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{ "@context": [ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", { "Hashtag": "as:Hashtag", "sensitive": "as:sensitive" } ], "id": "https://plusbrothers.net/?p=36562", "type": "Article", "attachment": [], "attributedTo": "https://plusbrothers.net/author/english/", "audience": "https://plusbrothers.net/@network", "content": "<p>In media and political debates one term is very often used: “woke,” mostly a negative label toward certain ideas concerning politics and society.</p><p>The Agony Ass attempts to understand the phenomenon and explain what is wrong with this word.</p><div class=\"wp-block-group has-global-padding is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\"><div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div><hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-custom-verde-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-custom-verde-background-color has-background\"/><div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div></div><p><!--more read more--></p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Is Agony Ass a political space?</h2><p>In these pages we don&#8217;t want to persuade readers to side with left or right, but if politicians use words in the wrong way The Agony Ass will talk about them with no regards.</p><p>Our mind won&#8217;t change until one of them comes to show us that they, as a trusted right or left activist, have their party&#8217;s symbol at the end of their spine.</p><p>Unless proven otherwise though, we assume that every human has a butt with two more or less firm cheeks, and it&#8217;s their prerogative to do with it as they please.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What does &#8220;woke&#8221; mean?</h2><p>&#8220;Woke&#8221; culture is a fake news. Let&#8217;s introduce this concept as drastic as possible, but our intention is to clarify it right away.</p><p>It originally was “stay woke” slogan, and it appeared for the first time in 1938 from a song by Lead Belly about social injustices toward black population in the United States.</p><p>But, also in the same year, it was taken up by the African-American writer William Melvin Kelley in a New York Times Magazine article entitled “if you are woke you dig it”.</p><p>Consequently, in concrete terms, the term “woke” means &#8220;pay attention&#8221; toward social causes, especially human rights.</p><p>That&#8217;s the reason why we think that real “woke” does not exist: you can have as much awareness as you want toward social injustices, but the world is so complex that something can surely get unwillingly and unknowingly ignored.</p><p>We&#8217;re the first to see it on ourselves: our main activism concerns HIV stigma, focusing on accessibility towards sensory (mainly visual) disability as well, but our site&#8217;s puzzles and puns prevent us from defining our blog “accessible” because a person with cognitive impairment might encounter several difficulties. Not to mention our English translation still incomplete for our international readers.</p><p>However, this does not automatically mean that we don&#8217;t care of the world around us.</p><p>Maybe people should stop calling themselves &#8220;woke&#8221;. Let&#8217;s rather collaborate to achieve a common goal. Together, we can at least make progress in overcoming social injustice.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Woke: what&#8217;s the WRONG meaning?</h2><p>Conservatives tend to label as &#8220;woke&#8221; any progressive idea, through online and off line propaganda.</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Do you support gender equality? You are woke.</li><li>Do you support LGBT rights? You are woke.</li><li>Are you active against racism, or for environment related topics? You are woke!</li></ul><p>Have they realized this is not the term&#8217;s real meaning? We don&#8217;t know, but if ultra-conservatives use it this way, we must blame some extremists who misunderstand progressive ideas and label themselves as &#8220;woke&#8221;.</p><p>Basically they assume to be more aware than others regarding social justice, but who are they? What do they want?</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Social justice warriors</h2><p>Social justice warriors: individuals who respond violently when they perceive an injustice in their physical or digital environment. No matter if that injustice is real or it&#8217;s just inside their own mind.</p><p>A silly example: going on and on about how rude it is for a sighted person to say &#8220;look&#8221; to a blind person, meaning &#8220;pay attention.&#8221;</p><p>Or when someone misses the whole point of our web site&#8217;s satire and complains that we&#8217;re making fun of people who are stigmatized, when we writing about talking HIV virus and the &#8220;positive world.&#8221;</p><p>They suppose to be the smartest who own the truth. They&#8217;re Woke. But this behaviour ends up harming all causes they claim to support, creating a serious damage to the whole progressive ideals.</p><p>When a self-proclaimed feminist declares, &#8220;You&#8217;re a man? So you&#8217;re violent,&#8221; she completely misrepresents the feminist movement. She&#8217;s a fanatic, closed to any dialogue. This harmful ideology not only damages society but also ruins art and culture, as these individuals seek to impose their narrow worldview on everyone.</p><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What&#8217;s “cancel culture”?