#you all know you ought to be progressive and that feminism comes with that

[atthebell-moved]

I think what's most frustrating about misogyny in this fandom (and any fandom, but this one has particular issues I'll get into) is that people who've never read a single word of feminist theory can recognize when they're pulling sexist bullshit. Like, my dad has never in his life consumed anything beyond milquetoast feminist takes on NBC family dramas, but he's capable of taking a step back and going "hey, that sucked and i know why."

But here, no matter how much i want to give people the benefit of the doubt for being young and not having the same opportunities as me to engage with feminism, people just go beyond the level of patience and grace I'm willing to extend to them. Yes, it is obvious that you don't care about women. No, I don't care that you rb pretty pictures of them, because at the end of the day you'll turn on them in an instant for any perceived wrong that for your favorite male streamer you would do endless apologia.

Every single woman on the DSMP is treated as an extension of male characters. Every streamer is treated like she doesn't matter unless she's streaming with some guy you actually care about. I've gone through their fanart tags, extensively, and I PROMISE you that the ratio of fanart of them on their own compared to art of them with your favorite white boy is fucking sad. Not to mention how many of these women get doxxed to hell and drug through the mud any time they flirt with a man or do lore that you don't approve of because it slights Tommy or Wilbur in any way.

Do you know the shit that gets slung at female streamers? There's an attitude in certain corners of this fandom that male streamers are over sexualized. Let me tell you about what female ccs go through. There is deepfake porn of every single one of them. There are constant messages about their bodies, about how they don't deserve their fame if they don't wear revealing clothing, and about how they need to cover up more. There are stalkers and rape threats and constant judgment of their actions as inherently sexual and deserving of not just criticism but genuine hatred. Please go watch an unban requests stream and you will see the BAREST minimum of what I'm talking about. The things I have heard people call Niki and Puffy are fucking disgusting, and I can't even imagine what their mods have to see.

If you think Twitchcon SD shoving the only panel for female streamers into a tiny room is bad, I want you to look twice at this community and how it treats women and then tell me you think that's surprising. There were people in line for that panel and for Niki and Hannah's meet n greets who were only there bc they're on the DSMP and stream with the guys you people actually care about. I know because I literally talked to them. They don't know a thing about these CC's content.

Don't pretend like this community is better than how all of twitch treats women. Don't pretend like you care about feminism and then throw completely disproportionate levels of criticism and hate at any woman who fucks up. Don't pretend you care about women within their own narratives and then sideline them at every opportunity in favor of the guys you actually care about. Suck it up and say the quiet part out loud (you don't care about women) and start actually trying to care.

[bilboyagathechickenfootedhobbit]

I feel like the whole Karen thing started as a way to mock and silence and discredit middle-aged women. The first time I heard it used it was when a white woman had called the police on some Black people having a BBQ, which like, yes, that was massively shitty. And it wasn’t cool of her to do that and it was most likely rooted in racism and she rightly earned the criticism leveled at her. But then I heard it used whenever a middle-aged white woman expressed ANY concern over ANYTHING. Suspicious man in a hoodie lurking outside the girls soccer practice at the local high school? I’d be concerned. But if I say anything, I’m labeled a Karen. Male customer being aggressive with the workers and intimating violence? Better not call the police you fucking Karen. Maybe he has mental health issues, you bitch. As if his mental health issues make it acceptable for him to commit violence all willy-nilly with no consequences.

Older women have a lot of knowledge to share and a lot of times the concern they express is coming from a place of personal lived experience. But you get all these men and pick-me’s who want to brush off her very valid concerns and so they call her a Karen and then everyone knows not to listen to her because she’s just some old, racist white bitch who wants to ruin everyone’s fun, even if said fun is putting innocent people in danger. It plays off the idea media sells younger women that older women are just jealous of them. We aren’t. We’ve been where you are and we’ve made mistakes that cost us dearly and we want to impart advice to you to help you keep from making the same mistakes. But men know that if younger women listen to older women, the jig is up. So they label us Karens and with one word, invalidate anything we say.

To me, it’s more insidious than just “let’s use women’s names as insults because we don’t like them.” There is very much a reason why there is no male equivalent to Karen. It’s because Karen (and now pretty much any older sounding female name) is deliberately used to silence women and deprive younger generations the chance to meaningfully connect with older women and their wealth of lived experiences. Think about it, where would feminism be if we weren’t so utterly disconnected from the generations of women that went before us? Silencing and belittling older women ensures that younger women won’t listen to them. It ensures that whatever progress each generation of women makes, the next will have to do all over again. There is no continuity in feminism from generation to generation because men work to keep us at odds with one another. Men don’t want to silence men, so that’s why Chad evolved from an insult to high praise. It’s why if it’s not Karen, it’s Janet, and if not Janet, Esther, and if not Esther, it’s Nancy. There will always be another name for them to call us to keep us silenced and separated.

Maybe we ought to reclaim Karen the way they reclaimed Chad. Start calling your girlfriends Karen’s when they stand up to injustice. Start calling them Karen’s when they help their community. When they look beautiful (which let’s be real, that’s always) tell them they’re channeling their inner Karen. Make Karen a beautiful thing to be; strong and capable and compassionate and driven. Then when someone calls you a Karen and you smile and say “Wow! Thanks!” It will fuck up their little lizard brain and make them short circuit.

Does anyone else think it’s weird that basic female names are insults now. Like it started with Karen but it’s bled into nearly all female names. When someone is talking about a fictitious generalization of annoyances they experience and they attach a female name as a joke. Like I saw a post recently that said something to the effect of “I hate when old people go on long rambles when I’m just trying to do my job. I’m not your therapist Janet” I agree with your point here but why are we attaching a female name to this for no reason. What about the name being female makes it inherently evil. Is it because it’s commonly associated with older women? Why isn’t there a male equivalent to “Karen”?

My friend recently said she doesn’t like the vitriol toward the name Karen because all Karens she has met were nice. Then she threw out a couple other generic female names she thought were much eviler and asked my opinion. I told her my opinion was that I don’t attach morality to names just because they’re names usually given to female babies.

[icarus-suraki]

Since I seem to enjoy Starting Shit on the Internet today, I'm going to share some thoughts on the OnlyFans debacle.

First: sex work is real work. I said it, I believe it, that settles it.

It seems a lot of people (often young women, I've noticed?) are really celebrating OnlyFans banning all NSFW content. They’re having a great time saying things about how they hope all the (cis) men who liked NSFW OnlyFans content die mad about the NSFW ban and so on. It’s downright gleeful. And it seems like they're celebrating on the grounds of stopping trafficking and protecting minors and so on. And that's a noble thing, ending trafficking and protecting minors--do not misunderstand me: trafficking and abuse of minors is a real and serious issue and I absolutely support ending trafficking, rescuing victims, and protecting minors.

It is my opinion (insert Vine here) that OnlyFans banning NSFW content is going to hurt sex workers and also will do absolutely nothing to protect minors or stop trafficking.

A considerable number of people here in the US lost their jobs during the pandemic. And, among those people, are those who desperately need income. They're of age, they're legally allowed to do these things, and they need some way to survive. And, in the absence of a UBI or even a country that seems to care about the wellbeing of its own citizens, you have to find a way to survive. And a lot of the people who found themselves unemployed discovered that they could earn enough of an income through OnlyFans to actually survive. They could keep the lights on, get food, pay for medication, put gas in their car so they could drive to job interviews. It became a means of self-employment.

Are you thinking of the people on OnlyFans and elsewhere who are doing sex work as actual people? Or are they just a mass, just a concept, onto which you can project your ideals of Purity Culture? You’re giggling gleefully about unhappy men with blue balls, but I feel like you’re forgetting the women who are still stuck in a Capitalist situation.

"But they didn't start doing it willingly!" You can't prove that that's true for everyone on the site. You cannot prove that. You do not speak for everyone. Maybe some people turned to OnlyFans out of desperation, sure. But others may have felt relieved that they had it there. Others may have even felt liberated or enjoyed the work. I don't know. And you don't know either.

"But if you make sex work legal, that makes trafficking easier!" Yes, yes, I've seen the whole "Nordic System" argument. I've read it. My issue with it is that everyone is using it in the wrong way.

Remember when Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of most drugs? It was a decision made on the grounds of harm reduction. If you won’t get arrested for having some crack in your pocket, you can feel safer. Look at what the War on Drugs has accomplished: legal slavery and police brutality. It doesn’t work. And it’s an excellent experiment to try something else.

If sex work is declared protected or legal (and banks and credit cards cannot therefore refuse payment made to legal providers of the service), then any sex worker who is threatened, abused, harmed, attacked can make a report without fears of repercussions for doing sex work. Do you know how many sex workers are killed? If only there were some way to report a threat or a risk to the police without repercussions...

