I love images of Black women in armor, as you can see, I used to have one as my avatar so:
Here! Have a DeviantArt page full of nothing but images of Black men and women in armor:
Basira- Wisdom by Othon Nikolaidis
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Probably one of the funniest phrases I’ve ever seen on the internet is “Its the Goatpocalypse!” It’s then followed by the actual reasons this neighborhood has been taken over by goats, which is almost as funny as the images themselves.
Goat Rentals!
If this happened in our neighborhood, half the residents would be having a complete shitfit while cursing their torn up lawns, and the other half, (probably all the women and children), would be running outside to pet the goats. (A smaller, more pragmatic, contingent would be trying to herd the goats into their garages to milk them.)
The goatpocalypse is upon us. (via KTVBJoe)
Updates have since come on this subject; we now know where the goats came from and I gotta tell you, it is better than you could possibly imagine. See.
These goats got loose from a goat rental service.
You may be thinking, who rents a goat? Who rents a hundred goats? What are they for?
They’re for eating.
Specifically, they’re for eating unwanted, flammable vegetation that can contribute to the spread of wildfires. Some people whose property tends to grow such vegetation, keep their own goats. But for some people it works out better to just rent some goats.
So.
These are Professional Eating Goats. They are trained to thoroughly and methodically scour an area of plantlife. And they came to the suburbs.
And they did their jobs.
I’m so proud of them.
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*Tumblr users discuss exactly why Brooklyn 99, a show I absolutely love despite my general dislike of cop shows, and my awareness that the show is, in fact, a form of propaganda. Now, this was not the argument I made for its being propaganda, but this person does a fine job of outlining the different reasons why it might be considered such. This is not to say you can’t enjoy this show, even if it is. What critics of Pop Culture are actually trying to do is get people to be more mindful of what they’re consuming, not destroy their enjoyment.
So, as I have been briefly visiting some of the B99 tumblrs I see showing up in the notes, I’ve discovered that the tumblr algorithms keep directing me over and over to posts about the question, “Is Brooklyn Nine-Nine just propaganda for cops?”
I have some thoughts about that which I will put below the cut tag. The short story:
1) Any show with cops as protagonists unavoidably becomes cop propaganda.
2) Brooklyn Nine-Nine is overtly idealistic, whereas most cop shows at least pretend to be realistic.
3) At this point in American history, idealist cop propaganda may actually be socially useful, in part because it counterbalances the social effect of realistic cop propaganda.
I could go on about this topic for a long time but I will try to keep it short.
* The position of protagonist is so powerful and the desire to identify with the protagonist is so strong that whoever you put in that role becomes the person that the viewers will attach themselves to and sympathize with. This is true whether the protagonist is good or evil. If your protagonist is a serial killer, the fans identify with and sympathize with the serial killer. If your protagonist is a chemistry teacher gone bad, they will sympathize with the chemistry teacher gone bad *no matter how bad he goes.* It doesn’t matter who you put at the center of the narrative, people identify and empathize with that person. This is why it’s so important that white men are losing their lock on the position of protagonist (and why so many white male viewers are freaking the fuck out over that).
+( Except when, as has not been pointed out here, that primary character is a man of color, in which case, White viewers are quick to vilify them as villains, while giving White male villains, in the same narrative, a pass.)
* In general, crime fiction tends to idealize the detective and more specifically the police procedural tends to idealize the police. Even in the hard-boiled genre where the detective is a deeply flawed antihero, this still happens (see point #1).
* I grew up during the heyday of the “gritty” cop show, which attempted to change this by offering a more realistic depiction of American policing (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, etc.). “Gritty” basically meant more violence, more drugs, and more unethical behavior from the police. You started to see storylines for main characters who were abusing their powers, corrupt, addicted to police brutality. If this was intended as a critique that might motivate people to demand social change, that is definitely not what happened. Instead, this bad cop behavior became the norm, and eventually, the cool and the good. If the protagonist is doing it, then it must be cool. Dirty cops, cops who use excessive force, cops who lie about the excessive force they’re using–all of that was rehabilitated because the cop is, by definition, for most viewers, the ‘good guy’ and if the ‘good guy’ is doing bad things there must be some reasonable/sympathetic explanation for that. Then after 9/11 torture became A-OK for ‘good guys’ to do and that was very bad for the police procedural but I’m not going down that rabbit hole right now.
