Monthly Archives: May 2015

We’re More Theon than Sansa: Game of Thrones’ “Subtle” Viewer Trolling

Posted on by

487ac820-ce92-4d42-a12a-3872e7cf2c85-620x372

 
I can’t seem to gin up the expected outrage about Game of Thrones’ most recent controversial rape scene. From Senator Claire McCaskill’s tweet that “Gratuitous rape scenes are disgusting and unacceptable” to Joanna Robinson’s article “Game of Thrones Absolutely Did Not Need to Go There with Sansa Stark,” many are angry over the nature of the scene. The outrage is to some extent understandable: a beloved main character is raped by a man who was already clearly in the “bad guy” camp. The scene altered the plot line in the book, making Sansa rather than Jeyne Poole the victim. The camera leaves the viewer with Theon’s miserable face, a fact to which Sarah Ditman responded “Apparently violence against a woman counts for more if it distresses a man.” That said, the bulk of my reaction to these critics can be summed up in Amanda Marcotte’s fabulously patient, clear delineation of the flaws in each objection. She does, however, neglect one major point that made me appreciate the scene in an unexpected way—we as viewers are asked to identify with—or empathize with—the right character given the viewership. Before I clarify that argument, let me pace out a few questions in terms of fiction and real-life correlates.

What constitutes a “gratuitous” rape scene? Dividing rape scenes between “justified” and “unjustified” already seems to be treading into very hazy moral territory. While I’m talking about works of fiction, much of the fan resentment is centered around the fact that many women in the non-fictional universe are raped, and that when rape is depicted in film, television, or literature, it should be done in such a way that:

  • Does not make rape “sexy.”
  • Makes sense in terms of what came before in the plot
  • Focuses on the victim character.

I’m not entirely convinced that demanding that rape scenes adhere to a certain set of rules necessarily serves the audience’s best interests. Rape in real life is often as confusing as it is terrifying, and rape in fiction should better reflect the complexities of the crime. In Sapphire’s Push, the incestuous rape scene that opens the novel also includes the victim feeling sexual pleasure in spite of her fear, anger, and confusion. When I first read that scene, I was appalled. In retrospect, given what follows, this depiction makes sense in terms of carefully crafting the utter lack of clarity in the main character’s world. Of course, this was a novel that resisted identification at every turn.

The second parameter insists that the rape be a legible, understandable outcome of previous plot points. I find this to be the weirdest expectation. Rape in real life tends to happen unexpectedly. Retroactive attempts to impose meaning or narrative arc on the events leading up to a rape generally focus on how the victim could have made different choices and thus avoided the rape—which, of course, is the type of victim-blaming we don’t want to see in relation to rape cases. Furthermore, claiming a desire for understanding why it happened tends to also naturalize rape as a logical outcome of some series of events, rather than a grotesque violation.

Why can rape only be included in a work when it “drives the plot forward”? The question of plot works both prior to the rape scene and after the rape scene. The rape scene must have meaning, some argue, and it must be a transformative experience that later results in the character who was victimized having more agency and a stronger sense of self. Well, yes, that would be ideal, but it neglects the fact that rape doesn’t always bring about a radical transformation of a character, and that the expectation of this transformation is… creepy. After all, this isn’t exactly what we’d like to see modeled as a “rite of passage” for young women.

It’s true that the rape of a woman has too often been used as a device to galvanize male characters into action (see Gail Simon’s Women in Refrigerators). But it also remains true that rape doesn’t only affect the victim. Sexual violence is a poison that affects society. While it disproportionately directly affects women, the effects of sexual violence are as far-reaching as its prevalence, and it’s worth considering that when we speak out against rape. Rape damages at physical and psychological levels, and those wounds reach out like skeins of telephone wire, transmitting pain and fear and confusion wherever they land. While I do not mean to argue “but what about the menz?!”, anecdotally, I’ve seen many men care more about the sexual violence visited upon women when it happens in some social proximity. In addition, because they are so often given scripts of vengeance for the violation of “their” woman, they find themselves impotent in the face of a society that tends to frown upon vigilantism, no matter how warranted.

