Heteropessimism & Rey Palpatinism

[extrapenguin]

Yes hello, am very busy IRL still, proooobably shouldn't have signed up for ficinabox or swrarepairs but hey, I managed to complete my assignments and comment on my gifts! Even if I didn't manage to read a single other thing from the collections. But! I exist. And I even wanted to make a post!

1) I discovered a link to Tara Mooknee's video essay on Heterofatalism: WHY straight women aren't okay and watched it, though as always I think text is nicer and headed straight for her sources document. Of those, I enjoyed/found intriguing Indiana Seresin's original essay, Yuhe Faye Wang's essay, Sophie Lewis's related thoughts on the architectural enabling of hedonism (this one was kind of brain-bendy) and the WTFery of straight culture (looking at it from the outside with an exotifying tone), and this excerpt from Jane Ward's book that deals with how heterosexuality itself is new and how the idea that men could/should love women, rather than just exploit them via marriage, is new and the transition to this paradigm is still incomplete. It's 0% applicable to me, but idk, it's also completely new as a theoretical framework and I desperately needed to think about something unrelated to [list of things making me v v busy IRL].

2) While clipping through RotS for Reincarnation, I noticed that Palps uses the same saber technique in his one lightsaber fight that Rey uses in TFA, so I've been thinking about vidsongs for a vid about negative family relations/rejecting the family legacy for a bit. Nothing already in my music library has struck me, so I've looked at my vid_bingo bingo card and gone hunting for 00s songs. (I already know what I'll be doing for character study, have a WIP I could plonk for the free square, and metal/rock is, like, 99% of everything I vid and listen to.) So far my backup plan is to vid something to one of Apocalyptica's instrumentals, but the Rey Palpatine vid feels like it needs vocals, ideally female. I'll be going through the 00s discographies of Stratovarius and Apulanta anyway, as well as re-checking out albums from the 00s already in my music collection (Indica, Katra, Xandria, etc), but if you have any recs for female-fronted metal/rock bands active during 2000 to 2009, please share. (Metal Archives advanced search reveals 1270 albums from the period. Halp.)

Comments

[pauraque]

I've heard more than one trans lesbian say that one of the ways they felt they never fit in with straight men is that they actually *liked* the women they were attracted to, rather than seeing them as objects to be exploited and disdained. The Jane Ward excerpt made me think of that.

[extrapenguin]

There was another article in the sources that spoke of a bi woman being invited into het men's misogyny, since the men saw misogyny not as part of their gender role, but as of their sexual orientation. I would not be surprised if trans lesbians would have similar experiences of, like, not thinking it's gay to love your wife while a man.

[mecurtin]

1) Jane Ward's essay is fascinating, especially the bit about 19th C Iran. But then I think about The Tale of Genji, and The Dream of the Red Chamber--both works from HIGHLY patriarchal cultures, centering on male characters and the women they love, with male-male friendships a distant second. These male characters are heterosexual, or so it appears.

But they also spend much of their lives inside spaces (houses, palaces) with more women than men, they don't work in traditionally male-dominated spaces like the military.

As a bi woman married to a man, I see a lot of gender essentialism in these posts. My answer to "why a man when there are woman?" has a lot to do with "they're not that different!" Men, women, and people who are neither can all be beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, kind, and all the other attractive qualities.

[extrapenguin]

I agree that the level of homosocialness/gender segregation is probably a large part of the difference between 19th C Iran and The Tale of Genji, though I guess culture is also a big part, in that even places that are similarly homosocial might have different attitudes toward liking women as people.

Honestly I think gender essentialism is just one of those things that happens when heterosexual people write about Straight Culture, since straight culture is built on gender essentialism and they seem to have about half a dozen other things to deconstruct before they can get to that. (And then there is the division between bisexuals who have completely different tastes in men vs women, who thus join in on the "fun", and those who don't.) Some people also legit seem to have a gender difference fetish and thus like gender essentialism. You will be pleased/enraged to know that I left out the essay on gender by the straight woman who felt thrilled in her womanhood when she was unable to open a jar and had to ask someone she perceived as a man to do it instead, capped by a long sentence on how she liked being a woman and thus frail, weak, small, lacking in upper body mass, etc.

[mecurtin]

thrilled in her womanhood when she was unable to open a jar
thank you for leaving out that essay, that was definitely a thing I did NOT need to see. OMG.

I've been thinking recently of patriarchy's misogyny paradox, but on a psychologically deeper, dare I say Freudian level. Under traditional patriarchy, the infant's first source and object of love, the very definition of Love, is Mother & Mother only. But Mother isn't respected in the family, she's subordinate to Father in a way that social mammals will pick up on really quickly, even if she isn't treated to outright abuse.

So love itself becomes suspect, untrustworthy. But human beings *need* love, so patriarchy has made it extremely difficult for people to satisfy their basic needs.

[rosefox]

Thank you so much for those heterofatalism/heteropessimism links! SUPER interesting, and I really want to talk with my mother about them. When #MeToo was a new thing, she and I were discussing just how many men of her generation had mistreated women in some way, and I expressed sympathy that she and other women had been stuck choosing partners from such a toxic pool. "Oh, it was worse than that," she said. "We loved them." It's haunted me ever since, and I keep looking for an analysis of heterosexual women's lives under misogyny that includes their desperate need not just to be loved but to love. Lewis's wonderful essay on hedonism comes close, and a find-and-replace that swapped out sex for love would be an interesting experiment. I do think many people need good love just as much as they need good sex, and the conditions for the two to flourish are much the same.

[extrapenguin]

That sounds like an interesting continuation for the conversation you had! I know people like to love in addition to being loved, and perform acts of love in addition to receiving them. (The balance is, perhaps, a bit different for everyone, but everyone likes things from both columns A and B.)