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theblurplegirl · 4 years ago

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So I had my first bad and overtly sexualized experience when playing D&D last night. And I can't sleep until I write it out.

For context, I had decided to start looking for an other group to meet with (online of course) about a month ago. Within the last week I found a group that was in my time zone, and seemed to be an ok fit. When I added my character to the DNDBeyond campaign page I noticed that my character was the only one listed as female. Now I know that people can play whatever gender of character they want, but just the general vibe I got from my few messages with the DM lead me to believe that the players were all playing characters their same gender. I also learned that I was going in as the least experienced of the group, as well as being the only player who was not able to meet with the DM beforehand to run through character details. I was going in mostly uninformed. I immediately knew that this was going to be a lot more difficult than my previous campaign. I was a woman surrounded by men, playing a game that is gatekept by men, and stereotypically played by only men. My thoughts and mindset to not show weakness or inexperience and to prove that was just as good of a player as any of the rest of them did not however prepare me for the session.

First thing we did was describe our characters after we where given our roles within the group. This immediatly made me have to make some major chapter changes because I had planned for a more light-hearted character this go around, but the position she was given required her to not only be aged up but also her alignment changed. So I was already a little on edge and even more unprepared. I had known before how I wanted my character to act in general situations, but now, my overall plan was thrown out the window. The motivation I had put down for my character no longer applied. If my character had nothing to strive for, did I have anything to play with?

Within the first few minutes of the session, as a new group of people, the DM had our characters go through some "bonding activities". My character and another had an arm restling match, which my character lost in one role (7 to an 11). Two other characters bonded by teasing one of the other members of the group, a high born water genasi. Generally that went well except for the fact that the DM, when describing the towel the two were using to taunt the character with he described it as a rough towel, but not just any type of rough, rough like there was dried cum in it. This comment made me immediatly uncomfortable. We were within five minutes of this session starting (the first of the campaign!) and the DM was already making sexual comments. I think I probably would have still been uncomfortable if my other DM, who I have known for close to 7 years, had made that description. I let the comment slide, hoping that maybe it was a slip up on the DMs part and he would remember he was with strangers.

The next incident that happened was when the party entered the town tavern and there was a fight. Our warlock used thamaturgy to make each punch and slap sound louder than they actually were. The DM initially described this as deafening, what was a perfectly fine description. However, later on in the fight when thamaturgy was used again, our DM described the sounds as lude and as if someone was jacking off. This again made me uncomfortable, but I kept silent.

Another thing the DM made a quick comment about is that the barkeep gave the water genasi a glass of water instead of beer and it was the barkeep being racist. Which was a completely unnecessary thing to say.

A little later while still in the bar, it was discovered that our party's mark was also in the building, and that he was commenting about how he found my character attractive, especially since she was apparently the only women in the bar. (Which not only contradicted the DM's earlier description of "Men, women, and children crowed around watching the bar fight" but also the fact that it was the towns only tavern and we were supposed to believe there were no other women then? Not even barmaids?) It was then implied heavily by not only most of the rest of my party but also the DM that I was supposed to go over and seduce the mark and gain access to his house by doing so. I felt set up and nervous. This was by no means how I had ever intended for this character to be played (she was originally going to literally still be a minor before I had to age her up). To make matters even more uncomfortable the DM insisted on role-playing a good portion of the in bar discussion/seduction between my character and the NPC. I said that I was uncomfortable with the situation, and them tried to use the excuse that I was not good at role-playing and had never done it before, but the DM was insistent. Through out the experience other players kept commenting on different aspects or were just being overtly sexual. I ended the in bar role-play fairly swiftly before my character had to go over and tell the rest of the party where she was going, and for them to follow her and scout the house. One the the other players had his character turn invisible and come also in the house as a scout while the other party members where outside.

When my character got back to the house with the mark, his younger sister was apparently awake and waiting. She was decribed as an young girl looking around the age of 13. This immedatly set off some warning bells, because the oarty was meant to capture her and transport her somewhere, which made me worried about what the DM had in mind. In the moment nothing else came of the little girl except that she tried to shame my character for coming back with her brother.

Next, my character and the mark went to his bedroom, and the DM described the multiple tools and weapons hanging on the NPCs wall, I could have been reading into it at this point but it felt like he was describing them in hopes I would have my character use them in the coming moments. The DM again then had my try to role-play the instruction between my character and the NPC, to which I was fairly bland with my words and sped through the process again. My DM then made my character take a point of exhaustion, which gives you disadvantage on checks. I then had my character leave after the NPC had fallen asleep, to which she was met with the younger sister again, who once again tried to shame her for a sexual experience.

When the DM switched to the POV of the other party members two of the players made the comments that they were pretty sure that the invisible party member who was in the house was probably sticking around and getting a show from my character and the mark.

When our whole party met up later to compare intel from the evening my character was the only one that had nothing to add to the scout mission. She had been purely used as a distraction. She was utterly unimportant to the plot of the mission and the campaign. The only "good" that came out of it was when one of the party members asked if my character could show them what she had done to the mark I replied so quickly with an adamant NO (of frustration and annoyance) that the DM told the other player his character suffered 4 points of psychic damage. At this point I was thoroughly upset, annoyed, and bored with the session and DM. This was when one of the other party members (the one who had played the invisible scout) private messaged me and asked if I was uncomfortable. It felt like I was able to take a breath that I didn't even know I could.

The other player explained to me that he was also uncomfortable with the situation and that he was here to support me. We continued to message back and forth for the rest of the session. I honestly don't think I would have made it to the end without him.

In the middle of the night a man broke into the room my character was sharing with the party's orc fighter. But my character slept through the whole interaction between the two characters, which just made me more uncomfortable, but I at this point I was so uncomfortable with this whole campaign that it was just another layer.

When our party awoke the next morning there were comments from the party about how my character had slept so deeply because of being worn out from the night before. This just caused more annoyance from me. When out party stepped out of the tavern there was a man selling potions on a cart pulled my two humans and two drow elves. The DM stated, after the invisible scout's insight check, that the people pulling the cart were slaves and that the whole region we were in had slavery. The owner of said slaves (played by the DM) stated that they were better than horses because they fought back. This statement made me extremely uncomfortable, even more so than the sexual encounters.

At this point the invisible scout spoke up and said that our characters should free the slaves, in response my chracter was the only one that agreed so we set about to release them. This involved me casting blindness on the owner and then getting shot by his goblin lacky and taking over half of my HP in damage. Then the genasi cast sleep on the goblin (not to help us free the slaves, but to steal something off the cart), which allowed the scout and I to cut the chains and try to let the slaves free. By that point the owner had regained his sight and the slaves had not run away. One of the slaves then glared at my character and said "should I dispose of them master" and honestly I wish he had, because then I would have gotten to leave. Instead, I had to stick around because the owner insisted that I was merely misunderstanding the situation and that no further punishment should come to my character if she worked off the payment of the chains she had cut. There was no mention of the scout being punished. I wanted to cry at this point, out of frustration and annoyance.

The last few minutes of the session involved the party then splitting up to look at different locations around town that we also needed to scout, but at this point I was not paying attention to anything the DM or anybody else said.

Throughout the course of the session the DM and other players also made other unnecessarily sexual and racist comments, but there were so many that I only explained the major ones. By the end, when the DM asked how the session was, I couldn't respond. I felt assaulted. Yes, I had put myself in this situation, but there had been no prior indication before starting the evening that I would be subjected to a multitude of sexual and racist comments throughout the session.

The whole experience was horrible, except for the fact that the invisible scout player and I have continued to talk and have both decided to leave the campaign and look for a friendlier one together. I am just glad that I had him to talk to during the experience because otherwise I probably would have thought I was exaggerating things in my head. I have loved D&D for a long time and this experience has tarnished my love for the game. I just hope I can recover from it and learn to again love the game and the people who play that are truly loving, accepting, and kind.

Ps: If you are 18+ and in either CST, MST or EST and looking for a cleric and a ranger in your campaign, I've got you covered

Tl;dr

I joined an online group of D&D that was full of unnecessarily sexual and racist comments and it was the worst experience of D&D I've had so far.

Sorry for any typos I dont want to have to reread everything, it was bad enough going through it once.

#dnd #dnd memes #dnd rp #dnd ideas #dnd ocs #d&d #d&d 5th edition #d&d 5e #d&d oc #d&d character #d&d homebrew #dungeons and dragons #dnd 5e campaign #5e #dnd 5e #dnd 5e homebrew #racisim #sexism

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arcticdementor · 3 years ago

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“Hey bro! Check out this Nike ad!” This was my entry point into a new world.

…

Since Carlos had lived mostly outside the United States, he was able to follow soccer on a level I’d never encountered in my hometown. Back then, before social media and the advent of scarf-wearing Northwestern fútbol hipsters, big-time European soccer was like the metric system: Known to almost all but ourselves. But Carlos knew, and immediately used LimeWire to curate me a massive archive of 1990s through early 2000s soccer highlights. What was I doing in the world without them?

Oddly enough, in trying to inculcate me in soccer fandom, he started not with game highlights, but with the advertisements. Yes, Carlos was an educator and a voluntary footsoldier for Big Apparel. Going in, I had no clue about high-quality, internationally popular Nike soccer ads. The ads, written by the legendary Wieden+Kennedy firm, were miniature movies, films that were often creatively daring but also quite funny. The most popular of these ads might be “Good vs. Evil,” from 1996, where Nike’s best soccer players team up to play Satan’s literal army. The blending of sacrilege, theology and comedy just worked, like a more ambitious version of Space Jam that somehow took itself less seriously than Space Jam.

…

Yes, I know ads aren’t supposed to be high art. I understand that they are the purest distillation of manipulative greed. And yet, they sometimes are culturally relevant generational touchstones. While Nike was weaving soccer into enduring pop culture abroad, it was having a similar kind of success with basketball and baseball stateside. These ads weren’t just pure ephemera. Michael Jordan’s commercials were so good that, as he nears age 60, his sneaker still outsells any modern athlete’s. “Chicks dig the long ball” is a phrase (a) that can get you sent to the modern HR department and b) whose origins are fondly remembered by most American men over the age of 35.

Modern Nike ads will never be so remembered. It’s not because we’re so inundated with information these days, though we are. And it’s not because today’s overexposed athletes lack the mystique of the 1990s superstars, though they do. It’s because the modern Nike ads are beyond fucking terrible.

…

They’re bad for many causes, but one in particular is an incongruity at the company’s heart. Nike, like so many major institutions, is suffering from what I’ll call Existence Dissonance. It’s happening in a particular way, for a particular reason and the result is that what Nike is happens to be at cross-purposes from what Nike aspires to be.

…

For all the talk of a racial reckoning within major industries, Nike’s main problem is this: It’s a company built on masculinity, most specifically Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambitions, scandals, and intellectual trends, Nike finds masculinity problematic enough to loudly reject.

This rejection is part of the broader culture war, but it’s accelerating due to an arcane quirk in the apparel giant’s strange restructuring plan, announced in June. Under the leadership of new CEO John Donahoe, Nike is moving away from its classic discrete sports categories (Nike Basketball, Nike Soccer, etc.) in favor of a system where all products are shoveled into one of three divisions: men’s, women’s and kids’. Obviously Nike made clothing tailored to the specificities of all these groups before, but now, Nike is emphasizing gender over sport. Gone is the model of the product appealing to basketball fans because they are basketball fans. It’s now replaced by a model of, say, the product appealing to women because they are women.

And hey, women buy sneakers too. Actually, women buy the lion’s share of clothing in the United States. While women shoppers are market dominant in nearly every aspect of American apparel, the clothing multinational named after a Greek goddess happens to be a major exception. At Nike, according to its own records, men account for roughly twice as much revenue as women do.

You might see that stat and think, “Well, this means that Nike will prioritize men over women in its new, odd, gendered segmentation of the company.” That’s not necessarily how this all works, thanks to a phenomenon I’ll call Undecided Whale. The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close? The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And yeah yeah yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but those were birds. This is a damned whale! And so you start forgetting about your base.

You can see this dynamic in other places. For the NBA, China is its Undecided Whale. It could be argued that the NBA fixates more on China than on America, even if the vast majority of TV money comes from U.S. viewership. The league figures it has more or less hit its ceiling in its home country, so China becomes an obsession as this massive, theoretical growth engine.

…

Here’s the main issue for Nike in this endeavor: The company, as a raison d’être, promotes athletic excellence. While women are among Nike’s major sports stars, the core of high-level performance, in the overwhelming majority of sports, is male. Every sane person knows that, though nobody in professional class life seems rude enough to say so. Obviously, there’s the observable reality of who tends to set records and there’s also the pervasive understanding that testosterone, the main male sex hormone, happens to give unfair advantages to the athletes who inject it.

Speaking of which, there’s a famous This American Life episode from 2002 where the public radio journos actually test their own testosterone levels. The big joke of the episode is just how comically low their T levels are. Sure, you would stereotype bookish public radio men in this way, and yet the results are on the nose enough to shock.

As a nerdy media-weakling type, I can relate to the stunning realization that you’ve been largely living apart from T. Before working in the NBA setting, I was an intern in the cubicles of Salon.com’s San Francisco office, around the time it was shifting from respectable online magazine into inane outrage content mill. Going from that setting to the NBA locker room was some jarring whiplash, like leaving the faculty lounge for a pirate ship. To quote Charles Barkley on the latter culture, “The locker room is sexist, racist, and homophobic … and it’s fun and I miss it.”

…

The “Good vs. Evil” ad boasts a “Like” to “Dislike” ratio of 20-to-1 on YouTube. On June 17th of 2021, Nike put out an ad ahead of the Euro Cup that referenced “Good vs. Evil” as briefly as it could. In this case, a little child popped his collar and used Cantona’s catchphrase. As of this writing, the new ad has earned a thousand more punches of the Dislike than of the Like button.

When you see it, it’s no surprise that the latest Euro Cup ad is disliked. I mean, you have to look at this shit. I know we’re so numb to the ever-escalating emanations of radical chic from our largest corporations, but sometimes it’s worth pausing just to take stock and gawk.

…

But today we are in the land of new football, where we take dictatorial direction from less-than-athletic minors. After her announcement, we are treated to a montage of different people who offer tolerance bromides.

“There are no borders here!”

“Here, you can be whoever you want. Be with whoever you want.”

(Two men kiss following that line, because subtlety isn’t part of this new world order.)

Then, a woman who appears to be breastfeeding under a soccer shirt, threatens, in French, “And if you disagree …”

And this is when the little boy gives us Cantona’s “au revoir” line before kicking a ball out of a soccer stadium, presumably because that’s what happens to the ignorant soccer hooligan. He gets kicked out for raging against gay men kissing or French ladies breastfeeding or somesuch. Later, a referee wearing a hijab instructs us, “Leave the hate,” before narrator girl explains, “You might as well join us because no one can stop us.”

Is that last line supposed to be … inspiring? That’s what a movie villain says, like if Bane took the form of Stan Marsh’s sister. Speaking of which, was this ad actually written by the creators of South Park as an elaborate prank? It’s certainly more convincing as an aggressive parody of liberals than as a sales pitch. Why, in anything other than a comedic setup, is a woman breastfeeding in a big-budget Euro Cup ad?

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

Now juxtapose that ad not just against the classics of the 1990s but also the 2000s products that preceded the Great Awokening. Compare it to another Nike Euro Cup advertisement, Guy Ritchie’s “Take It to the Next Level.”

…

Here’s the problem, insofar as problems are pretended into existence by our media class: The ad is very, very male. Really, what we are watching here is a boyhood fantasy. Our protagonist gets called up to the big show, and next thing you know he’s cavorting with multiple ladies, and autographing titties to the chagrin of his date. He can be seen buying a luxury sports car and arriving at his childhood home in it as his father beams with pride. Training sessions show him either puking from exhaustion or playing grab-ass with his fellow soccer bros. This is jock life, distilled. Art works when it’s true and it’s true that this is a vivid depiction of a common fantasy realized.

Nike’s highly successful “Write the Future” ad (16,000 Likes, 257 Dislikes) works along similar themes.

…

The recent Olympic ads were especially heavy on cringe radical chic, and might have stood out less in this respect if the athletes themselves mirrored that tone on the big stage. Not so much in these Olympics. It seems as though Nike made the commercials in preparation for an explosion of telegenic activism, only to see American athletes mostly, quietly accept their medals, chomp down on the gold, and praise God or country. Perhaps you could consider Simone Biles bowing out of events due to mental health as a form of activism, but overall, the athletes basically behaved in the manner they would have back in 1996.

But Nike forged onwards anyway. This ad in celebration of the U.S. women’s basketball team made some waves, getting ripped in conservative media as the latest offense by woke capital.

