Half the Sons Are Actually Daughters

This may not be new information, but I've been marathoning The X-Files since the end of September. I have a lot to say about the show - I mean, of course I do, because I've spent over 100 hours on it in the last three months - and maybe there'll be a long and semi-ridiculous post about it to come. In the meantime, a three-parter I watched just before Christmas gave me some food for thought about storytelling.

The first two parts were balanced between Mulder and Scully pretty evenly, and were no nuttier than the show's usual fare, but the third part kinda lost me. It portrayed Mulder as a Christ figure. There are a lot of qualifying "not really" details for that comparison, but there's no denying that the comparison is there, and in my opinion its hubris is beyond the pale (especially since Duchovny co-wrote it for himself to act). One of the episode's most prominent motifs was that of fathers and sons. This theme has cropped up in the show from time to time, but never in a way that, er, alienated me so deftly.

There was so much weight on Mulder as son, Mulder as father - weight that I just didn't feel on my shoulders. A lifetime of training in the male gaze made me comprehend that this was going on, but none of it applied to me. I am neither a son nor a prospective father, and I never can be.

Maybe this fathers/sons thing was on my mind anyway because I watched the Star Wars trilogy again mid-December, as break and reward for finishing my horrible, horrible final paper for the Faulkner/Morrison class. One of the things that happens when you watch Star Wars is you think about fathers and sons; a decent amount of the emotional heft in Empire and Jedi depends upon the theme. Thankfully, there's enough broad-stroke hero's journey stuff and enough general entertainment going on in the films that you don't have to be male to let Star Wars sweep you up in its arms, but this time around I did really notice that some of that emotional heft was missing its target in me. What a father means to a son, what he signifies, is not very available to me.

source: PaulNRoll on DeviantArt

One of the short stories I read last semester was "Boys", by Rick Moody, which I found of interest for quite a lot of reasons. Among its endeavors, the story suggests that a boy does not, metaphorically, become a man until his father dies. I'm not in a position to agree or disagree with this assessment, because it arises wholly outside of my experience, but it's certainly a common one. I could write a lot about the process of going from girl to woman, but pretty much none of it, in my view, has to do with how alive a daughter's parents are.

I have complicated relationships with both of my parents, and art that relies on daughter themes often speaks to me in the way that I think Star Wars and this arc on The X-Files are meant to speak to sons. But it bothers me that daughter themes are often in art that's directed more specifically at women, or at small audiences, while son themes are so often in art with much wider intended audiences. The two sets of issues are just so different from one another.

My quick free-association reports that son themes are about replacement, mortality, and legacy, and daughter themes are about purity, possession, and similarity-anxiety. (Of note: I rattled off three nouns for sons immediately, just thinking about father/son art, but it took much longer to come up with daughter nouns.) (Also of note: in assembling this post I found this series by a German photographer, Julia Fullerton-Batten, who has communicated many of the weird, free-floating feelings I have around daughterhood through surreal posed pictures. The direct link is SFW, but the artist's website is not.) There's more to it than three words apiece, duh, but no matter how vaguely they are summarized, the relationships are distinct. They cannot be swapped out for each other in a story and maintain resonance.

I mean, does this happen with fathers and sons? And I want to talk about this. For hours. 

The point of all this is to note, politely, that father/son issues are not as universal as the writers of Star Wars and this arc of The X-Files and Paul Thomas Anderson and John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy and oh, my God, so many other writers and creators would apparently like to think. (In fact, I'd argue that they're approximately 49.2% as universal as those creators would apparently like to think.) And I would appreciate feeling a little more included in this kind of art, or at least a little less disconnected from its emotional texture.

I remember a big crop of mother/daughter books coming into print around 2012, and I was glad for it, but I think I'll be waiting a while before a Star Wars appears that's centered around Leia's journey to cope with her mother's absence. Those stories need writing. They need mainstreaming. So let's get on that, mmkay?

*That* Story Published! and Another Story Free of Charge

Last weekend, the winter/spring issue of The Rampallian was published. My story "Little Bitch" is the final piece in the magazine. You can read it here, through a pay wall of $3 for the digital version. (Half of the proceeds for this issue go to a reading charity, so even if you don't want to read it, why not pitch in?) Honestly, I'm kind of glad that there's a pay wall, because this is that story, one with a very unpleasant topic and language with which I was very pleased.

Two weeks ago I read a book for my experimental fiction class, Anna Kavan's Ice, that I couldn't but think was sexist, despite the gender of its author. The main female character is dreadful: passive, childlike, fragile physically and emotionally, somewhat character-free aside from her unusual appearance, etc. In class Wednesday night, the professor mentioned that in a way, creating this character is a "violently feminist" act, because the author is skewering men's perceptions of women. I felt a little chagrined at my prior opinion of the book, because this exact dynamic is what I was up to in "Little Bitch." I imagine a lot of people will read it the way I read Ice, which is something I accepted when I finished the story, but I also imagine people will look at my gendered name and wonder if I'm doing something else. I am. Or so I hope.

