Note that is not necessarily a BETTER place. But it is a DIFFERENT place.

And that is where my interest lies. Because a world in which that is an assumption is a much different world than ours.

There is no longer any “singular badass woman” in my recent fiction, unlike some of my earlier dabblings with epic fantasy. She tends to be one of many, just like the old feminist SF of old, and a lot less like today’s Urban Fantasy with its singular gifted woman.

There are plenty of real-life examples of female fighter pilots, revolutionaries, war heroes, boxers, martial artists, innovators, heroes, leaders, and spies. But when we talk about them, still, we pretend that those particular stories of women are extraordinary. We celebrate their uniqueness. We trot them out like remarkable circus freaks. We make no attempt to normalize them. When I spoke with one of my academic advisors back in Durban about how I wanted to look into the role of women revolutionaries because so little was ever spoken of them, he scoffed and pointed out that women had always been a part of war. Even Shaka Zulu had an all-female band of warriors.

But what specialized academics in particular fail to see, so often, is that the popular cultural narrative is not one of women warriors and female empowerment (strip tease cardio classes aside). When you turn on the TV or listen to the radio, you’re most likely to hear about men making decisions and doing things and women having things done to them. This is still the case. When your most powerful governments and corporations are chock full of guys (when, indeed, men own the majority of the world’s wealth and certainly our nation’s news outlets), it’s highly likely they’ll be the ones making news. Powerful women are still more likely to make the news due to some fashion faux pas or the fact that their husband got caught dicking around with some other woman.

We do not have a cultural narrative of female power in the way that our culture values power (childbirth is loooooads more powerful than money or movie deals, but we place very little value on it because, well, women do it). In fact, the narrative is largely one of female disadvantage and disempowerment, often to such an extent that I have to turn the news off for fear I’ll get discouraged about my chances of not being raped or killed or sexually humiliated because I was born a woman – stories about women that make the news are, quite often, stories of rape, abuse, cheating, murder… or pregnancy. Because “women” only get into the narrative by virtue of what’s been done to them or who they’re giving birth to, right?

Oh, sure, there are plenty of examples to the contrary – always those Singular Women who are trotted out to prove that All Women are not painted with the same brush… just those whores, you know. There’s Oprah (who, of course, wouldn’t be Oprah without the constant churn of interest in her weight, love life, and abusive past), various other female celebrities (always spoken of in terms of how hot they are, how they lose weight, what they’re wearing, or who they’re sleeping with – very rarely purely in terms of talent), and oft-cited “women now get 56% of all degrees so this must mean men are disenfranchised!” (without noting that, in fact, the difference is a little over 100,000 degrees, and women make up 52% or so of the population, so getting a little more than half of all degrees is certainly nowhere close to the ravenous female hordes of degree-stealing blondes that such terrified proclamations seem to wish you’d envision).

But anyway, all this crap just kinda got to me after a while. I wrote a lot of angry, venomous posts here a few years ago about just these issues, and I still get worked up enough to rant sometimes. But after a while, you know what? All that talk about how shitty it was to be a woman got to me too. I started thinking, “Shit, man, it really sucks to be a girl. I hate being a girl.”

And you know what? That’s bullshit. It sucks.

I wanted to imagine something better. Where me and women like me weren’t victims, but active agents – in our own success or demise. We were the ones doing things, not having things done to us.

I was tired of talking about how shitty things were, because it ended up being at the expense of how powerful people could be – it drowned out all the good stories of how we could make or break worlds.

We needed to highlight the good stories. Yes, we need more good stories, always – but MORE than that, we need to actively promote the good stories. It’s the sensationalist crap that bogs me down. There are plenty of people writing about rape culture, and domestic abuse, and power, and yes, sure, I’ll comment on that stuff sometimes. But when I sit down at the keyboard, I’m not here to imagine a world exactly like this one where I’m getting constant messages about how much it sucks to be a girl.

I want a different narrative.

And oftentimes, if there’s nobody else promoting or creating that narrative, you need to be the one to do it.

But, whatever.

This movie was indeed exactly as it was advertised, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing. I mean, hey, cowboys and aliens! But… but… I don’t know what it is about Spielberg and trite storytelling (yes, I directly blame Spielberg for any  movie he executive produces, even if he didn’t write or direct it. I have a gooood feeling that it’s his preferences that often burble to the surface), but at some point he seems to have found The Formula, and now he is proceeding to beat us to death with it. This does not, luckily, detract from the visual/emotional experience of the story as your in it (I was engaged throughout the film), but it does start to bug you as you begin to notice and count the beats, and it’s especially aggrevating when you go to to postmortem posts like this and realize it didn’t all sit as well with you as you thought.

