So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.

God, what a Mary Sue.

and it reminded me of an experience I had at WinCon 1999: I had just got hold of a copy of Vonda N. McIntyre’s wonderful novel, The Moon and the Sun (1997), and was full of how great it was. At a relevant panel, I mentioned it – to be greeted (to my surprise) with howls of derision from the women the audience, about how terrible it was because the hero, Marie-Joseph, has too much. She’s a composer, a mathematician, a fair artist, and she has a sea monster for a friend. As Catherine Asaro points out in her review

Science fiction is replete with the idea of the polymath — a protagonist talented in many diversified disciplines. This isn’t coincidence; in real life, artistic and linguistic gifts often pair with scientific or mathematical talent. The math-physics-music constellation is perhaps the best-known combination. Science fiction writer and Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, for example, is also a Ph.D. physicist, linguist, composer, and musician. The character of Marie-Joseph fits right into this tradition. McIntyre gets her personality down well, with sharp details, such as her fledgling attempts to quantify natural phenomena with equations. In essence, Marie-Josephe is struggling to derive chaos theory far ahead of its time. I found her a likable genius, unaffected and humble, with charm, integrity, and humor.

I remember a similar reaction to Segnbora in The Door Into Shadow – not the more usual one of defining her by having been raped, but a complaint that by the end of the book she has a magical sword that will cut anything, she has the Flame, she has Hasai – she has too much.

But she’s the hero. No one made that complaint about Herewiss. But (back to Comic Book Girl):

The idea that woman has to “earn” any power, praise, love, or plot prominence is central to Mary Sue. Men do not have to do this, they are naturally assumed to be powerful, central and loveable. That’s why it’s the first thing thrown at a female character- what has she done to be given the same consideration as a male character? Why is she suddenly usurping a male role? “Mary Sue” is the easiest way to dismiss a character. It sounds bad to say “I don’t like this female character. I don’t like that this woman is powerful. I don’t like it when the plot focuses on her. I don’t like that a character I like has affections for her.” But “Mary Sue” is a way to say these things without really saying them. It gives you legitimacy.

Is there any useful way to use the trope “Mary Sue”?

Few things provoke a man gripped by anxious masculinity like the idea of a woman reading, at least a woman reading anything beyond patriarchal assignments in man-pleasing. As any female bookworm can attest, almost no public behavior you can perform is more likely to get men to bother you and demand to know what you’re doing than simply reading a book.

– Flying monkeys: why they suck, and why they must be opposed

The above is the opening paragraph of Amanda Marcotte’s blog about the incident in which a 15-year-old atheist posts a pic of herself holding a book by Carl Sagan, given her for Christmas by her “super-religious mother”, and because she is a female-type atheist, Reddit explodes in male assholery – an ugly example of how some men hate women. Not merely because so many men made so many ugly comments advocating that she should be raped, but because those comments got upvoted by hundreds of other men. Literally. Hundreds of men, most of whom presumably were members of Reddits atheist community, read a comment advocating the rape of a teenage atheist and liked it enough to click the upvote button. There are downvotes on those comments too, but far outnumbered. For those men, Reddit’s atheist community is for men and about men: no woman has any business feeling part of it.

(For any man reading this who is less than inclined to pay attention to women pointing out that this is a problem originated by men, here are a couple of posts by men on what is wrong with this from a male perspective: Nerds and Male Privilege and Pix Pls. Go away and look at those and don’t bother us.)

I cherish my right to be pseudonymous on the Internet, and defend the right of anyone to be as pseudonymous as they choose – to quote again this neat list of reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet:

* Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution
* Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence
* Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, aquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it
* Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers
* Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children
* Because it’s the custom among their Internet cohort
* Because it’s no one else’s business

That last is and should be the strongest one. But as I have said before, I opted to be pseudonymous, as many other women do, because I had found that using my legal name gets me all kinds of crap. Because my legal name is obviously a woman’s name, and Yonmei, while based on my legal given name, isn’t. The default assumption made online is that you are white/male/straight/cisgendered/American – and generally you have to be very upfront clear that you are not any of the above before people will move away from what they perceive as “the norm”. One of the reasons I like this blog is because although we have men blogging here (*waves*) the default assumption made is that if you blog at a feminist blog, you’re female. I like not getting the instant crap from men who haven’t even stopped to think for one moment about what I’m saying, they just hate women. But I don’t actually want everyone to assume I must be male, and have to come out as female over and over and over again. (People who assume I must be male after reading what I write generally declare it’s because I’m sharp-spoken and upfront about what I think. I think this attitude in women is usually called being “bitchy”, and when identified as a woman I’ve usually been identified as a bitch.)

Kate Harding wrote a response to the men who advocate that women use non-gendered pseudonyms:

Finally, if your solution to sexist abuse on the internet is, “Just don’t let anyone know your gender, or see a picture of you, or ever mention where you live” (as one of the first commenters on Watson’s post suggested), you are so fucking awful, I can’t even. It’s not just that you’re putting all the onus on the targets of hatred to change so that bullies won’t have to, or that you’re conveniently ignoring situations, in almost 20fucking12, where a woman might want to have her picture and contact info on the internet for, I dunno, business reasons? For example? And it’s not even that you’re representing yourself as someone who’s clearly more internet-savvy than the lady blogger in question, but you apparently don’t realize that a highly motivated person can pretty easily discover the identity behind a pseudonym. No, it’s that you’re arguing that abuse of women online would solve itself if only women disappeared from the internet.

