Found Feminism: Lady Pirate
There’s an issue that pirate-fans such as myself and Miranda are very aware of. It’s an issue that is fairly common to women characters in the fantasy genre and is closely linked to Chainmail Bikini Syndrome. Miranda calls it the Nautical Sexpot Problem.
Shiver me timbers. I bet she’s cold.
We both enjoy reading about and discovering stories about women pirates.
Sadly, they are often poorly represented in pop culture and in advertising as little more than the aforementioned nautical sexpots, turning up, as women sadly often do, only to prove that the central male characters are heterosexual and dashing.
The example on the left is a good one. This was taken from a pirate-themed crazy golf park. The male pirates had clothes. And coats. And treasure. All kinds of useful pirate things.
This is the trope we are used to – men representing the cut and thrust of the character, women thrown in for a bit of titillation (assuming that you like your titillation in this form, and sadly we live in a universe were that is the the assumption).
But all is not lost, me hearties!
There’s a sea-change coming. If we set sail to Hastings, that lesser known bastion of cut-throat feminism, there is a weather-beaten and battered but nonetheless awesome figure of a woman pirate on the roof of a restaurant.
A far cry from scantily-clad mermaids attempting to flog battered cod and chips – and a very refreshing change, as well as two fingers up to all the people who think that a woman’s place is stapled to the prow of a ship.
Avast in front! Now you’re talking.
No high seas bikini here! She’s got an outfit suitable for Proper Adventuring, she’s steering a boat, and she’s got treasure, which (aside from clothing that protects you from the elements and your enemies) is what every pirate wants.
Throw in the eyepatch and a pet crow (plus points for cool animal companion) and she’s ready to plunder the high seas.
So, aside from the fact that we’ve finally (finally!) got a female character in a similar position and costume to male characters, what really makes this a Found Feminism for me is the placement: we’re so used to having female characters as the special, odd one out, look-at-me-I’m-a-girl that having this figure here without any particular attention drawn to it makes it all the better.
It’s not a special Lady Pirate Restaurant, it’s just a bit of pirate ship decor which also happens to have a normalised, non-stereotyped female pirate aboard.
I’ve long flown the flag for giving women characters equal weighting in stories, especially fantasy and sci-fi fiction, where writers and audiences get the joy of experiencing other worlds that aren’t bound by the tedious social rules of our own – including sexism.
On intersectional feminism: Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.
I wrote a quick and exasperated post recently on what I perceived to be a reductive, stereotyping and patronising use of the term ‘working-class’ cropping up in a lot of otherwise well-meaning writing. I was initially inspired by the editors of Vagenda Magazine’s defence of Caitlin Moran, but the surrounding debate and its systemic problems are bigger than both of these. Despite retaining their article as a jumping-off point, therefore, I’m less interested in the specifics of Vagenda themselves than in giving a more considered explanation of some of the reasons behind my annoyance with the idea that intersectional feminism and ‘comprehensible’, ‘accessible’ feminism are somehow incompatible.
One reason behind how badly the Vagenda article was received was, I think, the authors’ attempt to address a relatively specific issue (‘Leave Caitlin alone, she’s working-class and hardly anyone else in the UK media is!’ – as if that isn’t in itself a whacking great elephant in the room, on which more later), and to address it in the more or less specific context of the kind of feminism they’d seen and experienced in the UK, without recognising that, well, feminism is really fucking big.
As explained in this post, ‘feminism’, even just within the UK, is not and never has been exclusively ‘a white, middle class movement’. The history, theory and practice of feminism is diverse, multiracial, international, and takes in issues of class, age and sexuality among others. Throughout feminism’s development there have been, as noted here, tension, discussion and conflict within the movement over how this diversity is represented, and, as noted here in 2008, there continue to be.
The concept of intersectionality is, in part, a way of helping to articulate this diversity. This was the very term Vagenda identified, oddly, as an example of unhelpfully academic language, when in fact, as the vast majority of responses to their article have pointed out, it’s one that’s relatively simple to explain by reference to lived experience. It’s also a term whose practical relevance is easily proved; in the immediate fall-out from Caitlin Moran’s failure to question Lena Dunham on the racial diversity of Girls, her fellow journalist Bim Adewunmi did a comprehensive and accessible job of clarifying why this mattered, both explaining intersectionality and making a positive case for it:
I am a woman, a black woman born in London to Nigerian parents, a Muslim woman (who does not wear a hijab or veil). I am educated and self-employed but relatively low-earning. These things, as standalones or collectively, define how I see the world. One often bleeds into the other so comprehensively, they seem almost interchangeable. This is, in its most basic form, what we call intersectionality: the idea that we wear a lot of caps, and often in challenging one wrong, we are challenging many. In reading that Moran tweet, my first thought was: “I cannot afford to take off my ‘race cap’ and focus just on the plain ol’ sexism that plagues the television industry; and nor do I want to.” – Source
Intersectionality allows the integration of systems of oppression – patriarchy, capitalism, racism, among others – to be identified, analysed, and challenged, and it provides a means of transcending and critiquing single-issue politics. The theory may be obscure, the practice surely is not.
There is an identifiable, and to some extent understandable, urge within some pop-feminist platforms to crusade against a feminism which they describe as too theoretical, remote and academic to gain mass appeal. The idea of a divide between academic and populist ways of promoting progressive politics is not unique to feminism; a similar debate periodically engulfs much of the left. How can ‘ordinary women’, or indeed ‘ordinary people’, be appealed to in language which will resonate with their everyday concerns and not alienate them by using words of more than two syllables?
