Hello my darlings! This month I’m back to my mid-month gaming post (as last month I wandered into the realms of TV) and I’ll be presenting to you the Humble Bundle V, after which we’ll be taking a bit of a negative turn… you will see. Potential trigger warning, mind you, of the Epic Rage descent.
Humble Bundle V
The Humble Bundle is a nice little concept: a collection of indie titles for you to pay what you want for and then decide how much of that fee goes to a) the developers, b) Humble Bundle themselves, or c) charity.
I got it on the first day (and, sorry, but by the time this post goes live I suspect the window will have closed) so I only got the first five games that were included. Since then there’ve been three more titles added if you paid over the average. These were added in light of this bundle making over $1.8 million in the first 15 hours.
Included in the Bundle were:
- Psychonauts
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent
- LIMBO
- Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP
- Bastion*
- Braid*+
- Lone Survivor*+
- Super Meat Boy*+
* denotes games that were unlocked if you paid over the average; + denotes those titles added at a later stage.
Like I say, I only got the first five, but I’m not too sore as I already have Braid (not a big fan) and I’m not overly interested in the other two. I’m not going to discuss the games themselves here because that’ll be coming in a “Playing…” post later on.
I thought it would be nice show you that sometimes, somewhere out there, someone does something good. A lot of money has been raised for charity through this: not least through Big Names of Gaming competing to be the top contributors (Notch and HumbleBrony Bundle have been vying for the top spot: when I bought the bundle they were dueling around the $3000 mark, now they’re on $12,345.67 and £11,111.11 respectively).
Taken from Humblebundle.com at 10:40am GMT, 13/06/2012
Of course, as the popularity of indie games continues to rise, it’s nice to be able to have the choice to decide how much of your cash goes to the developers as opposed to not really knowing for sure how much just gets kept by various third parties.
Sigh, Misogyny
From that nice little snippet of camaraderie, I regret that I must now depress the tone somewhat and talk about InternetFail, and more specifically, how it’s been discussed recently with regard to the world of gaming.
At the start of June BBC News Magazine ran an article highlighting the constant, abhorrent abuse that female gamers get in online play: here. It mostly focusses on the experiences of one Wisconsin gamer called Jenny, of the CoD ilk, and the abuse she gets daily on voice chats. She records them and uploads them to her website, Not in the Kitchen Anymore, and I gotta say, she handles this shit pretty well but the point is she shouldn’t have to. Especially, as the article points out, 42% of US gamers are women, and adult women outnumber teenage boys quite considerably.
There’s also a BBC World Service programme based on her experiences and those of other female gamers. If you read the article or listen to the programme you might hear some charming young fellows claiming “freedom of speech”, but here’s a point of interest for any such time someone tries to use this smokescreen of an excuse if you call them out as misogynists (or racists, homophobes, etc… the list, depressingly, goes on). In both American and European (incl. British) law the “freedom of speech” excuse doesn’t fly.
Why’s that? Well, if you actually read the laws you’ll see there are exclusions to what the precious First Amendment protects: look here. What’s that? Obscenity? Threats? Defamation? Intentional infliction of emotional distress? They’re all excluded from protection by the First Amendment? OHGAWDNO! It’s like living in a world where people treat each other with respect! How horrible.
And, Euro law? Just for starters you can consult Article 10 and Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Yeah. Human rights. But be careful out there: trying to educate these fools in the error of their ways and the legal flaws in their defence might offend them. The fact you’ve done some learnings (that aren’t centred around how to make tasty lunchtime treats) is clearly a work of pure evil!
Although Jenny of Wisconsin might be able to deal with it, there are a lot of people out there who can’t or don’t want to. It takes a lot of effort, seriously. I’m an antisocial gamer – we know this – I like playing games on my own, I hate chat and I hate voice-chats even more. I don’t want to listen to somebody’s inane drivel while I shoot stuff, regardless of the content. I ditched the one MMO I played a long time ago because of the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic crap that occurred on a daily basis. Not directed at me, just there – and no one really ever objected (if you did, you got the abuse turned on you).
My solution is not one that everyone can adopt. I just avoid the social elements, even if it’s online team-based play like TF2, and I refuse to disclose any information about myself. Generally, I am the wallpaper: I keep quiet and ignore chat. This is mostly because I’m a misanthrope and do not care for being social, but partly it’s also because I know that a lot of people on chat are going to be dicks. I just don’t understand why banter has to be offensive, even if it doesn’t go near questions of gender.
Taken from Kickstarter.com at 11:30am GMT, on 13/06/2012
But back to the specific point of misogyny in the gamingverse. I mentioned the KickStarter from Feminist Frequency in May’s “Playing…” post and the woman behind it, Anita Sarkeesian, has been yet another figurehead victim of abuse. She put her head over that parapet, so to speak, and has had it all but shot to smithereens. Gladly, however, this isn’t going to stop her making those videos, nor has it stopped people pledging (when I last checked, she was on $87,000+ with 68 hours left to go). But this sort of thing does make me want to adopt a superhero persona, fly all over the world, and stand in defence of these women.
I was going to say “brave women” just ther, but that, to me, gives too much credit to these scum-sucking parasites of the internet. It shouldn’t have to be brave just to identify as female and like games. FFS.
At least – if we’re to take anything positive away from this – this all-too-common abuse is being given more and more of a public face. A site that BBC article mentions is Fat, Ugly or Slutty (because that’s pretty much all you are if you’re a female gamer, apparently) where you can upload screengrabs of sexist abuse/harrasment. So, if you can catch the abuse you receive, or see, in a screen grab or a recording, make it known!
In 1937 Goebbels presented a birthday gift of 18 Mickey Mouse shorts to the Führer. […Disney] and Hitler […] shared an overall social vision. They dreamed of a dispersed post-urban society, with a population — kept in line by a strong domestic realm instilling a keen sense of blood loyalty and “family values” — that could be efficiently mobilized to serve either the military needs of the state or the labor needs of industry.
– Matt Roth, The Lion King: a Short History of Disney-Fascism
Everyone knows about Disney’s ongoing racism issues, so to hear that Uncle Walt was an active member of the American Nazi Party during the Thirties may not come as much surprise. But there were pink triangles as well as yellow stars in 1930s Berlin, and I want to know why pretty much all of Disney’s villains seem designed to display some kind of sexual or gender deviance.
