By the way, I’m going to be in Sarasota Florida over the next week or so, so if you’re in town and want to have lunch drop me a line.
- An Unbelievable Story of Rape – ProPublica A woman reported being raped to the police, and later confessed that she had made it up. But she hadn’t. A horrifying long read.
- Study: Your Brain Is a Mosaic of Male and Female.
- On Setting The “Universal Sex Difference” Bar Way Too Low | Skepchick
- Growing Up Arab American in DC After 9/11 — Medium
- Tennessee Woman Charged With Attempted Murder After Failed Self-Induced Abortion
- Son, Men Don’t Get Raped. An Esquire article from last year about male victims of rape in the military. It’s not a great scan, you can visit this post to see a few pull-quotes if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
- Feminist Frequency: “Yes, it’s fake. Who cares? This is legitimately what she would have said anyway, so she might of well of said it.” Remember, it’s about ethics. Also, CW for misogynistic comments and death wishes.
- Whites earn more than blacks — even on eBay – The Washington Post
- Fun facts. (Humor).
- Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty | Demos I used to be provisionally in favor of marriage-promotion, on the grounds that marriage seems to be something that a lot of people really really want, and it seems to be a net positive in most married people’s lives. But it’s become increasingly clear that marriage promotion policies simply don’t work.
- 80 Books No Woman Should Read | Literary Hub “…of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.”
- Men Explain Lolita to Me | Literary Hub “But “to read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov” said one of my volunteer instructors. I thought that was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and another nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn’t thought of that yet.”
- Are Republicans For Freedom or White Identity Politics? Interesting article about how (in the author’s view) Trump represents a change in the GOP to a European-style White Identity Party. CW: The author is a conservative who makes unfair assumptions about liberals. The discussion of immigration – in which it’s a terrible injustice to voters that neither party supports deportation policies that even right-wing immigration experts agree are not possible to implement – is impressively incoherent.
- When a school assigned homework on Islam, it drew so many threats the district shut down – Vox Of course I don’t excuse the threats, but some parents objecting angrily was inevitable given the assignment: “The worksheet asked students to try to copy the Shahada — the statement that “there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah,” the pillar of Muslim faith — in order to understand the complexity of Arabic calligraphy.”
- In Texas, a 12 year old Sikh boy was arrested for “terrorism” over a solar charger / Boing Boing He was also suspended from school for three days. Deja vu.
- More Big Pharma outrage after 2,000% overnight price hike on an infant seizure medication. Deja vu squared.
- Shut up about the y-axis. It shouldn’t always start at zero. – Vox
- 1918: Court Refuses To Fine Women In Man’s Attire. News you can use.
Arabic calligraphy is so beautiful! But the quote is creepy. It would be just as creepy if in the course of learning Greek or Aramaic and Christian culture they used an affirmation of belief in Jesus. No excuse for violence but protesting is ok no? Tibeten calligraphy is also beautiful as is what remains of Tibeten culture.
Wow. The person who asked children to copy the Shahada is either a fucking moron or a agent provocateur. (By the way, if you should really capitalize the word)
There have been times in history where the Shahada has been considered binding even if uttered at spear point. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Ukraine have century old art (paintings, novels, poems) that focuses on captives being forced to convert, by you guessed it, reciting the Shahada while being threatened. Whoever chose this, of all the ways to introduce kids to Arabic writing, should be fired.
I found a link to the GQ article listed above on rape in the military:
http://www.gq.com/long-form/male-military-rape
This one is much easier to read.
That Shahada worksheet came from a workbook that’s used in a whole lot of districts. It’s not something that one teacher came up with.
Um, Barry, you do know that the snarky Campbell’s Soup response didn’t come from Campbell’s but from a couple of comedians using a sockpuppet account? It’s mildly amusing, yes. But not an official company response.
Yeah, uh, choosing the Shahada for your Arabic calligraphy seems, uh.
Poor taste?
Ill-advised?
Culturally insensitive?
Some other euphemism?
yrs–
–Ben
Pesho – thanks, I’ve capitalized.
Duncan – I do know it’s a fake, I’ve seen similar fakes by (I suspect) the same people – but it made me chuckle. Maybe I just don’t have very high standards. :-)
Which I think makes it even more mind-boggling; multiple people looked at that and didn’t see any reason to change it to virtually any other phrase in the world.
There was a wonderful quote in one of the papers I read, although it may require a bit of familiarity with French politics. “I worry less about Trump, the Americans’ Jean-Marie Le Pen. I do worry about the Marine that will come after him.” The article said more or less the same thing as #13, but with a lot less sympathy for White identify politics.
I think that the next few decades need a lot of explaining why it is not OK when White people do what other minorities have been applauded, or at least tolerated, for doing, at least by one side of the political aisle. Or we will be more and more pressured to vote for assholes like Clinton to keep assholes like Trump from office.
That’s the second time I’ve come across the “Men Explain Lolita to Me” piece, and each time it’s exactly that reply she quoted that makes me do a double take. It’s just so… like, why would someone who felt that way about the book even think it was any good in the first place? Did they just reach for that to “defend” it from feminists, in much the way that GGers “defend” video games by becoming furious when feminists treat them as anything but meaningless colored baubles?
I learned a new thing today. “Americana,” when referring to art, now means racist art of the USA. I had no idea.
Jake,
Curious! Do you have a source on that? I’d always understood “Americana” to mean nostalgic, old timey pieces of American culture, like Normal Rockwell paintings of Santa Claus.
I thought so, too, Kohai. But then a coworker started talking about finding Americana for her collector husband and describing what he has and what she was seeing in antique-like stores and so we looked on Etsy and, for the most part, she was right.
Another coworker claims that this is a somewhat recent phenomenon. I dunno, but it seems that, for knick knacks, this is now the case.
Jake and Kohai,
Yeah, Americana is stuff along the lines of red white and blue bunting, kids playing sandlot baseball, bald eagles, etc. Sure, some of it can be racist, but that’s a subset (like in most genres), not an intrinsic feature of the form.
The stuff on Etsy (mixed in with material that fits the broader, traditional definition) is both definitely racist and definitely Americana, but I think those sellers are reliant on the tag because “utterly racist historical sh*t” isn’t a good alternative. At least some of the sellers look white, and I can only assume that they’re at least a little embarrassed about selling this stuff, so sticking it under such a bland, broad tag may be some form of cover.
The only way that Americana writ large gets upgraded to racist is to go jump into “Amerikkka is a racist warmonger state and anything celebrating it is racist,” but you won’t get much traction for that outside certain very narrow circles. It’s the internet, so seek and ye shall find, but it’s not a widely accepted interpretation.
The Etsy phenomenon is pretty interesting, however.
LTL FTC:
It may be that coworker’s husband finds racist Americana to be the shit and it’s not representative of Americana as a concept. I sure hope so.
Jake,
Oh god, re: that Etsy link, it really is Racist Yard Sale.
Rebecca Solnit’s piece, “80 Books No Woman Should Read” kind of bothers me because, like a lot of similar pieces, it sort of claims to be a full throated defense of “extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself” while in practice actually being very ambivalent about whether that’s a good idea.
If we look back towards the top of the piece, we find her quoting Danya Tortorici, who says,
“I will never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs. I think it was the first time I felt like a book that I was trying to identify with rejected me. Though I did absorb it, and of course it made me hate my body or whatever.”
Identifying too closely with Bukowski’s narrator is difficult, perhaps impossible, perhaps even an invitation to neurotic self-hatred. Better to stick with characters who more closely resemble you, then to attempt that massive leap.
The follow-up, “Men Explain Lolita to Me” goes even further.
“‘You don’t seem to understand the basic truth of art. I wouldn’t care if a novel was about a bunch of women running around castrating men. If it was great writing, I’d want to read it. Probably more than once.’ [said a Facebook comentor] Of course there is no such body of literature, and if the nice liberal man who made that statement had been assigned book after book full of castration scenes, maybe even celebrations of castration, it might have made an impact on him.”
The subtext in these articles is always, “You, straight white cis male, need to make the leap to empathizing with people outside your own desires and experiences. Meanwhile, the fact that I’ve constantly been asked to do that has made me very uncomfortable, and I wish people wouldn’t ask it of me quite so often or so forcefully.”
Right? Constant attempts to ask a man to extend his empathy towards a castrating female monster might not, in fact, “be a great act of empathy that lifts you outside yourself” but might actually be a tiring imposition.
I’m going to go ahead and propose something: art by women often casts men as an alien other, and as a man it is disconcerting to read about yourself that way. I think men in particular for some reason feel the need to pretend that this isn’t the case, that they live in some rarefied world beyond such things as feeling uncomfortable with castration jokes, but in practice that discomfort is very real.