Oh, of course that’s not what you’re saying! I know, I know. In the scenario you describe, sexist shitheads would know that there were still women out there–it wouldn’t be as though around half the human race had just vanished!–but they wouldn’t know which specific screen names deserved to have their hotness assessed, their gender mocked, their ideas dismissed, and their bodies threatened. So they wouldn’t even need to bother with all that! PROBLEM SOLVED YOU’RE WELCOME.

Know what, dude who thinks this? You’re probably the awfulest. That’s all.

Kate’s right: while there are all sorts of reasons why anyone who prefers to be pseudonymous should have that preference respected (and sites that do not respect it are discriminatory against women and against other minority groups) but yes: being pseudonymous can also be a disadvantage. You’re not building an online reputation linked to your legal name under which future employers can find you: advantage if future employers are likely to see that reputation as a reason not to hire you, disadvantage if they’re looking for evidence of expertise in writing, analysis, and social media.

And the key reason, for a lot of women, why we don’t use our legal names on the Internet: the sexist abuse from men that is accepted and upvoted by other men.

Pink Narcissus Press has issued a call for submissions for a new anthology of short science fiction. ‘Daughters of Icarus’ will feature stories exploring gender roles in society, using the medium of science fiction. Stories of any length, by authors of any gender, will be considered. The deadline for submissions in 31st May 2012.

Guidelines for submissions can be found on the Pink Narcissus website.

source: lancashirewritinghub.co.uk

This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan also blew me away. It made me think strongly of Woman on the Edge of Time, but sort of in reverse, or in reverse somewhere from the middle in a fractal way. Its timestreams are a bit confusing. The heroine, Jill, is in a slightly nicer future than ours, and others that might have been “before” ours — but she keeps remembering other streams, the ones with Hitler, and the assassination of JFK, and the times when she and her siblings played on the Infinite Game Board which was infused with Substance Q…. She, her siblings, and her parents as well as many people around them are in an unstable position in the timestream, trying to improve it but experiencing confusion and loss, mental breakdowns (and confronting deep ethical issues) around what it means to adjust the history of the world. Meanwhile, Dr. Eliani Hadntz drifts in and out of the story and through the timestreams, a fabulous and enigmatic mad scientist. I liked it that Jill and her timestream aren’t in an actual utopia, but just come off as strangely privileged and lucky in a world where there *is* still war and horror. Aside from the politics — I deeply enjoyed the scenes of memory and childhood and the atmosphere of the dream-like Halcyon House that holds so much meaning for Jill’s family — especially its attic.

Highest Frontier and Shared Dream had a couple of interesting commonalities beyond being about deep disruption and people collectively trying to figure out how to bring about social change. (So resonant with current Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.)

Both books have a sort of Magical Stuff, a macguffin that sets off events and catalyzes people — in both cases, something that makes people *wiser by contagion*. Contact with Jennifer’s wisdom-pheremone-emitting plant research project in Highest Frontier, and contact with Substance Q, makes people wiser and more empathetic, expanding their minds and their ability to put themselves into another person’s shoes. Wisdom also makes people act with more altruism and as part of a collective. And it makes them choose to engage in direct action!

Both books also turn to reform of existing systems as their hopeful solution for social change. (Echoes for me here of Cory Doctorow’s For the Win & its focus on unionizing.) In Highest Frontier the radical reform is over voter registration and electoral politics. In Shared Dream, perhaps a bit hilariously and unbelievably for some people… it’s the United Nations and the World Bank. There is a lot to argue with there but it’s great food for thought and discussion!

This post is a snarky recap of the 1994 television movie Hercules and the Amazon Women starring Roma Downey (Monica from Touched by an Angel) as the sexy man-hating Amazon queen Hippolyta, Lucy Lawless as her fierce and obedient number two Lysia, and of course Kevin Sorbo as Hercules and Michael Hurst as his li’l buddy. I meant to put this film on as background noise while I graded, but little did I know I was about to watch a cautionary tale. I was enthralled and delightfully appalled by this campy film cautioning against sexist behavior in men because you might drive women to become bands of scantily clad separatist warrior chicks.

This film is on Netflix if you’d like to watch along with me. The screencaps here are curtesy of Mary Crawford’s Vices and Miroir d’Arc Archives.

Hercules and the Amazon Women begins with three white villagers bumbling through the jungle in pursuit by unseen monsters. Ferns shake and the men are snatched away velociraptor style. Clever girl! One man is sucked into a sand pit. Only the villager Pithus escapes.

Cut to the opening credits. Epic theme song and beautiful shots of New Zealand the Shire ancient Greece. In a village, boys play ball. A girl whines, “I want to play.” The boy says, “This game is for boys!” The girl’s mom says, “He’s right. Now come help me wash your father’s feet.” Oh boy! Sexist peasants with their narrow views of gender!

Cut to hunky, oiled Iolous in a low-cut tunic stalking a taller, longer-haired, scantier-clad beefcake who was apparently intruding upon this village where women wash men’s feet. Iolous attacks the intruder, then rassle, the big guy picks Iolous up over his head. It’s Hercules, half-god and best friend of Iolous! I wonder: is Iolous short to make Hercules look bigger and godlke?

