Brené Brown: on Shame and Gender
Over 4 million people have seen Brené Brown’s fantastic TED talk about Vulnerability. She’s a researcher who looked into what successful people have in common, and found that they were all willing to make themselves vulnerable.
I was excited when she gave a follow-up talk in March, but I didn’t imagine I’d be posting about it on BadRep. The reason I am is that at 15.00 minutes, it became ALL about gender. (I strongly recommend you check it out – both videos are excellent):
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Shame is often strongly gendered; we are intended to feel it when we don’t live up to our society’s imposed, sexist expectations. She cites a study from Boston College which got women to answer the question:
What do women need to do to conform to female norms?
The answers were: be Nice, Thin, Modest… and ‘Use all available resources for appearance’.
For men, they were: Always show emotional control, Work should be your priority, Pursue status… and ‘Violence’.
That they’re different answers for men and women should be enough to prove the need for some real changes in our society by itself, but that the actual points are also so disgusting just seals it for me. Nice. Thin. Don’t make a fuss. Physical appearance is everything. Emotionally cut off. Violent. Competitive. Judged hugely by job and status. Not one of these things is good for society. We could lose them all and it would only improve everyone’s lives. (Well, ‘nice’ could be okay, if it were applied to the more powerful groups in society, but in terms of gender you’ve then still got the ‘chivalry’ problem – that men can forget about power differences if they treat women ‘nicely’ while giving up nothing.)
Brown’s previous point had been that successful and happy people have to allow themselves the risk of being seen as weak, or to fail. However, in reaching that conclusion (and it’s definitely true), she only interviewed women. In this second talk she relates how a male fan pointed out to her that men often feel unable to choose this route.
Shame feels the same for men and women, but it is organised by gender…
For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations [as it is for women], shame is one: Do Not Be Perceived As Weak.
– Brené Brown
The fan claims that it’s the women in his family who reinforce this for him. In terms of how strictly the two sets of ‘norms-to-conform-to’ listed above are enforced, I often see that men have a lot more leeway in dropping one or two of them… but only if they replace them with ‘money’.
So the next time I’m looking for a shorthand example for why feminism is important, I’ll reference what people perceive as the biggest demands by society on who they are allowed to be. It’s a flawed, gender-binary test, but the fact that the public returned those answers counts for a lot. That a list so gendered and outrightly harmful to society should be the TOP pressures many of us seem to be facing is something we just don’t need. It may not be set in law, but this stuff is a strong daily message.
…Which makes me want to find a solution. Well, first to scream F*** THAT and opt out, and then find a solution. Equality means removing this heinous bullshit for everyone. The goals listed as the top answers in that survey are both unattainable in size and harmful in practice, but what choice do we have? It’s fine for me to urge people to stop conforming, but for many if they do the reality is they’ll never pass a job interview again. (Although not shaving your armpits or legs sometimes works out just fine).
I refuse to give up. Reducing inequality towards any gender is so fundamental to everyone’s happiness that stuff like this just makes me more determined to keep fighting: we’ve all got to keep educating each other, pushing for change and making the issues visible. Whether it’s about who they marry, if they have sex, issues of consent, or who their political leaders are, women have a lot less freedom than men internationally. That’s not in dispute. Gender inequality is measurable. If you really can’t see it, you haven’t spent two seconds looking. Yes, I’m also concerned with the pressures sexism places on men, and I think these ‘norm lists’ showcase exactly why there’s so much still to do for everybody.
Grannies Take Over The Film Industry
We found out about this fascinating film project through the lovely people at Bird’s Eye View Film Festival. Hanna Sköld is writer and director of a film called Granny’s Dancing on the Table, “a tale about predicting earthquakes and finding sex”. In fact, it’s not just a film, it’s a story universe: a Granniverse, which includes an iPad game, street events and an international Granny Day to celebrate grandmothers everywhere.
And something else that makes the project special is that it will be released with a Creative Commons licence at the cinema and online, at the same time. Sköld is calling for a film distribution revolution which will take the power of storytelling out of the hands of a few large corporations and put it back in the hands of the people. If anyone can do it, it sounds like Sköld can: her first feature, Nasty Old People, premiered in 2009 on the front page of The Pirate Bay. The movie was spread online in 113 countries, has been translated into 17 different languages by the audience, and was even screened on Swedish television.
We think it sounds rather splendid, so we got in touch with Hanna to find out more about the project.
Hanna Sköld
Please tell us a bit about the ‘story universe’ of Granny’s Dancing On The Table.
“The story universe emerges from the story about Eini, a lonely girl who grows up outside society. She feels unconnected and she doesn’t belong anywhere. But she has a big imaginative world, and fantasizes about her granny. She runs away from home and goes on a journey to discover the world, but she also starts to discover herself, her sexuality; she finds some people where she can belong. All the time, her granny is some kind of spirit, watching over her.”
