Alex Has Opinions 4/23/20 Alex Has Opinions 4/23/20

‘Steven Universe’ Destroyed What It Means to Be a Hero

Although not the first empathetic hero out there (e.g., Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008) also comes to mind), the existence of hero’s like Steven is the refutation of a type of storytelling decades, arguably even centuries, in the making. His use of empathy in the original series challenged the very values we think a hero should have.

The animated show Steven Universe (2013–2019) by Adventure Time animator Rebecca Sugar has always been more than a kid’s show. The cartoon about a half-human, half-gem battling evil monsters from outer space, was rooted in empathy. Steven was the hero not because he was the savior of the universe — though he was that too — but because he responded to those threats with kindness and compassion.

Although not the first empathetic hero out there (e.g., Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008) also comes to mind), the existence of hero’s like Steven is the refutation of a type of storytelling decades, arguably even centuries, in the making. His use of empathy in the original series challenged the very values we think a hero should have.

Steven Universe Future takes this criticism one step further and challenges our need for a singular hero at all.

In media, there is a narrative structure that some controversially believe to be the underlying-template for all popular stories that exist — “The Hero’s Journey.”

Joseph Campbell first popularized this theory in the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell argued that in a variety of cultures across time and space, there was a meta-trend in storytelling — something he called the “Monomyth.”

It has three essential parts (although depending on who you ask, it has anywhere between nine to seventeen in total). The condensed version is that the hero hesitantly leaves home, has a transformative adventure in a new or extraordinary environment, and then returns home with new knowledge or a “boon” to bring back for the betterment of society. The plot or adventure becomes a stand-in for the thematic and emotional changes that happen to the protagonist along the way.

Joseph Campbell would expand upon this theory in several books (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (1986), Transformations of Myth Through Time (1990), etc.) as well as documentaries (The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (1987), The Power of Myth (1988), etc.), but the reason why it has entered the popular lexicon is partly due to our love of a galaxy far, far, away. George Lucas credited Campbell as one of his major influences for the creation of Star Wars (1977). Campbell and Lucas reportedly had a deep friendship, and this publicity, in part, led to the Hero’s Journey’s proliferation within the film and television industry.

Even before the Campbell-Star Wars connection was widely known, Hollywood Executive Christopher Vogler allegedly wrote about the similarities between Campbell and Star Wars while studying cinema at the University of Southern California. This analysis became the basis for a widely distributed, 7-page memo he wrote while working for the Disney Corporation. Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg loved the memo and made it required reading, which is partly why Disney films ranging from the Lion King to Mulan follow the Hero’s Journey template.

Vogler would go on to adapt his analysis into a widely-read book called The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2007), which is considered to be a must-read for anyone interested in learning story structure.

Today, the Hero’s Journey is the default narrative structure in Hollywood. Every major story from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to Harry Potter uses it, and retrospectively its an analysis that is applied to a lot of old works. Some have argued that Lord of the Rings, for example, is a quintessential archetype of the Hero’s Journey. The same has been said for The Hunger Games series.

While this analysis is prolific, however, it is a mistake to claim that it is THE default narrative structure across all cultures. This may sound redundant to some, but at the risk of sounding obvious:

Oher story structures exist.

Anyone who has seen a Bollywood film knows that it’s possible for stories not to emphasize the plot at all. In the words of academic Sabrina Ciolfi in her work “Popular Hindi Cinema: Narrative Structure and Points of Continuity with Tradition:”

“Returning to the narrative structure of popular Hindi cinema, the first element that strikes and confounds western criticism is the apparent lack of a story — or at least narrative coherence — in the film, which usually shows a somewhat fragmentary structure…In popular Hindi cinema, in fact, the plot is considered to be of decidedly secondary importance among the various ingredients of the film; according to the authors themselves it serves solely a basis for the representation of emotions as well, obviously, as creation of the spectacle.”

The 1970 cult classic Mera Naam Joker (“My Name Is Joker”), for example, is about a clown’s career (Raj Kapoor) and his romantic encounters with three separate women. There are no Empires, Deatheaters, or Capitals to be encountered, only his own emotional turmoil.

Conversely, the plot and emotional development in many “Nollywood” films (a term for Nigeria’s film industry) are considered orthogonal to thematic tensions. In the words of Olagoke Alamu in his essay “Narrative and Style in Nigerian (Nollywood) Films:”

“Due to their status as among the society’s primary mass media, Nigerian films are stabilizing forces that contribute to the maintenance of social order…For these reasons, films display a range of ideological and cultural positions that are consciously portrayed by filmmakers in their stories.”

The focus is not always so much on the story itself, but the values being transmitted.

Nintendo’s “Birdo” is NOT a Trans Icon

Nintendo means something to queer people around the world. These were the stories we grew up with. Although Nintendo has not handled the issue of gender particularly well, that proximity to childhood means that plenty of queer people saw themselves in ambiguously gendered characters such as Zelda, Vivian, and Birdo.

The character “Birdo” premiered in the Mario-verse in 1988 in the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. 2. She is a pink dinosaur-like creature of the same species as Yoshi, steed sidekick to protagonist Mario. Sources such as The Advocate have described her as one of the first trans characters in the video game industry, but there’s an obvious problem with this characterization.

While many fans identify with her, the Nintendo company has yet to fully embrace Birdo as trans. The company instead has waffled on how to treat her character — sometimes depicted using “she”; other times “it”; always unaccepted — her depiction underlines a contentious issue in both fandoms and media consumption alike:

What types of representation are valid?

Do you call out Nintendo’s transphobic characterization for what it is, or do you accept the interpretation of her fans?

And how does this rewriting of history shape the video game community’s collective understanding of queer history?

The initial portrayal of Birdo’s transness was complicated. She was initially not in a Mario game at all, but the 1987 Nintendo game Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic or Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic. It took place in an Arabian setting and was a promotional game for the characters of a carnivalesque event in Japan called Yume Kōjō ‘87.

That previous year in 1986, Nintendo of America had rejected a prototype of Super Mario Bros. 2 (later called Super Mario: The Lost Levels) because they thought it would be too hard for Americans to play. Doki Doki Panic was easier and met many of the series requirements. So with some minor modifications, they reskinned the game with classic Mario characters and released it in 1988 as Super Mario Bros. 2 for American audiences. Characters such as Shy Guy, Birdo, Pokeys, and Bob-ombs were initially designed for Doki Doki Panic and were kept in the sequel for the sake of convenience.

In the game, Birdo was a minor boss who fired eggs at the player. The manual for the Japanese version refers to her as Catherine, a man who thinks of himself as female, and the name Catherine is still used in Japanese descriptions to this day. The manual for Super Mario Bros. 2, also misgenders and deadnames the character (i.e., the practices of refusing to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns and name), but in this instance, she is referred to as Birdo. The text in the manual is as follows:

“He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He’d rather be called ‘Birdetta.’”

It’s important to remember that this transphobia comes from a clear cultural context. There are few places in the world that have known trans equality. The United States has an abysmal record on transgender acceptance, and so does Japan. As recently as 2019, the Human Rights Campaign defined the process for changing one’s gender there as “regressive and harmful.” The misgendering and deadnaming of Birdo in the manual above would sadly not have been considered strange in the 1980s in either the US or Japan.

LGBTQIA+ representation existed in the 80s — queer people have always existed — but insensitivity to such groups was the norm. Several years before Birdo debuted, the textbased game Mad Party Fucker (1985) started with the text: “The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).” The makers of this misogynistic game were using homophobia here as a punchline to appeal to conservative straight people.

It should surprise no one that Birdo, as an early piece of trans representation in video games, followed this trend of using queerness as an edgy punchline. When the Satellaview version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was advertised to the Japanese public as BS Super Mario USA (1996), the character Birdo was used to promote it. One commercial has a sexy Birdo laid out on a couch, beckoning the viewer with text that translates to English as “Welcome to Catherine’s Room.”

Source: 1996 Japanese Commercial for BS Super Mario USA — Source: 1996 Japanese Commercial for *BS Super Mario USA*

This commercial (as well as the BS Super Mario USA game itself) employed an “Okame” voice actor to play Birdo, which is derogatory Japanese slang that can describe a range of “sexual deviant” people from homosexuals to transsexuals to crossdressers. The term Okame, like with the English term transvestite, is complicated, and now is mostly considered to be offensive. It would not have been uncommon, however, for cisgendered people (and even some trans people) during the 80s to use the term to describe the sexual or gendered “other.”

There were famous queer people in Japan during the 1980s (cabaret singer and drag performer Akihiro Miwa, real name Maruyama Akihiro, immediately comes to mind). This acclaim earned by a few, however, does not change the reality that trans people were (and still are) not widely accepted in larger Japanese society. The humor here for Birdo comes not from a place of empowerment, but the all too common trend of the majority ridiculing the disenfranchised as a means of control.

Birdo is supposed to be funny because she is an “other.”

A strong example of this otherization is the Japanese exclusive Wii game called Captain Rainbow (2008). The protagonist of the game is a human named Nick, who has a superhero alter ego, Captain Rainbow. There is a sidequest in the game where Nick has to rescue Birdo from jail after she was arrested for using the wrong bathroom (i.e., the women’s bathroom). You then have to find an object from her house, probably her vibrator, that “proves” to the robot police officer that she is a woman. The bathroom debate for trans people is a very contentious issue, and this joke plays into that painful history.

While transphobia in Japan translated into a belittling trans caricature for Birdo, in America, it (mostly) resulted in silence. References to Birdetta were scrubbed following Super Mario Bros. 2’s initial release. Her secondary sex characteristics (e.g., pink bow, pink skin, etc.) meant that she was primarily portrayed in US media such as the Super Marios Bros. Show! (1989) as a cisgendered woman. She was even shown to be in a relationship with Yoshi in Mario Tennis (2000).

This omission in the states is often depicted as censorship, and it is to some degree, but as we have seen, Nintendo’s portrayal of Birdo was predominantly transphobic. When her transness would bleed into English-speaking media, it would problematically always come from the perspective of a man wanting to be a woman.

When, for example, a minor character named Popple introduces Birdo in the 2003 game Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the character hesitates to call her a dame. When she asks to be called Birdie instead of Birdo, Popple refuses:

Source: Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga — Source: *Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga*

Popple: This, uh…dame passed my audition perfectly, see? She’s my all-new, bigger-and-better rookie, Birdo!
Birdie/Birdo: Darling…don’t call me Birdo. Call me Birdie!
Popple: …I don’t care about names, see?

This perspective of Birdo “being a man” has remained unchanging throughout her thirty-plus-year run. Her gender has flipped-flopped across translations between he, she, and sometimes something far more ambiguous. In the fighting game Super Smash Bros: Brawl (2008), a trophy of Birdo refers to her as it.

