The racism of Agent Carter isn’t malicious: it’s negligent. It’s the racism of privilege; of growing up so saturated with a very specific set of self-reinforcing norms, in a culture and creative and business environment that treats white as a natural default and anything else as an exception.
Let me say this again, just in case: The overwhelming whiteness of Agent Carter is constructed. It is artificial. It is not normal or realistic. It did not happen in a magical creative vacuum any more than deliberately cultivating more diversity would.
I don’t mean to pick on the Amazing Atheist, but the need to defend himself from feminist critiques didn’t come out of nowhere like the knife-wielding clown that snuck up behind you as you read this. Here he is arguing that sexual objectification doesn’t exist, and here he is again making fun of feminist cartoons while the point of them flies so far over his head it strikes a passing 747.
“But wait,” you say. “Why is someone called the Amazing Atheist talking about feminism? That’s like a columnist on a comedy site writing about religion. What kind of idiot does that?”
That hurt, hypothetical reader. But you know what else hurts? The fact that this isn’t an isolated problem. As AlterNet points out, atheism has become as bad at talking to girls as the boys at a junior high dance. A movement that’s supposed to be about rational thinking has fallen into the same “vagina emotions make chicks a bunch of crazy broads” trap as your friend who got into the pick-up community and reeks like an Axe factory. You can’t claim to be a proponent of science and reasonable thinking, only to regress to hacky sitcom stereotypes about women being humorless harpies who bring sexual assault upon themselves. That’s like complaining that no one will take your obvious soccer skills seriously just because you occasionally punch opposing players and pick up the ball.
“Right now, I would just like to take a moment and say FUCK THIS GUY. Seriously. Fuck him. Fuck him going around crying about how it’s not fair that he can’t discriminate against gay people when he’s a goddamned child molester. Fuck him, and the whole fucking family (other than the victims) for going around telling everyone who will listen about how fabulously holy they are, how they are so much better than everyone because they wait until getting married to kiss someone. Fuck them. Fuck them for trying to frame their bigotry, homophobia and transphobia as holy righteousness, while all this was going on. Fuck Jim Bob Duggar for lecturing the rest of us on “sexual purity” while protecting an abuser. Fuck Michelle for doing the same thing. Fuck her for calling people up claiming that trans people are trying to molest their kids in bathrooms, while her precious, darling son was an actual abuser. Fuck all of them. How. Dare. They.”
According to recently obtained documents from the Cleveland Police Department, 12-year old Tamir Rice was going to be charged with the outrageous crimes of “aggravated menacing” and “inducing panic.”
Dear police: We give those crimes back to you. All across the United States, you have induced panic and served as aggravating menaces and have gotten away with these crimes for far too long.
How dare you ever consider charging this young brother with these crimes. He was no menace, but a sixth-grade boy, and the only reason you or anyone else panicked was because of his brown skin. Here are eight white people who pointed real guns at real people and lived to tell the story.
I keep seeing stuff about Lord of the Flies going around
Obviously, the individual experiences of the people making the posts - re: teachers, lessons, the way they were forced to study the book - aren’t up for debate
but like, I feel that people might not have the whole story here and as someone who knows far too much about literature, I wanted to talk about it a little
Sir William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in response to an earlier novel called The Coral Island. In The Coral Island, a small group of upper-class British boys from a boarding school get stranded on an island and have an absolutely wonderful time. They look back on it as a fond adventure, where they had a little vacation, invented things, and generally made their well-bred high society English parents proud.
Sir William Golding read that novel and was disgusted by the way that R. M. Ballantyne used the plot as a huge essay on the superior intellect and higher morality of English folk (read: white people). The boys in The Coral Island eventually have to seek the aid of Christian missionaries (who are there to convert the local Polynesian populace) to save them from the natives who are written as raping pillaging amoral cannibals.
Sir William Golding set out to write a more realistic novel, by the way, using the same names for his main characters as Ballantyne did (although Golding’s characters are slightly younger). So, all the posts about Lord of the Flies showing the “human condition” insofar as it pertains to young middle-class British boys who grew up in a boarding house in the middle of the Cold War are correct. But I get the feeling that most people don’t realize that was the point of the novel.
Lord of the Flies was meant as a huge “fuck you” to the ingrained belief that English people are the most noble and wise of all people and thus incapable of descending into savagery. I doubt it was ever meant to be a sweeping generalized metaphor for the universal savage nature of humanity, and shame on the teachers who force that interpretation on their students.
I wish that the information in this post were told to students reading Lord of the Flies more often, considering that this context is necessary for understanding the book.
can you imagine steve and jane foster being bestest bros though? I mean, Jane literally throws herself into harms way for science and for Thor (and for literally everyone else her self-preservation instinct is zero) and steve sees so much of who he was back in the 40s in her
so they hang out all the time, swapping stories and Jane helps him acclimate to the future. (steve’s no astrophysicist but he can work a computer i dunno why people love thinking that he can’t figure out anything modern)
and then all the shit with ca:ws happens and when Bucky is finally found, steve introduces them thinking that bucky will like jane as much as Steve does. but bucky is flat-out horrified. because somehow 70 years later there is another fucking skinny steve rodgers walking around only this one is a girl and doesn’t just like to pick fights with bullies, no, this one likes to pick fights with shady government agencies, throwing caution to the fucking wind, and he nearly has an aneurism when he finds out that she broke into a facility to get Mjölnir back
needless to say, bucky is a fixture in jane’s life after that. and whenever she wants something from shield he accompanies her, metal arm uncovered, just glaring everyone down if they so much as look at her the wrong way. in the history of shield, nick fury has never been so accommodating as when jane foster walks in with bucky on her arm.
