#WOC had been trying to call out that man's grossness since the shows were airing

[hussyknee]

I'm really sick of these takes where we're supposed to pretend art exists in a vacuum that never says anything about the artist's own worldview or reflects their problematic aspects, especially considering up until now, anybody trying to bring attention to it has been shut down and called a puritan. Like sure, you're not personally a bad person for not noticing them or not agreeing with the criticism. You can still enjoy the work for the meaning you personally imbued in it. But this drive to sanitize, whitewash and continue to silence criticisms of his work, some of them by SA victims themselves, is simply to protect the comfort of white liberals who can't stand self-interrogation or any accountability of their own biases. It's simply the same violence of privilege that allow predators to build their social cache off their work and protect it from criticism of themselves by extension. Yes, there are those trying to problematize fans of his work simply to be smug and superior, but if you don't think that that his fandom's own behaviour has been above reproach, without bias in favour of privileged white cis men and not complicit in continuing to elevate and flock to them, you're just trying to evade self-examination and accountability.

i don't really want to see this retconning of neil gaiman's writing where people are re-analyzing stories like "look...you can see the message under the surface...showing how he was actually abusive IRL...it's all there..."

idk maybe we should just listen to people when they speak up and say they were abused and try to foster a culture of respecting victims and actually enforcing justice against perpetrators instead of doing this weird fucking da vinci code-esque picking apart of his stories. stories which everyone was fine with for decades!! because we understand that the content that people write and produce does not have a 1 to 1 correlation with their real world actions!!!

i fully support people who cannot engage with his work anymore and i do think that because he's a still-living person it's imperative to not give this guy another cent, but we cannot pretend that everyone was just "too dumb" to see the secret clues and turn this into another case of "what you write is what you endorse." plenty of dogshit people write good stories. plenty of good people write dark stories. that's all.

[violet--minds-blog]

‘The Bold Type’ and Surface-Level Intersectionality

Piper Gibson | July 26, 2017

Long time, no write, I know. It’s hard, as a mentally ill person working and going to school and trying to stay politically aware in these trying times, to update this blog. But I’m back with another post, because I am annoyed.

I’ve caught up with The Bold Type, a new Freeform series which is about three friends who work at a women’s magazine and is currently airing its first season. As I’m writing this there’s four episodes, but each is packed with so much that rubs me the wrong way that I’ve been incessantly livetweeting on my (private) Twitter about it. I don’t even know where to start, so I suppose I’ll begin with a few things I like.

I like that it’s a women-driven show. I like that we get to see women in power and at the top of their game. I like that the side characters are kinda diverse. I like that it passes the Bechdel test in a major, major way. I like that they are at least trying to come from an intersectional feminist perspective. That’s actually why I’m really frustrated with this show, but I’ll talk about that more later.

Firstly. Jane, the kind-of main character (To me, she’s clearly the main protagonist, but it could be argued that her, Kat, and Sutton are all protagonists) is boring. I’m sorry. She just is the human embodiment of plain yogurt. I cannot bring myself to care about her budding career or mediocre hetero love life. I don’t care when she wins, and I don’t care when she loses. I guess to some, her story might be interesting, but I just... don’t... care. I feel basically the same about Sutton, but she’s a teense more likable because the glimpses of her backstory spark an interest in me. For Jane, I think the writers were going for a Gifted-Child-Who-Grew-Up-To-Need-To-Please-Authority-Figures vibe, which I can relate to, except I see basically nothing of myself in her. Maybe it’s the bland cishet girl thing, but she’s not doing it for me.

My main problem with this show is that they focus on Plain Jane (low-hanging fruit, I know, but I had to do it), who has the personality of a lightly-salted potato chip, way more than they focus on Kat, who is IMO the most interesting person on the show. For a series that’s at least kind of trying to be diverse, it’s frustrating to me that 2/3 of the main characters are white and cis and heterosexual, but anyway. They have two cis, heterosexual, white woman main characters and then a black woman main character who is questioning her sexuality. Who do you think a large portion of the viewership for a show that claims to be feminist is gonna gravitate towards? Not the pasty heteros, probably.

Kat is dynamic, and interesting, and good at her job, not to mention gorgeous as all hell. Yet they give her storylines like "Black Girl Who Grew Up Upper-Middle Class Has to Have Poverty Explained to Her by White Girl” and “Black Girl Living In Modern-Day America Somehow Doesn’t Understand Why A WOC Immigrant Might Not Want to Interact With Police” and “Black Girl Who Works at a Feminist Magazine Doesn’t Seem to Know About Bisexuality For Some Reason” and y’all. It’s honestly so tiring. I understand that Kat is the one with the majority of the interactions with Adena to set up the queer romance between them (which I love and appreciate) but this also means Kat is their point-girl to explain xenophobia and immigration issues to the audience. 

