Dave McKean’s Celluloid
As a big fan of Dave McKean’s rich and haunting art and illustration, I was intrigued and admittedly a bit excited to hear he was producing an erotic graphic novel earlier this year – Celluloid.
Pr0n
I’ll get my position down as briefly as I can here so I can get on with the post. I wouldn’t say I’m ‘pro-porn’ because I’m dead against the unsafe and exploitative (like many industries, it must be said) mainstream porn industry. I find a lot of it distressing and unpleasant to watch. But I don’t accept the argument that violent porn has any causal link to violence against women beyond the fact that it re-inscribes the values already at large in our society. Symptom not cause, I‘d say.
I have no problem with porn in theory. But mainstream heterosexual porn and all its cliches has become so dominant and so widely accepted that it has become the ‘norm’ against which the bodies, fantasies and sexual experiences of real people are judged. We need positive, progressive sex education and much greater diversity, acceptance and openness about sex and representations of sex.
Back to Celluloid
Anyway. Here’s a brief synopsis I pinched from this Comics Alliance review:
Celluloid is the story of a woman who, during a moment of sexual frustration, discovers a film projector and reel of film that depicts a couple having sex… this woman finds herself traveling from our world into a dreamlike realm of sexual fantasies that’s presented in the artist’s trademarked style(s)…. The woman begins simply as a voyeur and eventually graduates to full participant in various activities with the entities she encounters.
And here’s a Flickr slideshow of images from the book so you can see what they’re talking about. It’s terribly beautiful, which to be honest I have come to expect from McKean. But the whole thing left me with a sadly unsexy feeling of ‘meh’.
Tickle my Intellect
Of course, reviewing an erotic work is tricky because what flicks your switches is such a personal matter, but even setting that aside I found I was disappointed. It didn’t turn me on. But it didn’t interest me either. In this Comic Book Resources interview, McKean outlines some of his aims behind the project:
Most pornography is pretty awful. I mean, it does the job at the most utilitarian level, but it rarely excites other areas of the mind, or the eye. It’s repetitive, bland and often a bit silly. I was interested in trying to do something that… tickles the intellect as well as the more basic areas of the mind.
Yay for intellect-tickling! That sounds right up my street. But I don’t think Celluloid delivered. I realise now that what I was hoping for was something that felt as different to mainstream porn as Black Orchid was from most 1980s superhero comics. And of course it is different on its shimmering surface, but the fantastic situations and sensual artwork are resting on some conventions from mainstream pornography that hold no allure for me.
For example: the female protagonist is inevitably thin, white, and able-bodied, with long blonde hair. She’s apparently bi-curious heterosexual. After having a bath in her empty house, she decides to put her high heels back on. The situation that frames her sexual journey is that she comes home and calls her boyfriend/husband/playmate, but he’s still at the office, so she’s stuck with a pout, a bath and some self-pleasure. I was half expecting her to order a pizza and get it on with the delivery man. One reviewer, who I won’t grace with a link, even described her as a ‘bored housewife’. It just feels so clichéd, and for me that undermines the eroticism of the art and the originality of the project.
Boobfruit
Visually the weakest section (in my opinion) is what I’m going to call the Boobfruit section, in which the protagonist:
…encounters an “earth mother” figure, haloed in fruit and with fourteen breasts… as the woman consummates her meeting with the goddess, the resultant imagery throws some interesting analogies between fruit and the body.
The beginning of the Boobfruit episode. The 'earth mother' character is wearing some grapes on her head. Image © Fantagraphics, 2011
I don’t know what Graphic Eye find so interesting about the analogies between fruit and the body. Fruit as a symbol of sex and fertility, and particularly cis female reproductive organs, is pretty much as old as art. Here’s some extremely luscious fruit conveniently dropped into a painting of a youthful Elizabeth I, painted at a time when her fertility was a subject of international political speculation. And what could Frida Kahlo possibly be referencing here? You get the picture.
There’s also a cliché-within-a-cliché of fruit being used as a sensual reference point in descriptions of lesbian sex. I just couldn’t take this episode seriously, especially as the fruit pictures look like they’ve been cut out of an M&S advert.
Subject or object?
In the Comic Book Resources interview, McKean says:
I also thought it would be more interesting coming from a woman’s perspective, and for it to be essentially fantastical, a series of sex dreams, allowing for a more impressionistic view, trying to express the feelings of each stage, rather than just showing you literally what happens…
Image © Fantagraphics, 2011
But although the story ‘stars’ a woman, it’s not really told from her perspective. I mean, you follow her on her surrealist sex adventures, but at no point do you get any real idea of her feelings or thoughts. She is stereotypically passive; she wanders into situations and things happen to her, and she embraces them, but doesn’t act or take the initiative.
Although the woman begins as an observer and becomes a participant, it’s just a trade of one kind of objecthood for another, we have no sense of her interior life, to the extent that I find it a bit creepy. She is even drawn in a remarkably dead-eyed, expressionless way.
I still admire Dave McKean as an artist and illustrator, and I don’t intend this review as an attack on him; he seems like a thoroughly nice bloke. I understand that he didn’t produce Celluloid with me in mind as his target audience, and perhaps he never intended to challenge all (or any) of the conventions of mainstream porn. But I wish he had, since for me that would have turned a mildly interesting and attractive book into something extraordinary.
Unsung Heroes: Hermila Galindo and Adelita
A slight change from the usual format today as we look at two people. One a gifted writer and political activist, the other a folk-hero bringing together the deeds of many actual people into a single inspirational composite.
