29
May
2007
The Essay Generator
No need to make up your own bullshit ever again!
Kameron Hurley
“Come on. Do I look like the mother of the future? I mean, am I tough, organized? I can't even balance my check book!”
- Sarah Conner, The Terminator
Archive for May, 2007
29
May
2007
When the Jokes Don’t Even Make Sense Anymore
I was idly plugging away at my stumbleupon toolbar and happened across a tired old joke that plays on expected gendered behaviors. It’s something like this: a guy’s in bed with his girlfriend and really wants to have sex with her, but once he’s all buttered up, she says she’s really not in the mood and why can’t we just cuddle? and doesn’t he want her for more than the fulfillment of his sexual desires? So the next day he goes out shopping with her, tells her to buy anything she wants, and watches her work herself into an “orgasmic fit” at the idea of purchasing all of these items. Then they get to the register and he says he no longer feels like buying her anything, and doesn’t she want him for more than his ability to buy her things?
The tone was from the first person male POV, with the shopping scene deliberately set up as a cool “ploy” to get his “point” across. It was mean-spirited.
But what struck me about this particularly gendered joke of the sort I see all the time was not just that it was stupidly sexist, but that this joke’s “punchline” relies on gendered norms that are completely foreign to my experience. It was a joke based on a shared assumption of behaviors. But it was an assumption I didn’t share, cause it wasn’t true in my life, so it wasn’t funny.
When you tell a joke, you’re playing on people’s actual experiences. You’re ribbing at everyday behaviors, everyday truths, and for the first time I realized that these jokes weren’t funny just because they were sexist or crass, but merely because, well they didn’t make fun of true experiences. It didn’t take behaviors out of context and make me look at them in new ways because this isn’t the way my relationships with people have ever worked.
I don’t find orgasmic fulfillment in shopping. It makes me feel *worse* about myself. And I’m generally the one who conflates sex with emotional fulfillment in a relationship (yes, I’m working on that). The men in my life don’t really buy me things. I struggle to be as fair and equal as possible in the purchasing of shared meals and trips, even when unemployed.
This joke didn’t make fun of my life.
It made me think about the shelf-life of sexism, workplace harrassment, etc. The more we live lives that *don’t* fit stereotypes and these rigid and absolute gender norms, the more people who speak in these terms look dated, old-fashioned. When an unmarried woman announces she’s pregnant these days, the first question out of people’s mouths isn’t immediately, “When’s the wedding?”
I suppose it’s too much to hope that sexism will just “go out of style,” but certain forms of it have, and I’m watching the rest follow suit. It’s why I can understand the fear and terror and violence of the people watching it go; the desperate cry of people watching an entire system of oppression, a system that’s kept them in power, headed for the door.
There are days when I worry that it really will take some kind of bloody, radical revolution to get to an egalitarian society. The problem with starting a society based on bloody revolution is that then you have to figure out how to police the bloody-handed revolutionaries. That world isn’t any better. I don’t really want a Joanna Russ world. What starts with fire and blood often ends with fire and blood.
29
May
2007
In the End, Everybody DIES
Not exactly uplifting, is it? (wait for the gifs to begin scrolling – it’s a little slow)
29
May
2007
Going Home
I want to be better.
28
May
2007
Blogging Will Save the World!
Blogging will not save the world.
I’m going to say that again: screaming on the internet will not save the world.
But it can be a good place to start.
Blogs are great places, but I see them more as testing grounds – as initial steps, as consciousness-raising – more than I see them as real, solid activism. They’re a form of, maybe, virtual activism. It’s where you go to find your voice and speak to others who’ve shared some of your experiences in the world and want to converse about a common cause or interest.
The trick is to then use this voice you’ve found online and speak out in the real world. If something is fucked up, you need to be able to say it’s fucked up just as easily in real life as you can online.
Because you’ll find that it’s a fuck of a lot easier to rip into the latest asshattery published by the Washington Post than it is to point out your coworker’s blatent sexism during a morning meeting. It’s a lot scarier to actually do than to talk about (like most things).
I remember standing around with some coworkers waiting for a meeting to start and having one of the guys make a “joke” about how one of our coworkers must be “shooting blanks” because they found out his wife was having “another” girl. For the first time in a long time, the not-coolness of it struck me deeply enough that I spoke up and said, “Wow, you’ve just offended every woman here.”