At the level of fiction, men are capable of investing in female characters (although the evidence points towards the fact that most of us identify less with female than male characters). And for me, this is the site of the brilliance of this particular representation of rape in Game of Thrones. The assumed audience is male. While the viewership skews slightly male, it’s considerably more evenly divided than one might expect given the subject matter. With that said, even female audience members—in light of the data—are more likely to judge female characters (and real women in their lives) harshly, an attitude that extends to sexual violence.

Rather than focusing on the sadistic Ramsey, which would have repulsed the audience, or co-opting Sansa’s point-of-view, which would have allowed viewers to vicariously adopt the mantel of “victim-heroine,” they instead chose to focus on Theon. This choice is absolutely essential to the ethical project of the show because it subtly indicts the viewer (assumed male, but also assumed to judge female characters) for standing idly by while the rape epidemic unfolds—quite obviously—all around them.

 

 

 

 

Comics to Change Your Gender

Posted on by

This first ran on Splice Today.
______
 

ranma-12-2311781

 
Comics in the United States have traditionally been associated with guys. The stereotype of superheroes as male adolescent power fantasies has more than a little truth to it; Neil Shyminsky’s informal survey found that 95% of X-Men readers were male. Surveys focusing on a wider array of comics have found a less lopsided breakdown, though one still tilted towards men.

But the link between comics and XY chromosomes isn’t some sort of preordained biological truth. In fact, in Japan, comics (or manga) have been read by just about all demographics — kids, adults, men, women, and everybody else. Manga’s deliberate appeal to a wide range of audiences is one reason it became so successful in the U.S. in the 90s: shojo manga titles, or comics for girls, catered to a niche in the American market that the mainstream superhero publishers were unable/unwilling/too clueless/too sexist to fill.

One of the first major manga American successes in the late 1980s/early 1990s was Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma ½. Takahashi supposedly had determined to write a comic that would appeal more to girls than some of her earlier series, and that series couldn’t have been much more straightforward (if that’s the word) about its cross-gender  ambitions. “Ranma” refers to the hero of the book; “1/2” refers to the fact that, due to an accident at a cursed spring, that hero spends a significant portion of his time as a heroine. Whenever he’s splashed with cold water, he turns into a girl; when he’s drenched in hot water, he turns back into a guy.

If that sounds like a preposterous premise for a series — well, that’s the least of it. Viz has just started to rerelease Ranma 1/2 in budget two-for-one volumes, and re-reading the beginning of the series again, it’s hard to express, right from the start, how completely, joyfully absurd it is. By page four, we’ve got Ranma (as a girl) racing up the street pursued by a giant panda bear — a giant panda bear who turns out to be Ranma’s father, Genma Saotome. At the same time that Ranma fell into the cursed spring that turned him into a part-time girl, Genma fell into a spring that turned him into a part-time panda. And a very cute part-time panda at that.

This labile approach to gender and species is mirrored in the book’s genre commitments. The narrative is devoted to a series of crushes/romantic entanglements interspersed with violent martial arts battles interspersed with gender switch hijink and a heaping helping of sexual farce.

Though Ranma is the titular star, he shares the spotlight with Akane Tendo, a young girl who loves martial arts, hates boys, and is kind of/sort of Ranma’s arranged fiancé at the behest of their parents. The two have hardly met before they’re engaged in a martial arts battle (with Ranma as a girl), and they’re hardly done fighting before they’re running into each other naked in the bath, where the hot water has changed Ranma back into a guy. This is but the first of many nude sexual teases, all the more giggle-inducing it’s unclear who the fan service is for. Are we looking at female bodies for male gazes? Male bodies for female gazes? Both for either? Or are there other possibilities? In one scene, female Ranma and Akane run into each other in the bath again, both naked, prompting Akane to deck him (or her.) “But you were both girls, right? Doesn’t that make it okay?” Akane’s older sister Nabiki asks. For Nabiki, the gender (and genre) changes ease or erase sexual tension. For Akane, though, the male/female switch makes all relationships potentially charged with polymorphous verve.

Ranma ½ as a whole leans towards Akane’s interpretation. In making a book aimed at both boys and girls, Takahashi doesn’t opt for a middle-of-the-road, appeal-to-everybody kind of story. Rather, she revels in the way that she can giddily bash boys’ genres and perspectives against girls’ genres and perspectives and come up with ridiculous risqué adventurous loopiness for all. Thus, upperclassman Kuno’s mano-a-mano desire to best Ranma in single combat for the hand of Akane slips inevitably into courtship, as the antagonist confusedly falls in love with Ranma’s girl form, thrusting flowers at her (him) with the same hostility/obsession with which he first went after him (her) with a sword.

