It’s a Trap: Reylos, Racism, and the Whiteness of Data in the Harassment of Women Online
From that kiss at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, via John Boyega’s social media posts, to a recent essay about online harassment, everyone, it seems, is talking about (or avoiding talking about) Reylos. Reylos are a Star Wars sub-fandom that seems to be dominated by white women and girls (in that they hold the most power as white women in that space, although there are, of course, women of colour who are Reylos) that ‘ship,’ or invest in, a relationship between the characters Kylo and Rey from the sequel films.*** Recently, following his experiences of racism from Reylo-affiliated accounts on Twitter and Instagram, Boyega published a light-hearted video that dismissed the comments while leaving the users’ account names visible. Discussions about racism within the Reylo community, and about harassment targeting women shipping Kylo and Rey, then rapidly blew up online. In the fallout, data analyst and fan Katie McCort published ‘When Systemic Hatred of Women Online Goes Unnoticed, What Does it Say About Us?,’ which, as its title suggests, conflates Reylos with all women in online spaces, and calls out targeted harassment and bullying of the group on social media.
While there are some elements of the article that I broadly agree with, I want to challenge its methodology and offer an explanation as to why the essay should not, as it suggests in its disclaimer, be used for educational purposes. For like so much of the discourse about Star Wars, it centres whiteness — and white educators, researchers, film critics, fans, and others engaged in conversations about the franchise should not be leaving it to colleagues of colour to point out (which they have already been doing for a long time).* I am therefore writing as a queer, cis, feminist white woman who researches the history of Star Wars as an academic, writes about it as a film critic, and loves it as a fan. My analysis is not a study of Reylo fandom (I am not, for the record, a Reylo, although in general I believe in supporting rather than shaming people’s fantasies), but rather a critique of the language, ideology, and data in McCort’s work. Whatever her intention, the result is an essay with a veneer of intersectional politics that has gained enormous traction, but which perpetuates harmful and racist tropes that support the very accusations of racism she aims to overturn.
The Semantic Slipperiness of ‘Women’
From the outset, McCort’s essay presents itself as a thoughtful analysis of the recent Reylo furore that is attuned to what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectional oppressions (that is, overlapping elements of marginalisation based on people’s gender, race, class, age, disability, sexuality and so on). For example, McCort opens her article by recognising that female fans may have had comments wiped or been banned from social media platforms based on ‘sexual identity,’ ‘race,’ and ‘religious affiliation.’ She sets the scene with content warnings, and a disclaimer that her writing is ‘intended for educational and research purposes,’ which suggests it is not only progressive in its attention to readers and their needs, but also authoritative on its subject matter (it can be used in educational contexts). Indeed, there are enough generally accepted feminist arguments in the early paragraphs that I was comfortable with McCort’s reasoning — that women are demonized for enjoying media made for them, by them, or on their own time (see Abigail De Kosnik’s 2016 Rogue Archives, among others, for insights into this phenomenon).
However, the next paragraph is more troubling: ‘You have read every time the latest hive mind online has labeled you a sexist. A racist. An abuse apologist. A school shooter. An inbred. A Nazi. A mental case. Inhuman.’
I have no doubt that women have received these insults from their detractors because of their fandom. I, too, have been called a feminazi and received rape and other threats of violence for talking about gender and race representation in the Star Wars franchise. But McCort shifts between the general and the specific, here, and does nothing to distinguish between what is likely to be actual hate (‘mental case,’ ‘inbred,’) and what might be valid accusations (‘sexist’ and ‘racist’). If her critique is going to be intersectional, it must, surely, recognise that (particularly white) women in any fandom can display abusive behaviours, and that without clear evidence or further commentary on her part, the list of abuses she includes is questionable. It’s starting to read like none of these accusations can ever stand because women are oppressed as a single class — and that would seem, given McCort’s own identity, to be a class of white women. It’s telling that later, when McCort discusses Kelly Marie Tran being hounded off social media, it is because Tran is a woman and not because she is a woman of colour. Well, so much for intersectionality.
