Even Furiosa

Further to some objections I've had to my description of Mad Max: Fury Road as having reasonably good gender politics.  Trigger and Spoilers, obviously.


What Mad Max: Fury Road does - with its depiction of Furiosa - is to refuse to make violence the exclusive province of men, or to make men the only ones who are any good at it.  (Not unprecedented - but quite good.)  Furiosa gets to do all the trad-masculine things that Max does.  She's just as good at them as him.  This, apparently, is a big problem for those kinds of insecure, reactionary misogynitwits who drivel on about how women are weaker than men.  According to such douchenozzles, this is just a scientific fact, and it's not a man's fault if he just repeats the incontrovertible findings of Science.  In actuality, of course, what such bigoted ninnies are actually doing is regurgitating some half-digested sociobiologistic bullshit.  They then accuse feminists (who control Hollywood in their ideologically distorted, bass-ackwards bizzaro world) of playing a dirty, emasculating trick and oppressing men by spreading the vicious civilisation-eroding lie that not all women need a man to open jars for them.

The thing is, there is a rational kernal to some of these complaints (wait).  The complaint comes as a response to a genuine threat (I said wait).  The genuine threat which is correctly perceived by the bawling manbabies is a threat to their privilege.  You see, when Furiosa beats up some man just as well as Max can (including Max himself), or shoots a gun just as well as Max can, or drives a car just as well as Max can, what is being done is that these traditionally masculine behaviours are being completely detached from masculinity.  And what is being detached from masculinity is violence.  So the threat to male privilege is about as primal as you can get: male privilege is threatened with losing its monopoly on violence.  Given that violence, in one form or another, is at the root of how all systems of oppression function, this could hardly be more threatening (at least within the confines of a mainstream popular movie).

This isn't some submerged theme in the film that you have to hunt about for.  It's front and centre.  The violence Furiosa excels at it specifically and explicitly a violent response to a patriarchy which itself openly functions through violence.  Most obviously, there is the implied violence of rape (and kudos to the film for not directly and unnecessarily showing sexual violence).  But there is also the structural violence.  The system is literally patriarchal, in that Imortan Joe's fertility seems to be inextricably linked to his rulership - either materially or ideologically, or perhaps both.  He rules partly through his family.  It is stated that several members of his ruling elite - and his Imperators (bosses-cum-generals) - are members of his family.  Brothers, etc.  Several are sons.  They all seem 'disabled' in some way.  One seems unable to breathe without a mask and oxygen tanks.  Another is played by Quentin Kenihan who has the bone disease osteogenesis imperfecta.  Joe's quest for a 'healthy' or 'normal' son is a big deal, ideologically.  It would appear that the majority of the surviving population are either old and decaying remnants of the old world, or 'disabled' children of the new world.  (To be clear, I'm not praising or denigrating the film for this... I'm ambivalent about the film's treatment of ability issues.)  Joe seems to harvest the healthiest boys from his subjects and turns them into his War Boys... yet even these young men seem mutated and medically entropic; anaemic to the point where they need to ingest the blood of victims in order to survive.  Joe may even suffer from a similar condition himself, given his pallor.  Just as Joe harvests the 'healthiest' boys to be warriors, he harvests the 'healthiest', 'prettiest' girls to become his sex-slaves-cum-breeders.  He is desperate to recapture all his 'Brides', but especially Angharad (played by supermodel and Matt Smith-lookalike Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), not just because she's "his favourite" but also because she's pregnant.  When she's injured and her dead baby is posthumously delivered, Joe and his sons make a big deal of publically announcing that it was a healthy boy.  This is patriarchy turned up to eleven.  It's almost a caricature.  A male-dominated hierarchical system that works through a warrior-ethic and a patrilineal transmission of power and property.  Joe decorates himself in medals, as men often do in George Miller's dystopias.  As in all Mad Max movies, the masculinity is so aggressively hyperactive that it becomes camp, and also deeply freighted with anxiety, ambivalence, and repulsion.  (Partly, of course, this is because the films co-opt an exaggerated version of the performative manners and motifs of biker culture, but I'm not going there because it's outside my wheelhouse and I don't want to be writing this essay forever.)

