Back with no demand whatsoever, I, Erika the Blog Queen, am here to answer your questions. These are definitely reader-submitted questions and not things I've been asked by friends or Will and I made up for our own amusement.
Question: I was dating this one person for years, and we broke up, and now I'm dating someone new (yay!) but I haven't had sex with anyone else but my ex in over half a decade and the idea of having sex with other people is kind of intimidating. Any advice?
Blog Queen: Ok, here, try this. Think of sex like an epic fantasy adventure story. The actual end goal is often unimportant, the real story is the journey to get there, right? You're embarking on a journey full of unknowns and adventure and excitement! That's awesome! So pack your provisions, and get ready to get lost. I mean, you will get lost, it's what happens, and probably get trapped by giant spiders or something like that. That's ok, that's normal. Just remember your quest and the values guiding you on it. Courage, honesty, and loyalty and you'll make it through with minimal tragic deaths. If you don't reach the end goal you thought you were headed for, that's ok, too. Just enjoy the journey! Take in the stunning vistas and the lush smell of the forests and enjoy the feel of the waterfall on your skin and if you're worried about doing it wrong you ask that majestic ass waterfall how it wants to be fucked and go from there. You'll be fine! Also use protection, who knows where that waterfall has been.
Question: How do I tell my fiance that I am actually just a bunch of squirrels in a trench coat? Our wedding is only a few weeks away!
Blog Queen: Tell them after the wedding by dropping your coat to reveal your squirrel body. By then they're already legally tied to you, and there are no laws to annul a marriage just because your spouse is in fact a bunch of squirrels and you didn't notice that. They love you, they agreed to marry you! Have faith in that. You'll work it out.
Question: Which cupcake is objectively the best?
Blog Queen: Nothing is objective.
Question: My time travel machine is only good for one more trip; what ancient animal should I bring back to the present?
Blog Queen: Dawn horse. They're like, horses the size of cats. They would make such good pets.
Question: Fiiiiiiiiirrre!
Blog Queen: Absolutely.
Question: I have found my way into a socially regressive fantasy world; should I remain here to become a ruler and force them towards equality by dictatorial fiat or return home and allow them to progress naturally?
Blog Queen: Being a dictator isn't for everyone, but if you're already considering it, odds are it is for you. There is obviously no way that could go wrong, so I say go for it! Societies being forced to adopt new social standards never rebel and try to commit regicide!
Question: I'm concerned that we will never have a dog for prime minister; how can I have hope for our country's future?
Blog Queen: I share your concern. We can only keep doing our part by voting for the most dog like candidates, and hoping they're dog like in good ways. Or we can create some sort of mind control device and use it to get a dog elected. I'm definitely not working on the mind control device myself. No sir. Not me. So you better get on that.
Question: My boyfriend says he wants to "50 Shades" me. What should I do?
Blog Queen: Run. Very fast and very far. Change your name, get a job waiting tables in a small, sleepy town. Meet a nice single father who works as a teacher at the local school named Jeremy, and bond with his adorable but troubled 11 year old daughter, Vanessa. Help her through some of her troubles over her dead mother as you fall in love with Jeremy. Get engaged, only to have his wife, not-so-dead, return after having recovered from retrograde amnesia to reclaim her life. Have a heart-wrenching talk with Jeremy as he decides to try and make things work with his wife, and remain a part of Vanessa's life from a distance. Eventually Jeremy's troubled younger brother, Robert, will roll into town on his motorcycle, trying to forget the ghosts of his past. The two of you will have a passionate affair where you both discover new depths to yourself, and run away together. Somewhere warm.
Question: How do I tell my father, high priest of Nyarlathotep, that I want to go to a Lutheran college and also not murder anyone?
Blog Queen: Coming out to your parents about ideological differences can be hard. They might feel like they failed as parents because of it, or like there is now a rift between you. Sit them down and gently explain that while their religion and culture have been huge influences for you, they're not you. Try to still celebrate the high holy days and kill someone from time to time (if you're comfortable with it) so he feels like he hasn't lost you while you strike out on your own. He may not respond well at first, so have somewhere else you can stay for a little bit while he processes it!
Question: I have retrograde amnesia and it's really hard feeling like I have no history or past.
Blog Queen: Don't look at it as something you've lost, but something you've gained! You get a chance few people can get. You can invent your own past. You can be, and have done, what ever you want! Plus, if it's outlandish enough, people will be trying to prove you wrong, which will mean that they're helping you in your search to find your more mundane past!
Showing posts with label how to not suck at relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how to not suck at relationships. Show all posts
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Erika vs Gilmore Girls: Showdown in the Conversationdrome
I used to watch Gilmore Girls with my mother when it first came out. I think we, like a lot of mothers and daughters watching this show, wished we could be like Lorelei and Rory (bestest friends and, to quote the show, "freakishly bonded" parent and kid), when we were more like Emily and Lorelei--two people who loved each other because they were family but had no idea how to communicate despite their most earnest efforts, and just kept fighting. Which sums up the show pretty well for those of you who have never seen it: it's a comedy about mother/daughter relationships. I just finished re-watching it on Netflix from start to finish, so you all now get to be subjected to my thoughts on the matter.
First things first, here's some of what it gets wrong: There is not one canonical not-straight character in the whole series (although I will fight you that the town weirdo Kirk is bi but I'll get into that in the comments if anyone wants). The cast is very very white, although there are a few notable exceptions. There are characters who are supposed to be impoverished or struggling, yet everyone enjoys an asston of privilege, have nice homes, eat out constantly, and generally are never really shown leading a life that isn't upper middle class. The show is mainly about relationships, and while it started off being about non-romantic relationships it does develop a focus on it.
Its approach on pregnancy needs some detailing too. Lorelei Gilmore, the protagonist of the show, had her daughter, Rory, when she was 16. She then ran away from home and raised her on her own and boot-strapped her way to middle class. (Yeaaah. I mentioned this show is kind of classist, right? It has no earthly idea what anything below upper-middle-class looks like.) The possibility of abortion for her (or anyone) is mentioned once in seven seasons, and quashed quickly and with disgust. It is not mentioned to her, but to her mother. We can assume that Lorelei wanted to have the baby, but at no point do we ever see her being offered an alternative. This is framed as having been the right call because her daughter is objectively perfect and if she did it then she wouldn't have her perfect kid! And her life is awesome now! Which is kind of nice in a way--it's a show that says over and over again "Fuck up. For glory. You can still fix it and bounce back."
In the last two seasons we see two women who are not happy to be pregnant. One is Lane, a newly wed and struggling musician who comes from a very religious household (though she mostly rejects that for herself) who gets pregnant on her honeymoon. With twins. She says, clearly, when she finds out she's pregnant that she doesn't want to be a mother. Not yet. Down the road sure, but right now? And with twins? But never does she think about an abortion, and never does someone else suggest it. Rory just tries to encourage her because she's sure she'll be a great mom! And who's ever ready for anything? They're twenty but, you know, have these kids!
The second is Sookie, Lorelei's best friend, co-worker, chef, and co-owner of a very successful small country inn. She is married with two children. After she gives birth for the second time, a nurse appears to take her husband for a vasectomy because, nope, she is done. Spoilers: He did not get the vasectomy, and he didn't tell her. At first there's no issue, but after some confusion about whether she's still on the pill she gets pregnant. She does not want to be pregnant. We see her freaking out, and Lorelai has to try and remind her of all the wonderful things about new babies to get her on board with the idea (The line "Think of that new baby smell" is used. I have never sniffed a baby; can someone who has weigh in here? Is this like people talking about eating babies feet? Is it a 'new car smell' joke?) and slowly wins her over with "awww cute babies". I was cringing so hard I pulled a muscle in my neck in this scene. We do see her upset at her husband as an ongoing story line, which is a small mercy that cute babies doesn't fix all and also children are a huge deal. They eventually talk and resolve it, and then they're good, but this was huge to her. She was pregnant. She already had two kids. She did not want a third. Never does anyone say "You don't have to keep it", which distresses me. We have three instances of women who are pregnant who do not want to be, for very different reasons. Even if the answer each time was "No, I think I should keep the kid" clearly each time, it would have made me feel better. As it is, it made me feel like pregnancy is just... something that happens, and is ultimately a good thing because aww look at the little baby's itty bitty fingers!*
That is the bad. What do I like about this show? It is a show that at its heart is about women, relationships, and the relationships between women. In the early seasons this is specifically about mother-daughter relationships, and it isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't all doom and gloom, either. People fight, they make up, some relationships are happy and healthy, some are not! Emily, the grandmother, is downright abusive and manipulative at times (this eases up to cast her less as an antagonist and more as a real person as the show goes on). As the series progresses more romantic relationships become a central theme, but even then, the women around Lorelei and Rory remain important.
