Avert your eyes, girls, I get to look YOU over

PZ Myers posted I have been objectified! which is where I found out about a post I want to write about and won’t link to directly: a post on a blog called Common Sense Atheist entitled “Fifteen Sexy Scientists”, dated 16th July. All the scientists (apart from Myers himself, who’s number 15) are women: all are white. There’s also a header pic of a revealingly-dressed woman bending to look into a microscope – except she is not looking into the microscope, but at the photographer, whose camera angle is peering down at her breasts.

The man who put the post together defends his picks with “Why no men? Because I unavoidably find women more sexy, of course! ….. I’m not pandering to my male readership. I’m pandering to me. ….. Are you saying it would be nice if I were ‘freethinking’ and not attracted to women with a waist-to-hip ratio of .7, with clear skin and big eyes? ….. I’m just not aware of non-white sexy women. My favorite women in the world are actually darker-skinned Latinas, as it happens. If you can point me to some sexy non-white scientists, I will most gladly add them to the list. ….. You’re tired of women being portrayed as beautiful? I’m not. This is a post about sexy women. So it portrays women as sexy. …… Also, as it happens, latinas are my favorite. I just couldn’t find many latina scientists on a quick search.” (That last comment was directed at someone who pointed out this post was not just sexist, but racist.)

What the Common Sense Atheist did was search the web for photographs of women who identified as scientists (at least one of whom is still a student) and defended this with “I took pictures that are already online and put them together in a list. Just to be clear: is that the objection? That I took public pictures and put them altogether with the word ’sexy’ at the top?”

(I’m quoting him exactly because he claims “I’m tempted to make a list of the hundreds of ways people here and on other blogs have explicitly misrepresented my stated views, often even erecting strawmen which said the opposite of what I explicitly claim. Quite exhausting.”)

I’m pretty certain that this epMotion ad depicting a number of attractive men dancing round a scientist to sell her the automated pipette system has already been linked to from this blog (Warning: clicking on this link will start video/sound playing on an endless loop: lyrics here if you need to be reminded) because I remember discussing/reading discussion about the unusualness of an ad for something-geeky using sexy men to sell it to a woman.

Or, really, the unusualness of having sexy men being objectified for a woman’s gaze at all. The 15th photo on Common Sense Atheist’s list, P Z Myers: Myers is (from a lesbian eye view) a reasonably attractive man, if you’re into that kind of gender: I could certainly (from a slash fan’s view) pair him off with Samuel Gerard in a cross-universe adventure in which scientist and US Marshal save Chicago from anti-evolution terrorism and have hot sex, angst, and sizzling dialogue, except I don’t do RPS. But the photo of him riding a dinosaur is plainly not intended to be read as a sexy photograph – though nor are some of the other photographs in the list, of young scientists working out at the gym or on the playing field. They’re made “sexy”, “objectified”, because this “common sense atheist” presumes to put them up as if they were his pinups, his to look at and admire, in a way he does not intend to be admired himself.
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The Homophobia Keeper

So, I was thinking about homophobia and heterosexism and the creative process.

I was told last year (by someone who had no idea who I was, to be fair) that I had no idea how the writer’s mind works: I couldn’t, she thought, or I wouldn’t be asking questions like “Why are you writing about this?” because I ought to know that writers don’t choose their subject matter, their subject matter chooses them. And I thought, well, there speaks a writer who has never been challenged.

I’ve had discussions that started from the question “Why are you writing about this?” for twenty-plus years. I am a lesbian writing about gay men. Everyone assumes this is a choice that can be challenged, apart from other lesbian slash writers, and meeting the challenges has led me to a better understanding of how a writer’s mind works – mine, if no one elses.

A post I made a few years ago about Robin Hobb’s Six Duchies/Liveships trilogy of trilogies, The Fool, the Fitz, and Fanfic brought up a question for me in the discussion thread that followed; Why is the culture of the Six Duchies homophobic? An important plot point turns on Fitz’s being homophobic – and homophobic in an accepted, settled way, as if being homophobic is just regarded as natural and right. While Fitz was somewhat isolated from the mainstream in the Six Duchies, his homophobia is not presented as part of his being out of step: it’s never questioned at all, except by its target, and the target is not from the Six Duchies at all.

There’s a new trilogy coming out, The Rain Wild Chronicles: I just finished reading the first volume, The Dragon Keeper, this weekend. (Minor spoilers under the cut) Continue reading »

Alien to Avatar: How James Cameron Learned to Fail

In 1979, the movie Alien became the first known film to pass the Bechdel Test. Thirty years on, where are we at? James Cameron’s big sci-fi movie for 2009 has three women playing major roles – Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), and of course Doctor Grace Augustine herself (Sigourney Weaver)… and yet fails to pass the Bechdel Test. I don’t think any of the three women ever get to speak to each other.

[Before any more Constant Readers point it out to me: Yes, I managed to muddle Cameron, who directed Aliens, with Ridley Scott, who directed Alien. Oops. *facepalm*]

I went to see Avatar with a friend just before Christmas, and we both enjoyed it – for the background special effects rather than the plot, of course.

Walking away from it afterwards, I thought how Cameron could have made a film that passed the Bechdel Test (and would had at least a superficially more-original plot) simply by taking the same “risk” he took thirty years earlier – and casting a woman to play Jake Sully instead of a man.

