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doingproblematicmedia · 1 year

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Velma Wrapup: On Adult Comedy

Hey fam. I know this is mad late, but let’s be honest, trying to write a wrapup on Velma was about as painful as watching it. Enjoy!

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So speaking of HBO, I just watched Marc Maron’s From Bleak to Dark, which is one of the funniest standup routines I’ve seen in a long time.

It was also deeply dark and pretty disturbing in places.

I mean, he didn’t hold back. COVID? Auschwitz? Terminal illness? Abortion? Disinformation? Antisemitism? Suicide?

All there.

And it was funny as fuck.

I’m gonna keep coming back to Kurt Vonnegut here, because I think he got to the root of comedy: that all humor is based on fear. “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.”

From Bleak to Dark worked because of this fear. We’re exhausted. The state of the world doesn’t seem to be getting any better, and it’s just hard to navigate being human right now. How on earth can you make this material funny?

And the answer is: by reaching deep into the dark places of the soul, plucking the strings of our agonies and worst fears, and dragging them into the light. Saying: Hey, I’m human, you’re human, and here we are trapped in the mess of our humanity. I see you. Hi.

And we laugh.

Because what else are we gonna do about it?

As both Maron and Vonnegut remarked, the jokes in Auschwitz must’ve been amazing.

I stumbled on this essay by Matthew Morgan on the state of modern irony, and it stuck a chord:

One feature of the free mind is an ability to entertain contradictory ideas simultaneously; at its most refined, this is an appreciation of the ironic, which Schlegel showed is borne of contradiction. Albert Camus talked about the Absurd as the search for value in a valueless universe. Humans are both the only known creatures who comprehend the meaninglessness of the cosmos and the animals most insistent on discovering meaning, demonstrating that irony is at the heart of the human condition. To embrace irony is, therefore, to embrace life.

Irony, the essay points out, strikes at the contradictions of our messy lives. Vonnegut was a master of irony, using it in such a subtle way that it sailed over many peoples’ heads. In an interview with Playboy in 1973, he famously stated:

You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit...But it’s a useful, comforting sort of horseshit, you see? That’s what I object to about preachers. They don’t say anything to make anybody any happier, when there are all these neat lies you can tell. And everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we can’t get very high-grade truths out of them. But as far as improving the human condition goes, our minds are certainly up to that. That’s what they were designed to do.

Vonnegut’s comforting lies contradict the inherent meaninglessness of life; they give us something to hold onto. Something to reach out with, to show us that we understand each other. That we all want and fear. That we can form community with this shared understanding. An understanding based in irony. In the contradictions of life.

What does all this have to do with Velma? Bear with me. I’m getting there.

Morgan’s essay also gets at what I think is an issue with a lot of current comedy:

...social commentary has been lost amid the exponential growth of shock-value comedy, the inanity of which is exposed by its label: rather than using shock to change values, the vacuous comedy of something like Family Guy values only the shock. This kind of humour merely consolidates one’s place within the in-group of cynical cool kids by sniggering at increasingly “offensive” jokes, a sort of lack-of-virtue signalling.

...The reason that shows like Family Guy are so empty is that they want to mock everything (because that’s detached and cool) while refusing to show us anything (because that would be old-fashioned and ridiculous).

And here’s where we get to Velma.

High school is a weird time. Lots of teenage media would have us believe that high school is when we come into our own: amongst the parties and rebellion and teenage love and heartbreak, we are tested, and emerge from this crucible as a fully-formed person. Nothing could be further from the truth. High school is messy, ugly, and painful. It doesn’t look like what it does on the screen. The idea that ‘high school is the best years of your life’ is oft repeated, which in hindsight is horseshit. But maybe we believed that deep down, back when we were in high school, and were terrified that we were doing it wrong.

And so many of us emerge from this with scars.

There is a lot of adult media about high school kids! Because on some level, we’re all still trying to process this time of our lives. Putting it into art, stylizing it or flaying it open, helps us to do so. And for teens watching this media, hopefully we’re saying: it’s ok. This is messy ugly and painful, but you’re not alone.

I think Velma is trying to do this. Velma goes to some serious lengths to dig into this messy high school experience. It also pokes at how the media treats the high school experience, which is awesome in theory.

The problem is, it falls into a very high school sort of trap. The kind of trap that we were supposed to mature past. The kind of trap that a lot of shock comedy hasn’t matured past.

As Morgan says, it’s that Velma wants to mock high school media - because it’s detached and cool. I remember this being a thing in high school. In order to be cool, you had to be detached. You could never show real emotion or real hurt. Everything had to roll off like water on a duck’s back.

Because showing real vulnerability wasn’t cool. Cool was not caring. Cool was being able to hurt others, without showing any hurt yourself. Velma wants to skewer the idealized version of high school we see in media - but instead, it just becomes another high school bully.

And all the criticism that has been levelled at Velma? It’s rolled off. Like water on a duck’s back. HBO has renewed it for a second season.

It’s like watching your high school bully get elected class president.

I’m not gonna dissect the content of Velma, because enough people have done that already. The piles of shitty jokes, the weird meta commentary, the moments that don’t work, the moments that hurt - it’s all been compiled, and I don’t want to beat a dead horse (I’m the horse in this metaphor. Because dealing with Velma is painful).

But I do want to say, it’s an exquisite study on how comedy fails. Fails to reach out, fails to plunge deep into its audience and pull on its worst fears. Fails to make us seen, fails to find a shared humanity.

Doug Walker, who of all people is qualified to comment on bad comedy, probably said it best:

[Velma has] this wall of protective bullshit that's stopping it from being really funny or really clever.

