This is a rant.
Oct. 31st, 2011 12:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineFor some reason, I keep stumbling across conversations about me -- some of which are deeply flattering and some of which are the Internet equivalent of accidentally overhearing your classmates slagging on you in the bathroom -- and the whole thing is kind of awkward. Do you say something? Do you pretend you didn't notice?1 I don't know what the protocol is for these things!
Honestly, I've always found it bewildering that anybody ever bothers to talk about me if I'm not there to remind them of my existence, but apparently it happens! I'll be minding my own business and run across people going omg brilliant (yay!) or omg bitch queen of the universe2 (...) and it's super uncomfortable. Which is only peripherally relevant to what I'm ranting about, but for some reason "overhearing" two completely separate instances of people talking about me (one of each type!) led directly to this. I don't know how coherent it is and I'm definitely speaking as someone who replies compulsively and is generally happy to argue into eternity, but whatever, here we go.
There's this bizarre behaviour in humans called “expressing an opinion.” Fandom at large, as far as I can tell from the various fandoms I've been in, is deeply uncomfortable with the phenomenon, doing its best to minimize the potential or actual risks involved.
An opinion, you see, is just an opinion! I know, shocking. But let me explain. People don't have reasons for their opinions that vary from the rational to the nonsensical—of course not! People disagree because we have feelings, and our feelings about things we read or see or experience are all different (for no reason, of course). Feelings, after all, are neither wrong nor right. Ever! They simply are. So it is with opinions. Nobody is ever wrong and nobody is ever right, and all opinions are completely subjective and can neither be validated nor condemned.
And since all opinions are created equal, nobody ever needs take responsibility for an opinion. If the arguments you make to support your opinion are ill-conceived or offensive or simply mistaken, you don't have to say, “I didn't think about that” or “I'm sorry” or “I was wrong about that”--heaven forbid! No, instead you say, “well, it's just my opinion” or “it's a pity you feel that way” or “everyone has opinions.” There's the ubiquitous “your mileage may vary,” too, which as a disclaimer can be useful in forestalling pointless debates, but is more often seen within debates as a shorthand for “I don't have any actual arguments, so I'll just pretend that nobody else does either.”
This is then extended to an insistence that nothing is good or bad or anything in between, people just have good feelings or bad feelings about it. If you have good feelings, you enjoy it, and therefore to you, it's good. If you have bad feelings, you hate it, and to you it is bad. But there is definitely no such thing as actual quality. Nothing is better or worse than anything else, people just have different feelings because they read/saw one of them first/middle/last, they're grammar nazis/illiterate, they liked/hated/never knew someone like the main character, they just wanted him to be perfect/boring/monstrous/whatever, and honestly the list of reasons why there are no reasons just goes on and on.
It's generally assumed, therefore, that if you enjoy something you think it's good, and if you don't like something you think it's bad. The idea that somebody might distinguish their subjective enjoyment from their opinions of something's objective merit—heresy! Remember, there's no such thing as quality! In anything! Ever! There are only feelings!
Nothing is bigoted: it's just an opinion. Nothing is wrong: we've all just got different opinions on things. Nothing is stretching a point beyond the bounds of credibility, nothing is constructing a straw man (you don't like your hero exploiting women or committing murder? You just can't stand characters with flaws!), nothing is irrelevant or idiotic or making up things that never happened. Nope. If any anybody tries to call you on these things—or heaven forbid, argue with you—you can instantly silence all disagreement by explaining it's just an opinion!
You know, just something you're personally convinced is true. But it's not important or anything.
Seriously, though. Some opinions are wrong (e.g., the woman on an Austen mailing list who insisted that it was totally valid to see Darcy as thirty-something, she'd always imagined he was in his late thirties: um, no). Some are impossible to disprove but based on faulty reasoning. Some follow from a mistaken premise. Some are just offensive as hell and no, they do not have equal standing with all other opinions. This is not American news; we don't have to pretend that there are two, and only two, equally-valid sides to everything and bring on someone batshit insane to argue with the climatologist.
Sure, some things are debatable or ambiguous and can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways. And if you think you're making a reasonable argument, you don't need any “but it's just opinion” to weasel out of defending it. Acknowledging alternate points of view: fine. Using their existence to silence disagreement and refuse to answer for your own stated beliefs: please stop it.
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1Do you leave passive-aggressive notes in your lj?
2To be fair, that's an exaggeration. But if I read with my gut and not my eyes, that's what it says! And c'mon, guys, it's just my opinion!
Honestly, I've always found it bewildering that anybody ever bothers to talk about me if I'm not there to remind them of my existence, but apparently it happens! I'll be minding my own business and run across people going omg brilliant (yay!) or omg bitch queen of the universe2 (...) and it's super uncomfortable. Which is only peripherally relevant to what I'm ranting about, but for some reason "overhearing" two completely separate instances of people talking about me (one of each type!) led directly to this. I don't know how coherent it is and I'm definitely speaking as someone who replies compulsively and is generally happy to argue into eternity, but whatever, here we go.