I do also get tired of the way art critics do the “Art can change society for the better, or the worse! But I’m not advocating censorship, come on!” dance.
If art is so dangerous, then why aren’t you advocating censorship? There are plenty of reasons why one might feel that art was dangerous, but that censorship is a worse danger, but if something is really so dangerous to society, surely it’s not inherently ridiculous to suggest that the government should control it like they do other dangerous pollutants.
And yet people like Solnit want to go “It’s insane to argue that I would want to protect people from what I myself consider dangerous pollution. How could you even accuse me of that?!”
I wish they’d actually make their anti-censorship argument explicit rather than simply relying on indignation to do it for them.
Darn, I so wanted the Campbell’s response to be real.
Jake,
I know a few people who collect various forms of Americana. Mondale ’84 buttons, Liberty Bell bookends, World’s Fair stuff, etc…
#notallamericana
The armed forces rape article is heart breaking. We are culturally like we were in the 1950s with female rape.
Christopher, I think you’re missing a piece of the puzzle if you gloss over this part (emphasis mine):
Or, in bits you didn’t quote (emphasis also mine),
It’s not the idea of being asked to empathize with a single instance of a person like that, but the regular and unquestioned prevalence of the point of view, that’s the problem. You sort of get at it here:
but this seems to miss that asking a man to extend his empathy towards a castrating female monster is not “constant”–in fact, it rarely happens, and I don’t think you can paint either of the articles mentioned as saying men should solely or primarily read fiction like that–while the opposite is, in fact, very common.
Christopher,
That is not actually the subtext, that is just a weird, cramped, misreading that you are imposing that prevents you from understanding or addressing the text. You are arguing with ghosts.
And again you misread absurdly and profoundly. Your gloss is wildly off-point and inaccurate. You are arguing with a ghost rather than addressing the text.
Also, I agree with everything Harlequin said.
I think that the next few decades need a lot of explaining why it is not OK when White people do what other minorities have been applauded, or at least tolerated, for doing, at least by one side of the political aisle. Or we will be more and more pressured to vote for assholes like Clinton to keep assholes like Trump from office.
Honestly, this strategy is unlikely to work. When whites were the overwhelming majority, it made sense that white identity politics was different from minority identity politics. But as demographic changes push whites into minority status, identity politics is inevitable, because the alternative is to get rolled by people who are more tribal. Any explanation that allows some ethnic groups identity politics and other not will be seen as desiring the destruction or disenfranchisement of those belonging to the disallowed group. (This does not apply to sexual identity politics the same way, because the genders rely on each other, and because straight cis-sexuals are unlikely to lose their overwhelming demographic dominance).
“Explaining why it is not OK when White people do what other minorities have been applauded, or at least tolerated, for doing” is more likely to be met with accusations of hatred of whites than with contrition. Amp linked a while ago to a cartoon that mentioned the “white genocide” meme. I think that attempting to explain things in a way that appears to justify a double standard is going to result in a lot more of those memes rather than producing harmony and fewer Trumps in the future.
MJJ and Pesho,
A friend of mine who studies politics academically quips that the political opinion of elected politicians are determined by median contribution dollar, not by median voter, much less by median citizen opinion. In the same way, white people will be an effective minority in the US when political and financial power in the US is not majority white controlled.
(Also, the idea that white identity politics have not driven US politics in both political parties since forever must be one of those ideas that drifted over from the same alternate Universe where John Kerry was a socialist who planned to nationalize major industries as soon as he came to power.)
In the past 25 years, Congress has gone from 90% white non-Latino to 80% white non-Latino. If that trend continues, white Anglos will be just barely reduced to a political plurality in 75 years. However, in 75 years it is unlikely that 4th generation Latinos will be considered meaningfully non-white.
Financially, the median white household had $114k in wealth, compared to $11k for the median black household and, $14k for the median Latino household. Call that 10:1 for simplicity, and the middle quintile of white households will be an effective financial non-majority status compared to the middle quintile of non-white anglo households when 9% of the population is white anglos. Going by mean wealth actually gets white people to plurality status earlier, as the ratio is ~1:4, so white total wealth would be less than total non-white wealth if white people were 20% of the population.
Obviously, political demographic trends projected out 75 years or until the nominally white category declines to 20% of the population are pretty meaningless and not really something that can be used to justify current white identity politics. Modern white identity politics are pretty much a continuation of white identity politics of the past, Donald Trump the upholder of the legacy of George Wallace, the white supremacist terrorists of today the upholders of the legacy of the KKK, even if they have expanded their target list to include Muslims and mostly dropped Catholics from the list. Even the fear of the decline of white racial supremacy is a traditional part of white identity politics.
“they have expanded their target list to include Muslims and mostly dropped Catholics from the list”
The acceptance of people with a Catholic identity into the mainstream of American white race politics is a sign that the white identity perceives itself as weakening – it can no longer afford to be quite so picky about who qualifies as “white”.
@Christopher:
This seems to be a demand that people who think art is actually important and powerful–and who, as you acknowledge, could have plenty of perfectly sensible reasons to oppose censorship–turn pretty much everything they write about the power of art into a piece about censorship. I don’t think this is a particularly appealing proposal myself.
I also think it speaks to the cramped and constrained way that people talk about rights, like the right to free expression that underlies opposition to censorship and the freedom for people to create and consume whatever art they like. If there’s no power there, why is the right to free speech even important?
In the same way, white people will be an effective minority in the US when political and financial power in the US is not majority white controlled.
Except that most white large donors don’t donate to advocate the interests of non-rich whites, and often seem more interested in helping non-white identity politics (largely because they can use it to enrich themselves, e.g. by advocating for immigration policies that flood the labor market). So even if most of the people with power are white, for the middle and lower class, this makes little difference.
Also, the idea that white identity politics have not driven US politics in both political parties since forever
I probably worded my post poorly. I did not mean to argue that white identity politics didn’t exist in the past, just that viewing it as morally problematic in a way that minority identity politics wasn’t made more sense in an America that was more overwhelmingly white.
However, in 75 years it is unlikely that 4th generation Latinos will be considered meaningfully non-white.
This runs counter to the current trends. More and more groups want to be distinguished as non-white. In the 1980s, South Asians were no longer categorized as “Caucasian.” Recently, the Obama administration has been considering moving Arabs and North Africans out of the white category. In fact, non-Mestizo Latinos were probably thought of as more indistinguishable from white before the 1960s than now (think Desi Arnaz). The past four or five decades seem to have indicated a trend towards dissimilation away from white rather than assimilation toward it.
Tamme:
Given the history of non-white groups becoming white, this is not a convincing argument.
Rather than looking at “white” as strictly expanding or contracting, I think it’s more worthwhile to look at it as both shifting and contextual.
yrs–
–Ben (white, except in the month of December)
Well “white”-ness, like any race, is ultimately imaginary. But that imaginary concept can change in telling ways.
@Harlequin
One thing I didn’t bring up, but should have, is the weird panic that led that guy to leap immediately to castration. Solnit’s examples of Kerouac and Bukowski are not, as far as I know, examples of narrators who engage in genital mutilation.
That’s clearly not the threshold for being uncomfortable with the depiction of people like you as the other.
I’m a Philistine, so I don’t know much from literature, but film has a body of work in which men are consistently portrayed as the other: romantic comedies.
As a man, it can feel kind of awkward to watch these movies and identify more with the schlub than with the hot, suave guy who the heroine ends up with in the end.
Genital mutilation isn’t the threshold for being thrown out of a book because it others you. I think a list of books for men is going to have an overwhelmingly male perspective precisely because it’s very easy to be alienated from art by small indications (smaller than genital mutilation, anyway) that you are seen as the other.
I mean, I don’t disagree with anything you said.
I don’t disagree with Solnit’s ambivalence about the way art asks us to empathize with some people and not others, I’d like her to own it.
@pillsy
Maybe? But I didn’t need her to bring it up in her first article, it’s just that I want her defense to be something other than “that’s ridiculous.”
Lots of times we might suggest that something has, say, a racist or sexist subtext, even if that wasn’t the primary purpose of the thing we’re criticizing. We can bring that up without demanding that everyone always preemptively defend themselves against charges of racism and sexism in everything they write.
If she’s going to go to the trouble of explaining why she doesn’t advocate censorship, I’d like her to actually go to the trouble.
@Charles S
Oh, I wasn’t supposed to be misreading her? I totally thought that was what I should do!
Thanks for correcting my mistake.
I really get very frustrated when people just go “You’re wrong.” and then walk away from me. What am I supposed to do with that? It doesn’t give me a way to understand and change what I’m doing wrong, or a way to clarify something I said badly, or a way to decide where we fundamentally disagree, it just makes me feel annoyed, and like you don’t respect me enough to actually engage with me.
