get on your knees, hands up.

[darkindegrees]

I had my first exam yesterday. It was biology and it didn't go as bad as I thought it would. The essay question was on enzymes so it was a frigging gift. Mind, it was on what affected rates of reaction with graphs and you then had to name the independent variable so if you didn't know what each would look like on a graph you were pretty screwed but

Comments

[bewarethespork]

There was Merlin wank about Morgana? D: Do I want to know or will it just make me all angry and rage-y?

Sometimes, I just want to slap fandom over the head with a clue bat. If my grandmother, who was born in the 1920s in Pakistan, believed so strongly in education for women that she made her maids go to school (she herself had a uni degree); if my father, who is as old-fashioned as they come, gave my sisters and me excellent educations because he wanted us to have the same opportunities as my brothers; if my mother can go back to uni after having six kids and can be almost finished with her degree; if my male best friends can treat all women like human beings, even the ones they don't like - why can't fandom do the same? All we're asking is that everyone gets a level playing field - not for special treatment, not for extra rewards just because we're female, not for anything that men don't already take for granted. What is so very hard about that?

And now look, I've gotten all ranty in your comments. I really need to stop doing that.

[darkindegrees]

Tbh, it was more wank about Katie than Morgana as a character but it definitely bled over--on the kink meme for a while and in one of the comms (I think it was an Merlin/Arthur one but I can't find it anymore), before the mods squished it, there was a "debate" which amounted to Katie can't act and makes Morgana wooden and awful and we hate her and she should die. It reeked off "she's pretty and speaks her mind and therefore uppity and smug and that is unacceptable". There's a comm out there which is supposedly just full of people anonymously hating on Merlin, particularly Katie and Morgana but I've specifically refused to even ask what it's called

[bewarethespork]

I adore both Katie and Morgana to bits and am now glad that I haven't really paid attention to merlinxarthur in forever. As much as I love the pairing, I could do without the whole girls-are-evil mindset that so many slash fans seem to have.

Sometimes I think fandom can't do that because it's so full of women and, for some reason, it's completely okay for women to hate on other women!

That is such a good point! I'd never really thought of it that way, but I think you're right. Sometimes a woman's worst enemy really is other women.

"Oh, we don't need feminism anymore women can work and vote!"

You know, I am not much of a feminist at all - but I would never say we don't need feminism. I do think that sometimes feminism as a movement is a bit impenetrable to outsiders because of all the (completely justifiable) rage and bitterness of some feminists - it makes it hard to really engage with them and discuss things, because if someone is raging at you, you tend to feel like you're being targeted, even if you're not. But the ideas behind

[darkindegrees]

Yeah, sometimes slash fans get really out of hand. I will freely admit to the fact that I used to absolutely adore Harry/Draco in HP absolutely ages ago and the hate there for Ginny and the "die for our ship" attitude many of the fans had towards females was just so bizarre

[bewarethespork]

I was quite mad about Snarry back in the day, much to my embarrassment. I was a Sirius/Remus fan, too, and it always made me a little ill how some people would slam basically every single female those two knew if there was even the tiniest chance that they'd get in the way of their magical OTP.

I think I'm a louder feminist on the Internet than in real life because I can take a deep breath before I respond on the Internet

I know exactly what you mean! I think I'm the same way.

I've basically decided that even if I don't call myself a feminist, if I support the ideas behind it then I should share them with people, and I think I'm in a good place to do it because I don't share that rage. I can sit down with people and go, "Yeah, look, I know all the anger can be hard to work through, but if you put that aside, there are actually all these ideas that I think we can all agree are pretty cool." I figure that if that's something I can do because of my lack of personal baggage or whatever, then I should do it, even if I don't choose to