#other than what I assume was the writer's room's of understanding feminism.

[ssaalexblake]

absolutely hate it when something stupid and negative somebody wrote on one of my positive fandom posts gets stuck in my head but like, i truly wish i'd asked the rando person who said they just Couldn't keep watching 13's era because of the constant put downs of men if they'd legitimately gotten her era and moffat era dw confused (which does, quite frankly, have a ~girls rule boys smell~ lean to it uncomfortably often) because that is simply preferable to the alternative that they meant it and genuinely think that men Not being front and centre is an affront to men and that they couldn't deal with it. But I blocked them bc Be Real. But I regret not asking even though I strongly suspect that the answer would have given me a headache.

[comrade-meow]

I.

For a long time, academic feminism in America has been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women. Feminist theory has been understood by theorists as not just fancy words on paper; theory is connected to proposals for social change. Thus feminist scholars have engaged in many concrete projects: the reform of rape law; winning attention and legal redress for the problems of domestic violence and sexual harassment; improving women’s economic opportunities, working conditions, and education; winning pregnancy benefits for female workers; campaigning against the trafficking of women and girls in prostitution; working for the social and political equality of lesbians and gay men.

Indeed, some theorists have left the academy altogether, feeling more comfortable in the world of practical politics, where they can address these urgent problems directly. Those who remain in the academy have frequently made it a point of honor to be academics of a committed practical sort, eyes always on the material conditions of real women, writing always in a way that acknowledges those real bodies and those real struggles. One cannot read a page of Catharine MacKinnon, for example, without being engaged with a real issue of legal and institutional change. If one disagrees with her proposals--and many feminists disagree with them--the challenge posed by her writing is to find some other way of solving the problem that has been vividly delineated.

Feminists have differed in some cases about what is bad, and about what is needed to make things better; but all have agreed that the circumstances of women are often unjust and that law and political action can make them more nearly just. MacKinnon, who portrays hierarchy and subordination as endemic to our entire culture, is also committed to, and cautiously optimistic about, change through law--the domestic law of rape and sexual harassment and international human rights law. Even Nancy Chodorow, who, in The Reproduction of Mothering, offered a depressing account of the replication of oppressive gender categories in child-rearing, argued that this situation could change. Men and women could decide, understanding the unhappy consequences of these habits, that they will henceforth do things differently; and changes in laws and institutions can assist in such decisions.

Feminist theory still looks like this in many parts of the world. In India, for example, academic feminists have thrown themselves into practical struggles, and feminist theorizing is closely tethered to practical commitments such as female literacy, the reform of unequal land laws, changes in rape law (which, in India today, has most of the flaws that the first generation of American feminists targeted), the effort to get social recognition for problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence. These feminists know that they live in the middle of a fiercely unjust reality; they cannot live with themselves without addressing it more or less daily, in their theoretical writing and in their activities outside the seminar room.

In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.

One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler’s work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.

II.

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler’s own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with “Consider…” or “One could suggest…”--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims.

Take two representative examples:

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.

And:

Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”?

Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that “direction for thinking,” what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Now, Butler might have written: “Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time.” Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims. Announcing the award, the journal’s editor remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet.’” (Such bad writing, incidentally, is by no means ubiquitous in the “queer theory” group of theorists with which Butler is associated. David Halperin, for example, writes about the relationship between Foucault and Kant, and about Greek homosexuality, with philosophical clarity and historical precision.)

Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others’ manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student’s dissertation on Hume’s views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn’t she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader’s intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty.

III.

Butler’s main idea, first introduced in Gender Trouble in 1989 and repeated throughout her books, is that gender is a social artifice. Our ideas of what women and men are reflect nothing that exists eternally in nature. Instead they derive from customs that embed social relations of power.

This notion, of course, is nothing new. The denaturalizing of gender was present already in Plato, and it received a great boost from John Stuart Mill, who claimed in The Subjection of Women that “what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing.” Mill saw that claims about “women’s nature” derive from, and shore up, hierarchies of power: womanliness is made to be whatever would serve the cause of keeping women in subjection, or, as he put it, “enslav[ing] their minds.” With the family as with feudalism, the rhetoric of nature itself serves the cause of slavery. “The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural…. But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?”

Mill was hardly the first social constructionist. Similar ideas about anger, greed, envy, and other prominent features of our lives had been commonplace in the history of philosophy since ancient Greece. And Mill’s application of familiar notions of social-construction to gender needed, and still needs, much fuller development; his suggestive remarks did not yet amount to a theory of gender. Long before Butler came on the scene, many feminists contributed to the articulation of such an account.

In work published in the 1970s and 1980s, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that the conventional understanding of gender roles is a way of ensuring continued male domination in sexual relations, as well as in the public sphere. They took the core of Mill’s insight into a sphere of life concerning which the Victorian philosopher had said little. (Not nothing, though: in 1869 Mill already understood that the failure to criminalize rape within marriage defined woman as a tool for male use and negated her human dignity.) Before Butler, MacKinnon and Dworkin addressed the feminist fantasy of an idyllic natural sexuality of women that only needed to be “liberated”; and argued that social forces go so deep that we should not suppose we have access to such a notion of “nature.” Before Butler, they stressed the ways in which male-dominated power structures marginalize and subordinate not only women, but also people who would like to choose a same-sex relationship. They understood that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a way of enforcing the familiar hierarchically ordered gender roles; and so they saw discrimination against gays and lesbians as a form of sex discrimination.

Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and compelling account of how gender differences replicate themselves across the generations: she argued that the ubiquity of these mechanisms of replication enables us to understand how what is artificial can nonetheless be nearly ubiquitous. Before Butler, the biologist Anne Fausto Sterling, through her painstaking criticism of experimental work allegedly supporting the naturalness of conventional gender distinctions, showed how deeply social power-relations had compromised the objectivity of scientists: Myths of Gender (1985) was an apt title for what she found in the biology of the time. (Other biologists and primatologists also contributed to this enterprise.) Before Butler, the political theorist Susan Moller Okin explored the role of law and political thought in constructing a gendered destiny for women in the family; and this project, too, was pursued further by a number of feminists in law and political philosophy. Before Butler, Gayle Rubin’s important anthropological account of subordination, The Traffic in Women (1975), provided a valuable analysis of the relationship between the social organization of gender and the asymmetries of power.

So what does Butler’s work add to this copious body of writing? Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter contain no detailed argument against biological claims of “natural” difference, no account of mechanisms of gender replication, and no account of the legal shaping of the family; nor do they contain any detailed focus on possibilities for legal change. What, then, does Butler offer that we might not find more fully done in earlier feminist writings? One relatively original claim is that when we recognize the artificiality of gender distinctions, and refrain from thinking of them as expressing an independent natural reality, we will also understand that there is no compelling reason why the gender types should have been two (correlated with the two biological sexes), rather than three or five or indefinitely many. “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice,” she writes.

From this claim it does not follow, for Butler, that we can freely reinvent the genders as we like: she holds, indeed, that there are severe limits to our freedom. She insists that we should not naively imagine that there is a pristine self that stands behind society, ready to emerge all pure and liberated: “There is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains `integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very `taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there.” Butler does claim, though, that we can create categories that are in some sense new ones, by means of the artful parody of the old ones. Thus her best known idea, her conception of politics as a parodic performance, is born out of the sense of a (strictly limited) freedom that comes from the recognition that one’s ideas of gender have been shaped by forces that are social rather than biological. We are doomed to repetition of the power structures into which we are born, but we can at least make fun of them; and some ways of making fun are subversive assaults on the original norms.

The idea of gender as performance is Butler’s most famous idea, and so it is worth pausing to scrutinize it more closely. She introduced the notion intuitively, in Gender Trouble, without invoking theoretical precedent. Later she denied that she was referring to quasi-theatrical performance, and associated her notion instead with Austin’s account of speech acts in How to Do Things with Words. Austin’s linguistic category of “performatives” is a category of linguistic utterances that function, in and of themselves, as actions rather than as assertions. When (in appropriate social circumstances) I say “I bet ten dollars,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I do” (in a marriage ceremony), or “I name this ship…,” I am not reporting on a bet or an apology or a marriage or a naming ceremony, I am conducting one.

Butler’s analogous claim about gender is not obvious, since the “performances” in question involve gesture, dress, movement, and action, as well as language. Austin’s thesis, which is restricted to a rather technical analysis of a certain class of sentences, is in fact not especially helpful to Butler in developing her ideas. Indeed, though she vehemently repudiates readings of her work that associate her view with theater, thinking about the Living Theater’s subversive work with gender seems to illuminate her ideas far more than thinking about Austin.

Nor is Butler’s treatment of Austin very plausible. She makes the bizarre claim that the fact that the marriage ceremony is one of dozens of examples of performatives in Austin’s text suggests “that the heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about what they name.” Hardly. Marriage is no more paradigmatic for Austin than betting or ship-naming or promising or apologizing. He is interested in a formal feature of certain utterances, and we are given no reason to suppose that their content has any significance for his argument. It is usually a mistake to read earth-shaking significance into a philosopher’s pedestrian choice of examples. Should we say that Aristotle’s use of a low-fat diet to illustrate the practical syllogism suggests that chicken is at the heart of Aristotelian virtue? Or that Rawls’s use of travel plans to illustrate practical reasoning shows that A Theory of Justice aims at giving us all a vacation?

Leaving these oddities to one side, Butler’s point is presumably this: when we act and speak in a gendered way, we are not simply reporting on something that is already fixed in the world, we are actively constituting it, replicating it, and reinforcing it. By behaving as if there were male and female “natures,” we co-create the social fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there. At the same time, by carrying out these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little.

Thus the one place for agency in a world constrained by hierarchy is in the small opportunities we have to oppose gender roles every time they take shape. When I find myself doing femaleness, I can turn it around, poke fun at it, do it a little bit differently. Such reactive and parodic performances, in Butler’s view, never destabilize the larger system. She doesn’t envisage mass movements of resistance or campaigns for political reform; only personal acts carried out by a small number of knowing actors. Just as actors with a bad script can subvert it by delivering the bad lines oddly, so too with gender: the script remains bad, but the actors have a tiny bit of freedom. Thus we have the basis for what, in Excitable Speech, Butler calls “an ironic hopefulness.”

Up to this point, Butler’s contentions, though relatively familiar, are plausible and even interesting, though one is already unsettled by her narrow vision of the possibilities for change. Yet Butler adds to these plausible claims about gender two other claims that are stronger and more contentious. The first is that there is no agent behind or prior to the social forces that produce the self. If this means only that babies are born into a gendered world that begins to replicate males and females almost immediately, the claim is plausible, but not surprising: experiments have for some time demonstrated that the way babies are held and talked to, the way their emotions are described, are profoundly shaped by the sex the adults in question believe the child to have. (The same baby will be bounced if the adults think it is a boy, cuddled if they think it is a girl; its crying will be labeled as fear if the adults think it is a girl, as anger if they think it is a boy.) Butler shows no interest in these empirical facts, but they do support her contention.

If she means, however, that babies enter the world completely inert, with no tendencies and no abilities that are in some sense prior to their experience in a gendered society, this is far less plausible, and difficult to support empirically. Butler offers no such support, preferring to remain on the high plane of metaphysical abstraction. (Indeed, her recent Freudian work may even repudiate this idea: it suggests, with Freud, that there are at least some presocial impulses and tendencies, although, typically, this line is not clearly developed.) Moreover, such an exaggerated denial of pre-cultural agency takes away some of the resources that Chodorow and others use when they try to account for cultural change in the direction of the better.

Butler does in the end want to say that we have a kind of agency, an ability to undertake change and resistance. But where does this ability come from, if there is no structure in the personality that is not thoroughly power’s creation? It is not impossible for Butler to answer this question, but she certainly has not answered it yet, in a way that would convince those who believe that human beings have at least some pre-cultural desires--for food, for comfort, for cognitive mastery, for survival--and that this structure in the personality is crucial in the explanation of our development as moral and political agents. One would like to see her engage with the strongest forms of such a view, and to say, clearly and without jargon, exactly why and where she rejects them. One would also like to hear her speak about real infants, who do appear to manifest a structure of striving that influences from the start their reception of cultural forms.

Butler’s second strong claim is that the body itself, and especially the distinction between the two sexes, is also a social construction. She means not only that the body is shaped in many ways by social norms of how men and women should be; she means also that the fact that a binary division of sexes is taken as fundamental, as a key to arranging society, is itself a social idea that is not given in bodily reality. What exactly does this claim mean, and how plausible is it?

Butler’s brief exploration of Foucault on hermaphrodites does show us society’s anxious insistence to classify every human being in one box or another, whether or not the individual fits a box; but of course it does not show that there are many such indeterminate cases. She is right to insist that we might have made many different classifications of body types, not necessarily focusing on the binary division as the most salient; and she is also right to insist that, to a large extent, claims of bodily sex difference allegedly based upon scientific research have been projections of cultural prejudice--though Butler offers nothing here that is nearly as compelling as Fausto Sterling’s painstaking biological analysis.

And yet it is much too simple to say that power is all that the body is. We might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do not; and this reality shapes our choices. Culture can shape and reshape some aspects of our bodily existence, but it does not shape all the aspects of it. “In the man burdened by hunger and thirst,” as Sextus Empiricus observed long ago, “it is impossible to produce by argument the conviction that he is not so burdened.” This is an important fact also for feminism, since women’s nutritional needs (and their special needs when pregnant or lactating) are an important feminist topic. Even where sex difference is concerned, it is surely too simple to write it all off as culture; nor should feminists be eager to make such a sweeping gesture. Women who run or play basketball, for example, were right to welcome the demolition of myths about women’s athletic performance that were the product of male-dominated assumptions; but they were also right to demand the specialized research on women’s bodies that has fostered a better understanding of women’s training needs and women’s injuries. In short: what feminism needs, and sometimes gets, is a subtle study of the interplay of bodily difference and cultural construction. And Butler’s abstract pronouncements, floating high above all matter, give us none of what we need.

IV.

Suppose we grant Butler her most interesting claims up to this point: that the social structure of gender is ubiquitous, but we can resist it by subversive and parodic acts. Two significant questions remain. What should be resisted, and on what basis? What would the acts of resistance be like, and what would we expect them to accomplish?

Butler uses several words for what she takes to be bad and therefore worthy of resistance: the “repressive,” the “subordinating,” the “oppressive.” But she provides no empirical discussion of resistance of the sort that we find, say, in Barry Adam’s fascinating sociological study The Survival of Domination (1978), which studies the subordination of blacks, Jews, women, and gays and lesbians, and their ways of wrestling with the forms of social power that have oppressed them. Nor does Butler provide any account of the concepts of resistance and oppression that would help us, were we really in doubt about what we ought to be resisting.

Butler departs in this regard from earlier social-constructionist feminists, all of whom used ideas such as non-hierarchy, equality, dignity, autonomy, and treating as an end rather than a means, to indicate a direction for actual politics. Still less is she willing to elaborate any positive normative notion. Indeed, it is clear that Butler, like Foucault, is adamantly opposed to normative notions such as human dignity, or treating humanity as an end, on the grounds that they are inherently dictatorial. In her view, we ought to wait to see what the political struggle itself throws up, rather than prescribe in advance to its participants. Universal normative notions, she says, “colonize under the sign of the same.”

This idea of waiting to see what we get--in a word, this moral passivity--seems plausible in Butler because she tacitly assumes an audience of like-minded readers who agree (sort of) about what the bad things are--discrimination against gays and lesbians, the unequal and hierarchical treatment of women--and who even agree (sort of) about why they are bad (they subordinate some people to others, they deny people freedoms that they ought to have). But take that assumption away, and the absence of a normative dimension becomes a severe problem.

Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have, and you will quickly find that subversion takes many forms, not all of them congenial to Butler and her allies. As a perceptive libertarian student said to me, Why can’t I use these ideas to resist the tax structure, or the antidiscrimination laws, or perhaps even to join the militias? Others, less fond of liberty, might engage in the subversive performances of making fun of feminist remarks in class, or ripping down the posters of the lesbian and gay law students’ association. These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren’t they daring and good?

Well, there are good answers to those questions, but you won’t find them in Foucault, or in Butler. Answering them requires discussing which liberties and opportunities human beings ought to have, and what it is for social institutions to treat human beings as ends rather than as means--in short, a normative theory of social justice and human dignity. It is one thing to say that we should be humble about our universal norms, and willing to learn from the experience of oppressed people. It is quite another thing to say that we don’t need any norms at all. Foucault, unlike Butler, at least showed signs in his late work of grappling with this problem; and all his writing is animated by a fierce sense of the texture of social oppression and the harm that it does.

Come to think of it, justice, understood as a personal virtue, has exactly the structure of gender in the Butlerian analysis: it is not innate or “natural,” it is produced by repeated performances (or as Aristotle said, we learn it by doing it), it shapes our inclinations and forces the repression of some of them. These ritual performances, and their associated repressions, are enforced by arrangements of social power, as children who won’t share on the playground quickly discover. Moreover, the parodic subversion of justice is ubiquitous in politics, as in personal life. But there is an important difference. Generally we dislike these subversive performances, and we think that young people should be strongly discouraged from seeing norms of justice in such a cynical light. Butler cannot explain in any purely structural or procedural way why the subversion of gender norms is a social good while the subversion of justice norms is a social bad. Foucault, we should remember, cheered for the Ayatollah, and why not? That, too, was resistance, and there was indeed nothing in the text to tell us that that struggle was less worthy than a struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.

There is a void, then, at the heart of Butler’s notion of politics. This void can look liberating, because the reader fills it implicitly with a normative theory of human equality or dignity. But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as for Foucault, subversion is subversion, and it can in principle go in any direction. Indeed, Butler’s naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.

V.

What precisely does Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism.

If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. “Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially.” In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.

Isn’t this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed--but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women’s lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women’s bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.

Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler’s focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.

Excitable Speech, Butler’s most recent book, which provides her analysis of legal controversies involving pornography and hate speech, shows us exactly how far her quietism extends. For she is now willing to say that even where legal change is possible, even where it has already happened, we should wish it away, so as to preserve the space within which the oppressed may enact their sadomasochistic rituals of parody.

