An open letter

It won't be the first or last time that I don't quite get your point, LK. I agree that what is required is fundamental change and not just "acting nice."

I think we're fishing in the same lake. You're just angling for a bigger catch.

That analogy make any sense at all?

I'm generally slow to chime in on situations like this because (A) everything's been said already and there's not much useful that I can add, and (B) I don't tend to want to prolong painful or disruptive situations unless there's some clear benefit to others in doing so. That said, sitting on the sidelines can be perceived as complaisance, lack of caring, or (worse) tacit agreement, and I think what Flowers did here was idiotic and shitty and I want you guys to know that I really appreciate your willingness to share your experiences with sexual assault and the like. TBH, until now, I'd never (due to cis-white-male privilege) seen his posts as quite so caustic or alienating as others have mentioned before - sometimes they were just long rants that were clearly trying to be funny but fell well short of that mark - but now I understand where those perspectives come from.

But more importantly (and getting this post on track in a constructive direction), I hope none of you who use BF to share painful, awful stories about a variety of topics will let this experience stop you from doing so. I think those experiences are extremely helpful to hear about, and if a disruption such as this destabilizes the environment that fosters that level of sharing, that would be terribly tragic. I hope that isn't an effect of the fallout, but I'd understand if folks felt less willing to allow themselves to be vulnerable after some bullshit like this.

Lum has eyes, he can see what's up. I think we all trust him to make these judgments.
Public lobbying for bans is inevitably going to make his job harder. That's all.

I've had to go back to this post to try and see what you're saying LK...

I can only speak for myself but I think you're doing yourself and this forum a serious disservice in saying "we are acting to create" in this community. For me and I have literally expressed this sentiment before, the act of creation has already happened. To use the term you're trying to get away from, this is a nice community. The people here are caring and wonderful people. Now I don't do much posting in the actual gaming parts but in the politics, entertainment, general chat subforums, etc. I don't feel like anyone is judging me in a hurtful way. Quite the opposite I feel encouraged and heartened by the way people act and post around here. The forum does and did have a way of shutting Flowers down. That happened.

Like I said, I can't speak for anyone else but I really would hope people wouldn't let fear of prejudice or shitnozzling hold them back from speaking out against a wrong here. Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky, privileged and oblivious in that I can't see it in the subforums I post in. But from me to you, I would count you as a top notch person on here, especially with how you've acted in this thread. And to me you and the forum deserves a *squish* for that.

/squishes

Edit:

I know of a student, though not one that I have taught, who attended a program* where he was the only guy in the classes. So he recieved a lot of attention from the girls in the class. The attention got increasinly sexualised and unwelcome, eventually ending with two girls dragging him into a toilet at school and giving him a blowjob, in the senior year of highscool. At which point the boy went to the teachers and spilled what had been going on, utterly devastated. While it sound like a bad porn he felt utterly abused and became suicidal after the incident. He didn't press charges. The kid was of an immigrant family while the girls were ethnically swedish, which perhaps might have affected how it played out.


*Swedish highschool students choose different programs with different profiles instead of the more personalised curriculas of American highscools

So, I want to talk about this point.

"on some level, all men interested in women always want to have sex"

This is factually untrue, but the kernel of truth that does exist within it is that it is generally accepted as discourse about men that they always want to have sex.

The distinction is crucial; on the one hand there is the social construction of masculinity (in which the "typical" or "normal" man absolutely is the sitcom horndog); on the other hand there is men as they actually are (a sphere in which the concept of the typical or normal man is an illusory chimera).

The dissonance between the social construct of masculinity and the fact of male rape is indeed a thing to talk about. (And it is a big hint that the social constructs are just that, and have no actual basis in reality.)

If on the other hand we want to talk about men as they actually are, well, then we're going to need to bring data. And also, have a conversation about what a "man" actually is, from the point of view of like, science. (Is it identical with possession of a Y-chromosome?) I'm betting if we do that the conclusions we come to about what "men" are like are going to be far less sweeping and essentialist, assuming we can even locate the concept of "man" at all.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I don't think anything beyond what Flowers himself was posting is problematic, and from where I'm standing, the thread is already back on topic. Inexcusable tone deafness, ignorance speaking from privilege, and being pathetically unaware of the problems faced by those who don't share that privilege are all fair game in this discussion, aren't they? Flowers provided some egregious examples of all of the above, so I'd assume it's fair game to talk about those issues, and the warning of impending thread closure is a little confusing.