What’s the point of that? What am I supposed to do with it?
Wait! Examples? In which romantic comedies does the woman reject the schlub for the hottie? Shall we count the various Adam Sandler movies, or Billy Crystal movies, and so on?
I mean, these things are hard to measure, but do you really want us pouring through film history and counting the number of hot-woman-and-schlubo-guy movies versus schlubo-woman-and-hot-guy movies?
I mean, speaking for myself, I’m perfectly happy when both the man and the woman are hot, cuz why not? It’s a movie. It’s escape. But the imbalance in this favors men so-fucking-much. Good grief. Just go watch that shitty Sideways movie again or something. Gah!
And what Solnit is trying to explain with her pieces is that if you flip the genders in these two statements you are describing the majority of works of literature not specifically aimed at women, and a fair fraction if not a majority of the works that are, including rom coms. The female characters are just…wrong, sometimes, or represent a very narrow slice of possible women, or accurately describe some women but have troubling implications.
I agree with you that this can be alienating! Now imagine pointing out that this describes most of what you read and having people accuse you of censorship as a result.
She is not ambivalent about it. She is pointing out that art can do that, and then pointing out that only one group of people is regularly asked to experience it. Saying, “I do this all the time and you do it never, and I think we should both do it sometimes,” is not being ambivalent about the thing, but critiquing its current distribution of use.
83% on the face recognition. I tend to score about average, or low average, on those things, so that’s not a surprise.
Gah, the way they manipulated the images at the end! I’m almost surprised I got any right. But then sometimes, someone’s gaze just looks at you, and you’re like, “I know that person!” even though this is just the brain overfamiliarizing itself with things that look like faces.
I’ll have to make my husband take it; he’s good at faces, although this might mess up his cues.
I surprised myself by getting 65% on the facial recognition test. I’m the worst at recognizing people. I regularly introduce myself to vendors who then tell me things like, “I sat across from you at a year’s worth of construction meetings.” Which is to say that if I don’t recognize you the next time we meet, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I haven’t seen you a hundred and fifty times, yet. Also, if you change your hairstyle I’ll be lost.
I flat out guessed on those. None of them were recognizable to me at all. I find myself wondering how lucky I got and if my random guesses at those were what pulled my score up into the average range.
Christopher,
I have read your comments through a couple of times now, and I am having a really hard time following your logic. I agree with everything Harlequin and veronica d have said in response to parts of what you have said, and, like Charles, I think you are grossly misreading both essays, but I’m not even sure how to begin my own response because the logic of the argument you are trying to make—and/or of the question(s) you are trying to ask—is lost on me. What exactly are you trying to say? Thanks.
Christopher,
If you’d like to explicate and substantiate some of your reading and your claims as to what is the subtext, then there might be something for me to argue with.
Well, you do provide something to argue with when you repeatedly claim that her second essay is not sufficiently about why she opposes censorship (and I guess, for you it is not, but you also make a factual claim, which is clearly wrong). You say that she merely rebuts concerns that her first essay is pro-censorship by saying “that’s ridiculous.” In fact, she devotes at least 5 paragraphs of a 23 paragraph article to why she opposes censorship, and endorses and links to Arthur C. Danto’s “The Politics of Imagination.”
To mischaracterize that as her just saying “that’s ridiculous” is, well, ridiculous.
Solnit’s clearly not calling for any kind of censorship, but statements like “I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty” seem to contain pretty big value judgment against anyone who reads and gets something out of those books, especially if that person is a woman. It seems the same as any other kind of shaming over media consumption.
There’s no question, though, that “canon”- style booklists skew overwhelmingly towards male-centric stories, and that the misogyny behind a lot of them gets minimized or ignored. And that female readers have to deal with this in a way that male readers don’t.
Vilfredo,
I guess I can sort of see how it could be taken that way, and Solnit clearly saw that it could/would be misread that way, which is why she went out of her way to disavow that interpretation extensively and repeatedly.
Charles S,
She clarifies that she doesn’t mean to suggest that people should read male authors instead of female, and of course that “anyone should read anything they want.” And she mentions identifying with Lolita in Lolita, which she casts as the one acceptable point of identification with that novel. But she still seems to be saying “these books are bad and only an unreflective man would like them in anything but a specific critical way.” Which puts the pressure on the reader to justify their experience of reading, which I don’t think is right.
I think “seems” is doing a lot of work in your second to last sentence.
To my intense surprise, 92% on the facial recognition test.
Here’s the scariest facial recognition thing I’ve ever witnessed. I once visited a bar with a friend and a friend of hers I hadn’t met before; we had a drink or two, they played pool while I watched. Three months later I was meeting the two of them at a mall. Haven’t seen the guy in the intervening months, and we’d hardly interacted. He spotted me standing on the other side of a large, crowded ice skating rink, while our mutual friend was off in the food court and couldn’t confirm it was me. (He was a bartender at the time, a job I imagine rewards facial recognition skills; even so that was pretty frightening, in the impressive way.)
Charles S,
I don’t know. If someone says “I think X is evil,” and details all the ways in which X is harmful, I think I can at least observe that it doesn’t jibe with them also saying “but of course engaging with X is fine.” I think she doesn’t want to censor anything, but she also wants to discourage people from reading the books she mentioned, so she’s using deliberately inflammatory language. And I guess that upset me, and per her observation I’m just too stupid to know I’m upset (which is a great way to turn criticism back on people in a way that fucks with their heads, natch).
It’s really a side-note, but I wish people would stop using castration as a “male equivalent of rape” thing. It’s a remarkable vanishing act on male survivors and I can’t imagine it’s particularly pleasant to those who’ve been violently castrated, either.
OMG what do you guys expect? This is feminist culture critique, and these are sexist books produced in a sexist culture by sexist men. Gender plays an obvious role in how they were produced, popularized, evaluated, and how they continue to be received.
You are part of that.
I repeat, you are part of that.
Now, the role you play in this will vary. Being a “media consumer” (aka, a “reader”) is different from being an author, editor, or critic. Fine. But still, if you read the misogynistic feverdreams of terrible men, and they resonates with you — well that says something about you. If you consume mostly this stuff, when less sexist material is widely available, well that also says something about you.
I mean, too fucking bad if you don’t like it when feminist criticize you. You’re probably sexist. Deal with it. Get better. Or don’t. Whatever.
We see through you.
Vilfredo, that’s a fairly common response to feminist media critiques: the idea that because something has problematic content, the person criticizing it means it’s always and forever tainted and nobody should like or consume it at all.
I think Caroline Siede at the AV Club has a good explanation of why this is an incorrect interpretation.
The beginning of the article about men raped in the US military mentions a man who was left for dead. Not to diminish the high importance of rape, but how much murder is there in the military?
Thank you to Ikeke35 in comment 3 for supplying a good link to the article.
Since this is an open thread, I’m going to drop this in here:
http://jezebel.com/no-offense-1749221642
It’s a very long broadside at competitive offense culture, the narcissism of performative outrage, intra-left sniping and the utter pointlessness of much of online social critique chatter today. All this from Jezebel, the center of the offense-taking universe, no less! I could pull out so many nuggets to talk about individually – there’s something for everyone.
” if you read the misogynistic feverdreams of terrible men, and they resonates with you — well that says something about you. If you consume mostly this stuff, when less sexist material is widely available, well that also says something about you.”
This is all very well, but if you’ve ever read a classist book (Jane Austen) or a racist book (Tolkien) and they resonated with you, I hope you’re prepared to condemn yourself just as strongly as you’re condemning others.
Well, yes. But I don’t think “that says something about you” is a very strong condemnation at all.
I recently read an essay by someone who couldn’t enjoy “Jessica Jones” at all because of the anti-fat joke in the first episode, combined with the complete lack of any positive fat characters – well, actually, any fat characters at all – in the rest of the series.
I loved Jessica Jones. And yes, that does tell me something, which is that I’m prepared to overlook some anti-fat in a TV show that has enough of other things I loved it in. That says something about my priorities, yes?
Also, as Veronica’s comment implied, there’s also a difference between enjoying an individual work with X in it, versus a diet consisting mostly of works with X in them.
On the facial recognition test, I was able (I think) to do okay on the questions where there was just a single face to be recognized. I couldn’t actually recognize the face per se, but I could pick a particular feature to memorize, like the chin, and recognize that feature.
Every single question in which there were multiple faces to recognize, rather than just one face to recognize, was 100% guesswork for me.
Just because: Donald Trump with a British accent:
This sort of hyperbolic reaction has been pushed back against in this thread by Halequin @21, 33 & 46 already, but I’ll give it a go.
