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'.

Writing, The Gestation Of Ideas, And Shamelessly Plugging An Indie Author While Riding His Coattails

I write books in between dealing with other human beings, and I somehow find the time to write while being swamped under a university degree. This is because I find not writing for too long physically uncomfortable. I didn’t just buy an iPad because I wanted to read eBooks on it and play around online with it, but because I discovered this device could allow me to write down the thoughts of my every waking moment so I never miss an idea that might be worth something. I’m the kind of person who traditional pen and paper writers would be confused by, I even switched to mainly ebooks because a feature of my high functioning autism is, I don’t like getting my nice books creased and scuffed up so I back them up to my hard drive from Kindle where possible via clandestine methods the MPAA and RIAA would frown upon. I’m a product of my time, in the better way than the kinda way you use that word to mean outdated un-PC humour from old films like The Kentucky Fried Movie or The Flintstones’ racial stereotyping. The Kentucky Fried Movie has some good ideas in it, so does The Flintstones, but the jokes that didn't age well just aren't all that funny to me at least. It happens. I mean that i’m used to the idea of online distractions being online research tools whether you realise it or not. I’ve gone to some of my university classes with two hours sleep and i came out of there with more knowledge than one would expect an insomniac to soak in. I watch internet television - no not TV pirated on the internet, actual TV made for the internet. Screw reality television, I want to see what horrendous remnant of the Best Buy bargain bin nerds in their basement with cameras acting as critic comedians are gonna torture themselves with this week. Usually when i watch actual old media TV it’s  in a DVD box set and it’s usually anime, something made by HBO, or cartoons and old TV classics like Star Trek that actually worth watching versus a bunch of crap they put on DVD because everything has to be on DVD. And i buy a lot of movies on DVD too because i enjoy movies and my film school grad brother doesn’t read nearly as many books as I do so i have to communicate to him through the second language of cinema. And i read more books on my iPad because i carry it with me everywhere and i can write a book on the same device as i read one on. And while navigating the minefield of modern life’s distractions, books somehow get read and written, because i make time for them. Right now i have no real romantic or social life to speak of, and i became a writer because i wanted to do something productive with my tenure as a lonely shut in instead of whining into the abyss of internet forums which have no love for the mentally tortured whatsoever - a stupid thing i did because i had assumed internet forums worked like they did in Train Man by Hitori Nakano where the anime nerd is helped out by his forumite bros to ask out the girl of his dreams he just saved from a drunk guy on a train, hence the title. But my attempts at reaching out to the cold heart of two separate internet forums i now no longer post on were repaid, perhaps deservedly, with scorn and bile aimed at the whiny beeyotch-ness i once was and currently attempt to avoid returning to despite multiple failures in this department. This is the reason I only post on TV Tropes anymore. I spent about sevem years in the online wilderness trying to find both a place to belong, and myself. I haven’t found either one of those things but I’m still trying. Still trying even after constantly failing to find those is what’s important. The times i just gave up on everything were some of my most miserable. Of course this is coming from a man who staved off suicidal thoughts by shifting my haterade from loathing myself to something productive, like despising the Australian government for not giving us a bill of rights after more than a century. Also, writing was the cheapest medium of art I could find I could latch onto. That and I liked reading books enough to want to contribute to the craft of bookmanship instead of just reading Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales Of The Greek Heroes over and over until the spine began to fall apart (again, this is why as a high functioning autistics love ebooks, the tech is replaced and not the books). I wanted to be part of it all, i wanted to give people my age a reason to read again, since the perception of books compared to other mediums like film and television has much less razzle dazzle. I could probably write an entire post on razzle dazzle other mediums other than literature supposedly have, but this post is getting long as it is, so I’m trying to get to the point I originally started out with. Which was gestation of ideas. Often I try to write all of the ideas at once instead of focusing on three or four points to put in lots of blogs so I maintain some kind of productivity average that isn’t awful and makes me look lazy. So I decided to write this one blog post and shortening the other about eighteen blog posts gestating and needing to be cannibalised into other, better blog posts sooner or later. I know I keep promising that blog review of Mishima: A Life In Four Colours but right now since I'm at university my existence is a bit more Jacob Martin: A Life In Four Semesters. So instead I'm going to talk about Scott Morgan and his book How To Be A Whiny Beeyotch, since I both recently purchased and read it, and going into Mishima: A Life In Four Colours unprepared and unresearched could get me death threats from Japanese right wing groups, possibly even litigation from the author's widow if I dare suggest Mishima was gay, as I found out before sidelining that project in the Esky Of Unfinished Concepts. Meanwhile let's get to the point of the whole ideas gestation thing I hope I got across but probably didn't, as my arrest record by the Tangent Police is a long and storied one.