Source: Super Smash Bros: Brawl — Source: *Super Smash Bros: Brawl*

“A pink creature of indeterminate gender that some say would rather be called Birdetta. A big ribbon on its head is its most distinguishing feature. In Super Mario Bros. 2 you can return fire by jumping in the eggs from its mouth. Be careful not to get psyched out by fake-egg fireballs!”

While gender fluidity and agender identities are 100% valid, this portrayal is not coming from the perspective of trying to respect and understand these marginalized identities. She is being portrayed here as an other. This has been a problematic perspective throughout the franchise, and it is one that did not die in the late 2000s. As late as 2018, fans noticed discrepancies with her gender across various translations for the switch release of Marios Party (2018).

There has been no evolution of Birdo’s characterization from Nintendo. Progress has been assumed from what actually appears to be a disconnect between the Japanese construction of her identity and the English-speaking one — a vacillation between offensive caricature and oppressive silence.

We should be able to classify these various portrayals from Nintendo as transphobic, but that’s largely not how the greater fan community has reacted to her. She is depicted by many as a trans icon.

This reading of her character not only ignores much of the history we have already discussed, but it has the effect of erasing queer history.

The classification of Birdo as a trans icon can be traced as far back as 2000 when designer Jennifer Diane Reitz argued for Birdo’s transgender status in an article titled “The First Transsexual Video Game Character?” Reitz made the argument that Birdo had received the magical equivalent of a sexual resignment surgery, saying:

“To the best of this game otaku’s knowledge, Birdo is the very first transsexual video game character, and best of all, succeeded in achieving full transition and acceptance. You go, Birdo!”

We can find a more contemporary version of this argument with Trans Youtuber Riley J. Dennis. She argued in her video essay Why Birdo is a trans icon that Birdo had effectively gone “stealth,” which is the practice of transitioning and then going about the world as cisgendered.

These arguments do not follow the strictest interpretation of history; in fact, they run counter to a lot of the points that we know. They are instead “headcanons,” which, for the non-shippers out there, is the practice of a fan interpreting a character or characters in a way that is not officially supported by the text.

This practice is prevalent in the queer community because, for much of history, it allowed LGBTQIA+ people to feel represented by a world that shunned us. A great example of a popular headcanon is the speculated relationship between Science Officer Spock and Captain James T. Kirk on the science fiction show Star Trek. Many fans noticed a tension between the two characters and decided they were in a relationship.

It should surprise no one that headcanons fall neatly in line with slash or fan fiction. Fans often rewrite characters, so they satisfy the reality they wish to portray — a reality that is often denied them. That’s the beauty of the human imagination. Once a character is out in the world, no one can control how others remix it. Spock and Kirk may not be romantically inclined in the original series, but are here, here, here, and here.

Birdo may be a little iffy in the franchise, but in my version, she is queer AF.

A person’s headcanon, however, does not undo the textual representation we see in the original work. The transphobic caricature in games such as Captain Rainbow and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga still exist, and that deserves to be highlighted. The problem with depicting Birdo as not only a Trans icon, but the originator of Trans representation in video games, is that it reshapes history to problematically place Nintendo at the epicenter of a story it does not own.

When you search for LGBTQIA+ representation in video games, Birdo will come up time and time again as the first trans character, and she simply is not. While Birdo has been depicted as an “other” that exists outside the gender binary, she has never been officially confirmed as trans by Nintendo — let alone confirmed as having sexual reassignment surgery, and going stealth.

She was a joke character, and us placing the start of LGBTQIA+ history here erases actual representation.

Do you want to know what game came out three years before Super Mario Bros. 2?

The Rocky Horror Show on the Commodore 128 (also on Amstrad CPC, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, etc.). The admittedly bad arcade game was based on the cult queer classic of the same name, and it has its protagonist (you choose between either Brad or Janet) racing through Frank-N-Furter’s mansion before it blasts off to planet Transsexual.

The year after Mario Bros. 2 debuted, in 1989, game designer CM Ralph released Caper in the Castro, a murder-mystery adventure on HyperCard for the Mac Plus. You play lesbian detective Tracker McDyke searching for her missing friend and drag queen, Tessy LaFemme, in San Francisco’s famous Castro district.

This game is considered by some to be one of the first LGBTQIA+ games ever (the 1992 D&D parody GayBlade has also been given this accolade). It was released as “Charity Ware” and asked players to donate to the local AIDS charity of their choice.

The following year in 1990, the game Circuit’s Edge, based on George Alec Effinger’s 1987 novel When Gravity Fails, was released by Westwood Associates. Circuit’s Edge is a game that centers on private investigator Marid Audran as he navigates the seedy underbelly of the fictional Arab city of Budayeen. Marid has a trans-ex-girlfriend the games’ introduction describes as follows:

“Yasmin was Marid Audran’s long-time girlfriend, although she hadn’t been born female. They seem to have grown more distant lately. Yasmin may be tricked into being an excellent source of data on Marid.”

Circuit’s Edge is far from perfect. It, at times, exoticizes the Arab world in an unhealthy way, and it treats its sex worker characters poorly. The game’s treatment of Yasmin, however, is surprisingly not terrible, especially for the 90s. We have a trans woman who is not deadnamed or misgendered, and while her portrayal is oversexualized, she has far more characterization and empathy than Birdo just two years earlier.

Developer Jennifer Diane Reitz was probably unaware of this history when she argued that Birdo was the first transgender video game character. There have been decades of research done since then by organizations like the LGBTQ Game Archives. We simply know more than we did in the year 2000, and we shouldn’t start the beginning with Birdo anymore.

Even if Birdo were the first trans character, however (and she is not), that doesn’t make her a trans icon. Her portrayal has been actively transphobic for much of her history, and that makes sense given the conservative nature of the company which birthed her.

Since its inception, Nintendo has advertised itself as a family company. The colorful graphics and child-friendly imagery have been part of a purposeful campaign to capture an early, lifelong, and committed fanbase. When asked about their family-friendly focus by the Toronto Star in 2018, then-president for Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aimé said:

“It’s been an incredibly important market because the kid who’s 5 or 6 today is going to be 12 or 13 and not all that many years later 18 or 19 … And when you have an affinity for Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda series or Mario Kart or Super Mario Bros. that affinity carries with you.”

Nintendo has always tried to be a company that capitalizes on nostalgia. They have created characters that follow you for your entire lifetime. This focus on younger viewers — on being family-friendly — has typically meant appealing to the broadest, most conservative portion of society at the expense of marginalized identities.

For queer viewers, this has translated to a lot of queer subtext with characters such as Birdo, Zelda, and Vivian, but an outright hostility to anything that affirms queer relationships both on-and-off the screen.

For decades, this meant no recognition whatsoever. When queerness was mentioned in Nintendo’s orbit, it was usually through the lens of homophobia, not positive representation. Several examples include that time Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiy made it clear to the world “he was not gay” or that DS Homebrew, where players had to avoid gay blobs.

It was only when LGBTQIA+ rights started to more seriously solidify in the late 2000s and early 2010s that this oppressive silence started to be addressed. A flashpoint came in the mid-2010s when Nintendo refused to let same-sex relationships in their quirky Sims-esque simulator Tomodachi Collection: New Life (2013/4). Male-on-male pairings were initially allowed in the game, and when Nintendo caught wind of this feature, they labeled it a bug and released a patch to remove them.

Unlike in previous decades, however, this omission was not met with silence. A fan named Tye Marini led a campaign for “Miiquality” to try to push for same-sex pairings in the game. When Nintendo responded with the tone-deaf statement that it “…never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of Tomodachi Life,” there was an immediate fan backlash. The company had to apologize, and although it refused to reinstate same-sex pairings in that game, the stage was set for future conflicts.

In 2019, another scandal occurred after the company removed a user-generated Super Smash Bros. Ultimate course for being “inappropriate and/or harmful.” The course had a trans flag with the title “Trans Rights Now.”

User Warm Safflina claims their account was suspended for nine hours for making this course. When they asked for clarification, they were told it was because the map was a “political statement,” and that they should appeal to corporate.

We have only started to experience more positive representation within the Nintendo-verse in the last year or so. The newest chapter of Animal Crossing, for example, has some queer references and greater gender customization. The Fire Emblem series has also had queer characters for years (though not always positive ones).

These subtle nods, however, are small when compared to the bolder representation happening with companies such as Bioware. Nintendo is a very conservative company that has frankly not demonstrated the desire to be at the forefront of queer representation in video games.

Its icon status is unearned.

In November of 2019, DONTNOD Entertainment (e.g., Life Is Strange, Vampyr, etc.) released a trailer for their upcoming game Tell Me Why. Reports for the game tell us that there will be two main characters — Tyler and Alyson Ronan. Tyler is a trans man. DONTNOD Entertainment worked closely with the LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD to make sure they portrayed Tyler’s character respectfully.

He will be, by all accounts, one of the first playable trans characters in a mainstream series.

Several years earlier in 2014 — the same year Nintendo refused to add in same-sex relationships for Tomodachi Collection: New Life — Bioware made headlines with the introduction of the character Cremisius Aclassi or Krem in their fantasy game Dragon Age: Inquisition. Krem is second-in-command of the mercenary group Bull’s Chargers, and the way his story was handled earned Bioware praise from publications as far left as the Mary Sue.

The age of divining representation from half-assed subtext is quickly coming to an end. We are soon going to have actual representation, and that makes Birdo’s status as a trans icon contentious.

That beautiful, queer subtext was never something Nintendo purposefully brought to the table.

That was the work of Nintendo’s unappreciated queer fans.

Hopefully, one day Nintendo’s version of Birdo will more closely align to the reality the queer community wanted: that of a trans woman, out and proud to her boyfriend Yoshi, the Mushroom Kingdom, and the world.

To get there, however, it means accepting the reality that we are in. We must be critical of Nintendo for their historical and current conservatism, and that involves uplifting stories with trans characters in the actual text, not just the subtext.

We must painfully admit that Birdo is not a trans icon. She never was, but hopefully, one day, she can be.

Alex Has Opinions 2/16/20 Alex Has Opinions 2/16/20

The Witcher’s Cool Girl Has No Chill

The series is at war with itself as it strikes a balance between affirming its male fans' toxic fantasy of feeling special, while simultaneously easing those said fans into the reality that women can be heroes too. It creates a chimera soldered together by empowerment and misogyny alike. This makes the show cringeworthy to watch at times, and enjoyable at others.