And that’s that. There’s a wall. Velma is not reaching an audience, because it physically cannot.

Is it the writers’ own fears that built this wall? Fears of being mocked? Wanting to be detached and cool?

Because to make real connections, we run the risk of being hurt. Being hurt is a part of life. And the best comedy overcomes this. Says ‘Hi. I know you’re hurting. So am I. Can we make this less painful together?’

If Velma is to be believed, we cannot. All we can do is carry on hurting each other, with no connection or relief in sight.

But as good comics have shown, we can ease the pain with shared laughter.

#doing velma #velma wrapup #legit I am so sorry this is mad late #I never wanna think about this show again tbh

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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There’s no nice way to say this: a certain subset of (mostly) white people have lost their minds online. These people wake up to a vast insurrection crossing all racial and national boundaries – and contrive to make this all about themselves. Their affects, their unconsciouses, their moral worthiness. How can I be Not Complicit? How can I be a Better Ally? How do I stop benefiting from white supremacy in my daily life? How do I rid myself of all the bad affects and attitudes? Can I purify my soul in the smelter of a burning police precinct? Occasional ratissages out into mainstream culture (we’re decolonising the Bon Appétit test kitchen!), but mostly what this uprising calls for is an extended bout of navel-gazing. Really get in there, get deep in that clammy lint-filled hole, push one finger into the wound of your separation from the primordial world, and never stop wriggling. Maybe there’s a switch, buried just below the knot, and if you trip it your body will open up like a David Cronenberg nightmare to reveal all its greasy secrets to your eyes. Interrogate yourself! Always yourself, swim deep in the filth of yourself. The world is on fire – but are my hands clean? People are dying – but how can I scrub this ghastly whiteness off my skin?

You could set aside the psychosexual madness of this stuff, maybe, if it actually worked. It does not work. It achieves nothing and helps nobody. Karen and Barbara Fields: ‘Racism is not an emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred, or malevolence. If it were that, it would easily be overwhelmed; most people mean well, most of the time, and in any case are usually busy pursuing other purposes. Racism is first and foremost a social practice.’ Social practices must be confronted on the level of the social. But for people who don’t want to change anything on the level of the social, there’s the Implicit Associations Test. This is the great technological triumph of what passes for anti-racist ideology: sit in front of your computer for a few minutes, click on some buttons, and you can get a number value on exactly how racist you are. Educators and politicians love this thing. Wheel it into offices. Listen up, guys, your boss just wants to take a quick peek into your unconscious mind, just to see how racist you are. How could anyone object to something like that?

…

See, for instance, the form letters: How To Talk To Your Black Friends Right Now. Because I refuse to be told I can’t ever empathise with a black person, I try to imagine what it would be like to receive one of these. Say there’s been a synagogue shooting, or a bunch of swastikas spraypainted in Willesden Jewish Cemetery. Say someone set off a bomb inside Panzer’s in St John’s Wood – and then one of my goy friends sends me something like this:

Hey Sam – I can never understand how you feel right now, but I’m committed to doing the work both personally and in my community to make this world safer for you and for Jewish people everywhere. From the Babylonian Captivity to the Holocaust to today, my people have done reprehensible things to yours – and while my privilege will never let me share your experience, I want you to know that you’re supported right now. I see you. I hear you. I stand with the Jewish community, because you matter. Please give me your PayPal so I can buy you a bagel or some schamltz herring, or some of those little twisty pastries you people like.

How would I respond? I think I would never want to see or hear from this person again. If I saw them in the street, I would spit in their face, covid be damned. I would curse their descendants with an ancient cackling Yiddish curse. These days, I try to choose my actual friends wisely. Most of them tend to engage me with a constant low level of jocular antisemitic micoaggressions, because these things are funny and not particularly serious. But if one of my friends genuinely couldn’t see me past the Jew, and couldn’t see our friendship past the Jewish Question, I would be mortified. Of course, it’s possible that the comparison doesn’t hold. Maybe there are millions of black people I don’t know who love being essentialised and condescended to, who are thrilled by the thought of being nothing more than a shuddering expendable rack for holding up their own skin. But I doubt it. Unless you want me to believe that black people inherently have less dignity than I do, this is an insult.

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If you want to find the real secret of this stuff, look for the rules, the dos and don’ts, the Guides To Being A Better Ally that blob up everywhere like mushrooms on a rotting bough. You’ve seen them. And you’ve noticed, even if you don’t want to admit it, that these things are always contradictory:

DO the important work of interrogating your own biases and prejudices. DON’T obsess over your white guilt – this isn’t about you! DO use your white privilege as a shield by standing between black folx and the police. DON’T stand at the front of marches – it’s time for you to take a back seat. DO speak out against racism – never expect activists of colour to always perform the emotional labour. DON’T crowd the conversation with your voice – shut up, stay in your lane, and stick to signal boosting melanated voices. DO educate your white community by providing an example of white allyship. DON’T post selfies from a protest – our struggle isn’t a photo-op for riot tourists.

Žižek points out that the language of proverbial wisdom has no content. ‘If one says, “Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!” it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air – think about eternity!”), it also sounds deep.’ The same goes here. Whatever you say, it can still sound woke. Why?

