Tag: internalized misogyny

Sporking For A Good Cause: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Shutdown (Anita Blake 22.5)

Stitch12 Comments

sporking for a good cause

First things first here is a list of charities that you can (and should) donate to in order to help people directly affected by the government shutdown here in the US. Many of these people aren’t going to get paid even once the government re-opens and right now they’re suffering greatly. If you can donate, you can help someone get a little bit of financial security in these trying times.

Now, some backstory:

In October 2013, the US government was shut down for several days as a result of the Republican congress really hating the idea of letting the United States people get anything close to universal healthcare.

In response to the shutdown and ostensibly for her readers impacted by the shutdown as government workers, Laurell K. Hamilton posted “Shutdown”, a short story (or, more likely, a deleted scene from  the novel that had come out in July of the same year, Affliction) about the werewolf alpha Richard Zeeman introducing his newest human lover to Anita Blake and her main-shapeshifter squeeze, the wereleopard alpha Micah Callahan. This 7200-word story is a quick and frustrating look into the life of one of Anita’s former main lovers.

As Hamilton posted this story with good intentions and reuploaded it with the threat – I mean, promise – to figure out a sequel or original short story if the shutdown continues – with good intentions as well, I am sporking it with the best intentiions at heart. I would appreciate it if my followers/readers donated to one of the charities or organizations I linked to at the beginning of this piece.

So, now that you’ve (hopefully) donated to an organization that’s going to help folks impacted by the government shutdown, let’s start the sporking (for a good cause). The usual trigger warnings for any conversation about the Anitaverse apply here as I’ll be talking about the consent issues in the short, internalized misogyny, kink/sex shaming, and sexual violence. So read carefully if you can!

Note: If you prefer to listen to your sporking, here’s the MP3 narration I did! Don’t forget to donate, you nerds!
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Internalized Misogyny and that Damned Slash Shipping Post: A Response

Stitch2 Comments

ScreenHunter_233 Feb. 11 20.30.jpg

(Wherein I answer the first part of @legendofzeldamajorass‘s question, sort of answer the second, and promise try to do a better job about fleshing out my comments at some point soonish when I’m not swamped with work.)

This is in response to Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom

First things first: Girls and people perceived to be girls are spoonfed some seriously toxic thoughts about what it means to be a girl and what femininity as a construct is from the moment that they’re born.

Think back to high school, if you weren’t a teenage girl, you were around them. How many of them were super nice to one another across the board? When you exist in a society that has made an industry out telling women they’re not good enough and never will be, you wind up with some pretty twisted views of what you’re supposed to be like.

One of the pushbacks I keep seeing to my post on slash shipping and pseudo-progressiveness is that people like you and like others assume that women aren’t capable of actively expressing internalized misogyny and that we shouldn’t confront the fact that it’s something that’s so very present in fandom spaces.

I was a teenage girl once. I was also a teenage slash shipper and have been a slash shipper for the past 13+ years. And I save everything. So I can go back and look at the slashfic I wrote and read back then and see very vividly the internalized misogyny that was present in my erasure of female characters or how I used them as villains more often than not. And I can also see the evolution of my writing as I turned my academic research towards queer history and gender studies.

And I’m still evolving! Because people talked to me, they called me out and they called fandom out. And I learned just as much from them as I did my textbooks.

So why should we you know… not talk about the fact that internalized misogyny (and internalized racism) is something that our fellow female fans need to grow out of because it definitely informs the way that a majority of them tend to gravitate towards the white dude ships when they ship slash.Read More »

Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom

Stitch29 Comments

disproportionateHere’s a newsflash for you my fellow slash shippers: Your male/male ships that focus almost exclusively on white men aren’t as progressive or as rebellious as you think they are.

Especially when (not ‘if’) they come at the expense of women and characters of color who have significant intimate relationships with one or both of the two white guys you’re shipping.
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