I am the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was 1, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy; we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil.I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm in England’s Lake District, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunchbox once in a while and biscuits instead of fruit, like all the other kids.We ate (organic local) meat maybe once or twice a week, and my mother and father cooked everything from scratch—I have yet to taste a Findus crispy pancake, and oven chips (“fries,” to Americans) were reserved for those nights when Mum and Dad had friends over and we got a “treat.”As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox. In my 20s I got precancerous HPV and spent six months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that Mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.So the anti-vaccine advocates’ fears of having the “natural immunity sterilized out of us” just doesn’t cut it for me. How could I, with my idyllic childhood and my amazing health food, get so freaking ill all the time? … My two vaccinated children, on the other hand, have rarely been ill, have had antibiotics maybe twice in their lives, if that. Not like their mum. I got many illnesses requiring treatment with antibiotics. I developed penicillin-resistant quinsy at age 21—you know, that old-fashioned disease that supposedly killed Queen Elizabeth I and that was almost wiped out through use of antibiotics.*
Once again I have put my foot in it. Let’s start here:
"If you mean the cast is primarily white, it’s the 40s. Which is more offensive to you: black help and blacks in service, or no blacks? I would like to see more POC, yes, but that was the time, and I’m not sure I’d like to see more POC if they’re always going to be in service."
My meaning was that up till that point Agent Carter takes place in a boarding house, an office building, occasionally at an Automat, on barren streets, and in warehouse-and-dock land. My memory is not good: was there material in a nightclub? If so, then I apologize. My feeling is that the show writers are straining their drawers to be accurate to history, and in this limited setting, that generally means working-class blacks. Hate me all you want, and then find some photo books of the period. If the show went to Harlem, Spanish Harlem, the lower East Side, the population would look very different. The city would look very different. But the show doesn’t show those areas. It shows grim areas. And so I say what went on in the period and what seems to be going on with the show and right away I am accused of racism. While you’re at it, you could also mention the lack of presence of the Chinese, and of the Mohawk Indians who were working on the high iron of the skyscrapers of the time. No one shows them, either. Either the show is trying to give the audience an appreciation of the time—thus the thuggish treatment of women and the disabled—or it’s a fantasy show and should be all inclusive.
But you were looking for a racist and despite my apologies and attempts to clarifiy my views—this wasn’t my first post on this matter—you decided I was one.
Next issue. I tried to humanize Hitler. Yes, I did. Guilty as charged. In fact, I have spent my entire career writing monsters who have some aspect of humanity about them, and do you know why? Because it’s very easy to hate a Johann Schmidt, or a Dr. Doom, a Joker, a Dr, Octopus. That’s the Big Lie. Jeffrey Dahmer did not look like Scarecrow. He was a soft-spoken dreamer who liked to torture and eat his dates. Ted Bundy did not look like Penguin. He worked a rescue hotline next to one of the country’s best crime writers for two years and she never guessed what he did when he was supposedly going to law school. Hitler wanted to go to art school, loved his mother, and little dogs. He also led an entire country to commit mass murder on a scale that should have left the world unable to even IMAGINE doing such a thing again—but we didn’t. People have to know the monsters aren’t the guys in the movies. If my warning you that the worst monsters can seem like nice people close up teaches you to beware, I’ll take that hit. But seeing that some of you have decided to inspect all of my posts for further thought crimes, I think the point of what I was trying to say got lost.
Article the third: Quvenzhane’s name. I explained myself. I apologized. I love Ms. Wallis’s work, am delighted to see the roster of her forthcoming films, and don’t much care if you think I’m scrambling to regain racial swellness points.
Next: “There is NO reason to exclude them from this show or to claim that we shouldn’t have black people because hey, they’d only be a maid or
something. Wow.”
I’m not the one excluding them. I don’t ask they be excluded. I would much rather see them in all their variety. If, rather than coming unglued, you had asked me this, I would have clarified it, I would have said so. But no one did. It was so much more fun to scream at someone with a Name. Which is more valuable, screaming at me or screaming at the writers?