Beyond that: if someone is trafficked and they make a report about what's happening to them, it can be taken seriously because sex work is considered a legitimate area and trafficking would be very much outside the laws related to sex work. Same thing with minors in the same situation: it’s outside the laws, so it’s a crime, but someone reporting it would not be held as a criminal themselves. Collateral damage.

To go back to Oregon for a minute: if you decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs, are you going to stop drug deals altogether? No. Oregon knows that too. But you can assist the people who do use drugs when they come forward with information about, say, murders connected to drug deals. And you can also provide a means for them to leave their situation if they so choose. 

Yes, ACAB, but we can at least provide a measure of protection to people who need assistance. See how this works? If a sex worker knows about minors being abused or trafficking going on and they make a report about it, they themselves don't have to worry about getting caught up and charged for also being engaged in sex work.

More protection for more people.

Lastly, and this might make you mad, you can thank the US Conservatives for a lot of this.

It’s the good ol’ Moral Majority come back from the dead. Again.

Any time someone yells about pedophiles or trafficking, it gets everyone concerned--and rightly so. But the problem is that it immediately becomes "if you're not overtly against it, then you must be tacitly for it, so agree to this bill." And so, anyone who's progressive or vaguely left-leaning signs off on legislations or statements about how sex work is bad and sinful.

But in doing this one thing, the US Conservatives and especially the Conservative Evangelicals of the US, can then convince more and more people to sign off on a longer and longer list of laws or beliefs that the Conservative Evangelicals want to push through. That’s their goal: to push through their ideas of a Good and Wholesome Christian Nation, with all the white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia that entails.

So you start off with the existing laws regarding sex work, then you start sliding into "all of these kinds of sex work are illegal" and then "all sex work is illegal" and then "all pornography of all kinds is banned" and then you start slipping into lawmaking like ending access to birth control (because that encourages casual sex) and ending the rights of LGBTQ people (because "perversion"). You've seen it before, you could see it again. (And yet we can't seem to get child marriage completely banned in the US. Funny how that works.)

I don't mean to "slippery slope" this stuff but, trust me, it seems bad now but it can get so much worse. And I hope it doesn’t get worse.

“If you’re a feminist, how can you be in favor of sex work?” Because sex work is work. And, if you look back through history, you’ll find that banning sex work and punishing sex workers didn’t make things better, it drove everything down deeper and made everything worse. Less safety, less security, more risk, more punishment.

It seems like a shallow version of feminism if all you’re doing is sneering at cis men and turning up your nose at sex workers. I think you ought to reexamine your beliefs.

[tigerdrop]

hey i just wanna say the long posts genuinely make my day. also can you talk more about gordon freeman character because the way you write him makes me quake in my gay little boots

i would love to talk about gordon freeman. thank u for the opportunity

the first thing i need to communicate about gordon is that this dude sucks. and i say this in the fondest way possible. he is a bitch from the moment he drops into the world until the moment he goes out. if you dont believe me, give it another watch! gordons mouthy and rude for no real reason, at least so far as “being a regular dude on his way into work” goes, and this dude goes around calling his coworkers names with zero provocation. (of course, we all know that the reason is because its a funny guy improv stream that borrows a bit from freemans mind, but im talkin from a character sense.)

but my argument isnt just that gordon freeman sucks. its that he sucks in a very specific way that i find insanely endearing. i love this dude. i love to hate him. hes awful in a very mundane sense - weve all known a guy like this, at least if youve spent too much time online - and its cathartic to watch him suffer because of it.

gordons a smart guy. as written, hes gotta be - hes a recent MIT grad, on his way to work at a top-secret research facility to do weird shit with crystals and theoretical physics. but the thing about smart guys is that theyre often......selectively intelligent. we can see this in the way that he has a hard time navigating his surroundings, and needs the science crew to guide him through it and keep him alive.

this is one of those things that is a natural consequence of somebody going through the game for the first time, but that i am interpreting as “gordon is kind of stupid sometimes”. its uncharitable but its not like he doesnt deserve it. he likes to boss around the crew as if he knows what hes doing, when he often very much does not, and is fond of demeaning their intelligence. hes real bad about this with tommy in particular, treating him like hes a kid whos playing at being a scientist when tommy is actually a decade older than him. all i am saying is that gordon ought to stay humble. hes awful cocky when he perceives himself as better than others.

which, i think, tracks with how cocky he gets when he gives up on the whole “well-meaning citizen” thing and just unloads bullets into people. he puts up a front of being a Nice Guy, you know, just some dude caught in a bad situation who doesnt like seeing his companions obliterate every NPC they come across, but that doesnt stop him from cackling like a fucking madman and mowing down aliens (and soldiers) every once in awhile. when he stops seeing himself as helpless and starts seeing himself as the one in control, the gloves come off. he gets mean. and i think thats very sexy of him

this, among other things, is why i am insistent that gordon freeman is a control freak. he desperately wants to be in control of the situation at all times, shepherding around the science crew primarily by bitching at them, but its of limited success. its futile. sisyphean. tommy, coomer, bubby, and benrey exist almost to torment him with exactly the thing that would make him suffer the most: a gaggle of people running around causing problems for him, but he cant go anywhere without them b/c hes reliant on them to make it out alive.

its perpetual suffering, and its cathartic to watch. and funny, too. and if youre a little weirdo like me, its very, very enjoyable. how twisted up he gets when nobodys listening to him! how sweaty and frazzled he must look. its cute, and it also makes me want to reach through the screen and shake him and tell him to just be a little nicer. he wants control but he doesnt know how to attain it, he doesnt know how to play nice like a real leader. i think its a neat contrast to gordon freeman as we know him in HL2, where he literally is the leader of the resistance and has to live up to it. this is gordon freeman but if he was moe through helplessness.

“helpless” is, i think, a great way to describe him. a core bit of imagery in half life is this sense of railroadedness and helplessness, with gordon freeman being put into play like a chess piece and having no choice but to move forward. and this iteration of gordon leans into that by being totally dependent on the science crew in order to make progress and Not Die. and hes also subject to the whims of benrey, local eldritch weirdo who has basically made it his life mission to fuck with gordon.

gordons anxieties dont help with that. if he wasnt so fun to stress out and fuck with, the science crew probably wouldnt do it so much! too bad for him that they like fucking with him so much that he was driven into a panic attack (multiple times, even, depending on your interpretation). hes got that real neurotic mindset. always worrying about shit that could go wrong, and attempting to exert control over his surroundings in an effort to control the anxiety.

IMO the real way to nail the Neurotic Gordon Freeman Experience is to combine the ever-present anxiety with his pervasive sense of self-loathing. he openly states that he has no friends and nobody seems to like him, and to that, i really gotta say, i wonder why. he doesnt really seem to factor in that hes kind of a bitch, and has way too high an estimation of his own intelligence relative to everybody elses. its really one of the worst ways to be: aware that people dont like you, but unaware of exactly why. if he was like, 10% nicer, he probably wouldnt have had half as many issues getting through black mesa, but also, its funny to see him squawking his way through the game. so, you know.

its stuff like that that makes me headcanon him as a dude with low self-esteem in general. convinced that hes not likable, not attractive, out of his element......impostor syndrome, except that theres some truth to it. this is a guy who truly does not realize how good he has it: he really is just an average shitty dude, and yet, somehow, benrey took a shine to him. some poor motherfucker out there actually likes him and wants to suck his dick. thats dedication

also, i keep bringing up “repression” when i talk about gordon. and hopefully, what ive been talking about helps explain why. he has a strong desire to be a regular dude, not just murdering his way through black mesa, but if hes pushed hard enough he leans into it. gets bossy. picks up a cigar off a dead soldier and takes a long drag, before smacking forzen around with a pistol and ordering him around. gordon freeman is a regular, kind of anxious guy who likes competitive swimming and streaming on justin.tv and making anime references, and he is also a guy who takes a filthy pleasure in making a trained soldier his bitch. and i didnt make up any of this shit - this is purestrain canon, baby. this is a guy with problems

to me, this screams the kind of guy who represses a lot of shit b/c he doesnt feel like its morally decent. you run into this guy a lot online: the wokeboy, the online leftist, the guy who spends too much time on social media websites. (like reddit. i think he would actively use reddit and he would never get any appreciable amount of karma but he never stops posting. its sisyphean! cathartic.) from the way he talks about “bootboys”, i think it tracks. he knows about imperialism, he knows about feminism, but at the end of the day hes your average american white dude who struggles with internalizing it.

a lot of those dudes struggle with sex and gender issues. (dont we all.) when youre trying to be a Good Person(tm), you spend a lot of time thinking about your own relationship to sex and kink and all that shit. and i maintain that a too-online dude who buries a lot of his control freak tendencies would also try to bury a lot of weird sexual shit in an attempt to seem Normal and Well-Adjusted and not like a little freak. i justify this by the sheer number of times gordon blurts out weird sex shit as a joke. there are only two outcomes to making that many piss jokes: either youre secretly a piss guy, or you lathe-of-heaven yourself into becoming one. i will stand by this

ive talked a lot about why this dude sucks. now, let me talk to you about what makes gordon so much fun to write. first things first: hes funny! a subjective evaluation, yeah, but both in- and out-of-character, hes aiming to be funny. and being the straight man to everybody else plays into that whole “helplessness” thing.

