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antoine-roquentin · 7 years ago

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As long as South Korea existed, its politics had a division of the right-wing and the left-wing. By the early 2000s, however, the right-wing in South Korea seemed like old news, in a literal sense. Much of its subscribers were old people whose memories of the Korean War, communist terror and desperate hunger dominated their political decisions. As they did not grow up with democracy, they worshiped South Korea’s military dictators—foremost of whom was Park Chung-hee, who ruled for nearly two decades from the 1960s to 70s—as they would a king. In this sense, they could not possibly called “conservatives,” since the term, in its strictest interpretation, presumes a liberal democratic system. “Fascists” would be the more apt description. Korea’s right-wing was contemptuous of democracy, and favored dictatorship. They favored jailing “communists,” a catch-all stand-in term for any political dissident.

But in the 21st century, the right-wing seemed like an old news. Twenty years after the peaceful democratization of 1987, it seemed that liberal democracy was the settled practice in Korea. Although the right-wing still wielded considerable force, they were aging and would fade away—or so Korea’s liberals thought. The liberals were riding high from the two consecutive terms of liberal presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, from 1997 to 2007. Of course, conservatism would continue to exist, but it would exist in a form that is more common in the advanced democracies: along the lines of the philosophical difference in terms of the proper role of the government, arguing over the proper size of the government, the appropriate level of taxation, regulation of corporations and redistributive policies, and so on. Even when the conservative Lee Myung-bak won the presidency in 2007, the liberals’ expectations for democratic governance continued.

It’s fair to say that Korea’s liberals were totally unprepared for what awaited them.

One cannot understand today’s Korea without understanding the internet. Until the 21st century, Korea was a middling, anonymous country. When placed among the numerous names of the world’s countries, Korea was a blank: not rich enough to command attention, not poor enough to arouse sympathy. Even the most seminal event in modern Korean history—the Korean War—is considered the “forgotten war.” Internet is what propelled Korea into the forefront of the world in the 21st century. Having seen the potential of high-speed internet earlier than just about any other world leader, Kim Dae-jung embarked on a massive project to equip the whole Korea with fiber optic cables during his term. This is perhaps the most underrated achievement of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. The result is the Korea of today: world leader in smartphone technology, cities constructed as a technological marvel, a major generator of the popular culture optimized for the digital age. So it shouldn’t be surprising the new breed of Korea’s young right-wing rose through the internet. What was surprising was just how retro these young right-wingers were.

The “new right wing” traces its origin to the website called DC Inside. Established in 1999, it was originally a message board to discuss the latest trend in digital cameras. (The site’s name means “digital camera inside.” It had a now-forgotten sister site called “Notebook Inside” that discussed laptops.) Soon, however, DC Inside organically grew into something else entirely. Reflecting its origin as a digital camera site, DC Inside had numerous “Galleries”—a themed message board in which people gathered to talk and, more frequently, engage in the earliest form of internet message board flamewar seen by the humankind. Particularly insane were the DC Baseball Gallery and the DC Comedy Gallery, where gladiatorial fights opened nightly to attract the amused onlookers.

The influence of DC Inside on Korea’s internet scene in the early part of the 2000s cannot possibly be overstated. DC Inside was the birthplace of every internet trend and meme. From the fires of the vulgar keyboard wars, a comedic gem would emerge. Such gem of a meme would spread into other major Korean websites, and eventually made their ways to newspapers and television. You might recognize this type of site—it’s Reddit, with Galleries being Subreddits. Reddit was once described as the “dark, unruly id of the internet,” but DC Inside was the OG of that description, as DC Inside is at least six years older than Reddit. (Note: Remember how I keep saying Korean politics is a five-year preview of US politics? Keep this in mind.)

DC Inside always was a cesspool, but even there, some truly deranged minds distinguished themselves with their over-the-top cessiness. Many of them gravitated toward DC Inside’s Comedy Gallery, then in 2010, separated themselves into their own message board site. There, they collected the most fucked up jokes, photoshopped images and gifs, and voted to choose the “best” material of the day. Thus, the site was known as the “Depository of the Daily Bests,” or Ilgan Best Jeojangso [일간베스트 저장소]. Over time, this site came to be known as the acronym of the first syllable of the first two words: Il-be.

For Korea’s young right wing, Ilbe was the demented internet version of the Viennese salon. At the first encounter, Ilbe would appear to be little more than a collection of destructive attitudes. The core of such destructive attitudes was self-loathing, in which Ilbe users wallowed and reveled. In their own telling, Ilbe users were aware of their own ugliness—the awareness which gave them a position of moral superiority in a twisted way, because everyone else who didn’t own up to his ugliness was a hypocrite. With this distorted moral license, Ilbe users engaged in a constant, nihilistic quest to create the most offensive contents possible, which in their minds would expose the hypocrisy of the rest of the Korean society. Violent misogyny, homophobia and racism were Ilbe’s mainstays.

It was only a short time before Ilbe as a whole began taking on a discernible political stance as they sketched out their identity based on self-loathing nihilism. After all, all politics is identity politics. As they hunted for the sacred cows of Korean politics, they latched onto the most sacred one: Korea’s democracy. For the nihilistic youth who wanted to destroy the legacy of their father’s generation, there was no better target. Rejection of democracy was perhaps Ilbe’s only clearly stated political goal: the “downvote” button on Ilbe’s site was called “democratize.” This made Ilbe’s politics take on a curiously retro character—curious because while Ilbe’s political gaze looked backwards to pre-democracy Korea, it did not look at the same direction as Korea’s older right wings. The hero of Korea’s older right wing was Park Chung-hee, the authoritarian who (in their minds) defended South Korea from the communists in North Korea and delivered the country from desperate poverty. But the hero of Ilbe was Chun Doo-hwan, the authoritarian who succeeded Park Chung-hee—because Chun is most prominently remembered as the one who massacred hundreds of democratization activists in Gwangju in 1980. For Ilbe users, the ability to kill the liberals was more important than the authoritarian economic development.

