#his eating disorder is also heavily connected to his views in gender but that's for another day

[beanghostprincess]

it wouldn't surprise me that, despite sanji being the literal cook of the crew, he had an eating disorder (ofc trigger warning here for eds, child abuse, starvation and, y'know, sanji's background in general).

he experienced the most traumatic years of his life trapped inside a fucking cell, with a metal helmet around his head and only eating when his father let him. which was 'only when the kid needs it', probably. which leads to judge saying 'i couldn't even kill my son' and it can translate to 'at least i kept you alive'. and not to turn this into irl trauma, but abusive parents constantly use the 'keeping you alive and giving you food' excuse (the bare fucking minimum) to guilt trip you into thinking that they're good and that you're exaggerating how bad they treated you because, well, at least they kept you alive, didn't they?

so here, sanji sees food as a form of loving but in the sense of 'at least my dad didn't kill me. that's something'. so his vision towards food remains positive but only because of his mom. only because his love language is acts of service and his mom took everything he gave her, even if it was horrific, as a way of saying 'i love all of you. you're perfect because you tried and the fact that you brought me your food is enough to make me feel loved. you're not a mistake' despite his brothers and his father saying that he was, indeed, a mistake and weak for wanting to give food to others instead of just taking it for himself.

both ideas of 'someone who loves you wouldn't let you starve' and 'offering food to others is opening up your heart' coexist inside little sanji's brain.

so it wouldn't be crazy to think that, although sanji loves cooking and his best early memories of it are that book that kept him dreaming while he was locked up, and his mom's words, has a hard time eating food.

besides, sanji is used to giving, not taking. he's not selfish, but actually extremely generous to the point of forgetting about his own well-being. i don't think he actually thinks about how hungry he is until it hurts. until he needs it. he only ate whenever his father let him so he wouldn't starve, and the only thing that made him feel well about food was the fact that he could give it to the one he loved and needed it.

sanji doesn't have good experiences eating food, but only cooking it. it's a great representation of his personality as a whole, to be honest.

then the whole zeff thing happens, and he actually almost starves to death and learns what hunger feels like. but once again, zeff saves him and he's the one to be hungry for not letting the kid starve. which might seem similar to what judge did, but 'not letting you starve because i couldn't kill you' isn't the same as 'not letting you starve because i don't want you to die'. sanji learns the difference that day.

he didn't know somebody could be that kind. especially to him, someone who doesn't deserve it (he thinks he doesn't) because, in his house, love only came when you earned it.

and, you know, sanji's like that. sanji's selfless. sanji does everything for others. and so the guilt eats him up first. what zeff did is beautiful and amazing and we love him for it, but we don't know about how that affected sanji at a young age. which only makes him even more selfless and more of a better, kinder, generous person. and that might be bad, considering how little he thinks about himself already-

he learns that throwing away food is awful, and that you have to be grateful for being able to eat. grateful for living. so his don't-waste-food policy is obviously a big part of his personality due to almost dying of starvation and also owing his life to his dad (zeff, the real one, of course. fuck judge).

but that can almost be dangerous because refusing to waste food leads to forcing yourself to eat only because of his concept of what food means.

and then we have luffy in wci saying the whole 'i won't eat anything that you haven't cooked' which is precious and something very beautiful to say to your cook, but that only brings sanji back to 'starving is a form of loving' and 'you can't let someone you love starve'. and no matter how much he wants to force himself to push luffy away, he gives him food because he knows his captain will keep his promise.

sanji feels guilty, once again, but he ends up fixing it.

the thing is, after everything i've said, i don't think it would be weird to think about sanji viewing food as something external. something that isn't for himself. something that he only has control over because it's for others and not for himself, and it's a concept, a form of love, and not a need. because he does not feel hungry. when it comes to food, he feels responsibility and guilt and love... but never hunger.

hunger is, by all means, a form of selfishness sanji isn't used to unless his body is about to give up completely. he can eat out of pleasure and satisfaction and love for food, but he does it to train a selfless skill that may or may not also be selfish in the sense of 'wanting to be loved and useful'.

so here we have:

seeing food as a form of love because at least his dad wouldn't let him die, but he probably learned to push away the concept of hunger

seeing cooking as the most beautiful way of showing your feelings and efforts and taking care of people

not knowing the concept of hunger due to his own selflessness

scratch the first one, actually starving for others is a form of loving. he will never let the people he loves starve even if it means he dies in the process.