So let's talk about how the show handles its three notable characters of color. Rory's best friend in the world is Lane Kim, who's mother is a Seventh-Day Adventist. I am not terribly versed in Korean stereotypes, but I suspect they're played with by how often Lane says things like "Koreans do things like X" and there is a lot of kimchi. Mrs. Kim, Lane's mother is incredibly strict, and in the early seasons when Lane is young and living with her Mother still (I believe she's widowed, but it's never made explicit) we see Lane living under a very strict regime. She can only date Korean boys from church (who her Mother approves of) and their dates will be escorted. No chocolate or carbonated drinks in the house. No make up. Only approved music and clothes. We see Lane hiding reams and reams of cds in her floor boards to listen to at Rory's, we see her having a second bedroom set up in her closet which is her "real" room. She secretly joins a band. Her Mother eventually finds all of her illicit stashes and throws her out of the house. They eventually make up.
Despite all this, the show never vilifies Mrs. Kim. She is an antagonist, she's kind of scary, but she has motives that make sense. She ultimately loves her daughter and consistently does what she believes is best. Later on we see her shift to more middle ground stances as Lane gets older and more independent. Most of her strictness, her coldness, her rigidness is based within her being a Seventh Day Adventist, not Korean.
The other character of color is Michel. He is the concierge at the inn Lorelai and Sookie run, and a snooty French man. His character leans heavily on a lot of the prissy French man stereotypes or gay man stereotypes (strict diet and exercise, loves fashion, very "metrosexual"), but he is straight (or bi and never shown to be interested in men) and played by a black man. His character is very one-note, but at least they didn't opt to use stereotypes based on his race?
The lack of racial and sexual diversity sucks, but there are women of different ages, different body types, walks of life... Sookie is played by Melissa McCarthy. We have two other regular, reoccurring characters who are larger. We have aggressive type A "I will stab you in the throat to get my way" women, we have sweet kindergarten teachers, we have women who are a bit or both or a whole lot of neither. I love the wealth of women in this show, I love that they are (for most of the series) friends who care about each other. I love that the show is clever and never makes fat jokes. I love that fat women are shown as worthy of love, sexual attraction, and get to be happy. I love that it has antagonistic but not villainous women**. It all just feels so... novel to me. This is what it takes to make me happy you guys. "Here are a bunch of reasonably well written women" and I will binge watch 7 seasons. I hunger, ok? I admit it.
If you are looking for a comedy/drama that has a lot of relationship drama but never stuff that has you screaming "OH MY GOD JUST TALK TO THEM YOU JERK FACE", I highly recommend it. If you have any other recommendations for shows like that, toss 'em to me, I need something new to watch now.
Sound off in the comments for things you want to see me write about (movies preferred, but I'm not ridged) or things you've been enjoying yourselves lately (or yelling at). Tune in next week for Will's suffering!
*Ok, I get the baby finger thing. They are absurdly tiny. Like, how do you even get fingers that tiny? Cheat codes, probably.
**Save for early Paris, but she stops like halfway through season 1 I think?
First things first, here's some of what it gets wrong: There is not one canonical not-straight character in the whole series (although I will fight you that the town weirdo Kirk is bi but I'll get into that in the comments if anyone wants). The cast is very very white, although there are a few notable exceptions. There are characters who are supposed to be impoverished or struggling, yet everyone enjoys an asston of privilege, have nice homes, eat out constantly, and generally are never really shown leading a life that isn't upper middle class. The show is mainly about relationships, and while it started off being about non-romantic relationships it does develop a focus on it.
Its approach on pregnancy needs some detailing too. Lorelei Gilmore, the protagonist of the show, had her daughter, Rory, when she was 16. She then ran away from home and raised her on her own and boot-strapped her way to middle class. (Yeaaah. I mentioned this show is kind of classist, right? It has no earthly idea what anything below upper-middle-class looks like.) The possibility of abortion for her (or anyone) is mentioned once in seven seasons, and quashed quickly and with disgust. It is not mentioned to her, but to her mother. We can assume that Lorelei wanted to have the baby, but at no point do we ever see her being offered an alternative. This is framed as having been the right call because her daughter is objectively perfect and if she did it then she wouldn't have her perfect kid! And her life is awesome now! Which is kind of nice in a way--it's a show that says over and over again "Fuck up. For glory. You can still fix it and bounce back."
In the last two seasons we see two women who are not happy to be pregnant. One is Lane, a newly wed and struggling musician who comes from a very religious household (though she mostly rejects that for herself) who gets pregnant on her honeymoon. With twins. She says, clearly, when she finds out she's pregnant that she doesn't want to be a mother. Not yet. Down the road sure, but right now? And with twins? But never does she think about an abortion, and never does someone else suggest it. Rory just tries to encourage her because she's sure she'll be a great mom! And who's ever ready for anything? They're twenty but, you know, have these kids!
The second is Sookie, Lorelei's best friend, co-worker, chef, and co-owner of a very successful small country inn. She is married with two children. After she gives birth for the second time, a nurse appears to take her husband for a vasectomy because, nope, she is done. Spoilers: He did not get the vasectomy, and he didn't tell her. At first there's no issue, but after some confusion about whether she's still on the pill she gets pregnant. She does not want to be pregnant. We see her freaking out, and Lorelai has to try and remind her of all the wonderful things about new babies to get her on board with the idea (The line "Think of that new baby smell" is used. I have never sniffed a baby; can someone who has weigh in here? Is this like people talking about eating babies feet? Is it a 'new car smell' joke?) and slowly wins her over with "awww cute babies". I was cringing so hard I pulled a muscle in my neck in this scene. We do see her upset at her husband as an ongoing story line, which is a small mercy that cute babies doesn't fix all and also children are a huge deal. They eventually talk and resolve it, and then they're good, but this was huge to her. She was pregnant. She already had two kids. She did not want a third. Never does anyone say "You don't have to keep it", which distresses me. We have three instances of women who are pregnant who do not want to be, for very different reasons. Even if the answer each time was "No, I think I should keep the kid" clearly each time, it would have made me feel better. As it is, it made me feel like pregnancy is just... something that happens, and is ultimately a good thing because aww look at the little baby's itty bitty fingers!*
That is the bad. What do I like about this show? It is a show that at its heart is about women, relationships, and the relationships between women. In the early seasons this is specifically about mother-daughter relationships, and it isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't all doom and gloom, either. People fight, they make up, some relationships are happy and healthy, some are not! Emily, the grandmother, is downright abusive and manipulative at times (this eases up to cast her less as an antagonist and more as a real person as the show goes on). As the series progresses more romantic relationships become a central theme, but even then, the women around Lorelei and Rory remain important.
So let's talk about how the show handles its three notable characters of color. Rory's best friend in the world is Lane Kim, who's mother is a Seventh-Day Adventist. I am not terribly versed in Korean stereotypes, but I suspect they're played with by how often Lane says things like "Koreans do things like X" and there is a lot of kimchi. Mrs. Kim, Lane's mother is incredibly strict, and in the early seasons when Lane is young and living with her Mother still (I believe she's widowed, but it's never made explicit) we see Lane living under a very strict regime. She can only date Korean boys from church (who her Mother approves of) and their dates will be escorted. No chocolate or carbonated drinks in the house. No make up. Only approved music and clothes. We see Lane hiding reams and reams of cds in her floor boards to listen to at Rory's, we see her having a second bedroom set up in her closet which is her "real" room. She secretly joins a band. Her Mother eventually finds all of her illicit stashes and throws her out of the house. They eventually make up.
Despite all this, the show never vilifies Mrs. Kim. She is an antagonist, she's kind of scary, but she has motives that make sense. She ultimately loves her daughter and consistently does what she believes is best. Later on we see her shift to more middle ground stances as Lane gets older and more independent. Most of her strictness, her coldness, her rigidness is based within her being a Seventh Day Adventist, not Korean.
The other character of color is Michel. He is the concierge at the inn Lorelai and Sookie run, and a snooty French man. His character leans heavily on a lot of the prissy French man stereotypes or gay man stereotypes (strict diet and exercise, loves fashion, very "metrosexual"), but he is straight (or bi and never shown to be interested in men) and played by a black man. His character is very one-note, but at least they didn't opt to use stereotypes based on his race?
The lack of racial and sexual diversity sucks, but there are women of different ages, different body types, walks of life... Sookie is played by Melissa McCarthy. We have two other regular, reoccurring characters who are larger. We have aggressive type A "I will stab you in the throat to get my way" women, we have sweet kindergarten teachers, we have women who are a bit or both or a whole lot of neither. I love the wealth of women in this show, I love that they are (for most of the series) friends who care about each other. I love that the show is clever and never makes fat jokes. I love that fat women are shown as worthy of love, sexual attraction, and get to be happy. I love that it has antagonistic but not villainous women**. It all just feels so... novel to me. This is what it takes to make me happy you guys. "Here are a bunch of reasonably well written women" and I will binge watch 7 seasons. I hunger, ok? I admit it.
