December 30th, 2011
So I’ve been reading Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, a social history of the post-WWI “surplus women”, the two million women whose (potential) husbands had died at the front and how they coped and had to find their own way in the world since the traditional role of wife and mother was denied them. It has a lot of moving stories of how individual women coped and by doing so, changed Britain. One of those women was Getrude MacLean, who had long been the devoted aunt to her brothers’ and sisters’ children, caring for them when her siblings had been scattered all through the Empire due to the war. But now they were back and if she could no longer be an aunt, what could she be?
One elderly uncle had the answer:
“why not do for others as you have been doing for your family?” Gertie’s reply was instantaneous, “and be a universal aunt?” She decided to offer a personal service with the motto “Anything for anyone at any time.”
Having found a partner, Miss Emily Faulder, she started her business in a little room behind a bootmaker’s in Chelsea. Their lease did not allow them to work in the afternoons, so they went, with their papers in a capacious knitting bag, to Harrods’ Ladies’ Rest Room where they received clients and applicants on a sofa in the corner.
And so Universal Aunts was born and became a huge succes according to Singled Out. I found this interested so I googled it. Guess what? They still exist. That’s a brilliant bit of social history still alive today, like something out of the background to a Heinlein novel, if one co-written by P. G. Wodehouse. But it’s also the sort of consequence of a big historical event that is difficult to get right in science fiction, right up there with Isaac Asimov’s quip about that an intelligent person in 1900 might have foreseen the mass adaptation of the car as the primary transportation of America, even foreseen traffic jams and oil shortage, but that it would’ve taken a genius to have foreseen the drive in movie and backseat romances…
Categories: Feminism, history
November 24th, 2011
A couple of days ago James Nicoll linked to Jeanne Gomoll’s open letter to Joanna Russ which I hadn’t seen before. Written around the time William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk collection Burning Chrome was published, it talked about how Bruce Sterling’s editorial in it rewrote seventies science fiction history, turning the seventies from a decade that explored the boundaries of science fiction and opened up the genre to writers with a greater range of backgroundsrs into something that was just a bit dull. Something which Gommoll argued was systemic for how science fiction fandom was remembering the seventies a decade later, erasing the very real accomplishments women science fiction writers had made:
It was not one or two or a mere scattering of women, after all, who participated in women’s renaissance in science fiction. It was a great BUNCH of women: too many to discourage or ignore individually, too good to pretend to be flukes. In fact, their work was so pervasive, so obvious, so influential, and they won so many of the major awards, that their work demands to be considered centrally as one looks back on the late ’70s and early ’80s. They broadened the scope of Sf exploration from mere technology to include personal and social themes as well. Their work and their (our) concerns are of central importance to any remembered history or critique. Ah ha, I thought, how could they suppress THAT?!
This is how:
In the preface to Burning Chrome, Bruce Sterling rhapsodizes about the quality and promise of the new wave of SF writers, the so-called “cyberpunks” of the late 1980s, and then compares their work to that of the preceding decade:
“The sad truth of the matter is that SF has not been much fun of late. All forms of pop culture go through the doldrums: they catch cold when society sneezes. If SF in the late Seventies was confused, self-involved, and stale, it was scarcely a cause for wonder.”
With a touch of the keys on his word processor, Sterling dumps a decade of SF writing out of cultural memory: the whole decade was boring, symptomatic of a sick culture, not worth writing about. Now, at last, he says, we’re on to the right stuff again.
So help me, I bought into this back then. When I started reading science fiction sometime in the early/mid eighties, I was almost completely dependent on the local library, which had a fairly good collection of classic forties and fifties science fiction, a lot of seventies sf, but not much published after that. Once I’d read my way through the children’s section and could finally get into the adult section, the science fiction that I had to my disposal was all seventies New Wave doom and gloom, or so it seemed to a twelve to fourteen year reading somewhat above his comprehension level. Especially since I could get into the English books earlier than the Dutch adult section, as the latter had an age check and the former …didn’t. It seemed to me that a lot of “adult” science fiction was just dull and depressing, not to mention a bit old fashioned and dated.
So when the cyberpunk revolution finally hit my provincial library, it hit me pretty hard. Here suddenly was evidence that science fiction, adult science fiction could be modern, could be relevant and didn’t have to be dull or depressing. I lapped up Bruce Sterling’s editorial in Mirrorshades telling me how smart and clever I was for liking cyberpunk, how all other science fiction was just awful and uncool.
