#it's why it is hard to take a lot of feminist discourse seriously when it's about how this celeb is a feminist and this one is not

[taylortruther]

hot take but i truly do not believe meaningful feminist education or critical engagement of feminism can happen when your primary method is through celebrity stanning/stan wars. because i think if you truly did educate yourself about any facet of feminism, and critically engaged with it, you would not actually seek it in celebrities.

[sagevalleymusings]

Responding to "Lesbian is a Powerful Word:" With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

So I wrote the bulk of this essay in February of 2020 when the original article I reference came out. Then… I dunno, something happened. And I forgot about this in the face of… well, you know. Everything. But I think it’s still highly relevant, so I’ve wrapped up the ending, cleaned up my sourcing, and am setting it loose on the world. Enjoy.

A while ago, AfterEllen published an article by Claire Heuchan called “Lesbian is a Powerful Word: Here’s Why We Will Always Need It.”

This bothered me a lot, not because I disagree, but because I felt like the argument being made was disingenuous at best. The author assumed that their definition of lesbian (a biological female who is exclusively attracted to other biological females) is the only valid definition, then proceeded to use this assumption to explain why lesbian identity needed to be protected from modern queer politics or risk erasure.

I wouldn’t just disagree, but would counter-argue that Heuchan is pushing a dangerous false narrative, one that misses a huge swathe of discourse around how the term lesbian can and does fit into non-binary spaces.

But what struck me the most was that the argument itself was poorly constructed. There were multiple instances where I didn’t just disagree, but didn’t think that the argument even made logical sense. For example, at one point Heuchan cites three articles about how modern lesbians dislike the term lesbian. But there are two issues with this: the first is that two of the three articles are joking listicles with no real substance which of course could be torn to shreds with the most basic of counter argument, but the second issue is that Heuchan constructs this as an attack on lesbians by non-lesbians when in fact these articles were about how lesbians themselves feel about the term for their own identity. Not only that, but the only article of substance wasn’t provided a link for, so by lumping that article in with these two joking listicles, and then on top of that falsely claiming that these listicles were written by non-lesbians, Heuchan has literally constructed a strawman argument that non-lesbians are trying to tell lesbians not to use the term because it has too many syllables or sounds like a disease (a point made, ironically, by lesbian icon Ellen, who AfterEllen gets their name from).

I was so frustrated by this lack of well-constructed argument that I did some research, and I discovered that self-proclaimed radical feminist Claire Heuchan has a blog where she made a much longer, more nuanced version of this argument. And although I still disagree with the premise, I think it’s important to acknowledge that for me to respond purely to this AfterEllen fluff piece without an acknowledgement of the fantastic work Heuchan has done on black feminism on her award-winning blog would be as disingenuous as failing to include an intersectional perspective of lesbian that is trans-inclusive in an argument about where the term lesbian fits into modern queer rhetoric. Because not only is it the case that lesbian can fit into modern queer rhetoric, it’s a conversation that is happening in trans-inclusive spaces.

But Heuchan’s accomplishments as a black radical feminist don’t change the fact that she’s a radical feminist, and only the briefest dissection of her six-part series on sex and gender does legitimize my concern that this means that Heuchan is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. And on some level, I have a hard time taking trans-exclusionary arguments seriously, because they so frequently construct a false narrative. Heuchan’s argument assumes that all lesbians agree with her definition of lesbian, because in her world, a lesbian is a cis woman attracted exclusively to cis women, and anyone calling themselves a lesbian who doesn’t fall into that category is contributing to lesbian erasure. 

It’s a winner-take-all argument that allows for absolutely no middle ground, because all dissent is just considered oppressive patriarchy. Heuchan doesn’t believe in gender. At all. She believes that gender is a tool by the patriarchy to keep women (and by women she means people with vaginas) oppressed. So any argument that I attempt to make about queering lesbianism to include trans women or non-binary folks is stopped before it even gets to the discussion stage because the premise that people can identify as women at all is considered invalid.

If I were to make a counter-argument to the AfterEllen article, it would be to say that “lesbian” does have a checkered history of transphobia which means that lesbians like me have trouble relating to it. So do I stop identifying as a lesbian because it feels like other lesbians are trying to push me and the people I love out? Or do I try to open it so that more people can be included? The argument I would make is that lesbian fits into modern queer politics better by opening. Lesbian used to be defined as an attraction to women in general (fellow queer tumblrina star-anise has documented this extremely well), not an exclusive one, and that older definition is very compatible with modern queer politics. A loosening on the reigns of lesbian would allow non-binary folks and trans women to find acceptance of the very real experience they have. And although trans-inclusive rhetoric can get pretty aggressive, at times complaining that lesbians refusing to date trans women is itself transphobic, I think there is a place in the middle where we can acknowledge that trans lesbians and cis lesbians who date trans women exist, while still allowing for preference, much like anything else. No one is forcing transphobic lesbians to date trans women. This point even gets brought up in the much longer discussion Heuchan is encouraging on her blog, when she talks about the “cotton ceiling.” But the way in which it’s brought up here conflates the argument in a disingenuous way, not only by pointing out that the cotton ceiling was coined by a trans woman but then not providing links to the original conversation, but then also by dismissing the entire argument of the cotton ceiling and by extension the trans activist’s extremely valid point that cis lesbians are bad at talking about trans inclusion. 

I want to add a sidebar here to say that actually I think I can understand why Heuchan didn’t cite the original cotton ceiling discussion. It’s poorly archived. I am not the only person who has looked and failed to find the original source. Wikipedia doesn’t even cite the original source - they cite an academic article citing a blog that no longer exists. The oldest sources I can find are trans exclusive radical feminists tearing into it as early as March 2012, but none of them screenshot the original tweet (it is implied it’s a tweet). If it weren’t for the fact that I have heard other trans activists use the term, I would almost say it was made up whole cloth. At the very least I think it is telling that the term traveled through Heuchan’s spaces far more than it did trans activist spaces - potentially an example I see not infrequently of radical feminists blowing a bad take out of proportion and treating it as representative of trans perspective as a whole. 

To go back to my point about Heuchan’s premise, there is a counter-argument being skirted around that seeks to incorporate lesbianism into modern queer politics. The problem is that Heuchan’s argument doesn’t allow for this possibility at all, doesn’t even acknowledge it, because from a trans-exclusionary radical feminist viewpoint, lesbians who have sex with trans women are no longer lesbians and therefore do not get a say.

Another way to construct this argument would be to say that Heuchan is arguing that lesbians who think lesbianism includes dating trans and non-binary folks are themselves contributing to lesbian erasure, and that trans-exclusionary lesbianism is here to stay. But phrased this way, the argument sounds a lot less defensible. Because from that perspective, the trans-exclusionary stance is one that stands against other lesbians specifically. 

And yeah. It does.

Lesbian is a powerful word, and I want it to be here to stay. But it’s hard to advocate for a term when so many people have tried so hard to link the term lesbian with transphobia. And this especially hurts when… it’s just not true. 

In March of 2023, the LGBT+ youth charity Just Like Us published an early report on their survey on trans inclusivity among LGBT young adults. They found that of the over 3,000 LGBT+ young adults surveyed, lesbians were the most inclusive orientation, with a staggering 96% saying they were supportive or very supportive of trans people. 

Queer folk are more supportive than the general populace, but 96% is unreal. And yet, those numbers back up my own experience in lesbian spaces. Almost all of us are supportive or very supportive of the trans people in our lives. 

Lesbian does not necessarily just mean “female homosexual.” It can be a cis woman attracted to femmes. It can be a non-binary she/they. It can be a he/him butch. Hell, believe it or not, some trans women are also lesbians. 

Lesbians aren’t being erased. It’s just that a lot of the people calling themselves lesbians now are people you disagree with.

Welcome to the club.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Five years ago, the women on this site who treated me like trash over loving Labyrinth and shipping Jareth/Sarah were almost always obliviously consuming Radfem propaganda, or were out and out Radfems/Terfs themselves.

They were the types of people who casually threw the word “pedophile” around against grown women who shipped an adult Sarah with Jareth, aka literally one of the most popular ships for women in fandom for 30 years.

Pretty much invariably, these women had serious sex-negative anxieties, which included a severe paranoia about any and all kink and fetish, and porn in general. I saw a lot of shocking, fear-mongering propaganda surrounding sexual expression. Pretty much invariably, their method of approach involved immediate personal shock-value attacks on anyone they perceived to be “bad.”

Today, you can look at the way some people react to other popular so-called “problematic” ships and recognize the same toxic, fear-mongering rhetoric coming from women who consider themselves regular, trans-inclusive feminists. Sometimes it even manifests in the words of very well-meaning people (including myself here), who feel the need to talk about specific issues that pertain to their own experiences of trauma and oppression.

The people who shit on Labyrinth often seem to not really be able to comprehend that the Goblin King, like the film itself, is canonically a representation of a teen girl’s psyche, a soup of fears and anxieties and desires and dreams. He’s not a literal human adult preying on a literal child, and to read the film that way seriously undermines the entire point of the film. 

When I (and people of many fandoms) say “This is fiction, calm down,” I’m not just saying it’s not real so it cant hurt you and you can’t criticize me. I’m trying to call attention to what fiction actually is - artistic representations of feelings and experiences. The Goblin King is Sarah’s fiction. Therefore, he can be anything she or any woman who identifies with her wants him to be, including her lover when she’s grown and ready for such a thing.

I once took an alarming dive into Beetlejuice fandom to see what content was there (the cartoon was a favorite when I was little). Chillingly, what you’ll find is an extremely wounded fanbase, with a sharp divide between the older women who had long been shipping BJ/Lydia because of their love for the cartoon series (and whom were previously the vast majority of the Beetlejuice fandom), and a massive amount of young people riding the wave of the musical fad who had decided that the entire old school Beetlejuice fandom was populated by literal pedophiles. 

I saw death threats. Suicide baiting. Constant, constant toxic discourse. It did not matter how the BJ/Lydia fandom dealt with any particular issues that would exist in their ship, in fact I’m certain that the people abusing them cared very little to even consider if they were trying to handle it at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were disgusting subhuman scum asking for abuse. If you have at any time reblogged recent Beetlejuice fan art or content from fans of the musical, you have more than likely been engaging positively with the content of someone participating in toxic fandom behavior.

Nobody is really sticking up for them, either, as far as I saw. It’s really hard to imagine how painful it must be to have such a large group of people explode into into your relatively private fandom space to tell you that you are evil, vile, and deserve constant abuse, and also you are no longer allowed into the fandom space to engage in it’s content. But I think there’s something very alarming indeed about this happening specifically to the BJ fandom, and I’ll explain why. 

The pop-culture characterization of Beetlejuice, which is heavily influenced by the cartoon series to be clear, has always in my mind been a vaguely ageless being who matches with the psychological maturity of whatever age Lydia is supposed to be. He’s more or less like an imaginary friend, a manifestation of Lydia’s psyche. In fact, I would argue that i think most of us who grew up with the cartoon or it’s subsequent merchandizing before the musical ever existed probably internalized the idea as BJ and Lydia as this ageless, salt-and-pepper-shaker couple beloved by the goth community, similar to Gomez and Morticia. In each version of canon he may be a creepy ghost in the literal sense, but any adult who is capable of identifying literary tropes (even just subconciously) would read cartoon!BJ as an artistic representation of a socially awkward outcast girl’s inner world. Lydia’s darker dispositions and interests, which alienate her from most others, are freely accepted and embraced by her spooky magical friend. BJ/Lydia in the cartoon were depicted as best friends, but to my memory there was always an underlying sense that they had secret feelings for each other, which I identified easily even as a small child. In fact, their dynamic and behavior perfectly reflected the psychological development of the show’s target demographic. They are best friends who get into adventures and learning experiences together, who have delicate feelings for each other but lack any true adult romantic/sexual understanding to acknowledge those feelings, let alone pursue them.

Though I haven’t seen the Musical yet, I’ve read the wiki and I would argue that it embodies this exact same concept even more so for it’s own version of the characters, in that Beetlejuice specifically exists to help Lydia process her mother’s death.

This is not a complicated thing to recognize and comprehend whatsoever. In fact, it looks downright blatant. It’s also a clear indicator of what BJ/Lydia means to the women who have long loved it. It was a story about a spooky wierd girl being loved and accepted and understood for who she was, and it gave them a sense of solidarity. It makes perfect sense why those women would stick with those characters, and create a safe little space for themselves to and imagine their beloved characters growing and having adult lives and experiencing adult drama, in just the same ways that the women of the Labyrinth fandom do. That’s all these women were doing. And now, they can’t do it without facing intense verbal violence. That safe space is poisoned now.

Having grown up with the cartoon as one of my favorites and been around goth subculture stuff for decades, I was actually shocked and squicked at the original Beetlejuice film’s narrative once I actually saw it, because it was extremely divorced from what these two characters had evolved into for goth subculture and what they meant to me. It’s not telling the same story, and is in fact about the Maitland's specifically. In pretty much exactly the same way two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be extremely different from each other, the film is a different animal. While I imagine that the film version has been at the heart of a lot of this confused fear-mongering around all other versions of the characters, I would no more judge different adaptations of these characters any more than I would condemn a version of Little Red in which Red and the Wolf are best friends or lovers just because the very first iteration of LRRH was about protecting yourself from predators.

