#is it Internalized Sexism or Repressed Homosexuality? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mx-shirogane · 4 years

Text

Persona 4 and LGBTQ+

Ah yikes, an opinion piece. These are just my thoughts and I’m more than open to hearing other people’s opinions and thoughts on the matter.

When I first found the Persona Fandom, I was introduced by Game Theory. Not the “Teddie is Yu’s Shadow” video, rather their video on LBGTQ+ represention in video games. MatPat threw around the word “Persona” and as someone who was just learning about the LGBTQ+ community, I became interested in what I thought to be a game with character development around sexuality and gender identity. While I can understand Kanji’s shadow being used as an example for this in their video due to Persona 4 being recent and how it appears at a first glance, I think a better example would have been Jun and Tatsuya from Persona 2: Innocent Sin. In this post I’ll be covering Yosuke, Kanji and Naoto.

Sexuality, Kanji and Yosuke: From the beginning, there were created issues with the idea of Persona 4 being an LGBTQ+ game, this was with Yosuke being removed as a romance option. Had they kept him as a romance option, I personally feel they could have explained his behaviors as internal homophobia and suppression of his own feelings for the protagonist. However, with this removed, Yosuke’s cracks at Kanji’s sexuality lack the reasoning of insecurity and projection and instead comes across as ignorance and fear. The anime made no attempt at fixing this, having more negative connotation around Kanji as the party is hesitant to save him. Another scene that comes to mind is the camping trip, where Yosuke asks if they’ll be safe alone with him. In the anime, the protagonist also joins in on this interrogation. Kanji’s clearly uncomfortable as he eventually runs off to sleep in the girl’s tent at an attempt to defend himself. In the game, Yosuke does express concern for Kanji as he fears he might be expelled. This at least shows that Kanji is a friend regardless of the feelings Yosuke harbors towards his sexuality. This exchange portrays Yosuke as quick to flip sides from being worried about Kanji to worried for Kanji and still maintains their friendship. This does have a bit of karma as Chie insinuates the same thing when the girls sneak into their tent. Where as in the anime, Yosuke and the Protagonist just watch Kanji leave and there are no later comments made on the matter. Overall, Kanji’s homosexuality becomes more of a punchline than a sexual orientation and was more so fueled by hyper-masculinity and Naoto. A later scene in the game that shows his perception change of Naoto from male to female is during the group date cafe when describing his ideal girl and Yosuke calls him out sarcastically for being obvious. During this same event, if you choose to be on the girl’s side, you have a few options. If you pick Yosuke, he’ll freak out but then begin flattering himself, the protagonist noting that he seems “proud for some reason.” Meanwhile if the protagonist picks Kanji, Yosuke will note that they’re a perfect match to which Kanji refuses and even threatens Yosuke if he keeps bringing the matter up. Instead of there being any snarky remarks following from Yosuke, he compliments Kanji saying it’s due to his manliness which Kanji does take well. This could come across as Yosuke trying to protect himself, however his remark is more positive than that in the tent and does signify a growth towards trying to understand. If you sit on the guy’s side and ask if Yosuke likes any of the guys, he’ll respond saying the protagonist before stuttering and calling him out for making him play along. With factors like Naoto’s reveal taken into account, Kanji’s shadow becomes less focused on his sexuality and more so on bullying and hyper-masculinity. As for Yosuke, he comes across as ignorant and fearful. Had he remained a romance option, this could have been played off as an internal conflict Yosuke was dealing with and projecting onto Kanji.