Yes, all the bloody race issues are still there, and yes, taking a classically boring heterosexual white soldier falls for “native woman” does not actually become that much more original plot when the white soldier is a woman – but … even if Brokeback Mountain wasn’t that great of a gay story, wasn’t it still astonishing to see two men in love in a blockbuster movie? Wouldn’t it be astonishing to see two women in love in a PG-13 you-can’t-see-the-nipples sci-fi action movie where the central plot is not all about how titilating it is for the guys to have two women making out on a big screen?

Or am I just being too hopeful? The Playboy interview about why the Navi have to have breasts even though they’re not mammalian does not sound like James Cameron has spent any time in the last thirty years learning anything except that women don’t buy cinema tickets and female characters exist to promote male leads, and of course: you can spend millions creating a realistic alien world, but by god the female aliens must be otherness without being offputting – to heterosexual men.

I could dream about what Avatar would have been if Cameron had been brave enough to cast a woman as Jake Sully. But really, if he had, wouldn’t everything else he learned in thirty years have come to the fore, so that Jake and Grace would spend their movie-time together talking about what Jake feels for the Navi man that Cameron would have wanted to hook her up with?

We left no footprints

I went to see an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery this week: The Heart of the Great Alone, a collection of the photographs and artifacts from Scott and Shackleton’s explorations in Antarctica, that were presented to King George V and Queen Alexandra about a century ago, and which Elizabeth’s curators have dug out of the teeming collection to share with us plebs. (Granted, though Royal Prerogative=Bad, having these photos and books that once belonged to your grandfather is an extremely cool use of the Royal Prerogative.)

I wanted to go because I had heard great things about Herbert George Ponting’s photography of the ice, and I was not disappointed. (Frank Hurley’s photography was also excellent.) A friend who also visited that exhibition responded to it by making a music video to Holst’s Saturn: Scott’s Last Expedition, on Youtube.

But what struck me, wandering round the exhibition, listening to commentary on the photographs and on the landscape, was how much of the exploration of Sur (“that strange continent, last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, supposititious islands, headlands that may or may not be there: Antarctica”) is pure narrative.

Yes, the ice is there: yes, the magnetic south pole of the Earth is there: yes, there is the vast silence – the unliving land, across which polar explorers say you talk aloud to hear something living in all the dead world.

But what Amundsen and Scott and Shackleton went for was the story.
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Hugo Voting on the Cheap

This post was written by Cheryl Morgan as part of the ongoing series about men-only short lists at the Hugo Awards. It’s full of excellent positive ideas about how we can change the men-only lists – for this year and for always! – and I hope people will comment with other ideas about nominating more women for the Hugo Awards. (I’ll post a follow-up when the short-lists go public.)

If you want to argue about whether this is worth doing, or about the Joanna Russ Amendment from last year’s Worldcon, I suggest you do so on one of the other posts on this topic, rather than take up discussion space on this one.

Update: The deadline for Hugo nominations is Sunday 14th March 2010, 07:59 GMT.

Guest post by Cheryl Morgan

It is another year, and Hugo nominations are once again open. What’s the betting that come April when the nominee lists are announced most of the people listed will be men?

Yes, I thought so. And the only way that’s going to change is if more women get involved in the process. But it costs money to participate in the Hugo process, and that’s a definite barrier. One of the many ways in which women are disadvantaged is that they are poorly paid, even for the same work, so an economic barrier will act against us. Therefore it is important to know how to participate cheaply.

Let start with some good news. Firstly, you do not have to go to Australia. Worldcon might be in Melbourne this year, but you don’t need to fork out for an attending membership, plane fares and hotels in order to vote in the Hugos. A simple “Supporting Membership” will suffice, and that only costs $50 (and may be cheaper in other currencies, depending on current exchange rates). [£31 in UK]

But, if you had a membership in last year’s Worldcon in Montréal then you already have nominating rights for Melbourne. You don’t have to pay anything more to nominate this year.

In case you are confused by that, here’s a bit more detail.
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“Just call me James”

Yesterday, James Chartrand, the founder of MenWithPens, came out: Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants:

Using a male pseudonym when you’re a woman isn’t anything new. Writers have been doing it for centuries. George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen. Even the Brontë sisters, championed today, wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell back in their time.

Why did they do it? To have their work accepted, because women weren’t supposed to be writers. Their work had a much better chance if their audience didn’t have to get over initial skepticism that a woman could write at all, much less do it well.

Since then, we’ve had feminism. We have the right to vote, to own property, to be members of Parliament and Congress, to get a job, and to be the main breadwinner of the family. And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.

The evidence was right there in front of me.

When James Chartrand wrote under her own name, she “struggled to get gigs — there was tough competition from more experienced hustlers. When I did manage to grab a job before someone else could, I worked hard and wrote well. I wanted to do my best. I earned $1.50 an article. I averaged $8 a week. I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.” When she changed her name to James Chartrand, “Instantly, jobs became easier to get. There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all. Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.”

As Kate Harding on Salon notes (and many others round the blogosphere today) it’s not a shock so much as a sobering reminder of what happens when you write like a woman.

I’d been meaning to do a statistics-laden follow-up to my posts on the Joanna Russ Amendment (Late Business at the Hugo Awards), and been putting off writing it because I didn’t have time (seriously: I got back from Canada and fell into work, and the only reason I have time to post this now is because I am off work with a cold).

