Baking the Stress Out

tacoposey:

what if we just created a fandom for a tv show that doesn’t exist and we build it up really big and make a ton of inside jokes until the internet just accepts it as a real show and it starts getting included in polls and gets it’s own imdb page and a group of outsiders go crazy trying to find dl links

suleskerry:

carnotaurus-sassytrei:

suleskerry:

uggggghhhhhhhhhhh

I am so tired of this trend where in order to make your female char ~quirky and ~unusual you put in a throwaway line/scene about how she ‘had a gay phase’ or ‘kissed a girl one time.’ But no worries because she’s totally straight now! It’s gross and male-gaze-y, it’s queerbaiting, and it erases non-gay/straight identities.

Pls stop.

I actually agree with this, I’m particularly irritated by this occuring in Persona 4 but that’s been talked about to death.

However, I would like to reserve my judgement for four reasons:

1- I actually got the impression from the trailer of Orange Is The New Black that the character might actually be bisexual/lesbian and her prison experience helps her realize that.  She says something like “I’m not sure if I’m myself in here, or more myself in here.”

2- The whole prison wives thing is a real thing that actually happens.  So if that is what it ends up being, it’s not exactly ‘false.’  Not playing into that would be erasing female relationships that do exist IRL.

3- The character may be bisexual and after her lesbian partner screwed her over, she happened to fall in love with a man.  Maybe she wasn’t entirely comfortable telling her family she is bi and thus tells them she ‘was a lesbian’ in the past-tense to avoid the stigma?

4- I believe this show is based on an actual person’s memoirs?  So I don’t see how a real life person being queer and then choosing a straight relationship IRL = queer erasure in fiction.  It’s.. not fiction if it actually happened that way, but I don’t know.

I guess I believe you have a point in most cases but this is kind of jumping the gun.  The series isn’t even out yet.

-shrug- You’re entitled to feel however you want though. And please correct me if I’m wrong.

I am a little bit more concerned about the show being sort of racist or having the ‘quirky white character’ syndrome where the non-white characters are basically shown as set pieces to contrast the sympathetic white character.

I only watched part of the trailer, so point one and three are quite possible. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m just so annoyed with this trend and commenting on it as a whole. The show also looks, as you mentioned hella racist, so I’m less inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. And, what I’ve seen of Netflix original series’ have relied heavily on problematic media trends.

I really just wanted to respond to your point four with a couple things because I’ve been thinking more about this since I saw your post. I appreciate your response because I was just sort of making a flip comment and not really going in depth as to why I’m so annoyed. First of all, I’m more talking about how this specific behavior (i.e. dating a person of the same gender and then breaking up with them and marrying someone of a different gender) is framed, both in real life with out bisexual people (specifically women) and in fiction. Just because she’s a real person and it’s based on her memoirs doesn’t mean the show is going to frame her experiences the same way she does or the same way they actually happened. It’s a different account and one that is being presented as media for people to consume. Secondly, I would argue that it’s more important to talk about these issues because it’s being presented as a ‘true story.’ We live in a really fucking racist, sexist, queerphobic, biphobic culture and telling more stories that contribute to holding up harmful stereotypes is not helpful. This story wasn’t just randomly picked out of a hat to be adapted into a television series. It was chosen with intention. The way things are framed makes a difference. Third, even if everything in the show happened exactly as it is presented, even if the woman who wrote the memoir references and thinks of her experiences that way, even if the people in jail with her were really stereotypical caricatures, even if all of that were true, I would still have an issue with this series.

Let me use another example. The problem with stereotypes and isms is not that they aren’t true ever and actually the opposite is true. The problem is that when we are consistently presented with the same narratives over and over they become ingrained in our cultural consciousness and become really fucking hard to shake off. Even if we actively know that they are wrong and hurtful. Even if we see the damage they cause not just to things like self-esteem and job advancement potential but to people’s basic rights and lives. And then they become self-reinforcing. Stuff like this is why I have an issue with this show, because really I’m more upset about the apparent racism than the biphobia, even though my original post was about that.

I’m just really tired of the same old stories being told over and over again when the EQUALLY REAL and EQUALLY VALID lived experiences other people are just being massively ignored.