C'est La Vie
The last of the Seven Legendary Riders, Stronger! #kamenriderstronger #projectrider
(via samuelrider)
Hey everyone,
If you’re here, it’s probably because of this post I wrote about the Kickstarter “Above The Game.” “Above The Game” was successfully funded this morning, raising 800% of its target goal. Unfortunately, the product it’s funding, I think, was pretty repugnant.
Basically styled as a book on “how to meet women,” what the content really did was tell men how to exploit some the awful systemic pressures we put on women, to take an overly aggressive role, and never take no for an answer in order to get sex. Some of the excerpts were pretty disgusting, even in their proper context - context the original author removed when I had linked to it - and it forwards a rape culture, no matter what its proponents might tell you. Even the section which the author, Ken Hoinsky, stresses the importance of obtaining consent ends with the phrase, “wait a few minutes and try again.”
So, yeah.
I was upset because this is a really grotesque, upsetting thing being funded on a platform I am bonkers for. So I posted that thing calling for people on the internet to speak to Kickstarter and ask asked for it to be taken down, and holy crap when I woke up and my post was everywhere. Currently at around 7K notes, my second most popular post has 8 Notes, and is a man in a Food Court wearing a Batman t-shirt, seen below:
So all day people have been reaching out to me for comments and questions and telling me to link this thing or that thing and do I have screenshots and telling me I’m overreacting and giving me some degree of either praise or harassment.
One of the groups of that reached out to me was, in fact, Kickstarter.
I e-mailed them earlier in the day, expecting fully for that e-mail to hit some poor community manager who had no idea this was what they were waking up to, and for a simple thanks for your input we’ll look into it or to not hear anything back at all. Instead they got back to me. And after a long day of “one second, we’re still discussing this,” they sent me a statement, the relevant bits I’ve pasted here -
This morning, material that a project creator posted on Reddit earlier this year was brought to our and the public’s attention just hours before the project’s deadline. Some of this material is abhorrent and inconsistent with our values as people and as an organization. Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.
As stewards of Kickstarter we sometimes have to make difficult decisions. We followed the discussion around the web today very closely. It led to a lot of internal discussion and will lead to a further review of our policies.
So, yeah.
This is a huge bummer, it’s a bummer that they allowed this project to be funded, and it’s especially a bummer in light of this statement. Because the statement, “Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.” is intensely problematic when you look at the guideline I’ve posted above. Because given what the author said, and given that this material was advertised as part of the final product - the author’s Kickstarter was to provide a published and expanded version of the material on Reddit - and they find it “abhorrent and inconsistent with your values as people and as an organization,” how is this not offensive? And then, how does it not violate that guideline?
I suspect that, had the material on Reddit been part of the initial Kickstarter pitch and video, it never would have even been approved. While the material on Reddit ostensibly was what was being Kickstarted, it is admittedly unreasonable to expect for whoever vets these projects to read what amounts to a manuscript for every book that wants a Kickstarter. It’s not feasible for them to approve all content that could POTENTIALLY flow through this channel - to say nothing of books that are unwritten. So we can’t expect Kickstarter to be proactive on everything except from every piece of writing that might appear in something funded through their site.
But we all pointed it out to them, at which point, they chose to allow it to be funded.
Hoinsky - knowingly or unknowingly - found a loophole in Kickstarter’s guidelines. By hosting the truly offensive material outside of his pitch, people were unaware that it existed until it was too late, and it was too complicated an issue for a multi-million dollar business to do anything about. And I am completely disappointed, because while Kickstarter is a huge company concerned about maintaining policies and setting precedent, I am just a dude concerned about someone getting $16k for creating a manual on how to sexually assault women and concerned about, jeeze, I don’t know, the nobility of crowd funding?
So I understand that this was probably not an easy decision for Kickstarter to come to in a short periord of time (I discovered the content 10 hours before the Kickstarter ended, 6 hours of which were sleeping time for reasonable people). And to me, the result we ended up with was not the moral one.
Here are kind of my final thoughts on this -1. Don’t let anyone fool you, This Book Is A Rape Manual
I heard a lot of people telling me that I was taking some of those quotes out of context or that “JEEZE when he said take your dick out she was already making out with you!” Well, fuck you. Because acquaintence rape is a real thing. Because a girl kissing you or letting you do SOMETHING does not mean you get to do ANYTHING. And by creating a book whose leitmotif (YEAH FUCK YOU PRETENSION I WENT TO FILM SCHOOL FOR A FEW MONTHS) is “be aggressive, and do what you want because women like that,” you are telling people to rape. Not everyone who’s going to read the book is going to be a rapist, but I promise you - someone who read this book will rape someone. And they might not even know they did it, because you told them the woman wanted it that way, you human nightmare. The whole thing is a boiling cauldron of rape culture, and you are not going to convince me otherwise any more than you could convince me the sun has been replaced by a bran muffin.
