passion fights but reason wins

[orangerful]

Love the discussion we are all having in the comments on the other posts (so much so that it apparently triggered the LJ bots because I got two spam posts!).

Anyway, I've been having thinky thoughts and Tim has been sending me articles because he loves browsing the Google Newstand. I wanted to share three of them with you all.

Am I A Bad Feminist? - Margaret Atwood

The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari - Caitlan Flanagan, The Atlantic

Aziz Ansari is Guilty. Of not being a mind reader - Bari Weiss, New York Times

A Q&A for the post-Weinstein era <--- from back in November, but a piece I keep going back to

I read all three of them from start to finish and most of them echo thoughts that I have had over the past few days. I point out that I *read* them because I found the first link through a post about how people were mad at Atwood for her comments and one of the Tweets they quoted for the article actually said "I didn't read what she said" and then proceeded to say she was wrong...even though what they were saying had nothing to do with what she was saying. **sigh**

Oh and then this happened:

Crybabies edit The Last Jedi down to a 46 minute chauvinist cut

This doesn't have anything to do with the above, just posting so you can *facepalm* at people who are truly guilty and stupid of being everything wrong with everything.

(Entry title is a Doctor Who quote...he says this but then about 60 seconds later, punches a guy in the face for being a racist ass so...yeah)

Comments

[elisi]

The thing that pleases me about that TLJ cut is that they needed to cut SO MUCH. Like, we watched A New Hope the other day, and there's Aunt Beru and Leia and THAT'S IT. The rest is wall-to-wall white men. (No POCs.) There are aliens of course, and droids...

[beccadg]

Thanks for sharing the links! I'd given into #metoo/#timesup fatigue, and not looked at anything about the Aziz Ansari situation. I particularly enjoyed Bari Weiss piece for the New York Times. I found it interesting, once I went down the rabbit hole of going from link to link, that there seems to be something of a generational difference in how women are reacting to the story told by "Grace." To the extent there seems to be a divide, I'm definitely on the older women's side, which shouldn't be surprising since the divide seems to be pretty much Millennials versus everyone older than them. As far as I know I'm squarely a member of Generation X. The writer that ran with Grace's story hurling both ageist and sexist remarks at Ashleigh Banfield isn't exactly going to help a divide among women. There is one article I ran across while I was bouncing around I thought to save for you. I think this CNN article goes along well with the ones you've already posted Let's Be Honest About Aziz Ansari

[orangerful]

Thank YOU for sharing that article, I looked it up right away and nodded my head while reading it. This is a weird divide when it comes to sex and relationships.

[alificent]

I am late to this party, but like you, I have had a terrible time with this issue. For me it wasn't Aziz Ansari, but Garrison Keillor that made me start wondering if I was really comfortable with the media frenzy over this particular issue, and whether I was comfortable with how employers were handling it. The next day, my parents came to dinner and asked me if I didn't think it was becoming something of a witch hunt. I agreed that I thought it was, and since Atwood is one of my FAVORITE authors, I am glad you linked that article, because it made me able to organize the thoughts in my head better.

I was more where you were at, where I was thinking, "this is making me uncomfortable, am I a bad feminist," vs. "Man, I am glad this is blowing up, because something needs to be done about this." I explained it to my dad that night as fighting how uncomfortable I was with the witch hunt aspect versus feeling a little like the protagonist of Oleanna: NOW you understand. Now it's YOUR turn to feel nervous and worried whenever you're in a room alone with a member of the opposite sex, it's YOUR turn to be afraid if your actions are going to interpreted as a sexual advance and have to deal with the fallout."

That isn't fair, and I know it isn't fair, and I do want things to be fair. However, it is also my experience that with issues like this where the system is broken, there is no widespread acknowledgement that the system is in fact broken until it affects white men. This system has been broken a long time, and a lot of women have spoken out about before, and are detailing how they did so and nothing was done. It was because they were dressed a certain way, or because this is how it works in this industry, or because they saw other women humiliated and shamed in the media as sluts and just didn't speak up. So while it isn't fair that the needle swung so far the other way, I'm glad it did, because now that white men are afraid, maybe something will actually be done. Now that white men don't want to be wrongly accused and be humiliated and shamed, maybe the system will actually be fixed, instead of it being passed off as oh no, there is nothing wrong with the system, it was just that ONE person being a bad person and not a long-running, deep-seated culture ingrained in the very system.

