The Mistaken Gendering of DVDs

So my brother does this thing where he occasionally, about once a month, comes into my room, rifles through my DVDs, and upon picking out some particularly "girly" ones like my Forever Marilyn 7-Disc Blu-Ray box set of Marilyn Monroe films, or the egregiously pink amaray case that Can't Stop The Music (The Village People Movie, for those not in the know) and the pink and glitter bedecked cover of my Clueless Blu-Ray copy, I've noticed he cherry picks these, ignoring the far darker subject matter of Cannibal Holocaust, Salo, and my entire grindhouse DVD section including Zombie Flesh Eaters and the like, just so that he can make cheap jokes about how "gaaaayyyy!" my DVD and Blu Ray collection is. I have long suffered under my film studies graduate brother's regressive agenda when it comes to the gendering of DVDs without them needing to be. Case in point, the fact that I have an anime DVD and Blu Ray collection from the get go is a big fat target for him to just shout "GAAAAAAY" at me without any real insight into how Ouran High School Host Club is somehow for a female or homosexual man audience only. I really hate how my brother outright dismisses entire subsections of media because they either look too girly or too "gay" for him. I should remind you, reader, that out of me and him I'm the only one who was willing to put his lips to the test to find out if he was gay for certain, whilst he seems to be very overtly of the "trolling makes homophobia funny!" camp. Oh how he justifies his regressive ideals through the guise of trolling. I've seen this argument many times and in the real world of the internet (bear with me here) such an argument usually gets laughed at or results in somebody cracking out the banhammer.

In any case, the mere suggestion that DVDs are gendered objects is something worth looking into since I've seen commentary from both my brother and his friends that there even exist "Manly DVD Shelves" as opposed to girly of "GAAAAY" ones. Allow me to elaborate on this. What comes to mind for most men when they engender a film with overtly masculine qualities? 300, the oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Charles Bronson, that MMA movie Warrior, things like The Raid: Redemption and Dredd, Drive despite Ryan Gosling having a sex symbol status with women, these are fairly testosterone filled works of cinema, you start to think. Surely no hint of oestrogen could even touch these digital video disks and remain un-impregnated by their sheer virility? This is the kind of mentality my brother and some of his friends have when it comes to their DVDs. But the thing is... I own a lot of DVDs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies. I probably own more of these than my brother or his friends do. But due to the particularly pink packaging of certain films like Can't Stop The Music and Clueless, one can cherry pick these out of a shelf of otherwise gritty and muscle heavy audiovisual material and assert that the masculinity of the DVD shelf owner is somehow lacking in some weird imaginary way that guys who haven't really experienced the Tumblr Social Justice flame wars for themselves tend to do because they either don't know any better or are legitimately homophobic.

Now the supposed "Chick Flick" or "Romantic Comedy" has been stigmatised as a genre "men don't watch". This... kinda needs to die. Along with the idea that all of these kinds of films are terrible. When Harry Met Sally, gold standard romantic comedy right there. (500) Days Of Summer, one of the best romantic comedies of the last ten years by far. Yet somehow these films irritate men in some way (and often irritate women in completely unrelated ways which I'm not quite as qualified to comment on) and are regarded as the dross of cinema where nothing with testicles can enter without being emasculated. As I mentioned earlier, anime, particularly anime made in the last ten years, has a very, very stigmatised reputation as being "less than it was" in the 1990s where gore-fests like Ninja Scroll and Berserk were the order of the day. Worse still, I feel really uncomfortable about suggestions that something like Free! which is intended for a fujoshi audience of women who like to watch hot dudes splash around in water are somehow an affront to the standards of anime's halcyon days when manly men were men and women were... still as badly written a lot of the time as they used to be in the more fanservicey shows.

It's this really weird mentality of manly media that I don't understand when it comes to complaints about how anime's turned into an all out girly man mode. A lot of the anime that gets made now definitely draws in a female audience, which is a good thing, I assure you. You realise what happens when there's only dudes in a fandom, right? You get stagnation. Also you get a sausage festival. Just sayin'.

I Fell Down A Hole Part II: Fall Harder

Read this first, as it was the beginning of my trying to grapple with this. It explains some of what I've been going through, not all of it.

As you may be aware, for the past five years I've been trying to complete my University degree whilst struggling through a fog of depression. This isn't easy because my mood swings so often that you could be forgiven for thinking, if you only saw me for about three hours that day on a Friday when I only have one class, that I was happy as a clam this whole time. Not the case, since as soon as I got home usually when it got dark and cold as it does in April in the Australian climate my mood goes haywire and my brain gets sad and I start hating myself.