I would even argue that the people who have engaged in Anti-shipper behavior over BJ/Lydia are in intense denial over the fact that BJ being interested in Lydia, either as blatant predatory behavior a la the film or on a peer level as in the cartoon (and musical?) is an inextricable part of canon. Beetlejuice was always attracted to Lydia, and it was not always cute or amusing. Beetlejuice was not always a beloved buddy character, an in fact was originally written as a gross scumbag. That’s just what he was. Even people engaging with him now by writing OC girlfriends for him (as stand-ins for the salt-and-pepper-shaker space Lydia used to take up, because obviously that was part of the core fun of the characters), or just loving him as a character, are erasing parts of his character’s history in order to do so. They are actively refusing to be held responsible for being fans of new version of him despite the fact that he engaged in overt predatory behavior in the original film. In fact, I would venture to say that they are actively erasing the fact that Musical Beetliejuice tried to marry a teenager and as far as I’m aware, seemed to like the idea (because he’s probably a fucking figment of her imagination but go off I guess). The only reason they can have a version of this character who could be perceived as “buddy” material is because...the cartoon had an impact on our pop cultural perception of what the character and his dynamic with Lydia is. 

We can have a version of the Big Bad Wolf who’s a creepy monster. We can have a version who’s sweet and lovable. We can have a version that lives in the middle. We can have a version who’s a hybrid between Red and the Wolf (a la Ruby in OUAT). All of these things can exist in the same world, and can even be loved for different reasons by the same people.

I’ve been using Beetlejuice as an example here because it’s kind of perfect for my overall point regarding the toxic ideologies in fandom right now across many different spaces, including ones for progressive and queer media, and how much so many people don’t recognize how deeply they’ve been radicalized into literalist and sex-negative radfem rhetoric, to the point where we aren’t allowed to have difficult, messy explorations of imperfect, flawed humans, and that art is never going to be 100% pure and without flaw in it’s ability to convey what it wants to convey.

This includes the rhetoric I’ve seen across the board, from She-Ra to A:TLA to Star Wars to Lovecraft Country. We don’t talk about the inherent malleable, subjective, or charmingly imperfect nature of fiction any more. Transformation and reclamation are myths in this space. Everything is in rigid categories. It is seemingly very difficult for some of these people to engage with anything that is not able to be clearly labeled as one thing or another (see the inherent transphobic and biphobic elements of the most intense rhetoric). They destroy anything they cannot filter through their ideology. When women act in a way that breaks from their narrative of womanhood (like...not having a vagina), then those women must be condemned instead of understood. Anything that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable is a mortal sin. There is an extraordinary level of both hypocrisy and repressive denial that is underlying the behavior I’m seeing now. Much like toxic Christian conservatism, these people often are discovered engaging in the same behaviors and interests that they condemn behind closed doors (or just out of sheer cognitive dissonance). As an example, one of the people who talked shit to me about Labyrinth was a huge fan of Kill La Kill, which to my knowledge was an anime about a teenage girl in like, superpowered lingere (hence why I stayed the fuck away from that shit myself). Indeed, they even allow themselves plenty of leeway for behavior far worse than they condemn others for, and create support systems for the worst of their own abusers. 

Quite frankly, I’m tired. Instead of talking about theoretical problematic shit, we need to start talking about quantifiable harm. Because as far as I can tell, the most real, immediate, and quantifiable harm done because of anybody’s favorite ships or pieces of media seems to consistently be the kind that’s done to the people who experience verbal violence and abuse and manipulation and suicide baiting and death threats from the people who have a problem.

[thexfridax]

© Claire Mathon

Translated interview with Director Sciamma

‘We started a culture war‘

Andreas Busche and Nadine Lange, in: Der Tagesspiegel, 29th of October 2019

Additions or clarifications for translating purposes are denoted as [T: …]

Manifest on the female gaze: Céline Sciamma speaks about her period film ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, MeToo in France and queer visibility.

In France, Céline Sciamma, born in 1978, is already revered as the new feminist and notably queer voice of French cinema, in the tradition of Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat. The director (‘Tomboy’, ‘Girlhood’), who writes her own screenplays, is largely unknown in [T: Germany]. This is most likely about to change with her fourth and most beautiful feature film so far. At the Cannes Film Festival, the period love story between the young painter Marianne and her model Héloïse, daughter of French aristocrats, won the Best Screenplay. Between the rugged landscape of the coast of Brittany and the candlelit interiors of an old villa, the film creates a utopia of solidarity and female desire, in which the characters of Marianne, Héloïse and Sophie the maid overcome class barriers.

Interviewers: Ms Sciamma, ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ is your first period film, it takes place a few years before the French Revolution. Why is this era important for your story?

Céline Sciamma: My interest in those years came from art history. At the time, there was an unusual number of female painters, hundreds in France and across Europe. It really moved me to discover the biographies of these women, who had successful careers. They supported each other and were very political. There was for example feminist art criticism at the time.

I: Noémie Merlant plays the painter Marianne, who is commissioned to do a portrait of Héloïse, a daughter of aristocrats. There are two main themes: the representation of female painters in bourgeois society and the female gaze – and how this [T: gaze] is reflected in the art world at the time. How are these themes connected?

CS: When I went into more detail about the work of female painters in the late 18th century, I realised how much the female perspective is missing from art history. For me this is the most painful loss, which results from the elimination of the female gaze: this relates to the artwork themselves, but also to what art brings to our lives, the memory of a kind of intimacy.

I: Marianne is not based on a specific female painter. But is she representative of women at the time?

CS: I collaborated with an art sociologist, who did extensive research on this era. All biographical details for Marianne correspond to the time in which she lived. The dynamics of a biopic – a successful woman who defies societal norms – never really interested me. My film is a manifest on the female gaze. But there’s also melancholy in this process, because we have to restore something that has been ignored for a long time.

I: Why melancholy?

CS: It makes me sad, because this perspective was withheld from me all my life. That is why the scene, where Marianne, Héloïse and Sophie the maid re-enact an abortion, is so important for the film. By painting an abortion, the act becomes art and is therefore represented. Art gives women the opportunity to tell their own stories. But it’s not only about the past. The topic of abortion is still virtually invisible in cinema.

I: How do you deal with this lack of female perspectives as a screenwriter and director?

CS: I was aware about the lack of queer and lesbian representation in cinema early on. But it becomes dangerous, when we don’t realise anymore that something is withheld from us. I noticed this again, when I watched ‘Wonder Woman’ by Patty Jenkins. It is hard to express how you feel when you know you’re not represented, and at the same time are oblivious to the power it can give you to recognise yourself in cinema. That was a new experience for me.

I: You were one of the initiators of the 50/50 by 2020 movement, which is committed to gender parity at festivals and in film. What do you expect from Cannes next year?

CS: I’m glad that this topic is finally taken seriously. We set out our target for Cannes and want more transparency in the selection committee. However, to achieve these, you have to introduce quota. The board will be replaced [T: next] year, let’s see how it works. We started a culture war. One of the most important things for me is the work on inclusion. The 50/50 [T: movement] and the film production/promotion agency CNC created a fund for cultural diversity in [T: film] productions last year. There’s usually less budget for films made by female directors, this inequality will be slightly mitigated. More than 20 films have already benefitted from this fund.

I: There is progress on one hand, but on the other hand some things are deteriorating again. Do you see it in a similar way?

CS: We had no MeToo-debate in France, unlike the one in the US. The [T: debate] was quickly hijacked and reinterpreted as discussion about free speech: that feminist film criticism would lead to a new form of censorship. You could feel the backlash in France. A good example: Sandra Muller, who created the French MeToo movement ‘Balance ton Porc’ [T: ‘Denounce your pig’, see here for the evolution of the term ‘pig’ in this context] just lost a libel lawsuit. Action was filed by the man, whose harassing statements she made public. The level of societal discourse is not where it’s supposed to be.

I: You lead by example: There are mainly women working on your sets.

CS: It creates a different atmosphere, that is for sure. But I’ll tell you something: Women only make up 50% of the crew, my crew is probably one of the most diverse in France. Claire Mathon is my cinematographer, but a lot of men work with her. My cutter is a man though. It’s about the right balance. The film world is very much dominated by men, but I don’t want to exclude anyone.

I: In Cannes, you said something similar about your colleague Abdellatif Kechiche, who was criticised for his voyeuristic gaze on women, for example in the Palm d’Or winner ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’. Do you want a cinema, in which your and his gaze can exist side by side?

CS: We have to be conscious about our perspective. In France, I’m always asked about my female gaze, but no one is ever asking a [T: male] filmmaker about his male gaze. Which is still considered as gender neutral. Of course, you can love ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ as much as you love ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ [T: 😈], otherwise cinema will become a battlefield of ideologies. We just have to learn to read the images correctly. I would like to invite Abdellatif Kechiche to this relatively new discourse. But he should be asked the same questions as me.

I: You call ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ a manifest on the female gaze. What does that mean?

CS: It starts with the screenplay. I wanted to tell a love story on equal terms. There is no gender-specific power imbalance in the film. That was important for me, especially in a time, in which gender inequality was the social norm. There is also no intellectual dominance between Marianne and Héloïse, they both come from the upper class, are sophisticated and self-determined. Between them, they did not have to negotiate a status.

I: What role did your actresses play in this?

CS: I wrote the film for Adèle Haenel. But it only works if she has a partner who is equal to her. Noémie Merlant is about the same age as Adèle, they are even the same height, which cannot be underestimated in cinema. That’s why shorter actors often have to stand on a pedestal. All these considerations are political, but they are also an offer to the audience: for new emotions, for surprises. Equality creates freedom, because social rules are overturned.

I: As Marianne, Héloïse and Sophie keep to themselves, they are not exposed to the male gaze. They can move freely.

CS: That’s why I don’t think of my film as social utopia. Every utopia is based on our experiences and ideas. You cannot easily find this kind of solidarity among women, you have to create this freedom. That’s why I decided to exclude male characters. What I exclude from the shot also defines what is shown in the picture. That’s the power of cinema.

I: Your film is about the visibility of women. They tell each other, how they see one another – and thus create an image of themselves. At the same time, desire arises from their gazes. How do you create this feeling of intimacy?

CS: We offer a philosophy and politics of love. Even the depiction of queer sexuality in cinema is based on heterosexual paradigms. We first had to learn how to deconstruct this gaze on us. Similarly, it’s also about abolishing the outdated ideal of the muse. There is of course a hierarchy on set, but we tried to transfer the working relationships in the film to our shooting.

I: All your films have queer aspects. Do you ever had any problems to fund your films?

CS: No, but that’s because I don’t need so much money. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ did cost 4 Million Euros. If I had asked for 12 Million Euros, it might have been different. I can’t complain. I live in a country, in which I can make these kinds of films and be radical. 23 percent of French films are made by female directors.

I: It seems like there were more [T: female directors] recently?

CS: No, the figure has been constant for 20 years. We are just forgotten and then ‘rediscovered’. Think about Alice Guy-Blanché, who made films at the time of Méliès [T: around the turn of last century]. She did everything by herself, used the first closeup. She literally co-invented the cinema. But like all the women, who were active at the beginning of film history, they were driven out, when it was suddenly about money.

Still from ‘Be natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’ (Pamela B. Green, 2018)

[mulderscully]

these past two weeks have made me seriously, seriously reconsider my relationship with cop shows and b99 in particular. i also keep thinking about why it has taken me so long to reconsider.

i understand that in the large scheme of things fictional cops aren't a big issue, but as someone who has spent years engaging with the show and fandom it feels wrong for me not to think/talk about it. i need to express my feelings somewhere and i'll put it under the cut starting here.

b99 is far from my first cop show. tbh if you look at most of my favorite shows they're police shows. castle, lucifer, the x files, twin peaks, and now roswell new mexico. all of them have a cop element and most of my ships are cops/one is a cop. full honesty the police aspect used to be what drew me to tv shows. i loved the mystery and the crime solving, esp if it was mixed with the supernatural. but now i am having a hard time coming to terms with that.

when i was still a full fledged b99 stan one argument i used to make was that the show got the most shit out of all cop shows. as someone who was so familiar with cop shows i couldn't understand why the funny and diverse show got the most discourse. now it's all too clear.

whereas with other shows the police aspect is secondary, b99 is pretty much ONLY about the police. on my other shows the police play a part to tell a larger story that obviously is not in our world. i mean, we don't have the actual devil or aliens running around. no one is trapped in the black lodge. that doesn't make it okay, but it makes the police part less important. it's just... there (and it should not be.)

even if b99 is an alternative universe where good cops exist it's still a world strickingly like our own, no?

b99 gets the most shit because while it TELLS us the squad is different it still a lot of times shows us the opposite but it flies under our radar because it's so funny and diverse.

let's take rosa. she's latina. she's bi. we love her. but she is also canonically and explicitly violent. she genuinely loves police brutality.

let's take jake. he's goofy. he's a feminist. we love him. he also deported a man for charles. he totes how much he loves guns. he actively tries to pin crimes on doug judy even if he can't prove it.

let's look at scully and hitchcock. they literally sexuality harass every woman on the show.

ray holt is one of my favorite characters of all time. i adore him. but he still plays a large part in the "not all cops" conversation. he is the prime example of a "good cop." frankly, i think holt is the only thing that can still save the show as it undoubtedly comes to an end next season. wouldn't it be ideal for him to resign after years and years of trying to fix the nypd to no avail? all it's done is get him demoted over and over again.

this is all just scratching the surface of the issue but as much as fans try and try to deny that the show is police propaganda the more it is. the reason the show keeps being mentioned is because people cannot separate the show from reality as much as they claim to. to fully laugh at b99 you have to put aside the atrocity of the real police force and not think about it. but WE HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT. because we can laugh at jake we soften ourselves to real cops.

for me personally i can't see myself going back to the show now. it feels wrong. and i am still processing how to feel about all my other shows as well, but b99 is the one i most adamantly defended and i feel guilt for doing so.

it absolutely IS copaganda - and it worked on me. i hope there is further discussion coming from dan goor and the cast in the coming months and i hope that every fictional cop resigns. i hope that even if it will take us a while to abolish the police in real life we can start in fiction sooner than later. fictional characters bend at our will and DO influence real life, be it positive or negative. we don't need fictional cops that spread the "not all cops" narrative that so many people truly believe. the system is rotten, we have to throw it away.