Almost all of us have read a sexist book which resonated with us. No one says that makes you a bad person. The problem arises when some people have hardly ever read anything but sexist books and/or refuse to see sexist books as problematic. There are many “well-read” people out there who could count the non-sexist books they’ve read on one hand. If books with these sorts of sexist patterns form the vast majority of the works that you’re reading, that is a thing you should examine, because it might be having a bad influence on you.
That being said, I DO think Tolkien’s racism is an excellent parallel to the type of mysogyny present in a lot of the works Solnit is criticizing. There is a comparable villainization/tokinization/invisibilty of people of colour in the literary cannon. My inability to see it when I was in high school was definately a sign of my privledge. Tolkien’s works can still resonate with me, but it is important that I acknowledge the problematic aspects and actively seek out works which do not reenforce such racist thought patterns.
Jane Austen, I think, is pretty critical of the class system she describes. I don’t read her as supporting it. I also think that there is much broader class representation in the literary canon, such that classism doesn’t form an all-pervasive pattern comparable to sexist and racist patterns.
[Warning: I’ve been wandering around Boston today, getting sexually harassed and, in general, fucked-with, plus I’m drunk-as-fuck, so yeah.]
@Ampersand — Agreed on Jessica Jones. I mean, she’s supposed to be a sardonic, hard-boiled bitch, so it makes sense that her character would be (mildly) fat-phobic. But the writers! — the writes could have given us some gesture that they understood what was happening, how it would sound to fat people, and that fat people are valid and wonderful. They did nothing of the sort. It is a flaw in the show.
On the other hand, this is literally the best bit of feminist genre fiction to appear on screen, that shows the reality of male power-over women. It was profound. It makes me hunger for more. (I mean, I can’t sit through the average piece of shit that Lifetime puts out about women’s issues. I want heroes. I want bigger-than-life. Just please, give me real-fucking-women OMG, not more Joss Whedon wet-dream-rape-fantasies. Please! More Jessica Jones!)
So anyway, yeah, Jessica Jones was great on feminism and awful on body-size issue. Everything is terrible. True justice is elusive, beyond our grasp. We all someday will die and then it won’t matter.
Blah.
#####
Tolkien was racist as fuck, and gah! That sucks. I was a huge Tolkien fan as a kid.
That said, I have this sense — nothing I could prove — that if Mr. J.R.R. were alive today, and had he seen the unfolding of civil rights, that he would see the problems in his work, and that he would advocate (maybe in small ways) to mitigate this. I dunno. Call me ever hopeful. (Except I’m not hopeful and we’re all doomed whatever.) The point is, I have some faith that Mr. Tolkien would rise above his era. Maybe. Maybe not.
I have zero faith that Kerouac would rise above his misogynistic cesspool. Fuck that guy. Fuck every guy who romanticizes that crap. Fuck you all.
But back to Tolkien — the point is, that was then and this is now. How are we moving forward from there? Do you love those books? Great! I did as well. I used to cry — literally fucking cry — cuz I lived in this shitty world and not Middle Earth. I’m with you. (I used to cry also cuz I was born with a dick. So yeah.)
But anyway, Tolkien was racist as fuck. What can we do? The Peter Jackson movies tried, in small ways, to mitigate the fact he was sexist as fuck, but there is only so much to be done with the source material. (On the other hand, Liv Tyler as Arwen, on a glorious horse, swinging her curvy sword — OMFG kill me now so I may never see anything less than that!)
Blah. I don’t know what to do. I know this, the “guy in your MFA class” describes a real type of guy, and fuck those guys. The whole battery of “mid-century misogynist” literature is full of garbage that appeals to men — but fucking should not, cuz what kind of misogynistic creep are you? Don’t you see how terrible that is?
Which, obviously there is a way to engage with that fiction that is not terrible, just as we can read Tolkien and not be racist, just as we can read Lolita and not be a horrible pedo-rapist.
But on the other hand, what is there in On the Road that is not terrible? That is not self-indulgent? That is not garbage?
Fuck if I can see it. Blah!
I get this sense that some folks here want a toothless version of feminism. Fuck that and fuck anyone who thinks that. I eat nails for breakfast. I throw rocks. There is so much sexist garbage out there. I’m calling it what it is.
READ SOMETHING BETTER.
(This isn’t “censorship.” Stop being a fucking asshole.)
“Well, yes. But I don’t think “that says something about you” is a very strong condemnation at all.”
Well, I didn’t quote the whole comment, which included Veronica saying ‘you’re probably sexist’. Which strikes me as quite a strong condemnation. Certainly when I tell people they’re sexist I mean it as something a bit stronger than ‘you may have absorbed some of the biases of the kyriarchical culture you live in’.
And given what Veronica’s subsequently said, I don’t think I’m reaching in reading strong condemnation in what she’s saying.
“I get this sense that some folks here want a toothless version of feminism. Fuck that and fuck anyone who thinks that. I eat nails for breakfast. I throw rocks. There is so much sexist garbage out there. I’m calling it what it is.”
I don’t even disagree with you. But I will say, it’s easy to advocate for a progressivism that’s red in tooth and claw when we see that anger as something that will be directed outward from where we stand. The flipside of saying that we should meet prejudice with rage is that we’re going to have to take some of that rage ourselves some day. And I’m not saying that everybody is equally sexist or racist or classist or whatever, I’m just saying there are no identities that grant you immunity from this kind of rage – not “feminist” or “anti-racist”, and certainly not “woman” or “PoC”.
But if you advocate rage, and your reaction when somebody rages at you is to say ‘fair enough’ and learn some lessons from the rocks they are throwing at you, then yeah, I can’t fault you.
Some day? Like this isn’t something that’s been happening for decades, centuries or millennia (depending on which group you’re talking about)?
“Some day? Like this isn’t something that’s been happening for decades, centuries or millennia (depending on which group you’re talking about)?”
I don’t just mean we’re going to have to take rage generically, I mean we’re going to have to take rage from people who believe that we are oppressing them. And we’re not just going to have to take it as in endure it, we’re going to have to try and use other’s rage as an opportunity for self-critique and humble reflection.
Some day? Like this isn’t something that’s been happening for decades, centuries or millennia (depending on which group you’re talking about)?
That’s a different thing. Which leads to another question. Why? I mean, if we’re not oppressing them, what kind of self-critique and humble reflection are talking about?
Who said anything about “rage”?
Like, what the…?
This is about Rebecca Solnit and the “nice liberal men” who want to lecture her about literature. Which is to say, this is about boredom and emptiness. It’s about people who lack substance, but who cannot quite understand that — because they stupidly believe that to be male is to have substance. But it just ain’t the case. And a woman like Solnit is smarter than they are.
It’s living with the status games, which is to say the pecking order, and where women get to fit on that, sorted among men we secretly laugh at cuz they got nothing but sexual anxiety poorly expressed — but they built a world where sexual anxiety poorly expressed is “literary,” but where laughing at same is merely snide.
Or something. Fuck if I know. But it ain’t rage. It feels more like contempt.
60% on face recognition. No surprise. I embarrassed myself once by talking in detail to someone I thought I recognized who actually didn’t know me at all. Of course I met that someone again later and they remembered the whole thing, sigh, though at least they just thought it was funny.
Since that experience I tend to hang back until acknowledged by the person I think I might recognize. I make myself easy to see, but don’t say hi or make focused eye contact until they do. Sometimes I still embarrass myself by introducing myself to people who already know me, but it’s happened often enough that I’ve gotten better at gracefully saying I’m just bad at faces or have a touch of face blindness and of course I know who you are and bringing up some context for how we know each other. That usually puts them at ease. Face blindness seems to be much more a part of the popular lexicon now than it used to be, for which I’m very grateful.
What’s funny is I started dying my hair, and a bunch of acquaintances found themselves unsure if they actually recognized me. I found myself on the other side of the equation for once. There are probably some folks who are just lost to me now because neither of us recognized the other.
Ampersand (emphasis mine):
These are an example of one thing I find so toxic about identity politics, the fact that people become so obsessed with seeing their ideology reproduced and having their feelings coddled that they’re unable to enjoy culture, whether that culture be literary classics or media marvels. It’s one thing to observe or comment on a particular element of a work, it’s another to conclude that an isolated element taints the entire work.
I think it says you are able to enjoy fiction that doesn’t fit some impossible ideological vision of perfection. Even if you were to habitually consume media that included anti-fat attitudes I don’t think it would say any thing more.