If you are looking for a comedy/drama that has a lot of relationship drama but never stuff that has you screaming "OH MY GOD JUST TALK TO THEM YOU JERK FACE", I highly recommend it. If you have any other recommendations for shows like that, toss 'em to me, I need something new to watch now.
Sound off in the comments for things you want to see me write about (movies preferred, but I'm not ridged) or things you've been enjoying yourselves lately (or yelling at). Tune in next week for Will's suffering!
*Ok, I get the baby finger thing. They are absurdly tiny. Like, how do you even get fingers that tiny? Cheat codes, probably.
**Save for early Paris, but she stops like halfway through season 1 I think?
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Speaker for the Dead, chapter one, part three, in which Pipo makes a lot of bad decisions
I missed last week's post, quite unintentionally. And now this one is late. Holiday season; y'all know how it is. I've also now read ahead a bit, just the next three posts or so. I don't think that enough information came up to affect my analysis of any of this material so far. I just know that it's going to start getting really, really bad soon. I have previewed my horror and I can see the pain incoming again. (I mentioned to my mother that I was reading Speaker for the first time and she tried to talk me out of it, like I had said I was going to hitchhike to Mexico. She does care.)
Let's wrap this first sucker up.
(Content: sexism, murder. Fun content: balloons, the human nervous system.)
Well done, Card. Managed to make it to page 20 before describing a barely-pubescent boy as 'beautiful' in an explicitly romantic/sexual context. (Of course it's romantic/sexual, and yes of course Libo and Novinha will hook up within the next few years/pages. What kind of book do you think this is?) Novinha snipes at him one day when she learns that Pipo and Libo have never met a female Little One and don't know anything about how the species reproduces. (They described the concepts of male and female, and all of the Little Ones have identified themselves as male.) Libo is quiet for a while before responding at all, and then they have this back and forth of "Obviously you should just do this" and "Well, no, that won't work because X" until finally X is "Because trying to tell them what we want their hair for would risk giving away scientific secrets that could change the course of their society and ruin everything".
Basically what I'm saying is that Card was very impressive to foresee political blogs but this is the part where he clearly did not see tumblr incoming.
So then there's a misogynistic interlude in which Libo riffs off the Little Ones' habit of naming trees and starts naming their office furniture. Actual quote: "Don't sit on Chair! It's her time of the month again." And Novinha does the same, obviously, she writes "a series of mock reports on an imaginary pequenino woman called Reverend Mother, who was hilariously bitchy and demanding."
Now, maybe, maybe, these arrogant teenagers mocking the primitive aliens' noted reverence for their unseen female population are still going to accurately collect and assess and analyse all of their information, and aren't going to let their superiority affect their objective rational Sciencemastery at all. But maybe--probably--they won't, and if that happens there will be no one to catch them, no one to call them out, because they are utterly isolated from the rest of their community and the only people who are even aware of the mockery going on in the privacy of the Zenador's Station are the three of them who are complicit in it. Where is the oversight? For that matter, where are the experts from the rest of the galaxy making trips to Lusitania to attempt to add insight or oversight to their work? (Travel might be stupidly expensive, but that won't stop Ender from jetting in shortly, and no one thinks it's weird to request a Speaker to come in.)
This here is exactly how science and academia get bigotry in them and become part of the larger system of oppression--it's just a joke, and then it isn't.
But when they do ruin everything one day, it's not because of that, of course. It starts with Rooter, alien teenage supergenius, who demands to know who it is that the humans go to war with, since he knows they only have one city. Pipo reassures him that the humans would never kill the Little Ones, and some time later Rooter remarks--joking, but he's smart enough to know that jokes are always about the implicit truth--that the only reason Pipo is still alive is that "your women are too stupid to know that he is wise".
The weird hybrid of bloodlust and misogyny continues, until Libo finds a safe answer.
The forest is loud with drumming that night, and Pipo and Libo wonder if they haven't accidentally introduced the concept of sexual equality to the Little Ones--meaning, of course, not that the revered females might have broken free of wherever they're hidden away, but that the males might have thrown off their shackles and be fighting for liberation. I have literally no idea what these 'shackles' might consist of, but a whole lot of ideas about why the males might be keeping the females locked up and never let them meet the outsiders. Sigh.
In the morning they find a patch of freshly cleared earth, and Rooter's corpse with a tree growing out of his chest. It's gruesomely detailed--every organ and tissue and sinew has been carefully extracted (though not detached) and laid out in a pattern around his body. (I keep picturing this amazing but terrifying image of the human nervous system extracted from the rest of the body.) From the blood spread, they determine that he had to have been alive when they started to eviscerate him. Libo has the understandable reaction that, if the non-interference law means letting this happen to a person, then the law is ignorant and wrong.
Pipo and Libo debate which of them said something to trigger this sudden violence, and Novinha interrupts:
Libo and Novinha continue to bond more intensely, treating the Zenador's Station as their only sanctum now that the Little Ones seem just as mysterious and dangerous as other people always have. Pipo and Libo apparently can't get over the feeling that one of them must have ruined everything, so Libo and Novinha are each other's only non-stressful companions. Pipo goes Shakespearian, comparing the station to the island in The Tempest:
The Little Ones don't talk about Rooter's death, and the humans don't bring it up either, lest they give away more information or trigger more violence, and so the years kind of stumble on. By age 17, Libo and Novinha often talk about what they'll be doing together twenty years from now, and this sort of saddens me. Don't get me wrong, I love the fantasy of people finding each other early in life and first love being truest and forever love, but I am also creeped out by the idea of people attaching to each other out of desperation and never having any consideration of other options, especially when they seem to literally have no other friends or anyone--once in a while even they are going to fight, and who are they going to talk to about those issues? It is good to have your magical one true love to whom you can tell anything, but it is not sufficient.
Also, the romance quotient in the room is reading a solid zero. I'm going to assume that's because I'm not supposed to be emotionally invested in their relationship and rather just take it as future backstory.
And then one day Novinha is examining plant cells and she finds the Descolada agent sitting in them, the same body that swept through the colony as a plague stopped only at the cost of her parents' lives. She starts searching specifically for that and finds Descolada in every kind of cell from every kind of species she's catalogued. She shows Pipo, who starts running the same tests himself and asks her to explain how it functions. I don't know enough about biology to comment:
Pipo would not survive in a horror movie, either.
Libo's committee meeting runs long, and then he gets groceries (where does this tiny walled colony get its food), so he doesn't arrive at the station until after dark, and Pipo hasn't returned. They go looking for him, preparing for a long scouring of the forest, but very quickly they find him dead in the snow, eviscerated like Rooter without the tree in his chest.
This is just... I don't even know what to say. Is there anyone who doesn't find it howlingly infuriating when a character figures out a vital secret but then refuses to tell anyone else for no good reason and then walks voluntarily into incredible danger? Like--Pipo, you know this is a subject they kill people over and you know they're super casual about "So, will your women decide to murder the hell out of you soon?" This isn't hard. Write something down and take precautions. (This would work better if he really was trying to take precautions, specifically of the 'Don't let my son come with me into this dangerous situation' variety, but that's not how the situation is sold.)
So let's hypothesise wildly based on the hints dropped. The plague that takes apart your DNA is a vital part of this planet's life. The Little Ones consider themselves all male and no one ever sees a female. The females apparently evaluate the males and decide when the wisest ones should die, and they are specifically killed in a particular ceremonial and surgical manner. Conclusion: death is part of their reproductive cycle, male Little Ones die in order to open up access to their DNA, and only the best are chosen to die in this particular way and contribute to future generations. I'm trying to decide if it's more likely that the trees are simply ceremonial or if female Little Ones actually are trees because the whole ecosystem is interlinked somehow. Anyway, that's why Rooter was so concerned about the humans having another village to go to war with--because war and associated death is ceremonial (or somehow mandatory) as part of their reproductive cycle.
Not sure how long I'm going to have to wait to have my guesses confirmed or rejected (I know it won't be within the next twenty pages) but I'm going to be unimpressed if Pipo worked it out in thirty seconds but his genius proteges don't catch on for decades and need Ender's help to solve the mystery. Seriously, Pipo, write a note or something. Don't just Fermat us. That's a jackass move.
Speaking of jackass moves, come back next week when we catch up with Ender and endure some just really spectacularly bad theological strawmen! And, if you can't wait for that, look for the return of Erika the blogqueen later this week! It is about to be a new year and we are GEARING UP.
Let's wrap this first sucker up.
