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The Cult of Nice = performing white femininity
Seriously. Fannish spaces are dominated and often run by white women and we’re socialized to do things in a very particular way.
This may sound familiar to some people: Don’t toot your own horn or you’re a big prostitute. You have to believe that fandom is strictly a meritocracy and you must support this idea and WAIT for people to recognize your talent. You can’t admit to wanting acknowledgement because that’s greedy and wrong. Anyone who critiques a ‘better’ or wishes in passing to have the same perks as that person is jealous and has to be chastised. Don’t speak out of turn. You have to create for yourself, but not REALLY for yourself, because doing things only for your own enjoyment is greedy and masturbatory, so you have to be generous and create for other people whilst asserting that you’re doing it for the sheer joy of creation, because that’s what True Artists do*, they don’t expect accolades, expecting accolades is greedy and NOT LADYLIKE OH GOD et cetera. This How We Are Supposed To Act, and we expect other people to act this way too because we’re the privileged ones in the space. We view discourse through the lens of this, and expect others to do the same. Everything is either/or. You’re a good girl or you’re not. When people don’t adhere to this model, cue OMG FREAKOUT!!!1!!
This ‘sit down and shut up and wait for your prince to come wtf is wrong with you seeking acclaim you’re either jellus or desperate (and I am going to be super de duper fucking defensive because I know damn well I’m being a dupe but I refuse to acknowledge that I may have shot myself in the foot)’ hangs in the air of fannish spaces like a cloud of Axe/Lynx around a teenage boy on the subway. It’s a complete impediment to communication. Looking at everything through this lens of virgin-or-slut means missing the point cataclysmically most of the time. Look, there is nothing wrong with wanting acknowledgement for your work. There is nothing wrong with wanting people to recognize your talent, and wanting to hear that from them. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to hear that people like your work.
Seeking attention is not a problem or a bad thing. There are certainly lousy METHODS of doing so, but someone saying “Sometimes I wish people would review me more” is not harming ANYONE. Stop acting like it is. Yeah, it’s violating the social code of white femininity, but—that social code is pants. It’s harmful and useless. This is the fannish “Cult of Nice”. This is the true face of it: bullshit sexist ideas of what womanhood and femininity entail, gender essentialism, stereotyping, and a simplistic and fallacious understanding of The Way Things Are. There’s this desperate hope that virtue will always be rewarded, that people get to the top because they’re Good Folks and they worked hard. Bring up nepotism or luck, and house explode.
This social code is what led to so many white women freaking the fuck OUT when the whole Cassie Edwards plagiarism fiasco hit the fan. I mean, hell! There are still people leaving comments on two- and three-year-old blog posts about the whole thing—comments declaring the Smart Bitches staff and Nora Roberts to be nasty jealous h0rz and bitchy attention-seekers who are only out to tear a poor old lady down because they’re mean and nasty and did we mention jealous h0rz.
This is what leads to the point flying way the fuck over our heads in some discourse—when we see everything through the same lens, it’s all distorted the same way. We need to remember this: Not everyone perceives the world the way we do. Not everyone is socialized the way we are. Not all social interaction proceeds the way we are told it should. To try to force everything to fit into our little how-to box and then further pigeonhole it into either/ors is a fool’s errand. That we do this at all is a huge flashing LOOK, PRIVILEGED PEOPLE HERE! sign. We expect people to adhere to our rules and more because we’re the majority and majority rules and makes the rules, and that’s that. (…I feel the need to clarify that THIS IS NOT WHAT I ACTUALLY BELIEVE, I’m explaining the mindset that dwells within this socialization structure…)
This expectation, this insistence on clinging to a flawed perspective, this stubbornly looking at everything through the Nice Girl glasses…this is the mechanism that’s fucking us over. (There is a hell of a lot of overlap between this and the Geek Social Fallacies too.) It all comes together into a big unhealthy puddle of bluh that we’re kayaking around in when we don’t have to.
Not everyone grew up within the confines of this structure—and even if they did, there’s no guarantee that they still adhere to it.
I grew up going to Catholic schools, and this way of performing femininity is basically canonized (ho ho, I’m so funny) in that setting. I know what it looks like and how it sounds. I know that way of looking at the world. I am still trying my damnedest to evict it from my head, because it does not help me or benefit me in any way. These are hard habits to break, we NEED TO try. We need to take a good long look at the way we choose to interpret others’ actions and words (yeah, I know this is the argument that ‘splainers use all the time, but the difference between them and me is I am addressing the people with the privilege) and at the way we choose to interact with one another, with the way we navigate and run fannish space. We need to do this; if we don’t or we’re going to keep making the same mistakes. The structure we cling to is going to remain a giant stumbling block, and we’re going to fail@understand over and over and over again until we stop trying to perform the Cult of Nice version of femininity.
Remember that this is a structure that was set up to keep us in our place. The sooner we lose it the better.
*This True Artists thing is a whole ‘nother can of peaches, but I think there’s a correlation between art being seen as a feminine pursuit (even though most of our Big Names are men) and artists being expected to work for nothing.