But the first half of that question doesn’t automatically imply the second. Being ‘ordinary’ doesn’t mean being stupid. It doesn’t mean not having been to university either. Politics predicated on the assertion of an academic/middle-class versus populist/working-class divide are, at best, disingenuous, presenting as mutually exclusive what is surely more a question of priorities.
There is a difference between wishing to focus on ‘ordinary’, material concerns – the gradual erosion of living and working standards under the present government; closures and funding cuts to women’s refuges and childcare services; the removal of housing, child, and disability benefits – and assuming that the people affected by these concerns cannot recognise, analyse and talk about them for themselves, in language which can be sophisticated as well as rudimentary.
Too often, in debates within feminism – often valid and necessary debates – over how best to engage ‘ordinary women’, these women are implicitly othered, there to be appealed to and won over by more enlightened middle-class feminists rather than considered capable of engaging in the debate on their own terms and by themselves.
In such narratives, liberal commentators often employ presumptious ideas of what ‘a working-class girl’ might think of feminism, without having any meaningful direct experience of this on which to draw. Back in March, by contrast, the Camden New Journal writer Pavan Amara produced an excellent piece for The F-Word in which she interviewed a variety of working-class women and recorded their opinions and attitudes towards feminism. Her conclusion – that working-class women face preoccupying problems of poverty and inequality, and frequently regard mainstream feminism as remote and irrelevant – is the same kind of thing that Vagenda’s post was trying to get at, but far more plausibly expressed and empirically grounded. My problem lies not with that argument itself, but with the patronising ideas about class which seem to inform so many presentations of the argument.
It’s particularly galling to see an assertion with which I agree – that class is an aspect of identity too often left out of debate – being used in ways which can actually shore up negative assumptions about class. From Vagenda’s article:
Going into certain state comps and discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse (what are they going to do? Protect or feed themselves with theory? Women cannot dine on Greer alone.) “This woman does not represent me”, they will think of their well-meaning lecturer, because how can she, with her private education and her alienating terminology and her privilege, how can she know how poverty gnaws away at your insides and suppresses your voice? How would she know how that feels?
(I assume there’s been an unintended elision between secondary and university education made there, since in my state comprehensive we had teachers, not lecturers, and I’d be frankly astounded if any of them had been privately educated – they’d been educated, yes, but by the state, exactly as I was being. ‘State-educated’ shouldn’t be used as a synonym for ‘stupid’ either.)
Generalisations like this are often in danger of buying into narratives which see working-class parents, schools and communities as unable to impart education or instil political consciousness in the same way as their middle-class counterparts, and which present working-class girls as the helpless inhabitants of some kind of neo-Victorian netherworld, a perspective which is, again, less helpful than it clearly wishes to be.
What this perspective also neglects is that Women’s Studies, at least in the UK, was rooted to a large extent in attempts by women of generally less privileged backgrounds to question and critique the privileges of existing academia and to draw attention to neglected perspectives and experiences, including those marginalised by virtue of class, race, age and sexuality. That feminism in academia is now considered middle-class and irrelevant perhaps says more about the squeezing out of attention to and discussion of class-based analysis within it; the erosion of empowering traditions of adult education and of self-education through libraries and community colleges; and the pricing out at postgraduate and increasingly at undergraduate level of poorer students, than anything about education’s intrinsic appeal to and suitability for anyone outside the bourgeoisie.
The unhelpful aspects of these well-intentioned arguments are compounded by the fact that those who find themselves in the position to make them to a mass audience are hardly ever working-class themselves. The restriction of access to politics, media, arts and entertainment to those with the parental support or independent wealth to get them through unpaid internships, or maintain them in precarious freelance work, is referenced increasingly often as it becomes more glaringly apparent, but hardly ever with a view to how the situation might be changed. Caitlin Moran is frequently held up as a representative of The Real World on the grounds that she had it tough once upon a time, as though her current individual high profile makes up for the fact that there is hardly any mainstream media or political platform for those who continue to have it tough right now. To their credit, it’s not as if Vagenda don’t recognise this:
What feminism needs is more voices – a whole chorus of them. By all means, we can criticise those already at the top, but we should be combining that with a real desire to listen to women from all walks of life and their experiences: to actively seek them out, rather than waiting for the lucky few to claw their way into our ranks. Giving them jobs on newspapers so that they can write movingly and persuasively about the inequalities they suffer.
But what should also be recognised is that an intersectional perspective is vital in facilitating these developments, and that intersectionality affects the very focus on ‘ordinary’ concerns which these arguments advocate. The political climate since the banking crisis of 2008, and the imposition of economic austerity, has only sharpened the need to prioritise issues of material inequality and financial stability – especially for women. Much of the burden of analysing and opposing the impact on women of rising unemployment and the erosion of the welfare state is being shouldered by women whose identities mean they are under attack from several intersecting angles: as low earners, as mothers, as women of colour – very often, all three. Here for instance is Ava Vidal interrogating the myth of reliance on benefits as a ‘lifestyle option’ (and doing so, incidentally, in highly accessible language):
The promotion of a multiplicity of voices within feminism is surely better done in ways which challenge alienating ideas of what ‘feminism’ is, rather than in ways which risk entrenching these ideas by presenting feminism as an intrinsically white-normative and middle-class-normative movement which should benevolently open its gates to ‘others’.1 I believe that a lot of working-class awareness of disadvantage and oppression is already informed by what we may as well call a feminist impulse, even if the women in question wouldn’t necessarily call themselves feminists.
