By David Futrelle
We’re in the grip of a pandemic that has already killed more than 132,000 Americans. The Black Lives Matters protests continue across the country. And somehow at this fraught moment in history the internet babies are throwing yet another tantrum about “Captain Marvel” actress Brie Larson — though at this point I doubt many of them can even remember what they’re ostensibly mad at her for. (Because she’s named after a cheese?)
A couple of months back, professional and amateur outrage merchants on YouTube pitched a fit over her appearance in a Nissan commercial. Now they’re mad that she’s started up a YouTube channel of her own.
Her channel has been up all of three days and already her haters on YouTube have started pumping out attack videos.. Here’s a selection:
Yes, that last one is three and a half hours long.
I would offer some more commentary on these bullshit videos, but I refuse to watch any of them on principle, the principle being that I don’t want to watch any of these bullshit videos.
But scrolling through the search results on YouTube I did find one relatively unoffensive video about Brie Larson that I would like to share with you. It features Ms. Larson wearing a pantsuit, and it was put up online by a channel that specializes in “Female wearing suit shirt & tie.”
I have to say, that’s the best clip of a woman wearing a pantsuit I’ve seen in some time. And it’s got puppies! How can anyone be mad at someone with such obvious rapport with puppies?
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@ opposable thumbs & naglfar
Apologies! That’s the level of attention to detail you get when you instruct me.
That reminds me of a case from a decade or so back, when I received the follow comment from the solicitor.
“That’s great advice, however we’re acting for the other side.”
First female author my florescent pale white arse.
I was reading the Valdemar series of books put out by Mercedes Lackey long before Rowling even thought about inflicting her mediocre word dribble on the world. As a bonus, there are several prominent gay/lesbian characters, and none of them were retconned in! I also read the Darkover series and Sword and Sorceress anthologies by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer books (I never did get around to checking out her Pern books). Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles were quite enjoyable too. (At the time MZB was a breath of fresh air in the typical fantasy male hero/rapist genre).
Has TERF lady even published anything under a non-male or non-androgynous name yet?
@Jesalin
AFAIK she has not. IIRC the reason she originally wrote Harry Potter under the name JK Rowling was because she thought young boys wouldn’t want to read a book by a woman. And it gets all the worse when we take into account the origins of her pen name. She claims the pseudonym Robert Galbraith was from a name she liked as a child, Ella Galbraith, but it seems too specific to be a coincidence*.
TW: discussion of sexual abuse
One of the books she wrote as Galbraith also feature a scene where the main character jokes about a trans* woman getting raped in prison.
*For those who don’t know, Robert Galbraith Heath was a psychologist who tried to perform gay conversion therapy using brain electrodes, making him known in later decades as “the man who fried gay people’s brains.”
Update on Atwood and the TERFs: they are now trying to ‘splain her own book to her. Given that I think a fair number of the “adult human female” TERFs online are actually cis men using sockpuppet accounts, this might qualify as mansplaining.
@opposablethumbs
Is scofflaw not a current usage anymore, then? Blast, I really need to update my vocabulary.
@Naglfar
Oh yeah, I don’t buy for a second that her choice of name was accidental, or coincidental.
Anyone really interested can read this PDF of the Roland Barthes article that originated death of the author. It’s quite short
“Death of The Author” makes sense when you consider that authors don’t have an omniscient perspective on their own work and its implications. Should we defer to Ayn Rand on what Atlas Shrugged is supposed to mean?