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This stuff is masochism, pleasure-seeking, full of erotic charge – and as Freud saw, the masochist’s desire is always primary and prior; it’s always the submissive partner who’s in charge of any relationship. Masochism is a technology of power. Setting the limits, defining the punishments they’d like to receive, dehumanising and instrumentalising the sadistic partner throughout. The sadist works to humiliate and degrade their partner, to make them feel something – everything for the other! And meanwhile, the masochist luxuriates in their own degradation – everything for myself! You’re just the robotic hand that hits me. When non-white people get involved in these discourses, they’re always at the mercy of their white audiences, the ones for whom they perform, the ones they titillate and entertain. A system for subjecting liberation movements to the fickle desires of the white bourgeoisie. Call it what it is. This is white supremacy; these scolding lists are white supremacist screeds.

But systems of white supremacy have never been in the interests of most whites (‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded’), and they have never really fostered any solidarity between whites. Look at the stories. I had a run-in with the police, you announce, and a black person might have died, but I’m fine, because I’m white. No – you’re fine because you’re white and rich. You’re fine because you look like someone who reviews cartoons for a dying online publication called The Daily Muffin, which is exactly what you are. Bald and covered in cat hair. Frameless glasses cutting a red wedge into the bridge of your nose. The white people who get gunned down by police don’t look like you. Their class position is stamped visibly on their face, and so is yours. And you’ve trained yourself to see any suffering they experience as nothing more than ugly Trump voters getting what they deserve.

Why aren’t there protests when a white person is murdered by police? Answer 1: because, as John Berger points out, ‘demonstrations are essentially urban in character.’ Native Americans are killed by cops at an even higher rate than black people, but this too tends to happen very far away from the cities and the cameras; it becomes invisible. Answer 2: because nobody cares about them. Not the right wing, who only pretend to care as a discursive gotcha when there’s a BLM protest. And definitely not you. Sectors of the white intelligentsia have spent the last decade trying to train you out of fellow-feeling. Cooley et al., 2019: learning about white privilege has no positive effect on empathy towards black people, but it is ‘associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor white person’s plight.’ A machine for turning nice socially-conscious liberals into callous free-market conservatives.

The rhetoric of privilege is a weapon, but it’s not pointed at actually (ie, financially) privileged white people. We get off lightly. All we have to do is reflect on our privilege, chase our dreamy reflections through an endlessly mirrored habitus – and that was already our favourite game. You might as well decide that the only cure for white privilege is ice cream. Working-class whites get no such luxuries. But as always, the real brunt falls on non-white people. What happens when you present inequality in terms of privileges bestowed on white people, rather than rights and dignity denied to non-white people? The situation of the oppressed becomes a natural base-state. You end up thinking some very strange things. A few years ago, I was once told that I could only think that the film Black Panther isn’t very good because of my white privilege. Apparently, black people are incapable of aesthetic discernment or critical thought. (Do I need to mention that the person who told me this was white as sin?) This framing is as racist as anything in Carlyle. It could only have been invented by a rich white person.

Give them their due; rich white people are great at inventing terrible new concepts. Look at what’s happening right now: they’re telling each other to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. You should never tell people to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo – but we live in an evil world, and it’s stormed to the top of the Amazon bestsellers list. You maniacs, you psychopaths, look what you’ve done. I’m not saying people shouldn’t read the book – I read it, and I don’t get any special dispensations – but you should read it like Dianetics, like the doctrine of a strange and stupid cult.

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The book is a thrill-ride along a well-paved highway – ‘powerful institutions are controlled by white people;’ true, accurate, well-observed – that quickly takes a dive off the nearest cliff – ‘therefore white people as a whole are in control of powerful institutions.’ Speak for yourself, lady! All a are b, DiAngelo brightly informs us, therefore all b must also be a. She doesn’t advocate for her understanding of the world, she simply assumes it. So it’s not a surprise that the real takeaway from White Fragility is that Robin DiAngelo is not very good at her job.

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Imagine a devoted cultist of Tengrism, who sometimes gets invited by company bosses to harangue the workforce on how the universe is created by a pure snow-white goose flying over an endless ocean, and how if you don’t make the appropriate ritual honks to this cosmic goose you’re failing in your moral duty. But every time she gives this spiel, she always gets the same questions. Exactly how big is this goose? Surely the goose must have to land sometimes? Geese hatch in litters – what happened to the other goslings? Something must be wrong with these people. Why don’t they just accept the doctrine? Why do they hate the goose? We need a name for their sickness. Call it Goose Reluctance, and next time someone doesn’t jump to attention whenever you speak, you’ll know why. Of course, the comparison is unfair; ideas about eternal geese are beautiful, and DiAngelo’s are not. But the structure is the same. Could it be that Robin DiAngelo is a poor communicator selling a heap of worthless abstractions? No, it’s the workers who are wrong.

(By the way, how did you feel about that phrase, racial humility? I didn’t like it, but her book is full of similar formulations – she also wants us to ‘build our racial stamina’ and ‘attain racial knowledge.’ Now, maybe I’m an oversensitive kike, but I can’t encounter phrases like these and not hear others in the background. Racial spirit. Racial consciousness. Racial hygiene. And somewhere, not close but coming closer, the sound of goosestepping feet.)

I didn’t seek out any of the material I talk about here. It came to me. And it’s making me feel insane. The only social media I use these days is Instagram – because if I’m going to be hand-shaping orecchiette all night, and serving it with salsiccia, rapini, and my own home-pickled fennel, it’s not for my own pleasure, and I demand to receive a decent 12 to 15 likes for my efforts. (I will not be accepting your follow request.) A week ago, on the 2nd of June, my feed was suddenly swarming with white people posting blank black squares. People I’d never known to be remotely political, people whose introduction to politics was clearly coming through the deranged machine of social media. Apparently, that was ‘Blackout Tuesday.’ I don’t know whose clever idea this was, and I don’t want to know, but it came with a threat. If all your friends are posting the square, and you’re not, does it mean you simply don’t care enough about black lives? Around the same time, I was helpfully made aware of a viral Instagram album titled Why The Refusal To Post Online Is Often Inherently Racist. I honestly can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to live like this – always on edge, always trying to be Good, always trying to have your Goodness recognised by other people, in a game where the scores are tracked by what you post on the internet, and the rules are always changing.

