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mprjanedoe · 4 years

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Hi there folks. I really did not intend to make this blog a regular update situation. I intended for the information to be out there for those to read and that really be the end of it. But a number of noteworthy things have happened and I feel they are worth talking about.

Please repost this if you see this.

Nothing in this post is legal advice directed to anyone or from anyone. I am not a lawyer. I know lawyers, I have spoken with lawyers, I am reading what lawyers have to say – but this is not legal advice.

I am here expressing my opinion on this situation and how it has been handled.

At no point in talking about this, in any correspondence on this blog, my twitter, or my Instagram, has my intent been malicious. I am not talking about all of this with the intention of saying any of it to harm Michael, or any members of Steam Powered Giraffe. And I would venture to say that Bunny and David, when they’ve spoken about what Michael’s done, also had no intention of harming Michael by speaking about this. It is a pervasive and toxic myth that the vast majority of people who would ever speak out about abuse have something to gain from doing so. I have absolutely nothing to gain from this. Even in my personal life – non-anonymously, I have nothing to gain from this. I am putting myself at risk of retaliation in various forms. I am doing this because I care about the people Michael harmed, myself included – and they all, we all, deserve the respect and dignity of people knowing what happened in our path to healing and recovery from the lasting harm caused by Michael.

I was informed by multiple people, publicly, and privately/anonymously that Michael has threatened legal action against Steam Powered Giraffe LLC and has used the word “libel” to describe what legal action he may choose to take. This is likely the reason Bunny chose to delete her tweets about Michael. I have been asked to remove the public conversation around this. I am not going to do so. The person who publicly mentioned this to me deserves no negative attention for doing so. The access fans and supporters get to SPG when becoming patrons is merely a paywall.

So let’s talk about Michael’s response, and let’s talk about libel. Libel is the legal term for written defamation of character. The legal definition of defamation is as such: “Generally, defamation is a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone's reputation, and published "with fault," meaning as a result of negligence or malice. Libel is a written defamation.”

Steam Powered Giraffe has mentioned on public posts on Patreon that Michael has “denied everything”. Steam Powered Giraffe has mentioned on public posts on Patreon, verbatim: “The evidence is far from unfounded. It's all damning and there is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The evidence is overwhelming.” (sic)

I do not know who all has reached out to Steam Powered Giraffe’s members and what they have all come forward with about what Michael has done. I only know what I have experienced, what I have personally witnessed (in person, and online/over the phone), and what I have been told (and shown, in photos, texts, chatlogs, etc) from other victims. I have no reason to believe Steam Powered Giraffe is hyperbolizing, exaggerating, or making anything up about the situation. I also have made no hyperbole or exaggeration. To my knowledge, there is a significant amount of evidence and a significant number of victims to prove that Michael has caused the harm that has been spoken about. There is no indication that Steam Powered Giraffe has posted anything that is not true about him in this situation. That in and of itself, nullifies the idea that there is libel occurring.

In addition to this – as I said earlier, I have nothing to gain from this. I am at risk of more harm in this. Steam Powered Giraffe as an entity also has nothing to gain from this. From what they’ve said, it appears they have not been working with Michael for a while, and while I imagine some sort of legal residual financial situation for royalties will have to remain in place, what I cannot imagine is that Steam Powered Giraffe is paying Michael so much in royalties that they would lie or seek to tarnish his image just to find a way not to pay him. Steam Powered Giraffe is also at risk for talking about him, and it is a financial risk to put their reputation on the line for being associated with him for a number of years to talk about this.

In my opinion, Michael’s threat is at best, an empty one, and at worst, a foolish one. Legal action of any kind is expensive. From what I’ve read, a libel/defamation lawsuit can cost on average $15,000, over a process of at the least $1,000 a month to pursue. Not to mention Michael is not in the US anymore, and we’re in the middle of a pandemic where legal cases are not as easy to just initiate and process. In addition to this, much of what Michael has done, that I can personally state I know there is proof of, was and is illegal. Statutory rape, possession and distribution of illegal drugs, providing alcohol to minors – all of these things were and are illegal. To initiate a process where Steam Powered Giraffe would be in a position to present the burden of proof of what he’s done, would be a significant risk to “open up a can of worms”, so to speak. It would not be in Michael’s best interest financially or personally to pursue legal action against Steam Powered Giraffe LLC or anyone talking about the things he has done.

It is not uncommon for perpetrators of abuse to threaten legal action in an attempt to silence victims and those who would bring their actions to light. In the case of directly attempting to silence victims, there are laws called Anti SLAPP laws. SLAPP stands for “A strategic lawsuit against public participation is a lawsuit intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. In the typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. “ These laws and these types of lawsuits typically are talking about domestic violence cases wherein an abusive spouse threatens legal action to try to prevent a victim from seeking help and talking about the abuse they’ve experienced or are experiencing. This does not apply directly here, but it is an indicator that these behaviors from abusive people are not necessarily a rare occurrence.

I have some grievances about how Steam Powered Giraffe – namely David and Bunny, are handling this situation. Is it reasonable for the Bennetts to make sure to cover their brand and their *assets*? Absolutely. But not everything is black and white. I believe that not enough is being done by David and Bunny to appropriately make it known the harm Michael has caused. This is a morality issue, and I know not everyone has the same morals as I do, but I would hope with the things David and Bunny appear to stand for, that they would care more about Michael’s victims than Michael’s threats or the potential at Steam Powered Giraffe being looked at negatively by being associated with Michael. Here’s the thing – Michael’s harm cannot be divorced from his associated with Steam Powered Giraffe, and Steam Powered Giraffe handling this appropriate and respectfully would make people who care about things like this respect and admire SPG more. Currently, it feels as though SPG is more committed to doing the absolute bare minimum and focusing the rest of their attention on protecting themselves from a perceived threat as opposed to caring about the severity of the situation and doing their part to help the victims.

David said, in a tweet on July 3rd: (I have not checked to see if this tweet is still up) “I’d trade everything with Steam Powered. Giraffe if it meant I could go back in time and stop Mike from joining the band in 2009, so he might not hurt anyone”

David said on a tweet on June 30th “I feel sick having hired him for gigs in 2017, knowing this all now” and in another tweet “To know what he was actually doing sickens me”

Bunny has also stated a number of emotional and remorseful things which have mostly since been deleted:

She stated that she “almost couldn’t” love him anymore (in the past) because of “the sheer panic attacks” she got “around him and fans”

She said “I know the band wasn’t harboring an abuser knowingly or anything like that, but it’s hard not to feel like I was. I will be asking myself that for. The rest of my life. I should’ve said something. I should of stood my ground. We had nothing to go off of except an irate fan and a girl who didn’t want to press charges or do anything about it”

Bunny also said – presumably on behalf of SPG as a whole: “We’re talking, we’re listening, and we’re horrified at the accusations against Mike”

She also said “I can’t express my disgust. I can’t express the rage and hurt I have inside of me boiling up” and “I will fucking tear down this band and burn it to the ground if that gets the fucking bile out of my mouth” and “I’m watching this bastion of hope we created be sordid by someone we let in… gave the benefit of doubt to… MULTIPLE TIMES. I don’t know if SPF will ever be the same for me – every guitar lick… every phat beat he wrote. Tainted.”

David said in a tweet “We stand with the victims who have come forward to us privately, publicly, and those that haven’t.”

Bunny said “This is something that will haunt for years. I’m personally energized to spend the remainder of my life contrary to what Mike and people like Mike do. When the world heals and touring begins again, know that if you take advantage of our audience, we will be there with other performers like us to hold you accountable. And our audience. And your audience.”

On July 12th, Bunny said “The best part of this is that Steve and Mike get away scot free. They don’t get their comeuppance. I dunno if “vengeance” is the way to live life, but I know for a fact the next decade is going to be spent finding my own happiness in truth and loyalty.” “Mike has denied it all, even in the fact of damning evidence. We gave him the benefit of doubt too, and we contacted his family. No regrets, no justice in the slightest. And there are still people singing his praises”. She goes on: “Trying to describe my feelings on Steve and Mike’s behavior and how for years I’ve defended them… all the while being lied to is… heartbreaking to say the least. I know things are confusing, but you can’t make this shit up”

On the specifics of Michael’s behavior: “Mike’s stuff is so much worse. I was afraid Mike’s underage grooming habits would be somehow lessened or forgotten in the wake of Steve’s behavior back in the day… which while deplorable, have at least been owned up to.” “Stringing together tweets is the worst way to address all this, but I suppose a video about it or something down the line is called for. Right now I’m far too upset and rattled to reflect on it all. I don’t know how SPG will be salvaged from all this”.

Why am I repeating all of this? I want it to be cleared that David and Bunny expressed remorse, disgust, regret, anger, grief, shame in all of this. I see that. I acknowledge that. And in seeing these statements, I trusted them to handle this in the best way they could manage. But it also needs to be acknowledged that there has been a harmful failure on their part in how they’ve responded beyond these tweets. I am not the expert on how best to handle horrible situations like this, but as both a victim and an ally to other victims and a person who has been a fan of SPG before, I think I know enough to say that not enough has been done, and inaction in and of itself causes harm as well.

I’d also like to address the unfortunate situation that David and Bunny maintain they had no prior knowledge of Michael’s behavior. Here’s the thing: while I 100% believe they did not know all of the details of all of the harm Michael caused, there were definitive patterns and red flags and there needs to be actual accountability around this. Bunny said that the band gave Michael the benefit of doubt multiple times. She also said that Michael was caught and reprimanded for kissing a teenage fan in 2011. If my math is correct, at the time Michael would’ve been 25 and the fan was 17. That’s nearly a decade of difference, despite the fan being almost 18. On top of this, this was a fan and a minor and not only is there a power dynamic at play with age but also setting and influence. Bunny also mentioned Michael had been reprimanded for being “too friendly” around fans as young as 14. As an adult in my 20s, if I had a peer and friend my age who had a pattern of getting friendly with teenagers and minors of any age, that would be a huge red flag. Let ALONE a bandmate, a coworker or sorts – or technically a contractor level employee. I would see anyone like that as a liability I could not take the risk of associating with, and as a likely dangerous man to be around. That was an entire decade ago, and nothing was done beyond a slap of the wrist. On top of this, as someone who was Michael’s friend, I went to multiple Steam Powered Giraffe shows to support him. I also was apart of online fan communities as well. I saw how visible he was with his predatory “friendliness” towards young fans, and I saw fans gossip about his friends and give them a sort of adjacent celebrity status as well. While I was young and being manipulated myself and not in a position to prevent harm – I am saying this to state that I witnessed the public visibility of Michael’s predatory behavior. I take issue with the claim that there were no signs and that no one could’ve prevented this sooner. I’ve seen some fans say that Michael would’ve “always been this way” and found ways to harm other people had he not been in Steam Powered Giraffe. While this could be true, it cannot be denied that being apart of a successful band like Steam Powered Giraffe that gained a cult status online and in the local scene and had a significant YEARS of DAILY exposure in a family setting to minors, cultivating a fandom of a significant amount of younger fans, giving Michael the upper hand of minor celebrity and influence, travel, etc, cannot be divorced from this situation. This is not inherently Bunny or David’s fault. But it is a factor in the breadth of harm Michael was able to do, and it is a factor in knowing there were opportunities for him to have had the resources he gained and used to cause harm pulled from him much sooner than now, when he has already removed himself from the band as it stands.

The past is the past. It cannot be changed. As David and Bunny both lamented that they’d go back and stop things if they could’ve, well yes, to a degree, there were opportunities to prevent further harm, but it’s too late now. Now is the time to make things right, and to prevent the potential for further harm.

Currently – there is absolutely not enough publicly visible and available information on the harm Michael has caused on Steam Powered Giraffe’s social media presence. This is made worse by the fact that consistent promo and every day band stuff creates a wider and wider gap between the leftover posts about Michael’s abuse on Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon. It is now becoming a game of chance whether a fan of Steam Powered Giraffe will know what Michael has done. I have seen numerous posts and tweets from fans asking what happened, saying they are confused and in the dark. It has been less than 3 weeks since Bunny first tweeted about this, and it cannot fade to memory.

It is unfair and grotesque for fans of all ages, including children and parents of children, to unknowingly hold Michael dear in their hearts as an admirable, safe, kindhearted person – without knowing what he has done. It is unfair to not let people decide for themselves whether they still look up to him, whether they still admire him, whether they still support him. Michael’s victims cannot safely have a platform to speak openly about his violence without harming themselves by being exposed to backlash and being triggered by repeated exposure to their traumas out in the open. However, Michael’s victims deserve to have their voices heard, their grievances aired, and deserve to get some slight respite after years of abuse at least knowing that what they suffered is no longer a secret and people are not *unknowingly* offering praise and fame to someone who has done such disgusting and lastingly harmful things.

