Monday, September 19, 2011

If all that was ever on was shows about monkeys

I've been thinking about how best to explain to the dudely types just what it's like when all media is filtered through a lens you don't have.

Imagine that every single damn tv show was a show about monkeys. Ok, not every. But the shows that manged to show something other than monkeys all did so from a "stupid humans, look at them with their stupid, petty shallow ways" or you know, from the monkeys' point of view. It's the market, they are just making what people monkeys want.

And not just the tv shows, but the movies we all Monkeys in Space! Monkeys VS Giant Monsters! Monkeys, and the occasional bone thrown "relentlessly perky, young, single human must be humiliated and humbled in order to find perfect monkey love" aka, the romantic comedy. It's still the market. They're still making what the market wants.

But it doesn't end there. The news is all made by monkeys, but under the guise of "journalism" the news is supposed to be the truth for everyone, monkey and non-monkey. The fact that most of the writers are literal chimps with typewriters shouldn't make you question why most of the headlines are "stupid humans do something stupidly, again".This is journalism and it is TRUTH!

And then there's science, we all know that science is unbiased. I mean it's all done by monkeys for monkeys. The idea that humans might have a different take on say the importance of the banana as currency or why flea picking feels so damn good or has no place in science. It's TRUTH.

And we haven't even gotten to literature, politics, education, workplace policies.We're just talking about who gets to send out the messages that everybody hears. Sure, maybe there are a handful of token non-monkeys who get to say something, but by nature of being tokens they are usually just spouting the monkey line.

Now if you live in a world like that, wouldn't you want to turn of the tv, stop reading the paper, and choose your movies really damn carefully. Wouldn't you just want to puke because the new fall season is nothing but fucking nature shows.


(You can, as usual, substitute the humans in this little analogy for every single damn oppressed group. While how those oppressions color the world we see work differently in each group, how the oppressors control access to the message everyone receives is pretty damn universal.)

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