Pre-Revolutionary Mexico was not a good place to be female. The Mexican Civil Code of 1884 strongly curtailed the rights of women at home and in the workplace, placing almost unbelievable restrictions on them compared to men. Between this and the heavy influence of the Catholic Church, President Porfirio Diaz’s regime was not one that fostered female freedom of expression. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that young Mexican women were so keen to become involved in the revolutionary activities of the early 20th century. Women like Hermila Galindo.
Born in the small town of Lerdo in 1896, Galindo was still young when Mexico began its long period of revolution in 1910. This didn’t stop her from quickly becoming a political writer and advocate for Venustiano Carranza – she was a gifted writer and public speaker, producing many political tracts. Following the removal of Victoriano Huerta, Galdino gained Carranza’s attention whilst giving a speech to welcome him into the city. Recognising her eloquence, and the importance of having women support his cause, Carranza made her a part of his new government.
As a part of Carranza’s government, Galindo pushed heavily for improvements to women’s rights. She argued for the provision of sex education and increased rights with regards to divorce, both topics that caused friction with the influential Catholic church. Indeed, Galindo repeatedly prompted controversy by openly opposing the social influence of the church and describing Catholicism as one of the main barriers to female progress in Mexico. Although unsuccesful, she also campaigned for female suffrage in Mexico.
Ultimately Galindo grew disillusioned with politics as it became apparent that Carranza would not bring about the changes she had hoped for, and as the corruption of the new regime grew more evident. Although she ceased to be politically active after 1919, her tactics, and the arguments she put forth in her journal, Mujer Moderna, would continue to be used by Mexican feminists of the ’20s and ’30s.
Hermila Galindo did not suffer imprisonment for expressing her ideas. However, she did have to face a great deal of hostility, scorn and ridicule from both men and women for expressing unpopular views and for speaking up on subjects which still remain taboo in Mexico. Her willingness to face strong opposition gave heart to the more advanced feminists of her own, and to the succeeding generation
– Anna Macias, Women and the Mexican Revolution
Soldaderas
As well as the political contributions of women like Galindo, the Mexican revolution saw many women taking part in the armed conflict itself, known as the soldaderas (‘soldier women’). From their ranks emerged the figure of Adelita, almost certainly a composite of the deeds of many different female soldiers. (Indeed, many of her reported feats are mutually exclusive. Josefina Niggli‘s play about the soldaderas shows Adelita sacrificing herself to protect vital supplies from the Federales early in the revolution, for example.)
Adelita functions as something of a folk hero, an example of bravery in combat and the extraordinary will to fight for one’s cause. The term became something of a label of courage in post-revolutionary Mexico: The young Marisol Valles Garcia, for example, was nicknamed ‘Adelita’ after becoming the police chief of one of Mexico’s most dangerous regions in late 2010, a job no one else dared take.
Modern depictions of the Adelita figure vary, ranging from the cold and efficient soldier, no different to her male counterparts, through to a hypersexualised figure reminiscent of the pin-up girls painted on American planes. This contrasting representation is due in part to the unfortunate lack of records regarding a lot of the actual soldaderas, making it hard to know the true scope of their activities and easy for later writers and artists to impose their own spin on the tales of Adelita.
Jose Posada's depiction of a soldadera as a calavera.
For more on both Galindo and the Soldaderas take a look at Anna Macias’s Against All Odds and Shirlene Soto’s Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman.
Found Feminism: Sinfest
Sinfest is one of my favourite webcomics. I can’t quite work out why I haven’t written it up as a Found Feminism before, I guess I just made the assumption that like kittens with captions, everyone already knew about it. The strip has been going for a while, and I love the mix of anti-dinner table talk (politics, sex and religion) with the more winsome or just for gags strips. It’s updated pretty regularly and has a massive archive so I’ve just fixed that question over what you are going to do for the next week – go read!
On the face of it, a drugs-and-porn fuelled pig, bikini devil girls and a lead female character who talks a lot about clothes and boys doesn’t seem like an instant win for Team Bad Rep – but appearances can be deceptive.
Monique (with the awesome purple hair) is a revolutionary and a style guru, whilst still being a well-rounded character. Proving, if more proof were needed – and it sometimes is – that feminism isn’t about wearing dungarees and being angry all the time. It’s a thing that people do, to make other people’s lives better. And it can be light-hearted, well meaning, serious AND funny. With amazing hair.
Sinfest is written and drawn by Tatsuya Ishida, a Japanese American writer/artist who takes pop culture references and uses them to make some really good points about gender politics and American consumer culture and mashes them up into a great read. I distinctly remember following the strip more closely than the American election, especially because Sarah Palin Pig made me cry with laughter. The artwork is wonderful, with some lovely bits of line art. He also does some cute dog and cat jokes as well as some beautiful calligraphy word-to-shape panels. There really is very little not to like.
They’ve really pulled out all the stops with the recent Patriarchy series, which neatly uses the idea of the Matrix to describe living in the “patriarchy” – I’m going to print out copies and hand them out to anyone who asks what this feminism malarky is all about.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
At The Movies: The Three Musketeers, or Markgraf Loses It
I am the worst person in the world to take to a cinema. Cinemas turn me, through no fault of my own, into a Grade A Douchebag. I just find the whole experience too engrossing. My ticket crumples in my eager hand as I enter the theatre, and magic happens. The low light, the seats and the excited quiet cause a strange mutation in my brain and suddenly, the whole world is just me and that cinema, and nothing else matters.
I laugh. I cry. I shriek like an excited child. I hurl insults, groan and grip the hand of the person sitting next to me, and I just can’t help it. The film, in that darkened, magical room full of equally hypnotised people and their rustling sweets, is my entire life for the hours that it runs.
