A Litmus Test For Adequacy of Representation In Genre Media:

Would a child be disappointed in being assigned the character/s representing a given group in a game of pretend based upon the piece of media?

If yes, it’s probably not going to be appreciated.

See “You can be the assistant”

Also so I was reading through a list of communists the other day and a lot of the old school ones were novelists or media creators, and like we don’t do that as much anymore.

I think we need to make more entertainment media that explains and valorizes our perspectives.

I think we need to infiltrate Hollywood

Goddamn Watashi ga Motete Dousunda is too real about the difference between how dudes treat you when you meet standards of conventional beauty vs. when you don’t… which is like hilariously relatable but also depressing

Whorephobia in Harlots and Harlots Fandom

Honestly, a lot of the fandom is whorephobic and terrible and a lot of the writing is whorephobic and terrible (and lazy and unrealistic)

Like Haxby is a little shit, your ship is gross. He’s been blatantly, unforgivably HORRIBLE to Charlotte.

The ship with Marney is honestly amazing because it’s two sex workers who get the biz, who get each other being together HOWEVER it’s being handled in the shittiest fucking “Let me take you away from all this” way and I hate it.

Sex work is being treated as ultimately demeaning and degrading REPEATEDLY

All the misery porn, all the suffering, the fact that Lord Scumbag turned on Charlotte just to make it so that no one could be good at this and be okay with their work, all sex workers have to suffer. They should have let him continue to be the kind of client he is, an impotent pouty man-child who wants the glamorous status symbol and is vexed by her, but like… doesn’t turn massively spiteful and over the top vengeful because he’s not even that determined.

The type of suffering, in my experience as a sex worker, is unrealistic. It should be the moral crusader as the main antagonist, not the rival madame.

The fact that they’ve made pretty much all of the notable clients sadistic fucking monsters says a lot about their view of sex work and sex workers, most clients are just… dudes who want to get off and be told they’re real good at it. You don’t have to make them the antagonists but the writers CHOSE to. They chose to make another madam and the clients their main antagonists when there are SO many other options.

We’re not helpless victims, our clients are largely not monsters.

Can our work never be portrayed as just work?

This should be a lot more slice of life and a lot less over the top and I’m honestly just SO fucking angry with so many of you.

The Get Down Is Like Stranger Things

But with like 70s action and exploitation as the genres it’s mashing up instead of 80s horror and scifi and it’s fucking beautiful

I Wish There Were More Depictions Of People Who Look Like Me

With the types of people I’m actually attracted to/as people with personalities and minds and such.

Most media with women who look like me tends to write women as pretty 2-D, and put us with manly type male power fantasy doodz.

Sometimes There Is A Kind Darkness

As much as we do say “it’s okay to like problematic shit” I do think there’s this weird pressure on the left never to express an interest in what’s dark, what’s ugly, because to express an interest is somehow an endorsement, or a lack of empathy.

Like you know, sometimes looking at photographs of awful skin sores isn’t callous prurience, and sometimes fascination is an attempt to understand what happened, what went wrong, how to stop it happening again, how to fix it.

And you know what sometimes jokes about dark shit are about coping with it, about processing it, about dealing with it (this btw does not mean shitty standup comics should get away with their shit).

This isn’t a post-hoc excuse for bad behavior, for insensitivity, for cruelty or callousness, or failure to listen to people who are too often silenced.

I think though that sometimes there is a sort of callous insensitivity in the demand for cheer, in the demand for light, in the demand that people who have been compared with monsters for their whole lives never identify with monsters unless they’re the defanged cartoon kind.

It’s fucked because I see people getting away with horrible shit because of positionality in terms of their behavior on the one side, but people with similar positionality getting shat on for ever making art that is dark or ugly or scary, for having dark, ugly, scary things in them, and for having the audacity to say so, to show people what’s wrong instead of performing purity and hurting others, passing their pain along.

