For to exit the Matrix is not to know the truth but to discover the poverty of knowledge. “Welcome to the desert of the real,” Morpheus intones after Neo takes the red pill. There’s a reason the real is a desert. What good is the truth if nothing grows there? The notion that gender was socially constructed, instead of biological fact, was intended to free people like me from our assigned sexes. It did this, perhaps, but only at the cost of the very categories into which we sought entry. As a good feminist, I know there’s no such thing as a woman. As a woman, I resent this.
/quote]
That's not truth as a way to find deeper truths. That's saying that they discovered a truth and didn't like it, followed by a bit of complete nonsense. The video creator noted that you can't be something if it doesn't exist. I don't think that's complicated. Maybe Chu meant, "As someone suffering the delusion of being a woman, I resent this." But it's not what she said. She said there's no such thing as a woman.
GreyICE wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 10:14 am
This sort of shit was what the term "sophomoric" was created to describe. As an aside, it's why I hate video essays (the worst parts of SF debris are the video essays, as opposed to the video reviews). Video Essays allow some truly terrible reasoning to float because people just string words together with no actual logical connection between them. It encourages sophomoric reasoning, because it is spoken rather than written, therefore errors in logic and reasoning are harder to detect. If we were actually reading this shit, we'd realize it was fallacious nonsense very quickly, because none of the points actually parse as logic.
Of course the fact this is a video essay meant he wrote it all out, read it through, said "yep, that makes sense" and then read it to us. So I'm viewing the work of an idiot.
Let's see if he had any logical points.
* Many of the points that are used to indicate a trans allegory could be interpreted as other things. Compare that to
Animal Farm.
* That Neo sense that something's off about the world is a reference to being trans but that
doesn't work because transgender people don't think that there's something off about the world,
but that there's something off about themselves. It's not the world that is wrong
but that their body and or mind is wrong.
* The Matrix is how people see themselves, but the real world is how they are? But if they see themselves as the other gender, and the Matrix is a lie, that makes their internal view of themselves a lie.
* Chu says that Neo has dysphoria about his role and tries to avoid it by violence. But Neo embraces that humans have to be free, and his violence is either self-defense or in pursuit of that.
* Chu says that the Matrix is a gender binary. However that doesn't fit once you watch the aniMatrix shorts, especially second renaissance and the sequels you're literally told numerous times that humans and programs have a more nuanced relationship in the real world and the Matrix than previously thought. It's not that one side is inherently good or evil; that there is a binary, the Manichaean
dichotomy of the first film is repeatedly shown to be false, as is the prophecy: just another system of
control.
But maybe those don't make sense to you. Maybe Tolkein was stupid or, to use what seems to be your go-to insult, "retarded." Maybe you're the smart one.
