What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

sarahreesbrennan:

rj-anderson:

Hey, Tumblr, that ship you’re so angry about and point to as a sign of what happens when immature and vulnerable teenaged girls romanticize violence in males and mistake abuse for romance? Yeah, that one. May I point out that this ship is also a fairy tale. It’s called “Beauty and the Beast,” and it’s the story of how a courageous young woman transforms a horrible monster into a handsome prince – not by embracing or excusing his violence and cruelty, but by steadfastly remaining true to her own kind and caring nature and showing him a better way. And by the time her duty to her loved ones calls her away from his side, he has grown to value her so much that he’s prepared not only to let her go, but even to lay down his own life rather than keep her against her will.

I don’t actually ship Reylo, for the record (Rey/Finn all the way for me); but I don’t think it’s the sign of the shipping apocalypse, or a dire commentary on how susceptible young women are to false and potentially self-destructive ideas of romance. It’s just another variation of a tale as old as time, and there are a million different ways to approach it. Relax. Breathe. Think happy thoughts. And don’t assume you know other people’s motives or what’s going on in their heads (or lives, for that matter) for liking a different ship than you do.

Such a smart post by my friend R.J. Anderson, noted smartie. I do not personally think Rey and Kylo Ren should be together, because I watched Star Wars for John Boyega and I LOVE FINN and Rey is a smart girl, why would she go for anyone but FINN? She never seemed into anyone but Finn. In conclusion, FINN! 

However, I was saddened to see people saying how concerned they were by girls’ reactions (wanting these two to be together), how it reminded them of girls liking this stuff in YA media (you know, the media seen as too female-focused). It makes me uncomfortable how much more people scrutinise girls’ reactions to media, starting from back when it was thought ladies should not read novels because it would overexcite them. I don’t see as many people going ‘Boys are going to all drive their cars way too fast because of the Fast and the Furious movies!’ 

(Edited to Add: I know some boys do drive their cars too fast, and of course I know some women are in abusive relationships, but I’m concentrating on concern displayed about media here. I think we should all be concerned about both these real, serious and tragic issues, and I am!)

Lots of relationships in media are fraught, between flawed and often highly dramatic people, in highly dramatic situations. And it’s natural and awesome to discuss those relationships and how they might play out (Jane Eyre, Rochester is gonna sell the kids to pirates!). I like generally when people end up being made happier and healthier by their relationships. But no fictional relationship is going to get the Healthy Award Now You Get To Happen In the Text And Also Be Regarded as the Best Relationship By All prize: there is no such prize. And I’ve loved many such relationships. I love Beauty and the Beast. I trust ladies. I trust them to enjoy flawed, highly dramatic media, to wish for any flawed, highly dramatic fictional-character relationship that strikes their fancy, to have their feelings, and to–in the main–drive their feelings cars safe.

OK. Right. I am trying to respond to this rationally, as a calm adult, but that’s super difficult when I’m literally shaking with anger. Nonetheless, I will try.

There’s a Maya Angelou quote I saw recently: “Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.” It resonated with me for a lot of reasons, but right now, I’m thinking about all the things I didn’t know as a teenager, and all the ways that ignorance horrifies me now. I try to forgive my younger self, but it’s hard sometimes, because she did things that hurt us both, and now she’s all grown up and gone, and I’m the one who has to live with it.

I trust myself – my current, adult self – to engage with problematic narratives; to, as Sarah puts it, “enjoy flawed, highly dramatic media, to wish for any flawed, highly dramatic fictional-character relationship that strikes [my] fancy” without internalising any toxic bullshit. I also know, with visceral fucking certainty, that my teenage self couldn’t, didn’t do that – not because I was a teenager and therefore inherently ignorant, but because I, specifically, had no access to conversations about narrative or fandom or feminism back then, and nobody ever told me that the stuff I was absorbing absent those discussions might, in fact, be dangerous if applied elsewhere. I fantasied about being held down and dominated years before I ever knew what a safeword was, because that’s what happened in stories, and gee golly, if the man was hot and the heroine wanted him even just a little, then that made it okay, right?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. It doesn’t. And yes, I am acutely aware that women – as characters, creators and audience – are frequently subjected to far more scrutiny than men, and that even when this scrutiny endeavours to be feminist, to discuss diversity and representation through things like the Bechdel or Mako Mori tests, it is still, ultimately, a bar for women to jump that men must never hurdle. We need to start discussing the roles men have in stories, too, holding their characters to yardsticks of account, unpicking the toxicity of their tropes, all that jazz –

But if there is an arena, one fucking arena, in which we urgently need to discuss women in general and teenage girls in particular, it is sexual assault, because we live in a fucking rape culture – or rather, in a nested set of cultures overlaid with rape apologia like crayon-scrawl on a Venn diagram – and young girls, young women, are overwhelmingly its victims. Yes, young boys – young men – old men – people of every age and gender – are also threatened by abuse and sexual assault, whether domestic or otherwise. But right now, specifically, in this moment, we are talking about a permutation of the problem that predominantly affects young women. Because we can do that, you know. We can actually have that particular conversation – not just because it’s necessary, but because we want to. We are allowed. And for some of us, who would’ve benefited hugely from doing so ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, when nobody around us was saying jack shit, there is a very personal, urgent need to make sure the error isn’t repeated.