2. People are way more amazing than awful.I got tons and tons of e-mails and tweets and Tumblr messages of support and all the reblogs and all of this shit basically saying that women should not be treated this way and people who say otherwise are assholes. And saying good on me for speaking out. And that felt great, to know that the internet - which I find is most often represented by shit like Penny-Arcade and Reddit - is not as bad as I thought. Also, please consider that the VAST MAJORITY of “Thank you for saying this” messages I got were from women the next time you think that maybe this shit isn’t real.
3. This is probably in HUGE PART because I am a man.
All of my photos are pictures of me, and I have a awful (just awful) beard and am clearly not a woman. I think this curbed the abuse I got from the internet EXPONENTIALLY. A few of the awesome women in my life IMMEDIATELY messaged me about blowback this morning, because they had ALREADY RECEIVED HARASSMENT JUST FROM RETWEETING ME, where at that point in the day I had received NONE. They asked me first thing if I was being harassed because that is what the world does to them if they talk about this stuff, and this awful book furthers that attitude. The worst harassment I got - and one nice message, to be fair - was clearly because I have a gender neutral name and they thought I was a woman.
4. I still love Kickstarter, and will keep using it.
They made a really bad call. Straight up, this was a bad call to allow this to be funded. But it’s undeniable that they had not a lot of time to make that call in, and a weird confluences of loopholes in their policies. Big companies move very slowly, and they had to act fast, so you know. They made a bad call. That does not mean it’s a bad platform, or they’re bad people - in fact, they seem pretty upset about the whole thing, and I hope that they re-examine some of the policies that led to that call now that they have more than a few hours to breathe.
I still think crowdfunding in general is the internet’s way of fighting back against the monopolies on entertainment, and Kickstarter specifically is a pretty special tool. My friends have followed dreams because of this, they’ve made games and prank apps and children’s books and burnt giant guitars. It’s awesome. And I find it inevitable that I’ll launch one of my own one day. I hope that more projects like this being funded doesn’t cause that inevitability to fall away.
This project is funded, but make your voice heard by signing this petition someone started over at Do Something - http://www.dosomething.org/petition/kickstarter - Hopefully they’ll know that if projects like this that forward a culture of violence against women or any oppressed group continue to be funded, we’ll stop just stop using it. And as I’ve made clear, I would like to continue using it!
Finally…
5. Fuck Not Saying Something
I am super burnt out on everything in my life being about rape. I’m a video game designer - so I have to deal with people like Penny-Arcade, or the people that harass the outstanding Anita Sarkeesian. I’m a stand-up comic - so I have to deal with the endless hordes of angry white dudes telling me it okay for them to talk about how funny it is for them to be raping a girl on stage, and how if I say otherwise then I am censoring them. And I love the internet - and here we are. I am sick. and tired. of rape.
But I probably have no capacity to even understand how sick and tired women are of it.
I have an amazing friend who I go to whenever I’m totally lost of this stuff and once I said, “I just am so frustrated with talking about this shit, I am going to just NOT THINK ABOUT IT FOR A WHILE.” and he replied, “Okay, but just so you know, being able to not think about it for a while is the definition of privilege.” Oops.
I don’t want to deal with this shit. I have a ton of amazing women in my life - the funniest comedians I know are women, the strongest writers I know are women - and I don’t want them to have to deal with this shit. But I guess the only want for people to not have to deal with it anymore is by dealing with it as loudly as I can and hoping you guys signal boost some more. So that hopefully people like fucking Ken Hoinsky and his nightmare kingdom of sub-Reddits will shut the fuck up.
And then, finally, when no one has to deal with these morons being the dominant voice in the culture, we can all stop talking about rape.
(via crackerhell)
(via dungarvon-whooper)
digg:
Fine, charts it is.
“people are naturally greedy so socialism will never work” is pretty much the same logic as saying “people are naturally violent so lets not bother punishing criminals”
I understand your perspective, but naturally, you must accept that it does not work, and that people are naturally violent. I do not say that it must not be punished, or that there shouldn’t be consequences to these actions, nevertheless in my opinion it’s more about human nature, than logic.
human nature doesnt exist lol
we should just accept monarchs it’s human nature
Yep, I just yelled “fuck you” at some blow job who said “ni hao” to me in the park.
My good friend Phoenix, posted this Facebook status a few weeks ago that turned into this interesting hotbed of resentful Western White male privilege.
Not only did this guy, Luke, brazenly display an incredibly condescending whitesplaining, mansplaining attitude, but he demanded that my friend, a woman of color, explain to him why the behavior that this man displayed while yelling at my friend in the park was harassment.
