telephone calls from on high/rangoonery.

I always answer the phone. It's usually either telemarketers, which she hates, or relatives, who aren't related to him (he's left for the frozen northern wastes now anyway), and some of whom stress her out, so I always try to get there first. I thought this was a telemarketer - there was that silence-then-fuzz thing, and I almost hung up halfway through the first sentence, but didn't. It was 'This is a recorded message from the Labour Party.'

Election on November 1st? You betcha. The message system (clearly I should write a ranty post about why the recorded voices are always women) asked who I was going to vote for in 'the next general election', no timeframe specified, (I pushed 4, 'don't know'), and then whether I'd ever voted Labour in the past (no). I'm now wondering if I should've lied to fuck the system, because it would be great fun if this exercise left them falsely confident and they wound up going to the country and hanging it, but hey.


A thing I should not have to rant about, but do; Aung San Suu Kyi/gender. This is not the 1950s and should not still be a fucking issue. I feel almost as if I am being petty about it but I am not; they are. After reading the abovelinked post, I then later caught this from the Beeb;

"What can we bring Daw Aung?" we asked the contact who had set up the meeting in Rangoon. "Oh, she wants supplies and reading matter!" was the reply.

I had assumed she wanted the latest edition of the Amnesty International Almanac or perhaps Nelson Mandela's memoirs. Supplies, I assumed, meant batteries or light bulbs.

What she did in fact want were the last four editions of Vogue, perhaps a Marie Claire or two and a few jars of face cream. This was utterly reassuring.

Aung San Suu Kyi has an Oxford degree and was married to Michael, an Oxford academic and a leading authority on Buddhism.

She has given her life to her people and needs to prove to no-one the seriousness of her intent. But this woman, who also happens to be exceptionally beautiful, wanted to preserve a degree of normality and dignity under very abnormal circumstances.

We handed over the gifts, she prepared delicious curry for my cameraman and me, and then we conducted a tough interview about how she could actually run a country as ethnically divided and brutalised as Burma, if she ever got the chance. Her answers were humble but firm. There is steel behind the jasmine scent.

*looks around for something to bang head against* Well. Definitely not me who's obsessed with Suu Kyi's gender. Where to start? That it is reassuring that a female political figure reads Vogue and Marie Claire? That it is 'normal'? - I seriously, honest-to-god, haven't known any woman who reads that stuff since I was at sixth-form. This is not to say that it is a bad thing, only that that form of gender performance is a minority interest and it being seen as 'normal' and 'reassuring' says a lot more about the moran who wrote this shit than it does about Aung San Suu Kyi. The 'ohh-we-must-ponder-whether-she-is-tough-and-srs-because-she's-a-GIRL' stuff is piling moranity upon moranity.


A thing that made me laugh.

A thing that made me cry.

Might go into both of those more later, not sure. I have a new copy of Neuromancer so expect cracky rants about Gibson and the Virgin Mary soon. I could also whine about hating Microsoft (wtF @ everything about the new Hotmail), Yahoo (stupid fucks buy up Musicmatch then wreck it) and Google (why is Blogger talking to me only in Dutch? Or is 'Tastaturkürzel: drücken Sie Strg zusammen mit' German? Wtf is this setting and how do I change it?)

Democracy, represent.

There seems to be a general agreement that democracy is good and ideally everyone should do it. In fact, a lot of people have died over this opinion recently.

If this the-people-choose thing is so vital, why are we not moving towards direct democracy? We could. Representation began in an age of primitive communications and very low literacy - does it really still have the least purpose, or do we only do it because it's what we're locked into? Is there any real benefit to keeping civic life restricted to a tiny elite (who are, at least if you look at UK MPs, almost all white, male, heterosexual and of a middle-class background)? You can say expertise is necessary in political life, but it's not the representatives that provide that; they just make the civic choices.

If you love democracy, is it possible to defend a system of representation that often ignores, or acts against, the will of the people? (I'm thinking of the 90% of British people who were against the Iraq war).

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ makes me sad; it's a graveyard of civic impotence. I've signed dozens of them, even though I know there's never, ever a point to it - the best result anyone can hope for is for the PM to email 1.7 million people to tell them he doesn't give a fuck what they think. From someone who went to war for democracy, he seems oddly cold to it at home.

Yeah, in practical terms we're locked into what we've got. (Though given that we stalwartly defend the use of juries to enforce our judicial process, and have the bureaucratic machinery in place to manage that, I'm wondering how hard it would be.) But is it even slightly ideologically defensible to not be working on dismantling representation here in the same way we seem intent on dismantling dictatorship overseas? Let's refer to SCUM here:

The elimination of money and the complete institution of automation are basic to all other SCUM reforms; without these two the others can't take place; with them the others will take place very rapidly. The government will automatically collapse. With complete automation it will be possible for every woman to vote directly on every issue by means of an electronic voting machine in her house. Since the government is occupied almost entirely with regulating economic affairs and legislating against purely private matters, the elimination of money and with it the elimination of males who wish to legislate 'morality' will mean there will be practically no issues to vote on.

I'm not digging all that ideology, and I think there's more to civic life (and the economy) than she makes out, but it's cute that Solanas is way ahead even of Switzerland on one of the most vital questions of liberty.