Herc greets his BFF. He’s in town to attend Iolous’s marriage to the villager Ania but first, warn his bro: “you’ll give up a lot getting married dude!” (I paraphrase.) Like sleeping with all the sexy ladies in ancient Greece. “At least you’ll eat better when you’re married,” Herc goes on. Iolous shakes his head. “Ania’s not that much of a cook.” She can’t sew, can’t cook, can’t look after animals. What’s she good for? Herc insists. Iolous says she’s a hottie, and besides he paid a lot of livestock for her. Oh boy! Not only a ball-and-chain who can’t do domestic duties for shit, but she was expensive. Herc just won’t give up: “are you willing to give up your whole life for a woman? I’m gonna be a bachelor for life!”

While Hercules tells Iolous how much ladies suck, the BFFs walk into a nearby forest. There, they meet a whiney crying child. “The monster ate my father!” the babe insists. Then the child turns into a monster herself. An icky phallic CG snake monster, at that! Herc says don’t provoke the mob; Iolous ignores him and pulls snake monster aggro. Herc bails out Iolous cuts off its head. Herc laughs at the limp snake body laying on the forest floor. “That’s Ania the day after you marry her.” Ew. Then the monster revives and grows two heads for every head Herc cuts off. It bites Iolous’s shoulder. Iolous grabs a torch that is conveniently burning at a forest alter and tosses it to Herc so he can burns the monster to death. Teamwork!

Iolous plays captain obvious for the viewer’s benefit: “What was that? You cut off its head and another one and another one.” Herc says Hera his evil stepmother was behind this monster sneak attack. Herc smashes Hera’s alter to lecture: “Take a lesson Iolous. She is a perfect example of what happens when a woman gets too much power.”

Back in the village, Herc sneaks up on his mom and picks her up. She says she motherhood is a constant worry, offers to wash Hercules’s feet, and calls Hera a bitch. Oh, and Mom tells son that Zeus still comes around for a booty call!

Speaking of the devil, Zeus materializes. Says he’s been a bad father but Herc has been a wonderful son. Zeus lust’s after Herc’s mom, she invites Zeus to stay for dinner, but Herc glares at dad. Oedipus much?

Cut to evening with some townies sexually harassing a village girl. This plot goes nowhere.

Hercules and Iolous have dinner with Ania and Herc’s mom. Turns out Ania is whinier than the kid who turned into the snake monster, but who cares because she is a buxom hottie. Herc’s mom comes in and says “what’s this, a man in the kitchen? Get out!” Herc tells Iolous that Ania is very pretty and will give him some good looking sons. Ania the bad cook serves Herc some gruel, an extra big portion, and he winces and lies that the nasty food is delicious.

Suddenly, a peeping tom gazes into this family meal and frightens the womenfolk. It’s Pithus, the survivor from the Jurassic Park jungle massacre! Herc has to duck through the door to confront Pithus, then smacks the poor man with the door and and picks him up by the scruff of his neck. Pithus tells Herc his village Gargarencia is under attack by ferocious beasts. Herc agrees to help but tells Iolous that he can’t come because as a soon-to-be-married-man that his adventure days are over. Iolous says “this is our last chance together, best friends fighting back to back.” HoYay! We’ll be back in time for the wedding, Iolous reassures.

The next morning, the men say goodbye to their women. Iolous lies to Ania and says Herc begged him to go. Herc’s mom joins the chorus of nagging women and insists “I wish you weren’t going!” What’s up with all these greedy women don’t care about the village in need? Herc tells his mom that Ania has changed Iolous so much… because women change men! Make them better! Ania teases/pouts/whines that she’ll marry someone else while Iolous is gone, and Iolous says “you’ll never find anyone else who loves you as much as I do!” Or maybe nobody else would pay Ania’s expensive dowery.

Cue marching across the countryside montage. Hey, these clips of beautiful New Zealand wilderness are the same opening credits! Although Gargarencia is just two days away, Herc and friends push through a jungle, melting snow, and cross a mountain pass. Iolus jokes that he has a surprise: Ania the horrible cook made us some food for the road! The men laugh at her expense.

The gang crosses a tiny rope bridge into Gargarencia. The villagers rejoice. Pithus is back! I immediately notice the village is all dudes, then I wonder if a dudetown is normal in ancient Greece just like a dudearmy would be. A kid runs up and wants to join Herc. Hey, I know this kid! He plays Solan on Xena: Warrior Princess! Too bad Pithus says “Herc already has a partner.” That’s you, Iolous!

The men tell Hercules and Iolous that the beasts steal their women and leave baby boys beside the river. Don’t worry, the men insist, we care for the abandoned babies. Herc demands: but where do the babies come from? The river bank! Hercules’s questioning goes in circles and we get back to the men describing the beasts as animals.

Iolous and Hercules set out to find these monster beasts. While they walk, Iolous asks Hercules why he doesn’t carry a weapon. Iolous draws his down swords and tries to playfight, and Hercules easily disarms his little buddy. Iolous goes on to say that Ania is going to give him five sons, no daughters, and that he wants to name them all Iolous.

Merrymaking comes to an end when Iolous and Hercues come across some upside down corpses in the jungle. The “monsters”–armored people wearing animal masks–repel down vines and attack Hercules and Iolous. They nearly strangle Iolous and Herc breaks their weapons. No match for these dudes, the monsters scamper back up the trees and disappear into the foliage. A hand appears from the ground and grabs Iolous’s sword. “Who needs a sword?” Herc says. To prove his point from earlier that weapons are unnecessary, Herc reaches into the ground and pulls out one of the monsters. More lovely choreographed fights continue.

