skeletonprotagonist:

“Sometimes you hear that statistic about how if Barbie were a real person, she would fit the weight criteria for anorexia and her boobs would be so disproportionately big that she wouldn’t be able to walk upright. There’s a less fantastical version of that idea, though, that a generation of girls like me saw play out in Britney Spears: If you did everything you were supposed to do to become the Perfect Girl — did just enough sit-ups and cooed just so and showed just enough skin and kept up the lie that you were born only to make someone else happy — it all just might send you completely over the edge. I hear a strain of this idea in the macabre of Lana Del Rey’s music, which blurs the borders between life and death, between the American dream and a nightmare: “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” But Britney’s music explores this deep a darkness in only its subtext; her sad songs like “Lucky” and “Everytime” strike me as so intensely devastating because even in their darkest moments, they still put on the façade of pretty, like the girl who early on learned that trick of how to blot away tears without smudging even a smidge of mascara. Britney’s meltdown happened when I was in college, learning to hate the game more than the player, finally able to see larger and more systemic threats to my liberation than the feigned innocence of a pretty girl from Kentwood, Louisiana. Still, something about her breakdown felt too traumatic to fully process it at the time. Only when she managed to miraculously come out the other side of it could I acknowledge the terrible pain she must have been going through, could I admit that I didn’t know how Britney Spears didn’t die of it, of being a girl.”

—

Lindsay Zoladz, Leaving Britney Alone (via wizzard890)

“Listening to all of Britney Spears’s albums in chronological order is like looking at an Animorphs cover of a teen girl gradually turning not into a woman, but a cyborg.”

STRONGLY RECOMMEND READING THIS WHOLE PIECE

(via professorspork)

I did finally read the whole piece, and I’m glad I did. 

(via goldenorbrokenorlost)

threelisabeth:

a friend of mine told me about her friend i think from high school who was gay but not out, and he pretended for a while to have a girlfriend named Amanda who he would go see a lot, and they’d be all, come hang out with us and he’d be like sorry I’ve got a date with Amanda, and they were like when are we gonna meet this Amanda??? anyway he kept this up for like a year until he finally came out; and when his friends were like, “wait, what about Amanda?” he said, “IT’S A MAN, DUH.” 

i have literally never admired anyone’s commitment to a joke more

wolfinthethorns:

“All the grim superstitions of the North had been implanted in her during her childhood by the servants, who believed in them. They recurred to her now,—with no shrinking from the spirits of the Dead, but with such an intense longing once more to stand face to face with the souls of her sisters, as no one but she could have felt. It seemed as if the very strength of her yearning should have compelled them to appear. On windy nights, cries, and sobs, and wailings seemed to go round the house, as of the dearly-beloved striving to force their way to her. Some one conversing with her once objected, in my presence, to that part of “Jane Eyre” in which she hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, “But it is a true thing; it really happened.””

— Elizabeth Gaskell, from The Life of Charlotte Brontë.

(via malglories)