I also worry a lot that calling it out for what it is in the witch-hunt sense is going to upset that, that then it will become, "Oh, and this became a media witch hunt, where innocent men were unfairly accused and so it wasn't really a long-running, deep-seated culture ingrained in the very system, it was just backlash from hairy-legged feminists against our president trying to make America great again and so there's nothing actually wrong with the system, men and women are totally equal now, proceed as you were, America." So I hope that the needle swinging so far doesn't do THAT, as well. Like Atwood said, in a time of extremes, only the extremists are heard, and that makes me so tired, and so glad she said it, because I really just want the problem fixed for both women and men.

However, I do think it's very sad, and very important to notice, and very important not to lose, that when this was solely a problem for women, my father, and a lot of other men, didn't get on board the way they got on board when it became a problem for men. Sure, he acknowledged there was a problem, and expressed sympathy for women who suffered from unwanted sexual attention from employers or men in positions of power, but there wasn't this same outrage. The outrage only came when it was his turn to be afraid something might happen to him. That isn't fair either, and I hope that isn't lost in this whirlpool.

Deep thoughts indeed.

The Star Wars thing made me both irrationally angry and also glad it happened for the same kind of reason. Angry because like Elisi says below, women were not REMOTELY half the population in the previous galaxy far far away. (I think she missed the lounge singer from the Cantina though, who I think is noted as female in the literature, and I never remember if my girl Mon Mothma is in A New Hope or not), but glad because by doing this, they prove that those men still exist, and make it harder for other men to say "sexism is over, women are equal now."

I only just managed to see Last Jedi about a week ago, and even my own upbringing and gender issues are so deep-seated that my first reaction was "okay now you're going too far, now there are TOO MANY ladies and it's going to cause backlash." And I was genuinely surprised at myself. That's how much lack of representation growing up affected me. My actual first gut reaction was "this is unrealistic, there are too many women." WOW. So I'll be working on that myself, it seems. Talk about being a bad feminist.

Movie was FUCKING AWESOME though.

[orangerful]

I totally understand what you mean about your brain going "what, this is ridiculous, so many women/non-white/non-straight people in [insert show]? They are just going overboard" And then I have to shush myself because, wtf brain. I think it really does show how much that stuff seeps in there and people just don't realize the effect it has.

Mon Mothma is not in ANH, not even CGI'd in the 90s LOL. And Sy Snootles is the singer you are thinking of. (again, not counting the creepy alien girls singing in the 90s remix)

Great comment, btw. I agree with so many things too. I think firing people like Weinstein and his ilk makes sense, they did horrible things, abused their power and broke the law. Even someone like Louise C.K. - that was indecent exposure to say the least so yes he did break the law. But I think the article about Ansari felt very forced, like they wanted the reader to be outraged and I kept *waiting* for the outrageous thing and it wasn't there. It was bad night, but I've had worse and I didn't feel like it was necessary to destroy the man's life over it.

And extremist always get the news coverage and make everyone else look crazy, no matter what the topic is. And I'm worried that when articles like this blow up, not only does it lessen the meaning of the movements, it also distracts us from real things going on in the world that are bigger fish. Like Trump addressing the anti-abortion marchers and pretty much scaring the crap out of me that if he watched Handmaid's Tale, he would be taking too many notes for the wrong things.

I think Atwood did make a fantastic point, which is all of these hashtag movements tend to come about because people have lost faith in the justice system BUT we should not throw out the systems all together. For every "he is SO guilty" twitterstorm, there is someone's life who might get destroyed when bad information gets out. I mean, if our justice system is so fallible, with trained professionals working behind the scenes, then our Twitter Shaming system has got to be 10 times worse since people get their information from so many random places. I'm sure it is a release for a lot of people to pile up on these men and say awful things about the accused and men in general, but at some point they are going to destroy someone's life who was innocent (or, at least, not guilty) of things that someone says?

I keep mentioning it, but the book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" makes some great points about all of this, mostly that this online stuff does absolutely nothing for the big picture. For every person tweeting #TimesUp and #MeToo, how many of them bother to donate to causes? To actually stand up to someone at work? To DO something beyond the passive-aggressive posts online? Or to just say "NO" to someone who is bothering them, even if it hasn't hit the level of harassment?

AND I LOVED THE MOVIE TOO! I get so mad when I see posts saying "Star Wars fans hated Last Jedi" and I'm like "NOOOOOOPE!" I haven't been to my Star Wars club meeting yet, very curious to see what the group thought of it. I will gladly debate them LOL.

And, side note, but one of the best things I've seen coming out of these new movies is one of the guys who has a daughter coming to terms with/understanding the importance of representation in these movies. He talks about her love or Rey and playing with the Star Wars toys together and complained about how hard it was to find the figures for her. So some of the straight white middle aged guy can learn and grow, there is always hope!