Final Word: Thoughts from a Woman on Live Action Roleplay
Hi, I’m Sarah and I’m a Live Action Roleplayer. Following on from a guest post we recently ran on the subject we got a few responses from other folk who enjoy the hobby talking about their experiences – including this response to the original post, which we ran yesterday. So we thought it might be a good idea if one of Team BadRep (that would be me) joined the discussion our guest bloggers have been having and wrote about LARP. Before I wade in with lots of personal anecdotes or analysis of game theory with respect to gender (and I can talk for hours on that), I thought I’d kick off by talking a bit about the comments from the original post.
The big issue appears to be around whether or not “LARP is sexist”, which is difficult to deal with because that’s a lot of games and a lot of players to tar with the same brush, whichever way you paint them. It is also, as one commentator pointed out, a little bit hard to seperate LARP and LARPers from the real world (where we all live), which IS sexist. Some of those sexist values are going to seep in, no matter how hard we try. And people do try. I talk to a lot of gamers and game designers about things I think they’re doing which might be seen as sexist, and a lot of the time those (rare) occurances are not being done on purpose. This doesn’t excuse it, but it does rather empower people who give a shit to improve things by talking about it more, and raising problems where they find them.
I think it’s really important to separate the design of a game (what it was intended to do) from the experience of playing it (how it feels to do it). This way, we can look at where and how a game may or may not succeed on being Not Sexist; after all, there’s a difference between a game being inherently sexist and those who play it sometimes behaving in ways which are sexist. I would argue that most LARP games are not desgined to be sexist, but that there can be sexist elements that occur within gameplay and that it is the responsibility of the player base as a whole – men and women – to root this out and set it on fire with extreme prejudice, as follows:
Get your fucking sexism out of my hobby. Now.
*Ahem*. Now, to business.
Live Action Games: an Action-Drama Love Affair
The subtitle for this is “why my cupboards are full of kit, costume and rubber swords for various pretend people”.
My own personal experience of playing has been very positive. LARP, for me, is about storytelling, play-acting, and a permission to explore different personas and world-views which I don’t normally get access to. I can also wear cool costumes, have magic powers and fight Epic Battles. That fact that I am a woman does not bar me from any of those things, although I would be lying if I said it didn’t colour my gaming experience.
I’ve played sexist characters, such as a matriarchal tribal leader in Maelstrom who assumed that anyone of importance was female. I’ve played characters who were victims of terrible, awful sexism; I’ve played downtrodden and abused prostitutes. I’ve also played characters who used their looks and feminine charms to their advantage. Conversely, I’ve played characters who would consider such actions ridiculous and to whom a sword or a well-placed word was the correct tool to use. I’ve even played characters whose gender and sexuality was, for the purposes of the gameworld, almost entirely absent, such as a human slave in a world where humans are uniformly seen as cattle to their orcish, elvish and dwarvish overlords – my gender was as important to the other characters as the gender of a table.
In short, I’ve played around a lot with gender and sexuality, and LARP has been a big enabler in exploring those roles. My one “bad” LARP experience revolved entirely around the race of my character, rather than her gender, and in fact the person who delivered that bad experience was female. In my experience, men who LARP tend to be more concerned with not being sexist than men in day-to-day. Perhaps because the man who leers at me whilst I’m at a bus stop does not fear me striking him down with a fireball. Or perhaps – optimistically, but possibly, maybe – the chap who LARPs has a much broader experience of women being in charge than men in real life.
So, what does LARP have to offer women? First, a bit of a health warning. “Women” is a broad category which we at BadRep Towers want to avoid using in a way that assumes all women want the same things. They don’t. Fortunately, in LARP, as in life, there are options. Even more fortunately, there are often more options in LARP than there are either in life or in most fantasy and science fictions. One of my major complaints about the FSF genre is that we create these amazing make-believe worlds but then populate them mostly with men. All too often women characters are whores, witches or princesses – prizes to be won or challenges to be overcome. Check out the piece fantasy author Juliet McKenna wrote for us on the subject. LARP lets you, the player, take control of these stereotypes and challenge, subvert or even explore them. You can become your own hero in a fantasy world. Which means you get to tell your own story how you want.
Making LARP Work For Women?
I have also written, crewed and managed live action games. A quick rundown includes Odyssey, Winter in the Willows, Victoriana and some local systems, so I’ve got experience behind the curtain, as it were. I have noticed that I am in the minority. The vast majority of games are written and run by men – it’s much the same with anything nerd-based. I’m never quite sure why this is the case with LARP, given that young girls are almost magnetically attracted to games of Let’s Pretend and Dressing Up Boxes. I think that these little girls end up doing drama and the few boys that like dress-up (who often can’t do drama on account of it being seen as “girly”) created LARP to allow them to run away to a field, where no-one else could see them, and play dress-up. This is backed up by the fact that I often see young teenage boys at LARP events, but rarely young teenage girls. Any, even slightly more, scientific study into this would be appreciated.
With all due credit to the guys behind the Games Operations Desk (GOD – geddit?), there is absolutely a perception of the hobby as being profoundly white and male. This is not their fault. Let me repeat this: this is not their fault. What absolutely is their fault is any time when a game feels lacking in opportunities for women to enjoy it, and connect with the game as much as men. The absolute best way to work this out is to look at some game websites and then play the games. Here’s what to look out for:
- Game Background – This is the blurb that tells you about the game and the gameworld. It’s like the back cover of a book or DVD. Gender-aware games should include both male and female example characters in their background documents so women players can see that there are parts for them to play. Pronouns are your friend – there should be instances of “he” and “she” – or my personal favourite, “they” and “their” – I like pronouns that include everybody. Game blurbs often include artwork and photographs, which should have a good selection of all kinds of characters; male, female and sometimes neutral. If the blurb doesn’t, or if anything makes you feel “put off” because of how they have described themselves, then don’t play that game. If you’re feeling brave, email the game designers and tell them why: I’ve done this and the response was very positive, including instances where I’ve received follow up emails from other game designers going “are we gender-aware enough, can you help?”