Last of all, nomenclature. When I was a teenager, there was a war of words on. When I started grade school, people of one color were “coloreds” (if you were nice) and n-r if you were common or my grandfather, and people of another color were Indians. By the time we got to high school people of one color were “black” (and proud”), and people of another color were “Native American” or “American Indian.” And then, when we were used (those of us who cared about the feelings of people of color) to the term “black,” some decided they preferred “African American,” or “Person of Color,” and the “Native Americans” are “First Nations” depending on where you are. I still say “Black” because for me that term is fixed to the vision of people marching, of Black Panther men and women, of Angela Davis speaking then and now, their hair a proud banner, of Martin Luther King, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Bobbie Seale, Malcolm X, and a lot of people who brought the country forward, whether we wanted to come or not. When someone who is actually a person of color tells me what they would like me to call them, I use that. My mentor very emphatically prefers “black.”
Now. I’m getting very tired of hanging out at Salem Village (one of you has issued a call for all of my posts so those that are offensive can be thrown in my face). The tendency to take something and, rather than ask for clarification for something that seems odd or wrong, to call out the troops and start collected firewood for a witch burning, is tiresome. It hurts the friends who have gotten in touch to ask what is going on, and it reminds me that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain myself to people who have proved several times now that they have no interest in a conversation; they just want to burn them some witches. I choose to go elsewhere. To those whose work and wit I enjoyed, I apologize; the same to my friends.
First of all, I’m not selling my body to gross old men.
There’s a few misconceptions in that one sentence alone. You may have noticed I’m home in my bathrobe, alone with my dogs, having finished my gyro, answering this. How did I get my body back?! Did I buy it back? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of selling it? Maybe he GAVE it back to me out of charity when he was done using it, is that it?
So —taking this ask at face value—i’m gonna say your feminist praxis needs a bit of a refresher. Women—all women, and tbh all people as little as I care for men—are living beings with agency and calculating capabilities. We calculate our best options and go from there. We are not tissues to be used, regardless of that fervid and foetid radfem rhetoric. They only regard certain women as people anyway.
And then, if you’re talking to me, you know my stance on pole dancing. You know that western appropriation narratives aside, the reason you want pole dance specifically to be your fitness routine and not mallakhamb (which doesn’t welcome women anyway) or aerialism, is that neither have been sexy and appealing background props setting the standards of female desirability for the past twenty years.
Strippers have.
You want to look like a stripper. You want that slumming, dangerous, mysterious aura, you want to walk with confidence like I walk in 8” heels, you want to look like men pay you hundreds of dollars because you’re desirable.
You want to feel edgy and desirable.
That’s why you haven’t run off to cirque du soleil, nor are you calling aerialists tramps.
With that cleared up, let’s go back to your first point:
You do have a problem with strippers. Your problem: you want our aura and desirability and not the stigma, not the danger, not the real threat of losing homes/jobs/family/scholarships/children/careers/futures.
You know that the edginess you crave comes at a price, and your way of dealing with this is NOT to combat stripper stigma, your way of dealing with this is to play up respectability politics for all you’re worth, widening the dichotomy between pure you and filthy us, too busy selling our bodies to dirty old men to develop the skills and grace you so admire.
And to a certain degree this makes sense. It will work for you, sort of. There are people who will buy it, mostly other women who have the same investment in maintaining respectability politics.
Men, babe, are never going to believe you, and they are never going to care.
BUT! There’s another option. Instead of crying when someone asks if you’re a stripper after a certain effortfull routine, sobbing like strippers can’t climb a pole through shoulder mounts backward and then do a drop in a straddle split catching themselves an inch above the floor in 8” heels, instead of reassuring yourself that we’re all mushy muscles barely able to stagger around the pole, making your tricks all the more unique and special—
The next time someone asks if you’re a stripper you could say:
No! But isn’t it amazing that they manage to do this in heels?
No, I’m not a stripper, but I’m flattered you think I have that self confidence!
No, I’m not a stripper but I’ve thought about it, but the stigma scares me.
No, I’m not a stripper but their skills and bravery inspire me and my classmates!