There's this bizarre behaviour in humans called “expressing an opinion.” Fandom at large, as far as I can tell from the various fandoms I've been in, is deeply uncomfortable with the phenomenon, doing its best to minimize the potential or actual risks involved.
An opinion, you see, is just an opinion! I know, shocking. But let me explain. People don't have reasons for their opinions that vary from the rational to the nonsensical—of course not! People disagree because we have feelings, and our feelings about things we read or see or experience are all different (for no reason, of course). Feelings, after all, are neither wrong nor right. Ever! They simply are. So it is with opinions. Nobody is ever wrong and nobody is ever right, and all opinions are completely subjective and can neither be validated nor condemned.
And since all opinions are created equal, nobody ever needs take responsibility for an opinion. If the arguments you make to support your opinion are ill-conceived or offensive or simply mistaken, you don't have to say, “I didn't think about that” or “I'm sorry” or “I was wrong about that”--heaven forbid! No, instead you say, “well, it's just my opinion” or “it's a pity you feel that way” or “everyone has opinions.” There's the ubiquitous “your mileage may vary,” too, which as a disclaimer can be useful in forestalling pointless debates, but is more often seen within debates as a shorthand for “I don't have any actual arguments, so I'll just pretend that nobody else does either.”
This is then extended to an insistence that nothing is good or bad or anything in between, people just have good feelings or bad feelings about it. If you have good feelings, you enjoy it, and therefore to you, it's good. If you have bad feelings, you hate it, and to you it is bad. But there is definitely no such thing as actual quality. Nothing is better or worse than anything else, people just have different feelings because they read/saw one of them first/middle/last, they're grammar nazis/illiterate, they liked/hated/never knew someone like the main character, they just wanted him to be perfect/boring/monstrous/whatever, and honestly the list of reasons why there are no reasons just goes on and on.
It's generally assumed, therefore, that if you enjoy something you think it's good, and if you don't like something you think it's bad. The idea that somebody might distinguish their subjective enjoyment from their opinions of something's objective merit—heresy! Remember, there's no such thing as quality! In anything! Ever! There are only feelings!
Nothing is bigoted: it's just an opinion. Nothing is wrong: we've all just got different opinions on things. Nothing is stretching a point beyond the bounds of credibility, nothing is constructing a straw man (you don't like your hero exploiting women or committing murder? You just can't stand characters with flaws!), nothing is irrelevant or idiotic or making up things that never happened. Nope. If any anybody tries to call you on these things—or heaven forbid, argue with you—you can instantly silence all disagreement by explaining it's just an opinion!
You know, just something you're personally convinced is true. But it's not important or anything.
Seriously, though. Some opinions are wrong (e.g., the woman on an Austen mailing list who insisted that it was totally valid to see Darcy as thirty-something, she'd always imagined he was in his late thirties: um, no). Some are impossible to disprove but based on faulty reasoning. Some follow from a mistaken premise. Some are just offensive as hell and no, they do not have equal standing with all other opinions. This is not American news; we don't have to pretend that there are two, and only two, equally-valid sides to everything and bring on someone batshit insane to argue with the climatologist.
Sure, some things are debatable or ambiguous and can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways. And if you think you're making a reasonable argument, you don't need any “but it's just opinion” to weasel out of defending it. Acknowledging alternate points of view: fine. Using their existence to silence disagreement and refuse to answer for your own stated beliefs: please stop it.
---------------
1Do you leave passive-aggressive notes in your lj?
2To be fair, that's an exaggeration. But if I read with my gut and not my eyes, that's what it says! And c'mon, guys, it's just my opinion!
no subject
on 2011-11-10 02:37 am (UTC)Yeah, my experience in geekdom has been more of the, "talk casually online with a fellow fan for a while, get to know them well enough that we talk RL stuff, find out that they have some combination of professional/practical/academic experience that is informing their fandom creations, usually in at least something of a systematic and thoughtful way, even though they don't wave their credentials around" rather than the "internet-pseudo-expert" crap. Which now that you mention it probably is unusual!
I was initially surprised that Austen fandom would attract that level of aversion to intellectual rigor... then it occurred to me that probably a lot of the intellectually-rigorous Austen fandom is happening in, like, university lit departments rather than online? So online/casual Austen fandom is getting, if you will, a lot higher concentration of the intellectual lightweights than fandoms where there's less of an opportunity to pursue your fannishness in a professional/academic environment--- you can make a living as an Austen scholar and that's probably what many of the intellectually rigorous ones are spending their fannish energy trying to do; not so much as an HP or Star Wars one, lol.
no subject
on 2011-11-10 05:40 am (UTC)And there definitely is that thing where stuff you'd do fannishly *can* be respectable in RL, or at least marginally so. I mean, I paid for a term's worth of textbooks off an Austen fanfic I never took offline. And Austen criticism never really tapers off, even if a lot of it is kind of batshit. You can realistically specialize in Austen; not so much in Star Wars or Harry Potter or even Tolkien.
no subject
on 2011-11-11 02:19 am (UTC)And oh, yeah, on the fannish stuff, and also, I am wildly impressed by the following: Like, seriously, sweet!!!!
no subject
on 2011-11-27 08:09 am (UTC)