Gender Identity and Naoto: I’ll be using They/Them pronouns to refer to Naoto. Naoto Shirogane was originally thought to be a male which greatly fueled Kanji’s Shadow. However, Naoto’s arc referred more to sexism in the work place and their struggles with being a child detective and idolization. Side note: Props to Kanji in the shadow scene for realizing Naoto had to confront their shadow in order to stop hurting. After the fight, Yukiko asks Naoto if they dislike being a girl and if that’s the reason they dress like a man. Naoto responds saying their sex doesn’t fit their ideal image of a detective and notes that the police department is a male-oriented society. They express that if anyone knew Naoto was biologically female, they wouldn’t be needed anymore. Kanji and Yukiko both make remarks on this, Kanji saying that they didn’t know how others would react, and Yukiko remarking that Naoto didn’t want to become an adult or a boy. This is followed by Naoto saying “What I should yearn for... No, what I must strive for isn’t to become a man. It’s to accept myself for who I really am...” From this point on, Naoto is referred to with female pronouns terminology, even by their close friends. While Naoto continues wearing the male uniform, they say it’s what they’ve become comfortable in and are show to be generally shy about their body, key examples being in the bath house and the beauty contest. My opinion on how to portray them as LGBTQ+: These are small notes on how I would portray and shape them based on contradictions and hints in the game. Yosuke: Have Yosuke identify as bicurious. It’s cannon that he likes girls and there are scattered remnants of him liking the protagonist littered throughout Persona 4 and the other spin offs. His internal conflict over liking guys as well as girls could prove to be an interesting story premise when done properly. As well, him projecting his insecurities onto Kanji would shift his character from being ignorant and fearful to being insecure about his own feelings and not knowing how to deal with them. If you want to have someone in Yosuke’s life that shaped his views on homosexuality, create someone like a friend, parent or even bully who caused him to see homosexuality in a negative light. Try to avoid having him instantly fall in love with the protagonist and present more of a struggle as to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. Even if you end up having him identify as straight in the end, allow for some wiggle room for experimentation due to the small hints throughout the games. Kanji: Have Kanji identify as pansexual and focus his shadow around him questioning his sexuality and not hyper-masculinity. Keep in the fact Kanji was called queer by female students because he liked cute things and knitting. This would serve as a starting point for him questioning his sexual orientation. However, when it comes to his shadow, have the repressed self trying to figure out who he likes whether it’s guys, girls or if sex just doesn’t matter instead of flat out calling him gay. That way, when it comes to the reveal of Naoto, his entire shadow arc doesn’t get cancelled out. Naoto: Have Naoto identify under the transmasculine umbrella. As much as I love Trans!Naoto in fanworks, Naoto does say that they should strive to be true to themselves and that what they want wasn’t to become a boy. Transmasculine, acording to the nonbinary wiki, is an umbrella term that refers to those who were assigned female at birth, and whose gender is masculine and/or who express themselves in a masculine way. Transmasculine people feel a connection with masculinity, but do not always identify as male. This way, you can still have Naoto identify as male for the first majority of the game and have the shadow reveal Naoto felt pressured by the police force to negate any feelings they had and portray themselves as strictly male. They said themselves that both their parents were detectives, which contradicts Naoto saying that they’d get tossed aside if the department knew they were biologically female. Focus less on their age and have the repressed feelings focus on how they felt like an outcast for not fitting in the gender norm which contributed to an anxiety of shutting people out and obsessing over masculine stereotypes as an attempt to fit in. Naoto identifying as masculine would allow for more wiggle room in terms of pronouns and the variety of honorifics used (Chie and Yukiko use Kun, Rise, Yosuke, Kanji and the Protagonist don’t use any, and Teddie uses Chan) whilst further supporting Naoto’s preference for masculine clothes and body insecurities, mainly their chest.

#Kanji Tatsumi #naoto shirogane #yosuke hanamura #p4 yosuke #p4 naoto #p4 kanji #Persona 4 #persona 4 golden #p4 #p4g #lgbt #lgbtq #gender identity #sexuality #headcannons #persona 4 headcannons #opinion #opinion piece

102 notes · View notes

woman-loving · 4 years

Text

Transforming “Queer” into “Kvar”

Selection from "Queer Beograd Collective: Beyond Single-Issue Activism in Serbia and the Post-Yugoslav Space," by Bojan Bilić and Irene Dioli, in Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia, ed. Bojan Bilić and Sanja Kajinić, 2016

Serbian LGBT activism has a relatively short history given that homosexuality was decriminalised in 1994. Soon after this routine revision of the penal code, which came as a surprise to the LGBT “community”,[5] the first gay and lesbian organisation Arkadija, operating from the early 1990s, was officially registered in July 1994. As the activist “scene” slowly differentiated, lesbian activists separated from Arkadija in 1995 to form a specifically lesbian non-governmental organisation, Labris (Mlađenović, this volume; Hura, this volume). It was this group that, inebriated by the ephemeral enthusiasm that followed the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s oligarchic regime in October 2000, misread the apparent “opening” of the political field and decided to stage the first Pride March in June 2001. The Pride—a feeling presumably “reserved” for other kinds of belonging in highly patriarchal environments—encountered an explosion of hooligan resistance and ended with around forty seriously injured activists (Bilić, 2016; Bilić & Kajinić, this volume). The then-Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić said in the wake of the event:

“I think that it is too early for a country that has been isolated for so long and under a patriarchal repressive culture to endure such a tolerance test. I am, of course, a supporter of tolerance in every sense and everyone is entitled to express their difference as long as they do not harm anyone else, and in this case there can be no harm because someone has different sexual affinities. That is the highest level of tolerance and I am afraid that we still need a certain period of time to reach it.” (B92, 2001, online)

The first attempt to stage a Pride March started the pairing of LGBT-oriented street protests with overtly homophobic aggression and inaugurated a chain of activist actions and immediate nationalist reactions sustained by the Serbian Orthodox Church. After the 2001 Pride, which became known within activist circles as the “massacre parade”, there was no initiative for Pride organisation in the following two years. In 2004, when the activists thought that the time was ripe for another attempt, they realised that they still could not count on political/state support and were yet again faced with homophobic threats, eventually cancelling the manifestation. In the words of Dušan Maljković (2013, online), a long-term LGBT activist from Belgrade:

“Forms of activism are often a local copy & paste of Western ones, which is very problematic because it implies a failure to consider the local context. This is the case, for example, of Pride parades, which many believe should be carried out like in the West at all costs, rather than reflect on how they might be reinvented to be made more effective.”

