continue / exit

Three quick gamer links here, because I hope to get my groove back (though, as followers of my deadjournal may have noticed, I am slightly obsessed with a certain videogame right now, so who knows?):

a) From VorpalBunnyRanch, a great look at how the nature of violence in videogames is skewed by the protagonist's gender. In a brief follow-up it's noted how survival horror breaks the general rules regarding women and violence/action - this genre also stands out among films, something noted by Randall Monroe here in Two Female Leads.

Perhaps the more a story blurs the lines between violent heroes (or villains) and victims of violence, the more likely it is to have active female characters? I am, inevitably, thinking about how that works in Metal Gear, a game series in which women frequently commit acts of violence, but generally bloodlessly, or from a distance - with the exception of that one group of villain/victims/survival horror exhibits in MGS4. *le sigh*

b) From the Beeb, a survey of MMO players; 40% are female, they're more likely to put hardcore time into it than male gamers are, and - get this - female gamers are 5x more likely to be bisexual than the general population. (My guess: bisexuality is massively underreported in the 'general population', and if you did something as simple as matching gamers with non-gamers by age and perhaps social class, the difference would close significantly. Another possible explanation is that game design is inimical to straight female desires and makes straight women slightly less likely to play MMOs than gay women - gee, I wonder how that might have happened?)

[addendum:: see also some scepticism from Kotaku: "...these are the results of a voluntary study in which participants received a free in-game item for participating, so I can't really see how they can even begin to pretend that they tallied accurate results. If I was told to complete a study in order to receive a free in-game item, I'd complete that puppy so fast that I might have wound up one of those hardcore bisexual raider women. Think about that before you start fantasizing about that hot wood elf you saw running about Qeynos."]

c) Merry Christmas from VGCats!

FMT: an intriguing new fail.

As I've already said, at great length, I take great exception to the way male sf/f/h writers get so hung up on sex work. And if most or all of the women in their story are sex workers, that's a really bad sign. But this, this is interesting, I dare say not good, but at least original in the realms of failure.

[Both the links in the next paragraph rate a warning for talk about rape/SA in abstract & imaginary situations.]

io9.com has this piece up on what it describes as 'zombie feminism'. Basically it's a horror movie trend that's very like r&r in 80s fantasy fiction. They've written about three zombie films with unusual implications for women, but it's the second that pinged the FMT radar - Zombie Strippers:

This flick features porn star Jenna Jameson as a stripper bitten by a zombie infected by a government drug to keep soldiers fighting after they die. The more zombie-fied she gets, the more the clientele goes crazy for her. Even when she drags men into the back room and rips their throats out and bites their dicks off. Soon, the other strippers are begging to be infected too, so they can make more in tips.

Before long, nearly all the strippers are infected, and they've got a giant basement room full of all the reanimated, mutilated men they've been gnawing on. None of these strippers are being raped or murdered by men — they're just dealing with standard-issue stuff like objectification and the dangers of working in the sex industry. And yet it's hard not to see their undeaths as a kind of revenge on men who treat women like objects. These guys come to the strip club to "get some meat," and then they're turned into meat themselves.

The problem here is that the men actually like it. Their favorite strippers are the zombies, and the women have gained "power" only by becoming monsters. Just as our girl in Deadgirl can only fight back because she's a monster. So is the message of zombie feminism that a strong women is always a monster? That she must die and return as a ghoul in order to fight back against rape and less violent forms of sexism?

Does Equality Pay Its Bills?

Big question. When you pass by equality trainwrecks on the internets, you sometimes see a blind faith in the free market to solve all our problems. I mean, the free market (which exists, honest) being the bastion of efficiency it is, if a problem still exists it must be because there's an economic upside to it, right? If action films with female leads were profitable, there'd be tons of them, but there aren't because it's just not profitable. If women's work was really as valuable as men's work, employers wouldn't discriminate against women, would they?

This faith seems to underlie a lot of the outright disbelief you sometimes meet when you talk to people about equal pay or media sexism. It's basically saying that the desire to make a profit is so great it must override the desire to be sexist, so sexism can't be occurring at the expense of profit, and any further attempts to fight sexism will cause economic harm.

FSF recently linked to a series of articles by Jennifer Kesler about how this blind faith applies wrt the Bechdel Test. One of these directly asks Why Discriminate If It Doesn't Profit?

What tipped me off was that whenever film students pointed out how movies/shows for, by or about women had indeed profited, film professionals wouldn’t hear it. Those movies/shows were exceptions! Or it was really the alien/Terminator/Hannibal Lechter people wanted to see, not Ripley, Connor or Starling. Etc. It couldn’t be that people were actually happy to see movies/shows for, by or about women, because that was impossible - end of argument.

...people who claim to worship profit above all else sometimes actually worship what they want to believe is profitable.

Looking at the inflation-adjusted all-time box office, many of the top names are films that had a specific appeal to female audiences; Gone With The Wind, Titanic, The Sound Of Music, Doctor Zhivago. Three of these four were made a rather long time ago.

I'm not sold on Kelsey's reasoning simply because it relies on pathologising individuals; see her earlier post, Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not To Pass The Bechdel Test:

I concluded Hollywood was was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the “target audience” - a construct based on partial truths and twisted math - to perpetuate their own desires.

I find it hard to believe that mere individuals can keep that shit running as long as they do, but does anyone have a better theory? It's important, this. Because the phenomenon goes beyond Hollywood and infests the real world.


Last year, Slate's Ray Fishman declared 'It Takes a Village...to fail to thank its female leader, no matter how good she is':

Rural Indians are learning firsthand what it's like to live under female leadership as a result of a 1991 law that restricted one-third of village council elections to female candidates. The villagers' experiences are analyzed by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova in a recent unpublished study. Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods"—like schools, roads, and water pumps—Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.

[...] They were also less corrupt—villagers with female-headed councils were 25 percent less likely to report having to pay bribes to access basic services like getting ration cards or receiving medical attention.

It's like Hollywood; however well the women perform, it doesn't register with the people who care. (Except that US cinema audiences seem to approve plenty). This really is sexism as a quantifiable pathology, and it merrily flies in the face of any desire for material gain; women suck, no matter how much they've improved your local governance.

Then there's a straightforward headline from workforce.com: Firms With More Women on Boards Perform Better Than Those That Don’t.

During the four-year span of the reporting for the study, Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards saw equity returns that were 53 percent higher than those companies with the fewest number of women on their boards.

I strongly doubt that either this or the India survey demonstrate any female superiority when it comes to governance; rather, they represent the replacing of mediocre men with brilliant women who in other circumstances are locked out of high places. But the question's still there - if female board members have such a marked effect on profits, why are there so few of them?

If hiring women is basically a way of getting free money, why are so many companies scared of the idea?


When talking about the pay gap, I tend to link to this: the story of the UK's largest ever equal pay settlement:

Early last year, 1,600 women, all of them health workers at two Cumbrian hospitals, won the biggest ever equal pay deal: a total of £300m. At a time when the pay gap between men and women is actually growing, the settlement should have sparked a clamour for equality. Instead, there has since been an eerie silence. The story of how the women, underpaid for years, spurned an offer of £1.5m compensation and achieved £300m, all from one health authority, has been mysteriously buried, as if it were an embarrassment. They sense a fear of "mutually assured destruction" wafting around the headquarters of their union, Unison, which represents more than a million public service workers: a feeling that the settlement was too huge, and the ramifications of it just too enormous - what would happen if it triggered equal pay claims across the whole of the public sector?

[...] The claim was possible because of "equal value", a concept contained in a European directive announced during a late sitting in the Commons 20 years ago by a reluctant, and drunk, employment minister, Alan Clark. It allows different jobs to be compared for skill, complexity and responsibility; it focuses on the work, not the job. In detail, the claim translated the gothic arithmetic and arcane patois of industrial relations into the everyday life of men and women: everything, from bonus, to pension, to the length of the working week, to a working life. "It took a while to convince some of them that what they did was not only of equal value to a man, but more important," says Doyle.