This is an obvious one – why grannies?
“We need them. I need them. They are invisible, in the history, in the culture of today, in my everyday life. If you don’t have a direct relation with your own granny, there are not many places you meet grannies.
In Granniverse, the Granny is a metaphor for some things that gets lost in our society. We all have Grannies, we all have stories and feelings about our Grannies, but still old women are made almost invisible in our society. What consequences will this have, which part of our history has been lost because of this? What would happen if that changed? Would life for young men and women of today, or tomorrow, be different?
By playing with the concept of Granny and the meanings we give it, we aim to inspire both the imagination and the reality of the possible answers to these questions.
Granniverse can be seen as an experiment to make always existing, but invisible parts of society visible!”
Did you have a good relationship with your own grandmothers?
“I hardly met them. And this is a big loss in my life. My grandmother on my fathers side died when I was 11, and I only met her a few times. My grandmother on my mother’s side, the same. I grew up very very isolated myself, that’s why I didn’t meet them. I think that’s why I tell this story.”
Elderly women are often stereotyped as crones or as sweet old biddies. Why do you think there are so few representations of old women as individuals?
“I think it’s because we don’t meet them naturally in our daily lives. Many old people are at homes for old people, and we have a way to separate people from each other – due to their age. And especially old women lose a lot of attention, they are not counted anymore, and I think this is because we have too few role models in the history. And also, many young women live all their lives as objects, and not as subjects.”
We heart grannies, but a lot of our heroes are elderly women without children (like Miss Marple and Lolly Willowes). How much is your project specifically about the relationships of women with their grandchildren?
“It’s crucial. Because it’s about young people’s need of older people, but also the cool, unmarried woman has already some kind of status, in a way that the granny doesn’t. But it doesn’t have to be the biological granny. I could maybe borrow someone’s granny, ’cause in the end this project is about how we are all connected, through history, through time, through biological bonds, and just because we are humans.”
We also love the sound of Granny Day! What are your hopes for the day and what it will mean to people?
“I hope that people will get a closer relationship to their grannies all days of the year. Granny Day is all the time!! But it’s also great to have one day when people can celebrate and think of their grannies, and the grannies of the world – the backbone of humanity – a little bit more!!”
Why did you decide to include a game in the mix? What’s it like?
“I wanted us to make a game with a deep meaning and where you challenge yourself creatively! The game will be a 2D, psychological adventure game where you go deep into the subconscious minds of your game characters to find the solution to their problems, ’cause this project is a lot about the deepest places in us. And since we want to make this project as interactive as possible, a game was the obvious thing to do!”
We reckon this is an exciting project with a noble aim. Plus: Grannies! :D But in order to get off the ground, Sköld needs to raise $50,000 by the first of June. She’s already got over $13,000 pledged, but she needs your help – please back Granniverse on Kickstarter now. As Team Granny says:
We invite the audience to take part in Granniverse, economically by crowdfunding, creatively by telling their own stories about their own Grannies, uploading filmclips, sound, pictures and music and socially by collective distribution. By creating, financing and distributing in collaboration with the audience we want to change the landscape of film production and film distribution.
TwitBomb: What A Woman Needs
BUT WHAT DO WOMEN REALLY NEED?
Age old question, really, this one, and one where “want” and “need” are often made unhelpfully interchangable, just to make it EVEN SIMPLER.
Welcome back to Feminist TwitBomb, Deluxe Edition, in which we take a sexist Twitter hashtag and try and make it slightly less soul-harrowingly bleak by exploring its inherent absurdity, usually with caps lock, bad puns, and the sudden appearance of wildlife. Previously on this channel: how #TipsForLadies was skewered.
Abridged (But Still Frustrating) History Of The #WhatAWomanNeeds Question
- 14th century: The Wife of Bath tells us one particular knight (and rapist) had a complicated time working it out.
- 1920s: Freud facetiously prattled about it (often available as a patronising e-card or rubbish Tumblr graphic. Life=complete).
- 1993: Tammy Wynette warbled “a ring on my finger and champagne on ice” at Elton John in a song helpfully titled A Woman’s Needs; if you are lucky enough to have these items to hand, I advise you to down the entire bottle before you try to listen.
- 1999: Even Christina Aguilera is disappointingly lyrically coy about it – the song is originally titled What A Girl Needs and renamed to Wants by the record label execs. FOR FEMINISM, I assume. (Either way, apparently the answer is “whatever her dude wants her to want/need”).
PROBLEMATIC, as Tumblr might say.
It’s all fine, though, guys, because TWITTER TO THE RESCUE. Eat your heart out, Sigmund, Xtina and Geoff, for the question will now be answered.
