YourFaveisProblematic

Recently I was directed to a Tumbler thread called "Your Fave is Problematic." I've looked through it enough to understand that this encapsulates everything I hate about the egotistic, extreme end of liberalism.

Your Fave is Problematic is contains a compilation of the "problematic" things that popular, apparently liberal and open minded celebrities have said on camera. The very idea of it is somewhat McCarthy-istic. The people we think are like us are actually guilty of something. Something that, while may not be a crime, may indicate a secret, subversive attitude.

The entire idea is completely skewered, then. That John Green, a community-focused and uplifting author and charity founder, has written a single objectionable compound noun in An Abundance of Katherines, is meaningless. That Benedict Cumberbatch used autism in an analogy to describe a character he plays tells us no useful information about him, and is certainly less indicative of his personality than when he was polite and encouraging about feminism and activism in one of his interviews. But this list makes these statements disproportionately important, listing every statement that could be interpreted as bad in an entire career.

Do me a favour, think back on your life and tell me honestly that you have never said anything that could be construed as offensive, or that was overtly offensive to any group of people, ever.

We all say dumb shit from time to time, either because we are inarticulate in our point, because we reach for the nearest, most convenient word in the common, social vernacular, because we are deep in our own thoughts and are speculating wildly, because we are angry at the time and we want to hurt a specific individual, perhaps we are trying to be edgy and off-colour for effect. Perhaps we have just been exposed to an idea and we are figuring out our own reactions to it. The bonus most of us have is that people aren't waiting around with cameras and tape recorders when we do it.


Truth is, I have to turn to Harry Potter for my guideline here. In Chamber of Secrets (I think) Harry is racked with fear that he is actually bad because the Sorting Hat seriously thought he was Slytherin material; he only avoided being labeled as a genetically evil wizard by begging the Hat not to put him in the cursed house. And that's what was more vital to Harry's personality and moral integrity, not his unthinking circumstances, that he chose not to be Slytheristic.


Like Harry, I really don't think some unthinking remarks these individuals made are the most informative pointers about the make-up of their personalities, whereas their choices, for example, Jennifer Lawrence's clearly well developed and selected views on body image, are far more important than an unguarded, offhand comment. And yet this list, is the go-to place for someone who has just taken against some of these people for one reason or another. These are people whose primary effect in this world is good, they are a force for making the world visibly better, in whatever small way. And what I'm about to say will sound utterly pathetic, but some of us out there look to people like these as little beacons of light. It's lonely out there, and hostile, everyone tells us we are wrong somehow and these kind-minded people give us a frail, blow-away piece of hope that the world really isn't all that bad, that there are good guys in the mix. I'm speaking from a position of feeble mental health, slowly knitting together better as the world goes on, while my eyes slip backwards and remind myself of how bad it was before, and how modeling my view of an undecipherable world on these people helped drag myself to my feet, stopped my stomach dying just a little bit everytime I went outside.


Picking over these people is at best a waste of time, and at worst, shitting all over the good bits of the fame world, which when you think about its heavy saturation and relevance to real life, is really quite damaging.

My entire Life

I decided a few years ago that being good at something isn’t for me. I have about average capacity to be good at most things – I did ok at school even though I was barely there, but not savant level good. Basically, I could be a good artist or a good scientist or a good storyteller. I just decided not to be.

Because what is the worth? I enjoy things, yes. I enjoy learning about ions, electro-magnetism, I enjoy drawing and painting, I enjoy reading and speculating about things, I love languages and I love inventing stories (although I normally only invent stories for me to masturbate to.) I like current events.

But my multiple likes do not create a guideline for my life. My perfectly able brain has not formed a path I can follow. Nothing really took, and even when it did seem like I was getting ok at something, it would lead to further inspection and criticism from the supervising adult – apparently pushing promising pupils is a common tactic, but I never welcomed the extra attention. When I was just average, dumb, no tongue in my head, all the people around me left me alone. Which was greatly preferable.

The people I encountered in fiction were a lot more accommodating. They didn’t ask me questions that I didn’t invent myself. They were brave, they were never mean. They didn’t make facial expressions that made me nervous. Their choice of words and the tone they used never made me confused or behind in the information.  I could mold them after I had finished the book or the game or the film I saw them in, fitting them to my mood, my needs. They only said things that were interesting and meaningful, and they never interrupted me when I was speaking. I could spend as much time with them as I liked, and because I was mainly watching, I never had to panic over how I would seem. I didn't fit myself into any persona that they could see through.

I never obsess over music in the same way I know some people do, not except when I am trying to fit in, but music became an important tool in helping me formulate the rooms inside my head. It helped me create emotionally elaborate worlds, deepening my connection there. Because I am only interested in music that makes my worlds more sensory, I ended up having a truly diverse music collection that I illegally downloaded. Because I had a 360 degree world which was full of emotional pulls that I had assembled on the very basis of what affected me and what didn’t, I would cry when listening to something. I would become enraged, or anticipating, or I would giggle with glee. All alone in my room, sitting at my desk in front of my itunes, I had a life abundant in meaning and emotion. Lying motionless in bed each night, I would go through each gesture that my imaginary friends would make in the pivotal conversations in their life, their facial expressions. Every night everything became more sculpted, more precise, the world so sharp it was almost physical.Trying to figure out the best way to link them all together.

Truthfully, a lot of the time I was coming up with the best sex scenes. Which scenario’s had the most erotic atmosphere, that would make me pant. I am not so attractive in real life, so my imaginary friends, who are almost certainly people I want to be, were all stunning, glamorous at all times. I am flabby, hairy in the wrong places, I constantly get colds, I have a big nose and bad skin. Every possible detail of female self-hate can be found on my body somewhere. So to imagine my skin as smooth and hairless, my hair voluminous, my teeth even and white. Better than anything.

So there I was. In my world of perfect me and malleable associates. I still don’t know what the real benefit of leaving it is. I still go there a lot, at night, when other people aren’t there to distract me. The real world is horrifically unmoveable and unfathomable. I still don't understand what people's criteria are for me pleasing them enough. 

My fantasy world was and is a huge part of my psyche, how I know how to act, to connect with real people. I have previously been described as a nerd, because of my preoccupation with characters from different shows. But nerd is too flippant, it indicates that it is the shows or the games themselves that I am interested by. And I do learn as much as I can about these things, because I find them interesting. But the target of my obsession isn't them, but what I can do with them myself. 

Vulgarity

What is it when someone tells me how bad something is to look at, how brutal, how stomach churning, I have to see it, and then, try to top it?

Why is it?

I try to break through my fear to look, and I look, and the truth of it is that it is never horrible in the way I was expecting.

It doesn't offend me, it's not a matter of an intellectual capacity to withstand trauma. It doesn't break my mind.

It doesn't do anything at all, and I scoff, amused, I say something worse, I can't stand how soft it is. I want something worse, something that will make everything else fall away.

Instead it just lies there, is just one more horrible thing. I try to subsume it into my mass like that monster in Spirited Away. Make me bigger, more monstrous.

This morning I got a call from my sister. My mum is in hospital.

I'm frightened.

Models

When I find out that someone is a model, my immediate thought is that they must in some way be disabled and unable to work normally. Actually, I think being unemployed is a more useful use of your time, as that way you can be a drain on a government that is corrupt and uncaring anyway, while also being the living embodiment of their failure. If you're a model, you're the background to all this, and what you drain is the confidence of literally hundreds of thousands of people who have never done anything to you. And you do it in the most passive, dumb way possible. There is no skill nor effort associated with it.