There are problems with the gender politics in the movie.  You could argue that most of the women in the film have a great deal less agency than Furiosa.  But I think the Many Mothers acquit themselves very well.  And I think the Brides have a ton of agency.  (Actually, I'm going to stop calling them 'the Brides'... I'm going to call them 'the Runaways', since that better describes them and pays them more respect.)  It's just a different kind of agency to the ass-kickers in the film.  It's the agency of brave endurance... fundamentally the agency Cinderella displays.  Cinderella is something I'd have unthinkingly dismissed as a misogynistic, patriarchal fantasy until relatively recently when I spotted a tumblr post (I regret to say I can't find it now so can't give the proper attribution) in which someone explained that the Cinderella story has huge significance for them as it is, essentially, the story of someone who survives abuse through endurance.  In many ways, the agency of the Runaways is fairytale agency, but sans the fairytale idea that brave endurance and patience are 'enough'.  The Runaways are the ones who choose to run away.  They're the ones who ask Furiosa to launch the whole adventure in the first place.  It all happens because they demand their freedom and her help getting it (in so doing they are, it is implied, appealing for help on the basis of sorority from a woman who has, up until then, been living as a comprador with their oppressor - which is not a timid or unrisky thing to do).  The set-up (i.e. Furiosa helps the Runaways at their request) is an acknowledgement that you shouldn't have to be a kick-ass hero to escape oppression, that ordinary bravery and endurance makes people survivors, but also that asses need to be kicked ultimately if you decide that you shouldn't have to endure any more mistreatment from a violent system.  Furiosa is a bad-ass, but the very fact that she is being bad-ass on behalf of people who are not natural fighters vitiates any fetishization of the notion of the bad-ass.  In this set-up, the bad-ass woman is at the service of the non-bad-ass women who nevertheless deserve to be free.  Indeed, her submission to the project of their freedom is her road to redemption; redemption she needs because, as is implied, she has previously been a ferocious champion of the very system that has enslaved them.  

It's been pointed out that the Runaways are presented as supermodels in skimpy clothing.  Now there is doubtless a degree of servicing the male gaze here, and yeah, sure, the script could've found a way of getting the Runaways some more clothes at some point.  However, you never forget that these women are in the position they're in because they've been selected - obviously against their will, or at least after intense structural coercion - as the inmates of Imortan Joe's vault, of his harem of sex slaves.  He's picked the ones that most closely conform to patriarchally-dictated standards of 'beauty'.  He's clothed them according to his fantasy.  If you look and leer, you're implicated in Joe's behaviour.  And it's not like the film allows you to forget the looming presence of Joe, or the situation of the Runaways as a direct result of his treatment of them.  Now, on the one hand I have issues with this (as I have with all such inherently hypocritical attempts at doing themes about 'complicity') but, on the other hand, it's hard to see how else they could make the point.  It's not unlike what Ridley Scott does with Ripley in the last bit of Alien. Yes, she is stripped to her underwear for the delectation of the implicitly male audience member; then we see her diegetic audience... and it's a profane abomination, panting and touching itself languidly like a wanking Peeping Tom, drooling cum/slaver from its lolling jaws.

The sexualised display of the Runaways in their first appearance - scantily clad and washing each other - is also a direct subversion of patriarchal myth and fantasy tropes about the man who finds beautiful women bathing in private and watches them.  The water they wash with is another connection between precious bodily fluids, life-giving water, and the commodification to which they themselves are subject.  They are presented in a sexualised way... but it's an entirely self-involved, inter-woman scene upon which a threatening male presence intrudes.  You then see the complications.  The barbaric, bolted chastity belts and the pregnant belly.  It's like what Zack Snyder was obviously trying to do in Sucker Punch.

Implicit in the film is a recognition that social hierarchy depends upon control of surplus. Stephen Maher in his Jacobin essay is right to point out that the film doesn't portray and decry capitalism.  There's no exploitation of surplus value from productive industrial workers or anything like that.  But there is a depiction of social hierarchy being based on the sequestration of surplus resources from the mass of the people.  This only works in the broadest terms, but it's still there.  The priestly and warrior and political castes rise up the hierarchy based on their roles in controlling, tracking, protecting, acquiring and organising the distribution of surplus.  If it's like anything, Immortan Joe's oligarchy is like an early form of class society from after the Urban Revolution, or like Neil Faulkner's blunt description of pre-capitalist forms of class society (most especially the Roman Empire) as based on 'robbery with violence' to reinforce systems that stagnate from within because they do not develop the forces of production.  The warring brigandage of Joe and his competing 'nations' of scavengers in the wilderness is a post-apocalyptic, salvagepunk-inflected version of the warlordism that evolved in human society as soon as there were pools of urban surplus that could be raided.  Joe is actually the ruler of one of those pools of urban surplus, though his surplus appears to be a harnessed natural resources rather than a self-reproducing social system based on agriculture... even if agriculture is part of his system. Furiosa's relatively high position in the hierarchy at the start of the movie is obviously based on her skill as a raider and brigand for Joe.  The film doesn't give her much explicit backstory, but it wouldn't be crazy to assume that she herself was used as a sex-slave and breeder for Joe until such time as she proved to be incapable of producing 'healthy' children, whereupon she somehow migrates to a much higher position based on her ability as a warrior.