You figure out all the beats early on – all the characters who have spouses/loved ones taken by the aliens will, of course, join Our Hero in getting their loved ones back. The hero is haunted, of course, by the death of his wife, who was killed by aliens (before this, she is referred to as having been a whore – very explicit whore/martyr thing going on there, which annoyed me. Why did he like her to begin with? We never know). For a minute, I actually thought she’d been raped, to boot (which would have fit neatly with this lazy storytelling).

Yet for all that, Spielberg does this other thing that is mooshy-wooshy sentimental and yet, works. He makes you really care for the characters, despite  or because of the pat little plot and easy beats,  because that’s the other bit of the storytelling formula that works.

You wake up in a white room, or a desert, not knowing what’s happened to you, and slowly piecing together the narrative along with your protagonist. Classic and slightly tired SF trope, but it works. Your characters are achetypes, basically, from our Lone Wolf hero to the arrogant rich teen, the plucky young boy, the possible love interest/guide, a grizzled war vet with a heart of gold, and etc. etc. The acting here of Ford and Craig is terribly lovely, and Ford’s character in particular is given that perfect blend of character traits that makes you both hate him and sympathize with him (as with any good villain). Sadly, this often meant skimping on characterization of the supporting cast, which is why everybody else seems to have gotten only the vaguest handwave. The acting and cinematography and effects were so good, in fact, that it was often difficult for me to jive these sophisticated trappings with the rather unsophisticated story. They just did not go together. When are we going to allow our storytelling chops to match our mastery of the visual medium?

Yes, the movie gets points for the “we should all work together instead of fighting” angle, but even that felt terribly contrived. It’s like… it’s like watching a film made for 12 year old. Again. And again. And again. Which is fine. If you’re 12.

For my money, I did actually enjoy the alien tech, though the fact that they wanted gold was… weird. Another heavy-handed clunker of lazy writing, if you ask me. I wanted a whole lot more… non-laziness, I guess. We also get this avenging angel in the form of our only real female character, but  – even though she potentially has the most interesting story – she, too, is given short shrift so we can spend more time sympathizing with Harrison Ford.

Sometimes, I think, a movie is only big enough for so many big egos. Everybody wants their character to be the “star,” and what you often end up with is too much emphasis on the wrong people. I felt like that happened a lot here. I was learning a lot about the people who had the least invested in the story. Which was… weird. Or, would have been weird if one of them wasn’t Harrison Ford.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy this movie. There were plenty of clichéd things it avoided – the crazy “bad guy” Indians being a big one – but the story was stuffed with too many people painted with far too broad of strokes. They weren’t people in the end, just archetypes (Ford got the closest to being somewhat rounded). Which is fine, I guess, but not what I was looking for.

The trouble is, I suppose, that now when anybody says, “Cowboys in space,” I think of Firefly.

And this was most certainly not that.

I remember being at my first World Fantasy convention and seeing Daniel Abraham walk across the floor toward me and hold out his hand and I thought, “Oh sweet Jesus he’s totally going to bitch me out about that mixed review I gave A Shadow in Summer. Crap, are we going to get into some big argument about abortion?” But instead, of course, Daniel merely shook my hand and said he’d enjoyed and appreciated my thoughts on his book.

Exhale.

I actually stopped writing about books here for awhile after getting some angry author emails from folks who insisted my opinions of said books were wrong. Expletives were included. I just didn’t have the spoons to deal with it. So, for awhile…

…I just shut up.

This outspoken fan’s public criticism at ComicCon got me to thinking why it was I became a creator, and why it is the books and stories I write have veered sharply away from the mono-cultured pseudo European medieval folks and settings that are considered “more traditional” of the genre, despite the fact that traditional stuff sells so absurdly well.

When you’re not seeing the stories you want to read on the shelves, there are a few things you can do 1) Stop buying stories 2) Complain to the people writing stories that they should be writing something that doesn’t suck 3) Write your own stories

I’ve settled into doing some combination of all three, really. I buy a lot fewer books now, but the ones I do buy are the sorts of stories I actually want to read. I’ve stopped putting up with boring or offensive crap just to “give me something to read” and started actively looking beyond what’s on bookshelves for my media. Being connected to so many other writers now the last few years has been great – it means I often get a heads’ up on new, wonderful stuff coming down the pike. That said, I also make an effort to step outside my circles now and then and look for new people to follow – social networking has made it easy to step outside my comfort zone and find powerful new stuff.

Still, nobody writes a book the way… well, the way I would like to write a book. So I still have to write them. It’s a curse, really. You can only throw so many books across the room before you decide it’s time to write your own.

