#seem to suggest that like... the racism in the genre is JUST LIKE misogyny in the genre

[mermaidsirennikita]

what your thoughts on title cole's hades hangman series?

My immediate thoughts are that Tillie Cole is a racist who should be actually cancelled (not the weak shit we call cancellation), as in any possible publishing career, indie or otherwise, done. Nothing. I'm honestly worried about the pen name shit I imagine she'll pull or has pulled, because I dread people buying books by her without realizing it's her after all this.

But uh.... yeah. I have zero tolerance for Nazi romances, KKK romances, any romances featuring a racist, genocidal protagonist or protagonists. And I do want to be clear--genocide is what the KKK wants in the end. As is the case for most hate groups. They may say they want people "in their proper place" or "over there instead of here" (displacement being a part of genocide) which is all heinous and unacceptable. However, the reality of the nitty gritty is that they want them eradicated, or at least eradicated from the part of the earth the genocide mongerer feels entitled to, which is most of it. The only alternative, if you could call it that, being that the racist wants the "inferior" race enslaved or subjugated for their own gain (the implicit word usually being "again"). And I think that even the "smallest" breadcrumb of racism can easily tip into these mindsets with some degree of radicalization. So yes, zero tolerance.

I often have seen the "devil's advocate" arguments from "liberals" (white feminists who want to read these books) being "but how is this any worse than books where the heroine falls for her rapist".

And here's the thing--there are a couple books I've read wherein the heroine does fall for her rapist, and I like them still. I'll be clear--these are historical old schools (as in, the 80s) which I don't think came from the perspective of say, a contemporary Sam Mariano book. (I haven't read her books, but I know they can contain this content). I have yet to read a recently published contemporary wherein the heroine falls for her rapist that works for me. I have spoken to people for whom certain books have worked, including a couple survivors.

What I think sets these books apart is that a heroine in a dark romance falling for her rapist, however fucked up and unrealistic, is based on a personal relationship between two people. It isn't about anyone the reader represents, and I don't even really think it's often about gender (though it can be, which I think is probably a line--if a hero is a serial rapist because he hates women, I don't think the reception would be the same). And let's be real here--most of the time, this does reflect real life. The vast majority of sexual assaults are the result of intimate partner violence. It is something between two people, and while I would personally never suggest anyone forgive their rapist and reconcile with them, or frankly forgive them in general... That is something where it is about the one individual and her perspective, and in a romance it follows the same mentality. I may not LIKE that book, but I do see that as a book about harm to a PERSON and within a RELATIONSHIP, which is more individualized.

A KKK hero or a Nazi hero or what have you is often paired with a woman who represents a group he hates (though in Tillie's case, the heroine is a white-passing Latina, a "cartel princess", which lol, ALSO RACIST, but I suppose her complexion is meant to create ambiguity). If he isn't, she's the white woman he is allowed to be with anyway. Either way, he hates a collective. He is enacting violence, physical or otherwise, against a collective. Even if the heroine is of the group he hates, SHE cannot validate his redemption arc~ or "forgive" him. However unrealistic the forgiveness or validation of redemption a rapist "hero" may be, that is a situation where I can say "fucked up, but her choice". This is very literally not something a single heroine can give, and even if the author came from the same marginalized group as the heroine in a genocidal hero book... that author can't speak for the collective either. (I say this because I have heard of authors writing about sexual assault and reconciliation in books state that they're survivors, and I really can't speak on how they work through that on an individual level, but I do think it's important to again note the individual.)

While sexual violence is absolutely a worldwide epidemic, it is NOT the same thing as genocide. Doesn't mean it's better or worse... Though I will say, I think the fact that sexual violence is used as a tool by genocide mongerers does speak to the fact that genocide is obviously a more existential threat, here. And I don't really care for the comparisons I've seen made between the two in discussions of this book and its place in dark romance--because they often seem to be coming from my fellow white women, and I feel there is often a "we're all women, we're in this together" mindset. When the reality is... no. First off, women aren't the only targets of sexual violence, and men are not the only people who perpetuate it. Second of all, not all women experience rape culture in the same way. Cishet white women live under the threat of rape culture, absolutely. But white women don't experience racialized predation. Nobody is trying to "convert" cishet (or simply cis) women through sexual violence. Nobody is killing cis women because they feel "tricked" by us. And for that matter, white women, especially cishet white women, can be the oppressors of women of color, queer women, trans women, and so on. They can encourage sexual violence against women with a single vote--and have. How many white women voted for Mr. "Grab 'Em By the Pussy", again?

So yeah, I don't really like the whole "well this is fine for me to read because y'all read your rape books" discussion of these books when we get into discussion, because these just are very different topics. And I don't like conflating them to either EXCUSE the violence of these books, or once again devolve into a "dark romance readers are universally dirty little perverts". Because--while there are ABSOLUTELY dark romance books that go way too far, which I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole... I think there's a point where a book isn't even dark romance, it's just using that as a mask to perpetuate a form of like... artistic violence against an entire group of people.

Because these genocidal hero books are about violence against the collective marginalized group being dismissed, "redeemed" or "forgiven", there's this inherent dismissal of what has happened to potential readers of these books, and I see that as a kind of casual violence. That dismissal happens every day, and it is ESPECIALLY happening right now, when so many western nations (and I'm not denying it's happening elsewhere, I'm just much more aware of the USA, Canada, and Europe) are in the midst of nationalistic far right swings. And hell, let's be real, most people of color are not reading Tillie's books on purpose, I imagine--but frankly, that doesn't matter. Tillie has, I suppose, a legal right to write these books. But I don't view them as any different from the vitriol spewed from a Westboro Baptist Church representative, or the people calling BLM protestors looters.

You just can't slide this shit into a "dark romance is gonna dark" slot, or "why do dark romance readers keep bringing this to us" whine rant. I will bet you anything that a lot of the readers who read this book and rated it a 4 or 5 on GR haven't read a single other dark romance novel in their fucking lives. They enjoyed it because they want to romanticize a guy in the KKK and act like he can be redeemed, because their sick little fantasies about their white prince proud boys are what they're looking for here. This isn't about tiptoeing to the ver edge of dark romance, this is about wanting to bathe in a racist fantasy. It's their Birth of a Nation moment, but with porn.

I mean, what has been really frustrating to me... because obviously outright racists will shamelessly defend Tillie, outright... is just this idea that this somehow has come back to a discussion of dark romance, when really, it should be a discussion of RACIST ROMANCE NOVELS. Which is something that extends faaaaaar beyond dark romance, or any subgenre. I've read a fuckton of racist contemporary romances. Obviously historicals have quite a long journey with racism in books. I've read racism in paranormals, for fuck's sake. I believe one of the big Nazi romances was an inspirational romance. To me, there's just been this dancing around admitting that this is a romance-wide issue, because people want to go "well, it's only an issue with dark romance, MYYYYY favorite romances would never" and it's like. I don't know, girl. People of color are widely underrepresented in the genre (as are queer people and trans people) so maaaaybe just maaaaybe romance isn't your perfect haven where all we need to confront is men being misogynistic. Maybe, just maaaaybe, there are other issues going on here.

[imaginesupply]

Homecoming - Chapter Five

(Gif’s not my own.)

Summary: The day has arrived, Captain Syverson is going home. For good, this time. He is going home to a civilian life he can hardly remember and a wife he barely knows, with memories of the war still fresh on his mind. Love might not be able to heal everything on its own, but it’s a good start.

Genres: Romance, drama.

Story warnings: Smut (always fully consensual), mentions of PTSD and nightmares and mental health, angst, hurt and comfort, fluff, mentions of war (minor), mentions of cheating (minor), mentions of pregnancy (very minor), police appearance (very minor), violence (very minor).

Notes:

It’s my first time writing for one of Henry’s characters and I’m unsure I did Sy’s character any justice.

This is a Capt. Syverson x OFC (Ada) story, written in 3rd person POV but OFC’s physical description is very limited so it could also be read as Capt. Syverson x Reader, I think.

English is not my first language, so there might be some mistakes. Proofread, but not beta’ed. We die like men and all that.

Timeline is a little wacky: The movie takes place in 2003 and the U.S. forces were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but I never set a precise date because I don’t think it’s essential for this story. However, some elements might not be realistic because if we set this story in 2003: Phone cameras quality was not as good as it’s now, but for the purpose of the chapters, I will need you to imagine you could film great videos with your flip phone haha. Plus, it says Sy is coming back after being deployed for more than three years which makes no sense unless we set this in 2006 or later. I am asking you disregard any time inconsistencies.

Also: I am not American. I only lived in the US for six months and it was in the Midwest, not Texas so please bear with me if I write something stupid.

Finally: This will be a Christmas fic and I intend to post the last chapter (there will be seven in total) on or before Christmas. However, religion is never mentioned in this story and the Christmas-sy elements of this story are limited to family gathering, gift giving and tree decorating.

Chapter Five starts after the cut. (Chapter Four can be found here.) Let me know if you wish to be tagged in future chapters or if you wish to be removed from the tag list.

A/N: I am aware of the neutral, perhaps positive, portrait of the police I painted in this chapter. I am fully conscious of the recent (and not so recent) instances of police brutality happening all around the world, many – if not most – of them motivated by racism and other despicable ideologies. With this chapter, I did NOT mean to express support for the police forces. I simply had this ‘plot’ idea come to my mind and decided to write it. There is no ulterior motive.

While all my personal experiences with the police have been positive, I am aware that my ethnicity gives me privilege and that many people are not as lucky as I am. This both angers and saddens me. It has to change.

Black lives matter. Minority lives matter.

Chapter 5

Chapter warnings: Cockwarming, irresponsible driving (kind of), car accident (not serious), police (but no police violence), very mild violence, language (perhaps a little bit worse than in previous chapters but nothing you don’t hear in real life, I guess), mentions of mysogyny.

Ada yawned with Sy quickly following suit. “You can drive my car if you want, Sy. It’s not that new anymore, you know.” She offered, gracing him with the most angelic smile she could muster. It was the first time she was granting him the opportunity to drive her car.

Sy laughed next to her, his left hand moving over the center console to rub her thigh. He had that stupid grin again, that looking endearing with his current droopy eyes. “It’s your car, darlin’. Besides, you’d kill me if I ever so much as got a scratch on it.” He chuckled, suppressing another yawn. “And I know you’re only offering because you want to sleep.”

His wife gasped, a look of mocking offense on her features. “They’re your nephews!”

“But you were the one who said yes,” Sy countered, his eyes closing again as he made himself more comfortable on the car seat. The drive home was only about one hour and a half, but it was the perfect length for a nap.

“What the fuck was I supposed to say, huh?” Ada laughed, gesticulating wildly as was her habit. “Yes, Joshua, I understand you’re taking my pregnant sister-in-law to the hospital. No, I will not look after your kids for the night. It’s our date night.”

Next to her, Sy grimaced. She did have a point, even if he had been looking forward to going bowling with her: Ada was a sore loser which always ended with lots of fun for him. At least, his sister and the baby were okay. Just a normal case of Braxton Hicks, apparently, whatever that was supposed to mean. Perhaps it was good thing Ada didn’t want children because he’d freak out if she started having contractions four months in. “You fell asleep on Luke’s bed at one in the morning when you tried to get him to sleep for the third time and I had to spend the whole night entertaining them with tea parties because they wouldn’t tire!”

“Hey! That’s not cool!” She protested accusatorily, her eyes on the road as she switched lanes to take the next exit. “I didn’t know you couldn’t give kids sugar after a certain hour!”

Sy huffed, shaking his head. They’d had the great idea to bring donuts because according to his dear wife, sugar always made you feel better when you was anxious or down, and the kids had been aware something was off with their mom. “We suck at this parenting thing.”

“You don’t say!” Ada laughed, before loudly cursing at driver who’d just cut her off, something which never failed to make Sy smile. “The nap’s going to feel heavenly once we’re home.”

Sy hummed in agreement, his head falling back against the headrest as he drifted off, hiding his eyes from the sun with his cap. Ada glanced sideways at him, shaking her head. Part of her wanted to shake him awake. If she had to suffer, so did he. But he was right, she had slept more than him and he looked too peaceful to disturb, especially with some leftover glitter still on his cheeks.

Suddenly, there was a mild thump and the car stuttered before stopping, startling Ada who jumped on her seat.

"Shit!" She cursed. "Did I just...?" She began to panic, her eyes moving to the red car in front of them, too close. She had bumped it while she had been distracted by her husband’s stupid, sleepy face!

"Yes, yes you did," Sy laughed next to her. Ada was a good driver and she loved driving, but she was easily distracted and Sy never failed to tease her about it. This time, however, he could tell she was scared from the way her chest was heaving with her shallow breaths. "Want me to deal with it, darlin'?" He offered, tilting his head at the other driver who had just come out of the red, broken-down car.

"No!" Ada protested all too quickly, taking off her seatbelt and grabbing the necessary documents from the glovebox, accidentally hitting his knees in the process. "I am an independent woman who don't need no help," she muttered, trying to convince herself of her own statement. In the eight years since she’d had her gotten her licence, she had never given any of her cars a single scratch, let alone gotten into an accident.

Sy grinned at her antics but tried to hide his amusement, not wanting to make it worse. "All right. I'm here in case you need me, okay?" With a determined nod in his direction, Ada stepped out of the car and attempted to summon the Annalise Keating or the Olivia Pope inside her, whichever she could find in herself.

The man from the red car, who seemed to be in his early forties and balding, was already inspecting his vehicle for damage – looking mighty pissed as he did so. Ada approached the impact point from the other side, noticing the bump on the man’s old car. It didn't look too bad, she sighed with relief. Her own car barely had anything. Ha! She would have to use this as an argument next time Sy and her started discussing cars. Her black Citroën DS5 was sturdy and not just fancy looking, unlike what he said.

"Hello, sir," she said calmly, the man instantly looking up at her. Damn! He really looked furious, seething even. "I am so sorry for this. I was a little distracted- Anyway, it doesn't matter. My insurance will cover whatever repairs your car may require."

"You stupid little bitch!" The man shouted, out of the blue.

