I'm not sure that I understand your position, so what I'm about to write may miss the point. If so, please do set me straight.
I think your family was wrong to disregard your response to Chuck & Larry. Telling you to shut and stop spoiling their fun with your perspective is exactly the sort of privilege you and I both dislike. That's what I'm trying to do or to defend, nor is it at all democratic. [NB, I have avoided seeing this movie, because I suspect I'd hate it just as you did.]
If someone had said to you 'I know you hated the movie, but I liked XXX about it, especially when Adam Sandler did YYYY and then someone hit him with a pie', that's not an assertion of privilege. It's an expression of a personal experience and individual taste. It doesn't dismiss your response, even if it doesn't agree with it, and it allows room for you and this other person to have a conversation about it, after which you might see some virtue to the film, and they might have come to despise it as the homophobic piece of crap that it appears to be. That's what I mean by 'true democracy': it's a game we all can play, if we don't insist on 'winning'.
I don't insist that others agree with my response to Avatar, nor do I claim that the other reviews that criticize Avatar are wrong, though the blowhards at Big Hollywood do mightily tempt me. I don't think that I choose my positive emotional response to the film anymore than this guy (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jtreese/2010/01/11/treese-avatar) chose his negative one. (Though I bet his stridency is motivated by long-suppressed guilt.)
It's true that very few people share my social, economic, national, and cultural background, and that makes it harder for them to see things my way. But it's hard for me to see things their way, too. And I haven't given up on doing so.
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Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"
Date: 2010-01-11 04:39 pm (UTC)I think your family was wrong to disregard your response to Chuck & Larry. Telling you to shut and stop spoiling their fun with your perspective is exactly the sort of privilege you and I both dislike. That's what I'm trying to do or to defend, nor is it at all democratic. [NB, I have avoided seeing this movie, because I suspect I'd hate it just as you did.]
If someone had said to you 'I know you hated the movie, but I liked XXX about it, especially when Adam Sandler did YYYY and then someone hit him with a pie', that's not an assertion of privilege. It's an expression of a personal experience and individual taste. It doesn't dismiss your response, even if it doesn't agree with it, and it allows room for you and this other person to have a conversation about it, after which you might see some virtue to the film, and they might have come to despise it as the homophobic piece of crap that it appears to be. That's what I mean by 'true democracy': it's a game we all can play, if we don't insist on 'winning'.
I don't insist that others agree with my response to Avatar, nor do I claim that the other reviews that criticize Avatar are wrong, though the blowhards at Big Hollywood do mightily tempt me. I don't think that I choose my positive emotional response to the film anymore than this guy (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jtreese/2010/01/11/treese-avatar) chose his negative one. (Though I bet his stridency is motivated by long-suppressed guilt.)
It's true that very few people share my social, economic, national, and cultural background, and that makes it harder for them to see things my way. But it's hard for me to see things their way, too. And I haven't given up on doing so.