Why man 2013 - woman
Gosh birger
At the end of 2013 we can say that the man of the year is a woman: in culture, society, media and politics it was women who set the tone for the last 12 months. Of course, it’s ridiculous to state this on the pages of Wonderzine, which is already regularly reporting on the victories of feminism, so we asked the man, the deputy, to summarize the emancipation. Goshu Birger, editor-in-chief, "Posters". They themselves, they say, asked for it.
In early March, the American feminist cultural analyst Anita Sargsyan released the first video from the series "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" - that video games were created by dorks to grow new dorks. Sargsyan chose the right goal for the crusade: the games now really become the most important cultural medium and more than others influence the formation of youth. And most importantly - often, due to the insignificance of the plot, they are built on the classic banal chauvinist images. Like, for example, the archetype “a maiden in trouble”, about which Anita tells in her first video: there is a princess imprisoned in a tower, and a knight who jumps to save her. A woman is a helpless and inanimate thing, a prize pool, a man is a muscular hero who will simply come and take it. This is how the mindset of children develops, at games brought up.
Meanwhile, exactly in the same month, the game Bioshock Infinite was going on, also starting with the “maiden in trouble” trail. The hero - a typical dork - is trusted to find and lead a girl imprisoned in the tower, but the hero is not a very knight, and the captive, to whom he gets at the very beginning of the plot, first of all figuratively saves a savior on the head with a textbook of quantum physics. And then Elizabeth will regularly tear the space-time continuum and save the hero from death over and over again in order to save his soul in the final.
The aggressive girls wearing horn-rimmed glasses are not the best conductor of any ideas.
These two counterexamples are not the dissynchronization between feminist criticism and modern culture, but, on the contrary, the result of a single phenomenon. One thought occurred to many people in different parts of the globe: it’s time to take feminism away from feminists. Because let's be honest: aggressive girls wearing horn-rimmed glasses, blasting out “misogyny”, “patriarchy” and “objectification” are not the best guides for any ideas, even if they are correct. Feminism needed a rebranding, and it happened the last few years (you can assume, for example, from the launch of the Jezebel site). This year, its results have become obvious: on the one hand, criticism of pop culture flourished, as in Anita Sarkisyan, and on the other hand, ubiquitous examples of new culture that respond to this criticism.
For example, in the TV. In The Fall, where Gillian Anderson towers in all senses over all male characters. In Top of the Lake, for the first time in a scene of sudden oral sex in the toilet, the subject is a woman and the object is a man. In The Good Wife, in which the main character reached emancipatory enlightenment, and instead of being torn between two men, she began to skillfully play them. The male FX channel turned into a herald of emancipation at all: if in the first two seasons of American Horror Story women's topics were still somehow covertly submitted, then in the current one almost directly the idea of the similarity of the stories of blacks and women in America (in both cases - long and still not complete deliverance from slavery). In the biker masculine tragedy based on the "Hamlet" of Sons of Anarchy, the local Gertrude is not at all like an eternal sacrifice. Even in the show about Soviet spies in the USA, The Americans turns out to be more interesting than a male character. And in Orange Is the New Black men simply have no place.
In the video games that Anita Sargsyan undertook, all is not so bad either. Banal plots are a thing of the past, and besides Bioshock Infinite there is, for example, The Last of Us, in which another chauvinist path - the "manic pixie dream girl" - is deconstructed in much the same way as the "maid in need" in "Bioshock". There is still a touching indie story Gone Home about two sisters; and even Tomb Raider, which was once the benchmark of women's objectification in games, has restarted this year: Lara Croft there is now a complex and challenging character, whose story is much more interesting than her forms (however, it’s still 80% of the time to stare at her pretty ass in shorts ). In pop music, Justin Timberlake had to return, because Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and others literally occupied the whole space. In independent music, The Knife band masks feminist manifestos as songs, and Pussy Riot does not even mask. In the cinema - "Sweet Francis", "Gravity", "Cops in Skirts", "Stocker", "Weeping Holidays" and "Hunger Games" and a dozen more films about interesting, one-dimensional and heroic women.