As mentioned, the other women are associated with images of fertility all the way through the movie, from the water in which they bathe to the collection of seeds in the bag.  The milk of lactating women is harvested by Immortan Joe's patriarchy for drinking (presumably all drinkable fluids are precious in this poisoned desert).  If this were just to emphasize - for emphasis' sake - the fact that women can get pregnant and have babies, this would be flabby symbolism and nothing more.  If it were to suggest that the fertility of women is the key to the renewal of the human race, it would amount to a kind of sexist fetishizing of the whole idea of the female, as well as suggesting that female fertility is just a resource to be used.  The film escapes these traps (largely) but embracing both of them and then holding them up as exactly what they are: traps.  Traps, moreover, conceived and laid by Joe's patriarchy.  The continuance of Joe's power relies upon female fertilty because his familial oligarchy needs to be reproduced.  He presents this as the renewal of the human race when he claims to be the saviour of the starving, but what he's actually doing is harnessing the fertile female body (there is, of course, no suggestion that his society has any idea that there might be people identifiable as, or self-identifying as, female who are not physiologically capable of pregnancy) to reproducing an oligarchy.  His conception of women thus entails the idea of them as resources to be used.  This is what the movie does when it associates the women characters with such things as milk, water, seeds, etc.  It identifies them with the resources when make the reproduction of human life possible, and which are therefore 'owned' and controlled by Joe in Joe's oligarchy.  It presents women as resources among other resources in order to make a point that the women have been turned into resources by their society.  "We are not things" is written on the walls of their prison by the departing Runaways for Joe to find.  It is the essential nature of the rebellion that they reject Joe's conception of them as resources.  Later, they encounter the Many Mothers and their bag of seeds.  These are resources too, but resources harnessed by those who have rejected oligarchy and patriarchy.  The seeds represent an acknowledgement that Joe is right to harness nature, fertility, vegetation, etc as resources for the production and reproduction of society... but that such resources should be controlled from below.  What better way to put across this idea than to put these resources into the hands of people who would themselves be treated as resources by the ruling class?  The concept of fertility is not shied away from.  The seeds end up being cared for by one of the Runaways who is herself pregnant.  This is an acknowledgement that human reproduction is the basis of social reproduction.  If the film seems to accept that women are, in some sense, 'resources', it also presents this as being an impoverished conception when constructed by an oligarchical patriarchy, and argues... to be crude about this... that the resources themselves should stick together and expropriate themselves from hierarchical control.

Sans Everything

Spoilers & Triggers


So, Sansa and Ramsey.

Well, it was totally necessary because it shows rape is bad, which we didn’t already know…

Oh, hang on, we did.

Well, some people don’t understand how bad rape is, and this’ll make them see that they were wrong…

Oh no, hang on, it proably won’t.

Well, it was necessary for the plot.

Er… no.  And even if it had been, plots are things people make, not things that grow by themselves.

But it was in the book, wasn’t it?

Um… no, it wasn’t.  In fact they had to rewrite the storyline from the books quite extensively to make it possible.  And even if it had been in the book, that wouldn't bind them to include it.

But at least it was germaine to the text, like the rape scene in, say, The Accused…

Umm… except that this is a show about dragons and magic in a fairytale kingdom.

But at least it shows the horrors of the treatment of women in the middle ages…

Except that this show isn’t set in the middle ages in the real world…

But, being set in a fictionalised version of the middle ages, the show has a mandate to cover medieval misogyny…

Um, no.  Not necessarily.

Well, at least it's broaching a topic it's been silent about up until now?

Except that it hasn’t been.  In fact, it's looked at violence against women, sexual or otherwise, in what some might say is pitilessly and cynically unnecessary depth and detail.

But it handled it tastefully and unsensationally and in a way that nobody could possibly get off on watching in any kind of creepy, woman-hating way…

Um…

But it at least advanced the characters’ progress towards… er…

Well, at least it told us stuff we didn’t know about the characters, like Ramsey’s a sadist and a misogynist, and Sansa can put up with cruel treatment.

Um…

Well, it’s good for headlines and ratings, so that justifies it.  I guess.

Er...

Well, it was edgy.  ZOMG, they are so hardcore and dark, man.  Yay for them.

Emergency Anti-Fascist Shabcast 3 (Hugo Awards)

Shabcast 3 was supposed to be the second part of my discussion with Josh Marsfelder.  (Here's part 1 of that discussion.)  But events have intervened.  Now, Josh and I will carry on our talk in Shabcast 4 (hopefully out quite soon... so you'll probably get two Shabcasts this month, you lucky blighters).  Shabcast 3, meanwhile, has been devoted to an emergency, hastily-convened discussion between myself, Phil Sandifer and Andrew Hickey on the subject of the recent right-wing incursion upon the Hugo Awards.

