Why are trending topic #hashtags so sexist? Part 1
If you use Twitter, chances are you’ll have clicked on a hashtag listed under the ‘trending’ (i.e. most popular) topics sidebar at least once. And perhaps only once – I can see why you might never do it again, especially if you clicked on #rulesforgirls or #ihatefemaleswho.
Here are some examples of standard fare, from apparently male users. Apologies. They’re pretty grim.
#aGOODWOMAN knows how to shut the fuck up!!!!!!
#agoodwoman is always ready to give head!
#Agoodwoman cooks for u when u get in from work and gets up and cooks breakfast when u leavin to go to work
when y’all cheat, expect for it to be over… when us men cheat, you have to be forgiving and give us another chance… #rulesforgirls
#rulesforgirls When we say we wana watch football, that means no cleaning,no talking,NO FORM OF INTERACTION.We will Chris Brown you.
#ihatefemaleswho slap they boyfriend thinkin he wont hit you back
And my two favourites, from the same guy:
#IHateFemales Who want to be men. God gave you the best gift ever bitch, acknowledge it!
You tell her! Why on earth would she want to be a man? *scratches head*
#IHateFemales Who don’t see the beauty in them & still don’t take care of their bodies & looking decent.
Why can’t she see how beautiful she is? And maybe get a wax?
These make for depressing reading, and when you’re faced with a whole screenful and 60 more appear in a few minutes, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But I don’t think what we’re watching is a misogynist Twitter takeover as some people have suggested. So what’s going on? I’ll start with some theories I have encountered and explain why I don’t think they’ll do as an answer.
A) “There are just more sexist idiots on Twitter / the internet than in Real Life”
I was at an event recently where Yasmin Alibhai-Brown spoke briefly about her recent run-in with Twitter, and was disappointed that the insight she chose to pass on to the room of feminists was to be careful of using Twitter because it’s filling up with horrible geeky misogynists.
Not really relevant, but I love it.
This comment on a blog post about hashtags clarified it for me: “I wish I understood how and why stupid hashtags become trending topics.”
Um. Because they’re popular?
Sorry everyone, I know you don’t want to hear this, but Twitter is people with misogynist views, at least if the trending topics are anything to go by. I would hazard that Twitter might feel like a feminist space that has been invaded by these ‘orrible ‘ashtags because you follow feminists. But we’re in the minority, just like in Real Life.
It’s much easier to craft your own media bubble online than offline, but it’s basically the same thing. If you read the Guardian, and hang out with other people who read the Guardian, then Guardian-y sort of opinions are going to appear to be the norm. Whereas the norm, in circulation figures at least, is actually the Sun. And then the Daily Mail.
Like I said, sorry.
B) “Because black people are more sexist than white people”
Click on a sexist trending topic hashtag. Everyone in the hashtag stream is African American. Therefore…
Just, whoa there. Wait a second. Since when are ALL BLACK PEOPLE represented by a subsection of a social network? Following that logic you might think that every single white person owns an iPad. And besides, there’s plenty of misogyny to be found in ‘white’ hashtags streams too – some of the trolling on #mooreandme for example – and on Twitter in general. Sexism isn’t restricted to hashtags.
I’ve seen a number of people describe trending topics hashtag streams as the ‘dark undercurrent’ or ‘dark side’ of Twitter. I don’t think for a second that they were referring to the ethnicity of the users but I think it’s illuminating nonetheless. There are some fascinating (and sometimes toe-curling) discussions going on at the moment about ‘blacktags’ or ‘black people twitter‘ which I recommend checking out, in particular this comment.
I think it’s safe to say that there is greater uptake of the attitudes and poses of hip hop and R&B – genres notorious for misogyny and heavily polarised gender stereotypes – in the young African American twitter demographic than there is in, say, the middle-aged white British demographic, and that’s probably part of it.
But before you try and tell me that black people invented sexism (that must be why wholesome family entertainers like Jim Davidson hate them so much!) I recommend reading this 1994 article on misogyny and gangsta rap by bell hooks.
C) “Because the web encourages people to be shitheads”
There is definitely some truth in this one, and I can’t put it more eloquently than this.
I think it’s also about the hashtag format. It’s a joke, and there’s an age-old link between cheap gags and crude gender stereotypes. See also: your mum jokes, mother-in-law jokes, women driver jokes, blonde jokes, Essex girl jokes, nun jokes… Comedy, to some extent, encourages (or allows?) people to voice more controversial opinions than they might in another context.
But I can’t help feeling that there’s more to it than a web 2.0 Bernard Manning routine. In Part 2 I’ll throw in my two cents about why sexist hashtags are so overwhelmingly popular.
Found Feminism: “The Girls on Film” – famous scenes remade…
So, there’s a group of camera happy people who remake famous film scenes recasting the parts for women. I’ve linked to the sequence from Fight Club, partly because it’s one of my favourite films and partly because I think that Chuck Palahniuk is a bit of an unsung feminist, with a lot of interesting things to say about gender.
What I like about the Girls on Film project is that it shows us how thoughts expressed by characters in fiction are in fact deeply coloured by our perceptions of gender – such as the idea of being unable to know yourself without having first been in a fight. In the original piece, which is very much an anthem to anxieties over modern male identity, we take it as read that it is through fighting that men can come to know themselves. This recasting expresses those same anxieties as something we all share and need to deal with, regardless of our ostensible gender roles.
- 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. Send your finds to [email protected]!
At The Movies: Season of the Witch
All those other bodies totally don't count.
There are many ways to make a film about witches.
Firstly, you can make a straight-up witch film. You know, with a spooky young woman with a drippy curtain of hair over her face, glowering out from heavy eyelids, muttering to herself to make stuff go on fire and horses stress out. A proper witch film. With at least one scene of crows taking off from a forest and yelling. It’ll be insidious and creepy, a spine-crawling exploration of subtle witchery and spooky magic that’ll end in the witch being vanquished and a sort of bleak conclusion as we all examine our ideas of the supernatural. Something like The Blair Witch Project, to pick an obvious example.
Secondly, you can make a film that’s hyper-aware of the cruelty of witch trials and is cynical to the bone; the horror seeping in from our horrified examination of how cruel humans can be to each other when given a modicum of authority and a healthily heaped serving of paranoia. You can also spice up this trope by having a nice wade through an examination of religion’s hand in the instigation of human cruelty. The classic example of this trope is the 1996 film version of The Crucible, as we all know – a fine film. A fine film indeed.
