Tag: identity politics

Identity Politics — Lorne Michaels & SNL As The Taylor Swift Of American Comedy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Upon the news that Lorne Michaels will be feted as part of upcoming Kennedy Center Honors festivities, I saw someone complain on Twitter about how Lorne Michaels hasn’t promoted enough POC comics over the years.

That’s a fair point, and, yet, it also misses a crucial aspect of what’s going on: that’s not SNL’s function. SNL is not meant to be The Chappelle Show. It’s not meant to be edgy or challenging or go way out of its way to introduce mainstream audiences to unknown POC comics. Though the show has begun to promote non-white comics more of late which is good, SNL is meant to be the exact center of American comedy.

In this respect, SNL is similar to Taylor Swift. Tay-Tay serves a function. And that function is to be the exact center of American pop music. If you want songs about WAP, turn your ears elsewhere.

So, in a sense, woke complaints about Lorene Michaels and SNL are more attacks on the idea of any sort of “mainstream” at all. There’s nothing wrong with simply being mainstream. There are so many other off beat, edgy venues for people to enjoy non-mainstream content that it’s annoying when people attack something for being mainstream for simply being mainstream.

Ugh.

It’s this type of thinking that aggravates the culture wars and makes MAGA New Right cocksuckers want to burn the whole thing to the ground. Welcome to the New Right, as Jesse Kelly keeps say. (Double ugh.)

There are no easy answers to any of this. We’re careening towards a moment in time when either we have a MAGA autocracy and everything goes to shit, or we have a civil war and there’s some sort of culture “reset” where we all agree that having a “mainstream” this or that thing is fine. (Because once such a horrific civil war is over, people are going to cling to the traditional again — at least, that’s my thinking.)

Good luck.

If These Walls Could Talk


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m EXTREMELY self-conscious any time I find myself writing a female character, doubly so when I have to think up what I imagine women say when they’re alone (say, in the bathroom) and are talking about men.

It’s a situation fraught with the potential for disaster. I just can’t win. How do I know what women say in such a private situation? I’ve never been there and it would never happen even if I was there because, well, I’m a man. So, I have to use my imagination. (Duh.)

The only solution to this insecurity, as best I can tell, is to be really, really self-conscious about it and also very conservative about any assumptions I might make. I can’t have an agenda. I strictly stay within what I can maybe reverse engineer from what I know about women (what little I know) and then have in the front of my mind, “WHAT WOULD OLIVIA WILDE AND JESSICA CHESTAIN THINK OF THIS TEXT.”

That’s all I got. That’s the only way I can think of to not have women tittering on Twitter about how a doofus, clueless man AGAIN didn’t write female characters well.

MAGA Is Just Identity Politics For White People


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let me be clear, that going to one small MAGA rally in DC does not an expert on the subject make. But it was my first MAGA rally and it made a big impression on me. Then I talked to a relative who is conservative-but-not-MAGA and something occurred to me.

One reason why it’s so fucking hard to deal with MAGA is at its core, it’s identity politics for white people, but you can’t bring that up because they get all defensive and think you’re calling them, personally, racist. What’s more, they don’t even believe in systemic racism — period — so you can’t even bring that up.

Throw in the two sides no longer having a shared reality and, well, you have the makings of a pretty unstable country. And I honestly don’t know how this particular situation fixes itself peacefully. We have about 20 years before the dead hand of demographics finally whittles away at the core of the Republican Party — old people.

What’s more, it’s possible that as brown people grow more “white,” that their natural Catholic conservatism will kick in and, well, we turn into an autocracy no matter what. That could just be our fate now — the United States, on a macro level, is going to become an honest-to-God autocracy in my lifetime.

I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what is going to happen.

The Identity Politics Critique of Pop Art is Lit


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I am what I am, play my piano, sing my little Songs
— Ray Stevens

Here I am, an aspiring novelist working on some pop art. I am constantly reminded, however, of what a pain in the ass the Vox identity politics critique of pop art is. I just want to entertain people and yet in the back of my head I have to constantly worry about the Vox assholes poo-pooing anything I may produce because I’m just another CIS man who can’t write women because I’m too busy “fridging” them.

Jesus Christ.

This is how we got Trump.

I have come to believe that a lot of the criticism from likes of the very beautiful and talented Olivia Wilde and Jessica Chastain is they don’t even want men to write women — THEY want to write women. They just dress up their own creative ambition in an identity politics critique of men’s work.

This is not to say that their complaints aren’t valid — they are. But I’m making a good-faith effort to address their concerns and I fear that just because I’m a “CIS male” that it will all come to naught. There’s just nothing I can do to placate them because of who I am and what I look like.

The whole thing is a shit show — especially on Twitter — because the “thought leaders” on this subject are so fucking touchy that it’s best that you just not say anything and work on your art. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. But if you’re an anti-MAGA person like me your echo chamber is fucking full of women harping on the piss-poor portrayal of women by male authors. They’re right, it happens all the time.

All I ask is a fair shake if I try to address their complaints.

The Struggle Is Real: Writing Female Characters As An Aspiring Male Novelist


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There’s an old joke from the Usenet days which is relevant to the modern social media world. “Go thee not to Usenet for answers, for you will only get ‘yes,’ ‘no’ and ‘Try another newsgroup’ as your answers.”

So, often time, one can say something pretty innocuous (at least for you) and the next thing you know it goes DL viral and everyone is coming at you from different directions, telling you how much you suck.

I tweeted something under yet another video by a woman complaining about how piss-poor men’s descriptions of women in novels are about how I, for one, was at least TRYING not to fall into that trap. Everyone went bonkers, coming at me from every possibly direction.

It’s all very annoying.

Not only does it remind you of the old adage, “Never tweet,” it also makes you grit your teeth and think, “This is how we got Trump.” If you’re so blinded by identity politics that you think it is absolutely impossible for a man to be empathetic enough to write female characters that aren’t just poorly written bimbos, then you need to re-evaluate your priorities.

The last time I checked, women are, like, humans and it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch that imagine that a man — also being a human — could, with some thought, write female characters that are good enough that you don’t want to throw the book across the room in frustration.

Anyway. I just needed to get that out of my system. I couldn’t do anything more with the thread on Twitter because I would only stir up more trouble.