man sorry for the #long post but boy is this creepy

I read this earlier today and tried to ignore it but I just can’t stop thinking about how absolutely terrible it is, so fuck it.

It’s a 16,000 word apologia for fandom’s racism and sexism with a bunch of extremely dubious “statistics” as evidence.

Choice horrors:

“It’s not unreasonable to think that some straight women are interested in m/m because they don’t find women erotically or romantically exciting. And, look, straight people don’t need anybody’s protection most of the time, but trying to shame straight women for their sexualiy isn’t activism.”

Het romance novels are a billion dollar a year industry. The most successful fanfic of all time is het. Lots of women like het romances. The question isn’t, “Why don’t women like pairings with women?” It’s “Why aren’t women who like pairings with women in fandom?”

“Why Are All The Slashers Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”

What made the author think this was a good idea. Slash writers are not an oppressed minority. This is pure white fragility and entitlement, to imply that your fan fiction tastes make you oppressed and then take the name of a book about black people to explain why you need a safe space. I understand THINKING of this line. I don’t understand PUBLISHING it.

“Step outside of AO3, and you find a very different story. Media Miner, a major multifandom archive of the 00s that is (was?) a hub of Inu Yasha fandom, is 52% het, 37% gen, and only 10% slash…Media Miner: 52% het; 10% slash
Wattpad: 89% het; 5% slash
FFN: more het than AO3 and less slash, but percentages are elusive”

Media Miner has about 150,000 works. AO3 has over a million, Wattpad and FFN over six million. Comparing percentages across those populations is meaningless. More than FORTY PERCENT of the total analyzed fanworks are filed under “percentages are elusive.” The methodology for generating the stats across archives is not standard or randomized. These numbers are completely meaningless.

Cutting and pasting is a pain on mobile, so double fuck it. The race arguments include that American TV and movies are mostly white, so naturally fanfic and vids are white, but also, all of the shows with popular black actors are 90s sitcoms, and no one likes to vid 90s sitcoms; someone once complained that a vid exchange was too white, even though they themselves requested lots of white stuff, and this chaps the author’s ass because she made a vid of a black dude (as a personal challenge to herself to vid everything her recipient requested, of a canon she only watched for the challenge) and she thought the exchange was fine; diversity efforts in fandom are too “doom and gloom”; black characters like Sam and Rhodey aren’t shipped because they’re too emotionally stable; it’s too scary to write non-white characters because you might mess up and be racist (too late, friend!) and writing CoC is “defined by fear” with “no upside” (that is a really disturbing insight into this person’s writing process, actually) and an EXTREMELY creepy aside about how there aren’t enough hot black guys on OKCupid.

There are also a bunch of weird-ass arguments about het and fem slash that are basically, “Fans should stop complaining that there’s no fem slash in Fandom A because there’s fem slash in Fandom B” and “Fans should stop complaining that female characters in media fandom are sidelined because girls in boy band fandom write a fuckton of self-insert fic.” So I guess people who want to read Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill fic should just go read Xena/Gabrielle fic and readers who want Abbie Mills gen fic should just go read a 1D romance?

This meta is a 13-chapter disaster, is what I’m saying.

Apparently this author has been online for like two decades, which means they should have been here through Racefail 09 and the great interracial pairing slur cockup of 2007, AT THE VERY LEAST, ie, they should know better. And yet here we are. I’m sorry, everybody. This thing sucks.

This is a good take on the “meta” I basically refused to read last night and I see that it was basically worse than I expected. Ugh.

I couldn’t get past the title. This person is actively working to silence fans of color. It’s not going to work. 

I didn’t read the whole thing but I read Chapter 6: Race and Shipping. Where the author provides a notoriously known statistic results from dating sites to explain that POC aren’t seen as attractive = racist fans shouldn’t be blamed because this is a general problem,  and not just a fandom problem. Okay… And then they end up with:

I have calculated that about 20% of my fic and 30% of my vids are about POC. You can go calculate your numbers and feel smug. Or not. I’m betting not. 

Translation: ”I don’t see POC as attractive but I’ve written 3 fics with characters of colour, where are my cookies?!!”

- Mod P.

I read this entire clusterfuck, including the comments, and now I’m passing it on for anyone else who, like me, has managed to filter their fandom interaction enough that they didn’t realize this toxicity was still not just passively practiced but actively considered and played out.

None of these points are particularly new, but seeing them outright stated without shame in 2016 is an Experience.

I have to share this one quote about femslash:

When I see someone haranguing a fandom like, say, MCU movie fandom for not shipping f/f enough, I don’t wonder what’s wrong with the fandom: I wonder why that fan hasn’t bothered to seek out the many popular f/f fandoms that do exist. Perhaps the joy of harassing other fans for their ignoble shipping preferences is greater than the joy of finding fellow femslashers to squee with? 

Guys, this was the problem all along. I’m doing fandom wrong by falling in love with the wrong source text. If I’d only understood that this wasn’t my space to enjoy non-white and/or non-male characters, because the majority of characters are white men, imagine how much happier I’d be in my life.

franzeska’s been heavily involved in western media fandom, esp as a former board member of OTW (which runs AO3) and fandom challenges like yuletide and parallels. 

they’ve been spouting yt apologia while fetishizing asian culture for years, this is nothing new. i’m pretty sure i’ve read franzeska saying the same things back when racefail ‘09 was going down. like most of this isn’t surprising bc it is exactly what we saw yt lj fandom peeps spouting in 2007-2010 and i’m personally not shocked that these people learned absolutely nothing. they don’t want to learn and being accountable for their actions. 

Yeah I saw the same arguments during RaceFail. If anything it shows that the current toxic environment is one white fans are invested in and HAVE been for a while. It isn’t incidental as much as it’s an environment they’ve actively cultivated using the exact same strategies.

I want to highlight this thread of comments in particular because the “let me school you on fandom history” aspect of this meta is one of the most disingenuous, and it really reveals that the author’s intent is not to “improve civility” but to erase fans of color because she finds writing and vidding about characters of color “joyless,” “defined by fear” and to have “no upside.” I also think it was incredibly shady to roll an “analysis” of slash opposition, the lack of femslash in media fandom and racism in fandom into one post, because arguments about one start to indirectly act as arguments about the other.