(Content: sexism, murder. Fun content: balloons, the human nervous system.)
Speaker for the Dead: p. 20--30
It takes three days for Novinha to take the test to become the new xenobiologist of Milagre, and because she is 13 years old and a main character in a Card novel, she passes with a score better than most graduate students. Obviously reasonable. She starts spending most of her time in the Zenador's Station, because they have all the cool data, and Libo finds her cold condescension aggravating, especially since they're the same age and presumably both ubergeniuses but she has an adult job and he's still just apprenticing.
He was not prone to taking umbrage openly. But Pipo knew his son and saw him burn. After a while even Novinha, insensitive as she was, began to realize that she was provoking Libo more than any normal young man could possibly endure. But instead of easing up on him, she began to regard it as a challenge. How could she force some response from this unnaturally calm, gentle-spirited, beautiful boy?
*blows noisemaker*
Well done, Card. Managed to make it to page 20 before describing a barely-pubescent boy as 'beautiful' in an explicitly romantic/sexual context. (Of course it's romantic/sexual, and yes of course Libo and Novinha will hook up within the next few years/pages. What kind of book do you think this is?) Novinha snipes at him one day when she learns that Pipo and Libo have never met a female Little One and don't know anything about how the species reproduces. (They described the concepts of male and female, and all of the Little Ones have identified themselves as male.) Libo is quiet for a while before responding at all, and then they have this back and forth of "Obviously you should just do this" and "Well, no, that won't work because X" until finally X is "Because trying to tell them what we want their hair for would risk giving away scientific secrets that could change the course of their society and ruin everything".
Once she realized that they were excellent at their science, and that she knew almost nothing of it, she dropped her aggressive stance and went almost to the opposite extreme. [....] Politeness gradually gave way to familiarity. Pipo and Libo began to converse openly in front of her, airing their speculations about why the pequininos had developed some of their strange behaviours, what meaning lay behind some of their strange statements, why they remained so maddeningly impenetrable.Libo and Novinha become BFFs, making inside jokes based on their unique scientific information that no one else except Pipo could possibly understand. And it's sort of sweet, but I also wonder why, with the galactic instant internet that's been in place for over 3000 years, none of them have, say, friends on other planets. A hundred worlds with a total human population in the tens or hundreds of billions--shouldn't the galaxy be full of lonely supergenius teenagers looking for someone else smart enough to get them and make complicated xenobiology jokes?
Basically what I'm saying is that Card was very impressive to foresee political blogs but this is the part where he clearly did not see tumblr incoming.
So then there's a misogynistic interlude in which Libo riffs off the Little Ones' habit of naming trees and starts naming their office furniture. Actual quote: "Don't sit on Chair! It's her time of the month again." And Novinha does the same, obviously, she writes "a series of mock reports on an imaginary pequenino woman called Reverend Mother, who was hilariously bitchy and demanding."
Now, maybe, maybe, these arrogant teenagers mocking the primitive aliens' noted reverence for their unseen female population are still going to accurately collect and assess and analyse all of their information, and aren't going to let their superiority affect their objective rational Sciencemastery at all. But maybe--probably--they won't, and if that happens there will be no one to catch them, no one to call them out, because they are utterly isolated from the rest of their community and the only people who are even aware of the mockery going on in the privacy of the Zenador's Station are the three of them who are complicit in it. Where is the oversight? For that matter, where are the experts from the rest of the galaxy making trips to Lusitania to attempt to add insight or oversight to their work? (Travel might be stupidly expensive, but that won't stop Ender from jetting in shortly, and no one thinks it's weird to request a Speaker to come in.)
This here is exactly how science and academia get bigotry in them and become part of the larger system of oppression--it's just a joke, and then it isn't.
But when they do ruin everything one day, it's not because of that, of course. It starts with Rooter, alien teenage supergenius, who demands to know who it is that the humans go to war with, since he knows they only have one city. Pipo reassures him that the humans would never kill the Little Ones, and some time later Rooter remarks--joking, but he's smart enough to know that jokes are always about the implicit truth--that the only reason Pipo is still alive is that "your women are too stupid to know that he is wise".
The weird hybrid of bloodlust and misogyny continues, until Libo finds a safe answer.
"Most women don't know him," he said.
"Then how will they know if he should die?" asked Rooter. Then, suddenly, he went very still and spoke very loudly. "You are cabras!" [....] He pointed at Libo and then at Pipo. "Your women don't choose your honor, you do! Like in battle, but all the time!"'Cabra' means 'goat', and they seem to be the bison or antelopes of Lusitania. Pipo tries to explain that couples make decisions together, but the Little Ones continue shouting in distress and then haul Rooter away into the forest and forbid the humans to follow. Pipo and Libo book it and try to figure out what happened, starting with Rooter calling human women weak and stupid.
"That's because he's never met Mayor Bosquinha. Or your mother, for that matter." Libo laughed, because his mother, Conceição, ruled the archives as if it were an ancient estação in the wild mato--if you entered her domain, you were utterly subject to her law.Paraphrasing Card: "Gosh, I sure do have some strong female characters offscreen. Hoo boy, if you could only see them! Now then, back to making sexist jokes about primitive tribal cultures." Also, our characterisation of Conceição now consists of knowing that she doesn't believe children are full people, she doesn't understand her husband's quiet brilliant insights into human nature, and she's iron-fistedly domineering about her library. Top notch, Card.
The forest is loud with drumming that night, and Pipo and Libo wonder if they haven't accidentally introduced the concept of sexual equality to the Little Ones--meaning, of course, not that the revered females might have broken free of wherever they're hidden away, but that the males might have thrown off their shackles and be fighting for liberation. I have literally no idea what these 'shackles' might consist of, but a whole lot of ideas about why the males might be keeping the females locked up and never let them meet the outsiders. Sigh.
In the morning they find a patch of freshly cleared earth, and Rooter's corpse with a tree growing out of his chest. It's gruesomely detailed--every organ and tissue and sinew has been carefully extracted (though not detached) and laid out in a pattern around his body. (I keep picturing this amazing but terrifying image of the human nervous system extracted from the rest of the body.) From the blood spread, they determine that he had to have been alive when they started to eviscerate him. Libo has the understandable reaction that, if the non-interference law means letting this happen to a person, then the law is ignorant and wrong.
Pipo and Libo debate which of them said something to trigger this sudden violence, and Novinha interrupts:
"Do you think their world revolves around you? As you said, the piggies did it, for whatever reason they have. It's plain enough this isn't the first time--they were too deft at the vivisection for this to be the first time."
Pipo took it with black humor. "We're losing our wits, Libo. Novinha isn't supposed to know anything about xenology."Well done, Sherlock. So they file their report, and the committees agree that since the Little Ones are going to meet human women sooner or later it would have been stupid for Pipo to lie about our genders, so nothing could have been done differently. Life and research go on, although Libo is traumatised and doesn't return to the field for weeks--he grew up hearing about the Little Ones and had known Rooter by proxy for years. I like this; for once someone's empathy for aliens seems realistic, rather than nonexistent or 'Oh my god this fanfic has changed society's entire outlook on our near-extermination'.
Libo and Novinha continue to bond more intensely, treating the Zenador's Station as their only sanctum now that the Little Ones seem just as mysterious and dangerous as other people always have. Pipo and Libo apparently can't get over the feeling that one of them must have ruined everything, so Libo and Novinha are each other's only non-stressful companions. Pipo goes Shakespearian, comparing the station to the island in The Tempest:
...with Pipo a loving but ever remote Prospero. Pipo wondered: Are the pequininos like Ariel, leading the young lovers to happiness, or are they little Calibans, scarcely under control and chafing to do murder?Or both! I vote for 'both'.
The Little Ones don't talk about Rooter's death, and the humans don't bring it up either, lest they give away more information or trigger more violence, and so the years kind of stumble on. By age 17, Libo and Novinha often talk about what they'll be doing together twenty years from now, and this sort of saddens me. Don't get me wrong, I love the fantasy of people finding each other early in life and first love being truest and forever love, but I am also creeped out by the idea of people attaching to each other out of desperation and never having any consideration of other options, especially when they seem to literally have no other friends or anyone--once in a while even they are going to fight, and who are they going to talk to about those issues? It is good to have your magical one true love to whom you can tell anything, but it is not sufficient.
Also, the romance quotient in the room is reading a solid zero. I'm going to assume that's because I'm not supposed to be emotionally invested in their relationship and rather just take it as future backstory.
