Gay marriage, guys. Gay marriage. I was at a Utah hospital yesterday when the news came on the waiting room TV, and my friend and I were all “nice!” and then this cute blonde butch-looking receptionist looked stealthily around her and made eye contact with us and did a lil thumbs-up and it was a righteous moment. I mean, long way to go.
The curious case of “Oh No They Didn’t” and how it got jacked by white people:
If the site sounds like any other gossip rag online, that’s precisely what makes it unique: It was started, in 2004, by three black teenagers—Erin Lang, Bri Draffen, and Breniecia Reuben—who were looking for a place where “Black ‘indie’ kids who felt out of place [could] talk about music (and life) with other Black kids,” blogger Rafi Dangelo has written about the teens. Youth of color contributed the majority of the comment threads. The site’s mission, according to its founders, was to create a safe space where members could discuss pop culture with an authentically black voice without being exclusively black. Because users of the site both created and read the content, site members believed they were reading gossip “by the people, for the people.”
Oh, honey, no. This thing is…incredible:
I think it’s worse when they shove it in there. Sanjay and Craig is a really good example, which funnily enough is written in part by Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi from Pete & Pete. That show is awkward because there’s actually no reason for that character to be Indian — except for the fact that [Nickelodeon President] Cyma Zarghami and the women who run Nickelodeon now are very obsessed with diversity.
Some more Supreme Court cases to watch out for.
The luminous and perfect Geoffrey Holder has passed away. Everything he did was the MOST fun.
There’s some kind of new Twin Peaks thing, it seems, maybe you want to discuss it, IDK.
Kate Harding shared this on Facebook and was all “oh, so promising until you felt the need to tell us you aren’t a feminist, bro.” And then it wasn’t very good but I guess I’m glad he won’t be on all-male panels anymore.
Our reader Ellen, who keeps an eye out for vintage misandry for us, sent along this gem from the 1931 Plattsburgh State Normal School yearbook:
The LEGENDARY Jane Marie will be here on Wednesday doing an interview with Diane Cook about her new collection of short stories, Man V. Nature, so we are happy to see it getting some nice buzz!
She went on staring at me with haughty insolence. Marie-Laure was tall, and much stouter than the fashionable woman I’d seen in pictures from the nineteen-thirties and in portraits by Dali, Man Ray, Balthus, and Picasso. The features of her pale, aquiline face, which was framed by a mop of wild black hair, had begun to droop. As I proceeded to interview her, any trace of tolerance she might have had for me was diminished by my lack of an adequate retort to the one query she put to me: “Men who love Proust have short penises, don’t you think?” Then she looked at her watch and said, in crisp British-accented English, “I must go. I have a date with my gyno in twenty minutes.”
OK, this is maybe going to sound really petty and difficult, but I’d really appreciate we call it ‘same sex marriage’ or ‘equal marriage’ instead of gay marriage. Bisexual, asexual, trans etc people are frequently removed and erased from the equal marriage discussions and it effects us, too.
The constant use of ‘gay’ to mean LGBTQ+ in even quite progressive arenas is something that really hurts and is a microagression.
I agree–I prefer “marriage equality” myself, but if the context is already given, I think “marriage” is sufficient. Example: text from one of my best friends yesterday (context: we’re both lesbians) was simply “marriage is legal in Indiana.”
That is a really excellent point. I have a friend who always corrects me if I slip and say “gay marriage”, but laying out in print who is being erased when I am too lazy for the extra syllables is helpful.
It’s not petty at all. I generally use ‘same-sex marriage’, but you definitely won’t see me using ‘equal marriage’ or ‘marriage equality’ unless that’s actually what we’re talking about – and more often than not, it isn’t. Recognizing same-sex marriage is absolutely a step in the right direction, but ultimately, it’s just a patch on the basic problem that it is inherently discriminatory to legally define and recognize marriage at all.
SO conflicted about the refusal to rule in on marriage equality. I mean, yeah, we get our lower court rulings, but future Supremes could rule against it at any time. It just feels like they’re waffling, and I’m not going to celebrate until I have a country-wide ruling in our favor.
I completely understand your conflicted feeling, but I’m choosing to view this as “any future court can only be MORE likely to rule in favor of marriage equality” so it’s therefore a good thing, although they did totally wuss out this time.
I don’t think that’s true at all. I think the current Court is extremely likely to rule in favor of marriage equality, but if Ginsburg is replaced by a GOP appointee, no chance.
Quiet you, I’m trying to be irrationally optimistic! I mean, you’re right and all, but just let me have this.
Well, I’m optimistic that the Court will jump in and do the right thing once one of the appeals courts does the wrong thing, and it looks like the Sixth Circuit will be doing the wrong thing in the near future.
I disagree. I think if they were extremely likely to rule in favor, they would have taken the cases. I haven’t been watching the court super closely in the last year, but I don’t think you can count on Kennedy being fully on board.
Man, I read it completely opposite. I thought it was a beautiful smackdown, like a totally dismissive “We won’t even waste our time with this shit anymore” refusal. “This is not longer worthy of our attention, listen to the lower courts, this is child’s play,” etc. I mean, they DID issue an actual decision in 2013, right?
A tacit agreement seems like the best kind of agreement, IMHO. It means the conversation can start to change.
Procedurally, they need the circuit split. Maybe not NEED, but if they take a case without a disagreement amongst the circuit courts, the ruling is much easier to construe as ~judicial activism~, which is exactly what we don’t need. The Supreme Court mostly exists to settle disagreements between the different circuit courts, and right now the circuits that have ruled have all ruled in favor of marriage equality. I think that it’s probably going to depend on how the Fifth Circuit deals with Louisiana. We may never get a Supreme Court ruling.
Publishing, too! You might not like this or care, but it’s very hard to be a man in the publishing world. No one talks about that. My agent: woman. My editor: woman. My publicist: woman. The most successful genre is young adult novels — 85% of which are written by women. That discussion doesn’t really come up when it’s the other way around. It is 2014 now. It’s not 1995. Political correctness needs to change.
LET ME PLAY YOU A SONG ON THE WORLD’S TINIEST VIOLIN. Jesus God, everything in that article is fucking infuriating. Really, it’s exploitative to have people who are non-white and not male and disabled portrayed on television? What the fuck are you SMOKING?