#sam kriss #read the whole thing

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gcintheme-blog · 7 years

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Debunking Serano’s “Debunking”

Julia Serano believes he has “debunked” radical feminists in this article published on his blog yesterday. I would like to take some time to deconstruct Serano’s arguments and debunk trans activism’s “debunking.” Because of all the fallacies and straw men in the article, this post will be a long one. Grab a snack and join me. Serano, this is rhetorically addressed to you.

Your second sentence in this article:

From pre-interview conversations we shared, I knew that my interviewer planned to ask me about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s comments from earlier this year wherein she claimed that trans women are not women.

And in the article you link to for a source:

Adichie, who is not transgender, responded: “So when people talk about, you know, ‘Are trans women women?’ — my feeling is trans women are trans women.”

Notice how you’re dishonest in the second sentence of this article? You begin by touting yourself and your interview for the New York Times, and then immediately, falsely, cast skeptical feminists like Adichie as the villains. While I wouldn’t disagree with Adichie if she had said trans women aren’t women, she didn’t say that and you begin your piece by framing “popular” feminists (Adichie and women like her) as a natural enemy.

Moving on, you talk about your own book for a while, and then:

Women who insist that trans women are not women often object to being called “cis women” under the false assumption that it somehow undermines their femaleness — this is not at all the purpose of this language....In other words, referring to someone as “cisgender” simply means that they have not had a transgender experience.

You do not get to determine other people's analysis of your writing, especially if you want to falsely put words in Adichie's mouth. If you are going to claim that trans feelings are what matter over other people speaking, then you cannot simultaneously tell anyone who feels undermined by putting a prefix on our oppression that we are wrong.

I could say "In other words, referring to someone as 'he' simply means he was born with a penis and has been treated accordingly by society" and you'd call me a bigot. You cannot support, for instance, the idea that misgendering a trans person is violence if the alleged offender meant no harm because according to your logic, the intent of words matters more than the effect.

How many times have women heard men tell us not to take their words negatively? “Calm down!” “Relax!” “It’s a compliment!” This is tired.

While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history.

This is not an argument. Sexism has occurred in virtually every culture and throughout history. So has rape, murder, and child abuse. Longevity is not relevant. You cannot argue that it lends legitimacy or validates your claims.

While cis feminists who claim that trans women are not women obsess over questions of identity (“How can a ‘man’ possibly call ‘himself’ a woman?”), they purposefully overlook or play down the fact that we have very real life experiences as women.

Actually, we don't obsess over your identity. You do. Radical feminists are focused on material problems whereas you are the one constantly blowing about identity validation. I have never asked how a man can call himself a woman because society allows men to call themselves anything they want, including the biologically impossible.

You do not have experiences as a woman. You have experiences as a man masquerading as a woman. They will never be the same as our experiences.

Forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism.

Spaces free from men does help our goal by allowing us to organize women like you to come and tell us who we are and what our goals should be. Men forcing themselves into women's spaces is sexism.

Other common appeals to biology center on reproduction — e.g., stating that trans women have not experienced menstruation, or cannot become pregnant. This ignores the fact that some cisgender women never menstruate and/or are unable to become pregnant.

A man has never become pregnant. Where are women who do not menstruate or are unable to become pregnant complaining like you are? I have never become pregnant and never once did I doubt that I'm a woman. Society has treated me from birth as a female with the potential to become pregnant. You do not have that potential.

Women’s genitals vary greatly, and as with chromosomes and reproductive capabilities, we cannot readily see other people’s genitals in everyday encounters.

Women do not have penises. Diversity in vulvas and vaginas is not a penis. We can evaluate the sex of 99% of the people we come across at first glance. I PROMISE you that men know I have a vagina when they sexually harass me on the street even though they can't see it.

When I lived in Spain as an Iraqi girl, I was sometimes mistaken for a person of Romani heritage and treated as such. (One specific incident comes to mind where I was patiently waiting to use a cash machine and the current user tried to shoo me away, believing I would try to rob her.) While my phenotype might appear to be that of a Roma girl to some people and I have had “real experiences” of being an Iraqi mistaken for a Roma person, that doesn’t make me Romani. It doesn’t give me the history of the Romani people or the struggle of their daily lives and common discrimination.

And frankly, what could possibly be more sexist than reducing a woman to what’s between her legs? Isn’t that precisely what sexist men have been doing to women for centuries on end?

Possibly the idea that a woman is a collection of stereotypes rather than a biologically oppressed class? Acknowledging I have a vagina and my life has been a certain way because of it is not reductive. I never said it defines me; it makes my life significantly different from yours and as a radical feminist I am trying to fight against that. You're the only one using that argument.

So it is hypocritical for any self-identified feminist to use “biology” and “body parts” arguments in their attempts to dismiss trans women.

Biology is directly tied to our oppression. We need to point that out to fight the oppression. Is it a black person playing into racism by pointing out that she is black? Is a Jew hypocritical for pointing out that antisemitism happens to her because she is Jewish? During the Holocaust, people with Jewish heritage who self-identified as atheists were STILL murdered along with practicing Jews. They couldn't identify themselves out of the ghettos or the concentration camps because your identifarianism is made up.