The statistics I wanted to gather had to do with the number of people who nominate writers and novels for Hugo Awards: to confirm the point that many people have made, that shortlists for the Hugos – the top six, the top fifteen – are voted into existance by a very small number of people.

Adrienne Martini suggests that “The solution is to get more women involved with fandom so that they are invested in voting for the award” but this seems to me to be as misguided as her apparent belief that if Ursula K. LeGuin had won a Hugo for “The Royals of Hegn”, this would have been a “pity Hugo”, awarded to LeGuin because women writers “can only succeed if the rules are changed”. (“The Royals of Hegn” would have been added to the short-story Hugo shortlist under the Joanna Russ Amendment rules in 2001.)

I have been involved in fandom since I was 16 – for over a quarter of a century. I’ve been to four Worldcons (though at the first one I didn’t hold a voting membership). Two in Glasgow, easy to commit to buying a membership since I could get there and back each day if I had to: and of course Anticipation in Montreal, an expensive holiday but a fun one. Not one I could afford to take every year, even if I were willing to travel to the US any more. I am involved in fandom: but voting for the Hugos would be far too expensive to commit to every year, and rule changes to make voting for the Hugos less expensive can only happen if a majority of regular Worldcon attendees agree that they want to let people vote for the Hugos who won’t be coming to the Worldcon. (The WSFS rules can only be successfully amended by majority vote at two WSFS business meetings in succession, and proxy votes are not permitted: therefore, you cannot hope to make a change in WSFS rules unless you are able to attend – not just buy a membership, but physically attend – on a regular basis. I watched as elderly regulars argued against and voted down rule-changes requiring Worldcons to make it easier for parents to attend Worldcon with their families, or young people to buy cheaper memberships, and formed the pretty strong conviction that most regular attenders at Worldcons do not want anything about their Worldcon to change.)

In order to nominate in the Hugo awards, two conditions apply: one must be (or have been) a Worldcon member before February for that Hugo year; and one must be able to buy or borrow enough newly-published SFF fiction to be able to nominate. This year, the first condition applies to me: the second doesn’t, though I do plan to try to read enough to be able to fill in a nomination form (given the wasps-nest I stirred up, that seems only fair). Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis is something you can only do if you live in North America and are at least well-off enough to buy new science-fiction and take your annual holiday every year at Worldcon time – or if you are much more well-off and can afford to take an annual holiday in North America most years (in which case, you can probably also afford to buy plenty of new SF…) It’s not a game for the poor, and women tend to be much less well-off than men, and much less likely to think they can spend what money they have on their own pleasures.

I got a lot of flack from various sources for proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment. I will admit here that while it would certainly have been fun if it had passed, the best I hoped for it ever was to get through to the Saturday business meeting and have discussion time there – I was not altogether surprised, however, when it got shot down without discussion at the end of Friday’s business meeting. What I wanted was to get people talking about all-male shortlists, about why every year for the past ten years at least there has never been a Hugo that was free of all-male shortlists: SF writers who write under women’s names are systematically ignored and devalued. It’s the James effect: it doesn’t take much.

When I thought about it, I realised that I should never have expected many woman writers who might someday get onto a Hugo shortlist to speak up in support of the principle. (And indeed, Cheryl Morgan, who won a Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2009, was the only one who did – though her strong support and help was worth a thousand: thanks again.)

For professional writers, winning a Hugo is to a certain extent an advantageous award. (Well, primarily, it keeps your book in print for longer, according to what I’ve been told.) To go out of your way to offend the small group of fans who nominate writers for this Hugo and that, by pointing out their sexist bias is responsible for all-male shortlists and means better writers are ignored and devalued because of their gender, would be professionally disadvantageous… to say the least. Add the James effect on – that these fans are not inclined to pick women writers – and the best response to the Joanna Russ Amendment for a professional woman writer would be outrage and open anger – how dare I suggest that the voting pool is biased, that the reason so few women writers are nominated is because the fans who do the nominating are subject to the James effect?

Well, I am not a professional writer. I write fanfic, and – as I noted on another panel at the Worldcon – one of the chief advantages of being a fanfic writer is that you have absolutely no standards to live up to: you can take whatever literary risks you want, because everyone with any literary standards whatsoever has already judged your writing as worthless. And I am not a Worldcon regular: I have nothing to lose by proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment – or by suggesting that if there’s another set of all-male shortlists, someone else should bring that pesky apple to the next WSFS business meeting and throw it at that wasp’s nest.

Because we need to break the institutionalised concept that so long as men succeed, the rules don’t need to change. And that’s a nasty, backhanded message.

Nomimations for this year’s Hugo Awards should open in early 2010. Are we going to see another year of “Just Call Me James” shortlists?

True Blood, Jocks, and Consent

(This post contains mild spoilers for the HBO vampire series, True Blood.)

The most recent episode of True Blood, “Frenzy,” had a feminist reminder coming from a jock of all people. In this episode, the second to last of season two, the town-folk of fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps are brain-washed/possessed by maenad Maryanne and run around partying, having outdoor orgies, and eating human hearts. Police dispatcher Rosie hits on Jason Stackhouse, a promiscuous jock whose sexual escapades frequently get him in trouble, when Jason tries to break into the police station to arm himself and fight his possessed neighbors. He plays along enough to tie Rosie up so she can’t sound the alarm until he tells her, “Rosie, I ain’t never taken advantage of someone while she was fucked up.”

