Karaba’s Potential Never Fully Realized

I recently watched the french animated film Kirikou & the Sorceress on the advice of multiple friends and while I did like it I had issues, specifically with the character Karaba the Sorceress.

Let me start by saying that I love the evil witch archetype that Karaba is part of. In fact, there was a post I wanted to write for this blog that never really came together about one of the first female characters I loved being the Evil Queen in Snow White. It probably says more about my being an only child for 12 years than about Disney that I identified with her. She was powerful and went for what she wanted, how can you not admire that? I mean I’m not advocating sending poison apples to your rivals but her I loved the character if not the actions.

Kirikou & the Sorceress is based on African folk tales and Kirikou is an exceptionally small boy who manages to birth himself and is already wise (and really really tiny) when he comes out. His village has been terrorized by the evil Karaba who has eaten all the men, dried up the spring and blocked the path over the mountain.

So my problem with Karaba is obviously not that she falls in this Evil Witch archetype/stereotype but that there are a couple moments when she seems like she’s going to burst out of that mold but it never comes to fruition.

Warning - Spoilers Ahead
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Bits and pieces of singularity conversation

Cynthia1960, whump, Madeline, jhkim, Oblomovka, vito_excalibur (most of us have not read the previous posts and comments), Everyone is talking at once

- Octavia Butler Xenogenesis , humanity transformed/disappeared (and in fact the entire Earth) along with gender and bodies. What could be more singularityish. discontinuity!
- Mindscape.
- gender changing
- we are in one already, move to human rights & equality
- Native Tongue books, singularity acheived through language, society transformed
- Well, the whole audiosythetarian thing from Native Tongue too
- Gwyneth Jones in Bold as Love & the energy/body thing, 3rd book, psychics
- White Queen & North wind as well
- whileaway!
- Marq’ssan aliens diff. consciousness
- instead of magic called nanotech, just have magic called MAGIC…? (everyone goes “eh… no”)
- if we take the narrower definition of singularity with ai and consciousness…
- degrees of singularity
- Trivial home genetic engineering! what would happen, hard to predict
- “singularity” is modern replace ment for nuclear war, the book is about the few people who got missed
- Blindsight! so awesome you have to fucking read it… (rave rave) really alien aliens.
- singularity as thing actually going to happen? Or as literary device?
- does it have to happen to everyone, to be the singularity?
- clearly not since there are observers, outsiders, left behinders watching the sky turn metal or whatever
- the guy at the end of childhood’s end…
- works as a story, or works in the world?
- what’s the point of it in a story? hate it… (jhkim) wacky predictions like nanotech, no deifferent from any other devices like ftl travel
- singularity presented as anti device. ceiling of unpredictablility, people writing about 2000 in 1950. But people in 1985 still writing about year 2000 because we don’t think we can predict 50 years out.
- Value of prediction in SF is not really about prediction, it’s about the present date. they are tools we use to think about now.
- friction of distance getting smaller. that hapened. what if it gets bigger? it won’t go back to the way it was. does it kill internet ordering? do we raise carp in our basements? what? Stuff, food?
- hard to predict doesn’t make it a singularity. prediction, extrapolation
- justina robson’s quantum gravity books
- aliens themselves are often presented… cultural contact
- singularities that are hard starts (?) ie a sudden jump or shift (this is what I (liz) keep asking for)
- ecological disasters. Peak oil. plastics.
- what are the 3 sf plots - what if, if only, if this goes on
- For god’s sake in this conversation can we avoid 2 things, heinlein and pratchett hahaha
- reproduction? etc
- Is part of the muddling here that we begin just listing big technological changes
- (digression into fatphobia and politics)
- something something ecology of star wars in my mind and radioactive grains of dust and ladybugs and warming their eggs. (WHAT?) ladybugs optimized blah blah, Redundancy, repeated things for important stuff, mutations, wide tastes in mating
- Long Now talk, notes by whump: http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/2004/06/19/04010/
- “I just think that radiation-proof sluts is not what the world needs”
- “when i say HOT I don’t mean geiger counter”
- recognizing mating symbols. There was this one time, I was in Chicago, it was spring, I was walking past this tree, birds were making a racket, i was thinking, ahhh mating and noise, and this car came by going WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP and i laughed so hard I dropped my groceries, and so, interfering with species recognition (Oh, like pesticides?) (Yes) Unless they went up a TREE and went whomp whomp whomp…
- Radiation proof bacteria, food spoiling, in the 50s. Redundancy, fixing dna very quickly. Places in the world with high radiation? But, they are exactly the techniques you use if you’re dried out… craig venter… so movie villain…