secondly: underneath it all, there is a good dude under there. gordon worries when his companions get hurt, he tries to clean them off and patch them up, and hes got his lil leftist heart in the right place. you could even read a lot of his bossy, bitchy demeanor as him wanting to make sure everyone gets out okay and doesnt hurt themselves. when it comes to animals and anti-imperialist sentiment, gordons a pretty good guy.

hes the kind of guy who would probably see a dog on the street and get excited and play with it, but would get really prickly about the correct way to put dishes in the dishwasher. control freak tendencies.

finally, subjecting such a miserable, tormented guy to even more psychological anguish is really, really fun. you feel a little bad for him, but he kind of deserves it. so many problems he goes through are purely of his own making, and if gordon would just relax and quit trying to hard to maintain control - of himself, of the people around him - and own up to having Problems and Issues, he would be a happier guy. but thats why its fun to bend him until he breaks. being a little control freak myself, putting gordon freeman thru psychosexual torment is cathartic.

when it comes to writing his thought processes, the fact that he is canonically some kind of psychotic (yes, i am boldly claiming this. suck me) and i am also canonically some kind of psychotic makes it easier to write what i think his thought processes are. i just give him my brain issues of “getting lost in thought” and “overthinking fucking everything”. a touch of paranoia helps. even if i dont explicitly label him as schizophrenic please know that i am writing him as a paranoid little nutcase at all times because, uh, you write what you know.

paranoid. anxious. of the mindset that everyones out to get him (which isnt helpful when everyone is out to get him). repressed and deeply Not Normal but trying so very fucking hard to be normal and well-adjusted. a control freak with sadistic tendencies who also really, really likes getting bullied by his best frenemy. a hapless little nerd who sounds really cute when his voice starts to break from nerves. and, most importantly, a dumb jock. do not ever forget this.

thats gordon freeman, babey. hope that helps

[mk-wizard]

An Analysis of G1 Arcee: A Misunderstood Feminist

Hello, Transformer fans.

As a woman, it was inevitable that sooner or later, I was going to do a character analysis of Arcee the most iconic if not recognisable female Transformer in the lore. Specifically, the G1 version. I personally always liked her and still like her now, and despite what many people think, she was very progressive for her time.

Arcee first debuted in the comics and initially, her inception was meant to poke fun at feminism at how introducing a female character for the sake of doing so is in fact sexist. It also caused the great confusion and rift among fans as to whether Transformers have genders or not. Her coming was supposed to reinforce that they did not, BUT since the Beast Wars era, this fact was retconned and it is now 100% official that Transformers do indeed have genders as they even have gender related biology and pronouns.

Even before that, Arcee was reintroduced during the 80s in the animated movie in which she was debuted as a female and darn proud of it with her voluptuous physique, pink and white colouring, her bright red lipstick and her Princess Leia style helm. Right off the bat, Arcee may have been all things feminine, but she was just as much a femme fatale. She nowhere near being a damsel in distress and what she lacked in size or firepower, she made up for in skill and courage. Plus, she had quite a long string of broken hearts behind her which included Rodimus Prime, Springer, Skywarp and many other impressionable mechs. Yet, she was always at the end of the day, a strong independent femme who despite enjoying the company of mechs, didn’t really need one. In many ways, she was the first sex positive female character in fiction. At least in Transformers. Yet, everyone only remembers her pink colouring and poofy lips.

I admit that in appearance, Arcee was kind of stereotyped, but in her defence, she wasn’t the only one. Just take a good look at Kup. And least she was not a negative stereotype. She was never catty or unkind towards anyone not even other women. Arcee was kind to everyone, she was diplomatic and perhaps even protective at times. Moreover, her kind nature was proactive not submissive. And just because she was kind doesn’t mean she took anyone’s trash. She didn’t. She spoke her mind. If anything, Arcee was a good role model for girls by showing them that being strong and having an opinion can be done without being mean or rude. And to not see men as the enemy. You should stand up for yourself, but not every disagreement merits aggression or is a personal attack against you. With this all said and done, Arcee was never unfeminist. She was just a feminist who also happened to be feminine and pleasant. Ok, maybe her comic introduction was rocky and controversial, but the cartoon reintroduction made up for it.

Since her G1 debut, Arcee went on to become an icon in the Transformers lore. She is even mentioned in Beast Wars as being Rattrap’s great aunt and she was originally supposed to be one of the main members of the Autobot gang in the first Michael Bay movie. At times, she was not shown in a very just light in my opinion like the Bay Era. Though I think the Animated Era really downgraded her character immensely especially since she was initially conceptualised to be a fighter.

In the comics later though and especially in Prime, Arcee at long last was given the respect she had always deserved by once again being portrayed as a strong independent femme and a skilled warrior. As always, she is still shamelessly feminine even when her dominant colour isn’t pink and more power to her that she is so. After analysing her first incarnation, this ought to be the definitive way we should always portray her as. She has influence over the Transformers lore after all.

Anyway, that is just my analysis and take away from her. I would like to hear yours.

If you have a Transformers theory or character analysis you want explored, please let me know in my ask box. And please, support me through Patreon or Ko-fi if you want me to make Transformers merch and videos. Or if you want a commission of your favourite bot, let me know in my shop. All links are on my profile page.

Thank you for reading and please, stay safe.

[mukhannath]

Serious question, how do you concile being a trans woman and a radfem in the current climate where even the most progressives radfem orgs pushes for outlawing transition and would rather let people like you get killed by your partners rather than letting you enter a woman shelter? I have a lot of problems with what trans activism has become and i mostly agree with anti-porn/anti-prostitution policies radfem and conservatives defends but as it currently stand i dont think i even know 4 radfems who wouldnt consider you an abomination at worst, or at best a mentally hill man that should eather be cured with basically conversion therapy or simply excluded from the mainstream society to prevent "social contagion" and the "invasion of womens spaces"

I dont spend much time in the online communities because no one on them actually reads any books by radfem activists. saying the second wave is transphobic is a very clever tactic to discredit all the good ideas radical feminism has to offer that benefit all women including trans. if u want to read radfem thinkers who got shit done... my babes dworkin and mackinnon are right there, they did the work pushing antiporn legislation (actual activism not just angryposting online). and both of them were avowed tirfs (trans inclusive). In one of her books dworkin actually eviscerates Germaine Greer (notable terf) for being a grifter basically. 

anyway the reason i say its such a clever tactic is because radfems and libfems ought to agree on a lot, like even if both ‘sides’ feel different about it both largely support legalizing sex work as harm reduction for the women themselves. I firmly believe that trans exclusionary radfeminism was a psyop started by right wing infiltrators to guarantee that feminists would waste time arguing about that instead of learning where to form coalitions. the evidence for this is that both sides refuse to listen to each other even on points that have nothing to do with trans politics. I don’t understand why most trans people are so pro-sex work when its an industry that harms us as well-- except I do completely understand it, its because mainstream trans politics is dictated by white women who just care about what feels good and empowering instead of all the black trans women in america who are victims of sex work, and trans women abroad like thailand or south america who are victims of white men coming there for “sex tourism” (why isn’t this called smoething else??) 

In the end the way i reconcile the two is I don’t actually publicaly identify as transgender anymore, im stealth because i hate the trans communtiy so much. this doesnt mean im transphobic, my gf is trans we just both stay out of all the bullshit that the loudest voices push. shes been getting more and more radpilled and is afraid to talk about it in the community too because people assume its trasphobic. the other thing that we feel alienated from is so many trans women just vocally hating on cis women-- like .. why?? cis women hold no privilege over you, its completely unfair to say cis woman are privileged for their sex (just like its unfair to say that trans women are privileged for theirs!). its honestly so stupid how misogynist the community has become, considering how much in common the two groups have. as my gf said “we have different struggles but we can still have solidarity”. 

[starrywisdomsect]

The Eldritch Horror of Shattered Ignorance: A #Cancellation of Robert M. Price

Are you one of those H.P. Lovecraft fans that gets all drooly and frantic when a new anthology of Lovecraftian tales is released? It’s okay, me too. I just long for the magic words of “Featuring Stories by Laird Barron, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Kim Newman, Brian Lumley…” and so on and so forth.

Truly, I never really paid much attention to the “edited by” credit, unless it mentioned S.T. Joshi, who is like a gold-standard among Lovecraft scholars.

