Everyone is on the same level
That’s a very very very intelligent thing to say:
“If you can’t say it about women, you shouldn’t be able to say it about men without the same repercussions.”
So, you can’t talk about rape. You can’t say that women rape women because women aren’t equipped to rape women, and therefore you can’t say that men rape women, even though men are equipped to rape women and, as a sex, have a long history of raping women. What a handy way to shut women up!
Apparently there’s no such thing as a power imbalance of any kind ever, so you can’t talk about rich bosses exploiting poor workers, you can’t talk about prosperous safe powerful people exploiting and/or punishing struggling threatened powerless people. You have to pretend that everyone is on an equal footing right now this minute and therefore no one can accuse anyone of committing any form of injustice.
When did all this get straightened out and why weren’t we told?
I replied to Kisin:
He’s so wound up you’d think she’s planning to turn a Star Wars flick into a documentary about sex inequality in Pakistan.
What repercussions? Do elaborate, dear enlightened Konny. Men of various stripes routinely say all sorts of awful shit about women, far worse than “I like to make them uncomfortable”, without any apparent repercussions. What exactly are you doing about THEM?
A part of me agrees with having singular standards. I’d quite like it if Konstantin Kisin gave it a bash.
You see the standard I have is that one shouldn’t take what someone says in a specific context completely out of that context in order to demonize them.
And that appears to me to be what is happening to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy here.
To put what she is saying into context, her filmography includes A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. It is about a girl who survived an attempted honor killing by her father and uncle, only for the Pakistani public to pressure her into forgiveness – so the people who tried to kill would get to go back home.
An earlier documentary was Saving Face, about two women who survived acid attacks. Women in the Holy Kingdom is about feminists in Saudi Arabia.
As a man I do not object to being disturbed by subject matter like this. She should absolutely be happy that men find this stuff disturbing, and it is the precise sort of stuff that should be made with that in mind.
I am extremely opposed to this idea that I should never be disturbed, and generally when the shoe is on the other foot, well, if the shoe was on the other foot Kisin would be championing Sharmeen’s right to express ideas people find disturbing.
So far as to whether she’s the right person to revive Starwars, I don’t know. Her background in politics and economics could be useful for fixing the biggest flaw in Disney Starwars – the lack of solid world building.
In the OT – we know why the emperor wants to build the Death Star, it is because he wants to devolve governance to the system lords, and the Death Star is there to keep them from taking the opportunity to rebel. The conflict is between the empire that rules by fear, and the resistance which believes in rule by consent.
You never really get just what the First Order really believes in, what its ultimate big picture vision for the galaxy is. Having someone come in with a background in politics and economics, if she can bring some of that into the story, may well be what the series needs.
Exactly. This is sheer hypocrisy on his part.
BTW I see from Wikiwhosit that she’s been directing a television show based on a Marvel Comics character. So it’s not like she has no experience directing fantasy/action/adventure.
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on Everyone is on the same […]
For what it’s worth, that’s precisely the sentiment I read in the original tweet. That is, Konstantin is usually on the side of more free speech, and he perceives there to be imbalances in the way that people are “permitted” to speak of the sexes. He thinks this is bad.
It’s the same heuristic as changing the race in a statement to check whether it might be racist.
I don’t think so, Nullius. In another tweet he says:
Looks like he’s all for policing speech when it bothers him.