Queer Beograd Collective appeared in this context as a group of activists who decided to establish a safe haven in which the fluidity and richness of sexuality could be expressed and celebrated. A hamster with wings riding a bicycle was chosen as a logo because, as the activists stated (personal communication with Irene Dioli, 2009), “forming a queer collective in Belgrade was about as likely as finding a hamster with wings riding a bicycle”. They started condemning homophobic violence, which they perceived as a symbiosis of war,[6] clericalism, nationalism, militarism, and machismo that became deeply ingrained in the way in which politics was done by Serbian officials.[7] Accounting for the appearance of the Collective in their first Manifesto, issued in May 2005 as a “programmatic” statement of their first festival, the group members said:

“[…] the state and citizens are still ignorant toward problems of the LGBT population and all the others who are different. […] human rights are abused on a daily basis.

That is why this year we had a new concept—we refused to spend time on worries about violence that might happen and hiring private security or police. We wanted to build exciting cooperation between people on an international and local level, to have fun, and to promote queer politics. In this context to be queer means to refuse social rules and to constantly re-question supposed norms of patriarchal tradition. To create space beyond the rigid boxes of LGBT or straight sexuality, allowing each other the ‘privilege’ of self definition. To present a radical politics that sees the interconnectedness of all forms of oppression.” (Queer Beograd Collective, 2004)

The first “manifesto” introduced the concept of queer in its English original and announced that the initiative would attempt to offer a “holistic” approach to the frequent abuse of human rights by showing how various forms of discrimination stem from the same patriarchal nucleus. Over five days of the first festival, Do It Yourself, which took place in an abandoned building and gathered participants from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom, there were numerous art exhibitions, film screenings, performances, concerts, and workshops as well as a self-defence training. This event, which can be considered the start of grassroots queer activism in Belgrade, ended with a street party in the centre of the city, symbolically marking an attempt by the activists to, at least temporarily, claim a public space without provoking violent reactions (Dioli, 2011a).

However, after the initial enthusiasm to put an end to the incessant lamentations about Serbia’s backwardness and exclusion from the world, it became clear that the physical safety achieved through the use of the term queer did not come without a price. The activists and their sympathisers continued to grapple with the concept, some of them believing that the lack of violence and a sense of empowerment produced by the first festival could become possible because “queer” masked their sexual identities, which needed a more explicit politicisation.[8] At the “Queer Beograd Party & Politics” roundtable, organised within the second festival that took place in December 2005 and which lasted for three days, one of the participants said:

“I would like to describe a bit why I predominantly don’t identify or name myself queer, but rather lesbian. […] For me, using this term—which more or less has an Anglo-American connotation—is very questionable. […] There are these western paradigms which are most commonly translated, not just translated but sometimes copy/pasted to other regions, but not the other way around. This is also often the case with the term queer. It is very questionable, what we do with this translating of the concepts.” (transcribed by Irene Dioli, see Dioli, 2011a)

Thus, in the wake of the first festival, activists understood that “queer” did not really feel at home in the Serbian sociopolitical context. Although it could serve as a “folding screen” that would for a little bit of time keep hooligans “in check”, the concept was not widely known either within the Serbian LGBT “community”, which was supposed to be addressed by and take part in the Queer Beograd Collective festivals. Bearing this in mind, Jet Moon, a performer and one of the group’s founders, said in December 2005:

“After our first festival in Beograd, we realised it’s not enough to try and stage a queer DIY festival in Serbia, because for a start no one knows what queer is! On the one hand this is useful because the fascists and homophobes don’t come to attack us, on the other it means we don’t make contact with the community of people we want to play with. We don’t want to make a new kind of closet, but we use the word queer for a reason, for us it means more than the right to freedom of sexual expression.” (Moon, Party & Politics Roundtable, transcribed by Irene Dioli, see Dioli 2011a)

The second festival, self-financed like its predecessor a few months earlier, brought yet another series of performances, movie screenings, parties, and theoretical discussions on gender, sexuality, politics, and art. It was organised and attended by activists and artists from the former Yugoslav states and their guests from the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. In contrast to the first event, which was supposed to acknowledge the presence of those who tend to be left out of the heteronormative paradigm, the second one was devoted to a closer engagement with the creative political potential of the concept of queerness in the Serbian/post-Yugoslav context. As a result of these discussions, the third Queer Beograd festival, which took place in October 2006, rounded the evolutionary trajectory of the concept of queer within the initiatives of this activist group by substituting it with the Serbo-Croatian word kvar, meaning malfunction. Thus, the “manifesto” of the third festival read:

“In Serbian there is no word that means queer, no way to say what we mean about queer being more than LGBT equality. For us queer means radical, inclusive, connecting to all kinds of politics and being creative about how we live in this world. So our new festival is called “Kvar”, a technical term literally translating to mean “a malfunction in a machine”, because in this world of capitalism, nationalism, racism, militarism, sexism, and homophobia, we want to celebrate ourselves as a malfunction in this machine. We dare to resist conformity and go against what is accepted to create something about living and justice, not false productivity, war, and money. We are happy to present to you “Kvar—the malfunction”, a festival celebrating diversity and freedom of sexual expression, celebrating everyone who fights against the system.” (Queer Beograd Collective, 2006)