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Orson Scott Card, meet Alan Turing

Reading various discussions and justifications online about whether or not to boycott Shadow Complex – a new game which is written as a prequel to Empire, Orson Scott Card’s novel/game about a liberal conspiracy taking over the US – brought this to mind again. There’s a thoughtful article by Christian Nutt in Gamasutra: The Complex Question and another by SurplusGamer in Destructoid – both defending the principle of a boycott, whether or not you take part.

Peter David, the writer of Shadow Complex, takes the rather disappointing position that (Kotaku) “If anyone wants to boycott the game and thus damage me or Chair while doing nothing to change Orson’s opinions, that’s naturally their right. Or…They can display the sort of tolerance for someone who is different from them that they feel is lacking in Orson and thus prove they’re better. Your choice.”

Orson Scott Card was born on 24th August, 1951, six years after Alan Turing had received an OBE from the British Government for his services to the Foreign Office during WWII. Those “services” at that time remained unspecified: we know now that Turing had been working at Bletchley, building a computer out of stone knives and bearskins that could crack the German codes of the Enigma machine. He called his computer the Bombe.

In his lifetime, Alan Turing visited the US twice, two years at Princeton University (1936-38), and a stay of five months over nine years before OSC was born: November 1942 to March 1943. Before he went to Princeton, he published a paper famous now in computer science: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in which he outlined the concept of a Turing Machine. The Universal Turing Machine was, in concept, a programmable computer. Like Ada Lovelace before him, Alan Turing could conceive of computer programs before technology was sufficiently advanced to build the machine that could run them.

In 1942-43, Turing worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and Bombe construction in Washington DC. Alan Turing was probably more responsible for the Allied victory in WWII than Winston Churchill: as Churchill himself would have agreed, if he hadn’t been there, someone else would have stood up: but there was only ever one Alan Turing. (He enjoyed long-distance running, and apparently used to frequently avoid the wartime transport difficulties by running the 40 miles between Bletchley and London when summoned there for an important meeting.)

The paper which was to make Turing posthumously famous far outside his particular fields of mathematics, logic, and cryptology was published in Mind, in 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence: in it he proposes what was to become known as the Turing Test. He wrote a computer program to play chess, before there was a computer built on which that piece of software could be run. He invented the concept of storing a program in a computer, long before anyone built such computers. He was the founder of computer science. He is acknowledged and honoured by the annual presentation of the Turing Award to the person responsible for the greatest innovation in computer science.

“Jane”, the AI software that becomes sentient, in Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, is Orson Scott Card’s clearest literary debt to Turing: though there is another fictional character whom Card dealt with very similiarly to Turing. Anssett, the former Songbird, who is chemically castrated in Songmaster as a consequence of having a sexual relationship with another man.

In November 1951, Turing had finished his first long paper in mathematical biology. In December, Alan Turing picked up a young man, invited him home for sex, met him a couple of times more, and then the young man broke into Turing’s house with a couple of friends and robbed him. In the course of their investigations into the burglary, the police established that the young man and Turing had had sex, and Turing (who kept his notes on the case in card folder labelled “Burglary and Buggery”) found himself on trial for homosexuality. He was convicted – he was unquestionably guilty of the crime! – and lost his security clearance, so he could no longer work on government cryptanalysis; he was given the choice of jail or chemical castration, and chose castration.

This was all in accordance with the principles which Orson Scott Card advocated in 1990 (and has since, consistently, defended) – principles which he explicitly says should be applied to “the polity, the citizens at large”:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity’s ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships. The Hypocrites of Homosexuality

Just as Card advocates, Turing did not go to jail: he was nonetheless sent a clear message that he could not be permitted to remain an acceptable, equal citizen of British society. He had flagrantly violated society’s regulation of sexual behaviour – and the penalty was one which Orson Scott Card could have written of with relish.

Alan Turing was born in 1912: it’s possible he could be alive today, aged 97. In 1953 he was writing what biographer Alan Hodges describes as a “sudden explosion of ideas about the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics and relativity”. But he’d lost so much: he’d lost what Orson Scott Card proposed a man like Alan Turing should lose – the right to be regarded as an acceptable, equal citizen. His friends at Cambridge spoke for him in court and stood by him until death: but he lost his job, he was subjected to routine harassment by the police, and – a known side-effect of the hormones used to castrate him – he had grown breasts. On 7th June 1954, he ate a cyanide-laced apple, and he died.

In the video linked to here (Alan Turing’s death) his friends discuss the motivation for his suicide and all assert that it couldn’t possibly have been the hormone castration or the police harassment, because he was always so witty and amused about that, never seemed troubled at all.

I first heard of Alan Turing in my high school biology class, when I was 14, and the teacher was talking to us about what was life and what was sentient life and how could you tell: I first played with an AI program (as a joke – it used BASIC arrays and BASIC’s not-very-random numbers – worked to fool teenage boy-nerds, but that’s an easy game) when I was 19. I was a computer science nerd: I knew what I owed to Alan Mathison Turing.

There is a petition now active on the Prime Minister’s website, that will remain live till 20th January 2010: if you’re a UK citizen, you can sign it here. The petition asks for a formal apology to Alan Turing – an acknowledgement, by the government, of their wrong-doing towards him, and recognition of the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended Turing’s life.