Now, if a film is uniformly delightful, I’ll get used to the level of delight it’s producing in me and be relatively quiet. If it’s uniformly miserable, I’ll just cry quietly to myself for the duration. If it’s completely terrible, I’ll start out shouting and then my fury will dull into silence, while I glare at the screen with the cold, dead eyes of a shark. But if a film varies, and has parts that I love and parts that I hate, I’ll react anew to the different levels of content as they emerge.
Paul WS Anderson’s The Three Musketeers was, therefore, a big problem for everyone else in the cinema.
**** WARNING: spoilers from here on out!****
It’s a film with its pros and cons, as most films are, but the problem with this film for me was that the pros and cons were both very forthright in how pro-y or con-y they were, and they constantly vied for supremacy. The result was a sort of see-saw effect, whereby the quality of the film yo-yoed wildly from start to finish, and my face was sort of like this:
So at the end, I looked a bit like this:
Oh my god you guys, what was this film. It was obvious that they knew what they wanted to do with it, but really weren’t sure how. As you can tell from the title, it’s ostensibly based on Alexandre Dumas’ lovely book, but much in the same way that every time I take a trip to Tesco, the journey is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. I read The Three Musketeers when I was young – so young, in fact, that the memory is a mere rose-coloured blip on the horizon of my literary consumption – so have possibly unrealistic recollections of how ludicrous it was. But I’m pretty sure the bloody thing didn’t have zeppelins designed by Leonardo da Vinci.
The whole thing’s meant to be set in the year 17-whatsit, and the costume department and set designers have had a fucking ball with it. The clothes are divine, and the interiors are spot-on. It’s really lush to look at, the attention to detail – even in the weaponry – is sublime, which makes it all the more bloody baffling that they saw fit to sledgehammer shit like rotary platform mini-cannons and clockpunk crossbows on top. The final straw for me was the sudden, rage-cage-inducing appearance of modern stringed instruments at the end.
The way I see it is this: if you love 18th century France so much, don’t spend oodles of obvious love and affection recreating that amazing period of European history in all its gaudy, beautiful, corrupt and hilarious glory and then promptly drizzle congealed green-screened steampunk on top! And if you want it to be a full-on, anachronistic love-in with airship-mounted flamethrowers, stop pretending it’s in any way historically accurate! Go the whole hog! Have a mechanical Tyrannosaur! Stick Cardinal Richelieu in leather!
…Ooh.
And the dialogue. Oh, god. The dialogue. It was clearly written by a team who thought they were far more witty than they really were (Alex Litvak and Andrew Davis, I’m looking at you) and while the cast, bless them, did their best, no one – not even Christoph Waltz, doing a staggeringly attractive turn as Richelieu – could redeem the continual stream of steaming cat vomit.
This brings me on, neatly, to the casting, one of the film’s only saving graces. As I say, Waltz is charismatic and delicious as usual, but it isn’t just him carrying the show. The Musketeers themselves (Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson) are fun to watch1 with good interpersonal chemistry (OT3 FOREVER) and King Louis XIII, (played by Freddie Fox, characterised as basically me in a sparkly hat) is a gigantic hilarious fop. To balance out the prevalence of heroes, I was personally foaming with delight to see that we had not one, but three and a half whole villains to choose from! Milla Jovovitch, who is my future wife by the way, does a truly spectacular turn as demi-villain Milady de Winter (but more on that in a bit), an eyepatched Mads Mikkelsen (who you may remember as the blood-weeping, testicle-flogging villain in 2006’s Casino Royale) as the Cardinal’s captain of the guard, swanning about in red brocade being all leg and blades, and Orlando Bloom.
… Orlando Bloom. Now. I hate Orlando Bloom. I’ve found him phenomenally unremarkable in everything he’s been in to date, and in every case his universal expression is the perplexed discomfort of a dog that’s been instructed to sit on snowy ground. Here, he’s the villainous Buckingham – a tarted-up-to-the-nines fop with a pearl earring and a 24-carat smirk, and he’s fucking perfect.
I’m terrified that – after his Oscar-guzzling performance as Hans Landa in Quarantino’s most recent romp, Inglourious Basterds – Christoph Waltz will be forever cast by English-language cinema as villains, and Musketeers certainly doesn’t abate my fear. But please, please, gods of cinema, if there is any justice in the world, please let Orlando Bloom be typecast for life as a scenery-chewing villain off the back of this film alone. He’s having so much fun! He’s more camp than a goth Mardi Gras! The facial hair suits him and everything! I never want to see him doing the beleaguered hero act ever again.
So the casting’s great. Except, sadly, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), who’s irritating, boring, and frankly too young to carry the role off with any gravitas. But all of his shortcomings pale in comparison to the humanoid plankton2 cast as his love-interest, Constance (Gabrielle Wilde). She has one facial expression:
This is her expression for all things. Delivering sarcastic put-downs, being dangled from the prow of an airship, stumbling along a boardwalk a million miles from the ground and being held at knifepoint. All that face, and a monotone to match. It’s awful. It’s not even as if she gets nothing to do. She gets herself captured on D’Artagnan’s behalf by dressing as him and acting as bait3 and that could be amazing! But she does it with the charisma and presence of a bowl of cold soup.
Readers will be surprised to learn that this film does actually get a technical Bechdel pass. There are actually quite a lot of women in the film, serving – on paper – very important roles. The Queen (Juno Temple) has an entire contingent of ladies-in-waiting, of which Constance is one, and the Bechdel pass comes when she asks for her jewels, only to find that they’ve been stolen. It’s only one line, though! She spends the entire film surrounded by women, having a fun time in the garden and calling Richelieu on his bullshit to his face, but she never gets more than a meagre handful of lines. Why? It feels as if the lines she does get – there are literally only about four – and the placement of them are lip service to having to write her a part. So, in an entire French fucking court of women that practically fills the screen, they only get six lines between them. WHY? Is there a LAW against women advancing the plot? The Queen has a vital fucking ROLE in the plot, as she’s one of the chief pawns that Richelieu fucks about with!