- Character creation – this is the way in which you pick what sort of a person you will play, and it is almost always the same for men as it is for women. There are rarely, except in games which have a specific built-in sexism (few and far between), situtations in which a woman cannot play a certain type of character. Unlike me, aged 6, trying to participate in a game of cops and robbers with the boys who lived next door, being “a girl” does not stop you from picking up a gun. Refeshingly, I have never seen a character creation form with a section for “gender” which then negatively impacts my options if I select female. Women are fighters as much as they are wizards, healers, leaders and politicians. I’ve also played in lots of games where women have chosen to play male characters, and vice versa.
- There are all kinds of games; try several. There are big games and little games, games in fields for the weekend and games in a room above a pub for an afternoon. There are high fantasy games with magic, and gritty, realistic games with guns. Games for ten people and games for a thousand. There are games about fighting, games about battles of wits, games with long, complicated rules and systems, and games where you turn up and improvise your way along. LARP is becoming more and more a space to try out new ideas and new ways of playing around, many of which have their backgrounds more in theatre and performance than Games Workshop. There will probably be something that suits you.
- Ask Other Women Who Play. There are, when you get into it, a surprising number of women who LARP. The common perception is absolutely still that it’s ‘a male hobby’, but the reality is different. There are also a large number of women, like myself, who are very active and vocal in the hobby, and equally active and vocal about getting other women into the hobby. Ask us which games you might like.
Sarah writes about designing and creating games and live performance over at sarahcook.net and is unapologetic for this shameless plug.
Photos by disturbing.org.uk.
[Guest Post] Women and LARP: The Other Side of the Coin
This post was sent in by reader and commenter Ribenademon as a response to another earlier guest post, Some Thoughts On Women In LARP. Quick trigger warning: this post discusses some quite graphic misogynist language.
Tomorrow, we’ll conclude the discussion that first post has generated with a post from our own team, since we’re no strangers to LARP ourselves…1
LARP is sexist in the same way that many things we can know and touch in our society are sexist. It’s a broad sweep to say it is primarily played by white, male, ostensibly middle class individuals often lacking in social skills and hygiene, and it’s increasingly not true or fair to do so.
In this response to Al’s post I’ll speak about the games that have informed my perspective – Lorien Trust, PD’s Maelstrom and Camarilla/Vampire LARP. I’ve been LARPing for about 11 years now. It’s probably also appropriate to point out that I am a cis male and therefore I won’t experience sexism – at least, not in any way comparable to most female players.
LARP is, primarily, a male-dominated game – just on the basis of who attends. Women can and do come and play, but as Al notes in his post, it is often (though not exclusively) as tag-along girlfriend characters. Women who subvert this and succeed in the game, whilst sometimes respected, often become more of a target for “PVP” (“player versus player” conflict) than male players succeeding in the same manner, simply because they’ve deviated from an assigned social position.
In a highly anecdotal and unscientific manner I’m now going to list a few instances of sexist and/or straight up misogynist behaviour I’ve witnessed whilst LARPing. I’m listing them because I feel they most accurately depict common manifestations of sexism within LARP, and I promise they’re all true. They’re absolutely not true of every male player, but they do definitely exist and they’re not rare like a dinosaur. They’re also not especially true of one system over another.
“Humour” and Misogyny
First off, myself and a NPC (non-player character) were standing around during a major Lorien Trust game watching people walk by. Half a dozen teenage girls in ballgowns walked past us. They were pretty smiley and seemed to be having a laugh in the sunshine.
NPC: Aww, look at them! Don’t they look all bless and nice!
Me: Aww, yeah!
NPC: Fair play though, as soon as they hit the stroke of 16 they’re going to get the living fuck raped out of them.
Me: WTF?!
The untyped climax of this story is that I said that this was not a cool or acceptable thing to say, and I did not think it was on. It had definitely been said in such a way as to suggest that such abuse would be quite desirable/fun were it to take place. My reaction caused a significant souring of attitude towards me both from the individual I had this exchange with and also from the people generally around this person – it was felt that I was making a fuss over nothing and should just “take a joke”. I’ve heard similar comments from other individuals and small groups, as far as I can remember though only when there was no female player or female member of staff around to overhear.
I can also cite numerous cases where a “provocatively” dressed female player was scorned and massively disparaged for “being a slag”. This often seems especially likely to happen if she has achieved some kind of success in the game, and it’ll range from jokes about what “whorish behaviour” must have taken place to get said advantages to just straight up behind-the-back savaging:
Male Player 1: Yeah, I hear she’s a virgin.
Male Player 2: At this event, maybe.
Male Player 3: If we went to kill her character, we could be half way through and then be like “OK, we won’t kill you if you suck us off”.
Male Player 4: Then kill her anyway afterwards. If she complains to a ref just say she’s trying to get out of being killed because she’s a cheating bitch.
This sort of shared humour goes way beyond risky “laddish” jokes told privately amongst men, and in some cases actively steps towards hate. It also suggests that actual sexist action – even where it is less extreme than the above – is more and more being seen as okay (or desired?) at LARP amongst some parties.
Gender Roles
It’s already been identified that women can play prostitutes or healers in many systems, and that alternatively they can make a push into a more ‘competitive’ character that is less traditionally ‘feminine’ (at least in terms of many LARPs’ expectation of what is appropriate for a woman to play). Women who choose these characters may find they are competing with male player characters in a way that male characters do not have to. A male character that is not a caricature or inversion of masculinity can compete with any other character on the strengths and weaknesses of their character. A female player character, unless she wants to be ignored outside her group of mates in roleplay, can expect to be treated principally as a woman rather than as a magician or a priest or whatever else first – unless she is particularly vigorous IC and manages to defy being categorised as some kind of “slag” – or indeed “just” a female.
Casual Sexism
The above are fairly extreme examples of nastiness I’ve seen happen at LRP events, but there’s also milder general and casual sexism. Pleasingly, this sometimes goes wrong. About two years ago I was at an event where four very hard, very killy male combat characters all died from drinking the poison that a corseted and large breasted female character served them from a bottle of mead when she came into their camp. This is quite believable – boys are often stupid, and many like breasts, whilst also assuming that “girls are bound to be harmless”. A few camps down? Oh, how we laughed.