As the first male-male martial arts rivalry in the book, the Kuno-Ranma rivalry/romance sets a blueprint for other encounters. When the next antagonist, Ryoga, shows up, his ill-defined desire for revenge (because Ranma stole bread from him at some point?) seems like it could just as easily be some other ill-defined passion. The slipperiness of motive fits into other slipperinesses; Ryoga too fell in a cursed spring, and when exposed to cold water he turns into an adorable baby pig. That pig wins Akane’s heart, and the Ryoga/Ranma battle ends when Akane drags off the irresisitibly neotenous ungulate to cuddle in her bed. So Ranma goes to get him out of Akane’s room, and there’s an epic battle with Ryoga-pig boucing around the room in an explosion of racing motion-lines. The cuddly-animal martial arts battle ends with Akane discovering that her little comfort pet has been replaced in her bed by a very embarrassed Ranma, the funny animal comic for kids morphing into a sex comedy with the same sort of audible “Bloosh!” that always greets the panda’s ascent from water.

Those easy substitutions — of genre for genre, gender for gender, species for species — are enabled by, or work as a metaphor for, the comics form itself. Each panel in a comic is a different, fractured moment. We see a picture of Ranma kicking here and a picture of Ranma punching there and we determine those are two images of the same person simply because we’re told they’re the same person. So you can call this pig and that human the same character if you’d like; who’s to stop you? Identity in comics is a convention — and if self is simply a trope, then so is gender, and even species. Comics don’t have to be for boys only, because in comics even boys don’t have to be boys only. Ranma ½ is its own cursed pond; you fall in and come out every which body, whether a boy reading girls comics, girls reading boys comics, or a panda reading both.

 

 

 

 

Louis CK Will Never Get Cosby’d

Posted on by

louis_ck_660

 
Bill Cosby’s rotten reputation has finally solidified in such a way that there’s no doubt it will be his legacy. It’s strange to realize that less than a year ago, this was emphatically not the case. Not yet a monster, he was still more or less Dr. Cliff Huxtable in our collective imagination. He had a TV show in development with NBC, a 77-stop comedy tour, and a new brick of a biography that, in September, was one of Amazon’s best books of the month. An elder statesman of comedy, he had been raping women for at least 45 years.

Last week, just one day before Louis CK hosted the season finale of Saturday Night Live, Gawker posted the latest episode in what has been years’ worth of rumors surrounding the comedian’s sexual misconduct. (I’ve been aware of it since their first post along these lines, which was in 2012.) Much like CK’s comedy on his TV show and in his standup, the subject of the allegations is pathological masturbation. No longer able to satisfy his exhibitionism by talking about jacking off in front of an audience, it seems that he prefers the real deal, in person, in front of non-consenting female comics. They say he once went so far as to block his victims’ egress from his hotel room by standing in front of the door.

On Monday, the same culture outlets (Slate, Vox, and Vulture, among many others) that heavily criticized Bill Cosby’s non-interview last week tweeted furiously about Louis CK’s transgressions. They weren’t referring to the accusations of sexual misconduct. Instead, they were talking about his “edgy” Saturday Night Live monologue, which included jokes about pedophilia. Was his monologue offensive? Maybe. Waving his dick around at people who didn’t want to see it? Apparently not.

To my ear, CK’s “boundary-pushing” jokes about child molestation were pretty lazy. They were much less polished than, say, any given joke in one of CK’s stand-up specials. I’ve watched them all, I think, in addition to seeing him live in 2010. I watch Louie. And while I think he’s often funny, and mostly likable, two things have always bugged me: his tired jokes about not having sex with his (now ex-) wife, which were prominent in the first stage of his career, and his weird brand of sanctimony, which has become more pronounced over time.