Thirdly, you can do an all-out schlock-horror gore-and-monsters fest where things sprout wings, raise the dead and have An Eville Laughe. Something like Van Helsing. Something where there’s no realism to speak of, and you’re in it for the rollicking monster fights and stabbination.
Season Of The Witch, bless its little darling pseudo-medieval socks, tries to do all three at once.
And you know, blow me, it failed in every single conceivable way. I thought that it might be able to do something right. It didn’t. It didn’t at all. It was amazing.
****Here’s a SPOILER WARNING, just in case, by some strange chance, you would rather see its failings yourself first! ****
The films starts with Some Women being accused of witchcraft and flung over a bridge and hanged. “Oh, I see,” I thought, as the priest pronounced them worthy of hanging despite tearful, desperate confessions. “This’ll be an Examination of the Church’s Cruelty.”
And then one of them comes back to life.
“Oh,” I thought. “Oh. Right.”
Then, we jump to THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES, where Ron Perlman and Nicolas Cage are fighting a dark-skinned, faceless horde, stirred into friendly, competitive violence by the Christianity-spouting standard-bearer. God only knows where they think the Crusades happened, however – the intertitles confidently proclaimed “Styria” – as our heroes trundle from the desert into bafflingly-named snowy wilderness in only a few years. Presumably, then, they had been fighting Staracens in Stamascus on the way to Sterusalem which had defied the laws of steographical stysics and raised in staltitude, altering its stlimate beyond repair. And they are, I assume, Knights Stemplar. Or of the Steutonic Order of – okay, I’ll stop.
But despite the prolonged, stupidly-costumed battles spent massacring hundreds of turbaned Staracens, it’s only when Nick Cage stabs a young, white woman in the stomach that he comes to the staggering realisation that they’ve been killing people.
“Holy shit, Ron Perlman!” Nick Cage says with his best worried face. “I didn’t realise that we were killing people!”
Ron Perlman’s face resembles a disgusted brick with frightening accuracy. “Killing people,” he repeats, confused. Then he looks at the floor, which is littered with bodies. His tiny, crab-like eyes widen slightly with sudden horror. “Holy shit!” he rumbles. “Killing killing people! I didn’t sign up for this shit!”
And so they left the crusades.
It was at about this point that I sort of hoped for them to run into some Stashshashin.
By now, I think you’ll have realised that this film has one hell of a lot of problems. The race failure is intense, as I’ve mentioned: I’ve yet to see a film that handles the Crusades at all handle race in a non-insulting way, but it’s a very difficult and horrible era to handle at all, what with the inherent colonially-minded, racist nature of the conflict in the first place. But to have the moment of realisation for Nick Cage’s forgettably-named protagonist to come as he plants his sword squarely in the gut of a young, white woman (who must be very lost, all context considered) after cheerfully hacking his way through what appears to be all the non-white extras from Prince of Persia is just offensive.
The other problem that glared out of the celluloid into my tired, disbelieving eyes was the witch herself. She was the only female character in the film, and she didn’t even get a name. She’s credited as “The Girl”. But as crap as this is, this wasn’t the worst problem with her.
Oh no.
She’s captured, tortured and abused at the hands of the Church, and that is made eminently clear. She crawls, curls into the foetal position and weeps. When anyone tries to talk to her, she panics and begs not to be left alone with the priest who she doesn’t want touching her. The implication of rape is ladled on thick, heavy and triggering in a way that I found, in some parts, challenging to watch (although nothing is explicit: the way the witch behaves is just so wounded) – but then she lashes out like a caged tiger, and is eventually proven to be the “deceiver” the priest says she is all along.
Wow. How many problems are there with that?
For a moment, I thought the film would be an expertly-balanced exploration of whether the “witchcraft” the girl does is real or imagined by the terrified men who keep her caged, and started to get into it – but it wasn’t at all. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It felt as if the film makers had made themselves all uncomfortable by bringing the reputation of the Church into question, and therefore had to reassure themselves that yes, everything was as it should be: any maltreatment of “the Girl” was made excusable and fine due to her actually being evil after all, and any power the girl had was due to her actually being a non-gender-applicable demon (the protagonists switch from referring to her as “her” to “it” in a single cut of film) and not a girl at all. And any accusations of rape in the first place were probably false, anyway.
All that said, my film-watching companion and I did find ourselves bellowing disruptively with laughter at several points during the film, because it really is one of those films that’s so dreadful, it’s amazing. The ill-researched sets, costume and fighting styles (that’s not how you fight with anything!) were hilarious. Nicholas Cage’s permanently worried face was hilarious. The clunky, awkward dialogue was hilarious. The scene with the wolves was side-splittingly hilarious. And the fact that it was all meant to be deadly serious and wire-sprung with tension was the best punchline of all. We certainly weren’t the only ones ruining the scary-movie-dates of young couples by howling our amusement every time a plague victim’s head exploded.
But the handling of The Girl and her abuse was not hilarious at all and made me feel quite sick.
Oh, and here’s one for the gamers: there’s a bit in the soundtrack that is nearly identical to the stealthy-mission music in Assassin’s Creed. This and the fact that Templars appear in the film combined in my mind to deadly fanboying effect.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It is such ridiculous bullshit that in places it’s genuinely funny
- It’d make an excellent cliché-spotting drinking game
- Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman make zombie plague monks explode
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- There’s racefail galore
- The Bechdel Test doesn’t even get a look-in
- No film should handle abuse in the way this one tried to
An Alphabet of Feminism #16: P is for Pussy
P
PUSSY
daaa be da-da da da da-da DA da da da da da da-da
Robert Smith, The Lovecats (1983)
What’s New Pussycat?
Where's the cat? The Toilet, by Francis Boucher (1742) (Detail)
It should take no great mind to figure out that there is a relationship between pussy and puss, right? The second is, as with so many -y words, a diminutive form of the first.
Etymologically, puss comes from a family of Germanic words, including the Dutch ‘poes’ (= ‘cat’, or ‘a large soft mass’), and this is one of those words that has had a telling journey from its initial meaning to its modern significance. In simple form, of course, it just means ‘cat’, with a tendency towards the proper name, as in Puss In Boots. The dictionary refines this to a ‘call-name’ or ‘nursery term’ for a cat, perhaps originating in the sort of ‘tsk tsk tsk’ noises even the most Serious People inevitably make when seduced by the classic paws, ears and whiskers combo (‘Here puss puss!’).
