, non-biased studies on that. Because we focus on researching men's arousal in this culture, and women imprint sexually in this culture, also, for one thing. Rape fantasies have been sold to women in  entertainement for years, as well as me, When being feminine is largely about being forced into sexual repression, as it is, and has been, in this culture, you are going to find that the results  of that are not going to be so straightforward, or pleasant, maybe.

Edited July 17, 2018 by Buttless

[Butless]

On 7/8/2018 at 7:06 AM, BooBear said:

I was referring to the distress of it. Any rough behavior is in theory... consensual acting.  So the deep point they were making that the pretty people were being treated badly, well, not necessarily because it is acting. 

That's been the company line, for decades.  Now with "MeToo, more and more women porn workers are coming out to  describe the sexual abuse they've suffered through, in the porn industry.   Also since porn is mostly unregulated  around the world, it would stand to reason that not all of the violent porn you consume is acting or consensual.

On 7/16/2018 at 7:43 PM, Miles said:

That video collage seemed far fetched, so I looked at the hottest pornhub videos for research purposes (yes really, the porn I usually watch doesn't have any women in it). Not even in 10% of the videos were the women treated roughly.

It also seems to be implied by the show that women being treated roughly in porn is some indication of misogony, when it's just that some men and women get off on it. There is also a lot of gay porn where one of the men is treated roughly. I'm usually not very much into that kind of porn, so I don't watch it, but I also don't assume missandry because of it.

I get a bit infurirated how these "progressive" writers kink shame to the max and think they are so great for it. They are so progressive, they are oppressive.

This is a fictional show, and they are making a broader point.  Their focus isnt on "kink-shaming."  The violence against women in porn isnt something women are making up in order to shut down porn. It's very real, and it's very mainstream.  Also, they mentioned that it was the top clips in the world. Not just the US.  If youre from the US and jumped on there, youd only see the US clips. Did you even sit through all of them, just curious. I didnt slow down the porn sequence, but I saw nothing unusual from mainstream straight porn in it.  Im curious as to what you saw that was so unusual?

If you dont watch any porn with women in it, then why are you jumping to assumptions that they are kink -shaming, I wonder?  The one kink that I recall seeing in this show is that of a man with a 'feeder' fetish.   And Plum was clearly being force-fed by this creep. She was telling him to stop, and he ignored her boundaries. He was a massive sexual abuser who didnt even look at Plum as a person. Just something to get him off sexually.

On 7/3/2018 at 10:21 AM, Jodie Landon said:

The kicker was when she told him he had to sit in her office while she ate it.

I rolled my eyes at the "They're the precious ones. How's that working out for them," line because it just isn't true. A lot of the people I  see in porn look like regular people with really bad makeup and stripper shoes. Pornhub offers a huge variety of it (or so I've heard....). I knew a guy that liked elderly porn (didn't even know that was a thing) so there's really no restrictions on what makes a great porn star. So that scene really missed its mark.

I think this is why I've lost interest in this show. I don't really like anyone except for Prue's friend. I  might like the guy that works at the coffee shop, but we really don't know enough about him. And I'm not sure if I like Julia for Julia or Tamara Tunie.

I think the point they werre making here wasnt that thin women are treated badly.

It was , ALL women are treated badly in a partriarchical society run by men, who largely exploit them..  Doesnt matter if youre fat or thin, 18 or 81.

[BooBear]

15 minutes ago, Buttless said:

It was , ALL women are treated badly in a partriarchical society run by men, who largely exploit them..  Doesnt matter if youre fat or thin, 18 or 81.

No that doesn't make any sense within the context of this show. It was Plumb who wanted to get thin with the surgery and they were trying to get her to accept herself. So they were saying a drawback to not accepting herself was being treated badly.  The porn room was the reason she gave up on the surgery.  I believe this is all of our problem with it... it doesn't make sense in that regard. It would make sense if they had a broader message. 

[Butless]

On 7/4/2018 at 4:13 PM, bobbyjoe said:

If Calliope House is setting Plum up (as that string of suspiciously consistently horrific dates last week might suggest) that’s one thing, but if the show is attempting to present stuff like the porn room as at all reflective of reality that’s another.

