The Wives of Stepford

Yea.

I put off watching this movie as long as possible. When I saw they were making a remake of "The Stepford Wives" that was supposed to be funny, I thought "backlash." But Jenn had seen it, and kept wanting my opinion on it, so I gave in.

The original Stepford Wives is fucking creepy. Really, really, creepy. As far as I'm concerned, The Stepford Wives should be in the horror section of the movie store.

It's that fucking creepy.

The premise of the original was this: a successful, "liberated" woman goes into the suburbs and finds that all the women are "perfect" wives. They're always immaculately dressed, they cook and clean and don't talk back to their husbands. They're very, very creepy. The liberated woman figures out what's going on - the men have conspired to replace/reconfigure/change their wives so that they become, effectively, robots. They're no longer real people. The liberated woman, realizing what's going on, tries to flee, but her husband has hidden her children from her, so she's go herself trapped in Stepford. The last shot is the liberated woman dressed in properly feminine clothes, with a properly detached, brain-dead look on her face, moving dream-like through an immaculate supermarket in her high heels, moving serenely among the aisles with her fellow female automotons.

Trust me. It's creepy.

So, I went to watch the remake and tried to be open-minded. OK. They wanted it to be funny. Let's do funny.

Nicole Kidman is a power-hungry - and admirably good, in my opinion - executive who runs a television network. Her programming rests on shows where women are put into parodies of reality tv in which the women are stronger, more aggressive, and more sexually voracious than their male counterparts. The clips made me chuckle a bit, but really, they weren't all that different from what we're seeing now. Idiots giving themselves over to reality tv.

Now things get loopy. One of the reality shows was much like "Temptation Island," called, "I Can Do Better" in which a married couple is put on an island with a bunch of sexy people and encouraged to cheat. In the end, the man and woman need to decide if they want to stay with their spouse, or if lots of sex with hot people wins out over married love. In the clip, the man says he'd rather stay with his wife, and his days on the island with his personal prostitute were chaste ones. But the wife had sex with pretty much everyone on the island (including a couple of women), and decided that, in the end, she "could do better."

The thwarted husband, upset at his wife's decision, shoots at Kidman and then goes off and slaughters his wife and her lovers.

It's too much bad press for the network, so they fire Kidman, blaming her for inciting the thwarted husband to violence.

This was my first real, "Huh" moment.

So... man goes on murdering spree. It's the woman's fault.

This should have been my first clue that this was going to be a "blame the women" movie. Though for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how they could turn Stepford into a "blame the stupid women" movie. I lack imagination about just how much shit movie-makers are willing to spread over a movie in order to make their "vision" work.

Kidman has a nervous breakdown, and her really sweet husband, played by the very sweet Matthew Broderick comes to comfort her. It's obvious pretty quickly that they do have real affection for each other. He's "only" a VP at the network, but he gives it up so they can go away to the country and she can recover from her nervous breakdown.

So, it's not like Broderick doesn't have a job or something. He's a VP, OK? Which means he's likely got a good education, and he's a sweetheart of a guy, the kind of guy you totally marry, cause he loves you, and you adore him. It's not like he doesn't have a life, or that she crushes him under her heel, or is cruel and evil to him, or anything like that. They do genuinely seem to like each other for being each other.

The couple and their kids relocate to the gated community of Stepford, which is full of beautiful, terribly thin, twittering women in big floppy hats with perfect hair and absolutely obesceince to the whims of their very obviously dorky, out-of-shape, but overall nice-seeming husbands. The sorts of "good guys" that strong women end up with, you know?

Now, things get slightly weirder. For some reason that I can't figure out, the remake decided to put a gay couple in Stepford.

Yea. And they were accepted into Stepford (though the fact that everybody's white was brought up pretty early - gays are OK but not blacks? Huh?). It was weird. It went against everything Stepford stood for - that old-school fundamentalist Christian everybody's in these certain boxes thinking. But, hell, I was like, OK, let's see what they do with this.

So Kidman meets the other two "newbie" couples in town, a frumpy, successful writer played by Bette Midler, and the more flamboyent guy in the guy couple, played by Roger Bart, who was supposed to be a famous architect or something. The three of them become fast friends, and share stories about how weird everybody is in Stepford.

Now comes one of the best scenes in the movie, which got crapped on. The three of them go over the Midler's house - which is a filthy mess (she doesn't cook or clean - when her husband asks why, she says, "Why don't you?") - and they have this bit of dialogue about how they're all on anti-depressents, or compulsive eaters, and talk about how incredibly unhappy they are, even though they're so successful, and Kidman says, let's try and make this Stepford thing work. Let's try and be happy without all the drugs.

And I was thinking, "Cool. They're going to talk about how to find happiness without drugs, or turning into a robot. Maybe they'll talk about the fact that society is telling these people they're freaks, which is what makes them unhappy, and they'll learn to accept who they are. This'll be great."

Unfortunately, that wasn't the movie I was watching.

Kidman begins baking cupcakes obsessively. She and Broderick have a really sweet talk about how much they like each other. Roger gets robotofied, and turns into a butch gay man (he throws out his photo of Orlando Bloom [?]), which pleases his butch partner, and he runs for a Stepford political office.

Then Midler gets robotofied, and her house is suddenly clean, and she's become a slave to her husband and kids and is writing cookbooks instead of poetry.

Kidman tries to get out of town, but her kids have been stolen by the men's club, and then there's a confrontation between Kidman and the men of the men's club where she goes to try and find her kids, and they explain that they've put nano-chips into the brains of all the women to make them obey their husbands, and they've "pefected" them with some "enhancements" that make them all thin and blond, and now they're going to do it to her.

Once again, Kidman and Broderick confront each other, and I admit: I just didn't get it. I just couldn't understand Broderick wanting - *really* wanting - to change his wife into a robot. Who the hell did he think he married? Didn't he love the balls-busting woman? If that's not who he loved, why marry her? Why be married to what's basically a castrated version of the person you love? I mean, sure, maybe dump her and find somebody who's brainless to wait on you hand and foot, but giving somebody you love a lobotomy?

Broderick is just too good at playing a nice guy. Though I'm not crazy-attracted to him, I do have a lot of affection for this geeky guy, and I just couldn't understand this scene, when he tells her she's always been better at everything than he has, she's always been better at her job, at sex, at everything. And I was like, "Wasn't that what you liked about her? You want to eviserate the person you love?"

I was just really confused.

So, she basically says to him what I just said, and he appears to reject her tears, and she doesn't fight him at all, just goes down into the robot-hell to be robotofied.

Then we get what should have been the last shot of the movie, which was a frame-by-frame reshoot of the supermarket scene from the end of the original Stepford Wives, and Kidman is wearing froofy clothes and a floppy hat and has this really long blong hair, and I was watching it expecting this to be it, and thinking, "What a waste of time that movie was," and then.... it kept going.

It got worse.

Broderick takes the apparently robotofied Kidman to a Stepford party, then slips away while she distracts the guy in charge, and goes down to the robot-hell-center and deactivates all of the nanochip programs inside all the women, and the women all snap out of their reveries, and become pissed off at their husbands, and Broderick returns, the conquering hero, and Kidman reveals that she's been herself all along (I'm not sure how she was supposed to have grown out her hair so fast, but hey), not really a robot, because Broderick became a Real Man at the last minute and chose not to robotofy his wife.

Gosh, it sure is lucky *he* decided that. I mean, heaven forbid she had any kind of agency in the matter (if she was really "better" at everything than he was, couldn't she have fought him off in the robot-center, when it was just the two of them? Oh well).

And then we have the Big Reveal.

When Kidman hits the leader of the Stepford robot program over the head, the guy's head pops off.

Turns out he was a robot.

His wife, played by Glen Close, wasn't robotofied.

*She* had made her husband into a robot, and got that robot to convince all the other men to put chips in the heads of all of their wives.

Close gives a big evil-doer speech at the end to explain her motives. She killed her husband when he had an affair with her research assistant, and then rebuilt him as a robot so that everything would be "perfect," and she created Stepford so that all men would love their wives and everyone would be perfect. Or, at least, her version of The Way Things Should Be. Which is an interesting idea, I guess: a woman decides to change *the women* so that the men will love them.

Once again, the problem's not the men, or men's idea of women, but the problem is that *women need to be fixed in order to be loved.* Kind of sad, actually.