Ada gasped, backtracking. The muscles in her jaw twitched. What the fuck was wrong with him? "I understand your anger, but there's no-"

"What were you even doing behind that wheel?" He snarled, gesturing at her car, her baby. "Who the hell lets women like you drive cars like that?!” The man cursed, aggressively waving his hand in the air.

She just stood there, still in shock. Did... did he just bring misogyny into a fender bender situation?! "Women like me?!" She repeated, quite stunned.

"Aye! Bitches like you have no business driving-”

Ada flinched at the man’s words. He was starting to breech the distance between them, moving too close to her. Ada jumped again when she felt a warm hand on her shoulder before realizing it belonged to Sy and letting herself exhale slowly. Thank God he didn’t listen to her and stayed in the car!

"I get that you’re pissed, but that's no way to talk to a lady. You should to apologize," Sy told the man, making it sound very much like an order and very little like a suggestion. The driver huffed before coming closer, his face about as red as the car as when he started laughing. Ada instinctively hid under Sy's arm, though she aware of the ridicule of the whole situation.

"That's your whore? You let your whore drive your car?!"

Okay, this was going too far. It left her lips before she could help it, "that's my own goddamn car, you wanker!". Maybe it was time to stop borrowing insults from Tom.

Ada could almost hear how his jaw clenched when she felt Sy's whole body tense up against hers. "Call her a whore one more time and you're gonna wish she had run you over instead."

This was escalating. Ada bit her lower lip. She was going to have to be the bigger person here. "Look, I'll just go grab my phone from the car and call the police. They'll deal with this." Ada announced, dislodging herself from Sy’s grip before turning around to get to her car.

Her hand had just wrapped around the car door handle when there was a clouting noise, quickly followed by a loud thump, this time. Ada immediately turned around at the sound. The angry driver was out cold on the ground, blood rushing out of his nose and forehead, with Sy looking down at him, the same blood tainting his fist.

"Oh shit!"

°°°

A lanky guy, smelling heavily of pot, was thrown inside the almost full holding cell by the same officer who had arrested him. Sy was amused at the sight until the guy, after a full survey of the room, started walking him up to him before sitting down on the bench far too close for his liking.

Exhaling through his nose, Sy tried ignoring the smell and closed his eyes again. He didn’t expect the nap he had been looking forward to, to be in a stinky cell with stinky men but it would have to make do. At least, after the man sitting closest to the entrance had commented on the leftover pink glitter that still shone in Sy’s beard, nobody had bothered him anymore – not after he quite literally made the man piss himself with just one stare. That man wouldn’t have survived a single day in Baqubah.

"It's cramped in here," the new guy commented nonchalantly though his eyes were fixed on Sy. Out of politeness - damn Ada and her insistence on good manners! - Sy acknowledged his useless statement with a noncommittal hum.

"Name's Ben, by the way," he said, stretching out of his hand but Sy didn’t move a muscle. What was it in his current posture - crossed arms and spread legs - that made him appear friendly enough for a chat, he wondered, rolling his eyes behind his closed eyelids.

"And you are...?"

Sy groaned out loud time. "Not interested."

Ben didn’t get the hint and proceeded to ramble off about how he got caught selling pot near the university. Sy was actively working on drowning out his voice when the sound of fast and angry clicking heels on the concrete floor caught his attention. He smiled. Ada. Apparently, she hadn’t changed and was still dressed for date night, wearing a dress and stilettos, even though they had only meant to go bowling and eat at a steakhouse.

Somehow, everyone in the holding cell must have been intrigued by the same sound because all conversation suddenly stopped, the men all hoping to eavesdrop.

"I am here for Syverson. I wish to talk to him."

"Ma'am, I apologize but we are not allowed to let him out of his cell."

"Not a problem. Just give me the keys and I'll let him out myself!"

Every person in the holding cell laugh with Sy grinning quietly, amused at how she sounded distinctively more foreign when she was mad. He was used to her accent in more intimate settings, but he was enjoying the sound of it during her current outburst which was followed by an uninterrupted string of curse words and insults alike, all coming from her delicate mouth. First, in English, then French. Spanish. Portuguese. Italian. Sy frowned at the last one, he didn’t recognize it. Was it German? He'd have to ask her.

"What a woman, huh," the guy next to him deadpanned, still not giving up on a conversation.

Silence fell again as everyone attempted to listen to the rest. “I swear to God I’ll hang your heads up in my living room if –“

Sy only huffed, leaning back against the cold wall. "You can't even begin to imagine."

"You know her?" The pothead quipped up.

"Yeah," Sy replied. "She’s my wife." He said it loud enough to make sure everyone was able to hear it.

“Oh,” came the nasal voice next to him just as they heard heavy, resigned footsteps become louder.

A different policeman stopped just behind the door, a colleague just behind him as he fished out the right key from his pocket. “Syverson,” he called out loudly. “There’s a woman here for you.”

Sy got up at once, unable to hide his smug smirk. Ada always got her way.

°°°

“What the fuck were you thinking, Sy?!” His wife blurted out as soon as she was let inside the interview room, the young officer locking the door from the outside. Then, turning around, she caught sight of her husband handcuffed to the table and her shoulders instantly slacked, her anger vanishing almost instantly. “What you did was disproportionate,” she sighed, her voice calmer as she took a seat in front of him, the cold iron table separating them.

"He called you a whore, I just punched him!" Sy protested, leaning back on the chair. "My response was disproportionate - disproportionately small."

"You knocked him out cold!" Ada reminded him, her voice pitching higher than usual but the only response she got from Sy was a smug grin. "He might press charges, you know. It's battery."

Sy rolled his eyes, sitting up straight. "He’s an asshole."

Now, it was her turn to roll her eyes although she knew he hated it when she did that. She took a deep breath, hoping to calm down. Sy was looking entirely unbothered, but she was freaking out at the situation. "I'll try to convince him not to press charges and offer to cover the medical bill on top of the car repairs in return."

"Medical bill?" Sy asked, cocking his eyebrow.

"Yes. After the police took you into custody, he was brought to the hospital. From what I heard, he has a broken nose, needed stitches on his forehead and got a concussion." Sy only huffed with a smirk. "This is not funny, Syverson!"

"It wasn't funny when he called you a whore either," Sy countered. He was right. It was also very pleasant to see that dickhead in pain, but she wouldn’t tell him that.

"Look, my friend, Gale, who's a lawyer, is on her way. I'll get you out of here tonight. He’ll either agree to drop the charges or I’ll bail you out."

The corners of his lips twitched. He moved his hands as much as the chain allowed, to grab hers and squeeze them in his large ones. "Are you worried about me, darlin'?"

What a teasing little shit he could be! Of course, she was worried about him! He was in a cell! Feigning innocence, Ada smiled, running her thumbs over the back of his hands. "I am not. However, seeing what you did to that prick just got me really horny and I would like to have you back in my bed tonight," she whispered, watching as her husband’s smug grin slowly disappeared as she got up and grabbed her purse, heading to the door.

"You better get me out of here quickly!" Sy called after her.

°°°

He was returned to the holding cell, the officer uncuffing his wrists again once the bars closed behind him. There were two new faces, but he also recognized that at least three men had left already. Unfortunately, pothead was still there.

“I saved you your spot,” Ben smiled wildly, gesturing at the vacant portion of the bench next to him. “The guy in the red shirt was going to sit here but I told him it was occupied.”

Sy merely hummed, taking the seat that had so generously been saved for him. Hopefully Ada would get him out quickly because he didn’t know how much longer he could deal with his chatty neighbour.

“Was she mad?” Ben asked, whispering loudly and defeating the entire purpose of a whisper in the first place. “Did she yell at you?”

Despite his closed eyes, Sy could feel Ben’s stare on him as he awaited an answer. “No.”

Ben nodded thoughtfully, shaking the uneven bench as he did so. “If we go to prison, I want to share a cell with you.”

If Ada didn’t get him out of there quickly, he was soon going to get charged for battery again.

°°°

Sy stood by the counter, his attention on the ugly Christmas decorations he hadn’t noticed when they brought him in hours earlier. Somehow, he had managed to forget all about it. And fuck, he still needed to get Ada a present!  

“Here are your things,” the young officer told him as he slid over a transparent plastic bag.

With a curt nod, Sy ripped it open and fetched his wedding band first, before looking for his wallet and belt. He was already heading to the door when he turned around at the last minute. “Did Mrs. Syverson post my bail?”

“No, the charges were dropped.”

Huffing with amusement and a hint of pride, Sy zipped up his coat and headed to the front door. He swiftly descended the stairs in front of the precinct, his face illuminating at the sight of her. She was still wearing the black dress and the fancy shoes, her makeup now lightly smudged around her eyes.

As soon as he was close enough, his hands moved to Ada's waist and he leaned down to kiss her, only for her to pull away at his touch. "Not so fast, big guy," she teased, a glint in her eyes as she grabbed something out of her coat pocket he couldn't yet identify. "You're still in trouble."

Sy threw back his head, his laugh booming through the night sky as he finally saw what she was holding up in front of him. Handcuffs, and not the fluffy ones either.

"Now gimme your hands," Ada demanded, making him cock his brow at her authoritative tone.

With a chuckle he obeyed, presenting her his hands. "Yes, ma'am."

Sy watched keenly as she fumbled with the cuffs to get them around his wrists, and then seized the right opportunity to take the upper hand, easily taking the cuffs away from her small hands.

With a shriek, Ada found herself bent over the black hood of her own car, her cheek pressed up against the slick surface and her husband's body pressed up against hers. She could hear the smirk in his voice when he spoke. "Mrs. Syverson, you're under arrest for unlawful teasing back in the questioning room." Ada scoffed, the sound weakened by his heavy weight on top of her. "You have the right to remain silent. Everything you do say can and will be held against you in-"

"Your dick!" Ada suddenly blurted out, a little too loud given where they were, and Sy immediately stopped, clearly surprised, but she quickly felt him laugh against her back.

Before she could join him, Sy smacked her ass, effectively silencing her. "Guess I'll have to fuck that attitude out of you," he grunted before pulling away and fastening the cuffs around her wrists.

Ada kept complaining as he carefully dragged her inside the car. Despite her struggling, Sy easily opened the right backdoor and threw her on the backseat, mindful to fasten her seatbelt before closing the door. Her eyes widened and her mouth went agape when Sy sat down behind the steering wheel and proceeded to push back the driver’s seat and readjust all the mirrors.

��Are you shitting me?” She exclaimed, leaning forward on her seat as much as the belt would allow. He was messing up with all her settings and the grin on her face made it very clear that he was doing it all on purpose just to get her riled up.

“Language, darlin’,” he chided, turning on the engine. “Didn’t you ask me to drive earlier, anyway?”

Ada groaned in response, shutting her eyes tightly before opening them again. “You know very well that was-“

Sy didn’t let her finish, the tires squealing on the tar as he sped out of the parking lot all too fast. Ada involuntarily cringed at the noise. “I’ll make you pay for this!”

“We’ll see, kitten. We’ll see.” He was entertaining by her determination even though her eyes were already closing.

As expected, Ada fell asleep within five minutes despite the handcuffs keeping her arms in an uncomfortable position. Her head lolled before it finally came to rest against the window. He watched her though the central mirror, an adoring look in his blue eyes as she sighed contently the very moment she had fallen asleep. While he had managed to rest while in the cell, though not as much as he had hoped, he knew Ada had been up all afternoon trying to sort everything out and get him out. Sy had noticed her exhaustion as soon as she started fumbling with the handcuffs, her movements uncharacteristically clumsy.

He stopped at a junk food drive thru on their way home – night had already fallen and he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He doubted she had either. Her eyes didn’t even flutter under the bright neon lights and once he parked the car on their driveway and went to carry her inside along with their food, after undoing the cuffs, her body was completely limp in his arms. It was only when he accidentally let her shoulder hit the doorframe as he tried to lead them inside their bedroom, that she woke up again. “Ouch!”

“Sorry,” Sy murmured and kissed her forehead before laying her down on the bed and setting down the bag on the mattress next to her. Her nose wrinkled as she sniffed the air even as he helped her out of her coat and dress, and then the shoes. “Did you get us food?”

“Tenders and fries.”

Within an instant, she had ripped the bag open and was clutching the bucket of chicken to her chest, moaning as soon as she took a bite. He smiled knowingly at her– she had been hungry after all.

Hurriedly, Sy took off his clothes and slid in bed behind his wife, wrapping an arm around her waist to pull her closer to him. They hadn’t slept together the previous night as they babysat the kids and he had missed the feel of her soft body against his. A content hum escaped him as his already partially hard cock nestled against the roundness of her ass.

Ada chuckled at his reaction, the vibrations of her body sending sparks of pleasure to his growing erection. “I have an idea,” she whispered, her voice becoming seductive again as she started rubbing herself against him.

Sy groaned deeply and tightened his grip on her waist, forcing her to still even though he was no longer sure for what he now hungered more; food or his wife. “We’re both hungry and exhausted,” he reasoned with her, his fingers moving some hair away from her neck so that he could kiss her there.

“Let me,” she insisted, a grin audible in her voice. Her hands disappeared under the bedsheets and she slid off her panties before retaking her initial position as the little spoon. Behind her, Sy groaned as her delicate fingers took hold of his cock, giving it a few pumps before guiding him inside her warmth. He muffled a soft moan against neck at the snug feeling of tight her walls, his arm tightening around her again. She let out a quiet gasp at the stretch, it hurt a little despite her still being sufficiently wet from when he had pushed her against the hood of the car. But once he was fully inside, Ada sighed at the pleasure of being again. “Now we can eat.”

°°°

There are two more chapters to go! Next chapter will include Christmas tree decorating. I am running behind on schedule so I cannot guarantee the last chapter will be posted by Christmas but I’ll do my best.

°°°

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[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | The World, the Flesh and the Devil (MacDougall, 1959)

This review contains spoilers.

When we first meet him, the miner played by Harry Belafonte seems to be having a bad day at work. You see, the mine's just caved in, and he can hardly get in touch with anybody topside. Realizing that nobody's going to come down and save him, he manages to dig himself out. At this point, he finds himself bewildered by the total absence of people anywhere he goes, although as he goes looking, the picture becomes clearer, with newspaper headlines and old radio broadcasts confirming that he missed the apocalypse as he was trapped underground. Eventually he makes his way to New York City, and these initial scenes provide the movie's most haunting passage, juxtaposing him with a sea of unattended cars on a bridge and other landmarks. The most poignant of these images has him framed against skyscrapers, suggesting that as a working class black man, he could only attain such heights once society has totally collapsed.