The critique in this thread seems to be going beyond identifying patterns in culture works, and going into some absurdly simplistic psychoanalysis that assumes a monkey-see-monkey-do outcome from people consuming them. Veronica d’s “you’re probably sexist” comment seems to be based on this premise and the logical implication is that people who knowingly consuming such works are wilfully making themselves more sexist. It all seems to be based on the same flawed premise as the claims that playing video games will make people more violent, or that Harry Potter will make kids want to practise actual witchcraft.
yes Virginia, there is a left-wing reform movement
No offense – Apparently at least one person at Jezebel is capable of being self-aware.
“Fuck that and fuck anyone who thinks that. I eat nails for breakfast. I throw rocks. ”
This is what I generalised to “rage”. If you prefer “contempt”, sure.
“Why? I mean, if we’re not oppressing them, what kind of self-critique and humble reflection are talking about?”
But that’s the thing – we are all oppressing somebody, somehow. And we’re not the best judges of our own oppression. So if we expect others to treat our rage/contempt/whatever as valid and educational, the quid pro quo is to extend the same courtesy to others.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what people like Solnit and Amps friend are objecting to. They are objecting to a literary/media envioronment in which people like them are either invisible or reduced to caricatures, while white men are depicted as individual human beings.
[Cross-posted with Kate]
Desipis, quoting me, wrote:
This is a little awkward, because I can’t find the post I was describing. (I’m now in Florida, and so I can’t look in the browser history of my computer in Oregon). So I can’t double-check to see if my nutshelling of the article (such as the “at all”) is completely accurate.
But – assuming for the sake of the discussion that my description of the essay was accurate – I think you’re being unfair. Who are you to police what she does or doesn’t enjoy? She didn’t say that it should never have been made; she didn’t say that no one should ever watch or enjoy it. She said that she, herself, had her enjoyment of it poisoned. Should she have pretended to enjoy something she didn’t?
For that matter, what if instead of an anti-fat joke, “Jessica Jones” had started off with an antisemitic joke, or a racist joke? Would you call it “toxic” if a person of color said “I couldn’t enjoy it at all after that nasty racist aside right in the first seven minutes?” Would you say that not enjoying racist entertainments was a sign of a toxic ideology?
I dislike the “having their feelings coddled” boilerplate, by the way. Partly because I’ve heard it most often from Gamergaters and Sad Puppies – which is to say, from people who can’t stand anyone criticizing work they like, or praising/awarding work that they don’t like. Talk about wanting to be coddled!
But also because there’s indifference to other people’s genuine suffering implicit in sneeringly dismissing “identity politics” issues as “coddling.” I don’t know if you’re a fat person with thick skin, or a non-fat person. But in either case, little contempt-sneers like the one in “Jessica Jones” – when multiplied by tens of thousands of other similar little contempt-sneers, in the context of a society which constantly tells fat people (and let’s face it, especially fat women) that they are worthless – genuinely hurt some fat people. I take it that it doesn’t hurt you; but it does hurt other people, and the desire of marginalized people to not be hurt isn’t a desire to be “coddled.”
This totally happened to me once. A married couple of cartoonists I know – we had had dinner together a few times – came up to my table at a convention; I knew who they were because she had a nametag on. I started praising the man’s new book to him, and it went on for a minute or two before I realized my assumption about who he was, was wrong. Ah, well.
Ampersand:
If a racist comment was made in the same way as the fat comment, then yes I would consider that a reaction of “not enjoying it at all” would be overblown. To the extent that reaction was driven by ideology then I would consider that ideology toxic. I’m obviously making the assumption that it was ideologically driven in this case; an assumption that is based on what I’ve read from a lot people who are pro “fat acceptance”.
I think the way you characterise it as “racist entertainment” highlights the problem. It wouldn’t be “racist entertainment”, it would be “entertainment that portrays a racist character”. The whole point of that scene was to show that the character was a misanthropic jerk who was making harsh judgements of others.
I would apply the same criticism to a Christian who couldn’t enjoy something because a character made an aside about how anyone one believing in god is stupid, or a conservative man reacting in that way to a character saying all men are sexist and horrible.
I don’t think she should have pretended to enjoy it. I just think the reason she doesn’t enjoying says much more about her than it does about the show. Saying a single comment made them feel uncomfortable is one thing, saying a single comment poisoned the subsequent 10 or so hours of the season suggests a significant over-sensitivity.
There are numerous shows I’ve watched (including Jessica Jones) that portray things that make me feel uncomfortable because they make me feel the pain, suffering and/or injustice of things in my own life. But I consider it an important part of being emotional mature to be able to acknowledge those things, deal with the feelings, and move on to enjoy the rest of the show for what it is. Obsessing over a comment for the rest of the show in a way that takes away from the enjoyment just seems like unhealthy behaviour.
If a character can make me, as part of the audience, feel bad or hurt, then I think it’s a sign the writers have done their job in writing a “sardonic, hard-boiled bitch” as veronica puts it.
I got 89% on that face recognition test. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m naturally good at recognising faces, or because of the hours I’ve spent in the face editors of games like Skyrim and Fallout.
I find I’m really good at recognising people, but not remembering anything beyond their faces. So I recognise the face enough to know I supposed to know who person but find myself lacking the ability to recall names or any other useful information. This leaves me in the awkward position of having to smile, nod and say “hello” and hope the person gives me some other clues to go by.
I’m pretty uninterested in comments about “identity politics” that come from people who don’t deal with what I deal with. It’s like, what do they know?
Which is to say, ignorance is a thing in the world. Some people are ignorant about certain topics. It’s not really a mystery.
It works like this: being a member of a hated minority is different from not being a member of a hated minority. One would think this is obvious, but evidently some people need it explained.
Of course, it has been explained, many times, so at this point one wonders: what sort of cognitive defect does it require to remain this clueless? Or is it a character defect?
(Obviously I have an opinion on that. But anyway.)
This is all to say, look, I get harassed virtually every time time I go out in pubic.
No really. Every! Fucking! Time!
Well, maybe I don’t get harassed one day, but then I get triple the harassment the next. Trust me, it adds up.
The point is, you get used to it after a while — well, except sometimes you hit some weird escalation, such as the guy who threatened to cut my throat the other day.
After than happened, when I told the story, a bunch of my friends were all freaked out. But I was like, whatever. This ain’t the first time some angry white guy threatened to murder me.
Blah. Of course, most days it’s not an actual murder threat. It’s just some asshole in my face, saying horrible shit about me for no reason except that I’m trans.
Which, I know that empathy is sometimes in short supply, but really try to imagine that.
Okay, here’s the thing: you probably cannot.
No really. It’s weird, right. But true. There are experiences in life, that you imagine, but until you experience them you don’t really know.
I remember the first time a man sexually assaulted me. It was different from what I expected, and I behaved differently from how I had imagined I might behave in that situation. I’d seen TV shows, that showed women being sexually harassed and assaulted — this was back before my transition, when I still walked around in “boy mode” — so yeah. The point is, I watched and imagined what I would do, and in my imaginings I was poised and heroic. Blah blah blah. Then it happened to me, and I was not those things.
It’s sometimes nice to talk to other assault survivors, cuz they understand.
Well, usually. It’s complicated.
I never served in war. I’ve never seen combat. Thus I don’t presume to tell combat veterans what combat is like, nor do I lecture them about bravery or “coolness under fire.” I’ve read books about that stuff. I’ve played some video games, seen some movies. We all have. But I haven’t done it. I don’t know shit.
Many of you (most of you, perhaps) don’t know shit about what it is like to be a hated minority. You are not harassed on a daily basis. It doesn’t happen to you. You don’t know.
You might imagine, but then you’re like the kid who imagines he’ll be a brave soldier, but then shits himself when the fighting starts.
And then people who have never served in war will condemn him. Blah!
My “identity” is not an outfit I put on and take off. It’s not some arbitrary thing, just hanging in my closet, inert until I feel like slagging on some random TV show. It doesn’t work that way.
Do you imagine it works that way? I mean, what the fuck?
#####
I’m not really fat now, but I used to be. I remember the pain of constantly being the butt of the joke, the fat neckbeard guy, the unlovable nerd. That shit sucked.
Of course, I’m still the butt of the joke, ’cept now I’m the tranny, which is heeee-larious. Heh. Laugh away, asshole.
Which look, in recent years this has gotten slightly better — with Laverne Cox in the media and so on — but for the most part, every portrayal of trans women in the media is alienating garbage. Honestly, I think we trans gals get it worse that fat dudes, insofar as cis folks seem sexually preoccupied with us, by which I mean, we are tokens of their own sexual anxieties — at least it seems as if something like that is going on. I can’t read minds. But all the same, we are people who exist quite beyond whatever strange mixture of attraction-revulsion is felt by your random cis-bro. But guess who writes TV shows?
