Night of the living gender roles

I watched Night of the Living Dead last night, and was, as always, impressed at just how well it’s aged. The pacing, dialogue, and design have an amazingly timeless quality, and the story is fantastic. As far as movies go–especially genre movies, which rely on effects and tropes that can quickly become dated–it’s a classic.

One thing that kept bothering me, however, was the way gender kept playing into it. Sometimes movies that rely on a certain kind of gender relations make me feel insulted or sort of depressed (it’s that “Is that really what we look like?” feeling.) Oldboy, for example, is built on a model of gender relations in which female sexuality is always masochistic, women are props, etc. But Night of the Living Dead is the kind of stereotyping that’s just bemusing.

Why I don’t like booth babes.

It seems that the folks over at Penny Arcade recently took a poll about booth babes (the long-suffering, often scantily-clad professional models hired to stand alongside product booths at conventions), and most of the community is against them:

6,313 people took the poll, with 60 percent of respondents either liking or loving the ban on booth babes. Only 12 percent of respondents hated the ban, putting public opinion firmly in the anti-babe area.

Looking at the Ars Technica comments, however, it’s clear that folks there are, at best, confused. Plenty of people give reasons why they agree with the ban (I’d put it at about 60%, much like the poll), and there are the usual number of joke comments (“You know how you’re gay?”) But a good number of people seem to think that this means the PA community is either prudish, micromanaging, or fascistic:

I went to PAX 2008. I remember seeing a booth babe at least once. I had no problem with her being there.

What I learned from this survey: PA fans are surprisingly prudish for being fans of a routinely NC-17 rated comic.
Okay not NC-17, but certainly “R”

I’ve never been to one of these and probably never will, but this is silly.
I don’t get the obsession with trying to get people to take games seriously. They’re games

There are a couple angry posts (one person calls this “feminism run amok”), but overall people who disagree seem simply bemused, as if they simply couldn’t imagine a reason why people would dislike seeing booth babes at the convention (for the record, the “ban” is not on female or costumed booth staffers–it requires that there be no partial nudity, although revealing costumes that are true to the character design are allowed, and that employees be knowledgeable about the products they represent.) So, in the interest of communication, here’s why I would.

Women who hate women

There are always a few.

So I only occasionally read Cracked.com, but when I do I sometimes get really great factoids, like the Lake Peigneur disaster, in which a team drilling in the twelve-foot deep freshwater Peigneur accidentally hit the salt mine below, causing a massive whirlpool and turning it into a 1300-foot-deep saltwater lake. “The 5 Biggest Mistakes Women (Like Me!) Make On The Internet,” however, is mostly just bemusing. I sort of assume it was written by either a high-schooler or someone just out of high school, so I won’t go too hard on it.

The article is about a certain stereotype of the nerdy girl that encompasses both camwhores and the girls who are obsessed with criticizing them. The author seems to be the second type–she’s the girl who “doesn’t have many female friends” in real life because “girls have so much drama” (not her words, but the words of many a sixteen-year-old like her.) They usually also very ostentatiously hate pink.

The camwhore type is–I believe–what the author is claiming she used to be, based on anecdotes like

Had I gone with the less subtle, “Any other girls here?” I would have been forced to pretend I was happy to see all these other more attractive girls, matching their false enthusiasm with an even more over the top. “Oh my GOD, it is so GREAT to see another GIRL HERE!! ^_^ ;0) We’ll all be SUCH great FRIENDS! Kekeke!” Every time I see it happen, some manner of disappointment ensues.

or headers like

You Can’t Control Men With Sex Appeal

Aaaand so.

“When race and gender enter the scene, all discussion stops.”

I stepped out of the real world for a descent into ResearchLand only to come out and find that apparently something of note happened in my University. I don’t know anyone involved, and I’m not even really sure what the context is, but apparently a (South African) Africana Studies faculty member invited two graduate students to a conference, at which the following transpired:

The two students arrived late to a conference panel, after which Farred walked over and thanked them for making it out to the conference. According to one of the two students present, Farred then lowered his voice and said, “When you both walked in, I thought, ‘Who are these black bitches?’”

When the two students visibly expressed shock at the remark, the student said Farred changed the subject and, soon after, walked away. She said that both she and the other student later told Farred that his comment was offensive. She said he quickly apologized, saying that that he had meant no harm.

[...]

