Oh my god. So today somebody stuck a drill in my mouth. Luckily, that somebody was a dentist, this is not a preamble to a story about some kind of horrible DIY accident, but it means that I am now feeling tragic and only imbibing sustenance through a straw (well, not quite, but chewing is difficult and cold ice cream is RIGHT out this evening *tragedy*). Also the new edition of Bitch Magazine came out and I spent all today doing homework for online university courses so... do I really have to blog today? Really? really? Let's call the whole thing off and come back tomorrow OK.
... no, alas, we've come too far for that. So this is still an entry, of more than one paragraph, because aching teeth and the persistent taste of blood are not a good enough reason to fail. Instead, here's the deal: I will try to make you go away by giving you links to all the things around the internet that are more interesting than being here listening to me whine about tooth pain.*
Bitch Magazine got a new issue today!: One of the best dead-tree-optimised feminist reads out there, Bitch is a "feminist response to pop culture". I'm a donor (a B-Hive member!) so I get all their exciting new stuff delivered in dead-tree-optimised PDF right to my inbox. The latest issue is "Grey" and there are some articles from it which are also up on the website.
Improve your mind, academia style: I'm currently signed up to what definitely qualifies as Too Many online university courses from both Coursera and EdX and I am enjoying all the things that have started (i.e. "The Modern and the Postmodern" and also a course on quantum mechanics which I am almost certainly going to fail). It's all free and though I am antisocial on both websites, you can also meet likeminded study people from all over the world if you choose :o
If you only follow one China blog: Make it this one. I am assuming that if you only want to follow one China blog, you can probably do without the heavy political or sociological stuff and can just skip to the fun, interesting pictures of slightly insane things that have happened in the world's biggest country. Off Beat China delivers in spades. One of the best bits of my Tumblr feed.
I would prefer to be enraged over the infuriating state of men: In that case, I recommend Mansplaining or Fat, Ugly or Slutty for some timeless examples of dudebro charm in action.
Really stupid things you can do on your iPhone: So I, er, started playing High School Story. It's like a cliched teen drama mixed with what I sort of imagine the Smurfs is about having not watched the Smurfs. Everybody has different talents that they use to work together and achieve goals and there is no in school conflict or geeky kids getting beaten up except in inter-school rivalries (which are obviously fine). I am just up to the part of the game where you start endlessly hooking people up in random bisexual combinations. My favourite students are my ginger-and-pink haired asian runner girl, and my weirdly cheesy looking blonde student government boy who literally spends all his time standing in front of the same building canvassing everyone who walks by. Is this a good use of my time? No!
Ninja Ropes? Ninja Ropes!
The best browser game you'll ever play: Is a dark room. Keep stoking that fire!
And if all that fails, you could always go back to places you already know I like, like Femusings and Twitter, both of which are conveniently linked over to the right.
That's it. Still here? Go away. Tomorrow will be more. Ow my mouth hurts. Sadface.
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*My dentist today was great tough. Really insistent that I shouldn't have to put up with any pain whatsoever whilst actually having bits of my tooth drilled out (super old filling, possibly the third repair, apparently the tooth itself doesn't... produce... minerals? So the fillings all come away horribly, blah blah how exciting my mouth is a warzone but at least they're all still there, even the wise ones, excellent). So none of this is her fault, it is the abstract fault of my mouth. Also I sort of prefer the pain and weird taste to the effects of the anaesthetic, which caused me to dribble all over myself on the way home.
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
Shouting back vs. shutting up: the lost art of listening
(This post can also be read as an article on Femusings)
This morning, I joined the ranks of the superconnected, and purchased my first smartphone. To be exact, it is an IPhone 4S, my first ever Apple product, and it is forcing me to learn all sorts of new technology skills. I consider myself pretty computer savvy ‒ for example, I lost track of the number of classmates' theses I helped format because I actually understand the logistics of Microsoft Word's formatting codes and systems, which apparently is not a common skill ‒ but over the past few years I've sort of revelled in being utterly lost as soon as anybody hands me a fancy phone. What is this? Why did it just turn itself off? Why aren't these keys thumb sized, even though they expect me to type with my thumbs? Can it tell when I turn it sideways? Why do you have all these silly games? Why are the birds angry and what could it possibly have to do with me?
The decision to join the world of smartphones happened for two reasons, First, because I can't actually use a Tesco PAYG Motorola Razr from 2005 for the rest of my life, no matter how much I may want to. Second, because I am now at that stage of internet dependence where actually, the ability to access e-mails and twitter whilst not sitting behind my laptop has started to sound not just good but... a bit necessary. Avoiding a smartphone upgrade because you don't want to feel like that about your Twitter feed is sort of redundant when you already do.
And yeah, it is kind of about Twitter (I know, I know, I said no more writing about Twitter! But this is a important I promise). I've upgraded to Tweetdeck and now I've upgraded to Twitter everywhere, and now my entire purpose feels like it is based around building Brand Adrienne for the world to see. So far only 115 people have actually followed Brand Adrienne, and more than one is a personification of a library building which doesn't actually tweet any more, so even if I was not being utterly sarcastic about the concept of Brand Adrienne, it's not been too successful so far. But I keep trying to be interesting, partially because interacting with strangers on social media is actually a pretty difficult skill for me and I'd like to develop it, and partially because it sort of feels like I'm supposed to. Because I want to use Twitter, and that's what I should do on Twitter, right? Tweet, follow, follow back, grow those numbers. Platforms, reach, networking. Other. Words. Like those. Etcetera.
Except when people actually ask me in person why I've started spending so much time on that website, I never respond with "oh well I'm slowly making some arbitrary numbers bigger and it makes me feel like a more important person", even if that is a little bit true sometimes.* What I usually say is "ah, when I am on Twitter I read so much great stuff that I never read when I'm not following it!" This is true. If you set it up right, Twitter can be the most amazing news aggregator. Why check news websites individually when you can get the right 100 other people to check them for you? Not to mention getting access to blogs and other less well-known opinion sources that are generally much more interesting than any newspaper-approved comment section. When I read from Twitter, I feel like I have become a generally better-informed person than when I'm obsessing over academic texts or browsing the Guardian every morning.
Two put the above two paragraphs more simply, I can use Twitter for two purposes: I can speak, or I can listen. I am a little biased in that, strange as it may seem for somebody who writes thousands of words on a daily basis, I actually tend to be better at listening than speaking. This is because I am very quick to convince myself that I don't have anything useful to say about a given issue, and that if I do want to speak I should do it quietly, in my own space, to myself and not expect anybody to care. This is a state of mind that modern feminism is pretty vocal in opposing: like Sheryl Sandberg's comments about how "bossy" girls should be celebrated, like the Women's Room, like #shoutingback as a response to abuse. Women are silenced in patriarchy, and feminism fights patriarchy, so it's logical that a big part of the movement is about encouraging women to find a voice.
Except for some inexplicable reason, we expect it to be just that: "a" voice. One voice, singular. An assumption that if all the women of the world could speak, they would be talking about the same problems, and expect the same solutions. When the "mainstream" visible feminists have differences of opinion, it's treated like it's the end of the world, or a terrible reflection of the terrible state of our terrible movement. It's the same picture of baying crazed infighting women that the anti-suffragette movement used for decades to explain why women should not be within the political system. And when I see worries about "solidarity" in feminism ‒ why attack Caitlin Moran over Twitter Silence? Why get mad at online editors for letting a known abuser use their platforms when they were secretly being manipulated too? Why is #solidarityisforwhitewomen attacking me personally, I haven't done anything wrong! What about the movement? ‒ I see a lot of women who seem to refuse to accept that the "a voice" myth of feminism doesn't exist, and is silencing a lot of very important debates.
