"What we're engaged in is trying to distill whatever aspect of the human condition is appropriate for the story, and present it. I've always thought of acting as a kind of extra-dimensional anthropology. By which I mean we're in the business of people. People interest me: what motivates them; what inspires them and what makes them happy, what makes them sad. And we're all united by it, we're all united by it. We're all united by these feelings that we all feel at different times. The reason I became an actor is that I sat in the audience - in the cinema audience and also in audiences at the theatre, and I love it when you go to see something, and you enter as an individual and you leave as a group. Because you've all been bound together by the same experience."
Tom Hiddleston, on creating art
(Nerd HQ, SDCC 2013)
Teen Wolf is often under fire around Tumblr for being as casually misogynistic as they come. The central women are all love interests or mothers. The female villains die horribly, where the male villains get backstories and development. Sometimes women seem to be gratuitously murdered just because. These accusations all may be true, but I think to call the show as a whole misogynistic is to miss one of the central themes of the show: matriarchy.
Teen Wolf, as far as I can tell, is about matriarchies. Specifically, it’s about matriarchy as an ideal and about the problems that arise when men grab for power that belongs by right to women. Which is to say, all the problems in the show.
More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look. What it feels like to be not skinny/dark-skinned/a minority/not conventionally pretty/female/etc. It’s not very interesting to me, but I know it’s interesting to people reading an interview. Sometimes I get jealous of white male showrunners when 90 percent of their questions are about characters, story structure, creative inspiration, or, hell, even the business of getting a show on the air. Because as a result the interview of me reads like I’m interested only in talking about my outward appearance and the politics of being a minority and how I fit into Hollywood, blah blah blah. I want to shout, “Those were the only questions they asked!?
If you’re at all familiar with me and my personal thoughts on comicverse Tony Stark, you probably already know that I believe Tony is at least semi-canonically bisexual. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which I plan to address at some point in the future, but this post is only tangentially related to that viewpoint. This post is mainly about how Tony Stark is sexualized/has his virility or manhood mocked or questioned by villains and antagonists in the comics. At the end, I vaguely describe why I feel this adds fuel to the fire of my theory about his sexual orientation, but in this context that’s more for my personal justification than anything else. In the 1998 Iron Man and Captain America Annual, upon first meeting Tony psychically, Metallo immediately calls into question Tony’s playboy status.
This innuendo, while obviously intended to be a throwaway insult to Tony, is interesting because it presents Tony’s sexual promiscuity as something which weakens Tony, thus questioning his power and subverting the typical societal view of a promiscuous male (one that equates male power with sexuality). According to Metallo, because he is suddenly able to resist Metallo psychologically (he intends to mentally stop him from using mind control), his sexual strength must be diminished through his own will, making power and sexuality mutually exclusive. This then calls into question to power of Iron Man, whose identity is still a secret to everyone at this point. Iron Man’s power is clearly non-sexual in nature, but Tony’s reputation has allowed for questioning of his agency and virility on the part of Metallo, subverting traditional views of male sexual prowess.
sometime I just think about how easy it would be to market superheroes toward little girls and I am filled with rage
like do these people not realize how fucking easy this shit would be
there’s the dazzler she’s like a popstar and a superhero do you know how many 4-12 year old girls would dig that shit
there’s the wasp and her superpowers are seriously like zapping jerks, flying, and being cuter than everybody else. also she’s a famous fashion designer. and she’s better than you. (like she shrinks and stuff too but mainly her power is being better than you)
she-hulk is like this nerdy chick with the power to get bigger and greener and be spontaneously tougher than everybody in the vicinity like I don’t even know a little girl who wouldn’t slit someone’s throat for the ability to be stronger than all the boys when they pissed her off
little girl likes magic? scarlet witch
little girl likes science? invisible woman
little girl likes spies? black widow
little girl likes aliens? karolina dean
little girl likes bionic arms? misty knight
little girl likes flying horses? wow. guess who has one of those? valkyrie. valkyrie does.