Dioli (2011b) notes how the translation of queer as kvar preceded the publication of Judith Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure, which questions conventional notions of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society. The choice of the word kvar, thus, becomes particularly relevant in the context of the so-called “queer asynchrony” and “temporal disjunction” that Mizielińska and Kulpa (2011) use to explain the relationship between Western and Eastern queer activisms. Although departing with a noble goal of “de-centring” Western sexualities, they stick to a Western point of reference that inevitably portrays Eastern European countries as lagging behind their Western “models” (Takács, 2013 ). With this in mind, “the Serbian queer movement may almost seem to have anticipated the times. This may help dismantle some stereotypes of ‘Eastern’ LGBT and queer movements running after ‘Western’ thought and conquests in a linear trajectory of development” (Dioli, 2011b , online). By opting for the word kvar, which, while being phonetically similar to the word queer, encapsulates the essence of their politics, the Belgrade Queer Collective activists showed how a foreign concept can be appropriated in the local context. “The local subjects found a brilliant synthesis on the linguistic as well as semantic level, and thus fully ‘localised’ the original term” (Dioli, 2011a , p. 164).

#lgbtq history #lgbt history #serbia #queer #queer beograd collective #Bojan Bilic

20 notes · View notes

solacekames · 6 years

Photo

Insurgent Supremacists – a new book about the U.S. far right By Matthew N Lyons | Sunday, April 01, 2018