Download Shabcast 3 here (thanks once again to the Pex Lives guys for donating their bandwidth).  We do a fair bit of fash-lambasting, and Andrew especially gives lots of background to this particular issue, but we also find time to roam and rove a bit around some related topics, such as modernism and postmodernism and geek privilege and GamerGate and "what is SFF anyway???".

Andrew and Phil have both blogged about the Hugos issue (which is why I asked them to speak to me about it), and here are some more links...

Here's Charlie Jane Anders at io9.

One of the movers behind this business is the utterly reprehensible fascist shithead and 'fantasy author' Theodore Beale (AKA 'Vox Day').  Here's his entry at Rational Wiki.  And here is every post ever about him (there's lots of them) at David Futrelle's excellent MRA-watch blog We Hunted the Mammoth, cataloguing the man's career of saying vile, nazi things.  This is the guy who created a slate that swept the nominations at the Hugos, thanks to him organising his tiny gaggle of reactionary scumfuck fans.  Read, boggle and weep.

(Once again, here is the link to download or listen to our shabcast.  Special thanks to Phil and Andrew for joining me to do it at such short notice.)

NOTE 7/4/15:  I originally included a link to a Bibliodaze article about last years' Hugos.  Thanks to Phil Sandifer for pointing out my stupid mistake.

No Name

Triggers


Apparently, they've found out who Jack the Ripper was.  Maybe.  At least, so says the Daily Mail, and a bloke who's written a book about the case, and who owns a business selling 'Ripper' tours.  So, reliable and unbiased sources.

Turns out, Jack the Ripper was... some guy.

Who'd have thunk it?

So, will this put a stop to the lucrative Ripper industry?  The books, movies, walks, etc?

No, of course not.  Like all previous unmaskings, it'll just fuel the fire, even if this unmasking turns out to rest on marginally better evidence that some hack's ability to create anagrams, or an evidently untrue story told by a publicity hound, or the baseless hunch of a crime writer, or an obviously forged diary, or the manufactured bad reputation of a dead one-time heir to the throne.

Because, contrary to what everyone ever has always said about Jack the Ripper, interest in the case doesn't stem from the fact that the murderer was never caught.  It stems from the appeal of the degradation, humiliation, punishment and silencing of women... and from the way revelling in this (with whatever spurious self justification) can distract us from other stuff about the lives those women led, and the world they lived in.

Our misogynistic culture is obsessed with the murder of women.  It is possibly the main subject of the present-day Western narrative culture industry, aside from the sexual/romantic conquest of women.

It could be objected that there are so many stories about the murder of women because so many women are murdered... but that doesn't explain, say, the lack of a similar number of stories about the rape of women (as Alan Moore pointed out), or about the political and social subjugation of women, or about any number of other things that are more common.

The prevalence of the actual murder of women is intimately connected with the prevalence of depictions of the murder of women, but in ways that are far more complex than the merely causal (whichever way you want to imagine the causation runs).  It's all part and parcel of a cultural misogyny which stems from sexism and patriarchy, generated by class society all the way back to what Engels called "the world historic defeat of the female sex" with the start of social hierarchy.  (None of which is to excuse our present cultural practice by appeal to the influence of older structures.)

The women murdered (as is supposed) by the man dubbed Jack the Ripper are objects of morbid fascination because they shared a fate which made them only slightly unusual for women of their class and time.  Lots of these women were raped, abused, beaten and/or murdered (by men - let's not efface that vital part of the story).  It just so happens that some of these women were murdered in particularly vicious and gruesome ways, with their bodies mutilated and insultingly displayed afterwards.  (It's by no means clear how many women were the victim of the one escalating killer who ended up reaching a crescendo of perverse cruelty in the killing of Mary Kelley and then vanished, but it does seem likely that at least four were part of his distinct sequence.)

There is a degree of pity attached to the fascination.  Certainly, at the time, many common people in similar walks of life were motivated by fury at the fate of people who they knew, or might have known.  But also at the time, part of the fascination was to do with a kind of furtively aroused moralism about 'unfortunates' (as women who were driven to prostitute themselves by poverty were daintily called).  Such patronising and contemptuous pity is a mixture of fear and loathing of the poor, and of women.  And it puts the focus on sex, safely away from other scarier stuff.

But the fascination with the women is marginal to the wider cultural obsession with Jack the Ripper.  The women are props in his story, used as background detail and as titilation (particularly since the women involved worked as prostitutes, with all the sordid arousal this brings to some).