[whitehotharlots]

So we’re just gonna straight up embrace conservatism?

A few months ago I came across the story of a group of young trans activists who wrecked up the opening of a feminist library in British Columbia. To avoid accusations of taking sides or whatever, here’s what the feminists had to say about it, and here’s what the trans activist kids had to say about it. (Direct link: https://www.facebook.com/notes/gag-gays-against-gentrification/response-to-vancouver-womens-library/379623995740078 )

Both sides agreed that the activists physically disrupted the opening of what was purported to be a feminist space, caused several hundred dollars worth of property damage, threatened physical violence against the library’s proprietors, and demanded that a dozen or so books be removed from the shelves.

I decided not to write about this. Firstly, because engaging with trans discourse in any way other than nodding politely guarantees you will be accused of Literal Murder, and I just don’t want to mess with that. More importantly, I felt I couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t amount to a simple, maybe even pedantic observation: namely, it’s kinda weird how we’ve begun to fear subjectively perceived, metaphorical “violence” so intensely that we’re willing to accept literal, physical violence as a response to it. It’s easy to make fun of people who say that using gendered pronouns is a direct cause of murder or whatever, but these people aren’t just obscure cranks anymore--they control the discourse; we’re living in the world they’ve built. 

Here’s a sample of what I tried to write:

Here, in the interest of objectivity, it’s traditional for a writer to point out the tremendous amount of danger faced by those trans people who committed violent acts against the cis feminists and have demanded that the cis feminists radically alter their own space. A writer should re-cite the oft-cited statistic that over twenty trans people were murdered in 2015--and that, no doubt, at least half of them were beaten to death with a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography. And I don’t mean to be facetious: should a trans activist suggest that these books were being wielded as literal, physical weapons, there might at least be a smidgen of logic behind their demands. But such a connection, however tenuous, is never proffered. We are left instead with a vague implication by association: the trans activists understandably don’t like trans people being murdered and they also don’t like books they assume question the essentialist foundation of their self-understanding, therefore a responsible author will make sure to establish a sense that the former is indeed caused by the latter. Or, if it’s not a case of actual causation--since obviously it’s not and no one would ever be so daft as to suggest that it is--at the very least we should respect the trans activists’ sensitivities toward literature they find upsetting, seeing as they’re acting out of a sense of extreme fear that they at least believe to be justified. Criticizing them at lashing out would be like getting mad a cornered raccoon for showing its teeth.

Just… can you believe this? Honestly? Here, very real violence and property damage is excused simply by putting in the context of the emotional state of those who committed it. Can you imagine any parallel situation taking place in contemporary America? A black man would have a much more solid case in going down to his local police station and wrecking up the place. Police violence against black people is an actual, direct, and literal thing--no flimsy metaphors are required to explain it. If such a thing were to happen, however, the black guy would be killed or imprisoned and his actions would be condemned in all but the most radical of spaces (try to find a mainstream publication that supported Chris Dorner. You can’t). Or more on point: let’s say a group of radical zionists entered a store the specializes in classical music, so at to disrupt a talk about Wagner. They post threats on social media. They wreck merchandise. They tear down posters, shove some elderly classical enthusiasts, cause several hundred dollars worth of damage, and leave a manifesto demanding that certain naughty works be banned. Again: they’d most likely be arrested. They would find no defense within the mainstream press. Their sense of victimhood would certainly not be used as justification for their actions, and no serious person would yield to their demands that certain works of music be banned from stores.

So… yeah. I was having trouble not sounding dismissive. But since then other shit has gone down, and it’s dawned on me that this tendency to prize the metaphorical over the literal isn’t new. It’s very old. It is, simply put, the general grounding of the American conservative worldview. It just happens to be coming from woke people now. 

For an example, take a look at a piece about trans activists vandalizing a rape crisis center with death threats. The vandalism was, of course, denounced on all sides. But check out the phrasing here: 

Trans people face employment and housing barriers, Jenkins said, and the graffiti could be a product of a trans person’s pent up frustration. Vancouver Rape Relief, she said, is a visible organization at which to point a finger.

“A lot of the actions of Vancouver Rape Relief through exclusion of trans women I think are symbolic of society’s disdain for trans people generally,” she said.

“So I can understand that for someone who is having a really hard time generally, this is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the world that is treating me terribly — which is no excuse, but I can see how someone could get to that point.”

Just… fucking seriously? Again, can you imagine this kind of even handedness being afforded to any other marginalized group? The only time you see violence regarded in such an apologetic or celebratory manner is when cops and soldiers do it. 

But, oh, it gets even weirder and stupider:

More graffiti adorns the sidewalks of Commercial Dr., further east from the Vancouver Rape Relief location. In support of trans people, the message “Trans women are women” appeared on sidewalks near Grandview Park earlier this summer.

Another message reads “Lesbians unite,” coupled with a double Venus symbol. Claire Ens, president of the Vancouver Dyke March and Festival Society, said the two Venus symbols are a coded threat to trans people.

“The two Venus symbols, that may seem innocent and to some even a call for lesbian rights and women-power, but in fact it is the opposite,” she said.

Two Venus symbols, side-by-side, is a larger symbol for “biological essentialism,” she said, a belief that peoples’ identities are determined by their genitals or chromosomes, which is inherently discriminatory to trans people who may have genitals that don’t match outdated ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman.

“The Venus symbols are meant as a warning sign to trans women, to state that trans women are not included nor welcomed, and is a perfect example of ... ‘dog whistling’ (because it is) innocent to those who aren’t in the know about it (but) harmful and hateful specifically to trans women,” she said.

Oh... oh dear. 

I’m reminded of the time when I was in 8th grade and my best friend did some weird art project where he put an arrow through a George Jetson doll he won at the carnival and painted the wound with a red marker. His mom found the doll. She spoke with her evangelical busybody cunt friends at work, who informed her that the “ritualistic sacrifice” of stuffed animals was a surefire sign that the boy had been brainwashed by Satanists. She then had him involuntarily committed. A state official determined him to to be depressed but not under any demonic influence, and so he was released under the condition that he start going to cut-rate therapy, where yet another evangelical busybody cunt informed him that the doll was, in fact, a sign that at least one satan lived within him (possibly several) and advised his mother to throw out all of his cds and videogames and keep him under constant watch. Oddly, this did not help with my friends’ depression. Made it a lot worse, in fact. Kicked off about a decade of severe substance abuse. But that’s neither here nor there--the point is, he did something objectively harmless that a bunch of hateful conservatives found offensive, and demonizing and bullying him was a small price to pay to get him to stop doing said harmless-but-offensive things. He might not have meant the plush art project to be a sign of aggression. A dispassionate observer would most likely not regard it as such. But the subjective, spiritual harm suffered by his mother engendered a violent reaction, and the cruelly conservative social structures of our community prized her perceived victimhood over any actual harms, and so they therefore encouraged her to damage the boy so as to make herself feel more safe. Nobody wins. Everyone was worse off. But the woman got some momentary catharsis, and that’s what was important.

Uhh… shit. I was gonna try to connect this to something else, but I think maybe I made my point. If you don’t agree with me yet, you’re never going to. But just remember, pedantic as this argument may be, there’s a reason censorship has historically resided in the conservative purview. There’s also a reason why it used to be considered virtuous, in liberal spaces, to not regard your own tastes and pet peeves as moral issues that warranted vicious remediation. Conservatives are conservatives, regardless of their color of their skin, the people they like to fuck, or whether or not they regard themselves to embody the gender they were asigned at birth. Cruelty is likewise always cruel. A cunt is a cunt. And there’s nothing to be gained by denying these basic truths.

[hecohansen31]

Gurl if you got more ideas for them please dish! Lol that's my request, just more of that, whatever your ideas are for them lol

(A/N): Hello sweetie!

I know that I have already started a story about those two, but hey… I literally wrote this supernatural AU (although I don’t know if this could be properly called AU, since Roman is already a supernatural being) a few months ago and it was supposed to be about an OC insert (so if you see Heco, sorry it’s reader) and it was supposed to be actually MichaelxReaderXIvar… but I feel like Roman is just more fitting, so…

I really hope that you’ll enjoy it and if you like this verse please let me know because I literally finished the first chapter of the other fanfic I was working on so I will be working on the smutty continue of this…

Thank you, again for your support lovelY!

(Also I am tagging @walkxthexmoon, since she expressed her love for it, if you want to be tagged into something else… let me know!).

Also, since it is implied but not explained: Ivar is a werewolf, whereas Roman is a vampire (actually a “upir” but both Ivar and Reader tease him calling him “vampire” so I am here doing the same thing!).

WARNINGS: Bad Friends (I literally have to say that each time I am wirting about shitty friends I am like “No, my friends are not like this”, and then they make something… and I am like “this is karma for being assholes), Bitchy Reader, Heavy Flirting and Mentions of Sex and Threesomes.

She couldn’t help but feel a bit betrayed when her friends had sent her into that demonic village, as a birthday gift.

She was almost wondering if they hated her that much

(Was it the fact that she was more successful than them, or the fact that she was the only single one of the group, ruining with her mere presence the life of all its components…).

Because there was no way that journey was a vacation, it was absolutely a punishment of some kind, starting from the fact that her freaking car had stopped working an hour before arriving to the hotel, on a full bus, with her heavy luggage.

She was supposed to spend a weekend as a single lady with her newly broken-up best friend, except…

Except her ex-boyfriend appeared a few days ago, proposing to her and basically blowing off her plans.

If you could call “plans” something which had been thrown on your way.

She still regretted all the books she might have received, instead of being sent in this shithole.

She didn’t mean to judge a book from the cover, or better by the shitty phone reception, and the shitty appearance of the hotel where she was staying for two nights and three days and the shitty shops.

She hoped she might find some kind of bookshop… because that’s where she hoped to spend the days… although there were a lot of bar and liquor shops, maybe people liked to get drunk enough to forget about this shithole.

No, she wouldn’t be judging, not even as it started raining just when she stepped off the bus and reached hurryingly the hotel, almost slamming herself on the closed door, that thank God gave out under a little pressure, allowing her inside and in the warmth of the hall, for which she was thankful.

She spent a few minutes trying to recollect herself and thanking whatever make-up goddess, she hadn’t worn any, alongside collecting from her bag the vacation’s document and her wallet.

She approached the receptionist, a man, bigger than her of a few good inches, and turned around fixing some documents, till she coughed, more because of the cold she had been in than anything else, gaining his attention, or better a very pissed glare.

She almost though about fleeing the scene and checking the buses station, but the glare dissipated as soon as he took her in: she was sure she looked a mess enough to pray for his pity.

-Well… it is raining outside, isn’t it? – he mused almost shyly, immediately leaning on the table of the reception hall, almost as if to be closer to her, making her squeak lightly and in response her social anxiety kicked in, making her shove her folder with the payments and bookings in his face.

He smiled, with his shining blue eyes, taking (very gently for a man of his stature) the documents and setting down his eyes on them, and she almost whined to be robbed of those two spots of ocean, but she tried again just to readjust her appearance, wanting to seem calm and at ease, although she hated doing anything that remotely made her have contact with strangers.

-(Y/N) (L/N)? – he asked and she had to stop herself from saluting him as a freaking soldier, but the voice raspy and rough made him seem like someone who wanted everyone to stand at attention when he spoke to them, so she tried her best, although staring right into the ocean was a bit scary -… but I don’t see any Annie Howin, are you waiting for her? -.

Here came the hard part: explaining her friend had balled out of this “magical adventure” and if she could use a single room, instead of a double…

-… nope…- she almost wanted to slap herself for the childish expression, but the guy looked at her wolfish, clearly amused by the way she had rolled the word, which made her blush (wasn’t it too warm here? Or was she just burning from embarrassment?) -… you see… we were supposed to spend a weekend as singles…-

-You are,,, single?- he seemed  almost surprised by the way she said it, but she tried not to mind the comment too much, spitting out the discourse she had rehearsed for two days.

-… but her ex-boyfriend came back in town and… he proposed…-

-… and she accepted? – he commented as if they were in some kind of cheap telenovela, bringing a smile on her lips, while his own mimicked it in a smirk, a very sensual smirk (part of her thought it was the one lovers offered when they were teasing the other, as if humoring them but also trying to get them out of the shyness shell).

-Yep- again the childish expression and again the wolf-like smirk, which honesty made her wonder if his teeth were freaking sharp or it was just an impression -… and after he cheated on her… the dude kind of sucks…-

-Well, he must have other talents- the innuendos made her start out a laugh, mostly because of the absurdity of the situation: shy little (Y/N) gossiping with a gorgeous receptionist, who seemed into her.

(Key-word: “seemed”, she was pretty sure he was just flirty by nature, with those good looks and arms that could carry her everywhere, no she wasn’t totally imagining herself clinging at them, meanwhile he whispered naughty things, before dropping her to their shared bed…).

-I don’t know, I wasn’t the one he cheated her with…- and then she went back to the straight discourse, gaining a little laugh from the receptionist -… so she is not coming… and I am all by myself…-.

