Tag: feminism

GUEST BLOG: I Watched JESSICA JONES, and My Hands Froze, by James Wylder

On By Luther M. SilerIn Television11 Comments

Day Three of guest blogs; there will be one more tomorrow morning, although it won’t be strictly necessary since I’ll be home.  I’m incredibly proud that James trusts me enough to let me run this; it’s an amazing piece and it deserves more attention than I’m probably able to produce for it.  That said, for the second time in two days, I’m gonna let y’all have a trigger warning, as this one also could be hard to read.  

I do not have the sort of readership who I need to warn to behave in comments, so I won’t.

Man, I hope this con is going well.

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We were sitting in the room together, me and my friends. I’d been warned, and so I warned them.

“I might need to leave the room while we’re watching, just so you know.”

“So… Pause it?”

“No, uh, I was told there was some content I might not be able to handle. So if I can’t handle it…”

“Got it, so you want us to give a holler when it would be over?”

“Yes, that would be wonderful.” I love my friends, it was good they got it, without me having to explain further. I tucked the blanket under my feet. Good, we can finally watch Jessica Jones.

I’d been waiting for this show for a while now, but I’d been scared. I thought about watching it alone, but I decided it was a bad idea. I’ve mostly dealt with my issues, mostly, but some things don’t ever really go away, you just hope you dealt with them enough to that you can stop dealing with them on a day to day basis. Eventually you stop crying yourself to sleep, eventually you stop having to leave parties because you feel so worthless you can’t stand being around people. Eventually you stop yelling at people for what seems like no reason when they say something innocuous about a TV show. Eventually.

But it still comes up. A few months ago I drove down to visit a friend, and he decided to show me one of his favorite story arcs of a show I’d only seen the first season of: the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. We were watching it, eating sloppy Taco Bell food and discussing things when there wasn’t much dialogue. Usual, normal.

Then the scene happened.

When I next was in control of myself, I was in a Wal-Mart. I’d driven there, I guess, I mean, I had to have. The tiles in front of me were strangely white against the florescent light. I had put my shoes on, but I hadn’t grabbed my coat. I recalled that it had been dark outside, that was something. I had texts on my phone, and I reassured my friend I was okay. I’d lost maybe twenty minutes. This hadn’t happened in years. It was terrifying. I paced the aisles, and decided I’d try to fix one of the license plate lights on my car. I went out to it. I found what kind of light I needed. I bought it, and realized I didn’t have a screwdriver. I bought a screwdriver. I went back in because it was the wrong kind of screwdriver. I bought another screwdriver. My hands shook. I fixed the damn light, and went back into the Wal-Mart, shielded by its 24-hour capitalism. Eventually, I cooled down enough to drive back to my friend’s. The roads were empty. I put on “Keep the Streets Empty for Me” by Fever Ray, because a lack of subtlety is my specialty.

When I got back, I tried to play it cool. I got hugs. I hated that this still affected me.

What exactly happened to me doesn’t matter. Don’t ask. Its not even one thing. That’s not the point here. I’m not telling. I don’t want to tell you.

What does matter, is that I watched Jessica Jones, and my hands froze. This might sound strange, but it was a reassuring reaction. Usually, when sexual assault is portrayed in media, its for shock value. It happens so people can react to it. Its a motivator, and then the heroes can sweep in and save the day, or whatever. Sometimes what happens isn’t even treated as a serious issue, its laughed off, its forgotten about the next episode, or the perpetrator is brought into the main cast. Sometimes, I just can’t take seeing it. Sometimes, the only thing my body can do is run. And then I end up in a Wall-Mart in the middle of the night.

But when I watched Jessica Jones, I didn’t run. It was hard to watch. My hands froze: I couldn’t make my fingers move, and I was sure the guy next to me could hear me whispering to my fists “come on, you can do it, you can do it…” as I slowly got my arms to work, then each of my fingers (my legs followed after), but I didn’t run. Sure, I cried myself to sleep later, but whatever. There was something different about this show, and while it was difficult, it felt safe in a way it didn’t usually feel, because the show understood that Jessica Jones wasn’t a victim to be saved, but a person who had to keep living her damn life.

So often when rape or sexual assault is portrayed, the narrative treats the survivors of the assault as needing to be redeemed. They need to be saved. They need to be purified. But we were never dirty, we were never in need of redemption. We were just us, and people did horrible things to us, but fuck them not us. Jessica Jones isn’t broken, she has PTSD. She uses techniques to get herself steadied and stop dissociation I’ve used and seen others use. She goes to work, she does her job, she has friends, she lives her life, she has flashbacks, she struggles, but she lives. She pushes other people away, she lashes out at people she shouldn’t, she has problems, she won’t ask for help and hates it when people do things for her, and I know exactly how she feels.

