The reason the entertainment industry’s support of SOPA / PIPA and stance on piracy and the market angers and annoys me is that they are trying to sell us the idea that millions is being lost along with jobs. Have you ever seen the pre-movie commercials where the Best Boy Grip or the Stunt Coordinator try to convince us that pirates are stealing food from their babies mouths? Horrible, right?

Thing is, none of that is true.

First, the people involved in making movies on that level get paid as the movie is shooting, not after. They get paid no matter how much the movie makes or how much it supposedly loses due to piracy.

The only people who “lose” money are those who get cash when a movie turns a profit, and even then they employ creative accounting measures to ensure that only a certain section of those people get to that money. See fights over Forrest Gump, Lord of the Rings, and more.

Second, I refuse to believe that movie studios are hurting for cash and that jobs are being lost when Hollywood continues to make shitty movies that no one wants by people who have a track record of making awful films hated by all with good taste.

To put it bluntly: as long as M. Night Shyamalan is allowed to make films I will not buy any sob story Hollywood tells me.

Think about it. Ever since The Sixth Sense Night’s movies have been steadily worse. You’ll find some people who defend Unbreakable or maybe Signs and I even know someone who found a sliver of merit in Lady In The Water, but by the time we got to The Happening it was clear to everyone that whatever mojo the dude once had was all gone.

Yet still he was allowed to make The Last Airbender and pen a script for Devil. He’s been given budgets in the millions, allowed to employ hundreds of people, make bad casting decisions, and generally run what should have been a guaranteed success into the ground. And he was given this opportunity after making a movie wherein sentient plants attacked the world in retaliation for global warming in all seriousness.

It’s not even just one director or one set of bad movies. This is the industry that greenlit and brought to our silver screens movies like Just Go With It (2011), Sucker Punch (2011), The Smurfs (2011), Clash of the Titans (2010), Knight and Day (2010), Burlesque (2010), Marmaduke (2010), Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore (2010) – shall I go further back? Oh let’s — The Final Destination (2009), Year One (2009), The Love Guru (2008), Step Up 2: The Streets (2008), Norbit (2007), Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006), Big Momma’s House 2 (2006), Son of the Mask (2005), Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004), From Justin To Kelly (2003) okay, I will stop.

You see my point, though. Those movies each made multiple “worst of” lists. I’m sure some were honest efforts, perhaps some were ruined by interference by studio bosses, producers, and the like. However, I challenge anyone in Hollywood to tell me that absolutely all of those movies were made in good faith that they weren’t terrible.

If the entertainment industry was hurting, if piracy was really costing people jobs and stealing millions from those who needed to feed their babies, then the industry wouldn’t waste money this frivolously. In the end, it doesn’t matter if they make a shitshow of a movie, they will make money off of it. Who cares if it flops at the box office?

They’ll distribute it internationally and make up the difference. It will be released on DVD and Blu-ray and digitally no matter how few people went to go see it and someone will buy it. Digital and physical rental services will purchase copies and rights. The studio will sell it to one of the premium movie channels and then again to other premium movie channels a few years down the line. It will be on TNT or TBS or Comedy Central or any number of channels a few years after that.

Hollywood has money to spare. And they have no trouble employing people all the time to write, produce, make, film, and edit both good and terrible movies.

When the day comes that movies everyone knows will be terrible aren’t made in order to focus on the good ones that will make the most money then I will maybe believe that piracy is hurting the industry.

Do I think that piracy is right? No, I don’t. What I do think is that the arguments the entertainment lobby is using to push SOPA and PIPA are disingenuous. And when you push bad policy under those circumstances I will not support it. The problem is that they know if they were honest about what they want to accomplish no normal person would be on their side. Maybe not even the congressperson they’re buying off.

I Will Believe That Piracy Hurts Hollywood When Hollywood Stops Making Bad Films -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I meant to post this yesterday, but work things got in the way. Then the ever-wonderful Cleolinda posted the long, long post I was going to write and said everything I was going to say. So I’ll keep mine short. I suggest you click over to Cleolinda’s blog for the full story. Seriously.