I'm also inclined to wonder how much the limpness of representative democracy contributes to our idea of adulthood - 'adult' being a byword for sex and an accompaniment to alcohol, an invitation to enjoy those two things as you please, while the political rights of an adult are so slight they're barely worthy of discussion. I have voted three times (two local, one general) and sat on two juries; that's the full extent of the effect I, as a citizen, have had on my country. To do more I'd have to align myself with a popular party (guess what, they're all lead by white, privately educated men), hope I fit through their hoops, win a popularity contest against several other people (who have no less right to participate than I do), then spend five years pretending I alone could convey the wishes of 75000 fellow citizens, no two of them alike.

I can't describe the leap of logic (maybe after lunch -), but when Gordy faffs about 'Britishness', or Daaave hugs those hoodies, I see one huge connected process, with them at the top pretending that the power they unjustly hold has nothing to do with any of it.

Regulation!

Just a little true-life story about companies that suck:

When I was a filthy student, I used to live in this lovely four-storey, six-bedroom house with a bunch of friends - four of us stayed for two years, another four for one year each. Most of the financial stuff was handled by one of the basement-dwellers, Pete, and I took care of the rest.

He got in touch with me last week to tell me that Southern Electric had just called and told him to give them £1000.

This was not the first time Southern Electric had asked us for money we did not, in fact, owe them (our home was once two separate properties and they were at one point asking us to pay double the metered bill because of this), so he was naturally uncowed. A mess of contradictory details was produced - improbable differences between readings and estimates, demands for cash for power used at a time after our group had moved out, timescales that changed from phonecall to phonecall. Maybe they had a case and were just really, really disorganised about it - that's more likely than them just making it up, but it sure as hell seemed like they'd made another ridiculous error and were expecting us to give them money for it. So Pete called Ofgem, who told him that Southern Electric were too late to legally back-bill us anyway, and gave his complaint a case number.

He called Southern Electric and passed on Ofgem's comments and our case number, and they instantly capitulated and decided not to pursue our money after all.

Like magic.

So when Tory politicians prattle about how we'd all be better off if businesses were deregulated, I can't help but wonder how they're defining 'better off'.

the eyes have it

It's annoying, having your favourite sexual organ constantly underrated.

I've been reading around the porn wars again (oh blah blah wank whatever wank about wanking blah) and it's irritating how often it comes back to the status of the female body. In particular there were two CiF pieces at the weekend about prostitution; you'd've read them a million times before, I'm sure, one idolising the Swedish model, one saying that it's not that simple. The comments return over and over to your-body-your-choice, to whether feminism is consistent, blahblahheck. It's not relevant. The meaning of a female body will never be relevant to women's sexual liberation, because I've got news for you; 98% of women fancy men (buried in a sidebar there).

Men. Male bodies. The ones with cocks, you know? Not that you can ever see that on TV, because male bodies are obscene and all. Looking at men is something 98% of women have in common - there's no feminist principle more unifying than this. Given that, feminist issues centre on female bodies strangely often.

So there's this Sheila Jeffreys idea that I just find plain ridiculous:

"A world without prostitution in any form, including pornography, for men might seem very threatening indeed because it removes the sexual prerogative of being able to degrade and use women irrespective of their personhood or pleasure. It means that men cannot access the sexual pleasures of women enslaved to their will by purchase. [...] In a world beyond prostitution women can relate to each other without the division created by the different, and conflicting uses to which men put them. Women will have the opportunity to unite to pursue goals which do not include sexual subordination, even for a fee."

Nope, sorry, not important to how women relate to each other, or to their goals. Because 98% of women fancy men. It's not, on the whole, relevant to them that a tiny proportion of other individual women are exchanging their bodies for the money of a larger-but-still-minority group of men. In a social responsibility sense we need to worry about trafficking and pimping, just as we need to worry about gun crime and the deaths of innocents in warfare - these things can be vital matters of conscience, things that have to be solved in order to make people feel comfortable with the world outside their homes, but they don't have to have personal impact. I don't believe the prostitution laws effect those 98% of women whose sexual interest lies, exclusively (82%), primarily (11%) or partially (5%), in the male body.

The Girl made an excellent post about how focusing on the male body makes women happy - and how the media, and the law, can conspire against our gaze. Many of the comments she received were along the lines of 'nonoez, objectification IS WRONG and if women do it that makes them JUST AS BAD AS MEN'. I'm of the opinion that yes, objectification is wrong, and what's wrong with it is that men are so inhospitable. They'll take it, but they won't dish it out. Really, why wrong? It's just looking. There are any number of ways to avoid being looked at, if you do find it upsetting - ways of dressing, of acting, of being present. It's just odd that so few women employ those ways, when almost all men do. You'd almost think they didn't want women to ogle them, as if being the object of our gaze was so terrifying it wouldn't be worth the extra sex they'd get out of it. There's reams of literature about men finding female sexuality scary - about terrible divinities like Aphrodite and Lilith. It's not the female body that's not wanted, is it? It's the eyes.

It's never happened, but I've always imagined that if a man asked me why I don't shave my legs, I'd say 'For the same reason you don't shave yours'. Because the way my legs look is irrelevant to my presence, to my sexuality - what matters is where my eyes rest.