David Tennant plays Killgrave, aka the Purple Man, aka the scariest character ever, who manages to pick up on so many traits of rapists and abusers that you could probably make some sort of checklist out of them. He controls your mind, and honestly I can’t think of a better analog for the feeling of powerlessness that those things do to you. There is damage done by it. His careless hedonistic evil is so casual, so compassionless, and so shockingly real. At one point in the show, spoilers, he makes Jessica send him a picture of her every day at a set time. He doesn’t need to do this, he can mind control people to take her picture if he wanted to. No, he wants the power over her. He wants to know she is under his thumb. To me, Killgrave is the scariest villain, because he is the villain I know. He is the villain who is given fist bumps over beers afterwards, and the one who is defended later. He’s the one people don’t unfriend on Facebook, because sure what he did was wrong, but everyone makes mistakes. I’m sure you both did something wrong, they will continue. Smile, they’ll say, he’ll say. The look in their eyes will tell you they think it shouldn’t bother you anymore. They’ll call you broken behind your back.

I got my fingers unclenched, and I could move. I’d conquered by body, and I could enjoy the rest of the episode. It was still hard to watch, but it understood. It understood like so few people really did, that you can heal the damage, wipe away the bruises, but the damage lingers inside you. And I’m damaged, but I’m not broken. I’m a superhero. And even if you ran away, you are too.

#FeministFriday: Advice for #NotAllMen on How to Occasionally be Less of an Asshole

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics24 Comments

shut_up__listen_and_learn_by_cdckey-d4afs9aA couple of weeks ago I was at the doctor’s office.  They have a receptionist who is, oh, I dunno, in her mid-twenties and generally fairly lovely.

Since the last time I was in there (I’ve been spending my share of time at the doctor’s office lately) she’d dyed her hair grey.  I’ve come to understand that that’s becoming a thing.  If so, I approve.

As I was waiting, an elderly woman emerged from her appointment and engaged this young lady in conversation about her hair.  She was quite complimentary about it.

Damn right, I thought.  The grey hair looked great on her.

And I didn’t say a word about it to anyone.

Why?

Here is a rule for men who want to be either better people or better feminists, and frequently I have found that those two goals overlap:  practice the fine art of keeping your opinion to yourself a bit more often.  You will be surprised at how much it helps!  And, here’s the awesome part: never once will keeping your trap shut about your opinion on a stranger’s appearance be harmful.  Not once!  Not ever!

Is it entirely possible that me telling this young woman (a good fifteen years younger than me, if undeniably an adult, so I think I can get away with that title) would have made her feel good for a few moments?  Sure!  Sometimes people like getting compliments from strangers.  This is true!

It is also possible that at work is not a place where she’s particularly interested in getting opinions from strange men on her decisions about her hair.  Is this gender-specific?  Not necessarily.  While she was gracious to the old lady, she could have been gritting her teeth on the inside.  It’s possible that the old lady was the 44th person that day to tell her she liked her hair and it was getting aggravating.  (True story!  I once snapped at someone for saying Happy Birthday to me, because I’d heard it so many times that day it was starting to sound like an insult.)

Simple fact, dude: She doesn’t need your opinion on her hair.  She didn’t need my opinion on her hair.  She’s at work.  She’s not very much in the be complimented by fat bald married men on her hair zone.  There are literally no circumstances under which I would tell, say, the male nurse, or the dude sitting across from me in the waiting room, that I liked his hair.  So there should also be literally no circumstances under which I tell the female receptionist my opinion on her body.

But I don’t mean to be creepy!  I just want to give her a compliment!

Doesn’t matter, shut up.  A thing I tell my students on a fairly regular basis: your opinion is not necessary here.  Similarly, it is virtually never the case that my opinion is necessary on someone’s appearance, even if that opinion is a positive one.  If there’s even a tiny chance that me talking to her about her appearance is going to make her uncomfortable– and there is way more than a tiny chance of that— then I need to keep my opinion to myself.

But how do I get to know people if I don’t approach them in public, you ask?

Maybe go to places where people meet each other.  I hear good things about parties and clubs and bars.  There are probably other places, too!  But here’s the thing: even in those places, maybe you don’t start with the body talk?  Find something else about the person other than their body to start the conversation with, if you can.  You never know!  It might work out!

