I was reading Diablo Cody’s blog on MySpace the other day (complete with hangover, oh my!) and she was talking about being hated by strangers on the Internet for, well, pretty much everything she does these days.
That, plus being the press person hangin with the comic creators last weekend, and discussing with a very cool guy how he doesn’t like to read reviews–and agreeing with him. Hell, I take it personally when I get trolled, so I can’t imagine how it feels when someone rips a piece of creative work I put my soul into to shreds.
When I was writing reviews on a regular basis, I reserved most of my bile for people who were already famous. For one thing, I was a lot less likely to ruin their career if I said a band with a major label contract was shit, while if I said the same thing of a small, local, unsigned band trying to get a contract, I could kill their career. For another, if you’re willing to create something knowing you’re not going to make a lot of money at it, but you do it anyway because you just have to do it…well, I respect that even if the art you make isn’t something I like.
But even if you’re super-duper-amazingly famous, like, oh, say, Madonna, (link through Belle because she’s funnier than I am, by a long shot) I still think it’s silly to take potshots.
Critique the work if you must, but taking shots at the person?
Diablo Cody has been the topic of plenty o’hate in the Feminist Blogosphere of Doom lately–and by lately I mean ever since Juno hit theaters. Again, critiquing the movie is one thing, but ripping on her as a person–talking about how annoying she is, etc.–just strikes me as bitterness.
Woman hate, we’re full of it. And it’s sad to me when feminism becomes an excuse to tell other women that they’re too old, too young, too sexual, too pretty, too ugly, too inappropriate, or not women at all.
And when you’re just snarking on other women for the sake of snarking on them, whether it’s discounting another woman’s argument by saying she’s “unloveable” [sic] or complaining that celebrities “hurt us all” by looking so damn..good or something, well, how is that any different from saying they look bad and that hurts us? If any woman looking any way hurts us, well, we’d all better toughen up.
Or, as a wise woman pointed out elsewhere, if I have to spend all my time worrying that what I do might please a man in order to not do those things that might please a man, I’m still spending all my time thinking about what might please a man. I’m still giving up control. Giving up what I want because of what someone else might want.
Whereas Madonna might honestly just not give a fuck what you, or men, or anyone else thinks.
And I love Beyonce. And ScarJo (especially ScarJo–I have to love the girl who brought the hourglass shape back to prominence, and who covered Tom Waits songs with backup vocals by David Bowie).
But even if I didn’t, I’ve got better things to post about than slagging off other women because I don’t like the way they look, or talk, or dress. And if there’s one thing far more hurtful to other women than conventionally attractive people or people with a weird sense of humor, it’s women who talk about sisterhood while talking shite behind your back.
My feminism’s got room for Madonna and for Harriet McBryde JohnsonŲ for Beyonce and Beth Ditto, for Scarlett Johansson and Hillary Clinton and Cynthia McKinney and all these brilliant women all over the blogosphere who have been told that they’re not proper feminists at some time or another. Or not proper women. Or just “annoying.”
We will get further if we stop worrying about who toes the line and start supporting each other’s choices and desires.
(like my tie-in there? thought so.)
So right. So right. I dedicated my very first post to Madonna. I’m not even big Madonna fan, but I love her as an exemplar of something I really respect. She (and the other women you mentioned) have a feminism that isn’t flogged into them by totalitarian (hater) feminists. Her feminism is intuitive. So many women who are not academic feminists are chastised by the establishment for not explaining themselves to “us”. It keeps what counts as “feminist” completely homogeneous, limited and exclusive to bourgeois college alums who will never evolve because they have no sense of feminism’s many faces. Their feminism is a fun house of a handful of self-referencing mirrors duplicating the same image endlessly. They become totally demented.
*ahem* basically, barring extreme circumstances, it’s the academic feminist’s obligation to consider all the potential feminisms in her/his analytical lens without condescension and with an OPEN MIND rather than lazily demand Madonna, or Diablo or whoever explain why they deserve the title. If these artists were to do so, they would have no time to create much needed art and popular culture in the name of feminism.
The indifference to aesthetics from feminists needs to end now, or the movement is going to loose or alienate much needed support.
Great post. Thanks for the one before too! Hurrah!
well said.
Juno had its issues but you know what there were parts of that were really enjoyable which is alot more than I can say for the usual tripe that passes for entertainment.
I think the problem with feminism in this case is colluding women. Some women are just so focused on men that they don’t realize that feminism is about women. We need to be autonomous, free thinking individuals We may not all agree, but as long as the starting point is not from a male perspective we have already added a new dimension of thought.