Around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pussy hit its most common modern usage as ‘the female genitals’ (‘the vulva or vagina’, specifically), with an attendant list of seductive compounds and phrases: eat pussy, pussy posse, pussy patrol, pussylicker… &c. For the moment, though, eyes on the road: pussy’s earliest non-feline meaning was ‘a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, especially sweetness or amiability’ (1580s), where it could also be used as a term of endearment (pussycat. Oh, Mr Jones, really…).
This is, natch, a colloquial usage, as is its subsidiary meaning under this banner, ‘a sweet or effeminate man’. Only later does this degenerate into the unarguably opprobrious, as ‘a weakling, a coward, a sissy’, in which sense citations tend to link it to the idea of ‘a domesticated man’, akin to a ‘house-cat’ (of which more presently). Of course, suggestions about sexuality are never far away from such mockery, and a pussy could, from its earliest beginnings, refer also to ‘a male homosexual’ (where it sits in parallel to pussy‘s final meaning as ‘the anus or mouth of a man as an object of sexual penetration’, connecting it to ‘weakling’ through the concomitant feminisation such penetration implies).
Perfect As Cats
Where's the cat in Jan Steer's The Morning Toilet (1663)? (Detail)
But to really answer the question of when and why cats became synonymous with all this, we must, as usual, ask another question: when and why did cats enter our everyday lives in the first place? It happened late: like so many modern phenomena, cats-as-companions were an eighteenth-century innovation. They had been knocking around before, of course, but primarily as pest control; those showing undue affection for their felines were considered, at best, as a bit eccentric, and, at worst, in league with Satan, and the pagan forces of Nature. Dogs had had a bit more success elbowing their way into domesticity, due to their usefulness in hunting and their essential biddability, but even for them, the eighteenth century was a golden time.
See, it’s easy to forget the fear and awe this Nature lark could inspire in the centuries before efficient systems to keep it under ‘control’, and as the European traveller elbowed his way into Asian and American forests at the dawn of the Enlightenment, he must have felt he was asserting mastery over the very earth (along with the pesky native peoples already living there, of course). With confidence comes bravado, and this increasing satisfaction with Man’s superiority over the elements quickly sparked a fashion for adopting domestic creatures. And so it was that throughout the eighteenth century, cats were welcomed into the home partially as symbols of conquest (where they were painted, along with those Definite Symbols of Conquest, monkeys, parrots and exotically dressed African slave boys).
Inevitably, anything to do with the domestic sphere comes under the auspices of the woman, and the pet-keeping craze was almost universally spoken of as a female-driven trend (although cats were also the favoured companions of weirdo intellectual types like Samuel Johnson, Christopher Smart and Horace Walpole): while the men were out brokering deals down the coffee-house, their wives lounged around in their hoop skirts with an army of diverting creatures to keep them from complete mind-numbing boredom. Of course, fail to go down the coffee-house as a Man, and you risk mockery as a ‘pussy’ in the literal sense of ‘the creature that stays at home with the woman’, viz., a house husband.
Kitten As A Cat
Where's the cat? Where's the cat? 'Le Lever de Fanchon', c18th.
So we have here a consortium of pets, creatures the woman owns, something special to her, a possession and constant companion – and it is easy to see the short step from the woman’s private domestic world to pussy in its Naughty Connotation (spot the cat! spot the cat! passim). So the coincident lexical trend that ended in pussy as genitals must have begun with something along the lines of the now-common association of pet and owner – not a surprising association, since pussy‘s cousin, moggy originally meant just plain old ‘woman or girl’, and didn’t acquire its feline associations until the early twentieth century.
And these associations were standard: we only have to look at the legion eighteenth-century portrait variants on the theme of a girl holding a kitten to see a perceived resemblance extending even to the facial: something about the cat made it a perfect image of womanhood. Its furriness could hardly have been irrelevant (nudge nudge), but the cat’s synonymity with the female must have had a lot to do with felines’ status as a convenient symbol of beauty and cruelty, known to play with their prey before killing it. Thus, little girls looking at Joshua Reynolds’ contribution to the girl/kitten portrait were instructed by an accompanying Moral Poem to look at ‘this thy furry care’ and see ‘an emblem of thyself’, since, once grown, both girl and kitten will find delight in torturing, respectively, ‘some trembling MOUSE’ and ‘some sighing SWAIN’.
We’re gift-wrapped kitty-cats…
The sexual symbolism a cat could suggest also found expression in a series of male-dominated complaints about something slightly more insidious: the familiarities their would-be lovers allowed their pets – from monkeys sharing their mistress’ beds upwards. And, unsurprisingly, there was a particularly misogynistic strain of such writing aimed at the ‘old maid’, who had replaced the never-appeared fiancé and family with a veritable menagerie of domestic animals (an idea that endures to this day, for who else is the ‘crazy cat lady’?), with an inevitable imputation in many cases that there was some kind of sexual element to the displacement, however repressed it might be.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, to find that pussy eventually resolves itself into a final definition as ‘a woman, or women collectively, regarded as a source of sexual intercourse’ (thus pussy patrol), and, in specifically prison-based slang, as ‘a man or boy regarded in this way’ (cf. bitch). Curious that feline and canine should find themselves so aligned…
NEXT WEEK: Q is for Queen
“We Three Fossils”: In Praise of Noel Streatfeild
My father took me to secondhand bookshops throughout my childhood. They were mostly the same few haunts, growing increasingly familiar over the years, although as time dragged on, we would have to cross locations off our list as they closed. For him, these were business trips: an academic must have his books, and there was always some rare tome calling him to the chase. For me, they were about tracking down Noel Streatfeild books: I was in the constant state of having read all the ones I had.
This old thing?
She has a dizzying list of titles to her name, of which I managed to snatch only a portion: most people have heard of Ballet Shoes, and, for many, it was a defining childhood book. It’s a critics’ and writers’ pet: (Dame) Jacqueline Wilson cites it as her “all-time favourite children’s book”, and the BBC has twice adapted it for television. Lots of people also know about the other ‘Shoes’ books: Dancing Shoes, White Boots, Tennis Shoes, Ballet Shoes for Anna and the Carnegie award-winning The Circus Is Coming, but maybe less are familiar with The Children of Primrose Lane, Party Shoes, the Gemma books, or Caldicott Place. Certainly, her considerable output of books for adults has largely gone unnoticed (one of which formed the basis for Ballet Shoes itself) and I myself have only read one: Saplings, an experimental novel that explores contemporary thought about child psychology in the aftermath of war. Somewhat disturbingly, it is still written from Streatfeild’s distinctive ‘child’s-eye-view’, from which vantage point it addresses issues as varied as depression, alcoholism, sex, bed-wetting, bereavement and female self-esteem (not all at once, of course).
