Random acts of Ranting

They had me at “Horse Mounted Gatling Guns”, they lost me at “Megan Fox”

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

So I sat down and watched the Jonah Hex movie over Christmas. This was a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has a bounty hunter who can speak to the dead and horse-mounted gatling guns in the first ten minutes, and that kind of absurdity is the kind of wrongness that I’m willing to roll with. And for the first first half-hour or so, things were looking pretty good – it wasn’t a great movie, but it was zany and weird and it had undead fucking cowboys and that kind of shit is awesome.

Then Megan Fox showed up.

A few years ago I had a friend who worked off the theory that Kate Beckinsale was the kiss of death for a film. As soon as she appeared on screen you were pretty much doomed to a cinematic experience that sucked. At best you’d get a film that achieved a kind of stylized aesthetic to try and cover for the lack of plot and continuity (see Underworld, and Van Halen), and at worst you got the kind of film that made you wish you could beat someone with a cluestick until they admitted their failings and gave you your two hours back (see Pearl Harbor).

Now Megan Fox seems to be performing the same function, ’cause I swear to god that every scene after her first appearance, even the ones she wasn’t actually in, the film made less sense and tried to cover it by shoehorning metaphors for terrorism and the atomic bomb into what was essentially an occult western. Plus evil confederate general John Malkovich did some crazy evil with a tattooed Irishman while beer leaked out the side of one-of-those-Quaid-chap’s mouth.

To my considerable dissapointment, they didn’t bring back the horse-mounted gatling guns.

They almost managed a stylized aesthetic that made me want to like the movie more than I did, but I got distracted by trying to figure out exactly how the not-really-an-atomic-bomb McGuffin worked. ‘Cause, seriously, I’m all about ignoring science in favour of awesome, even I thought that shit made no sense. I spent the last half hour of the film drinking scotch and screaming “seriously, what the fuck?” at the screen.

– sigh –

I wanted to like that film. I really did. If only they hadn’t made it so damn hard to like.

This post contains swearing

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts , ,

So this is something of an addendumto yesterday’s post, and it’s written because every now and then I see people I really like get in trouble because they don’t yet grasp the realities of white male privilege until it’s too late. I had this conversation with a friend the last time this issue raised its head, but I don’t think I ever put it together as a complete post, so I figured I may as well have it handy. Be warned that I’m going to swear a lot. Be warned that you’re probably not going to like hearing it, especially because it flies in the face of the way we wish the internet could be.

Call it the two-word rule you need to wrap your head around before you launch into a discussion of feminsim online as a white male.

It goes a little something like this: Fuck civility.

I say this as someone who’s a fan of civility, who dislikes confrontation, and who comes pre-loaded with all the privilege that being a university educated white male delivers in contemporary Western culture. Lets face it, I can be an articulate and moderately well-read guy when I put my mind to it. My first response when confronted with an internet flame-war is to recoil in horror at the chaos and raw emotion on display. On 99% of topics, I’m all for calming down and having a civilized argument.

But for the purposes of talking about feminism, or racism, or any other kind of ism that exists as a barrier to equality in contemporary culture, fuck civility. The moment you insist on the civilized discussion of the issues you are a fucking arsehole who deserves everything you get, and I will come along and revel in the schadenfreude of watching people kick your virtual corpse to the curb. I will literally sit down at my computer with a large slice of cake and laugh at your fucking misfortune. The moment you call for civility, or close down the argument because it’s getting too heated, there’s pretty good odds you’ve lost. Why?

‘Cause the moment you bust that sort of phrase out, you are an arsehole whose part of the problem.

When you get right down to it, civility is a means of oppression. It’s a means of taking someone’s voice away because they don’t articulate on a particular level. Civility was the tool of the white male upper class, based on the assumptions of individual responsibility and rhetoric, and it was a way of demonizing those who didn’t meet the standards of eloquence and education that made one white, male, and upper class. Handily, they could do this because the White, Male and Upper Class had a death grip on those standards, which means the call for civilized discourse is one of the most fucking cowardly abuses of white male privilege that you can get.

“We’ll talk about this when you’re less hysterical,” is one of the classic put-downs of the angry female voice for a reason. It reinforces the cultural divide that male privilege is built on, whereupon men are the rational and educated and the concerns of women come from an emotional place that isn’t to be engaged with for it’s icky and unfounded in logic. The message here is simple – until you can talk about this like an educated and rational man, your voice and opinion isn’t really valid.

Fuck civility.

And for that matter, fuck your desire to debate things one on one. Fuck your rhetoric about people being unfair because they swarmed over your half-baked and ill-conceived arguments like rabid ants. Fuck the desire to argue things without the issue getting headed and devolving in a mob. Fuck your bullshit about wanting a rational discussion of the issues, because you don’t – you want to wield your privilege like a fucking club and feel superior to the “bullies” who embody all that traits once associated with the lumpenproletariat – the weight of numbers, the use of force over intellect, the collectivism that seems abhorrent in a culture that idealises the singular.