However. The editor responsible for the Chaosium “Call of Cthulhu Fiction” Anthologies, Robert M. Price, has recently come to my attention as a ranting lunatic with harmful and bigoted viewpoints. (That’s one way to emulate ol’ H.P. I suppose…) Now, before we proceed further, we must establish one thing…

Can “Lovecraft Fans” cancel anyone? We like a racist asshole’s fiction, after all. True. We are all eternally and often daily conflicted about this, and calling myself a “Lovecraft Fan” is usually accompanied by a small sigh indicating I should have made better life choices. That being said, Lovecraft was eventually cancelled by that big-trending-hashtag in the sky, namely, his own mortality. So that is well and good, I suppose.

Now, this is not when I should have taken first notice of Mr. Price’s vileness. Apparently he gave an interview in 2016, which, had I read or heard it, would have clued me into a lot of his transphobic and sexist attitudes, and stopped me from attempting to collect his “Cycle” anthologies for Chaosium. However, the tattered veil was wrenched from my eyes this fine morning in 2020, when I read of many authors withdrawing their fiction from a sword-and-sorcery anthology (Lin Carter's Flashing Swords!) that Price had edited.

The cause? A single page of Price’s introduction to the anthology was made visible on the Amazon “look inside” preview.

“Sports and games must no longer be based on competition, lest someone feel dejected because of his mediocrity. Poor little flowers! This, in case you hadn't noticed, is no way to prepare young men (or women!) for adult life in a free market economy and in a world full of powerful national enemies.

The continuous false rape accusations serve the same end, seeking to make masculinity, even the natural male interest in women, into a "rape culture." Of course, such wolf-crying works against women because soon it will become habitual to dismiss every rape accusation as the shrill lying of yet another Lena Dunham. (Am I thus suggesting we ease up on rapists? No; you don't want to know what I think ought to be done with those bastards.) Nor is it only the self-defeating futility of crying "Wolf!" There's more at work here. It smacks of an ideology of man-hating.

I have long been puzzled at the feminist hatred of pornography. "It reduces women to sex objects!" Absurd. It is simply a highlighting of a particular aspect of beautiful women. It is no different from fashion modeling. Does that reduce fashion models to animated mannequins? If I were a sports fan, it would not occur to me to think of the athletes as no more than exploited cattle. There is much more to all such public people. But what we do not see of their lives is none of our business. This is why our society's voyeuristic curiosity about the private lives and scandals of celebrities is so pathetically sick.

So then I have to wonder: Are these feminists really protesting male sexual interest in women per se? A woman may be a "sex object," if that's what you want to call it, without being a "mere" sex object. But when feminists refuse to draw such a line, I start thinking of Jill Johnson's book Lesbian Nation, in which she argues that all feminism is at bottom lesbianism.

In some schools boys are encouraged to play with dolls, girls with trucks. Many "progressives" want to replace "he," "she," "his," "her," "him," with "gender-neutral" language so as to promote the illusion that gender is a matter of "social construction." No wonder we are observing a sudden epidemic of transgendered youth. They are responding to the propaganda which suffuses our society like clouds of mosquito poison pumped out of trucks coming down the street.”

 This is of course, in a word, repugnant. Furthermore, it has no goddamn place in an introduction to an anthology of sword-and-sorcery stories.

So what can Lovecraft fans do? Simple. I, for one, can end my quest to collect the “Cycle” anthologies edited by this waste of humanity. We can stop shelling out money for back-issues of “Crypt of Cthulhu,” on which he served as editor. Additionally, we can email Chaosium and Titan Books, two important publishers of Lovecraftian fiction, and request that they end associations with this nut-job. And finally, we can stick to buying anthologies by S.T. Joshi, Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow.

[magdolenelives]

Tweet here, article here. Highly recommend reading the whole article, but just a few choice quotes: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen. -- AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence. JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry. -- AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments? JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.  -- First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?   I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.   Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way. -- AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling? JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable. -- It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society. -- My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.

[meyhew]

wait u said you had an unpopular harry opinion that you couldn’t share until you got back power... whag was it 👀

welcome to the harry styles roast session where i limit myself to saying 5 honest things with an overwhelming amount of love for him

he’s a BRAT. he was already cursed with youngest child syndrome and then he was the youngest member in 1d and Then he was again the youngest one in his own solo band. he’s always been the baby and so he’s just. he’s a brat. we don’t see too much of it now bc he’s so private but i know in my soul he’s obnoxious around his family and friends and he’d get on nerves so much so quickly just like my own little brother 

i dont think this is unpopular but his friends suck <3 and he’s such a huge people pleaser on my god. like my dude.... learn to say No every once in a while. he seeks approval mostly from his friends and it is. not good. get well soon 

this one’s about real life issues and idk how to articulate it best so let me just ramble a little. i have a conflicted relationship with the way he (rarely) addresses social issues. he’s not an activist so i don’t think he’s obligated to talk about anything he doesn’t want to. but at the same time, given the massive reach of his platform, i think he ought to be more... inclusive in the social commentary he does on occasion make himself a part of. he’s been very clear about his stance on issues close to him and that effect the vast majority of his fanbase — queer rights and feminism — and i think that’s a huge factor in said fanbase thinking he’s “woke” or whatever. a lot of white gays who stan him rlly aren’t open to the idea that he’s a person capable of making mistakes and that he isn’t some all-knowing infallible being. but his fans aren’t all white — the pepsi/nfl fiasco was... so ugly. the insensitivity regarding israel/palestine. muslim fans being disregarded and sidelined during hslot (not his fault, but much to think abt regarding his fanbase). and the fact that he said he hasn’t found something to truly stand for just reeks of privilege. i like to think i understand where he’s coming from — he isn’t Technically out, so he doesn’t want to speak over queer activist. he isn’t a person of color, so he doesn’t want to speak over people of color. he isn’t a woman, so he doesn’t want to speak over women. i get that but again — the ginormous reach of his platform is just... there. you shouldn’t speak over marginalized groups you’re not a part of, but you can speak with them. you can uplift them. you can amplify their voices. and i think he should, especially given this very progressive image that’s been created of him. 

facial hair rlly isn’t for him but i support him figuring it out . hope he’s having fun 

this isn’t an unpopular opinion outside the fandom echochamber but... he didn’t end toxic masculinity or do anything groundbreaking by wearing fishnets and some badly applied contour. poc have been blurring the binary line since forever... white ppl are simply late to the party and they need to highlight more poc who have always been doing what white ppl r just opening themselves to <3 

[frostiifae]

hi i’m not gonna engage directly with that post about masculinity and the pressures it’s put under growing up bc i am much too fragile for that, but also my feelings on that post wind up going out to jupiter and back instead, so sorry about this but --

I’ve been mulling over the idea that maybe social media, as a whole, is a bad place for social discourse (shocking, I know). The core idea of it is simple - you take a statement like “men are overly sexual”. This statement is at least glancingly true, but not ironclad. It is true enough to make a specific point in context, but it isn’t true enough to project outward into the world without context.

People with more authority than me have already done plenty of research to demonstrate how modern social media is designed specifically to present ideas free of context. It’s virtually impossible to have a meaningful conversation in the open space of Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook, for varying reasons - but the sites do their best to trick you into not noticing. 

In a post I exchange between my two best (female) friends, we may cajole about the horrors and ugliness of men, saying things we don’t really believe, partially tongue-in-cheek, partially to make fun of the radical ideas that say these things without the requisite irony. But it would be so very easy for someone - even someone that knows me, someone I care about - to stumble upon that post and misunderstand. In reality, that post wasn’t really meant to be public. It was just for the three of us, because we have a shared context that changes and colors the way our words are interpreted, and without that context - the things we make look alien, or worse.

How easy it is for this simple misunderstanding to repeat itself at progressively larger and larger scales. Isn’t it amazing how Anita Sarkeesian attempted to say something hardly controversial and completely understandable, but a lack of context drove an entire counter-cultural movement and drove a wedge into the heart of the community she wanted to speak to. Incredible how, even as we all rally behind the cries Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, we still have people claiming to be races they aren’t, asserting themselves over marginalized voices without thinking - and how, even as I do my best to keep my mouth shut, I can’t help but wonder if something is being missed because I can’t find the words to ask the questions I wish I could ask. 

I keep wondering, what if I could just pluck one of those horrific alt-right reddit meme boys from their chair and sit on a park bench with them, offer to get them lunch, and just talk about our visions for the future. Surely, we’d disagree on a lot of things, but I’m used to that. I’ve always been a weird kid, and I found solace in understanding the why of people’s beliefs - people’s reasoning always made more sense to me than the conclusions they would reach because of that reasoning. And I really feel like we could find a lot in common, if we could break past the surface layer of what we believe, and instead talk about the experiences that led us there. After all, I, too, was once a disenfranchised middle-class white male on the Internet, whose favorite pastime was to lose themselves in an emerging culture of chaos and creativity that seemed impenetrable from the outside. I, too, was once frustrated with the posturing of feminism, with the idea that men ought to be judged demographically without regard to their individual status. I still am frustrated with that idea, even now that I’ve come to grips with why it keeps coming up. I can’t say that it’s false. But I can’t say that it’s true, either. 

