Hello all you gentlemen bastards of the Internet, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only dating advice column that helped tame the wild, wild west. This week, we’re tackling the challenges of marriage and long-term relationships. What do you do when you don’t work as a couple but you can’t leave your relationship? What about when one party has unilaterally ended your sex life? Are there compromises to be had, or is it time to leave? It’s time to pay those outstanding bounties or go back to being outlaws of love. Let’s do this. Hey Doc, I’m struggling to not be overwhelmed and depressed with the situation I am in now. I am 26, male, and obese. I’ve been married for over 7 years and while there has been plenty I look back on with fondness it has been full of hardships, growing and learning. Recently, my wife and I have come to the conclusion that, while we overall are great friends we each are not getting something from this relationship … [Read more...] about Ask Dr. NerdLove: We Survived A Cult, But Our Marriage Didn’t
Romantic arranged marriage stories
Cardi B, Offset and the Business of Celebrity Marriage
The concept of celebrity romance as publicity tactic has existed since at least the dawn of the entertainment business. A natural extension of the well-oiled Hollywood machine, placing two up-and-coming talents together and suggesting they smooch, as if they were real-life Barbie and Ken dolls handled by a child, not only feeds into the public’s desire for allure on and off-screen, it almost certainly doubles the kind of media attention those individuals would receive on their own. As a lifelong Directioner, the short-lived yet deeply important 2012-2013 partnering of a young Taylor Swift and Harry Styles strikes me as a burning example: take country music’s beloved teen talent, introduce her to the biggest boy-band heartthrob on the planet, and together you’ve got a power couple with immense cultural currency at the top of both worlds. The right pairing of personalities is an almost impenetrable fortress, guaranteed to make money and headlines. Cardi B and Migos … [Read more...] about Cardi B, Offset and the Business of Celebrity Marriage
Mary Shelley Is a Tragically Flat Coming-of-Age Film
Mary Shelley has all the makings of a classic teen girl coming-of-age film. There’s a passionate, star-crossed romance, spats with pseudo-intellectual sexist bros who undermine our heroine’s intelligence, drunken parties, and nights filled with scribbling in a notebook instead of sleeping. The themes are so familiar, so well-worn, that you might forget this is a movie about Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who wrote the groundbreaking sci-fi horror story when she was just a teenager in the early 19th Century. The surprisingly limited scope of Mary Shelley, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, is precisely what makes it a drag. Elle Fanning, who’s continuing to successfully move on from the fragile, doll-like roles of her youth into harsher territory, stars as 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin, the daughter of philosopher William Godwin and feminist advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. She possesses dreams of being a great writer who can make readers’ “blood … [Read more...] about Mary Shelley Is a Tragically Flat Coming-of-Age Film
Here’s Everything That’s Banned on Facebook, All on One Page
Facebook has publicly released its most complete community guidelines to date after many years keeping the specific rules its moderators used to govern the platform secret. The update tacked over 5,000 more words onto the already unwieldy document, which now includes highly specific examples of banned or heavily regulated content. Is any of it at all surprising? Well, yes. Most platforms have rules that outline common-sense genres of content they’d rather not be liable for—harassment, hate speech, gore, child endangerment, etc.—and these are no different. But as a reflection of its size and global reach, Facebook’s guidelines include some of the most granular examples of what not to do online. Cannibalism is off limits. “Sexualized massages” are specifically barred. Staged animal fights won’t fly, and neither will videos of animals being processed for food. Images of buttocks or an anus are a no-go, “unless photoshopped on a public … [Read more...] about Here’s Everything That’s Banned on Facebook, All on One Page
What Syfy’s Superman prequel series Krypton is doing right
Superman’s origin story is so well-known that Grant Morrison opened his All-Star Superman series by summing it up in just eight words: “Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.” Krypton showrunner Cameron Welsh, who cites All-Star Superman as one of his favorite Superman stories, has the unenviable task of trying to make audiences really care about the “doomed planet / desperate scientists” half of that story. Prequels always struggle to justify their existence, and that’s especially true for Krypton, Syfy’s pre-Superman prequel series. The show has to deal with the fact that all of its characters are doomed, and its eventual endpoint was first established 80 years ago. It also has to deal with the inevitable comparisons to DC’s other current superhero-prequel series, the lackluster Batman show Gotham. Welsh has risen to that challenge by abandoning the serialized monster-of-the-week structure of DC’s other … [Read more...] about What Syfy’s Superman prequel series Krypton is doing right