Society Fail

[the_other_sandy]

So, I was planning to post a little bit about Eureka today, but I've inadvertently spent the day on the Internet reading about all the various ways people suck.

1) Gatefail

Gatefail was triggered by the following casting call that was actually sent out to various casting agencies for a guest character on SGU:

[ELEANOR PERRY] (35-40) and quite attractive. A brilliant scientist who happens to be a quadriplegic. Affected since childhood, her disability has rendered her body physically useless. However, after being brought on board the Destiny as the only person who may be able to save the ship and her crew from certain annihilation, she is given temporary powers that enable her to walk again and to finally experience intimacy.sptv050769..Strong guest lead. NAMES PREFERRED. ACTRESS MUST BE PHYSICALLY THIN. (THINK CALISTA FLOCKHART).

Sheafrotherdon has done quite a bit of follow-up on her LJ (but there's no common tag for me to link to, so I just linked to one post).

John Scalzi, SGU's creative consultant, responded here. Last I checked, he'd done a really good job of shutting down trolls, so there was some excellent discussion in the comments.

io9 also wrote a decent article encapsulating the Gatefail here. Don't read the comments if you have a tendency towards high blood pressure.

2) Culturefail

This is an older post by cereta on mens' role in rape culture, and while it's interesting, she did such a good job of policing trolls that the 26 (so far) pages of comments that follow are fascinating, sad, and unbelievably eye-opening.

3) Racefail

At a Senator Claire McCaskill town hall, several black women brought a sign with them (and were apparently booed upon entering the room). They rolled the sign up, and set it aside. A photographer approached the woman sitting on the end of the aisle and asked to see the poster. As the woman unrolled the poster for the photographer, a white man got out of the bleachers, grabbed it from her, and attempted to destroy it. Audience members, who were overwhelmingly white, cheered. The woman got out of her seat to retrieve her poster. And something like four police officers grabbed her and escorted her out of the building. The audience cheered louder.

The hugely offensive sign that the man decided to rip up, by the way? It was of Rosa Parks.

--The Curvature.

---

I think I need chocolate. Or possibly ice cream. This is just too much fail for one person to deal with all in one day.

Comments

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

I've read a bunch of the articles/commentaries/comments, etc. on these spoilers (the only ones I've really read on SGU) and well, somehow, it doesn't surprise me, becuase the writing staff are the same folk who gave us Lucius Lavin.

What's more fail is how some fans think the episode will be great becuase it will have 'hot lesbian sex' (and yes, that was a male saying it). *headdesk*

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

it doesn't surprise me, becuase the writing staff are the same folk who gave us Lucius Lavin

And that's exactly where the problem lies. TPTB never saw that Lucius Lavin was a rapist, even when fans pointed out the lack of informed consent by anyone he drugged, and continued to see him as some kind of comic relief. So now that TPTB are complaining that fans are taking the spoilers out of context and that the episode itself will be awesome, how can we trust them? They even gave Lavin a second episode.

And yeah, 'hot lesbian sex' makes everything better, even when it's non-consensual. ::rolls eyes::

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

What was really creepy about that whole Lucius thing is that there were fans who thought that drugging up the women was just fine. AIeeee!

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

It was the same thing on Torchwood. Many fans, and the show itself, saw nothing wrong with Owen Harper committing date rape twice in the very first episode. The lack of consent was never addressed, and Owen was considered just a "naughty boy" nudge nudge wink wink.

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

Guess I'm glad I never bought the Torchwood dvds to see what everybody was all ga-ga about. That's a definite turnoff. Geez, this is like turning Jack the rapist in General Hospital into a guy his victim married. Yech.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

Overall, I mostly liked the show, but I was always filled with great amounts of Owen hate.

Geez, this is like turning Jack the rapist in General Hospital into a guy his victim married.

Are you talking about the whole Luke and Laura thing? Or was there another one? I only heard about Luke and Laura. By the time my friends got me watching General Hospital, the hot couple was Robert and Holly. But yes, having Laura marry her rapist was unbelievably inappropriate, and it was amazing how many people were willing to forgive and forget and turn the two of them into the hottest couple on daytime TV.

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

Oh sorry, yes, Luke and Laura. I remmeber the furor over the wedding!

[seesmooshrun.livejournal.com]

I feel a need to leave a comment, but I'm kinda speechless. About all of it, even the SG stuff I didn't think I cared about. But I bookmarked cereta's post to pass on to others, so thank you for bringing it to my attention. Now I need chocolate.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to spend pretty much the whole day reading comments on cereta's post, but 5 pages in they haven't stopped being interesting and thought-provoking yet.

[samazon13.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you for sharing cereta's post. I started to read it and realized I too would be here all day, so I bookmarked it to come back to. I read a book a while back called "Transforming a Rape Culture" that was a collection of essays about rape, and how ingrained and institutionalized it is in our culture, despite how enlightened we think we are. Violence against women isn't slowing down at all, and yet very few folks are willing to look at it as more than isolated incidents that other people do. Argh.
-Samazon

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

I'm on Day Two of reading through the comments. The most interesting thing I've taken away from this discussion so far is that society puts the burden of rape prevention on women: don't wear that, don't go there, don't drink that, take a self-defense class, carry pepper spray, educate the men around you, etc., etc., etc. There's no burden on men to prevent rape by keeping it in their pants or by assuming that a woman's default setting is no until she says yes.

Grown men should take responsibility for themselves. Women should not have to be the Penis Police.