I Think A Lot Of The Time People Mistake Discussion For Advocacy

Like I can depict war without being pro-war (I’m generally very anti-war except for revolution). I can make art about something without being in favor of it. I can be interested in something without being in favor of it.

I also think people often think media causes society to be a certain way, when I think it’s more usual that media is produced because society is already a certain way and a fucked up society is just expressing what’s already there.

People also seem to think that fetishes are an advocation rather than a response. You know? Like a lot of my fetishes are me working through and dealing with misogyny and stuff surrounding gender I’ve dealt with my whole life and around class and mental illness and just… shit.

And I’m not advocating the way the world has treated me, I’m processing it.

Like the fact that Conan is believable as a heroic badass in tiny leather shorts

and a woman is not believable as a heroic badass wearing the same tiny leather shorts (usually because she’s been written badly and has been cast/drawn/etc based on beauty standards that value feminine fragility) is as much a sign of patriarchy as the fact that they’re always putting women in tiny leather shorts.

So Genderswapped Rick And Morty

Beth/Ben: Thinking about dude Beth, we’ll call him Ben I guess, actually makes you realize what an abusive monster Beth is. Like imagining Ben treating Jeraldine the way Beth treats Jerry? Fuck that’s a seriously abusive relationship. Like Beth has essentially prevented Jerry from ever growing up and has crushed every trace of agency and personality from him. Imagining cowering none too bright Jeraldine with shitty nasty but smart Dr. Ben is awful. Probably gives his mom shit for failing to do feminine gendered labor.

Sort of like this

But a monster

Jerry/Jeraldine: A severely battered wife, chosen for vulnerability because Ben has abandonment issues from his ma, terrified of her husband, desperate for her daughter’s approval. Trying really really hard not to show the hell she’s going through. Emotionally vulnerable

Summer/Winter: Probably like a together punk or emo dude, like a better looking more together version of Robbie from Gravity Falls, you know, moody, grouchy, can be a real dick, but basically decent underneath it all, way more together than his family and kind of smug about it. Has a decent job, does okay when it comes to girls, all around a together if moody and often self centered guy.

So kind of this genre of look-ish:

Morty/Molly: Basically like Meg from the early seasons of Family Guy (so good hearted, basically of unremarkable appearance and intelligence, unglamorous, but you know fundamentally a decent human being and all) with a little bit of Tina from Bob’s Burgers (kinda pervy, kinda weird). People tend to draw this one pretty much right.

Rick/Rochelle: Okay so the “absolute genius and total wreck of a human being” isn’t a character archetype that’s almost ever female, like male examples include House, Hunter S. Thompson and kind of the whole Keith Richards variety of rockstar. It was actually really interesting to think about what the lady equivalent is, and what I came up with is interesting, generally the whole wildly inconsistent, self destructive genius thing in women is accompanied by being kind of glam, like Cat Marnell or Amy Winehouse, and actually the male examples are too, but it’s just buried under a layer of drab masculinity, so like House has his motorcycle and flash electric guitars, and Hunter S Thompson has wild clothes and badass cars and Keith Richards is Keith Richards and even Rick has a kind of weird charisma and parties like a rockstar. So Rochelle is a lady with a mess of a beehive, and fabulous makeup that’s kind of caked on that she’s been wearing for three days, and like she’s probably broken a heel on her fabulous shoe. She’s kind of an aging drunk cabaret diva, kind of a 65 year old nihilist party girl, and absolutely the least nurturing person on earth. She doesn’t have the moral compass to be an actual feminist, but fucking hates sexism because she’s had to put up with it for fucking ever. Probably tells Winter “Eh you’re a whiny little boy” when he asks why she won’t take him on adventures, probably makes fun of Molly’s fashion sense. Dealing with dude scientists in like the 60s is probably one of the reasons she left earth, would tell Ben the fuck off (but also be nasty to Jeraldine for taking his shit, because again Rochelle is a horrible person). Has sex with the pool boy.