Equally, while there’s nothing wrong in seeking to engage ‘ordinary’ women in feminism through using ‘accessible, populist’ language, it’s also not too much to ask for this language to be conscious and sensitive, free of condescension and stereotyping, and seeking to be inclusive through attention to race, ability, age and sexuality as well as class. The problems of the ‘ordinary’ working class are inherently intersectional: material inequality is intersected by racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, all experienced as real and immediate issues rather than matters of abstract theory. It’s just that this generally takes place outside a media and political mainstream which is increasingly the preserve of a homogenous and insular elite. Liberal condescension which pays lip service to issues of race and class is less meaningful than attempts to address the many failings in cultural and political representation which make it increasingly difficult for non-privileged voices to be engaged with on their own terms.
- Ed’s Tiny Note: I think it should be noted that Team BadRep, who are (among other things) predominantly white, wouldn’t seek to claim that we always avoid falling into this trap in everything we do – almost certainly we don’t. But it’s important to try. [↩]
Found Feminism: HANDS OFF! Women’s Self-defence, 1942 style
It’s not automatically feminist for self-defence books to point out that women can be in physical danger from men. I wrote a previous post for BadRep on suffragette Edith Garrud, who produced a leaflet describing a woman being attacked as she walked home at night, as well as a short play in which a wife defends herself against her drunken husband. In both those writings, she showed the woman in a routine or domestic situation defending herself using the ju-jutsu that Edith was teaching (in 1910!).
Well, it’s maybe not surprising that Mrs Garrud’s guides were written from a feminist standpoint, but I wasn’t expecting quite the same level of realism from the very military William E. Fairbairn in a book I stumbled across this week.
A policeman and soldier, Fairbairn knew a LOT about combat. I mean, really. No, REALLY. As the ever-excitable website Badass of the Week put it:
Fairbairn was stationed in Japanese-occupied Korea from 1903 to 1907, and he spent the majority of those four years learning everything he possibly could about the long-lost art of epically kicking the fiery rainbow-living sh**fire out of every living thing on the planet until the only things left inhabiting Earth are multi-colored protoplasmic bags of liquefied organs and bone shards.
What made him unique was that he didn’t mind fighting very, very dirty if it meant you won. And so he did win, usually against street gangs and organised crime rings in Shanghai, where he served with the police. And he then taught that to the commandos, and special forces, the pre-CIA, he invented the SWAT team and tactics still being used today, had a black belt in judo certified by the guy who invented judo, and allegedly held a six-week training course in ‘silent killing’ which included using only a normal stick. He is an enormous figure in Western close-combat history.
In 1942, Fairbairn wrote a book which was marketed in the US as HANDS OFF! Self Defense for Women. Where the feminist interest comes in isn’t that he wrote it at all, or that it contains full-strength combat moves while being aimed solely at women, but that he included paragraphs like this:
It frequently happens that you meet a person who is very proud of his gripping powers and takes great pleasure, when shaking hands, in gripping your hand with all his strength, apparently with the idea of convincing you that he is a real “he-man”.
It is a very simple matter for you to take the conceit out of him – place the point of your right thumb on the back of his hand between the thumb and index finger, as in Fig. 27A.
The cover of the book, featuring a young woman and her trusty umbrella.
The thing which struck me about the whole book is his attitude, which coincides completely with Edith Garrud’s where she wrote “Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves ‘men’ are not worthy of that exalted title.”
Fairbairn assumes that the male attacker in his examples – who grabs, threatens or harasses a woman – deserves no mercy from the terrifying array of STONE-COLD KICKASS which she is then encouraged to perform in return. And he does so not with a tone of patriarchal protectiveness, but of dismissive contempt for the man and righteous calm practical advice for the woman.
In some places, he qualifies his including the more extreme moves with a ‘should you need to’, but it always seems to be cushioning language for civilians frightened at the thought of personal combat, not at all because the reader is a woman. In his introduction, the only differences he cites for women are in typical averages of height and muscle strength, never some imagined intrinsic weakness of will or emotions. That stuff was rampant in 1942, and not including a word of it is impressive.1
What’s also nice to see is that he classes any unwanted touching – such as a man stroking a woman’s knee when sitting next to her at the theatre or cinema – as serious enough to warrant a physical response. Damn right. Also, ouch. (He calls the resulting arm-lock ‘The Theatre Hold‘ and notes that while his photographs show just two seats together, if it was done when there is a row in front, ‘the opponent’s head would have been smashed onto the back of the front seats‘.
The opponent. For a knee-stroke. YES.
Sadly our attitudes to the public groping of women have relaxed a great deal, but it’s nice to find a manual with no condescension, a frank regard for the dangers women face, and the emphasis placed on a woman’s right to her own body. In 1942.
At no point does he even begin to discuss the idea of victim-blaming, that the woman could have ‘brought it on herself’ through dress or actions. It doesn’t come into it.
I’m currently developing self-defence classes for women and have to always keep in mind a level of force which will seem very reasonable in law, and frankly, the attitude in this book is a breath of fresh air. Because I didn’t have to go any farther than the partner I’m demonstrating moves with to find a woman who has had her knee stroked creepily by a stranger in public in the last six months, as well as her boob grabbed in the last week and frequent close approaches by strangers, the temptation to step things up to Fairbairn’s level is mighty high. (But then, I think the appropriate legal response to street harassment should be the sound of a woman drawing a sword).
So well done to Col. Fairbairn for producing a work with a respectful tone and the rare inclusion of harassment scenarios aimed solely at empowering women. If you’re in need of some (eye-wateringly violent) advice on how to fend off attackers, check out his book here. Just bear in mind that the suggested responses might be viewed as legally off-the-scale today!
