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RRWWARRGH!!! I roar, stomping on arbitrary gender norms and stereotypes.

"um, excuse me, you really can’t expect me to use ‘they’ as a singular pronouns, can y-"

Joss Whedon, in an Interview with Vulture

(via queendread)

I’ll take “Out of Context Quotes” for $1000, Alex.

Here’s the whole thing, which is in no way as douchy and self-serving as that single sentence.

How would you advise men in the world who are shy about saying they’re into feminism? What do you think is the best way to support the cause?

Well, they need money, they need volunteers. Action is the best way to say anything. A guy who goes around saying “I’m a feminist” usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.

Is Joss Whedon’s behavior as a feminist perfect? Not at all.

Is my behavior as a feminist perfect? Not at all. 

But I will throw down with you Sharks-vs-Jets style if you try to tell me I’m not allowed to identify as one or that my honest-to-god best effort isn’t good enough because hey, patriarchy sticks some shit deep into our psyches that’s hard to eliminate 100%.

I get it; it’s really easy to point out hypocrisy in people. It’s really easy to point out when people fail to uphold their own ideals, especially when they’re outspoken about them.

But if you’re going to criticize someone for something, for the love of crackers please don’t criticize them for one sentence that’s taken way out of context.

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Have you ever had someone try to interact with your cat, and they’re not being mean or anything, they’re just doing it wrong? They’re touching all the wrong catparts with the wrong kinds of pats and you know that the cat is like wtf are these pats and you’re just sort of watching helplessly, this mutually unfulfilling patting interaction?

when i see an ao3 tag set that makes particular mention of ‘characters of color’ or the like, particularly in a fandom where the canon contains significant nonwhite characters, i kinda cringe and avoid the story. and i’ve been sorta wondering, in a backburnery way, if that’s some kind of racist instinct on my part — not that i don’t want to see nonwhite characters, obvs, because clearly i do — but like i’m resenting other people’s efforts to secure and publicize representation.

but lately i’ve been thinking that’s not what’s going on, and maybe my cringe response makes sense. particularly in a story that contains falcon and nick fury, adding the ‘original characters of color’ tag just feels… weird. like the author is so hyperaware of race (in an effort to be inclusive, i don’t doubt) that they’re kind of… fetishizing it? or focusing more on color than on character? and i’ve seen it, when i’ve read stories with tags like that in the homestuck fandom, where the author makes such a point of mentioning dave’s ‘brown hand’ and ‘dark cheeks’ every other sentence like the entire point of the story is to go “hey you know that character who in canon has straight white hair and red eyes, well actually his hair is curly and he bleaches it and his eyes are red because of LOOK A MONKEY” — idk, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth?

I often question if it’s some sort of internalized racism on my part, but I think my discomfort might be mostly from the fact that they tend to change so many characteristics of the character’s appearance to fit a particular race, that they often become too unrecognizable. This is probably because I literally identify people in meatspace using specific traits that stand out and that I can easily remember and recognize at a distance (skin tone being a big one, mind you), and not bothering to learn other more specific traits of recognition until its necessary. When people don’t keep enough of these traits for a character, it takes a lot of effort on my part to recognize that this iteration of Dave, who had no traits like the canon one, is actually Dave if he’s drawn without his sunglasses or something, and that is sometimes a little off-putting.

and yeah, it does kinda make you wonder why you have to make a straight-haired character curly to indicate they’re not white. maybe because dave is sorta coded as albino, so the idea is if you draw him with straight hair how do you know he’s not caucasian, but at that point i kinda have to ask, why is it so important that dave in particular be at-a-glance nonwhite? like, of all the characters you could’ve picked. half the kids have black hair, all the trolls do if you’re doing humanstucks, of the strilondes dirk and roxy have curly/styled hair and rose’s hairstyle harks back to the bob styles worn by 1960’s black girl groups, so you pick dave?

it just seems really… point-making. and something about that feels skeevy to me.

i’ve gotten similar shudders from a trend in the wtnv fandom, of making a huge huge deal out of how nonwhite one’s particular cecil headcanon is. when one of the beautiful things about that story, imo, is how unspecified cecil is — we don’t even know if he’s human — and how diverse the rest of the cast is. and it’s just as hard to explain why it creeps me out. same thing when people draw a little assortment box of nonwhite centaurs or mermaids or something. it’s. idk.

also, none of the characters in the menagerie are ever jewish.  i guess we’re just not exotic enough! 

 Write out a table of demographics appropriate to the subject matter - for US race for example, 12% black, 16% latino, 5% asian, etc - and then generate a random number (or just roll one or more dice) to pick at random according to the probabilities.  Probably multiple such random drawings, for varying demographics - gender, orientation, even physical attributes.

Do that for one or two central characters, and then build their supporting cast realistically (and probably non-randomly) around them.

It's far from perfect (and I have no idea how I would apply it in non-human contexts) but I feel it would at least be some kind of start towards overcoming biases, in either direction: an unconscious tendency to represent my own race/gender/demographic; a conscious tendency to represent not-my-own-demographic to counter-balance the expected unconscious tendency; etc.

Hey guys!

This is probably the most pretentious thing I’ve ever done but YOLO.

I’ve made a Facebook fanpage where I’ll be posting videos and other random things that don’t make it to meladoodle.com. (and some of the things that do)

I’d appreciate it if you could give it a ‘like’! It’d help me heaps with getting exposure outside of Tumblr and a chance to really get opportunities for a career in comedy. Please please please! I’ll love ya! It’s gotta be better than all the clickbait that your newsfeed is filled with at the moment.

Here it is!

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i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

MRAs Feminists in general, and ridiculous blogs like misandry-mermaid in particular, amply demonstrate that feminism is solidly into stage three.  

Removing the crossed out parts, your edit reads “Feminists in general, and ridiculous blogs like misandry-mermaid in particular.”  In particular what?  Quote Gandhi’s accurate description of the lifecycle of resistance movements?  Should keep up the good work?  Well, I quite agree that feminists including misandry-mermaid should do both!