She’s at work.  Leave her the hell alone.

16b138fIt is, in fact, rather astonishing how often the “Shut Up” rule works well for men when dealing with feminist issues.  I know, guys: as men, and particularly as white men for those of us who are both, we’re used to society valuing our opinion– to the point where we’ve allowed ourselves to believe a conversation isn’t complete until we’ve weighed in on it.

Here is a thing that every woman alive knows more about than every white man alive: being a woman.  Therefore: if a woman is discussing her experiences and her opinions about her own womanhood with or (especially) near you, it is probably best if you shut the hell up and listen.  This is particularly true if you disagree with her.  If she tells you someone catcalls her every time she leaves the house, and you were with her one time and nobody catcalled, maybe you keep your mouth shut about that.  Because you know what?  Other dudes saw her with a dude.  Which means she was already owned by somebody.  And they kept their mouths shut, because that one was taken.

She. Knows. Better. Than. You. About. Being. A. Woman.

What, you’ve never catcalled a woman?  Have a cookie; hopefully you can bake them on your own.  Shut up anyway.

Are there women who like having things shouted at them by random men?  Sure.  There are also people who think voting for Ben Carson is a good idea.  There’s lots of crazy ideas out there.  But we’re talking about your behavior here, and unless the woman is wearing a sign saying “PLEASE TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT MY CLOTHES AND BODY” you probably ought to assume that she’s not interested in what you have to say.  Note that wearing revealing clothing is not the same thing as wearing a sign inviting comment.

Dude, all these goddamn rules.  How the hell do I even talk to women anymore?  Feminists are so fucking touchy!

Pretend she’s a dude.  If you wouldn’t say anything to a dude under that circumstance, chances are you probably shouldn’t say it to her.  You ever walked past a guy on the street and told him he should smile once in a while?  No?

Don’t say it to women.

There’s nothing new in this post at all, by the way.  If you happen to be reading it and nodding your head and thinking shit, this makes some sense, you probably should have been listening to women, because they’ve said this to you before– they’ve said it to all of us— and you didn’t listen.  You’ve never seen my cock, I promise, so I have no idea why it makes the stuff I say more worthy of attention than it would be if someone without one had said it, but unfortunately that’s how it works in American society right now.

So, yeah.  Shut up.

The classroom’s coming along

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching6 Comments

How the hell do I only have one more day until school starts?  Christ.IMG_2843

In previous classrooms the Hulks have lived near or behind my desk.  About 80% of those were gifts from students and a few of them are actually handmade.  We’ll see if I can trust these current classes to not mess with my stuff.  Crossing fingers.

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Bulletin board, front of room, to the right of the whiteboard.  Plan is for the girls to add other professions to the extra space; there’s room to put pictures to the right of the bulletin board.  The mirrors are held on with Velcro.  I’m kinda proud of this one.

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My desk, such as it is.  Note three different computers in use at the same time, which is not atypical.  And one of these days I should probably tell the story of the green thing on the wall back there; I think it might entertain you.

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Data walls, calculators.  Pbbbbbbbbt.

IMG_2844And the rest of the room.  The desks and tables are where I want them but there’s still a lot of organization to be done, as well as at least one more decoration thing that’s going above the whiteboard and will take a couple of hours.

Maybe I can convince the boss to let me come in on Sunday, no one but a teacher ever thought.

Sigh.

#FEMINISTFRIDAY: On Teaching Girls, As a Guy

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching31 Comments
ChristaMcAuliffe-1
Christa McAuliffe.

“You’re teaching an all-girls’ class?  I’m not sure I feel like that’s right.”

I heard that for the first time… wow, was it four years ago?  Probably.  My homeroom was all girls, and my afternoon class was a mixed group.  I did not reply the number of girls in my classroom doesn’t actually make me more likely to be a sex criminal, ma’am, which was probably the right answer– I am either too much of a degenerate to teach middle school students or I am not, and the composition of my classes doesn’t actually have much of an effect on that– but I don’t remember what I actually said to that mom.  Probably something along the lines of We’ll be fine, and then an abrupt ending of the conversation, because I don’t really like wasting my time with people who blithely suggest that I might be a sex offender as if that’s an okay thing to say to someone.

Hi.  I’m Luther Siler.  And this year, I’m only teaching girls.  Roughly sixty of them, as it currently appears, although with transfers in and transfers out I’ll probably have had seventy to eighty different girls in my room by the end of the school year.  Fifth grade, math and science, meaning that the majority of them will be 10- and 11-year-olds.