She didn’t meant to appear that pathetic, but it must have seemed that way to the guy, who rose his head, as if his ears could stand at attention as a well-trained dog, before giving her a sultry look and in that moment she remembered how stuck to her body her clothing was, nothing too transparent but… she was definitely vulnerable and that guy was checking her out as a piece of meat.

But not in the “sexual harassment” way, the “I really want you in my bed” way, and she was sure she was just mistaking the signs.

She was not ugly, but not a boy magnet: she just eased the “feminist who won’t put up with your shit” attitude, and it didn’t help to have social anxiety and shyness.

-So, you are all alone in a wedding suite… that’s honestly sad…- he mumbled but he didn’t seem sad for her, he was still leaning, and although his head was at the same level of her cleavage he was being a gentleman and still staring at her eyes.

-Yep, that’s why I would like to change it to a single: wedding suite is definitely too big for me…-.

-Sorry, lovely- she almost jumped at the nickname but he just smiled at her sweetly, letting the flirty persona behind -… we can’t change, but I am sure you will find the wedding suite to your liking, it is one of our best-.

Oh, just her luck.

She must have shown her disgust on her face (not a difficult thing, since she couldn’t hide anything) because he smiled apologetically to her:

-I swear it is a lot better than it looks, and we have warm water-

-But no wi-fi- she mumbled sadly at the sign on the window.

He scratched his head nervously, nodding.

-That sucks absolutely, but you can find an amazing wi-fi connection at “Shiny Moon”, it’s a bar near here, if you want, I can accompany you later-.

She seriously was flattered by the offer, but she didn’t know this guy and although he had been a gentleman (still sending her a few glance that made her feel hot and bothered, but maybe she was imagining them) she didn’t want trouble, mostly with hunks.

-Thank you, but I am sure I will find it, also I wouldn’t want to disrupt your work- she tried to push the “don’t want to bother you” excuse and he clearly didn’t believe it, but nodded as if he was used to that rejection and she thought for a moment to tell him, that maybe he…

But a beautiful blond-haired woman appeared catching the receptionist’s attention.

-Ivar! – she shouted, the name probably written on the little thing on the man’s tight t-shirt, which she couldn’t read because her glasses were a mess.

Ivar didn’t seem happy to be called and (Y/N) honestly didn’t get why: the woman looked like she came straight from a Swedish version of “Sports Illustrated”, definitely a model, who had unluckily chosen a shitty hotel.

-The water in my room isn’t working- she didn’t acknowledge (Y/N) as soon as she stepped near the receptionist table, locking eyes with Ivar, who turned his head down, avoiding categorically her gaze, but grunting a “ok” -… it needs to be fixated immediately, so come to my room-.

The last part of the quote seemed a clear invitation and it was what made Ivar snap, turning around abruptly and sending a glare at the woman, before recognizing her presence and softening his grim grin.

She didn’t know why, probably for empathy, but she smiled straight back at her, before coughing to make the rude model acknowledge her presence and whisper, trying to appear sultry.

-Ivar was minding my case, give him five minutes and he will solve your problem…- she wanted to add “your attitude problem” but she didn’t dare, already having said much more than the model expected, from her smiling face which sent her way a venomously sweet smile, nodding.

She didn’t answer to her, just turning to Ivar again and mumbling in a languid voice.

-Be swift, I don’t think it can wait much longer-.

Ivar just nodded, eyes fixed on the desk, and raising just when (Y/N) whispered a “she is gone”.

-She is a…- he tried to mumble, clearly numbing his rage to her benefit, meanwhile she shot him a compassionate look.

-Some people should just get a kick in their beautifully shaped butt- she mumbled and laughed honestly, as if releasing all the tension, something which was truly heartwarming for her, and made her smile to him as genuinely as she could do.

-I mean I would, but I am scared it would get just stuck there…- he made her laugh brightly and for a moment she thought about how embarrassing she must have sounded: nobody liked her voice or her laugh, too high-pitched, childish and definitely creepy but he looked at her as if she had just told him she was the freaking Virgin Mary, before turning around and catching a key.

-I am supposed to photocopy your document, but since you seem pretty cold and have dealt with an assholish receptionist, I’d say you can go to your room and warm up, it should be done by now- he put the key in her hands, reaching out for the physical contact.

He could have thrown them at her, made them dangle in front of her, but he straight up waited for her to offer her hands, gently putting the keys into them, covering them with his: that freaking contact was not accidental.

But she enjoyed the warmness of his hands, smiling thankfully at him, before trying to take everything in her hands.

And just when she was going for the elevator, she felt herself being called out.

-I know you might already know, because Fredys gave it out, but I am Ivar-.

She got into the elevator and she faced him smiling brightly before offering her hands as if she could grip his.

-I am (Y/N), but I think the documents gave it away-

-… unless they are fake, (Y/N) a pretty common name…- he made her laugh so easily she forgot to push the button, thankfully somebody else called the elevator and she made it in time just to smile at him and start her phrase.

-Strangest…-

-… parents- she mumbled meanwhile she reached her number, forty-eight, she low key liked it and the place looked much nicer inside, the old style that made everything seem “vintage” although it was a step from destroying itself, which might happen with her luck.

The key actually worked and she slipped swiftly inside the room, smiling at the clean smell and the warmth of it: a shower and a change of clothes would do her good, but firstly she moved around the room to check everything was alright and was surprised to find out how luxurious it actually looked, with even a bathtub, with hydromassage and a long plump bed where you could roll around in silk sheets.

The architecture was old and there was the much hated and anti-hygienic moquette, alongside with a horrible fantasy on it but everything looked in a classy way, much better than the motel she expected to find and much more than for what she had paid for her.

The place didn’t cost too much, according to her last research but it looked like it was worth every penny, if you ignored the fact that it was in the middle of nowhere with no wi-fi.

It was perfect if you looked for the perfect place for a “Shining” replica.

She tried to focus on positive thoughts, such as the fact that she shower water was immediately warm and she was happy to sing a little meanwhile relaxing her tights muscles from carrying her luggage every freaking where.

She then blow-dried her hair with the hair-drier that was there working perfectly, meanwhile slipping in a more comfortable attire: she had mostly short dresses, since she thought she would be out partying, a few sweater and her beloved high-waisted skinny jeans but she had managed to slip some ugly leggings and an old ruined university sweater.

It was barely three p.m. but she was tired for the long journey, which should have been a very short one, but the breaking of her car didn’t help (she had thought for a moment it was a sign that she should have just gone back home); she had had to deal with the police, coming to help her.

She had thought that maybe luck would be on her side, when she saw the bus coming on her way.

Unluckily the freaking bus journey sucked, so… she was tired AF and the cheap reality show she had chosen didn’t help and she ended up falling asleep on the plush bed, mumbling something about how bitchy bridesmaids could be…

She woke up because something on her head was vibrating and scared her into thinking about a possible earthquake, but it was just her phone.

It was Annie, from whom she had missed five calls and thousands of messages.

But she was so tired, that she actually thought about not answering her back and going back to Tom Hardy’s muscled arms.

(She had dreamt for a minute about the reception boy… Ivar… but it low key felt wrong; he wouldn’t definitely be involved into the situation she was dreaming, alongside the fact that it would be low key disgraceful to see him and blush after what she had seen in her dream).

-Hey Annie… I was sleeping- she even yawned, trying to tell her friend to make it quick.

They had never really been best-friends, forever competitors in everything and at the social level it seemed Annie was winning.

-Thank God you answered! I was getting worried…- she mumbled, clearly chewing her lips, she was also probably staring at her elegant diamond ring, part of (Y/N) wanted to tell her it was as small as her boyfriend’s dick, or so the rumors said, but she had stopped herself from doing anything, she had just “awed” stupidly alongside her other friends, when Annie had shown it to them (the ring, not her boyfriend’s dick)-… did you arrive? -.

-Yeah- and she watched her watch, apparently it was late enough that she might have missed her dinner, because of her little nap and outside it was pretty dark.

She put her friend on speaker, trying to put on a decent outfit, nothing too much to go to the “Shiny Moon”, which she highly hoped wasn’t some kind of exclusive club or a strip-club, because she had no intention to stick her tired body in a skirt, so she ended up in her comfortable jeans and an even more comfortable sweater.

-… so I am still sorry, but I felt like me and Gerry had to have our space and time, after the proposal… did I tell you he took me out to the “Sinatra”…- the most expensive place in their hometown, Heco remembered how it was something Annie always wished to do, and she was low key happy her friend could cross that off the list.

-Oh, it’s beautiful! – she commented, grabbing in her hand the sheer lace of her mini-black dress, the sexiest dress she owned and definitely the one she used to go out to clubs, but she immediately put outfit down, not feeling confident enough for that look -Hope you two had fun! -.

-I hope you will, too, (Y/N), is the room nice? -she asked, quitting the chipping about everything else.

-Oh, yeah, I have a jacuzzi- she heard her friend “owww” and mumble “maybe I should have come” -… and I am going out to get wi-fi, that’s why I haven’t been answering your messages because my 3G is not working so well…-.

-Yeah, I can’t hear you well…- mumbled Annie, but this didn’t discourage her from keeping up the conversation meanwhile (Y/N) adjusted her head in a high ponytail -… so I was thinking about the maid of honor: my sister or my cousin? -.

She low key didn’t expect to be the maid of honor, but not even being considered?

They hadn’t been best friends but (Y/N) had tried to play the part, remembering her friend’s birthday and gifting her lavish gifts, consoling her when asshole Gerry had left her and helping her build her confidence.

Annie had always left (Y/N) behind, after she was alright, and (Y/N) had been ok with that, she had stopped expecting people to do something for her, but still, it stung…

And to avoid confrontation, she started making horrible sounds and stumbling on her words as if she was seriously having a shitty phone reception, hearing Annie trying to scream and give up in the end, telling her to call her when the phone reception would get better.

She threw the phone on the bed, huffing and breathing heavily before adjusting elegantly her appearance and attempt to go out.

She stalked the reception hall and found a woman instead of Ivar: a beautiful blonde woman who seriously made her wonder if everyone there was a model.

She chatted a bit, asking for directions for the “Shiny Moon”, meanwhile the woman photocopied her ID, but clearly as disinterested as Ivar had been flirty.

She thanked the woman and adjusting her light coat she moved outside.

It was November and it was definitely cold but not as cold as in some  other states: the sweater and the coat kept her warm for the ten-minutes-journey to the “Shiny Moon” a dark and grimy place.

Still from the window she saw that there were many people dressed just like her, just with their computers or chatting up.

She entered and although the main colors of the club were golden and black, in a very tacky assemble that mixed a sex-club with a diner, the atmosphere was peaceful, alongside almost empty.

She sat at the bar stool, immediately making eye contact with a pretty girl of her age.

-Hi, welcome to the “Shiny Moon”! What can I get you? – her voice was emotionless although she showed off a smart smirk.

-Whatever can get me the wi-fi password?- she asked, trying to get straight to the point and gaining a sincere smile from the girl, who took a little piece of paper and offered it to her, before asking if that was all.

-Can I get a menu if I am not too late for dinner? – she asked, feeling her stomach grumble miserably, since she had avoided lunch.

-You are lucky, the kitchen is open for another hour and in the meanwhile can I bring you some kind of drink? – she said, putting out a white notebook and offering a plastic menu.

-Oh…- she didn’t know what to say -… coca cola? -.

-With rum? – added the girl, smiling at her teasingly and making her blush.

-No, no alcohol- she liked alcohol, but only when she knew she would make a fool of himself between people who did know her, not a strange grimy place, where she knew nobody, although if they looked all like models she could make an exception -… I need to go back on my own, so…-.

-If you can wait till my turn is over, I can accompany you- offered the girl she had just met and this brightened (Y/N)’s heart, but also she didn’t understand why a stranger might offer her help, after a few minutes of knowing.

-Oh, no I don’t want to bother you- she mumbled, using again the excuse she loved, since she constantly felt like a bother for everyone, even strangers she just met in a bar.

-Oh no bother, sweetie- the girl cheered sweetly -Us girls must stick together-.

And she sent a wink her way, worsening her blush, but she was immediately distracted by a blonde ghost appearing beside her.

-What have I said about talking with clients, Destiny? We have a full night.. we have no time to…- and then she met the ghost bluish-green eyes -… well I think I can make a little time for you, doll-.

Ivar adjusted the hydraulic tools back again on their shelf, fixing his appearance.

He had managed to avoid Fredys’ advances this time, although he hadn’t minded the flirty attitude of the new guest.

It wasn’t a typically flirty, more like he was the one doing all the flirty parts and she was just batting her long eyelashes, smiling shyly and worst of all: her freaking hips…

They looked like a freaking goddess’ hips, large and he wanted to see them in his hands, meanwhile he pushed them down on the bed, reassuring her with kisses on them.

Shit, the little girlie had done just a few steps in his direction and he wanted to bed her already, something he couldn’t do, but still nothing made him avoid the pleasure of making her blush and maybe if he played his cards right he would get to feel those hips.

He had a serious problem, worse than Hvitserk and food.

Talking about Hvitserk, he was coming up the stairs just when Ivar was going down on them, swiftly.

-Oh, hello there! – saluted him cheerily his brother, meanwhile he stopped alongside Ivar -Going out? -.

-Yep, I am going out for a few shots at the “Shiny Mood”, want to come? – he proposed.

-Sadly not, me and Ubbe have clan thing to do, but maybe I can join you later…- he knew he had lost the faith of his brothers and it hurt every time they reminded him of that but he tried to rein in his anger.

