Rebecca Allen: A Nerd at Peace

So. I have ranted before about my experience as a female geek trying to have a conversation with male geeks, and the prove-your-credentials bullshit that goes on. The more I pay attention, the more I see this bullshit is everywhere; it’s a fucked up game that, when I see it going on, I refuse to play. It pisses me off.

I have also written that I think that, generally speaking, I think that happens less in sports fandom because women have been “allowed” to like sports for longer. Actually, what I wrote specifically was:

That said, I’ve still been, um…initiated by male sports fans, by which I mean skeptically asked to prove that I’m part of a group. Let’s just say I’ve never heard anyone ask a dude if he’s really a fan or if he’s just wearing the hat. But (while I wouldn’t be surprised if it had happened to others) I’ve never run into anything as malicious or defensive as I did in the comic book situation.

Spoke too soon, it turns out. Now, I still suspect that’s generally true, but all I’m working with is personal anecdotes, so I shall refrain from drawing any specific conclusions. But I did run into a pretty parallel, this-isn’t-how-you-treat-male-fans situation on Friday, that I need to rant about because it’s still pissing me off.

Traditional, old-fashioned, House-that-Ruth-Built Yankee Stadium is closing after this season, to be replaced by a shinier, more expensive House that Steinbrenner Built. So Jess and I decided to go see one last game together (err… one last game at the stadium, the first one we’d seen together) and snagged a couple of bleacher seats. The bleachers definitely used to be known as the home of the drunken assholes in the stadium, but in recent years alcohol has been forbidden in that area, so they’ve become more family friendly. But that didn’t stop a couple of drunken douchebags from congregating outside the stadium to yell at people as they walked by. Specifically, a drunk dude screamed at us, “HEY LADIES, you like baseball?”

Tee-hee, no! We just thought the hats were totally cute and felt like dropping $80 so we could admire the players in tight pants!

Wait, no, the other thing. The game. Yes, we enjoy that. I froze up because I had no idea how to answer, and probably shouldn’t have answered at all. Then again, I’m someone who smiles at everyone and stops to chat when random strangers talk to me — still trying to shake my small-town upbringing. So I said, “Yeah…?”

To which he answered, “So then, like… Do you know how many outs are there in an inning?”

At which point I exploded with, “OH MY GOD, DO YOU THINK WE ARE STUPID, YOU JACKASSES!” and stormed in to the bag-check line while Jess stared at me in surprise. I rarely scream at strangers. I rarely scream at all, actually. But like I said, I won’t play that game anymore, and it seriously enrages me.

Here’s the thing: six outs per inning is kind of the most basic, standard thing you know about baseball. Three strikes, you’re out; three outs per half-inning. I don’t know when I learned that, but it was ages before I actually became a baseball fan. It may not be universal knowledge, but it’s pretty standard; it’s especially standard among people who are attending a baseball game, whether they’re big fans or not. To ask someone attending a baseball game if he or she knows that is insulting and yes: in this situation, it was a sexist thing. It wasn’t a good faith question. It may have been a severely misguided attempt at flirting, or it may just have been some douchebags being douchebags because they could, but they weren’t yelling insults at men. They were targeting women, questioning our intelligence, and questioning our reasons for attending.

Deep breaths.

It didn’t ruin the night: the Yankees pulled off a 2-1 win, and I got to see Mariano Rivera (my very favorite player) get a 5-out save. We had a great time. It just sucks that in order to get in to have a great time, we were slapped with yet another reminder that, as women, there are still people who are at best surprised (and sometimes hostile) when we venture outside of our specifically-designated woman-places (the kitchen, I guess?) and enjoy life as if we were actually just people.

I love my office: not only do we do good work, but I really like most of the people I work with. A very high percentage of my coworkers are either really into scifi, really into baseball, or really into both. Obviously, this is fantastic. Sadly, though, tonight we had a goodbye party — my coworker Erika (a lovely person who invited me to join the feminist SF bookclub she attends) is leaving the company. Sad for the company, but awesome for her: she’s actually off to get her Master’s degree.

A Master’s degree in science fiction. How freaking awesome is that?

Anyway, I bring this up here not just to congratulate her (hi, Erika!), but also because she has a blog. It’s just starting out, but so far, so awesome. Consider this a high recommendation.