And I spoke up in part because of the voice I’d found on this blog. How could I be the writer of a blog called “Brutal Women” and be too terrified to call out a simple example of blatent sexism?
He laughed about it of course, and there were efforts made to move on to another subject, but I remember how difficult and terrifying it was to say that in the workplace to people I had to work with every day. Nobody wants to lose their job or get shunned by everybody else and have their job made horrible because you’re that fucking Nazi who “can’t take a joke.”
But nobody wants to live in the fucked up beat-you-down-somebody’s-gotta-be-top heirarchy either.
I got tired of people saying they “just didn’t know” something was not cool, offensive, abusive, etc. If you *tell* them they’re being sexist, at least you can take away that particular excuse, and maybe your courage can give other people courage. When enough people say no, you have a movement. Behavior changes.
While at Wiscon this weekend, I had somebody introduce me to somebody else as another writer’s girlfriend.
One sentence. Full stop.
I laughed out loud and said, “Wow, I can’t believe you just introduced me that way at a feminist SF con when I have a story coming out in a Year’s Best SF on Tuesday.”
I tried to be very good-natured about it, and she was actually a little embarassed about it I think, because it was something she did without even thinking about it. It was a funny thing, too, to be at a professional con and have the entirety of my writing career erased and my identity boiled down to “that chick who’s sleeping with so-and-so.”
These are all little things, of course, personal things. But if we let these sorts of things go, what else will we let go? The first step to altering behavior isn’t to ignore it or smile at it or make excuses for it. The first step is to change your own behavior and call out those normalized behavior in others.
I love to babble online, becuase it is, largely, safe. I can delete comments all I want. I can choose to share or not share things with certain people. I can control whether or not there are comments at all. I have yet to be fired from a job for something I said online (knock on wood). There isn’t a lot of danger in it.
What’s dangerous is speaking out at the office and confronting harrassers on the street.
It takes courage. It’s fucking hard. And terrifying.
But it’s the only way we’ll ever change anything.
The alternative to speaking out is not speaking out, and that’s worse. Silence in this culture implies consent (however fucked up that fucking fucked up idea is). By not speaking out, I am consenting. That’s how it’s read, no matter that I’m not speaking up because I’m afraid to be beaten, raped, harrassed, fired, etc.
It’s going to be read as consentual, because the means of oppression in this society are just so damned normalized.
And you know what? I want to live in a world that’s really different. And in that world, the sorts of sexist, oppressive people-like-me-are-better-than-you-and-we’ll-force-you-to-fuck-us-to-prove-it stuff that people say everyday is *not* normal, and it’s *not* OK, and if I can wrap my head around this idea – that the language of equality, of valuing individuals based on their humanity and not on their race, or class, or gender, is the *norm,* then when I hear these things spoken, they’re all the more shocking. They’re missives from another world where somebody’s got to be on top. Where a woman’s value is based on the man (always a man!) who she’s attached to, and if you can’t beat somebody else into submission then you’ll be the one who’s beaten.
That is not the world I want to live in. I have to speak from somewhere else.
Sure is a good thing I’m a fantasy writer.
Makes it easier to believe it can be different.
28
May
2007
Traveling Sugar
I know my numbers are going to be “off” when I travel, but for some reason this particular con had me running particularly high numbers (I was 313 at lunch today. 313! I haven’t seen a number that high since my pizza splurge at Christmas!). I blame some of that on the dessert thing last night; I probably should have gone with something like the fruit cup and the chocolate covered strawberries instead of the fruitcup and the chocolate cheesecake and then having dinner.
My mistake was not setting my alarm for 2am to re-adjust my insulin dosage. I was so tired I just thought, “oh, fuck it” and tested at 215 this morning.
I’m not going to bother logging any of these numbers, BTW. I know exactly why I got them, and the a1c doesn’t lie, so there’s really no point in logging them just so my new endocrinologist can wag her finger at me and say something brilliant like, “You should lose weight!”
No, what I should do is start working out at cons.
In my spare time.
