Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 25 - We're Not Misogynistic, Reality Is
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
For the record: I know this title is clickbait, but I couldn’t find an alternative I liked.
I watched The Social Network for the first time a few months ago.
It’s a pretty good movie, but it was also very obviously written to be an entertaining movie instead of an accurate story. In reply to criticism along these lines, the scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin said, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?”
I think it’s self-evident that Sorkin bent the story to make it more cinematic, and he achieved his goal very well, but I’m not sure it makes up for its depiction of the tech industry.
For one, the whole movie is pretty misogynistic. No, I mean really misogynistic. Almost every female character in the movie is defined by having sex, dating a male lead, or partying half-naked. Turns out I’m not alone in feeling this way, because based on news articles from the time there was a lot of backlash over how the movie depicted women. In response, Sorkin said this.
Facebook was born during a night of incredibly misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who’d most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard.
More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80’s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)
I’m not sure I like this explanation very much. Sorkin’s claim is that he wanted to present people the way they were, and the people he presented were actually that misogynistic. In other words, if you found the movie’s depiction of women distasteful, it was supposed to make you feel that way. This falls apart when you realize he wrote out Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s long term girlfriend during Facebook’s early years. If you’re bending the facts for your narrative, I’m not sure you get to claim you’re depicting people accurately.
A similar defense was given by the show writers for Silicon Valley. Now, for the record, I haven’t seen the show. By my understanding, their goal is to satire startup culture, so they feel they have an obligation to present the world as accurately as possible - meaning a very homogeneous cast of almost all white dudes.
There’s an issue lurking behind the show’s success—and it’s the same one that faces the real Silicon Valley. The show is overwhelmingly white and male, especially in the first season, where the only “diversity” comes from one South Asian programmer and a female VC.
Berg said they’re not shying away from the issue at all. They’re just reflecting the valley as they see it.
“We shot some crowd footage at Disrupt,” the real TechCrunch conference that fictional Pied Piper competes in, he said. “I have a friend in tech who called me, and she said, ‘Those crowd shots are absurd, you didn’t put any women in there at all.’ I had to tell her—those were real shots. The world we’re depicting is fucked up. Do we have a responsibility to make the genders on our show more balanced, when this is the world we’re depicting?”
It’s an interesting question. Should show writers be obligated to present the world as it really is, or should they present the world as we wish it should be? What’s the right balance between aspirational and reality?
I think show writers actually do have a responsibility to depict gender balance, even when it doesn’t reflect reality. Your show is going to be unrealistic anyways. If people are going to give you shit for gender balance, they can go to hell.
For the record, I partially defend Silicon Valley’s depiction, because they’re trying to lampoon the tech industry. The whole point of the show is to portray Silicon Valley accurately, then make a few biting comments to point out its absurdity. I wouldn’t have made the same decision, but I understand why they did.
On the other hand, The Social Network doesn’t have this defense. It takes the diversity issues in tech and exaggerates them for the sake of drama. It tries to show how personal issues among the people closest to Facebook led to isolation, but the movie can’t avoid portraying those people with glamour. In the end, everyone still comes out ridiculously rich.
There are people in public health who campaign against depicting smoking in movies. And again, people have made the same defense - we’re trying to depict the world as it is. People smoke in real life. People are going to smoke in movies too. On the other hand, back in the 1950s a lot of actors were on tobacco company payrolls, in the sense of “advertise smoking or we aren’t going to give you funding”, which made that argument a lot weaker.
In contrast, I highly doubt there are people who are going to pull funding if a movie’s cast is too diverse, or its plot is too progressive. Oh, unless you count instances where executives thought a movie wouldn’t sell with a female lead or an Asian lead, and gently pushed for someone less likely to shock the audience. Yeah, on second thought maybe this is still an issue.
I’m not saying the whole media industry is against dated depictions of society. I’m just saying there’s enough aggregate resistance against diversity and misogyny to make it continue to be an issue. Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I think a show can be aspirational in its depiction of gender and race and be successful as well. It’s been getting better in real life. Why can’t it be getting better in cinema?
If you actually want to depict the world the way it is, why focus on the negatives, when you could focus on what people are doing to make the world better? That’s reality too.
Somehow, I doubt I’ll ever see a show about a company’s efforts to improve workplace diversity. But, a man can dream.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 24 - Free to be Weird
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
I’m here to show you who I am
Throw off the veil, it’s finally time
There’s more to me than glitz and glam,
And now I feel my stars align.If it wasn’t already clear, I’m a pretty weird dude.
Spend enough time with me and you’ll discover I’m one of those people who are “from the Internet”. I’m a big Friendship is Magic fan, meaning I’ve read over two million words of fanfiction and have spent money buying comics from the Expanded Universe.
(Yes, MLP has an Expanded Universe. I know, it’s absurd.)
In high school, I got into the Touhou fandom. I only follow the music side, but it’s a thriving scene, and I find lots of it objectively good even without the Touhou context. The first music album I downloaded to my phone was BEGIERDE DES ZAUBERER, a metal album by Demetori. On reflection, they’re actually my favorite band, ever. I’ve yet to find anyone as consistently amazing.