+(What people don’t take into account is that the people who are cops now also grew up watching all this gritty cop imagery as well.)
* So the “gritty realism” cop drama just became another kind of cop propaganda. A bad kind, to my mind. It got people used to the idea that cops don’t have to obey the laws, that it’s OK to mistreat people as long as you ‘know’ they’re criminals, and that if they steal a little blow or get paid off by the occasional mobster, that’s OK because they do a hard job and they have to deal with the pressure and anyway they’ll eventually be punished for it and that will be tragic and we will feel bad for them.
+(This can be traced as far back as the gritty cop films of the 70s/80s, like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and The French Connection, and even in comedies like Beverly Hills Cop, where the police routinely break the rules of law, and get rewarded for it, because they caught the bad guys. We have an entire generation of Americans who grew up watching countless hours of such plots, and they have not stopped making these movies either.
But I want people to notice the similarity of the tropes in these movies to the constant refrain from apologists of police brutality. Many of their excuses for why the police kill unarmed Black people sound they can be taken directly from the excuses the cops use, in some of the movies.)
* “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is a comedy and not just in the ha-ha-funny sense of the word. It’s comic in a more old-fashioned sense in that it takes place in a world that is, essentially, good and happy and full of fellowship and community. This is precisely why, when you contrast the world of the Nine-Nine with what we know about the actual NYPD, it can seem grotesque (as symbolized by the GIF I opened with, where happy Gina rocks out obliviously as violence and chaos erupt around her).
* But. What is valuable to me about B99 in the context of cop shows is that it has rejected the “gritty realism” definition of a good cop. On B99, a corrupt cop is a bad cop; a bigoted cop is a bad cop; a cop who plants evidence is a bad cop; a cop who’s addicted to excessive force and illegal activity is a disordered and deranged cop (Adrian Pimento). These bad cops are sometimes people’s friends, partners, or idols; but they are not given a pass for that reason, and they are not given protagonist status. They are, or become, antagonists and they are eventually expelled from the Nine-Nine (Pimento is a bit of an outlier, but Diaz does eventually kick him to the curb). The protagonists, meanwhile, are committed to being ‘good cops’–which means following the law, treating people with respect (even if they show up in superhero garb), and being honest.
I think this is deliberate on the part of the show’s creators, and I think they’re deliberately satirizing a lot of the ‘bad cops are cool’ tropes that have become part of the genre. B99 is like what would the Adam West Batman would have been if it had been done after the whole Dark Knight franchise thing instead of before. I mean this is B99′s version of torturing a suspect:
And as Jake points out, it never works.
* This is demonstrated in one of my favorite Charles & Rosa bits. In the S4 episode “The Overmining,” after Rosa discovers that their foot massage parlor is most likely a front for some criminal enterprise, she and Charles have a scene in the briefing room where they discuss what they’re going to do about it. Rosa enlists Charles in the development an elaborate fantasy in which she invents a justification for leaving the foot massage parlor alone. They are briefly enraptured by this collaboration; it’s one of their most charming interactions. But once they reach the end of it, they both look at each other in silence. Then Rosa says, “we’re gonna have to do our stupid jobs,” and Charles says, “Yeah, let me get my stupid gun.” It’s a minor point in a B-plot, but it’s very revealing about the show as a whole. This place hasn’t tried to corrupt them; nobody’s offering them money; only they are aware of the ‘bribe’ that they are considering offering themselves; the chances that they would get ‘caught’ are almost nil. But they still can’t do it; and what’s more, the audience wouldn’t let them do it because the audience knows on some level that even this trivial act of police corruption is unthinkable for Rosa and Boyle. Because they’re good cops, even though at this moment they’re pissed off about it.
* Is that propaganda? Well, it’s propaganda for the idea that cops should be good (brave, honest, and just). Not that cops are good (which is the message sent by traditional police prodecurals in the Law & Order vein) or that cops are brave but can’t be expected to be honest and just (which is the message sent by “gritty realism” cop shows). But that they should be, and that maybe under the right conditions they could be. And in the context of art, that’s what idealism is: a representation of how things *should* be.