Generally, the obsession is with the man.  The killer has been fetishized, celebrated, glamourised and bigged up beyond belief.  He has been transformed from a skulking trick into a top-hatted, cloaked, evening-dress-wearing toff with a sinister gladstone bag, riding around in a coach with a royal crest on the side.  Gentleman Jack, the genteel and aristocratic killer.  There's no doubt that part of this - alongside the various attempts to make him a royal, a freemason or a posh establishment figure covering up for Queen, Country and Lodge - is the submerged horror of a system in which the poor, especially poor women, were the playthings of the rich, material to be used when needed and then allowed to sink back into the slum.  But the effect is to transform the killer himself, and his vacuously misogynistic crimes, into a meaningful figure, a powerful figure, a figure of purpose and steely determination, or of glamourous and tortured Jekyll-and-Hydean complexity, an artisan with a philosophy and a moral agenda of his own (however twisted), etc.  In this, the Ripper is the prototypical serial killer of the present-day culture industries, of Seven, Messiah, The Tunnel, etc.  The killer as intellectual, as the isolated thinker with lessons to teach us in blood, as the sinister harbinger of well-thought out rebukes (which shows simultaneously how much 'we' supposedly all need rebuke for 'our' sins, and how evil the opinionated outcasts bringing the rebukes usually are).

(I used to quite like the Gull/Masons theory... but it's only a story, and only a good one when told by Alan Moore.)

The bullshit and the obsession started at the time, with most of the mythmaking about the case being spun by the contemporary newspapers, eager to mop up the profits along with the blood.  The case could be moralised about from every angle except actual, practical sympathy with oppressed women (after all, the only place to go with that was to stop blaming the women and start saying they should be allowed to be safe... which was self-evidently unpublishable radical lunacy).  The case was a litmus test on the moral state of society (the killer brings the rebuke that 'we' all need, in his mad way).  The case was about swarthy Jews and their sacrificial religion, or about all the foreigners (no wonder the Mail loves this latest story - the guy supposedly identified as the killer was a Polish immigrant).  The case was about the degradation of the criminal classes (Punch Magazine, as usual, took the opportunity at the time to define satire as consisting of kicking downwards).  The case was a big joke, jolly London lore.  Hence the newspapers' invention of the name 'Jack the Ripper' when they hit upon the lucrative idea of sending themselves letters written in red ink, purporting to be from the murderer, invoking 'Springheel Jack' in their fabricated signatures, and sniggering about the whole thing in words that were painstakingly badly spelled (because, of course, 'Jack' couldn't be an educated man).

By the way - notice the contempt for the women integral to the name.  He's not murdering people, he's ripping things.  In the name, the women become nothing more than sacks or sheets or dresses.  Remember, when 'Jack' drones on in his letters about how he hates 'whores', he's actually a journalist speaking with the contempt of the respectable for the 'unfortunate'.

All this is a massive distraction.  Was then, is now.  Talk about anything, but don't admit that most serial killers - 'Jack' included - are just squalid, pathetic, inadequate little men who hate women because they take the furious feelings of thwarted entitlement inculcated in so many men by patriarchy, and actually act on them.  We don't want to have that conversation, or miss out on the latest thriller.

And don't admit that hugely more women died in the East End as a result of preventable disease, despair, drink, hunger, domestic violence... in a word: poverty... than died because of 'Jack'.

And don't admit that, as now, the London of 1888, the hub of an empire, harboured bigger mass murderers in the corridors of power than on the streets where the poor lived, worked their lives away, drank, hit each other, stabbed each other, laughed, joked, prayed, fucked for farthings and huddled together for warmth.  And those mass murderers in the corridors of power didn't need to sneak out at night to commit their murders.  They oversaw a system of murder every day, from within those very corridors, from behind their eminent Victorian respectability.  And they still do.

And don't damage the Ripper industry by admitting that there was never any such person as Jack the Ripper.  There was a pathetic and revolting misogynist who probably killed four or five women with escalating hatred and contempt.  And then there was a marketing opportunity.  And - in a society that still runs on drastic inequality, and on the disciplining, punishing and controlling women and their bodies - the market is still there.

Unredeemed

Spoilers for Game of Thrones... if the writers haven't already spoiled it enough.
 

Aside from being just horribly and needlessly misogynistic (Moffat has nothing on this. Nothing.) and basically relying on the assumption that Jaime can be redeemed despite being a rapist (presumably because Cersei is such a b*tch that its okay to rape her), it also perfectly illustrates something I was banging on about in a post about The Borgias a few years back. 

It illustrates what happens when you purposefully remove consistent moral thinking from narrative texts just for the show-offy hell of it. 

Now, I'm not a moralising finger-wagger (at least, I try not to be because it's a deeply unattractive and narcissistic trait) but I do believe that morality is a vital part of fiction.  Not in the sense that all stories should contain clear moral messages, or avowedly support a certain moral position, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that they should be aware that questions of justice and injustice are built into storytelling, at least in the Western tradition, and that it is literally impossible to tell a story in that tradition without raising moral questions, whether one wants to or not. 

Such narratives depend, for their interest, on our moral engagement.  (Would I do that?  How would I respond to someone who did?  That happened to me, I know how I felt.  Would I react the way he did?  Have I ever done anything that bad/good?  Would I have the courage to intervene?  Does anyone I know think like that? Etc.) 

