Call for Submissions: “Nurturance Is…”

Posted on by Nora Samaran

YES! We are still taking submissions for new posts!

Dating Tips for the Feminist Man is accepting submissions for a series on your own personal experiences of masculine* nurturance culture.

Send us your ways to finish this sentence: “Nurturance Is…”

What does masculine nurturance culture look like, feel like, taste like?

What is the timing, the rhythm, the pacing of nurturance and attunement?

Earlier this year, the post “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture” blew up on the net. The responses to the piece were global and astonishing; see the five most common responses here.

Responses streamed in from all over the world. But in all this talking about talking about masculine Nurturance Culture, we still haven’t gotten to figuring out the actual thing. How does masculine nurturance really look and feel? We learn nurturance skills by being nurtured. The little details, the ways men can take care of women and nonbinary folks, are usually hidden in the ‘home’ realm or in private moments between friends. This private nature of intimate nurturance means it can be hard for people to learn nurturance if they don’t have models at home.

‘Care’ work, meanwhile, is considered feminine, and in a misogynist culture, it is devalued or not understood as an expert skill. It is supposed to ‘just happen’ – so if you are a man, you’re not allowed to say “I don’t know how to do that” and ask. All too often nurturance – taking care of emotional needs – is treated as something ‘natural’ that women ‘just do’ when in fact it is learned through experience.

So let’s shine a light on this misunderstood and under-shared set of wonderful life skills!
Luckily, in this media-rich age, we can share our experiences and knowledge and spread the wealth.

What do you know now about nurturance that you wish someone had told you long ago? What would you want to tell your younger self?

The best posts will be ones that are collaborative, showing how nurturance is done together and in an attuned way. Let us see the facial expressions, the body language that creates connection. Take five minutes and send in your best descriptions of how nurturance feels to you. Or take a short video clip of you and someone you nurture (your child, your lover, your friend) holding hands, looking in one another’s eyes, or cuddling in a nurturing way.

Some examples:

nurturance can taste like the salty chicken soup your male* partner brings you when you are sick, and the loving way he looks at you as you drink it.

It can look like the cosy arms of a dad cuddling and comforting his five year old son on the couch, for as long as his son needs, when he asks his dad not to leave for hockey practice one evening. “Screw the game, my boy needs me to be with him.”

It can look like the connected eye contact you make, every so often, with your female friend when you are in a crowded room, that shows you the two of you are connected and looking out for each other, so you never feel alone in the crowd.

It can feel like the arms of your male partner helping you up the stairs when you are in chronic pain and having a flare up, so you can go out dancing again the next day knowing someone will be there to help your stiff joints get into bed for a good night’s sleep afterwards.

It can feel like your male roommates’s comforting hand on your back to help you sleep on a night when you have insomnia, or the feeling of pillows behind your back propping you up to help with your cough at night.

It can feel like a hand caressing your cheek tenderly while gazing at your face with a soft expression that lets you know how important you are to this person who loves you.

It can taste like the food men cooked for an event where the featured speakers are an all-women lineup.

It can look like men in a professional or any work environment remembering to make an introduction, with a few words about her excellent work, between a female colleague and your male friends who could advance her career.

It can look like a man showing you with his eyes, with his facial expression, that he is really here with you, not just in body but in spirit, and willing to let you touch his true self, willing to put his trust in your hands so you know you are both taking care of one another.

It can mean sharing directly in the efforts, the successes and failures of the people you support: ironing her clothes the night before her big talk while she practices out loud, taking her out for a meal to celebrate afterwards, and saying “we did it!” instead of “I’m so happy for you.”

It looks like always being willing to drop everything you are doing to make it clear that your people come first, before your tasks or your work; something women have been taught to do for a long, long time.

It means responding to people’s needs, as much as possible, as they arise, not when it happens to be convenient.

