I fully endorse your character selection tactics, but I object to the idea that "in the ‘70s, anyone who was Black, on TV, and not George Jefferson was a street pimp." I realize this is a joke, and as such exaggerated for effect, and I'm not trying to be tiresome I swear, but this stuff folds right in to a pet peeve of young social justice types thinking that everyone who came before their enlightened generation were racist monsters because they only recently invented the concept of being decent human beings. It's ridiculous, offensive & devalues anything good in the past. I'm not saying this trope didn't exist, and I don't have counter-statistics or anything, but there was a lot more variety that's worth remembering -- I remember watching Sanford & Son, Roots, Benson (which was a spinoff of... something), What's Happening, Barney Miller, Star Trek, The Love Boat, Soul Train, & basically all of PBS's kid shows as a kid. Again, not trying to attack a joke (srsly, sorry!), just wanted to throw that out for any impressionable readers under 35 ;p
As a translator fluent in three languages, words matter an awful lot to me. Yesterday I read an article that referred to a person as them and I honestly had to stop and think what did I miss here? Then I realized somebody was just trying to be politically correct and I was really really bothered.
This is the most honest – and honestly hilarious – piece of writing I've read in forever. Thank you for the deep belly laughs and all the rest of it. I feel a little better about the world now. And that's not nothin'.
This is a very interesting article, because it directly relates to the complete degradation of today's media productions.
You summed up the problem here very nicely: "If a writer thinks “There are gay couples in real life, so I’m going to make one of the two couples on my show gay,” and every writer does that, then suddenly half the couples on TV will be gay. [...] The actual share of same-sex households in the US is 1.44 percent."
The wild overshoot of "diversity" targets result in media where characters are laughable caricatures and every friend group looks like a liberal college pamphlet covershoot. Then, to pile onto the progressive fantasy, all stereotypes are either avoided, or subverted. Women act like men, and men women. How about the driver is a white man and the billionaire industrialist an Indian woman? If we need a criminal, can it be a black man? Why can't our action hero be a heroine?
When your understanding of the world is 'everything is a result of the white cis patriarchy, and we must fight back', your media creations look absurd to every normal person, since you are depicting characters that either don't exist in reality, or do exist at such a small % most people have never met anyone like that.
Your solution, random demographic generator, solves a good amount of this, but that still has flaws in that professions that are female or male dominated would be very screwed. Half the soldiers aren't ladies, half the nurses aren't dudes, and literally every president has been a man.
This idiocy, where we must be completely blind to both the outside world, and traditional character tropes, has caused most mainstream content to become 'by progressives, for progressives', with little appeal for the normie masses.
I've made my peace with "they" for a person of unspecified gender.
But it was not very long ago I read an article in New York magazine that used "he or she or they" for an unspecified person. I thought to myself, "We have reached peak pronoun awkwardness."
But what about people in other countries?! By entering UNITED STATES census data into a number generator, you are forcing Western representation onto the rest of the world, pushing into marginalisation and inevitable doom all oppressed people who have been denied access to the US!
*opens a dictionary of synonyms at the word 'nazi' and rambles for three more paragraphs*
"In my opinion, a writer who calls a fake president “them” is a conscientious and well-meaning person, but also a deep idiot who should be fired. Because to English speakers, “them” is a pronoun referring to two or more people."
Thank you for this. It’s the fricking Kobayashi Maru of modern storytelling and it takes up an inordinate amount of energy trying to “get it right”. It’s why the cast of every animated show now looks more and more like the 90s Burger King kids club.
The random number generator idea is a good one. I’ve often wondered if there’s value in taking a random picture of people in the location your story takes place and using that as your demographic breakdown, so that the midwestern High School you’re writing reflects a more natural distribution (and not some distracting multi-ethnic utopian society where a massive computer has been keeping the citizens in a bubble, deciding which citizens can have children, all in an effort to create a pan-demographic rainbow where there’s one of everything for the sake of representation).
