Sidetracks - Episode IX

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

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➝ I'll start with some sensible commentary on the predictable reactions to the casting of Lucy Liu as Watson in the upcoming American Sherlock-based series "Elementary":

Fandom's rage over all this is very typical and it's an extension of the boys'-club mentality that forms around canons that hyperfocus on white straight male homosocial relationships, and that tend to marginalize anyone who isn't that. The shows (and there are a lot of them) do it, and then the fans follow suit. There's a lot of valid reasons to not be on board with another Holmes adaptation, but I don't think this is one of them because I've seen it too many times before.

I might be worried about heteronormativity if the BBC version had provided any actual glbtq representation, but as Jodie and I have discussed before, it didn't exactly do a great job on that front. Having said that, I think there are plenty of valid reasons to be wary of this new series: here's a post with more commentary that Renay sent my way.

➝ One of my favourite reads of the week was A Plague of Strong Female Characters, a thoughtful New York Times piece by Carina Chocano:

Maybe I'm a cream puff, but few cultural tropes get under my skin like "strong female character," and it still surprises me when like-minded people use it. Maybe the problem is semantic. Maybe what people mean when they say "strong female characters" is female characters who are "strong," i.e., interesting or complex or well written — "strong" in the sense that they figure predominantly in the story, rather than recede decoratively into the background. But I get the feeling that what most people mean or hear when they say or hear "strong female character" is female characters who are tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to scowling and not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone.

Of course, I get the point of characters like these. They do serve as a kind of gateway drug to slightly more realistic — or at least representational — representations of women. On the other hand, they also reinforce the unspoken idea that in order for a female character to be worth identifying with, she should really try to rein in the gross girly stuff. This implies that unless a female character is "strong," she is not interesting or worth identifying with.

YES. This is something that has been worrying me for years, and it's been particularly on my mind lately as I notice more and more feminist-identified blogs using victim-blaming and girl-cooties rhetoric to dismiss female characters they perceive as "wimpy", "needy", "doormarts", "slap-worthy", or otherwise "weak". Of course, when I say this I absolutely don't mean to silence conversations about, or critiques of, stories that normalise placing women in positions of helplessness and dependency; I just think it's important to remember to "direct our attention to the straitjacket, not its dutiful wearer". (I warned you I'd be quoting this sentence a lot.)

Having said that, I definitely also don't want to dismiss female characters who "don't say goodbye when they hang up the phone" as "unrepresentative of real women". All the stories about all the possible ways of being a girl, please.

➝ Here's some Oscars commentary from a new-to-me blog I've been enjoying, Girls Like Giants. And don't miss this Racialicious piece about Billy Crystal wearing blackface at the Oscars.

➝ Rosie Swash wrote a piece for The Guardian called Among the Asexuals, and being ignorant and privileged I can't really tell how accurate or comprehensive it is. But I'm sharing it anyway because I thought some of you would be interested in asexuality getting mainstream coverage, and might perhaps have some thoughts to share.

➝ Institutional sexism of book world needs new girls' network: Jennifer Weiner responds to the latest Vida count with some suggestions of what we can do:

I'm committed to using my voice and talking about women writers who aren't getting the quality or quantity of attention that their male peers receive. In the past few years, I've done blogposts, Q&As and I've had a lot of success with giveaways, where I ask readers to purchase a book by a female author, from Sarah Pekkanen and Julie Buxbaum to Emma Donoghue and Liz Moore, and then send them one of my books for free. (...)

I'm not the only commercial woman writer who's gone out of her way to support her peers – and, right now, that's the best response I can think of to a problem that's not going away any time soon.

I'm not a writer, but I'm a woman and a reader who shares Weiner's concerns, and as such I try to use my (infinitely smaller) voice in similar ways.

➝ And speaking of sexism in literary circles, here's an essay on Jonathan Franzen's female 'problem': ... Franzen continues to indict himself with gender theorizing that panders to the worst instincts of the male intellectual. It is neither art nor thought, and it is certainly not humor. Franzen can do better. Let us hope that he can. The response by Victoria Patterson this piece links to is even better.

➝ I love these! Critical thinking explained in six kid friendly animations.

➝ But, Pinterest is for Girls! Sexism and Social Media. I brought up the sexist media coverage of Pinterest a few weeks ago, and in the meantime the problem only seems to have gotten worse. s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown provides some great analysis.

➝ This New York Times article about how young women are often trendsetters in vocal patterns and linguistic innovation reminded me of Deborah Cameron's excellent The Myth of Mars and Venus, which is about sexism in sociolinguistics. Also, have I mentioned how awesome I think Mark Liberman is?

➝ Wow. I LOVE YOU, China Miéville:

It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It's really not very fucking complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient.

This whole essay is absolutely amazing. If you only click one link this week, I hope it's this one.

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➝ The Oscars are over! I honestly didn't care much (because I rarely ever do) but am finding the articles about the Oscars and their diversity pretty exciting! Let's talk those old white dudes into a stupor. The Oscars' women problem:

None — zero — of the films in the best picture, best director, best adapted or original screenplay, best lead or supporting actor, and best supporting actress categories were directed by women. In the major categories, 98 percent of nominations went to movies directed by men, 84 percent went to movies written by men, and 70 percent went to movies starring men. The only female-centered movies that appear outside the best actress categories are "The Help" and "Bridesmaids." In the best picture category, there are as many movies about women as there are movies about horses.

Emphasis mine.

➝ Currently my partner and I are renting and our apartment has no washer/dryer hookups. This has been, on the whole, a miserable experience, including unreliable apartment-provided washers with inconvenient hours taking tons of money, the public laundromats taking even more, and adventures in borrowing the appliances of friends. We're settled now with a good set-up that's way cheaper (help the friend with the electric bill a bit, get free laundry every week). So really this is all about my complicated relationship with laundry, okay! But this week I had an interesting conversation with friends, who were boggled to learn that as a child I often used a Maytag Wringer Washer. There were other washer/dryers available, but I was on that weird cusp between old-ways and new ways, I suppose (I also lived in the very rural South). My mother used the newest versions when they worked (they often broke down). My father and grandmother used standalone washers (interesting about my father who was very anti-new washers, don't know what that means, though). I spent many, many days putting clothes on the line with clothespins, with my mom during "oops broken dryer" times but mostly with my grandmother.

That means that Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed by Cat Valente was fascinating. She speaks about the technological divide in the public sphere and the private in Japan and how much the technology in public is much better than the technology in private, and what it means that technology is so gendered (more work for women, less excitement about "female" tech). I suspect that part of the problem is women themselves in tech-creating positions, which deepens the thought a little bit. I did wonder if it would differ from place to place — she seemed to be in a particular (terrible) circumstance, so I wonder if it's different for women in other locations, in other financial groups, etc. I don't think Japan (!!!) can really be this technologically similar all over.

Anyway, the real reason I have spent so much tl;dr on the topic of LAUNDRY OMG is that it reminded me of this TED talk by Hans Rosling discussing the magic of washing machines. It's 100% worth it to watch until the end. OKAY, done talking about laundry now, I'm sorry.

➝ Inadvertently, I sort of built a themed list of links without even trying. I'm going to provide a general trigger warning for the topic of abortion, privacy issues, reproductive health and some disturbing imagery in most of the links/my commentary.

➝ Funny or Die ran Women's Health Experts Speak Out. It's interesting to see how this is played for a joke. It is really funny in how ridiculous it is, but on the other hand some of the things they say are things men actually believe without coming out and owning their opinions. That's okay, I suppose — their actions say it all. Jerks.

➝ How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. A fascinating look at the way compnies can bend data to their will, even personal data, by the digital footprint we leave behind with our credit cards, bank cards, customized coupons mailed to our doors, or if you happen to use cash to avoid these problems, even an employee discount card.

What I find most interesting about the article isn't the article itself. It's that in the article, we have talk of pregnancy, with the catchy little phrase, "Target knows before it shows" on women characterized by either a almost-to-term stomach as well as somewhere in the middle of a pregnancy. They're definitely showing. Also, these women are just pictures of stomachs and nothing else. They've been reduced to the ability to reproduce in a photo, attached to an article about how to squeeze as much money as possible from them. Wheee, objects. Author might want to look where they're standing on that creepy scale, because Target's just massaging the data we (thoughtlessly or not) give them in legal ways. The author is characterizing first-trimester pregnancies with mid-term and full-term pregnancy pictures. Classy.

I think it's fairly interesting how often when we discuss pregnancy, a woman's stomach becomes a symbol for all of them, even pregnancies that women themselves don't even know about. That's the creepiest thing about this article (and every article about pregnancy I read). It's like the FedEx arrow. Once you see that most of the media does this (especially in the context of abortion discussions), you can never, ever unsee it.

➝ The Way It Was. I read this essay on my couch, and when I was halfway through zachariah walked into the room and said, "You read with your mouth open."

I wanted to snap at him, well, of course my jaw was dropped, I was reading about abortion and its history. I was so angry at that moment, maybe at him for not remembering I hate to have my appearance commented on in that way or for not asking me what I was reading instead (maybe I wanted him to care about what would make me forget to control my jaw). Or maybe at the reality of what I was reading about, the things you never hear about, the way the current debate is being framed in the media with none of the past historical context, the way the most women I know using birth control use it for everything but preventing pregnancy. Sigh.

➝ Reproductive Parts:

A politician says abortion is bad for women. A politician says birth control is bad for women. A politician says he wants to ban prenatal testing. A politician says women should focus on their families. A politician says sex is for reproduction only. A politician says queers are disgusting. A politician says.

➝ To round this out, io9 posted What does science fiction tell us about the future of reproductive rights?, although I disagree with some of the final conclusions drawn for complicated reasons that involve the claim that the whole debate is about parenting. It doesn't feel that simple given how women have been left out of the debate, women politicians forced to submit joke amendments to make points that should be obvious to anyone, Planned Parenthood attacked even when most of their work is just plain health-care — it feels like a male-dominant culture trying desperately to put the women back in places where they can be easily controlled.

The Further Adventures of Lady Business!

This week, Ana posted four reviews: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks, The Firefly Letters by Margarita Engle, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, and The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice.

Jodie posted a review of Scott Westerfeld's Goliath, that completes the trilogy following Leviathan and Behemoth.

Renay didn't post anything, but she did contribute to the massive Volunteers & Recruiting section of the OTW's February newsletter with the help of her VolComrades. \o/

Comments

[nymeth]

Hahaha - love the Auto-response. I have not yet read him, but although I won't say I never ever will this kind of thing certainly doesn't make me want to rush out to get his books.

I'm glad to hear the article wasn't terrible! And ugh, so many people seem unable to drop the "Lead your life my way, because I clearly know best!" routine.