I’ve been holding off on posting about this couple who I’m sure you’ve already rea
I’ve been holding off on posting about this couple who I’m sure you’ve already read about by now, even though it’s probably the most the mainstream Internet has talked about the Victorian era in the past year. I’d like to write about why I’ve been keeping my mouth shut about this potentially great opportunity to get mainstream-relevant on this blog.Mostly, because it feels like a troll. Not by the author and her husband, as some are hypothesizing, but by Vox. They’ve been posting some real clickbait flame war fodder lately, and I’m super not about that shit. Think back to the recent “I’m a liberal professor and my leftist students scare me” article/response series. The article was poorly argued, entirely misused and misunderstood what a trigger warning is, and because it was so weakly argued on so many levels, it got passed around like wildfire. Everybody on any side of the argument (even no side) had a reason to post and rant about it; conservatives to agree, lefties to disagree, and moderates to point out how poorly made the argument was. Any editor worth their salt would have read that article and sent it back for some serious editing without even making it past the first paragraph, but instead, they knew that “viral” does better than “good,” so they published it.And Vox did exactly the same thing with this one. The article is barely even that–it’s just a description of stuff that the author has and does, and is pretty poorly written overall, so once the debate dies down about whether what they’re doing is good or bad, people can keep posting the article to call the author misogynistic slurs related to her intelligence, call her materialistic, defend her materialism, call her whatever.* Basically, it all boils down to this: Vox should have edited this article, given Chrisman directions on how to make her article into a narrative, read this mass of meandering text and identified the most interesting part of the story and told her to focus in on that. The fact that they didn’t tells me that they knew exactly what this article was going to provoke. Even her 2013 article for xoJane is better written and contains more of a narrative thread than this one, and I’d argue that Vox gets more mainstream publicity than xoJane does, and thus should have the manpower to do a better job at editing.Chrisman is obviously interested in self-promotion, which there’s absolutely nothing wrong with. She writes books, maintains a website, and all of this is surely driving massive traffic to both. And as Vox certainly knows, pageviews are pageviews, regardless of how much readers hate her. So good on her–it worked. What she’s doing is no more heinous or worthy of attack than the average steampunker, she just had the gall to say it a little bit louder and in a more public platform.In terms of my reaction to the content of the article? Well, this part’s gonna be way shorter. I’ve already made my feelings about steampunk clear many times (though I still think this paragraph from a book review is the best summing-up). The fact that she is harassed, threatened with violence, and groped in public is totally unacceptable. There’s never any value to playing oppression olympics, and that’s not what I’m trying to say here. At the end of the day (in spite of the equivalence she makes in her xoJane piece) her time period of choice is not like a trans identity. Instead of this Vox piece, I’d like to draw more traffic and attention to this piece on Darkmatter about harassment and identity. Not to belittle the pain of Chrisman’s experiences, but to draw more attention to the difference between a preference for a time period and an identity and the way that the resulting harassment differs as well. *The most notably silent voice is her husband’s, which I am almost certain was a conscious choice on the part of editors. I’m sure reactions would have still been negative, but I’m certain they would have been much different in tone were this piece written by her husband. -- source link
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