#gone home

fiightingdreamers:

Hey, so Gone Home is free for the weekend because it’s creator felt like it’s something people could use right now. It’s a wonderfully done lgbt+ game that is probably less than 3 hours total, so if you wanna give it a try go for it!!!

Some of you may remember that I put this game on my Video games For Literature Lovers list - and now you can play it for free!

Internalized Misogyny: “I’m Not Like Most Girls!” by Bleeding Feminism
Now please stop claiming that you don’t act like a woman. It doesn’t make you a special fucking snowflake. It makes you a perpetrator of misogyny.

I grew up and I started actually thinking about this all-too-common phenomenon: girl-hate. It’s so rampant that it’s contributed to the stereotype that all girls are catty and horrible and some of us have started insisting that we’re “not like other girls” to separate ourselves from all these generalizations, saying that we’d rather hang out with boys, because “boys have less drama”. Here’s the thing, though: homogenizing the entire female gender down to one or two negative stereotypes is sexist. When girls perpetuate it, it’s called “internalized misogyny”. And sadly, I’ve found that girls are guilty of perpetuating misogyny almost as often as men are.

If we, as a society, would stop conditioning girls and women to feel like we have to constantly compete with each other, girl-hate would pretty much stop. If we, as a society, would stop trying to tell girls and women that the most important thing is male attention, we’d stop feeling threatened by other girls and how they look and we’d stop ripping our fellow ladies to shreds over their appearances. Society has told us that male attention is the ultimate prize and that every other girl in the room is competing for it. It’s made us feel that we’ve “won” if a man thinks we’re attractive, so we get angry if another girl in the room might take that away from us. This is about the time we start sizing other ladies up: deciding that she has the better body, but your face is nicer and hopefully that makes up for it. This is about the time you start comparing your hair and your clothes to hers, start looking for every flaw you can possibly find in this human being just because she’s there.

We feel that we’ve “won” if a man thinks we’re special. This is part of what contributes to that god-awful “special snowflake” complex that leads many girls to attempt to separate themselves from the rest because they have to be better: if unique and special is what gets attention, then I have to be the most unique and special! Cue loads of posts online by girls who think they’re better than other girls because they like staying at home and using the internet more than they like going out and partying.

This is behavior that’s been programmed into women by society our entire lives, so it won’t be easy to un-learn. I’ve internalized much of this myself. Us girls, we’re victims – victims of a society that constantly tells us we’re too fat (but we can’t be too skinny, either), too ugly (but don’t wear too much make-up or you’ll look “fake”), that your clothes have to be amazing (but caring about fashion is petty and shallow), that you can’t be a doormat (but if you’re too assertive, you’re a total bitch); a society that screams at us from every billboard and magazine cover: YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. And because we perceive each other as threats, we rip each other to shreds.

This reminds me of the Cracked podcast episode on harmful Disney tropes that I listened to a few days ago. There was a particularly salient point on the portrayal of friendships in Disney movies: “Pocahontas has an entire tribe of humans to hang out with – all the other humans in her tribe hang out with humans – but what Pocahontas does is hang out with a raccoon, and a hummingbird, and a talking tree. And Ariel hangs out with fish under the sea, even though she has all these other mermaid friends she could hang out with, and they hang out with each other, and I think it makes a lot of movies have best friend characters for the main character who are kind of subordinate”. Disney princesses, whom girls are supposed to relate to and aspire to be, don’t have many human friends, let alone girl friends. They’re always the “other” in some way, and in the end, they’re vindicated by being the object of pursuit for a man. Disney princesses are the epitome of special snowflake syndrome.

A related article is Cara Ellison’s S.EXE: Gone Home. She writes about her internalized misogyny and how it was exposed in Gone Home:

I never had a sister, and there never was a feeling, when I was a teenager, that any other girl could have moved me or made me sympathetic towards them. Girls didn’t like games, and I liked games. Therefore I was not like other girls. I was a better sort of girl. I was special to the nerd boys. I liked cool stuff. I liked Street Fighter II and I could beat everyone with Chun Li and boys whooped and cheered when I did it. They admired me. That’s who I was. That was my identity.

But Katie and Sam in Gone Home like each other. They are young women who like each other. […] And the thing about the young women that inhabit this house: they are just like I used to be, only they aren’t alone.

Women’s voices are the only voices you hear in the Gone Home house. Isn’t that unusual? I mean yes, for a video game. But when is the last time you watched a film or saw a TV show where the only voices in it are women’s?

When I was growing up I never knew women could be in punk rock bands. I thought women were uncool. And I didn’t know about ‘sisterhood’. I disliked other girls. I didn’t trust them. But the Gone Home house feels safe. A space that exists in which women love and appreciate each other.

In a way this is the fantasy house I always wanted to inhabit. The Gone Home house is a place where it’s okay, maybe even normal, even cool, to be a girl.

Gone Home offers me a girlhood I never had, and it recognises I am an adult woman who needs that fantasy too.

There are barely any TV shows or movies centered around only women, least of all a show that centers around happily single women. There’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and…what else? Even music videos by so-called feminists promote misogyny. Music videos are one of my most abhorred mediums because, for some reason, most of the videos with mainstream singers default to sexualization, cultural appropriation, exoticization, or using animals as props. I’ve talked about Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams music video before, but her Bad Blood video (which won the VMA Video of the Year award) is also terrible. Sexualized female bodies under the guise of female empowerment? Check. A celebration of thin, white bodies? Check. Pitting women against each other? Check. Let’s not even get into the sexual politics of wearing leather (to be sexy) and glorifying the consumption of animals (to enforce that these women aren’t on diets).

Yes, I have thing against Taylor Swift. Amy Zimmerman put it well:

We’re living in the heyday of the Swift wave of feminism—go girls, no boys allowed, etc. It’s the kind of wave you ride in a highwaisted retro bikini next to your 10 most flawless, expertly cast model friends, before taking a series of artful Instagrams on your private beach. Taylor Swift’s brand of feminism is like that time your friend told you that One Direction was going on hiatus and you pretended that you were only tearing up because something was stuck in your eye. In other words, unbelievable and contrived.

Swift’s feminism is like a malfunctioning Pokémon—somehow managing to simultaneously evolve and get worse. When not damning beloved female comedians for doing their literal jobs, Swift’s feminism can be seen taking the form of white solipsism. When Nicki Minaj called out the VMAs for failing to give her “Anaconda” a Video of the Year nod, Swift chastised Minaj for complaining about the success of other women. Seriously, Taylor, why did you do that? While Minaj was making a substantive point about how the music industry undermines black female greatness, Swift essentially blew up the constructive conversation by insisting that Nicki’s tweets were a personal attack. Swift, who’s never met a white size zero model she didn’t Instagram with, didn’t need any help confirming that her specific brand of femininity isn’t exactly inclusive. The problem here isn’t that Swift is whiter than Ed Sheeran—it’s that, despite her stated boner for feminism, she couldn’t even bother to finish reading a black feminist sentiment without tweet-shouting “me, me, me!” like a middle child on a sugar high. […] Swift’s brand of feminism is less “an intersectional approach to structural systems of gendered inequality” and more “look at my friends, they’re hot and they like me.”

Let’s strive for the type of intersectional feminism as defined by Kimberle Crenshaw instead of the white, consumerist “feminism” portrayed in mainstream media.