As a work on the law of free speech, Excitable Speech is an unconscionably bad book. Butler shows no awareness of the major theoretical accounts of the First Amendment, and no awareness of the wide range of cases such a theory will need to take into consideration. She makes absurd legal claims: for example, she says that the only type of speech that has been held to be unprotected is speech that has been previously defined as conduct rather than speech. (In fact, there are many types of speech, from false or misleading advertising to libelous statements to obscenity as currently defined, which have never been claimed to be action rather than speech, and which are nonetheless denied First Amendment protection.) Butler even claims, mistakenly, that obscenity has been judged to be the equivalent of “fighting words.” It is not that Butler has an argument to back up her novel readings of the wide range of cases of unprotected speech that an account of the First Amendment would need to cover. She just has not noticed that there is this wide range of cases, or that her view is not a widely accepted legal view. Nobody interested in law can take her argument seriously.

But let us extract from Butler’s thin discussion of hate speech and pornography the core of her position. It is this: legal prohibitions of hate speech and pornography are problematic (though in the end she does not clearly oppose them) because they close the space within which the parties injured by that speech can perform their resistance. By this Butler appears to mean that if the offense is dealt with through the legal system, there will be fewer occasions for informal protest; and also, perhaps, that if the offense becomes rarer because of its illegality we will have fewer opportunities to protest its presence.

Well, yes. Law does close those spaces. Hate speech and pornography are extremely complicated subjects on which feminists may reasonably differ. (Still, one should state the contending views precisely: Butler’s account of MacKinnon is less than careful, stating that MacKinnon supports “ordinances against pornography” and suggesting that, despite MacKinnon’s explicit denial, they involve a form of censorship. Nowhere does Butler mention that what MacKinnon actually supports is a civil damage action in which particular women harmed through pornography can sue its makers and its distributors.)

But Butler’s argument has implications well beyond the cases of hate speech and pornography. It would appear to support not just quietism in these areas, but a much more general legal quietism--or, indeed, a radical libertarianism. It goes like this: let us do away with everything from building codes to non-discrimination laws to rape laws, because they close the space within which the injured tenants, the victims of discrimination, the raped women, can perform their resistance. Now, this is not the same argument radical libertarians use to oppose building codes and anti-discrimination laws; even they draw the line at rape. But the conclusions converge.

If Butler should reply that her argument pertains only to speech (and there is no reason given in the text for such a limitation, given the assimilation of harmful speech to conduct), then we can reply in the domain of speech. Let us get rid of laws against false advertising and unlicensed medical advice, for they close the space within which poisoned consumers and mutilated patients can perform their resistance! Again, if Butler does not approve of these extensions, she needs to make an argument that divides her cases from these cases, and it is not clear that her position permits her to make such a distinction.

For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.

VI.

When we consider the quietism inherent in Butler’s writing, we have some keys to understanding Butler’s influential fascination with drag and cross-dressing as paradigms of feminist resistance. Butler’s followers understand her account of drag to imply that such performances are ways for women to be daring and subversive. I am unaware of any attempt by Butler to repudiate such readings.

But what is going on here? The woman dressed mannishly is hardly a new figure. Indeed, even when she was relatively new, in the nineteenth century, she was in another way quite old, for she simply replicated in the lesbian world the existing stereotypes and hierarchies of male-female society. What, we may well ask, is parodic subversion in this area, and what a kind of prosperous middle-class acceptance? Isn’t hierarchy in drag still hierarchy? And is it really true (as The Psychic Life of Power would seem to conclude) that domination and subordination are the roles that women must play in every sphere, and if not subordination, then mannish domination?

In short, cross-dressing for women is a tired old script--as Butler herself informs us. Yet she would have us see the script as subverted, made new, by the cross-dresser’s knowing symbolic sartorial gestures; but again we must wonder about the newness, and even the subversiveness. Consider Andrea Dworkin’s parody (in her novel Mercy) of a Butlerish parodic feminist, who announces from her posture of secure academic comfort:

The notion that bad things happen is both propagandistic and inadequate…. To understand a woman’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure dimensions of pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs--the clothes that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent conformity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency of signs, an obdurate appearance of conformity that simply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs.

In prose quite unlike Butler’s, this passage captures the ambivalence of the implied author of some of Butler’s writings, who delights in her violative practice while turning her theoretical eye resolutely away from the material suffering of women who are hungry, illiterate, violated, beaten. There is no victim. There is only an insufficiency of signs.

Butler suggests to her readers that this sly send-up of the status quo is the only script for resistance that life offers. Well, no. Besides offering many other ways to be human in one’s personal life, beyond traditional norms of domination and subservience, life also offers many scripts for resistance that do not focus narcissistically on personal self-presentation. Such scripts involve feminists (and others, of course) in building laws and institutions, without much concern for how a woman displays her own body and its gendered nature: in short, they involve working for others who are suffering.

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. Even in America, however, it is possible for theorists to be dedicated to the public good and to achieve something through that effort.

Many feminists in America are still theorizing in a way that supports material change and responds to the situation of the most oppressed. Increasingly, however, the academic and cultural trend is toward the pessimistic flirtatiousness represented by the theorizing of Butler and her followers. Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn’t it exciting and sexy?

In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler’s ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.

Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.

[floatingbook]

The place of lesbians in women’s liberation and lesbophobia (1/2)

- Reading: Tales of the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay (part 2 here) At Karla Jay’s first Redstockings gathering:

“I would have never dared to question the leaders of a group I wanted to join. But after the [Redstockings] manifesto had been handed around, a woman named Rita Mae Brown, whom I knew slightly from NYU, pushed into the center of the room from her position in the doorway to take issue with Redstockings, even though it was her first meeting. Why, she demanded, didn’t Redstockings have a position on gay women? She began to argue that lesbian relationships were as important for a feminist group to embrace as the struggle to change men.” p. 43-44

The Redstockings completely forgetting to mention lesbians or to even have an opinion on the subject ready to be shared show how much of an afterthought we lesbians have always been in women’s liberation movement. We might only represent a fraction of women, but we still are women, and as such deserve liberation as much as any other straight women. The “struggle to change men” means having to interact, having to implicate oneself in reforming them. And what of women who would have nothing to do with their oppressors? What of women who do not want to spend all their energy and strength on the thankless task of making men understand that women are humans too?

“Rita [Mae Brown] alone had the courage to speak up at that Redstockings’ meeting, long before anyone else in New York’s feminist circles dared to be openly gay. Back then, apart from early activists such as Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, and the other pioneering women of Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), few dared to admit in a public setting that they were lesbians. It was one thing to hang out in a gay bar where anyone simply assumed similar sexual proclivities or to be open in a gay student organization. It was quite another to announce one’s lesbianism and then demand it take center stage in a room full of straight feminists who were likely to be heterosexist (the word “homophobia” came later) and who had just issued an ultimatum to keep on sleeping with men as part of a program to mend the oppressors’ ways. Rita’s sharp challenge made Redstockings’ program seem quixotic to the point of being delusional: Were these women the oppressed or the oppressors?” p. 44

It’s a shame that being a lesbian had to remain a secret, on pain of being discriminated against. As lesbians, we have a unique outlook on the world around us and on men especially. We have way less interest in maintaining the status quo or in retaining any kind of ties with men. Our outlook on relationships with men are less tinted by the rosy lenses of the patriarchal promise of a happy-ever-after made of marriage and a brood of kids. Our very reasoning when it comes to women’s liberation is often less reformist than separatist; and as such our ideas are despised. Straight women wishing for romantic love cannot accept our conclusions that women would be better off independent from our oppressors.

“The leaders of Redstockings were disturbed and threatened by Rita [Mae Brown]’s behavior. They turned the conversation back around to men as our oppressors. Still, they looked uncomfortable. After all, Rita was calling them her oppressors when they were insisting that women like them (and us) were the most oppressed on earth. One of the main tenets of the “Redstockings Manifesto” was, “We identify the agents of our oppression as men… All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc. ) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest.” Although the group’s members identified with “the poorest, most brutally exploited women,” they would have found it counter productive, to put it mildly, to be forced to contemplate the ways that working-class women, disabled women, or Third World women (as we called women of coloraturas) were far worse off than someone like Kathie [Sarachild], who had attended Radcliffe College. By formulating a Marxist class analysis that emphasized unity among all women and foregrounded sexism as the tool to analyze other oppressions, they had hoped to quell demands by other women that double and triple oppressions receive priority.” p. 45

This kind of behaviour is obviously one of the reasons that led Kimberlé Crenshaw to pen down her vision of intersectionality in feminism. The founders of Redstockings and writers of its manifesto were mostly white, straight, university-educated women who had never and would never be oppressed on account of their sexual orientation, skin colour, social class or disability. As a result, the conclusions they draw in their theory can only be flawed and short-sighted. Their conclusions might be insightful, but only for a specific type of women. And according to Karla Jay, they seemed reluctant to widen their scope or take into account the experience of women different from them. While Rita Mae Brown (and other lesbians that later spoke up) offered them the opportunity to reflect on what they had concluded and make their reasoning better, more pragmatic, more adapted to the various circumstances of the women around them, they stood on their positions and dismissed lesbian concerns.

“Lesbianism was a more widely discussed issue than clashs and labor. Rita Mae Brown’s vociferous arrival in Redstockings had sparked discussion in Group X [the founding Redstockings cell], although reactions were mixed. Irene Peslikis, for one, was emboldened to admit to a long-term lesbian affair that Group X knew nothing about. But other members of Group X, echoing Betty Friedan’s assertion that lesbians were a “lavender menace,” began to blame gay women for causing dissension in the group and accused them of being “antifeminists.” Katie Sarachild wrote in Feminist Revolution that “many lesbians complained that they were excluded from the movement in the beginning often by simple virtue of the fact that the women in it spent so much time talking about such boring or irrelevant or disturbing to them subjects as sex with men, getting men to do the housework, and such related problems as abortions and childcare.”

What she and many other heterosexist Redstockings overlooked was that lesbians had been raised in families with men, had usually had sexual relationships with men, had worked with men, and sometimes lived with male roommates. Several lesbians I knew had children from previous marriages. What the straight women couldn’t see was that many Redstockings talked about men all the time the way dieters obsess about food. There were times when some of us, including a few of the heterosexuals, felt it would be more productive to focus on ways in which women could interact with one another positively.

The current of homophobia made many new members, including me, reluctant to mention homosexual experiences to the group. “ p. 65-66

Some straight members of Redstockings dismissed lesbians experiences as irrelevant to women’s liberation under the assumptions that because lesbians are not attracted to men and therefore would not engage in relationships with them in an ideal world, and so were not interacting with the male oppressor. In our world, this is a completely delusional assertion. Even in separatist communes, lesbians still have to deal with the law of the land, which has so far mostly been written and enacted by men. Lesbians too have fathers and brothers; lesbians too get sick and need to go to the hospital; lesbians too go out and use the amenities offered by society; lesbians too can be harassed and attacked by men. So women’s liberation concerns us as much as it does straight women, and our experiences with men and of sexism should not be dismissed as irrelevant.

And our experiences as lesbians tell us that straight women concerned with women’s liberation are most likely wasting their energy when they focus on trying to change men. Yes, these kind of discussions should take place, especially between women who do not want to renounce relationships with men; but lesbians are right to wonder why such subjects often take center place in women’s liberation movement.

Continued here in part 2.

[star-anise]

why would your social environment affect if you identify as a woman or nb?

I don’t know if you meant it to be, but this is a delightful question. I am going to be a complete nerd for 2k+ words at you.

“Gender” is distinct from “sex” because it’s not a body’s physical characteristics, it’s how society classifies and interprets that body. Sex is “That person has a vagina.” Gender is “This is a blend of society’s expectations about what bodies with vaginas are like, social expectations of how people with vaginas do or might or should act, behave, and feel, the actual lived experiences of people with vaginas, and a twist of lemon for zest.” Concepts of gender and what is “manly” and “womanly” can vary a lot. They’re social values, like “normal” or “legal” or “beautiful”, and they vary all the time. How well you fit your gender role depends a lot on how “gender” is defined.

800 years ago in Europe the general perception was that women were sinful, sensual, lustful people who required frequent sex and liked watching bloodsport. 200 years ago, the British aristocracy thought women were pure, innocent beings of moral purity with no sexual desire who fainted at the sight of blood. These days, we think differently in entirely new directions.

But this gets even more complicated, in part because human experience is really diverse and society’s narratives have to account for that. So 200 years ago, those beliefs about femininity being delicate and dainty and frail only really applied to women with aristocratic lineages, and “the lower classes” of women were believed to be vulgar, coarse, sexual, and earthy, which “explained” why they performed hard physical labor or worked as prostitutes.

Being trans or nonbinary isn’t just or even primarily about what characteristics you want your body to have. It’s about how you want to define yourself and be interpreted and interacted with by other people.

The writer Sylvia Plath lived 1932-1963, and she said:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars–to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording–all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.”

She was from upper-middle-class Massachusetts, the child of a university professor. A lot of those things she was “prohibited” from doing weren’t things each and every woman was prohibited from doing; they were things women of her class weren’t allowed to do. The daughters and sisters and wives of sailors and soldiers, women who worked in hotels and ran rooming houses, barmaids and sex workers, got to anonymously and invisibly observe those men, after all. They just couldn’t do it at the same time they tried to meet the standards educated Bostonians of the 1950s had for nice young women.

Failure to understand how diverse womanhood is has always been one of feminism’s biggest weaknesses. The Second Wave of feminism was started mostly by prosperous university-educated white women, since they were the people with the time and money and resources to write and read books and attend conferences about “women’s issues”. And they assumed that their issues were female issues. That they were the default of femaleness, and could assume every woman had roughly the same experience as them.

So, for example, middle-class white women in post-WWII USA were expected to stay home all the time and look after their children. Feminists concluded that this was isolating and oppressive, and they’d like the freedom to pursue lives, careers, and interests outside of the home. They vigorously pursued the right to be freed from their domestic and maternal duties.

But in their society, these experiences were not generally shared by Black and/or poor women, who, like their mothers, did not have the luxury of spending copious amounts of leisure time with their children; they had to work to earn enough money to survive on, which meant working on farms, in factories, or as cooks, maids, or nannies for rich white women who wanted the freedom to pursue lives outside the home. They tended to feel that they would like to have the option of staying home and playing with their babies all day. 

This is not to say none of the first group enjoyed domestic lives, or that none of the second group wanted non-domestic careers; it’s just that the first group formed the face and the basic assumptions of feminism, and the second group struggled to get a seat at the table.

There’s this phenomenon called “cultural feminism” that’s an attitude that crops up among feminists from time to time (or grows on them, like fungus) that holds that women have a “feminine essence”, a quasi-spiritual “nature” that is deeply distinct from the “masculine essence” of men. This is one of the concepts powering lesbian separatism: the idea that because women are so fundamentally different from men, a society of all women will be fundamentally different in nature from a society that includes men.

But, well, the problem cultural feminism generally has is with how it achieves its definition of “female nature”. The view tends to be that women are kinder, more moral, more collectivist, more community-minded, and less prone to violence. 

And cultural feminists tend to HATE people who believe in the social construction of gender, because we tend to cross our arms and go, “Nah, sis, that’s a frappe of misused statistics and The Angel In the House with some wishful thinking as a garnish. That’s how you feel about what womanhood is. It’s fair enough for you, but you’re trying to apply it to the entire human species. That’s got less intellectual rigor and sociological validity than my morning oatmeal.” Hence the radfem insistence that gender theorists like me SHUT UP and gender quite flatly DOESN’T EXIST. It’s a MADE-UP TERM, and people should STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. (And go back to taking about immutable, naturally-occuring phenomena, one supposes, like the banking system and Western literary canon.)

Because seriously, when you look at real actual women, you will see that some of us can be very selfish, while others are altruistic; some think being a woman means abhorring all violence forever, and others think being a woman means being willing to fight and die to protect the people you love. As groups men and women have different average levels of certain qualities, but it’s not like we don’t share a lot in common. The distribution of “male” and “female” traits doesn’t tend to mean two completely separate sets of characteristics; they tend to be more like two overlapping bell curves.

So, like I said, I grew up largely in rural, working-class Western Canadian society. My relatives tend to be tradesmen like carpenters, welders, or plumbers, or else ranchers and farmers. I was raised by a mother who came of age during the big push for Women’s Lib. So in the culture in which I was raised, it was very normal and in some ways rewarded (though in other ways punished) for women to have short hair, wear flannel and jeans, drive a big truck, play rough contact sports, use power tools, pitch in with farmwork, use guns, and drink beer. “Traditional femininity” was a fascinating foreign culture my grandmother aspired to, and I loved nonsense like polishing the silver (it’s a very satisfying pastime) but that was just another one of my weird hobbies, like sewing fairy clothes out of flower petals and collecting toy horses.

Within the standards of the society I was raised in, I am a decently feminine woman. I’m obviously not a “girly girl”, someone who wears makeup and dresses in ways that privilege beauty over practicality, but I have a long ponytail of hair and when I go to Mark’s Work Wearhouse, I shop in the women’s section. We know what “butch” is and I ain’t it.

But through my friendships and my career, I’ve gotten experiences among cultures you wouldn’t think would be too different–we’re all still white North Americans!–but which felt bizarre and alien, and ate away at the sense of self I’d grown up in. In the USA’s northeast, the people I met had the kind of access to communities with social clout, intellectual resources, and political power I hadn’t quite believed existed before I saw them. There really were people who knew politicians and potential employers socially before they ever had to apply to a job or ask for political assistance; there were people who really did propose projects to influential businessmen or academics at cocktail parties; they really did things like fundraise tens of thousands of dollars for a charity by asking fifty of their friends to donate, or start a business with a $2mil personal loan from a relative.

And in those societies, femininity was so different and so foreign. I’d grown up seeing femininity as a way of assigning tasks to get the work done; in these new circles, it was performative in a way that was entirely unique and astounding to me. A boss really would offer you a starting salary $10k higher than they might have if you wore high heels instead of flats. You really would be more likely to get a job if you wore makeup. And your ability to curate social connections in the halls of power really was influenced by how nice of a Christmas party you could throw. These women I met were being held, daily, to a standard of femininity higher than that performed by anyone in my 100 most immediate relatives.

So when girls from Seven Sisters schools talked about how for them, dressing how I dressed every day (jeans, boots, tee, button-up shirt, no makeup, no hair product) was “bucking gendered expectations” and “being unfeminine”, I began to feel totally unmoored. When I realized that I, who absolutely know only 5% as much about power tools and construction as my relatives in the trades, was more suited to take a hammer and wade in there than not just the “empowered” women but the self-professed “handy” men there, I didn’t know how to understand it. I felt like I was… a woman who knew how to do carpentry projects, not “totally butch” the way some people (approvingly) called me.

And, well, at home in Alberta I was generally seen as a sweet and gentle girl with an occasional stubborn streak or precocious moment, but apparently by the standards of Southern states like Georgia and Alabama I am like, 100x more blunt, assertive, and inconsiderate of men’s feelings than women typically feel they have to be.

