The Conformist Puns

there are many conformist, resigned people who minimize the virus.

many live in their negative world assuming that a cure will never come because all attempts have failed decades ago. as if companies and researchers continue to do the same, everything advances. there are those who do not trust Dr. Jerome.

There are also those with toxic positivity, those who want to show that it is something insignificant, they say that it is possible to live without problem.

and lastly we are those who do something. I am asymptomatic of hsv1 and even so I support the campaign for the cure of hsv as well as I make my monthly donation.

many of you do? ANY Those who say it's not a big problem really should keep quiet It is a big problem, asymptomatic or not, it is a virus that causes neurological problems, physical pain, exterior and interior. prevents personal fulfillment because you live in fear of infecting someone else and going through the same problems.

Fuck the stigma, a cure is urgently needed and not because of the fucking stigma, it's a virus that no one should live with, it causes real problems. We need a cure

"The name I made I'll trade for his."
"My whole life, I've just clung to whatever came along. [...] What if I'm really nobody?"

Whenever people mention Anya, they tend to emphasize her humorous and rebellious side, which is a huge part of her character, but her character would not be complete without the other side, which I think is really central to understanding who she is.

More than a sardonic rebel, Anya is a conformist. Sometimes she conformes due to external pressure, such as when Xander tries to get her to act like a normal human. But what is often overlooked is that Anya wants to conform. She'll read something or watch something on a TV show and she'll take it as the gospel truth. Just as Xander tries to get Anya to conform to his idea of normal, Anya works to get Xander to conform to hers, and their ideas of normalcy aren't that far apart.

Anya is very insistent on defining her relationship to Xander. She wants their relationship to conform to the types of relationship that other humans are having. Many of her ideas of what such a relationship is supposed to be like seems to come from TV (for example the idea that you can get over someone by sleeping with them).

And she enjoys her job at the Magic Box, not just because it gives her money, but because it gives her purpose and a role. She is a part of the capitalist machine. She is an American. She belongs.

And she hates rule breaking, ambiguity and wishy-washy subjectivity.

But despite all this, Anya struggles, because parts of her is both unable and unwilling to conform.

That is what makes Anya so relatable to me. Society is weird. It puts all these insane demands on us. It forces us to consider ourselves as members of closed categories of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, etc. We yearn for belonging, but the more with feel as though we belong, the more suffocated we feel.

I think we are all ex-demons trying and not trying to be human.

Here is an old essay I wrote about the ways in which the truth about subjectivity is constructed in an American cosmetic makeover show called The Swan. The themes I explored within this essay some years ago seem highly relevant given the age of identity politics, where people seldom realise their personal ‘choices’ don’t exist outside of existing power structures.

“Selfhood is now seen to be in a state of perpetual crisis in the modern West” says Nick Mansfield (2000, p13). This could not be reflected more visibly so than in the fetishism of cosmetic makeover culture amongst women in recent years, despite feminist critique. Using post-structurialist psychoanalysis of the media, this essay will discuss how the cosmetic makeover show, ‘The Swan’ (Haworth 2012), constructs certain subjectivities about women as normal, abnormal and self-evident rather than revealing the contestants ‘true’ self or addressing the complex power relations at play.

To understand this we will primarily focus on Foucault’s concepts of subjectivity, governmentality and power in order to discuss how the contestants are disillusioned by their freedom to choose and in turn, voluntarily subject themselves to ‘normalization’.

I will also address how discourse on neo-liberalism, authenticity and American individualism gained value in the western psyche thus fuelling empowering ‘self-help’ media narratives in American cosmetic makeover culture. Finally, we will look at the role of televisual affect in cosmetic makeover shows and how our emotions are commoditized to appeal to normative processes.

The Swan was an American cosmetic makeover television show in 2004 that transformed insecurity-ridden women (the ugly duckings) into beautiful confident swans through a series of extensive procedures, fitness regimes and rigorous styling as well as counselling (Show summary:TV.com).

In order to be crowned the ultimate swan, the contestant must compete in the finale pageant amongst other women in order to reveal the success of their transformations. All of the women who enter the show suffer from a number of body confidence issues and have suffered consequently with relationship issues; from bullying to marriage failure.

This is significant in highlighting the connection between the inner and outer self. In light of this, we will focus on the case of contestant Beth, a ‘swan’ who is unhappy with her appearance, particularly after giving birth and has become distant towards her husband, which

Religions usually reflect the society that it is in. But I find the animist character of Shintoism and the conformist character of Japan contradictory. In Shintoism, the Kamis are diverse, so much so that everything from dead people to entire mountains can become a Kami. Meanwhile, diversity is shunned in Japan as people try to act like they are the same as everyone else even if they privately see themselves as unique individuals. Isn't conformist societies supposed to only come from monotheist or Abrahamic religions where people try to conform to social norms to be pure and away from sin? Isn't having diverse gods suppose to indicate cultural diversity amongst people too, such as a tribal societies being polytheistic as each tribe worships its own god? How can the existence of a culture as self-contradictory as that of the Japanese be explained?

I have come up with this theory: traditional Japanese culture is heavily socially stratified. Hence, unlike in less socially stratified cultures, the difference between how society treats individuals and how society sees gods do not have to converge. People will just see the gods getting to enjoy a much higher degree of diversity than themselves and think that it is totally normal because the gods are from a different "social class" than the people and it is impossible to cross the barriers between "social classes". Is this a plausible explanation for the seemingly self-contradictory nature of Japanese culture?

https://preview.redd.it/lt07pgy7ppa71.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=e129940ac3ea1c3fce747e1ec03d8883b819dd01

In 1941, Harper's Magazine published an essay by journalist Dorothy Thompson called "Who Goes Nazi?" It invites readers to look at a collection of characters at a hypothetical gathering in a drawing room somewhere, naming each with a letter of the alphabet and determining whether they would support a fascist movement if it gained power. In the 80 years since, the piece has become a frequent media touchstone, colorfully insightful as it is about the psychological impulses undergirding fascist leanings, and in the past 5 years in particular, it has seen a series of tributes that update its premise and its characters to fit modern times.

Most of the time, when film and television includes a character with totalitarian inclinations, they tend to focus on a Mr. C: someone with unchecked ambition and bottomless resentment that has curdled into a desire to see their enemies crushed under their bootheel. Sometimes a minor character is a Young D, someone whose sociopathy is put to brutal use by the machinery of the corporate state; occasionally someone will turn out to be a Mr. J, a successful member of a minority group who puts money and class above his own race and foolishly downplays the threat that ethnic cleansing poses to his life. The Conformist, a film by Bernardo Bertolucci (director of Criterion selections The Last Emperor and La Commare Secca), portrays an archetype that is much less well-represented in fiction but arguably much more instrumental as to how fascism takes power: Mr. B, a man for whom success is success, no matter how success is defined - someone who always goes along to get along. Marcello Clerici is jus such a character, living in Italy in the 1930s, among the original Fascists with a capital F. We learn that he was a leftist philosophy student in college, and yet he has changed to fit the times, drifting clumsily into the service of the secret police. He goes to confession even though he professes no guilt for his sins; he plans to marry even as he flirts with another woman on his honeymoon and represses his bisexuality. He is willing to kill, all in the name of scoring brownie points with blackshirts.

Jean-Louis Tri