Love In The Asylum

This weekend, hanjuuluver came over for an afternoon of cookie baking and ridiculous j-dramas. I'm all caught up on Ouran, but when we checked dramacrazy we realized that there's a remake of the Korean drama You're Beautiful airing right now, so we decided to check it out.

That...may have been a mistake.

Guys, I don't have high standards for dramas. I don't care about plot holes or plausibility or acting ability, just give me some pretty boys and some wacky hijinks and I am set. I loved Princess Princess. I loved RH Plus. And Ikemen Desu Ne seems like it was made for me, since it hits a bunch of my narrative kinks for J-dramas - pretty boy band characters, mistaken identity, a defrosting ice queen hero, and a cute girl cross-dressing. But...oh my god, this is the most infuriating show I have seen in ages. Just thinking about it now is making me want to throw things.

The Premise: Miko is an orphan and a novice nun, about to leave for Rome for two years of study before she takes religious vows. However, one day she is unexpectedly approached by a man who, as it turns out, is the manager of her twin brother, an up and coming pop idol. Mio is about to sign a contract with A.N.Jell, a hugely popular boy band, but there's a problem - he broke his nose in a drunken fight and needs to recover from reconstructive surgery before he can be seen in public. So the manager asks (well, begs) Miko to pose as her brother, just long enough to sign off on his contract so the label doesn't find out he messed up his face. One thing leads to another, and although she doesn't really want to do it initially, by the middle of the first episode Miko commits to spending the next three months pretending to be a boy and sharing a house with her bandmates. They are: Yuki, the little blond one who is dumb as a rock; Shu, the little brown one who is supposed to be the nice guy; and Ren, the lead singer, who really, really does not want another singer in the band. But we'll talk more about him later. At this point, misunderstandings, drama, and romance ensue.

This is by far not an exhaustive list of my problems with this show, but it is my major issues:

( emotional abuse and general grossness under the cut )

colourofsaying, who has been watching with me, also has a good post about the show up here.

Has everyone seen this article yet? To sum up briefly: the Bush Administration is pushing to require that recipients of aid for federal health programs agree not to refuse to hire people who (nurses etc) who object to abortion. Understandable, sort of, if morally questionable.

HOWEVER. They explicitly define abortion as anything that terminates the life of a fetus at ANY POINT after conception. This definition is broad enough that many contraceptives would be considered abortion - and thus, health providers are not allowed to refuse to hire people who refuse to distribute contraceptives to women.

Excuse me, but FUCK THIS SHIT. I - well, this sends me into fits of flailing, incoherent, apoplectic rage. What the fucking hell is wrong with these people? I will NEVER understand the sub-group of people opposed to both contraceptives and abortion - people will have sex regardless of whether you disapprove of it or not! If you don't want them to have abortions, you have to allow people the opportunity to protect themselves from getting pregnant! This is very simple math! And this? Is going to make it that much harder for low-income women and women in difficult situations to get contraceptives, that much harder for rape victims to get the morning after pill, and the end result of that is more pregnancies in women who can't afford or don't want to have a baby.

Not to mention the degree to which this makes me uncomfortable on the "men are dictating what /I/ do with /my/ body" level, because it really does. When you consider how many pregnancies end in natural miscarriage without the woman ever knowing she's pregnant, a legal definition of pregnancy that begins at conception basically means that every sexually active woman of child-bearing age can be considered pregnant - there's no way of proving she isn't! And this kind of thinking is appalling - it reduces women to incubators, implies that we're only valued our reproductive capacity. Excuse me if that fucking pisses me off. Really, I just object wholesale to the idea that women need men to tell them what to do with their bodies to make sure they don't screw things up. My body! Mine! I've been saying since I was twelve that men can make decisions about abortion when THEY can have a fetus growing inside them for 9 months, fucking with their hormones, feeding off their nutrients, and kicking them in the kidneys, before they have to go through the 2 -3 days of labor necessary for a baby the size of a watermelon to pass through a hole the size of a grapefruit.

So to summarize: I hate people, and I am desperately counting down the days til it's January and Bush is fucking out of there.