This was usually what happened, every April, like clockwork until this year when after I got into somewhat of a decent sleeping pattern my moods swung less erratically and for once this time of year I was a lot happier. And scared, because I didn't know when my mood was gonna swing back into Sad Land at any moment. I didn't trust it, I thought I'd wake up in The Matrix and find out I was in Sad Land the whole time.

But after three days being happy as a clam... my mood didn't swing back to unhappy and crazy.

I have a few theories as to why this must have happened.

For one thing I stopped troll rolling on message boards trying to reach out to people who didn't want to deal with me, and I didn't want to burden with my crazy mood swings. This resulted with me going to bed at semi-appropriate times instead of falling asleep at 3am in the morning at best. And because I got better sleep I got more sunlight and my brain got happier I guess.

I've also wanted to get back into my usual hobbies I had before I fell into this hole of academia and depression, but it also seemed like it felt that getting a University degree was the thing preventing me from achieving my true potential trying to get published instead of rotting away undiscussed while trapped in an academic situation where I was forced to analyse stuff rather than create it, since I'm at that part of my Uni degree where you're doing theory subjects instead of practical work, and too much theory lumped in there makes you feel very uncreative sometimes unless you put your mind to it and start making it fun. I had to use gamification to improve my outlook on academia, despite my lifetime of negative, stressful experiences trying to play actual video games which put me off the medium of video games for life.

So what was I if I wasn't a gamer? Did I suck because I sucked at video games, alienating me from a lot of men I grew up around who loved video games? I hated video games growing up because my autism comes with this thing called a motor skills deficiency which means everything the movie The Wizard told you about autistic people pwning at video games is a hollow lie. The game controllers intended to immerse me into these digital worlds were ironically the thing that cripples me from being able to enjoy those imaginative digital worlds at all. And yet young people were playing video games in droves. Hardly anyone apart from me who I knew were reading books. I loved reading books. I loved writing them too. It's all I really had, considering I enrolled in an art school degree out of a fear that an Arts Literature or Creative Writing degree would be the same recycled shit I learned in high school about postmodernism. I hated that, I'm not surprised a lot of kids my age hate reading because I had to fight tooth and nail to retain my love of it through an education system that failed to imagine things, or for that matter imagine a future of kids who loved to read because they were allowed to think their own thoughts about what they read, and read for fun even.

Reading and writing were my true passion. I'd been doing it since I was twelve years old, I think anyway. They gave me an award for Interest In Library back in Primary School, I wish I could find it in the pile of boxes we had after my family moved. It's all I knew how to do. My brother, he was way more into film growing up than me. He didn't just want to watch films and be entertained like I did, he wanted to make them. Me, I read books not just because I wanted to read them, I wanted to write some of my own too. When I read a book, I thought to myself that this was a form of expression I could totally do myself, it's a low budget medium with minimal stress compared to film which would have overwhelmed me with a career of one panic attack after another once the smallest thing went wrong.

Literature on the other hand allows itself to be taken in slowly. It's what I like about it. You go at your own pace and you can deal with the emotions it throws at you in your own time.

And a few days ago that got me thinking about other things, not just books, that I used to love before I got all depressed, lonely and miserable. Things that got me through the day since I didn't have a girlfriend like the other boys sometimes had to motivate me to get out of bed in the morning. I had my book writing and book reading to do, but I had to compensate for the whole being terrible at video games thing. So I looked out for things that gave me the same beautifully imagined creative worlds of video games but presented in a format I could actually enjoy.

I started looking up videos on the internet, somewhere on TVTropes I came across ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com and I found something there. To this day that website is the reason why I'd rather watch nerds in their basement talk about a movie or cartoons on the internet instead of reality television. Fuck Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I wanted to figure out what The Cinema Snob was gonna drag out of the dustbin of history this week. Fuck Honey Boo Boo, I was watching Nostalgia Chick and Todd In The Shadows introduce me to the joys of pop music and incredibly girly media I wouldn't have touched back in high school for fear of being persecuted more than I was. Before I watched Brows Held High for the first time the only arthouse films I was familiar with were the ones I walked in on my mother watching on SBS, and she'd tell me to scram because these movies often had nudity, or violence. There was one Friday night my mother was proven right in her assertion that SBS wasn't a kid's channel because that fateful late evening they were showing Perfect Blue, and if you know what Perfect Blue is you'd realise why a twelve year old boy would be scared shitless by it.

I was twelve years old, man. I didn't even know what rape was. I was so innocent that if I were a character in the Dragon Ball Z universe I'd still be eligible to ride the Nimbus Cloud. That's how green I was then. Depressing to think that the kid who once was horrified by Perfect Blue at age twelve barely raised an eyebrow at Cannibal Holocaust because Brad Jones, The Cinema Snob warned him in advance what he was getting himself into. And I think that's why I was willing to expand my horizons a bit more. Spoilers are generally avoided by some, but if I know something horrifying is about to happen in a movie, and your spoiler saves me from being traumatised, you've done a service to my poor anxiety disorder that thanks you for the heads up.