I take Lum to mean "don't talk about Flowers and what he said." I don't think it means "don't discuss the general subject matter."

I think he means stop engaging with stuff Flowers has posted, because it's all been said, post dinosaur pictures until the page flips over, post something of a lighter nature for a while, like about how stupid it is that the McDonalds Happy Meal toy for Boys is a transformer that shoots a missile out of its arm, and the toy for girls is Hello Kitty holding a baking tray of cookies and dispenses stickers, and then we can get back into the more personal stories that many are finding real benefits from sharing.

I think it's fine to have those stupid toys, but damaging to call them the Boys Happy Meal and the Girls Happy Meal. Just call them Happy Meal A and B. Or Happy Meal Transformers and Happy Meal Hello Kitty. Whatever.

That's what I'm inclined to believe given his body of work, and I hope that is indeed the case - but with a bit more clarity we don't have to assume anything.

I'm guessing he just hadn't read to the end of the thread before posting, because those things already happened. People are already using this incident as a springboard to constructive, worthwhile discussion, which is nearly a DamienF level of best-case situation in recovery from thread trauma.

Ugh those make me so frustrated. Are they the only chain that does this? I can't recall BK or any other competitors doing gendered toys like that.

BK's current kids meal toys appear to be non-gendered science toys. Someone got the wacky notion that girls like science, too!

McD's next set of happy Meals are some kind of bugs for boys and Barbie ballet for not-boys.

Reading the last few pages and the quoted post above made me think about the (rather too many) recent school scandals in which female teachers engaged one or more male students in sexual relationships. On the one hand we've got nearly 30 years of culture saying "Diamond Dave was right man, I'm hot for teacher!" but on the other hand we've got the notion that underage persons cannot really give informed consent and sexual contact without informed consent (due to age, alcohol, etc) is rape. So the incidents involving female teacher-male student relationships is, in fact, an example of women raping men; surely not the only example but a crystal clear one.

Second, we have things like the meme pictures of Twilight Moms with the caption "If these were 40 year-old men screaming for 17 year-old girls, someone would call the police." This again reinforces the idea that any dude (Edward/Jacob from the movies) would totally hit that shit if a wild horde of MILFs started throwing their panties at them, while young girls ought to be protected from predatory rape-machines who are already well along their way to retirement.

I believe this is a fundamental part of that double standard and it is extremely deeply ingrained in our society. And it is not funny.

Speaking of that unholy place where hack comedy meets fast food marketing - just what the hell is Grimace?

That's because the toys were miniature beanie babies.

Everyone loves lobsters.



ETA: Cursory Google search indicates the gendered toy campaigns started in the late 80's or early 90's with Barbie/Hot Wheels.

Absolutely Icebox.

We cool. Just like Fonzie.

When was your day? They definitely had gendered Happy Meal toys in my day, although you were allowed to just ask for whichever.

Holy crap I actually had one of those toys. The purple car.

Fuck you gender roles, even as a kid I knew better than to fall for your Barbie shit.

I don't remember happy meals being segregated either, they were mostly boy toys by whatever labels we want to put on things. They were cars and lego like things or action figures of the mcd's folks whatever.
I do remember arguments maybe in my early teens? These were the start of omg Sally doesn't WAAANT a car , give us something else. Perhaps that lead to the beanie babies thing later. I do know that the flavor of toys became very neutral for a long wile.

Perhaps the whole disney princess bullcrap brought out segregated toys again?

I -hate- the disney princess crap, let's lie to girls that they just have to find the perfect guy by looking in the worst places or maybe he finds -you- but believe that he will be that prince , believe it!

--
edit

You know being florida and all that, I bet hands over feet that my local mcd's never had anything but the "male" toys avail. Who feeds their precious little girl happy meals?

That's almost exactly what the rest of my post was meant to convey, yes.

Yes, that's almost exactly what the rest of my post was meant to convey.