We’re told that the Porn Room consists of streaming the top 100 videos currently running on Pornhub, and when Plum goes in there’s all these brutal rape-like videos playing all over the place.  Well, what’s popular on Pornhub is easy enough to check (I’d joke “oh, the sacrifices I go through for Previously TV,”  but as a gay man for whom straight porn does nothing I’m genuinely curious about whether Dietland is being accurate about this, so consider this an anthropological project :-) )

As far as I can tell, there are essentially two ways Pornhub ranks videos, “Top Rated” and “Most Viewed.”  “Top Rated” doesn’t look on first impression anything at all like Dietland’s Porn Room, and many of the top rated videos appear to be solo videos of women.  “Most Viewed” of all time leads to the predictable Kim Kardashian sex tape and then a lot of various stuff like MILFs, lesbians, and standard variety.  I didn’t see a significant amount of BDSM or rough stuff, and what appears to be more popular than that appears to be women in control narratives, particularly MILFs, CFNM, etc.  (If anything, the question someone might be asking if genuinely going into a Pornhub Room like Dietland’s is “what the heck’s up with all Pornhub’s step-this and step-that fantasies?”— if I were Plum and I came out of a room like that I’d be less likely to be in a righteous rampage and more likely to go up to the kitchen and see if Verena would pull a mask off her face like on Scooby Doo and be revealed as the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud).

All this is to say, I’m still questioning whether Dietland itself is being disingenuous (and not a little sexphobic) in how it portrayed this, or whether we’re meant to again be questioining whether Calliope House is slanting everything to push Plum towards radicalism.

Why do you put any faith in Pornhub telling you the truth?  Th  show is fictional,as you know, and has a limited amount of time to get its point across. So it is making its point -which is a well-known one. This isnt a documentary where you can research what is being put forward as the literal truth. Their point in using Pornhub was to say, This is mainstream porn.

Pornhub is a place to source free porn.  They have no obligation to tell you the truth about what is their most popular porn, if it's going to bring their venture into even more negative focus. 

I dont get the sex-phobia accusation, but I've heard this hurled as an insult against anyone with criticism against porn.

Btw, I hate that I have to say this because it is unnecessary and Imnot trying to sway anyone pro- or con-, but I have nothing against porn.  I also have nothing against being critical of it, though.  Im sure you dont , either.  If you look atounf the net , though, some people react to criticism of porn as if they are babies whove had their pacifiers snatched away.

19 hours ago, BooBear said:

No that doesn't make any sense within the context of this show. It was Plumb who wanted to get thin with the surgery and they were trying to get her to accept herself. So they were saying a drawback to not accepting herself was being treated badly.  The porn room was the reason she gave up on the surgery.  I believe this is all of our problem with it... it doesn't make sense in that regard. It would make sense if they had a broader message. 

I think they have a message far too broad for the public at large, and that is the problem. Theyre expecting them to think critically through this show, and that seems to confuse a lot of people who want to be told what to think, and want it in black and white.

Just like the "incogNegro" word threw a lot of viewers off to thinking they meant Julia was supposed to be passing as a white person, it seems, the porn montage also has really confused people, who are comfortable with porn and how women are treated in it.  The overarching themes of this show is that 'no woman, no where' is treated well under a patriarchy.  That IS the context of this show. Plum is one of only two (reoccuring) fat women on this entire show.  The porn room exists for all women,  Verbena didnt just throw it up for Plum.  

In Plum's case, as the main character of this story, she is shown that the beauty myth ideal she was holding isnt the entire truth. That all thin and pretty women are not treated well in this society, That ALL women are exploitable, and ALL women are prey. Plum goes on to yell this exact thing to Stephen when her words are falling on his deaf ears. He has no concept of what life is like for a woman, let alone a fat woman, and he hasn't even tried to understand where she is coming from; he just condemns her and then tries to pathologize her.

It seems we have picked up differing understandings of what Verbena intended with those dates. Unless I missed something explicitly mentioned, Verena didnt set her up with those loser men. They were her dentist's picks And Plum suffered the all to common effects of men who were conditioned by our culture to treat fat women badly. Verbena says to Plum at one point that , "What if you are OK, and its the world that is wrong?" Which is correct. It is the culture we live in that vilifies fat women.  Thos emen , as well as Plum, have internalized it.