…

“Today I have a presentation on dynasties,” a pink-haired teenage girl tells us. “But I refuse to talk about the ancient history and drama. That’s just the patriarchy. Instead, I’m going to talk about a dynasty that I actually look up to. An all-women dynasty. Women of color. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot. A dynasty that makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.”

When she says, “That’s just the patriarchy,” the camera pans to a bust of (I think) Julius Caesar. At another point, the girl says, “A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.” Fuck you, Classical Antiquity. Fuck you, fans of teams. You’re all just the patriarchy. Or something.

Nike could easily sell the successful American women’s basketball team without denigrating other teams, genders and ancient Mediterranean empires that have nothing to do with this. Could but won’t. The company now conveys an almost visceral need for women to triumph over men because … well, nobody really explains why, even if it has something to do with Undecided Whaling. In Nike’s tentpole Olympics ad titled “Best Day Ever,” the narrator fantasizes about the future, declaring, “The WNBA will surpass the NBA in popularity!”

…

There are theories on the emergence of woke capital, with many having observed that, following Occupy Wall Street, media institutions ramped up on census category grievance. The thinking goes that, in response to the threat of a real economic revolution, the power players in our society pushed identity politics to undermine group solidarity. Well, that was a fiendishly brilliant plan, if anyone actually hatched it.

I’m not so convinced, though, as I’m more inclined to believe that a lot of history happens by happenstance. If we’re to specifically analyze the Nike Awokening, there is a recent top-down element of a mandate for Undecided Whaling, but that mandate was preceded by a socially conscious middle class campaign within the company.

This isn’t unique to Nike, either. Given my past life covering the team that tech moguls root for, I’ve run into such people. They aren’t, by and large, ideological. Very few are messianically devoted to seeing the world through the intersectionality lens. They are, however, terrified of their employees who feel this way. The mid-tier labor force, this cohort who actually internalized their university teachings, are full of fervor and willing to risk burned bridges in favor of causes they deem righteous. The big bosses just don’t want a headline-making walkout on their hands, so they placate and mollify, eventually bending the company’s voice into language of righteousness.

…

All the guilt and atonement transference make for bad art. And so the ads suck. There’s no Machiavellian conspiracy behind the production. It’s just a combination of desperately wanting female market share and desperately wanting to move on from the publicized sins of a masculine past. So, to message its ambitions, the exhausted corporation leans on the employees with the loudest answers.

There’s a lot of interplay between Nike and Wieden+Kennedy when the former asks the latter for a type of ad, but the through line from both sides is a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Based on conversations with people who’ve worked in both environments, there’s a dearth of personnel who are deeply connected to sports. In place of a grounding in a subculture, you’re getting ideas from folks who went to nice colleges and trendy ad schools, the type of people who throw words like “patriarchy” at the screen to celebrate a gold medal victory. The older leaders, uneasy in their station and thus obsessed with looking cutting edge, lean on the younger types because the youth are confident. Unfortunately, that confidence is rooted in an ability to regurgitate liturgy, rather than generative genius. They’ve a mandate to replace a marred past, which they leap at, but they’re incapable of inventing a better future.

…

Ironically, Nike mattered a lot more in the days when its position was less dominant. Back when it had to really fight for market share, it made bold, genre-altering art. The ads were synonymous with masculine victory, plus they were cheekily irreverent. And so the dudes loved them. Today, Nike is something else. It LARPs as a grandiose feminist nonprofit as it floats aimlessly on the vessel Michael Jordan built long ago. Like Jordan himself, Nike is rich forever off what it can replicate never. Unlike Jordan, it now wishes to be known for anything but its triumphs. Nike once told a story and that story resonated with its audience. Now it’s decided that its audience is the problem. It wouldn’t shock you to learn that Carlos hated the new Nike ads I texted to him. His exact words were, “I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly.” He’ll still buy the gear, though, just not the narrative. Nike remains, but the story about itself has run out. Au revoir.

#ethan strauss #nike #sports #substack

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lockedstuck · 3 years ago

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how to make friends and influence people

March 2021

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you probably should have thought this through better.

Picture a thin blonde girl sitting by a phone, being watched by a woman in navy blue scrubs. The girl wears light blue hospital issue pants, and a white T-shirt with a pink cat on it. Her frustration shows clear as day, from her posture to her facial expressions. She yanks the phone off the hook and punches in a number with such speed that the gesture must be semi-unconscious. She puts the phone to her ear, waits a few moments, then swears loudly. Then, in a tense voice, she begins to speak.

“Mommy, this is the fourth time I’ve called you today… Please call me back when you can.”

Her bobbed hair bounces as she turns to face you.

“Oh!” she exclaims. “Did you want to use the phone?”

Yeah, yeah you did, to call your unceasing nag of a brother. He’s the reason you’re here in the first place, since he’s the fucker who called 911 on you. Therefore, he should have to bring you clothes. You grab the phone and dial Kankri’s number. He does not answer. You listen to his voicemail and grow progressively angrier. You mentally curse him and his next seven generations.

The weird blonde girl watches your frustration with a hint of amusement. This will not do.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” you ask her. She blinks, shrugs, and walks away.

Your name is Karkat Vantas, you’ve been in the loony bin for ten minutes, and you’re already pissed off. Score one, you.

Apparently you arrived just in time for morning meds, so all the fucking loonies are out on parade, including the blonde girl, who gives you a friendly wave. You scowl. Nobody has told you where to put your shit yet, or deigned to assign you a room. Not that you have much shit to put anywhere. Just the clothes you arrived in the psych ER with - a black turtleneck, and black sweatpants. They took away your shoes and gave you a pair of hospital socks.

Allegedly this is one of the nicest hospitals in the area. Go fucking figure.

Finally, after what feels like six hundred years, an orderly tells you that you’re in room 1224, on the men’s side.

Wait, there are sides? The psych ER wasn’t organized according to gender; you were stuck there with two homeless people (one man and one woman), an alcoholic, and some guy who had overdosed on alprazolam. Whatever, though. You shuffle your ass over to room 1224, which is about thirty feet away. You drop your stuff in the closet, take one look at your snoring roommate, and go back outside.

The blonde girl - having taken her medication - dashes back to the phone, dials a number, waits a moment, and then bursts into tears.

Great. You should have never written that note. Now you’re stuck in here with this chick. You contemplate trying to comfort her, and decide that you’d probably suck at it.

Another person saunters past her and stops. She’s a few shades lighter than you, and has these long Poetic Justice type box braids. Her green dress looks like it’s been immaculately pressed. She tugs the hem down to fully cover her thighs. She also has three eyebrow rings, a lip ring, and a full face of makeup. You didn’t know staff could have piercings. She offers the blonde girl a hug. You really didn’t know staff could do that.

This is not what you were expecting from the psychiatric ward.

“Roxy, why are you crying again?” the woman asks. Roxy sniffles and swipes at her eyes with the back of her arm.

“I had a nightmare and my mom won’t answer the phone,” she responds. “Where is she?”

“Asleep, most likely. It’s awfully early, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Roxy admits. She gives the woman a weak smile. “Did you go for vitals yet?”

The woman sighs and nods. “Yeah. 92/53. They’re telling me to drink more water since my pressure’s so low and my heart rate’s so high.”

Wait. That woman must be a patient.

She doesn’t seem like the type. She’s too authoritative, too poised.

You take a look at her again, scanning her for some sign of insanity. Maybe a few marks on her brown arms where the razor slipped. You search her carefully, not trying to seem like you are.

She has one thin, deep, healing scar down each wrist. Well, then.

She manages to pick up on you, because at that moment she turns to face you. She smiles.

“You must be the new admission to the unit,” she begins in a cool, pleasant tone. You’re reminded of a receptionist.

“Uh, yeah.”

She offers you her hand to shake. “I’m Porrim. Porrim Maryam.”

“Karkat,” you reply.

Trying to sleep in your room is an absolute trip. It goes the way everything in your life has been going, absolutely fuckawful.

“I won’t take it!” a high-pitched voice exclaims, all of a sudden, jolting you out of your light sleep. “Water you even playing at?!”

Oh, how you can empathize with that sentiment, furious as you are with whomever voiced it. Fuck the psych ward. With distinction. You peer out of your room, and watch a black girl in a purple onesie sprint down the hallway, yelling all the while.

Your roommate, who had heretofore been snoring with his mouth open fish-wide, starts to mutter things at the ceiling.

“Nurse Esther musta tried to give Clozapine to Fef again,” he says. “What an idiot.”

He looks at you and blinks. Fully registers your presence. He props himself up on one hand and stares some more.

“You must be my new roommate,” he says. “I think. Are you?”

You roll your eyes. “No, I’m just here for shits and giggles.”

He snorts and turns on the light. Apparently he’s got the front part of his blond hair dyed purple. You’d never do anything like that personally, but it looks okay on him. He gropes for his glasses and crams them onto his face.

“Christ, you look awful,” he says.

Where the fuck does he get off saying that?

“You don’t look so hot yourself.”

Your roommate curses and shakes his head.

“Nah, I didn’t mean it like that,” he goes on. “I mean, you look like you haven’t slept in days.”

“I haven’t,” you reply, thinking of the time leading up to your suicide attempt. Not even an attempt, really. More like… a contemplation. A contemplation that led you to telling Kankri you’d rather jump in front of the train than send one more month in your parents’ house,

“Well, you’ll get lots of sleep here. There’s not much else to do. The name’s Eridan, by the way. Welcome to 3 East.”

“Thanks,” you say. “I’m Karkat.”

“Nice to meet you.”

A few minutes later, someone starts knocking on your door. Eridan groans.

“If it’s Roxy, tell her to come back in half an hour. I got ECT today. I need my beauty sleep.”

“The crying girl?” you ask.

“Was she on the phone while she was crying?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Rox, then. She calls her mom every four hours and then flips a shit if she doesn’t answer,” Eridan says. “Ever heard of Rose Lalonde?”

Before you started transitioning a couple years ago, they had you in the women’s unit for a week. Dr. Lalonde saw you twice over that seven day period and was probably the only clinician who reliably used your pronouns.

“The psychologist for the unit downstairs?” you ask.

“Exactly,” Eridan says. “That’s Roxy’s mom.”

Well, fuck.

---

A couple of days later, there’s a new admission. Kid looks comprised of a bunch of coat-hangers and duct tape, all angles and gangle. He walks up to use the phone, without realizing there’s a line for the phone already behind him. Gamzee just rolls with it, even though he was next in line. This dude is clearly a massive douche. He’s only on for a couple of seconds though - you assume whomever he was calling didn’t pick up.

When the good ugly fairy was handing out ugly, she must have dumped in almost as much for him as she did for you. He is by far the skinniest dude you have ever seen. And being that everyone in your major in college was hopped up on amphetamines, you have seen some truly thin people. If a strong breeze hit him, he’d fly clear to Canada.

Roxy asks him for his name, and when he replies, “Thollukth Captor”, with the universe’s thickest lisp, you can’t help yourself. A snort escapes your mouth before you can take it back. The dude looks at you with a narrow-eyed suspicion, and you raise your eyebrows at him in response. How does he talk like that and not expect mockery?

“And uh...” Roxy trails off helplessly. “How do you spell that, exactly?”

“What’re you, with regithtration, or thomething?”

“I was just curious.”

You won’t laugh, Karkat. You swear it. You thwear it, to use this man’s parlance. Unfortunately, though, you’re grinning. His eyes alight on you, and he gives you a quick, “the fuck are you looking at, aththhole?”

“Call me an asshole again and I’ll cram those glasses so far up your ass they’ll need a colorectal exam to find them.”

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mst3kproject · 5 years ago

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511: Gunslinger

I’ve probably given the impression that I hate Westerns, which is not quite true – I’m mostly just bored with the entire concept after having been force-fed it since childhood. If a Western wants me, it’s gonna have to give me aliens or dinosaurs or vampires or something as a ‘hook’. Gunslinger is just a straight-up tale of law and order in the old west, and as such it doesn’t interest me much at all. Yet when I watch it, I have to give it a surprising number of props, especially for being something that wound up on the Satellite of Love.

Gunslinger does not waste time. In the opening scene we see the Marshall of Oracle, Texas, gunned down in his own office, and his wife Rose vow to take her revenge on the killers. Until the new guy can arrive from San Antonio, Rose decides she’s going to do the Marshalling herself! She starts small, trying to make the local Red Dog Saloon comply with the laws about not being open late. This brings her into conflict with the Saloon’s owner Erica, who decides that Rose has to go. While Rose makes freely with the police brutality, Erica hires her outlaw ex-boyfriend Caine as an assassin. This being a movie, Caine and Rose immediately fall in love instead. Her husband’s been dead about a week at this point.

The biggest strength of the movie is that the writing and acting, while not stellar, are certainly good enough. We know who all these people are, we can tell them apart, and we know what they want and why they’re in conflict with each other. Rose and Erica have never liked one another, and now their jobs have put them in a position to do something about it. Erica uses people’s image of her as a floozy to bilk them out of money. Jake is in love with Erica and tired of being spurned. Mayor Polk dwells on his war stories because they’re more exciting than his lackluster present life. Caine is still shaken by PTSD and doesn’t understand that killing Polk won’t make it better. The funeral scene introduces us to most of these characters, and their relationships are sketched out in ways that aren’t boring and don’t interfere with the flow of the story.

Gunslinger’s ‘gimmick’ is that it takes a pretty standard Western plot – local Sheriff versus land-grabbing tycoon – and places women in the main roles. This could have been an absolute disaster depending on what the writers thought of women, but Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna handled it very well. It never treats either Rose or Erica as a joke, or thinks they’re ‘cute’ for being a law enforcer or a businesswoman. Both of them are portrayed as people, slightly larger-than-life in the way genre characters always are, but written and played with complete sincerity. The fact that they’re women allows the introduction of the love triangle with Caine, but the only person who lets that get in the way of what anybody’s trying to accomplish is Caine himself! Even the very minor character of Mayor Polk’s wife Felicity is an active rather than reactive character, who actually protects her husband when she thinks he’s in danger rather than just standing around fretting. Likewise with the can-can dancers, who take action to try to avoid losing their livelihoods.

Rose in particular could have driven the whole thing into the ground if her heart had overcome her head, but while she does have a weakness for Caine she knows it’s a weakness, and uses it to her advantage when she can. She meets him knowing he plans to try to seduce her, but keeps her head and questions him. She firmly tells him that she can’t let emotion interfere with the unpleasant job that needs doing, and at the end, even though it visibly upsets her, she does her duty and kills him. Even the fact that he just shot Erica to protect her doesn’t sway her decision! The way Erica and Rose keep their heads while Caine loses his heart suggests to me that this inversion of the male and female roles is entirely intentional. Gunslinger is predicated on the idea that men and women are equally capable of being rational and emotional, giving and greedy, and generally human, and on that basis it seems to be an earnest attempt at a feminist movie.

So as far as that goes, Gunslinger works all right. The plot is, as Kevin noted in The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, a series of wild west clichés, with only the gender swap to really give them any flavour. Details of Erica’s land scheme are pretty muddy and the movie studiously avoids any actual action or suspense, but we’re interested enough to see it through to the end. It’s not really that bad. Unfortunately, it’s not that good, either.

The primary reason why is because the movie is desperately cheap. The streets of Oracle often look all but abandoned, as they couldn’t afford extras and therefore saved them for the most important scenes. The buildings appear to be made out of cardboard and the jail cells in the Marshall’s office look like they would have trouble holding a large dog, never mind an armed human being. Characters ride horses along dirt roads with visible tyre tracks. Most of the film takes place at night, but you can’t tell because they shot it in the daytime and didn’t even use a very dark filter – witness the hilarious bit where Caine points out the constellation Ursa Major while there is blue sky visible behind him.

Another reason is the direction, which is at best boring. Far too many wide shots call attention to the empty streets, while all the gunplay takes place at very close quarters to disguise the fact that none of the actors can even pretend to aim. The fight scene between Caine and the Deputy is downright tragic, with punches that obviously miss by several inches. The worst moment of this is Caine’s story about why he hates Polk. I understand and respect that they couldn’t afford an actual flashback, but all we see for this entire narrative is Caine’s talking head in a single, static shot. Surely there was something more interesting they could have done here. I should not watch this and find myself thinking about how ugly that wallpaper is.

The thing I spent most of Gunslinger thinking about, though, is Rose’s approach to law enforcement, which is inconsistent to say the least. We have a few quick scenes in which she upholds the law in Oracle by shooting people – what these men did we’re never told. Later she shoots at Caine, having mistaken him for somebody else. What if she’d hit and killed him? Yet only minutes later, she’s telling Caine she wants this man alive and tells him off for shooting the guy before he could be questioned. So how exactly was Rose planning on questioning a dead man? Later, when Erica’s little toady Jake tells Rose that Caine is planning to kill her and Mayor Polk, she says she cannot arrest him for something they have no evidence of. Really? She seemed perfectly happy to shoot a guy whose face she couldn’t see earlier in the film.

