Why I Don’t Read Much Urban Fantasy

(from here) 

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."

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?

First They Came For...

They came first for the gays and the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't gay, or a Jew.

Then they came for the immigrants and the socialists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an immigrant or a socialist.

Then they came for the Muslims,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Muslim.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

(re-imagined)

Seriously, you guys. Stop with the historical wheel of hate, OK? As somebody with a background in historical studies, it gets really depressing, and leaves me with very little hope for a future that doesn't look like V for Vendetta.

Steampunk Africa

"Virtuoso" New comic of a steampunk Africa that never was... 

Prince of Persia

Sooo.... let me get this straight. You had folks like this chick and this guy to carry this movie:




And YOU CHOSE this guy and this chick?




I'm sorry, what planet are you living on, Hollywood? Because it's not the same planet I'm living on.

Also, it looks like a terrible movie.

Maine, Or, the Legacy of Why We Don't Vote on Human Rights Issues

"Someone in power is finally going to state the obvious truth that gay marriage is absolutely necessary, and they're not going to put it up for a vote, because that's not what you do with basic human rights. You don't let six wolves and four sheep vote on what to have for dinner (or in this case, what, fifty-two wolves and forty-eight sheep?).

The National Guard will stand outside the courthouses and force you to grow the hell up, and you will be remembered in history like those sad ugly white people yelling at the black kids coming to class.

And this isn't the fifties. This is the twenty-first century. Your bisexual grandkids will still be able to Google your sorry ass and see that you were a spiteful hateful closeminded bigot. They'll have your lying ads, annotated with footnotes showing how you knew you were lying at the time. They'll have your ugly homophobic comments and your hate-filled fake news reports captured in crystal clarity on whatever magical Internet++ they're using decades from now. And they're going to be ashamed of you.

All you've done -- all you've accomplished with your lies and hate and fearmongering -- is to delay the inevitable. In the next few years, every widow who loses her home because she "wasn't really married" to her life partner, and the life partner's kids have a good lawyer? Every man who dies scared and alone because the man who should have been his husband wasn't allowed to be at his bedside? Every not-spouse who dies because of not-health-coverage, coverage they would have gotten were they married? Every one of those things that happens between now and whenever the National Guard puts a little learnin' on you? That's on you.

That's your legacy.

(read the rest)

Women in the Fight

Images of Women in WWII.

(via Elizabeth Bear)

This is Not My Beautiful Life...

I first noticed this phenomenon in the photos of folks I have on my Yahoo IM chat list. More often than not, women with young children would use the photo of their children as their avatar photo. The first couple times, you figure, hey, they're just really proud of their kids. Then I saw my mom use a photo of my neice and nephew as her user pic on Facebook and I thought... huh?

On the one hand, as the author points out, it's almost refreshing to see a focus other than me-me-me on traditionally me-centric social media sites. On the other hand... um? I'm proud of a good many things in my life, and no doubt if I ever have a child, I'll be proud of them too, but why use the photo as a stand in for... me?

There are plenty of photos of folks with their best friends, mothers *with* their kids, fathers with their kids, and of course, whole families together that sit in as user pics. So it's not like this is as huge a trend as the author points out. But it does come up often enough for me to go "hm," too. I haven't seen any fathers use pics of their children as their user photo, for instance. But I may just not be looking, or I don't note them as much when I see them?

I wonder if it's a mix of pride and guilt? Are you more likely to see working mothers using photos of their kids as avatars? I don't buy that it's about creating anonymity, as there are plenty of folks who just use objects/random scenery shots to hide behind. Is it really a flight from aging, like the author suggests? I don't buy into that so much. I'd be interested to find the commonalities and differences among men and women alike (because there must be some guy, somewhere) who use their children's photos for their social media pics.

I'd be interested, for instance, if it's more likely working moms or stay at home moms who do it. Or is there a class distinction? Is it really an age difference? Do over-30s just view the web differently, and shy away from its me-centric nature more than 20-somethings? Or has our culture really shifted... now that we all have less children, we invest more in them... and more of ourselves in them, and carry them close the same way we would anything else we'd invested so much of our youth in?

Children have always been a source of pride. I just can't ever see my grandmother posting a photo of her children as her user pic, if I could ever get her to join FB...