It's concluded that she's just a fucking nutcase. She kisses the robot head of her decapitated husband, is electrocuted, and dies.

Picture me staring in utter confusion at my television screen.

The final scene is Kidman, Midler, and Roger - all back to their usual-looking and acting selves (though Kidman's hair has remained blond. Huh) - having a discussion with Larry King about how great and successful their lives are. No, they say, they aren't perfect lives, but they're great.

When asked what happened to the men in Stepford, Midler laughs and says they're "Under House Arrest" and our final shot is of that supermarket again, this time with the whipped men wandering around the supermarket aimlessly. A female voice over the intercom snaps, "Stop talking and get back to shopping!"

The men mill around some more.

THE END.

Seriously. The End.

Picture me sitting through most of the credits, still looking really confused.

What the fuck was that?

What am I supposed to take away from this movie? That good men will always love their wives and not turn them into robots, but women will punish bad men by making them shop?

And what about that cool scene where the threesome is talking about all the drugs they're on? Are they successful again but still on drugs? Why didn't they make a statement about the pressures they feel to be perfect being alleviated or at least put into perspective? Or was the whole experience just something to profit from, as it got them on Larry King?

And what the fuck was up with having a gay guy get "turned butch" but still be gay? In Stepford? Gay people shouldn't exist in Stepford, any more than women who have personalities. The whole idea is to parody the fundamentalist Christian "moral America" as, in fact, a sort of deep, sizzling hell where nobody's a real person, where the strong have to impose their beliefs about what's "perfect" on the weak.

This was just like... it was like somebody said, "Let's make The Stepford Wives funny!" and the only way they could figure out to make it *really* funny was to make it all actually the idea of a thwarted woman.

Cause ha ha look at how funny those stupid women are, making themselves so stupid.

It just ended up looking like an entire movie that was stupid and ill-thought out.

My Roomate is a Sneaky Bitch - & Other Heart-Warming Holiday Tales

I left work early yesterday and milled around Borders for a crappy gift-exchange gift for our office Christmas lunch today. I find these gift-exchange Secret Santa things kinda crappy. Basically, everybody goes out and finds some really crappy junk gifts and passes them around, and you open them, smile nicely, and then promptly go home and shuck them into the garbage can.

I promptly fulfilled my capitalist duty to buy shit nobody wants for somebody I don't particularly care about and went home only to find that my sneaky roommate - who'd flow out to the West Coast for the holidays - had left me two very well-packaged Christmas gifts.

Have I budgeted in Christmas gifts for anyone this year? No. Arg.

Being my lovely roommate and good friend, she'd gotten me the Kameron equivalent of really good porn - an Osprey book on the Peloponnesian War (I literally swoon over this series of books at the bookstore. They're just too damn expensive to properly stock up on), and The Art of Memory, a book that studies how people are and were able to retain vast stores of knowledge by memory.

I'm such an easy person to buy gifts for. Just tie a ribbon around a book. Any book. If it's about war, so much the better.

Then I spent the night eating Thai food and watching movies. Because that's what I do when my writing isn't going well, I have no money, and I've got the house to myself.

I was watching Rocky III (I saw all of these when I was a kid, but they're so much more interesting now that I have some conception of just how hard you have to work to fight like this) and thinking how much I hated the holidays and wished they were over already.

This was a really bizarre twist for me. I've traditionally really loved the holidays. There's always some angst about going home, but I love the Christmas trees and stockings and music and little twinkly lights and crappy gift buying. But this year I just want it to be January. No more holiday schedule at the MA school, no more trips to interfere with my routine. No more...

Advice columns trying to make me feel pathetic. Ah, yes, thanks for that MSN advice column unmasking, Amanda.

Gosh, why do so many single women feel bad around the holidays? Gosh, could it be because everybody tells us we should feel bad and unsexy?

What bugs me the most is that it's not just the single who get harped on. If you've got a boyfriend, everybody spends the holidays talking about how you should get married, if you're married, everybody asks when you're having kids. And let's not forget that there's a lot of pressure on guys about this stuff, too. I have a friend who was dreading going home for the holidays because he knew his parents were going to start harping on him again about why he and his girlfriend of 9 years still aren't married. Give up the ghost, guys.

I've always suspected that people are really so interested in the social lives of others because they want validation for their own life choices. *Please* have a boyfriend. *Please* get married. *Please* have kids, and a mortgage, and a two-car garage. Please validate my choices by making the same ones.

Without all this pressure to conform to the picket-fence ideal, what sort of society would we have? Would we be happier with the lives we've chosen, if we weren't always comparing them to some mythical ideal created by other people, instead of the ideal we thought up? That always interests me.

Cause there I was, watching movies, thinking, OK, this is it. I'll start dating in May. I'll do it. Really, I will. No! Squash those sudden feelings of intense anxiety. No! Forget that you feel a panic attack coming at the mere idea of subjecting yourself to date after sorry date with 1) boring people I don't like 2) people I like who think I'm boring 3) people I like who like me who want to come in and stomp all over my life.

That just sounds like a swell time.

So, deep breath. Will. Not. Give. In. To. Social. Dating. Pressure.

Must live the life I want. If I bump into somebody along the way that I like who likes me, so much the better. If not, that's why I have good friends, for company. But you know what, I want to be able to take off to New York for the weekend, or fly to Colorado for rock-climbing lessons for the weekend, or take a week-long rafting trip on the Snake River. And those are just the weekend trips that don't include bike riding in China, hiking up to Macchu Piccu, and taking that tour of the Greek Islands. I have about a bazillion things to do, and I'm not getting any younger. I want that kind of freedom, and in my experience, welding myself to another person means less freedom, not more. It would take an amazing person to live that kind of life with me, and I'm not fooling myself into thinking those people live around every corner.

It always makes me curious, what sorts of people I'll end up surrounding myself with in my dotage.

And you know, whenever I start to get the holiday blues, I remember all the friends I have who lust after my life. The ones who go "You went to grad school *where*? You spent *how* long in Alaska? You want to do *what* for a living? You live in *Chicago* now?" And then they look at their own perfectly good and happy lives and think, "Oh, God, what's *wrong* with me?"

The grass is always greener, isn't it?

And... Here's Leguin's Proper Response to Earthsea's Whitewash

Titled, appropriately, "Earthsea in Clorox," or A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi Channel Wrecked My Books.

snip:

I had just seen Mr Halmi's miniseries Dreamkeeper with its stunning Native American cast, so I said to them in a phone conversation, hey, maybe Mr Halmi will cast some of those great actors in Earthsea! -- Oh, no, I was told -- Mr Halmi had found those people impossible to work with.

"Well," I said, "you do realise that almost everybody in Earthsea is 'those people,' or anyhow not white?"

I don't remember what their answer to that was -- it may have used that wonderful weasel word "colorblind" -- but it wasn't reassuring, because I do remember saying to my husband, oh, gee, I bet they're going to have a honky Ged.

Ah. How right she was.

They then sent me several versions of the script -- and told me that shooting had already begun. In other words, I had been absolutely cut out of the process.

I withdrew my offered pronunciation guide (so Ogion, which rhymes with bogy-on, is "Oh-jee-on" in the film.) Having looked over the script, I realised they had no understanding of what the two books are about, and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic MacMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence. (And "faith" -- according to Mr Halmi. Faith in what? Who knows? Who cares?)

Larry Landsman, who looks after the book end of things at Sci Fi and has been very kind, sent me an early CD of the film, so I saw it some weeks before it was aired.

There was nothing I could do about it at that point, and I said nothing negative in public. It seemed mean-spirited to bash the thing it before other people had a chance to see it. Anyhow, what's the use whining? Take the money and run, as whoever it is said. Someday, somebody would make a real Earthsea movie. . .

Any volunteers?

And here's why this matters:

I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else does.

I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from colored readers who told me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre that they felt included in -- and how much this meant to them, particularly as adolescents, who'd found nothing to read in fantasy and sf except the adventures of white people in a white world. Those letters have been a tremendous reward and true joy to me.

But Aren't You Worried You Won't Grow Up to Be a Real Girl?

Here's an interview with Hilary Swank, who trained four and a half hours a day, six days a week, for three months to get into boxing shape for "Million Dollar Baby" - the latest troubled-woman-boxer-will-kick-your-ass-movie.

