personally, i am SHOCKED to hear that fallout 4 is being glitchy for some people. as a long time bethesda fan, i expected better from the company that gave us masterpieces like oblivion,
Pros of identifying with a fictional character: It’s nice to see yourself in someone else’s shoes, it’s inspirational at times, it inspires you that you can also make it through difficulties
Cons of identifying with a fictional character: when bad things happen to them or they hit a bad point in their lives it can almost be physically painful to watch
Alternatively: you feel personally offended/rejected when others criticize them.
Obi-Wan: Prince-Consort Bail Organa of Alderaan, I entrust to your keeping one of the children of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala. Hide her well, and keep your family safe.
Bail Organa: I shall raise her as my own child and, when she is of age, send her off to a high-profile job in the Galactic Senate. Also, I shall become one of the main spokespeople for dissent against Emperor Palpatine.
Obi-Wan: That… That is a terrible idea.
Bail Organa: I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of your plan to give Darth Vader’s other kid to Darth Vader’s step-brother on Darth Vader’s home planet.
Obi-Wan: In my defence, Anakin is incredibly dim.
I hate alcohol culture and I especially hate when my friends are caught up in it. I hate that drinking is seen as a rite of passage, and I hate that turning 21 in the US means you have to publicly declare and prove that you love alcohol by making terrible decisions all day and night. I hate that it changes people, and I’m not talking about the drinks themselves but all the lead up to it and the aftermath. I hate that getting “shit faced” is an actual goal and not even for a vague sense of enjoyment but rather as a notch on your belt because you haven’t lived until you’ve gotten drunk…or some shit like that. I hate how alcohol manages to amplify all your worst qualities. I especially hate alcohol in the hands of men, for whom it is yet another tool (or excuse) to be violent and predatory. I just really hate the culture surrounding alcohol.
Between gay marriage and President Obama singing Amazing Grace at Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s memorial, today feels like a West Wing episode that Sorkin didn’t write because it was too far outside the realm of possibility.
this is a response to Feminist Frequency’s (Anita Sarkeesian) slew of tweets about Mad Max: Fury Road, which I first saw here on rubycue‘s blog (tweet photo credit to rubycue, I tried to reblog this traditionally as a response but either i am ignorant or you just can’t do it, so I am creating my own post)
from the top
#2 adoring your setting is somehow misogynist? if I am watching a space drama and I admire the sleek design of a spaceship then I am being a misogynist? this reasoning makes no sense, and I believe George Miller very effectively addresses sexism and misogyny in this setting
“the camera […] caresses the brides’ bodies” this happens all of 5 seconds, literally 5 seconds. after a sand storm the brides and Furiosa stop, Max catches up with them, and when Max (and the audience) see them for the first time they are washing (clothed) after spending the better part of the day in a steel tank in the desert. Max demands that they give him the hose so that he can drink, he proceeds to drown himself (almost) and that’s it. it’s a wide angle shot that could, in all fairness, be taken as objectification, but the flow of the film doesn’t seem to agree with that
let me re-address the camera objectification thing. the above shot could be taken as objectification, that is a fair criticism, but it never happens again. literally, in no other sequence in the film is there even the slightest room for interpretation as the brides being objectified. do not take my word for this though, go see the movie!
plot: there is a sequence in the film where Immortan Joe (the sex slaver/master) is firing at Furiosa, and Splendid shields Furiosa with her pregnant body. Joe yells “that’s my property!”
(source) Splendid uses her body to shield her female savior in a show of compassion and bravery, very aware of the value placed on her body as a thing by the patriarchy she was used by. she uses this against the patriarchy, becoming a savior herself in the process. if her defiance isn’t enough for you then i can give you Dag’s questioning of the desert women and her receiving life from them symbolically, Capable’s empathy and forgiveness of Nux (once a part of the patriarchy), and Cheedo’s fear turned to devious determination. all very interesting, and most definitely humanizing
#4 “Mad Max’s villains as caricatures of misogyny” that might be true for some american women, but this is a very real thing for many women around the world. I have in fact encountered college educated americans who say that a woman refusing to have sex with her husband is immoral because it is his right to be able to sleep with his wife, even if she doesn’t want to… so is the sex slaver/master motif really all that far fetched in american society? no
“doesn’t challenge more prevalent forms of sexism”
George Miller does in fact take on more common forms of sexism in american society:
(sourcesource) in this sequence Max has a limited amount of ammunition, but he repeatedly fails to hit his target, and so he puts lives at risk. he fails traditional hero, protector, and skill roles that are associated with males. with only one shot left Max gives Furiosa the gun and she makes the shot. a female is better at skill and protector roles than a male! this is somewhat similar to the ‘boys and their toys’ comment in the STEM community that prompted this. both Furiosa and the women of science show that females can thrive in traditionally male skill roles
#5 men questioning themselves and how sexism works in society: men are in fact forced to question themselves. it may seem a caricature to some, but Nux is a male who has been fooled by the patriarchy, and throughout the film he fails to meet the unrealistic expectations placed on him by said patriarchy. when all seems lost and he is depressed, who saves him? Capable does, she shows compassion and empathy, and so in time he turns his back on the patriarchy to fight for the freedom of the people he has come to love
#6 feminism as “women can drive and kill too!” except that the brides very specifically state to Furiosa when she starts killing people “you said no killing!” and when Dag first meets the women of the desert and confronts them about violence she says “and i somehow thought you all were different”. the brides are very clearly non violent pacifists
#7 “concepts of power and glorification of violence”
in the still below Dag is taking a bag of rare seeds from a dying desert woman.
