Category: Feminism

Cannibalism

April Daniels3 Comments

Lateral violence is when people within a marginal community take out their rage on each other. If you’ve witnessed an activist circle meltdown, you’ve probably seen it. The egos, the pain, the venom, the hurt. It boils down to a radioactive sludge that poisons everything it touches, until once vibrant communities become digital ghost towns, low-rez tumbleweeds blowing through ancient and abandoned threads.

(My blender has a metaphor mixing setting, and damn if I don’t enjoy it.)

At the beginning of 2014, there was a real sense of hope in the online feminist communities that I hang out in that we’d make real progress in confronting lateral violence. That didn’t happen, or if it did, it only seemed to be the results of an effort to circle the wagons against the screaming hate machine that erupted later that year. The root of the problem wasn’t pulled up; if anything, we’ve only become more insidious with each other.

But let’s get specific. What do I mean by lateral violence within marginalized communities? I mean points-scoring. I mean witch hunts. I mean the way the word “problematic” has been weaponized into a scarlet letter. I mean the way our social justice discourse has necrotized into a filthy ethos that encourages us to point the finger early, point the finger first, lest the finger be pointed at us.

I mean the way it’s strangling us.

Over and over we demand more representation, more marginalized creators, more voices from the edges. And these are good demands. We need more movies by women, and people of color, and queer folk. We need more books by women of color and trans folks. We need music by gay dudes and paintings by lesbians. We need more art from the edges, so that the kids at the edges growing up today will know they’re not alone. To see themselves embodied in all aspects of life, to help them find the strength to thrive in a world that too often wishes they weren’t around.

I cannot overemphasize how important this is to me. I wrote Dreadnought specifically so a scared trans girl could stumble across it on a library bookshelf and have something that, at least for a few hours, would help her feel powerful and important and worthwhile. To help her imagine a world in which she’d decide to stick around long enough to see what her twenties would be like. The money is secondary for me, as it is for many marginalized artists. We do this because we can’t not do it. Because we know what it was like to grow up with only a few scraps of culture that even acknowledged we existed, and because we want to ease that pain for the kids who come after us.

That’s why it breaks my heart that I can’t think of a single marginalized artist, writer, or creator that I am familiar with on a personal level who hasn’t expressed fear that someday they’re going to put a foot wrong and then—

–and then the mob will come for them.

We’re not talking about Gators when we have these hushed conversations. We talk about Gators and their ilk loudly, and in public. The conversations I’m talking about are hushed, as often as not. DMs, face-to-face, Gchat. Sometimes Twitter. Sometimes blogs with all the names stripped off. But very, very frequently with one eye over our shoulder, we speak about how our allies and compatriots sometimes scare us to death. Sometimes it feels like any friend can become an accuser. Any finger can be pointed right at our hearts, right through our chests, right down to our soul to damn us eternally in the eyes of our community. You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it happen before. I say lateral violence because it’s precise, but what I really mean are social hit jobs, and they are especially devastating to members of marginalized communities who, once ejected from their support network, may have nowhere else to go.

Not only are the consequences more severe for marginalized people, but the chances of this happening seem to be higher, as well. The moment you stake your claim out as a queer writer (or a writer of color or a feminist writer or any other marginalized voice) you are stating your intention to become part of a tradition. It’s a proud tradition, and a vital one. It’s a statement that yes, there will be politics in your work, and you won’t shrink from that. It doesn’t demand that you write nothing but polemics or didactic just-so parables, but it does demand an awareness of who you are and where you’re writing from, and to my mind it can create some of the most beautiful art we have available to us.

But the blade has two sides. Because now, as a queer writer, you’re also expected to be better—for some value of better­ that varies from reader to reader, community to community, sometimes self-contradictory and always in flux—than those other writers, those plain old writer-writers. It’s okay for a writer-writer to fuck up, or if it’s not okay, there are allowances to be made. Sure Popular CisHet White Dude Author X makes all his female fans cringe when he writes chapters from a woman’s point of view, but hey, his plots are zippy and the dialog is fun, so we’ll ignore that. But should a self-identifying lesbian writer screw up a chapter from a gay man’s point of view, she cannot expect the same mercy. She should have known better. And the more marginalized groups a writer belongs to, the higher the standards she’s held to. We love to eat our own.

So not only are the consequences of lateral violence—both emotional and professional—more devastating, the very same forces that make marginalized writers and artists marginal in the first place make this lateral violence far, far more commonplace for us.