I wish I could explain that it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false - that it never has mattered - that none of this was ever about telling people how they should think, or what words they are and aren’t allowed to use, or how they should volunteer their assets in the name of the less-privileged, or how they should sit at the back of the bus to make way for the flavor of the month. I wish I could explain that I understand how it seems from the outside, I really do, because I was there once, and it seems like such a mess of contrarian nonsense that can’t even find time to agree with itself, but you have to understand, it’s not about rules and regulations, it’s not about a strict moral or social code, it’s just about trying these ideas out in a public space and seeing if they make things better for people, because the way the world is now isn’t working. 

But I know what would happen if I tried that: I would get told, “And what about me?” and, well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? What about you? 

Is it selfish to focus on one’s own problems? Is it “male privilege” to listen to a talk about feminism and ask “but what about us?” Does that make you a pillar of the patriarchy? I feel like the answer is so obviously no, but we keep reacting that way, because when some dude comments on a feminist post and all we have to go off of is a name, an anime avatar (and believe me, I love anime avatars, so don’t think for a second I’m going to judge you for having one) and a single off-color remark, we have to come to some kind of judgment and it’s never going to be accurate. We tried so hard to teach everyone to think about the person behind the screen, but at the same time the Internet evolved in such a way that we know less and less every day about the screennames we come into contact with; the mountain is being built higher and higher ahead of us as we climb. 

I think the solution is to just stop. I really, really do. 

I was educated in feminism by a person who sat down with me in a series of one-on-one conversations and answered my questions as patiently as they could. I’m not friends with that person anymore - we wound up having a lot of disagreements on finer points, even besides the way we actually treated one another - but I deeply appreciate that time they spent with me. I refined my knowledge of feminism by taking those conversations to other people I trusted, and seeing how they felt about those ideas, further whittling away at this chunk of philosophy I had been given, turning into a thing I, personally, could believe in. This is the way human beings learn: we find a teacher we trust to confide in, we find a place to practice that feels safe so that we can try things out, and we build up confidence in private before taking our findings into the open. 

What do we accomplish by taking two people who have already cemented their convictions and bashing them against each other in a public space? Spectacle. That’s really all there is to it. Hate to sound like an old batty cynic but social media really is built around social spectacle. Twitter’s Trending tags, fandom discourse, political pages on Facebook mocking each other in memes that spread through social circles while dissidents look on in quiet disgust. The point of the whole model is to turn human culture into a hadron collider. This is not the place for nuanced debate. We should all know better. But, somehow, we don’t. And all the worse for the younger people caught in the crossfire that don’t understand what’s happening. 

It’s funny how you hear about things happening to other kids, parents and teachers and principals setting rules that seem completely ridiculous and unfair, and then you grow up and start to realize that - even if you still disagree - there’s a hint of wisdom in there. I dunno, maybe we should be withholding the internet from our kids until they’re adults. Not because they’re not mature enough for the Internet, but because the Internet isn’t mature enough for them. 

ᵒⁿᵉ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉˢᵉ ᵈᵃʸˢ ᶦ ᵍᵒᵗᵗᵃ ᵐᵃᵏᵉ ᵐʸ ᵒʷⁿ ˢᵒᶜᶦᵃˡ ᵐᵉᵈᶦᵃ ˢᶦᵗᵉ

[the-goofball]

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”

Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture. In the three decades since Gender Trouble was published, the world has changed beyond recognition. In 2014, TIME declared a “Transgender Tipping Point”. Butler herself has moved on from that earlier work, writing widely on culture and politics. But disagreements over biological essentialism remain, as evidenced by the tensions over trans rights within the feminist movement. How does Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butler recently exchanged emails with the New Statesman about this issue. The exchange has been edited. *** Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics? Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.

AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence. JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry. AF: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur. JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived. AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments? JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people. AF: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply? JB: As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals? I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms. Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way. AF: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online? JB: I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms. AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling. JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable. AF: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper's this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you? JB: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently. On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud. AF: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement? JB: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity. AF: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights? JB: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society AF: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate? JB: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.

22 September 2020        

*Judith Butler goes by she or they

[eyreguide]

5 Things I Learned About Jane Eyre

A few years ago I was interviewed by a UK based educational company in preparation for their release of content about the Brontës aimed for teachers and students. Sadly the company, Train of Thought Productions, seems to be no more, but at the time they sent me a complimentary copy of the DVD titled “Brontës in Context”.  Unfortunately I believe it is hard to find now, but I found it a very interesting examination of the Brontës’ lives and work.

The Jane Eyre section of the DVD was especially illuminating.  I’ve never studied Jane Eyre in school, and although I've read critical texts about the story, there are schools of thoughts that I haven’t really explored.   Jane Eyre is such an intertextually rich story, that I should have anticipated that this DVD would be eye-opening in unexpected ways. So this post is about the things I learned from the "Brontës in Context" DVD. 

1st Person Narration

Okay, I do know that Jane Eyre is written in the first person. And I know that because the novel has a first person POV, the reader is drawn more into Jane's story, her spirit and her fiery nature. But one comment from a professor on the DVD really struck me - the idea that Jane addresses the reader personally (by saying "reader") more and more as the story progresses. "Reader, I married him." being the famous example. I was curious though to see if that was really true, so I went to the Gutenberg online copy and did a search - in the scroll bar, there are little yellow ticks that show where the word comes up in the text, so I took a screenshot of that bar to illustrate (I made the scroll bar horizontal).

From left to right: The beginning of Jane Eyre to the end

Again the yellow marks are every time Jane says "reader" (which is not absolutely accurate since there are like three times it's in the novel, and it's not addressing the reader of the book) But it's true that Jane does directly reach out to the reader more as the novel progresses. The professor on the DVD explains it as Jane wanting to take control of her story, and one way she does this is by correcting the reader's thoughts - by giving them the truth directly. I thought that was a fascinating and accurate explanation of the purpose of Jane addressing the reader.

Bluebeard

To me, Jane Eyre is most succinctly compared to two fairy tales - Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. I am aware of a Bluebeard connection, but I feel like the aforementioned tales encompasses the story more. But after watching this DVD I am leaning more towards seeing Jane Eyre in a "Bluebeard" light. Especially as Jane Eyre is a Gothic novel, and Bluebeard fits that genre the best of these three tales. There's a "secret at its heart" (quote from the DVD) which is a thoughtful encapsulation of both stories. And there was a comment made by one of the professors that placed the reader of the novel as the curious Bluebeard wife, reading the novel to discover the secret. Such an interesting idea! (And does that mean that Mr. Rochester is my husband??)

St. John and Helen

The role of religion is touched on in the DVD, and there was a thought that the character of St. John Rivers (who is not a bad person, but is kind of unforgivably self-righteous - oh, just me?) hearkens back to Jane's friend Helen Burns.  Helen is such a positive character and St. John considerably less so, that I initally felt it's almost a slur on Helen to link the two. But in the context of what the professor on the DVD said it makes sense -  they are similar in that they 'quash physical desires'.  And in that way I can understand why Jane would be drawn to them - they both encourage Jane to embrace a devotion to God and reason, at a time when her passionate nature is giving her the most pain. Unfortunately for St. John, his function later in the novel means he also has to show Jane that living such a cold, dispassionate life is not for her. And hey, both Helen and St. John meet untimely ends. Which to my mind is Charlotte making a harsh judgement on the idea of living just for God.

Jane and Injustice

Here's something that is hugely appealing to me about this novel. The novel can be pointed to as a feminist work, and Jane is speaking out for women everywhere, but what I love about Jane is that it's not her treatment as a woman that makes her upset. She's really angry at injustice. And the whole misogyny thing is just a part of that. It really took this DVD to drive that home to me. Jane is so passionate about what she feels is not right - the inability of Mrs. Reed to love her, the treatment of the girls at Lowood, the way Mr. Rochester speaks of Bertha, St. John Rivers not wanting to marry Rosamund Oliver. It's a glorious aspect to her character and reminds me of a line from an old sixties adaptation of the novel - Mr. Rochester calls Jane "the small crusader, pitiless with righteousness and rectitude." Rochester was a little harsh with that line, but I do like the 'small crusader' imagery. (In the 1961 adaptation he's more perturbed than happy that Jane's come back to him after he's been blinded and can not be the kind of man he wants to be for her.)