The main thrust of this assertion is that women are women because of socialization and/or their experiences with sexism. But what about me then?

It's NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU.

You're not a woman. There is your answer.

Or what about young trans girls who socially transition early in life, and who never have the experience of being perceived or treated as a man?

Socialization literally starts in the uterus. There are cultures with superstitions that doing certain things will "curse" a pregnant woman with a female infant. I can see you don't spend a lot of time with children (alhamdulillah--thank god) because you would see how early that socialization begins and reflects in their behavior. I’ve already written about how society disadvantages female infants.

A young girl is forced against her will to live as a boy. Upon reaching adulthood, after years of male socialization and privilege, she comes out about identifying as female and begins to live as a woman. Do you accept her as a woman?

Children are not forced against their will to live as their biological sex because biological sex is natural trait for human beings . Children are forced to conform to gender roles but your insistence that womanhood is just a collection of those roles is actually upholding the problem.

Saying "you are a boy" is not the same as being told what “boy” socially entails, or that you cannot do feminine-labeled things because you are a boy. You were NEVER a young girl so don't act like a victim in that sense. I'm sorry society forces children to uphold gender roles but radical feminists are the ones out here fighting them.

More often than not, people who claim that trans women aren’t women make both the biology and socialization arguments simultaneously, even though they are seemingly contradictory (i.e., if biology is the predominant criteria, then one’s socialization shouldn’t matter, and vice versa).

Biology is the basis of that socialization. Radical feminists are not arguing conflicting ideologies. We acknowledge that socialization is assigned to us based on our material and unchangeable biological sex. This is not contradictory in any way.

Much like their homophobic counterparts who make appeals to biology (“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”)

Creationism is not biology. You're trying to undermine biology and evolution with an example that you know is religious and not scientific at all.

The trans-women-aren’t-women crowd desperately throws the entire kitchen sink at us rather than attempting to make a coherent argument.

I think I've made a very coherent argument but trans activists ignore that argument and set up straw men, like you just did in the sentence immediately before this one. You're the one who has it wrong.

While gender socialization is quite real, all of us are capable of overcoming or transcending the socialization that we experienced as children.

So now you're acknowledging gender socialization but saying we can overcome it. This is blaming women for our own oppression because we cannot socialize or identify ourselves out of it. Even trans men cannot escape their socialization and the attacks against their female biology like anti-abortion laws.

If I could transcend my socialization, I wouldn't wear makeup, but my job requires me to look "presentable" and this means wearing makeup in my society. If I could transcend my socialization, I would be much firmer with men who interrupt me but I know they will likely react with more hostility and I have to prioritize my safety over shedding stereotypes. It's hardly an option really.

The "Male Energy" and "Male Privilege" Fallacies

The way you've put "male privilege" in quotation marks and followed with the word "fallacies" makes me extremely nervous for this next section because it sounds like you don't believe male privilege exists. But I will read and judge fairly...

In my many years of being perceived by the world as a cisgender woman, I have never once had anyone claim to detect “male privilege” or “male energy” in me.

This is because your male socialization means you are more likely to react with hostility or violence when being criticized, and our female socialization makes us less likely to criticize men, out of fear or concern for your feelings over ours.

Do you think male-identified males have these conversations with women or with each other all the time? I have never told a man he exudes "male energy." I've never even heard of this. It's bizarre. It’s also unrealistic to believe people tell you every thought they have about you. I’m sure people have thought things about me—both flattering and unflattering—that they’ve kept to themselves.

Male privilege is a very real thing. In my booking Whipping Girl, I talk at length about my own personal experiences of having it, and subsequently losing it post-transition.

Why do you have male privilege in quotation marks in every previous line? It's very obvious you don't think it applies to you as you've stated this directly. That's the same line of thinking I've heard from most male self-identified "feminists" who really just want to deny their own culpability. We've all heard it.

The fact that the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd constantly harp about trans women’s real or imagined male privilege, yet refuse to acknowledge or examine their own cisgender privilege, demonstrates that their concerns about privilege are disingenuous.

"Trans women's real or imagined male privilege." So which is it then? You aren't putting forth a coherent argument.

Cisgender privilege is not real. Women are not privileged more than men in the world, and accepting the reality of your body and how it means you are treated in the world is not a privilege unless you argue that being transgender is a mental illness, in which case those without that mental illness do have some advantages. But the trans lobby takes offense to that.

There are numerous problems with this line of reasoning [that trans males are caricatures of women]:

1) It relies on a highly negative view of feminine gender expression (that I have debunked in my writings) and implies that conventionally feminine cisgender women are also behaving superficially and/or reinforcing stereotypes.

If you do believe that women are an oppressed group, then naturally if follows the oppressed group cannot be blamed for their participation in that system to the same extent as the oppressors.

I have been socialized from birth to act feminine according to my culture’s standards. You haven’t. When you imply that acting out my oppression make you oppressed too, it’s insulting. First, it makes a joke of what I am forced to do to live safely, and second, it implies if I acted differently, I wouldn’t be oppressed as a woman, which isn’t true.

2) It ignores the many trans women who are outspoken feminists and/or not conventionally feminine.

Lots of men call themselves feminists but it doesn't make them feminists or make them women. Calling yourself a feminist doesn’t make you a feminist any more than calling yourself a woman makes you a woman. (It doesn’t make you those things at all.)

3) Trans women do not transition out of a desire to be feminine; we transition out of a self-understanding that we are or should be female (commonly referred to as gender identity).

If there is no discernible biological condition that defines someone as a woman, as you argue before, then what are you transitioning to?