</h3><p>Bristol, June 2020: Black Lives Matter, a movement for the rights of black communities, tore down a statue of a former slave trader and threw it into a river &#8211; the same one in which he is said to have drowned people rising against him.</p><p>His name was Edward Colston, honored with a bronze sculpture that had been there since 1895; this man was remembered because when slavery was abolished, he built hospices, hospitals and schools through money earned by selling slaves.</p><p>Black people had also approached the mayor to have the statue removed but they then decided to take it down because their appeals had gone unheeded.</p><p>Now, if Colston could be considered a hero to white people, how can we expect him to be treated as such by black as well? All right, slavery is gone, but a community oppressed by that person is certainly not going to honor him because you ask them to.</p><p>If, however, this episode might have made sense if Bristol population was a high percentage of black folks, it is harmful when the elimination of a symbol is promoted in large communities: avoiding to study classic literature due to incompatible values with contemporary society, would be wrong.</p><p>Our present and future are tightly connected to our past, we are what we are because in the past there has been the history we have had. Mistakes included.</p><p>Was it better that slavery, state murder, authoritarian regimes were not there? Sure. But we cannot go back and manipulate history according to what suits us.</p><p>This is called “cancel culture,” and conservatives, while accusing progressives of shaping history according to their own ideas, are the first to do so:</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>remove sexuality-themed books, racism, LGBT rights… from school libraries</li><li>prevent sex and affective education in schools</li><li>ask companies to withdraw commercials that conservatives dislike.</li></ul><p>For Italy, we report two emblematic cases of conservative “cancel culture.”</p><p>One stocking company had packaged its product commercial singing “sisters of Italy” instead of “brothers” in an adaptation of the national anthem dedicated to stockings; they had it removed.</p><p>Another snack chip company, in its commercial, depicted a priest and a nun. Catholic ultraconservatives did not appreciate it at all, and that commercial also came to a bad end.</p><p>So it is useless for them to accuse progressives and then do worse; “cancel culture” is a mistake anyway.</p><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Only we can</h3><p>There are some bangs of extremist “progressivism” that take a stand on clothing and the roles of artists.</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>aren&#8217;t you Mexican? Then why do you wear the Sombrero? “Because I am an actor! Because I dress like a carnival! Etc.”</li><li>you are hetero! Why do you want to play a gay role?</li><li>only disabled people can talk about disability</li><li>a man has no right to speak out against violence towards women</li></ul><p>And millions of examples could be pointed out. But we, though in total disagreement with conservatives on social issues, agree with them when they oppose such an approach to art, politics and culture.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hetero actors for gay roles?</h2><p>A great actor should be able to empathize with any character: in theory, the concept is well-established and there are many examples. Let no one tell us that Tom Hanks was incapable of playing a gay man with AIDS in &#8220;Philadelphia&#8221;, or the guy with a mild cognitive impairment in &#8220;Forrest Gump&#8221;.</p><p>And what about Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown, the Irish artist with motor and cerebral disabilities who managed to paint and write using his left foot, his only remaining ability?</p><p>&#8220;My Left Foot&#8221; is its title, Day-Lewis has no disabilities, yet the movie is brilliantly acted.</p><p>So why all this fuss about hetero actors playing gay roles?</p><p>There are hetero actors who feel uncomfortable playing a gay character because of scenes where there is kissing or having to simulate sexual intercourse, so what?</p><p>We don&#8217;t have that much knowledge about acting but we are aware that body-to-body physical contact (even between a man and a woman) is not immediate especially if you&#8217;ve had a strict upbringing about sexuality.</p><p>The issue remains, however: when you act, you should put aside your real personality with related ideas and conditioning to empathize with your assigned character.</p><p>The debate did not originate from hetero and gay, but from black and white: once the roles were all assigned to white actors, then people started saying “why not assign black roles to black actors as well?” That made sense.</p><p>By the way, one thing is when it comes to including different people from each other in a set, but when it becomes extremism it is more harmful than beneficial.</p><p>Just look at the rules for Oscar-eligible “best picture” nominations.</p><p>Standard A, “on-screen representation,” constrains producers to have at least one lead actor be part of an “underrepresented” group, and in supporting roles this applies to at least 30 percent of the actors. Constraints also in the plot, which must be centered on stories of marginalized people.</p><p>There are similar rules in off-set organization, but if the intent is good, it becomes a limitation in the long run: do I give up a good actor because instead I have to choose the LGBT/disabled/black/Hispanic one?