Postcolonialism

The DVD touches on three critical schools of thought in connection to Jane Eyre - Feminism, Marxism and Postcolonialism. And I learned two things in relation to the last one - what Postcolonialism is exactly, and that I really don't like seeing Jane Eyre in that context. In a nutshell, Postcolonialism is looking at the imperialist, British attitude as represented by Mr. Rochester as rich white guy, and Bertha as poor Creole woman. And Bertha's relation to Jane as a dark mirror. There's even a book written with those themes called Wide Sargasso Sea which is a prequel to Jane Eyre. It's from Bertha's viewpoint. I didn't care for the book actually. The thing with me is, I am sympathetic to Mr. Rochester. And I don't really see how you can accept the view that Mr. Rochester is a lying, manipulative scoundrel with no redeeming qualities and still like the novel or Jane. Because Jane - the character to whom the reader is intimately involved and invested in - chooses Mr. Rochester in the end, as the person who makes her the happiest. And if you love Jane because she is an intelligent, moral, capable heroine, as we have gotten to know her and rely on her throughout this story - it's silly to think she is so mistaken as to have made a horrible choice in the end. Also she is telling her story with 10 years distance, and not repenting her decision. She is happy, so what more could anyone ask for?

But back to Postcolonialism and why it does not gel with me; because I also feel like making a story called JANE EYRE, with the first person narration by said JANE EYRE, and then evaluating the story through NOT the main character is kind of ridiculous. Jane Eyre is such a personal journey, that I feel it's a big leap to talk about the novel like Charlotte Brontë was seriously examining slavery/race and British imperialism. If one chooses to see Bertha as completely innocent and horrendously mistreated, at least let it be because Mr. Rochester has misjudged her and acted unsympathetically, before saying it's obviously a master/slave dynamic. And I will just insert this excerpt of a letter that Charlottë Bronte wrote in response to some comments on Bertha:

Miss Kavanagh's view of the Maniac coincides with Leigh Hunt's. I agree with them that the character is shocking, but I know that it is but too natural. There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind and a fiend-nature replaces it. The sole aim and desire of the being thus possessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural ingenuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end. The aspect in such cases, assimilates with the disposition; all seems demonized. It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant. Mrs. Rochester indeed lived a sinful life before she was insane, but sin is itself a species of insanity: the truly good behold and compassionate it as such.

- Charlottë Bronte to W.S. Williams, written 4 January 1848

For me, the interesting points in the letter being Charlotte was (later?) more sympathetic to Bertha's plight, but not condemnatory of Mr. Rochester - she mentions that Bertha has led a sinful life before she was insane and that because of the nature of Bertha's insanity (as Charlotte wrote and understood it), it was probably too easy to 'demonize' her from the character's POV, which shouldn't happen to someone who is truly compassionate. Obviously Mr. Rochester doesn't get points in the philanthropy department which is noted by Jane early on. I understand and completely believe that Bertha's situation is awful and sad in so many ways, but I don't feel that it is important enough to the novel to base interpretations of the story on. Yet can I point out that Mr. Rochester didn't lock up Bertha for funnsies - it would have been so much easier for him if she were not mad because then he could divorce her. (The law at the time being that you could not divorce your wife if she was diagnosed insane.) If he could have let her go to have a normal life and not been responsible if she attacked people, he probably would have been all over that.

To wrap up, I am saddned that this DVD is not widely available any more (at least my google searches have not been fruitful) because it was a very well concieved educational program.  This DVD was sent to me in 2015, and I’m revisiting it, by posting this on my blog.  I orginally posted this on a former blog.  And I believe this post once featured on the Train of Thought Productions website, but sadly that site is no more.

[jumpinjamesjr]

What Are the Biggest Problems Women Face Today?

It's been a memorable year for ladies. There are more serving in Congress than any other time in recent memory, and a record number are as of now running for president in 2020. Yet, even with these critical increases, ladies—both in the U.S. what's more, around the globe—can in any case discover sex equity subtle.

For International Women's Day this year, we solicited some from the most intriguing ladies we know—including a few of those previously mentioned administrators and presidential competitors—to let us know: What do you believe is the greatest test confronting ladies in the U.S. today? Furthermore, what do you believe is the greatest test confronting ladies globally today? This is what they needed to state.

The absence of ladies in places of intensity

Amy Klobuchar is a Democratic U.S. congressperson from Minnesota. She is running for president in 2020.

One of the battles that underlies the entirety of our approach fights is the proceeded with absence of ladies in places of intensity. From corporate meeting rooms, to the courts and political administration around the globe, the absence of ladies in senior positions keeps on obstructing progress on issues from pay to compassionate guide to segregation in the entirety of its structures. The sooner we comprehend that the absence of ladies in positions of authority keeps down ladies, however all individuals, the sooner we will have the option to propel society all in all.

Male controlled society

Keisha N. Blain shows history at the University of Pittsburgh and right now fills in as leader of the African American Intellectual History Society. She is writer of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and co-editorial manager of a few books, including To Turn The Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019).

The greatest test confronting ladies in the United States today is male centric society. This is particularly apparent in the domain of governmental issues. Despite a lady's understanding, instruction or capacities, the man centric nature of U.S. society encourages the observation that ladies are less qualified and less able than men. What male controlled society has done is persuade individuals that a solid and astute lady speaks to an issue; an interruption to the social request as opposed to a vital piece of it. One-sided media inclusion of ladies government officials—stories that attention on ladies' style and takes a gander to the detriment of their thoughts on strategy—underscores this point. It is accordingly no happenstance that the U.S. is totally out of venture with the remainder of the world with regards to choosing a lady as president. While ladies have kept up the most elevated office of authority in Liberia, India, the United Kingdom, Dominica and numerous different countries over the globe, the equivalent can't be said for the United States.

From a worldwide viewpoint, probably the greatest test confronting ladies is instructive imbalance. Regardless of the numerous additions of current women's activist developments in the Americas, Africa, Asia and past, many despite everything accept that ladies are less deserving of the equivalent instructive open doors stood to men. While there is no denying that neediness, geology and different components add to tremendous variations in instruction, male controlled society legitimizes this forswearing of chance. It takes care of the message that men ought to use the force and ladies ought to possess a subordinate situation in every aspect of society. This obsolete, yet constant, perspective powers instructive imbalance and a large group of different abberations along the lines of sex on national and global levels.

Insufficient ladies at the table

Kamala Harris is a Democratic U.S. congressperson from California. She is running for president in 2020.

I don't believe it's conceivable to name only one test—from the economy to environmental change to criminal equity change to national security, all issues are ladies' issues—yet I accept a vital aspect for handling the difficulties we face is guaranteeing ladies are at the table, deciding. Something I've seen again and again in my own vocation is that ladies in power bring an alternate point of view, a basic viewpoint. We made incredible walks in 2018, with an extraordinary number of ladies pursuing position, and more than 100 ladies sworn in to the 116th Congress. Be that as it may, we despite everything have far to go; the U.S. positions 75th out of 193 nations as far as ladies' portrayal in government. Also, this is really a worldwide issue. In case you're attempting to handle the world's issues, you ought to get notification from a large portion of the total populace. Along these lines, we have to keep shouting out for the benefit of each lady's entitlement to be heard and understand her capacity. My mom used to tell my sister and me, "You might be the first, however ensure you aren't the last." I've always remembered that.

Sexism, bigotry and monetary imbalance

Rebecca Traister is an author everywhere for New York magazine and The Cut.

The very intense blend of sexism, bigotry and monetary imbalance—this may appear too expansive an answer however it essentially covers it on both a local and worldwide front. The entirety of the individual difficulties we might be enticed to rank are symptomatic of these enormous fundamental force awkward nature, working couple.

Injury focused women's liberation

Christina Hoff Sommers is an occupant researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the writer of a few books including Who Stole Feminism? what's more, The War Against Boys. She co-has The Femsplainers. Follow her @Chsommers.

The risk of mischief is a human consistent, yet by any sensible measure, American ladies are among the most secure, freest, most beneficial, most open door rich ladies on Earth. From multiple points of view, we are not simply doing just as men, we are outperforming them. In any case, all over the place, particularly on school grounds, young ladies are being instructed that they are powerless, delicate and in up and coming peril. Another injury focused woman's rights has grabbed hold. Its essential center isn't uniformity with men—yet rather security from them. This past June, the Reuters Foundation discharged an overview reporting that the U.S. was one of the best 10 most perilous nations on the planet for ladies—more risky than even Iran or North Korea. The investigation was unbelievably defective and ended up being a study of "observations" of anonymous "specialists." But in the present condition of dread and frenzy, different news associations revealed the ridiculous discoveries. This new ethic of dread and delicacy is noxious and incapacitating—however it's making progress. American ladies should fight the temptation to imagine the world is fixed against us when it isn't.