he can't waste food because that would be insulting and disrespectful. no matter the context.

and i'm just saying (and this whole thing is extremely self-indulgent and me projecting again and again) that it wouldn't be surprising to me if he had some issues when it comes to eating and making food for himself.

it's not that he thinks he doesn't deserve food, it's just the thought that he doesn't need it. going back to his past it could be seeing hunger as a form of weakness (not when it comes to others. never when it comes to others), both because of what his family taught him men should be like, and the fact that the manliest man he knows used starvation as a form of love.

so it's seeing hunger as something that makes you weak, but only when it comes to himself because of course, he wouldn't apply the same rules for him as for everyone else. he's just like that.

he thinks about others first, and himself second. always second. and the thought of eating and needing it only comes when it's too much. and when that time comes, the voices in his head tell him that he's weak. and again, i don't think he sees himself as undeserving of food because he has this whole thing about everybody deserving to eat. but he has never played with the same rules as the rest, always a few steps behind, so if he can't fight the thoughts in his head contradicting his morals, that's just how he is.

not to mention the 'don't waste food' part which also would make him feel guilty about not being able to eat if the thoughts of not deserving food and being weak for needing to eat become too much. he can't eat because he doesn't deserve it and because he's weak. and he can't starve, because that would mean wasting food.

so, you know, sanji is out of options here.

if some days sanji just casually decides not to eat- forgets to prepare himself a meal while his crew enjoys his food... that's just the way he is, isn't it? and if he lies about it, it's just another form of love, keeping them away from his problems.

besides, controlling hunger and controlling food is the only way he has to take control of his messy life. when something is out of reach, the unstoppable thing called life he has never been able to control, at least he can choose not to eat. he can choose to starve, this time, with the comfort of knowing he won't. he can choose not to eat this time, not like all of those times when food was controlling him instead.

at least the strawhats will never, ever, starve if he's around. but of course, nobody thinks about asking the cook if he wants to eat. that would be absurd. and it's impossible to think sanji would have some sort of issue with it! sanji, the cook, who keeps telling them not to waste food, not eating? that would be absurd and too selfless to make sense.

that's just the way he is.

#this headcanon is literally just me projecting my shit onto sanji ngl #*holds sanji gently* you've changed my life darling i love you so much please take care of yourself #why's he such a good person and why do people always treat him like shit i am violent #i swear all of this makes sense in my head #like he's a person who's always taking control of the situation only bc he feels like he can't control what he's feeling #and yknow feeling is for the weak and men aren't weak and yadda yadda yadda fuck the vinsmokes #his eating disorder is also heavily connected to his views in gender but that's for another day #tw eating disorder #sanji #black leg sanji #vinsmoke sanji #<- i hate this tag btw only using so it gets to more people bc i spent my time writing this ngl #red leg zeff #one piece #op

[heeres-suffering]

Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?” 

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life... 

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long. 

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t. 

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with. 

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat. 

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad. 

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake. 

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature) 

#bmc #be more chill #squipemy #brooke lohst #jeremy heere #jeremy queere #puppylove ship #puppy love ship #ot3 #ot4 #ot5 #polyshipping #darkfic #noncon // #n/sfw // #nsft // #richmo #mashed motato #oc #text

[thereislifeafterhq]

Quinn Fabray is 27 years young with a birthday on June 1st. She hails from Lima, Ohio but now lives in Upper East Side, New York. She is an Actress and looks a bit like Dianna Agron.

Full Name:

Lucy Quinn Fabray

Pronouns:

She/Her

Gender:

Cis!Female

Sexuality:

Lesbian

3 Positive Traits:

+ hardworking  + benevolent + adaptive

3 Negative Traits:

- manipulative - dramatic - sarcastic

Biography:

triggers: abuse, dubious consent, pregnancy  alcoholism, cheating, eating disorder

Lucy Quinn Fabray just wanted to be the perfect daughter. Except no one bothered to tell her perfection was overrated and that she’d never be happy trying to obtain such. So, for a long time, she strived for it anyway. By the time she started high school, she’d gotten a nose job, lost a lot of weight, and started going by Quinn instead of Lucy. However, it never particularly won her Russell’s favor. It was the appearance he wanted but really, appearances change so quickly. And it’s not like it ever stopped his wine drunk abusings. The almost nightly fights with her mother, when he bothered to be home at all. Always claiming he was going away on business.