I think we have veered from the singularity so I will stop. Except they are all making fun of the “Liz blog singularity” in which I write for every single blog including Little Green Footballs and Instapundit and me and Scalzi merge into grey goo…

Feminism, SF, and Technology as Mystification

In recent entries to this blog and their comments, people have brought up technology as a SFnal feminist issue. I have to make an intervention on this commentary, because my opinion on the subject is profoundly influenced by an essay by Joanna Russ entitled “SF and Technology as Mystification”; and some of those comments are making me angry and frustrated, and furthermore I feel that I must put forth my point of view so that it may steer the exchanges that take place here in a more fruitful direction.

Russ’s essay appears in the collection To Write Like A Woman, and is, luckily for me because this means you can all read it that much more easily, also available in its entirety online: SF and Technology as Mystification ⁽¹⁾, from Science Fiction Studies # 16; Volume 5, Part 3; November 1978. (Thirty years ago!)

In the bulk of her essay, Russ describes talk about technology as a cognitive addiction, which allows a mystification to take place. My primary focus in writing this blog entry is the mystification that can and often does happen, rather than the addiction that she was addressing at the time, and what it is that the mystification conceals. (I’m not saying the addiction to talk about technology is vanished from public discourse — but the context for its occurence has changed a little since the late 1970s. I’ll write more on context below.)

The first thesis of Russ’s essay is this:

Technology is a non-subject.

That is, “technology,” as it finds its way into almost all the discussions of it I have been unfortunate enough to participate in in the last five years, is the sexy rock star of the academic humanities, and like the rock star, is a consolation for and an obfuscation of, something else.

(Please refer to the essay for Russ’s definition of technology, which I’ll skip here.)

Online discussions of SF from a feminist standpoint are a bit like “the academic humanities”, and as such, I often find that technology is a non-subject here too. With the obvious caveat that, in, say, discussions of world-building, or the bugs in the implementation of plug-ins for this blog, technology could itself be a subject, but… in a feminist forum, it cannot, must not be “a consolation for, and an obfuscation of, something else.”

Further on in her essay, Russ explained what she reasoned to be that something else which lurked below the surface of those discussions that took place in academic and SF circles during the 1970s:

Hiding greyly behind that sexy rock star, technology, is a much more sinister and powerful figure. It is the entire social system that surrounds us; hence the sense of being at the mercy of an all-encompassing, autonomous process which we cannot control. If you add the monster’s location in time (during and after the Industrial Revolution) I think you can see what is being discussed when most people say “technology.” They are politically mystifying a much bigger monster: Capitalism in its advanced, industrial phase.

In the second thesis and synthesis of her essay, Russ explained the addiction model and applied it to talk about technology, then suggested alternative forms of input as a cure for the addiction.

(…) I suggest that politics and economics take the place of the kicked technology-habit until the victims’ intellectual taste buds recover and they find themselves capable of thinking in more practical terms, especially about money and power.

For the second thesis of this entry I write here, I will put forth the radical statement that feminism is a political issue.

I hope that this doesn’t surprise any of you. I cannot, however, let it remain unwritten as an implied premise for the dialectic of my argument, so I have to explicate it.

Feminism is a political issue. It’s a political movement. It’s a wide number of trajectories, positions and attitudes, all of which have to do with politics, and thereby conjointly with various spheres of human activity. Economics, violence, art, etc.

It is because of politics and economics that feminism exists. Feminism is a complicated issue. It has innumberable facets and intersections. But it is a social, a political matter, because it comes from the way that human societies are set up, from the way human beings regulate interactions between people, from the power and money and statuses and relative positions that human beings create through the organisation of our societies.

On Feminist SF - The Blog!, this blog, we can have discussions on the subject of feminist SF. We can also talk about technology as it relates to feminist SF.

But, for the sake of feminism as an endeavour in this world from which we contribute to the blog, we cannot allow the mystification of technology, we cannot allow an obfuscation of the politics and economics, of the social ramifications that push feminism into existence.