You are just adopting feminine stereotypes (but picking and choosing, mind you) and saying that makes you a woman. It doesn’t. Womanhood isn’t a feeling or an inner identity and to imply this is anti-woman because it sets the foundation for blaming us for our own position within an oppressed class.

4) Trans women who are conventionally feminine are not in any way asserting or insinuating that all women should be conventionally feminine, or that femininity is all there is to being a woman. Like cis women, trans women dress the way we do in order to express ourselves, not to critique or caricature other women.

You are asserting that feminine stereotypes make you a woman instead of what you are: a feminine man. And, by your language “[imply that] femininity is all there is to being a woman” you are implying that femininity (which is a set of cultural stereotypes) is at least part of being a woman. This is in conflict with your “identification only” mantra and it is proven false by every proud gender non-conforming woman and man out there.

5) This line of reasoning accuses trans women of arrogantly presuming to know what cis women experience, when we do no such thing. In reality, it’s the cis women who forward this accusation that are the ones arrogantly presuming to know what trans women experience and what motivates us.

You literally said in your last point: “Like cis women, trans women dress the way we do in order to express ourselves.” I do not dress the way I do in order to express myself; I dress this way in order to avoid violence in an extremely patriarchal society where women are expected to be covered or attacked. You just claimed to know my experience and motivations and you got it completely wrong.

As a trans woman, I will be the first to admit that I cannot possibly know what any other woman experiences or feels on the inside.

Then why have you spent this entire article constructing straw man arguments and insisting radical feminists believe things that we simply don’t? Your second sentence was a lie about something feminist and woman Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie said. How could you assume you have anything in common with us?

But the thing is, the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd cannot possibly know what any other woman experiences or feels either!

Actually, I do know what other women experience and feel because I am a woman. We have a shared experience as an oppressed class that you are not a part of. I’m glad you are acknowledging that you don’t know how we feel, but women around the world have the common experience of our biology and our socialization as the lesser sex according to that biology.

It’s the cis women who attempt to exclude us who seem to have a singular superficial stereotypical notion of what constitutes a woman, or of what women experience.

When you call the shared experiences of women under patriarchy “a singular superficial notion” you are arguing that sexism does not exist. Sexism has to have a definition in order to fight against it and that definition is the oppression of women as a class of people based on our reproductive biology.

Some cis feminists will extrapolate from this [trans people’s claims of sexed brains] that all trans people must hold highly essentialist beliefs about female-versus-male brains, and therefore that we are an affront to feminism. Often, they will make this case while simultaneously making essentialist claims themselves (e.g., regarding reproductive capacities) in order to undermine our identities.

The idea of different male and female brains is an affront to feminism because we know scientifically that our brains house our personality traits, intelligence, and memory and thus significantly affects how we act within society. Arguing that women have fundamentally different brains from men supports sexism by allowing men to argue our social circumstances are actually brought about by biological determination and that our lower place within society is valid because we are less intelligent or naturally drawn to certain tasks.

As a biologist, you should know that genitals serve a completely different purpose than the brain and does lead to different lived experiences for men and women. Even without the social construct of gender, women have pregnancies and men do not. To point out that male and female genitals are different is acknowledging material reality, whereas you are trying to construct your arguments upon subjective “identities.”

Radical feminists argue this material reality should not place women at a lower position within society or designate certain roles for us that have nothing to do with biology. Radical feminists accept our realities as people with vaginas and uteruses and the biological consequences of those things. What we do not accept is the unnecessary and oppressive social roles that have been created based upon them.

But here’s the thing: Rachel Dolezal is one person. In sharp contrast (as I alluded to earlier), transgender people are a pan-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon, and comprise approximately 0.2 – 0.3% of the population.

Prevalence does not make something good or healthy. A lot more than 0.3% of the population is sexist and that doesn’t mean sexism should be accepted in society. Since you can’t undermine that Rachel Dolezal acted out stereotypes and then called herself a black person and how this is directly linked to the trans phenomenon, you’re trying to argue that the problem is small.

According to the American news networks, white people “identify” as people of color to check those boxes on university and job applications to take advantage of affirmative action all the time. People confess to doing it. So the problem of people moving into spaces designated for certain marginalized groups—including people of color and women—is not small like you make it out to be.

I am Iraqi and I plan to study in the United States which means I have to require a special visa and still face possible rejection as a result of Trump’s travel ban on my country. (I’m not a Muslim, but the ban targets Muslim-majority countries and I live in one.) Still, I checked “white” on my university applications because it clearly states Middle Eastern people are white during that process. Marginalized Americans worked hard for those distinctions and I will not undermine their work by claiming to be someone I’m not. Maybe we can discuss a separate Middle Eastern category in the future, but I’m not going to claim to be black or Pacific Islander.

I have never once in my life heard a trans woman claim that our experiences are 100 percent identical to those of cis women.

Then what is your article even about? Why does the idea of women having our own spaces without trans women bother you? What is under threat here? Your “identity,” as you state above?

The problem isn’t that we (i.e., trans women) refuse to acknowledge any differences, but rather that the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd refuses to acknowledge our many similarities.

Feminism doesn’t focus on similarities because sexism doesn’t. “Why don’t we just all come together because we aren’t that different” says the person in a position of institutional power. Society tells people we are different and then as soon as you want something we have (that you have relegated us to) you claim to be just like us. Please.

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when many heterosexual feminists wanted to similarly exclude lesbians from women’s organizations and from feminism. The justifications that they forwarded were eerily similarly to trans-women-aren’t-women arguments: They accused lesbians of being “oppressively male” and of “reinforcing the sex class system.”

