[Gamer Diary] – Assassin’s Creed 3: Reactions Roundtable
Three short months after the release of Ezio’s last dance, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, and we’ve been graced by the presence of the first Assassin’s Creed III reveal. So Stephen B, Markgraf, Miranda and I had a chatette.
First off: go check out the trailer if you haven’t seen it already.
Stephen B: Well, I’m a Brit, and that probably colours my reaction to the setting. I’m just not invested in how glorious the War of Independence was, and killing the dastardly English isn’t really as exciting to me as Assassins vs. Templars.
My first reaction was concern for the fighting: is going up against guns with a small hand-axe really going to work? The moves lacked the skill and finesse of previous styles, although they’re better on a repeat viewing. Plus, I am a bit disappointed that no-one else is following Mass Effect 3‘s lead and doing female version trailers. Or… having even one female in the whole trailer.
All this grand posturing is about English vs. American white guys only and the protagonist is of Native American descent, so while you’re blowing all those trumpets you’re ignoring the incredible ongoing & future genocide. The game might highlight how his people are treated as part of the story, but that’s not clear from the trailer.
Miranda: Would it be possible to have a leading lady in this franchise? I’d love that – I like the Orlando-esque idea of the protagonist being different genders through time – but isn’t Desmond always the person, er, “wearing” the history? So I imagine we’d have to lose him as well; they’d have to create a female equivalent? Even without that leap, I’m personally hoping there are less Sex Assassin type ladies this time around, and more, y’know, female characters.
Readers might remember the last time we covered Assassin’s Creed on here and talked about the Sex Assassin NPC thing – Ubisoft Workshop staff actually read the post, which featured Markgraf’s own designs for female assassins, and gave it a friendly shoutout, which was nice to see (sadly, when I try to find the shoutout, it’s been archived and doesn’t seem to have the hyperlinks anymore. Shame, that – we were originally hyperlinked from “we thought this would quell some people’s fears on where we stand on important subjects”). We then had a bit of feedback from people who pointed out that there are female assassins in ACII you can deploy places, so then we made another post to address that a bit, because the point is, we’re aware of that, but it’s not like there isn’t room for a good deal of progress.
Rai: I too am concerned about how they’ll fit this protagonist into the grand scheme of things: after all historically it’s one set of oppressive zealots complaining about being oppressed (by the English) without a shadow of irony as they murder and destroy the indigenous population. Given the protagonist’s ethnicity, one has to wonder how he’s on either side of this war, given the racist sentiments aimed at Native Americans (in that era and beyond).
On the anti-Brit theme, I have my doubts that it’ll be handled appropriately or even accurately – there are tendencies when anything American is involved for Brits to be portrayed as some sort of devil spawn (which is getting pretty dull).
I’m pretty peeved it is still a dude. What happened to all the stuff at the end of Brotherhood when Minerva was telling Desmond to go and find this ‘other assassin’ he’d need to beat the Templars? Minerva was using female pronouns to talk about this other assassin – so, where is she?
Changing tack slightly: the trees(!) – in the trailer we see the guy free-running among the branches. This could be an interesting switch from the buildings we’re used to thus far.
Also did anyone else hear the theory that AC3 would be set in the Far East? If so… would Far East have been a better setting than 1777 America? I think so, but then America is of very little interest to me as it all feels quite egomaniacal: could the setting of AC3 be a ploy to get more US fans? Or to bring the centre of attention back on to the USA, as is the tendency of so many games?
Stephen B: Well, I suppose the previous games were quite brave in that the first one had you playing a medieval Arab, and the second went to Italy with no mention of the US. So it could be okay that they do one in the USA… but the Far East would have been a lot more exciting for me.
Markgraf: As per Rai’s reaction, I’m baffled as to why our hero isn’t a woman, still – I mean, come on, it’s 2012, surely we know that women exist by now and that it’s fine to have them as protagonists?
But my angle is this one: I’m keen to see people of colour represented as actual hero-y heroes in games, because it’s damn rare, it’s still damn rare, and that’s frankly an embarrassment to civilisation as a whole. So I’m delighted, actually, to see that Ratohnhaké:ton is mixed race and doing his bit for First Nations people in games.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise is doing itself quite proud of multiculturalism in games: it started the series with you playing Altaiir ibn La-Ahad, who is a Syrian Arab, born and raised, which is literally one of the only examples I can think of where the playable protagonist is Arab. But you’ll all remember that Altaiir had an American voice, and if you peered under his hood, it was Desmond doing an Altaiir cosplay. So, you had a character with the right sort of name for the place he was in, but without the right sort of voice, and not really the right sort of face, either, which was pretty much ethnicity-trimming, if you ask me.
No-one can possibly have any problems with the representation of First Nations people – they’re under-represented and it’s uncontroversial to represent them as heroes – and that’s great, but I do feel bad for Altaiir, the Arab hero that never really was.
I’m not that thrilled by the setting, either, to be honest. For all the reasons we’ve mentioned (yet another America-centric game) but also because… I just want to see a more diverse range of ethnic backgrounds to playable characters, really. So couldn’t we have wandered further afield than America for the third?
(And raise your hand if you’re bored of having The English!!! as villains in things…)
Oh, and I’m also excited that YOU CAN CLIMB TREES!!!!, yes.
Rai: I too am more than pleased that the AC franchise has done good things for protagonists of diverse ethnicity and to have another character in that trend is good; even better if he is actually his own self and not just Desmond-in-a-hood! Their failings with portraying Altaiir appropriately will always stick in my mind though.
It is a shame it’s not a woman though, and it is a shame it’s in America – if previous form is anything to go by, we may end up with a trilogy of games in that period, and I suspect they’ve brought it home to America so they can more easily blend into Desmond fighting Templars himself in the present/future. So I have no idea where on earth this ‘she’ assassin Minerva was banging on about is going to come from. I truly hope they don’t just let Desmond find her and then she’s an unplayable sidekick character.