</p><p>Since we belong to marginalized groups ourselves, we are the ones who support social inclusion policies the most, knowing that without “obligations” production companies would only hire rich white hetero and cis people.</p><p>Same for more “ordinary” jobs. What office would hire an employee with a disability by choice without the law obligating them to do so?</p><p>Yet, taking a look at the Oscars thing, something sounds wrong: if you force me to focus on so-called “minorities” for the plot, I end up bringing up a collection of stereotypes because my job as a producer is not to do social education, but to guarantee you a product that can be sold to the majority of audience.</p><p>No movie company can ignore market&#8217;s demands, so if, as in the last period, the far right tends to attract the masses, they circumvent the rules of “diversity and inclusion” by creating some clichés based personas.</p><p>We witnessed this phenomenon watching the Spanish series <a href=\"https://plusbrothers.net/breathless-medical-mishmash/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"33736\">“Breathless”</a>, on Netflix: a medical setting where four LGBT characters, two men and two women, embody the worst stereotypes between promiscuous sex, drugs and child abduction.</p><p>This way you&#8217;re killing two birds with one stone: satisfying the diversity quotas by including LGBT people, while also giving the conservatives what they want &#8211; a negative representation of minorities.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Constraints and capabilities</h2><p>We have often wondered what a world would be like where creativity is constrained only to those who can speak about a condition because they experience it firsthand. SPOILER: A disaster.</p><p>That was our direct experience when we started writing our blog because eeach of us had their own characters to develop:</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Elettrona plays women and HIV negative characters.</li><li>Gifter plays men and HIV-positive characters.</li></ul><p>We&#8217;d established this storytelling routine when forced to stay at home during COVID emergency, but once we had to go back to our regular jobs, our free time decreased so our mutual roles became impossible to manage.</p><p>“Gifter, are you playing the negative character today? Elettrona, you take care of it tonight, I don&#8217;t have time / I don&#8217;t feel like playing the talking virus role…”</p><p>We made the best of a bad situation, but it turns out we were worrying about nothing for long time. Now, it doesn&#8217;t matter who&#8217;s behind the words anymore.</p><p>However, we have never felt uneasy when interpreting a character in our first-person narration because we chose when, how, and who.</p><p>No one forced us to publish on our blog about being an HIV-positive guy who transmits the virus to dozens of adoring girls, nor about being the guy&#8217;s beloved lady who purposely asks him for HIV.</p><p>We&#8217;re the authors and own our characters&#8217; life so, whenever feeling uncomfortable with one of them, we can think about a plot to get them out of the picture without any commercial restrictions or marketing recommendations. Just following creative writing&#8217;s rules about consistent characters.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;You are woke&#8221;!</h2><p>Let&#8217;s close this article by making a dutiful apology to a reader; we did it in person but it&#8217;s better to write it down as well.</p><p>Assuming he was meaning the far-right interpretation of &#8220;woke&#8221;, we have been very rude to a reader when he gave us this definition some time ago.</p><p>As part of unrepresented groups, we both receive plenty of hate speech so we feel uncomfortable when a stranger uses certain terms; we tend to defend ourselves even when it&#8217;s not necessary or appropriate.</p><p>In this context however the idea of “woke,” while inspired by its extremist meaning, referred to our fantasy world.</p><p>Fanatics who misunderstand and exaggerate progressive ideas seem to consider all those who do not belong to underrepresented groups as dangerous.</p><p>Consequently, for a black man, white is the enemy; for a gay man, hetero is antagonistic; if you are a woman, every man is violent regardless, let alone if one is white, male, hetero and cisgender. Worse than evil.</p><p>Such a conception of life is undoubtedly scary and this is what white-male-hetero-cis-conservatives fear (far from real progressives, though).</p><p>Our reader however, was taking his cue from that phantom dystopia to name the world we have created, where a negative HIV test becomes an object of discrimination, opposite to what happens in real.</p><p>He was not trying to criticize us or to consider us as extremists. Was he perhaps trying to ascribe a genre to our stories?</p><p>No matter, being aware about all this we don&#8217;t feel comfortable with the label &#8220;woke&#8221;, whatever meaning it could have because we&#8217;re not superior to anyone, we&#8217;re just two bloggers with our merits and flaws. Nothing else.</p>", "contentMap": { "en": "<p>In media and political debates one term is very often used: “woke,” mostly a negative label toward certain ideas concerning politics and society.</p><p>The Agony Ass attempts to understand the phenomenon and explain what is wrong with this word.