Bunny expressed that Steve and Michael got off “scot free” and that there was “no justice”. I am not advocating that SPG or myself or any of Michael’s victims be the ones to make any attempt at giving Michael consequences for his actions or enacting justice. However, Bunny and David can do things to make the burden of harm lighter.

Here is what I believe can and should be done, at the least, to do the right thing in this situation:

-SPG needs to make public statement(s) about Michael’s harmful actions on ALL public social media. Not just Patreon and not just the statements that have already been made. These statements should not be deleted.

-Michael’s likeness should be removed from all SPG’s media, within the realm of whatever royalties or residual contractual obligations will allow

-SPG should take a moratorium on normal fandom posts: promotion posts, art prompts, casual band updates on band specific pages. Every promo post, every art prompt, every band announcement will detract further and bury the information if not given the space and respect to allow the information to be seen and processed. The moratorium should at the very least last a week, if not more.

-I and Michael’s victims that I know would appreciate the original statement of harm reposted on Steam Powered Giraffe’s social media. I remind David and Bunny that doing so does not make them legally liable for MY statement, and some fans who have read this statement have also directly encouraged SPG to repost. David and Bunny’s words cannot properly convey the direct harm caused to Michael’s victims. The victims deserve to be heard directly. Using Steam Powered Giraffe’s platform to make this known, the same platform that helped enable Michael to cause harm, is a respectful course of action.

-I also encourage David and Bunny to reflect on their role in allowing Michael to “get away scot free” in this. I have no specifics of personal accountability to ask of them, but I do encourage them to not focus on guilt or shame that cannot be fixed, but to really process this and do what they can to learn and grow from this and not allow the chance of letting harm occur again.

I know this was an extremely long post, and if you stuck through it all, thank you.

I hope that actions are taken in the right direction, and I hope I will have less commentary to offer on the situation in the future so I can focus on healing.

#steam powered giraffe #steam powered giraffe fan #steampunk #spg fan #spg #michael philip reed #mprjanedoe #mpr #merker #michael reed #mike reed #make believe #david michael bennett #david bennett #isabella bunny bennett #bunny bennett #steve negrete

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gra-sonas · 4 years

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Alex Manes - an essay

Alright, my inbox is bursting with asks, and I’ll get to them (tomorrow, it’s almost midnight D: ), but I’ve been thinking about this all day while trying to work (had to get up and angrily pace my flat several times), and I had to write it all down to get it off my chest. (Also, I’m sorry, but once again Tumblr won’t let me add a Read More, after two attempts at creating new posts with a Read More, I’m giving up 🙈)

As viewers, we’ve been introduced to two different versions of Alex.

Alex at 17

wears mostly black

puts on nail polish, eyeliner and jewellery, including a stud earring and a septum piercing

loves skateboarding

plays the guitar

works at the UFO Emporium

his mom, a Native American woman from a New Mexican tribe left the family when he was younger

has 3 brothers, presumably they’re all older than Alex

Alex at 27/28

a soldier, he’s been in the Air Force for a decade

a decorated purple heart airman with three deployments under his belt

an amputee, he lost part of his right leg in an attack in Iraq, sometimes uses a crutch

a codebreaker who's hacked into Russian and Chinese intelligence

a man who still dips fries into his milkshake

the nail polish, spiky hair, piercings and jewellery are gone

Alex wears fatigues occasionally, his civil clothes are mostly neutral colored shirts/jeans (until The Leather Jacket™ in 1x13)

we don’t know whether he still plays the guitar

his brothers are also all military, Flint (~2 years older than Alex) is a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant with the US Army

Quotes from/about Alex’s youth (incl. Jesse’s abuse)

1x01, Alex: "We're not kids anymore. What I want doesn't matter.“

✧→ 17 year old Alex hoped to escape his father one day, he dreamt of making music. His hopes were shattered that day in the toolshed, and Alex hasn’t allowed himself to go for what he wants since then - including Michael.

1x02, Alex: “Made me think about... I don't know, who I was when this started. Before I went to war.”

1x05, Kyle: “Do you remember that night your dad made us set up that tent to teach us extreme weather survival?” Alex: “Yeah. Your dad had driven home for the night, so mine concocted a brand-new form of kiddie torture.”

1x05, Alex: “My dad was a homophobic, abusive dick."

1x05: Alex: “The dad I got was a monster. Is a monster.” Kyle: “Because he sent you off to war?” Alex: “My father was my war. And your dad saw it, when we were kids. Do you remember the summer - that we built the tree house?” Kyle: “Yeah.” Alex: “That's the summer that my dad found out I was gay. He knew before I did. He thought he could beat it out of me. Jim tried to intervene. But you can't make someone stop hating someone. And my dad hated me.”

✧→ Alex is talking about his father/childhood matter-of-factly, but the language he’s using to describe his childhood allows a glimpse at the hell he went through: torture (through extreme survival trainings), homophobic abuse, his dad is a monster, sent him to war, for years tried beating the gay out of Alex, Jesse hates him. This is not just a homophobic remark his dad made at the dinner table, this informs us about years of violence and abuse Alex endured at the hands of his father.

1x06, Alex: “Things at my house suck.“

✧→ Many teenagers will probably say this at some point while growing up, this isn’t about Alex being upset about a curfew, or having to do his homework tho. This is as much as Alex will disclose about the ongoing abuse.

1x06: Alex: “Dad, this has nothing to do with you.“ Jesse: “Everything you do... everything. And I will not be humiliated.“

✧→ This is Alex, terrified of what his dad might do. And he knows that Jesse will do something (he’s already picked up the hammer). Alex expects violence, because that’s what his dad has done to him numerous times. 😔

1x07, Mimi: "You look like your dad today." Alex: "Oh, good. I was hoping that the rage face might skip a generation."

1x08, Alex: “I've been looking for leverage my entire life.“

✧→ “My entire life”, a clear indication that having Jesse as a dad’s never been a walk in the park, Alex just got the special ‘anti gay’ treatment as a bonus when he got older.

1x08, Alex: “When I was...- I wanted to make music. You sent me to war.“

✧→ Alex at 17 wanted to make music, and although he never says it, I think it’s implied that he never planned to join the military. Jesse didn’t give him a choice though, he made Alex enlist, probably threatening him with what he’d do to Michael if Alex didn’t do as he was told.

1x08, Alex: "Why are you trying to frame Michael? Haven't you done enough to him?"

1x08, Alex: "Do not talk to me about unprovoked violence!"

1x09, Michael: "And what do you want to say, Alex?” Alex: That I loved you. And I think that you loved me. For a long time.” Michael: “Yeah.” Alex: "But we didn't even know each other that well, did we? I mean, we just, we-we connected, - like something… -“ Michael: “Cosmic.” Alex: "Yeah, but we didn't even do that much talking."

1x10, Alex: "My dad is a bigot with no moral compass."

1x12, Flint (to Alex): "You ever get tired of being the black sheep of the family?"

1x13, Alex: "Look... I shouldn't have left you behind when I enlisted. I could... I could stand here and tell you that I didn't want to leave, but I did. After what my dad did to you, I just, I... I wanted to be the kind of person who won battles. But now I-I look in the mirror, and I-I don't even see myself sometimes. I see my father. I'm still fighting his battles. Not mine."

✧→ It’s kinda implied that Alex never wanted to enlist, but once Jesse forced him to do it, he tried to make the most of it. He wanted to be the kind of person who won battles. He was also looking for leverage, something he could use to take his dad down.

✧→ Alex at 17 wanted to get out, he wanted to make music and live life his way. Since Jesse was going to beat him for being gay anyway, he’d at least wear what he wanted, put on make up, and wear jewellery. Jesse hadn’t manage to break Alex.

✧→ The shed incident changed everything, because someone else got hurt. And from Alex’s POV it was because of Alex. Because he’d been selfish. He’d wanted Michael. And because of that Michael got injured.

Now that we’ve established the basics, onto Carina’s statement.

“Alex was too ashamed of Michael (not of being gay, which Maria knew, but of michael specifically) to name him to Maria for 10 years - until he saw Maria as a threat.” [x]

✧→ At 17, we saw how much Alex cared about Michael, that he wanted him safe and warm bc nights twere too cold to sleep in the car. That’s why Alex offered Michael to stay in the shed. He liked Michael, and he wanted to spend time with him. He even brought Michael a guitar bc he thought Michael would like to play. None of Alex’s behavior gives any indication that he was ashamed of Michael before the shed incident.

✧→ 17 year old Alex was afraid of his father, no surprise after years of abuse, but he also seemed confident, defiant even, believing he could handle it for a little bit longer until he’d finished high school and would finally be able to leave to make music. Despite living under Jesse’s roof, he dressed in all black, openly wore make up, nail polish, and jewellery/piercings, refusing to be another picture perfect son of his military father. We didn’t see it on screen, but given Jesse’s homophobic views, Alex’s behavior very likely caused his father to punish him in some way for it.

✧→ Then Michael kissed Alex at the UFO Emporium, Alex kissed back, one thing lead to another and they ended up at the shed where they had sex for the first time. It was Michael’s first time with a guy, we don’t know whether it was Alex’s first time tho. Alex still didn’t show any signs of being ashamed of Michael.

They were SO in love and happy in that moment. 🥺

✧→ When Jesse and the hammer happened, and it changed everything. Up until that moment, Alex had been used to his father’s abuse, he’d been strong enough, he’d been convinced he could take it, but this time someone else got badly hurt, and I think that broke something in Alex.

✧→ We never saw how things played out for Alex after Michael left the shed, all we know is that Jesse made Alex enlist. And given Jesse’s preference for blackmailing (he blackmailed Jenna, and Alex asked Flint what Jesse had on him) it’s probably fair to assume that Jesse threatened to go after Michael should Alex not do as he says.

Alex didn’t tell Maria for a decade because he was ashamed of Michael (at 17)?

Say what now???

There are several good reasons why Alex wouldn’t have told her, but shame isn’t one of them... I’m sure Alex thought of Maria as a trustworthy friend back then, but the most important reason why he wouldn’t reveal who ‘museum guy’ was would be the one the straight showrunner of the show’s apparently not aware of:

Alex would’ve outed Michael (without Michael’s consent I’d like to add) to Maria by telling her who it was. As a gay kid in 2008, I’m sure Alex was very well aware of LGBTQ etiquette, and the first rule of queer club is, you don’t out a fellow queer. And guess who’d just experience a brutal attack because he’s queer? Why would Alex ever consider outing Michael and potentially putting him at risk???

The outing reason alone would be enough to explain why Alex never told her who it was. And in 1x10 he didn’t outright out Michael either, Maria realized it was Guerin and Alex reluctantly confirmed (there was no way for him to plausibly deny it).

1x10, Alex: “It is just a standard, run-of-the-mill boy problem. Oh, come on. Don't give me psychic face, Maria.” Maria: “It's the guy from the museum, the one that kissed you into crazy stupid love when we were kids. He's back?” Alex: “Wha... How-how do you do that?” Maria: “You're just... I feel it, you're-you're hopeful, like you were before. Who is he? Come on, spill it. I've been waiting ten years for this. - Come on.” Alex: “You... you wouldn't believe it.” Maria: “It's not like you're hooking up with Wyatt Long or Michael Guerin or something. Geez. Please tell me you're in love with Wyatt Long. Wow.” Alex: “Michael's not so bad after a shower. But you know that.” Maria: “I had no idea...” Alex: “I know. I mean, how would you?” Maria: “It meant nothing, Alex. Seriously, I swear, it was just a drunk, dusty, no-good Texas rounder."

Another reason why Alex wouldn’t necessarily have told Maria: Alex was traumatized by what happened at the shed. This wasn’t just the ‘normal’ kind of abuse he endured on the regular (which is a boatload of trauma all of its own), someone else had been hurt, someone Alex liked, and because Alex liked him. On top of that Jesse likely threatened him. There’s no way Alex wasn’t scared and deeply traumatized. It’s fairly common that victims of abuse don’t tell anyone about it, out of fear even more bad things could happen, there’s surely also a lot of shame and self-blaming involved.

Alex also knew that Michael was homeless, and probably not yet of age. Jesse could’ve threatened Alex to put Michael back into the system or whatnot.

Absolutely NOTHING we’ve seen on screen suggests that Alex was ashamed of Michael when they were 17. Alex joined the military afterwards, and was away for a decade. Not many opportunities to talk about it to Maria, but again, the first reason (outing Michael) is a perfectly valid reason not to tell her for an entire decade. And this being a major trauma, Alex probably didn’t feel like opening that box again after such a long time.

And wow, claiming that Alex waited to tell Maria (which isn’t exactly what happened) because she felt threatened by her? Sure, Alex just waited for the right moment. 🙄

Is Alex ashamed of Michael at 27/28?

