What is life without controversy?
Dec. 4th, 2020 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Black Feminist Activist Professor Loretta Ross Teaches a Course Critiquing the Cancel Culture
This is a rather fascinating article on a controversial topic.
Uncomfortable Conversations’
That perspective has made Professor Ross, 67, an unlikely figure in the culture wars. A radical Black feminist who has been doing human rights work for four decades, she was one of the signatories of a widely denounced letter in Harper’s Magazine, for which she herself was called out. “There’s such an irony for being called out for calling out the calling-out culture,” she said. “It really was amusing.”
Editors’ Picks
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation
Pedophile Scandal Can’t Crack the Closed Circles of Literary France
Did John McCracken Make That Monolith in Utah?
ImageProfessor Ross has been an activist for more than 40 years, and she helped organize a delegation of women of color at the March for Women’s Lives in 1989.
Professor Ross has been an activist for more than 40 years, and she helped organize a delegation of women of color at the March for Women’s Lives in 1989.Credit...Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections
At Smith College, Professor Ross teaches courses called White Supremacy in the Age of Trump, of which the “calling in” module is part, and Reproductive Justice. Yet she tells students when they enroll: “If you need a trigger warning or a safe space, I urge you to drop this class.”
“I think we overuse that word ‘trigger’ when really we mean discomfort,” she said. “And we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations.”
She doesn’t believe people should be publicly shamed for accidentally misgendering a classmate, which she once did, leading to a Title IX complaint that was later dismissed; for sending a stupid tweet they now regret; or for, say, admitting they once liked a piece of pop culture now viewed in a different light, such as “The Cosby Show.”
The Great Read: Every weekday, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go.
“If it were on TV right now, I’d watch the reruns,” she said.
“What I’m really impatient with is calling people out for something they said when they were a teenager when they’re now 55. I mean, we all at some point did some unbelievably stupid stuff as teenagers, right?”
Professor Ross thinks call-out culture has taken conversations that could have once been learning opportunities and turned them into mud wrestling on message boards, YouTube comments, Twitter and at colleges like Smith, where proving one’s commitment to social justice has become something of a varsity sport.
“I think this is also related to something I just discovered called doom scrolling,” Professor Ross told the students. “I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger. And I have to honestly ask: Why are you making choices to make the world crueler than it needs to be and calling that being ‘woke’?”
The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. “It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.
Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it. “Every time somebody disagrees with me it’s not ‘verbal violence.’” Professor Ross said. “I’m not getting ‘re-raped.’ Overstatement of harm is not helpful when you’re trying to create a culture of compassion.”
There was call-out culture when Professor Ross was young. “We called it ‘trashing,’” she said, referring to a term used by Jo Freeman, in an essay in Ms., to describe infighting within the women’s movement.
“It used to be you’d be calling someone out to a duel. This is how Alexander Hamilton got shot!” Professor Ross said. “What’s new is the virality and the speed and the anonymity.”
Image
Ms. Ross spoke on behalf of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center in 1979.
Ms. Ross spoke on behalf of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center in 1979. Credit...Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections
Civil conversation between parties who disagree has also been part of activism, including her own, for quite some time.
As executive director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center from 1979 to 1982, she used her own story of sexual assault to facilitate a conversation with incarcerated rapists, teaching them Black feminist theory.
She worked to improve the participation of women of color as a program director at the National Organization for Women and is credited, along with 11 others, as having coined the term “reproductive justice” — a combination of “reproductive rights” and “social justice” in response to what they believed was missing from Bill Clinton’s 1994 health care reform plan.
Later, as the program and research director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitored hate groups, she found herself on a mountaintop in rural Tennessee, teaching antiracism to women whose families were members of the Ku Klux Klan.
She thought of what her organization’s founder, the Rev. C.T. Vivian — who had been Martin Luther King’s field general — told her when she started her job: “When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.”
And so she was.
In the early 1990s, Professor Ross accompanied Floyd Cochran, once the national spokesman for the Aryan Nations, on a national atonement tour.