Maybe this is supposed to be Rose’s character arc. She goes from cold-bloodedly shooting one of her husband’s assassins at the funeral to realizing that the law is more complex and due process is necessary. Maybe realizing she’d almost killed the wrong man was her turning point. The script actually does kind of hint at this. At the end Rose leaves Oracle and all its bad memories behind when her official replacement arrives, wanting nothing more to do with this town or with law enforcement, and she and Caine do discuss the violence associated with the job. Men who are outlaws in one state become lawmen in another, and then go back to a life of crime – either way you get the rush of killing (and a lawman can do so legally!), but crime pays better. Caine thinks of himself as better than other professional murderers, because he’s in it for the money rather than the blood.

That’s not how the movie uses these moments, though. Rose’s killing spree is apparently supposed to convince us she’s the most effective law enforcement this town has had in a long time, and her almost shooting Caine merely provides a ‘meet cute’ scene of sorts. Their conversation about killing and police work just gives them something in common to bond over, and her leaving at the end has to do with being forced to kill the man she’s fallen in love with (just days after her husband died! Couldn’t they have made her the first Marshall’s sister or something?).

Gunslinger is one of those movies where just a little extra effort would have made the whole thing a lot better. A few more extras would have made all the difference to a lot of shots. Better lighting would have improved the night scenes immeasurably. Anything would have been better than a talking head and bad wallpaper for Caine’s war story. These are such tiny details, and yet just a little more money in the right places could have done so much to help the audience focus on what’s there instead of what’s missing.

Sadly, this is a Roger Corman production, so making a good movie was never really the goal. Rather, the union rules were about to change so that actors could only work five days a week, so Corman shit out Gunslinger as fast as he could to get it done before he would have to let anyone have a weekend. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

#mst3k #reviews #gunslinger #50s

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gayagendaofficial · 5 years ago

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Wait, what’s gay lingo? Like, what does twink, bear, etc. mean?

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED!

Before I get into actually defining these terms, I’d like to write about a few things:

So this is probably in reference to this post I made. Not to explain the joke to death, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. I wanted to make fun of how people who aren’t mlm think they know what mlm terms like “twink” and “bear” mean and how they blatantly use them incorrectly everywhere, because they think they’re funny (bc gay men are a joke, right? //sarcasm), or because it makes them look “woke”. It’s an idea I had for the longest time when I saw something a str8 woman wrote about Zac Efron being a twink, in the present. Like yes, Zac Efron was a twink, past tense, but he is absolutely not a twink anymore (if you can even call a str8 man a twink). And she also implied that being a twink is something you can’t outgrow, which is laughable, because it’s kind of a meme among gay men that being a twink is something you grow out of whether you like it or not.

This mostly seems to be a problem among cishet women, since cishet men tend to be too concerned with their “masculinity” to touch gay culture. But since this is tumblr and virtually none of you are cishet, a lot of the times I’ve seen people misuse these terms on this site were LGBT+ people who weren’t themselves mlm. In those cases, the reasons seem more that these people are just misinformed, and they use these terms because mlm use these terms, and we share a community. Part of it comes from the fact that wlw might see the terms “twink” and “bear” as analogous to “femme” and “butch” respectively, which is not true in the slightest (Butch and femme are their own complex thing. What they actually have in common with twink and bear is that few outside their communities actually know what they mean lol). Another reason might be that other LGBT people see mlm using these terms sarcastically and think they’re being used in earnest; if an actual gay man calls a bodybuilder a twink, he’s probably being sarcastic, and also probably trying to insult him (which is a whole can of worms I’ll open up in a bit).

I’m gonna try to define what “twink”, “bear”, and a couple of other terms actually mean, as well as give a little bit of context to how they’re used and controversy surrounding these identities within gay spaces, partially based on my experience as a gay man and partially based on casual research. I’m just one gay man, and I’m not an expert in queer studies or anything, so take from that what you will. I hope this will be useful to mlm who are just discovering their identities and exploring their sexuality/gender, who are new to the community, and I also hope to inform our siblings elsewhere in the LGBT community. This info could also be useful to cishet allies, although please be mindful of your intentions in using these terms.

Anywho, lets get to the definitions:

A twink is a young, smooth, slim mlm. The definition here is generally seen as being pretty strict on those 3 criteria, although “twink” is sometimes used for older mlm who are skinny and don’t have much body hair. Those last two criteria are the most important, because there are other categories for mlm that fit one of the criteria; an otter is essentially twink + bodyhair, and there’s a whole host of other words for other body types.

The definition of “bear” is a little more flexible than “twink”, although it generally comes down to the inverses of those same 3 criteria. The most important of these is the bodyhair requirement; any definition you find of bear includes something about being hairy. Almost as important as bodyhair is body type, although “bear” covers a slightly larger range than twink in that regard. Usually, “bear” indicates that someone is large or plus-sized, although it can also sometimes be used to describe someone who is muscular in the sense that they are beefy (if you can see a 6 pack, he’s probably not a bear). It’s also sometimes associated with being slightly older, but that’s not nearly as important, and “bear” can refer to any age. The term “cub” refers to mlm with the same body type as a bear, but who are smooth and young.

Now, let’s get into some misconceptions/controversies surrounding these terms. The first of these is that twink and bear are the only two options, and that all mlm fall into one of these two categories, or that other terms are simply variations on those two main terms. This misconception is really only one held by people who aren’t mlm themselves (or are, but are only just learning the terminology). These terms are extremely specific, and the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of mlm don’t fit into either of these categories. And that’s ok! There are a ton of other words mlm use to describe themselves. I’ve already mentioned “otter” and “cub”; there’s also “jock”, which refers to muscular mlm; “wolf”, which also refers to muscular mlm, but specifically hairy ones (with a bit of overlap with the “beefier bears” I mentioned earlier); the relatively new term “twunk” which you may know from this video as “a combination twink and hunk”; and many many more. In addition, all of these categories are really just physical descriptions of your body, and don’t have any bearing on anything else. You don’t need to fit into any of them.

That being said, there are a number of stereotypes associated with these terms, and it is important to address them.

Our next misconception is one that’s as common among mlm as as it is among everyone else: that twinks are by definition fem, and bears are by definition masc. “Masc” and “fem”, short for masculine and feminine respectively, come with their own host of problems, and that is a can of worms that I am not going to open up right now. This post is long enough as it is. If you want the sparknotes version of the controversy surrounding the masc-fem dichotomy, it basically boils down to misogyny, transphobia, and internalized homophobia. But back to twinks and bears: I would like to assume that it’s obvious that your body type or bodyhair has absolutely no impact on your personal presentation of gender. There are plenty of fem bears and masc twinks. But unfortunately, most people don’t seem to get this. And this super important, because the gendered way we think of these terms affects everything else I’ll be talking about in the remainder of this post.

My next point, which is really and observation based on my experience in the gay community, is that bear as a term seems to be much less… loaded. However, being a twink myself, there might be a gap in my personal experience, so any bears feel free to correct me. However, from what I’ve seen, “bear” isn’t really used as an insult in the way “twink” is. Which is a bit of a miracle, considering how prevalent fat-shaming is in the gay community. From what I’ve seen, bear isn’t a term that’s forced on you, it’s a term that bears choose for themselves, almost always in a positive way. It’s a term associated with body positivity, and bear communities seem to be much less toxic than the gay community as a whole. Even when it’s used to describe someone else, it’s always a neutral statement of fact. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used as an insult, or even sarcastically. The worst I’ve seen of it is that it’s used as a porn category, which contributes to the fetishization of fat people; but then again, twink and jock are also porn categories, so it would be weird for bear not to be. This isn’t to suggest that bears are treated better than anyone else in the gay community, if anything they’re treated worse; just that the word “bear” itself has neutral to positive connotations. (Again, any bears correct me on this if you’ve seen it used negatively!)

Twink, on the other hand, is absolutely used as an insult, and frequently. And while this may sometimes be harmless, more often than not it’s really problematic. If you’re plus-sized and you use twink as an insult in the same vein that Nicki Minaj said “fuck the skinny bitches”, that’s completely fine. Twinks are seen as being desirable (if they behave a certain way; more on that later), so effectively it’s punching up instead of punching down. However, a good 95% of the time that “twink” is used as an insult, it really comes from one of the many stereotypes that all essentially boil down to the idea that twinks are fem. And the idea that being fem is inherently bad and insult worthy is, once again, rooted in misogyny, transphobia, and internalized homophobia.

This association between twinks and femininity also has a lot of scary implications on the beauty standards twinks are held to. I’ve noticed that twinks fill a niche in the gay community that is similar to the role cis women are supposed to fill in western culture as large, and that we’re only seen as sexually valuable if we perform the same behaviors and meet the same beauty standards that are typically reserved for women. We’re bottoms by default, submissive both in and out of the bedroom (yes I actually am a sub bottom, but that’s beside the point). We’re supposed to maintain a completely smooth, hairless appearance; a shaved ass is the bare minimum of hygiene. I once met a guy on grindr who demanded that I be completely hairless everywhere beneath my eyelashes, and while that’s a bit extreme, he was by no means an outlier. Just today I talked to a guy who wanted me hairless between my neck and knees. We’re often seen as vapid and stupid, and infantilization of twinks is rampant (some guys put way too much emphasis on the young part of the definition). And, to cap it all off, there’s the racism! Who’d’a thunk that all forms of oppression are connected? (sarcasm). Twinks can of course be any race, but the ones you’ll see men on grindr going after the most are white or light-skinned Asian twinks. Combine that with stereotypes of Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern men as dominant and aggressive, and you have a whole slew of white supremacist ideas painted over with a thin coat of gay porn. (mlm of color who’d like to add or correct me on anything, please do so!)

I’ll end this already long post with a comparatively brief discussion on who these terms apply to. Basically, if you’re an mlm and you fit the definition of “twink” or “bear”, congratulations! You’re a twink/bear! “Can bi men use these terms?” Of course! “What about trans men?” Are you attracted to men and male-aligned people? Then of course! That last one might be controversial to some cis gays, and to that I say fuck right off. However, it does get a bit muddier with trans women and transfem nonbinary people and the word twink. Trans women are absolutely not mlm, but many of them have been a part of mlm communities for a long time, often before they even realized they were trans, and some may be reluctant to give up the word twink (I haven’t seen this for bear, although again, lmk if you’ve seen evidence to the contrary). And on top of that, a lot of cis men looking to have sex with trans women conflate trans women and cis twinks. Because remember what I said about twinks filling the niche of women? It’s often a niche they share with trans women, except trans women have it even worse, because they are actually women. My two cents is, if a trans woman wants to refer to herself as a twink, she’s more than welcome to. Just don’t go around calling trans women “twinks” unless they specifically say you can; it’s a gendered term, you are misgendering them, and, once again, you can fuck right off. (trans women also please comment if you want!)

Well, anon, I bet you weren’t expecting a post this long. At least I hope y’all learned something! Be gay do crimes!

#mlm #twink #bear #gay #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbt+#lgbtq+#gay culture #ask #anon #sfw #long post #transphobia //#misogyny //#racism //#fatphobia //

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Avengers (2012)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Three (23.07% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Ten.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Episode Quality:

It’s solid. Unpopular opinion? I don’t think it’s half as good as people made it out to be, back when it first hit cinemas and everyone was swooning. It’s solid, but that’s the best I’ve got for it.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

...

Female characters:

Maria Hill.

Natasha Romanov.

Pepper Potts.

Male characters:

Nick Fury.

Phil Coulson.

Erik Selvig.

Clint Barton.

Loki.

Bruce Banner.

Steve Rogers.

Tony Stark.

JARVIS.

Thor.

OTHER NOTES:

‘free from freedom’ is such a wanky piece of writing, man. It’s absolute nonsense, but it sounds vaguely profound if you don’t think about it at all. I thought about it. It’s idiotic.

The very first thing we see of Black Widow in this movie is her being hit in the face, wearing a slinky little dress, tied to a chair being interrogated by a bunch of men. We’re supposed to indulge this excuse for hurting and objectifying a woman and then write it off as ‘empowering’ because she beats the Hell outta the dudes a couple of minutes later. That’s not a game I’m interested in playing. This is garbage.

The classical music over the beginnings of the Stuttgart attack is great.

All those German folks so confused by this Loki dude speaking English at them. What a tool.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard ‘not today’ used as an effective badass declaration. It’s ALWAYS cheesy. Make it stop.

“There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” I don’t really like this line for Steve; he just doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would play the ‘one true God’ card, and there was nothing in his origin story which implied that he’s particularly attached to religion at all; plus, he already read the brief on Thor, he knows this is literally the old Norse deity, there’s no question of whether or not they’re dealing with a God here. To argue the point (because he’s not MY God!) is meaningless in context, and feels like a weak attempt to correlate (Christian) faith with being ‘old-fashioned’, like OF COURSE Steve would defend the idea of the ‘one true God’, he’s from the past, not a cool enlightened atheist/agnostic modern man like the rest of us, right?

Thor and Loki are using such archaic phrasing, when Tony makes his ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ joke, it’s...more an observation than a quip. The Asgardians were not half as stuffy in Thor. It makes it seem like someone didn’t bother to see that movie first before writing their version of the characters.

Thor has to fight with the others when he shows up. He’s just gotta.

Gotta give a nod to Mark Ruffalo’s work here; I feel like I can see the clear comparison between his version of the character and Edward Norton’s in The Incredible Hulk, but at the same time there’s no sense of this being a Norton’s-Banner impression. Ruffalo is doing a sweet job of making the character his own without totally overhauling the template Norton laid down, and I dig it.

Oh, here we are. Loki calls Black Widow a ‘mewling quim’, which is just a fancy way of calling her a whiny cunt. Your gendered slur is still a gendered slur, movie.

I know they’re playing the idea that the sceptre is causing the antagonism between the characters, but fuck, it’s tedious. It just feels like they’re all contrived petty versions of themselves, being shitty because it’s ~dramatic~ for them to not get along.

I didn’t see this movie until months after it was released, and people were raving about how crushed they were by the major character death in the film but they were doing a pretty good job of not spoiling it; good enough that for a moment, I really thought I’d get to enjoy the surprise/horror for myself. You know who spoiled it for me? In a tweet, no less? It was the 44th President of the United States. Thanks, Obama.

This guy is the MVP of this film:

You can chalk “Son, just don’t,” up on the list of Things Steve Rogers Would Not Say. Just because he’s technically in his nineties doesn’t mean he isn’t still in his twenties in his mind: I don’t buy that he’d go for a blithely patriarchal term like ‘son’, it seems like another poorly-considered attempt to make him sound old-fashioned. Juxtapose that with ‘just don’t’, which is very modern vernacular. It might seem clever to combine the two as a meta-expression of Steve belonging to two different times now, but in practical application it just sounds out-of-character, and there’s nothing clever about that.

I know I said after the last movie that I love it when someone gets hit and flies off-screen in an exaggerated fashion, but Hulk punching Thor off-screen after they finish working together to take down the big beastie is an exception, because there’s no reason for Hulk to decide to hit Thor in the first place, it’s just a gag for the sake of a gag. I can’t believe they messed up such a simple pleasure.

I will forgive it, in return for Hulk smashing Loki all over the place. That was funny.

Back when this movie came out, before I saw it, I had people tell me - straight-faced, totally sincere - that it was one of the best movies they had ever seen. The internet was on fire with Avengers love. The film was rated in the IMDb Top 20. Admittedly, that all sets a pretty impossible standard for a movie to meet, and being at least a little disappointed in the result is probably a given. I was not particularly invested either way (I didn’t fall down the Marvel rabbit hole until later), so I didn’t allow myself to go in to my first viewing with such lofty expectations to be crushed, just the general assumption that this was gonna be good, it had to be good, at minimum. And it was that; it’s a good film. It’s entertaining. The plot makes basic essential sense. It’s easy to follow. There are some nice visuals, and most of the special effects are relatively clean, which can be a significant difficulty for big-budget extravaganzas that sometimes/often try to get way too much spectacle bang for their buck, so, a nice win. All in all, The Avengers is not a bad film. Sure is a bland one, though.

I know, I know, getting all these big-name characters from previous films together in one movie was a serious task and it’s hard to write a well-balanced script for so many leads, blah blah. Let’s put that whole equivocation to bed right now, because I honestly don’t think that balancing the big-name cast was the problem. All of the characters had something to do, no one felt like a random extra, I could quibble about certain places where I really wish things had been plumped up a bit (pretty much everywhere - the film is extremely low on meaningful character beats), but ultimately the characters are fairly evenly presented. What makes this movie bland to me is 1) the way that the personalities of the characters deviate from that established in their previous films, and 2) the simplicity of the story they inhabit.

