I am aware that at some point when I wasn’t paying attention Imagine Dragons slipped past that social tipping point of popularity that transforms things into ‘cringe-inducingly mockable’
which is a phenomenon I do not seem wired to understand
just in general
but also from like – a music theory standpoint I also don’t get it and I wish someone would explain what critiques are even being leveled in this case?
like I do not have coherent musical tastes or whatever, i don’t understand music well enough to assess anything much beyond ‘like it’ and ‘don’t like it’ and maybe ‘liked it until I heard it 10 trillion times a day for 1 year’
and I am just really curious? I have literally never managed to come across a specific critique for this group, just taken-for-granted ‘this is bad’ and I just
?
As a weird additional datapoint:
the FIRST time a remember noticing the popularity==>cringe phenomenon sticks with me vividly to this day
I was 12 and Titanic, and by extension Leonardo DiCaprio, were EPICALLY popular. And then suddenly Titanic, and to a much larger extension Leonardo DiCaprio, were EPICALLY unpopular.
And I was SO confused by both ends of things and just went on watching Leonardo DiCaprio movies when they seemed good and here we are a few decades later and people are like ‘wait, nevermind, he actually is a good actor after all.’
And then I kept seeing this pattern repeating forever with Too Popular things and I still don’t get it
…….ohhhh.
Imagine Dragons had a weird longevity imo because the young boys who liked it, as a group, got enough of their own clannish momentum going to remain oblivious to how many young girls also liked it.
that dumb “Rules of the World Cup for Women” list made me livid and @sashayed had some good thoughts about it. I screencapped her tweetstorm so I can refer back to it when I feel anxious about my own way of caring about sports.
a secret code between women: are you safe? in a contact of eyes. i’m here if you need me, the littlest shift of a skirt, of an inclined head, of watching the man who is asking you to smile, bitch. you aren’t alone on the walls of restrooms, i was where you are too. the quiet doling of emergency numbers, the shelters. the space between two women in a largely empty train station. the waiting game of two women strangers who walk, quietly and quickly, to their cars in abandoned parking lots, who watch to be sure the other leaves safely. text me you get home safe. the tally marks of drinks on hidden wrists, carefully disguised as other things ever since men picked up on what it meant and used it to target the “weakest link.”
my father tells me we have nothing to worry about. last night he sent me one of those email chains that say at the top “Safety Tips For The Women In Your Life!!!! Don’t Let Her Die!!”
me, and the stranger on the train. she is asleep and the man is asking me who i am going home to. i feel tears pricking the sides of my eyes. i am 13 while he towers over me. he reaches out one hand, and while i don’t know how she knows, she speaks up without opening her eyes: “If you touch my daughter, sir, I will murder you.” Whatever he grumbles is lost in history, because this moment I am so grateful for the existence of other people that I cannot breathe.
I am 19 and on my phone when i become aware of a 13 year old girl is smiling nervously at a man who’s saying disgusting things. I grab her arm. “There you are, cindy,” I say, and then look at the man like he is bile. “Do you need something from my sister?” i ask, and i walk away with her. she cries later.
this is the way of things: a silent, secret web. our promise to each other that despite our differences, when it comes to the wire, we become family, instantly. the unspoken promise. i’m here. i’m watching. i’ll witness.
you don’t lose this language, this obligation, when you leave being a woman behind, either: as a man among other men, you see a woman hesitate on the threshold into your space, looking to see if she’s gonna pay for coming within arm’s reach. you say ‘it’s cool, we’ll behave.’
you keep an eye out. on the train you watch drunks, at the bus stop you look out for girls, in restaurants you care about your waitress. you say to your coworkers— i saw him touching you, testing you. i heard what he said. can i help? you’re not alone.
you say, i’m here, because you too were born there. you still own that space.
So, while for some reason everyone here is engulfed in one of tumblr’s periodic debates about whether or how to police writing done largely by women for women for free, in the world of contemporary fiction there’s a meltdown going on right now over men who get paid for writing literature, and the men who give them money and prizes for it.
