I am apologizing if this is long but, I think it needs to be said.
First let me say this. All celebrities are problematic. Margarita is problematic. Sebastian is problematic. If you try to say otherwise. You’re a liar.
Sebastian could be considered problematic because he wears leather. Sebastian could be problematic because he might smoke. Sebastian could be problematic because of some negative fan encounters.
But the reason people like him is because he is a good person (from what we see). For the most part he knows how to treat his fans. He connects with his fans. He talks to his fans. He makes an effort to talk and connect with his fans. He knows how to be a “good” celebrity. He has a lot of younger fans looking up to him and I think that he realizes that. He understands how to act in the public eye. Therefore, he can “get away” with the problematic things. The good outweighs the bad in a sense.
Margarita needs to learn how to act. She needs to learn that when you are in the public eye people watch you, especially when you are dating someone like Sebastian Stan. When most of the people liked who you were before you started dating him. That says something. When people say that they like you better when you don’t post about him. That says something. She needs to understand that sometimes it is okay to say things and sometimes it is not. She needs to learn how to act.
If she was a nicer person on social media. If she supported her work. Made an effort to speak to her fans (NOT THE ONES RUNNING SEBASTIAN STAN FAN ACCOUNTS). The real fans. The fans who like her for her. Made an effort to let be herself. I have a feeling that a lot more people would like her. I think that people would allow her to “get away” with the problematic things.
One reason I think that we are so hard on her is because she doesn’t give us anything positive to say. She doesn’t work on her acting. She doesn’t make an effort to open herself up. (Yes, Sebastian is private, but he makes the effort to talk and connect with us.) We don’t need to know every aspect of her life. But maybe something small. Like more Betty photos. Maybe more photos of her. More photos of NYC. Give us small aspects.
Don’t give us the constant Sebastian Stan photos. Don’t give us the likes on the Sebastian Stan fan accounts. Don’t give us the coke picture. Or the vague post. Don’t make us guess on anything. It’s stupid and childish. Or the stupid “thehatstayson…” comments. No. Just stop. No one likes when anyone does that. I hate it when my fave celebrities do it. So when someone I don’t like does it. It’s even more annoying.
Give us the old Margarita. Give us the photos of Betty and going out with your friends. Give us the dancing Margarita. Give us the Margarita who likes her fan accounts. Give us the paintings and the rest of the small looks. Give us the positive things to talk about.
It is annoying because we know its there. We know that you can be someone that we could possibly like. BUT she makes it so hard to like her now and days.
We don’t like her because of her attitude. We don’t like her because of the way she presents herself. We don’t like the fake, I am better than you attitude she has. We don’t like her acting. We don’t like her because she hasn’t given us a reason to. We don’t care that she is dating Sebastian. I don’t care if you have been a fan of Margarita for a long time. You have to admit that she has changed since she starting dating Sebastian.
She just needs to change her attitude and be nicer on social media. Be nicer to your fans. Be nicer to the people who support you. Not to the fans who only care about you since you are dating their fave.
When applied to a family, the gaslight treatment is a special form of dysfunction. It happens when you, a child, receive messages or encounter experiences within the family which are deeply contradictory. Messages which are opposing and conflicting; experiences which can’t both be true. When you can’t make sense of something, it’s natural to apply the only possible answer:
“Something is wrong with me.”
Today, scores of children are growing up under a gaslight of their own. And scores of adults are living their lives baffled by what went on in their families, having grown up thinking that they, not their families, are crazy.
I have seen gaslighting cause personality disorders, depression, anxiety, and a host of other lifelong struggles. Receiving contradictory messages that don’t make sense can shake the very ground that a child walks on.
The Four Types of Child Gaslighting:
1. The Double-Bind Parent: This type was first identified by Gregory Bateson in 1956. The double-bind mother has been linked by research to the development of schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder. This type of parent goes back and forth unpredictably between enveloping (perhaps smothering) the child with love and coldly rejecting him.
