antisocial

Early advice from my mother: write nothing down you don't want someone to (be able to) read. If it's written, she said, anyone can read it. Maybe someone you didn't intend. If it's written, there's no guarantee of privacy. Nor should there be expectation of it.

(My mother basically taught me that people kinda suck, or at least enough of them do that you gotta be wary. I don't think she was wrong.)

Also early advice from my mother: think before you speak. 

I am not so great at the second--sometimes deliberately so--but the first one stuck with me. I wouldn't keep a diary of anything real because, little cute lock or not, someone might read it. (I did not think of writing in cypher, like Anne Lister; if I had, maybe I'd've written more, and there would be juicy details for someone to decrypt after my death. But see? That's even the point. Anne Lister's diaries got decrypted and fucking published. I would be long dead and would not care as a result, but even so: Mom would be right. I wrote something, and people read it, and I had no control over it. Would have no control. Oh, fuck the verb tenses. You get it.) 

The point is, I am less likely to write something potentially inflammatory than I am to say it. Even on social media. Maybe especially on social media: I don't pop off with the first thing that comes to mind (and out of my mouth, snarked for the benefit of whichever cat is in the room and possibly Nous, as we are in the habit of saying the shit we'd never write to each other, just so it gets said). If I say some shit to somebody online, boom, there it is. There it stays. Then everyone else who can read and access that page sees it, and suddenly my snark has an audience, and well, we know how this works. Proliferating toadshit. I'm not allergic to opinions--oh no, heavens, haha, I have a few of those, and they are not always kind--but I don't see the point in sharing them for their own sake, either on my wall or in someone's comments. I don't want to have a goddamned brawl. I hate the drama. 

Therefore I avoid posting in Facebook threads, even among my very locked up friends list. I avoid Twitter threads for the same reason, plus, you know, totally public (and I'm a woman and a teacher). I hesitate to post here, even, which is... kinda antithetical to having a blog in the first place. 

So I'm gonna try and write more this year. Here, I mean. Even if I am talking to the echoing emptiness of the internet...that isn't really too different from talking to my cat(s) (except Tinycat, who always answers). I probably still won't post a lot of inflammatory stuff because all the reasons. You want to hear what I really think, catch me at a con and I'll tell ya. 

i am fire, i am death

This is becoming a regular thing, isn't it, I write about the weather? Like there's nothing else going on. But since my nation's currently a dumpster fire, well... I am not happy that my state is also burning, burning. Again. Especially since the new horror of a tax bill will not allow deductions for fire-disaster expenses because it's a mean-spirited partisan piece of malice.

Anyway, wind, ash, dust, wind, more ash, smoke. I'd rather have an actual dragon burning shit up, with actual gold in a hoard somewhere, so that we could at least pay for the rebuilding afterwards.

And we can't say "climate change" because... because... I guess we don't do science anymore? Man, I don't get that. I don't get the social conservatism, either (oh, let's just call it bigotry), but that's all amygdala. But science?

A process of trying to understand the world's materialist function, from observation and experimentation and extrapolation from principles. A search for the fucking rules, which would seem to be right up some people's alley, and yet--isn't. Rules for society! But not rules for the planet.

But also...facts, I guess. People imagine science is facts, and sometimes it is, but more often it's an evolution of understanding. (Here I fall back on my Kuhn, and The Structure of Scientific Revolution). New data emerges, new theories float, new tests, new knowledge. I think it's kinda awesome.

And yet.

I was flipping through a Signals catalog the other day (paper. I KNOW.) and there's a whole page of astronomy-themed stuff, and there's this solar system bracelet with, yes, Pluto on it. And the ad copy made a big deal of that, like including Pluto was something subversive, a strike against The Man who wants to take away our ninth planet. My first thought was "pretty bracelet" and my second was, FFS, Pluto? Come on.

When I was growing up, I learned that we had nine planets. Then, when I was an adult, I learned that the solar system was more complicated than that, and the ninth planet had been reclassified. And then the fight reignited about planetary classifications, and Pluto might be a planet again...along with 110 other bodies out there, This did not make me sad. Or upset. Or anything, except yay, science! A new thing has been learned about how solar systems form!