What you run into as you start becoming a creator, though, is that there are already a lot of people who enjoy working together, for whatever reason. They like stuff they’re comfortable with. It’s hard to step outside their comfort zone and actively look for new voices, new perspectives. We still have this strange assumption that if something is good, it will just bubble to the top. I have no idea why we still believe this when all the marketing folks are telling us we should write more books like Twilight and The DaVinci Code. Good stuff doesn’t always make it. In fact, there’s a lot of good stuff that simply gets lost in the screaming noise of the thousands upon thousands of books published each year. And if you can’t process everything, you have to hope that somebody else does the work for you. You rely on recommendations and a handful of thought leaders and influencers.

That’s a really small pool of people to rely on for new reading material.

If you really want to read new voices, discover new creators, and you know – walk the walk – you’re going to have to do more than sit on your hands and wait for your fraternity (or sorority, sure) buddies to send one of their buddies your way. Because I can guarantee you that if you just wait for your tiny group of homogeneous folks to forward things your way, you will end up reading, publishing, or green-lighting projects that are all incredibly homogeneous.

And when you create homogeneous stuff, it tells the rest of us that, in fact, WE should be writing homogeneous stuff too. Afterall, that’s what’s being published. I spent years trying to write stories in the style of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Sword and Sorceress stories, which I hated. Yes, I hated the stories but I kept trying to ape their style because obviously: that’s what sold.

This is the point at which you create a feedback loop. If you’re in charge of publishing and creating work, and you only publish certain people and certain styles, only those people, who tell only those kinds of stories, are going to respond. If you really want something more than that, you need to actively demonstrate to people that you’re promoting it.

I fight this all the time. I know exactly what the comfort zone is for science fiction and fantasy. I know exactly what “sells.” Writing blatantly feminist stories, I was told, was the fastest way to ensure that I’d never have a fiction career. Writing blatantly feminist stories that included a lot of swearing was doubly bad. Some people got upset when I posted a book trailer for God’s War that poked fun at Urban Fantasy cliches. But an equal number of people were just as exasperated with Urban Fantasy as I was –  those were the people the trailer was for (I got several emails from people who said they bought the book as a direct result of viewing that trailer).

Sometimes you have to push the line a little to break through the noise. And sometimes that may mean that you piss people off. If you’re like me and you were raised to just grin and bear it and not make waves, being bold enough to cut through the noise is going to be really, really hard.

And I’d bet that there are more women than men, still, who’ve been raised to just shut up and wait for someone to “discover” them. Someday your prince will whisk you away from your life of obscure drudgery and make you a princess, right? Don’t agents and publishers just do the same thing… show up and tell you you’re brilliant and whisk you away to J.K. Rowling fame?

No. They don’t. You have to write something good, yes, always the first step. But after that, the bulk of you getting anything noticed is up to you.

Now, let’s be clear – I know I’m not going to sell mighty gobs of books, but I’m with a small press, and we don’t have to sell 10,000 or 100,000 copies to make money. Megacorps like DC have to sell a lot. I get that. But it’s the small, quiet voices that will eventually change the homogeneous cloud. Publish enough of them, and you start to change the conversation. Among them, they will start to grow larger and larger audiences, and those influences will begin to creep into the mainstream. You’ll reinvent and reinvigorate the body of your work – whether that’s a comics line or a whole genre – by taking some risks. Eventually, those small voices will be the big voices, and then another new set of voices will come along and change the conversation again. That’s how things grow and change. That’s how they stay alive.

If you’re a creator, I know this sounds shitty. It sounds like you’ll never break out, like nobody will ever pay attention. It sounds like you should just write the same old shit. Here’s the thing, guys. Anybody can write the same old shit. It makes you interchangeable with everybody else out there and brings you fifty million steps closer to permanent unemployment or layoff-land. The only thing you have to sell is your unique vision of the world. Figure out the vision first, and worry about  how the hell you’re going to sell it to the monoculture later.

As Batgirl’s crusade illustrated, the big guys may not be paying attention, but their fans are, and at the end of the day, we pay the bills. We just need to be more vocal about what we want… and fully participate in the conversation with the work we produce…

…even if we have to claw, scream, or rant our way through the noise.

It’s not easy. It’s not fun. It’s full of sexist crap. But every time one of us is quiet, or gives up, or bows down because we’re booed at a panel, we extinguish a valuable voice with the potential power to change the conversation.

Speaking up is worth a few boos, a few spoons, and some angry email from the Internet.

It certainly has been for me.

I didn’t hate this movie as much as most people, and I suspect this is because I didn’t go into it expecting some Grand Feministe Epic. You can generally tell how seriously a movie takes it female characters by what they’re wearing throughout. One glance at all the lingerie and little-girl fetish gear in the trailers should have been your first clue.