For those men who are learning how to heal themselves in a way that nurtures those around them, what does nurturance really look like in lived daily practice? Think of exmples in your life of men you know who make those around them feel rock solid secure and safe. Observe them. What do they do? For those of all genders who have men in your lives who make you feel rock solid secure with them, what are the little things they do that lead you to trust they are really always there for you?

Men, what have you healed in yourself in order to foster nurturance as the source of joy and connection it can be?

Women and all gendered folks, what have you healed in yourself to know that you deserve nurturance, and to recognize and value it when it is offered?

Remember those Snoopy memes from the 70s? “Happiness Is…”

snoopy-happiness-is-sunnyday snoopy-happiness-is snoopy-happiness-is-home snoopy-happiness-issookies snoopy-happiness-isnap snoopy-happiness-is-dayoutside.jpg

You are invited to finish the sentence: “Nurturance Is…”

I want to hear about the regular everyday kinds of nurturance, the daily attunement you practice with babies, kids, lovers, partners, parents, siblings, colleagues, friends. The things you just do without being asked, day in and day out, that are the fabric of trusting relationships.

Not just the overt ‘tasks’ like making a lunch, but the subtle ways you respond to nonverbal body language, the ways you offer loving arms, the way you share a gaze that lights up and protects another person’s heart and spirit, whether that be your daughter, your new lover, your girlfriend, partner, or friend.

I want to hear about the ways you nurture your female colleagues professionally, consciously and intentionally, moving their careers along instead of just advancing yourself.

I want to hear how you nurture your friends of all genders.

 

 

You can send your contribution any way you like. Any of these will be considered:

  1. Send one sentence! Take five minutes and send off one line that describes a moment of nurturance. You can start “Nurturance is…” or just say it your own way!
  2. Take a short video clip (20 seconds – 2 minutes!) on your phone with a person you nurture or who nurtures you – partner, parent, coworker, friend – to show us visually what masculine nurturance is like for you. Men, you can do this with the people you nurture. Women and other gendered folks, you can do this with men who nurture you. The focus is on how men practice nurturance, so other men can get a glimpse into the inside world of healthy nurturing interactions. Share close up video of how you look lovingly at one another, how you hold hands, what it looks like when one person turns in for a hug and the other responds. Let people who have never experienced a secure attachment bond see one in action.
  3. Tell us your experiences in writing. Use all your senses to bring us intimately into your moments when men nurture. Think of nurturing moments you have offered or experienced with men, and describe the visuals, the smell, taste, feeling on your skin, as well as emotions and thoughts.
  4. Draw, paint, sketch, or make comics about what men being nurturing looks like, feels like.
  5. Any other form you can think of! We’ll consider anything that can be shared easily on the web.

Whatever you send, make it feel alive. Bring us right into the experience with you so we know how nurturance by men feels in real tangible ways in daily life.

You can use your name or make up a screen handle. Please say in your email what handle you would like to see appear with your post and where you are located.

Our favourite submissions will go up on the DTFM blog during the “Nurturance Is…” series.

Men: you can be featured in this space, sharing your skills and knowledge about how you take care of the people around you.

Everybody else: you can be featured here describing what it feels like when you  are being deeply nurtured by men: personally, professionally, spiritually, emotionally, you name it!

 

Send submissions with the subject line: “Nurturance Is” to norasamaran@gmail.com.

Thank you and can’t wait to read/hear/see you!

More “Nurturance Is…” posts here:
We need some good news today: six more ‘Nurturance Culture’ entries
Ten Reader Replies: Nurturance Is…
Boys, Brothers, and Saying “I Love You”: Readers’ Thoughts about Nurturance Culture

If you are seeing this, you can still send in your new submissions. 🙂 This series is rolling, and when enough good ones come in, a new post will appear.

Apologies in advance; because of the volume of email we may only be able to contact those whose submissions are likely to be included in a future post.

—

*I want to be clear here that I am using this term (and terms like ‘woman’ etc) in a trans-inclusive way, referring to masculine-identified people. I have chosen not to write ‘men and trans men’ etc in the piece above because I’ve been told and understand trans men do not need their own separate signifier as that suggests they aren’t already part of the main signifier. I recognize there are different opinions on how to do this well; as a ciswoman I’m no expert, am open to feedback so let me know if this works. For now until I hear otherwise, I’m going with the approach that made the most ethical sense to me when I heard it.

