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Why I Fucking Hate Dollhouse

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

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

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

Why? Why oh why?

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

Also, of course, I was exhausted and vegetative.

That's always how they get you.

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

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

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

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

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

It's gross.

Really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex, Death, and the End of the World: Thoughts on The Windup Girl

There has been a lot of ink spilled (real and virtually) about Paulo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. A few months back, I decided to see what all the fuss was about and ordered a copy.

This was a dense book, the type you don't see mass marketed very often, in large part because it throws you right into the story and expects you to catch up. There's no popcorn here along the way. No, "As you know, Bob," just "Here's what I'm doing, ha ha figure it out."

I pushed through the first twenty or so pages thinking I was going to end up putting it back down again. The characters aren't particularly likable. There's really nobody to root for. Toward the end of the book, I realized I wasn't terribly invested in who "won" or died.

That said, the characters are interesting, and that makes all the difference. Exiles and outcasts, expatriates and profiteers... they're all here. Bacigalupi is a great evocateur of worlds, and he captures the heat and stink and chaos of this future Bangkok with great force. This is a book that's very much about the world, the re-emergence of colonization after a spectacular collapse, civil war, and above all, exploration of the world after the terrible repercussions from too much genetic meddling with our food stuffs and our environment.

The host of characters include a scheming expatriate employed by a "Calorie Company" - big ConAgra-like companies that literally control every edible thing that comes on the market. The entire economy is based on calories - fossil fuels have been used up, and energy is measured in literal human calories. Genetically modified animals and people help pick up where fossil fuels let off, but it's been a long climb back into industry.

Part of what seems to have made this book so popular - besides the fact that it's well-written, evocative, and engaging - is that so much of it is so here-and-now newsworthy, which people love. I felt the same thing when I read his take on how big-business-controlled seeds had aided in toppling the world. I'd just finished watching a smattering of documentaries about the monopoly on corn seed and fertilizer of some big companies today, how farmers weren't even allowed to harvest their own corn for planting, because the seeds themselves are patented. Yes, the seeds are patented. They are owned by a corporation.


In the Windup Girl, we get an answer to the question, "What happens when all the seeds are patented, and then there's a blight, and no alternatives around anymore?" We also get an answer to the "What happens if we continue on like we are and the oil runs out" question, too. These are both big concerns. Science fiction has never really been about the future so much as it is about exploring answers to today's questions and concerns. We write our future fiction (and our fantasy fiction) in reaction to what we're experiencing now. The Windup Girl is right there at the forefront.

Big stuff aside, I did want to take a minute to share some thoughts on The Windup Girl herself (the blog's titled Brutal Women, afterall). The whole Asian sex slave robot/genetically tailored pleasure girl slave thing has been done to death. The minute she comes on the scene I was like, "Tra-la, whatever."

But Bacigalupi makes some very interesting choices, here. Though she is created by and owned by men, it's a woman who is her primary on-stage abuser, and the person you hear spewing the most hate at her. As a Windup Girl, she's outcast, hated, feared, and can't walk outside alone without fear of being recycled. Not only that - her flawless skin means she has pores so small that she doesn't regulate heat properly. This is a big problem in sweltering Bangkok at the end of the fossil fuel age, when things like ice and air conditioning are for the super rich... and she's an rich guy's abandoned companion who's been taken up into a petty brothel. That means she's utterly, completely dependent on others. Physically, and genetically. Because she's been bred to be submissive, dependent, with an overwhelming desire to please.

What makes her different that other robo-women? She knows exactly what she's been bred for. She has a painful knowledge of her dependence, even as submitting to her masters' desires fulfills her dog-like need to please, she hates herself for it. She knows it for what it is: bad programming.

And she fights it.

How many times have you done something for somebody that was against your principles? How many times have you done something you were uncomfortable with, or that you didn't really like, but that made somebody else happy? And then afterward you were like, gah, why did I do that?