When Noah Puckerman talked a rather drunk Quinn into having sex with him, Quinn didn’t entirely view it as the end of the world. Sure, it hadn’t been a great time and she had been saving herself for marriage and had definitely cheated on her boyfriend, but it wasn’t a problem. At least not right away. The missed period and the positive pregnancy test, however, made it a problem. She was sixteen, a sophomore in high school, the head cheerleader, and was about to lose everything she thought she loved. Except, even as she was kicked out, all but disowned by her parents, lost her spot as a cheerleader, and also her boyfriend, Quinn gained even more. She gained friendship in a way she wouldn’t have otherwise, a newfound appreciation for the idea of found family. And by the end of it, she had a daughter, someone who would love that daughter and raise her as her own, and her own mother back. As well as learned just how bad a man her father truly was.

The rest of Quinn’s high school career was a drama filled and chaotic as sophmore year had been, if not even worse. There was a lot of scheming and heartbreak. Cheating and lying and just plain being a bitch. Pink hair, a nose piercing, and a really bad tramp stamp of Ryan Seacrest. An attempt to sabotage Shelby, for Beth. And a car crash that landed her in a wheelchair for not nearly as long as it should have. However, through it all, Quinn had her friends, her makeshift family. The very people that would see her through just about anything.

In college, Quinn learned a lot, but also did a lot of stupid shit. Lying to boyfriends, seducing married men, it was the same kind of chaos she’d seemingly found herself in from the moment she started going by Quinn. Of all her chaos and stupidity, fucking her best friend wasn’t actually one of those things. It was rather eye opening and while she’d claimed it to be a one (two) time thing, it sparked something in her she wouldn’t understand until much later. It did, however, push her somewhat haphazardly into more and more relationships with men that would almost all end horribly.

Dating Puck, after Finn’s death, was, unbeknownst to Quinn, a last ditch effort to conform to a sexuality she had no place trying to be in the first place. He was in the military and often deployed, leaving Quinn home alone with her thoughts. Thoughts that she eventually bothered to go to a therapist about. Something she, admittedly, probably should have done long before then. No matter how late it came, therapy really helped Quinn work through trauma she didn’t know she had. An eating disorder that flared up more often than she realized, especially when trying to land specific roles. The emotional abuse suffered at the hands of her father. The uncertainty and chaos that surrounded her and why. She also explored her sexuality, what each failed attempt at relationships with men actually meant for her. The ways she’d sabotaged everything just to feel something. How the only time anything had ever felt remotely right was the night she’d spent with Santana. This, added to Quinn’s distaste for long distance, is ultimately what ended her relationship with Puck. Her honesty, along with his own, an admission of having cheated on her while deployed, meant their relationship ended well and without the chaos of prior relationships. 

In therapy, Quinn also learned how to forgive and started to make amends. When she was 19 her mother broke the news to her of her father’s other family and Quinn had been angry. Angry at her father, angry at the woman and her other children, even angry at her own mother. In a lot of ways, it was unnecessary and irrational. A response born out of chaos. A chaos Quinn was starting to get under control. So, she decided to make amends. Four years after their initial meeting, Quinn reached out again. First to Flora, the woman her father had lied to more than he had lied to anyone else. She was simply looking to apologize, to make amends for the way she’d acted. It wasn’t Flora’s fault, nor was it her children’s. In connecting with Flora, Quinn gained a second mother, whether she’d been expecting it or not. It was a welcome change and while she didn’t know what to expect upon reaching out to her half siblings, she knew one thing: it couldn’t hurt to try. Because she wasn’t looking for a relationship, she was just looking to say sorry. Everything else was pure bonus. While she managed to strike up a relationship with the youngest of Flora’s children, she seemed to strike out with the twins. Not that she could blame them, of course.

Around the age of 24, long after she’d learned, and committed to heart, that her father was not a man to be trusted, Russell Fabray walked back into her life. He grovelled and begged for her to forgive him, saying he would do anything. So, after talking it over with her mother, Quinn showed just how much of her father’s daughter she really was. She took every bit of pain and anger she’d been saving and laid it all out. Hitting every possible wound she could find, and exploiting that pain. Then, she lied straight through her teeth, told him if he paid off her student loans and financially supported her, no matter how much she asked for, she’d keep him around. Well, it wasn’t lying, per se. She did keep him around, but only for as long as his money was worth something to her. Within a years time she’d managed to not only financially support herself, but also her mother and Flora, sending the women a large portion of the money he’d given her. And like that, she was done with him, threatening legal action if he ever thought to come near her again.