Lesbians are women and feminism is the movement to liberate women from sexism. Lesbians are biologically female and therefore women, whereas you are not. Many previous “feminists” have been racist and antisemitic as well, but people with common sense know black women and Jewish women are adult human females and therefore included in feminism. Biological males do not belong in feminism. Do not appropriate the struggles of lesbians.

Trans women are women. We may not be “exactly like” cis women, but then again, cis women are not all “exactly like” one another either. But what we do share is that we all identify and move through the world as women.

No, you are not women. You are biologically male and socialized as boys and then men. Not all women are exactly alike but we all have the shared experience of being biologically female and being treated accordingly. You do not have that experience. You do not move through the world as a woman, but as a man pretending he is a woman.

I said at the outset, forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism. In fact, it only serves to undermine our collective cause.

Sexism is rooted in biological sex. You are a biological male and in this way you are distinct from biological females and we do not have to include you in our mission to liberation ourselves from oppression by men.

What is our collective cause? What are your goals and how do you hope to achieve them? What are you doing to help women other than writing about how we exclude you because you are a man? How do you define sexism?

Your piece is riddled with incoherent arguments and you attempt to paint radical feminism as illogical when, in fact, radical feminism can be used to logically dismantle all your arguments and point to a clear foundation for women’s oppression.

This work starts with a falsehood and ends with a vague assertion that feminists, by asking for our own spaces free from men, are hurting ourselves when actually, you have only argued how these actions hurt you and men like you. You have blamed women for our own oppression throughout this article and yet you expect us to take you in with open arms and validate your identity because that is the only thing that you believe ties you to womanhood.

It doesn’t, and we’re not here to entertain you.

#julia serano #trans activism #gender critical #radical feminism #transgender #theory #debunked

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drjacquescoulardeau · 7 years

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BEN AFFLECK – MORGAN FREEMAN – THE SUM OF ALL FEARS – 2002

This is a film that was essential at the time when it came out and that is all the more important today as a generic film on global tension in a time when tension is seen as some aphrodisiac drink by some politicians.

In 2002, one year after 9/11, the same year when the invasion of Afghanistan was ordered and performed and one year before the similar strike was ordered and performed in Iraq, this film showed that politicians are constantly manipulated by various factions in various agencies or out of them, and what’s more are the victims of all sorts of plots from isolated but networked individuals, isolated since they are representing no one at all and networked because they are half a dozen and they are engaged in some “project” that makes them both dangerous and tied up together. To step out means to be eliminated radically to death.

That was a strong call against any limitless war project against terrorism because it was inevitably going to rekindle the animosity between the USA and Russia, especially since the Russian president in the film is typically a personification of Putin though the film insists too much on the fact that he does not really control his military or even the political system at all that is still in the hands of the old Soviet Communists. This last fact is just not feasible since Putin was the last generation of security top officers, working outside the USSR mostly trained by the KGB under Brezhnev. That could maybe have been right for Gorbachev but cannot be true for Putin, though like any state there are contradictory motivations among the bureaucrats or civil servants. This is perfectly well shown on the American side where the President is surrounded by people who have very contradictory opinions from extreme war mongers to rather conciliatory peaceful minds.

But the film has to be taken today as a generic film about the danger of nuclear war in our modern world and we have to keep in mind the opposition between Trump’s USA (and I insist on the fact we are talking of the USA under the leadership of Trump) and North Korea. Or as for that China and Russia, not to speak of Iran, Syria, Turkey and so many other countries in the world. All those who defy the absolute leadership Trump wants to represent and impose after the USA definitely lost it in Iraq after having partially lost it in Vietnam.

Of course North Korea is a mystery. Their young leader may be considered as easily manipulatable though from what me know or may know he seems to be strong-headed too and able to get rid of people who are in his way, including his uncle and his own brother. That might be because he is under control from one faction in the upper tiers of the regime, or he has his own agenda and he has managed to bring enough people around his agenda to be secure.

On the other hand, Trump on the American side is impulsive and does not know what even medium range thinking is all about. He fired the FBI director in the worst possible way but he certainly had not foreseen the backlash after this event, with a first official reason from employees, and then another one completely different from the President himself that caused the worst possible speculations, accusations, and amplified backlash effects by connecting the firing with the Russian investigation, and this firing brought the private memos of the Director on the various conversations he had had with the president and that brought the next wave of tsunami rage bringing the suspicion of possible corrupted obstruction of justice, which is impeachable. Unpredictable, impulsive and what’s more unable to say in any way “I was wrong but I have changed my mind and I am sorry about what I said before” and this last characteristic is strong in appellate courts where he has to defend his travel bans and runs into the contradiction between his strongly anti-Muslim declarations during the campaign and the fact he has never stepped back and clearly said he had changed his mind on this point before signing the two executive orders of his travel bans against seven at first and then six dominantly Muslim countries.

In the film you have the Israelis connected – is it accidentally or is it openly – with the descendants of Nazi war criminals and other Nazi continuers who try to correct what they call the stupidity of Hitler who went at war against the USA and the USSR instead of doing what the modern world makes very easy, i.e. to make the USA and the USSR fight each other to death and then the surviving Germans would have been able to pick the pieces and draw the chestnuts from the roasting pan without burning their paws too much. Today we know that Israel was vain enough to use cyberwar weaponized software devised by the Americans, probably within the NSA in 2007-2009, on their own and with some modification against Iran’s nuclear project in such a reckless way that it went out public on the Internet. And even more advanced in time we know the latest global cyber-attack by criminal hackers used a ransomware that had gone public “accidentally” but that had been devised by the NSA as a cyber-war weapon to be used against terrorist organizations (and some other nation states of course). Adding a line or two of code to turn a weaponized tool exploiting a vulnerability in Windows Operating System to turn it into a ransomware is rather easy and possible for small hacking groups, whereas they could not devise the whole software because they do not have the means nor the time nor the equipment to do it on their own.