Franzeska goes deep into the history of AO3 to talk about why slash is represented heavily there, with lots of links and documentation and references to how she was there and “we” did this or that. Her stated intent in the very first chapter is “to educate by providing historical perspective and non-AO3 context that is missing from most of the frothing rants on this subject,” rants that she believes “[depend].on an ignorance of fandom history” and “[do] little or nothing to stem the tide of so-called ‘whitecock’ juggernauts while making it unpleasantly fraught to write about people of color.”    

But in 16,000 words over 13 chapters, there is not one mention of Racefail ‘09. Not a single reference to the time a popular Harry Potter LJ community used a racial slur as a prompt in 2007. Nothing about the Supernatural RPF Big Bang story that used the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a backdrop for a J2 love story (THAT’S A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED). Nothing about the time in 2006 that comics BNF Te (Te! Te of the roses, Te of my heart. Te is amazing. I don’t know her personally, but she was a fucking LIGHT ON A HILL in Smallville and DCU fandom) pointed out the marginalization black characters faced on two then-juggernauts of white m/m slash fandom, Angel and Smallville.

ALL of those things were happening roughly concurrently with the founding of AO3.* Going into extensive detail about the history of slash fandom without ONE SINGLE MENTION of the history of fandom racism, including in slash fandom, is an effort to erase that history for the comfort of white fans. Rewriting the founding of AO3 and ignoring this history paints slash writers and fans as victims who need protecting from other parts of fandom or fandom spaces (which, by combining this sexism and racism argument, can plausibly be said to refer to “non slash fans” but is in fact primarily fans who are women of color and their allies) and who shouldn’t be disturbed in their safe space while completely ignoring the many, many fans of color** who have made themselves incredibly vulnerable over the past decade to talk about how fandom generally and often slash fandom specifically has hurt them.

*Which Franzeska attributes to wanting “a safe place to post our kinky porn.”  I have a REAL problem with that, because while providing a secure forum for slash fiction and explicit fiction was one reason the archive was founded, it was not the only or main reason cited in early discussions about the archive. AO3 was inspired both by the creation of a for-profit archive run by non-fans who hoped to monetize and then profit from the fannish gift economy and by a desire for fans to be at the forefront of any efforts to legitimize fanfiction, confirm its legality, and bring it into the mainstream. Not only was “protecting slash from the rest of fandom” not identified as a primary goal, in the post archive founder astolat links to in her call to found what would eventually become AO3, slash is specifically identified as one of the BEST possible test cases to establish the legality of fanfic as a transformative work, which was then seriously in question (you would not believe the disclaimers writers used to use). (The author of that post on legality, someone whose fic I read as recently as last month and who I had previously admired, commented approvingly on The Horrible Meta, proving that rewriting history is a group project, apparently, and that there is nothing white people won’t excuse from their friends).

**I almost linked to some of them here but then I thought…why would I drag this bullshit back to their door? It’s time for this problem to stay in the family. White people need to start taking responsibility for each other, and hey, change starts with me. Please no one bother Te. My ask box is open.

This entire piece completely erases fans of color and their contributions to fandom over and over and over. When Franzeska says that anti-racist activism in fandom “prioritizes the ‘safety’ of fictional women over that of real women,” she means white women, because women of color have been expressing for YEARS, in very personal and painful writing, that they are hurt by the way fan culture works and that they are withdrawing from fandom because of it. Those women are completely ignored in this calculation. The dichotomy is between fictional characters of color and white female fans. Women of color in fandom literally don’t exist in this argument.

Further, Franzeska dismisses objections to racist tropes or erasure in fanfic as “a flood of precious nonsense” and “concern trolling” using “social justice terminology.” She also says that “[if] there’s one pattern I have seen over and over, it is that people who get up in my face about race and shipping do not produce many fanworks about non-white characters themselves. So why the aggro?” By completely ignoring the last full DECADE of this discussion, she implies that all of these objections are coming out of nowhere from white people who want to score social justice points or fulfill their “duty” by crushing other people’s fun. In fact, women of color have been criticizing this for years, and leaving fandom over it (in the 2006 post linked above, Te discusses withdrawing almost completely from several fandoms with marginalized black characters). EVEN IF the majority of the criticism at this point were coming from white women (which IS NOT TRUE; Franzeska just ignores everyone else), we aren’t concern trolling. We are doing what women of color have asked us for years to do, which is to call out the racism in our own communities in the hopes that eventually we will make it safe for them to return and have as much fun as Franzeska has apparently been having for the last two decades without a second thought about the people she’s hurt.

Transcribing starting after some lead-in stuff not relating to the story:

Even if you know nothing else about how the USA is governed, you know that we’re a representative democracy, right? We elect our leaders at the federal level, the state level, the local level. We hold elections. The people who win the elections because they get the most votes, those people get put in charge of government. That’s the way it works.

Except in the one place where they decided to not do it that way anymore. And that place is in Michigan.

Republican Governor Rick Snyder, at the start of his first term as governor, he signed legislation that lets him OVERTURN ELECTIONS, basically wherever he wants to. Yeah, you can still vote for your neighbor or your school board member or whatever, but if Rick Snyder doesn’t like what you decided in your little election, then he has the power to step in. The state can step in and effectively VOID LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS. They can take your elected mayor or your elected city council or your elected school board and STRIP THEM OF THEIR POWER and instead install someone of the governor’s choosing to run to run things solo. By fiat. Answering to no one other than the governor.

That’s kind of a remarkable idea, right? This idea that if your town needs fixing somehow, if something’s wrong in your town, democracy is not going to be part of the solution, it’s not going to be the way you solve that problem. Democracy is the problem. Democracy has to be gotten rid of if we’re going to fix things in Michigan towns and cities.

Governor Rick Snyder knows best, so he’s going to sweep away your elected officials and install someone to run your town. To fix it without pesky democracy or voters electing people getting in the way.

It’s such a radical idea. It’s a radical idea, let alone a thing to go through with and do. I still almost can’t believe it’s real all these years after we started covering it. But very quietly, this is the radical thing that Michigan has started doing. It’s been going on for a few years now. Rick Snyder is in his second term as governor now. 

