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clockwork-khaleesi · 6 years ago

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Toxic masculinity, slut-shaming, gender reversal and other stuff

emmablackthxrn said: There are people who believe that Julian slut-shamed Emma in Lord of Shadows when he brought up her having dated him and Mark, and then said, “Who’s next, Ty?” How do you feel about what people are saying and the situation as a whole?

One of the interesting things about fiction is that it’s so flexible in its analysis because people read onto and into it. You always bring your own ideas, triggers, prejudices, preferences, and opinions to reading, so it’s rare — nonexistent, even — to have any character or event in a book be something, or someone, everyone agrees on.

Nobody has to like Julian — or any character! Sometimes a character reminds you of someone you don’t like or your rude uncle or whatever. Sarah takes against characters with red hair on a repeat basis. One thing I would say about your question, though, is that the scene in the book isn’t as you described it, really. It is not a scene where Julian brings up Emma dating him and Mark. He is bringing up her dumping him and Mark. It was actually a really specific choice I made, language-wise, because I wanted to be clear Julian wasn’t shaming Emma for having a relationship with Mark. I mean, I guess I could have been clearer! But here’s the scene:

“On the topic of confessions, were you planning on telling the rest of Mark’s family why you dumped their brother with no warning?”

Emma looked astonished. “You’re angry that Mark and I broke up?”

“I guess you’ve dumped two of their brothers, if we’re really counting,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “Who’s next? Ty?”

He knew immediately he’d gone too far.

There is no mention of dating or sex here, and that’s purposeful. Zara, for instance, does slut-shame Emma. She calls her boy-crazy and is very specifically referring to rumors about Emma’s sexual experience, because that’s what slut-shaming is. It’s specifically about women’s sexual behavior and sexual lives. It’s about their ownership over their bodies and what they choose to do with their bodies. It isn’t about romance or emotions or the complexities of interpersonal relationships. It’s is about sex, and that’s important, because women being judged for what they do sexually — for being provocative, for dressing sexily, for having sex too much or too little — is part of the policing of women’s bodies and sexual lives that is embedded in patriarchal control of women and which leads to sexual violence against women.

So here’s what’s up with Jules: he knows Emma broke up with him suddenly, having told him she suddenly wanted to be with his brother and not him, at a point where he had complete trust that he and Emma were both in love and best friends. It was an incredible shock that shattered his heart and his confidence. He is afraid she has — unbelievably and out of character for her — caused Mark the same pain. Julian fears for Mark — he fears that Mark is fragile, that he will be broken —(Julian is in love with Emma, and is going to have a hard time imagining that being broken up with by Emma isn’t basically the worst thing that could happen to anyone.) There is nothing in this scene about him judging Emma for having sex or behaving sexually. There is only his anger because he’s worried that she hurt Mark emotionally. As above, conflating criticism of a woman’s sexuality or sexual behavior with criticism of her social behavior (“Elena broke up with Brad via a Post-It stuck to his mom’s coffin the day of the funeral! That was so mean!”) diminishes the actual horror of slut-shaming, which is the perpetuation of the idea that a woman’s sexual behavior can and should incur the kind of denigrating judgement that leads to assault and sexual violence and the logic of “she deserved it”.

About Jules: Julian is a complicated character, and complicated characters bring out complicated feelings. Julian is also not your typical alpha male, and that is deeply troubling to many people, who will often reflect that feeling of disturbance back onto the character or the narrative. Note the ongoing conversation about how Julian can’t actually really be tall. (More on that later.) He cooks, he does childcare, he is nurturing. He has attended to his younger siblings like a parent. He makes hand toys for Ty and writes and illustrates entire books for him to help him with his language processing. He’s manipulative rather than physically violent (because his upbringing has forced him to lie and so forth, but it’s certainly still true) which is a feminine-coded flaw (manipulation is often seen as a “woman’s weapon.”) I knew this would be an issue for some readers, but it’s interesting to see Julian get hit with some of the scorn and hatred that’s often reserved for female characters because these specific things he does are correlated with femininity, which — because of the rotten misogyny that floats about us all the time — is often correlated with weakness, jealousy and evil. (It’s also interesting that when I do signings, usually people tell me they’re terrified for Julian — they assume he’ll die, because they read these characteristics of his as feminine-coded, and the fear that attends on the fate of a morally gray female character attends on Julian: basically, they assume I’ll kill him off because female characters who don’t toe the moral line often die. Which, darnit, because I love a morally gray lady!)