We Three Fossils... The Fossil Vow, illustrated by Streatfeild's sister, Ruth Gervis
It has been often commented that Streatfeild’s gift is her ability to establish a rapport with her reader: she never talks down to children, and deals with difficult topics in the same way she describes everyday occurrences. Her commitment to realism in writing extends to her habit of painstakingly explaining what all the characters are thinking at all times. Thus, in Dancing Shoes, the just-orphaned Rachel is considered unloving and aggressive because she took her mother’s death with equanimity: we the readers, on the other hand, are kept aware of Rachel’s trials – how she scowls to keep from crying and wants to avoid any questions that might set her off. The child-reader is nevertheless forced to see the situation from at least two perspectives simultaneously, a common approach to Literature since Samuel Richardson, but amazingly innovative in writing for children. The result is a style that demands a responsibility from its readers as well as understanding: it accepts that life is often unfair, but invites children to consider how best to respond.
Streatfeild was famously the ‘unattractive’ middle girl in a clergyman’s family of three daughters. After the ‘beautiful child’ tradition of nineteenth-century children’s literature (best represented by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lewis Carroll), her novels frequently focus on the rebellious, the stubborn and the plain, than which no better example exists than the ‘black-doggish’ Jane Winter in The Painted Garden, which meta-fictionally reworks Hodgson Burnett’s most famous novel on a film set in Hollywood. In the absence of naive beauty and idyllic country settings, her characters must make their way on merit, and, not only plain, they are often money-minded to a startling degree: “The law lets me work; I don’t need a licence, and I can do what I like with my own money,” asserts Pauline, in Ballet Shoes, at fourteen (and she gets her way).
Dr Jakes and Dr Smith, by Ruth Gervis.
The central conceit of this novel – the absence of Great Uncle Matthew (“Gum”), who adopts the three ‘Fossils’ and then dashes off to “some strange islands” – means that the book features an essentially all-female cast. Aside from the Fossils themselves – Pauline, Petrova and Posy – the house in Cromwell Road also contains Sylvia, the children’s guardian (“Garnie”); Nana, a no-nonsense disciplinarian; Theo Dane, a dancing teacher at the Children’s Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, and Dr Smith and Dr Jakes, doctors of Maths and English respectively. These last two later move on to “a charming flat in Bloomsbury” and although aged seven I never thought to ask why two female doctors should have to live together, now I wonder if Streatfeild has not rather audaciously put a lesbian couple in a 1930s kids’ book (there are some rumours about the nature of the friendships she shared with women herself, and she has been claimed variously for a lesbian and an asexual). Certainly the illustration of the Doctors by Ruth Gervis suggests she saw it that way, even if Streatfeild may not have done: they are depicted in a stereotypical style that has barely changed since the novel was written in 1936.
The only man in sight, apart from the absent Gum, is Mr Simpson, a border who teaches Petrova all about cars and then must go back to his ‘rubber trees’ in Kuala Lumpur. And while Pauline and Posy have looks and interests to endear them to the most pink and fluffy reader going, Petrova remains as stubbornly boyish as that perennially scruffy heroine of female fiction, Little Women‘s Jo: when the dancing school plan is first mentioned, Nana hopes it will “turn her more like a little lady” – Petrova “never plays with dolls, and takes no more interest in her clothes than a scarecrow”.
Alas for Nana, Petrova ends up spending auditions “flying an imaginary airplane on a new route to China”, and by the end of the book, is a determined aviator: “Amy Mollison and Jean Batten will be [in the history books], but not as important at you”, promises Pauline, imagining the distinctly un-fluffy story such books will tell: ‘[She] found routes by which goods could be carried at greater speed and less cost, and so she revolutionized trade.” Hardly the dreams of a ‘beautiful child’.
For Petrova, as for so many of Streatfeild’s children not given to performing art (and there are a surprising number, despite her reputation), the most important lesson of stage school is self-sufficiency, a goal underlined across all the books by the fact that the overwhelming majority of child-characters have no parents to speak of, or are lumbered with a domineering guardian to struggle against (notably in Ballet Shoes For Anna and White Boots). With their realist emphasis, and the lessons that ‘even’ little girls can get on in a world assailed by stupidity, war, and even natural disasters, I can think of no better author to recommend to absolutely everyone you know.
Women, Men, and Music: the XY Factor, Part 2
Part One of this article identified a split in approaches to music between the intellectual and abstract and the personal and emotive. This is, of course, a false dichotomy, as is the concomitant view of the former approach as a male preserve and the latter a female one. It’s not like emotional engagement can’t be channelled into sharp and intelligent critique. And it’s not like girls are incapable of dry and po-faced analysis (an album review of mine once received the amusingly disgruntled response “I bet you write for The Wire, you pretentious cunt”. I mean, chance would be a fine thing). Neither are male writers incapable of experiencing or articulating an emotional reaction. Gender has no intrinsic – as opposed to socially and culturally instilled – effect on how an individual engages with music. But the effects of cultural conditioning in creating this false dichotomy, and the degree to which ‘male’ ways of music writing are privileged – the existence of what Everett True describes as a dominant male hive mind – goes some way towards explaining why female music writers are so scarce in the mainstream press.
Music criticism as presently constructed has an undeniable tendency to discourage female participation. Sarah Barnes recalls that when writing her first album review:
I felt out of my depth, because my experiences of music reviewing told me that what I wrote had to be very technical, almost cold. All that technical knowledge seemed very male, and I think I had picked up on this as a pre-requisite in music criticism from reading copies of Kerrang … or listening to my boyfriend reeling off genres and sub-genres until my head starts spinning.
More recently, Aoife Barry’s study of gender imbalance in music magazines compares reading The Wire to ‘poring over academic texts in an attempt to formulate an answer for an essay due the next day; the feeling that out of the dry sentences I have to pull something tangible that makes sense to me’.
Image by Flickr user happyfacesrock, shared under a Creative Commons license.
The masculinist bent of mainstream music criticism has seen certain forms of engagement with music – attention to the emotional, the pleasure-seeking, the glittery, the silly, the frivolous, the undeadly serious – conceptualised as less deserving concerns, and downgraded accordingly, along with musical genres – pop, glam, disco – which are seen as primarily catering to these concerns. So in order to be taken seriously, to do ‘proper’ criticism, one must elevate cerebral, scholarly Pure Music and implicitly disparage the dizzy, gushing immediacy of the personal Applied. Better a nitpicking Hornbyite geek than a groupie, regardless of the degree to which these categories can and do overlap in the same individual.