On 7/4/2018 at 5:19 PM, DiabLOL said:

I really don't know where you got the idea that I believe of those things but I guess I need to declare that for the record I most certainly do not. What I said was that I do not believe that women who aren't fat are going to devote their lives to helping someone like Plum. Given plenty of unfortunate and deeply painful anecdotal evidence I can say with great confidence that most thin people do not understand how a fat person feels to the degree that they will say any number of startlingly insensitive and downright offensive comments both in front of and behind the back of a fat person. Just come to some dinner parties with me.

A mere glance at studies about the infuriating and dangerous anti-fat bias in healthcare workers tells me all I need to know about how shockingly rare empathy and basic decency is. Plum has a few kind people on her side but we see over and over again that they don't inhabit her body in her world. Also how many terrorist organizations can you think of who formed out of deep empathy for someone else's cause? I can think of none. Yet here we have both Jennifer and Verbena Veranda. 

Which brings me to a huge flaw in the show that I never addressed before. There's a fatal muddling of Jennifer and all that drives them to do what they do which is to say that it is not just about fat women like Plum. Jennifer is coming from a deep rage about a whole variety of feminist issues so why such an unlikely investment in Plum who really just wants to wear that red dress and have a boyfriend?

I think Veranda is recruiting her to write about her new Baptist/ feminist issues. She said she realized her talent (writing), and she obviously is influencing young minds, for the betterment of women. It seems that simple to me, That she is lighting a firecracker under her ass, to get her moving in the right direction, with the education and psychotherapy. i dont think Verena is harmless, but I thiink thats where it's been going since the beginning. She doesnt seem affiliated with Jennifer, as f right now;l only Julia.

On 7/4/2018 at 10:19 PM, Madding crowd said:

I apologize if I read you wrong. There is so much fat shaming in this forum that I thought you were suggesting a fat woman couldn’t be interesting. Also, I’m a fat woman myself and have many thin friends who care about me and what I have to say.I think Plum went looking for Verena because she was once on the Baptist diet, and Verena wanted to take her on as a project.

I remember wanting to give up on the book because there were so many story lines and they never came together in a way that made sense.

Julia worked with Plum at Daisy Chain, so she knew Plum wrote the advice column. Lita was a Julia recruit, and may have sent Lita to recruit Plum.

[BooBear]

6 minutes ago, Buttless said:

I think they have a message far too broad for the public at large, and that is the problem. Theyre expecting them to think critically through this show, and that seems to confuse a lot of people who want to be told what to think, and want it in black and white.

No there is just too much confusing about this show. I am thinking critically that is the problem. The show wants me to put my knowledge of the real world on hold and listen to them. But they haven't written a coherent story to illustrate these messages in any convincing way. The show wants us to be just as brainwashed as the fictional Plumb but when the audience uses its critical thinking skills the entire thing falls apart. Yes are fat woman treated badly you betcha. But Plumb's recent problems are 100% of her own making. 

If the porn room existed for all women what sense would it make for the transgendered person there? She is freely choosing to become a woman? And I am guessing Verbena is ok with it. 

[Butless]

41 minutes ago, BooBear said:

No there is just too much confusing about this show. I am thinking critically that is the problem. The show wants me to put my knowledge of the real world on hold and listen to them. But they haven't written a coherent story to illustrate these messages in any convincing way. The show wants us to be just as brainwashed as the fictional Plumb but when the audience uses its critical thinking skills the entire thing falls apart. Yes are fat woman treated badly you betcha. But Plumb's recent problems are 100% of her own making. 

If the porn room existed for all women what sense would it make for the transgendered person there? She is freely choosing to become a woman? And I am guessing Verbena is ok with it. 

Then they made a mistake thinking that most of the viewers were coming to it with a basic understanding of women's issues, maybe, and that just doesn't seem to be the case. They're talking about issues that affect women, but that sadly  mostly get talked about in feminist spaces. Sole anecdotal evidence might leave some people confused. Critical thinking isnt just self-referential.

Regardless, if there is anything constant in the public viewing in the US, its that a whole lot of people want their characters in black and white, and they want to clearly be shown who to root for. Look through any forum on the franchise shows.

Transgendered people don't make a choice based on superficial cultural things,  like how a gender is treated. They make it based on which gender they identify with.  There are plenty of trans feminists.