At this point it starts to come into focus that this is not merely a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons (the same year saw the release of the talkier but no less involving On The Beach, and the following decade produced one of my favourites in the genre, The War Game, the sometimes bitterly funny and mostly terrifying pseudocumentary that hits like a sledgehammer). Belafonte eventually starts accepting his new reality, finding ways to amuse himself like befriending two mannequins, one male, one female (he does not however give the female a fake mustache and the male lipstick, nor does he make them kiss; his intentions are more dignified). He even regales them with a song, perhaps as a commercial concession and acknowledgement of Belafonte's other talents. Boy, this nuclear apocalypse sure is grim, here's a tune from the "Banana Boat Song" guy to cheer us up.

He eventually tires of the male and tosses him out the window, which leads to the reveal that he's not alone. In fact, a young woman played by Inger Stevens has been stalking him the whole time. They become friends, but up to a point, as Belafonte is unable to accept her affection, and the movie slowly reveals how their internalized racism colours their relationship, no matter how much they desire to bridge the gap. Further complications are posed by the arrival of a sailor played by Mel Ferrer, who announces that he's not a racist but is beholden to patriarchal notions, feeling the need to compete for Stevens' heart, neither man paying much heed to what she actually wants. Eventually he forces an ultimatum, triggering a showdown between both men that has them hunting each other across the city.

There is arguably something quaint about a movie that chooses to tackle racism and misogyny without explicitly addressing structural issues, but I found the movie quite moving in how it depicts the depth to which the characters have had such ideas ingrained in them by society that they're unable to shed them even said society has collapsed. It helps that it provides three very engaging lead performances. It helps even more that the delivery is so cinematic, with striking B&W scope compositions lending the proceedings an austere beauty and heightening the tension of the climax. And if the movie's resolution, which has the characters walking off like I assume Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke and Lee Marvin do in Paint Your Wagon (which I haven't seen but am happy to make wild assumptions about), is a little hokey, I guess that's okay too. If Inger Stevens held our hands and looked deep into our eyes, I suspect many of us would be powerless to resist too.

[gunnerpalace]

Hi! Same anon as the previous one. Tbh, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Y'see I do ask rhetorically,too but i could really accept and understand how and why ppl can be oblivious to IchiRuki, and somehow felt that the 'canon' should suffice, even the most excruciating of all is the fact a number found the ending even acceptable (ships aside, too). Again, I could respect that. But it's my greatest bane when ppl ask 'why' and not be clear they are asking rhetorically because I literally will

provide you an actual answer. And I get it, it’s the reason why ppl find shipping wars toxic and silly. But then again, as human, conflicts are always part of us (partly because as social psych explains so, we are gravitated to the negative for that allows us to change and survive), and the reason why “logical fallacies” are coined in the first place. Human will always debate, and argue about something; the only thing we could change is how we approach the opposing views.

Again, I dont condone any way, shape or form of abuse and harm. In some certain extent, I could perhaps understand it’s much harder for some IH to approach the actual argument being there’s either too much noise, and trapped in their own island between sea of salt. Thus becoming too acquianted w/ few IH who shared the same thought until it became their views as the only truth (see, that’s why its important to have debates! it is what keep us grounded and fair! Just like you said)

Who am I to speak though? I never ever challenged anyone anyways. And as you said, you just have to understand things in every way you could possibly think of–endless ‘whys’. Which is where I agree in your reply the most–this silly fandom wars is just the black mirror to every truth that lies beneath human psyche–the dark and the grimy. Heck, being a psych major is like staring at dark hole–at times, good, but most just plain confusing, revolting even or just heartbreaking.

Sorry it’s been long, but for the final of this ask: let me tell how glad I was with IchiRuki fandom I found in tumblr. It was the saltiest I’ve ever been (im not generally a fandom person anyways) but it’s the himalayan salt–expensive and actually nutritive it really deepened my desire to become wiser in general. And you for your wonderful essays, critiques and whatnot. I definitively would love to talk with you more not only about IchiRuki but the wonders and nightmare that us humans! Kudos!

I have sitting in my drafts a post spelling out my thoughts on “canon” (and thus, the people who cling to it) in that as a concept it privileges:

officiality over quality when it comes to validity (thus violating Sturgeon’s law)

corporations (intellectual property rights holders) over fans, and thus capitalists over proletarians

hierarchical dominance over mutualist networking within fandom

curative fandom over transformative fandom

genre over literary content

plot over characters

events over emotions

It is notable that (1) generally degrades art as a whole, (2) generally advances the capitalist agenda, and (3–7) generally advances the dominance of men over women (as the genders tend to be instructed by society to view these as A. dichotomies rather than spectrums, and B. to ascribe gender to them and make them polarities). These form the sides of a mutually reinforcing power structure (in the typical “Iron Triangle” fashion) designed to preserve and maintain the status quo.

Who really benefits from say, the policing of what is or is not “canon” in Star Wars? Disney, first and foremost. And then whomever (almost certainly male) decides to dedicate their time to memorizing the minutiae of whatever that corporation has decided is “legitimate.”

One can imagine a universe in which fan fic is recognized by companies for what it is: free advertising. (Much like fan art already is.) Instead, it is specifically targeted by demonetization efforts in a way that fan art isn’t. Why? Because it demonstrates that corporate control and “official” sanction has no bearing on quality, and it is thus viewed as undermining the official products.

In the same way, by demonstrating that most “canonical” works are frankly shit, it undermines the investiture of fans in focusing on details that are ultimately errata (the events, the plot, the genre), which is the core function of curative fandom and the reason for its hierarchical structure. The people who “know the most” are at the top, but what they “know” is basically useless garbage. And those people so-engaged are, of course, usually male.

To “destroy” the basis of their credibility, and indeed the very purpose of their community, is naturally viewed by them as an attack.

(This is not to say that efforts to tear down internal consistency within established cultural properties are good unto themselves, or even desirable. For example, efforts to redefine properties such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Ghostbusters, for the sake of a identity-politics agenda have largely A. failed as art, B. failed as entertainment, C. failed to attract the supposedly intended audience, and D. failed to advance the agenda in question. Trying to repurpose extant media in the name of culture wars is essentially always doomed to failure unless it is done deftly and gradually.)

(At the same time, this also shows what I was talking about last time, with regard to people seeing whatever they want to see. You will see people complain that Star Trek and Doctor Who didn’t “used to be so political,” which is obviously nonsense. These shows were always political. What changed was how their politics were presented. For example, Star Trek has, since TNG, always shown a nominally socialist or outright communist future, but was beloved by plenty of conservatives because they could [somehow] ignore that aspect of it.)

Of course, almost no one is seriously suggesting that one side of the spectrums outlined above be destroyed, rather merely that a new balance be struck upon the spectrum. But, as we have seen time and again in society, any threat to the status quo, whether that be 20% of Hugo Awards going to non-white male authors or the top income tax rate in America being increased by a measly 5.3% (from 28.7% to 34%… when the all-time high was 94% and for over 50 years it was above 50%) is a threat. This is why, for example, Republicans are out there branding AOC as a “socialist” when her policies are really no different at all from a 1960 Democrat who believed in FDR’s New Deal. (Which they, of course, have also demonized as “socialism.”)

(As an aside, all this ignores the fact that most of the “literary canon” of Western civilization, or at least English literature… is Biblical or historical fan fic.)

And this is when I finally get to my point.

Those people out there who denigrate and mock shippers and shipping, the people who hurl “it reads like fan fiction” as an insult, and so on, are the people who benefit from and enjoy the extant power structure. You will see the same thing with self-identified “gamers” complaining about “fake girl gamers.” Admitting that the hobby has a lot of women in it, and a lot of “casuals,” and is indeed increasingly dominated by “non-traditional demographics” is an affront to the constructed identity of being a “gamer.” They are “losing control.” And they don’t like it.

This exact same sort of population is what the “fanbase” of Bleach has been largely reduced down to through a slow boiling off of any actual quality. Of course they’re dismissive of people who are looking for anything of substance: their identity, their “personal relationship” with the franchise, is founded on a superficial appreciation of it: things happening, flashy attacks, eye-catching character designs, fights, etc.

(What this really boils down to, at heart, is that society at large has generally told men that emotions are bad, romance and relationships of all kinds are gross, and that thinking and reflecting on things is stupid. So of course they not only don’t care about such things, but actively sneer at them as “girly” or “feminine,” which is again defined by society at large as strictly inferior. And this gender divide and misogyny is of course promulgated and reinforced by the powers that be, the capitalists, to facilitate class divisions just like say racism generally is.)

(The latest trick of these corporate overlords has been the weaponization of “woke” culture to continue to play the people off one another all the time. “If you don’t like this [poorly written, dimensionless Mary Sue] Strong Female Character, then you are a racist misogynist!” They are always only ever playing both sides for profit, not advancing an actual ideological position. It is worth noting that there was a push by IH some years ago to define IR as “anti-feminist” for critiquing Orihime for essentially the exact same reasons [admittedly, not for profit, but still as critical cover].)

Which makes it very curious, therefore, that the most ardent IH supporters tend to be women. (Though there are more than a few men, they seem to tend to support it because it is “canon” and to attack it is to attack “canon” and thus trigger all of the above, rather than out of any real investment.) I think there are a number of reasons for this (which I have detailed before) and at any rate it is not particularly surprising; 53% of white women voted for Trump, after all.

What we are really seeing in fandom, are again the exact same dynamics that we see at larger and larger scales, for the exact same reasons. The stakes are smaller, but the perception of the power struggle is exactly the same.

Of course, the people who are involved in these things rarely think to interrogate themselves as to the true dimensions and root causes of their motivations. People rarely do that in general.

Putting all that aside, I’m glad that you have found a place you enjoy and feel comfortable, and thank you for the kind words, although I am not of the opinion that there is anything poignant about the non-fiction I write. It is, as I keep trying to emphasize, all there to be seen. One just has to open their eyes. So, it’s hard for me to accept appreciation of it.

Anyway, don’t feel shy about coming off of anon rather than continuing to send asks. We don’t really bite.

[michael-radi-the-glamorous-life]

In Review: "Oklahoma!"

The first time I saw Oklahoma! live was at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada (in 2006?). I remember turning to my parents and saying:

“That was fantastic, and they really didn’t stray away from the dark part of the show. I don’t think I ever need to see this show again!”

All of this to say that, when the recent St. Ann’s Warehouse production of Oklahoma! first caused a stir at the Warehouse and then again in its move to Circle In The Square, I did not feel the need nor desire to run to see it. I had seen it onstage twice, plus the two filmed versions, and how different could it really be?

So I waited…until last weekend. The second-to-last performance. (How’s that for procrastination?!)

So, was it all that different?

Well, no. But yes? And also really no.

Don’t Throw Bouquets at Me

Most of what I’ve heard people say about this production were things like:

“It’s so dark!"“

“It’s really different!”

“They did some cool, but strange things with it.”

“They took it in a completely new direction.”

“I’ll never see Oklahoma! the same way again!”

“You have to see it. You would appreciate it.”

Some of this I agree with, but some of it I very much do not.

Let’s tackle the idea that this production of Oklahoma! was particularly (thematically) dark: Yes, but no darker than any production of this show really should be.

It seems to me that either - with the number of people whose minds were blown by the production’s darkness - many people had not ever seen Oklahoma! onstage, or just were not aware of the content of the show. But let us not forget - early musical theatre was all dark. It’s written into the DNA of the genre: There is disturbing content (usually intentional, sometimes not) between and underneath all the glitz, glamor, and show tunes.

Examples:

Show Boat - Racism, Prejudice, Abandonment

Carousel - Domestic Abuse, Murder

South Pacific - Racism, Tokenism, War

The King And I - Racism, Colonialism

The Sound Of Music - …I mean, it’s set against the backdrop of Nazism…

And these are just Rodgers/Hart and Rodgers/Hammerstein musicals! Once you start including Lerner & Lowe, Comden & Green, and Kander & Ebb you get more murder, classicism, racism, misogyny, mob mentality, white supremacy, white saviorism, colonialism, capitalism, and so much more.

Now, to be fair, many writers included these themes specifically to subvert them - it’s a large part of why the piece was written (whether or not they accomplished their goal). But it’s undeniable that dark themes have been part of the tradition of musical theatre since its very inception.

Which brings us back to Oklahoma!

This production did not specifically add in dark elements to the story - they already existed. These themes include:

Murder

Rape

Toxic Masculine Behavior

White Male Entitlement

White Privilege

Racism

Misogyny

Mob Mentality

Intentional Othering

Community Crime Cover-Up

Excessive/Irresponsible Gun Usage

White Expansionism/”Manifest Destiny”

Violence or Threatened Violence Used to end Disagreement

And more

What I think this production did brilliantly was something that was ultimately a simple idea, but probably very technically difficult to thread throughout the entire production: They stripped the show of it shiny, musical theatre veneer and let the subtext become the text.

It was very effective.

Don’t Laugh at My Jokes Too Much

What I loved the most about it’s blatant stripping of the musical-theatre-genre-crutch was how often in the show the characters were all just sitting down in chairs spread across the stage, speaking in matter-of-fact tones.

Musical theatre so often relies on stage business, larger-than-life personalities, big voices, over-the-top movements, music, and choreography to provide the “entertainment” side of the evening, all the while hoping that the underlying messages of the show don’t then become lost on the audience.

Oklahoma! took no chances here. When the darkness of the scenes’ text, subtext, or situations were paramount, they stripped all of those other elements away, leaving you to sit with exactly what was being presented to you.

This worked so well that, during intermission and as I was leaving the theatre, I heard people saying things like:

“Is that how it’s always done?”

“Wait, what did they change?”

“There’s no way that’s the actual text.”

But it is! This production just made sure you did not forget it.

Now, that’s not to say that the production didn’t lean into the lighter moments of the show and bring out the comedy, dance, and fun - it totally did. BUT, often the laughter was tentative.

Why?