* Idealism’s social effects are complicated and some of them are starkly negative. White Americans, for instance, tend to idealize institutions like the police and the courts, and to be resistant to the idea that said institutions perpetuate inequality. That kind of idealism is a function of privilege: if you’ve never been wrongfully accused or convicted, then you can go on for quite a long time believing that nobody else ever has been. On the other hand, idealism is also ultimately the only foundation for progressive politics or for ideas like honesty and justice. This is a central preoccupation of “The Good Place”: in a world without idealism, how can people be good? The only motivation for being good that is not in some way corrupt has to be based on an idealistic belief in *something*–even if it’s just your idealized beloved.
* So, if you believe that policing can never be good–if you, for instance, think that developing a full-time police force is where modern society went wrong, and that social progress depends on dismantling ours–then yes, B99 is part of the problem. B99 uncritically accepts the necessity for a police force and there is no examination of the ways in which even good cops can negatively impact society as a whole. For instance, it’s always accepted that more arrests=good. That’s the metric Holt and everyone else use to determine whether a detective is good at their job: how many people do you arrest and how many of those do you clear. The consequences of the fact that the Santiago/Peralta bet given them both an incentive to arrest people they might not otherwise arrest are not examined. The idea that*fewer* arrests might be desirable is a bridge too far for the characters and the show. In fact, in the B99 universe it’s a problem when crime rates drop because the Nine-Nine is threatened with closure. By getting us so invested in the preservation of the 99th precinct, B99 does get us attached to the idea that we can’t do without the police. To that extent, it is cop propaganda.
* But if you believe that the police must exist but that they should be just and honest, then B99 is part of the solution–because it challenges the idealization of bad policing that has been a trend in US popular culture since at least the 1980s.
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gingerjuju;
I just don’t understand where this concept of ‘fake geek girls’ came from. Like, AT ALL.
Cus when I look for fandom related stuff like 90% of the fan art and the fanfiction and the meta, zines, comics, etc. Like 90% of the shit that I’ve seen is created by women & girls.
And all that stuff take’s a lot of work and research and critical analysis and staring at reference photos for hours.
We are literally the most well versed and invested group in the fandom. So, like, What the fuck boys? You mad you can’t keep up?
I saw an argument, and I can’t find it now, but it totally made sense, that there’s a gender split in fandom. Male fandom tends to be a curator fandom; male fandom collects, organizes, and memorizes facts and figures. Male fandom tends to be KEEPERS of the canon; the fandom places great weight on those who have the biggest collection, the deepest knowledge of obscure subjects, the first appearances, creators, character interactions.
Female fandom is creative. Females create fanart, cosplay, fanwritings. Female fandom ALTERS canon, for the simple reason that canon does not serve female fandom. In order for it to fit the ‘outsider’ (female, queer, POC), the canon must be attacked and rebuilt, and that takes creation.
“Male” fandom devalues this contribution to fandom, because it is not the ‘right’ kind of fandom. “Girls only cosplay for attention, they’re not REAL fans!” “Fanfiction is full of stupid Mary Sues, girls only do it so they can make out with the main character!” “I, a male artist, have done this pin-up work and can put it in my portfolio! You, a female artist, have drawn stupid fanart, and it’s not appropriate to use as a professional reference!”
In the mind of people who decry the ‘fake geek girl,’ this fandom is not as worthy. It damages, or in their mind, destroys the canon. What is the point of memorizing every possible romantic entanglement of heterosexual white Danny Rand if someone turns around and creates a fanwork depicting him as a bisexual female of Asian descent (thus subverting Rand’s creepy ‘white savior’ origins)? When Danny Rand becomes Dani Rand, their power is lessened. What is important to them ceases to be the focus of the discussion. Creation and curatorship can work in tandom, but typically, in fandom, they are on opposite poles.
This is not to say that there aren’t brilliant male cosplayers or smashing female trivia experts, this is to say that the need of the individual fan is met with opposing concepts: In order for me to find myself in comics, I need to make that space for myself, and that is a creative force. Het white cis males are more likely to do anything possible to defend and preserve the canon because the canon is built to cater to them
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And for the serious, more informative part of this post:
This is a list of tropes about Asian women, and that first trope is probably the reason I had such an averse reaction to the Elektra character in Daredevil. For me she was a classic example of The Dragon Lady, being of course, beautiful, evil and mysterious, who seduces Matt and tries to corrupt him. This is especially obvious when she was contrasted against the blonde, wholesome, and virginal, Karen, who is supposed to be good for him. The article also outlines how these stereotypes are harmful to Asian women in the real world.