[Miles]

On 5.7.2018 at 12:19 AM, DiabLOL said:

Also how many terrorist organizations can you think of who formed out of deep empathy for someone else's cause? I can think of none.

RAF?

 

On 6.7.2018 at 7:24 PM, mytmo said:

As for the porn room some women I know have told me they think that their male partners would rather masturbate to porn than have sex with them due to weight gain.  Fucked up as that is the women felt like the ladies in porn were better than them as they are more desirable as the porn actresses are considered as fuckable and these women as conditioned by their male partners are not.  Remember the whole let's make you more fuckable Plum makeover?

I mean if you have a type, you have a type. If your partner changes from the type you find desireable into the type you find undesirable it's hard to still get it up for them. I'm into dudes who at least have some meat on their bones and my ideal is a full blown bear. If the bear I'm dating would suddenly turn into an annorexic twink, I'd probably rather jack it to porn, too.

 

On 7.7.2018 at 4:10 PM, icemiser69 said:

The dudes aren't faking it.  I have no clue if any of the women are getting anything out of it or not.

Of course the dudes are faking it. Do you have any idea how much chemicals they have to directly inject into their dicks to even get them up?

 

7 hours ago, Buttless said:

How do they determine their subjects and results? Because a lot of men pose as women online (for various reasons), and Im thinking its at a higher rate on a porn site.   Still men on a porn site will outnumber women, by a large margin (and some women may be pretending to be men on there , too).   So statistically, I wonder how sound these results actually are. 

Yes, if it doesn't fit in your worldview it can't possibly be real. These sites rely on ads and ad networks. They know more about you than you know about yourself. The genders are accurate.

 

7 hours ago, Buttless said:

Third, internalized misogyny is strong. If you  grow up learning that you cannot be sexual, then the onus of desire is put upon the man to act. If you grow up seeing sex mixed with violence against women, this is not only acceptable as the norm, it is instructive, and it is what you would sexually imprint on, if youre a girl.

Internalised misogyny is the worst. It is so much harder to scrub than externalised misogyny!

I suppose I imprinted at a young age at all the gay shit around me. That I didn't even know existed, which utterly confused me when I first got a crush on a boy.

All that is to say: That is not how sexuality works! Again, just becaus something doesn't fit in your worldview doesn't mean it isn't real.

 

6 hours ago, Buttless said:

This is a fictional show, and they are making a broader point.  Their focus isnt on "kink-shaming."  The violence against women in porn isnt something women are making up in order to shut down porn. It's very real, and it's very mainstream.  Also, they mentioned that it was the top clips in the world. Not just the US.  If youre from the US and jumped on there, youd only see the US clips. Did you even sit through all of them, just curious. I didnt slow down the porn sequence, but I saw nothing unusual from mainstream straight porn in it.  Im curious as to what you saw that was so unusual?

I'm not from the US. But pronhub doesn't seem to filter by country. Why would they?

If you didn't see anything different in the porn room from your usual porn viewing you wwatch some kinky ass porn.

 

6 hours ago, Buttless said:

If you dont watch any porn with women in it, then why are you jumping to assumptions that they are kink -shaming, I wonder?

This show is clearly saying "If you like porn or consentual sex where a woman is treated roughly, you are a horrible misogynist!" and you seem to imply the same. That is kink shaming. No ifs or buts about it.

 

5 hours ago, Buttless said:

The overarching themes of this show is that 'no woman, no where' is treated well under a patriarchy.  That IS the context of this show.

Yes, that is the overarching theme of the show and it is bullshit, like patriarchy "theory" in general.

Edited July 17, 2018 by Miles

[Dizzychickstar]

I’ve been using the word incognegro for a while—I remember growing up and hearing it used to describe people who looked as though they had Black ancestry but passed for something else—not necessarily white, but a more socially acceptable other ethnicity-Hispanic, Italian, etc. (though one can definitely be both B and H and so on) 

It is not uncommon for me to have conversations about this actor or another, mention their blackness(as revealed through interviews, etc.) and have my white friends be surprised. “I thought they were this or that...” “Really?” “Are you sure?”  Think The Rock(back in the day) and the ambiguity of a Vin Diesel. Remaining racially ambiguous(when you are black) allows for participating in the privilege other non-black POC possess. The poster discussing visibility and invisibility got this right, I think. #2cents