Post AbuATNfFzVTxgJyVTk by cour13r5@zirk.us
(DIR) More posts by cour13r5@zirk.us
(DIR) Post #Abu8QP1iGoRj84vlw0 by Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
2023-11-17T17:28:28Z
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Just read something discussing what the writer hoped for from a Denis Villeneuve adaptation of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer,' and in it the writer discusses the core premise of the text as being about the dangers of escaping into virtuality, saying they feel that Villeneuve would be best able to communicate that in film. Thing is, I think that reading misses something crucial, and i think what exactly it misses is really quite telling.Neuromancer as a book and cyberpunk as a genre aren't (just) analyses and critiques of digital escapism, they're analyses and critiques of the material conditions which LEAD to that escapism. And unfortunately people lost hold of THAT understanding long before they lost hold of the "Do Not Uncritically Fetishize These Aesthetics" part; in fact, they lost the latter SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE they lost the former. It has "punk" in the name for a very specific and conscious reason.The continued lack of critique of capitalist and hegemonic structures, here, is part of why C2077 and even the most recent GitS series just didn't work for so many people: Netrunners, Street Samurai, Console Cowboys, and Cyborg Mercenaries are all vocations of desperation, not pure choice. If you need to be those things, it's because the world has foreclosed itself to you and disenfranchised you in a crucial, fundamental way.This is also why analyses of cyberpunk as a genre and aesthetic which don't include race, gender, and disability are inherently facile, to me.Cyberpunk asks, "What if we take all the social structures of the 1970s and '80s, all the burgeoning technologies, and like… hyperrealized them?" And the answer is something that is dazzling, awe-inducing, brutal, heartbreaking, and even potentially a little comforting in its reappropriation of agency from the jaws of alienation.It is also increasingly, starkly familiar to anyone looking outside their window, or existing aware in the world, right this moment, today.But you already knew that; I'm just talking it out.(Also, as a sidebar: the idea that millennials aren't familiar with Neuromancer is Weird™, to me, to say the least.)
(DIR) Post #Abu8uaJ6tT4snqSaJM by GavinChait@wandering.shop
2023-11-17T17:33:56Z
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@Wolven Reminds me of my critique of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor which initially classified all forms of self-employment as entrepreneurship. So countries like Nigeria or South Africa, where a significant proportion of the poorest are self-employed out of desperation at a lack of alternatives, are considered hyper-dynamic. They may be, but "entrepreneurship" so defined isn't a measure of it. If the economists didn't instinctively realise this, how would cyberpunk genre readers?
(DIR) Post #Abu9HNIxP1XF8YFukK by Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
2023-11-17T17:38:02Z
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@GavinChait There's like… a lot of context clues and even just textual events in cyberpunk lit that say "THIS IS NOT GOOD ACTUALLY," and also economists are often very very good at overlooking the relevant socioethical contexts which should lead to better understandings of real-world events.So like… I dunno, man.
(DIR) Post #Abu9unWxpSvBljbbtI by davealvarado@hachyderm.io
2023-11-17T17:45:04Z
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@Wolven oh man this nerd sniped me so hard. I'm currently spinning with thoughts of why The Matrix isn't so cyberpunk, why the Ready Player One book is hardcore cyberpunk and why the movie didn't land nearly as well as the book. This is clarifying for me why I like proper cyberpunk a lot more than just grimdark stuff.
(DIR) Post #AbuA7X7Q9xtSdHjMky by FeralRobots@mastodon.social
2023-11-17T17:47:26Z
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@Wolven Re. 'millennials aren't familiar with Neuromancer': I think Gibson may have fostered that a bit, in his forward to a post-2K edition of Neuromancer in which he mentions young fans expressing complex headcanons for why there are no cell phones in Chiba City, or explaining how 'color of a television tuned to a dead channel' looks in their mind (i.e., different than in his) & why it still works.
(DIR) Post #AbuATNfFzVTxgJyVTk by cour13r5@zirk.us
2023-11-17T17:51:19Z
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@Wolven i have...significant issues with the frame of "escapism" in general (which i've yet to "do a piece on", so i haven't had the chance to run it by all my smarter-than-i friends), and have a preference for thinking of such things as augmentations, accommodations, and prostheses. i think those frames tend/veer toward both the structural/material conditions that necessitate them, as well as what they reach toward (as in leguin's quote about escapism "toward freedom").