I also love (hate) when he says something about how TV writers and editors are mostly women, then adds “And that’s fine, that’s how it is,” implying that it’s not at all fine. Good job, guy.
And he does that repeatedly! “Well, that’s fine, that’s just how it is” does not actually make you sound like you think it’s fine, you make it sound like there needs to be some correction in that.
Where is Edith Arnold, she could teach this guy a thing or two.
TV WRITERS ARE NOT ALL WOMEN THOUGH. YOU’RE LUCKY IF TV WRITING STAFF IS 50/50.
As a friend pointed out, his own logic shows that women run publishing because we’re simply naturally better at it. Not biased! Just the facts!
That guy is out of his mind and I hope he gets bedbugs.
Ooooo, Good curse. I’m stealing that curse.
I think the most infuriating thing in the world is white men who think that portraying or celebrating ANYONE ELSE is somehow exploitative and anti-them.
His whole THERE NEEDS TO BE A REEEEAAAASON FOR A CHARACTER TO NOT BE A WHITE MALE thing was entirely ridiculous. He’s so convinced of his state as “default human” that asking “why NOT have this character be anything but a straight white male” would break him.
Well, don’t you know that White Male really is the default? Everyone can identify and sympathize with them! Having all white men characters really IS diversity — the whiteness is a beautiful blank canvas for every race to project themselves onto! See? Diversity! But, for the sake of argument, sure, we can thrown in some Very Special Episodes about ethnicity and race, I guess. But that’s really being almost too generous. And also, well, men > women so of course women don’t really need to see other women doing anything.
(My sarcasm may be a bit heavy-handed here as I have not entirely woken up yet.)
I once sat in a panel on the future of sf publishing, where the Serious Professionals were being urged by the proletariat down in the audience to speak about the lack of diversity, and what was scariest to me is that…the white dudes on the panel were so apparently honestly confused. One of them actually said, “Well, if a person of color can’t identify with a white protagonist, isn’t that just a failure of imagination?”
Yeah. It’s *people of color* whose failure of imagination is on clear display here. Good call, Serious Professional. Checks out!
(The lone white woman on the panel responded to my gf’s entirely courteous question about lack of representation in hard science fiction with, “Well, there’s your problem! You should be reading fantasy; there are a lot more female characters there.” Which… okay, but… she’s a science fiction fan? And the solution for her is really just, “No prob, abandon your genre and find one that isn’t onlyt for boys!” The panel was just a really uplifting experience in general.)
Also New Jersey – where everyone is white! (????????)
Yeah, editors and publicists are women, but the executives are almost all men. And guess who those men promote as their eventual successors?
“But…..there are lots of women. Where are all the men? Won’t someone think of the men? It’s like 85% women!!!”
Something tells me that if this guy was presented with the results of that study that says that when women represent 20-30% of any given sample, men tend to interpret it as even, and when women actually represent 50%, men interpret it as being heavily female-dominated, his head would explode. [This is one of my patented I Heard This Somewhere And Am Probably Repeating It Incorrectly moments, but I’m so frustrated that I don’t care.]
Is it this?
We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.
From here, though I’ve tried and failed to find the actual study anywhere…
Yes!!!! Thank you! I wish I could find the actual data, though.
ME TOO. It would be so great to have for discussions like these, but I’ve scoured the internets and haven’t found where it came from. Grr, I want my peer-reviewed smackdowns!
Oh, and there’s a bit more specifically about speaking time in groups:
Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.
From here (with some citations/further reading at the bottom).
Also try Applied Psycholinguistics 11 (1990), 253-272
Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk
ANNE CUTLER
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
DONIA R. SCOTT
University of Sussex
What the shit.
I’ve heard the same thing with racial integration of neighborhoods, actually — on the average, white people see a neighborhood as integrated when it’s only about 10-20% “other”, and would feel like they were in the minority if the street was 50-50.
Somewhere in Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw he talks about conducting his own personal experiment with this. In large groups that he perceived as 50% women, he did a head count, and discovered that it was actually around a third. With groups that he perceived as roughly 2/3 women, the head count revealed they were actually around 50%. I read this book when it first came out, in the late 70s, and Delany’s account has been a powerful touchstone for me ever since.
My husband actually caught his boss doing that very thing, and I believe there was some amount of head exploding when it was realized that women weren’t “dominating” a team, and were in fact not even half of it. And a certain amount of head removal from ass, as well, since his boss is a pretty decent person who cannot help that he is a white dude.
God, RIGHT?! As the latest salary survey from Publishers Weekly reveals, “The average compensation for men in 2013 was $85,000, the same as in 2012, while average compensation for women rose to $60,750 last year, up from $56,000 the year before. Women filled at least 70% of the jobs in sales and marketing, operations, and editorial, but only 51% of the management positions.”
And can we touch on the fact that publishing is super, super white? Again, from PW: “[O]f the 630 respondents who identified their race, 89% described themselves as white/Caucasian, with 3% selecting Asian and another 3% indicating Hispanic. Only 1% said they are African-American.” It’s a small sample size but this data seems pretty representative to me.
I love this industry but we DEFINITELY have a gender and race problem. And while I’m at it, I’m going to say we have a class problem too. Most people can’t afford to complete the unpaid internships required to get a foot in the door.
(Source: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/indus…
former publishing person who wholeheartedly agrees re: all of it, but especially the class problem.
“Former”? Where did you goooooo? Sometimes I think about leaving and then I just don’t know what to do with myself. “I know how to edit other people’s sentences!” I say, to a field of crickets and am offered no jobs ever.
Look into technical writing. It’s what I do now and it’s pretty soulless, but depending on the industry (like, if you want to go oil/gas, *really* soulless), it can pay mighty well.
…Yes, I am a technical writer who works in the oil/gas industry and is planning very hard to make the jump to publishing asap. I have to at least try, or I will die small and ashamed.
All of it is incredibly stupid, but the point about YA is just incredibly off. Even if 85% of it is written by women (and I’d like to see where he got that figure) John Green, Scott Westerfeld and others are clearly doing fine.
Not to mention the current rhetoric around YA, which in many people’s eyes (although generally not the people who are actually in/into YA) has been “saved” by John Green. I think the articles about this have died down a bit, but I follow a number of female YA writers on twitter and when the TFIOS movie was released there was a lot of discontent with how mainstream media was discussing the issue. Namely, in the way I mentioned above, by erasing and ignoring the accomplishments of women in order to prop up John Green, a man.