What bugs me about these interviews of ass-kicking heroines is this need the interviewer feels to remind the audience that it's so sad that these women aren't looked at as more "feminine" (if you want to hear a woman snap back at an interviewer about this bullshit, check out some Michelle Rodriguez interviews). There's lots of questions about what her husband thinks, and how her training affected her husband's view of her (instead of asking, you know, how the training affected her view of herself, her confidence, etc), cause lord knows all us women are supposed to be living for that Idealized Feminine Form that men are always talking about (see previous post that bitches about just this).

Apparently, some dipnut (casting director Felicia Fasano) said of Hilary (who's mostly played untraditional female roles) that she needed to "embrace her inner supermodel" and start taking on more traditional feminine accourtrements.

Hilary's response:

"I follow my gut because in the end that's all you have. I shied away from playing just 'the girl' roles because I didn't find them inspiring," she added. "I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to push myself to the limit. I wanted to -- I want to -- do all that. That's where my passion lies, and it's not just playing the arm candy."

I think my response would have been a little less diplomatic. I think it would have come out something like:

"Fuck you, you fucktard."

Take Out All the Black People, & God. It'll Make it Less Controversial

So, Earthsea's got a token black guy in a world that's supposed to have a token white chick.

Oh well.

And now we have Pullman's work getting savaged, too. For fear of wingnuts.

Wingnuts. All twelve of them.

What the fuck is genre fiction supposed to be all about? Why write this crap, when it's just gonna get whitewashed and hacked up into regurgitated putty? What's the point?

God is cut from film of Dark Materials
By Sam Coates

THE Hollywood adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, in which two children do battle with an evil, all-powerful church, is being rewritten to remove anti-religious overtones.

Chris Weitz, the director, has horrified fans by announcing that references to the church are likely to be banished in his film. Meanwhile the “Authority”, the weak God figure, will become “any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual”.

Like a Church that says having same-sex attractions, having sex outside of marriage, or reading certain books is EVIL?

Why I'm Not A Woman

Sometimes, I'm just sad.

Cristina translated a piece by Mircea Cărtărescu from Romanian to English called "A Few Reasons Why We Love Women," and then she posted her own response, "A Few Reasons Why We Love Men."

Now, before I start, please know this about me: I did find some of this very sweet. I'm a hopeless romantic. But when I read it, I looked at it again as a litany of all of the things I'm not, of all of things I'm supposed to be, and I came up lacking. This always happens when images of female beauty and "what being female is" are plopped in front of me by (usually male) writers, editors, designers, etc. Not that men don't get this too, but it's the reason written pieces like this bug me. It tells me what somebody wishes me to be. Something I'm not.

And Cristina did express worry that feminists would take it the wrong way:

Reading it as a Romanian, I was amused and nostalgic, and caught myself smiling wisely to myself several times. Then I couldn't help but wonder, could this be written in English, now? Or would it attract irate replies and burrowing frowns from aggravated feminist intellectuals all over the US?... I believe that the spirit of Cartarescu's text is not to be misconstrued as some patriarchal political statement, but rather as the quirky, tender voice of the writer-as-man. And as such, it's endearing and funny.

And yet, despite the swooning in the comments over at Cristina's place, I found the idea of dating a guy who thought these things really uncomfortable. What would happen when he woke up? When he realized I was just a person?

What I found interesting about both versions was the idealization of each gender, the emphasis on separateness, on difference, and the glorification of the "other." A lot of romance, and putting people on pedastels, is built around language like this.

I'm a little weird when it comes to sexual relationships, I've discovered. I tend to look for egalitarian, buddy-buddy relationships. Instead, a lot of guys I deal with look to make me into a child or a mother, when all I really want to do is hang out with somebody funny and interesting and respectful who treats me like a real person, not an idealized "other." I think that idealization is dangerous, particularly when you're with a guy who finally gives up the ghost and realizes you're a real person. Bad things can happen.

And I worry when I read about the reasons women are loved, and find that none of those reasons describe me.

I wonder what that makes me.

Which is exactly the sort of doubt the romance myths look to inspire.

I want to make new stories.

General Update - Here's What's Happening

So, my roomie is outta here for the holidays (not that it'll be all that different around the house - she and her SO have been connected at the hip for the last two weeks, so I haven't seen much of her. They're terribly cute), which means I'm going to be watching a lot of movies this weekend, so you'll likely be getting lots of me-pissed-off-at-movies posts in the near future. I'm also planning on sitting down and writing up a rant about Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy. Apologies to Anne in advance if she ever gets here through Google. It ain't gonna be pretty. I intend to bitch (I. Can't. Believe. I. Read. This. Book.).

It's also Holiday Blues time again, so I'll be doing some more how-did-this-year-go speculation/roundups (to remind myself that no, really, I've done OK this year), including favorite books and movies of the year, with commentary. And I'll also be speculating about what I've got to work on this year. My list is extraordinary: aim for the stars so you can hit the moon.

I'll be heading out on Wednesday to WA state for a nice, relaxing holiday in the sticks. I'm looking forward to silent nights (the only sound that of cows and coyotes - not a train to be heard for miles and miles), long dreary jogging routes, and hopefully a day trip to the beach. Blogging will be sporadic from the 23rd-29th, as my parents' place has a dial-up modem and only one working computer (my brother's mad machine).

If anyone wants to chat outside the comments, you can reach me at my usual "public" address: kameron_hurley AT hotmail.com - for those back in WA, I'll be sending you all let's-do-lunch invites soon. Hope to see you!

Health & Safety... Remember the Fat!

This morning I was forwarded an "all users" message from our health & safety department.

Was this a reminder about wearing a hard hat on construction sites, or properly lifting boxes by using your legs so you don't throw out your back? A lesson in ergonomics? Or perhaps it was just the usual holiday reminder to "drive safely" or "don't drink and drive and be safe" and all that?

No.

Oh, no no.

This year's Health & Safety information was about avoiding those holiday pounds!

Seriously!

Now, OK, they give sensible advice, and it's good advice for those of us who have traditionally spent most of the holidays binge eating (this is the first year I'm packing my jogging clothes with me for my week of home-for-the-holidays. I figure I can jog my brother's route), but you know... it says a hell of a lot about today's America when the Health & Safety department of a bazillion dollar international company finds it neccessary to remind everyone to watch what they eat over the holidays.

Unfortunatley, the only bit I can include here without violating my confidentiality agreement is the part they took from an ivillage article:

Drinking one beer every night adds 1,036 additional calories per week or 15 pounds to your stomach per year. No wonder they call it a beer belly. Three glasses of dry wine a week adds 318 calories, or an additional three miles on the treadmill just to walk off the extra calories. If you're watching your weight, try this advice:

· Don't drink alcohol on a regular basis.
· Remember that the calories from alcohol add up quickly, and they go straight to the fat in your abdomen.
· Most people eat high calorie snacks when they drink alcohol, a double whammy in terms of weight gain.

Yum. Beer! I think I still have four bottles of Negra Modelo - my beer of choice - over at my parents' place: Thanksgiving leftovers.

And you better bet I'm drinking beer at Christmas. Calories or no.

I think my worry about all this concern about food and calories is that it makes people obsessive about it. You start not being able to think about anything else. Your whole day revolves around what you're "allowed" to have... and now the workplace is getting on board.

I have such incredible mixed feelings because, honestly, I'd rather we had a fruit tray as the morning office treat instead of two dozen donuts, and I prefer whole wheat chicken wraps to pizza (yea... they brought in chicken wraps yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised), but.... but... I worry. I worry that we're all going to become food Nazis.

And I don't know how ethical it is to start telling people what they can and can't eat. The future of where all this Fear of Fat is going really worries me.

Have a Great Night, All

And So it Goes

From here.

A Day at the Movies

How about a show of hands from everyone who gives a shit that Alien's Ripley would be played by a 55-year-old woman?

Anyone?

Apparently, Hollywood's concerned about it. Um. Hello? Sigourney Weaver, dude, ass-kicking heroine extraordinaire. Not only do I not care if she *is* 55, I'd appreciate it if she *looked* 55 and went around kicking everybody's asses. Male actors do it all the time (Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, etc.). Get over it. I think she should start dating some 20-year-old hottie, just to make a point.

And, though my initial reaction to the idea of Hilary Swank playing a boxer was "eh" - I've seen enough stellar reviews of the latest gritty-female-boxer movie that I'm just going to have to go out and see it, if only so I can argue afterwards about how much cooler Michelle Rodriguez was in Girlfight.