We’ll cover the Avengers themselves first: the good news is, Tony Stark is still Tony Stark. His personality is intact. Bruce Banner is, as noted, not exactly the Bruce Banner we met back in The Incredible Hulk, but that’s both a given and a good thing - the casting change is an improvement. Hawkeye was barely in the MCU previously, so we don’t really have enough to compare him against in order to make a judgment. Black Widow, however, is a bit of a mess; Joss Whedon’s special brand of misogyny is on display from moment one, as noted above (he LOVES writing women being brutalised because ‘how would we know/believe that they’re strong if we don’t get to see them overcoming mistreatment?’ - he tends not to feel the need to ‘prove’ his male characters’ strengths in this way), and Natasha’s personal story for the movie continues in a distinctly gendered vein: as is common for female characters being written by shitty dudes, her arc revolves predominantly around a man (Hawkeye), and she is ‘emotionally compromised’ by her attachment to him. She also zones out in the middle of an action scene and winds up in a corner shaking and traumatised (very out-of-character for a super spysassin), and particular emphasis is placed on all the bad things she’s done in the past and how she should feel bad about it, though no one does more than shrug their shoulders about Clint or Fury or any of the other SHIELD agents who are acknowledged as having dark and dirty pasts. Why is Natasha the one who is singled out to have her morality judged while her ‘arc’ focuses on her inconvenient emotional engagement? You know why. There’s no reason why this particular tack had to be taken in bringing her backstory into the film, and as a result of it we spend little time with Black Widow displaying the kind of cool professionalism and self-assurance she had in Iron Man 2. The inclusion of that vulnerability and backstory doesn’t make her feel more rounded or complicated because it is deconstructing the power and mastery of the character; rather than building upon the foundation set in her previous film visit, we’re questioning the stability of that foundation and seeing if we can get a few pieces of the structure to rattle loose.

A big part of the trouble for Thor is that he gets saddled with that poxy Ye Olde Cliche dialogue, and there are few things worse for achieving character consistency than changing the way that they talk: no matter how hard the actor tries to play the character the same, they can’t compensate for the fact that the very structure of their sentences has been remodeled. They can improvise rephrasing the lines and/or argue the point if they want, but it’s hard to challenge every line, and if the director (who, oh look, is also the writer) insists you follow the script verbatim, there’s not a lot you can do with that. Poor Captain America suffers the same fate with the overt attempts to make him sound ‘old-fashioned’ by having him utter words and phrases that he never used in his origin movie. What’s worse is, this stilted dialogue is pretty much the sum total of the film’s acknowledgment of the fact that, oh yeah, Steve just recently woke up from the ice to find that seventy years has passed and nearly everyone and everything he used to know is gone. He has an exchange with Fury in his first scene, about ‘getting back in the world’, but there’s zero follow-up on how he’s handling it, what difficulties there might be, or even just how Steve is feeling about all of this on a basic emotional level. And yes, I am aware that there’s a deleted montage of Steve going about his day being isolated and out-of-touch, and it’s a travesty that they cut it because that’s essential character content, but it’s also a total bare minimum which has zero follow-up. Steve Rogers spends the whole film just being...there, speaking lines that don’t suit him or reflect the personality we just saw in The First Avenger, and not even in an understandable character-development ‘throwing myself into my work to hide from the pain’ kind of way. He’s kinda blandly self-righteous and all-business no-pleasure in exactly the way he was NOT in his origin movie; my impression is that Whedon doesn’t care for the character and wrote him off as the traditional patriotic cliche one might have expected him to be instead of the nuanced character that he actually is. As with Thor and Loki, it feels as if Whedon didn’t bother to watch the previous movies first in order to get a sense of the established characters.

Speaking of Loki: if there’s one character who really, REALLY suffered a personality change in this script, it’s him. None of what made Loki the highlight of Thor is in evidence here; where that character was a cunning plotter full to overflowing with complex and contradictory feelings for his family and driven to action by that same emotional cascade, this Loki...wants to rule the Earth. Because. He’s, like, crazy, the other characters all say so, even Thor - the only one who actually knows Loki and is fit to assess his mental state - says that his ‘mind is far astray’ (what Thor thinks of that, whether he’s surprised or concerned, whether he feels like he understands why this has happened to Loki or not, is unclear, because, I dunno, Thor having feelings is as inconvenient to the story as Steve having feelings - as Loki snarls derisively about ‘sentiment’, we must remember that being emotionally compromised is dumb and only for women? Hmm). Loki is just a placeholder villain in this film, driven to action by nothing in particular, it’s just a business arrangement with a mysterious third party that coincidentally happens to involve Earth. Loki prattles and hollers a lot about how ruling is his right and people want to be ruled and blah despot blah, and it’s both supremely uninspired, and not true to the character we met in Thor at all - the Loki we know was not obsessed with ruling, his motivations were all about his family standing and the things he was denied within those relationships and their implications. I remember fandom, back when this movie came out, scrambling with various headcanons about Loki losing his mind in the void or being brainwashed, ad nauseum, because no one really seemed to feel like they were watching a logical progression of the same character at all.

Now, one of the main ways that the lack of character consistency contributes to narrative blandness is that it disrupts narrative immersion - we’re re-negotiating the way that we engage with the characters, and that distracts from engaging with the story itself. At worst, we may even find ourselves cynical about every decision that a character makes (whether it’s in-character or not), because we’re too aware of the man behind the curtain to buy the act. There are definite shades of that in this film, but the worst of it comes from the whole team-antagonism schtick that is vaguely blamed on ‘Loki’s manipulations’ and the sceptre. The thing is, this all requires the characters to behave out-of-character, and since they mostly already are out-of-character due to bad writing, the exacerbation of that by creating artificial conflict feels like more bad writing, not actual plot. Having the characters initially get along poorly before triumphantly uniting to win the day is such an overused device, it’s easy to construe the conflict as arbitrary, and as it turns out...it is. Loki/the sceptre causing the Avengers to argue doesn’t actually impact the narrative in any meaningful way, since they don’t start a fight or fracture over it, it doesn’t slow down Tony’s efforts to learn what Fury is really up to, nor does it prevent Steve from investigating the same thing in person. Them conflicting with Fury and questioning their decision to work with SHIELD, etc, is a normal thing to have an argument about, no magic-mind-stick required; the only mileage the movie really gets out of the forced-conflict ploy is that Steve and Tony keep pissing on each other, which is extremely OOC for nice-guy Steve and WOULD throw up a big red flag for mental manipulations if the movie weren’t already misrepresenting him as an insufferable stick in the mud anyway, and even for Tony it feels off - he’s generally a jerk as a rule, but he doesn’t pick unprovoked fights - but again, when the movie is already so left-of-centre on so many characters everyone feels off, so it’s easy to assume the characters are just falling victim to contrived drama, and not something in the actual story. As noted, it doesn’t end up mattering where the conflict comes from anyway; the bad news is, it takes until the halfway point of the Goddamn movie before the characters get their prescribed ‘rough patch’ out of the way. The fact that they were just being really annoying for no real reason and without narrative consequence kinda steps on the idea of it being ‘triumphant’ when they all come together at the end to fight Loki, because there was zero reason for the audience to ever legitimately doubt that it would happen, not even in a begrudging-putting-this-genuine-disagreement-aside-so-that-we-can-save-the-world kind of way. It’s just dead air with no weight behind it, and with characters reduced to such cliche versions of themselves that it’s hard to muster the will to care.

AND SO, we have a movie which, as previously noted, is awfully damn simplistic. That’s not a terrible thing, in and of itself - it’s all about what you do with an idea, and I would posit that a more complicated plot wouldn’t be a great idea here since there are so many primary moving parts in the form of characters to justify. But, the aforementioned griping about the skewy characterisation makes this film a bad candidate for character-over-plot, and if the shenanigans are falling flat, that’s when simplistic plotting becomes a problem. It goes like this: Loki shows up and steals the magic cube (action ensues). The avengers assemble to catch Loki (action ensues). The characters argue on a helicarrier until Loki’s goons show up to wreck shit (action ensues). Loki escapes and goes to New York to use the magic cube to portal an alien army to Earth. Action ensues until the portal is closed and Loki is defeated. The end. I’m not complaining about the action - it’s a standard facet of the genre, and most of it is entertaining enough (though the unnecessary Thor/Iron Man fight I coulda done without, and the battle of New York runs a bit long) - but the plot itself is pretty point-A-to-B-to-C without much in the way of surprises, and like I said, that’s fine so long as you’re delivering in another arena, i.e. STRONG CHARACTER NARRATIVES. And character is sooo far from being this film’s strong suit. The result? Is not very compelling.

It tends to wind up that, by the time I get to the end of explaining why I think a thing didn’t work (and this is...the abridged version), it maybe seems ridiculous that I’m also saying ‘this thing isn’t that bad’. The truth is, there’s nothing that I think this movie does impressively well, and there are a lot of pretty major things that I think were poorly handled. BUT, I still meant what I said: it’s entertaining. It makes at least basic sense, and flows easily enough. And while I have serious issues with a lot of the characterisation and feel that - though balanced(ish) in handling - the plot failed to take real advantage of any of the character resources at its disposal (except maybe Tony), the actors still brought the goods to the table, and those whom I enjoyed in their previous films (I mean you, Chris Evans) didn’t disappoint, even though the material they were handling did. It’s a solid film, it’s good fun, I don’t regret watching it, and while I am irritated by various aspects, I don’t feel the need to keep ranting about them. And hey; Mark Ruffalo is really very wonderful. They’ve got that going for them.

#The Avengers #MCU #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #Avengers

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lachlanmunzert-blog · 7 years ago

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hey y’all ... it’s sara again and i’m tired of my old format for these intro posts so i’m trying smth a lil newer / different. don’t @ me. this is my son lachlan and i love him w my whole heart and soul. if you wanna plot just like this post and i’ll shoot you a message ! wc are at the bottom and i’m so so so sorry for how long this is gonna be.

trigger warning : death, violence, burglary, kidnapping etc.

BASICS

full name: lachlan benjamin munzert nickname(s): lach, lachy age: thirty date of birth: january 14th hometown: miami, florida current location: london gender: cismale pronouns: he/him romantic orientation: panromantic sexual orientation: pansexual occupation: underground fighter / does various other side jobs like outdoor work and being an uber driver sometimes living arrangements: inherited mansion with the highest - end security / lives alone language(s) spoken: english

FAST FACTS / BIOGRAPHY

grew up with two sisters and a brother in a two - story home with his parents for eighteen years of his life. his sisters ( carmen & liana ) were twins that were five years younger than him and his brother ( caine ) was seven years behind him. lachlan was the oldest, so he was always in charge when his parents went out or away.

he wasn’t the best student and kept to himself during most of his years in school, growing very interested in computers as he got older.

when he was around ten, his family inherited his uncle’s mansion –– a relative his family was fairly close to and they moved to london to live in it. the mansion, at the time, didn’t have the best security and wouldn’t until tragedy struck the munzert family when lachlan was about seventeen.

during one of the weekends his parents went away, lachlan threw a party at the family’s new mansion and hundreds of people showed up. he didn’t know half of the people there and his siblings stayed at their friends’ homes during the night, but he thought he was in the clear because he’d hired people to clean up the next morning. all went well with the cleaning crew and his parents never suspected a thing when they got back.

his gullibility at seventeen was what got the family robbed the following weekend of the party. six different men and two women ended up breaking into their mansion, making the family well out - numbered when they arrived. they’d made imprints of the keys the previous weekend at his party and took note of pretty much anything they could in the house, and lachlan still refused to tell his parents about the party, even that night.

lachlan, caine, and their two sisters were all tied up, and lachlan didn’t know where his parents were the majority of the night ( the house was huge, there was no way of really knowing ). it left him to protect his siblings all alone while the intruders searched for the one thing they came for : money from the family’s safe in the basement.

long story short, lachlan made some bold decisions that night, which included doing anything he could to ensure the safety of his siblings while his parents were nowhere to be seen. because he was seventeen and not the best with assessing situations realistically and logically, he tried to play the hero. his heroics resulted in witnessing his brother’s ten year old neck being snapped right before his eyes and his twelve year old sisters being dragged off somewhere, never to be seen again. the burglars seemed to think lachlan would suffer more if he was kept alive and responsible for the deaths of his siblings from trying to save everyone. it was one against eight and he was never going to win.

he found out later that his parents tried to fight back, too, and they were killed upstairs before he had the chance to try and save them. the cops were called when the criminals left, but none of them were found at the time and they sent out a search for his sisters that would go on for years and years later.

still, even at thirty, his sisters aren’t back. he doesn’t know if they’re dead or if they ever got away, but he never stopped looking. even now, he’s obsessed with trying to find them and has hundreds of files in one of the studies dedicated to clues or possibilities of what could have happened.

lachlan is still living in the mansion, and with the money he’d inherited from both his parents and his uncle now, he installed the most high - end security in his home when he was about twenty - six. there’s not an entrance that doesn’t have a camera and he has eyes on every room in the house, along with a remote that controls nearly everything electronic on every floor. some could say he’s paranoid, but he just likes to be safe.

he took up underground fighting because the physical workout was a good outlet for all the anger and guilt and regret he kept deep inside. he’s always had a short temper and fighting really helps with fulfilling that temper whenever it gets out of control. he also earns most of his money through bets and winning those fights, even though it’s very illegal and extremely dangerous.

oh and he also has a list of people he knows are the burglars from years ago, and he’s working on getting revenge for the pain and agony they’ve put him and his family through. he’s very much one of those eye for an eye people, and he won’t stop until all eight of them are found and taken care of. he might be a little bit of a vengeance - driven kind of guy, y’know ?

WANTED CONNECTIONS / PLOT BUNNIES TO GO OFF OF

“we were best friends but then you hurt me somehow and now i can’t stand you”

“we’re friends but it’s a really toxic relationship made up of trying to one up each other all the time”

“we keep bumping into each other and now it’s getting weird are you sure you’re not stalking me”

“we hate each others guts but we always hook up when we’re drunk”

“you caught me on my way home from a fight with a busted lip and bruised knuckles and ended up taking care of me for the night and now you’re the one i call when a fight gets too bad or i get too hurt”

“we used to date and it was okay but we just grew apart and decided on a mutual break up but hey we met up again and now things are just weird and awkward and weirdly tense”

“we’re gaming buddies and i have a sick setup in my house that you should totally check out sometime and oops now we’re best friends”

“someone was flirting with you at a bar and they were getting a little too weird and so i punched them and now we’re friends i guess”

fwb in any way idc

exes on any kinds of terms

someone who knows about his underground fighting and helps him train or nurses him back to health or just tries to get him to stop

someone who know technology and helps him constantly upgrade his security in his house

someone who helps him try and find the people who killed his brother and parents and took his sisters when he was seventeen

maybe if there’s a cop that he’s on bad terms w bc they pretty much stopped looking for his sisters

best friends

flirtationship

first love

idk gimme angst

#londonhq:intro #i . am so sorry he's trash.#death tw #violence tw #burglary tw #kidnapping tw #long post tw

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friendsgwssanalysis · 4 years ago

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S2E11: “The One with the Lesbian Wedding”

Season 2, episode 11, “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” opens with Ross talking with his ex-wife, Carol, and her partner Susan. (Backstory here: Carol left Ross for Susan after discovering she was a lesbian.) They reveal that they are planning a wedding, which Ross has a strong reaction to. He returns to the apartment of Monica and Rachel (two of the other “friends”) to process what he’s heard. Monica, Ross’s sister, consoles him on the fact that his former partner is getting remarried. This remarriage is presented as the primary concern--it’s something of a secondary blow, though a humorous/ironic one, that it’s going to be a lesbian wedding. The attempted humor here is driven home by both dialogue and subtextual cues. A laugh track plays when Carol and Susan reveal that they’re getting married, just thirty seconds into the episode; Ross immediately responds with an “I pronounce you man and wife” joke (the joke being that this quintessential nuptial phrase doesn’t “work” with this relationship); we then cut to the cheery opening sequence, whose montage includes a clip where Ross kisses Joey (both heterosexual male characters) on New Year’s Eve, just to underscore the fact that same-sex kissing is a joke.

On the couches of her apartment, Monica helps Ross understand why it is important to Carol and Susan to get married, comparing it to a straight wedding and saying that they deserve to show everyone their love in the same way that straight people do (2:44). The gay jokes mostly calm down until the final scene when the friends actually attend the wedding. Here, we see that Monica’s pep talk was even more effective for Ross than we might have thought--he ends up walking his ex-wife down the aisle after her family drops out of attending at the last minute. Joey and Chandler, two straight male roommates and the buddy-comedic relief to this charged scene, mingle among the crowd at the wedding (presumably all lesbians) and bemoan the fact that they can’t find dates. Joey laments, “I feel like Superman without my powers” (17:47). Chandler at first jokes to a short-haired white woman, “I shouldn’t even bother preparing a [pickup] line, should I?” (21:00) before circling back to her later in the evening with a desperate, “Penis, schmenis, we’re all people!” (21:50).