However nebulous or subconscious this construction may be, it ties in unhelpfully with rock-solid sexism and gender imbalance within the media and the music industry to reinforce both the image and reality of music writing as a boys’ club. As this excellent overview explains:
Periodicals like Rolling Stone and websites like Pitchfork Media – which have largely usurped print publications – tend to discuss the appearances of women more often than those of men, take their music less seriously, stereotype them and incorrectly attribute their successes to male coworkers. These double standards govern how women and men are viewed in general, rather than being specific to music criticism and reporting. Music journalism is a product of its culture’s gender roles and consumer demands. When this culture combines with mainstream pop and rock publications’ largely male staff and the sexism already prevalent in the music business they address, critics unwittingly carry on tropes that they have the power to ameliorate.
So, as noted ice-skater V. I. Lenin once asked, what is to be done? First, let’s acknowledge how many women are interested, engaged, and actively writing about music. Female music bloggers may still constitute a niche, but as all these sites show, we are out there. Blogs are necessary and useful – journalist and promoter Sara Sherr urges female writers to ‘pitch, pitch, pitch… If no one publishes you, start a blog’ – but should be accompanied by a concerted attempt to address the mainstream’s failure to acknowledge the validity of other voices, and to recognise the benefits of a personal and emotional contribution, in its construction of a credible approach to music.
The more women who are seen to be writing about music, the more women will write about music, and the more the dynamics and conventions and hierarchies of writing about music (by both women and men) change because of more equal participation in it, the more we all benefit, the more the form progresses. – Frances Morgan
Active and visible participation by women is a key part of promoting perspectives beyond the mainstream, an expansion which can only enrich the analysis, understanding and enjoyment of music. The road we take from here needs to pass through the land of a thousand dances as well as a thousand doctorates.
For Rhian Jones’s own blog, hop over to Velvet Coalmine.
Women, Men, and Music: the XY Factor, Part 1
Let me begin with some residual New Year bonhomie by saying that the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross is not the problem here. It’s just that one sometimes needs to take an inventory of the symptoms before starting on the cause. Last month I attended a talk by Ross on the release of his latest book. The talk and the discussion which followed were was interesting enough, but throughout the evening I couldn’t help noticing that, although there were several women in attendance, every single raised voice in the room was male.
Hardly revelatory, I know. This time last year, I contributed to a relatively prominent and very good music blog’s retrospective on the best songs of the past decade. More depressing if grimly predictable than Kate Nash’s inclusion in the best-of was the fact that, out of over forty contributors, I was one of only two women. From the demise of Plan B magazine, with its conscious commitment to encouraging female writers, to Anwyn Crawford’s recent rebuke of The Wire, the current lack of female voices in mainstream music criticism is a truth universally acknowledged.
It takes all sorts. Image by Flickr user Derek K Miller shared under Creative Commons licensing.
As part of Ross’s audience, I’m not saying I felt excluded or unwelcome, nor did I find the questions less interesting, relevant or articulate for being asked in a masculine rather than feminine register. But something did click with me when, towards the discussion’s end, a man towards the front reticently asked Ross: “This might sound a silly question, but – do you like to dance?”
The opening caveat there is as important as the question itself. Let’s start with the latter, which threw into sharp relief the varying ways one can engage with music. Let’s call the difference that of Pure versus Applied. Where Alex Ross excels is his ability to demystify music, separating and examining its component parts. This scholarly and almost clinical approach can succeed brilliantly, particularly when discussing Ross’s first love, classical music. But, as an exclusive approach, I find it lacking, and the absence of attention to dancing helps explain why.
I find it very hard to think of any song I truly love that I cannot also dance to – whether by ‘dance’ I mean drunken mock-waltzing to (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais or that routine one does to Killing in the Name Of which involves attempting to stab your knees with your eyebrows. I intellectually analyse the music I love, scouring its lyrical content and its social and cultural context for meaning to enhance my enjoyment of it, but not necessarily to justify my enjoying it in the first place. I am equally interested simply in experiencing its rhythm, its flow, its grind, its melody, the way it makes me want to move as well as the mechanics of how it achieves that, its impact on my body as well as my brain. I attach as much weight to a physical and emotional response as to a cerebral anatomising of music. Until that question was asked, the talk had concentrated wholly on the latter, lacking any consideration of the former, equally useful, dimension of how music works. So no, it wasn’t ‘a silly question’. Why the questioner, and we, might feel that it is, perhaps approaches the heart of the matter.
I’m sceptical of the patronising and reductive idea that men and women appreciate music in intrinsically different ways, men with a cold and technical analysis and women with an exclusively personal and emotional response. But this scepticism is a continual struggle against the weight of cultural conditioning and its success in bequeathing to boys and girls approved modes of engagement. The male = analytical/female = emotional dichotomy is a counterproductive product of social training, and identifying and questioning this assumption in relation to engagement with music is part of breaking down the barriers between genders and combating sexism in general. Doing so is hindered, however, by the extent to which these different approaches are accorded varying weight in wider discourse, with prevailing attitudes in music criticism privileging one over another. The implications of this will be explored in Part Two.
For Rhian Jones’s own blog, hop over to Velvet Coalmine.
An Alphabet of Feminism #15: O is for Ovary
O
OVARY
Oh! Darling.
Ovary hopped onto the semantic stage around 1658 meaning ‘the female organ of reproduction in animals, in which ova or eggs are produced’ (ova being the Latin plural form of ovum = egg). Eggs, of course, are now generally recognised as a crucial part of reproduction in all species (a chicken ovulates every day, fact fans), making the ovary rather important for the construction of little’uns. Straightforwardly, the word derives from ovarium: ‘ovum’ + ‘-arium’ (aquarium, oceanarium, planetarium, toastarium). Consistency: it’s helpful. But hold! 1658? Really? What about before? Was there some mass genital evolution in the late seventeenth century that made early modern cisgendered Woman so drastically different from her medieval sisters?
Hartsoeker's drawings of 'homunculi', or 'little humans' inside sperm. (1695)
Well no, but there was an evolution in what Scientists considered “Woman” to be. For hundreds of thousands of years previous, the established thinking had been that they were simply men ‘turned outside-in’: female genitals were held ‘up there’ by a colder body temperature than their male counterparts, and, thus, sex differences were a matter of degree. Women were men who hadn’t quite unfurled properly.
