yeah, the people arguing that we should give the Joss Whedons and Louis CKs a pass because they created meaningful stuff ignores all the meaningful stuff that *didn't* get created because of men like them
Like, I *can't* spend too much time thinking about what I could have *made*, what I could have accomplished, who I could have been, if I hadn't had to constantly deal with the misogyny and abusiveness of my industry.
Behavioral scientist Sendhil Mullainathan talks about poverty as a "tax on cognition." People in poverty literally have their ability to *think* drained away by the pressure and exhaustion and humiliation of just trying to survive in a world that hates poor people.
And that actually holds true for most marginalized groups. Just having to fucking deal with existing as a woman in a misogynist, abusive environment means that that's where a lot of your brain power and energy is going.
And that is exponentially worse if you're a woman of color, a trans woman, etc. It's there if you're a non-binary person. Or a man of color. Or a disabled person. Or a non-neurotypical person. Or. Or. Or.
And a lot of us stay angry, because anger is the place we fix our gaze to balance as we walk a tightrope over the yawning pit of grief at the stuff we'll never do, the people we'll never be, because we have to spend all that energy dealing with this shit. To look down is to fall.
The harm men like Joss Whedon do can't actually be measured, because we'll never know what the women who worked with him would have done, would have made, would have accomplished, if he hadn't created an environment that drained them.
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aaaaaauuuuughhh having lived with a college roommate who refused to clean up her rotting food in the kitchen or the trash she threw in the corners because "it doesn't bother me, so why should I clean it up?" this makes me fucking FURIOUS
Like, it's bad enough to do that under normal circumstances. But when the person who prefers a higher level of cleanliness is your SIGNIFICANT OTHER and you're hosting a PARTY FOR THEM, you fucking suck it up and clean.
Like, maybe it doesn't bother you if the house is a mess, but if you know that having people over when it's a mess is going to embarrass them, and--I can't emphasize this enough--it's for a party that YOU initiated that's supposed to be a GIFT to them, you clean.
Like, we can spend all day parsing the nuances of nationalism vs. patriotism, but even most of the supposedly harmless forms of American patriotism are shaped by (and usually intertwined with) Christian triumphalism.
I bring up white supremacy here because, of course, that's the third string of the Christian-triumphalism/American-nationalism braid.
I know I've said this before, but there's a reason that there are a ton of Catholic horror movies and tv series (yes, I'm watching 30 Monedas, why do you ask) and not very many Jewish ones (short thread)
Like, Catholicism has DEMONS and SAINTS and a whole giant SF/F series cast of both which is great for cosmic war stuff
Judaism has <checks notes> God, who can be kind of horrific sometimes and whom Judaism's culture heroes spend a lot of time trying to protect humanity *from* and, like, bad humans?
oh man, the Damia thread is making me think of a weird personal genre of books for me
those SF/F books that on paper, as a kid, you should have liked, that you wanted to like, and that maybe you thought you did like, but you just couldn't finish for some reason
and then you reread the book or a book in the series as an adult and are just like HOLY SHIT THIS IS SKEEVY AS FUCK
and you wonder if young you maybe was uneasy with that but couldn't really frame why and so just... for some reason couldn't finish
Who the fuck recommended The West Wing thing to me?
like while I'm down for leftist critiques of the West Wing, I'm not down for leftist critiques from white men who decide to criticize the portrayal of women without apparently TALKING to any women
so I listened to the ep on the pilot, which did one of my least favorite things from dudes who think they're being feminist, which was to describe the cast as "Allison Janney and a bunch of white men" (they acknowledged that Dulé Hill exists, but he wasn't in the pilot so)