Conclusions:
Miranda: “Hurrah for more beautiful vertigo-inducing rendering, but let’s hope there are some women NPCs at least in this that are written as characters, not damsels and sex machines!”
Stephen B: “Potential racial sensitivity GOOD, provided they stick to it. Setting’s a bit blah; hoping the general ‘Assassins vs Templars’ struggle is enough of a hook to keep me interested.”
Markgraf: “I BET THE FANDOM ARE MORE HAPPY TO ACCURATELY REPRESENT THIS GUY’S ETHNICITY THAN ALTAIIR’S BECAUSE HE WON’T BE ALL WHITEWASHED IN-GAME LOL”
Rai: “Where is my she-assassin?! Good to see an appropriately portrayed non-white protagonist, but the American setting feels like a bit of a disappointment, and definitely poked my inner cynic with a very pointy stick.”
Did you know that Daniel Radcliffe originally wanted to be a stand-up comedian? I was delighted to find this out, because in interviews and the like, he is basically the funniest person alive. His timing and delivery are dead on, and he’s got this sweet earnestness, like your favourite dog putting its chin on your knee.
Naturally, these skills are directly applicable to his role as Arthur Kipps, a harrowed, traumatised, suicidal young single father-of-one sent to catalogue the creepy shit in a haunted house on some salt marshes in The Woman In Black. Obviously a laugh a minute, there. I can only assume he took the role determined to prove himself a Serious Actor, You Guys – which we’ll talk about in a minute. First, let’s talk about the actual story.
**** Obligatory this-is-how-my-reviews-tend-to-roll SPOILER WARNING here!****
I’ve seen the stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel several times, because I love having the shit scared out of me. The scares in WiB come from Surprise. They’re things that jump out at you and say, “Boo”. Nothing more sophisticated than gribblies in the dark, which is a bit damning of me, but seriously – that’s all they are. They’re good at it, but I never find the horror in WiB particularly horrifying.
On stage, in the intimacy of seeing real life flesh-and-bone players getting menaced by things in the dark renders the jump-and-boo tactic of scare artistry very powerful, because you all empathise together in a big knot; you notice what the actors notice, when they notice them. Things can be hidden and sneak about, and then you, as an audience, find yourselves watching the scenery as much as the actors, and the hidden gribblies play out in real time and it’s all very nice and spooky.
SERIOUS FACE
You can’t do that in a film. You gotta work harder. The film (directed by James Watkins) does its best to reproduce the “things lurking in the background” feel of the play by having Mr Radcliffe constantly off-centre in shots and filling the space behind him with shapes that might be an out-of-focus human face. It’s one way to create the atmosphere, and it does it well, but the main thing the film does differently from the stage show is that it recognises that cinema can’t get away with jump-scaring all the time without being boring. You have a lot more time with the camera up in your character’s face, and you gotta give them reasons for all them facial wranglings. Theatre is … all close up on your audience, and cinema is all up in your character’s grill. Distance is important. You can get away with less in film. You gotta have backstory and all that. The Woman In Black movie understands this, and Jane Goldman‘s screenplay valiantly fills the holes that the stage version simply doesn’t have the room to fill. We get suspicious villagers! Pale, zombified children drinking lye! Backstory and juice all about The Children and that, and that certainly goes some way to giving horror that’s more psychologically fulfilling than just working on pure adrenaline.
Problem is, in a way that it simply isn’t in the play (and I ain’t red t’book, so I can’t comment on that), it really is all about The Children (in the stage version, there’s a play-within-a-play motif that more-or-less prevents this focus wholesale). And, you know, while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, I just never feel particularly comfortable with anything that centralises female desire for children and biological motherhood. There’s a lot of that in the film, and I mean one hell of a lot – we’ve got the Woman In Black going literally insane over the loss of her child, first through adoption and then through death, and then we’ve got Mrs Daily (Janet McTeer), who isn’t so much of a medium as a large,1 channelling her dead son’s spirit all over the place and keeping little dogs as child replacements, and then we’ve got Dan Radcliffe being traumatised over the death of his wife who died in childbirth and all that. So it’s a pretty central theme.
Hold up a sec, Society. I got a little request. It’s no biggie, just: CAN WE PLEASE, AS A CULTURE, STOP CENTRALISING PHYSICAL GENETIC PARENTHOOD AS THE ONLY VALID FORM OF PARENTHOOD. Please. Please. Because right here, right, we’ve got the demonisation of the Mr and Mrs Drablow – who have adopted Nathaniel, the eponymous black-clad Woman’s child – as literal child thieves. This is what drives the whole descent into madness which leads to the haunting, deaths and general destruction. That’s it. That’s the root cause. Adoption. And I know there are tales that do it worse, but seriously; The Woman In Black revolves around how terrible it is when biological parenthood is subverted, either through death, or worse, through adoption!
It drives me a bit up the wall. We know that parenthood isn’t inherently holy and pure; there’re neverending streams of news stories about the extreme situations where it all goes wrong, but what about chosen family? Is it really that terrible to form familial bonds with people to whom you are not genetically tethered?
Aside from that, this flick catalogues Dan Radcliffe’s fine ability to look serious while opening doors, see ghosts and drink heavily. That’s pretty much what he does. He does so with alarming dedication, actually, and while I know we’re meant to, as an audience, suspend disbelief and accept that he’s a man on the edge with nothing left to lose, he has a wanton lack of a survival instinct. I mean, I’d realise I was in a horror film way back at the beginning with the creepy staring children and the rural locals who are afraid of cars. You end up feeling that his determination to open all the doors and chase disturbing sounds around the OBVIOUSLY HAUNTED HOUSE is remarkable. The man’s a hero. But you do really rather want to shout, “STOP OPENING THE SODDING DOORS!” at him.2 Still, his frowning skills have come on a long way from that other film thing he did when he was younger, whatever it was called.