Recall that Korea is the world’s first wired society. Korea had cyberbullying and doxxing before the rest of the world even knew what cyberbullying and doxxing were. Korea had the world’s largest social network service long before Facebook entered Mark Zuckerberg’s imagination. So it shouldn’t surprise you that Korea had the world’s first alt-right, long before there was such a word “alt-right,” because it is impossible to conceive of alt-right without the internet. Ilbe users were the world’s first alt-right, in that it foretold central characteristics of all the alt-right movements that would come. To put it diplomatically, they were disaffected young men who, disillusioned by the establishment politics, sought refuge in the idealized version of the past. To put it more straightforwardly, they were fuckheads who indulged in their worst tendencies online, to create a type of politics that is little more than a tool for nihilistically causing pain.

And boy, did Ilbe cause pain. In the decade of conservative rule began in 2007, Ilbe gained enough strength to be one of Korea’s largest websites by 2012. Ilbe became a social phenomenon, the fountainhead of noxious ideas from which Korea’s conservative politicians gathered their talking points and spread their own. When the Sewol ferry sank in 2014 and created the greatest political crisis that Park Geun-hye faced (at least until the Choi Soon-sil scandal broke,) Ilbe took the forefront of the unbelievable task of making the parents who lost their children in the sunken ship as greedy money grabbers. In the most disgusting political theater I have ever seen in my lifetime, hundreds of Ilbe members gathered at the City Hall Square, where the parents of the Sewol ferry children were engaged in a hunger strike, to start a “gluttony strike”: eating fried chicken and pizza to taunt the parents who had been starving for days. Ilbe’s negative influence peaked toward the end of 2014, when an Ilbe user bombed—bombed!—a leftist Korean American speaker, injuring three members of the audience.

Ilbe put Korea’s liberals completely at a loss. Never in their wildest imagination could they conceive that Korea’s youths would so actively reject democracy itself. Liberals—what else?—wrote a number of books and articles, trying to process what is happening. Some blamed themselves: Park Ga-bun, in his book “Ilbe’s Ideology” [일베의 사상], claimed Ilbe’s hostility to democracy resulted from the failed promises of democratization and the civic movements. Others tried to re-affirm their liberal values, such as freedom of speech. Law professors like Park Kyung-shin of Korea University and Hong Sung-soo of Sookmyung University offered pieties about how even Ilbe members had the right for free speech.

As it turns out, Korea’s liberals were even less prepared for Ilbe than they thought they were, because they simply lacked the imagination to fathom the lengths that Korea’s right-wing would go to destroy them.

Park Geun-hye administration was a lame duck almost from the beginning. Just days before the 2012 presidential election, an agent for the National Intelligence Service—South Korea’s spy agency—was discovered in a small room in Seoul, adding internet comments that criticized liberal politicians. It was big news that came too late in the election cycle; eight days later, Park Geun-hye squeaked past Moon Jae-in to become the sixth president of the Republic of Korea in the democratic era. The Park administration spent its first year fending off charges of a rigged election. After a year of investigation, the facts revealed by the end of 2013 was enough to shock the conscience. Since 2009, in the middle of the Lee Myung-bak presidency, the NIS ran a “Psychological Warfare” division whose sole task was to attack South Korean liberals. The 70 or so agents in the Psychological Warfare division were professional internet trolls. They wrote posts on major websites, and upvoted or downvoted posts. They spammed comments until every major news story comment board was filled with their comments. They fired out more than 1.2 million fake tweets. All of these were about Korean politics, praising conservatives and attacking liberals. All of these were in foul, vulgar language—the screen name for one of the NIS agents, for example, was “Decapitate Lefties” [좌익효수].

Four years later the Park Geun-hye administration fell, through an utterly irrational scandal involving a shaman’s daughter. The incoming Moon Jae-in administration re-opened the NIS investigation—whose findings are so staggering that it defied belief.

The government actively created contents to damage the liberals. The NIS consulted psychologists to create the most damaging and humiliating photoshopped images of liberal politicians and activists. The most prominent example was the photoshopped mixture of Roh Moo-hyun’s funerary photo with a koala, designed to derisively undermine the last president’s dignity without quite stepping over the line. The Blue House also fed narratives: when the parents of the children who died in the Sewol ferry began their hunger strike, the internal Blue House memo said “take out Moon Jae-in, claim he is assisting suicide, politics of death.”

Other damage to liberals was more direct. The Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations blacklisted liberal-leaning celebrities, making sure they could not appear on television. The NIS even had a timetable; an internal memo titled “Expanding the expulsion of left-leaning talents from MBC,” several celebrities such as outspoken rock stars like Yun Do-hyeon and Shin Hae-chul were specifically named, with the date on which they were to be taken off the air. The government also threatened advertisers, making sure that these celebrities could not appear on their commercials. The NIS also directed a GamerGate-style attacks against liberal celebrities, using its troll army to spread false rumors about drug use.

The government also created Korea’s right-wing media. Not assisted, not subsidized, created it out of thin air. In 2009, the Lee Myung-bak administration tapped Byeon Hee-jae, a pathetic gadfly whose only claim to fame until that point was being called “a gadfly no one ever heard of” by a prominent liberal commentator, to start an online publication called Media Watch. The NIS under the Lee administration paid the seed money for Byeon to start his website. Then the Lee administration pressured corporations to buy advertisements on Byeon’s site, and also ordered government workers to sign up for Media Watch’s paid subscription. Park Geun-hye administration, for its part, pressured Naver—Korea’s analogue of Google—to bury the bad news stories from search results.