Pipo never bothered to ask them about their marriage plans. After all, he thought, they studied biology from morning to night. Eventually it would occur to them to explore stable and socially acceptable reproductive strategies.Ha ha! Social pressure to conform to traditional religious institutions regardless of whether they're appropriate to your personal goals, relationship, and preferences sure is adorable. (Libo and Novinha apparently hypothesise endlessly on how the Little Ones reproduce, given that they only see self-identified males with no apparent mating equipment. Again, Pipo finds this delightful. Is this supposed to be a parallel to recommended 'courtship' practices in conservative American Christianity, with the constant chaperone?)
And then one day Novinha is examining plant cells and she finds the Descolada agent sitting in them, the same body that swept through the colony as a plague stopped only at the cost of her parents' lives. She starts searching specifically for that and finds Descolada in every kind of cell from every kind of species she's catalogued. She shows Pipo, who starts running the same tests himself and asks her to explain how it functions. I don't know enough about biology to comment:
"...It attacks the genetic molecules, starting at one end and unzipping the two strands of the molecule right down the middle. [....] In humans, the DNA tries to recombine, but random proteins insert themselves so that cell after cell goes crazy. Sometimes they go into mitosis, like cancer, and sometimes they die."Pipo says unnecessarily vague things about how 'it's the same thing' among the cells, then grabs his coat to run outside, telling Novinha that when Libo arrives he should look at the simulation and see if he can figure it out before Pipo returns, because it's "the big one. The answer to everything." He says he has to go ask the Little Ones if his theory is right, and if he's not back in an hour he must have broken his leg in the forest.
Pipo would not survive in a horror movie, either.
Libo's committee meeting runs long, and then he gets groceries (where does this tiny walled colony get its food), so he doesn't arrive at the station until after dark, and Pipo hasn't returned. They go looking for him, preparing for a long scouring of the forest, but very quickly they find him dead in the snow, eviscerated like Rooter without the tree in his chest.
This is just... I don't even know what to say. Is there anyone who doesn't find it howlingly infuriating when a character figures out a vital secret but then refuses to tell anyone else for no good reason and then walks voluntarily into incredible danger? Like--Pipo, you know this is a subject they kill people over and you know they're super casual about "So, will your women decide to murder the hell out of you soon?" This isn't hard. Write something down and take precautions. (This would work better if he really was trying to take precautions, specifically of the 'Don't let my son come with me into this dangerous situation' variety, but that's not how the situation is sold.)
So let's hypothesise wildly based on the hints dropped. The plague that takes apart your DNA is a vital part of this planet's life. The Little Ones consider themselves all male and no one ever sees a female. The females apparently evaluate the males and decide when the wisest ones should die, and they are specifically killed in a particular ceremonial and surgical manner. Conclusion: death is part of their reproductive cycle, male Little Ones die in order to open up access to their DNA, and only the best are chosen to die in this particular way and contribute to future generations. I'm trying to decide if it's more likely that the trees are simply ceremonial or if female Little Ones actually are trees because the whole ecosystem is interlinked somehow. Anyway, that's why Rooter was so concerned about the humans having another village to go to war with--because war and associated death is ceremonial (or somehow mandatory) as part of their reproductive cycle.
Not sure how long I'm going to have to wait to have my guesses confirmed or rejected (I know it won't be within the next twenty pages) but I'm going to be unimpressed if Pipo worked it out in thirty seconds but his genius proteges don't catch on for decades and need Ender's help to solve the mystery. Seriously, Pipo, write a note or something. Don't just Fermat us. That's a jackass move.
Speaking of jackass moves, come back next week when we catch up with Ender and endure some just really spectacularly bad theological strawmen! And, if you can't wait for that, look for the return of Erika the blogqueen later this week! It is about to be a new year and we are GEARING UP.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
The long fugue down the aisle towards children
Do you know "Here comes the bride" is styled after a funeral march? It's from one of Wagner's operas (and if you know Wagner, you probably know where this is going) and is played as the bride and groom prepare to consummate the marriage (yes, Here Comes The Bride is actually not what Elsa marches down the aisle to) when the antagonist (spoilers!) bursts in and starts killing a bunch of people. It's also meant as foreshadowing of the bride dying horribly because Wagner.
This is a song that 70% of couples choose as the opening credits to their married life, because it's what you do. No wonder it's even odds on divorce.
There is a script that we are all fed for how our lives will pan out. We'll grow up, go to school, start a career, meet someone, get married, have kids, pressure them to do the same so we can have grandkids, retire, travel a bit, die.
I think at some point in our lives we all buy into this script, but I think it's a toxic one. It encourages us to define ourselves by our roles (wife, mother, teacher) rather than who we are (Monica with a great sense of humor, a passion for model sail boats, and salsa dancing). It tries to force everyone into one mold, and there is so much social pressure that it's hard not to try.
When I was a teenager, I assumed I probably wouldn't get married, and kids were just not on the radar. This was constantly met with people flat out telling me I was wrong and to "just wait". I was open to the idea of marriage, someday, maybe, but kids? Less likely. This went on, but would eventually die down when I didn't relent, or hide my annoyance at people telling me I was wrong and didn't know my own mind and couldn't possibly know my own mind. People would react so strongly to my rejecting the script that they would start fighting with me about it. When I was a 15 year old girl and admitted that maybe in ten years I'd feel differently, but for now?
Ten years later, I'm getting ready to walk down the aisle myself, but I still don't want kids. Those same people who were picking fights with me at 15 are still doing so at 25. Over my not wanting kids, which I've written about before, wanting to buy a condo in the city instead of a house in the suburbs, keeping my last name... People get nervous when you go off script. They get angry, I would assume (and it is just that, an assumption) that because they bought into it, it is the Right Way and by actively not choosing it, you are telling them they (and their friends and family who bought into it, too) are Wrong.
This is where it starts to get toxic. Little girls are not sold the idea of marriage, we sell them the idea of a wedding. We tell them about this magical day where they get to be a princess and everything is about them and everything will be Just. What. They. Want. It will be the happiest day of their lives! I can not count the amount of people who have told me "It's your wedding! Be more of a diva!" which strikes fear I can not readily articulate into me. We're told that this is part of growing up. If you're in a long term, seemingly happy relationship, it doesn't matter that you're 20*, people will start giving you unsolicited advice to just get married already! If you're 25 and in that position people start asking what's wrong, why haven't you done it yet?
It's hard not to be swayed by it. If it were one or two people spouting this it'd be easy enough to brush aside, but it isn't. It seems to be everyone, and it starts so early. It's hard not to internalize it. So we grow up thinking if we're not married by 25-30 we're doing something wrong. It leads to anxiety and panic and maybe getting married because we feel we're supposed to more than because we want to. It leads to having a hard time being happy for your friends when they get married because you're not yet, or because maybe you legally can't get married. It leads to unrealistic expectations of marriage, because half of us are sold a wedding, not a marriage. Which brings me back to my earlier snark about divorce rates.
Marriage is only one step in this process, though. What about kids fresh out of high school who take on staggering debt to get an education when they're not positive that's what they want because they're still kids, and because that's what they're told to do? What about the shame we push on the kids who don't go to school, or can't?
And what about kids? I've written before about how annoyed I get when people ask and insist I have kids. When people tell me I will never understand what love really means until I have kids (again the assumption that I will) and that it is the greatest thing EVAR and really I'm missing out why have I not insisted The Boy put a baby inside me already? They make some pretty horrible assumptions, and not just assuming I'm incapable of knowing what I want. They assume that I CAN have kids. I'm sick, and I don't know what's wrong with me, it's entirely possible that I physically can't. I'm a cook; I'd be skeptical if I financially could either. What about the women who desperately want to have children but for one of many, many reasons can't? What about adoption? There are a lot of reasons that can't work, either, and we talked about making obvious suggestions and how that's bad before, remember? Are we just pretending these people don't exist? That's a painful enough scenario to be in to start with, I'm not okay with adding to their pain by pretending they don't exist, and by pretending that they will never be complete or whole person until they have a child. It's bullshit, and it's toxic, harmful bullshit.
On the other side of the coin there are people who are married, and maybe things aren't going so well and they figure that they'll have a kid and that will help them through this rough patch. Adding kids to the equation doesn't mean making any major changes which will lead to stress and hardships during the time of transition! Babies are magical, after all, and bring nothing but happiness! What if THAT couple faces infertility? Will they feel their struggling (or failing) marriage is due to their inability to check off the next box on the list? Will they not be real adults until they do? What if they conceive and the child is sick and now they're even more angry and bitter at each other because remember what I said above about major life changes stressing people out?
The narrative, and the enthusiasm we push it with, often leads us into shame, embarrassment, insecurity, corners and dead ends because there is no one size fits all life, or path. Yet we push it on others, and ourselves, because that is what we think we're supposed to do. Asexual? Infertile? Disabled? Impoverished? Gay? Doesn't matter! You can** still have all these things! And if you don't then how will you ever be happy?