Women are not simply and solely oppressed by the advanced, industrialised phase of capitalism. This concern that lurked behind the addictive talk about technology which Russ wrote about is not the only one that we have. In our discussions of SF, there are many other concerns that can hide behind the surface.

I wholeheartedly believe that it is vital to keep, therefore, the taste of the politics and economics that push feminism into existence, in our minds when we approach SF as feminists.

***

I will bring in specific examples of some of those political issues and instances of obfuscation here.

One of those issues being the use of the pronoun “we”. Behind it there are people, and it addresses people also in different ways — depending on the people behind it, depending on the intentions of the writer, depending on the political relationship of the writer and of the readers in the intended audience, and of the readers actual.

We’re not all the same when we contribute to this blog. And we, therefore, face different challenges. Writing from the radical perspective of the oppressed isn’t the same as writing from the liberal perspective of the ally.

And I radically, viscerally resent the liberal ally who wastes my time with a lunatic objectification of feminism.

It’s an excellent example for comparison with Russ’s indictement of technology as a non-subject, because he puts the theoretical concept of technological singularity on the same level as feminism.

It’s an excellent example of obfuscation, because, as Madeline F. points out, he:

contrast[s] Feminist SF with hard SF… To no real purpose? Except doing so backs up the old canard of “women can’t hack science”

Tycho shows absolutely no grasp of the underpinnings of feminism as a real issue. In his position as a liberal ally, however, he is free to “be playing with false abstractions” that include feminism.

The many mystifications in his blog entry, and in his comments, may be the byproduct of a lack of understanding that may eventually be remedied, but they sicken me nonetheless, on two counts.

One, in that they make no sense, and the mental effort required to discern whereby they came to make such little sense is dizzying.

And two, in that they appear on this feminist blog, which forces the rest of us — which includes me — to deal with them because they become part of this first-person-plural-”we”.

The silver lining, here, is that this we also includes people who are not me who can look at the abstractions and see the details indicative of their nature, and that sometimes productive tangents may also come of bumping into the moonlit objects of false abstractions.

⁽¹⁾ NB: the printed version of “SF and Technology as Mystification” in To Write Like A Woman has the corrected attribution of the reference to “lunacy” and “idiocy” to Rebecca West, but the online version still references Mary Ellmann instead. I’d like to add that the reference originally appears in the prologue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Cheat sheet to L. Timmel Duchamp’s work, for WisCon

Okay all you people who have Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, and Blood in the Fruit in a 2-foot-high stack on your to-read shelf. Listen up!

For the ultimate WisCon prep so you can know what everyone is talking about, read the novel Mission Child and then read Duchamp’s analysis, Maureen McHugh’s Mission Child. That makes the perfect combination so you get some insight into the work of the two Guests of Honor for WisCon 2008.

There will also be a fabulous little inexpensive book for sale at WisCon, Plugged In, with one short story from McHugh and one from Duchamp, both very guaranteed to make you run off to your time machine and hack your body into Cyborg-Manifesto-ish feminist futurity while you download James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” straight into your brainstem.

So, what else?

You *could* read the whole Marq’ssan series before WisCon if you are that sort of person. Or at least books 1 and 2.

But we know you have lives. Just *buy* the Marq’ssan series now. Buy it at WisCon and get Timmi to sign it. Read it all in one big gulp, later, if you must delay till the last book of the series comes out.

Meanwhile, here is the bare bones guide to the mindblowing coolness that is L. Timmel Duchamp’s writing.

Cyborgs, women’s relationships with other women, surveillance, torture, interrogation, co-optation, dystopia, weird aliens, time travel, art, alternate histories; but above all, brave revolutionaries, resistance, and hope.

I think everyone should read The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding), a novella Duchamp wrote in 1990. Dystopian interrogation novel, lite: the gateway drug to her longer work. It’s a near future where pretty much everyone is in the prison-industrial complex. Eve Escher, a prison psychologist/torturer, is dealing with a prisoner, Sarah Minnivitch. Read it and plan to need comforting afterwards. It is not that the torture scenes are over the top compared to what you might read or see in the news. It’s that the way the torturers and tortured think will be familiar. You will recognize something about the structure of society here and of all power relationships. Of teacher and student, boss and employee, doctor and client, author and reader, maybe lover and beloved. If multinational corporations and prisons creep you out; if you have thought at all about the insidious effects of surveillance in our culture; if you like the twisty no-good-guys ethics of TV shows like The Wire, then you will fall into Red Rose and stay up all night thinking it over.