They’ve also changed the ending from the play, which has it quite open-ended and desolate. (Skip this paragraph if you still want to watch the film without knowing the fine detail!) The film does something completely different, and it’s ridiculous. I imagine some people may find posthumous familial reunion on an otherworldly railway track quite comforting, but I found it ludicrous. It goes quite a long way to undermine the sincerity of the plot, and isn’t it funny that in horror/survival films, the pragmatic, rationally-minded one is always shown to be wrong or narrow-minded? Mr Daily (Ciarán Hinds), who is vocally sceptical of ghosts and contacting the dead… well, it’s a bloody ghost film, isn’t it? So he’s proved wrong all over the place, and the stupendously melodramatic ending pretty much consolidates his comprehensive wrongness, and I’m like, well, actually I sympathised with him a lot, so what do I take home from this?
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It does surprise!horror very well.
- It’s very well cast and located, and check out that house, I mean goddamn.
- Mrs Daily is the best thing in the film, what with her mediumage and her creepy little dogs and all.
- Oh fine, yes, Daniel Radcliffe is worth a watch as something other than that other role he played in That Other Film Series.
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It only really does the “boo!” horror very well; the rest is very, very cheesy. That said, I found myself jumpy in the dark for a week afterwards, and I’m hard to scare.
- OH MY FUCKING GOD, ADOPTION REALLY ISN’T A SODDING CRIME, IT IS 2012 CAN WE REALISE THIS PLEASE
- The soundtrack is like Fisher Price Psychological Tension Music and I could have provided a more subtle and nuanced soundtrack on vox and kazoo.
- Some children die. But I suppose you wouldn’t be even considering going to see this film, of all things, if that was likely to distress you.
Last year we marked International Women’s Day with a personal post from a team member who talked about living and working in countries where it is, or has been, celebrated in different ways.
This year I asked some of the team to give a shout-out to a relevant project, organisation or intiative.
Image via dryicons.com
Sarah J: I’m being a bit cheeky and flagging up something that the charity I work for are doing for International Women’s Day. Womankind Worldwide is hosting a virtual march around the globe to celebrate the international women’s movement, raise awareness of the incredible work our partners do and remind feminists in the UK that we’re part of a powerful, global force for change.
We’ve added an interactive map of the world to our website, with a counter showing how far the march has travelled around the world and how many people have taken part. For everyone that signs up the marker moves 10 miles forward. We need about 2,500 people to get all the way round!
Please stop by www.womankind.org.uk/world to join the march, and show our partners working for women’s rights in Africa, Asia and Latin America that you are with them. You can also leave a message of support for the activists we work with on our Facebook page or by sending us a tweet (@woman_kind) – we will pass all of them on.
Sarah C: JOIN ME ON THE BRIDGE! On 8th March, Women for Women International are asking you to join them on the bridge. All kinds of bridges. All around the UK (there’s a list of events here). Why bridges? Well, it’s about building bridges – geddit? – and proclaiming messages of peace. They are inviting everyone to come and participate or register their own event. I love events like this that reach out across the whole world and make connections. As well as events structured around a good pun.
The key thing for me here is that S word, solidarity. I often rail against the idea that all women need to do such-and-such a thing because they are women or assigned-female-bodied, cos that’s, you know, sexist. But that people – of whatever shape or gender – could get together and show support for women around the world, for a couple of hours, at least? That’s drawing attention to inequality. And as they’ve put it on their Mission Statement: “On International Women’s Day, 8 March, thousands of people will show that they are with the women of Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan and other war-torn countries.”.
Hannah: The organisation I’d like to give a big shout-out to is Southall Black Sisters, an organisation by and for Black and Asian women which began in 1979 in the aftermath of the death of Blair Peach (an anti-facist protestor who died from police violence). Since then SBS has changed and expanded its remit to fit the needs of those around it – specifically as advocates of womens’ rights, supporting women suffering from domestic violence and campaigning against religious fundamentalism. The role of SBS as a support group especially for ethnic minority women is especially important as women of colour often face different pressures (see their forced marriages campaign) and specialised services are needed.
Southall Black Sisters first came to my attention at a London Feminist Network meeting in 2010 and they’re regulars at Fawcett Society gatherings and marches, too. Their speakers have always been bright, warm, engaging and utterly unwavering in their points, unfazed by the battles they have ahead. Working at grassroots level, the SBS have their fingers on the pulse and report to people in power – they have been invited to speak at the Home Office and the UN.
In 2007 SBS faced funding cuts from Ealing Council which would have closed all SBS’s operations. The council claimed argued that their services were no longer necessary due to ‘Social Cohesion’ – SBS fought this in the high court citing the Race Relations Act and their victory has set a legal precedent for other ethnic minority support groups facing cuts – an especially important victory as so many charities and support networks are squeezed and so many women and ethnic minorities feel the force of the cuts deeper them others.
Me (Miranda): Following on from that, I’m gonna get on my political crate for a moment here too and mention that International Women’s Day has its roots in socialism. It was founded by Clara Zetkin under the name International Working Women’s Day. It came from the labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century, and in a year when government cuts have put women at a twenty-five year high for unemployment figures, I think this is something that it pays to bear in mind. Opposing these cuts – to our NHS, to our jobs, to our libraries, to our working lives – is vital as far as I’m concerned because they enforce and underline systemic inequalities and limit our power to do something about them. Denise Marshall handed back her OBE just over a year ago on this very point.