The conservative government also subsidized right-wing civic groups, using them as extra-governmental political weapons. Lee and Park administrations paid veterans groups, who in turn paid to carry in busloads of old people from the countryside to stage massive political demonstrations in Seoul. (These included the “counter protestors” to the Candlelight Protests that brought down the Park Geun-hye administration.) Again, the government simply told these civic groups what to do. Following the government’s direction, these civic groups petitioned to keep out former president Kim Dae-jung from the National Cemetery upon his death, and engaged in a letter-writing campaign to Norway to somehow cancel Kim Dae-jung’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Taken together, it was not simply that the conservative government added some trolling firepower Korea’s right wing with fake comments and tweets. Rather, the conservative government was the entire game. The conservative government created political storylines, fed them to the right-wing media that the government itself created, used the right-wing civic groups to repeat them—until they became the mainstream opinion. The dissident voices were harassed, defamed, fired, and silenced, through pressures applied to media and search engine sites.

From start to finish, the conservative government managed the entire process that created a political narrative. And the biggest beneficiary, of course, was Ilbe, Korea’s most heavily trafficked right-wing website. Ilbe was the testing tube that the NIS used to see what humiliating meme would work the best to attack the liberals. Ilbe was the never-ending wellspring of right-wing troll army, who swarmed the left-leaning celebrities the NIS directed them to attack. Ilbe was where right-wing storylines were amplified, giving clicks to right-wing media and serving as a meeting ground for right-wing groups. For all of its vile, outrageous actions, Ilbe was shielded from consequences—the Park Geun-hye administration gave the Ilbe bomber a suspended sentence while deporting the Korean American speaker.

A gardener does not bear a fruit; the tree does. But the manner in which the gardener fertilizes the grounds, prunes the branches and pollinates flowers, determines the type and quality of the fruit that the tree bears. Even without the conservative government, Korea may have developed an alt right; but the type and quality of that alt right would have been different. Without the efforts by the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations to nurture it with money, and mainstreamize its voices, Korea's alt-right certainly would have been smaller, its vileness less pronounced and more firmly rejected by the rest of the Korean society. It was the conservative administrations that raised Ilbe, to harvest the most toxic fruit. Korea’s alt-right, the first alt-right of the world, was a government start-up.

the author claims Reddit as the best American parallel to Ilbe, but 4chan would probably be a better one.

incidentally, the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica, girlvinyl, worked at a high level position in the National Nuclear Security Administration at the time she founded the site. part of her job was to work with counterintel agents.

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bryantomber · 4 years ago

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What Is Wrong With Using Dismembered Sex Dolls

A lot of people think that people who prefer dismembered love dolls only view women for just their sexual parts.

But, that’s not entirely the case. There are a lot of realistic doll torsos and genitals available on the market nowadays because more and more people prefer their sex toys this way. However, unlike with full sex dolls, not only are they obviously not complete, their owners are being more flagged as weird as well. Some automatically think there is something wrong with these owners who would want to have sex with something that symbolizes only a part of a doll.

Misjudgments About Partial Sex Dolls

Some parts of the society are now indifferent to people using sex dolls and toys, but there is still a limit to what they are comfortable with. People who buy female doll torsos or vaginas that look realistic get labeled as men who see the other gender as mere sex objects. Anyhow, the toys are not the reason for behaviors like such, nor should they be used as an excuse. The man who pays no respect to women is the issue here, not the part of some silicone model. So, it is not wrong to have sex with dismembered blowup dolls. There’s nothing wrong in using a sex doll for self-pleasure. As long as you’re enjoying it, why not?

Buying only the body parts that can be used for sex is like reducing women to just the bits that can make men feel good. Or at least, that is what others would say. But then, even complete sex dolls are still used for pleasure purposes with the same body parts are being used for satisfaction. The only difference is that you can dress up and comb the hair of one, while the other may not even have facial features or limbs. Misogyny is practiced by misogynists.

It is undeniable, however, that there are men who use partial blowup dolls as a form of showing disrespect to women. They may indeed think that girls are nothing without the parts that they can use to please boys. But rather than it being the toy’s problem, it depends more on the person using it. It may influence them, yes, but that still relies on the user’s way of thinking more so than on the inanimate object.

While men who just buy pocket pussies are considered weird, no one points their fingers on women who own realistic dildos at all. Technically, those are still dismembered body parts, but what sets them aside is that they are of men’s. Unlike with the lads, ladies can go and play with their toys however they want and people are not saying that they have corrupted morals. Everyone is fine with it, but men who do the alternative are sadly being called out. If it is being normalized for the other gender, then it is only fair to give men who use partial dolls a chance as well.

If you think about it carefully, there is no way that everyone who buy doll torsos or pocket pussies actually fantasize about a dismembered woman. The point of using these products, or any other lifelike toy for that matter, is to create the fantasy of having sex with a real person. Some are fond of strokers that look exactly like the female’s genital more than the ones that are so toy-like. That is because sex or masturbation feels way better if there is a visual component added into the mix. Although sleeping with a full sex doll would make the experience better, there are reasons some go for just the parts instead.

Just as there are people who think buying only a part is weird, there are also some who find complete love dolls uncomfortable. As a result, they purchase the bits as they feel better than plain sex toys but not as extreme as dolls. Basically, it is a matter of respecting preferences. What feels good for you may not feel good for them. At the same time, what feels good for them may not feel good for you. Different people have different tastes, which is completely fine.

Another reason would be the problem with storage. Although there are already a lot of people who own sex dolls, not everyone is open about their sexual fantasies to their families or roommates. Therefore, they need to have a wide and private space where they can hide their toy and not all owners have one. On the other hand, the torsos or the genitals are relatively smaller and easier to store and hide.

The biggest reason is most likely the price of the love doll with everything intact. While some prefer just the parts, that is not the case for everyone else. They would get one if they could, but that is the problem, the price range might be too high. Full-sized sex dolls are not cheap at all and some are even too expensive for what they are worth.