So my expectations were pretty low from the get-go.

The first 20 minutes of this film are lovely, with a great opening scene done without dialogue that reminded me a lot of the impact of the opening scene in Antichrist (another movie that went immediately downhill after the opener. I suppose with great openings like these, a film has no choice but to get worse).

As expected, the opener addresses the sexual exploitation and abuse of women, a theme which is pretty heavy-handed to the point of ridiculous throughout.

Yes, terrible things happen to women. Thanks. Can we start the story now? Because stories shouldn’t be about the terrible things that happen to women. Stories about the terrible things tend to be fetish movies. Instead, the sort of stories we should be making are the stories about what women do when terrible things are done to them. They are the stories about the women, not the Terrible Things.

And perhaps that was some of the problem with this film.

When our protagonist is tossed into a mental asylum with a bunch of other “crazy” women for attacking her abusive stepfather (and accidently killing her sister in the process), we leave the world that is so full of promise – the perfectly setup plot pieces for her escape – and we go… somewhere else.

We leave the terrible, oppressive world of the mental asylum where the women are sexually exploited and abused and go into the free, happy-happy land that all women dream of to escape such situations –

Yes, ladies and gentleman, our heroine decides to fantasize that she’s been sold off to a brothel instead of a mental institution.

Because really, that’s the first place I would wish I was if I was looking for an escape to fantasyland.

First thing!

This is probably the deepest problem with this movie (well, that and the one coming up). We put a second layer of “reality” on top of the first that is even more horrible and exploitative than the first, but it allows the director to dress and treat his heroines as whores throughout.

Now, if you’re paying attention, you’ll note that the movie Chicago does something similar with a woman in jail fantasizing about being on stage. She fantasizes about being a star. She may show a little flesh, sure, but she’s got her freedom, fame, and most of all – power. Power over her audience. Power over her fellow performers. Power over other women who want to be here. When you’re in a position of absolute powerlessness, it’s highly unlikely that the place you’re going to retreat to is one of even further powerlessness.

In fact, I felt really cheated by this movie, because this whole whore-land completely covers up the “reality” of how our protagonist actually accomplishes getting the plot-pieces she needs to allow another girl to escape the mental asylum. The truly excellent parts of this film were turned into whores seducing men to get what they want instead of sneaky/clever ways to achieve their goals – the things they would have to do with far less makeup and far less sexy clothes on if we stayed in the mental asylum.  Remember how dowdy everyone looked during the prison scenes in Chicago? The director apparently just couldn’t live with that idea.

Sadly, this does not address the biggest failure of imagination in this film. In fact, because the third level of fantasy scenes are so wickedly awesome, this failure stood out as shockingly hilarious.

Our third level of fantasy scenes – the ones you see the most in all the trailers – happen when the protagonists are completing each part of their quest. In order to escape the asylum, they need to acquire a knife, a key, a map, and some fire.

At this point, the lazy writer in me knows exactly what happened.

The writers sat down and went, “Man, these girls are so screwed. What’s the only way they could POSSIBLY distract all the men in the mental asylum/whorehouse in order to achieve their goals. Hrmmm… hrm… well… we really need to get a draft together to present to the producers. OK, well… let’s just write in that the main character does this really distracting sexy dance. You know, she just dances sexy and it intoxicates all the men and then… the women can get what they want.”

I KID YOU NOT.

In a film with helicopters vs. dragons, steampunk Nazis, massive Ancestor statues come to life, and all manner of beautiful, intense cinematography, the only way the writers could think up for the women to get the quest items was to have them… seduce the guys in the film.

Vomit on my shoooooooooooooooooes.

I laughed out loud the first time this happened. The heroines starts doing this “fade to the lamp dance” where all you see is her sorta lamely swaying back and force in a really not-sexy way, then you fade into her eyes and get transported into the fantasy-land scenes where she’s battling big monsters for her quest items. When you jump back out, the heroines have magically appropriated said items while she was dancing.

It is the lamest hand-wave I have ever seen. And, reader, I’ve seen a LOT of them (let’s face it: I’ve also WRITTEN a lot of them!).

Just like the lame whorehouse fantasyland, I went ahead and sighed and rolled my eyes and went with the sexy dance hand-wave, because, you know, again, when you’re dressing your female protagonists this way to start, how can you expect better?