Puung image used with permission by the artist. See more here: http://www.grafolio.com/puuung1/illustration.grfl

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18 thoughts on “Call for Submissions: “Nurturance Is…””

  2. Pingback: Five Responses to Nurturance Culture vs Rape Culture | Dating Tips for the Feminist Man
  3. Pingback: The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture | Dating Tips for the Feminist Man

  4. Nurturance-related quote: ‘Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.’

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  5. Nurturance is never having your child feel shame or embarrassed about anything.
    Nurturance is really listening with you heart.
    Nurturance is imagining how it feels to be born.
    Nurturance is singing away a child’s sudden fear or pain.
    Nurturing is expressing without words that you see the other for who they really are this moment.
    Nurturing is turning the most mundane event into a celebration with a young child.
    Nurturance is knowing that our children see who we really are and always being the best because they are looking.
    Nurturance is never doing for a child what they can do for themselves.
    Nurturance is not praising a child because you and they know what it means to be naturally competent.
    Nurturance is taking compete responsibility for your child’s health, well being and education.
    Nurturance is making up stories instead of being Disneyfried.
    Nurturance is being quiet, fully present, fearless and completely empathetic as you wife or lover gives birth at home.
    Nurturance is knowing when it is OK to say ‘yes dear.’
    Nurturance is suddenly being smitten by how beautiful your wife or lover is for the ten-thousandth time and saying so.

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  7. Pingback: Violence is nurturance turned backwards – Parental Alienation's Dirty Secrets , Akin to Domestic Violence 40 yrs ago

  8. Nurturance is cooking 3 different dinners for a family of 4 ‘cos they’re all such bloody picky eaters (oh, and doing ot with good grace)

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  10. Greetings, Ms. Samaran.
    You might recall our e-mail discussion last August of the scene in Casino Royale in which James Bond comforts a badly traumatized Vesper Lynd. I was recently skimming through one of my favorite novels from my childhood, Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark, refreshing my memory of some of the details for a comment I was writing on Dawn Davidson’s stunning graphic novel adaptation of Alexander’s best-known series, The Chronicles of Prydain. Reviewing the scenes in which the two central characters, Theo and Mickle, begin to develop what will eventually be their romantic relationship, it struck me that they provide one of the better literary examples of nurturance culture that I’ve ever seen in children’s or YA fiction.

    Westmark’s fictional setting is based on late eighteenth-century Europe, and the conflicts between a corrupt aristocracy desperately clinging to its power and privilege, a rising class of literate craftsmen and merchants, and a downtrodden peasantry growing impatient with their “betters'” abuses. Theo is a former printer’s apprentice turned fugitive after injuring an agent of the kingdom’s secret police in a failed attempt to defend his master and their press. Although an orphan of peasant stock, the craft he was learning means that he’s literate and had access to a library of every book and treatise of which his master had ever printed copies, including law, natural sciences, and political philosophy — he’s better-read than most aristocratic university students, idealistic and compassionate, but somewhat naive in the ways of the world.

    With his master dead, their shop destroyed, and a warrant out for his arrest, Theo takes refuge with the clients who had commissioned the ill-fated pamphlet: an itinerant showman, snake-oil salesman, and mountebank calling himself variously “Count Las Bombas,” “Doctor Absalom,” “Mynheer Bloomsa,” and a variety of other aliases, and Musket, Las Bombas’ short-tempered dwarf coachman. Although the count’s confidence schemes chafe at Theo’s conscience, he finds Las Bombas and Musket surprisingly likable, and also has no obvious alternative means of survival.