(And don’t do the thing with the umbrella in Fig. 34, because seriously, sheesh.)
- Readers will note that this is not the first time one of us has found an artefact from the past and gone on a little feminist history adventure. We like old books! And history adventures! Have you had an adventure like this? Do you have recommendable artefacts we should investigate? If so, SAY HELLO TO OUR INBOX. We’re nerds for that stuff. It is one of our favouritest things.
The new, raw, and female sound: women in post-punk (and a plug)
Over the past year, a lot of my spare time has been spent researching and writing on women in post-punk for Julia Downes’ new history of the girl band, Women Make Noise.
A surprisingly difficult part of this was establishing what we talk about when we talk about post-punk. Roughly, the term refers to the wave of musical experimentation which took place in the wake of punk from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. It was informed conceptually by the art-school background and grounding in political and cultural theory of many of its members, and distinguished by musical, vocal and lyrical experimentation and by a frequently self-conscious and self-critical approach to the idea of being in a band and making music. All of which meant that it sounded, to varying degrees, original, arresting, and odd.
Post-punk’s disorderly, subversive and category-resistant nature has seen it marginalised in accounts of its era, although the past few years have produced a handful of useful retrospectives, as well as the early-2000s revival of post-punk musical techniques which, if you still can’t explain what it is, at least make it easier to explain what it sounds like.
For me, a large part of the significance of post-punk was that it seemed to involve an unprecedented amount of women as artists, fans, and critics. Its musical, political and aesthetic influence can be traced in many subsequent female-friendly movements, including twee, riot grrrl, grunge and electro. Some post-punk women – the Slits, the Raincoats, Lydia Lunch – have made a more enduring dent in popular consciousness than others, and some of them are more ‘hmm, interesting’ than ‘fuck yeah, hidden early-80s gem’, but all the artists featured below are worth a spin.
Extending the gains of punk’s emphasis on DIY culture, accessibility and amateurism, post-punk women were able to take their bands in experimental directions, producing lyrics which explored the female experience in startlingly innovative ways, and music which itself took on what Slits bassist Tessa Pollitt described, when I interviewed her for the book, as a ‘new, raw, and female’ form, a self-consciously radical sound dealing with rarely-expressed emotions like embarrassment, awkwardness and anxiety.
In terms of subject matter, post-punk’s ideological concern with the politicisation of the personal, and with identifying and promoting authenticity in the face of popular cultural stereotypes, lent itself to exploration from a feminine and feminist angle. This concern with authenticity was expressed in the songs themselves, which were produced, structured and presented in a way which set them apart from the glossy manufactured products of mainstream artists. It was expressed too in lyrics which demystified and deconstructed conventional femininity, love, sex and romance, and which analysed social and cultural pressures on women or the tensions of personal relationships in implicitly political ways.
There is far more to post-punk, and many more women within it, than I have space for here. The Young Lady’s Post-Punk Handbook provides a good starting-point to other women and bands in the movement, but here are ten from me to kick off:
1. ESG
ESG, from South Bronx, based their pioneering sound on a love of James Brown, Motown and disco. Spotted at a talent contest, they began to play New York’s cutting-edge clubs, where their sound dovetailed neatly, if unexpectedly, with that of the No Wave scene, and went on to share billing with PiL, Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio.
ESG’s blend of hip-hop and girl-group lyrical sensibility was sampled incessantly by acts from Miles Davis to Tricky and Public Enemy to Liars – although the lack of royalties received antagonized the band, who addressed the issue with typical panache in the 1993 single ‘Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills’.
2. Raincoats
The Raincoats attempted an unsweetened exploration of the social and sexual experience for women, mapping a landscape previously foreign to mainstream rock – a female-centred one of self-consciousness and self-doubt. Their debut’s self-effacing musical communalism has seen it described as the first ‘women’s rock’ album.
3. Slits
From the art-student squats of London’s Ladbroke Grove via Germany, Spain and English suburbia, the Slits made slippery and spacious dub-punk hymns to sex and shoplifting. ‘Love und Romance’ burlesques the banality of boy-meets-girl, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ analyses retail therapy as addiction, and ‘Typical Girls’ castigates conventional femininity as a profit-driven invention.
For more on the Slits I’d recommend Zoe Street Howe’s Typical Girls? The story of the Slits.
4. Bush Tetras
There’ve been whole essays written on this song as key to life in late-70s crisis-riddled New York, but Pat Place’s stabbing guitar and Cynthia Sley’s vocal darting between grouchy imperious disdain and incipient panic are more than enough to recommend it.
5. Lydia Lunch
The infernal anti-Blondie, or perhaps the sub-par Patti Smith. For Lunch, the extent of her musical ability ‘wasn’t the point. I developed my own style, which suited the primal urgency I needed to evacuate from my system’ (quoted in Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984).
Lunch’s performances were, according to contemporary music writer Roy Trakin (quoted here) ‘very influential in freeing people from the idea of technique as being somehow prerequisite to talent’.
6. LiLiPUT
Surrealistic in their Swiss-German and English lyrics, rudimentary in their technique, and the subject of a 40-seconds-long Yummy Fur song (Why don’t you listen to Liliput / Where punk rock starts and ends?), but great for all that.
7. The Bloods
New York’s finest queer anarcha-feminists. ‘Button Up’, their only single, is absurdly ahead of its time kink-funk.
8. Mo-dettes
Sharp-tongued and stylish Anglo-Swiss outfit. Had a complicated relationship with the partisan feminism of some of their contemporaries, but their arch, insouciant music was less ambivalent. ‘White Mice’ giddily champions female sexual agency, ‘Two Can Play’ dramatises relationships as struggles for autonomy and control, and ‘Foolish Girl’ catalogues the misadventures of a girl who renounces feminism for an unhappy marital ending.