It’s been going on long enough now that we can see some of how it works. Turns out, with a few exceptions, towns and school boards who get put under this “emergency management state oversight”, turns out in most cases, THEY NEVER REALLY COME OUT OF IT AGAIN.

I mean, in theory, the idea is to hit “pause” on democracy, so “real work can get done fixing places”, and then democracy can un-pause and start up again in those places once these problems have been fixed.

That’s the theoretical idea. That has not been the way in most places that it has worked. PLACES UNDER EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT JUST STAY UNDER EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT. They just stay broken, and therefore the democratic form of government just doesn’t get switched back on in those places. 

That’s mostly how it works.

And, it turns out we can now say, having one non-elected overseer making basically autocratic, solo, personal decisions by fiat, we now know that is a form of governance that leads to, in Michigan’s case, some notorious consequences. 

Like, for example, when the emergency manager of the school district in Detroit moves to close down that cities only school for pregnant girls and young mothers. And when the pregnant girls and young mothers protested, police ended up dragging them bodily from the building.

Or when they emergency manager in Pontiac, MI sold the Silverdome for pennies on the dollar to a company that then let the roof cave in.

Or when the emergency manager for the City of Detroit shut off the water to thousands of inhabited homes. The outrage and the outcry and the flat-out desperation of denying people drinking water, that got so loud that the people of Detroit were heard by the United Nations. Special Reporters from the UN were dispatched to study the situation as a world-class, international human rights violation.

Well now here’s another one. And this one is just astonishing and you know what? It is not a local story. It is a story about truly, unbelievably reckless radicalism in our country. A story about which it is starting to become inconceivable that nobody has gone to jail or been impeached or recalled from office.

This is the subject of our special report tonight, and this is how it starts.

This is another one of these orders by an emergency manager. You’ll see this one is dated June, 2013.

See, right up at the top there?” By the Emergency Manager.” Hire an engineering firm to get the town ready for using “the Flint River as a primary drinking water source.”

At the time, the state-appointed ONE MAN GOVERNMENT for Flint, MI, the state-appointed “emergency manager” was trying to carry out a plan that the city council had voted for back in the day, which was to try to save money by having Flint no longer buy its drinking water from Detroit. They had always bought water from Detroit but it was expensive, and they decided that Flint was broke, they needed to save money, they needed to get a better deal for Flint, and so they wanted to use a new water system, be part of a new water system that was still under construction.

In the meantime, while that new water system was still under construction, the city of Flint had a choice to make. They could make some sort of short-term deal with Detroit, which the emergency manager said was too expensive, or they could MacGyver some kind of solution for where they would get their water now that they were quitting Detroit but the new system wasn’t ready. They needed something to bridge between getting out of Detroit and getting into that new system.

Flint’s emergency manager decided NOT to try to work something out with Detroit, but instead they went with Option B. They decided to MacGyver it. He signed that order, that June 2013 order, for Flint to get ready to use the Flint River as a primary drinking water source for at least a couple of years.

A few months after that, April 2014, with Flint being run by yet another “emergency manager” Flint unhooked itself from Detroit’s water and started drinking from the mighty, mighty Flint River. The following month that emergency manager in Flint decided to sell the pipe between Flint and Detroit.

So if anything went wrong with this new MacGyver’ed solution of getting the water from the river, well now there was no going back. The emergency manager sold off–literally–the pipe that allowed them to go back to Detroit water if for any reason they needed to. He basically sold the eject button. So Flint was committed to drinking from the river. This idea they’d come up with. 

The Detroit water, the water they used to be on, that was water from the Great Lakes. The water they were switching to was river water from the Flint River. And if you talk to people who know about this stuff, they’ll tell you you do not switch from drinking lake water to drinking river water as Flint did without taking certain precautions.

River water has a different chemical balance, which basically boils down to rivers being saltier than big lakes and that makes river water more corrosive. So you have to take steps to basically keep river water from EATING THE OLD PIPES, which are HELD TOGETHER WITH LEAD SOLDERING. If you let the untreated, corrosive, salty river water eat the old pipes, the lead leaches out of those pipes and gets into the water.

And lead in the water makes people really, really sick. There’s no level of lead in the water that is considered safe. But if you take in way too much lead, it’s rashes and skin lesions and hair loss and also permanent neurological damage.

Particularly if you’re exposed as a kid. It can lead to lowered IQ, emotional problems, behavioral problems. The works.

It’s not that you should never use river water for drinking water. Plenty of places do. You just have to do this one thing. You just have to do it safely. You have to treat the water first so it doesn’t corrode the pipes.

We now know that the State of Michigan, the Snyder administration, TOLD FLINT IT WAS OKAY TO SWITCH TO THAT NEW WATER SOURCE WITHOUT THE ANTI-CORROSION TREATMENT.

And so they did. They just made the switch.

And first came reports that the new water smelled bad. It stung in the shower. In some homes, if you poured it in the tap, it came out rusty-colored, or it came out looking like maybe it was light beer.

Next came news that a local General Motors plant was having problems with the new water. It was corroding the engine parts built at that new factory. GM started bringing in semi-trucks full of water to use at their plant. They knew they had to get Flint’s terrible new water away from their car parts.

Meanwhile the state, the Rick Snyder administration, the state environmental agency started to get in test results showing that the level of lead in Flint water was rising. It had started at six parts per billion. Within six months that had nearly doubled. To 11 parts per billion.

Around the same time, somebody leaked a copy of an EPA memo warning that some very very high lead levels were showing up in Flint water samples. When that EPA memo started making headlines, the State of Michigan denounced the EPA worker who wrote it as a “rogue employee.”

So, the Snyder administration knows that lead levels are rising. That EPA report shows very high, very worrying lead levels in some samples from some Flint homes.

The Rick Snyder administration at the time had an answer for an increasingly worried public who was looking at this stuff going on and starting to realize there might be a problem. And the Snyder administrations message to an increasingly worried public was: “Relax, people. Jeez.”