“Here’s a guy who had never done anything but be a Nazi since he was 14 years old, and now he was 35 with no job, no education, no hope. And we helped people like them,” she said. After The Los Angeles Times wrote an article about their unlikely friendship, in 1997, Professor Ross and Mr. Cochran were each paid $10,000 for a Hollywood adaptation option of their story. But when the script came back, there was a fatal flaw: It ended with the two falling in love.
“Floyd was married, and I don’t fall in love with Nazis,” Professor Ross said.
Sometime in those years, Professor Ross found herself on a street corner in Janesville, Wis., in the dead of winter, watching as Ken Peterson — a defector from the K.K.K. — filmed an interview with “The Geraldo Rivera Show.” Mr. Peterson and his wife, Carol, had to flee their home quickly, and Ms. Peterson was shivering in the cold.
“I stood there for the first half-hour watching her, and at some point I made the decision to share my coat with her,” Professor Ross said. “I just couldn’t maintain that anger, I couldn’t maintain that posture.”
The idea of “calling in” occurred to Professor Ross at a speech she was organizing at Smith in 2015 to honor Gloria Steinem. What was up with all the nastiness she saw on Twitter, she asked a young woman.
“Oh, you mean ‘calling out’?’’ the woman said.
“You-all named it?’” Professor Ross said in surprise.
She soon assembled a group of students to practice the techniques of “calling in” and took the message on the road. During quarantine this summer, she began offering an online course called Calling In the Calling Out Culture, and is working on a book of the same name.
She has also been hired by nonprofits and women’s organizations to help them grapple with their own reckonings around race and gender. “I wouldn’t call myself a mediator,” she said. “I’m like a one-time consultant, rearranging relationships. ‘We’re on Indian land,’ ‘we’ve got trans students,’ ‘we’ve got buildings named after slave owners.’” The hardest part, she said, is “to convince them is that they aren’t each other’s enemies.”
Image
Professor Ross, pictured at her home in Atlanta, believes calling out has become a kind of “woke competition” in some circles.
Professor Ross, pictured at her home in Atlanta, believes calling out has become a kind of “woke competition” in some circles.Credit...Peyton Fulford for The New York Times
‘Should I Be Concerned?’
Not that Professor Ross is conflict averse. “I have no problem calling out politicians who aren’t living up to the oaths that they swore to,” she said. She cited Colin Kaepernick, someone who quite effectively called out a powerful organization, the N.F.L. “The thing I am sharply critical of is punching down, calling out people who have less power than you simply because you can get away with it. But there is a very strategic use of punching up.”
Indeed, after the #MeToo movement and global protests of police violence in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, employees have called out bosses, consumers have called out corporations, students have called out peers, and victims have called out abusers.
“Folks have figured out that social media shaming and attention makes things happen,” said Meredith Clark, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia who recently published a study of call-out culture called “Drag Them.” “It evokes apology from things and places that wouldn’t normally enter into that sort of dialogue, and it allows people who otherwise would have no recourse to influence their own experiences.”
More troublesome, Professor Ross and others agree, is when small infractions become big infractions; when context gets lost and facts are distorted, or it becomes difficult to discern between the two.
“These algorithms can’t distinguish between outrage and shaming that is proportionate and outrage and shaming that is disproportionate to the original transgression,” said Molly Crockett, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University who studies moral outrage online.
I agree. I've changed more minds in my lifetime with kindness than shaming or self-righteous ranting. I turn people off when I attack them.
There was an individual back in 2016-2017, who was VERY conservative that I ended up losing my temper with. They were pro-Capitalism and hated socialism, any type of socialism. (Folks? I work in a State and Federally funded agency.) And they felt that the US was the promised land because it was Capitalist and Brexit would get them to it. I felt, and still do, that Brexit was a xenophobic response to immigration, specifically the Syrian immigrants fleeing Syria at the time and being thrust at Britain by the European Union (specifically Germany). The same thing happened in the US - Trump was largely a result of xenophobia or the influx of Middle Eastern immigrants from Syria, and other locals. (Although both were more complicated than that - and both were for similar reasons.)