</p><div class=\"wp-block-group has-global-padding is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\"><div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div><hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-custom-verde-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-custom-verde-background-color has-background\"/><div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div></div><p><!--more read more--></p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Is Agony Ass a political space?</h2><p>In these pages we don&#8217;t want to persuade readers to side with left or right, but if politicians use words in the wrong way The Agony Ass will talk about them with no regards.</p><p>Our mind won&#8217;t change until one of them comes to show us that they, as a trusted right or left activist, have their party&#8217;s symbol at the end of their spine.</p><p>Unless proven otherwise though, we assume that every human has a butt with two more or less firm cheeks, and it&#8217;s their prerogative to do with it as they please.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What does &#8220;woke&#8221; mean?</h2><p>&#8220;Woke&#8221; culture is a fake news. Let&#8217;s introduce this concept as drastic as possible, but our intention is to clarify it right away.</p><p>It originally was “stay woke” slogan, and it appeared for the first time in 1938 from a song by Lead Belly about social injustices toward black population in the United States.</p><p>But, also in the same year, it was taken up by the African-American writer William Melvin Kelley in a New York Times Magazine article entitled “if you are woke you dig it”.</p><p>Consequently, in concrete terms, the term “woke” means &#8220;pay attention&#8221; toward social causes, especially human rights.</p><p>That&#8217;s the reason why we think that real “woke” does not exist: you can have as much awareness as you want toward social injustices, but the world is so complex that something can surely get unwillingly and unknowingly ignored.</p><p>We&#8217;re the first to see it on ourselves: our main activism concerns HIV stigma, focusing on accessibility towards sensory (mainly visual) disability as well, but our site&#8217;s puzzles and puns prevent us from defining our blog “accessible” because a person with cognitive impairment might encounter several difficulties. Not to mention our English translation still incomplete for our international readers.</p><p>However, this does not automatically mean that we don&#8217;t care of the world around us.</p><p>Maybe people should stop calling themselves &#8220;woke&#8221;. Let&#8217;s rather collaborate to achieve a common goal. Together, we can at least make progress in overcoming social injustice.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Woke: what&#8217;s the WRONG meaning?</h2><p>Conservatives tend to label as &#8220;woke&#8221; any progressive idea, through online and off line propaganda.</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Do you support gender equality? You are woke.</li><li>Do you support LGBT rights? You are woke.</li><li>Are you active against racism, or for environment related topics? You are woke!</li></ul><p>Have they realized this is not the term&#8217;s real meaning? We don&#8217;t know, but if ultra-conservatives use it this way, we must blame some extremists who misunderstand progressive ideas and label themselves as &#8220;woke&#8221;.</p><p>Basically they assume to be more aware than others regarding social justice, but who are they? What do they want?</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Social justice warriors</h2><p>Social justice warriors: individuals who respond violently when they perceive an injustice in their physical or digital environment. No matter if that injustice is real or it&#8217;s just inside their own mind.</p><p>A silly example: going on and on about how rude it is for a sighted person to say &#8220;look&#8221; to a blind person, meaning &#8220;pay attention.&#8221;</p><p>Or when someone misses the whole point of our web site&#8217;s satire and complains that we&#8217;re making fun of people who are stigmatized, when we writing about talking HIV virus and the &#8220;positive world.&#8221;</p><p>They suppose to be the smartest who own the truth. They&#8217;re Woke. But this behaviour ends up harming all causes they claim to support, creating a serious damage to the whole progressive ideals.</p><p>When a self-proclaimed feminist declares, &#8220;You&#8217;re a man? So you&#8217;re violent,&#8221; she completely misrepresents the feminist movement. She&#8217;s a fanatic, closed to any dialogue. This harmful ideology not only damages society but also ruins art and culture, as these individuals seek to impose their narrow worldview on everyone.</p><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What&#8217;s “cancel culture”?</h3><p>Bristol, June 2020: Black Lives Matter, a movement for the rights of black communities, tore down a statue of a former slave trader and threw it into a river &#8211; the same one in which he is said to have drowned people rising against him.</p><p>His name was Edward Colston, honored with a bronze sculpture that had been there since 1895; this man was remembered because when slavery was abolished, he built hospices, hospitals and schools through money earned by selling slaves.</p><p>Black people had also approached the mayor to have the statue removed but they then decided to take it down because their appeals had gone unheeded.