gryphonsegg

I am becoming increasingly dismayed by the amount of cultural space taken up by A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, especially in what I'll call, for lack of a better term, nerd feminist discourse. This isn't just another "I'm tired of popular thing I don't like" complaint. Wherever I go to read women's thoughts about the fantasy genre or fandom or female characters in popular fiction or feminism from a nerdy, bookwormish perspective, a big part of the conversation is dominated by ASOIAF. So many women spend so much energy dissecting this series, analyzing its gender dynamics, defending its female characters . . . and yet the author is a man, and a man who makes creepy, fetishizing comments about abused adolescent girl characters and who has never even pretended to be even slightly feminist-friendly at that. The longer it goes on and the farther it spreads, the more desperately I want to know Who the hell put George RR Martin, of all people, in charge of setting the terms of conversation about women in fantasy fiction, and why are so many intelligent women who have some awareness of feminist issues so ready to accept that state of affairs?

Yes, I know the standard answer is "That's a lot of female characters!" But I'm not satisfied with that. First of all, ASOIAF is a long series that has a lot of characters, period. Soap operas have a lot of female characters too, and at least their sensationalized rape storylines aren't handled in a way that has "MALE GAZE" stamped all over them. Secondly, those characters in the books are a little too obviously written by a man for an audience of men. I understand that the HBO series is supposed to be somewhat better in terms of letting the more negatively portrayed women have some human qualities, but it's also worse about gratuitously inserting explicit sex with gross power imbalances, so yeah. Finally and most importantly, there are plenty of real life women who have written stories about multiple female characters, and very few of those have gotten the level of attention and wide-ranging discussion that ASOIAF and some other male-authored texts I can think of have recently received even from women who are all about the feminist analysis.

The only women authors I can think of right off the top of my head who take up a comparable amount of cultural space are Jane Austen (who didn't write fantasy) and J.K. Rowling (whose children's books do feature more prominent male than female characters and whose non-fantasy adult novel is still pretty well overshadowed by the earlier children's fantasy series). Stephenie Meyer has name recognition, but her work is treated as a (very, very stale) joke in the circles I run in, and her reputation as a bad writer who became popular with teenage girls is often wielded as a weapon against other women who want to write novels, participate in fandom, or just have their opinions respected. The closest thing I can think of to a woman-authored ASOIAF equivalent is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which is somehow mysteriously just not considered as fitting a topic for ongoing serious discussion and is often dismissed out of hand with highly inaccurate comparisons to Meyer's Twilight. All the others just kind of fall through the cracks. Somehow. Just like Joanna Russ said. Speaking of Joanna Russ, she and the other feminist SF authors of the seventies and eighties wrote about a lot of female characters, and some of them wrote more "grim and gritty" fiction than Martin or Richard K. Morgan or the rest of the "grim and gritty" fantasy dudes could ever envision. Sure, it's dated in some ways, but I've been surprised more than once by how many "second wave" concern are still relevant today.

So, to sum up, I am: a) SO sick of discussions about female characters being driven by a man, b) fully intending to come up with a list of science fiction and fantasy by women that includes many female characters and perhaps does other things that ASOIAF gets credit for and does them better, and c) especially sick of seeing it implied or stated outright that women who find Cersei Lannister a poorly written aggregation of misogynist stereotypes instead of a sympathetic portrayal of a woman coping with patriarchy only feel that way because of our own internalized misogyny.

I'm having a huge amount of anxiety about what I'm doing as a graduate student today. I feel like I should post about fun fandom things to help myself feel better, but the anxiety birds won't stop squawking at me. Or I should post about serious political issues, but so much as looking at a serious political issue tonight feels like looking into a pit of despair. Or I should just be happy that I had a great visit with my best friend IRL last week and I don't have any business having negative feelings so soon. Ugh. I'll try to make a real post tomorrow. Right now, I just feel horribly uncomfortable with my life.

Also, I was going to wash test tubes to prepare for an experiment, but I couldn't do that because the protective gloves I would need for the acid bath were gone. And I couldn't get a private meeting with my advisor, so I had to ask my painfully ignorant questions at the lab meeting and look like a fool in front of everyone. I graduated from a college that was way too small to offer the kind of research experience that undergrads get here, and my master's program mostly consisted of me being left to flail around and work things out on my own with some guidance from a lab manager who only had master's herself and wasn't even much older than I was. So I am still asking noob questions and trying to catch up with the other students who started the program at the same time I did but who came into it with a lot more lab experience.

