Kameron Hurley

Some Belated, Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Suckerpunch (An Epic of Failed Potential)

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.

Tags: media, The F Word
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The Runaways: When Good Stories Go Bad

It’s so sad when a movie with a potentially great story goes so wrong.

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.

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RED Means Stop

J and I went out to see Red on Saturday night at the cheap theater. The previews were great, but it performed a bit poorly and showed up at the cheap theaters quickly, so I wasn’t holding my breath. This, despite the draw of Helen Mirren as a retired assassin among Bruce Willis’s crew of misfits.

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.

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Revenge of the Blogosphere: Haters & Comment ModerationRevenge of the Blogosphere: Haters & Comment Moderation

I started this blog back in 2004 as a place to mouth off about my life. It was a natural extension of the long and winding emails I was sending out to groups of friends. Back then, only the “cool kids” were on the Internet anyway, so I didn’t feel so strange about posting things in public. Geeks and freaks stilled ruled the net. It was pushing into the mainstream, but I can guarantee that nobody at my day job back in Chicago Googled me in 2005 or even 2006.

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.

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Why I Fucking Hate Dollhouse

So I’ve gotten through all the Pawn Stars available on Netflix, and now I have a stack of gender and Islam books to get through, and you know, hey, sometimes I need a break.

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.

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Why I Don’t Read Much Urban Fantasy

Daniel Abraham had an interesting post up about rape and urban fantasy that I’ve been chewing on for awhile. To sum it, it’s some thoughts on women and power as they’re portrayed in urban fantasy. Or, “urban fantasy is a genre sitting on top of a great big huge cultural discomfort about women and power.”

True and true.

Much of urban fantasy, he argues, exists to explore and unpack – among other things – women’s fear of sexual violence. So the best way to explore the issue of women and power and sexual violence may be to not state it explicitly. After all, once you state a book’s overall theme out loud, “Why yes, I am immune to sexual violence and find it quite liberating, but I am also interested in how it has re-shaped my life” it loses some of its power.

I thought it was an interesting thesis, and mulled on it for awhile. I was reminded of the Buffy episode – one of the most disturbing for me – when she loses her powers (taken away from her by a guy, her mentor, as a test. Talk about worst nightmare) and walks down the street, small and afraid, as a group of guys leers and heckles her. It was a profoundly unsettling moment, to see the heroine you love so much for her physical strength get demoted to, well… a woman like us. She doesn’t confront her hecklers like she would have done when she had her superpowers. She just does what we’ve all done at one time or another – hunches up her shoulders, doesn’t make eye contact, and scurries quickly away back into her house.

What Abraham came to realize over the course of the dialogue that ensued after the post went up was that, actually, urban fantasy and its predecessors (i.e. the warrior woman books of yore – which I have a much firmer grasp on, and will talk about more than UF here) pretty much all explicitly use rape and/or sexual violence in the narrative more than you might think. It’s a big old honkin’ cliché that in order to give your heroine an “excuse” to be violent, you have to give her a good, violent reason – like a past rape or intense fear of sexual violence.

There is a long history of literally weaponizing your heroine in response to attack. It happens to guy characters all the time, too (you know, the ones whose wives and daughters are raped and killed in order to spur him on to revenge. Once again: we all get weaponized in response to rape, which is THE WORSE THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN!!).  So on the one hand, powerful female characters are weaponized because their guy counterparts were. The thing is, they’re just more likely to have personally felt the violence themselves in addition to acting out violently in retaliation against violence done to others. We made weaponized women heroes who were also victims. The first couple times you read it, it’s interesting. And then it’s not.

I’m re-reading Jennifer Roberson’s Sword Dancer series right now, which I read back when I was 14 or 16, and there it is right there: the ass-kicking female heroine was raped and her family was killed, which spurs the entire arc of her narrative. She becomes cold and hard and goes on a blood rampage after the guy who raped her and killed her family. Red Sonja gets her powers from rape, too. Ash gets raped. Hell, even Veronica Mars gets raped (yes, yes, I’m mixing my media – stories are stories. I am also reminded of “That was the end of Grogan… the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!”).