Oh My God
With this thinking, the vagina became an inverted penis, the labia a foreskin, the uterus a scrotum, and the ovaries testicles – and all these now-familiar gynecological terms date from the same period: the oft-maligned vagina (= ‘sheath’) is faux-Latin from 1680, labia (= ‘lip’) slightly earlier (1630s) and uterus the earliest, from 1610 (although, as already mentioned in these pixellated pages, it was conflated with the gender-neutral ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, its original Latinate meaning). Pre-seventeenth century ovaries were consequently referred to as ‘female testicles’ or ‘stones’, and the synonymity was so literal as to accept the possibility that if a girl got too hot through strenuous exercise, her entire reproductive system could accidentally pop out and turn her into a boy.
So if sex was a false distinction to make, how did male and female manage to breed? Seventeenth-century scientists approached this question firstly through Aristotle and his theory of epigenesis (= ‘origin through growth’). Aristotle reckoned male semen gave the embryo its form, and female menstrual blood supplied the raw materials.1 The ‘soul’ enters the embryo at the moment the mother first feels the baby kick.
However, by suggesting new people can spring into being organically, epigenesis risks dispensing with divine involvement. Not cool. So a much more palatable alternative, for seventeenth-century scientists, was preformation (the idea that the parents’ seed already contained a miniature adult, so all the embryo has to do is increase in size). Bit creepy, right? Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725) was well into this idea and even claimed he could see these ‘homunculi’ through the microscope (above, right).
But once this had been agreed, there came the inevitable Swiftian debate about how you like your eggs, with scientists divided into ‘aminalculists’ and ‘ovists’: those who were with Hartsoeker in believing the ‘germ’ of life to be in the sperm, and those who preferred the ‘egg’ (= ‘the female’). Arguing in favour of the latter was the (understandable) confusion about why God would be so wasteful as to create thousands of Hartsoekerean sperm-germs to be lost on every egg-ward excursion for the sake of one single fertilization: from the outside, the female looked a bit more efficient.
Oh! You Pretty Things
But clearly, all this Knowledge was better on the subject of males than females (and even the women themselves were hard pressed to explain menstruation or recognise pregnancy): ova were still shrouded in mystery, and ovulation a great unknown – it was not even certain whether human females could conceive without orgasm, or if they were more like cats, rabbits, llamas (now known as ‘induced ovulators’) and, er, men. Official advice erred on the side of caution and recommended that both man and wife reach orgasm during procreation – as a side-effect, a rapist could get off scott-free if his victim fell pregnant, since, until the nineteenth century, the law worked backwards and considered conception to imply enjoyment and, therefore, consent.
It is William Harvey (1578-1657), most famous for ‘discovering’ the circulation of the blood, who is commonly credited with realising the importance of an ovary-thing, and the frontispiece to his treatise on the subject blazons the tag ‘ex ovo omnia‘ (‘everything from the egg’). But he was thinking less of a modern day ‘egg cell‘ and more of a ‘spirit’: an egg was the mother’s ‘idea’ of a fetus which was ‘ignited’ in her womb during sex. It was a general generative catalyst, not technical anatomy – as is clear from the image (below, left).
Can of worms... The frontispiece to Harvey's Treatise on Generation (detail). Image from http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/
Oh My Gosh
After kicking around for just over a century, ovary suddenly became enshrined in anatomy books as an independent organ that somehow encapsulated ‘woman’: in 1844 Achille Chereau declared that ‘it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is’ (oh dear). In part, this was to do with a retreat from the previous centuries’ idea that women and men were anatomically the same and an advance towards the notion that sex equalled gender (a surprisingly modern invention, if you listen to Thomas Laqueur). With this came an increasing focus on specifically ‘women’s’ problems via hysteria (= ‘womb trouble’), and, neatly (if disturbingly) a favourite cure for this pre-Freud was the bilateral ovariotomy, also dubbed ‘female castration’: removing a patient’s healthy ovaries to man them up a bit (just as men become ‘feminized’ through removal of the testicles). The ovariotomy would thus, it was believed, act not just as a cure for hysteria, but also for behavioural pathologies including nymphomania, and even general aches and pains. Of course, it also stopped menstruation, rendered women infertile and carried risks endemic to c19th surgery methods. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS DOES, SO LET’S JUST TAKE IT OUT.
It was not until the 1930s that scientists got near a hormonal understanding of ovulation, how it worked and how it could be controlled. Here we really should give a nod to that symbol of 1960s sexual liberation: the combined oral contraceptive pill, a great source of division between parents and children, as epitomised in the backstory to the seminal Beatles song She’s Leaving Home (1967). See, children of the 1920s and 30s must have found the idea of their daughters silently and imperceptibly controlling their ovulation terrifying, whereas the children of the 1960s saw such control as simple empowerment. In miniature, this gives us the whole history of ovary and its linguistic cognates: what cannot be seen is inevitably free for appropriation by a host of meanings. Meaningarium.
Further Reading:
- Making Visible Embryos – an ‘online exhibition’ from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. And Thomas Laqueur, of course (as linked).
NEXT WEEK: P is for Pussy
- Yes, menstrual blood. [↩]
I made a category on this blog a bit ago called History Is Awesome. I planned to fill it with INCREDIBLE TALES OF DERRING DO from the feminist-relevant pages of history. Time to make a start! For Halloween 2010 I dressed up as Undead Anne Bonny. Some subsequent thinking ‘n’ reading led me to decide that what BadRep needs is a short run of posts about the lives and legends of history’s roughin’ toughin’ ladypirates.
Sea Queens
I’d barely heard of any ladies who swashed, let alone buckled, until Sarah J lent me this book, a 280 page lesson in “just because you ain’t heard of them, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist”. So, you may have heard of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, because they’re in the rather tabloidy A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724 and written by probably-Daniel-Defoe-with-a-pseudonym. But it didn’t start and end with them!
LADIES ON BOATS: got up to more than this lass, it turns out.
Now, I’ll try not to glorify the murderating tendencies and obvious criminality of historical ladypirates just because they were ladies. But it did surprise me at Halloween to find a fair few fellow party-punters believing no women pirates existed at all. Isn’t Elizabeth Swann’s turn as the Pirate King, they asked, in That Obviously Very Historically Accurate Movie Franchise, a total wishful? A lady pirate king; that just takes the disbelief-suspension cake, right?
Wrong! Lady pirates, though rare in history, are one of the few things in those films whose historical accuracy should not be in dispute. (Jury’s out on Governor Swann’s periwig.)
Lives and Legends
It should be noted before we go any further that “lives” and “legends” are difficult to separate, and this is arguably even more the case for the women than for the dudes, simply because more has been written, in general, on the dudes, who were greater in number. That book, that started me on my research? You can’t easily get a new copy of that in England any more right now, unfortunately (keep watching Amazon though), and there aren’t all that many books in print that aren’t 50% retellings of the myths we have. So these posts will have to be as concerned with fun storytelling and legend-sharing as anything else.