But people did get upset, as if Pluto's reclassification, as if this new knowledge, was some kind of personal assault on The Way Things Are.  No need to go relearning new things, why, we had nine planets when I was a kid, and nine planets are good enough now, too. And somehow the debate was evidence that those scientists are just silly, fighting over that stuff...all while insisting that Pluto was a planet because that was what they learned from a book when they were kids (which is, you know, pretty silly too).

I don't get it. I mean, I do--sometimes new data, new information, overturns something we found comforting or comfortable, and it sucks. But that's emotional reflex. Discomfort is part of growth and change, and change and growth are necessary and constant. Or they should be.

tired

I had coffee yesterday with a brilliant young friend of mine. We met when she was a student in one of my writing classes--the argument and research class, the one I almost never teach because I find it difficult to teach political subjects without getting exhausted. Outrage with no outlet is bad for the soul. Anyway, K. and I were talking about her life, and she was describing one of her friends to me, a guy who had a 'friend with privileges,' and how that relationship had gone south because, essentially, the girl wouldn't put out one day when she was tired.

"Oh my god," K says. "I just. You know."

I raised both eyebrows. "What did you say?"

She winced. "I turned away from him. Disengaged. But I didn't say anything. Sometimes I just get so...so...tired, you know? Of having to educate all the time, speak up, all of that. It's exhausting."

Yes, yes I do know.

My hat is off to the people who do this day in, day out. The feminist bloggers. The female gamers. The women who engage, again and again, with the well-meaning men and the assholes and the "nice guys" and the self-righteous (and often defensive) beneficiaries of privilege. I just made the mistake of commenting on a Facebook post and caught a faceful of but my misogynist game isn't REALLY misogynist from some fanboys, complete with such clever responses as 'absurd' and 'what he said' and assorted ad hominems. All I did was link Scalzi's "Lowest Difficulty Setting" essay to 'em as an example of why a world-build in a patriarchal, inherently misogynistic single POV was not as complicated as, say, what Bioware attempts, and Bioware deserves some credit for that, even if the gameplay/hero/whatever the hell has some issues, in part because there are choices in making that hero--gender, race, class-- because, well, it does. It's more work. When my students try something challenging and don't succeed as neatly as the student who took the easy way out, you think that doesn't factor in?

Because this is the internet, the discussion has shifted position and turned somewhat personal. I have now engaged exactly four times, and that is exactly four times more than I should have. I am tired. I think we'd all do better with face to face and some beer for discussions like this. The anonymity is a bitch.

On the other hand, my friend K, with her friend...sometimes you're just tired, even if the person's sitting right there with you. Maybe the only solution is beer, or yoga, or Borderlands 2.

Maybe I'll just keep writing what I write, and let those characters--who are not allowed to be tired, because I say so--keep fighting the good fight. I'll be over here, with my stout and my Xbox.

breaking character

I've been a long time defender and fan of Pitch Black. I loved it when I first saw it, which, admittedly, was because Claudia Black was a cast member. I remember looking at the Riddick dude and thinking whoa, who is that guy? Dayum. It took me a while to connect Vin Diesel to Caparzo from Saving Private Ryan. Anyway, this is not a post about Vin Diesel and gibbering fangirlishness, mostly because a) I don't gibber and b) I left that fandom a long time ago because of Reasons, mostly involving the mental breakdown of several people because the Jack character was recast in Chronicles of Riddick.

There are spoilers. Just so you know.

What I liked, and still like, about Pitch Black was its ensemble nature. The characters--even the ones who die early--have arcs. Small moments--a line of dialog, a single action--serve to define personalities and motivations, which are then complicated and layered through other actions. There are some brilliant moments of cinematography, mirroring between Riddick and the monsters, that explore the liminality of what we define as monster. Of course, the worst monsters in Pitch Black are the two-legged human kind, and at the end, when one of those monsters survives, the viewer is left with the discomfort of our affinity for him. No matter how cool Riddick is, he's...well, not a nice guy.

But here's one thing he isn't: a sexist. He kills. He torments. He abandons. But he doesn't treat women as if they are, as a class, lesser than he is. He does not spare them, but neither does he single them out for predatory behavior; he goes for the weak. He just doesn't assume women equals weak by default. He also doesn't make the sexist cracks about women as fuckable objects, or threaten to rape, or boast about his own sexual prowess. That trait marks him as different from some of the male characters around him. In Chronicles, his pitiless egalitarianism continued. Weakness--which he would attempt to exploit, like any good predator--is a matter of character, not gender.

There are no character arcs in Riddick, although Riddick himself has indeed changed. He's become just like every other idealized male badass-hero. The writers attempted to undo some of the stupidity of Chronicles and get back to the gritty, dirty, ungrandiose world of Pitch Black. They failed. I won't discuss the rambling plot, or the predictability, or that the movie attempts to be the unholy lovechild of  Dancing with Wolves and Pitch Black. I could've overlooked all that, if Riddick had still been Riddick. Okay, fine! Have a pet. But don't be a big-mouthed, arrogant, boasting sexist whose major distinction from The Bad Guys is that he will wait to go "balls deep" in the only named female character (a lesbian) until she "asks him all sweet-like," instead of trying to rape her and getting his ass kicked. Riddick waits until she asks. That's how we know he's the good guy.

And here we have the problem. Dahl's a lesbian, and by the end, she's screwing Riddick (we presume). I've heard cries of homophobia. I think yeah, but only because the movie's so sexist it can't conceive of a lesbian. Most of the dialog around Dahl is riddled with crude comments about her sexual availability, including one outright assault. She's a merc, but she's clearly not in the same class as the men. Part of that dialog is used to mark the Bad Guys, because Bad Guys are assholes and sexist behavior is one of those easy markers...except Riddick gets into the game, too, and the only men who don't talk to Dahl like she's an inflatable doll are her boss (who ends up being the coolest character in the film) and the young guy whose bizarre devotion to God seems at odds with his professional choices.

Riddick is a movie for males stuck perpetually at 15, where a) tough women must be lesbians, and b) all lesbians can be cured of that particular problem with a good helping of manly member, because c) there really is no room for a world in which a woman isn't just a walking fuckhole, no matter her skills or capabilities. The trait that made Riddick unique, as a character, was his alienation from society, where that alienation served as a means of critique of how uncivil we really are to each other.  At one point in the movie, Riddick wonders what's happened to him, how he's lost his edge, is it because he's gotten civilized.

Yeah, Riddick. I think so. Now you're the same sexist asshole as everyone else.

crushing creativity

I am a little tired...nay, a lot tired...of the manufactured angst over the whole Tomb Raider reboot. In a nutshell: an interview at Kotaku revealed how the audience would "want to protect" the new Lara, because men the players cannot possibly want to BE a woman action hero, and! as a bonus! the game was throwing in an attempted gang rape as backstory to humanize young Lara.

Chuck Wendig does a very nice take-and-breakdown of the whole business so I don't have to. Let me only say that if you require a gang rape and trauma to make your characters seem human to you, I think you should seek therapy.

I got involved in a protracted angst-fest on Facebook with a young man who insisted that nothing should ever be off limits to artists, nothing, not even RAPE as a backstory! Sob! And while I agree, in principle, with that idea--I do think that a male-written game exploiting rape as backstory for a female hero, when we never ever ever have male heroes raped as part of their backstory, suggests that rape's awesomeness as a storyline is limited to women. There's an appalling prevalence of rape in games (both video and tabletop) and geekdom already.  An examination of why that is might possibly reveal some attitudes that should be changed if we really want women to play--

But it's all about the aaaaaaart, said the Voice of Male Privilege. We should not censor artists by making topics taboo. It's not that there's sexism, it's just that no one ever writes rape scenarios for men.

But why might that be---? Oh, never mind. I am infinitely patient with students. I am not at all patient with idiots. I live with one deaf cat, so I know the futility of shouting at those who will not hear.

But here's the thing: no one said anything about censorship. No one said "you cannot write this thing, not ever!" It's not censorship if part of your target audience objects to what you're doing and throws a fit or writes mean blog posts or whatever. Offending people in the name of "Art" seems to be the new aesthetic, but the artists are not allowed to be offended in return. Art does not exempt you from criticism. Criticism is not censorship. But it is also not  political correctness if, because of protests or public opinion or audience outrage, a storyline or topic is declared off limits. That is the market at work, mes amis. If the audience does not want it, the producers will not produce it. Sometimes bad press is just bad.

But let's come back to Tomb Raider. 

Lemme quote from this article:

Why don't people project themselves onto Lara? Because "people" means males. Nobody (well, almost nobody) wants to be Lara Croft, not even women, because Lara is very much the subject of Male Gaze in her games, and who wants to open themselves up to that sort of scrutiny? Getting a bit deeper, while many women do want to be attractive to males, which is part of why women's magazines often take a Male Gaze perspective as well, they don't want to be only that. They don't want to be stared at all the time, by everyone. Lara is at no point "just a person."

Yep. And that's part of the problem. Which is why it's okay to subject her to sexual violence as part of an emotional hook for the (male) audience, and why no male heroes get the same treatment.

Look. Being asked to listen and consider the privilege underlying your artistic choices is not censorship. And it's not PC. It's a check on privilege, yes, and it might make things more difficult, since you might have to think about a) what you are doing and b) how it might affect an audience. But that's rhetoric. That's marketing. That's making a product for consumption. If you don't care how women feel, carry on! But if you do, then shut the fuck up and listen. Because what we're hearing right now, from you, is "why won't the bitches play the games we make for them?" 

power to the yogi, baby

I was all fired up to write this post last week, in a spasm of outrage after so-called "power yoga." Then I put it off and didn't and now it's power yoga day again, so this is like pre-emptive outrage. I would have said, before this quarter, that I had not met a yoga class I did not like. Even the mellow ones. Even the hard ones. Whatever. But this... this... I do not like. I knew power yoga would be all aerobic and shit, fine. I like pain*. I like challenges. I like feeling achy and exhausted at the end of a practice. And while this class delivers all those things, it is not made of win. I was expected ashtanga-lite. I am getting... pushups? What? When we have vinyasas, we are doing pushups? Why in the name of the many gods...? And then, for the Savasana, instead of either blessed silence or something worldess and meditate-y, she played this smarmy love-yourself, you're wonderful! song that required me to sing Amon Amarth to myself so I could focus.

So okay. It's not the yoga. It's the instructor. This woman vacillates between hippy-dippy peace and love and drill-sergeant. Which would be fine, if she inspired in me any confidence. I think she's knows yoga just fine, but her pedagogy does not work for me. I wish she did not a) make a habit of touching without permission and, b) when she does so, shoving the body in question into a more extreme version of the pose.** And c) most damning--no precision at all in the practice. I know power yoga is about speed and movement. That's great! But without proper alignment, all the moving with your breath in the world won't help. And you are likely to get hurt. And this class is full of beginners. Out of shape beginners. They need help. I should not be the one spotting a Rubenesque newbie trying to jump into a handstand in her second week of yoga class EVER. The instructor should be, and she should be explaining how one aligns one's shoulders over wrists, hips over shoulders, and offering alternates for those who are not physically able to manage. She should not be haranguing those of us who know our limits or simply don't want to try that pose. I don't respond well to insinuations that I am too timid to try something, but I am certainly strong enough, so go up and try! Whatever, lady. I have wrist problems and if I want to do upward bow later, then I need to save them, because once they're done, they're done. There is some pain I don't push through.

So why go, cinnabari? Why subject yourself to aggravation, which is antithetical to yoga? Because I paid for it. Because I'm stubborn. Because maybe I am catching her on two off-weeks in a row and I will love her teaching in another week. Okay, mostly the first two.

*I know that's not a yoga-sort of thing. I'm not always good at the mental part of yoga.

**I get why. Some students are tentative. But not all of us are, and some of us sport injuries and joint weaknesses that do not benefit from adjustments. And really, it's fucking courtesy to ask before handling a student. Even if you're a woman handling women.