I’ll also note that the blame for this does not lie with John Green himself, but the people writing about him. In a number of interviews I read, he mentions and discusses the work of women in the field.
Not to mention, YA is finally getting a bit of respect but for a long time has been seen as a “lesser” genre than male-dominated genres. I mean, the romance novel industry is probably more than 85% women and makes more money than all the other genres combined, but “romance novel writer” is still practically an insult in a lot of circles.
The cognitive dissonance, it burns:
“TV is dominated by white men, and that’s because they’re the best. If women and minorities want to succeed in TV, theyneed to be better.”
“Publishing is dominated by women, and they discriminate against men. It’s really unfair and hard.”
Interviewer: But what about the incredibly popular Clarissa?
Awful Male: No, that is not success. Success is when me and my bro friends like something.
Making it even better is that he was publicizing an event for HIS BOOK. I bet his lady publicist and editor felt so valued and proud.
He’s just sad his Trouble Male Antihero isn’t doing so well
The interview Pilot conducted with Mr. No Self Awareness is truly fascinating. It’s very much a car wreck thing where you can’t stop reading, even though you know it’s not good for you to see it. She tries to help dig him out of so many holes throughout it, and it literally never works.
I know! I kept waiting for him to realize how bad he was sounding and backtrack, but nope, he just doubled down on being awful!
I could only read it in chunks because it was so appalling, and it kept getting worse!
1920’s misandrist glee club. Now there’s a TV series that won’t fall apart in the second season.
Jane Lynch in flapper garb.
I didn’t have access to Nickelodean when I was kid (hurray for rural Canadian basic cable), but seems to me this guy is nostalgic for an all white male world that has never existed. Love how when the interviewer says “all my friends love Clarissa”, he replies with “ah, no women love Clarissa. Not everybody. And by everybody, I mean white guys like me. Who love Pete & Pete.”
And that Maclean’s article. “I am not a feminist because I know men and women are equal. But I am proudly a recipient of old boys’ club privilege and that’s cool. And Emma Watson is too young and actressy (and female) to understand what’s she talking about. And boring. Stop boring me women with your complaints. I have nothing to learn from you. But do I get a feminist cookie for my moment of enlightenment that women are 50% of the population and should be represented on panels so they don’t ask me questions I can’t answer?”
I am tired of mainstream publications telling me what men think about feminism.
In other news, I’m trying to excise “I think” and “It seems to me” from my writing (emails, comments, tweets) because it’s better to declare than soften.
And what’s more: he never actually points out why Pete & Pete was so great. Nor Ren and Stimpy. And for what it’s worth, even as a kid I hated Ren and Stimpy, I found it gross and unsettling. And Pete & Pete? Was boring. So if you can’t tell us why you think these shows are so awesome….maybe they’re not so awesome, you just liked them because you were a kid who enjoyed them because THEY REFLECTED WHO YOU WERE AS A WHITE BOY.
Wow, it’s almost like seeing representations of yourself in the media makes a difference, wow.
As a little girl, I adored Ren & Stimpy. It was probably my favorite thing on TV. I liked that it was really absurdist and strange, which I guess is a “boy thing” now. Or always was. Who knows.
We weren’t allowed to watch Ren & Stimpy, so when I did watch it, it was mainly because it was a forbidden fruit. I don’t remember really liking it for what it was.
I think I was just old enough with Ren & Stimpy that I could kind of tell what they were going for, and what I was *supposed* to get out of it, so I watched it (because I wanted to try to *get* the joke) even though I just didn’t actually enjoy it.
And the whole “everyone was talking about it” + “everyone I talked to only talked about Pete & Pete and Ren and Stimpy”–I’m willing to put a hefty amount of money down that everyone=white guys. AND WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO DECIDE WHAT’S GOOD AND WHAT’S NOT. ugh, where’s that sea again?
Ren & Stimpy made me nauseous and anxious. Pet and Pete was sooooo boring. Clarissa 4ever.
My daughter’s friends were the first to be married in Arlington VA at the Courthouse! She is so excited, She wrote her IB thesis on Same Sex Marriage and was told by her teacher “This will never happen” so she is pretty pleased that it has. And she emailed him the ruling, to make sure he saw it.
Your daughter seems pretty fucking kickass. Good work!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2014/10/0…
Here are the Happy Couple!
<3 <3 <3
CHRIST, Scott Gilmore, what an asshole.
“When Vanity Fair breathlessly announces that Emma Watson has just given a game-changing speech on women’s rights, I roll my eyes and turn the page. I don’t have much to learn about equality from an undergrad with a talent for playing make-believe.”
Try to be a little more condescending, shitbird.
“The politics of tokenism does nothing for me and I have little time for those who claim they lack opportunity.”
WTF, mister.
The entire piece is basically “I fully acknowledge that women are discriminated against, but I think they shouldn’t talk about it because that’s just whining. If they want someone to talk about it, they can ask me and I will write an article about it for them”
I stopped reading Maclean’s (not that I ever read it on a regular basis, but now I won’t even look at it) when their cover story on the Quebec student protests was titled “100 Days of Cutting Class.” Yeah, because that’s what it was all about! Just a bunch of millenials who wanted to play hooky! The accessibility of higher education is by no means an important issue in modern society.
That entire magazine is a condescending shitbird.
That entire magazine is a condescending shitbird.
TOTALLY.
I started dropping it when they kept on publishing Mark Steyn’s editorials about his own human rights case. They all blur together, but I seem to remember that the best argument he could come up with was putting “clever” “quotation marks” at random around the words “human rights” and pretending that this excused his obvious racism.
Myself, I don’t have much learn about equality from a blowhard with a talent for pressing keys.
I’m not sure I’d even call what he has a “talent”. An unpleasant habit of pressing keys, maybe.
Oh my god. SHITBIRD. Yesyesyesyesyesyesyessssssssss.
Right??? For some reason I have yet to incorporate the excellent insult that is “shitbird” into my daily vocabulary. What have I been doing with my life until now??