(Unrelated PS: I’ve installed a plugin that allows me to put in an avatar with each post. Not sure how I feel about it yet, but the image to the left is from faceyourmanga.com and is actually a pretty decent likeness…)

(A second ETA: Damn, I didn’t see this until after I’d posted, but it’s pretty awesome. The excellent people at Girl-Wonder.org have organized a Con Anti-Harassment Project, because cons should be fun, damn it.)

So my blogging roll was killed by non-blogging-related stress, unfortunately. (Though hey, two posts in a month is better than I’ve managed at points in the past.) I don’t have anything real for tonight, but here’s some smart stuff other people have written:

The Dark Knight, Part 2: Yes, I’m Still Mad About This, another excellent post on The Dark Knight by Poison Ivory. (Psst: spoilers included.) I point this one out not only because it’s smart and interesting, but because there’s been a little discussion in comments here about the question of if and when feminism enhances or detracts from storytelling. I think Poison Ivory makes a good case for how, if TDK had been less sexist, it would have been a better movie.

Second, via Seeking Avalon, an International Blog Against Racism Week post: Smilla’s Not all cats are grey: 25 years of cover whitewashing in Joan Vinge’s “Cat” series. This post had my jaw pretty much on the floor because, here’s the thing: I’ve read Vinge’s “Cat” series. Twice, in fact; I was really excited when I found they were reprinted and bought copies (which I promptly lost somehow). I really enjoyed the series.

And I’d never noticed Cat was a character of color.

Yeah. The descriptions of Cat, while rare in the books, are pretty clear on that. And I’m a reader who skims for dialogue and action, a bad habit which I now realize is even worse than I’d thought. This post was a huge privilege check for me, because while I generally try to be conscious, I clearly have blind spots. It never would have occurred to me that being able to skim books and just plain not notice the characters’ ethnicities was one of them. I think — hope — I notice more than I used to, but it’s always good to have a reminder that I can do better and pay more attention. I will push myself to do so.

(Un-)Confounding the Matter: More on “Strong Women”

Apparently, when I promise to blog more I stop blogging for months at a time; when I say I’m too busy to blog, I get out a record number of entries (for me) in a month. Go figure. But one of the cool things to come out of the Dr. Horrible discussion (at least for me) was a long list of things to blog about.

Here’s one thing that came up a lot in that discussion: Strong Women. Because I felt very much that Penny was a weak character, and many people responded that she was very strong in nontraditional ways; in other places I saw a lot of angry muttering that not every female character needs to kick ass, and that Penny would have been ruined if she’d kicked someone in the face, in response to people wishing that she had been stronger. And the thing is, all of the above are true, and non-contradictory.

The heart of the problem is this: there are two meanings of “strong” in play here, and that’s making the discussion a lot harder to have. In one of my very first entries, I actually wrote this in a footnote:

I call them dynamic female characters rather than strong female characters to avoid conflating the idea of a well fleshed out, well written female character with a female character who is physically strong.

Still true! Basically, what we’re looking at is two definitions: physically strong (or emotionally/mentally/etc), referring to a character trait; and strong characterization, referring to well-written, three-dimensional characters. Penny from Dr. Horrible was, I think, emotionally strong—she was quietly, optimistically trying to make a difference in the world, from what little we saw of her personality—but was weakly written because we saw so little of her personality in a story that could have given us much more. What motivated her to help the homeless? What was it about Hammer that enamored her to him? What would her idea of a happy ending have been? I’ve got no idea. I know she was nice, and pretty, and very well-acted. But her presence in the story wasn’t as a character, it was as a prop; she provided motivation and a point of contention between the men. Penny may have been a strong person, but she was a weak character.

I suspect that the fact that Dr. Horrible was by Joss Whedon made the distinction even less clear—after all, Buffy is an iconic character. She’s strong, in that she’s able to throw her enemies across the room; she’s strong, in that she has her own motivations, a developed personality, and she was able to grow and change through the course of even just the handful of episodes that I watched. So I was disappointed that Penny was “weak”: not that she didn’t have Buffy’s superpowers, but that she didn’t have Buffy’s agency.

This is why I prefer the word dynamic to strong when discussing the quality of presentation of female characters. But overall I don’t think it’s a very hard concept—but often the two meanings of strong are mistaken and it’s rarely a good thing. I’d much rather read a story about a dynamic woman who is rescued from danger by a man than read a story about a physically strong female caricature who always rescues herself. Either way can be done well, but to tack physical strength on to a dynamic hero who doesn’t need it–who’s dynamic in other ways—can be confusing and detrimental. So to illustrate this, I’m going to critique a movie I actually really enjoy (Ever After) behind the cut.
Continue reading ‘(Un-)Confounding the Matter: More on “Strong Women”’ »

(Note: the conclusion of this piece non-specifically references elements of Dr. Horrible and The Dark Knight that could be spoilery, but gets in to no detail.)