An important subplot to this episode is the appearance of Rachel’s mom, who arrives to visit Rachel and also let her know that she is thinking of leaving Rachel’s father. Rachel is thrilled at the opportunity to show off her New York apartment and barista career to her mom, as she knows both her parents were disappointed by her refusal to marry Barry (a wealthy, highly eligible former suitor of hers). But in fact, Rachel’s mom is so impressed with her life that she confesses she wishes she had her same independence and youth; she says, sadly, “You didn't marry your Barry, honey, but I married mine” (16:15). This subplot sets up a parallel with the lesbian wedding, suggesting that marriage for true love’s sake could never be wrong when compared to marriages of convenience.

All in all, this episode does not come across as explicitly condemning same-sex marriage; many consider it groundbreaking, as it was the first depiction of a lesbian wedding on television (“Here's The Carol And Susan Scene That Was Banned From Friends: News”). It is, however, something of an uncomfortable watch in 2020, as the characters have a very “grin and bear it” attitude toward actually attending the wedding (because it’s filled with lesbians!). Phoebe (a straight female member of the “friends”) ends up getting asked out for a drink by an unnamed butch (Lea DeLaria) and accepts, not realizing the romantic connotations; Rachel’s mom relishes in the sexual attention she’s being granted. The wedding scene itself is a nexus of lesbian stereotypes, especially whiteness (most everyone in the crowd is white), “frumpiness” (the characters are rather unfashionably attired, cutting a contrast to Rachel’s Ralph Lauren sensibilities), and promiscuity (the lesbians are so desperate/predatory that they resort to trying to pick up straight women!). Susan and Carol’s characters, too, are one-dimensional and are set up as plot punchlines to Ross’s love life, rather than fully fledged people. Friends does not really engage with intersectionality and appears to be attempting to “isolate its variables,” at least in this episode, by only focusing on sexuality (and gender, to a lesser extent) and never discussing race. Because the main cast is all white, this has the effect of portraying whiteness as an invisible, “default” race that does not need to be acknowledged nor examined. The characters are oblivious to the ways it impacts their lives. This holds true for the majority of the show, in fact, which does not feature a major Black role until the penultimate season (Munzenrieder). In this particular episode, all the speaking roles are white; some Black extras appear in the background of the coffee shop, one as a patron and one as a server, conveying the idea that New York’s residents of color are “scenery” at best and a lower, serving class at worst.

In a show that largely eschews discussion of social issues, I found Friends’s depiction of a lesbian wedding to be positive, in the mildest, most lukewarm sort of way. As mentioned previously, the parallels between the main wedding plot and that of Rachel’s mom’s divorce seem to highlight the importance of marrying for true love, rather than being cajoled into an unideal marriage by societal pressures. Rachel exemplifies this by choosing to leave Barry and remain independent; Carol and Susan do this by defying heteronormativity to get married; Rachel’s mom accepts her difficult separation from her husband, and bonds with her daughter in the process. I saw this particular episode of the show as reaching for a statement on women’s rights to self-determination (as well as a bland endorsement for same-sex marriage). For all its whiteness and other problems, Friends is at least perfectly balanced along binary gender lines, with three main male characters and three main female characters, and at least pretends to be equally interested in the lives of all six. The women are not really treated as a joke for the sake of the men, as the show hinges on the ensemble nature of the cast. Unfortunately, because everything must be couched in comedy (which often punches down, in this show), this episode stops shy of saying anything too bold on either marriage rights or women’s rights. Ripples, at the best; definitely not waves (especially considering the fact that the titular wedding scene itself was excised in many networks across the United States when it originally aired [Dommu]).

Works Cited:

Dommu, Rose. “'Friends' Lesbian Wedding Was 'Blocked Out' by Certain Affiliaties.” OUT, Out Magazine, 7 Feb. 2019, www.out.com/popnography/2019/2/07/friends-lesbian-wedding-was-blocked-out-certain-affiliaties.

“Here's The Carol And Susan Scene That Was Banned From Friends: News.” Comedy Central UK, The Paramount UK Partnership Trading, www.comedycentral.co.uk/news/heres-the-carol-and-susan-scene-that-was-banned-from-friends.

Munzenrieder, Kyle. “'Friends' Co-Creator Struggles With the Show's Very White Legacy.” W Magazine, Bustle Digital Group, 8 June 2020, www.wmagazine.com/story/friends-co-creator-marta-kauffman-regrets-white-legacy-90s-sitcom/.

"The One with the Lesbian Wedding." Friends: The Complete Second Season, written by Doty Abrams, directed by Thomas Schlamme, Warner Brothers, 1996.

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transfemdiscourse · 7 years ago

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Are Terfs Fascists?

Well the answer is more complicated than yes or no, but it is true that TERF has a lot of elements of fascism present in it. Any sort of political movement that isn’t based around concrete goals beyond “exclude X” is going to be pretty fascy.

Here I want to talk about the sort of things TERFs and fascists on the internet have in common and whether or not that means people should punch TERFs.

Goals

While TERFs certainly don’t share all the same goals with fascists they do hate one of the same group of people, and frequently use the same methods to bully members of that group of people when they get the opportunity. The general theory among fascists is that transgender people are degenerates, and their proliferation weakens masculinity, and that the strength of society is dependent upon masculinity.

I don’t think most radfems will say that the strength of society is dependent upon masculinity, but that comes with a lot of cynicism when there are some of them that do unironically say that.

So regardless of what your thoughts are on the matter you have to agree that sharing verbatim points of view with fascists is a bad look. Especially for a political groundswell that has so many lesbians in it.

Including the person in that video I just linked. Like, really? Okay I’m moving on but really? alright, im moving on

However TERFs do generally believe that trans women should be excluded from feminism, and many of them also believe that trans people should be excluded from the gay community. Many of them believe that this would lead to nobody being trans. It wouldn’t but that’s what they believe.

Their usual justification for this is that the existence of trans people is insulting in some way to women, that in reality trans women are just men who have a mental illness (another fascist talking point), that feminism is for women only, and that therefore the existence of trans women in feminism erodes the credibility and strength of it.

I didn’t make that up, that’s what I’ve heard and read from terfs.

So no, it doesn’t have all the same sorts of specific points but it does share the same basic belief.

“These people make us weaker and so we must get rid of them.”

It’s hard not to see fascist logic in that, possibly because it’s definitely there.

Identity

Most TERFs aren’t concerned with the purity of the white race. Whew, well that’s something. Is that necessary for a fascist movement? Could TERFs be carrying elements of fascism from other points of view into feminism?

A lot of the critique toward radical feminism in general has been that the school of thought has mostly been informed by the perspective of privileged middle to upper class white women, who were the first to be afforded a point of view at all in feminist discourse. Naturally a lot of these people turn out in retrospect to be racist eugenicists.

And to that I just have to say,

huh.

well, but...

... oh.

... so

In order for a movement to be fascist it has to coalesce around a single identity. There are elements of terf that are trying to make “womyn born womyn” that identity but AFAB women are as diverse as the sun is large so that hasn’t really worked.

There is a particular niche of female identity that has seemed to successfully coalesce into an exclusionary community, and that is

Yes many feminists have noticed that lesbian TERFs have become something of a creature unto themselves. It’s become an insular community on tumblr with a few similar interests including

1- vulvas

2- bullying me

The notion is basically that AFAB women have a unique experience, and the lesbians thereof are tired of you constantly trying to get them to touch gross transgender genitals.

A response that is unfortunately popular among transfeminists is, cmon

just try it

cmon...

It’s kind of a hippie notion, usually responded to by screeching “you’re a rapist” over and over. The belief that if terfs just rose above their sexual hangups that they would see the world in a new way and realize that everyone should love everybody and that society should be one big warm orgy is...

i mean, i appreciate your being a hippy but no, they won’t

they just wont

I’ll open that whole can of worms later trust me.

TERFbians have taken that central premise and extrapolated it to two basic points.

1- Lesbianism is a political statement against the patriarchy.

2-Trans women are men attempting to trick you into abandoning that political statement and soiling your pure vulva with wiener.

Now they’ve not only forged a political identity, but they’ve portrayed their opponents as people whose existence is an attack on that identity.

Which is a pretty fascist thing to do.

Tactics

The most concerning thing to me about TERF is the tactics they use. The bullying is well documented, you don’t need me to prove that TERFs are bullies. We know already.

We all know. It’s a bad look, TERFs. It just doesn’t look good. Fascists are bullies and when you bully people you look like a fascist. It’s just not a good look.

Here I want to talk briefly about how TERFs are aware that they look bad, similar to how fascists are aware they look bad, and freely use deceptive techniques to get around being identified as TERFs so they can continue bullying people and indoctrinating others.

For starters you’ve probably heard at least one TERF respond to the label TERF by saying

“TERF is a lesbophobic slur”

This is an example of two clever techniques common to internet fascism being used at once. First of all they’re moving away from toxic labels that make people not want to listen to them, they’re not “TERFs” they’re “Radfems” or they’re not “Radfems” they’re “Gender critical”. This reads pretty similar to how nazis aren’t “nazis” they’re “white nationalists” or “alt right”.

The second technique is moving the goalpost, a technique that turns out to be very effective against liberals. The idea is that it’s a dumb thing to say, and that means a liberal is going to try to educate you. A transfem will see that and start explaining how words work because clearly you’ve missed the memo.

What that transfem isn’t getting is that you’ve just indicated that all TERFs are lesbians and that all lesbians are TERFs which isn’t true. In getting the transfem to debate you on how words work they’ve unknowingly agreed to a faulty premise that assists the TERF in consolidating their identity, which is much more important than actually winning any arguments.

Additionally TERFs love dogwhistles. Let’s take a look at a popular one

“Women deserve spaces free from men”

Most normal people who aren’t paranoid internet goblins like me will see that and go “Yea! Free the women! :)” and I just want you to know that I don’t hate you at all but it is frustrating to see you spreading that talking point.

When they say ‘men’ they don’t mean men they mean trans women, they’re misgendering trans women as a dogwhistle. TERFs will see that and know what it means, they’ll know they mean trans women when they say ‘men’ because there is no movement trying to get men identified men into women’s shelters except TERFs now that you mention it.

Once they’ve identified you as agreeing on that point then they will talk to you about what a “man” is and attempt to indoctrinate you, which was their goal the whole time.

So do I punch terfs or not???

if you’re a trans person it can be pretty scary seeing how prevalent TERF really is. It’s not a majority of feminists, or a majority of lesbians, but TERFs are passionate and loud people and insert themselves readily into wherever people let them go.

And there are no rules against TERF rhetoric on youtube or tumblr or reddit.

So I could say to you “No, use discourse, reason will win” but the reality is that reason doesn’t always win and if it looks like reason isn’t winning then it’s probably scary to you if you’re part of the group of people TERFs want to eliminate.

On the other hand if your goal is to convince people that you’re not a secret undercover man out to destroy feminism putting your fist in the face of someone who calls themselves a feminist isn’t the best way to do that.

The reality is that the presence of TERFs can have a silencing effect. TERFs are always ready to provide you their point of view, but rarely willing to be open minded to others. TERFs will readily bully people if they god forbid find a trans person that isn’t a model, and if you do get them to engage you and you do make good points then often they’ll just fall back on trying to bully you, and if you’re not the kind of person who can be bullied they’ll just pretend that you are and call it a day.

And then go take that anger out on someone who they can actually hurt

When trans people are threatened out of speaking at public events they usually comply because they don’t want anyone to get hurt on their behalf. It’s true that TERFs when they’re not the ones in danger are very quick to jump to violence and the threat of violence as a silencing tactic against people they disagree with.

And certainly if you ever meet a violent terf that is actively trying to harm trans people using force then by all means attack away.

Additionally these same terfs will ready avoid actively engaging anyone on any sort of intellectual point, they’ll backpedal and evade all day until they find someone that they actually think they can bully or indoctrinate. I’ve seen TERFs that actually have their disinterest in debating put right next to their interest in educating people on TERF.

Someone who will educate but not debate isn’t an educator, they’re a cult leader, and they’re the people you should be most concerned about.

At the same time I have a lot of problems with the way trans people and allies talk about this sort of thing on tumblr. Many of them relish and condone violence against TERFs which is a dangerous thing. Even if we do acknowledge that violence is sometimes necessary to avoid complacency against more harmful insidious nonviolent forms of bigotry, we do need to still acknowledge that violence is bad and that sadism is creepy.

So as a critical thinker I would say to you, person who is interested enough to actually read through all this, that while I certainly don’t blame you for closing your eyes when some immense shitty degeneracy discourse having dingbat gets slugged, it’s not how you should elect to respond to TERFs in general.

There will always be people who are passionate enough to act but not smart enough to articulate, and you do not have to be one of those people. Rather, you should take note that what sent fascists back into the shadows was not punching Richard Spencer, but public shaming and backlash.

For your part, you should mostly be focused on saving people who are still being educated from miseducation. To this end, I’ll write up a short playbook for you, but for now let’s return to my original question.

Are TERFs fascists?

Kinda

Edits: Fixed some errors, radfems hate one of the same groups of people as fascists not all of them.

Update: Members of the radfem community have informed me that sometimes when one is bisexual or deviates from the norm in terms of opinion that they’re viewed as lesser women by their peers.

Which i mean, come on guys. that’s a bad look. you can’t be a critical thinking movement and ideological authoritarians at the same time ladies. come on

#TERF #radfem #gender critical #transfeminism #libfem

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wirewitchviolet · 8 years ago

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A Random Roundup of Surprisingly Positive Trans Portrayals

Over the last half a year or so, I’ve run across a number of bits of media I’ve come across which blindsided me with trans characters that rang pretty true. Every time, I was tempted to sit down and write a proper review, but other things were going on, so I’m just going to sit down and bite the bullet with a collection of relatively quick takes.

So let’s start off with Swiss Army Man. It’s an indie film, but it caught on a bit with wider audiences thanks to, well, the titular character being the magical farting corpse of Daniel Radcliffe. Odds are you’ve at least heard of it, but at least no one I’ve talked to about it had any idea there was anything trans-related in there, so you might be thinking I’m reading into it. Quite the opposite. The main character is, with absolutely no ambiguity about it, a closeted trans woman, and the entire plot of the movie is directly about her coming to terms with that, learning to accept herself, and stop worrying about everyone judging her so she can transition already (which she’s heavily implied to do just after the credits roll. A lot of this is subtext, but plenty of it is just plain text. I mean, halfway through the movie she starts dressing as a particular woman she sees as a rolemodel and getting lost in very girly fantasies, and these are specifically presented as her only really happy memories in a later life-flashing-before-her-eyes sort of scene. I’d really recommend watching the whole thing yourself, since hey, it’s a funny uplifting heartfelt movie (if requiring a trigger warning on suicidal imagery) but here’s someone else’s spoiler filled, inconsistently gendering explanation of a good chunk of the trans imagery.

Somehow though, all this gets lost on a huge chunk of the audience. Including most professional reviewers, even ones for LGBTQIA-focused media outlets. I read one shortly after watching it which stubbornly insisted it was trying to convey that the main character was a gay man through a bizarre metaphor that didn’t work. I’m tempted to call that one willful ignorance, but it IS to be fair one of those movies that plays around with an unreliable narrator and an odd mix of grounded reality, obvious fantasy, and supernatural elements that are hard to fit in either of those boxes. As someone who takes in a lot of that sort of thing, my personal takeaway is that while the main character is just imagining the corpse talking as an imaginary friend to cope with her suicidal loneliness, it does seem to be, within the observable reality of the movie, a legitimately magical corpse full of hyper-compressed Gyo gas. And a metaphor about shame. The main character being trans though is completely unambiguous and clear through every possible prism.

I do find it interesting though that on the commentary track, the pair of writer-directors responsible for it fail to directly refer to the main character’s womanhood, mostly just talking about her loneliness, and how relatable it is. So, blatant as the nature of the movie is, this may be a case of closeted trans women creating a story about a closeted trans woman without even realizing it.

