mermaid blood wrote: Thu Mar 08, 2018 10:34 am
Stakhanov wrote: Thu Mar 08, 2018 9:14 am
What worries me even more is that I think some people now attribute Dan's response to fear and his depression rather than a misinterpretation of the situation (regardless of who's responsible for the misinterpretation). So rather than trying to find a common ground between their own thoughts and the apparent thoughts of Dan in the liveshow, a whole new layer of motivations and intentions get added to explain away the conflict in what was being said. We all have the right to believe in our own truth, but it does also mean nothing is at the core getting resolved here, and people just continue building their own truth on different wavelengths.
Luckily in this case it's about people we love and care for and not about serious policy with real consequences
i'm not sure i see someone's motivations and a misinterpretation/miscommunication as mutually exclusive. if anything, they're directly related, right? someone's life experiences up until a point of communication totally inform how they perceive a situation. whether that perception and subsequent behaviour is objectively fair to both parties involved, is never guaranteed. at no point in his liveshow did dan say he doesn't put penises in his mouth, which if it were a true misinterpretation he wouldn't have been hesitant to clarify simply and in one sentence. instead he displayed behaviour he's intermittently displayed for 6 or 7 out of his 8 years online, so people picking up on that doesn't worry me at all. i see it as a good thing that people are perceptive and take into consideration states of mind the subject themselves have highlighted, with intention, otherwise a resolution and progress of any sort feels impossible. better understanding someone's behaviour is not synonymous with excusing that behaviour, for me. whether it's queer politics or the heinous murderers in the many true crime documentaries i watch.
**I do not consider daniel nor the people who used the coming out narrative as murderers, lol
Thanks for your reply. An Interesting post with plenty in it that made me think. Let me unpack my thoughts piece by piece
and procrastinate the pain away
"i'm not sure i see someone's motivations and a misinterpretation/miscommunication as mutually exclusive."
I agree. To an extent every communication must be motivated by something, otherwise we'd just be monkeys making random noises right? So yea i think there is always *some* mix of motivations that's behind everything he says. The hard if not impossible part is figuring out which ones.
if anything, they're directly related, right? someone's life experiences up until a point of communication totally inform how they perceive a situation. whether that perception and subsequent behaviour is objectively fair to both parties involved, is never guaranteed.
I mostly agree, though i don't think everything here is a matter of life experiences and perception. We have an "objective" fact to examine in this case which is there regardless of his perception and behavior. There are the actual words which he said and we can look at. We can put the explanation he provides in the livestream about his joke next to his words and we can judge if that explanation seems reasonable to us and if we believe he didn't catch the innuendo, or is trying to make fun of people who "didn't understand" etc. We have a material basis that can inform us and that is public and out there for everyone to see and draw conclusions about.
When it comes to figuring out his true intentions and motives though, there's a whole lot less to inform us. That's why I'm extremely hesitant to attribute this to fear and anxiety, his state of mind or historical patterns in his behavior. Which I don't think are really there to start with and are themselves based on previous conclusions people have drawn, without much objective confirmation about them.
at no point in his liveshow did dan say he doesn't put penises in his mouth, which if it were a true misinterpretation he wouldn't have been hesitant to clarify simply and in one sentence.
Agreed and this is why i think none of this says anything about his sexual identity or how he's backing away from it. It's rare to find a video nowadays where there is not at least some reference to same sex attraction in a way that's consistent with how they have presented themselves for a good while now.. be it "no label", "queer", "bi", "pansexual". They don't seem to want to confirm anything though. I think back at the interview with the Times, a publication that in the at least in the UK has some luster (regardless of whether you think the article was any good). When introducing themselves to other / new audiences they seem to take the line that their sexuality is 'private' and refuse to label themselves. Which i find meaningful by itself because few straight people would refuse to label themselves as straight.
Though that is always a possible approach.
Similarly I would agree that he wasn't trying to say he "doesn't suck dick" or wanted to backtrack on his sexual identity in the liveshow. There were other ways to do that that were far more direct and in the end it are others, not he himself, who may have attached significance to that joke beyond what one can reasonably take away from it. I don't think it was a coming out.