But yet, she’s completely out-parted by… Milla.
Oh, Milla. I love you so much. You’re the lizard-eyed, carved-bicepped, bullet-dodging action queen of my dreams. This role is a fucking gift for her. Milady is a double-agent, assassin and spy! She’s a fucking Swiss army knife of bad-assery. She’s got a lockpick haircomb, icy-cool emotional control to spare, and abseiling stays. She can dual-wield a pistol and a rapier, has no problems selling people out or killing them, and appears to be literally invincible. 
I can’t say enough brilliant things about her. It’s all going so well! And then her clothes fall off and she becomes a lingerie model on a clock, complete with lascivious camera pan. Because, obviously, men won’t understand or enjoy a woman being badass unless she’s got as few clothes on as possible (even in a culture where the collars were big and the dresses bigger). I cried. Sex assassin, ho!
Speaking of assassins, the opening action scene is in Venice. “VENICE, ITALY!!” we’re told (to differentiate, presumably, from Venice, Barnsley). A guard stands watch on a dark canal edge. Something bubbles in the water at his feet. Suddenly, a dart is fired straight from the water into his gullet. Athos emerges, wet and masked, armed with some kind of automatic crossbow.
Meanwhile, Aramis, hooded and billowy, synchs up a viewpoint before Leap-of-Faithing down onto a gondola.
Porthos manages to get a kill-streak of 15, fighting off soldiers in a basement, earning himself a new trophy!
They have basically made Assassin’s Creed II: THE MOVIE, and split Ezio into three people.
The rage-cage descended over my eyes. HOW DARE THEY, I announced, being restrained by the two people who foolishly accompanied me to the cinema. GET OFF MY ASSCREED, I declared. People had started to stare. PRESS X TO AVOID MY ACID VOMIT OF WRATH, I continued. I was out of control. It was of great relief to everyone when the scene changed and I could be pacified with Mads Mikkelsen’s gorgeous cheekbones and mile-long legs.
All in all, a mixed bag. Like reaching your hand into pick ‘n’ mix and being unsure as to whether you’ll get a fizzy cola bottle or an enraged musk rat.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It is so blisteringly camp and sparkly that I came out wearing glitter that I didn’t go in with
- The sets and costumes are lush beyond compare
- The casting’s brilliant, with few exceptions
- It’s one for the Eurofilm nerds, with excellent performances from Mikkelsen, Waltz and a motley crew of Brits – and an unexpected, hilarious cameo from Til Schweiger, who starred alongside Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
- VILLAIN PORN!!! VILLAIN!!! PORN!!! YES!!!
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It just doesn’t know what it’s doing, with anything, ever, especially the women
- “What? You mean… just having them on-screen isn’t good enough? :(“
- The dialogue’s an experience quite a lot like snorting crushed glass
- I’d rather deep-throat a live conga eel than watch the scenes with D’Artagnan in again
- Who the hell thought model battle-maps would make good scene transition material?
- Why is D’Artagnan glaringly American, when everyone else at least tries to be pseudo-British?
- MODERN FUCKING INSTRUMENTS HRRGHNH WHY GOD
Here’s a bunch of geeky, fandom and feminism-relevent things I’ve been enjoying lately. We’re hoping to turn this into a regular feature, and our ed, Miranda, has called it Awesomewatch, presumably knowing of my love of watching Chris Packham and team harass the nation’s wildlife every week on Autumnwatch…1
Game: Mass Effect
About a hundred years behind the rest of the entire internet, I’m playing Mass Effect 2, and I’m enjoying it so, so much. I want to book a week off work just to complete it, and game all day long.
You play Commander Shepard, who can be a man or woman, and it’s amazingly refreshing to be able to play a female war hero (either way, you’re pretty famous, after saving the galaxy in Mass Effect 1). It’s great to be able to play this female character who inspires so much respect in her colleagues, military and civilian – everywhere she goes, even big scary warlike aliens are afraid of her. My Shepard’s a not-very-physically-intimidating blonde, so it’s kind of fun.
I love the team-building aspects of the game, too. You have to persuade people to join you, and keep them happy and loyal throughout the game. You can play as a good guy or a bad guy, and some of the choices the game gives you (allow genocide to continue for the good of the galaxy?) are brilliant to play through. As writer and fellow Garrus fangirl Jennifer Williams said in her review:
Bioware seem to specialise in making the sort of games where you have to put the controller down for a bit and have a really good think about the consequences of your actions.
Several articles have been written on how feminist-friendly the game can be, some on this blog, so I won’t go into too much detail here except to add my name to the many reviewers recommending it. Even if you don’t play many games, you should try this one. I’m running it on my laptop; you can check here whether you can run it on your computer…
Mass Effect 3, out next summer, looks like it’ll be even better. They’re promising to use a female Shepard in the marketing drive, and although there were lesbian options2 available for Shepard to romance in Mass Effect 1 and 2, in 3 male Shepard will be able to romance some of the guys, too. I’m not sure why these things weren’t done before, but I feel like Bioware is at least a company that listens to what its fans want. I’ll be checking out their Dragon Age II next (another game highly recommended by geeks and feminists!) while I wait impatiently for ME3…
Comic: Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights #1
I didn’t buy many of the comics that came out of the DC52, but I did have to pick up Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights, because I’ve enjoyed his Doctor Who episodes and his Captain Britain comics before.
As much as many DC52 comics have been a disappointment, (Harley Quinn loses half her costume! Catwoman wants to show you ALL HER BRAS. ALL OF THEM. Amanda Waller becomes skinny! Disabled character Oracle walks, becomes Batgirl! DC comics manage to become even less diverse!) I still have to say, this one looks promising.