Margaret_Hamilton
Margaret Hamilton.

I’m a proponent of single-sex education, although probably not for the reasons that you think.  I’ve found most of the Mars vs. Venus, boys-and-girls-learn-differently brain science stuff to be bunk.  Are there better ways to educate a group of boys and better ways to educate a group of girls?  Yeah.  But you’re identifying a trend, there, and single-sex education is not any more one-size-fits-all than anything else in education is.  I’d have been completely miserable as a boy in an all-boys’ class.  And I hate teaching all-boys’ classes.  I get along with girls better.  I get along with women better than men, too, and all my closest friends have always been women.  So, yeah.  I’m a straight cis dude, external genitalia to prove it, and your daughter will learn from me better than your son will, because that’s how I’m wired.

She will not learn from my genitalia.  Those will not be involved.  Just so I’m clear.  The learning will mostly be from, like, talking and gestures and stuff like that, like normal teaching.

Isis Anchalee.
Isis Wenger.

Anyway.

Teaching girls at the middle school level puts me in an interesting position.  Fifth and sixth grade is typically where girls start disengaging from subjects like math and science, because those subjects are perceived (and, too often, presented) as being For the Boys.  Nobody ever hears about a Boy Scientist, because the boy part is assumed.  Girl Scientist is practically a job description.  And fifth grade is when puberty starts hitting, and suddenly the world doesn’t make any sense anymore anyway.  It’s a hell of a transition year.  Social drama starts ramping up something fierce.  They start fighting over boys– boys who, at that age, generally can’t be bothered to give a damn about the girls fighting over them.  And navigating friendships is the scariest and most complicated thing imaginable.

520px-RIAN_archive_612748_Valentina_Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova.

My job, as their teacher, is to help them work their way through all of that.  My job, as their male teacher.

Don’t worry.  I’m actually pretty good at it!  But it’s complicated.   Because here’s the thing: my main job isn’t actually math or science.  My main job is confidence.  My most important job is that these sixty or seventy young girls walk out of my classroom feeling like they are unstoppable.  What does that mean?  It means teaching as a feminist.  It means being a white cis het guy and creating a comfortable and safe multicultural feminist space for my students to learn in anyway.

And it frequently means having to hide that I’m doing it, which is part of what brought me to this topic today.  I teach, again, math and science to fifth grade girls.  I have discovered a fascinating thing over my years as an educator: if I say the word feminist in class, whatever I’m trying to do is instantly derailed.  The girls often don’t like the label, even though they’ll agree that any individual tenet of feminism that I might name is a true and/or correct thing.  Then they go home and tell their parents about it and all the sudden I’ve got to have a conversation with the principal.  So I’ve got to be sneaky about it.  At ten, I’m not sure they really need to have conversations about intersectionality in math class anyway, y’know?  But subtlety works.  I try and use the word she whenever I’m talking about a mathematician or a scientist.  I use pictures like this one rather than a typical white guy in a lab coat.  And I try to teach them, as much as I can, to stand up for each other rather than tear each other down.  That’s teaching feminism, even if I don’t call it that.

Marlena Jackson.
Marlena Jackson.

Should I, though?  Should I make a point of naming feminism in my classroom?  I don’t know.  It does run the risk, of course, of pissing off parents– either because they have a poor opinion of feminism or the somewhat more personally acceptable feeling that maybe their kid’s math teacher should be focusing on math and not politics.  And they are, again, eleven.  I don’t know that they need the word so long as they’re getting the concept.

Then again, I don’t have the kind of principal who is going to get mad at me because I call myself a feminist in class and some yahoo has an issue with it, so maybe I do need the word.  I don’t know.  That might be a question for smarter people to answer for me.

 

Quick note: I’ll be at school all day, so if I don’t respond to comments until, say, early evening, please don’t take it personally.  Phone reception in my building is terrible.

The Whiner 3

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy3 Comments

UnknownDon’t even bother reading this post.  Seriously.  It ain’t worth it.

So I’m maybe halfway through Bloodborne, which I’m still enjoying quite a bit.  Despite the rumors of punishing, horrifying difficulty, I’m finding that I’m going through it at a fairly steady (if slow) pace, although who knows what the game has left in store.

I have maybe three hours a week to play.  Maybe.  Probably not even that much.  The game will last several more weeks at this rate, especially if it gets harder.