Iolous chases one of the retreating monsters. Herc hells “No Iolous, stay at my back!” Dang Iolous don’t you know this movie has a teamwork message? Iolous unmasks the monster and yells with surprise, “Hercules, it’s a woman!” Wait, these were chicks? But they were wearing such practical, fully-covered armor! Iolous feels tricked! To add insult to injury, the lady warrior stabs Iolous. Iolous says his goodbyes and dies in Hercules’s arms. The lady warriors prepare to kill Hercules when Xena Lysia appears on a horse and orders and makes the most wooden delivery ever: “No, stop. The queen will want to kill him.”

We cut to the camp where the women are wearing skimpy clothes, as they should be in this titilating movie about gender equality! In the camp, a fit light-skinned black lady trains the girls–the first person of color I’ve noticed in this film. An old white lady jokes that she wants to buy Herc… opps she meant his horse! Meanwhile the amazons have Herc is tied up all shirtless and hairy.

One of these hot scantily-clad ladies sharpens a knife. “My father used to chase my mother with one of these! Now no one chases me!” Wow, we Hercules has arrived into a village of man-hating lesbian separatists! As if we didn’t get the point, Lysia says, “if you are looking for men, you won’t find one. Not in the city of amazons.” I start to wonder how this village could be a city by any stretch of the imagination, but then I am too distracted by young Lucy Lawless in her amazon attire. She goes on “You’re the only one.” The women start to heckle Hercules. “I’m sure you’re used to having your way with women. I’m sure you they fall at your feet. Here, you fall at their feet!” With a signature WHOOSH she kicks out Herc’s feet. Lysia demands that Herc wash the Amazon queen’s feet. The queen, MonicaHippolyta says, “you’d rather die than assume the role of a woman. Women be proud! You’ve put the best men have to offer in chains.” Now the ladies are dressed in even sexier clothing. The queen cuts off Herc’s gag and says catching him gave her pleasure. “Pleasure is the last thing I’d give you, you murderous bitch,” Herc says.

The queen tries to engage Hercules in debate: “we are not beasts Hercules, we’re women.” “Hardly.” “Just because we’re not the type of women you’d like us to be, we’re women who won’t be controlled by men, who won’t be bought and sold like Oxen. Men will never dominate these women.” Herc: “We don’t dominate you, we protect you.” The women laugh. “Because you’re weaker,” Herc goes on. Herc looks at Hippolyta’s boobs. She asks if he finds her attractive. “Your friend is dead, I have you in chains, yet you still desire me. You’re pathetic. There is no point in talking to you, you have no idea what makes a woman.” Herc: “you don’t know anything about what makes a man! You don’t know anything about me!”

The queen gets a magic candle and turns Herc into a baby. Baby-Herc flashes back through all the moments where men taught him how to be sexist. Wow, a social constructionist argument! Who knew? Zeus holds his baby and tells lil’ Herc that he’s going to have a wonderful life. “And women! There’s nothing like a beautiful woman!” Women are the harder journey, papa-God insists. “Take a lot of them!”

The queen says, “See Hercules, that is who you are. Women mean nothing to your father. They’re just play-toys to be used and then thrown away. All father’s teach this to their sons on the day that they are born, and it doesn’t change as you grow older.” Now Herc is a kid wrestling with young Iolous. His wrestling instructor tells the kids not to have emotions, to be stone. Emotions are for the weak, for girls. Herc in Kiwi accent says, “let’s die together Iolous!” But what I really want to know is why young Hercules is not Ryan Gosling but some kid with a rat-tail.

The queen asks Herc when men create anything but death: from this new perspective, Iolous dies because of his shock that a woman could kick his butt.

Herc wakes up naked. The queen gives him clothes. “It is not my intention that you should suffer needlessly, this is not a female trait. You loved Iolous.” Bromance! “Could you love a woman as you lived Iolous?” “It’s different,” Herc insists. “Why? Women need respect and loyalty, just as men do.” Herc is convinced now. “What if I try to change?” “You can’t change, you are a man.” “But I learned to be this way. I can unlearn it!” Herc wants to unlearn the masculine conditioning that cost his beloved bro his life. The queen denies him: “No. Men can learn nothing but to deceive and dominate and kill.” Queen refuses to show him another way. Herc says she can’t show him. Queen puffs her chest and locks Herc in a cage.

So women are naturally caring but men are capable of learning to be sexist. This queen’s contradictory position on essentialism vs. social constructionism is making my head hurt. But that’s OK because women aren’t logical or rationale so I will suspend any skepticism and carry on with watching this charming tele-flick.

In the night, women sneak in to see what a man looks like. They ask Herc if it is true that other places women and men live together? One woman asks about her son, the kid from the village. Lysia busts in and kicks them out and then threatens to kill Herc. Zeus appears and offers to help. Herc says, “how can I understand women?” Zeus says this is impossible because women are full of feelings and instincts. Herc says he can bust out of the cage, but he is staying because he wants to understand the queen: she has strength and power. Zeus says he fell for Hera because she has strength and power, and she is nothing but trouble. Herc tells his dad what he taught him about women may be wrong. Zeus admits he may have been wrong, but reminds Herc that Hera loves the Amazons and will get pissed. Herc points out that Zeus and Herc both never have cared about Hera’s happiness.

Queen Hippolyta prays to Hera. Hera says queen needs to kill Hercules. The queen doubts it. Meanwhile I start to wonder why if Hera hates men so much, why doesn’t she divorce Zeus and sue for custody of Mount Olympus?