I am now a beautiful fairy queen and you can all come live with me to be fairy queens or kings or royalty or knights or princeps or whatever the hell you want lets have an awesome fairy kingdom
Gnomes and goblins are also allowed in the fairy kingdom
I want to be the fairy serf who toils all day in the dewdrop fields for his lord and master, living in fear of goblin vikings, starvation, and the coming winter.
This is acceptable but I feel you should know that we have socialized fairy healthcare and very good fairy insurance so even in event of goblin vikings and early frosts you’re fully covered!
#this does mean you all pay fairy taxes tho
So like, daisy petals and pine needles or cold hard cash?
Babies.
Taxes are paid with mortal children and cool rocks.
Where is one going to get a decent supply of mortal children to pay taxes all the time?
It’s just like…one child a year! Barely anything. Or just some cool pebbles. IDK. I’m an easy ruler
“The researchers found that across the board, when participants were asked to emphasize merit in their decisions, they ended up being much more likely to treat the fake women employees worse than the fake men. Even though the women had performance evaluations showing they were just as qualified as the men, they were given lower bonuses, less likely to be hired, less likely to be promoted, and more likely to be terminated. It’s worth mentioning that the differences between the merit-emphasis group and the non-merit-emphasis group were not high enough to be statistically significant for hiring, promotion and termination decisions. It was, however, statistically significant in the amount of bonus dollars assigned to each employee. The researchers suggest that this may be because hiring, firing, and promotion decisions are generally public whereas bonuses are secret. Perhaps managers are more likely to consider diversity in their decision when they have to consider how the decision will look to outsiders.”
White feminists like to pretend that they get it. They get it because they’ve been there. They’ve experienced sexism. They’ve experienced misogyny. They’ve been passed over for promotions, whistled at on the street, and had to listen to boring dudes at parties who require approximately ten years of your time in order to explain how fascinating they actually are. These white women have been down in the feminist trenches for years, and like your world-weary Grandpa, they’ve seen it all. They understand the oppression of all women, ok?
Except not. Intersecting forces of oppression mean that women who are queer, racialized, disabled or trans will experience misogyny in very different (and frequently more deadly) ways than white women do. Saying that just because you’re a woman you totally understand all different ways that women are marginalized is not only wildly inaccurate, it’s also just plain ignorant. Just because you don’t have male privilege doesn’t mean you aren’t the proud owner of a whole host of other types of privilege. And whether you like it or not, those various forms of privilege influence how people treat you.
White women don’t own womanhood, and they don’t get to explain it to women of color. End of story.
Today’s Obsession: Deer girls, faun girls, and there’s one ram girl in there. :) I want to try my hand at making an antler headband soon and maybe ask one of my photographer friends to do a shoot with me. :D These girls look so magical and whimsical.
Images found on Pinterest.
Writing in the NYT, Corey Robin highlights the frightening trend in state GOP labor laws
to deny unemployment benefits to workers who are fired for breaking the
“behavioral norms” demanded by employers, from dating workers from
rival companies to posting unhappy work-related remarks to the Internet.
Conservative douchebag Ben Stein loves these rules, and wants high
schools to help instill them by vigorously punishing “talking back” –
if you’re subordinate, you need to learn not to be insubordinate.
For more background, see the Economic Policy Institute’s 2013 report, The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012.
First Lady Michelle Obama talked about her experience with race and the media during her commencement speech at Tuskegee University. You can watch the full address here.
I fuckin love her. Sad to see them leave the White House.
“Kids love black holes the way they love T-Rex. And I think it’s because each of these entities can eat you. And anything that eats you, you give your highest respect.”
-
Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries (via
Researchers at the University of St Andrews have discovered that crows store their tools when they don’t need them - just like people.
New Caledonian crows are famous for using stick tools to get insects out of tree holes and other hiding places. Crows hold the tools in their bill when foraging but need to put them down to eat.
In the first study to look at how animals (non-human) avoid misplacing their tools, researchers discovered that crows carefully place them under their feet to use again later. If foraging at a height rather than on the ground, crows look after their tools more carefully and even seem to get really upset when they accidentally drop them.
Tool ‘safekeeping’ may be very important as crows can spend more time on the critical business of finding food, rather than wasting time making replacements.
“The white feminist becomes the CEO. The black feminist becomes the exiled rebel. The white feminist speaks about teaching literacy like i should thank her, hold her hand, kiss her for teaching children of darker skin. The black feminist should be grateful. The black feminist wears her natural hair, she is called ‘too rebellious’. The white feminist cuts her hair, she is brave. The white feminist gets featured on TIME. The black feminist is the fine print.”
“you can’t complain about lack of diversity in texts that empower white women because no media is perfect~~~”
no shit, sherlock, we all know no media is perfect. the problem is that you white feminists are talking about it as if it were and thereby treating the erasure of woc as a mild inconvenience rather than an act if exhaustive, active oppression.
“The story we’re hearing today is: Yes, it was a mistake. We wouldn’t do it again knowing what we know now. But we acted on information that just turned out to be wrong. But that is quite simply a crock. The Bush administration was at best in deep denial about the true costs of the invasion. And it lead the country to war based on claims that were quite simply willful deceptions - lies. It may be too much to say that it was obvious to everyone at the time. But to reporters working the story and certainly anyone in the government, it was clear that the White House was involved in a mammoth exaggeration. Only later did it emerge that there was even more willful deception than those following closely realized at the time. Looking back and looking at the time it has always been somewhat difficult to find the bright line where flagrant lying met willful self-deception. But the truth is painful and clear: Iraq wasn’t a good faith mistake. It was a calamity based on lies and willful deceptions. Much of that was clear at the time. It’s all clear now.”
