My Genius playlist based on "Bad Romance" included My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion.  Two questions: why is this still in my library, and why did iTunes put it in a Bad Romance playlist????

I actually meant to write about something else for Part 3, but it's turned out to be very difficult and I've been experiencing some fatigue lately so it will have to wait.  These are starting to become more tangents to things I've read in the women and slash discussions, and not necessarily directly related.  Introduction, Part 1, Part 2.  These are posted on both Dreamwidth and Livejournal.  There are generally more comments on the Livejournal posts.

Trigger warning: Brief discussion of rape below.   No descriptions or graphic details.


( Cut for tl;dr )

But here's where the catch 22 comes in.  On the one hand women need to be honest, need to have a safe creative outlet, even if they aren't breaking down the patriarchy with every fic.  Even if they are not as self aware and as aware of misogyny as some of us would like.  On the other hand, repetition of these tropes can be harmful, and the use of them in slash can be exploitative.  And that goes equally for other sexist tropes.

*Not that those gatekeepers prevent misogyny or bad writing. They're often the problem.</div>

I've been saving for a PS3, and I was going to get one in March in time for Final Fantasy XIII. But I got my tax money and figured I'd go ahead and get it now. Apparently everyone else thought the same because I spent an hour after work trying to find a store with one in stock, and then getting stuck chatting with the dude in Gamestop. And when I got home, instead of working on another post as I'd planned, my computer gave me a heart attack by getting stuck on the log in screen when I rebooted. Took me a while to figure out it was my Logitech mouse and/or keyboard. And of course I had to watch Lost! Spoilers ahead!

My Awesome Thoughts on Lost (Where I steal the overused Good/Bad/Ugly method)
( Spoilers behind the cut! )

I'm working on Part 2 of my series, which if all goes well will start a sub-series on writing female characters - why it's difficult to write women in equal relationships, fear of the Mary Sue, writing sexuality through female characters, etc.  I really appreciate all of the very thoughtful comments on Part 1.  I'm so glad that it resonated with a lot of people and brought out some very interesting discussion.

In the meantime, I've seen more people who seem to object to this line of analysis.  Some of them aren't necessarily talking about me, but they reject any reasoning for women writing more male characters than female except that we want to so there (should we also stick our tongues out?).*  Is shaming women's fannish responses to the media and framing them as thoughtless, superficial, pornish pursuits more feminist than listening to what women have to say?

I really would like to see more women and girls writing fabulous female characters, both in the professional media and in fandom.  And I'd love to see female characters valued more by fandom, flaws and all.  Why can't we start with valuing real women in our fandom community, flaws and all?


*Of course the whole reason women who write slash started talking about the reasons was they were accused of exploiting gay men, disappearing women, convincing the media to keep writing men only, and possibly triggering the apocalypse.  So any response except self-reproach has been attacked.

Melissa Silverstein, who blogs at Women & Hollywood, has a post that goes very well with the current discussion of female characters in the media. She frequently talks about the lack of women with creative and financial control over the movies that get made, and here she discovers how very few women are writing pilots for the television networks this season.

While there are a fair amount of pilots about women, the story here is the lack of women who are writing and creating the shows. The only way I know about this is from a very disturbing email from a reader who sent me info that came from a high level female TV executive. This is an industry wide problem and 2010 is way worse for women creators than it was in 2009.

Women make up 23% of executive producers. Usually all creators get an executive producer credit and there are always other executive producers besides the creator. While I know of no comprehensive list that lists all the creators and executive producers by gender, extrapolating from the data above you could probably guess that women maybe make up around 10% of show creators and showrunners (and I’m probably being generous.)

She goes on to list the few pilots that were written by women.  Many of those were co-written by men.  

*obligatory intro/disclaimer: I am more familiar with yaoi fanfic than slash and in addition some of my impressions might be outdated. I am open to correction on any misperceptions on my part. Introduction and reason for this series of posts is here.

That's one of the points brought up in the debate about why women are so wrong write m/m slash in such huge quantities compared to f/f slash. The natural rebuttal is that fanfiction is used all the time to change cannon to suit the interests of the writer and their audience, so lack of female characters who are interesting and who interact significantly in canon shouldn't be a problem.