In 1x03 it seems like Alex let’s his father’s words get to him. “Seems to me the only one you're embarrassing is yourself, son.“ I’ve always interpreted this as a thinly veiled threat tho, and Alex, on instinct, immediately put distance between himself and Michael. Because before he talked to his father? Alex was perfectly happy to be seen with Michael, if he'd been ashamed, as Carina claims, he wouldn’t have approached Michael in public in the first place.

This is also how I read the scene in 1x02: “What happened at the reunion cannot happen again.“ In the pilot, Jesse had been part of the group of soldiers poking around Michael’s Airstream, and Alex saw the way his father looked at them talking. Then they kissed at the reunion, and I’m sure it felt so good and like coming home, but the fear of what Jesse could do if he found out was back the next morning, and Alex once more tried to put distance between himself and Michael to keep Michael save.

This is not an excuse for Alex pushing Michael away, not an excuse for Alex to call him a criminal either. That is absolutely shitty behavior and not okay. I just don’t buy this ‘Alex is ashamed of Michael’ shtick.

Friendly reminder that Maria did not only tell Alex in 1x10 “It meant nothing, Alex. Seriously, I swear, it was just a drunk, dusty, no-good Texas rounder.", here’s what she said in her next scene with Guerin:

1x10, Maria: “We're closed. - You found my necklace.” Michael: “Clasp broke. I fixed it. I think it calls for a celebration. And by celebration, I mean booze, preferably the free kind.” Maria: “Alex is one of my best friends.” Michael: “Congrats.” Maria: “I never would have slept with you if I knew you two had history. It can't happen again.”

So in 1x10 Maria

learned Michael is 'museum guy’

realized that Alex is in love with Michael (still), and hopeful

swore to Alex it was a one time thing and that it meant nothing

told Michael that Alex is one of her best friends (and you don’t go after your best friends’ love interests)

she would’ve never slept with Michael had she known

she also says it can’t happen again

And yet Carina’s surprised why many few fans don’t understand

what made Maria ignore Liz’s advice to talk to Alex (which would’ve been the fair thing to do, no one’s mad at Maria for catching feelings, it’s that she acted on them without talking to Alex first what upsets and angers people)

why Maria invited Michael to kiss her just 3 episodes later

why she’s still chasing after Michael 2 weeks later without having talked to Alex

she’ll continue to go after Michael but still won’t talk to Alex

and therefore some are having a hard time not to dislike Maria to some degree? Okay...

Either way, imo Alex was definitely not ashamed of Michael at 17, and I don’t see much evidence of him being ashamed of Michael at 27/28.

Apart from that, shame is for sure NOT the reason why Alex never told Maria.

Alright, this got LONG, but it I had to write it all down. I think I provided facts in the form of dialogue quotes. In addition, I’m sharing my interpretation of these facts.

I don’t claim that I’m right, I don’t claim that I know more than Carina (who seems to have forgotten some things she herself wrote tho), none of that. This is my interpretation of what happened, based on what we saw on screen, what’s been said by the characters, and what we know about the different characters involved.

I also don’t claim that Alex didn’t do anything wrong, that he’s a saint, or whatnot. But I strongly disagree with the notion that by not telling Maria Alex is somehow to blame for her going after Michael.

#alex manes #malex #michael guerin #long post is long #my apologies for the missing read more #i tried but tumblr wouldn't let me #🙈#rnm opinions #the alex essay

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thankskenpenders · 5 years

Photo

Yeah, this is the big one. Grab your popcorn

Sally finally gets a moment to talk to Sonic after being ignored all day, and tells him what’s up. With her being put in charge, and Sonic being her royal consort (basically, the guy who’s committed to marrying her someday but isn’t quite her fiance yet), Sally wants Sonic to stop going on away missions and lead Knothole by her side

Look. Let’s set aside all of our preconceived notions about what a Sonic comic should or shouldn’t be. Ignore the fact that we obviously want to see Sonic go on adventures. Forget it. Let’s look at it from Sally’s perspective for a second

Yes, this is the post in which I explain that “The Slap” isn’t that bad. It’s certainly not great, but it’s not The Worst Thing Ever like it’s been made out to be. I wish I didn’t have to spend my evening writing this, but 15 years of hyperbolic fan outrage (note: some Wikia rando added that “reception” section this year) have forced my hand

First of all, again, Sonic is formally committed to marrying her and ruling alongside her someday. This was established ten issues ago. He was already committed to this. Then, Sonic went and died. Sally still spent an entire year of her life thinking her basically-fiance was dead, and had to deal with shit in Knothole without him as things continued to get worse and worse. No one can just bounce back from that unscathed. After his return, she WANTED to help Sonic and go be a Freedom Fighter on the last mission, but her parents forbade her and the royal guards kept her in the castle. (That SUCKS, but is a whole ‘nother conversation.) She wants to fight by his side and keep him safe, but her parents are forcing her to stay home and be the princess, which only makes her more distraught. Last issue, she broke down into tears when she saw Sonic get shot by M over Eggman’s video feed, and her mother had to console her and reassure her Sonic wasn’t dead

Sally very clearly has PTSD over Sonic’s “death” a year ago. She doesn’t want to lose him again. She’s outright said as much

And also... when she says Sonic isn’t the only hero around, she’s got a point?Sonic barely did anything in the last arc! Tails was the one who outsmarted ADAM. Shadow dealt with Eggman. Bunnie did most of the damage to M and took out an entire fucking aircraft carrier on her own. Knuckles, the Chaotix, Rouge, and Amy took out the robot horde. All Sonic did was land the final attack on M--which, honestly, someone else could’ve done. And he got his arm injured in the process

Add on to this all of the chaos of the last few days. Sally’s barely had a free moment to see Sonic since she found out he was alive. They nearly got nuked by Eggman. They’re being harangued by the paparazzi. It sucks. And hell, it goes back WAY further than this! She spent years as a kid trying to save her parents, and now all they do is belittle her. She found out she had a secret older brother, and then her parents decided he was the more important child. She went through all sorts of relationship drama. She nearly died a few times herself. And now, her parents have decided to leave her in charge of their whole kingdom at a time of war, while she’s still a mess from the trauma of losing Sonic. The idea Bollers had was apparently that Sally had been bottling up her issues for years (which she totally had been), and this was just the breaking point

I know Sonic’s desire to keep being a hero is understandable. I know he’s right. That’s all he really knows how to do, and he feels useless in times of peace. And obviously, we the readers want to see Sonic go on adventures. But Sally’s concerns are valid. We don’t have to agree with her plan to have Sonic rule by her side for her emotions to be understandable

Sally’s been on the verge of a breakdown for who knows how long. She should be mad at her parents, but they’ve worn her down to the point where she thinks she’s unable to confront them. (It would be very, very easy to make a case arguing that Sally’s parents are emotionally abusive. Max especially.) She thinks that Sonic is the one person who will listen to her and have her back. They’re betrothed, after all. This is literally what he signed up for. After trying to get his attention ALL DAY, she finally gets a chance to talk to him. But he wants other things in life, and refuses. In front of a crowd, no less

So she lashes out at Sonic and slaps him

Then they both start yelling at each other and crying. Sally asks Sonic if she’s more important to him than fighting Eggman, Sonic can’t answer, and Sally runs away in tears. For all intents and purposes, Sonic and Sally are now broken up. (For now.)

Should Sally be lashing out at Sonic? No. Could this scene be done better? Oh, absolutely. This is not the direction I would want Sally to go in as a character, and if you ARE gonna have them fight, this wasn’t written with the care required to make fans sympathize with both parties. The fact that we’ve seen everything from Sonic’s perspective with barely any insight into Sally’s certainly doesn’t help. But as the several lengthy paragraphs above explain, this does not come out of nowhere. It’s easy to find lots of fans online calling Sally all sorts of names (sometimes very misogynistic or ableist ones) because they think she just flipped out on Sonic out of nowhere. But she didn’t. Sally having some sort of breakdown had been foreshadowed for several issues, and the reasons why make sense. No, she shouldn’t have lashed out at Sonic, but this isn’t just her going “Oh no, my period! Let’s nuke England!” as so many have made it out to be. (And hell, the comics already had a lengthy history of treating Sally even worse than this, with Gallagher making her the nagging girlfriend who bickered with Sonic all the time and Penders sympathizing more with her shitty dad.)

Again, this was supposed to be a turning point in which Sally bottling up all this crap and carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders finally leads to her breaking. It’s a dramatic low point to build back up from. The problem is that Bollers left the series only a few issues later, and Penders and “Chacon” never did much with this. So in hindsight, many view this as her randomly snapping “for no reason,” because the followup stories that would have explored how she’d been bottling up her feelings were never actually written. But it’s not hard to figure out what’s supposed to be going on in her head if you actually go back and look at the preceding Sally scenes

For the most part, this is just run of the mill relationship drama for Archie Sonic. You see this kind of shit all the time in serialized media. Characters date, but the writers need to keep things ~spicy~, so they break up, see other people... then inevitably end up back together, and the process repeats ad nauseum. You ever watch Scrubs? You know how JD and Elliot are obviously love interests from episode one, but they had to do that will they/won’t they shit for years and have flings with other characters to keep up ratings? Yeah, it’s just that. For Sonic, there’s also the added pressure from Sega, who never allowed Sonic to be in any stable relationship for very long. Several writers have talked about how this limited what they could do with Sonic and Sally. Do I like that this cycle of drama is the norm? No. But after over 200 of these comics, I’m used to it

(And hell, at this point in the comics, they had literally just broken up Bunnie and Antoine, and Rouge was starting to get in the way of Knuckles and Julie-Su’s relationship. Between Julie-Su and Knuckles’ first kiss and them actually dating, Penders had Julie-Su get mad at Knuckles and go out with some random other guy. They do this shit all the time)

The worst you can really say about this scene is that Jon’s art is a little too goofy and undermines the drama a bit. In his own words from his website’s FAQ: “I’m sorry. Like I said, I was an overeager noob and I drew what I was given.” But really, he had been drawing these sorts of exaggerated, frantic expressions throughout the entire issue. Not just with Sally. Look at all the panels of Sonic wigging out in the previous pages. I still think his work is fantastic. If anything, it was a bad call on Archie’s part to give this somber scene to a brand new artist with a very exaggerated, silly art style. He just drew what was in the script

You know what really blows about this whole thing, though? Jon Gray is still, to this day, over 15 years later, getting harassed for drawing The Slap

That is so utterly ridiculous and shitty. People have made up all sorts of conspiracy theories about the slap, saying that Jon had some sort of “anti-Sally agenda” and that it wasn’t in the script. (This is completely false.) People are so stuck in the past and bent out of shape over this one panel in a pretty run-of-the-mill Archie Sonic issue that Jon has to block people who come into his Twitter mentions accusing him of “sabotaging” the series on a regular basis. Y’all, Jon’s a good guy, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated like that

And lord. There’s so much nastier shit within this series. Penders hooking a 15-year-old Sally up with a dude in his 20s (and later saying that he wanted her to lose his virginity to said dude). Gallagher making Barby Koala have a creepy crush on Tails. Penders rephrasing a poem about the Holocaust to be about hedgehogs. Penders having Sally rationalize her dad’s attempt at genocide. (I could go on and on with Penders, can you tell)

This whole thing is just, so blown out of proportion. It’s not a great scene, but it didn’t “ruin” Sally’s character. Neither Jon nor Bollers had some sort of “anti-Sally agenda.” They weren’t out to ruin your fucking ship. And for god’s sake, quit yelling at them about it. This was 15 years ago and all parties involved have moved on. It’s just more melodrama in a series that’s always 90% melodrama

It’s a single panel in a comic about Sonic the Hedgehog. Can we move on

#StH 134 #tkp post #the slap #hall of fame

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the-nado-hunter · 4 years

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JKR and Harry Potter

So I’m also one of the kids that grew up with Harry Potter, and it was very dear to me. Being a pretty lonely kid that was socially isolated for a very long time, it was a world I could escape to where I could imagine having friends, using magic, fighting evil... all the stuff you love as a kid. Many people started reading and writing because of that book series. The Harry Potter fandom has done some INCREDIBLE things, The Harry Potter Alliance is a group that gets fans into activism and stands with Trans lives and does great work for social activism, and are in no way affiliated with Warner Brothers or JKR as they are an independent 501c3 non profit... so if you still have some scrap of energy left for Harry Potter as a fandom, it may be worth seeing how you can get involved with them, or other organizations looking to protect trans lives. Turn that energy into action, because Joanne using her platform to validate TERFs and spread TERF ideology is dangerous, she’s empowered them to come out of the woodwork and be more nasty than ever... and is currently endangering trans lives.