Herc escapes. He goes back to warn the men and defend. The men say they don’t know how to fight: they’re farmers. Pithus says he didn’t tell Herc the full story.

Cut to sexy amazon drumming and dancing around the fire. Hello male gaze! The ladies dress up for war. We see plenty of long shots of women dressing. Hello sexy butt in a thong! Naked ladies putting on armor!

The women ride to battle. SURPRISE! The women actually were coming to the village for sex. I guess they weren’t lesbians after all–just cultural feminists who think women are naturally nurturing warriors and men naturally suck. The villagers decide, at Herc’s motivation, to try being nice to the amazons and talk to them and wash their feat. The men say they want to know the women’s names. One man wrote his Amazon a love song. The kid who plays Solan on Xena meets his mommy.

Lysia busts into Zeus’s tent. He tries to feed her a tasty morsel. “The rules are no small talk, just sex,” says Lysia. She looks repulsed at the thought of boning Zeus. OK, so at least some of these amazons must be gay.

Meanwhile, the queen isn’t getting her freak on; she is grooming her horse. She tells Hercules they have to sleep with these losers to have a future generation of daughters.

Herc tells the queen that the men feel empty. Herc decides that the queen feels empty too. Herc says men aren’t weak to admit their feelings. Wow Herc learns that emotions in men are a good thing! He kisses the queen and tells her she is not afraid. Hippolyta spends all night doing Hercules and forgets to blow the it’s-time-to-go-home-horn. The women stay all night and get to know their man-friends. (I really begin to notice that the men are middle-aged and frumpy while the amazons are all supermodels. Double-standards abound!) Lysia says boning Zeus felt like heaven. Dang, another lady “cured” by a good lay. Sigh.

After the women leave, the men rehash their night. Most stayed up all night talking. Solan says “I met my mother!” Then the men say yay the women will come back and cook and clean and mend our clothes! (Why doesn’t anyone remember that the Amazons were killing them just a few days earlier? Isn’t anyone pissed?)

Now it is time for Hercules to give a lecture about gender. “The women stayed because you talked to them. You can’t expect them to do your domestic duties because that is what made them into amazons in the first place.”

Meanwhile, Queen Hippolyta starts to have a change of heart. “Maybe all men aren’t the enemy.” Herc has changed, after all!

Hera won’t have any of this change business, however. The bitter hag tells Hippolyta that men don’t change, only pretend to change. Hera is a bittered betrayed woman! She hates men! Hera possesses the queen when the queen refuses to kill Hercules. Hera-as-Hippolyta commands the women to kill the men. They protest, but Lysia is all into the carnage so the women mount their horsies and ride down a sand bank (uh where did this sand bank come from?). The men hear the women coming and stand outside with flowers for their sexy ladies. The women start to kill the villagers and ransack the village. Woops guess Amazon’s don’t want flowers! Herc shows up late. The queen says she is saving their women. Herc says, “you won, you’ve got their respect.” Her says he loves her. Then he realizes she is possessed by Hera.

Zeus says he won’t help Hercules. Zeus is scared of Hera. Hera tries to taunt Hercules into killing Hippolyta’s body. Hera won’t give up.

Cut to a water fall montage. Hera chases Herc to the top of the waterfall. Herc says he’ll die before he lets Hera kill the queen. She rushes Hercules and he steps aside, and she falls off the waterfall. Herc carries her body back to the village, where the battle is over and everyone commingles and shakes hands like two teams shaking hands after a softball game. Does anyone remember that the amazons were murdering people a few hours earlier? Solan asks where his dad his and he whines that his dad his gone. Solan’s amazon mommy says, “there is nothing we can do to bring him back. ” Herc says, “don’t be so sure.”

Hercules tries to light the magic candle that made him into a baby in order to change the past. Zeus tries to talk him out of it. Herc tells his dad to change what happened. Zeus says Hera wouldn’t let him come back home. Herc says, “you don’t go home anyways.” Zeus blows out the candle and it undoes everything that happened. The movie plays backwards until Herc is back at the dinner table with Ania and Iolous. Herc is a changed man: he doesn’t think Ania’s cooking is gross anymore, and he tells Pithus that he doesn’t need Hercules’s help and that if they are nice to the amazons and wash their feet all will be well. Herc tells the men how to take care of the women, wash their feet. He thinks of Hippolyta, out there somewhere, as the perfect woman for him. The end!

If you have made it this far, I am sure you are dying to know: why the heck was I watching a 17-year-old TV movie in the first place? I am attending the last ever Xena Con, and I’m trying to familiarize myself with the popular 90s TV series (and TV movies) that spun-off into the delightful little 90s TV series known as Xena: Warrior Princess. While Xena shaped a generation of women, I rarely watched the show growing up because I didn’t understand that the camp was intentional and I tended to avoid the rare SF/F starring women. Yay internalized sexism! (Unfortunately, I was late to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer party for the same reason.) Fortunately, I rediscovered Xena in Summer 2010 and now count myself amongst the Xenites. Battle on, Xena!

Then the Three Archdragons
Offered out of hand
Anything in Dragon’s gift
That she might command.
Edith’s eyes upon her,
Kenneth’s guiding light,
Tolkein’s sword against her heart,
Anne said: “Flight!”

Anne told us dragontales, blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.
And while the Weyrs of Pern and Harper Hall remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto April’s Anne!

