(no subject)

[wavyarms]

Re: stress - thank you, Eddie Izzard!

In other news, Cranky Curmudgie McCrankpants today read this article about the Facebook movie and whether it's sexist on Slate, and had no problems with it really (haven't seen the movie) with one glaring exception, where the writer says, "The writer Rebecca Davis O'Brien found Christy to be an Asian-American stereotype, a reading that never occurred to me while watching: Neither the opportunistic seduction of powerful men nor the melodramatic burning of silk scarves seem like ethnically specific behaviors."

Now, I don't have an opinion on whether either of the examples mentioned is stereotypical or not, because I am not well-versed in how Asians are stereotyped in popular culture, but how obnoxious is it to dismiss someone's claim with "Well, that never occurred to me." Because clearly, whether or not things OCCUR to you is directly related to whether or not they are true! FAIL. There are quite a lot of things that it never OCCURRED to me are insulting or prejudiced, but once it was explained to me, and I listened, then I learned that they were! Amazing.

Comments

[wavyarms.livejournal.com]

Well, that's not the main thrust of my post though. Whether or not she is an example of a given stereotype is not crucial - I was complaining that someone apparently thinks a logical comeback to a given argument is "Well, that never occurred to me."

[ethicsgradient.livejournal.com]

The more I look at the article and that line, the more I think that the comeback isn't the "it didn't occur to me" but the "X and Y behaviors don't seem ethnically specific." The author gives a specific reason that ethnic issues didn't occur to him/her (Dana?). It's not just a blanket "It didn't occur to me so it's not there." I read it as "Nothing I saw was remotely ethnostereotypical, so it didn't occur to me."

Is the alternative that we assume every action we see in a movie probably stemmed from some stereotype that we aren't aware of yet?

I think that article is right on target about the relationship of the movie and its characters to women, btw, having gotten a chance to read it more closely.