All of which is to say: nope, Dave, SHAN’T “calm down, dear” and my recommended Thing I Am Doing is probably “yelling at Parliament about these cuts at every possible opportunity” because I believe that absolutely is a feminist issue – the NHS for example is a major employer of women, of whom I am one, aside from the obvious issue of service cuts! In terms of being more specifically-IWD, there’s also the Women’s Resource Centre, and as has been well documented, I really dig the Red Pump Project over in the USA.
- What are you doing this IWD?
On Women, Red Shoes, and Public Healthcare Blues
A short while ago I made a short post talking up the Red Pump Project. I was really pleased that the lovely people at the Project actually saw my shoutout, and stopped by to say hello, hoping that in the run up to March 10, which is National Women & Girls’ HIV Awareness Day over in the USA, we’d share some photos of ourselves rocking red shoes as a gesture of solidarity.
This post is delivering on that request – I got several of our mixed gender team on board, so you can see some of our feet here rocking various shapes and styles of red shoe from the subtle to the spaceboot. (Yeah, those are mine. I have no taste and proudly revel in it.)
But I also wanted to scribble a few notes about HIV as a feminist issue and our own battle to save our National Health Service. I have much less know-how about HIV in the USA, so I’ve bolted on some UK-based rambling to go with my more general cheerleading.
Shoes, Shoes, Shoes
On the most basic symbolic level, shoes are about Going Places. Michele Roberts’ short story Your Shoes, so beloved of GCSE anthologies nationwide, is about a missing girl who has flown the nest, leaving behind an unworn pair of shoes which seem to speak of unspent potential. Waiting For Godot – a play where no one goes anywhere – opens with a lonely visual of a worn-out pair of boots that no longer fit. Nancy Sinatra’s had enough; her boots are gonna walk all over you.
The red-shoed woman, too, is a woman who dares, who takes the bull by the horns, from Hans Christian Anderson’s thoroughly judgey tale of woe to Dorothy’s ruby slippers. So for me the visual of all our shoes on show is a good way to put the question: where from here? whilst also adding god damn it, somewhere, though. Somewhere good. Somewhere better.)
But I want this post to be more than just flag-waving – after all, since we are not in the US and cannot fully participate in the project at large, it surely doesn’t change much about HIV stigma for us to simply photograph our feet. The arresting visual of the shoes – and the Red Pump Project are running a full fashion show at the end of the month – is a starting point or conduit, like wearing the World AIDS Day red ribbon, to having a conversation. So I’m gonna put a lot of UK links in here too.
Across the Pond
In that post I made I talked about the importance of awareness/prevention campaigns not using a kind of shock tactic to alienate and stigmatise people living with HIV. Without going too deeply into UK/USA healthcare provision comparisons, initiatives like the RPP (excepting the NAT-spearheaded fundraising drives pre-World AIDS Day) don’t feel so common over here. Perhaps because we assume the NHS will carry our HIV testing and awareness needs, but also because services who do take a non-discriminatory approach, like Positive East and the Terrence Higgins Trust are very much up against Tory cuts just now. Unfortunately, this dovetails with the fact that the NHS is facing “reforms” that threaten to stitch it up like a free market kipper, so in drumming up awareness for the RPP I guess I’d also like to talk briefly about the importance of trying, in the UK, to both appreciate the gravity of our own situation, and the commonalities between the areas the RPP is concentrating on – urban districts where people just aren’t talking or thinking openly or inclusively about HIV – and UK equivalents. HIV affects so many people that a lot of UK feminists simply don’t see it as a specific enough issue, but the thing is, it often interacts with more commonly accepted feminist issues such as contraception, sexual assault, and so on in complex and – as far as the feminist blogosphere is concerned – markedly under-analysed ways.
HIV transmission rates, access to support services, and the level of stigma faced by people living with it, all intersect with, and are influenced by, cuts to advocacy, disability benefits, education and healthcare services. And when the latter are in play to the level they currently are in Britain, they mean that existing social inequalities get very heavily underscored. Stigma around living with HIV then gets worse, and this underscores inequalities even further, and you get a snake-chew-tail plughole situation. Stigma is very often doled out in inherently gendered terms, with a load of harmful assumptions about what kind of woman or man would be likely to contract or transmit the virus, so not engaging with it feeds more general problems of racism, homophobia and gendered prejudice. As far as I’m concerned this makes it very much a feminist issue in the same way that issues of poverty, class and race are, and indeed these areas are all affected by HIV in complex ways which keep people in disadvantaged groups one step removed from the care they need, and have a right to access.
In the UK at least, I don’t think enough women, feminists or otherwise, are receiving the information and discussion they need and deserve on this issue, so I’ll always come out loudly shouting for a project like the RPP which encourages a discussion which takes into account the intersections of gender, race and class and their impact on HIV issues.
‘Girlhood in the time of AIDS’
For an illustration of how a lot of ‘western’ mainstream “girl culture” – like teen magazines – has historically displayed an unfortunately privilege-waving “us and them” attitude to the prevalence of HIV, along with some harmfully obtuse ideas about who contracts it, where, why and how, I would recommend the essay Girlhood in the time of AIDS by Nancy Lesko and Elisabeth Johnson, from the book Girl Culture. Reading it – it’s pretty US-focussed – just makes me that much more relieved there are initiatives like the RPP going strong.
As founder Karyn put it in her comment on that earlier post:
One of the main goals of our nonprofit and the campaign is to promote open dialogue, to fight the stigma around the disease, and to share knowledge around the issues so that women are EMPOWERED to advocate for their health and the health of the women in their lives.
I couldn’t agree more.
Back on the UK Front…
It’s important to recognise the power of grassroots projects like this whilst also refuting David Cameron’s position that community-based initiatives are a “Big Society alternative” or in any way an oppositional model to a free national health service. Some NHS Trusts in the UK work in partnership with community-specific schemes such as, for example, the Terrence Higgins Lighthouse projects – a fact this article, for example, which contains a great example of a grassroots HIV activism project, fails in my view to take account of. There are lighthouses and there are ports. Having both is generally not a bad idea. I would not be optimistic about the storm of social inequalities facing either in the event this bill passes uncontested.