They also had issues with my terminology, and were upset over a female Doctor Who (which still makes no sense to me.)
Instead of being kind, I got angry and annoyed. I regret that. They've pushed my buttons and I couldn't think clearly. I deal better with this in person - I walk away. Or don't discuss it. I should do the same thing with emails and responses to social media entries. Walk away. I've started to do that - it works very well. People forget. The posts get lost. It's not all that important in the scheme of things. I mean people are dying daily. Life is far too short to get upset with someone on social media.
Also, I've been reading "How to be an Anti-Racist" and it really gets across how we are all guilty of racist (etc) behavior and it's best addressed by calling it out in ourselves and others, but not by demonizing the person. JK Rowlings is not a bad person, she just has transphobic views colored by ignorance and intolerance, and needs to be called out on those views. She doesn't need to be attacked and ripped to threads online. That solves nothing. Hate breeds hate. And the hardest thing in the world, and what takes the most courage is to address someone who hates, with kindness. I wish I was better at it. I'm trying. All I can do is try to do better. I can't do anything about anyone else.
It's kind of like wearing a mask. Today, on the subway back from my doctor's appointment - I saw this man without a mask. It occurred to me that he was poor, he wore threadbare clothes, carried a skateboard, and didn't appear to know English - also seemed not quite right in the head. I offered him the two masks I had in my purse, he refused. So I realized it was best to pull away and put space between us. I was furious of course, and frustrated. He was the only person on the train without a mask. And the train was spotless, and cleaner than you can possibly imagine. But at the end of the day? I can only control me, no one else. And I was scared, and embarrassed that I couldn't ignore him as well as all the others on the train appeared to.
2. The Crown Stokes Uproar Over Fact vs. Fiction
I talked to my mother about the Crown - my parents had finished watching the latest season. They agreed with the critics - it's not quite as good as previous seasons. Part of the problem is much of this season takes place during a period of time and regarding a series of events - that have been written to death about. We've all seen the story played out before - both in press reals, live coverage, tell-all books, movies, and television documentaries and mini-series. We've all watched the wedding. We've all
seen the accounts of how horrible Diana's life was in the palace and how nasty Charles allegedly was to Diana.
Add to that - the people are still living and the wounds are still raw.
Mother didn't think they handled Thatcher or Diana all that well. And really didn't like how they portrayed Camilla and Charles. And my mother doesn't care that much - she's ambivalent about the royal family and Thatcher. I can only imagine how people who do care - reacted.
I've not seen it yet. Will most likely watch it over the holidays along with His Dark Materials and The Expanse.
3. Hillbilly Elegy - which a lot of the folks (the ones who care about such things) have decided is a disgrace and misses the point.
Ron Howard Defends Hillbilly Elegy Against Various Critics
Negative Review
This is the book everyone felt the need to read after the 2016 election in order to figure out why Trump was elected. (I didn't read it - I already knew why Trump was elected, and wasn't at all surprised by it - actually kind of saw it coming. I work with Trump Supporters - also Wales brothers and sister supported Trump. And I had an uncle who voted for him. Add to that - I know a lot about the working class in the United States.)
My parents read it - found it interesting, but didn't recommend it. It's a memoir - memoir's always are problematic. Also, in the book I'm currently reading "How to be an Anti-Racist" - the author's professor states that everything in life is subjective. Objectivity is impossible. Very true. Memoirs tend to be a subjective view of one's past, family, etc.
I really have no interest in a Harvard Law School Granduate's take on his dirt poor Kentucky roots.
But, Janis Ian apparently loved the movie. So I may watch - just to see what it's like - plus it has a decent cast.
4. The Prom...
James Corden Should Stay the Hell Away From the Prom
Corden, who is straight, is so bad in The Prom—somehow both appalling and terminally bland—that it had me thinking maybe the hardliners were right along. Forget the whole case-by-case thing: No more straight actors playing gay men until the sins of The Prom are properly atoned for. Murphy, a gay man, has led some straight actors into fertile gay territory before, like Darren Criss in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. But Corden, flitting and lisping around in the most uninspired of caricatures, misses all potential for nuance, and thus never finds even a hint of truth in the role. And this is in a movie that’s supposed to be about empowering queer people!
