Plugging the Alphahole
“It’s not anti-feminist if I like it” seems to be the subtext. “It’s not misogynist if it turns my crank. It’s not problematic if I pretend it’s a guilty pleasure.” [...] It also creates an imbalance, a hierarchy, between pseudo-intellectual readers and those who just read for pleasure and don’t turn a critical eye to every book: “I can read and enjoy the Greek billionaire ordering the virgin around because I took three Women’s Studies classes in college and donate money to RAINN. I’m not That Reader.” Oh, yes, you are. Own it. And talk about it. Don’t pretend the modern-day romance reader is any more liberated/aware/superior than the first person who got tingly when a pirate ravished an unwilling maiden.
Dear Author, as per usual, does more mental gymnastics to justify this shit. A new low when one of their whiteys claims racism actually helps advance multicultural ia ia ftagn Hitler.
Before I go on, I want to note a couple of things: first, in these narratives, cultural diversity and hybridization are viewed as positive values (another way in which I see Romance rooted in an Anglo-American cultural context). Consequently, these narrative involve a certain level of cultural appropriation for the purpose of investigating alternative cultural and social realities, which themselves are not necessarily grounded in an authentically realized portrayal.
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All of Julia’s wealth and social privilege as a Roman did not give her the kind of autonomy and personal agency she has with Wulfric, and her realization makes her want to create a new kind of reality with him, one that blends the best of her Roman and his Goth customs. Wulfric tells Julia that he wants to settle in Gaul to “’learn to live with my Roman neighbors.’” Flipping the social script, Allen grounds notions of civilization and barbarism in human nature, rather than cultural difference. Julia sees in Wulfric a man who is “like his wolf, domesticated until roused, then a killer,” while Wulfric compares Julia to “an exotic animal, half-tame, half-wild.” Although highly idealized and somewhat simplistic in its reversal of the old captivity ideology, (which, does, of course, wind through the history of Rome), Allen’s novel also very bluntly sets the agenda for the transcultural union as one that can represent and initiate transformative, egalitarian social evolution.
To a rational person this might sound like yet another instance of a really misogynistic trope where a woman can only be complete/get liberated by a man, but to romance readers this apparently translates to subversion of the status quo.
This is a fun instance of a whitey appropriating outrage… wrongly.
Jamil being a good Hati (sic), making sure his Ulfric didn’t drown.
What? Random racism what? What does Jamil being Haitian have to do with keeping Richard from drowning? WHY THE FUCK IS HAITI MISSPELLED IN A FUCKING PROFESSIONALLY PUBLISHED FUCKING–
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My brain has hit fail overload. Seriously. HOW DO YOU DO THAT? How do you manage to fail that hard in just three fucking paragraphs?
The problem being that Laurell K Hamilton bases her wolf crap around Norse mythology. “Hati” refers to this, but this whitey–who claims she can “put up with not getting the nuances for racial stuff right”–decides it’s a misspelling of Haiti. She’s an admitted straight white Christian American. I’m sure all Haitians appreciate this valiant outrage.
Pregnant Women in America are Being Persecuted for Losing Their Babies. So the US is, like, 24/7 mass shootings, gang rapes, genocide, rape cults, what else? Sex trafficking. Plus this: Gitmo is Killing Me. Oh, and workplace sexual assault.
On the following day, in front of two other faculty members, I told him that I wasn’t interested in him and that he was to leave me alone. I asked him if he understood and he replied yes. On the following day, as I was leading my class into a computer lab, one of the faculty who had been present the day before (also a male senior faculty) assaulted me. He threw me up against the door and shoved something hard into my back. I fell. I took a moment to get my breath. Shaking, I walked to the art office and reported this to my chairperson. I was being physically attacked, intimidated, bullied and harassed. I thought that, surely, something would to be done to these two people, that some action would be taken. I had been harassed and assaulted. The law had been broken twice. I was in a state of shock.
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they began to launch an investigation into my background. I was hounded, harassed and totally ignored. Every day, my student display cases had garbage stuffed in them. No one would sit next to me in faculty meetings and I was not invited to departmental gatherings. I became a pariah. Then, the faculty committee tried to end my contract. However, both professors continued to sit on tenure and promotion committees and to participate fully in the running of the department.
The American national identity sure involves a lot of rape, gang rape, and trying to rape.
In case this was in doubt, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is Excrement.
Since there are still people who hail JK Rowling as the goddess of anti-racism, let’s shit on her some more.
Rowling is progressive, clearly pro-immigration, and the Harry Potter series illustrate a typical liberal approach to race blindness. Her works still presuppose that integration is synonymous with invisibility, but she also argues for the potential success of Britain’s multicultural model. Their well-integrated and invisible races ensure that Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, and the Patel sisters can be British without disrupting British identity with their racialized bodies. While I appreciated that Cho Chang became a sobbing mess inOrder of the Phoenix without her emotional deterioration being tied to her ethnicity, I can’t separate issues of representation from the larger systemic trend found within the fantasy genre. (Cho is the character of colour with the most screen time. One chapter is dedicated to her character in Order of the Phoenix, where she spends most of the time crying, and she receives a few sentences here and there from books 4 to 7. When we meet her, in book 3, she doesn’t say much of anything.) That characters of colour are in the background allow the reader to know that Hogwarts is Very Diverse, but their importance to the plot is minimal. As the very worst possibility, they act as ornaments to Hogwarts’ status as a Very Progressive School.
MMORPG powergamers.
Rewind to the three days following the release of World Of Warcraft’s Wrath Of The Lich King expansion. Delise played almost without pause. He stopped only momentarily at his desk to eat and drink, the need for intermittent dozing and defecation seen as infuriating biological interruptions by the young player, delaying his quest to rise through the rankings first. In-game, he accepted every quest he was offered, assimilating the experience points, but discarding those activities he believed would take too long to complete. He never idled, only pressed forward.
Ew.