That's her whole life. It's knowing what free will's like, but never having it.

All that said, she does work hard at rebellion, and in the best of all girl-power stories, she does in fact get weaponized... and the whole place goes to hell. She has been slowly battering against the cage of her genetics for some time, so when she bursts out, it's pretty spectacular, and unpredictably violent (after yesterday's post about women getting weaponized in response to sexual violence, I should have found this more predictable, but the way Bacigalupi sets it up, it's actually not. It felt like an interesting instead of a predictable choice).

everybody's getting stepped on by everybody else.

Overall, this was a good read. If you can get through those first few initial pages without going, "Fuck this, I don't know what the hell is going on!" you'll be fine.  Things pick up. Things make sense. Sometimes they make too much sense. And you start to wonder just how fun the world is going to be in 50 years unless we get some electric cars and high-speed trains and stop corporations from controlling the genetic makeup of our foodstuffs.

Which, of course, is exactly what a good SF novel should be doing... freaking me out about the future.

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."

Finch: The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of

Finch's gun is awesome.

I’ve been a Jeff VanderMeer fan ever since I read the novella Dradin, In Love. It had so many of the things I love: a mad, unreliable narrator; weird setting; lush worldbuilding; and a perfect, simple, brutally honest reveal that told you mountains about the narrator and what he really wanted out of life.

There were some fun stories in City of Saints and Madmen, but I didn’t love any of them the same way I did Dradin. After Dradin, I loved Veniss, Underground best. More twisted scenery, broken narrators, piles of bodies and darkness and did I mention the broken people? The Situation was another delightful read for me, which took all the weird worldbuilding and set it on top of a workplace satire that any desk jockey could relate to.

The thing with much of VanderMeer’s fiction is that most of the narrators are not likable. You don’t read VanderMeer if you want to read about heroes (his most heroic character is probably Shadrach from Veniss, Underground. Probably, again, one of the most honest heroes I’ve encountered in fiction in awhile. Heroism is about doing what you know is right, not doing something because you believe you’ll get something out of it – whether it’s fame or riches or, in this case, the girl). 

And that brings us to Finch. 

Finch isn’t a hero. He was so much of a non-hero that I found myself, at best, ambivalent about him. Even when we find out his prior identity, it’s really not terribly interesting.

What Finch has is an incredible, amazing, nightmare-inducing world the likes of which I haven’t experienced since Veniss, Underground. The book would literally give me weird dreams when I read it before bed. Only reading Lovecraft has ever given me those same dark, slippery sorts of nightmares. The ones that crawl around in your head and whisper crazy things that leave you feeling a bit dirty and confused come morning.

Finch is a strong book, and probably one of the best plotted I’ve seen from VanderMeer. If you can get past the unlikeable main character, there’s a whole hideous new world here to sink your teeth into. It’s not pretty. It’s not heroic. It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s what makes it so scary.

VanderMeer’s venomous mushroom folk are true aliens, the kind whose powers and technology and motives you realize you’ll never be certain of (they actually lose a little of their scariness toward the end when we get too much telling about their motives, but I’m not sure how tension could have been sustained without knowing something about what they were doing). I love their slimy memory holes, their leaky organic guns, the edible bullets (edible bullets!!), the addictive mushroom fumes, the contaminated areas.

This book is fantasy worldbuilding at its best.

I had some issues with the narrative – particularly how the protagonist seemed to be pushed and pulled and used by other forces, which, again, made him so much less heroic (being a used object is always less heroic than being an active agent), but that’s a personal preference in my heroes. This hero was purposely non-heroic, and he stayed that way the whole way through. It reminded me a little of Hobb’s title character in the Assassin books – it’s a story about the catalyst for change, not about the heroes.

I was also pleased to see a big leap here in the quality of VanderMeer’s heroines. Ya’ll might not have noticed this, but it was something I took issue with very early on (and was what sparked my initial correspondence with VanderMeer).