The latter might sound counterintuitive given that CK has built an empire on exploiting his own flaws. But to me his comedy persona (not unlike Cosby’s) has always been centered on the idea that he’s a good person. The SNL thing was for shock value—and don’t get me wrong. He does that, too. But much more often, CK’s comedy is about being a Good Dad. His “mild racism” bit from that SNL monologue is another good example of how aggressively he presents himself as a good person, even as he’s ostensibly putting himself down.

Like many people who celebrate their own goodness, it seems as though Louis CK has a bad, bad secret. So far there have been no formal charges—only whispers. These sorts of rumblings often surround serial abusers in male-dominated industries, where it’s hard for women to come forward. The CK allegations are gossip, not journalism, but remember Jian Ghomeshi? There was a whisper campaign around him too, which many people wrote about once he had been fired. One woman described it like this:

I’ve said that “we” knew about Jian, but I couldn’t tell you exactly who all that means. For years, the “we” was so amorphous, a shifting chorus of voices that whispered or shouted and slipped away. To be clear: what I heard and what I knew was not special. It was not secret knowledge. It was open and clear as day, a smear of bright-red warning paint slashed across entire loose-tied social scenes.

Hannibal Buress was the turning point with Cosby. When his bit went viral last year, victims saw a cultural shift and understood they’d be believed—unlike the 13 women who had preceded them. Dozens more ended up coming forward. I’m a huge fan of Buress, and I don’t take what he did lightly. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the conditions that made his joke sayable: he was already well established, and Cosby, who can barely string a sentence together, was no longer a potent figure in the industry.

Louis CK, in sharp contrast, is the reigning king of comedy, and at some point during the last year or two, people have also started to think of him more as an artist and an auteur, the same protected class in which we’ve placed Woody Allen. Even with the minor backlash surrounding Season 4 of Louie, his cultural status isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon. He’s at the top of the heap, but he’s still retained his status as a comedian’s comedian, a vital force in a relatively insulated world.

Stand-up comedy is one of the hardest hustles there is, even for men—and on top of that, of course, it’s an especially misogynistic milieu. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a struggling comic going on the record to say that Louis CK forced her to watch him jerk off. I mean, would you want to risk throwing away your life’s ambition for that? Is that how you would want to be known?

Dunderfucks like Patton Oswalt perceive the most salient issue in comedy to be censorship, but as ever the real stakes are a different kind of silence. I think about CK making jokes about how gross he is—something I myself once paid $40 to watch. I think about Cosby’s bit about drugging women. I wasn’t there for that one, but on the recording you can hear the crowd laughing their heads off. Comedians can say whatever they want, and that’s one thing. What we’re willing to laugh at is another, and what a comic’s colleagues endorse and support—explicitly or otherwise, onstage or off—is another still. Comedians tend to close ranks around even their worst specimens (like Daniel Tosh). Collectively, the comedian, his audience, and his colleagues form a system. And it is broken.

Unsourced accusations shouldn’t preclude discussions of CK’s talent, but they can’t quite be separated from it either. The most recent Gawker piece is sketchy as hell, but statistically speaking, women aren’t likely to lie about allegations like these (even to their friends). In the absence of concrete charges, I don’t have an easy answer for what’s the “right” way to talk about Louis CK. But I’ll tell you one thing: if I were one of the girls he assaulted, I would have taken one look at Twitter over the last few days and resolved to take it to the grave. That’s not just on CK. It’s on us.

The Problem with Hollywood Super-Dudes

Posted on by

The summer superhero blockbuster season has officially commenced:

Avengers 2 opened in May, Ant-Man follows in July, and Fantastic Four in August. That’s only half of 2014’s six films, but 2016 will make up the difference with a record eight.

There was time when I thought the genre had an artistic future. But after Heath Ledger’s Oscar for playing the Joker, Warner Bros. and Marvel have only been interested in reproducing the same formula-driven commercial product again and again. So to analyze the nature of Hollywood superheroes, I’m calling in two experts from opposite ends of the literary spectrum: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the most acclaimed novelists of Russian literature, and Blake Snyder, a third-rate screenwriter that Sylvester Stallone once likened to a flatworm.
 

Blake_Snyderfyodor-dostoevsky_6-t

 
I read Crime and Punishment in A.P. English as a high school senior—and I even finished it (a dubious honor my adolescent self did not award Moby Dick). I started The Brothers Karamavoz in college while working graveyard shifts as a warehouse security guard, but after totaling my Toyota on a sleepy drive home, I quit both.