Next we have a Korean film I stumbled across on Netflix with the unfortunate title of Man on High Heels, which I have to assume is trying to riff on Man on Fire or something similar. It’s about a tough martial arts action figure sort of cop who ignores procedure and beats confessions out of crime lords, who’s even more respected in the underworld for being such a stone cold badass than by the police force who has a pretty easy job accordingly. Who is, again, a closeted trans woman. This one I went into expecting to cringe a bit at a weird exploitation action comedy, but it plays the premise completely straight. When the movie starts, she’s been walking that knife edge for a while of starting HRT, buying a new wardrobe, and practicing with makeup, while still very much in the closet, and the main thrust of the drama is her trying to scrape up enough cash for The Surgery while trying to preserve her tough macho action legacy, and generally fumbling, with fellow cops thinking she has a drug problem and mobster fans thinking she’s gone crooked. Lot of emotional gut-punches too with flashbacks, falling out, and not exactly a happy ending. It doesn’t have the same inner monologue as Swiss Army Man, but it still feels fairly authentic in terms of the emotional turmoil she’s going through. And of course it gets some basic facts about medical transition wrong. Still, not what I expected.

Turning to TV, somehow I ended up marathoning through the entirety of Sons of Anarchy on a whim. Now, I cannot actually recommend that anyone ever watch Sons of Anarchy. Frankly it’s a poorly written show which spends more time than not completely rudderless, constantly forces people to act completely out of character to spur on new plot arcs, and stumbles hard every time it tries to say anything about women, race, politics, or morality.

Some time in the 5th season, a random filler episode has the core cast hiring a trans prostitute to stage explicit photos with someone they’ve knocked out in order to blackmail him, resulting in a very forced exploitative scene. It certainly doesn’t help that the trans woman in question is named Venus, and played by Walter Goggins (not that I approve of cis men playing any of the characters I’m listing here, but Goggins is the most overtly masculine actor in the mix, and playing the only character on this list who is out as trans and well past first transitioning). That episode left a particularly bad taste in my mouth, and I’m curious if there was some backlash to it at the time, because in the next season, Venus returns, as a minor recurring character who gets fleshed out and made significantly more sympathetic. She gets a tragic and cliched backstory full of sexual abuse of course, but she’s at least in the running for the single most morally centered character in the series, gets a lot of sympathetic dialog, and sticking up for her in various ways becomes a way to signify someone is, for the time being at least, on the path of righteousness.

What really amazes me though is the last season. The entire final season of Sons of Anarchy is frankly a train wreck. Season 6 ends with the incredibly pointless and poorly motivated murders of its most sympathetic major characters (including the main audience surrogate) to stir up conflict, and as a result season 7 is just a ridiculous exercise in body stacking. Almost every character ends up either dead or at a complete loss of what to do with themselves, and there are really only two characters who can be said to really get a happy ending. Tig, one of the more consistent characters, who can largely be described as the Designated Weirdo in the core cast, ends up spending the last season dating Venus, and their last scene implies that him falling in love with her breaks him of his weird self-destructive performative freakiness, and they get to live happily ever after. Everything else about the final season, and really the show at large, I rolled my eyes at, but hey, pleasant surprise there!

Meanwhile, turning to Japanese children’s television from a few years back, there’s Kamen Rider W. Like every Kamen Rider series, it’s a self-contained superhero show with lots of quirkiness and rubber-suit action sequences. The main gimmick the W alludes to is that the hero of this particular show is really two people. When it’s time to throw on the suit and jump into action, one of the two protagonists passes out, the other getting a split consciousness (and then of course late in the series when they get their ultimate powerup, they full on merge into a single body instead). One of these characters is Shotaro, a dorky wannabe hard boiled detective. The other is something of a mysterious MacGuffin character named Phillip, who has quite a lot going on, but most significantly for this article’s purposes, this is Phillip:

Broadcasting standards in Japan are a bit further behind the times than they are in America, so you can’t ever full on come out and state that a character is gay or trans. The best you can manage is to just barely provide plausible deniability while implying the ever loving hell out of it. And so we have Phillip, who is about as blatantly not-a-man as you can really get away with, visually. Whether the idea is to subtley portray a trans woman, or to portray the only non-binary human character I can recall ever seeing in anything is a tough call, but the hair clips and some variation on this non-quite-a-dress are present on Phillip in every single episode other than the one where a contrived sting has Phillip throwing on a dress and a wig to really pull of a Lovely Magician’s Assistant look... and trying to find a screenshot of that by searching for “Kamen Rider Phillip Dress” just gave me a variation on the standard Phillip Outfit on a female manikin at a cosplay shop.

Anyway, Phillip is great. Aside from being Very Clearly Trans, Phillip Very Clearly Has Autism (sensitively and realistically portrayed), but neither of these is ever commented on by anyone in the show. Instead, everyone is constantly talking about how Phillip is so unambiguously the more powerful, intelligent, and competent of the two, and constantly suggesting Shotaro is dead weight. It’s fantastic. Oh and the two are also as unambiguously in a romantic relationship with each other as broadcasting standards will allow. There is blatant queer-baiting between male leads in every Kamen Rider show, but I mean, they have a love theme, their ultimate weapon/armor is rainbow themed, and the lyrics to the show’s opening are all about the ultimate union of body and soul between two partners.

Incidentally, Kamen Rider Wizard from 2 years later does make a more overt effort of trans representation with a minor character, but fairs far worse with it, and the following year’s Kamen Rider Gaim has... this character, but I’m trying to focus on surprisingly good representation, and neither of them exactly qualify.

Finally, the tragically obscure 7th Dragon III Code VFD for the 3DS, along with making literally the entire cast of NPCs and PCs explicitly bisexual features as a prominent NPC a game designer/time machine designer who shortly before the game begins switched over to being called Julietta and dressing like this:

I haven’t found the time to finish it, but misgendering localization aside, yeah this is totally in keeping with my general composite image of my fellow trans game devs, and she’s great so far.

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sweatersexual · 8 years ago

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1983

Winry and her granddaughter come out to each other. Characters include Ed, Winry, and two OCs. Past WinPan.

As a kid I remember hopping out of the car the minute we pulled up to Grandma's house, tearing up the dirt path all the way to the doorstep. This is the first time I've ever been hesitant to open the car door.

Saundra squeezes my shoulder. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “You always make it okay.” I peck her on the lips, though I still have butterflies in my stomach. I can't remember the last time I felt this nervous. I've never brought anyone to meet my grandparents, and I have no idea what they'll make of my having a girlfriend.

We both climb out of the car, and my grandmother steps out on the front porch to meet us.

“Jeanine! You look so beautiful!” She hugs me and asks, “Who've you brought with you?”

“Grandma, this is Saundra.”

She takes a step away from me and shakes Saundra’s outstretched hand. “It's nice to meet you, dear.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Elric,” Saundra says in her politest voice.

She invites us in for sandwiches and asks about school, which is going fine. So is my internship. She and Grandpa don't really understand the field I'm going into, but she's interested in what I have to say about it all the same.

I'm quick to turn the conversation to Saundra, though, because she's an engineer. She's surprised to know how up to date Grandma is on all the latest research.

“My granny worked every day of her life, and so will I. And my husband and I think that if you're not learning every day, you might as well be dead.” The front door opens, and she says, “Speak of the devil.”

“Sorry I'm late,” Grandpa says. “High school research reports are coming up, and of course they left their books stacked open on top of each other, you’d think they were hired to murder the bindings.”

The Risembool Public Library is Grandpa’s baby. When Risembool became a more established city, he advocated for its creation. Forty years later, he’s still running it.

“Well,” says Grandma, “book mercenaries aside, Jeanine’s here.”

I get up to give him a hug. “It’s so good to see you,” he tells me.

“Good to see you, too, Grandpa.”

He asks, “Who’s your friend?”

Saundra smiles uncomfortably at being called my friend, and I smile back reassuringly. I will set my grandparents straight on what exactly our relationship is . . . once Grandpa gets to know Saundra a bit more.

I tell him, “This is Saundra.”

“She’s an engineer,” Grandma adds.

“Oh no,” says Grandpa. “Poor Jeanine.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Grandma says testily.

“She’s probably been sitting here for the past half hour, bored to death, while you’re talking shop with Saundra. Good thing I came home to save her.”

Grandma hits him playfully. I say, “It’s never boring listening to Grandma.”

Grandma smiles. “No need to kiss up to me, Jeanine. You already won the award for favorite grandchild.”

“I have to defend my title.”

“So Saundra,” says Grandpa as he sits down with his sandwich, “tell us more about yourself. How does Jeanine know you?”

“I grew up in East City, and I met Jeanine at school.”

“What part of East?”

“By the fire station that used to be an army base.”

Grandpa nods. “It was smart of the city to convert it. That way it actually became useful.”

Saundra seems a little surprised by Grandpa’s politics. “Jeanine said you were a vet.”

“So I have enough experience to know our military hurt more than it helped. Still is hurting, if I’m being honest. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mustang had the old stomping grounds converted in order to hide something. He was always lousy with secret plans.”

Saundra asks, “You knew Fuhrer President Mustang?”

“He was my commanding officer and a major pain in my ass, pardon the language.”

“That’s Ed’s way of saying he misses him,” says Grandma.

“Nonsense. I said that plenty of times when he was alive. To his face, even.”

“They were close.”

“I was close to punching him in the face.”

“May he rest in peace.”

“I’d pay good money to see that.”

Saundra gives me a look that says, Is your grandpa for real? I smile and give a little shrug back.

We start talking about all the other ways East City has changed over the years. Which are the “good” and “bad” parts of town, what the popular restaurants are, the coffee shop chain that’s popping up all over the place.

“Jeanine and I like the local-run place by our apartment best,” Saundra says. “We go there all the time.”

“I didn’t know you two were roommates,” says Grandma.

Saundra looks at me, and I take a deep breath. “Actually, roommates isn’t the best way to put it,” I say. “Saundra’s my girlfriend.”

“That’s great!” says Grandma. “Congratulations!”

“That's nice,” says Grandpa. “Real nice.”

Grandma elbows him. “Ed! Is that all you have to say?”

“What else am I supposed to say?”

“Congratulate them!”

“You already did!”

“She wants to hear it from you! She wants to know you approve!”

“If I approve?” Grandpa’s eyebrows rise, and probably his blood pressure as well. He turns to me and says, “Jeanine, you're a grown woman. You don't need approval from some old fogey like me. Your grandma may call me obtuse, but I can read in between the lines. You've been nervous about introducing us to this Saundra, who seems great to me, but even if I didn't like her I'd support you one hundred percent. Or at least eighty-five percent, if she really seemed terrible.”

“Ed!”

“Kidding! I'm kidding!” Once Grandma seems placated, he continues, “But really, Jeanine. You've been acting like you’re scared of what we might think, and frankly I find that insulting. I thought you trusted us better than that.”

“Grandpa, it's not that I don't trust you . . .”

“We just didn’t know whether you’d be comfortable with the idea of two girls being together,” Saundra says.

Grandma and Grandpa share a look. Grandma says, “We must not be doing our job right if you think we might not accept you or anyone you love. We should have made it clear that we’re more than comfortable with two people of any gender loving each other. Did your mother never tell you about me and Paninya?”

“Your friend from Rush Valley? What about h- ohhh. You were together?”

Grandma looks a little wistful. “She was my first kiss. And she was a wonderful girlfriend, though it didn't last.”

“What happened?”

“We were teenagers. You know how young people can go through relationships. We both moved on, but stayed close friends.”

“Wow,” I say. “I can't believe I didn't know you had a lesbian phase.”

Grandma's smile freezes in place. “It wasn't a phase. I'm attracted to both women and men. The fact that I chose to spend my life with your grandfather doesn't change that.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean . . .”

“I know you didn't, sweetie,” says Grandma. “A lot of people get confused. But it's a lot simpler than they think.”

“Yeah,” I say, and turn to look at Saundra. I remember our first kiss, the time we spent in the alcove together, and how well our hands fit together. She takes my hand, and it becomes more than a memory. “It really is.”

#edward elric #winry rockbell #edwin #503week #bisexual winry #winpan #fanfic #dorktp #1200 words

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narrativeninja · 8 years ago

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The Necessary Feminization of Heroes

The rise of superheroes is a phenomenon worth studying in its own right. The birth of heroes like Superman and Batman came at a time of great unrest in history. World war II was looming, and the threat of atomic annihilation was on everyone’s mind.

It’s no coincidence that the more recent popularity of superhero films began at a time of great economic unrest. We revived the old heroes, longing for a previous stability that had been lost.

The initial hype for the films was exciting, but most of that excitement seems to have fizzled off. Some blame the mediocrity of the films, but perhaps it’s because of a limited concept of what a hero can be.

They all seem to be cardboard cutouts of the same concept: a punchy do-gooder. Sometimes writers try to throw in some angst or romance to make it more interesting, but it doesn’t help much. There’s little character development, because we already know what the “hero” is supposed to be.

Their job is to be the lone ranger that punches the bad guys to save the victims. That’s all. Their work consists of punching and shooting. Nothing else.

The individuals they save play no role and have little identity besides being a helpless victim to be saved.

The plot becomes predictable because we know that no matter what, the hero is going to find a way to punch/shoot the bad guy. The villain will do nothing except get punched, the victim will do nothing but be saved.

That’s not always a bad thing. Sometime formulaic stories are enjoyable, like in detective dramas. I’m also not on an anti violence tirade. I’m just saying that interesting characters should have more, and a “hero” should have a wider definition.

One of the contributing factors of this homogeneity is the fact that most of our heroes bear masculine traits*, regardless of the individual character’s gender (more on that later). It’s possible, however, to have a hero that bears feminine traits, and it completely changes they way they relate to their world.

*When I mention the masculine and feminine, I don’t want to refer to stereotypes or some kind of idea that all men are/should be X or all women are/should be Y, nor am I talking about about gender identity. I’m speaking in the archetypal, conceptual sense, referring to a set of traits that have been traditionally labeled masculine or feminine. This is not indicative of individual, unique humans. This is purely conceptual.

The Masculine

The masculine hero is something nearly as old human civilization itself. One of the first heroic tales, The Epic of Gilgamesh, dates back to 6000 B.C. and describes a hero with the typical masculine traits that we still see today.

The typical masculine hero is:

- Individualistic (I can do it on my own, I don’t need others.)

- Brash, foolhardy, lots of dumb risks

- Brave in the face of danger

- Relies entirely on brute strength and audacity to make his way in the world

The usual endgame of the typical hero is a good deal of destruction (as long as we smashed the bad guy too, we’re good). They smash their way out of trouble and solve all their problem by punching, shooting, or blowing something up, usually through very stupid decisions.

There is an ongoing theme in a lot of superhero stories that being a hero is incredibly isolating and solidly detrimental to the individual’s relationships, though it’s not always clear why that is necessary. The hero tends to view him/herself as qualitatively separate from “victims” and does not delve much into their lives. They are merely there to be rescued.

Heroes (while in hero mode) seem to have little concept of how to interact with other people, and often switch into a hyper aggressive mode that can even turn heroes against each other.

Why is it that heroes are inescapably linked to aggression, to the point where studios are handing us films in which the heroes are fighting each other for seemingly no good reason?

Additionally, there’s no place for this kind of hero during peacetime. What do they have to offer when things are going well?

The long term outcome of this kind of heroism is not very effective. How is one man dressing up as a bat and beating on criminals going to change anything?

What if we had a hero that did not rely on rash, foolish decisions and brute strength? What if we had a hero who did not just rescue victims but empowered them to save themselves?

Suggestion: What if we had a feminine superhero?

The Feminine Hero.

The feminine hero is a nurturer. They conquer and defeat through cunning, planning and cultivation rather than brute strength.

Traits of a feminine hero: - Does not isolate themselves. Their relationships with others are a key part of their work - Saves through nurturing and empowering - Relies on tact, intelligence and cunning rather than brute strength and rash decisions - Unafraid to use violence or do hard things when necessary - Continues to develop their community outside of crisis situations

My model for this concept is Carol from The Walking Dead. She’s managed to save the group and defeat the bad guys several times over, but never in the traditionally masculine way. She embodies the archetypal traits of a nurturing mother, while still managing to be a total badass.*

Case Study: The Walking Dead Season 6, episode 2: “JSS”

In beginning of this episode, the community is at peace. Carol can contribute and build up a community outside of a major crisis, but when a crisis comes, she knows what to do.

Murderous people invade the community while Carol is in the midst of baking a casserole and watching a baby. Instead of taking on a simple motherly role and protecting the baby from the invaders, she hands the more than capable teenage brother a semi automatic and leaves to go be a hero. The following is where the real distinction lies.

A masculine hero (like Rick, the show’s male lead) would have whipped out a big gun and stormed the bad guys, killing them all and rescuing the poor victims cowering in their homes. Carol does not do this.

She refrains from drawing attention to herself, kills without remorse when she needs to,

and disguises herself so she can move freely without gunning her way through the village.

She has a plan, a goal, and is carrying it out with tact and precision: Give everyone their own guns.