This may sound familiar to some people: Don’t toot your own horn or you’re a big prostitute. You have to believe that fandom is strictly a meritocracy and you must support this idea and WAIT for people to recognize your talent. You can’t admit to wanting acknowledgement because that’s greedy and wrong. Anyone who critiques a ‘better’ or wishes in passing to have the same perks as that person is jealous and has to be chastised. Don’t speak out of turn. You have to create for yourself, but not REALLY for yourself, because doing things only for your own enjoyment is greedy and masturbatory, so you have to be generous and create for other people whilst asserting that you’re doing it for the sheer joy of creation, because that’s what True Artists do*, they don’t expect accolades, expecting accolades is greedy and NOT LADYLIKE OH GOD et cetera. This How We Are Supposed To Act, and we expect other people to act this way too because we’re the privileged ones in the space. We view discourse through the lens of this, and expect others to do the same. Everything is either/or. You’re a good girl or you’re not. When people don’t adhere to this model, cue OMG FREAKOUT!!!1!!
This ‘sit down and shut up and wait for your prince to come wtf is wrong with you seeking acclaim you’re either jellus or desperate (and I am going to be super de duper fucking defensive because I know damn well I’m being a dupe but I refuse to acknowledge that I may have shot myself in the foot)’ hangs in the air of fannish spaces like a cloud of Axe/Lynx around a teenage boy on the subway. It’s a complete impediment to communication. Looking at everything through this lens of virgin-or-slut means missing the point cataclysmically most of the time. Look, there is nothing wrong with wanting acknowledgement for your work. There is nothing wrong with wanting people to recognize your talent, and wanting to hear that from them. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to hear that people like your work.
Seeking attention is not a problem or a bad thing. There are certainly lousy METHODS of doing so, but someone saying “Sometimes I wish people would review me more” is not harming ANYONE. Stop acting like it is. Yeah, it’s violating the social code of white femininity, but—that social code is pants. It’s harmful and useless. This is the fannish “Cult of Nice”. This is the true face of it: bullshit sexist ideas of what womanhood and femininity entail, gender essentialism, stereotyping, and a simplistic and fallacious understanding of The Way Things Are. There’s this desperate hope that virtue will always be rewarded, that people get to the top because they’re Good Folks and they worked hard. Bring up nepotism or luck, and house explode.
This social code is what led to so many white women freaking the fuck OUT when the whole Cassie Edwards plagiarism fiasco hit the fan. I mean, hell! There are still people leaving comments on two- and three-year-old blog posts about the whole thing—comments declaring the Smart Bitches staff and Nora Roberts to be nasty jealous h0rz and bitchy attention-seekers who are only out to tear a poor old lady down because they’re mean and nasty and did we mention jealous h0rz.
This is what leads to the point flying way the fuck over our heads in some discourse—when we see everything through the same lens, it’s all distorted the same way. We need to remember this: Not everyone perceives the world the way we do. Not everyone is socialized the way we are. Not all social interaction proceeds the way we are told it should. To try to force everything to fit into our little how-to box and then further pigeonhole it into either/ors is a fool’s errand. That we do this at all is a huge flashing LOOK, PRIVILEGED PEOPLE HERE! sign. We expect people to adhere to our rules and more because we’re the majority and majority rules and makes the rules, and that’s that. (…I feel the need to clarify that THIS IS NOT WHAT I ACTUALLY BELIEVE, I’m explaining the mindset that dwells within this socialization structure…)
This expectation, this insistence on clinging to a flawed perspective, this stubbornly looking at everything through the Nice Girl glasses…this is the mechanism that’s fucking us over. (There is a hell of a lot of overlap between this and the Geek Social Fallacies too.) It all comes together into a big unhealthy puddle of bluh that we’re kayaking around in when we don’t have to.
Not everyone grew up within the confines of this structure—and even if they did, there’s no guarantee that they still adhere to it.
I grew up going to Catholic schools, and this way of performing femininity is basically canonized (ho ho, I’m so funny) in that setting. I know what it looks like and how it sounds. I know that way of looking at the world. I am still trying my damnedest to evict it from my head, because it does not help me or benefit me in any way. These are hard habits to break, we NEED TO try. We need to take a good long look at the way we choose to interpret others’ actions and words (yeah, I know this is the argument that ‘splainers use all the time, but the difference between them and me is I am addressing the people with the privilege) and at the way we choose to interact with one another, with the way we navigate and run fannish space. We need to do this; if we don’t or we’re going to keep making the same mistakes. The structure we cling to is going to remain a giant stumbling block, and we’re going to fail@understand over and over and over again until we stop trying to perform the Cult of Nice version of femininity.
Remember that this is a structure that was set up to keep us in our place. The sooner we lose it the better.
*This True Artists thing is a whole ‘nother can of peaches, but I think there’s a correlation between art being seen as a feminine pursuit (even though most of our Big Names are men) and artists being expected to work for nothing.