Demon Knights is set in the Middle Ages, and Paul cites Dragon Age II and ‘the medieval Magnificent Seven’ as points of inspiration. Much like my old favourite Secret Six, (sadly, sadly, outrageously cancelled for the DC52,) it seems as though it will star protagonists who range from reluctant antiheroes who’d rather be at the pub, to absolute bastards who are just along for the fun of it, saving the day and arguing and falling in and out of bed with each other while they do it. My favourite kind of heroes.
Promisingly for the fans of this blog, it also looks as though not only will four of the seven ‘knights’ be of the female persuasion, but the main baddie, the Questing Queen, is also very much a lady.
Well, I say four ladies… Sir Ystin, a knight who self-introduces as ‘sir’, may turn out to be more nuanced than that. Earlier versions of the character, the Shining Knight, have been both a cissexual man, and a young girl disguised as a man in pursuit of her true love, Sir Gawain, but neither of those seem to fit here. Hints dropped by Paul, and Ystin’s insistence on the title ‘sir’ in this volume, however, despite the other characters’ doubt, makes me wonder whether we’re actually seeing the first gender variant character of the DC52…
It’s hard to judge an entirely new comic on just twenty pages, but this issue made me laugh, and made me want to know a lot more about all seven of the main characters, which is pretty much what I want in a first issue.
It’s also extremely quotable:
We find the source of the problem, and we throw dragons at it.
Blog: The Mary Sue
The Mary Sue is really awesome. It’s like BoingBoing for fangirls. They always have the news first. Trailers, casting decisions, I don’t know how they get there so fast.
Battlestar Galactica‘s Starbuck features on the logo above, but you get a different geeky lady character every time you refresh the site. You can read about their logo design and why they picked those characters here.
I’m enjoying the way they’ve named it after Mary Sues, as well. It feels like a challenge. That word that gets thrown at the woman in a fandom work who’s, y’know, not supposed to be there.
There’s slash references and feminism and science and fun things on Etsy and Hipster Harry Potter fanart and the gender-bent Justice League and lists like 10 Things That Could Happen If You Pretend to Be A God, 10 Couples Who Are Badass Together, and 10 Fictional Universes We’d Like to Live in Based on Food Alone…
It’s a bit addictive.
And finally, under “also awesome”:
My feminist-inclined friend Hannah, who, when recently invited to a ‘Tarts and Vicars’ party, dressed as a Bakewell Tart. Because, well, what is a ‘tart’ anyway?
- AwesomeWatch returns next month. Send Jen your own geeky picks – if she agrees with you, they might get a look-in.
- Ed: “I may not have been entirely sober when I thought of this, but it’s too late now, we’re GOING WITH IT.” [↩]
- I was going to let my Shepard have a lesbian romance, but, well, the Tank Girl lookalike on my team is straight as a very straight thing, and
Space Batmanalien Garrus has caught my eye. He was on Shepard’s team in Mass Effect 1, and their dialogue’s adorable in a kind of equals-and-comrades-under-fire kind of way. “There’s no one in the galaxy I respect more than you, Shepard.” Bless. [↩]
The Strange Worlds of Margo Lanagan
Recently I’ve had a few sharp bouts of insomnia, and found myself up at 3am scouring my shelves for the just-right thing to read myself away from worry and into sleep. What I settled on was one of Margo Lanagan’s short story collections, Red Spikes. Lanagan is said to write fantasy fiction for young adults, but her stories are totally unlike anything else I’ve read in either of those categories, and in the overlap.
Weird tales, well told
For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.
She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.
And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.
Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.
These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.
Tender Morsels
Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her 
baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.
Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.
Women in fairytales
It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:
Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.
So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.
Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.
The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.
I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.
[Guest Post] Thoughts on Women in LARP
A while ago we asked you all what you enjoy doing with your time, and whether you had any thoughts on your hobbies from a gender perspective. A fair few of you got in touch, and following on from Jo’s post on black metal yesterday, here’s Al on the soapbox…
“That’s pretty geeky,” laughs the guy in the pub. “I bet you don’t get many girls doing that!”
I sigh inwardly. I’ve just outed myself as a Live-Action Roleplayer, and although he’s never heard of it before, my drinking partner instantly knows that all larpers are young, socially awkward, computer programmers, and male.
If you don’t know what larp is, it’s often somewhere between Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft and amateur dramatics. We dress, act and speak as our character – so mages cast spells using vocals, and combat is resolved using specially-made “safe” weapons to hit each other. Sound silly? Damn right, and a great deal of fun too.
I’ve been larping for 16 years, and although many systems and genres exist, I mostly enjoy standard “fantasy” settings, with warriors, wizards, trolls and the like. A game might be 8 friends playing in a local wood, or several thousand at the largest of the weekend fest events.
Rules and Regulations
What’s it like larping as a woman? Well, there’s the rules, for a start.
The rules of a system cover combat mechanics, magic systems and character creation. Superficially, for the past 15 years these have been gender neutral. In every system I have played, skill sets are available to any gender – a woman can play a battle-hardened warrior, just as much as a man can play a one-hit healer.
Larp is a physical sport, and other restrictions have far more impact upon your character choices than gender. L has been larping for nearly 20 years. “If you don’t have the physical ability, you are far more restricted from playing a tank than if you are a woman,” she says. “In my experience, what affects somebody’s ability the most is personality: a combination of being larger than life, able to take initiative, play your character, and be part of a team.”