And I think that's where the pieces started to fit together. I was raised in a family where somehow, by some twist of fate, the act of tricking one's elders into letting you see The Godfather is a rite of passage that for unknown reasons was passed down to my generation, after my own mother tricked her mother into letting her see it in cinemas on its release. Truly the watching of highly age inappropriate material that changes your life is a time honoured tradition in my household, as smut and ultraviolence is passed down through the ages to the younger generations. This is the tradition I hope to pass down to the children I hope to have the privilege of conceiving, considering that my lack of luck in love or romance compared to my peers of the same age made me shun the entire rom-com genre for its making me feel miserable and lonely when I compare my life to everyone else's.

It's a flawed, borderline crazy reason to hate rom-coms, but you can see how a twenty three year old lifetime with no reciprocation in romance can make a man hate such a genre and its tropes rather than using that genre to live out fantasies that will become reality maybe one day when the stars are right. Instead my depression ridden sadness brain was offended by the rom-com genre due to its believing I, and my brain, were being lied to by Hollywood.

Things started to change for the better more recently, not from the charms and embraces of a woman's love, but instead an intellectual love of new ideas and concepts found in cinema, books and various other places I'd run into at Books Kinokuniya and JB Hi-Fi where entire worlds could be found inside a graphic novel or a DVD that was sold in either of these places.

I'll tell you about that stuff in Part 3, where I come to grips with what it is I actually enjoy in life rather than hate about it.

I Fell Down A Hole

Soooooo...

I ended up being swamped with academic demands for most of April, which for me is an awful time to be not in a coma because my brain goes haywire when it gets cold. It happens to me every year, without fail. April sucks. It is my least favourite month, of all months. My mood swings get out of control when this month rolls around and I'm glad it's nearly over. It's a month that's awful for a number of reasons I could name, financial woes, getting sick, seasonal affective disorder, depression, the works.

And then by the end of the month when my cash flow started getting better I began to think about the kind of hobbies I used to really love but ended up neglecting because of academic or depressive reasons. The things that make me feel alive again, or more alive than angry I guess.

I watched End Of Evangelion today, for the first time since I first watched it along with the rest of Neon Genesis Evangelion with my brother and he punched me in the stomach over the ending and he autotuned my yelps of pain with his I-Am-T-Pain iPhone app for the lulz. I will never forget that night I watched End Of Eva with my brother not in a grudge holding sort of way but in a "That was the summer of Evangelion" sort of way when I think back and really remember what it was that used to make me happy before the first rounds of horrible, horrible depression sank in.

I'm not sure if most people are aware but I was a Pathways student who did my final high school year over a number of years so my high functioning autistic brain could cope with the workload. I was emotionally abandoned by three separate year groups of students who just plain forgot about me the minute they graduated, so as a result I'm really nervous a lot of the time that the people I go to University with will forget about me and never talk to me again just like they did. I'm awful at making long term connections with people. Never had a girlfriend, all I have is my novel writing and because I've been so busy with art school work doing a Photomedia degree I no longer believe will lead me to what I want to do with my life, my blogging here's taken a bit of a back seat to the madness that's been going on at home. Not exactly newsworthy madness, but definitely a neurotic madness that leads one to wonder about things of minuscule importance at 3am because I can't sleep properly.

I guess what started happening as to why my brain seems to be resisting the winter blues more than usual is because I've had to get up earlier in the morning than usual for a number of reasons, one is that I'm back at University. I have theoretically, somewhere I need to be instead of being a self employed novelist bum who sits around at home reading books and watching cartoons of both the Western and Japanese variety.

I'm putting this up here so that I don't look like I've been squatting on this blog URL making nothing, but new stuff is coming.

We Want Some Too, Counter Culture and Modern Bohemia

I like reading a lot of books on my Kindle, I take it everywhere I go if I can because you just never know if you're gonna need to read something while stuck on the train or a bus. And I read some pretty interesting stuff if I don't say so myself. One of these books was We Want Some Too by Hal Niedzviecki. It was written in the early 2000s, but it was pre-viral internet, there was not nearly as big a self publishing, indie DIY presence through the internet that there is now. No social media either. Also MTV was still relevant at the time of writing.

But to discount the message this book has because of how it's aged is to ignore certain basic truths about the nature of media, and "lifestyle culture" as the book puts it. Lifestyle culture as defined by this book is essentially the mutation of the real lives of young people yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves, to contribute to the culture, to be like the people on TV. Consumerism and a desire to buy into celebrity and mass culture was there even pre-internet, but I think that the ways mass culture works now has been so splintered by the internet that any attempt to heal the wounds of the mutilated mass culture, and young people now are far apart from each other in the different groups of what people are fans of. There's fandoms now, not subcultures, that people belong to.