People seem to just hate fat dudes in the casual way, that hateful mockery they use to hide their own inadequacy.
Or something. I dunno. But my point is, when I fat person complains about shitty television, I’ll listen. I’ll respect.
#####
A lot of my trans friends kinda avoid going out in public, except to get to work and stuff (those who have jobs). Which fine. They still manage to find cool hobbies, online or whatever, or just visiting friends.
I don’t want to live that way. I want to be out in the world. It’s important to me.
Truth be told, I think some of my friends live diminished lives, and I think their fear of being in public is part of that. But I don’t blame them for this fear. It’s really hard to deal with the relentless hate.
IT’S REALLY FUCKING HARD YOU HAVE NO IDEA.
(Well, some of you know, because you live it.)
I don’t judge my friends for this. It’s like — it’s not their fault that people hate us. It’s not our fault. We didn’t do it. All we can do is find some way to weather the storm of hatred.
Myself, I’ve actually-really just accepted that I might be murdered someday.
Which is weird, cuz back before I transitioned I was a terrible chucklefuck coward. Now I am not. So that’s a thing.
I read about how Norse warriors believed in fate and wanted to “die well.” Whatever. It’s silly. I know that it’s silly. But I hope I die well.
And the people who want to lecture me about “identity politics” — they can fuck off sideways. Idiots.
@veronica d: Sorry, was that intended as a response to what I said?
@Tamme — No.
Desipis:
In your earlier comment, you wrote:
Not having a fat joke like that isn’t an “impossible ideological vision of perfection,” btw. But I really want to comment on “Even if you were to habitually consume media that included anti-fat attitudes.” Because I do habitually consume such media, because it’s nearly impossible to avoid. Either anti-fat attitudes, or the unnatural absence of fat characters, or both, are incredibly common in US media. So common that often, when I rewatch a show or movie, I’ll hit on an anti-fat moment I’d completely forgotten about, because I can’t remember every stupid anti-fat moment I see in media any more than I could remember every squirrel I see when I walk.
I don’t know what other shows and movies the writer I read has enjoyed. But I think it’s completely plausible that she watches and enjoys a lot of TV with implicit or explicit anti-fat attitudes, but wasn’t able to do so for Jessica Jones.
Usually I pretty much shrug such moments off and forget them. Because they’re super-commonplace. But although I shrugged off the comment in Jessica Jones, I found that I wasn’t able to forget it.
Why? Well, part of the reason is how the anti-fat moment was nasty. You wrote “The whole point of that scene was to show that the character was a misanthropic jerk who was making harsh judgements of others.” Yes, I understood that was the intention – although the intent was also to make her a likable, funny misanthrope. (A crass racist comment wouldn’t have worked because viewers wouldn’t have been as willing to like Jessica if she had done that. They didn’t randomly choose a fat joke to show how crass Jessica is; they chose it because they believe that fat jokes are widely seen as acceptable, even in a show obviously intended to appeal to a feminist audience.)
But part of what makes the fat joke memorable is that the “objective” narration – the camera – showed us a fat woman getting off a treadmill and eating a huge burger, and then getting back on the treadmill with the burger still in hand, presumably so she can exercise and eat junk foot at the same time, as everyone knows we fat people do.
In other words, it’s not just Jessica’s comment. It’s that the camera and direction said that Jessica’s crass stereotypes about fat people are are objectively true. It’s as if Jessica had looked through her binoculars and muttered “those people are such money-grubbers” and then the show switched to a shot of two Jews with skullcaps and sidelocks having an angry tug of war with a single penny as the rope.
So that’s one reason this joke “sticks’ in the mind more than a typical anti-fat joke might. Another is, Jessica Jones is one of the most feminist TV shows ever created. (I’ve seen some feminists praise it as the most feminist TV show ever made.) I think that context matters a lot, because most “fat acceptance” folks either are feminists or think of feminists as allies. It can be more of a sting when it comes from someone you have higher hopes for.
BTW, I wouldn’t assume that she watched all ten hours (although the way I phrased my nutshelling implied that she did). It’s quite possible that she said “okay, fuck this shit” and turned it off after just a few episodes made it clear that there were no other fat characters at all. Again, I wish I could find the post again. Oh well.
There are plenty of tv shows where there’s one or two episodes I have to skip over ever time on rewatch for severe anti-fat stuff. I can handle it to a certain extent, heaven knows, but sometimes something will be so hateful, or just triggering. There’s a House episode, and granted I don’t rewatch House for various reasons, where a character suggests it’s ok for a little girl to die because she’s fat. I mean, holy shit. To be honest, I don’t even remember the JJ joke at all; for me, it was background noise. But I don’t blame folks for not wanting that background noise. Or for being annoyed that the “most feminist tv show of all time” (a characterization I find odd) or even just “a very feminist tv show” does not extend that inclusion to women who are fat, and being annoyed that thin people don’t notice that.(I didn’t really notice it either.)
@veronica: OK, thanks for clearing that up.
The discussion on identity politics is frustrating to read.
There are lots of good insights in the world, and lots of them come from people not like you–and contra veronica many of them can come from people who haven’t lived the experience. But people tend to take their one or two pet insights to ridiculous extremes and continue to apply them well past the point where they are most useful.
Libertarians are right to point out that the government has enormous repressive tools which are often used to stamp out individual freedom well out of proportion to government’s legitimate needs. They also correctly note that a lot of the way to deal with it is to remove certain tools from the government arsenal. But that insight can be taken WAYYYYYYYYYYY too far for what would be hilarious effect if it weren’t so damaging when libertarians try to argue that nearly every government power should be reduced to nothing.
Positive thinkers are right that taking a positive spin on things often leads to a happier and healthier outlook. Except when it leads to denial, so there is a balance. And if you are a Jew being forced into the incinerator by Nazis you can have a positive outlook and still end up burned to death. It doesn’t fix all ills.
Those who are more into identity politics than I am are correct to point out that people get classified in stupid and unfair ways. They sometimes take it too far by trying to shove everything through that lens–especially when they routinely avoid legitimate critiques with the “you haven’t lived it” dodge. They are also correct that little things can really add up. Just because they are of the type you would normally want to brush off if you didn’t face them every day doesn’t mean they don’t add up.
Desipis, what you aren’t extending sympathy toward is the fact that the drip drip drip really does add up. Your insight is that people can train themselves to be too vigilant about the small slight, and when they do that they let it ruin things that they really could be enjoying otherwise. You also correctly point out that this can lead to life being more miserable than it needs to be. But what you aren’t groking on a fundamental level is that the drip drip drip is a torture by repetition. Yes if it happened once a month, the object of the one drip should just brush it off rather than freak out. Yes there are some college students who are training themselves to go into freak out mode over just the once. But there are also those who have to deal with it 5 or 10 times a day, and at some point get overwhelmed by it.
So on the original link it makes perfect sense to say, hey can’t we aim for at least some books that don’t lead to the drip drip drip? That is an identity politics insight working in a balanced way.
On the Jessica Jones thing your criticism makes more sense, but even then you aren’t really understanding the soaking nature of the drip drip drip. The balanced insight is something more like “You’re right that the fat shaming drip drip drip sucks. In a world where it happens, it doesn’t happen again in the series and the series has redeeming qualities that probably aren’t worth missing if you can skip over that scene.”
Part of the problem desipis, is that you are reacting against a stereotype of the academic user of identity politics language. It makes sense, because they are the ones who write the most about it. Also many upper-class people (a group which most academics are a part of) cultivate the unnecessary slight as a weapon–especially against lower class people. That is a nasty power play, and it should be pushed back against. But you aren’t being fair to the people with legitimate exposure to the drip drip drip, especially those who have to face it in multiple dimensions (say weight, sexuality, and color). Yes there are times they have to learn to suck it up. But they shouldn’t have to suck it up infinitely. Yes some of them train themselves to take over-offense in a way that ruins other things. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t even more who suck it up a lot, don’t take over-offense, and are still having their lives ground down.
Honestly, I think you’re right about this. (Also, I think that on average fat women get it worse than fat dudes – not ignoring that some people are trans AND fat).
If you’ve traveled around, do you think the public harassment you get is the same everywhere, or is partly a product of where you live? I don’t hear of it being a daily thing from my trans friends in Portland – but maybe they’re just not mentioning it to me. :-(
veronica d:
Neither, or perhaps a subset of the latter: a vested interest. As I know from experience, and you probably do, too, it’s just a lot nicer to go through the world believing that most people are basically okay, and actually do smile because they’re glad to see you and everyone else, and actually do listen to what you have to say, just as they do with everyone else. Once you transition, you learn how very untrue that is. It’s disturbing and difficult to learn that in fact it’s not that way for everyone, and that all of that pleasantry is actually unearned advantage which accrues to you for no good reason.