When I think about solidarity, three things come to mind. The most basic is "people I want to give support to"; I would add to that "not doing shitty things that hurt others just because they are convenient to me", because solidarity is a state and a process, not just one action that you do and then tick off your list for the day. You have to do a bit more than just tweet "poor you :( hugs xoxo" every time a feminist internet celebrity friend has a bad day. Even more than that, "not hurting others" means learning about more than just the bad days of your feminist internet celebrities‒ it means actively seeking knowledge about how women you don't even know are affected by your actions and behaviour, and, yes, your prejudices. It means knowing what a racist microaggression is so that you can combat them in your own behaviour, it means learning about how trans women and trans* people experience violence and discrimination and adding that to our knowledge bank about VAWG instead of making snide remarks about men in dresses. It means, in a word, accepting voices, not "a" voice. It means that the women out there who disagree vehemently with your feminist priorities and still dare to call themselves feminists have just as much right to call themselves that as you do, as long as their ideology is about achieving equality for women (and here I do mean all women, so TERFs are still not really feminists.) It's alarming how many feminists see themselves as receiving abuse from above and below, as if "shouting back" at women who are telling you your feminism is incomplete or offensive is as noble an act as "shouting back" at waves of misogynist abusers. If a woman tells you your feminism is offensive to her, you are a pretty rubbish feminist if you think that is something that can be dismissed offhand, no matter how wrong you think she is.
As somebody who struggles constantly with the legitimacy of her own voice, I'm grateful to feminism for giving me the message to speak out against sexism, and against systematic discrimination against me as a woman. But I do wish that feminism taught feminists ‒ particularly white feminists, although almost all of us have our privileges in some form or another ‒ how to listen as well as speaking up, and how to figure out the difference between listening and silencing. Saying "this woman has experiences of womanhood that are fundamentally shaped by her skin colour/sexuality/gender presentation/disability as well as just being a woman, and they are different to you, white straight able cis-feminist" is a call to listen, and actively seeking out and promoting these marginalised voices is not silencing, because the majority voice already has more than enough people repeating its message (an ironic thing to say for a white girl blogger with delusions of Twitter grandeur. But I'm young and stupid enough to believe I can find my niche and maintain my integrity about this, because it's a pretty basic belief for me).
I said I had three definitions of solidarity, but I've only given two so far. My third definition is a bit vaguer, and possibly stolen from that man who did the TED talk about Disney Princesses, but it is also the one that resonates with me the most. Solidarity, to me, is about my definition of who is on "my team" ‒ if I am A Feminist, who would I most like that label to associate me with? The answer is "pretty much everyone I follow on Twitter" ‒ not Big Twitter Celebrities, not dead white people with Must-Read books. When I identify as feminist, I have in the back of my mind the diverse range of women and men who, like me, probably spend far too much time staring at Tweetdeck or an Iphone sharing their view of the world for the benefit of others. Right now, I don't give back as much as I take, because I still have a lot to learn. Mostly? I listen.
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*I've just outright said I'm still very much learning about this myself, so I don't know why anybody would want my advice on interacting, but in case you do, here is my super short guide to be cool and feel good on Twitter. 1) Don't post TOO much about arbitrary things in your day, because detractors of Twitter are correct in their assertion that nobody cares what you ate for lunch. They are wrong in that they assume that is all that is on Twitter. 2) Pass on interesting things you read, especially if they come from obscure places that people may have missed. 3) Don't be afraid to tell people if you think they are great or if you agree with things they say, because everybody likes to hear that and it will make you feel good to compliment others. BUT 4) Don't apply the Nice Guy principle (if I say enough vaguely nice things, I am entitled to lots of nice responses and recognition) to interactions with anybody, "famous" or otherwise. 5) Know when a thing is serious, when it is not serious and (most importantly) when the other person thinks it is serious but really it's not worth your time. In the third case, just stop talking. Also 6) is "don't abuse people" but really that should just be unwritten.
This morning, I joined the ranks of the superconnected, and purchased my first smartphone. To be exact, it is an IPhone 4S, my first ever Apple product, and it is forcing me to learn all sorts of new technology skills. I consider myself pretty computer savvy ‒ for example, I lost track of the number of classmates' theses I helped format because I actually understand the logistics of Microsoft Word's formatting codes and systems, which apparently is not a common skill ‒ but over the past few years I've sort of revelled in being utterly lost as soon as anybody hands me a fancy phone. What is this? Why did it just turn itself off? Why aren't these keys thumb sized, even though they expect me to type with my thumbs? Can it tell when I turn it sideways? Why do you have all these silly games? Why are the birds angry and what could it possibly have to do with me?
The decision to join the world of smartphones happened for two reasons, First, because I can't actually use a Tesco PAYG Motorola Razr from 2005 for the rest of my life, no matter how much I may want to. Second, because I am now at that stage of internet dependence where actually, the ability to access e-mails and twitter whilst not sitting behind my laptop has started to sound not just good but... a bit necessary. Avoiding a smartphone upgrade because you don't want to feel like that about your Twitter feed is sort of redundant when you already do.
And yeah, it is kind of about Twitter (I know, I know, I said no more writing about Twitter! But this is a important I promise). I've upgraded to Tweetdeck and now I've upgraded to Twitter everywhere, and now my entire purpose feels like it is based around building Brand Adrienne for the world to see. So far only 115 people have actually followed Brand Adrienne, and more than one is a personification of a library building which doesn't actually tweet any more, so even if I was not being utterly sarcastic about the concept of Brand Adrienne, it's not been too successful so far. But I keep trying to be interesting, partially because interacting with strangers on social media is actually a pretty difficult skill for me and I'd like to develop it, and partially because it sort of feels like I'm supposed to. Because I want to use Twitter, and that's what I should do on Twitter, right? Tweet, follow, follow back, grow those numbers. Platforms, reach, networking. Other. Words. Like those. Etcetera.
Except when people actually ask me in person why I've started spending so much time on that website, I never respond with "oh well I'm slowly making some arbitrary numbers bigger and it makes me feel like a more important person", even if that is a little bit true sometimes.* What I usually say is "ah, when I am on Twitter I read so much great stuff that I never read when I'm not following it!" This is true. If you set it up right, Twitter can be the most amazing news aggregator. Why check news websites individually when you can get the right 100 other people to check them for you? Not to mention getting access to blogs and other less well-known opinion sources that are generally much more interesting than any newspaper-approved comment section. When I read from Twitter, I feel like I have become a generally better-informed person than when I'm obsessing over academic texts or browsing the Guardian every morning.
Two put the above two paragraphs more simply, I can use Twitter for two purposes: I can speak, or I can listen. I am a little biased in that, strange as it may seem for somebody who writes thousands of words on a daily basis, I actually tend to be better at listening than speaking. This is because I am very quick to convince myself that I don't have anything useful to say about a given issue, and that if I do want to speak I should do it quietly, in my own space, to myself and not expect anybody to care. This is a state of mind that modern feminism is pretty vocal in opposing: like Sheryl Sandberg's comments about how "bossy" girls should be celebrated, like the Women's Room, like #shoutingback as a response to abuse. Women are silenced in patriarchy, and feminism fights patriarchy, so it's logical that a big part of the movement is about encouraging women to find a voice.