(DIR) Post #AbuAUpsqYfpTUX1d9k by jplebreton@mastodon.social
2023-11-17T17:51:20Z
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@Wolven thanks for these thoughts. agree that the theme of labor under coercion / extreme precarity is both central and forgotten in many more modern romanticized *punks. also a big part of why i found Hardspace: Shipbreaker so compelling, it puts you in a dirty, desperate job where the company owns your body and (as debt) soul... and has the political consciousness to tell a story about labor revolt. as power fantasies go, it's a much cleaner more enjoyable high.
(DIR) Post #AbuBkRDm7WBLacomDA by anthk@paquita.masto.host
2023-11-17T18:05:40Z
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@Wolven The best game to experience cyberpunk minus the magic, it's Shadowrun for MegaDrive/Genesis with the Shadowrun 2058 patch. It has everything. That and the Cybersphere MUD, it's ongoing and the minorized people's role the it's taken by the mutants, not other races, but it holds the same ideas and fears to the different.
(DIR) Post #AbuFySv30II4j70DWy by voron@mstdn.party
2023-11-17T18:53:02Z
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@Wolven most cyberpunk movies & t.v. Completely miss the punk part. Which isn’t a corporate sold aesthetic, but is an anti corporate kinda burn em down fight the power rage against the damn machine thing
(DIR) Post #AbuGgUdNzKHUmtjf1M by klintron@mastodon.social
2023-11-17T19:00:43Z
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@Wolven I'm not even sure "dangers of escaping into virtuality" is a theme *at all* yet alone the main one.
(DIR) Post #AbuKXXHt9aSqE8fGgS by astatide@hachyderm.io
2023-11-17T19:44:12Z
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@Wolven I feel like you nailed something tragic about Case that I couldn't put my finger on before when he's later mentioned in one of the two remaining books; that is, he's married and living a happy little life. It felt sad, and it made me sad, because the world has continued to be bad for Molly and others... but Case, having Gotten His, is no longer fighting the system but accepting it. Case only had to solve a problem and the system worked; it never worked for Molly.
(DIR) Post #AbuL3xGI7LUe3FNNFg by kissane@mas.to
2023-11-17T19:49:56Z
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@Wolven Yeah, this nails it, and is why Gibson’s cyberpunk specifically has always worked so well for me. Always above he’s a writer of material conditions! With a real sharp eye on the mechanics of poverty and addiction and desperation.
(DIR) Post #AbuLBagBxgGAKY8EnA by smitty@dice.camp
2023-11-17T19:51:31Z
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@Wolven Just read the full Sprawl trilogy for the first time (I’d read Neuromancer previously). I feel like Count Zero contains the best summation of the core idea:“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
(DIR) Post #AbuLNWACZsMjncr8fQ by adrianh@mastodon.social
2023-11-17T19:53:32Z
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@Wolven @kissane Oh. God. Yes.I get a little… annoyed… when cyberpunk gets described as “dystopian” since it’s so very obviously written to reflect society right now (well… “right then” I guess… but… y’know not much has changed)Case and chums are freaking desperate… and they’d be just as desperate in the real 70s/80s/90s/00s/10s/20s as they would be in Gibson’s fictional 20whatevers — they are not happy people… and they very explicitly do not get happy endings.
(DIR) Post #AbuMSAzSpIX5XAcQEa by janxdevil@sfba.social
2023-11-17T20:05:37Z
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@Wolven Richard Rorty famously delivered a similar critique against cyberpunk, but he chose SNOW CRASH as his example, and he went further: noting that it’s one thing to present a dystopia as a cautionary tale, but doing so while amplifying a basically nihilistic acceptance of the dystopia as inevitable and without alternative is a basically destructive rather than creative work.
(DIR) Post #AbuMVGyN2Zk0xNaGBc by esko@hcommons.social
2023-11-17T20:06:13Z
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@Wolven Extremely well put and wholeheartedly agree on why contemporary mainstream really has a resonance problen.