In Tamora’s Peirce’s Alanna books, she said she created the character with the explicit intention of NOT having her become a warrior based on past experiences with rape or violence. It was just so incredibly overdone, in her reading experience, that she wanted to do something different. She wanted to create a heroine who wanted to be powerful because it felt right and made her feel powerful, not because of what someone had done to her

One commenter in particular took issue with Abraham’s post, and I followed the dialogue with interest. I didn’t find anything he’d said particularly offensive (not loving UF all that much, myself), though the more I thought about the “books about women and power don’t talk about sexual violence” thing the more it seemed weird to me.

Why’s it weird. Well, because UF exists in a version of this world. Even if you can defend yourself from a rape… you are still going to fear rape. Why? Because, you know, you’re a woman. And our society pretty well grinds it into you from day one that rape is THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN TO YOU. Worse than dying, even. You see it much more explicitly in other cultures where women are literally stoned to death or hang themselves after being raped, but you still see it here a lot too. There’s a lot of cultural baggage around rape, which is yet another reason women don’t like to report it. If you report it, you’re presumed guilty in one way or another. Even if you didn’t wear a short skirt, and you fought back, and you weren’t walking “somewhere” alone, or going to your car without pepper spray, or whatever reason people make up so they can make it your fault that somebody attacked you, just being raped still carries the stigma of taint. Of badness. Of brokenness. Dishonor.

So, you know: you are going to carry a lot of internalized stigma around about being raped, even if, you know, on some level, your new shiny powers protect you from it.

After much back-and-forth, Abraham’s anonymous commenter got there, too. She said it much more pointedly than I did, tho:

“As a privileged male, you have the unique opportunity to throw yourself into a situation where your power is taken from you. You feel safe, secure. You don’t think of yourself as a victim. You don’t have a cultural script running through your head about how you should act, dress, talk in the same fashion as a real life woman does. In all probability you’ve created a female protag who mimics more of your real life privilege than a real life female.”

I don’t read much urban fantasy, as stated (the heroines have all started to blur together for me), but I’ve suggested Abraham’s MLN books to others, and I had a few people say that it sounded like it was written by a guy – folks who didn’t know who the pseudonym was for. When people say things like this, I always wonder what they mean. Nobody could really articulate it. But I suspect it has something to do with the above. Because even if you’re Superwoman… you’re still a woman. And the world you live in makes certain that you remember it – superpowers be damned.

Urban fantasy is, indeed, about women and power. Learning to wield it. Negotiate it. Have meaningful relationships while wielding it. In a world where women are starting to make as much or more money than men (in some areas), and are pushing ahead in terms of formal education, this weird power sharing is something we’re all trying to negotiate in real life, too.

Why are guys so intimidated by strong women? Not even Mad Men knows.  But urban fantasy books are interested in exploring those themes, too.

The thing is, even with all this perceived power, we still have a lot of cultural baggage trying to push us back down. Outdated ideas about virgins and whores, continued hysteria over what women do with their uteruses, sexual violence and the stigma around it (still primarily for women – when was the last time you heard the epithet “rapist” used against a guy in a negative way?), tricky power negotiations, social baggage around pregnancy and taking time off to be with your kids, stigma around being a stay-at-home mom and stigma about being a working mom (basically, if you’re a woman, you must be doing SOMETHING wrong), and etc.

Having superpowers doesn’t peel away all the social baggage. In fact, it actually HIGHLIGHTS the social baggage so it stands out starkly and ridiculously for what it is. Superpowers say, “Hey, I’m buff and tough, so… why do I still think all these made-up rules apply to me? Why do I still care so much about being skinny and having a boyfriend?”

It’s a lot easier to critique society when you obviously no longer fit within its confines. It’s also easier to talk about how lonely you are in it because you don’t fit in it.

So, women and sexual violence. A lot more of it in your woman-power fantasies than you might think. Because, women with superpowers are still women.

Which, if you think about it, is also a really good sum up of women’s places now: We can make our own money, get great high-power jobs, take boxing classes, mouth off, have sex outside of marriage (and even enjoy it!) and take on all the trappings of power… but… well… at the end of the day, we are still women – and being called “Women” means we get to deal with all that that means to our culture. And there are still men (and other women) who go to great pains to remind us of this, and who try and use those reminders to strip away our power.