I would like that they’re showing interracial ignorance issues, because people of color can be ignorant about and discriminatory towards other people of color, but I don’t think that’s what they set out to do. I think they wanted this to be a cool, hip, intersectional show, so they do a few kind of performative scenes where the Muslim lesbian woman on a work visa explains to another woman of color why she doesn’t take her hijab off or why she ran when the police showed up after a man assaulted her. At one point, Kat’s white boss actually explains to her that Adena ran from the cops because she could’ve gotten deported, which Kat hadn’t even considered somehow. What this actually does is tell the audience that Kat is ignorant on issues pertaining to women of color, and since Jane and Sutton literally never have race discussions beside one throw-away line about the Civil War from Jane, it feels like race is a topic secluded to only a few WOC characters. The women of color do all the literal and metaphorical emotional labor on this topic on the show, and the white women characters don’t have to deal with it. Which, I guess, is realistic to actual race relations between women, but I would like it to be acknowledged on-screen. For Kat to have to be the person with the brunt of the ignorance on xenophobia and queer issues while her white friends don’t have to deal with it is upsetting, to say the least. Because the show doesn’t address it, to me, it feels like them saying that white women are just so much better and more knowledgeable about these things than women of color, which is just... straight up wrong. I’d like at least one scene of Sutton and Jane not understanding something about race and Kat saying “Just Google it, I’m not gonna do the emotional labor for the both of you,” please, for the love of God. 

This isn’t even all of my problems with the show. It revolves way too much around romance and sex for media that seems to say women’s lives don’t have to revolve around romance and sex, for one thing. Both Jane and Sutton’s love interests are white assholes. Sutton’s boyfriend works for the same company as her and as such, is in a position of power over her. At least the show acknowledges that if this were to get out, the high-up board member boyfriend would not be the one in trouble and probably fired. But he’s still touted as this super sweet guy who tries really hard, despite him talking down to Sutton about how young she is and how he “remembers feeling like” there was no time to accomplish things like he’s so much more worldly and intelligent than her. Ew. Dump him, sweetheart.

Jane’s love interest is the. Literal. Worst. His name is like, Tyler or Aaron or something douchey, and he’s my least favorite guy archetype. Tyler-Aaron works for the “rival” men’s magazine about sex and relationships, with stunning article titles like “How To Make Your Girlfriend Fuck Like a Porn Star.” I know. Obviously, White Feminist Jane hates him at first. But I am a smart person, so when I saw them get in a disagreement in which he condescendingly calls her article “cute” and she storms off, I said, “Oh no. They’re gonna fuck, aren’t they.” Because that’s what happens every time a man and a woman dislike each other in popular media. A woman thinks a man is sexist? Yeah, eventually she’s gonna see the error of her ways and they’re gonna have sex.

See, what bothers me about Tyler-Aaron is that they made him a Secret Male Feminist. He tells Jane, “You haven’t read my articles, have you?” after she calls them sexist, and everyone tells her that he’s a pretty good writer and not a bad guy. He told her there’s nothing he finds sexier than a woman speaking her mind, and he wrote one good article about how women feeling like they need to fake orgasms is the fault of men, so he really schooled her, huh? Jane stands there with her mouth agape as Secret Male Feminist struts away smirking, and then within a day or so she’s kissing him. Yawn. Puke. Etc, etc.

This storyline doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because he already was a dick. He already condescended her writing, said she was sexy when she called him out for legitimate reasons, and wrote shitty sexist articles. Him writing one good article or being nice to her now doesn’t change that. And making him teach her something about feminism or prove her ideas wrong is akin to gaslighting. Women are already told every single day that we’re imagining all this discrimination and violence, that sexism is basically over and we need to shut up, that Congress passed X thing or a movie had Y plot so we “won,” and it’s time to move on. We’re told this despite seeing and experiencing this violence on every level, starting with interpersonal and going up to governmental and global. Tyler-Aaron apparently being an okay guy instead of the sexist douche Jane once thought he was (and I still know he is) is basically the show saying, “Hey, crazy feminist, not all men are bad, and some can be feminist, so calm down, okay? Your gut-reaction of a man being sexist and condescending is a fake reaction and you’re just making things up and jumping to conclusions.” It’s gross. And I expect better.

That’s why I dislike the show. It’s clearly trying, at least a tiny little bit, to be feminist and intersectional. It could be a really great, diverse, ground-breaking show. Instead, it is still so limited, racist, and surface-level white feminist-y. Most of what it tries to do, it fails. And, okay, I recognize that it’s important that a show like this, with a large majority of female characters, even exists. But they’re doing a disservice to characters like Kat, a lot of characters are boring and one-dimensional, and they haven’t even mentioned issues like trans or disability rights. It’s just not great writing, folks. Personally, when a show claims to be feminist, I expect it to follow through.