Most realistic dolls start at a few thousand dollars. There is a wide variety of different appearances available on the website of different adult brands. There are even some that offer customization services, although clearly, those cost more. There are also brothels where you can rent a doll for a short time, but nothing beats having one for your own. With that said, not everyone who owns dismembered body parts prefers them. Instead, those toys are sometimes chosen as an alternative because they are relatively cheaper and more efficient.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, what matters the most with these toys is the pleasure they can give. Go for whatever brings your fantasies to life or quenches your sexual desires. Whether it is a sex doll that is complete from head to toe or merely a part of it, just do what feels good. It is better to not let other people’s judgment dampen your libido. They can go and enjoy whatever toy they want, and you can go and enjoy yours too.

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andranikolayi · 5 years ago

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Gxrls Can’t Mix - misogyny and discrimination in the electronic music world

originally appeared online in Romanian for Revista Cutra

A brief note about this translation

I initially wrote this text in July for Romanian intersectional feminist mag CUTRA and they published it mid September. The focus was supposed to be on events that did take place locally, however, this summer there’s been a constant stream of tweets from female-identified and enby djs/producers about their horrendous Boiler Room experiences.

I wanted to shine a light on that and the endemic kind of sexism that boiler room is constantly facilitating and refuses to take any responsibility towards, as well as share some of the horrors from the Romania scene that nobody wants to talk about because we still live in a very homophobic, racist and sexist environment. As a local queer artist myself, I do believe it is our duty to speak up on these issues even if it may negatively affect our social/professional life. The local community leaders do know what they need to do in order to create safer, more inclusive spaces yet prefer to use a superficially woke discourse that looks good online, yet they would never take direct action or present an unpopular opinion.

Having spoken to Ceci after their Boiler Room and their scary bad experience (including receiving multiple death threats), it became increasingly clear that this text needed to exist in the world. Also running into Lakuti last week in Berlin and hearing how traumatized she still is after her experience playing in Romania, I was all the more motivated to translate it into English and make this available for everyone.

It may be sprawling at times, but I think it’s important to present a translation of the original published material, as it appears on the CUTRA website. Please keep in mind that CUTRA is not a music/dj-specific publication so certain aspects of the industry come with very ELI5 explanations.

First I thought she was just messing with us, but now i m starting to think that this girl doesn’t know what she’s doing

This is boring room not boiler room

Are they trying to put us to bed and broadcasting Schumann resonances?

She would have been better at spinning pizzas than records

Go back to the kitchen!

These are just a select few from the over 2000 comments of the very first Boiler Room live stream taking place in Romania. Said comments appeared on the initial Facebook live post. The event took place in July 2016. At the time of writing this article [na – july 2019], all the comments are still publicly visible on their page.

I could probably write a thesis on misogyny in electronic music, but for this particular piece I’d like to focus on the following question: why do we saying that gxrls can’t mix?

I would also like to ask the follow up questions: should we be surprised that colleagues from the Romanian club industry would say that a female-identified person is a sick DJ but „a little too homely” to play a certain club? Or that another person I used to consider a close friend would tell me during a b2b set that because he just took some MDMA I looked like „a juicy piece of meat” to him? Or how when Electronic Beats Romania did their first feature on local producer Admina and they didn’t even know who to contact from the magazine to moderate the deluge of hateful comments? Or how nobody even bats an eye at the way industry men here always tend to grab you by the lower waist when talking to you in the club as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Try to explicitly say something and you would be instantly labelled an „unchill bitch”.

The answer is a resounding yes. We should be surprised, as well as angry and concerned enough to start actively doing something about this.

Miss I’s Boiler Room

On July 6th, 2016, the promoters behind the Interval event and festival series put together the very first Boiler Room in Romania. For those of you less familiar with the club world, Boiler Room is a platform that organizes events specifically designed to broadcast a live video stream of the club experience. Think DJs mixing or musicians doing live sets, while also making a point in filming the audience and their reactions to the music. Since its inception in 2010, Boiler Room has become a global phenomenon, with immense pull in the industry. The project is equally revered and reviled to the point that there are parody YouTube channels (see People of Boiler Room). For most artists, being on Boiler Room is a make or break moment, sort of like a calling card highlighting your skill as a DJ.

Promoters, fellow DJs, agents and ravers all follow Boiler Room religiously. The platform’s increased popularity and growing volume of videos produced per week may have slightly decreased its influence due to sheer oversaturation, being on BR is still the highlight of many up-and-coming artists’ career. Unlike a mix, the BR videos don’t just physically show off your mixing skills, but they also document the audience’s reaction in real time. Oh, and as a DJ you only get 60 minutes to give it your best. Or, as with Miss I in the following example, you’ve just been asked to open the very first BR broadcast ever from your country. Miss I is one of the most beloved local female DJs, also responsible for opening the first vinyl only record store in Romania and highly appreciated in the minimal/deep house scene, so you know there’s gonna be eyeballs. But no pressure, u do u grrrrl.

For every Boiler Room event, the broadcast is livestreaming on their website and Facebook page. Reading the live reactions on the chatroom and Facebook comments is intricately related to the experience. On that humid summer afternoon in a rooftop garden in Rahova, the comments that started pouring just a few minutes into her set were absolutely shocking. The level and volume of vitriol had greatly surpassed the BR staff’s expectations. About 40 minutes in, the host publicly posted a call out comment.

However, while researching this article, I was surprised to discover that most of said harmful and sexist comments were still up online. There were no attempts on behalf of the BR team to warn or ban users. Hell, there was no moderation. But maybe there should have been.

The Boiler Room Effect

Part I - San Francisco Pride, 2019

This story took place in 2016. We could easily justify what had happened by claiming we don’t like to talk about gender politics at the club or how, generally speaking, the Eurominimal/tech-house scene the event was catering to is notoriously populated by aggro cishet bros who worship Villalobos. Unfortunately (surprise surprise!), this has not been the first, nor the last online scandal Boiler Room has been responsible for.