Even before it debuted on Netflix in December of 2019, The Witcher was polarizing viewers. The series is based on the book series of the same name by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, which has already been successfully adapted into an equally divisive Witcher video game franchise. This controversial series has been criticized for its misogyny, and we see some of those problems permeate in the new show.

Both the video game franchise and the show are centered on the titular Witcher, Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill). He is a magical mercenary traveling the medieval lands known simply as “The Continent” for his creature-hunting expertise. He is officially hired to stop magical creatures from hurting people, but usually, it happens to be the other way around.

This is a grim fantasy land where it’s often humanity that turns out to be the real villain: the elves have been pushed off their native lands, mighty dragons have been driven to the edge of extinction, and human rulers are petty tyrants who care nothing for their citizenry. Geralt, technically being a magical creature himself, many times empathizes with these creatures over humanity, and it makes for some interesting, albeit predictable, tension.

In traditional conservative fantasy, the world would not deviate from his perspective. The Witcher would fall into a long line of fantasy works that manage to make the strapping guy “the real” oppressed one (see Carnival Row, The Mandalorian, and The Harry Potter Universe). The show tries to counteract this by having powerful women on every rung of the political spectrum — both the good, the bad, and the complicated.

The most prominent of these women is Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), the magical sorceress who would sooner let the world burn than meet its expectations. Yennefer straddles a lot of complicated intersections of what a woman, particularly a “strong woman,” should be.

Attractive, empathetic, cold, and deadly, she is a “Cool Girl” with no chill. Her portrayal is both a subversion of one of cinema’s most damaging tropes, while simultaneously being the enforcement of one.

The Cool Girl is a trope written by and for men as the manifestation of two paradoxical, patriarchal desires. She is a woman who is strong and independent, but simultaneously, she is also a woman who doesn’t have emotional needs of her own. She is a Stepford Wife who doesn’t display the artifices of being controlled because her genuine goal in life is to “coincidentally” like all the same things her male partner likes at all times. As the video series The Take commented:

“This bro-y temperament is packaged in an effortlessly hot female form. She’s easy-going and never gets angry. Most saliently, The Cool Girl isn’t a real girl. She is a myth, created by men, perpetuated by women pretending to be her.”

Cool Girls are women who enjoy guy things like sports, cars, and beer, but also don’t make a big deal about “girly” things like emotions and being a functional human being. Cameron Diaz’s Mary in the 1998 film “There’s Something About Mary” is a perfect example. She genuinely likes traditionally masculine activities and desires a partner who can keep up with her enjoyment of these activities.

She is also “traditionally” attractive (i.e., thin, blonde, white), and is the fixation of all the men in her life. Mary has been stalked so intensely, that as an adult she had to change her identity and move to a different state. This premise seems horrific, but because it was written and directed by men, her stalking is depicted as comedic. She falls for protagonist Ted (Ben Stiller) after he has the “courage” to admit that stalking her was wrong. Her feelings are ancillary to how the male protagonist feels about her, and in the end, she dumps long-term partner Brett Favre (of real-world football fame) because Ted’s such a “nice guy.”

The “Cool Girl” trope was common in the 90s and 2000s (and now) as men tried to reconcile their sexist desire for control with the relatively new norm of female empowerment. We see it replicated again and again with Megan Fox’s mechanic character Mikaela Banes in Transformers (2007 to present), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) in How I Met Your Mother, and Jennifer Lawrence in many of her breakout roles.

The men who wrote these stories are defining empowerment for these Cool Girls as uncritically affirming both male activities as well as men themselves. These women do not question their male partner’s motivations or demand emotional needs of their own, lest they are labeled clingy, needy, and uncool.

The validity of this trope started to be called into question more seriously in the early 2010s, which was coincidentally around the same time that women started to gain the power to question such things.

The most seminal work on this topic was Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl — later adapted into a movie in 2014 — that deconstructed the psychic toll such unrealistic expectations have on the women who try to replicate them. As the main character, Amy Dunne (played by Rosamund Pike in the film), says of this trope in the book:

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

Amy becomes so resentful of these expectations that she frames her husband for her own murder. She disappears and leaves behind enough evidence for police to suspect him, all while watching the incident in the news from a safe distance several states over. Flynn seems to imply that the Cool Girl is not only unrealistic but a debilitating expectation that can drive women to insanity.

The Cool Girl continues to exist in the public consciousness, but its no longer viewed as innocuous. We have started to call attention to what this means. This revaluation makes Yennefer’s portrayal complicated because, in the TV show, she is a Cool Girl written like a person (not just a male fantasy) and we as the viewer are left wondering if that’s okay.

Yennefer has many of the archetypical qualities of a Cool Girl. She is traditionally attractive and detached. In season one, she moves through the world, pretending as though she is disengaged from the conflicts of The Continent, even though as a sorceress, she is very much connected to it. There is one haunting scene where she gives a monologue to a dead baby, where she advocates for radical ambivalence: “I’m sorry you didn’t have a life. But if truth be told, you’re not missing much.”

The character of Yennefer is also the subject of rampant male objectification. It’s easy to find searches on the web that articulate how “hot” she is, such as BestOfComicbooks.com’s 2018 list of “49 Hot Pictures Of Yennefer From The Witcher Series Which Will Make You Fall In Love With Her Sexy Body.” Her body is a commodity for some members of the fandom, and there is validation in the TV series as well. Yennefer is objectified multiple times on screen (though refreshingly, this extends to Geralt as well) in a way that’s inescapable for the viewer:

Source: The Witcher (2019) — Source: *The Witcher* (2019)

The show uses her body to engage in a type of fanservice, and like any Cool Girl, Yennefer is down to have sex. Her and Geralt first meet at an orgy she has magically orchestrated out of boredom. She engages sexually with Geralt casually over the literal decades, and at first, it seems very chill. In a stereotypical narrative, she would dutifully end up with Geralt after he slowly chipped away at her “unobtainable” veneer.

From the onset, it’s made transparent to the viewer, however, that the Cool Girl persona she puts on is constructed. Yennefer is not actually as detached as she wants to appear. She gets into a fight with Geralt because she discovers he magically wished for her, and she dramatically breaks up with him. She petulantly refuses to listen to her magical mentor Tissaia de Vries (MyAnna Buring) at nearly every turn. She tracks down her spurned lover Istredd (Royce Pierreson) out of the blue, years after he’s moved on.

She is emotional to her core — the very opposite of chill.

Her beauty is also literally fabricated, and by no means “effortless.” She originally had a hunchback, and her father sold her into slavery because he considered her to be too disfigured to love. She gets a magical surgery to become “beautiful” not for beauty’s sake — Tissaia gives a very moving speech about her being perfect just the way she is — but out of a desire to obtain power. As she tells her former lover Istredd:

“My world is cruel, and predictable. You enter. You survive. You die…I want to be powerful. It is what I am owed.”

Yennefer is not living for the women and men around her, but for herself. She does terrible, complicated things that often defy other people’s expectations to a frustrating degree. She vies for a position at court, only to abandon it once she gets bored. She finds the perfect “nice guy” and spurns his happily ever after to pursue power. She sacrifices her ability to give birth in exchange for beauty and then spends years trying to find a magical way to get it back just because she can.

This last point is particularly poignant, given the reality that powerful women are often expected to sacrifice aspects of their feminity to gain power. In the real world, successful women will defer pregnancy altogether to climb an inch up their male institution of choice.

From this lens, her surgery can metaphorically be viewed as the sacrifice women make to gain power in a patriarchal world. Yennefer resents that she was forced into such a position at all, and is fighting it. As she tells Geralt about her desire to reclaim her fertility: “They took my choice. I want it back.”

The entire first season, people are trying to get her to conform to the world around her, even the people who care for her immensely. Her mentor, for example, paints her “erratic” behavior as a liability. As Tissaia tells Yennefer in the second episode (Four Marks) on why she might fail as a sorceress: “You lie. You succumb to emotion. To weakness. Do you actually have what it takes?”

Again, the push for women to conceal their emotions is something very much rooted in the real world. Women are often taught to “man-up” and not express feelings to get ahead, and Yennefer refuses to adhere to this false choice.

In fact, her emotional nature turns out to be the thing that saves the Continent from the antagonistic Nilfgaardian Empire. In the last episode of the first season (Much More), she defeats an army by unleashing all her fiery fury at once. She gives in to the chaos inside her, her rage, and it turns out to be the thing the world needed.

Yennefer is so uncool, the world burns around her, and the show suggests that this is a good thing.

This depiction of Yennefer might make it sound like The Witcher is a feminist masterpiece, but like with Yennefer herself, it’s complicated.

There are a lot of profoundly complex women on this show. We mentioned Tissaia already, but there’s also Ciri (Freya Allan), the magical princess (and another lead character) who had to run away after Nilfgaard sacked her kingdom. There is Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), the authoritative Nilfgaard sorceress leading the armies against the North. And let’s not even get started on the complexity of Ciri’s grandmother Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May), the woman so ballsy she told fate to screw itself.

These women are fascinating portrayals of powerful women in a patriarchal society, but unfortunately for us, there’s also the men, and they often undermine these women’s moral point of view in the narrative. The loose rules of this fantasy world mean that the text itself often bolsters the actions of the men.

In episode three of the first season (Betrayer Moon), for example, the Witcher stumbles across a kingdom haunted by a monster. This magical creature is the lovechild of an incestuous relationship between a king and his sister. This depiction is controversially cast as true love, and it’s the court physician who turns out to be the man responsible for the curse. A confession from him confirms the king and queen’s love. So we, as the viewer, are forced to accept the consensual nature of this relationship — the sister’s perspective centuries buried.

We see this again with Queen Calanthe from the kingdom of Cintra. In episode four (Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials) we learn she doesn’t want her daughter to marry a cursed knight of low birth. Calanthe uses both force and manipulation to try and prevent the arrangement.

In doing so, Calanthe turns out to be violating a cosmic force of the universe called “The Law Of Surprise” (i.e., someone is owed what their debtee did not know they have). In this case, Calanthe’s husband unwittingly promised their daughter to this knight, and she now has to submit to this law. Her daughter also coincidentally loves the knight, continuing a trend of convenient love that prevents the men from being demonized in the text. The narrative forces Calanthe’s hand, and in the end, this fictional conceit proves her wrong and the male knight right.

Calanthe’s resistance to The Law Of Surprise would lead to the eventual sacking of her Kingdom by Nilfgaard because she refuses to hand her grandaughter over to The Witcher, who was also promised Ciri by the same mystical force. It’s heavily implied that this fate could have been avoided if only she listened to Geralt. We are left blaming the woman who tempted fate, even though that ultimatum would not have existed if Geralt had not decided to collect in the first place.