9. Au Pairs
At the intersection of left, feminist, queer and antiracist politics, Birmingham boys and girls the Au Pairs made radical, slyly danceable music. A good introduction to them from the Kitchen Tapes’ Rupinder Parhar can be found here.
10. Linder Sterling
Muse to Buzzcocks and Morrissey, a visual and performance artist whose work critiqued cultural expectations of women and the commodification of the female body, an unequivocally militant feminist and occasionally a musician with the band Ludus. Ten post-punk points if your response in 2010 to Lady Gaga’s meat dress was to sniffily point out that Linder did it better at the Hacienda nearly thirty years ago.
For more on the background, careers, music and politics of these and other girl groups, and a look at the history of women in music from Ma Rainey to Pussy Riot – please consider buying the book!
[Gamer Diary] What I’ve been Playing… October 2012
This month I finally bring you Borderlands 2. I took my time, I enjoyed myself, and I promised I’d complete at least one run-through before gabbling on about it, and that I have.
Borderlands 2, or ‘the Accidental-on-Purpose, not-so-secret, feminist game’
There really is a lot that can be said about BL2, and although I’m not going to say it all, I’ve picked up on some points I think are more relevant for BadRep. It isn’t, however, as hard as you might expect to find good, feminist-friendly things to say about BL2. In fact, it’s probably one of the best AAA titles in terms of its ability to give players something quite egalitarian as an overall experience.
Basic game-stuff first, though: keeping to form, Borderlands 2 is beautiful. Hand-painted landscapes, smooth animation, great character design, brilliant monsters and, like, a gazillion-billion guns and other loot items. It’s an FPS/RPG that combines the best of both game styles; you can recognise the colour-coded scale of awesomeness for your loot alongside the superb right-in-there combat mechanics. You can grind, farm, explore – whatever. It’s fun. A lot of fun.
It’s available on the three big platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, PC) and is big on multiplayer, though frankly it’s just as great solo. However, the one thing that annoys me with these big multi-platform titles and multiplayer is that we can’t interact with each other.
While I can play through Steam with one friend, my Xbox friend can’t join in and is left to languish alone with inferior loot. Not the fault of the game – more the big console companies trying to keep their corner of the market isolated – but it’s still a letdown.
Anyway, these things aside, why is this such a great egalitarian game? Put simply, it takes the piss. Out of everyone. On the surface of things, anyone is fair game, but(!) if you listen and observe, what I’ve noticed is that there’s a bit of a slant on the piss-takings, and it’s a positive one. I’ll give you some examples, but from here on out, beware the spoilers.
My two favourite NPCs are Ellie and Tina. They’re both great examples of powerful, self-confident, self-reliant women who aren’t your average pin-up character and who represent integral, practical and useful components of the story & mission.
They’re not decoration over in the corner of the room; they’re key to your success. Ellie is a mechanic (and a bit of a whizz at that) and she’s a larger woman. She loves it, and so does the game and its creators.
In the book that came with my special edition game-pack, Inside the Vault: The Art & Design of Borderlands 2, one character artist has said:
Ellie is one of my favorites… I like that we have embraced a variety of different character shapes.
Ellie’s dialogue is snappy, funny and generally awesome. Some examples include: “…they like skinny chicks ’cause they’s pussies!” and “My mom Moxxi always told me if I slimmed down, men’d pay me more mind. Shows what she knows – I got these boys bending over backwards…”.
And Tina. Tina is an early-teens girl who has been orphaned and likes to spend time having tea parties and, uh, exploding stuff. She’s the best explosives expert on the planet. Even the man leading the resistance defers to her.
Tina’s a confusing character to meet – her speech is a little discordant with her sweet appearance – but she nevertheless maintains BL2 hilarity while being totally badass.
Tina and Ellie are just two of the female NPCs (yup, there’s others!) but I gotta say, having played through, the women are very important in BL2. They’re powerful, proactive, and practical. They can fight, build, explode stuff and save the day – they are full and proper characters and they’re equal (if not more awesome) than their male counterparts.
Even a rather minor female NPC adds to the all-round feminine badassery by “accidentally” giving you coordinates to mortar a very misogynist fellow into tiny pieces.
What’s great is that while the game’s pleasing me by being fair with its female characters, it’s also very subtly passing on the message that misogyny and sexism isn’t cool and isn’t funny. Plenty of anti-egalitarian types rear their heads in the story, but they all get punished in-game. I think that’ll go a long way to dissuading that sort of behaviour in the audience – and hopefully show other developers that women can be awesome too.
Deadlight, or ‘the obligatory, festivity-themed title that’s actually pretty awesome’
Finally, in the spirit of all things spooky, there’s Deadlight, which recently ported across to Steam from Xbox Live Arcade (released on Steam 25/10/2012). Developed by Tequila Works alongside Microsoft Studios, Deadlight is a tense indie zombie-survival offering set in post-apocalyptic 1980s Seattle. You play Randall Wayne, who’s been separated from his wife and daughter, battling and evading the ‘shadows’ as he navigates a ruined, hazardous cityscape to reunite his family.
It’s a simple premise by all accounts, and we’ve certainly seen plenty of zombie themes in recent years across the entertainment spectrum – but don’t let that put you off.