During the writing process for this material, initially meant to focus mainly on Romanian issues, I started paying attention to the comments on recent BR livestreams. This process, coupled with the increased number of artist friends talking about the backlash in the comments following their BR streams I was seeing on Twitter lead me to believe in the dire necessity of live moderators for the entire BR social media. These comments are not just mean spirited or unfunny trolling, they can be incredibly harmful and have a lasting negative effect.

On June 1st 2019, Boiler Room organized a Pride-related event in San Francisco where an artist I not only appreciate but happen to occasionally work with made their debut. Ceci aka CCL is a DJ, producer, co-founder of queer collective TUF and [at the time of publishing] agent working for Discwoman, an NYC-based talent agency created to boost womxn and non-binary artists. CCL identifies as non-binary and uses only they/them pronouns. Being AFAB and feminine presenting, they are often misgendered due to their presentation, even after clearly stating their preferences.

In the beginning of the video, the host does use their correct pronouns, but most people in the comments were still referring to them by using she/her pronouns. This might seem like a minor inconvenience compared to the bulk of the discourse happening below the stream, mostly comprised of people complaining about the music, ranging from how weird the selection is, whether or not that sound is a faulty cable and how bad their technical skills were. Later Ceci confessed they even received actual death threats. All this was happening at a Pride-related event in one of the gayest cities in the world and with a line-up specifically tailored for the occasion.

Being misgendered is always a bad experience, but when it happens during what is supposed to be a career-defining moment, the effect is even more traumatic. Besides, a torrent of sexist and negative comments cannot have a positive effect on anyone, regardless of their gender or sexual identity. Especially with BR, this only seems to happen when female-identified or non-binary artists are concerned. In CCL’s case, the misgendering may have not been the most atrocious part of the online response, however we do need to start implementing such habits as not assuming one’s gender or choice of pronouns. It may seem like a small step, but it does make a world of difference.

What Boiler Room continuously refuse to do is acknowledge the influence it carries in the industry and the responsibility that comes with that. BR could have avoided causing a lot of damage by simply adding a little blurb about the artist’s preferred pronouns in the description of the Facebook live video, for the users tuning in later or not familiar with their work.

It’s this kind of thoughtfulness and concern for the actual scenes they feature that is consistently lacking from their approach.

Part II - The Sherelle Incident

In March 2019, a different incident took over both the online and offline music discourse – for approximately two whole weeks, all you could see on Techno Twitter were reactions to Sherelle’s Boiler Room. In short, there was clip of a POC female-identified DJ from the UK playing bass and jungle to a packed room going totally berserk until someone from the audience touches the CDJs and the music stops. This unwanted intervention coming from an unidentified hand created a meme-worthy WTF reaction. To nobody’s surprise, this snipped was the one Boiler Room chose to use as their preview advertising her set online. All of a sudden, her startled face in the clip was all anyone could think of, not the incredible atmosphere she created. Yewande Adeniran wrote a thoughtful piece on the implications and how said “accident” took the discourse away from a moment that was supposed to be just about Sherelle and her skills as a DJ.

Following the incident, the Twitter community managed to ID the person who caused the hubbub, who turned out to be infamous UK DJ Riz la Teef, who was also playing the event. Online, he’s been bombarded with accusations of racism and misogyny to the point of having to delete his account. However, a wave of reputed DJs and producers jumped to his defense and justified his action. Keeping in mind that most of what we call Techno Twitter is comprised of people from/who live in North American, their argument was that his unwarranted intrusion was in fact a very common practice from the UK grime/bass culture.

Known as a wheel up or to turn up, it consists on moving the jog (the little CDJ wheelie thingie) to rewind the track playing and increase the hype. It’s traditionally considered a sign of appreciation and supposed to be very flattering when your friends/fellow DJs perform it. Think of it as a hands-on rewind. Only in this case his attempt failed and the only thing he managed to accomplish was create a whole lot of confusion. Plus, they were friends and earlier in the clip you can see him come say hi and hug her. In true Internet fashion, think pieces from major publications followed, educating the poor American kids on the wheel up, as well as photos with the two hugging and making peace, telling everyone it’s time to chill out. As for Sherelle’s part, I’m actually curious what else was she supposed to do than say something along the lines of “OK, fine, let’s move on”? It’s already hard enough to break through in the industry as a queer black woman, the last thing you want to do is be that unchill bitch who can’t take a joke.

Our Daily Misogyny

Going back the shitty things that happened in Romania chapter, I want to talk about an incident that happened in October 2016 at a Queer Night party in Guesthouse. To give you a little context, Queer Night is a series of queer parties, the first of its kind, co-run by local choreographer/dancer Paul Dunca and DJ/singer Cosima von Bulowe for over a decade. Guesthouse is a club mainly associated with the Rominimal/tech-house cult, with a pretty cishet, homophobic audience. However, they occasionally host the odd underground event, like DJ Stingray or Lena Willikens. This particular event was a collaborative effort between Queer Night and the Interval (the people responsible for the Romanian Boiler Rooms – na) curatorial teams, who invited queer womxn DJ couple Lakuti and Tama Sumo to do an extended back to back set. Lerato Khathi aka Lakuti is an incredibly talented DJ from South Africa, who also runs the label and talent agency Uzuri and Tama Sumo has an extensive DJ career and also books for Panoramabar.

As Lerato was mixing, a guy standing in front of the booth reaches towards the turntables and touches the record that was playing and the music glitches. Lerato simply froze for a second but continues to carry on mixing. A few minutes later, said guy suddenly appears behind the booth (access to the booth and the backstage area requires a separate bracelet) and tries to get her attention and starts touching her. In that moment, Tama rushes in and extracts the person from the booth. In spite of his highly inappropriate conduct at event that promotes safe spaces, the security staff refused to kick him out of the club for a fuzzy array of reasons – friends with the owner, being a “house regulars” and my favorite “he didn’t beat up anyone” line. Considering the organizers’ credo and position as community leaders, they could have done more than simply trying to minimize the incident.