The men are almost always proven right or superior by the narrative at the expense of the strong women around them, and that includes Yennefer. When she first meets Geralt, she is trying to bind herself to a genie to restore her fertility. Her methodology is discovered to be wrong (despite having studied magic for decades), and the Witcher has to save her before the genie rips her apart.

On a meta-level, the rise of Nilfgaard — the evil empire on the show — is implied to be Yennefer’s fault. She was supposed to go there on assignment, and during episode six (Rare Species) a prophetic dragon directly insinuates that a stronger sorceress (i.e., her) may have been able to stop the country’s rise:

“Perhaps if Nilfgaard’s religious zeal had been tempered earlier by a stronger hand…:

When you get down to it strong, complicated, “problematic,” women can be blamed for many of the Continent’s largest snafus (i.e., the rise of Nilfgaard, the fall of Cintra, etc.).

There’s also the issue of how the framing of many of these scenes undercuts the empowering message being sold to us textually. If you have ever seen the Feminist theory episode of pop culture critic Lindsay Ellis’s introduction course to film studies, then you are familiar with the concept of how visuals can sometimes sabotage what’s being said by the characters.

Ellis uses the first Transformers movie to discuss how the dialogue is empowering, but Michael Bay’s misogynistic filmmaking dilutes that message. We all remember Megan Fox’s car scene, and yet what’s often forgotten in that scene is her discussing the misogyny she faces in the realm of automobile repair:

Mikaela: My dad. He was a real grease monkey. He taught me all about this. I could take it all apart, clean it, put it back together.
Sam: That’s weird. I just wouldn’t peg you for mechanical.
Mikaela: Well, you know, I don’t really broadcast it. Guys don’t like it when you know more about cars than they do.

The text is empowering, but Michael Bay’s framing is, well…

Similarly, Yennefer says a lot of important things textually, but the framing we see on screen undermines her words. When Yennefer gets magical plastic surgery, for example, the symbolism behind the operation is that it’s a form of genital mutilation. The scene is spliced with Geralt fighting an actual monster, and we aren’t meant to think it’s a “good thing.”

There is textually a complexity as to why Yennefer is getting this surgery (power, expectations, etc.), but visually her surgery is framed sort of sexually.

Yennefer may scream in pain, but viewers are “treated” to her lying back, and then after her reproductive organs are removed, we see her exhausted naked body. This visual language spattered throughout this show is what makes the feminist moments within it so frustrating. Good points are being made here, and they are being undercut by contradictory visual and narrative messaging.

Whose story matters here — Yennefer’s or Geralt's? Because they do not seem to exist on the same moral footing, and they often contradict.

The Witcher is admittedly a hard text to adapt. It has a sprawling world that requires a lot of exposition to establish, and on top of this, it also has a very toxic fandom that has carried over from the video game series and books. You have an audience that played those games, and there is an expectation that those norms will bleed through into this new series.

It’s clear, though, that showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich does not want to tell the same type of story. The decision to have two female main characters running side-by-side Geralt’s story demasculinized the narrative in a good way.

As the first season progressed, it became apparent that Geralt was not going to be the singular, driving force behind everything in the narrative. The final episode tellingly ends with Ciri, who has been trying to reunite with Geralt the entire time because of The Law Of Surprise, asking him: “Who is Yennefer?”

The screen then cuts to black.

Yennefer serves as a salve for those bruised egos. She has the appearance of a Cool Girl — the prize “nice guys” have believed to be theirs for decades — but she does not act like one at all. She is a messy, emotional being of immense power.

She has no chill whatsoever, and for chaos’ sake, men better get used to it.

Alex Has Opinions 1/17/20 Alex Has Opinions 1/17/20

Was The World Ready For The First Trans Supervillain?

The portrayal of Whiterose from the TV show Mr. Robot, though controversial and flawed, will undoubtedly represent a shift in how we will perceive trans characters in the future. She is one of modern cinema’s most enticing villains, and yet, one has to ask: is this portrayal the breaking of a trend or the enforcement of one?

Trans representation is so sparse in media that, for some, you can squint and pretend like it doesn’t exist at all. There have been a few noteworthy standouts in recent years (e.g., Pose, Orange Is The New Black, Grey’s Anatomy, arguably Steven Universe, etc.). Yet for most of cinematic history, the few visible trans characters on film and television have been either “evil” or tragically silenced.

Trans people have barely started to see themselves reflected back, albeit imperfectly, from the silver screen. We had only just gotten to the point where trans characters were being portrayed as actual people when Whiterose, from the hacker tv show Mr. Robot, effortlessly walked on screen and changed everything.

Her portrayal, though controversial and flawed, will undoubtedly represent a shift in how we will perceive trans characters in the future. She is one of modern cinema’s most enticing villains, and yet, one has to ask: is this portrayal the breaking of a trend or the enforcement of one?

An Abridged History Of Trans “Evil”

When we first meet Whiterose, as she casually lights up a cigarette, we are told upfront how powerful “he” is (at first, the protagonist Elliot mistakenly assumes the gender of the world’s most legendary hacker). She is the leader of the Dark Army, the elusive hacker collective behind some of the world’s greatest hacks. Her time is so precious that she times their initial conversation, and will allot Elliot no more than three minutes.

This initial impression of power is never questioned. There is a moment in episode ten of season two where Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer), the CEO of E Corp (a combination of Enron, Bank of America, and Facebook all rolled into one) is talking about the worlds most influential people and says:

“In my life, as I was making my way, I always asked the question, am I the most powerful person in the room? The answer needed to be yes. To this day, I still ask that question. And the answer is still yes.
In every room in the entire world, the answer is yes with the exception of one. Or two. And that drives me.”

He is referencing her. She is the exception.

Historically, trans people in media have been allowed to be a lot of things — duplicitous, confused, tragic — but powerful has rarely been one of them.

This was by design.

Under the threat of greater regulation from Congress, the Association of Motion Pictures adopted the tediously named Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 to “maintain social and community values” in films. This set of rules would become known as the Hay’s Code after the then-president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), William H. Hays. The moral conservative and former chair of the Republican National Committee would start to more strictly enforce the rules in1934, which is “coincidentally” when films began to get a whole lot less progressive.

The Hay’s Code does not reference LGBTQIA+ people directly — that would require recognition — but it does forbid films to make references to “sexual perversions of any kind,” which queer people would have been considered to be at the time.

The Hay’s Code also required that criminal activity in films be portrayed in a way that neither provides sympathy for the criminal nor encourages imitation. Aspects of transness are still illegal today, and would undoubtedly have been more so when the codes were drafted.

These regulations meant that if a filmmaker wanted to have a queer character, then they couldn’t make direct reference to their queerness, and their portrayal could not be openly positive. This moral framing meant that queer characters were almost exclusively linked with criminal activity, which affirmed the widely-held conservative belief that they were criminals in real life.

A classic example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, which is about a motel owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who kills their clientele. We are led to believe that they are following their mother’s wishes, but in the film’s shocking closing moments, it is revealed that Norman has been cross-dressing as her this entire time. Their gender identity is a byproduct of mental instability.

Even when the Hay’s Code was overturned in the mid-60s in favor of a rating system, the queer association with criminality would not end. The trans serial killer, in particular, would remerge now and again in pop culture such as with Christopher Morley’s transvestite character in “Freebie and the Bean” (1974), psychiatrist Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in “Dressed to Kill” (1980), Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) in “Sleepaway Camp” (1983), “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine) in Silence of The Lambs (1991) Leatherface (Robert Jacks) in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation” (1995), and many more. We would see this trend continue well into the 2010s with “Insidious: Chapter 2” (2013), where the main villain was shown to crossdress before committing murders.

For the sake of our comparison with WhiteRose, however, a telling example is the 1994 cop comedy “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” The antagonist of the film turns out to be Lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), who changed their gender to get revenge on their former football teammates. The protagonist, Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey) makes Einhorn reveal her genitals to prove she isn’t a real woman. Her transness is the butt of a joke and effectively undermines her villainy.

Whiterose counters a lot of these old assumptions. Although she is a criminal of epic proportions, her transness is not the reason why she is “evil.” She is, importantly, never portrayed as a person deserving of mockery. Her identity is not a twist, but rather something we are aware of from her opening introduction.

The question becomes whether this breaking of the old and offensive trans criminal stereotype is enough.

Whiterose’s “Problematic” Identity

The first issue people have with this character is one of representation. Whiterose is played by cisgender actor BD Wong. There is a long history of cis actors, or in the case of sexuality, heterosexual actors, playing LGBTQIA+ roles (see Jeffrey Tambor in “Transparent,” Jonny Beauchamp in “Penny Dreadful,” Rebecca Romijn in “Ugly Betty,” etc.). This “cis” or “straight” washing denies LGBTQIA+ actors’ roles in an industry that has historically barred their entry with a vengeance.

Whiterose falls into this phenomenon. Show creator Sam Esmail reportedly saw several trans actors for the role, and yet he ultimately went with BD Wong. As Wong told Vulture in September of 2015:

“I was then told Sam did meet some trans actors but didn’t pick them, and then he asked me to do it. I don’t know why he was asking me to do it, and I was putting up a little bit of resistance.”

Wong is a great actor, but for some people who are tired of ciswashing, it understandably might be a bridge too far.

Casting is not the only problem people have with her character. There is also the issue with the arguably predatory romantic relationships Whiterose has had with her subordinates. She is one of the most influential people on the planet, maybe even the most powerful person on the earth, and it’s implied that she engages with sexual relationships with her assistants. As Dark Army operative Irving told then-Whiterose assistant Grant in Season three:

“Tell me something. She still making her spontaneous overtures? She make you taste her yet? Remember, doll face, I was you years ago. And I’ve already done my time. I think she’ll be good with me.”

While the idea that a powerful person would abuse their position in this way is not unrealistic, this accusation hits close to home because of the stereotype that trans people are inherently predatory. Straight men will often accuse transwomen of “trapping them” into sex — sometimes referring to them as “traps” for short. This meme recasts trans identity as being duplicitous. It consequently is often used as a pretext to assault and kill trans people, which is partially why trans individuals are killed at such an alarmingly high rate.

On a societal level, this same justification was and is still used to discriminate against trans people. The bathroom debate of the mid-2010s (and now) framed trans women as men using their trans identity as a pretext to gain entry into female spaces. Former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory is infamously remembered for warning people that trans rights would “[put] citizens in possible danger from deviant actions by individuals.”

