#that little kids are growing up in unconscionable circumstances

[elodieunderglass]

I’m glad to be included in gender, and it’s an honor to trans your gender, but gender is astrology to me. “Girl sun boy moon.” You don’t agree, but now you get me better. Send post

[mxadrian779]

A second anti-Kataang vent, but a little more coherent and organised this time.

Have you ever stopped to think about how toxic Kataang actually is?

1. It's forced from the first episode.

Here's a kid who wakes up after being in a coma for a hundred years, sees the first girl ever, and goes "I'mma make her mine for the rest of her life." Seriously?

2. It's not 100% consensual.

Aang repeatedly forces himself on Katara, physically and emotionally. She's never asked about her feelings or what she wants; it's all about his feelings and what he wants, to the point where he actively disrespects her when she heavily implies she doesn’t want a relationship.

3. The obsessive attachment is unreal.

Throughout the entire show, Aang is overly fixated on her, to the point of being possessive (as in “Jet” and “Crosssroads of Destiny”) and putting the world at risk because of his attachment to her. He was willing to sacrifice his destiny, and the world’s health, because he refused to let go of his unhealthy obsession with her.

4. Katara alone inherits the love and grief of his people.

"The Guru” flat-out said that this poor girl was the object of Aang's trauma, the manifestation of his lost culture. That's an incredible burden, unfair for a young girl who has enough troubles of her own.

5. After the war, she loses her independence.

She seems to become just an extension of Aang. Everything she is and does now is dependent on him. She's his sidekick, his source of support, his second banana. She isn't herself anymore.

6. Katara gets demoted.

Relationships are supposed to allow each party to grow through the other. Aang sure grows through Katara, but as for her part? She ultimately goes from a passionate, restless warrior to a homebody, from an amazingly powerful, independent young woman to the mother of Aang's children. The Gaang all have achievements to speak of...except her. She's just the Avatar's wife. No more “Master Katara” or “Sifu Katara.” She’s “Mrs. Avatar.”

7. The kiss is all that mattered.

The show about children rising above adversity, coming into their own, finding and redeeming themselves, & ending a century-long war that a world of adults couldn't end...

...culminates in a kiss.

This amazing story of strength and valour ends with "the hero gets the girl," as if that's all that really mattered. Who cares about all the lives they've saved? The new course they've charted for the world? The winner gets his trophy. That’s the moral of the story.

8. Their relationship wasn’t founded on healthy means.

Bryke seriously looked at two traumatised children and thought it would be a good idea to couple them for the rest of their lives.

9. It isn’t love.

They can’t naturally have a romantic love in their circumstances. Their love is emotional. After everything they’ve been through, independently and together, they’ve become attached to each other. They (or at least Aang) have mistaken their severe emotional dependence upon each other for romantic love. Do they honestly desire each other? Or are they just terrified of losing each other, like they’ve lost so many others in their lives?

10. It’s way too fast.

So you still want Kataang to happen. Okay, at least give it a couple years. They need a lot of time to heal and get their heads together. They need time to grow independently. They need space--physically, mentally, and emotionally. They’re still children. They’ve been through more hell than most adults. Forcing them into a relationship that they weren’t in the right space to have is unconscionable.

[queernuck]

Taking a Knee: Megan Rapinoe and the American Self

US Soccer, by deciding to adopt a policy where players are required to “stand respectfully” during the National Anthem, has unmistakably taken a reactionary turn as part of ingratiating themselves to a specific nationalism that exceeds the representative implications of their status as a national team. To understand the violence implied by this decision, one requires a great deal of context and an understanding of the political in sports, the way in which a measure of removal allows sport to become political even as it represents the state, and to articulate the significance specifically of the United States’ national teams in a sort of dream of the American empire.

America is frequently a dominant nation in international competition: while the Olympics are the largest stage for this dominance, there are numerous others upon which it may occur. The Women’s World Cup, along with Women’s Soccer at the Olympics, is unique much in the way that Women’s Ice Hockey is at the Winter Olympics. Soccer, as a sport, is conceptually different from Football so to speak: Žižek has offered that every nation has soccer except America, for which baseball in effect is soccer. While his characterization is perhaps a bit generous to baseball (especially given the global character of baseball compared to the overwhelmingly American character of Gridiron Football) it does establish part of what is unique about soccer as opposed to Football internationally. Americans may grow up playing soccer, but relative few continue with the sport past that age. Baseball, but especially football and basketball, are more attractive options for most players, especially given that the structuring of the NCAA as well as various prep schools mimic that of Soccer Academies in much of Europe and the rest of the American continent. These structures favor basketball and football rather heavily, given the American taste for the sports, leaving soccer by the wayside. America has indeed become an international team of importance over the last few World Cups, making it out of the group stage even under tough circumstances, but the Men’s team is just that: a team of importance.

Meanwhile, the USWNT has up until the 2016 Olympics been the gold standard of international Women’s competition. Because of how the Men and Women’s national development programs were structured together, often directly in tandem, there was a readiness to America’s women’s teams that was only matched by the best-structured national programs when these competitions were established. The USWNT entered postmodern pseudomemory as a dominant team, as women who a larger audience could invest in, moreover invest a libidinal desire in, and who could in turn express those intensities on the field of encounter with a great degree of collaborative, assembled intensity. The USWNT has been at once a sort of joke and the crown jewel of American soccer, a singularly dominant team that captured American investment so uniquely because it at once captured an ungendered expression of investment and because that investment could then be gendered in order to reinvest it in certain flows of desire, be it becoming-woman or an externality to womanhood that could be shaped in its exact flows by a sort of largely male libidinal redirection. Nevermind that women’s sports is, on both sides of the ball, full of lesbians, these are girls of sport for the man’s gaze, winning the trophy and upholding it in all its phallogocentric glory for him. This is not to deny that the USWNT is phenomenal at best, or to disparage the women on the team. As a collection of the best soccer players in the world, there are few teams of any sort that can parallel them. However, one cannot help but notice that they have a uniqueness within American sporting culture when compared to other women’s teams.

