Feminism

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts , , ,

I recently answered a bunch of questions for the 2012 Australian Spec Fic Snapshot project, a semi-regular interview series that surveys the Australian SF scene and presents the interviews in a week-long flurry. I don’t know if my particular snapshot will be online by the time this post goes up, but it’s coming and in one of my answers I mention the rise in feminist discourse taking place within SF over the last few years and how happy I am to see that happening despite the fact that my engagement with feminism is haphazard at best.

And I’ve been thinking about that phrase, a lot, since I sent off my snapshot response.

My initial intention with that phrase was to acknowledge that I’m basically white, male, university educated, and middle class. I am white male privileged incarnate and get to play life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, and even as someone who tries to be aware of that, even as someone who sometimes gets *seriously fucking angry* about displays of privileged and misogyny, I’m going to have blind-spots a mile wide and a history of not-getting-it as long as any ant-feminist idiot on the internet.

Worse, I’m a geek. I spent my teenage years feeling white, male, middle-class, smarter than the average person,  and utterly dis-empowered by both feminism and conventional notions of masculinity, even if that wasn’t really the case. I was a gamer and a comic-book fan and a reader of trashy fantasy novels, and all of these are mediums that have a spotty history of accepting feminism and equality. Many, indeed, are jealously guarded bastions of privileged where fans are passionately loud and stupid when accusations of sexism are thrown their way.

I like to think I’ve gotten better, and in a lot of ways I have, but if you work through my narrative history there is still a steady stream of female antagonists who serve as manic pixie girls to transform the lives of their male partners, or women rendered voiceless, and even female protagonists who are routinely critiqued as sounding male. The male gaze is terribly prominent in my fiction, and you’d be hard pressed to find anything I write that passes the Bechdel test. On the occasions when I weigh into discussions about gender and feminism on the internet, I’m always surprised when people don’t point that sort of thing out.

I understand feminism. I agree with it. I can engage in discussions about cultural constructions of gender and male privilege and the inherently gendered reading positions we use to judge the quality of fiction, and I can generally do so without looking like a complete idiot. I’ve read a lot, and talked about things a lot, and generally maintained an interest in feminism for the better part of a decade. On an intellectual level, I’m all for it. On an emotional level, a subconscious level, the pace where gut impulses and, apparently, fiction drafts, come from, there’s still a core of privilege and misogyny that I’m still trying to sort out. Intellectually I’m all in. Instinctual, I’m not.

I can still remember the day I realised that Feminism was something I wanted to understand. I was twenty-five, teaching a writing class at university, and if you’d asked me I would have told you that I knew a lot about feminism and considered myself one. In truth, what I understood were the broad strokes. I was running a tutorial about Michael Chabon’s Wonderboys and the topic of gender came up, largely because one of the students had some issues with other students referring to a drag queen as “she.” So we got into discussions about gender discussion, and feminism, and I assembled an explanation based on the bits of feminist theory I’d picked up from literary theory and discussions with other post-graduate students who knew far more than I did.

Then one of the male students busted out an argument familiar to anyone whose had a feminism 101 discussion:

If women wanted to run the world, all they need to do is to stop having sex with men until the men do what they’re told.

It was greeted with the kind of silence you’d expect from the class. I knew what he’d said was wrong, as did every other student there, but I didn’t know enough to articulate why he was being an idiot, and there was no-one around to do it for me. He got to sit there looking smug ’cause I didn’t know enough, and that left me feeling unbelievably pissed off and angry at myself.

So I started reading, started having discussions, started trying to understand feminist issues in a far more complex way than the lip-service I’d paid the concept during my early twenties. And somewhere along the way I realised that my strident belief that I’d been a feminist at twenty-five was largely just bullshit, since my own understanding was only somewhat more advanced than the guy in my class who argued that the sexuality is the only power women need.

There’s this poster-thing that’s going around facebook at the moment that captures my feelings on feminism pretty closely. The tagline goes something like “If someone says, ‘oh, I’m not a feminist,’ I ask, ‘Why? What’s your problem?”

My problem is that I’m white, male, middle class. My problem is years of privilege. My problem is when I thought I was a feminist, it was pretty clear that I did a very shoddy job. That when I did start to understand feminism better, the bits that always interested me were the bits that could be liberated to talk about portrayals of masculinity and theories that could help me understand the confusion and anger I felt growing up.

Oh, I’m not a feminist, but I’m trying to do better, and I never want to be so comfortable discussing issues of gender that I feel certain I know what I’m talking about.