Except for some inexplicable reason, we expect it to be just that: "a" voice. One voice, singular. An assumption that if all the women of the world could speak, they would be talking about the same problems, and expect the same solutions. When the "mainstream" visible feminists have differences of opinion, it's treated like it's the end of the world, or a terrible reflection of the terrible state of our terrible movement. It's the same picture of baying crazed infighting women that the anti-suffragette movement used for decades to explain why women should not be within the political system. And when I see worries about "solidarity" in feminism ‒ why attack Caitlin Moran over Twitter Silence? Why get mad at online editors for letting a known abuser use their platforms when they were secretly being manipulated too? Why is #solidarityisforwhitewomen attacking me personally, I haven't done anything wrong! What about the movement? ‒ I see a lot of women who seem to refuse to accept that the "a voice" myth of feminism doesn't exist, and is silencing a lot of very important debates.
When I think about solidarity, three things come to mind. The most basic is "people I want to give support to"; I would add to that "not doing shitty things that hurt others just because they are convenient to me", because solidarity is a state and a process, not just one action that you do and then tick off your list for the day. You have to do a bit more than just tweet "poor you :( hugs xoxo" every time a feminist internet celebrity friend has a bad day. Even more than that, "not hurting others" means learning about more than just the bad days of your feminist internet celebrities‒ it means actively seeking knowledge about how women you don't even know are affected by your actions and behaviour, and, yes, your prejudices. It means knowing what a racist microaggression is so that you can combat them in your own behaviour, it means learning about how trans women and trans* people experience violence and discrimination and adding that to our knowledge bank about VAWG instead of making snide remarks about men in dresses. It means, in a word, accepting voices, not "a" voice. It means that the women out there who disagree vehemently with your feminist priorities and still dare to call themselves feminists have just as much right to call themselves that as you do, as long as their ideology is about achieving equality for women (and here I do mean all women, so TERFs are still not really feminists.) It's alarming how many feminists see themselves as receiving abuse from above and below, as if "shouting back" at women who are telling you your feminism is incomplete or offensive is as noble an act as "shouting back" at waves of misogynist abusers. If a woman tells you your feminism is offensive to her, you are a pretty rubbish feminist if you think that is something that can be dismissed offhand, no matter how wrong you think she is.
As somebody who struggles constantly with the legitimacy of her own voice, I'm grateful to feminism for giving me the message to speak out against sexism, and against systematic discrimination against me as a woman. But I do wish that feminism taught feminists ‒ particularly white feminists, although almost all of us have our privileges in some form or another ‒ how to listen as well as speaking up, and how to figure out the difference between listening and silencing. Saying "this woman has experiences of womanhood that are fundamentally shaped by her skin colour/sexuality/gender presentation/disability as well as just being a woman, and they are different to you, white straight able cis-feminist" is a call to listen, and actively seeking out and promoting these marginalised voices is not silencing, because the majority voice already has more than enough people repeating its message (an ironic thing to say for a white girl blogger with delusions of Twitter grandeur. But I'm young and stupid enough to believe I can find my niche and maintain my integrity about this, because it's a pretty basic belief for me).
I said I had three definitions of solidarity, but I've only given two so far. My third definition is a bit vaguer, and possibly stolen from that man who did the TED talk about Disney Princesses, but it is also the one that resonates with me the most. Solidarity, to me, is about my definition of who is on "my team" ‒ if I am A Feminist, who would I most like that label to associate me with? The answer is "pretty much everyone I follow on Twitter" ‒ not Big Twitter Celebrities, not dead white people with Must-Read books. When I identify as feminist, I have in the back of my mind the diverse range of women and men who, like me, probably spend far too much time staring at Tweetdeck or an Iphone sharing their view of the world for the benefit of others. Right now, I don't give back as much as I take, because I still have a lot to learn. Mostly? I listen.
---------------------
*I've just outright said I'm still very much learning about this myself, so I don't know why anybody would want my advice on interacting, but in case you do, here is my super short guide to be cool and feel good on Twitter. 1) Don't post TOO much about arbitrary things in your day, because detractors of Twitter are correct in their assertion that nobody cares what you ate for lunch. They are wrong in that they assume that is all that is on Twitter. 2) Pass on interesting things you read, especially if they come from obscure places that people may have missed. 3) Don't be afraid to tell people if you think they are great or if you agree with things they say, because everybody likes to hear that and it will make you feel good to compliment others. BUT 4) Don't apply the Nice Guy principle (if I say enough vaguely nice things, I am entitled to lots of nice responses and recognition) to interactions with anybody, "famous" or otherwise. 5) Know when a thing is serious, when it is not serious and (most importantly) when the other person thinks it is serious but really it's not worth your time. In the third case, just stop talking. Also 6) is "don't abuse people" but really that should just be unwritten.
Monday, 12 August 2013
Bitesize Monday bite three: the bite where everything inexplicably starts to taste like socks
So I didn't quite expect Bitesize Monday to become this regular, but I just ate soo much homemade Mexican food (including a half hour crisis with guacamole because I am too stupid to check if the avocados are ripe whilst in the shop) that I cannot possibly think about writing several paragraphs on the same topic because digestion. So! Here are some things that have happened.
Femusings!
Some more vintage Joy is up over at femusings, including a better-edited version of why Janet Yellen is awesome and America sucks for doubting her, and my piece in support of No More Page Three (the one with naughty pictures, tee hee hee!) You can of course read both of those here, but if you do, you'll miss out on all the other sweet stuff they have posted there by people who aren't me, including eight ways to cover up your next political sex scandal, a really good piece about how fat is perceived differently in men and women, and the beginnings of a super informative agony aunt column. You can also join us if you are feeling so inclined!
Copyediting
I have been putting finishing touches on a thing I wrote that is going to Go In A Book! This is extremely exciting, but before I get to the stage of Thing In Book I have to go through the stage of Thing Has Been Copyedited. Which is fun in a whole different ways!
The edits aren't nearly as bad as I thought they would be, although there are more minor fact changes than I am happy with. Did I really get that much wrong first time around? Apparently so. I also had no idea that those luminous rainbow cheerio things are called "Froot Loops" and not "Fruit Loops", which now I think about it is so that you can have as many Os as possible to replace with luminous cheerios. I'm sort of proud of not knowing that until now, because it was one corner of my brain that was immune to branding for a little while at least. I also wrote at one point that India cancelled trees, because why wouldn't you?
#solidarityisforwhitewomen
Again, if you don't know who Hugo Schwyzer is, I recommend that you keep it that way. If you do, and you've been keeping up with The Meltdown and Withdrawl of Hugo From The Internets forever, you'll know that there is some seriously divisive bullshit going on between the women who gave Schwyzer his platform for years, and the women, mostly WOC (Flavia Dzodan and @Blackamazon, to name but two), who were actively calling him out and getting abuse for it. From him. For years. With the tacit consent of platform-giving women. Anybody who is not on the side of the people who were being abused by a man and ignored by the women who could have stopped it are Doing Feminism Wrong, just putting that out there.
Today, both Jill Filipovic of Feministe and whoever that woman is from Jezebel both offered the most mealy-mouthed "oh we're very sad he's not a nice man after all, but we totally didn't figure it out until now so *absolved*" non-apologies that there have ever been in the existence of language. The Jezebel one is worth reading even if you don't know who Hugo is, because it is just the most perfect example of oblique, passive-aggressive, selfish, disingenuous journalism. The comments are split between "er, what is this even about, I have a life off the internet you know" and "we all knew, don't pretend you didn't know", because this is about a guy who made a living writing about the attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend on feminist websites, and also teaching feminism and LGBT studies to young people who he then also admitted to sleeping with and having sexual fantasies with (whoops, now you know about Hugo Schwyzer).