Her goal is not to obtain the macguffin or blow up the key location, but to empower others. She reaches the armory, fills a tote with guns and hands them out to all the no-longer-cowering “victims”.

The invasion is ended very quickly by empowering those under threat to save themselves. It’s a primarily “motherly” action, to nurture and strengthen others to the point where they don’t need you anymore.

There is minimal damage to the community because there was no big firefight or show of brute force. Victims are no longer faceless and helpless, creating an entirely new dynamic between the “hero” and the “victims”.

This is my proposal for a feminine hero.

*My favorite part about Carol is that she isn’t a 22 year old stripper ninja. Her main purpose isn’t to appeal to men. She saves everyone’s life as best she can, and doesn’t have to be a sex object to do it.

How does this affect gender?

It’s important to note that the masculine hero is not limited to men. Women fill this role easily, but not always with the best results. The problem with most female heroes is that they are not allowed to be anything more than the typical brash, violent and sexy cliche (I like to call it the “bossy stripper ninja”). They are not given distinct personalities, or complex motivations. They are merely “punchy”.

Who needs a deep, rich inner life when she has guns?

There are some notable exceptions. Buffy, for one, was allowed to be human, complex, AND punchy.

Most that have come after her have not been given the same generosity. The problem is, after the writer decides that a woman is “punchy”, they give up. They give her nothing else. We are hard pressed to describe this character apart from her appearance and her weapons.

Conversely, there are a number of examples of men that are masculine in character but feminine in role. That is, the individual possesses masculine traits in their personality, but they interact with the world through feminine traits (cultivation, patience, planning, etc).

The problem is, most of these examples seem to be villains. We can make a man function in a feminine way, but somehow it usually makes him a bad guy. I’m having trouble coming up with a single example of a male hero that functions through feminine traits.

Villains seem to be the only ones with tact and precision, who cultivate a world into their own vision and develop others rather than just knocking them down. They have henchmen, converts, and their own little community. Unlike heroes, they don’t stop working when there’s nothing to smash.

Examples:

Loki has a good amount of feminine heroic traits, as do most villains whose goal involves something other than blowing up the world. He is cunning, patient, and has emotional depth.

The fact that he experiences emotion doesn’t diminish his strength or power in any way.

2. Another good example is Wilson Fisk (of Marvel’s Daredevil). He’s a large man who can easily be nothing but evil and punchy, and instead possesses a rich and complex inner life and a fantastic sense of aesthetic.

Although he has his physical rages and is incredibly physically strong, he succeeds through intelligence, subterfuge and subtlety and cares deeply for those around him (beyond the typical best friend and love interest).

He’s a very masculine character, but feminine in his villainy.

3. Frank Underwood is crafty, patient and ruthless. He is a terrifying villain, because of his ability to manipulate others, stay one step ahead of everyone, and think his way out of trouble.

Writers seems to be doing a very pretty good job in developing interesting (and feminine) villains, but haven’t given us much variety in heroes. How many of us have questioned ourselves for being far more interested in the villains? It’s because they are genuinely more interesting!

Wouldn’t it be more interesting or effective if superheroes actually got to know those they were protecting? What if Bruce Wayne befriended those who were at risk of becoming villains? What if he educated each citizen of Gotham concerning every supervillain’s weakness?

This doesn’t even take into account other important issues surrounding heroic stories, like moral ambiguity, the objectification of women, and the lack of depth in heroic characters regardless of Masculine or Feminine traits. I’m just saying we could use some variety in character traits. As Carol shows, it doesn’t make for a less interesting story. The conflict is still there. It just gets a whole lot more nuanced. We’ll always need smashy punchy stories, but can we please develop a little variety?

#fandom #feminism #marvel #dc comics #superheroes #the walking dead #carol peletier #when you make a man feminine he automatically turns into a villain #its science #my meta

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96thdayofrage · 8 years ago

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1. In 2006 the Atlantic magazine asked a panel of “eminent historians” to name the 100 most influential people in American history. Included alongside George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain and Elvis Presley was Ralph Nader, one of only three living Americans to make the list. It was airy company for Nader, but if you think about it, an easy call.

Though a private citizen, Nader shepherded more bills through Congress than all but a handful of American presidents. If that sounds like an outsize claim, try refuting it. His signature wins included landmark laws on auto, food, consumer product and workplace safety; clean air and water; freedom of information, and consumer, citizen, worker and shareholder rights. In a century only Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson passed more major legislation.

Nader’s also the only American ever to start a major social or political movement all by himself. The labor, civil rights and women’s movements all had multiple mothers and fathers, as did each generation’s peace and antiwar movements. Not so the consumer movement, which started out as just one guy banging away at a typewriter. Soon he was a national icon, seen leaning into Senate microphones on TV or staring down the establishment from the covers of news magazines.

What lifted Nader to such heights was the 1965 publication of “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an exposé of the auto industry’s sociopathic indifference to the health and safety of its customers. In little more than a year Congress put seat belts in every new car and created the forerunners of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Washington’s rapid response affirmed Nader’s belief that people provided with critical facts will demand change and that sooner than one might expect politicians, however listless or corrupt, will give it to them. This faith in the power of ideas and of public opinion — in the educability of people and thus in the viability of democracy — distinguishes Nader from much of what remains of the American left.

For nearly 30 years Nader largely abstained from electoral politics while turning out a steady stream of testimony and books. But his influence waned. By the late ’70s the linked forces of corporate and cultural reaction we memorialize as the Reagan Revolution were gathering force. In 1978 Nader lost a pivotal battle to establish a federal consumer protection agency as key Democrats, including Jimmy Carter, whom Nader had informally blessed in 1976, fled the field.

In Reagan’s epic 1980 sweep the GOP picked up 12 Senate seats, the biggest gain of the last 60 years for either party. Nader had done his best business with Democrats, especially the liberal lions of the Senate; men like Warren Magnuson, Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern, all swept out to sea in the Reagan riptide. In the House, a freshman Democrat from California, Tony Coelho, took over party fundraising. It’s arguable that Coehlo’s impact on his party was as great as Reagan’s on his. It is inarguable that Coehlo set Democrats on an identity-altering path toward ever closer ties to big business and, especially, Wall Street.

In 1985 moderate Democrats including Bill Clinton and Al Gore founded the Democratic Leadership Council, which proposed innovative policies while forging ever closer ties to business. Clinton would be the first Democratic presidential nominee since FDR and probably ever to raise more money than his Republican opponent. (Even Barry Goldwater outraised Lyndon Johnson.) In 2008 Obama took the torch passed to Clinton and became the first Democratic nominee to outraise a GOP opponent on Wall Street. His 2-to-1 spending advantage over John McCain broke a record Richard Nixon set in his drubbing of George McGovern.

Throughout the 1980s Nader watched as erstwhile Democratic allies vanished or fell into the welcoming arms of big business. By the mid-’90s the whole country was in a swoon over the new baby-faced titans of technology and global capital. If leading Democrats thought technology threatened anyone’s privacy or employment or that globalization threatened anyone’s wages, they kept it to themselves. In his contempt for oligarchs of any vintage and rejection of the economic and political democratization myths of the new technology Nader seemed an anachronism.

His critics would later say Nader was desperate for attention. For certain he was desperate to reengage the nation in a debate over the concentration of wealth and power; desperate enough by 1992 to run for president. His first race was a sort of novelty campaign — he ran in New Hampshire’s Democratic and Republican primaries “as a stand in for none of the above.” But the experience proved habit-forming and he got more serious as he went along. In 1996 and 2000 he ran as the nominee of the Green Party and in 2004 and 2008 as an independent.

The campaigns defined him for a new generation, but he never stopped writing. His latest book, “Unstoppable,” argues for the existence and utility of an “emerging left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state.” The book is vintage Nader and ranks with his best. The questions it poses should greatly interest progressives. The question is, will any read it.

It’s a question because on top of all the hurdles facing even celebrity authors today, Nader is estranged from much of his natural readership. It goes back, of course, to his third race for president, the one that gave us George W. Bush, John Roberts, Sam Alito, the Iraq War and a colossal debt. Democrats blame Nader for all of it. Some say he not only cost Al Gore the 2000 election but did it on purpose. Nader denies both charges. Both are more debatable than either he or his critics allow.

In 1996 I served as counselor to President Clinton and met often with Nader to discuss that campaign. Early on he told me he wouldn’t be a spoiler. Judging by his message and schedule and the deployment of his meager resources, he was true to his word. In 2000 his allocation of resources was little changed: He spent 20 days in deep blue California, two in Florida; hardly a spoiler’s itinerary. But he was in Florida at the end and his equation throughout of Gore with Bush — “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” — outraged Democrats.

The Democrats’ dismissal of Nader in 2000 was of a piece with our personality-driven politics: a curmudgeon on steroids; older now and grumpier; driven by ego and personal grievance. But Nader always hit hard; you don’t get to be the world’s most famous shopper by making allowances or pulling punches. The difference was that in 2000 Democrats as well as Republicans bore the brunt of his attacks. What had changed? It says a lot about the Democratic Party then and now that nobody bothered to ask the question, the answer to which is, a whole lot.

Between 1996 and 2000 the Wall Street Democrats who by then ruled the party’s upper roosts scored their first big legislative wins. Until then their impact was most visible in the quietude of Congress, which had not enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s. It was the longest such stretch since the 19th century, but no one seemed to notice.

In the late ’70s, deregulation fever swept the nation. Carter deregulated trucks and airlines; Reagan broke up Ma Bell, ending real oversight of phone companies. But those forays paled next to the assaults of the late ’90s. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had solid Democratic backing as did the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. The communications bill authorized a massive giveaway of public airwaves to big business and ended the ban on cross ownership of media. The resultant concentration of ownership hastened the rise of hate radio and demise of local news and public affairs programming across America. As for the “modernization” of financial services, suffice to say its effect proved even more devastating. Clinton signed and still defends both bills with seeming enthusiasm.

The Telecommunications Act subverted anti-trust principles traceable to Wilson. The financial services bill gutted Glass-Steagall, FDR’s historic banking reform. You’d think such reversals would spark intra-party debate but Democrats made barely a peep. Nader was a vocal critic of both bills. Democrats, he said, were betraying their heritage and, not incidentally, undoing his life’s work. No one wanted to hear it. When Democrats noticed him again in 2000 the only question they thought to ask was, what’s got into Ralph? Such is politics in the land of the lotus eaters.

The furor over Nader arose partly because issues of economic and political power had, like Nader himself, grown invisible to Democrats. As Democrats continued on the path that led from Coehlo to Clinton to Obama, issues attendant to race, culture and gender came to define them. Had they nominated a pro-lifer in 2000 and Gloria Steinem run as an independent it’s easy to imagine many who berated Nader supporting her. Postmortems would have cited the party’s abandonment of principle as a reason for its defeat. But Democrats hooked on corporate cash and consultants with long lists of corporate clients were less attuned to Nader’s issues.

Democrats today defend the triage liberalism of social service spending but limit their populism to hollow phrase mongering (fighting for working families, Main Street not Wall Street). The rank and file seem oblivious to the party’s long Wall Street tryst. Obama’s economic appointees are the most conservative of any Democratic president since Grover Cleveland but few Democrats seem to notice, or if they notice, to care.

2. There’s much talk lately of a “populist” revival but few can say what a populist is. Like “liberal”and “conservative,” it’s a word best used with conscious imprecision. As apt to indicate a sensibility as a theory, it’s often just an epithet, the conjured image being one of class envy and fist-shaking anger. But populism can be civil; Huey Long was a populist, but so was Will Rogers. It has conservative as well as liberal elements. Populists espouse traditional values. They loathe bureaucracy, public or private. They seldom raise taxes and never on the poor or middle class.

The best template of populism remains the career of William Jennings Bryan. Like Jefferson and Jackson, Bryan railed against big banks. He thought it in the nature of big businesses to oppress small businesses and to corrupt government. He despised the gross income inequality of his day. His proposed graduated income tax left the lower and middle classes alone.

Bryan took the national stage decrying banks in his Cross of Gold speech and left it denying evolution at the Scopes trial. He didn’t become a Bible-thumper in old age, he’d always been one. And he never altered his view of banks. He reminds us that populism can be economic or cultural — the first tends to reform, the second to repression — and that both species may abide in the same person. For a century the parties divided populism between them; Democrats ran the Cross of Gold speech at Republicans. Republicans ran the Scopes trial at them. Then Democrats decided to let Republicans have both cultural and economic populism. It was some gift.

Populism encompasses not just Bryan’s late 19th century agrarians but their close relations, the early 20th century urban progressives and countless descendants of each. Jefferson and Jackson are called fathers of both populism and the Democratic Party. Jackson and Bryan are the only Democrats other than FDR to be nominated three times for president. All populists share common traits: love of small business; high standards of public ethics; concern for individuals, families and communities; suspicion of elites and of all economic trusts, combinations and cartels.

Some recent populist talk is owing to the election of two liberals, Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio. (Liberals taking Massachusetts or Manhattan didn’t used to be news.) It’s unclear how well they and other Democratic liberals can tap populist sentiment. In any case, Democrats are late to the populist dance. Mass protests of corrupt oligarchies have roiled global politics for a decade. In America the Tea Party has been crying crony capitalism since the Bush bailout and Obama stimulus. Income inequality’s so bad Mitt Romney wants to raise the minimum wage.

Even the Democrats’ tardy me-too-ism seems insincere, less a churning of policy than a freshening of message. In 2009, when he had the votes in Congress, Obama chose not to raise the minimum wage. Not till late 2013 did Democrats press the issue. Why then? As the New York Times reported, “they found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014.” If there’s a true populist revolt on the left it is as yet invisible to the naked eye.

Meanwhile the populist revolt on the right persists. In 2010 the Tea Party declared open season on GOP incumbents. It has since bagged quite a few. But Republicans don’t just fight over offices, they fight over ideas. It’s hard to track all the players in their endless policy scrum: Heritage, American Enterprise, Focus on the Family, Club for Growth, etc. Rand Paul pilfers Democratic issues like a fox stealing chickens while dynasty star Jeb Bush grapples with such timeless questions as whether there can be such a thing as a conservative social program.

Democrats aren’t even having a debate. Their one think tank, the Center for American Progress, serves their establishment. (Its founder, John Podesta, once Clinton’s chief of staff, is now counselor to Obama.) The last real primary challenge to a Democratic senator was in 2006 when Ned Lamont took on Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman. They say the GOP picks presidents based on seniority. Two years out, Republicans seem headed for a bloody knife fight while Hillary Clinton may be headed for the most decorous, seniority-based succession in either party’s history. (If she loses this time it will be to herself.)

If Democrats had caught populist fever they’d be reappraising their own orthodoxy and offing a few of their own incumbents. Owing only partly to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they instead spend their days as Republicans do, in an endless search for new ways to help the rich pump money into politics. As public alienation deepens, polls show Democrats generally content with their party’s leaders. Of such stuff revolutions are not made.

3. Which brings us back to Nader’s book. It opens with a story of left and right banding together in 1982 to stop construction of Tennessee’s Clinch River Breeder Reactor. Authorized in 1972, by 1977 this “public private partnership” had spent $1.3 billion of public money ($4.5 billion in current dollars) on preconstruction costs. That’s when Jimmy Carter pulled its plug. Or thought he did.

In 1981 the Reagan administration revived it. It looked good to go until Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers convened an ad hoc coalition of liberals opposed to nuclear waste and conservatives opposed to wasting money. Its sublimely eclectic membership included the International Association of Machinists, the National Taxpayers Union and the Audubon Society. What happened next was Reagan and his allies in Congress got rolled. By 1983 the project was dead, this time for good.

Nader cites other issues, most culled from his own experience, on which left and right collaborated. He predicts convergence on topics ranging from civil liberties to defense, corporate welfare and open government. He assays 25 ideas he deems ripe for alliances and the strategies for forming them. He says all appeal to a growing populist movement. It’s this movement he calls unstoppable.

Nader’s belief in convergence isn’t the same as Obama’s naïve pursuit of the holy grail of bipartisanship. He doesn’t say Democrats and Republicans can talk away their differences, only that some of them can work on issues on which they haven’t any. He concedes that doing even that much is hard for Republicans, for whom it often proves fatal to work with Democrats even on Republican ideas.

To many, Nader’s vision will seem naïve, as will the book’s very title. Surely a lesson of our time is that all progress is stoppable. Not long ago optimism was in vogue. Obama’s slogan then was “Yes we can.” Today it could be “It turns out we can’t.” His basic brief: “With an economy so broken, government so broke, politics so corrupt and Republicans so crazy, no one could do better, so quit whining: from now on, this is as good as it gets.” Better the Obama of 2008, or the Nader of today who insists “pessimism has no place in a democracy.”