That disregards the fact that huge quantities of m/m slash revolves around characters who have a significant relationship in canon. The amount of m/m slash that involves 1. two minor male characters who never spoke in canon; or 2. a main male character with a male character he rarely or never spoke to in canon, is tiny compared to fic about best friends, enemies, frenemies, brothers, etc. As far as I'm aware, most f/f slash, whether written by people who write in multiple genres or by those who only write f/f, is also about female characters who have some significant interaction in cannon.*

Because, again, much of the history of slash is about subtext. There's no text to sub when women are rarely given screen time together. The fandoms that I'm aware of with the most f/f slash have many female characters who are given significant roles and have significant relationships with each other: Buffy and Xena are the obvious examples. In the anime world, I've found more f/f fic in fandoms like Fullmetal Alchemist and Bleach, which do have interesting female characters.

The next rebuttal is that women are expressing internalized sexism or misogyny in the dislike of female characters. I'm not naive or ignorant enough to say this never happens. I remember an interview with one of the only writers at the time making a living by charging for website access to yaoi-ish original fiction. She made a comment about why women write slash and not female characters that made me wince with embarassment, it was so full of sexist assumptions about women.  

I've seen some really nasty character bashing using misogynist language.  The interesting pattern there, for me, is that most of the character bashing is aimed at female characters that many women feel are the type they are expected to live up to.  Typically the main romantic interest for the main male character.  Others have identified this as female characters being seen by women as not worthy of the awesome man, but I think there is another dynamic happening as well.  These female characters are often presented in a way that women are expected to identify with, and they are often limited to the role of support of the male lead and they often embody sexist stereotypes.  Some examples, so I'm not just generalizing:  Rinoa (Final Fantasy 8); Elizabeth (Pirates of the Caribbean); Aeris (Final Fantasy 7); Kate (Lost). All of these characters have some good characteristics, but many women legitimately feel resentful and uncomfortable with the expectations of women that the characters perpetuate.  That this resentment is expressed with misogyny against the characters as women is a troubling product of our misogynist culture, but I don't think the solution is to expect all women to embrace these characters as totally awesome.  

I haven't seen nearly that much bashing against, for example, Yuiko (Loveless), Rukia, Urihime & Yoruichi (Bleach), Riza (Fullmetal Alchemist). -- This is where my obvious bias towards anime and my relative inexperience in media slash comes through. I'd love to hear others' experiences.

Are there awesome women in TV and movies that many women relate to and feel inspired by? Yeah, I have many favorites. How many of them are written in such a way that I never feel yanked out of the story by the reminder that This Is Probably A Man Writing a Woman? Precious few. So I think the accusation of internalized sexism against women for not finding more female characters wonderous and inspiring is something that shouldn't be flung around so easily when many of those characters remain fraught with sexist stereotypes/tropes/storylines. 

I haven't seen anyone actually say there are NO women worth writing about.  I've seen that claimed as what someone said, or used as an exaggeration.  I'm sure someone can find one example of it (there are always a handfull of people at any extreme), but the general sentiment seems to be that there are far fewer interesting female characters than male to write about.   My view is that this is a problem at both ends - the creation of media and the fandom of the media.  My default position is basically "I blame the patriarchy."  I prefer to look at the experiences, social expectations, and other forces that shape women's experiences.  None of this is to absolve people from self-examination, which I am always in favor of, or to suggest that women shouldn't, individually, think about why they are reacting as they are.   But many of the generalizations going around are not that much more useful than saying "women who wear makeup are perpetuating the gender binary and enforcing misogynist standards of femininity."  Okay, sure, I'm a proud feminist with some radical feminist background, so I can relate to that.  But it's also a hell of a lot more complicated than that and dismissing women who talk about why they wear makeup as derailing would mean you're severely limiting the scope of the discussion, and it's ultimately only helpful in a certain context.

When I got home from work last night I was tired and had a total brain freeze. Which I guess is better than a brain cloud. But anyway, I started writing a post and was hit with this-time-of-the-month fatique and then self-criticism and doubt about what I was writing and why. So I went to bed, instead. It was a beautiful 9 hours of sleep and I could use a few more.

This morning I read this post by carolyn_claire, in which she says some brilliant things.

And be willing to listen to those who come to refute what you're saying and to examine your own motives and biases in the process. Many people have strong feelings about how one should publicly respond to fic, based on the fact that we're all fannish "neighbors" (some will say "community") and that what we say and how we say it can directly and negatively affect the feelings of the person we're talking about. That's true in meta discussion, too; what one says there can also hurt, because it IS about observed behavior in the people participating in fandom around you. So there is no disclaimer that will (or should) protect you after making these kinds of accusations; your neighbors won't be happy and they will come to talk to you about it. As they should.