My book Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire is due out this May and is being published jointly by Kersplebedeb Publishing and PM Press. It draws on work that I’ve been doing over the past 10-15 years but also includes a lot of new material. In this post I want to highlight some of what’s distinctive about this book and how it relates to the three way fight approach to radical antifascism. I’ll focus here on three themes that run throughout the book: 1. Disloyalty to the state is a key dividing line within the U.S. right. For purposes of this book, I define the U.S. far right not in terms of a specific ideology, but rather as those political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, inevitable, or desirable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system. That includes white nationalists who advocate replacing the United States with one or more racially defined “ethno-states.” But it also includes the hardline wing of the Christian right, which wants to replace secular forms of government with a full-blown theocracy; Patriot movement activists who reject the federal government’s legitimacy based on conspiracy theories and a kind of militant libertarianism; and some smaller ideological currents. Insurgent Supremacists argues that the modern far right defined in these terms has only emerged in the United States over the past half century, as a result of social and political upheavals associated with the 1960s, and that it represents a shift away from the right’s traditional role as defenders of the established order. The book explores how the various far right currents have developed and how they have interacted with each other and with the larger political landscape. I chose to frame the book in terms of “far right” rather than “fascism” for a couple of reasons. Discussions of fascism tend to get bogged down in definitional debates, because people have very strong—and very divided—opinions about what fascism means and what it includes. Insurgent Supremacists includes in-depth discussions of fascism as a theoretical and historical concept, but that’s not the book’s focus or overall framework. As a related point, most discussions of fascism focus on white nationalist forces and tend to exclude or ignore other right-wing currents such as Christian rightist forces, and I think it’s important to look at these different forces in relation to each other. For example, critics of the Patriot/militia movement often argue that its hostility to the federal government was derived from Posse Comitatus, a white supremacist and antisemitic organization that played a big role in the U.S. far right in the 1980s. That’s an important part of the story, but Patriot groups were also deeply influenced by hardline Christian rightists, who (quite independently from white nationalists) had for years been urging people to arm themselves and form militias to resist federal tyranny. We rarely hear about that. 2. The far right is ideologically complex and dynamic and belies common stereotypes. Many critics of the far right tend to assume that its ideology doesn’t amount to much more than crude bigotry, and if we identify a group as “Nazi” or as white supremacist, male supremacist, etc., that’s pretty much all we need to know. This is a dangerous assumption that doesn’t explain why far right groups are periodically able to mobilize significant support and wield influence far beyond their numbers. Yes, the far right has its share of stupid bigots, but unfortunately it also has its share of smart, creative people. We need to take far rightists’ beliefs and strategies seriously, study their internal debates, and look at how they’ve learned from past mistakes. Otherwise we’ll be fighting 21st-century battles with 1930s weapons. For example: because of the history of fascism in the 1930s and 40s, we tend to identify far right politics with glorification of the strong state and highly centralized political organizations. Some far rightists, such as the Lyndon LaRouche network, still hold to that approach, but most of them have actually abandoned it in favor of various kinds of political decentralism, from neonazis who call for “leaderless resistance” and want to carve regional white homelands out of the United States to “sovereign citizens” and county supremacists, from self-described National-Anarchists to Christian Reconstructionists who advocate a theocracy based on small-scale institutions such as local government, churches, and individual families. One of the lessons here is that opposing centralized authority isn’t necessarily liberatory at all, because repression and oppression can operate on a small scale just as well as on a large scale. This shift to political decentralism isn’t just empty rhetoric; it’s a genuine transformation of far right politics. I think it should be examined in relation to larger cultural, political, and economic developments, such as the global restructuring of industrial production and the wholesale privatization of governmental functions in the U.S. and elsewhere. We need to take far rightists’ beliefs and strategies seriously, study their internal debates, and look at how they’ve learned from past mistakes. Otherwise we’ll be fighting 21st-century battles with 1930s weapons. As another example of oversimplifying far right politics, it’s standard to describe far rightists as promoting heterosexual male dominance. While that’s certainly true in broad terms, it doesn’t really tell us very much. Insurgent Supremacists maps out several distinct forms of far right politics regarding gender and sexual identity and looks at how those have played out over time within the far right’s various branches. Most far rightists vilify homosexuality, but sections of the alt-right have advocated some degree of respect for male homosexuality, based on a kind of idealized male bonding among warriors, an approach that actually has deep roots in fascist political culture. In recent years the alt-right has promoted some of the most vicious misogyny and declared that women have no legitimate political role. But when the alt-right got started around 2010, it included men who argued that sexism and sexual harassment of women were weakening the movement by alienating half of its potential support base. This view echoed the quasi-feminist positions that several neonazi groups had been taking since the 1980s, such as the idea that Jews promoted women’s oppression as part of their effort to divide and subjugate the Aryan race. This may sound bizarre, but it’s a prime example of the far right’s capacity time and again to appropriate elements of leftist politics and harness them to its own supremacist agenda. 3. Fighting the far right and working to overthrow established systems of power are distinct but interconnected struggles. A third core element that sets Insurgent Supremacists apart is three way fight politics: the idea that the existing socio-economic-political order and the far right represent different kinds of threats—interconnected but distinct—and that the left needs to combat both of them. This challenges the assumption, recurrent among many leftists, that the far right is either unimportant or a ruling-class tool, and that it basically just wants to impose a more extreme version of the status quo. But three way fight politics also challenges the common liberal view that in the face of a rising far right threat we need to “defend democracy” and subordinate systemic change to a broad-based antifascism. Among other huge problems with this approach, if leftists throw our support behind the existing order we play directly into the hands of the far right, because we allow them to present themselves as the only real oppositional force, the only ones committed to real change. Insurgent Supremacists applies three way fight analysis in various ways. There’s a chapter on misuses of the charge of fascism since the 1930s, which looks at how some leftists and liberals have misapplied the fascist label either to authoritarian conservatism (such as McCarthyism or the George W. Bush administration) or to the existing political system as a whole. There’s a chapter about the far right’s relationship with Donald Trump—both his presidential campaign and his administration—which explores the complex and shifting interactions between rightist currents that want to overthrow or secede from the United States and rightist currents that don’t. During the campaign, most alt-rightists enthusiastically supported Trump not only for his attacks on immigrants and Muslims but also because he made establishment conservatives look like fools. But since the inauguration they’ve been deeply alienated by many of his policies, which largely follow a conservative script. Three way fight analysis also informs the book’s discussion of federal security forces’ changing relationships with right-wing vigilantes and paramilitary groups. These relations have run the gamut from active support for right-wing violence (most notoriously in Greensboro in 1979, when white supremacists gunned down communist anti-Klan protesters) to active suppression (as in 1984-88, when the FBI and other agencies arrested or shot members of half a dozen underground groups). This complex history belies arguments that we should look to the federal government to protect us against the far right, as well as simplistic claims that “the cops and the Klan go hand in hand.” Forces of the state may choose to co-opt right-wing paramilitaries or crack down on them, depending on the particular circumstances and what seems most useful to help them maintain social control. Insurgent Supremacists isn’t intended to be a comprehensive study of the U.S. far right. Rather, it’s an attempt to offer some fresh ideas about what these dangerous forces stand for, where they come from, and what roles they play in the larger political arena. Not just to help us understand them, but so we can fight them more effectively.

#far right #antifascism #definitely going to buy this book #insurgent supremacists #antifa #alt right

34 notes · View notes

killushawn · 7 years

Note

Hey shawn, i would like to know ur opinion about sth... What do u think about inverse racism? (Black ppl hating withe ppl) do u think its okay just bc they were hated in the past? And what about homosexual ppl hating heterosexuals just bc their sexual preferences? I think things are changing and not for good.. God, we are in 2017 we should know we are all fucking the same. No matter wtf ure/u like, everyone is human, we all have the same rights. Why is it so dificult to understand?

Ooh, this is a really touchy subject that I almost don’t want to touch base on because I am so afraid of going there, and saying the wrong thing.

I’ll do my best though. *Deep breathing intensifies*

I do think that any and all forms of hate, racism, sexism, etc are wrong and shouldn’t be tolerated in the slightest. That includes white people hating on black people, black people hating on white people, gays hating on straights, straights on gays, etc. I want that to be known from the start.

That being said, as a white person, I have been blessed with an enormous amount of privilege. Most of which I didn’t even stop to think about until recently, and that’s where a lot of the problem lies.