I have never been sure how Orson Scott Card justifies his homophobia to himself: I know he loathes being identified as a homophobe, because he would rather think of himself as a normal person with a normal distaste for and hatred of gay men who normally wants gay men to be kept in the closet, and chemically castrated or otherwise punished if they fail to keep themselves out of sight. Peter David feels we should show tolerance towards Card for being “different” from us: though that is not what Card himself advocates. I’m not in a position to say one way or another about a boycott of a game I wouldn’t buy – I’m not a gamer.

The Alan Turing Year, 2012, will be a celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing on the occasion of the centenary of his birth on 23rd June 1912. He never got to be 42. Orson Scott Card, whose writing career was made by computers both real and fictional, shared a planet with Turing for less than 3 years.

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Update: 9th September. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement in response to the petition: “So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”

Fandom to researchers: We are not your lab rats

The problem people have who decide to “study fandom”, if they do not do sufficient prior research, is that they frequently underestimate fannish intelligence.

A pair of “cognitive neuroscientists”, ink barely wet on their PhDs, decide that online slash fandom is the perfect place to run an untested, untried, unreviewed survey to get material for a book deal for Dutton (a subsidiary of Penguin) about “how the Internet reveals new insights into some of the oldest circuits in our brain which control romantic attraction and sexual behavior”. [Update: this thread discusses in some detail the serious ethical issues raised by the way in which Drs Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam are conducting their research.] They launch the survey three days ago (29th August) after about a month’s prep work (apparently the book contract was signed in August), and…

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I, Zombie With Disabilities

An unusually tall, strong young girl with no name grew up miserable in an institution, and tried to kill herself. She wakes up, not quite dead, smarter and with a zombie-worker pack installed in her brain, piled in a stack of other corpses in the hold of a spaceship.

On a freezing cold mining planet she lives in the zombie barracks pretending to obey the remote control helmets of the overseers while sabotaging the factory and stealing stuff to feed the ooppressed and almost extinct frog aliens who have psychic powers.

Meanwhile, she talks to and cares for her fellow zombies very tenderly, interpreting their personalities and their lives and histories, protecting them and helping them resist the pointlessly sadistic bosses. The zombies are a diverse crew and she cares for them whether they’re repulsive and rotting or whether or not she likes them. As she analyzes the situation she’s in as an oppressed worker she compares the misery of the lives and deaths of her fellow zombies to their state now in a fairly radical way. I get the impression she was in the institution or asylum because she had Downs or some other mental challenge, but she doesn’t go into any big exposition there – it’s all contained in scattered throwaway statements about how people didn’t listen to her before because she was stupid and now because she’s a zombie, they don’t even notice that she’s not really dead like the others.

She also notices the messed up things happening between the bosses with power and gender – for example Bates, the boss who’s the nicest to the zombies, is constantly sexually harassed by Peterkin, who’s kind of evil. Peterkin notices something’s weird about this latest batch of zombies. He starts to kill them off. Zombie fight scenes with crowbars! People sizzling into giant vats of molten metal! Full of awesome!

The big strong compassionate witty zombie girl helps the frog aliens steal an enormous engine or mini-nuclear-reactor from a warehouse so that they can start to melt the ice and grow their crops. Yay!

The book is usually marked as by Curt Selby but that’s the pen name of Doris Piserchia, one of my favorite oddball 70s feminist SF writers!

I liked this book when I last read it, but it’s even better now when I read it with more of a feminist marxist eye and some disability rights and human rights consciousness.

In anticipation of Anticipation

I registered at the Palais des Congress for the 67th World SF Convention yesterday, and have been looking through the programme to check where I am supposed to be at any given time, and where I want to be in the intervals of being where I’m supposed to be.

I plan to write up the panels I’m on, and possibly some of the panels I’m not on. I’d like to meet up with other feministsfers at the con.

The first panel I wouldn’t miss for the world, though, isn’t one I’m on: I proposed it to Anticipation after I’d posted on my journal about the Werewolves of Brigadoon, and they took my idea: the panelists are George R. R. Martin, Kari Sperring, and Peadar O’Guillin, whose name I am spelling wrong because I cannot remember the HTML for accents. (Sorry.) It’s one of the 90-minute panels, P-512BF, in the “Human Culture” strand, about the appropriation of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as lands of “Celtic fantasy”.

Following that, the panel I’m tempted not to miss is the 2pm “Introduction to WSFS Business Meeting”, which promises that each and every member of Anticipation has an equal say (and democratic vote) in how the WSFS functions: the rules of the Worldcon, the Hugos, etc…

…well. It did occur to me, browsing the programme on the Metro last night, that we (and by ‘we’ I mean, well, me) could propose a change to the Hugo rules: for one year, everyone proposed for a Hugo shortlist must be a woman. I know exactly how the (mostly male) SF fans likely to be present at the WSFS business meeting will react to this: indeed, we could probably write their dialogue without ever actually going to the meeting. After all, if no man, no matter how good his work, can be considered for a Hugo, doesn’t that downgrade the quality of the award? Isn’t it meant to honour the writers that Fandom thinks are the best? Doesn’t that mean considering all writers? Hm, yes, quite so.

Still. An apple that would be interesting to throw, and watch the wasps flurry at it, yes? After all, given the number of excellent women writers who have been ignored by the Hugo shortlists since the awards were instigated, how would it be unreasonable if, for just one year, all the fans who do Hugo nominee-ing were required to ignore all the doubtless-excellent men writers and seek out the excellent women writing in SF?

