Tag: but

lesbianabstraction:

carnistprivilege:

carnistprivilege:

have you guys ever tried to explain memes to old ppl?  not even that much older, just like, my parents are gen xers and like.. i tried to explain @dril to my mom one time.  it didn’t work.

i’m just trying to imagine explaining that gregorian cover of “wake me up inside” to anyone over the age of 37.  like, how do i put into words the horror i felt listening to it for the first time, the hilarity, the bleak despair, the truly transcendental level of dada-esque memelord bullshit to which that track has ascended here on tungle dot com, with that fucking picture of that fucking monk smugly drinking – what is that, scotch? it doesn’t look like a scotch glass – is it brandy? it doesn’t look like brandy – WHATEVER.  the point is, how could i ever possibly explain to someone whose consciousness is not steeped in the roiling depths of the memetic maelstrom, who does not spend every day blissfully drowning beneath the waters of this ever-evolving brand of randomness-as-humor to which we as a generation have inextricably bound ourselves, who is not frozen in that eternal moment as their feet leave the diving board and they plunge headfirst into the nihilist void with a terrible grin fixed on their face, because that is the only way to cope with near-total disenfranchisement from a world of smug authority figures who have utterly abandoned them, how do i explain to someone who has not completely given up on the things they love – how do i explain to them why a gregorian chant cover of a wildly popular emo rock song from the ‘90s literally reduces me to tears?!?!?!!  because i don’t FUCKING know.  jesus christ.  fuck.

the more important question is why you haven’t linked the gregorian chant cover of wake me up inside yet

(1) While some strands of radical feminism are harmful and tend to forget that there are real people at the hearts of their arguments there are many strands which seek to help trans people as much as female born women. In particular, I’ve found that reading the perspectives of detransitioned people is illuminating, because the extreme of trans politics is just as mra-like as the extreme of radical feminism eg womanhood=feminity, the idea that lesbians must sleep with trans women to validate them

earlhamclassics:

teashoesandhair:

(this accidentally got quite long, so feel free to press J to skip. Please look at the trigger warnings in the tags if blacklisting hasn’t worked.)

Oh, I completely agree with you – that’s why I made sure that the post said ‘terf’ rather than ‘radical feminism’. Even though I don’t personally agree with a lot of radical feminist ideology (I personally believe in the idea of fighting toxic masculinity rather than men as a gendered group, and I don’t think that a lot of their sex work criticism is helpful to sex workers) I don’t think that it has the same violent rhetoric as terf debate in particular. That’s probably a valid point of contention – when does something become ‘violent’; is it when it perpetuates harmful ideas or when it explicitly condones action? – but my point is basically that terf ideology is a lot more extreme than a lot of radical feminist ideology, even though they’re often conflated.

I also agree that Tumblr’s chosen brand of feminism can be incredibly harmful and toxic. I think that part of it is the misinformed belief that to be right is just to be as far away from wrong as possible, whereas in reality there are a lot more points to consider than that (eg. it’s obviously wrong to be a raging transphobe, but I equally don’t think it’s helpful to break the debate down into ‘either you are incredibly transphobic, or you are completely 100% right’ when I think there’s a huge grey area, much of it un-navigated, in between the two points, which could be alleviated with education and understanding on both sides). I think your point about people saying that to be attracted to a type of genitalia is being transphobic is a good one, because at the end of the day, there are some people who are attracted to masculinity / femininity / gender characteristics and there are people who are attracted to certain biological sex characteristics (ie. some people will be attracted to penises, and some will be attracted to masculinity as a gender performance – I’m not sure that this is a choice). There’s probably a debate about language to be had here (ie is it accurate to say ‘I’m attracted to men’ when you mean that you’re attracted solely to people with penises, and should you be allowed to distinguish your own preference and decide on your terminology to describe it – I don’t have the answer to that) but I don’t think it’s as black and white as a lot of the rhetoric would have you believe. 

I also think that Tumblr in particular goes about its politics in a very dangerous way – doxxing minors, creating call-out posts designed to seek wrongdoings rather than expose them (eg. ‘does anyone know if [Tumblr user] has ever fucked up?’), failing to ensure that their allegations have any basis in fact before spreading them (Xkit guy, anyone?), using extreme terminology for shock value (eg. calling the Steven Universe creators ‘paedophiles’ because they made some comment about allowing all kinds of fanart), not acknowledging the difference between ignorance and bigotry (eg. attacking someone with the same fervour who accidentally misgenders someone as someone who intentionally refuses to use correct pronouns) and conforming to a binary ideology (eg. either you’re perfect and you use all the correct terminology at the first attempt, or you’re a -ist -ic piece of shit – there’s no room for error or for learning).

My own set of political ideology is probably just a muddled porridge of about 39485702 different perspectives – I would define it as intersectional feminism, but without the insistence upon binary thought (eg. I would rather someone get something wrong and be approached and educated than be attacked and doxxed for it). I think my own viewpoint is very much to be aware that not everyone has access to the same resources and education as anyone else, and that no-one is born inherently knowing everything about gender politics and race, etc. I remember when I was a 14 year old kid who thought that abortions were only acceptable in the case of rape – thank the stars above that I was able to educate myself on that one. It’s a constant learning process, and I don’t think it’s helpful to envisage everyone as starting from the same point.