So, so, SO much better to believe that it all accrues to you because life is basically fair, or because you’re awesome. Then you don’t have to confront all kinds of stuff, and you can dismiss those whiners who go on and on about all that petty stuff which so obviously doesn’t matter.
I’m not emphasizing that it’s easier — though it undeniably is easier to live without that constant corrosion. I’m emphasizing that it’s nicer. It’s just a more pleasant way to live. The fact that it’s denied to an awful lot of people is something you kind of have to engage with, if you’re aware of it and not sociopathic. Easiest fix: don’t be aware of it, and gaslight people who mention it.
I long ago accepted that I might die in the line of duty, and got on with business. It was trivial to carry that over into life as a visibly trans person. When I die, if it’s caused by anything other than old age, I hope to die well, to go down swinging and to make my death worthwhile, or at least as costly as possible to the people causing it. I used to teach newer officers to acknowledge that someday they might face a threat which no one human being could beat, and they might get taken down and killed, but if they did, they better go down swinging.
I don’t say that to trans people; officers are volunteers, and trans people are draftees. But for myself, I also hope for a good death, and I expend some effort on making it more probable.
(I now have enough passing-as-cis privilege that being visibly trans is largely optional, and I try to choose safe spaces to do it in; doing it all the time is exhausting and dispiriting, and sometimes I decide not to try to smooth out society’s roughness by grinding my face against it. I know how lucky I am to have this option, to be able to be treated (and sometimes despised) as merely a woman, rather than treated (and often despised) as a freak. Veronica’s right; you have to experience it, the pervasive, relentless, corrosive toxicity of it, to understand how it wears on you.)
99% of men can never know what it’s like to be a woman, but almost anyone can access, oh, 25% of what it’s like to be trans. It’s especially easy for cis men (go figure). Put on a dress, put on a skirt and pumps, and go out to buy groceries, walk the dog, whatever. Apply for a job. Try to rent an apartment. Take a complaint of stomach pain to the doctor. Experience the reactions. Put your hair in barrettes. Wear makeup to look as feminine as possible. Do it for a month, and don’t ever take a break from it. You will come out of that experience a changed, changed man. When you’re done, walk away from it, and realize that you can, and for people who can’t, that’s the other 75%. Realize that the insults and the jeers and the threats didn’t hit home as much for you, because they were directed at your costume, and not you, and that if it weren’t a costume, if it were you, that’s the other 75%.
To quote someone else, a long time ago in a part of the Internet far, far away:
Grace
@Ampersand — I haven’t lived there, and the only west coast travel as done as a trans gal was a week in Mountain View for work stuff. So anyway. I can share anecdotes, like my friend who went to San Fran and was on Castro when some joker came up and spat in her face. So yeah. It can happen anywhere, from really anyone.
Like, no matter how many cool queers live in an area, we’re still never the majority. I mean, maybe we’re the majority in some place like P-Town — ’cept honestly P-Town is mostly straight tourist these days, since gays are a spectacle or something.
Look how colorful we are! Just like Disney!
Blah. We built this culture cuz you hated us.
Anyway, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the Boston Pride parade were majority straight these days, with all the big companies who get (what seems like) their entire staff out to march, plus the nice liberal politician and their staff. The crowd is certainly majority straight.
Plus there is all sorts of race-stuff and class-stuff breaking down here, which is hard to talk about, cuz we get enough bullshit from the white-straight-cis crowd that talking about lateral oppression just confuses the issue. But it’s a big deal. Black guys mess with me a lot.
The point is, that middle-class white businessman hates me in a different way from that rough-edged Southie with a neck tattoo. So.
But the Pacific Northwest has its share of rough people with neck tattoos, and that braindead jerk on the wrestling team who can’t handle the fact that some pretty trans gal gives him a boner, plus the religious bigot — since maybe they are outnumbered in “liberal” areas, but they usually still hit around 20%.
It only takes one to ruin your train ride.
Take any cluster of young dudes filled with surging testosterone and brains that haven’t learned to deal with that, with alcohol abuse, and some weird pecking order where they can seem cool to their friends by acting out violence — and then some trans woman steps on the train.
Does Portland have guys like that?
On and on, TERFs galore. And then the basic middle-aged housewife who is “uncomfortable” that I’m in the restroom, and who gives me a baleful stare.
Whatever. I don’t care about “stares” anymore. I’m past that shit.
But the other day a lady like that made my best friend cry.
There is no god. Everything is terrible. Burn it all down.
Do you imagine the Pacific Northwest lacks for “nice liberal women” who will give us dirty looks?
Or this one weird creepy guy in a clown suit — I. am. not. making. this. up. — who was chatting up some lady on the redline. Like, he was trying to be all interesting and impressive to her. In a clown suit. Whatever. ’Cept he saw me, and he did this weird, utterly transparent thing, where he tried to impress her by joking around with me — like to show his “good liberal guy” bona fides.
And it was really obvious. Anyway, he asked me my stage name. No really! My stage name! I just laughed in his face.
At that point it’s just pathetic. It’s like, cissies gonna cis.
I would imagine Portland is filled to the gills with eccentric weird dudes in clown suits that try to impress random women by saying dumb, alienating things to trans women.
I mean, maybe not that specific thing, but stuff like that.
Blah.
Then there is the violence.
@grace — +100
Veronica – Thanks for answering (and that completely sucks that you experience that everywhere). I wasn’t assuming the answer would be one thing or another. I was kind of hoping it might be better some places, but I’m not surprised that it’s not. :-(
Some thoughts on the not-watching-Jessica-Jones-because-of-fatshaming-thing:
-As a reason to be critical of social justice ideology, “someone might not watch all of/enjoy a show they would otherwise enjoy” is pretty weak tea. People can decide not to watch a show for any reason or no reason. There might be a weak moral reason to watch a show if it gives you a shared experience to help you bond with family or friends, but for any given person it’s just as likely that they should cut down on their TV viewing so that they have more time to spend with their family or friends. I don’t think there’s any more virtue in trying to get yourself to enjoy Jessica Jones despite that fat-shaming moment than there is in me trying to get myself into The Sopranos because I’ve heard it’s a good show artistically even though the concept doesn’t grab me and I think all the violence will be kind of a downer. And I think the chances are pretty good that once I started watching it, I would get interested in it! But there are too many good shows/books/etc for me to start forcing myself to watch that one.
-Desipis, I think although you know intellectually that it’s a matter of them not enjoying a show rather than deciding that they’re ideologically opposed to watching a show, you’re still kind of treating it like an intellectual decision. Like it’s more about, “I will feel angry and/or guilty if I decide to watch this show, so even though I still kind of want to, I won’t,” rather than, “It’s just harder for me to get excited about watching this show.”
-The factors that go into whether someone likes a show are complicated, and I myself don’t always understand why I like or don’t like certain things, or why I get around to finishing certain things and not others. (I could end a book excited to read the next book in the series, but it hasn’t come out, and by the time it comes out it just isn’t as much of a priority for me. Long delays before the next part comes out definitely make a difference.) Or similar plot elements in different contexts will make me interested in some cases and put me off the show in others. I disliked Game of Thrones in part because of all the rape/torture stuff, but I’m interested in Jessica Jones and rape is a major theme! And simultaneously, I’m now finding myself less motivated to watch Jessica Jones (though overall I still want to watch it), now that I know that there’s a bad fat-shaming moment! Even though I don’t expect that it would have a strong effect on whether I enjoyed the show! (I suspect that having the fat-shaming moment early on, rather than later on, has a significant effect on how strongly someone would associate Jessica Jones with fat-shaming, and therefore how excited they were to watch future episodes.)
-Some people are just more sensitive than others. I’m not at all convinced that they’re all just “coddled” and if they started seeking out ways to be insulted (because, in the example before us, it’s NOT a matter of being “exposed to different ideas”) or whatever they would stop being the way they are, and given that, I don’t think telling them, “you are bad for being sensitive and you should feel bad,” is productive or helpful.
I just found out about this, it’s kind of upsetting to me. I love Peter S. Beagle’s work, and I met both of them, however briefly, during the screening tour.
Peter S. Beagle Sues His Manager For Elder Abuse and Fraud
Hey, for those of you who like Christmas, and who happen to see this: Merry Christmas!
I’m with my sister’s mixed family, so there’s a little bit of Christmas going on here; we watched “Home Alone.” The kids just went to bed, and we’re beginning to stuff the stockings. I feel like I’m in a sitcom family.
ETA: Please don’t take me wishing y’all a M.C. as a sign that I am any less devoted to our side of the War to End All Wars.