A job evaluation expert, Sue Hastings, assessed the Cumbria dossier and reported that the cases were a golden equal pay opportunity for "exactly the people who ought to get it" - nurses who had been undergraded for decades, cleaners, telephonists and sterile services staff, who prepare instruments for surgery and who had been stuck on the same grade as washers-up since the health service was founded. Doyle had found men willing to stand as comparators: a wall-washer earning £3,000 a year more - and working 104 fewer hours a year - than a seamstress and sterile services staff; a plumber earning more than a nurse; a specialised nurse on a cancer ward, at the top of her scale, earning £8,000 a year less than a plant maintenance man; a nurse on £9,000 less than an engineer.

My suspicion is that the fear of equal pay claims - as in Hollywood - is entirely real; equal pay for equal work means that men will have to take home less, one way or another. Councils in the UK - who finally implemented their equal pay agreements in 2006 - complained that they need central government assistance in order to pay women what their work was really worth. Boo fucking hoo; progressive taxation (as if that existed) passes money from wealthier men to poorer women, cry me a river. Hollywood? Would probably get more money overall if it stopped failing so often. But less of it would go to men. And that would somehow be so threatening it's worth paying to make it go away.


How far does the threat go? Well, the NYT is calling bullshit on the different ways we frame men at home vs. women at home here:

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed.

It goes back to families and parenting. It usually does.

Truth & consequences in the stories we tell.

[Or, a meandering collection of links to stuff about stories, sandboxes, and power.]


Quick, what's the one thing everyone knows about Grand Theft Auto? Keep hold of the answer - we'll be back for it in a moment.


I was never sure how to order this post, or what exactly to include in it. So it's been festering in Dashboard for weeks now. Partly it was sparked off by reading criticisms of Iron Man, which blurred between entirely valid digs at the film's racism and sexism, and a less definable discomfort with the entire genre it's part of. See WOCPhD's brilliant post, where she seems to have lost sight of the fact that she's reviewing an adaptation of a 1963 pulp comic book.

That's pulp, where what is right and just comes way second to what's considered entertaining. That's 1963, the past, where a lot of our current media franchises come from - whether it's those comic book adaptations, or Narnia, or James Bond. Not that the newer franchises are a lot better, but (as I said when it came up on Punkass) characters like Pepper make way more sense in that context. The whole wonderboy-hero, powerful enough to do everything we wish to do, except for those boring things his ever-capable sidekick(s) do(es), makes more sense in that vein of pulp than in the current one. This hero-character is always at the top of the world. Why do we identify with him, when he's got nothing in common with reality at all?

Because we want to. Because we're wishing for his absolute power, and we are vividly interested in what the consequences that power might bring. We play sandbox games for similar reasons - a wish for the absolute ability to choose - and that raises discomforts of its own.

(It's always 'he'. Unless the red one is writing it, it's always 'he'.)


There is something Aishwarya said in the Iron Man thread at Daisy's place; "I really, really wish I could just watch movies where things blow up (because movies where things blow up are excellent) without being constantly alienated by this sort of thing. :("

That alienation is one of the major sources of the criticism of Iron Man; that when we leave ourselves behind and go to places where we have infinite power, and can blow up whatever we like, we're almost always asked to identify with white, heterosexual upper-class men. We want to be Bruce Wayne or James Bond. We wish for their momentum, possessions, power, and their challenges. Why do they all have to look the same?


An aside; Cleolinda is talking about a whole other sort of wishing, in a post about a book series that's aimed at teenage girls. I liked this:

Wish fulfillment: I really cannot stress how important this element is, because I think it's also the reason that Harry Potter grabbed the cultural imagination. You're not a neglected orphan sleeping in a cupboard! You're a wizard! You're the bestest wizard of all and you're also great at sports and you had rich, wizardly parents who loved you so much they died for you (but you've still got their money) and also, we brought you birthday cake! And then you, through Harry, are plunged into this fantastically detailed wizard world. I mean, shit, I'm sold. And I think most things that really grab people are going to tap that "I want to be that person and live in that world" vein. I want to be Elizabeth Swann, I want to be Lyra Belacqua, I want to be the Pevensie kids.

She's talking about the same instinct that makes us love those boys who can do anything they want...and yet everything she says about this sort of wish fulfilment turns me off. I don't much like any of the books and films she's referring to. Some of these are in a middle ground - but I seem to be banging my head against the fact that the wishes I like are usually aimed at (we might even say assumed at) a male audience, and Cleolinda is talking about teenage girls, and women who remember being a teenage girl.


A while ago, Trinity wrote about our discomfort with power and excess in an unrelated context - kink!:

Think about standard criticisms of the rich and opulent. Whether they're criticisms of the nobility, of the bourgeoisie, or other criticisms of the rich and powerful. The idea that these people are decadent, that they wallow in excess, drown themselves in pleasure.

That kind of excess is actually a big turn on for me. The idea of going further and doing more, overflowing with energy, desire, and intensity. It's something I began to have a very hard time with when I got into feminist circles that were also socialist or influenced by socialism.

Because the central idea of that kind of political movement is that some people have too much and some people don't have enough. If that's the material situation of people in the world, and I seek to be committed to some kind of distributive justice that least makes the first step to equalizing some of that, how can I get into bed and touch myself while imagining, sometimes literally, that I'm lord over other people?

While not primarily sexual, wish fulfilment stories seem to hit a similar wall in the liberal press; you can't be fantasising about that, that's too much, too violent, too greedy, too unfair. So onto Cate's GTA article at Shameless:

But the object of the game is still to shoot people and win gang wars, right? I find it hard to fathom why so many intelligent people insist on defending this game, whose major appeal I once heard summarized as, “you can sleep with a prostitute and then shoot her so you don’t have to pay.”

Creative, indeed.

What, is Shameless not so shameless after all? :O Certainly Cate is saying that a virtual world's functionality should contain hard-coded moral limits, rather than simple moral consequences. It is not enough that nothing real can be harmed or lost in the space, or that your virtual self suffers virtual consequences for performing proscribed actions; instead she asks that a line be drawn, and certain evils be rendered impossible. (Something like this exists in Sims 2 - you can't kill a baby or a toddler, can only have sex with adults and elders, and character's genital areas are obscured by pixels. These restrictions have been ripped up by a legion of fanmodders, which demonstrates how practical that approach is, though when choosing nominal imaginary limits, practicality is hardly the point. Worth remembering that it was modders who caused GTA3's Hot Coffee debacle. Ultimately neither lawmakers nor creators can censor the use of game software - it's the users who determine how it is played).

Our species of cyborgs has been wrestling with this problem, of defining our virtual limits, since A Rape In Cyberspace or before.

Dibbell's story touched on one point that has been gaining ground recently; should virtual crimes be subject to real-world consequences? The answer he watched arise from LambdaMOO was a no - those who commit virtual crimes should face justice within the intimacy of the wronged community. Then as now, the internet usually gives its wrongdoers a sentence of exile.

Regina Lynn, writing about a more recent virtual rape, also thinks not. Meanwhile, DailyBits has a list of unexpected real-world spillovers from virtual events; MMO addict deaths and in-game funerals, virtual thefts and real arrests, and a story about a Gunbound player from Brazil that I can barely get my head around.


Last week I read a Cif Arts piece in defence of James Bond that talked about how uncomfortably realistic violence is part of the thrill, when it comes to boy-heroes...and added a few words about consumption and luxury:

Thanks to the cartoon violence of the films it's also easy to forget just how effective the sadism in the novels can be. Fleming's books are creepy and chilling and this graphic cruelty, combined with painstakingly accurate descriptions of high-living, fine eating and the pleasures of quality consumer goods must make Bond a direct ancestor to characters like Patrick Bateman and the unnamed protagonist of Fight Club as much as the promiscuous father of so many lesser pulp-thriller spies. It certainly merits him a place in the canon.

