I’m Just A Smiling Void

it would be so awesome

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

Gilbert baker rainbow, huge intersex circle, the design is cluttered but in a good way 10/10

anna daliza, artist bio, 2021

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.

And yes, we all are supposed to learn to see ourselves in others by default, that’s an important part of being a person and also engaging with stories, I should be able to understand why my lesbian neighbor is upset that her amazon package got dumped on someone else’s porch even though I’m not a lesbian, and I feel like Clark Kent and I could talk about growing up in the middle of nowhere and find common ground even if I’m not a white male alien superhero but like, it’s different when you HAVE to do it ALL the time JUST to engage in media and feel represented and seen. And that’s what we do and we get really good at it because if we didn’t we’d never enjoy anything.

Quick obligatory disclaimer that plenty of men are perfectly capable of learning to do this, as well as everyone else, and do it all the time, this is not a natural state of white manhood this is something chosen that can be discarded–but your average white dude who grew up with all the media around him being about him just straight up does not have years of hard training in “seeing myself in the other” because he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to try to find himself, he’s Luke Skywalker, John Wick, Superman, he’s always seeing a reflection of himself.

So what happens when suddenly he’s looking in a mirror and sees someone else? He gets uncomfortable, angry, confused. Which at it’s core is understandable, this is a skill that you have to learn and it’s normal for your brain to respond with discomfort or anger when you don’t know how to do something, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to let it fester into resentment and bigotry and hate….which is what these dudes do. He can’t relate to this person, he doesn’t know how to look for things that are similar like where they grew up or shared interests, things that we look to when connecting with a character to relate to them enough to be invested in their story. And some are so bad at dealing with that discomfort they lose it at the thought of having to think that hard about relating to a story, get pissed that they’re being asked to consider that humans exist who aren’t like them and who also deserve to be in the spotlight sometimes, but I think at the core it’s insecurity born of a lack of a skill our society necessitates everyone but these men learn. They don’t know how to do this and they have no idea how to handle that.

That’s similar to the logic of the horror stuff, women and minorities spend so long learning to like horror despite us being the fucking bad guys and victims in everything, but I remember I thought of this originally after people got mad at the Charlie’s Angels remake having the biggest male character turn out to be a villain. These guys weren’t just mad that there wasn’t more men, they were mad that they were specifically being painted as the bad guy, and I was like…confused? At first, because like yeah dude that doesn’t actually say much about you as a person, sometimes the bad guy looks like you….and then I was like oh. Oh. The bad guy never looks like you, does he? And you don’t know what to do now that you’re looking at a character you’re supposed to hate and seeing yourself.

Because the other thing we as minorities have to learn to do is love the bad guys because WE’RE the bad guys. The torn queer kid who wants to be Aladdin but sees so many of his mannerisms in Jafar and has to just…deal with that. It’s like horror for me, I love horror, but I’m disabled and mentally ill. I am almost always the bad guy in horror. The face in the mirror is my own, and I like horror, so I and everyone else in the same place learns a delicate act of like, sympathizing and seeing yourself in the characters but also not and trying to root for the good guys who aren’t like you or just not doing that and rooting for the bad guys the whole time, like I’m not describing it well, but it’s hard to articulate despite being something again, almost all of us have to go through at some point.

And god I remember Ghostbusters 2016 having the bimbo be a himbo instead, dudes were SO fucking uncomfortable and I was just laughing because yeah wow that….that sure is just how some men write women!! And they do it all the time, and it’s really fucking stupid and sexist and weird especially seeing it come from a male character, but like dude fr me @ these men do you seriously have absolutely 0 tolerance for a depiction of a person who looks like you in a story being negative??? You literally never learned how to deal with that???

But they didn’t. They never had to. Because even when the bad guy looks like them there is always a good guy who does too. Charlie’s Angels and Jenifer’s Body and Ghostbusters make them uncomfortable and angry because the bad guys look like them and the good guys don’t. They have no tolerance for that discomfort, they are not desensitized to their only representation being the villain or the victim or the idiot, and they also seemingly have no idea how to not internalize the idea that the bad guy looking like you doesn’t mean the story is saying you are the bad guy.

I mean they do to the rest of us but for majority white men it doesn’t because:

I mean fuck half the horror movies out there explicitly just say “all mentally ill people are crazy dangerous murderers you should never trust” and I learned to live with that somehow while Charlie’s Angels just says “this one particular dude sucks” and it’s the end of the goddamn world to every white dude who suddenly forgets other people aren’t them. Almost funny if it wasn’t so infuriatingly immature and deeply bigoted.

It plays out in smaller ways, white people failing to see themselves in folks of color, skinny people refusing to humanize fat ones, hell it even plays out in adults refusing to attempt to relate to children, every axis has a side that is not asked to see themselves in the other as often and it leads to this disconnect and discomfort and anger and lashing out when you actually do get asked to do it. To learn to like a story even if the bad guy is wearing your face, to relate to a hero you know has nothing in common with you, seeing yourself in the other is not something asked of everyone, and not being able to do it messes you up.

I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable for men to see themselves as the victims of women or as the bad guys, they never have to learn to be okay with being treated like shit by a narrative, or at LEAST just not being the main character, and they hate that.

But they’re just experiencing what the rest of us have been for all of human fucking history and we’re perhaps a bit too exhausted by it to humor it for long and just gotta give a firm

"Now I've shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat." (From his Wikipedia article).

Neil Munro "Bunny" Roger

June 9, 1911-April 27, 1997.

Bunny Roger killed a bunch of Nazis and then invented Capri pants.

He was expelled from Oxford for his indiscrete gayness (discrete gayness being perfectly fine at Oxford and part of the curriculum until...today probably, at least like 1992?). Then, having been sent down to London, he started his own fashion business, and his first client was Vivien Leigh.

Bunny served in WWII, killing fascists in North Africa and Italy, and often wearing a mauve scarf in the field. Roger claimed that he had gone into a battle brandishing a rolled-up copy of VOGUE and commanding: "When in doubt, powder heavily!"

Roger was known in high society for his themed soirées; Diamond, Amethyst, and Flame Balls were held to celebrate his 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays. He wore a curious plum colored catsuit with a feathered headdress at his 70th birthday ball in 1981. At his 80th, he made his entrance in a catsuit of scarlet sequins with a cape of orange organza, greeting his guests from behind a wall of fire. His parties were covered by the newspapers, including a New Year's Eve Fetish Ball where the proper upper class mixed with young guests in rubber S/M gear.

From an obituary: "Beneath his mauve mannerisms, Bunny was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates, a life enhancer and exemplary friend."

From another obituary:

And this in-memoriam piece.

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”