I do not know of a single writer who I know in a personal context who hasn’t expressed, at least privately, some doubt and fear that someday they will say something careless and be ruined for it. Or that something they write will be taken out of context, and they’ll be called to be “accountable” for it, whatever the hell accountability is supposed to mean in this context. Or even, yes, that someone who is an oversensitive ninny could decide to take out their insecurities on them. It’s happened. Don’t think it hasn’t. And the more marginal you are, the greater this fear tends to be. I know that it’s my biggest fear as a writer.

I’m not worried about never getting a fat contract. I don’t spend a lot of time twisting my apron over the fear that I’ll never leave a WorldCon with a rocket in my luggage. Sure I think about these things, but they don’t scare me. What scares me is the thought that one of my human flaws will be excavated from the deep sedimentary layers of the Internet, ripped from context and history, and spun out into a reputation-destroying dagger planted right in my back by someone I thought valued me as a member of their community. I think we can all think of an instance where we saw something like this happened. And if you can’t—well, have I got some bad fucking news for you!

This kind of thing is horrible enough when it isolates people from their social groups. People have been traumatized, ruined over this kind of thing. But when it destroys writers and artists personally and professionally, it contributes to the impoverishment of our culture. It pays the bullshit forward to the next generation by strangling our clearest marginalized voices before they can do their best work. It contributes to that blasted cultural wasteland that so many of us struggled to survive in when we were younger and still looking for our people.

For a long time, I resisted using the word violence to describe actions that don’t involve inflicting physical harm on people. In some ways, I still wish we had a better term for this, one that distinguished this kind of harm from bloodshed. But the anxiety I feel over this—that all my writer friends who aren’t straight, cisgender white dudes feel over this—doesn’t seem like it would come from something as innocuous as a few dirty words, a few unpleasant conversations. This is a poison right at the heart of our communities, and it makes me sick to think how many voices—perceptive, beautiful, lively voices—we’ve lost before we even got to hear them simply because some people decided it wasn’t worth the risk of seeing if anyone wanted to hear what they had to say.

I don’t yet know how we fix this.

But we need to admit that it’s a problem.

You’re Probably Wrong About A Lot of Important Things

April Daniels2 Comments

I am sick of this notion on the left, never spoken but often implied, that whomever is most offended is most correct. No. Go fuck yourself. You might be full of shit, and I’m not going to assume you’re right and I’m wrong just because you’re squawking at me. I would hope that you would hold me to the same standard, and dismiss my own bullshit when it shows itself.

Everyone is a messy, complicated person, trying to live in a messy, complicated world, operating on imperfect information and making decisions with a brain that mostly runs on hormones and emotions. We are all–all of us–flawed, limited creatures. We do the best we can, and that’s all we can do, and sometimes we make mistakes, but sometimes that mistake is assuming that we can see other people’s failures perfectly when really we’re only seeing the distorted reflection of our own.

You may think someone did something wrong. And in thinking this, you may yourself be mistaken. That horribly oppressive thing you just saw someone doing might actually be a completely innocuous or even healthy behavior, mediated by a context you were too busy huffing outrage to notice. Have some humility, and be willing to accept that your deeply held moral convictions do not give you magic powers of perception. Before you fire off on someone, consider that you may not have all the information. Consider that their concerns, while not your concerns, might be as valid and important as your own. Consider that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Consider that anger can be righteous, but very often it is not. Consider that love and compassion are almost never a bad choice.

There is a sense in progressive spaces–and this may be true of conservative spaces, I don’t know because I don’t hang out there–that we must all agree on every moral question. Of course nobody raises their hands and says “Yes, I’m the unreasonable asshole who destroys friends and slanders loved ones because we disagree on the appropriateness of using a particular word,” but let’s be honest, we’ve all seen it happen.

And it just so happens that the step which we’re expected to be locked to tends to be the one that promotes a maximal restriction on what is considered acceptable conduct, while somehow simultaneously promoting minimal standards of personal responsibility. If someone throws an absolute tantrum over nothing, we can’t tell people to suck it up and be adults because society is unfair or whatever. We’re not able to ask people to keep some perspective and exercise discretion and emotional self-control because personal responsibility is a neoliberal plot or something.

It simultaneously privileges the individual subjective experience above all else, while demanding a collective effort to curate that experience. This is a contradiction. It cannot function over the long term. And hey, check out what’s happening on social media these days: it’s not functioning!

More and more people are cutting off, backing out. Because it is literally impossible to function in a society where we are all responsible for the emotional experiences of everyone but ourselves.