"What can be taken away from it" is another one of those tricky and subjective questions that will differ depending on who you ask, but i do feel the person who is the primary source and actually made the statement to begin with is best suited offer an final interpretation on what
it's supposed to mean. That doesn't mean i buy all his shenanigans around it about he didn't catch the double meaning (i think it's more likely he just misjudged the impact).
instead he displayed behaviour he's intermittently displayed for 6 or 7 out of his 8 years online, so people picking up on that doesn't worry me at all. i see it as a good thing that people are perceptive and take into consideration states of mind the subject themselves have highlighted, with intention, otherwise a resolution and progress of any sort feels impossible.
I think this is where we disagree most. I see a different meaning in his intermittent behavior in those 7-8 years and at least on "phan", the topic in which i most often see Dan's behavior and denials explained as Dan being insecure and/or fearful of people's reaction, I disagree. I think the more straightforward explanation is that he means what he says and I don't see how people can make all these assertions about what drives him on an
objective basis.
I too am queer, i struggle with a lot of issues about being open about parts of my identity and it's easy to see parallels with one's own situation and assume others must be in a similar state of mind ... but that can turn out to be right or wrong in any given situation.
What worries me most I guess is that people who hope other people are feeling similar to them and imbue their behavior with motivations and intentions they have for themselves can get let down hard. It's easy to construct a narrative around other people if it's already one that you construct around yourself and your own life experiences. I'm not saying this is what anyone specifically does, but I do feel that this often happens in the fandom at large.
Like in this case the people who were very proud of Dan "being more open" and thinking he was "coming out" and who got inspired by that and wrote long messages of praise or used his words to build up their own resolve to change things in their lives... well it sucks that that's probably not what he intended. This is why my instincts and mind is wary to jump to any conclusions. A lot of his viewers are young, LGBT or searching for their own identities. It's a dangerous thing to weave that search together with the behavior of two men who (while i think they are good and charming people) we mostly know and represent themselves as professional entertainers. Even if they do that in a much more personal and 'blurry' medium than previously existed, and there
might be some real parallels.
This worry may be totally inapplicable or sound like 'mothering' to (most) people here, but it's a genuine concern of mine especially when i remember that there are indeed also just a ton of young teens who watch them and may pin their hopes and dreams on them.
"the resolution and progress" you say is otherwise impossible i think
is the narrative that is getting constructed around this, and if you believe in it that's fine but I'm wondering what good grounds there are here, which really inform us here that Dan was trying to be more open here about his sexuality. Other than the joke of which his own interpretation seems garner a lot of criticism.
better understanding someone's behaviour is not synonymous with excusing that behaviour, for me.
Here we agree. Are we understanding his behavior any better though? Or are we just constructing narratives and assuming intentions and moods on the basis of very little information indeed. Perhaps they help us smooth out any conflicts we have, but with the best will of the world i cannot see how we can know these people's true thoughts and emotions on the basis of a joke here and there or a 5 minute talk that only tangentially goes into the concerns raised, in a broader context that's full of ambiguity and in which i think we have to accept that it's mostly they who control what and how much they let us show and know of themselves.
from me too, mermaidblood. I hadn't thought of Phil's video like that, but I'd been thinking about Dan and how he feels about his own videos in terms of insecurity going way back to things he's said before (some are old and I don't remember much, but things like "suddenly parents care" when Tabinof was a best-seller). I like this video a lot, but wondered what to make of so many sex jokes on the back of what just happened, and how snarky Dan was. I relate things back to myself a lot here especially regarding Dan so I wasn't going to say anything, I'm not always sure how much I'm projecting.
). I did as they demanded and checked out my own explore page and noticed some similar things I follow and actually look at, but there's an awful lot of random on there. Mine now comes with extra slime, though, cos those are the best, especially the little crackly balls (yet more sex pun not intended, but idk what else to call them).