Pathfinder

This was not the movie I wanted to see. See, I wanted somebody to take the opportunity to tell the story about complex, fully developed Native American societies whoopin some Viking ass.

Instead, it's just another cliched ramble about "noble savages" getting saved by The Great White Hope.

It was like watching 10,000 BC... in Saskatchewan.

Divide and Conquer

Excellent.

Katha Pollitt Moneyshot

"The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers.

No wonder Middle America hates them."

Read the rest.

Someday I Will Be Famous Enough to Fix My Covers

I saw the initial row over this, but somehow the resolution totally passed me by (I don't spend nearly as much time on the internets these days). There are lots of stories about SF/F publishers whitewashing covers. So even if you've got a heroine who's a far darker shade of pale, it's unlikely it'll be seen on the bookshelf.

This was one of those, "Yeah, and this surprises people because...?" But it's important to remember that our silence as authors can be read as complicity. If you don't say something publicly - even if you're fuming - readers assume you're just going along with it. And that's a shame. Because as somebody who has sometimes wanted to drag a publisher out and kick them in the shins publicly, I can tell you I'm not so keen on doing it because it means, you know, I might be out a meal ticket.

That said, I need to choose my battles. Because if I end up with a whitewashed cover someday, I'm going to have to say something about it. Even if it means the loss of a meal ticket. Because at the end of the day, it's about systematic silencing, erasing. It's about lying.

That said - and understanding what JL was up against - I find this to be a pretty cool win.

Bloomsbury backs down in Larbalestier race row

How (not ) to Write About Africa

I've read Binyavanga Wainaina's essay How (not) to Write About Africa a few times, but here's a great spin on it: How (not) to Write About Africa read by Djimon Hounsou.

(via deadbrowalking)

You can bet this is showing up in a GW book or two....

Moscowitz is founder of the International Security Coalition of Clergy, whose mission is to train Jews in self-defense and advance fighting techniques in the event of a terrorist attack on a synagogue. He says business was slow for his Coalition until May, when the FBI arrested a group accused of plotting to blow up synagogues in The Bronx. But now Moscowitz's 100-hour synagogue self-defense course is in high demand.

The Importance of Tragedy

One of the things I always thought odd about American taste in fiction and cinema is our aversion to tragedy. Filmmakers, in particular, are constantly changing movie endings for American audiences to "lighten" them up. Many British books just aren't carted over the ocean for the simple fact that they're just "too depressing."

I had a lot of trouble understanding this phenomenon. I figured it had something to do with our belief in the American Spirit and Manifest Destiny. I figured we were terrified of tragedy, and in love with the idea that science and progress and good, god-fearing folks could overcome everything.

But it still bugged me. Because I love tragedy. I love watching the inexorable trudging on events toward a inevitable end knowing there's no way to stop it... but watching our heroes bravely try anyway. I like the cathartic rush.

Then I watched this TED talk with Alain de Botton and was suddenly stuck by what he had to say about our aversion to tragedy. Tragedy, he points out, was created to teach us compassion. Instead of looking at somebody who's down on their luck and saying, "God, she's such a loser. She must have done something pretty terrible to end up that way," we learn the old "there but for the grace of god go I" lesson. We learn that each person who's down on their luck isn't a loser, but merely "unfortunate."

But in America, we don't believe in misfortune. We believe in pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We figure that bankrupt people living out of a friend's house, unemployed, with chronic medical conditions, working temp jobs, are just... losers. Lazy. Meritless. After all, if they worked hard and had merit, they'd be winners, right? They'd be successful American entrepreneurs.

But what our American dream ignores - each and every time - is the influence of tragedy on people's lives. We don't like tragedy. We don't like the idea that sometimes you really do get hit on the back of the head with a shovel for no reason. Sometimes, shit happens.

Because if shit happens, then we can't ignore the bum on the street. We can't plead entitlement for healthcare. We can't just say, "If you don't own your own house, you're a loser," or "if you don't have a car, you're a loser."

Without tragedy, without teaching compassion and morality by putting us all in the shoes of good people who experience bad things, we look down on the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt, the destitute, with scorn, derision, and not one ounce of compassion. After all, they must have *done* something (or *not* done something) to get there, right? I'm good, I'm hard working. That will never happen to *me.*

I mourn our lack of tragedy.

Real News

"After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care."

