thekateblack

Everyone’s feeling very proud of themselves today for being grossed out by a Gawker post containing the text and email exchanges between a male escort and a well-connected, married executive who was trying to procure said escort’s services. The issue at hand, according to everyone who’s outraged, is that this is the outing of a gay man who would otherwise have been living a closeted life with his wife and three kids, harming no one. Because he is not an elected official or public office holder whose work involves anti-gay politics, this outing seems cruel and unjustifiable. 

I agree that nothing about the man’s behavior indicates he deserved the suffering this post inevitably caused in his life. Except for one thing: FULL SERVICE SEX WORK IS ILLEGAL, and he attempted to participate in this illegal activity. This basically makes the exchange “a story” regardless of who is on the other end of the transaction. It’s why local newspapers often publish police reports naming those arrested for soliciting, sometimes complete with mug shots. I’m not defending Gawker, because their decision to run this was capricious and cruel. But the reactions to this story make me even angrier than the original post.

There are a lot of threads to follow if you’re looking at all this from a place of concern for the safety/human rights of sex workers, but here’s the one I’m hung up on: the belief that this man deserved to hire someone for sex quietly, privately, and without consequence. That obtaining a thoughtful, ethical level of service was his right. And the attitude that, because two people participated, two people should be named (or outed) in spite of the fact that only one party (the sex worker, in case you’re confused) is likely to be at risk of public retaliation or arrest.  

Odds are very high that you, whoever you are, have tacitly or actively participated in keeping prostitution one of the most criminalized, stigmatized, and subsequently dangerous professions on the planet. And I do not have the words to fully articulate the amount of rage I feel watching so many people act like it should be every/any man’s—I am not using “man” as universal/gender-neutral, btw; the gender aspect here is essential—right to pay for sex, delivered professionally and discreetly by whomever he chooses, when this is the climate sex workers operate within. No one is owed consequence-free hiring of sex workers, not when sex workers themselves labor under some of the most hostile conditions imaginable. And the idea that the outed man should be allowed to do what he wants with whatever other adult he wants? That, basically, adults should be able to carry out victim-less actions to improve their own lives? It would be really amazing if such a vociferous commitment to that notion were in evidence when credit card companies are furthering endangering sex workers’ livelihoods and safety, TV shows are treating sex workers’ precarious safety as entertainment, or when men brutally murder sex workers with impunity because they know this is a class of people who are not publicly valued. (Please be aware the previous link contain incredibly graphic and disturbing details about sexual violence against an indigenous woman, and that it is one of many such stories I could have pointed to.) 

Why we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage

© Aleksandar Antonijevic

Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!

The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”

I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)

NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.

It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)

Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.

My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”

I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.

The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.

I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.

You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.

I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?

My dear friend is protesting in Mexico City and has told me to let people know of this. He relayed this message to me “We are coordinating the info with all the cities that are protesting today because there’s literally zero coverage in the news, if something happens, people will be left on their own.”

Fact Sheet on Battered Women in Prison

Y’know those neat little nail decals I use in my manis? They’re ready for you. Lemonfinger Speakeasy Nail Decals.

Oh yeah, and police admit to firing more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition at the burning house in a span of less than 20 minutes, even if they were to come out of the burning house alive.

The FBI took after Black Panther Party members plenty, from use of COINTELPRO to destroy from within, from inadvertantly kickstarting Samuel L Jackson's acting career after his mom got a call saying expect him to be murdered if he kept up his BPP affiliation (after which he moved to So Cal to focus on acting).

Noisey asked me to write about some stuff, so I wrote about my existence in Hardcore/Punk, Ferguson and the Angry Black Woman trope. Please go read the whole thing!

“You know, people joke all the time about the Angry Black Woman, but fail to realize why we’re angry, and what or who we’re actually angry at. Instead, everyone rolls with the stereotype that they’ve been fed and applies it anytime a Black woman dares to express herself. I couldn’t tell you how many times white punks and metal nerds have said, “Kayla from Bleed the Pigs is too aggressive and angry. Why is she so tense all the time?” 

Think about it. 

My anger as a Black woman fronting an aggressive, politically charged hardcore/metal band with DIY punk ethics is somehow too much for them. White punks screaming about the same politics, the same fucked-up shit, and even about racial issues and injustices they don’t even particularly face, are wholeheartedly accepted, never questioned, never told to tone down, and never told to relax. No matter how justified I am, or how down for the cause they are, they’re put off by my very valid rage. Why is that? What is it about a Black girl doing the same shit white men do that makes them feel like it’s too much? How am I the only one being labeled too aggressive in a genre that is all aboutaggression?”

"Egyptian artist and blogger Deena created a fictional superhero, Qahera, a ‘female Muslim superhero who combats misogyny and Islamophobia.’

In a recent installment of the comic, a young woman leaves the police station crying after being blamed for her own sexual harassment, only to encounter more harassment from four men, one of whom is carrying a knife. In the nick of time, Qahera swoops in, takes out all of the men, and then hangs them from poles outside of the police station with a note saying, ‘These men are perverts.’ It’s unclear if they are dead and honestly, there is a large part of me that doesn’t care. The writer who shared the comic with me also rejoiced at the conclusion, leading me to believe that as women, we need these stories.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg hates Supreme Court mansplaining as much as you