Specifically, Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, has been accused by multiple Latina writers of a wide range of asshole behavior toward them, ranging from sexual assault to verbal abuse to deliberately trying to destroy the careers of women who challenged him on any of it. This story is complicated by the fact that Diaz recently published an essay in The New Yorker in which he writes about being sexually abused as a child and the effect it had on his sexual and romantic life as an adult. It’s a good essay, and it was greeted with universal admiration; but now, the possibility arises that it may have been an attempt to pre-empt the critique he knew was coming. Mary Karr has also pointed out that Diaz is more vulnerable to these charges because he’s Latino; the literary world has known for years that Karr was abused and stalked by David Foster Wallace, author of the critically acclaimed mega-novel Infinite Jest, who suffered no consequences fbecause, Karr says, Wallace was white. For all of these reasons, it’s worth pointing out up front that what Diaz is charged with doing is not unique amongst contemporary American male writers; and when you go farther back in time, things get worse. Just off the top of my head, William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer and Ernest Hemingway was an abusive husband.
Below, I’m going to talk about men, writing, and the history of contempt for not only women writers but women readers.
Because it’s behind the cut tag, I’m going to pull out my favorite part of this post and quote it:
“Because if the critical establishment loses its taste for misogyny–if a book like This Is How You Lose Her, or a book like The Corrections,comes to be considered just bad form–that will reduce the amount of misogynistic work out there far more effectively than any attempt at direct censorship would. Think of the vast number of conventions regarding love and sex that would be discarded, one by one, if people stopped being able to enjoy and appreciate misogyny embodied in literary form. What conventions would arise to take their places? Which revered Literary texts would gradually become minor works taught only to graduate students? What kind of canon would an aesthetic that valued equality more highly than masculinity produce?”
ok LISTEN. first of all, keep your tom wilson hate out of my inbox. let’s just get that out of the way right now. alright, moving on.
clearly you have no idea what a power forward is, because you said, and I quote, “whatever the fuck you were talking about”, so let’s review that first. according to wikipedia, a power forward is “a forward who is big and strong, equally capable of playing physically or scoring goals and would most likely have high totals in both points and penalties.” wikipedia ALSO mentions that power forwards are also often referred to as the ‘complete’ hockey player.“ (source) wikipedia not a good enough source? ok, let’s look at a bleacher report article, where the author defines power forward as “a big guy who puts up points and likes to throw his weight around.” (source) let’s throw in another definition, just for good measure…oh, how about one from former NHL head coach Barry Melrose: “There is a certain criteria a player has to fulfill to meet my definition of a great power forward. He has to be a frontline player, he has to be very physical and he has to fight. A power forward to me is not just a big guy who scores goals. He is a big, mean, nasty, physical, tough guy to play against as well as being a very good hockey player.” specifically, they “have a lot of penalty minutes, they have a lot of goals, but they [are] also the type of guy the other team didn’t like to play against.” (source) so, to put it neatly, the main components of a power forward in the NHL are:
1. high point production 2. physicality 3. lots of PIM
now that we’re all clear on the definition of a power forward, let’s move into what we all came here to talk about, tom wilson. let’s look at his stats from the past 3 years and compare them.
(source) (these stats haven’t been updated after tonight’s game, so his GP is at 66 and he tallied another assist tonight which brings him to 20 on the season and 100 career points)
even just looking at his goals, assists, and point totals you can see the offensive improvement. PLUS the 15-16 and 16-17 stats are for a full 82-game season, but he’s only played 66 games so far this year. he’s ALREADY surpassed all 3 of those stats. additionally, look at the MASSIVE increase in shooting percentage he’s had this season! he went from 7.4% last year to 11.1% this year. that’s a team-wide top-10 stat.
