Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Sexual Identity and the Online World

Reading this article today on how two straight men have apparently been reverse outed after it turns out that they were not the lesbians they claimed to be online.  I find so much of this article to be offensive.
First of all, I hate the comments from various people that no one would listen to a white man.  It's such a whiny thing to say.  White men always have space in the world to talk to the point where they dominate the conversation.  Marginalized people wanting a space to talk to one another and about the issues important to them is a perfectly legitimate desire. 
The article also ignores whether or not anyone would need to hear the views of these two men.  Is there some reason I should want to hear MacMaster observations of Syria?  Has he been to Syria?  Is he an expert on the Middle East?  (It mentions he was in graduate school, which could indicate he has some intellectual background to talk about things, but otherwise, who knows.) 
What really frustrates me about this whole thing is that when actual lesbians, especially those from a nonWestern country do want to talk about these issues on the Internet, people will dismiss them as potentially frauds. 

4 comments:

  1. Well, thanks for this, Eliza. I read the article.

    I think the article alludes to the fact that Shakespeare created different gender roles for characters and they were all men anyway.

    There is an artistic need to put yourself into the shoes of your characters, male and female. I am sure Jane Austen tried to get under the skin of her male characters as well as her female characters otherwise they couldn't have been authentic.
    Characters changing gender is fine too. We in Britain have a tradition called the Pantomime which probably originates in Greek tragedy but characters like the principal boy is always a girl dressed as a boy, Mother Goose is usually an old man dressed as an old woman. We accept this cross gender stuff. Children actually love it. Like the cruelty of fairy stories and nursery rhymes they need this role experimentation. It's psychologically good for them.

    Students over here go on charity pub crawls and get very drunk collecting money for a given charity, at least once a year.They get dressed in , "drag," men as women, women as men. Marilyn and I used.......well, I'd better not go there. Don't want to shock you.

    But these two have transgressed. They have stolen people identities. That is their crime. They could and probably have hurt people. Experimenting with gender is fine, we all do it, oh yes you do, and might not even think about it, and of course, coming back to Shakespeare, theatre has always done it.It's part of our culture!!!!!!!!

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  2. It's so strange that you say that about Jane Austen, because I could have sworn that I read Austen commenting somewhere (and I'm paraphrasing here) that she wouldn't know what men sounded like when they talked to each other without women because she could never be in those conversations.

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  3. Hi Eliza. You could well be right. However, artists do have to do their best to get into the heads of their characters.

    Jane did have six brothers, James, George,Edward Henry,Frank and Charles. Two of them became admirals in the Royal Navy. Henry was a banker and often had Jane to stay in his London houses where she met many of his colleagues.She was a bit of a tom boy as a child joining in with her brothers and their friends games.She was brought up in Steventon in hampshire and wentt many of the balls in the local area and was friends with many local rich families. She was in love with Tom Lefroy a local landowners son and was proposed to by another. She had a plenty of male friends and knew men well.

    All the best,
    Tony

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  4. Oh by the way, just in case you get entirely the wrong idea. Marilyn and I did do some pub crawls and thats ALL. Oh I suppose I performed in some student pantomimes. I've always liked amateur dramatics!!!!!!

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