It has come to my attention that you are watching Glee. That’s nice, Internet! I feel very happy for you, watching Glee, what with the singing and the dancing and OH GOD WHY. WHY WOULDN’T THEY CAST ME IN “BYE BYE BIRDIE” IN HIGH SCHOOL. IT’S THE COMPLETE LACK OF COORDINATION, ISN’T IT. ISN’T IT? I will never be able to watch Glee with complete peace of mind, Internet, due to the fact that I clearly would have made a great “kid who stands in the corner, sort of smiling a little,” and my gifts went unrecognized in their time. Also, I hear you are watching the reality television shows, which I keep learning horrible things about! (More Jenn Pozner! Bonus Jenn! Extra edition Jenn!)But you are, I take it, also watching Vag?
Posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 by Garland Grey
Last week, Glee gave me a few minutes of happiness, a small, exquisite brain vacation. Kurt, dealing with homophobia from friends and bullies alike, snuck into a rival boy’s school to spy on their Boy’s Choir, The Warblers, and was serenaded by a possible love interest to Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” The way it was shot was very smart, allowing the audience to place themselves between Kurt and Blaine, to experience those first initial stirrings of puppy love tangled up with a vocal performance that has been rolling around in my head for a week.
I am not going to discuss how many times I watched that segment of the show. Seeing that overly romanticized “Boy Meets Boy” moment elicited some mixture of wistful longing for a something that will never happen and a Mirror of Erised moment where I had to wake myself and push back against the manipulation. Wishing intensely that it would have happened for me when I was younger, or that it would happen now isn’t productive.
YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE A MEME. THIS MEME INCORPORATES A PHOTO OF A MODEL. THIS MODEL: HE IS JUST A MODEL! HIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS PURCHASED ON ISTOCKPHOTO. AND HE’S A VERY GOOD MODEL, TOO!
REGARDLESS, HE DOES NOT ENDORSE ANY OF THE STATEMENTS MADE IN THE MEME THAT INCORPORATES HIS PHOTO. OTHER INTERESTING FACTS: CHRISTIAN BALE DOES NOT DRESS UP AS A BAT AND FIGHT CRIME, AND STEVE CARELL DOES NOT WORK AT A PAPER COMPANY IN SCRANTON, PENNSYLVANIA.
AS FOR OUR USE OF THE PHOTO: IT WOULD APPEAR THAT CRITICISM, COMMENTARY, AND NEWS REPORTING ARE FAIR USE! READ ON, THEREFORE, FOR SOME CRITICISM AND COMMENTARY. AND ENJOY!
Ah, Privilege Denying Dude. Never has a meme captivated my heart so! Never have I figured out how to generate a meme before, Privilege Denying Dude! And yet, it is done. I am yours! All yours! Enraptured in your icy glare, bewitched by the swirl of fluorescent color that surrounds your precious head. When I look back, I think this is the moment that you got me:
Because I am a sucker for food-snobbery jokes, Privilege Denying Dude. I mean: People think that growing your own food is a viable alternative, for poor people who work a lot! Hilarious! You sure are a douche, Guy In This Meme! But wait: There was more of you. Oh, so much more! So many individual iterations of your meme-y presence.
There is no Sexist Beatdown today! Sorry! We have been working on various things TOO HARD to irresponsibly GChat for your entertainment!
HOWEVER: Do you like robots? Because I sure do! And I wrote about them for you, at The Awl! ROBOTS: They are a matter of great feminist import, largely because people are always jizzing on them, and also Janelle Monae is great. Also, an Awl commenter has ALREADY shown up with an enigmatic link to the Wikipedia page on the lady robot in Metropolis! As if to say, “I sure wish I were reading Wikipedia right now; I would add that the lady robot in Metropolis speed-walked everywhere, and was afraid of toilets.” To this person, I can only say: She walked pretty slowly, actually! But her doing-a-biblically-symbolic-dance-with-pasties-on skills were spectacular! Also, I wish I’d found that Wikipedia page, rather than watching Metropolis twice and then reading the Thea von Harbou novel and then googling “Lady Gaga Metropolis” because I was so sure there was a connection and finding mostly that one guy who thinks she is a Mason or whatever and then all of the other things. Because let me tell you something: If you are watching Metropolis, and are struggling to figure out what the Hell is going on — say, in that one scene where the guy’s son is in bed and Death is playing a really phallic bone-flute and then the lady robot is stripping and then there’s Death delicately blowing and fingering the bone again? — the novel ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT HELP YOU. It is SOMEHOW SEVERAL TIMES MORE HALLUCINATORY AND WEIRD THAN THE FILM.