I feel I often stop and call for us to simply reject a cultural norm on this blog, but I fear I don't fully credit how huge a thing that can be to do. I mean, we can't just will dinosaurs back into existence, as much as I would also like to call for that. I like to think I've rejected the norm, but now that I've taken one of the Approved Steps I understand how easy it can be to get swept up in enforcing and encouraging the narrative. So what, and how, can we do it? Amber and frogs?
Step 1 is recognizing when we're enforcing it. Asking someone why they don't want to get married (or have kids, or go to college or or or) or telling someone they should seems like a good starting point. These are valid choices, or painful circumstances which are really none of our business either way.
Step 2 is having conversations about the narrative with other people. We need to talk about it, and we need to call people out for trying to push this agenda, and we need to support people resisting it.
Step 3 is to invade the media. Wait, what? I know that some of you are artists, in what ever medium you happen to art in, think about breaking that pattern as often as possible. Don't have your hero settle down with their love interest and live happily ever after! Have them find a different kind of happy ending. Seeing other narratives will help us normalize that there's more than one, which will loosen the stranglehold the current one has on us.
I am not saying that these are bad things to want, for the record. If you want to get married and be a stay at home parent? Power to you and I'm jealous you know what you want out of life! What I am condemning is how we push the idea of marriage/kids so fervently that people feel that these are just things you're supposed to do rather than choices that should have a lot of thought going into them.
---
*No, really. When I was 20 people were pushing me to just marry my high school sweetheart. Co-workers, relatives, random people I'd get chatting with at bus stops...
**I am not, by the way, saying that you can't still get married have kids etc if you ARE these things, simply that they are very real reasons why you may not want them.
This is a song that 70% of couples choose as the opening credits to their married life, because it's what you do. No wonder it's even odds on divorce.
There is a script that we are all fed for how our lives will pan out. We'll grow up, go to school, start a career, meet someone, get married, have kids, pressure them to do the same so we can have grandkids, retire, travel a bit, die.
I think at some point in our lives we all buy into this script, but I think it's a toxic one. It encourages us to define ourselves by our roles (wife, mother, teacher) rather than who we are (Monica with a great sense of humor, a passion for model sail boats, and salsa dancing). It tries to force everyone into one mold, and there is so much social pressure that it's hard not to try.
When I was a teenager, I assumed I probably wouldn't get married, and kids were just not on the radar. This was constantly met with people flat out telling me I was wrong and to "just wait". I was open to the idea of marriage, someday, maybe, but kids? Less likely. This went on, but would eventually die down when I didn't relent, or hide my annoyance at people telling me I was wrong and didn't know my own mind and couldn't possibly know my own mind. People would react so strongly to my rejecting the script that they would start fighting with me about it. When I was a 15 year old girl and admitted that maybe in ten years I'd feel differently, but for now?
Ten years later, I'm getting ready to walk down the aisle myself, but I still don't want kids. Those same people who were picking fights with me at 15 are still doing so at 25. Over my not wanting kids, which I've written about before, wanting to buy a condo in the city instead of a house in the suburbs, keeping my last name... People get nervous when you go off script. They get angry, I would assume (and it is just that, an assumption) that because they bought into it, it is the Right Way and by actively not choosing it, you are telling them they (and their friends and family who bought into it, too) are Wrong.
This is where it starts to get toxic. Little girls are not sold the idea of marriage, we sell them the idea of a wedding. We tell them about this magical day where they get to be a princess and everything is about them and everything will be Just. What. They. Want. It will be the happiest day of their lives! I can not count the amount of people who have told me "It's your wedding! Be more of a diva!" which strikes fear I can not readily articulate into me. We're told that this is part of growing up. If you're in a long term, seemingly happy relationship, it doesn't matter that you're 20*, people will start giving you unsolicited advice to just get married already! If you're 25 and in that position people start asking what's wrong, why haven't you done it yet?
It's hard not to be swayed by it. If it were one or two people spouting this it'd be easy enough to brush aside, but it isn't. It seems to be everyone, and it starts so early. It's hard not to internalize it. So we grow up thinking if we're not married by 25-30 we're doing something wrong. It leads to anxiety and panic and maybe getting married because we feel we're supposed to more than because we want to. It leads to having a hard time being happy for your friends when they get married because you're not yet, or because maybe you legally can't get married. It leads to unrealistic expectations of marriage, because half of us are sold a wedding, not a marriage. Which brings me back to my earlier snark about divorce rates.
Marriage is only one step in this process, though. What about kids fresh out of high school who take on staggering debt to get an education when they're not positive that's what they want because they're still kids, and because that's what they're told to do? What about the shame we push on the kids who don't go to school, or can't?
And what about kids? I've written before about how annoyed I get when people ask and insist I have kids. When people tell me I will never understand what love really means until I have kids (again the assumption that I will) and that it is the greatest thing EVAR and really I'm missing out why have I not insisted The Boy put a baby inside me already? They make some pretty horrible assumptions, and not just assuming I'm incapable of knowing what I want. They assume that I CAN have kids. I'm sick, and I don't know what's wrong with me, it's entirely possible that I physically can't. I'm a cook; I'd be skeptical if I financially could either. What about the women who desperately want to have children but for one of many, many reasons can't? What about adoption? There are a lot of reasons that can't work, either, and we talked about making obvious suggestions and how that's bad before, remember? Are we just pretending these people don't exist? That's a painful enough scenario to be in to start with, I'm not okay with adding to their pain by pretending they don't exist, and by pretending that they will never be complete or whole person until they have a child. It's bullshit, and it's toxic, harmful bullshit.
On the other side of the coin there are people who are married, and maybe things aren't going so well and they figure that they'll have a kid and that will help them through this rough patch. Adding kids to the equation doesn't mean making any major changes which will lead to stress and hardships during the time of transition! Babies are magical, after all, and bring nothing but happiness! What if THAT couple faces infertility? Will they feel their struggling (or failing) marriage is due to their inability to check off the next box on the list? Will they not be real adults until they do? What if they conceive and the child is sick and now they're even more angry and bitter at each other because remember what I said above about major life changes stressing people out?
The narrative, and the enthusiasm we push it with, often leads us into shame, embarrassment, insecurity, corners and dead ends because there is no one size fits all life, or path. Yet we push it on others, and ourselves, because that is what we think we're supposed to do. Asexual? Infertile? Disabled? Impoverished? Gay? Doesn't matter! You can** still have all these things! And if you don't then how will you ever be happy?
I feel I often stop and call for us to simply reject a cultural norm on this blog, but I fear I don't fully credit how huge a thing that can be to do. I mean, we can't just will dinosaurs back into existence, as much as I would also like to call for that. I like to think I've rejected the norm, but now that I've taken one of the Approved Steps I understand how easy it can be to get swept up in enforcing and encouraging the narrative. So what, and how, can we do it? Amber and frogs?
Step 1 is recognizing when we're enforcing it. Asking someone why they don't want to get married (or have kids, or go to college or or or) or telling someone they should seems like a good starting point. These are valid choices, or painful circumstances which are really none of our business either way.
Step 2 is having conversations about the narrative with other people. We need to talk about it, and we need to call people out for trying to push this agenda, and we need to support people resisting it.
Step 3 is to invade the media. Wait, what? I know that some of you are artists, in what ever medium you happen to art in, think about breaking that pattern as often as possible. Don't have your hero settle down with their love interest and live happily ever after! Have them find a different kind of happy ending. Seeing other narratives will help us normalize that there's more than one, which will loosen the stranglehold the current one has on us.
I am not saying that these are bad things to want, for the record. If you want to get married and be a stay at home parent? Power to you and I'm jealous you know what you want out of life! What I am condemning is how we push the idea of marriage/kids so fervently that people feel that these are just things you're supposed to do rather than choices that should have a lot of thought going into them.
---
*No, really. When I was 20 people were pushing me to just marry my high school sweetheart. Co-workers, relatives, random people I'd get chatting with at bus stops...
**I am not, by the way, saying that you can't still get married have kids etc if you ARE these things, simply that they are very real reasons why you may not want them.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
I think we should be friends
Hello! So, Erika the Over Queen of the blog is still hungover and not able to prepare a Tuesday post (because obviously the party was only on Saturday and that is not nearly enough recovery time) so instead, for those of you who are still all "Who is this guy with all the Ws in his name and what makes him think he should be on this blog", we now have a chance to get to know each other better! But this is also a busy month for me and I have not lately blogged a bunch (the second Ender's Game post will go up next Sunday, though!) and so for your amusement and judgment I offer the following, which was previously posted on my original blog under the title "The Comrade Sector".
(Content: screwed-up gender dynamics, heterocentric discussion of sexist concepts. Fun content: Klingons and daguerrotypes!)