One of the reasons we know it was genuinely revolutionary is that Gene Roddenbury’s bosses at Paramount were virulently opposed to the idea of a black woman as a major, permanent character on the bridge – as a military officer with rank and authority. For the first two years of Trek, they refused to let Nichelle Nichols have a long-term contract like the other actors who were playing major roles: Nichols was a black woman, so she was on a two week contract and paid by the hour. Her job security rested on Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, and her income was dependent on his outrage at Paramount. (Uhura appears in many scenes because Roddenberry was determined to make Paramount pay through the nose for their racism, and did.)

The new Trek’s reboot was neither revolutionary nor interesting. The best you can say is that New Uhura was ace (actually, the best you can say is what Sarah Rees Brennan had to say, which is:

UHURA: I seem not to be assigned to the Enterprise. Please correct this error.
SPOCK: Well, I didn’t…
UHURA: You know my qualifications. MA in advanced linguistics. PhD in badass.

See?) ….But, you know – grr, argh, etc – thanks to Star Trek the Original, it is no longer revolutionary for a film to have just one major character who is a woman*, black, and not maid, mother, or crone.

As Kate Elliott says:

Did I really reach this age and be forced to watch the young James Kirk as a rebellious, impulsive boy racing a car in a chase scene down a road? Seriously? That’s it? That’s my reboot?

I wish they had let ME reboot Star Trek.

Let me start with my fantasy cast.

I looked at her fantasy cast (you should too!) and my eyes widened, my jaw dropped, I thought omg omg omg omg, and in other words, Kate Elliott should have a new job: directing and casting for the REAL Star Trek Reboot.

*There are four speaking parts for women in Star Trek Reboot. Kirk’s Mom, who disappears once she gives birth: Spock’s Mom, who disappears when her planet blows up: Orion Green Star Fleet cadet, who gets to have sex with Kirk: and Uhura, who is splendid… but why is she the only one? This gets total fail on the Bechdel test.

Helen Lewis Hasteley, on her blog at the New Statesman, has recently posted a series of three posts about the gendered, sexual, violent abuse which women bloggers receive. (“You should have your tongue ripped out”: the reality of sexist abuse online, On rape threats and internet trolls, What about the men?) There was a Twitter feed about it, #mencallmethings. It’s taken me a little while for me to remember I too have a story about that.

The Independent‘s discussion boards back in 2002 were my first clue that going under my real name online this not a good idea. I’d crossed swords a few times with a conservative woman (living abroad, originally from Devon, certain that socialist UK was going to the dogs) and she’d evidently got much angrier with me than I was with her: when I was having an argument with a male chauvinist arse who happened to live about 45 miles away from me – a man who had initially thought I was male (I was using a form of my name that didn’t immediately indicate my gender) but who once he knew I’m female, had taken to isssuing crude sexual threats about coming over to see me and giving me a seeing-to. Since he knew no more of my location than my city, and didn’t know what I looked like, this didn’t bother me. Then Angry Conservative Woman did a bit of Internet-searching, found an online photo of me, and posted a link to it, announcing that THIS was what I looked like and this was what ny real name was.

…and suddenly, I didn’t feel safe any more.

I eventually got the website managers to take that link down, and after it became clear that Angry Conservative Woman wasn’t going to forgive or forget that I’d annoyed her, I quit those discussion boards. (The male chauvinist arse had got himself banned for making crude sexual threats once too often.)

In late 2002, given a Livejournal invite, I adopted a handle, Yonmei, and have used it pretty consistently ever since. I left Livejournal in 2006, banned by LJ Abuse for the crime of using a pic of a woman breastfeeding her baby as my default icon: childfree, with two breastfeeding friends, I’d adopted that default icon out of pure ruddy annoyance at the creepy attitude by LJ Abuse/Six Apart management that breastfeeding was something obscene that ought not to be done where anyone might see it. (This was some time ago in Internet years – the public discussions that I could find about it are at The LActivist, on Making Light and, ironically, an interview that a LJer did with me – TalkShow.) My journal on the Livejournal servers has been suspended since 2006 and a year or two ago was purged and deleted from their servers. This still annoys me and saddens me when I think about it, but it was a political decision I made and I live with the consequences.

What I repeatedly wipe out of my mind, because it was horrible and repeatedly disgusting, is what happened on my journal in the few weeks between my taking my public stance for a woman’s right to breastfeed in public.

I got trolled. I got repeated comments from LJers who had often created a journal for the purpose of posting attacks – and some of them created two journals, so that when I banned one the other could post immediately – who wanted to let me know how ugly I was, how disgusting my body was (they all assumed I must have a baby whom I breastfed, a not unnatural presumption, and most of their insults were predicated on that belief) – and so on, and so forth. I reported them to LJ Abuse, who did nothing.

The worst two were actually cartoons, not verbal – sketched pictures of a woman being raped and mutilated. I reported them to LJ Abuse as usual but this time with added urgency. After a day or two I hid the cartoons from sight (I could see them when I was logged in) following protests from several of the women who were reading the thread that they understood why I hadn’t deleted them, in order to get LJ Abuse to act on them, but they could not bear to see them whenever they scrolled down through the discussion on my journal. I notified LJ Abuse at the time that I had had to hide the pics for this reason, and would they please let me know when they investigated my journal so that I could un-hide them again.