Things get more troubling still when McCort identifies the culprits of these hateful and abusive posts as belonging to one of two possible groups: the alt-right, ‘or one dictated by factions of the progressive left.’ This is an odd claim, given that when we talk about the ‘progressive’ left (as opposed to centrist or liberal groups) we tend to mean movements invested in equity, social justice and overcoming economic inequality. Progressive political factions, for all their faults, are usually predicated on erasing the intersecting oppressions of marginalised people, including women. Of course, leftist movements have flaws, and misogyny is rife among many groups — ‘brocialism’ is a term used to call out the patriarchal tendencies of many socialists. But it’s a very different set of politics to, say, the alt-right, which dismisses identity politics and favours a white supremacist, and fundamentally patriarchal, model of governance. Could it be that if progressive left-wing critics are calling out racism in the Reylo fandom that it’s because white women need to check themselves? Not according to McCort, who positions progressive left ‘factions’ as infantilising women and not allowing them to indulge in complex fantasy engagements with screen media. In her essay, both sides are — inexplicably — the same.
Again, the essay gains traction here by offering enough criticism of the alt-right that it feels like a balanced and fair assessment because the reader likely shares McCort’s politics in this instance. However, when she discusses ‘antis’ — that is, specifically the women she accuses of far-left ‘pearl-clutching’ — she slips into misogynistic language herself by denigrating progressive women for their moral or ethical concerns and accuses them of bullying. There’s also a lot going on in terms of her linguistic jumps: she seems to conflate ‘women’ in this context with ‘women of colour,’ and then refers to women of colour as ‘antis’ throughout the rest of the essay. It’s a wild ride of semantics, for that’s sure.
In Defence of Shipping Whoever You Want
McCort then goes on to describe the harassment of Reylos by ‘antis,’ which involve three accusations levelled at the community:
- That Reylos support real life abuse by wanting a romantic pairing between two characters who begin as enemies in an epic myth.
- That Reylos are racists because they support a romantic pairing between two white characters.
- That Reylos are sexist because Reylos write sexually explicit fanfiction between the “pure” heroine and the “bad guy.”
There seems to be some bad faith interpretation going on somewhere here. So let’s talk about why these accusations don’t stand up to scrutiny before talking about the contexts in which, well, they almost certainly do.
When we talk about shipping, we are talking about fictional characters in an imaginary space. Representation matters, of course, but as multiple academic studies have shown, one film is not going to cause people to start perpetrating violence. Screen media might contribute to our pre-existing behavioural tendencies, but video games alone don’t make people commit aggressive acts. One or even three Star Wars films featuring a relationship that can be read as abusive is not going to turn viewers into abusers or victims of abuse. The sustained normalisation of male violence across multiple media platforms; cultural standards that generate and perpetuate toxic masculinity; education and sports and justice systems that say ‘you’re a great swimmer and a white guy, don’t worry about doing too much time for sexual assault’ — are responsible.
Star Wars, of course, exists within this white, patriarchal culture and perpetuates it, and we should be critical of the franchise. However, there are multiple viewing positions available to viewers of the films, and it’s not a straightforward case of saying Kylo is or isn’t abusive given the complex nature of his and Rey’s relationship with each other and with senior male figures including Snoke, Palpatine and Luke (I say this as the survivor of multiple instances of gender-based violence). We should all be mindful that survivors do not have one opinion between them, and that non-survivors might have multiple readings, too. We can enjoy the films and ship its characters without turning into them, and no one deserves hatred on the basis of shipping two age-appropriate adult characters. We can and should respect one another.
Moreover, shipping does not necessarily endorse real-world abuse, even if a shipper reads the Kylo-Rey relationship as abusive. The fantasy of the bad guy being won over, or even fantasies of being the bad guy and perpetrating violence against a woman as a woman could have any number of normal or even useful emotional and psychological functions. This is not my area of expertise, but it strikes me (as someone who has entertained a variety of sometimes strange fantasies and discussed them in therapy where my therapist legitimised them), that Reylo could create a space of control for the shipper that inverts experiences of abuse. It could be about living out a scenario that the shipper knows is not possible in reality. It could be about assuming authority over a traumatic memory. It’s not my fantasy, but I can empathise with the people that share it.