There’s a good line in utilising sexism in this way that can be done by women at LARP events, although this is still arguably a hideous cop-out in terms of actually being able to play the same game as male players, on top of whether you find it distasteful or not. Some (usually) female players create characters who work in the in-character sex industry, the background to which rarely involves STIs, violence, drug abuse, sexual assault or any of the other issues of the real world sex industry. This is an interesting thread off of the infamous Rule 7 forums about how to play through the in-character sex industry with “sex” as both a business transaction and a romantic interaction.
It also cuts (very, very slightly) both ways: as a male player, I’ve played character types who were meant to be without gender or sexuality and found that some female players attempted to use what I’ve perceived as out-of-character flirting when interacting with me, probably because as a male player I’m perceived as potentially at least a bit sexist in my behaviour. A more advanced manifestation of sexism in LARP is what I like to think of as “harem” behaviour. This is where a female player deliberately cultivates around her – both in and out of character – a small collection of young men that follow her around and who do what she wants – in a way that I think is often distinct from simply being a female group leader with group members who happen to be male. I think I can see in this a recognition that some women feel they can’t compete in the same way as male players because of sexist attitudes and general uncomfortable treatment. Instead they may feel the need to cultivate a group of male characters to act through – or to provide enough security to roleplay with the rest of the field in such a way that is insulated on their terms, without being either leched at or just ignored.
In LARP and in Life
I think my main issue and argument is that all the examples above translate neatly across from real life. Sexism does happen a lot in real life, but there is an increasing social and political movement backed up by law to reduce and prevent discrimination. However, in a LARP game, there is only what players and system are prepared to step up against and say “NO” to. There is no standard of behaviour that can really be expected to be enforced beyond the absolutes of “no out of character violence”. This means people are free to avoid rewarding female characters in-game and can also get out of taking them seriously. If someone behaves in a sexist way, people might think less of them but often there’s still no threat of consequence. The behaviour that often goes on in the field, if it were relocated to an office, would result in investigation and employment tribunals, which illustrates how some men are able to get away with treating women in the field in a way they might not always in real life.
The Plus Side
Things are getting better – in real life, many men and women are increasingly unimpressed with sexism. Male and female staff exist in senior roles in more and more systems. One LARP system I’ve heard has allegedly cancelled the contract of a catering company at its festivals because of numerous complaints about its staff standing around loudly making rape jokes with customers.
It’s certainly unfair to say that every man who plays is sexist or hates women, or agrees with the things they hear their mates say when standing around in the dark at an event. It’s just as unfair to say that every woman that plays is either a victim suffering from sexism, encouraging sexism in some way or having to engage with sexism all the time. It also wouldn’t be right to say that every female player is actively engaged in dealing with or fighting their way past sexism all the time as they try to enjoy the game – most of the time people care more about killing the undead, and a lot of the time sexism does not come up. After all, it wouldn’t be much of a fun game if it was always horrible. When it does go wrong, though, fantasy can be just as bad as some of reality.
I would advise women that are into sci-fi or fantasy to go LARPing if they like the sound of it – I think it’s awesome – but I wouldn’t sell it to them as a completely optimistic, prejudice free, potentially feminist activity – at least, not any more or less than any other male dominated hobby.
- Ribenademon has been larping for 11 years since starting at university. He is very tall with laser beams for eyes; once mainly a purple demon, he now more often resembles a tall and angry tree focussing its efforts on fighting imaginary imperialism and colonialism, all the while appeasing its dark god. He also clearly spends too much time thinking about LARP. He looks forward to sacrificing you regardless of your gender.
- OK, not all of us. But a significant amount – about a third of the team – have LARPed at some point in their lives. Geek power at BadRep Towers! [↩]
My First Love: Star Trek
If you asked me what my favourite TV show was, I could pick any number of shows at this point. I’m a bit of a small screen geek, and I collect shows (and their associated fandoms) almost as quickly as I lose interest in them once I’ve milked them of all the interesting bits. But only a few shows have stood the test of time, and one of them is my first love. I bet it’s your first love, too. In fact, it’s the first love of so many people that there’s a whole name for people like me: Trekkie.
Wobbly Utopia
Let’s be honest, Star Trek has had some bad press over the years. Its gender politics were sometimes a bit wonky. Its racial politics also wobbled a bit. Its view of homosexuality was that it didn’t exist, and if it did, only aliens were gay (and if they were hot, semi-naked female aliens, so much the better). Most people in the Western world have seen at least one episode of the original series, and if they saw it at any point other than the ’60s, they may have formed some negative views. There were probably Forehead Aliens involved, and the sets probably wobbled a bit. Captain Kirk spoke… with many… pauses… and… gestures. Spock raised an eyebrow. McCoy said, “He’s dead, Jim,” and at least one redshirt died to prove it was serious. And maybe it was interesting at the time, and had some interesting ideas, but then ten million spin-offs followed, and then there was a film, and Zoe Saldana ran around in a miniskirt while Chris Pine fought Zachary Quinto in an erotically-charged episode of fisticuffs on the bridge.
This is all true, and the less said about the debacle of Enterprise, the better. But the thing is, none of this detracts from the achievements of the original series. I’ll start with this cast photo…
Original Trek, second season cast. Image (c) Paramount
You’ll notice several things immediately:
1) everyone is wearing implausible outfits and has magical levitating hair;
2) the women are in miniskirts; and
3) the Russian guy is definitely wearing a wig.
But look a bit closer. This is a second season cast photo, so that places it in 1967/8, in a show marketed as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. There are people of different ethnicities and backgrounds, and there are also two women. Neither are secretaries.
I could talk at length about what Star Trek has done in promoting a vision of a multicultural, utopian future. The crew included a Russian crewmember at a time when the Cold War was going strong; it included a Japanese crewmember not so very long after WWII and not in a chop socky or waiter role. It featured the first interracial kiss on American television, when Kirk and Uhura are forced to embrace in the otherwise execrable episode, Plato’s Stepchildren. (In fact, the actors ensured that the actual kiss, rather than a simulated one, was shown, by pulling faces in all subsequent retakes.) The Federation itself is a multicultural utopia, where member nations hate each other and violently disagree on everything, and yet will work together for the common good just the same.