The image is distinctive in the creating scene. In nations like Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia and Egypt ladies are fighting with practices, for example, respect killings, genital mutilation, corrosive burnings, youngster marriage and sexual orientation politically-sanctioned racial segregation. Be that as it may, there is uplifting news. The quantity of taught ladies in these nations has arrived at minimum amount and they are making their quality felt. Wajeha Al-Huwaider has been known as the "Rosa Parks of Saudi Arabia." In 2008, she made a universal sensation by posting a video of herself driving a vehicle. Until a couple of months back, ladies were not permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia. On account of ladies like her, the laws are starting to change. Dr. Hawa Abdi, a 71-year-old Somalian specialist and legal counselor, is said to be "a balance of Mother Teresa and Rambo." She established a medical clinic and exile camp in country Somalia that offers a sheltered space to almost 100,000 of the world's most jeopardized men, ladies and kids. Under her authority, the settlement is advancing into a model common society. The difficulties confronting ladies in the creating scene are overwhelming. In any case, without precedent for history, a considerable armed force of bold and unflinching ladies is on the walk.

Access to rise to circumstance

Ertharin Cousin is recognized individual of Global Food and Agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the previous official executive of the United Nations World Food Program.

As the previous official chief of the World Food Program I was regularly lowered by ladies in struggle or emergency circumstances who, when gotten some information about their needs, needed nothing for themselves except for asked that we instruct their little girls. Instruction, these moms accepted, would give their little girls open doors they, in light of their sexual orientation, were denied. Sadly, even with satisfactory training, ladies here in the United States just as ladies across a great part of the world despite everything need equivalent access to circumstance.

Notwithstanding many years of outstanding advancement, at home and abroad, a reality where openings are not characterized by sex presently can't seem to be all around accomplished. Much all the more vexing, in such a large number of spots the world over, ladies practicing or in any event, looking for their fundamental rights is deciphered as a direct and destabilizing challenge to existing force structures. A few systems are presently attempting to move back the hard-won privileges of ladies and young ladies. Hence, today I join the voices of ladies pioneers from around the globe requesting governments, the private segment and common society revitalize and reinvest in the strategies just as in the lawful and social structures that will accomplish overall sex fairness and consideration.

Here in the U.S. we as of late chosen a record number of new congressional agents. In different pieces of the world, political powers take steps to disintegrate the advancement that we have made at both the national level and through milestone worldwide motivation. Regardless of whether these powers succeed will rely upon whether ladies pioneers and backers of today and tomorrow, and all who remain with them, perceive the desperation and risk of inaction. Moms and fathers whether in South Sudan or the South Side of Chicago, are doing their part to request quality training for their little girls. It is up to ladies pioneers and promoters, including the recently stamped congressional pioneers, a considerable lot of whom profit by past aggregate exertion and remain upon the shoulders of such a significant number of, to push and hold all the way open the entryways of chance. Guaranteeing each lady and young lady. If you interested about it read more

[morlock-holmes]

@tanadrin @arjan-de-lumens

I think that... I don’t know how to say this exactly, but the problem is deeper than a few bad apples who label themselves as feminists. When I said I think there are major blind spots in feminist thinking about where the pressure to conform to masculine roles comes from and what the consequences of abandoning them are, I had a story I told when I started this blog in mind. If I may quote myself:

I went to a very small, private arts high school in a very progressive city. One day, for some reason pretty much all of us in the year were gathered together for swing dancing lessons (And now you know pretty much exactly how old I am, remember the swing revival? Anyway).So, basically the instructor splits us into two groups, the leaders and the followers. Instructor says something to the effect of “Traditionally the men lead and the women follow, but you don’t have to split up that way, anybody of any gender who wants to lead can go to that side of the room, anybody who wants to follow can go to the other side.

And here I am, maybe 16 years old, really shy, and I think to myself, “I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of having the responsibility of leading, and since we’re all so progressive here, I bet things will shake out pretty much 50-50 on each side, I’m going to choose to follow.” Yeah, you know the punchline is that I spent the rest of the day dancing with every boy in the class and the one girl who decided she wanted to lead. And let me be clear, this school was progressive enough that this wasn’t social suicide. Some of the boys I danced with made some mildly homophobic jokes to defuse the tension, but my recollection is that even at the time I didn’t take it too personally, and it certainly didn’t extend out of the class; nobody threatened to beat me up, nobody called me names the next day. If you’re evaluating things on whether or not this was an environment where it was OK to be gender non-conforming in some general way, some broad moral sense then, yeah, it was fine. If you were a heterosexual young man evaluating what kind of behavior would end up with you dancing with the girls, than oops! It turns out there totally was a right answer and a wrong answer, and the right answer was conformity.

If there was pressure to conform to masculine social roles in that situation, where was it coming from? Homophobic jokes, perhaps, but those were a very minor thing to me. Pressure in the form of “Bad things will be done to you if you defect from masculine norms” was actually almost non-existent. Nobody was dissembling about that, their efforts to eliminate that kind of pressure were imperfect but sincere and mostly successful.

But I only got to dance with one girl. The vast, vast majority of the people organized themselves, without malice, in such a way that bucking gender roles still resulted in a massive trade-off for me that was really not worth it.

And I absolutely think that this is phenomenon generalizes to the broader, adult world. I spend most of my time in circles where standard middle class American feminism is the basic default, and I have met a lot of women whose beliefs seem to be as follows:

“Man, traditional gender roles are so stupid! It’s totally fine if women ask guys out! It’s totally fine if the guy wants to stay home and do housework while the woman makes all the money at work! We should be encouraging people to do whatever makes them happy!

.... (long ellipsis)..........................

“But personally, I don’t really ask guys out. I wouldn’t really do it unless he was making it really clear that he was totally into me. Also I kind of find passive men to be a turn-off.”

In my experience the proportion of women whose feelings shake out more or less like this is about the same as the proportion of women who decided to follow in that dance class I took.

I want to be very clear that I am not at all interested in calling women like that hypocrites or demanding that they “examine their desires” or anything like that. I have no problem with that particular attitude, we are never totally in control of our turn-offs and turn-ons, and I do not want women to feel some social obligation to force themselves to feel attraction to anybody.

No. Seriously. I really, really mean it. I feel like this bolding may not communicate how seriously I mean that.

You should not feel guilty about finding someone unattractive.

Hopefully that made my point. 

That out of the way, what I do want is some honesty and clarity about what kinds of pressures men will feel like if 99.9% of the women they meet have that exact attitude. If that’s the world they find themselves in, what pressures will they feel, and what strategies will they develop to succeed in the world? How will they begin to conceptualize their own actions? What can be done to support them in the world as it is now, rather than our hoped-for post-gender utopia?

The current approach is to just silently hope that all the men can figure out on their own without consulting with anybody else that they ought to lead when they dance and if anybody can’t figure that out they’re shit out of luck. We can make it okay that some people are shit out of luck if we angrily insist that nobody has a right to dance with girls and that the fact that you aren’t dancing with them isn’t a real problem so you should just shut up.

This approach is bad and has gotten so much traction that it is officially A Problem.

PS - Actually, my little dance class parable from real life also illustrates why I find people who go, “Uh, men aren’t entitled to sex!” so frustrating. None of the girls in that class refused to dance with me. Rather, there was a fundamental communication disconnect. What I thought I was saying was “I’d like to dance with lots of girls, but in an unusual way because I’m unusual”. But what they heard was “I guess he doesn’t want to dance with us, oh well..” If I had asked in a way that was contextual, I’m absolutely sure that I would have had plenty of willing dance partners. But I didn’t know the proper way to ask, so...

I feel like if, when I expressed regret about not having been able to dance with girls, people had gone, “You aren’t entitled to dance with girls, you sexist!” I would have developed a complex that would have inhibited me from solving a relatively tractable problem that could easily be solved without ever forcing an unwilling girl to dance with me.

I feel that way because, metaphorically, that’s exactly what people said to me and exactly what happened.

[meeedeee]

Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

          from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows https://ift.tt/2V13Qu4 via IFTTT

[lia-nikiforov]

Winter 2018 Anime Final Review

Why yes, pretty much all the Spring premieres are done (don’t even remind me haha I’m so far behind) and this is horribly late, I had a busy couple of weeks ;---; and am still struggling to catch up, but here’s my final rundown of this long slow winter! Worst to best, as always.

Dropped

Basilisk Ouka Ninpou Chou: Although I’d said I’d keep watching for the Nobunaga twist, given the onslaught of new stuff for Spring, it’s unsustainable to keep watching something so mediocre I don’t even find anything to say about it. Also Nobunaga hasn’t been mentioned in three episodes.

DUMPSTER FIRE

Darling in the Franxx: So we’re halfway through the show and still feels nothing of importance has happened, except we learned “lesbians are not viable, what a relief” and also KOKORO REALLY WANTS TO MAKE BABIES. The whole Kokoro business is very unsavory because on the one hand the writing is a dick to Walking Fat Joke Futoshi, but on the other hand Futoshi is an entitled Nice Guy who acts like Kokoro has some obligation to return his feelings, so basically everyone sucks lmao. Btw, does anyone know what happened with episode 13? I went to watch it but what I got instead was a Deadman Wonderland episode, complete with the story of Palurdo meeting Lab Experiment-turned-Beast Waifu as children and making a promise that would subsequently be forgotten until they meet again in their teenage years. Jesus, does Womenz are Beastz: The Anime have a single original idea?