A few days ago Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith wrote a guest post for the Genreville blog over at Publisher’s Weekly about their experience with an unnamed agent who asked them to make changes to their YA manuscript to erase the fact that a main POV character was gay. At least for the first book in the series. The pair went on to say that they’d heard that this thing with erasing gay characters in YA was something other authors experienced and thus they felt the need to write about it and bring the overall issue to light.

They did not name the agent or agency. They moved on from their specific example to the broader issue. They pointed out that this seemed to come from a concern over market forces rather than labeling anyone Homophobic or Gay Hating. If you don’t believe me, go read the original.

The post sparked a big conversation about the issue and I saw in the comments and on blogs and social networks that several other authors, published and not, talk their stories of having agents and/or editors tell them to remove gay characters from their YA.

Then Joanna Stampfel-Volpe, an agent with Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation, posted on Colleen Lindsay’s blog, The Swivet, outing her agency as the one in question (though claims she is not the specific agent in question) and essentially called Rachel and Sherwood liars. Under the guest post part, Colleen added this:

FACT: Both these writers already have their own agents. At least one of those agents reps YA books. So what does it say when the respective agents for both these well-established writers advise them to find a different agent for the book in question because neither of them wanted to rep it themselves?

It tells me that homophobia was most likely not the reason that this book has thus far not found representation.

And that made me see red because that just looks like a personal attack and an attempt to dismiss what Rachel and Sherwood said by saying that their book is no good. Further, on my Facebook page, Colleen claimed that she knew other agents who turned the book down because it had structural issues.

I like and respect Colleen a lot, but I’m calling bullshit on this. Though she says she didn’t mean for the above words to be an attack, that’s what it looks like. And, even if other agents passed on the book for structural reasons, that does not mean that the conversation as represented by Rachel and Sherwood didn’t happen. One does not preclude the other.

Putting that aside, at this point we’ve reached He Said/She Said, and it comes down to which side you believe. Stampfel-Volpe said that at no time did they say they wanted to eliminate the character because of the gayness. Rachel and Sherwood maintain that this is indeed what was said.

For my part, I believe Rachel and Sherwood. My main criteria being that my interactions with Rachel online and the interactions and friendships she has with people I know and trust do not lead me to believe she would lie in this way. I don’t know Sherwood well, but nothing I have ever heard from her good friends leads me to believe she would perpetuate a hoax for publicity or lie for profit.

Rose Fox of Genreville apparently felt the same way. Colleen mentions something about how the piece wasn’t fact checked, but how was that supposed to happen? The agency wasn’t named. And even though there are claims that the gossip identified the agency, the majority of us wouldn’t know without their self-outing. These are not the kind of “facts” that can be easily checked because the other party can say “That didn’t happen” and they could be lying just as easily as the authors. Rose used her judgment based on what she knows about the two women and, so far, I haven’t seen any reason for her to have doubted that.

Additionally, Stampfel-Volpe’s post is filled with the kind of red flags I see every day as an anti-prejudice activist. The tone is too defensive¹ and unconvincing. Plus, what exactly do you expect the agency to say? “Yes, we did that”? No. Hell no.

Think about it. If they did request the changes Rachel and Sherwood claim and did so because of market forces and such, they wouldn’t admit to it especially if they aren’t homophobic themselves. It’s just like the whole cover controversy with Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. I’m sure that her publishers are not racist people, but they put a non-black person on the cover of her book at first because they assumed that systemic racist attitudes would hurt sales. That is not something you want to admit in public, because it’s gross. It happens, though. We all know it happens. And thanks to #YesGayYA we know that the erasure of gay characters in YA happens, too. And it’s still gross.

No one wants to admit when they give in to prejudiced bullshit.

The other reason I just don’t believe Stampfel-Volpe is that she made this whole thing personal:

One of our agents is being used as a springboard for these authors to gain attention for their project. She is being exploited. But even worse, by basing their entire article on untruths, these authors have exploited the topic.

Someone explain to me how the agent in question is being exploited when he/she wasn’t named. Also, bringing a topic to light is not exploitative. The kind of people I see using language like that are the folks who try to tell me that by bringing up racism or “inventing” it when it’s not there, I am the one being racist. This is a classic defense. It may even be on the BINGO card. When I see people using this kind of language, I immediately distrust what they have to say. I’ve been on the receiving end of this too often to not recognize it.