There's Homestuck fans, The Most Popular Girls In School fans, Disney fans, Sherlock fans, Girls fans, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com fans, Webcomic and Webseries fans, there's now a mixture of both corporate and web based counter cultural fandoms that meld together on Tumblr, posting GIF images featuring their favourite quotes from TV shows and movies they love, and share with others who also love these media bites of a larger whole. On Tumblr you can often find yourself alone if you're not part of the same fandoms that the cool kids are part of, which is not unlike the tale of the Tarzan obsessive collector from We Want Some Too who is isolated by his distinct fandom because so few others share that fandom because other fandoms are more popular.

This book was written at a time where young people's popular culture barely made reference to the internet, whereas now you can't escape it, the very people this book is telling who yearned for a way to get their voice out there, and possibly become viral, got what they wanted, at least I think so. Maybe not. I certainly don't know what it takes for something to become a viral hit, and most of the stuff that does become viral doesn't appeal to me all that much. Psy's Gangnam Style is a notable exception because the success of that song awakened the awesome market forces of the K-Pop industry, with this breakout hit that struck a chord with people around the world without anybody even understanding the lyrics, it was the shock of the new, the sound of now, Asia seems to be having a renaissance of cultural content breaking out in the West even as Japan's output like anime is sagging in popularity due to a tendency for the animation industry there to pander to local otaku instead of casual and foreign fans who might find the cultural tendencies towards otaku fetishism of little girls to be uncomfortable and not what they're looking for in their entertainment. Rather than one Asian country dominating the visual and musical culture of the now, the stranglehold Japan had in the minds of the young seems to be fading and spreading out to the rest of Asia where their own voices, once feared to be trampled by monolithic Japanese culture elements, may get a chance to be heard once again.

Meanwhile in the West, long after this book was published, I heard on Twitter a little drabble where a notable webcomic artist was saying that the electric guitar is an extinct instrument, and heavy metal is the only genre of music where the instrument is still relevant. It's not an instrument of the young, whose music is now made by DJs and computers. Occasionally you get a middle class white college educated band whining about how their city needs a guitar based band to represent them, but the ship has sailed, the damage is done. Clinging to the guitar as a cultural mode of expression is about as useful to stemming the tide of new culture as only watching MTV Classic, which in Australia where I live is a channel that's still around and plays old music videos aiming for the nostalgia and hipster markets I imagine. The overwhelming whiteness of guitar based music in both indie pop and rock, rock and roll and heavy metal has been struggling under the burden of rap and hip hop, as well as K-Pop recently becoming far more relevant to young people raised in a much more ethnically and culturally diverse world. White people are in no danger of going away, that's just stupid, only the most hardened of Stormfront members would be bold enough to suggest that white people are going extinct.

What I'm saying is that European influences, such as France, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, to a lesser extent Australia, are fading into the background for a while because right now is the time when hip hop, rap, R&B and electronic music have gained legitimacy, they've got cultural capital that's long overdue, and the idea of what counts as legitimate music is changing. The Grammy Awards have always had a hard snub of rap as a genre, but the people, white, black or anyone else have been exposed to it long enough that it's part of life, it's just there and to ignore it would be as foolhardy as ignoring the reality that a lot of people of multiple races play video games, or that Hollywood cinema isn't speaking to the common people due to a combination of remaking classic films rather than funding new, more racially diverse content as well as more roles for women in mainstream Hollywood pictures.

Which brings me to Lena Dunham's project with HBO, Girls, a show that I can't agree with on an ideological level, I used to have my problems with Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim and the movie adapted from it due to a number of reasons including that I couldn't relate to characters who so easily throw away romantic relationships where I've struggled all my life to begin my first romance that wasn't one sided, but Girls makes Scott Pilgrim look like Menace II Society. None of the houses depicted in Girls look remotely like homes that regular blokes like me or regular women I know could afford, nor do they look particularly lived in, they look like aspirational show homes rather than abodes that people live, work, play and sweat in every day of their lives. For a supposedly Bohemian show, it's very slick, polished and manufactured to appeal to the fantasy of what its fanbase wants to live as their lives rather than what I could on any level deem reality. Lena Dunham clearly wants to be the voice of a generation but when she spends a lot of episodes as do other characters romancing wealthy and culturally powerful older men with much more clout and influence than they do, I'm forced to wonder whether Dunham is being honest that she's portraying the reality of what twenty something women are these days versus what they wish they could be. Say what you will about Twilight, it's garbage, but it's very honest in what it's trying to achieve.

Mass culture, although splintered, is still around, and the internet has not completely replaced it. It does however, provide some form of escape from what society showers with mainstream and financial success, for sometimes it is undeserving.