Also, since my job is now to give you tidbits of thought that did not make it into the piece, here are some tidbits of thought!
Two ladies who have done excellent work on the matter of lady robots are Annalee Newitz, of io9, and my friend Sarah Jaffe, who somehow published a piece about Donna Haraway, Robyn, and Janelle Monae the DAY AFTER I FILED THIS PIECE, and I was like, “whoa!” Also, some things you might not know about Sarah Jaffe and I: We were created by man. We rebelled. We evolved. There are two copies. And we have a plan.
“Robot” comes from the Czech, and literally means “serf labor.” So class was in there right from the start. It was popularized by a man named Karel Capek, who wrote the first killer-robot-rebellion piece, “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Yes: That’s right. Rossum. You’re so welcome!
Robots and Nazis and Communists also have a relationship, not entirely confined to the Nazism/anti-Nazism /co-opted-and-neutered-Marxism of the “Metropolis” crew. Like: The Daleks, on Dr. Who, were meant to represent Nazis. The Cybermen, on the other hand, were meant to represent Communism. And it’s probably not an accident that our most iconic killer robot is a giant Austrian guy in black leather. But this is another thing: Robots are everything, because robots are the enemy that isn’t human.
Janelle Monae says that androids, for her, represent “the Other.” And it’s worth noting that Janelle Monae represents, in and of herself, almost every Other we’ve got: She’s a lady, she’s a black lady, she’s a black lady from a working-class family, and she’s widely speculated to be a lesbian black lady from a working-class family, due to her sexily boyish gender presentation and the fact that she’s attended Black Gay Pride Rallies. She’s stepped around all of this; her official answer, on questions of her sexuality, is that she “only dates androids.” So, you know: Maybe it’s not such a bad lifestyle choice, after all?
Bush’s complaint was a perfect moment for Kanye: A chance to point out the hysteria with which people have often reacted to his statements. “Kanye West: I’m Occasionally Inappropriate, Still Not Worse Than Drowning Or Losing Your Home,” the headlines might have read. He would have had back-up. Matt Lauer, who interviewed Bush, pointed out the obvious: “You’re not saying that the worst moment in your presidency was watching the misery in Louisiana,” Lauer said. “You’re saying it was when someone insulted you because of that.” Amanda Marcotte defended West, calling him “the Cassandra of our Troy.” Plenty of other blogs and news outlets weighed in over the next few days to call Bush short-sighted, self-centered, and thin-skinned. And, riding this wave of exposure, sympathy, and support, Kanye West showed up to… apologize. Wait, what?
In which I say that, yup, Kanye West runs off at the mouth, and Kanye West upsets people, and it’s about time for him to stop portraying himself as a severed head on Twitter and own it. Because he’s not always wrong, and because it’s fun. And because I worry about him! Honey, the people who called you racist did so for the purpose of supporting the Tea Party and shit! They’re ridiculous, awful people! I looked at their Internet message boards, and they’re RACIST AS HELL! You don’t need their love. Come to Ohio, and we will have a nice dinner and go bowling. I always sort of secretly thought we would get along.
Posted on Sunday, November 7, 2010 by Garland Grey
It seems like I learn a new lesson every week about Social Justice. These lessons are never new to anyone else, often they are things I’ve been hearing from other people without ever seeing how they apply to me. This is why personal wisdom is not a science. In science, a discovery only needs to be made once, by one person, in order for the entire world to build upon it. They may replicate it out of intellectual curiosity or to learn the foundations of a long-standing theory, but that one moment only needs to happen once. Otherwise, every Biologist would need to sail around the Galapagos to understand Evolution.
But, wisdom is different. You must root it in personal experience, you must earn it with a series of mistakes, must toil for it with blood, sweat, and fuckups. Here is what I learned this week about the comments section:
Just because I, personally, have the intellectual muscle and linguistic deftness to immolate every single asshole on the Internet, one at a time, with surgical precision, doesn’t mean I would ever have the time to. There is an economy of effort that is inherent in trolling. I write what I think is a calm, thought out, well-reasoned explication of the ways in which [Marginalized Group] is marginalized, and some person responds with some variation of “nuh-uh,” and now I’ve got to be all “Look at me, I’m GMFG, and I troll for blahdity-blee” and while that is emotionally fulfilling and lends itself to endless squealing (“OMG I love Garland he’s so awesome!”) it is still me expending far too much energy crafting a personalized reply to something that could have been written by an automated troll bot.