Snyder started his career writing episodes for the Disney Channel’s Kids Incorporated before going on to pen Blank Check and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a comedy Roger Ebert called “moronic beyond comprehension” and which its star, Sylvester Stallone, declared “one of the worst films in the entire solar system,” insisting “a flatworm could write a better script.” And yet when a good friend of mine—a former script reader for a California production company—wanted to collaborate on a screenplay, he handed me Snyder’s Save the Cat!

The how-to screenwriting guide explains why the Sandra Bullock comedy vehicle Miss Congeniality is a better movie than Memento. It comes down to formula: Miss Congeniality hits all 15 beats on The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, while Christopher Nolan’s directorial debut “is just a gimmick that cannot be applied to any other movie.” If Snyder were a poetry professor, he would lecture about the superiority of sonnets to free verse, while defining the greatest works of literature by the uniformity of their iambic beats.
 

save-the-catCrimeandpunishmentcover

 
Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s pawnbroker-murdering philosophy student, would classify Snyder as “ordinary.” Raskolnikov explains: “men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. . . . The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them.”

In other words, Hollywood spec writers play by the rules. And Snyder understands those rules well. He divides the universe into ten idiosyncratic genres. His “Dude with a Problem,” for example, includes Die Hard and Schindler’s List, while “Superhero” goes beyond Batman Begins to claim Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind—and probably anything else starring Russell Crowe. Snyder’s ur-Superhero is Gulliver surrounded by Lilliputians: “a Superhero tale asks us to lend human qualities, and our sympathy, to a super being, and identity with what it must be like to have to deal with the likes of us little people.” So Batman, Frankenstein, and Dracula are all Superheroes “challenged by the mediocre world around them,” because it’s really “the tiny minds that surround the hero that are the real problem.”

Raskolnikov would agree. His second category, “extraordinary” men, “all transgress the law,” because “making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people.” So “all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.” The rut-dwelling Lilliputians, meanwhile, will try to “punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfill quite justly their conservative vocation.”

Snyder fulfills his Lilliputian vocation for Christopher Nolan when he shouts “screw Memento!” and dismisses all the “hulabaloo” because of its low box office revenue. That was in 2005, the year Batman Begins premiered, and three years before Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight. Raskolnikov warns that “the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them,” and sure enough, Synder lauds Nolan’s caped crusader for following “the beats down to the minute.”

Or does that means Nolan is a Superhero who overcame his Gulliverness by conforming to the Lilliputian Beat Sheet? Either way, he, like Bruce Wayne “is admirable because he eschews his personal comfort in the effort to give back to the community.” That, says Snyder, solves the problem of “how to have sympathy for the likes of millionaire Bruce Wayne or genius Russell Crowe.” They save the cat.

And Raskolnikov agrees again. His “extraordinary man” has “an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep” if overstepping “is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea,” and idea which might be “of benefit to the whole of humanity.” That’s how he rationalizes killing and robbing that nasty old pawnbroker. He argues (faux hypothetically) to a cop: “Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”

It doesn’t matter how the cop answers, because a real Gulliver wouldn’t have asked a Lilliputian for his opinion. That’s Raskolnikov’s downfall. He’s reading from the wrong page in Save the Cat! He wants to be a Superhero (“An extraordinary person finds himself in an ordinary world”), but he’s really just a Dude with a Problem (“An ordinary guy finds himself in extraordinary circumstances”). Worse, his circumstances are self-inflicted. He fell for Snyder’s Superhero formula because it “gives flight to our greatest fantasies about our potential.”

Raskolnikov fails to be “a man of the future,” but Nietzsche (who ranked reading Dostoyevksky “among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life”) took that “extraordinary” character type and renamed him the ubermensch. After Jerry Siegel adopted it, DC completed the circle by calling Superman “The Man of Tomorrow.”

But Dostoyevsky is no origin point. After explaining his theories, even Raskolnikov admits: “there is nothing particularly new in all that. The same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before.”Or as one of Snyder’s studio execs told him: “Give me the same thing . . . only different!”