And there are men responding to The Girl's Cif piece this morning saying 'women have sexual power, any woman can get sex whenever she wants!', still assuming that a woman is a body and a man is a pair of eyes. That's not sexual power. Sexual power is desiring and having those desires fulfilled; doesn't matter how easily you can get a man to fuck you if you fulfil his wants and he doesn't fulfil yours. But this is new, and women's bodies being on display is not new, so his visions are clearer than yours, and easier to live up to. And it bothers quite a lot of people that he can go out and buy what he wants; even if a woman can, even if she has the economic power to do so, few do, right? Because paying men to cater to your sexual desires is something only wild young women who've grown up in this evil, sex-saturated society do, right?

Bitchy Jones is ever-articulate on how men who pay find it hard to relate to women who do not pay. (I confess that I was looking for a different post of hers but I can't find it and that one does almost as well. She's also done something on how irritating endless sexual images of women can be to members of that 98%. Plus she is, on the whole, to blame for me latching on to this woman-body man-eyes thing.)

My eyes, incidentally, are (thanks to both Bitchy and to my sister) lately mad into Dieux du Stade. Have a good look at them, but I warn you, that fifth guy is so mine.

terminology creep:

I have insomnia. If I didn't, I might not be bothering with this, but tea+biscuits+ranting on the internet is my way of dealing with 2.30am, and that pernicious terminology creep just sidled up over here.

I don't much like pointing out these things, because it makes me feel like I am being Issues, and I'd kinda like to be a brain and a voice and stuff rather than just a wangsty backstory. It's not just on the internet - I've been in this position at the London Socialist Feminists discussion group too. I either speak up and feel like a whiny little discussion-derailer or let it pass and have my head esplode of logic failure and unexpected invisibility. So please, say it with me:

single parents =/= single mothers.

All Bs are A, but not all As are B. You follow?

It is true that the vast majority (I've heard it quoted as 90%) of single parents are women. This is not a good reason to use the terms as if they were interchangeable. Firstly it renders single fathers and their children invisible and conceals the places where their needs differ from the needs of single mothers. Secondly, it's pure fucking misogyny. Yeah, it's just reflecting the misogyny that generally exists in family structures - the bulk of single parent families are formed from the breakdown of two-[heterosexual]-parent families, and of course mummy always has to keep the kids, because human beings are just designed that way, so calling single mother families 'single parent families' is just the natural way of things, m?

It's using a neutral word to cover up an un-neutral problem. It's saying that we don't have to question why mummy takes the kids. It cuts both ways; she has to have that parental responsibility, while he cannot have it. Or alternatively; she is permitted to hog that position, while he is permitted to neglect.

It disguises the differences between single mother families and single father families. I'm not made of bullshit statistics, but every single father family I've known of is the result of either bereavement or imprisonment; the absolute imperative for mummy to take the kids means that the place where daddy takes the kids is a pretty confined and inaccessible terrain. On the other hand there's this whole jumble of problems many single mother families experience - getting child support, coping with the emotional fallout of family breakdown, access (sometimes referred to as 'pay-per-view parenting', by which we mean 'pay-per-view paternity'), and dealing with the lousy stereotypes (foolish, pathetic welfare mum and incapable, irresponsible deadbeat dad. I don't know any single father family stereotypes. Maybe they wouldn't work so well on TV or something.) There's always going to be some overlaps and some reversals of the norm, but on the whole assuming that a single parent family is a single mother family means assuming that some problems are everyone's problems (and that my problems were/are not really there).

I'd like to live in a world where there were parents. It's a role I wouldn't run away screaming from myself. In that world the term 'single parent' would have substance. I just haven't personally experienced this world - I've seen only single mothers and single fathers, and conflating the gender roles that prescribe their fates into a nice, neutral term is not a great idea.

Tasers.

Odd that this should pop up right when I'm digging into writing me some cyberpunk. Tasers are technology shaped like a dream-come-true - a terrible threat that does no real harm, power held with no consequences for the powerless. Except, of course, that we live in the real world, and the corpses are piling up and up.

But that's alright, because they're only used in really tough situations where the only other option would be to use a gun, right? All those corpses are bad people? Right?

There is also evidence to suggest that, far from being used to avoid lethal force, many US police agencies are deploying tasers as a routine force option to subdue non-compliant or disturbed individuals who do not pose a serious danger to themselves or others. In some departments, tasers have become the most prevalent force tool. They have been used against unruly schoolchildren; unarmed mentally disturbed or intoxicated individuals; suspects fleeing minor crime scenes and people who argue with police or fail to comply immediately with a command. Cases described in this report include the stunning of a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Florida, following a dispute on a bus, and a 13- year-old girl in Arizona, who threw a book in a public library.

So, being aware of taser-related corpsepiles already, I was pretty stunned by that chief constable's attitude. "What was it like? Not pleasant, is the answer.[...] I was completely incapable of movement. I would have fallen if I hadn't been supported by my colleagues. I very strongly advise you, if faced by an officer and a Taser, that you follow the instructions of the nice police officer, because you will not enjoy the consequences of disobedience."

Um. That's a pretty dim exercise of power there. I guess when you're the hand behind the trigger, you don't see the need to say "What was it like? Not pleasant, is the answer. I and the others who have the power to do this will use it only as a last resort, will not make idle threats with it, will not treat it as if it is harmless and without consequences, and will not bully the difficult or the incapable with it."

And I'm the hand behind the pen, and have the responsibility of exploring these issues in cyberpunk, which I shall.