An Actor’s Life for Me
An Actor’s Life for Me: The Fox seduces Pinocchio
It starts with Pinocchio, and the Fox and the Cat. Probably best remembered for their song ‘An Actor’s Life for Me‘, it’s this pair of crooks that first lure young Pinocchio off the straight and narrow. And I mean that literally: they’re Theatre Folk, dapper, urbane and not a little camp. Their bodies are constantly intertwining, grotesque and chaotic. I’m with Matt Roth when he says they’re obviously coded as gay – one of the key minorities Hitler argued, in Mein Kampf, were threatening the health and morality of contemporary European youth.
But this doesn’t end with the fall of Hitler; later Disney films work their way through a succession of sexually deviant or ambiguous villains. The first significant entrant is the terrifying Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty(1959). Like Aladdin‘s Jafar (1992), she is elegant and a bit camp, though fundamentally sexless (witness how unattracted Jafar is to Princess Jasmine, wanting her only for political gains). Maleficent inhabits a strange underworld where orgiastic parties are the norm, and, like so many of her villainous successors, she’s got no-one of her own, but still remains determined to thwart the monogamous, heterosexual union of the noble royals Princess Aurora and Prince Philip (whose name was chosen by Uncle Walt in the 50s, when our Prince Philip was still someone nostalgia-loving Anglophile Americans might feel dewy-eyed about).
Cruella de Vil – a withered, aberrant form of sexless femininity – squares up to the hyper-femme homemaker Anita
Two years later, 101 Dalmatians‘ Cruella De Vil continues the trend. She shares Maleficent’s ill will towards the heteronormative family sphere, and acts as a kind of child-snatching boogyman. Her hyper-femme fashion sense only throws her withered, sexless frame into relief, and unlike the blissful feminine home of her friend Anita – who has settled down and found a nice man to take care of, sorting out Roger’s chaotic life with a Woman’s Touch – Cruella’s decadent mansion is completely falling apart, which we can probably assume also mirrors the state of her biological clock. Cruella’s flamboyant yet barren sexuality focuses itself instead on fetishising the traditional trappings of femininity, including fur coats made from the produce of wombs more fecund than her own – like Perdita, the sexy Dalmatian.
Dragged Up
In the 80s, long after Walt’s death, the intentional gender deviance of Disney’s villains becomes more blatant still: this time the Gays are even more obviously in drag, and they’re looking back to the golden Pinocchio age of seducing The Children away from their suburban homes: think of Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989) and her contrast with the alpha male King Triton, his big beard, and the Barbie-style InnoDBl with her Princess Diana hair.
Dragged up… Ursula from The Little Mermaid
Ursula is overweight, flamboyant and dragged up; her tentacles, as my pal Matt Roth points out (you really must read this article, seriously), only make her the more sexually ambiguous. Like Maleficent, she lives in an underground other-world, with a ‘garden’ of corrupted young people now condemned to live half-lives as plant-like beings. Her stagey hyper-femininity presents her as a dangerous prospect for the heteronormative, cisnormative InnoDBl – whose voice she steals in order to seduce the also very straight Prince Eric.
Ursula is given a metaphorical kind of new life (after being conquered by, er, the erect prow of Prince Eric’s enormous ship) in the figure of Hades in Hercules (1997). He’s pretty much an exact counterpart to Ursula, black tentacles and all. His cabaret-style song ‘My Town’, from the Hercules TV series, introduces the underworld as a kind of underground New York, with its king a flamboyant, gender-ambiguous leader revelling in its delights:
It’s interesting, of course, that because of the source-text, Hercules must of necessity espouse the Ancient Greek worldview that says the Underworld – and therefore Hades himself – is a crucial part of the order of things; unlike the shady worlds of Pleasure Island and The Theatre in Nazi-era Pinocchio, ‘New Hades’, and the queers and deviants that inhabit it is a potentially corrupting influence that can be tolerated, as long as it’s kept firmly in its place. It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) – the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere (that is, the obscure Elephants’ Graveyard). When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.
Hanging on
Intertwined: the hyper-masculine Gaston and the fawning creature Le Fou
There are also a whole host of less significant characters throughout Disney’s oeuvre who are mostly made ridiculous by virtue of their sexual ambiguity and concomitant lack of personhood. First up is the rotund Le Fou in Beauty and the Beast, who fawns, much like the Cat on the Fox, on the hyper-male Gaston (who is in strange contrast to the uber-femme but dragged up Ursula, and seems suspiciously uninterested in the various females laid on for his consumption).
Then there’s Chi Fu, the emperor’s advisor in Mulan. He is primarily ridiculed because he is camp and rather gender-ambiguous – he has bunny slippers and a woman’s scream – in what I’d suggest is a double-whammy of homophobia mixed with Orientalist racism, much like that currently directed against Asian-American basketball player Jeremy Lin (‘Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight‘ was a tweet from Fox sports commentator Jason Witlock on Lin’s recent sporting triumph). Or, to put it in Disney’s own terms, how about the notorious Siamese Cats in Lady and the Tramp, whose own gender is confused to say the least?
Miss Man
The only difference between male and female Mulan is a bit of grooming.
It’s interesting to compare these gender-fails with Chi Fu’s own filmic context – Mulan (1998), where the title character is herself cross-dressing. There are two direct references to drag in this film (strange, given that Disney doesn’t in general have much of Dreamworks’ obsessive-compulsive need to shove in over-the-kids’-heads jokes for the parents). The only one in direct reference to Mulan is Mushu (Eddie Murphy)’s Hilarious Ebonics – ‘Miss Man had to take her little drag act on the road’.
Yet, unlike the true weirdos doing it for a sexual thrill (like Ursula), Mulan’s is a noble gender-variance, taken on for the sole purpose of rescuing her ailing father and (ultimately) preparing herself mentally for marriage, which is how the film ends; note too that she has to become male in order to truly triumph in the male sphere, and that once this has been accomplished she can return home to her father and marry the sexy shirtless man (as she was unable to do at the beginning of the story).