So of course when JKR’s transphobic views came to the public eye my heart was broken, I was already disillusioned by her making Nagini... a snake acting as a pet/servant to Voldemort, an Asian woman and her retroactively claiming being a werewolf was an allegory for AIDS both of which have so many problems that go along with it I don’t even know WHERE to start. With that you could maybe be like “well I can just not see fantastic beasts so I don’t support that!” or “We can ignore any crap she’s adding that wasn’t in the original text” But now... not only that but with the context of how the author is as a person and her ideology... a lot of problems with the original books series that you could have maybe explained away or just been too ignorant to notice, are now glaringly obvious and questionable.

And it just gets worse and worse. Her new book about a man dressing as a woman to commit murders is baked in TERF propeganda, not to mention her pen name Robert Galbraith is the name of a notorious anti-LGBTQ+ man who who pioneered a range of practices that would later be known as conversion therapy. Now she’s claimed its a coincidence, and she didn’t know... but we ALL know Rowling has carefully chosen names and always seems to do extensive research behind the meaning of names, so her conveniently after expressing transphobic views just being like “oopsie!” Seems incredibly unlikely... but lets say somehow she didn’t know, she definitely knows now, she’s been informed, but she’s not going to change her pen name. She shrugged it off and just said “i was just oddly fascinated with the name”.

Now her experience with abuse is, horrible, No one should have to go through that. However, she’s used that, and pointed to that to try and justify her bigotry towards trans lives. She’s focused on the people who are: sending her death threats, which no one should do by the way, instead of the many many many trans people who tried, very kindly to explain to her why her words and actions were hurting them, not to mention many people in the trans community have dealt with abuse, and misgendering and the kind of actions and words she’s spouting can be potentially re-triggering, and once again... its empowered TERFs to harass and threaten trans people. So JKR whining about some people being mean online in response to her bigotry seriously lacks perspective.

So yes... it hurts to let something go that was a comfort and a way of coping for a long time... but Trans lives matter more to me right now.

I see some people struggling to let Harry Potter go, and try to pull a “death of the author” or “Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter”, Lindsay Ellis has a great impromptu video on why, in this situation pulling “Death of the Author is kind of impossible” . The short version is that because anything with the Harry Potter name on it that you buy sends more money to her... you can’t really continue to support Harry Potter without aligning yourself with her.

I see a lot of people, with the announcement of the open world Harry Potter game doing mental gymnastics to try and justify supporting the game when literally a day before they were screaming “Fuck JKR!”. Put. Your money. Where your mouth is. A video game is not more important than human lives.

Don’t get me wrong, this looks like the game I DREAMED of existing when I was a kid. And it pisses me off so much to not be able to having that coping mechanism. But once again. TRANS LIVES MATTER MORE TO ME THAN A VIDEO GAME OR MY OWN PERSONAL COMFORT.

Here’s some of the common arguments I hear and what’s wrong with them.

1. She’s wealthy anyway, supporting the game or not supporting the game won’t change anything. You can’t really buy anything that isn’t supporting something problematic

- Maybe not, but it’s the morals and principles of the thing. This isn’t like... being stuck in a situation because of late stage capitalism where “Well I need to eat even if the company selling me this is corrupt!” This game, these books, the park, the movies, the merchandise - they are a luxury . You don’t need them to survive, you’re well aware of how this women hurts people, and you have an active choice here. Continuing to invest in anything HP still puts a big message out there that you care more about a brand than Trans lives. 2. Think about the poor game developers of the Harry Potter game! - First of all, are you high??? The developers are going to make the same amount of money no matter how well the game does. Most of the money from people buying is going to go to corporate levels at Warner Brothers and JKR herself. If your in the camp of “well it would suck to work on something for so long only for it to go nowhere...” That’s just... how the game industry is. Developers know that and accept that on ANY project they work on. There are projects that get super close to release only to be cancelled at the last minute, there are SO many game projects that never make it to the public eye. But the devs are like “hey I get paid either way”. Again, stop making up stupid reasons to try and justify supporting a transphobe that is actively endangering trans lives.

---

Harry Potter was dear to me as a kid. Its hard to let go of something that got you through a lot, but think of all the trans folks that also grew up with that world that was so meaningful to them only to be told “this world isn’t for you and the author is actively supporting causes that harm you and using her large platform to spread propaganda because she knows she’ll be believed more than the lived experiences of trans people or medical science.” Can you even imagine what that would feel like??? Have some god damn empathy, and if you say you support trans lives. Actions speak louder than words EVER could.

As for me on a personal level, I can’t even look at anything fan related to Harry Potter without being infuriated. I see anything HP related, and I get pissed off. The love of it is gone for me. It’s been dead for almost two years now. The only way I could see ever returning to it is if one way or another the money from it no longer goes to Joanne, but that’s not going to happen for a long time, and even then, I’m not sure if I’d be able to come back to it.

Trans lives matter. And they matter more to me than any fantasy world or brand ever could. Period.

#long post #tw #transphobia #brief abuse mention #JKR #joanne rowling #Harry Potter #trans lives matter #rant

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gunnerpalace · 4 years

Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hierarchical dominance over mutualist networking within fandom

curative fandom over transformative fandom

genre over literary content

plot over characters

events over emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is when I finally get to my point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Asks

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humaudrey · 5 years

Text

TheThings is back on their bullshit

(WARNING: LONG RANT AHEAD!!!!)

Anyone know how to delete a YouTube video from someone else's channel (or just their entire channel all together) because...

This

Is SO

I don't even have the words!!!!

Once again, your girl watches one of their videos (several times unfortunately to really analyze this ish) so y'all don't have to and let me tell you, this one is 1,000,000x more infuriating than the one when they belittled Uma to lift Mal and make her better in comparison (link to my post on that here).

I've been recommended this video so many times since the trailers for D3 dropped and when I saw the title, I KNEW I was gonna hate it and low and behold, I DID!

So let's go over their "5 Signs on why Audrey is the real threat", shall we?

#1. Audrey's Outburst

So, their first piece of evidence as to why Audrey's the unfathomable dark force (their exact words) is because of the fact that Audrey yelled no as Ben proposed to Mal, "ruining their beautiful moment". They then explain that it would be "natural for Audrey to be jealous since she is Ben's ex-girlfriend", being perfect okay with the ugly "black, bitter, ex-girlfriend" trope that many have loved to stick onto her in their fanfics (I see y'all 👀), and then compares that moment to when Ben asked Mal to be his date for coronation in D1, stating that she didn't react so strongly before, so why now? EXCUSE ME?! Our girl left the Tourney Field crying that her BOYFRIEND had serenaded another girl with a love song, and not a single person ran after her. She had every reason to be upset then, too. Who's to even say why Audrey's saying no? It could be a terrible misdirect on the trailer's part. The theory that Audrey's possessed is swirling around everywhere, maybe it had already begun to take effect, which is why she's "acting so strangely". D3 hasn't even been released and they're already villainizing her. Figures.

They also use the typical argument that Audrey's into titles and she wants what Mal has, and that she didn't want Chad because he was merely a prince.

She doesn't want Chad because CHAD CHARMING IS A MANIPULATIVE TOOL! Ask Evie! Chad only thinks that being king would get Audrey's attention. You wanna talk about jealousy? Titles? If ant character is jealous of anyone's titles, it's Chad freaking Charming, not Audrey.

#2. The Crown

An obvious piece of evidence is the fact that "Audrey" steals the Queen's crown and Maleficent's scepter from the museum. Whatever, right? They assume that Audrey's faking her slumber when the sleeping spell hits, giving her an alibi. They then have the FREAKING AUDACITY to say that AUDREY, a non magical princess, who has been so anti-magic since D1 (with a grandmother who she loves dearly, that's triggered by the mention of said spells and curses), was the cause of the curse. Their evidence? Well, her family's VERY familiar with it, so it makes sense, right?

NO!!!!

Audrey has NO magic whatsoever!!! Did they forget that? The only reason her family is "so familiar" with the sleeping spell is because THEY ARE VICTIMS OF SAID SLEEPING SPELL!!!! And it's not like she could cast it, because, again, AUDREY HAS NO MAGIC!! If anyone is familiar with a sleeping spell, it's Mal. After all, she almost put Evie under just so she could grab her mother's specter from her.

How dare you take an Innocent family's trauma and turn it around to make them the bad guys?

#3. The Scepter

They continue to say that "Audrey" is to blame for the sleeping spell, rather than Celia, Hades, or Uma because "Audrey" has the specter. And immediately, they suggest that maybe Audrey's not working only. You wanna bet who they hinted Audrey was cooperating with?

If you guessed Uma, you'd be correct. All because Uma's seen laughing in her teaser. WHAT?! So, not only do you attempt to take Audrey's entire character and drag it through the mud, you take ANOTHER black girl's name that you've already tried to ruin and tarnish and say they're working together because they're BITTER?

If they're BITTER, it's ONLY BECAUSE YOUR WHITE, PLAIN, BARNEY COLORED DRAGON FAIRY PRIVILEGED PRINCESS PROSPECT FAVE had treated them HORRIBLY.

They end their third sign with the line "We knew Audrey was a mean girl, but we didn't think she'd stoop so low".

The meanest thing Audrey has ever done INTENTIONALLY, was 1.) Tell Evie that she and her family don't have a royal status in Auradon (to which, she is technically correct) and 2.) Tell Mal that she and Ben wouldn't last because she's "the bad girl infatuation".

Jane should be branded the mean girl because she turns on the one girl that helped her with her rise to popularity (which, granted, was for malicious INTENTIONS and caused EVEN MORE self esteem issues by degrading her).

MAL should be branded the mean girl, if anyone! She's:

Dumped rotten shrimp on her former best friend because she laughed at her

Forced a guy to throw a party since his mother was away, knowing that his abusive mother wouldn't be okay with it

Then locked a girl in a closet full of BEAR TRAPS at said party all because she wasn't invited to her birthday party when they were SIX YEARS OLD

Dumped lye on another former best friend's hair because she DIDN'T WANT TO BE COMPARED TO HER

Told another girl that all she had going for her was her personality, so she needed the wand to make herself pretty

ROOFIED HER SOON TO BE BOYFRIEND INTO DATING HER IN THE FIRST PLACE JUST TO GET A FRONT ROW SEAT AT HIS CORONATION SO SHE COULD STEAL THE WAND

AND TAKES SAID WAND FROM THE GIRL SHE EMOTIONALLY MANIPULATED EARLIER AND POINTS IT DIRECTLY AT AUDREY ALL BECAUSE SHE KNEW THAT MAL WASN'T GOOD FROM THE JUMP

Let's see a video ranking Mal's top five worst moments, huh? There's plenty of those to use for a freaking video.

#4. It's All About Mal (sounds like D3)

They start this point off with: "Audrey has beef with Mal".

AS SHE SHOULD!

They use the fact that Mal stole her boyfriend and her title and their families history with one another, so Audrey has this motivation to ACT OUT AGAINST HER ENTIRE COUNTRY? Not buying it! I won't buy it, especially since both parties seemed to have made amends at the end of D1 when Mal silently curtsies as a lame form of an apology that Audrey gracefully accepts anyway like the future Queen of Auroria would. Audrey's even seen bowing willingly at the end of Set It Off, and is even cheering and dancing with her friends as Mal and Ben share their moment under the fireworks, so clearly, Audrey's not broken up about it in the slightest.

They propose a theory that Audrey's absence in D2 is because she's planning her revenge in Sherwood Forest, and that she doesn't have car troubles because "Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather should be more than capable of handling it, so she's only calling Chad to help her plot her scheme.

Whatever they're smoking, I want it.

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather can't help Audrey with her car troubles because of the MAGIC BAN!! They needed Chad to help with her car.

And I HIGHLY DOUBT that Disney would plan something so carefully since the entire series is branded with plot holes and inconsistencies anyway, so... 🐸☕

#5. Face Off Time

Their final point states that Mal has to face off against the enemy and they use the first teaser of dragon-Mal blowing fire at "Audrey" on top of the castle, and the card at the end that says "betrayal", that Audrey has betrayed all of Auradon. And since Mal only turns into a dragon against SERIOUS ENEMIES LIKE UMA IN D2, Audrey has to be a REAL THREAT.

Thank God they're probably not making a D4, because if they continue this trend of WOC wronged by Mal as the villain, I'd be scared for Evie...

So, in their words, Audrey and Uma, two of the few black girls in the entire franchise who have every God given right not to like/trust Mal, are Mal's MOST SERIOUS rivals, as if Hades doesn't at ALL pose a threat to Auradon. No, Audrey is So mUcH MOre THreATEninG thAN ThE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD, SO SHE MUST BE STOPPED!!!

I see you, TheThings, and if I didn't despise your channel before, I hate it that much more now after enduring 5 minutes of hell with you guys.