Women who write about sex.

Two links;

Ponderosa (she of banned-from-Livejournal fame) on shame/harm/sex writing.

Abby Lee (she of one-track-mind fame) on surviving being outed as a sex writer.

I'd want to add some commentary, but it's really not necessary, is it?

I'll Be In My Bunk

[this is too long and I vaguely wish I could elllljaaaycut it here, but I dunno how, so whatever. tl;dr at will]

A lot of feminists like Joss Whedon. He's been honoured by Equality Now, which he calls his 'favourite charity'; he's spoken out against violence against women; and he really has done more to put women in the spotlight than any other male sci-fi filmmaker I could offhand name. He's a feminist in every way that matters. But I have this petty desire to explain where I feel his feminism is lacking. I don't think, in a storytelling sense, he's got his head around feminist sexuality.

Two initial caveats about this round of pettiness;
-I've not seen Buffy or anything else by him - this is going to be all about the Firefly.
-Yes, I'm going to spoiler stuff if I feel it will help me get my point across. OMR, for instance. If that bothers you, go watch it first and then come back to this. C'mon, it'll only take you twelve or so hours. Get going. Now.
-a brief note on names; while I think it's cute of Whedon to give one of his menfolk a generally female name (Jayne) and one of his womenfolk a generally male name (River), he still stuck fast to that quaint Anglo rule that, while men can roam about the alphabet as they please, all female names end in A, E, Y, I, N, L, H, R, S or T, with M and D as occasional bold outliers, or sometimes O or U in fantasy fiction. It does sound like a lot of letters, but common male names end just about anywhere except Q. Another respect in which he seems to be trying, but not hard enough for my tastes.


So let's take these women and their sexualities one at a time.

Zoe - the wife. Much of the criticism of female sexual stereotypes concerns the virgin/whore dichotomy; I feel that this analysis neglects a certain third category which happens to contain more women than either of the two aforementioned groups. Wives can fuck. They can have as much sex as they please, and can enjoy it as much as they like, so long as they do not stray from good, old-fashioned monogamy. Some people even think that wives are the only women who should be permitted to have sex for pleasure rather than for procreation.

Zoe is far more sexually assertive than any of the other female crewers - in fact, only one of the male cast (Jayne) has any edge over her in that regard. Her assertiveness isn't just about saying yes when she wants to say yes ("I need this man to tear all my clothes off."), but also about saying no when she wants to say no ("Remember that sex we were going to have, ever again?") When I was first whining about this whole Firefly-sex-is-crap thing to my darling Matthew, he pointed out that Zoe somewhat echoes the stereotype of the wife who uses sex to control her husband. (Furthermore - as far as I can recall - on every occasion in which they disagree the plot later proves Zoe to have been in the right.)

The lovely people at Feminist SF have hacked at another stereotype she embodies;

Zoe, as a kick-ass warrior woman, I adore. But I am not blind to the fact that a lot of white boys like to have a Black Warrior Woman in their work to demonstrate how cool they are with the race thing. The weird thing to me is that it’s so deeply problematic and emblematic of white boy issues, at the exact same time that it is hugely empowering and exciting. Typical of these difficult issues, maybe. Having a Black Warrior be a woman is less threatening to white people. Making the warrior woman Black further exoticizes her and taps into stereotypes of Blackness as wild, primitive, fierce, and stereotypes of Black women as butch. These are general issues with stereotyped exotic characters, and not necessarily appropriate to each instance of those characters, of course; Zoe is her own character, because Joss is actually really good with characterization in terms of personality (just not so much with figuring out characterization in terms of social aspects of race/class).

Her marriage does, for the most part, avoid traditional gender clichés; her husband, Wash (who is white), is a mild-mannered spaceship pilot whose physique and martial prowess is notably inferior to her; it's her who makes her way in the world with physical strength and he who gets by with cheerful chatter and 'nimble fingers'.

This is the bit where I ought to write something about War Stories but I don't know where to begin. It's a send-up of male jealousy, and of the idea that non-sexual bonding can't occur between a heterosexual woman and a male friend, but...it's like there's something getting at me about it that I can't even pin down. Maybe the simple fact that two men so intensely disputed the sexuality of a woman who didn't contribute a word - only actions - to their conversation. Maybe just because the plot allowed Wash to be a crazy jealous asshole who was trying to control his wife (sexually and in other ways) in the first place, even if he did get extreme comeuppance for it. Maybe it was the foul domesticity of the last few minutes - personal issues there I guess, but I found Wash's attitude in the 'wife soup' scene pretty disturbing and insulting. (See, personally I don't have much of a problem with keeping patriarchy out of the bedroom - it's the kitchen where I keep finding it crop up unexpectedly, hiding in the smelly crack behind the cooker. And I know it's not just me.) So if nothing else, War Stories portrays Zoe as a victim of misogyny in spite of her otherwise near-immunity to the most demeaning aspects of gender dynamics. It's not a comfy move - there's a bit of hopelessness about it. As there is to this whole general idea that the only woman who can have the sex she wants, when she wants it, is the wife.


