god i wish lesbians in mainstream media werent so sexualized. like… wheres my dorky highschool gfs… wheres my uptight office lesbian and sloppy sweatpants lesbian who shows office lesbian the joys of eating raw cookie dough at 4am… wheres my rich and famous lesbian who falls in love with shy bookish lesbian… wheres my waitress gfs who work at competing restaurants… wheres my mutual pinning neighbor lesbians who barge into each-others’ houses uninvited… like not every sapphic couple is two Sexy Women With A Forbidden Passion… give me my fun and sweet sitcom lesbians
I don’t think there’s an applause gif big enough to properly convey my reaction to this.
Also, I love that if anyone tries to say that you’re just “another hack fic writer with no ideas of her own who is jealous of the “real” writers out there”, they could quite literally be crushed under your catalog of award-winning original writing as a response. They can’t dismiss your stance on this topic the way they do to so many unpublished / fanfic writers because you’ve already met all of the standards that they insist someone has before they’ll accept their opinion as worth listening to.
Right?
“Well, fanfic authors never win awards, so–” “WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOLD MY HUGO.” “That’s basically, it’s, you know, the People’s Choice, so–” “LOOK AT MY NEBULA.” “That’s a science fiction award, it doesn’t really–” “LOOK I’VE WON THE ALEX.” “…” “IT’S GIVEN BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO GIVE THE NEWBURY.” “…” “I’M THE FIRST PERSON TO WIN IT TWICE IN A ROW.” “…well you wrote porn.” “GOSH I SURE DID.”
Sometimes, a work relies on having the privileged group as certain members of the cast. Diversifying those works/roles? A terrible idea.
Lord of the Flies is a critique on the assumption rich white boys are the panicle of civilized behaviour. Rebooting it with an all-female cast misses the point.
Heathers is a story of how a clique of rich white girls run a school. Rebooting it with an all-marginalized group of Heathers misses the point.
While my list of works that are super bad ideas is short, since 1- Hollywood has only recently decided to expand their cast away from white bread (let me know if you have more!) and 2- I tend to try and forget bad examples, these ideas point to a very, very troubling trend:
Taking works whose whole point is lampooning privilege and assuming they’d work the same way if you removed the core concept.
If we actually reached parity between marginalized representation and privileged representation, those types of reboots might be safe ground to tread on. But right now marginalized people are still very much marginalized, and as a result their cultural systems are different from the privileged group.
Rich white people have a wildly different frame of reference from rich black people. A rich black person will usually have a living relative who wasn’t allowed to own a house in a certain area because of skin colour, or whose parents weren’t allowed to. Meanwhile, even a new-money white person doesn’t have the recent historical racist barriers that actively tried to prevent their upward mobility.
The two groups are going to think about money differently. While both can flaunt it for the same reasons— it’s new, and they want to show it off— the sheer amount of ex-legal baggage a black person is carrying around is something I can’t speak about, but know is there.
If you’re starting to think about tossing in a little diversity into your cast, look very hard at the social structures you’ve put in place. Are the villains relying on wealth? Social power? How about the ability to act with impunity? All of those are highly tied to privilege— the type of privilege somebody marginalized simply would not have.
It’s different if you’re doing a single-marginalized-group cast. Black Panther doesn’t suffer from having rich and power-hungry black people as villains because there’s a bunch of rich heroic black people as protagonists, to name one example. In those situations, you’re dealing with equals. The same thing would apply in a secondary world fantasy where everyone in the cast is of the same or similar ethnic groups, or if you had a group of characters who all shared the same axis of oppression in general.
It’s also different if the power structures don’t rely on privilege. All female Ghostbusters? Awesome, because Ghostbusters was primarily about stopping ghosts. The amount of black girls and women in A Wrinkle in Time? Lovely, because we need more stories where the important figures are not white.
But if you’re recreating any sort of power imbalance where one group relies on privilege, and you have multiple ethnic groups in the cast ? Take a good hard look at making too many villains marginalized, especially if they’re kingpins within the organization. Also consider what they can get away with, and if they have to use different tactics from the privileged villains; chances are, they’ll have to.
This applies for both works set in the real world and in secondary world fantasy. Because secondary world fantasy is still read in the real world, and you can reinforce some extremely toxic ideals if you recreate real world marginalization.
Sometimes, diversity is a very bad thing. Keep that in mind when deciding what group plays what role.
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Lemonade was not made for me, either. As a Singaporean Chinese woman, I would be lying if I said I was familiar with the complex, myriad ways Beyoncé explores black female personhood, sexuality, and spirituality in the film. But as a non-American, non-white woman, what I am familiar with is appreciating art that is not and will never be made with me in mind.
This is a process that white people are now struggling with more publicly than ever. It seems to me that much of the pain in this process comes from entitlement, which often stems from ignorance. I wonder: Do white people in the Western world understand just how much of global popular culture is tailored to their tastes and their histories? Do white people in the Western world know that, for non-white people who wish to participate in and discuss global popular culture, being well-versed in white cultural and musical history is almost compulsory? Do white people in the Western world know how laughable it is that they feel excluded just because a popular work of art dares to be less culturally legible to them?
It’s been said already a billion times but when cishets ask how lesbians have sex, it really is indicative of how much cis heterosexuality & rape culture & Christian sex-as-reproduction-only values are taught
Like the idea of “sex = doing what all involved find mutually pleasurable” is just completely out of the framework. People don’t even know that definition is an option! That’s terrifying. There’s such a culturally normative sexual *script* of specific behaviors you’re supposed to perform, to the point where there are people who cannot comprehend what sex is outside of that.
The same goes within wlw spaces with cis wlw being completely baffled at how trans lesbians have sex. Like sex= doing things everybody involved finds mutually pleasurable, it’s not a specific combination of acts. It’s not a secret code. It’s asking what both/all of you want and like and having fun doing those things. It shouldn’t be that confusing, and it’s really sad (in a literal genuine way) that so many people haven’t learned that definition of sex and don’t know that’s a possibility.
Unfriendly fucking reminder that the best predictor of mass shootings is not mental illness, but being an angry young white man who has recently experienced rejection and has easy access to guns.
Bringing this back because it makes terrible people angry. And I’ll add a note to all the people saying “But you’d have to be mentally ill to do that!”: Mental illness is, by definition, abnormal. Does “mediocre white boy is so entitled that he resorts to violence when told no” really sound particularly unusual to you?
I devoted my entire graduate studies and thesis on mass school shootings, multiple murderers, and criminal psychology and I can tell you that this is in fact completely true and is suported by an unbelievable amount of emperical, quantifiable data that I slaved over for years. 💯
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