Lindsay Ellis

It's up now. Must be Youtube database shenanigans.

And don't worry, we'll watch it.

Because it was listed when I opened it, it doesn't actually say that

Also it's kind of a bummer topic, I gotta have a specific mood to get into that.

Edited by Adannor on Feb 22nd 2021 at 9:00:22 PM

Ooh, boy. There’s a loooooot to take in here:

First, I’m glad she states good movies can have problematic moments while still being good. Not a groundbreaking revelation but people still don’t understand that. Some Like It Hot, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, The 40 Year Old Virgin are classics.

Second, as someone who’s been exposed to all this, I personally never felt any of those type of jokes to be funny. Even then, I never understood why they were stigmatized as being “violent”. It was more confusing to me than me being morally angry. The only thing I do regret in my past is thinking transgender people were also gays and lesbians but clearly that’s just my ignorance. They can be but this has nothing to do with sexual orientation. I’m still learning and I know I’ll fail in the future. For me, people shouldn’t be influenced by fiction when it comes to these subjects. They need to do the research themselves.

Third, The Trouble With Harry is my favorite Hitchcock movie. That has nothing to do with anything but it’s so underrated and needs more love.

Fourth, regarding Silence of the Lambs, I consider it the feminist movie of 1991 (eat your heart out, Thelma & Louise). Demme even flat out said that women are stronger than men, not an unfounded accusation. Still, she kinda got Crawford wrong. He didn’t respect her at first but he did develop as a character to being more understanding toward her after the sheriff incident, especially when she called him out for that kind of internalized prejudice. And there where disclaimers, as she mentioned, but if the audience didn’t remember those lines, it says more about them than the movie, but we can debate that. Also, Bill wasn’t meant to be gay, according to Demme.

Fifth, ...[sigh] South Park. I admit that it didn’t have a great record on this (though Matt & Trey despise the 2nd season, as much as the 1st and 3rd seasons so I don’t count them as being representative of the show) but I’m glad they did try to make things more enlightened about it with the 18th season episode “The Cissy”. And there’s Board Girls but that was more about PC culture than transgender issues. Should they include a well-written transgender character to balance out and be the voice of reason for those episodes, I agree with that but I’d say there are worse examples of this behavior (Seth MacFarlane and Todd Phillips are the worst). And I can forgive the whole Cartman’s Mom (Liane) being a whore plot. Matt & Trey were flat out misogynists earlier on but they’ve grown older and Liane has become more than just that.

Sixth, good to see some more Cyberpunk bashing. Ok, it wasn’t technically that but fuck that game.

Edited by HBarnill on Feb 22nd 2021 at 11:34:03 AM

Man that’s a brutal subject matter to talk about.

The #Feud is neck and neck

Notice by the way that Some Like It Hot and the novel Psycho came out in the same year, so both versions of that trope existed side by side at that point.

Honestly when the quotes the GLAAD survey of trans people in police procedural shows, I'm surprised it's only 21% of Trans characters who are villains or criminals. Being someone who has followed a lot of the genre and is kind of a fan (Well, I like mysteries. ACAB but the main source of mysteries on TV is police procedurals) I'd expect that far higher.

That 65% of them are presented as sex workers tracks though.

Edited by Ghilz on Feb 22nd 2021 at 2:02:26 PM

Wow, I hadn't heard of that book from Rowling. As if the tweet wasn't bad enough... Wow.

Seeing those excerpts from her book, her writing seems to have gotten worse if anything. Or more likely, she no longer employs a proper editor.

We happened to be talking in the HP thread about how Rowling tends to describe villainous women as ugly, or with their beauty now distorted by evil, and really seems to like the Evil Is Ugly trope for her characters. But it was never as bad as this.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 22nd 2021 at 8:24:57 PM

It's a 900 page detective novel 5 deep in the series. No one edited it.

I didn't even know about the fatshaming in the book wow.

The Ugly Woman trope comes from her deep hatred for Thatcher, who’s hatred of minorities spurred her to write a fantasy series about the dangers of bigotry. Too bad it’s doesn’t translate towards transgender people.

I mean say what you will about George Lucas, but he never went on a rant about how much he hated black people. He made Jar Jar to do that.

... didn't they then somehow regress on trans issues when they went and attacked trans athletes in the 19th season episode "Board Girls"?

Lucas' problem seems to be more an over-reliance on ethnic stereotypes for characterization and humour than anything outright hateful. It's still bad, but not to the same degree.

I remember this commentary about Looney Tunes cartoons with racist elements, where someone noted you can always tell which cartoonists are the bad sort of racist, rather than the casual racists, because they tend to make their racist portrayals particularly mean-spirited, rather than just using it for comedy.

Also, I hadn't heard of Fourth Wave feminism (I think), but now that I have, I conclude that I am a Fourth Waver now. The field just keeps moving forwards.

That one was more about someone pretending to be trans to compete against women, who he could easily beat at sports. But yes, it seemed to be some sort of botched commentary about a then-current debate about whether or not trans women should be allowed to compete with women.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 22nd 2021 at 8:50:40 PM

I am glad that some shows are just casting trans people as actors without them being trans being relevant to the role. The Magicians had a trans woman play the Fairy Queen and most of the audience couldn't tell at all, and the Queen's Gambit has a trans actress play a presumably cis character in the first episode.