It’s a good book to read alongside of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother or Alice Nunn’s Illicit Passage.

Also, it is cheap, short, punchy, and a quick read. You can see what Lesley Hall thought of it over on Strange Horizons.

Other short stories or novellas might also be a good lead-in and get you hooked on Duchamp’s complicated, scary, masterful science fiction. The stories in her book Love’s Body, Dancing in Time go forward to the future and other planets, and stretch back into histories and alternate histories. I thought of Joanna Russ’s story “Souls” and am inspired to re-read it, after a day I spent last weekend reading “The Heloise Archives” and “The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi” and researching (online) the story of Heloise and Abelard. Finally I found this interview which explained some of Duchamp’s thinking behind her alternate history and her take on the “real” history.

If you can’t buy Red Rose or Love’s Body yet, you can still read some of Duchamp’s criticism and her short stories online — for free.

In one of her essays, The Stories of Our Lives Duchamp speculates on the kinds of stories we are capable of telling, that we are allowed to tell, that other people can even comprehend to be stories:

…how the lives people live are shaped by the way they tell stories about themselves to themselves as well as to other people (just as memories are set by those stories– one of Samuel R. Delany’s perennial themes, of course). The forms stories take are no accident. These forms pretty much call the shots. Departure from them stands out (and to certain people looks immoral, or false, or incomprehensible, or even insane).

She goes on to discuss Karen Joy Fowler, Nicola Griffith, Le Guin, Gwyneth Jones, and the stories they tell, the meta-stories that women are able to tell in science fiction.

You might just start going through the list of incredible essays on great science fiction by women that Duchamp has made available on her web site. She tackles the most difficult and intricate work, takes it apart and lays it out. I appreciate how her essays are easy to read, but complicated to think about. Her writing has helped me think about things I didn’t know how to think about before.

But, as a starting point, try Pleasure and Frustration: One Feminist’s Reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign. You’ve all read Civil Campaign, right? HOW many times? I can’t even count. See what you think of Duchamp’s analysis of Bujold!

Or, if you have read Glasshouse recently, you might dive into her complicated critique, published in Strange Horizons.

From the short fiction available free on her website, I recommend Bettina’s Bet and “The World and Alice”. You might not be able to resist the Elizabeth Bennett/Darcy story.

If I have time this weekend I’ll write about Maureen McHugh’s work, but for now, here is a link to her blog and one to her author-ish web site, which links you right to her fiction with stories free online & novels to buy. I think my Twittering “Tranny Julie of the Wolves! In space!” is not really doing justice to Mission Child… though it did make a couple of people immediately buy and read it!

The Feminist Singularity

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the singularity. Of all the great concepts (tropes?) in science fiction, it’s never been one that has really spoken to me, but as I was falling asleep the other night I was thinking about other philosophical uses for the concept of the singularity, at which point I said, “ah, now there’s something interesting.” And though a poor sleep strategy, I’d like to think about some things with you.

First, the singularity. We’ll hand the originating citation to Vernor Vinge, who described a technological singularity, the point where humans are able to design artificial intelligences that are more intelligent than humans and thus able to improve themselves without human intervention.¹ That’s sort of specific though, and I think the concept of singularity speaks to the point of “ultimate progress,” or perfection beyond which, all future progress is meaningless.

So this is one of those SF concept that really dredges up the “hardest” elements of the genre, and doesn’t typically have a lot of feminist content (that I’m aware of, though I’m alright being proven wrong in this regard.) while this is an appropriate criticism, I don’t think it’s something that’s unique to singularity literature.

But here’s what woke me up when I was thinking about this. Feminist SF deals with gender and sexuality (and race and … ) in much the same way that hard SF deals with technology, which predictably lead me to “well then, what would the feminist singularity be?”

Which is dangerous, because it forces us to answer “what’s the goal of feminism,” which isn’t a particularly productive discussion in context of activism/theory or the singularity as “it depends on your perspective,” won’t help you very much if you’re looking for the singularity.