I’ve been wishing everyone a Happy Hannumas and a Merry Crismukkah, so I’ll do it here, too.
This is a pretty amusing follow up for anyone who enjoyed Home Alone.
Merry Christmas to those who want it!
This is a Christmas song that’s really grown on me: Hot Cider Cinnamon by Harrison Kennedy
I saw Star Wars and ate tofu with brown sauce and eggplant with garlic sauce, and my fortune cookie told me “A journey of 1000 miles begins with as many dumplings,” so I feel that I’ve had a successful Christmas.
I made a roast beef using the reverse sear which worked pretty damn well.
I notice that the attacks on “identity politics” here are mostly coming from devotees of masculist identity politics. Kind of amusing, really. I know I overuse the “X for me but not for thee” trope, but it really does describe many people’s attitude. I’ve also noticed, in general, that “identity politics” is attacked by almost everybody, and blamed on someone else. So, for example, one commentator from a left background whom I generally respect blames identity politics on “postmodernists,” while most of the postmodernists I read blame it on the left, and so on. And most of them are blissfully unaware of the variety of identity politics they themselves are invested in. I think the term should be retired as a term of abuse.
Barry — I got a chuckle from the Campbell’s soup thing too. It’s the kind of response I make to bigots. But I think it’s important to remember that it wasn’t actually Campbell’s customer service who posted it. You know, factual accuracy and all that.
I have a right-wing acquaintance from high school who reconnected on Facebook, and she posted at least once a popular story about a (high school, I think) student who effortlessly demolished the anti-God arguments of his teacher. “And that boy,” the story concluded, “was Albert Einstein.” When a liberal friend of hers and I explained that the story was false, she protested, basically, that she got a chuckle out of it. And who cares if it’s true, it made her feel good, so stop being so politically correct, okay?! Since then, when she posts more of these bits of folklore, I will often comment along the lines, “And that child / old man / grandma was … Albert Einstein!”
LOL!
Ben, I’m sorry I missed that roast, it sounds great.
“, she protested, basically, that she got a chuckle out of it. And who cares if it’s true, it made her feel good, so stop being so politically correct, okay?!”
I hate this kind of thing. These kinds of shareable lies (not limited to the right, sadly) are clearly intended as a form of ingroup-signalling rather than a way to share information, but even people who are intellectually honest enough to admit that the point of them isn’t that they’re true won’t actually object to others spreading them as truth and making claims based on their alleged truth.
-Some of the more extreme pro-BLM people regularly express the sentiment that every single cop is bad, because every single cop is complicit/covers up for the behavior of the bad ones. I don’t agree (I suspect that the bad ones will keep things at least in the plausible deniability zone with the good ones, but will be skilled at sounding out who is sympathetic to their views and will cover up for them), but setting aside the truth-value of that statement, I suspect it’s bad politics and will be used as an example of how bad the left is similar to how Americans treating troops badly post-Vietnam is used today. (I think there’s dispute about how widespread the bad treatment was, but that’s all the more reason that a real phenomenon is likely to be used against the left.)
-I was thinking recently about the wolves-sheep-sheepdogs (criminals-regular people-cops) metaphor popular among some law enforcement officers. Maybe cops–and would-be cops–in this metaphor are not sheepdogs, but many kinds of dogs. And if you do not select your sheepdog carefully, you end up with a dog that kills your sheep. And even sheepdogs with the right instincts need guidance from a human because while they may protect the sheep, their reaction to sheep is, “A fun toy! Let’s make the sheep go here and then go there because it’s fun!”
Having a fat joke thrown out in, literally, the opening moments of “Jessica Jones” seriously made me question whether I wanted to watch any more, not because I am some whiny, sensitive crybaby SJW identity politics baby, but because once a show (book, comic, whatever) goes to “ha, fat people eating cheeseburgers!” as a throwaway joke, I can never be sure they’re not going to go back to that well again and again for “comic” material.*
And it’s kind of unpleasant to be reflexively hunching yourself against a repeat for the entire rest of the 13-episode series.
If I hadn’t already seen a bunch of blogs and news outlets I respect saying positive things (while avoiding spoilers), I might not have been very keen to quickly watch the other 12 eps. There’s a lot of things on my to-watch list – none of which, I’ll note, I can trust 100% not to use fat people as lazy punching bags, thanks so much early 21st century sizeist and healthist culture, but “once bitten, twice shy” is a more effective sorting mechanism to use than “never watch anything because everything is potentially terrible.”
Fortunately I did watch the rest. I mostly thought it was pretty great.
Anything can have some pretty great qualities, even if it also has some problematic ones. Nothing is not problematic. OTOH, I agree that it says a lot about someone if their favorite literature is largely written by white men, dealing in sexist tropes and stereotypes. There’s a lot of ground between “I like a thing even as it is problematic; I, in fact, am filled with problematic behaviors and attitudes because I, like everyone am a product of kyriarchy” and “I pretty much bellied up to the all-you-can-eat kyriarchy bar and I’m thinking of going back for fourths, because it’s a lot more convenient than the ‘ethnic’ place in the little strip mall across town and besides, all my friends are there.”
*And as far as I’m concerned, that well is also likely to contain “man in a dress” and “pseudo-crip working the system for money!” and “dangerous angry sassy black woman!” stereotype “jokes,” so even if the writers don’t serve up a dose of fatphobia on the regular, there’s usually a lot more where that comes from that I don’t want leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
Absolutely. Everything is problematic in one way or another, and everybody likes things that are problematic. But you can acknowledge the screwed-up nature of something and continue to like it.
People seem, very frequently, to react to “Wow, that was a [sexist/racist/fatphobic/etc] thing in that piece of media” as if what was actually said was “That piece of media is irredeemably evil and everyone who likes it either has crappy taste or kicks puppies.”
Yes, exactly this. And because there are few or no fat people anywhere else in the series, that moment stands out as the series’ take on fat people—walking stereotypes trotted out as a joke, then totally ignored.
And one of the major points of the Medium article is that, hey, fat women are rape victims too, and fat hatred interacts with that in really ugly ways, and maybe a show that’s trying to be (and mostly doing a kick-ass job of being) very feminist and honest about sexism and abuse and PTSD shouldn’t crap on a group of women who deal with the same sexist shit (sometimes worse) as their thin counterparts.
Also, this is my answer to the “twenty minutes on a quarter pounder” scene. (Fanfic that imagines an actual story and life for the woman on the treadmill.)
If “everything is problematic“, then what purpose does it serve to state “this thing is problematic“? Given the premise “everything is problematic“, the statement “this thing is problematic” seems to mean nothing other than “this thing is a thing” (i.e. it’s simply stating a tautology).
I mean my educational background covers engineering, science and law, and if I were to call out every case of bullshit in instance of modern media that might perpetuate some harmful misconception about the way things (computers/cars/guns/medicine/law/etc) work I wouldn’t get to stop. Yet I don’t, because I understand the purpose of this media is entertainment, not shaping people to be perfect human beings.
It’s also because the nature of the mediums require simplifications about the way things work in order to efficiently communicate the idea that forms the element of the story. Sometimes that requires someone be knocked out with a blow to the head (which would ordinarily cause serious brain damage) as a quick and convenient plot device, or to instantly hack the CIA as a quick way to get critical information; other times it requires the use of a stereotypes about people to quickly communicate the basis of a character without requiring lengthy exposition.
(And that’s not even covering the point that the fat “joke” was so cutting because people actually are shitty at estimating calorie content of meals.)
If the meaning of “this thing is problematic” isn’t supposed to mean that thing is “irredeemably evil and everyone who likes it either has crappy taste or kicks puppies“, then my reaction to it is “so what?”.
The issue is that the supporting sterotypes are dispropotionately female and/or people of colour, while the well developed characters are dispropotionatly white men. Look, just recently we’ve had a bunch of white men freaking the f**k out over a Ghost Busters remake with female ghost busters and a new Star Wars movie with a woman and a black man in the lead roles, even though such central roles still overwhelmingly go to white men. Stop for a second and try to imagine if the roles were reversed. Think about watching dozens of movies with black women in all their diversity and complexity at the center and then black women freaing the f**k out when a few movies feature black men and white men in the lead roles.
I actually like such pedantry. Plastic clothes baskets shouldn’t be in movies about the 1950’s – really, movies/art/literature which gets such details right tend to be better. It’s like the mythical green m&m’s (there shall be bowls of only green m&m’s backstage) – they’re put in the contract so the band can see at a glance that every word of the contract was read. When I see a crap shortcut, I expect that there will be more crap short cuts. As someone said above, a cheap, obvious fat joke isn’t just about that joke, it’s about the writers propensity to go for the easy, stupid laugh which will get old fast if they do it too often.