Your attempting to use my math skills to push your argument just makes this that much sweeter, and that much sadder. "You're supposed to be a mathemagician, right?" Yeah. I am a woman, and I am good at math, and I have a basic understanding of probability that implies we aren't seeing random coin flips here--unless you really think execs flip fair coins and end up their casts.
"Mathemagician" is an honorary title that I use for every single person that knows basic mathematical functions. You are not a magical scion of mystical math powers, but you are a fellow human being that has passed kindergarten. Are you trying to say that I'm calling you magical for being a
woman who is good at math? I know damn well that there are women who know math. I was not appealing to your math skills, I was using a turn of phrase to indicate that I was about to use mathematics in the realm of gender politics. I could have completely abandoned the phrase and left my post without an introduction, but that is not how I write prose. You can call my prose sad if you wish, but I will
never sit down and let someone call my opinion pathetic. Never. I can be wrong. I've been wrong before. But never, EVER, will I allow someone to deride my opinion. There are very few situations in which an opinion can be right or wrong.
Hint: how many times have you seen a wheelchair-ridden main character? How many times have you seen a black female main character, or a gay main character, or a transsexual main character? How many times have you seen a disabled, female, transsexual, poor, gay person of color on the screen? What--never? But I thought we were working with fair coins! Shouldn't I see one of those for every able-bodied (etc.) white man? I mean, surely we've had enough trial runs by now.
I have seen quite a few. Have a few lists from the top of my head.
Wheelchair: How about Professor Xavier of X-Men? Jake Sully of Avatar? Joe Swanson of Family Guy? Lincoln Rhyme of the Bone Collector?
Black Female: Cassie of Animorphs. Valerie Smith from Josie and the Pussycats. Diana from the D&D animated series. Storm from X-Men. Libby from Jimmy Neutron. The princess in the recent edition of Princess and the Frog.
Gay: Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist of Brokeback Mountain. According to J.K. Rowling, Albus Dumbledore of Harry Potter. Baron Harkonnen of Dune. Alec Scudder of Maurice. Christopher Metcalf of Now and Then. Ash from Streets of Rage.
Transsexual: Infinite Darlene/Daryl of Boy Meets Boy. Jess Goldberg of Stone Butch Blues. Berry of Choir Boy. Sage of Almost Perfect. Poison and Roxy of Final Fight.
As for your inquiry about a conglomerate minority, I'll assume by female transsexual you mean a MTF transsexual. In that case, I'll also assume that you're using 'gay' as a term for all homosexuals. I haven't seen one personally, but I do not watch many TV shows or movies. Foxxy Love from Drawn Together is black, a woman, and bisexual. Ah, here we go. Chaka from the Whateley Universe is a black MTF transgender bisexual mutant with ADHD. So are several other characters. Others are FTM transsexuals. Others are wheelchair bound. Wow, it happened. I guess we
have had enough trial runs.
I'm actually starting to wonder about your grasp of probability. It makes absolutely no sense to assume that there will be a poor, disabled, homosexual, MTF transsexual of color for every able-bodied white man. Let's take a look at the coin flip experiment I posted about? Do you see one HHH or TTT to match every other combination? No? Those only make up a small portion of the entire sample! Well, I'll be! It turns out that fractions aren't always equal to other fractions! Wouldn't it be more reasonable to say that you should see a proportional amount of them? If you take a sample of 1000 people from any one region in the world, I highly doubt that you will end up with a perfectly mixed group with an exactly equal number of every race, gender, or other defining feature. Take the Chinese school system for instance. You will likely end up with a larger number of boys than girls, because that's how it is in China these days. I find it very unlikely that every single Chinese school will have an equal number of boys and girls when the sum of the boys is larger than the sum of the girls.
PS: Let's use the coins again, since you are fixated upon them. Each one of the six terms you listed is a coin. White male requires the gender and color coin. That's a 25% chance there. A disabled, female, transsexual, poor, gay person of color will require five coins. That's already down to a 3.125% chance of such a person. Statistically speaking, that means there for every 100 people there will be 13 disabled, poor, black MTF transsexuals and 87 white males. Not equal, even using this model.
Obviously, the world isn't fair. And yeah, it's not fun trying to make it more fair, but let me tell you, man--it's not fun to spend a lot of your life being treated as little more than an object, and it's also not fun to have those men who treat me like a person say "Well, but you aren't like most women. You're different, so we can get along with you." Usually, they say "you're rational, like us, and not like them" or "you're smart and good at math like us, and not like them." Fortunately, other than the constant shock around here that someone with my personality could be female, ended only through demonstrative pictures, B12 is mostly okay.