I did enjoy the third-level fantasyland scenes with the women fighting dragons and zombies to awesome remixes of cool songs. Why? Why would I enjoy this crap where half-dressed women kick some ass? Because, you know, this is all I’ve got right now. There’s no Aliens. No Sarah Conner. When the women are working together as a squad in the trenches, shooting steampunk Nazis while wearing probably the most clothes they do in the whole movie, I couldn’t help but think this was the closest I’d come to seeing my short story Wonder Maul Doll in action – a female squad working together quickly and efficiently, with that incredible group cohesion that allows small squads to take out cities. I delighted in that, because that’s all I’ve got, and sadly, it’s going to be the closest I’ll get to anybody taking whole groups of fighting women seriously for a good long while.

In fact, I held out hope for this movie long, long after J. did (he admitted to tuning out after the first 20 minutes, like most reviewers).

One of the reasons for this is because it is such a good idea, such a good story. It was like watching that trainwreck that was the last couple Star Wars prequels, where your heart breaks because it’s such a good story but so, so poorly told.

The best relationship in the story is between two sisters – whose relationship adds a lot of interest to the third-level fantasy scenes – but the most interesting one dies. And dies stupidly.

To top that off, the protagonist sacrifices herself too. Which wouldn’t be all bad except that she sacrifices herself to save one of the least interesting characters, who is nearly caught but then subsequently saved by a male bus driver. Which just about blew my mind, there at the end. WTF, really?

Of course, because we’ve spent the entire movie except the beginning and last few minutes of the end inside the mental hospital, we’re not really sure if this chick is really deserving of freedom or not. I mean, was SHE really crazy? We don’t know, because we weren’t given a chance to know her outside the fantasyland brothel (once again, yeah, the first place I ALWAYS retreat to in my personal power fantasies is a brothel, people).

What possessed these writers to keep in their placeholder “hand-wave hand-wave sexy dance” and send all the women to a brothel is just absolutely beyond me. There was plenty of opportunity to sexy-fy the women in the third-level fantasy scenes. We could have lived with dowdy mental asylum scenes that had the real characters in them, you know, the actual people we could root for and be happy they got away in the end.

As it was, all the men in the movie were sexual predators and all the women were sexually exploited. It was a black and white victim and victimizer world that that just fell absolutely flat. And it was a tragic shame, because it did have so much potential.

Tra-la, tra-la.

Gee, Kameron, why do you write the types of books you write?

Because of this. Because of movies like THIS.

I am willing to forgive Kristen Stewart the whole Twilight thing because she had such a great Joan Jett look. The problem was she just wasn’t given much at all to work with. Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie was even worse, with only slightly more to work with. And if you think the other three band members got much more than a name and a snide remark or two to substitute for “characterization” you’d be dreaming.

In between images of trash-throwing, leather-wearing, and band members making out, I wasn’t really sure what the overall point of the movie was. It opens with Currie lip synching to David Bowie in a talent contest, and I thought, hey wow cool this could be like a trippy version of Velvet Goldmine only totally reimagined for The Runaways!

In fact, it was nothing of the sort as the protagonists stumbled through random disjointed scene after random disjointed scene.

At one point, J. walked in while Kristen Stewart was slunking around and said, “Is this movie even good?”

“No,” I said, “but I keep thinking of what it could be. It’s like watching those terrible Star Wars prequels where you keep going ‘oh, that’s such a good idea! They could have done something so cool with that!’ and then being endlessly disappointed with how they failed to tell you that story.”

In fact, the movie was one big messy stew of failed potential. It’s such a wonderful story – all-girl rock band in the glam 70’s made up of these incredibly young and talented girls. It has the potential to do and say and be all sorts of things. But in the end, I wasn’t sure if it was a love story between Joan and Cherrie or a heavy-handed cautionary tale about mostly off-screen drug abuse or how rock n’ roll can kill you or save you or…? Oh hell, it wasn’t even trying to be any of those things. It was just a poorly put together montage of moments from what could have been a great story. The only decent part of the movie was the soundtrack, which of course, was their actual decent music and, later on, lots of great just-Joan-Jett music.

At the end of the day, I knew nothing more about these characters. Joan is the only one with any kind of articulated goal, which is to be a rock star, and that was nice, but it was so muffled and stuffed and padded with so much other garbage that the actual people in the story and their motivations got lost.

The sexism was heavy-handed and sloppy – sexism is less about a guy shoving his hand in your crouch and more about the other Joan in the Mad Men getting replaced by a guy as script reader, and the epically sad and resigned look that fleetingly passes across her face.  But either the director didn’t feel these actresses could do subtle or she didn’t believe her audience would understand subtle, so it’s all random make-outs and orgasms without dealing with stuff like concern over contraception or pregnancy, which you’d think would figure in more with an all-girl band (granted, most of the making out was within the band, so…?).

Regardless, there was a big opportunity missed to create real, interesting people with a real, interesting story. How I could be bored five minutes into the movie and bored right up until the end with such a great subject just baffles me.

But why did I sit through it, then, if it was so boring?