I highly recommend the whole thing, if you haven't read it already.  She talks about the need for discussion and engagement, and that's my intent with the posts I hope to be writing in the next few days.  I'm not interested in self-abjecting, shaming talk about how slash writers are perpetuating misogyny, etc.  I think that when slashers as a group are accused of being soaked in internalized sexism and helping to perpetuate the invisibility of female characters, and when some respond with reasons they don't write as many female characters, I think that deserves a deeper look.   And I like to overanalyze.

So here's hoping to an actual post being completed today.

Joking of course.   And I realize I'm probably going to be guilty of doing some of the things I complain about others doing.

I'm really enjoying a lot of meta posts by people who are doing it more right than I am.  But any conversation that involves slash and is framed around "what's wrong with those women" inevitably brings out posts like this, which don't seem to serve any purpose but to make fun of slashers. Some of them are even written by women who write slash, so of course it's about those OTHER slashers. And they come with admonitions for other women to think about internalized sexism in the same breath as dismissals of women's reasons for loving slash and having trouble relating to female characters.

There's a comment to that post by havocthecatthat makes a lot of sense:
"Boyslash isn't the root of women being marginalized in media. What many of us are saying is that the marginalization of women in the media is being reflected in boyslash."
 
Except that I don't see that at all in the original post.

And then, elsewhere, there are accusations of derailing when someone wants to look more closely at the reasons women ("some" is always left out, we are assumed to know who this is, and it's always someone else) write slash that marginalizes, neglects, or villanizes female characters, instead of just shouting MISOGYNY INTERNALIZED SEXISM DOINGITWRONG.

Instead of just complaining, I want to look closer at some of those reasons from a feminist perspective, keeping in mind that yes, internalized sexism is a real thing but also that sexism in the media and in the creation of female characters is a real thing, too.  And also that women are individuals living in a patriarchal culture and we all will have different experiences and ways of coping with this reality.

 

I'm going to break this into parts, because I can only work on it for short periods of time.  So consider this the introduction.  Part 1 will be coming later. I know you're all on the edges of your seats.

I have to be honest.

I love reading some meta, and I love analysis along the lines of gender and orientation and feminism... pretty much all the elements of the latest discussions of women writing slash.

But collectively it's all starting to read a lot like "what's wrong with the women."  And I've had enough of that for many lifetimes.

I need some icons of awesome women. Femslashy icons would be great!  Anyone have any to share?  Any good communities to rec?

I find most of the fandom communities I've been exposed to far less alienatingly heteronormative than Jezebel, the feminist(-ish) website.

This is a pretty good post about sexism and heteronormativity in slash: The flip side. ("Pickering, why can't a woman be more like a man?") 
My minor quibble is that I really dislike the use of "we" and "fandom" because it's generalizing a huge group of people and speaking for them, but I recognize that what she talks about is a problem in m/m slash fandom as a whole.  I would include yaoi fandom in that, because it's also a huge problem for us.  (I also disagree that writing slash is a progressive act, per se, which she seems to suggest at the end of her post.)

It gets really messy, too, when we are mixing up hatred of male-fantasy female characters with hatred of the female.  Do women, in general, just not have a good way to frame their resentment of female characters who are just props for men without engaging in misogyny?

I don't read published m/m fiction.  The only published book I've read is Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale.  But in general, most of it doesn't appeal to me.  And my reading of fanfiction is pretty narrowly selected from people I think are better authors, and consists of either pure smut or stories that center around characterization.  So I just don't run across the more blatantly appropriative or badly stereotyped stuff.

So I'm just trying to take a step back from the mess that is going on with this discussion online to try to get a better grasp of what appropriation means here.

The most appropriative, offensive female writer I'm familiar with doesn't write slash at all.  Instead, she appropriates both slash (or yaoi, since she focuses on the pretty) AND queer male experience into some uber fail.  This, of course, is Laurell K. Hamilton of Anita Blake Vampire Hunter fame.  So I'm taking some time to try to clear my head and think about how she fails, and why.  There are some great posts on the LKH_Lashouts livejournal community and it's worth checking them out.

Short explanation: LKH finds men of ambiguous sexuality hot but can't stand the idea of actual gay sex, so her ambiguously oriented (and even obviously bisexual/gay) male characters all serve the needs of the heterosexual female character (and the female readers, vicariously).  Bisexual and gay men never hook up with other men during the timeline of the books, as far as I can remember.  There are m/f/m scenes, but only one where a man actually engages in sex acts with another man.. and that scene is deeply problematic for a lot of reasons.

I don't really know what the point of this post is except that I hate LKH's writing and she's disgustingly appropriative.

