As bad as most of the misogynistic ideas I write about on this blog tend to be, they at least have a certain perverse logic to them; if you accept their deeply flawed premises, at least long enough to try to parse the arguments, the conclusions make a sort of rough sense.
But when I wander into the online worlds of the so-called “involuntary celibates” I can quickly lose my moorings. Most incels are hugely depressed, and as I know from my own experience dealing with depression of varying degrees of severity over several decades, deep depression not only distorts your thinking; it also can make you weirdly self-obsessed, assuming that everything that happens in the world has something to do with you — both with your own imagined failings and with the alleged injustices the world supposedly imposes on you.
When you combine all this with the standard bad ideas of the misogynistic manosphere, incel “logic” can quickly become very strange indeed.
I say all this as a sort of introduction to this little “true story”I found on the Incels subreddit, a story that starts out with an awkward not-quite-interaction on a largely deserted bus and ends with a plot twist I have to say I never saw coming.
So let’s take a look at the post titled “Feminism’s fault I’m incel,” (archived here) by a fellow calling himself Brazierlord.
I was sitting next to this girl on the bus the other day and as the bus starting emptying out, I stood up to change seats like a good male is supposed to. I would be labeled as a danger to females if they saw me continue to sit next to that innocent female when I could easily move – obviously I was preparing to stalk her and rape her as soon as we got off the bus.
Obviously what he means by that last bit is that the others on the bus might consider him a bit creepy if he continued to sit next to the girl in question when there were now plenty of open seats. But his choice of words here, while meant sarcastically, make him seem even creepier than he intends.
So I stand up and I see her look at me through the corner of my eye. I move to the seat behind and at angle of -45 degrees from the horizontal to her. The entire time she is tracking me. Once I am seated she looks away and lays her head on the window.
Maybe she’s “tracking you” because you’re “tracking her” as you move to a new seat.
We get to our stop and she glances back at me. I am standing at this point and she hurries off the bus and nearly breaks into a run in the opposite direction.
Either she’s in a hurry, is nervous about being out alone, or our narrator really is giving off a creepy vibe.
So far, this seems to be a relatively straightforward story of a guy who may be giving off more of a creepy vibe than he realizes.
Then we get this:
If it weren’t for feminism I wouldn’t have changed seats and she wouldn’t hate me for breaking her heart. She probably would have followed me to my apartment and asked me if she could have sex with me and I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore
WHAT.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You didn’t break her heart. At best, she barely noticed you; at worst, you creeped her out. That’s it. Everything else is going on in your head, and nowhere else. Women do not follow strange men to their apartments to ask them for sex because they happened to sit next to each other on the bus. This is the sort of fantasy you come up with when you can’t imagine actually interacting with a woman as a real human being.
Get off of r/Incels and into therapy. Please. For your sake, and for the sake of every woman you sit next to on the bus.
@Alan
That type of thing has aquired the name dieselpunk.
@Bina
Despite the common European phrasing, Tariq ibn Ziyad’s armies (and hence the later population) were multiethnic. Many of the residents of Al-Andalus had skin tones that would have them absolutely counted as black in the U.S. today.
@Franscesca Torpedo
Your perspective on the mlp fandom is the same is mine (I was a Ponychan mod for a while). Not just Nazis, bigots of many types.
My favorite was the person who when confronted with the fact that the show was explicitly based on feminist ideas insisted that Lauren Faust was really an “equalist”. It’s amazing what some people can irrationally reason away. My first fandom and I’m very disappointed in humanity. I’m pretty much out of the fandom from getting exhausted with constantly playing bigot whack-a-mole.
Re: Renisance fests.
Interesting. I’m going to one in N. Texas this weekend and will think about what you have posted.
@Brony, SJC
Oh, dear. I hope I haven’t spoiled Renfaires by revealing the thick racist white underbelly of them for you.
You are so unlucky. I am so sad for you. I enjoyed many fandoms for a while before the whole Anti-SJW Bigot Brigade invaded them (perhaps they were there all along but kept quiet?) and only recently began to have them spoiled for me.
I am bitterly holding out in spite of all odds and writing fanfics about Zebra pones (i.e. black people) because goddamn if I’m gonna let Nazi bronies dictate my fucking life for me, I tell you hwut. [/hank hill voice]
I’m that person who writes tales about black female Zebra ponies and Latin Mexican male humans fighting the system if you happened to come across any fanfics that might belong to me.
