the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”
like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”
how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???
these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.
they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.
I know this seems like such a niche topic to get into but I grew up in an old town where everyone has one or two ghost stories, and it’s almost always wives telling them while their husbands chuckle and shake their heads throughout the entire story.
It doesn’t matter whether they believe in ghosts or not. What it is is one adult recounting experiences they not only firmly believe to have happened one way, but which have profoundly affected their lives, and the other adult literally publicly laughing at them “hahaha, women and their imaginations, you know?”
Both possibilities shock me but don’t really come as a surprise: the husband literally thinks his wife is such a child that she “imagined” these experiences like a backyard game for elementary schoolers, or the husband believes his wife apparently idk?? hallucinated but it’s not a big deal and we don’t need to have a discussion about her health and whether she feels safe and happy in her home because again. silly women and their apparent hallucinations you know???
Turns out horror tropes aren’t actually Metaphors, that’s really just how it is
Listen there’s no argument of “rape/abuse fantasies, even if they’re exclusively fantasies, are disgusting and you are disgusting for having them” that doesn’t turn directly in radfem rhetoric.
The idea that it’s your responsibility as a feminist to police all your thoughts and private sexual expression (which I would strongly argue appropriately tagged and archived fiction/art is) in order to avoid harming feminism and Be A Good Woman is radfem. There is no way around it.
If your taste in fiction/fantasies necessarily correlates to your personal politics and morals, then it makes sense to ensure that yours and others fantasies line up with your politics and morals. It becomes a form of protecting yourself, a subset of activism in its own right. And all of a sudden we’ve looped straight back around to policing women’s sexual thoughts for The Good Of Society.
The moment you start shaming and forbidding fantasies on the basis of morality, you’re about ¾ of the way to radfem.
So radfem is respectability politics?
hmmm. Not especially ‘radical’.
tw: misgendering, transphobia.
When radfems use the word “radical” they are not using it in the general political sense of having an extremely different point of view, they are using it from the sense of believing that the root of all the world’s troubles is sexism/misogyny. (”radical” as derived from “radix”, meaning root) and that therefore if you eradicate all vestiges of sexism and misogyny (including from your own heart and mind) the world will therefore be Perfect and so will you. In this ideology (evolved among academic upper-class white women in the 70s and 80s, and largely unchanged since then) there is no room for intersectionalism, for the oppressions of racism, classism, ableism, or queerphobia (other than lesbophobia). (lesbianism, being by, for, and about women, is ideologically congruent with their beliefs, and hatred of lesbians can be boiled down to “people hating women and hating that they don’t depend on men,” but other forms of hatred of LGBTQ+ people can’t really be acknowledged because first you would have to acknowledge that isms other than sexism exist, and that it is possible for men to be oppressed.)
Radfems did some wonderful theoretical work in the 70s and 80s. They really did provide the theoretical foundation for a lot of our understandings of sex, gender, and oppression. However, they proved more interested in putting themselves at the top of the hierarchy than in dismantling it, because they chose not to acknowledge other oppressions than the one they themselves faced, and so did not listen to their sisters of color and of lower class, or who were in any way different than themselves, and so they didn’t and do not accept responsibility for the ways in which they contribute to the oppression of others. And they are willing to join with ultra-conservative Evangelical groups to enact and enforce laws that fit their ideology. Radfems believe that they are the ultimate arbiters of feminism, and that therefore any woman who does not agree with them is either deluded about the patriarchy or consciously participating in her own oppression. Therefore, they have the right and the duty to tell other women what they can and should think and do.
For example: they did some really EXCELLENT theoretical work on the exploitation of women inherent in the sex industry, both pornography and prostitution. About the ways in which our culture devalues women’s bodies and uses them as articles of consumption for men. Well and good. But when women who work in the sex industry, both porn stars and prostitutes, point out their limited economic choices and why they and women like them don’t always have better options, radfems do not listen. To a radfem, a woman in the sex industry is either a blameless victim, or an oppressor who betrays your own people. Because of this, not only have radfems endorsed laws created by the Religious Right (blech), they have doxxed sex workers and former sex workers who publicly disagree with them. Including at least one case where a radfem sent a woman’s current location to her former pimp. This is why radfems are sometimes called SWERFs, Sex-Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
Also, radfems got the ball rolling in the 70s and 80s talking about gender and how we should abolish gender roles. But they also believe that men/males are the root of all evil. Therefore, any transman is betraying their sisters by joining the oppressive patriarchy, and any transwoman is a “man” who is trying to infiltrate women’s spaces. Thus radfems have doxxed transpeople, signed on to bathroom bills, consistently deadname and misgender them, and done a variety of other transphobic things. This is why radfems are sometimes called TERFs, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
But yes, a whole heaping helping of respectability politics, just with THEM as the ultimate arbiters of what “respectable” (or rather, “a good feminist”) looks like.