Whiterose’s predatory framing is further complicated by the fact that she is a Chinese woman, which means her relationships with her subordinates can arguably fall within the Dragon Lady stereotype. This trope is when strong Chinese women are depicted as overbearing and emasculating (see the majority of Jackie Chan’s American movies). As Elizabeth Ho wrote in The Michigan Daily:

“In her relationship with Grant, whiterose epitomizes this stereotype with her domineering behavior. While the Dragon Lady can also positively represent Chinese women as assertive and independent, in this case, it only further emasculates Chinese men.”

Season four tries to reverse course with this association by giving Whiterose a female-presenting assistant Wang Shu (Jing Xu). This relationship is not framed as abusive or sexual, but respectful and professional. The final season clearly learned from some of its past mistakes.

In doubling down on Whiterose’s power, however, the show highlighted another chief problem — that of placing a trans character in the center of a vast, globalist conspiracy.

The Trans Agenda

Whiterose is not just in charge of a malicious hacker collective but also moonlights as Zhi Zhang, the male Chinese Minister of Defense. She uses this high-ranking position in the Chinese government as a cover to control much of the world’s affairs, and this trope falls into a tragic stereotype about marginalized people.

Discrimination has manifested in conspiracy theories for centuries. It doesn’t take too long on the Internet to find bigots justifying their hatred of a marginalized group by claiming that said group is a part of a cabal of people secretly running the world. Anti-semitism, for example, has been an unfortunately stable aspect of anti-globalist discourse for hundreds of years. The European world has blamed the Jewish population for everything from eating babies to poisoning wells to spreading the black plague itself.

In 1903, a pamphlet titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (sometimes abbreviated as The Protocols) began circulating in the Russian newspaper Znamia. The document claimed to print the notes from a secret meeting, where the Jewish people allegedly planned to undermine Christian civilization through a vast conspiracy. This pamphlet, which was later deemed fraudulent, was “coincidentally” released around the same time the Russian people were expelling their sizeable Jewish population from the Pale of Settlement through a series of violent pogroms.

The idea that Jewish people are undermining the world through the secret control of established institutions has never entirely died. The Protocols would recieve renewed interest under Nazi Germany and controversially are still spread today by organizations around the world. Its footprint can even be felt indirectly. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, for example, believed that Jewish billionaire George Soros single-handedly controlled the world economy.

Jewish people are not the only marginalized group to be the object of such conspiracy theories. When LGBTQIA+ rights started to pick up steam in the United States in the lates 80s and early 90s, it was not uncommon for conservatives to claim that there was a “gay agenda.” Critics labeled many queer civil rights campaign as an attempt to make society, particularly children, gay. As hate activist Phil Burress remarked of a California bill that would require foster parents to recieve LGBTQIA+ sensitivity training:

“This is the way the homosexual activists continue to build their numbers — is to get people confused about their gender identity and start acting out.”

Some people are likewise convinced that we are amid a trans agenda. As the ideas of genderfluidity (i.e., the concept that not all people embody a rigid male-female dichotomy) has entered school curriculums across the country, similar conspiracy theories have amassed. The state of California’s decision to pass an LGBTQIA+ inclusive sexual-education curriculum, for example, has been met by some as an attempt to convert their children. One parent told Vox News they wanted the law to be overturned or otherwise:

“… our children are going to be against us.”

From stealing babies to brainwashing them, conservatives have been blaming social minorities for such conspiracies for centuries. Whiterose fits into this long, complicated history because, in the world of Mr. Robot, such a globalist conspiracy is real. An investment firm called the Deus group (a pun on Deus Ex Machina) has been pulling strings since the end of the Cold War. As Phillip Price said in episode two of the last season:

The Soviet Union, a great world super power, was collapsing.
And where some saw freedom, a young, imaginative Minister Zhang saw possibility.
A new world order.
So Zhang formed an investment group called Deus.The goal, bring together the world’s wealthiest, most powerful men to consolidate control and manipulate global events for profit.

Whiterose, a trans woman, is the de facto head of this globalist conspiracy to hoard the world’s wealth. Her goal with that wealth could arguably be construed as good. She is trying to build a machine that “makes the world better” (note — we never learn what the machine does), but that doesn’t change the fact that she has done a lot of bad to achieve this goal. Her grasp on the world’s most powerful institutions comes with all the baggage that that power represents.

Given that we exist in a world where some of the world’s most powerful men believe in conspiracy theories like the “trans agenda,” Whiterose’s character should not be taken lightly. The criticism that “this narrative is inappropriate” is worth listening to.

Loving Whiterose, Despite Her Edges

Near the end of the final season, Whiterose’s position at the Deus group is revealed to the world. The camera opens on her looking into a mirror to finish up her makeup. When she is ready, armed guards escort her down the stairs of her elegant mansion. We, for a moment, think that this is it for her — that these are the guards sent from the Chinese government to whisk her away to prison or worse.

We then see the dead bodies everywhere and realize that she has won this battle. She leans over a dying soldier and says:

“You were looking for Minister Zhang? He isn’t here.
He’s dead.
There is only Whiterose.”

When trans people transition, they sometimes take on a new name, and their old name is referred to as their deadname. To deadname someone is a way to invalidate a trans person’s identity. You are aware of their preferences and refuse to recognize them anyway.

When I first watched this scene, I burst into tears. As a nonbinary person, I have been misgendered countless times. I have grown accustomed to the feeling of discomfort as I navigate whether or not I should be open with those around me. There are few moments where people come to my defense, let alone armed guards.

To witness a transperson powerfully rebuke her deadname, even as someone as “evil” as Whiterose, was something I had rarely experienced in media. It made me feel powerful, and despite Whiterose’s many character problems, I will always remember the catharsis I felt from this single scene.

This is all to say that Whiterose straddles a lot of complicated intersections. She is a trans character played by a cisgender actor who, at times, embodies some problematic tropes that have haunted trans people for decades.

She is also a powerful trans woman in charge of everything, and there is an odd beauty in being able to witness her trying to control a world that hates her.

I can’t say the world of media was ready for the first trans supervillain, but because of Whiterose, it will undoubtedly be prepared for many more.

Alex Has Opinions 1/10/20 Alex Has Opinions 1/10/20

Jedi Are Just As Tired Of Gender Politics As You Are

For most of the Star Wars universe, the Sith and Jedi represent the two sides of “traditional” masculinity. Feelings are framed either as a weapon or a weakness. You can either lash out against the world as a Sith or bury your feelings deep inside yourself as a Jedi. The Jedi Order is composed of a group of repressed men (and a few women) who would rather watch the galaxy burn than talk about their feelings.

When Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi was first introduced to audiences in the 1977 movie A New Hope, he nostalgically described the fallen Jedi Order as a benevolent organization. From his perspective, the Jedi Knights were “guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic.”

As more and more installments of the Star Wars universe aired, however, this initial impression became increasingly harder to justify. This was the organization that “obtained” orphaned children from battlefields across the galaxy, and rather than give them therapy, turned them into unfeeling child soldiers. It was the entity that pressured children and teenagers to bury their feelings of anger and love so deeply that if they ever slipped up, then they were told that they could become some of the Galaxy’s worst monsters.

To be a “good” Jedi or Sith, you had to go your entire life feeling either rage or nothing at all. It is toxic masculinity as a religion, and we see this mindset with both the light and the dark.

The Dark Side Of Masculinity

The Force — the cosmic entity that flows through all living things — is all about balance. The dark and light sides are described as interconnected aspects of the same whole, and so we cannot talk about the Jedi without also first addressing the Sith.

The most famous Sith in the public imagination is Anakin Skywalker, father of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who is known infamously by his moniker Darth Vader. The legacy of his image lingers with us even today. We remember Vader for his deep-sounding voice (brought to us by the magic of James Earl Jones) and his sickening black cape, but there is another aspect of his personality that always lies just below the surface — his rage.

We see Vader throughout the first three films choke rebel alliance foot soldiers, freeze dissenters in carbonite, and give the order to destroy entire worlds. The Empire and Sith are modeled loosely off of Nazi Germany, so unsurprisingly, this violence is embedded into the code of the Sith Religion itself. The first line of the Sith Code begins by claiming:

“Peace is a lie, there is only passion.”

The Sith are not talking about the entire spectrum of emotion here when they use the word passion. The only type of emotion we see them express care in cultivating is anger. As Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) tells Luke Skywalker in Return Of The Jedi (1983):

“Let the hate flow through you”.

In one of Vader’s most well-quoted scenes, he is arguing with a subordinate (Richard LeParmentier) about the force. He then utters the line, “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” and uses the force to choke his dissenter into submission. His application of the force here is the ultimate expression of masculine anger, powerful, but unexpressive at the same time.

Vader is chill, which is to say that he is holding in barely contained rage at all times.

The ability to express yourself through physical violence while not being able to handle your emotions is an integral part of toxic masculinity. When discussing the link between masculinity and anger, the American Psychological Association posted the following in the fall of 2018:

“In early childhood, violence and aggression are used to express emotions and distress. Over time, aggression in males shifts to asserting power over another, particularly when masculinity is threatened”

To be a man, you have to be willing to hurt those trying to expose your natural limitations, and if there’s one thing Vader is, it’s a man.

In the force choke scene described above, the subordinate is expressing the fear that the Rebels — who have just stolen plans for the Empire’s planet-destroying superweapon the Death Star — will uncover an exploitable structural weakness. Vader dismisses this legitimate concern and then waxes poetically about the force. His subordinate scoffs at his religiosity, and that is when Vader intervenes with a good force choke.

This scene is meant to demonstrate Vader’s power, but in retrospect, it makes him seem weak. Vader’s inability to examine his weaknesses — both tactically and emotionally — leads to the destruction of a starbase the size of a moon.

Over a million died to satisfy his ego.

The latest trilogy still lives in the shadow of Anakin’s performative anger. Minor antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) stares longing at Darth Vader’s crushed helmet whenever he needs inspiration or direction. He looks up to him as a role model on how to behave, and he replicates that raw masculine energy constantly. Rather than process his own emotions, Kylo will do things like smash computer terminals with his lightsaber.

Vader and Kylo Ren’s violence are toxic by design. They are the “bad guys” in these films, and we aren’t supposed to think of their behavior as redeemable (until we are).

While substantially less violent, the light side of the force isn’t much better. It possesses the same emotional stagnation as the Sith.

Like most men, the alternative to anger is nothing at all.

May The Patriarchy Be With You

The Jedi code is about duality, and this fact is echoed within the naming conventions of the primary characters. The word Luke is a derivative of the Latin word lucere — a verb meaning to shine. Luke is literally the light side of the force.

If the Sith are all about unrestrained rage, then you would think that the natural duality to that end of the spectrum would be learning to process your emotions. The Jedi would conquer the Sith by taking that pain and anger and channeling it productively, and compassionately. We would see an Order devoted to cultivating people’s love and joy.