When politicians get engaged in such at-the-brink cliffhanging procedures and actions there is no way to say whether they will back up in time or that they will let the whole world go the way this reckless procedure is bound to go. And the film is just that.

Of course it is a film and it has to be both frightening but also with a certain hopeful dimension. That hopeful line is provided on both sides by some individuals who have the intelligence, the stamina and the guts to play it cool and just push the right button at the right time to block the most dangerous developments. And at this level the film is most pregnant with human reason and human vision. And it is these human reason and vision that make me consider a man like Donald Trump has nothing to do in the White House. He is dangerous and he may cause a political and military catastrophe before the end of the year. Here again he has to be humble and he is not able to be. He has to admit the USA have been wrong all along with North Korea when they refused to implement the agreement negotiated with North Korea so long ago no one remembers in spite of Jimmy Carter’s recollections about it since he was the main negotiator. At the time there was not even the slightest nuclear allusion. But now it is too late. The USA have to negotiate with North Korea as a nuclear power, one nuclear power to another nuclear power and they can ask a few other nuclear powers to help like in Asia Russia, China, India and Pakistan. But Trump will never be able to do that on his own. He will have to be forced to do it by a global alliance that might get the attention of Congress.

This film is a masterpiece then and it is the recipe how to avoid the Apocalypse that will destroy the red Babylon and the Red Babylon is the Red Republican Party in the USA. This Republican Party will have to be destroyed if they do not want to put Trump on the side, and they better accept the voice of reason and the vision of sanity. This film will remain prophetic for a long time because humanity being what it is there will always be a crisis situation of some sort developing among the nation states of this planet. They get that from the milk they drink after birth and the diapers they are wrapped in on minute one after birth, after being checked and measured and made ready to be given to the mother wrapped up in some kind of diaper and a woolen blanket. The germ of it is in our genes.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

OLDER REVIEW ON AMAZON, 5 December 2007

Propaganda is hateful, especially when it smells antisemitic

This film could have been a good one. It came out after 9/11 but before Iraq, at the time of Afghanistan. It is about the "final" confrontation between the USA and Russia. A nuclear terrorist attack is organized in Baltimore so that the USA may believe it comes from the Russians and may start the procedure leading to a full out nuclear war. From the very start the theory that is illustrated here is that terror in the world is organized by the Israeli secret services with the help of some western autonomous adventurers and with the complicity of the hard liners in the Russian and Ukrainian armies.

Then the whole story is difficult to believe because of the total lack of real believable hard facts. The American president appears as quite manipulated by his own military personnel and his State and Defense Secretaries, without speaking of the CIA. The Russian president appears just as much manipulated but with maybe a little bit more nerve. The whole plot fails because a small CIA intellectual agent manages to speak to the Russian president directly via the red telephone and make him take the decision to halt his alert, a decision that the US president immediately imitates. How can we believe that.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction are quoted in some remote small sentence somewhere unimportant but the propaganda is clear. The various actors of this plot are then eliminated one after the other in the most radical way possible. That's a shame in a way because the film is rather well made and acted but it is obvious war propaganda that supports the theory pretending the world is being manipulated if not controlled by the Israelis, a resurgence of sorts of the old hitlerian anti-semitism of old. I guess some believe that good old hate-theories can always be revived in a way or another, with a little bit of upgrading if necessary.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

ANCIENNE CRITIQUE SUR AMAZON.FR, 5 décembre 2007 La propagande de guerre fleurit toujours abondamment aux USA

Un film sorti après les attentats de septembre 2001 mais avant la guerre en Irak, probablement en même temps que la guerre en Afghanistan. Une histoire de politique fiction à peine crédible, mais c'est la piste terroriste israélienne qui est développée ici : les services secrets israéliens en connivence avec les purs et durs dans l'armée ex-soviétique et maintenant russe ou ukrainienne.

On est après Eltsine mais pas très clair sur le président américain qui apparaît comme manquant pour le moins d'information et manipulé facilement par ses propres extrémistes dans l'armée ou la diplomatie, ni sur le président russe qui semble tout aussi soumis à des pressions mais pourtant plus lucide et prêt à nettoyer son écurie.

On découvre en même temps que l'attentat nucléaire qui doit provoquer la destruction mutuelle des USA et de la Russie a été fait avec du plutonium volé par la CIA aux USA et fourni aux Israéliens en 1968 pour en faire une bombe qui sera perdue quelque part dans le Sinaï. De fil en aiguille on va tout droit à l'ordre final et c'est un petit agent intellectuel de la CIA qui parle directement avec le téléphone rouge au président russe qui accepte d'arrêter son ordre d'attaque, ce en quoi le président des USA le suit. Puis les comploteurs sont tous éliminés radicalement d'un côté comme de l'autre.

On cite les armes de destruction massive, mais on nous raconte la fable que ce ne sont ni les Russes ni les Américains qui veulent la guerre, mais qu'ils sont les victimes d'un complot international mené par les Israéliens et quelques autonomes d'origine occidentale. C'est dommage que ce film soit trop plein de propagande car les acteurs jouent relativement bien et le film est assez bien ficelé. Il y a de l'argent pour les films de propagande militaire aux Etats-Unis.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

#nuclear war #cyber war #ransom ware #babylon #apocalypse #Israel #Palestine #Russia #Putin

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