Shriek had a female narrator, but, alas, she was just so dislikable for me that I was never able to finish the book. Finch was, to me, a stronger and more engaging book, and I ate it up like candy. It also had some really engaging female supporting characters. The possibly-turncoat-lover – who made the leap from “Yawn, it’s the woman who exists to have sex with the hero” stereotype to full-blown character with one particularly cutting line toward the end (very a much a “The women men don’t see” type of line), the bookish information gatherer with her own secrets, and the rebel queen, of course (every good book needs a rebel queen).  All three were strong, complex people that really stood out for me along the way, and, I think, greatly contributed to my enjoyment of the book (rebel queeeeeeeeen!).

That said, this isn’t a book for everybody. It’s weird. It’s grotesque. It will, likely, give you nightmares. And Finch, the character, is kind of boring.

But.

Ambergris is not boring. It's amazing. And the civil war, mushroom war, and life-in-alien-occupied-Ambergris-slice-of-life is so incredibly worth reading if you’re a lover of intense worldbuilding that I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Of course there are also some plot holes, a little over-explaining at the end, and some dues-ex-machina-ing (also at the end), and a few too many nods to Shriek (which, as noted, I didn’t finish), and there’s that protagonist thing....

But if you love the type of fantasy that takes you somewhere else… with something else, Finch is a very fine romp.

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?

Where Have All the Brutal Women Gone?

One of the things that bled out of me after I got sick was all the rage and anger and angst. Oh sure, I get upset at things still, but I no longer get worked up into a blind rage. Whenever I start getting worked up, it hits a certain pitch and then it all bleeds out of me, like water. This is unfortunate for a lot of reasons, among them being that anger, despair, and self-hate drove a lot of my motivation. This came up a lot in my personal life, where folks told me that in order to be happy, I’d need to cut out the self-hate. At which point I said, “Well, yeah, that’s great, but… what does that leave me with?”

Not a whole lot, apparently. I find it very hard to get worked up or passionate about much of anything these days. It does come and go sometimes. My writing has finally crept back a bit, after a year-and-change book depression when GW got canceled by the prior publisher. I find a lot of pleasure in writing book 3 these days, primarily because I’ve done that thing that writers do – gave my protagonist a similar issue to tackle. She recently came back from the dead, got a whole lot of extra time… and now she’s not really sure what to do about it. 

Mortality can be like that. 

I got sick four years ago… you’d think I’d be over it by now. You’d think that’d be enough time to go through the grieving process. But I suspect there are many stages of grieving, and when you have a full life with a lot of other, immediate feed-and-clothe-and-medicate-myself things to tackle, you don’t spend a lot of time working through your “Holy crap I’m a cripple now” issues. 

I very nearly gave my protagonist a chronic illness in book 2, just to see how she’d deal with it. But as I worked through that version of the draft, I just wasn’t buying it. Not only because it felt far too Mary Sue-ish but also because, well… I enjoy writing the Nyx books because I get to write about a physically powerful and capable female protagonist. When you take away her physical power, she’s just another woman. Just as vulnerable and frail and potentially weak and fearful as any other person (not just women, but I know my aversion to making her physically weak has a lot to do with her sex. Lack of power is especially terrifying to women, and certainly to me). And, you know, that’s just not something I want to spend my time writing about. I spend a lot of time living it. Why stay up at night writing about victims?

Because that’s what it feels like sometimes. It feels like somebody took a shovel to the back of my head. Just got right on up behind me and swung before I could even turn around (of course, if I’d turned around, I’d be dead. The fact that I came so close to dying – and that dying is so much easier for me now than before – is something else I deal with).  There is nothing you can do to prepare for illness, for disability. With violent attacks, we like to feel that we have some kind of power. That if we just trained hard enough, ran fast enough, hit hard enough, that we could avoid violence. Violent attacks, at least, we can pretend we have some kind of fighting chance against. It’s why I started lifting weights. It’s why I started boxing. I wanted a body I could control. After a lifetime of hating my body, I found some peace in knowing it was very good at knocking over a 200 lb punching bag with a good right hook. There was some comfort in that. 