The Filipovice one is better because it has spawned a brilliant hashtag from Mikki Kendall about the disturbing habit of white women (who are generally the ones in power in the feminist movement, because the feminist movement has some serious racism problems) to preach about solidarity and act on threats to each other (see: twitter silence) whilst ignoring or participating in threats to WOC in the movement. It is brilliant and everybody should go on Twitter and look it up, because you will learn many things. Like, how often do you hear people moaning about misogyny in hip-hop, but it rarely occurs to the same people to look at misogyny in classic rock? One example among many many many. I'm not saying that misogyny in hip hop should not be critiqued, just that we should probably examine why we want to do it so often.
I don't write about race on this blog because as a white woman it is not my place to do so. It is, however, not just my place but my absolute responsibility to listen to women who have different experiences to mine, and to understand how my feminism is shaped by my privileges as well as my experiences of oppression. I'm sympathetic to people who go through the experience of discovering you trust a manipulative arsehole (whoops, what is this sentence). But 1) I don't think is what actually happened to the Apologetic Power Feminists and 2) the pain of that discovery does have to go hand in hand with confronting how you might have hurt other people. It's a whole cocktail of painful suck, but it's also a bit of a moral duty, especially in cases like this.
Whoops, soapbox over! And I promise I will try to stay away from Twitter stories for the rest of this week, even though that will be super hard because I just got TweetDeck and it is a disaster for my life oh help help.
This is amaze
Despite being made by a man (I think). Why don't women report abuse more regularly?
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Stuff I like Sunday: Tamora Pierce
So unlike yesterday, I was not lying when I said that today I am going to talk about the best female fantasy author out there, and one of the most important fantasy authors ever. That someone is Tamora Pierce, who also conveniently wrote my childhood. To start you off, here is a video of Tamora Pierce being an awesome young adult fantasy author winning all the awards (as well she should:)
Pierce's books are mostly orderly fantasy quartets (there is a two-parter and a trilogy in there somewhere, I think...) set in two distinct fantasy lands: Tortall and Emelan. I'll focus on Tortall because there's more of it, although the Emelan books I've read are equally as good. Tortall begin with the story of Alanna, a kid with a dead mother and a distant father, who is about to be sent off to nun school to do noble lady-type stuff. Alanna doesn't want to do noble lady type stuff, and she conveniently has a brother who doesn't want to be sent off to knight school to do noble man type stuff, so she disguises herself as a boy and takes his place in knight training and he goes off to get trained in magic (which totally exists, because fantasy!) The first couple of books books deal with Alanna trying to cope with being a page and then a squire whilst disguising the fact that she's maturing into a super tiny woman and not a big burly knight-type, whilst also foiling the plans of Bad Guys and unsuccessfully fending off mutual attraction with her BFF Jonathan, who also happens to be crown prince. Spoiler alert, this is reasonably light-hearted young adult fiction, so she gets to be a knight and everybody discovers she's a woman but they mostly get over it. Also she has a magical cat that is probably actually a star constellation.
After Alanna the next quartet shifts to another character, a kid called Daine who can magically talk to all of the animals. This is weird in universe as well as in real life, so she gets to Discover Her Powers whilst also doing the whole growing up shebang, and also come to terms with having a childhood where her mother had to raise her alone despite prejudice against single mothers, and then gets murdered by bandits who Daine then kills along with a bunch of wolves she's been chatting to. Which is a bit traumatic. Also she prevents a war both against a neighbouring country and against a magic land of magic creatures, and is caretaker to a totally sweet dragon. After that, you get Keladry, who decides she also wants to be a knight and who doesn't actually have to disguise herself, but puts up with lots of prejudice from her peers and the people training them, and generally grows up to be enormous and almost unbeatable at jousting but still gets rubbish "feminine" assignments when she becomes a knight, but then it turns out they are the most important jobs and nobody else could handle them, she is just generally the best. Then there's Alanna's kid, who is a little bit annoying but ends up in the middle of a racial/colonial war and falls in love with a crow that gets to turn himself human. Basically it is all happening all the time!
I know fantasy tends to be quite a polarising genre, and reading young adult books as a grown-ass woman is also not desperately common, so a lot of people might be scratching their heads at the moment and wondering why on earth any of this is a worthwhile recommendation. The answer is this: these books are not only brilliant entertainment (rest assured, the stories happen a lot better than how I write them down here) but they also do what almost no books for young adult women do: they combine coming-of-age with wish fulfilment. We pick up with Alanna, Daine, Keladry and Aly (Alanna's kid) when they're all between around 10 and 13, and follow them through some of their most important years, both as they grow into awesome career women protecting the kingdom, and as they just generally grow into women. Alanna gets through some of the hardest parts of knight training more easily than all the bigger kids around her, only to be completely freaked out when her period comes (because dead mother, so nobody ever explained it). Daine copes with some really serious family issues and learns to respect how strong her mother was for bringing her up, whilst also coping with some really serious "oh god I can shapeshift now and I don't know how to hold on to my humanity" issues, which most teenage girls don't ever have to deal with. Unlike the first two, Kel has loving and supportive parents who remain loving and supportive (and teach her about periods), but she's grown up in a culture away from Tortall ‒ pseudo-Japan, to be specific ‒ and has to deal with being the only girl in a hostile environment, reconciling her adopted culture with her birth culture, and also with jousting with a lance twice as heavy as anybody else's because the awful boy gave her that one and she was too proud to ever give it back. They combine storylines that young women can relate to, and which humanise the troubles of young women for men who aren't used to putting themselves in the shoes of female protagonists, with plots that are pure fantasy in the best possible way. Kids can't actually be knights of a fantasy realm, but they can dream of being a girl just like them who is.
All of Pierce's Tortall women take on a patriarchal culture reasonably analagous to discrimination in the modern world, come to terms with their differing strengths and weaknesses, and achieve superhuman things with them. What's more, where the characters do have romantic interests, said romances have nothing to do with their growth (the one possible exception, Daine, has a romantic plot which could interfere with her magic teaching, but this is at the point where spoiler spoiler spoiler so she'll probably be alright...). This is not Twilight, where Edward gets to show Bella a whole new world, protect her for three and a half books, and then finally give her her own superpowers so she can protect him for a change. Nor is it the Hunger Games, which I love dearly but which is a story of a woman being brutally crushed by a world she has no agency in, but it's OK because she gets the Nice Boy at the end. All the romances are, by and large, treated as teenage romances should be: a couple last, most don't, you don't always love just one person at one time, sometimes you aren't that interested in anybody at all, and it's usually not necessary to hook up with your best friend of the opposite gender just because you're friends. Alanna's story was originally meant to be a single book for adults, so it's probably not surprising that she has a fair bit of implied sex with more than one love interest (shock!), but none of the other characters are chaste virginal types pining constantly after The One or using love triangles to motivate all of their life choices. This is refreshing.
I also like that Pierce's women don't live in a rosy genderblind world of Strong Female Characters. In fact, one of my favourite parts of Keladry's books are the Awful Teasing Boys, who continue to be awful and not accept her even after she's proven herself to the older, stuck-in-their-ways chauvinists around her. It's implied that a couple of them are just... unwell, in the same way as some women-fearing MRAs come across as unwell in the modern world. They get their comeuppance in different ways, but I love that the moral of the story isn't "kickass woman fixes everything around her!"; it's "kickass woman follows and achieves dreams and achieves love and respect from people worth achieving it from, and more would be nice, but sometimes you do just have to accept lost causes." Kel also ends up having to balance having "fun" with one of her fellow knights with sexist reactions to female promiscuity, where an older female character takes her aside and says "this is what happens, it's completely wrong, you can choose to fight it or you can modify your behaviour because of it, both will be difficult and it will suck but you should know this." It's not exactly the most inspiring message, and it may raise some feminist eyebrows that the character's choice is to be clandestine rather than organising fantasy slutwalks, because hey, she likes being a knight and she'd rather devote all her time to doing that and fighting sexist bullshit directly related to it. But, again, it drives home that these are women dealing with the practicalities of being women, however much they may suck. Not even the most dedicated feminist can fight every microaggression all the time.