But in terms of good trans portrayals, one show that did it extremely well was Dispatches from Elsewhere. Eve Lindley (a trans actress) plays a trans woman named Simone, and the way it's all framed, her being trans informs her character but her story arc isn't about her being trans at all. The actual show is kind of odd and the ending is pretty surreal, but it's honestly one of my favourite shows.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 22nd 2021 at 3:06:17 PM

That sounds like the exact argument that Ellis addresses fairly early in the video, that a lot of the transphobic characters strictly speaking aren't transgender but at the same time are used to basically further transphobic arguments.

For example, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: I don't think the villain is transgender so much as Disguised in Drag but at the same time it comes across as uncomfortably transphobic nowadays.

I have to say that I do find transgender athletes a... difficult subject. As a former college athlete on a team that did actively train with our female counterparts, biology makes a difference there. Coupled with the fact that sports are effectively pointless and by definition are built around arbitrary restrictions it's probably the one area where I'm "against" trans rights.

I agree it is a difficult issue, though not to the extent that I would be against trans rights on that ground. But I would take that problem even further to the segregation of the sexes in sports, as I have serious doubts about the actual need for the divide.

I’ve pretty much disowned a lot of Jim Carrey’s 90s work that aren’t Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar, and The Truman Show. It’s easy to remember the transphobia but the homophobia was controversial, even then. Carrey himself included those elements just to push buttons. I’m sure he has a different opinion these days but still.

By the way, Cartman's mom was named Liane after a girlfriend of Trey Parker's who cheated on him. So there was definitely some internalized anger there. Parker and Stone also named an unfaithful horse from Cannibal! The Musical (their student film) Liane.

Well that explains a lot, then. I always thought they were just being edgy.

I remember that Frank Drebin joke with the trans henchwoman. I always found it a weird joke even way back then.

I have to wonder if Rowling has always been transphobic. There isn't any obvious transphobia in the HP books, though there is plenty of more general sexism tropes in there. But then people can change for the worse sometimes.

From this article: Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us.

Well, as they say, bingo. That does indeed seem to be a clear case of transphobia in the books, much more convincing than the evidence mentioned earlier in the Harry Potter thread.

This was a difficult video to get through. A lot of the subject matter was deeply disturbing. I had to pause a couple of times while watching the Ed Gein section or the section discussing sexual abuse in prison.

Still, it's definitely my favorite out of Lindsay's recent work. I really wasn't a fan of the Omegaverse era (no matter how bizarre that whole situation was) and I still have yet to read Axiom's End or watch Borat.

However, I am a retired HP fan that is invested in trans rights and pop culture, so this video was right up my alley. I'm really glad she decided to take on this topic. I'm also glad she called out the blatant transphobia in shows like Family Guy and South Park, which really have not aged well. At all.

I will say on a less-related note, that POSE is one of the best shows I've ever seen on television and I am so, so happy that it exists. It's not perfect (and I do need to watch more media with well-portrayed trans characters), but it's far ahead of a lot of shows in terms of representation and empathy for trans (and cisgender gay) POC characters.

Lastly, JK Rowling is just...wow.

Another interesting quote:

JK...look, I've gotten into a bit of hot water before voicing some thoughts on her, so I'll just keep the morbid, maybe-over-the-line-but-maybe-not stuff out of this post (thought not out of P Ms if anyone's curious) and say if I had my way she would at the very, very, VERY least be booted from Twitter. I had plenty of Harry Potter in my childhood but I don't feel like I grew some strong attachment or anything, but I don't need to to realize she's not only fucked in her views but is one of those problematic artists whose problematic elements as a person, intentionally or not (seems quite intentional here), managed to leak into her own art and it's only gotten more and more glaring as time's gone on (see also John K and Joss Whedon).

I'm not gonna say you're a bad person or an idiot if you still like any HP media, but it's essential to have some perspective. Also, yes Family Guy and South Park suck and deserve to be called out.

That's something I've thought about, not to derail this too much, but I feel like when you've reached a point of enjoying the fan content for something more, perhaps even MUCH more, than most anything the official work has to offer, it just feels like a big red flag and I go "...okay, something's wrong here." Sure, creators like Rowling may have provided springboards for the world and setting, but for whatever reason it's just not fleshed out into all it could be and it's the fans like the HP crowd that take the untapped potential and really capitalize on it into ways that the author is either too inept or in this case too fixated on spilling her horrid views onto these characters when she could be doing better.

Edited by AyyItsMidnight on Feb 22nd 2021 at 2:09:22 AM

So that’s what My Immortal was about all along…

Anyway, I’m firmly on Team Lindsay in #TheFeud just for those hairpins.

Edited by Lyendith on Feb 22nd 2021 at 11:43:08 AM

J.K. Rowling’s transphobic new novel sees her at the mercy of all her worst impulses: In the detective novel Troubled Blood, Rowling spends most of her time explaining why she’s mad at modern feminism.

I think that essay and latest books confirms what I've already concluded about Rowling: that she is a 90s feminist who just stopped growing as a feminist or as liberal in general. Her brand of feminism, what we now call TERF (and various other popular net acronyms like SWERF), was basically the norm back then. It's easy to forget, but what we now call "radical" feminism in those acronyms used to be the mainstream of feminism, what scholars call the second wave. Rowling clearly grew up among second wave feminists, learning their particular brand of feminism, and just stopped there. She probably accepts black and gay feminists as part of the movement (though then again, maybe not, considering the racist undertones of her work), but she never really could let go of that old fashioned second waver notion of fixed binary gender, with a solid barrier between the two.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 22nd 2021 at 11:47:24 AM