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idabackwardsintherain · 3 years

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I've been using social media, in one form or another, for nearly twenty years. I've been on message boards, mailing lists that were actually used for making friends, online pen pal ("keypal") groups, Geocities, Xanga, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo Groups, Bebo, VampireFreaks, Livejournal, Blogspot, Blogger, Formspring, Instagram, Amino, and probably some more I can't even remember.

Within two weeks on Tiktok, I witnessed more antisemitism than I'd seen in the last two decades.

(If hearing descriptions of this antisemitism will be triggering, this is your cue to scroll past this post.)

There are people who deny the Holocaust, people who say it didn't happen but they wish it had, and people who say it should happen again. There are people who say "6 million wasn't enough" (often abbreviated to 6MWE) or other jokes about the number of Shoah victims. There are white nationalists and white supremacists who use neonazi dogwhistles like 14/88. Jews who explicitly say "I support Palestinians" are called liars, dirty, scum. There are people commenting "lol good" on posts about antisemitic hate crimes, and frequently claim that the hate crime in question was "just antizionist, not antisemitic" even if it had nothing whatsoever to do with Zionism. One guy posted a bunch of videos of himself playing Grand Theft Auto and getting out to gun down any NPC dressed in traditional Chasidic clothing, continuing to shoot even once they were down, and saying he was proud to be killing the "Zionist scum". There are people using (((echoes))) to indicate Jews, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, and using 👃 as a shorthand for "Jew". There are codes beyond 14/88, such as 6MWE ("6 million wasn't enough"), references to 109/"make it 110" (the idea that "Jews have been kicked out of 109 countries so they must be doing something wrong"/"let's kick them out again to make it 110"), "wooden doors" (a Holocaust denial meme), and so on.

Jews are called baby-killers, asked how many babies they've killed, told that by simply existing (even if they have zero connection to the State of Israel) they are causing Palestinian children to die. People claim Jews torture children to drain them of adrenochrome, then crush up their remains and put it in McDonald's burgers. That's basically a modern-day version of blood libel, but I have seen actual traditional blood libel repeated unironically. People say Jews are child-molesters and Judaism condones child abuse. They say that Judaism teaches that gentiles are cattle and that Jews plan to enslave them all. They say Jews are "the biggest anti-white group" and plan to "destroy the white race". They say Jews control the economy and the government and the media, and use the term "elites" as a dogwhistle to refer to Jews. They sexualise Jewish women's bodies in demeaning, racialised ways, while also mocking Jews of all genders for being "ugly". They either say Jews aren't white and are plotting to destroy the white race, or they say Jews are all white (ignoring all Jews of colour) and trying to co-opt the anti-racism movement to oppress people of colour by making it all about themselves. They say Jews have a victim complex and aren't really oppressed. They say Jews invented and/or exaggerated the Holocaust in order to extort money from guilty Western nations. They say being Jewish is a choice, so if you don't want to experience hate crimes, you should just stop being Jewish. They say nobody would know you were Jewish unless you told them, so it's your fault if you experience antisemitism because you should just not tell anybody. They call people kikes, zios, hook-noses, rats (I got called a "juden rat" this week!), demons, pigs, goblins, oven-dodgers. They leave comments like "zey are in ze attic" and other Holocaust jokes. Videos Jews post can get shadowbanned or removed entirely for just using the word "Nazi" or "antisemitism", while actual Nazi content is left up. One guy uploaded a video blaming Jews for every major world event and tragedy for the last 150 years, and it was evaluated as "not violating Community Guidelines", but people responding to it to explain why it was wrong did get censored. Sometimes the app will actually just censor the word "Jew" itself.

Even though most Jews acknowledge that it is entirely possible for some Jews to have white privilege and recognise that Jews of colour are targeted more explicitly, there are a lot of people who tell Jews who are (or pass as) white that they should shut up about antisemitism because nobody can tell they're Jewish and Jews of colour are the only ones who are ever targeted. They say that it's just "white tears" to say you're scared of the neo-Nazis at the Capitol riot, the congresswoman who quoted Hitler there, the evangelical Christians who used Jewish symbols and led the public to believe the whole thing was a "Zionist" conspiracy, the man with the "Camp Auschwitz staff" shirt. They weaponise the trauma experienced by Jews of colour to make their own political points while ignoring (and even blocking) actual Jews of colour. They promote conspiracy theories like the Khazar hypothesis, claiming that Jews are actually just European identity thieves who stole a Middle Eastern culture. They accuse Jews of colour of upholding white supremacy by not rejecting Jews who descend from the diaspora in Europe. They say antisemitism against Jews isn't real because "they're not true Semites"/"they're not the only Semites", so Jews are the real antisemites because every single one of them personally oppresses Palestinians.

They defend the Messianic movement (the self-styled "Messianic Jews" who are actually evangelical Christians) and say Jews are bigots if they don't accept Messianics. They defend the appropriation and bastardisation of Judaism and Jewish culture, which they claim to understand far better than Jews themselves. For instance, they like to lecture Jews about what the Tanakh and Talmud actually say, and refuse to be told otherwise.