So violence is an intrinsic part of this wishing-ground. Graphic violence, ultimate consumption, extreme adventures - and as the article hints, unlimited access to sex. Sometimes the hero is simply a tireless playboy, but many of these stories include legions of imaginary sex workers.

To my shame, it was only a week ago - and thanks to Chris - that I read the mighty OH JOHN RINGO NO review, which charts an odyssey of violent and misogynistic wish fulfilment. From Hradzka's description, every woman in the series is a sex worker, or described as a potential sex worker; within the fantasy space, all women are perceived as being available for sexual purchase.

Hradzka also mentions a whole aspect to this wish fulfilment thing that I'd never much thought of before:

Once you get past GHOST's initial spleen-venting, the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series falls into a much-maligned, much-loved genre which, for lack of a better name, I call "Man Builds Stuff and Gets Lots of Pussy." This is, quite frankly, what got me reading the series: I am not much for stories of a guy just killing terrorists and getting laid a lot; but let him start building a small kingdom while killing terrorists and getting laid a lot, and I am there. I confess that have a soft spot for these kinds of stories. I suspect that *lots* of men do: even if we don't build things ourselves, we like to *read about* guys building things: castles, weapons, companies, societies. It's really very soothing; it combines the pleasures of fiction with a those of a do-it-yourself manual. The same impulses may explain why a lot of male writers aren't content to have their hero just carrying, say, a 1911 as his sidearm; they have to tell you what make, model, whether it's got an internal or external extractor, what aftermarket parts he's tuned it up with, and who he bought them from, until you know all about his Kimber's Ed Brown slide stop and Wolff springs.

(Curiously, the sex-related parts do not require details of every thrust; if the chapter fades to black with the hero hopping into bed with two nubile wenches, honor is satisfied. John Ringo, alas, often carries honor considerably farther.)

I'd never put a name to that before, but building stuff is definitely a genre I like. I enjoyed this aspect of both Iron Man and Batman Begins...not to mention Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, a game in which you have to procure yourself an entire army. (I can think of only one Woman Builds Stuff story - A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. While I enjoyed the Woman Builds Stuff part of the book, it seemed rushed and unconvincing compared to the rest of it).


On CiF, Charlie Brooker unwraps the problem, and finds a new one wrapped inside:

The one thing everyone knows about Grand Theft Auto is that you can kill prostitutes in it. That's because it's a "sandbox" game in which you can kill anyone you like. Or you can not kill them. Or you can simply drive around slowly, obeying the traffic lights. If you break the law and the in-game police spot you, they'll hunt you down and nab you. Murdering innocent people is neither a) encouraged, b) free of consequence, or c) any more realistic than a Tex Avery cartoon.

...in other words, the problem is not that you can kill prostitutes, but that prostitutes are a singled-out class of people, neatly prepackaged as a unit by our culture in spite of their great diversity of circumstances, and the killing of this class of people IRL is common and so easy to get away with because of this - so when a game also presents sex workers as a class of people, and just happens to let you kill whoever you like, guess who people get most excited about shooting.


I should add; Brooker's point c) is under dispute. The Slate game review...which is entitled 'It's Not Just About Killing Hookers Any More'...says it's simply not true:

There's a difference this time: The violence is no longer cartoonish. Shoot an innocent bystander, and you see his face contort in agony. He'll clutch at the wound and begin to stagger away, desperately seeking safety. After just scratching the surface of the game—I played for part of a day; it could take 60 hours to complete the whole thing—I felt unnerved. What makes Grand Theft Auto IV so compelling is that, unlike so many video games, it made me reflect on all of the disturbing things I had done.

...and David Wong, in Seven Commandments All Videogames Should Obey (a followup to another wonderful article, A Gamer's Manifesto), devotes an entire page to saying it shouldn't be true:

If we shoot a zombie in the arm, we want his arm to blow off. If we shoot him in the knee, we want him to limp. And if we shoot him in the head, we want his head to explode. We want our bullets to create wounds.

[...]

Sword-fighting games like Oblivion are worse. You can slash the bad guy in the face with your blade and it does nothing. The enemy looks perfectly normal until he finally falls over dead, as if he had a heart attack from the excitement. Why give us a sword if we can't decapitate people? Don't tell us the system can't handle it, we were blowing off zombie limbs in House of the Dead a decade ago.

It's not about our blood thirst (well, not just about that), it's about making us feel like we're accomplishing something as we work our way through hordes of cookie-cutter bad guys. Oh, hey, you know what else we hate?

Filling the game with hordes of cookie-cutter bad guys.

This is another one of those problems that are exacerbated by new-gen graphics. Now that we can do photo-realistic faces, it's suddenly very weird that we're killing hundreds of identical clones.

How hard would it be to randomize facial features and skin tones? That's what we want, to feel like we're killing hundreds of different people. Not a bunch of clones or twins. We want to know, deep down, that there are hundreds of grieving mothers out there, lamenting the terror of our dreaded blade.

And I agree with him, I agree with Slate - we need the effects of our actions to look realistic, and the media queasies have repeatedly demonstrated the reason for this.


The first time I read an article about violence in videogames was almost ten years ago. It was in a library newspaper - probably the Times - and it mentioned several games, but was illustrated with one of Nomura's promotional images for Final Fantasy VII; a game that uses violence, questions it, and at one point devolves into an argument between Cait and Barrett about whether any of the violent things they've been doing are remotely justified.

That was the moment I first realised that I was never going to read anything of value about videogames in a printed newspaper, ever. Why shut up and go away when you can challenge and explore instead?

This is why my least favourite scene in Iron Man was the one that steamrolled over #6 of David Wong's Ultimate War Sim demand list:

Speaking of innocents, I want a war sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in games like the Red Alert series. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

See, Wong is a gamer kid with a good grip on reality. There exist other gamer kids who think reality is like Iron Man, where magical white people who waltz into other people's countries have the magical power to distinguish between nice, innocent brown people and evil brown people (there are no other kinds, just innocent or evil), remove the latter with pinpoint precision, and go home after a day well saved. These other gamer kids are called the US government.

It's the people who don't want their imaginary violence to be realistic that I worry about. The people who want the details glossed over, who want to make out that it's not as bad as it really is, who want to conceal the fact that it's the least powerful who always suffer first and most.


One last link: Catherine Bennett on GTA. Oh dear god, you must read this:

With a violent and nasty movie, or corrupting literature, the thing is simple. You merely have to buy a ticket for, say, No Country for Old Men, or There Will be Blood, and watch it, with a keen eye for anything that might be violent or nasty. With books, you simply open, then read a copy of The Catcher in the Rye or, to go back a bit, Lady Chatterley's Lover or a bit further, one of those 18th-century courtship novels whose potential to enervate young virgins was discernible, apparently, within just a few minutes of scholarly inspection.

How different for the mature student of Grand Theft Auto IV, who discovers that acquisition of the game, an Xbox 360 and a working television will not be nearly enough to expose the sickening extent of its moral bankruptcy. For that, you need time, skill, dedication and, I suspect, youth. In fact, it would probably be cheaper, and easier, for any averagely underqualified adult who craves the excitement of casual violence in a context of social indifference to make your way to somewhere like Borough Market and snarl: 'Out of the way, bitch' at every double buggy.

[...]

In fact, if a new book on gaming, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games, is to be believed, there may exist hardly anyone in sound mind who might not, from time to stressful time, benefit from an hour or two of moderately violent gaming. The authors, two Harvard psychiatrists, Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K Olson, were told by many young players that they played violent games to 'relax' or to 'get my anger out'. Should we not, as a matter of urgency, implore Gordon Brown to escape into GTA IV over the bank holiday? Or would the experience make an already vulnerable and solitary Prime Minister more likely to aim his car, à la Niko, at cyclists such as David Cameron?

Fancults!

As promised. And what better way to conflate religion with fandom than to look at religions that have come out of fandom?