speaking of team-wide stats, let’s check on a few other stats and see where he falls this season (team stats accurate prior to tonight’s game):
average TOI: 10th (15:50) points: 7th (30) +/-: 6th (+7)
another interesting stat to look at is point shares, or an estimate of the number of points contributed by a player. his PS for this season is 2.8, ranked 12th on the team! and then we have OPS (points contributed by a player due to his offense) and DPS (points contributed by a player due to his defense). wilson’s OPS is 1.3 and his DPS is 1.4, ranked 10th and 8th on the team respectively. those are great stats!
still not convinced on his offensive production? let’s look at an article RMNB published titled “Tom Wilson is the new bacon bits” (source) where they discussed Wilson’s top-line production. I could re-type the important points but I think a screenshot will suffice, no? here are some fun stats on how wilson has improved the two lines he’s skated with the most this season:
but point production and good offense isn’t the only marker of a power forward, right? I know what you must be saying right about now: “but what about his penalties?! he’s such a dirty player! he spends so much time in the box!!” yeah. yeah he does. but remember the second and third points we listed at the beginning? physicality and lots of PIM. wilson is currently ranked 2nd in the league in PIM with 166 on the season (source). he is ranked 8th in the league in hits with 207 (source). so yeah. but I would like to point something out about his penalties. some of the calls against him are due to what I like to call the “Skating While Tom Wilson Effect”. wilson gets called on some things that other players don’t because of his reputation. and whose fault is that, you may ask? yeah, it’s his. because in prior seasons, he was more of a goon. but this season I think he’s trying to distance himself from that label and grow into the player we thought and hoped he would be when he was drafted. he doesn’t take nearly as many boneheaded penalties as he used to. and I am by no means trying to excuse every time he gets sent to the sin bin, because sometimes he does something stupid or blatant and you’re like “oh that’s definitely 2 minutes.” but tom wilson is by NO means the only player to whom that applies. you’re telling me that your fave player has never done something stupid to get sent to the box? I don’t think so.
I would ALSO like to add something that not a lot of people (especially people who share your opinions, anon) talk about, and that is the fact that while tom wilson spends a lot of time in the box, he also draws a lot of penalties. wilson has drawn 30 penalties this season, which not only leads the team, but is also tied for 7th in the league so far. so yes, he spends a lot of time in the box, but he offsets it by drawing on average .462 penalties a game. (source)
bottom line, tom wilson has been playing top-6 minutes this season and he deserves it.
ok so. we’ve talked about tom wilson a lot. now I would like to talk about something else. don’t you DARE insinuate that I, or any of my friends, only like players because of how they look, or that we don’t know what we’re talking about, or that we are lesser fans than you. I am so fucking tired of being looked down on as a female sports fan. we do not have to prove ourselves to anyone, we do not have to show you how much we know, because, quite frankly, we don’t owe you shit.
also, SO FUCKING WHAT if people like to look at players because they think they’re pretty? you think male sports fans have never looked at, oh I don’t know, women’s beach volleyball players and gone “oh yeah, she’s hot”? you can bet your fucking sexist ass they have. so, with no due respect, shut the fuck up.
don’t you fucking dare come at me with this sexist shit again. I am so over it.
today’s depressing sight on reddit: a woman being downvoted into oblivion for saying that there is, contrary to what the other posters claim, a vast array of books authored by women prior to 1950 and that, in fact, at one point in time in Western Europe, the novel was seen as an emasculating form and thus avoided by men.
how_to_suppress_womens_writing.txt
Had I expected this to get more than two notes, I would have linked a pdf of How To Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ instead of working under the assumption you all would know what I’m referencing, so here’s the text, belatedly.
I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow. I read feminist leisure research (who knew such a thing existed?) and international studies that found women around the globe felt that they didn’t deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends. I began to realise that time is power. That time is a feminist issue.
My father, an activist and artist, told me I wouldn’t be able to be an artist when I had kids, because I would have to give all my time and energy to them.
This was said in 2005 when I was pregnant with my first child.
And I have also been told on this very site that I had no right to have opinion, outside interests, or write because I should be taking care of my children. This was said, most recently, in November 2016, by a woman who claims to be interested in the rights of women.