Tonight the TUC are declaring a rally at Westminster to make this point again. In the week a doctor was caught on film openly challenging Lansley’s bloody-minded assault on our services in the hospital in which he works, in the week June Hautot cried “Codswallop!”, and as an NHS employee myself, I would invite anyone who is in the area to swing by and raise your voice.
Boots, after all, were made for walking.
Have some bonus daleks on us.
Cover Girls and Typical Girls
There were several predictable bones to pick with last week’s Guardian piece in which former editors of the New Musical Express selected their most noteworthy covers. The feature left out a lot of the former Accordion Weekly’s history, notably anything prior to the late 1970s, but what struck me most about the covers chosen was the disparity between the first one and the last. The NME‘s decline from a vital and thoughtful read to a list-heavy vehicle for mutual backscratching seemed to be reflected in the journey from Pennie Smith’s 1979 cover shot of the Slits, then a relatively obscure and resolutely uncommercial dub-punk girl-gang, dressed in mud and loincloths, to, thirty years on, a cover featuring the monarch of manufactured mediocrity in a headshot which, to quote a commenter, makes the paper look like the Radio Times.
Smith’s photographs of the Slits mudlarking in the grounds of their Surrey recording studio became a defining image of the band, notably through being used on the cover of their debut album Cut. This article looks briefly at the controversy generated by the images themselves, and how it relates to subsequent and current presentation of women in the UK music press.
Under the Cover
The space provided by punk for female as well as well as male self-expression and emancipation can be overstated – see Helen Reddington’s research on the persistence of entrenched chauvinist and sexist attitudes – but the Slits were unarguably, in the words of Caroline Coon, ‘driving a coach and various guitars straight through… the concept of The Family and female domesticity’. One of the first prominent bands to spring from the art-squats of punk west London, the Slits’ early music and performance was a squall of untrained, instinctive energy, and their casually confrontational appearance and behavior drew negative reactions ranging from media disapproval to violent hostility. Although tending to recoil from any overtly political espousal of feminism, the band bluntly advocated female independence and empowerment, encouraging girls to form bands and to define themselves by their actions rather than their relationships.
‘We’re just not interested in questions about Women’s Liberation… You either think chauvinism’s shit or you don’t. We think it’s shit… Girls shouldn’t hang around with people who give them aggro about what they want to do. If they do they’re idiots.’
– Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, June 1977
The image on the Cut cover fits into the Slits’ more general disruptions and subversions of accepted feminine tropes, including their punk-inspired adoption of fetish and bondage gear as deconstructed parts of an everyday wardrobe, and their plain-speaking on sex and sexuality. The band’s proto-Goth contemporary Siouxsie Sioux remarked that they ‘weren’t glamorous, they were very earthy’. The Slits’ aesthetic and behaviour onstage and off was repeatedly referenced in terms of wildness and ferocity, reinforcing their performance of an exoticised, ‘untamed’ sexuality, which on the album cover clashed with the band’s bucolic backdrop to create an arresting mash-up of English Rose and Amazon.
Covered in Controversy
Having in their earlier career declined several offers from labels intent on exploiting the novelty aspect of a girl band, and battled with industry men who expected female musicians to ‘kowtow or flutter your eyelids’, the band’s stated aim for the cover of their debut was to ‘show that women could be sexy without dressing in a prescribed way. Sexy, in a natural way, and naked, without being pornographic’. Their bassist Tessa Pollitt described the cover as ‘one of the most liberating things I have done’, claiming that the band were ‘celebrating the freedoms we were creating’. The cover divided opinion at the time of its release, dismissed by some as a cynically sexualized ploy, and ridiculed by others because of the group’s deviation from a conventionally desirable body shape (Smith’s photographs were taken at a point when the Slits had succumbed to the regular eating and sleeping hours of studio life, away from the chaotic amphetamine-fuelled living to which they’d grown accustomed, leaving them looking softer and more rounded than expected by those policing punk angularity – a particularly frustrating slant of attack given punk’s early attempts to transcend these kind of prescriptive aesthetics).
Music writer Vivien Goldman embraced the Cut cover as a defiant reclamation of the female body, and Pauline Black, who went on to form 2-Tone band the Selecter, saw it as ‘so joyous, innocent and natural that it just seemed like a celebration of womanhood rather than any cheap titillation’. It still has the power to spark disagreement: Roni Sarig in The Secret History Of Rock waxes lyrical that the cover ‘confounded notions of sexuality and civility and positioned the group as modern primitive feminist rebels – girls not afraid to be natural, sexual and formidable’, while the author of the Punk77 website makes the counter-claim that the image in fact undermines Sarig’s idea ‘that they were one of the first all female bands to avoid being ‘marketed as sex objects’… They had their tits out. For instance I was 16 when this album came out… I and many others didn’t see it as anything but three nudes on a cover!’
Bad Cover Versions
As for the women-in-the-music-press discussion, so far so same-old. Cazz Blase’s recent article on the UK music press maintained that it is marketed, sold and created primarily by and for men. The NME, which in 2009 appointed Krissi Murison as its first female editor, is actually not too bad as far as the balance of genders among its staff goes – although the relative positions women occupy, and how this translates to coverage and presentation of female musicians, are different debates. In 2010, Aoife Barry gave an overview of the underrepresentation of female musicians on the covers of music magazines, emphasizing the egregiousness of Q in particular:
Why not count how many women you can see on the covers of Q magazine this year (two solo covers: Cheryl Cole and Lady Gaga – and two group shots: Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen together in a group shot; and Lady Gaga again in a group shot). The reason I mention Q is that the response to ‘there aren’t enough women on the covers of music magazines’ is often ‘but that’s because it reflects the amount of women working in music’. This is not true – particularly in the case of Q, which covers mainstream rock, indie and pop music. In fact, the female musicians it covers are usually from the pop arena. And you cannot argue that the pop realm is oestrogen-free.
