Oops, hypomanic
Jun. 29th, 2014 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyI shall pay for this later. But for now:
ETA 4. I forgot to mention! I understood the first line of a Kpop song just by listening to it! Admittedly all it said was 제발 하지마라 "For goodness' sake, don't do it!" but nonetheless I am proud. :D
1. I picked that the composer for Ouran High School Host Club also did some of the music for Death Note: Yoshihisa Hirano. In fact, I'm not sure that the music accompanying serious scenes (often to bathetic effect) in Ouran aren't in fact from the Death Note soundtrack. (If you're not familiar with these anime, one is an intricate dark fantasy psychological thriller, and one, erm, isn't.)
2. Vampire Knight. These two are totally doing it:
3. A fellow Tumblrer just suggested that we can learn sensitivity from Tumblr: "... every time somebody gets slapped down, you think, hm, better not do/say/think that." I must dispute this. The Onion invented the phrase "seriously uninformed discussion", which describes most "social justice" blogging and comments perfectly. In fact, let's say that 99% of people posting about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, et al, are seriously uninformed*.
Now if that's accurate, as I believe it is, when someone performs a smackdown, the odds are that they are almost exactly as ignorant as the person they are smacking down. All they've learned, and all they can teach, are the correct opinions and buzzwords.
Two case studies. A few years ago I discussed the fact that I was gender non-conforming** as an adolescent and as an adult fan. This attracted a few comments deriding me for trying to impress boys and for offending transgender people. That was partly my fault for expressing myself clumsily; at the time I didn't know the term, or the concept, "gender non-conforming". But neither did the angry commenters.
In South Korea and China, apparently for historical reasons, lighter skin is seen as prettier than darker skin, leading Kpop idols to sometimes tease their darker-skinned friends. Naturally this is very painful to darker-skinned Western Kpop fans, particularly African-American fans, who bear the brunt of a long, damaging history of colourism, the legacy of slavery. When an idol makes one of these hurtful comments, part of fandom will call them racist while the other half will defend them on the grounds that it's a different culture's beauty standards, causing the former half to label them racists*** as well. Neither side will discuss whether or not darker-skinned Koreans face discrimination, as darker-skinned African-Americans do, nor the impact of colonialism and globalism on Asian beauty standards, nor even the indirect harm caused by beauty fascism, because they haven't got the first clue about any of these fucking things. And neither, to my great irritation, have I.
* Having now read a little in these areas, I would say I am about 95% uninformed. (For example, I get a few more of the references in We Didn't Start The Fire.) ETA: Here's one explanation for why people think they know what they're on about when they don't - the illusion of explanatory depth.
** My gender non-conformity has oft attracted fangirl ire, alas. Apparently there is a wrong way to be a girl. Or there could be another explanation: when I did a bit of feminist analysis of gendered activity in fandom, one irritated person remarked, "I don't see gender." ETA: Part of the problem may be the inability to imagine fandom not numerically dominated by women.
*** They are racists, of course. So are the people calling them racists. So am I. We apologise for the inconvenience. My point is that there is little point in dividing people up into racists who have been caught with their feet in their mouths and nice people who haven't. Racism runs a lot deeper than the occasional unacceptable remark, and we should treat it that way.
ETA 4. I forgot to mention! I understood the first line of a Kpop song just by listening to it! Admittedly all it said was 제발 하지마라 "For goodness' sake, don't do it!" but nonetheless I am proud. :D
1. I picked that the composer for Ouran High School Host Club also did some of the music for Death Note: Yoshihisa Hirano. In fact, I'm not sure that the music accompanying serious scenes (often to bathetic effect) in Ouran aren't in fact from the Death Note soundtrack. (If you're not familiar with these anime, one is an intricate dark fantasy psychological thriller, and one, erm, isn't.)
2. Vampire Knight. These two are totally doing it:
3. A fellow Tumblrer just suggested that we can learn sensitivity from Tumblr: "... every time somebody gets slapped down, you think, hm, better not do/say/think that." I must dispute this. The Onion invented the phrase "seriously uninformed discussion", which describes most "social justice" blogging and comments perfectly. In fact, let's say that 99% of people posting about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, et al, are seriously uninformed*.
Now if that's accurate, as I believe it is, when someone performs a smackdown, the odds are that they are almost exactly as ignorant as the person they are smacking down. All they've learned, and all they can teach, are the correct opinions and buzzwords.
Two case studies. A few years ago I discussed the fact that I was gender non-conforming** as an adolescent and as an adult fan. This attracted a few comments deriding me for trying to impress boys and for offending transgender people. That was partly my fault for expressing myself clumsily; at the time I didn't know the term, or the concept, "gender non-conforming". But neither did the angry commenters.
In South Korea and China, apparently for historical reasons, lighter skin is seen as prettier than darker skin, leading Kpop idols to sometimes tease their darker-skinned friends. Naturally this is very painful to darker-skinned Western Kpop fans, particularly African-American fans, who bear the brunt of a long, damaging history of colourism, the legacy of slavery. When an idol makes one of these hurtful comments, part of fandom will call them racist while the other half will defend them on the grounds that it's a different culture's beauty standards, causing the former half to label them racists*** as well. Neither side will discuss whether or not darker-skinned Koreans face discrimination, as darker-skinned African-Americans do, nor the impact of colonialism and globalism on Asian beauty standards, nor even the indirect harm caused by beauty fascism, because they haven't got the first clue about any of these fucking things. And neither, to my great irritation, have I.
* Having now read a little in these areas, I would say I am about 95% uninformed. (For example, I get a few more of the references in We Didn't Start The Fire.) ETA: Here's one explanation for why people think they know what they're on about when they don't - the illusion of explanatory depth.
** My gender non-conformity has oft attracted fangirl ire, alas. Apparently there is a wrong way to be a girl. Or there could be another explanation: when I did a bit of feminist analysis of gendered activity in fandom, one irritated person remarked, "I don't see gender." ETA: Part of the problem may be the inability to imagine fandom not numerically dominated by women.
*** They are racists, of course. So are the people calling them racists. So am I. We apologise for the inconvenience. My point is that there is little point in dividing people up into racists who have been caught with their feet in their mouths and nice people who haven't. Racism runs a lot deeper than the occasional unacceptable remark, and we should treat it that way.