Deadlight is a side-scroller with a dark, moody art style reminiscent of LIMBO . It doesn’t feel too distant from the survivalist title I Am Alive, which also requires you to focus on your stamina levels to avoid falling of buildings or running out of energy mid-fight. Similarly, you have limited weaponry and ammo (only what you can salvage on your way) so a lot of the time you have to make do without, meaning you can’t go full force forward shooting everything that moves. Nor can you charge about with an axe and splatter everything, because that runs your stamina down pretty sharpish.
Running, climbing and hiding are some of the best options, but there’s also environmental elements you can use to your advantage. Zombies aren’t smart: if you jump over a hole in the floor, they’ll just fall in it.
Without giving away too much, zombies aren’t your only problem in Deadlight, and not every moment is spent dashing about. It’s good fun and manages to keep up the tension without being so nerve-racking you log off (I’m looking at you, Amnesia… you too, Slender!).
At under a tenner full price (£9.99) it’s not bad value either, but if you’re quick there’s 15% off on Steam until the end of today (£8.49), so it’s worth checking out for a little Hallowe’en amusement. For those of you who prefer XBLA, it’s 1,200 Microsoft Points.
If you aren’t tickled by Deadlight, don’t forget, Thanksgiving is nigh approaching (22/11/12) so keep a look out in November for more sales all over the place from US-centric platforms and digital management systems!
Musical Chairs: “It Hurts Me Too”
Previous Musical Chair: Super Sexy Woman by Sufjan Stevens, picked by Hodge
This song was brought into my life a few years ago by my Mum, a reliable source of excellent music. It’s a blues standard, but my preferred version is Elmore James’ 1962 recording, with his incredible voice and slide guitar.
While It Hurts Me Too is superficially about a man’s love for a woman who loves another (highly unpleasant) man, to me it could as easily be about platonic love as romantic love. I’m bringing my own experiences to bear of course, but to me it sits on the same shelf as Strawberry Switchblade’s Let Her Go or the Dresden Dolls’ Delilah. It’s about watching from the sidelines, furious and helpless as someone you care about gets hurt, over and over again. For me it is inescapably about abuse.
While the song is old and has been re-interpreted time and again, when Elmore James recorded his version he made some lyrical changes to the hit version recorded by Tampa Red in 1949. Comparing the two there’s a subtle shift from a reasonably upbeat song imploring an object of desire to leave a cheating no-gooder, to a heartbreaking lament for the trap in which a loved one has been snared.
For example, Tampa Red sings:
That man you love, darlin’
He don’t want you ’round
Whyn’t ya make love with Tampa, darling?
And let’s jump the town
When things go wrong, so wrong, with you
It hurts me, too
And James sings:
He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you
It hurts me too.
What I like best about it is that unlike many other blues standards (and plenty of mainstream pop songs – see Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe, The Beatles’ Run For Your Life, Tom Jones’ Delilah), It Hurts Me Too is a song about empathy, not jealousy. The singer claims no ownership over the woman, it’s her suffering that pains him, not the fact he can’t have her. For me, it works as an antidote to the musical tradition of the jealous murder of women by men. I believe it’s a song about love in the truest, broadest sense: what you feel, I feel.
It Hurts Me Too by Elmore James
You said you was hurtin’, you almost lost your mind.
Now, the man you love, he hurt you all the time.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.
You’ll love him more when you should love him less.
Why lick up behind him and take his mess?
But, when things go wrong, whoa, wrong with you, It hurts me too.
He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.
Now, he better leave you or you better put him down.
No, I won’t stand to see you pushed around.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.
Free Hugs, or Markgraf’s Comic Convention Adventure
If you’re reading this, I assume you know what a comic convention is. Right? Cool. We’re on the same page.
You may also be aware of the FREE HUGS meme. It’s quite sweet: you hold a sign with “FREE HUGS” on it, and people can come to you to claim their free hug. Because free things are nice, hugs shouldn’t be charged for, and aaahhh and d’awww and other such sentiments. FREE HUGSing is very prevalent at comic conventions.
Having set that up, let me tell you a tale.
The scene: a large and popular comic convention held in a large and popular UK city. It’s spring, verging on summer, and it’s warm.
Cosplayers roam the convention with absurdly large props and wigs, and excited teenagers clutch bags of stash from their favourite webcomic artists, faces flushed with glee. Someone is dressed as a cardboard box. Someone else has a large plush Totoro. Gangs of Stormtroopers march about, videogame demos blare and cameras flash.
Numerous people saunter about, idly holding scraps of paper with “FREE HUGS” scrawled on them in pen, either because it’s what everyone is doing, or because they hope for a tiny scrap of human affection in this amazing sea of other people’s playtime.
Something terrible jingles past.
A long, thin, white jingling thing, with no real face and long tentacular horns. It has claws and hooves and no eyes and… a FREE HUGS sign all of its own.
Jingle, jingle, slrrrrrrrp.
Do you hug it?
My costume monster, Babylon, is a non-gendered-but-femme creature, with no anthropomorphic secondary sex characteristics, but with performatively femme behaviour.
Now, as it is rare for women to “perform” their femininity, performative femininity generally tends to be the preserve of people that don’t identify as women – because “performance” indicates a degree of “artifice”, and it is unusual for someone to “put on” the presentation that’s generally considered “appropriate” for their identity.
(But of course, it does happen, because everything does, and identity and presentation are two different things and being a woman doesn’t make your presentation femme by default, so of course one can identify as female and also perform your femininity. That’s a thing that happens too. I don’t need to explain these things to you: you know about stuff, you’re all down with this. Back to telling the tale.)