There's three honest-to-$deity religions which are sourced from sci-fi fandoms. Scientology is the most notorious; Gor is also pretty clear-cut, though it's not always referred to as a religion. Then there's the ParatheoAnametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric Discordianism. It may be a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion, or it may be a joke disguised as a religion disguised as a joke. It began with the Principia Discordia and its followers, but was spread by the psychadelic conspiracy epic, ILLUMINATUS!, a book which is as canonical to Discordianism as it's possible for anything to be.

Meanwhile, the Lovecraft fandom has produced the mother of all religious hoaxes in spite of the author being an atheist. (Someone at the Weird Symposium described Lovecraft's world as being a sci-fi speculation based on Darwin and the emergence of atheism. Hm).


Then there's fandom out of religion, a topic which popped up on LJMQ today with winning timing wrt Christian fanfic. The Arthurian mythos is another tangle, though it seems to be moving in the opposite direction - scads and scads of stories first (stories that were steeped in Christianity anyway), and now you meet pagans who incorporate it into their religious beliefs - or insert the myths into a made-up English history that has it that their newborn religion is really thousands of years old. (Many of these people believe Stonehenge and Britain's other ancient monuments were designed by Druids, which is equally untrue; the only truth you'll find at Stonehenge is the stones themselves).

There's a website that claims to expose an Arthurian cultist who operated in New York in the 80s and 90s, one who bases her practises largely on roleplaying games and on, $deity help me, the Dark Is Rising fandom. See here:

The bulk of her ideas, concepts, and practices in regards to metaphysics were obviously derivative of popular fiction; she went so far as to describe Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising cycle of books as a loosely fictionalized account of events in her life. She alleged that Ms. Cooper had been a "friend of the family", especially the Druid/Voudon/Archaeologist father (The name 'Merriman' is actually taken directly from these books, as is the name 'Bran') and had fictionalized the exploits of her and their lives accordingly, occasionally swapping the genders of characters (which was her justification for the lead character in the series's being male).

She did not claim that I was a reincarnate of an obscure figure with a somewhat tangential connection to Arthurian mythology (Gwion Bach) until some time later.

[...]

She was also the main force behind the structure of the group, which was again heavily influenced by the structure of RPG-style 'adventure parties' (I repeatedly insisted that this be abandoned; she adamantly maintained that there was a much finer line between the RPGs that she/we played, and reality, than most people thought. She also insisted that fictional representations in popular books and movies were more useful as metaphysical education than that of established traditions. During the second half of our association, her insistence that White Wolf's "Kindred Of The East" source-books were based on fact, as well as the books of Tim Powers--going so far as to designate one of our 'magickal operations' around a plot-line lifted directly from them--proved to be a breaking point for numerous people.)

That's all pre-internets, not within the same territory I was talking about yesterday. The most famous internet fancult is probably the Snapes On An Astral Plane folks. They are religiously devoted to a Harry Potter character, who they believe to be literally real and able to contact them in their dreams. The wank report is too perfect to be summarised or excerpted, so I urge you to go read it.

[edit: I meant to add this yesterday but forgot; an intriguing comment from the F_W thread. "To me, getting a tat of a character is the same thing as getting a tat of any symbol-- it serves as a permanent reminder to embody certain characteristics, or to uphold a values system, or whatever. I have the Triforce tattood on my back, and it's there because what it stands for (the joining of Courage, Wisdom, and Power) is powerful and has a lot of meaning for me. But on the other hand, I also don't think the Triforce exists in some mystical realm, or that Link is sending me signals to write crappy fanfic and make godawful manips in his name. THAT'S what's totally batshit here."]


Then there's the Hojo.org Public Warning, a site which describes the misdeeds of two women, Jen and Renee, whose occult practices involve the Final Fantasy VII fandom, and who use the fandom as a way to make converts. Some dispute this exposé - I've seen a few comments around alleging that it's all just grudgewank on the part of the site owner, possibly taking inspiration from the Madison website I quoted above. I am certain that it's at least broadly true, because I briefly knew Jen Sagan myself, in early 2003. She was the 'friend' of...an emo nuisance, really, who got me nattering to her on MSN. [I would love to know if the blue person recalls any of this.] She seemed quite pleasant and reasonable, and I'd count her as one of the two most evil people I've ever met.

The site's mostly about allegations of appalling behaviour towards housemates, but fancultishness is never far away; "jen was on about how she had been betrayed, how they were so united...about this time i began to read a few horror stories. jen had made aeris [another member of the cult, real name Angel] sit in a bathtub full of ice cubes and green food colouring as part of her 'cetra training.' it's a wonder the poor girl didn't get hypothermia."

It also quotes something she wrote about herself on LJ once:

Hi, my name is Jen, and I help rehabilitate vampires and assist in spiritual awakenings. I also take care of metaphysical emergencies and, oh yeah, I do exorcisims and banishings too. I'm quite versed in ancient ritual and I often use my own blood to seal spells. I'm not catholic, but I'm not wiccan. God talks to me and tells me that the end of the world is at hand, she says. I'm married to Metatron and, oh yes, I'm the physical embodiment of the angel Uriel. In past lives I've been Integra van Helsing, Sephiroth, and Dilandau Albatou, amongst others. I've been to many theripists, but they all keep telling me I'm okay. Aside from catholic priests wanting to exorcise my house and my husband, things are pretty normal. Unless you count having 20 some kids live in the mental realm that my husband and I share as NOT normal...

[...]
I sing, I do celtic, modern, ritual and sword dancing, and I'm training to be the next soprano sorceress. Famous people I'm related to; Finn MacChumhal (McCool),Morgan LeFaye, and Bram Stoker.

[...]

I have no father, and my mother isn't human. My crazy Uncle Michael works for MI-5, and my Best guy friend was created in a super secret laboratory in Glendale, California, and "born" in the same hospital I was in Pasadena, which leads us both to believe that I might be part of the same "project". My husband, by the way, besides being Metatron, is also a No Life King. Not a nosferatu, no, but an echthros. And a mad scientist. And an Emperor. And a Priest.

(The whole otakukin business is helpfully explained in humanese here).


Dunno that there's any point to make here, other than that there's a slippery slope. There are fans who play with love and dreams, who put their all into it, who let it live inside them, and there are fans who get swallowed by it. And there are religions, which are mostly old and of murky origin, but the stories they tell are supposed to have some different value, morally and religiously, than the stories told in fandom. You get Christian proselytisers handing out copies of St Mark's Gospel, telling you to read the story, because then you'll believe. What's with that?

(My own view is that the Things Out There are unlikely to conform to any shape that comfortably fits in my dear little head, so I may as well grok it however's most appropriate for me. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao, and all that).

Castor, Achilles, Euryalus, Aretaeus, Alexander, Dubreuil

And Orestes.

[Or, to get into the spirit of the thing: Orestes and.]


I have a long memory - the kind where a good book can lodge for years, with me dropping by its cubbyhole every so often to continue our ongoing conversation. I've got broad tastes; encounters with the current mainstream are generally disastrous, and I tend to go home to sf/f eventually, but I wind up with a lot of isolated loves. Les Misérables is one of them. I don't know the first thing about other literature of the time and the place; it has no context for me, and if I want to grok all its obscurities, I grok alone.

After years of intermittent obsessing, I think I'm finally done talking to this one beautiful passage. It comes close to the end of Part 3, Book 4, Chapter 1: A Group Which Almost Became Historic, and it describes the connexion between Enjolras and Grantaire.

There are men who seem born to be the opposite, the reverse, the counterpoint. They are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja. They live only upon condition of leaning on another; their names are continuations, and are only written preceded by the conjunction 'and'; their existence is not their own; it is the other side of a destiny which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the reverse of Enjolras.

We might almost say that affinities commence with the letters of the alphabet. In the series, O and P are inseparable. You can, as you choose, pronounce O and P, or Orestes and Pylades.

Grantaire, a true satellite of Enjolras, lived in this circle of young people; he dwelt in it; he took pleasure only in it; he followed them everywhere. His delight was to see these forms coming and going in the fumes of the wine. He was tolerated for his good-humour.