Thoughtful look at a quandary so many of us find ourselves in today. As a teacher I often find myself in that “no way to win” space. Interesting thing is that we live in a day when it takes some degree of courage to simply give voice to it as you have. Ahhh, life between a rock and a hard place ...
We already have a non-gendered 3rd person singular pronoun in the English language (thanks to German!). I don’t understand why can’t we use “it” in the case where a thing’s gender is not specified? Our general use of “it” for inanimate objects makes this sound odd, but that is just our sapionormativity talking...
And just to blow your mind further, a little girl in German is called “Mädchen” which is neuter and would be referred to as “es” rather than “sie”. Talk about patriarchy!
In Italian, objects can only be referred to as “he” or “she” (lo/la). This is basically the same in all Latin languages.
In many Asian languages they don’t use pronouns at all. And we all know China is the most gender equal place in the universe.
The good news is that almost everyone who doesn’t speak English natively thinks all this crap is nuts, and I am inclined to agree with them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't! Might as well live our lives, trust in our basic goodness, be humble and open to well-intentioned feedback, decline anyone's attempt to shame us, and always aim to do better as we learn better...
> I don’t think there’s a fix for this; I don’t recommend that the Writers Guild create Gay Character Permits and hand them out at the beginning of pilot season
Yes, this is obviously wrong. It should not depend on who you know.
I read a Steven Pinkerton book, and he says in the first chapter that the convention among linguists when writing hypothetical speakers is to:
- Flip a coin for the first usage (like, heads "he" tails "she")
- Switch back and forth every time you come up with a new person
I thought that made good sense. You could add in they w/ a random number generator for enby people too. Then just keep a running count of what the most recent hypothetical person was in an article and switch back and forth.
I fully endorse your character selection tactics, but I object to the idea that "in the ‘70s, anyone who was Black, on TV, and not George Jefferson was a street pimp." I realize this is a joke, and as such exaggerated for effect, and I'm not trying to be tiresome I swear, but this stuff folds right in to a pet peeve of young social justice types thinking that everyone who came before their enlightened generation were racist monsters because they only recently invented the concept of being decent human beings. It's ridiculous, offensive & devalues anything good in the past. I'm not saying this trope didn't exist, and I don't have counter-statistics or anything, but there was a lot more variety that's worth remembering -- I remember watching Sanford & Son, Roots, Benson (which was a spinoff of... something), What's Happening, Barney Miller, Star Trek, The Love Boat, Soul Train, & basically all of PBS's kid shows as a kid. Again, not trying to attack a joke (srsly, sorry!), just wanted to throw that out for any impressionable readers under 35 ;p
As a translator fluent in three languages, words matter an awful lot to me. Yesterday I read an article that referred to a person as them and I honestly had to stop and think what did I miss here? Then I realized somebody was just trying to be politically correct and I was really really bothered.
This is the most honest – and honestly hilarious – piece of writing I've read in forever. Thank you for the deep belly laughs and all the rest of it. I feel a little better about the world now. And that's not nothin'.
This is a very interesting article, because it directly relates to the complete degradation of today's media productions.
You summed up the problem here very nicely: "If a writer thinks “There are gay couples in real life, so I’m going to make one of the two couples on my show gay,” and every writer does that, then suddenly half the couples on TV will be gay. [...] The actual share of same-sex households in the US is 1.44 percent."
The wild overshoot of "diversity" targets result in media where characters are laughable caricatures and every friend group looks like a liberal college pamphlet covershoot. Then, to pile onto the progressive fantasy, all stereotypes are either avoided, or subverted. Women act like men, and men women. How about the driver is a white man and the billionaire industrialist an Indian woman? If we need a criminal, can it be a black man? Why can't our action hero be a heroine?
When your understanding of the world is 'everything is a result of the white cis patriarchy, and we must fight back', your media creations look absurd to every normal person, since you are depicting characters that either don't exist in reality, or do exist at such a small % most people have never met anyone like that.