Dilemma: I really like zebras and would definitely identify as one if I were a pony person. Would that be appropriation?
@EJ
DHX and Hasbro recently broke apart the fandom mythos that black people are Zebras with a new Pony character voiced by a black woman called “Queen Novo of the Seaponies”.
As I was saying in another thread, this is hilarious because white people like to say black people can’t swim (fwiw, I am a black person who was on a swimming team).
The racist bronies are already calling her Queen Wewuz as in the awful white supremacist meme that denigrates and dehumanizes African monarchies as being fairytale JOOISH LIBRUL SJW LIES.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-wuz-kings
EDIT:
Anyway, to answer your question, I don’t think it would be appropriation per se. If it makes you uncomfy I won’t pressure you to do it, though.
Oogly
Sorry I missed your comment. Congrats on your grandma coming home.
Also steampunk as brain bleach
?w=490
http://pre06.deviantart.net/ca0b/th/pre/f/2013/018/7/f/steampunk_pirate_by_ingunnbf-d5mfa7b.jpg
I would love to see more native people/stuff
Ej
I don’t think so because there are plenty of white people born from African black parents in Africa (skin condition called vilitgo and abinoism) and also they are just animals. Not sure if that answers the question.
@Francesca Torpedo:
*bangs head against desk*
And I suppose the possibility that North Africans aren’t ‘real black people’ because they’ve been actively trading and interbreeding with Europeans since at least the bloody fourth century B.C. would either be taken as proof that they’re right or explained away somehow…
It’s not as though it takes much more than a basic look over history to realize that, yeah, racial purity has never been a thing; people will mix. And the times when it has gotten closest, it has never been a good thing.
(Of course, a good chunk of the ‘people will mix’ part down through millennia of recorded history also involves rape of slaves…)
re: non-pony races in MLP:FiM standing in for real-world ethnic groups
This could raise additional hackles in the fandom if we consider the myriad other sentient species in MLP:FiM. While I’m not totally caught up, the only other species I can remember being a direct parallel to a real-world ethnic group were the buffalo||those who were in the Americas first.
But then there’s griffons, donkeys, draconequi, whatever the hell Steven Magnet was. Also within more pony-like species, there’s the Crystal Ponies and the Breezies. And a lot of shit I’m probably forgetting about.
The hell would those correspond to, by that logic?
@Valentine:
Yes, you’ve got it!
@Jenora
Pretty much!
Also, FWIW, as mentioned I have white people in my ancestry lines.
However, I am dark enough and have large enough nose and lip shapes for racist white people to call me an n-word (if they’re really angry, an n-word f-word (the one for gay people)) when they are upset with me.
So that doesn’t count.
[TW]
@francesca
Isnt ‘black people cant swim’ from when slavers would throw the people they captured overboard? Which means really they saying ‘black people cant swim when they’re fucking chained together hahaha we’re monsters! Our ancestors killed & slaved people and now its a hilarous joke! More ice tea anyone?’
@Troubelle
The Yaks of Yakyakistan are obviously angry muslim people.
The Dragons are either Chinese or Japanese depending on who you speak to.
The Griffons are Russian White People (Slavs).
The Crystal Ponies are either German Empire Superior White People or Britishers.
Unicorns are Superior White People in general.
This is the best pony, according to 75% of the fandom.
ETA:
I recall reading a fic on the aforementioned ponyfic site where Aryanne the Nazi Pony tried to kill everypony with poisoned lemonade.
It received 600 upvotes.
Gryffons are slavs?
@Franscesca Torpedo
oh god kill it with fire. It’s not even drawn well, Jesus.
Ironically, the biggest Touhou fan I know who also recently hopped on the pony train is ethnically Jewish.
He’s a weeb, a tankie, and a little weirder than me (which is saying something), but he’s got a mushy heart.
He doesn’t deserve this shit.
I once got it into my head to try to create a period-appropriate steampunk cookbook. I don’t have the sticktoitiveness to really pull it off, but the research part was fun.
One thing I realized quite early is that the era marked by steampunk — late 19th century to WWI or thereabouts — is also the height of both the British Empire and the Gilded Age (as well as Jim Crow) in the US. That IMHO greatly complicates how you can play it, and to be honest with you I think that kind of imperialist thinking might be a major draw for racists. The irony is that I feel like the mad scientist types that the genre centers around would probably be the least racist of all of them, though they’d probably have horrible issues with sexism…
@Valentine
Yep.