The Message: You are nothing. You are everything. Nothing is real. You are not real.
The Gaslight Effect: As an adult, you don’t trust yourself, your validity as a human being, your feelings, or your perceptions. Nothing seems real. You stand on shaky ground. You have great difficulty trusting that anyone means what they say. It’s extremely hard to rely on yourself or anyone else.
2. The Unpredictable, Contradictory Parent: Here, your parent might react to the same situation drastically differently at different times or on different days, based on factors that are not visible to you. For example a parent who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs one day and not the next; a parent who is manic at times, and depressed other times, or a parent who is extremely emotionally unstable. Whatever the reason for the parent’s opposing behaviors, you, the innocent child, know only that your parent flies into a rage one moment and is calm and seems normal the next.
The Message: You are on shaky ground. Anything can happen at any time. No one makes sense.
The Gaslight Effect: You don’t trust your own ability to read or understand people; you have difficulty managing and understanding your own emotions, and those of others. You struggle to trust anyone, including yourself.
3. The Appearance-Conscious Family: In these families, style always trumps substance. All must look good, or maybe even perfect, especially when it’s not. There’s little room for the mistakes, pain, or natural human shortcomings of the family members. The emphasis is on presenting the image of the ideal family. Here, you experience a family which appears perfect from the outside, but which is quite imperfect, or even severely dysfunctional, on the inside. This can stem from Achievement / Perfection focused parents (as described in Running on Empty), or from narcissistic parents.
The Message: You must be perfect. Natural human flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses must be hidden and ignored. You are not allowed to be a regular human being.
The Gaslight Effect: You feel deeply ashamed of yourself and your basic humanness. You ignore your own feelings and your own pain because you don’t believe it’s real, or that it matters. You tend to see and focus on only the positive things in your life, which fit into a particular template. You are extremely hard on yourself for making mistakes, or you put them out of your mind and simply pretend they didn’t happen. You may be missing out on the most important parts of life which make it worthwhile: the messy, real world of intimacy, relationships and emotion.
4. The Emotionally Neglectful Family (CEN): In this family, your physical needs may be met just fine. But your emotional needs are ignored. No one notices what the children are feeling. The language of emotion is not used in the home. “Don’t cry,” “Suck it up,” “Don’t be so sensitive,” are frequently uttered by the CEN parent. The most basic, primary part of what makes you you (your emotional self) is treated as a burden or non-existent.
The Message: Your feelings and needs are bad and a burden to others. Keep them hidden. Don’t rely on others, and don’t need anything. You don’t matter.
The Gaslight Effect: You have been trained to deny the most deeply personal, biological part of who you are, your emotions, and you have dutifully pushed them out of sight and out of mind. Now, you live your life with a deeply ingrained feeling that you are missing something that other people have. You feel empty or numb at times. You don’t trust yourself or your judgments because you lack your emotions to guide you. Your connections to others are one-way or lack emotional depth. Even if you are surrounded by people, deep down you feel alone. None of it makes any sense to you.
Were you born under the gaslight? If so, you are not alone. You are not invalid or crazy or wrong. it’s vital to realize that you have been, by definition, deeply invalidated. But “invalidated” and “invalid” are not the same. “Invalidated” is an action, and “invalid” is a state of mind. You can’t change what your parents did and didn’t do, but you can change your state of mind.
I’m very glad this post is going around. I didn’t think it would get this many notes, since I usually just love posting articles I can relate to. But anyway I’ve been reading the comments people have been leaving on it and I’m glad that I’m not alone in this. I’m also reading how some people are just figuring things out in regards to it, or still actively experiencing gaslighting. Reading all the different experiences people have has been interesting and it’s also shocking at the same time how so many suffer or have suffered at the hands of their parents. I think it’s very important for those to be aware of how powerful gaslighting can affect a person negatively and/or that it exists and is a very real thing that can leave a detrimental effect.
