gryphonsegg

Like a fool, I tried to follow discussions on tumblr instead of just looking at nice pictures and keeping that as my fluffy fan art and fuzzy animals happy space. I tried to follow non-fandom feminist discussion on tumblr. Ugh! Everything people say about "gender/sexual identity" and "social justice warrior" tumblr is true. EVERYTHING. Tumblr: where radical feminism is about hating women for not being perfect, all other types of feminism are about how female-assigned-at-birth people should shut up and stop complaining because every kind of oppression is so much worse when it happens to male-assigned people, trans safe space is for people who want to "socially transition" and exclude those weak and unradical people who have actual sexual dysphoria, queer activism isn't for those mean and icky lesbians, and asexuality is about wanting to have sex but not preferring or getting emotionally attached to a specific partner. I never want to look at that bullshit again. Also, I never realized how protective of Ellen DeGeneres I could feel until I saw someone ~critiquing~ her for not being Radikewl Queer enough. It wasn't the first time I'd seen someone dissect a female celebrity's image for any and all possible points of failure to appear sufficiently threatening to whitecisheteropatriarchy (somehow the Very Progressive Feminists and Queer Activists never seem to get around to subjecting any male celebrities to this particularly personal kind of "critique" where they go after not what the person has actually said but who and what the person is), but Ellen was the last straw for me.

I had another feminist click moment this morning, and it helped me articulate one of the things I find immensely frustrating about the recurring debates over female characters in fandom, especially the ones that center on labeling certain female characters as "feminine" or "girly-girls" and labeling others as "unfeminine," "rejecting or hiding their femininity," or "men with breasts." One of the baseline assumptions that both of the two most vocal sides of the debate start from is that a fixation on fashion and make-up is inherently feminine, girly, and womanly and that a female character who doesn't care about or take pleasure in playing with fashionable clothes, accessories, and cosmetics is more like a guy and more distanced from typical women and their concerns than a female character who does. And I just realized that I fundamentally disagree with that assumption.

Look at world history. There have been many, many times and places-- even within modern European history!-- in which men were just as fashion-conscious as women. There have been--and in some places still are--cultures in which both men and women use make-up and other cultures in which neither men nor women do that. There have even been times in the not-so-distant past when white Americans and Europeans considered wearing make-up improper for "good" women. There have been and still are some non-Western cultures in which it's the men who use cosmetics and elaborate clothes and accessories to attract attention to their appearance, while the women's traditional dress and grooming styles are more practical and low-key. The emergence of the current Western popular gender schema, in which women are highly ornamental and men are much less so or not at all, emerged along with certain shifts in economic structure and cultural values, including women's work being disappeared from public view so that married women were increasingly regarded as ornaments and economic drains to their husbands rather than household managers and economic assets, and fashion being considered less a luxury that upper class people enjoyed and more a waste of time that frivolous people enjoyed.

So the conversations I'm seeing now about whether certain characters don't get enough respect because they're feminine, where feminine is defined as highly focused on and invested in fashion and make-up, are really bugging me. I mean, I used to be uncomfortable with those kinds of conversations because I could see that both sides had some good points. But now it has become really clear to me that the very terms of debate are more full of problems than I had consciously recognized. In addition to the issues that are entirely about gender in and of itself, it also bothers me that these conversations completely erase the matters of class and poverty. All of this really settled for me while I was thinking about recent commentary on The Hunger Games, in which people asserted that the series is anti-femininity because it's about people who are too poor to pursue fashion as an end in itself rebelling against an oppressor class that revels in ever-changing fashions because they have the time and material resources to do so thanks to a sociopolitical structure that takes away resources produced by the former group. Supposedly, this valorizes the main character's so-called rejection of femininity (she was too busy keeping her little sister from starving to death to care about clothes and make-up) and disparages "girly things" (literally defined as "fashion and make-up") and the people who like them. Way to completely ignore all the themes, especially the entire issue of poverty and exploitation on which the whole story hangs.

Days after posting about it, I am still absolutely furious about the ongoing controversy (HOW IS THIS A CONTROVERSY?) over Hugo Schwyzer in feminist blogging circles and the hypocrisy of the feminists who are defending him (which include the usual suspects at Jezebel, Feministe, Pandagon, and now Feministing too . . . because the Feministing people couldn't watch Amanda Marcotte and part of the Feministe crew jump off a cliff and not jump too). I've followed horrendous messes in Blogland before. This one is hitting me in more places that hurt than most others could manage. Many important discussions are spinning off from it, and articulating exactly where I stand on the issues and why would require me to write about several very personal things that I usually prefer not to be too specific about-- including my religious beliefs and my mood disorder. I've been worrying over these things for hours on end . . . but then I take a step back and realize OH YEAH, THIS STARTED WITH AN ADMISSION OF ATTEMPTED MURDER!