And this is still all just US/Canadian white women.

And like I said, after years of this, I came home (from BC, where I encountered MORE OTHER weird and alien social constructs, though generally more around class and politics than gender) to Alberta, and I went to what is, for Alberta, a super hippy liberal church, and I helped prepare the after-service tea among women with unstyled hair and no makeup  who wore jeans and sensible shoes, and listened to them talk about their work in municipal water management and ICU nursing, and it felt like something inside my chest slid back into place, because I understood myself as a woman again, and not some alien thing floating outside the expectations of the society I was in with a chestful of opinions no one around me would understand, suddenly all made sense again.

I mean, that’s by no means an endorsement for aspirational middle class rural Alberta as the ideal gender utopia. (Alberta is the Texas of Canada.) I just felt comfortable inside because it’s the culture where I found a definition of myself and my gender I could live with, because its boundaries of what’s considered “female” were broad enough to hold all the parts of me I felt like I needed to express. I have a lot of friends who grew up here, or in families like mine, and don’t feel at all happy with its gender boundaries. And even as I’m comfortable being a woman here, I still want to push and transform it, to make it even more feminist and politically left and decolonized.

TERFs try to claim that trans and nonbinary people reinforce the gender identity, but in my experience, it’s feminists who claim male and female are immutable and incompatible do that. It’s trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people who, simply by performing their genders in public, make people realize just how bullshit innate theories of gender are.. Society is going to want to gender them in certain ways and involve them in certain dynamics (”Hey ladies, those fellas, amirite?”) and they’re going, “Nope. Not me. Cut it out.” I’ve seen a lot of cis people who will quietly admit they do think men and women are different because that’s just reality, watch someone they know transition, and suddenly go, “Oh my god, I get it now.”

Like yes, this is me being coldly political and thinking about people as examples to make a political point. Everyone’s valid and can do what they want, but some things are just easier for potential converts to wrap their minds around.. “I’m sorting through toys to give to Shelly’s baby. He probably won’t want a princess crown, huh?” “I actually know several people who were considered boys when they were babies and never got one, and are making up for all their lost princess crown time now as adults. You never know what he’ll be into when he grows up.” “…Okay, point. I’ll throw it in there.” Trans and enby people disrupt gender in a really powerful back-of-the-brain way where people suddenly see how much leeway there is between gender and sex.

I honestly believe supporting trans and enby people and queering gender until it’s a macrame project instead of a spectrum are how we’ll get to a gender-free utopia. I think cultural feminism is just the same old shit, inverted. (Confession: in my head, I pronounce “cultural” with emphasis on the “cult” part.) 

I think feminism is like a lot of emergency response groups: Our job is to put ourselves out of a job. It’s not a good thing if gender discrimination is still prevalent and harmful 200 years from now! Obviously we’re not there yet and calls to pack it in and go home are overrated, but as the problem disappears into its solution, we have to accept that our old ways of looking at the world have to shift.

[gnosticgnoob]

Variations on a Theme: "The Weird vs The Quantifiable" -- Aggregated Commentary from within the Gutenberg Galaxy

The pursuit of examining the world through philosophy, mathematics, and science tends to be seen as expanding the borders of what is known and quantified, conquering the territory of what is not yet known. In this pursuit, the investigator encounters wonder or the "weird", and what ideologically separates some philosophers and scientists from others is whether the investigator sets aside the weird as a misunderstood quirk of what is not yet known but still knowable, or the investigator takes into account the weird as a fundamental, permanent attribute of the landscape of inquiry that may perhaps always represent factors which intrinsically and inescapably evade knowledge and literary explanation, not as a bug of our understanding but as a feature of the true ontological state of affairs. The former mindset supposes that with more time and rigor, our inquiry will finally arrive at a sort of epistemological/ontological "bedrock" that dispels any sense of the bizarre, the latter treats scientific inquiry itself as necessitating the injection of a sort of subjective poetry or play to adequately do justice to the full reality of what is observed and described for our purposes, without ever expecting that we will hit such bedrock. Materialism/scientism perhaps would posit that any inclusion of the mystical or poetic in the language we use to describe the world is inappropriate, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, or maladaptive; the mystic posits conversely that to exclude the poetic and not make room for the weird is maladaptive.

I have here a collection of excerpts from other thinkers that I think work together to allude to the mystical as a permanent fixture of our endeavors for clarification through experimentation and language, or at least suggest that a more "mystical" mindset will always be more useful than one that is conversely more in the vein of materialism/scientism trying to arrive at a "final technical vocabulary":

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“We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” --Gregory Bateson, English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941- 1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954 - 1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences; he was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology.

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“The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language. Language is very, very mysterious. It is true magic. People run all over the place looking for paranormal abilities, but notice that when I speak if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary, that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought. Your understanding of my words. Telepathy exists; it is just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.” --Terence McKenna, "Eros And The Eschaton". McKenna was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. -------------------------------------

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” --Niels Bohr, Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. -------------------------------------

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” --Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, and he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe. -------------------------------------

“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” --Max Planck, German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory; the discovery of Planck's constant enabled him to define a new universal set of physical units (such as the Planck length and the Planck mass), all based on fundamental physical constants upon which much of quantum theory is based. -------------------------------------

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” --Daniel Dennett, American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. A member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. -------------------------------------

“Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream.” --Michel Foucault, French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. -------------------------------------

“When the mind projects names and concepts on what is seen through direct perception, confusion and delusion result.” --Patanjali, sage in Hinduism, thought to be the author of a number of Sanskrit works. The greatest of these are the Yoga Sutras, a classical yoga text. -------------------------------------

“The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.” --Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911). Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe. Heart of Darkness is among is most famous works. Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. -------------------------------------

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” --Richard P. Feynman, American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public as a member of the commission that investigated the Challenger shuttle disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. -------------------------------------

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” --Michel Foucault -------------------------------------

“In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as ‘dazzling obscurity,’ 'whispering silence,’ 'teeming desert,’ are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. “He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,’ and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana…. When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer…. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE…. And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.… Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat.” (H.P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence). These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.” --William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential U.S. philosophers, and has been labeled the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, as well as former US President Jimmy Carter. -------------------------------------

“Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. … Whenever the Westerner hears the word ‘psychological’, it always sounds to him like ‘only psychological.’” --Carl Jung, “Psyche and Symbol”. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, during which time he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements, a process which Jung considered to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. -------------------------------------

“God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved.” --Carl Jung -------------------------------------

“Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as ‘social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,’ which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake…. He also commits the blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” --Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual, Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political.

[themyskira]

Wonder Woman: Earth One, Vol 2 - Part 1

I’m going to break this into a few parts, because it turned out I had a bit to say. I’ll start with my overall impressions, then dive into the spoilery recap.

General thoughts: Next verse, same as the first.

Grant Morrison purports to want to explore Marston’s ideas, but he’s more interested in the kooky, kinky trappings than the sentiment behind them.

Marston was radical and progressive in his time. Writing in the 1940s, he told his readers that women were men’s equals — and even superiors! — in every way. He told young girls there was no limit to what they could do. His stories promoted love over hatred, peace over violence, rehabilitation over retribution.

If Morrison had taken that bold sentiment and reimagined it through a lens of modern society and feminism in 2018, he might have had a compelling story to tell. Instead, he takes Marston’s ideas as he understands them and transplants them wholesale into a time in which they’re no longer radical and progressive, but rather backward and out-of-step with modern intersectional feminism, and then proceeds to ask such deep, incisive questions as “yes but realistically could we actually replace all world governments with a matriarchy?????”

He never truly deconstructs any of Marston’s ideas, just parrots phrases like “submission to loving authority” a lot and raises questions without ever making a decent attempt at answering them. To be fair, part of the problem is that he’s simply trying to do too much at once: juggling parallel stories in Themyscira and Man’s World, an interrogation of the Amazons’ philosophies and the introduction of three new antagonists and the tensions they cause, all within a limited page count, Morrison is unable to devote the necessary time to properly developing any of them. It’s no wonder the result is so half-baked.

But hey, just throw in a bunch of vagina planes and a dusting of kink and watch as everyone crows over how subversive he is.

Yannick Paquette’s artwork is still beautiful. His page layouts are still dynamic and expressive, and his character designs are still lovely. Diana in particular gets a variety of very cool outfits, including a beautiful modest costume for a trip to the Middle East.

But he still can’t shake his tendency towards drawing women’s bodies in weirdly-contorted poses with bizarre pornfaces. Wonder Woman shouldn’t look like she’s orgasming as she’s leaping into battle, ffs.

Oh, and the series is still being edited by noted serial sexual harasser Eddie Berganza. HASHTAG FEMINISM!

Let’s get into the recap.

Content warning for some skeevy mind control content and general discussion of the gender essentialist, body-shaming, TERFy attitudes of Morrison’s Amazons.

The story opens with a flashback to 1942, with Paula von Gunther leading a Nazi invasion of Themyscira, and god I’m already so tired.

idk, I mean, I get that Nazis were a major Golden Age antagonist, and Morrison is harking back to that. But there’s a broader historical and cultural context to consider. Cartoonish Nazi villains in patriotic WWII-era American comics carried very different associations than they do in 2018, in the midst of a presidency steeped in white supremacy and hate speech, on the eve of a midterm election in which a record number of neo-Nazis are standing for office, at a time when hate groups are surging, when migrant children are being separated from their families and held in detention camps— just. Not a time when I want to be reading about cartoonish super-Nazis, personally.

And I don’t really see why they necessarily need to be this story? The battle serves to illustrate how Amazons combat and… “rehabilitate”… their adversaries. Paula ultimately serves as a plot device. Couldn’t that maybe have been achieved without Nazis?

Anyway, Paula announces that she is claiming the island for the Third Reich, and Hippolyta is like “lol no”.

Okay, that part I like. Evil army storms the island, backed by guns and warships, surround a half-dozen barely-armed women… who all but roll their eyes. ‘Pfft, children. Fine, if you want to play this game…’ And the evil army can only gape in bewilderment as the women proceed to take them apart in minutes.

But this is where it gets weird.

The Amazons fire a purple ray at all of the Nazis, which… makes them all drop their weapons and start screaming “YES!” orgasmically?

Hippolyta tells Paula that the soldiers “will be taken to the Space Transformer. They will be transported to Aphrodite’s world where Queen Desira and her butterfly-winged Venus Girls wait to purge them of their need for conflict. They will be taught to submit to loving authority. They will learn to embrace peace and obedience. They will be as happy as men can be.”

Paula attacks Hippolyta, rips off her magic girdle and heaves a great boulder over her head— wait, were we supposed to know that Paula had superpowers? That seems like something that should have been flagged.

She effortlessly takes down the Amazons who rush to the queen’s defence and takes a moment to cackle villainously. “Behold the pride of Germany! The ultimate daughter of the thousand-year-empire of Adolf Hitler!” To which Hippolyta— okay, I like this part, too.

Hippolyta calmly gets to her feet and puts Paula in a stranglehold. “We are the Amazons of myth, my dear! I am Queen Hippolyta eternal.” She swiftly and efficiently brings Paula to her knees.

But, welp, never mind, it’s about to get fucking creepy again.

Hippolyta forces Paula into “the Venus Girdle”, a device that “charges every body cell with vitalising currents and harmonises the brain, encouraging obedience.”

Paula: Let me go! What is that? What are you doing? Hippolyta: The Venus Girdle? It charges every body cell with vitalising currents and harmonises the brain, encouraging obedience. A dainty thing, is it not? Paula: I won’t— I won’t— You can’t control me— you can’t— can’t make me— make me... oh… make me…

Paula: nmmuhhh… What’s happening? My Nazi ideals— slipping away— they— they don’t make any sense now… I— I thought— I thought— I was strong. What’s wrong with me? I’m so weak— I must be weak to wish to serve weak, cruel men— like— like Herr Hitler— I— I— Hippolyta: If you truly long to be a slave to the ideas of others, well… we can find a loving mistress to help you explore your desires in a healthier context. Paula: Yes. Yes! My queen— [sob] —how can you ever forgive me? How wise of you to know— to know this is all I ever wanted! Hippolyta: Devote yourself to me by following the Amazon Code. Go with out sweet Mala to Improvement Island. There you will come to know yourself until the Venus Girdle is no longer required.

Paula: But all I want is to serve you, my queen! I love you! Please don’t turn your back on me!

Basically, Hippolyta forcibly uses a mind-altering device on Paula that alters her brain chemistry to make her placid, compliant and suggestible, then immediately washes her hands of her.

So… let’s talk about this, because I think it strikes at the heart of the problems with Wonder Woman: Earth One.

Queen Desira, the Venus Girls, magnetic golden Venus Girdles that “harmonise the brain” — all these things are drawn from Golden Age Wondy comics cowritten by Marston and his collaborator Joye Kelly. Marston played with mind control a lot in his stories, and not all of it came from the bad guys.

Morrison’s bold, subversive approach to these story elements is to export them wholesale into the present day and force us to feel uncomfortable about them.

In other words, he’s taking some of the weirder and more fucked up story elements from a collection of comics that are widely agreed to be very weird, and then plonking it before your readers and asking, ‘hey guys, have you ever considered… that this might be weird and fucked up???’

There’s nothing clever or insightful about that. And there’s certainly nothing groundbreaking about a cis white male writer imagining a fictitious feminist dystopia where women strip away men’s free will.

Like, if you really want to be subversive with Marston’s Wonder Woman, how about you start by hiring a woman to write it? Why not see what this iconic feminist hero conceived by a cis white man in the 1940s and written almost exclusively by cis white men for over 75 years might look like if she were reimagined and reinterpreted by LGBTI women, by women of colour? By the women left out of those original comics?

That would be subversive. Morrison is just being a smartarse.

So yeah, Hippolyta turns her back on the helpless, brainwashed, lovesick Paula and walks over to Diana, who’s defied her mother’s orders and run down from the palace to get a glimpse of the action. She’s full of questions; Hippolyta brushes them off with the usual (for Morrison’s Amazons) ‘men are shit’ line.

There’s a moment where Paula and Diana meet eyes from across the beach, and each asks, “who is she?” Diana is simply curious; Paula is instantly lovestruck.

Paula: That girl… the image of my queen.

This looks like foreshadowing, but spoilers: it goes absolutely nowhere.

Sidenote: If the Amazons deal with invaders by brainwashing them, why did they want to kill Steve Trevor in Volume One?

Cut to present-day America, where a room of faceless men discuss the threat posed by the Amazons and their superior technology, which they assume extends to deadly weaponry. The only in they have with the Amazons is Wonder Woman, and to get through her defences they’ve called in “an expert in female psychology”, aka a misogynistic monster.

Doctor Psycho: Gentlemen. She may be strong and tough and smart and beautiful… but she’s just a woman. I never met one I couldn’t break.

Oh, goody.

Cut to a cute splash page of Diana playing baseball. She gets a lot of great outfits in this book.

She’s also clearly making an impact in Man’s World; her face is plastered across every magazine, and people flock to hear her speak.

A Q&A sessions serves as a thinly-veiled opportunity for Morrison to answer some of the criticisms of the first book. His response leaves something to be desired.

“Amazon training can make any of you into a Wonder Woman,” says Diana. We teach a system of physical and psychological health and vitality. The grace and beauty of Aphrodite, the skill and wisdom of Athena.”

Woman: What about Wonder trans women? Is there room for people like me in your utopia? Diana: There’s room for everyone. The Amazon Code was evolved by women over thousands of years and outlines a progressive, pacifist way of living and thinking that anyone can follow.

I’m sorry, but that’s a fucking bullshit answer. It’s a weak, superficial gesture towards inclusiveness that conspicuously fails to express any real support or solidarity.

And depressingly, this is 100% in-character for Earth One Diana, because Morrison’s Amazons? are absolutely TERFs. As with the mind control content, Morrison has exported Marston’s 1940s binaristic gender essentialism unchanged into the 21st century in order to ask searing questions like ‘hey but what if??? the idea that women are genetically more suited to ruling??? is simplistic and flawed?????’ But the most he’ll engage with the genuinely insidious implications around the exclusion of trans and nonbinary people is a smiling noncommittal, ‘Are trans people welcome? My friend, everyone is welcome! No further questions!’

Morrison’s Wonder Woman displays a profound disregard of context. He ignores not only the cultural, historical and individual contexts that shaped the original 1940s Wonder Woman, but also the contexts of the time in which he’s currently writing and the cultural space that Wondy has come to inhabit today as a feminist and LGBT icon.

Removed from context, Morrison is simply taking a hero who traditionally hails from an advanced utopian society, taking another look at the views that society actually espouses, and reframing her as a well-meaning but naive hero from an advanced but deeply flawed and unsettling society.

In context, he’s doing exactly what Brian Azzarello did in turning the Amazons into murderous man-hating monsters, just with more kink and vagina planes.

Woman 2: Umm, there’s a lot of stuff on social media about how you dress provocatively and promote an unrealistic body type, which is basically setting a bad example for women. I mean, the stuff you do is amazing and all, it’s just… does any of the criticism bother you? Diana: I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ‘unrealistic’ body shape. My own body is the result of diet, exercise and… um… sophisticated genetic engineering. Otherwise, I dress as I please.

Volume One made it clear that all Amazons have the physique of supermodels, and when they encounter the diverse body types of the women in our world, they are disgusted and respond with body-shaming insults. Here, Diana again avoids voicing any actual support (she doesn’t say that all women’s bodies are beautiful and valid, she suggests that her body type is not unrealistic), while also throwing out eugenics as a reason for the lack of body diversity among the Amazons. Oh good, I was hoping we’d get more Nazi parallels!

Finally, a militant white feminist stands up and observes that if the Amazons are capable of half of what Diana says they are, then they could dismantle the patriarchy overnight — so why is Diana wasting time giving philosophy lectures? “You can control people’s minds with that lasso of yours. Like you did with that dude on TV— so why can’t you put a lasso ‘round the whole world?”

Afterwards, talking to Beth Candy, Diana’s like, ‘gosh, Beth, I’ve never seriously thought about world domination before, but maybe it is time to consider stripping all mortals of their free will, dismantling all nations and compelling everybody on the planet to bow down before Amazonia.’

Then Diana gets on her mental radio and calls her mother, confessing her doubts about her mission.

It was around this point in the book that the Amazons’ dialogue began to grate on me. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was at first. Every line read like a ceremonious pronouncement. They used antiquated syntax and words, like “whole systems … must o’erturned be” and “she did, without due caution, this, her island home, depart!”. Even Diana would become infected with it whenever she was speaking to them. It felt like they weren’t so much conversing as they were reciting… 

...verse… 

oh my god, that motherfucker.