#WhatAWomanNeeds
An initial peek at the feed for this trending topic was a little bit unedifying. I’ve anonymised the authors because they’re really only being quoted for background. The fun comes later when you lot get involved.
“Curves and long hair”
Does it matter where the hair is? Can it be in my nostrils?
“Endless closet space”
FOR THE SKULLS OF THE FALLEN.
“a guy who will protect her like she’s his daughter, love her like she’s his wife, and respect her like she’s his mother.”
Apart from the fact that many of us do not fancy these things at all (or men), this is a worryingly ambitious MAIDEN-MOTHER-CRONE SUPERCONFLATION, and I am not paying his therapy bill when shit gets too confusing.
“oven mittens”
… hoo, boy, watch out, sisterhood. This dude’s a serious wordsmith.
“to meet One Direction”
Ah, shit. *throws up hands* Busted.
You get the picture there, anyway: high time, we decided, for a cheering TwitBomb session.
What the hell is this world where neither the pay gap nor Kool and the Gang are given true credence.
Amazingly, all these things can benefit blokes, too.
Now we’re talking, ladies. Now we’re talking.
From a friend on a locked account:
(In a strictly non-imperialist way, mind: no colonial elephant-hunting or dodgy empiring here. The helmet will be ethically sourced in a fetching shade of electric blue fairtrade material and will mainly be worn by the aforementioned wisecracking mandrill. Whom I have named Artemisia.)
"Fuck Jimmy Choo."
I got pretty wrapped up in this whole sweetly awesome world we were creating, actually.
Seriously. I cannot believe LEGO are still spraying all their “girl budget” on pastel shades whilst failing entirely to address the lack of ladypirates in this product’s long and otherwise noble lineage. Yes, I know there was one or two. One or two is NOT ENOUGH.
It just fucks with my chi, that whole business, okay?
OK, I feel better now :).
Stellar advice from one of the brilliant Better Strangers Opera collective there. (The Apocalypse Girls would be proud.)
This next one actually broke into the Top Entries for this hashtag, which I frankly regard as one of my life’s crowning achievements so far. It’s sitting there, nestled loudly between Smug “Oven Mitts” Guy and Creepy Oedipal Posturings. It’s ruining the vibe of patronage-and-patronising quite nicely. Proud moment.
(I feel like a load of Level 50 Gyrados waving DEFEND THE NHS placards would only be a good thing, really.)
A hat trick of pragmatism for us all from our own Markgraf. By the way, this team is never going to conduct a TwitBomb without reference to the noble pheasant at some point. No reason. It’s just better than ovens, chivalry and sleaze. And when these sorts of ridiculous generalisations continue to be hashtagged, surely anything goes.
"hey girl"
Other Vital LadyNeeds(TM)
- Reasonable Armour
- “A BRA THAT FECKING FITS PROPERLY! Also no more sexism ever please”
- “additional bionic arms”
- Destruction of tedious genderessentialism
- Awesome orchestral movie soundtrack for daily life
- A violent end to the categorisation of “WOMEN” (and “men”!) as amorphous Borg-like blobs of sexist predictability, unvaried by differences of any kind
- FAITHFUL CAPSLOCK BUTTON
And More Seriously
…you’d be hard pressed to argue with this one, whoever you are.
I’m glad we had this talk, Twitter. Now this pressing question’s been answered, we can all get back to the revolution.
Hoverboards, DEPLOY.
The Plot Sickens
To focus on misogyny is to obscure American Psycho’s scope, to ignore that the book is an uncompromising, unapologetic vortex of misanthropy and nihilism. Its narrator expresses disgust, contempt, anxiety and fear towards women, gay people, art students, Jewish people, the non-WASP, the homeless, the poor – anyone, in fact, who differs even by a small degree (a marginally more impressive business card, a better restaurant table) from the ideal which Bateman forces himself to emulate and sustain. Men in the novel are portrayed as unsympathetically as women, and dispatched as dispassionately – so why is it the torture and death of women that seems to abide with the reader?
Chip Kidd’s cover redesign for Picador, 2011
Like all satire, the book exaggerates and burlesques that which already exists. The book’s scenes of torture and murder were, apparently, all based on Ellis’ reading of real life cases and criminology textbooks, not whimsically called into being by him. So American Psycho on one level is an uncensored, unsanitised exposé of what has already been done to women without any incitement or instruction from its author. Neither does Ellis’ writing give the impression that violence against women is in any way attractive. The impression it does give, to me at least, is that violence against women is horrifying, viscerally disgusting, and the preserve of fucked-up, nightmarish individuals who are increasingly prevalent during a stage of socio-economic development which encourages selfishness and greed over empathy, and whose actions are increasingly ignored or disbelieved within the same environment. His work is a mirror, not a manifesto or an instruction manual. To posit it as something qualitatively worse either than crimes actually committed against women throughout history, or to the presentation of sexualised violence or serial killing in almost any other area of the entertainment world, seems dubious.