I suggest you read the original Genreville post and the other excellent links at Cleolinda’s blog before you come down on one side or the other, especially if you don’t know any of the people involved. The readiness of some people to immediate jump to HOAX! based on absolutely nothing but one person’s word would astonish me if I didn’t already have plenty of experience watching people readily dismiss real prejudice that exists right in front of them as not-prejudice. It’s so much more comforting to think that someone is just a lying liar than that there’s a serious problem to tackle.

Tackling problems requires thought, effort, and often sacrifice. Who wants to deal with that?

My Thoughts On The Latest #YesGayYA Developments -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Footnotes

1. Especially the parts added by Colleen, who emphatically claims that the agent is a good friend and not homophobic, even though Rachel and Sherwood didn’t say he/she was. A person might not be personally homophobic, but still perpetuate the idea that mainstream readers are too homophobic to deal with gay charcaters. It’s a systemic problem, and one need not be personally prejudiced in order to bow to the system.

This has been linked everywhere but I’m going to post it again because everything he says is true and this needs a signal boost to the sky.

Perhaps when our alien overlords do finally come, they will spare some of us because of this man.

Baratunde Thurston Lays It All Out For America -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today in my class we were trying to learn a camera technique. We decided to use funny youtube videos to illustrate the proper way to shoot the scenes we wanted. And my classmates decided that the Antoine Dodson videos were such GREAT candidates because man, wasn’t he SO FUNNY?!?!? I tried to point out the fact that he was talking about his sister’s rape. The response? They didn’t mind that, they were not laughing at him (o rly?) and my personal favorite…”At least he has a sense of humor about it”. And then they went on to discuss dressing up as him on fucking HALLOWEEN.

And this wasn’t just the white kids. There were the other black kids in on this, who thought it was just as funny as the white kids did. After all, isn’t he black and gay and lowerclass and acting in ways not coded masculine? Isn’t that so uncomfortable for us middleclass folk?And his actions and his way of expressing himself became the goddamn story, instead of WHAT he was saying, which was that he was pissed at his sister being almost raped. Hell his sister was written out of the story entirely, so that we the class privileged, we who act our genders as society dictates, we racially privileged, we the women who want to want to believe that rape will not happen to us because we live/work/walk/drive in the right places could laugh. because rape is so fucking funny. because standing up for your sister’s right to lie in her fucking bed without being targeted is so fucking funny. hell it’s not even worthy of note, because your brother’s method of expression is not societally sanctioned and that is much more important than the fact that this fucking culture has a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM IN THAT RAPE IS UBIQUITOUS AND NEEDS TO BE FUCKING STOPPED. Oh i forget. women are not really human are they? Especially if they are poor. Even worse if they are of color. Immigrants. Prostitutes. Women come in classes, people and dignity and humanity are a zerosum game.

And anyway, he got money from it! (After we made it quite clear that we as a society would completely refuse to take him seriously, to busy reinforcing our class, race, gender presentation and other privileges to see the humanity in a woman being attacked and her brother coming to her aid. They are not worth society’s outrage and protection are they? Of course not.) Hell, even BET, got into the fun. They brought him on to make him perform the “Bed Intruder” Song. Yes, yes they did. A young woman’s near rape was turned into fucking entertainment for the “best and brightest” at the “premier” black awards show!!!!

Oh, and just to make this situation even MORE fucked up, Mr. Dodson is a rape victim himself.

And this is how the mainstream news proceeded to frame it:

Like many, Dodson is hoping to take his 15 seconds of celebrity and turn it into a greater opportunity. “I just want to be the voice of people who are going through similar situations that have gotten their case swept under the rug,” he says. “Most of my fans are victims of rape and molestation and they reach out to me anyway so I just talk to them and comfort them. I try to tell them the ways that I dealt with it because I’m a rape victim myself.”

Because its HIS fault that that the society found this fucking FUNNY and made him into a famous internet meme.