I love The Onion.

When Your Results Confirm Existing Biases, Check Your Controls

I do love it when somebody has one of those, "Oh, shit, we totally missed something incredibly obvious" moments.

The mere act of physically approaching their potential romantic partner, behavior far more typical of men than women, makes people more confident and increases their attraction to their potential partner. In other words, by acting more like men (by physically approaching their dates), they begin to think more like them as well (by being more confident, aggressive, and less selective). In support of their embodied cognition hypothesis, Finkel and Eastwick show that, whether they are men or women, “rotators,” who approach their dates, have greater self-confidence than “sitters,” who are approached, and once they statistically control for self-confidence, the institutional arrangement (whether men or women rotate) ceases to have any effect on whether men or women were more selective.

Another Interesting Tidbit

This was a tidbit of particular interest to me from the article I link to below:

Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force.

Like everyone else, I, too, am curious about how a female dominated society whipped up into religious fervor would act. There's a lot of reasoning that societies of women will be inherently more peaceful than those where men predominate in public life.

As you'll see in God's War (and much of my short fiction), this isn't a belief I ascribe to. The issue may not even be religion (see the recent reaction in the U.S. to healthcare reform). I think there's a deeply human fear of change and "the other," and I just don't believe that switching the genders of the participants will change anything.

It's like saying that since I'm a woman, it's impossible for me to be a misogynist. Um, hello? I was raised in a misogynist society. I've said on many occasions that I'm one of the biggest misogynists I know. I'm *aware* of that casual misogyny (and casual racism, also a byproduct of growing up in a racist society), and I work hard every day to fight it. But if you put somebody - no matter their gender - into a society that glorifies war/conquest/God/bloody triumph, you will create a violent people.

Viking women spent a good deal of time alone on their islands while men were away, and they were more than capable of slaughtering any wayward band of mauraders who came their way. I think that glorifying violence is what makes people violent. If violence truly was considered repugnant, effeminate (for lack of a better word), cowardly, debase, and truly morally wrong under any circumstances, our lives - in a society run by women or men - would be far different.

The question then being, "Are societies of women less likely to glorify violence than societies of men?" To which I'd reply, "It depends."

Where did their beliefs come from? Have they risen to "power" from within a violent society? Did they have to do it violently? Is there religion/society already glorifying violence? How would they distort themselves to fit the culture? Because let's take a good, hard look at how women distort themselves to fit into our culture. Think about that for a minute. Old beliefs remain, and if you're a women dominated society that's constantly under attack from the outside, you're either going to find ways to defend yourself... or your women-friendly society isn't going to last very long.

It's the Women, Stupid

In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

And yet, for all the great information in this story... I was struck by how there was little to no mention of changing *men's* behaviors and *men's* attitudes toward women. Yes, give women aid, education, to lift populations out of poverty... but how does one go about changing the cultural attitude that women are beasts of burden?

By allowing them to make a buck, I guess. Which seems like an oddly capitalist solution. We measure the value of a life... by how much money it can make.

Hrm.

Not arguing with the solution. Just... concerned about that solution. Read the very excellent, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women for more about how the industrial revolution actually contributed to the *devaluation* traditional "women's work."

Like everybody else, we've just had to learn to do new things.

But you know what? Men have - and continue to need to - learn new ways of living, too. Giving women all the burden of change while excusing men who spend their family's money on alcohol and prostitutes... well.

Seriously.

For those tired of reading about this crap and want to make a difference, I recommend Kiva.

Change has Always Been Bloody, Yo

History suggests that major social policy unfolds on a continuum. The Social Security Act of 1935 disappointed liberal New Dealers because what was called "old-age insurance" covered only about half the adult population. It excluded farmhands, domestics, employees of small businesses, and most blacks. That was because FDR needed the votes of Southern Democrats, the Blue Dogs of their day. (The bill cleared the House Ways and Means Committee with only one Republican vote.) Similarly, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, immortalized in Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, was weak tea. It had to be strengthened by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the later bills, Lyndon Johnson betrayed Southerners he had made deals with in 1957. If Nancy Pelosi can't break Rahm Emanuel's promise to Big Pharma's Billy Tauzin this year, she can try to break it in the future. And Tauzin will lobby for more favors as the all-important new regulations are issued. Nothing in Washington is ever set in stone.