An anecdote: sophomore year of college, I took an American Literature class (ranging from Native American narratives through about 1900, so… pretty vast) as part of the requirement for my major. As we got to the later part of the course, we read works by Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne. My professor made an off-handed comment about how the books didn’t actually sell that well when they were first published, and the authors didn’t quite get why. After all, their works were important and intelligent, and in fairness, history did indeed prove them right on that count.

“So what were people reading?” I asked. Evidently, the answer is dime novels: romances, mysteries, and general silliness. Pretty much the same thing they’d read since the products became available, and the same things they read now. So, my question was, why weren’t we reading or discussing what most people were interested in?

The professor didn’t really get why I asked.

Here’s my stance: I think that what people—most people, the majority of people—consume is of deep importance. Culture is an inescapable influence on everyone; for better or worse, it creates the status quo and maintains it. It defines normal and exerts a constant invisible pressure that pushes people towards that norm.

Culture changes with time, but it’s slow to do so, and it takes a lot of people putting a lot of effort in to change it. This happens on many fronts, the most obvious being political, but social change is also a huge part of culture. For example, President Truman signed the order to integrate the army in 1948—the year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. It seems to me that there needs to be a cultural tipping point for change to happen, but it doesn’t just happen. People need to work to create that tipping point, to raise consciousness, to shove cultural norms in a new direction inch by inch. Nothing happens easily or automatically.

I am a feminist.* I believe that, while there have been many, many positive changes in this culture, that we’ve got miles to go. I look around and see a culture that dismisses women as just bodies, that feels entitled to tell women what their bodies should look like, and what they should and shouldn’t do with said bodies.

I’m a fairly huge consumer of media. And I get really excited on the rare occasion I find a female character I can really identify with, because they are just that: rare. And yeah, that has everything to do with the sexism of culture, which is reinforced in myriad ways. These ways are hard to see, especially if you have privilege. But they don’t have to be blatant, because there are millions of them, so they can be each be tiny still exert great pressure. That’s why I speak of things in terms of trends and tropes and cultural context: because each individual problem may be tiny, but then you look at how many examples of a problem there are, you actually start to see scope and the influence of the mostly-invisible culture.

So to go back to my anecdote: I think pop culture is hugely important. I think studying the past can reveal those fought-for and hard-won inches of change. When did dime novels first feature characters of color? How were they represented? When did the first character of color show up as the protagonist? How about queer characters? How about women in non-traditional female roles? If I had the time and the funding, I would loooooove to actually do a massive examination of dime novels.

And of course, if you look at current media, you can see a reflection of the current culture. In light of recent discussion, some examples: the problem isn’t that a couple of movies fail the Bechdel test, the problem is that so many do. The problem isn’t that one superhero’s girlfriend died horribly so he could angst, it’s that so many do. Look: the actual problem is a cultural normal doesn’t treat women as people, and those are two examples that I run across all the time when I look at this culture. And like so many others, they’re things you might not notice at first glance, because they seem small, or completely unimportant until you notice them stacking up.

So I think it’s important to pay attention to pop culture, and to analyze it. Think about it. Talk about it. Write about it. Put a viewpoint out there so that maybe someone else can run across it and have a lightbulb moment, realizing that there’s a problem and it takes consciousness-raising to fix it. Because people have to be aware that there’s a problem in order to shift the cultural norms; the cultural norms have to shift so people’s attitudes will change. It’s a cycle, and all pieces of it are important.

I’m not kidding myself about this blog. It doesn’t have much of a readership (my traffic the day of the Dr. Horrible post skyrocketed to, quite literally, a hundred times what it normally gets). But at least it’s a place for me to throw my thoughts out there, which is what I want. So I absolutely have a specific outlook when I analyze and review media. And I can’t turn it off. I can’t un-notice these things; I can’t not care about them. I can and often do enjoy things despite their shortcomings, but I have high standards and something like a female character getting fridged can really destroy my enjoyment. Sometimes it’s a slap in the face, because I’ve been enjoying a product, as happened with Dr. Horrible. Sometimes it’s what I expect and I’m braced for it, but not left unannoyed, as with The Dark Knight. In all cases, I’d have liked the end product much better if the sexism hadn’t been there.