THIS MAN IS THE FIRST ONE WE SEND TO THE ISLAND: “You might not like this or care, but it’s very hard to be a man in the publishing world. No one talks about that. My agent: woman. My editor: woman. My publicist: woman. The most successful genre is young adult novels — 85% of which are written by women. That discussion doesn’t really come up when it’s the other way around. It is 2014 now. It’s not 1995. Political correctness needs to change.”
OH REALLY, DUDE? IT’s “so hard to be a man”?
“You might not like this or care, but it’s very hard to be a man in the publishing world. ”
“Yeah, I don’t. Care, I mean. I don’t care.”
But don’t you see, no one likes listening to men complain about how hard it is to be a man when doing standup but WOMEN get away with it. NO ONE WANTS TO LISTEN TO HIM COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW HARD IT IS BEING A MAN AND WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP INSISTING A SHOW STARRING A GIRL WAS EVER POPULAR EVER AND WHY ISN’T THERE A WHITE MALE DORA THE EXPLORER YET??? :(((
“All real-life explorers were white men, and look how great that turned out for everyone!”
A+++ Joke, would thumbs-up again!
Island? Fuck no. Piranha tank. SLOWLY into the piranha tank he goes.
This reminded me of that guy who wrote an article a few months back complaining about the lack of representation of men in Orange Is The New Black, which I can’t be bothered to find now but was also like “CRY ME A FUCKING RIVER, BRO”.
Similarly, I remember reading a comment that Scott and Bailey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_%26_Bailey) isn’t that good, no better than any other TV police drama, and it’s only so popular because all the storylines are focussed on women. The guy writing didn’t seem to realise that that was way more a criticism of *every other TV police drama* than it was of Scott and Bailey.
It’s really, really hard having something like 99% of the world’s wealth and 80% (maybe 70? pretty sure is more like 80) of the world’s political positions. Sooo hard being a dude.
I am officially only going to care about men’s issues and men’s equality when those two numbers are 50/50 for men and women. I anticipate never having to care about men’s issues in my lifetime.
Oh cool, I think I no longer have corporeal form and exist solely as an incandescent ball of rage. Good thing I didn’t try to read the whole article!
ETA: Shit, that was supposed to be a reply to ArsenioB_Ham! What gives?
WE CAN BE RAGE BALLS TOGETHER.
You have evolved to your true form, congratulations!
INCANDESCENCE!
I have also noticed that my reply button has been a bit faulty lately.
Rather than petty and difficult, I find your stance really interesting because that never would have occurred to me. Personally, I’m a little uncomfortable with “same sex marriage” (or “opposite sex” anything) because I think it reinforces a false dichotomy of gender, which is why I also don’t identify as bi. I tend to read “gay marriage” as “queer marriage,” so it feel inclusive to me, but you’re right, that’s not what it says, and now I can think about it in a different light! Rich tapestries. I tend to use “marriage equality” or just wordless screams like a dolphin, because I am just so psyched and invigorated by the non-ruling, which I feel is the best way to avoid a) the split court ruling AGAINST it or b) spawn yet another decades-long right-wing persecution complex like Roe v. Wade.
I keep looking back in the past to teenage me and wondering if she would even believe where we are now (she wouldn’t). I still live in one of the 20 (20!!! Less than half!) states where marriage isn’t equal, but I CANNOT WAIT, I’m just so excited, everybody, I’m going to go lie down now.
I don’t expect people who aren’t in QUILTBAG/MOGAI circles to think of it that way. It comes from a place where (I can only speak for bisexual women here, as that is what I am) bisexual women are treated like shit in QUILTBAG/MOGAI groups, ignored and erased, expected to use the ‘gay umbrella’ when talking about what we suffer, and never allowed to express the unique biphobia we experience.
Basically we’re supposed to stay in gay groups but not talk in gay groups. We don’t need our own safe spaces, but we aren’t supposed to talk in LG spaces.
The constant use of ‘gay’ to refer to MOGAI people erases us and contributes to that general feeling that we don’t belong in queer society, that we are the least queer, that we’re (trigger warning, these are vile things said to me by gay people) ‘cock worshipping sluts who are sexually available to men’.
But we get married too. We suffer biphobia AND homophobia. We EXIST and we don’t have it any easier.
I would like the language used by progressives to include us and not assign us existence as a subset of gay. We are a unique and individual sexuality all of our own.
Equal rights, LGBTQA rights please.
And I know you don’t mean it this way, but Bisexual DOES NOT reinforce a false gender bibanry. Bisexuals are attracted to multiple genders, not necessarily in the same way, or in the same degree. ‘Reinforcing the gender binary’ is one of the many biphobic things thrown at us, when it isn’t thrown at say, lesbians or gay men.
We disagree on a few points, but I’m sorry I offended you.
I am using the description of bisexual used by all major bisexual organisations worldwide.
Bisexuals (especially trans bisexuals and bisexuals of colour) are more likely to experience sexual violence, including corrective rape; homelessness; physical assault. Overwhelmingly so. We even experience these things within MOGAI groups.
You didn’t offend me. I’m too used to this to be offended. You hurt me.
But thanks for the apology.
How do you feel about the use of “queer” as an umbrella term?
I ask because I recently saw some outcry about it that made me think. I’ve always referred to myself as queer (rather than bisexual, though I do rapidly correct people who call me a lesbian) because it feels more like an umbrella term and I usually don’t feel like being particularly specific about my orientation, but maybe I’ve been using it in a problematic way.
(For the record, I totally agree about avoiding the term “gay marriage” and about the unique prejudices bisexuals face.)
I have no objections to people using it for themselves; I don’t like people using it as an umbrella term because there’s a lot of people for whom it’s a slur.
Do you prefer the term bisexual to pansexual? I tried using pansexual to describe myself for a while because of hearing about the reinforcing gender binary business but NOBODY KNEW WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT ANYMORE. So I went to calling myself ‘bisexual or pansexual or whatever’. It’s… it’s not great. It is kinda pissy since my sexuality doesn’t give a shit about gender but ‘reinforcing the gender binary’ is all tied up in confusing knots around our identity.
my understanding is that bisexual and pansexual are actually different. Bisexual is multiple genders, Pansexual is all genders equally, which is why I identify as Bi rather than Pan.
Y’know I’m glad you brought this up. Made me do some reading.