Yes, I know. I’m being an unreasonable and dodgy feminist. But there you go.

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What is a writer’s job?

Reality is fractal. Art is communication. (Yes, there is the LeGuin Theory that the art of minerals and plants is non-communicative, but as we’re all animals on this bus, we understand and we create communicative art.)

Elizabeth Bear wrote a blog post recently on What my job is not in which she outlined some ideas about how she sees her job as an artist. I responded to this at a more personal level on my journal, but then I started to think about what I do as an artist, which is writing stories. (And sometimes taking photographs. But I could stop taking photographs. I am unable to stop writing stories.) I do not usually think of myself as an artist (as one always says), but:

My job as an artist is to communicate to you what I perceive: or, turned round, the role of an artist is to create something that can be communicated out of their perceptions of reality. Art is selectively fractal.

Where this fits into the Great Discussion of 2009 – the original RaceFail, the new MammothFail, and who knows where by 2010? – is this:

A writer, creating a story, is not attempting to replicate reality: all sorts of decisions get made, consciously and unconsciously, about where the story will be fractal and where it will not and to what degree each part of the story will be fractal:

- “The office opened at nine. The first meeting started at nine-fifteen. There was usually tea, coffee, and an assortment of breakfast pastries available, but not that morning. After a gruelling stint of three external meetings back-to-back, everyone was more than ready for lunch.”

- “The ceiling of my room is stained with damp in one corner: it’s right over my bed. My cat was purring by my ear. I could hear the rain against the window. I knew I had to get up and get dressed, but I didn’t want to go to work, though I knew I had to.”

- “The morning was cold, and the air filled with a delicate low-lying mist: the stone paving underfoot was wet. On this kind of day, the stones, the air, even the struggling box hedges around the narrow sour-dirt gardens, seemed to glow with light: she walked through a luminous city. Not even the damp and steaming bus could sour her mood.”

- “The number 42 bus was late. The rain wasn’t heavy, but unceasing: Bahiyaa’s khimār was wet by the time she got on the bus, and dripped unpleasantly. She sat down in the nearest empty seat, and a white man promptly sat down next to her, breathing hard through his mouth. She pulled out her notes for the UWT meeting: she wouldn’t have time to review them in the office at this rate.”

- “That morning the office had run out of coffee, so I went into my first meeting of the day without it, praying that despite the rain, Susan would make time go out and buy at least a jar of instant before the second meeting was due to start. Gracie drank tea, so she didn’t care.”

Every writer knows how to do this: it’s pretty much the definition of being a writer, that you are able to take your perception of a set of events: a person goes to work on a rainy morning, and communicate that perception in multiple different ways – that you are consciously aware that there are selections to be made in communicating the infinite fractality of reality to your readers. That’s my job as an artist, as a writer, to make those decisions.
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Star Trek doesn’t update the gender roles

I saw Star Trek this weekend, and overall enjoyed it. The special effects and characterizations were all engaging. This post contains spoilers!

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A feminist reading of Anathem

Here are some observations on gender and sexism in Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I noticed his attempt to have female characters who weren’t full of fail. Yet I was constantly jolted out of my enjoyment of this great, great book by what I think is unnecessary sexism. I’m going to write this without referring back to the book (in part because I read it on the iPhone Kindle app, and I didn’t start bookmarking Annoying Sexist Moments until part of the way through, and can’t easily search for words or phrases.)

It has many female characters who have power in the Saecular world and the Mathic world. They even have conversations with each other and not always about men. Woo, passes the Bechdel test.

Sort of.

So, most of what the women do that is powerful or that shows them in a thought process or a conversation occurs offstage; off the page.

For example, Ala and Tulia are described as having intense conversations all the time. But those conversations are not represented other than through Erasmus’ description of the rest of the Concent making fun of them and being annoyed by their long explanations to each other. Erasmus, Jesry, Lio, and Arsibalt as well as Orolo and Jad all have long conversations with each other that are represented “on camera”. Their relationships with each other are foregrounded.

So while it is good that Ala and Tulia’s trivialized conversations and off-the-page activities end up to be similar in result to the boys’ conversations — that result is a surprise and how they got it is a mystery.

Summary of the rest of this post with the spoilers out

- men and women’s conversations don’t happen much either, men just talk to men
- female characters’ strengths undermined by claims of instinct, by rape culture, by objectification
- condescension of male characters to female
- hideously pointless untrue-ringing romance plots
- fat girl remarked on as weirdly confident as if she thought she were a thin pretty girl
- Professions and class status assumed to be for men. “The truckers and their wives” etc.
- If it’s all about the menz, it’s just a coincidence OR IS IT?
- Umm the fertility stuff and I won’t spoil anything but, *eyeroll*

I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: I love the book, I think it’s fabulous, I wallowed in it and couldn’t stop reading it. I want to be a monk and have a cord and a bolt and sphere and hang around winding clocks, gardening my hills of corn and tomatoes, and talking about philosophy and math, epistemology and multiple universes, all day long. I would even sing stupid songs based on mathematical theorems. So I mean this as a loving critique. Also, I am *AWARE* that Stephenson wrote a book with a kick ass heroine, you are… the 8 millionth person to tell me that; I read the book 15 years ago, barely remember mildly liking it, didn’t think the heroine was all that, AND I’m talking about this book not that book. Disclaimer over!

- – - – WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- – - AFTER HERE THERE BE SPOILERS – - -

Erasmus’ relationship with Ala also has a curiously off-camera aspect. He writes her letters, he feels some feelings, but they don’t have any substantial conversations. The closest they get to one is Ala yelling at Erasmus that he’s self centered and doesn’t get anything that goes on in her mind and that he thinks of her like a doll he is dressing up. (Which seems rather true.) Cord and Yel’s conversations aren’t shown either The “relating” parts of their relationship don’t happen where we can see them.

I ended up feeling like Stephenson had made special effort to include women in the book, but the book is still about men’s relationships to each other. It rings false to write a book that includes a bunch of women without actually showing the women’s conversations and relationships. It’s just WEIRD.

The strong female characters are undermined in various ways; by casual insistence on sexual objectification, rape culture, heteronormativity, body size and image, gender inequalities in the larger society and in the Math, by romantic relationships, and by the condescension of male characters. Erasmus constantly evaluates the sexual attractiveness of the young women around him and gets crushes on all of them, even his own sister; fine, he’s a teenager, but in combination with the other ways of undermining of the female characters’ agency, it is annoying.

Cord, a totally great character, gets pointlessly paired with the geology Mountain Man dude, another fine character but it is remarkable that she spends about 2 minutes in the book without having a boyfriend. Even worse, the boyfriend promises her brother that he’ll protect her. Okay. Was that necessary? Her competent actions and her high intelligence are frequently described in ways that make them sound like the result of instinct, a common way that women’s brains and skill is devalued. This is not true every time she does something, but it happened several times. Cord’s job as an engineer is apparently unusual in the Saecular world, as she mentions being the only woman in her workplace and having difficulties because of it. (Again – I liked this character a lot – and her vests and tools and her impatience with Erasmus, but there are such problems!)

Many of the profession/jobs or descriptions of class status overtly express sexism, either Arbrean sexism or Stephenson’s. For example burghers “and their wives” are mentioned. Truckers “and their wives”. And so on – there are more examples.

There is another annoying bit where Erasmus is describing his history with Ala to his sister Cord, who then exclaims super knowingly about it all as if she knows exactly what is happening and the male characters then joke about how women have a strange telepathic connection. Um…. dumb? Why did there have to be a “girls are weiiiiirrrrd” moment? Was this meant to be a big representative moment of How Women Really Are? Like the description of Ala and Tulia’s constant communication habits, talking to each other so much the boys describe them as the “Two Backed Creature” – (which i read as a tasteless out of character sexual joke on ‘beast with two backs’ about these two teenage girls’ friendship) (Which was also especially stupid since the guys constantly talk to each other too, as does everyone there, since Dialogue is part of the *point of being in the Math*)

In Tredgarth, Tris, in the kitchen with Erasmus and several others, speaks up interestingly with observations of the conversation happening at the dinner parties. Erasmus describes her then as being “podgy” and as being confident and acting as if she were a much more attractive girl. Despite being raised in a vaguely egalitarian philosophers’ school cut off from mainstream society for the last 10 years of his life, he completely accepts that an average looking “podgy” girl should behave in a particular manner not attracting of attention, and a pretty, thin girl would and should be more assertive and will be more privileged and furthermore that this is natural and deserved. Perhaps it was meant to remind the reader again that Erasmus is kind of a jerky teenage boy.

I understand that Arbre is not a perfect utopian world (duh) and it has sexism in it and so why not show it. Fine… But in a world where people are sitting around thinking about philosophy they could not possibly fail to remark on gender and power relationships and since everything is non normative in the maths there must be something going on there. Like, it was someone’s idea to Collect women as well and they seem to be powerful in the hierarchy.

I note that the women don’t seem to have birth control. Instead something is “put in the food” for the men in the Maths to make them infertile. Birth control is never mentioned in the Saecular world. I’m just saying… try and name me some examples of SF by women that don’t mention reproductive control being important for women? It’s jarring and feels unrealistic.

I enjoyed all the bits that felt influenced by Gene Wolfe… And am still reading the notes and proofs and diagrams and links to philosophical computing papers…. all very cool. But speaking of Wolfe. What’s the deal with science fiction monks? Would anyone care to compile a list of sf monasteries? Thoughts on the relation of science/academia to monastic homosocial culture?

The idea behind “Sconic thought” was kind of good – it was from the scones that a woman (whose name I have forgotten) used to bake for her Salons on empiricism that ran for many decades; she wrote lots of books, but her name was only mentioned once – instead the school of thought is named after her baking. I thought this was mildly amusing and a nice hat tip to the many women of intellectual and literary salons yet it was annoying for her name to be left out of the name of the school of thought. I might remember her name, then.

There were some interesting female characters at the symposiums at Tredgardth. The Lorite one was funny and informative and assertive though her role seemed not to be to think and critique or do anything but to report when ideas are mentioned, basically, “someone’s already thought of that.” There was also a Saecular politician who was powerful & witty. She is kind of wrapped up later as a package with her brother and powerful family. But I appreciated all the female characters in the dinner party scenes. I just wanted more from them, and more of them elsewhere in the book. As with Ala’s brilliant skills as a general, women’s genius only seems to happen when Stephenson’s camera isn’t recording. They can be competent, brave, witty… but not geniuses who have inspiring relationships with others.