No, I’m not a stripper, and it makes me nervous that you would ask that bc sex work is so loaded and sex workers are murdered and discriminated against, so I get defensive about this but I’m trying to fight it and support strippers in ending sex worker stigma, starting with myself.
No, I’m not a stripper and I get tense about that question because of daddy issues stereotypes but isn’t it so fucked up that strippers (and other women) are the butt of jokes about male pattern abuse? 1 in 3 or 4 women is abused in her life time, usually by a family member or an intimate partner. You know someone who is the butt of that joke, stripper or not. And issues are a valid response to abuse across the spectrum, not just for strippers.
No, I’m not a stripper but I love them and I’m jealous they get to wear fancy outfits.
No, I’m not a stripper because they’re an exploited labour class and i enjoy my pole work best without having to give a percent of my income to a man who doesn’t deserve it.
No, I’m not a stripper, and they don’t pick up dollars with their vaginas either because unlike customers (who stick dollars in their mouths) none of us are interested in getting hepatitis.
So these are some potential answers for you! Hope this helps and thanks for indulging me.
The most frustrating thing about all of the measles coverage is that the articles I’ve read say something to the effect of “the paper linking vaccines to autism was later disproven.”
“The hatred of Black women IS taught. Whether it’s buying into Strong Black Woman narratives that dehumanize us, believing that we are “unrapeable” because our sexuality is deemed inherently “deviant,” accepting the message that the further away from Black that a woman is, the more beautiful, kind and worthwhile she is, that Black women, not imperialist White supremacist capitalist patriarchy destroy Black families and an incredibly long, could fill a book list of anti-Black woman propagandist myths, misinterpretations and lies, Black men and the rest of the world are actively taught to hate Black women. And since so many Black men already don’t love Black women and can’t unlearn the hatred of Black women because they don’t have the tools to even recognize they’ve absorbed White supremacist propaganda as absolute truth, they can’t recognize how misogynoir shapes their dating preferences and how they proliferate misogynoir.”
I’m just barely back from spending a week away writing (and meanwhile discovering that the fantasy novel I thought I was writing is in fact a police procedural: more of this later, as I start getting to grips with the prospect of taking apart everything I did over the week away and retooling it…) and as a result my brains aren’t up to dealing with this right now in the detail it deserves, as I’ve had sort of three hours’ sleep in the past twenty-four.
Would others care to chime in here (in the comments — for some reason the post isn’t offering me the “allow answers” box — and suggest useful online resources to rebut this view?
…But in my presently cranky mood, if faced with your friend, I would be very, VERY tempted to ask her this question: “So you’re okay with taking the chance of killing babies and the immunocompromised while ALSO seeing how many children can ‘get sick naturally’ and recover from strains of measles which [on the averages] have most likely mutated into more virulent and deadly strains than previous generations ever had to deal with? What an interesting experiment you’re proposing. How do I deselect myself from your little study in eugenics?”
…I said I was cranky.
…But you know what? THIS IS NOT A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. Why turn the back on an experiment that worked, one that saw measles damn near stamped out in North America, just because one tiny group of intellectually corrupt and stunted dingbats put the frighteners on half a continent in an utterly cynical attempt to make themselves famous and rich?
Ask your friend: What else would she like to experiment with? Polio? I encourage her to take herself and her ilk off to some wee distant offshore island (like Gruinard, where the ground is still full of anthrax), where her experimentation won’t interfere with the general population’s laboriously-established herd immunity, and let us know in twenty or thirty or fifty years how it all turns out. But don’t be experimenting on people who can’t be vaccinated, or moms with babies in utero, or (come to think of it) me.
And this: People who talk so earnestly about letting this kind of thing “work itself out naturally” have rarely seen many children die, stupidly, USELESSLY, in front of them. Let them spend some time working a pediatrics rotation and then come back to have this conversation again.
“White wealth is stolen wealth. White wealth is based on the use of the free labor of our great grandparents, and the parents before them; just completely stolen. Captive wealth, brutalized wealth, enslaved wealth. And somehow we still think they are deserving of the money. Amazing attitude. This wealth is based on the colonization of African countries. The industrial revolution of Europe based upon the molasses of Jamaica, based upon the sugar crops of Jamaica. The wealth of the white South Africans and Europeans today based upon the gold, diamond, oil, and minerals taken right out of the African country, and yet we have nerve enough to think that these people are deserving of that wealth. And we have nerve enough to think that we are undeserving and that it should not belong to us.”