So anyway that is my Sunday recommendation to you. Relive your girlhood! Or appreciate it for the first time if you didn't have one, because if I was compelled to read Catcher in the Bloody Rye and Vernon God Little as "gender neutral" coming of age books, you should be able to read the Alanna Quartet on the same terms. Tamora Pierce technically doesn't have a british publisher at the moment, which is a travesty, but I have everything she's ever written as an ebook and I don't think I paid for them sorry about that I did also own all the paperbacks once I promise so they are, er, out there. If you know what I mean. Go forth! Read Tamora Pierce.
Pierce's books are mostly orderly fantasy quartets (there is a two-parter and a trilogy in there somewhere, I think...) set in two distinct fantasy lands: Tortall and Emelan. I'll focus on Tortall because there's more of it, although the Emelan books I've read are equally as good. Tortall begin with the story of Alanna, a kid with a dead mother and a distant father, who is about to be sent off to nun school to do noble lady-type stuff. Alanna doesn't want to do noble lady type stuff, and she conveniently has a brother who doesn't want to be sent off to knight school to do noble man type stuff, so she disguises herself as a boy and takes his place in knight training and he goes off to get trained in magic (which totally exists, because fantasy!) The first couple of books books deal with Alanna trying to cope with being a page and then a squire whilst disguising the fact that she's maturing into a super tiny woman and not a big burly knight-type, whilst also foiling the plans of Bad Guys and unsuccessfully fending off mutual attraction with her BFF Jonathan, who also happens to be crown prince. Spoiler alert, this is reasonably light-hearted young adult fiction, so she gets to be a knight and everybody discovers she's a woman but they mostly get over it. Also she has a magical cat that is probably actually a star constellation.
After Alanna the next quartet shifts to another character, a kid called Daine who can magically talk to all of the animals. This is weird in universe as well as in real life, so she gets to Discover Her Powers whilst also doing the whole growing up shebang, and also come to terms with having a childhood where her mother had to raise her alone despite prejudice against single mothers, and then gets murdered by bandits who Daine then kills along with a bunch of wolves she's been chatting to. Which is a bit traumatic. Also she prevents a war both against a neighbouring country and against a magic land of magic creatures, and is caretaker to a totally sweet dragon. After that, you get Keladry, who decides she also wants to be a knight and who doesn't actually have to disguise herself, but puts up with lots of prejudice from her peers and the people training them, and generally grows up to be enormous and almost unbeatable at jousting but still gets rubbish "feminine" assignments when she becomes a knight, but then it turns out they are the most important jobs and nobody else could handle them, she is just generally the best. Then there's Alanna's kid, who is a little bit annoying but ends up in the middle of a racial/colonial war and falls in love with a crow that gets to turn himself human. Basically it is all happening all the time!
I know fantasy tends to be quite a polarising genre, and reading young adult books as a grown-ass woman is also not desperately common, so a lot of people might be scratching their heads at the moment and wondering why on earth any of this is a worthwhile recommendation. The answer is this: these books are not only brilliant entertainment (rest assured, the stories happen a lot better than how I write them down here) but they also do what almost no books for young adult women do: they combine coming-of-age with wish fulfilment. We pick up with Alanna, Daine, Keladry and Aly (Alanna's kid) when they're all between around 10 and 13, and follow them through some of their most important years, both as they grow into awesome career women protecting the kingdom, and as they just generally grow into women. Alanna gets through some of the hardest parts of knight training more easily than all the bigger kids around her, only to be completely freaked out when her period comes (because dead mother, so nobody ever explained it). Daine copes with some really serious family issues and learns to respect how strong her mother was for bringing her up, whilst also coping with some really serious "oh god I can shapeshift now and I don't know how to hold on to my humanity" issues, which most teenage girls don't ever have to deal with. Unlike the first two, Kel has loving and supportive parents who remain loving and supportive (and teach her about periods), but she's grown up in a culture away from Tortall ‒ pseudo-Japan, to be specific ‒ and has to deal with being the only girl in a hostile environment, reconciling her adopted culture with her birth culture, and also with jousting with a lance twice as heavy as anybody else's because the awful boy gave her that one and she was too proud to ever give it back. They combine storylines that young women can relate to, and which humanise the troubles of young women for men who aren't used to putting themselves in the shoes of female protagonists, with plots that are pure fantasy in the best possible way. Kids can't actually be knights of a fantasy realm, but they can dream of being a girl just like them who is.
All of Pierce's Tortall women take on a patriarchal culture reasonably analagous to discrimination in the modern world, come to terms with their differing strengths and weaknesses, and achieve superhuman things with them. What's more, where the characters do have romantic interests, said romances have nothing to do with their growth (the one possible exception, Daine, has a romantic plot which could interfere with her magic teaching, but this is at the point where spoiler spoiler spoiler so she'll probably be alright...). This is not Twilight, where Edward gets to show Bella a whole new world, protect her for three and a half books, and then finally give her her own superpowers so she can protect him for a change. Nor is it the Hunger Games, which I love dearly but which is a story of a woman being brutally crushed by a world she has no agency in, but it's OK because she gets the Nice Boy at the end. All the romances are, by and large, treated as teenage romances should be: a couple last, most don't, you don't always love just one person at one time, sometimes you aren't that interested in anybody at all, and it's usually not necessary to hook up with your best friend of the opposite gender just because you're friends. Alanna's story was originally meant to be a single book for adults, so it's probably not surprising that she has a fair bit of implied sex with more than one love interest (shock!), but none of the other characters are chaste virginal types pining constantly after The One or using love triangles to motivate all of their life choices. This is refreshing.
I also like that Pierce's women don't live in a rosy genderblind world of Strong Female Characters. In fact, one of my favourite parts of Keladry's books are the Awful Teasing Boys, who continue to be awful and not accept her even after she's proven herself to the older, stuck-in-their-ways chauvinists around her. It's implied that a couple of them are just... unwell, in the same way as some women-fearing MRAs come across as unwell in the modern world. They get their comeuppance in different ways, but I love that the moral of the story isn't "kickass woman fixes everything around her!"; it's "kickass woman follows and achieves dreams and achieves love and respect from people worth achieving it from, and more would be nice, but sometimes you do just have to accept lost causes." Kel also ends up having to balance having "fun" with one of her fellow knights with sexist reactions to female promiscuity, where an older female character takes her aside and says "this is what happens, it's completely wrong, you can choose to fight it or you can modify your behaviour because of it, both will be difficult and it will suck but you should know this." It's not exactly the most inspiring message, and it may raise some feminist eyebrows that the character's choice is to be clandestine rather than organising fantasy slutwalks, because hey, she likes being a knight and she'd rather devote all her time to doing that and fighting sexist bullshit directly related to it. But, again, it drives home that these are women dealing with the practicalities of being women, however much they may suck. Not even the most dedicated feminist can fight every microaggression all the time.