That, sadly, is the state of the Hollywood superhero.
 

stop! or my mom will shoot

 

Darna: ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’

Posted on by

darna1

Darna by Ghettobrigante

 
Darna is often described as ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’ and there are many persuasive reasons why such a comparison might be made. In the 1951 comic Darna is described as having ‘kisig ni Apolo at lakas ni Samson’ (which I translate as ‘the elegance of Apollo and the strength of Samson’ – Tagalog speakers, please correct me – I am still learning), which almost directly quotes Wonder Woman who was described in 1944 is ‘as beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury’ (issue 38, 1944 quoted in Berlatsky’s book on Wonder Woman, page 139). Darna was later seen as a Wonder Woman clone when, in 1991, a film version showed her blocking bullets with bracelets. This became a key aspect of the character and was repeated in the 2009 television show.

Darna paratexts have encouraged the comparison; in 2013 Marianne Riviera, the current most recent Darna, posed in Wonder Woman cosplay for a magazine shoot.  The comparison between the two is almost inevitable, and is dramatised in fan art such as that by Glee Chan.
 

darna2

 

darna3

Darna/Wonder Woman fan art by Glee Chan and Marian Rivera as Wonder Woman

Darna clearly borrows tropes from other American characters. Her powers are similar to those possessed by Superman. She transforms from her non-hero incarnation Narda into Darna by saying ‘Darna’, in a manner very similar to Captain Marvel saying ‘Shazam!’ That she is derivative is hardly surprising – many superheroes in the 1940s were variations on a well-established formula and the industry at the time did not particularly reward originality.

Conversely, there are those who maintain that Mars Ravelo, Darna’s creator, was pitching the idea of a female superhero in 1939, two years before Wonder Woman’s first comic book appearance. In such a timeline Darna is not a Wonder Woman clone, but a character who emerged independently around the same time.

I am not particularly interested in answering the question of which character came first. What does interest me is the question of why it matters. I believe that this is important because it is rooted in the artistic relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. Filipino comics. Both Filipino superhero comics and Pinoy Manga have often had to fight accusations of being derivative with the implication that Filipino comic book creators simply recycle the cultural work done elsewhere. If Darna is nothing more than the Filipino Wonder Woman, then, it follows, she has little value alone and can be subsumed into Wonder Woman studies. The argument that she exists independent to Wonder Woman, then, can be read as an assertion of Filipino national identity through comics.

One of the reasons why I find this interesting is that different incarnations of Darna seem to cycle between being an icon of Filipino identity and an outward-looking international figure. We have had English-speaking Darnas whose identity and attitudes are largely indistinguishable from an American equivalent, and we have had Tagalog-speaking Catholic Darnas whose enemies draw heavily from Filipino folk-law – see, for example, Roberto Feleo’s ‘Darna’s Fortress of Solitude’ (1987). It is noteworthy in this regard that in the original comics Darna looks distinctly Western, and the first actress to play Darna, Rosa Del Rosario, was biracial, as was Nanette Medved, who played her in 1991 and Anjanette Abayari who played Darna in two films in 1994.

So, is Darna more than a Wonder Woman clone? And, more importantly, does it matter?
 
 

Whose Gender is Artificial?

Posted on by

Radical feminist writer and blogger Meghan Murphy has written several posts over the last couple of weeks about how awful I am. I don’t really have much interest in responding in kind, but I did want to talk briefly about one argument she makes in her most recent piece, in which she accuses me of believing that gender is real, rather than a construct.
 

Berlatsky says feminist critique often involves a critique of “femininity,” which is true… Though he doesn’t quite get why. He writes:

Is femininity a tool to devalue women? Or is the devaluation of femininity a tool to devalue women? Wearing high heels doesn’t necessarily make you a dupe of the patriarchy. It could mean you’re a super-powerful rock star, and you want to show that femininity can be strong, too.

He seems to see femininity as innate, here. As though, to critique social constructs is to critique something essential about females. But “femininity” is an idea — a set of characteristics (invented and reinforced by a patriarchal society). It says “woman” means “delicate,” “passive,” “pleasant,” “accommodating,” “pretty,” “nurturing,” “irrational,” and “weak.” Feminists say women are not “naturally” any of these things. So no, femininity isn’t about “strength,” despite the fact that women are “strong.” And this is because femininity and femaleness are not connected in any material way.