I once asked an old friend of mine why she watched “The L Word” since it was such a formulaic, poorly written little soap opera. She thought about it for a minute and said, “You know, if you’re gay, and especially if you’re a lesbian, you don’t see yourself much in pop culture. So when you find stuff that features stories about you, even when it’s bad, it’s just very comforting to watch.”

And that, in essence, was why I kept watching this stupid show. Here was this story about an all-girl rock band, a movie mostly filled with women all talking to each other, where the two central relationships are between Cherie and Joan and Cherie and her sister, and they are making money and building careers and making out with each other, and it was just so nice to see a story about women that wasn’t, you know, about shopping or finding a guy who’ll marry you.

Which made it all the more disappointing that it sucked so damn much.

I know.

The cast is great in this one, and has a fun time. A bunch of retired CIA operatives find themselves being hunted down… by the CIA.

But the problems with this one start early. It feels like one of those movies where there were just too many hands stirring the pot, so you come out of it with these great big gems of meat, but then there are these odd banana peppers and apple slices in there, and then the stove explodes.

It opens with retired operative Bruce Willis on the phone with a woman at the pension department. Apparently, he’s called her 22 times about missing pension checks. In fact, he’s just been calling to chat her up. She’s had very bad luck with men and dating. They commisserate. Over the phone, he says he’ll be in town soon, and maybe they can finally meet?

She says sure, but call her first. She is a funny, quirky sort of person, and pretty likable, so at least we see some of the appeal for these two.

Well, you know, everything goes to hell the way it does in these kinds of movies, and Bruce Willis flees from assassins who shred up his house. There are some fun fight scenes here. Willis then breaks into the pension lady’s house and kidnaps her, explaining along the way that he’s doing this for her own safety because someone is trying to kill him and she will be a target.

Um. Ok. Back up.

This is a weirdly uncomfortable turn of events for a lot of reasons. First, because it shows an utter disrespect for the female “lead” (such as she is). He doesn’t find a neutral place to contact her and speak to her. Doesn’t even properly explain himself in her house (outside of her house would have made more sense). Can he not call her from a pay phone and set up a coffee date? Nope. No explanations at all. Just bound and gagged and thrown in the car.

Ick, right? Ick because you also know she’s going to be his love interest, which means she’d be falling for her captor.

Gah.

We get quite a lot of this ick before she frees herself and is then assaulted by a police officer, at which point she realizes that Everything Bruce Willis Says is True, and then she doesn’t have to spend the rest of the movie bound and gagged, thank god. But here’s the thing – couldn’t they have done this up front? Have assassins already in her house? Did we really have to go through the stranger-I-met-over-the-phone-kidnaps-me thing?

The answer is yes, we had to go through it. Because somebody thought it was funny.

That was, perhaps, the most insulting part. That this was supposed to be a really funny turn in the movie. It wasn’t.

You know, I was watching an SNL skit yesterday that was parodying Julian Assange. And he’s wonking on and the audience is laughing along at some mediocre jokes about Mark Zuckerberg and he says something to the effect of, “If somebody made a movie about me, the joke would be trying to keep it rated R!” or something along those lines. The audience goes totally silent. The comedian looks a little surprised, but recovers and moves on to the next joke.

See, that’s the thing. Rape, and accusations of rape, are, you know, not funny. Why are they not funny? Because they are real threats to women. It’s like joking about prison rape in a prison. Not so funny when it’s an actual threat to you, let me tell you.

At any rate, things got better after she got untied and the whole band of CIA retirees gets together. Morgan Freeman and some guy whose name I forget have some OK scenes, though once again, Freeman’s intro is of him coercing a female nurse to bend over in front of him because you know, ha ha, that’s so funny!

Who wrote this?

The good news is that Mirren’s assassin character may be one of the better developed in the whole movie, which let me forgive some things. She gets an old love affair, some battle stories, and some of the better lines in the movie.

Anyway, the band plots to break into the CIA to find out who’s killing them. Willis gets a great fight scene with one of the operatives trying to kill him (played really well by Karl Urban, who’s also given quite a bit to work with from a character perspective). This isn’t the climax of the film, though. It keeps going. There are some dirty arms dealers, and then a plot to kill/kidnap the Vice President (played by that creepy guy from Nip/Tuck).

The heist bit of the movie really comes together for the kidnapping of the VP (which, you know, is so much less creepy because nobody on the team is, you know, romantically interested in him. Writers take note!). Everybody in this movie was having a fun time (especially Willis and Mirren), I just wish the script hadn’t been butchered to pieces.