(DIR) Post #AbuNKGX4RAi0MN86d6 by pkw@mastodon.sdf.org
2023-11-17T20:15:23Z
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@Wolven To me Gibson's Sprawl books were about multi national corporations holding power. And that that the distinction between the AI mind and the multi-national mind was a distinction without a difference. Multi-nationals were just AI gone real big, and parts of their machinery were human committee and parts were computer algorithms.And all of that is just the scifi trick of showing the world as it was when written thru the lense of something foreign and far away to see it more clearly.
(DIR) Post #AbuNv7i4CcDBiAqeVU by RyunoKi@layer8.space
2023-11-17T20:21:58Z
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@Wolven I've read it a few years ago (Gen Y), but couldn't make a connection to my reality.Unlike 1984.But I could still make more out of it than with Solaris 🤷
(DIR) Post #AbuQtOkaAtl7qStU7E by pkw@mastodon.sdf.org
2023-11-17T20:24:44Z
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@Wolven Also that sky of tv color static is a way overblown quote. I'm mis-saying it on porpoise.I read all of WG's stuff as it came out, and in talking to other readers no one ever mentioned that.Those books are pre internet ubiquity, but most people now see them as remembered by the internet.The point being it's all second hand.Does anyone remember bicycle messenger culture accusing WG of plagiarizing?
(DIR) Post #AbuQtQlMgxZc5TH8c4 by Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
2023-11-17T20:55:20Z
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@pkw yes, but: he didn't mean static. He's said he meant a leaden, weirdly luminescent green-grey
(DIR) Post #AbuRtWAyfM4MpVrRPU by billyjoebowers@mastodon.online
2023-11-17T21:06:35Z
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@Wolven Yes.
(DIR) Post #AbuSWqxrJDmqb7Tu52 by foolishowl@social.coop
2023-11-17T20:56:11Z
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@Wolven @GavinChait Aside from Cyberpunk 2077, there's a TTRPG, Cyberpunk Red, that's a big seller by not-D&D standards. And I feel it aggressively misses the point in many ways, literally saying that cyberpunk is about style over substance.Ever since I read it, I've recommended William Gibson's short story, "The Gernsback Continuum", as a sort of foreword to his cyberpunk novels; it highlights genocidal white supremacy as the tradition in American science fiction he was rejecting.
(DIR) Post #AbuSblxNM5csVwbKAi by roburleconquerant@mastodon.underworld.fr
2023-11-17T21:14:37Z
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@Wolven Interesting, I would even go beyond this. I always thought of cyberpunk as an answer to the question "what is left of man once you take everything from him/her?"Spiritual belief (generally none subsist), political existence (corpo states), economic agency, nature, even his/her own body.Isn't a good cyberpunk story is about how to rebuild meaning, regain agency, in this context?
(DIR) Post #AbuTjQ2Iq5FOne7ELA by irenes@mastodon.social
2023-11-17T21:26:56Z
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@Wolven well said and strongly agreed
(DIR) Post #AbuURHbPYZufNuSA3U by sboots@mastodon.sboots.ca
2023-11-17T21:35:07Z
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@Wolven Whew, that's a great way of putting it.
(DIR) Post #AbuYZiWVkTtv0nRFFg by mrcompletely@heads.social
2023-11-17T22:21:27Z
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@Wolven I like and agree with this observation, which I think harmonizes well with what I take as one of the core/key themes of N. and Gibson's work in general, which is lack of agency. The protagonists are forced into the plot against their will. They never have very good information and usually spend most of the books wondering WTF they've gotten into (this aspect perplexes many readers). I consider this realism. Ppl caught in historic events are usually just swept along, not in control.