Maybe technology isn’t subject to this sort of thing (I doubt it,) but by looking for signs of other singularity–the point of ultimate progress, beyond which all other progress is irrelevant–I’m beginning to think that the entire concept of the singularity is flawed. It’s based upon that the paradigm shift is the normal mode of technological (or any other) development, which doesn’t tend to hold up. Change in it’s continuos, and regular forms–be it in the way we think about gender or about microprocessors–changes slowly and regularly. And sometimes we can look back at a couple of distinct and separate changes and see a “paradigm shift” but while we have moment to moment change, there are probably no movement to moment paradigm shifts.

So I guess this leaves me, and us with the following question: do we object to the notion of singularity as feminists because the feminist singularity isn’t clear, or do we as feminists oppose singularity because it’s not a politically productive conception of the future, or the present? I think that’s a pretty important question.

At the same time I don’t think that the concept of the singularity is without use. For starters, it is a fundamentally optimistic theory which assumes that change is a constant and holds at it’s core the idea that “things are always going to get better,” not “things are going to get worse before they get better,” and not “things are just going to get worse.” While we can have some debate about the bounds of progress (is there necessarily a point where things can’t physically get any better?), the social and technological assumption of progress is productive.

I don’t have thoughts collected on this, but it strikes me that it might be interesting and productive to think about “the revolution,” not in terms of what happens when things get “so bad that it can’t be tolerated any more,” as revolutions in the 18th century were (so American and French revolutions) and we might think about the struggles over fascism and communism in the 20th as being similar in this regard. Rather, what does the revolution look like when it’s progressive in this sense, or “the singularity?” Seems like there is room there for some pretty interesting thought.

17.948%: Best of Best New SF

39 stories. 7 by women.

I had to find that out in the bookshop, because no review of it I’d read mentioned the one thing I wanted to know: by how much was it predominantly male? Answer: by just over 82%.

Ursula K. Le Guin is in it (”Coming of Age in Karhide”) and so is Pat Cadigan (”Roadside Rescue”). So are Maureen F McHugh and Eileen Gunn and Molly Gloss, but none of those five are mentioned on the cover.

New Horror Series on NBC Lacks Women Writers & Directors

So there’s a new Horror Anthology series called Fear Itself which will premiere June 5th on NBC. The network has gone ahead and revealed summaries for their first ten episodes.

Right from the jump I get nervous because horror, in my admittedly limited  experience, does not have the best track record with female characters. Whenever I see anything resembling horror the women always seem to be extras that are a bundle of stereotypes and are there just to have these highly sexualized deaths. As I go through the summaries and realize about 4 out of the 10 have female leads it gave me a little bit of hope that maybe they’d survive. Then I took a look at who was writing and directing the episodes.

Out of the ten stories on tap only one is written by a woman and only one is directed by a woman and it’s the same episode. It also happens to be the only episode that deals directly with domesticity (I’m aware that there’s another one that deals with a wedding and a bride who gets a note about her fiance but I think that’s a separate thing than a story that focuses on domesticity). And let’s be clear I’m not saying women shouldn’t write or direct things that have to with domesticity and newlyweds but when that’s the only thing they seem to be allowed to do it raises an alarm with me.

Now we only have the first ten descriptions and while I’m not sure if that’s a big enough sample to wholesale write off the series I will be watching it closely to see what’s going on and to see if they get any other female writers/directors on deck and to see how the female characters are treated.

Below find the descriptions currently available

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Orson Scott Card is a misogynistic homophobic wanker

You all knew about homophobic Card, right?

Orson Scott Card is not a champion of fandom and fannish works. But in a recent essay in his “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything” series, which also included reviews of the Harry Potter movies, (via Avedon, thanks) he is apparently defending a fan’s right to take a fannish enterprise and republish commercially.

The essay is J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz, but it might as well have been called “Smack The Uppity Bitch”.

There a longer outline of the case here, but for a quick summary: back when the first Harry Potter book came out, a fan named Steve Vander Ark began to compile a lexicon. He wasn’t attempting to do criticism or review or analysis: he was simply providing an online resource, like a concordance, which took spells, characters, locations, etc, from the books, and defined them using quotes from the books: it was a searchable online resource, and it made SVA (so Harry Potter fans tell me) a very BNF indeed. As a commercial work, I think this couldn’t have been done without the copyright holder’s consent: as a fannish enterprise, it went ahead quite happily until SVA announced he had a book contract to publish the Lexicon. He had asked J. K. Rowling for permission to do this, she’d refused, and he’d decided to go ahead without her permission.
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21st carnival is out

Hey, the 21st carnival of feminist SF fans is out at heroine content.

