When fandoms become something more, again
I would have to be thankful for this tumblr simply for it enlightening me as to the existence of this picture of Key.
But it gets even better.
Grey discussed the nature of the same-sex shipping tendencies of fandom a little less than a year ago.
Here, Trevor Link does the same, and even concerning the same Lesbiansubtextinkpop tumblr, in ( Read more... )
But it gets even better.
Grey discussed the nature of the same-sex shipping tendencies of fandom a little less than a year ago.
Here, Trevor Link does the same, and even concerning the same Lesbiansubtextinkpop tumblr, in ( Read more... )
I have not watched anime in forever. I think the last show I started and stopped in the middle of was Seirei no Moribito, which will give you an idea how outdated I am. (No, wait, perhaps I watched Aoi Hana after that, but that's because I'm still following the manga.)
Anyone But Me is actually quite old; I saw the first few episodes when AfterEllen was featuring it as the episodes were being released. I didn't really catch on to it. Something about the acting felt flat to me. (Aside: I kind of feel like "L Word" has to be seen just to kind of get the lesbian culture feel, as in it's something that a lot of lesbians know [especially of my generation]. Other shows seem to be "Skins" [which I have not seen] and probably "Glee." Possibly the one about the women's prison too, but I can't remember what it's called~)
I didn't drool over Black Widow, specifically. She's wonderful eye candy, but as a movie The Avengers felt more like mindless summer fun. I was thinking about it and part of where I didn't really connect with the movie was the lack of tension. There's never really any question about whether or not they would win and if anyone would have to make a great sacrifice (in fact, I was more bothered by the glossing over of the great price of "winning"). I mean, it has fun Whedon dialogue, but I feel like its huge cast meant no real tension in any of its spheres, especially since the Avengers (and really don't in general) act like a team.
But Scarlett Johansson is close to my heart as eye candy I grew up with. My brother had a thing both for her and Natalie Portman when he was growing up, so as I watched him in his Portman and Johansson fandom (so weird to apply the "fandom" designation as I wouldn't have called it that at the time, being so young myself), so I watched them: Leon/The Professional, Horse Whisperer, and later in their maturer roles like Garden State, Closer, Lost in Translation and --and when they finally came together in one movie: The Other Boleyn Girl. XD (If Natalie Portman had been featured again as Thor's love interest in The Avengers, they would have been brought together again!)
Scarlett will forever be known as the "twenty-five cents, please" girl and I can't even remember what movie she says that in. (She was very young, though.)
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Related, I found this quote by Charlize Theron fascinating:
“It’s so bizarre to me because, I work with a lot of men and then I do these press tours with them and nobody ever looks at Chris Hemsworth and goes, ‘Wow, you play such a strong guy in Thor!’ Nobody does that, you know what I mean? But when we are conflicted and we play characters that find themselves in circumstances where we have to to find our strength or just something in order to survive, like all of a sudden we are such strong women.”
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I liked what one reviewer said about Widow about how yes, Widow is hot, but she doesn't use that as her mode of interrogation. It's a nearly genderless action role, (Of course, this was not the case in Iron Man 2.) other than her outfits and the inevitable waif fu.
That Theron quote: the reason why there still needs to be fanfare for such characters is to portray demand, so that supply can in turn also increase, at least until Bechdel results stop being so depressing.
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Yes, it's so true. But I think male characters can get judged on an analogous emotional criteria, ie it's notable if they're not action men or macho or are "sensitive." I don't know if it's as called out on or as egregiously on display, since this is probably the prerogative of a genre of romance stories, but it is a fine line of having a male character be emotional or emotionally expressive but not be perceived as emasculated by it.
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Yes, equality of difference, celebrating certain feminine traits, has its place. But not all of them should be celebrated, imo. There's a thin line between "sensitive" and simpering, and the problem is that media has blurred it so much that most tend to see them as the same thing and thus disparage the "sensitive man" as simpering, and thus emasculated.
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I'm not really even talking about that, but about simple and sometimes unnoticed instances of differentiating. A "sensitive" man can be, say . . . the celebration of how loving and attentive a father is (when a mother who is as equally attentive and loving isn't recognized but is just taken for granted)--as long as it's not taken too far, as in a man who is domesticated and thus somehow emasculated (problematic in that why should those things be emasculating? Or why should having fashion sense be emasculating, as a recent conversation I had with a mother about her husband having no style to dress her sons seemed to bring up that "that's just men."). I've been watching lots of Pixar movies on re-play lately and as I was watching Finding Nemo or contemplating Up (I have not been watching Up on re-run XD): stories that celebrate and look at male-child relationships, But imagine if the main protagonists had been women. What if it had been his mother looking for Nemo? Or if Up had been about the wife? How would these stories have changed? Could we have the same run of sequences? (We couldn't have had the Dory joke about men and directions.) Would they have had the same emotional impact with the audience?