AND, TO TOP IT ALL OFF THEY CLEARLY SHOW THEIR BIAS OF MAL OVER AUDREY!!

Like, just say you're racist and GO! Audrey's clearly influenced by some magical being, whether it be Hades (WHO WE SEE DOING SOME KIND OF MAGICAL RITUAL WITH HER AND HIS EMBER IN A TRAILER, BUT I GUESS THEY CHOSE TO IGNORE IT FOR SOME REASON 🐸☕), Dr. Facilier, Celia, or maybe even Maleficent. Your reasons for making Audrey the villain are pathetic, and I wish I could block a YouTube Channel so I would NEVER see another video from your channel ever again.

I'm so sick of how "mean" brown girls are treated in media AND fandoms. Why does Audrey get all of his libel while Mal gets away with EVERYTHING? Why are the Cheryl Blossoms, the Quinn Fabrays, the Kitty Wildes, and every other mean girl that Emma Roberts has ever played are so praised and are instant fan favorites while the Josie McCoys, the Santana Lopezes, and the Brees are seen as the bullies when, at the end of the day, they're both different sides of the same damn coin?

And if you don't see a problem with this, then, newsflash, you are the problem!

So, I end my rant with this:

And a short tag list containing: @amityravenclawelf and @coco-rena because I know these two are looking forward to this!

Have a wonderful day everyone!

And I apologize for the typos but I was HEATED!!

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simonjadis · 5 years

Note

I've always felt divided on shaming others for shipping "problematic ships." Don't get me wrong. I get the icky implications of Reylo but at the same time, well, I don't want to be that "No Fun Allowed" guy to teens and young adults who are just chilling. Sure, plenty of those shippers can be problematic (see how Finn is villainized unlike Kylo) but they don't speak for everyone.

That is super fair!

To be honest, I don’t really see Reylo as falling under the major “problematic” umbrellas. Imo, most Reylo shippers are thirsting after one or both parties, which is fine. My Star Wars OTP is Sheev/Vader. I don’t ship Reylo but it’s not a NOTP for me by any means. (I find Kylo and Snek disappointing as characters and as the only Dark Side representation in the series, but Kylo has nice hair and nicer tatas)

I remember seeing arguments after TFA came out where people equated Kylo’s (attempted!) mind-reading to sexual assault or to abuse. While it’s very fair to not want to ship someone with their abuser, I think that an enemy from the opposing faction is a very different concept, and that fantasy violence between enemies should not be misconstrued (remember the hubub about Mystique vs Apocalypse in 2016? That kind of sentiment is what made female superheroes relegated to having long-range energy powers and then passing out for decades. Let’s not go back to that).

I absolutely agree that it’s horrifying to see Finn, who has literally done nothing wrong, be villainized. It’s always a mistake to pretend that a rival ship is awful so that you can feel more secure about your own, but it’s extra bad when it’s the series’ first leading black character. That said, from my perception, I don’t think that those condemning Finn represent the majority of Reylos.

More generally, I think that what someone ships, in their imagination, only rarely reflects who they are as a person or their real-life values. It’s pretend.

While we’re right to judge books, films, shows, and games on things like representation, those pieces of media are not the same as fanfic, let alone smutfic. Fanworks are distinct in multiple ways.

Gonna get into this: cw for a reference to incest

For example, when Supernatural first launched, I watched the pilot live in 2005 (I am 1000 years old) and immediately shipped the only two actual characters, who both happened to be hot guys: Sam and Dean.

(Note: I don’t actually ship them anymore, but tbh I haven’t watched the show since Season 8 and even before that, I had grown to despise them both – one of the perils of writing a very long-running show with lots of personal drama is that characters do things that cannot be forgiven by some viewers. But that’s irrelevant.)

Only later would I learn that they were largely inspired and even named after Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, two bisexual main characters from On The Road who were lovers, and who were based upon real men who were also lovers. (Which goes into part of why Supernatural is fucked up – notably, Castiel was also inspired by Constantine; another case of a straight character based upon a bi character, and that’s without getting into the issues with race, gender, and worldbuilding)

At that point, fandom culture (in my experience at the time) only treated incest as a squick – something that some people personally disliked, as one might be turned off by mpreg or watersports, etc.

Why wasn’t it a squick for me? Who knows tbh. I have zero brothers and I’m gay, so I never had to develop a feeling of aversion like that.That’s my best guess. I didn’t exactly fetishize those ships, but if there were only two hot dudes in a story, I didn’t think anything of it.

(Note: I think that incest ships may be specifically appealing to some fans because the bond between the characters is already secure? A similar appeal to the “found family” trope but the opposite thing. That’s just a theory)

However, upon coming to Tumblr, once I got over my culture shock of seeing people treat imaginary pairings as not squicks but moral indictments, I did come to understand where a lot of people are coming from with this!

For some people, it’s not just a personal squick, it’s an extra-strong aversion because they’re leery of incest being fetishized (for example, most real-life twins do not find twincest jokes funny!). More often, it’s people who were abused in real-world incest and cannot fathom why it would be someone’s kink or even factor into someone’s ship.

The solution to any sort of ship that’s going to remind someone of the worst moments of their lives is to do what I did in bold, above: use a content warning. If your fic contains sex abuse or incest or whatever, please tag your work. The same is true with fanart. If you want to share your other media with friends or the fandom at large but worry that your kinks may be off-putting, literally just make a second art/writing account or a separate blog to share those.

Don’t deliberately take people bag to the worst moments of their lives.

HOWEVER

We’ve seen a lot of people write about how they don’t want to see fandom treated like Catholicism (or, alternatively, as Protestantism; the word that they’re looking for is orthodoxy).

People have every right to ship whatever vile things they like. That goes for things that personally horrify or squick me. All that they need to do is be respectful in public spaces and to upload their work/commentary in the appropriate places with the appropriate tags, warnings, and readmores.

I think that people who don’t feel especially powerful or in control in life are the ones who get the biggest kick out of things like gatekeeping, exclusionist rhetoric, and being fandom police. Others are simply well-intentioned but became carried away. Not all antis are bad people, but it’s not a healthy thing about which to frame your personality and your online brand.

Your personal dislike of something doesn’t make you a morally superior person. As someone who hates mushrooms, I know that it’s tempting to believe otherwise, but it’s true.

And wielding social justice language as a cudgel, especially one that just happens to validate your opinions on a piece of fiction, is disingenuous and harmful in so many ways.

Ships (or kinks, etc) don’t equate to someone’s real-life values.

(Side note: anyone else notice that people who wouldn’t bat an eye at someone writing Age-Appropriate Wolf fanfic, when the characters are highschoolers but played by adults, are quick to condemn people who ship cartoon teens together, even though those teens are literally ink on paper and are absolutely voiced by and drawn like adults? I’m not sure what that’s all about, but it needs to stop. It’s literally just pretend!)

(Other side note: I understand that a lot of people are uncomfortable with shipping real people, even though said shipping has been a part of culture for millennia. My thoughts on that is: literally just act like an adult about it! Don’t tweet them fic or fanart, and don’t show it to them at conventions or whatever. The same thing goes for actors who play fictional characters. Talk show hosts should also maybe stop showing fanart for shock value but that’s a whole other conversation)

If you’ve gotten carried away with fandom-policing or something else, hey, that’s part of being a person. I’ve done it too! What matters is to be a better person. Making mistakes and becoming a better person are part of what it means to exist.

#anon ask #fandom #shipping #I HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THIS #my post #anon #ask

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

Text

Race, Brand and the Placebo Effect

by Dan H

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Dan rambles on the vague theme of Racefail~

This is an article about race, but it's going to start off being an article about shampoo.

I have, on occasion, had trouble with dandruff, and as a result have needed to purchase shampoo to deal with this affliction. In my second year of university, I ran out of shampoo, so I went to the local Co-Op and picked up a bottle of Head and Shoulders.

It wasn't until I was on my way back home with my purchase that I realised that the only reason I had chosen that particular brand was that I had been seeing advertisements for Head and Shoulders for as long as I can remember, so that in my mind “anti-dandruff shampoo” was linked with the Head and Shoulders brand on a fundamental and inextricable level.

This was something of an epiphany for me, because it finally made me realise that advertising does not work the way I thought it did. I had assumed, and I think most people assume on some level, that advertisements worked my making you see the advertisement and immediately want the thing advertised. Some adverts do (particularly ads for food or drink if I see them when I'm hungry or thirsty) but that's usually secondary to their main function, which is to get into your head on a subconscious level and make you associate a particular need (anti-dandruff shampoo, a cool refreshing drink, a boost to your fragile self-esteem) with a particular product in a positive way, so that your choices and actions are influenced without your even knowing it.

And it works. If I am generically thirsty and not making a conscious effort to drink more fruit juice, or actively wanting a particular type of drink, I'll buy a coke.

What's even more interesting about this phenomenon is that it works even if you are aware of it. I know that a big part of the reason I drink coke, eat fast food, and shop in Sainsburys is that I've been influenced by advertising, but I carry on doing them anyway because most of the time people don't make informed decisions about things, we just go with our first instincts and our irrational impulses, even if we know they're wrong.

The same concept shows up in all kinds of places. It shows up in the pharmaceuticals industry, people find shiny red pills in bold, brand-name packaging to be more effective than nondescript white pills in generic grey packaging. We respond instinctively to visual cues, and we don't know we're doing it.

I bring all this up, because one of the many semi-irreconcilable controversies that came up during the whole Racefail debate is the dichotomy of race-as-physical-appearance versus race-as-cultural-identity. Heck, the whole thing basically started as a direct result of Elizabeth Bear saying you should write non-white people the same way you wrote white people, and some other people respectfully disagreeing.

Essentially there's two problems. The first is that most characters – particularly most protagonists – in genre fiction tend to be white (and tend to be men). The second problem is that most invented cultures in genre fiction tend to be based on either medieval Europe, modern America or horrendous stereotypes of non-European cultures.

The argument can be made that the latter problem simply can't be addressed by white American or European authors. Hell, it could be argued that it can't be addressed by non-white American or European authors. Nobody can ever really shake off the preconceptions of the culture they were raised in, and you can never really understand a culture that isn't your own. You can know stuff about it, but no matter how much anime you watch you can never know what it's like to be Japanese.

The first problem, however, can be addressed by white, American or European writers, and should be. Again the argument could be made that, particularly if you're working in a created world, race is kind of an arbitrary choice and so is ultimately meaningless. This argument is half-right. In a created world, race is purely cosmetic, but it's cosmetic in the same way that the colour of a headache pill is cosmetic. It's the sort of cosmetic that gets in your head and changes the way you think.

It all comes down to the nature of racism (or, for that matter, of prejudice in general). Prejudice is a lot like advertising: people think that it's all about big, obvious things. You see an ad for coke, so you go out and buy a glass of coke, a black man applies for a job, but he doesn't get it because the guy who interviews him is a big fat racist who hates black people.

I'm going to go off on another tangent here and talk about

Captain Planet

was a well meaning kids cartoon that took an endearingly multiracial gang of kids and had them fight villains who represented various ecological issues through the power of Earth, Fire, Wind, Water and Heart, which together allowed them to summon Captain Planet, who would lay the smackdown on evil villains who wanted to wreck the environment for no clear reason.

My mother really didn't like it.

She didn't like it because she thought it was dangerous to present the idea that problems for which we are all responsible (like pollution) are caused by single “villains”. I kind of think she was right.

I get that you can use a villain to personify something that is “part of all of us” (man) but I think it's actually hard to pull off in practice. Most of the time, personifying a social problem as an unambiguously horrible villain just sends the message that there are “bad people” out there who are polluters, racists, or whatever. This is why Whedon's cardboard misogynists piss me off, this is why the pseudo-Nazism of the Death Eaters was so annoying to me. Pollution doesn't happen because some guy in a cape decided to tip toxic waste into the sea for fun, it happens because guys like me can't be arsed to turn out heating down in the early summer.

The same kind of goes for racism. We all like to think that racism exists because of other people, that somehow there's some kind of rogue group of twenty or thirty hardcore racists out there who are between them responsible for all race issues everywhere, from the lack of Chinese characters in Firefly to the lack of decent Kosher butchers in Oxford. In fact racism exists because racist attitudes are pernicious, self-perpetuating, and all-pervasive.

There's a lot wrong with the Avenue Q song Everyone's A Little Bit Racist (it frequently sounds like it's using that statement to excuse racism rather than examine it - “ethnic jokes are so uncouth, but we laugh because they're based on truth” umm, no they're not, guys). It is, however, an important statement of fact. The reason that a white person is more likely to be hired for any given job than a nonwhite person is not because the person giving them the job is a cartoon racist, sitting there saying “no, I will not hire a filthy mudblood” it's because the person giving them the job is affected by racism on a level so fundamental they don't realise they're doing it. Just like you pass over the store-brand coke for the one in the red-and-white can you have been taught your whole life to associate with a cool refreshing beverage, so you pass over the guy (or woman) who doesn't look how you have been taught your whole life to expect a lawyer/teacher/investment banker/data entry clerk to look.