For anyone who wants to know what it was like to ride the NYC subways in the 1930s and ‘40s, Vanishing New York has you covered:
The Nostalgia Train doesn’t sound or feel or smell like today’s bright
and whispery subway cars. Heavy in its bones, it broadcasts a loud
symphony of sound, rattling and wheezing through the underworld. Inside,
ceiling fans whiz overhead. The air is olive drab or else some shade of
sea foam.
Open windows let in the smells of the tunnel, which shift from swampy
organics to a fragrance you’d swear was burnt buttered toast.
Soot flies in and lands in your eye. In these old cars, you are not sheltered from the city. You are joined to it.
There is no stillness here. The rattan benches bounce your spine up and down as the jolting car keeps all bodies in motion.
But the best part comes when the train dives beneath the East River and
launches forth to Queens. The driver lets out the throttle, like letting
loose the reins of a horse, and the whole thing torpedoes ahead. It
dives deeper, faster, jerking from side to side, shuddering in its
bolts. A gritty wind blasts through the openings, strong enough to knock
off a hat, if it tried.
In this unbridled speed, the riders are giddy. It is a relief to feel
the city thrumming in your gut, to not be insulated from it, to not be
held in some sterile, hospital-lit tube.
This feels real. This knocking around. This sucking down the filthy wind. This robust mechanical jolt.
.
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Yeah but…
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Are we going to get a ‘Bucky changes his shirt’ or ‘Bucky comes shirtless out of the bathroom, and he’s all clean, dripping wet and smells like heaven’ scene in Civil War or not..?
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And… Hydra isn’t shaving his chest hair anymore…
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Life is about learning, right? Upon coming to Ireland, a couple things were clarified for me by my Irish friends. For instance, no one speaks ‘Gaelic’ in Ireland.
Before people start fainting, let me explain. Gaelic is a linguistic term that covers three different Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. It’s what’s called in the biz, ‘Q-Celtic’, because when certain words in the Gaelic languages were making ‘Q’ or ‘K’ sounds, their sister-words in ‘P-Celtic’ languages were making ‘P’ or ‘B’ sounds. Welsh, Breton, and Manx make up the P-Celtic, Brythonic languages.
Here’s an example:
In Irish, the word for ‘son’ or ‘boy’ is mac.
In Welsh, that word is mab.
See what happened there? This is why asking an Irish person if they speak ‘Gaelic’ will only get you a confused reply. The Irish speak Irish. Basta cosí.
The second thing my friends made clear was that Irish myth is Irish, Welsh myth is Welsh, Cornish myth is Cornish. ‘Celtic’ is another word that won’t get you very far.
Like Gaelic, ‘Celtic’ is a linguistic umbrella term. It makes about as much sense to talk about a book of ‘Celtic myths’ as it does to talk about the ‘Romantic cookbook’ you used for that lasagne recipe (Italian is a Romance language). Often, when people talk about ‘Celtic’ myth, what they really mean are the myths of one of the six languages mentioned above.
TL;DR. Celtic ≠ Irish
≠ Gaelic, etc.
Why does this matter?
It matters because these are different cultures we’re talking about, different histories and social identities. In calling the character Rhiannon a Celtic goddess, she loses definition. She becomes vague. In calling her a Welsh character, she has a context, a history. Cú Chulainn is not a Celtic hero, but an Irish one, with all the literary and historical implications that brings. It doesn’t help that we don’t have, archaeologically or linguistically, any evidence to say that all the cultures that spoke Celtic languages shared a similar cultural identity.
Liz Bourke and Charles Stross have recently blogged on similar lines, and I admit I was inspired to say something, myself, after reading them. (Check them out!)
Is this all a bit pedantic? Maybe. To be honest, it’s worth being a little persnickety if it means adding definition and clarity and understanding to our world. Understanding, in my mind, is always a good thing.
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