While, as Barry admits, ‘there may not be a great conspiracy to keep women off the covers of music magazines and give them minimal coverage on the inside pages’, it is frequently the case that when women are featured, so is a latent or overt sexualizing of them which does not affect their male counterparts to the same degree.
One has to factor in, of course, the degree to which coverage of bands will depend upon commercial trends in rock and indie; the musical greywash which occurred under late Britpop saw a sidelining of female artists which appeared to reach its dull conclusion in the post-Libertines profusion of almost invariably male ‘landfill indie’ groups. This connection is made explicit in Q’s concern with catering for a target demographic supposedly ‘inspired by the rock’n’roll swagger of Liam, Noel, Blur and the whole Britpop scene’, a remit which perhaps explains last October’s gobsmackingly retrograde Kasabian cover while doing little to excuse it.
Covering Up?
Smith’s shot of the Slits in all their unphotoshopped glory differs from Q‘s cover in several obvious respects – its subjects muddy rather than glossy, wearing unselfconscious grins rather than careful high-maintenance pouts, and, crucially, having shaped the image via their own concept and direction rather than following a top-down marketing or editorial strategy. It’s true that the NME has never been an impregnable bastion of women’s liberation – even on that Slits cover, there’s the dubious strapline referring to them as the paper’s ‘Page One girls’ – and I’m sure that just as many readers saw the cover as wank material as chin-strokingly believed it to be ‘confounding notions of sexuality and civility’. A happy few may even have done both. But the upfront disheveled self-confidence the Slits display is still striking and even looks quaint in an era where the last comparable Empowered and Liberated woman on an NME cover was, who, Beth Ditto? Whose appearance, and the ensuing debates on whether it constituted ’empowerment’ or ‘objectification’, proved that non-standard naked women were still controversial in 2007.
Cazz Blaze, citing the music press’ recession-induced drift towards conservatism, characterized by an increasing reliance on sponsorship and advertising, predicts little room for improvement in opportunities for women to express their emancipation rather than their objectification. Her characterization of online music publications like The Quietus as more conscientious about women as artists, readers, and writers, is an interesting point. It ties in with the idea of the internet as a space where female engagement with music can be expressed and explored without being dismissed as exclusively sex-centred or derided as juvenile inanity, and where female musicians themselves can harness the internet’s capacity for unregulated self-expression and audience interaction, frequently in ways which circumvent or combat industry and media-led imperatives on how women are meant to appear.
Despite the internet’s progressive potential for allowing female artists control over their own presentation, the reception of and reaction to that presentation remains beyond their control. After punk, and after riot grrl, the jury is still out on the political uses of the naked female form, and on their degree of effectiveness. Do images like those of Ditto and the Slits deconstruct and demystify the female body? How constructively do they inform debates on body image and female sexuality? In the eyes of observers male and female, are they validating alternative ways of being attractive, or are they merely putting forward an alternative cut of meat?
And, of course, should we be concerned at all with how a musician looks as opposed to how she – or he – sounds?
The Help, Then and Now
So Southern civil rights fairytale The Help didn’t prove to be the Oscar bait it was predicted to be, apart from Best Supporting Actress for Octavia Spencer, even though it has many of the necessary elements gloriously summarised in this Trailer For Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever.
At the time it was released the debates online reminded me I wanted to write something about the modern day ‘help’: the estimated 16,000 domestic workers who enter the UK every year, most of whom are women, and most migrating for economic reasons. Then on Thursday last week, Home Secretary Theresa May announced some changes to immigration law which will put the thousands of migrant women working in domestic service in the UK today at far greater risk of exploitation.
In case it passed you by when it came out, the plot of The Help is this: a young white woman (‘Skeeter’) returns from college with idealistic plans to be a serious writer. Rather than documenting the petty dramas of her affluent circle, she shocks them all by interviewing ‘the help’ and telling the stories of the black maids and nurses she and her friends were raised by who are subject to humiliation and exploitation by their employers.
Spoof poster by The Shiznit
UK mainstream film reviews were broadly positive, and steered away from any prickly issues around the representation of the black characters or the glorified role of the white woman writer. Although I’ve heard it praised for the strong female characters it contains, when I dipped into the US feminist blogosphere (sorry to use that word – if it helps I’ve started to imagine it as a sort of aquasphere, plumbing the depths of the sea of misogyny) it was a different story.
Hands up – I haven’t seen the film. But I wanted to share some of the interesting comments and criticism I’ve read which seem to confirm my suspicions that whatever positive portrayals of women the film contains come with a dollop of racefail.
There’s a good selection of excerpts from reviews over at The Frisky, and I’d like to quote more from the review at What Tami Said:
Skeeter is not Moses. She liberates no one, but herself… These black women liberate themselves… In 1955, years before The Help takes place, Rosa Parks, who once worked as a domestic, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus and sparked a boycott that changed history. Many domestic workers would take part in that boycott, walking miles to their jobs in white people’s homes in a bid for their civil rights. How offensive to imply that what a group of grown black women needs is for a young white woman to come alert them they are “enslaved” and them lead them to freedom.
To me, The Help was less about race than it was about gender – about women of different races, ages and classes chafing against the ways society marginalizes them and restricts them and tries to own them. But that narrative, perhaps, does not lend itself to big box office receipts and product tie ins. (Yeah. Product tie ins.) So instead, we’ll get Nice White Lady Saves Po’ Black Folks – Jim Crow Edition.