Hassan’s written response included a letter detailing the comprehensive steps that have been taken to address the incident. According to the letter, Farred, who was Director of Graduate Studies in the ASRC at the time of the incident, was promptly removed from his position. Additionally, a special faculty meeting was held amongst Africana faculty to discuss the incident, and Fared was asked to not participate in the 40th anniversary of the ASRC occuring this week. Hassan declined to comment beyond his written statement.

To be honest, I’m really conflicted about this. Firstly, I keep trying to imagine how the remark was meant, and imagine it must have been either a joke in bad taste or, well…a joke in bad taste, really. Or possibly a moment of ill-concealed anger, masquerading as a joke in bad taste. It’s not unusual for people within one (usually marginalized) group to refer to other members in that group jokingly by terms that would be derogatory used in another context. There are, however, very few contexts in which this is appropriate or taken well, and it’s entirely up to the speaker to take the blame if it turns out it isn’t appropriate. And clearly, in this case, it wasn’t.

The second issue is how we decide what’s a removal-worthy offense for faculty. This I a subject about which I genuinely know nothing. I’m also not sure what kind of importance these positions hold, and how big a deal it is to be removed from them. Certainly someone’s life shouldn’t be ruined for an offhand remark, or even for being genuinely bigoted. But I have no idea if that’s what this is, and I also bristle at the idea that there should be no consequences for what seems, at the very least, to be a severe breach of professionalism. I know students and professors who are in similar departments at Cornell, and who have very close relationships, and I know that these professors still would not find it appropriate, in any situation, to slur their students even jokingly.

That said, it’s been a controversial incident, and there’s nothing like controversy for the Cornell Daily Sun, whose illustrious pages I too once graced. In particular, a passing acquaintance of mine, Judah Bellin, has written “Too Quick to Punish,” an argument against punishment which he claims include measures that will be responsible for “effectively ending [Farred's] career.” I’m not sure I disagree with him on this central point. What I disagree with is his reasoning.

Bechdel’s Rifters

[Part 3 in a multi-part review of Peter Watts' Rifters science fiction trilogy: Part 1, Part 2]

Last time in the Rifters reviews, I talked about what bothered me about the Rifters trilogy: Primarily, the way it took one model of relationship (male-dom/female-sub) and generalized it to an entire world. That said, though, I want to spend some time talking about the things I found really good about the books, feminism-wise.

First of all, I can’t stress enough how crazy it is for me to pick up a mainstream (i.e. not-specifically “feminist”) science fiction book, read the first few chapters, and see that not only are we getting descriptions of the characters that are actually relevant to their character, and not fanservicey, we’re getting the Bechdel Test passed within the first twenty pages. Seriously, Watts hits it out of the park. (The Bechdel Test, explicated in this Alison Bechdel comic, means that something has 1. Two or more female characters who 2. Talk to each other about 3. Something besides a man.)

This sounds like faint praise, but when I think about the fiction I’ve read recently, science or otherwise, I can’t think of too many examples: Female protagonists aren’t incredibly rare, but they usually appear in books where most other important characters are men. It isn’t that every book has to pass this test, but it’s telling that there are pretty few that do, and even fewer where you don’t have to search for it. When I think about my favorite books–Ubik, Veniss Underground, Perdido Street Station–the first doesn’t pass at all (PK Dick also seemed to put his ex-wife in every book he wrote, which kind of ups the woman-hating quotient), the second has enough female characters to pass, but I can’t remember if it actually does, and the third does, I think, but I would never characterize any of these scenes as central to the book. The really central scenes in all of them are men talking to men, or, rarely, men talking to women. This isn’t a bad thing for one book, but it’s a bad thing for all books. Unless women are just less intrinsically interesting than men, there’s no reason for a skew this big.

Starfish, Maelstrom, and Behemoth, on the other hand, make these relationships seem completely natural. It isn’t a “girly book” or a book where all the women are grouped into one occupation or role. The protagonist and reluctant antagonist are both female, and they interact with each other in a way that is completely believable. The books don’t paint a gender-egalitarian future by any means, but they paint one where woman exist, and where they can do things worth writing about.

A note on that: Aside from my criticisms about his particular weirdnesses (which I addressed last post), I actually like that Watts doesn’t make the future gender- or race-egalitarian; I’ve watched a fair number of movies and TV series that do this, and while sometimes it works (the new Battlestar Galactica did it very well), it often ends up coming off as whitewashing, or the authors trying to stay as far away from a touchy issue as they can. Inequality is central to Watts’ work here: Those who have jobs are overworked and overmedicated, but those without cluster in a vast refugee camp on the shores of North America, escaping countries that have been flooded by global warming. It’s a bleak, terrifying look at a particular kind of future, and people on both sides are real characters: The refugees aren’t vast hordes of nameless sheep, and the capitalists aren’t mustache-twirling villains (at least until the third book, and even then, that’s mostly only one character.) Indeed, the books are pretty explicitly about the kind of agency that people have when they’re powerless.