(source) look at the symbolism here! a young pacifist is being handed the torch bag of seeds from the older violent generation. this is the same girl who left her home where she was a sex slave under a patriarchal system, she went into the desert where she questioned the violent tendencies of past generations, she learned about the creation of life, and now she is returning home to build a new society from the ashes of the patriarchy, a society that is based on the power of freely given not forcefully taken fertility. i don’t know of a more efficient or beautiful way to deconstruct power structures
I have in the past agreed with Anita about certain things (video games) but I most definitely do not agree with her about this
[credit for all photos to the respective sites, Mad Max: Fury Road is the property of Village Roadshow Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures]
Very much agreed! I normally agree with Anita’s work, and I like her videos about video games. But Mad Max was a big win for me. It had some hiccups here and there (I felt like there may have been some gender essentialist even cis-normative views of gender in the film) but over all it was very satisfying for an action film.
I totally agree, except that the first night wasn’t consensual in the books either. So, Drogo gets the 13-year-old child bride he bought to say ‘yes’ that one time by virtue of not being the savage monster she expected. Wow, big deal. Are we supposed to assume that if Dany’d said ‘no’ instead he would have stopped right there? Really?
Dany was in no position to be no and be safe. More important, she wasn’t even aware that she could say no (because, let’s be frank, she couldn’t). From the first line of that chapeter Dany is painfully aware that she’s going to have sex with Drogo by the end of the night, and she’s scared out of her mind.
“He can have her tomorrow if he likes,” her brother said. “So as long as he pays the price.”
And
“As the hours passed, the terror grew in Dany, until was all she could do not to scream.”
The idea that she can say not doesn’t even pass through her mind, because Dany is from a culture where there’s no such thing as spousal rape, and just married a man whose culture involves men ‘mounting [a woman] as a stallion mounts a mare’.
All Dany has in this chapter is a semblance of control. She is asked what she wants, but she is in not real position to refuse (as her next chapter confirms – Drogo doesn’t ask if he can ‘ride her as rentlessly as he rode his stallion’ when she’s hurt and bleeding.)
She is in no position to give her consent. At this point, all Dany wanted was not to be married. Instead, her saying ‘yes’ is more about her taking whatever agency she could get, because Drogo at least made a show of giving a damn what she wanted any way or the other (I say made a show because he clearly didn’t care about Daenerys’s ‘consent’ when he bought her). Daenerys saying yes is about deciding to be a woman instead of a scared little girl under Viserys’s thumb, Daenerys saying yes is all about her and her character development, and is a very important, if fleeting way to assert herself. That’s good.
But Daenerys is also thirteen years old and a glorified sex slave, and it boggles my mind how much people like to ignore this, espcially in such an usually unofrgiving fandom.
We have fans acting like their relationship is so perfect when it started out incredibly stetcky and dub-con at least, even in the books.
We have Martin himself who continues to write Dany’s chapters as if Drogo was the great love of her life, but still parts of the fandom keep regarding him as if he were some sort of feminist god (I’m waiting eagerly for the moment where Dany finally realizes that she has Stockholm Syndrome. If that never happens, I’ll be disgusted.)
We have people dissing the show for treating Dany’s wedding night as the rape it was, but somehow conveniently unaware of how by romanticizing the scene in the books they are glorifying a relationship between a thirty-year-old man and a thirteen-year-old child bride.
Saying that pushing for better representation and speaking out against sexism in movies is “the worst thing [he] can do” reads as Whedon throwing his hands in the air and saying “I’m happy to pay lip service to ‘feminism’ but you can forget about me rolling up my sleeves and encouraging my colleagues to do better, and also it’s too hard for me to make the gender politics of my own pictures better”. It suggests that he thinks it’s all just too much trouble.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at James Cameron, who has insisted upon featuring a prominent, strong and complex female lead in nearly every single one of his films (and TV series), as this piece by L.A Times film critic Betsy Sharkey should remind you: “It’s not merely that his films are populated by strong women – they’ve been saving mankind since his first, 1978’s 12-minute sci-fi short Xenogenesis. What makes him a potent feminist force is the way he rides the mood swings and internal debates of the movement’s second and third waves, exploring what women want, how they define themselves and how society values their worth.”
With this in mind it’s worth noting that Cameron has never dined out on his films’ gender politics, nor expressly identified as feminist. He instead just focuses on doing the work. There are other male filmmakers, like Hayao Miyazaki, Pedro Almodóvar, and Alfonso Cuarón, who are doing this, but they are, inevitably, not the ones who get widespread media kudos for being “proud male feminists”.
In 2006, at his Equality Now tribute address, Whedon famously offered an imaginary interview, where the ‘journalist’ pressed him on the gender politics of his work. Continually badgered with the question “Why do you write these strong women characters?”, he responded in a number of ways before concluding, “Because you’re still asking me that question”.
A better response might have been, “Because as a powerful white male screenwriter and director, I am the dominant paradigm in Hollywood, and it’s up to me to ensure on-screen diversity until I can help create opportunities for female filmmakers.”
It’s not enough to simply throw around a few feminist buzzwords on social media; as the man at the helm of a movie that will make billions of dollars, Whedon is in a position to insist upon real change.
Whedon is just one example, but the important take-away is this: if they’re going to insist on continuing to refer to themselves as feminists, it’s time for these powerful men to step up.
We Need to Talk about Joss Whedon’s “Feminism” (x)
Past sins would be forgiven. Current flaws passed over. Who doesn’t want to hear the story of a secret operative who has settled down to a quiet life, but who has to take up arms again when his new life is endangered? Who doesn’t have heartache for him when he makes bad choices so the one he loves won’t find out what he used to be? When he is too afraid to tell the person he just married about his past?
Fandom would be screaming and aching and rolling around on the floor for this character. They would know why he had done all those things, even if it was never said. They would write fanfic about his tortured past. They would…woobify him.
