American Reflexxx is a short film documenting a social experiment that took place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Alli Coates filmed performance artist Signe Pierce as she strutted down a busy oceanside street in stripper garb and a reflective mask. The pair agreed not to communicate until the experiment was completed, but never anticipated the horror that would unfold in under an hour
The result is a heart wrenching technicolor spectacle that raises questions about gender stereotypes, mob mentality, and violence in America.
You see how quickly it escalates– and how quick people are to harass when they feel there is no reprecussion. But as soon as they are confronted, they ran away.
Notice that it’s a cis woman who shoves her down and that there are cis women hurling slurs at her right along the men. You can’t just chalk this up to male violence and act like it’s not your business. Cis women who consider themselves allies need to take a stand against violent transmisogynist cis women just like men need to take a stand against violent rapist men and white people need to take a stand against white violence.
This was really good
A reminder why we still need Pride…and why Pride that is not Trans inclusive is utterly useless.
When we say we’re more afraid of you than you are of us, we aren’t joking. When we say that cis women have a hand in our oppression, we aren’t *fucking* joking.
i looked up a few things after watching this, and there are some clarifications I would like to add
Signe Pierce is actually a cis woman, however much of the violence that ended up happening can be contributed to the fact that people couldn’t tell whether she was male or female, and that scared them. They assumed that she wasn’t cis due to features such as her slightly broader than average shoulders and small breasts, which I think says a lot on both how society views the bodies of trans women and the expectations of what cis women’s bodies are supposed to look like
she did actually acknowledge in interviews that if she was not a cis woman, or if she was a woman of color, the results likely would have been much worse. The interviews that she and Alli Coates did on it are in general really interesting and I would suggest that yall check them out
not directly related to the video, but Signe Pierce and Alli Coates, at least at the time of the video’s filming and then later public release, are dating and I think that’s cute and gay fdjaslkfdj
while checking for the umpteenth time whether Quiz Show is available online, I discovered that Netflix has something called Example Show
it consists of a Netflix employee doing stuff outside HQ like
cartwheels
moonwalking while using his laptop
reciting passages from Julius Caesar
juggling
it has two seasons with two episodes each, all of which consist of the same eleven-minute video
if you have closed captions on, the entire video is captioned “there’s no crying in baseball!”
You can also change the audio to English with commentary by A. Director, which is a man repeatedly saying “this is director’s commentary. this is directory’s commentary. this is director’s commentary”
there’s also a Spanish audio track that appears to be looped, but is much longer than one sentence. (I think it might be more Julius Caesar.)
there are three subtitle tracks; the “english” one just says “There’s no crying in baseball!” the entire time, the “spanish” one has actual subtitles in english, and the “portuguese” one has actual subtitles in french. this is so good
Pass Through Fire 