You know what? Other people have taken apart this situation way better than I can:

Think twice

think twice before you laugh at antoine dodson. i know everything is supposed to take a backseat to short-lived fame and exposure. but how would you feel if your sister was attacked by a rapist and people did nothing about it? officials laughed at you, police took their time coming to investigate, media crews didn’t arrive until you called them, and then your time on the news gets spoofed to entertain others instead of warn them. antoine’s taking his time in the spotlight in stride, and i think he’s doing it for kelly’s sake. i hope all the people laughing and singing “hide your kids, hide your wife” are writing all of the people in kelly’s community and state to do something about catching the rapist.

i planned to write about this at feministe, fast on the heels of the gang rape of a 12-year-old at a nearby skatepark. what does it mean when you read about attack after attack after attack, and one of the thoughts in your head is “i hope no one auto-tunes something like this” or “how can this story garner more attention than it’s gotten,” when these stories should be enough to knock ten people on their asses with grief.MORE

Flava Of The Month?: The Antoine Dodson Aftermath

By now many of us know how the story started: on the morning of July 28th, a man broke into the Dodson home in Huntsville, Ala. and, according to Antoine’s sister Kelly, attempted to assault her in her bedroom. As originally reported by WAFF-TV, Antoine struggled with the assailant, who subsequently escaped.

The first thing to note is that WAFF’s original story was not a live-shot. Meaning both the reporter, Elizabeth Gentle, and her editors had virtually the entire business day to get an interview with either a police spokesperson or the crime scene investigator shown at the scene to add to the story and respond to Antoine’s allegation about there being “a rapist in Lincoln Park” – for instance, had there been similar incidents in the area as of late? Gentle also had time to get a description of the alleged assailant from either the Dodsons or the police department, information that would be useful when the suspect in a forced entry and attempted sexual assault is still at large.

Instead, as you can see, the bulk of the story is devoted to capturing Antoine’s anger. And while the visceral emotion might have made for “compelling television,” that kicked off the most disturbing part of this entire affair. While it’s possible this is because of her own choice, Kelly Dodson, the original victim of the assault, became a non-factor in the story. In fact, WAFF aired a follow-up story that completely ignored her and focused on the online fuss surrounding Antoine, while absolving itself of any fault for its’ own reporting:MORE

On Feminism, Liberals, Black Folks and Antione Dodson

In the midst of this institutional racism are the actions of three groups that cannot be ignored:

1. the viewers and listeners who openly mocked Dodson, completely ignoring the rape survivor narrative embedded in his story
2. the white middle class hipster-nerd comedy troupe that made money off of the rape and attempted rape of poor black women and girls and the one man willing to stand up for them
3. the mainstream feminist blogs and feminist communities who have remained largely silent on Dodson’s sister despite the core issue of rape

The multi-racial viewers and listeners spent their time laughing at Dodson and mocking him and his sister in print in the youtube comments for days. The video received some of the largest hits of the week when it first went up. The auto-tune version played black radio stations and a black marching band even set did their own rendition, laughing at the “ghetto” in ways that I personally cannot excuse as black humor as survival but rather black humor as classism and internalized hate. Amongst the 100,000s of people commenting on Dodson or the autotune song, very few talked about the heinous act of rape, the existence of a serial rapist in the area that had gone unchecked for an unspecified amount of time, or the engineered tragedy of the state’s willingness to abandon poor women and girls to predators. In other words, the chance to mock an uneducated black man was more enticing than the fact of violence against women and girls. MORE

Finally we hear from Kelly Dodson video at link with full transcript

Kelly: (unintelligible) There’s really not much that I can say right now because I don’t know how to explain it to you because you really did a lot of damage to me whether you know it or not and if it wasn’t for Antoine, you probably would have got what you came in there for but you didn’t. I just want to know how you feel about the situationMORE

and The accidental fame of Kelly and Antoine Dodson has a different perspective on the subject:

Even though the whole debacle can be seen by some through the lens of “poverty porn,” this can also be viewed in another light. A light that by instead of being stoic and polished, the Dodsons actually got more attention for their plight and the issue of crime in poor communities BECAUSE people found the clip unintentionally funny. Antoine’s message was received (“Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park …”) and the community took notice.

Said Kenyatta Cheese of KnowYourMeme.com to NPR:

“Kelly and Antoine may be victims but they are fearless,” Kenyatta told me. “They both take control of the camera and call out their attacker. They issue a call to action telling people in their community to look out for the perpetrator. And yes, Antoine may not seem traditionally articulate, but he uses his time on camera to be performative and create spectacle and that gets our attention. In that sense, he’s probably more effective in getting his message out there than a more traditional community ‘representative’ would ever be.