Sorry, I just had to put that in all caps because I am still having trouble wrapping my brain around the concept of so many self-proclaimed champions of feminism giving a man a pass on trying to MURDER HIS GIRLFRIEND-- and not merely a pass to be considered an okay guy who gets the equivalent of invitations to all the right parties but a pass to continue presenting himself as a leader within the feminist movement and someone qualified to give advice on sex, relationships, and feminism. There are some conversations going on about whether men can or should be feminist leaders and spokespersons, and those are very interesting, but I would like to think that even the people taking the most extreme "Sure, men can do whatever they want too!" position should acknowledge that this particular man's actions disqualify him. I've done a lot of thinking (and a lot of having All the Feelings) about the religious angle and the addiction/recovery angle, and . . . and I almost typed a 100-word sentence and followed it up with "ARRRRRGH!" At this point, it's sufficient to say that much of the discussion around those issues serves Hugo well by drawing the people who find basically everything about him objectionable into arguing about the merits of specific addiction and recovery models, arguing about whether alcoholics and narcissists are targets of ablism, and either bashing his religion or debating theological points. I could write fifteen posts on those related issues, but you know what? I keep coming back to thinking how incredibly wrong it is that this whole thing ever got started in the first place. Seriously, how are we even having this conversation?

I really, really need to kick my fandomsecrets habit. There's always something that makes me want to throw furniture. This time, it started with some jerk whining about losing to a little kid in an Adventure Time-related contest. Then another jerk decided to commiserate because the second jerk once had to give up a chance to pet a tapir so that a little girl in a wheelchair could pet it instead, which brought on a chain of people whining about how children with disabilities shouldn't get special treatment (non-special treatment being whatever is appropriate for able-bodied adults) and the incident will teach the girl that she can have anything she wants because she is in a wheelchair and therefore make her whiny and spoiled. Trust me, people with visible disabilities know they can't have everything they want. They learn that pretty early. Then again, who would listen to me? I'm one of those awful people who believe adults shouldn't enter contests against children in the first place.

Yet another fandom has recently been rocked by shocking news of character blackness: Click for evidence of how far we as a society have not come The linked post collects evidence of racefail, plus some gayfail in case the skeevy race issues weren't disappointing enough.

Two significant characters in The Hunger Games are obviously described as being black in the book. One of them is in the first wave of character posters for the upcoming movie, and some people who claim to have read the book are unhappy to discover that a black actress has been cast in that role. I do not understand how anyone who grew up in the US could have read the book and missed that Rue is supposed to be black. Apparently the white default is very, very strong. Furthermore, there are characters who are described in racially vague or ambiguous ways in the book, and one of them is to be played by Lenny Kravitz, in response to which news even more people are revealing the gross undersides of their flipped lids. Also, Cinna is a male character who designs clothing for female characters, so gay stereotyping abounds in the discussion.

Fine. Okay. I'm sex-negative. I'll cop to that. If "sex-negative" is going to be the common descriptor for anyone who has noticed that our species has far too long a history of people using sex to hurt other people for any and all sexuality to be an undiluted good, I'll wear that label proudly. If the alternative is cheering for every male author who writes a story in which a woman initiates sex, even if she appears to do so reluctantly and with little expectation of enjoyment, even if she's an amnesiac escaped slave, or even if she aggressively persists after the person she's trying to have sex with pushes her away, then I'll be sex-negative til the day I die. I'm not slut-shaming. I'm sexist-writer/artist-shaming.

There's a trend of people on LJ complaining/worrying about "fandom" moving to Tumblr and kids these days and the internet sky falling and such. I don't think this is any big deal because it seems to me that Tumblr is better suited than journals to posting screencaps, scans, and fan art, while journals are better suited to posting fic (especially long fic) and having fannish discussions that aren't a total pain to follow. Anyway, there's a lot of "Get off my lawn!" and "Weep, weep in these degenerate times for the passing of a nobler age!" in the fear of a Tumblrized planet. The best part is when such sentiments are expressed in the context of blaming the increasing popularity of Tumblr for the lack of activity on kink memes. I mean, kink memes are pretty new themselves, right? I know I've seen other people complaining that kink memes are ruining journal-based fandom by encouraging people to write shorter fic than they did back in the glory days.