This is just a sample of what Black life looked like in the 1940’s. Drag balls in Chicago’s Bronzeville, weddings in NY, performers in NYC, people just going about their lives whether it was working in factories, going out on the town, going to college, making history, becoming stars, war heroes…you name it we were doing it. The history you think you know that erases everything between Reconstruction & the end of Jim Crow laws is a damned lie. Aside from anything else, you are depriving yourself of great things if you don’t know about the Renaissance in Chicago & New York. If you don’t know about HBCU’s and entertainers and vice and the rich tapestry of life that never seems to make it to history books but that are an integral part of our society.
January 15 2015 - Peaceful protesters on Martin Luther King day are pepper sprayed by Seattle police. [video]
Dude’s just walking on his phone.
Fuck police. Fuck government.
This happened right in Seattle, that was a teacher from Garfield High School on the phone with his mother. He’s suing the city for $500,000 dollars. This was at the MLK peaceful march against Police brutality. It’s always be and well in Seattle. They actually just arrested an elderly black man in his 70s for walking Down the street using a gold club as a cane. Bitch ass cop said he swung it at her, but they finally released dash cam footage showing he didn’t.
There is a reason why there’s a joke saying all black people are men and all women are white; this is the very crux upon which many in the Agent Carter fandom is operating. “There’s a woman lead!” Okay, but we’ve all see white women leads before; not revolutionary, actually. What’s also not revolutionary? All-white shows. So what exactly is Agent Carter being lauded for doing? Representing a white woman’s fantasy instead or…?
Can we just stop and appreciate Nicki Minaj’s face for a moment. She looks genuinely very concerned for Josh here, like she thinks he was actually in an arena full of kids trying to kill him, and is confused as to why no one else finds this as shocking as she does.
What do you expect? People from the Capitol just don’t understand.
There are always at least two sides to every issue, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You may not like your opponents, you may not want to come to terms with them, but if you do not understand them, you will never defeat them. “Dehumanization vs. survival” is a black-and-white proposal that has no grounding in the real world.
I, who sent the tweet above, and whose blog this originates from, said my humanity is NOT fucking debatable. And this link below to my essay on anti-Blackness and “opinions” was on the original post.
My humanity is not debatable. I will not have nor entertain “multiple view points” about whether I am a human being who does not deserve the dehumanization of anti-Blackness and the ramifications of misogynoir and other intersecting oppressions.
And spare me the “if you do not understand them” line. See the archive. I understand bloody fucking well. The receipt trail on a hunnid.
I am not talking about “opponents.” You speak of the “real world” yet your point is completely grounded in theory and not the reality of oppression and the violence of oppressors. Oppression is why Black womanhood is “not real womanhood” and why Blackness is “not human.” This is not a goddamn high school debate exercise when Black bodies litter the streets, when our very citizenship and sentience itself are treated as question marks.
You think epistemic violence and casual disregard of humanity, as a debatable topic with “opponents” (which already implies a parity in structural power that does not exist; again, this is not a high school debate exercise) is “logic.” Heh. I can tell. But you are wrong. Because there is no “logical” reason why I would entertain dehumanization of Blackness as valid. Plenty of violently socialized ones, that again, my tweet rejects.
Don’t put this violent mess on my blog. If you think your response is “calm” and “rational” and “unbiased,” response, you are wrong. It is violent. Please leave me and my personal blog Gradient Lair blog alone.
It's easy for me to support these statements, because the Agent Carter show is only SORT OF on my radar. I'm really starting to worry about the Jessica Jones show. Marvel, don't make me shun you. DO BETTER.
"So its a great show for feminism, but because it fails to adress racial issues it should be ignored and made to fail"
I’m just… going to repeat the first line here, and let it sit: “So it’s a great show for feminism, but because it fails to address racial issues.”
Motherfucker, HOW can ANYTHING be “great for feminism” if it “fails to address racial issues”?