It’s the privilege of not having to worry what other people think about my skin, of not having to worry about being judged while having casual conversation, both in how I look and in the way I speak. So much comes from that, and that can have such a negative impact on any person’s mentality that isn’t white, straight, male, etc.

That being said, I think things are definitely backlashing in a lot of places. I think a lot of people are starting to feel bad just because they’re white. Good people. People who actively try to be a part of the solution and not part of the problem.

I don’t like people who constantly shove white privilege down people’s throats.

I do like people who are aware that it does exist.

Now, having said that, your comment of ‘it’s 2017, we should all know we are all fucking the same’ oh anon, I wish everyone had that mentality truly, down to the core. But they don’t. Judgement is going to happen whether we want it to or not.

Eliminating racism, sexism, etc is about reducing that judgement as much as possible, and when it comes down to it, that’s something that we can all only do on an individual and personal level. Words and speeches can only go so far. It starts with you. Only you will know your internal thoughts and struggles, the true thought process you have, and the judgments you make on others. Only you.

I saw a quote that I really liked that just said “My mother always taught me that the first thought that goes through your brain is the one we were conditioned by society to think. The second thought is the one who defines us as a person”.

In terms of the root of your question, basically the backlash of black people hating on white people…I think the pendulum has to swing the other way. I think people of color have been repressed for so long that of course, now that they’re finally being given the freedom to say what they want, of course there’s going to be backlash, and I do think it’s for the better. When you pull a rubber band in one direction really tight for a long time, of course it’s going to lash the other way before normalizing. It’s the same with the LGBTQ+ community, and the need to be heard. I believe that eventually, this will normalize.

Our parents and grandparents generations fucking suck for what they’ve done to us, and what they’ve done to feed racism, sexism, and discrimination of all forms. We’re finally feeling the backlash of that. And we’re doing a great job as a generation to show that we won’t stand for racism. That we won’t stand for sexism. That discrimination of any kind will hold no ground for us.

I’m really excited to see our children’s generation, and how diminished discrimination will be by the time they’re grown up.

That’s uh…my thoughts on it. I’m pretty afraid to post this because I don’t know if I’ve missed anything or said the wrong thing…but here you go.

#my thoughts #Anonymous

21 notes · View notes

3-leggeddog-blog · 7 years

Text

I Got a Woman: Sexism in the Lyrics of 1960′s Rock’n’Roll Music by Connor Wood

I Got a Woman: Sexism in the Lyrics of 1960’s Rock’n’Roll Music

While it’s no secret that sexism was the rampant unchallenged status quo of the famously conservative 1950’s, as the liberal, progressive, and so-called revolutionary 1960’s advanced, sexism continued to plague the lyrics of the love generation’s most popular tunes. Though artists such as Big Mama Thornton and Wanda Jackson were powerful female voices in 1950’s rock’n’roll, they were nowhere close to as popular and appreciated artists as their male contemporaries, though no less talented, and quite arguably more innovative. And though the 1960’s had the pride of its prominent cast of famous female rock’n’rollers such as Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Nico, Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield, and Mama Cass who took control of a predominately male dominated art form, masterfully bending it to their will, it was not until the 1970’s when revolutionary artists like Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, and Joan Jett appeared that women began to have a semblance of achievement in the rock’n’roll sphere while using the perceptually masculine elements of the art form—androgyny, leather jackets, shouted, atonal vocals, etc. The 1960’s contained the most revolutionary advances in pop and rock music in history. The decade was also host to a variety of progressive movements such as civil rights, the Black Panther party, the initial decay of sexual repression, and advancements for women’s rights including equality in the workplace.

However, despite its reputation as a famous time for liberal mores and socio-cultural revolutions, the soundtrack to this era of progress was afflicted with lyrics full of outright, flagrant, and shameless sexism. This paper refuses to deny intersectionality as an integral aspect of the nature of oppression as well as an integral aspect of overcoming oppression. Women were an incredibly marginalized identity in the lyrics of 1960’s rock music, and their negative portrayal in these lyrics is not limited to white middle-class women, but also stretches to black women and other women of color, of both high and low socio-economic status who were fetishized and romanticized by white male rock’n’rollers for their supposed ‘exoticism’ and ‘hard living’ and ‘blues’ credibility. Homosexual women and men were also marginalized and negatively portrayed, and homosexual men especially were trivialized by many straight male 60’s rockstars who appropriated feminine and homosexually associated gestures, dance moves, mannerisms, make-up, and clothing styles while maintaining an emphasized and unquestionable heterosexual identity. The portrayal of females and femininity in the lyrics of 1960’s rock’n’roll artists stands in stark contrast to the popular notion of the liberated era.

The most famous rock’n’roll artists of the 1960’s were predominately male. Groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Zombies, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Velvet Underground, and the Doors, as well as solo artists like Bob Dylan, Donovan, and Johnny Cash dominated the pop charts. What these white male artists shared in common, were the roots of their musical origins: black American blues and 1950’s rock’n’roll. The Rolling Stones famously took their name from a Muddy Waters song, and the Animals achieved international stardom with the black traditional “House of the Rising Sun”. What all these groups and artists also shared in common was a life-changing love of Elvis.

