This week, we don’t get to an email, because Tony has some powerful urges. Namely, to talk about some crap things he watched, to talk about some bizarrely decent things he watched, and to relentlessly mock William. This might be the most episode-ass episode we’ve ever done. Enjoy!
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I thought it was interesting that your opening discussion about feminism and the later discussion about Nefarious were both about the relation of ideology to stories. I’ll come back to the feminism discussion, but I wanted first to take you through my thought process which began with a disagreement that good-storytelling overcomes an ideology that we disagree with. I immediately thought of some ideologies that no amount of good story-telling could get past. But then I was thinking about it from another point-of-view, going back to the Narnia stories as examples. I read those as a kid, and loved them. I was then (and am still) an atheist and I was growing up in an atheist household. I also could tell that Aslan was a stand-in for Christ, but I didn’t find that I had to believe in Christianity to enjoy the stories. And one reason was that I liked a lot of the values represented in the stories and the relationships of the characters. Yes, those values are Christian values, but they are Christian values that a lot of people share who aren’t Christians. So maybe in that sense, I share the ideology of the Narnia stories. There are other kinds of Christian stories that I don’t like–ones that are more authoritarian and unaccepting of difference. Perhaps one could argue those aren’t really Christian stories, but some people refer to them in that way. But the important point here is that I don’t agree with those values. And to Tony’s point about stories with blunt political agendas–aren’t those stories that are authoritarian and controlling? Maybe that also makes them bad stories. But if that is the case, then maybe the whole ideology/story distinction kind of breaks down in that one could look at stories from the perspective of values and say, I think these with values I share are good stories, or one could come from the other direction and say this is good story-telling, and find that all those good stories have certain shared values. Trying to control what other people think, for example, being both a value that I don’t share and think is harmful, and conversely makes for very bad story-telling. As in life, so in stories, or something like that.
Which brings me back to the feminism question from the beginning. One of the first things that Tony said that stories used to suffer (and many still do) from a representation of women with a simple defining characteristic. That seems to be what he was then describing as the storyline in which a woman has had it up to here with patriarchy and decides to take it down. In some ways that reminds me of a problem that feminist theory is often talking about, which is how to avoid taking on the oppressor’s tactics–how do you not recreate what you are trying to change. And there are other parts of that narrative besides the single defining characteristic that fall into that same trap. For instance, the single-champion-for-good-in-a-corrupt-world story is very much one that dominates Western culture and gets in the way of both cooperative alliances and in the kind of self-examination needed to think about how all of us have been influenced by that system. Plus, it syncs really well with Capitalist values (specifically of the Randian sort). Then one starts to wonder are these stories really “feminist” ones or has “feminism” just been coopted as a way to sell to a certain demographic. (‘Cause certainly feminism has been wrangling for a while with the idea that any one group (or hero) could speak for all women, or even whether there’s this single entity “patriarchy” which is the root of all evil.)
While I think your point out that the issue is more complicated than we laid it out in our discussion, I think you have to at least in part separate storytelling and messaging, if for no other reason than the fact that there are too many instances where I like one but not the other.
Now, they’re probably not in the majority. There’s definitely a strong correlation. But, for example, I am VERY opposed to the views in Nefarious, but still liked it. And there are many stories where I like the values described, but not the story.
And of course the added layer that, in the case of what I was describing with the feminist stories… while it is true that I prefer a more interesting approach than “woman approaches this conflict like a man, and is therefore the hero,” I wasn’t particularly even speaking against the messaging… mostly the monotony.
I didn’t dislike those stories. I just don’t need a 12 millionth one. I’d like something else now. Especially given we still have far too few female-led stories in general.