Feministing also flagged a nice historical smackdown from Professor Melissa Harris Perry. And Jezebel pointed me towards this review in the New York Times:
What does remain, though, is the novel’s conceit that the white characters, with their troubled relationships and unloved children, carry burdens equal to those of the black characters. Like the novel, the movie is about ironing out differences and letting go of the past and anger.
Hmm. I think it might be a bit premature to let go of all the anger, you know.
I think it’s a fascinating debate, and I don’t feel I’ve got anything to add. Instead it made me think of the extent to which the problems and abuses of domestic service revealed in The Help are still with us. Of course, the film is dealing with a very specific place and time, but there’s an army of women workers today who are dished out the same kind of exploitation and degradation seen in the film, and worse.
In 2006 there were around 2 million domestic servants in Britain, more than in Victorian times. Of course, not all domestic work is exploitative. It even takes in gardeners at its broadest definition. But there is definitely something that makes me feel uncomfortable about the numbers of usually migrant women cleaning the houses of middle class women throughout the UK.
Rosie Cox captures my unease in her book The Servant Problem when she says “Employing domestic help is at best an individual solution to a social problem. At worst it is the use of another human being to enhance and display wealth and status.”
And as this recent OSCE paper on domestic servitude and trafficking points out, the conditions of domestic work make it easy to exploit workers:
…domestic workers have a crucial role in society, but, at the same time, due to the isolated setting of their work, they are especially vulnerable to humiliation, abuse, violence, exploitation and trafficking… As domestic workers are invisible, victims of trafficking for domestic servitude are even more difficult to identify and therefore, they rarely receive assistance and redress. The ILO estimates that there are 12.3 million victims of “forced labour” worldwide, 2.5 million of them as a result of trafficking.
Slavery is prohibited in the UK under the Human Rights Act. But until 2009 the UK did not have a criminal law dedicated to the particular circumstances of forced labour and servitude, and victims were falling through the gap. Liberty and Anti-Slavery International successfully campaigned for a new law to protect women like Patience Asuquo, who was paid only £2,155 over three years working as a domestic servant for a solicitor in London. She was regularly subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and her passport was held by her employer, whose husband told her that she had to stay in the job for four years in order to remain in the UK.
Last year the International Labour Organisation made a historic decision to extend international labour standards to domestic workers all over the world, a change which will mean the rights of up to 100 million people will be better protected.
However, with its usual efficiency the current government has announced changes to visa rules which may undermine this recent progress by leaving foreign domestic workers in the UK more open to exploitation. Under the new plans domestic workers won’t be allowed to switch employers or to stay in the UK for longer than six months, meaning that it will be harder for women to escape abusive or exploitative employers and will be more likely to use illegal routes into the UK to avoid detection and deportation. Well done, The Government.
Migrant domestic workers are one of the most marginalised and exploited groups, and they are overwhelmingly women. The problematic representation of black women and the civil rights movement in The Help seems even more insulting in the context of ongoing exploitation of women from deprived areas in Europe and the global South in the homes of a new generation of wealthy white employers.
[Gamer Diary] What I’ve been playing… February 2012
Here we are, back again! This month has been fairly quiet for me on the gaming front as I’ve been blessed with the joy of Real World Things™, but do not fret(!) – there’s still content for you in the form of Dear Esther (a brand new – sort of – game) and other old bits and pieces I’ve been pootling about with.
Dear Esther's artwork is deeply beautiful and will make you feel things
Dear Esther
Dear Esther was released through the Steam platform on February 14th this year as a standalone offering via The Chinese Room. This is not, however, the first incarnation of the innovative story-led first person; it began life four years ago as a mod for Half Life 2, and for its independent release it was supported by The Indie Fund, who recouped their investment within five and a half hours of the game going on sale (selling over 16,000 copies in the first 24 hours). Now, that’s pretty impressive for an extremely minimalist game in a market full of guns, cars, swords and big bad monsters!
It’s £6.99 here in the UK, which means it’ll be floating somewhere around the $10/10€ mark for other regions, but bear in mind it only has full audio support in English. As it was plastered all around Steam and was something new, interesting and completely different, I thought I’d give it a go – if nothing else I’d have a new release to tell you all about for once! My first attempted playthrough ended rather swiftly, late at night, after the game decided it didn’t want to listen to my keyboard commands.
Never fear, I came back to it the next day after I’d had some sleep and my computer had been given a chance to think about what it had done. It worked fine the second time around. You start off by a lighthouse on an island somewhere in the Hebrides; the (male) voiceover begins to read excerpts from a letter (or letters), addressed to “Esther”.
As you walk around the island, trying to find your way, he reads different excerpts at different points in the game. I’d go into much more detail, but as I finished the whole sequence in just over an hour, I wouldn’t want to spoil things for anyone yet to play it by discussing my theories. Instead, I’ll tell you about the atmosphere and the artwork, both of which are superb. You’re alone on a bleak island, battered by wind with no person or animal in sight save the odd seagull, and it is a sadly beautiful world.
I found myself a little unnerved walking around, especially when I spotted a shadowy figure in the distance who, when I approached, disappeared (this happens twice). I think, in retrospect, that I was mostly spooked because I’d watched The Woman in Black the day before and was still half-expecting some ghoulish face to pop up and scream at me.
However, personally, I found Dear Esther a little underwhelming considering the hype it was garnering; I understand every compliment given to it, but equally those amazing, clever, innovative bits are altogether a bit too brief, especially at £6.99 – about 10 minutes per £1 in my case. The art is great, the story is great (if a little too easily guessed), the concept is great and it is a brilliant injection of something different into the market. It just would’ve been better if the ‘value for money’ factor was improved.
Apologies for the lack of feminist critique, but the only thing that it could be faulted on there is the age-old “Why is it always a bloke protagonist?”. Esther, obviously, is hugely important to the entire game so although she is absent, she is constantly present as she is who you’re talking to – she is the one you love. Still, indie game + male protagonist = not all that innovative after all.