Living in the Future
I could focus instead on the technological impact. I could talk about classic Trek ‘inventing’ a cornucopia of future tech, from mobile phones to warp drive to transporters. Sure, warp drive remains an impossibility, and thus far transporters have only managed to send bits of plastic from one transporter to another, more akin to The Prestige than true teleportation, but how many people were thinking about it at all before Trek dreamed it up? Someone always has to dream up the idea before it can be invented. Sure, Trek only invented their Feinbergers because they didn’t have enough money and had to make do from scrounging through the waste bins of other shows, but that’s the beauty of it. Other people’s rubbish – when painted purple and hung on the wall – was enough to inspire people. Now that’s impressive.
Fandom
Or I could discuss the creation of slash fiction, of how it came about in the 1970s in response to the cancellation of Trek. Of how fans – primarily female and in their 20s and 30s – loved the characters and missed them so much that they got together and wrote stories for them. Many of them got published and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list – AC Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son was a fanzine before it was a book, for instance. I could talk about how they took the names Kirk and Spock and made them into Kirk/Spock, the slash in the middle indicating a homoerotic relationship. I’ve read the early slash efforts, and frankly, they’re not terribly good: it’s primarily people writing about sex they’re not having, in plots that aren’t convincing, with art that is a bit lacking. But the thing is, it’s astonishing that those early fanzines existed at all, that communities sprung up with such fervour and dedication to focus on one little show, long-cancelled. These days, ‘slash’ means an m/m story, irrespective of fandom. Many young fans have no idea of the origin of the term and, influenced in equal measure by anime yaoi naming conventions, will mark the pairing with an x (eg. KirkxSpock), yet still refer to the relationship as ‘slash’. The name endures.
That’s not all that Trek decided online. When the internet started up, the Trek groups had a tricky problem: both classic and TNG‘s main characters shared letters. This was a disaster at a time when Usenet was the main source of contact, and subject lines were limited to a small number of characters. Naming and pairing conventions quickly sprang up, with the order of the letters indicating the pairing. American film rating systems were brought into use. [FIC] TOS: New Dawn, K/S, Mc, NC-17 (1/1) was instantly decipherable as a post title. Trek fandom has had a massive impact on fandom in general, its conventions and rules seeping through a multitude of others.
Making History
Then there are the people that Trek has influenced. How about Rev. Martin Luther King, for example? In a candid conversation with Nichelle Nichols, he expressed his admiration for her work as Uhura, and urged her to remain on the show at a time when she was considering quitting. Or maybe Dr Mae Jamison, the first African American woman in space. She, too, watched the show as a child and was inspired by the example that Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura set.
“I’ll protect you, fair maiden.”
“Sorry, neither!”
– Sulu tries to ‘rescue’ Uhura, but she’s having none of it in the first season episode, The Naked Time.
Mae Jamison, being awesome.
How can you NOT love a show that gives you this much awesomeness?
“Ah,” I hear you cry, “but you’ve only talked about the impact of the show, not the show itself! I distinctly recall some dodgy gender politics at work…”
A Handy Viewing Guide for the New Recruit
Yes. OK, I admit it. Star Trek, like many shows at the time, had its writing farmed out to a pool of writers that took story outlines and turned them into scripts. Maybe they knew and loved the show and its characters, maybe they didn’t know them from Adam. Sometimes you had Harlan Ellison delivering City on the Edge of Forever, and sometimes you had Arthur Heinemann’s The Way to Eden, where space hippies sing songs and the viewer writhes in agony. So what? No show out there can claim to have 100% hit rate, and when Trek got it right, they really got it right. So here are a few episodes to check out, mostly from Season 1, but a couple from the later seasons:
- Where No Man Has Gone Before: where two members of the crew develop god-like powers and the inevitable happens. There is gratuitous eye-candy, in the shape of Kirk’s bared chest. Meanwhile the lead female character is dressed in exactly the same uniform as everyone else, down to the ridiculous bell-bottoms. She’s the ship’s psychiatrist, and ends up saving the day… sort of.
- Charlie X: where a young boy with god-like powers… yes, OK. But this is a creepy, scary little episode, with eye candy provided by the semi-naked Kirk wrestling for no apparent reason. More disturbing is Charlie’s attempted rape of a crewwoman, his reactions coarse and demanding and selfish, and hers grown-up and mature. He may be the one using violence, but she never once relinquishes her control.
“There’s no right way to hit a woman.”
– James Kirk to Charlie X, after the latter slaps Yeoman Rand’s bottom, Charlie X.
- The Menagerie: where the original pilot is reworked. Trek does loyalty, captivity, mind-control and extreme measures.
- Balance of Terror: the Cold War episode, where Kirk informs a crewmember that bigotry has no place on his bridge.
- Devil in the Dark: where the crew learn not to make assumptions about appearances.
- City on the Edge of Forever: where Harlan Ellison disavows all knowledge of this rather excellent episode. Kirk, Spock and McCoy end up in 1930s Earth, where Kirk meets Joan Collins, a peace activist who runs a homeless shelter. She’s strong and independent and a visionary, and is unmistakably the love of his life. (Therefore, according to the requirements of drama, she must die.)
- Mirror Mirror: Where Uhura wears an even more revealing uniform, and evil!Spock mind-invades McCoy.
- The Enterprise Incident: where the opposing Romulan commander is female, and is tricked in the expected way. What isn’t expected is her dignity throughout. Kirk and Spock treat her throughout as their equal.
- Is There In Truth No Beauty?: Where Trek had a blind character, and had her as the lead guest character for the episode.
- Turnabout Intruder: where Kirk and an old flame – who has a grudge – trade bodies. This episode, for all its flaws, is fascinating. Janice Lester was a contemporary of Kirk’s, and they were briefly involved. However, she never got command, something she attributed to her gender. In Trek-world, she has no argument: her gender is irrelevant. In 1960s America, this is something so obvious that it was rarely mentioned: of course her gender stopped her from getting command, no woman could possibly be a military commander! Lester’s fury is so intently realised that you can’t help feeling sorry for her, for all her insanity… and rooting for her, just a little.
“Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”
– Janice Lester, Turnabout Intruder
Trek and Me
Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009
So, there it is: my deepest, darkest secret. I studied maths and music as a child because of Trek. I got into fandom because of Trek, trying to navigate newsgroups in a cybercafe at age 13 when an Amstrad was the height of luxury. I have the DVDs, and a few of the books, and many of the friends. And above it all, when people ask what I want to do when I grow up, my immediate, unspoken reaction is, “I want to be an astronaut.”