There’s also the possibility that Reylos might not be overcoming any trauma at all. It could just be about kink. In both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, Kylo restrains Rey or appears in costumes coded as fetish-wear, all black and topless and masked. If Reylos are living out BDSM fantasies, more power to them. Go get yours, in a safe space free from kink-shaming. That is not to conflate BDSM and the non-consensual acts that Kylo perpetrates against Rey in the films — but those signifiers of abuse coexist alongside the aesthetics of BDSM and are entirely the fault of the filmmakers. The films should not be used as a moral stick with which to beat people engaging in imaginary and playful scenarios that are subjectively meaningful to them.
But Check Your Privilege
Nevertheless, while I argue that Reylos should be left to ship who and what they like, that doesn’t mean that they’re not engaging in normalising abuse, or sexism, or racism against others in online spaces. Not all Reylos, I’m sure, but some of them. The fact that accusations are being made against young white women — a marginalised group compared to white men — doesn’t make the accusations untrue, especially if, say, black women are being racially abused in Reylo community spaces.
Furthermore, the desire to ship Kylo and Rey may have a range of foundations including, but not limited to, subversion, kink, deviance, trauma, queerness (Dark Side characters are coded as queer throughout the franchise) that are not, for individual shippers, inspired by or rooted in racism. But the shipping of white relationships over interracial relationships as part of a broad pattern among multiple fandoms is evidence of racism. A Reylo might not ship these characters for racist reasons in particular, but the Reylo fandom in general contributes to a wider, racist behaviour of shipping that overlooks or ignores characters of colour (Finn; Poe) in favour of white ones (Kylo). Recognising the privileges and biases that inform our personal decision-making is hard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
How much overt racism emanates from white Reylos, particularly toward black protagonist Finn (and actor John Boyega), is impossible to quantify without conducting both quantitative and qualitative studies of messages on social media platforms.** It is beyond the scope of this commentary to produce that data. The problem with McCort’s essay is that she dismisses the possibility of Reylos exhibiting racism toward Boyega without conducting any research at all to support her claim. Where she searches and data mines and scrapes tweets for information pertaining to abuse against Reylos, she simply states that any accusations of racism emanating from the Reylo community are false, referring to a tiny minority, or based on sock puppet accounts designed to stir up hatred. She argues of racism that ‘these incidents are statistically insignificant to the population of people who discuss Reylo positively on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.’ Later she states ‘You will not find any evidence linking the Reylos back to the targeted harassment of any Star Wars actors over the years.’ Yet there is no evidence that she has looked for it; there is no sign of any methodology or notes about her dates, search terms or otherwise.
Meanwhile, McCort also criticises John Boyega for calling out his racist detractors as she claims that his Reylo tweets were designed to start a bullying campaign against the group. She writes: ‘the tweet was successful in doing exactly what it intended and exactly what lurking hate accounts who successfully orchestrated the bullying barrage wanted the tweet to do. It galvanized a hoard of antis and alt-right trolls and their following to — by their own admission — bully Reylos.’
This, apparently, is more targeted abuse aimed at Reylos, whose account names have been exposed to Boyega’s millions of supporters. But having experienced a tiny, sexist fraction of the hatred that Boyega does, just for being a white woman with things to say about Star Wars, I understand his response. It’s like Sara Ahmed says in Living a Feminist Life (2017): when we are on the receiving end of oppressions that dictate the infrastructures of our daily lives, we will eventually snap (and if you think these are the only soul-crushing experiences of racism Boyega deals with on a daily basis, well, I have news for you). When we see people snapping under the weight of oppression, our response should be to call out the systems of harm that affect them — not their snapping in the first place. Anyway, if the racist accounts are just sock-puppets pretending to be Reylos, as McCort seems to suggest, then there’s no problem. If they are real, white Reylos, the community needs to do better to call its racist members in and hold them to account. Boyega shouldn’t have to do it for them.**
Your Data Doesn’t Give You the Evidence You’re Looking For
Further to its discussions of Boyega, McCort’s essay also includes screenshots of ‘antis’ bullying Reylos that are all taken out of context. The comments seem, for the most part, to be replies to Reylo posts that are written by (again, McCort never explicitly states this) women of colour. For example, ‘Genuinely curious, is Reylo a white person’s ship?’ seems like a valid question and suggests the writer is a woman of colour — I’m guessing we’re meant to infer that the writer is being ‘racist’ toward Reylos by drawing attention to their whiteness. It’s not entirely clear. Then there’s ‘stupid dumbfuck Reylo really thinking some screenshots is gonna erase my memory of the racism ive had to deal with from reylos like LMFAO like i dont have the receipts.’ This screenshot is more obviously positioned to outrage the reader about an act of aggression toward a Reylo (who is probably white) from an ‘anti’ (who is probably a woman of colour). However, as the comment suggests, the writer has experienced multiple instances of racism from within the Reylo community, which likely explains the tone of their post.