The Jedi, in a way reminiscent of real-world Buddhism and Taoism, instead, focus on the principle of non-attachment. Their entire order is built on not feeling any emotions at all. The Jedi Code begins with the phrase:

“There is no emotion, there is peace.”

For most of the in-universe lore (and indeed all of the movies), Jedi are not allowed to marry. They are discouraged from forming significant attachments outside of their paternalistic relationship with their masters. We see this sentiment echoed with Anakin. We learn from The Phantom Menace (1999), that before being whisked away by mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, he was a slave on the desert planet of Tatooine.

To become a Jedi, he had to commit to not only never see his mother again, but never to feel anything about her at all. When he consults Master Yoda about visions of someone in his life dying, he is told to stop thinking about it:

“Careful you must be when sensing the future, Anakin! The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side. Rejoice for those around us who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy, the shadow of greed, that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”

It should be noted that telling a person with PTSD to cut off their emotional past is not healthy. Anakin would bury these feelings of trauma deep within himself, and like a lot of men, it meant he was ill-equipped to handle future disappointment and pain. This pressure to hide his feelings behind a facade of detachment is an integral part of toxic masculinity. As Bell Hooks explained:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

When Anakin inevitably developed feelings, in this case, romantic ones for Queen Amidala or Padmé (Natalie Portman), the shame instilled in him by the Jedi Order caused him to handle everything in secret. By the time people like his master attempted to provide emotional support, Anakin had become the very thing the Jedi had feared. As he told Padmé in Revenge Of The Sith (2005):

“I won’t lose you the way I lost my mother. I am becoming more powerful than any Jedi has ever dreamed of, and I’m doing it for you. To protect you.”

Rather than an inevitable outcome of emotion, however, this consequence seems to be a result of his improper support system. One has to wonder if the trauma of losing someone “like he lost his mother” would still be as potent if he had had the emotional space to process that pain. As Dr. Nakia Gordon, a professor of psychology at Marquette University, remarked to Discover Magazine about Yoda’s philosophy:

“The first thing I thought of when you sent this request was my interpretation of Yoda as asking Jedi not to feel any emotion (which would just be bad). You need emotions to make informed decisions, and more recently, research has demonstrated that people make more cooperative decisions when they made a choice quickly and emotionally, rather than thinking “rationally” about it.”

The Jedi were constructed to respond to emotion not as we feel them, but as most men think they should be. This toxic mindset is one that has continued into the present day.

Compassion Without Feeling

There is a scene in The Return Of Skywalker (2019) where Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) is on the sands of Pasaana fighting with Sith Kylo Ren over an escape shuttle. They are both using the force to push the craft back and forth, and in a flash of anger, Rey loses control and releases a wave of force lightning. The blast eviscerates the ship, and as a result, we are led to believe that her Wookie friend Chewbacca has died.

Her emotions killed her friend.

It’s clear here that even as our norms on masculinity have evolved, the Star Wars universe continues to struggle with how the Jedi should operate in a more equitable world.

On the positive end, the movie demonstrates several examples of Rey showing compassion to creatures and entities that past Jedi would have sliced down without a moment’s hesitation. There is one scene, in particular, where Rey heals a menacing-looking sandworm, in a way that nicely juxtaposes to how Luke Skywalker killed a Rancor in Return Of The Jedi.

She questioned the sandworm’s right to exist, while Luke did not.

Women are often given the role of “the healer” in fantasy films, though, so it remains to be seen whether this is a breaking of a masculine role or the enforcement of one.

Additionally, as with most Jedi, Rey is still not allowed to feel. When her emotions become too potent, as they did on the sands of Pasaana, they fall beyond her control and are immediately weaponized. This follows the “traditional” model of masculinity that we have spent this entire article critiquing, and it makes one wonder if this franchise intends to truly evolve at all.

There was an attempt in The Last Jedi (2017), the second movie in the latest trilogy, to deconstruct the toxic masculinity in the Jedi Order. We had an entire subplot where Rey pushed against the stubbornness of a much older Luke Skywalker, who had retreated to the edge of the galaxy to avoid dealing with his perceived failures. The primary one being that he had attempted to preemptively kill Kylo Ren because he feared the young Jedi was heading to the dark side. Rey chastized him for this extreme measure:

“Ben, no! You failed him by thinking his choice was made. It wasn’t. There is still conflict in him. If he turned from the dark side, that could shift the tide. This could be how we win.”

She was advocating for a message of understanding and compassion that did not categorize the world into dark or light. This conversation was refreshing to many feminist critics, but a fan backlash seems to have caused the franchise to reverse course.

Sadly, The Rise Of Skywalker does not deconstruct what it means to be a Jedi but instead speaks of the force in the same dark-light dichotomy that has existed since the first movie. When discussing how Rey “brought balance to the force,” co-writer Chris Terrio told IndieWire:

“I think that the balance is restored, because the dark had been growing much, much more powerful than the light. By Rey striking this blow, it doesn’t mean that everything is happily ever after forever, but it means that at least for this moment in time, the dark has been held off as the light has pushed back.”

This interpretation, while useful for setting up future installments, does little to help people understand why past Sith have gone to the dark side. When we look at the galaxy’s most infamous fallen Jedi, they appear to have turned to the dark side because they weren’t able to talk about their feelings. Kylo fled because his master and mentor, Luke, tried to kill him for communicating with Supreme Commander Snoke. Anakin had to keep his feelings of pain and love a secret from the Jedi Order. Even Palpatine is primarily motivated by the fear of death — a concern detached Jedi aren’t supposed to think about.

By essentializing these men’s “evil” as an inevitability, the Jedi never have to question how their mentality pushes their fallen away. Rey may have brought balance to the force by killing the Sith, but we have yet to see a meaningful reformation to the Jedi ideology.

Balance To The Force

There is an argument to be made that protagonist Luke Skywalker won at the end of Return Of The Jedi by disregarding the light-dark dichotomy of the Jedi Order. His decision to love his father prompts Vader to renounce the emperor and throw him into the Death Star’s main reactor. The same can be said of Rey, who reaches out to Kylo, and through understanding, helps him to return to the light.

In the Expanded Universe (now decanonized by Disney as Star Wars Legends), Luke Skywalker attempts to build a more compassionate Jedi Order. He allows Jedi to marry and marries Jedi Mara Jade. He learns from the dogmatism of the past and tries to prevent future Jedi from following his father’s path. Luke brings balance to the force, not by evening out a cosmic chessboard, but by correcting its mistakes.

If Rey wants to do the same for the next inevitable trilogy, then she should reflect on why Kylo and Anakin turned to the dark side. The galaxy needs Jedi that can express their emotions — who can vacillate between more than only rage and nothingness — and the world needs that as well.

Alex Has Opinions 12/19/19 Alex Has Opinions 12/19/19

When Evil Choices in Gaming Spill Into the Real World

Players have the right to be dicks in video games, and that’s being exploited by white supremacists. It allows for an outlet of expression that, while not necessarily homicidal, can enable members of the “alt-right” to make crossroads with gamers “hypothetically” reconstructing the Third Reich in space. This type of play style exposes a minority of gamers to radicalization, and we need to ask if these types of narratives are necessary for players to have fun.

In 2010, Firaxis launched Civilization V for Mac and PC. The strategy game asks players to cultivate a civilization from the Stone Age to the present day, conquering the world through diplomatic, cultural, scientific, or military means.

At the heart of this game is a type of escapism that allows us to briefly believe we have control over the entire world. The diversity of play styles permitted in games like Civ V allows us to model society however we wish to. We are the voices that lead humanity to supremacy.

And so it should surprise no one that the open-ended nature of a lot of strategy games creates breeding grounds for supremacists and trolls.

Civ V was tremendously successful when it came out. It sold over 8 million copies and continues to enjoy a solid fan base, even though a sequel, Civ VI, hit stores in 2016. I am one such fan. I have logged hundreds of hours playing it.

The chief appeal of the vanilla game was about the accumulation and implementation of power. The question “What do you spend the most time doing in Civ?” was posted recently on the Civ V discussion board on the gaming platform Steam, and the top answers were “war” and “nuking people and making plans to nuke people.”

This power fantasy plays an important role in many games, but something of note in Civ V is the morally ambiguous approach taken in allowing players to construct their own realities. Players are not only allowed to conquer the world under the command of George Washington or Indonesia’s Gajah Mada, but the game also lets you go into battle with more problematic leaders like Jefferson Davis as he leads the Confederacy to victory against the Union.

On July 9, 2013, Civ V released its second major expansion pack, dubbed Brave New World after the Aldous Huxley book of the same name. The expansion tweaked the gameplay significantly, and one small addition was a scenario called The American Civil War. The expansion allowed players to fight either on behalf of the Union or the Confederacy to change or affirm the outcome of the Civil War.

Like all Civ V playthroughs, there is no morality on whether individual decisions are right or wrong. If you win as the Confederacy — a side fighting to preserve the institution of slavery — this is the only thing the game will tell you: “The world has been convulsed by war. Many great and powerful civilizations have fallen, but you have survived — and emerged victorious! The world will long remember your glorious triumph!”

*The American Civil War scenario in ‘Civilization V’*

At the time of release, neither The American Civil War nor the second scenario, the Scramble for Africa, which allowed players to recreate the European colonization of Africa, garnered controversy. If you look at the sparse reporting on these updates, game journalists restrained their commentary to the technical aspects of their playthroughs.

Game reviewers have only recently begun to examine the morality of games, a blind spot that has historically created intellectual safe spaces for “alt-right” or white-nationalist trolls with severe consequences.

In 2014, the gaming community was shaken by Gamergate, which was a harassment campaign that targeted several prominent female game makers and critics. The toxicity of the community has only intensified since then as a small percentage of gamers have become radicalized by online communities.

An infamous example of this phenomenon is gaming vlogger PewDiePie, whose “edgy” memes and humor have been used to push users to more extreme content. It’s not uncommon for gamers like PewDiePie to recommend anti-Semitic or racist YouTubers to their followers. Since YouTube’s algorithm likes to suggest similar content, this can create a ripple effect that pushes some viewers to the most extreme parts of the platform.

The public’s awareness of this issue grew after the March 2019 New Zealand Mosque shooting, when the perpetrator shouted “subscribe to PewDiePie” shortly before killing 51 people. The meme referenced was a subscription competition between PewDiePie and the Bollywood channel T-Series.