It’s worth noting too how the deaths of Bateman’s victims are affected by their socio-economic background. Having decided against the murder of his date Patricia – a minor character so boringly materialistic that I’m fully on board with the theory that takes her to be Patrick’s imaginary female persona – Bateman reflects on whether it’s ‘her family’s wealth [that] protects her tonight’. In contrast, the vagrants and call girls he kills are already economic casualties, considered disposable even before they become casualties of violence. No character from society’s lower strata appears to be missed; it is only Paul Owen, Patrick’s peer and rival, whose disappearance is considered deserving enough to warrant a police investigation. The crude and blatant contrast between Bateman’s lifestyle and that of his victims – their disparity in wealth, and therefore in power, is explicitly fetishized in more than one encounter – which calls attention to the issue of why the victims of such killers are so often sex workers, or homeless, or transient, both male and female:
“Within police culture… we know that if a prostitute goes missing and is reported as missing, that they won’t be given the same priority as other people would get… [sex workers are not] valued enough in our culture for the police to take it seriously.”
– again intertwining a socio-economic indictment with a proto-feminist impulse.
The Plot Thickens
Redesign for Picador’s 40th anniversary (Neil Lang)
One could argue incessantly about whether the book itself is misogynistic, or edifying, or indeed readable, but a
more productive debate centres on whether one can like art that one also acknowledges as problematic. When reading Anwyn Crawford’s excellent critique of the treatment of women in the lyrics and prose of that other aging enfant terrible, Nick Cave, I wasn’t convinced by all of her analysis – Cave’s work at least in its earlier phases seems, like Ellis, preoccupied with morbidly examining a pathologised masculinity rather than valorising it – but the most substantial point I drew from the ensuing debate was that the issue may be less such works themselves and more their involvement in the mainstreaming, acceptance and excusing of problematic attitudes. The gynophobic aspects of these works are made respectable by being cloaked as edgy or transgressive, when they merely dramatise the violence and inequality that already exists. Although I still contend that the violence in Ellis’ writing is not there as intentional titillation, as long as there are those for whom such things are lived experience, rather than escapist fantasy or performance material, then there will be a correspondingly visceral response to their artistic portrayal.
Although readers who read for prurient or puerile pleasure are hardly something for which writers can bargain or legislate, questions can be asked about the cachet Ellis manages to retain in the world of Guardian profiles and Soho salons, when other works of equally politicised and equally slapstick splatterpunk – Dennis Cooper, say, or Stewart Home, or even The SCUM Manifesto – languish in the ‘cult fiction’ gutter. Helen Zahavi’s brilliant Dirty Weekend, a novel published the same year as American Psycho, explores similar themes but blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator. There are marked stylistic differences, sure – Zahavi uses lyrical prose to distance or distract the reader from the trauma and gore she describes, whereas Ellis more or less rubs the reader’s face in it – and the violence of Zahavi’s protagonist is entirely reactive: she wishes only to be left alone and when she is not, she strikes out and strikes upwards. Dirty Weekend, despite receiving polarised reviews on publication, has had nothing like the long-term vilification heaped upon American Psycho, but by the same token has received far less enduring acclaim or even attention.
Maybe it’s just Ellis’ pre-existing status as wunderkind author of Less Than Zero that elevates his subsequent work. Or it might be the very obviousness of his traditionalist politics – American Psycho has more than a bit in common with something like Last Exit to Brooklyn, a cult novel of 1964 which also enlists depictions of depravity and sexual violence in the service of what can look an awful lot like proscriptive neo-puritanism. Is there more mainstream space for works which reproduce existing social structures and power relations, which, even if they challenge their existence, do so through the evidently ambiguous strategies of grotesque exaggeration or reductio ad ridiculum rather than direct disruption? For all its horrified laughter at the state we’re in, American Psycho isn’t in the business of imagining alternatives to it.
The last time I wrote that yes, I did like American Psycho, and no, that wasn’t because I’d only seen the film, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that other women felt similarly, but I’m aware that we’re still a minority. American Psycho proved controversial even before its release in 1991, its unedited manuscript pushed from publisher to publisher, leaked extracts from it incurring public outrage, and its eventual appearance leapt upon by critics with the single-minded speed of a rat up a Habitrail tube. In terms of people judging the book without having read it, not a great deal seems to have changed. I don’t really expect to alter anyone’s opinion with this post, and it isn’t really even a recommendation – it’s just an exploration of why I don’t regard American Psycho as the worst book ever written.