“To me, Antoine Dodson is brilliant.”

MORE

The last time I checked, Mr. Dodson had used the proceeds of “The Bed Intruder Song” to move the entire family to a safer neighbourhood and is planning to go back to school. The spotlight isn’t on Kelly Dodson as much, so I am not not able to discern what she is going to do.

Rape is a multifaceted problem, and it happens not only because someone decides to overpower and forcefully assault a weaker person, but because society condones it. And the lower you are on US societal heirarchy, the less society gives a fuck a fuck about your safety and wellbeing. This series of linkspams will try to examine the various ways in which society’s prejudices help to perpetuate the rape culture in the US (with an occasional piece on Canada).

Rape Culture USA: How race, class, misogyny and homophobia intersected in the Kelly and Antoine Dodson story -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Okay, so I think we all know about Taylor Swift being interrupted last year at the VMA’s right? Right. Kanye West caught all kinds of hell for it, and even for his subsequent apologies. So, then why is the video I linked her performance from this year’s show? You can’t convince me that you don’t want to talk about the past when you do a performance all about it. Barefoot, standing like a broken doll, and all but crying your way through the whole thing. Ooh, a whole stage show geared to present this image of delicate white femininity while you sing about your innocence being violated. By a scary black man.

Gee, that’s not a coded message we’ve seen before at all. Oh wait, let’s talk about the idea of white people feeling violated by black people “not knowing their place” and what that’s meant historically to American society. Better yet, let’s really dig down into why we’re singing about violated innocence like being interrupted on stage is at all equivalent to being physically assaulted. Oh, but then we might have to get into who interrupted her and whether this would be such a big deal if the racial makeup was different.

I’m certain someone will swear she didn’t mean to stir up the kind of images that she did. Especially in this “post racial” society. Which, if we were remotely post-racial might hold some water. Not a lot. But some. As we’re not actually post anything? Intent (or lack thereof) only carries so much weight before it doesn’t matter why you’re encouraging the same virulent hate that spewed last year in the immediate aftermath of Kanye’s bad manners. Yes, I said bad manners. Because being rude is what he’s guilty of and not much else. He’s a jackass with issues that he let spill all over her big moment. That sucks. But, that’s not a reason to still be playing the victim a year later and using dog whistle racism as a subtext in your performance.

Taylor Swift’s paean to being Kanye’s “victim” makes me want to roll my eyes at her routine as well as some of the reactions to it. Because if this what happens when someone is rude to a white woman in public we really haven’t come past race at all. Not even a little bit. In fact, while we’re on the subject of coded language and images let’s talk about the phrase “White Women’s Tears” and why it seems to be both problematic and accurate in this situation. There’s a case that could be made for inherent misogyny in the way the phrase is used. After all Taylor’s feelings were undoubtedly hurt and she’s got a right to express that pain right? Right. So, as a musician she expresses those emotions in the way that best suits her and we shouldn’t read more into it than her telling her side of the story.

Except she’s not expressing those emotions in a vacuum, and she’s well aware of the racial subtext after a year of her fans using racial epithets about Kanye at every turn. She’s had a year to debut this song (especially since according to her camp she wrote it in her diary last year) but she held onto it for a publicity stunt last night. There’s some complicated historical and social subtext tangled up in the use of tears this way, and in the reaction to those tears. It’s a subtext that makes the phrase “White Woman’s Tears” a convenient shorthand for a situation that boils down to a white woman wielding her tears as a weapon against a POC. We’re back to intent and the question of whether those tears (genuine or otherwise) and their ability to derail and/or escalate a situation can be separated out from the emotions that may be prompting them.

Personally, I look at the reaction to Kanye’s interruption of Taylor Swift and I think that we have a long way to go before the major concern is the terminology and not the act. But then, I’m not a white woman and my tears don’t have any power so I’m obviously biased by my experiences with the phenomenon. This time the goal of the tears is likely to generate some more sympathy, but we can’t ignore the death threats against him that were generated a year ago, or the ones that might have been generated tonight.