Tell me that’s a bad thing.
Parcel from India
Readers of this blog might already know that we discovered Indian publishing house Tara Books on Twitter a week or two after we first launched. Since then, we’ve followed them with interest, and recently we got a lovely parcel in the mail with a review copy of Following My Paint Brush by Dulari Devi, which I’d like to show you.
Backing up a bit, though, first, who are Tara? Based in Chennai, South India, they’re a “fiercely independent” publishing house showcasing illustration and writing from various regions and communities. They value “adventurous people around the world”. The feminist principles of dialogue and creating opportunities at the heart of their work are outlined pretty well in this piece over on For Books’ Sake. They want to open your heart and your mind, balancing “the pleasures of a beautiful book with wit and political rigour. Our titles are often unclassifiable, straddling accepted genres. We have pioneered the art of the book made entirely by hand, making artists’ books affordable for the average book lover.”
From the point of view of my illustrating I get particular enjoyment from their picture books, which always teach me new things – when we spoke to Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao about their work with artist Bhajju Shyam on The Flight of the Mermaid a few months ago, I found I was learning about Gond tribal art in the process.
Moving on now to the book in question, which is artist Dulari Devi‘s first book. She paints in the Mahdhubani style popular in the Mithila region of Bihar, eastern India, which you can read more about for starters on Wikipedia here.
I am an artist, but I wasn’t always one. This is the story of how it happened.
– Dulari Devi
This is a gentle, inspiring, true story about the urge to create – and running mildly but persistently through it, Dulari’s struggle to work that process out in a context where art isn’t a career she can economically support, and where education in artistic technique is not easily come by. She learns, in her own words, by doing, and keeping doing. One day after a long day working as a domestic help, she finds herself fashioning a bird from clay, and a journey begins. And for her, the discovery of her own creative power, and through it a new sense of self, is a momentous change. It would be really facile and silly to compare my own life to hers, so I won’t, except to say that I struggle with neurotic “creative block” a lot in my own way – and this reminded me to pull my finger out and get down with the muse again. There’s something very essential and beautiful about the way she describes having the ‘get excited and make things’-epiphany, and I love the cyclical way the text, which is all transcribed from Dulari’s oral account of her life, begins and ends with the affirmation “I am an artist”.
The art is serenely beautiful, full of detail that jumps out at you on a second look. Art Nerd moment: Mithila folk art really appeals to my love of strong line-work. Dulari’s work is high on decorative geometric borders and patterns, and double-lined and crosshatched outlines lifting the figures off the page. If I had kids, I’d read them this. As it is, I was super happy reading it to myself, with lots of pauses to notice all the birds hiding in the trees (I made a mental note to make Markgraf, our resident bird-art enthusiast, look at the birds).
So there’s a pile of reasons why you should keep an eye on Tara (plus the fact their latest graphic novel, Sita’s Ramayana, hits these shores in 2012, but it’s already made the NYT bestsellers). Christmas is coming, after all! Buy your family some beautiful readables.
Joss: Still Boss
Last week I discovered that some friends of mine had not seen Joss Whedon’s 2006 Equality Now acceptance speech. As I promptly sent them the youtube link, I remembered how powerful some of the phrases he uses are. For me it’s not about the endless frustrating fixation by reporters on his “Strong Women Characters”, but what Joss says when he pauses to talk about his feelings on sexism:
“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We NEED it to stand on this earth as men and women.”
Whedon in response to every journalist who has ever spoken to him. (Source: The Wellington Young Feminists Collective)
We NEED equality. That’s an incredible statement. It’s those capital letters which impress me – ignore that it’s a now-rich white guy saying it and look at the passion in those words. He’s saying that equality is not optional. It’s not something for only people with too much luxury and free time to turn their attention to.
And he makes it clear that this belief comes from his parents teaching him that the rights and respect we should give to ‘people’ don’t only apply to straight, white, cis males who behave in approved ways. It certainly doesn’t immediately stop applying to 51% of the human race – all other human beings get those rights as well. Why is this concept so revolutionary after all this time? Why are we having to campaign to stop homosexuality still being illegal in so much of the Commonwealth, for a start?
I certainly feel equality as something we ‘need’. I’m unable to hold my head up as a man while my country treats people in all the bigoted, ingrained ways it still does. It seems blindingly obvious to me, but in my case didn’t come from sentiments in the home growing up, or from the attitudes of my parents (who keep surprising me with how socially conservative they are). Yet the UK is far ahead of many others: I’m visiting Belgrade (the capital of Serbia) right now and the government recently decided not to allow a Gay Pride march because they wouldn’t be able to protect the marchers from massive violence. At least they’re not one of the countries handing out prison sentences, or death sentences.
Making a statement that I feel personally affected by inequality against groups I’m not technically part of is usually the point at which I’m told I’m not allowed to have an opinion – that I just have ‘White Middle-class Guilt’ for example. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that guilt as long as it leads to campaigning and action instead of the typical corresponding middle-class ‘slacktivism’. The idea that those outside of the group in question shouldn’t feel strongly about an issue would mean that straight people can’t be against homophobia – it’s ridiculous. And Whedon says so:
The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.
The imbalance affects him, and everyone else. Equality isn’t something to be sorted out after we tackle the other issues of society, it’s not an optional nice-to-have on top of the cake, it’s an urgent and real NEED which affects the whole population.
Whether or not you think Whedon succeeds in promoting gender equality in his movies and TV, that speech is still stunning. Every time I post the link new friends find it for the first time and are awed, and others feel the need to pass it on once again. Five years later and it still needs saying, so (almost exactly a year after that first BadRep post I made on it) I wanted to quickly share it in case we have even one or two of you who will see it fresh and feel inspired.
In less feminist-focused recent Joss news, he’s just filmed a version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 12 days with a lot of his friends, which means people like Amy Acker (Angel‘s Fred) and Alexis Denisof (Wesley) as the lovers Beatrice and Benedick. Nathan Fillion and Fran Kranz are in there too. Oh, and he didn’t tell the press until shooting was finished, when it got ‘casually’ mentioned on Twitter. I’ve been a fanboy of his work for a while now and still can’t watch those two leads in the last season of Angel without blubbing, so the chance to see them in romantic roles is exciting.1 Also, he’s formed his own studio to make micro-films, and has a supernatural romance called In Your Eyes already planned. And then there’s his horror-comedy “Cabin in the Woods” starring the guy who played Thor and Whedon peeps Fran Kranz, Tom Lenk and Amy Acker again, which was actually completed years ago but will be released by the now-bankrupt MGM in April 2012. But you knew that already.