A general complaint, not directed in particular at Stephenson. I don’t ask that every book be all things. But this book tries to be so much, and it fails so notably at this thing which to me seems so simple. Just make women characters as human as the male characters. Why is that so hard? How can anyone so smart and cool write something that fails to do that simple thing? Why do we as female readers and geeks so often get left behind and disappointed in this way by male writers? I am haunted by these questions in general while reading science fiction. Men, and heterosexual ones who claim to love and appreciate women and who in their daily lives surely do just that, fail to be able to write STORIES where women have full human agency and are important in any way other than romantic symbols or sadly cardboard sops to “strong female hero”.

The meta observations on non-sexism by Erasmus during the car journey were extremely annoying. It read to me like an in joke – that perhaps Stephenson had asked friends for feedback and someone said “Hey, how come 12 people just went off to do the main storyline, and 11 of them are men and one is Erasmus’ sister?” In character, Erasmus ponders the question and he concludes that maybe women just are less attracted to doing what they are doing (disobeying orders and going to look for ex-Fraa Orolo instead of going to Tredgardth.) This came off like an annoying little poke at possible feminist criticism of the scene as well as criticism of the book as a whole.

Then… the magical fertility and marriage chapter at the end. Why, why, why?

Working in the Dollhouse

Dollhouse requires a lot of work to enjoy. So far, it hasn’t required more work than I’m willing to give it, but then, viewing and responding to popular culture is my actual job. I read The Angry Black Woman’s response to the challenge that feminists who dislike Dollhouse aren’t getting the “subtlety” of it, and she got me thinking about how much work I’m putting into enjoying it. I was particularly struck by her point that you can “get” that the show is aiming for subtle horror and not buy it.

Fact is, I don’t think Dollhouse is succeeding at what it aims at yet. Grace over at Heroine Content is cautiously optimistic in her review. She notes the amount of ass-kickery the female Dolls engage in and points out the various ways character development twists and turns to suggest that the Dolls have the potential to surprise us, should the show continue. I’m of a similar wait-and-see opinion. I’m giving the show time because I like Whedon and Dushku and I’d like to see what they come up with when the network backs off a bit. That doesn’t mean what they come up with will be any good. It just means I have a somewhat positive impression of their track record and am willing to give them some time to find their way. Viewers don’t owe Dollhouse that time. It’s a gift. And calling viewers who invoke their right not to view “clueless” is presumptuous, rude and, in my opinion, absolutely ridiculous.

Case in point: Gianduja Kiss has created a fanvid for the show to the tune of “It Depends on What You Pay”. It was linked to on Feminist SF before, but I embedded it here too because it makes my point so well. The vid has a trigger-warning attached as the contrast of the Dolls’ assignments, mostly sexual, sometimes violent, with a cheery sounding song about rape is disturbing, to say the least. The vid is only triggering, however, if you get the horror of the show’s premise and work to make the connection between the words of the song and the scenes before you. And it is work. I’m saying this as a film scholar. The rape scenes on Dollhouse are rarely shot as rapes. They’re party scenes, sport fucks, “lurve-making”. The horror is intellectual, not yet on screen — at least not often. This isn’t about subtlety for me, it’s about a lackluster use of the medium. The shots are too glammy. The editing doesn’t make you question what’s going on.

The fanvid has to impose the horror of what’s going on explicitly through the song because outside of the context of the show’s premise, there is nothing in most of these shots to encourage the viewer to read the scene in front of them as anything other than what it seems. There are a few violent scenes, of course, but most of the “sex scenes” are shot no differently from how they would be shot on the now defunct Las Vegas.

More often than not, we get a Dolls’ eye view of events. That’s a choice that the producers are making, and it’s not the one that’s going to make most feminists go “ooh, subtlety.” It’s going to make most of us go I don’t have time for this. I can do the intellectual work and provide the subtlety, but I’m doing the work. It’s hardly ever on screen, even in coded form. The irony of Dollhouse, at least for me, is that as viewers we’re being asked to work there too.

As you may be able to tell, I think the biggest weak point in the series is not the premise, which doesn’t seem to be as triggering for me as it is for others, it’s the execution. I’m not 100% sold on the casting. I have a difficult time really buying into the actors playing Victor and Boyd. They don’t have the range of the female cast. I’m also bored by the technical aspects of the show. There’re so many things the producers could be doing in terms of shot design and editing to make the horror of the show visceral and ever-present. Look at the way the early seasons of 24 maximize tension through split screen and that damned running clock, or the way cinematography increases the gut-clenching realism of Battlestar Galactica’s space battles by selective invocation of a hand-held documentary feel.

Whedon’s strengths are writing and characterization, but Dollhouse can’t succeed based on those alone. The premise is too convoluted. This is the first Whedon show that needs to make full use of the visual medium in order to work. Buffy was witty, Angel was angsty, Firefly (love it or hate it) was pulp. Dollhouse changes from episode to episode. Even its characters change — personalities, looks, loyalties. The continuing narrative thread is human trafficking. But in order for that narrative thread to resonate even when it’s not the explicit theme of that week’s story, the camera has to serve as the narrator. IT has to do the work. It has to make us feel what the Dolls can’t. It has to make us remember what they don’t. It has to tempt us and disturb us, to capture aspects of performance that the glossy fast-cutting versions we’ve been seeing of the Dolls’ assignments elide.

And it’s not doing any of that.