On moral purity
May. 16th, 2007 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumIn another forum there is a discusion of this collectible.
I made the mistake of addressing the design of the thing (responding to the poster's question about where the tits came from; as the Mary Jane of the movies is less endowed than that).
I also said this didn't change the sexist nature of it.
For this I was castigated. It irked me. The person, making a left-handed accusation of sexist mysogyny (and not so left handed as that), was insulting. Which led me to snark, saying she apparently couldn't be bothered to read all of what I said.
Which was when she made it plain the left-handed insult wasn't me reading into things at all.
Because you see, answering the Original Poster's question of where the model makers got the idea to make Mary Jane Watson into Little Annie Fannie, when the Mary Jane of the film isn't that busty, was wrong.
I was, by not talking about the blatant sexism of the statue, of being more than one-dimensional defender of feminism I was imputed to be supporting it.
Except, by devoting most of your post to defending the picture as "from the comic book, not the movie," with only that small, and yes, easily-overlooked, toss-off line about not changing its sexist nature, you imply that the degree of sexism, like the statue itself, is somehow mitigated by being inspired by the comic and not the movie. It's a matter of focus, proportion, and degree. A tossed-off "yes, but" tucked into the middle of a paragraph defending a misogynist piece of crap (and again, there's a significant degree difference between sexism and full-blown misogyny) does not change the focus of the paragraph.
So I'll rephrase. That it's based on comic-verse MJ and not movie-verse MJ makes this defensible how, exactly? And if you're not defending it on those grounds (which you sure as hell sounded to me like you were, bone-toss to feminism or no), then why point it out at all?
Next time, try paying attention to the focus of your work, your main body, and what you're putting your emphasis on, before you get all snotty because your CYA one-liner, buried under your main point and overshadowed by it, didn't cover your ass the way you assumed it would.
Unless that's too hard for you, and you'd rather just remain an overbearing snot.
That's me, overbearing snot.
While this response annoys me, it's not so much the attack on me, that's annoying, but it's a sort of annoyance I'm used to. People tend to think all sorts of things about me from single comments. I probably do somewhat the same to them, though I like to think I try to read all of what someone said before slagging them. I don't think I'm, quite, slagging the person who said this. No, they didn't have more context on what I think, but I do have some specific accusations to work with. Those, and the things I'm using it to illustrate are all I'm addressing.
What really bothers me is that this sort of demand for purity is what gives so many activists (and it's not just feminists, though the models for the attacks on feminism, "shrill, whiny, ball-busting, etc., seem to be well tailored to this sort of feminist. It becomes a straw-man feature, which can be attacked without going to the substance of the arguments being made, or the points at issue) a bad odor.
I am not a two-dimensional person. It happens I read Spider-man. From the first issue, all the way to the late eighties (my step-father collected comics, I was fortunate enough to get to read them in chunks, so the storylines were much more clear). So the question was one I could answer.
I see the same thing with PETA. People who have gone to "extremism in the defense of virtue," to paraphraise Goldwater. In some ways I think that level of narrowed world-view is worse than the overboard things of ALF, or ELF. Those are less bothersome (and don't tell me about the extremism of PETA, I know. But the cases people bring up [the killing of dogs, for their own good, etc. aren't, quite, the ideals of the whole, though it shades that way. The vast majoritan of PETAns are well-meaning, but driven).
Why? Because they are fighting for a cause. Not metaphoricaly, but in fact. They may be misguided, foolish and stupid, but all we see are the actions.
Those who filter every thing someone says through its applicability to "the movement" lose something of what makes being alive fun. It's what puts people off when they see the super-pious, the die-hard political figure ("What will The Party think if they know I did "x") and every other form of zealotry.
Some things (even bad things) will have aspects which are just the stuff of everyday chatter. Aspects which have no deeper meaning. To attack someone who engages in that, as being unable to see the truth (or worse, to be defending the thing) is to miss the forest for the trees.
