Ahoy, everyone! I am Glenna, and I am new to both WordPress and Dru’s blog, though both are proving to be quite lovely. I’m here as part of Asheyna’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Blog, and hopefully, I do her, Dru, and WordPress some justice.
And so we begin:
Perhaps the best example of and for women is a man. Specifically, man who portrays a woman for a few giggles on YouTube. That man is Liam Kyle Sullivan, the actor who brain-birthed Web sensations Kelly, Mother Grandma, and Aunt Susan Walker on his YouTube Channel.
On the Font of Necessary Knowledge known as Wikipedia, Kelly is described as “a stereotypical blonde teenage American girl. She doesn’t care about much besides her mundane desires and often has intense (even violent) mood swings.” Women get that everywhere: shoe-shopping, hormone-driven crazy. It was on Scrubs last night. It will be on some other show later. It is a stereotype, and thus, cannot be killed no matter how many harpoons ands grenades and sparkly vampires you throw at it.
I’m not here to debunk the myth that women are crazy and love shoe shopping (because I can personally attest to both); I’m here to say that stereotypes have been around for awhile. That’s how they got to be stereotypes. And we use them all the time; if in every thought and interaction we had, we attached all of life’s and humanity’s vastness and depth and complexity, we’d operate on the same speed as a 2002 e-Machine desktop infested with malware (it takes twenty minutes to load 3 incoming emails, dammit). We need stereotypes. We need clean, simple, and efficient to function. A few people in our lives will be worth knowing, knowing for everything they are and aren’t and fail to be and aspire to become. A few people, a handful in the history of the world, have successfully managed to accept everyone for who they are, accept life for what it is, and devoted their lives to spreading that love.
All of those people were killed.
But then, we have artists. Since people have been scribbling on cave walls, every culture everywhere in all time has had artists. Artists aren’t killed as often as, say, revolutionaries and missionaries and what have you, because artists do not set out to change the world. Artists are flawed people, because artists are real people. Artists are portrayed as drunk, angry, brooding people who burn in the sunlight (I am not here to debunk that myth, because I can personally attest to most of it. As for the ‘drunk,’ I have no comment.). But artists are born with an amazing amount of empathy, which is what allows a person to cope with the vastness and depth and complexity of the world around them. Artists usually do not take up much with change, because they’re so busy trying to create a lasting work: a sculpture, a cathedral, a novel, a portrait, the wheel. In the face of complexity, vastness, depth, and an ever-moving world, it is the calling of an artist to capture the world in a snapshot so that the rest of us can better understand all the truth behind it.
For example, they try and get a message across in a blog post without speaking in Bumper Sticker.
So, when Liam Kyle Sullivan portrays a stereotypical blond teenage American girl, he’s portraying a stereotype, but he is also taking the steps toward empathy. Kelly, herself, is a shining beacon of acceptance. Her best friend’s a vampire. Her aunt is a butch. Her family is unaccepting, and (thus) seventy-nine-billion times more unhappy and dysfunctional than she is. In the video ‘Shoes,’ the catchiest of songs and the simplest of concepts, a bitchy saleswoman makes a comment about Kelly’s shoe size, denying her the pair she most wants. Kelly’s response was to politely tell the woman she was being rude (actually, she said ‘F–k you,’ which was very polite next to the shitstorm I would have unleashed). And in that simple exchange you have all the truths of disappointment, societal outlook on size and shape, girl-on-girl cruelty, and a small comment on the struggle of women, hidden inside a stereotype.
Perhaps my favorite lesson from Kelly comes from her interview with Aunt Susan Walker, where she segues the conversation from Susan’s latest country album to the movie She’s All That. Wisely, Kelly points that all ‘she’ did to become ‘that’ was remove her glasses, and then says, “They should have called it She’s Already That.”
We fight against stereotypes, because often they are used cruely. We fight against labels because we don’t want to be summed up in a few short words when we are people, dammit. But stereotypes and human dipshittery are timeless and undying; the good news is, so is empathy, and there is never a shortage of people who live by it. Artists employ it, because that is their art. But maybe it is in our best interests to slow down for a moment and see that all we are and are not, all we fail and aspire to be, all our depth and complexity is already here and always has been; all we have to do is accept it.
*** Glenna, The Blue Lipstick Samurai ***