As well as the rules, game creators invent the world into which characters must be placed, and these can come with social prejudices. Usually these are fantastical (“We hate the unliving!”) but a few reflect more real-world issues. For example, a society might be defined as “matriarchal”, such as many of the Drow from the Lorien Trust events, or the Tritoni from Profound Decisions‘ Maelstrom system.
Is this a problem? Perhaps. Cultural distinctions add flavour to a game, but by singling them out, other cultures risk being tarred as “patriarchal” by default. But players who don’t wish to interact with these issues in their games can usually opt out.
“I’m fine with Maelstrom, where there are a couple of cultures with strongly ingrained gender roles,” says R. “I can simply avoid playing a member of either culture and there is still a lot of game available. I don’t want to stop other people roleplaying gender politics just because it’s not something that interests me.”
Young, Geeky Men
Larpers should be used to stereotypes – as we’ve already established, we’re all single, misanthropic male students, yes? Well, no. Larpers are doctors, lawyers and teachers (and, yes, students and computer programmers). We often started as students, but most of my University friends are still larping, and are happily partnered (usually to each other).
And today, “male” is definitely right out. Women play at every level, both as players and game organisers, designers and plot writers.
We have our own stereotypes. We’re familiar with the Metallica Warrior (rock t-shirt, black jeans, £80 sword) and the Drunken Bum (turns up, drinks beer, smokes rollies).
Women in larp face stereotypes too. The most persistent is the “Healer Girlfriend”. She only came because her boyfriend insisted she’d enjoy it. The description is damning – you aren’t a proper character. Worse, your actions are only defined by a man, and you just exist to enhance his weekend (and act as a trophy for him to parade, of course).
R, who has been a key player and organiser in her local group for many years, agrees. “The stereotype is certainly sometimes accurate, but I don’t think it’s fair because applying it is patronising and dangerous. Even to people it does apply to.”
Healer Girlfriends do exist, albeit briefly. “I effectively started at the Gathering as a Healer Girlfriend,” says L. “In my experience, one of two things quickly happens; either she gets bored and stops playing, or she finds her own game.” L found her own game, becoming one of the most renowned characters – and players – on the field. To call her a Healer Girlfriend now would be laughable.
Another trope is the “Shelf” – the larper in a corset, often generously endowed, and invariably flaunting cleavage for (predominantly) male attention. Characters might resemble the likes of Ce’Nedra (from David Eddings‘s novels), or Tika Waylan (from the Dragonlance books) – or some less salubrious counterpart. Are these roles compatible with calling larp a feminist-friendly sport? Personally, I’ve always struggled with this. Empowerment does not equate to equality.
Ultimately I must have faith in those who choose to play these parts. We have a responsibility to resist stereotypes, and expect more from our fellow players. In film, the corset-wearing pretty girl is too often a bit-part to the male lead, but no larper writes a character in order to be part of the scenery. In your head, this story is all about you. There’s a place for these heroes, and a panoply of other characters, pleasant or otherwise – I could count on one hand the characters I’ve played that I wouldn’t detest if I met them in real life.
Real Life
Ah yes, real life. We tend to let our hair down at events. Late at night, you’ll find more than a little drinking, carousing and singing of some shockingly ribald songs round the campfire. That said, larp events are, for most, a safe, welcoming, accepting place to be.
“I generally find male larpers polite and gentlemanly,” says P. “I don’t remember any instances of sexist behaviour, but then, I don’t feel particularly vulnerable to that type of abuse, and particularly these days I feel confident to challenge it or ignore it. The main sexist type of behaviour is a tendency towards protectiveness, but I don’t find that offensive.”
“I have had someone try to stop me doing heavy lifting during setup and takedown because it’s a ‘man’s job’.”, says R. “That’s hardly related to larp. It’s a piece of sexism ingrained into society in general, which does need a kicking.”
Things have changed over the last 10 years, says P. “The proportion of female to male larpers has improved a lot in that time and changed the dynamics in the field.”
Larping men seem more liberated. The Gathering is one of the more child-friendly events; of the parents I counted this year pushing prams or herding toddlers, nearly a third of them were men. (Think that’s not good? Try counting the same thing in your town centre tomorrow). When there’s no social difference between genders, there’s no pressure for women to “stay home” whilst the men go out and fight the battles. We draw our characters from fantasy, but women aren’t relegated into playing The Arwen.
Playing Your Part
In larp, you must physically represent – physrep – your character. Costume, weaponry and armour is available to turn anyone into a warrior or a wizard. However, a tall, balding, overweight man can put on a pair of pointy ears and call himself an elf, but he’ll be a tall, balding, overweight elf none the less.
Does this restrict a woman’s game? In other forms of gaming, there’s nothing to stop you playing a character of another gender, but this is much harder in larp. Effectively portraying another gender takes more care, physically and socially, than most larpers are able to put in over the course of a weekend in a tent. The easy option is to go “panto” – fake breasts and falsetto, or badly-drawn beards and that testicle-airing stance of the “man”. Such characters make me wince. They rely on stereotypes – invariably negative – that are almost always drawn from our out-of-character world. Not only offensive, but immersion-breaking to boot.
That isn’t to say that gender-reversal can’t be done well – it can. But for the most part, a woman can only play female characters. Does that really matter? I don’t think so. All larpers make sacrifices over what they can play – the overweight can never play svelte, the clumsy can never play jugglers, the tone-deaf can never play bards. P says she has never felt restricted in her character choices by her gender. “Physical ability has been a much bigger restriction for me,” she says.
I Love Larp
Writing that last paragraph made me remember why I love larp so much. There are so many other things we can play. The recluse can play a talented diplomat; the coward can play the hero. And more pertinently, women can play characters with real power. There is no glass ceiling. A woman playing a warrior will be judged and accepted not on her gender, but on how well she can wield a sword and shield. In Profound Decision’s Odyssey campaign, when a woman was elected Autocrator of Carthage – a bloodthirsty and vengeful nation in-game – nobody gave a damn about her gender, merely whether she could deliver us the victory we so deeply craved over our arch-nemeses, the foul dogs of Rome.