It is therefore in keeping that her methodology basically amounts to ‘hair down = female; hair up = male’ – and no-one ever notices it’s all the same person, just with a different hairstyle (note how shocked the Evil Shan Yu is when she dons her ‘disguise‘): her gender-switch is more of a ‘sign’ to the audience indicating which social sphere she’s inhabiting than anything literally transformative. Interesting stuff here.
Hmm. So… From the Fox and the Cat to the villains of the 90s, Disney’s villains have represented a kind of ‘other’ that is almost always couched in terms of gender or sexuality, representing a challenge, and a threat, to the heteronormative worldview of the heroes and heroines – which always conquers, of course. What’s disturbing is that it’s so oft-repeated it almost becomes the whole unspoken tenet on which Disney’s works are based. The fight of good vs. evil is not so much a battle of objective morality as of sexual identity and preference.
Oops.
ActiPearls and Having a Happy Period
“Hi, nice to meet you. You’re looking great today, really confident and independent, good for you! A shame about the smell, though. I mean, really, everybody’s noticed it. And we all know it’s coming from, ahem, down there.
“Oh no, no, it’s OK, don’t get offended, it’s not your fault. You can’t help it, I understand that. Your genitals are disgusting and they stink, especially when they’re bleeding and there’s nothing you can do about it. You didn’t ask to be born with such a terrible curse, and nobody expects you to take responsibility for it. Help is at hand, though! If you give me lots of money every month for forty years of your life, we can help! Because believe us, you need it…”
I will admit up front that I am not a trained marketer, but it’s plain to see that the above isn’t the most convincing of sales pitches. Unfortunately, it’s a far more honest pitch than the current campaign for Always sanitary towels, which proudly declare the addition of “odour neutralising ActiPearls” as the next step in the evolution of “feminine hygiene” products. What the ads coyly decline to mention is that they’ve taken lessons in odour neutralisation from the Lynx school of “synthetic chemical stench and hygiene are THE SAME THING.”
This is straight-up vagina-shaming. It’s insulting and inexcusable. And giving me yet another reason to be pissed off when I’m already simmering with ire about the massacre going on between my legs is inadvisable. So congratulations, P&G: you’ve lost my custom for the next thirty years.
The packaging claims to “neutralise odours rather than just masking them”. This is at best a delicate glossing over of the truth. It’s impossible to tell whether “odours” (those vaginal FIENDS!) are neutralised or not because of the perfume.
Oh God, the perfume.
I appreciate that scent perception can be a highly subjective thing, so I’ll attempt to keep the description as general as possible. Cloying, synthetic, sweet florals with an undertone of disinfectant, false and stereotypically feminine. It hits you as soon as you open the packaging, before even unwrapping the first towel. A scent that lingers for hours even if you switch to an unscented brand immediately after using one of these. A scent that does not mask menstrual blood, but mingles with it into a nauseating aberration.
What I Expected
A thoughtful free gift from Always!
What I Got
OH.
The problems presented by this are manifold, but there are three main ones that leapt out at me. Bullet point list time? Bullet point list time!
- The obvious implication that people who have vaginas are utterly clueless about personal hygiene and how to take care of themselves, plus the completely ignoring the fact that vaginas are self cleansing and look after themselves without much intervention from their owners beyond showering/bathing regularly. The idea that menstruation makes a person malodorous or otherwise “dirty” is an outdated and misogynistic notion. If a vagina IS smelling bad, whether through illness or neglect, adding an unpleasant artificial scent to the crotch is only going to make the problem worse.
- Following on from this, people who are at least vaguely aware of their sexual health can tell from changes in vaginal scent if something untoward or unusual is going on. Trying to cover that up with perfumes isn’t going to help anybody stay in touch with their genitalia.
- The choice of such a blatantly “overt femininity-pink-and-flowers-BECAUSE-THIS-PRODUCT-IS-FOR-GIRLLLSSS” fragrance risks alienating trans* men and genderqueer customers who choose to use these products. As if the patronising “have a happy period, always” slogan weren’t bad enough. Not only are Always trying to insist that a reminder of nature not necessarily assigning the genitalia that most closely match an individual’s gender identity should be a matter for celebration, but also that everybody should smell like a field full of artificial blossoms when their loins are creating underpant carnage. Way to consider the needs of your whole customer base, there.
Now, at the risk of incurring violent flames, I’ll admit that I am not the biggest fan of my vagina. I appreciate the vast capacity for pleasure that it and its associated physiological paraphernalia provide, but for the most part our relationship is one of tacit acknowledgement and grudging acceptance. This does not mean, however, that I do not appreciate the inherent beauty and wonder of such genitalia.
A vagina should smell like a vagina. A vagina should not smell of roses or perfumes or any number of artificial masking agents. Every healthy vagina has a personality and life all of its own and scent to match.
At a time where in the USA, the wealthy, middle-aged, cis-male elitists running the country seem determined to drive women’s bodily autonomy and sexual rights back into the Victorian era, now seems a very prudent time to turn our eyes to our genitals and send a clear message to politicians and megabucks sanitary product manufacturers alike that our bodies belong to nobody but ourselves. Their efforts to undermine and deny our sexuality will be met with the resistance and fight it deserves, until they back the hell off what’s between our legs.
If we really must accept defeat and acknowledge that we are no longer capable of keeping our own vaginas spring-fresh, then our next step is clear: begin a campaign to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab to produce their own range of sanitary towels impregnated with their gorgeous scents. Because if my vagina isn’t allowed to smell like a vagina any more, it can do a hell of a lot better than Procter and Gamble’s sickly synthetic flower bleach.
Cookery was never my forté.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a history with kitchen equipment – it’s a sad, sad story involving a large quantity of Red Bull, an all-nighter at University, an offer of 50p, a camera, a toaster, and my genitals. The problem is that the output of my culinary bodgejobs tend to be either inedible, burned, or contain more cheese than the average human is capable of dealing with.
It’s hard to deny that cookery is fun, though. Get in a kitchen, crack out all kinds of implausibly-shaped apparatus, put squishy and goopy and chewy things together, bung it in the oven, hope for the best. It’s like science, but with an end product that will either serve as your dinner or a cheaper alternative to Polyfilla.