There’s some more la-la stuff in here. Fixing this movie would have required clipping that whole stupid kidnapping scene and just cutting to assassins in her house, which neatly avoids about 10 minutes of ridiculous movie time, and abbreviating the arms dealer weirdness, and possibly avoiding the CIA breakin, which is like a second movie climax. Weird pacing all around. Fun, on the whole, but poorly put together from a narrative perspective.

There’s some fun stuff that comes with blogging. I remember going to a Wiscon the year after I started and how people came up to me and introduced themselves – total strangers – saying they read and followed the blog. It was… weird. As a writer, the cliche is that everybody asks you, “Where do you ideas come from?” In the blogging world, the first thing other bloggers ask you is, “How do you deal with negative comments?”

Blogging is a great way to prepare yourself for when your first book comes out. If you haven’t started a blog and you want to be a writer who actually engages the world, I highly recommend it. Because, if you’re lucky, you’ll say plenty of things on your blog that make people who don’t even know you hate you. And people hating you, for a writer, is a very similiar feeling to people hating your book. So you’ll grow some thick skin real quick.

It’s funny that people who read your posts get far more personal in their attacks than people who read your fiction. If you’re lucky, they engage with your actual argument, but more often, they feel it’s necessary to personally attack you. Which is weird, since they don’t, you know, know you. But blogs are far more personal spaces than books, in part because of the fiction/nonfiction divide and in part because there’s not the status confirmed by mega-publisher standing between me and the reader. We read stories differently if they’ve been published vs. unpublished. I expect published stories to be better. It doesn’t mean they are. But I have different expectations. The web has become a great equalizer, and it means there’s no longer any ivory tower for you to hide behind when people throw stuff at your crappy arguments.

Now, there are all sorts of things I can infer about a writer from what they write. But I don’t know that I’ve outright called an author a woman-hating faggot, for instance, because of something he’d written.

But when you’re loud and offensive and explicitly tackling feminist issues on a blog, the odds of a day going by in which you’re not called a man-hating lesbian go up the more you post. Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being a man-hating lesbian. There are certainly women I find attractive, and certainly some men I strongly dislike. And I suspect the vast majority of people in the world find some women attractive and strongly dislike some men, and vice versa. What gets me is how this stuff is brought out to silence the speaker. To invalidate what they’re saying. You could have the best argument in the whole world, but one scream of “man-hating lesbian” and some weirdo thinks they’ve cut you down.

Um, no.

See, here’s the thing, folks. If you choose to live publicly, you have to deal with the haters. And there will always be haters. Far more haters if you have an explicitly political blog. They will send you nasty emails and threaten sexual violence and call you gay, because this is about the extent of the scary stuff they can think of.

That’s the good news. Because if it you know how to throw a good right hook and don’t find being gay offensive, the world is your oyster.

Yes, really.

I’ve gotten all sorts of hatred spewed over here in the six years I’ve been posting to this blog. Thing is, all everybody talks about is the bad stuff (look at this post, even!). What we fail to talk about (and what nobody ever asks me about) is how to deal with the *good* stuff. I’ve had fan letters and thank-you letters and some really good stories about folks who changed their lives because of a personal story I shared here. I’ve had letters and comments that literally leave me speechless (or word-less at least). In the face of strong, heartfelt emotion I always have trouble responding, and it’s no different with blog comments.

We continually focus on the bad. I know a handful of female bloggers who’ve deleted their blogs due to harassment. That’s a tragedy. I understand it, sure, but it’s a tragedy nonetheless.

When you start thinking about quitting, pull up the good conversations. The fan emails. The amazing comments. Remember the lives you’re making better.

And just know that harassment comes with the territory. Harassment means you’re doing something right. It means you made somebody uncomfortable. It means you’re freaking them out and shaking up their worldview. It doesn’t mean you need to shut up.

When people ask me how to moderate comments, I actually find it to be a trivial question. It’s not about how to moderate comments. It’s how to have the courage to keep talking when everybody wants you to shut the hell up. Hatred is exhausting. And we focus on the hatred, of course. We give negative comments three times the attention of positive ones, which always makes it seem like there are more than there really are.

The kind of blogging I do, I realize after my long hiatus, really is about courage. I was worried all the time about what people would think. I was worried about strangers at cons. Stalkers. Potential employers. Work colleagues.

But there’s also a lot of good that comes from it. A lot of people who find some value in it. Who take courage from it.

And that makes it all worth it.

You have to figure out what’s worth it for you, too. I don’t envy the bloggers who’ve been targeted with hate campaigns from the big conservative or MRA blogs. I don’t envy folks with exes who stalk them via their blogs. I don’t pretend that “just ignore the haters” works in every instance. But the majority of the time, what we need to go forward is, simply, courage.

And a willingness to hit the “delete” button.