The best part is that half the time, in the very same comment section where all of this is happening, there are other people saying "you're making that up. Nobody says things like that."

#tiktok #antisemitism #jumblr #Holocaust denial #blood libel

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mw-moriearty · 4 years

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I Don’t Like “Dudes” in Fiction

Let me be clear: I have no problem with male characters. I was assigned male at birth, I spent the first 23 and a half years of my life identifying as male, I’ve got no real problem with men (I have even been known to write them on occasion). No, I’m talking about dudes:

That weird kind of “relatable” male character who exists somewhere on the spectrum between nineties slacker comedy heroes and Woody Allen “lovable” schmucks, but with a heavy helping of off-putting misogyny.

These guys are the stars of so much 21st century genre fiction. They work fine in, say, creepypasta, where the common conceit is that the narrator is some internet-lurking incel anyway. But its surprising how common they are even in more “literary” genre fiction.

I was telling one of my very close family members, who is a tenured English professor at my local university and whose taste I very much respect, about how let down I was with the very over-hyped House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.

He, gratifyingly, agreed with me, and recommended that I check out Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, as he felt it did much of the same things that House was doing, but more successfully.

I just recently finished Oryx and Crake, and I’ve got to say, the only thing I can find that the two have in common is their very similar narrators: they’re both dudes, and both my least favorite thing about those respective books. The narrator reduces House of Leaves from “precious,” as said professor relation derisively called it, to utterly insufferable. And it serves as a major black mark on Oryx and Crake, a book that is otherwise not without merit.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with an unsympathetic protagonist in a work of fiction, so long as the work acknowledges that the protagonist is unsympathetic. But there’s a weird “boys will boys” mentality to how House’s Johnny and O&C’s Jimmy (note the similar names) are portrayed which is surprising coming from the famously feminist-leaning Atwood (less surprising from Danielweski, who unironically wears fedoras in public for God’s sake). These narrators aren’t Humbert Humbert, who we’re supposed to find gross and off-putting. They’re just everyday dudes.

Johnny and Jimmy are both exhaustingly introspective and angsty Holden Caulfield types (though Holden has the excuse of being a teenager; these are both grown-ass men) whose defining traits are their active libidos, casual substance abuse, and rampant objectification of every woman in their lives. They cheerfully live in squalor, practice absolutely no self care or personal hygiene, and spend most of their time drunk or high off their rockers. Every female character in their lives (and thus practically every female character in each novel) is simply another sexual conquest in the making.

And none of this is presented as particularly negative; both texts seem to suggest that this is just how dudes are, no judgement, they can’t help it, dudes are losers. Boys will be boys. In fact a lot of their misbehavior is hand-wavingly chalked-up to both characters’ absentee mothers.

In O&C, when teenage Jimmy and his friend Crake spend much of their time watching child pornography together online, the book levels all of its criticism at the media platform that gives these young men access to this content, placing zero responsibility on them for seeking it out and consuming it in the first place. Boys will be boys. We can’t blame them for getting off to little slave girls being sexually abused by grown men, its the internet’s fault for putting it there in the first place. Jimmy and Crake are the victims here (one of these child sex slaves is the primary object of Jimmy’s lust throughout the novel, and as an adult she repeatedly and distressingly goes out of her way to downplay her own trauma and play up the bright sides of her situation).

The only women in Johnny of House’s life are his frequent sexual partners, all of whom exist for no other reason than to be Johnny’s sexual partners, and who receive little characterization outside of this role. And Johnny has a LOT of sexual partners. One of the most eyeroll-inducing elements of Johnny and Jimmy’s characterizations is their improbably active sex lives. Despite their general grubbiness and the repeated mentions that they are unattractive and lack much in the way of redeeming qualities, these dudes are effortlessly able to hook up with every single woman they happen to bump into throughout the story (is there some wish fulfillment here on Danielewski’s part?). Again, the way these men use women as sex objects and then treat them as subsequently disposable is barely commented on with any qualitative judgement. That’s just how dudes are. Boys will be boys.

All of these negative traits seem to be put in place for the primary purpose of making Jimmy and Johnny into relatable everyman types to serve as reader self-inserts and juxtapose against the larger-than-life situations around them. They’re classical Ishmaels, but icky. Who out there is reading these books and finding these men relatable? I don’t want to meet you I don’t think. And what does it say about the authors that they think these characters are an adequate representative of the average human being? Call me naive, but I think most people are better than that.

When reading these books, quite apart from helping pull me into these respective worlds, these narrators just serve as constant barriers preventing me from immersing myself in the text and enjoying any of the more interesting worldbuilding going on outside the POVs of these “heroes.”

Avoiding accidentally creating male heroes like these is one of the primary reasons that most of my writing tends to be from a female POV.

#house of leaves #oryx and crake #mark z. danielewski #margaret atwood #writing #tropes #cliches #dudes #boys will be boys

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