It was quite a few days before I heard from LJ Abuse, and then it was an email from one of their volunteers to say they’d looked at my journal and seen no evidence of any offensive cartoons. I emailed back to point out I’d had to hide them and would unhide them now to let them investigate.

Then LJ Abuse suspended my journal. (This was in the middle of the whole breastfeeding row – I’d already been warned that my journal was going to be suspended.)

Then I got another email from LJ Abuse to say that they couldn’t investigate the offensive cartoons because my journal was suspended. I wrote back to point out that they’d suspended my journal, and they could un-suspend it – not permanently, obviously, but for long enough to check out these ugly cartoons, track whoever had posted them, and do whatever was legally required / required by their TOS to the people responsible.

I got a personal email from Denise Paolucci, the head of LJ Abuse then, now the founder of Dreamwidth, to let me know that they weren’t going to do that unless I changed the default icon which they’d suspended my journal for.

So I let it go. I had daydreams, admittedly, of printing out the ugly cartoons and sending them to Six Apart with a message inviting them to enjoy these images of women raped and mutilated which they’d decided were inoffensive, at least compared to the horror of a woman breastfeeding a baby. But that would have entailed looking at them again, and I really, really didn’t want to do that – even my memory of them now is bad enough. And I didn’t really want to inflict them on anyone else. Not even Denise Paolucci.

But that was how my time at Livejournal ended. The online abuse was horrifying – I don’t think I’ve ever experienced another such tirade of sexual hate that went on and on and on, at least not since I left high school. But almost worse than this, was the realisation that to the people who were supposed to keep Livejournal a safe place to blog, didn’t care. They cared profoundly about the public obscenity of an exposed nipple, but a woman receiving gross sexual abuse was just… not important. Not worth defending. The perpetrators of icons depicting women breastfeeding were worth tracking down and getting rid of: the perpetrators of a drawing indicating that I should be killed in a grossly unpleasant way which even now I can’t bring myself to describe more accurately, should be let continue.

I’ve never joined Dreamwidth. I don’t know how far Denise Paolucci was directly responsible for how LJ Abuse treated me and the perpetrators, or how far she was only following orders: I’m never likely to know. But I find I cannot forgive her even for “only following orders”. The actual perpetrators of the abuse are well beyond that – I understand why other people feel they can forgive Denise for what she did during her tenure as head of LJ Abuse, it’s just that I can’t. It’s like the difference between the teachers at my high school who ignored the bullies, and the bullies themselves – I get why people just look the other way when they see someone being tormented whom they don’t particularly like or care about, especially when their employers would a lot rather they looked away than made a fuss. (That was the reality of bullying when I was at high school – unless the bullies actually disrupted a class, the teachers just let it go.)

[Update: an email Paolucci apparently wrote in January 2005 about "freedom of speech" on Livejournal:

"Freedom of speech" is a government concept, and isn't applicable to LiveJournal as a privately-held company. The members of the Abuse team believe strongly in the concept of free speech; in fact, many of the team are members of organizations such as the ACLU. However, the team also recognizes that LiveJournal has business needs. As a privately-held company, LiveJournal can set any standards we want for
the use of our service. You can look over the policy document and see where the decisions have been made ​regarding unrestrained expression vs. maintaining a usable service. On the whole, the balance is significantly tipped toward the "unrestrained expression" side, but the classic example of not being permitted to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre applies here as well. This is not censorship. It's upholding a basic set of rules of conduct to keep LiveJournal usable. If you do not agree with these rules, which are widely publicized, you should not keep a journal on LiveJournal.

]

Memory of pain is a peculiar thing. There’s no doubt that the online abuse I got then, hurt – but I have difficulty remembering what it felt like. I remember the disgust I felt at those cartoons: I don’t think I was afraid but I’m not sure I would remember feeling fear any more than I properly remember feeling pain – they’re both essentially visceral emotions, not easy to remember with your head years afterwards. What I do remember, from both then and now, is the anger, the frustration, at not being able to do anything to the men who were enjoying themselves hurting me. Reporting them to LJ Abuse ceased to be satisfying as an act of retaliation when it became clear after a few days that LJ Abuse intended to do nothing about them. Banning them from my journal was not satisfying when I knew they would simply create a new journal and comment again. I wanted those men to be stopped. I wanted them permanently off livejournal as their playground. I wanted the ones who’d posted the worst threats reported to their local law enforcement. I wanted LJ Abuse to take action, as according to their own TOS they were obliged to do. And I do remember exactly how it felt to know that they wouldn’t.

It didn’t occur to me that I could have reported the perpetrators to the police on my own account. I’m unsure what, in 2006, Scottish police would have done about hate threats posted on a website based in California. I would also have had to link my handle with my legal name, and that I was reluctant to do.

As a direct result of my experiences as a product that didn’t fit in the eggbox, I became an early adopter (2007) of the Internet proverb that if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Website corporations will only care about online abuse of “the product” if it makes “the product” less saleable: and the online abusers, let’s not forget, are also “the product”. And it appears quite likely to me that they are considered a better “product” than we are – this is a gendered situation, with women overwhelmingly those being abused in this way. Women are traditionally, simply not considered as valuable an audience for advertisers. Why would our corporate overlords care if online abusers drive women away from their site, so long as the men stay?

The reality of online abuse is that some men hate women. As Sian at Crooked Rib points out, there is a recognisable set of excuses by men to make out that it doesn’t happen. The reason why so many website hosts ignore it or treat it as unimportant – we’re not useful product. Of course that perception too is rooted in sexism, and the use of sexist abuse to silence women is, as Laurie Penny points out, Older Than Dirt.