The United Griffon Soviet Socialist Republic is a common trope, too.
Griffons are basically the warlike big muscular white blonde blue-eyed Slavic peoples stereotype, which is some racist shit in and of itself.
Goddamn, the FiM fandom is so fucking racist, holy shit. Nobody warned me about that. It’s like the Spanish Inquisition – nobody expects it!
I love my little pony. Why? Why can’t we ‘females’ have anything to ourselves without it turning into porn or Nazi garbage or Nazi garbage porn?
I’m pretty sure the black people can’t swim stereotype derives from the segregation era in America, when there were a lot more whites-only swimming pools than black ones, and black families were less able to afford summer camps, lakefront cottages, and other opportunities to get wet.
@Troubelle
Did you see the Nazi Marisa from Touhou I posted? Even his beloved Touhou fandom is not safe.
Sadly, I know a lovely Jewish lady who left the MLP fandom, citing that she lost interest because of the new Harry Potterverse movie (HP was her first fandom or so)
I think we all know the real reason why she noped the fuck out of the MLP fandom, though.
One of the reasons is most likely a certain blonde Germane pony I just posted.
@Fruitloopsie
As if to prove your point about MRAs turning MLP into nazi garbage porn, this popped up on google:
ETA:
I feel like David should do an article about Nazi Bronies and Aryanne.
I’d help.
@francesca
Also all slavs are only ever communist in this things. Racist, predicable, white supremacist. Why gryffons anyway? I would make them Egyption because of sphinx. Strange also because some people say slav also is not ‘white enough’, but I suppose if they are literal nazis and nazis killed slavs, that explained it.
Re: race and mlp.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the discussion about Zecora and the “magic negro” trope here (sable_twilight
10:13:59 AM Oct 26th 2014)?
I thought it persuasive but am interested in other takes.
@Franscesca Torpedo
Sadly I do not read much fan fiction. I’ve wanted to change this but I tend to need a less complex social life for such. My experience of text is atypical and I find it very intense. In fact I would consider my experience of the fandom to be akin to a political party or religion forming with all the attendant mixing of people’s lives with the material. It was very powerful for me.
Don’t be sorry though. It was this cis, white, socially aggressive male’s opportunity to walk the talk when it comes to social justice. I like to imagine that when they asked me to mod the serious discussion board as the Twilight mod people came up with SJW to dismiss social justice claims without offering a reason because they had no good reason (I could never get someone using the term to actually line it up with characteristics in the definition). A lifetime of dealing with social overload has given me a lot of control and awareness and it was worthwhile practice despite the scars.
Francesca Torpedo – I’d be really excited to go horseback riding with you! I hope you can have halfbloods or draft breeds cuz I’m a fat lady and don’t want to lame up smaller horses. I have a friend who lives way too far from me who fosters and rehabs all kinds of horses for the local local animal rescues, so that’s one way to fill your stable, so to speak.
re: Riding with strangers – I think it depends a lot on where you are. When I was living in the DC area (Northern VA, right outside the Beltway) it was extremely common for people in cars to pick up folks at the bus stops during rush hour so that they could use the HOV-3 lanes to get to the Pentagon (which is also a huge public transportation hub). It was also common (sometimes mandatory) on military bases for people in cars to offer rides to walkers. Once, I got a ride from the Base Commander when I was stationed in Italy and it wasn’t even that awkward!
Francesca Torpedo: Do you mainly do rp and cosplay or do you also write some of your own stories?
@Fran
That’s what I meant–neither he nor anybody else should be seeing Nazi shit in their fandom’s artwork. But it happens, as you’ve demonstrated, and it sucks.
Sorry about not being more clear.
@Franscesca Torpedo:
Really, I think some of what I find annoying about some of this is just how bloody circular their argumentation is. It’s just so obviously motivated reasoning with no actual foundation in reality, and so blatant that they have just never actually thought about it. They keep Gish galloping around in circles hoping nobody (including themselves) notices that they’re using their prejudices and assumptions to justify their prejudices and assumptions.
(And yeah, being able to be annoyed at that is a bit of my own privilege at not being directly on the receiving end.)