#misogyny is a integral part of the story and we need to just accept it

[a-secret-bolton-vampire]

CW: Misogyny

(This is not an essay. This is a manic-induced rant about the fandom.)

HotD time soon, which means the dudebros will be out and about shaking their firsts cursing Sara Hess (who apparently is to blame for everything bad and must be removed from the show at all costs cuz she rightfully did not understand why people defend Daemon's actions) for hating men or whatever manufactured outrage they'll cook up next...

So, let's talk about what the show is not about first. It is not a misandrist piece of media that says men evil women good. That's so blatantly false it's genuinely baffling to me how anyone can reach that conclusion. It is also not about how the Blacks are better than the Greens or that the writers have a bias (what writer doesn't have a bias? I know I do). Remember, the Blacks and Greens are not real. This is fiction.

Yes, we get emotionally attached to characters (as I have) but there is no slander or character assassination going on. Hell, these characters literally have zero characterization (and sometimes contradictory characterization) in Fire & Blood. The writers haven't gone on twitter to cancel Aegon because he said something controversial. Because they are characters and they serve a purpose in the story, whether good people or not.

Now, let's talk about the way the fandom doesn't get certain themes. There is this recurring motif that the men want war and the women want peace. Think about it for maybe two seconds. In this very patriarchal gendered world, men are expected to be tough, hold in their emotions, be warriors and fighters. While war is considered maybe not ideal, knights are revered and men still have a particular expectation in this society.

Naturally, the toxic masculinity of Westeros is going to make quite an impression on some of the male characters in the show; Aegon, Aemond, Criston, Daemon. Mix that with their numerous neuroses and you don't get the most peaceful, calm, and rational people in the world.

Even disregarding that, there is a more thematic reason why the show went this direction. It explores the way patriarchy is an inherently violent, self-destructive system. Rhaenyra and Alicent, despite being in positions of power, are restricted by what the men around them allow them to do. This in turn adds to the tragedy of them trying to desperately avoid war even though it is unavoidable. It's sad, it's frustrating, and it's showing the flaws of the system.

This leads into a discussion for Alicent and Rhaenyra. The fandom is completely normal and not insane about these two. There is a lot of criticism about the characters being too "perfect", and that they lack agency and thus are less compelling than their book counterparts. There is so much to unpack here so lets take them one at a time.

No, Alicent and Rhaenyra are not perfect. Both make a ton of mistakes, do awful things, all the while they try to be decent and honourable. Rhaenyra has lied and killed for her own gain. She spared Laenor, but still killed an innocent servant and caused a massive deal of grief for the Velaryons by making them believe their son was dead. Not saying she is the worst person ever, but that was a pretty big political mistake even if she needed Daemon to be her sword to wield.

Alicent too is imperfect. I have so much sympathy for her and Rhaenyra, which is good since they are the two people at the core of the story, and being sympathetic is a very good trait to have in a protagonist! For me the biggest highlight of all is the way she treats her children. She is abusive. They do not feel that unconditional love from her. Aegon especially had a raw deal, with the way she not only verbally and emotionally abuse him and put immense pressure on him to becoming king, but also the way she physically abuses him. He's probably got PTSD from a lifetime of parental abuse (a lot of what Alicent and Viserys do to their children is something I have personally experienced with my own parents). This isn't even mentioning Helaena or Aemond. All of her and Viserys's children are like this. It's a huge, huge flaw of hers.

Now, what about agency? Alicent and Rhaenyra lack agency and they can't be the bad bitches like Cersei before them. I'm just gonna say it: I am glad they aren't like Cersei.

This is a story that, at its core, is about patriarchy and misogyny. Anyone who says that is not present in the book is honestly delusional or stupid. Is it the only theme of this story? No! But is it a major theme? Yes! It can still be about this and something else too! But anyways, the complaining about "lack of agency" is so weird considering this. Did we not watch the same episode 9? I feel like I took crazy pills with everyone talking about the "inconsistency" of Alicent's character.

Genuinely, this is such a pervasive idea in the fandom and it drives me insane trying to figure out how they missed the fucking point of episode 9! Or to explain more calmly, that was an episode of Alicent trying to regain agency. When she is upset by the Green Council, it is not because she doesn't want to crown Aegon. The opposite actually. She is upset they plotted behind her back without her input, and so the race to find Aegon is the race to find who will ultimately influence the king. Alicent finds him first and Otto accepts defeat.

And yet in the end her actual influence is in question. Because Alicent is trying to work within the confines of a patriarchal system, which further restricts her actual agency. This is a Shakespearean tragedy, and Alicent's own decisions ultimately spell her doom (based on what we have been told of season 2, which I will get to later).

Here is the thing: in exploring a show about misogyny, you do not need the characters to be triumphant. The story of the Dance is not a story of triumph. It is a story of trauma, bad decision making, bloodlust, and loss. To think this is gonna be a story about how Alicent and Rhaenyra stick a middle finger to the patriarchy is a fundamental misunderstanding. Instead, this is a show about how patriarchy is not a stable or rational system of power structure. Having Alicent and Rhaenyra have to claw their way to have agency is the fucking point.

Also I might add that in the book neither character actually displays much agency. Rhaenyra sits around and cries while her son makes the big decisions, and Alicent just disappears from the story after Aegon is crowned. What "agency" is there to be had? I have a sneaking suspicion that chuds don't like Alicent or Rhaenyra not being misogynistic caricatures...

People say that women should be rich, complex characters all on their own and then want them being literal caricatures of what misogynists view women in power as. That is not complexity. Saying "mayhaps the whore will die in childbirth" is not complexity. That's just Alicent being an asshole. Rhaenyra's entire character going "this is my birthright and I will have my brother's head!" is not complexity. "Rhaenyra not leading is the point" is not complexity.

As much as I really don't like Fire & Blood, even I am aware that the book is bias due to the perspective of the maesters that wrote it in-universe (and yes the book is the book and the show is the show but I'm making a point). Women are often smeared in the histories, and even today men pay much closer attention to any real or perceived faults women have and hone in on that with intense scrutiny men don't usually have to worry about (especially women who go outside gender norms).

This bizarre call to make Alicent and Rhaenyra more unlikable because "muh complexity" is nonsensical because it's asking to fall into the same stereotypes about women the book does (uncaring power-seeking bitches who are incapable of friendship and have uncontrollable emotions).

On that note, Rhaenyra and Alicent's old friendship is the best change made book to show. There is an extra layer of tragedy to it all and makes the characters a lot more complex. But wait, isn't the war between Aegon and Rhaenyra? Why is this Hightower whore stealing the spotlight on my war crime king?

No no no. This is another misunderstanding. The war is between Rhaenyra and Aegon, yes. That is how everyone remembers it. Aegon is a character I actually quite adore for just how messy and utterly vile he is. I can't wait to see him in action. But there is no relationship between Aegon and Rhaenyra. Not in the show, and definitely not in the book either. The main rivalry has always been Rhaenyra and Alicent.

This is in Fire & Blood. Who created the Blacks and who created the Greens? Rhaenyra and Alicent. Who has an established relationship and history (as badly written as it is)? Rhaenyra and Alicent? What was the novella in which the Dance is first described called? The Princess and the Queen. The war may be between Queen Rhaenyra and King Aegon II, but the rivalry has always been focused on Rhaenyra and Alicent. This insistence to remove Alicent off the promotional posters and place Aegon is... kind of misogynistic? Like, Alicent is narratively more important to the story and people want to replace her with her son who, while important, is not as important?

And also, you can like Aegon and want to see him have a larger role. I know I do, even if he is a fucking bastard. You can dislike the show or what I said for any number of reasons. Some people who aren't raging misogynists have perfectly valid reasons to dislike it. I'm just explaining about the most vile part of the fandom that grinds my gears so badly it hurts.

Also, I'm not even going to go into the whole Team Black/Team Green thing. All I'll say about it is: I hope they all look sexy while doing war crimes <3

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/6/2024: THE I SPIT ON YOUR LADIES' NIGHT MISOGYNATHON, PART 1 - BLINK TWICE AND DON'T WORRY DARLING

Sometimes during Blogtober I'll watch some movie that so activates my pattern recognition that I have to watch several other movies in a row, and then the entry is like this. In this case it is all the fault of BLINK TWICE.

I am perennially interested in stories about insidious forms of sexual abuse, and I thought this was OK. Spoilers be here, if you're worried you could skip to the image from DON'T WORRY DARLING below, although I don't know how surprising BLINK TWICE really is. Well, maybe it's surprising enough that the fucking studio put a fucking trigger warning on the beginning of this fucking R-rated movie like I'm a little fucking baby, but ANYWAY. It is rather obviously about how Channing Tatum is a recently-disgraced techbro who is continuing to do extremely bad things to the women he lures to his tropical island. Part of me wondered if this whole movie weren't some sort of warning shot at Jared Leto about the island cult he has or is trying to start, but in any case it is very entertaining. It's sort of odd to do what is kind of a heavy rape movie and make it this funny, but I supposed there ought to be some alternative to just extreme confrontationalism--although there is a dash of that here too.

There is also a dash of some sort of magic realism that didn't seem that well integrated. That the island is full of snakes whose venom just so happens to counteract the techbro's experimental rape drug--and he knows this--is a little too on the nose for me, a little too Eve and the Serpent, kind of silly. And if you're a genius with unlimited resources, why would you chose a place that's full of these problematic snakes for your island where you have to use this one drug for your rape orgies? Yeah, sure, he could have realized this too late and wasn't willing to cut his losses, but it all seems very convenient.

I also had a problem with part of the basic setup: Zoe Kravitz directs Naomi Ackie as this loser millennial who is first seen watching an apology video by Channing Tatum who has become notorious for doing some unspecified Armie Hammer-type shit. Then Naomi sneaks into this gala where she meets him and immediately accepts an invitation to his isolated island, and like *maybe* what you learn much later is supposed to explain why she has absolutely no misgivings about this, but in the meantime you have to spend quite a lot of time wondering what kind of person she is, that she's down for this. Her acceptance of him should mean something. Either she's so naive she believes public apologies from powerful men, or she's suffering from so much internalized misogyny that she doesn't believe other women, or she loves bad boys, or she's hypnotized by his wealth, or...something. I really wanted an excuse because whatever it is would majorly inform her whole character. We all have pretty specific assumptions about people who defend Johnny Depp, there are specific motivations behind that behavior. I just felt like the whole story needed more justification from the jump. Although that said, it is very amusing for a movie about a rape island.

Anyway, while I was watching BLINK TWICE I started to wonder if Olivia Wilde felt ripped off by it. Even though DON'T WORRY DARLING is a science fiction film, it has essentially the same plot: A rich, charismatic techbro invents a little elite paradise for his friends and supporters where they can enjoy perfect control over women. And I'm suddenly realizing this segment is also going to be fairly spoilery, so sorry if you haven't seen this one either but the twist ending actually IS surprising, even if the movie otherwise wears its debt to THE STEPFORD WIVES on its sleeve. But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that I actually sort of like DON'T WORRY DARLING, and I might be the only person in the world to say that.

I don't even know if I can justify my affection for it, but I am comfortable at least saying that even if it's not great, it doesn't deserve the heaps of abuse it got. In this cold, weird, '50s-flavored thriller, Florence Pugh and her husband Harry Styles live in a remote Southwestern cul-de-sac that houses all the bright young men who work on the mysterious "Victory Project". None of the too-perfect housewives knows what the Victory Project actually is, though everyone is way oversubscribed to the idea that glorified cult leader Chris Pine is somehow building a better future. Inevitably, Florence Pugh figures out that the women are being controlled somehow, which revelation causes some fabulous hallucinations and her eventual action hero rebellion.

I get the problems with this. The story is overly familiar, poor Harry Styles produces absolutely nothing resembling a recognizable character despite his earnest efforts, and worst of all, the movie just misuses its time. The revelation that this is not a Stepford-type project, but rather an underground virtual reality experiment for incels and their kidnap victims is honestly pretty cool. It's interesting! Interesting enough that they shouldn't have saved it for the very end, they should have found a way to integrate it into the main narrative more; instead there are too many repetitive scenes of Florence Pugh being argumentative, which all have forgone conclusions.

But meanwhile, DON'T WORRY DARLING establishes a very sharp, edgy tone that keeps you (or me, anyway) in a reasonable state of suspense and claustrophobic anxiety. I've been trying to analyze where this comes from and I think part of it is just the sound, which is often excellent (if occasionally over the top). There's a certain kind of ambient tone used in the little cloistered homes that makes me smell ozone and feel pressure in my ears. And I think most of the performances are very good, especially Florence Pugh of course who I just love. I love her because I think she could beat my ass. It's like, fucking Scarlett Johansson has been foisted upon the world as an action hero and she just seems so slow and dull and unconvincing. Meanwhile Florence Pugh is scrambling up a gravel road barefoot at alarming speeds and I totally believe it. Even in MIDSOMMAR she's just so fucking physical, and did you see that wrestling movie she made, FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY? It's really good, you should watch it. She could kick anybody's ass.

[soopersara]

Thoughts on post-series (especially TLOK) Katara? Do you agree that she became a shell of the woman she once were? Do you consider it to be misogynistic when people say that on the basis that she "just became a housewife + a sad old woman alone in her hut"?

I'm not sure if you're asking if I think the writers were misogynistic for reducing Katara to a sad widowed housewife or if I think that it's misogynistic to say that Katara's character was reduced when she became a sad widowed housewife. Either way, I'm not in the business of accusing people of bigotry over works of fiction that I find questionable or opinions about fictional works that I find questionable. In the case of creators, I'm not a mind reader—I don't know 100% what the intention behind thing X in story Y was, and I trust that if the creators are shitty, malicious people, it'll shine through in other areas of their lives. Are there certain tropes that make me squint real hard and whisper, "I don't trust where you're going with this" before noping out? Absolutely. But some people, even professional creators, are just... not good at their jobs. And frankly, just the idea of going through my life assuming the worst of everyone who makes me scratch my head and squint is exhausting.

And in the case of Katara's post-canon characterization (because IMO, canon ended when the credits rolled on ATLA), assuming incompetence over malice seems entirely fair. Yes, Bryke are professional creators, but they are visual artists first and foremost. Writing simply isn't where their strengths lie, and the writing is what suffered when the franchise was left entirely in their control post-ATLA.

Full disclosure, I haven't read all of the comics or watched all of LOK because the former infuriated me and the latter bored me to tears, but the biggest problem I saw with both was the fact that the characters' individual wants, needs, and motives vanished after the end of ATLA. Except for Aang's. His inner life stayed intact because he was The Protagonist™️, and everyone else flattened out because it's difficult to hit the plot beats you want if you give multiple characters autonomy. I can sympathize. Writing is a pain in the ass, and writing character-driven stories well is a bigger pain in the ass.

But...

The original series was led by a writing team who knew how to wrangle multiple characters with autonomous personalities and motivations and storylines. The writing team knew how to do the delicate finagling to steer things back on track without compromising the integrity of the characters when they veered a little sideways, and they were aware that sometimes it's not possible to get back on track if the characters are leading an entirely different direction. And that's the brilliance of the show—for the most part, you can get into the head of each character and track him/her through the whole series and see exactly why they were motivated to make each and every choice (there are a few big puzzlers in Book 3, but let's not get into that right now or we'll be here for a year).

So when you go from the original show, which had a whole team of people who specialized in writing, to the comics or LOK, helmed by Bryke, who specialized in visuals, the difference is jarring to say the least. Suddenly we go from a cast of complex characters with their own inner lives that strongly influence how they act/interact, down to... well, Aang, and flattened versions of the rest of the cast who exist to either agree with and support Aang or to disagree with Aang and later be proved wrong because The Protagonist Is Always Right™️. Never mind the fact that a lot of that directly contradicts the characterization established in ATLA. Never mind the fact that the base premises of some of the post-canon stories are ludicrous by the show's own standards. None of that matters. Zuko is going to take advice from his genocidal maniac of a father after he firmly rejected him and his beliefs because none of the people who love Zuko care enough to check in on him from time to time. Aang is going to agree to kill one of his closest friends when he wouldn't even consider offing the aforementioned genocidal maniac because... he promised to, I guess. And nobody else is going to see a problem with ANY of this because they no longer care about... um... anything that mattered to them previously. Because they're all been lobotomized, apparently. We as the audience are supposed to like and accept all of that solely because it's Dramatic and Unexpected. We're not supposed to care that the characters we got to know over the course of 61 episodes would fucking never do that. Because the plot is more important than the characters, and Aang is the only character whose motives matter now anyway.

And all of that is a very long way of getting around to the point that, as far as I can tell, Katara's reduction from a fiery, impassioned, irrepressible warrior to a sad, ineffectual, lonely widow is more a result of Bryke not knowing how to write a character-driven story and therefore butchering all of their characters aside from Aang in the post-canon material than it is a result of misogyny. Misogynistic undertones? Since Katara was more visibly affected by this inability to write a natural character progression than anyone else, it sure feels that way. But I hesitate to call Bryke misogynistic for the way her character turned out when I know for a fact that writing is not their area of expertise. If I'm looking at some of the attitudes they've expressed outside of the show, I'm less forgiving. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, I guess.

And if you weren't looking for a long ramble about the writing of the show vs the writing of the post-canon material and you actually wanted my opinion on the idea that Katara's character was reduced by becoming a sad widowed housewife... then no. I don't think it's misogynistic to say that. Listen, there is nothing wrong with being a housewife. Living according to gender expectations isn't wrong if that's the life you want. There is, however, something very wrong with a girl who was actively angry about being shoved into those gender roles being forced to accept them later in life without any explanation. Someone who fought (quite literally) for the right to not be "just" a housewife or "just" a healer can't turn up a few decades later as a housewife and a healer with next to no other accomplishments to her name if she didn't have a compelling reason to go back and choose the path she previously rejected. This is fiction. Things don't happen by accident. And when things happen without reason, that's just bad writing.

[rad-translations]

“We’re used to death threats” 6 years after GamerGate, nothing has changed

(It’s impossible for me to continue playing Valorant. To be provoked, harassed, insulted as soon as people hear my voice, all of this because I’m a woman, is unacceptable. I won’t accept undergoing this constantly, and having to signal people constantly. I’m sickened.)

If for some years now, awareness of the bullying that women suffer from in all parts of society has been increasing, everyday changes appear to be barely noticeable.

The world of video games is one glaring example. Or how, behind the grand speeches, the life of female gamers hasn’t changed — maybe even got worse since GamerGate, an event that has triggered the first large-scale wave of online harassment against women.

In partnership with the YESSS podcast, Numerama investigated  the sexism in the community of male and female gamers, with a saddening but certain report: since 2014 and GamerGate, nothing has changed. What we gathered from the dozens and dozens of testimonies that we collected, is that the daily life of women gamers is punctuated by these microaggressions. Tweet after tweet, insult after insult, from sexist comments to targeted bullying, these are individual actions that, when added up, create an incredibly violent wave of online harassment. A wave that swallow them again, day after day.