[Recording of radio interview] “Let me start here. Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can, can relax. There is no broad problem right now that we’ve seen with lead in the drinking water in Flint.–Brad Wurfel, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality”[End radio interview.]

So that was the word from the Rick Snyder administration in July. Literally “relax. There’s no broad problem that we have seen with lead in the drinking water in Flint.”

Turns out, there WAS a broad problem with the drinking water in Flint.

And the Snyder administration so obviously not caring about it spurred other people to action when they saw that the state did not care.

A MacArthur Genius Award-winning drinking water expert drove 15 straight hours from Virginia Tech to start testing Flint’s water. When he got the results, he went back to Flint and held a press conference on the lawn in front of City Hall to show Flint’s water eating through an iron nail. He told the people of Flint do not drink this water.

A local doctor started studying blood samples from kids in Flint. Her results were scary and stunning. The proportion of kids with elevated lead in their blood was nearly double what it had been before the town switched its water source. Just in a matter of a few months. In some neighborhoods, the danger had tripled, not doubled.

The first guy, the professor? Says the Snyder administration dismissed him as basically a huckster when he presented the results of his testing. The state described him as a magician who pulls the same rabbit out of a hat wherever he goes.

The Flint doctor who tries to tell them that Flint kids were getting lead poisoning? The Snyder administration told people not to believe her. They said that doctor’s results were spliced and diced. And in any case, the Snyder administration said those results were not related to the water supply. 

So relax, people! Drink you water! Six glasses a day, they say.

The Snyder administration held that line in public until finally they could not hold that line any more. And then finally, after Flint kids had been drinking this poisonous water for seventeen months, in late September Governor Rick Snyder conceded that maybe possibly lead might be a problem in Flint, saying for the first time, “it appears that lead levels could be higher, or have increased” since the town switched to river water. There are “probably things that weren’t fully understood when the switch was made.”

You think? You think maybe some things went a little cockeyed here? And now the kids who grew up in Flint are going to have to deal with it the rest of their lives? With points irreversibly shaved off their IQs and learning disabilities and behavioral problems? Irreversibly, for their whole lives. You think maybe somebody didn’t think this thing through?

“It appears?”

On Monday, this week, the mayor of Flint, MI just personally declared a state of emergency. A state of man-made emergency, she called it, in Flint. Saying even now that the governor is acknowledging, finally, that what these emergency managers decided and what his state agencies did, now that he’s acknowledging that that might be a problem here, the fixing of this problem is a matter that needs more help than anyone wants to count on Rick Snyder to be able to give.

If you want to know where things stand now, reporters asked Governor Snyder again yesterday whether his administration is ready to help the kids who quite literally have been poisoned because of his administration in Flint. Watch this. This is just amazing:

[Reporter] “Representative Dan Kildy has called saying, looking down the road, we’re going to be needing more state resources and more federal resources to be able to help the children who might have been affected by this. Do you agree that the state will have to kick in some kind of money somewhere down the line?”

[Snyder] “Well, again, we’ve already made major contributions. Let’s get the facts, let’s keep working this, and let’s remember, um, water isn’t the only sources of lead and we need to be sure we’re encouraging people to look at other places that could create a threat.”

[Rachel Maddow] Let’s make sure we encourage people to look at anything that is not the giant catastrophe that just happened on my watch in Flint MI.

Governor, the water in Flint MI has been poisoned. And this isn’t like–let me just say here for a second, I think the resistance to this being seen as a national story is that people think of lead as being a long-term infrastructure problem. Like, “ah, things went bad in that old city that needs work.”  

This is like, if you want to make an analogy to personal health? This is not like something finally coming due after you’ve had bad diet and no exercise for twenty years. This is the personal health equivalent of having been shot. This is not something that went bad over a long period of time. They flipped a switch to turn off one spigot last April and turned on a different spigot, and the spigot they turned on poisoned the kids. Those kids have been poisoned by a policy decision. All at once. The town has been poisoned.

Under your watch, Governor. Through the actions and inactions of people who report to you and the people you appointed. The emergency manager who signed that initial order to get the town ready for drinking from the river? He reported directly to Governor Snyder and to no one else. The emergency manager who sold the pipeline that should have been the escape hatch? He reported directly to Governor Snyder and no one else. The agency that did not tell Flint how to do this safely and who ignored the fast-rising lead levels in Flint’s water and disparaged first the EPA whistleblower and then the professor and then the local doctor who only wanted to help? That agency reported to and continues to report only to Rick Snyder, the Governor of Michigan.

And now Governor Snyder is like, “well, I guess we could try to do a little bit more to help you, but you know we’ve done a lot, and let’s not get ahead of ourselves, how about a task force? How about I appoint someone with a lot of experience in PR? Which Governor Snyder did this week as part of his response to this crisis. He appointed a brand new, state-paid communications professional to handle this.

This month, in Lansing, a local pastor tried to get a petition approved for recalling Governor Snyder from office. Because of this man-made disaster. Look at this, this petition, look at it. It’s a handwritten thing. Twice now he has tried with a hand-written petition to recall the governor for decisions made by him and his appointees and his administration related to this scandal. His petition has been rejected on technical grounds. For instance, Governor Snyder’s private attorney argues that the recall petition is not timely because Flint switched to the river water that poisoned the town back in the governor’s first term. And now it’s the governor’s second term and so you gotta let those bygones be bygones. You can’t recall him for that. According to Rick Snyder’s lawyers, what’s done is done. Settled. Nobody is accountable, certainly nobody in the governor’s office and certainly not the governor.

Mr. Snyder did manage to cobble together enough money to switch Flint back onto Detroit water for now, even though they sold the pipe. In Flint, though? Remember what this problem is, technically. Corrosion by that river water that came through, right? The pipes are still, in Flint, all scoured out by the untreated river water. Who knows how long they’re going to keep leaching lead?

Is Flint habitable anymore? Really? Michigan made the decisionwith Rick Snyder a few years ago to do something very, very radical to the way we govern ourselves as Americans, something nobody else has done.

Now we’re getting in the first results of what they have done. I did not expect those would have to be blood test results from kids, but that’s what they are, that’s what Rick Snyder did.