“It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications,” says Traister. “Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.”
So, we might summarize one trend as: “Independent Single Ladies on the Rise.”
For more than forty years I have specialized in working with men. I’m seeing a disturbing trend of increased male irritability and anger, along with a rise in the depression and suicide rates for males. In doing research for my book, The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression, I developed a quiz that has now been taken by more than 60,000 men throughout the world.
I’ve seen a disturbing trend where more and more men feel disconnected, disrespected, and angry. We see the anger acted out in violent attacks such as the ones we saw in Orlando and also in the rhetoric of presidential candidate Donald Trump. We also see it in a rise of male loneliness.
Unfortunately, this is a common experience for an increasing number of men. Joiner concludes that “Men’s main problem is not self-loathing, stupidity, greed, or any of the legions of other things they’re accused of. The problem, instead, is loneliness; as they age, they gradually lose contact with friends and family, and here’s the important part, they don’t replenish them.”
I see these two trends interweaving and reinforcing each other. As women become more independent and self-sufficient they are not willing to settle for a marriage where their needs are not met. They would rather get their social and emotional support from work associates, friends, and family.
As men feel unable to meet women’s needs for economic, emotional, and social support, they feel more inadequate and distance themselves even more, often escaping into pornography, increased alcohol consumption, and compulsive work habits. I hear from many women that “there just aren’t any good men out there to marry” and they become even more self-sufficient and self-contained. I hear from men who say, “Women just don’t want intimacy anymore.” They become more fearful of reaching out to women and risking rejection.”
When are males going to collectively decide to change?
Go to therapy, make better friends, stop being rapist, develop some interests other than porn, develop better social skills, become more empathetic, gain knowledge on actually giving a woman an orgasm, repair their relationships with their family, read a book on social skills, take a class on social skills, stop having sexual Tourette’s, develop a life that a woman would actually say yes to if you propose.
I can’t be sympathetic because most males don’t move an inch to change their lives for the better. They just get madder that no woman wants them.
^^^^^^ It’s easier for them to blame us then to take any real responsibility for their actions
let the church say amen.
Yeah, this is huge for me – I mean, before my current relationship I didn’t date for 2 years? 3 years? I don’t need a man in this century, I can have a job and open a bank account and sign contracts myself, so then it becomes why do I want one? What am I looking for a partner to add to my life?
For me I think it’s (in no order) – A+ sex and physical contact – Companionship, enjoyable conversations and time together – Emotional support – Reliability/dependability and these don’t seem like impossible things in general – some of my friends are 3 for 4.
But it seems like so many guys are not getting the “you’re not required anymore” message and understanding its ramifications. Then instead of making themselves desirable partners, they mostly react by just…getting mad and playing video games 24/7?
(btw I know I/women absolutely am not required either, and in fact I’m a worse deal than most women because I’m not signing up to handle a guy’s dirty socks and Christmas cards for him. BUT I am very into trying to improve partners’ lives in other ways; that’s something I take seriously…so I know it can be done??)
Yeah honestly from a non-binary perspective it’s just so totally fucking wacko, because I’m NO GODDAMN CATCH as a significant other: I’m not hot, I have weird hang-ups in bed, trauma has left me emotionally compromised and with a terrible fear of trusting other people… but I’ve still managed several long-term, committed relationships with people (and even more FWB style flings). Because people want others around them, they want companionship, or romance, or sex, or all of the above. Most people want, in one way or another, to not be going it alone.
In fact, most of my friends, in lieu of any useful romantic partners around, are beginning to discuss forming these long-lasting social and economic bonds with each other instead of a single male romantic partner. Seems reasonable; that way everything’s sort of spread out. If two humans are better at surviving together, surely three to five would be better, and between the lot of us, we’re BOUND to figure out the companionship, romance, and sex stuff. And I can tell you for sure, that if a decent guy came around wanting in on this (ESP a cis guy, out of the sheer innovation of the concept), he’d be the goddamn belle of the ball. The only thing is that he’d be expected to add just as much support to the group as everyone else… and as the article pussyfoots around, that’s the exact goddamn problem.