The adaptors of GoT have committed to the Jaime-gets-redeemed arc that is in the books.  This clashes with their increasingly evident intent to make the GoT universe as brazenly nasty and cruel and violent and hateful and abusive as possible.  I realise that its pretty nasty as GRRM wrote it, but the TV has repeatedly added to his nastiness quotient.  The Jaime-redemption arc has now clashed with their rather adolescent - but also, sadly, rather widespread - intent to make the show into one without much of a moral compass, to show everyone as radically morally inconsistent. 

Now, on one level - fine.  People are not morally consistent.  People all do bad things, even broadly good people.  And shitty people sometimes do good things, etc etc etc.  This is all obvious, or should be.  And nobody wants simplistic, moralistic storylines which give us clear goodies and baddies and reassuringly makes the goodies perfect and the baddies irredeemable, and comfortingly has the goodies resoundingly and unambiguously triumphant.  That sort of thing just makes for bad stories, at any level. 

But.  But but butty but butty but but but.  Butsworth.  Buttington Buttarama.

There is still such a thing as a yardstick to judge people by.  It may be fuzzy and subjective, but its there.  Even in stories.  Perhaps especially in stories.  It's easier to judge people in stories, and it always will be, and you can't deny or efface that, any more than you can deny that stories inherently raise questions of justice and injustice.  Jaime is in the process of being 'redeemed'.  That's the whole point of him at this stage.  Despite being an awful person in many respects, he has better traits which are in the process of being awoken and fostered.  Where does the rape fit into this?  Nowhere.  It obliviates it.  It's in there simply to shock - not in the simplictic sense (ie here's a horrible scene of sexual violence - yeurch) but in the sense of showily undermining our sense of the morality of the character, and thus of the entire universe we're watching.  It makes for great telly according to the logic being employed (ie the war of all against all, conducted by people who are all utter shits) but rubbishes the story.  The great shame about this lapse into moral illiteracy is that it makes the story less effective.

Well no, the great shame is that it once again puts loathsome misogyny on screen and bolsters rape culture, for no reason at all.  But the damage done to the story is a part of it.

The Wank Delusion

Sexist image alert.

Dom Kelly brought this to my attention, with his pithier comment: "*vomits*"

Okay, let's examine this in what some might say was far too much detail.

Reason is sexy because one conventionally 'attractive' woman reads books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al, and throws away a Bible.  In the nude.

Right...

1.  It is assumed that this picture - i.e. the person in it - represents 'sexiness'.  But the whole concept of what is sexy is subjective - far more so than is admitted by consumerist media culture, to which this image owes its entire idea of sexiness.  The image is catering for only one idea of what is sexually alluring: the idea of the straight, cis-het male.  He's probably assumed to be white as well.  The image, including the person in it, is arranged for the gaze of this intensely privileged group.  This is 'reason'?

2.  Because one sexy person is an atheist, that doesn't make Atheism itself sexy.  Systems of thought, ideological doctrines, persuasions of belief, scientific theories and hypotheses... in short: ideas... are not open to judgement based on the perceived sexiness of the people that hold and/or espouse them.  Ideas are to be judged on their quality, consistency, persuasiveness, empirical backing etc.  Otherwise, there's not much point separating them from purely aesthetic categories.

3.  Beliefs can be held by people of widely divergent levels of attractiveness.  China Mieville is a Marxist.  So was Diego Rivera.  Do a Google Image search if you don't know what that means.*

4.  People's level of attractiveness changes.  Engels was pretty dashing when he was a young man.  He became a crusty, wrinkly old fart with a straggly beard.  Was Marxism sexy when he was young and hot, but stop being sexy when he got a paunch and a big beard (assuming that you don't think paunches and big beards are sexy - which would mean you're not Ke$ha).

5.  What does it mean to call an idea 'sexy' anyway?  Even the idea 'let's have sex now! is only sexy when proposed at the appropriate time and place, by someone you'd like to have sex with. 

6.  It's difficult to see how Atheism could be said to be sexy.  It might possibly be propounded and espoused by sexy people, but that still doesn't make the ideas themselves sexy. I personally find Helen Mirren in Excalibur so sexy it almost hurts to look at the screen, but if she suddenly started reading the works of Robert Ingersoll, that wouldn't make the works of Robert Ingersoll sexy.  At best, if the process were repeated often enough, I might develop a Pavlovian fetish for the works of Robert Ingersoll... but we have now long passed the breaking point of this analogy.