As I’ve touched on a little here, I want to go back to the actual kind of world that Watts is talking about, something that my coblogger calls “post-viridian.” I’ll get into what that means next time.

Rifters and feminism: Love or Stockholm’s?

(Note: This is Part 2 of my review of Peter Watts’ Rifters science fiction trilogy. Part 1.)

I wouldn’t really be talking about gender relations in Watts’ books if they weren’t so utterly central to it. The book’s about capitalism, and accountability, in a way that’s intrinsically tied up to questions of victimhood and agency, which is also tied up with the characters’ takes on sex and gender. It’s there from the second chapter, when Clarke fails to react to an attack:

And  if not,  she knows,   it’s her own damn  fault.    She  just   lay there.   She just waited to die.  She was asking for it.

She’s always asking for it.

And with that line, you know the territory you’re in.

What’s funny is that Watts both manages to completely subvert this trope and completely confirm it, often several times sequentially. I’ve covered rape as character background before: It’s an easy way to give a female character motivation–it’s not enough to be metaphorically abused by capitalism; if you’re a woman, you have to be literally abused as well. If you’re a man, replace [you] with [girlfriend/sister/daughter]. No exceptions allowed.

As I mentioned before, Watts’ Starfish is about an underwater society of misfits and criminals: Although it’s never mentioned what exactly has happened to each of them, it’s strongly implied that nearly all of them are either survivors or perpetrators of domestic abuse: Lenie Clarke the victim of her father, and the first other Rifter–a man named Lubin–the near-murderer of his wife. Both of their stories get more complex in the two books that follow Starfish, and neither of them are exactly what they seem.

To see what I mean, follow me below the jump for trigger warning/major spoilers…

The He-Man Allan-Bloom-Lovers Club

I know my generation doesn’t have ethics. I’m reading The Closing of the American Mind, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we believe truth is relative. The thing is, if I had to break down my actual way of life, it would move into “angels dancing on the head of a pin”-style complications. Like “truth is absolute, but it’s very difficult to find.” Which is, I would argue, utterly different, as different as the man in Borges who independently wrote his own copy, identical to the word with Cervantes’, of Don Quixote and the man who makes a photocopy of the text.

I’m probably going to interpret Allan Bloom in a way that’s missing things. That’s probably one part internalized hostility to one part simply having not spent as much time with the book as I could: I’m only  halfway through it, after all. There’s a lot going on, including a lot of points I wished he had elaborated further; he says, for example, that college has been reduced to the mere study of vocations, but does he accept that studies other than the classics can be a true form of living the life of the mind? Can a doctor’s calling be as thoughtful as a philosopher’s?

If not, it seems like an exceedingly narrow kind of mental revolution he’s calling for. He never really brings it up, but Bloom, like many critics of postmodern America, must be aware that much of the changes in American education must be the spread of the tertiary degree: In 1950, less than 10% of the population had a bachelor’s degree or higher; that number had more than doubled by 2005. Suddenly, a bachelor’s degree was no longer a luxury for lifelong philosophers: It was a practical, relatively widespread phenomenon, open to more students from different backgrounds. Not only does Bloom never mention this, he (as far as I can tell) makes the assumption that early Americans were all either well-educated in the classics or not worth mentioning at all; the latter, I’m inferring, were educated in the Bible, and therefore had a set of deep rules to believe in that took the place of education.

My history isn’t as strong as it could be, but I’m fairly certain that some of the phenomena Bloom addresses never existed in the first place. The nuclear family, for example, comes up frequently in Bloom’s work (he points to the degeneration of the American nuclear family as the source of an increasing nihilism, since the family was what tied the individual to a sense of responsibility) but the extended family is only mentioned to deride people who bring it up; on the contrary, Bloom puts the responsibility for child-rearing squarely on the wife, who, he insists, must let her natural desire for children overrule artificially-inculcated career aspirations.

I’m not trying to read more into this than is there. I’m going to try not to make ad hominem attacks on him; I’m just going to say that, very clearly, Bloom believes that women should not have jobs (with the exception of a few spinsters), and nowhere does he mention women as being able to study the classics. That’s fair. There’s an argument there. But where on earth does that leave me? Why am I even reading his book if it’s got the equivalent of a big sign on it reading no girls allowed?