(I have to say I get rubbed the wrong way whenever I see a Huggies commercial saying they tested their diapers on "dads" with the complementary visuals of a dad struggling or daintily changing his child's diapers. Really? Dads don't change diapers enough to be competent at it? I'm glad to say my brother-in-law is pro at it, as is my father.)
I don't know.
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Btw, didn't they change that Huggies commercial because of an outcry from dads? I really hope whoever thought that original up got a severe talking to - and understands *why* there was such an outcry.
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And, interestingly, it being gendered, I've seen plenty of media outlets saying things like, "Is Brave's protagonist a lesbian?" Why should her sexuality matter just because she's a girl protagonist? Does she have to be sexualized in some form or her sexual identity have to be mentioned?
Did Huggies? I hope so, but I've seen more than one and not all of them may have been Huggies'. And that wouldn't stop me being chagrined at every cleaning commercial I've ever seen that features a woman doing all the cleaning. (They kind of make me laugh since I've seen my dad watching them closely, as if gauging in his mind if he wants to try that cleaning product. I don't know about others' Asian parents, but mine are clean freaks both. XD)
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Consider also the debate over that darned Heavy Rotation PV. Is it the ultimate fetish-pander, or a progress-through-deviance subversion of expectations for female sexuality?
And while "celebrate femininity!" media is not being represented equally under the feminist banner, in the grand scheme there are probably so many more of that kind of media than "celebrate tomboys!" media, (Otherwise why aren't there more boi bands, and why aren't they topping the charts?) which is why the latter gets more "feminist" fanfare when it happens.
Re: the Up and Finding Nemo examples
I think there's interesting discussion to be made about how femininity is usually linked to also being suited for motherhood, while masculinity seems to be evaluated by completely different standards from being fatherly. Hence why Up and Find Nemo aren't upheld as movies that celebrate the sensitive father as manly. Manly men, instead, are expected to shun settling down.
Is there a film where the mother is tomboyish and the daughter all pink and sparkles? I wonder which side the audience is expected to support there.
I do find it interesting that the gender role/family role debate largely stems from the fact that technology moved so much faster than cultural beliefs. The man-as-head-and-breadwinner-for-family genderization stopped applying once white-collar jobs were invented and became more important and lucrative than blue-collar jobs.
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But such objection may still be mired in a paradigm mentally. Not all girls who have traits of tomboy-ism are fullblown tomboys either. I think of the backlash against the butch/femme paradigm now, where so many emerging lesbians (I'd say my generation and the generation before mine and certainly the current and future generations) express how they don't feel either femme or butch necessarily and resent being pigeon-holed into one or the other. The terms themselves are inadequate because the discourse, I want ot believe, has come far enough that we can now address a spectrum, and not just a paradigm that for a time was asserted out of necessity: there were no guidelines and to make a splash and to impose order and understanding (in the community itself), the paradigm was set down. I think general feminine narrative is beginning to approach that similar point of saturation and understanding now, too, which is why when I was chatting with whoaheyyou last night, I was impressed with this feeling of needing to "break away" from these paradigmatic formulas that we've been riding.
I'm not saying that we should stop writing tomboy characters--lord knows I love me a badass tomboy, a woman in a suit, etc.--but that we can now begin to explore more modes of character storytelling, more dimensions of gender--in both directions, which is where OT is taking exception as well. Not just to explore how women can appropriate and "claim" masculine traits, but also to ask why it doesn't and hasn't been explored in the opposite direction, from the male perspective exploring the feminine within themselves.
Whoaheyyou asked me if what I was getting at in terms of "badassery" was assertiveness in a character, but I think that trait emerges as a necessity wherein we see the assertion of gender "strength" often posed in "battle" scenarios: either actual battle, as in something like The Avengers where we have characters physically fighting, or "battles" of wits and power dynamics, as in corporate settings where we get the Power Alpha Female. But there are other "battlefields" and other "battles."
