Wis[s]e Words

The Female Man — Joanna Russ

Published on April 3, 2011

Cover of The Female Man

The Female Man
Joanna Russ
214 pages
published in 1975

The Female Man is the third book in my list of works by female sf authors I’ve set myself as a challenge to read this year. Of the books on the list it is the most explicitely feminist one, a cri de coeur of “second wave feminism”, a science fictional equivalent of The Feminine Mystique. Written in 1970 but only published five years later it was somewhat controversial, science fiction never having been the most enlightened genre in the first place. Reading it some thirtyfive years later it’s tempting to view it as just a historical artifact, its anger safely muted as “we know better now” and accept the equality of men and women matter of factly, its message spent as sexism is no longer an issue, with history having moved on from the bad old days in which The Female Man was written.

Bollocks of course, but seductive bollocks. The reality is that for all the progress made since The Female Man was published, its anger is not quite obsolete yet, or we wouldn’t have had the current debate about the lack of female science fiction writers in the first place. What’s more, The Female Man ill fits in this anodyne, whiggish view of history anyway. Russ is much more angry than that. She’s utterly scathing in her view of men in this novel, reducing them to one dimensional bit players: thick, macho assholes her much more intelligent heroines have to cope with. You might think this “hysterical”, “shrill”, “a not very appealing aggressiveness” but Russ is ahead of you and has included this criticism in her novel already, on page 141: “we would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them.” Russ was too smart not to understand that no matter how non-threatening and “rational” The Female Man might have been written, (male) critics would still call it emotional and not worth engaging. But Russ uses her anger as a weapon and tempers it with humour and some of the angriest, bitterest scenes are also grimly witty.

Books read March

Published on April 2, 2011

Seven books read this month, one of which was a monster of a history book which took up most of the month to read.

Propaganda — Edward Bernays
There is nothing new under the sun, as this *ahem* propaganda pamphlet on the positive uses of properly directed propaganda in business and public life, first published in 1928, shows. Bernays was one of the founders of the “science” of public relations, active in helping the US government prepare the American public for the Great War and here he justifies his profession. The introduction by Mark Crispin Miller is helpful in setting out the context for Bernays’ book.

Empires of the Sea — Roger Crowley
For about sixty years the Ottoman Empire fought for mastery of the entire Mediterranean against a on again off again coalition of Christian states, from 1520 and the Siege of Rhodes to 1580 and the Battle of Lepanto where the Ottoman fleet was decisively defeated. Classic narrative history here, a good introduction to an important and interesting part of European history.

Ashes of Victory & War of Honor — David Weber
I got myself a new Android phone in late January and got the Kindle ebook app for it early in March, so I decided to download some David Weber for it as a test of whether or not reading books on a mobile actually worked for me — two novels later, I say it did.

Winterfair Gifts — Lois McMaster Bujold
Another Kindle book, a Miles Vorkosigan story I had not read yet. Set after A Civil Campaign, it’s told from the point of view of one off Miles’ armsmen as he witnesses the preparations for Miles wedding. A bit of emoporn for Vorkosigan fans.

Framing the Early Middle Ages — Chris Wickham
An excellently written and researched, very thorough socio-economic history on the transformation of the world of the Roman Empire into the world of the Middle Ages. It’s not the definitive answer to why the Roman Empire fell or why the transformation from Roman to post-Roman Europe and the Medtiterranean happened the way it did, but he does try to frame those question in such a way that you understand that this process was not predetermined, trying to avoid the teleological trap of wanting to write history in terms of its outcomes.

The Female Man — Joanna Russ
A classic feminist science fiction novel, which I read for my Year of Reading Women project. This is one of those novels every science fiction fan should at least try to read to be knowledgable about the genre. It’s also quite good.

Ten Years of gay marriage — Holland still not washed away by the tears of an angry god

Published on April 1, 2011

picture from the World's first gay marriage

You think what with the monotonous regularity God strikes immoral countries, at least according to Yankee fundamentalist wankers, Holland would’ve long ago been wiped out by a superflood/earthquake/volcanic eruption combination for being the first country to make gay marriage legally the same as “normal” marriages. Yet ten years later, we’re still here, gay people can still marry if they want to and no sign of any wrath of god yet.

One of the few times I’ve genuinely been proud of my country. No nonsense, no hysteria, just a (belated) recognition that yes, there is no reason why gender should matter in who you could marry. The only thing that mars it is that civil servants who have problems with performing gay marriages can refuse to do the work they’re paid to do. Ten years should be enough of that nonsense.

Five years ago.

