fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2030 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2030 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Nana to Kaoru, Oyasumi Punpun, Onani Master Kurosawa]

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03.

[Terry Pratchett]

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04.

[The Hollow Crown: Henry IV]

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05.

[Tori Amos]

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06.

[Dragon Age: Origins]

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07.

[Rihanna, S&M]

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08.

[LotR RPF]

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09.

[On the Road]

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10.

[SM Entertainment - Super Junior, SHINee and EXO]

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11.

[Sherlock]

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12.

[Planescape Torment]

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13.

[The Devil in the White City]

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14.

[CATverse]

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15.

[Fate/stay night]

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16.

[Rammstein]

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17.

[Mass Effect]

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18.

[Metalocalypse]

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19.

[Arashi, V6]

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20.

[Legend of Korra]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 063 secrets from Secret Submission Post #290.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ], [ 1 - personal attack ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I know nothing about you or your situation, but when it happened to me (well, I left rather than "correct" behavior that i didn't feel deserved banning anyway) it was because I'd really invested myself in that community and tried hard to follow its (SJW-y) rules. It hurt to be told that I wasn't enough, to be deemed one of the bad outsiders.

In the end, though, it made me reevaluate my whole life. I mean, not that my whole life revolved around one specific online community. But just... the whole idea that these people I'd invested so much of myself in would do that, that it would end in "Aw, you've been faithful to our ideas for so long, don't act like that and make us ban you!" That opened my eyes, and yeah, I think it being so eye-opening changed my life.

And that reevaluating led me to actually get involved in real-world activism, where it's not about words but about housing, jobs, and civil rights. It was wonderfully freeing.

I don't know if it's an SJ type community or fandom, or if the mods are dicks or if you did something bannable or something in between. But if my experience is at all applicable: sometimes small communities can get really restrictive and even culty.

Cults purge their impure members a lot.

Edited 2012-07-25 00:40 (UTC)

Speaking of, hi again. I simply dropped out of there because everyone I was interested in talking to had already been banned or quit for the same reason you did. Sad, really.

I wondered if I should recognize you. Hi. :-)

Are you talking about FR or one of the other places?

Salon Rose, mostly. I found I started burning out on the feminist blogosphere in general, though, because the conversations get so circular and so divisive. An older woman I met at an irl activist event warned me off the Sex Wars forever - saying it was a conversation that had broken down again and again for decades and was not worth having at the expense of real work. These days, I'm more politically interested in immigrant rights and in economic inequality anyway, and internetwise I drifted back into fandom in 2009 and never left.

Ah. I'm really sad to see that one apparently blew up. I thought most of those people seemed decent, with the exception of "you have butch privilege" lady. I don't even want to guess how many years it's been, and I still remember that one and just go "an-WHA?"

And yeah, I do disability rights now. In real life. As a job. :-) It saddens me that it seems some groups pull it together well enough to have active, cohesive movements, and yet the one oriented around women insists on trying to kill itself. I don't even know.

Edited 2012-07-25 03:22 (UTC)

I honestly don't know if it blew up completely - I just quietly left after some argument or other, and fell out of touch with most people who had stayed. I don't remember any butch privilege wank though I do remember Gauge's genuinely awesome posts about queer masculine privilege and how it intersects with ableism...I don't figure that's what you're talking about, though!

That is awesome :) I still remember when you put aside feminism; your reasoning was something that stuck with me, though I still call myself a feminist.

The wank was some really weird thing I still can't make heads or tails of. We'd been talking about some of the stuff about "problematic" media and I was mentioning some songs that I liked that were just... if you want to find Problems, they are it. Sex Type Thing, Figured You Out, songs like that that are written from the POV of a male who is a rapist/creep/etc. I wanted to talk (among friends who I thought would get it) about what it meant to love that stuff, even after supposed "consciousness-raising" would make you disgusted.

Well, one of the people there (not naming names mainly because you could still be friends with this person, and I really don't want to poison any wells) was bothered by that, and started talking about how those types of songs reflect something creepy about rock n'roll culture, and talked about women getting harassed or raped at concerts. I can't remember exactly what my response was, but I said something about how I can't speak to that experience, as it's never happened to me. I THINK I might have wondered aloud if that had to do with disability.

She went off on this big thing about hadn't I said I was butch/masculine, and that if I was, that protected me from harassment from men at concerts, and I needed to acknowledge that I had something akin to male privilege. She floundered for words a bit and settled on "butch privilege."

It really upset me (and in a funny way kinda still does.) I don't doubt that I never experienced the seamy world of the rock show the way someone who dresses femininely and doesn't hide out in the upper rows does. But the idea that that would mean that I have male privilege, where in those circles that's practically a dirty word... it just felt really weird to me. Especially when I was talking about songs like those songs because they really are deeply problematic and concerning. I was letting my guard down among friends and talking about some kinks I have that, yeah, are precisely the ones that aren't so easily explained away.

Maybe part of what made her feel comfortable doing that was that at the time I was toying with identifying as genderqueer, and she was trying to talk about some FAAB people as a distinct entity from "women?" I don't know, but I felt like I was being told I was unacceptable and invading, and it felt really... well, almost like I was the reverse of the bogeyman people think they see invading MichFest. I never really felt welcome after that.

The same person had some really rigid opinions about yaoi too. I understand that conventions in yaoi manga are often slavishly followed and really ridiculous. But I loved yaoi at the time because I enjoyed seeing depictions where "top or bottom" wasn't some kind of strange question about kink, but where it was just normal and accepted that someone would be one or the other. When I tried to talk about that, the person just got more and more wound up about didn't I see how problematic? and again, it just made things weird.

Honestly part of what I like about my current fandom is actually similar to what I liked about yaoi, in a way. A fair amount of fanon depicts the Decepticons' culture as very permeated with D/s and power dynamics, such that a "vanilla" Decepticon who isn't constantly navigating power struggles and dynamics, including in his/her personal life, would be an outlier. I love the idea of a world where people like me are the norm, rather than the kinky ones!

But I'm sure if I tried to talk in great depth about that in some feminist circles, it would be wanky madness all over again.

wow, that is some impressive victim-blaming (? is that even the term?) going on there. I totally missed that. Wow. Though I did remember you sharing your thoughts on yaoi (...sorry) and, again, that's something you said that stuck with me. I think I remember you framing it as being partly about gender multiplicity - eg. 'male' not being a monolithic identity but instead encompassing multiple other possible genders (seme and uke in the case of yaoi). It's kind of sad that fandom (fandom! with spies and robots and superheroes and stuff!) is a much better space to talk honestly about sexual fantasy than any explicitly feminist space, but that's the way it's happened and I'm just glad it exists. ♥

[ SECRET POST #2030 ]

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