So what does it matter if you can only play women? If you’re judged by your actions, not your gender, not a jot.
Introduce yourself as head of a guild, and you will rarely see that condescending attitude so common in the real world that shouts, “Gosh, and you’re a woman as well! How very clever.”
Take up a battleaxe, gather your spell cards, ally with your foes and betray your friends. There’s a thousand others in this field who don’t care if you’re male, female or neither. Sharpen your wit, hold the line, and cross swords, for they’ll show you no quarter.
*
- Al has been larping since he fell in love with the hobby at University fifteen years ago, and to his continuing surprise, never grew out of it. He is currently attempting to bring up his kids to be free of gender expectations, as well as awesome swordfighters.
- Illustrations by Miranda
[Guest Post] On Being A Feminist Metalhead
A while ago we asked you all what you enjoy doing with your time, and whether you had any thoughts on your hobbies from a gender perspective. A fair few of you got in touch, and we kicked off with crafting a couple of weeks ago – but prepare yourselves now for a complete subject change. (The range of interests we’re hearing about from you lot is frankly awesome.)
Hi, I’m Jo. I’ve been calling myself a feminist for as long as I can remember. And I listen to black metal. As in, while I appreciate other forms of music, the overwhelming majority of my time, attention and love is lavished on black metal. I can’t help it – I just love black metal, and the filthier it is, the better.
Black metal is purposefully alienating. Its logos are unreadable; its practitioners often wear corpse paint; its lyrics revel in references to hatred, violence, nihilism, death, Satan. The music itself is typified by screeched vocals, blastbeats, fuzzy guitars; songs stop suddenly.
The genre is also overwhelmingly white and male. Of the 46 black metal bands on my iPod, only one of the bands has a female member (LSK, bassist/backing vocalist for Secrets of the Moon from Germany), and as far as I know, none of the members of any of the bands identify as a race other than white.
As I said up top, I’ve identified with feminist ideas from an early age. Unequal representation of women in places like government, the boards of businesses, the upper echelons of journalism and the law and churches and so on make me angry and upset. So how can I justify investing so much in a type of music produced, in the main, by men? A type of music which is often linked to vile white nationalist ideologies, such that NSBM is a thriving sub-genre?
Er. It’s tricky.
Black Metal and Me
I operate from a position of relative privilege, being white, cis, currently able-bodied, in a relationship with a white cis man, UK-born, and so on. My various forms of privilege allow me to ignore some of the more problematic areas of black metal, and have surely insulated me from encountering prejudice at black metal gigs. For the record – as a cis woman attending many dozens of metal gigs in London, I have very rarely encountered sexist treatment from fellow gig-goers. From anecdotal experience, black metal bands also attract more women to their live performances than, say, death metal bands. Which is not to say that black metal audiences are gender-balanced, because they’re really, really not, but they’re relatively better than those observed at concerts of bands from other metal subgenres.
I sometimes wish I did like more ‘acceptably feminist’ types of music – or, at the very least, types of music where women performers aren’t a vanishingly small minority. The problem is, if it ain’t black metal, I’m (probably) not interested. The intensity of black metal gives me an emotional ‘hit’ I don’t get from many other types of music (live classical music can produce the same effect – but not as reliably as black metal, whether live or recorded). I fully acknowledge that black metal isn’t for everyone, and I fully understand why most people do not enjoy it; I don’t want to come across as ‘judging’ people for musical taste, which, OK, I did when I was 13, but that was a long time ago.
Which leads on to another of the problems with black metal, from a feminist/progressive point of view. It is, as I said above, unapologetically impenetrable to outsiders; more than that, the scene contains a strong current of elitism.
Kvlter Than Thou
One of the stereotypes of black metal fans is of the elitist “kvlter than thou” forum-poster who spends obscene amounts on deleted demos by long-defunct bands, limited to three tape copies. No, three reel-to-reel recordings, two of which were burned as part of an occult ceremony by the band before they went and attempted to torch a church. Black metal enthusiasts often proclaim themselves proud Nietzscheans, which, in their (often rather simplistic) worldview, boils down to I proclaim myself to be better than everyone else. As a feminist, I have a problem with any philosophy which deems some to be superior to others. Black metal is imbued with it. The elitist fans take their cues from the bands themselves, from Varg Vikernes onwards. Black metal is fiercely individualistic; feminism is rooted in solidarity with others, a concept that is incompatible with the proclamations of the most influential black metal bands.
Incidentally, the concept of “black metal as expression of individualism” has led some in the scene, notably He Who Crushes Teeth of the band Bone Awl, to describe NSBM as oxymoronic (warning: long article – ctrl+f “nsbm” for the relevant section); black metal based on a philosophy which is inherently ‘optimistic’ is paradoxical, he says, and Nazism counts as ‘optimistic’ because it aspires to be all about building a ‘better’ future – ‘better’ if you deny the humanity of groups you don’t like, of course. Black metal should be nihilistic, in his view, and nihilism as a philosophy is as antithetical to Nazism as it is to socialism. But I digress.