ETA: So, a further dissection of the lyrics was called for by a few commenters on another blog. And I went digging. Okay, let’s assume she’s not singing about her violated innocence and the whole song is about Kanye. That’s…not an improvement. We’ve still got her stage show based around White Damsel (love that one by the way), poorly written lyrics (I recognize that this one was a given) that left me and whole lot of other people thinking she was singing about herself with a verse aimed at Kanye, and for an added bonus she’s infantilizing a grown man. So we’re right back to coded images, complete with a White Man’s Burden’esque routine about about childlike black people. Again, in a country with a long history of using such images to justify terrible things. Since I know someone will claim (and probably already has) that any complaining is just proof that Taylor Swift cannot win with “those people” let me point out that mashing up one racist coded image with another isn’t exactly new or any less offensive. The truth is she cannot win as long as she’s using racism as currency. Once people stop doing that? Everyone wins.

Son of ETA: I’m sorry we lost all the comments in the hacking, but people are free to have at it again if they like.

White Women, Tears, and Coded Images (Repost) -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Is this really what Jesus would do? If your answer is yes, may I suggest the following:

CHRISTIANITY: UR DOIN IT WRONG

P.S. Dear Rick Lazio, as my mother used to say: God don’t like ugly.

Dear Pastor Jones and other so-called Christians intending to burn the Qur’an -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I’ve been ruminating over my own experiences as a pretty woman for some time now. On the one hand it has definitely benefited me in some ways. I understand that it can benefit me in larger ways that I don’t necessarily notice or know about because of the reaction our society has to attractive people. Here’s the thing, some days the positives probably do outweigh the negatives, but at 2 in the afternoon when I’m having to threaten to cut some guy on a bus to get him away from me and random bystanders are ready to victim blame because I had the nerve to wear shorts on a hot summer day it doesn’t feel like it.

I know street harassment (hell misogyny in general) knows no bounds and that women of all races and sizes deal with some version of it. I’m not trying to downplay anyone else’s experiences. I’m just focused on what I’ve noticed since I gained enough weight to move from a B cup to a D cup. I’m pretty in that way people are when they have symmetrical features, the genes for straight white teeth, and a socially accepted body type. Please note, I am not saying this is the only way to be attractive, it is simply the way in which I am attractive.

My decision to go natural, and put my hair into comb coils means that I now have longish hair with a minimum amount of effort. In the past when I was the aforementioned B cup and had a habit of wearing my hair short I’d run into harassment probably once or twice a week. Now? It’s pretty much daily. Some of it is definitely because I present as very feminine now (I have a grown up job that requires business casual attire and in the summer that means a lot of skirts because I hate long pants when the sun is trying to broil me alive) and that seems to make some men feel as though I’m dressing to attract their attention. Some of my harassers have gone so far as to claim that everything I do is to attract their attention. The other day I actually had a guy insist that I wouldn’t have sat in the same row as he did on the bus if I wasn’t interested. Apparently the concept of public transport eluded him. Then again so did the idea that he wasn’t entitled to my being receptive to his overtures so we went the standard misogynistic insult route when I didn’t play my part of his internal script.

And it’s not just street harassment (though I’m at a point where it feels like a one way forcefield would be a good look so I can traverse the city in relative comfort) I also find myself being taken for an airhead on sight. I’m having to prove my intelligence over and over again to people who should have a clue. Someone at my current job was so amazed that I knew anything about computers that he broke into a conversation another coworker and I were having to tell me of his shock and awe. Twice. I don’t have the fanciest job title in all the land, but I do employ a fair amount of critical thinking skills on a day to day basis. Granted the case could be made that his shock was down solely to race and gender, but I’ve got my doubts since his hands couldn’t stop making certain gestures while he was expressing that shock and awe.

Is this a “It’s not easy being pretty so you should feel tons of sympathy for my plight” post? No. Well, at least that’s not what I’m trying to convey. I’m just feeling like some of the people in this article who are both reaping the rewards and suffering from the side effects. It’s easy to talk about pretty privilege, but the reality is that (like a lot of other facets of life) being attractive is a double edged sword. Just as white privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of sexism, or male privilege doesn’t remove the oppression of racism, being pretty doesn’t do away with any of those oppressions. In fact it can heighten the incidence rate (at least that’s been my experience) and then any comments about why it is happening are met with derision. Because we as a society seem to think being pretty is a cure all, so there’s a huge focus on becoming attractive without any discussion of what happens when you are attractive. Misogyny is a hell of a drug in general, and it seems to get particularly potent when it can be justified by pointing at a woman’s appearance as being such that it attracts the male gaze so she deserves whatever happens to her. Fetishization of attractive POC lends a certain nasty edge to the racial component, and that’s before we start getting into the intersectionality of class with this topic. I know it’s a tricky area to discuss, but I want to start having the discussion any way. You in?

