On Offense (Or: How I Learned To Be An Asshole)

Recently, I offended someone.

This is, shockingly enough, not a new experience for me, but it got me thinking: what do we mean when we talk about giving (or taking) offense? In thrashing it out with Joel (who, incidentally, is one of the best conversationalists I know, and if you aren't fortunate enough to know them in meat-life you should at least be reading their blog), I realized that there are really two rather different things conflated in the term “offended”.

On the one hand, I am easily offended – by the perpetuation, deliberate or unthinking, of the assorted kyriarchal -isms that comprise the dominant culture where I live.

On the other hand, I am almost impossible to offend – by personal insults, viciously sarcastic banter, slurs on my taste in entertainment, and the like.

See the difference? In the first case, my being offended is not actually the point. The point is that systemic injustice is being perpetuated; my taking offense is merely a manifestation of outrage at injustice, which is the real Bad Thing. The second case, however, turns on personal sensitivity: the Bad Thing here is my hurt feelings.

Collapsing all distinction between these two modes of being offended is problematic. It's what I did as an asshole young teen awash in unexamined privilege, dismissing all instances of people being offended as the hurt fee-fees of oversensitive whiners.

But completely separating the two modes of offense isn't too great either, and I think that's what I've been doing more recently. In my zeal to fight the power, I've been separating offendedness into wheat and tares: being offended at -isms is legitimate and righteous, but personal sensitivity constitutes an illegitimate form of offendedness. Of course, on a very basic level this separation makes no sense at all, because -isms hurt people. The two forms of offendedness are not identical, but they are intertwined.

At a formative age, I learned the hard way to not have hurt feelings. If you let your hurt feelings show, you gave the people trying to hurt you the satisfaction of a job well done, and encouraged them to keep at it. Better to repress those feelings. Better to hide in the library, fade into the background, turn invisible. Better to try not to have feelings at all, and if you must have them, have them in the novels you read, the diaries and poems and stories you write, the secret world in your head to which you retreat in every idle moment.

I was a child with a tenuous grasp on theory of mind as it was, so “hurt feelings are a weakness and a failing” was not the most helpful lesson for my preteen self to learn. As much as I've tried since then to unlearn everything I absorbed from the kids who made my life so hellish for that couple of years, those things are an insidious part of who I am. (I am worthless. Nobody could ever like me. Showing hurt feelings means they've won.) My brain knows that hurt feelings are a perfectly legitimate reaction to insults and sarcasm, but my gut still dismisses them as weakness, oversensitivity, invalid.

I am, my many past and present failures in this field notwithstanding, getting pretty practiced at battling the kyriarchy. Even though I don't always combat them when and how I should, I have at least gotten quite sensitive to the pervasive presence of -isms all around me.

But I am still not at all sensitive to individuals' hurt feelings. Many times, my personal insensitivity has caused offense, and sometimes I haven't even understood how. What I've realized from this latest incident is that I am drawing an artificial dualism that cannot be maintained. Systemic injustice can cause hurt feelings. Personal insensitivity can cause hurt feelings. Most of the time, it's kind of both.

I will never, I think, be a very sensitive person. I'm too callused by my childhood experiences to be hurt by a bit of mockery or rudeness; but I will fight my tendency to assume that everyone else is too. I will bear in mind that what looks to me like personal sensitivity might well be influenced by a systemic injustice that my privilege has blocked from my view. I will remind myself that, even though a certain joke or comment wouldn't be hurtful me, it might well hurt somebody else, and that doesn't mean that person is oversensitive or somehow in the wrong for feeling that way.

I will learn. I will get better at this.

Dear "The Big Bang Theory": It's Over.

I hate you, The Big Bang Theory.

I've not always hated you. (I've always criticized you a lot, with good reason, but I've not always hated you.) A couple Decembers ago, when my relationship was falling apart and winter was doing its usual number on me, I marathoned your first three seasons. You've never been a good show as such, but you were an adequate guilty pleasure.

I mean, I was always troubled by your broadness, your reliance on lazy stereotypes, and your tendency to invite the audience to laugh at your characters rather than with them. (NERDS LIKE TYPICALLY NERDY PURSUITS! AHAHAHA!) But I put up with all that for the same reason my queer sisters suffered through five seasons of The L Word: when mainstream representations of people like yourself are so rare, you take whatever crumbs you can get. And also because Sheldon was awesome.