Now, all that said, and understanding Anon’s issues with a guy boldly stating that his heroine just wasn’t going to worry about rape because she was just never going to get raped cause of her powers… I have to say that I’ve got a pretty similar stance in my fiction – though I’ve had to take my heroines off this planet in order to do it in a way that I feel is believable, sadly.

I have that stance in direct reaction against the “strong woman got raped and now she’s allowed to be violent!” cliché. I prefer working in worlds where rape carries no stigma. Or carries some other stigma (preferably a horrifically negative one for, you know, the person perpetrating the crime as opposed to the victim). I want worlds where rape makes no sense. Where it’s not a weapon of war or control. It’s a violent thing, certainly, but not socially acceptable as it is in this society (yes, it is. I just skimmed some recent rom-com where the heroine turns down our hero half a dozen times – he shows up at her work, her apartment, and calls her a lot. She turns him down every time. Then, at time number eight, changes her mind and they hook up. What message is this kind of story sending to guys? Mass media still markets “passion” and “romance” to guys as “not giving up when she says no.” And then we all wonder why there’s a disconnect).

Committing sexual violence – which is a particular type of violence that goes out of its way to remind women that they’re women, and Other – has ridden off into the world of cliché for me. No doubt that, as Anon says, these books are helpful for survivors of abuse, which is still 1 in 4 in this country. They help us realize that yes, in fact, life does go on, and we can grieve, and go forward.

But I’m tired of reading about abused women. My master’s thesis looked at how the African National Congress recruited female fighters during the war against apartheid. I have stacks and stacks of real-life stories about violence perpetrated against women in every country. I’m a feminist blogger, and read the stats and facts and figures every day. I get images of women being abused all the time. Yes, it’s real life. Yes, terrible things happen.

But that’s not all there is to life. And I feel that seeing only negative images of women – of women abused, hurt, scared, exploited, harrassed – every day all the time is only going to make you hate being a woman even more.

Think about that. If all you ever saw about, say, an imaginary country called Valynna were sad, unhappy people, would you want to become a citizen of Valynna? What if you already were a citizen? Would you feel better or worse about being a member of that country if all you saw all the time was the worst of what could happen to you?

I made a conscious choice in my work on this blog waaaay back in 2004 that I wasn’t going to post images of women being abused. I was going to post images of happy women, strong women, powerful women, successful women. Yes, I would talk about the unique challenges we have, the abuses, the power struggles, the objectification, but I carefully chose those sidebar images to portray strong, vibrant, happy women. I am tired to see suffering women all the time. Because though it may be *a* truth, it is not *the* truth, any more than any one experience stands in for all experiences.

When I look for heroines, I look for heroines who choose violence as a tool because it works for them, not because it’s thrust upon them. I want heroines who are powerful for power’s sake. Who are honestly, truly, really, scary. Not sexy-scary. Not girl-next-door-scary. But genuinely someone who you’d be terrified to bump into in a dark alley. Because they are so good and unapologetic about what they do.

And I just don’t find that in any believable character in UF. Not anybody who’s got an interesting setting, at any rate. Because the setting… our world, even Changed… is still our world. With all the same bullshit.

Joanna Russ once said that the reason she started writing science fiction was because it was the genre where you were allowed to imagine how “things can be really different.”

UF lets us address issues of power and sex and violence as women in a changing world. Our changing world. I deal with that every day. I’m not so interested in writing it or reading it.

What I’m interested in is what makes us women. And who we’d be… with the same parts… but somewhere else. I want to pull off all the baggage and put on some different loads and see how people interact. I am tired of rape and leering and cat calls and expectations to have kids or not, or get married or not, or whatever.

I want to imagine how things could be really different.

My turnoff with UF is pretty much the exact opposite of what Abraham argued as being not there (or what shouldn’t be there): women in these books are still bound by the cultural rules of being women, including the threat of sexual violence. They are merely exceptions when people know about their powers. If they don’t know about their powers, they are still going to be treated like women. And though there is endless delight in watching them combat people’s stereotypes, there are still far too many of those moments when the heroine creeps away into the night, hunching her shoulders, leery of cat-calls.