As part of my sometimes uneasy ongoing attempts to reconcile my feminist/lefty political beliefs with my love of black metal, I do not listen to any bands which are classified as NSBM on Metal Archives. It’s nothing more than a gesture, really, but it’s an important one to me. I’m cutting myself off from many bands whose music I am sure I would love; but I just can’t bring myself to give them any playlist space. For many metalheads, my shunning of black metal is treated as illogical (I’ll listen to songs about the destruction of all life or the murder of Christians but I won’t listen to songs glorifying the ‘Aryan’ race) and ‘wimpish’. I think, for, me, the difference is that persecution of Christians is not something that happens in the West, despite what the Daily Hate-Mail would have you think, whereas we still live with the repercussions of what happened when a lot of Europeans got rather too worked up about racial ‘purity’. And a song attacking Christianity written by people from Europe or the US is a very different proposition to the same group of people attacking Muslims, who are an often-vilified minority in Europe. (Bands from Islamic countries attacking the theocracies under which they live, such as Janaza – that’s very different, and something I can get behind, mostly.)
Theatricality and corpse paint
Another reason I feel able mostly to disregard the lyrical content of non-NSBM bands is the theatricality of black metal. There is a definite tension at the heart of how many black metal bands present themselves. The spikes, the shining black leather, the corpse paint, the OTT references to Satan – they can’t be serious, can they? Well, the best reply to this I can formulate is yes… and no. It’s pretty impossible to parody black metal bands, because however hard you try to come up with something ridiculous, an actual band somewhere will have beaten you to it. (Watain store their stage outfits with dead animals so that they pick up “the stench of death”, FFS.) Fans – the non-über-kvlt ones, anyway – tend to treat bands with a mixture of affectionate humour and deadly seriousness. We go and watch monochromatically-painted and -clothed bands who follow the style rule that there is not a single type of apparel that can’t be improved by the addition of spikes, lots of spikes, singing songs about being the devil’s executioners or whatever; it’s all a bit silly. Yet at the same time, it’s taken quite seriously. Singers exhort audiences to hail Satan. And they/we do. Not because we’re all practising Satanists – most metal fans I’ve met tend to be of the cheerful atheist variety – but because it’s part of the act.
Black metal’s theatricality can be seen on one hand as being about escapism. Of course I don’t believe in demons, I’m far from being a nihilist, and I can’t even watch horror films because the sight of blood makes me feel all wibbly, but I’ll happily listen to bands singing about all these things because, on one level, it’s so outrageous, I can’t possibly be expected to take it seriously. Yet I do, truly, deeply love the music, and spend large amounts of energy seeking out new bands, going to gigs, talking about metal to friends with similar tastes, and generally being a huge fan. So I take it seriously – and not seriously. This allows me to worry less about the violence inherent in the genre’s lyrics and its underlying philosophy; it’s all part of a big joke, and everything is on a continuum of unseriousness, so I can ignore the less-than-savoury aspects of black metal fairly easily. (Again, I am sure that my relative privilege plays a large part in this luxury to ignore what I don’t like about the genre.) And hey, that church-burning and murder unpleasantness was years and years ago – we’re past all that, aren’t we? Unlike the stark black and white of corpse paint, I’m in something of a grey area; I can blur boundaries enough to quieten my social justice instincts. Is this an ethical position to hold? I’m not really sure.
“Not for girls”
The overall metal scene is seen by outsiders as bloke-dominated; there’s a lot of truth in that, but I am constantly annoyed by mainstream publications’ disappearing of women in metal, be they performers or fans. Just because we’re a minority doesn’t mean you can ignore us, dear music journalists taking sideswipes at “that boy from school who had a bumfluff moustache, constant body odour and an unwashed Megadeth T-shirt that he always wore on non-uniform days”. And please, as the mighty Grim Kim says, don’t dismiss us by trying to fob us off with “girlfriend metal”.
Having said that, though, I have a horrible snobbish tendency when it comes to outward signifiers of musical taste – which, in the metal scene, means t-shirts and patches. Moreover, it’s a pretty gendered snobbishness, which makes me feel even guiltier. Whenever I see a woman wearing a Nightwish t-shirt, I feel absurdly, un-feminist-ly disappointed; we female fans of metal are already characterised as liking ‘girly shit’ like Nightwish (symphonic, melodic, female-fronted, no Cookie Monster vocals), so why, I find myself thinking, do you have to go reinforcing stereotypes? This is a really bad habit of mine and one I am trying to break. It spills over into my own wardrobe choices: I’ll borrow my boyfriend’s Absu t-shirt to wear to a metal gathering, but not his Sólstafir one, despite the fact that I love the band – because Sólstafir is on our playlist of “stuff that’s safe to play for non-metalheads”, whereas Absu certainly is not. I don’t want to be thought of as one of “those” female fans of metal, you know, the ones who like metal with actual clean vocals and stuff. Ugh. As a relatively unstereotypical fan of black metal, it’s all too easy to think of myself as a special snowflake as a consequence – a tendency I have to be on my guard against.
If I were in a relationship with black metal, our Facebook status would definitely be ‘it’s complicated’. With depressing frequency, something happens to make me roll my eyes in feminist outrage (the “girly” t-shirt for the band Shining [Swe] which says “I have a boyfriend at home but I think of Niklas Kvarforth when he fucks me”, a blog post like this…), but I don’t want to give up on the scene. In fact, the recent internet flap over Sady Doyle’s article on Game of Thrones (spoiler alert!) reminded me why I want to stick with black metal. I’m a huge fan of GoT, and yet I agree with most of Sady’s points about its problematic nature. As with GoT, I don’t deny that there are many problematic aspects within the black metal scene. But I am and will remain a fan nonetheless, because a) if I leave, I’m not working within the scene to make a difference, and b) I love it and am not prepared to give it up.
*
- Jo lives in London, and goes to far too many metal gigs. She got into metal at a relatively late age, thanks to last.fm. She’s toying with the idea of writing the dissertation for her MA on black metal, if the university will let her. Say hi to her on Twitter, or at the Underworld next time Taake comes to London (19th October, as it happens).