Meanwhile, I read a decent number of webcomics, as my reviews page can attest to. I have a Dinosaur Comics T-shirt. I have a Homestuck T-shirt. I also have a Gunnerkrigg Court T-shirt, a Gunnerkrigg Court whiteboard, a metal Gunnerkrigg Court coin I received for backing the Legendary Showdown Kickstarter, and…look, Gunnerkrigg Court is really good, okay? You should check it out.
The point being, I’m part of a lot of subcultures, and I never felt like I had to hide that when growing up. I did for a while, until I realized I didn’t have to. I openly played Magic: the Gathering in middle school. I admitted to reading fanfiction in high school, and although my friends gave me shit for it, it was all in good fun. By the time I hit college I was well into the “from the Internet” niche.
This is completely at odds with the K-12 education people complain about, where everyone’s an asshole and it feels like hell. I’m not saying that my school didn’t have issues, but any issues it did have somehow never reached me. I had the freedom to reveal whatever I wanted about myself without having to worry about what people thought. It didn’t matter if there were people who did care, because there were enough people who didn’t to make my behavior socially viable.
In contrast, there are people who have to bottle up the weird things about themselves, not because they don’t want to share them, but because they can’t share them without ostracizing themselves. I find that really sad. It’s only in retrospect that I can see how fortunate my environment was. I’m not sure how I would turned out if I got bullied for things I liked.
In Season 5 of MLP, there’s an episode where an old friend comes back to Ponyville. She’s hit the big time, but over the course of the episode she realizes she’s drifted too far from who she was for the sake of fame. It eventually builds into this quote.
The real perk of friendship is gettin’ to see your friend bein’ true to their self. And Rara, when you’re simply yourself, you’re the brightest star I’ve ever seen shine.
And then, into one of my favorite songs from the show.
I don’t any reason to stop being weird, so I’m sticking to it. Until next time.
And now I see those colors
Right before my eyes
I hear my voice so clearly
And I know that it is rightThey thought I was weak, but I am strong
They sold me the world, but they were wrong
And now that I’m back, I still belong
‘Cause I knowThat I am just a pony
I make mistakes from time to time
But now I know the real me
And put my heart out on the lineAnd let the magic in my heart stay true
Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa
And let the magic in my heart stay true
Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa
Just like the magic inside of youJust like the magic inside of you…
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 23 - Why Do I Blog?
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
A while back, one of my friends asked why I started blogging. Amazingly, I’ve never explictly laid it out, so I figured it was worth writing about.
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First off, I’m blogging because I want to. This is obvious to the point of vacuousness - of course I wouldn’t write blog posts if I didn’t want to. Who would? Still, that doesn’t explain why I have this motivation to write. After thinking about it, I’ve ultimately decided I blog for mostly selfish reasons.
Everything comes back to my perspective on writing. Writing is the process of turning explicit thoughts into words. Thinking about writing, on the other hand, is the process of turning implicit thoughts into explicit thoughts.
This can take a very long time. I have a hard time explaining my points in person. It may just be my general social awkwardness, but often I feel like I want to say something and can’t because I don’t know how to explain it properly. If I try, it gets muddled into a ton of rambling that doesn’t go anywhere.
By blogging, I give myself an outlet for practicing turning vague notions into concrete words. It may not come out perfectly, but all I’m looking for is getting experience at explaining my thoughts.
With that in mind, let’s look at the posts I’ve written so far. I would broadly classify them into the following categories.
- Posts on topics I understand well. These are all technical posts, and are about problems with known solutions. The post is spent presenting and framing the solution the right way.
- Posts on topics I’ve been learning about recently. These are things I don’t understand very well yet, and trying to articulate them forces me to condense my understanding into simpler terms.
- For lack of a better word, discussion posts. These are posts where I try to present my point of view on a topic. They’re essentially life observations, things a person might post on Twitter or Facebook.
Writing posts on topics I understand well only helps train my framing, because I know the ideas well enough to have most of my feelings be explicit already. Accordingly, I’ve written very few of these posts, reserving them for ideas I find exceptionally cool. Yes, it feels good to teach something new, but writing a good teaching post takes forever, and I don’t have the motivation to sustain it.
Writing posts on topics I’ve been learning about, on the other hand, is good for raising awareness on ideas that I think should be more well known. At this point, I don’t know enough to make a judgment call on whether the idea is worth researching more, but I do know it’s interesting enough that someone else may want to research it more. It helps me organize the new information I’ve just received.
That leaves discussion posts. In these posts, I’m forcing myself to evaluate my own beliefs and become more aware of my implicit thoughts. Depending on how much I’ve reflected on my world views, these posts either come naturally or are a huge pain to write. In the worst case, organizing all the disparate threads of thought into a coherent narrative takes days to disentangle.
Now, note that these are all things I’m doing for me. I’m making blog posts to help organize my own thoughts, to help figure out my position on things. There’s very little I’m trying to do for anybody else.
I suspect the only reason I’m okay with writing a ton of blog posts is that I have very few inhibitions against sharing my thoughts on the Internet. I have friends who would never, absolutely never, share their life stories without careful consideration. Somehow, my barriers against this are much lower.
(Also, I’d be lying if I didn’t point out I was also writing this blog to try to make myself interesting. Come one, come all, sue me for my insecurities when I know awesome people! Get in line, I’ve got first dibs.)
Of course, pointing out your own selfish motivations doesn’t stop them from being selfish. It just makes you more honest. And besides, a lot of good things in the world happened for selfish reasons. If you like this blog, hopefully you consider it as one of them.