The rest of the night went well and their set was lovely, but talking to them the next morning, the entire experience didn’t sound like just a minor incident of a someone being an asshole: Lerato confessed that even though she traveled and played all across the globe, she’s never experienced anything remotely similar.

I’d love to be able to say that these stories are just rare occurrences. Unfortunately, being in the music industry reflects a much more grim reality of endemic sexism. Let me suggest a little exercise – take for example any Boiler Room video on Youtube where there are female-identified performers and within the first dozen comments you might something along the lines of “she can’t mix”, “great selection but her technique is lacking” or “X guy did this so much better in the ‘90s”.

Perhaps we all know by now that commenting on a womxn’s appearance is a no-no. Yet I still constantly hear various industry men making comments that womxn like Peggy Gou or Jayda G only got where they are now just because they’re hot. (How come nobody calls out Marcel Dettman for looking like a model I ask you?). Unlike jabs at someone’s looks which are easy to dismiss as harmful, commenting on someone’s “skill” and “technique” are seemly OK because they refer to an objective (they say) variable, easy to judge and quantify. I ask you this – doesn’t this all sound terribly familiar? Perhaps using the same arguments as those right wing Youtube personalities that post videos with titles such as „X DESTROYS feminists with FACTS and LOGIC”?

Consequences of the systemic sexism are starting to pop up everywhere, from Resident Advisor closing down their comments section due to the amount of harassment related to their recent focus on female artists to the petition against Giegling’s Konstantin. For a quick reminder, German DJ Konstantin used a bunch of “biological determinism” arguments in an interview trying to explain why he believes women don’t have the right kind of brain for mixing. In 2018, Konstantin was booked to perform at three major parties during Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), a key annual gathering for the electronic music industry. A petition signed by thousands of fellow DJs, music journalists and electronic music artists circulated online to have him blackballed due to his comments and half-assed apology that followed. Unfortunately, the only result was the ADE organizers offering him even more exposure by inviting him to talk about his actions on a live panel.

This kind of discourse is very dangerous, as by accepting and normalizing it we’re offering it unwarranted legitimacy to the point that opinions such as Konstantin’s start being reiterated by the press. After this year’s Movement festival in Detroit (the birthplace of techno), a journalist in a local newspaper writing a piece on the women’s rising visibility in electronic music, cited a “veteran DJ” who claimed women lack the technical capabilities to mix and rely on laptops and software in order to do their job. Despite this not being the author’s argument, he chose to offer a platform to a blatantly misogynistic opinion. These positions are not just wrong and should be called out for their obvious sexism, but perpetuating them in the press further increases their destructive power. The more we will continue to validate them, the more present they will become.

And still, why do we keep saying gxrls can’t mix?

Are girls really all lacking in the rhythm department? Commenting on one’s ability to mix is still one of the most widespread forms of criticism that AFAB and female-identified persons get. Why is it so widespread?

Through mixing, the art that defines the modern dance music DJ, most people understand creating a story through a continuous body of variegated music but particularly having no pause between the tracks. When industry people talk about mixing, they usually refer to beatmatching, which is usually means blending two or more tracks, often of different tempos or keys. The overall tempo of the DJ’s mix can remain constant or experience subtle increases across their set. This style of mixing, using long transitions, no tempo changes and working within the same musical subgenre throughout is particularly appreciated in Eurominimal and tech-house, which is also the most lucrative part of the industry in places like France, Germany and Romania. As many talented DJs have proven over the years, from legends like Larry Lavan or David Mancuso and their cosmic or loft deeply personal, eclectic styles, the perfect blends same tempo school is by no means the only “right” way to think about a dancefloor.

At a time when dance music has exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry, the “perfect mix” paradigm became the dominant style. In this climate, to be a DJ is synonymous with knowing how to mix, otherwise you don’t exist. Or at least that’s the androcentric perspective. And once you frame things like this, the comments on womxn’s “technical skills” stem from the same sexist pool as saying womxn are not good at math/science/driving or other “men’s” activities. After all, they’re just being objective, right? “Oh my god it’s not like I said she was fat or something!”

Mixing is a learned skill that requires practice to be perfected. The portion of the population who is encouraged to learn skills that involve music and technology, who is not discriminated against and has access to often costly equipment (be it controllers, CDJs or turntables) is overwhelmingly cis, straight and male. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the “I don’t have a mix online/nowhere to practice because my ex bf had all the equipment” story. Or gxrls saying they never learned how to mix because they didn’t have access to equipment. Or the supportive “nice guy” story who invites you over to “teach you how to mix” but quickly loses his interest once you reject his sexual advances.

It’s refreshing to see groups like Room 4 Resistance, No Shade or Discwoman not only organizing events, but also putting together free mixing workshops for womxn and non-binary people. People are also trying to change things in Romania, with groups like Corp. or Queer Night trying to tilt the gender imbalance locally, only unfortunately their efforts are lacking the infrastructure, institutional support and ideological consistency.

Where to Now?

We’re in 2019. DJs like The Black Madona, Josey Rebelle or Octo Octa and Eris Drew are some of the most in-demand people in the circuit. They all approach the dancefloor differently and bring unique views of what a DJ set can be. Yet straight white boys are feeling threatened by their success and are constantly looking for arguments to delegitimize their success. “Yeah, but this person is getting booked everywhere just because it’s cool to be trans now” – as if anyone would go through the intense process of forever altering your body just because queer is “in”! “Oh if I had tits I would get more gigs” – another male DJ I used to call a friend told me when I started playing more in Bucharest. I’ve heard phrases like “but why do women only book other women?” or “how can the super talented boys ever breakthrough in this environment if women are getting all the attention?” more times than I can recount.