One More

I love my job.

Cheer Up Your Work Day!

Ah. Here's a neat-o gallery of my favorite work-day inspirational posters:







More at despair.com

And Now They're Just Sitting Around, TALKING

There's something immensely satisfying about finding a successful author who finds their characters sitting around doing the same sorts of frustrating things that mine do, instead of furthering the plot:

Dave McKean phoned me up today. I got unexpectedly testy when he commented on a couple of scenes in Mirrormask that were just two people talking, and on the problem of getting those scenes to have some kind of narrative drive. The reason I got testy was, as I eventually explained to him, because I've spent a day fighting with an uncooperative novel and every scene I wrote kept turning into two people having a conversation, and it was driving me nuts. It wasn't even that they were sitting around having interesting conversations. They were telling each other things the reader had already seen occur, and I felt powerless to stop them...

"You're not allowed to do that any more," said Dave. "Something else has to happen."

- Neil Gaiman's blog

It gives me hope.

Geek Girls

"Any female[...] has had to work ten times as hard as her male
counterpart to be accepted in their organization. She will be
more able, will react quicker, and will generally be much more
dangerous. Kill her first." -- Starr, "One Man's War," Preacher

That's the best quote ever.

A great article on Geeky girls as portrayed in comics, with some thoughts on Buffy. (via Alas, A Blog)

Bickering (again) About Women in Combat

Rox Populi points to this article about recommendations for the deployment of mixed-sex units alongside all-male units in the US military:

The Nov. 29 briefing to senior Army officers at the Pentagon, presented as part of the service's sweeping transformation of its 10 war-fighting divisions, advocates scrapping the military's ban on collocation — the deployment of mixed-sex noncombat units alongside all-male combat brigades....

So, basically, we're not talking about a huge change here, just another scaling back. The mixed-sex units are still "technically" non-combat, but they'll be deployed *alongside* all-male combat units. What this means is that there's a significantly greater chance that these mixed-sex units will see combat. In reality, women are seeing lots of combat in Iraq. It's a guerilla war. You can drive a truck and fire at and be fired upon. So it's just a technicality. It's just fudging with the language so that it makes it *look* like women aren't fighting and dying, at least, not at "the front."

Whatever the hell the "front" is in a guerilla war.

The debate's roots go back to 1994. [Brutal Woman note: oh, bullshit. This has been debated FOREVER. Don't make it like this is something NEW UNDER THE SUN]. Impressed with the performance of military women in Operation Desert Storm, the Clinton administration lifted long-standing bans on women in combat aircraft and ships.

But the new policy clearly stated that a prohibition would continue for ground units that participate in direct combat. The 1994 policy also said women would not serve "where units and positions are doctrinally required to physically collocate and remain with direct ground combat units that are closed to women."

I usually yawn when I read all this noise, because women have always fought, have always known violence, and have even been buried with their swords. What made me guffaw was the silly reason the Pentagon's still giving for not putting women into land combat units right now:

The Pentagon has said it maintains the ban because upper-body strength is needed for land combat and because polls show most female soldiers do not want the policy changed.

What a load of horseshit.

You know they didn't even have physical tests of strength for firefighters until women started wanting to become firefighters? You know the "reason" that's often given for not promoting more women into management positions at movie theatres is that women "can't" carry 70 lbs worth of movie reels? (yes, that's the sound of me snickering in the background...)

Women aren't in combat units because war is what makes men men. Glory and sacrifice and male bonding and all that. In times of dire seriousness, when an entire people is really threatened, women have always stepped up. They formed all-female tank units in Russia, and guerilla movements have always relied on women for 10-20% of their combat forces (sometimes more, when all the men are wiped out - all those Greek stories about Amazons aren't so fantastic when you read about how many men get moblized and slaughtered during wars. Who do you think's left to protect hearth and home?). After the "dire seriousness" was over, women were told that actually, no, even though they may have fought in a war, really, they actually *couldn't* fight because they weren't strong enough. Yes, yes, just a little doublethink here, bear with us, we're men of SCIENCE.

It's not a matter of strength or ability: the real heart of it is how men and women will deal with being in combat situations together. There's a deep fear that all the women will "end up pregnant" (like they just rolled over and BAM! they were magically pregnant, like women reproduce via parthenogenesis - see the overseas "pregnant nurses" scare during WWII), and a fear that men will throw themselves in front of women in order to save them even more than they'll throw themselves in front of each other to save their buddies... Saving women being a natural masculine instinct, after all. I mean, when they aren't ordered to kill women.

So, anyway, why should anybody really care about any of this?

Well, remember when I said that mostly, historically, women have only been really seriously recruited in times of dire need?

The Times reported last week on an internal May 10 briefing that portrayed the Army as in a bind. The briefing states the Army does not have enough male soldiers to fill the FSCs if they were to collocate with combat brigades and thus required to be men-only.

Let's not get all clap-happy about egalitarianism in the military. It's not about recognizing that women are people too. It's the same old story: we don't have enough men. Time to bring the women in. Watch them scale back the "rules" again. Then, after they're done, watch them bring back the "women are really better suited to being home, barefoot and pregnant" argument when women aren't "needed" anymore. Notice they won't start publishing studies about how terrible war is for men, how men shouldn't sign up because they'll suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome the rest of their lives and pick up a host of mental illnesses enroute from the war zone. No, no: war is good for men! And war is good for women.... so long as we need them there.

Anyway, lack of soldiery doesn't bode well for the US's interest in world domination.

I'm just saying.

Some Thoughts On People, With A Really Obvious Fantastical Genre Bias

Amanda's got some thoughts on the latest round of the "weak Y chromosome" story at NPR. And I've got some counter-thoughts.

I've heard people lamenting for awhile that the Y chromosome is "too small." Mostly, it's men who say this. I think this has something to do with the male preoccupation with size. Let's be honest: the Y chromosome doesn't need to be all that big. This is why I don't go in for the gloom and doom of the Y chromosome, though it does interest me in the fictional "what if" sense. But for now, the Y chromosome makes a female embryo male (yes, in addition to adding DNA to the mix, though never as much as the Xs carry, so really, getting rid of the Y would only take out the sex determiner and any mutations/traits specific to the Y). But really, all the Y actually has to do is determine sex and slap a few wild card genetics into the mix. Once it forms the male genitalia, the sex organs can take over and produce the testoserone that alters the XX template to an XY. Cut off the genitalia, and you'll get a tall, not-so-hairy-as-uncut-man man, likely with a little more fat and maybe some fat accumulations that look much like breasts in old age. The reason this happens is because the testicles produce the sex hormones that make men men. All the Y chromosome has to do is alter sex. The resulting organs take over and do the rest. The template is female.

So the Y won't go away until we get some mutations in the XX that teach the egg to divide on its own X amount of days after ovulation, or release two eggs that have to merge their genetic material in order to begin cell division. And that would be really inconvenient. Not because there wouldn't be any penises in the world, but because we'd have to think up new and different means of contraception. And it would increase the risk of mutation, just breeding with yourself all the time.

For the record, there would likely still be "sex" and "sexual behavior." Cause sex is very social, not just procreative. Obviously. But I thought I'd reiterate that. I've been reading too much from the wingnuts about how sex is all about procreation, which gets more and more ridiculous the more I hear it. If that was so... oh, nevermind. I've already ranted about that.

It's more that we want to know--what would people be like if there weren't two genders? Would we all suddenly lapse into a "true" version of ourselves once the idea of "man" or "woman" was stripped completely away?

The key phrasing, I think is "idea". Man and Woman are ideas that include both biological and social roles/functions. Women have gone around dressing and acting like men while still retaining their uteruses, and people treated them "like men." Were they men? Men go around dressing up like women and may even be called "she" by most people. Are they men, or women? What does that word mean? If we're using strict biology, we get into trouble again, cause are we talking about visible or working penises making the difference between men and women? Are barren women men? If women don't bear children, are they men? Can we call everybody a "man" until "he" bears a child? Why not? Why not call everybody "girl" until puberty? What's the point at which a penis is too small for a man to be a "real" man? (don't laugh. Hemaphrodites are still assigned sex based on how "big" the penis/clitoris appears to be, and whether or not it will be able to function for penetration, as we're still really stuck in the idea of sex=penile/vaginal penetration/engulfment, whatever).