The really scary thing is that I catch myself doing it. I do, in fact, pay less attention to the opinions of my non-white and female friends. Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation. It's weird as fuck when you catch yourself doing it, just like when you catch yourself unconsciously reaching for a can of coke instead of a bottle of lemonade, or buy Head and Shoulders instead of a cheaper or more effective shampoo.

It all comes back to branding.

Now okay, you can make the argument here that I'm just passing the buck, and to a degree I am. Ultimately my attitudes, my purchasing habits and my behaviour are my responsibility, but they are influenced by the surroundings I grew up with. There isn't a causal link, I don't listen to my female friends talking and think “gosh, I remember this one TV show I saw had a woman on it who didn't know what she was talking about, therefore I won't listen to this person” nor do I think “well Willow knew what she was talking about, so this person must too”. I just have instinctive responses to things which are coloured by the society in which I was raised.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid. Of course first you need to get over the fact that it would then be a book about a black kid who gets rescued from his abusive black family by a kindly white guy, but if we assume that Harry was black and the Potter books weren't written in such a way that “Muggle” was effectively a racial slur. You would then have a situation in which the single most recognised fictional character in the world was a black kid (not only a black kid, but a black British kid). It would be huge, just like it was huge the first time they let an actual black guy play Othello. It wouldn't matter in the slightest that Harry Potter didn't listen to hip-hop or talk about Malcom X or use “urban” slang or do whatever else it is that white people seem to think black people have to do in fiction to properly represent “black culture”. The simple fact of the most popular fictional character in the world having black skin would have been huge. It would have changed the way a generation of children thought about race, and it would have changed it for the better. It wouldn't have been a miracle, it wouldn't have abolished racism overnight, but it would have done more good than any three government initiatives you might care to name.

Of course, if Harry Potter had been black, the book might not have sold at all, but that's a whole different problem.

Themes:

Topical

Minority Warrior

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 23:19 on 2009-03-31This is really interesting, Dan! The comparison between unconscious racism and branding makes a scary amount of sense. (And you are right about the "Potter" books, as well.)

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it? A friend and I were discussing this when racefail happened - the link is here, if you're interested.

http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/40140.html

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http://viorica8957.livejournal.com/

at 00:31 on 2009-04-01(I keep getting an error message when I try to log in, so I'm using OpenID)

It's a pervasive problem, and one that is worsened by the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge it. I was arguing with my mother about racism recently, and the argument she kept falling back on was "But don't you see how much has changed since the sixties? There's a black president! There's no segregation! Things are so much better!" It's a defense people use to ignore their own buried racism- "

I'm

not a Nazi/KKK member/skinhead, so clearly

can't be racist."

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Sonia Mitchell

at 03:20 on 2009-04-01

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I'd love to bristle more at that than I am, but much as I hate myself for it that's a bit of branding I end up buying into. Whenever my mum says I'm studying in Oxford I have to add 'Brookes, not proper Oxford' just to make it clear I'm not attempting to ride on coat-tails.

Anyway, interesting article. Whenever I'm staying for any length of time with advert game co-players (guess the advert on tv before the product is named) I find myself much more aware of how many don't mention the product until right at the end. Building up the atmosphere/message first and then linking it to the product, cementing it in people's minds on a less conscious level after a few repeated viewings, seems to be the way a lot of things are done.

Which, as you say, is exactly what makes these attitudes harder to spot - they don't come ready labelled.

Mary-j-59 - that was an interesting read, thanks.

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Guy

at 05:30 on 2009-04-01I think a really interesting example in relation to this question is the original series of Star Trek. For anyone who isn't a total nerd and therefore doesn't know this already, part of Gene Roddenberry's idea for Star Trek was that in the far future, all of our silly, parochial attitudes about race and gender and nationality and so on will have been resolved and looked on much like we look on witch-burnings or the crusades or whatever; we will have gotten over it and it'll just be a bit of ugly but quaint ancient history. And on this basis, he wanted to have a multi-ethnic crew, with men and women in equal positions, and, most importantly, for them *not to make a big deal out of it*, with "episode of the week on gender equality" stuff happening.

Of course, for any of us who watch an episode of Star Trek now, this is a pretty laughable conception of what's going on, because the most important person on the ship is Captain Kirk, a white American male, who is pretty much defined by his adherence to an ideal of American masculinity which is very much "of its time". Meanwhile, he's surrounded by a crew of other white men who are primarily distinguished by their funny accents... and Uhura, who essentially is a telephone operator wearing a very, very short skirt. So from the point of view of making a judgement about whether or not this represents a successful embodiment of Roddenberry's vision, we would stamp "FAIL" all over it in big red letters.

However, I remember seeing a documentary a while ago (possibly "Trekkies"? Anyway...) which mentioned that Uhura was the first black woman on television (either in a regular part or at all, I can't remember) and various well-known contemporary black women talking about how exciting and how important it was for them to see a black woman with a speaking part on TV. By contemporary standards the part seems incredibly sexist and virtually definitive of the whole "token black character" phenomenon, but compared with the standards of the other things on TV at the time, it was very progressive.

So I guess what I'm saying is, people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

In terms of fantasy fiction, I think the clear beacon showing how the representation of people of other "races" (I have to put the scare quotes because I'm one of those who believes the term "race" is not a good descriptor of anything) can and should be done is Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series. Ged is not just a "white character with dark skin", but nor is the culture he comes from depicted as some horrible stereotype of an existing earth culture. It may be the case that in 50 years time people will look back on Earthsea and find it just as gauche as we find Star Trek now, but for the moment I would say it is the gold standard. It's also rather unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be much else around that is even trying to achieve that standard, but... "90% of everything is crap", as they say, and with genre fiction that is probably, sadly, an understatement.

Lastly (I hope that I don't break ferretbrain with such a long comment!) on the "everyone's a bit racist" question, I think there is a grain of truth in that statement but taken at face value I would disagree with it. I think... in my own case, I grew up in a suburb of Sydney where I never saw a black person at all, on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the only black person I knew was my grandfather (who is/was an Australian Aboriginal - but the genes are "dilute" enough in my case that I look absolutely white) who I did not see often. And so as a consequence I think I had all kinds of unconscious ideas about "other races" that I didn't really think about... I guess I didn't have any real sources of information beyond books and TV and lectures at my very left-wing school that took the form of "Don't be racist! For real!" (which were well-intentioned but I think were in their form a bit stupid, rather in the way that Captain Planet is a bit stupid).

Anyway, when the family moved to England we moved to a suburb (and I went to a school) where there were a lot more non-white people around, and I discovered that... a lot of my ideas had been really dumb, as well as being rather unformed. And in some sense, if you were to spell out those ideas in words, you would probably conclude that they were indeed racist ideas and that therefore I was "racist", despite all my intentions to the contrary.

But... I also think that it was that exposure to the actual people that broke down and changed those dumb ideas. And it remains my conviction that all the well-intentioned talk (or even, clever and subtle argumentation and explanation) in the world is no substitute for encounters with real people for breaking down prejudices based on ignorance. I suppose, to go back to your Shampoo analogy, it's kind of like this: the world may be full of explicit, overt messages telling you to buy a certain shampoo, and those overt messages may be supported by hidden and hard-to-unearth ideologies (bright packaging indicates a superior product to those in bland packaging!) but once you actually put the shampoo in your hair, it either works or it doesn't. (There may of course be an effect whereby those social messages cause you to undermine or misunderstand your own experiences, but this post is already waaaay too long...)

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Gina Dhawa

at 07:46 on 2009-04-01@Guy regarding Star Trek - I entirely agree. There is a lot of fail with regard to the depictions of race in TOS, but as a product of its time, I give it a lot of credit. And about the gender imbalance, it's very interesting that he was specifically told to drop the female second in command from the pilot episode if he was ever to get the series on air.

@Dan I've never been entirely convinced by the argument that a white author can't write non-white cultures, particularly in SF/Fantasy. OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. I think the key thing people forget is just to have a

awareness

goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

In the case of culture, it isn't a case of understanding truly everything about a culture that isn't your own, it's about respecting that culture and not treating like the exotic other. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do, but hell, if I wasn't to write about a culture other than mine then I have no idea

what

I'd ever write.

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I will bristle at that, thanks.

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Arthur B

at 08:27 on 2009-04-01

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it?

I suspect a lot of this boils down to people using particular ideas or tropes developed by the grand old racist authors of the past without really thinking about where the tropes from and why they are doing it; all they know is "this is the sort of thing that happens in the SF/fantasy stories I like, so they're going to happpen in the stories I write."

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way: you simply have to skip the ones which are just blatantly horrible, and treat the others as an inversion of colonialism, in which the simple beliefs of a "primitive" outsider prove to be more powerful and enduring than the hypocrisies of so-called "civilised" people.

There is nothing in this scenario which

requires

that the outsider be a white man from an analogue of Northern Europe, or the corrupt civilisations he encounters have to be Mediterranean/Middle Eastern city-states. But hundreds of Howard imitators, and even more folk who have been unconsciously influenced by his stories, make that assumption every time they use the idea. And that's racist.

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Andy G

at 10:18 on 2009-04-01"For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way"

I wondered about this recently when I was reading H.P. Lovecraft - whether we really can "read in a non-racist way" - as Dan says, it's not a matter of racist individuals, but of pervasive racist attitudes in society as a whole. Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds? Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

I think you're spot on though about modern authors not reflecting on the dubious assumptions they take from older authors. I especially felt that about Olaf Stapledon.

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Andy G

at 10:37 on 2009-04-01Oh and there's also a great example

[here]

of the Captain Planet approach to complex world issues.

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Shim

at 10:58 on 2009-04-01

I suppose there's a bit of difference there, because if I wrote about aliens (or heck, even from an "alien perspective") there's little to no chance of aliens lambasting me in the Sunday papers about my ignorance and stereotyping. Also, because they're not real, there's no objective reality that my writing would fail to reflect. A lot of stories basically take White Middle-Class Anglo-Saxons and jiggle them a bit to make them vampires or wizards (sometimes, especially for wizards, these people are 'Celts' in an unspecified way that is hard to distinguish from WMCAS).

On the other hand, if I try to write about or from WMCAS female experiences, the fact that women actually exist means my writing can be objectively inaccurate. Same for, say, writing about Indian culture. So I think the fact that there is a whole deep, complex culture there that the writer doesn't understand is a real problem; while more understanding can mean they write more convincing stories, you can end up with the situation where people understand things just enough to make massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives.

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Rami

at 11:24 on 2009-04-01

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right.

Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is

♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫

because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas -- and if we admit that to ourselves and make a conscious effort, things could be a lot better. Lots of people mistakenly

equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions

(warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way

I was thinking vaguely along these lines recently as well, when I picked up

Triplanetary

, and had to put it down after only a few pages because it was so full of the unconscious attitudes of the 30s and 40s. It may be a classic of science-fiction and have inspired half of the current generation of SF writers and editors, but the racism and sexism were a bit too much for me. It distresses me that, as Arthur points out, lots of modern writers have doubtless picked up a few of the tropes because they "really liked it in the Lensman series" and completely obliviously dropped them, scheming dark-skinned villains and helpless blonde damsels included, into their own work.

think the key thing people forget is just to have a awareness goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

Absolutely!

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Rami

at 11:28 on 2009-04-01

massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives

IIRC, that kind of thing was at the root of the whole RaceFail imbroglio -- when people did exactly that, but refused to admit it.

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Arthur B

at 11:34 on 2009-04-01

Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds?

We'd better learn to, otherwise that's everything from before 1950 down the memory hole...

Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene in

The Book of the Short Sun

Secondly, if the stories have any merit at all there's going to be something more to them than just bigotry. Yes, Lovecraft used the fear of the outsider a hell of a lot. But the fun thing about that particular fear is that it's always going to be with us, and HPL had a clever knack of turning the fear of the outsider into the fear of the outside itself. When Lovecraft was writing about how threatening he found immigrants (

The Horror At Red Hook

) he was being horrid; when he was writing about how the entire universe beyond this placid island we call Earth is a cold uncaring void that is completely hostile to any life that even resembles us (

The Colour Out of Space

) he was being visionary. It's not always easy to divorce the cultural xenophobia from the cosmic vertigo - they're written by the same man, they have the same experiences and agendas shaping them - but I'd submit that it is possible.

Thirdly, there's plenty of Lovecraft and Howard where racism just isn't a factor, or is only a factor if you try hard to look for it.

