Current mood:	pensive
Entry tags:	cheerio-pissing, fandom, godwin's law, language, meta, otw

Cheerio
Daniel Radcliffe, on whether he'd ever consider playing James Bond:
"It would be weird to suddenly be involved in another big franchise, but hey, it takes a big man to turn down Bond," adding, "I don't think the world's ready for a short-arse Bond."

Cheerio:
Today, makesmewannadie  used the term "Cheerio-pissing" to describe the discussion happening in response to OTW's recent announcement. Meanwhile, cereta  posted to say that, from now on, she'd be labeling her posts "squee" to clearly indicate which Cheerios/posts she didn't want pissed on.

Both these comments make me wonder whether the usage of the term "Cheerio-pissing" isn't slipping widely from its origin to now include anything but squee, despite cereta  's attempt to define it more carefully than that. Part of what cereta  notes is that it's not simply a matter of negative vs. positive comments but is, also, a question of whether you're going to be a dissenter, outlier, or otherwise in the minority in whatever you have to say. Thus, she uses the example of a football game in which you are rooting for the "wrong" team (and thus your positive comment is negative only in the context of the given audience). In this case, your good Cheer is misplaced, as you are in enemy territory. Cheerio pissing has an element of befouling someone else's cereal/sandbox/swimming pool.

If makesmewannadie  is right and questioning (even criticizing) OTW is "Cheerio-pissing," then that points to an inherent problem with OTW--perhaps the very problem with which those accused of pissing are concerned. If those people outside the existing board and volunteer group ask questions or offer critiques, are they pissing in someone else's bowl of cereal? Who owns that particular bowl, and isn't it a problem if people like partly_bouncy  and hector_rashbaum  are considered "outsiders" to an enterprise that describes itself as serving fandom at large (including them)? Should they be considered, a priori, outsiders because they have not yet officially volunteered? Is the unspoken assumption here that one has to be on the list of volunteers in order to own the bowl and thus own the right to take a piss? Would anyone ever describe someone as pissing in their own bowl of Cheerios? Do we mind pissing only if we don't feel a sense of camraderie with the pisser? (Because, in my experience, the "squee only" rule tends to be mediated by the sense in which negative comments are acceptable not simply only in certain contexts but also only when said by certain people, with friends having more rights than strangers to define the boundaries of a given discussion).

Strangely enough, when I first heard the term, I could only think of what mothers everywhere know about Cheerios and toilets. Supposedly, sticking Cheerios in the toilet and allowing toddler boys to take aim helps to encourage them to "keep it in the bowl" and not on the seat, the floor, and possibly the ceiling. In that case, of course, pissing on Cheerios is absolutely encouraged, and is considered a rite of passage on the way to civilized (potty) behavior. The idea of pissing on Cheerios is to encourage aim--to teach proper boundaries for certain necessary behaviors.

This is, of course, not just a post about OTW, as I've been thinking about this since an earlier discussion on a completely unrelated topic in which someone invoked Godwin's Law in response to my mention of the Holocaust, and I started to think about the ways in which the phrase "Silence = Death" can become corrupted to the point where we can't even talk about death. Because of Godwin's Law, it's now virtually impossible to discuss the Holocaust online without the Law being invoked before anyone's had a chance to even test the comparison and see if there are any parallels.

Perhaps the problem is that we may well hold up democratic, open discussion as the ideal, but that notion is invariably in tension with the sense that some of us "own" the rights to things (fandom, fannish history, Jewish history, whatever that bowl of Cheerios actually is). The problem comes, I think, with the ways in which discussion is claim-making, and how often we seek to claim things which we know are too large and unwieldy for any one person or even one group of people to handle.

These are not fully formed thoughts, but the beginnings of thoughts, and I'll end with another one, which is on my mind. The name "Organization for Transformative Works" reminds me of that old problem of cultural anthropology, where the observer invariably changes the thing being observed. I wonder what fandom will look like in ten years, and what kind of transformation this attempt at "organization" will have wrought.