I don't want to make it. I just want [to be seen for what I am]

[prophetic]

I've been having this persistent thought, and I wanted to share it, even though it may not be as much of a revelation to the rest of you as it was to me.

So, you remember when MCR's Desolation Row video first came out, and everyone in bandom was watching and discussing it?  One thing I remember from that time was us collectively realizing that it

Comments

[prophetic]

Yay! Thanks! I'm glad you find some resonance in this!

I wonder if you know more than me about what the band thinks about girls and stuff. When I was posting, I was wondering particularly about Frank and Leathermouth, but that's just from rumor and hearsay and I don't have many resources to investigate it further. (If you have recs or references, I'd be happy for them.)

About teenage girls and stereotypes, I've been thinking lately not just about the girls who don't fit the stereotypes but also those who do. I can't really know what's going on inside them, I don't think, so I'm becoming more reluctant to dismiss people as "only squealing girls" because I probably sounded pretty squealy myself at their age, and yet I still was who I am on the inside. I work with younger kids, like pre-teen middle school age, and that's the experience that has caused me to rethink--these kids are such punks and they act like they are never listening and have a 2.3 second attention span, and I think it's mostly age-related behaviors that give this impression. I remember myself at that age, from the inside, and I know for a fact that I was absorbing things and thinking things that are still foundationally influential in my identity today. So I'm starting to take on faith that there is more going on in them than is visible to me, and I interact with them on that level, and they seem to respond. But I'm still not sure what the actual truth is. There's so much that changes as we age--our vocabulary, our attention span, the way we think and express ourselves. But there's still some sort of continuity on the inside.

I'm interested in this:

they do have a lot of power, the power that lies in the fact that we, as a society and a world, constantly and consistently underestimate them. And we think, "oh, she's just a little girl, there's no way she could do any harm", yet all the while, we've been breeding in her this ability to harm.

I've heard other people talk about the power that women and girls have, and I only sort of understand what they are talking about. My perspective in this area is really skewed by my experience of being completely decimated by sexism, by having my self destroyed in a way that I'm only now, at age 31, starting to get out from under. So I'm like "power, what power??" But at the same time, my friends from high school don't seem to have experienced me as silent and powerless--it's more the opposite, in fact, and I struggle with knowing where they get it from. It's like they see a part of me that I don't see. So, tell me more of your thoughts on this.

Re: Joss Whedon, I have to acknowledge that I haven't watched Buffy, ever, and my understanding is that it has been his most important and influential work. (I know, I fail. I've heard it's awesome, and I fully intend to rectify this someday soon.) My experiences of him are Firefly and Dollhouse, and in those I'm struck by the female characters (Echo and River) who are tortured and who have their minds erased and programmed. I don't know how to read it, I mean certainly having one's mind erased and programmed is a valid portrayal of how sexism desires to treat women, but I don't get a sense of commentary or critique from him. The women are just part of the plot--and admittedly, their situations really drive the plot well in a suspenseful way. I'll be watching Dollhouse tonight, even though last week's episode with that bow-hunter guy was sick as fuck, I thought. It was my husband, though, who said, "I'm just tired of seeing him torture women." And I think it's notable that the tortured women--River, rather than Zoe or Kaylee in Firefly--are the ones who drive his plots.

I dunno, portraying sexism and racism in art is very complicated, as periodic fandom spats reinforce. I'd agree with many critics who say that teachy, preachy (overly didactic) art is not the right way to treat topics like that--it makes the art really flat, hurts its functioning as art. So maybe Joss is just avoiding being too pedantic? But I really do have a sense of excusing some underlying sketchiness when I watch his work.

And probably, I also just need to watch Buffy.

[tempore]

Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, seeing Buffy does color my experience of his work in a good way. And yeah, that bow hunter thing was hella creepy. I think, so far, that maybe that what I like about it is that he's not shying away from the idea of creating these "dolls," these whores--because that is what they are--as a commentary on the way society views young women. This idea that we have to create these idealized creatures that cater to the whims and needs of the men who buy them. (I'd like to note that so far, while it's primarily women, there are male dolls in the background.) Isn't that what we have done with women? Is that not, essentially, what our pop stars like Britney Spears are? So I definitely see it as social commentary.