Straight white boys need to shut the fuck up! For decades, the vast majority of people in charge of running/booking clubs were straight white men who would only book other straight white men. Yes, there we certainly do see more womxn in line ups, but just as female:pressure cares to remind us periodically, the percentage is still predominantly male. The healthiest path towards building a more diverse and inclusive music world is not having the old gatekeepers trying to educate themselves and perform acts of tokenism, but make space for marginalized people in decision-making positions, because nobody could make more informed, coherent and inspired choices than a person who is deeply involved in the community. Just see Discwoman’s Frankie miracle work over at Bossa Nova Civic in NYC. And it is very likely that with the right people running the show, incidents of abuse and harassment will diminish as well.

Womxn have been so used to be touched without consent and constantly harassed that we’ve been programmed to dismiss such indiscretions as minor inconveniences, something that “comes with the territory”. In order to see an improvement of this state of affairs we have to become more radical in our attitudes against sexism and discrimination. We absolutely need to learn to speak up whenever we encounter misogyny, racism, homo and transphobia and, most importantly, believe womxn when they come forward with a story of abuse of boundaries crossing because whenever we brush it off with things like “he was drunk”, “it was just a joke” or “there are two sides to every story”, we become complicit and contribute to this toxic culture.

The good news is that we can all contribute to changing things. And no, you don’t have to go to a march or join an organization if you want to help out. Change starts in your own immediate community by simply calling out your friends when they say something sexist, not supporting the known abusers and problematic people in the industry and just coming out to see one of the local womxn artists.

We will continue to play, to defend the DJ booth as sometimes the only safe space we might have at the club, to record our music however we can and become ten times better than all male DJs who told us we don’t know, we can’t or we “don’t have the necessary biological conformation”. But, most importantly, we’ll keep making people dance.

images, in order of appearance

queer night at apollo 111, 2017

miss i boiler room, 2016

edited screengrab from comments in the miss i boiler room facebook stream

crowd at miss i boiler room, 2016

ccl at rewire, 2019

all photos courtesy of the author

#gxrls cant mix #cutra #boiler room #sexism

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heatherannehogan · 8 years ago

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the lesbophobia thing

Lesbophobia is real. It's the prejudice, bigotry, and oppression that exists at the intersection of homophobia and misogyny. Let me say it again: Lesbophobia is real. Hate for lesbians is real.

However, it is essential to acknowledge and understand that the term lesbophobia has been co-opted by a loud and growing contingent of LGBTQ women in communities that share troubling ties and ideology with factions that exist inside the alt-right movement — worse, the dangerous dogma that's attaching itself to word the lesbophobia has found a new home at AfterEllen.

I first encountered the word lesbophobia in response to the post I wrote called Queer Women Take Over The 2016 Emmys. Her Story got a revolutionary nod for Outstanding Short Form. Kate McKinnon took home a trophy for Saturday Night Live. Sarah Paulson won for The People vs. O.J. Simpson. And Jill Soloway scored another victory for Transparent. On social media there was a small outcry that I hadn't chosen the headline "Lesbians Take Over the 2016 Emmys," despite the fact that Kate McKinnon was the only winner who explicitly identifies as a lesbian. (In fact, Sarah Paulson is on record saying, "I refuse to give any kind of label just to satisfy what people need.") The reasons the handful of dissenters gave for my decision to call the Emmys queer was that I am a lesbophobe, an espouser and executor of lesbophobia.

To be very honest with you, I shrugged it off. The most unwinnable battle we have at Autostraddle is labeling LGBTQ people in a way that satisfies everyone. It's such a constant struggle, we laid out an explanation about labels in our official comment policy. Recently on a Pop Culture Fix, I wrote about the new queer characters coming to The Good Wife spin-off. One of them will be a lesbian, according to the show's writers; the other's sexuality has not been labeled. So, I said, "The Good Wife spin-off will prominently feature two lesbian, bisexual, gay, homosexual, or otherwise queer-identified women." Just to cover all my bases because it was almost Christmas and I was tired and I didn't want to have to argue about labels. And yet, the cries of lesbophobia came in again. I got a couple of emails, a dozen or so tweets. Essentially: "Lesbian is not a dirty word! Saying queer is lesbophobic!"

So, on December 26, I tweeted something I think is a true, fair, and accurate analogy:

Yelling "lesbophobia!" when someone says "queer" is like yelling "war on Christmas!" when someone says "happy holidays." Come on, y'all.

A couple of days later, AfterEllen's official Twitter tweeted at me and said: "@theheatherhogan oh, agreed. It's like yelling "biphobia!" and "transphobia!" when someone says lesbian."

To which beloved Autostraddle cartoonist Dickens replied:

"AfterEllen is three weeks shy of transforming their website into an online support group for victims of wyt lesbian genocide. This is honestly the most ridiculously entitled white lesbian coated petrified bullshit I have seen in a long time. And if you don't think white supremacy has reached out its dirty little fingers and touched a few groups of marginalized white folks, well. Keep an eye on their feed here and there. Keep an eye on their former writers. They aren't just trying to Make Lesbianism Great Again… They are asserting their strength. They are erasing the visibility of the defectors. They are sliding their salty little asses into spaces and feeds where they must know they are clearly not wanted or cared for. I was never a fan of AE but this new image they're building for themselves is a little too Nazi-adjacent for my galaxy Blaaaack aaaass."

Dickens was, of course, correct. And her point was proven once again the very next day when an article blasted out to the 125,000 followers of AfterEllen's official, verified Twitter account cried: “Lesbian Spaces Are Still Needed, No Matter What the Queer Movement Says". It suggests that trans women and bisexual women's desire to be included in queer women's spaces is to blame for the decline of lesbian-specific spaces, which lesbians need to stay safe from trans and bisexual women.

That kind of rallying cry feels very much like the "Save Our White Neighborhoods" rallying cry of the alt-right, so I went on a deeper dive to try to find the origins of what I called "the lesbophobia movement" on Twitter. And what I found was more horrifying than I ever imagined.