Earlier in the week I worked some more on the journalist story and set it aside to ferment. My most recent impression is that it came out reasonably well, if not as well as I'd hoped. It's a little longer, over 6K, and I hope it doesn't creep up to 7K after the next round of revisions. I'm tired of writing stories too long to sell.

Just for fun, here's a few hundred words I wrote as an exercise for the aforementioned class. I don't plan to do anything else with this, but I thought it wasn't terrible, so here 'tis.

This Is Not for You

I wrote and polished the below as a brief essay for a website like The Mary Sue or Jezebel, but neither responded to my queries. Before it gets too out of date, I want at least a minuscule audience to enjoy it. Et voila.

This Is Not for You

I think I'm done with spectacle movies.

You could also call these types of movies "blockbusters" or "summer movies" or "Baystravaganzas" or "movies where you just turn your brain off and enjoy the explosions." But because this demographic has kind of Voltroned in recent years to include superhero movies, sci-fi epics, resurrected franchises from the 80s, movies made from popular books, and other odds and ends, I'm just going to call them spectacle movies.

The last one I saw was Star Trek Into Darkness, and that's mostly why I think I've had enough. Rob Bricken over at io9 said it all about the incoherent plot, but I do have to add that of all the dudetacular spectacle movies I've seen in the past couple of years, this one was the most stunningly noninclusive. STID’s version of the future contains more white men than my average day in 2013. Even in the background, at meetings, they couldn't toss in a few extras of different races or genders? Really?

I'm tired of turning off my brain for these movies, but more than that, I'm tired of turning off my gender. More and more, I don't see where I belong in popular film. I am obviously supposed to identify with the central male character(s), but I don't, because I’m not male. I can't identify with most of the, uh, central? female characters, because they are nearly always sketches at best and cardboard stereotypes at worst. Recently, Iron Man 3 has been getting points for passing the Bechdel test. That's nice, but it's an outlier, and still not anything close to about the women in it. The big movies of late have told me, loudly and clearly, that they were not made for me.

One of these things is not like the others

I've come to the conclusion that many well-meaning men just don't get this. They don't see how the default setting in spectacle movies is for their eyes and their attitudes. (It took a film degree for me to see this.) They don't see that women are required to get over the hump of our gender in order to enjoy the piece, and men are not. I'm not talking about women not enjoying explosions or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as much as men do. A friendly but ill-comprehending man will say, well, of course STID doesn't pass the Bechdel test. It's about a starship crew mostly composed of men. That is precisely the point, I say. All the movies are about groups mostly composed of men.

Where are our spectacle movies? Where can women go to turn their brains off? Jezebel recently put together this revealing chart, showing how romantic comedies have vanished as superhero movies have bloomed. (I place this at the feet of the Farrelly brothers, for dudeifying rom-coms to the point where they're too vulgar and insulting for women to withstand, but that's really beside the point.) I never liked rom-coms much to begin with; they seemed to be about women who somewhat resembled me without really being for us. No mainstream movie about women has really felt right to me until Bridesmaids, and even that had the whiff of Apatow about it in places.

Coming soon are Man of Steel, which has Amy Adams going for it, but otherwise...; World War Z, in which Brad Pitt evidently ditches his wife to go fight zombies; The Lone Ranger, which has a disposable woman or two in it but seems to be largely about Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, and their respective hats; The Wolverine, which is by my count the fifth major release in fifteen years focused on one of the most hypermasculine characters in all of geekdom; and that took me to the end of July, where I got depressed and gave up.

Remember Hanna? A 2011 action movie starring Saoirse Ronan as a kickass girl fighting against a powerful woman? Yeah, not many people went to see it. It had far fewer plot problems than STID, and much more interesting hand-to-hand action sequences, but it came and went with hardly a whisper at the box office. I wish even half the women who unwillingly went to The Hangover II that year had seen Hanna instead. They might have seen someone they could actually identify with instead of feeling shut out.

Me? I'm done. I'll see Man of Steel because Zack Snyder's attitude toward women interests me (I could talk about Sucker Punch all day), but the next time a Star Trek movie comes around, I think I'll stay home and watch my DVDs of Voyager. Janeway could've taught Kirk a thing or two.

Postscript: Concerning Vaas Cheesecake

Two people said they wanted to hear me expound about something I brought up in the last post after all, so, here it is.

This is Vaas Montenegro.

92 Reasons I Won't Recommend This Book

Is this song cheesy or comforting to the heart? I love it, but the internet has said that it sounds like a song from the credits of a third-rate 80s movie.

