hey girl it's feminist fandom

[metaphortunate]

This was a reply to hradzka and then I thought I would just put it here as well.

Still, fandom is currently in a bit of a self-questioning state that it doesn't seem too eager to resolve. From my perspective as a non-feminist, this is at least partially because the answers presented by much of current feminist and leftist ideology would seem to me to be *answers that fandom does not want to hear.*

Yeah, you think that, because you think that there's 1) something wrong with feminism and 2) something wrong with our (where by "our" I mean female fandom, and therefore pretty obviously elide a huge number of differences) desires. God knows there's things wrong with feminism but it's not what you're thinking here. And what's wrong with our desires is only the inevitable outcome of what's wrong with the world. Read what Sugar wrote here about her teenage fantasies and their roots. Nobody's sexual development happened in a vacuum. Every woman in this world grew up in a world where men were presented every single damn day from a variety of sources as more intelligent valuable interesting strong capable central active resourceful blah blah blah, and incidentally, in a world where white men were presented as sexier smarter faster more valuable more cultured more interesting blah blah blah than non-white men, and do people really then wonder, somehow, when writing stories about canon that are 90% about white men, that our hindbrains come up with stories and desires for stories about white men? That the bits of our brains that are looking for fun and not hard work frequently consider their comfort zone to be white men? Surprise. And does that mean that those desires are wrong?

NO. Everybody makes their own erotic compromises with the patriarchy. We're going to die while the world is still fucked. We can't put our libidos on hold until everything is sorted out. And to sort out our libidos we'd not only have to sort out the world but we'd also have to hop in our imaginary time machine and go back and fix it so that we grew up in a fair world where people cared about what happened to people who weren't rich white men and that is also going to happen on the twelfth of never so you will forgive me if I say that there is nothing wrong with the way we live with our oppression by eroticizing it. I mean that. It's a survival trait that the brain eroticizes things it's afraid of or angry about, that is one of the ways we cope. And I love our survival. I will be cheerleading it forever. And when we find ways to not only survive but have fun with the place we are condemned to take, when we turn it into art and community and squee, I want to throw a fucking party. We win.

And questioning it is not wrong either. Feminism is not wrong about interrogating the whitecockers. Because that's how things get better. That's how we work on decolonizing our brains while living in our colonized brains. You say that this fic doesn't resolve or offer to resolve feminist fandom's ongoing internal conflict, but dude, to fix feminist fandom, you would have to fix the whole world. Are you seriously complaining that a 4000 word fanfic about a tumblr doesn't finish the job? It does its job, okay? It does its little part. It's one small step for fandom. I think it's a great story.

The story in question is When Fics Take on a Life of Their Own. Fandom: RPF/Feminist Ryan Gosling.

(Though to be honest I prefer Hey Girl, It's Kstew.)

Comments

[inlovewithnight]

Thank you.

[amaebi]

(And I think about how typically in mainstream culture, SF and otherwise, women are [un]presented as pre-killed. Sheesh.

[metaphortunate]

De nada, my friend!

[metaphortunate]

Inorite? Why would you ever viscerally disassociate yourself from that identity?

[kore]

Thank. You. So much. That was great.

(Everyone loves the Ryan Tumblr, but yeah, the KStew one is better, if only because that actress gets SO MUCH shit for not being a perky!smiley!happy! girl, and portraying Bella, the punching bag for "why teenage girls suck." I mean, I don't like Bella, really, but the online criticism of the Twilight series just goes rapidly into misogyny awfully quickly.)

From my perspective as a non-feminist, this is at least partially because the answers presented by much of current feminist and leftist ideology would seem to me to be *answers that fandom does not want to hear.*

.............man, I hate to admit this, but every single time someone is proudly up-front about how Non-Feminist they are, I take them a lot less seriously. Because, really, if you think women have the right to own property, and vote, and work, and choose their own sexual partners, &c &c -- THAT'S FEMINISM. That is at least the foundation of it. Feminists fought for it. Society CHANGED. Not all of it, not everywhere, and not completely by any means, and God knows the patriarchy is still fucking shit up everywhere, but it happened. And for someone (especially a guy) to kick back and say "I am not a feminist," when really pretty much what they always mean is "I don't agree with the liberal politics of some feminists," is....just Wrong, to me anyway.

And especially if they're guys, because I'm like look, feminism really isn't about what you think it is. (I know this is an irritated and incoherent response. I'm partly trying to figure out why that particular phrase is such an instant annoyance to me.)

[kore]

Yeah, I vividly remember identifying as a kid with the boys in adventure books because they got to Do Things, and the girls....often didn't. Or they got to do supposed Girl Things, which I was not interested in. That was fun.