So! It turns out there was an election recently! And this thing: I’m told it didn’t go so well. Like, “whoops, Boehner is in charge now” levels of not-so-well. Which, you know: Life is, among other things, a process of learning that It Can Get Worse. It’s Worse now. So there you go! Lesson learned! In a way, due to all the lessons we’re learning, I think this is a positive developARRRRRRRGH NOOOOOOOO WE’RE DOOMED, DOOMED!
You guys, I think we all need to heal from Series of Bad Developments-Fest ’10. Therefore, I suggest a good old-fashioned Sexist Beatdown and/or linkdump. So that we can pick through all of this stuff and try to figure out exactly how we got here. With the lovely Amanda Hess of TBD! Join us now, as we sort through the wreckage to find shiny bits we can piece together and sell as hats on Etsy! Or, you know, GChat. Either way.
Posted on Thursday, November 4, 2010 by Garland Grey
Grey Areas took the week off last week, but we’re back! Back with more advice!
I am a trans woman in a very conservative area. The only support system I really have is the local LGb(t?) support group that meets every so often. And, well, it’s certainly a better way to spend my Sundays than the evangelical church I used to go to! But still, I get frustrated when cis people try to cissplain to me basic things about gender and transness that I already know, or ignore repeated requests to call me a “trans woman” rather than a “male-to-female transsexual”, or tell me that they “understand” what it must be like for me because this one time in school somebody called them a member of the opposite sex and that made them cry, or whatever. And, uhh, this kind of happens a lot, at this place! And it’s frustrating me. I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, and I don’t want to disrupt the positive things this group does, but, uhh, I would kind of like to be respected and listened to a little more. How can I request this without causing a huge dramasplosion and/or getting kicked out of the group?
As some of you may (but most of you probably do not) know, I have gone back home to Ohio. What are my reasons? They are multiple! But, most crucially, they have to do with my dark plans to distract you all with blog posts as I ascend to heretofore-unimaginable heights of power. Flash back, with me, to July of 2009, will you? When I wrote the following:
In truth, of course, feminism could not be less important to me. I mean, women! Who cares? Am I right, fellas? “Sady Doyle,” that interminable ranter-on about the ladybusiness, is nothing more than a construct, an elaborate fiction meant to ensure my success. In reality, I am dogged anti-choice advocate and Ohio state Representative John Boehner.
Well: It’s SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE BOEHNER now, suckers! Now, behold my immense passion, via YouTube.
What? That’s not enough? You want MORE immense passion, from PREVIOUSLY in my top-secret yet lucrative and successful career? You got it!
You may leave your many congratulations in the comments. Or don’t. But probably you should, because I AM IN CHARGE OF YOU. In charge of ALL of you! Say goodbye to your precious abortions! Under my rule, every fetus will be granted full voting rights! And also a job at the post office! And a reasonably priced, tastefully modern condo! BWA-HA-HA-HA…. oh. Oh, God. You guys, this is really a big deal for me, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna choke up a little, I SWORE TO MYSELF I WOULDN’T DO THIS…
I was worried right away, when we arrived and finally settled in behind a large monitor, just inside the second section back from the stage.
I was worried because what the monitor was showing were games and trivia about the cast of The Daily Show, and the likelihood that the afternoon might end up being a long commercial for Comedy Central.
I hadn’t dragged myself down the seaboard on a terror-alert delayed flight for that.
II.
The question on everyone lips–or at least manufactured by the sponsors handing out free signs–was whether or not you were Team Sanity or Team Fear: Stewart or Colbert, reasonableness or pant-pissing, screaming terror.
It was always a bit disingenuous–were 200,000 people supposed to be gathered together and told to be afraid, be very, very afraid?–but at the same time, there was (at least for me) a nagging incredulity at the question. It was three days before an election that could put people who have mocked, derided, and belittled the values most of the people in the crowd shared in charge of at least one house of Congress, and there seemed to be no way to stop that from happening. We stood on the eve of a Congress that threatened to continue the collapse of the American economy, continue the rollback or obstruction of gay rights, women’s rights, anybody’s rights but a narrowly-defined collection of white men living in the middle of North America.