Enjolras, being a believer, disdained this sceptic, and being sober, scorned this drunkard. He granted him a little haughty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always rudely treated by Enjolras, harshly repelled, rejected, yet returning, he said of Enjolras; 'What a fine statue!'

Let's get our priorities straight (ha!) here; the slash, is it canon?

See, that's a totally incommensurable question to begin with. Hugo was writing before queer, before 'homosexual' was a word, let alone a rights movement; I can only guess at what he was trying to say about these two men, but he's left me a few hints. Seven, to be precise. Seven people who belong with seven other people.

Castor and Pollux are twins hatched from the same swan-egg, brothers of Helen of Troy; one mortal, the other divine but generous enough to see eternal life as worth sharing.

Achilles and Patroclus - is there anyone left who hasn't read Troy In 15 Minutes? Because, um, they were totally cousins. Totally. <3<3 Cleolinda.

Nisus, Euryalus? Even Wikipedia isn't quite sure about those two. Lovers for sure, but sexually? Maybe, maybe not.

Eudamidas is a character of 2nd-century satire; given the way people wrote at the time, I can't decide if it's more likely that he was fictional, or a vaguely real gossip-piece. He perhaps got himself on Hugo's radar via The Testament Of Eudamidas, a painting Nicolas Poussin made in 1643 about the guy and his testament, based on the original story by Lucian. This unusual document allegedly willed away not just Eudamidas's meagre possessions, but also his daughter and his mother. From the original Lucian:

Mnesippus. Eudamidas of Corinth, though he was himself in very narrow circumstances, had two friends who were well-to-do, Aretaeus his fellow townsman, and Charixenus of Sicyon. When Eudamidas died, he left a will behind him which I dare say would excite most people's ridicule: but what the generous Toxaris, with his respect for friendship and his ambition to secure its highest honours for his country, may think of the matter, is another question. The terms of the will--but first I should explain that Eudamidas left behind him an aged mother and a daughter of marriageable years;--the will, then, was as follows: To Aretaeus I bequeath my mother, to tend and to cherish in her old age: and to Charixenus my daughter, to give in marriage with such dowry as his circumstances will admit of: and should anything befall either of the legatees, then let his portion pass to the survivor. The reading of this will caused some merriment among the hearers, who knew of Eudamidas's poverty, but did not know anything of the friendship existing between him and his heirs. They went off much tickled at the handsome legacy that Aretaeus and Charixenus (lucky dogs!) had come in for: 'Eudamidas,' as they expressed it, 'was apparently to have a death-interest in the property of the legatees.' However, the latter had no sooner heard the will read, than they proceeded to execute the testator's intentions. Charixenus only survived Eudamidas by five days: but Aretaeus, most generous of heirs, accepted the double bequest, is supporting the aged mother at this day, and has only lately given the daughter in marriage, allowing to her and to his own daughter portions of 500 each, out of his whole property of 1,250; the two marriages were arranged to take place on the same day. What do you think of him, Toxaris? This is something like friendship, is it not,--to accept such a bequest as this, and to show such respect for a friend's last wishes? May we pass this as one of my five?

Toxaris. Excellent as was the behaviour of Aretaeus, I admire still more Eudamidas's confidence in his friends. It shows that he would have done as much for them; even if nothing had been said about it in their wills, he would have been the first to come forward and claim the inheritance as natural heir.

Lucian explicitly connected Eudamidas with Pylades. He was writing about two characters having a rhetorical competition over whether Greeks or Scythians had the best friendships. (Lucian himself wrote in Greek but is believed to have been Syrian). The contest begins with Toxaris, the Scythian, telling Mnesippus why Scythians make sacrifices to Orestes and Pylades; "We honour Orestes and Pylades, then, because they excelled in the Scythian virtue of loyalty, which we place above all others; and it is for this that we have bestowed on them the name of Coraci, which in our language means spirits of friendship."

Passing briefly over Alexander and Hephaestion as being too damn famous and Hollywood and canonslashy and all that: the only source I've ever, ever found on Pechméja also refers directly to Orestes and Pylades. (Male Friendship In Pre-Revolutionary France by Jeffrey Merrick, which you can read if you have the right login. I don't, but the blue person is magical like that). Jean Pechméja and Jean Baptiste Léon Dubreuil were both born in the early 1740s in the same small town in Aveyron, but after leaving said small town didn't encounter each other again til the 1770s. By then Dubreuil was a doctor, Pechmeja a writer - their friendship resumed when Pechméja fell ill and Dubreuil moved to the outskirts of Paris to care for him; in return, Merrick tells us, Pechméja dedicated a classical-themed book to Dubreuil with '"respect, affection, gratitude" (le respect, la tendresse, la reconnaissance) for his "austere virtue, generous friendship, and preservative power" (la vertu austère . . . l’amitié généreuse . . . la puissance conservatrice).' The book is about how male friendship is way better than marriage because marriage involves all that complicated sex stuff which just makes people confused and miserable. [Here you may insert your own rant about how much Brokeback Mountain sucked for drawing teh queer as being an idyllic escape from the real-life responsibilities women and children put on a guy, as if queer was somehow the opposite of being a proper grownup who cares for/belongs to a family. Go on. I'll wait here til you're done.]

Here's Merrick's word on the O and the P, if not the intervening T:

According to their contemporaries, Pechméja and Dubreuil enjoyed "the most intimate friendship" (l’amitié la plus intime) and resembled the mythological companions Orestes and Pylades. [...] Inseparable from each other, as if married to each other, Pechméja and Dubreuil shared everything: "dwelling, social circles, good things, bad things, pleasures, and pains" (logement, sociétés, biens, maux, plaisirs, et peines).

I checked the citation on that as soon as I read it, half-expecting it to lead back to Hugo. It didn't. It's from a 1780s-90s thingy called Correspondance secrète, politique, et littéraire. Was that comment influenced directly by Lucian, or was this Coraci thread running wider than that through the literary culture of the time? Also:

According to the marquis de Bombelles, Noailles pressured the local clergy, who had wanted to exclude Dubreuil from burial in consecrated ground because of the way he had died, without the last rites, as well as the way he had lived. Bombelles did not explain what they found objectionable in the life of the successful and respected doctor. No one in 1785 suggested that Pechméja and Dubreuil were sexually involved with each other or even acknowledged that they loved each other, but this one cryptic remark indicates that some contemporaries, in this case institutional advocates of traditional values, believed that friendship might involve dangerous as well as delightful possibilities.

Orestes and Pylades, incidentally, are totally cousins. (For real).

So what have we got there? Three men of myth, two of murky classical history, one who died a mere 20 years before Hugo's birth. A brother, three lovers, a testator, and a best friend who we don't really have reason to believe was also a lover. These, held up to two spirits of friendship. These, and Grantaire and Enjolras, who are not even really on speaking terms with each other. The hell?


Hugo is both quite particular about sex and also fond of making exceptions to all his rules in general; Les Misérables has it that God supports the Swedish model, and that male philanderers are bad, except for the cheerful old one; he idolises marital sex, and equates virginity with not just virtuous conduct, but with a virtuous appearance;

"Monsiuer", said Thénadier, "it is my wife's bridal cap."
The traveller looked at the object with a look which seemed to say 'there was a moment, then, when this monster was a virgin'.

And yet; 'all the nuns in the world are not equal to one mother', and other such sentiments. (I love this book, but it's part of the reason why I think anyone who says wives and prostitutes are the only women who get laid is stuck in the 19th century). Hugo seems to elevate wives and mothers when it comes to women, but men he cherishes as virgins. He makes a point of the virginity of almost all his male cast; of Jean Valjean he says; 'His youth was spent in rough and ill-recompensed labour; he never was known to have a sweetheart; he had not time to be in love.' Then later; 'Jean Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been a father, lover, husband or friend.' Marius is righteously indignant at his grandfather's suggestion that he take Cosette as a mistress; the antagonist Javert's virginity is also spelled out; 'His life was a life of privations, isolation, self-denial and chastity; never any amusement.'