“Gamergate had set the tone”

“GamerGate had set the tone in regards to sexism, and this changed things” assesses Julie, who mostly plays on League of Legends. “When they discover that you are a girl, it’s rampage” adds Leiden, a World of Warcraft player: “As soon as you’re a girl, you’re gonna eat shit. There are comments like “You don’t know how to play (...)”, it’s a very common behavior on WoW…” Kash, who also plays MMORPG, laments that “toxic comments became the norm”. One example: during a session, the presence of three female players triggered a collective cackling from the members of her guild, who said that “the disabled quota has arrived”. “I told them that we were fed up with these kind of remarks, that is was not normal. They responded by saying it was just humor. (...) That’s really a bummer, because when the game launched, this didn’t exist, we were a community. I wasn’t judged based on my sex.”. “Playing as a woman, it’s a hassle” confirms Lisa*, tiredly “There is always some pig there to tell you to “go back to the kitchen””. Laughter always follows.

She however assesses that GamerGate did not launch online bullying. Gamers are known to vehemently defend their passion: “In 2005, a wave of online harassment had been launched against the very controversial Jack Thompson, an american lawyer who declared that shootings in the USA were the result of the violence of video games” Brad Glasgow, a journalist who then published a study on GamerGate, reminds us, now asked by Numerama. Some gamers at the time sent death threats to his home, or even developed games in which the objective was to hit the lawyer… What GamerGate changed, is adding a sexist aspect to online bullying, focusing hate and attacks on multiple women.

Between journalistic integrity and harassment

On August 16th 2014, Eron Gjoni, a 24 years old programmer, published on his blog “thezoepost”, a 9000-words vitriolic announcement, describing in detail how his now ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, had cheated on him. The story could have ended there. But here is the deal: Zoe Quinn is an indie video game developer, and the man she cheated on him with is a journalist specialized in gaming-related press. That was everything gamers and the Internet needed to ignite: this man is writing for a journal which recently published a highly positive review of Zoe Quinn’s new game, Depression Quest. Between blogs, subreddits and 4chan, the GamerGate movement was born.

“They wanted to be able to continue playing with half-naked female characters without anyone saying something about it”

What did gamers really want? They would say that they were fighting for “more ethics in videogame reporting, less cronyism between developers and magazines” Brad Glasgow, who conducted a study on this subject, explains.  “The gamergaters who I interviewed had the impression that the industry was pushing on them more censored, family-friendly games. They wanted to be able to continue playing with half-naked female characters without anyone saying something about it, and without being considered misogynists”. The GamerGate contributors were for a long time believed to be cliché young gamers, however Brad Glasgow’s study show that the median age was 30 years old, very different from the often depicted carefree youngsters. All the people targeted by the supporters of this movement were women. The victims and numerous reporters commented afterwards that GamerGate was never about claiming anything, but simply a way to express their hate and disdain towards Zoe Quinn. Zoe Quinn, as well as the video game creator Brianna Wu and blogger Anita Sarkeesian received so many rape, torture and death threats that they were forced to move out out of their homes, fearing for their lives. In the United States, this event was huge, so much that the New York Times described it  as “the beginning on alt-right hegemony on the Internet”, and even as a culture war. In France, despite being covered by the media, it didn’t have such an impact outside of the affected community. The problem however, doesn’t only exist on the other side of the Atlantic. The blogger Marlard was talking, since 2013, about a "sick community", soaked in sexism, fetishizing Lara Croft’s new design, and, in the famous 18-25 forum on jeuxvideo.com, misogyny was already the rule. She was actually one of the first to receive numerous waves of online harassment for daring to point out the sexism in the world of video games.

A masculine universe

Why talk again about Gamergate today? Because six years later, despite the problem being under the spotlight and having media coverage, female gamers still suffer. Video games seem to stay a masculine universe, a space where the famous rule 30 of the Internet “on the Internet, there are no women”  could be a reality. It’s nevertheless false: according to a IFOP study published in 2018, women play as much video games as men do.The Internet and Twitch are full of casual and professional gamers, like Kayane, Trinity, Little Big Whale, Zulzorander, Marie Palot…. But, inescapably, the presence of women in online games startles, surprises, annoys. 

“Being misogynistic is trendy”

To insult women and social justice warriors (nickname given to anti-discrimination  activists by their opponents) is still seen today as a way to make your audience  laugh, to gain a place inside the boy’s club, sometimes even to become famous. French streamer Jean Massiet admits it: “Being misogynistic is trendy”.

(I’ve been streaming for 5 years and there is an absolute constant: being misogynistic is trendy, make your chat laugh by playing the rebel. To be feminist is to oppose retaliations and gatekeeping. Conformism really isn’t where most people think.)

The “young boy” trick to conceal your voice

One of the main problems encountered by female players online, is “vocal”, the act of talking with other members of the team to coordinate certain attacks during a game. In this moment, it’s impossible to hide behind the neutral usernames of characters typically associated with male players: “As soon as people hear that I’m a girl, it’s over. Many women don’t want to communicate because of it” reveals Lisa. “You really feel a difference in behavior when comparing the before and after.”

Julie, another player, explains that the “after” is often synonymous with saucy flirting. “Immediately, dudes will come talk to you in private, ask for pictures and lewd requests…” To avoid this, almost all the female players that we interviewed explained to us that they use the “young boy” trick: passing as a young male player whose voice has not dropped yet, to justify their high-pitched tone. Lying to stay undisturbed is a common strategy. Some even prefer playing with the account of their male partners, thus avoiding unrequited comments.

The #MeToo aftermath is even worse

But it’s not always sufficient. Kate laments that “The #MeToo movement created a mistrust”, revealing a violent rejection of the liberation of feminine and feminist voices. “It has become a PMU* (“PMU” or “Pari Mutuel Urbain” is a bar/gambling place chain. Nowadays it is synonymous for many people with armchair psychology, politics and chauvinist behaviors) Everytime you want to point out to players that they are making sexist comments, it’s always the same reaction “you can’t say anything nowadays”, ‘feminazi”....” Far from letting those concerned question themselves, it seems that the #MeToo movement has reinforced their aggravation, which then leads them to be even more defensive or to conduct gratuitous attacks, especially on Discord, a chat/vocal platform often used by players to communicate with each other. 

“The memes are more aggressive, everyone jeers at feminists… There is some sort of frustration towards feminist awareness, a very violent reaction. It is even sometimes almost incel behavior,” explains Kash, referencing the men's rights activists movement of "involuntary celibates". “You won’t make friends talking about feminism” Nat’ali, streamer, confirms to us.

 “#MeToo has revealed the privileges that men have, and they didn’t like seeing it”

She isn’t the only one who saw the situation getting worse after Gamergate and #MeToo. “Since I started playing in 2007, I truly saw the atmosphere deteriorate” Kash told us. “I saw more bullshit these last two years than in the ten years prior, "I now see things that dudes never dared to do before. The whole community got worse”. Lisa also observed  the explosion of sexism after #MeToo. “It’s really then that I started hiding the fact that I was a woman. #Metoo has revealed the privileges that men have, and they didn't like seeing it. Don’t touch cis white hetero men, or you will get branded a fucking feminist, a whore, a feminazi.” Lisa reached the point of “not wanting to play anymore, too toxic. Gets on my nerves too quickly.” There is, too, a fear of underperforming: “I’m scared to play certain FPS (First Person Shooter, like Call of Duty) because I’m no very good at them, and I don’t want to help the belief that “girls sucks at video games” to persist” laments Nat’ali.

The liability of professional streamers

In the eyes of Julie, part of the problem resides in the fact that the gamer community is growing rapidly. “There are more and more gamers, and the newcomers are usually very young and very sexist. Even if some people change and gain understanding regarding this problem, they will be drowned by comments by teens that have no reflexion on sexism”.“ In addition to the jeuxvideo.com 18-25 forum, numerous streamers and professional players are accused of perpetuating sexism. As Numerama showed in a study made in April 2019, members of the Solary team, a french esport structure, have encouraged online harassment against several women, and have contributed in spreading sexist insults (a woman receiving compliments from a stranger, not responding to them and “calling them out on social media” is in their eyes a “whore”)

“It’s an environment in which men pat each other on the back”*

(Translator’s note: a more literal translation would be “men forgive each other” but the underlying idea in this sentence was that they allow themselves to forgive each other’s faults without actually hearing the people targeted.)

Sardoche, a League of Legends streamer and Twitch partner (video creators able to monetize their videos) has also been known for years for his very violent remarks against female players, that he calls “shitty little virgins” or “huge whores”. In addition to being aware about inciting his followers to harass, he often mocks feminist activists on twitter, and his followers always join the party. “The problem is that he is followed by a lot of boys that want to imitate him” Nat’ali tell us.

“Trolling feminists, best thing to do in the morning. Thanks to @MrKryorys for archiving these kinds of clips” Yet Sardoche is not called out, and can still enjoy the free publicity made by numerous other streamers, promoting him and condoning his unacceptable speeches. At the start of June however, the streamer announced that he was now suffering from online harassment on his Twitch lives, coming mostly from 18-25 users. These behaviors have no influence on the mentioned players’ and streamers’ careers. “They still don’t understand that they are participating to the trivialization of hatred against women” Nat’ali angrily adds “Sardoche is now co-hosting PopCorn, one of the most viewed programs on Twitch. It’s an environment in which men pat each other on the back.”

“One girl per team, no more”

This impunity is reinforced by the erasure of female players, firstly because some are reluctant to present themselves as women in online games, and secondly, because the professional environment is not giving them a platform. We call that “the quota effect”. “Those who want to become professional know that there is only one “girl” slot per team”. complains Nat’ali. This infamous “quota woman” reminds us of the “Lara Croft effect” a overused argument often put forward when criticism against the lack of female characters in video games arise: You got it wrong, look over here, there is one woman.

“At the beginning of big web TV, 7 or 8 years ago, there was a of of competition between female players. No sisterhood whatsoever, girls were awful with each other because they knew there wouldn’t be a spot for everyone” Nat’ali, who had seen the problem herself, continues.

Once hired, these female streamers still have a lot to face. A friend of Nat’ali told her last year that her team forced her to wear a mini-skirt during a marketing campaign. According to Leiden “People still see their female players as sexy props, instead of focusing on their playing skills”.

The ambience is now healthier, and “there is a real solidarity on Twitch between us, we talk a lot. With #MeToo, we understand that we needed to help each other. These topics have the spotlight, we feel more comfortable talking about them. Dudes still behave the same, but the relationship between female players changed. This is the big victory of #MeToo.”   

“Streamers need to question themselves”

Should we see this whole problem as unsolvable? For Aurélie, “in practice men are not yet supportives. The knowledge is here, we know that “sexism is bad” But if you point out that a comment is sexist, they will immediately jump and respond that no, it’s just humor”. There are many hard to unlearn habits,” Lisa remarks: “It’s the patriarchal structure: nice guys sometimes have awful reactions. It’s rooted inside of them, they don’t even realize what they’re doing.” For all of the interviewees, the education of men regarding these problems is the solution. Kash affirms: “This men-only community create a unease. Streamers need to be the example. They need to question themselves, and they shouldn’t hesitate to take clear stances regarding this.” Still, it would be easier if these stances were the norm, and taking them was not a risk.

“When you keep talking to them about it, our male friends realize the problem” Lisa happily notices. One of Kash’s friends, with whom she’s been playing for years, has evolved a lot despite starting as “mostly uninterested in the sexism problem in games”. After our interview, she decided to talk to him about her experience, and he listened to her testimony. “Last week, during a raid in which I didn’t introduce myself, a player made a sexist remark about the body of a woman. My friend told me he felt uncomfortable and talked to the guild leader about it. Nothing happened, the player wasn’t sanctioned, but I’ve known my gamer friend for 11 years and it was the first time he reacted like that. So I’m hopeful!”

Aurore Gayte for Numerama 

*names have been changed This article was created in partnership with the YESSS podcast. .Their latest creation, "Warriors and Games" is available here. Every month, the YESSS team gathers testimonies of women who triumphed against sexism: those who responded, who corrected, who snapped and resisted. YESSS is a podcast for warriors, positive and decidedlyfeminist. It is conceived and hosted by Margaïd Quioc, Elsa Miské et Anaïs Bourdet, produced by the Popkast label in Marseille.

[petitepistol]

headcanon;but it is very messy

oh god strap in because this is going to be 3k words worth of rambling under the cut which you don't actually have to read since i posted it at 5am so it probably does not make much sense!! also I have only just recently accepted that my elena does not follow compilation timeline to the letter because I fucking hate the fact that before crisis placed her age at being a high school student almost immediately preceding the start of the original game and I always saw elena as being at least aerith's age by the time she became a turk so please bear with me as my elena uses a floating timeline to prevent her from being...like a literal teenager for original game fuck that noise they had cissnei be the uwu fifteen-year-old turk and elena gets to be her own character when im writing her so compilation can fuck right off

so first off her dad is a military man, and that entire side of his family? kind of just defaulted into the military for generations. well before shinra at least, the old shit. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the idea that shinra is the dominant military force on the planet when as little as forty years before game them were a fledgling company, and I'm fascinated by what kind of insane shit must have gone down to facilitate shinra going from defense contractor/power company to defacto global superpower, and what they superseded when that happened. so yeah her dad is military, and even after he was put out to pasture he still wound up teaching at a prestigious shinra sponsored academy in junon and both of his daughters attended.

her mom was upper middle class and driven as hell, had a ballet career which got cut short due to injury in her late teens. then she wound up going into nursing by her early twenties and spent some time working in deepground when it was still a run of the mill army hospital where she met elena's father who was...voluntarily a candidate for some biotech stuff that shinra was doing back when shinra was still a defense contractor, go figure he was one of many early examples of mako conditioning. they didn't get along at first but did wind up marrying but never actually settling down because of the nature of his career. she retired from nursing but did medical coding part-time.

elena's sister was born in deepground (canonically from the 'midgar slums' but deepground is pretty fucking close and it makes sense to the era and background worldbuilding), and things went as smoothly as possible at this point in time. elena herself was born in icicle because lol military stationed there (elena being an icicle native was also a very popular piece of fanon in the pre-compilation era and I feel like it may have had some supporting evidence in something like kaitai shinsho but I never really managed to cross-reference that so probably not true and just a gut feeling), and by then things were getting...fishy. details being covered up about the full extent of the side-effects of mako conditioning and rumors that shinra had an egregious amount of influence over the military at large. these things all turned out to be true, but elena's father kept his head down and did his duty because he was a good soldier. he was also in wutai on and off during this, before the situation over there fully hit the fan, so he had more pressing matters to worry about.

anyway, elena was born in icicle but she and her mother and sister weren't there for more than a year or so before it was back at it again in midgar because dad was being put on some kind of assignment that had him closely working with shinra. the general implication of this is he was doing legwork for the implementation of SOLDIER in a few years, but what that means can vary by interaction from being paperwork to mk ultra style endurance testing to teaching an adolescent jenova project specimen how to integrate into military procedure before they drop him in wutai which is slated to become an all-out conflagration very shortly. it all depends but the point is it is sticky and worsened significantly when his wife is killed in a car accident. if this seems familiar it is because I firmly believe elena is the aya brea of ffvii and parasite eve featured similar background story. I'm borrowing deal with it.

by this point, elena is around eight and in school but elena is just barely four and in the vehicle when it happens. mom is killed instantly, elena survives but barely fares better. she's in intensive care for a while and there is a period where they don't even know if she is going to be brain dead or just have permanent brain damage in the first few days. her sister is basically staying at a school friend's house for like...way more than a fortnight while this got sorted out because their dad still actually has orders to carry out, even if he isn't on a battlefield. at one point on of his higher-ups implies that it could be arranged to transfer elena from the civilian hospital to the recently renovated deepground and he turns it down and feels like shit for it because yeah, deepground probably would mean a better chance at his youngest daughters survival because of that cutting edge shinra biotech, but at what cost? he knows well enough now something is wrong and justifies his willingness to let fate take its course with elena by focusing on the fact that her sister is still alive and well and he needs to keep his head down for his older daughter because she needed him too, even though they barely saw each other during the crux of this.

so lo and behold elena does recover and goes through the icky sticky of physical therapy and does just fine. great, right? well yes but the family dynamic is stupidly fucked up. dad has done either really good or really bad on his assignment, and gets put out to pasture in junon to teach at a military academy that is now nearly entirely funded by shinra (yeah so in before crisis it is all but implicit that academy is in midgar but fuck that junon is the seat of military power it would be near there if anything). this is great because it keeps him in work and both of his daughters will benefit. which they do. elena's sister is an ideal student, and the roughness of losing her mother happened at a sensitive period but a period where she was old enough to understand what was going on. she was capable of being a little trooper through all of it, but the cost of it was not being able to emotionally process the loss of her mother and the fact that her little sister was still alive when mom was not. the seeds of discord are sown there and that will be an ongoing thing throughout their childhood and into adulthood. they don't hate each other, but the relationship is fraught with tension and it is far from a healthy dynamic, especially since their father has pulled back almost entirely from fatherhood. he has no idea what he is doing without his late wife, and can't organically interact with his daughters so he defaults to being an instructor. both of them flourish despite this, but it is not a good family dynamic.

paint over this family drama with the fact that wutai is now well and truly happening. the military is effectively controlled by shinra and very very soon the propaganda blitz surrounding SOLDIER is going to push that over the edge and shinra will be accepted on a public and official level as being the army. the slogans are changing and going from an old fashioned sense of unity to focusing on becoming top class and singularly extraordinary. there is an emphasis on joining to be great rather than joining for the greater good. the recruitment plays into the deeply seated neurosis of adolescence for a reason because the younger some kid joins up the more malleable they are to both the shinra rhetoric and the by now very refined mako enhancement process that costs so much but nets such spectacular gains. in fact, it costs far too much to ever justify wasting that kind of money on doing it to women. so yeah it is blog canon that women in the shinra army is not a thing that is encouraged and like hell would they ever be in SOLDIER. the company culture is an old boys club steeped in misogyny and the only reason scarlet succeeded is because she took that and marinated in it and played the game very well. dirge era deepground operatives are little more than a consequence of years of unethical human experimentation left to rot in a basement. we don't really see women in actual military positions in the original game. sexism is alive and well and it serves my characterization of elena and her development.

so yeah it is a time of paradigms shifting and reforming very rapidly. elena's sister takes to this with aplomb, she is a perfect cadet and in elena's eyes a perfect daughter. someone easier to idolize than the SOLDIERs on the glossy recruitment posters and more available than their emotionally distant father. she is pristine and by extension beloved, things elena wants to be as well. elena is too young to realize her sister doesn't have any better of a relationship with their father than she does, but who knows if that would change anything. she emulates her ideal sister but remains a half step behind, which makes perfect sense because elena is four years younger. from a critical perspective that half step is a very close gap because even if elena doesn't realize it, she is just as prodigious as her sister is. the difference is while her sister can follow orders to the letter, elena has the makings of a maverick. not a positive thing in the strict environment of a military academy, no matter how high her scores are. idealization goes hand and hand with a quiet resentment, the latter of which her sister has also harbored towards her ever since their later mother died and elena did not.