***

What happened in Flint is an unmitigated tragedy. But what terrifies me is that it was allowed to happen. Snyder unilaterally gave himself the power to throw democratic process out the window. If one man has the power to void election results and appoint someone who hasn’t been elected, how do we keep cronyism in check? How are we to keep these unaccountable appointees from skimming off the top? From hiring substandard contractors who cut corners–like, say, doing risk analysis before switching water sources and treating the water?

This is what Republicans stand for, people. This is what Republican leadership will get us. This is their definition of small government.

Never forget that.

Reblogging because I included the transcription.

rick snyder is the worst thing thats happened to michigan like possibly ever

Holy fuck this is horrifying

It…kind of is.

For now, I’m using the term PoC (people of color) as a shorthand, understanding that it refers to people in white-majority cultures and can’t describe white-minority cultures, for ease of writing, but also because I will largely discuss diaspora.

First, let’s discuss the issue of terminology and identity. “Asexual” is a difficult term for PoC to use. We are made hypersexual (e.g. stereotypes of Black women as very sexual) and asexual (e.g. Asian men being treated as alien, sexually dysfunctional; the Mammy trope). The term “asexual” is often actually used in these contexts. Even when it isn’t, to attach “asexual” to our identity means navigating a really complex, terrible issue where PoC bodies are regulated and controlled because of racist views of our “asexuality.” Sterilization programs that target minority women are realities in the US and other nations with racial minorities, while the simultaneous “aging up” of Black children and assumed asexuality means they are treated as sexually passive, and so often are targeted in sexual crimes. This sort of “de-sexing” has been a form to control PoC/especially Black women’s agency since slavery.

Siggy writes (1): 

"Stereotypically, Asian women are hypersexualized and Asian men are desexualized.  Each of these come with their own set of issues for asexuals.  Asian asexual women might be disbelieved because they conflict with the stereotype.  Asian asexual men might be assumed to conform to the stereotype completely, even if the stereotype is actually very different from asexuality in real life.  Also, sometimes people say Asian men are stereotypically asexual, which is bad because it’s using the word "asexual" as a pejorative."

With regards to the challenges Black women face, voltafiish writes (2):

"While asexuality has not had such a long history, the majority of its representation in the media has been overwhelmingly white. Asexuality is seen as a “white thing” too! For asexuality in black people (especially black women) from the outside looking in can be broken down into a few categories:

A) Asexuality functions as a white supremacist stereotype. This means asexual black person is not actually asexual, but simply a desexualized black person (like the mammy, for example) or they are simply suppressing their “true sexuality” in light of other racial stereotypes (like the jezebel). Of course, these are dependent on an inaccurate definition on what asexuality is but contrary to a lot of activism, a lot of people are still fixed on using this definition. Because people do not know what asexuality is, their first assumption is one that equates behaviour and attraction.

B) Asexuality cannot possibly BE a thing because black people MUST be sexual by “nature.” This is due to the myth and stereotyping and labeling of black people as hypersexual. If we operate on the definition on asexuality being about not having sex/being sexual and operate within the realms of white supremacy, black asexual people cannot exist. I remember looking up research concerning blackness and asexuality and came across someone make the very same statement: “Black people cannot be asexual because they are hypersexual.”

C) Asexuality (and any other sexuality for that fact) is not possible for black people because all black people are heterosexual. Cue compulsory heterosexuality.”

As you can see, not only does the concept raise issues for PoC self-identifying, but for those who identify as asexual but must, again, navigate larger issues.

GradientLair writes (3):

"If I tell anyone that I am 34 years old and I’ve been celibate for a little more than 8 years now, they look at my Black skin and female body and the judgment starts. Because I am a Black woman, I am automatically typed as heterosexual but “deviant” (as “normal” heterosexuality is reserved for Whites in a White supremacist society) and “hypersexual” (based on the long history of specifically anti-Black misogyny used to justify the rape, exploitation, lynching and dehumanization of Black women’s bodies and lives). Any sexuality that I ascribe to that is not heterosexual and hypersexual is deemed as me sidestepping the “norm.” However, this White supremacist lie is not the norm or even remotely explains the complexity of sexuality for any people, especially Black people because of our history."

I recommend if you are unfamiliar with some of the issues she discusses, to click through and then explore her embedded hyperlinks. Meanwhile, queerlibido/Alok Vaid-Menon discusses issues of intersection with respect to the South Asian male identity (4):

"As a queer South Asian I don’t feel comfortable ascribing the identity of ‘asexual’ to my body. Part of the ways in which brown men have been oppressed in the Western world is by de-emasculating them and de-sexualizing them (check out David Eng’s book Racial Castration). What then would it mean for me to identify as an ‘asexual?’ What would this agency look like in a climate of white supremacy? Can I ever authentically express ‘my’ (a)sexuality or am I always rehearsing colonial logics? The dilemma of this brown queer body is its inability to see itself through its own eyes. The mirror becomes a site it which we view what white people have always told us about ourselves. Regardless or not of the status of my libido, I’m not sure I will ever feel comfortable identifying as asexual because it seems like I am betraying my people. 

I am invested in South Asians and all other Asian Americans being able to reclaim, re-affirm, and be recognized for their sexual selves. I am invested in brown boys and brown gurlz being able to get what they desire. I am invested in the radical potential of brown (queer) love in a society where so many of us grow up hating our bodies and bending our knees for white men. I want to be part of this struggle. Sometimes I get angry at myself for not being able to eliminate the distance, not being able to join in solidarity. To fuck and be fucked, to publically claim and own my sexuality. I understand that there is something (as Celine Shimizu reminds us in her book Straightjacket Sexualities) radical about Asian American masculinities being displaced from patriarchal masculinities rooted in hyper-sexuality and hyper-masculinity and the reclamation of ‘effeminate’ and ‘asexual’ representations of our bodies as a political refusal of the very logics which have rendered those bodies numb.