How am I supposed to measure my own disinterest and contempt

This basically means I didn’t care for these shows. I don’t hate them but I was aggressively unengaged in them and I can’t really rank them from worst to best because that would imply me having any measurable emotional reaction to them

Violet Evergarden: I don’t think I have much to add about this one that I haven’t said before. Tryhard Sad Anime Girl stories rehashing old clichés with little novelty to them,  with a bonus of a super poorly explained and thought out child super soldier tragic backstory that still has me ?????? The final episode has the addendum of trying to redeem That One Asshole in a “he treats her bad because he’s sad about his brother dying sob sob sob he’s totally not a jerk” and i was very annoyed by that.

Koi wa Ameagari no You ni: It’s complicated to talk about this show. I really liked the first episode, hated the 4-6, then was mostly bored by the rest of it. The whole romance angle was completely dropped in the latter half, but I’m not even sure if that’s a good thing given how tastelessly it was being handled in some moments, or a bad one given how bland everything else was. It felt like Akira’s crush on Kondo turned out to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It also felt like Akira was profoundly underdeveloped, and it bothered me because Kondo was developed properly. His character felt more fully realized than hers. Like idk, I just cared so little for the last few episodes and it didn’t feel like Akira’s emotional progression was very connected with the first half of the show. 

Fate/Extra Last Encore: I don’t even have a screenshot. Apparently the reason the show started so late into the season is that it took a long time to produce, and apparently there are two more episodes that will be released at some point in July. But really, what matters is that I have no idea of what this show was trying to accomplish. The characters were a bunch of pieces of cardboard spouting pseudo nihilistic philosophical nonsense and I don’t even know how to describe the plot. It was generic in its Boss of the Week approach but the execution was often very flat. Definitely none of the fun from Apocrypha’s cool characters was to be had in this iteration of the franchise.

Too much iyashikei

This season we had too much iyashikei and I’m burned out. Here are the ones I didn’t hate but also wasn’t super in love with.

Miira no Kaikata: I think this show would’ve worked better as 3-minute vignettes. 20 minutes of it was a bit too much and I struggled to pay attention. I also felt the dragon and MukuMuku had very tangential roles. I don’t have a whole lot to say. It’s cute, if cute is your jam this show is for you. Connie is best smol monster.

Hakumei to Mikochi: Another cute show that gains extra points for its somewhat unique setting, beautiful color palette and picture book aesthetic and because the two main girls are great characters. I particularly liked the first and last episodes. It’s a relaxing, fun little show

Sanrio Danshi: The harbinger of feminism made into a toy commercial, while not quite iyashikei, is still a slice of life that just occassionally indulged in too much melodrama. It was nonetheless a fun little thing that managed to turn cynical consumerism into a positive message for boys: it’s okay to like non-traditionally-masculine things. One of the details I liked most was that none of the boys had to give up on their previous groups of friends even after “coming out”, Kouta’s friends and Shuu’s team were supportive of them and even participated in their dumbass musical play. Some may even read this show as a not-so-subtle allegory on homosexuality and while I don’t think this was Sanrio’s intent (their intent is to broaden their market, plain and simple) the fact that it works so well with that reading is honestly great. I had very minimal expectations for this show and I’m happy it turned out better than those.

Classicaloid 2: Classicaloid isn’t quite iyashikei either but it fits in the “didn’t love it, didn’t hate it” category. I’m a huge fan of season one, but unfortunately a big part of S2 failed to capture the magic. I think most of it was restored in the second cour, specially with brilliant episodes such as the one where Dovo-chan becomes a super-realistic painting of himself, and the last three episodes really captured what made Classicaloid great. I’ve really come to love this cast, so I wouldn’t complain if we got more seasons (please do Vivaldi!!!)

Shonen is a Good Genre, Actually

Shonen as a genre/demographic is much reviled for its repetitive clichés and childish stories, but I think we live at a time in which we can have well-executed shonen anime that, although falling for the same old clichés, have enough heart and sincerity that makes them enjoyable. This part also isn’t necessarily ranked, since my favorite one will change depending on which day you ask me

Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu: As I have mentioned before, this second season seems to be the polar opposite of the first one’s rapid pace. It’s been a while since I read the manga, but I feel like it took a lot less to get to the mid-season cutoff point there than this anime would lead you to believe, especially the training part felt excruciatingly long. NanaTai has other various flaws including its 1000% not funny harrassment jokes and the dumb introduction of quantified “power levels” (why Suzuki), but characters like Diane, King and Ban give the show a unique flavor. And I’m not even gonna pretend to be unbiased, I just love everything involving Ban, even the weird and questionable choice of bringing Elaine back. I’m excited that we’re finally approaching Escanor’s arrival.

Yowapeda Glory Road: I also forgot to grab a screenshot lmao. Yowapeda is a very particular beast, and with its episode count already in the hundreds, it’s not something I’d reccommend unless you’re super into dragged out ridiculous sports anime. This second season of Onoda’s second year has not been without its flaws either, starting with the, imho absurd persistence in making Sohoku look like underdogs even though they’re reigning champions. It’s made a lot of the first two days of the Interhigh feel a lot grimmer than this cheerful show ought to. Kaburagi is still an insufferable character, and the fact that he drags the team down doesn’t help him either, and I just wish the writers would let Best Boy Teshima win anything. I hope the second day ends on a lighter note, because the gloom and doom is making this a less enjoyable watch than it should be

Mahoutsukai no Yome: I feel a little better about this one knowing the final was anime-original, but at the same time I’m beyond livid with how it was wrapped up. I loved the second half of the series because of how well-written and emotional Chise’s growth was, and everything up to her embracing of Cartaphilus’s curse was a beautiful display of her strength and will to live. What I’m not here for is that asspull wedding whatever that makes no sense in the context of the previous events, especially because after the fact, Elias’s attempt to kill Stella is swept under the rug. This could’ve been my favorite show of the season without that bullshit ending and while I don’t regret watching it, it leaves me with a sad feeling of what could have been

Best of the season

Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens: It had a slow start, but with its endearing cast and well-developed character relationships, HTR won me over, especially the last quarter. The animation was veeery barebones, but Lin and Bamba’s charisma and their organically developed relationship carried the show to be one of the most enjoyable of the season. I also really appreciate the fact that the series includes a gay couple with an adopted daughter and that Lin’s crossdressing is never used as a joke or treated as a character flaw or a “phase”. I love stories about found families and I’d love to see more of this gang fighting crime and doing shady business in their city of assassins.

Garo: Vanishing Line: This iteration of Garo had a somewhat slow start, but boy did it pick up steam in the second half. The action was great -the final fight against King had some incredible stylistic choices, the characters’ journeys felt complete and very human and the story was interesting and different enough from other Garo to not feel repetitive, yet with enough Garoisms that made it feel connected to everything else. Like I said, I love stories about found families, so the way Sophie found a home with Gina, Luke and Sword by the end was very touching. Watching Sophie’s journey has been a treat, and I’m immensely happy that this wasn’t a Guren no Tsuki disaster, but was more in line with the excellence of Honoo no Kokuin.

Gakuen Babysitters: This was the huge surprise of the season for me, I almost expected it to be pretty dull. Instead it turned out to be super cute and extremely heartwarming. It had a couple of duds here and there, mostly the not-actually-a-pedophile joke character and the early love triangle skits, but the former disappeared and the latter was vastly improved in the second half of the show. I wish Ryuichi’s grief had been dealt with a bit more, but I think what they did show was very well executed and empathetic. And the portrayal of the kids felt very realistic, including both children’s most adorable and most obnoxious behaviors. KIRIN IS BEST GIRL

Card Captor Sakura Clear Card arc: I have expressed some complaints and dissatisfactions with this sequel all through the season. Mostly in regards to the new cards and how the old ones seem to have been forgotten (also the lazy designs of the new cards). In spite of that, Sakura hasn’t lost any of its heart in these 20 years, the characters are still the kids we grew up with. It is an overwhelmingly cheerful and positive show, from Sakura and Syaoran’s shyly developing relationship, to the hopefulness of Sakura’s magic and just the simple day to day life of Sakura and her friends. In spite of all its flaws, Sakura is still my favorite show of the season and I’m happy we get to spend one more season with these characters. Just please give me more Yue??? 

Ooooof, finally I’m done with this! PLEASE LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT THE 20+ SHOWS I’M SAMPLING FOR SPRING AHAHAHAHA. There’s too much anime. Anime must be stopped, immediately. Don’t hesitate to send me your thoughts about the winter season, even if it seems I’m losing my mind a little Dx TOO MUCH ANIME