7.  God is Not Great and the other books of the 'New Atheists' were not, generally, written by conventionally sexy people.  Hitchens was a bloated, nicotine-stained, red-faced, bug-eyed blowhard with questionable personal hygiene.  Dawkins resembles a vicar from an Agatha Christie book, crossed with ageing bird of prey and a Gerald Scarfe caricature of Bernard Ingham.  Sam Harris looks like Ben Stiller, to the point where you wonder if they've ever been seen in the same room at the same time. Okay, these things might float your boat... and, if so, fair enough... but they don't belong in the same category of conventional glamour as the young woman in the photo.  (This point is mainly spite.)

8.  The young woman in the photo is a young woman, not an old bloke.  Of course, there are lots of young women in Atheism and the Sceptic's movement... but the model is reading the best-sellers of the 'New Atheism', representing a strand of modern Atheism that is aggressively dominated by crusty blokes.  Dawkins and Hitchens are both famous for sneering at women and feminism out of the other side of their mouths.

9.  This image is certainly extremely sexist.  It objectifies women.  By 'sexy', this image means 'sexist'.  Reason is sexist?  In other words, sexism is reasonable?

10.  Some will argue that she's reading clever books and making an intellectual choice, claiming that this gives her agency... forgetting that she's pointlessly naked.  (See 1, above.)  This is the same kind of 'agency' that female characters in Steven Moffat scripts are permitted.

11.  Atheism automatically involves disdainfully handling the Bible (and, presumably, other books that have immense spiritual significance for many people... as well as being of immense scholarly, historical and literary interest) as though its a snotty hanky, and throwing it away? Umm, nope.

12.  Reason = Atheism?  Specifically the narrow, ahistorical, politically retrograde, male-dominated, theologically-illiterate, Islamophobic, determinist, reductionist, vulgar-Atheism of those books?  That's how we define 'reason'?  Christopher Hitchens - who supported the invasion of Iraq - gets to define 'reason'?  Funnily enough, if that's what 'reason' is here assumed to mean, then the sexist nature of the image is perfectly apt!

13.  Nothing that this image says, either in its top meaning or in any of the various assumptions underlying it, sounds very much like 'reason' or 'scepticism' to me.  It's exactly the kind of thing that makes women in the modern Atheist movement feel undervalued and under-heard.  Given that so much of the bluster of the 'New Atheism' was tied up with appropriating things like feminism and women's rights - as sticks with which to mindlessly bash religion in general, and Islam in particular - the irony itself also shows up the deeply ironic hypocrisy of Hitchens oft-repeated lament about fundamentalists lacking irony.


*Always bearing that aforementioned subjectivity in mind.  Diego Rivera did okay.

3

"Not so much of that oatmeal, girl," says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, "It's only pikemen we're feeding, not horses."

They're in Irongron's castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest.  Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron's stew.

"Don't the guards on the gate get stew?" she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor's knock-out potion.

"What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They'll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet."

So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.

"I'm not afraid of men. They don't own the world."

Well, they kind-of do... but Sarah isn't discussing actual property relations.  She's talking about the way the world should work, with no one group 'owning' it.

"Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?" she demands.

"What else should we do?" asks Meg.

"Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you're tired of working for them like slaves."

"We are slaves," says Meg.

Wow.  No mincing words there.

"Then you should set yourselves free," says Sarah.

None there either.

"Oh? And how should we do that?"

That's a trickier question.  It always is.  But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.

"Don't you want to be free?" she demands.  Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.

"Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl," says Meg, "We have our place."

You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.

"What subservient poppycock!  You're still living in the Middle Ages!"

Yeah.  We are, in many ways.  We're meant to laugh at this outburst, but there's no question in my mind that we're also meant to be on Sarah's side.

There are all sorts of problems with this story.  Sarah is - at least in conception - a stereotypical 'wimmin's libber', all touchiness and naivety.  The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we're meant to think this is funny.  She's made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement.  For instance, there's the bit quoted above about the "lusty" guards... it's obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy.  And so on.  Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism?  I'm not going to argue.

But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves -  and aware of the fact that she's a slave - by saying "set yourselves free".

It shines out amidst the crap.

The Way We Live Now

Capaldi.  Wow.  I'd have put money on it being some new variation on the Tenant/Smith entity.  A young relative unknown with male model looks (one reason Moffat says he hired Smith is that he looked like someone who got photographed wearing pants for a living).  I admit, I'm astonished.  Capaldi is a genuinely great choice (if only I could believe he's likely to get decent scripts to work with).

Of course, the Doctor is STILL not a woman or a person of colour... but I'm not 'disappointed' because I never expected that to happen.  Either written by Moffat would've been likely to end up as a blood-curdling, shaming disaster.  As one bizarre online comment has it, Moffat's idea of a woman Doctor wouldn't have pleased "internet anti-equality feminists" (whatever the bloody hell an 'anti-equality feminist' might be).

So it's probably just as well that Moffat has - completely out of left-field - cast an older, male, white Scotsman. 