This is, in turn, why Megan Rapinoe’s protest was so unconscionable. Rapinoe’s protest came in late 2016, in direct support of Colin Kaepernick’s decision to protest during the National Anthem, and was part of the transition to kneeling as a symbolic gesture rather than sitting on the bench. The violence that was visited upon similar protests on smaller scales was predictable: individual protestors were sanctioned, and when entire high schools participated in protests their players were met with death threats. After an abysmal showing at the 2016 Olympics and the retirement of multiple of the USWNT’s perennial stars, the team was adrift, still astoundingly dominant but very clearly wounded. Continuing from protests she had done while playing professionally, Rapinoe knelt during the anthem before a friendly while playing for the USWNT. That she was in fact representing America, supposedly, while engaging in this protest lead to a reconception of the question behind the protest, asking if she should be allowed to protest while representing America.

Soon after, John Tortorella was asked as coach of Team USA at the first revival of the World Cup of Hockey what he would do if a player protested the National Anthem, responding that he would sit any player who did so. Tortorella was widely praised, which is unsurprising given the reactionary character of hockey fans as a whole but moreover important in that it was supposedly an example of how one should treat representing a National Team. Team USA left the tournament without a single victory, Tortorella’s unique and provocative coaching style having lost the room in an absurdly short time period. Meanwhile, Team North America, a team comprised of players from the US and Canada under the age of 23 and far more connected to the spirit of the 1980 Miracle on Ice squad than Tortorella’s, displayed an impressive degree of skill before being knocked out of contention by a tiebreaker with Russia.

Mentioning the 1980 Miracle on Ice is important because it is part of an enduring concept of American international sports, much in the way the 1992 Dream Team or the later successes of the USWNT play a part in creating the concept of American internationalism. The 1980 Miracle team, comprised of college kids who beat what had been and would go on to still be the best single team in the world, is mythologized and is tied directly to the concept of the unreal through the naming of the miraculous, of an American secularity that is itself still Christian in its creation of the self. That its victory came against the Soviet Union is vital as well; the actual gold medal game is frequently forgotten and in fact is not the miracle named in the Miracle on Ice. That specifically American self is in many ways realized through the 1992 Dream Team, the single greatest basketball team ever assembled, a vertical singularity in the horizontal evaluation of the sport that even exceeds the 90s Chicago Bulls. By its very nature the Dream Team cannot be exceeded, as the way in which the players on the team are greats across the board has not been seen in even the greatest Olympic squads since, in any sport. There is no other Dream Team, and there cannot be one. Moreover, the way in which the Dream Team influenced the course of Yugoslavian basketball, as well as the culture of basketball that would stretch over the striation of Yugoslavia after its breakup, is vital to its postmodern character. Perhaps Žižek would be a good consult on this development. This postmodern deconstruction evident in the intensities of the 1992 Dream Team were eventually restructured in the USWNT, and this team has been one of the most prominent examples of such national investment since.

That this specific act of national selfhood, obviously targeted at Rapinoe but in fact precluded from such targeting through reference to the lack of protest rather than any act involved in protest, is part of restricting international competition as well as the athletes involved in it. Football is viewed internationally as American, there is no competition for dominance within it. Conversely, Rapinoe was willing to make her protest at a time of upheaval and dramatic change within the US Soccer community, and the unmistakably reactionary character of the response is indicative of a larger desire to return to the expression of national intensity that US Soccer has previously been. This is specifically ignoring that, for women in America, the American National Team is by far the peak of soccer achievement. For the players on Tortorella’s squad, the WCoH was a preseason warmup against friends and teammates with a coach that they had no reason to push themselves for. The Dream Team was assembled for itself, it was a singularity so unmatchable that comparison to it is trivial. The 2016 Olympics saw the Men’s Basketball team win gold with a team that was thrown together, showed little chemistry until the end of the tournament, and was largely missing the character that defined 1992: even an approach toward a Dream Team would not have been possible given that LeBron James passed on joining. For women’s soccer, even in rejection of the nationalism of the team, the USWNT is the most accomplished squad in the world, and not joining out of deference to the political ramifications is a ridiculous expectation. That so many former USSR players have joined parties and espoused politics bordering on reactionary, as with the association between soccer and fascist nationalism in parts of Serbia. The converse, that a lesbian player would reject the totalizing effect of the team she plays for, is itself even on principle not precluded by the function of the American team, it is simply precluded when it recognizes the larger function of antiblackness both within American sports and with American structuring of the self. American self-examination cannot admit its antisemitism, its antiblackness, its heteronormativity and gendered nature, as this constitutes the coloniality by which the self is named. These processes of naming are themselves what make an American self possible, they are what make an American.

By refusing to address Rapinoe directly, by ignoring the character of her protest while also refusing to name it as such, US Soccer has assumed a sort of nationalism that uses the unspoken to imply its own character. The violence it does is not merely in its structure, but in that which it leaves unsaid. This ruling, by not naming a punishment, is an open injunction toward the questioning of self that Rapinoe’s protest allows, and is intended not merely as a rule in itself but as a prohibitory limit upon the terms that the national team is constituted.