So anyway that is my Sunday recommendation to you. Relive your girlhood! Or appreciate it for the first time if you didn't have one, because if I was compelled to read Catcher in the Bloody Rye and Vernon God Little as "gender neutral" coming of age books, you should be able to read the Alanna Quartet on the same terms. Tamora Pierce technically doesn't have a british publisher at the moment, which is a travesty, but I have everything she's ever written as an ebook
Saturday, 10 August 2013
A screwdriver of one's own
So remember how I promised Deep Personal Feminist Reflection today? Well, my promises mean nothing and you should never believe anything I say. In all seriousness, I feel like a Deep Reflection post, unlike most of what I write, requires an actual correct mindset, and I am not in it today. This is partly because Hugo Schwyzer's uncomfortable public meltdown (look it up if you must, but if you don't know who he is honestly I'd just keep it that way) has has a pretty big impact on my feminist feels, and although it won't change my identity in the end, it doesn't feel right to try to be trying to affirm what that identity is right now. The other reason is because I spent all of today buying shelves, then putting up shelves, then putting things on shelves, and now I have a fully unpacked, tidy living space which is both completely magnificent and completely awesome. In-keeping with some of the greatest writing advice I ever had, from a fellow SOFA*-er, I have been leaving most blogs later and later because "if you only have an hour to write it in, it only takes an hour" (seriously, all aspiring writers take note, that is the kind of thinking that will get you ahead in this life); the flipside of this is that sometimes the day just gets too mentally exhausting for serious blogging at the end of them. This is one of those days.
As anybody who has ever done intensive long-term writing will know, writing constantly takes very little time to turn even the most pleasant, outgoing person into an aggressive, selfish, single-minded hermit. In theory, this amount of writing only takes up a couple of hours each day, but as I'm never quite sure which couple of hours and I like to keep them all potentially free in case the mood strikes me, I have become increasingly hostile to any sort of organised distraction that I don't feel fully in control of. My family have unfortunately had to deal with the brunt of me aggressively not wanting to do much, or spending an arbitrarily small amount of time doing something else and then having a meltdown about how those were the exact ninety minutes I needed for feminist writing, or getting very worked up about how every minute spent blogging is a minute less that I can spend writing elaborate lists of action for the Job Centre. Rest assured, Huntingdon Job Centre, I am doing my bit. You would be amazed at what job seeking activities double up as fun procrastination when you're trying to write this much.
The one exception to this, as blog posts have occasionally referenced, has been the slow but relentless overhaul of my room from "weird disorganised collections of nonsense" to an actual space that an actual grown adult/collector of nonsense might want to inhabit. Given that a lot of this has been things I can't do alone, like flatpack furniture, shelves, lifting heavy things up flights of stairs, and screwing things into walls, allowing this to be my one distraction (OK there was some Sypro the Dragon playing too, and the ice cream continues to be a thing, but shush) has rather exacerbated the aggressive selfishness, by making it so that my only desired socialisation with parents involves them assisting me in endless room improvement tasks which I do in a state of great agitation about where my blogging time will come from. Not from ice cream time, that's for sure!
Anyway, now the trials are over and ALMOST ALL of the nonsense collection is distributed in appropriate locations. This collection includes:
*Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness. It has an acronym now, and hey those initials conveniently spell out a word! Who knew?
As anybody who has ever done intensive long-term writing will know, writing constantly takes very little time to turn even the most pleasant, outgoing person into an aggressive, selfish, single-minded hermit. In theory, this amount of writing only takes up a couple of hours each day, but as I'm never quite sure which couple of hours and I like to keep them all potentially free in case the mood strikes me, I have become increasingly hostile to any sort of organised distraction that I don't feel fully in control of. My family have unfortunately had to deal with the brunt of me aggressively not wanting to do much, or spending an arbitrarily small amount of time doing something else and then having a meltdown about how those were the exact ninety minutes I needed for feminist writing, or getting very worked up about how every minute spent blogging is a minute less that I can spend writing elaborate lists of action for the Job Centre. Rest assured, Huntingdon Job Centre, I am doing my bit. You would be amazed at what job seeking activities double up as fun procrastination when you're trying to write this much.
The one exception to this, as blog posts have occasionally referenced, has been the slow but relentless overhaul of my room from "weird disorganised collections of nonsense" to an actual space that an actual grown adult/collector of nonsense might want to inhabit. Given that a lot of this has been things I can't do alone, like flatpack furniture, shelves, lifting heavy things up flights of stairs, and screwing things into walls, allowing this to be my one distraction (OK there was some Sypro the Dragon playing too, and the ice cream continues to be a thing, but shush) has rather exacerbated the aggressive selfishness, by making it so that my only desired socialisation with parents involves them assisting me in endless room improvement tasks which I do in a state of great agitation about where my blogging time will come from. Not from ice cream time, that's for sure!
Anyway, now the trials are over and ALMOST ALL of the nonsense collection is distributed in appropriate locations. This collection includes:
- An exquisitely painted oar (still not mounted, making it one of the few continuing out of place things, but hey. It's an exquisitely painted oar! These things are hard to find place for)
- An overgrown cactus
- A giant scroll which says "horse" in Chinese
- The Triwizard cup (which currently houses a Mudkip and three tampons, because... feminism?)
- The TARDIS
- Several Sonic Screwdrivers
- A small mug with somebody else's star sign on it
- A keyring intended for somebody called "Harrison"
- A shell shaped a bit like a vagina
- A marble tortoise that makes me sad every time I look at it because it reminds me of being abused into buying it in a shop in Vietnam (but which I can't throw away because I bought the damn thing and now I am going to damn well own it)
- A cyberman head intended for growing cress in, and cress seeds.
- A silver tankard full of plastic Daleks (a lot of this nonsense collection is Doctor Who related... fancy that)
- Scarves. Oh god, scarves.
- An original Game Boy and a special edition Pokemon Game Boy colour (with Kirby's Dream Land and Pokemon Blue in, respectively)
- Some individually wrapped Hubei speciality fish packets
- Zero accordions :(
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| One electric piano though. Also that scroll says horse in Chinese. AND IS ALSO A PICTURE OF A HORSE. It is a very crazy and conceptually difficult thing to understand. |
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| Other side of the room, feat. oar that is pretty much only out of place object in the entire room. DAMN YOU, BLADES. Also everybody who has ever been to my room before will notice that it is no longer luminous turquoise and pink. This was a magical surprise that my parents pulled on me at the end of 2012! I approved of the magical surprise: those were terrible colours for a bedroom, shame on me for ever picking them. |
Some things I don't have because they have mysteriously gone Somewhere ‒ probably to the attic ‒ include my DVDs of Mulan and Mulan 2 (and all my other DVDs), and my Kylie Minogue-in-Doctor Who action figure. I have all the other companions though, currently lined up on a shelf and not in any sexual positions at all. This will not last.
I like most of my nonsensical stuff collection. Lots of it has memories either of people giving it to me (like the Triwizard cup and the zodiac mug), or of using it (the Gameboys) or is Doctor Who related and/or generally makes me feel awesome (SONIC SCREWDRIVERS AAAA). I also own a lot of redundant Real Person things, like an actual screwdriver whose existence deeply confuses my dad, who assumes that all tools in the house fall under his domain and tried to remove it from my room to go live in the garage with the fifty screwdrivers he already owns. Like everyone who moves out and then back in again, it's hard to reconcile some of the material symbols of my independence with being back at home again, and even harder to figure out exactly where on my lovely new shelves this screwdriver I will never actually need should go. In the end, as homage to the "father attempts to steal screwdriver, feminist victory won as I defend my womanly right to own my own useful tool" story (totally how it went down) I went for "pride of place", but who knows how long that will last.
Anyway, there is no real point to this entry except gushing, so... I'll gush a little more then stop. I don't know how much longer I will be staying under this roof, but it's so nice to finally have a space which represents the important material bits of the last six years as well as the most important things before that. Given that my future is so completely uncertain for the first time in my quarter-century existence, it's nice to have good reminders of my present and my past all around. Now... if only it had an accordion.
*Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness. It has an acronym now, and hey those initials conveniently spell out a word! Who knew?