I was just a dumb teenager then and I sort of learned better later, but I do think Jeanne Gomoll had a point. There was a backlash against what had been achieved in the seventies, even though most science fiction written since has build on these achievements. We’re still noticing the consequences today, as the whole kerfuffle over reading female sf writers last year and this year shows.
Categories: Feminism, science fiction
November 19th, 2011
So somebody at The Hairpin thinks she’s at Slate and writes a contrarian article that praises the Twilight series for its supposed insight into what teenage girls are “really like”. In the process she let’s out the following sneer towards the Stieg Larsson Girl Who… novels:
Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a motorcycle, and she’s a master computer hacker. In other words, our actualized female heroine might as well be a tiny man.
It’s a weird sort of feminist critique that sees revenge, an active sex life, computer hacking and riding a bike (!) as inherently male and a woman engaging in them as “a tiny man”. Wasn’t the whole idea of feminism that women should be able to do the same things as men, should be able to seek revenge, have sex, play with computers and even feel a throbbing engine between their legs if they want to? Sure, there has been a backlash agains the idea that this is all feminism should be, that women should turn themselves into surrogate men to be taken seriously (something Joanna Russ already addressed back in 1975), that traditionally female-coded activities are unimportant and engaging in them is unfeminist. There’s even a point to make about how male-written action girls/heroines can sometimes become men with breasts.
But.
This article isn’t the way to do that, considering it’s written to praise the Twilight series for its supposedly true to life portrayal of what it feels like to be a teenage girl, when for all intents and purposes this series actually offers a reactionary view of what womanhood should be about, viz that a girl is only fulfilled if she’s married and preggers weeks after finishing high school. No need for motorcycles, computers or revenge, though some room for properly married but somewhat creepy sex.
In short: before you can argue about the relative worth of “feminine” and “masculine” pursuits, you have to have people who agree that these are not inherent to your gender.
Categories: Feminism, Numpties
October 19th, 2011
Trolling is as old as the internet, but while most trolling is just annoying, it can often slide into harassement. For most bloggers this sort of thing hopefully is an incidental occurence at worst, but for certain groups it’s a daily routine: the death threats, rape threats, threats against your family, friends or pets it’s all to be expected if you’re a feminist blogger:
It’s a good week, these days, if I only get 15-20 emails from people telling me how much they think I should die, or how much they hope I get raped, or how much they hope my cat dies or I lose my job or fall in a hole or get shot by police or any number of things people seem to think it’s urgently important to tell me in their quest to get me to shut up. We are not talking about disagreements, about calls for intersectionality, about differing approaches, about political variance, about lively debate and discussion that sometimes turns acrimonious and damaging. We are talking about sustained campaigns of hate from people who believe that we are inhuman and should be silenced; the misogynists, the ‘men’s rights activists,’ the anti-reproductive rights movement, the extreme conservatives, the fundamentalists. The haters.
That’s what s. e. smith goes through each day and she’s not the only one, as confirmed by Skud on Geek Feminism, where she talks about the consequences for the people like her on the recieving end of such a torrent of hatred and vileness:
What you don’t see from the blog posts are the effect this had on people’s mental and physical health. I can’t speak for the other women targetted by Mikee, but I know that it affected my ability to concentrate, sleep, work, and socialise. Apologies for the TMI, but my gastro-intestinal system is also fairly sensitive to stress, so I was physically ill as well. I took several days of sick leave and went to the beach for an extended weekend, completely offline, to try and regain some equilibrium.
And the end result is that people stop blogging altogether, as s.e. smith knows:
And it works. I see it happening all the time; blogs go dark, or disappear entirely, or stop covering certain subjects. People hop pseudonyms and addresses, trusting that regular readers can find and follow them, trying to stay one step ahead.
As you know Bob, trolling largely originated on Usenet, where harassers had little choice but to make public threats, which was bad enough, but at least this meant others saw this harassement happening and could rally around the victims. With blogs, the only person that sees the rape “joke” is the blogger it’s aimed at. Which makes it easy for harassers to deny their actions and others to disbelieve the victims, making the harassement that much worse. This incidently, is not an exclusively online problem; much real world sexual, racial or other harassement is invisible to anybody but the perpetrator and their victim.
What’s to be done? For those of us whose gender/race/sexual orientation/usw. does not automatically makes us a target for harassement, the task is simple: to take the victims of harassement seriously when they’re reporting on it and then to support them in however they want to deal with it. If an harasser is called to task, we should not make excuses for them; if we see harassement happening, we should not stay silent. For y’all reading this, it’s of course unthinkable that either you or your friends would engage in such behaviour, but even so we should stay alert to the possibility.