Since then, journalists have written hundreds upon hundreds of editorials about why gaming culture is so susceptible to radicalization. The YouTube channel Innuendo Studios has a video in its series, “Alt-Right Playbook,” about how the “alt-right” likes to take over affinity groups to get more members. The desire for recruitment is undoubtedly a factor. Still, gaming culture’s moral acceptance of, or at the very least ambivalence to, white supremacy is also a reason why gamers (and not, say, knitters) are so ripe for radicalization.

If you peruse the mod section for Civ V, then you will quickly come across fan mods that allow you to play some of history’s worst dictators, ranging from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il to Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Some of these mods’ fans are just doing so for the act of escapism, but it doesn’t take long to find actual white supremacists engaged in direct recruitment.

On the first page of the discussion forum for the Adolf Hitler mod, I found a user named “The Entrenched Soldier” asking another user to research the movie The Greatest Story Never Told. This movie is a piece of white supremacist propaganda by film producer Dennis Wise that tries to spin Hitler’s actions in a positive light.

The truth is that Steam has had a Nazi problem for a while. Reporters have long noted the prevalence of white supremacists on the site. In one infamous example, a Steam user named Nicholas Giampa used the site’s lax regulation to disseminate his radical opinions online. He would later go on to kill his girlfriend’s parents for criticizing his white supremacist views. As HuffPost writer Andy Campbell wrote in 2018: “What’s interesting about Giampa’s online presence ― and the Steam community as a whole ― is that the Nazi symbolism and other hate speech don’t appear to faze anybody. It’s too rampant, too normalized.”

Valve has quietly worked to delete the most obvious white supremacist accounts on its site. If you go on Steam now and search keywords like “Nazi,” you aren’t going to get as many hits for white supremacist groups as you would have in 2018. Problematic fan mods are still there, though. The same can be said for games such as the Blitzkrieg DLC for the game series Order of Battle or the card game Hearts of Iron, which place the user in command of Nazi forces.

When it comes to publishing games, Valve has maintained a “censorship-free” stance since 2018. The company only removes games on a case-by-case basis when they get too much attention in the press, are deemed illegal, or are overtly pornographic. This policy means that as long as white supremacists aren’t too vocal about their stated goals, then they can still play games that allow them to recreate their race-based power fantasies of Hitler conquering the world or Jefferson Davis vanquishing the Union.

The refusal of platforms such as Steam to judge the morality of games exposes gamers, a portion of whom are younger and male, to literal Nazis. It’s a moral hazard that extends beyond historical simulators alone.

Unfortunately, white supremacy isn’t limited solely to recreations of World War II. The ability to role-play as an awful, xenophobic person or empire is quite common pretty much across the board. In the past, I’ve written about the extensive amount of slavery in the MMORPG Eve Online, but consider also the game Stellaris.

Stellaris is a Civ V-esque game where a player can spread their civilization across the universe through cultural, diplomatic, or military means. I am a huge fan of this game, and I will be the first to admit that one of its greatest strengths is that it permits for a diversity of play styles; players have the ability to build Dyson spheres, create robot armies, and explore the galaxy.

The problem with the gaming community is that we are so used to letting players cosplay as awful people that we have trouble telling the difference between people who are joking, “half-joking,” and deadly serious.

Sadly, players also have the option to rule a slaver’s empire. The game allows player civilizations to capture foreign populations, force them into slavery, neuter them, process their bodies for food or energy, or exterminate them outright.

Half the appeal of many games is allowing players to role-play as maniacally evil people. The original Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, for example, had players giddy with the prospect of being a Sith lord. The game allowed players to execute innocent bystanders, sell the cure for a plague to a crime syndicate, and order your Wookiee companion to kill their best friend, Mission. One user remarked about that last quest: “I felt like an epic d-bag after I [killed Mission] the first time. Then I did thrice more, and I just laughed.”

Some players are undoubtedly into playing games like this for the raw power fantasy, but others have an appeal rooted in white supremacist impulses. As Reddit user The9thMan99 jokingly remarked about Stellaris in the eu4 (Europa Universalis IV) subreddit:

Stellaris is the superior Hitler simulator. Yes, in [Hearts of Iron] you literally can play as Hitler, but you don’t get to do any hitlery stuff, only go to war. In Stellaris you have a detailed control panel too [sic] choose how you want to hitler your inferior races … you can literally choose a population to be enslaved and turned into food or worked to death.

This particular user claims to have been joking, but it doesn’t take long to find a user on one of these forums apologizing or massaging Hitler’s atrocities. For example, in the Stellaris Steam discussion board devoted to the hypothetical question “What’s the best way to make the third reich?” user Jimib4158 posted a lengthy defense of the genocidal leader.

“As someone really into miltary [sic] history, and of Jewish roots, i would surprisingly say you may be a little too hard on the Nazis, while they certainly were NOT the good guys, they were a product of their time.”

Eventually, someone enters the feed who isn’t joking and has genocidal desires that are more than hypothetical. The problem with the gaming community is that we are so used to letting players cosplay as awful people that we have trouble telling the difference between people who are joking, “half-joking,” and deadly serious.

The perceived neutrality of these games allows white supremacists to interact with users who enjoy these games for non-race-related reasons. These “regular gamers” come to reenact a power fantasy divorced from white supremacy and get exposed to communities that — in-between Twitch recommendations on “resource optimizations and build styles” — talk about how “Hitler was maybe misunderstood.”

For decades now in politics and the press, we’ve debated over whether or not video games cause violence. This talking point is used by conservative and liberal defenders alike who blame the violence in video games and other forms of media as a cause for things such as shootings. President Donald Trump pressed this claim after the Parkland shooting and made it again during the summer of 2019.

There is no compelling evidence that playing video games causes players to pick up a gun and start shooting people. It does no one any favors to advance this claim.

Media, though, does have a more diffused effect on the consumer. There is some evidence, for example, that a viewer’s higher exposure to positive portrayals in the media of marginalized groups such as gay people and racial minorities leads to more accepting views. We may intellectually know that these people aren’t real, but that doesn’t stop our lizard brains from connecting with them (see “parasocial relationships”).

This effect of representation is why media representation groups such as GLAAD exist. The characters we see in our media will potentially go on to affect how we perceive people in the real world.

Video games are not divorced from this equation, and historically, they have been awful at representation. The ability for the player to control an avatar, however, makes gamers a more integral part of the narrative. We’re living that experience, but at the same time, the simulated nature of that experience is ever-present and, in some cases, challenging to take seriously. A study from the University of Illinois, for example, found that when players were allowed to adjust their characters in the soccer game FIFA, they defaulted to racial stereotypes and perpetuated racism.

This complicated status makes it possible for even the most well-intentioned portrayals in video games to permit players to perpetuate racist views and beliefs. Lisa Nakamura, director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, told NPR that a white player experiencing racism while playing a video game “does not actually improve the suffering of other people who he’s aligning himself with, because he still is benefiting from his whiteness in other parts of his life.”

There’s a balancing act in games between instilling empathy and permitting unhealthy voyeurism. There are plenty of white men masquerading as half-naked women in-game, but that doesn’t mean it’s making them less sexist. The way player choices are constructed does matter, and as we have seen, when you don’t put enough thought into player outcomes, your game can become an outlet (and recruitment tool) for white supremacists.

Some members of the gaming community prioritize player choice over player empathy and understanding. They’re allowing their players to role-play as the Third Reich, win the Civil War for the Confederacy, and enslave the galaxy for funsies.

Players have the right to be dicks in video games, and that’s being exploited by white supremacists. It allows for an outlet of expression that, while not necessarily homicidal, can enable members of the “alt-right” to make crossroads with gamers “hypothetically” reconstructing the Third Reich in space. This type of playstyle exposes a minority of gamers to radicalization, and we need to ask if these types of narratives are necessary for players to have fun.

This criticism is not a call to ban all depictions of slavery, violence, and objectification in video games. There have been games such as Undertale that deconstruct the concept of player violence by permitting said violence in their gameplay.

Neither should we label all gamers white supremacists. This claim would be wildly untrue. It would also do a disservice to all the amazing gamers and fandoms that mobilize for benevolent causes and charities (see Hbomberguy’s charity Twitch stream as an example).

We should, though, start to be more critical of in-game behaviors. We are long past the days of an entire game involving a pixelated figure saving a princess. Modern video games tell complicated, in-depth stories that can give any movie a run for its money. These games should be scrutinized beyond whether or not they’re merely fun to play. Narratives that glorify awful characters and points of view should be judged for their impact.

Along the way, this type of gaming criticism might just help us fight some real-life Nazis.

This article was originally published on OneZero.

Alex Has Opinions 7/18/19 Alex Has Opinions 7/18/19

The Stigma Of Not Working

People might not be criticizing our current system of work — not because it provides them profound meaning — but because doing so invites intense social stigma that jeopardizes their ability to subsist within our capitalist system.

Whenever employment is brought up in a conversation, inevitably a conservative actor will talk about how providing resources to the unemployed is a terrible idea. We could be talking about anything from the work requirements in safety-net programs to the fear that a universal basic income (UBI) will encourage laziness. Conservatives will claim that “helping the poor” not only makes them unproductive members of society but also that it stifles a core human drive to work. These Concern Trolls believe that the desire to work is an ingrained aspect of human behavior, which can paradoxically be squashed with the slightest amount of government intervention.

When we examine this argument more closely, however, we realize that this appeal to human nature is reductive at best, and at worst, it’s a cynical ploy to control those that are stuck within exploitative or dead-end positions. People might not be criticizing our current system of work — not because it provides them profound meaning — but because doing so invites intense social stigma that jeopardizes their ability to subsist within our capitalist system.

But Actually, The Argument Is…

Whenever we throw around labels like “conservative” and “work,” there will always be people who disagree because these are charged words that define people’s entire identities. Opponents might disagree because charged statements tend to trigger charged, emotional responses. They also might disagree because they hold different, contradicting arguments for why work is necessary.

In this context, we are referring to the argument that people need to have employment to be fulfilled and happy. This argument can best be summarized by former Mitt Romney domestic-policy director Oren Cass, who was paraphrased in the Wallstreet Journal stating the following:

“Unemployment, more than any of life’s other rough patches, leads to unhappiness and family breakdown.”

This justification is a common one among anyone who upholds the current economic orthodoxy of work. When, for example, former Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA), which was a law that imposed work requirements or “workfare” on top of the existing safety net system, he used the specter of this very argument. In a speech he provided about the PRWORA, Clinton remarked:

“From now on, our Nation’s answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare, it will be the dignity, the power, and the ethics of work.”