Marshall Arisman’s cover for Vintage Books’ UK edition
I read the book as a deeply moral – disappointingly puritan, if you like – anti-capitalist and even vaguely feminist tract. American Psycho is a house built with the tools of the master: it is, just like 1980s capitalism, crass, lurid, vulgar, heavy-handed and unapologetic. It bludgeons home its basic homily, that consumerism fails to make us happy or to lend meaning to our lives, with all the subtle and delicate artistry of a Reagan speech. But beyond this, in 2012 it’s undeniable that the values and trends the book castigated two decades back have only become more deeply entrenched. Does the book’s earnest, and still depressingly relevant, indictment of capitalism and consumerism excuse its scenes of rape, torture and murder? Maybe not, but I think those who criticise the book on these grounds, like those who called for its suppression and boycott twenty years ago, end up alienating a potential if problematic ally.
Nightmares on Wall Street
It’s hard to take seriously much that Ellis says, about either this book in particular or his work in general. A lot of his public pronouncements deal in Dylanesque obfuscation, or deliberate outrage-baiting – his Twitter account alone is a masterclass in trolling – which makes it both absurd and unfortunate that his work is so often perceived as deadly serious and condemned on the same grounds. His explanations of the origins of American Psycho, though, have the ring of sincerity, and place the book in opposition to the impact of 1980s society and culture on the individual male:
‘the book is, need I even say this, a criticism of a certain kind of masculinity and a certain kind of white male, heterosexual, capitalist, yuppie scumbag behavior.’
‘Whenever I am asked to talk American Psycho, I have to remember why I was writing it at the time and what it meant to me. A lot of it had to do with my frustration with having to become an adult and what it meant to be an adult male in American society. I didn’t want to be one, because all it was about was status. Consumerist success was really the embodiment of what it meant to be a cool guy.’
– Bret Easton Ellis, 2011‘[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself.’
– Bret Easton Ellis, 2010
Fay Weldon, one of very few women to positively review the novel, did so while emphasising its anti-capitalist aspects. Elizabeth Young, too, identified Patrick Bateman as not a character but a cipher indicating the nihilism and emptiness of yuppie culture and identity.
Bateman is of course capitalism’s dirty little secret – the madman in the attic. His sociopathy is mirrored in the socio-economic inequality and political insincerity around him. In his world, the atomised and alienated dealings of colleagues, friends and lovers are highlighted through contrast with the visceral intimacy of murder, and Ellis’ stylistic trick of detailing frenzied sex and violence in flat and clinically dispassionate prose does not disguise that as a form of human encounter it carries more weight than Bateman’s ritualised interactions with colleagues or his sexless and loveless interactions with girlfriends. His narration frequently betrays a yearning for consummation, contact and engagement in the midst of the desperate aching loneliness, the longing for meaning (even Bateman’s violence is purposeless and arbitrary) which permeates the book. In a society so unsustainably alienating and unequal that the centre plainly cannot hold, we see how badly things can fall apart.
Psycho Drama
Accused of having written ‘a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women’, Ellis found himself subject to boycotts, hate mail, death threats and violent revenge fantasies, on the basis that he had clearly written this book as either wish-fulfillment or glamorised incitement. Detractors of the book and author on these grounds display a puzzling inability to distinguish between creator and creation, which as a first principle is utterly bizarre – where is it written that characters must necessarily be extensions of an approving creator?
The novel contains a few dozen pages in amongst four hundred or so on the torture and dismemberment of women – and of men – though their impact is disproportionate. These scenes – often ludicrous, often grotesque to the point of comedy – are presented as a logical extension of the lack of empathy and mindless, numb urge to consume that characterise the world in which they take place. They don’t seem written in order to arouse any more than the determinedly un-erotic, sterile sex scenes do, or the interminable deconstructions of clothes, cosmetics and Huey Lewis’ back catalogue. The book gradually reaches a point where reading about all three feels indistinguishable in its horrific, unrelenting tedium.
The chapters in which sexual violence occurs are also, helpfully, almost all headed ‘Girls’, so you are able to avoid reading them – or I guess, according to how your tastes run, to read them in isolation and dispense with the rest of the book. I got through these scenes gingerly on my first read, treating it as a kind of endurance test, but tend to skip them on subsequent reads as they aren’t the reasons I revisit the book. I read American Psycho in the same semi-masochistic spirit in which I watch, for instance, Chris Morris’ and Charlie Brooker’s hipster-eviscerating Nathan Barley, a work also bleakly amusing, also received with disbelief and criticism of its gratuitousness, and also concerned with the consequences of elevating surface over meaning, although its slack-jawed, skinny-jeaned targets were more symptom than cause – and arguably Ellis had already been there, done that, too, with 1998’s Glamorama. I read American Psycho like I’d read any work which explored capitalism, consumerism and their messy, distasteful effects, from Voyage au bout de la nuit to The Hunger Games. (But not de Sade. Sometimes life’s just too short.)