Surely he hadn’t.

I scanned the dialogue again. I double-checked it.

He had.

Grant Morrison, that obscenely pretentious wanker, wrote all of the Amazons’ dialogue in dactylic hexameter.

For fuck’s sake.

After finishing her call with Diana, Hippolyta learns that somebody has vandalised one of the temples with the symbol of “a backward-turning sun”, i.e. a swastika. Unseen by everybody, Paula breaks into Hippolyta’s palace.

[serenagaywaterford]

#5 - Oh man, reading your latest chapter, lots of tension, I caught myself mouthing, ‘don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’. ...Aaaaand, she’s done it. Fuck! No idea where it’s going at all, good stuff! Anyway, this also made me think, how much blame do the refugees place on Serena individually? Everyone is at least okay sitting in the same room with her, begrudgingly, of course, but still. They don’t know how cruel she was to June, and if they don’t think she’s directly responsible for

the rise of Gilead, I guess they can tolerate to a degree. I am still not clear on how involved she was, either. She was the face of SOJ in the beginning, then got pushed aside eventually. We know she was pushing for “fulfilling one’s biological destiny”, to be honest, in the face of extinction, it’s not really an outrageous stance(I’d let the human race die out, but surely I am in the minority). And she did help write the law to take away women’s right to read and write. So that’s reallyfucked up, but what exactly is “help”, that could go a lot of different ways, I think. Anything else? Which happened first, the theater scene where they found out the bombing of 3 branches? Or when she was about to give her speech, and was told by Fred they said no thanks. That’ll determine whether she was part of the planning, maybe? Anyway, I am planning a rewatch before season 3 premiere, hopefully I learn something new...

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>:DDDDD 

Heh. I’m glad it came out like that cos that’s what I felt writing it!!! I was hoping it came across the way I wanted. Like, you just really don’t want this dumbass to pull her usual shit... but alas...

You know, I’ve wondered that myself--just in general, even in canon. Cos the only thing we really see is 2x09 and none of the Osborne crew seem to particularly notice Serena whatsoever. They’re focused on Fred and his demonself. Luke and Moira are specifically targeting him and sort of just... ignore Serena. So, I would assume there’s sort of “Well, she’s just his wife.” But then when you think about Moira, she was way more informed than Luke and you’d think she’d know Serena was the face of the movement at the beginning at least. Hanging out with activists and feminists like Holly, you’d think Moira would be well aware of Serena’s famous “domestic feminist” book and her role in the whole movement that eventually led to Gilead down the line. Even in my most basic feminist philosophy courses, we read pieces and books by anti-feminist writers. 

So Moira staying completely schtum over Serena was interesting. Either she doesn’t know, or doesn’t think Serena contributions were that influential, or she doesn’t care cos Fred is the worse of the two. She is strictly focused on Fred. I think Moira could reasonably assume that June’s suffered because of Serena, as any Handmaid will undoubtedly suffer as a Wife just stands idly by--at best, and aggressively participates in her abuse at worst. Moira has no way of knowing which Serena was without speaking to June about it. I think she could assume Serena’s not just a meek wallflower but regardless, in canon, Moira seems to not really care about Serena one way or the other. She’s a nonentity.

I’m also unsure exactly what the Canadians (esp. the govt) know. They seem to know about what happens in Gilead but how much of Serena’s specific contributions? Like there are 3 people who hint at things towards Serena: Tuello, the Foreign Affairs minister, and the lady with the kid at the elevator. The latter two could easily be talking merely about Serena being an active perpetrator of terrible things against women, someone who maintains the status quo.

Tuello’s the only one who mentions that she’s betrayed her country, and he’s “read a lot about her”. But what any of that really means and more importantly, whether he was being honest about her reward for flipping on Gilead is debateable. He seemed genuine in giving her the offer of freedom, writing a book, Hawaii, and a baby. They clearly don’t think she’s a terrible war criminal if they’re gonna let her off the hook that easily. The propaganda and intel she could give them is apparently worth way more than holding a criminal accountable. So to me, iff he’s not lying just to get her onto American soil where they can put her on trial and execute her, that would imply that either the US government doesn’t know how involved she was in the bombing of DC, or they don’t care cos she’s worth more as a tool rather than an example, or she wasn’t actually that involved and they know it. 

Cos, really, all we know is she and Fred talked about bombing DC--somehow--but again, by that point it seemed Serena was out of the important discussions anyway cos Fred was bitching about how the SOJ don’t have any balls and he was waiting on them for approval. And that was also before she wrote a second book (that she would never end up needing to write). So, really how much did Serena participate in the overthrow? Did she at all other than chatting about it with Fred? Was it her idea that he ran up the flagpole to the committee bigwigs? (I suspect this option was the case. She seems much more certain about it than he does, and he says “we proposed”. This would also explain why no one really knows her full involvement cos it was all done via Fred, like everything). We already know she wasn’t involved in anything related to Handmaids, or the Colonies, or basically any of the actual working reality of Gilead. She just maintains it and profits from it.

Anyway, in my fic/headcanon, I have Moira knowing more details about Serena’s behaviour than she seems to in canon but possibly not the worst bits because June would have to share those, and while I think she would open up about a lot of her experience, I feel like she wouldn’t rehash everything. So Moira would know that Serena basically represents everything she’s against, and, someone who has directly hurt June. But I think she’d still see Fred as the ultimate evil. And honestly, June is the most important person to Moira so she’d put up with shit she doesn’t agree with for her best friend’s sake. She doesn’t strike me as someone who gives ultimatums to her friends. Personally, that rarely works out well for the person giving them and at this stage, with all their experiences, I don’t think either of them would want to put the other in a position that would strain their friendship at all. It’s too precious.

We know she was pushing for “fulfilling one’s biological destiny”, to be honest, in the face of extinction, it’s not really an outrageous stance(I’d let the human race die out, but surely I am in the minority).

(Shhh... I’m with you. I’d rather we all just die out if it came down to that.) And also, I have to agree that Serena’s stance is actually not all that outrageous if healthy birthrates/infant survival rates fell by 60% in a single year and humanity was facing extinction. Would I advocate for forced pregnancies? No, of course not. But insisting women take seriously their “biological destinies” is actually not radical at all. I have this rant in my drafts about this whole issue and how what Serena is saying is not that different from what I argue the majority of people on this planet already believe. It’s a huge discussion but as someone who refuses to have children even though I’m perfectly capable of it, I’m constantly bombarded with the exact same sentiment, just put in more “polite”/less aggressive terms. But it’s the same damn idea. Ugh. It’s presented to me more like, “Isn’t it time you started thinking about having kids?”, “Don’t you want kids?”, “I want grandchildren.”, “Children are what’s important. Don’t you think?” etc. etc. Just guilt trip after judgement after criticism after guilt trip again.

So, to me, I don’t think a lot of people would actually have much of a problem with Serena’s stance when faced with a birth crisis like that... scarily. The whole concept of no babies makes people freak the fuck out and go completely NUTS. (I think a lot about Children of Men when these sorts of discussions come up, and compare that with what countries do or have done to counteract falling populations.) I don’t think it’s much of a stretch. The whole Gileadean Handmaid system is a totally different monster (and completely ridiculous and ineffective and stupid, besides being horrific. It’s just... dumb.) but Serena’s assertions that women needed to have more babies seems fairly reasonable for someone to say and believe in the face of extinction. How they get people to do that is the thing I don’t think she really thought through??? 

That’s partly why I don’t really understand why she was so hated. From what I know about life even when there is no birth crisis, most people do think women should have children, especially after a certain age--whether they themselves want them or not. We owe it to other people (whether its a spouse, family, or humanity in general) in our lives to have children, apparently. My father actually mentioned something along those lines once. I apparently was a bad daughter because babies give people hope when they’re sad, and society needs hope therefore I should have all the babies I can??????? 

From Yvonne’s perspective she assumes Serena wanted women to save humanity. Which sounds rather noble really, and yes, it’s very much maternal feminism. “The world needs the work and help of the women, and the women must work, if the race will survive.”

[An interesting sidenote about first-wave domestic/maternal feminism is that it did not diminish the role of the woman. It actually held women had important, distinctive roles in society, the household, and politics. (Many of the original maternal feminists were also suffragettes...) Being a mother and housewife was a “natural occupation” for women. In contrast, pure domestic feminism at it’s core basically didn’t want women’s participation in politics, but wanted them to have more autonomy in their households. There is a distinction between them, but maternal incorporates domestic feminism and combines it with social feminism of the late-19th and early 20th century. Sometimes what Serena seems to promote is more maternal feminism than core domestic feminism. I mean, maternal feminism’s main maxim was that motherhood was the be all and end all of womanhood which sounds mighty familiar... and that women were biologically superior to men, lol.

Also, as a Canadian, most of our most venerated women in early-modern history (Famous 5) were, as it turns out, maternal feminists--amongst other problematic typically white feminist things lol. I always find the title of Serena’s book to be a reference to Nellie McClung, a maternal feminist who said, “A woman's place is in the home; and out of it whenever she is called to guard those she loves and to improve conditions for them.” That second bit is often left out, but I suspect Serena would have been aware of it as well.]

I also don’t think people generally take domestic/maternal feminists very seriously either. So for people to be so outraged by Serena’s book to attempt assassination? Either she did/said a BUNCH of terrible shit we haven’t seen nor heard about, or it was just a clunky plot device to make us believe Serena is Very Evil and Bad. Like, lbr, domestic feminism doesn’t cause that much of a fuss even on university campuses and as far as we’re told, the book is only about that. Nothing else. It’s about how women should stay at home, raise children, take care of their husbands, etc. Outdated, idiotic thinking? Yes. Worthy of a violent riot? Um. No. (And this is backed up by Yvonne’s take that Serena was NOT thinking about women being stripped of all rights, or Handmaids, etc. So, what exactly was she saying that made the kids so angry as to call her a Nazi cunt?) It’s all very nonsensical imo. I assume there was a bunch of anti-abortion stuff, cos that follows from her line of thinking. And I suppose that could enrage people... But what else? There are loads of pro-life activists everywhere all the time and none of them are getting shot at.

[I suppose a lot of maternal feminists have historically been proponents of eugenics (in the sense of forced sterilisation of the “mentally deficient”, not race based) so... yeah. That would make people get really angry, and justifiably so. They also have been nativists. I don’t put it past Serena to subscribe to that ideology tbh. But if she’s a true domestic feminist, that wouldn’t really be part of her core beliefs. If she’s a maternal feminist, it probably has more change of being in there. However, we don’t really see any evidence of what Serena actually believes other than women should have more babies and their place is in the home raising their children, not in politics. Assuming that’s what the Mexican ambassador is referring to when she calls “A Woman’s Place” domestic feminism. I think we can assume she probably had some pro-eugenics ideas, an strict anti-abortion ones too. And considering the real woman Atwood based Serena on, it makes sense she’d hold these views too. Although we don’t see her actively talking about them.]

“but what exactly is “help””

I also wondered about this. A lot. Like what does “help” mean in the context? Comparing 1x06 and 1x10 is just... ??? (But I yapped about that crap in my other rant haha. I still don’t get it.) 

Which happened first, the theater scene where they found out the bombing of 3 branches? Or when she was about to give her speech, and was told by Fred they said no thanks.

The way I see it, based on Serena’s wardrobe going more and more plain and conservative, I’d line it up with 

1st: Serena’s book speech at the university, 

2nd: Serena getting locked out of the meeting, 

3rd: the movie theatre bit. 

My reasoning other than Serena’s changing wardrobe (going from pants & styled hair & makeup, to plain ugly “modest” dress and plain LDS type hair style) is that by the movie theatre bit Serena’s at home doing flower arranging, and by the way she’s talking, it’s been a while since she wrote her first book. She’s just considering writing a second one about fertility as a natural resource. Also, the college speech/gunshot gave no indication that they were part of any organised terrorist group yet. It seemed to be just her and Fred--although clearly by the time Fred murders the gunman and his girlfriend, there’s some sort of militia group he’s in cahoots with. The only reason I place the meeting lockout in between is cos Serena still seems to believe she has some involvement with the committee but by the movie theatre time, she seems resigned that it’s only Fred who participates. Also, again, her wardrobe is halfway between the college scene and the cinema one, and it seems to be the final time Serena attempts to be directly involved and Warren makes that pretty clear.

Also, by the pre-cinema scene, they’re being followed by the FBI. I feel like the events of the college riot wouldn’t have happened (esp. Fred being able to point blank murder two students in broad daylight if the FBI was tailing him. Or had any suspicions about his violent coup plans at all.)

Serena just seems so much more resigned to playing the housewife role in the theatre scene than she does in the meeting scene. That’s just how it comes off to me. Whether or not I’m right, who knows lol. I also think the committee seems much more robust in the theatre scene than the meeting one. Like if you’re getting a green light for a terrorist attack on DC, I’d assume the committee has defined itself much better than it had in the non-meeting scene when Fred didn’t even seem to know the rules. It seemed like Warren puts the final nail in that coffin for women.

The only flashback scene I can’t figure out is the sex scene. All I can tell is that it’s before the theatre scene. It could be prior to the college riot, prior to the meeting, after either of those?? Who knows. It doesn’t really matter I suppose. The only point to it is that Serena calls the shots, and they’ve been praying and trying for a baby for a while. Meh.

I can sort of see how it could be argued the opposite way though... That the theatre scene happened before the lockout one, but I’m not sure. I dunno, I guess I could even see how you could argue that the college scene is after those. I’m not sure if I totally buy it though.

Honestly, if you figure it out, please do let me know! :D x

[ibisfarrow]

How More Progressive Advertisements Have Contributed to a More Progressive Society

(Essay from my 2018 sexuality and gender studies class)

Historically advertisements and television have been used to reinforce traditional ideas of gender and sexuality, ignoring the changing times, in order to promote ideas that they believe will bring them the most support. The true effect of media and its ability to sway the masses was not utilised, instead it may have done harm by further promoting conservative ideas and isolating those who didn’t fit quite their standards, making them feel even more like a minority. Huang & Hutchinson assert that ‘persuasive communication’ is a key component of advertisement, so historical ads have not only used this method to persuade the public to buy certain products, but also strengthen any traditional ideas presented (2008, p.98). Would feminism still be considered such a dirty word if there wasn’t consistent ‘hostility from sections of the media,’ such as the various anti-feminist postcards available in the early 20th century attacking the suffragist movement (Curthoys 1994, p.16)? And would people still be insisting that ‘there were no homosexuals in the Australian armed forces’ if it weren’t for the large number of hypermasculine, heteronormative enlistment posters (Willet, G. & Smaal, Y. 2013)? Recently there has been a change in the way media and advertisers view controversial and taboo topics such as gender and sexuality, many having realised how beneficial supporting progressive ideas can be for their business through the attention it can bring. This essay will be addressing three different ways business have used progressive ideas in marketing and the effects it has had both on the business itself and the related cause/group, and along with this it will give a brief history of Gay representation in television, it’s critical reception, and how this influenced the directions of future TV shows.

During and prior to the 2017 marriage equality postal-survey many businesses put posters in their windows announcing that they were voting ‘yes’. This served two purposes, firstly, it was a show of solidarity towards the LGBT+ community; and secondly, it was a marketing ploy. Not only did it aim to make the businesses appear more welcoming to queer customers, and therefore be chosen over their competitors, but it also drew media attention to many of the companies, such as the various businesses mentioned in a Broadsheet article, which included big name corporations like Amazon, eBay, Testra, and Wordpress, as well as a plethora of small cafes and restaurants. An entire article on Techly was devoted to a Melbourne Subway store after it started printing pro-marriage equality messages on its receipts, which increased sales exponentially. Of course, I am by no means saying these acts of support were bad or selfish, even if they led to financial gain, because they likely had a hand in the postal survey’s positive results. The constant presence of the ‘vote yes’ posters may have caused what is known as the socialisation effect, a form of herd behaviour which is described by Teraji (2003, p.162) as when we are ‘influenced in our decision making by what others around us are doing’ and is a common way that humans deal with ‘environmental uncertainty’, meaning that those who were undecided on which way to vote may have chosen to vote ‘yes’ because the advertisements made it appear like the most popular option. This demonstrates how advertising’s recent indulgence of more controversial issues can both benefit the company and make society more progressive.

The first openly gay character on primetime television was the one-time character Steve (Philip Carey) on All in the Family. Steve appeared in the episode ‘Judging books by covers’, which received extreme backlash, with at-the-time president Nixon even stating in a 1971 interview that he ‘had to turn the goddamn thing off’ because homosexuality should not be glorified ‘anymore that you glorify whores’ (RICHARD NIXON TAPES: Archie Bunker & Homosexuality 2008). Despite the outrage, the episodes high rating, historical significants and praise from the gay community – which was still fairly new in the public eye – broke the ice, in a sense, and in 1972 The Corner Bar introduced the first ever recurring gay character in a primetime television show, Peter Panama (Vincent Schiavelli). Peter was largely criticised by the gay community, who saw him as little more than an offensive caricature, but that didn’t change the fact that producer Allen King was trying something that no one had had the courage to try before.

In 1994 Ikea began running the first ever television commercial to feature a gay couple, which showed the pair discussing how they met and their differing tastes in furniture while picking out a dining room table. Despite it’s late night runtime (beginning at 10pm), the ad still saw quite a bit of backlash, particularly from religious groups, with Reverend Donald Wildmon calling for an Ikea boycott and one New York store facing a bomb threat. According to an LA Times article, the Ikea headquarters were flooded with ‘hundreds of phone calls and letters’, mostly complaints but also some commending the company for its open-mindedness (1994). This wasn’t the first advertisement to feature openly gay individuals, however it was the first TV commercial to do so. It broke the ice, in a sense, and opened the door for more ads starring gay individuals. A European study on the impact of alcohol advertisements on teen drinking habits found that ‘exposure to televised alcohol advertising was found to be a significant predictor of drinking behavior’, meaning that, according to their research, teenagers who were exposed to alcohol advertisements were more likely to consume alcohol. Multiple other studies have made this same connection between tobacco advertisements and cigarette smoking in youths. While there have been no studies done on the effects of gay couples in commercials, it can be assumed that this advertising exposure effect can be applied to pretty much everything that is advertised. While gay people in ads cannot turn people gay, like so many religious organisations fear, it does normalise it and may, in the same way alcohol ads promote drinking, promote acceptance of LGBT+ individuals. Along with the increase in support for the LGBT+ community, these ads have also put pressure on other companies to create more inclusive advertisements – or at the very least remain quiet about their prejudices. A bakery that refused to serve a lesbian couple in 2o13 was forced to close its storefront and move online soon after the controversy, then close completely in 2016 due to continued backlash and poor sales brought on by their discrimination. It’s unlikely their actions would have prompted such outrage if it weren’t for other companies promoting the acceptance of the LGBT+ community. Up until 1994 the only times homosexuality had been mentioned in television advertisements were in fear-inducing Public Service Announcements about HIV/AIDS that directly or indirectly blamed the disease on ‘the depraved activities of homosexuals’ (Sendziuk, P. 2003, p11), such as the way the 1987 Australian AIDS PSA (Grim Reaper Bowling) specifies that ‘at first only gays and IV users were being killed by AIDS’, an unnecessary distinction considering the ad itself is about how anyone can contract it (Grim Reaper [1987] 2006). The ways LGBT+ rights are treated on television has a direct impact on how the public sees the matter, and so advertisements that normalise the LGBT+ community help to foster an accepting society.