Inara - the sex worker. Now here's a clusterfuck. Just as there's an abundance of variety among real-life sex workers, so there are in fantasy fiction. I've heard it said among geeks that Inara represents a challenge to the popular stereotype of prostitution; she's classy, educated, physically natural if overly adorned, comes from a higher social class than almost all of the other characters (and unlike the fugitives Simon and River she retains all the perks of her class status), and is one of only two outwardly religious major characters. She also has sex with both men and women, but I'll come back to that later. She's also part of a powerful organised group of prostitutes who all share these characteristics. (Organised groups of prostitutes are exceedingly common in male-authored fantasy; see Pratchett, Mieville, and ahahaha aahahaaa Frank Miller, among others. No offence to the sex workers, but I feel that these male fantasy writers are overdoing this, and not out of the goodness of their bleeding liberal hearts. But I will save Pratchett/gender & Mieville/gender for another day, and Miller/gender for the point-and-laughing it deserves. I'm working on Gibson/gender too, but my teenage brother stole my copy of Neuromancer, blah.)

My first problem with the praising of Inara is that people tend to assume Whedon made this situation up. I'd suggest that he didn't. She bears a remarkable resemblance to the historical shuyu - the high-status prostitutes of 19th-century Shanghai, who shared not only Inara's social status, silk outfits and provision of services that did not start or end simply with sex (Inara, like the shuyu, is in demand at social occasions as well as in the bedroom), but also minor details. Shuyu were examined every year (not for health reasons, as seems to be the case for Inara, but for their singing and storytelling skills); they also tended to live in small boats on the Huangpu River.

(I first read about this stuff in a book called Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai by Christian Henriot - I can't find anything snappy about the topic online, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.)

While there's nothing particularly wrong with being inspired by history, if Whedon really is writing about a futuristic shuya, he's taken out the genuinely ugly part of the shuyu culture and replaced it with more present concerns about sex work; firstly, that the prostitute's profession reduces her worth to her genitalia, in the eyes of her ever-misogynistic clients (see Shindig, also bits of Jaynestown). Whedon is clearly attempting to allay this concern. Secondly, that prostitutes lack sexual agency and can't have normal romantic/sexual relationships ("So what's the policy on dating?" "It's complicated.") - which Whedon explores in several ways, but ultimately doesn't debunk in the least. (Why does it have to be complicated? Do real sex workers find it complicated? From what I've read around the blogosphere, some do and some don't - those that do tending to be those who conceal their profession closely, which Inara does not.) Inara is the object of Mal's romantic desire, which she returns, but this leads only to angst and teariness rather than any actual cute scenes.

I'd like to wheel the bisexuality back in now; in War Stories, Inara entertains a powerful female politician. I'm going to quote here from the episode script, as hosted by FireflyWiki;

INT. INARA'S SHUTTLE - DAY

Inara massages oil onto the naked back of the Councilor, who's lying on her stomach on Inara's bed, eyes closed with pleasure. Filmy sheets cover what needs to be covered. Inara's in an off-the-shoulder silky dress, tied at the shoulder with a ribbon.

COUNCILOR
That feels amazing. Oh, right there.
Perfect.
(sighs)
I should've done this weeks ago.

INARA
(flirty)
I wouldn't have been here weeks ago.

COUNCILOR
And that would've been a shame.

INARA
For me as well... you have such
beautiful skin...

The Councilor turns on her side, looks at Inara.

COUNCILOR
There's no need for the show, Inara.
I just need to relax with someone
who's making no demands on me.

The Councilor starts to lay back down again. Inara stops her with a hand on her shoulder. The Councilor sits up, facing Inara, curious.

INARA
Most of my clientele is male, do you
know that?

COUNCILOR
No...

INARA
If I choose a woman, she tends to be
extraordinary in some way. And the
fact is, I occasionally have the
exact same need you do. One cannot
always be one's self in the company
of men.

COUNCILOR
Never, actually.

INARA
So no show. Let's just enjoy
ourselves.


While it never got to the screen, it's established fanon that there was originally intended to be a scene involving the Councillor's husband and family, so we can assume both these women are being portrayed as - in terms of behaviour if not identity - bisexual. Now. Apart from the general impression that this scene just exists to pander to the male audience, I have a huge problem with this portrayal of bisexual desire. See that word? Desire. These women are not talking about what they desire, what they lust for - they're talking about how wonderful it is to escape from teh evilz male gaze (by feeling each other up in front of a million zillion horny fanboys). They're talking about there being 'no demands' and 'being oneself'. Heaven forbid any woman would just want to fuck another woman because fucking women is good, hot fun. Of every Inara scene in the whole canon, it's here that I most keenly hear that Inara does not have any sexual, or romantic agency. She does not have sex out of a desire to have sex; it's a job, or a way to relax, or a semi-religious process. The only woman who gets to fuck for the sake of lust and enjoyment is the wife.


Kaylee - the girl next door. On the face of it, Kaylee looks like the most sexually assertive one of all. She pursues Simon while he remains very coy towards her. She waves Inara off by saying "Have good sex," which, as I've already demonstrated, is more consideration than Inara gives to the topic. She delivered that fanboy-slaying line "Goin' on a year now I ain't had nothin' twixt my nethers weren't run on batteries," which I think epitomises the Kaylee problem. She wants it. But she doesn't get it.

This really sticks out early on in Heart Of Gold; the crew are, for plot reasons, in a brothel, and Jayne and Kaylee are both enthusiastically eyeing up the prostitutes (mostly female, but some male). Jayne subsequently spends a lot of time with one of them. Does Kaylee? Hell no. In spite of her stated desire to have sex with a male prostitute, nothing of the sort is mentioned again.

