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SpoilerThe Tudors S01E01
Well I am rewatching The Tudors and not only do they have a sex scene before even 10 minutes in (because of course), and they have a second sex scene, less explicit, where the king takes one of the ladies in waiting because his wife Queen Catherine is not present. In the following scene King Henry says, "Do you consent?"
OK first of all, there's zero chance he would have considered a woman's consent.
Second, there's zero chance a woman in that situation, with the most dangerous man in the country, would have said, "No."
This insertion of the consent line is to make men feel better about the fact that this man raped numerous women who had no agency to decline him.
Another gripe: they chose a woman who looks old enough to be his auntie to play Catherine, the too-old-queen (I like this actress, it isn't a dig on her at all).
IRL Henry BEGGED to marry her and even went to the pope for permission. That's why he couldn't divorce later, because the new pope refused to extinguish something the last pope granted permission for.
She was 5, FIVE, years older than him. She was 24 and he was 19 when they married. She wasn't some middle-aged cougar. But the producers decided to make her look extremely old in comparison, so we would feel sorry for the king with his wife going through 'the change'. The truth is there would have likely been no discernible difference in appearance age-wise.
This is such an excellent article.
I used to think, "fine, sure i'll use your preferred pronouns, just stay out of women's spaces etc.". But actually the longer this goes on the more i see that linguistic concessions make it increasingly difficult to argue for women's rights and to explain to the populace what is happening. It also makes it impossible for anyone who cares about the representation of women to perceive - still less change - the unfairness we still see against women.
Playing fast and loose with language in this way, making it bend to match political objectives and social niceties, ends up distorting our perception of reality. If ‘she’ takes first place in a women’s event, nothing remarkable has occurred. Our capacity to push back and challenge the reality before our eyes – a man beating women – is then seriously thwarted.
It is for this reason that transgender activists are so obsessed with pronouns.
Edit for punctuation.
I don't think TRAs are that smart to use language as such a weapon. I think they stumbled into it just by happenstance when they got all screechy about being called "he."
language is a form of programing, every journalist worth his salt knows you can change someones opinions without them noticing, just by using the right words to steer the reader to what you want.
This is a really great article - like many, I used preferred pronouns (I even had mine in my work email signature) thinking it was the nice and kind thing to do. Needless to say, as I've peaked, I've become far less interested in that and more committed to using accurate pronouns in support of women and girls.
And on the same note, I am sick to death of the "biological" nonsense.
At first I considered it clumsy, wordy, redundant, superfluous, and just plain silly.
Now I consider it as bad as "cis."
Yeah, yeah, I know the motive is different: "Cis" is in their word; "biological" is ours. "Cis" is in your face; "biological" is subtle. No, wait, not just subtle, but rather, insidious.
The effect is the same.