Bob Dylan describes “hearing [Elvis] for the first time” as akin to “busting out of jail” (“Quotes About Elvis”, Graceland.com). Jim Morrison called Elvis “the best ever” and that he “started the ball rolling for us all” while Paul McCartney said he “doubt[s] very much if the Beatles would have happened if it was not for Elvis” and that when “[the Beatles] were kids growing up in Liverpool, all we ever wanted to be was Elvis Presley”. Keith Richards said that “before Elvis, everything was black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious technicolor” (Elivs.net, “What They Say About Elvis”). Mick Jagger called him “an original in an area of imitators” and “no-one, but no-one, is his equal, or ever will be” and John Lennon famously said that “before Elvis, there was nothing” (“Quotes About Elvis”, Graceland.com). It’s clear that Elvis was the catalyst, the progenitor, the inspiration, the blueprint, and the instigator for the rock’n’roll of the 1960’s. One not need to analyze too closely—if at all—to find blatant sexism in his lyrics. One of Elvis’ most famous songs, the Ray Charles cover “I Got a Woman”, includes the lyrics: “She's there to love me/Both day and night/Never grumbles or fusses/Always treats me right/Never runnin' in the streets/Leavin' me alone/She knows a woman's place/Is right there, now, in the home” plainly celebrating a woman who never challenges her male counterpart, treats them according to their whims, and never ventures out around in the outside world. Another one of Elvis’ famous songs, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” includes the lyrics: “Get outta that bed, wash your face and hands/Get outta that bed, wash your face and hands/Well, you get in that kitchen, make some noise with the pots’n pans”, once again quite explicitly not only celebrating a docile and home-chained woman, but demanding that she wake up, wash up, and cook for him. Such lyrics were hardly challenged by the mainstream public of the time. It’s no surprise or arguable assertion that the genesis of sexist lyrics found in 1960’s rock music lies in the fact that these future lyricists of the 60’s grew up idolizing a singer whose patently sexist lyrics saw no challenge during his own heyday, so why not theirs?

Rock’n’roll was a primal, visceral, sexual, political, and emotionally powerful force appreciated by countless women. Feminist and historian Sheila Rowbotham, who grew up in 1960’s England, eventually ending up in London, says of 1960’s rock music that it “went straight to your cunt and hit the bottom of your spine” while simultaneously acknowledging that “the culture which was presented as ‘revolutionary’ was so blatantly phallic” (August, Gender and 1960’s Youth Culture: The Rolling Stones and the New Woman). The Rolling Stones’ catalogue is fertile with lyrical examples of flagrant sexism. But no song of theirs is both so plain and so popular an example as their 1966 hit “Under My Thumb”. The song eponymously refers to male domination of a woman. The female in the song is conceded, in the song’s first verse, at most a brief history of agency. The words begin “Under my thumb/the girl who once had me down/Under my thumb/the girl who once pushed me around” showing that the male narrator has tamed and controlled the female who once dared to insult and exert power over them. The song’s lyrics are rife from then on with lyrics animalizing the woman, calling her a “squirmin’ dog” a “Siamese cat” and a “pet” and boasts of how the he controls her life, including “the difference in the clothes she wears” and “the way she talks when she’s spoken to” (Jagger, Aftermath). The song contains quite possibly one of the most explicitly sexist lyrics in 1960’s pop history, labeled by scholar Susan Hiwatt as a “revenge song filled with hatred for women” and remains a testament to the kind of sexism—as evidenced by record sales alone—that was at best, overlookable if not acceptable, and no doubt even enjoyable, to listeners during its time.

The Rolling Stones were deemed and marketed by their manager as the anti-Beatles, the bad boys who you couldn’t take home to ma and pa. Though the Beatles still weren’t most parents’ cup of tea, they had a notably more conservative image and mainstream charm. This didn’t prevent the Beatles from penning quite a few tunes whose sexism was anything but subtle. The song’s title is an obvious indication of what’s to come, titled “You Can’t Do That”, it features John Lennon chastising a girl who is, ostensibly his girlfriend, for “talking to that boy again”. He threatens to “let [her] down” and “leave [her] flat” because he “told” them already: “You can’t do that” (Lennon, “You Can’t Do That”). He equates this girl’s conversation with another male as “a sin” and also threatens to end their relationship based merely on observing “the second time” he’s “caught” her “talking to him” saying “listen to me, if you wanna stay mine” (Lennon, “You Can’t Do That”). The Beatles’ boyish and innocent veneer didn’t prevent them from writing overtly sexist lyrics, and more tellingly, was not tarnished by the sexist lyrics of this song, among others, such as “Run for Your Life”, in which a male narrator swears he’ll kill a lover of his if he catches her with another man.