I’m sick of the self-flagellating notion that if someone asserts that you’ve made some kind of moral error, that you must immediately back off of whatever you were doing, ask for forgiveness, and then adapt your conduct to whatever the accuser demanded of you. And if you don’t, then you are ::crash of thunder:: PROBLEMATIC. This ethos has no room to admit that maybe the person who is claiming offense is doing so for disingenuous reasons. Nor can it admit that maybe someone who is being sincere is nonetheless being unreasonable.

And then the weird, nasty wrinkle that makes all of this even worse is that somehow, once someone is being PROBLEMATIC, you can do whatever you want to them to vent your rage, and it’s perfectly acceptable. You want to violate someone’s privacy? Go ahead, they earned it. You want to spread rumors around that they’re a pedophile? Go ahead, that’s totally cool. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if they actually did something wrong. It only matters that you think that they did! Isn’t that great? I mean, horrifying?

I used to be as earnest a go-getter about this stuff as you can imagine. But now, at the ripe old age of 29, I feel like I’ve been fighting for a thousand years, and losing every step of the way. This corrosive, bitter way of thinking and behaving is killing us. We’ve made so much progress, and we’re in danger of losing it all because of a backlash that we on the social left will trigger with our own strident intransigence. Empathy for the people we disagree with is important. Cutting yourself off from anyone you ever have an unpleasant dealing with isn’t the answer. By all means, curate your online experience however you like, but this unending holy war mentality has got to stop.

If anything gives me me hope, it’s Stein’s Law: ”Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.”

Shut up about the Duggars already.

April Daniels2 Comments

Okay, as horrible as the Duggars are, I really think people should ask themselves what they would do if one of their kids started raping his siblings. Can you be absolutely sure that you would instantly know the right thing to do, and would have the courage to do it without hesitation, even if it meant condemning one child to start life as a felon, and four others to community ostracization when word of what happened to them got out? (Hey, here’s a thought: maybe being reluctant to subject your daughters to what the criminal justice system does to rape survivors is actually a good call. Or maybe not. Maybe these things don’t have easy answers when they’re up close and happening to people you love.)

While you’re thinking over your answer, do you think we could we maybe stop using the story of four young girls getting raped by their older brother as a way to become ever more comfortable on our very tall horse? Can we maybe conceive of a universe in which we acknowledge that the Duggars’ lifestyle is patriarchal and retrograde, but stop short of declaring that their adherence to fundamentalist Christianity as the sole source of this tragedy? There are liberal families out there that have had incestuous rape problems, too. How about we decide to hold back from making this family tragedy into the next front in our revived culture war?

What happened in that family was an abomination and a tragedy, and yes patriarchal purity culture is creepy as hell, and yes there is a lot of really squicky shit that happens in right wing Christian cults. But I don’t see these conversations happening. Or at least not with the same verve and gusto that I see people writing about how horrible the individual players in this tragedy are.

Hate those Duggars, show how virtuous you are! Don’t worry, you can leave your own unconscious rape-culture apologia intact! There’s no need to reexamine your own complicity in a system that punishes rape survivors and exalts their predators over and over in all walks of life in every city in the whole country. Yes, you can totally snark at people being upset at Game of Thrones while rejecting their concerns out of hands, because at least you’re not a Duggar! Yes, you can still reflexively approve of Christianity being enshrined as special in the public sphere, because at least your Christianity isn’t Quiverfull!

Whatever you do, make sure your critique isn’t systemic, is instead squarely focused on the actions of individuals operating in a realm of stress and anxiety the likes of which few can imagine, confronting the kind of crisis that most families can’t even bring themselves to admit exists much less prepare for before it happens. Because if you did that, why you might have to start asking other questions.

Questions like:

  • Why do we allow “purity culture” adherents to have TV shows that aren’t hugely critical of them?
  • What does it say about us that this show ran for ten seasons on TLC?
  • Why is the use of fertilization technology to get a woman pregnant 20ish times uncontroversial, but her daughters’ access to contraception is worthy of a debate?
  • Why can Michelle Duggar have no problem finding doctors who are willing to help her push her body past the breaking point with more pregnancies, while her neighbors might have serious problems finding someplace to have a safe abortion?
  • Why is it that a woman can push her body to the absolute breaking point, past all medical advice, to pump out a frankly unhealthy number of children on national TV, and nobody demanded an investigation into the family’s life to ensure that nobody is being coerced into doing something dangerous or unhealthy?
  • What does it say about us that these four young girls are likely being re-traumatized in the name of gratifying the public apatite for outrage, and now have to carry a stigma–yes, there is a stigma about being a rape survivor–around for the rest of their life?
  • Why hasn’t the Federal government seriously started enforcing women’s rights to control their own bodies with things like criminal investigations and strong new legislation?
  • Why are rape convictions so rare?
  • Would we accept similar apathy towards a man’s right to control his own body? (Hint, we do, but mainly if they’re brown and in prison.)
  • Why do we allow huge swaths of the country to be run by people who think that the people writing abortion legislation should mostly be men?
  • How come membership in a creepy cult like the Quiverfull movement isn’t automatic grounds for an investigation by Child Protective Services?
  • Is it because we let “mainstream” Christians get away with only slightly less outlandish behavior?
  • Do the women who are forced to live in these communities, either by circumstance or by birth, have less of a right to cultural resources that affirm and support their independence and self-determination?
  • If not, how come we allow these cults to persist?
  • Would we let an extremist group of Dianic Wiccans to do this to men?
  • If not, why not?
  • How come Josh Duggar’s mea culpa sounds just like so many half-assed apologies that come out of so many cases of sexual assault? How come he had a script to read from? A template to work from?
  • And why are these kind of apologies considered even remotely acceptable as a pass back into acceptable society?
  • Might it be because this has happened before, will happen again, and these periodic displays of public humiliation are more about releasing pressure against the system than it is about spurring real change?
  • WHY DO WE ACCEPT A CULTURE IN WHICH GIRLS ARE TREATED AS ONLY HALF A PERSON?

Wait, don’t answer. The Duggars are about to release another public statement for us to ridicule. That’s way more fun to do than answer questions that might implicate ourselves along with them.

Shut the fuck up about the Duggars already.

How To Make A Radically Subversive Feminist Tract

April Daniels

Apparently, all you need to do is film an extended chase scene where you treat women as people.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m tickled pink at the prospect of an action movie where women are allowed to  be humans who act, not prizes to be won or unattainable war goddesses, but really? This is where we’re at?

You make a flick where Charlize Theron can say of her role:

“We had a filmmaker that understood the truth of women is powerful enough and we don’t want to be put on pedestals or made to be unnaturally strong.”

And people are like slow down there, Judith Butler!

You make a flick where the director can say

the thing that people were chasing was to be not an object, but the five wives. I needed a warrior. But it couldn’t be a man taking five wives from another man. That’s an entirely different story. So everything grew out of that.

And all of the sudden it’s hold your horses Simone de Beauvoir!

The world cannot handle this much feminism! You’re going too far! Too fast!

Next you’ll be talking about socially constructed gender roles!

This Is Not The Supergirl We Asked For

April Daniels

Watch the trailer here. Try not to cringe too much.

My main problem with this Supergirl trailer is that they make her ephemeral, weightless. She’s got no emotional mass, just a silly little girl who above all must not be allowed to threaten male egos. She gets put down by that military dude and just sort of takes it, crumples up and starts to cry in her apartment. Are you fucking kidding me? She can arm-wrestle a jetliner out of the sky, but some military dude being mean to her makes her want to quit? That’s absurd. Ridiculous. Insulting. I could totally see a man treating her like that; I don’t at all see why she should let it get to her. Except of course she does, because a man needs to have power over her, at least once in this trailer. (Well, several times, actually.) Because that’s Hollywood. Because that’s what they think we mean when we say we want female superheroes. Because they can’t conceive of a sympathetic woman who also takes life on her own terms and accepts no bullshit.

The only woman in this trailer (well, short film, to be honest) who is allowed to have emotional power, drive, and confidence is her unbelievably bitchy boss who is clearly coded as a negative character. I’m not saying I want a grimdark Supergirl, but come on, can we have someone who can bench press a tank–and has known this about herself for years–maybe not be a neurotic insecure mess for no reason? Can we have her be confident, and embracing her attempt to live a “normal” life as just another challenge she knows she can overcome rather than a way to undercut her and make her look nonthreatening? What’s wrong with having a Supergirl who has a zest for life because she knows she can fly and fight and save people, who revels in her power and her ability to help people, and who chooses to live as close to normal as possible because it helps her relate to these funny little mortals with their frail little bodies who she loves so much?