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For example, I was contemplating part of The L Word's TV Tropes entry: "Pandering To The Periphery Demographic: The show was supposedly aimed at a female audience. However, it garnered a very large straight male fanbase mainly through extensive sex scenes, reducing gay guys to background extras, making one of the girls bisexual (which ensured a straight guy would participate from time to time) and making straight guys prominent in the supporting cast. Actual lesbians didn't miss that and often denounced the whole show because of the blatant pandering." (emphasis mine)
'Cause, see, . . . I liked seeing Sarah Shahi's sexy ass as Carmen giving Shane a lap dance (among many of the sex scenes). And the sex wasn't really shot like porn, but, as my friend put it, erotica. ("Soft porn," TV tropes.) And it's not as if lesbians don't watch porn; I saw someone on a lesbian comm requesting recs for lesbian porn. (Possibly could have been a man behind the user name, I suppose.) And it's not as if lesbians don't engage in sex themselves (oh noes!), vanilla or fetishistic (oh, Alice's adventures with Uta). So why couldn't the sex have been pandering to the lesbian audience? Now, it probably was shot with the intention to attract an audience across gender lines--as the casting of a lipstick lesbian cast was, in fact, intentional in order to maximize appeal. But then why not shoot sex scenes to pander to a lesbian audience . . . and what does that even mean?! I remember watching cast interviews and hearing the actresses note how it was nice to shoot sex scenes with women because they understood where to "cover" each other up and how to work with one another to make each other feel comfortable.
Our attitude toward sex--and women having sex and their agency in sex and their desire for sex--is really strange.
Hence why Up and Find Nemo aren't upheld as movies that celebrate the sensitive father as manly.
It's not that I was looking at them as movies that would uphold fatherhood, but that I am trying to imagine if those movies could have with direct gender swapping featured the female-equivalent protagonist. Would we just see Nemo's mother-with-the-personality-of-Marlin as simply smothering? Would a woman in the main protagonist role in Up have been able to be as crochety? Could they have been equivalently as adventurous as those male protagonists are? What changes contextually by just changing pronouns? In other words, why did Pixar use men in these contexts instead of having one of these films with this story have a woman protagonist?
Is there a film where the mother is tomboyish and the daughter all pink and sparkles?
I want to say yes, but I couldn't give you any concrete examples. It may be more in the context of hippy!mom vs. conservative!daughter, though?
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However, voyeurism itself does not negate stumbleine's argument, that fetish-pandering does not have to be a perpetuation of negative sexual power relations, which is the usual complaint against fetish-pander. Is fetish-pandering itself inherently bad, or does the audience demographic matter? Can self-aware porn be progressive?
One could argue that the video visuals are irrelevant to the lyrics, but AKB MVs usually aren't like that, so it's interesting that while Hebirote's lyrics are very, very needy sounding, the girls in the video don't show any sign at all of that towards the voyeur. They're more like "lol look you're here," indicating that the person they're singing to in the lyrics is not the voyeur. As a matter of fact, the MV visuals make it look like they don't need anyone but themselves, almost casting the lyrics in a mocking light. Which is what stumbleine argues: even if it's fetish pandering and voyeurism, the girls are in control, subverting the power relations.
Compare this to the tsundere lyrics of "Call Me Maybe" coupled with its visuals of Carly being needy towards the concrete masculine object of her desire.
Compare also to the hotel room scenes in Kataomoi Finally(4:01) and Dareka no sei ni wa shinai(1:06 and 2:40). imo these are much more one-dimensional in their voyeurism and outright invasion, respectively, under the guise of story.
Yes, of course, a large portion of the audience of Hebirote are indeed the older men perving on them that make fetish-pandering problematic. I also used that argument at that forum to argue against giving Hebirote's imagery a free pass. It's like what was pointed out for Gee. But as with Gee, that doesn't discount positive interpretations, and mostly I just disagree with you that Hebirote is one-dimensional fetish pander.
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Let me make it clear that I'm not offended, I just think it's part of a tacky, lazy aesthetic.
If they were fooling around with someone they seemed to care about, it would be more complicated. If they looked like they were keen on each other, or even just mucking about as good friends, instead of simply flirting with lezdom to tee-hee about it and to tease potential viewer, or if the video had some sort of style to it, a good visual idea beyond voyeurism, then maybe. I don't see anyone in that MV actually having fun by themselves in a convincing way. The shots are contrived, the poses awkward.
I don't think fetish pandering is automatically bad. There are good sexploitation b-films out there from the 60s for instance. They can be fun or ridiculous or weird, or empowering even, but they need something beyond pandering to be worthy of praise.
Not sure what you think is inappropriate in Dareka? Didn't see anything suggesting an invasion. Funnily enough I think SKE stuff generally looks tacky, but those two videos I'd single out as exceptions*. 'Finally' is a difficult one, as it's both positive to see a lesbian storyline as well as reasonable to believe it's used simply to grab attention, a cheap trick. But at least these two create a universe where the scenes fit in and make sense, not to mention a sense of humanity! Real human feelings!
* Not that I really like this Dareka video, I just don't think it suffers the same problems as HeavyRo (or the problems it's accused of having). 'Finally', I think may I like, or some images from it anyway, but this one is an example of a photographer who knows what he's doing but with nothing to apply those skills on.
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