Union support for UK Uncut

Published on March 31, 2011

Further confirmation that the supposed gap between the great mass of lawfully protesting DecentOrdinaryFolk and the StudentRadicals of UK Uncut is not as great as certain career opportunists might want us to think, here’s a letter of support for UK Uncut signed by various union and NGO bigwigs:

UK Uncut have played a significant part in changing the terms of debate around economic policy in the UK and have been praised by politicians and the media for doing so.

Indeed UK Uncut played a key role in ensuring that more people were at the march on Saturday than otherwise would have been. At all times they acted in a way which complemented and supported the TUC march.

However, in taking the type of peaceful action which UK Uncut routinely undertake on Saturday, targeting Fortnum and Mason on this occasion, they were treated in a political and deceptive manner by the police which sends an ominous message about the right to protest.

It would appear activists were misled by the police about not being arrested when asked to leave the Fortnum and Mason building, after which they were held for a significant length of time, their clothing was confiscated and they have been denied the right to protest in the near future.

This situation has now been seized on by the media and politicians to further threaten the right to protest. UK Uncut activists have been blamed for damage they did not cause and this story has become a substitute for discussion of the real issues raised by UK Uncut and the TUC march in general.

Christ, what a wanker

Published on March 30, 2011

You could set your alarm by it, it’s so predicable: that moment in every large scale protest movement where the opportunists start to concern troll their more radical allies, usually echoing rightwing propaganda when doing so. With the 2001-2003 protests against the War on Afghanistan and the War on Iraq, it was ANSWER, a smallish antiwar organisation that had taken the lead in organising protests when most liberals were still wringing their hands on whether or not they could trust Bush to run their war, that suddenly was the bogeyman when more respectable organisations and people finally jointed the antiwar movement. It supposedly had ties to groups that supposedly had ties to groups that supposedly had ties to terrorists and there were some *gasp* communists amongst its members and of course the people attacking ANSWER were not McCarthyites, but surely we should not let such a controversial group lead our antiwar protests, think of what it would look like to Middle America… The result was a divided and weakened American antiwar movement that found it that much harder to oppose these wars, but at least various centrists and liberals had shown how serious they were.

In the fight against the ConDem cuts we’ve now reached the point where both the Labour Party and the TUC are on board and helping to organise mass demonstrations like the March 26 demos in London, which had some 500,000 people marching, as well as saw more radical groups repeating the same tactics that had been used in earlier protests, including the early student protest: attacking and occupying shops owned by tax cheats and other symbols of the economic order that had fucked up Britain and made the cuts “necessary”.

With Labour and the TUC now directly in the picture, it was therefore inevitable that the professional pearl clutchers would start to doubledown on condemning these “childish vandals” and Oxbridge student activists (an old favourite) and accusing them of trying to hijack the movement, contrasting them to the thousands of real working people trying to have a decent, peaceful, lawful protest and who disapproved mightely of these antics. None did so more pompously than Anthony Painter, who ended his sermon like this:

The group’s retail outlet of protest choice is TopShop. Instant gratification consumerism has a mirror image in instant gratification politics. The dopamine rush of credit card financed prêt-a-porter fashion finds its corollary in the jejune fantasies of the retail activist chic. Meanwhile, those who are really hit hard continue to suffer.

I hope the TUC continues marching. I hope it gives voice to the voiceless in every village, town, and city in the land. UK Uncut owes a lot of apologies. Without trading Martin Luther King quotes – a glib game as we have seen – better instead to respect and understand his legacy. We can overcome. But only if we are wise. A small minority were not only unwise on Saturday. They were downright dumb.

(Oddly enough this appeal to end senseless violence and concentrate on lawful ways of protest does nothing so much as make me want to punch his smug, fat face in — childish, I know.)

Thing is, as anybody not gripped by tabloid hysteria knows, this supposed divide between ordinary folk decently protesting and evil anarchists just does not exist. Take the eighties squatters riots in Amsterdam for example, huge violent affairs in which the city centre was the battlefield between hardcore anarchists and riot police, whole streets ripped up to throw at the police etc etc, yet support for the squatters movement was never greater. That’s because quite a few ordinary, non-political people could actually see for themselves that the squatters had a point, that it was a scandal that private landlords let buildings rot away when so many people could not find housing at all.

The same goes for UKUncut and its occupation of Fortnum: for all the tabloid hysteria, plenty of people have no problem seeing the same rich bastard that caused the crisis that might cost them their own jobs suffer a bit. You can’t split the uncut protestors into two groups of supposed vandals ruining it for everybody and decent, hardworking ordinary people just wanting to have a meaningful protest. Criticising a particular kind of protest is of course legitimate, but demonising them and the people who undertook them will only serve your opponents cause. What somebody like Painter does is helping to divide the anticuts movement, which doesn’t help anybody but the ConDems. If you worry more about policing what those on your side are doing than what you can do to put the pressure on the real enemy, you are the enemy.