The Witcher 3, which has a dumb name, came out, oh, a couple of weeks ago.  It’s an open-world RPG in the vein of Skyrim or Dragon Age: Inquisition.  I loved Skyrim.  I hated DA:I, although it took me a while to be able to admit it.  I’m hearing stories that there are 200 hours of play in The Witcher 3.

Five years ago, that woulda been some exciting shit.  Now?  It just makes me tired.  That’s not a game, that’s another job.  I’ll be playing it until 2018 at that rate.  I don’t have time for this even if it’s the greatest game in the world, and I’m not starting a 200-hour RPG when I know good and well that I’ve got no time to play video games any more.

Then I saw this:

And I responded thusly:

For this silly little barely-a-third-of-a-full-Tweet I have received a minor torrent of abuse from a number of derps who I have been blocking as quickly as they can derp. This seemingly-innocuous Tweet has received over eight thousand impressions, which is ridiculous.

Then I found this article.  Which… okay, I’ve got a kid, right?  So I’ve done The Sex a couple of times.  I’m okay with it!  And I like naked people, and I have watched more porn than you have.  But sex in vidya gaemz has never ever been anything other than awkward and creepy, and I watched part of one of those videos and wanted a shower.  And apparently there are a bunch of places where there is pixel-sex.  No thank you!

And it appears that not wanting to play this game makes derps angry enough in their teeny little souls that they try and argue with me about playing it over Twitter.

And that’s before reviews that mutter darkly about control issues, which are a real fast way to get your game to piss me off.

So:

  • Control issues;
  • Pixelsex;
  • Absolutely no time for this at all;
  • potential sexism issues, which will get on my nerves;
  • Also apparently everyone is white;
  • makes Twitter assholes angry if I don’t play it;
  • Costs $60 of, let me remind you, my money; none of the derps have offered to buy the game for me;
  • Stupid name.  “Witch” is not a verb.

I guess I’m not playing The Witcher 3, then, am I?

The end.

(I look forward to something that hopefully will not happen, which will be some derp reading this, including this paragraph, where I say nothing you can say will talk me out of this and I don’t actually care if I’ve gotten details wrong about the game, and trying to argue with me/correct me/convince me to buy the game anyway.  It won’t work!  I’ll mock you until I get tired of it and then ban you.  The end!  Again!)

I think I might love this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music1 Comment

You might need a bit of brain bleach after the first minute or so.

I wonder what the rest of the album is like.

IN WHICH OH WAIT THERE IS NO LOVE IN THE UNIVERSE ANYMORE:

So my wife walks in and I show her the previous song.  She sends me to YouTube to listen to this abortion and now I never want to listen to music ever again: 

My very favorite part is where Jesus murders this little kid’s mother on Christmas eve so that this guy has something to think about while he waits in line.

IN WHICH OH FUCK IT WHILE I’M AT THIS:

REBLOG: OMG, Time Magazine- You’re So Cray Cray

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I love it when someone else says things so I don’t have to. Although, sadly, my penis magic would probably mean Time would take me more seriously if I did.

REBLOG: Think That Employee Harassment Complaint Is Too Stupid To Take Seriously? Just Write Your Check To Me Now.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

My wife, a regular Jezebel reader, first alerted me to this situation a couple of days ago.  This response from PopeHat is well worth reading:

 

Last week some writers at Jezebel made a public complaint about its parent, Gawker Media:

For months, an individual or individuals has been using anonymous, untraceable burner accounts to post gifs of violent pornography in the discussion section of stories on Jezebel. The images arrive in a barrage, and the only way to get rid of them from the website is if a staffer individually dismisses the comments and manually bans the commenter. But because IP addresses aren’t recorded on burner accounts, literally nothing is stopping this individual or individuals from immediately signing up for another, and posting another wave of violent images (and then bragging about it on 4chan in conversations staffers here have followed, which we’re not linking to here because fuck that garbage). This weekend, the user or users have escalated to gory images of bloody injuries emblazoned with the Jezebel logo. It’s like playing whack-a-mole with a sociopathic Hydra.

The writers further complained that they had repeatedly informed Gawker Media of the problem, but higher-ups failed or refused to do anything about it. A couple of days later, the writers announced that Gawker Media had responded and was taking steps to deal with trolls barraging them with rape porn.

This complaint was ridiculed in some circles. No, I won’t link them. The ridicule seemed to be based on the propositions that (1) it’s silly to think that Gawker should be responsible for what some third-party troll is doing to its employees, and (2) it’s silly to be upset by that sort of thing….

Go check the rest of the article out.