Sweeney: Somewhere along the line, this blog transitioned from, “LOL, kids books are ridiculous when read as adults!” to, “Wow, there is a lot of dangerous, problematic messaging in our favorite media.” It didn’t happen on purpose and it didn’t happen over night, but it definitely happened. Just as the blog has changed, it has also changed us in the process.
Marines: I don’t think I’m ever approaching the material we cover with the mind-set, “let’s find all the ways this is wrong.” To be sure, our primary goal has always been about finding humor in the way we discuss the media we chose, and letting that be the common ground between us all as consumers. Things did change, though, as we found ourselves unable to look past problems without calling them out. With humor or anger or gifs or CAPSLOCK, it became important to us to say, “here is a problematic thing.” That emphasis certainly did change how we recap and how we person.
Sweeney: Absolutely – it’s never some gotta-catch-’em-all quest to find problematic or flawed things. It’s just that the more stories you dissect, the more obvious those things become to you. We’ve been at this for a few years now. We have hundreds (fast approaching 1,000!) of posts and just as the stuff we recap varies in quality, so too have our efforts as recappers. Part of this is a consequence of growing as people alongside our blog.
Mari: It’s pretty much one of the scariest things about blogging in any form, having this archive of younger, sometimes less informed thoughts for all to see. Occasionally, it can be like cringing at old pictures of yourself, but with an audience.
Sweeney: It’s not a huge audience but it’s also not a particularly transparent audience, which is almost scarier. Never knowing who is looking at that awkward photo from your 8th grade dance is slightly terrifying at times. Not terrifying enough to make us stop doing it, but certainly something that give us pause.
If we were to name a primary catalyst for the shift in our approach, it would almost certainly be Fifty Shades. A year ago today we posted the Fifty Shades Freed Epilogue. We decided to write this post before we realized that, but it seemed serendipitous since that’s the best place to begin this conversation.
That project started out as Marines reading and laughing in a similar fashion to the old Childhood Trauma posts, but it quickly became clear that it was multifaceted bullshit. There were just so many ways to pick it apart! In so doing, we also learned a lot. By seeing this glaring example of stuff done wrong we became more vigilant about spotting its tropes in other places. There was some push back to this at first – people who had come for a different vibe were resistant to the idea that the stuff they loved could be filled with all of that terrible shit. Those responses also sharped our perspective.
Mari: As did the responses from those who got what we were doing and picked up on additional things we hadn’t seen. We bring our point of view to each recap, informed by our experiences and who we are as people. By hearing from our diverse audience, we learned how to be on the look out for even more things. In that way, positive and negative responses both pushed us toward that sharpened perspective. All signs pointed to never being able to consume media in quite the same way.
Sweeney: “Ruined for life,” was the original blog sub-moniker that Fifty Shades created here. Jokes aside, “ruined” isn’t the word I’d use sincerely, but we’ll get to that.
It became increasingly clear that the What Not To Do lessons of Fifty Shades remain important outside of that media – observations we made even within the confines of that project as we got further into it. More important, in fact, because the stuff we love is a much more robust carrier of damaging messages. It’s one thing to look at a terrible piece of media and say, “Why yes, it is all terrible!” When we become so defensively attached to a particular piece of media, then, we become far more inclined to internalize its messages uncritically, because surely the thing we love can’t be part of the problem.
Mari: To be repetitive here (because it’s important), most people would agree that Fifty Shades is terrible right up at the surface. There were no good characters or good storytelling to mask the terrible, so calling it out was easy and fun. We become far more inclined to internalize messages uncritically, because the problems are hidden somewhere beneath good characters or good storytelling.
Sweeney: That has been one of the big lessons we’ve learned over the last couple years. While we can love shows for doing big important stuff right, it’s also super important to acknowledge the parts that they get wrong. I have, without question, become a more aware, critical consumer in the years that this blog has existed. Yes, sometimes it’s frustrating because I know that nobody is ever going to get it right all the time, no matter how much I wish they would. I’m still grateful, though, because it makes me that much more in awe of the people and media texts that get shit so incredibly right.
Mari: That in mind, I think this is us stopping to acknowledge that we’re not going to get it right all the time either, no matter how much we wish we could. We are not above that truth, much to the disappointment of every version of our future!selves.
Sweeney: Precisely. And to that end, the complaints peppered throughout stuff we otherwise enjoy – which is, in truth most of what we recap – aren’t meant to declare the entire thing irredeemable either. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we don’t. Just as we celebrate the wins, we should be willing to step back and acknowledge the failures and missteps.
I’d also be remiss, while talking about how the blog changed me, if I did not mention that I started and finished an MA in a degree that deals heavily in media studies in that time. I’m not saying it’s all the blog. That said, for all the time I spent dealing in those things academically, it would never have resonated in the same way if I didn’t also have this outlet where to put some of those ideas into very real practice.
Mari: I’d be remiss if I did not mention that during the course of this blog, I’ve had very real life stuff happen that felt like manifestations of the same problematic themes we’d been discussing. Fiction became reality for me in a way I could’ve never imagined possible, and yes, that made me all the more passionate about calling certain harmful ideas out.
Sweeney: That too. The very disturbing real life things happening in tandem with these big media discussions certainly shaped the way I understood how these things fit into larger cultural conversations. When discussions about characters involve some of the similarly insane language you see being used about real life tragic events, it becomes something of a moral imperative to see these stories as staging grounds for important cultural dialogue.
And, of course, all of this is part of why we are so big on inserting our names and bylines and bios, so that it is always clear that we are a collection of actual individual humans with individual opinions, and not some sort of monolithic entity. We have internal discussions from time to time about treatment of certain situations, but for the most part, we all come at this with our backgrounds and perspectives.