So Jayne has casual, no-strings sex in Heart Of Gold, in Jaynestown, and he expresses a clear interest in the same in Our Mrs Reynolds. Kaylee never does. Unlike Jayne, Kaylee has a canonical romantic interest within the main cast; Simon, intelligent, bumbling, coy, shy, high-class, fugitive Simon, who has far more physical contact with his younger sister than he does with her. In spite of the lack of progress in their relationship, she only considers straying once, in The Message, and the plot makes sure that that's a bad idea. (Mal, by contrast, does sleep with someone else as well as attempting to romance Inara; of course that plot strand doesn't end well, but the fact remains that he did it and Kaylee didn't, in spite of Kaylee generally being more vocal about her sex drive than Mal is). In the entire canon, this vocally lustful woman has sex only twice; the second time is within a long-running, monogamous plotline. The first time is, hoorah, my least favourite Kaylee script extract, from Out Of Gas. It's a flashback scene that shows us how Kaylee got her job on Serenity;

INT. SERENITY - ENGINE ROOM

--Mal's looking for his mechanic (the handsome mechanic we saw earlier.)

MAL
What's this I been hearin' 'bout
yet another delay?

As Mal moves closer to the engine room, we can make out BESTER'S ARMY BOOTS sticking out from under the engine. Presumably doing his grease monkey thing.

MAL
You were supposed to have that engine
fixed and us up and...
(as he sees:)
What in the name of < all that's proper..? >
[suo-yo duh doh shr-dang]

Bester's shorts are... well, down around his army boots. He's having the sex with an unseen FEMALE. There is energetic humpage. Mal's a bit scandalized. Casts his glance away from the action. Might clear his throat.

MAL
Bester.

Much with the dirty humping. Mal gives it a beat.

MAL
Bester.

They seem to be, uh, finishing.

MAL
BESTER!

Bester climbs out, mostly still naked, yanking up his shorts.

BESTER
What?

Bester just looks to Mal. Innocently inquisitive. There is some dead pan staring on Mal's part. Oh, yes there is. Then:

MAL
You do realize we been parked on this
rock near a week longer'n we planned?

BESTER
Yeah, but... there's stuff to do.

MAL
As for example that job we got waitin'
for us on Paquin. When we landed here you
said you just needed a few days before we were
space worthy again and is there somethin' wrong
with your bunk?

BESTER
What?

More impatient staring, then Bester gets it finally: right. The naked girl behind the engine. Bester laughs.

BESTER
Oh! No. Cap!
(leans forward "confidentially")
She like engines. They make her hot.

MAL
Bester. Get your prairie harpy off my
boat and put us back in the air.

BESTER
'kay. But... can't.

MAL
Whaddya mean "can't."

BESTER
No can do, cap. Secondary grav boot's shot.

KAYLEE (O.S.)
No it ain't.

Kaylee pops up, getting dressed. The men look at her.

KAYLEE
Ain't nothing wrong with your grav boot.
Grav boot's just fine.
(to Mal)
Hello.

She drops down again, out of view. Mal glances at Bester. Bester's a bit flustered.

BESTER
(to Mal)
She don't... that's not...
(to Kaylee)
No it ain't!

KAYLEE
(reappearing)
Sure it is. Grav boot ain't your trouble.
I seen the trouble plain as day when I's down
there on my back. Your reg couple's bad.

BESTER
(clueless)
The... the what?

KAYLEE
Reg couple. Right here. See?

BESTER
No.

KAYLEE
This.
(Bester is still of the blank expression)
I'm pointin' right at it.

She rolls her eyes, sighs, reaches in, breaks off a part of the engine.

BESTER
Hey!

KAYLEE
Here.

She plunks the part in Bester's hand. She reaches back in, tinkers.

KAYLEE
Don't really serve much of a purpose, anyway.
Just tends to gum up the works when it gets tacked.
(re: a nearby wrench)
Hand me that, will ya?
(he does)
So I figure, why even have it? Better to just plug
your g-line straight into the port-pin-lock and that
should...

She's done. WHIRRR the turbine starts to turn.

KAYLEE
There.

She shoves it in Bester's hand. Fiddles with the engine.

BESTER
What'd you do?

MAL
She fixed it.

KAYLEE
Well, it wasn't really broke.

Bester looks at the part in his hand.

MAL
Where'd you learn to do that, miss?

KAYLEE
(shrugs)
Just do it, that's all. My daddy says I got
a natural talent.

MAL
I'd say you do at that.

BESTER
(re: the part)
We don't need this?

KAYLEE
Not 'specially.

MAL
You work for your daddy, do you?

KAYLEE
When he's got work. Which lately ain't
been too often.

MAL
And have you had much experience on a
vessel like this?

KAYLEE
Never even been up in one before.

MAL
You never been... how'd you like to?

KAYLEE
(points skyward)
You mean...?

MAL
Sure.

KAYLEE
For how long?

MAL
Long as you like. Long as you can keep
her in the sky.

KAYLEE
(getting it now)
You offering me a job?

BESTER
What?

MAL
Believe I just did.

KAYLEE
Just gotta ask my folks!

She pulls her hastily assembled wardrobe about her, pushes past Mal and a stunned Bester.

