Thursday 29 March 2012

Yay or Nay? Goths Make Better Lovers



So as the video tittle says this was aired in 2003, I just saw it for the first time a few days ago though when it was posted to a group I'm in on Facebook.

A lot of people seem to find it really sweet, and cute...Perhaps I just have a big, black heart but I really don't, I find it down right insulting in places.

I find the general idea that "goths make better lovers" to be wrong from the outset, I know I don't have very much personal experience (I can count my exes on one hand) but I have quite a varied friend circle these days and having seen their relationships from a friend's point of view I think I can safely say there are just as many good goths as their are utter twatwaffles, but lets not dwell on that.

The documentary itself is presented from the point of view of a non-goth looking in at the goth scene, from his point of view goths never seem to be single.
This is not true, I do however think I understand how he came to that conclusion.
There are of course less goths than whatever the fashionable norm is, and a lot of local goths know each other and will hang out together as friends, so perhaps he is mistaking friends for lovers? (not as stupid as it sounds, quite a lot of people used to assume my friend Gavin and I were a couple...It used to be a joke between us that we were cramping each other style when we were single).

I also feel that there are a lot of thinly veiled insults within this, the one that stands out most is the guy that is describing goth girls, who says something about how there are a lot of attractive goth girls but then also emphases that "fat girls" also sometimes join the subculture.
I find it really insulting that he would assume that what he finds attractive =/= what everybody finds attractive.
I also find the way he seems (to me anyway) like he is trying to "sell" the goth lifestyle like that really objectifying.

Delving further into what I find objectifying is the implication that goth girls are all (or mostly) kinky.
I really dislike that stereotype, not because I am against kink (I'm not), but because I am against fetishising groups of people based on stereotypes, it just leads to really negative things.
When I was fourteen (which would actually be the year this was broadcast, I'm not sure if what happened to me was related to this or not), I walked down my street on my way to the youth group I used to go to dressed as Death from The Sandman...It was a really bad attempt at Death but that is besides the point,  it was Halloween, I wasn't very confident in my early teens and Halloween was pretty much the only time I would allow myself to dress up.
For my make-up I had black lipstick and a ton of swirly eyeliner, I clearly looked 14.
Someone further up my street was having a new garage built and there were a lot of builders outside (I would just like to say here that I'm not stereotyping builders here, the majority of them seem to be fine, I am just explaining what happened to me), as I walked past they all lined up and shouted lewd things at me (about what they wanted to do with me based on my make-up) and made rude gestures.
I was so disturbed by the whole event that I still have issues talking about it, those men assumed because of how I had my make-up that I would be ok with that?
I'm not the only woman who has had to deal with this, when I shared this video with a few close goth friends of mine, other women started talking about how that part of the video had squicked them out and that they too had been harassed in the street by men who had assumed that they'd be "kinky" based on how they were dressed.

Most of all though, I just really dislike the idea that how someone dresses or what music they listen to would effect how they act as a person.

So what do you think? Am I just reading to far into it? Or is this video just really insulting?

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