Due to her father’s money, Quinn was able to set herself up in the Upper East Side and got to choose what films and jobs she took on as an actress. This led to doing a lot of indie and smaller films she found herself passionate about. Eventually, she’d land the role of Tess Larson on Conviction. It was her first proper break in the business and seemed to be the real start to her life, not just as an actress, but as a person. 

Quinn had never meant to fall for the lead on the show, Elizabeth Sutton, a British woman who lived in Vancouver and was a number of years Quinn’s senior. Then again, she never imagined Elizabeth would fall for her right back. The pair had made quick friends, sharing a love of dad jokes and rainy days, among numerous other things. And soon enough, what had started out as friendship had blossomed into something more. They decided to keep their relationship private, only telling a few people, because neither woman was ready to come out of the closet, much less take their relationship into the public eye for all to see. Elizabeth was coming off a bad break up and Quinn just wasn’t ready for the added pressure of the press to her first properly healthy relationship.

The older Quinn became, the more her body started showing signs of the trauma she’d endured in senior year. The car accident had done lasting damage, something Quinn had known. The slight limp when she walked, no matter how much she tried to correct it. However, the chronic pain was something that, while it didn’t appear out of nowhere, definitely got worse. It had been minor, more related to weather or having slept in the wrong position, but by the time she graduated college, Quinn found herself in pain, daily. Some days were nothing, a couple tylenol and she was on her way. Other days were harder. The pain was bad enough that even with painkillers she still hurt. And then, the worst days would come, the days where she couldn’t even breathe without hurting. Where she stayed curled in on herself, unable to move for fear of possibly blacking out because of the pain. So, she went to doctor after doctor until someone bothered to realize the damage that had been done to her body in the accident was still heavily present and likely exacerbated by her lifestyle. She was told to cut back on when and how she exercised. She was prescribed strong painkillers and muscle relaxers. The only problem? Quinn knew addiction ran in her family and didn’t want to rely on painkillers for everyday use. So, she went to more and more doctors until they found her something topical that worked for everyday use and when combined with the medications actually helped her function on her worst days. 

Quinn knows it’s only ever a temporary fix, that in time it might get worse. That she might lose her ability to walk again, either due to damage or to pain and that even if she retains it, the pain will never go away. It’s a frustrating fact of life and one that very few people in her life actually know about, but learning to live with. Learning to make the most of her life, no matter what it throws at her.

#quinn f #female #bio

[gracemulhollandstudio]

Notes/Quotes Taken From Texts/Bibliography Building

Women satisfaction with cosmetic brands: The role of dissatisfaction and hedonic brand benefits 

Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez, Patrick Hartmann, Sandra Diehl and Ralf Terlutter University of the Basque Country, Spain. 

Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria. 

Accepted 24 September, 2010 

“Research suggests that the exposure to pictures of good-looking and even slightly above-average looking females lowers the self-image of exposed women and increases dissatisfaction with their own appearance.”

“ This study analyses the effect of perceived instrumental/utilitarian and hedonic/emotional brand benefits on women’s satisfaction with cosmetic brands, focusing on relief from dissatisfaction with one’s self-image as one of four identified emotional brand experiences.”

So for context, what we see in the media can be of immense harm to one's view of themselves, which in fold brings out belittling ideas about your appearance.

“This research reveals that one of the mechanisms through which cosmetics advertising works is by lowering women’s self perception in the first place and then delivering relief from this negative feeling as an emotional benefit through the brand. However, from an ethical point of view, such a strategy is questionable, especially given the problems of eating disorders and body dysmorphia.”

“In particular, consumers are continuously exposed to imagery of highly attractive females who advertise cosmetic brands. For consumers this may lead to significant behavioural implications”

“Judgments based on physical appearance are considered powerful forces in contemporary consumer culture.“

“Also, multiple studies link personal appearance to positive reactions from others such as friendship preference (Byrne et al., 1968; Perrin, 1921) and romantic attraction.” 

“The individual is increasingly seen as responsible - not just for his/her behaviour - but also for the appearance and workings of his or her body. Consequently, to experience this connection and enjoy social favour, many individuals look for ways to improve their appearance and adhere to popular notions of beauty.”