that simmering toxicity stays at a low boil until her sister graduates. at the top of the class, even she could not become anything. or at least, to elena it looks that way, as she watches her sister back her things for midgar where she will start as a trainee for an administrative/auditing position for the shinra electric power company. elena does not know what a turk is at this point, even if her father does. he seems as impassive as ever, even if that is not the case and in actuality he is struggling to accept the reality that his oldest daughter is far too smart for his own good and is entering a profession no one would ever want for their child. despite his distance and his lack of connection and all of his failings as a father he does love his children and that will eat away at him until he dies no doubt. but all elena sees is her shining example of an older sister being doomed to desk work. when gun leaves (because she becomes gun the moment she is added to the payroll) the real constant of elena's childhood also leaves. and during adolescence, that is hard for anyone. more so when you realize no matter how sharp your skills are your future is off the chopping block and there is no path for you to take with them.

elena goes from being a prodigy prone to pesky critical thinking to a prodigy with a chip on her shoulder. her technical marks don't plummet, in fact, quite the opposite. she picks up a secondary battle specialty, close-quarters combat, which will set her apart from her sister. she flourishes with equal parts precision and aggression, despite her small size. the academic commendations feel entirely hollow to her though, and in the way teenagers tend to do she convinces herself she is not much more than nothing. the memory of her sister becomes tarnished with the bitterness of her negative self-image. her instructors must hate her for her failures, she tells herself with false objectivity. her instructors include her actual father, who is nearly clueless aside from a vague feeling in the pit of his stomach and he doesn't know if that is due to his oldest daughter going into wetworks or the fact his younger daughter is shattering academic record after record with the sheer force of what he assumes to be ennui driven spite.

at least he is clueless until in the spring just after she turns fifteen she files for early certification to leave academy, just like every other boy in her year as well as every other boy on the continent and beyond. they do it to catch the recruitment push and join the army soon enough to have a shot at making SOLDIER before they age out. but elena can't do that and he knows it and braces himself to have that conversation with her, calling her into his office where she keeps her stance formal until he tells her to be as ease and even in the chair across from his desk her posture is tense. spine straight, eyes ahead. he begins what he thinks is going to be the "you know you can't join SOLDIER" conversation but she cuts him off in what he thinks is a somewhat uncharacteristic display, but to her is just another example of how disgraceful her conduct is and how she needs to get out of academy before brings the value of the whole institution down. she tells him this, she tells him she is aware of her shortcomings and the fact she has no future in a military career and her intention is to go to midgar and learn how to be a civilian on her own terms. he signs off on it because none of her bullet points are actually wrong.

midgar is a city of industry and a city of vice and she hasn't been there since she was a child. it is good to her and it is bad to her, as she unlearns years of quasi-military discipline and figures out how to be her own person. she still sometimes wears the academy uniform because old habits die hard and it is a durable thing. she has a one-room apartment in the slums and a job tending bar in wall market. the hours are early evening to after the last train ends and her circadian rhythm adjusts from 4am wakeups and beds made with hospital corners to the distorted clock that comes from living under a plate with no natural sunlight. there are just as many fights and skirmishes to be had in midgar but none of them are like the training exercises at academy. each one is a beautiful short-lived shrine, sometimes they are fun and on her terms, and other times they are fraught and meant for survival. elena relishes them all as a skillset she once thought was a dead-end turns out to be valuable once more. the major negative point is her sister.

gun is in midgar and wears a sleek black suit along with many other people in sleek black suits. elena hears the term 'turk' for the first time. whether they are urban legends or hired killers or pencil pushers who do double duty waterboarding enemies of a power company turned judge and jury doesn't matter. what matters is the deadness she can see in gun's green eyes when she drops by the bar before closing, oftentimes with equally dead-eyed coworkers. those confrontations are never pleasant, they are a powderkeg. elena would like to reach out to her sister, chase away the exhausted look in her face the way she can with other patrons, but the sentiment gets stuck in her throat and they just snipe at each other. gun is a terrible adult and so are all of her colleagues and they are trying their best to neutralize a growing terrorist threat and they are failing. when they come around in the low light of the bar illuminates the stark futility of everything after midnight.

elena does not know exactly what is going on at the highest level of intrigue but she has a good guess. shinra is shitting the bed, and that includes the turks and SOLDIER, which seems to her to be in the middle of a massive coverup as their public-facing 1sts disappear one after another. she wants no part of it and her agenda switches from mastering the nuances of being a civilian to finding sustainability and meaning outside of shinra as the cracks in the facade split ever wider. when the sector six plate is effectively destroyed, it takes the bar she worked at with it and elena decides it is time to get the hell out of midgar.

her years in wall market set her up with some interesting connections and the owner of a small weapons shop (who she might have married for tax purposes but that isn't fleshed out) sets her up with a distinguished older gentleman who is a complete asshole and happens to run guns all across the continent. despite his immaculate coiffure he is not a people person and requires someone who is both qualified to demonstrate his product and more pleasant to deal with than him, because the market is hot right now. shinra has never had much interest in dealing with flyover country. sure they build reactors in some of the backwaters, but not all of them. and no reactor meant no need for shinra to spend the money on protecting hick villages from increased monster presence. the planet is dying and the monsters are restless in the same way wildlife gets in the real world. the people in those tiny towns do their best to defend their homes and livelihood and that means purchasing weaponry, mostly old stock from competitors that shinra has long since crushed or acquired. shinra lets this happen because it is not a threat to them.

so, for a few years, elena is a pretty face with a bang and it is almost scarlettian. she never comes close to the sex appeal of the actual weapons development director of shinra, but it is enough to help move merchandise. most of the buyers are just people trying to survive in the middle of nowhere, but not always. sometimes they are rougher than that, but the money is good enough that she doesn't care about that, or the fact the man who employed her hates her guts and doesn't care much whether she lives or dies. it is a thrilling rush and it is outside of shinra and more than ever does she want to put as much distance as possible between shinra and herself. because her sister is dead according to a notification that tseng of the turks had been cordial enough to send to her father, news that he passed on in a voicemail to elena with a hollow tone. maybe he was trying to reconnect with her because she was now all he had left in the way of family. maybe he just had the same sense of duty as always. she never calls back to ask.

midgar calls her back though. one day her employer informs her with a vindictive grin that he has sold the business part and parcel and that includes her as an employee. acquired by shinra. the reason, ironically, is scarlet, whom she has been doing a two-bit impersonation of. scarlet is a forward thinker but that doesn't mean she can't be swayed by a stockpile of vintage firearms, and with the viciousness required of her position she can throw weight around and get her hands on anything. the weapons are what she wanted and elena knows this and rejects the notion that she will become apart of the shinra payroll because of this little merger. this is proven wrong in short order as her assets are frozen systematically because the turks are hard up for people. they know her. they knew her sister and they know her, even if they haven't kept tabs on her. as soon as the papers cross his desk tseng seizes the opportunity.

the interview with hr to place elena is a mere formality. there is no other place for her there but in the turks. elena, for all her audacity, accepts this and plasters on a professional veneer. the game begins and the world ends.

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 7x18 Dirty Girls

aka gotta have faith

We did it, guys! We made it to the last season! Also, hello if you’re new, and stumbled upon this without context. As usual, these impromptu text posts are the product of my fevered mind as I rant about the episode I just watched for an hour (okay, sometimes perhaps two). Anything goes!

And in today’s episode, our secondary villain is finally revealed made of pure misogyny, and Faith is here to make everything better.

So... Dirty Girls. We really are in the finish line of the season now.

This episode opens with two scenes that I’m not sure were intended to have the connection I made, but let’s do it anyway. In the first, we’re introduced to Caleb, a priest with extremely misogynistic views of women, who is revealed to be an agent of the First. And one who’s been pulling a lot of its strings in our world at that, like blowing up the council, or organizing the Bringers.

I guess Caleb hates humanity as a whole - he is aligning himself with the First after all -, but he directs pretty much all of that hatred onto women. He calls the Potential he picks up with his truck a ‘whore’ and ‘dirty’, and from his fantasies of his past, you get the idea that he specifically targeted young women using his authority, seduced them, and then turned it around and punished them for it.

Misogyny as a theme happens a lot on the show of course, Buffy fights the patriarchy after all. But when it comes to overt depictions of it, it’s often a bit… well, overt. You want to cheer Buffy for punching the douchebag in the face, but you’re also aware of how it’s an exaggeration of reality, made to get that fistbump reaction out of you.

And actually, that’s something that I think is worth re-examining too. A few years back, when the Supergirl TV show was about to premiere, there were a lot of discussions around this type of overt feminism. When I watched the pilot, I experienced some of these cringe moments myself. But, despite some of the many actual problems of the show and its feminism at the time, it also got me thinking.

Why? Why do I actually feel cringey about this?

And the answer that I found was that I was imagining watching the show from a perspective other than my own. Kind of like watching the 1992 Buffy movie back in the 90s with my brother made me hyperaware of its many faults, instead of giving me a chance to enjoy its culty ridiculousness.

So, while considering other perspectives can be essential in forming critical thought of your media, there’s a difference in trying to understand a minority perspective for instance, and feeling the need to put yourself in the shoes of the dominant culture, and base your opinions with that in mind.

But that’s a tangent inside a tangent.

Disregarding all that, imo the show’s most successful and impactful depictions of misogyny arguably come from characters who don’t always act like monsters. I actually like the bad guy from Reptile Boy for instance. He acts charming and nice to lure Buffy in, and only reveals his true nature, once he holds all the power.

Caleb in that sense then, is the show’s best and most horrifying example of that type of misogynistic evil.

(And yes, we could also talk about the Trio here, but trying to fold them in would be yet another tangent, and it’s time to talk about the actual episode at this point.)

Caleb says to the First that he doesn’t lie... but that’s a lie. He does lie. By wearing the symbol of authority, of someone you can confide in, he tells you that he can be trusted. And yes, there is very much a commentary here about the evil of religion and Catholicism, but the point being is that for someone in that community, Caleb’s appearance signals no threat. And Caleb uses that assumption to his advantage.

He only gradually reveals his true nature to Shannon at the beginning. First by calling her a whore. Because hat that point, he knows that he holds the power in their interaction and that he doesn’t need to pretend to be anything but the monster he is in order to lure her in. Shannon’s guard is down, and he knows that she can’t escape.

Caleb’s misogyny is disturbing because it’s still believable in all of its overtness. He does what he does because he knows that he can. He has the power, and that power reveals all of his deepest darkest thoughts with nothing to keep him in check.

And right after this scene, you get Xander’s dream. Where he dreams about two Potentials coming onto him in a threesome situation (and specifically with the two women also getting it on with each other in front of him, because I guess fetishizing lesbians is still a thing that Xander hasn’t internalized despite his best friend being one), while the rest of the girls are having some sexy pillow-fight in the other room.

So… I guess we’re pairing up scary misogyny with “”fun”” misogyny?

Of course, since this is a dream, we can argue that Xander can’t really be held responsible for it. We don’t have power over our dreams after all. It’s where our subconscious works through stuff, and that doesn’t reflect our persona wholly.

Except then the question still remains – why is this scene here? Why would someone write this scene in, especially in an episode full of these themes? When Xander wakes up, he’s immediately faced with the reality, where his role is to fix the toilets. It’s supposed to be funny. Look how powerless he actually is, compared to the girls.

But then he also gets the big speech moment in the very same episode, supporting Buffy, and then loses an eye to Caleb. How are these things connected? And if they’re not… why is that scene at the beginning there?

I mean, you could interpret Caleb removing one of Xander’s eyes as a punishment for Xander having these ‘urges’… Except Caleb’s comment before doing that doesn’t reference that. It references Xander’s speech from Potential, where he’s telling Dawn that he sees a lot by being underappreciated.

So, that’s probably not what they were going for. And it’s a stretch of an interpretation. In the end, there’s little to no reason for that scene to be there, and therefore I’m left with the impression, that the writers weren’t even aware of the misogynistic angle of Xander fetishizing all these young women in his dream. They just thought it was funny.

God, I wrote 1k workds already, and I haven’t even got to Buffy’s storyline in this.

This episode is setting up the pre-finale twist of everyone turning against Buffy, which I kinda hate. And that bleeds into my thoughts of Dirty Girls, unfortunately.

Like, I get it. Everyone kept telling Buffy that this was a trap, that it was a bad idea to bring the Potentials to confront Caleb without knowing more, and she ignored them. And that got a whole lot of them injured. At least two of them dead. It was a bad call.

On the other hand, didn’t Giles keep telling her in the last episode that she needed to make these hard decisions? That she needed to think big picture, and accept that there would be losses? And now, when he advises her against action, and she makes the damn ‘hard choice’ and ‘acts like a general’ I guess it’s still her fault, huh.

I swear, nothing Buffy ever does is good for these people. And maybe that’s the point we’re making, that leadership is lonely and hard and whatever the fuck, but I’m tired and I kinda hate it.

Buffy fucked up, yes. Okay. But instead of dealing with that, instead of having an honest conversation where we can explore these things, we just vaguely hint at how this is driving a wedge between her and the rest of the group.

Thanks, I hate it.

But hey, at least Faith’s here! The way Eliza Dushku delivers this line in particular is an absolute highlight:

SPIKE:  “Not all that tension was about you. Giles was a part of a plan to kill me. For Buffy's own good.” FAITH:  “Well, that makes me feel better about me… worse about Giles...kinda shaky about you.”

The show also addresses the fact that no one told Faith about what the fuck was going on. Which… is a bit of a problem, and paints each and every character on Buffy in a pretty bad light? Willow’s whole explanation about how, well, Faith was in prison and they thought she was safe there falls pretty flat (especially since Faith was in fact attacked in prison due to this), and the characters know it. More than anything, it just feels like they all forgot about Faith, and how this whole plan of the First to murder the Slayer line affects her.

And yet, to be honest, I couldn’t help but feel like it was the writers that actually forgot? Or at the very least, thought that it was inconvenient to share this information with Faith, before both shows came to a point where they could integrate her character into the story again?

Anyway, whoever you blame this on, it’s kinda bad.

Overall, Dirty Girls is still chilling and effective, and Faith is a breath of fresh air in this final stretch of the season. I’m just not a big fan of where we’re taking Buffy’s arc here before the big finale, and that shows.

Next up: Wine mom and vodka aunt fight over the kids’ love.

[amphtaminedreams]

We Voted for Murderers

65.2%.

That’s the percentage of people who voted for the Conservative candidate in my constituency, and I feel completely heartbroken. See, things have properly gone to shit. 

If we’re talking numbers?

Local councils estimate the number of people sleeping rough on any given night between 2010 and 2018 has risen from 1,768 to 4,677, a 165% increase. The Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food bank charity, has reported a 5,146% increase in emergency food parcels being distributed since 2008. An 8% cut in spending per school pupil since 2009. Funding from central government to local government cut by 60% in that same period. £37 billion less spent on working-age social security compared to over a decade ago by 2020. A 90% fall in the number of social homes being built since 2010. A £7,300,000 decrease in funding for women’s shelters between 2011 and 2017. Don’t even get me started on the government’s treatment of the NHS.

I’ve heard stories of individuals applying for PIP due to mental illness being berated about suicide attempts and the likelihood of another as part of a “formal interview” process to see whether they qualify. People collapsing in job centre queues, freezing to death on the streets and the elderly in their homes, suicides whilst on never ending mental healthcare waiting lists. In fact, 17,000 sick and/or disabled individuals have died whilst waiting for PIP payments to come through, and in total, UCL researchers have linked 120,000 deaths to austerity (I’m not going to comment on the irony of my former university that’s notoriously lacklustre when it comes to giving a fuck about the wellbeing of its students publishing this unless...I just did?). 8 years of negligent homicide of the most vulnerable people in our society under the Conservative government and we voted them back in.

So I ask, are people really stupid enough to believe that the politicians responsible for this mess are the ones who are going to fix it just because they make a few characteristically empty promises on TV or does the British public at large really give even less of a fuck about other people than I thought? As in actually not give a fuck about people dying?

I have to tell myself it’s the former. The press’ treatment of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour was scathing. 

Corbyn, a man who has stood by the same principles of fairness, justice, and equality, for the entirety of his career, was criticised by the likes of The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, for being indecisive and a threat to this country whilst Boris Johnson, a man who can barely string a sentence together when he is asked to give a straight answer to something and blocked the release of a report covering Russian interference in British politics, was held up as the one people should put their faith in. 

I know, the press are never going to be completely neutral. But shouldn’t they at least be committed to integrity? And the truth? Isn’t that the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of journalism? I’ve been hearing the phrase “post-truth world” thrown around a lot and it’s probably an indication of my privilege that it was only with this election that I properly understood what that meant; it was found by the NGO First Draft just 2 days before the election, damage way past the point of done, that 88% of the Conservative Party’s Facebook ads (compared to 0% of Labour’s ads) contained misleading information. The repercussions were non-existent. After Boris Johnson’s claim that Jeremy Corbyn wanted to raise corporation and income tax to the highest levels in Europe was publicised, only Channel 4′s Factcheck website published the actual statistics (France, Belgium, Portugal and Greece all have much higher corporation tax rates than Labour’s proposal). Similarly, in many constituencies, the Lib Dems were posting fliers where Labour candidates were, in the previous election, the runner ups to the Conservative candidate, claiming that it was instead THEIR party’s candidate who had the highest chance of unseating the latter. Days before the election, the headline of one of Britain’s most highly circulated papers claimed that a Corbyn government would plunge us into a crisis the likes of which “we haven’t seen the Second World War”, which is kind of wild considering that 130,000 preventable deaths have been linked to austerity under the Conservative government compared to 70,000 civilian deaths in said war. Not that either is good, obviously, and I can’t believe I have to point that out. But then, right-wingers did paint Jeremy Corbyn as a monster for passing up watching the Queen’s Christmas Day speech to volunteer at a homeless shelter, so I thought I’d just cover my back, y’know. 

Shouldn’t there be standards that the media is held to? You know, like not making slanderous statements about some politicians that have no actual basis in fact whilst brushing over the statements of others. Whilst the PM’s father Stanley Johnson was on nation television calling the public illiterate, and Jacob Rees-Mogg was blaming the Grenfell victims deaths on their “lack of common sense”, and Michael Gove was stating that people who needed to use food banks had brought it on themselves because they were not “best able to manage their finances”, it was Jeremy Corbyn who was being called an enemy of the people, accused of trying to plunge us into a “Marxist hell”...I mean, if Denmark and Norway and Finland with some of the highest living standards in the world are “Marxist hell”s  then sure, that’s what he’s doing. But that’s a hell I’m sure a lot of people would find much comfier than a freezing cold pavement. Before Labour had even released their (fully-costed!) manifesto, barefaced lies were being published about how much it would cost and how it would plunge us into trillions of pounds worth of debt, as if it hasn’t increased from £1 trillion to £1.8 trillion in the years since David Cameron took office. Meanwhile, when Labour did publish their manifesto and the Financial Times published a letter signed by 163 prominent economists and academics backing their spending plans? Crickets. Nothing sums it up better than the debate around Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged anti-semitism, discussed ad-nauseam whilst Boris Johnson’s actual racism, islamophobia, misogyny and classism, RIGHT OUT OF THE HORSE’S MOUTH, was completely ignored by most news outlets. 