But Enjolras and Grantaire? Well. The former is clear enough;

'...he did not seem to know that there was on the earth a being called woman... Woe to the love affair that should venture to intrude upon him! Had any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais, seeing this college boy's face, this form of a page, those long fair lashes, those blue eyes, that hair flying in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those pure lips, those exquisite teeth, felt a desire to taste all this dawn, and tried her beauty upon Enjolras, a surprising and terrible look would have suddenly shown her the great gulf, and taught her not to confound the with the gallant cherubim of Beaumarchais the fearful cherubim of Ezekiel.

And Grantaire?

He was frightfully ugly; the prettiest shoe-binder of that period, Irma Boissy, revolting at his ugliness, had uttered this sentence: 'Grantaire is impossible,' but Grantaire's self-conceit was not disconcerted. He looked tenderly and fixedly upon every woman, appearing to say of them all: if only I would; and trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand.

Hugo piles up the adjectives right after that, contrasting Enjolras's 'chaste, healthy, firm, direct, hard, candid nature' with Grantaire's 'soft, wavering, disjointed, diseased, deformed ideas': again chastity is a trait that seems to extend well beyond sex - one Grantaire is devoid of even though he isn't getting any sex. Of course, I don't know what the hell he even meant by 'chastity' (and god help me, but I can't find the second volume of my French copy so I don't even know what the original goddamn word he used was). No sex? Not much sex? Not desiring sex? Sex only with people you're allowed to have sex with?

I could be a smart-alec slash canonista and say that Hugo is explicitly discussing only sex with women, but dude, did you catch the bit where I said the word didn't exist til a decade after his book came out? I am sure the OTP never occurred to him. Except for the part where he's talking about Hephaestion and Patroclus and Nisus and expecting us to grok it. You know, the part I got stuck on in the first place. My friend Kathie, being a little under three times my age, has it that the increasing visibility of queer people since the 1960s - and of queer readings of straight homosocial activities - has put new limits on straight masculinity, made it shy away even from homosocial forms more recent than those Hugo describes - constricting itself in fear of eyes like mine. I am just reading, just knowing that whatever bond he's describing is incommensurable with anything that could ever be written today.

He mentions Pylades only once more, in a chapter heading a full 400 pages later; Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk, in which Grantaire finally said "Vive la République! I belong to it," and 'Enjolras grasped his hand with a smile.'


A minor edit: here's 10littlebullets on LJ with some more gay metaphors Hugo pins to Enjolras.


an aside for those of you who've been net-stalking me since 2002; When I read that line early into the Lucian - "do you mean to tell me that you people actually sacrifice to Orestes and Pylades? do you take them for Gods?" "Sacrifice to them? of course we do. It does not follow that we think they are Gods: they were good men." - I put the kettle on and paced around the house until it boiled. I am staying with my person's family atm, so I had the restraint to only make one cuppa, not three.

How To Be A Postfeminist In 5 Easy Steps/many many links

Some time ago now Verte began musing on 'postfeminism': I went back to that now because of the way the word is used in the introduction to this book which I am reading. It's a collection of women's Telegraph obits - fun, quirky read so far, but here's how the two editors (both women) used the word 'postfeminism' in the intro:

As they explored new opportunities, some women went a little over the top in their efforts to prove that they could be as good as their male counterparts. [...] The sex war is only a s mall part of the story. With one or two exceptions (notably the splendid battling feminist Bella Abzug) few of these women had time for 60s-style Women's Lib. [...] Almost to a woman our subjects would have been horrified by today's 'victim culture' and would have taken a dim view of introspection. [...] Nor is there any whingeing about male chauvinism, though most of them faced it to a degree that would be almost unimaginable now.

But this collection is not some worthy litany of women's achievements played out to the accompaniment of shattering glass ceilings. In these post-feminist days we can welcome the fact that freedom for women means not only freedom to be good, brave or clever, but freedom to be mad, bad or dangerous to know - sometimes all three. [...]

None of the women whose lives are chronicled here had their careers mapped out for them. They could not follow their fathers into the family regiment - or inherit a title. No rich uncle would take them to his club to introduce them to his contacts in the City. As a consequence their stories often have a free-wheeling, anarchic quality, full of surprises and sudden changes of direction.

5-step recap there:

1. We're the Telegraph, dummy. It's like printed Fox News.

2. We want women to continue to be special cases of people rather than people, just as things have always been.

3. We are poutywahwah with everyone who has tried to make the world otherwise, and will make disparaging comments about them at every opportunity.

4. We will make vaguely feminist sentiments - freedom to be mad, bad or dangerous to know - but we will use a magic word to make these sentiments safe rather than challenging to the white guy overlords.

5. This word is 'postfeminism'.

This is just one instance of the word, and an instance with a particularly strong dose of wingnut behind it, but these things are starting to pile up. I've seen Tricia Sullivan's works referred to as 'postfeminist' too. They are not. They are feminist. Perhaps 'third-wave' was the adjective the reviewer was looking for. I do not know. Is postfeminism an attempt to pretend feminism (like punk) never happened?

Now, links: The Debate Link: Why is the Only "Good" Civil Rights Leader a Dead One? makes many interesting points that I think run parallel to the whole postfeminism hoohah in one sense; privileged people desperately trying to deny that the civil rights movement was what it was but at the same time having to give brownie points to what it was because if they didn't, they'd look like the assholes they really are.

Irshad Manji explains why Benazir Bhutto sucked all along.

RenegadeEvolution comes bearing win: Creepy Dudes and
Creepy Chicks.

Qaequam on intellectual property. I love this topic, because it's unusual in human history, completely broken and also the backbone of the popular culture industries. One of my favourite instances of it is the Rider-Waite-Smith Copyright FAQ, which should generate much fun in 2012, but that is by the by.

David Wong et al explain in gruesome detail why we should all pretend 2007 never happened. I for one would cheerfully do that.

And, Erin at projectdownload has found an unexpected happy ending. Which is great but it didn't have to be that miraculous and the only reason it is is because a bunch of cruel, violent assholes with pretend respect for human life decided it should be so.

Carnivals etc.

Just SFnal links today.

The 18th Carnival of Feminist Sci-Fi and Fantasy is up: Part I (Women, Gaming and You!); Part II (These Things We Love, And How We Interact With Them; Part III (Reviews, Reactions And Recommended Further Reading). It is a lovely carnival, in spite of the fact that I appear twice.

Helen Keeble is making a Weird writeup, which is way better than my Weird writeup. Here is part 1, which is about Lovecraft, Narnia and the tension between worlds - the discussion has veered towards Harry Freaking Potter. [addendum: part 2 and part 3.]


(Oh, and I think I never linked this before: the Alas thread about the whole sex-workers-in-sci-fi thing, which I briefly resuscitated t'other day with a link to my last post. It has been a fun conversation).

From The Whoreses' Mouth

[addendum: Helen Keeble has written some wonderful notes on the Weird Symposium, and I've collected the links here - my own, much inferior, notes are linked at the end of this post.]

This would be further to '1958'. Because, as I mentioned on t'other blog, I went to The Weird symposium, and then the Weird symposium went to a bar, and China Miéville bought me a drink and talked with me about whores.

I shall now leave a few lines blank to give you time to get over how wonderful my life is.




By then I was suffering from brain-mush induced by lack of sleep and passive inhalation of Immanuel Kant, so there are two important things about the whores in The Perpetual Train that I didn't manage to bring up, but on the whole, I forgive him. The first thing he said when I mentioned the topic was that he'd thought through the gender politics of it and was prepared to stand by that part of the story, both its stance and its way of getting there; I think he'd had this conversation before, and that he'd had it with himself before that.

It's a bit of a duckrabbit: looked at through the lens of an SF-reading feminist, it's part of one distinct pattern; read from the point of view of a revolutionary socialist (I can pretend to have that POV for a moment, right?) it's a different picture. He said he was reflecting the history of railway-making, in which women do appear only as prostitutes or as slaves; given that, presenting the prostitute as a wage-labourer who can, like male wage-labourers, be radicalised by their experiences under capitalism, is (he thinks) a positive. He's well aware of the general SF reading, though, and says 'they do not have hearts of gold.'