This was posted on FB, and the poster stated that only gays should play gay roles. And I thought, but what about all the gay men and women who played straight roles? Also doesn't that limit actors?
It is acting after all. They play people who are nothing like them all the time.
What's odd though, is Ryan Murphy produced and directed this - the same Ryan Murhpy who produced and directed Disclosure, which makes the point that only transgenders should play transgender roles. So why did he cast James Cordon and why did he direct him in this manner?
What a lot of people don't understand about movies - is the actor really doesn't do that much. It's 98% director. On television? 98% writer (who is often also the director). If you want to see an actor actually do anything - watch theater.
So if Cordon is bad in the Prom, a lot that is bad direction or directorial choices. A better question is why did Ryan Murphy, who happens to be gay, go that route?
If you want to limit gay roles to gay men, and trans roles to trans, then you may have to limit it across the board - which I don't think people will like. Personally, I'd be annoyed - since I think Matt Boomer is rather good in straight roles, as were Richard Chamberlain, Kristin Stewart, Barbara Stanwyk, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson and James Dean. It would be a shame to have limited them.
Again, I don't think that was the problem here - as the critic points out in the review - but the individual who was cast. But, what is striking to me - is the critic briefly falls into the trap of "sexualizing" behavior or "genderizing" behavior. (As did the individual who posted it on his FB page.) Cordon just happened to be bad in the role. He's not bad in the role because he's heterosexual or straight, but because he made some odd choices on how to portray it or he just isn't right for those roles or he was directed oddly.
It has absolutely nothing to do with his sexuality. A homosexual could have been bad in the role.
It's kind of like stating someone is racist because of their skin tone. Skin tone has zip to do with your behavior. Or that someone is a criminal because of there ethnicity - no, they are a criminal because they chose to be a criminal. I remember, when a co-worker told me that I better check if someone was a terrorist based on their name - I quipped, "watch it, your prejudice is showing".
Everyone needs to read Ibrahm Kendi's How to be an Anti-racist. I'm starting to understand what this book was constantly thrown in my face over the summer. It hammers home the point that we all need to review our own behavior for racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia and do better. The nice thing about NYC, my workplace, my church and the people I've chosen to surround myself with in life, including where I live, is my prejudices are constantly examined and challenged. I'm constantly discovering that I've made an unfair generalization or screwed up, and have judged and/or categorized this person or persons behavior based on "identity politics" and not on who they are as individuals.
It's hard. It's so ingrained in all of us. It's like a muscle that you have to constantly retrain to think differently.
This is a rather fascinating article on a controversial topic.
Uncomfortable Conversations’
That perspective has made Professor Ross, 67, an unlikely figure in the culture wars. A radical Black feminist who has been doing human rights work for four decades, she was one of the signatories of a widely denounced letter in Harper’s Magazine, for which she herself was called out. “There’s such an irony for being called out for calling out the calling-out culture,” she said. “It really was amusing.”
Editors’ Picks
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation
Pedophile Scandal Can’t Crack the Closed Circles of Literary France
Did John McCracken Make That Monolith in Utah?
ImageProfessor Ross has been an activist for more than 40 years, and she helped organize a delegation of women of color at the March for Women’s Lives in 1989.
Professor Ross has been an activist for more than 40 years, and she helped organize a delegation of women of color at the March for Women’s Lives in 1989.Credit...Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections
At Smith College, Professor Ross teaches courses called White Supremacy in the Age of Trump, of which the “calling in” module is part, and Reproductive Justice. Yet she tells students when they enroll: “If you need a trigger warning or a safe space, I urge you to drop this class.”
“I think we overuse that word ‘trigger’ when really we mean discomfort,” she said. “And we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations.”
She doesn’t believe people should be publicly shamed for accidentally misgendering a classmate, which she once did, leading to a Title IX complaint that was later dismissed; for sending a stupid tweet they now regret; or for, say, admitting they once liked a piece of pop culture now viewed in a different light, such as “The Cosby Show.”
