2012-06-21 12:24![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineToday's Sinfest pisses me off, and, more to the point, the reverberating echoes of laudatory comments of it piss me off, too.
"Why?" you might wonder (or you might not; that's fine, but, really, you're in for a boring life if you don't ask that question occasionally).
Do I harbor some kind of deep-seated distaste for women, or their right to express their desires?
No.
Do I think that men shouldn't respect women's boundaries?
No again.
Do I think that the color should be spelled with an "a" and not an "e"?
A third time, no.
Rather, my ire is drawn, two-fold, by both what is stated directly and explicitly in the strip itself, and what it implies by unspoken expression.
There are zero shades of grey here. "No" means "no," and that is black and white.[1] A binary expression is either stop or go, on or off, yes or no. There is no grey. None.
And that's all right; this is a perfectly legitimate, and, frankly, desirable state of affairs in many cases.
But... and this is where the meta steps in and pisses me off...
Leaving this story as "No. The end," strips feminists of agency. It buckets the reader into the author's (both Ishida and Feminist Girl) prescriptive and inflexible definition of what a feminist fantasizes about.
And that, dear reader, is bullshit.
"Feminist" is not a being; it is a descriptor. Using it as a noun instead of an adjective dehumanizes people who identify as feminists. It makes them less than human, incapable of nuance in precisely the same way that yes/no is.
It's reductive to the point of being destructive. And too many people are missing that point in the stampede to laud feminism, even when it's done shoddily.
Yes, laud feminism. Please, for the love of fuck, laud feminism. But also call out those who are against it, actively or passively. And, moreover, call out those who are doing it poorly. Theoretically, we learn from our mistakes; the artist has made one here.
More subtly, and probably invisibly to the author, is the fact that the "he" in the story only respects "her wish," not her. Maybe I'm being too intensely critical and driving needles into minutae here, but this is the way privilege works, and the way it needs to be fought and driven back - everywhere, all the time, no matter how big or small. Call that shit out, bring attention to all the fractal fuckery, because if the language and inflection doesn't treat the problem, and only addresses the symptoms, it's not going to get better, it's just going to get subtler.
To make a gross (in both senses of the word) analogy: if you smack a cockroach with a roll of duct tape, it will make a very impressive splatter[2]. Yes, you've killed the cockroach, but there's now a whole bunch of additional mess to clean up... and, while that mess isn't actively spreading, if you don't get it all, it will draw other unsavory things that might not otherwise have shown up.
I could probably go off on another couple paragraphs' worth of diatribe on the header's byline; it's possible that Ishida is using it to empower Feminist Girl's character (that is, the one in the story being written in the strip); but it's just as possible that it's damning Feminist Girl herself to a cage of her own making.
Feminism is nuanced around the edges, because, much like Soylent Green, it's people. It's not a white circle on a black background. Look at the edges of a spotlight shining on a deeply shadowed thing sometime; there are actual shades of grey.
So, please stop giving Tatsuya Ishida (and everyone else [see also: previous rant vis a vis a certain Joseph Whedon]) feminist cookies when he fucks up like this. He won't learn. People who read his strip won't learn. Encourage him to get better, because right now, he has all the nuance and delicacy of someone doing a paint-by-numbers with a bucket duct-taped to his ass.
Even if the paint happens to be grey.
[1] Of course, the D/s folks have a lovely spin on this: "'No' means 'yes'. '$Safeword' means 'no'." (Yes, kinky people, I'm aware that you might have multiple safwords, for things like "slow down" or "stop" or "JESUS CHRIST IT'S A HARD LIMIT GET OUT OF THE CAR.")
[2] I speak from experience. You would not believe how juicy those fucking things are if you catch them on a hard surface with a firm object with a fair bit of force.
"Why?" you might wonder (or you might not; that's fine, but, really, you're in for a boring life if you don't ask that question occasionally).
Do I harbor some kind of deep-seated distaste for women, or their right to express their desires?
No.
Do I think that men shouldn't respect women's boundaries?
No again.
Do I think that the color should be spelled with an "a" and not an "e"?
A third time, no.
Rather, my ire is drawn, two-fold, by both what is stated directly and explicitly in the strip itself, and what it implies by unspoken expression.
There are zero shades of grey here. "No" means "no," and that is black and white.[1] A binary expression is either stop or go, on or off, yes or no. There is no grey. None.
And that's all right; this is a perfectly legitimate, and, frankly, desirable state of affairs in many cases.
But... and this is where the meta steps in and pisses me off...
Leaving this story as "No. The end," strips feminists of agency. It buckets the reader into the author's (both Ishida and Feminist Girl) prescriptive and inflexible definition of what a feminist fantasizes about.
And that, dear reader, is bullshit.
"Feminist" is not a being; it is a descriptor. Using it as a noun instead of an adjective dehumanizes people who identify as feminists. It makes them less than human, incapable of nuance in precisely the same way that yes/no is.
It's reductive to the point of being destructive. And too many people are missing that point in the stampede to laud feminism, even when it's done shoddily.
Yes, laud feminism. Please, for the love of fuck, laud feminism. But also call out those who are against it, actively or passively. And, moreover, call out those who are doing it poorly. Theoretically, we learn from our mistakes; the artist has made one here.
More subtly, and probably invisibly to the author, is the fact that the "he" in the story only respects "her wish," not her. Maybe I'm being too intensely critical and driving needles into minutae here, but this is the way privilege works, and the way it needs to be fought and driven back - everywhere, all the time, no matter how big or small. Call that shit out, bring attention to all the fractal fuckery, because if the language and inflection doesn't treat the problem, and only addresses the symptoms, it's not going to get better, it's just going to get subtler.
To make a gross (in both senses of the word) analogy: if you smack a cockroach with a roll of duct tape, it will make a very impressive splatter[2]. Yes, you've killed the cockroach, but there's now a whole bunch of additional mess to clean up... and, while that mess isn't actively spreading, if you don't get it all, it will draw other unsavory things that might not otherwise have shown up.
I could probably go off on another couple paragraphs' worth of diatribe on the header's byline; it's possible that Ishida is using it to empower Feminist Girl's character (that is, the one in the story being written in the strip); but it's just as possible that it's damning Feminist Girl herself to a cage of her own making.
Feminism is nuanced around the edges, because, much like Soylent Green, it's people. It's not a white circle on a black background. Look at the edges of a spotlight shining on a deeply shadowed thing sometime; there are actual shades of grey.
So, please stop giving Tatsuya Ishida (and everyone else [see also: previous rant vis a vis a certain Joseph Whedon]) feminist cookies when he fucks up like this. He won't learn. People who read his strip won't learn. Encourage him to get better, because right now, he has all the nuance and delicacy of someone doing a paint-by-numbers with a bucket duct-taped to his ass.
Even if the paint happens to be grey.
[1] Of course, the D/s folks have a lovely spin on this: "'No' means 'yes'. '$Safeword' means 'no'." (Yes, kinky people, I'm aware that you might have multiple safwords, for things like "slow down" or "stop" or "JESUS CHRIST IT'S A HARD LIMIT GET OUT OF THE CAR.")
[2] I speak from experience. You would not believe how juicy those fucking things are if you catch them on a hard surface with a firm object with a fair bit of force.
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