The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

The Scarlet Letter 

All the world had frowned on her,—for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman,—and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died.

The Scarlet Letter 

...when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Their Eyes Were Watching God 

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Bathsheba, Far from the Madding Crowd 

90% of the time drag is a way for conventionally unattractive gay men to touch roided up clones without any qualms because theyre not seen as human and it depresses the hell out of me

i can't depend on anyone but myself tbh.......... like this is a fact lmfao. uh i dont know what im doing with my life n im fukken crazy i need to get shit under control and im dying not having a job or structure rn. i dont know if i want to move to la or nyc or stay where i am and try to make things happen. like i have 10k rn and i can either buy a laptop, a car, a phone, or a video camera and idk which one to go for first. i only need the car if i want to move to los angeles which i do because im very serious about acting but realistically there are very few roles for me out there so i would have to write them myself and to be a good writer i would need time to write which i have at home... and a laptop to write on which i dont have. the laptop is the necessity but the one i want is 2k but reliable but i dont have that kind of money to put down right now. if my last job didnt make me want to die i would go back to it in a heartbeat bcs i was making 3k a month but now i need to be like... a barista or something. and im not good at anything... im stressed. i also want to move to nyc when im yung but i would be by myself and bored as hell anyway so idfk! theres so much things i want to do still and can only do if im idle but i hate not working. i must b strong. unless i buy my camera and start making shit happen and soon im not fckn staying in the bay area another year and idc if it means going solo which lbr is like... the reality.

i want to write an in-depth study on why something like the night porter is considered art for the most part while something like the gestapo’s last orgy is not and i keep getting stressed out bcs this is the most problematic subject to tackle, especially since im not jewish and have no cultural claim on this experience to say what is tasteful or explorative and whats exploitation. tbh both have elements of both and the cultural memory of the holocaust was different even in israel in the 60s/70s than it is now (we associate it more with racial genocide now as compared to moral depravity, see: stalag fiction). both last orgy and the night porter use nazism/fascism as a background for their psychosexual s/m parable to play out against but one is seen as art or at least approaching it and the other is considered a derivative yet they tackle very similar themes. what makes last orgy stand out among the rest of nazisploitation is that it explicitly states the heroine is jewish which was rare in those films (usually they were coded or implied to be political prisoners to avoid racial allegations)... and the night porter were left to assume that she's in the concentration camp for political reasons which might have more to do with why its easier accepted as a kind of art/also considering its relatively high production values. but while the heroine and her captor are gunned down after a spiral of sadomasochistic self-destruction, Lise from last orgy gets her revenge on her own time on both her captor who dehumanized her and in some edits brings justice upon herself for the horrors she complied with to survive. last orgy to me is more a story of an individuals survival at the expense of others than night porter which cops out by 1. not directly addressing the racism of nazism and 2. using nazism in the loosest way as a matter of moral decrepitude in which sadomasochism is the likely outcome (though arguably from a sadean, feminist angle as the director is a woman and apparently a lesbian -- another reason its elevated to the level of art). and what both have in common is nazism as the central conflict from italian directors when the fascism of italy at the same time is more an apparent cultural claim for what both films try to use nazism as a metaphor for. i need to read more on this because i dont understand all of it or what im trying to say-- but i do think a cultural reevaluation of something like last orgy is a valid request because too often cinema is divided into exploitation and without meaning and art and with meaning even when the line is proved time and time again to be incredibly thin.