A few weeks ago AfterEllen — which everyone presumed dead after the company that owns it effectively fired everyone, including longtime editor in chief Trish Bendix — announced it had acquired a new editor named Memoree Joelle. In October, Joelle, tweeted a Change.org petition that she'd signed called Take the L Out of LGBT. The petition is a direct response to a previously failed petition that called for GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, HuffPo Voices, The Advocate, etc. to Drop The T from LGBT. The most popular supporter of the petition is a guy you might know called Milo Yiannopoulos. He signed it, tweeted about it, and dedicated 3,000 words to it in a post on Breitbart. Thanks to Milo's urging, Matthew Hopkins, one of the main perpetrators of Gamergate, wrote a post called "Why #GamerGate Should Help the ‘Drop the T’ Campaign" on his personal blog. Hopkins called it "one of the most politically important campaigns of our generation."

In addition to signing and tweeting about the petition, Joelle commented her approval. When former AfterEllen writer Elaine Atwell brought Joelle's support of the petition to light, Joelle's comments disappeared from the petition, and so did Elaine's byline from the hundreds of articles she wrote over the last five years at AfterEllen.

The comments on the Change.org petition mention lesbophobia multiple times and equate it with trans activism, as do the subreddits that discussed Joelle's contribution to the petition. "Part of lesbophobia is hating us for our same-sex attraction, but another very big part of it is hating us for our rejection of men," one user wrote on /r/GenderCritical/. (Trans women are almost always referred to as men on this particular subreddit.) Another Redditor on /r/actuallesbians decried the "male entitlement and lesbophobia" of protesting the petition. "The moment we talk about your rape culture or your male violence we're 'transphobic' or 'biphobic.'" (The men in this comment are actually trans women and "rape culture" refers to the constantly espoused idea in TERF communities that trans women are male predators.) The lesbophobia tag on the blog GenderTrender is a deeply disturbing trip down an anti-trans rabbit hole. The lesbophobia tag on the website 4th Wave Now is horrifying; it equates allowing trans kids/teens to come out and live openly as their true gender with child abuse, ideas that are — again — shared with Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos. Reddit and Tumblr are absolutely flush with lesbians using the word "lesbophobia" to back up the ideas presented in these "Drop the T"/"The L Is Leaving" petitions.

These spaces that use the word "lesbophobia" to attack trans and bi women or people who use the word queer share more than than an ideology with Breitbart. You'll find them saying things like "trans women want to colonize the lesbian community." You'll find them using the phrase "SJW" (meaning Social Justice Warrior), a pejorative term coined by the Men's Rights Activist movement. And you'll find a lot of talk about how the correct "biology" is the thing that allows people access to the protections of the majority. And lots and lots and lots and lots of just truly sickening propaganda leveled at trans and bi women. It's very much about creating an in-group and scapegoating an out-group through tried and true tactics that have been — I'm sorry — utilized by Fox News and the alt-right for years.

I wrote about these things on Twitter, and you can read Dickens further unpacking them here and here. (You should read that last thread before you jump in here and call her "my black friend.")

Look, we didn't just wake up one day with an openly racist, openly sexist, openly xenophobic, openly ableist, openly anti-semitic president in the White House, appointing the leader of the most dangerous white supremacist website in history to his top advisor position. We watched blatant and unabashed white supremacist language and ideas slowly take over the movement from the inside. We watched the most powerful scapegoat the most vulnerable. We watched Fox News make heroes out of the white men who murdered unarmed black children and terrify people with their whole War on Christmas bullshit and equate all Muslims with terrorists. A Nazi didn't walk into the West Wing and have a seat; the slow creep of white supremacy laid the path for him.

Vox did a fascinating interview with former conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes earlier this year. He quit over Trump. But the whole interview is him agonizing about how, to him, the GOP had always been about fiscal conservatism and states rights and he believed in that ideological purity so deeply that he fooled himself into believing that's what the GOP was about to everybody, despite the fact that he saw the white supremacy and fascism slowly gaining power and momentum until it took over.

To realize, first of all, that you’re part of a movement that was not the movement you thought it was, that you’re aligned with people that you didn’t really understand you’re aligned with, and to realize that everything that you thought about the conservative intellectual infrastructure was really piecrust thin. You thought you had this big principled movement and then suddenly along comes Donald Trump and you realize that it was just was just the pastry on top. So I think disorienting is a great term. Disillusioning is not too strong either.

To me, what we're talking about with lesbophobia is a similar thing. Is lesbophobia a term some lesbians have rallied around to protest the prejudice and bigotry that exist at the intersection of homophobia and misogyny? Yes, of course. Absolutely. HOWEVER. I had to go searching for people using the word lesbophobia like that because my entire experience with the way the word kept popping up in my timeline and in my comments and in the comments sections of other websites was to decry the use of the word queer and to espouse anti-trans and anti-bi ideology. And that includes every single person who landed in my mentions on Twitter when I started talking about this. I did not click on a single profile without finding anti-trans, anti-bi language; or ask a single person if they believe trans women are women and have them say yes.

If you are a woman who is using the word lesbophobia to NOT do those things, and you're more angry at me for pointing out that it's happening than you are at anti-trans/anti-bi people who have hijacked its meaning, I ... I truly don't understand. What's happening at AfterEllen is terrifying me. Maybe the website is technically dead, but it still has clout and power and it's using it to push some really dangerous ideas about lesbian exclusivity, and those ideas are shared by a very loud group of people who use the word "lesbophobia" on their blogs, social media, Reddit, etc. to vilify the people (like me) who stand against them.

I don't want to cause anyone pain. I don't want to make anyone feel unsafe or unloved or unaccepted. I DO NOT BELIEVE LESBIANS ARE NAZIS. I AM A LESBIAN. If you truly think that's what I was saying when I unpacked these ideas on Twitter, I'm sorry. It was not my intention.

I do think, however, that it's imperative for you to open your eyes to how the word lesbophobia is being used to persecute and oppress trans and bi women in very vocal and influential spaces that have direct ties in ideology and language with the alt-right.

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