The Tower of the Elephant

and

At the Mountains of Madness

spring to mind.

I honestly don't think that reading Lovecraft or Howard is necessarily going to feed anyone's inner racist unless they actually

want

to be influenced that way ("Oh man, I totally agree with that but I could never say it in public..."). It helps that they lived in a time when many people simply didn't know better; it doesn't excuse them, but it does mean that both the attitude of the society they came from and their own personal quirks are well-known and out there for all to see. As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

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Rami

at 12:00 on 2009-04-01

You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene

Depends how much you disagree with them, I guess, and how evident that is in the text. I agree you can't dismiss an author entirely because of their attitudes, since as you say there's got to be something other than bigotry -- but if the bigotry is omnipresent it does get pretty difficult. Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face. On the other hand, he's only peripherally bigoted (xenophobic, but in a more understandable way) in The Whisperer in Darkness, and that's much easier to appreciate for what it is...

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Dan H

at 13:18 on 2009-04-01

Crap, sorry about that. It's probably deeply ironic that in an article entirely about the subconscious effects of prejudice on our everyday thoughts and actions, I managed to forget that using "went to Oxford" as a synonym for "knows what they're talking about" is, itself, kinda offensive.

Sorry folks.

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

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Dan H

at 13:39 on 2009-04-01

Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face.

I suspect this is one of those examples of White Privilege in action. It's easy for me and Arthur to read Lovecraft (well, easy for Arthur to read Lovecraft, I don't actually like his writing) and say "gosh, this is very racist but I still appreciate it as an artifact from its time." We're in a position where we can condemn racism without it actually harming us. There's a world of difference between reading an old work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be black people" and reading a work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be *me and my family*."

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is ♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫ because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas

Yeah, I can see that. It's just that a lot of the way the song presents itself is in the language of racist apologism. Remember that the very *next* line is "and we could all stop being so PC!". The more I've thought about the actual sketch, the more I've been bothered by the way it's presented - remember it basically starts with a minority character (Kate Monster) calling out a non-minority character for being racist, and the non-minority character using "well you're racist too!" as a defence (and in fact citing the "but minority rights groups are racist as well!" argument).

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

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Shim

at 14:16 on 2009-04-01

Lots of people mistakenly equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions (warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

Interesting linked article... overall I tended to agree with the arguments, but at times it gave me the feeling that they were interpreting things in the way that supported their expectations, i.e. seeing racist attitudes that

might

not be there. Given how complicated some of the topics were, and how much discussion of racial issues goes on, it's not surprising to me (for example) that people sometimes argued from several sides, or were less coherent on more personal, complicated questions. I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take. Oh, and I'd have liked some counter-examples of answers that were

not

seen as hiding racist attitudes.

Also, it could really do with proofreading. But enough digression, back to Dan's article!

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Arthur B

at 14:48 on 2009-04-01

For what it's worth, I don't actually enjoy

The Horror At Red Hook

; I was raising it (not very clearly) as an example of a story that I'd usually just skip because the motivations behind it are entirely too obvious and entirely too ugly.

At the Mountains of Madness

is nice in that the monsters don't resemble

any

identifiable people - not physically, and not culturally - so that's at the other end of the spectrum.

I do think that a certain amount of white privilege is inevitable, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem so long as you're aware that it might be happening and that other people might not see your favourite author in the same way. (It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".) The most important thing is to read with your eyes open, and to read diversely; I think an exclusive diet of Lovecraft, Howard, and the various descendants and imitators is vastly more unhealthy and likely to blind you to problematic elements in their stories than a more balanced reading range.

A tangent: it dismays me sometimes to see the amount of uncritical fanboyism that surrounds

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

, which granted is a decently-written story but it again has massively problematic undertones; any interpretation of it which doesn't at least acknowledge that part of the point Lovecraft was making was KILL THE HALF-BREEDS is wilfully blinding itself to a really major component of the story, and there's a distressing number of authors who keep reusing the Deep Ones without even considering that angle.

Granted, the angle that people imitate most frequently is the "Oh no, it turns out I am a Deep One too" revelation at the end of the story, but - like Lovecraft himself - nobody ever makes the leap to "wait, surely that means the Deep Ones can't be all bad".

Even people who admit that Lovecraft was a racist

do this. And nobody calls people on it or says "hey, you're just repeating Lovecraft's slurs against miscegenation", presumably because everyone's kidding themselves that the fish people are fish people and can't possibly be a metaphor for something else.

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Arthur B

at 15:06 on 2009-04-01

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

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Andy G

at 15:57 on 2009-04-01@ Arthur: I did enjoy Lovecraft for the kinds of reasons you said (otherwise I wouldn't have kept reading) - and felt that I could "pick and choose", appreciating and analysing without necessarily condoning. But equally, I was aware that some of the bits I now found uncomfortable I would never even have noticed a few years ago - because I only really imagined racism to be overt KKK-style hatred, as Dan terms it (and Lovecraft does occasionally go there) - and yet even back then I would have prided myself on being able to detach myself from condoning the "racist bits" of the stories, which I now realise are far more pervasive. That's why I hesitate a bit before saying I can definitely remain a detached, objective attitude without colluding in the questionable ideas and imagery. Even if we can distance ourselves from stories by regarding them as historical artefacts, I'm not sure that we can do that completely successfully while still enjoying them as stories.

I also wonder whether it's sufficient to find the bad bits "unpleasant", "uncomfortable" or "distasteful" (from the perpsective of white privilege) but keep reading anyway - I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position?

Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:11 on 2009-04-01

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

Sorry, Dan, if my hackles got raised. It's one of my buttons.

This. People have different levels of privilege (white, class, education, etc) and that's such a big deal with regard to how their mileage will vary at what they will personally be able to deal with in texts.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:19 on 2009-04-01That's not to say I condone racism or any other kind of bigotry in texts, just that I find it understandable that people who don't themselves necessarily hold bigoted views can find things to enjoy in texts that do.

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Arthur B

at 16:33 on 2009-04-01

It varies for me. I have, in fact, stopped reading Robert E. Howard stories because they were pure out-and-out bigotry. On the other hand, I read

The Horror at Red Hook

all the way through. When I do keep reading, it's normally for one of two reasons (or a mix of them):

- The story has something more to it than racism.

Red Hook

is awful for many reasons, one of them being that there really

isn't

anything more to it than the racism.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

is, in many respects, just as racist, but it also features other ideas which are sufficiently interesting - and have exerted a sufficient influence over the horror genre - that those ideas are both worth salvaging and engaging enough that reading the story doesn't

exclusively

evoke discomfort.

- The story is useful for understanding the author, and I'm interested enough in the author to want to understand them.

Red Hook

as a story is terrible, but as an insight into what Lovecraft was thinking during his brief and unhappy tenancy in New York it's valuable.

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Dan H

at 18:11 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

I see what you did there.

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Dan H

at 18:44 on 2009-04-01Also:

Just reading the article you linked to Rami.

It's kind of terrifying, isn't it.

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Shim

at 18:45 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Hmm... I reckon there were enough references to his tousled mop of hair, and looking pale, to make that problematic.

East Asian descent? Native American? Inuit? Totally possible.

(this leads me to something Dan mentioned once; racism discussions always leap on to Black/White dichotomies even though it's not the most obvious one for everyone. I'd argue in Britain that Chinese or South Asian ancestry is much more common, certainly in the north)

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Arthur B

at 18:49 on 2009-04-01look he's albino with really messy hair

you are racist against albinos you are

you want to kill them and turn them into

medicine

and that's wrong

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Shim

at 21:56 on 2009-04-01What a wasteful idea! Everyone knows that albinos are best used as ruthless assassins.

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Dan H

at 22:15 on 2009-04-01

I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take.

I personally found it fairly clear from most of the examples that the actual opinions of the inverviewees were, if not racist, more likely to be perceived as racist than the opinions they tried to express.

It's things like the fact that pretty much all of them disagreed with affirmative action (which I'll admit can't be taken as racist in itself - it's a specific government policy and there's probably several reasons to disagree with it) but that none of them actually felt that they could *say* they didn't agree with affirmative action.

One of the things I've noticed in my recent Rambling Thoughts About Prejudice is that there's a lot of things that people are willing to condemn utterly (or support wholeheartedly) in the general case, but not in the specific. "I have nothing against interracial marriage, but I'm a little bit worried about the children" or "I support affirmative action, but obviously you can't let a better qualified white guy lose out to a black guy if it's a job he actually wants."

Ironically the person that comes out best is the seventy year old woman who says straight up "I'm against interracial marriage, but if my daughter married a black guy I'd still support her."

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Shim

at 22:44 on 2009-04-01

Indeed. Sorry, I'm not clear enough... it was the way the arguments were presented that I found dodgy, rather than anything in the analysis of the examples given; it seemed like they might be generalising from "this person said this, and in context of everything else they said which I have only partially printed here, they seem racist, so I think it may be tactical" to "this kind of language is a tactic to cover racism". The usual extrapolation problem arises. That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I found the paper a bit rambling (ooh, diminutive) and sometimes incoherent - for example, as basically a scientist I'm used to things with statistics and explanations of the experiment, rather than launching into an argument peppered with examples. Also I think it mixed up the names in at least one place (Andy/Mickey)?

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah".

Back on the article... I remember the Captain Planet thing coming up in a PSE class about ethics, on the lines of whether there were actually specific Evil people. A surprising proportion of the class (upper sixth) were really set on this idea and did

not

respond well to questions like "so do you honestly believe that Pol Pot never did a single good thing?" or "exactly what characteristics distinguish between the Evil people and everyone else?".

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Dan H

at 23:17 on 2009-04-01The paper is a bit rambling, and does make a bunch of assumptions (you can't really go from "these white people said this" to "white people say this") but I think it highlights some interesting points. I thought the example with "there is a firm which is 97% white" was a really interesting one, because a lot of the arguments people made were basically "you can only say their hiring policy is racist if you have met their HR guy and you know that he, personally is a racist".

Which brings us neatly back to Captain Planet and the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil.

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Wardog

at 23:24 on 2009-04-01I'm not saying anything constructive here because I'm quite frankly *terrified* since it's such an incredibly complex issue. But I just wanted to mention that I found the article interesting and the comments equally so.

I was also really worried we were going to have our own small-scale racefail but I'm relieved we only had a highereductionfail instead.

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Rami

at 00:04 on 2009-04-02

That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I don't remember exactly where I was linked to this paper from, but the two studies mentioned in the paper (from which the interviewees were drawn) tried to measure prevalence of racist attitudes based on survey responses, and found very few sets of responses that appeared minimally prejudiced. I think it's because of this that the paper makes the assumption that the interview responses are evincing racist attitudes, even where the responses themselves could be seen as ambiguous.

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah"

I'd say it's because she was honest ;-)

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do; I think that, as you say, the problem with Captain Planet et al is that they encourage the belief that the little actions of every day (not turning off the lights properly, etc) are perfectly OK, and that the Badness is distilled into the Evil People and that they are the only ones to blame.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 03:50 on 2009-04-02The Tarzan books are a little horrifying- I was pretty young when I read them and completely believed that racism ended in the sixties, but even then I understood that something strange was up with all the beautiful blonde women (and beautiful, blond Tarzan, of course). Why the hell would any ape (except humans) think a blonde was attractive? Later on in the series the racism gets more overt but its still ridiculous when its just "look how pretty and superior we are!"

My mom used to laugh whenever I watched Captain Planet and said I was being brainwashed.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 03:53 on 2009-04-02Andy G.:

I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position? Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

I enjoyed Taming of the Shrew when I saw it performed twenty years ago in college. Then I watched it again within the last two years. It sickened me. When Katherina obeyed whatshisname, I booed, but only loud enough for my wife and maybe a nearby audience member could hear.

Unless the play is promoted/listed as one of the tragedies, I won't see it again.

Perhaps the harder question is: is it making an excuse for the racism rather than for the enjoyment of the read.

The language the theater used excuse the production of TotS was that it may *appear* offensive to the modern audience and that it was the norm for the time. But that's donkeyshit. Disney's Song of the South won't be 're-released on dvd/blueray for only a limited time' even though it was the norm for the time because it *is* offensive to the modern audience today.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 04:14 on 2009-04-02

It all comes back to branding.

But the people that do the branding are members of the dominant culture.

Though arguably, that has been changing especially within last couple of decades. Well, at least to some degree though not quite for the better. Fucking BET.

- F.Dillinger

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 20:01 on 2009-04-02

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

Honestly, thinking about it at all lead to overthinking, because although that song from Avenue Q gets quoted *all the time* in discussions of race, it doesn't really seem to be saying anything simple about race at all except in the title. It includes characters talking about actual racism that they experience (Gary Coleman "can't even get a taxi"), apologetics ("stop being so pc"/"ethnic jokes are based on truth") and some things that honestly sound like they know perfectly well they're defending racism: people make judgements about race not about "big things like who to buy a newspaper from, but little things like thinking Mexican busboys should learn to speak GODDAMN ENGLISH!"