There’s nothing particular smart about decrying “group-think” and “massive mobs”, ’cause it’s really fucking easy to make the side with the superior numbers look like the bad guy in western culture.; We want to believe in the myth of the brilliant individual. We like the idea of the singular genius. And we like these myths because said “brilliant individuals” were often white, male, upper-class fuckers rather than the swarming masses of uneducated labor who actually got shit done. And it’s not like this shit is a new concept, it’s been kicking around since Marx put together the first communist manifesto, and if you can’t wrap your head around the concept it’s time to admit you don’t have a place in this discussion until you’ve done your fucking research and actually attempted to be half as “civil” and engaged in “intelligent discourse” as you’re claiming you’d like the discussion to be.

And honestly, we still get back to the same thought: fuck civility.

It isn’t exactly a secret why the holders of white male privilege fear groups. I mean, the privilege is the result of the myths inherited from educated upper class, and those fuckers got themselves beheaded in France when the uneducated masses got their shit together and stormed the Bastille. Complaining about group-think and bullying is largely just falling back into classist bullshit, trying to take away the one weapon the underclasses had as a means of confronting their oppressors – weight of numbers. Therefor, all your calls for civilized one-on-one discourse is just another means of asserting control.

Fuck civility.

And man, yeah, it’s tempting to bust the calls for rationalism out when people start threatening your privilege. It’s easy to be afraid of the large mob of angry people who appear. I say this as a man who has used civility as a club in the past. I’ve done it in arguments, I’ve done it in relationships, I’ve done in day-to-day life. And odds are I’m going to keep doing it, because I’m white and male and I have the luxury of doing so. I know exactly how fucking easy it is to use, exactly how bad you cab make someone feel, and exactly how good it can be to think of yourself as the rational one, the civilized one, the respectable one. In fact, right now I’m acutely aware of how good it feels, ’cause this post post is me doing exactly that. I spent years at university teaching undergraduate courses that touched on issues of race, gender and class. I argued this this sort of thing for a living, and I feel no real compunctions about busting out the clue-stick every now and then.

If you’re serious about engaging in the discussion, resist that urge to call for civility. If you’re not, you deserve the pounding your going to get.

Fuck civility. It has no place in these discussions.

If you’re seriously interested in having a debate, in proving yourself to be an intelligent being of the modern world, then learn to control your impulse to decry the emotional, the mob, the bullying, the inarticulate responses. Don’t dismiss anger, try to understand where it’s coming from. Try to hear the voice of the mob rather than reeling in horror at its presence. And, most importantly, try and resist the impulse to be all “let them eat cake”, ‘cause even though that was just propaganda during the French revolution, I’ve seen people be just that fucking stupid in arguments about feminism and the like.

Fuck civility. It doesn’t make you better than the people your arguing with, it just makes you a fuck-knuckle who refuses to accept that the world doesn’t just belong to the rational white male gentlemen anymore. ” Civilization” was one of those ideas old white fuckers used as an excuse to dominate the rest of th world.

There’s no simpler way to say it: Fuck civility. ‘Cause if you really want to be civilized about things and engage with the issues, you’d leave your club at the door before the discussion got started. If you’re not willing to do that, it’s time to step the fuck away and accept that you’re part of the problem. ‘Cause, more often than not, the discussion of feminism I see online are actually a) articulate, b) intelligent, and c) full of diverse opinions, at least until some fucker with the chip of privilege on his shoulder starts wading in and bullying people with the call for “civil” discussion.

I would rage, but I no longer have the energy

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts

I hate it when things I usually enjoy go and do something daft. This week that space has largely been taken up by the Apex Blog, in which one of the regular bloggers has trotted out the argument that feminists complaining about all-male TOC are arguing in favour of political correctness over quality.

Which, yeah, way to be a few years behind the debate and all, dude. Thumbs fucking up.

I planned on getting irate, but lets face it, I’ve been irate about this before (and Apex has already announced that there’s someone posting a response on their site). Instead, I’m just going reblog the response I had last time this shit came up:

Gender and SF (Originally posted in February of 2009)

There’s been a bunch of debates about Gender and SF of late, all of which seem to end up with someone defending themselves with a variation of “I filled all the spots on project X with men because I was choosing on the basis of quality, not gender.” This answer flummoxes me every time it’s trotted out; not because the people who use it are not bad people or knowing oppressors, but just because it often reveals itself as a blind-spot in the approach of someone whose work I’d otherwise respect. And, to be honest, I just don’t get how people can’t question that statement, since SF itself has often been denigrated and ignored using the same excuse.

Think about that moment that all SF fans seem to share – that moment where you’re talking to someone who doesn’t read the genre, and you reveal that you do, and their response is a muted “oh” followed by a look that suggests you’ve actually just revealed that you mutilate kittens. It’s a power-play between you, the reader of a non-mimetic pulp genre, and the other person (who, if you’re lucky, will not follow their momentary scorn with the next salvo of “I only read stories in which real things happen”).