I’m going to start with a woman who lived in a castle1 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, headed up a family of notorious pillagers, and was pushing 70 at her most notorious. Her name was Lady Killigrew.
Killiwho?
Um. Actually, there are at least two pirate Lady Killigrews in the Killigrew Family Tree. Based in Falmouth, Cornwall, the family were sufficiently piratical that more than one Lady Killigrew was active within the same fifty years – Mary first, then Elizabeth. Hearsay has tangled them together so that their deeds are difficult to separate without writing a book. I’ll treat the legend here as one woman.
It’s important to understand that being uproariously criminal at sea didn’t necessarily make the Killigrew family, who were aristocrats, wanted criminals all over England; quite the opposite. Many of them received Letters of Marque from Elizabeth I; licence to go ahead and pillage, as long as it’s the pesky Spanish, in short. (Francis Drake? Arguably a hero of this sort of patriotic piracy, commonly referred to as “privateering”). Lady Killigrew’s husband was a big shot in the Navy with precisely this sort of Season Pass for pirating on foreign ships himself.
Guys, Nobody Wore Thigh High Stilettos In 1582
So, historians aren’t certain on all the details of the lives of the Killigrew women. Nor is anyone on DeviantArt (WHO IS SURPRISED) which houses a few ‘artist’s impression’ jobs, a couple of which have blown through the internet on an ill wind, originating, I presume, from somewhere on the cutting room floor for Dead Or Alive: Buccaneer Babes Edition.
What we do know for definite is that Lady (probably E) Killigrew had a long career hoarding the profits of a full-on smuggling racket at the family home, until she ended up on trial for an Incident in her mid-sixties (setting an indefatigable example to all angry older women that makes me think Moira Stewart should sail up the Thames in a galleon, storm the BBC and steal her job back.)
The legend of the Incident, attributed to both Ladies E and M Killigrew in different accounts I’ve read (though records show Lady E definitely went on trial for something piratical), goes something like:
- A horrendous storm rocked Falmouth to its very foundations. A Spanish trade ship struggled into dock. Bedraggled sailors made their way to the castle.
- This was their first mistake, for old Lady K saw them coming. And stocked up on pastries.
- The lure of a crackling fire, tankards of ale, and the friendly jurisdiction of a respectable old lady was strong. The sailors spilled the beans about what was on their 144-tonne ship (a lucrative lot of cloth cargo). Lady K advised them to stick around until the weather was fair, even going out of her way to set them up at a guesthouse in Penryn, further up the coast. The ship was left entirely under Lady Killigrew’s watch. The sailors left Castle Killigrew praising their good fortune – the Lady was married to the guy in charge of stamping out piracy, so leaving their ship under her watch was surely safe.
- Except for the part where Lady Killigrew up and stole the boat.
The whole boat.Had it towed clean out of the bay.
- On the dark night of 6th January 1582, the stormclouds hadn’t cleared. The story goes that she actually had herself rowed out to where the ship was docked and personally presided over the seizure. Guards were jumped and done in, booty was loaded into rowboats, and the entire ship towed up the coast by her dedicated staff of heavies.
- The sailors returned to Falmouth in the morning. “Ship?” said Lady K’s doormen. “What ship?” Bingo: GRAND THEFT BOATO.
… there are a number of versions of this story. In some, like I say, it’s Mary Killigrew in charge, rather than Elizabeth. In some, Lady K takes up arms and leads a gang of armed privateers onto the ship to ransack it while the majority of the sailors are in Penryn. In some, a small-scale battle takes place in the harbour. In others, she simply empties the ship of its cargo, leaving an empty boat for the sailors.
But I like the version where she steals the boat best. You can’t begrudge me that. (BOAT!, as Kate Beaton would say.)
“Who’s Queen?”
Elizabeth I is famed in TV-spot history shorthand for her knack for staking out and maintaining middle ground. Whatever the detailed truth of that, she managed the ecclesiastical schisms that plagued England at the time bloody well by the, er, bloody standards, and seems to have clocked with reliable diplomatic intuition just when, how, and how far to take out the trash.
Unfortunately, this Fun With Boats was a bridge too far, and Lizzie, under pressure from some irate Spanish ambassadors, duly stuck Lady Killigrew on trial for piracy. However, the Queen clearly wasn’t wildly bothered – or at least, privateering was probably still politically useful to her – so within weeks she’d issued a pardon, and Lady K headed home to live out her days merrily fencing stolen goods in that basement ’til she died. She has a snazzy tombstone, complete with brass etching, at… a place. The freewheeling anarchist press that published my book haven’t actually captioned the picture with a location. This is irksome for trivia-thirsty feminerds like me, and begs the question: when are we going to get a big-guns mainstream-academic book about these women? At this rate I’ll have to write it and pay the rest of Team BadRep in rum to edit out my overuse of the capslock key and the word “AWESOME”.
To balance out the boobtacular hi-jinks on DeviantArt, here’s an illustration with historically plausible costuming.
"Heh, park the boat round the back, boys! ... anyone for scones?"
Next time you hear a sexist joke at work about how women just aren’t dog-eat-dog enough to be the CEO, imagine Lady Killigrew, and do her proud. (But don’t shanghai your boss’s BMW out the car park. Age of CCTV, and all that.)
- Which lesser-known sea-queen shall I do next? Grace O’Malley, maybe. Never heard of her? STICK AROUND. HISTORY IS AWESOME.
- EDIT: or at least, her family occupied one part-time as caretakers-to-the-crown, as one of our commenters has helpfully pointed out below. [↩]
Assassin’s Creed: The Frank Miller Effect Strikes Again
Oh, BadRep. How I wish I didn’t have to write the article I’m writing now. How I wish that everything we fall in love with in the entertainment industry was miles and miles from feministic reproach. How I wish that something, somewhere would just do everything right and not suck in sudden and unexpected ways.
Today, I’m subverting my own trope and writing about a game. I do love a good computer game. I like ones with excellent, flawed characters, and even more excellent, bizarre plots. I like them big and sweeping and mind-bending, ideally with some kind of stealth element and something freaky and supernatural in the mix. So naturally, I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Dear god do I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
“Love” is probably not the right word. It’s not enough to convey the level of brain-melting, nose-bleed-inducing obsession I have with it. It doesn’t illustrate the way I dissolve into a twitching heap when exposed to the soundtrack, or that I screamed at the ending of the first game and spent the next week – avoiding spoilers – sleeplessly deciphering it with the aid of the internet. “Love” just doesn’t cover it. My affection for it is worrying. It feeds my soul with the purest, shimmering godlike joy from on high through a glee tube.
