Enough spilled salt to blind the devil
Dec. 29th, 2018 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isozymeHate-read a couple things the past few days because I have no self control.
First was about a woman who stopped cooking, and I was excited for some kind of exploration of gender roles or at least some sort of joy about freedom from a difficult chore, but, no, that was not what it was. Instead: a long pity-party about how women only cook to impress other women and how cooking makes them all miserable. Yuck.
Second, hopepunk. I have immediate suspicion of the entire thing, because it seems to come from the same place as other virtue-signaling media marketing bullshit. You know, like if I described my book like, "hey, you have to read this, it has awesome lesbian scientists and none of the women get sexually assaulted." The fuck kind of advertisement is that? That's some baseline-ass minimum-standards crap, god, I'm not so starved for representation that I'll read any old shit with a rainbow on it. We can be better than T-Mobile at a pride parade, folks!
So, from my starting point of dubious-about-this-shit, I also come at it having been an activist with a failing unionization campaign. You build a union out of community and hope and being fucking angry at your boss. Union organizing is about speaking to your peers one by one and convincing them that they deserve better and it's hard and grueling and we kept doing it for a long time even after we knew we were losing. And yet hopepunk, to me, so far, despite having all the same buzzwords, doesn't feel like my experience.
There's not enough specificity in hope-as-trope. There's no action plan. As union activists we counted every single person we talked to, every card we got someone to sign, every person we dragged to a training session. When you have an action plan you acknowledge that you're making compromises. That nothing is pure. That you're going to push people into doing things they do not want to do because you're right, goddamnit, and you'll pin them in place and watch them squirm until they cave to you. You do it because you believe things can get better; you don't do it to be nice.
In my life, the lesbians call themselves dykes in front of straight people to make them flinch.
I think the main problem is lumping in the non-threatening (wholesome memes! cartoons!) with the grueling, bad-for-your-mental-health, never-ending, gritty grind of resistance. Activists are often impatient and cynical and blunt. They do good fucking work anyway. I love a lil bright-colors cartoon, and I love activists, but that doesn't make them the same fucking thing. I like my coffee-sugar-teatree face scrub, but it's not progressive! It's fucking skin care, bud!
Third, Luciano Garbati's Medusa is a decent concept executed in the most man way possible and I hate it. Here she is, Medusa, carrying a sword and the head of Perseus, with her pussy out and waxed, her thighs gapping, her hipbones protruding, her tits perky and bare and full and not a wrinkle or a muscle on her. Here it is: a man has taken a woman's rage -- her power, her violence -- and packaged it for his own consumption while telling us it's progressive. That shit makes me want to spit.
Fourth, still reading the pity-party twitter threads of my old ex-pal ************* (that's not the right number of asterisks) and turns out he has not grown at all since I stopped talking to his ass.
Five, and this isn't a thing I read, but I'm salty about it anyway, which is that on Christmas I went for dim sum and had the most piss-poor soup dumplings I've ever encountered. They were so bad. You know the protein-skim that comes off of meat if you boil it? There was a lot of that stuff in the broth, so it was sort of thick and low on flavor and very unpleasant to look at. It would have been impolite to complain about this at the time so I'm complaining now.
GOOD NEWS THOUGH:
First was about a woman who stopped cooking, and I was excited for some kind of exploration of gender roles or at least some sort of joy about freedom from a difficult chore, but, no, that was not what it was. Instead: a long pity-party about how women only cook to impress other women and how cooking makes them all miserable. Yuck.
Second, hopepunk. I have immediate suspicion of the entire thing, because it seems to come from the same place as other virtue-signaling media marketing bullshit. You know, like if I described my book like, "hey, you have to read this, it has awesome lesbian scientists and none of the women get sexually assaulted." The fuck kind of advertisement is that? That's some baseline-ass minimum-standards crap, god, I'm not so starved for representation that I'll read any old shit with a rainbow on it. We can be better than T-Mobile at a pride parade, folks!
So, from my starting point of dubious-about-this-shit, I also come at it having been an activist with a failing unionization campaign. You build a union out of community and hope and being fucking angry at your boss. Union organizing is about speaking to your peers one by one and convincing them that they deserve better and it's hard and grueling and we kept doing it for a long time even after we knew we were losing. And yet hopepunk, to me, so far, despite having all the same buzzwords, doesn't feel like my experience.
There's not enough specificity in hope-as-trope. There's no action plan. As union activists we counted every single person we talked to, every card we got someone to sign, every person we dragged to a training session. When you have an action plan you acknowledge that you're making compromises. That nothing is pure. That you're going to push people into doing things they do not want to do because you're right, goddamnit, and you'll pin them in place and watch them squirm until they cave to you. You do it because you believe things can get better; you don't do it to be nice.
In my life, the lesbians call themselves dykes in front of straight people to make them flinch.
I think the main problem is lumping in the non-threatening (wholesome memes! cartoons!) with the grueling, bad-for-your-mental-health, never-ending, gritty grind of resistance. Activists are often impatient and cynical and blunt. They do good fucking work anyway. I love a lil bright-colors cartoon, and I love activists, but that doesn't make them the same fucking thing. I like my coffee-sugar-teatree face scrub, but it's not progressive! It's fucking skin care, bud!
Third, Luciano Garbati's Medusa is a decent concept executed in the most man way possible and I hate it. Here she is, Medusa, carrying a sword and the head of Perseus, with her pussy out and waxed, her thighs gapping, her hipbones protruding, her tits perky and bare and full and not a wrinkle or a muscle on her. Here it is: a man has taken a woman's rage -- her power, her violence -- and packaged it for his own consumption while telling us it's progressive. That shit makes me want to spit.
Fourth, still reading the pity-party twitter threads of my old ex-pal ************* (that's not the right number of asterisks) and turns out he has not grown at all since I stopped talking to his ass.
Five, and this isn't a thing I read, but I'm salty about it anyway, which is that on Christmas I went for dim sum and had the most piss-poor soup dumplings I've ever encountered. They were so bad. You know the protein-skim that comes off of meat if you boil it? There was a lot of that stuff in the broth, so it was sort of thick and low on flavor and very unpleasant to look at. It would have been impolite to complain about this at the time so I'm complaining now.
GOOD NEWS THOUGH:
- I posted 20k of wet'n'wild femslash (will put a link in its own post).
- Scab-cat, starting tomorrow, is down to only the medicines we have to give him once a day! And none of them have to be refrigerated!
- My frozen spaghetti sauce is good as fuck.
- Beat the NYT acrostic pretty handily even though the quote was a grammatically insane mess.
- Letterkenny season 6 is out!
- SPIDERMAN: INTO THE SPIDERVERSE WAS AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVED IT
no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 06:43 am (UTC)Sorry to hear about the dumplings.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 02:43 am (UTC)Also how dare dumplings be a disappointment. That's like disappointing bacon. It needs to be stopped.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 05:35 pm (UTC)