Years ago, when this site was young, we got so many people commenting to let us know “It’s just a show – lighten up!” that we expressly forbade this point of view in our comment policy. It wasn’t just the sheer volume, redundancy and dismissive tone of the comments that prompted us to get rid of them. It was also that it’s just not true.
I can’t tell you how times guys have disbelieved my claims to have gender-expectation-defying interests, preferences or activities, then cited television and movies as their proof I’m lying in some weird attempt to manipulate them. For example, women on TV and movies are always thrilled about getting flowers, they say, so when I say, “Oh, thanks, but actually having those anywhere near me will upset my allergies and lead to a bad headache”, I must really be saying, “I have secretly found someone else because your penis was inadequate and I hate you and your damn flowers.”
Another example: all women dream about their weddings. Men knows this because TV shows have given them the scoop. Remember the episode of Friends with the pillowcases? Even Phoebe was into it, and no one could be more of a strange loner misfit than Phoebe, therefore I must be lying when I say I have no interest in a wedding, mine or anyone else’s, ever. (In fact, I find them creepy.) Every woman wants a big diamond engagement ring to impress her friends, according to TV and movies, so what am I trying to pull when I claim I don’t? I must be trying to set men up to make mistakes so I can throw tantrums at them. Yes, that must be it. (I never even threw tantrums as a child, but women on TV and movies always do, so there!)
And of course, when I don’t get angry at men failing to recall my birthday, which I usually don’t recall myself, or for being late or for canceling last minute, which I totally understand and have to do myself sometimes, what I’m really saying is that I don’t care about them. Because the women in TV and movies always secretly seethe about this stuff, I must be secretly seething too – unless I just don’t care.
The sad fact is, a lot of people (including women) cite TV and movies as if they provide definitive evidence that all women feel/think/do X, and any individual woman claiming otherwise is lying, clearly for the purposes of manipulating somebody, the way all women do. I can’t defeat one stereotype without getting backed into another one.
The truth is, pop culture is not just fun and games, and that’s why “It’s just a show” is bullshit. Culture – and current culture has always been pop culture, and always will be – is the medium through which the privileged people educate all the other sorts of people on how they are supposed to behave so as to inconvenience the privileged the least they can with their undesirable yet necessary presence. I really am supposed to not only like flowers, but to accept them in lieu of kept promises and fidelity – not because it’s on TV but because that would be ever so convenient for uncaring and cheating men. What the person who criticizes me for diverging from TV portrayals of my gender is really saying is: “Don’t you know this is your responsibility? Even if you don’t like flowers, you still need to like the damn flowers because men need their women to be plug ‘n’ play, easily replaced! Men have nations to conquer and important things to do. They can’t be bogged down with trying to remember what each new current girlfriend likes, which is why it’s so crucial you all like exactly the same shit! Jeez, you selfish bitch!”
Pop culture has way more power than the law to change how people think and feel. We need laws to protect people from bigotry, but if you want to make people feel stupid about being bigots, pop culture can do that. After all, it’s what’s made people feel perfectly comfortable and righteous about being bigots.
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That makes sense. It is much better to have characters show signs of mental disability than to make it a big “flashing sign” part of their character.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Yes, that’s very much a flaw with Lucas’ writing in the movies. Other writers (notably those on The Clone Wars) have done a much better job giving Anakin empathy and a moral center.
And just to be clear, Jennifer, I absolutely agree with you that the redemption of sociopaths is a dangerous myth. The redemption of Force-users who have fallen to the Dark Side may be justified in Star Wars, but when they otherwise follow all the trappings of “he’ll change if I love him enough,” they are adding to the problem.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
I really think that the drive towards monogamy/non-monogamy is hard-wired, just like sexual orientation and identity.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
*nods* I think what I found most disturbing was that the sequels gave Anakin a textbook sociopath’s childhood. I’d been expecting his background to explain how he was redeemable in Jedi, but instead it confirmed the feeling I had the first time I saw the movie when I was 10: that he couldn’t see Luke as a person, let alone care about him. I took “It is too late for me” to mean something beyond his physical status – that he wished he’d never become this awful man, but he couldn’t go back and fix it now, so he was better off dying in this way, at this time.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Speaking of disabilities in fiction, does anybody remember Pelswick? It was a Nickelodeon cartoon that debuted around ’00~’01-ish, alongside Invader Zim, and As Told By Ginger and it’s about a teenage boy in a wheelchair who has an inept guardian angel and lives in San Francisco with his dad and little sister. He has a love interest and a villain in the school bully, who harasses Pelswick in spite of his disability, as opposed to because.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
I dread the annual November-through-May (pre-Christmas through Mother’s Day) inundation of commercials proclaiming that the only way for a man to show how much he loves his woman is to buy her something that has no practical use and that he may not be able to afford.
I don’t mind (properly certified) diamonds, but they’re not generally my first choice. I tend more toward non-precious stones like onyx, amethyst, and malachite. If I do want something sparkly, I prefer something less expensive that I won’t feel awkward about accepting or horribly guilty about losing (which has been known to happen with earrings in particular).
I also have a similar aversion to gold. Once I learned about color compatibility with skin tone, I realized that I look a hell of a lot better in silver, which has the added benefit of being less expensive.
The only time I will ever utter “He went to Jared” with a sincere sigh is during the scene in Alexander when the title character (played by Colin Farrell) pays a late night visit to his lover Hephaistion (Jared Leto).