With Buffy, and you definitely have to see it to make your own judgments, and I don't want to spoil or influence that too much, I like how he played with the stereotypes. Yes, the characters were, at times, tortured in some way or another, and I can't comment on Firefly, I didn't watch that-- but what he also did was show their resilience, as well. And Angel, who was a male, and a vampire, was quite possibly the most tortured of all his characters. I think, out of all the televised depictions of people, male and female, Joss has been best at showing them as more than 2 dimensional beings. I'll be interested to see if he has the time and the ability to do that further.

I think, from what I've read of Frank's interviews and heard in his songs, that Leathermouth is all about his anger in general, and a lot of it is based on his love for horror movies-- he's said that's a huge influence -- and that carries with it a form of misogyny as well, so as far as the songs go, I tend to attribute any inherent sexist lyrics about setting girls on fire and such to that -- he has a song about Jack the Ripper, you know?

Interviews: Nyghtscene one this one kind of touches on bumming people out, but there was one I'm trying to find-- it was in AP, and I had the actual hard copy, but I don't know if it ever got scanned by anyone -- where he references "little girls" in it. I'll see if I can find it.

I talked about this a bit somewhere, which I can't find right now (there's a lot of distraction now, with the kids around) in my journal, about how the reason Frank did that interview, or another like it, was because teenage girls were screaming things like, "Frank I want to have your babies" and he'd ask them to stop, and they wouldn't. Or they'd say, "I love you," and he'd say, "You don't know me." There is a level of extreme discomfort he displayed, which I think is part of why in interviews about it, he'd be all, "Yeah, I like bumming little girls out." And I think it was a way of him reacting to them.

And I think that, going along with that, the power I see that comes from us underestimating girls is that then, something like those girls harassing Frank becomes something he can't react directly against-- after all, he's a grown man, things like girls harassing him is something he's supposed to blow off. Yet if a guy said to a teenage girl the things they say to him, it'd automatically be sexual harassment. So I think there's a degree of "oh, they're just screaming, innocent little girls" that we've become too afraid of shattering, in a sense.

And in some ways, I even already see that with my niece. We coddle her because she's our little princess, and she has learned that turning the bright eyes and little girl thing on lets her get away with murder.

That said, it's as much a "strength" or weakness that any other gender or major group has, you know? Especially in the sense of the fact that they are so often dismissed for the very things that they can then use to their advantage.

Overall, though, I agree with you that we dismiss those screaming, shrieking girls, not bothering to find out or see what lies beneath it, and there's a lot of sexism inherent in that we think that anything a teenage girl likes must automatically be silly and frivolous.

[prophetic]

1. I will read every Frank thing you send my way. I like how you like him. Do you have a delicious account or something where you keep this stuff?

2. That said, it's as much a "strength" or weakness that any other gender or major group has, you know? Especially in the sense of the fact that they are so often dismissed for the very things that they can then use to their advantage.

Yes, this. Nicely put, and especially how it works for every group. Word.

[flourish]

Buffy is inconsistent about race and class, but it is very consistent in its feminism. That said, even in Buffy Joss is dealing with the issue of a powerful woman that people want to control.

One thing that people often don't talk about is that Buffy is a character that is just the other side of the coin from River or Echo. Buffy has amazing, remarkable powers, and she is largely self-directed. But there is a malevolent force that wants to control her - the Watchers Council - and later other forces too: the military, for one. The only thing is, Buffy is starting from a position of power (she has been functioning without their "guidance" that is really a trap) and so she is able to fend them off. (In one episode, the Watchers Council persuades Giles, Buffy's mentor, to poison her with a weakening agent as a "test." Giles admits it and atones, but the point is that this is not a new trope for Joss. (It appears in Angel too - and it appears in Buffy in other ways, including another doppelgänger for Echo, Dawn. Dawn literally is nobody: she was created, not born, from mystical energies. But she is also a person and treated as such in the series... anyway.)

In Firefly, I understood River as Joss's attempt to explore this territory from the other side. But Firefly was canceled before we got to see River coming into her own, which we do get a look at a little bit, in Serenity. I read Dollhouse in this context and have faith that what Joss is really interested in is having Echo break out of her chains. I do forgive sketchiness in him that I wouldn't forgive in someone else because of Buffy, because I feel strongly that I can trust him to show these women breaking free of their programming.