So, if there were only uteruses and no penises, would sex roles disappear?

Or, being such wonderful social animals who love little boxes, would we just create new ones? Perhaps based on something else this time. The breadth of a woman's shoulders, her height, the color of her eyes, her hair. Maybe women who had higher testoserone levels and more body hair than average would be considered a gender all on their own, and anybody who wanted to be that gender would spend all their time and money trying to get bigger and taller and grow their hair out really long and buy questionable tonics to increase the amount of body hair they had.

Would we go around with four or five genders with their own social roles? Women with uteruses still have varying hormone levels, so you'd still get a range of butch/fem and all-the-gray-inbetween. As an aside: I do think that some of the posturing is a nature thing - I've always been able to sympathize with transvestites because I tried to imagine a world in which I wasn't allowed to wear pants and had to dress fem all the time, and I found the idea terrifying. I have a deep and abiding fear of the 50s. Dress me up too fem and I feel like I'm in drag. I've never felt so uncomfortable as I did going with a boyfriend to his junior prom and mincing around in a terribly expensive white poofy dress and heels and elaborate underwear and stockings and a mask of cosmetics. He in his tux, me in my poofy fairytale dress, he found the idea of the theatre terribly engaging. I tried very hard to respond in kind, but I felt big and awkward and uncomfortable, though I couldn't figure out why, at the time.

I spent most of the prom hiding in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror, and watching other girls fluttering around, thinking, "This is the way I'm supposed to look. Don't I clean up well? So what the hell's wrong with me? Why do I feel so weak and awkward and out-of-control?"

Hiding in the bathroom, I later learned, humiliated my date, who caught me and berated me as soon as I came out, "You left me out here with Joshua," he said, naming one of the dorkier guys in our friends' groups, a guy who'd asked me out at one point, and who I'd turned down because, well, he was boring. "You know how much I look like a loser, standing out here with him?"

My date then proceeded to go around showing me off to all of his friends, a bit like a prize heifer. It was one of those, "See! I have a girlfriend!" shows that I thought was mildly cute but troubling at the time, and looking back, I understand why it troubled me, and I'm pissed at myself for not allowing myself to be more troubled.

I spent a lot of time trying not to be troubled by things that bugged me. Among them, the fact that I'm really not comfortable with pointy shoes and makeup... and yet, I'm still mostly straight. How does that happen?

Well. It's called being human.

There's not a binary. And certainly not a strict sex/gender correlation. You can talk in averages and maybes, but not absolutes.

Why is it that in most versions of this intellectual exercise-cum-fantasy that men are the sex that suddenly disappears? I doubt it has much to do with the genetics of the X and Y chromosomes. My guess is that since the great bulk of the day-to-day work of exaggerating the differences between the sexes falls on the shoulders of women, then it's just natural... Since we do the work of being a Gender, we are the ones who have a vested interest in the idea of a world without gender, which means that the standard we strive not to be like would be what disappears.

Women are really interested in worlds without men because they want to know if women would beat up on each other as much as men beat up on women. I'm cynical, and I tend to think that yes, the stronger will beat up on the weaker, for one reason or another, once you amass a society that has to fight for resources (Leguin's The Dispossessed is an interesting what-if experiment that argues that scarcity of resources would actually aid in the continuation of an anarchic/communist society). Lots of people who've written female utopias/dystopias disagree with me. You don't often see utopia/dystopia fiction full of men because... well, I think men freak out reading about all-male utopias because of deep fears of homophobia. You don't get male utopias that don't include women (the only one I've seen is Bujold's Ethan of Athos, which is a Bujold-written-book [lackluster prose - NBL, Lois!], but really neat on ideas). In fact, male utopias would likely include harems and harems of fake women. Or, like the misogynistic slugfest of S&M, the Gor novels, they posit worlds where women get "put in their place" (author John Norman's Gor books argue that the natural condition of women is slavery. Seriously. It's got a "liberated" 1970s feminist transported to the slaveworld of Gor, where she's enlightened about what her natural condition really is, and she learns to like it. Really classic stuff).

What I always found depressing about most female utopias/dystopias is that the women always "lose." That is, the men tend to come in and change everything, or threaten to change everything (even Russ is guilty of this), as if there's a "natural" status quo when it comes to relations between the sexes.

And I don't buy that. I don't think most of the women making all-female societies believe that either, but we all bring the biases we've been raised with into our fiction. There's an astounding amount of misogyny that shows up in some of my stuff.

Anyway, I think the ideas above about how it's put on women's shoulders to be really different from men to create gender interesting, but it also forgets the big social push for men regarding masculinity, and what it is to be a "real man." You're far more likely to hear a boy being berated for "acting like a girl" than you will a girl for "acting like a boy." I think men are made men by being encouraged to be "not-women." Which is why the areas with the most rampant sexism are warfare and sports. These are the activities that have made "men" men since before we had skyscrapers, and suits and glass ceilings.

What I find most interesting about the latter, the "not-women" conception of masculinity, is the fact that, biologically, all eggs start out as female. And the groove that becomes the labia major sometimes doesn't fuse in men, meaning you start out being formed female, and the Y sends out signals to alter that (I'm going to be jumping up and down about this one for awhile, because I just finished reading Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, and I learned all sorts of really fascinating stuff about the forming of biologic sex, which is just as iffy as I'd always thought). And women bear babies. You need a uterus to do that. Taking men out of the equation would be easier than taking out "women" - if you define a woman as a person who has a uterus.

So I think the tendency to think up worlds without men, in terms of biology, has more to do with interests in the very small biological difference between men and women - the sex determiner on the Y gene. So, what would be the easiest thing, biologically speaking, to get rid of and still have a human being?

The Y chromosome.

Without two sexes, there would be no humanity; it's like asking what we would be like without language or opposable thumbs or something else that makes us human.

I just about choked when I read this one. I'm coming at this from a biased perspective, of course: I write social science fiction, that is, I concentrate on making societies with fluid sex and sexual characteristics. I've written about neuter and hemophroditic societies. I've postulated worlds of women with several different genders, and being a writer of such, I've also read a ton of other writers who've worked with these ideas.

You could have eight sexes and still have humanity. Sure, it wouldn't be the one we see now (which is the allure of these thought-experiments - trying to figure out what would be really different), but it'd be humanity. A lot of my interest in writing SF/F is to find out what "humanity" still has once you strip everything else away. Change the gender roles, get rid of the gender, give them crazy settings, some organic tech, wars that never end, and what do you have left?

Well, you have what makes us human.

And I don't think what makes us human is the fact that we have two sexes.

We have to work with what we got. The inequality between the sexes isn't the natural consequence of the male/female binary, so intellectual exercises getting rid of it are limited in value. Oppression is what it is, and needs to be dealt with as is, and not as the consequence of the accident that "it takes two".

I do agree that feminists and progressives working toward a different (hopefully, better) society do need to work with what we/they've got. And that's two "pretend" sexes. And lots of pretend "races" and all the social bullshit that we've built up around differences in biology that are in fact so small as to be thought insignificant or dying out at the chromosomal level.

But I also think that examining the "what if"s give us a better understanding of the similarities among us. "What if" can shine a spotlight on some of our more absurd assumptions about what "really" makes somebody a "person," or a "man" or a "woman." If you can't get yourself to think about how things can be different, you could get caught in the trap of "well, it's always been this way. It will always be this way. There's no other way."

The reason I'm involved in writing what I write, and reading what I read, is because I see SF/F as having the possibility to show us something other than what we've got, to allow us to imagine a different society. If you can't dream it, how can you do it?

I'm reminded of a website my buddy Jenn forwarded to me a week or two before the election. Despite being all rah-rah hopeful for a Kerry win, I think that most of us, deep down, were having trouble imagining Bush allowing himself to lose. Jenn sent me a site called "Visualize Winning." It shows Kerry/Edwards winning, Kerry being inaugurated, Osama captured, the budget being balanced, and soldiers coming home.

The sad thing was that until then, I really didn't have any kind of conception of what a Kerry win would look like. I just couldn't visualize it.

Which may have been the problem.

So, all this hypothesizing, and dinking around with biology, and playing with the Y chromosome and thinking about societies where genders and sexes are different isn't counterproductive. In fact, it's what battling for a different society is all about.

If you can't even imagine a different place, how can you work toward getting there?

The Fighting Life, Jump Kicking, Etc.