You know what, maybe people earning £85k just DON’T want to pay an extra £3 in tax a week to make sure children get an education. Maybe everybody IS just as selfish as that one twat on Question Time who got all red in the face over the prospect of having to give up an amount less than the cost of a tub of Ben and Jerrys a week. But if that’s true, this isn’t a country I want to live in at all, or a planet I want to live on, really. I hope it’s not. I hope it’s a case of a need for some kind of collective realisation that the Sun ain’t shit. Merseyside did it. The younger generation are catching on. And look at the results there.

Labour probably couldn’t fulfil ALL of their promises. No political party is perfect. I was told again and again how unrealistic those promises were as if that was enough to make me go ”oh...I guess I’ll vote for 4 more years of people dying in the streets instead”. Yes, in an ideal world, the entire manifesto would be made a reality, but it depended on far too many rich people being good and honest. Let’s be real-the elite will always find a way to avoid paying their fare share on the premise that they “earned it”, as if anybody earns billions by sheer hard work alone and past a certain point, not off other people’s backs. As if there aren’t nurses and teachers and firemen and other public sector workers who don’t put in just as much energy and as many hours and emotional labour as CEOs and business owners and investors. But the point is that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn acknowledged this, and their manifesto aimed to give the power back to the average person, from the vulnerable to the supposedly middle class still struggling to make ends meet, and give them the quality of life they deserve. It was built on the simple premise that the people should use their government, not the other way round, and that everybody deserves the basic human rights of shelter, nutrition, safety and dignity, regardless of their fortune in life. However many of Labour’s policies would actually have been fulfilled, it would’ve been a shift in the right direction. 

Now the election’s been and gone and I’m scared. Already, the narrative is being rewritten by the billionaires in control of this country that a manifesto like the one we saw this year will never sit right with this country, when it is what so many desperately need. The people putting this information out there know the truth: that Labour’s membership trebled in size under Corbyn (more people voted for him than for any Labour leader since Tony Blair), that most of the safe labour seats were lost because of Brexit, and that if the manifesto had been represented accurately, there’s a good chance that Boris Johnson would no longer be our Prime Minister. I’m scared a person like Jeremy Corbyn will never front Labour again. 

Because I do not want a tory painted red who’s friends with Jacob Rees-Mogg behind the scenes, I do not want a war criminal who thinks that bombing innocent people is ever acceptable, I do not want a person who doesn’t see people of colour as part of the working class and indulges in the occasional bit of TERF-ism.

Already, the Conservative party are backpedaling on the few promises they made to increase NHS spending, and I am scared. I am scared for myself, in the event that I need urgent mental health care again, and I am scared for those less privileged than me who don’t have a family to support them, who don't have a roof over their head, who weren’t fortunate enough to be born in a country with relative economic and political stability, who cannot physically go out and work to earn a living. I am worried about the bigots that this election has already emboldened, the Katie Hopkins and the Tommy Robinsons of the world, who think the things that blind luck have graced them with they somehow earned, who pride themselves on ignorance and cruelty and selfishness.

So for now, what can we do? 

Join trade unions. Organise. Write to your MPs. Bring attention to those who are vulnerable. Be vocal with your criticism of the establishment. Call out those in politics for an ego-trip hiding behind “personality”. Do your research. Keep an eye on the numbers. The “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote” sentiment is old, because it does. No “as a feminist, I exercise my right to vote for whoever I want”, because as a feminist, you should care about ALL women, not just the white, middle class, able-bodied ones. 

And if anyone has any more suggestions, let me know. Because I am sick and tired of living under a government who doesn’t give a fuck about the people it’s supposed to protect.

Lauren x

[DISCLAIMER: The photo is not mine. Just devastated and trying to find the words to express it.]

[emmafrostyyy]

how in the world am i just reading this now and THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH

i'm just going to go ahead and say it. actress/model mj > reporter mj.

making her the generic Reporter Girl Next Door Girlfriend With Modest Clothes So She Automatically Has Agency trope misses the magic of what made comic book mj great and honestly the whole 'let's reinvent mj bc she can't be both beautiful and an actress THAT'S NOT EMPOWERING' thing is just internalized misogyny demon doing its work.

comic mj is fun. she's glamorous, vain, confident, obnoxious, independent, and LOUD. she's not your plucky Relatable™ down to earth girl who's clumsy and wears ponytails or whatever.

she's steals every scene, is proud of her looks, doesn't care much about 'intellectual' subjects and sciences like peter and gwen do, dates around, and refuses to be committed to a person. her personality has always been larger than life and her comfort with her sexuality is either too attractive or too uncomfortable for people. you either love her or hate her, but she wouldn't change for you. despite her bravado, she has so many gaps and struggles i still related to.

i think one of the main reasons why mj as a character gets some unfair (mostly sexist lbr) criticisms is because she's just the type of female character not everyone will like.

but there's also a reason why she had a huge popularity when first introduced - she was the first woman in comics representative of 60s counterculture. especially at the time where silver age comic women were..well, silver age.

60s was where second wave feminism began and women were challenging the outdated notions of women having to marry and be domestic. they were also opposing the system of work discrimination alongside fighting for their reproductive/sexuality rights. it's no surprise how a character like mj who refused to ever get tied down, was unapologetically sexual, and was working her ass off with her career to the point she's been living independently with her own apartment at just 19/20, became the breakout character in spider-man at that time.

and honestly the PS4 writers' logic annoys me because a female character being a reporter doesn't make her immediately 'strong' or have 'agency'.

why do these people attach a woman's worth to a job? when idk, women are MORE than that.

the implication that mj needs to be 'fixed' because apparently comic mj is not feministy enough for them?

mj breaking model/actress stereotypes and having the determination to be something in the entertainment industry because it's her true passion even when she's been called stupid/dumb/airhead her entire life, and even knowing that this is the industry where that sexism and stigma is prominent the most, makes her a FEMINIST CHARACTER.

mj fighting to get complex roles for female actresses and challenging people who want to typecast her as a one dimensional love interest who's just there to be pretty, makes her a FEMINIST CHARACTER.

mj being unashamed about wanting to be famous and loving the arts without ever compromising her traits that make people uncomfortable, refusing to be anything but HERSELF while people might deem her pursuit 'shallow' or 'worthless', makes her a FEMINIST CHARACTER.

mj being obnoxiously unapologetic of her sexuality and her hundreds of crop tops and love for attention and apathy to academia AND still being a well-written, complicated character with such character strength and flaws MAKES HER A GOOD, COMPLEX FICTIONAL WOMAN WHO DOESN'T NEED A 'REINVENTION'.

you know what doesn't count as feminist?

going to the cliche 'reporter girlfriend' route because you're too lazy to take the challenge of integrating an actress/model as a playable character to a game where radioactive spiders and scientists with psychokinetic tentacle arms exist.

implying that mj taking a culturally accepted 'empowering' job such as journalism gives her agency because apparently being passionate about acting/modelling means you're nothing but a stupid, talentless bimbo who depends on looks. ALSO, and according to them, being a reporter who's in the action side is better because being an actress/model means you just sit pretty and wait in the house for your boyfriend despite the fact that comic mj has beaten the shit out of some rogues and saved peter's ass more than twice.

making mj 'dress down/tone down' and removing her outlandishness because you want her to be more 'fit' to peter and you only accept one type of Strong Female Character which is the Generic Likable Fantasy Girl Palatable To Men. a girl who's sarcastic but not aggressive or else she's just a bitch, pretty but not TOO pretty or else she might be a shallow hag or whatever.

reporters are saving the damn world right now but that was never the reason why people rooted for mj, despite whatever ps4 or ultimate wants to tell me. using the 'reporter' as a plot imposed excuse just to put her in the 'spider-man' action side is a disservice to mj's history - an ambitious, proactive woman who was so driven to be an actress/model despite the barrage of mockery and sexist stereotypes thrown at her, who diversified the spider-man world BECAUSE she wasn't a reporter that gets shoved into the action plot. she was separate from that part and we get to see her own, individual story.

and personally, to strip those traits is to lose a large part of what made her stand out as a unique and interesting character.

i enjoyed mj in the game very much, but i can't stand the reasons, the laziness, the plain ignorance, and misogyny behind it. adaptational changes are normal but at least bury your arrogance somewhere 💀 thinking a 'fixed,' now 'empowering' mj is groundbreaking? buddy, comic mj has been that for 50 years.

[uglyducklingpresse]

“WE ARE ALL SOMEWHAT COLONIZED IN OUR EXISTENCE”: JAMIE CHIANG IN CONVERSATION WITH ZAHRA PATTERSON

UDP apprentice Jamie Chiang interviewed writer and educator Zahra Patterson in February 2019 after the release of her UDP title Chronology, recent winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. They discussed Zahra's journaling in Cape Town; her friendship with Liepollo Ranekoa, who passed away in 2012; the impact of language choice in postcolonial literature; tattoos; and more.

Taking as its starting point an ultimately failed attempt to translate a Sesotho short story into English, Chronology explores the spaces language occupies in relationships, colonial history, and the postcolonial present. It is a collage of images and documents, folding on words-that-follow-no-chronology, unveiling layers of meaning of queering love, friendship, death, and power.

Can you talk about the background of your decision to go to Cape Town to find who you are or the meaning of life? Did you find it? (In Chronology, Zahra refers to her journey to Cape Town as a search for herself.) 

Yeah, I mean sometimes I get a little dramatic perhaps when I'm writing in my journal. 

How old were you? How many years ago was that? 

It was the end of 2009 into 2010, so I would have been in my late twenties. I feel a journal is a place to express one's ideas, but it's also a creative space. I wouldn't take myself totally seriously in everything that comes out in a journal. I think there's definitely some self-awareness of one's own—my self importance, but also the quest to find oneself is not just to be made fun of. I think it's an important concept.

How long did you stay in Cape Town? 

I was there for around five weeks. As far as the decision to go, it was more spur of the moment. I was in South Africa for a wedding. My cousin got married and instead of going off traveling that far for a week, I thought I would just spend a couple of months if I had to go to that part of the world; there's no point in going for a week, so I was going to stay. I hadn't actually decided where I was going after the wedding until I got there, and Cape Town seemed to make the most sense to me. 

It perhaps felt the least imperialistic to go and spend time in such a cosmopolitan, international city as opposed to going somewhere more remote. You're either a tourist or a local, whereas Cape Town is an easy city to integrate into. 

I see. On page 33, you mention that you have a tattoo, and in the caption there is this word ke nonyana. What does ke nonyana mean? 

It means I'm a bird. 

That's the first word you spoke in Sesotho? 

Yes. I found the words in Liepollo’s English-Sesotho dictionary one day, and when she came home I spoke them. It meant a lot to her that I’d engaged with her language.

If you don’t mind, could you elaborate the story behind Liepollo’s colleague’s Facebook profile picture. What happened? 

It was the day she died, and his Facebook profile changed to her picture. It was an image of her. That was jarring because why somebody would put an image of a friend up, and there are very few circumstances that someone would do something like that and usually it's because they're dead. So when I saw that his Facebook picture changed to her face, it occurred to me that something terrible had happened. And I was at work at the time, so it was just very disorienting.

Sorry to hear that. Did you get your tattoo because of this? 

Yeah, so I didn't have anybody to mourn with because I had met Liepollo in Cape Town and we didn't have friends in common. Actually, we had a friend in common—an American who interned at Chimurenga while I was staying with Liepollo who I met once at the house in Observatory and once for coffee in Brooklyn—but she had moved to D.C. by that time, so I didn't reach out to her. It was a very isolated mourning experience. That's kind of why I got the tattoo, just to have her with me and to have that symbol and to think of her every day. Because when you have a long distance friendship, you're not going to think of the person every day. We were in touch every few months. I don’t want to forget her due to not having a lot of people to remember who she was with, so I needed to make her memory permanent on me. I think everybody thinks about getting tattoos in this day and age. My rule for tattoos is if I want it for a full year, then I'll get it, and I've never wanted anything for a year. So it’s my only tattoo.

And ke nonyana sounds beautiful. 

Thank you. I think it's beautiful also. 

And on page 37 and 38, there’s an interesting conversation you had with a Muslim guy named Saed. I found some of his talk kind of sexist. What was your reaction when you were talking to him? It sounds like he's almost preaching to you, trying to change your idea about what a woman's purpose is in this world. 

Exactly! But he also wasn't that; he was as if playing the role that he thought he was supposed to play and open to other ways of thinking. We're socialized beings, all of us. He wasn't terribly dogmatic. I don't think he'd been challenged too much in his way of thinking, but at the same time maybe he had because he was open to being challenged. So yeah, it was very interesting.

On page 47 to 48, you write about the panel What is the value of age and wisdom? at the Bronx Museum of Art. The five panelists are: Vinie Burrows, Boubacar Boris Diop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Achille Mbembe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. There’s a quotation from Mbembe: “If the language we use is in itself a prison...We have to put a bomb under the language. Explode language!” Could you tell us more about the context? 

Achille Mbembe is a leading postcolonial theorist. I think his words are also quite poetic, so he's speaking metaphorically. The context of that part of the conversation is imperialism and language. That intellectuals from formerly colonized nations use the colonial language to express decolonial ideas is problematic, but it's still very accepted. And even these intellectuals who are on the panel, they write in English and they write in French, but they also find it problematic that they do that; however, it's also part of their survival. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote Decolonizing The Mind in the early eighties, where he swore off ever writing in English again, but then he is put into prison and he's exiled, so he can't actually exist in his mother tongue and his mother land; the government there has ostracized him because he speaks out against what they're doing to the people. Therefore, he has to make his life in English in America, he teaches in California.

Circumstances don't necessarily allow a person to decolonize their lives because in order to survive in this society, we are all somewhat colonized in our existence. I think that saying to put a bomb under language is saying that we need to just get our ideas out there. There’s also the visual aspect of it, I see words and letters, like, splattered. Like fucking. . .we need to fuck with language; we need to push the boundaries of language.

As Diop said “Teaching Wolof enhances self-esteem.” Does Wolof have a writing system? 

I’m not positive about the history of Wolof’s writing system but I know some, especially in more northern Sub-African countries had created writing systems using Arabic script and maybe some of them now use the Latin alphabet, so I would have to look that up for Wolof specifically. 

You use your mother tongue to express yourself because ideas in a specific language can't be translated. When you lose the language, you lose the culture and the history of people. Also if you're writing in any of the indigenous languages to Africa, you're not writing for the colonizer; you're writing for the people who speak that language, which is also important. 

A lot of this theory, especially academic theory that is taught in universities, is very limited in its reach. I think even though these are serious intellectuals who write academic works for academia, they're aware and they're problematizing the limits of writing scholarly work for institutions that isn't necessarily reaching the people.

What other languages do you speak? 

I speak French. I lived in France for awhile. I would say I used to be bilingual; I'm kind of monolingual at this point in my life. 

What about in Sesotho? 

I was working on the project (an attempt to translate Lits'oanelo Yvonne Nei's short story “Bophelo bo naka li maripa” from Sesotho to English) originally, but the access to the language was limited. I wasn't able to access decent grammar books, I wasn't able to access the orthography that I wanted to access so I gave up pretty quickly...but it wasn't as simple as giving up. I stepped back because I didn't really feel it was totally appropriate for me to do what I was doing. I think that’s a hugely important part of my text, the part where I put myself into conversation with Spivak and she tells me, via an essay she wrote about translation, that what I’m doing is wrong. I want to learn a language in which I'm going to be able to speak to people. I’m still not totally sure if I should have published what was supposed to be such a personal exercise, so that section with Spivak is essential to me.

On page 72, you wrote Liepollo an email about a friend who taught you how to say Your sister is a whore in Tagalog?

A friend of mine, her first love was Filipina so she knew how to insult people in Tagalog. When she said it, it sounded Spanish to me so I was wondering if that kind of insult comes with colonialism...also a misogynistic perspective can come. Not to say that misogyny doesn't exist in all cultures, although I think there are probably some cultures where it doesn't exist. Just problematizing the way language can infiltrate into a culture and then become part of the existing language but isn't part of that cultural history—the etymology isn’t actually Filipino; the etymology is Spanish.

Are there any books and authors that inspire you a lot?

For this work, Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, that was a huge inspiration. Mouth: Eats Color by Sawako Nakayasu in terms of thinking about different ways, different things that can be done with form and then different things that can be done with translation. It was very liberating to read those two authors. I don't identify as a translator nor as a poet, so most of the things I've read are novels. My background is primarily in postmodern and postcolonial pieces of literature. I also thought about the nature of collage while I was working on Chronology. I looked at Wangechi Mutu’s work specifically for inspiration, but I’ve loved Romare Bearden’s work for years.

Thanks for sharing. The last question, what are you working on now?

I've started writing and hopefully I'm able to continue it. It's a piece that will potentially be called Policy. I'm an educator and I'm pretty passionate about how distorted and messed up the reality of public school systems is in this country. Although one could say I've been researching since I've been an adult, I started specific research for Policy last summer and I didn't start writing it until a couple of weeks ago. It's experimental in form. I'd say it's fiction meets theory, whereas Chronology is memoir meets theory. I'm not sure exactly where it's going but I'm thinking critically about charter schools and desegregation efforts in New York City and also the history of that. So going back to Brown versus the Board of Ed. . .I'll probably address school shootings, the school-to-prison pipeline, school lunches, teachers’ strikes; it’s about as intersectional an issue as there is—how we educate ourselves as a nation, and on the stolen land of our nation. 

I think right now, especially with the current administration, though public schools have been in danger for a very long time, our current secretary of education is a billionaire who wants to privatize education, so her agenda is to destroy our public school infrastructure. It's worrisome. Processing this information in a way makes me very angry because it's systemic. It's how you keep people oppressed. If you don't give people access to education, you're not giving them access to themselves. Never mind the tools they need to achieve and succeed in a capitalist society. 

I don't feel the United States has a liberatory agenda for education and I want to explore that a little bit in the history of curriculums and pedagogy because there have been, at the turn of the century, there were some really interesting education theorists like John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young, and their ideas for public education were very progressive, such as student driven classrooms, and not having really punitive systems. You find that education in private schools but rarely in public schools, so why are we not educating our youth in ways that let them think critically about the world that they're living in? Educating children to just follow rules and memorize doesn't work for most children. How many do you know in public schools who are excited to go to school every day? I think humans naturally are curious and want to learn and know things. So why is education taking that away from children? 