There’s such a big difference between how people who identify as bisexual (and their organisations) talk about bisexuality and how others talk about it. The terms homosexual and heterosexual also lexically buy into a gender binary but it’s bisexuals that are the problem. This is some erasing bullshit right here.
I like this too. “So in other words, the “bi” in bisexual does not merely refer to the types of people that I am sexual with, but to the fact that both the straight and queer worlds view me in two very different ways depending upon who I happen to be partnered with at any given moment.” Julia Serano
So thanks for posting Owl Queen!
we just had our 10-year anniversary of marriage equality in massachusetts a little while ago! sometimes i forget that there are still a whole 20 other states that do not have it. the new normal!
THAT DUDE.
omg, he spends one paragraph saying “Why does someone who’s making something about a black person need to be black? Why does someone making a show about an Indian person need to be Indian? Why does someone making a show about women need to be a woman? If you’re making something about an alien, you don’t need to be an alien to do it.” and then the next paragraph says that people making things about other cultures is akin to blackface!
IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE A JUICEBOX AT LEAST BE INTERNALLY CONSISTENT ABOUT IT!
I was so confused by that! His stance goes from offensive in one way to even more offensive in another!
It also doesn’t make any sense. If white folks can write about people of different ethnicities/races well, they why don’t they/shouldn’t they? An argument of “TV is very white because most TV writers’ rooms are very white” makes sense, and then we need to diversity the writers’ rooms. If you’re saying “yeah, the writers’ rooms are white, but that’s okay because you don’t have to be a person of color to write about people of color” then we have NO EXCUSE for why TV is so ridiculously white.
But of course, white dudes have a hard time understanding what it might feel like to not find anyone who looks like you on TV, since they have never experienced this. They think it is totally fine to ask the rest of the world to identify with them, but when they are asked to identify with a non-white character, they don’t know what to do.
That was the exact part where I stopped reading.
Mostly because, seriously, GUY?!?! Slippery Slope Much?!?!
But also because THAT part was kind of going against a prior argument he made and was now refuting.
Omg Pilot Viruet is a saint for that interview.
Who wants to make tshirts that just say “WHITE IS NOT THE DEFAULT”?
Also, “at what age did you become yourself?” BEST QUESTION.
I am an unapologetic member in good standing of the old boys club. I believe men and women are different. I don’t trust quotas or tokenism. But I am also practical. I recognize that if you ignore 50 per cent of the population, you’re never going to achieve what is potentially possible. It is absurd to suggest any enterprise that intentionally excluded half the talent pool could thrive.
Sooo, “Put a few women on my panel because they are just as competent and do just as much worthwhile shit as men do, but JUST SO WE’RE CLEAR, I don’t actually think women are, like, real people worthy of being in my club and all that. Because that would interfere with my rugged Hemingwayesque (Hemingwegian?) masculinity.”
Sounds a bit tokenising to me.
Interesting about Oh No They Didn’t! I sadly had no idea about the whole story. One of my interviews for my academic project was with a couple of African-American Game of Thrones fans who said they used to comment on it until it got too negative and mean, and have since moved to Tumblr.
yes, that whole story is so uncomfortable (it reminds me in ugly ways of the history of early rock and roll). It confuses me that the whole ejection was even possible — that no one brings up copyright concerns, for example, for the site name and concept, which are now monetized, and which were clearly created by Lang. Why *doesn’t* she have a good case, and is that really an objective evaluation of the situation?
I have been lurking/occasionally commenting on ONTD for years and had no idea about its true origins either (I think the earliest ONTD I remember was when Britney Spears shaved her head?). It can be enormously vitriolic and I avoid about half the posts at this point tbh.
That whole article was utterly fascinating. I’ve never really engaged much with ONTD, but I was on Livejournal for *mumblety* years while it started to grow, and this does a lot to explain the general tone shifts in that community that were visible even from a distance.
I LOVED ONTD. Loved it. I started reading in late high school (03?) and kinda tapered off when I moved to NYC in 2010, but I was there when Anna Nicole Smith died and the site crashed and it was one of the most exciting things to happen to me that year. (My boyf at the time was… less than amused at my excitement.) I knew of brenden and ecctv when they were only avid commenters, yet somehow I had NO idea whatsoever that the founders were AfAm. That story is really disappointing.
‘I understand the idea of “There’s someone like me,” but … ”
No, white able-bodied man who’s never had to search for representations of yourself in the media, you don’t.
Also, p.s., I love this:
*Update: A publicist from Nickelodeon reached out to confirm that “yes, Clarissa was a HUGE hit, massive.”
Good. I loved Clarissa SO MUCH.
Ha! I’m imagining that being said in the same cadence as Julia Roberts chastising the snooty saleslady in Pretty Woman: “Big mistake. HUGE.”
I mean, she explained It All. All of It. Not just, like, some of it. All of it.
also, you are NOT an expert on the representation of ableism and what is offensive or not, regardless of your valiant volunteer experiences.
Hahaha, I misread “interview with Diane Cook” as “interview with Dane Cook”, and nearly had some kind of DATA MISMATCH aneurysm.
Just flopping around on the ground, smoke coming out of my ears like the robots from “I, Mudd”.
I had the same reaction, but the utter improbability of “collection of short stories” in that context prompted a corrective re-read.
MASSIVE CORN CLOG IN PORT SEVEN
lol Klickstein and his impassioned opposition to shows that center people of color. like what a hill to die on, bro.
I do have little use for tokens, but it’s not as if this was a thoughtful critique of tokenism. It was just mean and stupid.
History’s hills are littered with the bones of white men fighting to keep their power, but few of those hills are as undignified as Mount 90s Nickelodeon Nostalgia.
Ugh, that interview. I’d been wanting to read that oral history of Nickelodeon book because I was all about Nickelodeon as a kid (and I was never interested in Pete and Pete and Ren and Stimpy weirded me out, but I loved Clarissa BEFORE there was Sabrina the Teenage Witch [which I also loved]) but now that I know the author is such an idiot the desire has completely shriveled up.
Yes, his insistence that people (read: women) only liked Clarissa because of Sabrina the Teenage Witch was so annoying. Clarissa was cool as fuck! She had a pet alligator! Her outfits were zany! Her weird friend used a ladder to get into her room and no one seemed to care!