* Please note: that does not mean that I am only a feminist.

This is a total blogging cop-out, but I’m in the midst of moving at the moment, and my cable is shut off until it’s hooked up at the new place, and I’m drinkingpacking all night tonight, so I just don’t have time to do a full post about it. (Also: I will answer the rest of the Dr. Horrible post’s comments when I do have time!)

Luckily, I saw the movie with my BFF Poison Ivory, and she hit all of my major comments in this post right here. Spoilers included, obvs.

And now back to taping boxes and finishing that bottle of wine.

So I watched Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. And I really enjoyed it! Until the finale.

First, in full disclosure: I’m not a Whedon fangirl. I was at most pretty much indifferent to Buffy and Angel; I watched them on occasion, but never got the big deal. I could see a lot of effort being put into making Buffy a dynamic female lead, which I appreciate, but I also spent a lot of time going, “…Really?” because there were areas where the show seemed to me to fail. But I’m sure those criticisms have been tackled by others, who are far more familiar with the show than I am, so that’s not what this entry is about. Also: I’ve never seen Firefly/Serenity. I kind of meant to get around to it, but never really had much of an urge, so it hasn’t happened. However, I’ve also always appreciated that, while he doesn’t do a perfect job, Whedon at least seems to always try, when it comes to female characters. He knows the world needs good ones, he does his best to put them out there, and he never comes across as a grandstanding douche who just wants recognition for writing good women even when he doesn’t do a good job, Aaron Sorkin.

Wait, got sidetracked.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m pretty indifferent to Whedon, but positively-inclined. And so the end of Dr. Horrible pisses me off hugely, because it really seems like he didn’t even try, and embraced everything he’s always stood against. More, with spoilers, below the cut.
Continue reading ‘Horrible Thoughts’ »

Oh lordy, this sort of thing again. While I don’t find that article particularly offensive (though… fairy tales? Really?), it’s back to a whole bunch of pretty dumb concepts. Specifically the one-two punch of “Scifi is for boys and girls don’t get it!” and “Girls who do like scifi are amaaaaaazing and I looooooooooove them.” On the assumption that I don’t need to retread why either one of those points is ridiculous, let’s move on.

I’ve been the half of a relationship who loves scifi, with a significant other who thought it was, at best, silly—but mostly thought it was kind of dumb and immature. And it is indeed frustrating, but guess what? The way to deal with that was not being thinking about how awesome the dude in question would have been if only he had liked the same things I did. Because here’s a thing about relationships: why would you ever be in one if you aren’t happy with the person you’re dating? Not an idealized version of who you’re dating, not what you hope that person can someday become. Why would you date someone if you don’t like him or her for who he or she is?

Look, I have no real qualifications for giving relationship advice. I’ve been in a few serious relationships but am single at the moment. I’m not a therapist. But here’s a quick rundown of how I survived and (gasp!) enjoyed being in a relationship with a non-scifi-lover. And guess what? It wasn’t by trying to change him. It was pretty much all things I did, and internal decisions on my part.*

ONE: Accept that you and your partner have different feelings about scifi, and his feelings are not positive. You know what? Science fiction certainly contains great literature, great stories, and great concepts and characters; it also contains a lot of things that are ridiculous. It’s associated with being a big nerd. So it’s kind of on you to accept that hey—you love something that’s nerdy and sometimes ridiculous.

This wasn’t such a big deal for me, but I do my best to empathize with people who have a hard time with it. That scifi is nerdy and ridiculous is not a negative thing, or a negative reflection of you as a person. It’s not bad. It’s not a problem. It is what it is; you are who you are. Know thyself. Embrace thyself. Don’t be ashamed of who you are or what you love: that’s painful. If you’re secure in your own tastes, you’ll not just feel better overall, but you won’t feel as much need for your partner to love what you love to validate you.

TWO: Relationships are about people coming together, not becoming each other. It’s not just that you shouldn’t need your partner’s approval to validate your interests, it’s that it’s completely okay to have interests and hobbies that you and your partner doesn’t share. There’s no reason why you should do everything together, and it’s always seemed to me to be way healthier to have your own identity than to get subsumed by a relationship anyway. Yay for feminism, which has certainly helped me learn and internalize that idea.