Though veiled at the time—it’s public fact now—Donovan’s 1966 hit “Sunshine Superman” was about the male singer’s designs not only to make a girl his by whatever means, but specifically by drugging her with LSD without her knowledge. In the first verse Donovan makes plain the female of his liking is “gonna be mine, I know it” simply because he has “made my mind up” that she is “going to be mine” displaying the male privilege and hubristic sense of entitlement it grants. Other than the horrendous premise that Donovan sees no problem with drugging someone without their consent, this idea devalues the female as not a human with individual agency but a prey that shall inevitably be captured by the male predator. Donovan goes on to speak directly to his victim declaring that he’ll use “any trick in the book” to possess her, and that, unbeknownst to the girl of his affection, assisted by psychedelic drugs, his male prowess will “slowly blow” her “little mind” (Donovan, “Sunshine Superman”). Here Donovan unknowingly forecasts the same type of LSD assisted mind manipulation that would be used by Charles Manson and other serial killers. Unfortunately, as the 1960’s went on and free love, civil rights, and women’s equality gained more traction towards progress, the lyrics of pop music did not.

Harry Shapiro may try to gloss over history in order to protect the image of venerated male rock stars when he ignorantly excuses Jimi Hendrix of “magnag[ing] to avoid the worst excesses of rock’s schoolboy sexism” when the innovative guitar player’s catalogue, like his peers, is full of lyrics objectifying women, dismissing their agency, and shaming them for expressing their sexuality the same way that is acceptable, if not laudable, a man does (Shapiro, 169). In fact, the song that launched Hendrix’s career contains one of the most notoriously misogynistic lyrics, normalizing and celebrating and justifying murderous violence against women. The lyrics function as a call and response between the singer and the murderer they’re speaking with, beginning with the question: “Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your hand?” to which Joe responds: “I'm goin’ down to shoot my old lady, you know I caught her messin' 'round with another man” (“Hey Joe”, Hendrix). If one were to try, albeit foolishly and futilely, to make the case that the song’s lyric is simply an expression in objective storytelling, one need only hear the tone of Hendrix’s voice when he sings it. It is certainly not a lament of remorse. But one need look no further than the lyrics and their punctuations at each line’s end. Joe confesses readily, happily: “And I gave her the gun and I shot her! Shoot her one more time again, baby!” (“Hey Joe”, Hendrix). Meanwhile the killer escapes scot-free “down south to Mexico” where he “can be free!” (“Hey Joe”, Hendrix). Though the Summer of Love was in full swing, lyrics about violence against women were blasting out the transistor radios of hippie’s Volkswagens all over the western hemisphere.

Finally, as the 1960’s drew to a close, a band whose reputation for sexist lyrics and behavior would extend ever more extravagantly and shamelessly as their popularity increased, released their debut album in 1969. This band was called Led Zeppelin. One of the most famous songs on this record is called “Dazed and Confused”. The song completes a common concoction of sexist alchemy where the male at once elevates a woman and while in doing so, objectifies them, pressing upon them outrageous standards and unachievable expectations. The romanticization of the mortal woman to an ethereal otherworldly ‘creature’ dehumanizes them under the disguise of so-called flattery. A common sexist trope in blues and rock’n’roll, stretching back to the sexist binary treatments and codes of Christianity, is that the woman is akin to, ‘born of’, a symbol, spokesperson, etc. of the devil. This trope is symptomatic of a culture that scapegoats women as the undeniable temptresses who render men powerless with their inherently evil sexuality, and therefore, dangerously excuse men of their actions. In the first verse, lyricist Robert Plant says that though “lots of people talk,…few of them know” that the “soul of a woman was created below”, claiming that this woman’s lies have “hypnotize[d]” him, he is powerless to her malicious supernatural manipulations of his affections. The lyrics also reinforce binary stereotypes, that the man goes out into the world to work, making money, while the woman stays at home and takes care of the household; the third verse begins “Every day I work so hard/Bringin’ home my hard earned pay”, going even farther into reinforcing deeply sexist stereotypes he implies that this female owes him sexual gratification because he’s worked “hard” to earn money by following the aforementioned lines with “try to love you baby, but you push me away” (Plant, “Dazed and Confused”). Once the sexual advancement from the narrator is presumably rejected by the woman in question, the song ends with the narrator deciding to rescind the money with which they’ve already given, lent, or spent on the woman under the presumption that she would return the favor with sex once they’ve learned she never intended to do so when Plant sings “let them say what they will/Will your tongue wag so much when I send you the bill?” (Plant, “Dazed and Confused”). Who knows?

One thing is certain though. While the 1960’s was a time of political and social upheaval renowned for its cultural, sexual, and civil progress, the music that blared from the Vox amps, car radios, airport speakers, portable bedroom turntables, and discothèque or acid test hi-fi speakers though universally, decidedly, and irresistibly groovy, the words to these tunes possessed incredibly old-fashioned, conservatively sexist content. Though the music felt right, and captured the minds and hearts of many female listeners, its lyrics did not reflect the times or pay heed to precisely just who were giving such groups as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles their immortal and international fame: girls.

#sexism in music #1960's #sexism #feminism #essay writing

1 note · View note