I haven't posted or kept up with journals in quite a while, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to join in the list bandwagon, since it's the end of a decade and all.  I saw a couple lists bemoaning the lack of sci-fi future in our lives, including jokes about jet packs and flying cars.  Wasn't that a commercial?  Anyway, I thought I'd celebrate instead, with a list of Sci-Fi devices science actually gave us.  This is my quick list of 4, what am I missing?

1. Touch screens.  Come on, Star Trek didn't get touch screens till The Next Generation!  Even then, they mechanically pushed a bunch of static "buttons" and never imagined flinging things across the screen with a swipe of the finger.  Soon we will all have those table displays that control everything!  I personally can't wait until I'm fussing with some settings and my cat jumps up on the display and wreaks havoc.  You think they'll have claw-proof screens?

2.  Communicators.  Flip open your cell phone, state a name, and be instantly connected.  I know, I know. The flip-open style cell phone is so Aughties.  But we got the awesome cordless, portable communication device of our sci-fi dreams. 

3.  Teeny Tiny music players.  I used to watch SeaQuest DSV. Yes, I'm embarassed, but I was young.  Young enough to have a crush on the MarySue nerd boy.  He had this little music player with little memory chips that held a gazillion and one songs.   But Mp3 players today are even better than imagined; thankfully we don't need a collection of teensy memory chips that are way too easy to lose. 

4.  Laptops, Smartphones, GPS.  Portable computers!  We take these so much for granted we don't remember the days when they were pure fantasy.  We might not have flying cars, but now we really can have devices that tell us which direction to turn to get to our destination.  We can get messages anywhere, in an instant.  We can take our computers with us!

What else?

Because a lot of my recent involvement on DW and LJ has been the result of various FAIL controversies, most of the people I read are in Western or American media fandom while most of my fannish life has been in anime and Japanese video games.  I rarely read fanfiction for books or for tv shows and movies that aren't animated.  Harry Potter has been one exception, but I love the fandom a lot more than the original source.

My fandoms do not have enough fanfiction!  I read Fullmetal Alchemst almost exclusively now, and not much of it, because I just don't have the time I used to to sift through the junk.  Loveless is too good to have much fanfiction, really.  FMA should be, too, but it has the benefit of being a really, really huge fandom.  Weiss Kreuz, bless it, is just old now, as is Final Fantasy 8.  And Yami no Matsuei never had a large enough fandom to provide a lot of fan fiction.  Sukisho? Forget it!

Someone recently mentioned having a hard time finding non-kink, non-phobic fics about transgendered characters (I can't find the link now).  In my cis privilege, I hadn't really thought about that much before.   Seems like there are several anime characters who would led themselves well to being written as trans women or men.   I would love to see a fic with Watari from Yami no Matsuei as genuinely transgendered.  The subtext is certainly there in the manga.  There have been some other interpretations of his desire to create a sex changing potion, but I haven't ever seen a fic where that is taken seriously as a suggestion that Watari is trandgendered.  He is one of my favorite characters, and I wish I had the ability and knowledge to write that story.

This morning in a preview for a story on Michael Jackson, the NPR host asked(slightly paraphrased from memory) "is Black America embracing the singer who declared that 'it don't matter if you're black or white'?"

wut?

Of course, this is also the station where the host of Marketplace was joking about reports about an Australian dude who got in trouble for looking at naked women online, most of them apparently African. (I'm not very familiar with the story). The host joked about how we see that all the time in National Geographic, so maybe that's not a big deal. hur hur. African women are primitive! African women have no sense of privacy and are fair game for the white male gaze! HILARIOUS. Hey, Marketplace host: fuck you.

(Crossposted to Dreamwidth)
I'm finding I can't get too deeply involved in this, but there are some excellent posts and comments that deserve to be read and thought about.

What it has brought to my mind is Kyle Payne, the guy who self-identified as a radical feminist anti-porn activist, who counseled sexual assault victms and was later arrested for assaulting a young woman. he is an "anti-porn" man who self-identified as a radical feminist. A man who supposedly did and said the right things, who was vocally against sexual violence. And a man who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman and kept video to enjoy later.*

So fuck all of you who argue that we should give men the benefit of the doubt, or that we're just too hypersensitive, or that we are anti-male for being distrustful of men around us. Rapists don't wear labels. When women distrust men in general we are fucking justified. And when we actually say it, when women dare to tell the truth of their lives, we are trying to tell men/society something.

When they try to shut that down? They're making it perfectly clear that they don't give a shit about women's lives.

*My google-fu is limited at work and I can't remember his name at the moment, but I will update later.

[updated and edited with Kyle Payne's name]