I’m still waiting to hear what happens when these crimes are committed by a TV show you’re watching.  

I suppose when these transgressions occur, you eventually rise up above the all-consuming horde and …

….post an animated GIF.  Of a person on a different TV show rolling their eyes.  

It’s a bummer to me that I can broadcast 30 minutes of content through a gauntlet of state and corporate-imposed boundaries and still somehow manage to enrage a real person.

It’s a bummer to me that a real person, without restriction, with nobody policing what they say or how they say it, can sit down to make their voice known, and end up…posting a complaint about a sitcom.  A sitcom on a network that predates our grandparents, from a company that makes stereos, games and phones.

Everything’s a bummer to me, but I try to focus on what makes me happy and what I’m able to control.  Now imagine a GIF of me shitting on your face and tell your parents I said “you’re welcome.”

Oh Dan, Mr. Harmon, whatever, 

You are missing the point completely. 

Good for you, you have succeeded to get a real show on national television. But that’s not the point being made here. Yes, she criticized something that may have been on your show (I don’t know, I can’t see her tags), but you should take pleasure in the little things, You are being given criticism on something relatively minute. Feminism is often silenced and thought of as this big dirty word. It’s not. It’s human rights. Yes we can get angry, but when you live in a world built for white men, and every little piece of your femininity, and possibly race, is shat on by the media (we are silenced, never pretty enough, or too pretty, we are too much this and too little that) some of us would like to see a woman actively calling herself a feminist and not being the butt of a joke. We want women who call themselves feminists and don’t actively hate on other women for petty external things, like how much sex they think the other is having or how she chooses to dress herself.

But its common to write women this way, it really is, because society tells us that this is how women act to each other. They pit us against each other. So you did something that is just a symptom of a greater problem. But you can take this and either stop doing it in the future or complain about how she criticized you, for legitimate things, in her own space on the Internet. Sure it may not have been a ten paragraph essay on why slut shaming is harmful, but other women have wrote this, its not her job to write a grade A Women’s and Gender Studies paper every time she has something to say. So this time she chose an eyerolly gif. Well really that’s how we all feel when we see so many progressive shows decide to not use the dirty “F” word and then have their most feminist character go and be all anti-women and slut shame.

Because these tropes, fiction’s cliches as it were, are annoying and over used, and can grate on our nerves. And sometimes only an eyerolly gif can adequately express her emotions at the moment. 

And just because she doesn’t like one aspect of the show doesn’t mean she wants to stop watching. We can take the good with the bad. We are grown ups. It’s like being given pickles on a burger when we said no pickles, we pick them off and go about our day. But these aren’t just an inconsequential pickle, these are things that continuously hurt women as a whole. They are  called “microaggresions,” Google it. So us feminists feel the need to talk about it, as without thought about our lives, how are we to grow as a species. “The paragon of animals” we have higher level thinking and can analyze our world. For the better and for the worse. 

Now, you can choose one of two paths.

1) Continue complaining and insulting (yes, you insulted her) someone who is presumably a fan for having a legitimate complaint and not giving her a legitimate counterargument, and continue being part of the problem. 

or

2) Learn. Grow. Think. Be part of the solution. You discussed once about how having a writer’s room with equal male/female representation was a good thing, and the way it should be, natural. So you’ve set precedent. You’ve done it once you can do it again. 

Now you choose. 

-Anais. 

or 3) the age old adage: STAY OUT OF THE TAG, nothing good happens there. Seriously. Just, don’t even bother with the tags. They are that shadowy place, the elephant graveyard. (Lion King reference, what whaaaaaaaaat.)