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

I frequently find myself watching The Big Bang theory, finding it funny, then  hating myself for it. I mentioned this on the twitters and facebook yesterday, which immediately had a group of people saying, in essence, why, dude, it’s actually funny? And, yes, it is. There are times when it’s absolutely smart and entertaining, and I watch it for these moments because they’re a kind of humor that makes me happy and speaks to me as a man who self-identifies as a geek and enjoys being part of an active geek subculture. It’s a show that’s very, very good at doing that, creating little in-jokes among the broader strokes.

It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry.

The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of the female characters with any depth are either caring mother-replacements (Penny, Leonard’s girlfriend from season two, Shelton’s actual mother) or emasculating shrews (Leonard’s mother, Raj’s mother, Howard’s mother – are you seeing a theme here? – Leslie Winkle, and ironically, Shelton’s mother due to her ability to countermand Shelton’s self-built idea of masculinity based around intellect).

The remaining female characters that appear in the series are generally there to be gratuitously objectified and competed for by the male cast, thus serving as a means of proving their masculinity and “growing up” (see Shelton’s sister and Penny’s friend from Nebraska) or non-idealized sexual partners who are characterized by their non-threatening naivety (Howard’s girlfriend Bernadette in season three).

The core cast of Male characters don’t actually fare much better: they’re infantilized by their interests, by their inability to get women (problematic, in and of itself), by their heights, by their familial relationships, but their inability to do their jobs correctly (Leonard’s research is derivative, Raj’s hypothesis is disproved, Howard fucks up every engineering prospect he comes up with), by their lack of knowledge about non-geek popular culture (I mean, really, geeks tend to know radiohead is a band). They’ve been neatly cut off from any traditional notions of the masculine, which would be fine if 90% of the show’s narrative wasn’t focused on three of the four trying to prove their masculinity through having sex while the fourth is determined to prove it through constantly being right.

Essentially the show strives to create a contemporary tribe of Lost Boys adopting a Wendy as a mother figure, except that only works in the case of Sheldon who actually is a childish innocent because the others all have deeply fucked up relationships with women (Which is not to say Sheldon doesn’t, but at least his relationship with women isn’t defined by sex).

We won’t even speak of the Howard-and-Raj-Are-a-dysfunctional-gay-couple thing they’ve started playing with. It was unpleasant-but-tolerable when it was a joke being played out in the episodes featuring Leonard’s mother, it was less tolerable when it became a recurring part of the narrative.

Yes, there are individual episodes where they seem to get it right. I breathed an audible sigh of relief the first time they introduced Stuart the comic shop guy, who spent his first few appearance being self-assured enough to flirt with Penny even if he exhibited signs of nervousness about the actual date. “He runs a successful small business,” Leonard opines, “he’s a talented artist. Not all geeks are like Captain Sweatpants over there.”

And I was like, “man, finally, it’s about fucking time.”

Of course, Stuart serves his narrative purpose, getting Penny together with Leonard, and the next time he appears he’s a lonely and isolated man who obsesses over Penny and  shares his Friday night meals with a stray cat.

And really, fuck that shit. All of it.

The show is largely redeemed by solid casting, the episodes where the writing is genuinely smart and interested in laughing with the geeks rather than at them, and very occasionally by the presence of guest stars from the cast of Roseanne (lets face it, any television show that puts Laurie Metcalf back on television gets something of a pass).

But beneath it all is a series of narrative assumptions I find deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Sooner or later they will hit the point where the stupid outweighs the smart, and then I’ll be forced to stop watching lest I throw things at the television.

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Friday night I went to check my PO Box and discovered a cheque I forgot was coming, which was kinda nice, then got home to the news of the Japanese earthquake and Pacific Ocean tsunami’s, which was less nice and kinda put a downer on the evening overall. There’s news on the latter everywhere at the moment, so I won’t repeat what’s readily available. There is, as always, Red Cross donations that can be made to help those affected.

Later, after absorbing the news via twitter, I paid far to much for the least appealing take-away Butter Chicken of my life, but ate it anyway ’cause, well, it was butter chicken. Then the news of the explosions in the nuclear reactor started filtering in.

I don’t watch television anymore, nor to I read newspapers, so world news and I have a very strange relationship. Information tends to flow in through the communication in online mediums – twitter, facebook, blogs, etc – which means simultaneously seem better and worse than they appear to be depicted in traditional media. There are portions of my friends list that are all lo, the nuclear Apocalypse is upon us, and there are those linking to things like this post over at Genki English.

I expect that if I were watching traditional media, I’d be a nervous wreck right now. At this point, I’m just watching the internet and waiting further developments.