(I genuinely have no idea where we're differing on something here.)

It looks like you're suggesting that the image with caption itself is reinforcing this idea, when, as Elyscape pointed out, it's showing how creepy it is.

He's supposed to represent milkshakes. Apparently a big purple lummox who either has some sort of severe congenital condition affecting his brain or has recently suffered severe head trauma just screams McDonald's Milkshake. When you consider the fact that there's about an 85% chance that the milkshake machine in any given restaurant will be broken, it starts to make sense.

Also, he used to have four arms and he robbed people of their delicious treats. McDonaldland got fucking gentrified, yo.

I always remember Happy Meals being boy/girl. You had the boy toy--usually a car or transformer or something and the girl toy which was usually some kind of doll. Every so often you'd get them putting out joint toys, like the McNuggets dressed up in Halloween costumes or Disney would release something like the Rescue Rangers Car Set and there wouldn't be a distinction.

I get the whole hate on Disney princesses thing, but I don't really buy it. Bedtime/fairy stories always have the happiest of happy endings, for the most part. I'm not sure of any story put out by anyone for little girls that ends with "And then you settled for the guy making minimum wage who wasn't really nice to you because the world is an unfair place and that's what you have to look forward to so never grow up." It also ignores the time context in which a lot of those stories take place in--Disney himself thought Cinderella was super progressive cause she didn't wait around, she went out and found her prince herself. More recently Mulan wasn't really interested in doing anything but saving her family and kicking ass, and while I think they sort of lost their way on this one, Tiana was a strong female lead that wanted to own her own business.

I think talking to your kids about gender stereotyping in Disney movies is a whole lot easier than dealing with subtle things like "Why is Anne ordering a BOYS meal?!" or "Why is Bobby ordering a GIRLS meal?!" when out in a group of their peers. It immediately and ultimately marks you as Doing Something Wrong. It also allows other people to make snap judgments on what you want--you're a girl? Of course you want the Barbie toy. Boy? Truck. And if you don't want it you might start secretly wondering at a young age what's wrong with you.

I'm pretty sure that most little girls realize they aren't secretly princesses by the time they're 7 or 8. Okay, maybe 13. It's not like a wear a tiara all day every time my birthday rolls around or anything.*

*Shut up.

Chthulu fhtagn

My god...that means Milkshakes is Gimace!


Hey, relax old timer- have a happy meal...

OF GENDER SPECIFIC SOYLENT GREEN!



(has the page flipped yet?)

Unstoppable.

For me it's not so much a problem with the movies themselves (the most troubling movies can be put in a certain context even by small children), more the marketing behind the "Disney Princesses" as a branch, which is pretty divisive in the way they set up their "Pink is for girls, duh" PR. It's selling the idea of being a princess to kids rather than a movie about a princess. I've said this before but this very much comes from personal experience. The fact that my neighbour's daughters (age 5 and 7) talk about 'their wedding' creeps me the fuck out.

And tiara's fucking rule. That is all.

To be fair, weddings + little girls has gone on long, long before Disney realized they had a goldmine in princess marketing--that's been a surprisingly recent marketing development. I'd say Barbie is actually the more divisive with the "pink for girls!" since Disney goes a hell of a long way to make sure that EVERY color is represented by a princess. Which is why Aurora is in a pink dress and not a blue dress, because blue is for Cinderella. Even though that's bullshit because she's in a blue dress all throughout the movie, Disney!

Disney's also not interested in just selling you some dresses, they want to sell you the experience of BEING a princess in your very own fantasy land that they've built for you. So go vacation with them, kids. Bug your parents. BUY IN! I've actually been kind of impressed with them trying to give "boys" something to do to. Captain Hook, Peter Pan, Jake, and pirates in general are taking off. You now not only see little girls running around in princess dresses, but little boys all dressed up too.

Not the good ones.

Given the entire rest of my post, I think a more forgiving understanding of my bolded-sentence-beginning-pronoun "this" may have been in order.

It would be really awesome if discussions of difficult topics here on BF do not become like the word niggling hyper-dissecting Wittgensteinian minutiae turdstorms that happened at Other Forum (to which I sadly admit I contributed early on).