It’s been a long week here already and its only Wednesday. I’ve got a new dog that won’t crap outside, bad weather, unresponsive city officials, and lots of day job.

So last night I turned on the TV. Drank a couple beers to get up my courage, and watched a couple more episodes of Dollhouse.

Why? Why oh why?

Because there are, in fact, people who like this show. Who talk on and on about how Whedon is doing this amazing transgressive things with it. Who say it really hits its stride in season 2, and if you can just sit through all the used and abused women until then, it gets really interesting.

Also, of course, I was exhausted and vegetative.

That’s always how they get you.

I stopped watching initially after episode 2, when our supposed heroine is hired out to some guy as a whore/target practice. Yeah, I’m serious. It’s The Most Dangerous Game. Again, this might be more interesting if I wasn’t around to endure this whole “ha ha hee hee isn’t that funny” hoax.

As it was, it creeped me the hell out, and I stopped watching.

I wanted to give Whedon credit. You always want to give folks you see as allies credit for stuff. But here’s the thing: just because you were responsible for writing and producing the majority of the Buffy series and Firefly was a lot of fun doesn’t mean you get a free pass when you’re creating bad TV.

Last night I squigged through three more ponderous episodes of misogynistic hate. Sexy ladies being used, abused, wiped, and bought like so much merchandise. You can go on and on about how this is really an in depth critique of modern day human trafficking, or tell me that Whedon really is just building it all up and showing you how bad it is so he can tear it all down.

But the fact is that 1) The Madam isn’t actually in charge. She answers to a guy, which she’s on the phone with in ep 3 or 4 and 2) Alpha, who plays around with folks and also wipes folks, is a guy 3) And Topher, of course, the genius wiperoo of them all, is a skeevy, nasty sort who I hate more and more as each episode goes on 4) Echo’s protector/body guard is a guy 5) the “good guy” trying to save Echo from all these bad people is, of course, a guy. 6) the only female regular character outside of Dollhouse is obsessed with our “good guy” in a romantic way and even brings him meatloaf or lasagna early on (I suspect she’s likely a Doll, too).

It’s gross.

Really.

It’s a bunch of women being used, controlled, and abused  by guys. Orbiting guys. Serving guy clients. They aren’t always whores. Whooop-dee-doo. Sometimes they are safe-crackers who suddenly become mind-wiped cucumbers. At. every. single. step. along. the. way. these people are people manipulated and controlled. And it doesn’t get better. Telling me, “Alpha will help inspire them to be freeee!” or “that FBI guy will help set them freeeee!” or even, “Echo will someday become a super weapon!” are all stupid, boring, cliched, hackneyed things. There is nothing at all redeeming about this show. Not one single thing.

To add insult to injury, Eliza Dushku just doesn’t have the acting chops to pull this off. And the overt sexualization of all the women just gets annoying. And the wiping and wiping and wiping gets old. He had a couple episodes to give us the script that she then unpacks and rebels against. I’m just not going to sit through half a dozen or a dozen or two dozen episodes of abusive hate in order to get around to the point.

Knowing that Whedon produced it makes it even more insulting. You always react strongest when somebody you perceive as a part of your “in” group appears to betray you. I still feel the same way about Dollhouse as I did after the second episode: Whedon could have been spending his time creating far better shows. And instead, wasted several years of his life putting together this piece of crap.

Did anyone get past the first two episodes? Why did you keep watching? I only made it through three more because I was a little buzzed and hoping to find something redeeming; you want to be able to find what others find. Was that the only reason ya’ll kept watching? Because you kept hoping it’d get better?

Because I have to tell you – it’s a physically painful show for me to watch. Every episode, you’re just waiting for somebody to sexually assault the heroine. Every. Single. Episode. That gets really exhausting and nerve-wracking. Folks might say, “Hey, good TV should *make* you uncomfortable!” But to what end does my discomfort serve? Will it teach me more about myself or the world to watch a heroine manipulated, controlled, and assaulted for hours on end? Even if she rebels against it later because she gets her special powers? Cause like the UF stuff I gnawed on earlier, she’s never going to escape being a doll. She’s absolutely surrounded by men manipulating and controlling her.

Smacks a little too close to home for a lot of people, you know? And her getting superpowers as bestowed by somebody else (Alpha or whoever) just isn’t going to make up for all the gross human trafficking stuff.

I realize these are interesting things to you, Whedon, and that you’d like us to be uncomfortable. But there’s being edgy and transgressive and then there’s Hunting for Bambi. Five episodes in, there’s still little to nothing to distinguish one from the other, except yours is TV and there’s was a marketing ploy.

Here’s to hoping that Pawn Stars season 3 shows up on Netflix soon.