(Alternate titles for this post included The Ally Territory, The Companion Realm, and Eight Rules For Dating My Non-Age-Specific Fellow Sapient. [Edit: also, Salacious Tortoises would have been a good one.])
This is one of those subjects that makes it hard for me not to just profane for a while. I have been spending time (any amount is too much) on parts of the internet where 'The Friend Zone' is treated as an established and accurate concept, and now I just want to reboot the world. On the plus side, it's also providing me with a fascinating new perspective on the way I view people.
I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I love the heroic villain archetype is that they are doing the right thing even while not feeling like it. They protect people they don't particularly care about and they stand up for ideals that they think are just daydreamy nonsense. This is what I feel like most of the time, because while I'm a long-run optimist (I believe that people will eventually transcend their current widespread and colossal failures) I'm a short-run pessimist (I believe that on the road to that transcendence we will oppress, harm, and in various ways kill uncountable multitudes of people and things) and I have unreasonably high standards for folks. I tend to think of myself as being misanthropic by nature, and continually try to remind myself not to act like it. And yet the internet, in its signature style, teaches me things that were not the things I expected to learn.
And one of those things is that I'm way less misanthropic than some of the chuweros out there subscribing to supposedly mild and mainstream concepts that are actually totally awful. And the Friend Zone will here act as our exhibit A.
The definition is simple: a woman (occasionally a man) is said to have 'friendzoned' a man (occasionally a woman) when she spends time with him but rejects the possibility of a romantic relationship, which the man was interested in. Once it happens, there is no escape from its sorcerous boundaries, no matter how the man may entreat for a fresh trial to prove his suitability.
Or, in normal-person talk, ladies only date dudes they want to date, and callously disregard the dudes they don't want to date who nevertheless want to date them.
I grew up in the age when home video game consoles exploded, and so was bombarded with the insistence that this new form of media would corrupt and ruin the young and completely remove their appreciation of daguerrotypes and that sort of thing. Is this the reckoning that was foretold? Do people now believe that relationships have terrain hazards? If you mistakenly equip the Hylian Shield as you're heading up the river valley, the octorok will shove you off the ledge and you'll land in the friend zone and have to start over?
All of the things wrong with this framework require some effort to disassemble and fully appreciate. It presents the idea that forming a relationship is, from the dude's perspective, the task of continually avoiding 'getting friendzoned' until some kind of romantic connection can be made. It's an inherently adversarial concept like something out of Klingon rituals ("Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects. [The male] reads love poetry. He ducks a lot.") and it repeats the same eternal stupid thing about men wanting (especially sex, but often generalised into 'affection') and women withholding (see previous). But beyond that, it also implies that a woman can want to friendzone a guy but not be able to until he does something to justify it. It has to presume this, because otherwise it would have to accept reality, which is: if a woman doesn't want to date a man, then she won't (voluntarily). There is no complicated process, there are no rules, and there is no rigid categorisation; no one is getting a forehead stamp and sorted into the Non-Dating Cabinet.
Or, in abnormal-person talk: if the friend zone existed, it would be immediate and unstoppable. You can't dodge it, you can't ward it off - you don't get put in it; it simply eminent-domains the ground under your feet.
But some people apparently see a personal benefit to operating on this nonsensical framework (elsewise they wouldn't be parroting it to each other), and as near as I can tell, it's about the externalisation. It lets a person reclassify what they did (or have done, or are doing) that made them an unsuitable date and turn it into something that was done to them. And this is a particularly important reclassification to pull off if you are a Nice Guy.
The Internet Nice Guy, of course, is the guy who is sweet and caring and giving but women just won't date him because they're only interested in jerks. At least according to his webpage. In reality, it turns out that he's a self-important self-entitled guy who thinks that not actively burning down orphanages puts him in the top 1% of humanity and just can't understand why women don't reward his awesomeness with Naked Fun Times. He's already spending all of his time hanging out with them and only doing what they want and trying to make them completely dependent on him for their emotional needs - what more is he supposed to do, explicitly say that he is attracted to her? MADNESS. If he did that, he would just get friendzoned! Do you expect him to fall for such an obvious ruse?
At this point, I may sound like I'm constructing strawmen and chastising them for their dealings with strawwomen, but it's honestly not that difficult to find examples. Erika linked me to another blog's post on friendzone concepts, and lo, but the second comment from the top was a guy explaining that Some Women really do manipulate guys and use the dudes' "honest mating attentions" for personal profit which they have no intent to compensate the dude for. Check it out. That's a direct quote: "honest mating attentions". I couldn't make this up if I tried. So: do I have a low opinion of my species as a whole? Often. Am I insufficiently sympathetic to others' pains? Probably. But am I as much a misanthrope as that guy? No. Because that guy believes that women are heartless selfish manipulators and men are conniving fools who are trying to trade for sex but are being hornswoggled by the evil women's superior treachery. That is what some quality misanthropy looks like. Now, as a socially-awkward person myself (and note that when I talk about Nice Guys, I refer to a group I was previously part of) I do like rules, and I think the desire for rules is part of what makes Nice Guy philosophies and frameworks like 'the friend zone' so attractive to dudes: it purports to take a complex system and reduce it to a simple series of laws, interactions, and consequences. Never let it be said that I am unwilling to provide good rules to replace bad ones. Here are some actual rules that serve well:
Move on with your life.
Which is bleedin' difficult sometimes, I know. Great Jaddeth Below, I know. When I refer to myself as a 'former Nice Guy', I see parallels with 'recovering alcoholic' - with destructive behaviours, we might never stop wanting to backslide, we might have to work constantly to be better than ourselves. I may never stop wanting to be Romantic Comedy Guy. But resisting that is the definition of winning. (And sadly there are no cookies for basic decency.)
I used to dislike stories that made it explicitly clear that Our Heroes could never really win - that they would just right this injustice, push back evil this time, and then some day it would come back, and they would fight it again, or someone else would have to do it, forever. But I get it now.
---
*Gracious, I almost let a post go by without a footnote. Well, it occurred to me on rereading this rule that the 'you' here might just be a polysomething person of the sort who doesn't feel any particular need to maintain hard lines between platonic and sexual relationships, and that may be just fine on its own; I'm not saying you're a horrible person. But I hardly need to tell someone who has a robust set of sociosexual ethics that the turning-you-down person may not be comfortable getting into that, so I think the rule stands on its own, both in its judgey and non-judgey forms.
(Content: screwed-up gender dynamics, heterocentric discussion of sexist concepts. Fun content: Klingons and daguerrotypes!)
(Alternate titles for this post included The Ally Territory, The Companion Realm, and Eight Rules For Dating My Non-Age-Specific Fellow Sapient. [Edit: also, Salacious Tortoises would have been a good one.])
This is one of those subjects that makes it hard for me not to just profane for a while. I have been spending time (any amount is too much) on parts of the internet where 'The Friend Zone' is treated as an established and accurate concept, and now I just want to reboot the world. On the plus side, it's also providing me with a fascinating new perspective on the way I view people.
I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I love the heroic villain archetype is that they are doing the right thing even while not feeling like it. They protect people they don't particularly care about and they stand up for ideals that they think are just daydreamy nonsense. This is what I feel like most of the time, because while I'm a long-run optimist (I believe that people will eventually transcend their current widespread and colossal failures) I'm a short-run pessimist (I believe that on the road to that transcendence we will oppress, harm, and in various ways kill uncountable multitudes of people and things) and I have unreasonably high standards for folks. I tend to think of myself as being misanthropic by nature, and continually try to remind myself not to act like it. And yet the internet, in its signature style, teaches me things that were not the things I expected to learn.
And one of those things is that I'm way less misanthropic than some of the chuweros out there subscribing to supposedly mild and mainstream concepts that are actually totally awful. And the Friend Zone will here act as our exhibit A.
The definition is simple: a woman (occasionally a man) is said to have 'friendzoned' a man (occasionally a woman) when she spends time with him but rejects the possibility of a romantic relationship, which the man was interested in. Once it happens, there is no escape from its sorcerous boundaries, no matter how the man may entreat for a fresh trial to prove his suitability.
Or, in normal-person talk, ladies only date dudes they want to date, and callously disregard the dudes they don't want to date who nevertheless want to date them.
I grew up in the age when home video game consoles exploded, and so was bombarded with the insistence that this new form of media would corrupt and ruin the young and completely remove their appreciation of daguerrotypes and that sort of thing. Is this the reckoning that was foretold? Do people now believe that relationships have terrain hazards? If you mistakenly equip the Hylian Shield as you're heading up the river valley, the octorok will shove you off the ledge and you'll land in the friend zone and have to start over?