-Ok, have fun at the clan meeting- he tried not to sound bitter, but he knew he had failed when Hvitserk failed to keep his own straight face.

-You know we would absolutely love for you to be here with us, but… the clan is still not trusting you…- and he patted on his younger brother’s back -… you’ll be back soon-.

-I hope- he mumbled closing the conversation, and moving down the stairs, meanwhile his brother stuck there, but got a last look from Ivar -Oh… and we have a new guest, room forty-eight, she is mine, don’t try anything funny-.

If with Ivar, the flirting was strangely comical and harmless, with the green-eyed bartender she felt dangerously exposed even in her turtleneck and her full fitting jeans.

-Just cola, so, beautiful? – she just nodded, avoiding the bartender’s gaze.

Men weren’t usually that blunt with her and not having the control made her feel definitely vulnerable.

-… Destiny you can go to deal with other clients, I got this one- he ordered to the gentle girl and (Y/N) shot her a glance as if to ask her not to leave her with the hot bartender.

But the girl just sent her a sorry glance, before moving off to the other clients.

-You are new in town- it wasn’t a question, but she still nodded again, just to feel a hand under her chin, gently raising it up so that her ink eyes could meet the bluish and greenish of the bartender, who sweetly stare into her making her feel as if she was showing him her soul.

And she was thankful he liked what he saw.

-Much better, doll, look at me in the face while we speak, you have pretty eyes and even a prettier mouth-.

-I have never been told that- she mumbled but kept her eyes up.

-Oh, what a shame- he replied, moving his hand, which was still resting on her chin, to her hair, caressing her as if she was some kind of dog, something which made her roll her eyes but also lean into the touch -… women like you need to be cherished each day-.

-Aren’t you the flatterer…- she mumbled and he laughed sensually, dropping his head and turning around, thing that made her almost drop a whine, being robbed of the beauty, but he came back immediately, with her drink, and exactly like Ivar, he handed it to her with extreme physical contact, thing that made her almost wink at him.

-Just the truth, lovely mystery lady- he replied, before dropping on his elbows so he could stare at her at the same height, making her blush and cough out her cola.

-You didn’t tell me anything about yourself also, mysterious bartender- she sassed him and it got a pretty smile and an hand offered to her.

-Roman- and she accepted it, offering her own name.

-(Y/N)-.

-Pretty strange name, (Y/N) look more like a tequila girl- he humored her making her cackle a laugh.

-I do like tequila, but I am in the middle of nowhere and I don’t want to be kicked out of my single night out-.

-Ohh… single night out…- Michael almost whistled, clearly focused more on the single part than the ladies night -We host a thousand of ladies night, but don’t they involve another friend? - .

-Didn’t I tell you I am nothing like ordinary? – she said, with a bitter smile, drinking her sorrows away in the sugary drink -My last single friend got engaged a few days before, so I am all out of single friends, that was why I was trying to talk Destiny to join my night out… you literally ruined my night-.

-Oh, did I? – and he did a thing with his tongue that made her almost faint.

-Yeah, you are obviously not a single lady- she mumbled, trying to regain the upper hand in the conversation.

-I am not a lady- he appointed -… but I am single, sweetheart-.

And the hand was back on her cheek, coaxing her nearer, till she felt somebody occupying the bar sit next to her…

-…well I am single too, so can I join the single train? -.

Shit, flirty! Ivar was back again.

Roman had had a tough night, a full night at the “Shiny Moo” and Roman had wandered off, meanwhile Destiny was chatting up clients, making others wait, and he had immediately moved to tell her to move her ass, till he saw the pretty girl she was talking to.

Clearly the type of girl who didn’t care to walk in a bar in simple clothes and she still managed to be the most stunning girl in there, and she was just wearing jeans, jeans that looked like they were painted on her perky butt, and a mickey mouse sweater, he honestly thought looked deviously innocent.

Part of her looked like she could have just come out of a fairy tale books, but the way she talked and once the shyness went away… she seemed to come out straight from an erotic novel, the well written kind.

She honestly made his night better.

Ivar, a little less.

The fact that they wanted to bring the same girl in their beds made it… interesting.

-Hello there, lovely, saw you found the “Shiny Moon”-.

The girl smiled more at ease, than with him; Ivar was a people-charmer, whereas Roman was more sensual and the girl looked like she was entirely scared by her sexuality.

So, Ivar clearly had the advantage, but Roman knew how to get everybody on their knees for him.

-… yeah, I mean I am not amazing with directions, but this place is basically in front of the hotel so…-.

-So, you are staying at the old “Kattegat”? – asked Roman, trying to get more info than Ivar, also because he was honestly mesmerized by the girl, utterly smitten and curious to know more.

-Yeah, just for the weekend- and then she moved her little chin to Ivar, smiling slightly and asking -Oh by the way the room is beautiful-.

Ivar looked like a puppy who got a treat after the compliment he had received, nodding immediately meanwhile he mumbled lowly a few words.

-… that place might seem a terrible on the outside, but believe me, it’s very much worse inside, alongside the fact that his owners are all assholes- replied Roman, wanting her eyes back on him and getting them, alongside a shocked expression and a grunt from Ivar, which was immediately suppressed by something that said “do you want war? I will bring it to you”.

-People only come here for the free wi-fi- replied swiftly the other man, sparking a little fight.

And immediately (Y/N) came between those two, touching Ivar’s chest.

-Woah woah… your places are equally broken on the outside, but they are prettier on the inside, and yeah the wi-fi bonus is amazing- she laughed lightly, but her intention was clear: she wanted no riot or brawl in there, cocking an eyebrow at Roman, in a little show of dominance.

He, instead, licked his lips, a little aroused by a girl that could handle two extremely territorial males, without and ounce of fear; Ivar was thinking the same, looking at the hand on his chest with wide eyes.

-You are definitely all over men’s bullshit- mumbled attentively Roman, making her drop her hand from Ivar, who looked a few minutes from crying for the loss.

-Oh, all over every person’s bullshit, but you men are just the absolute worst- she laughed timidly, before downing again her drink, as she tried to avoid thinking about the two men looking at her smugly and intensively.

“Well you are lucky, we are not men, sweetie” that’s what he wanted to tell her, but seeing through all  the confidence she was faking, that she was pretty shy, it wasn’t the time to tell her they were supernatural beings.

Although she seemed smart to figure that out on her own.

-… men disappointed you, lovely? – Ivar asked, tried to sound compassionate, meanwhile he adjusted himself on the stool, probably because of his legs bothering him.

-It’s just…-.

-Are you a lesbian? – asked again Ivar and Roman sent him a death glare, knowing perfectly from the adorable blush she was wearing that they had just burned a chance to talk with her.

-No, I mean girls are beautiful, but not interested into them, although maybe I should, men are…-.

-… the worst- mumbled Roman, sending a straight up glare at Ivar, as if to let the sweetheart know that he was indeed “the worst”.

Ivar clearly looked embarrassed by the way she mumbled back, and moved near to get her attention, offering and half-hearted apology, helped by his sweet and dramatic blue eyes.

-Sorry, didn’t mean…-.

-Don’t worry- she mumbled leaning towards him -… a lot of people assumed it the same: no dates, no guys out of my house and I frighten every boy who comes my way-.

She tried to laugh it off but Roman could find how much it actually pained her: the loneliness and the sadness made her feel as if she was not enough.

But she was so so much more than enough and sweet, and she had already two men courting her.

-They were all boys to be frightened by such a pretty and powerful girl- replied Ivar, immediately gaining points by the pretty compliments, she leaned back into him, not enough to touch but… Ivar helped the contact by putting a hand over her shoulders, making her blush even more and sending Roman a winning smirk.

But he hadn’t lost.

-So, pretty girlie, do you have any plans for this weekend? – he asked, taking away the attention from Ivar and leaning forward, thing that was made by (Y/N) herself.

-Just to relax and do anything else-.

-Never thought about a threesome? – and the look of shock was enough to be a win for him.

Ivar seriously couldn’t be the prouder guy in the entire bar with the prettiest girl in town under his arm, smiling sweetly and with red shadows on her cheeks he wanted to kiss and maybe he would get to if he accompanied her back to the room.

Also, it was a little win over Roman, who instead of him, just needed to look at a girl to have her in her bed, and he also had had another little advantaged over him.

But he ruined anything as soon as Roman spit out the “threesome” proposition; it wasn’t rare for them to share a girl, mostly because of Ivar’s “little problem”, but this girl so sweet and pure… he felt like the sharing option was crazy.

She looked shell shocked in her expression of true shock, even worse than the one that she had on her face after his “embarrassing question”, but she almost laughed out, probably expecting it all to be a little joke.

Michael looked at her like a cat with a mouse, clearly trying to stay serious, although he laughed it off as if it was joke before going back to being serious.

-But seriously sweetie… if you want to do something more than just relax, we are more than willing to help you with a little fun-.

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

“I do see exclusion as an inherently bad thing, yes, and nothing will change my mind on that. Simply because women are not a monolith, and being born with a vagina does not mean we all share the same experiences of how being female relates to the world. I believe in intersectional feminism, and that transwomen are very much a part of that.” And this is the core thing, isn’t it. I actually held this same opinion until a couple of years ago. I started seeing a certain kind of rhetoric from trans activists online - some of whom, upon reflection, probably represent an extreme view that shouldn’t be taken too seriously - that had me doing double takes and started changing my mind. I’ll back up and try to explain how my mind changed and why I struggle with this topic. I agree with you that women are not a monolith and that women in general have different experiences. I also agree that being born with a vagina does not mean we all share the same experiences of how being female relates to the world, but I disagree with what that implies and how you’ve interpreted that - those different experiences are because of the different cultural takes on what that vagina means. The presence of the vagina is inherent and necessary. The fundamental principle of feminism that I grew up with is that the category of woman is given to people with the female reproductive system, and that category was seen and treated as inferior for no good reason in all cultures. What ‘woman’ actually is (gender roles, gender expectations, treatment by wider society etc ie “gender”) is culturally malleable and constructed and varies slightly from place to place; the universal consistency is that this category is placed upon people born with the female sex (distinct from gender) in order to control and oppress them. Like, it’s key to feminism that the sex provokes the ‘woman’ category, and females are socialised into the ‘woman’ role. The oppression women face isn’t due to a demonstrable lack of intelligence or capability or physiology, it’s because someone looked at our genitals as babies and went 'okay, this is what we call and how we treat people with this biology.’ So that’s my understanding. Women are historically oppressed due to abitrary negative stereotypes placed on them because of their biological sex. How that oppression manifests is different according to culture, geography, ethnicity, religion. Where intersectionality comes into it, for me, is acknowledging all those differences in experiences and including them in feminist progress in dismantling these stereotypes and the unequal treatment and discrimination resulting from them. (some) Trans women state that they are women because they essentially 'feel like it’. They claim an internal sense of 'womanhood’ and this means they are women. When I saw this I was like “:/ okaaay, but how do you measure that, what does that actually mean.” This internal sense seems to be explained in terms like “I preferred pink and playing with dolls as a child, and I always got along better with girls, I preferred doing girly things.” This is more of a call on gender stereotypes than a satisfactory explanation - identification with the performance of the arbitrary, cultural construction of gender, something which changes over time and with which many (cis) women do not identify (yet are still discriminated against - their feelings don’t matter to people who look at them and treat them differently). They have this idea of womanhood and identify with that. I know trans people say that cis people don’t understand that internal sense of 'manhood’ and 'womanhood’ because in them it’s all aligned with their sex - I disagree. If there’s this strong of an internal sense of being a woman or being a man, surely a reasonable proportion of all women and men would report experiencing it. Again, I’m falling prone to the anecdote thing, but in my case, I don’t 'feel’ like a woman. I’m a person in a meatsack who is treated unfairly because of stupid ideas about the meatsack that have nothing to do with my qualities as a person. My female and male friends report the same kind of feeling. If I woke up tomorrow in a male body, I’d probably miss some things about my female body, but I’d be able to go through life in a male body without too much concern. I would then be a man and not a woman, despite my previous few decades in a female body; the concept is a nothing concept so it doesn’t matter. I am open to the idea that people have an innate sense of womanhood or manhood, but it’s so subjective it’s not very useful as a key identification measure for a political group. This is a very different definition of 'woman’ and to me, it completely undermines the key principle underlying feminist discourse. What is also confusing to me is that the transgender community seems roughly split into two groups - those, like above, who *feel* aligned with the opposite sex; and those who say there is a physical miswiring somewhere that causes a mismatch between their internal sense of themselves and their sex, this is a medical condition called gender dysphoria, and the best treatment is transition. Ie you’re trans if you think you are, you’re a woman if you think you are, and you’re a man if you think you are, versus you are trans if you have gender dysphoria, you think you are a woman but biologically you’re a man and you can’t expect to be treated as a woman (or a man) until you physically transition, which will ease your dysphoria. These are two quite different experiences underpinning the definition of transgender. To me, all this confusion over what it even means to be transgender doesn’t represent a cohesive front or group to meaningfully discuss this stuff with. The big thing that got me criticising the issue of inclusion of trans woman is the above realisation, that that definition undermines the ideological foundation of feminism that has brought so much progress to women. It’s an ideological difference that’s fundamental. Other things that bolstered it was accompanying rhetoric I saw online. - eg it’s transphobic/exclusive to discuss things like uteruses (uteri?), menstruation, FGM in feminist spaces, if you do it, you’re a bigot. That doesn’t feel like progress to me, to tell women they can’t discuss the bodily stuff that is the basis of their oppression, and still is for girls and women around the world, in the context of their experiences as women and as people in the world. It feels like misogyny by another name. - eg it’s transphobic to have genital preferences. I think this is a horrible thing to say. Some people do not care what genitals are involved in the sex they’re having, that is fine. Some people do, and that is also fine. Dating and who you have sex with is inherently exclusionary - not everyone is attracted to every person in their identified pool - and it involves bodies, it involves hardwired preferences, and these things can’t be changed if you just think about it really really hard. 'Preferences’ is not a good word for the concept, it implies a choice that I don’t think is there. I really don’t think people choose what they’re attracted to and what turns them on in sex. Examining your sexual self to understand how you operate and what you like and don’t like is an excellent thing to do. I also agree that trans people find it hard to date people. But calling people transphobic - especially lesbians, this seems to happen more with lesbians and trans women than gay men and trans men - because of something innate is just shitty behaviour. I was really disgusted by this. No one is owed sex. - eg there are no real differences between trans women and cis women. Any differences noted in discourse are a result of the person stating them being transphobic. A person who says they’re a woman has female biology because of this statement. This is an attitude I see a lot - any criticism of things like the above, any reference to any differences between trans woman and cis women, and suddenly you’re a bigot, a terf, a transphobic asshole, wrongthink in action! This worries me. Because there ARE differences, and shouting them down is not the way to bring people to your way of thinking. - eg gender dysphoric children should be encouraged to transition or go on puberty blockers. There’s a study out there that states something like 70-90% of gender dysphoric children desist by the end of puberty. Telling them they’re trans and putting them on drugs is not the right way to treat these kids, sensitive and appropriate counselling is. This in particular really worries me. - eg detransitioners exist and have a lot to say, but because it’s critical of transgenderism, they’re ignored. This rubs me the wrong way - they have insight into the interplay between self-understanding, sex, gender and culture, that’s valuable to general understanding of the self, sex, gender, and culture. I could go on, but this is so long. So I was originally supportive - I really was. I’m now more critical, because I don’t see a clear cohesive movement that is, ironically, inclusive, or that supports feminist issues, I’m seeing something that aggressively undermines the one movement that has truly progressed women’s rights. It strikes me that women and feminists are arguing about this more than men are, that men aren’t saying 'trans men are men’ in the same way women are expected to say 'trans women are women’. That also says something to me about the overall issue, and it’s not a good thing. It’s entirely possible that I’m hanging out in the trans part of the internet that has the assholes in it. Every group has its assholes. I also acknowledge that radical feminist groups have their hateful assholes too - but the reason I went into radical feminist spaces was to see what those evil terfs are saying and why they’re so bad, and I didn’t find evil, I found them addressing the concerns I had. They’re talking about the above things, whereas in the supposedly inclusive spaces with trans people, those topics weren’t allowed to be discussed. But I haven’t seen many answers to some of the problems trans people face - violence and discrimination in employment and housing is a real thing, and that does need to be addressed. By feminists? I’m not sure. Trans people are more than capable of organising in their self-interests - if they could find a common ground and common interests. I do think trans women face violence in male spaces and can be accommodated in female spaces - within reason. The case of Karen White in the UK is a good example of how that’s not a good rule of thumb. There’s also a domestic violence shelter in Canada that’s being sued by the women who were in it for allowing a trans woman inside, because the trans women acted in a very predatory way that caused the women distress in a place where they expected safety. I also know of one trans woman in Vancouver who tried to have a rape crisis shelter defunded because it didn’t support sex workers - that’s a valid criticism, but defunding it isn’t the action I would hope to see from any woman; it’s pointedly aggressive coming from a trans woman. For me, I do wonder whether people such as yourself are seeing the same stuff I’m seeing. I guess not. I find it very difficult to go back to the whole 'oh yeah, trans women are women and share our oppression’ stance, because I just don’t see that in evidence. In our conversation I notice that we’ve got a really fundamental difference in how we interpret and approach the world, for example the exclusion thing. Perhaps it’s too fundamental a difference and we won’t find much to agree on. I don’t know if you’ll take the time to respond to this, because it’s so long, but if you could articulate why this inclusion makes sense to you, I would actually really appreciate it. If not, that’s fine, we’re both busy people. Thanks for reading anyway, and thanks again for the conversation and for engaging with me. I *am* sorry about the length :S