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
Ugh. That’s awful. I only have a “mild” sensitivity to some perfumes. They just give me a headache for a few hours. I can’t imagine having to deal with an allergy that severe.
Also? I second your mom’s awesomeness.
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
We’ve been trying to convince my mother for years that “Can’t you take some cough medicine?” is not the proper response to my sister-in-law’s asthma-induced coughing. In fact, medical science says it’s precisely the wrong treatment.
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
OH MAN BLAST FROM THE PAST! I’d totally forgotten about that show!
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
It’s a shame, really, because there are a lot of situations in which Magic Missile would come in really handy.
I don’t think the Jack Chicks of the world get that D&D generally doesn’t harm people, but in fact acts as a place to socialize and can even help them work out their aggressive impulses in a non-aggressive way.
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
Yep, that was a thing: REGARD rings (ruby, emerald, garnet, amethyst, ruby, diamond) rings were the most popular, but there are others.
JMS(Quote) (Reply)
What really amazes me is the “RPGs keep people from learning social skills.” Because spending hours at a time working together with other people to solve problems doesn’t teach any useful social skills.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Are any of you planning on writing about “Nikita”? I’d love to share my thoughts, but if there’s a post upcoming, I’ll wait for the comment section there.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Not I! Anyone else?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Can I second this? I recently watched the first nine or so episodes and I think there is a LOT there that can be discussed, gender-wise.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
Hey, if nobody wants to, maybe a guest post?
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, please email it to me! We’re starting to do a few guest posts, even though we… don’t really have a plan or system in place.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Will do. I assume I can include a picture?
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
There was this awesome cop in Criminal Minds who had obsessive compulsive disorder (and wasn’t anything like Monk)
The cool thing about him was that it was his OCD that led him to discover the killer, but in such a way as to supercrip him. More like his OCD led him to organise, his concern for the poplace led him to focus that organisation on cases and death reports, and his skill set led him to understand the significance of the resulting patterns, but then his OCD made it easy for others to dismiss what he found as phantom patterns. His condition was important without it being all there was to him – and it was the very perception that it was that let the murders carry on for so long.
Plus, if it’s the episode I’m thinking of, there were a lot of other things that game me happies, but I’m not sure if I’m conflating it with another.
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
Not to mention the hours spent exploring other ways of thinking.
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
It’s the one where the killers are putting homeless people through an old slaughterhouse – rooms filled with shards of glass and so on – and the main culprit thinks he’s doing humanity a favor.
His superiors seemed to think being OCD = being unreliable, and they also assumed homeless people disappearing was par for the course. But the BAU people knew better in both instances: OCD people are not delusional, and they’re no more likely to perceive phantom patterns than anyone else (neurotypical human brains excel at reading patterns into coincidences). And statistically, they knew there actually IS enough stability among homeless populations to make the number of missing people from that small area highly unlikely to be a random event.
There is a lot of win in that ep.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
That is the episode I was thinking of, thanks. Other things I liked were that this was one of their “this is a bad one even by our standards” episodes without being sensationalised – and one where you saw a lot of the current victim and what she was going through, but it was harrowing, with no sense that I was being invited to find it titilating (though I think Criminal Minds isn’t as good at either of those as it used to be, though it’s still better than most).
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
I had – still have, actually – a problem with people conflating bisexuality with polyamory. (Problem not meaning that I’m angry, but that it makes my life difficult.) They are overlapping Venn circles, sometimes the same and sometimes not.
I was raised in a very conservative, very Catholic household. Consequently, everything from masturbation to homosexuality to married, heterosexual oral sex was lumped together under “sexual deviancy”. When I got into high school, I became friends with a network that included several bisexual, polyamorous teens. Consequently, I was told that bisexual = both a boy- and a girlfriend.
I was 14 when I realized that looking at naked women gave me squiggly feelings. I immediately self-identified as a lesbian, because that was the only word I had for “likes women”. For several years I dismissed all attraction to men as part of society’s happily-ever-after brainwashing. Finally I couldn’t deny any longer that men gave me squiggly feelings too and decided I was straight but sexually deviant. My attraction to women still bothered me; I thought there was something wrong with me. I automatically dismissed the possibility of bisexuality because through my friends I associated it with polyamory and I knew I wanted a single partner. It was several more years before I heard of people who were both bisexual and monogamous and realized that’s what I was.
Which is in a roundabout way why I believe in the importance of sites like The Hathor Legacy. I had ideas about things like “attracted to both genders” and “men just don’t understand women” and “society’s happily-ever-after brainwashing”. But until I had words like bisexuality, privilege and heteronormativity to work with, I had nothing to build on. I was stuck re-inventing the wheel.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Orwell was onto something – we control thoughts by controlling words. It’s amazing how difficult we manage to make it for people to figure out their sexuality – and not just for “deviants.” I really think there are varying forms of heterosexuality, which are easily confused with asexuality, emotional issues/hangups (not everyone who fails to obsess on sex is “damaged”), etc. But all of these are topics it’s not nice to talk about, so you end up with virtually no info, or really bad info coming from people who are almost as ignorant as you, or sources like porn which are at right angles to reality.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Well, someone on DeviantArt named Humon did a comic about the Tsunami/Earthquake that hit Japan and it was…rather glib, to say the least: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/071/2/0/don__t_panic_by_humon-d3bhlb6.jpg (hope that works, I can’t do HTML for shit)
I “complained” about it and a bunch of people just said “IT’S ONLY A WEBCOMIC, GET OVER YOURSELF”, no I will NOT!
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
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