I know that being treated like an object sucks. I've lived my entire life as a curiosity for others to gawk at and talk to like I'm some sort of freak. "Oh wow! You have a twin! Do you do everything together?" "Oh, I can tell you how to tell them apart. There's this mole...". Isn't it funny how people resent being treated as objects? Even the people you verbally attack over the internet? It's not actually a shock at all that you are female. I guessed almost immediately, and the confirmation didn't change my perception of you at all. Everyone on the internet could be an androgynous hybrid, but it doesn't matter. It's what you do, not what gender people expect you to act like, that counts. I don't care that you're female. I don't care that MaximumZero is male. You're both interesting personalities that I occasionally chat with on the internet. I still have no idea why you're bringing your gender into this discussion, because it's seemingly about an animated show and its 'gender politics' to you. I was merely bringing up the fact that a homogeneous cast is not necessarily politically incorrect or an inherently bad thing. Instead of ranting at
me about how people don't treat you properly, yell at someone who is
actually gender profiling.
I am just so tired of dealing with this. It isn't about some stultified movement of political correctness. It's about me wanting to see female leads, or an all-female team, where the characters aren't walking fetishes and the writing isn't targeted towards men. It's about me being tired of having cartoons broadcast over here with large portions of them cut out so that we can get to the part where there's a male hero, with the dialogue rewritten to give him a bigger part, because people won't watch shows about women. I want to see women that I can feel proud of associating with, who aren't just clotheshorses for the male leads to be distracted by as the move from problem to conflict.
I too wish that there were more variety in media, but I can see this paragraph isn't really directed at me. I'll just leave this one be.
So call it "political correctness" if you like, because you're the one being advantaged by it. And, just FYI, I wasn't going to say anything about the composition of the cast (not having watched the video, nor really caring that much--because after all, it was just another white male cast doing their thing) until folks started fucking with probability theory in the name of fighting "the political correctness machine."
I'm ashamed.
Riddle me this: when was the last time I was advantaged by an animation about an ex-governor and a group of children saving California? Am I somehow empowered by the color of the drawings? Does the lack of variety strengthen me because the depicted children share my skin color? You're ashamed of
me? I am absolutely horrified that you think this in ANY way advantages me. For your information, not every person was male, and the entire cast hasn't even been revealed. My point was that, while a male-only Caucasian cast is boring, there is nothing inherently wrong with it. My Psychology 100 class is comprised of 21 middle-aged white women and myself. Are you trying to say that this class advantages white women? Are you saying that my Psychology class should be more diverse? You'll have to convince another demographic to join my class, then. The other Psychology 100 class is fairly diverse from what I've seen. It just so happened that the alphabetical order of last names caused one class to be fairly homogeneous. But why would you want to make my class more diverse? Apparently its current state
advantages you.
Maybe the writer of this show had some great ideas for characters. These characters are all different and exciting people. There's just one
problem, apparently! They're all white! What do you propose the writer do, go in and change his characters based on the color of their skin? For what reason? Because people can't stand to accept his characters as a group if they all look similar? Are people going to suddenly dislike his interesting character because there aren't any Hispanic characters about? Maybe they just live in a town where there aren't many Hispanic people. There are many towns like that.
You do not get to use mathematics to argue this. I do not care who you are, or what you think your reasoning is. I don't care if you're a rhetoric student trying to demolish Nietzsche, or some idiot trying to attack the Bible because it reports the value of pi incorrectly. I don't care if you're some dipshit from Harvard trying to explain, once again, that men have a more diverse IQ bell curve and that's why there's hardly any women in mathematics (because they aren't allowed to say we're just naturally more stupid, weak-willed, and "feeble-minded" than our male counterparts--as of Nazi Germany), and I don't care if you're Pythagoras, saying with the natural numbers that women don't have souls. I don't care if it comes from the psychological side or the biological side, from sociology or misogynistic heuristics.
I have every right to use mathematics to argue this. I use examples and metaphors in place of words. The example I chose was one I knew. I could just as easily have made another point, but I chose math. I have no idea why you're trying to convince me that I can't use it. You don't own math. You have no monopoly on it. I have no idea why you're bringing your gender into this. You're blindly attacking a foe that
just isn't there. Not everyone is a misogynistic twerp with a hankering for slander.
You don't know what you're doing, and so until you've done your studying and paid the weighty, weighty price to understand what the hell you're talking about:
Keep. Your fucking. Gender. Politics. Out. Of. My. Mathematics.
I think what you want me to do is keep
our mathematics out of gender politics. Ignoring that, the price I have paid thus far is not as weighty as yours, but only because of time constraints. I've taken seven years of math in the past three school years because I just love it
so goddamn much. After next year I will have learned more math than any teacher in this county is qualified to teach. Happily, I'll be moving on to college to learn more math. I'm glad I have a reason to learn more math now. Instead of doing it solely for the joy of it, now I can train myself to be WORTHY enough to use it in your presence.
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Topic: Diversity In Media (Read 8801 times)