- For an extra frisson of excitement there’s the mystery of whether Joss can actually stand for characters to be happy, or whether he’ll just re-write Shakespeare and kill them all. You never know. [↩]
Boxer Girl, Give Us A Twirl
In the last few years, I’ve found myself in a bit of a love affair with boxing. When I started, every lesson was a metamorphosis. Social awkwardness, inhibitions, and body image angst would slink away and cower behind the punchbags, or hide in the changing room lockers until I was done. Boxing makes me feel aware of how I’m put together, and of my own physical power. I feel unafraid to take up space.
New to the hobby in 2008, I assumed women could box in the Olympics, and was surprised to find this wasn’t reliably the case and thrilled when things changed. Having failed to secure tickets, I nearly nosebled with excitement when a friend offered to sell me hers. Katie Taylor‘s competing! Hero worship explosion!
So. That’s the background to this post. But what I want to talk about today is the Amateur International Boxing Association’s latest statement about women and boxing, which the Beeb reports thusly:
The latest talking point is not whether women’s boxing should become the newest Olympic discipline at London 2012, but what the boxers will actually wear when they compete.
During last year’s World Championships, the Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA) presented competitors with skirts, rather than the usual shorts, which it wanted to “phase in for international competitions”.
AIBA asked boxers to trial the skirts, which they said would allow spectators to distinguish them from men.
There’s this, too:
“By wearing skirts, in my opinion, it gives a good impression, a womanly impression,” Poland coach Leszek Piotrowski told BBC Sport. “Wearing shorts is not a good way for women boxers to dress.”
My initial reaction? More flail than the semaphore alphabet. I’ve now slept on it and had a bucket of calming tea. There’s a lot of justified rage already out there. This is a shitty patronising move by AIBA, and one I find quite insulting, but no doubt this surprises nobody. So rather than just spitting WHAT THE BILLIONTH FUCK? about the place forever, here’s a bit of history and a bit of telly, via which we can consider for a moment what all this says about the neurosis we have about women who punch things.
I’m gonna start with Popeye. Bet you didn’t see that one coming.
She’s A Knockout
Never Kick A Woman, a six-minute short in which Olive, with the aid of Popeye’s spinach, goes toe-to-toe for his affections with a Mae West-a-like female boxer who throws punches in a skirt and heeled boots, came out in August 1936.
Contemporary with the Berlin Olympics, this springs from a place where women didn’t commonly box at high profile, and the interaction between Olive, who transforms into a cat for her fighting sequence, and the boxer bombshell, is all a bit ooh-matron (“Not bad for the weaker sex!” remarks Popeye, before declaring a desire to sample “her equipment”). However, women were competing with pretty solid regularity, as they had been throughout the nineteenth century, in underground/amateur events, with varying levels of safety and credence afforded them, although they were often fetishised by the small press coverage they received. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the overall feel of women’s events was that of a circus prizefight. There’re many surviving photographs of women boxing from this period, some in skirts, some in bloomers. But things develop, and from about 1920 onwards, if you look at the images on this webpage, they’re also commonly wearing shorts, revealing that Poland coach Leszek “not a way for women boxers to dress” Piotrowski doesn’t really go in for research. Or even Google Images.
Prize-Fighting Amazons
That article also nails the early social response to women’s boxing in the 20th century:
While the battered body of the male boxer was a symbol of the defeat of heroic masculinity, the battered body of the female boxer was the very denial of the supposed essence of femininity and a symbol of brutalization and dehumanization, at the same time creating an image of exciting and animalistic sensuality. For that reason, women’s boxing always attracted male voyeurs – not only working men, but also local dignitaries and businessmen.
This attitude prevails – YouTube’s comments are often a bear garden, but comments left on the Popeye cartoon include quite seriously invested gems like “I love that sexy blonde beating Olive senseless”. Amazon’s fancy dress catalogue also includes some heavily eroticised “boxer babe” outfits, almost all of which are pink and satin, and some of which have skirts.
All of which is to say: skirts in boxing generally collide in two contexts: erotic fancy dress, or “vintage” prizefights as we might popularly imagine them – even if in reality they might’ve looked like this, this or this – it seems to have been a matter of personal preference and the general variation across continents and regional scenes. Reintroducing skirts at this stage in the development of women’s boxing is a bit like citing Edwardian paintings of ‘women wrestling nude in ancient Sparta’ where they’re all looking conveniently sexy and liberated as definite historical fact for what that shit was really like – it’s easy to throw up your hands and say “this is the traditional feminine way for women to box” when the historical truth, or the reality of who this is all for, may contain extra layers of complexity. Exoticising women who box professionally does them no favours, and because it carries with it the aesthetic of prizefighting, insisting they skirt up will do just that. There’s no easy way to divorce the garment from this sort of context, and especially not the way the AIBA are handling it. It reeks of “Cor blimey these girls can punch!” and when tabloid joshing and Popeye-style “wanna check out that goyl’s equipment!” are being encouraged by the governing body… that’s a very sexist problem there.
Rather than promoting the boxers themselves, who work unbelievably hard to get where they are with sweet FA big press recognition, AIBA, whether it intends to or not, is pandering to prizefight imagery with this decision. This, in turn, selects the kind of schoolboy-tabloid-YouTube-comment response to women in boxing as the primary favoured response. Women shouldn’t have to feel that they’re perfecting their footwork for a panel whose engagement with basic principles of equality barely extends beyond the level of a Popeye cartoon. What else are we supposed to feel?
