smirkingbenevolence:

widdershinsgirl:

iamgrey:

Excerpted from Natalie Reed’s blog:

The stinger in this trailer? The Lorax, obnoxiously voiced by Danny DeVito (the very opposite in personality from the gentle wisdom The Lorax should represent) points at another character and asks incredulously “That’s a woman?!”

Yes, a beloved character from my childhood. One of the most noble, kind, just, wise and empathic characters in children’s literature, who always represented defending the defenseless, standing up for the vulnerable, and encouraging social awareness has here been re-imagined as a snarky, cruel, insensitive, cissexist, gender-policing asshole, who mocks variance in gender presentation, and tramples over the defenseless and vulnerable in the name of maintaining cisnormativity (and making the producers a few extra dollars selling Happy Meals).

I wonder how many trees died printing the scripts.

A piece of my heart definitely breaks knowing that these are the lessons we’re still teaching our children: that there are really specific ways a woman or a man is supposed to look (and be) and that variation from that is weird and bad and should be ridiculed and scorned. My heart especially breaks for any of the kids being taken to this movie who are themselves dealing with gender issues, and I’m horrified at the thought of the shame they’re going to take home with them. One more little piece of culture telling them to be ashamed of who they are, and suppress it so that they can fit into their assigned box and not have to worry about being made fun of. By the fucking Lorax.

The worst thing is that this isn’t anything new or surprising. It’s not like I dropped my popcorn, spilled my drink and gasped in scandalized shock. These kinds of jokes are incredibly ubiquitous. So ubiquitous that I barely even noticed them until I began transition. But after that, I saw them everywhere. I still remember how in the first month after I finally made up my mind that I was trans and I was going to transition, I saw six episodes of The Simpsons, and FOUR of them contained jokes at the expense of trans people. That’s two thirds of the episodes I saw that month. And these weren’t just jokes about gender variance, like the one in the Lorax, these were jokes about transsexuality and transgenderism. Using slurs like “tranny” and “shemale”, too.

But the ubiquity of this kind of humour makes these jokes more dangerous, not less. On their own, they’re mostly harmless; just another micro-aggression. But when they accumulate, and build upon one another into an inescapable leitmotif of cissexism, they create a climate where it’s really hard to be trans while maintaining a sense of confidence and self-acceptance… a world where everywhere you look you’re being subjected to who and what you are being ridiculed, mocked, dismissed, or treated as disgusting and horrifying, where you can’t go more than a couple hours or so before finding yet another reminder that you’re supposed to be ashamed of who you are. Another reminder that you don’t belong, or count, in your society. You’re a mistake. You’re an uncomfortable tragedy or incongruence that people want to ignore. You’re creepy, and make people squeemish, and most would rather you just didn’t exist (or at least stayed out of sight). And you’re a punchline at the end of a trailer for a bad comedy… right alongside the slapstick and fart jokes.

This made me grind my teeth. Seriously.

I am less and less comfortable with each movie that is made posthumously based on the works of Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss). One by one they take my childhood and sacrifice it upon the altar of cis- hetero- white male capitalist culture.
I always loved the Lorax, that book instilled in me the beginnings of what would become a deep appreciation and veneration for wild places and our niche (as a species) within them. If it wasn’t for the Lorax I might be just another consumer participating in greenwashing and thinking it does a damn thing.

I was never a tv person but I used to watch occasionally. I now don’t own a tv but enjoy a number of shows on Netflix. Some of my past favorites (among them the collected works of Matt Groening) have demonstrated themselves time and again to simply reaffirm and reinforce the structures of cissexist oppression.

Not exactly how I should have started my day but eh.