I hate to inform you of this but WOMEN. OF. COLOR. EXIST.
What kind of feminism are you practicing, exactly?
If something “fails to address racial issues” it is AUTOMATICALLY bad feminism, bad on gender issues, bad for women. You CANNOT have feminism without antiracism, because “women” are a racialized group, and women face racism.
Like, jesus christ.
I just… I’m so stunned by this assertion that something can be “great for feminism” while failing on racial issues. Great for whose feminism, exactly? For white women’s feminism? Because I’m not playing the “we’ll get to women of color EVENTUALLY” game. That’s not feminism.
That’s white supremacy.
(I mean, literally. It’s “white people come first, and THEN we’ll deal with people of color’s issues. It is LITERALLY white supremacy)
"(it just ignores them, it doesnt introduce and then kill POCs left and right - hi joss)"
Y’all out there who think it’s somehow better to IGNORE people of color than to fridge them - you realize that ERASING people of color is violence, right?
Ignoring black and brown bodies is violent because it’s the kind of discursive and aesthetic rhetoric that ALLOWS us as a nation to ignore black and brown bodies in our public policy. Because we never see black and brown people in our culture, they’re never made human for us. We’re given tacit permission to never give a shit about them, which is why we don’t give a shit when they’re *literally* murdered through economic and state-sanctioned violence.
It’s not “better” to ignore racial issues than it is to “introduce and kill POC.” Neither of them is “better.” They’re both racist, they’re both forms of white supremacist violence.
But hey, AT LEAST the actors of color in Joss Whedon’s shows are getting PAID.
"It should be ignored and made to fail."
You realize no one is actively trying to make Agent Carter fail, right?
What I’ve seen is people on tumblr saying that we MUST watch Agent Carter because it’s SUCH a good show on feminism and social justice, and so anyone who cares about those issues MUST watch it.
And at a bunch of other people are pointing out that ACTUALLY, Agent Carter isn’t all that great on feminism and social justice.
If your premise is that I should watch Agent Carter because it’s “great on feminism,” then it better be fucking great on feminism. And it’s not.
Me pointing that out isn’t me trying to “make it fail.” No one is organizing a boycott. No one is writing letters to the TV studios trying to get it off air. We’re just resisting the idea that it’s the second coming of Social Justice TV (tm).
I love that refusing to buy into the logic that a show MUST be great social justice because it has a white female protagonist means we’re attacking it, and want it to die with fire. Please.
"Because what Marvel and other producers will take away from this is not "oh female super heroes suck"? We will get another show with a dude instead."
The fact that the entertainment industry takes the failure of female-led shows as a sign that ALL female-led shows suck is not our fault. That phenomenon is a product of misogyny, not of feminist not trying hard enough to make Peggy Carter a success.
We are not responsible as individuals for magically changing an institutional problem.
And the flip-side of this is that Peggy Carter succeeding does not automatically mean more female superheroes will appear. I remember a couple years ago with Bridesmaids, everyone was like “oh, you have to see this, or we’ll never get smart female comedies again!”
And Bridesmaids did really well… and we didn’t suddenly get an influx of smart female-led, female-written comedies. Because *misogyny* is the problem.
I happen to know that Marvel did a study after the release of Avengers to see what people thought of the characters, and two highest rated characters were the Hulk and Black Widow.
Guess who HASN’T gotten a movie?
Yeah, because actually, Marvel DOESN’T always listen to the market. Marvel doesn’t always listen to the fans. Marvel doesn’t always do what would make the most money. A lot of the time, Marvel will IGNORE THE EVIDENCE, because institutional oppression is not magically solved by capitalism,
It’s not that we’re not trying hard enough to promote female characters. Misogyny is the problem.
So please stop this bullshit guilt-tripping of people because they’re not watching #SolidarityIsForWhiteAgents.
"I mean discuss it with the creaters, criticize it but watch the show. so it can get better."
Ah, yes, I will just pick up my cellular telephone and call up the creators, who are close personal friends of mine, and tell them to cast Dichen Lachman, Q’orianka Kilcher, John Cho and Derek Luke. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before! Racism solved.