One of the frustrating things about discussing the obstacles society places in the way of people who fall into certain categories is that some of the people who get involved in the conversation tend to assume that when you talk about Category X, you are speaking of the LEAST marginalized members of Category X. For example, "women" is often taken to mean "normatively abled, thin, conventionally attractive, straight, white women who have great social skills and are loved by middle-or-higher-class white men and totally comfortable with that," whereas "disabled people" is often taken to mean "straight white men who either have disabilities that do not prevent them from holding down middle-class jobs or have family money that takes care of all their needs."

One particular type of this phenomenon has been especially prominently displayed recently: Women bloggers say, "Hey, men, this behavior right here? It scares women. Don't do it." Then a bunch of men (and sometimes a few women who feel that those mean OTHER women are being too harsh with perfectly nice guys) respond with, "But what about non-neurotypical people? What about introverts? What about shy people? What about geeks? It's ABLIST to tell men not to treat women in certain ways. The men are just socially awkward and clueless. They have Asperger's. They don't know how not to be creepy." In all the discussions of this kind that I've witnessed so far, the people on the pro-feminist side come back with some variation of "It's sexist and victim-blaming to expect women to know the difference between a guy who does something scary because he doesn't know any better and a guy who does something scary because he's planning to do something worse. We are outright TELLING socially inept men what they should avoid doing in order to avoid scaring women away. Ignoring these basic rules of social interaction can be interpreted as a sign that you don't care how the person you're trying to get close to feels about you and might ignore their wishes in general, and you can't expect women to know you're not quite THAT bad." That's a good point, but something's missing. Sometimes, a few people point out that those who genuinely don't know how to interact with others are usually happy to be explicitly told the "rules" of social interaction and apologetic about having unwittingly broken them and that whenever they've witnessed an adult get called on disturbing behavior at a social gathering, the adult in question responded like someone who had already known that he (it's usually a he in these situations) was skating on thin ice. Someone might bring up the idea that this is all a smoke screen because a genuine introverted geek with AS who gets a woman cornered is more likely to tell her about his model trains or his comic book collection and expect her to care almost as much as he does than to proposition her or touch her. Fair enough, but something is still missing.

What's been missing from the discussion so far is acknowledgment of the women (and people who get read as women by other people, regardless of whether they think of themselves as women) who are themselves shy, introverted, socially awkward, on the autistic spectrum, getting through life with anxiety disorders (including SOCIAL ANXIETY, HELLO?), coping with PTSD due to past stalking/sexual abuse/intense bullying (yes, it happens to girls too!), or any of the other things that might make them less well-equipped than the stereotypical feminine social butterfly to deal with getting hit on by a guy who either can't tell or won't admit that the woman he's chosen is not interested. What's missing is any mention of the people who have just as much trouble navigating social situations as any man but who are expected to have a natural talent for it because social interaction is supposed to be a special strength of girls, the people who have to deal with everything the ever-so-put-upon socially awkward men have to deal with PLUS years of cultural training that the most important quality they can or should possess is niceness. Another thing that's missing is acknowledgment that, just as not everyone who has social difficulties is male, it can also be said that not everyone who has social difficulties is heterosexual. Strangely, I haven't noticed anyone in these discussions defending the right of socially inept men to make disconcerting advances toward other men or even considering that such a possibility exists. Surely there would be some mention of this possibility if everyone who fits into these vaguely defined categories of people-who-can't-be-expected-to-interact-normally were really THAT oblivious to social cues. If Socially Inept Guy A can't even tell that Neurotypical Woman B is afraid of him, he probably can't tell that Neurotypical Guy C is straight either. If he genuinely is THAT clueless and/or THAT unable to control his actions, where are all the comments castigating Guy C for freaking out when a fellow convention attendee kept trying to give HIM backrubs outside the dealer's room? I've heard "creepy person coming onto me at a con" stories of the m-->m, f-->f, and f-->m persuasions, but I've only ever heard the creepers seriously defended and the creeped-out people scolded for ablism when the off-putting behavior was male on female.

Those of you who know me already know of my long frustration with the woobification of rich boys who treat everyone around them like dirt. It's bad enough when the excuse is "His daddy didn't love him, so that justifies every bad thing he's ever done in the name of either pleasing his father or taking his understandable resentment of his father and/or more favored sibling(s) out on people who have nothing to do with his family issues." Now I've seen fandom's rich-douchebag-defenders reach a new low-- arguing that we should cut slack to silver-spooned racists, imperialist oppressors, and domestic abusers when they abuse the people they presume their inferiors because the poor dears were raised to believe in their own natural right to control and abuse others. So the dude has an overwhelming entitlement complex, but that's okay because he was raised to have an overwhelming entitlement complex.