DW: 

For me, it’s not a matter of “transwomen are women and share our oppression.” 

It’s a matter of “transwomen are women and are oppressed because they are transwomen.” 

Their oppression might not be exactly the same as mine, but neither is the oppression of a 12 year old child bride on the other side of the world. 

Simply put, it intersectional feminism can make room for all the different types of experiences of women–cultural, and economic, and religious, and social, and geographical–then why not widen the umbrella to include transwomen? 

There’s also a domestic violence shelter in Canada that’s being sued by the women who were in it for allowing a trans woman inside, because the trans women acted in a very predatory way that caused the women distress in a place where they expected safety. I also know of one trans woman in Vancouver who tried to have a rape crisis shelter defunded because it didn’t support sex workers - that’s a valid criticism, but defunding it isn’t the action I would hope to see from any woman; it’s pointedly aggressive coming from a trans woman.

There will always be anecdotes, and there will always be assholes, but judging all transwomen by the actions of a few is not helpful to anyone. 

When it comes to women’s shelters, there are plenty of shelters who don’t allow boys to stay, forcing families out onto the streets in cases of domestic violence because a mother doesn’t want to be separated from her son–who is a child. I think that’s unfair and wrong, but I’m not going to claim from that that all feminists are anti-child. 

I’ve taken calls from women’s shelters before where women were being threatened by other women and the workers were requesting the police. The women there also had an expectation of safety, but gender doesn’t come into it, and the implication that the transwoman was predatory because she is trans is drawing a very long bow.   

In the case of the Vancouver rape crisis shelter, why aren’t sex workers supported? That seems discriminatory. Also, why it is more “pointedly aggressive” coming from a transwoman than from anyone else? Given that transwomen are over-represented in sex work, why wouldn’t a transwoman have every right to want to fight this?

And you can bring up Karen White if you like. And I can counter with articles about transwomen who have been raped in male prisons, which I hope you would agree is just as heinous. 

In the end, nothing is going to change my mind on this. I think that being a woman is more complicated than a biological function, and I think that transwomen, while not oppressed in the same way as ciswoman, still face oppression because of their gender. And I think that there is plenty of room to be inclusive. 

[balioc]

Once upon a time, @slatestarscratchpad talked about “Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory.”  His particular take on this idea always struck me as a bit odd, for reasons largely having to do with its being super-focused rhetorically on one particular issue suite (distributive macroeconomics). Regardless, the dichotomy is a helpful thing to have available in your philosophical toolkit. 

For general-purpose use, I’d suggest a refinement: replace “mistake theory” with, uh, let’s say “solution theory.”  There are, roughly speaking, two analytical lenses you can use to examine a given debate.  You can say “people are trying to figure out the Overall Best Solution [by whatever criteria], and their arguments represent either empirical disagreements-of-fact or genuine disagreements over the values that determine the Best Solution.”  Or you can say “people are trying to advance their own interests against the conflicting interests of other people, they have formed alliances and coalitions in order to do this more effectively, and their arguments should essentially be understood as gambits and rationalizations within a power struggle.” 

Each of these lenses is obviously going to be helpful sometimes, depending on the circumstances.  Some people have a natural proclivity towards one, some towards the other, etc.  We all know how useful conceptual dichotomies work.

OK.  All that said, let’s talk for a minute about the kind of collective-grievance-driven identity politics that have taken over mainstream culture for the past five years. 

If you want to understand how these arguments are working for the people making them, and why they have the particular effects that they have, I think it’s very helpful to try looking at them through a conflict-theory lens. 

Which is to say:

Identitarians make claims like “members of the Oppressor Class act in ways X and Y and Z, it totally sucks and makes us miserable, the world is so unfair, justice must be done.”  And a lot of people -- in particular, a lot of the sort of people who Take Arguments Seriously -- read this as having its obvious surface meaning, which is something like “the current ruleset is bad for us, we should change to a different social equilibrium where a different ruleset is enforced, a new Overall Best Solution is hereby proposed.”  In the saddest cases, this leads to bewildered nerds screaming, “PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO!  I DON’T WANT TO BE A SEXIST CREEP / RACIST IMPERIALIST ASSHOLE / WHATEVER-IT-IS!  I’LL DO ANYTHING!  JUST LIST THE RULES I HAVE TO FOLLOW THAT WILL MAKE IT ALL OK!” 

Which of course never works even a little, which breeds a lot of resentment.  It especially breeds resentment because there doesn’t particularly seem to be a correlation between “people who make the identitarians mad” and “people who counteract the identitarians’ stated desires.”  (As has been pointed out time and again, many of the most-admired men in feminist circles are pretty traditionally masculine, in exactly the ways that come up in discussions of “toxicity.”  Visibly trying hard to avoid Doing A Racism will at best make you a punchline and at worst get you hit with serious accusations of actual racism, whereas people who breeze right through the stated norms with a cheeky grin often get away with it.  Etc. etc.) 

But -- as @bambamramfan has recently noted, correctly -- it’s dangerous, and wrong, to read that lack-of-correlation as an anti-correlation.  It’s not like the confident jocular straight white cis asshole is safe from potentially getting slammed by the wrathful end of identity politics.  He’s just as vulnerable as anyone else, probably more so, the moment anyone gets upset enough with him to make an actual move. 

The only real difference is that, because he’s a confident jocular asshole and therefore conventionally-likeable, he’s not making people upset quite as easily. 

This bizarre circle can be squared, and the facts of the world accounted for more cleanly, if you drop some of your discursive charity and put on your conflict-theorist goggles.  All those arguments about oppression, all those claims about what exactly the Oppressor Classes are doing in order to make the world horrible for the Oppressed Classes, are...beside the point.  I’m not even commenting on whether they’re right or wrong, I’m saying it often doesn’t matter, because the people making them often don’t really care except insofar as they can win points by convincing people through logic or sympathy. 

The actual “claim” underlying it all is something like: In conflicts between Oppressed People and Oppressor People, the Oppressed People should get to win more often and more easily.  The very-generalized justification is something like, “life is overall very unfair to Oppressed People and therefore they should get to win more.”  And there’s a real argument that the very-generalized justification is true, at least to some extent. 

(...but of course it’s impossible to separate “I believe I should get a handicap because life is genuinely unfair to me” from “I believe I should get a handicap because, well, I’m a human being with cognitive biases and therefore it seems intuitively obvious that life is unfair to me.”  At some point the justification stops working, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that that’s the point where it will stop being employed.) 

Anyway.  Most of the time you can’t just say “I should get a ‘Win an Arbitrary  Fight Free’ card,” because that doesn’t play well, everyone knows that justice doesn’t work that way.  You have to say “I am being wronged in these specific ways and the following changes would make it better.”  But of course the changes mostly won’t make it better.  If that were the actual effective medicine, then people who sedulously followed the alleged rules would be rewarded for it.  The actual effective medicine is -- 

“ -- I get that job/promotion/award I want so desperately, instead of one of the other people who might get it, many of whom are white/male/straight/whatever.”

“ -- when my boyfriend and I break up messily, everyone agrees that he is worthless slime and I am a Very Tragic Heroine.”

“ -- when some hopeless loser displays too much interest in me, I can extract myself from the situation cleanly without having to feel mean and without having to put in too much effort.” 

“ -- when I get into an argument at a party, everyone will know that I am very wise and enlightened and that my interlocutor is a hopeless bigot.” 

Or, in other words, “I should get some number of ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ cards.”  That is what conflict theory looks like, on the social micro-level.  That is claiming your share of the spoils, not because you can somehow prove before God that you deserve them, but because you’re going to stand up for yourself and your own and it’s not like those assholes in the other tribe deserve them any more than you do.  Don’t you get the short end of the stick way too much already?  Isn’t life just one long testament to that? 

This is actually really bad.

I realize that, by putting it solution-theory-versus-conflict-theory terms, I’m kind of implying “this is just how the world operates at a fundamental level and we should wise up to it” -- but, no, it’s a cultural disease, and we’re already infected, and finding the right antibiotics is critical.  It probably is “just how the world operates at a fundamental level” for a sufficiently narrow understanding of “the world” (globalized, atomized, multicultural)...and yet we used to be holding it at bay almost completely, and right now we’re definitely not.

It’s really bad, in part, because it poisons the well of discourse.  If your opponents don’t mean the things they say, if they’re just trying to rack up enough sympathy to get another ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ card, eventually you’re going to notice and stop paying attention to their arguments; and then, on the occasions when they’re actually right and you’re wrong, everyone is screwed.  Debate is important if we want to fix the problems.  That means we have to be able to have it, for real. 

But even more so, it’s really bad because there’s no obvious place for it to stop once it starts.  This is how group grievance politics work generally; this is why Lee Kuan Yew sold his soul to the devil to ensure that Singapore would not divide politically into the obvious ethnic factions.  The goal is peace and harmony and stability, but individuals are always going to feel aggrieved in ways that can be theoretically traced back to group membership, and we’re not going to find a [viable][compromise] equilibrium so long as people think it makes sense to keep pushing for more spoils.  Which in the end is equivalent to total war.  

So...solutions?  What does the antibiotic look like?

Shit, man, I don’t know.  If I did, I’d be out saving the world, not writing this Tumblr post. 