The kind of guys that are getting angry instead of just depressed are guys that feel obligated. Entitled. The men who were promised the world–which INCLUDED a submissive woman–and then never got it. Not romantically, not economically.
There’s literally never been a plague of ace/aro/aroace men goddamn murdering people, this is not, as the article seems to be pushing, because these men ~don’t have a woman~ to do literally ALL their domestic and emotional and social labor for them. It’s because they never learned and can’t be bothered to learn how to do that labor themselves because they were PROMISED someone else to do it for them. Now they don’t have it, and still, instead of being honest and telling them the problem is internal and there IS hope and they CAN fix it and gain companionship (and letting them know they need emotional companionship! do you know how few men fucking realize that’s a THING they need and then don’t understand why they’re depressed all the time???) in this life, articles like this coddle them and then point the blame squarely at women for not being willing to be abused by emotionally stunted men anymore. So of course the men continue to blame women and society, when they’re told it’s women and society’s fault that they’re alone and miserable!
Instead of giving these men hope and help, articles like this just point them at women and society and say “those two things you can’t control? it’s their fault. you’ll always feel like this, and it’s their fault.” And then wring their hands when more violence and mass shootings occur!
These men were trained from birth to have most domestic, social, and emotional labor done for them. And they resent that circumstances are forcing them to learn how to do it now, as adults. This is the root of both the aggression and the depression. If you were taught that others doing this labor for you is how you know others care about you, and then suddenly you find that no one is doing it for you and actually expect you to do it yourself, you might come to the conclusion that no one cares about you or will care about you. That you are forever unloved and unworthy because these independent women won’t do this labor for you. This is why men need feminism, to break some of these terrible myths about people’s worth and value and how caring and affection “should” be expressed.
for thousands of years men have their men-only cults and religious orders and clubs and all that denigrating women for being useless for the life of men and now that women have no time for them they get want to get mad
The biggest problem is that this aggression and violence turns into the continued abuse and violence against women. Instead of every looking at themselves, they turn it to blame everyone else outside and lash out.
Men need to be taught how to make friends, how to care for themselves, how to better themselves without it turning into anti-women garbage, because too often, that’s how it starts. You think you see a bunch of men getting together to improve men and the next thing you know it turns into “what we really need to do is put women back into their places so we can prosper”. They seem fine on the points of all these things as long as at the end of the day, they still get to control women and that also needs to be addressed and stopped.
I don’t feel sorry for men. I cannot. They do too much damage and in the end women are still supposed to be their fixers.
All these articles ever seem to be in some appeal that women will go out of their way to build and bridge and fix and heal and sadly women fall for it every time, but they have to stop.
Women will get hurt, they will be abused, and sadly even be killed, but the answer must still be no. Say no to fixing men. Acknowledge the problems, encourage them to self help, but stop fixing them.
I want 2018 to be the year women stop trying to appease men who have nothing to offer them but restraint from violence.
Men HAVE been taught how to make friends, how to self-care, how to be part of a community. They get access to the same damn TV shows and movies that we do. They attend the same schools, the same churches, apply for the same jobs. What they don’t get, is punished if they fail to take care of the people around them, starting in infancy.
And they think they’re being punished now, because they’ve been waited on their whole lives (literally, as in, “women have to wait for them, and adjust their schedules to fit around what men want to do”), and now… that’s not happening. Women are saying, “this is what I want to be doing. You don’t want that? Ok, shrug; I will do it by myself, or with my girlfriends. Bye boy.”
They believe that being told “you do your thing and I’ll do my thing” is some kind of penalty.
ALL MEN HAVE TO DO IS LEARN TO TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER INSTEAD OF TRAPPING WOMEN INTO DOING IT FOR THEM. THAT’S *IT*.
just moving along like everyone else 