In the end the song is kind of a big mess of things you've heard people say about racism, but without a clear pov. The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay, but there's other stuff in there too...and also racism is such a hot button word it's hard to imagine using it to be completely positive. Also yes completely about the way it starts off with the idea that a minority is being "racist" to ever focus on its own group without including the majority, the "reverse racism" claim. Blech.

And regarding the rest, yes--in some of the discussions about sci fi I remember somebody mentioning the mystery genre and that shows a real difference. Where sci fi and fantasy has in many ways stuck to their traditional white guy roots, I don't think any mystery fan would say that they really expect the detective in any series to be white or male. I'm not a huge reader of mysteries, but even knowing the genre a little it seems like creating detectives from different backgrounds has become totally common. I guess since the detective is always going to have certain standard qualities (smart, analytical, observant, insightful etc.) people are eager to branch out in other ways looking for how they are different and how their differences affect how they solve crimes.

Where as fantasy seems still so stuck in the whole colonial project mentality...you've often got the race that's our pov race, who seemings white and British or American, and then you've got these other races who are all far more alike than the main race is. To us HP as an example, you couldn't really say what a Wizard was like personality-wise, but you could do that for a House Elf or a giant or a goblin or a centaur...

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Arthur B

at 20:57 on 2009-04-02

I think sometimes it is colonial, and sometimes it is an attempt to be pseudohistorical. People have this odd idea that in the medieval period nobody travelled at all, and while it's true that 90% of the population never travelled much under normal circumstances a) that's still kind of true today in many places, and b) even though that was the case, you never had a situation where you had the English people who lived exclusively in a place called England whose borders were always much the same as they are today, and neighbouring them the French people who lived in a place called France with borders much like today's, and so on. People moved around: rich folk travelled and became merchants and sometimes settled in cities where the money was, poor people went on pilgrimages and were drafted into their lord's militia when time came to go to war, and enormous numbers of people ended up becoming refugees from plague, famine, and war - and that's just in medieval Europe.

This is not to say that our cultures aren't more diverse today than they were back then. But they were significantly more nuanced and heterogeneous than the sort of fake-medieval societies that sub-Tolkien fantasy hacks crank out. Writing realistically diverse societies is

achingly difficult

, and many people just don't try. (Which is wrong of them.)

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Dan H

at 02:04 on 2009-04-03

The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay,

It's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with. Or rather, it's the way *in which* it's supposed to be okay. I'm okay with the idea that "it's okay" to have racist attitudes in the sense that everybody has them, and having racist attitudes doesn't make you a bad person, just somebody who needs to be a bit more aware of race issues. The song, though, seems to imply that racism is just plain acceptable.

This might be a bit overly-analytical, but the song basically involves a bunch of minorities complaining about racism, then being revealed to be hypocrites. There's a fine line between humour about racism, and humour that is just plain racist and I fear that EaLBR strays into the latter camp.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 02:35 on 2009-04-03

t's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with.

Sorry, I wasn't clear there--neither am I. I don't think that the clearest message being "everyone (including minorities) is racist and that's okay" is a particularly good thing.

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http://descrime.livejournal.com/

at 17:52 on 2009-04-03re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

I thought the firm question was stupid, to be honest, if the only information they are given is that a firm is 97% white! Draw inferences!

I once worked for a small business that employed 5 people. It was 100% white. By the paper's logic, the owners were horrible racists. But the population size of the firm is too small to use statistics like that.

Also, what industry is this firm in? If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

If a hospital's nurses are 97% female, does that mean the hospital is discriminating against male nurses? To figure that out, you need the percentage of male nurses in the area to compare with.

Now, I did do an internship at a ~170 person, publicly traded company and every single position of importance was filled with a white male, and that did seem suspicious.

If a firm is 97% white, all that statistic tells us is that is could be racist, not that it is racist no matter how obvious the author of the paper finds that conclusion. Similarly, even if the company has reached that magical percentage that means diversity, it doesn't mean the company /isn't/ racist.

My aunt works for a large "diverse" company, 600 employee, and she told me about a month ago how a group of white coworkers had hung voodoo dolls from their desk lamps (as in mimicking lynching) in response to a black coworker reporting on some previous misbehavior they had done (I don't really remember the details). The company had no real policy to deal with the situation and basically tried to sweep it under the rug.

I thought the paper was interesting in that it showed some examples as to how people have developed a method of speaking around an issue that is impossible to discuss in our society.

I also thought it was interesting that people who reported having friendships with someone who was part of a minority group were much less racist towards that group. Which would suggest to me that diversity in elementary schools is probably one of the most important things we could do to help promote understanding.

I thought his methodology was a little suspicious for what he was trying to achieve--an honest discussion of racial prejudices. A stranger asking you questions to your face on a sensitive topic (which he obviously have strong feelings for) is hardly likely to promote honesty and is probably a large factor in the nervousness and stuttering the subjects showed.

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Arthur B

at 18:11 on 2009-04-03

If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

Wait, what? I know it isn't very fair to blame individual game companies for an industry-wide bias, but wouldn't it be completely fair to criticise them if they made no effort to address that bias?

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Dan H

at 19:31 on 2009-04-03

I think you're actually making a classic mistake here, which is to make the focus of a discussion about prejudice the question of whether or not specific *people* are prejudiced instead of whether prejudice is at work in a given situation.

If a games development company is 95% male, whether they have 20 employees or 200 there's something wrong. Is it partly the fault of the industry? Probably, but not entirely. Roughly one in six

World of Warcraft

players are female, the proportion of women in your hypothetical company is one third that size.

There is, actually a serious issue here. An interesting statistic is that when people are asked to judge what a "balanced" gender mix looks like, they tend to settle on a male:female ratio of about 2:1 with anything more than that being perceived as unfairly biased towards women. Even

Buffy

follows this pattern, with the core cast of the first series being two girls (Buffy, Willow) and three guys (Giles, Xander, Angel) for a 60-40 split in one of the most female dominated shows on mainstream TV.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance. You actually

can

take the fact that only 5% of a company's employees are women as evidence of sexism. Evidence isn't the same as proof, but if your first reaction to the suggestion that your hiring policy might be sexist is to go on the defensive, you're never going to make any progress.

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Shim

at 22:54 on 2009-04-03@Dan

agreed. I do think the response depends on exactly what question is asked (and due to editfail/vagueness of the article I'm not sure) and how the interviewees interpret it; someone might say that racism was definitely at play (in the industry as a whole, in the education system...) but not necessarily conclude that the company itself is definitely racist. But as you say, it would be a pretty good place to start.

Re: gender balance; a similar rule applies to time-per-student in the classroom. Teachers of either gender judge a "balanced" lesson as one that gives far more time to boys (cf. "Language Myths", Bauer & Trudgill - let nobody say I make airy claims). Observers, students etc. also follow this pattern. Giving equal time is a major problem for teachers even when made aware of it and leads to people claiming the lesson is dominated by girls.

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http://arkan2.livejournal.com/

at 22:30 on 2009-04-06Another excellent essay, and great discussion, too.

Yeah, it's scary what advertisements can do, without being able to influence people through “subliminal messages.” Ever seen

The Ad and the Ego

? Heavy stuff.

And then of course, there's Naomi Klein's

No Logo

…

You're right, Dan, this is exactly how racism works. And sexism, heterosexism, classicism, ableism and all the rest. Until those types of oppression are completely eradicated, they'll be with us to some extent, but the first step towards making the solution is identifying the problem.

I also agree that you can't learn Japanese culture by watching anime, but that's not the same as saying you can't learn it at all. You can't learn everything about Japanese culture, or even just a subsection thereof—but then, this applies even if

you yourself are Japanese

. Nobody can know everything about a culture, their own or anyone else's.

Fortunately, authors don't need to do that much, any more than honest anthropologists do. How should an author in the United States go about writing a story set in modern India with modern Indian characters? To which I would reply: the same way said author should go about writing a story set in medieval Europe (or a decent knock-off thereof): research. Of course, cultural imperialism and cultural misappropriation are dangers that rear their ugly heads in the former case, but I think if the author comes at it with the right mindset (including but not limited to sympathy, sensitivity, awareness of probable pitfalls and a continentload of caution) they can pull it off (though you can't please

every

one).

I have the same problem with Whedon's Misogynist-Of-The-Week depiction of sexism as you do. Audiences in my experience tend to process characterization first, symbolism second. (A strongly feminist friend of mine who is also a major Whedon fan once tried to sell me some argument about how incredibly feminist the symbolism of the female characters in

Firefly

is. I'm betting she'd say the same about

Dollhouse

. My reply would be that even if so, the straightforward characterization is rather less feminist, to put it charitably, and that counts for a lot more.)

I'm sure

Harry Potter

could've sold if Harry had been black, or brown, or any other known shade of human skin. Whether it would've been such a cult phenomenon is a different problem. (Who knows, it might've been. And yes, that would've done more than probably any ten government initiatives. And what if he'd been Arabic …?)

people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

That's a very good point, Guy. I believe I maybe try harder than Roddenberry to be progressive on issues of race, sex, sexuality, class and all the other -isms, but if in 100 years' time people aren't looking at my fiction and finding a dozen holes in it at first glance, I'll be one disappointed ancestor. I'll be disappointed because it will mean that a) the culture will not have progressed so far as to outpace anything I could even imagine at my most radical, or b) that I never ended up actually publishing any fiction (or at least none worth looking at). To some extent, whatever I do will be a product of its time, just like the

Star Trek

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

Yeah well, white privilege means that you can ignore all that and not have to worry too much. Whereas if you're a person of colour (say, Arabic) and you piss off the white folks, Allah help you. (There are exceptions like Salman Rushdie, of course, but they are very much the exception.)

I for one do care about public opinion of people of colour, but I think it better to take that risk and at least try to be part of the solution than play it safe and know for sure that I'm perpetuating the problem.

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards;

This is a good point, Arthur. I recently read Michael Crichton's

State of Fear

, and, for various reasons, have been obsessing over it for months. It's a pretty mediocre thriller, but I have an intense love/hate relationship with the discourse. Some of it I agree with, a lot of it I don't, but what really gets me is that Crichton sets himself up to make his points in a way that should get even the readers who don't agree with him thinking, then lets most of it dissolve into a tired political rant. I felt like I would've enjoyed the book more—should've enjoyed it more—even as I was disagreeing with it, but Crichton failed to try hard enough to connect with the skeptics (which is ironic considering we're presumably the one's he's addressing).

… Although, as Dan points out, there's a difference between something being disagreeable and something actually insulting you as a person because of the social group you happen to belong to, especially when there is a looong history of insult and oppression of people from that social group.

On the other hand, as we're agreed that in a racist society everyone is racist to some degree, all the fiction we produce is probably going to be racist in some way. So if we can't find any merit in racist works, then Arthur's suggestion of throwing out everything before 1950 is too conservative by half.

So basically, I guess, it all comes down to degree of offensiveness and personal taste. If you can find merit in something, I'd say there's probably some merit, although I reserve the right to withdraw my condone-ance (there doesn't seem to be a proper word for that) if the merit you find is something along the lines of e.g. “All Arabs are evil.”

As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

Damn, you people are good at making excellent points with incredible clarity.

It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".

That's my viewpoint too, and something I feel slightly guilty about not cultivating more some of the time. However, I do think there's a bigger difference than you suggest, Arthur. I have a lot of close friends who are queer, but when I see something homophobic, the fact that “they're talking about my friends” doesn't spring immediately to mind. Similarly, when I see something blatantly anti-Palestinian, I don't immediately think of my Palestinian-American friend.

I agree that it helps to have friends who belong to the insulted group in question, but maybe not as much as you suggest.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Or in the liner notes to the movie script. Dumbeldore's sexual orientation on the other hand …

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do;

Well I for one, don't doubt the exact opposite, and think that's a

very

dangerous philosophical road to venture onto. Of course, it partially depends on what definition of “Evil” we're working under, but still …

re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

Me neither.

And yes, racism is amazingly adaptive when it comes to rhetoric.

I've heard elsewhere that positive exposure tends to dilute one's own prejudices at least. So yes, diverse elementary schools = very good idea.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance.

Like all other types of basically immoral attitudes/behaviors/actions. War/torture/murder/rape, people can (and too often do) excuse away the patently inexcusable when it gets down to specifics. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get people to stop doing this I'm listening.

very

attentively.

#Ferretbrain #Minority Warrior #Captain Planet #Avenue Q #Dan H

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