bluedepressionaesthetic said: Please don’t kill Jules :(

Oh dear. *Head pat*

Look, misogyny is all around us. I can’t say it’s never touched me, or been unconscious in my work. I try to be aware of it, and I’ve tried to be careful to write Julian as never asking Emma about her sex life at all. Even when Mark and Emma are broken up and Julian and Emma reconcile, Julian never even asks her if she kissed Mark, much less if she had sex with his brother or anything close. (Many people, male or female, would be burning up with curiosity.) Julian treats Emma’s sex life as relevant only when she’s having sex with him. Otherwise it’s her business. Regarding sex, he always asks her if it’s okay or she wants to stop, and he always stops without complaint when she says she wants to stop. He has zero issues about her being more sexually experienced than him. Basic human decency to be sure, but not alpha male behavior as we’re used to seeing it.

There’s an interesting bit in Queen of Air and Darkness where Emma talks to Julian about something one of the Cohort said, in which they mocked him for having a girl parabatai (boys are often judged for this by sexist Shadowhunters, as if having a girl warrior partner makes them weaker or more feminine.)

“Julian, remember what Dane said, that you were the kind of guy who would have a girl for a parabatai?” She knelt up on the bed, raising her chin to look him directly in the eye. “That’s what I always loved about you, even before I was in love with you. You never thought for a second about it diminishing you to have a girl as your warrior partner, you never acted as if I was anything less than your complete equal. You never for a moment made me feel like I had to be weak for you to be strong.”

Emma knows Julian better than anyone, and she has few illusions about him at this juncture. (She goes on to tell him some definitively less positive stuff.) The thing is, I didn’t write this because I thought of it as flattering to Julian; I just thought it was true about Julian, and relevant to the characters in the moment. I also knew plenty of people would like Julian less because of it, and regard him as weak. Toxic masculinity stuff, it is all around us, and expresses itself in peculiar ways.

To return to Julian’s comment about dumping Mark, it was a jerk thing to say to Emma, and he shouldn’t have said it. People say mean things sometimes in the heat of the moment, especially when heartbroken (and especially when, like Julian, they are the product of intense trauma and an adolecense of almost complete neglect, which is a form of abuse). There is a real difference between snapping at someone and ongoing toxic behavior, though, and a key element of that difference is: Does the person recognize that what they said was over the line and apologize? Here’s what Julian says the next day:

He looked at her for a long moment … “I’m sorry,” he said. “What I said was unacceptable and cruel.”

Julian acknowledges his own behavior, judges it, and apologizes for it without sugarcoating it. Rare is the character who never does anything wrong, but it’s interesting to see people judging Julian for snapping at Emma because he’s worried she hurt his brother and then forgiving Kieran for getting Emma whipped. (Was it Kieran’s intention? No! But if he can make up for mistakes by being sorry, odd that Julian can’t.) Sure, we’re all more likely to forgive the characters we like, but it’s always good to consider our whys carefully. Like I said, it’s totally okay to not like Julian — he’s a weird and unusual kind of romantic hero for a book, and I knew he wouldn’t be up everyone’s alley. But I do think it’s important not to use words like “slut-shaming” lightly, or to make the term encompass so much it becomes meaningless, because it is such a serious thing with such a huge impact on women’s lives.

Hii Cassie! This isn’t exactly a serious qestion but, there have been some talk about the heights of the TDA boys specifically and how Julian being the tallest makes Mark and Kieran ‘short’ XD so I was just wondering, what exactly are the heights of the TDA characters?

I don’t know all their heights, unless it comes up somehow in the story. Julian is taller than Mark and Mark and Kieran are about the same height. This only comes up because Mark thinks in LM that Julian was shorter than him when he left, and is now taller. However, Julian being tall does not make Mark or Kieran short any more than Julian being nearsighted would mean they have perfect vision. Also, I do not really get comparing them — I assumed Mark was shorter because Mark was malnourished in the Wild Hunt and probably didn’t reach his full height, but otherwise I never gave it much thought. (And unfortunately, the actual reason why anyone cares is because height in men is stereotypically associated with power, masculinity, and other gendered alpha male stuff. For years I dealt with people thinking Jace was taller than Alec even though Alec is repeatedly described as taller than Jace.)

The thing is, stereotypical alpha male stuff usually comes wrapped with other stereotypical alpha male stuff in a neat package, but it doesn’t have to. I chose to make Julian a guy who brings up children, cuddles babies, makes pancakes, wears an apron, does the shopping, is tall, and can fuck a lady against a wall all night if that’s what she wants. Why not? :-)

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