Learned how to do a jump kick last night. Well, sorta. OK, I figured out how to do the basics of a jump kick last night. You know that winning move at the end of The Karate Kid that Danny uses to win the match? It's like that. Only, without the arms.

We had an odd number of people during the target training class, so I got paired with Sifu Katalin, which was cool and intimidating at the same time. My coordination is terrible, and it means that whenever we get something new to learn, I feel like it takes me twice as long as everyone else. In actual fact, this isn't true - I've progressed about the same as everybody else who started when I did, but it doesn't feel that way when I'm hopping around on the floor. Give me punching drills. I'm way better at those - of course, I was just as uncoordinated and hopeless at those, too, when I first started them. Anyway, Sifu Katalin seemed really confused that I could do a jump kick OK the first couple times, then switch to a left leg jump kick, get confused, hesitate, and botch it. I admit it confused me, too.

A lot of this had to do with the fact that I've spent the last six months learning that you kick with the leg you initially bring up off the ground. For a right jump kick, you step forward with your right leg, put your weight on your right leg, but you bring up your left leg as if you're going to do a left leg front kick, only you don't - you jump off the right leg, kick with your right leg, and land on your left.

Confused yet?

For what it's worth, I'm really bad at dancing, too.

It's the coolest kick ever, when you nail it. It's officially my favorite kick, but trying to wrap my uncoordinated brain around it was frustrating. I could do it two or three times in a row without a problem, then I started thinking about it, doubting myself, and tripping over my legs again. "Left? Right? Huh? But you always kick with the leg you bring up first!"

I felt the same way when I was learning how to do uppercuts. It was like, "The fuck? How do you move your body that way, and shift your weight that way? And you can hit them with an uppercut to the body that way?"

Now I understand the mechanics, even if the technique isn't perfect.

We did target training intercut with ten pushups and ten situps for 13 rounds. I didn't think much about this (because it's become the norm for this class - they switch out the class routines about once a month, for variety), until we lined up at the end and Sifu Katalin gave some encouragement to those newbies who were having trouble with the situps.

"We did ten situps, 13 rounds, that's 130 situps. Even if you only managed to do half of them, that's still 65 situps. So for those of you who felt like you were dying, don't be too hard on yourselves."

Now, I do 170 situps every morning as part of my free weights and stretching routine, but when she said that, I realized that not only had I done the situps (::yawn::) but I'd just done 130 *pushups.*

Not those pansy-ass push-ups, either, the kind you do on your knees, but real pushups. OK, yea, I could have bent my elbows more and improved my form, but dude, I did a 130 pushups. No, not all in a row. But dude, I did 130 pushups!

I wonder if I'm strong enough to do chin-ups now? I have awful memories of those terrible, terrible days in gym class when we'd have to face the chin-up bar, and it would be sweet-ass to see if I can do a couple now, instead of, you know, just sort of falling off the bar once they take the chair away.

Adulthood: spending all of your time trying to be stronger, smarter, better-looking and more intelligent than when you were a kid.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why people who were already strong, smart, and good-looking when they were kids end up being really boring adults. They don't have any reason to be better.

2004 Roundup

Because I wasn't invited to today's meeting. I have mixed feelings. That aside... here's a yearly round-up questionairre via Vandermeer:

1. What did you do in 2004 that you'd never done before?

Took up martial arts and boxing, started a blog, got a story published in Strange Horizons, got the most "this is a great story that I can't publish" personal rejection letters ever. Went to Wiscon.

2. Did you keep your New Years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I joined an MA school and *tried* to sell my book. Those were the big ones. I also got hired as a "real" employee at my job. This has probably been my first year as a "real" adult with a "real" job and extracurricular activities that are moving forward.

Next year, I need to finish and sell Jihad. And I want 3 short fiction sales. Also, I plan on dropping back the last two sizes to get me back to my Alaska fighting shape. This means bike riding more, and more boxing sparring, which I've been lax on.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes! My buddy Patrick and his wife Karin are now raising up Little G.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No. But somebody's going to jail. Anyway, the holidays aren't over yet.

5. What countries did you visit?

Does Wisconsin count? Also went to Vegas, which is also very like another country. Oh. And I saw Indiana, where the Bush voters live.

Seriously another country.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?

Traveling money and time. And a more out-going personality. Can I get one of those in my stocking?

7. What dates from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Election day, cause it sucked. The week I was sick with laryngitis, a sinus infection, and an ear infection just after Wiscon, because I spent the entire time psyching myself up to start kickboxing. And the day of my buddy Stephanie's wedding was truly awesome: one of those weddings that proves to the cynical (like me) that there really is such a thing as a gloriously happy wedding day that isn't marred by unwanted pregnancy, unhappy brides, bickering bridesmaids, spastic or drunk family members, or vindictive, back-stabbing friends.

Probably one of the few times in my life where I've been at a gathering of people that was really, truly happy.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Six months of mixed martial arts training. It's made a huge difference

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not selling a book or a story, or getting an agent. Three sales last year: nothing this year, though the SH story showed up in February, they bought it last December.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Yea. Aforementioned week confined to bed due to a series of illnesses that all piled on at once.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

My tablet PC.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Pretty much everyone's. A bunch of my Clarion buddies had great things happen. Greg sold a story to Sci Fiction, Patrick sold a couple stories to Amazing Stories, Julian got accepted to Oxford, Jenn got her Master's certificate, Inez just landed a great job, and back home, my buddy Stephanie got married.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

My sister's still running after a loser guy. The same loser guy.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Books. Student loans. Martial arts school fee.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Finishing the big rewrite of book one of the fantasy saga.

16. What song will always remind you of 2004?

The Secret Machines "Nowhere Again."

17. Compared to this time last year, you are:

Stronger, denser, more self-confident, slightly better read. Also, much better at popcap.com games.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

More writing. More MA classes. Wish I would have started French. Wish I could get that Planned Parenthood volunteer app. to load correctly. Wish I made more money. Wish I'd paid off more of my student loans.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Less angsting about stupid things, like height, weight, and dating. Should have spent less time playing popcap.com games at work.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I'll be going back to WA state for a week so I can clean my parents' house.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004?

Oh, at least two or three times.

23. How many one-night stands?

::snicker:: For an SF girl, I sure am a prude about casual sex.

24. What was your favorite TV program?

There's actual shows on TV? Well, the one I've seen the most of is Lost.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

No. The same people who were blowhards last year are blowhards this year.

26. What was the best book you read?

Ack. I'm always reading The Hours (I just keep it by my bed, and when I get to the end, I just start over). But this year's favorite discoveries were Balzac, Vandermeer, Bishop, and Joanna Russ's nonfiction, particularly On Strike Against God and What Are We Fighting For?.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

The Secret Machines.

28. What did you want and get?

A job that pays my bills, and some happiness, however fleeting.

29. What did you want and not get?

Agent/book contract, you know, the usual.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

Well, favorites that I *saw* this year: Run Lola Run, followed closely by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I did absolutely nothing for my birthday. I think I bought some food or something. My roommate wrapped up two books and gave them to me. I got quite teary-eyed about it, because I hadn't gotten her anything for her birthday. I turned 24 this year.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Sex?

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004?

Hats. Particularly, newsboy caps. And coats. Boys' coats and striped scarves. Also, boots with good square heels.

34. What kept you sane?

The usual. Writing. This year, that included blog writing.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Kate is the best. As always. But I did officially fall in love with Paul Bettany this year.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

The election sucked ass. The erosion of women's rights continues to trouble me.

37. Who did you miss?

My buddy Stephanie, back in WA state, and my buddy Julian, now rowing his heart out at Oxford while writing a Ph.D. dissertation.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Sifu Katalin & the Amazons.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004:

Here's this year's: there are often long stretches of downtime on the road to where you're going. You know, those long stretches of highway between New York and LA, or the shitty stretches of nowheresville between Seattle and Chicago - but those distances, those driving times, are neccessary to get to where you need to go.