My point is that’s it’s so fucking easy so chop-chop, Marvel, get on it. Seriously, I went ten years of my life thinking superheroes were boys. That’s ten years of you not profiting off of my inability to refrain from buying even the crappiest merchandise you offer if it has a character I love on it. Little girls are an enormous market; they will buy all your shit if you just suggest to them that maybe they’d like to.
or you could just keep on not profiting when you could be making money selling literally any object that has enough space to plaster a female superhero’s face on it. that’s cool too.
how can you complain about “mary sue” characters when 90% of mainstream male characters are perfect strong heroes who save the day and “get the girl” but you can’t let a female character be the same without being mocked or having something fucking horrible happen to her you whiny fucking babies
I’m allowed to complain about Mary Sues because 1) I complain about those male characters all the time 2) those male characters are giving unequal depth to the female ones I’m complain about 3) Gary Stus are called out ALL the time - Batman’s Gary Stu-ness is an IN CANON JOKE 4) asking for well-written female characters is not anti-feminist like I can’t believe I even have to say this and insisting that we treat badly written women characters as equally awesome as well-written male ones will not help the cause.
Scientific explanations of witch hunts/trials tho. Like, yeah, no, none of these weird, specific signs and symptoms have any cultural relevance worth uncovering and studying, we can just attribute it all to molds and ticks. You figured it out, science. Great job.
I can’t speak more broadly to like, all witch trials ever, but like, Reginald Scot in the 1500’s basically was like “witches are either nuts, have convinced themselves of lies, catholic and thus stupid, or scammers. I am now going to go undercover and learn how to do every street magic known in england to prove it.” It resulted in a really cool first book of stage and street magic, but also, more relevant - people were totally saying it was BS from way back.
But- but like. Again, I have only really read up on Salem, but, some of that shit sounds just like modern UFO encounter stuff. Bright lights descending from the sky, slowly drawing people in, people feeling stuck in place, glowing balls of light that zoom into peoples bodies, floating cows… I mean, it was uncanny reading it because it was the same stuff that in the 1960’s people were like “this is obvious cold war paranoia”.
So I mean, I am not saying it is aliens, I actually think it is more likely to be this science stuff.
Which is not to say that science explains any of the little yellow birds or specific narratives from black slave traditions that got corrupted by a gaggle of girls or any possible folk or witchcraft that may or may not have been happening, or the sexualization of women’s bodies and the assumption that any abnormality on a women’s body was satanic and evil. Or the fact that a lot of the complaints sound like sexual fantasies/fears or illicit affairs or jealousies - that there is some element of Enlightenment masculine fear over the unknown working itself out here… these are probably still things worth looking at critically.
Like it is really a very shallow reading of social history to think that humans can’t be pushed by just social pressures to do something like this. I mean, even if maybe one or two cases in one or two places had something to do with ergot or something, that wasn’t the case in salem - where if you look at the documents is all about grievances and vengeance and a community that was all into knowing everyone’s business and also remaining all prim and proper about it.
I think things like sleep paralysis and migraine aura and maybe some fear hallucinations and the occasional bad wheat stalk might have added to the fury of it all or even been the spark in some places, but racism and religious passion and national fervor were more than enough kindling. I mean. The testimonies in Salem talk constantly about a “Black Man” in place of the word Devil, and the Black Man is also sometimes said to look like an Indian, and then the Witches fly off with the slaves to a pow wow in the woods. That is not ergot.
All that being said, farmers’ reporting seeing weird shit* at night has sounded very similar for over 300 years and maybe there is science causes in there to.
Or aliens. Don’t despair Mulder, it could still be aliens.
*here is a sample, from Cotton Mathers contemporaneous reporting in Wonders of the Invisible World -
“John Pressy testify’d, That being one Evening very unaccountably Bewildred, near a field of Martins, and several times, as one under an Enchantment, returning to the place he had left, at length he saw a marvellous Light, about the Bigness of an Half-Bushel, near two Rod out of the way. He went, and struck at it with a Stick, and laid it on with all his might. He gave it near forty blows; and felt it a palpable substance. But going from it, his Heels were struck up, and he was laid with his Back on the Ground, Sliding, as he thought, into a Pit; from whence he recover’d, by taking hold on the Bush; altho’ afterwards he could find no such Pit in the place.”
My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.
The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)
But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.
Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.