This is a great summary of radical feminism and how it turns into anti-kink, SWERFs, TERFs, and exclusionism in general.
“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.
A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.”
we’ve been seeing female characters drawn with their nipples pointing out of their clothes, with cameltoe poppin’ out of leather pants somehow, with thong leotards with their butt cheeks flapping in the wind. is about time we saw some super men dick if u ask me
Honestly I read the bleeding cool article when the news broke and laughed my ass off.
“Many retailers were okay with a butt crack…. But a Batpenis on full display in many areas of the United States of America is a different story entirely. There are calls to make the comic returnable. Or maybe reprinted with the original shadow.”
I have to ask, where is this energy when Supergirl, a 16 year old character, has dozens of panty shots with her skirt just so? Are these people who are upset and demanding returnable orders over a rated M comic book with a penis inside it also upset when a RHATO 32, a rated T comic book, had Starfire wearing what is essentially lingerie lounging seductively on a sports car with her perfectly round magic breasts?
Bruce Wayne has an anatomically sized penis that was drawn without sexualization in a book meant to be purchased and read by adults and comic stores are freaking out and want their money back. They’re weak as hell. Bruce’s nude body was drawn with more respect than the clothed bodies of teenage girls.
Where’s the outrage over that?
Got a lot of people messaging me saying that there is no penis in Batman Damned. DC wound up censoring it. I honestly don’t care about that. I do care they said they removed it because “It doesn’t add to the story.”
DC continues to reprint & profit off of mid 2000s Supergirl books filled with butt/boob poses, nipples poking out of fabric, skirts so low the artist can draw the pelvic bone, and panty shots of a 16 year old girl (XXX). They have sold statues of Supergirl with clothes that look like bodypaint and panty shots with her butt sticking out (XXXXX X)
Again, I don’t care that the penis is gone. I care that DC thinks they can have it both ways. A non-sexualized penis doesn’t add to their story. Evidently sexualizing teenage girls does add to their stories. Hyper-sexualizing women in general adds to their stories. Why is that?
So, back when Ancillary Justice was essentially sweeping that year’s SF awards, there was some talk from certain quarters about it not really being all that, people only claimed to like it because Politics and SJWs and PC points and Affirmative Action and nobody was really reading the book and if they were they didn’t really enjoy it, they just claimed they did so they could seem cool and woke.
My feelings were so hurt that I wept bitter, miserable tears every time I drove to the bank with my royalty checks. I mean, those people must be right, it’s totally typical for non-fans who don’t actually like a book to write fanfic or draw fan art, totally boringly normal for students to choose to write papers about a book that just isn’t really very good or interesting, and for professors to use that boringly not-very-good book in their courses, and for that book to continue to sell steadily five years after it came out. I totally did not laugh out loud whenever I came across such assertions, because they were absolutely not ridiculous Sour Grape Vineyards tended by folks who, for the most part, hadn’t even read the book.
Now I am sorry–but not surprised–to see some folks making similar assertions about N.K. Jemisin’s historic (and entirely deserved) Hugo Threepeat. Most of them haven’t read the books in question.
But some of them have. Some of them have indeed read the books and not understood why so many people are so excited by them.
Now, Nora doesn’t need me to defend her, and she doesn’t need lessons from me about the best way to dry a tear-soaked award-dusting cloth, or the best brands of chocolate ice cream to fortify yourself for that arduous trip to the bank. Actually, she could probably give me some pointers.
But I have some thoughts about the idea that, because you (generic you) didn’t like a work, that must mean folks who say they did like it are Lying Liars Who Lie to Look Cool.