So please understand how hard it is for me to criticise it in any way.
The franchise is, as the title may suggest, about Assassins with a capital A: not hitmen-for-hire, but the original Hashshashin, a devoted army of politically-motivated killers locked in a battle against the Knights Templar in an exciting tangle of conspiracy theory fodder that gets increasingly bizarre as the series continues. Most of the characters are male. This is partially a reflection on the time period in question (mid-Crusades era Syria and the Italian Renaissance) but also because, according to trope, there is only one type of female assassin.
“What type is that?” I hear you cry, perplexed that there should be more than one type of Assassin at all.
You already know. It’s the Sex Assassin. The one that lures in the victim with sexual desire, and then! when they’re at their most vulnerable! murders them with stabbing.
This trope is old. The Sex Assassin is inevitably female. She’s the Battle Whore; a sexually desirable object of cunning, guise and stabbing, and it’s exciting because there she is! Subverting regular heterosexual intercourse by penetrating the man she’s seduced! With a knife. Do you see what they did there! Surely we are all undone with the inventiveness. Women being all deadly and effective! But only if couched in the narrative device of being used as a sex object. That is the only way they can be empowered, apparently.
I desperately hoped that my beloved Assassin’s Creed would break free of this trope and give us some hard-ass, female battle bastards, but it doesn’t, really. I looked at the line-up of playable classes for the most recent massive release, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and there’s an array of interesting traditionally male roles: you’ve got a tank hangman, a plague doctor and a priest… and then there’s the woman. There she is, at the back. You can tell that she’s The Woman because there’s an awful lot of cleavage going on.
One of these is not like the others.
She’s a Sex Assassin. That’s what she is. Because she’s a woman. What else would she do? She’s special! She has breasts, unlike all the other people in the world, who are apparently all hard, breastless, cisgendered men. Women and their breasts are magical and rare, much like unicorns. So naturally, she’ll be a Sex Assassin because goodness me, we can’t have any of the guys doing that. Because they don’t have breasts. And men are not sex objects for anyone ever. Also, that’d be gay. And that’s terrible!
There’s also a female harlequin, available as an optional extra. And that’s brilliant, because the harlequins are terrifying, androgynous, lithe and competent (exactly what you want from an Assassin, really) and it really is nice to see a deadly, dangerous female character that isn’t a sex worker. But – an optional extra?! Why am I having to look for female characters who aren’t clinging desperately to the Lady Sex Assassin trope like a koala bear to the last damn eucalyptus tree on earth?
The second game (well, of the big platform releases; there’s been numerous spin-offs and blah blah blah, massive nerd dump on the series goes here, honestly, you’re better served asking Wikipedia than me because it is massively less drooling) is no better. Ezio, our hero, has to learn how to be stealthy and to pickpocket people. So, he learns from a female stealth expert. Guess what she is! Correct! A concubine. Because, of course, there is no other sort of dangerous woman. All other women in Assassin’s Creed II are either harrowed victims in a revenge cycle, or Ezio’s passive, faceless lovers.
And what’s the deal with sex workers being cast as “dangerous”, anyway? Is it yet another embodiment of Evil Female Sexuality, wherein a woman in control of her own sexuality is deemed “savage” or “out of control”? Or is it some kind of “trap” issue? The normative dialogue is that Mr. Cisgendered Manly McHeterosexual takes the first step towards initiating sexual contact; our Ms. Sex Assassin twists that by being the one that does the seducing instead. The assumption, then, is that the seducer is the dangerous one, being as that men are the ones to usually instigate sex, and I’ve dropped my monocle in horror.
However! It’s not all bad news. Sidestepping any spoilers, Assassin’s Creed I and II have “framing” characters away from the time-travelling stabbination who are female Assassins. They don’t stab anyone up, but are actually totally brilliant, stealthy and clever, and frequently save the (male) protagonist. There! That’s the juice without any spoilers. The modern-day framing narrative characters rock my entire world, even though they’re not as action-entrenched as Altaïr or Ezio.
Recently, one of the wonderful Ubisoft community developers I follow on Twitter linked to some beautiful Assassin’s Creed-related artwork. “Sexy Assassin!” they said. I exploded with joy all over the internet and clicked through, hoping, as I always do, to find hot male pin-up.
Well. I found this.
I mean, look at it. It’s gorgeously done. I can’t paint even remotely that well. Hats off to the skills there! It’s completely brilliant! And who doesn’t like stockings? Nobody. Stockings are a sure-fire winner. And, you know, I’m a fan of knives and stockings. So that’s good.
But do you see the point I’m making? Women apparently can’t be Assassins unless they’re some kind of Sex Assassin. No! Please! It is perfectly possible to have scary, efficient, ruthless, politically-minded, devoted, armoured Assassins who are women. Please give your female gamers someone to identify with who is tough and awesome without the over-riding message that the only way for them to be so is to give themselves sexually to men.
And, you know, I know this has been said before but – what’s with the lack of male pin-ups? Why can’t we have male Sex Assassins? What’s going on there? Ezio is certainly meant to be sexy, and there’s lots of handsome portraiture of both him and the lovely Altaïr from the first game in the fanart-producing sector of the fandom. But nothing quite like the “Sexy Assassin” I’ve linked to above. Where’s all the ludicrous cheese and posturing? I love cheese and posturing. Ezio is one of the cheesiest posturers of any videogame character I have ever seen. So where’s the pictures of him in just the hood draped all over Florence like it’s a city-sized chaise longue?
So, Ubisoft, if you’re reading, I gift to you the following three illustrations:
NUMBER ONE: the battle-worn avenger who kills for her beliefs and her Hashshashin family.
NUMBER TWO: the wise, old Master who is not to be under-estimated despite her years.
NUMBER THREE: Altaïr (artist’s impression thereof) in stockings doing a cheesecake.
NOTE TO READERS: I really do love Assassin’s Creed more than anything; please don’t let this article lead you to believe otherwise.
OTHER NOTE TO READERS: Anyone who suggests that I wrote this article as an excuse to draw Altaïr in lingerie is a heretic and liar and probably a Templar. The Brotherhood are watching you.
Image credits for the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood box art lie firmly in the hands of Ubisoft.
- Postscript: So then Ubisoft actually read this post, and Markgraf wrote a follow-up. You can read that here.