Sabrina was almost boring in comparison.
also it has the timeline wrong? I was super excited for Sabrina because it starred Clarissa!
That’s what I thought too?
Loved loved loved Clarissa as a 10-year-old girl. All of my other female friends religiously watched Clarissa too. Never watched Sabrina. Thanks for telling me about my own cultural experience, bro. (Also loved Pete & Pete, but found R&S completely terrifying and disgusting.)
That part irritated me enough the first time I read the interview that I never even got to the REALLY crappy parts later on. (Read the rest now, and HOLY SHIT.)
ITT: 90s girl-centered-show nostalgia. Secret World of Alex Mack? Anybody?
also, “there’s no reason for that character to be Indian”
why…does there have to be a reason
Why does there have to be a reason.
WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE A REASON?
It’s horribly indicative that the speaker sees no reason for people of other ethnicities to exist in his world, either. I mean, why would there be a reason to represent them in the fictional worlds he creates, if they have no place in the real world around him?
That was my first thought, too. What…is the reason that some people are Indian? What are you even looking for there? I mean, I get that as a writer you do tend to pick and choose details for your story based on your ultimate goals, but *everyone* incorporates some things just because they reflect the world as it exists. Why does a character know how to drive a car? Just — because a lot of people do, I guess! Like a lot of people are Indian! It’s such a bizarre question that it becomes immediately obvious that it’s coming out of a whole alien worldview wherein being non-white isn’t just a value-neutral set of characteristics, but a thing that actual people need to somehow explain or justify in order to be admitted into the category of Regular People. “You’d like to be a regular person, but also, you’re clearly ethnically east Asian. Can you say a little about that?” Uh…not really?
I’m not sure what annoyed me most about that interview, but I found myself feeling *really* defensive of Clarissa. That show was amazing, shut your face.
She had a window seat! And her friend would climb up into her window and they’d hang out! In her window seat!
I may have had a small obsession with window seats when I was a child.
That interview is CRAZY BANANAS and I must email it to every single person I know right this second. He can’t even get his own argument straight, saying in one paragraph that people don’t need to “be an alien” to write about them and then saying it’s predatory that none of the writers are indian on that show????? He literally just talks in circles trying desperately to create a viable world in which white men can and should be the creators of everything because THAT’S actually the way it’s “supposed to be.”
I also like the part where Klickstein is all, “I’m doing stand up now, and talking about how hard it is to be a guy, and no one wants to hear it!”
Good.
Klickbro
I would really like to post that quote about Proust (and penis-length) to FB, but a good 33% of my friends would probably feel personally victimized by it, and then there would be some awkward “let me subtly refer to the length of my penis” interactions. Better just to acknowledge its insight here, and move on.
I want that quote on a t-shirt.
I would like a t-shirt that says “I do not care about your penis”. I would quietly point at it aprox. eleventy times per day and watch dudes bluster ineffectually.
http://www.lookhuman.com/design/26731-nobody-care…
Some day I will own this shirt.
😀
TWIN PEAKS! So excited to have an excuse to rewatch the original (as well as the classic Sesame Street parody, “Twin Beaks”).
I only finished a rewatch two weeks ago so I can’t watch it again *just* yet. But I do have Coop’s autobiography and Laura’s secret diary to read in the meantime.
SO EXCITED.
Also, how crazy is it that the original show was on ABC? And had good ratings, at least in the first season? That seems impossible now, despite how far TV has come.
This is the thing that blows my mind too, and I’m old enough to have watched it when it aired. Twin Peaks proved that the American mainstream audience would watch and enjoy some pretty weird shows, and several of the shows that were made shortly after it aired (I’m thinking of Wild Palms, Picket Fences, The X-Files) would likely never have been made without that success.
I was struck by how freely he switched back and forth between Why does someone who’s making something about a black person need to be black? Why does someone making a show about an Indian person need to be Indian? and I just don’t understand why they feel that they need to do that. Why not have it be Indian creators doing it, and have it more about the Indian culture and Indian-American culture?, depending on… which one he felt like would win him more “totally not racist” points at that particular moment?
Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to one of the other threads about that asshole.
I mean, the fact that Gilmore immediately makes the automatic jump from equality/equal representation of women to “tokenism” (UGH) just speaks absolute VOLUMES.
It’s really a surprise that the one show featuring an Indian-American lead doesn’t compare to the best of the hundreds of shows with a white lead, viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of childhood nostalgia.
My name is Sanjay. It’s a pretty common name, though less so in the United States. Every time a character or person named Sanjay pops up in popular culture, someone sees fit to tell me about it. Granted, this is a relatively minor annoyance, but I think hidden in it is the sentiment “Isn’t it REMARKABLE that someone else has the name Sanjay?” It makes me feel foreign, weird.
So I heard about Sanjay and Craig. And frankly, the existence of this show makes me so happy. Here’s an American kid named Sanjay who is totally unremarkable (aside from his snake friend). Sure, I suspected (and later confirmed) that the character is Indian because of the Indian snake-charmer trope, but that’s not an important part of the show at all. The more I hear about Sanjay from Sanjay and Craig, the less I’ll hear about Sanjay from the Simpsons, or, hopefully, the less I’ll hear about these Sanjays at all.
It’s not just that I want to see myself on television. I want other people to see me too.
It probably goes without saying, but that Nickelodeon guy is so off-base.
I am an unapologetic member in good standing of the old boys’ club
Yeah, you know, not for long, bud. Rule number 1 of the Old Boys Club is Pretend There’s No Such Thing as the Old Boys’ Club.
Man, I can’t get over how angry this interview makes me.
Anyway, not to keep piling up on this Matthew Klickstein guy (except for how there is probably literally no better target in history for a furious internet dogpile), but Michelle Dean at Gawker has unearthed the fact that this dude is the author of an “erotic horror” novel that sounds like straight-up the grossest thing I have ever heard of.
http://review.gawker.com/nickelodeon-nostalgia-su…
I’ve been on ONTD for all those ten years (what’s up my fellow indoor/outdoor kids who love community driven websites), and can I just say that it fucking sucks now? People have started using it as a marketing device, and the current mods are actually making money off of it! Ugh.
Anyway, on to read the article. 2014, coming for your favs!
If “class man hater” were still a thing I could have been in the yearbook, I wouldn’t have hid from the yearbook kids all four years of high school. (There is literally only one, maybe two pictures of me in my high school yearbooks, to my own delight.)