So, in order to believe this, one has to believe that A) one’s own taste is infallible and objective and thus universally shared and B) people who openly don’t share your taste are characterless sheep who will do anything to seem cool.
But the fact is, one doesn’t like or dislike things without context. We are all of us judging things from our own point of view, not some disembodied perfectly objective nowhere. It’s really easy to assume that our context is The Context–to not even see that there’s a context at all, it’s just How Things Are. But you are always seeing things from the perspective of your experiences, your biases, your expectations of how things work. Those may not match other people’s.
Of course, if you’re in a certain category–if you’re a guy, if you’re White, if you’re straight, if you’re cis–our society is set up to make that invisible, to encourage you in the assumption that the way you see things is objective and right, and not just a product of that very society. Nearly all of the readily available entertainment is catering to you, nearly all of it accepts and reinforces the status quo. If you’ve never questioned that, it can seem utterly baffling that people can claim to enjoy things that you see no value in. You’ll maybe think it makes sense to assume that such people are only pretending to like those things, or only like them for reasons you consider unworthy. It might not ever occur to you that some folks are just reading from a different context–sometimes slightly different, sometimes radically different, but even a small difference can be enough to make a work seem strange or bafflingly flat.
Now, I’m sure that there are people somewhere at some time who have in fact claimed to like a thing they didn’t, just for cool points. People will on occasion do all kinds of ill-advised or bananapants things. But enough of them to show up on every SF award shortlist that year? Enough to vote for a historic, record-breaking three Hugos in a row? Really?
Stop and think about what you’re saying when you say this. Stop and think about who you’re not saying it about.
You might not have the context to see what a writer is doing. When you don’t have the context, so much is invisible. You can only see patterns that match what you already know.*
Of course, you’re not a helpless victim of your context–you can change it, by reading other things and listening to various conversations. Maybe you don’t want to do that work, which, ok? But maybe a lot of other folks have indeed been doing that, and their context, the position they’re reading stories from, has shifted over the last several years. It’s a thing that can happen.
Stop and think–you’ve gotten as far as “everyone must be kind of like me” and stepped over into “therefore they can’t really like what they say they like because I don’t like those things.” Try on “therefore they must really mean it when they say they like something, because I mean it when I say it.” It’s funny, isn’t it, that so many folks step into the one and not the other. Maybe ask yourself why that is.
This also applies to “pretentious” writing. “That writer is only trying to look smart! Readers who say they like it are only trying to look smarter that me, a genuine,honest person, who only likes down-to-earth plain solid storytelling.” Friend, your claims to be a better and more honest person because of your distaste for “pretentious” writing is pretension itself, and says far more about you than the work you criticize this way. You are exactly the sort of snob you decry, and you have just announced this to the world.
Like or don’t like. No worries. It’s not a contest, there’s no moral value attached to liking or not liking a thing. Hell, there are highly-regarded things I dislike, or don’t see the appeal of! There are things I love that lots of other folks don’t like at all. That’s life.
And sure, if you want to, talk about why you do or don’t like a thing. That’s super interesting, and thoughtful criticism is good for art.
But think twice before you sneer at what other folks like, think three times before you declare that no one could really like a thing so it must be political correctness, or pretension, or whatever. Consider the possibility that whatever it is is just not your thing. Consider the possibility that it might be all right if not everything is aimed at you. Consider that you might not actually be the center of the universe, and your opinions and tastes might not be the product of your utterly rational objective view of the world. Consider the possibility that a given work might not have been written just for you, but for a bunch of other people who’ve been waiting for it, maybe for a long time, and that might just possibly be okay.
____
*Kind of like the way some folks insist my Ancillary trilogy is obviously strongly influenced by Iain Banks (who I’d read very little of, and that after AJ was already under way) and very few critics bring up the influence of C.J. Cherryh (definitely there, deliberate, and there are several explicit hat tips to her work in the text). Those folks have read Banks, but they haven’t read Cherryh. They see something that isn’t there, and don’t see what is there, because they don’t have the same reading history I do. It’s interesting to me how many folks assume I must have the same reading history as they do. It’s interesting to me how sure they are of their conclusions.
i'll apple your turnover 