So, if you’re like me and you feel that, for the sake of all involved, cookery is best done vicariously – it saves on cleanup, anyway – fear not, because the Internet is here to help.
It Begins: Epic Meal Time
Epic Meal Time is where it all started. A bunch of guys got together with a camera and made some brilliant, stupid food. The preview frame for each video contains a picture of the eldritch horror that is produced, along with its calorie count.
Previous creations include their riff on the turducken – the TurBacon Epic (79,046 calories, pictured above, and described as ‘a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig’), Fast Food Sushi (11,816 calories of I assure you that you really don’t want to know), and the Valentine’s Day special – 190,400 calories of ‘Super Sloppy Sundae‘.
I think we can rest assured that this is the kind of cookery that would give Jamie Oliver an aneurysm, and the rest of us a nasty case of angina. And why the hell not? It’s your body, and you should choose exactly what you want to put into it. If you can have a good time with your friends in the process, so much the better.
Epic Meal Time was brilliant, witty, and otherwise furiously entertaining for a long time. It got the idea that cooking could be a gentlemanly pursuit out there to a lot of eyeballs, and that has value. What ruined it though was, like so many things, its own success. Suddenly, the self-parodying bravado of this group of friends became actual bravado. A sponsorship deal and continuous references to ‘Internet Money’ took the metaphorical axe to the humour.
Behold: Epic Meal Time’s personal twist on gender balancing.
It wasn’t just that, though. You can be damn certain that if I’m getting the arse on at something on BadRep, there’s a gender angle too, and sure enough, there is. When the bravado became too genuine, the continuous (and already tenuous) references to ‘bitches’ went from problematic to outright misogynist. Attractive women started to feature in the videos – but only eating the food, never participating in its creation as part of the group. I can’t even remember a single video in which you hear a female voice.
Once it stopped being self-parodying and just became self-aggrandising, the shark had been jumped.
Scandinavia Steps In: Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time
A Swedish gentleman with the kind of facial hair not seen since the heady days of Technoviking decided that Sweden could do better without making any special effort.
With the ancient Swedish tradition of bacon tug-of-war, everyone’s a winner.
Our host regaled us with fairly uninspiring, everyday meals, prepared in a wonderfully over-the-top manner. Mayonnaise was eaten straight from the jar (“PRE DINNER SNACK. IT’S GOOD FOR YOU”). Butter was smeared by punching it. Cardboard packaging was opened with teeth. Water for boiling pasta was collected in the form of snow.
There’s undeniable machismo, but since this show is meant as a parody of Epic Meal Time, I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made for it being exaggeration for the sake of comedy. It doesn’t grate in the same way that Epic Meal Time started to.
Cooking is a better experience when combined with facial hair and shouting. Fetch yourself a horn of mead and check it out.
The obligatory, if unorthodox, musical: Vegan Black Metal Chef
Black metal conjures up imagery of teenagers in too much makeup running through the woods, filming themselves on their Dad’s camcorder, while they scream about the Grim Frostbitten North and wield ludicrous knives that they bought on eBay.
What it doesn’t conjure up, however, is vegan cuisine.
This is exactly the reason that Vegan Black Metal Chef is amazing.
The Dark Lords of the Deep are well-known for their vegan tastes.
The effort that goes into the Vegan Black Metal Chef kitchen is pretty mindblowing. The whole place is outfitted with studded black leather, occult symbols, skulls, you name it. The food isn’t particularly inspiring, but that might just be how I see vegan food. Fortunately, the food is far from the point.
Black metal is another field of intense bravado. Though I don’t want to paint an entire subculture by the failings of its extremes, it’s hard to avoid the fact that black metal fandom is a subculture full of homophobia and transphobia, and is often popularly associated with Nazi music. It’s wonderful, then, that Vegan Black Metal Chef is so inherently subversive. It’s self-deprecating mockery in which you’re invited to laugh with someone at the sillier bits of their own subculture, and that makes it a pleasure to watch.
The extensive make-up is a wonderful parallel here with more ‘traditional’ female-led cookery shows, particularly Nigella Lawson’s sexualised content where her appearance is pushed to the audience just as much, if not more, than the actual food. Vegan Black Metal Chef, it could be argued, takes host-over-food cookery content to the next level.
In any case, do you want to see a man in corpsepaint invoke Lovecraftian horrors over a bowl of Pad Thai? Of course you do. Vegan Black Metal Chef is for you.
Booze and brilliance: My Drunk Kitchen
As far as I’m concerned, My Drunk Kitchen is the best cooking show on the Internet right now. Hosted by Hannah Hart, it’s a very simple premise – drink booze and cook some stuff.
Shortly after this frame, the self-heating bag begins to billow smoke. If that isn’t selling you on My Drunk Kitchen, I don’t know what will.
It’s the first of the shows that I’ve covered here to feature a female host, and what I find particularly important is that it doesn’t fucking matter. There’s the occasional line that bugs me, but by and large the humour is genderless, and there’s no (or very little) cutesy look-at-me-I’m-a-girl-on-the-Internet-teehee. Hannah Hart is Hannah Hart, and she’s drinking beer and belching and overdoing it with the cheese and burning herself on the oven because fuck you, that’s why.
Far and away my favourite episode is the one where the good Ms. Hart tackles military Meals Ready to Eat – known as MREs – outdoors and clad in a bodgejobbed Braveheart-esque shawl.
It’s not going to teach you to cook. It’s going to make you grin repeatedly. Watch it.
And the rest
I’m absolutely certain that I’ve missed some gems. Have I neglected to mention your favourite homebrew cookery show? Let me know about it in the comments. If there are enough, and BadRep haven’t fired me for overuse of the term ‘bodgejob’, I’d love to write a followup with the fan favourites that I’m currently unfamiliar with.
Kickass Princesses, Part 2
When I think about everything about womanhood that hamstrung me with fear when I was thirteen it all came down, really, to princesses. I didn’t think I had to work hard to be a woman (which is scary but obviously eventually achievable). I thought I had to somehow magically – through superhuman psychic effort – transform into a princess instead. That’s how I’d get fallen in love with. That’s how I’d get along. That’s how the world would welcome me.
– Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman
Welcome to part two of Kickass Princesses – a look at some subversive female protagonists in children’s literature. You can read Part 1 here.
The more children’s books I read and the more princesses I come to know, the more I realise that ‘kickass’ probably wasn’t the best term to use. Some of these characters do kick ass, but the main feature is turning out to be simply that they make unconventional princesses.
As the archetype of a fairytale princess is so ingrained, it takes looking at a wide variety of ‘unprincessy’ examples to unpick exactly what some of our starting assumptions are. A closer look at the ‘unconventional’ princesses here, and in my previous post, reveals that these women and girls have agency, interests, and are more than just a beautiful, delicate, unsullied physical appearance. Sometimes they aren’t even beautiful at all. What they are – what, we realise, makes them ‘unprincessy’ – is often simply the fact that they are two-dimensional characters.
Ouch. This stereotype needs subverting roughly forever ago. On with the show…
The Ordinary Princess
- Written and illustrated by MM Kaye, published in 1980 by Doubleday
At 107 pages, this one’s aimed at a slightly older age group than the rest of the books in this post, which are all picture books.
The plot begins when the seventh princess is born in the land of Phantasmorania, and even the fairies are invited to the Christening, despite the King’s reservations. The bad-tempered and seaweedy fairy Crustacea, pissed off by the bad journey in to the palace, gives the baby the gift of ordinariness. Instantly the baby cries for the first time, and becomes considerably less attractive. As she grows up, our girl Amethyst (known as Amy) doesn’t look great in fine gowns like her blonde, willowy, ethereal and frankly boring and unknowable sisters. Instead, she loves climbing down the wisteria which grows up the castle walls and sneaking out to the forest.
Thanks to her extremely ordinary looks, Amy turns out to be impossible to marry off. Oh, the shame of it all! Not that our girl is bothered, but the rest of the kingdom is. When she learns of a harebrained scheme to get her rescued from a dragon so a prince will be obliged to marry her, she runs away to the forest, where she lives happily until her clothes start falling apart. So, in need of money to buy a new dress, she goes and gets a job in another palace, living in disguise as an ordinary girl. Where she meets a prince – but I’ll leave some plot to those who want to read it.
The style of writing makes for a truly luscious fairytale, and the black and white line-drawn illustrations by the author are very pretty too (just the right side of twee). Plot-wise, this book is strongest in its treatment of Amy’s interaction with Crustacea, her Godmother, who is practical, warm-yet-tough, and advises her to get on with it.
It’s weakest – in my humble socialist opinion – when our girl loves every minute of working insane hours on the lowest rungs of the servant-ladder. C’mon, girlie, you’ve worked out it’ll take you roughly a year to earn enough to buy a new dress. Aren’t you a bit annoyed at the sucky pay? Also: the insinuation throughout the book that freckles and an upturned nose make someone undateable got on my nerves quite a bit. Freckles can be well hot, and don’t get me started on pixie faces…
(Interestingly, each book I’ve looked at for these posts has often pushed an idea of what a typical beautiful princess looks like, but none of them quite match.)
I was a little disappointed in how conventionally the ends got tied up, but I suppose how the plot came to be is more important than what came to be. Our girl has agency, there’s no doubt about it. And there’s nothing wrong with a happy ending.
Princess Pigsty
- By Cornelia Funke and Kerstin Meyer, Chickenhouse, 1997
In Princess Pigsty our girl is one of three sisters, who live the traditional fairytale princess life:
Their beautiful clothes filled thirty wardrobes. They had footmen to blow their noses for them and ladies-in-waiting to tidy up their rooms, hang up their clothes and polish their crowns until they shone.
Every morning, three teachers taught them royal behaviour – how to sit on a throne without fidgeting, how to curtsey without falling over, how to yawn with your mouth closed and how to smile for a whole hour without taking a break.
Isabella, the youngest, despite being perfectly capable of walking the princessy walk, is not happy, and makes her feelings known by waking up the whole castle shouting:
“I am tired of being a princess! It’s boring, boring, boring!”
Her older sisters looked up from their feather pillows in surprise.“I want to get dirty!” cried Isabella, bouncing around on the bed. “I want to blow my own nose. I don’t want to smile all the time. I want to make my own sandwiches. I don’t want to have my hair curled ever again. I do not want to be a princess any more!”
And with that she took her crown and threw it out of the window. Splash! It landed in the goldfish pond.
In the pitched battle of wills with the King that follows, Isabella is sent to work in the kitchens until she changes her mind. When she enjoys her work in the kitchens, learning about how their food is made and essentially having too much fun to relent, she’s sent to the pigsty – where she gets along with the pigs and enjoys their company even more.
Eventually, seeing there is no way around it, her father relents and says she doesn’t have to be all princessy if she doesn’t want to – but by now our girl likes the pigs and stays in the pigsty just as often as in her feather bed.
Though no mention is made of any innate unprincessy looks (beyond curled hair), Isabella rejects her princessy role in life quite actively. While Amy of The Ordinary Princess is a failure at traditional princessy things (but isn’t that bothered about it, either) Isabella has lots of guts and lots of agency, not to mention an upbeat and cheerful nature. Eventually her father is won round. The patriarch isn’t a baddie, and – once it’s clear she’s happier that way – he accepts her as she is. Tangled, mucky and doing things that interest her. Hip-hip hooray for doing what you want! Hip-hip hooray for converting people! Hip-hip hooray for male allies!
Shrek!
- William Steig, Macmillan, 1990
Didn’t know Shrek started out as a book? It did, and it was… not a huge amount like the movie franchise. (Have the first part read to you by Stanley Tucci here, though sadly without pictures.) Shrek, in both media, is a famously revolting and ugly character, who delights in his own disgustingness (“wherever Shrek went, every living creature fled. How it tickled him to be so repulsive”) – but that’s where most of the similarities end.
The book is a very short picture book with a quest narrative. A witch tells Shrek’s fortune: “Then you wed a princess who/Is even uglier than you.” Shrek decides this sounds great, and goes off in search of this princess.
He strode in and his fat lips fell open. There before him was the most stunningly ugly princess on the surface of the planet.