I think I've written 10,000 words on KUFC this week. Not shabby. I would have written more if I could stop fiddling with the last two scenes that I typed up (dammit). I keep remembering things like "if she was eating grapes she'd have to spit out the seeds, no seedless grapes in 1940" and "wait, I have to point out that there were grapes on the coffee table in the first place" and "she forgot to put her coat back on before she went outside" and such. It's stupid little stuff, consistencies and anachronisms, but it's the kind of stuff I'm afraid I'll forget entirely if I don't put it in (which simultaneously feels too irrelevant to take notes about).

Also, the book is becoming much queerer than I intended it to be. My MC is bisexual, which was part of the plan all along, but it's turning out that there are more homosexual scenes/couples in the book than hetero ones. I think this is hunky-dory, but since this just happened, I'm slightly worried that I'll scare off publishers the same way Soderbergh scared off distributors. (Best comment I heard on that nonsense: "Now I'm just curious...how gay is this thing?") Ah well. Now is not the time to worry about that. And anyway genre fiction needs more healthy queerness and fewer spider-queens with eight boobs.

Speaking of scary monsters, I am reading this book:

And I think it will be the last advice book about the publishing industry that I read, unless I am recommended one after a serious, thoughtful conversation. I've read ten or so, all told, and a plethora of publishing advice on the internet. They always have the same effect. They make me insecure and arrogant in equal measures (i.e. "oh God, I'm not doing that, I'm not thinking about that, I'm a horrible writer, I'm dooooomed" intertwined with "I totally knew that, I'm brilliant, I'm way better than the herd, I'm gonna be a millionaire"), sometimes in the course of a single sentence. They get me spun up and competitive about who could be in the slush pile with me, and force me to obsess over why the process has to be so fraught and lottery-like. They make me angry because they contradict each other and themselves, sometimes in two neighboring paragraphs, as this one did. And because they codify everything about the process of publishing into secret handshakes that differ from book to book, indicating that the codification is thoroughly variable and meaningless.

To sum up: they keep me from doing good work. They take my focus off the book and onto myself and my ego, whether inflated or punctured. They advise less than they obfuscate. So I'm finished. Me and my perfectionism would rather do everything the exactly-right way to increase my chances of acceptance, but if I've learned anything at all from these fussy, confounding books, it's that the only part of the process that doesn't vary from house to house and agent to agent is do good work. (And tell the truth, but I've got that one down.) So fuck it. I'm just gonna do my best, and make the book part of that best, rather than merely my forward foot.

I note that this book, 78 Reasons etc., is apparently out of print. I'm not surprised, because the author's advice on self-publishing is no longer correct in the slightest and he doesn't mention e-books once. (It's from 2005.) However, its advice is otherwise no different than most of the other books I've read about writing and publishing. It's no outlier on the bad end. It's just as irritating and distracting as all the rest.

FWIW, I liked Self-Editing for Fiction Writers - it supplied practical, applicable advice to someone who abhors revision - and I liked The Fire in Fiction, although I suspect the latter was good because Maass is just a good writer. But, you know, those are craft books, not publishing books. Both invoked the carrot of "you want to be published, don't you?", but neither was specifically about how to get into print.

Okay. Rant over.

I'm trying very hard to do less Facebook lately, and it is a serious challenge. It's difficult on a minute-by-minute basis. And it makes me feel amazingly isolated. But I can also feel my life cracking open to let other things in: old habits, new uses for time. So...yay?

Katharine on Catherine

At the beginning of this week, a friend of mine posted this picture on Facebook with a comment on his disappointment in game-makers for doing shit like this:

He then linked to this ad for the video game in question:

In case I have to say it, ugh. Ugh ugh ugh.

Someone linked to a Malibu Stacy video, someone else reproduced Picard doing this in ASCII, some other people said some awesome defending-women-as-humans-with-brains stuff. Yay for enlightened men. But then someone linked to the Wikipedia page for the Japanese game Catherine. And I kind of did what Picard did:

Nooooooo Catherine is full of ridiculous sexism. Madonna/whore crap and female devouring. no no no no no.

My friend replied with

I haven't played through it yet, but to be fair, that stuff is in the dreams of the dude. It makes sense that his subconscious would have sexist ideas.

I did the computer equivalent of opening my mouth to reply with a long diatribe, and then snapping it shut again. I was going to argue that it hardly mattered whether the game put (very, very old and very, very harmful) ideas in dreams or subconsciousness or whatever, that putting them in games at all was harmful because it continued to perpetuate and spread the ugliness. Fucked-up is fucked-up and it matters very little whether the main character was dreaming or fantasizing or rehearsing a play. The ideas still burn out of the screen right into my brain as sexist.

