What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

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

sashayed:

Is it worth it to engage with people on that Dude Writing Post? I genuinely believe that it is better to reach out and try to connect on important issues than not to reach out, but also, I am so tired. Is it worth it to say to a self-righteous stranger on the internet: “Friend, your argument completely disregards the context in which women read and men write?” Is it worth it to say “The point of view male character filter that you want to hold up as a reason that this Is Not Bad Writing is actually NOT AN EXCUSE FOR BEING BAD WRITING, it’s just THE SAME FUCKING THING we see in EVERY BOOK ALL THE TIME???” 

Would it be useful to say, using patient and kind words, “No, you are wrong, no book could ever use these descriptions about a dude AND BE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED: and for example the statement ‘she could have been any age between eighteen and thirty five’ would literally never be written about a dude and it is disingenuous AT BEST to pretend that it would, and the reason for that is because there is NO DIFFERENCE between our cultural conception of a 35 year old man and our conception of a 36 year old one, but there IS a difference between our concept of a 35 year old woman and a woman literally EVEN A YEAR older, that difference being that it is literally only used as a shorthand for ‘she was of a fuckable age?’” 

Would it be useful to say, “No, none of these paragraphs is individually That Bad, but reading this kind of thing over and over is actually a really painful experience for many women, in the same way that being gently tapped on the forehead with a hammer over and over and over and OVER while trying to participate in an enjoyable activity your whole life might not actually cause you a traumatic brain injury but it might give you a fucking bruise? You might keep trying to do the activity, but you would also every once in a while yell ‘I WISH DUDES WOULD STOP GENTLY TAPPING ME WITH A FUCKING HAMMER!’ and it doesn’t mean that you think YELLING will STOP IT, it just means THAT YOU GOT TIRED AND YOU YELLED!”

Would it be useful to say “I realize that my objection to this one book does not solve a vast societal/artistic issue; that is why i did not NAME THE BOOK in my POST, because I DIDN’T WANT TO FOCUS UNDUE NEGATIVE ATTENTION ON IT, but I did wish to ILLUSTRATE the POINT that had me ALL HET UP IN THIS SPECIFIC INSTANCE?”

Would it be useful to ask “What is the value, for you, in objecting to my desire to be seen as human?” I would really like to know!

Or would it be useful to say “Actually, I too am a professional writer for a living! But thank you for your shitty, condescending five-paragraph assumption that, when I yell angry jokes on the internet, it’s as close as I get to activism! Thanks for that, you humorless clown!” Again, I would use nicer words.

SO MUCH THIS, I could actually cry.

Like. There are so many dudes who just assume that Everything Is Equal For Everybody Now because Women Can Vote and Racism Is Illegal, and who genuinely do not consider the issue with any more nuance than that because, well: if Everything Is Equal, then what is there left to talk about? Logically, they think, logically, if Everything Wasn’t Equal, they would’ve noticed it, because they are of course observant intelligent dudes, and as they have not noticed, their theory is solid forever, QED.  

And then they see a post suggesting that Everything Is Actually Not Equal, and their first response isn’t to go “huh” and investigate, but to assume the writer just doesn’t understand how the world works - because in assuming that Everything Is Equal For Everybody Now, what they’ve subconsciously done is substituted their own experience for a universal one. To them, Everything Is Equal For Everybody Now really translates to Everyone Has The Same Basic Advantages And Receives The Same General Treatment That I Do, and while individual people can obviously have individual differences that change things just for them, those differences are never collective enough or common enough to be representative of any genuinely different experiences at a base level. Thus, if someone claims to have experienced a thing that they don’t recognise - and more, that this thing has a context and meaning beyond what they understand those terms to mean - it’s easy for them to assume that this person must be:

a) lying for attention;
b) a statistically insignificant outlier ; or
c) confused/ignorant.

Because even when they’re reading books about the same kind of white dude, written by the same kind of white dude, reviewed by the same familiar subset of famous white dude names; even when they’re watching the same suite of movies starring the same six white dudes in the same approximation of heroic lead roles over and over again; even when they’re viscerally used to seeing themselves represented in every sort of position and job and story, they genuinely assume that this isn’t because there’s a bias in the kind of materials being produced or a historical thumb still pressed to the relevant social scale - it’s just that this is what they like, and why shouldn’t they enjoy it? More importantly, why can’t we? Everything Is Equal For Everyone Now, after all, which means we’re all free to enjoy exactly the same sort of stories, safe in the knowledge that they don’t really mean anything beyond the superficial, because Everything Is Equal and there is no war in Ba Sing Se and women can vote and racism is illegal, clearly, so nothing discriminatory or bad can ever happen at a collective cultural level ever again - and if it did, they’d notice, they promise they’d notice (they’re observant dudes!), but as they haven’t noticed a thing, there must be nothing to notice.

And that’s before you even get to the ones with active biases.  

  1. quest-for-immortality reblogged this from latining
  2. paininthepages-tearsintheink reblogged this from brlslngr
  3. vanni-bear reblogged this from apfelgranate
  4. soawen reblogged this from pockypuck
  5. pockypuck reblogged this from apfelgranate
  6. mhizah reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  7. yourlocalcreativeproblem reblogged this from cassiebones
  8. writingstrugglesaugust reblogged this from cassiebones
  9. sebadass reblogged this from sodapopblues
  10. brlslngr reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  11. theguineapiglady reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  12. followingtherivers reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  13. musicalbloodplayer reblogged this from cassiebones
  14. sodapopblues reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  15. cassiebones reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  16. angenou reblogged this from crossroadswrite
  17. crossroadswrite reblogged this from virtualsilver
  18. virtualsilver reblogged this from queerofcups
  19. unexpectedradiance reblogged this from liu-lang
  20. sashayed posted this