KAYLEE
Don't leave without me!

Mal watches Kaylee go, tickled. Bester just blinks, stunned.

BESTER
Mal. Whaddya need two mechanics for?

MAL
I really don't. Pack your things.
(then)
She got a name?

Oh dear god, where to start? Kaylee is indeed having pretty casual sex, even apparently exhibiting a fetish, but it's not about the sex. "I seen the trouble plain as day when I's down there on my back." - she wasn't thinking about the sex while she was having sex, she was considering how to use her professional skills. Perhaps Whedon was trying to imply that Bester isn't sexually competent, but what he's given us is a girl who lies back and thinks of...Serenity. It's not the guy she's into, it's the landscape. Considering what a great career move this encounter was for her, you could even tag her to the 'office slut' stereotype - the girl who fucks for a promotion rather than for pleasure. For all she talks about simple sexual enjoyment, Kaylee never actually gets it.


River - the witch-child. She's lovely. She's the second character, after Inara, to be shown naked. But sexually, River doesn't do a lot, either for herself or anyone else. She has a mental disability caused by damage to the brain, and everyone knows that people with mental disabilities aren't sexual, or sexy. They can have relatives and make friends and do srs MacGuffin plot stuff, be intelligent, be dangerous, be artistic, but no sex pls. (The only other celibate main character, Book, is a priest. Jayne queries his celibacy in a bout of smalltalk at the start of the last episode, and he said he'd deliberately chosen to join an order that did not allow priests to marry. I don't know how much I can, or should, read into this difference between the only celibate woman and the only celibate man.)

I think I should leave that right there - River doesn't add anything more to the topic of this rant, namely sex, though she is worthy of many other gender-rants in her own right.


Saffron - the temptress. Not a crewer, but a recurring villain, and how did that happen? Sex, sort of. She's another on the long list of Characters That Appear Naked, in this case in the process of pretending she wanted to have sex with Mal, not having sex with Mal, pretending she wanted to have sex with Wash, then leading the poor heroes into an awful trap before running away, oh noez! But no one can bear to kill her, so she comes back later, with more naughty lies and vile scheming. The point here is that her sexuality, which she usually puts over as being a very earthy, natural thing (she's generally simply dressed and not made up, is pleasantly ample-bodied, more so than Inara and maybe a little more so than Kaylee, I'm not certain) - is a lie. She implies - "You're assuming the payoff is the point" - that she gets off on the sexual deceptions she employs, one way or another. She appears in only two episodes, and heavily comes on to five characters, all of them in deceptive situations; she is known by three different names, none of which is really hers; she has had many brief marriages.

In a way, she resembles Kaylee - making clear sexual overtures but with no follow-up. In Saffron's case, the lack of action is clearly intentional. Now, you could see this as a ratings issue - if Saffron was doing all the stuff she appears to want to do, the story would be a mite less primetime - it would also have a very different chemistry, as teasing the characters romantically but not delivering until very late on in the story, or not at all, is part of the allure. There are reasonable not-specifically-gender-related reasons for Saffron to be the sweet cocktease she is. But next to Kaylee and Inara, seeing another woman who doesn't really act on her sexual desire is a tad suspicious. She'll talk of it, maybe do it offscreen a time or two, but it's not about wanting sex, it's really all for the sake of something else. And it's not that way for Jayne, or for Mal, or for the married couple.

So, conclusion; Firefly women do sex if they're married, or sex if they have some non-sex goal in mind, or sex if one of the male leads wants to fuck them and we're not even going to remember the girl's name after the end of the episode. (Honourable exception for Nandi, who goes in category 2 rather than category 3). This is feminism in sci-fi. Enjoy it.

dark dreamers.

Forgive me for doing yet more recycling of yesterday's news, but; I think this guy sounds pretty normal. No, really. He would've fit in with my social circle just fine. Just look at the social violations he's accused of there;

-CSI and TV crime dramas - doesn't everyone love those? (Well, except me, I don't watch TV, but that's by the by - everyone else likes them...)

-Violent computer games - I've written about that one already.

-No, really, why the hell is it even mentioning he kept condoms in his room? That's just sensible. (I use the IUS, but I tend to pick up free condoms from sexual health dropins and pass them on to my teenage brother, so often have them around - I seriously can't imagine why the article bothers mentioning this, and furthermore, I'm disturbed as to what message they're trying to send out by doing so).

-reading Wiki pages on serial killers? I did that not long ago - got linked to it from something else. I'm sad, I read about a lot of things on Wikipedia - it's great for getting a general idea of what interested people think about a subject.

-planning massacres, coups, and other atrocities? Check. It's an impulse - whenever I'm made subject to any security procedure, I think about how I'd go about getting around it. I know lots of people do this. I've even done it with friends in airports and railway stations - spoken in detail about how we'd go about sneaking bombs or weapons through scanners or physical searches - which probably constitutes conspiracy, but what the hell. Apart from being a world champion at sneaking water bottles into nightclubs, I've never acted on any of these plots and likely never will. The specific example - planning a coup led by a small number of people in Equatorial Guinea - pinged two parts of my geek radar; there's a Leslie Charteris short story about three people staging a coup in a small South American country; and the flag of Equatorial Guinea is flown by Hagbard Celine, the iconic anarchist and drug dealer who ILLUMINATUS! centres on.