…

So when I read this piece about how folks involved with the asexuality community feel as if they are post-race I’m pretty well, flabbergasted. Asexuality has always been a carefully crafted strategy to subjugate Asian masculinities. Asexuality has everything to do with race. Which goes to say that what if the very act of articulating a public asexual identity is rooted in white privilege? Essential understandings of being ‘born’ ‘asexual’ and loving my ‘asexual’ self will never make sense to me. In a world that continually erases Asian (male assigned) sexualities I was coerced into asexuality. It is something I have and will continue to struggle with. My asexuality is a site of racial trauma. I want that sadness, that loss, that anxiety to be a part of asexuality politics. I don’t want to be proud or affirmed – I want to have a serious conversation about how all of our desires are mediated by racism and how violent that is. My pleasures – or lack thereof – are not transcendental and celebratory, they are contradictory, confused, and hurt.”

He cites an interview on AsexualAgenda (5), excerpted here:

"Often, white asexuals and those who do not identify themselves use these threads to make statements that, 1) AVEN is a safe, diverse environment, 2) AVEN is a race neutral place and asexuals are color-blind, or 3) race is anarchronistic, un-important or itself “racist.” All three of these tendencies work to minimize the significance of race, to obscure “white” as a race by claiming neutrality, and to dismiss user interests or lived/digital experiences."

So now we arrive at issues within the community and how it treats PoC and the diversity of the ability for aces to identify as such. A good place to start is the “crux” of the community - AVEN - where we can see, in often popular threads, blatant racism.

A thread discussing World Pride 2013 and whether PoC aces should have a separate space:

AVEN forum search for keyword “racism” (6):

The AVEN thread “AVEN has traumatized me” (TW for sexual assault/rape/victim blaming) also brings up how often AVEN members come across racism in the forums and are unable to report it (7). The AVEN thread “Asexual People of Color” has many a post on the grievances aces of color face with their identities and on AVEN (8).

As we can see, there is an issue with racism, talking over PoC, and treating racism as a nonexistent issue, or else race itself as a nonfactor in asexuality and sexuality in general. But these issues are not limited to AVEN, which many identify as a generally problematic space and have thus abandoned for spaces like Tumblr. Here, and in similar spaces, the racism has been more subtle, and it is where I see the sweeping issue of racism in our representation, dialogues, and activism.

The faces of the asexual movement - and by “asexual movement,” I use a term and definition as employed by David Jay and his followers - have been exceedingly white. A simple example:

How popular was this image? Has it changed at all? Siggy writes again, two years ago (10):

"And yet, the publicly visible asexuals are disproportionately white.  An asexual who was Asian asked me the other day if there were any non-white asexuals I knew of, and was clearly disappointed when I could only think of a few.  This is both indicative of, and a contributor to greater asexual invisibility within API and other non-white groups.

And here I am, contributing to the problem even further.  I decided it was less worthwhile to present asexuality to an API audience than to a “general” (but probably predominantly White) audience.  I was further tipping the already imbalanced scales.  If all asexual activists did the same, it would become a major problem a decade down the road.”

Because, really, let’s look at who goes on talk shows, interviews with newspapers and magazines, and gets photographed. Who do we see associated with articles on asexuality, like HuffPost’s series?:

Some must wonder now if it’s that whiteness and white culture allows for greater visibility when it comes to queer identities. But is this true? What about the history of queer Black artists (musicians, visual artists, dancers, writers) and their precedence of very public activism? Because I say that the lack of brown and black faces in the public, representing us, cannot be completely chalked up to cultural differences. When I look at canonically asexual characters (or…attempted asexual characters), I see white faces - in fiction, where writers look at our community and try to create fictional characters, or else ace writers create these fictional characters. Sirens, House, Huge, Ignition Zero, Girls with Slingshots, Quicksilver all have canonically (or attempted) asexual characters that are white, and even articles/essays that seek to analyze the media where we find these characters will not bring up the race question a single time (11). These data can only reflect the community and the visible, un-erased members of the community - because not all of these authors are outsiders.

I also want to talk about how aces of color are cordoned off when it comes to dialogue. This is an especially subtle aspect of the community that I have noticed for a few years - where writers who discuss the intersection of race and asexuality are largely written off by the community as irrelevant to net community politics. For example, GradientLair’s posts almost never make the rounds of the tags or forums, except for black aces, as if white aces and non-Black aces of color have nothing to learn from an asexual Black woman’s important perspective on sexual politics.

There are two effects I observe from this habit. First, aces of color feel pushed out because their voices are not heard, or else they face racism as evidenced above in AVEN. Second, what is established is whiteness as the norm - PoC voices are, even if not actively, made an “other,” or a “niche,” and if these posts do make the rounds, they are not discussed, but tagged lazily with “intersectionality” or “boost” to be passed along for followers of color. PoC are made to feel like we are a separate cause and the nuances of our identities have no effect on the asexual community, where “asexual community” is thus equated with “white asexual voices.”

An example of this harm is the recent backlash against sex positivity rhetoric among the ace community. There is no harm in such dialogue, but what I find especially interesting is how aces, including prominent asexual activists who often represent the community publicly, have taken credit for spear-heading the critique of the sex-positive movement. As I’ve cited above, Black women in the West have traditionally been targeted sexually because of their race and as an effect of slavery - Womanism, therefore, has traditionally involved critical analysis of compulsory heterosexuality for decades. I recently began to compile a list of sources by mostly Womanists because of this strange trend among white aces (12). This type of irresponsibility and co-opting is exceptionally harmful to Black women and Black aces, who already face massive erasure, and furthermore it is distressing that leaders in the community propagate these attitudes in a largely white community.

In sum:

• the community ignores or dismisses race as a factor in sexuality
• blatant racism occurs in the community
• aces of color do not get any visibility in the media
• the issues aces of color face at the intersection of many identities are deemed irrelevant to the “broader” community, and so the community is equated with whiteness, and co-opting of QWoC dialogue occurs on a large scale

I want to wrap this response up here, because I think this information is sufficient enough to convince those willing to learn that racism is very much rampant in the asexual community, and that aces of color find it difficult to find a space in it as it exists currently. This post is not for those who refuse to teach themselves. You are the problem, not just those who merely don’t know what’s happening around them because of their privilege. I urge those of you in this latter group to recognize your privilege, end this Othering of PoC, challenge the presumed “normality” of the whiteness in our spaces, and magnify the voices of people of color around you. It is not tokenizing to stop erasing, and it’s not an attack on you to notice, let alone speak up.