(DIR) Post #AbuYmJzaGYDGh82zUu by teajaygrey@rap.social
2023-11-17T22:23:46Z
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@Wolven When you write "most recent GitS series" are you referring to SAC_2045?I think a lot of people, who don't speak Japanese and haven't read the source material by 士郎 正宗「shirō masamune」kind of deeply misunderstand that franchise.It's much less about cyberpunk, and a lot more about excesses, in that context: a hyper militarized police state in particular.The title, 攻殻機動隊「kōkaku kidōtai」 would be more accurately titled: "Mobile Armored Riot Police".Another comic by Shirō: 仙術超攻殻オリオン「senjutsu chōkōkaku Orion」aka "Orion" (in the USA) uses the same 攻殻「kōkaku」(attack shell) kanji, though in the superlative 超「chō」.Maybe it is not as well conveyed in the animated versions? Thematically, Shirō's ドミニオン「dominion」(aka "Dominion: Tank Police") kind of takes the superlative to another logical extreme: police forces with tanks.In the GitS franchise, such AI driven tanks are normalized; some are even endearing side characters (e.g. the Tachikoma).Everything is to excess. However, due to 押井 守「oshii mamoru」having directed the first two animated feature length films, the preposterous humor in the source material, more or less vanishes.You still see excesses, such as jet aircraft with six engines (whereas two is usually sufficient for redundancy, and four such as in the 747, is extreme in contemporary designs: also see why the more recent 777 went back to a 2 engine design, but GitS? SIX! SIX FRIGGIN ENGINES!!).Section 9, is over the top, by design. Even the opening sequence in the first animated film is Major Kusanagi, part of an overly militarized police force essentially, is assassinating a VIP with international diplomatic immunity. That is, deliberate.Section 9 is intended to be so over the top, they obey no civil laws. They are a veritable example of abuse of power, extralegal action to excess.I concur though, by the time SAC_2045 came about, the franchise had basically devolved into CSI, but with CGI and SciFi elements.
(DIR) Post #AbuZgc4YEPsozBDEm0 by FeralRobots@mastodon.social
2023-11-17T21:17:12Z
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@voron @Wolven I think about the glimpses we get of Panther Moderns in Sprawl stories, & there's almost always something wrong with them: their implants are infected, they're malnourished, the surgeries went wrong, etc. And look at hte price Molly has to pay to get what she's after.I get why people don't see it, that's just how readers are. But *I* can't not see it.
(DIR) Post #AbuaKVsifUQVMuhioC by Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
2023-11-17T22:41:09Z
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@teajaygrey Yes to everything you say here, but/and even and especially taking all of that into account, 2045 fails. The extremities and excesses of every other GitS— even the movies and the other TV series— were still exercises in nuance; hyperrealism, rather than a flattening. 2045 was a flattening.
(DIR) Post #AbubZNHH2WLayvq784 by teajaygrey@rap.social
2023-11-17T22:54:57Z
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@Wolven Maybe!For me GitS excesses are sort of antithetical to the punk part of cyberpunk.I am no fan of Gibson, without rehashing a lot of the reasons why, but one thing which was glaring to me about Neuromancer (which apparently he wrote: before he had even used a computer, whereas I had been coding, before I ever read Neuromancer) was how paltry the amounts of memory the computers "in the future" had, since they had less than memory than computers: in the 1970s.However, that was: punk!Similar to how blue scales, are reductionist from e.g. a C major scale, punk is even more reductionist than blues: often falling into just three major chords.So, I could at least imagine why Gibson's stuff was cyberpunk: you had a future SciFi setting, but the technology had even fewer resources available to it, I guess that is kind of punk rock! But, with "cyber".GitS, doesn't really fit into that cyberpunk mold though, more is MORE. Lots more. Even the original English dub in the final fight, Batou returns to take out the sexapod tank with "Your Standard Issue Big Gun".So, at least from my vantage: GitS, while cyber, isn't too punk; but I think there are a lot of overlapping aesthetics?I'm not too sure what my issues with 2045 were, I haven't bothered to watch it more than once, but I was already starting to feel as if the GitS franchise was off the rails with Arise, also see: https://rap.social/@teajaygrey/111428240849713234Maybe it was flatness? To me, it was maybe: too much CGI? I dig CGI, but 2045 had SO much of it.Listening to the director commentary on Innocence, there's a helicopter sequence where the commentary stated something along the lines of: "a lot of people complimented us on this scene's CGI, but: it's not CGI! This was all drawn by hand" which to me, was more impressive. Too much reliance on computation from an animation perspective, is maybe less enlivening? Maybe your term for that is flatness, I typically use "artificial" but the gist is probably the same.
(DIR) Post #Abv6261vF4QsVoGqOW by GyrosGeier@hachyderm.io
2023-11-18T04:36:23Z
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@Wolven @irenes this, except that my reason why Villeneuve should wait with that is that I'd like him to adapt the Terra Ignota series first.