Why don’t we see any of the original Reylo posts? By focusing on the replies and using ‘women’ vs ‘antis,’ McCort’s work covertly erases race from the narrative while simultaneously amplifying the feelings of white women who are allegedly endangered by the anger of women of colour. Never mind if that anger is justified. You got your screenshots. Nothing more to see here.
McCort’s data analysis of tweets about Boyega’s social media posts warrant criticism, too. While he was denigrated for sharing users’ social media handles in his video, she has no problem doing the same in her article. Moreover, her methodology is suspect because she does not articulate how she defines the differences between positive, ‘hate’ or ‘neutral’ tweets about Reylos, or how she determines the identity of the users making the comments. She states that she is assessing tweets made by the alt-right and the progressive left without providing any evidence that the two oddly counterposed groups have anything to do with the incident, aside from highlighting one or two key individuals’ posts. And arguing that because FinnRey shippers comment on Reylos simply to stir up hatred — rather than, say, call out racism among them — is a massive stretch that McCort’s data simply doesn’t play out. I appreciate that doing this kind of research is challenging and time-consuming, but as with so many other (often high-profile) analyses by white people on digital hate speech within Star Wars fandom, it simply doesn’t check out. The data that McCort’s essay relies on is evidence designed to back up her argument. There is no hypothesis or research question, no space for learning or self-reflection. Just an agenda and a pseudo-scientific approach.
Finally, the article closes as it opens, with remarks that on the surface aim to foster kindness and inclusivity. McCort makes sensible pleas to stop online bullying and prevent too-quick-off-the-mark reactionary posts about other people and their identities, fantasies and behaviours. She makes necessary comments about the questionable role of online news media in spreading biased and un-evidenced information. And she makes a totally legitimate point about harassment against women online (it’s everywhere, and it needs to stop). Let people ship whatever characters they want: you don’t know their lives and you don’t need to comment on them. I agree with many of McCort’s more generalist points, and I repeat, no women deserve abuse for their fantasies.
But the essay is, nevertheless, one that perpetuates racism and fails to engage in a meaningful way with the intersecting oppressions that people face online. Not all female fans of Star Wars are Reylos and Reylos are not all women. Not all women are white. As Bethancy Lacina’s important and intersectional study of hate speech aimed at Star Wars actors reveals, offensive tweets mostly originate from real people (not bots) and are more likely to be directed at women of colour than any other group. It is therefore possible to think that the Reylo ship is valid and meaningful to its community and that it likely needs to address issues of racism at the same time. McCort may be fighting to save those she loves but in doing so she’s told a one-sided story that erases the hate experienced by black fans and actors and anyone more marginalised than her. In the end, then, it’s all about white supremacy and the innocence of white women, and while it might seem appealing in its moderate, faux-intersectional appeal, it’s a trap. Run the gauntlet of those ideas with extreme caution… and be ready to challenge them with your (always imaginary) lightsaber.
*This sentence was amended to acknowledge that people of colour in the Reylo and other Star Wars fandoms have been doing the work of calling out racism long before any white people stepped in as allies. I thank fans of colour on Twitter for pointing out the problem with the way the sentence previously read. **These sentences have been amended to more clearly articulate that I am addressing white Reylos who need to address racism — again, thank you to readers of colour for pointing this issue out.*** This sentence has been amended to clarify and articulate more clearly that I do not think the Reylo community is, or has ever been, entirely white (it previously suggested it was ‘predominantly’ white). I understand that regardless of its intention, my writing erased women of colour. I apologise for that suggestion.