PodCastle Has Girl Cooties!

A few weeks ago, Escape Artists, the folks behind EscapePod and PseudoPod, launched the fantasy fiction podcast, PodCastle.  So far there have been four episodes.  Keep that in mind.

I have been poking my head in the forum topic and the post for the third episode, “Run of the Fiery Horse” because Rachel, the editor, asked me to do the intro (because I love, love, love the story).  As with most Escape Artist forum discussions, people have wildly varying reactions to and interpretations of the story.  But there’s also been some discussion of the “tone” of PodCastle as being too women-centric/feminist.  To wit:

…but there’s one thing about podcastle that’s beginning to bug me, all three stories have had a heavy theme of female empowerment. … the backlash of female-centric fantasy is both necessary and welcome but there’s so much more out there.

This cast has also started off with (IMO) an unfortunate “by-women-for-women” overtone. I have to wonder whether there are male listeners out there who notice/are put off by this?

One criticism — the three main selections so far have had a definite feminist fiction feel to them. I’m sure you have a full variety with wonderful balance planned for the future.

Also check out the topic on the forum about the issue.

Of course there are people involved in the discussion who decry this as utter silliness, and as well a completely premature, as we’re only four episodes in. More quotes:

…it’s interesting that this comes up immediately into the launch of Pod Castle, when I know, as a lady, I am used to giving a magazine/pod cast quite a bit of leeway before I decide it’s too classist, sexist, racist, etc for my tastes. Methinks part of the whole male-privilege thing is getting to be very impatient and critical of something that doesn’t fit the male-normative format from jump.

It’s commonplace for podcasts to be organized by male editors, with stories by male writers, about male protagonists, and read by male readers. It’s not uncommon for there to be several such episodes in a row. … What is problematic is the double-standard… even one or two podcasts that involve multiple female creators will be objected to…

It’s like, “how DARE there be three stories in a row featuring girls! That must mean PodCastle is for vaginas only! Get thee back, men, or ye shall be emasculated!”

This is pretty much exactly how I feel, thus all the quoting. Four episodes in and already we’re overrun with the womens!  Jeez.

Why I have never read Native Tongue III

Suzette Haden Elgin’s SFWA homepage has more detail about the Native Tongue books, and if you’ve somehow managed to miss them completely, that’s where you should go.

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The Internets work how they’re supposed to

Here is a quick summary of the wild and wooly LJ throwdown today in the Feminist SF blogosphere which some call Gropergate and some call the Open Source Boob Grab.

I would like to unfold it before you as I experienced it:

First, I saw Rachel Manija’s post. I had to leave for work, so didn’t have time to read further or to do more than rant briefly in outrage that all we DON’T need in SF fandom is more encouragement for creepy-grope-culture and pressure for women to commoditize themselves for the benefit of men.

I thought about it all day from the little information I had. I thought about gay & lesbian and queer hanky codes to indicate specific detail about sexual preferences in gay bars, sex parties, and cruising grounds. I thought about the things that signify femininity, and gender in general. I thought over particularly painful and haunting incidents of sexual harassment I have experienced. I thought about doing sex work and what it taught me. I went “GRRRRR” big time and proposed that we ask MEN at cons to wear buttons that proclaim “Groper”, “Sexist”, “Ogler”, “Creep” and “Potential Rapist”. Make them identify, not us.

In a science fiction context, I thought certainly of the WorldCon boob grab perpetrated by Harlan Ellison. I thought of the girl I met at last year’s ConQuest who wore a button saying “I’m only 14, don’t even think about it” and was heartened yet saddened by what it implied. I thought of the extreme harassment and personal assault I have experienced in role-playing games with friends and at cons.

Then, just now, I read mystickeeper’s short summary. I learned that the original poster called this plan the “Open Source Boob Project”. Before I even finished the first screen of her entry, I was snorting fire because I love the open source movement and philosophy and think it’s a beautiful thing. I love the public domain, and copyleft, and Creative Commons. I question many mainstream ideas about private property and ownership, and intellectual property. And, I am involved with several organizations that support and foster the participation of women in open source. It did NOT make me happy to think of the words “women in open source” taking on a new meaning — the meaning that women’s bodies are privately owned property (owned by themselves, or their significant others) who should “open source” their bodies.