</p><p>Now, if Colston could be considered a hero to white people, how can we expect him to be treated as such by black as well? All right, slavery is gone, but a community oppressed by that person is certainly not going to honor him because you ask them to.</p><p>If, however, this episode might have made sense if Bristol population was a high percentage of black folks, it is harmful when the elimination of a symbol is promoted in large communities: avoiding to study classic literature due to incompatible values with contemporary society, would be wrong.</p><p>Our present and future are tightly connected to our past, we are what we are because in the past there has been the history we have had. Mistakes included.</p><p>Was it better that slavery, state murder, authoritarian regimes were not there? Sure. But we cannot go back and manipulate history according to what suits us.</p><p>This is called “cancel culture,” and conservatives, while accusing progressives of shaping history according to their own ideas, are the first to do so:</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>remove sexuality-themed books, racism, LGBT rights… from school libraries</li><li>prevent sex and affective education in schools</li><li>ask companies to withdraw commercials that conservatives dislike.</li></ul><p>For Italy, we report two emblematic cases of conservative “cancel culture.”</p><p>One stocking company had packaged its product commercial singing “sisters of Italy” instead of “brothers” in an adaptation of the national anthem dedicated to stockings; they had it removed.</p><p>Another snack chip company, in its commercial, depicted a priest and a nun. Catholic ultraconservatives did not appreciate it at all, and that commercial also came to a bad end.</p><p>So it is useless for them to accuse progressives and then do worse; “cancel culture” is a mistake anyway.</p><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Only we can</h3><p>There are some bangs of extremist “progressivism” that take a stand on clothing and the roles of artists.</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>aren&#8217;t you Mexican? Then why do you wear the Sombrero? “Because I am an actor! Because I dress like a carnival! Etc.”</li><li>you are hetero! Why do you want to play a gay role?</li><li>only disabled people can talk about disability</li><li>a man has no right to speak out against violence towards women</li></ul><p>And millions of examples could be pointed out. But we, though in total disagreement with conservatives on social issues, agree with them when they oppose such an approach to art, politics and culture.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hetero actors for gay roles?</h2><p>A great actor should be able to empathize with any character: in theory, the concept is well-established and there are many examples. Let no one tell us that Tom Hanks was incapable of playing a gay man with AIDS in &#8220;Philadelphia&#8221;, or the guy with a mild cognitive impairment in &#8220;Forrest Gump&#8221;.</p><p>And what about Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown, the Irish artist with motor and cerebral disabilities who managed to paint and write using his left foot, his only remaining ability?</p><p>&#8220;My Left Foot&#8221; is its title, Day-Lewis has no disabilities, yet the movie is brilliantly acted.</p><p>So why all this fuss about hetero actors playing gay roles?</p><p>There are hetero actors who feel uncomfortable playing a gay character because of scenes where there is kissing or having to simulate sexual intercourse, so what?</p><p>We don&#8217;t have that much knowledge about acting but we are aware that body-to-body physical contact (even between a man and a woman) is not immediate especially if you&#8217;ve had a strict upbringing about sexuality.</p><p>The issue remains, however: when you act, you should put aside your real personality with related ideas and conditioning to empathize with your assigned character.</p><p>The debate did not originate from hetero and gay, but from black and white: once the roles were all assigned to white actors, then people started saying “why not assign black roles to black actors as well?” That made sense.</p><p>By the way, one thing is when it comes to including different people from each other in a set, but when it becomes extremism it is more harmful than beneficial.</p><p>Just look at the rules for Oscar-eligible “best picture” nominations.</p><p>Standard A, “on-screen representation,” constrains producers to have at least one lead actor be part of an “underrepresented” group, and in supporting roles this applies to at least 30 percent of the actors. Constraints also in the plot, which must be centered on stories of marginalized people.</p><p>There are similar rules in off-set organization, but if the intent is good, it becomes a limitation in the long run: do I give up a good actor because instead I have to choose the LGBT/disabled/black/Hispanic one?</p><p>Since we belong to marginalized groups ourselves, we are the ones who support social inclusion policies the most, knowing that without “obligations” production companies would only hire rich white hetero and cis people.</p><p>Same for more “ordinary” jobs. What office would hire an employee with a disability by choice without the law obligating them to do so?</p><p>Yet, taking a look at the Oscars thing, something sounds wrong: if you force me to focus on so-called “minorities” for the plot, I end up bringing up a collection of stereotypes because my job as a producer is not to do social education, but to guarantee you a product that can be sold to the majority of audience.