I hate to burst your adorable innocent bubble, but people asking the entertainment industry to cast more people of color has not worked out very well so far.
Also, your logic is pretty classic abusive relationship logic. “Ah, yes, this show is terrible. But you must STAY WITH IT to make it better. ” Uh, no. No, I must not? The show is not going to get better because I watch it. It is not going to get better because it has higher ratings (if anything, that’ll convince the creators they’re doing something RIGHT). If I am not enjoying a show, for whatever reason, I am not obligated to stick around and “make it better” through the power of… osmosis, or something.
On a sidenote, I was totally planning to watch Agent Carter eventually, once grad school calmed down a bit. But defenders of the show trying to guilt trip people into watching it because it’s greatest thing for feminism since Margaret Sanger, and then responding to criticisms of the show’s supposed feminism with white supremacist logic of “it’s good for WOMEN and it’ll get better on people of color EVENTUALLY” is… really turning me off the idea.
If I ever needed more proof that Solidarity is For White Women, this discussion has been it.*
This is why I'm not a monotheist. But I disagree with Stephen's point at the end... my answer is not everyone's answer. I've found answers that work for me, that help me get through life, and if someone is interested in them, fine I'll share. But this world can be a horrible place to exist sometimes, and if someone else finds something, ANYTHING that makes the world a little more tolerable, a little saner, a little brighter, then that makes me unbelievably happy. Anything that helps people get through their lives with something resembling health, and dignity, and love, and joy is a good thing in my mind. But we, as humans, need to remember that what works for one individual does not work for another individual.
how many men who say they’re in the friendzone are actually in the “I was just nice to him because I felt bad for him but now he’s getting all clingy and manipulative to the point that he is making me regret basic human kindness which I feel really guilty about but I just want to be free from this nightmare” zone
We live in a culture that produces girls’ tops with narrower shoulder straps than boys’ tops, girls’ shorts that expose more leg than boys’ shorts, and then shames girls for wearing the clothes sold to them. We live in a culture that tells boys it’s okay to shed clothing in the heat in order to be more comfortable, but tells girls that there comfort is secondary to how others perceive them.
[…]
The message that we are receiving isn’t just that more ‘revealing’ clothes are wrong. It’s that our female bodies are wrong. That by having breasts and hips and legs and exposing them, we are less.
You all say you want a Black Widow movie, but if we let Marvel Agent Carter’s ratings slip out of our hands, and it gets cancelled… You can bet your little ass that the industry will think that it was female leads that was a bad idea, and then you can kiss that possibility goodbye.
Female leads are important. Support them.
I don’t want a Black Widow movie full of nothing but white people though. That’s not the world I live in and that’s not the Marvel Universe I want, so if that’s all they’re going to make, then NOPE.
This “white women first, then eventually we’ll get to the women of color” model is racist bullshit, it was racist bullshit when it was about suffrage, it’s antique racist bullshit now. I’ve seen it pulled in feminist and queer communities and it always leaves white people ahead and everyone else behind and I’m not doing that to women of color anymore. They show up for me over and over, I’m not going to try to lecture and shame them when they have an issue with something — I hear what they’re saying, I believe them, and I’m showing up for them.
We all deserve to have our stories told. We deserve it today. “We” includes black women. Stop telling them to be patient and not complain and instead support a blindingly white show that is purportedly “better”. It’s worse when it’s coming from “better” programming, in a way. Fellow white women, please stop trying to tell black women and other women of color how to behave and feel; it’s extremely rude, for one, and I expect it will (rightly) get you dismissed out of the conversation. These women have been dealing with racist media much closer up than we have for much longer - we can learn from them, not the other way around.
OK, but for real, I am done with dealing with people who can't take a statement like "I'm sorry, I don't like sports," without treating me like I'm some kind of dangerous alien. People who are vocal about not liking sports are not all doing it because "not caring gives you power." Some of us just want the people who are othering us to GET THE HINT ALREADY AND GO AWAY ABOUT THAT STUFF THANK YOU AND PLEASE DON'T FEEL BAD JUST STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME FEEL BAD FOR BEING ME.