The rapper A $ AP Rocky in the song "Wild for Tonight" reads in plain text: "At this exit, we will get drunk with the boys and we will disrespectfully call women bitches." This, for a moment, hip-hop culture, in which to call a woman a “bitch” is the same as calling a biological mother “mother”, and this word “disrespectful” that entered the track is a herald of great changes. In the meantime, the scandal with the song of Robin Tike "Blurred Lines" has flared up, which unequivocally sings the misogyny and almost disapproves of date rape. The trick here is that this song was originally created for the scandal - and 10 years ago it would have been an ordinary pop song, and today it is excluded from the playlists of student radio stations. (In the meantime, old-school feminists write a horrific parody in which they reply to the subtle hints of Tika with the phrase “get ready for castration, we are in this world of men” and, thus, they remind you once again that everyone does not like them.)
In 2007, the leadership of Gawker Media wanted to attract a female audience to its websites: this is how re-branding of feminism appeared - Jezebel
In general, if in 2006, Time magazine made a mirror cover and called the reader Man of the Year (because of social networks), and in 2011 - a participant in mass demonstrations, then in 2013 the editorial board could easily repeat the trick and put on the cover of a woman. The woman who found this year the acceptable compromise between the chauvinistic world and the feminist extremes. She is not shy of objectification - because she understands that beauty is her weapon, and she herself would not mind considering it as an object of a handsome man. Cosmetics does not shun (because she just likes to be beautiful) and can nevertheless forgive the world that women want to be pretty here (after all, she herself does not tolerate stupid men and would be glad if they would invent something some kind of powder for the brain). Does not tolerate chivalry, but does not hesitate to ask for help with a heavy thing - she understands that a thing can not lift simply because it lacks strength, and the floor has nothing to do with it. She is a strong, independent, intelligent, sexy, in the best sense feminine woman whom modern culture has invented to us - glory to her, honor and praise.
Only if you think about it, men created this woman - with rare exceptions like Orange Is the New Black. Ken Levine wrote the game Bioshock. The series The Fall, along with the character Gillian Anderson, was coined by Alan Qubitt. American Horror Story was created by Brad Falchak and Ryan Murphy (perhaps someone will be reconciled with the fact that both are gay), and in general out of seven script writers working on the show, only two are women. Top of the Lake was created by two thirds of men. In addition to Karin Dreyer Anderson, The Knife has her brother Olof, and even if the latter, with a promotional accompaniment to a new album, has his back and a wig, the group’s ideology is still his ideology too. The site where you are reading it now, even if it’s known at the moment, is exclusively female editorial, but it was invented in the depths of Look At Me by men. Hell, even for Pussy Riot there are men - not so much the husband of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova Petr Verzilov, as President Putin, who provided the girls with prison time with fame and influence (even if he didn’t want this). And in the end, there is also a man behind Anita: her ideology was inspired by a certain Jonathan McIntosh, who, apparently, is still the gray cardinal of Anita’s YouTube-broadcasts.
Why does he - and other men - need it? To earn. In 2007, the leadership of Gawker Media wanted to attract a female audience to its websites - this was how rebranding of feminism, Jezebel, and then income from banners on Jezebel appeared. At about the same time, Anita, inspired by Jonathan, began to run the Feminist Frequency blog and by 2012 gained a solid audience, then asked Kickstarter for money on a series of videos about video games. It was necessary only $ 6,000 - Anita scored almost $ 159,000. This did not affect the quality of the clips, that is, feminism helped her (and, apparently, Jonathan) earn $ 150,000.
If emancipation is liberation, then at this stage it can be considered already completed.
They earned and all the others, in time attached to the trend that appeared - and at the same time created the same woman from the nonexistent Time cover. This woman, to be honest - the same fiction and fantasy, like a helpless princess from the castle or the magical "manic pixie dream girl". It’s not that they didn’t exist in nature (after all, the “princesses” and “fairies” are also sometimes found in life), but it’s probably a shame to suddenly find out that this proud image of feminists was at some point expropriated by capitalist patriarchy and turned into a marketing tool.
However, they say: if you like, let go, and all the cultural baggage of this year can be regarded as one big sign of love. And if emancipation is liberation, then at this stage it can be considered already completed. Previously, men invented images of women barefooted, pregnant and kitchen, today - a girl who can nip the head with a textbook of quantum physics (after reading it from cover to cover) and which, most importantly, should be respected and taken as equals. It will be cool if this girl herself now comes up with something. Or at least scream on the head.