So Maya wrote about cool young intersectional feminists and the article was about Amandla, Rowan, Zendaya and Nathan Zed. But then the picture that went along with the article was of Nathan which I guess was interpreted as centering the guy even though we’ve had articles specifically about each of the girls before and as such we have multiple articles where pictures of them are the featured images.
Anyway I guess people didn’t really like the fact that the featured image was of him and he didn’t either so he DM’ed the magazine account to say he wasn’t really comfortable with it bc he didn’t want to pull focus from women so we were like cool we’ll change the picture and we did and then Maya DM’ed him to be like ‘hey, sorry, didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable or anything’ and then he was like yeah it’s fine but you should probably just take me out of the article altogether. Which.
Ugh okay so I’m very aware of the fact that because of the way privilege works guys are more likely to be listened to than girls and white people will be heard over POC etc etc but given the fact that 1 the article was specifically addressing INTERSECTIONALITY and not just ‘girl power’ advocates, and 2 there was already a 3:1 ratio girls to guys the whole ‘this isn’t my place’ thing in this instance seemed weird to me. Like it’s so so important to recognise when you may be intruding but also it’s worth asking if you’re intruding rather than just going ‘ahhhh I shouldn’t be here don’t talk about me’ you know?
It reminds me of the whole thing when bands downplay their impact and invalidate the way their fans feel about them, like obviously there are a lot of differences but there’s a similarity in the way they’re saying ‘don’t draw any attention to my impact, regardless of what you feel about how I’ve impacted you, I haven’t actually had that big of an impact’. If you’re someone who has said they take pride in encouraging people to accept their culture and someone’s like ‘hey you know you do a good job of fostering healthy ideas about cultural identity and embracing your heritage’ it’s kind of weird to go ‘forget me, there’s WOMEN out here doing so much work!!!’. Like we can notice the women too. And in this case we explicitly did.Â
Idk I don’t mean to or want invalidate his feelings or anything but we’re just a bunch of teenagers writing about people and issues we think are worth drawing attention to and it’s kind of weird to say ‘don’t recognise me for my work because other people are doing good stuff’ when the stuff YOU do could very much be helpful to other people? Like we’re trying to stay relevant which means we can’t just write about Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua all the time (influential though they have been). And as long as you use your platform to lift up the voices of other people (women, LGBT individuals etc) I don’t think it’s wrong to recognise that you’re being helpful too? Like we’re not going to get rid of male privilege by shutting men up completely or ignoring their work, we need to collectively learn how to balance the way we value the voices and experiences of different kinds of people.Â