I missed livejournal – I missed the friends I lost when I left it, the online community. But when I actually parted from it, it was actually a relief – none of the abusers bothered to follow me off LJ.

The premise is pretty straightforward. Three young bachelors, the narrator Van, a sociologist, and his buddies Jeff, a doctor, and Terry, a wealthy womanizer, set off to see if there is any validity to the rumors of an all-female society hidden away beyond some remote mountain pass. Each man holds a different sterotypical view of women. Jeff believes women are peaceful and cooperative and ought to be protected and served, whereas Terry thinks women love to in-fight among themselves and that every woman really wants a strong man to conquer her. Van initially assumes that there must be men hidden away somewhere, as Herland is a civilized country. The three men are taken captive by Herlanders, and peacefully detained while they are taught the Herland language and culture. The men eventually tour the country and marry three women. Many long conversations ensue that compare Herland to the United States. Van comes to decide Herland is indeed the better society, and that some of the things he’d assumed were given social ills (such as poverty and war) are not necessary parts of a functioning society. Terry’s marriage ends after he tries to rape his wife and she kicks his ass. Terry is banished as a punishment, Van and his wife Ellador leave with Terry. Ellador is to visit the United States, and report back to Herland if diplomatic relations should be set up. Ellardor and Van’s adventures continue in the sequel, With Her in Ourland.

Gilman certainly has a political agenda in Herland, and I don’t think that this is a bad thing. Classic utopian novels are necessarily didactic because their function is to educate readers and motivate those readers to transform their social conditions. While I understand why many readers don’t want a lecture when they’re trying to read fiction, I appreciate the didactic style when reading classic literature because it makes my job a little easier. (I’m also immensely irritated by some of the assumptions that seem so wrong now, such as essentialist assumptions about race and progress–more on this below.) As the narrator Van experiences Herland, he teaches the women of Herland about his own world, early 20th century United States. As a reader 100 years later, I’m learning about the world Van inhabits as much as I’m learning about Herland.

A few things struck me about this novel that I think are illustrative of many of the dominant early 20th century values that were held even by progressive socialist-feminists like Gilman: a society where everyone’s needs are met is based homogeneity and assimilation rather than difference, and human progress can be achieved through breeding that weeds out undesirable traits like sexual desire or mental illness.

Van is careful to note that the Herlanders, despite being surrounded by “savages” in some undisclosed remote location, are white and descendant from classic western culture: “there is no doubt in my mind that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the old world” (page 54 in the 1979 edition). When all material needs are met for everyone in Herland, crime is a mental illness they “breed out” (82) and the perpetrator is not allowed to have children. Curiously, sexuality is bred out, too: “Two thousand years’ disuse had left very little of the insticts; also we must remember that those who had at times manifested it as atavistic exceptions were often, by the very fact, denied motherhood” (92). The lack of interest in sex outside reproduction is a source of tension in the marriages between the American men and the Herlanders, although Van and Jeff learn to live without sex and find their relationships more satisfying and loving partnerships. Ann J. Lane, in the introduction to the 1979 edition, finds that doing without sex is an assertion on the part of Gilman that sexuality is socially constructed: “Sexuality is subjected to the same treatment as are all other social values, as part of our primarily cultural, not biological, background” (xv). However, I’m not quite certain I agree. If sexuality is seen as undesirable by Herlanders, in this world it must be attached to biology if it can be bred out. Still, it is curious that Gilman decides Herlanders have no sex drives, and perhaps is an easy avoidance of including lesbianism in her utopia.

As far as I know, Herland is one of the first examples of human breeding through parthenogenesis. I was dying to know how parthenogenesis worked in Herland, and how one decided to get pregnant and how the state prevented pregnancy in those “unfit,” but reproduction appears to be of divine rather than technological origin.

In all, Herland seems to practice state socialism through breeding programs: “That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in any environment calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they had deliberately remodeled and improved the whole state” (102). I didn’t notice any discussions of dissent or democratic process, just a society built on a shared goal of improving a people and ensuring a better future for their children. Herland reminds me of the subjectivity of what is utopian, because if I showed up in a nation where sexual desire was atavistic, there was no gesture towards some kind of democratic process, and the societal goal was to create “a great race through the children” (95) I might believe I was in a dystopia.

When reading Herland and other historic utopian fiction, it is difficult me to find a balance between dismissing the novel as racist and eugenicist, and excusing it as a product of its time. (After all, there are certainly 19th and early 20th century writers and activists who I still think were really on point in their analyses. I learn a lot from reading thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois and Sojourner Truth.) I don’t mean to dismiss or apologize for this important historical novel; I find Herland can teach me a lot about what many people believed in 1915. If anything, it is a reminder that people don’t fit neatly on a political spectrum, and that one can advocate a visionary society while still being limited by prejudiced assumptions about how the world works. Even if Gilman held racist assumptions, I do want to end by acknowledging how she saw social construction shaping human nature more than genetics: “But very early they recognized the need of improvement as well as of mere repetition, and devoted their combined intelligence to that problem–how to make the best kind of people. First this was merely the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later–through education” (59).

They refused.

They have written a blog entry about the gatekeepers of publishing who may be keeping gay characters out of young adult fiction, and are asking you to help change the status quo.

See what they wrote, and pass it on:

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519