A skirt is not, of course, disempowering in and of itself. Roller derby, for example, makes frequent use of skirts, booty shorts, and so on. The difference is one of context. Derby’s given rise to the whole idea of the ‘rollergirl’, who is free to mix feminine costume elements – thigh-socks, pleats, and so on – with imagery that subversively references horror, punk and violence. It has a consolidated identity as a predominantly female sport. Derby aesthetic pitches at an audience with heavy female participation, and has a significant queer following – so there’s a sense that the skirts aren’t really “for” a dominant privileged gender group, or being imposed from on high on the players. (I do wonder, if male Derby players wanted to wear skirts, whether they’d necessarily be stopped.)1
Mantastic
Boxing, on the other hand, has deep roots in understandings of masculinity and male violence. “White collar boxing” and “chess boxing” (a round of violence, a round of chess, a round of violence) are popular phenomena within the boxing scene, and usually aimed near-exclusively at male participants. It crosses class boundaries in its universal appeal as a sport for men.
Just as it’s popular in media portrayals of working class male environments – Rocky channels his frustrations, while Billy Elliott longs to escape his mandatory classes – boxing also has a relationship with upper class expressions of masculinity around honour and gentlemanliness: Queensberry rules, and all that. But when we put women in the ring, there’s just something about the purity of action boxing involves – simply punching someone else, with an emphasis on the upper body as the weapon – that makes people actively dislike women across all social classes going near it. In a way that kickboxing or judo doesn’t. Amir Khan expressed his distaste about it a while ago, following in the footsteps of Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier, who laughed it up in 1978. (Gotta assume they later revised their opinions, since both their daughters went on to box and even fought each other.)
Women have enough crap to deal with in the boxing world without having to get in the ring with AIBA just to earn the right to a pair of shorts. This is a serious sport, which carries a risk of serious injury, and caricaturing women’s involvement in it does them a great disservice. There’s a lot of romance in boxing – the image of the boxer in film is universally that of a lone struggler, with personal issues, addictions and anger management all channelled into the ring. For female protagonists, usually that gritty struggle involves a fight with sexism too. The image these women cut is powerful and often inspiring – but whatever you think of Million Dollar Baby you can’t quite see Hilary Swank shutting up and donning a skirt.
My favourite boxing film? Girlfight. It’s supposed to show fictional examples of sexist behaviour in boxing and in life – partly as part of the pattern all boxing movies tend to follow of lone-struggler-makes-good, and partly in order to affirm a positive message specifically to women who want to go there. It’s depressing to realise just how much truth there is in that film, and how far we have to go.
I hope Katie Taylor’s forthright dismissal of the skirt issue as “a disgrace” forecasts the failure of AIBA’s suggestion; the last thing anyone who’s fought that hard to get into the ring needs is a constant reminder that they’re still being cast as some sort of other.
- If anyone has tried this, let me know how it went. [↩]
The Halloween Costume Interludes, Final Round: the Riot, the Kitsch and the Wardrobe
In which Team BadRep discuss Halloween costumes via email in a thoroughly serious and academically high-flying manner.
Final Round: What are you wearing?
Miranda: Before we answer this question, I have to say I was almost tempted by this, the most surreal thing Yandy has ever spawned. I give you ARCADE CUTIE. So unhinged I might actually wear it.
Look at the FACIAL EXPRESSION on the skirt. The skirt is actually embarrassed to be part of the outfit, which contains not one but THREE STRATEGICALLY PLACED FACES. It’s even better than Boob Fury. Absolutely blew me away in the sheer entropic blaze of its own wrong-glory. Katy Perry has nothing on it. But anyway, what are we all wearing? I suspect almost none of us are going down the off-the-peg costume route?
Sarah J: I’m going to two parties so I’m attempting to combine the themes The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Le Tigre into one outfit. I haven’t really worked out how yet, but I think I’ll probably be Riot Lucy (who looks pretty similar to Manda Rin from Bis).
Miranda: Alternate-Universe Lucy, who survives that horrible train crash in The Last Battle! Maybe you’re undead, too, and vowing revenge on CS Lewis for such a terrible plotting decision.
Jenni: I was actually the wardrobe from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe one year at school.
Miranda: I dressed up as Anne Bonny last year. Needless to say, I did not use a shop-bought costume. Pirates do particularly badly in terms of costume-shop gender separation – all the women’s clothes are labelled “VIXEN PIRATE”, “WENCH PIRATE”, “MAIDEN PIRATE”, and so on, while the dudes get to be “CUT THROAT JACK”. So I just bought some plastic pistols and raided Age Concern. There was slightly more boob-coverage going on than in this 1700s etching. This year I think I’m going more trad-gothic-novel-heroine, but hopefully with an impressive amount of lace and waft.
Rhian: My Halloween costumes tend to be ridiculous rather than sexy – in the past five years I’ve dressed as Terry Hall (incredibly vague tangential ‘Ghost Town’ joke), Patrick Bateman once, and Thatcher twice. Last year I had an entire party themed around Tory/Coalition Horror, but I fully accept that’s just me being slightly self-parodic. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly done Sexy!Halloween, it feels like a bit of a cop-out almost in the dressing-up stakes (as in, I’d far rather someone react to me with ‘That’s really funny’ than ‘Wow, you look hot’).
Jenni: Your predilection for dressing as Thatcher has always worried me, Rhian.
Markgraf: As I warned at the start of this chat, I’m going as a sexed-up Misdreavus. That’s a Pokemon. And I’m not even sorry. I love the shit out of Hallowe’en, and dressing up, and monsters, and bodypaint, and Pokemon, and horrible outfits that try to be sexy but aren’t. I love the former five for obvious reasons, but I love the latter because they’re so incongruous. I mean, sexy takeaway food? What the fuck? The allure of dressing as a tarted-up cartoon ghost from a videogame with the assistance of stripper heels and bodypaint is always going to be too much for me to resist. Also, I’m a boy. Hyper-femme incongruous drag is something I can pull off. So why not? Halloween is for dressing up as things that’ll impress or terrify, and I can’t think of anything more impressive and terrifying than sexy Pokemon cosplay in little more than paint and a wig.
Miranda: Thatcher, a sexed-up Pokemon, and Riot Grrrl CS Lewis. We know how to party in here. How do I compete? Maybe I’ll just build some kind of furry several-headed contraption that fits over my shoulders and just go as Three Wolf Moon.
Jenni: Or the Pixar lamp.
Miranda: That person wins the entire internet.
Rob: Well, I was going to dress as a pumpkinhead – as in, I am going to hollow out a pumpkin and wear it on my head – but this whole exchange is making me think maybe I should sex it up a bit. Me, with a pumpkin on my head… and a bikini.