Disney Channel’s live-action series ‘Good Luck Charlie’ went down in history as the first kid’s show to depict a gay couple, with the 2014 episode ‘Down a Tree’ showing the protagonist’s parents entertain a lesbian couple while their toddlers have a play-date. This episode aired near the end of what was already confirmed to be the show’s final season, so the writers did not have anything to lose from this decision. Reception for the episode was mixed, but ultimately the positive outweighed the negative and other series have followed Disney’s example. Since 2014 three non-Disney series have featured LGBT+ characters and relationships, and Disney has made history a second time with Andi Mack, a live-action show that features a gay main character. Each of these series has received media attention and polarising receptions, leading more people to discover the shows and increase their ratings, while also making queer children feel more comfortable with themselves by finally having characters to relate to.

In 2015 Target made what some considered to be a bold move by removing gender labels on their toy aisles, an act that elicited outrage from many conservative parents who didn’t seem to trust their own children to pick gender-appropriate toys without this signage. These complaints changed nothing, and soon Kmart and Toys ‘R’ Us followed Target’s example. While these stores still pack all of the traditional boys and girls toys in separate aisles, there are no labels, and so nothing to cause shame in children who wander down what some might consider the wrong aisle. This change coincided with a societal shift that brought gender politics into the spotlight, with both Caitlyn Jenner coming out and the transgender bathroom debate reached the US courts that year. This demonstrates the company’s understanding of social issues and willingness to take risks in order to appeal to a more evolved, modern audience then their previous store set-up. This became even more apparent in 2017 when Target released an ad showing an adolescent boy with their nail polish, subverting gender norms in a way that no other mainstream company has done on Australian TV since. This change reflects how society itself is becoming more open-minded, and instead of playing it safe and pandering to conservative views, companies are realising how diverse their consumers are and altering their advertisements to be more relatable.  

To summarise, the ways companies advertise has moved from promoting safe and traditional values to more controversial, yet modern subject matters. This has not only benefitted the businesses by giving them an edge their competitors don’t have, but has also helped to normalise the different identities and lifestyles being featured in these advertisements, which in turn assisted in creating a more inclusive society. Changes in representation in television programmes has had a similar effect, reflecting our current society more accurately now than ever before, and therefore to normalising certain identities and more accurately representing society than ever before.

 Sources:

Willet, G. & Smaal, Y. 2013, ''A homosexual institution': Same-sex desire in the army during World War II', Australian Army Journal, vol. 10, no. 3, p.25

Curthoys, A. 1994, 'Australian Feminism since 1970', Australian women: contemporary feminist thought, p.16

Sendziuk, P. 2003, 'Anally injected death sentence: the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ and the origins of Aids', Learning to trust: Australian responses to AIDS, p.11

Huang, Y. & Hutchinson, JW. 2008, 'Counting Every Thought: Implicit Measures of Cognitive Responses to Advertising', Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 35, no. 1, p.98

Teraji, S. 2003, 'Herd behavior and the quality of opinions', The Journal of Socio-Economics, vol. 32, no. 6, p.162

Bruijin, A., Engels, R., Anderson, P., Bujalski, M., Gosselt, J., Schreckenberg, D., Wohtge, J. & Leeuw, R. 2016, 'Exposure to Online Alcohol Marketing and Adolescents' Drinking: A Cross-sectional Study in Four European Countries', Alcohol & Alcoholism. Supplement, vol. 51, no. 5, p.620

Pineros B. 2017, An Aussie Subway store is taking it upon themselves to fight for marriage equality, retrieved 19 September 2018, https://www.techly.com.au/2017/09/08/aussie-subway-fight-for-marriage-equality/

McDermott C. 2017, Australia’s Institutions and Businesses Are Backing Marriage Equality at Every Level, retrieved 19 September 2018, https://www.broadsheet.com.au/national/city-file/article/australias-institutions-and-businesses-are-backing-marriage-equality-every-level

McMains A. 2014, 20 Years Before It Was Cool to Cast Gay Couples, Ikea Made This Pioneering Ad, retrieved 21 September 2018, https://www.adweek.com/creativity/20-years-it-was-cool-cast-gay-couples-ikea-made-pioneering-ad-161054/

Horovitz B. 1994, TV Commercial Featuring Gay Couple Creates a Madison Avenue Uproar, retrieved 21 September 2018, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-04-05/business/fi-42403_1_madison-avenue

Tharrett M. 2016, Homophobic “Sweet Cakes” Bakery Finally Closes, Three Years After Enforcing “No Gays” Policy, retrieved 21 September 2018, http://www.newnownext.com/sweet-cakes-bakery-melissa-aaron-klein-closed/10/2016/

Grim Reaper [1987] 2006, streaming video, Paul Kidd, 22 November, retrieved 24 September 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo&t=2s

RICHARD NIXON TAPES: Archie Bunker & Homosexuality 2008, streaming video, rmm413c, 24 December, retrieved 28 September 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivVcfSBVSM

Mitchell B. 2017, Who was the first openly gay character on TV?, retrieved 28 September 2018, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/07/28/first-gay-lgbt-character-tv-show/

Poul Webb 2015, 'World War 2 Propaganda Posters – part 8', Art & Artists, weblog post, 1 June, retrieved 18 September 2018, http://poulwebb.blogspot.com/2015/06/world-war-2-propaganda-posters-part-8.html

Hobson, C. & Hobson, P. 1910, Postcard, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa

[harrynightingales]

i wrote a whole bit on the ~discourse that was immediately banished to my drafts but now i have something else i want to talk about, mainly ~the list~ and the constant question of, if top!joe isn’t inherently problematic, what is the point of collecting and publishing the data?

many people have rightly pointed out that collecting data about who tops and bottoms (the methodology of which was clearly laid out so that readers could assess it for themselves) is simplistic and doesn’t take into account the other concepts we’ve been talking about since almost day 1 - namely, the tendency for joe to be written in a way that feeds into orientalist tropes and stereotypes about MENA men. again, no one on this “side” disagrees with the statement that there is nothing wrong inherently wrong with writing joe topping, or as a dom, or being masculine or violent - that can be done in a way that still treats him with respect and isn’t reductive! 

so then people argue that the top/bottom data is meaningless, and they demand to know whether the conclusion is to “fill the gap” and write bottom!joe. these people are not satisfied with the non yes-or-no answer of “maybe” “not necessarily” or “i don’t know” 

the way i see it is this: the top/bottom data is not conclusive. its not meant to be! the conclusion has never been “more top!joe than top!nicky” --> fandom is racist”. pointing out TRENDS is a way for us to step back, think about thought processes, challenge them in ourselves and in the content we consume in the context of information about harmful stereotypes and tropes that others have kindly provided background on over and over.

an analogy: let’s say we’re looking at data about representation of gay men in TV in a given year. we're going to track how many of those characters fit the trope of being your stereotypical effeminate gay man (think kurt from glee). this is a subjective category but let’s assume we come up with some standardized method to decide. say we find out that 75% of characters fit this trope. is that an inherently bad thing? well, going backwards, a gay man being effeminate is not a bad thing! there are plenty of gay men who fit that category and that is them being authentic and being their best selves, awesome. that being said, it doesn’t reflect all gay men, and there is an unfortunate history of gay men being stereotyped, where that effeminate gay man is also rude, unfaithful, aggressively forward with straight men, etc. once again, the existence of the harmful stereotype doesn’t negate the existence of validity of an effeminate gay man in real life! but we have to consider that in media, these things can very easily get tied up together. so back to our original question: are our findings bad? is this something we have to change? maybe, maybe not! its a starting point for us to look deeper, to look at the quality of the writing, to see if these characters are being written fully-dimensionally, to look at the writers room to see who is reflected there. and even if all those characters are being written wonderfully, the reality is that that one experience of being a gay man is not reflective of the population, and so, without claiming there is something “wrong” with writing effeminate gay men, there may be encouragement for writers to have more variety within their characters.

and to be clear, this is looking at it from one direction. the opposite could be just as harmful! if all our gay men in media are basically carbon copies of the straight men except they happen to kiss dudes, that can also be reductive and not representative of actual gay men. if that is what our findings showed us, that would ALSO spark a conversation for what those trends mean, where they are coming from, and how to move forward productively.

people have said that top!nicky can also be harmful and feed into stereotypes - absolutely! if we did this top/bottom data and found that consistently there was more top!nicky than top!joe, it would start another conversation about trends, where we could critically reflect on the tropes we are seeing in fandom content and if they are feeding into anything hurtful. 

as an aside, this is why the argument of “make a bottom!joe discord! run bottom!joe events!” doesn’t make sense to me. the call to action has never been “write fics in a way that we have a perfect 50/50 split all the time” because that is frankly impossible! i have never identified as a “bottom!joe” or “top!nicky” fan and i think there are very few people who do. from what i have seen, people making similar arguments to mine are interested in joe/nicky as a BALANCED, healthy, loving relationship with an incredibly wide variety of sexual dynamics they could play into to reflect their 900+ year history (i.e. they’re the switchiest switches to ever switch). somehow demanding more top!nicky content is not at all the point.

from the very beginning of this ~discourse, the point has ALWAYS been about being mindful and thoughtful about how fandom content can feed into harmful  stereotypes and tropes, with top and bottom as a shorthand because, unfortunately, those concepts can never be fully separated. my previous long-ass rant hiding in my drafts is specifically related to this idea of “people who prefer seeing content in which joe tops” vs. top!joe only fans. the sparknotes version of that one is that, from my experience reading fic and seeing posts from self-identified “top!joes” and the discord, there is a lot of overlap between that identifier and content that focuses significantly on joe being masculine, aggressive, dominant. again, those traits in and of themselves are not problematic and you can write a joe who is all of those things and not be harmful. but when you reduce his character to only those things and/or simultaneously consistently feminize nicky, overexaggerating their physical differences and arguing until the cows come home that nicky is smaller, weaker, and less physically competent, that’s a problem. that doesn’t even begin to touch the constant power-imbalance fics i see coming from self-identified “top!joe” fans including age difference and slavery-related fic/content. i personally have never been in the discord and never intend to, so i may have a flawed understanding. again, i have a whole other post about this topic specifically but i don’t want to start shit. 

that being said, circling back to the data: when we had these early conversations is july/august, with folks saying the exact same things (being mindful of trends and how top/bottom “preference” can potentially tie into more harmful tropes) the concept of the self-identified top!joe arose, and the discord was created because apparently there was “too much” top!nicky content in response to fandom-wide discussions and the fans who enjoyed consuming content where joe tops needed their own space. on a most basic level, this data shows that that was not the case. if nothing else, it has value to me for that by simply tallying what otherwise is a gut instinct about what kind of content is out there, which the brain can notoriously misrepresent. 

[jenksy]

Top 50 of 2017 a.k.a. At This Point It Should Be Pretty Clear That I Don’t Really Listen to Hip-Hop

After a year of political awfulness (#ThisIsNotNormal #Feminism) and entertainment industry scandals (a heartfelt "Fuck You" and "Goodbye" to Jesse Lacey), it's hard to claim that 2017 was much better than 2016 for the world at large. Even on a personal level, it was a bumpy ride for the first 10 1/2 months. Ups and downs, peaks and valleys- it was a real emotional roller coaster of a year for me. One big difference between coping with last year's bullshit and this year's bullshit was the immense amount of great music that was released this year. To put things in perspective, I have 672 songs in my 2016 playlist, and 942 songs in my 2017 playlist. Realistically, that's a good 25-30 more albums than I bought last year. Lots of big names released new music, and lots of new artists went from a blip on the radar to overtaking some legends for the best new music. But that doesn't mean the year came without its musical disappointments. Releases from Foo Fighters, Beck, Wolf Alice, alt-J, Dan Auerbach, Elbow, Gorillaz, Haim, and Arcade Fire didn't live up to my expectations. I don't hate any of those albums- they just aren't quite as good as I'd hoped they'd be, and don't appear here. Otherwise, if there are any albums missing from this list that appear on basically every other list, you can assume that I didn't listen to them at all or enough. Click on the song title to jump to YouTube and have a listen. Let me know what you liked this year! EPs/Other Benjamin Gibbard - Bandwagonesque "What You Do to Me" Bishop Briggs - Bishop Briggs "River" The Japanese House - Saw You In a Dream "3/3" Nine Inch Nails - Add Violence "Less Than" Save Ferris - Checkered Past "Anything" VAST - They Only Love You When You Die VAST - Here I Am VAST - Little Darling VAST - In Lieu of Flowers Top 50 50. In My Coma - Next Life "Take a Ride" 49. Torres - Three Futures "Skim" 48. The New Pornographers - Whiteout Conditions "High Ticket Attractions" 47. The Mountain Goats - Goths "We Do it Different on the West Coast" 46. Johnny Flynn - Sillion "Raising the Dead" 45. Blitzen Trapper - Wild and Reckless "Wild and Reckless" 44. The XX - I See You "Say Something Loving" 43. Paramore - After Laughter "Told You So" 42. Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Who Built the Moon? "Holy Mountain" 41. Stereophonics - Scream Above the Sounds "All in One Night" 40. Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - Choir of the Mind "Perfect on the Surface" 39. Cayetana - New Kind of Normal "Mesa" 38. Bully - Losing "Running" 37. ZZ Ward - The Storm "Let it Burn" 36. Dude York - Sincerely "Black Jack" 35. Kasabian - For Crying Out Loud "Bless This Acid House" 34. Billie Eilish - don't smile at me "Ocean Eyes" 33. The Shins - Heartworms "Half a Million" 32. Goldfrapp - Silver Eye "Moon in Your Mouth" 31. Sylvan Esso - What Now "Kick Jump Twist" 30. Toro Y Moi - Boo Boo "Girl Like You" 29. Royal Blood - How Did We Get So Dark? "She's Creeping" 28. Oh Wonder - Ultralife "Overgrown" 27. Chris Stapleton - From A Room: Volume 1/ Volume 2 "Them Stems" 26. Rose Hill Drive - Mania "Do it Right" 25. Portugal. The Man - Woodstock "Tidal Wave" 24. St. Vincent - Masseduction "New York" 23. Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice "Over Everything" 22. Beth Ditto - Fake Sugar "We Could Run" 21. Overcoats - Young "Leave the Light On" 20. Japandroids - Near to the Wild Heart of Life "Near to the Wild Heart of Life" "True Love and a Free Life of Free Will" 19. Blair Crimmins and The Hookers - You Gotta Sell Something "Beautiful Thang" "Wandering Joe" 18. Jason Isbell - The Nashville Sound "If We Were Vampires" "Chaos and Clothes" 17. The National - Sleep Well Beast "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" "Carin at the Liquor Store" 16. Imelda May - Live Life Flesh Blood "How Bad Can a Good Girl Be?" "Should've Been You" 15. Queens of the Stone Age - Villains "Feet Don't Fail Me" "Head Like a Haunted House" 14. Iron & Wine - Beast Epic "Call it Dreaming" "The Truest Stars We Know" 13. Electric Guest - Plural "Oh Devil" "See the Light" 12. Minus the Bear - VOIDS "Silver" "Lighthouse" 11. Slowdive - Slowdive "Everyone Knows" "No Longer Making Time" 10. Hurray for The Riff Raff - The Navigator "Living in the City" "Settle" 9. Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm "Brass Beam" "Silver" 8. MUNA - About U "I Know a Place" "Everything" 7. Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears - Backlash "Lips of a Loser" "Global" 6. Lorde - Melodrama "Liability" "Writer in the Dark" 5. The Regrettes - Feel Your Feelings Fool! "Head in the Clouds" "Seashore" "Ladylike / Whatta Bitch" 4. Spoon - Hot Thoughts "Hot Thoughts" "I Ain't the One" "Can I Sit Next to You" 3. Alex Lahey - I Love You Like A Brother "Everyday's the Weekend" "I Haven't Been Taking Care of Myself" "I Want U" 2. Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile to the Surface "The Grocery" "The Gold" "The Silence" 1. The War On Drugs - A Deeper Understanding "Pain" "Strangest Thing" "Holding On"

[oneweekoneband]

Ninety One, “Kaytadan” (Қайтадан), from Aiyptama (2015), released as a single spring 2016

(Warning: no lens flares this time, but there is a very brief sequence of a man and a woman having a physically violent argument. She gets away fine, but if you’d rather not, skip from 1:20 to 1:35 to avoid it.)

The most interesting aspect of the video for “Kaytadan” I’ll discuss later, but let’s get the distractions: out of the way now: one has to have the proverbial heart of stone to get through Alem’s climactic acting moment without laughing; I think Bala may actually be laughing, while rolling around on the pavement; and ACE IS IN PAIN,Y’ALL.

Now on to the song, which I would describe as approximately three and three-quarter minutes of decent pop song and 18 seconds of brilliant pop song--the 18 seconds being the bridge, which begins with AZ’s distorted, hiccuping version of the chorus, as if while bathing clothed he inhaled two lungfuls’ worth of water, and proceeds to Alem gently backing AZ up, providing a link between smooth performance and messy emotion. It’s jolting to hear the start of the bridge as if the song is going out of control; it’s jolting to realize a few seconds later that the song has never been out of control. That bridge elevates the rest of the song.