I just realized what certain points of my feminist philosophy that conflict with a lot the shallow pop feminism on the internet have in common with my dissatisfaction with a lot of the escapist reading I try to do only to be thwarted by unpleasant in the world I'm supposed to prefer to this one. I believe that any better world worth building in reality or escaping to in fiction must be a world where my mother's life could have been a happier one. That means that mothers aren't confined to narrow little boxes from which only the childless women can escape. It means that heterosexual pair-bonding can happen without the woman becoming the servant of the man, sacrificing important parts of her life to his comfort, or getting blamed for his mistakes. It means that women with disabilities are treated with as much respect and concern as the "badass" and "kickass" women who run marathons and kick dudes in the face. I already knew that my blood boils whenever I see anyone, in a politically conscious context or a fannish one, putting down moms, sneering at women who still want monogamous relationships with men, Monday morning quarterbacking about what some woman could have or should have done to change her husband's behavior, or acting like a woman who can't run is some kind of disgrace to feminism. Sometimes I've felt vaguely guilty for taking it so personally and feeling so let down and/or fired up when I don't have kids, I'm sitting out the whole sex/romance/sexual politics thing, and I don't have a severe or visible disability. I couldn't help but wonder if I was doing something wrong. And I knew that some people consider it strange that my relationship with my mother didn't go through a long rough patch in my adolescence. But I'm just now putting it all together, how my mother's love and care and support got me through the worst times in my life, how much it hurts to remember the crap she's gotten from my dad, from religious figures who insisted that she could fix him by being more submissive and more patient and thinner and prettier and a better cook and mobility limitations are no excuse for slacking off on housework or weight loss, from mainstream and patriarchal society generally. And how much I relish the thought of hulking out whenever I notice that, once again, someone who is holding up the banner of making the world better for women or promoting something as a safe, fluffy escape for women is doing the same damn thing and implying that women like my mother deserve whatever crap they get and should be excluded and left behind. When I think about it like that, it's no wonder I take it personally.

I need to make cards for Wanky "Hard" SF Writer Bingo. These are the spaces I have so far:

Turing Test that Alan Turing wouldn't have passed- Proving an entity's sapience and personhood involves demonstrating that the entity has a prurient interest in young, female humans. In many cases of this, the entity in question does not even have an organic body.

Hide the white women- Young, thin, human women or teenage girls with extremely pale skin (and usually with blond hair too) are super-attractive to all beings.

Obsessed with their own breasts- Any being with breasts is constantly aware of their shape, size, movement, nipple size, color and size of areolae, how the breasts are squished or held in place or not by completely standard everyday clothing, etc.

You keep using that word- Rape used as a metaphor for a thing that has absolutely nothing to do with non-consensual sex.

There's a word for that- Non-consensual sex occurs, but the narrative voice or a sympathetic character takes pains to point out that it was NOT RAPE.

Naked for the greater good- A contrived situation emerges in which the only logical course of action for a character is to remove every stitch of clothing and perform some series of athletic feats that give a watching mixed crowd a great view of everything. While she's doing this, she thinks about how some women would refuse to do this or think badly of her for doing this because it's immodest, but it doesn't bother her at all because modesty is a frivolous luxury that a woman who has her priorities in order simply cannot afford.

Adult writer audibly drooling over teenage character- Self-explanatory. The older I get, the more disgusting I find this.

Species of rational misogyny- Alien species in which males are sapient and females are not.

Species of dirty old men- Alien species whose biology requires extremely young females to bear the children of much older males.

Species of hot space babes- Alien species whose members look like female humanoids who are super-attractive by the standards of the writer's culture; males are either non-existent or super-ugly.

Does anybody out there have more? I just started (and quit) a book that had Adult writer audibly drooling over teenage character, You keep using that word, Obsessed with their own breasts, Turing Test that Alan Turing wouldn't have passed, Hide the white women and some ultra-creepy emotional incest that I'm not sure how to describe all in the first 32 pages.

I've been feeling guilty lately because I've been neglecting Dreamwidth and LJ posting, and I can't rightly blame it on being too busy with grad school or too distracted by tumblr. The truth is, I've been in a psychological hole for a while now. I've had time but not enough energy or spirit to make use of it. I am determined to do really good work in my doctoral program, but I'm constantly worried that I can't. I spend so much of my thought power fighting that, and I haven't had much left over to do anything interesting. I haven't been totally lost, though. I had an event to attend this weekend, and during the meetings, I realized that things have been coming together for my group better than I expected, and I've been contributing to the project more than I felt like. I still think I can and should do more, both for the project and for my own self.