So. Big, sparkly performance femme-ness is A Thing and a grand one at that – just, not necessarily tethered to a gender identity. So Babylon is very hard to read. It’s too over-the-top femme to be a girl, but surely boy monsters are big and spiky, right?
Obviously, the answer is that Babylon is non-binary, but our average member of the public in need of a full Gender 101 isn’t going to assume that.
I had lots of fun wearing Babylon during the convention, mostly because it is nice to dress as a monster, but also because I discovered a few interesting things about how people interact with an ungenderable non-human costume.
- Teenage girls with stripy armwarmers shrieked with delight at Babylon, largely gendered it male, and happily gave it hugs.
- Women my age wanted photographs and loved Babylon’s boots.
- Older steampunk gentlemen gendered it female and wanted photographs.
But the most hilarious demographic by far was teenage boys, and other men in costumes.
Teenage boys roam in knots about conventions, all holding papery requests for hugs. Their knuckles blanched as their grip on their FREE HUGS signs tightened when Babylon indicated that their desire for hugs was the same, and came over to hug them.
Oh, they didn’t like it. Oh, teenage boys didn’t like the Babylon. Oh no.
“What is it?” they said.
“Urgh,” they said.
“Oh man, it’s a bloke, mate,” they said.
Babylon is not a bloke. I’m a bloke; Babylon is a Babylon. They didn’t want photographs.
slrrrrrrrpp
You probably see where I’m going with this. My next example is brilliant.
I Babyloned up to a group of Star Wars Stormtroopers. Now, I rather like masks and men in uniform, so I saw this as a brilliant opportunity to put the “play” into “cosplay” and be an alien at them. Which is what I did.
Babylon jingled everywhere and posed for photographs, and one of the chaps, reading Babylon as female, got a bit saucy with it. This is fine, and Babylon, of course, sauced right back, all jingly silver bits and long talons – and then the Stormtrooper asked us, “Getting a bit hot are we, ma’am?”
Babylon made a surprised gesture (it doesn’t have a mouth) and indicated that he was wrong, and it wasn’t a “ma’am.”
The Stormtrooper, who had been happily playing moments before, rasped, “Oh my god, you’re a dude,” and immediately stopped playing. He backed right off.
I wondered if this was the first time in his life that he had ever had anyone he had not been sexually interested in being flirtatious and forward at him.
I idly thought about all the times I’ve been out with lady friends of mine who’ve experienced street harassment. Random strangers making sexual advances they weren’t comfortable with. I suppressed the urge to tear off my monster mask and bellow, “HUURARRRGGH, FEMINISM, NYERRRGH” and spray liquid feminism at him from my nipples.
Remembering that I’ve been told that sort of behaviour “hurts the cause”, I kept my mask on and flounced off elsewhere.
What’s the moral to this post? There isn’t one, really. It was just an amazing, beautiful, interesting and inspirational experience to be both fully androgynous and have no face.
I’m androgynous myself in presentation and I get gendered more-or-less randomly, but I have a human face, and this means I get treated differently from if I don’t. Some of the roughest transphobia I’ve ever had was when I was masked, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. Babylon doesn’t have anything like a human face: just two slits with emergent tentacles, and this simultaneously intimidates people and makes them feel more free to loudly express their opinion of it.
I’ll be at the large, popular comic convention again at the end of October. If you’re going too this Hallowe’en, come and find us and give us a hug!
First photograph used with permission of the owner; second picture courtesy of the artist. Stormtrooper image Creative Commons, from Wikipedia.
Found Feminism: Rubber Face Putin
A wise man1 once said that you ignore the writing on the walls at your peril. I hope the same is true of stickers.
In a world where it’s increasingly hard to get your message across, and available methods of communication are becoming more and more sophisticated, it’s refreshing to see a return to the simple things in life.
Like slapping a sticker somewhere nice and prominent that screams FREE PUSSY RIOT in fat felt tip pen.
I found this beauty a couple of months ago whilst walking across the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridge. Sitting loud and proud, obviously homemade, with bright colours and a take-no-prisoners message.
Hear hear!
So, why is this a Found Feminism?
Well, obviously there’s the show of support for Pussy Riot and the spreading of their message. Whoever slapped this on the wall was inspired to make and display the sticker themselves. I hope there are hundreds of them stuck around London. I only found the one. I hope other people find more. I hope they make their own.
I’m also going to add points for the artwork, done in a way that echoes feminist punk stylings. It’s that hand-drawn aesthetic of “we did this in our bedroom” personal creation. It mirrors the hand-knitted balaclavas of the band members, and it’s the heart and soul of grassroots movements.
Plus, it’s funny.
I’m not saying that feminism should be side-splitting all the time, although I do dislike that stereotype about feminists as po-faced, dungarees-wearing, yoghurt-plaiting monsters2 who hate all fun and all jokes. But being able to make someone smile when you get your point across can be valuable – and who wouldn’t grin at this sticker, with its cheerful two fingers up to one of the most terrifying and powerful men in the world? Doesn’t matter how strong you think you are, Mr Putin – the writing on the wall in London thinks you’re a dick.
Finally, there’s the political message here. The sticker, and Pussy Riot, are part of a rekindling of the political power of feminism, reminding us all that there’s more we can do (much, much more) than form elegant critiques of the use of the female nude in art for the Sunday edition of the national newspapers.
There are problems out in the world that an active, aware and politicised feminist movement can work to solve. Should work to solve. And the fact that someone with a few highlighter pens and a handful of stickers is getting out there and having a go, in their own way, at doing it should put a rocket under those of us who have more reach and power to do what we can.
So yeah, fuck rubber face Putin.
- Check out the website Free Pussy Riot for news and how you can get involved.