I hope I do not need to explain how utterly ridiculous and entitled of him it is to tell a Chinese-American woman to “present [him] with depth” and prove to him why it’s unacceptable for some dude to approach strangers in the park, saying “ni hao” at them. I hope it’s evident as to how absolutely arrogant it is for a White man to defend some stranger he’s only ever heard about rather than believe a woman of color when her life experiences deem this encounter to come from a point of racism/sexism. As obvious as how presumptuous Luke’s entitled reaction may be, I would like to make it clear that White men injecting themselves, uninvited, into conversations women and people of color are having about oppression happens all the time.
All. The. Time.
And worse than White men assuming their opinions are welcome in this place, White men believe their opinions should be valued above all others’, for theirs are the only ones that are “un-biased”. Notice the silencing tactics Luke uses. Women of color who are upset by racist/sexist remarks made to them in public who dare to react to those violations are “angry”, “irrational”, and not deserving of this White man’s Facebook friend list. Welcome to Gaslighting 101, everyone! Racist, sexist, privileged, arrogant gaslighting.
However, I don’t want to write about awful gaslighting today. I actually want to write about something else this privileged White dude brought up, being White in China vs. being Chinese* in the U.S.
Luke wrote,
[…] and for the record, I’ve had numerous similar experiences as being the ‘white guy’ in China for the past decade. I never reacted like that but then I don’t think this is about race as much as it is about Phoenix […]First of all, way to be an asshole, Luke, by again dismissing the validity of Phoenix’s experiences and her assessment of the situation that she was in and you were nowhere near.
Second of all—and I want White people to understand this so—YOUR EXPERIENCE AS A WHITE PERSON IN AN ASIAN COUNTRY IS NOT THE SAME NOR AT ALL “SIMILAR” TO MY EXPERIENCE OR THE EXPERIENCE OF FELLOW ASIAN/PACIFIC ISLANDER PEOPLES IN THE UNITED STATES. Got it?
But, “why, Kathy?” you may ask. “Why can’t I just swap out different races/ethnicities in any scenario and the end result be the same?”
Really? Why? Because read a fucking history book—preferably one not crafted by the hegemonic White Western discourse.
The same people who think saying “ni hao” or “konnichiwa” to an Asian person in the U.S. is the same as an Asian person saying “hello” to a white person in an Asian country are the same people who think “reverse racism” is a thing. Guess what? Reverse racism isn’t real and those two situations are not at all the same thing.
Let’s just start with demographics. We all know that race is a social construct, but for simplicity purposes, let’s use it.
Population of China: 1.35 billion
Population of the U.S.: 316 millionPercentage White in the U.S.: 72.4%
Percentage Asian in the U.S.: 4.8%Percentage Asian in China: 99.x%
Percentage White in China: <1% (the number of White people in China is so insignificant compared to the entire population, it hasn’t bee properly documented)Wow! There is a significantly smaller percentage of the Chinese population that is White compared to the American population that is Asian! Who would’ve thought?
Okay. That shouldn’t be a shock, right? The United States is a “land of immigrants” (even if certain states and politicians seem to spit on that fact). Being non-White in the U.S. isn’t supposed to be a novelty, it’s a truth. The U.S. census estimates that in 30 years, non-Hispanic/Latin@ Whites will make up less than half of the population. So seeing a non-White person really shouldn’t be a shock in the U.S. in 2013. And considering Phoenix works in Boston, and not middle-of-nowhere, Maine, she shouldn’t be treated as an anomaly walking through a park.
Approaching a random person of color or any person you do not definitively know the ethnicity of and saying “ni hao”, “hola”, or “jambo” at this person (particularly if you do not speak Chinese, Spanish, or Swahili) is not only obnoxious, but it is othering. The effect (regardless of whether it’s intentional or not) of this action on the person of color is to point out that they are somehow different from the White person (and legitimate American) speaking to them while transmitting the message “you are not welcome here”. API peoples constantly receive this message. From “where are you from?” to “what language do you speak?” to “what does your name mean?”, White people are consistently reminding us that because we are not White, we are not American.
So when some stranger says “ni hao” to my Chinese-American friend in the park, it is absolutely not to be “friendly”, it is to invade her space and remind her that no matter what her birth certificate, voting record, or life experiences are, she will never be considered American and she will never be welcome because her hair isn’t blonde and her last name isn’t Smith.