THREE: Respect goes both ways. Your partner may not like scifi, and may not get scifi, but that doesn’t entitle your partner to make disparaging comments about something he knows you love. Communication is hard, and calling someone you care about out for making you feel bad is often even harder, but regardless of how he feels about the genre, he should respect you—your intelligence, and your taste—enough to not say things that will make you feel shitty about a hobby you love.

However, this is a two-edged blade. He has every right to dislike scifi, and to think it’s ridiculous. Expressing those feelings in a way that’s still respectful to you is hard, but if he does, guess what? He’s not any less intelligent than you are, and there’s nothing wrong with him for not getting it. You’re not entitled to disparage him for that, either.

So yeah, it’s hard to talk about it, sometimes. Ideally, he’d be able to enjoy your glee when you find something you really love and adore even if he doesn’t get it, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, the best you can do really is to respectfully simply agree to disagree and change the topic to something neither one of you will find frustrating.

FOUR: If you feel you must—really, truly must—try and get him into science fiction, there is no magic combination of shows/movies/books that is guaranteed to work. Approaching in terms of “girls like fairy tales,” or “boys like space ships,” isn’t going to fly, because this isn’t about what a group of people allegedly likes. It’s about what your partner, specifically, might like. You know your partner’s tastes in stories and characters; only you can gage what he or she might appreciate.

My recommendation, if you’re going to do this, is also in how you approach it. Tell your partner, “Hey, I think you might like this one, I think it would be cool if we watched it together.” Be prepared to accept a similar overture in response, or even to suggest one. Don’t over-intro or spend too much time talking up whatever you’re suggesting: you want him to feel free to respond genuinely, not to force himself to have a positive reaction to please you—that will only lead to resentment down the line. Be okay with giving up or turning it off if he doesn’t like it after all. Be prepared for him to like one or two specific shows or books, but not interested in the genre as a whole. Try not to be too disappointed if these things happen, because not everyone will get it.

Hey. Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. Either way as long as what he does get is that it’s important to you and a part of who you are, and as long as he likes you for who you are… Well, at the end of the day, does it really matter if he gets science fiction or not?

* From this point forward, I’m talking from my perspective, which is as a woman who loves scifi dating a dude who does not. This relationship is obviously not indicative of all kinds of relationships out there. So not only may what works for me not work for everyone, but I’ve got no idea how this might apply to other kinds of relationships.

I’m exceptionally busy with moving and work right now, so blogging is pretty scarce. However, I saw the exceptionally ridiculous movie Journey to the Center of the Earth last night, and wrote a brief review over at Hathor.

What I’ve learned in the last two years: New York is not that big and scary. I mean, I guess it is, at a macro level, and it’s certainly crowded. But what people say about it being a bunch of small cities shoved together is true. It’s not just that there are four boroughs plus Staten Island*, there really are a bunch of neighborhoods. The semi-official ones (East Village, Upper West Side, China Town, etc) but the mini ones too. I live in Inwood, the neighborhood above 170th or so, which covers about 40 blocks top to bottom. But my stomping grounds are really only about six or seven of those blocks.

I bring this up because I got my hair cut over the weekend, pretty drastically. (Fifteen inches hacked off.) And when my sister and I stepped off the subway on our way home that evening, first the guy at the bodega noticed. Then this morning, one of the neighboring building’s managers, who I walk past as he cleans the sidewalk every morning, called, “Hey, nice haircut!” (To be clear, in a saying hi to a neighbor way, not in a street harassment way.) The local drugstore knows I always bring in my own bags. My sister has a “the regular” order at the other local bodega. The mailwoman recognizes us.

It’s not that different from the teeny-tiny farmtown where I grew up, is my point. I don’t have twenty years of history here, but I have people who know me, and who will probably notice when we move in a month and say goodbye. (I’m actually quite sad to leave the neighborhood, but moving is a necessity. My sister and I share a one-bedroom apartment. We’d kind of like two.)

Also, it’s got something in common with my hometown because every now and then when you’re walking around, you run into a chicken.

It was kind of surreal, actually. Rachel, Jess, and I were walking up the street towards our building, and a chicken popped out of the bushes.

“Uh,” Rachel said. “You guys see that, right?”

We did. Then we walked on. Because, well, a chicken wasn’t supposed to be in the bushes, and it’s certainly an unusual sight in New York, but… Well, it’s New York. These things happen.

* Very funny if you live in New York. Well, maybe not if you live on Staten Island.