When they meet they declare their love for each other’s revoltingness, and live “horribly ever after.” But if you’ve seen any of the movies, you’ll know this wasn’t quite how it went down when Dreamworks got their hands on it.
In the movie Princess Fiona (who has a name, unlike in the book) is only ugly after dark, – during the day she appears as a beautiful woman, and during the night she is an ogre, and she’s self-conscious about it. The only way to cure this is with “true love’s kiss” – and it’s initially an unpleasant surprise for her to learn that when the spell is broken she’s actually stuck with ogre mode constantly.
While the movie does feature a green monster called Shrek and an (eventually) ‘ugly’ princess – their unconventionality is treated as something they’re both self-conscious about. Fiona, especially, with all the princessy expectations heaped upon her, needs reassurance that she’s loveable.
Alhough the movie doesn’t mention weight specifically, one of the main factors of Fiona’s transformation (apart from the green skin) is that she becomes considerably heavier. Fiona is more of an everywoman – learning that she doesn’t need to be a size 8 to find love – and literally kicking ass. Caitlin Moran tracks the rewrite as part of a post-feminist trend:
In the last decade the post-feminist reaction to princesses has been the creation of alternative princesses: the spunky chicks in Shrek and the newer Disney films who wear trousers, do kung fu and save the prince.
While some cool people (I’m looking at you, Babette Cole) have been subverting these roles for a long time, it takes a while before the effect trickles down to a Hollywood blockbuster and the much wider audience that a movie like Shrek can reach.
While the original very short picture book is more about two people with unconventional values and no qualms or neuroses about them – a la The Twits or The Addams Family – the movie Shrek presents Fiona as someone extremely kickass, but with a fairly conventional narrative of body issues (though admittedly hers are mythical ones) and a postmodern self-consciousness about breaking the known conventions of the ‘fairytale’ wedding.
In this way Fiona is far more relatable (and has infintely more agency) than the nameless princess in the book, but part of me is sad that she doesn’t start with the self-assurance of our happily ugly picturebook princess. After all – if this is a world where gingerbread men can talk and cats can fence – surely we can have a princess who can just get on with her thang without worrying about being pretty enough?
Coming up next time:
- “Rapunzel’s Revenge – Fairytales for Feminists”
- Tatterhood
- The Tough Princess
- And more…
Last time I bought a new pair of high heels, an eleven-year old admired them.
‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’
‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.
I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.
Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel
Vertigo
The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.
He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.
As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.
Earthbound
Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.
The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child
Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.
Elevation
He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.
One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.
Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.
Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.
Venus in Furs
Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models
‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.
He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.
The fetish
Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):
‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”
The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’
– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm
The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.
‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).
Domination
For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.
But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…
‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.
– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
- Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.
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[Gamer Diary] – What I’ve Been Playing… May 2012
As promised, I actually played games this month! I started off with Portal 2‘s Perpetual Testing Initiative (which I mentioned last month) I tried my hand at the Puzzle Maker to make a few test chambers. You may notice from my efforts that I might, maybe, possibly, probably, harbour a teeny love of Deadly Goo. Having attempted to use Valve‘s Hammer Editor in the past to make maps for Portal 2, I can say that the new in-game Puzzle Maker is much simpler.
Obviously the simplicity has benefits as well as negative points: it’s simpler to use, so therefore more of the community can try their hand at map-making for an extremely popular title. This is demonstrated by the fact that since the Puzzle Maker has been available, the number of Steam Workshop files for Portal 2 has shot up to nearly 100,000 (by comparison, Team Fortress 2 has close to 5k and Skyrim just over 7k)1 despite being the newest edition to the Workshop repertoire.
My first test chamber for Portal 2
The negatives, I feel, come with the restrictions you face with what is available to you in the Puzzle Maker: e.g. you can’t add extra doors for staged testing. Plus, try as I might to create things exactly as I imagine them in my head, it never seems to be quite right as not all the tools are available to you. The solution here would be to learn how to use Hammer properly… but for a lot of fans that’s a bit too confusing to contemplate.
So, you may be wondering why my production of test chamber blueprints stopped mind-May… the answer is Diablo 3. This hit internationally on May 15th and domestically (in the UK) May 18th. After some very irritating cock-ups from various pre-order suppliers, I eventually got my hands on it for the UK release date.
I must say I’m sort of glad I didn’t get a copy until May 18th as Blizzard had some serious issues on the international release. Let me explore these. D3 is both single and multiplayer but you have to be online all the time, on Battle.net’s servers even to play on your own. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either. Couple that with the fact that their servers clearly weren’t ready – nor capable – of handling the volume of people trying to connect. Again, just to play single player.
Error 37 screengrabs were plastered all over the internet as eager fans were raging at Blizzard. That’s not to say I didn’t escape: I’ve had three instances since I got the game where I’ve been unable to play because the damned servers were having a tea break (or eating themselves, I dunno) with Error 35 taking out the game on May 20th for over 9 hours and Error 37 rearing its ugly head again nearer the end of the month (Error 35 = servers down for maintenance; Error 37 = servers are busy).
That’s the one major drawback of the game. The interwebs have been awash with rumours of an “offline mode”, but whether Blizz decide to actually do it or not only time will tell.
Enough of that. The game itself is great fun with brilliantly detailed graphics and fun attacks for all classes. This is the first RPG of this type (the hack’n’slash) that I’ve actually finished – albeit only on normal difficulty – and am now going through it again to try and find better loot (so far unsuccessfully). The fact that I haven’t got bored yet is praise in itself as I do have a tendency to just wander off despite all my intentions to play through as every class and on every difficulty. Again, time will tell if I do end up admitting defeat.
Blizz have done OK with the female characters; yes, they start off fairly under-dressed but so do the male counterparts. My one criticism is the fem-Demon Hunter’s boots… why would you wear heels (at all!) to fight the prime evil? Seriously. Oh, and the occasional armour vs. cleavage fail is a given.
In between my battling of evil I made a brief foray into the world of the mod. The mod in question is Centralia: Part 1, which is the opening sequence of a game developed as a mod for Half Life 2: Episode 2. I’ve written a more general review over here but I felt it worth a mention as a) it doesn’t involve shooting guns or killing things and b) yeah, OK, my brother is one of the devs.