Finally, if perhaps most obviously, it takes some effort to read Ellis’ presentation of Bateman’s attitude or actions as approving. Unlike, say, Thomas Harris depicting Hannibal Lecter, or the creators of Dexter, he gives his anti-hero little in the way of charisma or appeal. Mary Harron’s film of the novel, produced a decade after it when the stardust of the 1980s had settled somewhat, arguably does more than the book to establish Ellis’ unreliable narrator as a slick and stylish seducer rather than a pathetic interchangeable fantasist. Despite the subversive nature of Harron’s direction, Christian Bale’s tour-de-force performance renders Bateman far more compelling than his written incarnation, who is overtly racist, misogynistic and homophobic as well as dim, snobbish, superficial, chronically insecure, socially awkward, a hopeless conversationalist, and tediously obsessed with material goods. If it weren’t for the fact that almost every other character displays exactly the same character traits, it’s conceivable that the novel’s Bateman could make his dates expire of boredom without any need to break out the pneumatic nail-gun.
It’s interesting too that the film’s elevation of Bateman is bound up with its objectification of him, particularly via its concentration on his character’s proto–metrosexual aspects, but that’s a whole other essay.
- Catch the second part of this post here
Short answer? Not a lot. I find myself in the post-epic lull that tends to happen to me after I’ve powered through a great big game all the way through – I end up just being a bit frazzled. This has lasted longer than usual, possibly because I find myself in the odd position of having actually read a book. That sounds much more self-condescending that it ought to: what I mean is that I am terrible at finishing books – there’s a good 10-20 half-read titles populating the shelves here. This month however, I got through a whole one, from start to finish, but this may just have something to do with my new job (in a library).
Why am I babbling about books? Because I’m trying to explain, as best I can, why I haven’t done much gaming this month. Or, at least, not much that I can bring new content to you with. There was some more Kinect – my parents are better at the bowling game than I am – and some other little bits and pieces like a quick foray onto Team Fortress 2 to craft weapons and hats.
So, my apologies for the brevity of this post! What I did play was Portal 2, on the ‘Play Day’ that marked the one year anniversary of its release. I thought it’d be a good thing to write about, so I did a Google and it turned out we (BadRep) are the second result when you search for “Portal 2 feminist”.
Look! There we are! Second in the results!
I also had a gander at that top link and presented my counter-argument over on my own blog here, which some of you who follow us on Twitter might have already seen.
I didn’t want to simply regurgitate what I’ve already written elsewhere all over BR, which is why this is such a short post, but if I may, I’ll show you what I’m excited for in the upcoming Gaming Future.
- Portal 2: Aperture Perpetual Testing Initiative – May 8th
- Diablo III – Finally being released(!) and I’m looking forward to playing as some of those kick-ass looking fem-versions (apart from those stupid heels, ugh, seriously?!) – May 15th (UK)
- Max Payne 3 – More for the technology than the (totally original – hurhur) damsel-in-distress storyline – May 15th
Later on, there’s also Borderlands 2 which I’m looking forward to, and Crysis 3 but I have to finish Crysis 2 first – oops! I’ll also endeavour to play something a bit less, er… shooty and more casual, for those of you out there who don’t really do the FPS thing. Hopefully I’ll get some new tech over the summer to help on that front.
I’ll also be writing up some interesting posts about humour and gender in games, and I might do some ‘case study’ style posts on some of the prominent female characters out there. I’ll do my best to bring you more exciting tales next month!
[Guest Post] If I Had A Time Machine: Five Historical Women Who Would Thrive in the 21st Century
If I had a time machine, I would go back through history, picking up awesome chicks and bringing them back to the present. I would finally be able to giggle with glee as Victorians tried to work out how the tiny people got inside the TV and ancient Greeks marvelled at printed books, not to mention what showing them the internet might do! There are certain women, certain amazing icons, who would fit right into the modern world. They would be able to work, love, live and breathe, far away from the limitations placed on them in their own time. Here are five of them. Don’t get me wrong, 2012 is no utopia – we still have our battles and our injustices – but compared to any other time in history, the 21st century is a pretty awesome place for ladies.
Sappho
Sappho gave birth to two of my favourite things: lyric poetry and lesbianism. Born in 630 BC on the island of Lesbos, Sappho had a pretty good life, considering her gender. She was rich, talented and of good social standing. Her poetry, which she performed with a lyre (she invented a new subtype of the instrument, and the plectrum, of all things) was well-respected. She had her face on coins and on vases. But she was pretty lonely. The girls in her circle (which was either a religious order, something like a preparatory class or simply a gathering of women, depending on which scholars you believe) would all leave her when they married, and when she fell in love with them, she knew that they would inevitably part. She probably never married herself (accounts differ, but most 
scholars agree she did not, despite being linked to a male poet of the day) and almost definitely preferred women.