It’s a good game if you want to have some feelings, think a bit and look at pretty Scottish scenery while under no obligation to chase, fight or challenge anything. My only advice would be to make sure you definitely don’t want to use that £7 on something that might last you a bit longer.
Other Bits & Bobs
Apart from the above, I haven’t been up to much with the sole exception being Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection on PSP. Yep, I dusted off the ol’ PSP and have been button bashing during my lunch breaks on my Saturday shifts. I’ve also discovered I’ve lost all my wicked-sick skills and keep getting K.O.’d by rubbish opponents. It’s fun for portable fight-based gaming and there’s a bowling minigame too. It features the standard Arcade and Story modes as well as the potential to PvP online. As it’s a) old and b) PSP (now replaced by the Vita) it is pretty cheap to buy – best bet is probably eBay though – and presents a standard bit of amusement, providing you can ignore the panty-flashing from almost every single female fighter.
Next Month
On March 9th I will have a copy of Mass Effect 3 in my hands, so you can expect a review on that once I’ve powered through it, and hopefully I’ll be able to say it’s improved on some of the downfalls of the last game (which I explored many moons ago, elsewhere in the interwerlds). I will find other fun things to play and gabble about for you though, as I know not everyone cares about ME3.
Feminist Fanzine Fest!
Over the weekend, Viktoriya and I went to a fanzine fair at The Construction Gallery, a pop-up arts space in Tooting. We were excited by this, and not just because we didn’t have to venture far from home. I’m really cheered by the huge upswing in arty, crafty, DIY community stuff that’s happening right now, like the Crafty Pint series of making-stuff-inna-pub. It makes me feel connected to things that are going on locally, and I love the mash-up of traditional “feminine” pursuits, like sewing, in traditional “masculine” environments like the pub. It’s almost as if people of all genders could get involved. Serious.
“I used to write for a ‘zine back when there was no internet…”
But to the ‘zines. I used to write for a fanzine, back in sixth form, when I was trying to be as cool as the girl who made the fanzine in question, who wanted to be a music journalist and who didn’t like Kula Shaker so I had to pretend not to like them either (but I did, and I do). I remember getting super excited over the fact that I was holding in my hand something that I had helped to make, and seeing my art in print for the first time. It made me realise that I could actually be creative, that there were things I could physically make outside of the dismal sessions of Art Class where I woefully, grudgingly failed to reproduce any of the techniques of the grand masters. This involved scissors and glue and a photocopier. I could totally do those things! I did pictures for two issues, until teenage bitching meant that no one was talking to anyone and it all got a bit fraught.
My treasure trove
So that was my experience. I’m glad to say that other people are still making fanzines, and that they are varied, beautiful, different and amazing. I spent a tenner on a stack of ‘zines and came home giddy with the fact I owned little bits of art, thought and lovely stuff. Counter culture. I was gobsmacked with the array of fanzines on offer and made even happier when I realised how fucking feminist all of it was. And how diverse that feminism felt. All kinds of people were making all kinds of cool, gender-diverse, body-shape positive, politically forward things. Which were funny. And nice to look at.
Here are some of my faves.
Queer and Feminist ‘Zines
I fell in love with Nancy just from the cover alone, and more so when I read the contents. A series of personal essays, rants and raves on the subject of effeminate gay men and why there is such antagonism towards them both within mainstream AND gay culture. A seriously smart read, which delivers one gay chap’s take on queer theory sliced through with pics of Lady Gaga and Brian Molko. I particularly enjoyed the list of ‘positive femme men’. Shape and Situate subtitled itself as Posters of Inspirational European Women, and it did exactly what it said on the cover. A whole bunch of artists had done different pages, in different styles, giving stories and pictures about women as varied as Jayaben Desai and Liz Ely, so I now have a whole host of new icons, plus lots of links to new artists and new feminist allies I hadn’t heard of before. Girls Who Fight – do NOT google “girls who fight”; you will get bad porn – from Monster Emporium (see the distributors list below) is a good wodge of art, essays, stories, photos and all kinds of feminist goodies. I got all three issues due to being greedy. And I regret nothing. Another of my stellar buys was Miss Moti by artist Kripa Joshi. A stunning and high quality comic, standing out from its photocopied sisters. The rich, lush artwork details the daydream life of Miss Moti:
Pronounced with a regular T this Nepali word means
A Plump Woman
But spoken with a softer T it means
A Pearl
I really liked the curvy, sexy heroine – depicted on the cover in a seashell like Venus, but clothed in a polka dot dress. The simple storylines unfolded into wonderful fantasies: a bit of cotton candy becomes a pink cloud landscape where she sculpts her own David; a piece of apple grows into a new Eden complete with Adam. This was a real change from the lycra-clad hardbodies and explosion-tasms of the usual suspect superheroines I’ve become so used to seeing. This comic focused on her desires, rather than using her as a vehicle for the (assumed straight male) reader.
Distributors and Indie Publishers
Vampire Sushi are ‘zine distributors, so they’ve got their fingers in lots of pies. They specialise in perzines1, art ‘zines, queer ‘zines, food ‘zines and feminist ‘zines. Which is pretty much all your ‘zine food groups. Similarly, Monster Emporium Press have ‘zines and artbooks, as well as being monster-themed, which we at BadRep Towers are generally in favour of. Other Asias bring together artists whose work challenges misrepresentations and generalisations of “The East”. One of their cute mini ‘zines comes with a teabag inside, which meant that all my ‘zines now have a delicious scent to them. Finally, Honest Publishing are an independent publisher based in SW London, celebrating authors with unique, alternative voices.
- If you make feminist or feminist-friendly (or friendly feminist) fanzines, please get in touch with us and tell us all about it!
- Nope, I didn’t know either. But Wiki does. Woo! [↩]