I don't know exactly how the project is going to manifest. It will be weird.

Zahra Patterson’s first book, Chronology (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018), won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography and received a Face Out Fellowship from CLMP. Her short works have appeared in Kalyani Magazine The Felt, and unbag (forthcoming). A reading of her play, Sappho's Last Supper, was staged at WOW Café Theatre. She is the creator of Raw Fiction and currently teaches high school English at a Quaker boarding school. Her writing has been supported by Mount Tremper Arts and Wendy’s Subway, and her community work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, The Pratt Center, and many individuals. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute.

[millicentthecat]

Why The Last Jedi is a Reactionary Propaganda Film

I've been waiting for my thoughts to coalesce (and for the "spoiler" window to pass) to make a unifying analysis of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  This is not a position piece on whether you should or should not enjoy the movie.  It is not any kind of call to action.  It is only an analysis on how The Last Jedi works as a propaganda film.  It’s my personal interpretation based on my experience with assembling message.  This post is tagged "tlj critical" and "discourse" in hopes that will assist people in finding or blocking the content they wish to read.

To begin:   

As important as diversity in representation is, so too is balanced programming of message.  Programming message involves building value by presenting the very ideologies and mechanisms which sustain paradigms of injustice.  Will these be established as inescapable, natural, desirable, or effective?  The Last Jedi (TLJ henceforth) promotes integration with these ideologies and mechanisms.  It does not promote Resistance.

There are three central messages repeating in TLJ.  They are:

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

After The Force Awakens, my understanding of Poe Dameron's character was that he was designed as a classic rogue-individualist pilot--a hotheaded "flyboy," as it were.  This was not the fanon interpretation, which is understandable; The Force Awakens gave us a lot of poetic material to take in different directions.  I felt my interpretation was valid as it was supported by the visual dictionary (which calls Poe a rogue, I believe) and a line in The Force Awakens novelization about how some people are inherently more important than others.

In short, Poe Dameron was an individual who trusted his own instincts more than others and didn't believe in always playing nice.  In TLJ, this manifests in his relationship with a new character: Vice Admiral Holdo.  Now one of the only things we know FOR SURE about Poe Dameron is that he has no problem taking orders from women, respecting a female General, and trusting her experience.  This is demonstrated by his relationship to Leia, who he knows.  Holdo is a stranger who Poe has never met.  She is not just a woman, but an unknown woman.  EVEN SO, Poe is willing to trust her (at first) by sharing his assessment of the situation--essentially, submitting what he knows for her consideration, sharing his thoughts.  She responds to this by withholding information, reminding him of his recent demotion, and calling him names.  She responded to his  gesture of openness and respect with domination and authority.

This is well within her right, as established by both in-universe and our-universe rules of institutional hierarchy.  Poe, however, does not blindly trust authority figures OR institutional hierarchy more than his own instincts.  It's actually pretty unusual for a protagonist in this universe to do that, for reasons.

Later, General Leia reveals to both Poe and the audience that Holdo had information she was not willing to share.  She is strongly moralized as having been "right" about her plan: Poe takes his reprimand from Leia like a boy accepting a scolding.  Holdo is martyred and established as an example of strong leadership.  Her decision to withhold information from her subordinate is never highlighted (by a narrative authority or third party, such as Leia) as a mistake.  In our society, the rules of hierarchy dictate that "superiors" do not have to share what they have with "inferiors" or treat them with respect.  Those with more power are not beholden to those with less.  Poe is reprimanded for challenging that.

I was almost willing to overlook this deliberately moralized messaging as a botched attempt at a feminist moment before encountering the reviews about TLJ.  In general, there are a large number of reviews for this film which insinuate that most of the people who dislike this film are white male bigots, threatened by the presence of women. (a, b , c , d , e , f , g , h) .  This is not my experience.  The other thing many reviews point to is how Feminist this film is (as a selling point.)  It is an eerily unanimous opinion in mainstream, corporate media that Poe mistrusted Holdo because of her femininity--not her behaviors.  On social media where unpaid people are speaking, many young women are challenging this.  The shouting-down of women's opinions by accusing us of misogyny is a separate topic, but I did want to call attention to the discrepancy between the corporate media response and the social media response.  To me this is evidence of a deliberate misdirection.

Another story arc which enforces the position that we should trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy is in the reestablishment of the Jedi Order, via Luke, Yoda's Force Ghost, and, more significantly, Rey.  Now, much has been written (on this blog, and in many more prestigious place and by better known writers.  See Tom Carson's "Jedi Uber Alles," for instance) in the way of criticism of the Jedi.  The child abducting, the mind control, the over-extension of executive powers, the militarized cult status, the extermination of the Sith race, the monopolization of the Force; their crimes go on and on.  Moreover these are not just mistakes the Jedi made--crimes secondary to their nature--but rather these are the very nature of what their institution stood for.  The Jedi are not "the Light."  They are a specific religion with specific, inherently problematic practices and ideologies.

The Last Jedi is literally a movie about how it's ok that there are going to be more Jedi.

Luke's not on board with that, at first.  Master Yoda (from beyond the grave) reasserts the divine right of the Jedi to rule, as badly and indefinitely as they like.  Because even their failure is valuable.  Try try again, one supposes.  Whatever happened to, "there is no try?"  Oh yes, I remember.  The laws of the privileged do not apply to them.  

Last but not least, the character most overtly challenge institutional hierarchy in TLJ is Kylo Ren, when he kills Supreme Leader Snoke.  This move is not specifically negatively moralized (unless you read Kylo as the villain, which I prefer to) but it also very clearly does not result in a positive or progressive change for Kylo.  At the end of the film, he is miserable; his coup changed nothing.

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

"It's all a machine, brother," slurs an alcoholic loner-character known as "Don't Join," sometime after dropping the news on us that Good Guys and Bad Guys buy their weapons from the same arms dealer.  His general sense of hopelessness rubs off on Finn, who grows in his story arc from being willing to Unjoin, himself (as a deserter) to throwing himself into a suicide run for the Resistance.  What stops Finn from a kamikaze end is Rose: she saves him.  For the young viewer who agrees with DJ and sees machinery in war and capitalism, this suicide run represents the realistic (and popular trope) outcome of "joining."  War leads to death.  Capitalism leads to death.  Our generation knows this and we ask, as many before have asked, "why should I be a hero?  I'll just end up dead!"

The Last Jedi does what every great work of propaganda targeting young men does.  It gives a reason.  Why be a hero?  Because girls, that's why.

Before this pact is made, however, there needs to be a little softening-of-the-way--a little grooming.  The word "hero" has been deconstructed in the language enough that people know to associate it with self sacrifice.  We are wary of heros.  The Last Jedi substitutes the word "leader" to mean what hero once meant: a person in power whose sacrifices are gratified with moral rightness in the narrative.  This subverts any counter-programming people were able to apply towards "heroic" stories.  Leadership is presented as an inherently positive and desirable quality, linked to selflessness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and rewarded with female attention.

This same re-programming wordplay is employed in Rose Tico's call to action: "not fighting what we hate.  Saving what we love!"  Question: if the behaviors and outcome are the same, does the mental engineering matter?  Is a Rose by any other name still a Rose?

Is war still war if you call it love?

At this point I also want to call attention to the fact that there is AGAIN very little opportunity in this film where to SEE the First Order committing atrocities: abducting kids, repressing a labor uprising, etc etc.  The First Order is never called fascist (nor, if I recall, are they referred to as an actual nation.)  Their politics aren't even alluded to.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that the film implies it doesn't matter which side you join, but I think there's definitely an argument that being involves with one side or the other is lauded more highly than staying neutral.

Worth mentioning: "Girls like guys who Join" is also the message of Luke's story arc.  Both Rey and Leia wanted Luke to rejoin the arena.  Rey even expresses a willingness to get closer to Kylo--while he is acting like a Joiner.  The minute he makes it clear that he wants no part in either side of the conflict (No Jedi, No Sith, no ties to the past, etc) Rey's trust is broken.  She leaves.  Her rejection IMMEDIATELY follows his insistence on leaving tribal war in the past.  It does not correspond with any immediacy to his acts of violence, nor to his stubborn declaration that she "will be the one to turn."

A brief note.  Army enrollment messaging is a necessary and functional part of maintaining an imperial state.  The in-text discourse positions an offensive/insurgent military organization against a defensive military organization, during combat.  "Join up" is therefore an aggressively interventionist and arguably imperialist position.

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

This is one of the oldest motifs in storytelling, so when I say it's conservative I mean really, really conservative.  Traditional gender roles and traditional family values are just that: extremely traditional.  Many people find comfort in them and are extremely threatened by their breakdown.  For this reason, storytellers are authorized to hand-wave or sexualize an inordinate amount of violence toward women in order to keep paradigms of labor as gendered as possible.

First of all, there are literal feminine-coded creatures on the island of Ahch-to called "caretakers."  These aliens watch over the island and look after the hutts where Luke Skywalker has taken up residence.

Second of all, Holdo's arc with Poe and Rose's arc with Finn are full of nods to the idea that women must teach and lead men.  Men (who are inherently dogs, apparently) will speak over us, desert us, aim guns at us, and otherwise challenge us, and it is our duty to keep them in line.  This is to be expected.  Flyboys will be flyboys.

Third, it is Rey's sacred duty to prepare Luke to return to the arena of battle.  When Luke fails to step into that role, she turns to Kylo Ren.  Rey and Leia both possess Force-related powers.  Both spend most of their time directing these powers to trying to save, protect, or heal male warriors around them.  When they do fight, rather than act themselves as subjects, they punish men who objectify them inappropriately as a corrective measure.

To be fair, Admiral Holdo and Paige Tico both act directly against the enemy.  They also both have close mentor relationships with other women.  However, Paige and Holdo both die in the course of the film.

A final personal note: in my opinion, there are many ways socially problematic and coercive content offers comfort to a population where uncomfortable traditions feel like the only option.  However, this way of life is not the only option, and this media is not comforting to everyone.

[gch1995]

I slowly stopped recognizing all of my faves like Rumple, Belle, and Emma sometime around the end of 3B. Part of it has to do with the fact that A&E and these writers thought of “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did that” when no, it really wouldn’t you guys because 90% of your plots these days are cheap half-assed shock value bs, and they don’t give two fucks about how much character and storytelling credibility and integrity they have to flush down the drain to get it. For example, Rumple and Belle’s characterizations in 6A? Who were those pod!people? None of this made any sense! No, but it certainly shocked and pissed off many people in your little remaining general audience watching the awful crack!fic on screen this show devolved into.

But I think the reason why the character assassinations for Rumple (by extension Belle) and Emma were the most egregious in the series post 3A was that they ran out of story for them, and their organic growth and storylines as a family were all tied to the link of Nealfire, who Hook replaced. The entire relationship with Emma for Hook was entirely OOC, and it romanticized his misogyny, toxic masculinity, and creepy-ish behaviors with women in general. It promoted the entire message of “no” means “try harder,” which is just gross, and wrong on every level from its foundation. Rumbelle and Snowing were based on foundations of building true love, honestly, acceptance, and respect (even if Rumbelle struggled to regain those things from S4-S6 because of bad writing).

CS goes against everything that Emma stands for, and it romanticizes Hook’s worst misogynistic traits, which is the opposite of the sort of character development/redemption he should be getting.

If they really wanted to redeem Hook organically, then they should have had him reconcile with Bae, and keep the hatchet buried with Rumple. Bae didn’t “need” to be killed off for Hook to be “redeemed.” As for Rumple, I love him, but when you bring back a consistently sympathetic and emotionally complex anti-villain from a big selfless Shakespearean sacrifice, which we all know A&E always intended for, you run into the problem of what else do we really do with him until then?

I hoped they were going to do the BATB ending, so like there was something of a pay off for the four and a half seasons of character assassinating angst for him and Belle in the S7 finale as a payoff to break the curse, but nope! Twist! Rumple “has” to die again with Belle getting fridged for him to go on this contrived and OOC suicide mission to reunite with her, even though they both have a kid who’s alive who loves both his parents very much. So they floundered him to prop up H00k as their plot device on-and-off again “big bad,” and he became much more cartoonish as a result. I personally would have chosen the story with the ending of 3x11 for him, Neal, and Belle because it felt organic, well-earned, mostly well-written, and it made consistent sense. But whatever...

“This is a totally bonkers choice for a woman whose major trauma was growing up alone and whose Happy Ending will always involve her parents in some fashion. Last week Emma didn’t give a flying fuck about a realm full of abused kids and now she doesn’t care about her own baby brother growing up without his parents? WHO IS THIS WOMAN?”

— @screwballninja (via freifraufischer)

[cho-sekiei]

The Mom-friend trope in fan fiction and why it is problematic (an essay by me)

@eloarei asked:

So I saw that post about Ignis and the mom-friend trope, and I feel like I get the gist of what you're saying, but I guess I wanted to ask if that means you actively dislike it when people refer to him as the mom-friend? Or perhaps you just dislike that trope? Or maybe you just don't like tropes at all? Personally, I love tropes (esp. mom/dad-friend) probably more than is reasonable, as long people don't reduce good characters to JUST those tropes. (Same as any label; we are more than a word.)

Okay… let me try to organise a bit what I have to say because there are several things here. Also I’m going to take FFXV and Ignis as an example here, but this can be applied to lots of different fandoms where a caring male character exists (for example, Hakkai in Saiyuki would be the same, Shiro in Voltron, Sugawara in Haikyuu, take your pick).

The first problem is language related, the name of the trope itself. Not because of the words themselves but because of what they reflect. Do I have a problem with Ignis being referred to as the ‘mom-friend’? Yes, I do. I’m going to explain why, but, in short, this trope glorifies the existence of damaging gender-roles and I think it’s important to be aware of it and recognise it. I should point out here that while I have a problem with the existence of the trope, this is not an attack on all the stories that use it. They are too varied and numerous for me to talk about them as a whole. So not all of what I say here applies to all stories using the trope.

I know it’s an accepted fandom trope and people don’t mean anything bad by it, but it’s interesting to analyse why we say the things we say and to question whether we should at all. Words have power. They are the reflections of our beliefs and attitudes, they have implications and hidden meanings. But they're not innocuous, they can perpetuate hurtful stereotypes and systems of oppression which is why it's important to recognise the implications behind the words we speak and write. The fact that as soon as a male character is empathic and caring he becomes automatically referred to as having feminine traits or attributes (the mom) is a reflection of the rampant and toxic masculinity that exists in modern patriarchal society. Suddenly, he doesn’t fit with the typical image of a male anymore, he has to be the kind-of-feminine-friend. It’s the same kind of attitude that prevents men from recognising and expressing their emotions, the eternal ‘boys don’t cry’ thing, which is unhealthy and damaging. It’s one of the reasons men are so much more likely to be successful when they attempt suicide, because they are raised in a way that forbids them from expressing / dealing with their feelings without feeling weak and questioning their own worth. It also leads to violence against others as an alternative reaction / outlet as well. And it feeds homophobia.

The second problem is that in a lot of cases - not all - identifying the character with that trope will automatically give them attitudes they might not have at all in canon. The mom-friend often becomes nagging and annoying, the dad-friend is cool and fun. Again, what is reflected here is internalised misogyny (even from female writers… and I’m not saying this as a criticism. I still catch myself every day doing or thinking things that are stupidly misogynistic, because our society raises us to believe a lot of stupid things about women’s character or abilities. It takes a lot of self-awareness and introspection over a long period of time to recognise them). As you say, using a trope doesn’t mean you are going to fall into all the pitfalls that come with it but it’s a dangerous slope since some negative attitudes might be so engrained within the trope that they might seem natural and get integrated in your writing without you even realising it. It’s why we refer to ‘internalised misogyny,’ because it’s all but obvious or conscious.

As a brief tangent (I’m not going to go into it too much because I’ve promised @terra-bunny to write a whole post on the topic of toxic relationships in fandom), using the mom/dad trope automatically creates a situation of power imbalance between the characters with some being in charge and some being infantilised with part of their agency and autonomy being taken from them (again that’s coming from the kind of vocabulary that is being used). Of course, the extent of it will vary with the individual story, some will be a lot more extreme than others in their portrayal of the trope. However, in many cases, it doesn’t stop the two types of characters from being shipped together and it’s often presented as a cute and healthy relationship. I’m afraid it’s not. This is not a case where power exchange has been negotiated and ways out agreed upon as in a healthy D/s relationship. It’s not a relationship where the characters are on equal footing. It’s manipulative and a dangerous glorification of abuse, grooming and pedophilia. What matters here is the power balance between the characters rather than their age. If this sounds harsh, I mean for it to be. Our modern societies are way too comfortable with the romanticisation of abuse and exploitation of vulnerable individuals. Creative content does not get a pass on those issues because it's dealing with fictional characters.

Does that mean you can’t write about it? Of course, not. Writing is awesome because you can write whatever you want if it fits your story. What you shouldn’t do is pretend it’s a healthy model to follow. If you write about those topics, then you should be aware and explore the problems that they raise and how those can be resolved (i.e. by restoring / creating a healthy balance of power) or not; and if they cannot be resolved then you should definitely question whether that relationship should continue. Not doing so is passively condoning it as okay. As Desmond Tutu would say 'if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.' Now I should point out here that the smart way of addressing problematic situations is through a clever plot rather than a moralising author's rant.

You can see the tendency of glorifying that kind of unbalanced relationships in fan art as well, with the physical size difference between the characters being over-emphasised, the less powerful character being more slender and given a more youthful face than canon, etc. I have been made very uncomfortable recently by some of the Gladio x Prompto fan art on my dashboard. Without knowing the characters and their age, it looked like pedophilia. It felt very wrong and it is a problem. I don’t think we can pretend it’s not just because it’s part of the fandom. Fandom can be problematic and we should speak up about it.

Now, obviously, I know some people are going to wonder why I get so worked-up about those things. After all, we’re talking fan works, as part of a fictional universe. It’s entertainment, it’s fun, why would I drag all those issues into it? And my answer is because the stories we tell matter. They reflect what we believe in and they might also send some messages to our readers - some of whom might be in vulnerable situations - that might either reinforce their acceptance of or lead them to question problematic attitudes. Being aware ourselves when we write of why we would portray a character or a situation a certain way is the first step towards questioning whether we should. One story won’t change the world, but words have power. The other reason is that you can learn a lot about yourself by looking at what you write and how you write it. Who doesn’t want a good journey of self-discovery? :) And this might end up changing how we act and the problems we recognise in real life as well.

Parenthesis about tropes in general: Not all are problematic. And they’re often part of the fandom life (coffee shop or flower shop AUs for example). We’ve all read them, we all love them. Tropes that give characters stereotypical behaviour (mom-friend), I have more problem with because they tend to lead to paper-fine, somewhat OOC, portrayals of complex characters. But obviously, that depends on the individual writer.