2004 has been a shitty stretch of midwestern highway, with road stops along the way like Toledo's Tallest Tree & Billy Bob's Lint Museum, intercut by signposts that say stuff like "Civilization: 2000 miles," and the car has mostly run pretty good, but it overheated once (luckily, I keep a couple gallons of water in the back), and got a couple of flats (ever since my roadtrip to Skagway, I keep two spares in the trunk), and there was the odd problem with something hanging off the engine that was resolved by tying a couple of choice parts back together with a shoelace before I got to stop off at the shop and get it fixed proper, and I didn't stop for any hitchhikers along the way, but I felt bad about it. I'm now consulting a really confusing map somewhere in the Salt Flats of Utah on my way to the ocean, and yea, I'm stronger and more confident, and I'm getting better rejection slips, but I can't see the ocean yet, likely because I'm just not ready to see it yet. Likely because I need to pick up a few hitchhikers and learn how to play the harmonica and trade in the car for a motorcycle, but I switched from fast-food to granola bars sometime back, and I've got better shoes and a good pair of sunglasses, and there's nothing so cool as arriving at the seashore on a sweet-ass motorcycle, wearing a floppy newsboy cap as my striped scarf streams behind me, and maybe that's the whole point.

There's a place I want to be. This is the road I'm taking to get there.

I don't mind that it's a long road. It just means I'll be a more interesting person by the time I get there.

Remix

A Perfect Circle has a remix of Lennon's "Imagine" (and, uh... check out the very familiar propaganda posters they've got scrolling over their front page. I laughed and laughed)

I'm usually not a fan of remixes, but I've had this one on repeat all day.

Makin' the Crazy

One of my favorite studies on caloric restriction and the effects of dieting on appetite, metabolism, and brain function is actually 50 years old. Ancel Benjamin Keys, PhD., did a groundbreaking study about the effects of a restricted calorie diet on healthy men during a 6-month period.

I'm very, very thankful that he did this study on men, cause you can bet that if it'd been a bunch of women consuming 1600 calories a day (which, these days, is considered a pretty liberal "diet"), the amount of freak-out hysteria he found would have been attributed to the fact that his patients were women.

Check it out:

Young male volunteers, all carefully selected for being especially psychologically and socially well-adjusted, good-humored, motivated, active and healthy, were put on diets meant to mimic what starving Europeans were enduring, of about 1,600 calorie/day -- but which included lots of fresh vegetables, complex carbohydrates and lean meats. The calories were more than many weight loss diets prescribe and precisely what's considered "conservative" treatment for obesity today. What they were actually studying, of course, was dieting -- our bodies can't tell the difference if they're being starved voluntarily or involuntarily! Dr. Keys and colleagues then painstakingly chronicled how the men did during the 6 months of dieting and for up to a year afterwards, scientifically defining "the starvation syndrome."

As the men lost weight, their physical endurance dropped by half, their strength about 10%, and their reflexes became sluggish -- with the men initially the most fit showing the greatest deterioration, according to Keys. The men's resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging.

But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were profound. So much so that Keys called it "semistarvation neurosis." The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. ­They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating.

So... the dieting industry keeps itself in business by encouraging the binge/purge cycle of starvation. And dieting men and women are more likely to be weak(er) and more hysterical than average.

Excellent. We'll be less likely to make informed political decisions. Old White Rich Guys must love this.

WTF `04, indeed.

Why Women Appear to Be Crazy - Just Like Everyone Tells Us We Should Be!

Amanda regularly takes "advice" columns directed toward women and their hetero dating habits to task. If you're not following these (particularly if you're a guy), you should.

With advice like this, it's no wonder a lot of guys keep telling me that they find women really confusing (I've never found myself very confusing) and women feel so confused. Look at all these mixed messages about women's "proper" social behavior and then tell me how anybody connects with anyone else anymore:

To sum up: To make a man love you, come on strong and then ignore him so he wonders if he did something wrong. When you do consent to go out on a date with him, wait with an expectant look on your face for favors while declining to do anything nice for him yourself. Then stare at him lovingly like he was the last man on Earth. What kind of man could resist? Well, besides the ones who are too smart to hang out with crazy people.

Shit, throw out that Cosmo. Don't read dating advice at MSN. You'll become one of those people hovering over the telephone every night. I was channel flipping last week and found the authors of He's Just Not That Into You fielding questions from Oprah's audience. One woman stood up and said she was a lawyer, and that for the first couple of dates she had with a guy, she tried really hard not to mention it, and if she was online dating, her friends told her not to put that she had any post graduate work, "Just put college or some college," her friends told her. "Otherwise, no guy is going to go out with you."

I wanted to throw something at the TV. All the time and money and hard work and cramming sessions, and we're reduced to this: lying about how smart we can get some lame underachiever into bed. As if that were really difficult. Can't we all just act like nice people, and hang out with other nice people, and be nice and respectful and have fun learning from each other and spending time together?

Ah, yes. But "we're all just looking for respectful affection from a healthy, intelligent partner(s) who isn't boring" doesn't sell magazines. I keep forgetting.

Margaret Sanger & Radical Feminism & Silencing History & All That Jazz

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)

Stumbled across this, and it reminded me of a couple of my posts: "On Merit. And Sex. Of Course" and "More On Why Power is All About Women." Just to reiterate, once again, that there's nothing new under the sun.

Just keep saying the same damn things, over and over and over again, until we reach critical mass. Or something:

THE MOST far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood. Beside this force, the elaborate international programmes of modern statesmen are weak and superficial. Diplomats may formulate leagues of nations and nations may pledge their utmost strength to maintain them, statesmen may dream of reconstructing the world out of alliances, hegemonies and spheres of influence, but woman, continuing to produce explosive populations, will convert these pledges into the proverbial scraps of paper; or she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent function, and remake the world. When the world is thus remade, it will exceed the dream of statesman, reformer and revolutionist.

Her whole book, Woman and the New Race (1920) is online here.

Revenge of the Media

No. I'm not watching Earthsea tonight, in all it's whitewashed glory. Author Nalo Hopkinson and Leguin each rant about it. Remind me never to sell the rights to anything I've written that's really close to my heart. I'll end up screaming at the television (apparently, according to the director, it's a "multicultural" adventure because there are British and American actors in it hahaha hahaaha).

Speaking of moving pictures, the trailer for War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise is out. In true conservative SF fashion, all of "mankind" and "men" and "man" are in trouble, according to the voice-over. I always wonder what all the women are doing when the men are out getting slaughtered. Oh, yes, that's right. That's how I got interested in my research topics.... try watching Cold Mountain instead. There are actually people in that movie. For an urban guerilla movie, check out Guerrila, which looks cool.

Nicola Griffith has an excellent, excellent essay called "Alien in Her Own Tongue" about the frustration with the proliferation of "he"s in the media. This article really resonated with me, and helped me figure out what was bothering me about all the he-man language. I haven't backed down in my defense of neutral pronouns since.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug some books I haven't read but know will be good because... because... I just do. I had to cancel my recent amazon.com order due to money constraints, but on it was Catherynne Valente's book The Labyrinth, which you can order at a slight discount from Nightshade Books . Also, Vandermeer & Friends (& Co. & Conspirators? et. al? it's actually edited by Jason Erik Lundberg) also have a new book out, a quirky mix of fiction and recipes which looks like a lot of fun - check out Scattered, Covered, Smothered.

Big Dogs in Town

The Big Dogs from corporate are in town today, so it's been a bit of a "busy" (this is a relative term) morning, prepping some stuff for Blaine, my boss. I've got a few hours before their plane shows up, but they'll be here all week, so things could be busy with meetings I'm invited to... or not. I really never know. Just a head's up.

We're doing a bunch of heavy restructuring, as we've just signed a nationwide contract. My boss has moved from Senior Project Manager to VP Business Development since I've been here, and the VP of Wireless North America - let's call him Mosh - wants to put me back more firmly into the wireless team and ease up on my "support" function for my boss, because really, Blaine doesn't use me all that much, and I'd be way better as a Project Support Manager better melded with the corporate wireless team. This also means that when I'm ready to move in a year and a half, it'll be easier to switch offices. I wouldn't mind working at corporate. They're out of Colorado.

So I'll be meeting - let's call him Piper - the Senior Project Manager (wireless) for North America today, who'll be my new boss. Yellow's also going to be moving up in the world - they're giving him Project Manager North America for this project, so we'll both be reporting to Piper.

On the phone, Mosh made it sound like this was a Big Promotion for me (we'll likely be hiring on other people to take over some of my prior duties - you know, back when I *had* duties, six months ago), and he wanted to sit down and talk to me about my "career."

You better bet I'll be asking for a crapload more money. Especially if they give me my own support staff.