The Great Read: Every weekday, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go.
“If it were on TV right now, I’d watch the reruns,” she said.
“What I’m really impatient with is calling people out for something they said when they were a teenager when they’re now 55. I mean, we all at some point did some unbelievably stupid stuff as teenagers, right?”
Professor Ross thinks call-out culture has taken conversations that could have once been learning opportunities and turned them into mud wrestling on message boards, YouTube comments, Twitter and at colleges like Smith, where proving one’s commitment to social justice has become something of a varsity sport.
“I think this is also related to something I just discovered called doom scrolling,” Professor Ross told the students. “I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger. And I have to honestly ask: Why are you making choices to make the world crueler than it needs to be and calling that being ‘woke’?”
The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. “It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.
Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it. “Every time somebody disagrees with me it’s not ‘verbal violence.’” Professor Ross said. “I’m not getting ‘re-raped.’ Overstatement of harm is not helpful when you’re trying to create a culture of compassion.”
There was call-out culture when Professor Ross was young. “We called it ‘trashing,’” she said, referring to a term used by Jo Freeman, in an essay in Ms., to describe infighting within the women’s movement.
“It used to be you’d be calling someone out to a duel. This is how Alexander Hamilton got shot!” Professor Ross said. “What’s new is the virality and the speed and the anonymity.”
Image
Ms. Ross spoke on behalf of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center in 1979.
Ms. Ross spoke on behalf of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center in 1979. Credit...Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections
Civil conversation between parties who disagree has also been part of activism, including her own, for quite some time.
As executive director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center from 1979 to 1982, she used her own story of sexual assault to facilitate a conversation with incarcerated rapists, teaching them Black feminist theory.
She worked to improve the participation of women of color as a program director at the National Organization for Women and is credited, along with 11 others, as having coined the term “reproductive justice” — a combination of “reproductive rights” and “social justice” in response to what they believed was missing from Bill Clinton’s 1994 health care reform plan.
Later, as the program and research director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitored hate groups, she found herself on a mountaintop in rural Tennessee, teaching antiracism to women whose families were members of the Ku Klux Klan.
She thought of what her organization’s founder, the Rev. C.T. Vivian — who had been Martin Luther King’s field general — told her when she started her job: “When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.”
And so she was.
In the early 1990s, Professor Ross accompanied Floyd Cochran, once the national spokesman for the Aryan Nations, on a national atonement tour.
“Here’s a guy who had never done anything but be a Nazi since he was 14 years old, and now he was 35 with no job, no education, no hope. And we helped people like them,” she said. After The Los Angeles Times wrote an article about their unlikely friendship, in 1997, Professor Ross and Mr. Cochran were each paid $10,000 for a Hollywood adaptation option of their story. But when the script came back, there was a fatal flaw: It ended with the two falling in love.
“Floyd was married, and I don’t fall in love with Nazis,” Professor Ross said.
Sometime in those years, Professor Ross found herself on a street corner in Janesville, Wis., in the dead of winter, watching as Ken Peterson — a defector from the K.K.K. — filmed an interview with “The Geraldo Rivera Show.” Mr. Peterson and his wife, Carol, had to flee their home quickly, and Ms. Peterson was shivering in the cold.
“I stood there for the first half-hour watching her, and at some point I made the decision to share my coat with her,” Professor Ross said. “I just couldn’t maintain that anger, I couldn’t maintain that posture.”
The idea of “calling in” occurred to Professor Ross at a speech she was organizing at Smith in 2015 to honor Gloria Steinem. What was up with all the nastiness she saw on Twitter, she asked a young woman.
“Oh, you mean ‘calling out’?’’ the woman said.
“You-all named it?’” Professor Ross said in surprise.
She soon assembled a group of students to practice the techniques of “calling in” and took the message on the road. During quarantine this summer, she began offering an online course called Calling In the Calling Out Culture, and is working on a book of the same name.
