tiaramerchgirl: chelle-shock: Baruch and Roll: When is Gala Darling going to quit with the racist...

tiaramerchgirl:

chelle-shock:

Baruch and Roll: When is Gala Darling going to quit with the racist cultural appropriation bullshit?

I think it’s something very similar to the AFP thing, where she gets criticized so much for being “super positive” and a supposed trust fund kid and etc. etc. that any criticism at all is automatically dismissed as unwarranted “hating” without thinking about it. And she’s got a pack of fans/other “star bloggers” who will willingly jump on anyone who disagrees (see Natalie’s story, for example). 

THIS VERY MUCH THIS. I see this with a lot of (inevitably female) famous people too - Lady Gaga, AFP, Ke$ha, Gala Darling, other “lady bloggers” etc. They get so much unwarranted and problematic criticism (“you’re ugly!” “you’re a whore!” “you’re untalented!” “you’re overrated!” etc) that when people do actually come up with something worth critiquing it gets thrown out with all the other troll responses. It’s Positivity or Die.

It seems that you can’t be appreciative of certain aspects of a person or their work without also finding issues over other aspects. Female creatives are so often pitted against each other, that to celebrate one is to villify the other - “Lady Gaga rules! Ke$ha sucks!” or “Lady Gaga sucks! AFP rules!” etc. Woe forbid that you call yourself a fan of someone’s work and still find things to critique! Woe forbid that you like both sides of a (made-up) rivalry! You don’t see this with men so much - “omg you can’t be a fan of *both* Brad Pitt AND Johnny Depp!”. I’m pretty sure Warhol and Picasso have had their work and values critiqued without having their worth as a person diminished.

Also, I’ve noticed that when it comes to female creatives, if the reaction to their work seems disproportionate, it’s apparently the failing of the creator. Take Lady Gaga; there are plenty of people who don’t understand why she gets so much academic acclaim and attention when there are other people equally as deserving. Yet for some reason this is seen as Lady Gaga’s fault, as though she conspired to get all the critical attention for herself. If Gaga was male would people blame him for being an “overrated attention-seeker”, or would they see it as a reflection of society’s attitude towards art, elitism, and intellectualism? Deflecting the blame away from the target?