It’s a not-fun world. An uncomfortable world. A world we’re certainly working on making a better place.

But not the world I’m primarily interested in writing my spec fiction in.

Because it’s the world I have to live in and write non-fiction about every day.

I am tired of seeing women getting beat up and crapped on. I want to imagine something different.

Defenders of shows like Dollhouse would say that you have to show all the bad stuff before you show the rebellion against it. I respect that.

Trouble is, people get lost a lot in the bad stuff, and they forget why it was it was bad in the first place. Instead of being “bad” it just becomes the “norm.”

Tags: assumptions, The F Word
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Moonfail: Or, Why I Look Forward to Being a Dinosaur

I’ve followed the whole crazy E. Moon debacle since September, and experienced much the same reaction others did to Moon’s initial post. Some nodding along for awhile, raising eyebrows at a bit of the one-for-all view of citizenship, and then gaping at the bizarre turn it took with “Assimilate or you’re just asking for what you get” rhetoric. And then it launched into something akin to, “You don’t know how good you have it! We’ve been so tolerant! We could have thrown you all in concentration camps like we did to the Japanese!” (no, those are not direct quotes. Please read the link to the original post)

Weird.

Yes, it was certainly weird, and if it had been an essay about feminism and how women should just assimilate into patriarchal culture if they didn’t want to have stuff thrown at them, I think there would have been a stronger and clearer response from the Wiscon committee up front. But then, any big decision made by committee is an epically long, bitter, drawn-out process. It’s why I don’t like going to neighborhood committee meetings. You get the same kind of dynamic: one or two people ranting on about their own pet projects/beliefs, one or two people actually contributing something useful, and a silent minority slowly seething with resentment of the committee’s incompetence while another half dozen people check what’s happening on Facebook on their smart phones.

I’m pretty surprised the con had the guts to step up and recind Moon’s GOH status.  You have to figure out who you are and what you stand for in order to do that. And you have to be willing to piss a lot of people off. People are worried about what this means for future GOH’s. And they should worry. Because if you’ve got some intolerance built into you (and anybody who’s been raised in a racist, misogynist, fearful, intolerant society like, you know, pretty much all of them, is going to have some), at some point it will leak out. And there will be some places you aren’t honored at.

Big deal. Get over it.

Yes.

Get over it.

I don’t expect to be invited as a guest of honor by the Tea Party, either.

What hurts for Moon – and what worries many Wiscon-goers – is that it was their own community which they felt turned on them. When your community makes a leap forward and you don’t… well, you get left behind. That’s how it is.

Today’s radicals are tomorrow’s dinosaurs.

Yes, that’s a good thing. I want tomorrow’s society to be far more tolerant and progressive than I am with my in-built biases and knee-jerk misogyny (you have no idea how difficult it was to give Nyx female friends in the bel dame books. Or how weird it was to not make every token spear-carrier a guy. There are a lot of biases I had to be hyper-aware of, and on re-reading it now years after writing it, I can see a whole lot of misogyny in there. And let’s not even get into the whole “holy war” thing. That’s the subject of another post).

This wouldn’t have happened five or ten years ago. For some reason it reminded me of when David Moles posted all those quotes from Harlan-apologists from the private SFWA boards to a public forum (David took this post down some time after the fact, but I found an old post regarding the issue by Gwenda). Back then, the big outrage was about the breach of privacy on an internet forum (even more laughable today, I know, with the Facebook privacy fiasco. Nothing on the internet is ever really private), not a backlash in response to the sexism of some of the public’s most beloved SF/F authors.

In this case, of course, Moon posted her own thoughts to a public forum, so there was no one to blame for her comments but herself. And, true to her convictions, she stuck by them even after learning why others found them so appalling.Which, again, is fine. Nobody’s saying you can’t be a bigot. I say bigoted things all the time. But I shouldn’t be suprised when somebody calls me on it. And – at the very least – I can sit down and think hard about why I’m being called out as a bigot, and re-think my position in light of new evidence and/or arguements against my position (a very good recent example of how a civil dialogue and rethinking is up here about Daniel Abraham’s thoughts on rape in Urban Fantasy. Do read the comments. Anon really nails it in the line-by-line deconstruction. This is also something I’d like to tackle in another post).