She has also been hired by nonprofits and women’s organizations to help them grapple with their own reckonings around race and gender. “I wouldn’t call myself a mediator,” she said. “I’m like a one-time consultant, rearranging relationships. ‘We’re on Indian land,’ ‘we’ve got trans students,’ ‘we’ve got buildings named after slave owners.’” The hardest part, she said, is “to convince them is that they aren’t each other’s enemies.”
Image
Professor Ross, pictured at her home in Atlanta, believes calling out has become a kind of “woke competition” in some circles.
Professor Ross, pictured at her home in Atlanta, believes calling out has become a kind of “woke competition” in some circles.Credit...Peyton Fulford for The New York Times
‘Should I Be Concerned?’
Not that Professor Ross is conflict averse. “I have no problem calling out politicians who aren’t living up to the oaths that they swore to,” she said. She cited Colin Kaepernick, someone who quite effectively called out a powerful organization, the N.F.L. “The thing I am sharply critical of is punching down, calling out people who have less power than you simply because you can get away with it. But there is a very strategic use of punching up.”
Indeed, after the #MeToo movement and global protests of police violence in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, employees have called out bosses, consumers have called out corporations, students have called out peers, and victims have called out abusers.
“Folks have figured out that social media shaming and attention makes things happen,” said Meredith Clark, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia who recently published a study of call-out culture called “Drag Them.” “It evokes apology from things and places that wouldn’t normally enter into that sort of dialogue, and it allows people who otherwise would have no recourse to influence their own experiences.”
More troublesome, Professor Ross and others agree, is when small infractions become big infractions; when context gets lost and facts are distorted, or it becomes difficult to discern between the two.
“These algorithms can’t distinguish between outrage and shaming that is proportionate and outrage and shaming that is disproportionate to the original transgression,” said Molly Crockett, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University who studies moral outrage online.
I agree. I've changed more minds in my lifetime with kindness than shaming or self-righteous ranting. I turn people off when I attack them.
There was an individual back in 2016-2017, who was VERY conservative that I ended up losing my temper with. They were pro-Capitalism and hated socialism, any type of socialism. (Folks? I work in a State and Federally funded agency.) And they felt that the US was the promised land because it was Capitalist and Brexit would get them to it. I felt, and still do, that Brexit was a xenophobic response to immigration, specifically the Syrian immigrants fleeing Syria at the time and being thrust at Britain by the European Union (specifically Germany). The same thing happened in the US - Trump was largely a result of xenophobia or the influx of Middle Eastern immigrants from Syria, and other locals. (Although both were more complicated than that - and both were for similar reasons.)
They also had issues with my terminology, and were upset over a female Doctor Who (which still makes no sense to me.)
Instead of being kind, I got angry and annoyed. I regret that. They've pushed my buttons and I couldn't think clearly. I deal better with this in person - I walk away. Or don't discuss it. I should do the same thing with emails and responses to social media entries. Walk away. I've started to do that - it works very well. People forget. The posts get lost. It's not all that important in the scheme of things. I mean people are dying daily. Life is far too short to get upset with someone on social media.
Also, I've been reading "How to be an Anti-Racist" and it really gets across how we are all guilty of racist (etc) behavior and it's best addressed by calling it out in ourselves and others, but not by demonizing the person. JK Rowlings is not a bad person, she just has transphobic views colored by ignorance and intolerance, and needs to be called out on those views. She doesn't need to be attacked and ripped to threads online. That solves nothing. Hate breeds hate. And the hardest thing in the world, and what takes the most courage is to address someone who hates, with kindness. I wish I was better at it. I'm trying. All I can do is try to do better. I can't do anything about anyone else.
It's kind of like wearing a mask. Today, on the subway back from my doctor's appointment - I saw this man without a mask. It occurred to me that he was poor, he wore threadbare clothes, carried a skateboard, and didn't appear to know English - also seemed not quite right in the head. I offered him the two masks I had in my purse, he refused. So I realized it was best to pull away and put space between us. I was furious of course, and frustrated. He was the only person on the train without a mask. And the train was spotless, and cleaner than you can possibly imagine. But at the end of the day? I can only control me, no one else. And I was scared, and embarrassed that I couldn't ignore him as well as all the others on the train appeared to.