Your solution, random demographic generator, solves a good amount of this, but that still has flaws in that professions that are female or male dominated would be very screwed. Half the soldiers aren't ladies, half the nurses aren't dudes, and literally every president has been a man.
This idiocy, where we must be completely blind to both the outside world, and traditional character tropes, has caused most mainstream content to become 'by progressives, for progressives', with little appeal for the normie masses.
I've made my peace with "they" for a person of unspecified gender.
But it was not very long ago I read an article in New York magazine that used "he or she or they" for an unspecified person. I thought to myself, "We have reached peak pronoun awkwardness."
But what about people in other countries?! By entering UNITED STATES census data into a number generator, you are forcing Western representation onto the rest of the world, pushing into marginalisation and inevitable doom all oppressed people who have been denied access to the US!
*opens a dictionary of synonyms at the word 'nazi' and rambles for three more paragraphs*
"In my opinion, a writer who calls a fake president “them” is a conscientious and well-meaning person, but also a deep idiot who should be fired. Because to English speakers, “them” is a pronoun referring to two or more people."
Well.... it was nice knowing you, Jeff.
Thank you for this. It’s the fricking Kobayashi Maru of modern storytelling and it takes up an inordinate amount of energy trying to “get it right”. It’s why the cast of every animated show now looks more and more like the 90s Burger King kids club.
The random number generator idea is a good one. I’ve often wondered if there’s value in taking a random picture of people in the location your story takes place and using that as your demographic breakdown, so that the midwestern High School you’re writing reflects a more natural distribution (and not some distracting multi-ethnic utopian society where a massive computer has been keeping the citizens in a bubble, deciding which citizens can have children, all in an effort to create a pan-demographic rainbow where there’s one of everything for the sake of representation).
Thoughtful look at a quandary so many of us find ourselves in today. As a teacher I often find myself in that “no way to win” space. Interesting thing is that we live in a day when it takes some degree of courage to simply give voice to it as you have. Ahhh, life between a rock and a hard place ...
We already have a non-gendered 3rd person singular pronoun in the English language (thanks to German!). I don’t understand why can’t we use “it” in the case where a thing’s gender is not specified? Our general use of “it” for inanimate objects makes this sound odd, but that is just our sapionormativity talking...
And just to blow your mind further, a little girl in German is called “Mädchen” which is neuter and would be referred to as “es” rather than “sie”. Talk about patriarchy!
In Italian, objects can only be referred to as “he” or “she” (lo/la). This is basically the same in all Latin languages.
In many Asian languages they don’t use pronouns at all. And we all know China is the most gender equal place in the universe.
The good news is that almost everyone who doesn’t speak English natively thinks all this crap is nuts, and I am inclined to agree with them.
I just read this for the third time and it still makes me so happy. Hope and Despair had a love child. They named it Humor.
Shit like this is why people 100 years from now will consider this period a cultural wasteland
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't! Might as well live our lives, trust in our basic goodness, be humble and open to well-intentioned feedback, decline anyone's attempt to shame us, and always aim to do better as we learn better...
> I don’t think there’s a fix for this; I don’t recommend that the Writers Guild create Gay Character Permits and hand them out at the beginning of pilot season
Yes, this is obviously wrong. It should not depend on who you know.
Instead, the permits should be auctioned off.
I read a Steven Pinkerton book, and he says in the first chapter that the convention among linguists when writing hypothetical speakers is to:
- Flip a coin for the first usage (like, heads "he" tails "she")
- Switch back and forth every time you come up with a new person
I thought that made good sense. You could add in they w/ a random number generator for enby people too. Then just keep a running count of what the most recent hypothetical person was in an article and switch back and forth.
At least the ridiculous "Bechdel test" has stopped being the pervasive shortcut for lazy reviewers that it was a few years ago.