If I could go back and get her in my time machine, I’d sign her up to a dating site, put in a DVD of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Restless” (which features a lesbian writing Sappho’s poetry on her lover’s back) and explain to her that when she met the right lady, she would be able to date her, live with her, and in some parts of the world, marry her.
I’d show her this video, of Ellen and Portia’s wedding:
And I would be so excited because, in this time of technology, the beautiful poetry she would no doubt produce, probably about the woman she would eventually meet online, would never be lost and never be forgotten.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was a genius. Born in 1815 in London, she was the product of very short-lived marriage of mad, bad asshole poet Byron and staunchly moral abolitionist Anne Isabelle Milbanke. Schooled in mathematics from an early age, at the behest of a mother desperately trying to prevent her from turning out like her father, Ada began corresponding with important intellectuals on a variety of subjects while she was still in her teens, including Charles Babbage. The notes she included with her translation of an Italian mathematician’s article about Babbage’s Difference Engine were revolutionary and contained the very first working programming language, leading her to be seen as history’s first computer programmer.
If I could go to the Victorian period and pick her up, I’d go for the bright young Ada, before the affairs and the gambling. I’d show her iphones and laptops and cash machines, making it clear to her that none of this would exist without her. I’d take her to the Apple store and show her an iPad. I’d open a browser and let her google until she thought her head would explode with the sheer scope of it all. Then I’d go to the Google careers page and make her fill out an application.
Emily Dickinson
Born in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was not a famous poet during her lifetime. She was not a famous anything during her lifetime.
Known by her neighbours as an eccentric who dressed in white and rarely left the house, she wrote almost two thousand poems, only ten of which were ever published while she was living. Her fascination with mortality, due to numerous personal tragedies, along with her concise, free verse style, made her work a little too ahead of its time to be appreciated until much later. She was an avid letter writer and by the end of her life she was communicating almost exclusively via the written word.
If I could go back, I’d whisk Emily away from the early 1860s, when she was a fiercely creative thirty-something. I’d set her up in a nice apartment with a pretty garden – little known fact: Emily Dickinson was much better known for her gardening than for her writing in her lifetime – and hand her a shiny new laptop. After a hopefully brief, not too infuriating tutorial on the technological revolution, I’d introduce her to Facebook and Skype.
I’d show her how easy it is to instantly communicate with individuals from all over the globe and all walks of life whenever she pleased. I’d explain to her that now, with these tools at her fingertips, she could have her precious solitude without sacrificing the social stimulation she clearly craved. Next, I’d direct her attention to the numerous writers’ communities online. I’d show her the pages and pages of poetry – and the range of quality, from emo teens to professional writers. I’d encourage her to get involved and post daily. Finally one of the most under-appreciated poets of the nineteenth century would be able share her thoughts, feelings and art with like-minded individuals without ever having to leave her desk.
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart, born in Kansas in 1897, was as ballsy and independent as they come. She wanted to fly, so she flew. She wanted to fly all the way across the Atlantic, so she signed up to command a flight piloted by men in a project funded by a rich woman. She wanted to do the trip for real, solo, and a few years later, she did. In 1937, she decided she wanted to be the first to fly around the world, and sadly, this was where it all went wrong. She disappeared in the air, having flown almost the entire way around the world with only a navigator accompanying her. There are too many theories about how and why this happened to mention, but the most accepted explanation is mistakes were made, preparation was shoddy and she ran out of fuel over the ocean, plummeting to a watery grave.
If I could go back and get her, I’d go back to the early Thirties, and pick her up after her solo flight across the Atlantic, before she was forced to endorse product after product just to maintain her high profile, and before the press began their obligatory backlash, calling her flying chops into question.
I’d sit her down on my bed, fire up my laptop, and show her YouTube videos of women flying commercial flights and flying for fun and flying as fighter pilots. I’d show her this video of the Women In Aviation conference in San Diego:
Most importantly, I’d tell her that flying is now safe. The technology has caught up with her dreams and it is very unlikely, in the age of GPS and state of the art air traffic control, that what happened to her would happen now. I would also let her know that now, it is possible to set off to circumnavigate the globe before breakfast and arrive home in time for tea!
Margaret Cavendish
Margaret Cavendish, née Lucas, author of a diverse list of books, on subjects like philosophy and science as well as a memoir and creative works of poetry, drama and the world’s very first science fiction novel, The Blazing World, was born in 1623 in Colchester. Yep, really. In a time when most women would never think about trying to write a word, let alone publishing under their own name, Cavendish was a famous and controversial writer.