2. The Crown Stokes Uproar Over Fact vs. Fiction
I talked to my mother about the Crown - my parents had finished watching the latest season. They agreed with the critics - it's not quite as good as previous seasons. Part of the problem is much of this season takes place during a period of time and regarding a series of events - that have been written to death about. We've all seen the story played out before - both in press reals, live coverage, tell-all books, movies, and television documentaries and mini-series. We've all watched the wedding. We've all
seen the accounts of how horrible Diana's life was in the palace and how nasty Charles allegedly was to Diana.
Add to that - the people are still living and the wounds are still raw.
Mother didn't think they handled Thatcher or Diana all that well. And really didn't like how they portrayed Camilla and Charles. And my mother doesn't care that much - she's ambivalent about the royal family and Thatcher. I can only imagine how people who do care - reacted.
I've not seen it yet. Will most likely watch it over the holidays along with His Dark Materials and The Expanse.
3. Hillbilly Elegy - which a lot of the folks (the ones who care about such things) have decided is a disgrace and misses the point.
Ron Howard Defends Hillbilly Elegy Against Various Critics
Negative Review
This is the book everyone felt the need to read after the 2016 election in order to figure out why Trump was elected. (I didn't read it - I already knew why Trump was elected, and wasn't at all surprised by it - actually kind of saw it coming. I work with Trump Supporters - also Wales brothers and sister supported Trump. And I had an uncle who voted for him. Add to that - I know a lot about the working class in the United States.)
My parents read it - found it interesting, but didn't recommend it. It's a memoir - memoir's always are problematic. Also, in the book I'm currently reading "How to be an Anti-Racist" - the author's professor states that everything in life is subjective. Objectivity is impossible. Very true. Memoirs tend to be a subjective view of one's past, family, etc.
I really have no interest in a Harvard Law School Granduate's take on his dirt poor Kentucky roots.
But, Janis Ian apparently loved the movie. So I may watch - just to see what it's like - plus it has a decent cast.
4. The Prom...
James Corden Should Stay the Hell Away From the Prom
Corden, who is straight, is so bad in The Prom—somehow both appalling and terminally bland—that it had me thinking maybe the hardliners were right along. Forget the whole case-by-case thing: No more straight actors playing gay men until the sins of The Prom are properly atoned for. Murphy, a gay man, has led some straight actors into fertile gay territory before, like Darren Criss in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. But Corden, flitting and lisping around in the most uninspired of caricatures, misses all potential for nuance, and thus never finds even a hint of truth in the role. And this is in a movie that’s supposed to be about empowering queer people!
This was posted on FB, and the poster stated that only gays should play gay roles. And I thought, but what about all the gay men and women who played straight roles? Also doesn't that limit actors?
It is acting after all. They play people who are nothing like them all the time.
What's odd though, is Ryan Murphy produced and directed this - the same Ryan Murhpy who produced and directed Disclosure, which makes the point that only transgenders should play transgender roles. So why did he cast James Cordon and why did he direct him in this manner?
What a lot of people don't understand about movies - is the actor really doesn't do that much. It's 98% director. On television? 98% writer (who is often also the director). If you want to see an actor actually do anything - watch theater.
So if Cordon is bad in the Prom, a lot that is bad direction or directorial choices. A better question is why did Ryan Murphy, who happens to be gay, go that route?
If you want to limit gay roles to gay men, and trans roles to trans, then you may have to limit it across the board - which I don't think people will like. Personally, I'd be annoyed - since I think Matt Boomer is rather good in straight roles, as were Richard Chamberlain, Kristin Stewart, Barbara Stanwyk, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson and James Dean. It would be a shame to have limited them.
Again, I don't think that was the problem here - as the critic points out in the review - but the individual who was cast. But, what is striking to me - is the critic briefly falls into the trap of "sexualizing" behavior or "genderizing" behavior. (As did the individual who posted it on his FB page.) Cordon just happened to be bad in the role. He's not bad in the role because he's heterosexual or straight, but because he made some odd choices on how to portray it or he just isn't right for those roles or he was directed oddly.