(DIR) Post #AbvJno3SfvkA4E4SJs by slothrop@chaos.social
2023-11-18T07:10:40Z
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@Wolven Whoa!Full agreement, and well said.Scrolling through my timeline on a Saturday morning, and encountering this fine bit of cultural criticism, was a bit like finding a diamond in my breakfast cornflakes.
(DIR) Post #AbvLXc1RqNeI1YXE9Y by alcinoe@mastodon.social
2023-11-18T07:30:02Z
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@Wolven My problem with Gibson, who has always been my favorite writer, is that I believe all the the dystopia, but I don't think that there is any little crack or trailer or bridge that we can exist in once what seems to be coming down on us happens. I stopped hoping. I just dread.
(DIR) Post #AbvRgPfTkIiy2Tq3nc by number137@mastodon.social
2023-11-18T08:38:55Z
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@Wolven one of these starkly familiar moments of realization was recently when I saw this video about Chinese influencers streaming from under a bridge near a more affluent neighborhood to get the right boost from the algorithmshttps://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/1105v10/chinese_streamers_under_a_bridge_in_a_rich/
(DIR) Post #AbvZyjRXlArwDUZCF6 by claudius@darmstadt.social
2023-11-18T10:11:53Z
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@Wolven @JamesGleick what's your take on Deus Ex Mankind Divided? I think they have _great_ storylines in there that touch on most of these topics.
(DIR) Post #AbvsePv2XUVT06OFE0 by macedotavares@pkm.social
2023-11-18T13:41:09Z
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@Wolven Thanks for putting it so clearly. I’d add that plain-old-Punk itself became an empty shell around the 90s, and virtually disappeared from the urban tribe catalog. What remains are mere aesthetic influences in fashion and music, sustained by the very capitalism it spawned to fight.
(DIR) Post #AbwmWEN9BFFMJ1D5do by VictimOfSimony@infosec.exchange
2023-11-19T00:07:05Z
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@WolvenHollywood hates loyal adaptations. That's why they moved to adapting toys.You hear there's a "Magic 8-Ball" movie in the works?
(DIR) Post #Ac2GEbxohKtmfyfz4y by mhoye@mastodon.social
2023-11-21T15:33:34Z
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@Wolven Well, to anyone born this century, the phrase "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" means 'weirdly, uniformly blue'."
(DIR) Post #Ac2J9Qn96kk8ROuGQK by North@chaos.social
2023-11-21T16:06:13Z
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@Wolven hah, I saw that critique as well. Very weird. I also ended up writing a lengthy response, but yours is much more thorough.
(DIR) Post #Ac2Vc4ezfbwNeJWASW by breadbin@bitbang.social
2023-11-21T18:25:56Z
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@Wolven Neuromancer in the style of Dune (the movie) would be very boring to me. It’s a dystopia, it’s desperate, it’s tragic.Also I really feel it would work better as a mini series. Six 30-60 minute episodes per book. To avoid rushing through it and glancing over things.(Not dismissing Denis, I’m sure he isn’t a one trick pony if he doesn’t want to be. Dune just felt like a long recap for the next season. It was good, but it felt empty still.)
(DIR) Post #Ac2coavsCwn6tUKYGu by Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
2023-11-21T19:46:43Z
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@JoYo @maddiefuzz Sure didn't! 👍🏿
(DIR) Post #Ac2l5BMzIlbGAXQwhk by beka_valentine@kolektiva.social
2023-11-21T21:19:18Z
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@Wolven it's weird that anyone took that from Neuromancer when the book isn't about people escaping to virtualities at all. like, at ALL. there's barely even any virtualities, nevermind escaping into them. so weird
(DIR) Post #AcOjb84dAO6ymZ4U64 by KatS@chaosfem.tw
2023-12-02T11:46:17Z
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@Wolven Agreed: that writer missed something crucial, indeed. Making it about the dangers of escaping (whether into virtuality or heroin) is tiptoing around what they're escaping from.Granted, I was 15 or 16 when I read Neuromancer for the first time, just after it came out, but even then I read it as a critique of those conditions, which happened to have a technofuturistic setting.It was noir, just with neon lighting.Funny thing: I've always read it from the perspective of a cis white male from a comfortable background, and it always felt somewhat like voyeurism.Having realised I'm trans, I might just read it again and how it feels this time. As you say, gender is a factor.