The Dark Side of Being Pretty -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

It’s not often I cede the floor to a white guy, but Keith makes some good points. Bottom line, this community center everyone is trying to get you up in arms about is: A) Not a mosque, and B) Not at Ground Zero.

Oh, and one other thing: Ground Zero is not holy ground. It’s true that many people’s remains may still be there, but that does not make it holy ground nor does it make the general area off limits to houses of worship that you disagree with. Not in America, at any rate.

There Is No Ground Zero Mosque -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

(crossposted from my personal blog)

I know that pointing out RoF Fail is a little like kicking a puppy, but you know how it is when Nick Mamatas sends you a link clearly meant to induce blog-worthy rage — you just have to accommodate him.

So, LJ user torrain was reading the latest issue of Realms of Fantasy and didn’t get far before the facepalm reached epic proportions. Inside the magazine’s movie review of The Last Airbender ze found this awesomeness:

However, The Last Airbender has already caught flak for “whitewashing,” meaning, the casting of white actors (or actors who appear to be white) to play non-white characters, especially when those characters are heroic. It’s a hot-button issue that dredges up memories of images like Al Jolsen wearing black-face makeup. Of course, there are two sides to this coin. On one hand, whitewashing can feel insulting, disrespectful, and disappointing to movie-goers. Many may label it as politically incorrect. On the other hand, anyone who has run a casting call will tell you that when you find the right person for the role, something magical happens. Time seems to stop, and you feel as if the character comes to life right in front of your eyes. The character is no longer ink on paper; the character begins to live and breathe. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the individual human being reading for the part. Adding to the mix is the fact that some roles written for white people have been won by actors of color, and some roles written for men have been played by women. In other words, whitewashing isn’t a one-way street. It’s a difficult situation that places filmmakers between the goal of finding magic and not offending audiences. At the end of the day, most directors simply want to tell a good story.

There’s a lot of obvious fail going on here, and it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with this notion that “something magical happens” when the right person comes along for the role, even if that person is white and the character is not. Even if this was ever true somewhere in the world, it’s not true in this movie. Let’s quote Roger Ebert talking about the casting, specifically:

Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they’re all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It’s a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad. I don’t say they’re untalented, I say they’ve been poorly served by  Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing.

Entertainment Weekly:

The trouble with The Last Airbender is that Aang, as a character, is a saintly abstraction (Noah Ringer plays him with a sensitive pout that grows cloying), and he’s surrounded by generic young actors who are like place holders for real stars.

Variety:

Shyamalan has worked wonders with child actors before, but Ringer is no Haley Joel Osment, delivering some fancy footwork but zero charisma in the pic’s key role. Most dialogue scenes are framed in tight Sergio Leone-style closeup, emphasizing the actors’ wooden nature. At that proximity, we notice that Rathbone never blinks; nor can he be counted on to deliver any of the comic relief of his animated counterpart.

I could go on. The issue here is not that M. Night just happened to find these amazing kids to play these roles who just happened to be white. This is what he or the producers or the studio set out to do from the beginning because, even though millions of people love the cartoon and its clearly Asian characters, they felt that audiences just can’t handle brown and yellow people as the heroes. As the evil villains, sure. But protagonists must be white, right?

Whitewashing, no matter how much you pretty it up with the magical casting feeling of amazingness, is still just damn wrong.

The second half of that paragraph, which you probably didn’t even read because the first part was so rage-inducing with its faily wrongness, I shall paste again, because it also needs addressing:

Adding to the mix is the fact that some roles written for white people have been won by actors of color, and some roles written for men have been played by women. In other words, whitewashing isn’t a one-way street. It’s a difficult situation that places filmmakers between the goal of finding magic and not offending audiences. At the end of the day, most directors simply want to tell a good story.