 “In today’s society women are made to feel increasingly responsible for their body and physical appearance” 

“In addition, numerous advertisements present standards of beauty that most women cannot attain with the effect that most women develop feelings of dissatisfaction with their own physical appearance.”

“However, from an ethical point of view, such a strategy of lowering self images is questionable, especially given the problems of eating disorders and body dysmorphia.”

 “Researchers suggest advertising media may adversely impact women's body image, which can lead to unhealthy behaviour as women and girls strive for the ultra-thin body idealized by the media.”

“Although, Unilever’s brand is promoting their products with a message of “real beauty” by encouraging women and girls to celebrate themselves as they are, the “real beauty” ads still need to sell women on the idea that they need these products to become even better. In other words, they are still saying women have to use these products to be beautiful.” 

A Conceptual Model of Factors Contributing to the Development of Muscle Dysmorphia 

FREDERICK G. GRIEVE Western Kentucky University, 

Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA

“Muscle dysmorphia is a recently described subcategory of Body Dysmorphic Disorder.”

This sub category of body dysmorphia is very interesting to me because I did not know men would suffer through this.

“It is most prevalent in males and has a number of cognitive, behavioral, socioenviornmental, emotional, and psychological factors that influence its expression.”

“For years, the focus of body image studies has been on women; however, it appears that men are becoming more and more concerned with body appearance.”

“The disorder affects mostly men, particularly those who engage in weight lifting or bodybuilding”

“Muscle dysmorphia is a collection of attitudes and behaviors that are characteristic of an extreme desire to gain body mass.”

“Attitudes include a dislike of one's current body shape and a strong desire to change it through increased muscle mass, and behaviors include excessive weight lifting, eating large quantities of high-protein foods, use of weight gain supplements, and use of anabolic steroids.”

I find it very interesting how this issue is like the complete opposite to what it body dysmorphia is for most women. Most women have the desire to be slimmer but in this case for muscle dysmorphia these men want to gain more and more muscle.

“Individuals with MD are preoccupied with the fact that they do not perceive themselves to be lean and muscular enough, even though they are often more muscular than average people.”

“Individuals give up important social, occupational, or recreational activities due to the desire to maintain a strict workout - schedule; avoid situations in which their bodies are exposed to others”

Where as in the quote above the affects of this disorder are similar in a way with the people who suffer with it both try avoid social outings/situations as they do not feel comfortable with the way they look or the way others may perceive how they look.

“A key component to the development of eating disorders is a distortion of how the woman views her body (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Usually this is a distortion of size. Women with AN believe that they are larger than their actual appearance. The development of MD depends on a similar distortion of body size. However, in this case, the distortion is that . men believe they are smaller than what they appear.”

“In the model, body distortion is influenced by and, in return, influences, body dissatisfaction. It is the conjunction of these two variables that brings about the symptoms of MD.”

“The muscular ideal is conveyed to the population via a number of social influences, including family members, peers, schools, atWetics, and health care professionals, and mass media.”

Men also feel this pressure from the media to look a certain way

“Therefore, the potential is there for men to be as influenced by muscular body shapes as females are by thin body shapes.”

“While historically men have been perceived to be immune from social influences that endorse a certain body type, it appears that this is changing.”

One of the set texts:

Powers and Dangers: Body Fluids 

Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism P192-198

Elizabeth Grosz

“Relying heavily on Mary Douglas's innovative text Purity and Danger, Kristeva asks about the conditions under which the clean and proper body, the obedient, law-abiding, social body, emerges, the cost of its emergence, which she designates by the term abjection, and the functions that demarcating a clean and prop'~ body for the social subject have in the transmission and production of specific body types”

“What interests me here about Kristeva's work is the way in which this notion of abjection links the lived experience of the body, the ~ocial and culturally specific meanings of the body, the cultural investment in selectively marking the body, the privileging of some parts and functions while resolutely minimizing or leaving un- or underrepresented other parts and functions. It is the consequence of a culture effectively intervening into the constitution of the value of the body.”

“Douglas makes explicit here the notion that the body can and does function to represent, to symbolize, social and collective fantasies and obsessions: its orifices and surfaces can represent the sites of cultural marginality, places of social entry and exit, regions of confrontation or compromise.”

“In this sense, they betray a certain irreducible materiality; they assert the priority of the body over subjectivity; they demonstrate the limits of subjectivity in the body, the irreducible specificity of particular bodies.”

“Phenomenology is generally displaced in favor of externalization, medicalization, solidification.”

“Man sees that his "function" is to create, and own, at a (temporal and spatial) distance, and thus to extend bodily interests beyond the male body's skin through its proprietorial role, its "extended corporeality" in the mother whom he has impregnated and the child thereby produced, making them his products, possessions, responsibilities.”

Putting roles to gender/bodies etc

#perception

[nelleconley1-blog]

Gender and Sexuality Portfolio Post Two: Connection to Foundational Course Concepts

Nelle Conley

Gender and Sexuality 303

12.14.17

Gender and Sexuality Portfolio Post Two: Connection to Course Concepts

There are a lot of similarities when it comes to discussing gender, toxic masculinity, and male eating disorders. All of these similarities can be synthesized by conversing about gender as a social construct, agency, privilege and oppression, and intersectionality and the grasp it has over our present day society. This paper will elaborate on why all of these things come into play when reviewing the effects that gender within our society has on toxic masculinity and male eating disorders. I discovered four of my sources through EBSCO journals, and had a lot more success in doing so then the previous post; I think this search was more successful because I was able to do a broader search. I ended up finding a lot of journals that really sparked my interest too; a lot of the journals were about more of the interpersonal effects of eating disorders and how men specifically felt about having an eating disorder, and also how they got support to deal with it. This was especially interesting to me because we don’t usually hear very much from this personal perspective, and it was nice to have a combination of statistics and science mixed in with highly personal stories and experiences. I also found a book called “Males With Eating Disorders” which offers a lot of new ideas and resources, and I found an article on a website dedicated to eating disorders called eatingdisorderhope.com. My research for this second post was really interesting and I am very happy with the direction it went after the other post and excited about the direction it will go for future posts.

When it comes to male eating disorders, there is a very big emphasis placed on the social construction of gender. The social construction of gender is the idea that our assigned gender status says more about our identity than who we actually are as a human being. As discussed in both Gender Stories and Threshold Concepts, gender can have a huge influence over how a person views themselves. Threshold Concepts discusses how gender identity is a person’s gendered sense of self (Hassel and Launius. 28), and because of the social construction of gender, this can deeply affect how a person views their body in relation to gender. When relating this to male eating disorders, gender as a social construct plays a deep and crucial role in this due to toxic masculinity and gender roles. Men have expected roles of dominance and strength within our society, and this puts pressure on men to not experience emotion of any kind. For whatever reason, our society has deemed eating disorders a “female disease”, and has created statistics about the disease that are preconceived due to our notions about gender having an affect on this disorder. There is a common statistic that says 1 in every 10 people with an eating disorder is a man, when in reality 1 in every 6 people with an eating disorder is male. And from those, only 16% will actually seek treatment during their lifetime (Leichtman and Toman. 24). Due to this toxic masculinity influenced by the social construction of gender, men are embarrassed to seek help because their disorder is seen as demasculinizing.

Agency is something everyone wishes to experience and participate in at some point throughout their life. This is mainly because agency offers the perspective that a person has any sort of control in their life (Foss, Domenico and Foss. 16). Personally, I see agency as passionately fighting for the right to change your current situation. I believe that there has been a sense of agency when it comes to the discussion and slowly the normalization of male eating disorders. In the past, there was such a specific ideal about what an eating disorder was and what it looked like, and in recent years that has greatly changed (Thapliyal, Mitchison and Hay. 1). The discussion about men with eating disorders is starting to take on a form of agency, because people are starting to realize that it is not a gendered disease, and there is increasing research about the topic and what it means to be a man with an eating disorder (Leichtman and Toman. 25). The study done by Leichtman and Toman was done in order to “understand how men make meaning of their eating disorders. The intention of this research was to give voice to and provide insight into the male participants’ experiences” (Leichtman and Toman. 25). Because there are starting to be conversations and studies like this, there is already a greater sense of agency about the topic of male eating disorders than there ever has been in the past.

Privilege is when outside forces, out of the control of any individual, heavily influence the benefits a person can receive within our society. Threshold Concepts discusses how individuals can have high amounts of privilege without even knowing it (Hassel and Launius. 198). This is a difficult concept for me to relate to male eating disorders, because it can be approached from many different positions. I could say that women with eating disorders actually have more privilege than men with eating disorders because they are better able to reach out and get help than men are because it is more accepted within our society to be a woman with a eating disorder than it is to be a man with an eating disorder. But, that being said it could also be spun to say that men altogether are more privileged; since eating disorders are thought of as being heavily female dominated, it is undesirable for a man to experience this disorder, which relates back to women somehow being the inferior or undesirable sex. Privilege plays a huge part in eating disorders in our society as a general rule simply because our culture is dominated by so much excess food. Some countries outside of Western Culture never experience the types of body image issues that are experienced here simply because there is not the availability of food like there is here.

