smart enough to wish i was more kind

thenotes:

Cecilia wrote a screenplay that’s better than anything I’ve done. Not that what I’ve done is any good. Some people don’t read what I write and have the tactlessness to start a conversation about why and when and where they didn’t read it—though for some reason even this banality is colored by positive assumptions and great excitement about what remains to be read in some anticipated future. How I’ve made such a favorable impression of talent without the opportunity for engagement remains mysterious.

When her peers, for lack of a more damning term, want to talk to Cecilia about her work, the same glowing potentialities do not apply. There is, as appalling baseline, the question of whether it’s “something for women, or something that anyone can relate to,” as if a funny woman would naturally wish to purge men from her audience. There is, once the subject matter comes out, the question of whether it’s “stupid, or doing something smart with something stupid,” as if women would and should resort to hackery right out of the gate. Finally, when assured that the screenplay is dark, multilayered and satirical, a crypto-misogynist, even while mentally burnishing his feminist bona fides, will ask: “Oh, so you take after your man?”

Her man being the author of a novel that, even before it has been opened, is so transparently important, impressive and worthwhile. 

You may never see Cecilia’s first name in the credits of a movie she’s written. That’s because having a woman’s name on a script, and read by strangers, is to invite a prejudice that need not be overt to influence the odds of her success. It’ll be better, she says, to use her initials and sidestep gender entirely. There is a long tradition of this sort of thing.           

(via tylercoates)

wordsandturds:

it is also a major roadblock in earning your platform.

a friend and i who have both written for thought catalog are examining all of the situations of “girl, microfamed” like the internet phenomenon of marie calloway or other girls who write about sex and gain instant success for being so “out there” and “open” and “honest.”

the thing is, this piece, and so many pieces like it, lack insight. but she has a lit agent. the question that it boils down to for me and my friend is: what makes this so successful?

and the answer is really easy, and not something a lot of people want to recognize or confront. almost no one wants to hear you write about sex if they don’t want to imagine you having sex. aka if you ain’t a dainty little white thing.

when nightmare brunette’s readers sent me hate mail after i expressed being disappointed that she admitted she didn’t post pictures of fat people or people of color, i was shocked. i found nightmare brunette’s writing insightful, equal parts beautiful and sad, and real. i thought that i was trying to cultivate a space with similar qualities? so why had all of these readers who supported her send me messages like, “you think anyone wants to listen to a fat brown chick who can’t even have a normal relationship? they don’t.”

but if no one did, i wouldn’t have the readership i do now.

this is a problem very particular to female writers of color: some people will listen, but more people will want to dismiss you or replace your voice with a white woman’s. i feel like every time i write something, i have to defend my very existence and experience because i am not white or pretty, and therefore not desirable, palatable, or believable.

it’s exhausting. i’m exhausted.

fatwasandfanboys:

Knowing your subjectivity will never truly be accessible, or palpable to the white imagination is, at its core, an empathy issue. Empathy is to be able to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes. You don’t have to understand everyone but you have to be able to feel for them when you think about who they are, and where they’ve been.

Empathy should be colorblind. Some white people can’t, and won’t read anything by women of color. Women of color are so far outside the scope of the imagination for them. Lest we are performing for them, women of color are invisible. Show me a woman of color who has a readership but doesn’t touch on the touchy social fact of race, and I’ll show you someone who made a decision to appeal to white sensibilities before her own sensibilities. I’ll show you a performance artist well-versed in the art of shucking, and jiving. 

Where’s the woman of color Elizabeth Wurtzel, or Lauren Slater? How the fuck can there be two borderline identical books about white girls with depression (Prozac Diary and Prozac Nation), but not a single book like that from the perspective of a woman of color? Where are all the sad young pretty girls of color? 

Readers of color know how to default to white. We know how to fade to white in our minds. We can, and do place ourselves in white people’s shoes. Effortlessly. Too bad our shoes don’t fit anyone else but us.

This is in response to this. 

And while I’m at it read this wonderful thing my friend wrote about his childhood in Zambia!

october4th:

I spent my childhood growing up in both the UK and Zambia. As 90s kids in Zambia, until we got satellite TV around 1999 we only had the one TV channel, ZNBC. We used to come home from school, mess about in the garden until 17:00, then go inside and watch a little film of the national anthem being performed to signify the beginning of that day’s television programming. We then watched reruns of Fat Albert, He-Man, Voltron and other similar cartoons for about an hour. At midnight, after the A-Team, the multi-lingual news and then all the serious programmes, the same film of the national anthem would play shortly before the channel returned to static.

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