The big thing I did manage to get out was that it seemed like his male characters had jobs - surveyors, gendarmes, railwaymen - while his prostitutes were their jobs. He said he felt he'd written them as people who were in control of their labour - they had rules, enforced them, went on strike. He pointed out that the prostitutes are at the forefront of the workers' radicalisation, and reminded me of one charming aspect of the story that I didn't mention last time; the Iron Councillors all, irrespective of gender, call each other 'sister' because the prostitutes refused to use 'brother'. (The other radical group in Iron Council, the Caucus, all, irrespective of gender, call each other Jack, which was really funny before Ori and Madeleina got to know each other). That explicitly identifies the rest of the wage-labourers with the prostitutes, which I think you've got to love.

I pointed out how invisible sex work is to women; how my young brother is far more exposed to the sex industry than I am, how very few women will encounter stripping and hooking (and those who do will mostly be those whose partners are consumers of such), while the industry is marketed at most men and part of the culture of many. How this makes writing about the sex industry excluding for women and entitling for men. (I don't think I said that part particularly clearly). He told me that that was a pretty recent thing - that 15 years ago it was a far more obscure part of male life than it is now. (That is the kind of information that women do not have access to, see?) It's weird that that's happened at the same time as women are becoming more economically powerful.


I didn't, and I wish I had remembered to, mention the problem Ide Cyan so eloquently described here:

"This is the kind of bullshit coming from leftist men that feminist women have been debunking since the invention of socialism. It presupposes that women's oppression is the result of industrial capitalism, rather a specific form of oppression with its own relations of production, and conveniently obscures proletarian men's role in the oppression of women. Obviously, leftist men still haven't paid attention, or do not care to integrate that particular analysis into their revolutionary approaches."

I don't think Miéville has completely failed to integrate that analysis, but he's certainly putting it way second to capitalist oppression, because that's what the whole sodding book is about. (That his stance is ultimately abolitionist is related to this; yeah, he's imagining a post-sex work utopia, but that's because he's imagining the end of all capitalist wage labour).

The second thing I missed, closely tied to the above, is the point V raised here about the use of sex work as part of the 'story' of individual characters (Ann-Hari and Carianne, but also dozens of other SF characters - Molly Millions, Niki Sanders, several continuities of Catwoman, et cetera ad infinitum). It's extremely irritating when read as part of that group of male-authored SF about sex work; I'd imagine he'd again be writing it as a being about wage-labour rather than being about sex, but I would've liked to argue the toss about it, because I refuse to believe it's a coincidence that it happens with so very many strong female characters. It's also, I feel, touching on appropriation; using a real-world group (sex workers) to explain your politics, your stories, your world.

He told me to come say hello if we're ever at the same convention again, so you never know. My notes from The Weird, if you'd like to read them, are here.

The Rules

Alas and Feminist SF (I got a minor Heroes spoiler on that thread, oh noez) are doing an excellent job of saying 'Nice, but not good enough' in JK Rowling's general direction. This comment had me running to the Indy archives, because I recalled that I've heard this conversation before.

I first read this wonderful Hari piece in a newspaper I picked up on the Tube nearly two years ago, and it's sharp enough to have stuck in my head. It's about the laws of depicting gay men in Hollywood, and boils down to this:

"There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive - in which case you will die."

[an aside: Hari missed one of the rare exceptions, The Wedding Banquet, which was Ang Lee's first gay film. It's a comedy, but a serious one with a lot of cultural smarts to share and a lot of real troubles to talk about, and the sexuality is masculine and the ending is cosy. Back when I was at university, I once had half a gender seminar dissolve into an argument about whether we liked Simon or not.]

That's Hollywood, and Hari explores the particulars in splendid detail. The underlying rule - that men having sex with men and enjoying it and enjoying life cannot be shown to the world - also seems to drive Rowling, who has gone with celibate, tragic and dead, and added silence atop of that. Gay relationships in SF/F have a distinct leaning towards tragedy; Iron Council we spoke of yesterday, China Mountain Zhang can be shelved beside it, and the LHM goes without saying (um, that's when it is shelved, rather than in the guilty sop pile next to my bed). Meanwhile in ILLUMINATUS! (and I feel in The Year Of Our War too), teh gay is a sort of comedic, pornic horror. Interview With The Vampire skirts both, looking for shock, tears and erotic frisson. (One sometimes-glorious counterexample is the Authority, though most of what I know about that I learned from reading Alis Dee).

Lesbians, from Sandman to Discworld, are better at getting away with it, but I can't help but wonder if that's because everyone knows that if there's no cock, it's not real sex. Then there's distractions like Inara - and most of the queer in the Vagina Monologues, come to that - who are just doing it for the men, because the men are so mean, and the men never let us 'be ourselves', oh wah wah, because gay has to be a 'choice', a justification, a negative rather than a positive. Sex has to have a cock. One cock. Even if you're just hiding from it. And more than one cock just can't be good.


Addendum, which I can't believe I forgot earlier: Daurizre (see #8 specifically) once wrote on the same topic, but took it in the opposite direction. She calls it 300 Syndrome, and says it thusly:

"There is, among conservatives and Republicans, what I might dub 300 Syndrome. It's been pointed out before that many Nazi leaders were homosexual, and people have pondered why it is that gays would run to a group of people that would try to kill them--the obvious answer being summed up in the phrase 'self-defense'. But there's a flip side to it, when people who otherwise loathe gays embrace certain gay men, or bisexuals, as the epitome of Manliness, all without acknowledging that they were, in fact, gay or bi. For example, the movie "300" stars three hundred Spartans, and the Spartans, like most in Greek society at the time, subtly encouraged gay relations so long as they strengthened the bonds between fellow soldiers. However, the righties who want to hold the movie up as an example of all that is white manliness ignore this--not because they're stupid, but because being gay is forgivable if you kill a whole lot of people. Alexander the Great loved Hephaestion, and slept with Bagoas, but this is okay--he killed a whole mess of folks, too, which balances the gayness out. That sort of thing. This is Don't Ask Don't Tell in action, where men and women are allowed to fight and die so long as they don't admit their sexuality."

300 was, of course, based on a book by Frank Miller. Ho hum.

1958

[NB: I originally wrote this to let of steam, but both this post and the FMT are now very slightly Internets Famous, and have thus been Criticised by Smart People. I'd therefore like to add C A Monteath-Carr's suggestion for an alternate FMT equation:

If (# of Female Prostitutes) > (# of All Other Women), then [WTF?]


I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.

I said, alonglongtimeago, that I'd get back to the whole general mess of how sex work gets portrayed in sci-fi & fantasy. It's a happy coincidence for me that Yonmei recently wrote about this vile story CS Lewis penned in 1958 because if she hadn't, I would've had to search it out and reread it, ewwww. It's a short exploration concerning sex on an exploratory mission to Mars. 'Sex' meaning to Lewis exactly what it often means in sci-fi and in videogames - sex between the male adventurer and the female prostitute. Go read Yonmei's post, because I can't bear to rehash this vile example. Gist is, women can only come to Mars if they're going to be prostitutes. (The really cringlingly awful part is that when I first read it - I think I was 14 or 13 - I swallowed this shit whole.)

There's a lot of supposedly 'speculative' fictions where it's still 1958.


I am going to start with the ones I love the most, because they're the ones that hurt; China Mieville remains my writer of ultimate worship (and not just because of what he called Charles Clarke that one time on Lenin's Tomb), but there's this moment in The Scar where one of the minor characters, Carrianne, tells a story near-identical to that of Lewis's 'ministering angels'. Even on a first, frantic readthrough of a book I was badly in love with, this stood out as the weakest thing he'd ever put on paper.