Friday, 9 August 2013
Words and pictures
I feel like I have an odd, underformed relationship with my geek side. On the one hand, I adore a lot of what the subculture produces ‒ media which introduces entire alternate universes to play in, and often the explicit mechanisms to do so, alongside a general sense of awe and excitement regarding some of the most amazing parts of our own universe. I love video games, I love fantasy and sci-fi, I have already gushed about online roleplaying. I have even had brief experiences with tabletop gaming and card games which made me wish the communities surrounding them catered to me more. Despite this affinity, however, I feel like I've never devoted the correct amount of time to reading and watching to really be a geek, whatever that means. I've written before about feeling like a general culture failure because the things I like are usually too few, too specific and too far away from the "things you must watch/read/play or you are not a proper lover of media" list that people like to compile and then wave in your face. With "geek things", the problem is compounded by the way in which men attempt to protect the subculture, which has been well documented in the phenomenon of the "fake geek girl".
So, last week, for reasons which were part semi-geek identity crisis and part "I will do a thing that I can later write a blog about, how virtuous", I asked my friends at my local comic shop which comics they would recommend for an unrepentant feminist who wants to read Things About The Womens. I mentioned my friends on Tuesday but that was a very quiet blog post so let me do so again: a couple of years ago, against the backdrop of Recession and The Death Of Local Shops and Amazon Ruining Everything, a friend of mine from school and his little brother refurbished a gorgeous 16th century shop in the middle of Huntingdon, filled it with books, comics, tabletop games, action figures and imported sweets (and a Mass Effect art book which will one day be mine...), and have been quietly and successfully running Niche Comics since the beginning of 2012. If you ever find yourself in Huntingdon for any reason, I guarantee that visiting them will be the highlight of your day, because they are amazing and because Huntingdon is... not. They are down the non-pedestrianised end of the High Street, near the Samuel Pepys pub, or whatever it has rebranded itself to these days. You should also follow them on Facebook even if you never intend to set food in Huntingdon.
My friend is also very well-informed both about comics and about women's representation, so it was no surprise when he came back with a fascinating list of things for me to try out. The most prominent feminist discussion around comic books tends to focus exclusively on female body shapes, and particularly the Strong Female Character pose, here illustrated by the Hawkeye Initiative (which redraws female superhero poses done by Hawkeye, who is... some guy. I don't know. I'm not a real geek!) but what I ended up with was a very different impression. I'm not feeling desperately prose-y (perhaps because of all these comic books rotting my mental faculties?) so I'll bullet point what I've read so far.
As you would expect (we've all seen Joss Whedon's Strong Female Character rant, right?), Terry Moore has been asked about the whole Writing About Women business more than once. His answer (in one of the relatively few interviews I read, I've no doubt there are many, many more) was not quite what I was hoping:
Stating that using women is great because it avoids stereotype is a risky business, because it risks denying that stereotypes of women can be problematic even when characters are written away from the most restrictive ones. I enjoyed learning about another little corner of geekdom, where men are creating stories of biologically accurate, well rounded human women doing awesome stuff. But while it's great that there are men who think these stories need telling, I'm not sure if I can fully get behind them as stories about women if using women is purely an act of subversion. Being a woman is not a subversive act, it's a fact about us as people, and that needs to be recognised by creators and, more fundamentally, by the gatekeepers of creative industries, because they're the ones who really make it so that the only comics my friend can recommend are men writing about women. Sort it out, geeks. And give me more comic recommendations whilst you're doing it, I may be addicted. Whoops.
Day 17. Tomorrow is probably going to be Adrienne's feminist autobiography. Sunday will be me gushing about the most important women's fantasy author ever, no arguments allowed. Mark it in your diary! Seriously. Just write "ADRIENNE'S BLOG" across all the pages. Doesn't your life look so much fuller now?
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*I hate to act as if this is at all relevant because it completely isn't, but I was super amused to discover that Ming Doyle is, or was, dating Neil Cicierega, who made Potter Puppet Pals and Lemon Demon music and this thing that was super cool on the internet, like, ten years ago. That guy!)
So, last week, for reasons which were part semi-geek identity crisis and part "I will do a thing that I can later write a blog about, how virtuous", I asked my friends at my local comic shop which comics they would recommend for an unrepentant feminist who wants to read Things About The Womens. I mentioned my friends on Tuesday but that was a very quiet blog post so let me do so again: a couple of years ago, against the backdrop of Recession and The Death Of Local Shops and Amazon Ruining Everything, a friend of mine from school and his little brother refurbished a gorgeous 16th century shop in the middle of Huntingdon, filled it with books, comics, tabletop games, action figures and imported sweets (and a Mass Effect art book which will one day be mine...), and have been quietly and successfully running Niche Comics since the beginning of 2012. If you ever find yourself in Huntingdon for any reason, I guarantee that visiting them will be the highlight of your day, because they are amazing and because Huntingdon is... not. They are down the non-pedestrianised end of the High Street, near the Samuel Pepys pub, or whatever it has rebranded itself to these days. You should also follow them on Facebook even if you never intend to set food in Huntingdon.
My friend is also very well-informed both about comics and about women's representation, so it was no surprise when he came back with a fascinating list of things for me to try out. The most prominent feminist discussion around comic books tends to focus exclusively on female body shapes, and particularly the Strong Female Character pose, here illustrated by the Hawkeye Initiative (which redraws female superhero poses done by Hawkeye, who is... some guy. I don't know. I'm not a real geek!) but what I ended up with was a very different impression. I'm not feeling desperately prose-y (perhaps because of all these comic books rotting my mental faculties?) so I'll bullet point what I've read so far.
- The New York Four, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly (the first one wrote it, the second drew it), is a quite Scott Pilgrim-esque book about four women college students at NYU. The main one is socially awkward, love texting (zeitgeist alert!) and is trying to develop a relationship with her estranged older sister. The other three are a Fiery Latina with Cleavage (and a secret heart of gold), an Asian-Canadian who starts stalking her professor after she gets a B in one of her classes, and someone from the West Coast who skates and Can't Understand Boys! Despite this all being a bit stereotypical, New York Four (and the sequel, New York Five) is actually pretty decent at giving its characters satisfyingly melodramatic but not entirely unrealistic lives. It didn't replace Scott Pilgrim in the section of my heart reserved for "fun youth life story comics" but I did enjoy it.
- Local, also by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly. This is supposed to be their magnum opus or something and it's therefore bound in a super fancy hardcover book (which cost me the remainder of my Shakespeare tutoring money, oh the things I do for blog). It's supposed to be twelve stories that represent twelve years in the life of Some Woman who lives in twelve different US cities during this time. All the reviews on the back say it will be the most inspiring thing I ever read but I only read the first two and was... not that hooked. Maybe I just don't understand poignant woman stories.