Much of the humor in Oklahoma! is based upon racist and misogynistic assumptions and, amongst the rest of the stripped down show, you could not laugh your way around that. This was awesome to behold across the audience. (Disclaimer: Not all of the humor is in this vain, and these performers were truly funny.)

The stripping down idea was so pervasive in the show that - at 2 separate moments - there were scenes in complete darkness.

And a couple other times the only light was coming from the live, projected images of the onstage camera capturing the hauntingly intimate moments.

Your senses were heightened, and there was no escaping the show’s text. It was very well done.

Don’t Sigh and Gaze at Me

The sound design was brilliant.

I’m not sure I can stress enough how fantastic the sound design for this show was.

The sporadic and intentional use of handheld mics, live stand mic/monitor setups, wireless mics, no mics, sudden live gunfire, and traveling sound across a circle of rumbling speakers was effective, intelligent, and well-executed.

Additionally, the orchestration was great. I hadn’t been a fan any time I had heard the show performed on award shows or morning shows, but when played live - in the room as intended - the balance was excellent and it added a grounded modernity to the show.

The lighting often confused me.

Some of the choices were beautiful and made a lot of sense: The light for the Act 2 opening dance sequence, the use of the party string lights, having full house lights on for the top of the show, and the pure darkness scene choices.

But then other choices seemed very random and without meaning or intention. Though, perhaps these choices were simply lost on me.

For instance, I was never sure what the intent was behind the full-stage washes of lime green and burnt orange. They seemed to be randomly placed throughout the show. I was also not a fan of taking the entire theatre from pure darkness to full stage and house lights in ~30 fade-ins. This might be due to my light sensitivity though.

The set was purely appropriate and quite effective.

I loved the pervasive wooden look of the entire show. The use of the chairs and tables was excellent. And adorning the walls with rifles was a great touch - not letting you forget what this show is really about.

All in all, the production elements really helped deliver the vision of this production, and often enhanced it far beyond my expectations.

People Will Say We’re In Love

It’s entirely possible that you may gather from this review that I loved the show.

Well, I enjoyed it and I’m glad I saw it.

It was not the mind-blowing experience for me that it seemed to be for many - though this is probably because of that Stratford production I saw in high school that clued me in to the realities of musical theatre’s pervasive dark side.

But I did think it was excellently done and well worth seeing! I appreciate what this production did, and I’m sure I’ll never see an Oklahoma! quite like that ever again.

Only one more comment about the production itself:

Yes, Curly is not a good guy. In fact, no one in this show can be considered a “good guy” - they all have tremendous flaws that negate their more endearing, sympathetic, or empathetic qualities, and can leave you feeling both empty and disgusted.

The choice to change the wedding fight at the end was, in my opinion, not necessarily more effective than having Judd go after Curly openly. It accomplished the same ideas - Judd still threatens by coming to the wedding and bringing a gun, and Curly and Laurey both still want him dead, and everyone is still relieved to have had the excuse to be rid of him. Yay mob justice.

So the change still got the job done. But I remain unconvinced that it was oh-so-different or more effective.

Anywho!

If you missed this one, I would highly suggest (even if just for research) making a trip to TOFT at some point to give it a gander.

OK?

[stretchjournalemerson]

Revisiting Buffy the Vampire Slayer : Intersectional Feminism in 2019

By Allison Hoag

Over twenty years after the series first premiered, Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains not only as a popular show in the public consciousness, but also as a hotly debated text in the academic sphere. What exactly is it about this demon-fighting, vampire-slaying, teenage girl that has captivated audiences for so long, and why has Buffy spawned so much controversy both publicly and academically? Most importantly, how should Buffy and its various implications about gender, race, and “otherness” be read in 2019?

It is undeniable that Buffy is a somewhat exclusionary narrative that directs our sympathies solely towards its overwhelmingly white and privileged characters. Any feminist inclinations this series espouses are emblematic of the equally exclusionary white feminism. However, even within these constraints—focusing only on feminism impactful to socioeconomically privileged white women—Buffy scholarship continually debates the extent of feminist messaging in the series. In 2019, surface-level white feminism alone is often not seen as enough to define a text as feminist. More and more, people are embracing Kimberle Crenshaw’s notions of intersectionality as a lens through which to evaluate texts. Crenshaw suggested that both feminist and anti-racist movements exclude black women, who face the most discrimination because of the intersection of their race and gender, arguing that “feminism must include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non-white women” (166). This term has since expanded to include class, ability, gender identity, and sexuality in feminist critiques.

Recently, the feminist debate over Buffy has been revisited after a somewhat shocking blog post by Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, that suggested Whedon is not the “loveable geek-feminist” he presents himself as (Cole). Despite the flaws of its creator, is there still a way for Buffy to be viewed as a feminist show? Is this a matter of separating the artist from the art, or, because his intentions while making this art are being called into question, are the two inextricably linked? In light of these revelations, I intend to reexamine Buffy through Crenshaw’s intersectional lens, focusing less on surface-level feminist readings of this series, but instead shifting the focus onto specific storylines to explore how Whedon addresses topics of gender, race, love, and rape.

***

It is not without reason that critics and fans alike have showered Buffy with feminist praise since its debut in 1997. Not only does this series make Buffy the “subject of traditionally masculine storytelling tropes…, [but] she does it all as a tiny, blonde former cheerleader…the embodiment of the girl her genre usually kills first” (Grady). Buffy takes the idea of a “strong” woman quite literally and manifests a teenage girl with superhuman strength who “must stand against the vampires, demons, and forces of darkness,” as the introduction to each episode reminds us (Whedon). Buffy seems to be a show rife with positive female role models for the impressionable teen and pre-teen girls that make up its audience: Buffy is selfless and strong (physically and emotionally); Willow is kind, intelligent, and stands up for what she believes is right; Cordelia is bold and unafraid to go after what she wants; Tara is loving and is constantly helping and caring for her friends.

Buffy often addresses topics that many members of this teen audience may face, largely through its (sometimes heavy handed) metaphorical use of vampires and demons, as well as online predators (“I Robot…You, Jane”), drinking at parties (“Beer Bad”), and drug addiction (“Wrecked”). Seemingly less metaphorical, however, is its feminism. Throughout the series, Buffy repeatedly defends the whole of humanity against vampires, demons, and the like, maintains positive relationships with the other women in her life, is independent, and has (mostly) healthy romantic relationships. The overt “girl-power” theme of this show is quite clear. However, in its final season, Buffy “raises the explicit feminist stakes of the series considerably” (Pender). While in previous seasons, the metaphorical misogyny of the villains Buffy faces could be debated, season seven’s “big bad” is, “of all the show’s myriad manifestations of evil, the most recognizably misogynist” (Pender). Dubbed “Reverend-I-Hate-Women” by Xander (“Touched”), Caleb can only be defeated if Buffy teams up with and shares her power with all potential Slayers across the globe, an act that takes “female empowerment” quite literally in the series finale.

But how did Buffy get to this point? Buffy wasn’t even initially intended for the pre-teen and teenage girl demographic who would become its main audience. Knowing that this show was originally aimed at a male demographic, “it seems evident that producers did not intend to market a feminist show” (Riordan 292). Not only do some of the feminist statements in Buffy feel painfully forced, but upon deeper exploration, much of this show’s “feminism” is only surface-level and disregards Crenshaw’s notions of intersectionality.

Mary Magoulick, a folklorist and Professor of English, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Women’s Studies at Georgia College (“Mary Magoulick”), explores some of the downfalls of “feminist” shows that were primarily created by men for predominantly male audiences in her article, “Frustrating Female Heroism: Mixed Messages in Xena, Nikita, and Buffy.” Magoulick argues that female heroes like Buffy that are “conceived of and written mostly by men in a still male-dominated world…project the status quo more than they fulfill feminist hopes” (729). An integral part of Magoulick’s argument is the idea that “Buffy [is] less concerned with building or celebrating a world than surviving a hostile one” (745). Although Magoulick acknowledges that recognizing the hostility women face in the world is an important part of feminist conversations, Buffy is widely praised for its progressive presentation of women, not for “presenting the troubling reality women live in” (750). Buffy continually expresses her desire to escape from her responsibilities as the Slayer and lead an average life; yet, she continues fighting vampires and demons, largely due to the pressure from her Watcher, Giles. The idea that Buffy cannot escape her situation because of a social institution—the Watcher’s Council, dominated by men and put in place to control women—provides strong textual support for Magoulick’s claim that Buffy is “reflective of current social inequities and gender roles” (750).

Ultimately Buffy escapes her duties as Slayer, sacrificing herself in the season five finale, only for her friends to later resurrect her, bringing her back from what they believe to be a hell dimension. However, Buffy confesses to Spike, “I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not…this is hell” (“After Life”), making him promise to never tell her friends. After coming back to life, Buffy almost immediately returns to her predetermined social position and initially deals with being brought back into her personal version of hell alone, wanting to protect her friends from the truth. Not only does this arc present the feminist concept of emotional labor as something inherently expected of women, but it also more directly begs the question Magoulick poses regarding the entirety of the series: “Is survival in hell, albeit with occasional victories and humor, the best [women] can imagine?” (748).

***

Magoulick promotes an argument first raised by Elyce Rae Helford that “[Buffy] is laudable for allowing women unusual space to voice and act out anger” while also sending strong implications about what kind of women are allowed to express anger (733). Of the Slayers introduced throughout the series, Buffy is the only one who is allowed to act upon her anger, and most of the time this anger is expressed towards the vampires and demons she fights, not people in her personal life. However, Kendra—a Slayer who is also a woman of color—has her anger framed in a much more negative way. Despite the lack of people of color in Buffy—or possibly because of the show’s few characters played by people of color—race and racism have become prominent topics in Buffy scholarship. A closer examination of direct and indirect racist implications in Buffy reinforces the idea that any feminist tendencies in Buffy fall strictly into the category of white feminism, and the show cannot be considered an example of the intersectional feminism pushed for in 2019.

The intersectional failings of Buffy are further explored by Kent A. Ono, a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Utah who researches representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation in print, film, and television media (“Kent A. Ono”). In his article, “To Be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Race and (‘Other’) Socially Marginalizing Positions on Horror TV,” Ono argues that Buffy “conveys debilitating images of and ideas about people of color” (163), claiming that “the valorization and heroification [sic] of a white feminist protagonist is constructed through an associated villainization and demonization of people of color” (164). Here, Ono quite literally means demonization. Most of the vampires and demons that appear on this show are played by white actors, so it is not necessarily a question of casting people of color as villains, so much as it is a question of who these villains are intended to be.

As previously established, the writers of Buffy can be somewhat aggressive with their use of metaphor; therefore, it is inarguable that, on Buffy, a vampire isn’t just a vampire. Ono argues that “the marginalization of vampires on the show takes the place of racial marginalization in the world outside the show” (172). In contrast, Magoulick presents a non-racial reading of the teenage vampires as “representative of gangs” (745). Considering the show’s overarching plot, especially the first few seasons Magoulick references when Buffy is still in high school, both of these interpretations are equally valid, and both can be supported by textual evidence. Given the history of representation of people of color on television, it is particularly disturbing that two of the major metaphorical interpretations of vampires on this show are as people of color and as gang members. It is not unreasonable to believe that Whedon and his writers were familiar with racist representations on television that were prominent in the 60s and early 70s, especially because some of these representations still exist twenty years after the show was created. With this understanding, it could be argued that vampires were equally intended to represent people who were racially marginalized and gangs. Ono argues that because the villains of Buffy were the ones chosen to represent people of color, “Buffy…indirectly and directly shows violence by primarily white vigilante youths against people of color in the name of civilization” (168), evoking images of violent white supremacy that are present throughout American history and to the present day.

However, there is a reason Ono describes the “vigilante youths” as only primarily white (168). Kendra, the previously mentioned second Slayer portrayed by Bianca Lawson who is featured in three episodes over the course of Buffy’s second season, is a black woman. Although only appearing in three episodes, Kendra is credited as “offer[ing] the most complex development of a black female character in Buffy” (Edwards 95). While this is technically true, it is important to note that her arc was fairly straightforward, and any character development is as a result of a somewhat racist narrative of acceptance only after assimilation. However, because she is one of the few examples of a prominent character who is a person of color and essentially the only person of color who works with Buffy, I will be examining her in some detail.

Ono argues that because she takes the responsibility of being the Slayer far more seriously, Kendra is a threat to Buffy, causing Buffy’s own racism to emerge. Ono specifically cites “[Buffy’s] discomfort with Kendra’s language…When Buffy uses the word wiggy and Kendra asks what that means, Buffy responds with a racist comment…‘You know, no kicko, no fighto’” (174). However, Buffy’s comment is indicative of a much larger issue in the show’s production team. “By casting Bianca Lawson, a black actress, in the role of Kendra, the second Slayer, [Whedon] makes character a sign imbued with cultural meanings about gender, race, and race relations” (Edwards 87). Kendra is marked as other not only by her skin color, but also by her heavy Jamaican accent, and she is not accepted by Buffy and her friends until she begins to assimilate, sending the message that people of color are responsible for changing themselves if they want to be accepted by white America.

It is important to note that Bianca Lawson’s casting wasn’t accidental. The script specifically delineates Kendra as an “ethnic young woman” (Edwards 91). Whedon has admitted that he did not make any efforts to hire people of color behind the scenes (Busis), so there is a possibility that the overwhelmingly white writers’ room and crew did not detect the racist treatment of Kendra. However, that in itself poses a major issue, not only socially, but also with how we’re supposed to understand the treatment of the few people of color and the metaphorical “people of color”/vampires throughout the series. The absence of people of color behind the scenes could also at least partially account for the Ono’s observation that “no person of color acknowledged as such on the series has been able to remain a significant character. All characters of color…have either died or have failed to reappear” (177).

Although she was killed off after only three episodes, as a black woman, Kendra represents the black women facing discrimination based on both race and gender that Crenshaw advocated for in developing her theory of intersectional feminism. Kendra’s treatment in Buffy is indicative of both the white feminism that will often ignore racist representations in a text because of its slight feminist messaging, and the necessity of including intersectionality in the evaluation and creation of feminist texts.

