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johannestevans · 1 year

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Update - 27/02/2023

Good evening, good evening, good evening!

I've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes this week - I'm about halfway into a new Norse mythology-based novella that I'm very excited about, as well as a few other short stories and essays; I've also been getting some of the planning done for this year's Monstrous May! The prompts will be out some time around mid-March, which will give people a bit more than a month to prep and plan if you prefer to plan out your fills in advance.

If you haven't taken part before, the Monstrous May Challenge is a prompt challenge that I run every year, and this is going to be the third year going - I set up a prompt for every day of the month of May, all themed around different monsters!

If you're interested in seeing the last few year's prompts, these were 2021's, and these were 2022's.

I don't have a wide variety by way of media recommendations this week, but I did enjoy a double bill with the boys that I think is worth recommending:

Calendar Girls (2003, dir. Nigel Cole) - This is about a Women's Institute chapter (the WI is a kind of British club for women to do hobbies, charity work, and community activities together) who want to raise money for a leukaemia charity after the death of one of their husbands, so they do a nude calendar. Because they're all older women from Yorkshire, it becomes a huge media sensation. Helen Mirren and Julie Walters star, but every woman on this cast is fucking class, and it's such a fun, silly movie.

The Full Monty (1997, dir. Peter Cattaneo) - This is about a group of unemployed ex-steelworkers in Sheffield, suffering the after-effects of Thatcher's Britain - after the Chippendales (a male strip group) come to town, they decide to learn to dance and put on their own strip show where they, unlike the Chippendales, will give their audience "the full monty" - they'll be completely naked.

These two films came out half a decade from each other, and while both are set in the Yorkshire, they offer starkly and drastically different windows into life in the two counties (North and South) that are largely divided by class and gender. Both are explicitly about mainly cis heterosexual people (there is a canonical gay couple in the main cast in the Full Monty who get together during the course of their stripping, and they're adorable) navigating work that is adjacent to sex work, and a lot of the shame that that comes with.

Calendar Girls is about middle and upper class white women, many of whom are retired or running their own businesses, in a small country village - these are quite affluent women, and their difficulty in fundraising is depicted far more as coming from the boring nature of WI offerings rather than as a shortage of money in the community.

Throughout the film, they go, "No, no, we won't be naked, we'll be nude," and there's continuous repetition of the idea of the calendar as "art", and therefore far more elevated over mere pornography, even though the idea for doing the nude calendar is inspired by Helen Mirren's character paging through her teenage son's titty mags and then seeing a sexy nude calendar at her local mechanic's.

While there's of course a lot of nudity in the film, it's largely not extremely sexualised and is artistically posed - most of the women don't really discuss or seem to have active sex lives, again because these are affluent women for whom such things would be largely considered very gauche, even having posed nude for this calendar.

The Full Monty is wholly different.

This is not a film about affluent or well-off men - the vast majority of them are working class lads who were basically left without options after all the factories closed, all of whom are hunting for jobs that aren't there between picking up their dole every week: the most well-off member was previously the foreman at the factory, and he's in the same boat as the men he used to manage. Of the rest of the crew, the majority of them are white with one of them Black (played by Paul Barber, my beloved), and two of the lads, as I've said, are queer.

There's far less pretense in here about their strip show being about elevated high art - the lads quite rightly note that the women who'll want to see stripshows want to because they think men are hot, and that it's a good laugh seeing strippers. There's a moment where they're discussing a woman in a magazine, discussing the size of her breasts and then saying, "Oh, I wasn't criticising her personality, just her tits," and they then talk about how when they're dancing on stage, the women in the audience are going to be discussing them in the same objectifying manner.

This is a film that's broadly about masculinities and the shame of not being able to support their households financially with the pittance they're given on the dole, and how disposable they feel, especially because Robert Carlyle's character primarily wants to pay his arrears in child support to his ex-wife, and is very hostile to her new boyfriend because of how insecure he makes him feel while already feeling awful about his position.

Calendar Girls is a film about quite affluent women who are doing "artistic" nudity to raise additional money for a charitable cause - The Full Monty is effectively about a group of working class men who are doing one of the more acceptable forms of sex work for survival. The fictional town of Knapley for Calendar Girls is based on Rylstone - that's only an hour and a half away from Sheffield by car, but they live very, very different lives. Even just the panning shots are starkly different, Calendar Girls filled with beautiful sweeping shots of the Yorkshire moors, swelling green hills and blue skies, and Sheffield continuously showing shots of a dilapidated and neglected town, a car submerged in the canal, the towers from a factory no longer belching out steam, buildings half falling down and left empty.

There's just one more point of comparison I'd like to make, and one of my favourite aspects of The Full Monty - so, throughout Calendar Girls, a lot of these women are quite anxious about ageing and the way that their bodies look now that they're in middle age, fearing that they're no longer attractive or as desirable as they were. They talk about wrinkles, breast size, sagging, et cetera.

In The Full Monty there is a little insecurity from the lads as a whole, especially from the foreman and Horse both about being older men, and from the wee ginger lad about having "pigeon tits" (they're very cute) - but my favourite subplot is actually about Mark Addy's character, Dave. Dave is fat, and his friends make a lot of jokes about his being fat and therefore undesirable, and a lot of his insecurity about actually doing the stripping is anxiety around his weight and a lot of fear and anxiety about being undesirable. we see him a few times being intimate with his girlfriend and panicking that she's not attracted to him, and ultimately ending up feeling very empowered by doing the stripping.

Both movies obviously have those themes of boosting esteem and feeling somewhat more empowered through being viewed and presenting themselves in these desirable contexts, but the plotline with Dave is far more developed and considered than any of those in Calendar Girls, and is super impactful.

Mark Addy is also hot as fuck in this role, but that's my typical slutty commentary on most films.

Anyway, I've seen both of these films a bunch of times, and despite their numerous respective flaws, I absolutely think they're both work checking out and watching, especially The Full Monty. The latter is honestly one of those films that is just watchable again and again, and I love it to fucking bits. The soundtrack alone makes it a triumph.

Anyway!

New Works Published

Fiction Short: Without Mercy

2.6k, rated M, M/M. A retired mercenary seeks out another Spartan — the man, in fact, responsible for the deaths of his family. Featuring massage, guilt, banter, back-and-forth.

On Medium / / On Patreon

Blog Post: Advice on Being A Slut

Anonymous asked:

Possibly an odd question, but……do you have advice on how to be a slut? I’m recently out as a gay trans man, in my 30’s, only ever been with straight cisgender men, and I have no idea where to start. Being on testosterone has helped with the dysphoria, but I can’t seem to let go of old habits from when I was a girl having sex with guys. You can ignore this if you don’t feel comfortable answering, I just thought given the nature of your blog you might have some really good insights

This is a really big post digging into some of the differences between M/F casual dating culture and M/M cruising culture, how it feels to go between the two as a trans man, and also some more practical slutty tips!

On Tumblr.

This is another post from the same asker, following up a bit more on navigating trauma responses from disrespectful and coercive partners, and also on communicating in the bedroom. Also on Tumblr.

I've been answering more asks of recent, which I'm loving by the way!

Apart from advice stuff, I absolutely love getting asks about character or analysis topics, I really feel like I'm easing into a period of writing a lot more non-fiction, and I'm super excited about it!

Writing non-fiction alongside my fiction always comes super naturally to me, I just rarely publish as much of the non-fiction very formally, so I'm really into the idea of going a bit more of it going forward.

Oh, and if you have any particular requests or hopes for Monstrous May this year, feel free to hop into my asks and let me know!

#monstrous may challenge #the full monty #calendar girls #update

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