So here I am, posting again, mostly because I think that if I can find it in me to do one more thing, I'll be able to do another thing after that, and another one, and then another, until I'm all-around okay again.

I got my specimens this morning! Then I spent the rest of the scrounging up ingredients to make the medium they need to grow. I'd been hoping to have the medium ready by the time they came in, but I've been sick since Sunday. I'm feeling better now (not at 100% health, but much better than Tuesday)-- just in time to get my medium made up, except that. my lab was missing several ingredients and I had to scurry around, frantically mooching from other labs. I'll have plenty of time to do the actual medium-making tomorrow, but I still felt really anxious about it this afternoon. I think it's my sub-optimal brain chemistry trying to kick my ass again, so I've been self-awarely fighting it. I should be happy and excited about this, not frantic and worried. And even if my experiment doesn't work the way I've been hoping, at least I had to experience of realizing that the person I was asking for directions thought "trace metals" was a person.

A little background: Years and years ago, a very long time indeed by internet standards, I read the book Les Miserables and frequented a message board (remember those?) for fans of the book. I never saw the musical because I lived way out in the middle of nowhere until such as I had moved onto other fandoms. I remember there being a great deal "they're so dumb and we're so superior" attitude toward fans of "Eppie Sue"-- that is, musical-first and musical-only fans who over-identified with Eponine and used her as their self-insert in fan fiction. So I was aware that rabid Eponine fangirls and Eponine/Marius shippers existed, but I didn't understand why anyone would form that particular fannish fixation. I didn't get into griping about them too much unless they crossed the line into Cosette-bashing, but their preferences made no sense to me. I mean, why would anyone want to be Eponine? People who had seen the musical told me that musical!Eponine and musical!Marius were actually friends instead of a stalker and a guy who pities her a little and is slightly creeped out by her when he bothers to notice her at all. But still, who would want to be Eponine or think Marius was such a great catch?

Now that I've seen the movie, it's not so baffling anymore, mainly because Marius is not a giant tool there like he is in the book. Also, this version of Eponine seems a lot less beaten down than book!Eponine. Obviously, she's still poor and her parents are still awful, but she's more spirited and less resigned to a life of misery. I think I can understand why a teenager with a crush on a friend who likes someone richer/more popular/generally luckier would get invested in Eponine now, especially if they happened to see a production with a handsome actor playing Marius.

Okay, I was in a bookstore the other day, and I was initially pleased to see several new (or at least new to me) anthologies that looked interesting. But a quick inspection of the contents revealed that every single anthology on a theme that intrigued me included a entry by Orson Scott Card. Some of them were reprints of stories I'd seen in other collections, but I didn't recognize all the stories and the books themselves were all new. Was I hallucinating, or has there really been a recent resurgence of interest in Card lately? If he's going to be everywhere for a while, I'm going to spend a certain amount of time and pixels griping about all the stories I'm missing out on because of him. (Yes, I absolutely do not buy any book to which Card contributes, no matter who else is involved. Yes, I know I am being mean and unreasonable and cutting off my nose to spite my face and blah blah so on and so forth. For reasons both personal and philosophical, I refuse to give him one more penny of my money. This is not a matter on which I am willing to budge even a little bit.)

I'm on my way back from the holiday trip. Things went okay, I suppose. It was not all happy times, but some good came of it. I got to watch The Hobbit and Les Miserables with my mother, and I was able to buy nicer-than-usual gifts this year AND give them in person. Also, I got drive through Appalachia on the way back and stay at a hotel with an indoor pool. I'm really tired now, but I've got half a dozen things I want to post about later.

I've been reading Gail Simone's tumblr, and the number 1 question on my mind right now is "What the FLYING FUCK is wrong with the people who have invaded her asks?" In addition to the people who are trying to get her to trash other writers under her professional name in a public forum, she gets people asking stuff like "Do you believe I'm a bad person because I'm pro-life?" and "What is your opinion on cousin/cousin relationships?" Why would anyone ever think it was a good idea to ask questions like that of someone they have never met and know only as a writer, and not even a writer who goes in for profound explorations of the human condition at that? People, your favorite comic book writer is not also your mentor, spiritual adviser, and life coach.