Let me now take space to acknowledge that “decent pop song” is damning with extremely faint praise in some quarters. Pop music has so thoroughly saturated our culture, regardless of the position of the brow, that you actually have to make a real effort to find people carrying on the tradition of Pop Music Is Making Us All Dumb that Allan Bloom spent time passing on in The Closing of the American Mind. (Dwight McDonald, who did as much as anyone to make “middlebrow” a pejorative, would probably not be impressed that as I write this that the “most popular” article on the New Yorker’s website is an obituary for Chester Bennington.) Even journals of conservative thought are nowadays reluctant to condemn pop music outright, partly because its younger writers grew up listening to pop, partly because the rise of right-wing populism means that hating some pop music examples (Beyoncé) and not others (Toby Keith) makes a more valuable signal than hating the whole thing. Fortunately Sir Roger Scruton is still with us. This essay, although dating from the late 1990s--a good portion of it is spent discussing the Sensation exhibit, for those of you wondering what we had culture wars over before Tumblr--is a good example of his work. Let me quote one paragraph for flavor:

Even when modern pop aims to be lyrical, melody is synthesised from trite and standardised phrases, which could be rearranged in any order without losing the effect. It is not that such music is tuneless: rather that the tune comes from elsewhere, like food from the drive-round pizza merchant. A characteristic example is the recent hit by Mary J. Blige: ‘Get to Know You Better’. Here the melody is assembled from a small set of notes, arranged around the flat lyrics, and without internal movement. The effect is emphasized by the yukky thirteenth chords and droopy vamping which open the piece, with a sound that suggests someone trying carefully to puke into a wine glass.

Here’s another example, in which Crystal Castles gets held up as an exemplar of moral and aesthetic decay. To the best of my knowledge Scruton has never written about Kazakh pop; I’m going to go ahead and presume that he’d find “Kaytadan” slightly less appealing than dog vomit.

Some of you are going to read the linked essay, get to the line about “the vogue for deconstruction, Marxian analysis, feminism, and all the other intellectual and pseudo-intellectual devices”, and immediately nope on out.  Myself I feel a certain amount of futility in trying to battle Scruton’s criticisms. The first tape I remember as being “mine” was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, and the first CD I made a point of buying with my own money was History: America’s Greatest Hits; my mother basically gave up on all music made after 1978, pop or otherwise, and I inherited my father’s breadth of taste--in his case, smooth jazz, decidedly-not-smooth jazz, Beethoven, Glen Campbell--but neither of us have the vocabulary to justify said taste; my elementary school music teacher was sweet but largely ineffectual. Thus I suspect from Scruton’s side of the argument, any attempt on my end to make a counter-argument would simply be proof of the paucity of my musical education, the stuntedness of my supposed thinking brought about after a lifetime’s worth of suffocation by pop music. (One’s attempted counterargument as proof of one’s having been irredeemably corrupted appears in left-wing critiques of pop, too; but that’s a subject for another time.)

So instead of indignantly trying to bat away Scruton’s condemnation of pop, let me keep it here in the room and try to sound out its implications. If pop is corrupt and corrupting rubbish, then is there much point in talking about a song like “Kaytadan”? To put it differently, are there potential degrees of rubbish? Scruton seems to think so; he comes down harder on Oasis than the Beatles, and harder on Crystal Castles than Mary J. Blige. But that may simply be a matter of time passing: which is not a reference to Scruton’s age but that, if his theories are right, than the Beatles were closer, temporally and socially, to a less-corrupt musical age than Oasis was to begin with. If anything, that may be a reason to be more critical of “Kaytadan”: on a Kazakh group mindlessly adopting American-begun pop pablum when they still ought to have other options available.

Put the question another way: is there room for the hiccuping bridge, or rather the case for the hiccuping bridge, in Scruton’s critique? Or, rather: how should change occur, in a model of corruptible pop music? In a field where the pressure to conform to the three-minute, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-out model can be quite strong, simply changing things up can win attention, but change by itself isn’t going to redeem pop--Crystal Castles is definitely more original than “Kaytadan,” but per the Scruton model that doesn’t make them less contemptible. (For those needing a counterargument: there’s a whole Crystal Castles OWOB to peruse!) So just calling the hiccuping bridge “different” or “unexpected” doesn’t do much.

Here’s why I have such praise for the hiccuping bridge. It is artificially distorted, in a way that calls attention to itself. (It’s hard to tell, when Ninety One is performing live, how much help AZ is getting from the backing track; my guess is he can get the yelping effect across somewhat but it wouldn’t be as clear as it is in the studio track.) That in itself is nothing particularly innovative: announcing the presence of Auto-Tune and the like is now an old trick by pop standards. But the computer-enhanced distortion in “Kaytadan” is to enhance the emotion that’s been in the song’s lyrics but not entirely supported by the vocals. Bala in particular sounds callow in the second verse, more showing off his runs than projecting fear of giving up on a damaged relationship. I do wonder if that’s why the video for this reads as so melodramatic, as if it has to do extra emotional work.

Then the bridge: AZ runs through his rap, but then sounds like he can’t even breathe, like he’s having a panic attack at the thought of the argument failing, of the beloved leaving; and Alem comes in, far quieter than he was at the start of the song, serious, cowed. And then the song builds to the final repeat of the chorus, with Ace doing the belting, but by then the intensity makes sense: oh, wait, there really is something at stake here.

The standard (for listeners; I can’t speak for engineers) has been to associate audible technical manipulation of pop vocals with a lack of emotion, a cue to not take the whole thing so seriously: hence T-Pain’s progression from “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)” to “I’m on a Boat” and guest appearances on Auto-Tune the News was unsurprising. More subtle manipulation is also often anti-emotion, in that it’s used to squeeze out imperfections in the singers’ voices, to standardize the final product (assuming the final product isn’t just a re-recording to sound “live” without actually being live). So listeners take a fairly cynical approach to manipulation. Understandably; horrifyingly, presumably, to Scruton, since it represents one more step away from music as reinforcer of shared culture to music as secondary point in idol-worship.

Myself I have always been more a fan of Virginia Postrel than of Scruton, more likely to be hopeful about than horrified by the extensions of our lives through technological advancement. Thus the possibility of human emotion enhanced by, rather than smoothed over by, vocal manipulation encourages me. Most of “Kaytadan” is a bit cynical, in its conformity to pop standards, but the bridge is not; and that would not be enough to redeem “Kaytadan” in Scruton’s eyes, but it is in mine.

introductory post / all Ninety One posts

[helptowriteabook1-blog]

How To Write A Book

Very simple. It starts with understanding the market. A scary business Writing books is a scary business, but the scariest bits of the entire game is this: it's very easy to make a complete mess of the entire project before you get written your first word. You can misjudge the market. You can foul up your plot. You can have a hopelessly insufficient knowledge of your characters, or the world in which they find themselves. If you get these things badly wrong in the outset, you're headed straight for a giant mess. So planning matters. At the same time, any form of creative composing needs a kind of fluidity. It's just not possible to plan a thing out completely. For one thing, it's hard to help squash all your inventiveness into the three month period you've allotted. For another, the process of writing might reveal more to you about your characters and your story, and you need to give yourself room to answer these insights. The seat of your trousers There is no one single way to approach these issues. I know one publisher who wrote so many notes when it came to researching her first novel that the notes ended up increasingly being longer than the book itself. I also know an excellent author (one of whose books was a great deal promoted on TV and which sold a huge number of copies as a result) who takes precisely the antipode approach. she likes to research a period, get interested in some aspect of it, then she just starts to jot down. she barely knows her character and knows nothing of the story; she just throws the door available and waits to see what will come along. There are a number of other commercially successful authors who work in a similar way. Which means that there are different routes you can take, but most new writers who take one of these more extreme territory will have cause to regret it. If you are an extreme note-taker, then ask yourself honestly whether your book must have more research or whether you are simply procrastinating. It may well be that you are afraid of starting, which is a correctly understandable fear and one to be cured in one way and one way only: by getting stuck in. Since Kinglsey Amis famously put it, 'The art of writing is the art of applying the seat to your trousers to the seat of one's chair'. There's a little more to it than that maybe, but it's still Session One, the only lesson that tolerates no exceptions. Equally, if you're attracted to the vigour and boldness in the 'just get started' approach, ask yourself if you are not, in fact , afraid of the disciplines of planning, if you are not necessarily afraid of them because they're precisely what you most need. It's possible that, without planning anything out, you certainly will write a wonderful novel, appear on TV and sell a zillion copies - but statistically conversing, you are vastly more likely to end up with an unsaleable manuscripts, most of whose flaws were entirely predictable from the get go. Chasing Kay Scarpetta Let's assume, then, that you're sold on the idea of planning things out to some (non-obsessive) span. Where should you start? You start, inevitably, in the place you hope to finish: in a bookshop. A bookshop isn't simply a repository of all the world's greatest fiction and non-fiction; it's a marketplace and a catwalk too. You might want to learn to read wisely, commercially. Let's say, for example , that you intend to write crime fiction. Perhaps you happen to have a delicate spot for the British crime fiction of the 'Golden Age'. You love Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Bulldog Drummond, the 'Saint' and all the rest of it. So you want to do something similar. Something which includes a modern setting, of course, but nevertheless a novel that brews up the same attractive blend of comfortable living, provided social values, amateur sleuths, decent but bumbling policemen, and a good old splash of upper class experiencing. So you do. You write that book. It boasts strong characters, warm prose and a deft, when contrived, plot. (The contrivances are part of the feel. ) You may well achieve a manuscript that appropriately accomplishes its goals. And it will never sell. Perhaps, in truth, if the book was good enough, you might find a second collection publisher to take it off you for a very small advance. You might even, with a little luck, lure a giant publisher into launching the book at the cosy crime market, where you can perhaps aim to sell 5 and 10, 000 paperbacks tops, and little hope of cracking any overseas market. But you'll never earn a living from writing and indeed, because agents know the way the dice are likely to fall, you'll have the greatest difficulty in gaining even this success, because it won't be worth most agents' while to help you there. Why? Because you're authoring for the market as it was seventy years ago, not as it is today. The modern crime writer has to respond to that Dashiell Hammett / Raymond Chandler revolution of the 1940s. They have to deal with an audience that has learned forensics from Patricia Cornwell, seen society from the viewpoint of a Michael Collins, encountered feminism from Sara Paretsky, learned place from Ian Rankin, studied mood and light with the Scandinavians, and that expects books, enjoy Hollywood, to deliver thrills as well as mysteries. You can't even model your work after current bestsellers. Take the forensically driven novels of Patricia Cornwell as an example. She's still an active writer, and her work still regularly tops bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. But if you write like her, your booklet won't sell. That seems crazy at one level. She's a smash-hit, number one, multi-millionaire bestseller. If you happen to write like her, how can you not do well? At another level, though - the level of commercial reality, in truth - it makes perfect sense. If people want to read Patricia Cornwell, they will read Patricia Cornwell. Next her exhilarating decision to put forensics at the heart of the crime novel, others have followed suit, notably Kathy Reichs and the CSI TV series. There is now a huge forensically-led crime literature, dominated by the names which created it. If, more than two decades after Kay Scarpetta first emerged, you are seeking to chase an identical crowd, then you're twenty years out of date. Instead, you need to learn the market. You need to feel out its leading edge. You certainly essential info the big names in the market you want to write for. In crime fiction, for example , no writer can afford to never read Patricia Cornwell, because she's created such a large chunk of the contemporary crime vocabulary. But that is the historical part of your research. The current part is this: you need to buy and read debut novels issued as a result of major publishers in the last two or three years. You need to pay very particular attention to the novels that have done abnormally well (won prizes, been acclaimed, sold lots of copies), because these are the novels that publishers independently will use as their lodestars. The recency of the novels matters acutely, because you that guarantees contemporaneity. The reality that they are debut novels (or perhaps second novels) also matters, because it proves that the work is being produced for the qualities of the work itself, not because of the author's name, fame, or past achievements. That a serious publisher has its name on the book also matters, because it's likely to indicate that a good n amount of money has been paid for it. It's a probable indication that the market considered that book by that author to remain 'hot'. Needless to say, it's not enough to read these books. You also have to know what to do with them. Pigeon English, a first innovative by Stephen Kelman, recently sold for a high six-figure sum, following an astonishing auction contested simply by 12 different publishers. The book has been sold to publishers in the US, the UK, Brazil, Canada, China, People from france, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and elsewhere. Books like this come along very seldom and its author was altogether unknown beforehand. Yet his book looks set to be a massive world-wide hit. If you are seeking to write with the similar territory, then you need to understand the ingredients of Kelman's success. You don't need to understand them, because you propose slavishly to replicate them, but you need to understand literature as being in a kind of long-running conversation with again. You need to understand what feels current, what feels settled, what feels disputed, what holes and voids and additionally gaps may be opening up. Needless to say, you need to understand this conversation as it applies to your particular genre, whatever that is, but virtually no genre exists in complete isolation from the rest (though sci-fi and fantasy gets closer than most). If you read narrowly, you're likely to miss an important part of the developing conversation. Reading the market well is an extraordinarily challenging art. It is also an extraordinarily important one. It's both the most elusive and the most vital skill this any writer can have. Remember that you're at a huge disadvantage in this area. Every agent and every publisher is actually in the market, buying, selling, talking, comparing. These people aren't mostly reading the books that are on the bookshelves today. They're reading the books that will be on the bookshelves in eighteen months' time. They know exactly what guides are most hotly contested at auction. They'll know which books almost didn't sell at all. They are going to know the advances and the sales stats. When a book does unusually well or flops unusually severely, the trade will grope towards a consensus understanding of the outcome and alter its buying habits consequently. Reading this, most writers will draw the only logical conclusion, and instantly seek out marriage with a literary solution or successful commissioning editor. That's a good strategy and one that I'd commend unreservedly. If, however , people suffer the misfortune of being happily married already, you'll simply need to rub along as best you can. Imagine reading a lot, reading widely, and staying current. Looking inward These strictures might sound as if they're dealing with something external, but they're not really. They're talking about you. Most books that fail at the very first hurdle : that of concept - are more than anything else failures of honesty. You need to approach your own ideas using radical honesty. Is your idea for a book really founded on a good idea, or do you simply have a personalized attachment to it? Are you attached to it simply because it was the first idea that came to you? In very many cases, it does not take latter. Clear-sighted honesty is desperately hard to come by. It's taken me five or ten years to get close in addition to I've plenty more to learn yet. But one powerful tip is this: you must cultivate a positive posture towards contemporary fiction. In my role as editorial consultant, I often hear new writers say, 'There's so much rubbish published these days, ' or words to that effect. No one who has ever spoken those key phrases has got within a mile of publication. Of course, not all new books are good. There has never been a short while in history when they were. But it's very rare indeed that books are published which are incompetent for their sort. Dan Brown writes bad prose, but his audience doesn't care, as long as the story cracks with. John Banville's narratives may sometimes seem to have stalled completely in a flow of beautiful sentences, nevertheless his readers don't come to him for shoot-outs and car chases. Both authors excel at what people do. If you treat contemporary fiction as an embarrassment and a let-down, you can't hear its conversation. You won't generate anything which seems timely or pertinent. You won't get published and don't deserve to. The cynical path to failure It's also worth being clear about one other thing. I am not advocating cynicism. No cynically prepared book has ever sold. At the Mills & Boon end of the market, perhaps, a few cynically penned books are acquired, though not often even then. You must write for the market, because if you don't the market is usually unlikely to want what you produce. But you must also write with passion and conviction. You must - we should call a spade a spade - write with love. This game is so hard, so filled with challenges, you don't stand a hope unless you do.

[salmagundimagazine]

ON GIRLS, ADDICTION, AND GROWING UP by Catherine Pond

from Salmagundi, Summer 2017 [The TV Issue]

[photo by Annabel Mehran]

   1

It was always winter that year, my first year in Brooklyn. Snow fell on the power-lines.  A grey tree shivered outside my bedroom window. I had many friends but none that I could call.

I wanted to feel connected to the city the way other poets had, like Frank O’Hara in his famous poem “Steps”— “oh god it’s wonderful/ to get out of bed/ and drink too much coffee/ and smoke too many cigarettes/ and love you so much”— but I didn’t smoke, nor did I drink coffee. I barely made it out of bed some mornings. It felt more like I belonged in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Empire State Tower”:

The far lands melt to orange and to grey. The city lies, quiet but for a rumor, A single voice. People are guessed. We hazard The world we know is there, below, unseen. And in the street the many beautiful Unstaring walk unwaiting the knives of doom…

   2

It was 2012 and I was 21, living in East Williamsburg in a two-bedroom on Frost Street with my roommate Paul. Paul treated the few women in his life poorly. He despised his girlfriend (uncreative, immature, and blank were some of the adjectives he used) but no matter how many times he dumped her, she’d be back again the next week, sitting on our couch, Paul avoiding eye contact with me. For her birthday, he bought her a $200 steak at Peter Luger’s. “Maybe you actually like her,” I suggested one day, and he shrugged.  

My romantic life was no less antagonistic. I often brought strangers home to have sex with, only to decide halfway through the act that I didn’t want them there, at which point I’d kick them out into the snow at some ungodly hour. Paul witnessed all of this but never brought it up, and I was grateful for that.

His great passion was television. He liked watching TV with his girlfriend; it was passive, I deduced, and allowed him to ignore her for long stretches of time. I didn’t understand television, and found it distracting and unsatisfying. His favorite show, still in its first season, was Lena Dunham’s cult hit Girls. Paul worked at a law firm and hated women, so this baffled me. When he turned it on, I’d note silently how obnoxious the girls were, then retreat to my bedroom to read Paul Celan.

   3

One night, unable to sleep, I wandered into the living room and watched the entire first season of Girls. Still, I made it a point to actively hate the show. I told everyone I could: “The girls aren’t smart, or driven, and none of them have jobs. I can’t relate.” Occasionally episodes would be filmed on my block, in my coffee shop, in my neighborhood bar. I’d continue my criticism to whomever would listen: “I don’t recognize the world they live in.” Each month a check would arrive from my father to cover my rent. “They’re such spoiled brats,” I lamented to Paul.

   4

Lena Dunham’s lime-green raincoat, dotted with pink flowers, falls open at the crotch. Her teeth are crooked; her lips bright red. It’s February 2017 and she’s posing on the cover of Nylon magazine, happy to capitalize on the character she’s developed: part-child, part-woman, all-provocation.  

Fresh out of college in 2012 and riding the success of her movie Tiny Furniture, Dunham launched the pilot for her show Girls to much fanfare. She snagged the dream network (HBO), the dream co-producer (guru Judd Apatow), and the dream co-writers (Jenni Konner & Lesley Arfin among them).

Girls invited both acclaim and criticism from the get-go.  Deemed “toxic” and “white girl feminism at its worst,” the show, set in contemporary Brooklyn, New York, features four protagonists: Hannah Horvath (Dunham), Jessa Johanson (Jemima Kirke), Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet), and Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams).