BUT NOPE! Gotta have her be insecure coffee girl with mountains of hesitation. Gotta make her “relatable.” Not threatening. Not awe-inspiring. Yeah, sure, she’s basically a literal goddess compared to the people around her, but let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on her not being able to fly around corners quickly without wearing a cape! Ha ha! So cute and endearing! Let’s focus on her accepting a crappy job when she knows she can be so much more. Let’s focus on her unaccountable hesitation to experiment with her powers throughout her entire adolescence so that she only knows for sure that she can fly when she’s forced to do so. Let’s pretend that a girl who can get herself up into orbit just to enjoy the view would decide not to for no good reason, would decide to let her cousin handle all the heroics and test his powers, but not want to join him, the one other person on the planet who could really understand what life was like for her. Above all, let’s do everything in our power to ensure that the male viewers don’t feel inadequate or threatened by a power fantasy that they can’t explicitly relate to, because that, my friends, would be the worst thing ever.

This is not what we mean when we say we want female superheroes. Her interiority has been completely sacrificed on the alter of making her “relatable.” Her motivations are muddled, her characterization hamstrung. Would we accept this from Arrow, or Flash? Would we consider it an acceptable interpretation of Batman, or Superman? Even (to cross continuities) Peter Parker, the poster child of “superheroes with problems” isn’t hollowed out so thoroughly. A character who is predicated on POWER is not allowed to have any that isn’t safely contained and wrapped in a treacly candy shell of girls-are-so-neurotic bullshit.

“GamerGate didn’t do that.”

April Daniels

Okay, there’s a meme floating around that I want to take a pot shot at here if you’ll bear with me for a moment. It goes something like this: “How can you say that GamerGate even enters into the threats against Anita/Zoe/Brianna/etc? Where’s the proof? Where’s the evidence? Did they support this? Did they applaud this?”

Right. So that’s the meme. You’ve seen it around, right?

Here’s my answer:

Well, there’s been the months long pattern of escalating harassment that has proven links to a lot of GG incubators like 4chan/8chan, certain closed IRC channels, etc. There’s the fact that multiple specific threats have been made against more than one woman, all of whom have been sucked up into this bullshit tornado at one point or another, and the threats against their lives just happen to coincide with new waves of outrage among GamerGaters. There’s the fact that at least one of the specific threats mentioned GamerGate in its text, and probably more but I can’t be arsed to run down an exhaustive list just because you whine at me. There’s the fact that Adam Baldwin, the guy who coined the term GamerGate and is pretty much its most high profile booster, has a history of trying to dismiss threats as fake threat, or saying that Anita was somehow milking it or anyhow it wasn’t actually a big deal or if it was a big deal it had nothing to do with GG and she was still vile slime who should just shut up.

I mean, other than that, no, there’s not much to go on.

Look, this shit doesn’t happen among car enthusiasts or music fans. Movie buffs and sports geeks don’t do this kind of thing, at least not in any world I’m familiar with. But this *does* happen in gamer communities, and it happens frequently. It’s been happening for years. It keeps happening no matter how many times the respectable moderates post about how shocked and horrified (did we mention horrified?) they are that someone would make death threats against those women they’d been calling skanky hagcunts for months on end. GamerGate itself isn’t new or unique or really even that different than anything that’s come before it; it’s only a crystallization of a lot of really horrible trends and patterns that have been around for years. So if you really, really want to, you can draw neat lines and pretend that GG has nothing to do with (certain) threats. That’s not a real credible position, and you’re going to have to make some untenable arguments, but you can try. You can clap your hands make believe.

But that doesn’t change the fact that gaming, as a subculture, is showing itself embarrassingly childish, nasty, and cruel, or that these threats grow out of that environment. GamerGate embodies that. It was founded to shame a woman for having sex, and any claim to the contrary is chaff and propaganda. These threats are the logical, perhaps even deliberate, outcome of those first early planning meetings held in an IRC Channel. To claim otherwise is to, at best, be a useful idiot for some of the most hateful, bigoted people on the Internet.

And that’s a shitty place to be in life.

Mission Statement

April Daniels

EDIT: I wrote this while I was pretty pissed off about something. You may consider it hyperbole. 

From time to time, I’ve been asked what would “satisfy” me as a feminist concerned with media representation. I’ve thought about it for a long time.

So how about this: I want total, unfettered cultural domination by women at the expense of men in all forms of media. I want the lives and stories of women to be the preeminent concern of all popular culture in all venues, with only lip service paid to the existence and agency of men. I want this to continue in the face of mountains of incisive, cogent analysis why this is unfair. I want this state of affairs to continue for at least three generations.

And that, maybe, will go an appreciable distance towards healing the cultural and psychic damage patriarchy has done to women over the centuries. Maybe.

Until I get this, I guess I’ll just have to keep agitating and never be satisfied. If this is unreasonable, understand that those who fight for the status quo want the same damn thing, but worse and in the other direction. You don’t win at things like this by being reasonable.