The best I can give you is: don’t let yourself get sucked into this game.  Don’t honor anyone’s claim to a ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free” card, and don’t ever think that you yourself deserve one.  If someone proposes a new social rule, follow it or don’t as your conscience dictates, but don’t imagine that doing so will actually mollify anyone.  Try to evaluate right and wrong by the standards of the actual rules/principles/virtues/whatever that you espouse, not by simple demographic heuristics.

And if you’re reading this, you probably didn’t need me to tell you any of that.  So great.

It’s worth putting in an addendum to say:

At this moment, as it happens, the cultural left has the particular kind of dominance that allows it to play identity politics and actually accomplish things sometimes.  But it’s not as though the right hasn’t been positively eager to play the exact same horrible games when the constellations align differently...or as though the slimier parts of the right aren’t trying to play the exact same horrible games right now. 

[facesofcsl]

Sheena W., Instructor

Sheena Wilson is a CSL instructor who is passionate about getting her students involved with the community. Read more about her courses and involvement with CSL.

Could you please introduce yourself and your relationship with CSL?

My name is Sheena Wilson, I started teaching at the University of Alberta in 1999. I have been teaching at Campus St. Jean (CSJ) and my background is in film, media and literature.  I study how human rights abuses get represented over time, and how they get represented differently over time as communities take back their narratives. My work always has to do with women’s issues, and social justice issues. About 15 years ago I started getting interested in oil sands because I am from Alberta. Now a lot of my courses are based around writing and communication classes, media studies. So we study the way these narratives get mobilized, and the practical and theoretical implications.

What courses do you teach with CSL?

Last semester I taught three classes. Two Anglais (ANGL) 126 courses, and ANGL 122. At north campus these classes would be known as Writing Studies, and we study media and communication studies. I have worked with so many CSL classes in the past!

Could you trace your involvement with CSL?

I have been involved with CSL for a long time, especially at CSJ. I was really into doing CSL and promoting it to other instructors. But recently I think I had a break — it had been maybe 5 years since I had done CSL. My research and teaching style has always involved the community, and I always have community members come into my classroom, but it had somehow been a few years since I had done CSL in my classes. Basically, I have been doing CSL things for a long, long time! 

What are some of the community partners that your courses have been paired with?

Back in the day, I was partnered with the Greater Edmonton Foundation working with seniors which was interesting because that was in a different context, where I was teaching an upper level course on women’s narratives. 

Percentage wise, seniors homes usually house more women than men, so in this class we talked about thinking through historical narratives and historical feminist trajectories but talking about womens experiences through those years.  This is important because I think it is quite different from thinking how women used to be “this way”, or that they used to think politically “this way” and it's usually more complicated than that — you get more complicated stories! The students would go and talk to the women, and help write stories up for the community partners because these women definitely had stories to document and pass onto their families. 

I always loved debriefing with students about their visits with the seniors. There is one story that has always stood out to me. The students asked the women “How did you decide how many children to have?”, and like literally these senior citizens, like much older women who were like “What, decide how many kids to have?!” That was not a question they could understand. So the students and I discussed that and how these ideas around choice we have now were not decisions these women made. Back then you didn't really decide how many kids to have, you just had kids! 

More recently my students worked with FAFA, which is the ‘Fédération des aînés franco-albertains’. With this placement my goal was to teach students that they have knowledge, that they might not necessarily think of as knowledge, or other disciplines might not fully think of as knowledge.  As we think about climate justice and energy transition I think there are some popular discourses like: “The baby boomers have ruined the planet, they were such abusers of power and energy!” And it's true that these systems technologies came out at that time - but I say, I bet if you talk to a bunch of your grandparents that lived in rural Alberta, they weren’t exactly the 1% benefitting off this exploitation of resources. They probably weren't using many resources either! The question I asked students was, “What can we learn from them?” Like, “How do you live without all the plastics, and things they hold knowledge about how one lives differently”. I tried to push conversations that way - but also FAFA is doing a large documentation on Francophones in Alberta and what their lives were like — and it's not necessarily focused on climate justice - but we try to sneak in those climate justice history questions. 

We also partnered with Radio Cite, which is a Francophone community radio station with a theoretical media class. In this class we looked at the role of community radio and how communications functions and how it is a business, and who owns these businesses typically, and how a community radio functions. As well, how we could mobilize community radio to help mobilize the climate justice movement, for example. How we can do it to inform the Francophones in the city, or online. So that was a very interesting relationship, and I hope the students were able to maintain it afterwards. During the placement, some students created little radio documentaries (5-7 minutes) on particular issues that they were concerned about. Others were interviewed and became more comfortable with the technology. In general there was acknowledgement to what they were listening to, and what dollars paid for what, that made them a bit more savvy about the mainstream media they are taking in. 

Another partner was  the Solar Power Investment Cooperative in Edmonton who is an organization trying to create different types of economics around alternative energy that benefits communities. So the students analyzed what a Community Benefit Agreement is, which is interesting to think through if you are thinking about energy transition. For example, what happens if you take back the power in your community - literally, in all the meanings of the word power - what can that do? Right now we don’t own our sources of power, but what if we did, and what if the profits were community benefits?  If they paid for daycare programming, or subsidized a school, or built a park, or reinvested into different energy transition things, or created different kinds of jobs because you are supporting the local community, and those profits feed back into a community and not a multinational corporation somewhere.

Climate Justice Edmonton was another partner, they were not an original partner, but were added on a little bit later. In class we looked at speculating about energy futures, like how do we speculate about the future - speculative finance is one of those things we take very seriously - why not our energy futures? So the question is, “How do we speculate in the stories we tell, and how are our potential futures already informed by some base assumptions?” 

I sometimes say that we won’t die of the climate crisis, we will die of lack of imagination - because we cannot imagine how to live differently. So I said to my students, speculation is hard work, and I am not psychic. I am just suggesting that we speculate but 1969 was a big year and 2019 is wrapping up to be a big year. At the time there was all of the climate justice organizing happening by the youth, so we started preparing for the climate march. No students were obliged to go but we started to look at the different ways of participating, and how different bodies can participate in the climate march. Highlighting that different bodies live at different intersections of power dynamics. So people who were not able to attend could follow on social media, and how did those conversations influence what they believed happened, versus stories from the ground. Like how do you use communications technologies, like social media, how you use your own influence when you tell stories.  So, I had brought in Climate Justice Edmonton to talk about what it means to be a community organizer, what it means to mobilize. So the students asked for Climate Justice Edmonton to be a partner. 

What was the Energy Expo, and how did it come together?

At the end of the classes we had an Energy Expo with all of the classes. It was a co-construct event, where the students were in charge. The students would ask me, “How many tables are there going to be?” I would reply, “How many tables are there going to be?” Because it was their event, they were the youth who were putting it on. 

I made sure that community leaders and the Deans were invited, people from CSL, and their community partners came. They also got a few pages spread in the Francophone newspaper and they were also covered by Radio Cite. As well, I really appreciated the people from CSL coming to the Energy Fair, it was really nice to have their support! 

How does CSL fit with the courses you teach?

So for me really, I ask what is the point of the Academy, but to enrich public conversation and thought. I really like those relationships to be much more fluid and I like to invite people to the Academy and be out in the community. I like to see the students go out of the Academy into the community and they can see what the practical application of what they are learning is. Especially when you’re teaching a class like English where they might have a certain idea where they are completely subjective, and that they don’t really need this subject.  When students start to see how important it is for them to actually communicate what they know and learn about, they see the value of what they are learning. For example, some of the Education students have to think about training students for a future that is a bit bankrupt currently, right? Some of the Sciences students did some really innovative stuff, by really studying sophisticated science literature, and they wrote those up in ways that were accessible, through the communications tools they were given in class. This is important because I also argue that we can think about technology and science as discourses that will save us from climate change but realistically I understand pretty well from my own research that anything that is in research and development is 7 to 10 years out.  We have to respond to climate change right now, because they are saying by 2030 we need to have a lot of these transitions made - so we have to transition with the technologies we have, so I say, “What is out there? What is it we can glean from what already exists?” We shouldn’t always be thinking that there is something out there that can solve this problem, we have what we need to solve this problem! In fact, many of the technologies can solve the problem but then create other problems. So what are the social changes? Energy transition is a social problem, it is not a technical problem, it is a social problem first and foremost. We need to start thinking differently about how we live together and how we live in relationships with other species, how we think about all of our anthropocentric ways of being in the world. So my answer to that question: I mean why are students going to university? What is university for, I guess? 

What do the students learn from their placement, and how does CSL impact the student experience?

The students learn a lot of things and some of them, I don’t think that they know they learn! They learn how to take initiative, first of all — because  they have to walk across the street. Part of it is that a lot of the time non-profits are understaffed and underfunded, and they really have to walk across the street and take initiative and sometimes find a place. So they have to figure out a place for themselves at the organization. 

Also, the students learn the relevance of doing what they are doing. Students often want to understand how the things they are learning are somehow going to inform their future. Even though I am of the opinion that not everything you learn has to have some sort of employment end goal, I think it does help students understand why they have to take certain courses, and what the value of that contributes to their overall education.

[opisafascist]

"I can't take criticism so I send out my minions from 4chan out to get you" blocklist

I’ll be honest, I do not get what are these peoples deal but they seem to always get on the bad side of everyone and they can get to this very contrarian personality from 4chan /v/ so I’ll just take that a hint to making a list of them, they aren’t fascists by any means, crypto-fascists at the least, but they often gobble up the worst of people from this website and have probably been co-opted by fascists multiple time because of their apatheticness and coyness, the whole “I’m not a SJW! I don’t like protesters, fighting for something is dumb!” kind, shit they aren’t even probably right-wingers so this is a very special blocklist because I keep seeing them on tumblr whenever something bad happens, in fact i see so many fascists on this site only follow these people, so it’s probably better to block them to cut off their social rings immediately. 

--The list that has probably already been made once--

moontouched-moogle - Not much interesting to talk about here they’re just this hive mind for /v/ people. They kind of helped me build this list a bit. 

thefeelofavideogame - This guy never catches a break of not minding their own business and can’t help but feel cynical about anything but just ‘vidya’

nentindo - This one deserves a special mention because they’re 15 years old so it’s better to just block them and ignore them in advance rather then let them act elitist, i mean jeez kid you’re 15 you BARELY experienced life yet. Like really this amount of them surrounding themselves by adults that don’t wish them the best is an unhealthy obsession for them at it is. 

inkerton-kun - Dontcha hate when a porn artist has to have a ‘personality’

steven-universe-official - Kind of like the grand papi of this gang, I don’t even need to tell people to block them because I think about everyone does already due them sending their weird combination of anti-feminist fans around sending hate to anyone that would do criticism against their shitty attitude, technically in the recent years they kind of toned down on going around spewing bullshit and being THE uncle tom but it’s good to double check

dream-cassette - Oh this one I’ve heard of the most! Used to make child porn by the name of hoshime, in the name of rule 34, along the lines she deleted her original blog because she believed the obviously fake “down with cis” situation was the biggest EXAMPLE OF BIGOTRY in the world and the not absurd at all rival towards inequality (ignoring how it works systematically) and ever since then she’s been hanging out with the anti-sjws. 

thathomestar - I think they used to be a 100% gamergater but then again almost everyone here on this list was at one point. They still have that suspicious aura of “all the misery in the world is the left-wing’s fault for fighting back against their human rights being removed rather than just submitting!”. Says everything that is politically incorrect is just a joke, might be just a weird case of /pol/’s law (haha, get it?)

mr-cappadocia - Also an infamous gamergater, they sorta hold a grudge so much against social justice they end up sounding like they’re high on sherm. You know those try-hards that sound REALLY hard to sound politically incorrect? Yep! They sound like that. I also recommend blocking leopirate too as they are also a hotspot for gamergaters. Both are pretty terrible Islamophobic people. 

takashi0 - The OG Anti-SJW Brony of Tumblr! What a title. 

shitpost-senpai - I don’t even know why this guy’s on this list they’re just a 100% obvious fascist to the point they won’t stop being antisemitic about everything but hey, I guess because they like anime and metal gear rising that’s enough for them to fit in this blocklist... They’re also constantly being reblogging by this social ring of people and could just be the reason why a sum of people don’t trust them. 

maoh - They hate it when people fight back against oppression in general, the old cuck-like mentality of “No, don’t do anything, don’t fight back and die and it will be a win!” without knowing that peaceful protest holds no consequence and allows fascists to do anything they want to do at any time while removing human rights. They’re very petty about god damn children rather than just let them be too. What kind of an adult is this? Kind of funny that they changed their description recently from “I dislike the left-wing of tumblr” to “zero tolerance for faux morality and art censorship”, dude got some brand new codewords to pass off “I hate criticism” and “I’m a nazi sympathizer cuck and I’ve been brainwashed by the enemy to say that violent dynamics, no matter how history shows the story otherwise, is ineffective in justice and is villainous, anyways let me just frantically love an anime where they beat someone up”. It’s basic praxis and how the world works! 

shameshack - Ey! the-cringe-channel, known for producing their own cringe content because for some odd reason they keep ignoring the academic values of things and brush ofF everything in the world as mindless paranoia but probably aren’t a very smart person themselves and would rather waste their life making fun of kids and fueling the quickly made anti-sjw blogs on this website that all have urls like “tumblr-is-dumb-because-i-hate-minorities”, out of everyone who acts coy about why people dislike them, this one acts the most coy out of them all, what a malicious kind of guy. I really don’t know if they legit don’t get how things work in the real world because they take silly things seriously and serious things as if they were silly. Have you ever tried living life once where you have to don’t have to keep insecurely looking down on others that are just harmless oddities to fuel your ego or what?