***

Buffy is filled with incredibly disturbing scenes. We watch Willow get skinned alive by a demon (“Same Time, Same Place”), Buffy’s own mother attempt to burn her at the stake (“Gingerbread”), and a demon stalk and murder sickly children in their hospital beds (“Killed by Death”). However, “Seeing Red” (2002) remains one of Buffy’s most upsetting episodes. Spike corners an injured Buffy in her bathroom and violently attempts to rape her until she is finally able to fight him off. In a recent interview, James Marsters (Spike) described his opposition to the scene, inadvertently pinpointing the reason this scene is so difficult to watch: “My argument was that, actually, when anyone is watching Buffy, they are Buffy…the audience, especially the female audience, they are not superheroes, but they are Buffy” (Marsters). This scene is particularly upsetting not only because of the content, but also because it presents many women’s worst fears—if an injured Buffy, who is still exponentially stronger than an average woman, can barely fight off Spike, what hope do they have of fighting off their attacker? Additionally, Spike is not presented as a violent vampire here: he is presented as human, making this scene more realistic and horrifying.

Wendy Fall, a doctoral candidate at Marquette University and editor of Marquette’s Gothic Archive (“Graduate Research”), discusses this scene at length in her article “Spike Is Forgiven: The Sympathetic Vampire's Resonance with Rape Culture.” She suggests that because James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845) is the first English-language vampire narrative that conflates an attack and rape scene, it established a “three-part strategy [gaslighting, silencing the victim, and emphasizing the assailant’s goodness] which encouraged readers to overlook Varney’s sexual violence, and thereby increased their sympathy for him” (Fall 76). She argues that although Spike’s attempted rape technically avoids Rymer’s narrative because he does not attempt to bite Buffy and is never even seen as a vampire, “The more problematic nature of this attack…is in what happens next, when the show adopts similar narrative schemes to Rymer’s to reinforce sympathy for Spike after his attempted sexual assault” (Fall 76).

Fall points out that there are only three more episodes in season six following Spike’s attempted rape, followed by a four-month gap between seasons, prompting the audience to forget how violent and serious it was (77). Not only are Spike and Buffy not seen together for the rest of the season, but they are separated because attempting to rape Buffy acts as a catalyst for Spike’s quest to get his soul back. This gives the audience time to develop sympathy for Spike as they watch him go through painful trials as he tries to recover his soul, while diminishing the severity of the attempted rape in their minds—because, surely, someone willing to go to this extent to obtain their soul and be a better person would never have acted as violently as he did.

Fall argues that Buffy also follows Varney’s narrative strategy of silencing the victim because “the show’s writers seem unwilling to allow the characters to have further discussion on the topic; Buffy never tells anyone the full story, and after this scene, she rarely mentions it again” (78). Fall further claims that “they had access to a strong female character and the opportunity to address her experience of trauma, but they opt not to pursue it” (78). Surely, at least part of the reason we never see Buffy attempting to deal with the emotional aftermath of someone she trusted trying to rape her is because the larger narrative suggests a degree of victim blaming that cannot coexist with holding Spike accountable for his actions. Prior to this scene, Buffy and Spike had been having a consensual sexual relationship, and Buffy attributes the start of this relationship to her “bad kissing decisions” (“Smashed”), so “when Spike attempts to rape her, it seems like an inevitable consequence of her poor decisions” (Nichol).

Finally, Fall suggests that Buffy completes this pattern when it “adopts a narrative strategy that redirects attention away from sexual violence by emphasizing the assailant’s positive contributions” (80). Not only does the rest of season six focus on Spike’s attempt to regain a soul, but the early episodes of season seven also show Spike as psychologically damaged as he comes to terms with the harm he caused as a vampire, putting Buffy and the audience in a position to want to pity Spike when we next see Spike and Buffy interact. Fall suggests that this plotline goes further than simply asking the audience to excuse the fact that this character tried to rape someone. She argues that “the vampire narrative’s memory-altering strategies are also deployed to reinforce rape culture, mostly in the cases of assailants who have sufficient financial power to reframe their own narratives to emphasize their better deeds” (Fall 83). This narrative is everywhere, especially after it became widely acceptable, even expected, to report on the #MeToo movement. It’s unfortunate that this supposedly feminist show perpetuates and validates this narrative that has successfully allowed so many rapists to escape legal scrutiny; Brock Turner’s swimming career comes to mind as a relatively recent example. While Fall ends her article on a relatively hopeful note, providing research stating that articles—like hers—that challenge rape myths can make people more likely to believe survivors than assailants (83), arguments for forgiving Spike still abound.

In 2017, Alyssa Rosenberg, an opinion writer for the Washington Post who covers culture and politics (“Alyssa Rosenberg”), made a case for why both Buffy and the audience should have a more forgiving view of Spike. In her article, “On ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” we fell for the Slayer along with Angel, Riley and Spike," Rosenberg specifically addresses this scene as a “horrifying…illustration that Spike’s gestures are not the same as moral reform” (Rosenberg); however, she identifies it as “the catalyst for a quest that ends with Spike…earning back his soul and sacrificing himself to save the world” (Rosenberg). Rosenberg’s argument falls flat in a way many rapist-apology narratives do. She directly acknowledges the horror of the narrative, both literally in the scene and also in the audience’s minds as they grapple with the fact that this character who is supposedly trying to reform himself can still do something this violent; yet, she quickly glosses over it. Rosenberg immediately dives into how trying to rape Buffy influenced Spike to become a better person, without addressing how it affected Buffy—the actual victim. She highlights that Whedon’s integration of the narrative tactics Rymer introduced to get the audience to want to forgive Spike were effective.

Rosenberg argues that although Spike “commits some of the show’s cruelest acts…he sacrifices the most in an attempt to atone for his sins” (Rosenberg). She additionally characterizes his arc following his attempted rape of Buffy as “a journey that encourages us to think about the conditions under which even someone guilty of heinous acts can perform genuine penance and achieve real redemption” (Rosenberg). Interestingly, her choice of the word “penance” invokes a religious underscoring that implies that once he has performed this penance, Buffy, and by extension, the audience who identifies with her, have no choice but to forgive him. Additionally, none of the “penance” Rosenberg describes is directed towards Buffy. Spike undoubtedly goes through physically and emotionally painful trials as he attempts to regain his soul; however, this is not so much penance as it is a self-centered act. Spike believes that getting a soul might make Buffy finally love him, eventually “becom[ing] a legitimate romantic interest after the near-rape incident” (Nichol).

Rosenberg claims that Buffy “explored where evil and misogyny come from and urged us to fight them,” while simultaneously “ask[ing] those of us who loved Buffy and identified with her to contemplate grace and forgiveness” (Rosenberg). She technically is not wrong here, Whedon absolutely positions us to want to forgive Spike. However, I would venture to argue that the question up for debate is not so much the question Rosenberg poses of are we put in a position to forgive him, as it is, should we be put in a position to forgive him. Buffy is intended to be a role model for the pre-teen and teenage girls who watch the series. Yet, here, it sends a very damaging message: if you have a consensual sexual relationship with someone without loving them, you’re responsible if they attempt to rape you; but even if someone tries to rape you, you should easily forgive them and possibly begin a romantic relationship with them because they may change.

***

In the past few years, the public feminist conversation has shifted towards embracing Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality. This has therefore influenced the ways we read all texts, even texts such as Buffy that were created after Crenshaw’s paper was first published but before intersectionality was a major concern of the feminist movement. Additionally, the #MeToo movement has revealed the prevalence of the abuse of power by men in all sectors, but notably in Hollywood. Joss Whedon admittedly “didn’t make a point of hiring female directors…[or] people of color’” (Busis); explicitly equated a woman unable to have children with the Hulk—yes, that Hulk (Yang); and, as recently as 2015, refused to call himself a feminist (Busis). The combination of these two public paradigm shifts, closer examinations of Whedon both personally and as a creator, as well as Kai Cole’s disturbing essay about her ex-husband has many people questioning what Whedon’s work can add to the cultural conversation surrounding feminism in 2019. Is the problematic nature of Joss Whedon a matter of separating the artist from the art, or, because his intentions while making this art are being called into question, are the two inextricably linked?

Joss Whedon has made his name creating and writing shows featuring strong female characters. However, he does not seem to understand that “having a girl beat up guys is not equivalent to a strong female character when they always, constantly depend on men” (Simons). Yet, he has still managed to create a career and profit off of television’s lack of actual strong female characters, catering to a largely underserved audience who hoped to see any sort of feminist ideas in fictional television. “Whedon’s openly feminist agenda, frequently mentioned in interviews, has provided an interpretive framework for much Buffy scholarship” (Berridge 478). Whedon pushes this narrative and the public’s perception of him as a well-meaning feminist, while refusing to be labeled as such “because suddenly that’s the litmus test for everything you do…if you don’t live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you’re a misogynist” (Busis). It’s upsetting for fans of Buffy to realize that its creator feels that unless he is overtly espousing feminist ideas, his writing will be seen as misogynistic—which, it has been, he’s been criticized for both his Avengers: Age of Ultron script (Yang) and his rejected Wonder Woman script (White).

Although his public persona is that of a feminist, a closer look at his work and his personal life tells a very different story. In a commentary DVD extra for the second season of Buffy, Whedon discusses writing the script for the initial confrontation between Buffy and Angelus, saying “It felt icky that I could make him say these things. It felt icky and kind of powerful. It was very uncomfortable and very exciting for me to do it” (Nichol). This short piece of commentary is a perfect metaphor for Whedon’s career. He’s trying to be seen as “more” of a feminist by claiming he had no idea how he could write a scene where his heroine is eviscerated by her (newly-evil) boyfriend after having sex with him. However, he’s actually taking what could’ve been a moment to discuss the prevalence of slut shaming in our culture and refocusing it on himself.

Not only has his work contained misogynistic and offensive language toward women, but according to his ex-wife, Kai Cole’s, guest blog on The Wrap, he has also had several inappropriate affairs “with his actresses, co-workers, fans, and friends” (Cole). Aside from cheating on his wife, as creator and producer of several prominent series—at least in terms of his actresses, co-workers, and fans—it could be argued that he objectively had more power in these situations. This begs the question of exactly how consensual these affairs were and how much, if any, (possibly unintentional) coercion may have been involved. Furthermore, Cole says he wrote her a letter trying to excuse these affairs, explaining that he “was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive young women” (Cole), and blaming them, rather than taking responsibility for his actions. This pattern of blame is unsettlingly close to the blame Buffy endures for her relationship with Spike.

***

Despite the shortcomings of both this show and its creator, Buffy was, and remains, a prominent series in the lives of many of the pre-teen and teenage girls who have watched and grown with Buffy and her friends since its 1997 premiere—this author included. However, as we become more educated on certain cultural topics, we—especially those of us in positions of power and privilege—are often forced to reconcile our love of certain texts with their more problematic aspects.

I began this essay with a very different conception of Buffy than I have now. Admittedly, I bought into the allure of this series’ surface-level feminism and girl power when I was watching it for the first time. Sure, it was sometimes overtly problematic, but the positive aspects seemed to outweigh the negatives. I thought that this essay would reveal the surface-level feminism of Buffy ran much deeper than I originally realized—not the opposite. A closer examination of Buffy has revealed that the issues with this series are far more serious than its creator’s personal failings. Reading Buffy as a cultural text exposes a series of disturbing messages. Moreover, even when it does put forth feminist ideas, they often fall under the more exclusionary sect of white feminism, completely ignoring Crenshaw’s proposed intersectionality, which had been published nearly a decade before Buffy’s premiere.

The question of how Buffy should be read in 2019 is a question that has been repeated a lot recently: Can the Harvey Weinstein’s films still be appreciated? What about The Cosby Show? Or shows affiliated with Fox Broadcasting, and, therefore, Roger Ailes? While some argue that these men and any texts or media associated with them should be “cancelled,” others call for a separation between the artist and the art. However, I would argue that, at least for Buffy, it is not so much about separating the artist from the art as it is about recognizing the art for what it is—its limits included.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my mom for proofreading all 4,500-odd words of this and catching the many mistakes I missed. I would also like to profusely thank Mary Kovaleski Byrnes for her support, guidance, and the much-needed periodic confidence boosts.

Works Cited

“After Life.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 3, UPN, 9 Oct. 2001. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/70c15619-2955-499f-b1ca-48bb650ad68f.

"Alyssa Rosenberg." The Washington Post, The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/people/alyssa-rosenberg/?utm_term=.29211618cb7b. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.

“Beer Bad.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 5, The WB, 2 Nov. 1999. Hulu,www.hulu.com/watch/6ce16885-24ba-48b0-b729-b01c3b52213d.

Berridge, Susan. "Teen heroine TV: narrative complexity and sexual violence in female-fronted teen drama series." New Review of Film & Television Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 477-96. ESCOhost, doi:10.1080/17400309.2013.809565.

“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2, episode 16, The WB, 10 Feb. 1998. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/4569c5ed-aebc-4cea-86ce-8e05f2fbef4f.

Busis, Hillary. "Joss Whedon Declares Himself a "Woke Bae"." Vanity Fair, 10 Mar. 2017, www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/03/joss-whedon-woke-bae-feminism-buffy-the-vampire-slayer.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist

Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, 1989, pp. 139-67, chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.

Cole, Kai. "Joss Whedon Is a ‘Hypocrite Preaching Feminist Ideals,’ Ex-Wife Kai Cole Says (Guest Blog)." The Wrap, Aug. 2017, www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/.

Edwards, Lynne. “Slaying in Black and White: Kendra as Tragic Mulatta in Buffy.” Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and

David Lavery, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002, pp. 85–97.

Elison, Meg. "The Non-Toxic Masculinity of Rupert Giles." Syfy Wire, 17 June 2018, www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-non-toxic-masculinity-of-rupert-giles.

Fall, Wendy. "Spike Is Forgiven: The Sympathetic Vampire's Resonance with Rape Culture." Slayage, vol. 48, Summer/Fall 2018, pp. 68-86. EBSCOhost, proxy.emerson.edu/login?url=search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=133526410&site=eds-live.

“Gingerbread.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3, episode 11, The WB, 12 Jan. 1999. Hulu,www.hulu.com/watch/666ff3b9-c7d6-4f5f-adaf-3483ce8add76.

"Graduate Research." Marquette University, Marquette University, 2018, www.marquette.edu/english/research-graduate.php. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.