I then sat down to pound furiously upon my keyboard to give my ranty thoughts & reactions a good, quick, unedited ranty bloggity outlet.

THEN after I went through that whole nostril-flaring thought chain, I followed the link to the original poster’s journal entry. He had updated it and closed comments after over 1000 comments. People are surely still going to be emailing him for days, weeks, months. He apologized, and said that he realized now that it only made sense in context, with a group of people who knew each other and who thought it fun — In my opinion, in his mind it was like the hanky code in a gay bar, in the context it was in. And his apology reads as sincere and thoughtful to me. It doesn’t erase the wrong of it. But, I give him credit for making an attempt.

And the chances that the Project would get fucked up, making con spaces more amenable to hordes of stalkers and mouthbreathers who will grope and maul women, are pretty damn big. Hell, it’s already made women feel less safe by me mentioning it, and that makes me feel like shit. As it should.

Further, he says,

And while that’s not the way it happened - at least from the perspective of the folks who participated …[whiny bit deleted, out of mercy]

…It doesn’t matter.

I agree with that 100%. That is a decent apology, especially coming so quickly.

THEN I read misia’s hilarious, perfect, beautiful, post: A Modest Proposal. It healed my soul, as did the many great comments. Misia proposes the Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project (OSSKBP). Here is the short version, but go read her whole post. It’s a treat.

1. Men who would like to be asked for permission before a woman administers one or more swift kicks to their balls shall wear the offical OSSKBP “Ask First Pin” at all times. This is a black lapel pin with a lavender question mark on it.
2. Men who do not wish to be kicked in the balls at all must wear a large visible official “No Kicks, Thanks” badge at all times, including when swimming, showering, and sleeping. They may also wish to avoid areas where large numbers of women are present, particularly at night. Some men may also wish to invest in assertiveness training…

Ha!!!
Many people chimed in with funny, apt comments: pantryslut with

“And always remember, we are creating a better, more honest world with this project. By being open about our desire to kick men in the balls, instead of shamefully hiding our pure, innocent, harmless feelings.

and vito_excalibur:

Why, the validation they will get from knowing that we find their testicles a worthy target will be a pure source of satisfaction and joy!

If you don’t get it they are mocking the things that guys say, Nice Guys who want women to be “liberated” about their sexuality with the agenda of getting some free pussy.

There is another lovely extended parody from roseembolism: “In this moment, all of the societal restrictions had fallen away, and we discovered an eBay-like need: We liked to express the desire to kick him inna crotch, and he liked the compliment of being noticed.” And there is GREAT in depth discussion in the post and comments inthe-red-shoes‘ journal. Oh, there’s so much. I can’t link to it all! The responses keep coming, with infinite depth. Can’t! Stop! Reading! Awesome! Internet! Naamen, you rock!

DAMN! This is some privileged BULLSHIT! This is disgusting! This the the illusion of endorsing open sexuality by opening up bodies that aren’t your own for touch! This is a way for you to get your rocks off groping womyn in public and pretending to be deep! This is enforcing the belief that womyn are public property!

Let me say it loud so thast it might -might- penetrate your skull:

WOMYN’S BODIES ARE NOT A PUBLIC SPACE!

The beauty of saoba’s declaration filled me with happiness:

“I am a person, actual and whole. I am not a walking interactive art installation for random passersby. I choose clothing to please myself, based on my own intent and the event I am attending.
I am not an ambulatory therapy object. I am not public property. ” - saoba

You may also enjoy coffeeandink’s fierce thoughts on the subject. I’d like to go digging through all the threads and find her comments as I am sure they are worth the hunt. If you do, please link that up in comments below. She disagrees that the dude’s apology is worth a damn. Actually I agree with her but I am a little easier on his sorry ass since I think about 99% of blogging dudes would have not even got as far as he did into actual thought, and that kind of CR work goes slow. I think when Scalzi told him he was wrong he listened… nevermind what all those chicks say… ;-)

The point I am winding up to, though, is that it is US who did the right thing here, all the people mostly women but some men, who went furiously type type typing immediately to their blogs and LJs and make the freaking internet EXPLODE with mockery, outrage, anger, orneriness, analysis, questioning, and criticism. THAT’S how it’s supposed to work! The feminist blogosphere is swift and fierce! It lays out the issues, it gets its hands dirty, it disagrees and shouts and does it right. Go team! What we all did, and the way this can work, is to head off shitty ideas at the pass. Obviously, not by forbidding anyone to flirt in any context, ever. But, by public discussion and debate. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Great Denial of the Boob Grab. I take heart from it, immensely so.

