Comments | canis_m: Belated linkblog & ponyfail

canis_m

Belated linkblog & ponyfail

Apr 30, 2011 09:20

"Gender Equality: Not for Women Only" by Michael S. Kimmel

"Get Your Antifemininity Out of My Feminism" by s. e. smith ( Read more... )

poniezomg, why don't i have a feminism tag

Comments 7

flamebyrd April 30 2011, 15:26:35 UTC

Yeah, that was pretty much my thoughts on the buffalo episode too (and I haven't watched any since either). I do not understand how writers keep making these mistakes, over and over! Gah!

Also, also, why do people keep creating fantasy worlds (about anthropomorphic animals, no less!) and then base the cultures in the story on actual earth cultures? It never ends well!

stray_dog_strut April 30 2011, 16:09:37 UTC

Yeah, that episode was the killer for me. I could stomach the whole Zecora thing (despite being a Woman of Color™, and as such skirting my responsibility of being offended, OMG). I'm not even sure why. Maybe because the only stereotypes they were promoting were that Zebras/"Ponies of African Decent" are ( ... )

jetamors April 30 2011, 16:22:23 UTC

After all, at the end of the show, Zecora is a pony too, right?

She isn't, actually. Twilight specifically says "She's not a pony, she's a zebra." Like you, I could kind of roll with Zecora overall, but it was still an Othering, albeit not nearly as bad as the buffalo episode.

I'm sorry, you caught me on Wall of Text day spywindow April 30 2011, 17:32:10 UTC

Thanks for those links. The way kids' shows are gendered really is infuriating (and consistent!) -- the best you can hope for is a 50/50 ratio of girls to boys, and it's just downhill from there. (You see it all the time with three-person casts: if the main character is male, it is acceptable to have one female sidekick, but the other sidekick must be male. If the main character is female, both sidekicks must be male. Sometimes all three characters are male. There's no room for a configuration that has two or more girls ( ... )

canis_m May 1 2011, 13:30:20 UTC

RE: gender in kids' shows, yeah, and I'm really, really glad the Geena Davis Institute and its collaborators have done the research to give us HARD DATA, with NUMBERS and PERCENTAGES to shove in the faces of any nonbelievers for whom mere overwhelming impressions don't count as evidence of a problem. XD;

But you just need to take a look around LJ fandom -- not even the whole internet! -- to see that that's not the case.Sad but true. How can we have gender equality unless everybody (characters included) is free to perform femininity without getting reviled for it? Get with the program, people ( ... )

harumi May 1 2011, 03:38:15 UTC

I heard about this episode and was glad that I never got into the show. Just hearing about it again made me sick to my stomach. So what would I be in pony-verse? A water buffalo (for Asia olololol *gag*)? Because it's clear I'm not good enough to be a pony. But it must suck for those who really liked it. Good on you for sticking to your principles.

I'm sorry if this is a bit TL;DR but-- pere_chan May 31 2011, 06:37:22 UTC

--I'd been away for a while, and I was eagerly devouring each episode, then I got to 'Over A Barrel' and as soon as the bison descended on the train I said 'WHAT' and hit fast forward. Hoping it wouldn't all be like that. It was all like that. And WORSE. God.

I cried. I really had high hopes for this show, and I would have adored the other episodes unconditionally if I hadn't seen this one. But it...well, the perfect, horrible word is COLOURED...everything else for me. In big, offensively RED (not even brown!) crayon.

They dug a path through the apple orchard and they call that a compromise? GIVE THAT SHIT BACK.

Next season I fully expect an episode where the ponies encounter slant-eyed hairy yaks with beanie caps and buck teeth. Or to name my other racial origin, 'tropical' seahorses with flowing black hair and hibiscus flowers behind their ear. Goddamnit, I thought I'd found a safe place.