(Remember when Sheldon was awesome?)

Last year, though, you were in serious decline. The twin headlights in the darkness of season four were Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, both criminally underserved as Penny's friends Amy and Bernadette. And now you've completely lost the plot.

You've always kind of mocked your characters, but it used to be in an affectionate way; now it's just outright contempt. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia this ain't – you're not a dark, edgy show about horrible people doing horrible things; you're a fluffy three-camera sitcom for mindless entertainment, and You're Doing It Wrong.

Look at How I Met Your Mother. It's always been better than you, of course, but the comparison stands because it too is a show well past its prime, coasting on its six prior seasons of audience goodwill. (Again, not like Always Sunny, whose seventh season is completely killing it and, if it continues like this, might just be the best thing to happen to television ever.) HIMYM has gotten lazy and is spinning its wheels, but – ideological problems aside – is still a pleasant, unchallenging watch, because it doesn't hate its characters.

You seem determined to make your viewers hate all your central characters. You've stripped them of every non-loathsome characteristic, reducing them to cartoonish bundles of broad tics, unfunny running gags, and unbelievable interactions.

And you're just so fucking offensive.

I've put up with so goddamn much of your shit. For four seasons I've overlooked your dumb gender essentialist stereotypes, your constant racism, your sneering at nerd culture; and I just can't take it anymore. The four episodes of season five that have aired so far turn the racism and slut-shaming up to eleven, but it's the most recent episode that was the final straw for me. It was so irredeemably loathsome on every level that I no longer feel even the slightest pang of regret in saying:

Fuck you, The Big Bang Theory. I hate you and will never watch you again.

A Very Glee Blog Post

Regular readers and personal friends will know that I like watching Glee almost as much as I like complaining about Glee. There's just so much to complain about! Lately all my thoughts on Glee have been channeled to my best gals Emily and Erica at the awesome GleeKast, thus depriving my lovely readers of many wise insights and/or fangirly squees (unless you listen to GleeKast, which you should, because it is, as I said, awesome).

My love for Glee is like the Grateful Dead's back catalog: vast, inexplicable, and deeply confusing. Each episode entertains and delights me; each episode offends and annoys me – and my feelings about the show in any given week tilt with the balance of these two axes. Even the better episodes always have a number of elements that need fixing, and the worst ones are downright unpleasant to watch. Nevertheless, Glee has a genuine wildness at its heart, a disconnect from reality and a compelling originality that maintains its status as appointment viewing.

Last time I blogged about the most annoying show on TV was in November. At that time, Glee was really getting on my tits. The ten episodes of Glee's second season that aired before Christmas included the delights of “Duets” and the uneven pleasures of “Grilled Cheesus”, “The Substitute”, and “Furt”, but there was also a slew of truly awful episodes: “Britney/Brittany”, “The Rocky Horror Glee Show”, and “A Very Glee Christmas”. In 2011, the good/bad balance has been more to the positive side, with lots to enjoy about “Silly Love Songs” and “Blame It on the Alcohol”, while “Sexy” and “Original Song” featured enough fanservice to counteract their problematic parts.

My assessment of TV's finest musical dramedy depends not only on my aesthetic response to each episode, though, but also on how much it offends me politically. From the outset, Glee declared its political intent: it was to be an all-inclusive rainbow story of diversity, embracing the bullied, the outcast, and the marginalized kids – per its tagline, it's “for the underdog in all of us”. How it's actually handled diversity, however, has varied wildly.

First, the evidence for the prosecution:

Example 1 – Blaine thinks he might be bisexual. I think there is a chance for the show to offer a thoughtful, nuanced story about adolescent insecurity regarding sex and sexual identity. We actually get a flip resolution and an apparent reinforcement of Kurt's biphobia (“Bisexual is a term that gay guys in high school use when they wanna hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change”). N.B. I still hold out hope for a slightly different exploration of adolescent sexual insecurity now that Blurt is a real, honest-to-God thing.