Oh, yeah don’t forget this kinda newish trope, the rebellious Asian woman with the colorful hair: as seen on the TV show Minority Report, and the movies The Wolverine, Deadpool 2, and Pacific Rim!
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/asian-women-colorful-hair-trope-problem
Recently, a friend and I were talking about growing up Asian American in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, and she told me that when she was in fifth grade, boys teased her on the playground by saying that she had a “sideways vagina.”
This has happened to me, too – and I’m sure to so many other Asian girls.
From racist humor in mid-1800s brothels to today’s playground jokes, the race and gender identity of Asian women is seen as so foreign, so “alien,” that our vaginas magically defy biology.
Throughout my life, I’ve received unwanted comments and questions about my body, specifically my anatomy, including being harassed on the street with calls like, “Ni hao,” “Konichiwa,” “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Korean,” and recently, “Hi Ling Ling.”
On top of that, in my dating history, I was expected to be more quiet and less assertive.
The hyper-sexualization and fetishization of East Asian women is problematic – I am not “lucky” that my race and gender is imagined as sexy and exotic, that Asian women “all so beautiful.”
Or that, an image search of “Asian women” pulls up excessive pictures of women posing in lingerie.
Racial fetishes are about objectification, fetishizing an entire group of people – in this case Asian women, means reducing them down to stereotypes instead of recognizing their full personhood.
Beyond just personal preferences or “having a type,” racial fetishes project desired personality and behavior onto an entire racial or ethnic group.
The fetishization of Asian women even has a name, “yellow fever” – as if the obsession with Asian women were also a disease.
When my identity as an “Asian woman” becomes the only thing that’s important to someone in an interaction, that’s a problem.
This is different from an interracial partnership where all partners are equally respected. Fetishizing someone’s race and gender means not caring about someone as an individual.
So, where did the fetishization and objectification come from? How did Asian women get the hypersexualized stereotypes of being docile and submissive or being dangerous and seductive?
While today, some people might think of fetishes and sexual stereotypes as “not a big deal,” the history behind these tropes is rooted in violence and war, which get oppressively reimagined by mainstream media and entertainment.
Below are five ways East Asian women became fetishized and how that fetishization horribly impacts our lives.
1. Mainstream Media Creates the Submissive ‘Lotus Blossom’ and Evil ‘Dragon Lady’ Stereotypes
“[S]mall, weak, submissive and erotically alluring…She’s fun, you see, and so uncomplicated. She doesn’t go to assertiveness-training classes, insist on being treated like a person, fret about career moves…” —Tony Rivers, “Oriental Girls”, Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1990
Growing up, Lucy Liu was one of the only East Asian women I saw on TV and in movies. It was her, the Yellow Power Ranger (Thuy Trang), and Mulan.
For me, Liu is badass – both for being one of the only Asian American actresses in mainstream Hollywood and also for playing roles that literally kick ass.
However, many of her roles throughout the 90s and early 2000s, such as Ling Woo on Ally McBeal or as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, were also ones that showed Asian women as beautifully evil, aggressive, and also mysterious.
Asian women are often stereotyped as either the dangerously cunning “Dragon Lady” that seduces White men, leading to their inevitable downfall, or as the submissive “Lotus Blossom.”
Both are meant to be demeaning and demonizing.
While there are exceptions, for the most part, mainstream media has created one dimensional, sexualized representations of Asian women that have affected the way they’re perceived by others.
Chinese actress Anna May Wong, the first Asian American actress to be internationally famous in the 1920s, was often cast in stereotypical supporting roles – and passed over for leading roles of Asian characters, which were given to white actresses in yellowface.
One of her most recognized characters was the demure, respectful Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea.The demure, subservient, and delicate “Lotus Blossom” stereotype is intended to cast Asian women as “less than,” both in terms of race and gender.
These stereotypes are seriously harmful. In the US, up to 61% of Asian women experience physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime.
Being docile is specifically about being deferent and obedient, especially to the authority of men.
As our race, gender, and sexuality become ruled by Western and male fantasy, in order to serve men sexually, Asian women must both be “feminine” and “heterosexual” and also either submissive and/or hypersexual.
These double stereotypes of “Lotus Blossom” and “Dragon Lady” reflect the ways that Asian women become transformed into either a sexual servant or embodied as a sexual adventure.
https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/asian-woman-fetishes-hurtful/
Geeking Out about It 