Why is my gmail showing snow?
Jan. 24th, 2010 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erastes(I use “Tree” background which usually echoes (rather cleverly) the weather outside. It’s not snowing. and as far as I know there’s no forecast of it. Stop it, Gmail!!
This is the weather symbol for Tuesday. I have no idea what that yellow thing is. SCARY!! Eggses in the sky!
The super-teddypig has a very interesting post discussing some wanker’s opinion on Brokeback Mountain. Amazingly manages to be homophobic and chauvinistic in the same article!! (the wanker, not Teddy). As I said in my comment on the post, time and again I see the argument “this does not represent ‘the gay experience’” – because it doesn’t represent THEIR gay experience. Well, Mr Man, I’ve news for you. No fiction represents my experience. How could it? Every single person’s experience is different! There are cases where people read books and go “OH my god, this was my LIFE!” but that’s pretty rare. A while back someone else said “this is not my experience” (I believe the complainant lived in LA) and I simply pointed out that a guy from LA is going to have a completely difference experience than one in, say, Cardiff, or Oslo, or Melbourne… or even perhaps from the guy next door…
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 01:46 am (UTC)I love how these people get all up in one's face about "Well, that's not MY experience" - as if the book/movie/music/comic were something they ordered custom-made for them personally and they're all huffy because it's not what they wanted. ART IS NOT A GODDAMN SMURF CAKE YOU ORDER FROM THE SUPERMARKET. (I want to shout this at them. I really, really do.)
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Date: 2010-01-25 02:56 am (UTC)If we all wrote our own experience, and only that, there would be no fiction.
I can't even read these sorts of articles anymore. Doing so only gives legitimacy to the idea that women should only be "allowed" to write about certain things, which, as we all know, is bullshit.
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Date: 2010-01-25 03:05 am (UTC)Wish I could remember who that was, because she pretty much said it all.
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Date: 2010-01-25 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 03:47 am (UTC)okay lets be fair, brokeback mountain is mastubatory angst fic, it bored me something chronic (and my extremely church going irish catholic aunt gave it to me) and I couldn't be bothered to sit through the film. I didn't care for the characters and kinda wished them to freeze to death up the mountain
Now I just sat through Azumi a story which was completely plotless about a young girl in heian japan killing folks with a sword so obviously I'm easy to please (it was great)
did i despise it because it was gay, no, did i try to read it because it was gay, no, i read it because my aunt said it was lovely (I traded her a copy of GGK's Tigana, she phoned me up in tears, oh, i can't stop crying, it's so lovely,) although I have learned my lesson since she recced twilight.
but in other news
the cover of standish always reminds me of this stately home that i live right beside (it's less than a mile from door to door and most of that is through it's land) Elvaston Castle which always strikes me every time i see your icon
and b) to be a complete hypocrite I just got accepted for a gay historical and thought you'd like to know
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Date: 2010-01-25 05:04 am (UTC)1) Straight women are the primary writers of M/M.
2) They do so because they think it is hot.
3) They do so because it fulfills some deep-seated need to have a relationship between equals, which they cannot imagine between a man and a woman.
You know, it's funny. I've never seen anyone up in arms about men writing books with f/f pairings. I've never seen anyone psychoanalyzing male writers for writing about lesbians, or anyone not a radical feminist asking if men can write women credibly at all. I've seen specific writers criticized for not writing believable women, mind. But I've never seen critics brooding over men writing books with female leads or with female/female pairings and asking why, why, WHY they do something so odd, so divergent, or what deep-seated need writing about gay women satisfies in male writers...who are, of course, primarily straight.
I don't understand why we have to keep explaining why we write what we do, despite not having personal experience with this kind of sex. No one is shocked by mystery writers describing murders that they haven't committed. Authors of hard science fiction are not compelled to be astronauts. No one ever insisted that Isaac Asimov build robots before codifying the Three Laws of Robotics. Ray Bradbury never set foot on Mars--indeed, his Mars is nothing like the one that we know of today--but The Martian Chronicles is still selling in bookstores. No one insists on writers of historicals owning TARDISes and traveling back in time to do on-the-spot research. And I'm fairly certain that Poe was never held prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition and forced to lie beneath a descending blade, nor do I believe that he ever walled up a man alive in a wine cellar. I do not think that Shakespeare was ever a thirteen-year-old girl in love, an ambitious and murderous Scottish noblewoman, an Amazon woman about to marry a Greek aristocrat, or the Queen of Egypt...yet, though I've been reading Shakespeare commentary since I was thirteen, I have never seen any critic suggest that the Bard had no right to write about lives, times and places that he could not possibly have experienced.