Dunham is not the first to have the idea to follow four white girls around New York (see: Sex & the City) but she is the first to be held accountable for her show’s lack of diversity.  In The Atlantic in 2013, Judy Berman spared no mercy: “Dunham continues to cast non-white actors only when race defines their character—which is to say, she still doesn’t get it.”

Lena Dunham, sometimes to her own detriment, is not concerned with political correctness (“I haven’t had an abortion but I wish I had,” she said recently in an interview). It is part of what makes the dialogue in her show so accurate and brightly humorous, and it is also part of what might be deemed problematic about her public and professional persona.

Is there an upside? This insistence on accountability has encouraged a long-overdue dialogue about diversity in television. And Dunham herself has learned a little something along the way: “When I wrote the pilot I was 23. Each character was an extension of me,” she told Nylon. “I wouldn’t do another show that starred four white girls,” she added.

   5.

In the first season, Hannah (Dunham) has weird, sloppy sex with the overly aggressive Adam (Adam Driver); Jessa misses her own abortion appointment because she is getting drunk and having sex with a stranger in a bar; Shoshanna sets out to lose her virginity; and Marnie dumps her boyfriend of five years because he’s “too nice.” Later, Hannah takes acid in order to write a more interesting article, and Adam sends Hannah a picture of his dick wrapped in fur, then quickly texts, “That was for someone else.”

Despite this (or because of it) Hannah falls in love with Adam. Adam, for his part, seems drawn to Hannah, but disdains her, presumably because she evokes emotional reactions from him that he’s not fully comfortable feeling. In subsequent seasons, he dates ‘conventionally’ beautiful women, but finds himself defending Hannah, as in a scene where the stunning Shiri Appleby (whom Adam’s character degrades sexually, then dumps) bumps into Hannah and Adam at a coffee shop. Appleby sizes up Hannah’s body and exclaims, with lacerating cruelty, “That’s her?”

Late at night I considered my own body in the mirror. I had a proportional hourglass shape, with big boobs. But my body scared me. I preferred being thin and wearing baggie clothes, and it was my worst nightmare that anyone would learn I had large breasts.

I liked watching Hannah move through the world partially clothed, because I couldn’t, and her obliviousness, while sometimes problematic, seemed in this one sense a blessing.

   6.

As the show progressed, I expected a personality transformation in the characters much like the one I expected in myself: I assumed Hannah would eventually mature, stop loving Adam, publish some writing, make a real career for herself. I thought Jessa would stop doing drugs, get her shit together, that Marnie would become less obnoxiously privileged and white, that Shoshanna would shed her Jewish-American Princess prissiness and learn to take care of herself. I hoped Adam would have a functioning relationship and make peace with his demons.

I was pissed when this didn’t happen. I was angry when Hannah went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then left because she couldn’t live anywhere but New York City, and didn’t understand how to take constructive criticism. Her writing was self-referential and sometimes straight-up bad. When I first watched Jessa attend AA meetings, I thought it was silly. Jessa’s stint in rehab seemed futile, and she picked up drinking soon after.

When, on my 23rd birthday, I broke down in front of my brother and admitted I needed help with my alcoholism, I didn’t make the correlation to Jessa’s character. I was proud and vocal when I stuck with AA for one month, and then two.  And I was mortified and quiet when I stopped going and picked up drinking again, more heavily this time.

   7

Around the time the fourth season came out, I fell in love with an artist named Charlie, who had dated a friend of mine years earlier. This friend was particularly possessive of him.

I made lists of all the reasons why my attraction to Charlie was bullshit, why it wouldn’t work, why I should avoid him.  I assumed the attraction was based on some subconscious yearning, the fucked up parts of me attempting a ruinous self-sabotage. In a fury with myself, I used the money from a poetry prize to buy a ticket to France for a week. I decided in that time I would get over my bizarre crush and move on with my life.    

I fell in love anyway. I lost my friend. And eight months later, I lost Charlie too.

   8

In the fifth season of Girls, something surprising happens. Adam begins pursuing Jessa. As Hannah’s best friend, Jessa is furious to find herself falling for Adam as well. They date. Hannah finds out; Jessa begins to resent Adam.

“Y’know, people hate me,” Jessa confides to Adam. “I’m a hateable kind of person. I don’t know why, I can’t help it, maybe it’s because I have a big ass and good hair but I know, I know that I have principles and one thing I don’t do is steal people’s boyfriends. But you ruin that. Don’t you see that? We could die in the same bed and I will never forgive you.”

Adam, livid, replies: “Hannah is a lazy, entitled, manipulative, myopic narcissist who knows a lot less than she thinks she does. Why do you think I fucking hated you for so long? Because Hannah fucking hates you.”

Jessa whips her long blonde hair. “Welcome to having a friend,” she digs coolly, and Adam smashes a lamp against a wall.  

   9

As the other characters slide into caricature in the late seasons of the show, Adam seems actually to begin to mature, even playing guardian to his nephew after his unstable sister (the brilliant Gaby Hoffman) disappears. In this way he serves as Hannah’s foil, and his maturity highlights the ways in which Hannah fails to grow up with the world around her. Ironic that the character with the most interesting arc on Girls is a man.  

   10

I consoled myself a lot in my graduate school years by comparing myself to those I deemed less intelligent. I was convinced I could’ve written Girls, but better, and I protected myself this way, moving through the world with the conviction of my own gifts, and no awareness of the deep uncertainty I harbored inside. In the poems I wrote, I was at the mercy of everyone in the world who didn’t love me back.  

Girls, for all its flaws, anticipated and mirrored my own life in ways I did not want to acknowledge.  As I grew older and more forgiving of myself, I found myself more forgiving of the characters on the show, and their myriad missteps. Annoying, immature, adolescent—sure. But Lena Dunham had something I wanted: agency.  

It’s this that I think we all work towards as we get older.  Agency in our relationships, in our writing, in our careers, and in ourselves. I still want to be, as Hannah Horvath puts it in the pilot episode, “the voice of my generation. Or, you know, a generation.”    

   11

I haven’t spoken to Paul in years, but I think of him each time I watch Girls. How badly we behaved back then. How scared we were of being hurt.

I think of telling him how he saved my life with his dumb shows and giant flat-screen TV. How safe I felt, hearing him have hate-sex with his girlfriend through the wall. How I loved him, though I never said it. How I knew him by heart.    

When I walked past the other day, Frost Street was quiet. Three trees struggled under ice.

I live on South 3rd now, a street with small fenced-in yards, and a happily neutral name.

[trans-matters]

My friend just told me that he thinks he's transgender and I want to support him but I'm not sure how because I've never dealt with this kind of thing first hand before, do you have any advice?

I found the following article had some good tips, I’m going to past the article in here.

SOURCE: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/how-to-be-ally-to-trans-friend/

1. Find an Appropriate Space to Process Your Thoughts and Feels

Holy guacamole! Transgender?

Maybe it’s been a long time coming, or maybe you’re completely shocked. You might be scared, or uncertain, or downright confused. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s understandable that you have some processing to do.

Because while your friend has had years to come to this realization, you haven’t had much time to figure it all out.

That’s totally okay! Take some time, some space, and unpack those thoughts and feels.

However, the important thing to know is this: It is not your friend’s responsibility to help you sort out your feelings.

That is, while it’s perfectly understandable that you might be struggling with your friend’s transition, it’s not fair to unload that weight onto your friend.

Your friend already has a lot on their plate. A transition is a big step! And chances are, they’ve come out to a lot of people at once. They are likely not in a position to guide each individual person through the complicated feelings that they have about this transition.

Nor should they – during such an emotional time, it could be hurtful (and even traumatic!) to try to ease people into acceptance.

Your friend has asked for your support during a really challenging life event. It’s not an appropriate time to demand that they shoulder your emotional baggage when they are already carrying such an enormous weight!

Instead, seek out a support group, whether it’s online or offline. Look to other friends that you trust to help you process your feelings. Journal about what you might be thinking. Seek a creative or physical outlet that lets you release some of the stress you might be feeling.

This allows you to be in a better place to support your friend and ensures that you won’t be triggering your friend by saying something unintentionally hurtful as you try to process.

2. Do Your Homework

I’m going to sound like a broken record by now, because this is far and away the most frequent advice I give to allies of trans folks.

But it’s true! You gotta do your homework!

The Internet is a magical place, and there’s an enormous wealth of information out there on the transgender community. And if you’re looking to support your friend, it’s a great idea to do a little bit of research.

This takes your friend off the hot seat instead of forcing them to painstakingly educate you (and many others) on every little aspect of their experience.

This article is a great place to start, but there are many other places to go from here! GLAAD has an abundance of friendly resources to get you started on the basics. You can always poke around the transgender tag or non-binary tag here at Everyday Feminism, too.

And depending on how your friend identifies (maybe they’re neutrois, non-binary, or genderqueer!), there are so many fantastic blogs written by trans folks where you can get direct insight into the experience of being trans.

If you’re overwhelmed by the reading, you can always hop over to YouTube and let Ash Hardell (and fantastic special guests!) school you on everything gender, or check out Dr. Doe at Sexplanations as she chats about the social construction of gender in sailor attire (no, seriously, she’s dressed like a sailor).

You’ll have the benefit of deepening your knowledge of gender (how cool!), and your friend will appreciate that you took the time to learn.

3. Respect and Validate Their Identity

The worst thing you can do for your friend is invalidate their identity. When your friend comes out as transgender, it’s not your place to greet them with disbelief, amusement, contradiction, or a refusal to recognize their gender.

Regardless of how you perceived them in the past, it’s your responsibility to believe your friend when they come out – and affirm their sense of self.

For example, when I came out, a number of people told me they were having a difficult time believing me because I had worn dresses in the past and had seemed to enjoy femininity. They suggested that I was confused and should take more time to think about it.

When a trans person comes out to you, it isn’t your place to tell them how they should or shouldn’t identify. No one can know someone’s gender except for the person themselves. If they say they are non-binary, they are. If they say they are a woman, they are. If they say they are a man, guess what? They are.

This probably goes without saying, but support means using the name they have asked to be called, using the pronouns that they have requested, and tuning in when they share their experiences – without judgment, without contradiction, and without accusation.

Remember that appearances can’t tell you what someone’s gender is. Gender is not something you can necessarily see, although we sometimes choose to express our gender in a particular way. Gender is not a haircut, a way of dressing, a set of body parts, or a set of behaviors. Gender is a sense of self, an identity that is only for us to declare.

So please, don’t say things like “But are you really?” or “I don’t believe that” or “Those pronouns are too complicated.”

If you are having a hard time accepting someone as transgender, give yourself the space and time you need to get to a place where you can better support this person before attempting to give support.

4. Don’t Just Talk the Talk

Sometimes being supportive means showing the fuck up.

Being an ally is about more than just vocalizing your support. One really excellent and helpful way to show that you’re standing by your friend is to offer tangible, concrete support to make their transition a little bit easier and make our lives as trans people a little bit safer.

Do they have a doctor’s appointment or a surgery consultation? Offer to drive or hang out in the waiting room. Are they going to court to legally change their name? Bring them flowers and accompany them. Are they shopping for new clothes? Ask to tag along.

If your friend is using a public restroom but they’re afraid for their safety, offer to go with them. If they’re fearful of using public transportation, offer to ride with them or give them a ride. If they need to get home after a fun night out, offer to call them a reputable cab or walk them home. Because while the victims are never at fault, the reality is that transgender people are statistically more likely to be the victims of violence and assault.

And if your friend is experiencing body dysphoria, I’ve written an entire article on steps you can take to support them.

And of course, ask your friend if there’s anything you can do. Your friend may have something in mind that they won’t ask for unless prompted.

We are the experts on our own experience, so it’s best to check in with us before assuming our needs.

5. Be an Ally and Advocate (Without Overstepping)

Support can be personal, of course, and standing by your friend through their transition is a valuable and wonderful thing.

But in today’s world, being transgender is sadly not just a personal struggle. Often times, it’s political. There are difficult battles each and every day being fought over our right to exist, our right to be recognized, and our right to be safe.

Being a supportive friend can also mean being an ally – because creating change is one of the best ways to make your friend’s transition safer, easier, and more empowering.

“Whoa,” you might say. “That sounds serious. But where do I even start?”

Well, here’s a list of 52 things you can do for transgender equality. Yes, 52; so don’t tell me there’s nothing to be done! You can do one thing per week for a year, damn it.

Ultimately it means making sure you are politically engaged and aware when there are issues at stake for the trans community (hint: this means always).

It can be as simple as voting “yes” on local ordinances that will support the trans community or calling someone in when they say something problematic about trans people.

It can mean being involved at your local LGBTQIA+ center and canvassing for a trans cause or donating to a fantastic trans organization.

But it also means stepping out of the spotlight and allowing trans people to lead and tell their own stories.

You should amplify the voices of trans people – sharing their work, inviting them to conferences and universities, getting them involved wherever possible – rather than speaking over them.

There’s always more work to be done. And if you’re looking to support your friend who is trans, it’s time to make this world a better place for all trans people.

6. Learn to Take Criticism and Know How to Apologize

Even if you follow every bit of advice in this article, you will still make mistakes. And I want to remind you that making mistakes is okay, as long as you’re willing to receive criticism and apologize sincerely.

Remember that regardless of your intention, your impact is still important. You may not have meant to spill coffee on my shirt, but I imagine that if you did, you would still apologize and you would still try to help me clean things up. Because, you know, I’m assuming you’re a nice person.

You may mix up your friend’s pronouns by accident. You may say something insensitive, only to realize this later on. Even I, as a trans person, make mistakes with other trans people from time to time. We’re all learning. Every single one of us!

Just recently, a thoughtful friend and fellow Everyday Feminism writer, Adrian, explained to me that a word I was using was actually extremely harmful to trans women. Instead of getting all prickly and defensive about it, I had to remind myself that this was a great opportunity to do some growing and avoid hurting others in the future.

Even I make mistakes! What’s most important is to learn from those mistakes.

So how do you apologize?

When you misgender someone, it’s best to offer a quick apology, a correction, and let the conversation move forward. Nothing is more awkward than a person spending five minutes apologizing for misgendering you and completely redirecting the conversation. I shouldn’t feel like I have to console or comfort you after you’ve made a mistake, right?

When there’s a bigger hiccup – maybe you’ve said something offensive without realizing it – it’s good to know how to give a sincere apology. There’s an amazing video that breaks this down that is basically required viewing for anyone who aspires to be a decent human.

As the brilliant Franchesca Ramsey says in her video, “A real genuine apology is made up of two parts: the first part is you take responsibility for what you’ve done, and then the second part is you make a commitment to change the behavior.”

If you’ve said something that is hurtful to your friend, an apology can be the difference between a rift in your relationship and an opportunity for growth. Never underestimate the power of a sincere apology.

—-

Kyle

[judedoyle]

While the Strike is Hot

It’s an odd position to be in, being vehemently and angrily agreed with by your colleagues. Still, in the weeks since I published my essay on the upcoming Women’s Strike, I’ve become aware that a few women and feminists see me as the voice of “anti-strike” thinking. I was puzzled by this, at first, simply because I think it requires a backbreaking amount of work to read that piece as anti-strike; I explicitly endorse the strike, and say how cool I think it is, at many points throughout the piece. When I’ve seen critiques of my work that I’ve agreed with, I’ve passed them around, in the name of keeping the conversation open. Yet the bad feeling bubbles on -- most recently, in a piece by Dayna Tortorici of n+1, where I am the sole “anti-strike” feminist cited in over 2,000 words. 

I like Tortorici’s work, a lot. I have no doubt that she’s a smart and deeply progressive thinker. Yet I’m flat-out bewildered by her reading of my essay. So, because I am an idealistic fool who never learns -- and because the conversation is more important than the handful of sexist douchebags who’ll inevitably respond to it on social media with whooping and hollering about the cool catfight going down -- I’m responding to her response. 

Now: In order to even get into this, we have to address the elephant in the room. Due to the fact that I (a) supported Hillary Clinton, or (b) reported sympathetically on allegations of fairly severe sexist and racist harassment coming from “the left” during the 2016 primaries, there are several people who view me as a kind of bogeywoman; an emblem of the evil, careerist, “identitarian” feminism that nailed Our Messiah, Bernard of Sanders -- and, with him, all hope of American socialism! -- to the cross at the Democratic National Convention. This argument doesn’t much line up with the facts, or my politics -- for example, the fact that I’ve worked at a labor publication since 2011, and have specifically covered class differences and exploitation between women, the dangers of consumerist feminism, cynical pop feminism and femvertising, and misogyny on the left for years. (Until 2016, you see, it was widely held that these critiques were not mutually exclusive.) But it has served to divert attention from my real arguments and to imbue my every move and word with some kind of sinister resonance for certain people -- the sense that, even if what I’m saying sounds perfectly reasonable, I must have some hidden, malevolent reason for saying it.

Most of the people who dislike me this way have skin in the game, often because they were directly implicated in the harassment allegations, or simply because their work has been criticized as sexist. Alternet’s Ben Norton, for example, did not like the Elle article about the strike, and repeatedly told his Twitter followers I was attacking the strike as part of my role as a “relentless Hillary Clinton propagandist” -- but that’s because Ben Norton once angrily e-mailed me, demanding I change an article because it contained a single sentence critiquing a piece he wrote about Joe Biden, until my editor stepped in and told him not to contact me again. I don’t engage with Norton’s arguments because, well, he doesn’t have arguments; what he has is hurt feelings, and his “critique” is just an attempt to breach the “do not contact” rule by other means. But men refusing to honor a woman’s express wish not to hear from them is nothing new, in a bar or on the street or (in this case) at work. You can’t have a good-faith argument with a bad-faith interlocutor, so I don’t. 

However, one of the inevitable side effects of living through a smear campaign designed to paint you as a sinister, scheming character is that otherwise reasonable people will start to find you sinister, for no good reason, simply because they’ve heard the same groundless accusation repeated so many times. (Someone should ask Hillary Clinton about that.) I’d like to think there’s a qualitative difference between someone like Tortorici -- who certainly doesn’t seem like the sort of person who’d knowingly attack a feminist colleague just so that leftist men don’t have to deal with the soul-scorching horror of being called sexist on the Internet sometimes -- and someone like Norton. I feel compelled to engage, if only to test my own assumption that good-faith debate between feminists is still necessary, and still possible. 

Yet I can’t help feeling that my innate evil seems to be the foundation of Tortorici’s critique, which is entirely based on her deep reading of my true feelings, or my hidden intentions, a reading which is not backed up by -- and indeed, at points, is blatantly contradicted by -- the actual text of my piece. 