    Mickle is a street urchin, formerly apprenticed to a burglar until he was caught and hanged, with a remarkable talent for vocal mimicry and ventriloquism that leads Las Bombas to recruit her for a new act, “The Oracle Priestess,” using his props and her voice to stage séances. Clever, streetwise, and outwardly tough, she’s also emotionally vulnerable, scarred by time she spent in a brutally abusive orphanage, the deaths of her criminal mentor and her “grandfather” (an elderly, deaf and mute hermit who had found her washed up on a riverbank and taken her in), and plagued by recurring nightmares of the near-drowning that left her with no conscious memories of her life before waking up in the old man’s hovel.

    Upon learning that she’s illiterate, Theo offers to teach Mickle to read and write, which she eagerly accepts. In turn, she begins teaching him the private sign language she used with her grandfather, and developed further with Hanno the burglar — silent communication being a highly valuable skill in that line of work. The scene that reminded me of this article occurs near the end of Chapter Ten, as the troupe settles into their lodgings in the town where Las Bombas plans to debut the Oracle Priestess act:

    Too tired even to enjoy the feather pillows and mattress, Theo sank into them like a stone. He had been asleep, he did not know how long, when a scream ripped apart his slumber.

    He sat up, head spinning. His body answered before he could gather his wits. By the time he realized the sound had come from Mickle’s room, he was on his feet and plunging through the connecting door.

    A candle guttered on the night table. Mickle crouched amid a heap of bedclothes. Her face was dead white, streaked with sweat, her eyes wide and staring, empty of everything but terror. He was not sure she even recognized him. He ran to her.

    She threw her arms around him. He rocked her back and forth like a child, smoothing her tangled hair.
    Her cheeks and forehead were icy.

    “Nothing, it’s nothing,” he said. “You had another bad dream. It’s gone.”

    “I was drowning. Water over my head. I kept sinking. I couldn’t breathe.”

    Theo was only now aware that Las Bombas and Musket had been standing behind him. The count, nightcap askew, ordered the dwarf to fetch a glass of wine, then peered anxiously at the girl.

    “You’ll be fine in a moment. A nightmare, eh? Too much supper, I shouldn’t wonder.” He sat down beside her and laughed good-naturedly, though giving Theo a quick glance of concern. “Drowning, you say? In that case, you’re perfectly safe. No one, to my knowledge, ever drowned in bed.”

    Mickle sipped the wine Musket brought. She snuffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Some color had come back to her cheeks. She smiled at last. After a few more moments, she was making impudent remarks about the count’s nightcap, joking with Musket, and mimicking Theo.

    Even so, when Las Bombas and Musket went back to their chambers, Theo sensed she was still frightened and stayed, waiting until she fell asleep. He sat watchful the rest of the night. Mickle did not stir.

    In the terms you discussed in the original Nurturance Culture post, what I see here (and more generally over the course of their relationship) is a young man with a secure attachment style, thanks to the healthy relationship he had growing up with his surrogate father, the printer Anton, nurturing and trying to heal a young woman with a deeply insecure style (mostly preoccupied-avoidant, I think, but with elements of the anxious type as well) due to the repeated traumas of her past. His fear that his fugitive status could endanger her complicates things, as does the revelation of her forgotten identity near the end of the first book, but they do work it out in the end.

    Looking back on it, I think that Theo and Mickle’s relationship, and that of Taran and Eilonwy in the Prydain Chronicles (after he outgrew his adolescent foot-in-mouth syndrome, anyway) were significant influences on my own thinking about romantic relationships as I grew up. Not too many of my other childhood favorite books included any such relationships where both principles were well-developed characters with their own needs and inner lives. (You certainly won’t see anything of the sort in Tolkien or Lewis; Susan Cooper probably could have written such, but the characters in The Dark Is Rising sequence are all too young; Asimov and Niven were much better with concepts than characters, especially female ones; I don’t think Heinlein’s influence was a net positive in that area, much as I love his storytelling; and the less said about Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony, the better.) I’ve included scenes similar to the nightmare scene from Westmark in several of my own attempts at writing fiction, notably a Harry Potter fan-fic inspired by my annoyance with Harry’s miserable failure at comforting his love interest in the fifth book. (I kept wanting to yell at him, “Look, when the girl you like picks your shoulder to cry on, that’s a very good sign; stop treating it like a burden, you insensitive clod!”)