Getting sick was like starting all over again. Suddenly all my worst food addictions weren’t in my head at all – there were tangible, physical symptoms of my need for immediate glucose (symptoms like convulsions and eventual death). Food had been the enemy for so long, for me, and now it was both the enemy and the cure. Sugar’s too high, your body slowly rots. Sugar’s too low, you go into a coma and die. 

Better figure out the balance, lady, or you’ll die. 

It’s frustrating, and exhausting, to be so aware of your personal care. Your own mortality. I get sick of it sometimes. Sick with my own mortality. 

In that way, I’m not sure how much of my current malaise has to do with being 30 now and how much has to do with simple stress and my poor eating habits over the last year, both of which affect me much more strongly now. Some people might be able to shrug off the effect of stress and food on their health, but when you can measure its effects with a glucose monitor, it’s less easy to brush it aside. 

I should have died back in 2006. I’ve had four years of extra time to mull that over. But when I look at it some days, it just feels like Nyx out on her porch at the coast in book 3, pissing and drinking and fucking her life away. Sure, a lot of life events have happened. Good, wonderful, passionate things. 

But most days, life doesn’t feel as big and bold as it once did. It feels closed and exhausting and unimaginative. Dull-eyed. 

I know what I need to do. That’s the rub, there. My recent A1c was deplorable. My eating habits have degraded to the point of farce. I am tired all the time and when I get excited about anything at all these days, it feels very surreal. 

I would like to live a big, bold, passionate life. 

I’m just so tired all the time. 

And I know where my feeling of power and health comes from – it’s from lifting weights, and boxing, and those horrible, horrible, deplorable, teeth-gnashing 3-mile jogs I was doing on the Chicago waterfront.

I know I need those things to feel better. But I no longer have the self-hate to drive me to do them. 

Just a lot of extra time. 

A lot of fucking and drinking at the end of the world.

Why I Haven't Posted in Awhile

Someday this will be a real, live book!

Someday SOON, even!

Page proofs have arrived for STET'ing.

All That's Fit to Print

God's War, the novel I started back in the misty-haze of post-graduate school in Chicago, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com (and Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Night Shade's site, of course).

Proofs are in the mail, and I'm told there will be cover art to weep over (one way or another) quite soon. I've also purchased the domain www.godswarbook.com, though I'm not sure how I'm going to maintain that in addition to this site, which... well... as you can see, isn't getting updated as often as it needs to.

Day jobbery + writing book 3 + proofing book 1 + buying a house + moving + desperate need for a vacation are all kinda wrecking havoc with my ability to produce quality content after about 3pm.

The good news is, World Fantasy is coming up, I'm drinking beer again, and oh yeah... GOD'S WAR has a February 2011 publication date. Perfect way to say "I love you" to that special brutal woman in your life...

Not in love yet? Check out the book trailer... 

Toss a Coin

You CAN Learn...

Having a Baby...

Me: Just one more push! We've just got one more!

Steph: YOU SAID THAT THE LAST FIVE TIMES!!!!!!!!!

Me: I meant, one more in this set.

Because baby-birthing is the ultimate total fitness workout.

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.

I'm Not Sure Yet if This is Depressing Or Not

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”
     – Joseph Campbell

Three Things Make a Post. Pity I Only Have One...

Started writing a post about The Windup Girl, then was beaten out by the heat.

Tra-la.

Have been spending most of my updating time on Facebook, as it's faster and easier to update than the blog when all you've got are a couple of links and some piecemeal reactions to random life events. Too much work blogging means too little personal blogging, and that is kind of a problem.

Hoping for a day without a heat index of 100+ and humid. May free up the brain pan some.

For the Record...

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

I suspect searching for something like "women's studies" would end up with similar results.