-sword with a 39-inch blade? Check. Hella check. Mine's a WW2 ceremonial army thingy, recently restored to shiny beauty as part of a scurrilous insurance claim, and it's sexy as hell. It's propped up against the dead piano in my bedroom. I use it for killing wasps, mostly, but it makes a great dream-prop too. My partner has a replica broadsword too, and seriously, once you've got metalwork why the heck shouldn't it be a feature of your sexual landscape? (A very small feature, in our case, but like the whole girls-with-guns kink, it's a great arena for playing with power and agency.)

-books about crime and weapons? It's not clear whether this means fiction or nonfiction, but either way you'll find a large section devoted to it at your local bookshop. You'll also find zillions of people glued to Crimewatch etc. The world we live in is obsessed with crime, with media coverage of it only rising as actual instances are falling. Being obsessed with lurking villains is not at all unusual. Honestly, I'm far more creeped out by weirdo SAS obsessives, and I've known several of those.

-then there's this oft-used phrase 'he lived in a fantasy world'; check, but, do you know what? So do you. Everyone sees the world through a filter of dreams and expectations, and these can be wildly divergent even between people who live in close physical proximity; many people see God behind every feature of the world; others have ridiculous, fantastical fears about being targeted by criminals or paedophiles; even the mildest of us sees the world in a way heavily influenced by our habits and memories. We accept the dictates of unseeable forces like money, the law, our perceived society. I keep a ceremonial sword around for handling my near-phobia of wasps, and I barely take care when crossing the road; that's life in a fantasy world. In a more purely geeky sense, I know a lot of people who pay more attention to their fantasy lives than to the day-to-day world around them; sometimes because that day-to-day world is nonexistent, like mine, or mediocre, or fails to satisfy someone's dreams and expectations, or because they simply find more joy in their life as a reader, writer, or gamer than in their life as a worker, student or parent. I think the general cause is that the real world sucks, and a large number of people get through it on a sort of spiritual autopilot while their soul is really dwelling elsewhere.


So, yeah, I find this shock-horror-profile-of-killer not horribly far from home. I'm trying to figure out what that's meant to say about me, or anyone else, and coming up blank. Dissecting the habits and possessions of a killer, trying to discern the shape of his dreamworld and classify it as intrinsically harmful, is a futile exercise. I don't think there's such a thing as an incorrect thought, dream or emotion - even the darkest of such things are true, genuine, and in and of themselves do no harm. What I think is really revealed here is that the line between dark dreamings and evil doings is - while not a fine one, not in the least, it's a very clear and wide stripe in the sand there - alarmingly easy to cross if you want to. This, dadada, is also not news.

alkomahol, yes, that stuff

The smoking ban is soon upon us; this will be to my benefit, and will make many places I like to go seem more pleasant, but I was ambivalent to it in a sledgehammer-nut/civil liberties kinda way and now I read this; the ban includes shisha. This makes me sad, and I suspect that some small parts of the world as I know it may be at an end. I've never used shisha - I've never been part of a gathering that was collectively up for it - but I spent a lot of my student days lurking in shisha cafes with newspapers, for all the reasons the article mentions, plus I've found them to be sources of very tasty, very cheap food. The cultural mingling got to me in the usual petty ways; it was shisha cafes that got me hooked on mint tea, though I more often make it at home now; aubergines also, which I could never abide before; the odd bit of cheesy Algerian pop music has made its way to my hard drive. If there's no last-minute fix, then - well, the world will move on and I will feel a little eroded.

I never used shisha, but I never minded being around it; it smells pleasant, and doesn't change how people treat each other. It's also minor and innocuous enough that it can be banned. These things are generally not true of alcohol.

That alcohol dominates communal life in the UK isn't exactly news. Though it was in the news not long ago. Older non-news has it that a third of A&E admissions have been drinking, though that could, rather than being causal, simply indicate that a huge proportion of the population is drinking at any given time.

Quite apart from cycles of harm and violence, alcohol is a filter that excludes a lot of people from the rest of their communities; the young; those who fear violence; those who can't drink for medical reasons (including addiction); Mormons, Muslims and others who abstain for religious reasons; those who can't get to their homes without a car; those who really can't afford it. I guess the whole thing chugs on because, durhur, of the economy; substance use is a capitalist's dream, a self-reinforcing social habit that gets people spending, spending, spending; places that provide alcohol will always outcompete those that do not.

I'm not particularly anti-drinking, just anti-cultural-obsessions, and this one is a cultural obsession. Drifting off at a slight tangent here, I love this table;



It represents a study commissioned by the Science Select Committee; I'm not sure how the heck they worked out the numerical harm scale, but you get the general idea. Contributing experts included senior policemen as well as doctors and scientists. (Here is where I stole it from). Both the laws governing substance use, and the practise of substance use, has nothing to do with rationality; we're in something driven by economics and acquired habit (social behaviour and foreign policies both), and no one's holding the reins.

My aunt, a dear gentle Christian lady roughly three times my age, told me yesterday that cannabis should be legalised and heroin should be prescribed because so much progress has been made in fighting tobacco smoking while keeping it legal. I think it's a pretty good approach, if misplaced; alcohol users likely do far more harm to non-users than smokers do. Would health warnings and billboards change drug use, or drinking habits? And if they did, what would become of the economic machinery behind those substances? Hmm.