But I took my fingers off the keys when it occurred to me exactly how hypocritical this would be. In my short story "Fucked", which was published in two print venues, my main character gets her lower abdomen sliced open (shallowly; she winds up okay) by a man who's angry because she's pregnant. A recent story I wrote from the POV of an abusive gymnastics coach begins with this paragraph of sunshine & rainbows:

She’s doing it wrong again. The little bitch. She’s not trying hard enough. She thinks because she has other talents I’m going to let her slip by without doing it right, exactly right, every time. Sneaky little bitch.

And, in fact, the depraved story I wrote last week invokes the devouring woman in a pretty literal way.

So I sat with this for a little while and wondered how I could continue to believe in the ugly fiction I write while maintaining that Catherine was misogynist and harmful. I think it is, but I couldn't figure out how to defend that position while still defending my own work.

I know very well why I write stories where such terrible things happen to women: because terrible things constantly happen to women in real life, and I believe that by bringing attention to them in literature, people will actually give some thought to these things in real life. I want to explore wounded women and unlucky women, and even villainous and clueless women. I am drawn to the dark rather than the light because that's the way I am, but I'm drawn to darkness in women because I find it more interesting, more provocative, and less explored than in men in literature. I approach darkness with the intent to empower and enrage, maybe in equal parts.

But in thinking about how I'd rebut this Facebook comment, I couldn't say for sure that in writing stories where awful things happen to women, I wasn't doing the same thing Catherine did, showcasing and encouraging bad attitudes against women by exploring them in such loving detail.* Scripting harm against fictional women probably does harm actual women in any form, and the fact that I'm a female writer trying to make a point about the unfairness and commonness of violence against women could have been beside the point. Since I couldn't defend myself while leveling criticism at Catherine, I just said nothing.

And then I asked twinkly and kamper about it when I saw them in San Diego. What am I missing? I asked. I described Catherine in a few sentences, explaining that girlfriend-Katherine wants to get married now please, I don't care if you're husband material or not, buy the cow, shackle yourself to me, NOW but otherwise is sort of personality-free, and that dalliance-Catherine is a perfect mistress, sexy and playful and devoid of distinct personality or motivation that is not first, ideally pleasure the man, and then, bring that sucka down and emasculate the stuffing out of him. I noted that the main character is sort of a well-meaning schlubby type whose life isn't going anywhere.**

twinkly and kamper explained in equal and intelligent parts that what I was missing was the approach. It sounded to them as if Catherine came from a base of unconscious misogyny, rather than a base of trying to overturn and explore misogyny (my own). And they're right. The underlying assumptions of the game are degrading and harmful to women. Such as Katherine and Catherine automatically being Madonna and whore and not having any sort of nuance to these portrayals. And the necessary underpinning that all men have nightmares about being devoured by giant, terrifying succubi with many breasts. That nightmare comes from a place of fear about women being too powerful or dominating, as an entire gender. That is not good.

I do think twice about what I write before I write it. Something I put in a recent story seemed a little bit like an instruction manual in a way that creeped me out. But it came right out of warnings my mother gave me about keeping safe when driving by myself (in brief: always check your backseat before you get in the car), so my hope is that it'll keep safe someone who's good more easily than it'll give inspiration to someone who's bad. My enduring hope is that people reading my work will say "hey...why is the other half of the population treated this way?", even if none of them burn a bra or join NOW.

None of what I write blots out the insidious workings of games like Catherine or, most unfortunately, Top Girl. What's interesting to me that sexism like you find in Catherine is more and more often being replaced with the new sexism of Top Girl or the Bic for Her pens or the awful, very-quickly-cornfielded "Science...It's a Girl Thing!" ad campaign.*** That stuff is harder to pin down, as it's not part of an old and harmful archetype, and it's not very blatant.

But it's still there. It's always there.

--
*Total sidebar: I don't think a male director could have gotten away with American Psycho. It, too, explores violence against women in extreme detail, and I think in failing to explain much about why Bateman chose mostly women as his victims, Harron was saying that of course he chooses women, because what other group would an American psycho choose to victimize? At least, I think that's her point. If a male director had made the movie, it might have made me a lot madder even than it did.

**Not unlike a Judd Apatow character, in fact. Golly, what a coinkydink. 

***Do watch both of those videos, when you have the chance. Five minutes altogether. 

Spitting in the Male Eyeball

Although MovieBob, the reviewer for The Escapist, and I do not always see eye to eye, I started taking him seriously when he released a review for Sucker Punch back in spring 2011. Not unconditionally, but strongly, I loved that movie. I was able to nail down most of why in a review I wrote at the time, and MovieBob helped me to see the rest.

For some reason, Bob has decided the time is right to re-defend Sucker Punch, and he's doing so in two separate episodes of The Big Picture (a feature that digs beyond review to analysis, and is often not to my taste). The second one was released today. Here are parts one and two, and because I realized I had a lot more to say than Facebook comments would permit, here is my original review/defense of Sucker Punch, tarted up a bit for its grand re-release.

Spoilers below.