There is a gay Christians group, however.

You've got a long way to go, Ohio.

God's War & Infidel Book Contract Arrived Today

(yes, yes, this is the SECOND one. It's a wacky business)

Need I say  more?

Words for the Road

"As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it."
-Eckhart Tolle

Half our cauliflowers appear to have been eaten by some kind of fungus, but these two turned out lovely, and we'll be turning them into a fine cauliflower mash tomorrow.

 And here's what our garden currently look like, after harvesting some peas, a tomato, two cauliflowers, and two broccoli (including harvest of broccoli florets after initial head harvest):

I've been growing more keenly aware of where my food comes from (and what it's actually made out of) the last couple of years. I grew up eating fast food. My parents both worked at a fast food company for 25 years. It was just... what you ate. It never occurred to me that you should eat any differently. I didn't spend much time in the produce aisle until I was 18 and interested in dropping some weight I'd put on while on the pill. Switching to fruits, vegetables, and protein meant dropping 60 lbs in about 6-8 months. It felt almost effortless.

I've read all the books - like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food - and watched all the shows, like King Corn, Supersize Me, and Food, Inc.I know how we got here. And I know why.
These days, I work hard to eat well.

And, of course, that's just it - I have to work hard to eat well. Folks who haven't tried it really don't know just how tough it is. Fast food, prepared food, soda, crackers, canned soup, frozen meals... these are revolutionary, time saving victuals that make it possible to feed a tremendous number of people on a very small amount of land with 80% of the base made of up just one versatile commodity crop - corn.

And it's a blessing.

Yes, it's killing us prematurely, because we have no defense against a double bacon cheeseburger. It sets off all of our primitive pleasure centers. Why not eat them all day?

Because, of course, you'll die of malnutrition. But you'll keep doing it, and doing it, like a rat with a way to self-administer cocaine. Giving up carbs is really hard to do. Even before I was sick, I'd get the shakes, and intense cravings. Then there are the visual cues, which are constant. As somebody in marketing and advertising, I know just how helpless we can be in the face of $5.99 single-topping pizza specials, particularly when you're exhausted after work, haven't eaten in six hours, and are faced with the prospect of an hour's cooking time before food ingestion.

It's amazing that we can feed ourselves so cheaply and easily in this country. Try growing a garden. Try losing half your cauliflower crop to fungus, like we did. "It's a good thing we're not relying on any of this to feed ourselves," I told J. as I pulled out the cauliflower. Our little garden is just for fun. When we get a house with more land, we'll likely be able to feed more of ourselves with it, but even a "for fun" garden is disappointing when you discover half your land was wasted on crops that don't feed you.

As sympathetic as I am to the bullshit and poison that's ended up in our food, I'm also very much aware of how things were before cheap food. Farming is not a fun life. Food doesn't just roll out of the truck at the end of the day, full-formed. And after you grow it, you know... then you need to cook it. And that takes time. And planning.

On the one hand, the West is addicted to a diet that's killing us. On the other hand, we spend less than 20% of our income on food and spend less than, what, 10 hours a week? preparing food (on average). As somebody who's had to rebuild her entire conception of food from the ground up, I'm still sympathetic to the thinking behind where we are today.

There is another way to eat, I know, somewhere between industrialized, corn-fed fake food and fungus-ridden-today-we're-eating-dirt-grown-your-own-grass food. There are farmer's markets. Local agriculture. All that jazz. But that doesn't take into account how people are going to eat during the winter, or those precious spring months when you're growing what you'll gorge on come end of summer. You end up eating a lot of turnips and jam and drinking a lot of vodka.

What''s on offer now is so damn good that's it's been a struggle to break the pizza-burgers-prepared-food-cycle. Taking that next step - the parsley-at-all-meals-turnips-all-winter step - is something I just don't know that I can do if I want to continue to maintain a modern lifestyle.

There's a better way to eat. And I'm still struggling to find it.