I guess my view on non-damaging tropes depends mostly of what a writer is trying to do. If it’s filling a fandom need, have fun with a stereotypical story, then most of the time they’re fine. Fandoms are interesting because no-one would read twenty novels about people working in a coffee shop… but then we’ve all probably read that many fanfics about it - if not more. I also think tropes are useful to help inexperienced / beginner writers get started. From that point of view, they can be very beneficial.

Now, if you’re trying to write a more nuanced and original story, tropes can actually be dangerous. They will simplify the characters and the plot, they might make them caricatural, less alive and credible. They might rob you of your own creativity. You can use tropes as a tool to get started, but for a more ambitious piece of work, it’s good to stop and think about how you can subvert or move beyond the scope of the tropes, and whether problematic situations in the story should be addressed at some point (as previously mentioned, I’m not talking of doing this in a moralistic way, more in the plot itself).

@eloarei asked:

Anyway, sorry for rambling in your inbox so incoherently. It's hard to explain my feelings about this in so few words. But to get to the honest point of the matter: I'm actually writing a fic that sorta revolves around Ignis as the "mom" type (not /exactly/, but you know, that's why I use quotes), and I'd hate to think that someone I admire (you) would find it distasteful. So if it's something you have strong feelings about, I'm happy to take advice on how not to be tropey about it, at least.

First, let me blush like mad. 😳 ‘Admire me?’ 😳 Why would you do that? 😳 I’m honestly a badly put together mess. Nothing to admire here. 😝 It’s hard for me to tell you if I’d find it problematic without reading it. I just want to emphasise here that I have no problem with Ignis being a caring (sometimes a bit overbearing) character. That’s canon, that’s who he is. The problem is not that Ignis is caring, it’s how it is often portrayed. I often write Ignis telling others what to do because he’s a bossy jerk who thinks he knows better (and he often does) and he cares deeply about his friends and tries to stop them from getting into trouble. I guess the question to ask is whether the way you write him falls into any of the pitfalls I’ve described above (does he get feminised or appear weak for being caring? does he come across as more nagging and annoying than in canon? does he respect other characters’ agency and autonomy or not? and if not, is it acknowledged as problematic at some point in the story? etc.). You could even push this further and subvert the mom-friend trope by engaging with the character’s experience of his own identity and how a toxic vision of masculinity might hurt him and make him feel vulnerable even as he tries to come to grips with his caring nature. But obviously, that’s a much more engaged and deeper kind of story.

I hope this makes what I meant a bit clearer. I probably think about that kind of thing too much, but I can’t rightly ignore it either. Also stop saying ‘sorry’, you have no idea how much I love talking about all that stuff. ^ ^’’’ If you want me to expand on anything, let me know. ;)

[itscaptainyoulittlemaggot]

Journalistic Integrity

You’re a journalist trying to take down the perverted gymnast, Lance Tucker once and for all. But your plan goes awry and your ethics become compromised as he preys on your insecurities. (3,201 words; Lance Tucker x Reader; 18+, smut; Oral both giving and receiving; Manipulation; Self-esteem issues; Issues regarding lack of parental affection; Some readers will find this distressing to read).

This was it. The past two weeks of work had led up to this very evening. You were going to end Lance ‘the Fucker’ Tucker and his reign of misogyny once and for all.

A flurry of women on the nation’s gymnastics team had retired over the last year or so after they ended up pregnant. Girls with potential, a future. If this wasn’t coincidence enough, it happened to girls who happened to be linked to their coach, Lance Tucker. You knew you were on to something. You knew this would take down the loathsome Olympian once and for all.

Of course your intuition was correct. Over a two week period, you collected a slew of interviews with those former starlets who had their careers cut short. It all started with Maggie Townsend. Five different girls told tales of perversion and debauchery with Tucker.

Soon enough, you had enough evidence. Your story could stand on its own, you were sure. But journalism; it was a man’s game. Your editor suggested - insisted, rather - on balance for fear of damaging the gold medalist’s reputation. You had to hear it from Lance Tucker himself. You had to interview him.

It wasn’t too difficult to secure an interview with him. Under false pretence, he agreed to meet you at a local bar. For all he knew, you wanted to write about his achievements. He wasn’t exactly wrong.

You knew the drill, having interviewed more than a few perverts in your career. You could get all the answers you needed if you just looked the part, played dumb and then went for the money shot towards the end of the interview. At least, this was what you told yourself in the cab to the bar.

The truth was, Lance was gorgeous.

Damp, icy hands began smoothing themselves over imaginary creases on your dress; the dark fabric stretched taut over your curves. Your eyes were wedded to your foot, quickly bobbing away. You admired your heels. They added extra inches to your stature, allowing you to stare into his tar black soul on an even keel as you ruined him. A small comfort as you snapped back to reality at a red light.

Lance was notorious. You had to stay vigilant.

Rolling up to the bar, you felt a pit of unease form in your stomach.

Inside the decadent joint, you darted through the revellers to find Lance propping up the bar, martini in hand. His attire befitted his surroundings. He was striking. And you weren’t the only one aware of it, judging by the amount of attention he drew. But it wasn’t his finely tailored suit that drew you in as you approached him. He was imposing. Far taller than you had anticipated. When you were face to face, he loomed silently over you and placed an immobilising kiss on your cheek. You felt inches tall.

“Well ain’t you a picture,” he muttered in your ear.

You had to work overtime to maintain your composure as you introduced yourself. “Mr Tucker,” you began in a shaky voice, “I’m the reporter from The Times. Do you  mind if I record our conversation tonight?”

Lance lounged back on his stool cocking an eyebrow. “Relax, toots. We got all evening. You look like you could use a drink.”

”I-“ you began, only to be swiftly cut off by two slender fingers, beckoning the bartender.

Lance leaned into you. ”And call me Lance. Mr Tucker was my father. And he was an ass,“ he added.

You smiled uneasily. Lance was, indeed, an ass.

The bartender stood in front of you both awaiting your order.

”Tequila?“ He asked.

”Actually I don’t-“

”Two tequilas please,“ Lance confirmed to the bartender.

You quietly observed Lance as the man behind the bar bustled to get your drinks. The stench of his cologne was offensive to say the least. The sporty little wristwatch jarred with his swanky evening attire. He wore too much gel in his hair so his hairline stuck up proudly in greasy little peaks. And manspreading. You hated that too. 

You had come to two conclusions. One: Lance Tucker was so much more repulsive in person. Two: Lance Tucker was so much more handsome in person.

”Like what you see?“ Lance grinned, sliding a stout little glass towards you.

Compelled to tell the truth (kind of), you proudly declared: ”Actually, I think you’re vile.“

He was taken aback. Lance refused to accept that you, a woman, was immune to his charm. Taking a different approach, he dialled back his attitude. ”You don’t even know me,“ he said softly.

You choked on the mouthful of tequila. His eyes were piercing. How absurd.

He leaned into you again, repeating himself for effect: ”you don’t.“

You were incensed at this vile creature trying to pass himself off as a victim and was he trying to flirt with you? It was written all over your face but you had so much riding on tonight. You needed to keep calm. You plunged a hand into your bag and fumbled for your phone, buying yourself enough time to think of a response.

Bingo.

Pulling out your phone, you made your offering: ”why don’t we show my readers the real Lance Tucker, then?” Your voice was sickly sweet.

Lance tipped his glass to his lips and swallowed hard. “I don’t know who the fuck reads The Times, but ok.”

As Lance ordered two more tequilas, you set your phone on the counter and hit record, ready to grill the Olympian to within an inch of his existence.

“So, Lance,” you began with a nod, “let’s talk about your childhood.”

“Yeah, I mean I started gymnastics at the age of three. I-“

“Tell me about your parents, Lance?” you weren’t fooling around. You had done your research. His father fucked anything with a pulse while his mother ploughed all of her energy into crafting Lance’s career to a tee.  

Lance shot you a concerned look. “Why are you asking about my parents?”

“Well you wanted my readers to know the real you. I think they’d connect with you more if they knew about your tragic back story,” you pressed.

“Well there’s not much to tell,” he sighed, “my mom was your typical pushy parent. I was never good enough for her. Even after the gold. She’ll never be proud of me. I think she just hated men after what my father did… She always turned a blind eye. And then my father… when he wasn’t busy sleeping around with girls half my mom’s age, you know… Gymnastics isn’t all that masculine.” He was coy, his voice tinged with pain.

That was the first tiny steps towards the evidence you needed for your story. Somewhere in your stony heart though, you could relate to that. Your dad was an award winning journalist; overbearing but never praise giving. And your mother? She was just as bad. Her no boy rule during your teenage years had left a dent in your self-esteem causing you to latch on to any man who showed you the slightest bit of attention. But this wasn’t about you.

You gathered your thoughts and continued.

“So would it be accurate to assume that your insatiable need for female attention stems from your mother’s lack of affection? Or are you just a chip off the old block, like your father?” you asked.

You hit a nerve. He slammed glass down with a clatter. His eyes traveled your body up and down. His expression darkened, his tone defensive, “and whose attention are you trying to get?”

You backed up on your stool. Was Lance Tucker really that good at reading people?

He took your phone and stopped the recording. “You wouldn’t meet someone like me, dressed the way you are, if you weren’t expecting to gain something. Let’s be honest,” he smirked.

“I don’t you know what you’re talking about,” you said coldly.

Lance smirked: “You’re not the first reporter to try to get the drop on me. I’m guessing it all stems from your father, it always does.”

He hit you where it hurt. All these years you hid that insecurity behind big hair, tight dresses and red lipstick, taking down powerful men by flirting with them. It served you well but you hated yourself for it; you knew deep down you lacked real talent.

And now you sat, slightly buzzed from the tequila and slightly embarrassed, completely quiet. Your face was flushed and your mind was blank. Lance knew he had won. There was no way your story would make it to print now. You couldn’t fathom a response.

You snatched back your phone, holding it in folded arms.

“For what it’s worth though, you are, by far the most beautiful reporter to try it,” he drawled, leaning in close enough for the scent of lime to be burned into your nostrils. “I mean, I love gymnasts. They’re always so desperate for attention, for approval themselves. But I truly do love a girl with a little fire in her belly, you know? Like she has something to prove.”

Your inner monologue couldn’t keep quiet. He was definitely getting hit with a restraining order when this whole ordeal was over. “Can we just get back to the interview?” you asked.

As if by magic, the bartender set another two tequilas in front of you both. Lance picked his up. “One more and I’ll answer anything you want, Lois Lane.”

You nodded uneasily.

“I read your article with that crooked senator. You’re pretty good,” Lance said after a gulp.

“I thought you didn’t care too much for The Times?” you asked.

“I don’t. Girls like you belong on Fox News is all I’m saying. Brains and beauty,” he commented.

How original. It still sent heat pooling to your chest. “You’re lucky I’m not recording this,” you said rolling your eyes.

Your bravery was returning.

“So tell me more about this little power trip you’re on,” Lance sighed. He paused, resting his head on his hand, studying you. “Do you get off on ruining men’s lives?”

“Do you get off on impregnating 18 year olds?” you quipped not missing a beat.

Pleased with yourself, you downed your drink.

He hooked a leg around your stool and pulled you in so that your face was barely an inch from his. His eyes were blank pools of nothing. It was unnerving but you couldn’t stop yourself from being glued to them.

“Not as much as I get off on being worshipped like a god,” he snickered, “and I think all this tough girl bravado is a cover for what you really get off on.”

He was right. You weren’t sure if it was being talked down to like this, or if it was the tequila but you had already bridged the gap between yourself and Lance, the taste lime on Lance’s lips seared over your tongue. You felt the chill of a hand ghosting along your thigh, as you were pulled closer by another.

It wasn’t romantic and it sure as hell wasn’t pretty, but before you knew it, you were back at your apartment with Lance in tow.

He completely engulfed you, pressing you against your door, teeth and lips roaming over your neck leaving trails of red and purple in their wake.

“You’re a terrible fucking journalist,” Lance murmured, yanking the neckline of your dress lower, taking your bra with it, exposing one of your breasts.

“You’re a terrible fucking person,” you sighed, shivering as he bit down on your skin again.

Lance began moving lower, eventually ending up on his haunches. His strong, elegant hands pushed up the hem of your dress as he looked up at you. “That’s what they all say.”

Your mouth dropped open as the Olympian went to work between your legs.

Lance quickly snatched down your underwear, briefly smug at the damp spot that had formed on them. His tongue met your slick slit, lavishing it with long and languid strokes. Those strokes soon turned to ravenous sucking as he lapped your soft pink folds into his mouth. All the while his fingers left pale imprints on your hips, pulling you into him. Not that you needed him to. You were so overcome with need that you writhed over his mouth. You reached for the door frame to steady yourself.

Lance was completely wordless aside from satisfied moans as he coaxed timid sighs from you. Even though he eyed you intently, you could barely bring yourself to look at him. He loved the quiet girls the most.

You threw your head back, cursing abruptly, just as he traced a featherlight circle around your clit with his tongue. Then he began to pick up the pace, flicking the tip of his tongue over that little bundle of nerves.

But you really started to let loose when Lance slipped one, then two, fingers inside you. He began curling them forward, working in time with Lance’s mouth, stroking just the right spot inside you. You rolled your hips in response, howling in total ecstasy.

Just as your release was in sight, Lance tore his mouth away from you, his fingers still squelching away at your cunt. A needy whine escaped you.

“You wanna cum?” he taunted.

You couldn’t help but focus on the only contact your pussy was receiving. You bucked and squirmed as he slowly fingered you but it just wasn’t enough. “Yes please,” you sighed quietly, still not looking at him.

“I’m gonna need you to do a little something for me then,” he said rising to his feet.

You bit your lip, sinking back against the wall with his fingers still inside you. He loomed over you. He expected an answer.

You nodded.

He slipped his fingers away and sat himself down on the staircase, beckoning for you to kneel down in front of him. There was no love there; this was Lance Tucker in his element. “It’s not gonna suck itself,” he remarked.

He was absurd but it brought you to your knees all the same. You crawled to him.

“I’ll even get it outta my pants for you, here,” he said impatiently, undoing his zipper, his signature tattoo on display.

You wrapped a hand around his thick, veined shaft. Drawing your tongue over the underside of his, you tried to coat it with as much saliva as you could, catching salty little glimmers of precum as you went. You could understand now why so many women were just dying to fuck Lance Tucker as you eased as much of his cock into your mouth as you could possibly take. You gagged a little on the first pass as you struggled with his girth but you quickly acclimatised. He gave a contented groan as you settled into a steady rhythm, taking more and more of him each time and pumping a hand around whatever you couldn’t.

“Atta girl,” he cooed, “now look at me, I wanna see those beautiful eyes.”

His cock popped from your mouth leaving a thin thread of spit clinging to your lips. Through your lashes you looked up at him with glassy eyes. You began teasing his swollen tip with your tongue, dancing over it in swirls.

“That’s it,” he sighed, snaking his hands through your hair with a slight pressure, “keep going. Take it all the way down for me.”

Hesitantly, you began easing Lance’s cock back into your mouth, his hand still guiding your head further and further down until there wasn’t an inch left to take. You let out a muffled mewl in a mix of enjoyment and discomfort. And then his hand gripped your hair again.

Now he was in control of how you were using your mouth. Slowly pulling you up and down by your hair. He was never particularly rough, but your jaw ached. But still he lay, sprawled across your staircase, fucking himself with your mouth and making you wait.

Just when the pain was becoming unbearable, you got your first sign that Lance was nearing his climax. His breaths grew erratic, those low growls of his hitching in his throat. Not to mention his grip on your scalp had tightened substantially. He was nearly there. You could do this.

He continued to taunt you until the very end. “You gonna swallow every fucking drop?” he moaned, knowing full well you couldn’t answer through your mouthful of gold standard dick.

All you could muster was a quick, “mmmmf,” and widened eyes before great ropes of cum coated the back of your mouth and found their way down your throat.

You didn’t miss a drop. Partly because Lance made sure you didn’t.

When his grip loosened and you were free to catch your breath, you couldn’t help but see that same smirk playing on Lance’s lips.

Without a word he stood up and put his cock back in pants.

He wasn’t going to make good on his end of the bargain. This realisation dawned on you when he walked past you, two steps away from the door.

“Where are you going, Lance?” you asked, attempting to mask the need in your hoarse voice.

He paused, his back to you. “Did you honestly think I’d fuck you?” he asked with a laugh.

“What?” you questioned, the annoyance building in your tone.

“I had to make sure you didn’t publish your story. You know? The one you interviewed Maggie for?”

You never told him you interviewed Maggie or any of the other girls.

“But I-“ you began in protest.

“You can’t even quote me. You got too close to your source. It’d be unethical,” he sneered. Turning towards you, his last words were these: “If that journalism career doesn’t work out, I reckon you could make a lot of money giving head to the male gymnastics team though. How about that?”

And then he left.

The following morning you woke up. Your mouth was dry and your throat felt like broken glass. A pang of panic and a wave of shame washed over you as you remembered what you did the night before.

You compromised your integrity. Wasted two weeks of work. Had your source’s dick stuffed down your throat in your hallway.

Lance was right, you truly were a fucking terrible journalist.

You stretched your arm out towards your nightstand, picking up your phone and lazily looking through all of the interview files you had accrued over the course of researching your story.

Then you saw it. A second, longer, file from last night. It was four hours long. You couldn’t remember recording anything past Lance snatching your phone from you.

You scrambled upright and hit play on the file.

At first you heard the bustle of the bar. And then your conversation.

It was then that you realised you had unknowingly caught Lance’s admission.

But you couldn’t use it. It was unethical.

Plus you sucked his cock on your staircase. You were sure that was on the file too.

You skipped the file on. It was.

You were confronted with a dilemma that could secure your journalistic glory or finish it completely.

REQUESTS // MASTERLIST

Tags: @ceebeetumbles @lady-thor-foster @hisredhenley @almondbuttercup @daddysebastians @mrtinslydia 

[rhiannonkthomas]

Struggling with Sexism in East Asian Dramas

When it comes to “problematic things I enjoy anyway,” my biggest guilty pleasure is East Asian dramas. Typically Japanese ones, as that’s the language that I (sort of) speak, but now I’ve started to study Chinese, I’ve added those to my viewing line-up too.

Most recently, I’ve been watching a very silly Taiwanese drama called Miss In Kiss, which is a remake of a remake of a Japanese manga called Itazura na Kiss, or Mischievous Kiss. The show’s tropey romcom set-up is pretty typical of these sorts of dramas — the girl (Xiang Yue, in this version) is in love with the smartest and most popular boy in school, but he dismisses her as too stupid to pay attention to. When her house is destroyed in an accident, she and her dad move in with her dad’s best friend and his family — including her crush. Misadventures ensue.

It can be a fun show to watch. The bright colors and zany adventures are definitely refreshing compared to a lot of western dramas. But the supposed love interest is consistently a cruel jerk to the protagonist, and any vague sign of decency on his part is treated as a Hint of True Love. Meanwhile, another guy decides that he has ownership over the protagonist, because he loves her, and so he calls her father “dad,” insists they’re basically married, and plans his life around “protecting” her and building comic schemes to kickstart their love.