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    1. thanks! yes. i some this scene and it does seem to capture the kind of evident-comforting response of a secure attached being a good friend or eventually romantic interest. thanks for the reflection!

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  11. Hello again, Ms. Samaran.
    I ran across a picture on DeviantArt recently that made me think of this article – an unusually skillful piece of Harry Potter fan art, by one of the many fans who think Harry and Hermione should have ended up together. I think it fits the theme of nurturance within the context of a romantic relationship fairly well; it would certainly be a reasonable result for a Google image search to bring up for the “man comforting a woman” search you talked about in the main Nurturance Culture article: https://www.deviantart.com/asha47110/art/Moonlight-Through-the-Window-HP-722135842

    This one, by the same artist, is also good: https://www.deviantart.com/asha47110/art/Return-to-Godrics-Hollow-HP-747606558

    (Looking at our exchange of comments above: was that really six years ago? It doesn’t feel like that long.)

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  12. Hi, Ms. Samaran.
    I’ve recently been watching the speculative fiction series Stranger Things. I expect you’ve heard of it, whether or not you’ve seen it, as it’s been one of the most popular shows on Netflix since the first season went online in 2016, but I’ll describe it briefly in case anyone entirely unfamiliar with it reads this comment.

    The show is set in the mid-1980s, and inspired by the popular culture of that era, especially Stephen King novels and the films of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter. It has an ensemble cast of ten main characters (in the first season, with additional major characters introduced in subsequent seasons) living in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, and weaves together three connected storylines, centering on two adults, police chief Jim Hopper and single mother Joyce Byers; three high school students, Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers, and Steve Harrington; and four seventh-grade boys, Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, Lucas Sinclair, and Will Byers, along with a mysterious girl known as “Eleven” (played by the fantastic Millie Bobby Brown, a child prodigy of the actor’s art on par with Natalie Portman, Emma Watson, and the Fanning sisters in their earliest roles) who Mike, Dustin, and Lucas encounter while searching for Will after he goes missing in the first episode.

    I’m talking about it here because I think that Jonathan and Mike offer several good examples of nurturance in their interactions with the people closest to them, particularly in the first season. Jonathan has an especially close, loving bond with his younger brother Will (which reminds me of my own relationship with my older half-brother when I was growing up), provides emotional support to his distraught mother in the wake of Will’s disappearance, and comforts Nancy after a traumatic encounter with the season’s principal antagonist that occurs as they search for Will and for Nancy’s friend Barb Holland, who vanishes two nights after Will did. His personality is shaped in part by the negative example of his emotionally (and perhaps physically, though that’s implied rather than made explicit) abusive father, who abandoned Joyce and their sons some years before the series begins. In his father’s absence, Jonathan has taken on some of his responsibilities, giving him a more mature outlook than most of his teenage contemporaries.

    Central to the younger kids’ story is the relationship between Mike and Eleven (often shortened to “El”). The boys sneak out to search for Will the night after his disappearance and instead find Eleven, alone in the woods during a thunderstorm, evidently frightened and traumatized, and barely capable of speech. The term “autistic” never comes up (which is probably realistic, as the series is set several years before the release of Rain Man dramatically increased public awareness of the condition), but to the show’s present-day audience Eleven shows several characteristics that suggest she might be on the autism spectrum. However, the truth behind her lack of socialization is far more sinister: born to a victim of the infamous, flagrantly unethical MKUltra experiments, El has lived her entire life as a research subject inside the fortress-like Hawkins National Laboratory, where the egomaniacal Dr. Martin Brenner sought to exploit her powerful psionic abilities.