Grady, Constane. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer's feminism is still subversive, 20 years later." Vox, 10 Mar. 2017, www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/10/14868588/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-feminism-20th-anniversary.

“I Robot…You, Jane.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1, episode 8, The WB, 28 Apr. 1997. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/6232c153-896e-4d99-b152-9feed2f99fd1.

"Kent A. Ono." University of Utah Profiles, University of Utah, faculty.utah.edu/u0849982-Kent_A._Ono/hm/index.hml.

“Killed by Death.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2, episode 18, The WB, 3 Mar. 1998. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/75cb8a45-13ec-4b44-91a3-920d85cc6908.

Luria, Rachel. “Nothing Left but Skin and Cartilage: The Body and Toxic Masculinity.” Sexual Rhetoric in the Works of Joss Whedon: New Essays, edited by Erin B. Waggoner,

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010, pp. 185-193.

Magoulick, Mary. "Frustrating female heroism: Mixed messages in Xena. Nikita, and Buffy." Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 39, no. 5, Oct. 2006, pp. 729-55. EBSCOhost, proxy.emerson.edu/login?url=search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao& AN=edsgcl.153778141&site=eds-live.

Marsters, James. “Buffy’s James Marsters on the hardest day of his professional life.” The A.V. Club, 9 Mar. 2017, https://tv.avclub.com/buffy-s-james-marsters-on-the-hardest-day-of-his-profes-1798258915.

"Mary Macgoulick." Folklore Connections, Georgia College & State University, 1 Apr. 2001, faculty.gcsu.edu/custom-website/mary-magoulick/.

Nicol, Rhonda. “When You Kiss Me, I Want to Die”: Arrested Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Twilight Series. Gale, Cengage Learning. EBSCOhost, proxy.emerson.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e dsglr&AN=edsgcl.H1100110197&site=eds-live.

Ono, Kent A. “To Be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Race and (‘Other’) Socially Marginalizing Positions on Horror TV.” Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, edited by Elyce Rae Helford, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000, pp. 163–186.

Pender, Patricia. "Buffy Summers: Third-Wave Feminist Icon." The Atlantic, 31 July 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/07/how-buffy-became-a-third-wave-feminist-icon/493154/.

Riordan, Ellen. "Commodified agents and empowered girls: consuming and producing feminism." Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 3, July 2001, pp. 279-97. EBSCOhost, proxy.emerson.edu/login?url=search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.78260548&site=eds-live.

Rosenberg, Alyssa. "On ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ we fell for the Slayer along with Angel,Riley and Spike." Editorial. The Washington Post, 10 Mar. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/03/10/on-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-we-fell-for-the-slayer-along-with-angel-riley-and-spike/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.90b458f0de94.

“Same Time, Same Place.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 3, UPN, 8 Oct. 2002. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/f9a3b884-b72b-4bef-81e4-bcd95b002608.

Simons, Natasha. "Reconsidering the Feminism of Joss Whedon." The Mary Sue, edited by Kaila

Hale-Stern and Dan Van Winkle, Dan Abrams, 10 Apr. 2011, www.themarysue.com/ reconsidering-the-feminism-of-joss-whedon/.

“Smashed.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 9, UPN, 20 Nov. 2001. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/7728e9d5-e05d-4be3-ac93-d8792a018e54.

“Touched.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 20, UPN, 6 May 2003. Hulu,www.hulu.com/watch/ba2c6e7c-b015-47d2-8c62-4f16be64c579.

Whedon, Joss. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The WB and UPN, 1997-2003.

White, Adam. "Five time Joss Whedon, self-proclaimed 'woke bae', blew his feminist credentials." The Telegraph, edited by Martin Chilton, The Daily Telegraph, 21 Aug. 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/joss-whedon-5-times-blew-feminist-credentials/.

“Wrecked.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 10, UPN, 27 Nov. 2001. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/661f80ab-5cdc-426f-a494-283b03cf2ca6.

Yang, Jeff. "Is Joss Whedon a feminist?" Editorial. CNN Wire, 8 May 2015. EBSCOhost, www.cnn.com/2015/05/08/opinions/yang-joss-whedon-feminism/index.html.

[taytay4ever]

Social Justice Warriors Prepare to Pounce on Taylor Swift’s Upcoming Album

Superstar will need to dodge PR landmines like the professional she is

People say Taylor Swift is a racist, a horrible anti-feminist and even a Nazi version of Barbie. These are just some of the things that have been written about one of the best-selling pop stars of all-time. If Taylor Swift poses with a golden retriever, you can bet that certain media outlets will jump in to say she’s racist for not posing with a black or brown dog. The social justice wing of the media wants to destroy Taylor Swift. For the most part, the backlash is completely misguided and makes a mockery of real social justice issues.

Taylor Swift is not perfect, and some of her actions have been rightfully criticized. For example, in terms of her background, Swift wasn’t the underdog that she has portrayed herself as. Also, not only was trying to portray herself as a victim of Kanye West’s misogyny (at least recently) a mistake, but her tweet about the Woman’s March in January was ridiculous considering she didn’t even show up.

However, none of Swift’s actions deserve the vitriol she has received. Unlike other female superstars, Swift has never claimed to be a sexual assault activist and then filmed a music video starring R. Kelly and Terry Richardson (hello, Lady Gaga). Although Swift has dabbed into hip-hop, she has never tried to soften her image by claiming she now hates the genre (hello, Miley Cyrus). She has never tried to use drag queens to sell music that hasn’t been making waves (hello, Katy Perry). Criticism currently surrounding Taylor Swift has (mostly) nothing to do with her but rather the self-appointed cultural police who are doing the criticizing.

Taylor Swift represents everything the social justice police resent: she’s white, she’s pretty, she’s talented, and she’s amazingly successful. In other words, Taylor Swift has “privilege” and she’s part of the problem. While racism, sexism, etc. are still important social issues that need to be dealt with, Swift’s are using the wrong person as their scapegoat.

Adele, who’s also been bashed by the social justice crowd, isn’t a main target because she’s overweight and therefore doesn’t have “pretty” privilege. Madonna would be a perfect target, but she has a history with the LGBT community, although younger millennial LGBT members are actively trying to change this. Lady Gaga, who has posed with men in chains wearing blackface, would be the perfect target, but the singer has brilliantly cast herself as the victim and the underdog. Perhaps Taylor Swift might find solace in the fact that her arch enemy, Katy Perry, is close to replacing her as the target of the cultural police.

Still, Taylor Swift has to overcome a lot when she releases her new album, which is expected to arrive this fall. Social justice critics will be sharpening their knives. They will be looking to find something in the album that shows Swift is a racist who promotes nothing but white feminism.

As someone who has worked in the music industry and has followed its trends for years, I have the following suggestions for Taylor Swift and her return to the pop music scene.

Make It All About the Music

Taylor not only needs to not only deliver a great album; she needs to present it without social media statements or interviews that can be taken out of context. She needs to stay out of tabloids to ensure her art will be heard.

Use Social Media Sparingly

Social media used to be a great outlet for pop stars to promote their music. Now, it has become a landmine for media outlets looking to cause faux outrage in order to garner page clicks. Taylor can advertise her album and talk about the music, but she should stay off social media for the most part.

Don’t Over Publicize Charitable Deeds

Whenever Taylor Swift is in a PR ruckus, we soon see cameras following the star while she is paying a surprise visit to a veteran or visiting cancer patients. These are great things to do, but having a digital photography and video staff follow Swift around makes people question her motives. Swift seems like a genuinely caring person, so making her charity more personal shouldn’t be an issue.

End Feud With Katy Perry

Swift’s “Bad Blood” may have been a huge hit, but people have accused her of bullying Katy Perry and engaging in an anti-feminist woman-against-woman fight. If Swift changes her tune in regards to Perry, the message of forgiveness would resonate with fans.

Taylor Swift faces a huge battle, but success isn’t impossible. She has a huge fan base that will buy her music no matter how many times she is accused of all the “isms.” Other pop stars have overcome bad PR during album campaigns with huge success.

In 1994, Madonna was the most hated woman on the planet and critics consistently declared her “over with.” However, by launching a low-key campaign for her album Bedtime Stories, the singer made people concentrate on the music, delivered a critically acclaimed album and scored the longest-running (seven weeks) No. 1 hit of her career, “Take a Bow.”

In 2003 and 2004, Britney had one PR disaster after another, and it all came to a peak when she got hitched and divorced in a one-day period. The first single from her album In the Zone was a bomb, but by laying low key, Spears let the music do the talking. The industrial dance jam “Toxic” and the sultry ballad “Everytime” became huge hits and helped Britney stay relevant—at least for a couple more years.

There is a well-known cycle for pop stars, particularly female ones. Phase 1: Build them up. Phase 2: Tear them down. Phase 3: Build them back up. Let’s hope by the time her new album is released, Taylor Swift enters Phase 3.

The Observer (x)

[tessetc]

Consent and Virginity in Romance Novels

This is kind of a combination essay and review, but as I will be discussing consent issues, I suggest if this topic is an issue for you, you may want to pass on this post as well as the books I am discussing. 

This is extremely long so I am going to stick it under a cut, but there are reviews at the bottom of it for the books above and a few more as well. 

I was doing a lot of thinking lately about the role that consent and virginity plays and has historically played in the genre of romance, and how our relationship to those concepts has changed over the last forty years.

I have recently read all three of the books highlighted above, and along with a few others I will mention, I want to discuss the place they hold in romance history, and how they hold up as examples.

The first book above is The Wolf and the Dove, (1974) by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. Woodiwiss is famous as the mother of the modern romance novel, and the inventor of the “bodice ripper”. Prior to the publication of The Flame and the Flower (1972) (F&F) romances were extremely chaste, perhaps culminating in a sweet kiss at the end, at most. When F&F was published, it featured actual sex. Unfortunately, this occurred when the male lead raped the female lead.

I recently grabbed that book at a used bookstore. I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t comment in any great detail, but I am still aware of the issues with it. I remember reading it once a very long time ago, and being a bit bored by it, but otherwise I can’t say.

However, The Wolf and the Dove (W&D) is either the first or second romance I ever read, the other being The Pirate and the Pagan (1990) (P&P) by Virginia Henley. I really, really liked both books when I was younger, and I recently reread them both.

For the most part, P&P contains consensual sex, apart from one incident in the middle of the book. Unfortunately, this was not handled well, and when I recently reread this book as a more mature reader, it kind of ruined it for me. It’s acknowledged as a rape within the book, but it does not seem to have any real effect on their relationship.

In W&D, on the other hand, the male lead, Wulfgar, repeatedly “seduces” the heroine, Aislinn, by catching her and basically mauling her until “passion takes over” and she submits. This sounds very blunt. However, the book, set in Medieval England, begins with a sacking of her castle by the villain, who then basically drags her by her hair to be ravished. In contrast, Wulfgar waits several weeks before he gives in to temptation and has his way with her, and by then, her attraction is apparent and they have a relationship and are on their way to developing respect. Her opposition to his advances is not due to not wanting to be with him, but rather due to her objection to their unmarried state.

The scenes are very, very vague and undetailed. The book was published in 1974.

So why was the sex like this in these books? Most likely, the answer lies in purity culture. Women, the primary audience for romance, were meant to be chaste and nonsexual. Which means even having sex in books was revolutionary. Remember, this is roughly the time that birth control and abortion were becoming widely acceptable. Women were working in public and a rating system on movies meant that erotic and adult themes could be shown in theatre, rather than censored completely.

This was a revolutionary time for media and women’s rights, and it’s reflected in this genre as well. But culture doesn’t change overnight, and guilt and shame were still very thick on sexuality.

I’m not the first person to note that in order for a woman to “be allowed to enjoy erotica” it must be that the fictional female is overwhelmed or coerced. It sounds really awful. It IS really awful. But you have to think of the mindset. A sexually confident heroine is not only unrelatable to a repressed female reader, but it would also make her distinctly uncomfortable. There was a lot of socialization to be a certain way, and having a heroine who strolls up to the hero and cheerfully fucks him would have been really offputting and uncomfortable for the reader. They were simply not ready for it in the 70s, and a more progressive book would have gone nowhere.

***

The books from the 70’s and 80’s were available to me as a teen and young adult in the 90s and early 2000’s, but the concept of rape as necessary to the plot was still very prominent in books published at that time. However, it was becoming more of an issue, as more authors were taking note of it. I believe it was in a book called Remembrance, (1997) by Jude Devereaux, where the female lead was a romance author who refused to allow her heroes to rape the heroine, and the protag’s publisher took issue with it as they felt the readers would not believe he was virile enough.

So clearly, authors were conscious of this as a troubling issue by this point. You can see this as well in the works of Johanna Lindsay. She has been writing bestselling romance for decades. Her early books nearly all featured ravishment of the heroine by the hero; her novels are the very definition of bodice ripper, featuring burly vikings and knights and captured brides.

But when you look at her body of work as a whole, you see a gradual change over time. By the time Man of my Dreams came out, in 1992, the blatant rape was gone, and many of her books featured very innocent, virginal heroines.

Very innocent.

In Man of my Dreams, the heroine, Megan, goes to the hero, Devlin, to learn how to kiss. He takes it a bit far and ends up nailing her in the hay.

She is pretty much down with it the whole time. She doesn’t attempt to stop him, so it’s not rape, right? Has the author dodged the bullet?

No. No, I don’t think so. Instead of rape, heroines who know what’s going on but object as in the older books, this is much more subtle, and in a lot of ways, more disturbing. Devlin ABSOLUTELY knows what he’s doing. Megan ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT. She has no idea she’s losing her virginity until it’s too late. Devlin lies to her and says it’s “part of kissing” but he is knowingly taking advantage of her inexperience. So it seems clear to me that the author was already aware of the consent issues in the genre, but attempted to skirt it by framing it as a seduction rather than a ravishment.

As a reader in the 90s and a young woman, I didn’t see this problem. I just thought it was hot. Purity culture was still very much a part of my psychological makeup, as well as that of other readers.

When I say above that a sexually confident heroine made readers uncomfortable, I speak from my own past perspective. A forward or experienced heroine made for uncomfortable reading when it occurred. It’s hard to pinpoint how, exactly, but while I wanted to read about sex, I couldn’t identify with someone who knew what they wanted and went after it, sexually speaking.