The reason that “oh” moment exists is because quality is a social construct, and like many of our social constructs it’s been inherited from a predominantly white and male (and, for that matter, educated) point of view. From that point of view the final arbiter of quality is Literature, in which works are loaded with metaphorical meaning and fancy language use. SF, to borrow the phrasing of China Meiville, has a habit of literalizing its metaphors – the dragon in a story may be representing capitalist greed, but it’s also a physical dragon that exists within a secondary world of the narrative. The un-literalized metaphor – aka the metaphor that’s actively presented as metaphor rather than inherently real – is one of those quality markers that separated literature from everything else. It’s a class distinction more than anything, as a quick look at the pulp roots of SF should show – the literalized metaphor is for the populace mass, and the un-literalized metaphor is for those trained to read for such things by their grounding in the classics. This is one of the reasons SF fans had to reclaim works like 1984, The Handmaids Tale, and even seminal texts like Frankenstein as part of our genre; the default assumption of the authors and readers of these texts lie in their metaphorical power rather than the sense-of-wonder that marks SF. It’s nice to think that we know better than that now, but when Peter Straub was editing the New Wave Fabulist issue of the Literary Journal Conjunctions a few years back he was still put in a position where he was arguing Fantasy’s way into the literary field during his preface (and, for that matter, to address his own status and the status of many of the authors as populist writers).

And lets be honest for a moment here – some SF fans like it this way. I’ve had enough arguments with people who decry any attempt to apply literary theory to SF to know that the intrusion of metaphorical readings of a text are occasionally unwelcome; to suggest a deeper meaning, or an critique that seems unguided by authorial intent, is the stuff of sacrilege in some parts. At its best this impulse leads to a means of reading against the positioning implied by that “oh” – but more often than not these outcries are an act of complicity in keeping SF denigrated. I do it myself – every time I refer to my love of ‘Trashy SF’ I’m contributing to an understanding of SF that’s beneath other understandings of literature, but occasionally salvages my reputation as white, intelligent male (oddly, I do this primarily when talking to people within the genre, to keep my love of a metaphorically active Kelly Link story separate from my joy at watching a pulpy action film like, say, Underworld or Conan the Barbarian; obviously my own relationship with this issue is as complicated as anyone elses, and as a white male I have more than enough of my own blind-spots).

Now SF has primarily been a boy genre (and I stress the boy here, since SF is traditionally presented as an adolescent genre and thus excluded from the importance that texts written for white adult genres). Writing aimed specifically at women (soap operas, romance novels) copped a much greater shellacking, often because it had the potential to address notions that were inherently subversive to a patriarchal culture (an awareness of  female desire as an active force, rather than passive, for example) and thus needed to be completely disempowered by accusations of being shallow, cheap, and devoid of metaphorical meaning. Again, it’d be nice to think that we’ve moved beyond that, but there is still a cultural conception that a narrative addressing feminine desire is still addressing primarily female concerns rather than an issue of general interest. I could go search for a bunch of academic and social examples to back this up, but lets just go with an example that’s personal and handy – when you walk into my flat the first thing you see is the big shelf full of DVDs and CDs. The first things people tend to comment on (in a “why do you have these?” kind of way) are my collection of Gilmore Girls or Sex in the CityDVDs. If we live in a world where a single male owning such things is a cause for comment, then it says something specific about the perceived audience for those shows are and it doesn’t suggest the wide and diverse audiance that good work in any genre is supposed to be able to attract. Literature is supposed to have common appeal, something to say for everyone on the matter of being human (read: human in a patriarchal setting); SF and Romance and all the other pulp genres are often denigrated *because* they speak to only small groups of society, and often with the social expectations of a white male voice behind them.

And realistically, all this is pointing to the one reason that people with a vested interest in real equality between the genders (and, for that matter, sexuality and race) call bullshit on justifications on cause of quality – the perception of quality has long been a means of control and denigration, and it’s usually come up the patriarchy’s way even when the text is marketed towards a group that isn’t white, upper-class and male (IE Romance). The participation of a non-anglo male audience does not necessarily free us of that – Romance’s social status as a guilty pleasure and SF fandom’s clinging to the notion of entertainment without reading for social/deeper meaning are both the voice of the audiance being complicit in their own exclusion. In short, if you’re going to go all-men on the basis of quality, then you need to think long and hard about where those standards of quality are coming from and how they exclude in their own subtle way, because you can be sure that the people who are asking questions are aware of its ability to do the same.

None of this is to say that I’m incapable of doing any of the above – I’m as culpable as anyone when it comes to using mockery and denigration to reposition myself and others – but I’ll also freely admit that a lot of what comes out of my mouth is driven by the fact that I’m an insecure asshole. It’s something I’ve tried to get better about over the years, but some days are better than others…