Remember: being an ally is not about posting a political alignment on Facebook or any social equivalent. It means knowing that you will not be attacked for speaking up about a certain issue (ergo, you have privilege), and employing that power to protect and defend those of us who are vulnerable. Because we are vulnerable. I have personally received hate/abuse for even mentioning race in this space and offline spaces, and have been building up the courage for four years to discuss these issues on such a public blog, so please understand that I am not exaggerating. 

70% of anti-LGBTQ murder victims are PoC (13). 87% of hate murder victims in 2011 were QPoC (14). TPoC statistics reveal even more - and make sure to go through this whole study (15):

This isn’t fun and games, or petty complaints on a website. This is survival. 

Sources:

1. http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2011/05/forecasting-issues-of-race.html
2. http://ace-muslim.tumblr.com/post/66431409049/im-supposed-to-be-working-on-an-art-history-paper-rn
3. This is a great essay on being Black and asexual that I personally learned a lot from: http://thingsthatmakeyouacey.tumblr.com/post/66431633676/im-supposed-to-be-working-on-an-art-history-paper-rn
4. http://www.gradientlair.com/post/61224262021/heterosexuality-compulsory-uniform-black-women
5. http://queerlibido.tumblr.com/post/74181237292/whats-r-ace-got-to-do-with-it-white-privilege ; http://www.thestate.ae/whats-race-got-to-do-with-it-white-privilege-asexuality/
6. http://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/interview-with-ianna-hawkins-owen/
7. http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=search&andor_type=&sid=01af01fc2a34562772e26f8092174d5c&search_app_filters[forums][sortKey]=date&search_app_filters[forums][sortKey]=date&search_term=racism&search_app=forums&st=0
8. http://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/95406-aven-has-traumatized-me/
9. http://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/78085-asexual-people-of-color/
10. http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2012/04/dilemma-on-asexuality-and-race.html
11. http://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/confirmed-asexual-characters-in-fiction/
12. My masterpost of sex-critical writings by WoC/Black women, many of which discuss the issue of being simultaneously made hypersexual and “asexual”: http://thingsthatmakeyouacey.tumblr.com/post/82269213656/if-you-dont-believe-me
13. http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/70_percent_of_anti-lgbt_murder_victims_are_people_of_color.html
14. http://www.queerty.com/study-lgbt-murder-rate-at-all-time-high-but-hate-violence-on-wane-20120531/
15. http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf

This is an excellent post, and everyone should read it. 

This level of conflict of interest is massively unsurprising.

This is horrifying. The worst of Chicago politics migrated south to St. Louis.

Extremely. While we think of Chicago and New York as the most corrupt, we tend to forget our own local politics. This problem is wide spread in every city/county/state. 

There is no way to escape it until we all become aware of this problem. And then when we are aware, we have to organize and attack the problem by its roots. 

Heartbreaking Simpsons Moments 1/∞: Bart Gets an F

I never understood why it’s an F if he gets more than half out of 100? Unless it’s more than 100. If you get more than half the answers right how is it an F?

You must not be from America. Here, grading is fucked up.

Average American Grading Scale:
A+- 97-100
A - 94-96
A- - 90-93
B- 80-89
C- 70-79
D- 60-69
F- 59 and under

And in some places in America it goes by a 7 point scale, so it’d be
A - 100-93
B - 92-85
C - 84-78
D - 77-70
F - 69 and below

Now you understand why American kid’s feel like there’s no point to school. If you have a 100 question text, and get 79 of them correct, that’s a C. That mean’s your Average Intelligence on this particular subject. And it get’s even worse when you have only like… a 10 question quiz. If you get two wrong? that’s a B. 80 fucking %. Now tell me again why American school’s are easier? 

No wait but whats the grading system in other countries?

UK Grading Scale

100-70: A

69-60: B

59-50: C

49-40: D

Below 40: F

next time you try to tell americans that we’re stupid

i’m gonna remind you

that our “average” is your “A”

#is that true?
Yep I was shocked when I heard this in a different post but a Google search pulls up a ton of sites backing this up.
Shit son I woulda passed College Algebra with an A in the UK. And I spent the end of the semester in perpetual fear that I would fail and have to retake the class.

And basically as an American you’re expected to get 80 or higher. Technically 70s are considered ‘average’ but there is such a level of pressure to get a B or higher, that Cs have become equal to Ds. Basically anything under 60 you might as well gotten a 0, and anything between 60-80 is considered practically failing. So basically schools have to be designed to make sure majority of students are getting 80s or higher on specific topics, which means you’re spending all your time going over a few choice facts a billion times and there is very little room to teach anything else. Which explains why American schools are of such low quality. The insane demand on the students ends up wrecking their education. Not only do you not have time to teach them anything, but they end up hating learning. Even outside of school your life is dedicated to memorizing these few dumb facts because your homework ends up taking hours of your time. A teacher from one subject says they expect you to spend 2 hours every night on their homework. And if you’re studying 5 subjects and they all demand that 2 hours? Good fucking luck, because if you don’t have straight all 80s or higher you’re not getting into a good college and college degrees have somehow become the minimum requirement for getting jobs.

I spent most of my junior year of high school in a state of constant panic that I was going to get a C in Honors Physics much less fail the class. If I got a C on my report card, I was grounded until the next one. I lost count of the times I’d wake up at five in the morning to take the early bus to go in for zero hour before school actually started for the day

File this under the exact reason so many Americans detest going to school.

Some are even more strict. At my beauty school, anything below a 76% is failing. :c it makes test-taking extremely difficult when we get to things like anatomy and the skin disorders and diseases chapters.