Was I repressed? I didn’t think so. After all, I was reading all these smutty books, right?

Wrong. Looking back, I was very much repressed. Not only was there shame in thinking about sex and reading about it, but even having sex before marriage was very shameful to me.

TMI here but the first time I ever even masturbated, I was 25. Despite the smut. 25.

So yes, in order to even be able to wrap my head around the idea of liking sex, it had to be very much noncon or seductive.

***

Times change, technology changes, and people change.

I spent my intervening years on the internet, tried selling sex toys at home parties (thereby learning to talk about it), and have plowed through the majority of my 30s, learning along the way how to give zero fucks what people think of me.

Society - and culture - have matured along with me. A big factor in the change, in my opinion, is the ability we have as humans to share ideas easily around the world. Subtle issues with racism, homophobia, and misogyny that were unnoticed by me and others in the 90s are more clear now as we have the ability to step out of our small, local social groups and gain understanding from people of all walks of life.

This is an ongoing process, of course, and we are not all as enlightened as we think we are or want to be, but it is a process, and I definitely see the effects as filtered through the lens of a romance reader.

Romance is about relationships, and so is culture, and our culture is reflected thusly.

In the past couple of decades, romance has undergone a significant overhaul. Not only within the strictly defined confines of the genre, but also in some influential books that have come out since. Particularly the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, the first of which was published in the 1991 and which is still ongoing.

Outlander is, strictly speaking, not romance. But it is heavily influenced by, and influential on the genre. A lot of romance tropes are taken and flipped. Most particularly the experienced female and virginal male leads, very, very explicit sex, (much more so than the much tamer books I have already discussed), and the rape which doesn’t occur between the leads, but which is inflicted on Jamie rather than Claire, by the villain. Clearly, the author was examining these issues in a fresh way.

As a reader, the enjoyment of the novel no longer hinged on the “taking” of the female. The fact that it was well received indicates that there was quite a cultural shift, as she was very forward. Also, the rape was not titillating or in any way exciting. Rather it was portrayed as a tragedy and a crime, and affects Jamie for decades throughout the following books. He suffers poorly-treated PTSD from the event that he struggles with in the background of several more books.

But the problem isn’t entirely gone from society. Outlander gets away with a lot because it isn’t, strictly speaking, a romance.

What is a romance, however, is the extremely popular and influential Fifty Shades series, the first of which came out in 2011.

Now in full disclosure, I only skimmed these, and it was before the movies came out. But it’s clear that the need we have as women to be overpowered sexually is still there. But it’s undergone yet another shift.

Setting aside the issues with the accuracy of BDSM, at its core, this series once again has a virginal female overtaken by an experienced male. The author has clearly tried to bury the consent thing once and for all by having the characters spell out consent on paper. But the need for the male to overpower the female has shifted to kink rather than rape or coercion.

There are a thousand essays on whether or not this was consensual, stalking, abuse, or whatever. I can’t really weigh in on that. But clearly the fact that it could be interpreted that way indicates there are still issues within the genre.

Most of the books I have read recently, mostly published within the last 2-3 years, feature clear consent and confident females. In a lot of ways, we seem to have gotten over this hump. But none of these books have had as wide an audience as 50 Shades. So it seems the need for a coerced female has clearly not gone away entirely.

Looking at my own relationship with consent in romance, I know I am less comfortable and more aware of non-con in books, and more able to point it out when it’s subtle than I was before. My relationship with virginity has changed as well. I am no longer particularly comfortable with an ignorant female.

I do, however, still like to see a strong, aggressive male overpowering a female. Maybe not to the extent in 50 Shades, but I certainly still like to see roughness, size differences, women being picked up and carried (although while laughing rather than screaming) and men who have an economic advantage over the woman.

So how much of this is kink and how much of it is lingering aftereffects of purity culture?

As much as I wish it was the former, I have to come to the conclusion that it’s probably the latter.

It makes me angry that I feel unfeminist when I want to read and write about submissive females and billionaire bad boys. That I still sometimes like to see less experienced females with playboy males. I WANT it to be kink, but looking at my own personal growth trajectory in conjunction with the romance genre, I can only conclude that it really is aftereffects of socialization and that in ten more years, I will shudder at the things I find appealing now.

We all grow, and change, and the genre does as well. Sometimes we need to step back and objectively analyze ourselves and our environment in order to facilitate this growth.

So where does this leave the final book pictured, Sinner? (2017)

Well, in this, purity culture, particularly in the evangelical subculture, is front and centre, and clearly highlighted as a factor in the heroine’s virginity.

But whereas in the past, her virginity = ignorance, in this case, she is much more aware of what is going on, and is more or less the aggressor, actively deciding that her virginity is a burden that allows men to control her, that is valued more highly than her actual self. So after developing a relationship with the male lead, she actively sets out to remove it.

The male lead, while still the stereotypical manslut, is totally mindful, to his own disgust, of how “caveman” he feels about taking her virginity, and goes to great lengths to confirm her consent, not only on that occasion, but on subsequent occasions as well.

The book becomes much less about virginity as a kink, and more about a woman’s right to make the decision for herself about when, and importantly, with whom to have sex.

Are all issues erased now, then?

Probably not. As I said, change is ongoing, and there are probably a ton of issues that I’m simply not seeing yet. But I find myself in a place where I can openly read smut, write smut, and write about reading smut, and I can find books where women are able to be free and open with their sexuality, where they take agency and control, and importantly, I ENJOY it.

I wouldn’t have enjoyed it in my younger days, and I suspect this rather run of the mill book would have probably not gone over as well with readers as a group twenty, let alone forty years ago.

***

So since I want to review these a bit too, and I was kind of meaning to anyway, here is a quickie review of all the books mentioned after the giant wall of analysis I just forced on you.

Books Mentioned:

The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Haven’t read it yet, but will soon. Not expecting good things, but it was a turning point, so I’m gonna take the bullet for you, dear reader.

The Wolf and the Dove by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

I am aware of the noncon, and can look at it objectively, and so it doesn’t bother me. I don’t recommend this book if it’s an issue for you. However, if you can ignore it, this is actually a really engaging story. Sex doesn’t actually play a huge part in it, and it’s got some notable historical inaccuracies. But Wulfgar is a likeable hero. Aislinn is like a prototype for Outlander’s Claire, and I just love, love, love the ending. I still fucking love this book, and the troublesome aspects really don’t detract from it for me.

8/10

The Pirate and the Pagan by Virginia Henley

This book and this author has been hugely influential on my own writing. Much more smutty than Lindsay and Woodiwiss, her main passion is history and storytelling rather than romance. She still falls into the rape trap, though, and in this case it bothered me a bit more than in The Wolf and the Dove.

I do like the overall plot of the book, however. Along with her other book, Seduced, which was an inspiration for my fic Only a Look and a Voice, I have jury rigged it into a fanfic. I won’t tell you which one, though.

I kind of only want to give this a 6/10. Summer, the female lead, is a bit too objectified for me to be comfortable with any longer.

Man of my Dreams by Johanna Lindsay

This had a good start, but the sex was miniscule, and as I said above, squeamishly non-consensual. I don’t recommend this book at all.

However, kudos for the ridiculous Fabio cover, which I couldn’t help but include when I took a picture for this essay.

4/10

Remembrance by Jude Devereaux

This book has both a virginal and a non-virginal female lead, and has almost no sex in it. I’ve read it a few times, and it’s a favourite, but it’s been quite a while since I last picked it up.

The basic concept is that the pair are reincarnated throughout history. A large chunk of the book is set a very long time ago, when their romance did not turn out well, and they cursed each other on death, a curse that reverberates through their future incarnations.

This book is angsty, and tragic. It’s really weird, really unique, and a really good read.

Unfortunately, the ending - although happy - is very flat and rushed, almost as though the author suddenly decided at the last moment to stop writing and wrap it up. This was a similar issue I had with the other book I reviewed by her, A Knight in Shining Armour.

That being said, it’s still really good.

8/10

Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon

Smut wise, she hit it out of the park in the first book. Seriously, so, so good. But throughout the series, it sort of becomes rote, like marriage often is, and the sex no longer is noteworthy.

Also, past the third book, romance is much less of a factor, and I feel like she’s gotten into the trap many contemporary authors fall into of endlessly writing a series that no longer tells a story but rather just keeps continuing a world that’s been built.

Luckily, I really enjoy the world she’s built.

If you have the stomach for tough scenes and a two foot high stack of words, have at it. 9/10, recommend. If you’re lazy, there’s a TV series, which was very well done by the same guy who produced the successful reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which I will slip in here as one of my other all time favourite shows.

Fifty Shades Of Grey by EL James

I had a hard time reading this and it was a long time ago, so I can’t really recommend it. If you’re into reading things because you want to see what the fuss is about or to make some kind of contextual analysis, have at it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.  I’m not going to assign a number to this since I don’t remember it well enough.

Sinner by Aubrey Irons

This review was why I started typing all this nonsense in the first place.

The story is about a preacher’s daughter and a bad boy dive bar owner. His dad’s a preacher too, although much more chill than her dad.

They have an immediate attraction, and over the course of the book, they gradually fall for each other.

The plot… is kind of thin. I mean it’s there, but it’s almost an excuse for the slow burn/build-up of smut that is the real heart of this novel. It’s well done smut, I fucking loved it. But this book is light on story.

That being said, 8/10 for a fun, shamelessly smutty book, that pretended to be serious.

***

If you got this far, I really appreciate any feedback or opinions you may want to share on this topic. I’m shutting off anon for the next day or so, however, as it never seems to go well when I express too much of an opinion on this site.

Thanks for reading.

[epiphanyx7]

Hey Followers, are any of you on goodreads?

I am looking for people who are feminists and who are critical of the media they consume with respect to ableism, racism, heteronormativity and the like, who read a lot of books and who I can follow/friend on goodreads.

Goodreads’ algorithms are TERRIBLE at recommending books for me, since I am hypercritical of sexism and misogyny in media regardless of genre, but I also like reading romance novels and high fantasy, both genres which seems to have an overabundance of sexist tropes I simply don’t have time for.

So if you’re a woman, or a POC, (or a WOC like me!) who rates/reviews novels on goodreads, who enjoys Historical Romance (or contemporary and/or paranormal romance) or Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult genres, let me know.

I want book recs for any book with POC/WOC leads, with disabled leads, with LGBTQIA leads, with poly leads, or books that have diverse casts and are well-written with respectful treatment of other cultures.

I want people who are able to leave reviews that are critical of the otherization/fetishization of other cultures, racism, sexism, abuse, rape culture, ableism, and heteronormativity.

If you have a goodreads account and you want to join me in my quest to find good books, please feel free to add me: goodreads.com/Claudiniac.

PS: If you don’t want to join goodreads, but want me to suggest books for you, feel free to send me a PM here on tumblr. I read a lot of books. Just tell me what type of book you’re looking for, and I will recommend some books or authors.

[theconservativebrief]

The first-ever threepeat of the Hugo Awards — the prestigious, long-running fantasy awards handed out annually at WorldCon — just issued a giant rejection of right-wing gatekeeping in the struggle to diversify the world of science fiction and fantasy writing.

N.K. Jemisin’s groundbreaking fantasy series the Broken Earth trilogy has won critical acclaim, been optioned for development as a TV series, and received numerous accolades from the sci-fi and fantasy community. And on August 19, it achieved yet another milestone when Jemisin became the first author in the Hugos’ 65-year history to win back-to-back awards for every book in a trilogy. Jemisin won the award for Best Novel three years in a row, starting with The Fifth Season in 2016, The Obelisk Gate in 2017, and now The Stone Sky in 2018.

In an acceptance speech that’s being hailed as one of the best ever made at the Hugos, Jemisin defiantly raised a “rocket-shaped finger�� (a reference to the rocket-ship design of the massive Hugo statue) to the racist rhetoric that positions the recognition of her work as being about identity politics rather than her own talent.

“It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it,” she began. “A hard few years, a hard century. For some of us, things have always been hard. I wrote the Broken Earth trilogy to speak to that struggle, and what it takes to live, let alone thrive, in a world that seems determined to break you — a world of people who constantly question your competence, your relevance, your very existence.”

[embedded content]

Jemisin knows all too well of what she speaks. Her Hugo threepeat isn’t just a win for her writing and for fans of her work — it’s a decisive statement made by the community in response to ongoing efforts to silence writers like Jemisin.

The Hugos are voted on by WorldCon members rather than by committee, and thus they’re generally seen as a barometer of changing trends and evolving conversations within sci-fi/fantasy (SFF) culture. By voting for Jemisin’s trilogy three years running, the speculative fiction community has effectively repudiated a years-long campaign, mounted by an alt-right subculture within its midst, to combat the recent rise to prominence of women and other marginalized voices in the SFF space.

To understand how we got here, we need to travel back in time to 2009, when a yearlong series of conversations within the SFF community, known as Racefail, created a broader understanding of white colonialism’s overwhelming dominance within sci-fi/fantasy narratives. Occurring mainly online, but continued offline throughout various conventions (and arguably still ongoing today), the conversations around Racefail resulted in an emerging awareness of the need to not only embrace the writing of women and people of color, but also to make the community a safer space for all writers.

Jemisin’s debut novel, A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was published the following year in 2010. Jemisin credited Racefail and “the increased awareness of the SFF zeitgeist re race issues” both for her book’s enthusiastic reception, and for making her feel more comfortable as a minority voice within the community.

Ever since Racefail, the push to diversify the speculative fiction genre has been loud and growing. Specific diversity initiatives within the community have led to everything from the anthology magazine series Destroy Science Fiction to the rise of new publishers expressly dedicated to diversity, like the popular publishing branch of the Book Smugglers blog.

This trend toward progressive narratives and diverse representation isn’t exclusive to SFF culture, of course; in conjunction with the rise of progressive voices on social media, geek communities including sci-fi, comics, and gaming have seen broad pushes over the last decade to end gatekeeping and be more welcoming to fans and creators of all kinds.

But as we’ve also seen, these pushes for social change have led to backlash tinged with racism and misogyny — most notably through Gamergate, the unfortunate 2014 movement that essentially underpinned the rise of the alt-right, codified harassment campaigns against women and people of color for years, and helped give rise to the ideological polarization of the internet.