Yet as soon as anyone gets on the subject of women writing about men, or men in love with each other, there is a flurry of panic. How can women be writing about this? Why are women writing about this? Why do they need to write about such a strange, strange subject? And why should they write about men? Why don't they write about women?
That women writers are writers first and foremost, and that writers write about anything that they choose whenever they choose provided a particular character, setting, plot or theme strikes their fancy seems not to have occurred to any of the pop psychologists or armchair critics who seem to be saying--whether they consciously intend to say it or not--that while men can write anything they please, the same courtesy should not be extended to women...at least not without a solid psychological explanation and permission granted by their most fervent opponents.
I am sure that many of the critics and analysts do not hear the comment underlying their critique. I'm sure they would say that they just want to understand a growing phenomenon. And yet...when you say to someone, "Why did you DO such a thing?", implicit in that statement are the words, "I don't think that you should have. And I don't think that you should do so in the future, either."
Oddly, not one critic has ever questioned his or her own right to judge whether a group of authors should or should not cease to write on a particular subject because of their sex and/or sexuality.
Interesting, isn't it?
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Date: 2010-01-25 05:52 am (UTC)It cracks me up that so many guys whine about 'hetero' privilege - though it doesn't apply to a number of us writing m/m - but they don't see that they're speaking from the long-established male privilege that gives them the notion that they have the right to tell women what to do.
As George Carlin would probably have said... un-fuck them.
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Date: 2010-01-25 05:54 am (UTC)I am attempting my "sit on hands and ignore the wankers" philosophy. It's not too bad, I just get on my high horse and feel extremely patronising and pitying and smug by their limited vision and circumscribed thoughts/lives. If that makes me a prat, well at least it makes me a prat who has energy left to edit/work/do sutffs.
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Date: 2010-01-25 06:15 am (UTC)The drivel over at Teachmetonight was by a woman. An academic, of course. Several women pointed out that at least one of her presumptions was flawed (the one about m/m writers being primarily straight), but she didn't respond to them...just to the ones who spoke fluent Academe.
I think there's even less excuse for a woman to be demanding justification than a man. A woman should realize that demanding that women writers justify their writing on Topic X when men writers are presumed to have every right to tell any story they please without having to justify themselves to anyone is just buying into male privilege. I can understand a man not realizing what advantages being male gives him...but a woman should see this.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 12:13 pm (UTC)As for the snow on gmail (far more fun) go to "settings" and then "themes" and select "tree" - then go to the bottom of the page and make sure your location is correct and it should mirror the weather in your area. (although it will be easy enough for the PC to guess. BLOODY COLD SNOW or HOT for you. :) It's very clever. Mine is correct today. Very grey and cloudy.
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Date: 2010-01-25 12:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 01:30 pm (UTC)*glum*
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Date: 2010-01-25 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 02:02 pm (UTC)It won't be out until the summer at the earliest but it's in Tanbi (called Tanbi too) but it's as much about the period as the characters in it.
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Date: 2010-01-25 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 04:01 pm (UTC)I'm pretty sure straight guys would have as many partners as gay guys - if they could just persuade women to go along with the idea. That's not a gay thing, it's a man thing. (Speaking in generalities here.)
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Date: 2010-01-25 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 04:03 pm (UTC)Google snow
Date: 2010-01-26 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 12:40 am (UTC)Bravo! Yes, absolutely and I agree 100% - plus, for me, there is an added inducement: telling me I cannot do something is almost a complete guarantee I will do precisely that thing, just because. :)
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Date: 2010-01-26 12:46 am (UTC)I remember having this same tired old argument in grad school around the notion of 'standpoint theory' - i.e., that we should only write our own experiences.
Bullshit. We should do what we feel like doing. That's what life is all about. I remember a few months back, some chap on a friend's LJ trying to engage me in a similar argument and him writing out long, expository passages in the comments until finally I said "Clearly you mistake me for someone who cares what you think."
I just...haven't got time to worry about what people think. I have work to do; I have books to write and things to accomplish.
IMHO opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one...
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 12:48 am (UTC)Fookin' RIGHT. And my personal horse is pretty goddamn high, I can tell you that. :D
no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 12:51 am (UTC)The other thing is that academia is full of sad wankers who couldn't get laid when they were younger. ^__________^