And it's bad politics.
I made the mistake of addressing the design of the thing (responding to the poster's question about where the tits came from; as the Mary Jane of the movies is less endowed than that).
I also said this didn't change the sexist nature of it.
For this I was castigated. It irked me. The person, making a left-handed accusation of sexist mysogyny (and not so left handed as that), was insulting. Which led me to snark, saying she apparently couldn't be bothered to read all of what I said.
Which was when she made it plain the left-handed insult wasn't me reading into things at all.
Because you see, answering the Original Poster's question of where the model makers got the idea to make Mary Jane Watson into Little Annie Fannie, when the Mary Jane of the film isn't that busty, was wrong.
I was, by not talking about the blatant sexism of the statue, of being more than one-dimensional defender of feminism I was imputed to be supporting it.
Except, by devoting most of your post to defending the picture as "from the comic book, not the movie," with only that small, and yes, easily-overlooked, toss-off line about not changing its sexist nature, you imply that the degree of sexism, like the statue itself, is somehow mitigated by being inspired by the comic and not the movie. It's a matter of focus, proportion, and degree. A tossed-off "yes, but" tucked into the middle of a paragraph defending a misogynist piece of crap (and again, there's a significant degree difference between sexism and full-blown misogyny) does not change the focus of the paragraph.
So I'll rephrase. That it's based on comic-verse MJ and not movie-verse MJ makes this defensible how, exactly? And if you're not defending it on those grounds (which you sure as hell sounded to me like you were, bone-toss to feminism or no), then why point it out at all?
Next time, try paying attention to the focus of your work, your main body, and what you're putting your emphasis on, before you get all snotty because your CYA one-liner, buried under your main point and overshadowed by it, didn't cover your ass the way you assumed it would.
Unless that's too hard for you, and you'd rather just remain an overbearing snot.
That's me, overbearing snot.
While this response annoys me, it's not so much the attack on me, that's annoying, but it's a sort of annoyance I'm used to. People tend to think all sorts of things about me from single comments. I probably do somewhat the same to them, though I like to think I try to read all of what someone said before slagging them. I don't think I'm, quite, slagging the person who said this. No, they didn't have more context on what I think, but I do have some specific accusations to work with. Those, and the things I'm using it to illustrate are all I'm addressing.
What really bothers me is that this sort of demand for purity is what gives so many activists (and it's not just feminists, though the models for the attacks on feminism, "shrill, whiny, ball-busting, etc., seem to be well tailored to this sort of feminist. It becomes a straw-man feature, which can be attacked without going to the substance of the arguments being made, or the points at issue) a bad odor.
I am not a two-dimensional person. It happens I read Spider-man. From the first issue, all the way to the late eighties (my step-father collected comics, I was fortunate enough to get to read them in chunks, so the storylines were much more clear). So the question was one I could answer.
I see the same thing with PETA. People who have gone to "extremism in the defense of virtue," to paraphraise Goldwater. In some ways I think that level of narrowed world-view is worse than the overboard things of ALF, or ELF. Those are less bothersome (and don't tell me about the extremism of PETA, I know. But the cases people bring up [the killing of dogs, for their own good, etc. aren't, quite, the ideals of the whole, though it shades that way. The vast majoritan of PETAns are well-meaning, but driven).
Why? Because they are fighting for a cause. Not metaphoricaly, but in fact. They may be misguided, foolish and stupid, but all we see are the actions.
Those who filter every thing someone says through its applicability to "the movement" lose something of what makes being alive fun. It's what puts people off when they see the super-pious, the die-hard political figure ("What will The Party think if they know I did "x") and every other form of zealotry.
Some things (even bad things) will have aspects which are just the stuff of everyday chatter. Aspects which have no deeper meaning. To attack someone who engages in that, as being unable to see the truth (or worse, to be defending the thing) is to miss the forest for the trees.
And it's bad politics.