- Our Rhian wrote on Pussy Riot when they first appeared in the UK national press here, and again after the trial here.
- Terry Pratchett, THUD (particularly in the form of Granny Weatherwax, he’s the source of a lot of useful moral philosophy). [↩]
- Actually, I really like dungarees, and would quite happily wear them, especially for their iconic status in (mis)representing feminism. But that’s because I’m a real person and not a stereotype! I cannot plait yoghurt, however. [↩]
[Gamer Diary] What I’ve been playing… September 2012
First off, my apologies for being so late with this edition of Playing! I work in a university, and the arrival of freshers and term starting again has made everything a little hectic. My secondary reason is that of the two new games I was playing in September, I still haven’t finished either, and I didn’t want to give half-prepared reviews. However, as time drags on I feel I must bring you something!
So I bring you a short and sweet look at Torchlight 2 and some interesting developments re: Booth Babes.
Torchlight 2 is an adventure RPG that has a slightly more cartoon-like presentation than big-budget rivals like Diablo III. Despite this, it’s been a huge success. It allows a lot more freedom than D3 does when levelling up your character with skill points, and there’s character points to spend where you want, not just automatically assigned. There’s a great variety of skills to play with to suit your play style and your character. I’m currently playing through as an Engineer, and although long-range weaponry is an option I’m sticking with my two-handed melee weapons because I much prefer bashing my way through enemies. That’s my example, but as I mentioned, I have yet to finish the game (or test the other classes out) so all I can do is advise you on what I know so far.
My favourite feature of the game is one’s pet. There’s more choice in this game than the first as to what species of pet you have – I picked a ferret for the novelty – and being able to dump items in Professor Furzl’s inventory when mine is full is like a gift from the gods of gaming. No longer shall you agonise over which rare item to pick up with only one space left in your backpack! Even better, you can send the pet to town with a bag full of junk, and he’ll return to you – wherever you are – with some lovely gold coins. Best feature ever.
The final plus-side I’ll bring for you today is Torchlight 2‘s price: £15/$20, which is half (or less) than what you’ll be paying for the big-budget, AAA+, giant developer titles (I think I paid £35 for Diablo 3 on release). The smaller price doesn’t give you any less enjoyment, I’ve found. It’s a great title with brilliant features, and comes in at a decent price.
Now, a brief word on Booth Babes
You probably know what I’m on about here; you go to a show or an expo, and the companies bring scantily clad women to sell their games. It’s insulting to the gamers and there’s a lot of bad press about how these women are treated, too. Well, as of next year’s show the Eurogamer Expo here in the UK will be formally enforcing a ban on booth babes. Frankly, I am glad, but I fear that those people who really don’t get the message will still try and sell their games with a little T&A. We will have to see what happens next year, but from my point of view, and that of others I’ve spoken to on this topic, it’s a step in the right direction!
Hopefully by the next post I’ll have completed at least one playthrough with Borderlands 2… which, as I suspected it would be, is a secret feminist game. More later!
Bread and Circuses: why Page 3 is even worse than you think
Page 3, revered by its supporters as ‘a British institution’ and pushed by its owners as ’empowering’, has been the horsefly on the cowpat of the Sun newspaper for years. In my early teens, pre-Internet, a glimpse of tit from a discarded copy of the Sun was my first vision of a naked breast. I’m also fairly sure it was the exact moment that I decided that mainstream, unimaginative, plastic-and-makeup porn wasn’t for me, but I digress.
Other people have made better arguments (here’s one, and here’s another) than I could for why having a teenager with her tits out in the first few pages of a national newspaper might not be a particularly stellar idea. It’s objectification at its worst, and the empowerment argument neglects the fact that there are better, safer, and more rewarding ways to take your clothes off for financial gain if that’s what you truly want to do.
My argument against Page 3 is quite simple; if you don’t want to reject it simply because it’s in bad taste, insensitive, and chauvinistic, then reject it because it uses psychological techniques to manipulate your views into agreeing with whatever fits the Sun’s goals at the time. The Sun sees its readership not just as customers, but as bargaining chips and weapons.
Let’s take a quick look at a few examples of Page 3. The rather excellent Tim Ireland over at Bloggerheads, nemesis of Nadine Dorries, has been collecting these – I hope he won’t mind me mirroring them here. Credit due entirely to him and anyone who might have scanned them for him.
Now, it’s quite possible that these women hold these opinions. It’s quite interesting, however, that they coincide with the vitriol that appears in the The Sun Says portion of the paper, home of a much more blatant attempt to tell their readership what to think.
Think about this, though – what if these statements are invented by the paper? Then, what we have on our hands is a cheap attempt to use the many cognitive biases that sexual attraction brings into play to form an opinion in the undecided. This person is attractive; you’re naturally more inclined to agree with people that you find attractive; your opinion is swayed. All the time, you’re seeing it as just a bit of fun, just a silly piece of paper with a pair of breasts. Every day, this message hits home. Over time, it affects people – they think the way the Sun, and thus the Murdoch empire, wants them to think.
Yes, alright, I’ve strayed a bit into tin-foil-hat territory. The fact is, though, that this is having an effect on the Sun’s readership. How big an effect is arguable, of course, but it’s non-zero. Also, don’t forget that there’s a huge line on the role of these women – they’re being used as tools, to have opinions thrust into their mouths. Even the names are probably pseudonyms. They are there for no reason at all other than to be a pair of tits, and that shit is just not on.
If you won’t boycott the Sun because you hate the exploitation and objectification of women that it represents, boycott it because you value your own power of self-determination.