Categories: Feminism, Numpties
August 17th, 2011
These are the top ten comics in the Hooded Utilitarian International Best Comics Poll:
1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
3. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
5. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
6. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
7. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
8. Pogo, Walt Kelly
9. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
10.The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
Notice anything? Yep, for an international poll it is very much dominated by American comics; even Watchmen, though created by two Brits, is very much in the American comics tradition. Worse, there’s no woman to be seen either, not until number 24, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. In total there are just eight women on the list for a total of nine entries (Alison Bechdel being the sole woman to be mentioned twice), most of which are clustered in the lower regions of the list, having gotten on with just a handful of votes:
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Dirty Plotte Stories, including My New York Diary, Julie Doucet
Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
Furûtsu Basaketto [Fruits Basket], Natsuki Takaya
Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahash
Ernie Pook’s Comeek and the RAW Stories, Lynda Barry
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio
Moomin, Tove Jansson
I’m not going to blame the poll contributors for their appalling oversights, my own collection not being very gender balanced either and at least the Hooded Utilitarian editorial team are aware of this shortcoming, having asked Shaenon Garrity to redress the balance somewhat in a separate article. The gender skewedness of this list is just a symptom of a much greater problem, that comics as a medium is much too male dominated.
Part of that is mindset, a certain ignorance of readers and critics of female cartoonists, in which only a handful of currently active creators are well known, but the context and history in which they work is lost, each a singleton, the same problem we’ve discussedhere before regarding science fiction. Nobody is consciously suppressing women cartoonists, but there is still a systemic bias working against them, which polls like this bring to light. It’s so much easier to think of ten, hundred, thousand great male cartoonists who could arguably be part of the list than it is to find even half a dozen female cartoonists who could also be. It’s natural to think of sequences of influence like Noel Sickles -> Milton Caniff -> Al Severin -> John Buscema, but where does somebody like Marie Severin fit in?
But as Shaenon touches upon in her article, there are other barriers as well. The past ten years have seen an explosion of classic comics series, both newspaper strip and comic book being rediscovered and republished in nice, prestige editions, but how many of them have been created by women? Where are the classic female underground cartoonists to take their place amongst the Crumb archives? Where is the Daredevil Visionaires: Ann Nocenti? If the best work by women is not available, how can readers ever discover them?
Finally, and this is something that’s especially true for American comics, it might just be that the kind of work that really gets you noticed in comics is the kind of work that — certainly historical — has been the last available to female cartoonists. That’s the long form comic, the multiple decades old newspaper strip, the fifty issue plus comic book run, the one that needs time and dedication and self sacrifice. In Tom Spurgeon’s unrelated, intensly personal rant from earlier this week (which I found both moving and hard to respond to, if response is needed), he mentions at one point the “children of strip artists whose primary memory of their fathers and mothers is that person at a drawing board, desperate to get away for a few moments but deciding with an almost whole-body resignation to continue working while life-moment X, Y and Z unfolds nearby.” Which of course has always been easier for men than women to do, traditional gender roles being what they were and often, in disguise, still are. As Virginia Woolf once argued, before you could have great women writers, they need a room of their own, which goes double for cartoonists.
So, umm, yeah. It is understandable if bad that a list of the best comics a group of dedicated, clever critics can think of is such a sausage fest, but it’s just one symptom of a deeper imbalance, one not easily solvable, so what can you do? Well, perhaps comics needs to take the Russ pledge too:
The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.
Categories: Comix, Feminism
Tags: Russ Pledge
July 25th, 2011
So it turns out Caoimhe/Kynn cancelled her Kickstarter project today:
Dear backers,
Due to situations of which some of you may be aware, I believe it is unfair to continue asking you to fund Heartbreak & Heroines. Therefore, I am closing the kickstarter project to funding and you will not be charged for the amount you pledged.
I thank you for your interest and I hope you will continue to support women-inclusive gaming projects in the future. I especially want to thank Joanne Renaud for her support and great work as the artist for H&H.
Caoimhe Ora Snow
The “situation” she refers to is not something I’m comfortable about discussing here, but certain allegations have been made against her, which have nothing to do with Heartbreak & Heroines itself; for a rough idea of what they are, look here. I’m not sure whom to believe in this or what the facts in this case are, so I’ll refrain from further comment. It doesn’t help that most of this played out on Livejournal which is going through one of its periodical meltdowns at the moment…
Categories: Feminism, geekdom
Tags: Caoimhe Ora Snow, Kynn Bartlett