Oppression plays a huge role in the comparison of issues with gender as a social construct and eating disorders. Oppression is the discrimination toward a group or groups of people that is created based on societal ideals that are not matched. A link has been shown between peer bullying and eating disorders in college age men and women that shows how oppression can influence gender as a social construct to the point where it influences people to develop eating disorders (Kwan, Gordon, Minnich, Carter and Troop-Gordon. 2). The oppression that toxic masculinity inflicts on our society also influences male eating disorders, because there are strict ideologies about gender expectations within our society (Hassel and Launius. 197).  Toxic masculinity puts men into a box and requires them to portray specific ideals that are given to them through our societal expectations and institutions. Because of this oppression, men are less likely to seek treatment because there are such high “societal ideals that include notions of gender-specific illnesses” (Thapliyal, Mitchison and Hay. 2).

Intersectionality has a huge influence of men with eating disorders for many different reasons. Intersectionality is when different forms of oppression and identity combine to create an individual experience. It is when things happen on a micro level, but ultimately affect the macro level of humanity. This can be related to toxic masculinity because whenever there is an instance where a boy or man is told that he has to be a certain way or act a certain way because of his gender, it affects every man. The same can be said about any gender; if there are certain societal expectations that people are unable to match, it negatively affects everyone, not just the person who it may be directed at. When it comes to eating disorders and intersectionality, a big connecting factor between the two of them is media. The media constantly controls what we see on a day to day basis and ultimately influences how we view ourselves. Media portrays men as concerned with their muscularity and physical fitness and women as overly concerned with their weight, when this is just a snapshot oversimplification of what reality is really like (Andersen. 31). Boys and girls both need to be told from a young age that it is ok to be the way that they are and they should not have to overly concern themselves with fitting into a societal norm (Ekern. 2). Intersectionality can really make or break a society, especially when it comes to eating disorders, because how we treat people and how people view themselves and their bodies can have a huge impact on society. In Beauty Sickness, the author mentions how much farther we would be able to progress as a society if people were more invested in what they put out into the world instead of being so invested in what they saw in the mirror.

This topic is really personal to me because I have witnessed first hand what it is life to be a man with an eating disorder, and doing research about it has been interesting. It has been informative and important, but it has also be painful because all of the articles I have found have all related so closely to my loved one’s experience, and thinking about him having to deal with this on a level in which I can only read about is difficult for me. However, because I am reading about it and learning about how it relates to toxic masculinity, gender as a social construct, agency, privilege and oppression, and intersectionality, I will be that much better at understanding what he is going through, therefore being a better support. Although it is painful, it is so important to me to better understand the deep and lasting effects that toxic masculinity has when understanding male eating disorders, and this research has only aided in that understanding.

Works Cited

Andersen, Arnold E. Males with eating disorders. Routledge, 2014.

Ekern, Jacquelyn. "Eating Disorders in Men is Becoming More Prevalent and Deadly." Eating Disorder Hope. Accessed December 13, 2017. https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/treatment-for-eating-disorders/special-issues/men.

Flynn, Mark A., and Alexandru Stana. "Social Support in a Mens Online Eating Disorder Forum." International Journal of Mens Health 11, no. 2 (2012): 150-69. doi:10.3149/jmh.1102.150.

Kwan, Mun Yee, Kathryn H. Gordon, Allison M. Minnich, Darren L. Carter, and Wendy Troop-Gordon. "Peer Victimization and Eating Disorder Symptoms in College Students." Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 36, no. 5 (2017): 419-36. doi:10.1521/jscp.2017.36.5.419.

Leichtman, Robin, and Sarah Toman. "Men Making Meaning of Eating Disorders: A Qualitative Study." Gestalt Review, 2017, 23-43. EBSCO.

Thapliyal, Priyanka, Deborah Mitchison, and Phillipa Hay. "Insights into the Experiences of Treatment for An Eating Disorder in Men: A Qualitative Study of Autobiographies." Behavioral Sciences 7, no. 2 (2017): 38. doi:10.3390/bs7020038.