Toasties! This is not related to anything here, but I chopped all my hair off, and I LOVE IT. I was growing it out out of laziness / experimentation, but I hated it even though I looked pretty. So I hacked it all off, and I have my short hair back, and I’m going around bragging to everyone about it, because YAAAAY SHORT HAIR. 😀
Congratulations! I hated my hair all my life but never cut it short because everyone always told me that with my round face and prominent ears I would look terrible with really short hair. Two years ago I finally took the plunge and got a pixie cut, and it is the BEST THING I ever did. I love it, it’s easy to take care of, and I get more compliments on it than I ever had before. Go short hair!
As someone who went to a convention cosplaying the Log Lady and was frustrated that no one got my costume (despite the fact that there was a Twin Peaks panel!!), this news makes me so, so happy.
I went as the Log Lady for Halloween a couple of years ago, and no one got it. Which was too bad, because my log (pillow) had lots of things to tell them.
I wanted to post this yesterday, but Life got in the way, so: THANK YOU Nicole for consistently putting together links that are both novel and profound, humorous and serious, crossing all points of interest in THE best possible way, giving rise to lively, intelligent (and at times rip-roaring funny) commentary that I fucking RELISH every single damn morning.
aww, thank you! I really love doing them.
This is off-topic but did anyone watch the premiere of Strange Empire last night? I LOVE IT ALL READY. Women helping women, women fighting with women, women having complicated relationships with other women and almost no men in sight! Also my dad kept stumping through the room and grumbling about MISANDRY and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS while I was watching it, so clearly they’re doing something right.
(Although on the subject of men in that show, I really hope Slotter makes himsef useful and kills Rebecca’s husband, because that dude is setting off a million Klaxon creepster alarms. “I love you so much honey! That’s why I took you in as my daughter, took credit for all your scientific achievements, showed you off as exhibitions like a prize cow, and married you as soon as my wife died!” EW EW EW GET IT OFF.)
“Also my dad kept stumping through the room and grumbling about MISANDRY and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS…”
I love this!
Yes. I loved Clarissa SO MUCH. So, I watched Sabrina hoping it would be Clarissa as a witch and… no. Seriously, no.
So I’ve been (slowly) (so slowly) watching season two of Twin Peaks on Netflix (it might have even dropped off Netflix before I finished it, that’s how slowly). I really enjoyed season one, but two has been rough going, to the point that I’ve been on the verge of dropping it altogether, except that I want to know how it ends and I like Dale Cooper. I hope this new Twin Peaks is more like season one, is I guess what I’m saying here.
Also, off-topic, but I just got an auto-play video ad for NFL Mobile and Verizon on here, and it rendered oddly in its ad space, and I was unable to mute it or stop it in any way as a result. I basically had to close the page and come back to keep from being really obviously not-working at work. Are video/sound ads a thing the Toast is going to be having more of in the future? If so, is there a way to demand that they not auto-play or something?
YES, for a while it was the Comcast ads trying to bust me at work, then that one today started when I was about halfway through the comments! Also, I remember Twin Peaks airing when I was a kid (pre-teen?), and seeing bits and pieces of a couple episodes, but I think I shall also try to revisit it on Netflix to see what I missed.
Season one of Twin Peaks was so good and then season two was meh. You are not missing anything. I also hope that the new show is more like season one. Do not even waste your time on the movie.
I also had the NFL Mobile ad and I had to shut my computer speakers off. The pause button and the mute button on the video would not work. I second the complaint on that.
Season 2 mostly just shits the bed because ABC insisted to David Lynch that he hurry up and reveal who killed Laura Palmer even though he was like “lol but that’s not the point of the show”. So after the reveal at the end of season 1, they pretty much did whatever the hell they wanted, regardless if it made sense, as a final “fuck you” to ABC (which I admire, but goddamn is James’ 100000000 year motorcycle journey boring).
“I’m starting to do stand-up now and it’s hard to go up there and talk about how hard it is to be a guy. People don’t wanna hear it!”
I mean obviously the whole interview is infuriating but this quote delights me because it’s so fun to imagine him on a stage going “Women, amirite?” and hearing…. crickets. Judgmental crickets.
And I can imagine exactly what that sounds like, because I happened to have been at a standup show that had exactly that soundtrack. It was a comedy club that normally showcased queer comedians, and I’d seen some uproariously funny shows there, so I suppose it was more or less the same audience on this other particular night with a line-up of all men, most of whom were both straight and white. The white straight men had fairly impressive credits: this one had written for The Office, that one had written for some other show I recognized but can’t remember. And they bombed. One after another they got up and cracked jokes about how weird other races are and how crazy it is trying to have sex with women, and they were met with stone cold silence.
One of them even complained that these jokes always get laughs, haha, what’s going on on with this audience anyway?
Silence.
I’m not even sorry I wasted my money, it felt amazing to be a part of a damning social consensus like that.
I went to exactly one comedy show in my life (because $8 for a can of Guinness? Be fucking serious, Comedy Club). Jim Gaffigan was there, he was funny! But there was this other guy, some douchey dudebro comedian who had a whole set of material about his Asian girlfriend, just terrible jokes, everyone is watching uncomfortably, coughing a little while he tries — increasingly manic — to get the jokes to take off.
Finally he turns to these two Asian girls in the front row, thinking that the human connection will save his sorry punk ass, and says to them, “What kind of Asian are you?”
The girl snaps back right away, “What kind of white are you?”
The audience loses it. Funniest thing in that guy’s whole routine. I hope he went home and cried about how sickly he got burned.
Oh my god I wish I were that quick with comebacks. That is just beautiful.
“Judgmental crickets” is my new favorite phrase/personal mascot.
Once I went with a group of friends to some comedy cellar thing in the East Village because one of us had comp tickets… One of us (alas, not me) is a STUNNING redhead, and one of the comics got about 30 seconds into his first bit, laid eyes on her, and derailed completely. I mean, he interrupted the rest of his 10 minute gig at least 3 times with some sort of lewd exclamation about how “fucking sexy” she was and “the things [he] would to to [her]” … TO HER FACE. We finally started heckling him until he shut the fuck up and got off stage, but she was pretty freaked out after that. I MEAN.