Muwahhaa haha aha

More later. Linkdump coming up.

Writing Today.

Yes, seriously. Really. I mean it.

I'm going to go and find plots for four short stories that've got lots of character and setting and not much else.

That's pretty much always the story of my stories.

In the mean time, check out the blogroll, rail against the idiots, snicker about power to the people with MoveOn, and just generally go out there and have a great time.

See you all on Monday.

Remixing War Propaganda For the War On Terror

I'm a sucker for war propaganda: my master's work looked at propaganda aimed at the recruitment of women in the ranks of the African National Congress (as violent fighters & activists - otherwise known as "the recruitment of terrorists") in South Africa during the 80s, and I got to page through lots of goodies.

So, I have a special fondness for these beautiful remixes.

Here's a great site that's remixed WWII propaganda for today's War on Terror.

Frickin' brilliant.

Tapping Out

"Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world."
- Dave Barry

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
- Isaac Asimov

John Rickards Is My Secret Boyfriend

Because I haven't been keeping up with Jon Stewart.

Here, John presents "a step-by-step demonstration of what editing a book at 3am looks like from the writer's own eyes."

It is absolutely, inarguably accurate.

Fat: More Handwaving

A roundup of thoughts on The Obesity Panic, stolen from BigFatBlog:

Commentary from Nick Gillespie: Thus the United States turns from nation building abroad to nation bodybuilding at home. In a world beset by terrorism, poverty, and malnutrition, who could have imagined that being fat would become the subject not simply of the derision and scorn it has long inspired but a political topic every bit as heartburn-inducing as a Tabasco-flavored Slim Jim?... The United States is the most tolerant nation on the planet -- as long as you look good in a tight pair of Levi’s. So when exactly did freedom become just another word for 10 pounds left to lose?

And, oh, the fucktards! Here's a weight loss surgery clinic comparing fat to cancer, and speading doom, gloom, and fear to the masses! Check out their truly horrific television ads.

Here's a piece examining the role of fat in reality television: On reality television, fat people are the new gay people. Earlier this year, Fox was forced to cancel two gay-themed reality shows, the short-lived Playing It Straight and the never-aired Seriously Dude, I'm Gay, due to protests from advocacy groups and general viewer indifference. These shows, which I discussed in a Slate article at the time, exploited cultural fears about homosexuality by making gay men the "wild card" in traditional reality-show competitions. To their credit, audiences responded with a shrug. But the evil forces that plot new reality shows have now turned their attention to a new sideshow attraction: the overweight.

And, for the record, here's what a 5'9 180 lb woman looks like. According to America's BMI, she's bordering on obese - you know, like me.

Damn, we're scary.

I suppose that's the real issue, though, isn't it?

Actually, the "Average American Woman" is a Size 14, But That's Not the Point, My American Harem Ladies

I just about flipped when I found this:

Fatima Mernissi and the Size 6 Harem

It was during my unsuccessful attempt to buy a cotton skirt in an American department store that I was told my hips were too large to fit into a size 6. That distressing experience made me realize how the image of beauty in the West can hurt and humiliate a woman as much as the veil does when enforced by the state police in extremist nations such as Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. Yes, that day I stumbled onto one of the keys to the enigma of passive beauty in Western harem fantasies. The elegant saleslady in the American store looked at me without moving from her desk and said that she had no skirt my size. "In this whole big store, there is no skirt for me?" I said. "You are joking." I felt very suspicious and thought that she just might be too tired to help me. I could understand that. But then the saleswoman added a condescending judgment, which sounded to me like Imam fatwa. It left no room for discussion:

"You are too big!" she said.

"I am too big compared to what?" I asked, looking at her intently, because I realized that I was facing a critical cultural gap here.

"Compared to a size 6," came the saleslady's reply.

[...]

"And who says that everyone must be a size 6?" I joked to the saleslady that day, deliberately neglecting to mention size 4, which is the size of my 12-year-old niece.

At that point, the saleslady suddenly gave me and anxious look. "The norm is everywhere, my dear," she said. "It's all over, in the magazines, on television, in the ads. You can't escape it. There is Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gianna Versace, Giorgio Armani, Mario Valentino, Salvatore Ferragamo, Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Lacroix, and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Big department stores go by the norm." She paused and then concluded, "If they sold size 14 or 16, which is probably what you need, they would go bankrupt." [Kameron note: Like Old Navy and Eddie Bauer??]

[...]

Yes, I thought as I wandered off, I have finally found the answer to my harem enigma. Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look fourteen years old. If she dares to look fifty, or worse, sixty, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned as ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

These Western attitudes, I thought, are even more dangerous and cunning than the Muslim ones because the weapon used against women is time. Time is less visible, more fluid than space. The Western man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealized childhood, and forces women to perceive aging—that normal unfolding of years—as a shameful devaluation. "Here I am, transformed into a dinosaur," I caught myself saying aloud as I went up and down the rows of skirt in the store, hoping to prove the saleslady wrong—to no avail. This Western time-defined veil is even crazier than the space-defined one enforced by the Ayatollahs.

[...]

Women enter power games with so much of their energy deflected to their physical appearance that one hesitates to say that the playing field is level. "A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty," explains Wolf. It is "an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

Research, she contends, "confirmed what most women know too well—that concern with weight leads to a 'virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness' and that . . . 'prolonged and periodic caloric restriction' resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are passivity, anxiety, and emotionality."

Similarly, Bourdieu, who focuses more on how this myth hammers its inscriptions onto the flesh itself, recognizes that constantly reminding women of their physical appearances destabilizes them emotionally because it reduces them to exhibited objects. "By confining women to the status of symbolical objects to be seen and perceives by the other, masculine domination . . . puts women in a state of constant physical insecurity. . . . They have to strive ceaselessly to be engaging, attractive, and available." Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eyes of its beholder turns the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.

Read the whole thing here .

There's also a fantastic book called The Body Project that looks at the history of women's obsession with their bodies. Essentially, she argues, we've merely gone from using external devices to control women's shapes (corsets, elaborate skirting and hooping), to using external devices (the 1920s saw the corset going out of fashion, and dieting or "reducing" really coming into its own): you can chalk up plastic surgery here, too. Many women who get breast implants don't "have" to wear a bra anymore. Their breasts are now hard and high enough that they don't jiggle much at all. Same goes for obsessions over flat abs - we used to wear corsets for tummy control and the illusion of a bust. Not having corsets doesn't neccessarily make women any more liberated in regards to their bodies. Sure, you've got less restricted movement, but if you're starving yourself to look thinner, you've hardly got more energy to move around.

And, perhaps more importantly, as Fatima says, "To deprive me of food is definitely to deprive me of my thinking capabilities."
Fascinating stuff.

Good vs. Evil (the same old story)

What Christian Fundamentalists tell us is Evil about Muslim Fundamentalists:

- They hate liberated women and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will bear children, when they show the independence of getting abortions. They hate changes in laws that previously gave men more power over women.

- They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality.

-They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

What Christian Fundamentalists hate:

-They hate liberated women who don't follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten or laugh at some men's arrogant pretensions to rule them.

-They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children even when that describes fewer than 25 percent of current American families.

-They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn't a fit form of government unless it is run by his kind of fundamentalist Christians.

I would laugh, and laugh, if only more people actually saw the irony.

more here
(thanks to Jenn for all the morning links. I'm feeling lazy today)

Sexing & Stuff

ActivistGradGirl has a great series of posts up about sex, gender, and sexuality here, here and here. Some really great thoughts on the gender binary we get banged on the head with. I think my biggest surprise regarding aguments for gay marriage was that nobody played these two big cards:

1) If you're going to say marriage is only between a man and a woman, you're going to have to define man and woman. And you're going to have to be really strict about it. So that women who are "visibly" women but who have XY chromosomes shouldn't be allowed to marry men who have XY chromosomes, and what about those who've had their sex surgically altered, whether in infancy (hemaphrodites, the most famous famous/visible here in America being Jamie Lee Curtis), or in adulthood? Man/Woman biology isn't an exact science.

2) Not allowing same-sex marriage is sexist. Period. If I was born a man, I would be able to marry a woman, but because I'm a woman, I can only marry a man.

THIS IS A HUGE ONE.

Hello! Obvious sexism here, people!

Anyway, she's got some good thoughts on what makes up sex and sexuality (throw out the illusion of the gender binary! Blah!). Check it out.