Do you know why it is supremely fucking unhelpful to respond to a post about the romanticising of abuse narratives in YA with “ladies can be trusted to know their own business, and also just take a breath?” Answer: because the only reason any of us can think rationally about all the rapey bullshit we’ve absorbed over the years is because, once upon a time, someone explained to us that it was, in fact, rapey, and that dissecting those tropes, instead of just blithely accepting them as a neutral thing, was maybe a good idea.

There are people shipping Rey and Kylo Ren who’ve never had this conversation before; who’ve never considered that their dynamic, in canon, is an abusive one. If you already understand the problematic elements of the ship and want to go there anyway, I’m not gonna fucking stop you, but I am going to point out that you’re not the ones we’re talking to. Just because you don’t need the reminder doesn’t mean that nobody else does; that there’s no value in saying it. Christ.

Being online, I’ve encountered teenage girls who know more about consent and feminism at thirteen than I did at twenty-three, and women who are twice my age who are still new to any of it. This is not about cordoning off a section of tropes like liquor bottles and saying, “only when you’re older”. This is about acknowledging that, once upon a time, we didn’t all know the things we know now, and that just assuming women – and particularly young women – are all magically endowed with the intelligence and trope-literacy to automatically dissect the problematic crap they routinely encounter – that we don’t need to actually discuss it, let alone with specific relevance to them – is a bad plan.

I could write you a list (I won’t write you a list) of all the sexual experiences I had between the ages of thirteen and nineteen that were fucked up, and all the reasons why I thought they were okay at the time, even when it meant I was crying afterwards or bruised or hollow, and I could fucking map that list, the list I will not write, to my favourite novels at that age, at how fucking abusive so many of the romances in them were, and what I’d be describing wouldn’t be a causative relationship – I didn’t go out and have inappropriate, non-consensual encounters because of Axis and Faraday or F’lar and Lessa – but it would be a correlative one, because they were all the yardstick I had to compare things to, those fictional romances. Because sometimes, that’s what life is. Not everyone is Minerva, born whole and adult with a head full of wisdom, or Artemis, with a pack of hounds to police their boundaries; sometimes you’re Io, or Danae, or Rapunzel, or Persephone; sometimes, you’re stolen away to hell, and you don’t know to call it that until after you’re free again.

Plus and fucking also: Beauty and the Beast? Yeah, that story works out fine for Belle, because it’s a goddamn Disney movie, but take it as a template for how you should behave in the real world – for how, if you just stay with the monster long enough, he’ll turn into a man who deserves you, a man who doesn’t throw plates any more or yell or lock you up – and your odds of actually getting that fairytale ending go down dramatically. When Belle runs away from the Beast, he’s the one who ends up hurt, and afterwards, she washes his wounds in front of the fire. I watched that movie at age eight or nine and remember, vividly, how the girl I was watching it with – she was three or so years older – caustically said how the Beast being hurt was all Belle’s fault; she shouldn’t have been so stupid as to run away in the first place. And I thought, oh, that makes sense, because he did get hurt defending her, and both of us thought that was fine. But out here in the real world, women who flee their abusers are seventy percent more likely to be killed in the first two weeks after they’ve left than at any other time in the relationship. Tell them to just “relax”.

Not all girls can recognise abuse. Not all women can recognise abuse. Not all people can recognise abuse, such that wanting to post warnings about what abuse is and why we can’t always identify it straight away has nothing to do with mistrusting women and everything to with mistrusting what women are taught. Half the point of these conversations is to point out that, actually, there is something to discuss in the first place; that wanting two people together in fiction doesn’t automatically mean their behaviours are okay elsewhere. Because understanding that distinction isn’t an automatic thing, not for everyone: it’s something we have to learn. And failing to learn it? That can have real consequences.

Trust me. I speak from experience.

(via sarahreesbrennan)

  1. angstandhappiness reblogged this from thebigpalooka and added:
    Not into this whole shipping wank thing, just here for BATB
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