We were sailing our whim-trawler for Kohnid in Gnurr Kett. That's a long, hard journey. I was seventeen. I won the lottery to be figurehead and concubine. I spent the daylight strapped to the bowsprit, scattering orchid petals in front of the ship, spent the night reading the men's cards and in their beds. That was dull, but I enjoyed the days. Dangling there, singing, sleeping, watching the sea.

Yeah. Great journeys are for penises, but vaginas can tag along and put out for us and that makes them winners! This isn't normative, I know, it's descriptive, he has an anthropology background, I shouldn't be so quick to smell a rat. And yet.

Carrianne is only one woman, but in male-authored sci-fi, the whole stupid prostitutes-only thing more often follows that 1958 pattern of the organised group. Iron Council is such a self-aware commentary on socialism, on industrial organisation, on the politics of objects (both technologies and bodies), on revolution, that I'm hesitant to rip at any one moment. It's a journey, a circle. The bit that involves prostitution is that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book that some people hate and I hopelessly adore: Anamnesis ~ The Perpetual Train.

Mostly, it's about technological determinism with sociological determinisms piled atop that. (Beautifully. It's probably the best book in the entire world). A company sponsored by a wealthy coastal city-state is building a railway line across a continent, out from their city toward places they have never been. The Perpetual Train follows Judah, one of the Transcontinental Railway Trust's surveyors: he watches as the construction of the railway changes the land and the communities that it passes through.

The villages they pass become rich and murderously violent - decadent, liquor-swilling, whore-filled and lawless - for the few days or weeks of the railroad, and then die. The towns live mayfly lives. Sex is as much part of the iron-road industry as spiking, grading, herding and paperwork. A tent city of prostitute refugees from New Crobuzon's red-light districts follows the rails and the men that set them down. The men call it Fucktown.

It's 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers' prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There's also, of course, this narrative about how 'vices' of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness -

- but not quite, I fucking adore this one:

There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets. [...] There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell sex or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos...

Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you're appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You're using the gender-neutral word 'worker' to mean 'man who pays for sex'? You're drawing lines between 'untamed' rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) 'corrupt' those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?

There are only four sorts of women in The Perpetual Train: these village sluts, these whores, monsters and a few passing gamblers. The only ones that organise are, naturally, the whores.

Mieville is a materialist revolutionary - the (male) workers unionise, and the (female) sex workers unionise, not for ideology but because the TRT's wage money dries up; the two unions then unite and eventually do things their own way, a way in which no one is being paid for anything. So women get to stop being prostitutes AFTER THE REVOLUTION! and not before. That's all the women he's writing about, by the end of The Perpetual Train, excepting a few nameless Remade (class-critical monsters). It's not like this in The Scar: there, where a small group of women gather together, they're usually librarians.

[Addendum: I spoke to him about this after the Weird symposium - see here for his response to some of the points raised.]


I've done Firefly. The circumstances are murky, but the only reason Inara was able to be part of the quest while retaining her class privilege was because she was a sex worker.


I said I wouldn't do Frank Miller himself. It's the writers I love that I want to unpick. We're going to Discworld. We're going to the fandom-splitting nadir/zenith of Discworld, Night Watch. It has two things in common with The Perpetual Train; firstly it is a fold in time, set about thirty years before the rest of the series around it; secondly, all the women in that time-fold are prostitutes, excepting only two, who are both addressed as potential prostitutes. In the past, all women were bought and sold, geddit?

There are the prostitutes. There's the cat-owning figure at the back, Madame, and at one point a man asks if that's her title or her profession. There's the real seamstress, for Discworld regulars. I can't recall another woman in the entire thick of the book: Sybil and Angua creep in only at the temporally flat edges. I can't excerpt *listens to collective sighs of relief* because I can't find a copy anywhere (fact: he once posted my copy of Night Watch to Australia, but then gave me one of the other zillion we had sat about just-in-case), but I swear to god it's true. And again, as in The Perpetual Train, the unionising of the prostitutes is their key issue. It's an entirely realistic concern. And yet.

It's not like this is how he usually 'does' gender; Pratchett adores toying with female stereotypes, and has made us see eye to eye with the bitter one; fall in love with the fat, forty-year-old virgin; awaken the inner babysitter. He's franchised the Tooth Fairy. He's done an entire book about the orphaned servant-girl not getting married to the handsome prince. He's followed the queen from beehive to chessboard to mountaintop kingdom. Do not ask us about Mrs Cake.

Thing is, outside of the agency-worker Tooth Fairies, the only organised group of women...is that union, a guild no less, of prostitutes. There is this whole thing about how the witches do not have a hierarchy, or a leader, because Esme Weatherwax would never allow it; there is this other whole thing about how only three city guilds will even accept female members; the whores, the beggars, and the detested Night Watch (but only long after the revolution, even then). In other words, women do not form organised groups, but prostitutes do. And in Night Watch, the revolution demands 'reasonably priced love', because the only women the author has welcomed on board are whores.


[Here there could've been a word or two about how prostitution is brought into videogames, but it's just more of that cock-coddling I mentioned here, with the occasional added touch of slut-shaming or poor-little-victiming. I do think it makes me feel less comfortable presenting as a female PC in a gameworld, just because it makes it overtly clear that this invented society, otherwise little resembling our own, is programmed to cater specifically to the cock. Bioware has been known to proffer an occasional rentboy. It doesn't work, because I am not really a potential consumer of sex. It just looks like mapping male sexuality on to that afterthought that is the female PC, which is what it is.]


I'll say it again; when male sci-fi authors write about trade unions for sex workers, they do not do so out of the goodness of their bleeding liberal hearts. One fascinating thing about sex work that I would never have known without reading the words of sex workers themselves: the johns are sometimes organised. (The immensely readable PeridotAsh has written about this here and here). The sex industry impinges more on the average man's life than the average woman's - few women are potential customers or potential employees, while a sizeable minority of men are consumers of sex and all will find it marketed to them at some point. Is this why male sci-fi writers circle the topic like vultures, appropriate it and sometimes use it as their only discourse on women at all? By fantasising about organised sex workers, are they becoming an organised community of sex consumers? Are they already that, and just acting it out on paper?

Um, I think Mieville doesn't even like vagina, and I know Frank Miller has never spoken to a woman in his entire life. But hey.

[addendum: the angry black woman assures me that Mieville does like vagina. I am more than cool with that, because oh god would I ever hit it.]


Does this matter out in the real world? Only in that it makes it harder to hear real sex workers because of all the male-invented versions getting in the way, and putting fanrats like me off the topic entirely because I've seen how these guys use it.

always christmas and:

[in my next post, I will take the piss out of CS Lewis more directly, I promise.]

Alis Dee: breaking my heart and winning the internets.

A related aside; when replaying RPGs, it's really interesting to gen a character of the opposite gender to the one you took in your first trip. Firstly, I find it subtly changes the way you see social tone of the gameworld. (This is particularly so in BGII: Throne of Bhaal - standing there between Sarevok and Imoen, whether you're representing yourself as male or female does make a slight difference, if only in my head.) Secondly, it makes you aware of how the gameworld doles out [relentlessly heteronormative] sexual comfort to each gender. I usually, but not always, go with female characters on first playthroughs, and regularly wind up shocked when situations that were rendered neutrally in that first playthrough are directly, deliberately sexual when I'm playing a man.

I've just got done replaying Neverwinter Nights and it's pretty stunning how much cock-soothing there is thrown in there - everyone from both the two female henchmen to many minor NPCs to one of the major villains is at it. I'm fond enough of Aarin Gend, but after trying it in gamer drag, he feels like famine. Solanas was right; a female PC is asexual, desireless, but a female NPC is an object, a fucktoy. [We will forgive NWN, but only because of Valen. Valen!]

You can always reinterpret a book, but in videogames misogyny is hardwired, right there in the 1s and 0s. It's made invisible to female gamers except in the ultralight of drag. Weirder still is the experience of playing one of those games that were written before gender; I played a little of Final Fantasy I last year, and was confused at the excess of random lesbianism until I realised that the game was assuming that all my self-genned, neutrally presented characters were male.

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.