Recently, American Airlines refused to let a woman continue on her journey wearing a t-shirt that says ‘If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator.” You can read more about the incident here. It wasn’t in response to a passenger complaint. One of the flight attendants took offense to it and complained to the captain, who spoke to the passenger in question and warned her she would not be allowed on her connecting flight until she took the t-shirt off.
I believe everyone has the right to be offended. Rarely can you control it when something offends you. It just does.
But since when did ‘being offended’ entitle you to put everyone else through hell? Since when did reading the word ‘fuck’ incapacitate anyone? When did it give them cancer or endanger their lives? Since when did holding a different opinion to someone else become INTOLERABLE?
If you can’t tolerate coming into contact with an offensive t-shirt (which is, let’s not be disingenuous, offensive and purposefully so), then quite honestly, how the fuck do you negotiate life in the 21st century? It seems pretty clear to me that someone who is that sensitive should seek work in a more sheltered environment than working with the public on an airline. People say ‘fuck’ all the time. Especially during turbulence. American Airlines shouldn’t have dealt with the passenger. They should deal with their staff.
And, just to clarify, this isn’t a right-wing/left-wing issue.
Last week, I got a lovely review at Dear Author. The reviewer, of course, summarized the story and went on to discuss how she felt about it. The next day, on Twitter, I am named in a mention as ‘@remittancegirl a piece of expat shit‘. Well, that got my attention, so I followed the thread and found out that a certain twitterperson had read the review, and on the basis of that, began a long tirade about the fact that I was a racist for writing Gaijin.
It almost instantly devolved from being about taking offense at the material, and became a very personally directed barrage of extremely nasty insults. Not about my poor writing skills or insensitive portrayals, but about me and my sexual habits and …well, I feel safe in paraphrasing her: I should just hurry up and die.
It offended her that the antagonist in the story, a Yakuza middle-man who rapes the protagonist, was Japanese. She felt it was the worst kind of racist stereotyping. She felt that, because I was ‘white’, I had no right to portray any other race as an antagonist in my fiction.
This was all based on a summary of the story in a review. She had not read the book and, in fact, she protested that she would never read it. She felt perfectly justified in accusing me of racism based on a third hand summary of a single piece of writing. And she felt perfectly justified in assuming I was ‘white’ because…? I have no idea.
Shindo, the antagonist in my story is indeed Japanese. So, of course, because the story is set in Japan, is the man who saves her physically, and so is the Fox Goddess in her dreams, who saves her spiritually. And although I am not Japanese, neither am I, racially, white.
Now, I accept that she was offended. Gaijin offends a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It contains erotically described non-consensual sex. It’s got violence in it. And it involves a clash of cultures. And I accept the fact that I, like any other writer alive, might inadvertently be racially, genderly, or sexually insensitive from time to time. I am very anxious to know if I have stereotyped someone and represented them in a bigotted way. Because, beyond anything else, that’s just bad writing.
However, I reserve the right to create and write characters who ARE bigotted. Because there are lots of prejudiced people in the world. Jennifer, my protagonist in Gaijin, definitely stereotypes the Japanese men she works with. I don’t think I’d call her a racist, but I would say that she makes some very unfair generalizations. Working in any part of the sex trade – even the mildest – can do that to you. Carl with a C, from the story Click, is most definitely a racist, a sexist, and a rapist. But neither Jennifer nor Carl with a C represent my world-view. They are characters. They don’t speak for me. They, essentially, speak for themselves.
I acknowledge that writing cultures, races and sexualities other than one’s own does entail treading in problematic territory. It is important to be mindful of issues of ‘orientalism’ and ‘post-colonialism’. And I sincerely think I am mindful of these things, I just don’t let them render me mute as a writer.
This presents me with a number of problems. First, I have not actually lived in the West much, although I was born there. I know much more about other parts of the world than I know about a lot of Western countries. Secondly, I think that to avoid writing characters who are of other races, cultures or sexuality to mine is probably more bigotted than avoiding them.
Quite honestly, I don’t think a lot about race. This is probably because I grew up in places where, for the most part, I was the outsider. I’ve been surrounded with people of different races all of my life. I tend to think a lot more about cultural differences than skin differences. And yet, I will freely admit that I am not without prejudice myself. No one is. No matter where we come from, or what skin we’re born with, we all end up acquiring prejudices through our cultures. I’m certainly not proud of my prejudices, but I acknowledge them. I think that’s the first step to attempting to purge yourself of prejudice – admit you have it, identify it, be critical of yourself for it.
In the meantime, I’m going to write what interests and compels me. I’m going to write about people from a lot of different places, but they are always going to be individuals first, before they are a nationality or a race or a sexual orientation, or even a gender.
And I’m going to write stories, and that involved having conflict. Protagonists and antagonists and some in between. I’m not going to spend a lot of time worrying about the post-colonial implications of what culture or race I choose them to be. I’m going to, as best as I can, write fully rounded characters who are not representations of anything other than themselves as individuals.
And this might offend you. And you have a right to be offended. But you don’t have a right to demand that what offends you be wiped off the face of the earth.
Well said. Describes the problem with everything these days.
Whenever I try to get my head around where it all comes from, I receive a visual image of a Rush Limbaugh type with a smirk, holding a cigar, wearing a cap that reads ‘Mission Accomplished.’
Nothing is that simple, of course, but oh, if it were.