Example 2 – Mercedes. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes. For God's sake, Glee writers, can't you give poor Amber Riley something to do? If you need some lessons in writing for a woman of color, I'm sure the writers of Community would be able to school you; perhaps in exchange for a nice ratings-boosting in-show plug. When Mercedes told Mr. Schue, in “Original Song”, that her song was good, and he said it wasn't regionals material, I felt that his comment bore the unspoken subtext “because it doesn't foreground the white kids”. Note also the near-total silence of Tina and Mike Chang this season. For a show that started out trading on its Benetton-ad diversity, Glee is really quite amazingly racist.

Example 3 – Quinn gets a personality transplant every five minutes. One day she's the closest thing New Directions has to a feminist; the next all she wants is to be prom queen. And there's the whole virgin-whore thing, where every female character is one or the other; the way a male character can lose his virginity (and even regret it, as Finn and Artie both do) without suffering in any discernible way, but when Quinn loses it she has to go through the oldest punishment in the book to earn her way back to (pseudo-)virgin status; the way, as The Funny Feminist points out, the hetero relationships are focalized through the male party. Sometimes I think that Glee just hates women.

Example 4 – the kicker; in my opinion, the absolute worst thing that has ever happened on Glee. I speak, of course, of Cyborg Artie in “A Very Glee Christmas”. A lot of PWD (that's people with disabilities to you non-PC brigade) find the casting of able-bodied Kevin McHale to play wheelchair-using Artie deeply problematic, because so few parts are available to actors with disabilities (google “crip drag”, y'all). The storyline with Artie's robot legs was the nadir of this show's neverending parade of offensiveness: “Hey, kids using wheelchairs, if your gym teacher is a gazillionaire, then maybe one day you too can walk again like a REAL BOY! It’s a ~*~Christmas miracle~*~”... I hope I don't have to explain why this is so very, very offensive. (If I do, then seriously, google “crip drag” and get self-educating.) The prosecution rests.

None of these things are defensible, of course, so the defense counsel can only hope to outweigh them with counterexamples. Step up:

Counterexample 1 – Coach Bieste becomes a BAMF. As you know, her treatment in “Never Been Kissed” turned my stomach, and since then the writers have wisely stepped back from the 40-year-old virgin territory. For a moment in “Blame It on the Alcohol”, I was terrified that they were going to go there, which would have undermined a truly awesome sequence of her and Will having a buds' night out at the roadhouse (Patrick Swayze sadly too deceased to cameo). At this point, their friendship is almost the only thing I like about Will. Long may it continue.

Counterexample 2 – Lauren Zizes. Oh, she is wonderful. A character who was initially nothing more than a delivery service for mean-spirited and offensive jokes (the AV nerd is fat! The fat girl is always eating! Ha ha!) has transcended this role to become one of my favorite characters in the whole ensemble. Lauren doesn't buy into society's prescriptions for women's body-image; she knows she's beautiful; she doesn't truck with standard Glee self-congratulatory footling around minority characters, telling Puck to cram it when he's being offensive; and, hell, I know a woman doesn't need a hot guy to validate her, but I really do love the Zizes/Puckerman pairing. They're just such a fun couple.

Counterexample 3 – Burt and Kurt's father-son relationship goes from strength to strength. Their every interaction nails it so hard that it's almost as if they've been airlifted in from a different show, one that values things like consistency and believability. The After-School-Special aspect of Glee has been handled really quite well lately, from the Kurt/Karofsky business to a teen-drinking episode that was reasonably realistic and not too preachy. Despite its frequently cartoonish nature, Glee has an ability to totally commit to its PSA-like aspects, with an endearing, My So-Called Life-ish earnestness.

Counterexample 4 – you knew this was coming! Brittana. Santittany. Whatever you choose to call them, they are another terrific instance of Glee's capacity to flesh out one-joke stereotypes far beyond what anyone could have predicted, into one of the best things about the show. Objectivity will never be a part of this for me, because I've been shipping this portmanteau with every atom of my being ever since that first fateful one-liner back in December '09, but I am super-chuffed with how this storyline is unfolding so far. We're not getting straightforward fanservice (well, except where body-shots are concerned); we are getting a long-term story arc, deep emotional truth, and one heck of a lot of processing. Could it get any more lesbian than that? The defense rests.

Noble internauts, fellow Gleeks, you are the jury. What is your verdict?