If you’ve never seen East Asian drama, this sort of set-up is pretty par for the course. I’d love to argue that there’s some hidden feminism in watching these shows, but nope. Although not every drama is like this, many of them are, and whenever I watch them, it’s with the knowledge that I’m enjoying the lighthearted drama and practicing my language skills at the price of attempting to ignore pretty consistent narrative misogyny.

I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s been a while since I watched one of these dramas, but Miss in Kiss seems particularly bad. We’ve got the “they MUST be together” trope, despite the guy’s indifference and cruelty to her. We’ve got the forceful hand slamming into the wall beside her head (multiple times), the grabbing her by the wrist to pull her around (multiple times), the guy she’s not even interested in getting violent to protect her honor from the guy she likes (multiple times) and basically acting as a stalker (almost every episode). It’s a really messed up representation of romance. And sure, it’s a silly show. But it’s uncomfortable to dismiss those elements as “well, that’s just the genre,” even though, in many ways, that is the genre.

I hit my limit about 20 episodes in, when the “oh my god, are you kidding me??” elements overwhelmed any possible benefits, and I quit. I wouldn’t have even lasted that long if I didn’t desperately need the practice listening to fairly straightforward Chinese. But as I spent my days writing about feminism in media and spent my evenings watching this “lighthearted” but messed-up romance, it got me thinking, again, about what it means to watch something that you know is problematic. I don’t just watch these series for language practice. I enjoy them. I like the music, the bright colors, the often farcical plotlines, especially the epic melodramatic romantic moments. My favorite in college was Hana Yori Dango, which has such gems as “guy and girl get trapped in broken elevator” and “guy gets amnesia,” as well as the familiar arc of “guy is horrible to protagonist but actually they’re in love.” I watch for pure entertainment value, with bonus learning on the side. But I’ve watched many of them while studiously ignoring certain elements, and quit several when those elements got too much.

I think, for me, it depends how far the story takes these elements, and how integral they are to the plot. These dramas aren’t doing anything particular new with their sexist plots, and they’re not doing anything that feels like it was taken from the 19th century either. These are all very familiar tropes, in series full of familiar tropes. They fit comfortably in that context, so it’s much easier to ignore them and accept them as just part of that sort of show. And we are all experts at ignoring run-of-the-mill sexism in entertainment. It’s presented as normal, so we either take it as normal, or accept it as a price for watching whatever the most popular shows and movies of the day are.

And so, honestly, I’ve trained myself to accept a certain level of “weak girl, controlling guy” sexism in my East Asian dramas, just as I’ve trained myself to often watch American series with two brains — the “I’m enjoying this” brain, and the “critical thinking” brain. And the same divide comes into play here. If the sexism is emphasized too much, or plays too big a role, I may quit, but a certain level of it… well, if I was writing about the show, I’d analyze it to death, but if I’m just watching for light entertainment, I often accept it as an unfortunate price of admission. I don’t really think that’s a good thing, but perhaps it is a necessary one.

But if anyone has any recommendations for any cute but non-sexist dramas in Japanese or Chinese, I’m eager to hear about them! Especially if they’re on Netflix.

Struggling with Sexism in East Asian Dramas was originally published on Feminist Fiction

[mastcomm]

Pressured by Simmons Over Film, Oprah Winfrey Was Caught in a Bind

For months, the filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering had a pair of dream partners: Oprah Winfrey and Apple, who had committed to back their documentary about women who have accused the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct. Booked for the Sundance Film Festival and Apple’s new streaming platform, the film was primed to be the next high-profile media moment of the #MeToo era.

Then the film’s future was abruptly cast into doubt last week after Ms. Winfrey withdrew as executive producer and pulled it from Apple, citing creative differences with the directors and suggesting that the picture was being rushed to Sundance “before I believe it is complete.”

But what preceded Ms. Winfrey’s announcement was more than just a dispute over filmmaking. It involved an intense campaign by Mr. Simmons and his supporters to get Ms. Winfrey to pull the plug. That campaign also targeted some of the women in the film on social media and, in at least one case, through direct contact with a family member, in what the women viewed as attempts to threaten and intimidate them ahead of the film’s premiere at Sundance, still scheduled for Jan. 25.

Ms. Winfrey acknowledged to The New York Times that Mr. Simmons had tried to get her to abandon the project. “He did reach out multiple times and attempted to pressure me,” Ms. Winfrey said.

She said he told her that the woman at the center of the film, Drew Dixon, was lying about their interactions. In addition, Ms. Winfrey said, she received phone calls from other people, whom she would not identify, who also questioned Ms. Dixon’s credibility.

Ms. Winfrey said that she still believed Ms. Dixon, though she also thought there were inconsistencies in her account that the film had not adequately addressed, in addition to other issues she had with the film.

She said it was those reasons, and not Mr. Simmons’s protestations, that led her to pull support.

“I told him directly in a phone call that I will not be pressured either into, or out of, backing this film,” she said. “I am only going to do what I believe to be the right thing.”

But it was clear that Ms. Winfrey, according to people involved in internal conversations around the film, was struggling over what to do, especially since she had appeared supportive of the movie before Mr. Simmons began pushing back against it. She was aware of the message she might send by backing out, given her reputation as a role model for African-American women and as one of America’s most trusted voices of moral authority. Ms. Winfrey has spoken openly over the years of being a sexual abuse survivor herself.

Her enormous following had made her appealing to Apple as it competed with other streaming services in attracting big names to deliver original content; Netflix had already enlisted the new production company started by Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as a series of accomplished producers. The film about Mr. Simmons’s accusers, titled “On the Record,” was to be Ms. Winfrey’s debut project with Apple.

When Ms. Winfrey announced her departure from the project on Jan. 10, she took pains to say that she believed and supported the women in the film. Just hours after her announcement, the Time’s Up campaign — of which Ms. Winfrey was an inaugural member — affirmed its own support of the women in a similarly worded statement.

But that has not prevented shock waves from reaching the circle of Mr. Simmons’s accusers. Ms. Dixon, who has accused Mr. Simmons of raping her when she was a young executive at his record label, Def Jam, in 1995, said she felt abandoned.

“I feel like I’m experiencing a second crime,” Ms. Dixon said. “I am being silenced. The broader community is being intimidated. The most powerful black woman in the world is being intimidated.”

Thomasina Perkins-Washington, a representative for Mr. Simmons, said in a statement to The Times that Mr. Simmons did not do anything unjustified in trying to counter the film. Mr. Simmons has denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex and has not been charged with a crime.

“If defending himself against terrible accusations is considered intimidation then there would be no justice,” Ms. Perkins-Washington said. She added that “written accounts and sworn testimony” showed that Mr. Simmons was “incapable” of being violent toward women, but when asked for that material did not provide it.

Disagreements and Double Binds

Until Ms. Winfrey pulled out, the dispute over the film had pitted two titans of media and entertainment against each other. Mr. Simmons helped establish the big business of hip-hop, and branched out early into film and fashion. The two had a decades-long relationship, before a split when more than a dozen women began to come forward to accuse him of misconduct including rape and assault.

Their clash also highlighted the fissures among African-Americans over their place in the #MeToo movement. In the film, Ms. Dixon and other women say that when the floodgates opened after the accusations against Harvey Weinstein in 2017, they still were unsure whether American society at large would listen to the testimonies of black women.

When documentaries about R. Kelly and Michael Jackson last year led to re-examinations of the accusations against them — and, in Mr. Kelly’s case, criminal charges — an angry debate roiled on Twitter about whether those men were being singled out for attention because of their race.

One result, according to Dream Hampton, the activist and filmmaker behind “Surviving R. Kelly,” is that black women remain afraid to speak up.

“This is a way of shutting down black women,” Ms. Hampton said, “that the victimhood of black men in the criminal justice system supersedes all other harm.”

As Ms. Dixon put it: “This is the ultimate double bind that black women face, where there is nowhere for us to go. There is no one to protect us. There is no one to help us. And our own community turns against us when you dare to speak out.”

Ms. Winfrey said she also began to have concerns that the film needed to say more about the broader cultural context, in particular the “debauchery” of the music business at the time. Women throughout the industry were contending with misogyny and worse.

Ms. Winfrey sent the documentary to a friend, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, seeking advice. She asked Ms. DuVernay to watch it with an eye toward how well the two filmmakers, who are white, captured the nuances of hip-hop culture and the struggles of black women.

Ms. DuVernay, who directed “Selma” and the Netflix series “When They See Us,” about the so-called Central Park Five who were wrongly imprisoned for rape, gave a harsh critique, which was later echoed in a letter Ms. Winfrey sent to the filmmakers informing them of her withdrawal.

In an interview, Ms. DuVernay said that Ms. Winfrey faced public fallout no matter what she did.

“She’s got Simmons on one side pressuring her, and then she’s got a film on the other side that she doesn’t agree with,” Ms. DuVernay said. “So if she walks away from the film she seems like she’s caving to Simmons, and if she stays with the film then she’s putting her name on something that she feels doesn’t quite hit the mark.”

The filmmakers described Ms. Winfrey’s change of heart as “sudden” and say they “were completely caught off guard” by her decision to exit the film.

“We had a really great working relationship with Ms. Winfrey, Harpo, and Apple throughout the many stages of crafting the film,” they said in a statement. “We feel we more than delivered a finished film that is in keeping with the qualities of excellence, integrity and veracity that we hold dear.”

A Partnership Fractures

The film’s primary character is Ms. Dixon, whose account details a wrenching accusation of how Mr. Simmons violently raped her after luring Ms. Dixon — then a young executive at his label — into his apartment one night under the pretext of hearing a CD.

Ms. Dixon first told her story publicly to The Times in 2017, and the film, which tracks her over two years, recounts her struggle over whether to go on the record with the paper. Some scenes capture parts of her phone calls with Times reporters during that period.

Dan Cogan, the financier behind the Oscar-winning documentaries “Icarus” and “The Cove,” introduced Ms. Winfrey to Mr. Dick and Ms. Ziering, whose work over the last decade has centered on sexual abuse, first in the military with “The Invisible War” and then on college campuses with “The Hunting Ground.”

According to Mr. Cogan, a partnership was formed in February between Ms. Winfrey and the filmmakers to create a series of projects about sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. Ms. Dixon’s story was set to be the inaugural piece that would lead into a series focused on different industries. All were eager for Ms. Winfrey’s involvement, both because of her access to the new streaming service and her ability to infuse the films with her unique point of view. “For a very long time, she was an extraordinary partner,” said Mr. Cogan.

In the filmmakers’ retelling, the two teams worked closely on the production, sharing notes and viewing each cut of the film. In October, with Ms. Winfrey’s approval, Apple submitted the movie for inclusion in the Sundance Film Festival, the country’s premiere exhibition for independent films.

A month later executives at Harpo responded to the final cut of the film with an email that read in part: “We absolutely loved watching the latest cut — it’s incredible.”

After learning that the film had been accepted to Sundance, Apple and Harpo touted the collaboration in a joint news release on Dec. 3, and called the film “a profound examination of race, gender, class and intersectionality, and the toll assaults take on their victims and society at large.” (That release has since been removed from Apple’s website.)

Trouble began the next day, once Sundance officially announced its lineup. It was the first time any public mention of the film had made clear that Mr. Simmons was the accused person at the center of it.

Ms. Winfrey, while in South Africa, received a call from someone she said she knew and trusted who cast doubts on Ms. Dixon’s story. Those doubts, Ms. Winfrey said, “gave me pause.” Later on, Ms. Winfrey said, Mr. Simmons called her directly.

Ms. Winfrey said that over various calls and text messages to her, Mr. Simmons seemed “frightened.” She said she often did not respond.

Once, she said, he implored her, “Look what you’re doing to my daughters.”

“I said, ‘I take deep offense to you thinking I’m doing anything to your daughters,’” Ms. Winfrey recalled.

Ms. Winfrey’s team immediately asked the filmmakers to provide detailed timelines of the accusations against Mr. Simmons and what the filmmakers had done to corroborate the accounts. The filmmakers provided the information the next day.

Within days, Mr. Simmons took to Instagram to mount a public defense, and the rapper 50 Cent accused Ms. Winfrey of “only going after her own” — alleging that by supporting accusers of Mr. Simmons and Michael Jackson, she was turning her back on the black community.

In an online video, Mr. Simmons discussed how to challenge the credibility of women by asking “how many times they went to jail, to a mental institution, have they accused five or more people, what does their father say.”

He added: “Questions that were not asked before may now be asked, and our sister may be embarrassed.”

Sil Lai Abrams, who accused Mr. Simmons of raping her in 1994, said she immediately felt that the “mental institution” line referred to her; the day after the alleged attack, she said, she attempted suicide. “He is using very dark tactics to intimidate and terrorize me and the others,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Dixon felt targeted by the line about fathers. A few weeks ago, she said, her father was approached by an old acquaintance, Yolanda Caraway, who asked him whether Ms. Dixon had ever falsely accused any man of sexual misconduct. The meeting rattled Ms. Dixon, who said she immediately suspected that Mr. Simmons was behind it.

“He is trying to muzzle our voices again,” she said.

Ms. Caraway, a longtime political operative in Washington, acknowledged that she had met with Ms. Dixon’s father, Arrington Dixon, a former City Council member. She added: “The conversation I had with anybody is none of your business.” Ms. Dixon’s representative at the time, Ann Walker Marchant, said that she called Ms. Caraway to ask whether she was working for Mr. Simmons, and that Ms. Caraway responded: “He’s my friend.”

A Demand for Changes

Ms. Winfrey said she took her concerns to the filmmakers with an ultimatum.

“We need to pull from Sundance until we can give ourselves a chance to retool this film,” Ms. Winfrey said she told them, “or I am going to have to take my name off.”

The filmmakers reassured Ms. Winfrey that they could address the issues she raised, and she remained on board.

“We know from working in the sexual assault field that changing any distribution plan after there has been an announcement is not a good idea,” said Ms. Ziering. “If we were to say we are not going to Sundance, people will infer that there is an issue with the credibility of the women in the film.”

On Dec. 18, the day after Ms. DuVernay viewed the film, Harpo sent the filmmakers a new set of requests.

According to people familiar with the chain of events, the two filmmakers addressed Ms. Winfrey’s concerns by conducting additional interviews with experts to contextualize the issue of misogyny in hip-hop. They also included a three-minute montage that introduced five more Simmons accusers with a technique that featured one woman’s line bleeding into the next woman’s story. The effect leaves viewers with a sense that Mr. Simmons is a serial predator who used specific, repetitive behaviors to lure women.

The new cut of the movie was delivered to Harpo on Jan. 8. Two days later, Ms. Winfrey sent the filmmakers a letter explaining her dissatisfaction and telling them she was withdrawing. The letter says in part: “I think it is a disservice to the women and this film to have their gut-wrenching disclosures reduced to a montage of sound bites and not give them the stature of elevating their stories.”

The film is still scheduled to show at Sundance, and the filmmakers have hired United Talent Agency to serve as its sales agents. It’s unclear whether the high-profile fallout between Ms. Winfrey and the filmmakers will harm its commercial prospects or make it an intriguing purchase for an eager distributor.

Ms. Dixon said she still looked up to Ms. Winfrey “as a business woman, as a fearless creative professional, and as a fellow survivor.”

But, she added, “Oprah Winfrey shouldn’t get to decide for any of the silence breakers in the film whether or not this movie is worth seeing and Oprah Winfrey shouldn’t get to decide for the whole rest of the world.”

“So all I hope,” she added, “is that somebody else will champion this film.”

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[postculturemag-blog]

What’s Better Than This? Guys Being Dudes

Read on Post Culture

The End of the Movie

Despite being a child of the 90s I consider myself a super fan when it comes to 80s movies. Every month my local Alamo Drafthouse movie theater holds viewings for older movies and I always try to make at least once a month. Last month it was Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter.

The first 80s movie I remember falling in love with was the Spielberg classic Stand by Me. Stand by Me was a coming-of-age story about a group of friends who go in search of a rumored dead body. Along the way they meet a host of characters and challenges that send them on individual journeys of self-discovery.

Even back then I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to another childhood-best-friends coming-of-age movie I’d seen: Now and Then. Now and Then was billed to me as Stand by Me, but for Girls. Instead of a group of boy friends going on an epic journal of self-discovery to find a dead body, the audience was treated to snapshots of summer spent with a group of girls who just wanted to buy a treehouse together and maybe put a disturbed spirit or two to rest, too.

Both films share themes that are integral to all coming-of-age films, most importantly growth and independence. At the end of Now and Then once the girls have secured enough money to buy their treehouse Samantha comments that “The tree house was supposed to bring us more independence. But what the summer actually brought was independence from each other.” The idea is sweet and profound, made even more so by the opening reunion between the friends, now all grown-up, and the promise they make to each other at the end to visit together more often.

The end of Stand by Me is noticeably different. After our brave heroes overcome trials and the perils of pubertal self-discovery and find the dead body, the adventure, and summer, are over. A flashforward narrated by Gordie tells us that the boys drifted apart with age. Teddy and Vern became passing figures in Gordie’s life. He remained close with Chris through college until he went off to university—then died breaking up a fight at a restaurant. This prompts Gordie to write the famously heartstring-pulling line: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.”

I remember casually asking my dad at the end of Now and Then why the boys didn’t stay together like the girls. His response? “They’re boys.” Like that explained everything. At the time, it actually kind of did. There was a reason the men in the movies I saw didn’t hug or talk about their feelings like the women did. In fact, attempts at intimacy or emotional connection between male characters were either played for laughs or shown as a cautionary tale.

“They’re boys” was the simple answer to a complex problem, but like most moviegoers, I was content to leave it at that.

But now that I’m older I have to ask why? Why are boys expected to sever ties with the people they care about when they grow older? What kind of Wormer Brothers-level havoc does puberty wreak on boys that it seemingly spares girls?

The answer is a lot less mystical than dead bodies or resurrected spirit.

Dude, Where’s My Emotional Intimacy?

Gordie’s line about never having friends like the ones he had when he was twelve isn’t isolated fiction. Boys tend to form closer bonds with other boys in childhood and almost seem to “lose” the ability to later. Sociologist Lisa Wade theorizes that around the ages of fifteen and sixteen teenage boys start learning what it means to “be a real man,” and the feminine-coded traits of friendship do not fall into that ideal.

In her book Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection psychologist Niobe Way followed boys of varying ages over four years to chronicle their views on friendship. Wade highlights a particularly devastating part of her research in which a 15-year-old boy named Justin was asked to describe his feelings towards his best friend at two different parts of his life:

[My best friend and I] love each other… that’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that you know that person is that person… I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect and love for each other.

By his senior year, however, this is what he had to say about friendship:

[My friend and I] we mostly joke around. It’s not like really anything serious or whatever… I don’t talk to nobody about serious stuff… I don’t talk to nobody. I don’t share my feelings really. Not that kind of person or whatever… It’s just something that I don’t do.