And within the world of SFF specifically, this backlash amplified two disruptive subgroups who’ve been attempting to game the Hugo Awards for years.

Diversifying the pool of established SFF authors hasn’t been smooth sailing. In 2013, a writer named Theodore Beale, a.k.a. “Vox Day,” was banned from the professional Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) after making posts referring to Jemisin as a “half-savage.” That same year, a writer named Larry Correia made a blog post in which he complained that his “unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy handed message fic” wasn’t getting any Hugo nominations, and suggested that his audience game the awards by nominating him en masse.

Also in 2013, ongoing controversy broke out over what was widely perceived within the community to be repeated instances of sexism from the official magazine of the SFWA. The controversy led to the resignation of an SFWA editor, and was quickly followed in early 2014 by complaints from men in the community who weren’t happy with the changing cultural standards — in essence, less pandering to the straight male gaze, and more politically oriented fiction — due to the sudden rise to prominence of women and marginalized writers around them.

In one such thread of complaints under the topic heading “Culture Wars,” a publishing professional named Sean Fodera stated, “I think there’s a battle worth fighting.”

Fodera’s words would go on to be prophetic. Emboldened by Gamergate’s methods, the disgruntled Correia created a set of disruptive collectives known as the “Sad Puppies,” who began fomenting discord within the SFF community in 2015. They were quickly joined by the even more extremist “Rabid Puppies,” led by Vox Day, who has become an acknowledged figure within the alt-right movement since his SFWA banning.

Their targets? The Hugos.

The Hugo awards are voted on by WorldCon members, and anyone can become a WorldCon member, which effectively makes Hugos voting crowdsourced. This meant that the Puppy contingent saw the Hugos as capable of being gamed — and they were right.

Beginning in 2015, both the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies mounted regressive “traditional” voting blocs among Hugo members. The idea was to unite conservative voters in voting for single Puppy-approved authors, against the profusion of diverse names on the expanded Hugo nominees lists. The first year they attempted the voting bloc, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies nominated a combined total of 127 nominees, and landed 107 of them on the initial Hugo ballot. The blocs got a boost from being supported by the conservative news site Breitbart, which praised the Puppy movement — sometimes referred to as Puppygate — as a blow against “political correctness.”

In part, the voting blocs were created out of a sincere wish to honor good writers who were perceived as being conservative-leaning, and who were seen by the Puppies as being in danger of losing deserved critical acclaim due to the push to diversify the awards.

But, paradoxically, they were also created in part to make the Hugo awards look like a joke.

As part of this latter goal, in 2016 the Rabid Puppies successfully nominated erotic fantasy author Chuck Tingle to its voting bloc of recommended authors for his short novella Space Raptor Butt Invasion. The joke, if you can’t tell from the title, is that Tingle’s work is notoriously mystifying, verging somewhere between absurdist surrealism and stream-of-consciousness badfic; it’s anthropomorphic porn as if written by someone with disjointed, half-formed thoughts and limited powers of expression.

The joke backfired, however, when Tingle turned out to be completely savvy in gaming the Puppies right back: he made a website celebrating his Hugo nomination by directing audiences to several of the women writers the Puppies intended to take down, and even joined forces with Gamergate enemy No. 1, game developer Zoe Quinn, who agreed to accept the award on his behalf if he won.

Tingle didn’t win, but his approach to sabotaging the Puppies’ game has proved to be the main method of combating the Puppies over the last four years. The harder they pushed to nominate “traditional” writers, the more the community responded by supporting minority voices. At times, this has even included authors the Puppies attempted to boost: Multiple writers, horrified at being lauded by the Puppies, chose to withdraw their names from nomination in response. In 2015, in response to some categories where the Puppies had managed to commandeer every nominee, Hugo voters by overwhelming majority simply selected “No Award” instead.

In succeeding years, the Puppies continued to generate bad press, but they gained even less traction over the awards themselves. This year, the most prominent awards all went to women. And Jemisin, the same author subjected to racist mudslinging by Rabid Puppy leader Vox Day, took the prize for Best Novel every year she came up for eligibility during the Puppies’ period of agitation.

“I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist,” Jemisin said in her acceptance speech. “We creators are the engineers of possibility. And as this genre finally, however grudgingly, acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future, so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)”

For now, at least, it appears that the SFF world has firmly positioned itself on the side of the marginalized, and against a vocal minority attempting to silence them — and their much-needed visions for the future of science fiction and fantasy.

Original Source -> The Hugo Awards just made history, and defied alt-right extremists in the process

via The Conservative Brief

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 07/27/2017

A dream-like, hallucinogenic image of the Trump family morphed into Muppet parts. The image was generated with DeepDream, a piece of software that uses a neural network to find and enhance patterns in images, “dreaming” strange features into existence based on how the network was trained. Source.

Democracy Sure Is Great

Against Bluexit: “The appropriate question to such a proposal isn’t whether or not it’s legal, but rather what it says about the state of American liberalism when prominent proponents start co-opting the anti-poor rhetoric of the Right to beat on their political opponents and declare they’re essentially giving up trying to affect any political change in whole swaths of the country.”

Bafflersplainer: Win the Future: “Mark Pincus is the co-founder of Zynga, your grandmother’s favorite video game publisher. Reid Hoffman is co-founder of LinkedIn, a networking website that’s harder to escape than a Scientology outpost buried underneath a gulag. These tech visionaries decided they’d had enough of business as usual in politics, put their brains together, and created an exciting new group called Win The Future. Its mission is to influence the Democratic party platform and assist the #Resistance. If you’re skeptical of this project, keep these facts in mind: People in tech are smarter than you are; disruption makes everything better; everybody loves winning; the internet is the future; and the group is called Win the Future. Enough said.”

Why Obamacare Repeal Won’t Die: "Liberals and the left like to highlight the 22 million people who will lose health insurance over ten years, and in recent months they especially like to point out that among those who will be deprived of coverage are many Trump supporters in Appalachia, who may now be rethinking their commitment to the GOP. That’s all true, but Republican strategists also know that the overwhelming proportion of those losing health insurance, especially among Medicaid recipients, are low-income minority people who are either Democratic voters anyway or are simply unlikely to vote. And while reporters and academics like to highlight the white working-class folks who will be deprived of Medicaid in Southern Ohio or Eastern Kentucky, the typical low-income Medicaid client is much more likely to be a Latino family living in East L.A. or an African-American family on the South Side of Chicago. Both districts are already solidly Democratic and therefore irrelevant to the political calculus of GOP strategists worried about 2018 or 2020."

An image of the face of a biometric tracking corporation executive, intended to be turned into a mask and worn in public for anonymity. Source.

Technology

You Can Encrypt Your Face: “You can, in fact, encrypt your face, and your bodies. The more people who do it, the better it works. Although putting a mask on in public on a regular basis is impractical, physically anonymizing yourself in public spaces should become commonsense for navigating contentious political events. The New Inquiry has come up with a novel approach to do this. We’ve devised an algorithm that has culled the faces from 130 executives at leading biometric corporations around the world and transformed them into masks for you to print out and wear. Since they’ve chosen to profit by face-snatching the rest of us, we figured that we would resist by doing the same in reverse.”

Developing Dissident Knowledges: Geert Lovink on the Social Media Abyss: “Our relationship with the internet seems to be on its way to becoming something very similar to the later years of the Soviet Union. The Spanish sociologist Cesar Rendueles formulates this concern when questioning the capacities of technology to guarantee a plural and open space: 'the network ideology has generated a diminished social reality', he claims on his essay Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia. Lovink shares the 'healthy scepticism' of Rendueles when elaborating what we could call an 'Internet critical theory'. In Social Media Abyss, he inaugurates the post-Snowden era — 'the secular version of God is Dead'— as the beginning of a general disillusionment with the development of the internet: now we can say that the internet 'has become almost everything no one wanted it to be'. But even though we know that everything we do online may be used against us, we still click, share and rate whatever appears on our screen. Can we look at the future with optimism? Or are we too alienated, too precarized, too desocialized (despite being constantly 'connected') to design alternatives? In the words of Lovink, 'what is citizen empowerment in the age of driver-less cars'?”

Yi-Fei Chen with her 2016 graduation design project, "Tear Gun". She wears the tear gun, a device with a silicon cup balanced under the eye which collects tears that flow into a brass gun. The tears are frozen using a nitrogen cartridge at the front of the gun, and can then be fired at will. Source.

Bodies

Larry Clark’s Teenage Lust, and My Own: “For the first time, I forced myself to pay attention to the boy in the photo. Though the image is black and white, the boy comes across as tan, with sandy hair. His chest is hairless and strong, with ropey muscles rippling over his stomach. Turned toward the girl, his face is hidden from the viewer. We can’t see what it is he’s feeling. The boy’s not performing for us; he doesn’t have to. Without seeing his face, we can believe his feelings are less messy than hers.”

The Tangled World of Bodies: "Daaya Kukafka begins her debut novel, Girl in Snow, by asking her readers to look at a dead female body. Despite how it sounds, it’s actually common, our societal default, to view a female primarily as a physical object, to neglect her humanness and see instead 'her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs,' as one of the novel’s narrators says of the fifteen-year-old Lucinda Hayes. Kukafka attempts to subvert preconceptions, principally of what is expected of the thriller genre, but succeeds more pointedly in destabilizing the biases toward illegal immigration, mental illness, law enforcement, and presentations of sexuality sewn into our country’s fabric."

Waiting on a Bright Moon: "The body arrives during the second refrain. It slaps on the receiving dial with the wet sound of rendered flesh, and the processing officer, a young woman fresh from the originworld, screams."

Graffiti on the side of a house depicts a person sullenly reaching up to clean a window with a squeegee. The window is covered with stars and planets, as if reflecting a night sky. Darkness is left in the wake of the squeegee, erasing the image of the night sky. By graffiti artist muretz. Source.

Issues

What happened when Walmart left: "In West Virginia, the people of McDowell County can’t get jobs, and recently lost their biggest employer – the local Walmart store. They describe the devastating loss of jobs, community and access to fresh food."

From Alt Right to Alt Lite: Naming the Hate: "In just one year, the alt right has gone from relative obscurity to being one of the United States' most visible extremist movements. This stratospheric rise is due in large part to the rhetoric employed during the 2016 presidential campaign, which granted implicit approval to the once-taboo hallmarks of the far right – overt racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, misogyny, and anti-Muslim bigotry. The alt right capitalized on the moment by amplifying those messages while loudly rejecting mainstream conservatism and its followers (often referred to as 'cucks'). You can’t discuss the alt right without mentioning the 'alt lite,' a loosely connected movement of right-wing activists who reject the overtly white supremacist ideology of the alt right, but whose hateful impact is more significant than their 'lite' name suggests. The alt lite embraces misogyny and xenophobia, and abhors 'political correctness' and the left."

An old newspaper headline reads, "Women Anarchists Have Become The Terror of World's Police: Their Daring Crimes Are Said to Have Outstripped the Deeds of Brothers of the Red". Text below it says, "Search for the Woman is Becoming a Safe Rule in Crimes Proceeding From Anarchistic Violence—The Guardians of the World Nearly Always Find a Woman Implicated When a Ruler is Stricken Down—Emotional Women Lose Sense of Fear." Source.

Activism

Revolution in Our Lifetime: Black Cartoonists on Life Under Trump: Comics by Ben Passmore, Shannon Wright, Chris Kindred, Bianca Xunise, Keith Knight, Whit Taylor, and Ronald Wimberly.

[CW: Gore] Know Your Rights: “Strategically, an appeal to human and constitutional rights is appropriate and necessary in the J20 cases. But as reactionary anti-protest repression heightens across the country, we do well to understand the risks and limits of a response framed by a rights discourse, which would only honor the rights of an individual to assemble in a manner deemed “peaceful” by the state.”

When Organizers Are Professionals: “Organizing has become a profession. To rebuild a radical, emancipatory class politics, we have to reckon with that professionalization.”

Direct Action Item

Support Trans People But Not the Military.

A tweet by @urbanfriendden: “Carl Jung coined several archetypes of the subconscious self: the masculine ‘animus’, the feminine ‘anima’, and the gender neutral ‘anime’”. Source.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

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Movie Review | Revenge of the Nerds (Kanew, 1984)

This will be of interest to most modern viewers as a cultural artifact, and not necessarily in a good way. True, it’s probably a typical example of a certain kind of ‘80s comedy, and with that comes a lot of baggage around its attitudes towards women. Basically, the movie doesn’t like women (unless those women happen to be nerds), and this channels itself into some fairly ugly scenes. Some of the forms the “revenge” takes basically constitute sex crimes, like a panty raid that’s a cover for placing a hidden camera in a rival sorority’s house, and a scene where one of the heroes effectively sexually assaults the head girl of that sorority. What’s more bizarre is that the latter scene, rather than just being played for a mean spirited gag, is portrayed with sweetness, with the victim becoming smitten with the hero. Not that I think there’s much appetite for a subversive Revenge of the Nerds remake, but I imagine someone could make a much sharper, darker take on the same material that confronts the original’s misogyny. It’s interesting that the movie will periodically confront the underlying sense of entitlement that would bring about these attitudes (in surprisingly blunt locker room speeches among the villainous jocks), but lacks the self-awareness to not perpetuate them anyway. All that being said, I think the movie holds up better than it should because it’s actually pretty well executed on the whole. Most of the characters are better realized and acted than the archetypes they’re based on might suggest, there’s a genuinely sweet relationship between the Anthony Edwards and Michelle Meyrink characters, and the climactic talent show is a pretty fun sequence. The highlight among these misfits might be Curtis Armstrong’s Booger, whose unapologetic slobbishness suggests he might have escaped from the set of Animal House.  Even when the movie relies on offensive caricatures, as in the case of the gay and Japanese students played by Larry B. Scott and Brian Tochi, respectively, the movie seems to genuinely like them. (After all, Scott’s Lamar gets the rap that’s the centerpiece of the talent show scene, although having Tochi’s Takashi dress up as a Native American is some Inception-level racism.) The movie shows surprising warmth within the confines of its genre, which makes its failings more disappointing.