I think the fact that I’m worried about posting this probably says a lot about how Tumblr tends to accept critical viewpoints on its methods, even though I’m very aware that it’s a minority on Tumblr who perpetuate and support these particular behaviours. I also think that I’ve been really waffly here (I just got out of bed, oops) so:

tl;dr I agree that radical feminism and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (which I very much do not like) are not the same thing, and I agree that a lot of politics at the other extremes are also Not Good – basically, IMO, ideological extremism at the end of any spectrum is going to merit some criticism, to put it politely.

(I’m also not really in the head space for a debate on this, so I’m not going to be answering any more questions on the topic of my political beliefs / response to Tumblr’s politics / opinion on any recent Tumblr dramas, if that’s OK!)

Reblogged because of its unicorn status: thoughtful consideration on Tumblr of (radical/terf) feminism that acknowledges a spectrum of ideas/practices.

More of this, please.

katherinestasaph:

piratemoggy:

speculativepast:

It’s been 10 years since we first started taking the Hobbits to Isengard. I mean, it’s been way longer – the Hobbits could have fucking walked there, back again, managed to get served several times at the downstairs bar in Doggett’s and got a Southeastern train service all the way to Charing Cross since Tolkien put pen to page. But (and believe me, this is deeply unusual for me) let’s put J R R aside in this.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is kind of… well, both too faithful (total lack of critical interrogation of Tolkien’s absolutely awful concepts around race, gender, etc.) and not faithful enough in that it appeared to miss all the points your correspondent’s teenage self managed to find in the series. Specifically, where Lord of the Rings is an obsessively detailed but ultimately quite modest and traumatised epic, a huge amount of which is two small, starving creatures crawling around in mud having moral dilemmas, the Jackson films take themselves as seriously and grandly as the books came to be and as I suspect their author probably never did.

Taking the Hobbits to Isengard, on the other hand, is a pure and perfect work and I will hear no ill spoken of it else ye never receive a pint in a round bought by me again. 

It takes as its base the Hovis-theme-ripping-off music from The Shire – the small-worlded part of the films, before any grandeur is truly injected into the bloated beastie that is the trilogy. The Hobbiton theme is supposed to be homely, reassuring, quaint – like anything that succeeds at that, it sounds fucking amazing played on an airhorn.

The simplicity of the Shire’s theme is what allows it to so naturally accept the kitchen-sink style auditory ornamentation that is ‘a donk’. A classic staple of rave, it needs no introduction even in a world as apparently dislocated from two WKDs and a honk on some poppers as the miruvor-quaffing pipeweed fiends we see here.

As a lyrical piece, Taking The Hobbits is discursive – like many of the very best pieces of pop. One only has to consider the sweet, sweet tension of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain or Brandy and Monica’s iconic The Boy Is Mine to recognise that dialogous pop is, when it works, a particularly sublime genre.

It doesn’t matter that the lines are, ostensibly, orphaned from their original place in the script – from the eponymous ejaculation to Gollum’s hissed What did u say??? they’re all perfectly addressing each other in the sort of gloriously confused cacophony usually reserved for a misunderstanding-based brawl outside a kebab shop at 3am. 

I remember the first time I heard Taking The Hobbits To Isengard. It was quite a momentous occasion because I still had dial up, so it took roughly the length of a decent pop song to load and it was very difficult to tell if it was deliberate or a bandwidth-related glitch remix for at least 30 torturously disrupted seconds. I’d imagined it would be a fairly quick joke – most internet video based things were, at the time, but no; a fully fledged song. That just kept going. 

The initial air horns! These are funny, yes because we remember them as the Shire theme, which isn’t even the music for this bit. The stuttering sample of the original line! Which sustains itself as Sheffield Dave-style shout out far better than it should, given it’s old seriousface Elf ears himself yelling off a horse. 

(In retrospect, should have equated that with Sheffield Dave earlier)

Then there’s …polka bit. Few pop songs manage to maintain a polka interlude – Bohemian Rhapsody springs to mind but Taking the Hobbits To Isengard manages to repeatedly insert it without losing coherency around its original rave premise. If you don’t think ‘Tell me where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him’ delivered over a little eurodance handbag bit is not both extremely funny and excellent pop, I can’t help you. 

Taking The Hobbits To Isengard would score reasonably at Eurovision. Not because Eurovision is actually the home of comedy trash but because if France (and it would probably have to be France in order for the Elven analogues to take themselves seriously enough*) scooted in on an artpop platform and wanged loads of fucking airhorns round the stadium it would be entirely in keeping with European sensibilities of solemnly considering the totally whimsical due to our inherent reservedness about experiencing joy.

(The slightly older and wiser part of me has to question the repeated use of Gollum’s ‘stupid, fat, Hobbits’ which makes sense in the context of what he is but isn’t as inherently funny as a bass-intoned ‘Balrog of Morgoth’)

The great thing about Taking The Hobbits To Isengard is it actually gets funnier the more it goes on. Like Star Trekkin it not only sets out to commit to a fairly one-note premise but to hammer that note until it falls out through the piano and becomes a transcendent free agent, cascading through the strings. 

It takes a premise; that the Lord of the Rings films, in their overblown format, are very, very silly and runs with it extremely, deadly seriously. This is the core of not all but a fairly substantial chunk of really good pop, as well as an excellent manual for life. All things are here – a manic sense of imminent implosion, troubling past associated with racist ideologies, handcarts, hell, what did u say???

Very seriously; Taking The Hobbits To Isengard is a superb piece of fan work and it has substantially enriched my life to listen to it on loop for the past 45 minutes whilst watching a parliamentary debate on mute. Creators of this piece: thank.

I ONLY FUCKING POSTED THIS TO THE WRONG FUCKING BLOG DIDN’T I?

best music writing 2016