    Lucas is suspicious of El, speculating that she might have escaped from a mental hospital, and Dustin initially views her as a curiosity. Mike, though, reacts with sympathy, bringing her to his house, giving her dry clothes to change into, and setting up a blanket fort with a sleeping bag for her in the basement recreation room where he and his friends play Dungeons and Dragons. Conveniently for the plot, the basement is primarily the boys’ domain; Mike’s parents and sisters rarely venture down there, and he’s able to keep El’s presence hidden for several days.

    Mike’s initial plan is to have Eleven slip out the basement’s back door in the morning, go around the house, and knock at the front door, so that his parents won’t know she was already there and that he, Dustin, and Lucas had snuck out during the night; not yet aware of her origins, he assumes the best way to help her is for his mother to contact the police and/or Child Services. However, El manages to communicate via gestures and the few words she’s able to say that it would be dangerous to reveal her presence to any adult – there are “bad people” hunting her, and anyone found helping her would be at risk. She also demonstrates her powers of telekinesis and clairvoyance, and points out Will in a photo of the four boys together, intimating that she can find him.

    The bond that grows between Mike and El in the first season inverts common gender stereotypes: Mike is the nurturer, sheltering the lost girl and introducing her to life outside the laboratory. He’s the first person in her life to treat her as a person instead of a specimen and show her kindness without trying to control or manipulate her. When it comes to protection against physical danger, though, it’s nearly always El who protects Mike and his friends. Her telekinetic power is a formidable weapon against human antagonists, and the only truly effective weapon against the supernatural forces that menace the town of Hawkins.

    Mike and Eleven’s scenes together include several good visual examples of “a man comforting a woman,” or in their case a boy comforting a girl. If you have access to Netflix, some of the most memorable ones can be seen in Season 1, Episode 6, at 42 minutes and 28 seconds; S1/E7 at 36:08 (a brief scene of all three of the boys caring for El after an exhausting and scary experience using her clairvoyant ability to search for Will); S1/E8 at 33:10; S3/E4 at 47:55; and S3/E6 at 54:55. (I should note that that last one is closely followed by one of the most gruesome scenes in the series, so it’s probably best to hit stop as soon as it cuts away from Mike and Eleven if you dislike cinematic horror.)

    If you don’t have access to Netflix, let me know and I’ll see if I can find YouTube clips of the relevant scenes; I know at least some of them are on there.
    Best Regards,
    Alex

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      1. You’re welcome. Incidentally, there’s an interesting piece of trivia about the scene in Season 3, Episode 4: several articles and YouTube videos I’ve seen about improvised dialogue and action in the series claim that Eleven falling into Mike’s arms after her battle with the Mind Flayer-possessed Billy Hargrove at the end of “The Sauna Test” wasn’t part of the script – that filming that fight scene was so physically and emotionally exhausting for Millie that she actually did collapse in tears at the end of one of the shoots, Finn was luckily standing close enough to catch her as her knees gave out, and his evident concern for her was as genuine as her distress. Thus, it was as much a scene of a male actor comforting his female friend and costar as of a male character comforting a female character with whom he’s romantically involved.

        Right as El stumbles backward and Mike catches her, he briefly turns his head and appears to speak to someone off the left side of the screen, though it isn’t audible, before he slides down the wall and pulls her into his lap. According to the articles, that was Finn asking the director for guidance on how to play out the unscripted moment, which was something along the lines of “go with it,” or maybe “El is crying, what does Mike do?” The entire sequence of the characters’ reactions after Billy is thrown through the wall has no diagetic sound, only the background score, which makes me wonder if Finn might have broken character a bit more and used Millie’s real name instead of calling her El while comforting her – pulling her out of character a bit might have helped her calm down. There are two quick cuts before he helps her to stand up again, suggesting that the actual incident lasted longer than what was shown onscreen.

        None of the articles or videos I’ve seen making that claim cited any primary source, such as an interview with Millie, Finn, and/or one of the other people present while shooting the scene, so I don’t know for sure the story is accurate. It seems plausible to me, though, based on an interview where Millie and Dacre Montgomery (Billy) talked about how strenuous the scene was to film – it was extremely hot on the set, with six cast members and about a hundred crew with their lights, cameras, and sound equipment packed into a space not much bigger than an actual locker room and sauna, and they worked themselves up to the state of frenzy you can see in both their performances by screaming at each other even before the cameras started rolling.