Niobe’s interviews with boys are both eye-opening and heartbreaking. At one point she interviewed a freshman named Jason who touted the merits of friendship as having someone to turn to. Three years later she asked Jason if he had any close friends and he “said no and immediately [added] that while he nothing against gay people, he himself [was] not gay.”

Despite popular belief, men actually desire (and need) emotional intimacy just as much as women do. In fact, not having those emotional connections contribute greatly to men’s health problems.

So if men want it, and the lack of it might actually kill them, why can’t they have it?

Heterosexual men are taught that the romantic and sexual relationships they have with women are the only acceptable source of intimacy and closeness they’re allowed to have. That’s often why straight men feel the need to caveat any positive, slightly friendly interaction with another male with “No homo.” Popular belief is that if a guy is showing affection to a person he must want to date or have sex with that person. Hence the word bromance. Know what the female equivalent of a bromance is? A friendship.

Friendship between men is such a delicate walk between ‘just-guys-being-dudes’ and ‘full-on-homo’ that its become almost regulated. Telegraph’s Chris Moss posted a handy guide titled “A fine bromance: the 12 rules of male friendship” that featured such ‘rules’ as this:

Never openly verbalise that you value the friendship. Most men avoid literalness. There’s something vulgar about declaring “how important you are to me”. But there is also a kind of mysticism in never quite affirming that this might just be the second, or even the, central love in your life. Sometimes stating the obvious makes the obvious deteriorate or vanish. So respect the given; you can always weep openly at a friend’s funeral.

Even with the wink-wink-nudge-nudge aspect, it is still depressing to think that men have to edit their feelings in an effort to not make the people they care about uncomfortable. The other day on Twitter a virtual (female) stranger told me she loved me. In line at the checkout at Walgreens, I overheard a man say to his (male) companion “That’s a nice shirt, man. No homo.”

The restrictive range of what’s considered “acceptable” emotions men are allowed to feel are just some of the ways the patriarchy takes a toll on men, and it has real-life harmful effects. Misogyny and homophobia are core driving factors to this epidemic, and what’s worse is that it’s become normalized. One way society is both chronicles and reinforces these unwritten rules of masculinity? Movies.

It’s important to remember that things haven’t always been this way for men. Silver screen blockbusters show us that at some point in time a fella could hug another fella after a shootout without  anyone feeling the need to qualify it with a “No homo.”

So where did it all begin to turn?

Blow Your Wig

Because platonic intimacy between men wasn’t vilified in early years, depictions of strong bonds between men were actively depicted in cinema. In fact, the first same-sex kiss on screen in the 1927 silent film Wings was an entirely platonic kiss between two male infantrymen (Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen).

Audiences didn’t so much as bat an eye at the kiss. It went on to become a critical success and won the first ever Academy Award for Best Picture.

Another early 20th-century film that highlighted male friendships was the bad boy classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Let’s be honest here for a second, folks: James Dean wasn’t that great of an actor, he was just handsome (don’t @ me). That mug put butts in the seats for his performance as Jim Stark, the film’s troubled teenage protagonist just trying to make it. Aside from James Dean’s bad boy good looks the most memorable aspect of the film is Jim’s friendship with even more troubled outcast Plato (Sal Mineo). Jim’s feelings toward Plato take on a paternal tone, helping them both make up for something they lack. For Plato, it’s a stable, loving family. For Jim, it’s a sense of what it means to be a real man. Unusual as their dynamic was people were touched by love and care they shared. That’s further complicated when you look a little harder, but that’s a conversation for another time.

What’s Your Damage?

The 1980s and 1990s gave rise to the timeless buddies trope. Buddy comedies were defined by their “odd couple” approach to hyper-masculine films. Movies like 1988’s Midnight Run took the tried and true formula and flips it on its head, but still stays true to the hyper-masculine-odd-couple trope.

The most popular of this genre is the buddy cop film. The Lethal Weapon franchise (1987) is often credited with starting the movement in films, and sure enough, helped define other films in the genre. You take one by-the-book veteran cop, mix in a younger, more hair-trigger partner, throw in a few explosions and shootouts for maximum masculinity, and bam, you’ve got yourself a buddy cop film.

Because the men themselves were in a profession defined by its hard-shelled masculine nature the characters were allowed—in small doses—a degree of intimacy between one another. You wouldn’t catch Martin cathartically kissing Robert Thelma & Louise-style after one of their many near-death experiences, but the average heterosexual man wouldn’t feel too weirded out over an affectionate clap on the back or mildly fond poses in marketing materials.

The late 80s and early 90s also gave birth to a peculiar kind of cinematic take on male friendships I like to call Feelings Are Gay and Bad.

Unlike the buddy movies of the same decade, these films wielded homoeroticism like an Aesop’s Fable in 35mm. Rather than depict male friendships as the begrudged act of two hardened, red-blooded American males, these films opted to show brutal, all-consuming homoerotic unholy unions that eventually came to screeching—and often deadly—halt. A character who placed his love and care with another man would come to rue it by the film’s end or would learn a valuable lesson about vulnerability.

In Reservoir Dogs the audience watches as Mr. White lovingly cradles a wounded and terrified Mr. Orange in his arms. In between horrifying, blood-soaked scenes in the present we’re privy to Mr. Orange’s secret: he’s an undercover cop working to bust White’s crime ring from the inside. Blissfully ignorant, White soothes and protects him. He even goes so far as to pull a gun on the man in charge for threatening to kill him. After the infamous Mexican stand-off, White crawls over to Orange’s body as the police close in, only to be told Orange is actually a cop. The movie closes in on White’s anguish as the police surround them.

Kathryn Bigelow’s  Point Break (1991) introduced the world to Special Agent Johnny Utah (birth name Heterosexual McManlyman), former football star and current by-the-book FBI agent who goes undercover in a group of adrenaline junkie surfers and becomes dude-smitten with their charismatic leader, Bodhi. The explosions, killer surfing scenes, and the fact that Special Agent Johnny Utahis a former Rose-bowl winner and current gun-wielding badass makes it okay for male audience members to laugh at lines like “We gonna jump or jerk off?”

Nick Schager of The Daily Beast referred to Point Break as “A Homoerotic Classic.” Whether Point Break is a cautionary tale about getting too close or an intentionally subversive homoerotic film a female director remains a hotly contested.

The film adaption of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) and David Fincher’s take on the Chuck Palahniuk classic Fight Club (1996) both use their source materials’ explicit homoeroticism to make the story darker and grittier. In Fight Club’s case, this was used in conjunction with what many feminists consider a critique of hypermasculinity, made with the intent to draw straight men to watch and leave rattled. For Interview with the Vampire, while Anne Rice’s intent was clear, some parts had to be altered considerably for consumption.

During this decade films of this kind also started to utilize the Deranged Homosexual trope. Poor, unfortunate heterosexual men would offer their friendship and find themselves in the grips another, obsessed and subtextually sexual man. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), another novel-to-film adaptation, takes the time to build up the dynamic between Tom and Dickie from budding friendship to growing obsession until Dickie’s ultimate death at Tom’s hands.

The 80s and 90s weren’t the purgatories of male friendships, though. For every Cable Guy(1996) there was a Sandlot (1993) after all. Still, the trend in media portrayals of male intimacy in films during this era set a particular tone that went virtually unchallenged until the following decade.

Isn’t It Bromantic?

The 2000s were the start of the “exclusively comedy” buddy films. In contrast with buddy films of the 80s that were action films that sometimes featured comedy, the male friendship movies of the 2000s were comedies that sometimes featured action.

The 2000s also saw a rise in the use of the term bromance or bromantic comedy to describe close male friendships. Even the word bromance evokes a mocking callback to romance, self-deprecatingly lampshading the connotations of two men being emotionally intimate. ‘Bromance’ takes the idea that men are emotionally illiterate and incapable of showing care without sexual or romantic inclinations and applies it homosocial relationships. In other words, the word ‘bromance’ pretty much plays itself. So started the attempt to strike a balance between “Fuck yeah, friendship!” and dudebro-ish mocking.

And mock they did. It was as if the homosocially-propelled films of this decade were constantly at war with their desire to show the close bonds men can foster with each other, and their need to assure the men watching it that yes, they know how “gay” the idea sounds.

I call this the “No Homo!™” movement.

When The 40-Year-Old Virgin premiered in 2005 it marketed itself as a raunchy, stupid, over-the-top sex comedy for men. Steve Carell plays Andy Stitzer, the eponymous forty-year-old virgin. After it’s revealed to his friends that he’s never had sex he’s put on a quest to lose his virginity as quickly as possible. This devolves into a series of cheap laughs, dubious sexual situations and, of course, rampant transphobia and homophobia.

The movie focuses on Andy’s quest (spoiler alert: the real loss of virginity was the self-discovery he had along the way!) but the B-plot belongs to two of his friends/bullies: Seth Rogen’s Cal and Paul Rudd’s David. The two spend most of the money bickering and insulting each other by making jabs at who’s “gayest” (“You wanna know how I know you’re gay? You like Coldplay.”) The jokes are cheap and unfunny but are sure-fire ways to get a chuckle out of your standard insecure bro-type.

At the end of the film after Jay apologizes to Andy for pressuring him into losing his virginity the two hug and embrace. In a call back to Cal and David’s game Haziz, their manage, comments snidely:

Haziz: Do you know how I know you guys are gay? You’re holding each other ever so gently.

This allows the film to reassure the audience that despite the lovey-dovey shit that’s just happened this is still a dude film.

Some praised The 40-Year-Old Virgin for “deconstructing the bromance formula,” but when compared to other films in its decade we can see its done nothing of the sort.

After the commercial success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, we were treated to another Apatow-Rogen bromance film with Superbad (2007). Superbad brought Jonah Hill and Michael Cera together as Seth and Evan (named after writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg), two high school seniors desperate to lose their virginity before college. Despite the classic pitfalls—Seth Rogen himself later said jokes in the movie were “blatantly homophobic”—the movie handled the friendship between Seth and Evan with surprising care. During a quiet scene, Seth (drunkenly) confronts Evan about rooming with their mutual friend in college. Evan apologizes and admits he’s afraid to live alone. The two make up and say they love each other, then wonder aloud why they’ve never said they loved each other before.

Evan: I love you. It’s like, why can’t we say that every day? Why can’t we say it more often?

Seth: I just love you. I just wanna go on the rooftops and scream “I love my best friend Evan.”

Sure, they’re drunk and it’s comedic, but the comedy is more about their drunkenness than their love for each other.

At the end of the film the two friends meet up with their respective love interests at a mall and go their separate ways. This reminded me of the end of Stand by Me (and that is the first and last time you’ll hear me compare Stephen King and Rob Reiner to Seth Rogen and Greg Mottola): boys with a fierce bond drifting apart as evidence of their maturity and growth. As if the moment they spent telling each other they loved one another the night before was meaningless.

Seth Rogen, you sonofabitch.

Riding off the rise of Seth Rogen’s bromance comedies came I Love You, Man (2009) which tried to brand itself as the “bromance” movie. The movie set out to answer one question: Why don’t men have friends? The answer was a resounding “Uhhh?”

Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) goes in search of a best guy friend after realizing he has no one to be his best man at his upcoming wedding. After going on a misfortune of “friend dates” he runs into and befriends smooth con man Sydney Fife (Jason Segal). I Love You, Man starts off as Feelings Are Gay and Bad and ends up a lukewarm reunion that skirts clumsily around the subject of real emotion like Jason Segal on a moped.

The only reason I rip on I Love You, Man is because it truly could have been groundbreaking. At the time it was considered groundbreaking because for once the premise of the movie was about male friendship. Not friendship plus virginity and booze, just friendship. It went even further to prove its progressive cred by introducing Paul’s But-Not-Too-Gay brother Robbie (Andy Samberg) as a shining example of sports-and-meat-loving masculinity. Still, despite its failure to truly commit, I Love You, Man managed to make a bromance film that didn’t rely heavily on sex and slapstick to validate itself as a “guy’s” movie.

Other notable bromance films of this decade like Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000), Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), and The Hangover (2009) also used similar tactics of highlighting friendship and neutralizing the discomfort of seeing intimate male friendships via homophobic language, slapstick comedy, objectification, and more. The self-deprecating overcompensation that defined the movies of his decade was a reflection and reinforcer of America’s evolving feelings towards male intimacy. It was no longer “Don’t be intimate with your male friends” but “Don’t be too intimate with your male friends.”

Men Have Feelings, Too (And That’s Okay)

Things began to subtly shift for bromance movies in the 2010s. Slapstick and Seth Rogen still reign supreme, but now there was a softer and more forgiving edge to it all. Conversations on hypermasculinity and homophobia were propelled into the mainstream to start a national dialogue. The idea of what it means to be a man and what masculinity really means started to change as did their portrayals in film.

“Your average dudebro” is the very demographic that needs to see these kinds of relationships normalized in the first place.

You could argue that Seth Rogen is the kind of bro comedies. He’s produced such nerdboy-testosterone, weed-filled slapsticks as Pineapple Express, Superbad, This is the End, and Game Over, Man! Whether as an actor, director, producer, or writer, Seth Rogen’s name has become synonymous with the kind of obnoxious bro-rock marketing execs don’t even consider women a demographic for.

But I would argue that much of the normalization of intimate male friendships comes from your average Seth Rogen film. Most of the time these are “dumb fun” comedies. That’s not to say other films by other people don’t portray male friendships just as well, but while movies like Magic Mike XXL (2015) are heartwarming examples of the kind of power platonic male intimacy can have they’re not as likely to be watched by your average dudebro. “Your average dudebro” is the very demographic that needs to see these kinds of relationships normalized in the first place.

The 2011 comedy-drama 50/50 cast Seth Rogen as Kyle Hirons, a man watching his best friend Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) undergo chemotherapy. Even though he doesn’t possess the necessary bedside manner he plants himself as Adam’s rock (and wingman) through his treatment. When Adam’s girlfriend cheats on him he angrily confronts her to defend his honor.

The film is at times tone-deaf and crude as any movie starring Seth Rogen and directed by Jonathan Levine is wont to be, but the message at its core is sweet and powerful.

In the controversial Netflix film The Interview (2014), Seth Rogen balances crude humor and James Franco-ness with an almost careful tenderness between the two male leads. During the penultimate scene where Dave and Aaron are preparing to walk to their deaths in order to save North Korea, the two share a quiet, intimate moment together discussing Dave’s hypothetical biography.

Dave: As the two best friends stared into each other in the eyes, they knew that this might be the end of a long road. But they also knew how much they meant to each other. And even though neither one could say it out loud, they were both thinking…

Aaron and Dave: [whispers] I love you.

What shocked me about this scene wasn’t just that two men had said they loved each other in an action-comedy, it was that the scene was played straight. No jokes, no thrown in “No homo!” It didn’t make up for the rest of the film, but it furthered my appreciation for Seth Rogen.

Another unexpected gem in the same vein are the 21 Jump Street movies, specifically its sequel 22 Jump Street. In 22 Jump Street we’re re-introduced to Jenko and Schmidt, who are assigned to go undercover at a college to find out what student has been dealing the drug WHY-PHY. Jenko gets close to a suspect in the investigation–the popular, athletic Rooster–and starts to blow off Schmidt, much to the latter’s dismay.

While Schmidt does spend a not insignificant portion of the film playing a comical version of a scorned lover for audiences to point and laugh it, you can’t knock 22 for trying to tackle a virtually undiscussed issue in male friendships: jealousy. This is pleasantly resolved near the end of the film with Jenko assures Schmidt that he lifts him up—while they’re dangling from a helicopter, but still.

There are plenty of other films from the 2010s that truly flip the script on your standard movie bromance (Due Date [2010], The Green Hornet [2011], and even This is the End [2013] if you’re in the camp of thinking they did rape jokes the right way) but I’d like to wrap up with one that’s dear to me: Seth Rogen’s Neighbors (2014).

On premise alone Neighbors sounds like your run-of-the-mill ignorant bro comedy. Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) get into a prank war with the Delta Psi Beta fraternity that’s moved next door, headed by Teddy (Zac Efron) and Pete (Dave Franco). The humor is slapstick and borders on gross at times but is absent the casual bigotry that early Rogen/Goldberg films weren’t shy about including. Of note is Pete and Teddy’s relationship. It’s revealed that Pete slept with Teddy’s girlfriend, and even though this causes bad blood between the two Teddy still sacrifices himself when the police show up to spare Pete’s bright future.

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (2016), though, by far takes the cake for the best of the two. It opens on the old Delta Psi brothers assisting Pete’s boyfriend Darren in a Jason Mraz-inspired proposal. Having peaked in college, Teddy lives on Pete and his boyfriend’s couch. This comes to an end after the proposal and the two friends having a falling out, prompting Teddy to leave in search of a place to feel wanted. When crashing with the Radners doesn’t work out he moves on to a struggling sorority.

The decision to make Pete bisexual (or gay) was a conscious one suggested by writer Evan Goldberg and reporter asking director Nicholas Stoller why he’s never had gay characters in his films.

At the end of the film, Teddy and Pete make up in time for Teddy to plan and be the best man at his wedding. Before walking Pete down the aisle Teddy stops to give him a pep talk:

Teddy: You all right? You seem really nervous.

Pete: I’m having a little bit of a meltdown.

Teddy: Just remember, man, Darren loves you more than anyone in the entire world- Darren cherishes his friendship with you. Darren can’t imagine his life without you. And Darren is proud to call you his best friend.

Pete: You’re not talking about Darren, are you?

Teddy: No, not really.

The humor stays intact and without the expense of losing intimacy. Teddy is even allowed to tear up with pride and happiness for his best friend in full view of the camera before the scene is over.

And you still get a poop joke.

A movie that utilizes Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, and Dave Franco and a plethora and copy-and-paste frat bros to chastise against using misogynistic slurs (“Don’t call them hoes. That’s not cool anymore.”) and normalize gay love is a feat in and of itself. You could argue that the movie tries a little too hard to seem progressive and open-minded (at one point Teddy helps the sorority throw a Feminist Icon Party that features three different Hillary Clinton costumes) but the effort is genuine and appreciated. The film doesn’t equate masculinity with misogyny and homophobia. It allows their funny frat bros to show vulnerability and care for one another in a way that promotes laughter but doesn’t mock.

The expected bro humor isn’t sacrificed in favor of these progressive elements either. There are women in bikinis, babies holding sex toys, and unnecessary dick and poop comedy. All the elements that define a sleazy bro comedy but without the sleaze.

These movies are important to show that men being vulnerable and caring about one another doesn’t have to be something shameful, or something that comes with rules, or something that should be laughed at. Looking back on the up-and-down progression of these portrayals is at times hilarious, but are mostly sobering and sad. We should promote and support portrayals intimate male friendships in media to normalize the concept of platonic male intimacy.

So, straight men, go. Re-watch Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle or The Shawshank Redemption and consider telling a friend they’re important to you. You might never have friends like the ones you had when you were twelve but it’s never too late to find that kind of bond again.