It has absolutely nothing to do with his sexuality. A homosexual could have been bad in the role.
It's kind of like stating someone is racist because of their skin tone. Skin tone has zip to do with your behavior. Or that someone is a criminal because of there ethnicity - no, they are a criminal because they chose to be a criminal. I remember, when a co-worker told me that I better check if someone was a terrorist based on their name - I quipped, "watch it, your prejudice is showing".
Everyone needs to read Ibrahm Kendi's How to be an Anti-racist. I'm starting to understand what this book was constantly thrown in my face over the summer. It hammers home the point that we all need to review our own behavior for racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia and do better. The nice thing about NYC, my workplace, my church and the people I've chosen to surround myself with in life, including where I live, is my prejudices are constantly examined and challenged. I'm constantly discovering that I've made an unfair generalization or screwed up, and have judged and/or categorized this person or persons behavior based on "identity politics" and not on who they are as individuals.
It's hard. It's so ingrained in all of us. It's like a muscle that you have to constantly retrain to think differently.
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Date: 2020-12-05 07:35 pm (UTC)I do, however, agree with your point that if the performance was not what the director wanted it would have been changed. There are only a handful of actors with so much pull that they can overrule directors to take over a project, and Corden is not one of them.
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Date: 2020-12-05 10:41 pm (UTC)Yep, that was all Ryan Murphy. He obviously saw the role as an over-the-top aging gay Queen. And he deliberately cast and directed Cordon to go that direction. It's not like he couldn't have cast Lane or Harvey Feinstein in the role. No, I smell Murphy. I've seen enough of Ryan Murphy's television series - to see him doing that. The critic is laying the blame in the wrong place here. Television critics, sigh.
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Here's my take, for what it's worth regarding limiting LGBTA roles to LGBTA actors. I get doing it with transgender, because you can tell someone is transgender by looking at them, and you can tell someone isn't, that has been grossly misrepresented. Also it's very easy to fall into harmful stereotypes and misrepresentations regarding Trans. But the rest? I think it's silly in regards to bisexual, gay and lesbian. You can't tell someone is lesbian, gay, or bisexual just by looking at them or watching their behavior.
Consider that both actors who were in Call Me By Your Name - were straight not gay, and many of the actors in Angels in America were straight as well..Meanwhile, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and Rock Hudson were all qay or in Dean's case, bisexual. So too are Matt Boomer, Richard Chamberlain, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan - and they've played straight roles.
The problem with sexuality? Is - I've become convinced it's not as binary as people want it to be. Nor obvious. People have been taught to think in binary terms or black and white terms, but reality isn't black and white or binary at all. Most people fall along a spectrum. I've lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances who were straight throughout their teen, adolescent and college years and came out as gay in either their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties or sixties.
The other difficulty with it - is unlike race or ethnicity or gender, you can't really tell someone is gay or lesbian just by looking at them. I have no idea whether someone is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual unless they tell me. The only way you can kind of tell is by watching who they are sexually attracted to or into. I figured out one guy was gay by his adoration of Jame Marsters, and enjoyment of one of Marsters rock concerts. He went on and on about how hot Marsters was - and I thought, yep, you are gay. And I was right. But some people are bisexual and you can't tell at all.
And making love or fucking someone on screen - is well ...you aren't into the other actor. You are playing a role. Whether the actor is male or female doesn't really matter. I've listened and watched actors talk about it - and for the majority of them it really doesn't matter. They aren't in love with the other actor, their character is.
It's like reading a book or watching a movie - do you have to be gay to enjoy a gay sex scene between two characters? Most likely not.
Now, if gay actors couldn't play any other role and it was obvious and you could tell - then yes, I'd say limit it. But you can't. Also, I know effeminate men who are straight, butch women who are straight - I'm kind of butch myself, I hate dresses and despise jewelry and makeup, but I am straight. While I also know macho guys and feminine women who are gay. Rock Hudson was gay. John Wayne who was very effeminate in reality, was not.