People of color built this country. They did so despite political, economic, and social barriers erected to prevent them from prospering. The first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the 1800s, brought over to work on the transcontinental railroad as cheap labor at wages. Chinese workers were paid $27-$30 a month, compared to Irish workers, who were paid $35 a month and provided with living arrangements. Not only were the Chinese paid less than the Whites, they were also treated terribly. The White construction crews would order Chinese workers to enter caves where not all the dynamite had gone off, killing dozens of Chinese men. These men were forced to risk their lives, placed in to baskets and lowered over cliffs or into mines to drill holes and place dynamite, staking their luck and their lives on how quickly their fellow workers were able to pull them up. The term “Chinaman’s chance”? This practice is one of it’s origins. Over 1,200 Chinese workers died building the Central Pacific Railroad alone.
And what did the U.S. do to repay these Chinese immigrants for building such an extensive railroad system in this country? They passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to prevent Chinese immigration and then passed the Geary Act to extend the exclusion and placed new requirements on existing Chinese residents of the U.S. Among these requirements was a law that Chinese residents must carry proof of their residency at all time or risk a year of hard labor or deportation. Sound familiar? The Geary Act also forbade Chinese residents from bearing witness in a court of law and denied Chinese bail in habeas corpus proceedings.
For a country so proud of its immigrant-roots, its laws speak differently. Or are only White, Anglo-looking people allowed to claim this country as their own and all people of color must simply accept that we can never call the United States our homeland?
Let’s just step back a minute. Many Chinese families have been in the United States just as long or even longer than your European ancestors. Chinese workers played a big part in building this country. Yet, Chinese-Americans are being treated like they don’t belong in this country daily. Yes, even in the 21st century.
So don’t you dare fucking compare how you as a White man are treated in China to how a Chinese-American woman is treated in the United States. I haven’t even started exploring the rampant sexism that’s entwined with White men fetishizing API women as submissive and exotic. This view is a stereotype. It is a stereotype largely rooted in a history of Western colonialism and the geo-political dynamics between American soldiers and local women in the various wars and military aggressions of the late 20th century waged in East Asia and the Pacific, a stereotype that’s been perpetuated by Western, White, male-dominated mainstream media.
If you are a White person in China, you are most likely a tourist, or your job has located you there and you make significantly more money than the average Chinese worker (~$9k/yr). If a Chinese stranger approaches you and says “hello”, that might be annoying, but it doesn’t come with any of the same history and implications as a White stranger saying “ni hao” to an Asian person in the U.S., regardless of whether that person is Chinese. Considering the fact that British and U.S. imperialism has made English the default official language for multinational organizations and the forced lingua franca of many states in the Global South, the power differential between the White person and the Asian person in both of these situations favors the White person.
To Luke and every other White asshole who doesn’t “think about race”:
Your experience as a “minority” in an Asian country is not comparable to Phoenix’s experience as a Minority (Capital M for all of the historical, political, social baggage of that word) in the United States.
So sit down and shut up.
—————
*You can apply this same theory to Japanese-, Korean-, and other API peoples in the U.S., in so much as noting that being White in Japan is nothing like being Japanese in the U.S. (or Korean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, etc.). However, remember that although API peoples have a shared identity, the histories of each ethnic group’s legacies in the U.S. are different and the geo-political histories of the U.S.’s respective relationships (and wars and imperialism, etc.) are also distinct. It is ludicrous to assume that all 17.3 million Asian-Americans have the same histories and that nations with a combined population of 4 billion people have the same diplomatic relationship with the U.S. It is not only irresponsible, it is also racist.
My cousin’s white boyfriend brought up being white in China as a parallel to being a person of color in the U.S., and I had to tell him, “Noooooooo…”
white people who think being white in asia (or any non-white country) is comparable to being a POC in the US or europe = willfully ignorant about the way the world actually works.
(via crackerhell)
The Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph was appointed Emperor of Mexico during France’s ill-fated invasion of the country in the late nineteenth century. The rule of Maximiliano I, as he was known in Mexico, lasted only a few years until his capture on orders of the Republican leader Benito Juárez. He was eventually sentenced to death by firing squad, and was executed alongside two of his most loyal generals at the Cerro de las Campanas, in the Mexican state of Querétaro, on June 19, 1867. His body was displayed for public view shortly after his death, and his remains were eventually shipped back to Europe aboard the SMS Novara, the same ship that had taken him and his wife to Mexico only a few years before. He is entombed in the Austrian Imperial Crypt in Vienna. Maximiliano I, an Austrian archduke married to the daughter of the King of the Belgians, had been Mexico’s second emperor in the nineteenth century. Over forty years earlier, General Agustín de Iturbide had crowned himself Emperor of Mexico during an elaborate ceremony held inside Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral, and he too went on to meet a violent end.
(The image above, captioned “The Execution of Maximilian, Mejía and Miramón at Querétaro, Mexico. June 19, 1867” was published in Harper’s Weekly onAugust 10, 1867.)