The tortured women do drive Joss's plots, but I don't think that that's because they're tortured women. I think it's because Joss writes about tortured PEOPLE (Angel, Spike, Willow, Giles all qualify as tortured - often literally - in Buffy, for instance) because in some ways they're more interesting.

[tempore]

Yes, exactly. Especially your last paragraph. And I think we see the other side of that with the men in Angel-- Angel, Wesley, Gunn, Angel's son-thing, the green-skinned bar owner psychic dude (I'm terrible with names), Quinn. These characters too, are all tortured, literally and figuratively, and in Lila and whatshisface the other lawyer, we see that same kind of good/evil dichotomy as we see in a lot of Joss's characters. I think that's his strength, is giving us these characters who are never purely good or evil-- even the ones who are "blank slates." And I hadn't made the connection with Dawn and Echo, that's really interesting. It does say a lot about what characteristics we imprint or project upon people.

[flourish]

Yes - Lorne! And you're right about all those examples.

[prophetic]

It's interesting to hear you talk about Joss Whedon and his work (thanks for coming over, btw). I hear in what you say, and in fandom at large, a real sense of trust in him around gender issues and in portraying female characters. It's nice, and it makes me want to trust him too. Maybe it's like how I am coming to trust Gerard Way.

[flourish]

Yes, for sure there's a level of trust... for me, it's a level of trust because in 7 seasons of Buffy I felt like he never let me down on gender issues, yknow? And because based on his responses to criticism of race and class in Buffy and Angel, he has clearly worked to change - not that he's "gotten there" yet, but it's really interesting to watch an auteur's work, to see how it matures over time. He has gotten better, and made an effort, even if he doesn't always get it right. So I trust that if there are major problems with Dollhouse when all's said and done, Joss will at the very least respond well to criticism, which is not something you can say about almost any other figure like him.

[prophetic]

Yeah, I've heard the responsiveness thing said about him before too. I don't know the extent or nature of his contact with fans (except for that comment on y_fish's Firefly vid), but I do sense that people feel he (somehow) listens and responds. That's pretty neat, not just on a personal level but on a cultural level, when I think about what it means to be a fan. One thing, in this case, is apparently to be in dialogue with the creator to help him improve his work.

I also like learning the fannish history of Joss Whedon's creations as I begin to watch Dollhouse. I get a sense of being part of a community that is not just watching Dollhouse, but watching Joss Whedon think, and it seems fun to do that together.

*looks up 'auteur'* Congratulations on a dictionary-perfect use of the word that helps me understand it almost more than the dictionary definition did. :)

[flourish]

He's fairly involved with fans. He goes to a lot of cons, and he came out of a fanboy space himself, so that's a strength. And usually his interviews reveal a greater depth of thought than other writer/producer/whatevers.

That is absolutely what it's like to watch Joss Whedon shows. It's really awesome. I imagine that people who are really into J.J. Abrams feel the same way. But then, you do the same thing when you're a fan of an author (not just their works), yeah?

Hee. You're welcome!

[tempore]

Oh, and what I wanted to say before, and I don't think I'm articulating (and man, the boy came in and started talking again, some I'm losing my thought process) is that what I'm trying to get at is that I think girls (or women, or any age, gender, etc.) have as much right to be everything -- powerful, innocent, stereotypical, strong, emotional, non-emotional-- as boys, you know? So when I say that teenage girls have this power in their coquetry, or in our underestimation of them, it's not necessarily a criticism-- it's just something I tend to see.

Incidentally, Eliza Dushku that plays Echo is Faith in Buffy and Angel, and she's a complicated character in both. In a lot of ways, she is a lot like Echo (still haven't seen this week's, we don't get Fox anymore, and I need to see if it's on Hulu.com yet).

[prophetic]

It'll be interesting for me to see the Faith/Echo crossover from the opposite side that most people in fandom are experiencing it.

And, Dollhouse! I am seriously falling for it--its sci-fi dystopia setup and all the suspense! And in tonight's episode THERE WERE MUSIC FANS.

[tempore]

I haven't seen it yet. Need to watch that today, if I can. :)