You guys, shit is rough at home with my husband’s mental health (he’s fine, just going through the process of trying to nail down meds and also dealing with some behavioral crap) and then this morning the dude next to me on the bus had his leg all up in my area and then at one point he actually put his arm across the whole back of the seat in front of us so I couldn’t brace myself on turns, and this dude was the last straw, and I had a straight-up crying meltdown on the bus. I hate everything.
I hope that dude on the bus was taken aback and suitably chastised, but I suspect not.
Taken aback, yes; chastised, no, just confused.
Sending you hugs.
Thank you. Truly.
Ugh. <3
Yeah, pretty much. Thanks.
Where are my gifs though? Is CleverManka absent today?
I’m so sorry you had to experience that on top of everything else, and I hope that dude develops raging hemorrhoids.
I love the creative, annoying-but-not-really-harmful little curses that toasties lay on those who have wronged other toasties.
Am I the only one infuriated by the Litquake online calendar? It is organized by… what exactly? Not time of day, and not location, which one might consider to be important factors in determining which events one could attend. There seems to be no way to re-organize it either. Help?
Psst… straight white able-bodied guy… the rest of us outnumber you.
The Hairpin has this great piece right now and it’s super worth a read : http://thehairpin.com/2014/10/stories-like-passwo…
BUT there are some juiceboxes in the comments pulling major “NOT ALL MEN” shit and normally I don’t come back at that kind of shit, but I kind of did and I’m still kind of coursing with rage? Ughhhhhh. Not what I needed today.
That piece was lovely but I spent half of it bracing mentally for the “But what about the mennnnn?” comments and, lo and behold, there they were.
Would have been even better if the Edith the Class Man Hater quoted Amy Lowell, instead of James.
And dear god, someone throw that juicebox douchebag off a fucking cliff.
THANK YOU FOR THE TWIN PEAKS THING NICOLE.
Guys, just open your hearts and let season 2 of Twin Peaks nestle in there. Yes, it’s not season 1, but it NEEDS YOU.
(In my household, we ate cake last night to celebrate this momentous announcement.)
I feel like s2 floundered for a while, but it actually gets its feet under it at some point, and the back half is pretty entertaining! It’s just that most people had quit watching/shifted into hatewatching mode by then.
At least that’s how I remember it. It’s been quite a lot of years since I’ve seen it, so I’m not prepared to stand behind this analysis. But — Twin Peaks s2…I think you might not hate all of it as much as people say you will!
speaking of guys who should be set adrift on ice floes, here’s a 40-something 19-year-old
http://captainawkward.com/2014/10/06/632-my-frien…
“That is an ouroboros of NOPE he’s wearing around his neck like an infinity scarf.”
Beautiful.
I maintain that the first half of season 2 is actually great, and the second half is endearingly bonkers.
(I love David Lynch. What a weird little buddy. I’m so excited to see what he thinks of cell phones and the internet.)
I agree that season 2 is actually totally watchable, especially in the second half – anyway, I just love Twin Peaks as a whole, and I don’t think you can separate the thrilling from the batshit without changing it into something it’s not.
I tried to comment this morning but I was in the field and this horrible auto-play ad a) wouldn’t shut up and b) wouldn’t actually let me comment. I don’t even know how to recreate it but it was the worst.
Not as bad as that cringe-worthy Nickelodeon interview, though. I’m going to NYCC and had wanted to go to that event on Thursday night, but now I’m really glad I am not. Ugh. Shut up shut up shut up.
That ad should be gone by Thursday, Nick is working on it!
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share Edith! Just look at all the fucks she does not give!
Should you wish to see the entire yearbook (and many more!) you may do so here: http://digitalcommons.plattsburgh.edu/yearbooks_1…
Would LOVE to know what happened to her!!! What was her life like? What did she do? How was she remembered? Did she have a partner and/or children? SO MANY QUESTIONS.
/historian
I know! I haven’t been able to find much other than a few mentions of her teaching in various places around northern New York.
“If you’re making something about an alien, you don’t need to be an alien to do it.”
I’d like to point out what that dude doesn’t seem to have noticed: “aliens” are (for the purposes of current entertainment writing) FICTIONAL. Anything we write about aliens at this point in our history is freely made-up fiction about creatures that we have no information about, and indeed don’t even know whether they exist.
Despite his obliviousness, that is not the case for female characters and characters of color. PoC and women are not like aliens because WE EXIST IN THIS WORLD.
Two of my friends posted a picture from their wedding with their 4-year old daughter looking up intently from below their hands as they exchanged rings. SO CUTE OMG.
SWEET JESUS THAT HORRIBLE TV BOOK MAN. Did he get hit in the head right before that interview and lose the ability to speak his real thoughts? Because who thinks that people are Clarissa fans because they really liked Sabrina or Melissa Joan Hart the person? MJH has said some gross homophobic stuff as an adult, and Sabrina was dumb. Also, I love Pete and Pete, but I certainly never thought “I’m so glad everyone on this show is whiter than me and my brother, it would be SO DISTRACTING AND ANNOYING to see an unexplained minority character pop up in a show where Iggy Pop plays a suburban dad.” And if people being different races FOR NO REASON ruins things, how does he explain All That? Amanda Bynes fans are making it seem like it was more successful than it actually was at the time?
I AGREE OH MY ENDLESS DAYS
this the emotional capacity of him, for the entirety of Twin Peaks:
: |
So, I live 4 miles from Bloomingdale and there are a lot of Arnolds around here. But her offspring (if she had any) probably have a different last name. I did find a mention of her in the Bloomingdale high school class of '28 – she was one of three graduates that year.
Okay, so kinda unpopular opinion, but I think the interview about Nickelodeon brings up some important points, which is that there’s just generally not enough minorities getting hired to make art behind the scenes. If media is going to do an interpretation of a minority they should actually, like, hire minorities to write the story as well, don’t just slap a brown kid in and call it multi-cultural. That I agree with.
And yeah, he was off base with all the other shit, like insinuating that the reason there’s not more minorities in the field is because minorities don’t the best in the business. White man says annoying white man things. Wah-wah.
Plus, dude, you can either make hackneyed metaphors about freedom and sex as pertains to motorcycles, OR you can wear a goddamn Cosby sweater, BUT NOT BOTH.