</p><p>No movie company can ignore market&#8217;s demands, so if, as in the last period, the far right tends to attract the masses, they circumvent the rules of “diversity and inclusion” by creating some clichés based personas.</p><p>We witnessed this phenomenon watching the Spanish series <a href=\"https://plusbrothers.net/breathless-medical-mishmash/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"33736\">“Breathless”</a>, on Netflix: a medical setting where four LGBT characters, two men and two women, embody the worst stereotypes between promiscuous sex, drugs and child abduction.</p><p>This way you&#8217;re killing two birds with one stone: satisfying the diversity quotas by including LGBT people, while also giving the conservatives what they want &#8211; a negative representation of minorities.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Constraints and capabilities</h2><p>We have often wondered what a world would be like where creativity is constrained only to those who can speak about a condition because they experience it firsthand. SPOILER: A disaster.</p><p>That was our direct experience when we started writing our blog because eeach of us had their own characters to develop:</p><ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Elettrona plays women and HIV negative characters.</li><li>Gifter plays men and HIV-positive characters.</li></ul><p>We&#8217;d established this storytelling routine when forced to stay at home during COVID emergency, but once we had to go back to our regular jobs, our free time decreased so our mutual roles became impossible to manage.</p><p>“Gifter, are you playing the negative character today? Elettrona, you take care of it tonight, I don&#8217;t have time / I don&#8217;t feel like playing the talking virus role…”</p><p>We made the best of a bad situation, but it turns out we were worrying about nothing for long time. Now, it doesn&#8217;t matter who&#8217;s behind the words anymore.</p><p>However, we have never felt uneasy when interpreting a character in our first-person narration because we chose when, how, and who.</p><p>No one forced us to publish on our blog about being an HIV-positive guy who transmits the virus to dozens of adoring girls, nor about being the guy&#8217;s beloved lady who purposely asks him for HIV.</p><p>We&#8217;re the authors and own our characters&#8217; life so, whenever feeling uncomfortable with one of them, we can think about a plot to get them out of the picture without any commercial restrictions or marketing recommendations. Just following creative writing&#8217;s rules about consistent characters.</p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;You are woke&#8221;!</h2><p>Let&#8217;s close this article by making a dutiful apology to a reader; we did it in person but it&#8217;s better to write it down as well.</p><p>Assuming he was meaning the far-right interpretation of &#8220;woke&#8221;, we have been very rude to a reader when he gave us this definition some time ago.</p><p>As part of unrepresented groups, we both receive plenty of hate speech so we feel uncomfortable when a stranger uses certain terms; we tend to defend ourselves even when it&#8217;s not necessary or appropriate.</p><p>In this context however the idea of “woke,” while inspired by its extremist meaning, referred to our fantasy world.</p><p>Fanatics who misunderstand and exaggerate progressive ideas seem to consider all those who do not belong to underrepresented groups as dangerous.</p><p>Consequently, for a black man, white is the enemy; for a gay man, hetero is antagonistic; if you are a woman, every man is violent regardless, let alone if one is white, male, hetero and cisgender. Worse than evil.</p><p>Such a conception of life is undoubtedly scary and this is what white-male-hetero-cis-conservatives fear (far from real progressives, though).</p><p>Our reader however, was taking his cue from that phantom dystopia to name the world we have created, where a negative HIV test becomes an object of discrimination, opposite to what happens in real.</p><p>He was not trying to criticize us or to consider us as extremists. Was he perhaps trying to ascribe a genre to our stories?</p><p>No matter, being aware about all this we don&#8217;t feel comfortable with the label &#8220;woke&#8221;, whatever meaning it could have because we&#8217;re not superior to anyone, we&#8217;re just two bloggers with our merits and flaws. Nothing else.</p>" }, "name": "Agony ass: woke, hetero actors and gay characters", "nameMap": { "en": "Agony ass: woke, hetero actors and gay characters" }, "published": "2024-11-25T12:14:11Z", "summary": "<p>What is Woke? This word is heard everywhere but who really knows what it means?</p>\n", "summaryMap": { "en": "<p>What is Woke? This word is heard everywhere but who really knows what it means?</p>\n" }, "tag": [], "updated": "2024-11-25T12:15:25Z", "url": "https://plusbrothers.net/agony-ass-woke-hetero-gay/", "to": [ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public" ], "cc": [ "https://plusbrothers.net/wp-json/activitypub/1.0/actors/4/followers" ], "replies": { "id": "https://plusbrothers.net/wp-json/activitypub/1.0/posts/36562/replies", "type": "Collection", "first": { "id": "https://plusbrothers.net/wp-json/activitypub/1.0/posts/36562/replies?page=0", "type": "CollectionPage", "partOf": "https://plusbrothers.net/wp-json/activitypub/1.0/posts/36562/replies", "items": [] } }, "sensitive": false }