The idea behind it is (I paraphrase) “to make creepy places fun”, so they’ve taken an extraordinary story from real life (Centralia, PA) and added some more spooky to the mix. Even though it’s pretty short for now, it still managed to make me jump a couple of times.
A still from the beginning of Centralia
It is a genuinely interesting concept for a game and I’d quite like to see where it goes, but to do that I first have to persuade my bro to set up a KickStarter fund, then he has to get funded through it. Blah, blah austerity etc.
Tropes Vs Women in Games: a cool thing for you to throw money at
As I’ve mentioned KickStarter, we here at BR had this drawn to our attention. Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is the brainchild of Anita of Feminist Frequency who is hoping to make a series of films based on, well, tropes of women in video games.
“The series will highlight the larger reoccurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders.”
This looks promising, and who here wouldn’t want to get paid to play games and make films about it? Exactly.
Next Month:
There will be Max Payne 3 – as the PC edition got delayed so it didn’t have to do battle with Diablo 3 – and probably (finally) some AC: Revelations as I now have a copy waiting for me. I suspect there will be more but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet!
But! Before I go, an Assassin’s Creed note…
Just quickly, this has just popped up on the internet: promise of a female protagonist in an Assassin’s Creed title! It will be a “companion game” to AC3, subtitled Liberation, but will only be on the PS Vita. Borderhouse (follow the link) say:
What’s interesting and exciting is that the protagonist of the game will be a woman of color named Aveline.
Admittedly, yes, that is pretty interesting – and awesome – but being me I have to push the cynic buttons and raise two points. First, we’ve talked about this before, and I will keep banging on about it until it surfaces for definite: is this the “her” Juno mentioned at the end of Brotherhood? This mysterious lady-assassin that Desmond has to find before he can defeat the Templars? My guess is: no. If it’s running concurrent to AC3 he can’t have found her yet as, surely, her story comes after his ends (after another three games).
Secondly, PS Vita? Really? An over-expensive handheld with few titles and not nearly as many users as Xbox 360/Ps3/PC? That’s where you decide to premiere your first femprotag of the franchise? You don’t think that’s a little bit sidelining? I suspect the peeps over at Ubisoft are expecting only the die hards to buy it, which means they aren’t too bothered about offering up a viable femprotag for the mainstream just yet.
Or, maybe they’re testing the waters for the Elusive Female Assassin that will save the world. Or, maybe Aveline is “her”. Prove me wrong, Ubisoft, please!
- as of 9am, 31.05.12 [↩]
It starts with an unfortunate throwaway statement. ‘This was an exciting time to be a woman’ says Lucy Worsley as she introduces us to the premise of Harlots, Heroines & Housewives: A Seventeenth-Century History for Girls (BBC4).
Gee… yeah, I guess the 1300s were a pretty boring time to be a woman. As for the 2000s… I’m so bored, like, all the time, nowadays, just being a woman. This is the same kind of thinking that underscores the title (which, BTW, is too long and therefore totally un-hashtagable – who does that, in this day and age? Live tweeting, like, totally ruined.). Said title also left me uncertain whether this was supposed to be a history for girls about everyone, or a herstory-style history of girls for both boys and girls, or a kind of disco-toilets-at-3am thing for girls about girls about how we’re all just the same really, we all have the same heartaches and problems and we’re all so modern why can’t we all get along.
I eventually settled on the latter, partly because I assume the title is trying to reference that whole kind of retro-Girls Own / Glorious Book for Girls type thing that I really have no right to find intrinsically a bit obnoxious but do anyway.
Granted, men and women moved in different social circles during this period, but I think all this is Worsley’s first error: she considers men and women in isolation from each other, rather than how they interact (unless, that, is, they’re ‘interacting’ with the king’s …sceptre). The sainted Amanda Vickery also writes about women in history, but her series on the eighteenth-century home last year was far more inclusive – and actually far more insightful – for focusing on an arguably female-dominated space rather than on one 50% of society to the exclusion of the other (which is, ironically, exactly the kind of short-sightedness a series like this is trying to go against).
The Man: Charles II
Had the first episode of History for Girls – ‘At Court’ – looked simultaneously at king’s mistresses, king’s courtiers and king’s womanizing major poet, I think Lucy W would have been onto a winner – and it would have told us a lot about women in the period. Instead, there is no mention of the Earl of Rochester and his notoriously rakish companions beyond a bit of giggling at the cast-list for Sodom (King Bolloxinian and Cuntigratia, his queen; Clytoris, the maid of honour, &c) in the first episode.
The second episode does look at marriage, and the increased female freedom to choose one’s own husband in evidence during this period; however, there’s nothing about how that freedom might come with certain societal obligations to choose a sober and sensible fellow to espouse. Given that this was the age of the ‘King of Bling‘, whose court frequently witnessed happenings such as the one in the local tavern described by Pepys – Sir Charles Sedley, in the company of a group of friends, ‘took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it, and then drank it off’ in front of a large crowd – it seems silly to ignore the potential implications for women and their societal freedoms. There’s no mention of body parts being dipped in wine and Charles’ own sanction of such behaviour, at all.
Which is a shame, because Worsley does talk about the notorious image of Barbara Villiers (Chief Mistress) with her illegitimate son, posing as the Virgin Mary. Linking the two up through the common appropriation of religious imagery for lewd purposes would have been an interesting move. Instead, we get Barbara V as a strikingly ‘modern’ woman, who has power over the king (but no particular political interest in him) because she’s Mistress Number One. How liberating. How strikingly different from every other period of history, ever.
I really don’t know why otherwise shrewd historians are so mad on the old ‘modern’ chestnut – it also irked me at the Portrait Gallery’s First Actresses exhibition: this eternal language of ‘celebrity’ and ‘PR’ and ‘spin-doctoring’ that either existed in the past (in which case it’s not truly ‘modern’), or it didn’t (in which case your theory is manipulating the facts and distorting our view of the past).
‘Women in this period have a surprisingly modern attitude’, she tells us. So we’re all just the same really, it’s the sisterhood whatever era it’s in, why can’t we all just get along. OK, I get what she’s trying to say: it wasn’t all lead on your face and weird stuff on your nipples to make them look darker (which you learn all about, and that’s quite fun): there’s also something ACCESSIBLE about the past.