The Midwich Miscarriages

On 26th September, 1957, or possibly 1948, something happened in a village called Midwich: it was called Dayout. I am unspecific about the year because it is unclear whether it is taking place in the past or the future: but the account of it is dated 1957.

For 36 hours or so, the village was asleep: a hemispherical field (apparently cast by a distinctly unidentified object) made it impossible to get near the place. Anyone who tried, fell asleep.

Then they woke up. The object that had been barely glimpsed at the centre of the field had vanished. Nothing else appeared to have happened.

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women: the undiscovered country

So a frequent topic of conversation in my household the last few months has been the so-called “Braxton Hicks contractions“. Also known as false labor, these are contractions that women experience during the latter half of pregnancy. The uterus is practicing for labor, basically. Women have always known about these. Midwives have known about them. But they are named Braxton Hicks because of the male scientist who first “discovered” them.

Women: the undiscovered country.

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What Feminist SF Books Should Be Movies?

I’m sure this isn’t the first time this discussion has been started in Feminist SF groups but there was a recent blog post listing the authors’ top 10 Science Fiction books that should be movies. Reading the list I realized that there were no women authors on the list or any books by male authors with feminist slant or even a female protagonist, which rankled me quite a bit, so I decided to pose a question to all of you. My question is: What Feminist SF/F books do you think should be made into movies?

To get things rolling here are the first five that that popped into my head:

Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey - Now before y’all jump on me for this one I know Anne McCaffrey has said some really bat-crazy-ish in the last few years and that most if not all of the books in the Pern series are super problematic (enough so that I’ve never actually gotten through the first duology). Now that being said I loved Dragonsong growing up and Menolly was one of my favorite characters in my little library, I reread this book at least twice a year for quite a while. Awkward, musical and oppressed by her father and her society Menolly finds her own way in the world of Pern. That being said the way the other women in the book are depicted is what eventually stopped the re-reading but I would still like to see Menolly’s story of running away from her father and finding a place for herself played out on screen just adapted so that every other woman is not incompetent or judged as an “evil slut” by every other character. Plus seeing the fire-lizards done right would be pretty cool.

The Orphan’s Tale Books {In The Night Garden & In The Cities of Coin and Spice } by Catherynne M. Valente - Now this would probably work best as a mini-series because there is no way to shorten things, everything ties into everything else, every story is important and most details are clues to the connections between the stories. That being said I would love to see Valente’s lyrical words turned into images though there is a part of me wonders if that would rob them of some of their power. Some of the images in this work are so powerful you can’t help but stop and re-read passages so you can take in all the detail, it would be interesting to see how they would be rendered in a film version.

Jaran by Kate Elliot - I read this when I was in high school and though I don’t remember all the details I remember loving the character of Tess the way she interacts with the tribes of Jaran and it was probably the first sci-fi/fantasy novel I read that had openly queer characters and I remember that being a huge deal for me (another one I remember re-reading quite a bit when I was younger). I would love to see the planet Rhui and the relationship between Tess and Ilya played out.

Brown Girl In The Ring by Nalo Hopkinson - The dystopic view of a Toronto that’s been abandoned by most of it’s affluent/white population is a powerful tale of connecting to lost/ignored heritage and family. It would be beautiful/horrifying (or beautifully-horrifying) to see some of the images described in the book and the vision of an abandoned Toronto still functioning best it can falling back into old ways emblazoned on the screen could be a truly classic image.

Return To Isis by Jean Stewart (I have a whole speperate post in the works on this book) - It would be amazing to see the two seperate societies of this book portrayed on screen, the oppressive Elysium where anyone not white, christian or heterosexual was killed and women are kept in breeding houses unless they are infected in which case they live on the outskirts of society as serf-farmers. And in the west {Freeland}, seven free cities where the People of Color, Queer folks, Women and those of alternative religions fled. Futuristic dystopic sci-fi with only lesbian characters and a betrayal plot dead for ten years that blazing back to life, I love the movie already.

So what do you guys think? Are there any books I list that you disagree with? What books are on your list? Why?