[ironed_orchid]

I'm glad you shared it here, and the link to the Sugar piece.

[laurashapiro]

Thank you for this excellent reminder of how fucking brilliant you are.

[cofax7]

And especially if they're guys, because I'm like look, feminism really isn't about what you think it is.

Seconded.

Maybe I'm playing "no true Scotsman" here, but it does seem like 75% of the disdain for feminism comes from a misunderstanding of what it is.

[anoneknewmoose]

Everybody makes their own erotic compromises with the patriarchy.

FUCK LOVING YES.

(here via inlovewithnight, btw)

[kore]

Yeah, or thinking that it is inextricably tied to a very specific political agenda. Which, I won't lie, I do think it fits in better with, say, the dreaded Secular Humanism goblin better than oh RUSH LIMBAUGH for example, but that for me gets into the "as feminists we must liberate the poor Muslim women from their awful hijab" territory, and, well, no, maybe that should be up to them. But anyway.

[kore]

That reminds me, I read a fantastic story in an anthology of fiction about S&M written by women....was it by Dorothy Allison? Fuckit, i can't remember. I do know there was a story by Kathy Acker in the same anthology. Anyway, it was about this girl growing up and going through puberty in a violent background, and how the violence itself became internalized and part of her sexuality, only not at all in a dry or moralistic way. It was amazing and totally believable. I wish I could find it again.

[anoneknewmoose]

Oh, man, that sounds like a great read!

[kore]

AH HA, I'm completely betting it's this one -- searched for Acker in anthologies, and Allison's in this one and it fits the bill. http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Risk-Anthology-Forbidden-Writings/dp/1852422319/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325465811&sr=1-2

OH, and apparently that story is about Bone's sister Reese, who changed as a character between this story and Bastard! I didn't know that when I read it. But that's totally the anthology. It was an amazing story.

[serene]

The way the first paragraph of the quotation is formatted like the rest of it made it look like you were calling yourself a non-feminist and I was of course all like bwuh?

[serene]

I haven't read the fic, but this response gave me a huge brainboner for you.

[serene]

I'm currently reading the play "How I Learned to Drive", by Paula Vogel, which is also doing a lot of this in a really interesting and beautiful way.

(Trigger warning for those who haven't read the play but want to: it deals with a woman who was molested by an uncle when she was a minor, and paints him as not quite sympathetic, but not a monster, either.)

[hradzka]

.............man, I hate to admit this, but every single time someone is proudly up-front about how Non-Feminist they are, I take them a lot less seriously. Because, really, if you think women have the right to own property, and vote, and work, and choose their own sexual partners, &c &c -- THAT'S FEMINISM.

My reply to metaphortunate will appear where she originally replied, but I'll read what you are saying to each other over here, because I benefit more from listening to feminist conversations than from having them.

In the meantime, the only reply I will make in this thread is to you, and it is a specific request, because this is something that happens a lot and it is really starting to annoy me.

Please, please, PLEASE, live up to the code you claim and DO NOT TRY TO DICTATE ANOTHER PERSON'S IDENTITY, BE IT PERSONAL, POLITICAL, OR SOCIAL.

Thank you.

[kore]

Oh, I love that play. I always remember something she said: "My play dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us." That was amazing. (Dang, that interview is apparently offline: http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/past/drive/drive1.html)

[kore]

....I sort of have no idea how to respond to this and have absolutely no desire to start anything like a flamewar in someone else's journal, so I will just bow out here.

[kore]

Also, this conversation reminded me of a Dorothy Allison story which is sort of part of Bastard Out of Carolina, published in High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings, which I remember as being pretty amazing (I think I read it when it first came out, in about 1991?) and which you might like.

[anatsuno]

This is an amazing, lucid and articulate post, and I thank you for it. *keeps it close*

[night_reveals]

Big thumbs up from my direction.

Thanks for writing.

[night_reveals]

(and thanks to Anat for herding me here. :) )

[ironed_orchid]

Or reacting to that one frustratingly annoying person that one time who said she was a feminist and not considering that maybe those characteristics have nothing to do with feminist and everything to do with the individual.

[gomijacogeo]

I really like your balance between "here's the ideal" and "here's the world we live in". As always, it leads to interesting discussions. Sugar's response was also excellent.

[gomijacogeo]

If it lasts more than four hours, well, that's actually pretty common.

[kest]

Yeah, I remember this as well. I think it didn't help that the books I was addicted to as a kid were all written in the 50s, but I don't recall 'modern' books having been much better. Boys got to do things. Boys had initiative. I learned the word 'tomboy' early, and identified as one, although parsing its meaning as basically girls who want to be boys, it wasn't a huge improvement over directly wanting to be a boy. It's really hard to get out of the cultural box.