But back to ethics. I’m still working a lot of this out, but I don’t think there’s necessarily an exclusive-or arrangement in believing you’re absolutely, doubtlessly right, and acting ethically. To me, one of the most fundamentally important moral postulates is to imagine that it’s possible you may be wrong, and keep that in the back of your mind, even when what you’re doing seems unambiguously good.

…And the way of all good things: Gender analysis, art, and cliches

I’m in a very weird position vis a vis the Rifters trilogy and feminism. It’s one of those books that combines the things I absolutely wish more writers would do with the things I hate it when writers do, then problematizes the things I hate, and then goes back and reinforces them all over again. It’s all very complicated.

But, first, a standard disclaimer on fiction and feminism, because there are two things that always come up whenever anybody does a feminist or Marxist or Christian or in-any-way-postmodern critique of anything:

It’s just a movie/book/interpretive dance!

Why do you think everything good has to be feminist? You’re missing out on great movies/books/interpretive dances this way!

The first one already has an answer. It’s called Moff’s Law. The whole thing is worth reading; here’s a bit of the conclusion:

And most annoyingly of all, you’re contributing to the fucking conversation yourselves when you make your stupid, stupid comments. You are basically saying, “I think people shouldn’t think so much and share their thoughts, that’s my thought that I have to share.” If you really think people should just enjoy the movie without thinking about it, then why the fuck did you (1) click on the post in the first place, and (2) bother to leave a comment?

The second one, I mean, it’s worth clarifying. Someone online once said that everything you’ll see falls into one of four categories: This is good and I like it, this is good and I don’t like it, this is bad and I like it, and this is bad and I don’t like it. So I guess you could class my deconstruction of gender dynamics under the “I like/don’t like” part of this, or you could say that I think there are different kinds of good: There’s aesthetic good, and there’s moral good. I think of fairness, equality, and kindness (something in which I include feminism) as a kind of moral good; they don’t have to be in everything I watch, but I’ll think about them in everything I watch, and part of the fun of seeing/reading anything is looking at how those things line up.

So, to be clear, I don’t limit myself to only things that are already vetted for “goodness,” aesthetic or moral. And I don’t think that only feminist or anti-racist things can be aesthetically good, obviously. Alan Moore’s “The Killing Joke” is really weird from a feminist standpoint: Batgirl/Barbara Gordon getting crippled just to motivate the heroes is practically the textbook example of Women in Refrigerators, but even so, it’s a well-written, interesting, and entertaining story that is integral to the Batman we know today.

There is, however, one area where bad gender politics is pretty clearly a symptom of bad writing, and that’s in cliches. I don’t know why, but it seems like cliches are somehow innately conservative, and when someone “accidentally” writes something sexist into a book, or creates another “magical Negro” character, or a romantic comedy based on hackneyed gender roles, it’s not that they’re trying to be sexist/racist/whatever, or that they even necessarily think that way–it’s that they’re relying on the crutch of using ideas from the lowest rung of the popular imagination.

To stick with the comic example, let’s go with a 2005 Steven Grant column at Comic Book Resources complaining about the overuse of rape as a gimmick in comic books, in which he argues that

[Rape is] used far too often simply as a motivating factor, and to paint an easy, lazy characterization for a female character – she becomes “the one who was raped” – that mostly male writers use to avoid any real characterization…Screw “realism.” If you can’t come up with better storylines or characterizations for female characters, particularly heroines (or the hero’s girlfriend) than that, something’s wrong. At minimum, something’s derivative, lazy and uninteresting.

This is pretty much explicated in this comic:

Real science-fiction — the kind that postulates alternate universes, as opposed to just westerns in space — terrifies TV executives and alienates audiences, so the people who usually write sci-fi and fantasy are underpaid, undertalented, and too lazy to come up with another motivation for a woman that’s not vagina-related.

I know there’s the sense that calling someone “a racist” or “a sexist” is tantamount to accusing them of killing children, but if I say I have a problem with the way something works gender-wise in a story, it doesn’t mean I’m saying the story itself, as a piece of art, is bad. If you’re doing stuff like this, though–knock it off. You shouldn’t want to be a hack either.

Solidarity with Gordon Freeman, gay rights, or both?

Summer-type weather means sometimes actually going outside, and seeing new graffiti pop up on the Cornell campus. The life of a feminist nerd is ever-complex.