OK, so maybe I just need to make better choices at the dessert bar and when I have to have the Governor’s club pastry breakfast, stick to half a bagel and the fruit dish instead of a whole bagel and the fruit dish.
Subsequent cons should also be less stressful, which I think is really going to help.
27
May
2007
Connage
I love me a good Wiscon, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never stayed Thursday-Tuesday before, and yes, it’s Sunday night and I’m incredibly burned out. It takes a lot of effort to get ready for those things. After I blew through the first couple days of “I love all these people! It’s so great to see them!” personal stuff started to wear me down, and I found I suddenly felt this desperate need to be interesting.
I’m stunned at the huge feelings of inadequecy by day three, where everything that comes out of my mouth starts to sound way too loud and stupid and all I want to do is drink liquor and burn something.
I knew this was going to be a stressful Wiscon, but it hasn’t been as blazingly, gloriously, stunningly bad as I thought it would be.
It’s at acceptable levels of screaming terror, which is all right.
I’ve met some great people and got to sit down and talk to others who I didn’t know so well, and really, socializing and a couple of panels that inspire some note taking is all I want out of a good con…
What can I say?
I’m easy.
24
May
2007
WEB MARSHALL [TM] (Dude, I Couldn’t *Make* This Shit UP!!)
My flight here in Milwaukee is delayed by 13 minutes, but still scheduled to arrive in Madison on time. Fascinating.
I’ve been passing the time online checking up on blogs that I was unable to access at Dayton International Airport, which also has a WiFi service.
What’s that, you ask? Why wasn’t I able to access my blogroll?
IT IS BECAUSE MY BLOGROLL IS FULL OF FILTHY PORN!!!
And so Dayton’s Web Marshall (TM) took me to task!
My favorite part is the fine print that says, “Your attempt to access this site has been recorded.”
Next thing you know, I’ll be hauled to prison on pornography charges for accessing my blog. Filthy fucking liberal blogs and their Lesbian Feminist Boxers!!!
Even those left-leaning “literary criticism” blogs are full of pornographers!
And Pandagon’s been censored for – among other things – using the words “breast” (without mention of “cancer”) and “lesbian.”
Dirty, Dirty Pandagon!
And apparently, Livejournal – all of it – is just Dirty Dirty Dirty.
Filthy pornographers!!
Is our terror of young people cruising for porn in the airport really so great that we’re willing to censor our media like DAY International is a communist state?
Oh, hell, who am I kidding? Just look at all the other shit we’ve been encouraged to put up with in the name of “terror.”
Ohhhhh Pandagon is so full of Scary Angry Women, and that Matt Cheney, man, what a terrorist pornographer! I tremble!
24
May
2007
In Case I Don’t Get the Chance…
I’m heading for the airport in about half an hour, so in case I don’t get the chance, remember that my story The Women of Our Occupation is going to be available for purchase on May 29th in the Year’s Best SF 12 collection -
Buy it and ask me to sign it! That would be EXCITING!!!
24
May
2007
Idol
Does the whole Simon Cowell poking at Paula Abdul (physically) thing bother anybody else but me? I realized last night that if I have to see Simon Cowell poking at Paula Abdul one more time, I’m going to fly to Hollywood and throttle him.
When she stands up and starts hitting him and telling him to stop touching her in the Ford theater on national television, it’s probably a good indicator to Cowell that his actions aren’t seen as friendly and amusing.
If he’d been doing that to Randy and Randy bashed him in the face, he wouldn’t do it it again. Instead, he picks on Paula; even worse last night cause she’s got the broken nose and bruised ribs. She’s already maybe half his size.
And you know, it’s got the same sort of whiff as the whole Harlangate thing. “Me and Paula are friends!” isn’t an excuse. It’s even more deplorable when it’s so fucking obvious that you’re being an ass. It does make you wonder: if Simon has problems backing off when someone publically tells him to knock it the fuck off and starts hitting him, what’s going to keep him from “knocking it off” in private? Will she have to claw his eyes out?
This is why I find Twisty’s whole discussion about “consent” (and… continued here) so damned amusing. What a different world we would live in. Not neccessarily a better one, mind, but oh fucking boy would it be different, and it sure does throw shitty behavior like this into stark relief.
Novels