Her critics complained about her spelling and grammar as much as they did about her writing at all. They also criticised her outlandish style of dress, calling her “mad, conceited, and ridiculous” – but her originality, paired with her keen interest in and interpretation of early science, made her popular.
If I could journey back to the 17th century, I would go to 1668, the year The Blazing World was published, and I’d bring Margaret back here. The first thing I would do is encourage her to get tested for dyslexia, as some scholars have suggested that this would have accounted for her terrible spelling and grammar. I’d show her women delivering lectures on TED about robotics and neuroscience:
I’d get her an application for Oxford University and introduce her to Microsoft Word complete with the lifesaving blessing that is spell check. Once she was accepted at Oxford, she’d get all sorts of support for her dyslexia, and shiny equipment. She would excel at all her subjects, even the ones that weren’t invented in her time. I’d watch her study, graduate, write and publish, and then become an academic, scientist, writer or all three. I’d sit back, hope for another science fiction novel, and smile smugly when she cured cancer.
Sadly, there ain’t no such thing as time travel. It’s likely there never will be. But I can wonder and I can dream. And I can use thought experiments like this to remind myself I have the freedom to love whomever I choose, aim as high as I choose, live however I choose and be respected for it. How very lucky I was to be born in 1984.
- Francesca Lewis is a queer feminist Yorkshirewoman, wordsmith and fruitcake. In Internetland, she is known as Franzi and divides her writing time between creative and journalistic endeavours, including her Big Distraction column Pop Smart and That Novel She’s Working On. In Realityland she works as an art model and spends the rest of her time on art, ukulele and the feverish consumption of media. She likes high quality American TV shows, female singer/songwriters and novels that land somewhere between literary and speculative. Ironically, she does not like fruit cake.
[Guest Post] Gender Divide: His and Hers Wedding Parties
In the third of my series of guest posts on the trials of being a feminist while getting married (previously: being given away; the Name Issue), I’m going to take a look at the issues of bridesmaids, best men, hen parties and stag dos.
On the surface, it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal, right? I mean, you say bride, you think ‘bridesmaids’. What wedding photographer doesn’t have a plethora of pictures of a girl in white, smiling, with five other women of varying ages in a terrifying shade of coral, looking less happy? If you’re the bride, you’re meant to be surrounded by loads of female extras being feminine and cooing about appearance and hair and The Dress and flowers – that’s what the media show. But I had a big issue when it came to my bridesmaids. I have a lot of friends and they are’t all female, and lots of them are in different groups and some are in different countries. In the end, I have a family member (stepsister), my best mate (who lives in South Korea) and a bridesman.
Yup, that’s right. I’ve known Dan since I was 18 and he knows me almost as well as my fiancé, so screw it, he’s in my bridal party. I have a bridesman. There are actually some great sides to this. For one thing, like my fiancé, he doesn’t drink, so he’ll be very helpful in negotiating the family tensions on the day when it comes to the group photographs. For another, he’s great at calming me down and getting me to remember to have some perspective. And he’s funny and can cheer me up when I’m stressed and grumpy.
Needless to say, my mother does not approve. ‘Why can’t he be part of Future Husband’s party?’ she wailed. It is seemingly ‘not done’ to have men in your wedding entourage if you’re a woman, I imagine because of women not having male friends in the same way in the old days, because, tradition implies, that would surely lead to romance. (Although I have in fact slept with him. I am not revealing this fact to my mother.) A couple of other people have joked ‘Oh, in a dress?’ and I’ve just stared at them until they stop with their gender stereotyping.
The idea of just having your female friends is a lovely one but a little outdated when you a) know what sex is and don’t need your married friends telling you before your wedding night, and b) regularly talk to men without the worry that someone will see you and call you a strumpet. We’ve moved on as a society, haven’t we? It’s nicely balanced by the fact that Future Husband chose his sister as his best man. I love that our wedding party is made up of a mix of men and women on both sides.
It’s also nice to have an additional excuse for extra parties. I’ve always said I would have a Cock Party as well as a Hen Do. Future Husband is having a Doe Night as well as a Stag Do. Fine, we’ll segregate by gender but by god we’ll have both. It shakes it up from the normal alternative of one single party we could throw, but also means that I’m not just hanging out in a female-only group.
It’s not even that I’ve set out to be ‘controversial’ (my mother, yet again), it’s just that I couldn’t see how I could organise my wedding and not be non-gender biased. We have too many friends, male and female, to simply be that abrupt and schismatic.
- Lizzie is getting married in 2013 and has already planned roughly 5,748 weddings in her head. You can find more of her musings, wedding-themed reviews and rantings at Wedding Belles UK.