Jesus. Okay, deep breath. First of all, the conceit of having women play roles written for men is usually about deconstruction more than it’s about some magical audition process or someone being “right” for a role. And I can’t come up with any examples of people of color playing roles “written for white people” unless you’re talking about classical theater or something. Maybe they mean Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? But again, when POC play, uh “white” roles, that actually has a different weight and purpose behind it than whitewashing. The power differentials there are NOT equal. Are POC overrepresented in Hollywood movies and American television? No. Are white people? Yes. So when whitewashing occurs, do you know who it hurts and disrespects and diminishes? POC.

The fact that this Realms columnist doesn’t understand any of this is already major fail. The fact that his or her editor doesn’t understand any of this is even bigger fail. And it’s leading many people to question why they would even bother to save such a magazine from its impending cancellation when all they have to look forward to is a bunch of racefail in the non-fiction section.

I’m just going to bottom line it for you: Whitewashing is never okay no matter what. If you don’t agree, then you’re really too far gone to exist in polite and cultured society and perhaps you should do us all a favor and go back to the cave you most certainly crawled out of.

Is that too harsh?

Realms of Fantasy Columnist Condones Whitewashing When “Magic” Is Involved -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

The Linkmistress would like to interrupt her regular linkspams to bring you an actual blog. With words. As usual, civility is requested and will be enforced. Iron fist, velvet glove etc.

crossposted. The following critique is based on the media I have consumed and the experiences I have had. Feel free to rec media in which the things I am complaining about have been fixed. Except that Pullman fellow. I tried. I tried. But.

Pharyngula is linked to my old blog, and thus, when I go over there, I sometimes check his feed. I say sometimes, because the writer thereof is like many white middleclass atheists in that FAIL! on race issues, and the difference in scale between religions affected by the past how many hundreds of years of colonialism and Christianity is constant and unremitting (and the comment section is WORSE.) This post however Letting go of gods is a reason for joy…like being free of prison, sparked an annoyed rant that I had been turning over in my mind for a very long time.

I am an atheist. A black atheist at that. And I am HAPPY AND FULFILLED ABOUT THIS. I do NOT run around wistfully gazing after religious people, feeling sad that I am missing out on the experience of faith. Nor do I run around feeling nihilistic and angry at the world because there is no God and therefore LIFE ON EARTH HAS NO MEANING !!!!!!!!!!!!! And I sure as hell do not run about committing crimes and hurting people left, right and center because God isn’t in my life. I have ethics. And morals even. And NO that it NOT because God is in my life and I don’t know it, WHAT!!! Hell I formed my ideas of ethics and morals in direct opposition to some of the things in the Christian Bible (fer instance, the idea of a god sending his people to go kill people and take their possessions reminds me of European colonialism and is WRONG WRONG WRONG in my ethical universe. Women are intelligent and sensible and should therefore have been in on the equal human rights from the beginning of time, no excuses. In fact, in my ethical universe, strict instructions about the equality of EVERYONE from transpeople to disabled people to poc to people with alternate sexualities to people in different classes to anyone who has a mix of these identities, plus anyone else who might have been left out of this list would be MY FIRST FREAKING COMMANDMENT. And that’s just the beginning.)

I am SICK AND TIRED of encountering those tropes in most of the tv, movies and books which even deign to acknowledge the fact that people who don’t believe in gods exist in the first place. Almost every black movie and tv show or book mentions God somewhere. If a character does not believe in God, the person is taught a firm lesson, which is usually accompanied by humiliation of some sort, so as to bring them back into line (praise ye the Lord!!) For white characters in tv shows, more latitude is given in that there are atheist characters, but we end up with people like House, or atheists who are made to accept that the fact that someone has faith makes them a better person. (I think I have seen that dynamic in Bones but I may be wrong. Anyone watch the show and can clarify?) Which. It doesn’t. It makes you a different person. Good for you. But my lack of faith is just as good as your abundance of it and gives you no moral cookies over me, kthx.

So. I want proudly atheist characters who are happy about it in my media. Minorities of every kind, even. Because we exist. And our stories deserve to be respectfully told.

The myth of atheists being “less” than religious people -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman