*goes all meta and feminist again*
Apr. 17th, 2008 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maculategiraffeEDIT 4/23: O hai, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom! Um, this is unexpected. *hastily straightens tie and tries to look presentable* I'm kind of swamped IRL right now-- will try and respond to your thoughtful comments in an equally thoughtful manner soon-- just a couple things:
1) Here is an earlier entry in which I talk a bit more about slash, feminism and those Dworkinite essays. I was sort of assuming that the only people who would read this one (i.e. my friendslist) would also have read the other one.
2) Potentially! I think slash is potentially feminist! Not inherently, or even usually!
OK, as you were.
ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:
So I was flipping channels (all six of 'em) and wound up watching the saddest show. It was a fictionalized account, but it depicted women living in a real, modern-day society, and it just made me want to cry, how limited these women were by the culture that defined them. Trapped in a society systematically working to destroy their sense of self-worth, giving them just enough freedom to feel anxious about the choices they'd made, but not enough freedom to find other, better choices that would fulfill them as people. It was horrifying to watch them blame themselves for the psychological abuse, excruciating to watch them slowly struggle towards revelation, only to be distracted and elated by some trivial reward-- material or, more often, emotional-- from the ruling structure.
Yeah, I watched Sex and the City. God, am I the only one who thinks that show is a frikkin' Greek tragedy? Seriously, it's like the opening chapters of A Thousand Splendid Suns, except these women are in their thirties, instead of five. Thrill! as Charlotte refuses to sleep with her boyfriend, even when he gives her a Cartier watch, until he tells her "I love you!" Spaz! as Carrie decides her loving, sexy, egalitarian relationship with John Corbett isn't giving her "the stomach flip" of excitement at being fucked around, and so decides to fuck him around until her relationship-related Munchausen's is satiated! Flip the fuck out! as Miranda finds fulfillment in doing her boyfriend's laundry, is briefly annoyed by the discovery of skidmarks on his underpants, and then gets ok again when he kisses her in the laundry room!
The saddest part to me, though (I watched two sequential episodes, a decision that may have been influenced by general emotional exhaustion and beer), was Samantha's subplot. Samantha is apparently the oldest of the four central female characters, and also the most glamorous and stereotypically "sexy" (bottle blonde, well-coiffed, immaculately made-up). Samantha starts flipping out because she gets a magazine for "premenopausal women" in the mail-- and just before this, she's been hit on by a skeezy-seeming gray-haired dude. When her period is late-- despite the fact that all the women complain about the hassle and pain of their periods-- she gets so depressed that she goes out on a date with Gray Hair, gets drunk, and sleeps with him, whereupon her period arrives mid-coitus and she leaves, elated.
Listen: there is one good reason to get that depressed and self-destructive at the onset of middle/old age, and that is if your life literally depends on your physical "marketability." These women aren't just vain and shallow: they are basically ownerless sex slaves. They have one bit of power in their lives, and it's sexual; sex is literally the commodity they barter in exchange for emotional validation (although with Miranda, it's more like laundry is the commodity, but then, Miranda doesn't even wear hardly any makeup, so who can figure her out). Charlotte extorts expensive gifts and emotional avowals from her boyfriend by withholding sex until he coughs up; Miranda can endure any number of tedious and/or disgusting chores when her boyfriend offers emotional validation as her reward; Carrie becomes terrified when emotional validation is offered to her with no apparent strings attached, to the point that she starts fucking her boyfriend around to see what the hell is going on, because he couldn't possibly really be being this nice to her, and maybe she should start acting like a bitch just to see if she can goad him into punishing her so she'll at least know what that's like with him. And you thought my slave characters were fucked up.
And Samantha? Samantha is a whore-- not in the sense that she sleeps around, although apparently she's supposed to be the promiscuous one on the show and wide-eyed little Charlotte is constantly scandalized by her sexual shenanigans like, say, sleeping with men who haven't said "I love you" first-- but in the sense that she has sex not because she wants to, but out of desperation, in exchange for the necessities of her life. Her self-worth is determined by the attractiveness of the men who desire her; it is dealt a heavy blow by being hit on by an "old man", and when she believes herself to be menopausal-- "dried up", as she tearfully puts it when admitting her period is late-- she drinks herself into a stupor and has sex with a man who disgusts her in the belief that his desire is now the best she can hope for. Unfortunately for everyone, her period arrives before she can wake up with a killer hangover, a gray ponytail on the pillow next to her, and the bleak realization that this is where her path ultimately leads, that she herself has stamped an expiration date on her potential happiness and fulfillment and her body is ticking towards it; this brief reprieve changes nothing except that she definitely has at least one more month before she must ultimately despair.
This terror of getting older is admirably portrayed-- it's the exact dread I've tried to express thorough my older slave characters. I think it's very realistic that people who are constantly told, from puberty, that their worth lies in their sexual attractiveness, and that any success they might have in life will depend on it* (until age inevitably decays them, when their lives will depend on the mercy of whatever protector they've managed to ensnare during their peak years, a bleak reality expressed on the show through "innocent" Charlotte's grimly calculated pursuit of marriage as a goal in itself, even when she is not currently dating) would obsess this way over trivial indicators of the onset of age. I just really don't think it's the stuff of comedy. I personally was horrendously depressed when it was over.
(Fortunately, G.I. Jane came on next. Nothing like bloody-faced Demi Moore with a butch buzzcut screaming "Suck my dick!" at Ugly Viggo Mortensen to take the bad taste away, even if TBS did amend it to "suck my stick," which made me giggle immoderately. Again: emotional exhaustion + beer.)
But seriously, y'all. This is why I do see slash as potentially feminist; when you look at roles without gender, you see gender roles more clearly. Even those weird Dworkinite essays about how slash is antifeminist and women write it because they're incapable of writing about women and blah dee rapeculturecakes-- aren't they revealing? Isn't it revealing when Dissenter says "The same-sex male relationships portrayed in slash stories are usually thinly veiled versions of heterosexual relationships, with one character taking on masculine characteristics and the other feminine, and with the ensuing power imbalances and abusive and destructive behaviours that result from this." God, I find that so interesting, that she would say that. Because yeah, in that last story I wrote, just for example, Yves does portray characteristics that are traditionally considered feminine: his silence in the face of male appraisal, letting Holden defend his "honor"; his anxiety about aging and his self-examination in the mirror for wrinkles; his dependency on Holden, financial and otherwise; his emotional, tearful response to Holden's act of providence for him. But to me, that's not because Holden and Yves' relationship is a "thinly veiled version of a heterosexual relationship"; it's because for most of history, and still in a lot of pop culture, heterosexual relationships have been a thinly veiled version of slavery, and I'm writing about slavery. Am I perpetuating the values of patriarchy by saying that-- by saying "Look, when men have absolute systemic power over other men, the same relationship dynamics arise between men as have become the stereotypical relationship dynamics between men and women in our culture. What does that say about the power dynamics in our culture?"
I'd like to think I'm doing the opposite. (I would certainly like to think my writing is more thoughtfully feminist than Dissenter's "radical feminist rewriting" of Tom Bombadil, which I sum up thus: "I am Goldberry. You suck, Tom Bombadil. You totally kidnapped me and subjugated me. I'm going to get you back, you bastard. I mean, my mom is. Totally." I'm all for creepy!brooding!vengeance-minded!Goldberry-- that sounds like a hell of an interesting premise for a story-- but, um, she didn't do much with the premise besides repeat it over and over again, in [as one of my boyfriends used to say] my humble, yet correct, opinion.)
I've had a couple of compliments lately on the way I write men, and one complimentary remark that a person who'd been reading my stories didn't know I was female until she checked. I find that flattering, yes, but also just... interesting. (I've also been told by a lot of people, who tend to annoy me, that I'm "the man" in my marriage-- because aside from the fact that I'm the breadwinner and he's the homemaker, I'm also the one who tends to be more protective and practical and sex-driven, whereas my husband tends to be more emotional and romantic and cuddly, and has more shoes. Personally, I don't think any of that has anything to do with who's the man or who's the woman; I have the vagina and he has the penis, and that kind of settles that for me.) I try to write my characters as people, not as men or women-- people living in a certain culture, people with problems, people with relationships, people with genitals and lusts-- and if they "act like girls" or "act like guys," I think that says more about our culture's typing than it does about my writing.
But what do I know? I'm just a girl.
*In a sadistic twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, Carrie's job is apparently to write about her angst in relationships with men, thus ensuring both that she has no other possible source of personal fulfillment than through said relationships, and that if she ever has a happy relationship with a man, her income will presumably dry up faster than Samantha's life-giving menstrual flow. No wonder she fucks the nice guy around on purpose.
For those of you following along with the hospital saga: no change, thanks for asking.
metafandom! Um, this is unexpected. *hastily straightens tie and tries to look presentable* I'm kind of swamped IRL right now-- will try and respond to your thoughtful comments in an equally thoughtful manner soon-- just a couple things: 1) Here is an earlier entry in which I talk a bit more about slash, feminism and those Dworkinite essays. I was sort of assuming that the only people who would read this one (i.e. my friendslist) would also have read the other one.
2) Potentially! I think slash is potentially feminist! Not inherently, or even usually!
OK, as you were.
ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:
So I was flipping channels (all six of 'em) and wound up watching the saddest show. It was a fictionalized account, but it depicted women living in a real, modern-day society, and it just made me want to cry, how limited these women were by the culture that defined them. Trapped in a society systematically working to destroy their sense of self-worth, giving them just enough freedom to feel anxious about the choices they'd made, but not enough freedom to find other, better choices that would fulfill them as people. It was horrifying to watch them blame themselves for the psychological abuse, excruciating to watch them slowly struggle towards revelation, only to be distracted and elated by some trivial reward-- material or, more often, emotional-- from the ruling structure.
Yeah, I watched Sex and the City. God, am I the only one who thinks that show is a frikkin' Greek tragedy? Seriously, it's like the opening chapters of A Thousand Splendid Suns, except these women are in their thirties, instead of five. Thrill! as Charlotte refuses to sleep with her boyfriend, even when he gives her a Cartier watch, until he tells her "I love you!" Spaz! as Carrie decides her loving, sexy, egalitarian relationship with John Corbett isn't giving her "the stomach flip" of excitement at being fucked around, and so decides to fuck him around until her relationship-related Munchausen's is satiated! Flip the fuck out! as Miranda finds fulfillment in doing her boyfriend's laundry, is briefly annoyed by the discovery of skidmarks on his underpants, and then gets ok again when he kisses her in the laundry room!
The saddest part to me, though (I watched two sequential episodes, a decision that may have been influenced by general emotional exhaustion and beer), was Samantha's subplot. Samantha is apparently the oldest of the four central female characters, and also the most glamorous and stereotypically "sexy" (bottle blonde, well-coiffed, immaculately made-up). Samantha starts flipping out because she gets a magazine for "premenopausal women" in the mail-- and just before this, she's been hit on by a skeezy-seeming gray-haired dude. When her period is late-- despite the fact that all the women complain about the hassle and pain of their periods-- she gets so depressed that she goes out on a date with Gray Hair, gets drunk, and sleeps with him, whereupon her period arrives mid-coitus and she leaves, elated.
Listen: there is one good reason to get that depressed and self-destructive at the onset of middle/old age, and that is if your life literally depends on your physical "marketability." These women aren't just vain and shallow: they are basically ownerless sex slaves. They have one bit of power in their lives, and it's sexual; sex is literally the commodity they barter in exchange for emotional validation (although with Miranda, it's more like laundry is the commodity, but then, Miranda doesn't even wear hardly any makeup, so who can figure her out). Charlotte extorts expensive gifts and emotional avowals from her boyfriend by withholding sex until he coughs up; Miranda can endure any number of tedious and/or disgusting chores when her boyfriend offers emotional validation as her reward; Carrie becomes terrified when emotional validation is offered to her with no apparent strings attached, to the point that she starts fucking her boyfriend around to see what the hell is going on, because he couldn't possibly really be being this nice to her, and maybe she should start acting like a bitch just to see if she can goad him into punishing her so she'll at least know what that's like with him. And you thought my slave characters were fucked up.
And Samantha? Samantha is a whore-- not in the sense that she sleeps around, although apparently she's supposed to be the promiscuous one on the show and wide-eyed little Charlotte is constantly scandalized by her sexual shenanigans like, say, sleeping with men who haven't said "I love you" first-- but in the sense that she has sex not because she wants to, but out of desperation, in exchange for the necessities of her life. Her self-worth is determined by the attractiveness of the men who desire her; it is dealt a heavy blow by being hit on by an "old man", and when she believes herself to be menopausal-- "dried up", as she tearfully puts it when admitting her period is late-- she drinks herself into a stupor and has sex with a man who disgusts her in the belief that his desire is now the best she can hope for. Unfortunately for everyone, her period arrives before she can wake up with a killer hangover, a gray ponytail on the pillow next to her, and the bleak realization that this is where her path ultimately leads, that she herself has stamped an expiration date on her potential happiness and fulfillment and her body is ticking towards it; this brief reprieve changes nothing except that she definitely has at least one more month before she must ultimately despair.
This terror of getting older is admirably portrayed-- it's the exact dread I've tried to express thorough my older slave characters. I think it's very realistic that people who are constantly told, from puberty, that their worth lies in their sexual attractiveness, and that any success they might have in life will depend on it* (until age inevitably decays them, when their lives will depend on the mercy of whatever protector they've managed to ensnare during their peak years, a bleak reality expressed on the show through "innocent" Charlotte's grimly calculated pursuit of marriage as a goal in itself, even when she is not currently dating) would obsess this way over trivial indicators of the onset of age. I just really don't think it's the stuff of comedy. I personally was horrendously depressed when it was over.
(Fortunately, G.I. Jane came on next. Nothing like bloody-faced Demi Moore with a butch buzzcut screaming "Suck my dick!" at Ugly Viggo Mortensen to take the bad taste away, even if TBS did amend it to "suck my stick," which made me giggle immoderately. Again: emotional exhaustion + beer.)
But seriously, y'all. This is why I do see slash as potentially feminist; when you look at roles without gender, you see gender roles more clearly. Even those weird Dworkinite essays about how slash is antifeminist and women write it because they're incapable of writing about women and blah dee rapeculturecakes-- aren't they revealing? Isn't it revealing when Dissenter says "The same-sex male relationships portrayed in slash stories are usually thinly veiled versions of heterosexual relationships, with one character taking on masculine characteristics and the other feminine, and with the ensuing power imbalances and abusive and destructive behaviours that result from this." God, I find that so interesting, that she would say that. Because yeah, in that last story I wrote, just for example, Yves does portray characteristics that are traditionally considered feminine: his silence in the face of male appraisal, letting Holden defend his "honor"; his anxiety about aging and his self-examination in the mirror for wrinkles; his dependency on Holden, financial and otherwise; his emotional, tearful response to Holden's act of providence for him. But to me, that's not because Holden and Yves' relationship is a "thinly veiled version of a heterosexual relationship"; it's because for most of history, and still in a lot of pop culture, heterosexual relationships have been a thinly veiled version of slavery, and I'm writing about slavery. Am I perpetuating the values of patriarchy by saying that-- by saying "Look, when men have absolute systemic power over other men, the same relationship dynamics arise between men as have become the stereotypical relationship dynamics between men and women in our culture. What does that say about the power dynamics in our culture?"
I'd like to think I'm doing the opposite. (I would certainly like to think my writing is more thoughtfully feminist than Dissenter's "radical feminist rewriting" of Tom Bombadil, which I sum up thus: "I am Goldberry. You suck, Tom Bombadil. You totally kidnapped me and subjugated me. I'm going to get you back, you bastard. I mean, my mom is. Totally." I'm all for creepy!brooding!vengeance-minded!Goldberry-- that sounds like a hell of an interesting premise for a story-- but, um, she didn't do much with the premise besides repeat it over and over again, in [as one of my boyfriends used to say] my humble, yet correct, opinion.)
I've had a couple of compliments lately on the way I write men, and one complimentary remark that a person who'd been reading my stories didn't know I was female until she checked. I find that flattering, yes, but also just... interesting. (I've also been told by a lot of people, who tend to annoy me, that I'm "the man" in my marriage-- because aside from the fact that I'm the breadwinner and he's the homemaker, I'm also the one who tends to be more protective and practical and sex-driven, whereas my husband tends to be more emotional and romantic and cuddly, and has more shoes. Personally, I don't think any of that has anything to do with who's the man or who's the woman; I have the vagina and he has the penis, and that kind of settles that for me.) I try to write my characters as people, not as men or women-- people living in a certain culture, people with problems, people with relationships, people with genitals and lusts-- and if they "act like girls" or "act like guys," I think that says more about our culture's typing than it does about my writing.
But what do I know? I'm just a girl.
*In a sadistic twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, Carrie's job is apparently to write about her angst in relationships with men, thus ensuring both that she has no other possible source of personal fulfillment than through said relationships, and that if she ever has a happy relationship with a man, her income will presumably dry up faster than Samantha's life-giving menstrual flow. No wonder she fucks the nice guy around on purpose.
For those of you following along with the hospital saga: no change, thanks for asking.