- Mara, by Brian Wood (that guy again!), Ming Doyle* and Jordie Bellaire. It's about a superstar volleyball player (not beach volleyball!) in a grim dystopian future. Yes, you heard. Bad things start to happen to her, made worse by the whole grim dystopia thing, and we get to read on as her whole existence falls apart. It's actually very good, although I hated two things: first, all of the comic covers use Super Arty Colours which hide the fact that Mara is a WOC (the first one makes her face literally white, although everything else has colour). Second, the comic itself uses a lot of in-universe news reports which constantly represent her using this picture:
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| Grim dystopian future where women (NOT BEACH) volleyball players are super famous, but still mostly famous for being pinups. Thanks...? |
- The first book of Strangers in Paradise, one of two things on the list by Terry Moore. I started off really sceptical about this, because it appeared to be about a Hilariously Angry Lady getting unwanted stalker attention from a Nice Guy despite telling him she's a lesbian, and pressuring her Heterosexual Female Friend into a relationship. It then goes through a load of what I can only call male fear-of-women fantasies about rejection and castration and people knowing you have a small penis, which did nothing to improve my mood. Also it has Hilariously Angry Lady crying in handcuffs on the front cover. But! The fact that it managed to win me over from this beginning is probably the best recommendation I can give to anything ever. It vacillates wildly between "cute slice of life" and "everybody is getting shot by the mob wtf" which shouldn't work but does, and while the Nice Guy overstayed his character's welcome, I completely loved almost everything after the initial castration/small willy story. Conveniently, this lines up with the moment when Heterosexual Female friend puts on thirty pounds and is drawn for the rest of the strip as a canonically gorgeous woman with a bit of a double chin and realistically distributed fat and a complicated relationship with her body type that doesn't boil down to any stereotype. Because not everything is Hawkeye pose, guys. It also lines up with the point where almost everyone important to the story is female ‒ mob boss, mob boss's dapper assistant, mob boss's giant silent muscled type, Angry Lady's dead mentor figure... statistically, the character gender ratio probably isn't far off 50:50, but women get all the good parts.
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| This cover is only marginally less awful than the weeping handcuffs picture on the front of volume 1, but oh! Double chin, waist fat-fold and belly on woman who several other characters find gorgeous and irresistible, drawn even in the picture where we are supposed to think she is gorgeous and irresistible. I FORGIVE YOU FOR THE NICE GUY STORYLINE, MOORE (nah actually that's not actually how it works, but if it was, I would). |
- Rachel Rising, which is what Terry Moore is doing now he's finished writing about Hilariously Angry Lady and company (there is also something in between, apparently). Again wins no points by beginning with a frightened, scantily clad young woman digging herself out of her own grave, but it hits all the good points of Strangers in Paradise but more cleanly. It mixes the exploration of relationships with some seriously crazy shit, the good character roles all go to women, and the women (and the men) are all easily distinguishable from each other through drawing alone. Whilst there's a lot of violence, including scenes of violence against women which always make me instinctively wary, it's interesting that the women victims are the ones who return and continue to have agency, whereas the men who die just... die. Often brutally. I think there's a whole complicated thesis in here on gendered victimhood which is way beyond the scope of this blog, but suffice to say it's... interesting.
I also have one of the Love and Rockets books sitting here waiting to be read, but I didn't get to that one. Maybe it will have its own post later?
Anyway, those are things I read! All of them were good. If you listen to things I tell you to do, you should definitely read Strangers in Paradise. But most of you don't listen to things I tell you do to. So. What did I learn from my little comic book binge?
Well, there's no getting around it, these sure are a lot of stories about women by men. The only comic with significant female creative involvement is Mara, which has two women artists ‒ one to draw, one to colour. It's also interesting that it's the same men, although this might also be related to my friend's opinions on what I would be interested in as much as a comment on the state of the industry in general. I've got him to put some Alison Bechdel on order so I'll be rectifying my man overload soon!
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| That's Alison Bechdel of the Bechdel Test fame, whose comic which introduces the Bechdel Test (which only about 50% of modern movies pass, and it becomes much fewer if you have requirements for two named female characters). This picture is going to break my blog frames, watch me not care because it is important and awesome. |
In general, this was OK. There were a few gratuitous "camera" angles here and there, the worst being that picture above of Mara, but most of the time women looked like actual real life different types of women ‒ not everything is Hawkeye! Everyone in Ryan Kelly's art, male and female, has big pretty eyes and luscious pouty lips, so I put that down to style rather than female stereotyping (and they do make varied facial expressions with their big facial features so that's nice.) Everybody acts like you would expect a comic book version of a real life person to act, which is pretty much like real life except everybody talks in complete clauses and sometimes bolds their important words.
What it means to me, though, is that I'm much less likely to be sympathetic when women do start doing things that are, to me, Man-Fantasies and not actual woman things. New York Four has a bit of professor seduction by Fiery Sexy Latina, which is portrayed as her being predatory and him being weak, and the implications we are supposed to draw are 1) she is a Strong Confident Woman and 2) Strong Confident Women get what they want through preying on poor squashed men. Now I'm sure that this has happened in the history of the human race, but I'm equally sure that it happens far more in the minds of men who are afraid of women being inappropriately Strong and Sexy at them than it does in actual real life. Similarly with the castration "fantasy". I think this is why all these stories are, perhaps surprisingly, at their best when it's women talking to other women. Even with the best will in the world, it's apparently hard to escape unconscious worries of what might strong women do to men?
As you would expect (we've all seen Joss Whedon's Strong Female Character rant, right?), Terry Moore has been asked about the whole Writing About Women business more than once. His answer (in one of the relatively few interviews I read, I've no doubt there are many, many more) was not quite what I was hoping:
"Well, if you'll notice, when I write female characters, I don't have them doing anything that's actually very feminine. There's no scenes of women having lunch together or shopping or talking about guys.There's a sympathetic and an unsympathetic reading of this quote. The unsympathetic reading would be to pick up on the "women only have lunch and shop and talk about guys, and men do literally everything else, what the hell", and that's definitely what first sprang to mind. But I think he's talking about tropes, not men and women themselves. As the "typically male" scenes he puts his women in are things like "get involved in mob shootout", it's pretty clear he's not actually equating "typically male" with "things that real men actually do regularly" (unless he's a really dangerous dude...) but instead pointing out that, yeah, we expect male characters to be in those situations and to react in one of those two boring ways, but when you write an unexpected character into the scene, the audience has fewer expectations for what might happen next. Unfortunately I cannot put a generous spin on the lions and penguins thing, but it's absurd enough that maybe it can be quietly ignored. I hope he doesn't actually think of women as penguins or men as lions?
So what I'm actually doing is using female characters and putting them in situations that are typically male, just because I find that that incongruous setting is so much more intriguing.
Put a man in a dangerous situation, and we automatically just assume he's either going to go commando or wimp. We've seen it so many times.
But if you put a woman in there, you're just not quite sure what's going to happen... Usually women are portrayed as victims of male predators. In my story, the woman is usually fighting against her own genre. I just find that a little more interesting. Instead of lions attacking penguins, what if penguins attacked each other?" (Source)
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| In this metaphor, both the alarm clock and the women are penguins. Or... something. Let's really just leave it. |
Stating that using women is great because it avoids stereotype is a risky business, because it risks denying that stereotypes of women can be problematic even when characters are written away from the most restrictive ones. I enjoyed learning about another little corner of geekdom, where men are creating stories of biologically accurate, well rounded human women doing awesome stuff. But while it's great that there are men who think these stories need telling, I'm not sure if I can fully get behind them as stories about women if using women is purely an act of subversion. Being a woman is not a subversive act, it's a fact about us as people, and that needs to be recognised by creators and, more fundamentally, by the gatekeepers of creative industries, because they're the ones who really make it so that the only comics my friend can recommend are men writing about women. Sort it out, geeks. And give me more comic recommendations whilst you're doing it, I may be addicted. Whoops.
Day 17. Tomorrow is probably going to be Adrienne's feminist autobiography. Sunday will be me gushing about the most important women's fantasy author ever, no arguments allowed. Mark it in your diary! Seriously. Just write "ADRIENNE'S BLOG" across all the pages. Doesn't your life look so much fuller now?
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*I hate to act as if this is at all relevant because it completely isn't, but I was super amused to discover that Ming Doyle is, or was, dating Neil Cicierega, who made Potter Puppet Pals and Lemon Demon music and this thing that was super cool on the internet, like, ten years ago. That guy!)
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