Happy Halloween from Team BadRep!
In which Team BadRep discuss Halloween costumes via email in a thoroughly serious and academically high-flying manner.
Round Two: Sassy, Sassy Superheroes
Jenni: I demand to know what the costume designers were thinking when they called these travesties Captain America costumes, or Ninja Turtle or Wolverine costumes. I mean, I don’t think you could get into a S.H.I.E.L.D. base dressed like that and claim to be Cap. Masters of disguise, these costume makers are not.
But you look nothing LIKE Wolverine!
I was the kid who thought ‘shoddy work’ when comic book inkers coloured in panels of Wolverine’s costume the wrong colour. What do you expect will be my reaction when you try to sell me that and call it a Wolverine costume? The only time I’ve seen a male superhero wear a skirt that short was when Deadpool put on Jean Grey’s costume and insisted he was an X-Man.
Rob: Just for the record, I’m planning to do that particular Deadpool outfit for a convention next summer.
Markgraf: Fuck NEXT SUMMER, do it for THIS WEEKEND!
Miranda: This Green Lantern one’s not so bad. Good: it still has those huge abs printed on it! No toning down the muscle power for the ladies. Less good: The lines on the front come over like a bra made out of sinew. Even She-Hulk does not possess this feature.
Sarah J: Sassy Thor Girl is quite amusing. The Mighty Avenger! It’s the coy way she’s cradling the hammer that makes it. And her angry thunder god fluffy boot-tops. Are they intended to represent clouds? Anyway, I think this is one example among thousands of the failure to translate power from a masculine to a feminine character. Thor is big and strong and powerful! Look at his beard, muscles and giant throbbing hammer! Thor Girl is… er… sexy? Sassy? Look at her fluffy boots of death!
Sassy!
Miranda: Yes! The failure to translate power thing you just said? I think that nails it. Look at how Marvin-Martian-girl has no war helmet. Also, I find it really weird how these manufacturers seem to think adding heels to things in the promo shots is logical – the worst offender by far is this shot of a Neytiri from Avatar costume. That character lives in a rainforest, rides a psychic dinosaur and is part of a tribe considering waging a war, in effect, on consumerism. The electric blue stilettoes scream “just took that dinosaur on a sweet trip to Topshop”. Which sort of ruins the whole nature-hippy vibe.
Rob: Also, this seems relevant.
Miranda: Yes. This is all, really, less about Halloween specifically and more about general societal trends around gender and bodies and clothing writ large. Why are we meant to be so uncomfortable with male flesh on display in this way? Sexy male costumes do exist, but they tend to be seen as much more out of place at a general house party than a woman in stockings and suspenders.
Jenni: By the way, I think these posters are amazing. They were created by STARS – Students Teaching Against Racism, at Ohio University, and I think they really get the point across about cultural appropriation and racism at costume parties.
Sarah J: Those posters are ace.
Miranda: Yes. Yet another reason why Sexy Chinese Takeaway should just go on fire.
Jenni: Take Back Halloween and their well-researched selection of costume ideas are still going strong, judging by this appearance on The Mary Sue. I mentioned them in the Halloween post I made on BR last year. Goddesses, queens, warriors and pirates – all costumes I’d consider!
Miranda: And for everything else, there’s always Angry Birds, which is just bringing everyone together in a transcendently glorious sexy-free world of cushioning and big eyebrows.
NEXT: What we’re wearing, and our absolute favourite WTF costume Yandy.com has yet spewed into the world
The Halloween Costume Interludes, Round One: Marvin the Martian and the Furious Boobs
In which Team BadRep discuss Halloween costumes via email in a thoroughly serious and academically high-flying manner.
Round One: Marvin the Martian and the Furious Boobs
Miranda: So I thought we could look at what’s on sale for Halloween this year. Jen sent me this from io9. It’s titled “this year’s sluttiest and weirdest store-bought Halloween costumes”, and while I’d question the use of “slutty” perhaps, the point stands: the gulf between MAN SUIT and LADY VERSION (for we are in polarised gender binary land forever, of course) here is… well, case in point, Marvin the Martian. Are you a man? Then your eyes go on your HEAD! Are you a woman? Then your eyes go on your TITS! That is the WAY THINGS ARE DONE AROUND HERE, PLEASE LINE UP TO PAY.
Jenni: I think it’s very considerate of them to leave out the leggings on the ladies’ costume. “Girls! Want to show off your new spray-tan and waxed-smooth legs yet STILL want to dress as a cartoon Martian? This costume is for you. Men, nobody wants to see your legs. They must be covered at all times. Put them away.”
Miranda: I mean, Marvin’s key features include his very engulfing polo neck. But why bother with that “recognisable” shit when you can STICK EYES ON YOUR BOOBULARS.
Sarah J: You know, I almost – almost – like this one. Of course the woman’s costume is barely recognisable as Marvin anyway, but without the boots, hat and gun you’ve got a pretty awesome boobfurious dress that says: ‘Yes, my breasts hate you’. Perfect for so many occasions! Whereas the romano-cyber-sportswear interpretation the man’s wearing looks kind of rubbish.
Miranda: I can definitely get behind the Boob Fury interpretation. Maybe I was being too harsh.
Markgraf: The thing Halloween costumes highlight for me every year is how no-one knows how the fuck to dress men. Women, in this ciscentric, binarist view of costuming, have sections: boobs, waist, arse and legs. And you can section costumes accordingly to highlight whichever of these areas you prefer. But men, right, they HAVE no areas! They’re just… a long rectangle! What the fuck are you meant to do with that?! I feel the costumier’s despair wafting out of my monitor like the sad back end of a horse. It’s the same school of thought that leads cybergoth fashion to dress women like awesome robots from the future crossed with angry Christmas trees, and men in a t-shirt and jeans (but black, and with rubber bits on). Men have sections as well, on account of also possessing a skeleton and body mass! And they can get away with showing off more skin, too, because man nipples are inexplicably inoffensive. It’s not hard, designers! Don’t let society rule you! Go for it! Break free of the top-half-bottom-half block painting of menswear! Give us thigh-high things and stuff to show off our shoulders! Do it or I’ll dress up as a Pokemon!
NEXT: Sassy Sassy Superheroes