[kest]

Just our of curiosity, not knowing you at all or really having any context....what does being 'non-feminist' mean to you?

[metaphortunate]

Yeah. :( Alison Bechdel wrote about spending her childhood in a sort of gender Switzerland. A lot of smart girls mentally disassociate themselves from the girl gender early. I started refusing to wear skirts at age 7.

[kore]

Yeah, and even in the books where girls Did Things, often the object of Doing Them was to get a boy's attention, or she wound up with it as a benefit. I grew up reading....let's see, lots of 70s Problem Books, along with Blume, Le Guin, L'Engle, and so on....complete sets of Nancy Drew (also Hardy Boys), Little House, Lewis, &c. One thing I had not noticed about a lot of YA 70s Problem Books is that if the narrator/heroine is a girl, the Triumphant Ending is often because she winds up finally attracting a boy.

[kore]

That balance is one of the many things I like about metaphortunate's posts.

[metaphortunate]

Well, there are people who look at feminism the historical movement that has largely been run by educated middle-class white women who threw black people under the bus a bit with various levels of intention over the decades, and want to move above that to a more intersectional level of fighting for equal rights for everybody. I can't object to that. Though I believe that is not where hradzka is coming from.

[kore]

YEAH. I had an epic battle about jeans with my dad because he thought jeans made women look "unfeminine." PART OF THE POINT, DAD. I think that went on for at least a year or two (he was absent a lot, so I wore jeans when he wasn't there. Mwahahah).

[metaphortunate]

We gotta swim in this murky cultural soup!

[metaphortunate]

Interesting - are you looking at it in your own style? It's surrounded by "cite" tags, and to me it's italicized, setting it off.

[metaphortunate]

Thank you! :)

[kest]

I read something somewhere once...it might have been Dan Savage...but it said basically that for people who have gone through a trauma, fetishizing some aspect of that is in fact relatively common and can even be quite healthy, in terms of having power over it.

[kore]

for people who have gone through a trauma, fetishizing some aspect of that is in fact relatively common and can even be quite healthy, in terms of having power over it.

Oh, I like that. Owning it, rather than being owned by it....

[kest]

A lot of times it's so subtle...like the girls *seem* to Do Things, but they only do them following someone else's lead, or by accident, or after discussing them (getting permission), or get themselves into trouble and have to be rescued and Learn Their Lesson.

I was going to say something else, but I appear to have been distracted by rage.

Oh, yeah. Now I remember. I had a whole theory when I was younger, about why main characters were all male - because girls will go see the movie or whatever either way, but boys are self-centered and won't see 'girl' movies or read 'girl' books. Unless the girl is 'sexy'. Patriarchy win by being smelly buttheads.

[kore]

I had a whole theory when I was younger, about why main characters were all male - because girls will go see the movie or whatever either way, but boys are self-centered and won't see 'girl' movies or read 'girl' books. Unless the girl is 'sexy'.

Yeah, isn't that still the standard argument in a lot of publishing and Hollywood? And part of explaining the success of Harry Potter &c -- "Well, girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls." (And then there is Twilight, but one guy apparently gained internet fame by going, "Lo, I am a guy reading Twilight on the Internet!", so.)

I do remember a lot of young boys going to see Titanic (not just on dates either), but again, that was pretty much the story of how a Girl was Rescued by a Boy, even if he wasn't the main focus of the story. (And the Girl's Story came out because of the Macho Male Explorer, as well. sigh.)

[serene]

Yeah, in my style, it's in the same italics as your response.

[serene]

And it appears to be fixed (or my eyes are better tonight).

[lovepeaceohana]

This is such an interesting and provocative conversation, and I love that it is being had.

[blueswan]

Thank you for this.

[starlady]

Did I comment on this yet? No? Damn.

Anyway, yes, thank you for posting this. Also, just as an aside, the way people--even other women--say they don't like KStew because she's "angry" really infuriates me. (No surprise: people have tended to assume that I have anger issues all my life.) It's not like she could actually have anything to be angry about, is it?!

[lian]

Oh wow, uhm? I had somehow read an excerpt from this post in a quote by *somebody* and it really resonated with me and so I unintentionally half-quoted something back at *you* in a comment to hradzka's post without getting that? I sort-of link-hopped my way to this post and it finally clicked. Hahahaha.

Anyway, I am amused and a bit embarrassed, but mostly glad I can bookmark this beautiful little essay because yep. STILL RESONATING LIKE WHOA. <3

[brainwane]

Linked someone to this today because it's great.