Proponents of this worldview (and there are many) do have some evidence for the claim that work is necessary. For one, humans do like “doing things” beyond merely subsisting on food. If ancient cave paintings are any indication, humans have been pushing themselves to experiment and create for thousands of years. There is evidence that it’s partly psychological. As writer Caroline Beaton remarked in Psychology Today:

“In hunter-gatherer times, work was literally a matter of life and death. Now, the stakes are lower and work is more complex. Modern work is divided into minutia: infinite industries and companies, hundreds of departments, unlimited specialized roles. Many workers, and even companies, lose the forest through the trees. We forget why what we’re doing matters. But employees innately crave seeing the bigger picture: the fruits of their labor.”

Surely, if humans need to “do things,” the conservative argument goes, then working is a vital component to human psychology.

Another common argument cited about the unemployed is that they are generally unhappy. Unemployed individuals are far more likely to be depressed. Unemployed Americans are also far more likely to be consumers of alcohol and narcotics. For example, a meta-study of 28 studies published between 1990 and 2015 found that “unemployment increases psychological distress, which increases drug use.” From a superficial reading of this trend, it would appear that the absence of work is making these people unhappy.

If these humans merely got a job, then wouldn’t they be less depressed?

These readings, however, ignore the reality that work is a rite of passage that holds a special place in our society. People are told that they must work from a very early age. The refusal to do so means that they suffer both material and social penalties (i.e., starvation, ostracization).

To not work is to buck a severe societal taboo.

Does Unemployment Mean Failure?

We are all indoctrinated quite early to think of ourselves in relation to work. A common question we ask children is “What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?”. The answers we prime children to give are almost always career-oriented (e.g., firefighter, astronaut, YouTube star). Seriously, check out this video where a hundred children are asked this question. Only a small fraction of them said anything beyond a career.

Rarely do we ask what values we want our children to strive for. It’s an omission that can have some adverse effects on their development. When we ask children to define their self-worth in relation to what they can do, it can create unnecessary anxiety. Some evidence suggests that a search for a calling in of itself can lead to an unhealthy amount of indecisiveness. In the words of organizational psychologist Adam Grant:

“When we define ourselves by our jobs, our worth depends on what we achieve.”

This line of questioning, sadly, never stops. In the United States, one of our primary icebreakers is asking people “What Do You Do?”. Again, this line of questioning is almost always implicitly asking people about their chosen career path, as opposed to what values they strive to achieve.

That’s damaging, and it’s not merely probing questions about employment that create this feeling of inadequacy. We see this expressed on a cultural level in the way we demonize the poor for insecure or total lack of employment. It’s not uncommon for more well-off people to assert that unemployed people are undeserving of help. In his article Why I Don’t Give Money To Homeless People, contributor Charlie Pabst stated coldly:

“You and I have jobs. We work and probably work very hard. We put in the time and we get paid for it. That is called fair exchange.”

A similar sentiment can be found among politicians, CEOs, and even presidents.

In the US, we have a society where people are trained from adolescence to the day they die to believe that employment is the most essential thing in the world. When a person doesn’t achieve that ideal, they are forced to internalize a lot of stress. A simple Internet search reveals thousands of testimonials from people who feel like failures for not fulfilling that ideal (check out some here, here, and here). This psychological stress can correlate with increased drug usage, alcoholic consumption, and even TV viewing habits. The meta-study referenced earlier stated that an increase in psychological stress among the unemployed was the primary reason why they self-medicated.

Sometimes this shame can lead people that need financial help to reject it outright. In one well-known example, a homeless man in Canada returned a sum of $2,400 he found on the street to the local authorities. The story went viral, and a GoFundMe page was made to reward the man for his selflessness. The page raised over $5,000, and the man initially turned down the funds and instead requested that the money be funneled to a local nonprofit. The thing the man really wanted, police later confirmed, was a job.

There is an undeniable stigma around asking for help, especially when related to safety net programs. In one terrible example, US Representative Jason Lewis infamously called recipients of government assistance “parasites.” This stigma means that sometimes people don’t take the help that society has already allocated for them. The federal food stamp program, which is known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), never reaches full eligibility. In places such as Nevada’s 2nd congressional district, it’s not uncommon for only about 2/3rd’s of the eligible population to be reached, and shame is a huge reason why. In the words of Vicki Nash when discussing her experiences with unemployment:

“I don’t claim welfare of any kind, because apart from anything else I am far too proud, another one of my failings.”

Of course, unemployed people are depressed and self-medicating. They are actively being told that they have failed to uphold basic societal standards. They are then shamed into not accepting the financial help that would mitigate their hardships. A person in that position is unlikely to have the emotional or physical resources necessary to be happy.

If unemployment-related stress were solely an issue of internalized shame, however, then it could easily be rectified through awareness. It would only take a couple of people living their “truth” to eventually dissipate that shame.

The problem is that employment is linked to a lot of people’s ability to subsist as human beings — i.e., you need a job to eat. This leverage prevents employers from receiving negative criticism about the systemic failures surrounding the nature of work. Employers don’t have to listen about how their jobs suck, and they often choose not to. Those who challenge the structural problems with work are routinely dismissed as problematic and “unprofessional.”

Unprofessional people have trouble eating.

Would You Hire A “Difficult” Employee?

The reality is that a lot of jobs suck. Study after study illustrates that Americans are unhappy with their jobs (though some recent data counters this trend). A 2018 survey by the Conference Board reported that roughly only half of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. For something that’s supposed to be an ingrained part of the human condition, it sure does make a lot of people unhappy.

There is a lot of evidence out there to suggest that, in comparison with other developed countries, American workers put in more hours annually than other work-obsessed countries such as Japan and Germany. Yet, they receive fewer benefits overall. Americans have experienced stagnated wages in recent years and face disproportionately higher medical, housing, and educational costs.

They are working harder and getting less in return.

Some jobs are just plain exploitative. Amazon, in particular, has come under fire for its terrible treatment of warehouse workers. It was reported in the UK that workers were scheduled so strictly that some employees were peeing in bottles to avoid being punished for taking breaks. Similar findings have been reported in the US. With ever-increasing quotas, the warehouses have been likened to sweatshops by employees.

Amazon’s conditions are by no means unique. For example, when undercover reporter Emily Guendelsberger worked at a McDonald’s for a story, she found the conditions there to be extremely hazardous. As one worker in the story remarked:

“My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands, I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill. The managers told me to put mustard on it.”

When it comes to the American workplace, there’s quite frankly a lot to complain about. When you ask Americans about job satisfaction directly, however, they tend to upsell their current positions while paradoxically reporting greater stress and less security. A Pew Research report on American Employment found that a high percentage of Americans believed their prospects were personally improving. They also thought that their current jobs were more stressful than in previous generations and would become more demanding in the future. A staggering 65% also claimed that good jobs were hard to find in their current communities.

There is a considerable amount of dissonance here. Everything cannot be simultaneously fine and super stressful; secure and ready to fall apart at the slightest change.

This is a framing issue in how Americans view work.

Some of it has to do with the internal shame we discussed earlier. The way employers permit criticism in the workplace also has a massive impact on how Americans talk about the nature of work both publicly and amongst themselves.

Employers generally do not like it when employees bring up structural problems at the office, and such dissent is often depicted as agitation or ungratefulness. Amazon workers who are striking for Prime Day have been described by the company as agitators spreading misinformation to increase union dues.

Likewise, when Emily Guendelsberger reached out to McDonald’s to get their perspective on their hazardous working conditions, the company discarded the complaints and blamed activists. In a statement, McDonald’s claimed:

“It is important to note that these complaints are part of a larger strategy orchestrated by activists targeting our brand and designed to generate media coverage.”

Retaliation from these companies does not always come in the form of propaganda either. While technically illegal, there have been countless cases of employees who have been fired for labor organizing: as McDonald’s workers were in 2014; and as five Walmart stores were in 2015; and as teachers for the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (a charter school network) were in 2016; and as a group of Tesla employees was in 2017; and as a group of engineers for the software company Lanetix was in 2018; and as Amazon workers were in 2019.

The list goes on.

Again, this is illegal. It’s effortless, however, for companies to obscure such decisions as cost-saving measures, especially for employees working under at-will employment.

Some rare American companies may allow political dissent, but this policy is entirely voluntary. The ability for an employee to complain in the workplace (free from retaliation) depends both on what’s stipulated in their contract as well as the laws of the state they are in, but ultimately protections in the US tend to be lacking for private-sector workers. Georgia, for example, is an “at-will” state, which means in the absence of a written contract, an employer may fire their employee at any time. The first amendment generally provides Americans who work for private companies no protection from being fired for what they have said in the workplace or outside of it (and that includes social media).

There have been countless examples of employees being fired for their controversial beliefs outside of the workplace. People have been fired for making racist tweets, tweeting critically about the President, wearing racist hats, attending a rally outside of work, and even writing a controversial blog post (gulps loudly).

The employer class’ general imposition towards framing criticism as ungratefulness effectively cuts off a lot of dissent from their workers.

Would you openly tell your employer that your job makes you unhappy?

Could you even be honest with yourself to give such an answer?

Implicit Biases Surrounding Work

When we talk about this subject it’s important to remember other areas that run into the same sort of problem. For example, the thankfully growing-stigmatization around explicit acts of racism has made publically identifying as a racist less popular.

This societal shift, however, has meant that you cannot ask people directly if they are racist, and then call it a day. For decades psychologists have consequently tested people’s implicit racial biases through tests such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the words of Vox correspondent German Lopez:

“The IAT tries to solve a very tricky problem we’ve seen in social science over the past few years: Measures of explicit racism (for example, directly asking whether a person thinks white people are superior to black people) have appeared to show a decline. But how much of that actually shows that racism is diminishing? Is it possible that people are lying when they answer those questions, fearing that telling the truth would make them look racist? And even if people don’t report explicit biases, is it possible they have implicit — meaning subconscious — ones?”

Tests like the IAT reveal little on an individual level, but in the aggregate, some believe that they can cast a light on systemic issues. The Scientific American has reported on the fact that communities with higher reported levels of implicit bias have a more substantial racial disparity in police shootings as well as an equally alarming racial disparity with infant health problems.

Implicit bias research extends beyond the issue of race. There has been good research surrounding the implicit bias around gender, sexuality, and even body type.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that we cannot simply ask people if they enjoy their work. There are cultural factors that prevent people from answering these questions honestly. Employees face both internal shame for not conforming to ingrained norms, as well as an outward fear of being deemed “unprofessional” and losing their means to subsist. Anyone who doesn’t factor this reality into their analysis on the state of work is either being naive or duplicitous.

As we analyze the state of work, the stigma of not working, and how that impacts our psychology, needs to be a part of the conversation. We need to recognize the social and psychological costs that come with being critical with the current working order.

Otherwise, we are just circulating empty talking points that mean nothing.