--End Of List-- 

Just copy and paste each url onto your blocklist if you wanna. 

Again I repeat these guys aren’t “fascists” and will deny they’re “anti-sjw” (Even though they don’t do anything to show for it besides say “Oh don’t worry we make fun of anti-sjws too! But we sound exactly like them when we go against our vague idea of social justice”), but fascists and crypto-fascists always seem to be around these people because they act coy about it all the time for the sake of being contrarians. They don’t want to care about them being followed by neo-nazis, just the power of having many followers that come straight from 4chan’s /v/! Almost the same as sympathizers.  

It’s the same odd link towards people who take video games and substancless anime too seriously and... Neo-Nazis, seriously what’s up with that? Anyways be careful when you criticize anime or them and don’t have them checked! 

Special mentions: KanColle fans I guess? Moe anime attracts a lot, and I guess that’s what happens when a medium genre is 100% bottom feeders towards substanceless girls just being cute, blogs with gray backgrounds, the nihilists that blog about trump jokes “ironically” (poe’s law), youtube celebrities, it’s more about ethics in games journalism and not objective game design. It’s not like they can’t be analytical ABOUT EVERYTHING right. Like how video game game design isn’t the only analytical theory in the world to take into consideration when criticizing media. Why is it always the gamers? 

Won’t say it again! Act coy about it all you want but take the loss because you guys have negative connotations and never really worked on it. 

This isn’t a “Reach” like a lot of you guys keep blaming it to be one or just belittle it as just “discourse” (the most thrown around word ever), the fact is just that you simply won’t accept the weight of your actions by either doing bullshit yourselves or allowing fascists to co-op your communities because you guys aren’t actively critical at all despite your contrarian image. 

Anyways this blog’s been moving slow (Which is good! Unless they've just been more secretive) to the point I gotta make a list out of these infamous dudes that i’m pretty sure everyone on tumblr already blocks or at least is suspicious about the people who reblog from them so i’m gonna go jack off to hentai rather than cowardly reblog ecchi to my blog to remind people I do indeed jack off to anime have no mistake about it. 

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: When Great Art Makes You LOL

Laughing Budda (image via Flickr)

If you heard peals of laughter ringing out through the quiet, reverent halls of an art museum, what would your reaction be? Would you “tut-tut” in their general direction, maybe shoot them a glare or offer them a pointed “shhh”? If so, can we be totally sure that you, and not they, are in the right?

For contemporary artists who love to insert a little bit of humor in their work, the situation above begs the question: Can art be funny? 

Yes, of course — but it doesn’t have to be, whereas comedy has to be funny or else it fails. The basic structure of a joke is simple: set-up, punchline, laugh, repeat. No laughs is proof that the joke doesn’t work. But art? It can be whatever it wants to be, as long as it’s full of thoughts, emotions, humanity, concepts, etc.

Melissa Rocha is a stand-up comedian who also hosts The TV Show Show, a themed comedy variety show. (Full disclosure: Alicia Eler participated in the Seinfeld edition.) Rocha left her performance art career behind when she realized she was funny, and wanted to work on crafting jokes. We caught up by phone about her transition, and why it happened. “The part of comedy that most artists and people have a hard time with is the failure of it,” she said. “It is so brutal…the trial and error is a lot harder to get a grip on. In the art world, you can just explain it.”

Image by Melissa Rocha (image via aliciaeler.com)

Another defining difference between art and comedy is that the latter has a clear purpose: the goal is to land the joke. It’s a comforting, binary relationship: either you’re funny, or you’re not. In art, there is no clear goal — there is no end, and there may not be a beginning, either. The complete lack of rules — of form and structure — can be overwhelming. But artists, unlike comedians, also have a convenient out if their funny art isn’t really funny. When art is, it’s a bonus — but it doesn’t have to be to succeed. “It’s about safety, ” said Rocha. “It’s like, ‘I’m an artist, and if you don’t think it’s funny that’s okay because it’s art.’ But if you do stand-up, improv, and sketch comedy that is specifically, deftly 100% supposed to be funny, and if it’s not, then you have no safety.”

But is funny art actually funny? The answer, as we see it, is a rousing chorus of “it depends.” Of course, to just use the term “art” when talking about this is to be imprecise. There are many different kinds of art — painting, sculpture, performance, whatever bullshit Richard Prince is currently up to — and they each come with their strengths and limitations.

For the purposes of this essay, we are going to break these forms down into two separate categories: static and temporal. The former, like painting and sculpture, produces pieces that are fixed and immutable. The latter, like performance and video pieces, exists in multiple, successive moments in time. For the most part, temporal art can incorporate and commingle with comedy fairly well, whereas static art (again, for the most part) does not.

Now, don’t get us wrong here: an image can of course be funny. For proof, check the internet. In 2016, we used funny memes as a kind of relational currency: I will gladly be friends with you tomorrow for a crying Jordan meme today. However, static art that attempts to be funny rarely succeeds at being both funny and art at the same time. This is inherent to its nature. In order to be funny, the artwork has to both set up the joke and deliver the punchline in one go. In order to do this, the art often has to sacrifice depth.

Crying Jordan (meme via Internet!)

Because here’s the thing about comedy: it relies on the subverting of expectations, which means that it cannot exist without them. Jokes need to be clear and comprehensible, but ones that are too easily understood — where the punchline can be seen coming from a mile away — are often the least funny jokes of all. These are the types of amateur jokes that you’re likely to hear during an attempt to write a funny wedding speech. But if you take any basic piece of comedy — “Why did the chicken cross the road?”, “Knock knock? Who’s there?”, “Take my wife! Please!” — you will see that it follows that structure of expectation and subversion. The more surprising the subversion, the funnier the joke.

Static art often lacks this element of surprise, because in order for its joke to be understood, it has to sacrifice most everything else. Yes, Marcel Duchamp was able to blow everyone’s mind when he took a toilet, called it a fountain, and declared it to be art — but he also had the benefit of novelty. When you’re the first person to do something, you get a lot of credit, as you should. Once we move past Duchamp to the works that he influenced, the flood of ingenuity becomes a trickle in no time. Because, while a funny piece of static art can maybe make you laugh, is it going to make you ponder it? Or feel much? Or even think about it again, once your momentary guffaw has passed? Likely, it will not. (Again, Duchamp is granted a special waiver here for innovation.) What is great about art — and is especially true about great art — is how it moves beyond the “get it/don’t get it” binary and gets at something far deeper, more complex and unsettled. Nobody stares at a Monet to “understand” the waterlilies.

An example of jokey static art is Eric Yahnker’s, who creates visual puns oftentimes in the form of title-as-punchline, or by just meme-ifying an image. In many ways, Yahnker is a political cartoonist; it’s not surprising that his training is actually in journalism, and he worked on the cartoon South Park. But with the death of the political cartoonist job and the rise of the internet, he decided to create his own small business as an artist, which ultimately gives him the freedom to do whatever he wants. Take, for example, his “American Piece,” a collection of VHS tapes lined up one by one on a shelf that all have “American” in the title. The humor is dry, almost kicking up dust. And, naturally, the name of his recent solo show in LA was Noah’s Yacht, a play on the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. Similar, humor-wise, is Cory Arcangel, whose dry wit comes across in his work “Super Mario Clouds” (2002), which is literally just the clouds of this game. It is a versatile piece, working as a tongue-in-cheek trick — haha, it’s just the clouds screengrabbed as a single image! — or the six-minute video of the clouds, decontextualized from their video game environment, existing as, well, pixelated clouds. 

Temporal art forms still have an easier time escaping the basic “get it/don’t get it” binary, and more gracefully collaborate with comedic forms. Because the art unfolds through time, it can create multiple sets of expectations and multiple forms of subversion. It can be funny in one moment and then deadly serious the next. It can play with multiple ideas — or at the very least many unique shades and tones within the same thematic palate.

For instance, Jason Musson, aka Hennessy Youngman, is hilarious. His ArtThoughtz videos are basically vlogs, and work in part because they’re performed by his alter ego — not by him, the Artist. He takes on the persona of a vlogger dude who breaks down theory concepts, like post-structuralism, into something easily consumed on the internet. The mission of Musson’s Youngman character is to take art less seriously by bringing in some humor. Writes Don Elder for Hyperallergic:

Part of Musson’s success with Art Thoughtz has been the creation of an unlikely character that challenges the core of the intellectual orthodoxy of today’s art world. Hennessy Youngman introduces a comedic, urban perspective into a largely serious and boring Ivy League discourse (a slightly ironic gesture, since Musson has an MFA degree from UPenn).

Yeah, that’s real.

  Andrea Fraser similarly uses comedy to a critical effect in her performance “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (1989), where she played the fictional character Jane Castleton, a docent/volunteer/artist who took people around the Philadelphia Museum of Art, commenting on toilets, the shop, the coat room, and other things that were not pieces of art, while also inserting her own social and political commentary. Using docent-speak, she blurred a fictional and “real” experience of the art museum.

A number of artists who are exploring with comedy create personas. Erin Markey’s queer, feminist comedy and live performances make us laugh hard because, as she once put it, they’re “absurdist and sometimes dark.” Some call her an actress, while others refer to her as a comedian or performance artist. Her intense cabaret–style rendition of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” transforms a song that’s marketed as sugar-sweet pop. Between Markey’s lecherous gaze as she performs and the ways that she over-enunciates every word, audiences are left wondering how they could’ve just hummed along to this actually dark song. Is it performance art, comedy, or both? 

(screenshot via Erin Markey’s “You Belong with Me” video)

Similarly, Dynasty Handbag, aka Jibz Cameron, plays with the absurd alter-ego, creating a buffer between real-life and fictional comedic performance. Dynasty is so over-the-top — we are fascinated like we are with a John Waters film — so we’ll go with her anywhere. Her performance work is actually funny — not just poking fun at the art world — and at times she ends up on bills and slates that include comedians. In her recent music video “Vague,” a spoof on Madonna’s “Vogue,” Dynasty dances and wanders amidst a variety of odd backdrops while also pulling off signature vogueing moves. Except for her, everything is vague — she’s not sure where she is or what’s going on, and most of what she says is almost incomprehensible. At one point, she sings about a vague situation she may have been in, where she couldn’t tell if it was a business lunch or a date. Produced by the comedy network JASH, Dynasty’s work fits into both the art and comedy worlds, creating something else entirely. Her work embraces a kind of middle space, a queering of traditional boundaries — expressing a kind of nihilism where maybe everything matters, maybe nothing matters, but either way, LOL.

(screenshot via Dynasty Handbag’s video “VAGUE”)

This lack of an agenda — of “say a joke, get some laughs, repeat” — is crucial to Dynasty’s work coexisting as both “art” and “comedy.” It’s clearly funny, but that isn’t all it is. It’s also significant that her videos are being presented by a comedy network. And it’s not just the artists who are breaking into the comedy scene — many comedians are taking their cues from the more contemplative, multi-shaded aspects of art. Though this is not new, either. It just seems like it is, because the accessibility to artists that is afforded to us by the internet can make us feel inundated with content. Ernie Kovacs, for example, was bringing his own brand of cigar-chomping weirdness to network TV in the 1950s. Then there was, of course, the sublimely British Monty Python, and the formalist silliness of early Steve Martin. (In fact, Martin himself has admitted that parts of his standup act were specifically designed to eschew punchlines entirely.) In the ’80s and ’90s Bill Hicks tested the stand-up comedy form to see just how much deeply felt philosophizing it could include. And then of course there was Andy Kaufman, who pushed stand-up so far that many declared that he just flat-out wasn’t funny.

Comedians have been testing the limits of the form — and of their audiences — for decades. Some of the best modern examples of comedy-acting-like-art come from Cartoon Network’s late night Adult Swim block. That’s right, just in time for you to have forgotten it, we’re dragging Too Many Cooks back into your nightmares. Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job may have been the first Adult Swim show that blended comedy and art, usually using copious amounts of horror and weirdness as bonding agents, but it certainly wasn’t the last. And while Too Many Cooks was the video that really went viral, the far weirder, far scarier Unedited Footage of a Bear provides an even better example of comedy becoming art. The film begins with a simple premise: it’s a commercial for an allergy medicine with a suspiciously long list of possible side effects. It’s a joke that’s been done before, but never like this: as a horror movie portrait of a psychotic breakdown. So is Unedited Footage of A Bear comedy, art, or both? Well, the film was directed by Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien, who both belong to the Baltimore-based art and performance Collective Wham City. Maybe the real question is, does the distinction between comedy and art even matter?

In reality, many comedians would bristle at being told that they are not artists. And maybe they should. After all, they are expressing their own thoughts and views through the creation of original work — just like other artists do. And while some comedians can be easily lumped into the category of crass, mass-market entertainers (see: Kevin James), the exact same could be said of some artists.

Ultimately, if there is one thing that artists and comedians share is their impulse to express something that is true about the world or themselves. As the old standard goes, “it’s funny because it’s true.” Replace the word funny with the word “touching” or “important” or “revelatory” and the same sentence could be applied to any great work of art.

Art can definitely be funny and still be art. More importantly, it can still be great art. The only difference is in the labelling and in the expectations that those labels can create. Label something as “art” and people might not expect to laugh, but label something as “comedy” and they will. And if producing funny art means subverting expectations, then maybe more art that makes us laugh is a good thing. After all, when was the last time you heard an artist say their goal was to give their audience exactly what they were expecting?

The post When Great Art Makes You LOL appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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