Some of the ideas in “Unstoppable” may seem small bore: defending whistle-blowers, auditing defense budgets, loosening restrictions on standing to sue. Some need elaboration — encouraging community-based businesses, reforming government procurement — while others seem too long a reach: tying the minimum wage to inflation, getting Congress to do its constitutional duty on declaring war. But all relate to systemic reforms Democrats no longer espouse.

Democrats envy Republicans their knack for framing issues in foundational values: thrift, hard work, family, patriotism. Nader espouses values that form the very substratum of American culture. He often cites lessons learned as a child, listening to his dad talk politics in the family restaurant or tagging along with his mom to town meetings. He doesn’t tell these tales as politicians do, for mere nostalgic connection, but to make the case for community and small business, to defend families from the commoditization of privacy and the commercialization of childhood and, above all, to spark a revival of the grass roots, New England-style democracy of his youth. One may call such values liberal or conservative, or simply say they are rooted in American populism.

Republicans can talk values even while defending a corrupt status quo because, recent Tea Party convulsions aside, defending the status quo is their job. The Democrats’ job is to challenge the status quo; when they don’t do it, nothing they say sounds sincere. Nader’s words resonate because they’re rooted in a populist tradition and connected to a populist vision. Democratic rhetoric rings hollow because it’s no longer rooted in any tradition or connected to any vision.

4. What agrarian populists did best was battle cartels and advocate for a kind of homegrown communitarian capitalism. They busted price fixing railroads and granaries, fought for rural free delivery and established cooperative banks that still provide a third of all credit to rural America. Most amazing, they did it all via Congress amid the venality of the first Gilded Age. Powerful trusts were turning farmers into wage slaves and the world’s greatest democracy into just another corrupt oligarchy when Populists and Progressives rose as if from nowhere to stop them.

Parallels to our own time could hardly be clearer. Like invasive species destroying the biodiversity of a pond, today’s global trusts swallow up everything smaller than themselves. The rules of global trade make organizing for higher wages next to impossible in developed and undeveloped countries alike. Fights for net neutrality and public Wi-Fi are exactly like the fight for rural free delivery. Small businesses are as starved for credit as small farmers ever were. PACs are our Tammany Hall. What’s missing is a powerful, independent reform movement.

Republicans make their livings off the misappropriation of populism. Democrats by their silence assist them. Rand Paul is more forceful than any Democrat on privacy and the impulse to empire. The Tea Party rails loudest against big banks and corporate corruption. Even on cultural issues Democrats don’t really lead: Your average college student did more than your average Democratic congressman to advance gay marriage.

It’s hard for Democrats to see that their problems arise from their own mistakes. Obama called the 2008 recession “the worst since the Great Depression.” It wasn’t; by most measures — jobs, wages, exports — it was the worst since 1982. The valid comparison to the 1930s is that now as then all our vital institutions are broken. Our healthcare, banking, energy and transit systems are badly broken. Our defense policy is obsolete. Politics is a cesspool. Oddly, the one system working relatively well, public education, is the object of our only sustained reform effort.

Mistaking the nature of the crisis, Obama mistook massive fraud for faulty computer modeling and a middle-class meltdown for a mere turn of the business cycle. Had he grasped his situation he’d have known the most he could do by priming the pump would be to reinflate the bubble. Contrast him to FDR, who saw the systemic nature of his crisis. To banks Roosevelt offered only reform; financial help went to customers whose bad mortgages he bought up and whose savings he insured. By buying into Bush’s bailout, Obama co-signed the biggest check ever cut by a government, made out to the culprits, not the victims. As for his stimulus, it didn’t cure the disease and hefty portions of it smelled like pork.

Populist rage against the bailout and stimulus saved the Republican Party. In 2006 it had lost Congress, in 2008 the White House. Younger voters recoiled from its racial and religious politics. Middle-class decline had even devout Christians focused on family finances. That’s when Democrats handed over title to economic populism. Absent the bailout and stimulus it’s hard to imagine the Tea Party being born, Republicans retaking Congress or the government being so utterly paralyzed.

Liberals have spent the intervening years debating macroeconomic theory but macroeconomics can’t fathom this crisis. This isn’t just a slow recovery from a financial sector collapse, or damage done by debt overhang or Obama’s weak tea Keynesianism. We’re in crisis because of all our broken systems; because we still let big banks prey on homeowners, students, consumers and retailers; because our infrastructure is decrepit; because our tax code breeds inefficiency and inequality; because foreign interventions bled us dry. We’re in peril because our democracy is dying. Reviving it will take more than deficit spending and easy money. It will take reform, and before that, a whole new political debate.

5. Reading “Unstoppable” reminds one of Nader’s standing among the ’60s reformers who formed populism’s last great wave. The book is drenched in populist themes: distrust of big business and big government, faith in democracy and contempt for its corrupters, defense of all things small — towns, businesses, people — against the inevitable predations of all things big.

Among its lessons for would be populists:

Populism isn’t about spending. Of Nader’s 25 proposals none costs any money. Eight actually save money. By cleaning up Reagan’s fiscal mess Bill Clinton made Democrats the party of fiscal responsibility. With the bailout and stimulus Obama handed the issue back to Republicans. Populists know we have a choice: change the rules or write the check. And they know which choice generally works best. If instead of a bailout and stimulus Obama raised the minimum wage, secured a public option, rescued homeowners and cut defense there’d be no budget crisis today and he’d be a folk hero instead of a punching bag.

Populists challenge big business. Apart from global warming, our most pressing problem is the mal-distribution of power, opportunity and income. In their denial, Democrats think they can compete with Republicans for Wall Street cash and still “fight for working families,” but on many issues — wages, credit costs, tax burdens — there really are two sides. Soon even the party’s base will ask which side it is on.

Populists stand up for small business. We think of small business as Republican. Not necessarily. In a 2012 poll of small-business owners, a majority picked Obama over Romney, a choice their Washington lobbyists were at pains to explain way. No constituency gets more lip service and less actual service than small business, which is why it’s always up for grabs. Nader’s small town, small business populism speaks to it like nothing else can. Small business has never been, or felt, more threatened. A party that earns its trust can govern a long time.

Populists care about ethics. So do voters. In two recent rounds of exit polls voters named corruption their top concern over jobs and the economy, this in the teeth of a “jobless recovery.” In 2008 Obama closed stump speeches with vows to “curb lobbyists’ power” and “change Washington’s culture.” Voters thought he meant to make it more honest. It turns out he only meant to make it more polite, and even in that he failed. His longest list of unkept promises is the one titled “ethics and open government.” Few among party elites have any sense of the price he has paid.

Populism changes with the issues and times. Ethics means even more to us than it did to the early populists. Technology has made privacy a populist issue. The bankruptcy of our foreign and defense policies elevates those issues. Populism is relevant to global warming. Its frugality fosters conservation. Its decentralization supports everything from local farms to distributed generation. Its anti-corporate ethos is a key to any credible effort to curb the influence of the fossil fuel industry.

It pains us to watch Democrats bungle populist issues. We see Rand Paul corner the market on privacy and the scrutiny of defense budgets and wonder why no Democrat rises to expose his specious rantings. We yearn for a new politics but worry that our democracy, like that Antarctic ice shelf, has reached its tipping point. For things to improve Democrats must come up with better ideas and learn how to present them. So why don’t they?

One reason is that today’s Democrats think politics is all about marketing. While Republicans built think tanks Democrats built relationships with celebrity pollsters. When things go awry one pops up on TV to tell us how they “lost control of the narrative.” Asked to name a flaw, Obama invariably cites his failure to “tell our story.” Judging by his recent book, Tim Geithner thinks failing to tell his story was the only mistake he ever made. People don’t hate the bailout because Tim Geithner gives bad speeches. They hate it because their mortgages are still underwater.

Democrats must learn that policy precedes message; figure out what you believe, then how to tell people about it. A good idea advertises itself.

Democrats must also learn to argue history. They chortle when Michele Bachmann credits the founders with ending slavery or Sarah Palin forgets who Paul Revere rode to warn. Yet they let the right turn our founding myths into pulp propaganda with nary a reply from any but academics. In “Unstoppable” Nader enlists Jefferson, Adam Smith, Friederich Hayek and a raft of others to buttress his case and reclaim valuable ground.

Democrats think the power of money is greater than the power of ideas. Nader thinks that with the right ideas you can win even if outspent 100-to-1. Every year Democrats further dilute their ideas to get the money they think they need to sell them. The weaker the ideas, the more ads they need, the more money it takes, the weaker the ideas. As you can tell from their ads, they’ve been at this a long time.

They don’t believe in ideas because they don’t believe in people. Obama wasted years dickering with Republicans who wished him only ill. He should have talked to the people and let them talk to the Republicans.

6. One reason we know voters will embrace populism is that they already have. It’s what they thought they were getting with Obama. In 2008 Obama said he’d bail out homeowners, not just banks. He vowed to fight for a public option, raise the minimum wage and clean up Washington. He called whistle-blowers heroes and said he’d bar lobbyists from his staff. He was critical of drones and wary of the use of force to advance American interests. He spoke eloquently of the threats posed to individual privacy by a runaway national security state.

He turned out to be something else altogether. To blame Republicans ignores a glaring truth: Obama’s record is worst where they had little or no role to play. It wasn’t Republicans who prosecuted all those whistle-blowers and hired all those lobbyists; who authorized drone strikes or kept the NSA chugging along; who reneged on the public option, the minimum wage and aid to homeowners. It wasn’t even Republicans who turned a blind eye to Wall Street corruption and excessive executive compensation. It was Obama.

A populist revolt among Democrats is unlikely absent their reappraisal of Obama, which itself seems unlikely. Not since Robert Kennedy have Democrats been so personally invested in a public figure. Liberals fell hardest so it’s especially hard for them to admit he’s just not that into them. If they could walk away they might resume their relationship with Nader. Of course that won’t be easy.

Populism isn’t just liberalism on steroids; it too demands compromise. After any defeat, a party’s base consoles itself with the notion that if its candidates were pure they’d have won. It’s never true; most voters differ with both parties. Still, liberals dream of retaking Congress as the Tea Party dreams of retaking the White House: by being pure. Democratic elites are always up for compromise, but on the wrong issues. Rather than back GOP culture wars, as some do, or foreign wars, as many do, or big business, as nearly all do, they should back libertarians on privacy, small business on credit and middle-class families on taxes.

If Democrats can’t break up with Obama or make up with Nader, they should do what they do best: take a poll. They would find that beneath all our conflicts lies a hidden consensus. It prizes higher ethics, lower taxes and better governance; community and privacy; family values and the First Amendment; economic as well as cultural diversity. Its potential coalition includes unions, small business, nonprofits, the professions, the economically embattled and all the marginalized and excluded. Such a coalition could reshape our politics, even our nation.

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a-mountain-girl · 6 years ago

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Buckle up kiddos it’s rant time! Click read more to hear about Local White Man and how he derailed a class exercise on the topic of rape culture!

*I should clarify that I am a white woman

No class can be perfect but the older you get, the further in your education you get the more you expect your classmates to have some semblance of decency and critical thinking skills. Also, reticence, knowing when to keep quiet. I will admit that I personally have an issue with blurting things out still, I tend to sit near the front and so can’t always see when other students have their hands up + ADHD impulsiveness so I’m not trying to set myself up as some exemplar of perfect behavior. But I still generally keep quiet and I do have that essential amount of reading-the-room skills that are required for women. Local White Man on the other hand does not.

Who is Local White Man? He’s a stereotype for a reason and still being in an undergraduate program at a university in a deep red state there’s still going to be a majority white student pop. and mostly within that group those token conservatives who think that they’re somehow special and smarter than everyone else for making it thru all 16+ years of education without ever once questioning their own views and only feign sympathy/open-mindedness when required (and aren’t they so benevolent and wise for deigning to pretend to listen to you for five minutes?). This particular Local White Man is in my Argument class. Argument is not to be confused with Debate. Argument is an upper-level English course about developing your critical thinking and communication skills. Of course contextually there’s always political and charged topics being brought in but we have just as much right and reason to talk about what makes a great ice cream cone. This class’s population is mostly women with about 4 male students. LWM bears a strong resemblance to other LWM’s I’ve dealt with in the past both in his behaviors and even his face.

So far this semester I’ve mostly ignored the guy, never bothered to speak to him even because in my experience as soon as I start interacting with an LWM said LWM will make it his life’s mission to piss me off and I’m not kidding. There were many, many times I had to punch a guy or talk to the vice principle about how the current LWM was harassing me before the problem would even approach a resolution. There was a restraining order at one point because a LWM was literally incapable of backing off. So when on the first day of this Argument course I identified the current LWM as an LWM I enacted the Do Not Engage policy. It worked just fine until this morning.

So this morning when I got to class the room was locked as usual and the rest of the class was sitting or standing around in the hall waiting for the professor to come and let us in. LWM was doing his usual VERY LOUD mansplaining to the one female student who always sits next to him and appears to be friendly with him about a company (I’m not sure if it really exists or if it’s just a concept or where it is, also the name of the company had white supremacy vibes) that if it exists consolidated insurance with actual healthcare so customers just have to pay to one company rather than pay for insurance and their healthcare separately. He called it “like socialism” and I, being an idiot, inserted “Uh, that’s not socialism that’s a very capitalist thing”. Now I was not in the mood to explain slightly more advanced economics esp when I know from experience LWM has no idea what words like “socialist” and "capitalist” really mean or how those economic systems function both in theory and in reality. Basically consolidating both insurance and healthcare into one corporation is an even more capitalist move because then a single private company has even more control. To be socialist the government would have to take control. But to LWM’s mind consolidation = socialist so things are already looking great! LWM was so upset by me correcting him that he stomped off (LITERALLY, angry arm flaps included) and went down the hall to sulk for the next thirty seconds before our professor showed up and let us into the classroom.

Now was it smart for me to interrupt and correct him? Not really. But he was talking very loudly to my friends (because his only volumes are Loud and LOUDER), making an obvious error, and has no qualms about butting into anyone else’s conversation so while I’m kind of kicking myself for it at some point LWM needs to be corrected instead of being allowed to steamroll over everyone.

So we get to class and the lecture is about causal arguments. The professor uses a rhetorical experiment which is the now rather normal asking the students what they do to prevent themselves from being victims of sexual assault. I won’t go into my smaller issues with how the professor is always taking note of how he’s trying to be inclusive because drawing attention to it only makes LWM more irritating and makes it sound like people who would think about “well there’s more than two genders” are overly-sensitive and need to be pre-appeased despite there being no complaints made about the terms the professor is using. Anyway. As soon as the question is out LWM has to take control of the conversation very loudly talking about how he was once roofied, how he gets hit on all the time by gay men... like I can’t say what’s true or not in his experience. Maybe he does get hit on, maybe he has seen some crap, I don’t know. While all the women in the class were adding our bits he kept adding comments, loudly, and at one point after the list was done he went (again at a high volume) “DON’T DRESS PROMISCUOUSLY! The FemIniSts might hate me for saying that but” blah blah and like that is something that women are told to do to avoid being a victim so like it fit for what we were doing but he seemed to think we were talking about actual measures people should take to avoid sexual assault.

We all kind of side-eyed or face-palmed as he went on about how our media is hyper-sexualized and like, yeah? but the way he was saying things made it sound like if you let kids watch Disney movies (which have sexual references!) they’re going to become sex-crazed and promiscuous and just all-around naughty (flashback to a family friend saying that maybe his daughter shouldn’t be allowed to watch The Little Mermaid because it ‘encourages girls to not listen to their fathers’).

A couple minutes later as we were looking over a paper on what men can do to work on the problem of sexual assault LWM was “whispering” about how hyper-sexualized our media is and THEN segued into how, essentially, if he is in a conversation with someone who doesn’t agree with him then he won’t even engage in conversation. He framed it as maturity but considering his reaction to my one (1) censure of his pseudo-lecture earlier and that he holds to very strong, obviously conservative convictions I can guarantee this isn’t a mature guy who’s just not getting involved in a conversation that all parties know won’t go well. This is a guy who insists on dominating the conversation, on being listened to and believed, and only ever feigns open-mindedness, compassion. This is also a guy who will absolutely accuse someone of being “hysterical” and “impossible to talk to” for exhibiting a shred of emotion over a topic that they care about or that affects them. He’s just the epitome of the Local White Man and I have a headache. LWM is just very upset that he’s in classes where the majority of the students are political opponents and where his ideas are very unpopular and instead of examining his ideas or listening to others he very loudly insists that anyone who opposes him is just not worth talking to.

Since many of us English students have classes together this whole drama resulted in a group of women who were stuck in that class spending the time before a different class we have together a couple hours later venting about LWM and his inability to shut up or read a room together.

Thanks for listening! May your life be free of the Local White Man syndrome!

#rant #personal rant #college #local white man

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