Gintama <3

Dat Eli though

im hollerin

Miyazaki: The Problem With The Anime Industry Is It’s Full of People Who Actually Buy the Content They Consume

 #I’M REALLY TORN ABOUT THIS #I LOVE MIYAZAKI AND THE THINGS HE MAKES #BUT NOW I FEEL COMPLETELY INSULTED BY A PERSON I LOOK UP TO #ALSO HE IMPLIES MASTURBATION IS AS BAD AS WAR????? #WTF MIYAZAKI WHO ARE YOU #I HATE SEEING THE PERSON BEHIND THE CREATIONS SOMETIMES #THIS IS HORRIBLE AND I WISH I DIDN’T SEE IT #IT’S JUST LIKE HORRIBLESUBS AND THE SHITTY THINGS THEY SAY ABOUT THE FANS WHO WATCH THE SHOWS THEY FANSUB #JFC FUCK THE WORLD 

Methinks Miyazaki has spent a little too much time going bar hopping with Hideki Anno

He’s the new Alan Moore. Was only a matter of time.

IN WHICH I WRITE A VERY LONG POST ABOUT WHY MIYAZAKI IS NOT WRONG AND I APPARENTLY CAN’T INSERT A READ MORE BREAK SO SUCK IT IN THAT REGARD TOO, I GUESS

tl;dr:

• If you unironically call yourself an otaku, you’re lumping yourself in with some of the least-respected members of society in Japan, and you shouldn’t be surprised/outraged when a well-respected member of Japanese society looks down on you.
• The things otaku like are off-putting, and because the anime industry makes most of their money from otaku, the anime industry in general is off-putting.
• The anime industry should probably be restructured so that otaku have less power to decide what gets animated, otherwise the anime industry will collapse because NOBODY LIKES IT.
• Gimme your lunch money, nerds.

Uh, he never implied masturbation is as bad as war. He’s being a cranky old man, as cranky old men are wont to do. The author of the article just listed those things as additional things Miyazaki doesn’t like.

And something you people really, really, REALLY need to understand is that "otaku" is not a term of endearment in Japan the way “nerd” has become so in the West. If I were to speculate, I’d say it has a lot to do with cultural values - here, we place a lot of value and pride in our individual identities, but that just is not the case in Japan. They, and the East Asian countries in general, place a lot of value in working to improve the collective. Being an otaku implies a lot of the things you’d think being the classical “nerd” implies - living in your mother’s basement, spending all your time watching anime/slacking off, and being a general drain on society. While that’s not “accepted” in the West per se, it is not directly contradictory to every cultural value we have. We’re just expressing our identities when we do those kinds of things. In Japan, they are the antithesis of a praiseworthy member of society.When the anime industry is, in Miyazaki’s mind, full of these kinds of people, who seal themselves off in insular groups and jack off to 2D waifus all day in between drawing said 2D waifus, that is a real problem.

Frankly, when I look at the entire catalogue of anime titles released over the past 5 years, I see what he means. Who the fuck is going to buy OreImo except lolicon siscon hentai otaku? Who the fuck is going to buy K-On! except ronery NEETs? I LOVE the Monogatari Series - but who the fuck is going to buy that shit except social rejects? 

Real-life people do not act like the people in those shows.Real people do not say to their friends/rivals in love “hey, let’s take a shower together while I fondle your tits.” Real sisters do not fall in love with their oniichan desu~s after many sessions of counseling. I love the tsundere archetype, but a real-life tsundere is someone that nobody wants to be around because they treat other people like shit.

I probably should devote an entire paragraph to lolis. (Most) people do not sexualize little girls, and in fact find the sexualization of of little girls to be repulsive. Why, then, are there so many lolis in anime? Because lolis represent a lot of things that a lot of men find desirable in women - innocence, petite bodies, cuteness in general. But for whatever reason, it has become not only okay, but the norm for anime to have prepubescent girls in compromising sexual positions. If you like flat chests - fine. If you like inexperienced girls - fine. If you like cute things - fine. Mashing all of those things together on a 12-year-old and slapping a bikini on her to appeal to otaku with those preferences? Most people will say that is fucked up. 

Fanservice is off-putting to a lot of people. Incest is off-putting to a lot of people. Lolis are off-putting to a lot of people. Unbelievable characters and character interactions are off-putting to a lot of people. But those things are things that self-proclaimed otaku audiences embrace, so that’s what the Miyazaki-proclaimed otaku in the industry draw. Because animation studios make so little money off of anything but DVD and merchandise sales, and otaku are the only people who buy that stuff, the anime industry of late has become inbred and stale at best, and offensive and pedophilic at worst.

Miyazaki is well-loved, both in the West and in the East. But he is not well-loved because his works are made for otaku. I’ve never seen anything he’s made, but the sense I get is that he’s loved in the mainstream because he tells stories that resonate with a hell of a lot of people. The problem he sees in the anime industry is that their works tend only to resonate with otaku, and otaku are not acceptable members of society in Japan. From what I’ve seen of what’s been released and been popular the past few years, I cannot blame him for thinking the way he does.

pfff i can’t believe people who like anime are getting offended and worked up over this. mostly what i got from this is Miyazaki dislikes how centered the industry is on “otaku” culture, like the commentary above talks about. not just the cultural shift or fandom, but as an art form. it’s boring. typical monotonous moe styles churned out constantly, geared to appeal to perverted men. it’s fostering a generation of artists who animate and design people poorly, or so uncreative to meet expectations he feels like it holds back the industry and cheapens it. they don’t take inspiration from real life, real people- they just do the style that’s making money and get it out as fast as possible. (many many many animes are like that, i’m not talking about the quality shows from innovative studios… even though they still are hung up on popular styles sometimes.) this guy had a huge hand in making japanese animation a recognized art form, i think he has more than enough of a right to criticize and grumble about what it’s become. he’s spent his whole fucking life dedicated to animation, dude has worked so hard for so long he doesn’t even know how to retire. you’d be pissy too.

and i agree with him, honestly. i love some anime but 80% of it is pretty lifeless and predictable, following the same formulas and with the same styles. i only really take notice when something seems unique or memorable. most anime these days is a total waste of time tbh. for every good show there’s hundreds of meh shows, yaaawn shows, shitty shows, and a HUGE variety of hentai/pervy shit. dude is bitter and who can blame him, he’s been animating for SIX DECADES and here we are.

i think this may just be the greatest string of tweets in the history of mankind

TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST I REMEMBER EVERYTHING BUT READING THESE TWEETS AGAIN AFTER SO MANY MONTHS IT ALMOST FEELS SURREAL LIKE “I CANT BELIEVE THIS PERSON IS ME”