Moon didn’t do that. This is why, in large part, I think the invitation was rescinded. We’re all bigots. What makes Wiscon cool is the fact that it’s a space where we can talk about why we’re bigots, and figure out ways to combat our skewed worldview.

Cons are notoriously bad at making controversial decisions, especially ones that have to do with pissing off their much-beloved writers. Much of Moonfail shows the strength of the LJ POC community and allies inside SF3. Fans decide what a con is and who should be honored. Wiscon wouldn’t think to invite Orson Scott Card or Harlan Ellison, no matter how progressive they personally believe themselves to be (ahhh, sorry, let me stop laughing).

Wiscon is a political con. But, more specifically, Wiscon is a feminist con, not a con about combating racism and encouraging religious tolerance – even if the new mission statement makes a nod to that (it’s been pointed out that the U.S.’s latest freak-out about Islam isn’t racism, but intolerance of religion. If the two weren’t linked, however, we wouldn’t be seeing the 20% of Americans who fervently believe that our bi-racial president is a Muslim, despite all evidence to the contrary. Part of race and ethnicity is religion, culture. See anti-semitism. Racism and anti-semitism are taboo in most circles now, but it’s now OK in a LOT of circles to spew hatred and fear of Muslims. The hilarious part about that is that this country was founded on religious tolerance).

I’d argue that everybody who attends Wiscon enjoys the idea that they’re supporting diversity, but what we saw in the Moon fiasco is that when it comes down to critiquing one of their own, about half the Wiscon crowd will support the cause of feminism over racism and religious tolerance. Looking at the comments in the SF3 thread, this is pretty obvious. Wiscon is a feminist con, they say. Bigotry be damned.  So, in their view, Moon should still be honored at a con whose mission statement is, among other things, about eliminating racism and promoting peace, love, understanding and all that.

Sorry. That’s not how change works.

As one of the biggest racist, misogynist bigots I know (having grown up in a racist, misogynist culture I’m not sure how anybody can honestly say anything else), I recognize that I’ll be among the writers who never goes to Wiscon as GOH. That’s cool. And Moon and others who this will likely happen to in future should also be cool with it. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of other non-political cons who are going to honor you with a GOH invite. Just not Wiscon.

Wiscon made a stand for something. It let folks know what was acceptable and unacceptable in a GOH. Are they silencing anyone? Did they delete somebody’s post? Bar Moon from coming to Wiscon all together? Of course not. They just said, in essence, “This is no longer someone who we see as supporting the mission of Wiscon.”(though I do wish they had made a more clear statement of *why* the invite was rescinded, instead of just saying it was rescinded).

And, see, that’s the deal, isn’t it? In Serenity, the assassin chasing our heroes notes that in the perfect society he’s building, there will be no place for him. His actions, he knows, will make his job – and killers like him – obsolete. In a a world where race and class and gender don’t matter, we’re all dinosaurs. And though I certainly hope that distant future looks more like the happy-go-lucky Star Trek universe than the fascist Firefly universe, I have to acknowledge that there’s no place for me in it.

I hate to tell you this, kids, but think about all those “old folks” who we look at as being big bigots. Guess who those bigoted “old folks” are going to be in 30-40 years?

They will be us.

And you know what? If society’s come so far that some of our most progressive people today are seen as tomorrow’s bigoted assholes, I am cool with that. Because it means we’ve made some progress.

And that’s the whole damn point of all this screaming and yelling and ranting and grief, isn’t it?

Tags: assumptions, The F Word, the writing life
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For the Record

… the nearest Meetup group that shows up when ones searches for “feminism” is in Louisville.

I suspect searching for something like “women’s studies” would end up with similar results.

There is a gay Christians group, however. Go figure.

You’ve got a long way to go, Ohio.

Tags: The F Word
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Five False Myths About Gender Differences

Blah, blah, blah… But say it enough times and maybe folks will start to look a the world a little differently. Can’t change something if you don’t know what’s broken.

Tags: The F Word
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An Oldie But A Goodie

Tags: Fictions, The F Word
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