        There’s also the first episode of the “Beyond Stranger Things” interview series, where Millie talks about how intensely she identifies with El’s emotions, including the fact that she cried for about forty-five minutes after filming her scene with Matthew Modine in “The Lost Sister” when Kali gives El a vision of Dr. Brenner. (That was partly because of the content of the scene, and partly because she and Modine had developed a very close real-life relationship during season one – she thought of him as a mentor or even a surrogate father, and as far as either of them knew that scene could have been the last time they got to work together on the show, since his character was supposedly dead at that point.)

        One thought that occurs to me about her reaction to that fight scene is that manual strangulation is one of the most viscerally frightening things one human can do to another. Hominids have been killing each other that way since long before we ever started using weapons – it’s a common way for chimpanzees to kill other chimps, as well as the smaller primates they prey on. In cases of domestic violence, incidents where the abuser chokes the victim are among the strongest risk factors for subsequent homicide. Given that, even having someone much bigger and stronger than you are pretend to choke you out in the context of acting out a scene, as Billy does to El until Mike clocks him with a weight bar, could be a traumatic experience triggering an instinctive fight-or-flight response, particularly for an actress who was only fourteen at the time of filming. It’s not 100% clear, given the nature of film work, that her collapse was actually proximate in time to the choking scene – they were shooting that ~six-minute sequence over a period of four full days – but if so that could have been a factor.

        Even if the physical aspect of shooting the scene wouldn’t have been that upsetting in reality, Millie’s emotional identification with Eleven could have a similar impact – in-story, that fight was probably the most terrifying moment of El’s life, at least since she escaped from the lab. Billy knocking her down and then grabbing and lifting her by the throat was the first time in the series we’ve ever seen her physically overpowered by an opponent, and if Mike hadn’t struck Billy when he did, he would likely have throttled her to death within a minute or two, as she seemed unable to focus enough to use her power against him while he was choking her. Then, if El had taken just a little longer to recover and counterattack, Billy would probably have killed Mike. (The way she circles around Billy after levitating him to place herself between him and Mike before ending the fight by throwing him through a brick wall is a nice sign of how much she still cares for Mike despite their nominal breakup two episodes earlier.)

        In retrospect, of course, whether it was in the script or not it was a natural reaction for El to have in that moment, and in the context of the season overall the scene serves as an important step in Mike and El’s reconciliation after their split in “The Mall Rats.” I would hope that Millie had some input on the decision to use the scene in the final cut if it actually showed her experiencing genuine distress, and I’d guess, given her obvious dedication to her craft and identification with her character, that she would have wanted it included, rather than let it go to waste. I don’t know if her approach would be considered Method Acting sensu stricto, as my understanding is that that would mean staying in character constantly, on-camera and off, throughout the period of filming each season. However, when the cameras are rolling she submerges her whole personality into her character and in effect becomes Eleven, which I think is what makes her performance so impressive.

        There’s a moment in that episode at about 45:55 that encapsulates in a single image Eleven’s strength and love for her friends: she’s standing in front of Will, Mike, Lucas, and Max,* game face on, arms outspread to keep them behind her and shield them from Billy as he breaks out of the sauna where they trapped him (the entity possessing him likes it cold, and they were able to exorcise it from its host the previous season using heat). Without the need for dialogue, her posture clearly communicates, “Stay back, let me handle this, I can protect you.” That confidence, which has always proved justified before, might be why it takes Mike a few seconds to recognize she’s in real trouble and intervene in the fight once Billy gets the better of her.

        * Maxine Mayfield, the main addition to the core cast in season two, who eventually gets inducted into the small group who know about the supernatural goings-on in Hawkins, dates Lucas, and in Season 3 becomes best friends with El.

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