your friendly neighborhood faggot

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

One time she was chasing me it and I asked her very nicely to stop, and she did not which left me no choice but to grab a knife and repeat my request.

I know this may sound like an extreme reaction. But there really was no other rational choice. What was I supposed to do, ask nicely a second time? Like a goddamn hippy? No. Knife time.

Unfortunately I was bluffing and Liz called my bluff by grabbing a knife of her own. Which meant I was then getting chased with a shark AND a large steak knife. I started off continuing to be more scared of the shark than the knife, but that was a mistake because Liz actually made a lunge for me with the knife (I think she mixed up her shark hand/knife hand?) and managed to lightly stab our new couch. Which Liz then had to explain to our mom. I think the conversation was something like "Mom, the good news is that I missed, and the bad news is that I tried, and the worst news is that I got the couch instead.”

My mom handled it very well. My survival to adulthood hinged entirely on this weird one weird exploit in human psychology where confusing someone enough temporarily turns off their ability to be angry.

Incredibly that wasn't even our worst dumb sibling chase incident. The worst happened when I was chasing her through the house, and she ducked into our freshly mopped kitchen. She managed to cool girl skate over the puddles and make it to the other side of the room, which led to me trying to cool boy skate in her footsteps. This failed horribly, and instead resulted in me sailing headfirst into the dishwasher.

The good news was that I was able to absorb the entire blow with my left eyebrow, which I wasn't using very much anyway. The bad news was that I actually cut most that eyebrow off as a sort of fuzzy flap, which was disgusting, not to mention painful. Fortunately, with my dad being a doctor, he was able to glue most of it back on, albeit slightly crooked, such that I spent the next two years with a Resting Confused Face. Like so.

I'll point out that the princess bride and H2G2 are presented as spoken stories. The princess bride's top level story is about a sick kid listening to his grandpa weave a fairy tale. H2G2 was, I believe, originally written for radio plays. Primarily auditory.

I started telling stories verbally before writing them down. Hell, I really got into stories at all because my dad would read Patrick McManus to me as a kid, which was my radio play. And he could read those stories beautifully because his dad did the same.