Sometimes we can make light because something is either impossibly stupid (i.e., 50 shades) or perhaps self-aware commentary, but when the stuff that mostly gets it right doesn’t seem aware of problematic messages, calling it out is important. We talk stories, and some of our analysis is, “Does this work from a storytelling perspective?” but the, “What is the message here?” parts and their social relevance are important to us too.
Unfortunately, sometimes we get stuff super wrong. Especially in those old posts. There are so many things from Way Back When that make me cringe. Some of it because it’s badly written but worse still are the points where I feel I’ve crossed a line. There was the rise and fall of the #hosuspension. (Whose tragic flaw was mostly that it got warped beyond recognition from its original form. Sorry, #hosuspension.)
Mari: A huge one for me is how we talked about EL James the author (or more importantly, the person) in connection to Fifty Shades, the horrible series. We hated the series so much that it felt fair to extend that to the person who created it. I just wish we had been a little more careful in how we discussed her.
Sweeney: Agreed. Whatever our issues with her story are, she’s an actual human being and our criticism failed some basic decency tests where she was concerned. We’re going to say this a few more times this post, but we fucked up.
I am genuinely sorry for all the stuff I’ve gotten wrong. That’s the first and most important thing to say here: I have gotten plenty of things wrong and I am sorry.
There’s a whole range of stuff that touches on some of the big issues that we are quick to call out today that, in our formative years, we overlooked. The actual inspiration for this post came from a comment we received on our recap of Go Fish. (In addition to the other stuff, I am also deeply sorry for this tragic reminder that Go Fish is a thing that happened.) There’s a bit at the end of the episode in which the death of Swim Coach is preceded by what is basically a rape joke – his “boys” had “needs” which had gone unmet. Since he was a misogynistic shit dick, we reveled in that moment in about the way the episode intended.
Yesterday we were rightly alerted to the glaring problem here: this is a “the victim deserved it” rape joke. In addition to being a dangerous message to perpetuate, it’s also mortifying to read back stuff like that. Knowing that I’ve put a few toxic thoughts out into the universe makes me long for the comparatively serene mortification of a few tacky butterfly clips and a pair of glittery jeans.
Again: We fucked up. We are sorry.
And we said as much, because that’s the first step. It’s really easy to get defensive. My instinct was to try to explain why we made the comment, to insist that it was just sarcastic and that we were being so! totally! misunderstood! But that, of course, is exactly the wrong way to respond. We can’t sit here and identify damaging media messages without being willing to be honest about our own harmful commentary.
Mari: I think the knee-jerk reaction is absolutely to get defensive. Even after my brain went, “well, you were wrong. Apologize,” my secondary desire was to give my apology context. The second worse thing you can do (after not apologizing at all) is to start chipping away at your apology with useless phrases like, “it wasn’t my intention…” Intention be damned. It’s true for the media we cover so it must also be true for ourselves: once a piece is out for consumption, message trumps intention. Let me also apologize for the times I’ve gotten the message wrong.
Sweeney: This isn’t the first time we’ve been called out and I’m sure it won’t be the last. This post isn’t just about that one line. (I’m not sure a two-years-later 2500 word retraction is quite the answer to that specific problem.) This post is about acknowledging, in a broader sense, that we get stuff wrong. That’s why we have these conversations. We never set out to make this what our blog is about, it just happens to be a big part of the way things evolved.
Mari: There’s a bit of a, “if you dish it, take it,” idea here, but that’s oversimplifying. The true idea is that we believe pointing these things out is important and to really believe in that, we have to open ourselves up and be receptive to this type of feedback. The truly upsetting scenario is one in which no one ever told me I was being the jerk laughing at an inappropriate rape joke. It’s like having food stuck in your teeth to the hundredth degree.
Additionally, I don’t want this to feel like a blanket, one size fits all, past and future apology. I want you all to know that Sweeney and I will continue to do everything in our power to be responsible about what we say. We aren’t going to drop offensive bombs, knowing that we can simply offer an, “OOOPSIE!” and have it be okay. It’s pretty much the opposite of that. We want you all to know that because we place such a high value on the messages of media, we also take very seriously the messages communicated by our little piece of internet.
We realize that this isn’t our usual funny fare (I think I’ve only used all caps twice now…), but with much snark comes much responsibility. At least, that’s how we’ll always treat our home.
Sweeney: Exactly. We want to keep having these conversations with all of you so that we can all keep growing, learning, and doing better in the future.
Creating another space to have this conversation is the essential point of this post. Specifically, we want your thoughts on how you think situations like this should be handled. It strikes us both as unseemly to delete that part of the post – it has the air of trying to pretend it never happened. So what do we do instead? Editor’s note, perhaps? Is it enough to just know that the conversation exists in the comments of the post? What do you think?
A related question that we’re currently debating: should we start looking into trigger warnings on posts? I suspect it will take a long time for us to actually retroactively apply them to old posts, and those discussions pervade so much of this blog that the lines are confusing, but if there’s a way that we can make everyone feel safer in our little community, we want to do it.
There are a lot of questions here. We don’t have the answers, so it’s all right if you don’t either. We’d like this to be a conversation. Talking to you for the last few years has changed us in significant ways. I am a different person than I was when we started this blog. I look at the world differently. The larger discourse that runs through this blog is part of that. In addition to the apologies, I’d also like to thank all of you for that. Thank you for coming to us with such open minds. Thank you for your willingness to let us bounce ideas off of you and for responding in kind. This wouldn’t be what it is without all of you.
With that, I turn the floor over to you, dear readers.