Basically what I was trying to say is, How To Be A Whiny Beeyotch is a book that mentions different excuses authors use for not writing and I noticed that there was a particular disdain for Hogan's Heroes reruns, and maybe by extension spending time watching reruns of anything. Scott Morgan seems like a very Generation X dude since his mentions of disdain for flannel shirts and goatees does not match my Generation Y appreciation of them, not so much as a retro thing like he fears. So he's right that things like TV reruns and internet dicking around is distracting to modern writers but at the same time my high functioning autism comes into play where I hyperfocus on things I'm really interested in, so my writing generally takes priority over things I actually should be doing as well like university assignments since I'm still bad at time management and do not know how the real world outside of my parent's house actually works despite my paying the rent to live there. Also the gestation of ideas I get when I go outside and then watch something like some internet TV where nerds in their basements are torturing themselves with the latest Hollywood dreck they found in the bargain bin of a Best Buy (most internet comedians are American, as an Australian I should say I shop at JB Hi-Fi which is pretty much the same thing as far as I'm aware), only to realise somewhere buried in the crazed rantings of that internet comedian that something inside that movie made that person react in a certain way that gives me a new approach to write a story or book with. And then I read an actual book, just to keep myself in tune with what the written word actually looks like. I mentioned The Kentucky Fried Movie earlier not just to cite it as an example of something that hasn't aged well on either a PC or comedic level but it's also the source of an idea I had for a short story collection where despite each short story having vastly different universes, some of them are similar enough that characters could appear in two rather than one story in cameos, like Big Jim Slade from The Kentucky Fried Movie emerging from one sketch only to resurface in another sketch unrelated to him called A Fistful Of Yen where he breaks other characters out of prison. Considering The Kentucky Fried Movie is a collection of short sketches, and short story collections are anthologies unto themselves, the idea of one character from one story reappearing in another is one worth recycling in my writing, hence watching a random film like The Kentucky Fried Movie was not a waste of unproductive time for me as a writer, it's not like I'm watching reruns of Hogan's Heroes and doing nothing with the experience. If anything watching new audiovisual material that's odd enough to be worth remembering rejigs my memory of unfinished stories or novels worth rescuing and bringing back out of the Esky Of Unfinished Concepts to be completed, since a lot of these ideas aren't bad, they're incomplete and need to gestate for a while before continuing. Which is a lot like that Mishima: A Life In Four Colours review. I'm not not writing it because I'm lazy, it's because I'm still writing other things while juggling university stuff and my research for university to obtain grades outweighs research that will help me avoid death threats from apologists for Imperial Japan. I've got enough on my plate as it is.

Oh, and as for why I trackback linked Scott Morgan? Trackback linking won me an interview with Australian radio personality John Safran before. So if I link to his website through my blog he'll probably notice, and might offer a rebuttal. Which is good because I've noticed he's been lamenting that new people don't reach out to him as much any more for Twitter discussions. Consider this the beginning of a discussion, Scott Morgan. I just rode your coattails before you knew it.

The Guardian Of Outdated Australian Stereotypes

I haven't blogged for about a week, but today I saw something in the Guardian.co.uk online news section for Australia where I was forced to comment via my corner of the web.

First some context, the Australia section of The Guardian's online newspaper site was recently opened up to provide more credible journalism than the mainstream news sources Australia has which have gone to the dogs, but articles like this just fill me with dread as to the accuracy of the picture this well meaning newspaper section is painting about my country.

Some of the commentary is dead on, a lot of racism and sexism is still around, the Aborigines are treated even worse, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. At least it seems that way. To say Australians don't like change is somewhat misleading. They don't like bad change, is a more apt description of what we like or don't like about this country. Change is slow down here, but it's happening more rapidly than most people who don't have the internet probably realise. We live in an age where the average twenty something in Australia knows more about the internet than the government figures supposedly meant to represent them and govern how everything is to be run.

This is notable in that a recent case where customs confiscated manga that a local Australian collector imported ended with the customs agency forced to return the manga/smut/erotica/art (which warms my heart, don't get me wrong, I relish every second of embarrassment the moral guardians in this country have dished out to them) to the person who ordered this stuff online. Oh, we have culture, we might have to import it sometimes but it's there.

We also have a culture, a time honoured tradition, of bringing embarrassment to politicians and moral guardians who question our way of life, for good or ill. Sure, we get situations where hate speech is played on the radio, but we also get situations where the attempts for a national internet filter were so poorly put together by overly nanny state-ish OFLC and telecommunications boards that it was defeated with much applause from the nerds of this country, whose tireless efforts to keep the Prime Minister's mitts out of our personal lives is in need of some kind of medal, considering how many flame wars our local internet has had to go through to remain uncensored like a lot of our movies and video games have been in the past fifty years.

Because of the incompetent attempts to nanny state the people too young to care about what the old stick in the muds of censorship have to say about us, and too old to be bothered fighting these annoyances directly rather than just ordering things online from overseas when nobody's looking, that right there is the Australian character, writ large.

We do have a culture, it's not built in stone or cement as much as it's built upon years of fighting in silence until now against irrelevant cultural dinosaurs that need to go extinct. There are people who are changing things in this country, they're just not as loud as the rugby and soccer fans drunk on Victoria Bitter about it.

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.