Avoidance chronicle.

[sinsense]

Today, while at work, I planned my trip to Washington D.C. I also researched jello wrestling opportunities. There's lesbian jello wrestling in D.C., but it's not while I'm there -- I may have to make a second trip

Comments

[sinsense]

I am very proud of you also for not kicking that guy in the actual nards! Also, exactly, this is exactly what I was responding to, that feeling that "triggered = offended." I've been guilty of letting the two categories slide into one another, to be perfectly honest. It's a seductive slide, because it allows me to pretend to understand the experience of being triggered. A lot of my feminist education has been saying quite firmly to myself that "no, you don't get it, you don't know, shut the fuck up."

(NOPE.avi pretty much made my day, because it put Lana saying "nope" into my head quite pitch-perfectly. Delicious.)

I tend not to mind spoilers myself. There are times where it's been detrimental to my desire to finish reading whatever it is I was spoiled for -- Sophie's Choice springs to mind -- but a lot of times that's because the trope that the thing is exercising is so goddamn stupid and awful. I didn't see Prometheus because -- spoiler warning! -- one of the central plot points is that a scientist lady is super sad that she's barren, her boyfriend tries to heal her with his (alien-infected) dick, and then she gets alien tentacle baby and there's a gross c-section scene. And I was like, "WELL OKAY NEVER MIND," not because I am afraid of gross c-section scenes, but because dude, talk about undermining the whole transgressive spirit of the Alien franchise.*

Which is to say, I hear you on the spoilers thing. Generally, if a book or a movie is really good, it doesn't bug me to know what's coming next. Mind you, I read a lot of romance novels, and my blog about romance novels is called "Spoiler: They Make Babies," so. Predictability is apparently not a deal-breaker for me?

I read the thing about Blade Runner to MOSS and he nearly drove off the road while shouting about rape apologia! It was great.

ALSO and FINALLY -- SHUT UP JESS -- is that I think part of the reason why I was getting really verklempt at my vegetables is that fandom seems to me to be an ideal space for people who have triggers! It's mostly made up of women, or woman-identified people, and there's a lot of survivors in the community. It ought to be a place where you can read things without having to go through a whole goddamn song and dance, is my feeling.

* - On Greatest Movie Ever, which is a podcast about terrible monster movies, the lead guy was quite acerbic about this plot point, and I loved him for it. As one of his co-hosts pointed out, to be a true science lady who wants babies, it would have been way cooler for her to be like "no, guys, let's roll with this and see what happens! science!" I mean, still reducing a woman to her ovaries, but it would have been cooler.

[belle_noiseuse]

Maybe part of the confusion is that occasionally triggery things are in fact also offensive? Like, the dude I shouted at wanted to have a discussion with me and creases and two friends about all those women who want to be raped by anonymous strangers and what an interesting and salacious edge case that is for testing theories of autonomy. I knew right away where he was going before he got there and told him to shut the fuck up a few times with increasing rudeness to no avail, until there was nothing for it but shouting (and also I felt cornered in the small tower room we were all in and really genuinely did feel in imminent danger of attack, ugh). So the stuff he wanted to say was offensive as hell, but what made it triggering was not the content of it but my own experience with having my rapist inform me that he had just known better than I had what I wanted. It would actually have been very convenient for me if I'd only been offended!

(The part I didn't understand was why he was talking to us at all! Which creases figured out immediately. Dude wanted to have a fun, sexy conversation with the cool people who seemed to be having a good time. We concluded that in the future when someone is saying something obnoxious to us that is going to go in a horrible direction but hasn't yet, and I have picked up on its trajectory, I should turn to creases and furrow my brow and ask in a perplexed voice, "Why is this person talking to us?" Belittling AND useful!)

The gross C-section scene is actually even grosser than that: she gets magically impregnated by deep alien dicking, the babylien gestates fast, so she goes to the magic surgery machine and asks it for a Caesarian instead of oh I dunno an abortion or to terminate the pregnancy, but it turns out that the machine is only calibrated for space dudes and it doesn't know where a uterus even is, so she fiddles with some controls and convinces it to cut in the right spot, and it removes the alien with a little grabby claw hand just like in skill crane games where the prize is a stuffed animal. I just cannot even!

[creases]

Guy wanted in on our conversation because we were the cool kids! He wanted to be cool too! Except he catastrophically failed to understand what the conversation was actually about.