The Oracle will see you now…

by Ted

Nabil’s post about the unstoppable Raphael Carter made me think of one of my favorite concepts from Raphael Carter: the Gender Oracle. It’s the person, often cisgendered, who curious strangers can approach and ask about a transgender or genderqueer person’s gender.

(Here at the blog night, Vito Excalibur suggested that this might be someone you could approach who will tell you what gender you are. That would be super-handy too! Throw a coin in the fountain and look in your reflection or something. But that’s not what Raphael Carter meant when sie used the term, though.)

(Then Nabil suggested that toxoplasma can serve that function, since it supposedly makes “women” more lively and promiscuous and makes “men” more surly and antisocial. Nobody here thought this was a particularly good test.)

But I digress. I do a lot of Gender Oracle work for my partner. Friends (mine and his) who don’t know a lot of trans folk come to me to confirm that yes, “he” is the proper pronoun, and yes, mistakes happen but they’re forgivable as long as you keep trying. Sometimes, I answer peoples’ questions about surgery/hormones, legal questions, outness, and so on. Sometimes I find myself fielding apologies and I think once I was even asked a bathroom question.

It’s a common way to be an ally, I think: Answer questions from people who are well-intentioned but not well-informed.  This can be a benefit to a marginalized person as a way to reduce the irritation of answering the same question over and over.

There are other ways to be an ally: activism, comforting presence, listening, and of course cat-sitting. But it’s nice to have a term for this particular thing.

Some folks really love having that kind of help. Some don’t like it at all. I try to do it respectfully, and ask permission before I start speaking for anyone else. But now, I get a magical-sounding title for it!

Since Nabil and I have started using the term, we’ve been applying it to other things too. Sometimes we talk about someone acting as a Race Oracle, or a Disability Oracle: answering questions from curious folk. Sometimes as someone who’s less “scary” and “other-like” to approach. Hopefully just to get some questions off a loved one’s back.

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Portal and the Bechdel Test

by Ted

Howdy, this is Ted, guest blogging from Liz’s yard. I’m thinking about the Bechdel test and video games right now. After bopping around Wikipedia, I’m also thinking that it’s awesome that Alison Bechdel’s brother is the keyboardist for Ministry, but mostly I’m thinking about the Bechdel test and video games.

I love the Bechdel test:

• It’s clear, empirical and indisputable.
• You can apply it to any works with narrative.
• It’s obviously kind of a low standard.

I don’t know many video games that pass the Bechdel test, even though a lot of big-budget mainstream video games are putting an increasing amount of their mainstream big budgets into dialog and scripted scenes.

The game I know that passes it best is Portal. The rest of this entry is full of spoilers about the game.

(I’d love to hear about games that do. My game of choice is NetHack, which is randomly generated and has very little dialog but which just barely passes the Bechdel test in slightly over 50% of completed games.)

Now, everyone loves Portal. It’s wonderfully minimalist and fun. It’s a quick game, and hilarious, and solving it requires you to understand its demented physics. It has semi-violent moments, but it’s actually the kind of game that a survivor of violence could play without trouble, which is also nice.

The thing that I can’t stop ranting at Nabil about is this: Not only are there two women who talk with each other about something besides a man, but the entire game consists of a dialog of two women talking about something besides a man. And the interaction is central! The biggest draw of the game, more even than the action, is the splendidly evil dialog.

Right now, millions of console players are flocking worldwide to get more opportunities to enjoy the dialog of two women talking about something besides a man!

Well, okay, not quite true: the lead character, Chell, doesn’t talk. It’s all the main ally/antagonist of the game, GLaDOS (voiced in English by Ellen McLain) talking. I don’t know if Alison Bechdel would still count it as passing The Rule. I hope so.

I hesitate to call Portal a feminist work. The majority of the writers of the game are men (notably Erik Volpaw and Chet Faliszek, who are known for their humorous review site Old Man Murray). Gender isn’t discussed or analyzed, and I haven’t seen it reviewed or criticized in a feminist context before. I would love to see that, though, because I think it deserves some note.

The lead character is run around in a system that consumes her efforts without explaining why, and only rises up against it when she realizes it’s going to kill her. The turning point of the game is when she realizes: if I keep following the rules of this experiment, I’m going to lose and die in a “victory candescence.” And then she gets out and discovers all the lies.

And that’s actually kind of one of the big puzzles of the game: rejecting the dangerous hierarchy of the premise, refusing your mission, and trying to escape the maze. Hurrah!

On top of that, your methods are totally non-linear. You win by understanding the situation and working around it. You can’t shoot the adorable deathbots, you have to understand them and get around them. A lot of the puzzles involve pushing the physics engine to its limits, and getting a comfortable understanding of the uncomfortably strange (but consistent) ways the Portals work.

And there’s the Weighted Companion Cube, which was actually based on reports from interrogations that people in isolation tend to become attached to inanimate object. It’s making light of real-world suffering of imprisonment, and I could see objections to that, but somehow it comes across as sensitive but hilarious.

But mostly, what I think about is the Bechdel test.

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