Nell Gwynn, one of Charles II's most famous mistresses
But, again, pretty much every period in history is claimed as ‘a point where things start getting modern’. Cardinal Wolsey was the first spin doctor; Anne Boleyn was the first feminist; Fanny Hill was the first businesswoman – isn’t it time we scrapped this cliche and started maybe thinking about ‘modernity’ as a fairly arbitrary concept? It’s an artificial divide intended to make stuff ‘relevant’, which I get, but perhaps it might have been more interesting to think about how aspects of this period’s thinking about women still prevail today than how Nell Gwynn was just like a seventeenth century Angelina Jolie. There’s an implied value judgement here, too: sure, women now rarely have to wear the ‘scold’s bridle’ (which we also learn about), but that’s not to say that everything else is fine and dandy.
I mean, on one level, good on Lucy for trying to make the past accessible at all: it should come as no surprise to Alphabet readers that I have drawn up several blueprints for a t-shirt with Samuel Richardson’s face on it accompanied by the strapline ‘BUT MADAM!’, so I suspect I am not the target audience for the whole accessible-history thing. Horse, gate, bolted &c. But on another level, it is a bit reductive. Which brings me on to my last big gripe: the dressing up.
Now, I love a bit of dressing up, me, but I didn’t really see how necessary this was – you don’t catch Simon Schama trying on fake eighteenth century calves (like padded bras, but for men concerned about their muscular shortcomings being exposed by contemporary fashions for breeches). Kinda wish you did, mind, but Lucy seems to go through an endless stream of minor sartorial humiliations for most of this programme, mostly whilst talking to various Esteemed Academics. I don’t have an intrinsic problem with it, but it did make her look a bit infantile, and I kind of wish it hadn’t.
So, in conclusion: nice bit of fun for a Monday night; enjoyed the shout-out to green-sickness; worth watching if you’re interested in historical bosoms. As far as any deeper insight goes, it’s not really up to scratch, and I wish it had been.
Silent Witness s15: ‘Calm down, dear…’
Silent Witness has just finished broadcasting its 15th series and, I’ll be truthful, I’ve been watching it for quite a few years. I’ve also been a bit of a fan of Emilia Fox for some years too – since seeing her in Reeves and Mortimer’s rehash of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) as Marty’s almost-bride Jeannie, left at the altar as he plunged to his death. She’s always played strong women in everything I’ve seen her in, from Morgause in Merlin to the new Gordon’s Gin advertisement where she deftly puts one Mr Glenister (aka Gene Hunt) in his place.
Emilia Fox as Dr. Nikki Alexander doing a brilliant representation of my Unimpressed Face
She’s a great actress who I think does a lot for Women In Telly, so I was a bit disappointed with the way Dr Nikki Alexander (Fox’s character) has been portrayed in this series of Silent Witness.
***Quick spoiler warning goes here.***
I’ll get to Nikki, but I also wanted to mention that I’ve been a bit dismayed at the BBC’s dumbing-down of the series with woeful stereotypes akin to Channel 4’s recent “Let’s just cause a hoohah to get viewers” strategy. Every episode of Silent Witness this series has pretty much screamed ‘The Police are incompetent and corrupt and evil!’. Topical? You could argue that, but the way they’ve tackled it has been very clumsy and unsophisticated – not like the Silent Witness of previous years. Plus I haven’t heard of any police violently sexually assaulting pimps in public toilets with long wooden implements to death and then covering it up recently – have you?
They’ve also thrown in the old ‘people who play violent video games are all psychopathic killers’ trope – in the first episode no less – which left me with a well defined Unimpressed Face. Really, BBC? You want to play with such obvious, ill-informed, stereotypes? Disappointing.
They certainly haven’t done much for the female figures in this series either, with three suicides, all colleagues or friends of Leo, two of which were women and neither of which were portrayed very well. One also apparently found the draw of Leo’s soft gaze too hard to resist and snogged his face off in a lab despite, her being married and him in a long-term relationship.
The second was a pathologist who challenged a post mortem conclusion of Shaken Baby syndrome (also, quite topical) who Leo took personal action against to make her look like an illogical, flustered fool by using his influence as Head of the Royal Society of Pathologists to say “nah, she’s wrong.”
Nikki studied under this particular LadyPatho and was quick to defend her, but the script made both women look as if they’d been stranded in swathes of stereotypically female overemotionality. It felt like the Beeb had attempted to suggest science is Man’s Domain, what with the way they aired Nikki’s protests that LadyPatho was being purposefully railroaded by a patriarchal pathologist hierarchy, whom she had dared to go against by suggesting something other than their fave shaken baby triad might exist as a cause of infant death.
The potential of this, however, is totally undermined by the acting instructions Fox seems to have followed. By making an accomplished, strong, independent female pathologist who we know – from many years of her gracing our screens – to be a sensible, balanced and intelligent individual, behave in a disorientated, desperate, hysterical, conspiracy-theory, ‘the men are out to get us’ way sort of undermines the whole attempt at a feminists-in-the-mainstream angle. Or just, y’know, that whole taking women seriously thing.
It is difficult for me to accept Emilia Fox’s performance as a betrayal of Nikki, but realistically I don’t see how she could have agreed to play the scene that way without going against Nikki’s intrinsic character. That is certainly disappointing. The series’ new obsession with Lowest Common Denominator dross (probably ordered down through the BBC management levels in order to win some more viewers in these austere times) is also highly disappointing. Though the stories have been, generally, interesting enough, Silent Witness still feels like it’s strayed from its path.
I hope that, for next year’s series, the BBC drop this new Ch4-esque manifesto for just being offensive and shallow in order to viewer-grab away from whatever reality talent show rubbish is on elsewhere. If needs be, just move it to BBC4 and make it a clever criminal show again – it’ll fit in nicely alongside The Bridge and other similarly intelligent drama that treats women with a little bit more respect. There’s no excuse now that analogue TV no longer exists: we’ve all got the digital channels and there’s always iPlayer (even on your Xbox now)!