All of the things wrong with this framework require some effort to disassemble and fully appreciate. It presents the idea that forming a relationship is, from the dude's perspective, the task of continually avoiding 'getting friendzoned' until some kind of romantic connection can be made. It's an inherently adversarial concept like something out of Klingon rituals ("Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects. [The male] reads love poetry. He ducks a lot.") and it repeats the same eternal stupid thing about men wanting (especially sex, but often generalised into 'affection') and women withholding (see previous). But beyond that, it also implies that a woman can want to friendzone a guy but not be able to until he does something to justify it. It has to presume this, because otherwise it would have to accept reality, which is: if a woman doesn't want to date a man, then she won't (voluntarily). There is no complicated process, there are no rules, and there is no rigid categorisation; no one is getting a forehead stamp and sorted into the Non-Dating Cabinet.
Or, in abnormal-person talk: if the friend zone existed, it would be immediate and unstoppable. You can't dodge it, you can't ward it off - you don't get put in it; it simply eminent-domains the ground under your feet.
But some people apparently see a personal benefit to operating on this nonsensical framework (elsewise they wouldn't be parroting it to each other), and as near as I can tell, it's about the externalisation. It lets a person reclassify what they did (or have done, or are doing) that made them an unsuitable date and turn it into something that was done to them. And this is a particularly important reclassification to pull off if you are a Nice Guy.
The Internet Nice Guy, of course, is the guy who is sweet and caring and giving but women just won't date him because they're only interested in jerks. At least according to his webpage. In reality, it turns out that he's a self-important self-entitled guy who thinks that not actively burning down orphanages puts him in the top 1% of humanity and just can't understand why women don't reward his awesomeness with Naked Fun Times. He's already spending all of his time hanging out with them and only doing what they want and trying to make them completely dependent on him for their emotional needs - what more is he supposed to do, explicitly say that he is attracted to her? MADNESS. If he did that, he would just get friendzoned! Do you expect him to fall for such an obvious ruse?
At this point, I may sound like I'm constructing strawmen and chastising them for their dealings with strawwomen, but it's honestly not that difficult to find examples. Erika linked me to another blog's post on friendzone concepts, and lo, but the second comment from the top was a guy explaining that Some Women really do manipulate guys and use the dudes' "honest mating attentions" for personal profit which they have no intent to compensate the dude for. Check it out. That's a direct quote: "honest mating attentions". I couldn't make this up if I tried. So: do I have a low opinion of my species as a whole? Often. Am I insufficiently sympathetic to others' pains? Probably. But am I as much a misanthrope as that guy? No. Because that guy believes that women are heartless selfish manipulators and men are conniving fools who are trying to trade for sex but are being hornswoggled by the evil women's superior treachery. That is what some quality misanthropy looks like. Now, as a socially-awkward person myself (and note that when I talk about Nice Guys, I refer to a group I was previously part of) I do like rules, and I think the desire for rules is part of what makes Nice Guy philosophies and frameworks like 'the friend zone' so attractive to dudes: it purports to take a complex system and reduce it to a simple series of laws, interactions, and consequences. Never let it be said that I am unwilling to provide good rules to replace bad ones. Here are some actual rules that serve well:
- If a person does not want to date another person, then they won't. Attempting any strategy that might subvert rule 1 makes you a bad person. (Trying to actually be a person they would want to date is a somewhat more complicated grey area; even if New You can be sustained, it's still generally a better plan to try with someone else.)
- Person A, if treating Person B like a friend when Person B has only ever acted like a friend, is not doing anything wrong.
- Acting like a friend purely for the purpose of getting something from your supposed friend makes you a bad person. (This was true when it was the jerks in school ingeniously absorbing the kid whose family had a pool, and it remains true now.)
- If a friendship is all one-way, then it's not a friendship, it's indentured service. Ditch 'em.
- If a person says they don't want to date another person, the most probable answer is that they don't want to date them, never have, and never will.
- It is possible that a person legitimately believes that, regardless of their possible attraction to you, the potential failure of a romantic relationship is too great to risk the consequences for the friendship.
- Ask yourself if you can, if nothing else, imagine a friendship with [member of whatever gender(s) you're attracted to] that you valued so much, in its platonic form, that you would hesitate or turn them down if they propositioned you. If the answer is 'no', then chances are good we've just identified why your friend didn't want to date you from the beginning.*
- No one needs an excuse in order to not date someone. Therefore, if you have had what you believe to be An Excuse deployed on you: it was for the sake of sparing your feelings and the other person simply doesn't want to explain that, while you're fun to hang out with, they might rather make out with a galapagos tortoise.
Move on with your life.
Which is bleedin' difficult sometimes, I know. Great Jaddeth Below, I know. When I refer to myself as a 'former Nice Guy', I see parallels with 'recovering alcoholic' - with destructive behaviours, we might never stop wanting to backslide, we might have to work constantly to be better than ourselves. I may never stop wanting to be Romantic Comedy Guy. But resisting that is the definition of winning. (And sadly there are no cookies for basic decency.)
I used to dislike stories that made it explicitly clear that Our Heroes could never really win - that they would just right this injustice, push back evil this time, and then some day it would come back, and they would fight it again, or someone else would have to do it, forever. But I get it now.
---
*Gracious, I almost let a post go by without a footnote. Well, it occurred to me on rereading this rule that the 'you' here might just be a polysomething person of the sort who doesn't feel any particular need to maintain hard lines between platonic and sexual relationships, and that may be just fine on its own; I'm not saying you're a horrible person. But I hardly need to tell someone who has a robust set of sociosexual ethics that the turning-you-down person may not be comfortable getting into that, so I think the rule stands on its own, both in its judgey and non-judgey forms.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
How to not suck at relationships
I keep seeing things like "How to keep a girl" or "How to make a girl happy" and while I am annoyed at Stumble Upon thinking I don't know how to woo a lady- it should know better by now- I also don't think the advice it's giving me would help. The advice assumed that you're not romantically entangled with a person, but with a monolithic gender stereotype, and let me tell you, they make terrible adventure buddies. The lady monolithic gender stereotype is all "OH NO I BROKE A NAIL AND THIS PLACE SMELLS AND WHY ARE WE EVEN IN A SWAMP?" and the dude one is too busy grunting and trying to discover fire and drink beer to be of any use on your quest. This may be a thing specific to me, but if they don't make a good adventure buddy, they are so not getting in my pants.
So, since the internet is sorely lacking a comprehensive, realistic list of How to Relationship, and there are no other articles on the subject anywhere ever, I will take on this burden.
Don't be a dick.
Nope, that's all I've got. Oh, you want me to elaborate? Fine, but I really don't think it's that complicated.
Listen to your partner when they talk, pay attention to their needs/wants/likes and try to remember them.
Respect the shit out of them.
Be open and honest and non-judgmental.
Have fun together.
Have good sex*, and talk about it, lots. Talking about the sex you're having will lead to figuring things out which will lead to having even better sex, and who doesn't want that?
Have their back.
Trust them, and be trustworthy.
MOTHERFUCKING ADVENTURES!
Show them you care in what ever way works for the two of you.
Did I mention respect the shit out of them?
See? Not that complicated! That's me dragging it out as much as I can!
Obviously relationships can be complicated little fuckers, and sometimes things just don't work, for no reason beyond they just don't. It can make the whole thing a lot harder and more confusing than it has to be, but most of the relationships I've had ended civilly, and those are the rules I try to play by, and I've been doing surprisingly well for myself, so I must be doing something right.
*Edit: This bit does not apply to romantic asexuals. According to facts about queers a super scientific and accurate site, asexuals tend to hoard shiny objects, so maybe a scavenger hunt?
So, since the internet is sorely lacking a comprehensive, realistic list of How to Relationship, and there are no other articles on the subject anywhere ever, I will take on this burden.
Don't be a dick.
Nope, that's all I've got. Oh, you want me to elaborate? Fine, but I really don't think it's that complicated.
Listen to your partner when they talk, pay attention to their needs/wants/likes and try to remember them.
Respect the shit out of them.
Be open and honest and non-judgmental.
Have fun together.
Have good sex*, and talk about it, lots. Talking about the sex you're having will lead to figuring things out which will lead to having even better sex, and who doesn't want that?
Have their back.
Trust them, and be trustworthy.
MOTHERFUCKING ADVENTURES!
Show them you care in what ever way works for the two of you.
Did I mention respect the shit out of them?
See? Not that complicated! That's me dragging it out as much as I can!
Obviously relationships can be complicated little fuckers, and sometimes things just don't work, for no reason beyond they just don't. It can make the whole thing a lot harder and more confusing than it has to be, but most of the relationships I've had ended civilly, and those are the rules I try to play by, and I've been doing surprisingly well for myself, so I must be doing something right.
*Edit: This bit does not apply to romantic asexuals. According to facts about queers a super scientific and accurate site, asexuals tend to hoard shiny objects, so maybe a scavenger hunt?
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