What’s interesting to me here is that Murphy claims to be undermining femininity even as she reifies it.

My point, in the bit she quotes, is that there’s nothing innately weak, or innately debased, about wearing high heels. Wearing high heels is coded feminine, and is therefore seen as weak, or wrong, or silly, or stupid. But both the decision to code high heels as feminine, and the insistence that femininity is weak…those are cultural choices, not some sort of absolute truth. And pushing back against either of those assumptions — by arguing that high heels don’t have to be feminine, or arguing that high heels, as “feminine” espression, don’t have to be weak — is effectively challenging the innateness of femininity.

Murphy starts out by saying she thinks femininity is a construct too. But the construct is for her awfully real looking and solid. First, she insists that femininity has to mean nurturing, irrational, weak; it can’t mean anything else. And second, she seems oblivious to the possibility that particular gendered expressions are only feminine by convenience. She doesn’t mention any gendered expressions at all in her paragraph, presumably because everyone knows what the signs of femininity are. Murphy’s “constructed” femininity thus has both a stable meaning and a stable expression. It’s solid enough, in short, to serve as a way to police women, who are dupes and tools of the patriarchy if they express themselves in certain ways deemed artificial and constructed.

Murphy thinks she’s getting out of patriarchal thinking by de-naturalizing gender. Patriarchy insists, in her view, that gendered differences are true; by insisting that gendered differences are not innate, she paves the way for women’s liberation. But in fact, she simply replaces the binary male/female with the binary natural/artificial—and that binary is used to police and chastise the same people as ever. Note that it’s femininity here which is seen as artificial: a patriarchal trope if ever there was one. Feminine gender expression is seen as false, frivolous, weak, debased; male gender expression (in Murphy’s piece, and in general) is seen as unmarked, unremarked, and natural. The artificiality of femininity is supposed to free women from patriarchal expectations, but really it just repeats the same old patriarchal prejudices. Feminine gender expression isn’t real. That’s what patriarchy says, and Murphy cosigns it.

In contrast, maybe a better way to approach gender expression is to admit that we don’t really know what’s artificial and what’s natural, or even what those words mean in the context of human behavior. The most human thing about humans is they use all those artificial tools, like language; humans are most natural when they’re most artificial, and maybe vice versa. As long as there is a “wrong” “artificial” “weak” gender expression, it seems likely that it will be attributed to women, and used to denigrate them. So, why not just stop policing people’s gender expression altogether? As long as an individual’s gender expression isn’t hurting or impinging on others fairly directly (like, when masculinity is used as a lever to get people to shoot each other), people should be given leeway to express their gender as they wish without being told that they’re dupes or artificial or monsters or failing feminism. Because it doesn’t make much difference if you’re censuring people in the name of biological truth or the one true feminism—especially when it’s so often the very same people who end up being censured for performing their gender wrong.
 

bigexcluded

Julia Serano said most of this better than me in her book, which you should buy.

Utilitarian Review 5/16/15

Posted on by

Wonder Woman News

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela reviews a bunch of Wonder Woman books, including mine, at Public Books.

The Dartmouth student newspaper is confused about the subject of the talk I gave there.
 
On HU

Janell Hobson and the context of global racism.

I am bitter that Paul Krugman gets to write pop culture crit at the NYT.

Should I try to run a patreon to write my book?

Kim O’Connor writes an open letter to Art Spiegelman about the PEN awards and Charlie Hebdo.

James Lamb with a long post on why diverse superheroes are an impossibility.

Chris Gavaler on how the KKK fit the definition of superheroes.

Phillip Smith on Saga and trauma.

Donovan Grant on the possibility of black superheroes.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote about Wonder Woman, A-Force, and how super sexy may be better than super violent.

At Urban Faith I reviewed Robert Marovich’s history of Chicago gospel.

Jordannah Elizabeth interviewed me to ask me what I think I’m doing, anyway.

At Raivshly I made a list of lesser known torch singers.

At the Reader a little review of Jason Eady, the best country singer out there now.
 
Other Links

Nicole Cliff with a list of books all white men own.

Dianne Anderson on the demand that Christian bloggers be nice.

Tressie McMillan Cottom on how if academic institutions want their scholars to be public intellectuals, they need to support them when the social media firestorm erupts.
 

images