For one thing, Tortorici concludes that the piece asks women not to strike, when its actual headline -- one which she quotes -- begins “Go Ahead and Strike.” 

Let’s roll tape. 

When we join other women in a general strike, we do not do so on equal terms. Some of us risk more in not working than others, and for some of us the risk is too much. 

Fair; I agree with every word. 

Some see this as an insurmountable obstacle to women’s unity. 

An obstacle, yes; insurmountable, no. It is, however, very tough to surmount, which is exactly why we need intersectionality -- the understanding that “women” are not monolithic, that we have different needs and different amounts of power, that we are capable of harming or exploiting each other, and that blanket calls for solidarity “as women” don’t do much good unless our strategy is tailored to the reality of different women’s different needs and lives. 

I mean, I don’t imagine that Angela freaking Davis is unfamiliar with these principles; I’m just stating them to re-affirm what I imagine are the common grounds of our debate. 

This point was made recently by Sady Doyle in an op-ed on the Women’s Strike for Elle, under the finger-wagging headline “Go Ahead and Strike, but Know That Many of Your Sisters Can’t.”

... It was?

Also, while I do regret that Tortorici doesn’t like the headline, as someone who works in media, she’s probably well aware that writers don’t choose their own headlines. That said, what’s underneath the headline is an admittedly wide-ranging article that tries to do several things in a fairly small space. 

First, it tries to educate an audience on what a “general strike” means and what a “women’s strike” means. (Elle is a general-readership publication, not an explicitly left-politics publication like n+1 or In These Times; you can’t just assume your audience has read Rosa Luxemburg.) Second, it sketches a brief history of women’s strikes, including the famous 1970 women’s strike that catalyzed the second wave as we know it, in order to show how powerful and cool these things can be when they work. (Why do I want readers to think strikes are cool? Well, I want those readers to strike, something Tortorici seems to miss.)

Third (and this is what Tortorici objects to) the piece interrogates the potential problems and complications of such a strike. It suggests that we can’t just import the framework of the great ‘70s strikes into 2017, given how much gender roles have changed; it also points out ways in which women could betray or exploit each other during the strike, specifically how rich women can betray or exploit poor women. Finally, it calls for feminists to keep these complications in mind, and work together to create a clear, specific, creative vision of what “women’s work” means in the present day, and how we want it to change through our protesting and striking.

The fact that the article is so crowded may lend to its being easily misread. So some good-faith misreadings are genuinely my fault. But it is odd to take the one faintly critical portion of the piece -- which amounts to nothing more than a call for intersectional class consciousness -- and characterize that as “finger-wagging.” As I say in the piece, “these questions aren't meant to undermine the women's strikes, which are (again) exciting for their promise to unify feminist theory and revolutionary practice.” Yet asking questions is being framed as undermining. 

To be blunt, it seems more than a little like I’m being called a nag or a buzzkill. I suspect Tortorici and I agree on rich women’s ability to be exploitative -- it’s just that I’m not supposed to bring it up, for some reason. 

Here, as far as I can tell, is the reason: 

The implication seemed to be that privileged women should feel guilty for striking, and therefore abstain... The alternative course of not striking—preserving one’s daily status quo, espousing instead “a kind of guilty, stagnant solidarity of intention,” as Magally Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths write in the Nation—helps no one. Instead, it places some women’s fear of hypocrisy over the needs of those they might join[.]

Here, I have to say, is where Tortorici’s argument really starts spinning out into the ether. She can’t point to a place where I say privileged women shouldn’t strike, for the very obvious reason that I never say it. She’s even conceded that “Doyle endorses the strike,” which I do. 

So she’s arguing that somehow, behind the text of the piece that encourages women to strike, I have subliminally asked women not to strike -- or, at least, that I have felt that women should not strike, without ever actually saying so -- and is left analyzing the implications of the implications of the thing she imagines I wanted to say while saying the thing I said. At this point, any actual analysis of my article is far behind us, and we are dealing exclusively with Dayna Tortorici’s psychic insight into the hidden workings of my soul. 

She does object to one real line: “Without a specific, labor-related point, after all, a ‘strike’ is just a particularly righteous personal day.” Here, for fuller context, is how I expand on that sentiment in the piece:  

A woman with a comfortable office job may be able to ‘strike’ simply by taking paid time off and feel confident that her job will be there when the strike is over. But for women in lower-wage positions with few or no protections, leaving for even a day might mean going without necessary wages, or incurring the wrath of an abusive boss, or even losing her job entirely... [A women’s strike] might [also] mean that a female CEO has to do without her nanny and her secretary, putting her in the position of being the potentially vindictive boss. 

Now, there is one “solution” for this, which is for women with office jobs not to strike. Tortorici and I agree that this would be a comically bad fix for the problem. 

But there is a worse solution, which I point to in the piece: Privileged women can “strike” while still exploiting less privileged women. The nice liberal white woman who runs the cafe can take the day off because she’s so angry at Trump, but tell her female kitchen workers and waitresses (many of them immigrants, or economically vulnerable women working for far less than a living wage) that there’s really no way she can let them off work. The upper-middle-class stay-at-home mother might decide that she’s going on a strike for emotional labor and childcare -- because she assumes she can pass the kids along to a nanny or a day-care center anyway. She might then fire the nanny when she doesn’t show up for work. The college student might strike, and decide to celebrate with a little “self-care” -- like going out for a manicure, unaware that the largely female staffers at the parlor are unable to walk away from their jobs due to the abusive working conditions. (Yes, there’s a call to only support women-owned businesses, but let’s be honest -- how many of us could name the women-owned businesses in our communities off hand? And what guarantee is there that your local manicure parlor isn’t owned by an exploitative woman, rather than a man?)

By calling attention to the inequalities between women, I am not calling on those privileged women not to strike. I am calling on them to strike mindfully, to show solidarity with something other than a red t-shirt or a self-care day. I say this pretty clearly in the piece, something else Tortorici blows past while, somehow, quoting: 

This argument, as Doyle herself concedes (“True, part of the point of a strike is for middle- and upper-class women to stand in solidarity with working-class and poor ones”), is based on false premises... The Women’s Strike isn’t undermined by the fact of difference. 

I think writing that Sady Doyle doesn’t want women to strike, in an article that contains the sentence “Doyle endorses the strike,” is also a pretty interesting example of an argument based on false premises.

The full line is “part of the point of a strike is for middle- and upper-class women to stand in solidarity with working-class and poor ones, protecting them from reprisal by joining in the action.” It may be true that the Women’s Strike isn’t undermined by difference or inequality between women -- or, at least, it can be true. But it can only be true if that solidarity actually holds; if middle-class and upper-class women are well-versed enough in what it means, and clear enough on the power they hold, that they don’t wind up sabotaging less privileged women’s efforts inadvertently. You cannot simply assume this will happen, in the same way that you can’t simply assume everyone knows what the phrase “general strike” means; these ideas are not all that mainstream, even in 2017, and as the Women’s March demonstrated, under all those pussy hats were people with widely varied levels of activist experience. 

The article’s notes about complication are aimed toward getting us all onto the same page. I am calling on (my fellow) privileged women to recognize that they are not just oppressed, but also, potentially, oppressors -- and to make striking possible for all the women in their lives, not just to take the strike as a special day for themselves. In one of the piece’s more controversial lines, I say “protest can be a privilege,” not because it is inherently privileged, because it can be -- and will be until we make protest accessible by supporting each other.  

Now: You can fault me for not making this call clearly or explicitly enough. But I think the organizers of the march and I are probably on the same page when it comes to making it. And I think they’ve done exceptional work on this front. 

Thankfully, much of my Elle article is now out of date; since I first faulted the International Women’s Strike for non-specificity, and for not making plans available for women who could not get the day off, they’ve rolled out detailed plans, with multiple ways to strike, including strike actions for women who can’t get away from work. In response to my original article, two of the organizers also wrote a detailed and thoughtful response in The Nation. I admire their response, because it contains lots of the historical and contemporary analogues and labor analysis I asked for, because it is stringently fair -- it sticks entirely to the text on the page, and even admits at some points that a passage may admit of multiple readings -- and because the fact that it exists shows that the organizers are committed to transparency and responsiveness.

I wish I felt the same about Tortorici’s. As is, I feel like I’m awkwardly wedged in to her (much larger and more all-encompassing) essay because the piece needed a villain -- and that need may have overwhelmed any commitment to an accurate reading of what I wrote. This is particularly frustrating because, as I say, I admire Tortorici’s work -- and because we so clearly agree with each other. 

By withdrawing my work, I show my place in the larger economy; when we all do (or don’t), we invite one another to see how our work is interdependent, see the ways we are compelled to exploit one another. And when we see it, we may be able to say with confidence—as the benefiting and exploited members of this system, speaking together—that this is not the system we want.

What an excellent vision! If I may, I’d like to respond with a quote from another feminist’s endorsement of the strike: 

It may be that, just as all the old revolutionaries promised us, we will discover our power through the very act of striking; we'll see what "women's work" looks like when women stop doing it.

We are at a moment of unexpected possibility. If we're able to seriously discuss a general strike, then any number of previously unthinkable options are within reach. These movements are being formed out of resistance to unacceptable conditions, and yet it might also behoove us to get more creative, and more specific, when we envision the world we want. We may be able to ask for more than we think.

Tortorici and I are not just agreeing with each other -- we are sometimes nearly word-for-word mirrors of each other. We may ferociously, sarcastically, angrily mirror each other at times -- about half of all feminist or progressive activism is just that -- but I don’t think we have to. And even if we have to, it’s not the end of the world. People only fight over what matters to them, and if we’re fighting over the strike, then at least it matters to us both. 

Solidarity between women and feminists is possible. I’d like to think that Tortorici and I, along with any given woman who likes or dislikes my piece, will be acting in solidarity by strike day. But solidarity can only work if we work it -- and it should never preclude discussing the things that matter, or asking uncomfortable questions. 

[helloarmchairphilosopher]

Writer's works in progress

I saw that someone else had written up their wip-s, so maybe writing up mine will make me GET ON WITH IT and help me write more on one (or more) of them. 1) 1938 Brooklyn Murder mystery: in which a Ripper (any killer with a knife is always dubbed a Ripper by the press, it's a thing) stalks the young men of the queer/gay community of Brooklyn. One by one young men die and the cops either can't or won't do anything about a few dead [slur]; the mob doesn't care either; war looms in Europe; the Mayor is trying to clean up the city before the World's Fair; the dynamics of the queer community itself is changing as men and women who previously might not have considered themselves part of it are thrown in with it, with new laws meant to manage a moral society; and two men, in exactly that predicament, are watching their friends dying at the hands of the Ripper and hoping they're not next, while dealing with feelings for each other. (The historian in me has run amok.) 2) The Sweater Curse: (Bagginshield) In which hobbits consider it bad luck to make crocheted or knitted garments for themselves (a sign that one has no kin) because sweaters are made and given between first and second degree blood relatives (parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews). Other kinds of garments are given freely. If a sweater is given to an unrelated person it is considered a proposal. In which dwarves make their own crocheted or knitted garments for themselves (a sign of their craft-skill and self-sufficiency). Other kinds of garments are bought and sold freely. If a sweater is offered as a gift to another person it is befuddling at best and an insult at worst. The Sweater Curse in our world says that if a person, usually a woman, starts to make a sweater for their significant other, usually a man, before they are married, the relationship will end. The fic I'd imagined had a happy ending - with Thorin thinking that Bilbo had been making the sweater for himself. "You loveable dunce, did you never notice I'd keep borrowing Kíli to size it correctly for you? I'd be swimming in it!" 3) transman Phil Coulson fic. I'm not trans, so I'd have to tread carefully here. My real aim is feminism and femininity. A male Coulson has leeway in a manner that a female Coulson would not. A male Coulson is not told that he is missing out on the essential manly quality of being a father and a husband; he is not automatically assumed, on walking into a room, to be the secretary or the assistant. Women always have to be twice as good to be perceived as half as competent, and then (often) they're told not to be a b*tch about it. But all this from the point of Clint Barton, who is kind of clueless, and who really loves Phil (I kind of love this ship and like the rest of the fandom I'm not really sure why), means that he just sees grade-A badass Phil Coulson. Full stop. No edits. No matter what is, or isn't, in his past, in his pants, in his medical file, or what his parents used to call him. 4) Werewolf romance novel Tall dark and handsome (TM) is the antagonist who is stalking and eating people. He's a creep who plays into rape culture and preys on young women who think that his bad boy vibe cover up anything other than a black heart. The protagonist is a smart and kick-ass young woman with a shiny degree and huge student loans working below her talents, as a barman, which is how she knows of the antagonist and his creepiness. She has a friend, her landlady's daughter, who is close to her age. (Yay for passing the Bechdel test? I'd better, after actually meeting Alison Bechdel.) The love interest is this sandy blonde dorky guy, a drifter who works construction and throws darts at the bar. When people start getting chewed up he's the prime suspect, and even our protagonist doesn't know what to think - but only until our antagonist tries to take a bite out of her, and he intervenes, as a werewolf. And from there it's your usual. I got sick of the werewolf books with creepy rape culture overtones and not passing the Bechdel test and thought, I could do better. 5) a Clint Barton/Darcy Lewis fanfic, in which she helps patch him up after Loki's mind control. In the comics, Clint had a pretty messed up childhood. Circus, dad who beat him, taught to shoot by a man who beat him and then used him first as a thief and then as a killer (or so I loosely understand; and I'd be using a variation on that in the fic, anyway). He would have had to have therapy for it at SHIELD just to be functional as an agent around people. But Loki's mind control messed with all that, breaking the locks and self-management he'd had for so long. He'd have major depressive episodes and PTSD following it. And Darcy, being a civilian, might not be the best person to bring him out, but she was there for Thor and the Destroyer. She saw some shit. And who knows what she had in her childhood. (I do, because I created it, but I'm the author and I can do what I like.) What was done by Loki cannot be undone, but what was done before Loki could, just maybe, be done over again, more painstakingly and with greater care, like walking around the glass shards of a broken vase. 6) a Fíli/fem!Bilbo fic: in which a pregnant Bilbo runs from the Mountain. (Thorin died of his wounds, but Fíli and Kíli survived.) Bilbo, in whatever feminized spelling of one's choosing, won't, can't, stay. The memories of battle, of being shaken like a rat over the gates of Erebor, are too fresh and too raw. The halls reek of dragon and she hears Smaug's eerie deep voice creeping in the shadows. No, she cannot stay. She must go somewhere green. A month, a year, five years, forever, she must go somewhere clean and cleansed. And Fíli, her One, can't go. She knows this. And she, even though she's his One, can't stay. Magic lover's nonsense and whatever, there's reality you have to deal with, and sometimes reality means PTSD and dragon stink. So they argue, the night after his coronation. She is due to leave the next day with Gandalf and it'll be the last time - it's emotionally fraught. He's mad and she's mad, because they both *want* it to be different. In my mind's eye I saw the argument, in the indirect result: his name was Frerin. And, of course, that can't be let alone, since as the eldest son of a king, half-hobbit or no, he is heir apparent to a throne, and a birthright. Tolkien wrote that dwarf populations at the end of the end of the Third Age and into the Fourth dwindled until the race itself failed - meaning that there were too few women having too few children. This is obvious enough from what we see in the appendices. A king having a son hidden from him and raised by a non-dwarf woman, even if she is his mother? A scandal, the fanon assumes, and I presume with it. 7) a Bucky Barnes in slightly more efficient and effective hiding fic. There's that photo going around of Sebastian Stan from the set of his latest movie and he has this big mustache, and jeez if Bucky looked like that, some people commented, and not all 90s Grunge, he might have escaped a lot better, since the photo Zemo circulated assumed that Bucky looked like a hobo. Personally I don't see Bucky growing that mustache (looking like Howard Stark, who he assassinated, would give him a heart attack). Nor do I see him as a teacher, of math or otherwise, as the original post suggested; he'd never pass the background check. But there's another picture of Sebastian Stan I saw that was also relatively recent (but before any of the photos from the set of I, Tonya) with a full beard, and if he'd grown that out, if Bucky had grown that out, maybe he might have looked like Norm Abram back when he was younger. So, maybe a carpenter. It's a sin to hide that beautiful jawline, but effective. Bucky would get away from HYDRA and SHIELD both, just by staying off the radar and not looking like what they expect. He could even use his real name - there are 4,207 other James Barnes-es in the US, what would make him special? There are only 27 Clint Bartons. One borrowed social security number, one rented house, anywhere would do but I was thinking Santa Fe (because I've been there and can describe it, it's cool enough in part of the year he can wear long sleeves outside and the rest of the year there's air conditioning and he can wear long sleeves inside to cover the arm, and because it's a tourist town, people with money to spend on his carpentry work). From my notes, in particular: He checks in at the spots the Smithsonian mentioned. Red Hook, Dumbo, Coney Island. Those spots in Brooklyn that are supposed to have had that towheaded little captain America to be and his sidekick to become running amok in the 1920s. Some pieces fit. Bits of bitty Steve fit in, here and here, slotting back into Bucky's memory. Steve is a huge, pun intended, part of who he once was. To have made Bucky forget Steve, no wonder he forgot himself - - or was it the other way around, that Bucky forgot himself because he forgot Steve? 8) nonfiction, Torah commentary, starting with Genesis (Bereshit). 9) nonfiction, the history (I've been working on for five years) of the Hasidic movement during the Holocaust. Various dynasties and their rebbes, and the rebbes' successors, and the survival of the Hasidim and the Hasidut - how it worked, where it happened, how it happened; but from there, which members of the rabbinical families did not survive? Why? What attempts were made to save them? When attempts were made, who was given first preference and what stated reason, if any, was given? These are questions that have not yet been answered. And I have limited access to Hasidim, by language and by culture. These are not questions anyone would ever give me a straight answer to, of course. I have strong suspicions. Nothing more. The demographics of death - these are records we do have - say a lot. And the final chapters of the book, or the last volume, or the next book, also needs to be written: the rise to power of the other Hasidic dynasties, the massive shift in power away from Poilisher-Yidish culture elsewhere due to the near destruction of that community. Lubavitch, Bobov, Satmar, Belz, and Ger - only the last is Poilisher-Yidish. Before the war the largest Hasidic dynasties were to be found in Poland: Ger, Aleksandr, and Radomsk. There's a lot here no one else has done. I suppose it falls to me. So, I have many things to work on. I have lots to choose from. If only my brain would ACTUALLY LET ME DO IT, DAMMIT.