Tag: feminist

A misogynist writer, a feminist portrayal and me: why I can’t choose a side

I know there’s a lot of hate about Steven Moffat, and from what I can tell, a lot of it’s justified, but I haven’t really weighed in much on it, because I am incredibly conflicted.

Why?

Because I was a girl in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, and like a lot of girls my age, I found Press Gang. It was such an important, unique, groundbreaking show in so many ways, and it gave me a role model who I still hold in my echelon of favourite female characters. Lynda Day.

She was strong willed.
She was ruthless.
She didn’t care about fashion.
She had ambition.
She advocated for herself and her profession with all her might.
She wasn’t perfect, and at times, she was just plain wrong and unlikable.
She was never punished for her sexuality.
She was willing to use that sexuality if it got her what she wanted, but she was never a slave to it.
She was hard and even cruel to people around her on a daily basis, but she would fight for their job security and for their freedom to tell the truth in their articles.

As a girl who’d spent her life abused, manipulated and shamed into conforming, Lynda Day showed me that you didn’t have to make nice, you didn’t have to play by the rules, and you could carve your own path. And without Steven Moffat, she never would have existed.

I’m not saying that everything I’ve changed about my life and become since is owing to him. It’s not. It’s down to me. I did all that, myself, and I earned all the kudos. I’m not that scared, shamed, traumatised little girl any more because of a lot of reasons. But one of the first female characters I latched onto, that set my feet on the path to being something better, was Lynda. And I can’t wish for a world where she didn’t exist.

jabberwockypie:

arrghigiveup:

grimalkina:

fozmeadows:

imsirius:

Your character falls into the “friend zone” – Is this primarily a man’s problem, or are women put in the friend zone as well? x

DANIEL RADCLIFFE FOR ALL THE AWARDS

ALL OF THEM

“That’s a lot less pithy so people don’t ask me about that”

DAN RAD IS AMAZING

How did this kid who literally grew up pretending to be a wizard end up such a sensible, well-adjusted adult?

It’s kinda trippy.

So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.

Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)

funny how the most popular narrative about helen keller is a harmless little girl who learns to communicate and then the story ends for some reason gee i wonder why that is

(via callmeoutis)

Gee. Why does the popular narrative end before she became a communist? So strange! And the Martin Luther King Jr. narrative does the same thing! What a coincidence!

(via malachite-in-corvidae)

Also, that the narrative is generally about the abled teacher helping her and how amazing she was to be able to do it.  As the wikipedia article frames it: “The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.”  So even the story about Helen Keller is often not really about her.

(via ami-angelwings)

Helen Keller is a glaring example of it, but history’s dominant narratives are full of women whose stories are depoliticised and infantilised in order to make them more “inspirational”.  

A current example: when Malala Yousafzai is the brave little girl who just wanted to learn, she’s the world’s darling, but when she tells Obama that drone strikes are driving terrorism the cameras all turn off. 

(via sharpestrose)

I believe that this BS would fall under “inspiration porn”, too.

I got her first book at a thrift store for 95 cents and figured “Hey, it’s short. I can read that.” because I read a few books about her in school, you know? Seemed sensible to read her own words.

Then I find out she was a communist!? 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 She got more awesome by an order of magnitude.

(via jabberwockypie)

Helen Keller is AMAZING. She was one of the first people who really campaigned for sexual health, because one of the leading causes of blindness in her era was caused by infant exposure to an STI during vaginal birth. The blindness was easily and cheaply preventable by putting a solution in the newborn’s eyes, but this was rarely done because the stigma around sex and STIs was so pronounced. Helen started publicly pushing for every infant to get this treatment when she was still a child, fundraising and educating people and saving the sight of many, many people.

I think everyone who has an interest in Helen and her teacher Annie Sullivan should read Helen and Teacher. It’s an absolute brick of a book, but it’s incredibly interesting and an intricately detailed biography of Helen from birth to death, not just during the childhood years publicised and sanitised for the public’s palette. Read my review on GoodReads here.

spiralstreesandcupsoftea:

maski:

“We [Fraction and his wife, Kelly Sue DeConnick] were pregnant at the time, and while I was out there I started to realize that if I had a daughter, there would come a day when I would have to apologize to her for my profession. I would have to apologize for the way it treats and speaks to women readers, and the way it treats its female characters. I knew that if we had a daughter, because I know my wife and I know the kind of girl she wants to raise and I know the kind of girl I want to raise, she was going to look at what I did for a living and want to know how the fuck I could stomach it. How could I sell her out like that?” Fraction continued. “That conversation is still coming, and I’m bracing for it in the way that some dads brace for their daughter’s first date or boyfriend. I became acutely aware that I had sort of done that thing that lots of privileged hetero cisgendered white dudes do. ‘I’m cool with women, and that’s enough.’ It’s not enough. It’s embarrassing to say, because we somehow have attached shame to learning and evolving our opinions, culturally, but I became aware that there was a deficiency of and to women in my work, and all I could do at that moment was take care of my side of the street.”

— Writer Matt Fraction on his role on expanding the profile of female characters in the Marvel Universe. (via goodmanw)

better late than never, dude. we can always learn and always do better.