Well said, my darling. FUCK ME. I WANT TO GET OFF.
Um… well, Ms Penny, if you can wait for about four months, I can probably help you with that last bit.
…in the meantime we can all have cake.
i meant, as in, STOP THE WORLD. Oh, that works, too!
I feel compelled to point out this post would’ve been vastly better if you’d included a link to the purchase point for the t-shirt mentioned in the opening sentence. I’ll take two please.
The fussy shall inherit the earth. Or at least mircomanage the rest of us into walking on eggshells least we offend.
*picture me stomping eggshells like Godzilla taking out downtown Tokyo*
I will not be whined into submission, damn it!
**
and as an aside, few people will burn a book they’ve actually read.
You know, I lived in Japan for 5 years. I’ve also traveled extensively in Asia. I also worked in the “floating world” in Japan for part of that time. What bothers me about that exchange with that person in which you got accused of being racist is that as a white person I had my own experiences with Japanese men/ people that were racist on their parts towards me. If I were to write a story that had elements of those experiences I could be called a racist for pointing out some not so nice traits even though they would be representative of my truth and actual experience.
I happen to love Japan. I also have a very positive few of Japanese people in general. I’m married to a Japanese American man. It doesn’t mean I didn’t come across some major assholes. But according that person, if I would create a character based on the assholes I dealt with, I’m a racist. That’s just ridiculous.
To only write a certain group in a positive light when in reality there are good and bad people in every group is placating to bullies who like to call others names prove to themselves what enlightened, perfect and without any bias/prejudice people they are. To me they are phony. As you say, we all have bias. It’s the ones that never admit to it that usually have the biggest mouths against others.
And imagine how boring fiction would be if everyone wrote nice, safe characters who are perfect? Zzzzzzzz….
There is a very strong belief among some people that the arts – literature, film, etc, should serve a political or philosophical end. And that creative products that don’t reflect their own ideologies should not exist. When the arts succumbs to this, what you get is propaganda.
This is not to say that I think the stereotyping of any group of people is okay. But my reasons for believing this are because don’t stem from my (very) left wing leanings. They come from a belief that stereotyped characters and generalizations are a mark of bad, lazy writing. Period.
We have, though, a competing problem. As humans, we are information ‘chunkers’. This is simply a function of how we organize information in our brains. We get far to much data in to cope with each piece of it individually, so we make generalizations in order to function. We create mental goupings: Shinto Priests are Japanese. Of course, this isn’t strictly true. There are, in existence in the world, a very few Shinto Priests who are not. And it might indeed be interesting to write a story of exceptionalism and focus on one who is indeed Japanese. It is interesting, but has the drawback of disorienting your readers in more than one way – Shinto, as a type of lore/religion, is unfamiliar enough. Add in a priest who is atypical, culturally, and you add to the disorientation.
What I have noticed in writings where it is pretty clear the author is promoting a philosophical stance or political agenda, is that they tend towards either their own stereotypes (i.e. all rich people are evil / all white people are racists / all vanilla lovers are inept) or you get so much exceptionalism in the story, it begins to feel like you’re wandering through a surrealist painting.
The thing is, if we are going to interact with other human beings in any capacity, we have to trust that they are going to be human and have opinions of their own. A T-shirt that says “fuck” is quite a it different than screaming obscenities at someone. Personally, if I saw someone wearing that particular shirt, I would probably ask them where they got it lol.
As for characters, I’m not a writer, but I have devoured a great many books in my lifetime. No one accuses purple aliens as being victims of racism if they are the ones eating people in a story lol. A cheap example perhaps, but characters we don’t take offense at are not synonymous with good writing.
And really, is there any point in getting offended by a fictional character? Especially in a book you haven’t read lol.
“characters we don’t take offense at are not synonymous with good writing.”
That’s a very good point. However, I don’t think she took offense at the character, she took offense that I wrote him. There is a very strong literary tradition in Japan, hundreds of Japanese novels, featuring evil Yakuza characters (a genre akin to the western ‘Hardboiled’ or “Noir’ genres). Her point is that I, not being Japanese, shouldn’t be writing them.
I watched that twitter… er… what shall we call it? Defamation? Whatever it was, and it just reminded me that people can be goddamn stupid. There are actually so many issues wound up in this: race, ignorance, literary freedom… AND, confusing narrative voice with authorial voice (which is my issue of the month it would seem).
I actually got a bit annoyed during the Fifty Shades hysteria (which seems to be dying down) that people kept reviewing it without reading it. I can’t help feeling you really should know something about what you’re criticising before you criticise it. And that really pissed me off about the twitter insults that got thrown at you: her adamance that she wasn’t going to read it.
Well, if you actually read something, you might find out you’re wrong. 🙂 And it wouldn’t do to be wrong, would it?
I felt the same about Fifty Shades of Grey. It was getting a lot of flack, yet it was appealing to millions of women. When you see a phenomenon like that, it’s worth reading the book just to find out why.
I wish that I could be articulate and mature but quite frankly the stupidity of her position leaves me fuming. I’m sorry that she ever darkened your horizon.
*applauds* As always this post just shows to me how much you give a shit. Sadly people will always exist who are douches but I’m sorry you got a colossal one.
Some people make my head hurt. I’ve taken to blocking or ignoring them. I don’t mind a discussion but I’m finding more and more that it doesn’t seem people want to discuss so much as be right & dictate to the rest of us.
Fuck that shit!