On the subject of online comment...  Facebook and Twitter are now plastered in remarks and memes in which fans sneer at all the (supposedly) weepy young fangirls who're unimpressed with Capaldi because he's not young and hot.

There's a bit of me that sympathises with the derision, if I'm honest. These young whippersnappers are annoying (largely because they're young and happy and I'm neither)... but the comment on this has immediately become venomously contemptuous and sneeringly sexist.  Because the focus is clearly on the silly, hormonal young wimmenz.

Viz:

Yeah, 'cos that's just what the Fourth Doctor symbolises: sneering at young women.

There's also a YouTube video doing the rounds of a young woman, possibly a teenager (I can't tell anymore; anyone under thirty looks like a foetus to me nowadays) reacting unhappily to the announcement that the new Doc will be an older, craggy fella.  Take a look at the comments below it.  I shouldn't need to quote them.  They're all too predictable.

As I say: misogynistic society + internet anonymity = ugly honesty.

Apart from anything else, this is rank hypocrisy. Just imagine the tantrums from the legions of sad, middle-aged fanboys if the new companion were an older, craggy actress rather than some perky young ingenue that they'd like to daydream about tupping.

Still, that's sexism for you. The sense of entitlement on the part of the privileged is so ingrained that it isn't even noticed, and any challenge to it as perceived as persecution or silliness.

On a related issue (well, it's the same issue really), it seems Moffat took the opportunity of the Capaldi announcement to sneer at the idea of a woman Doctor.  He says, sarcastically, that he wants a man to play the Queen.

Well doesn't that just say it all?

Firstly, Moff, why do you always, instinctively run to establishment authority figures?  You creep.

Secondly... OH YEAH 'COS NO MEN HAVE EVER PLAYED WOMEN HAVE THEY!?!?!?!?!  I MEAN, IT'S NOT AS IF CROSS-DRESSING AND DRAG ARE INBUILT, AGE-OLD ASPECTS OF THE BRITISH THEATRICAL AND TELEVISUAL TRADITION!!!!!  IT'S NOT LIKE MALE ACTORS, MALE WRITERS AND MALE PRODUCERS HAVE BEEN APPROPRIATING FEMALE CHARACTERS AND EXPERIENCES FOR, LITERALLY, CENTURIES, IS IT!?!?!?

Of course, that's not even the point.  Indeed, Moffat's glib deflection is a paradigmatic example of entitled fanboy tactical point-missing.  But we'll let it pass.  I'm not here going to rehearse, yet again, the same rhetorical questions about why an alien who changes his entire body periodically can't spend some time having a fanny instead of a willy.

Oh dear, look, I just rehearsed it.

Whoops.

The real point here is that the Doctor is a cultural marker who punches well above his weight.  And he is currently an exclusionary marker masquerading as an inclusive one. Still, as I say, that's the norm... and any challenge to it is perceived as persecution or silliness.

Carry On Screaming

Trigger warning / Spoiler Warning


Just watched Peter Strickland's amazing film Berberian Sound Studio.  It stars Toby Jones as Gilderoy, a repressed (or is he just normal for his home context?) British foley artist and sound mixer hired by Italian filmmakers to create sound effects for a satanic exploitation flick.

Berberian Sound Studio is a study of male fear and hatred of women.

The horror movie that we hear (never see) being made is about the undead revenge of women who were tortured and killed as witches.  The slimey director spouts pretentious bullshit about how his film is an important social document, intended to honestly portray and condemn the abuse of such women, to recognise their suffering, etc... yet his film rests upon the assumption that the women who were accused of witchcraft were, in fact, witches.  Otherwise, how could they come back from the dead in satanic rituals?

The torture - involving, at one crucial point, a red hot poker being inserted into a woman's vagina - is shown lovingly on screen... though, as I say, we (that is, the viewers of Berberian Sound Studio) don't see it.  Gilderoy sees it though.  He sees it again and again and again.  He has to wait until the crucial moment to come round on a loop so he can drop fat into a frypan, thus creating the appropriate sizzling sound.  He has to rip the stalks from radishes to simulate the sound of hanks of hair being ripped from women's scalps by the priests.  The film is comic in the way it shows the sound studio repeatedly ringing with the sounds of the hammering, stabbing and general abuse of various vegetables... yet, the comedy decays as we see the mangled fruit and veg decaying in buckets.

Like the tomato soup that gets splattered all over Gilderoy's face as he uses a blender to simulate the sound of a woman being carved up with a chainsaw, the rotting cabbages and melons make us think of mutilated human flesh, dehumanized by abuse and then dumped like rubbish.  Gilderoy, who spends his normal working life in the UK making gentle documentaries about nature rambling, has never imagined such horrors.

In the studio he is surrounded by women who are working for the men in charge of the picture.  It is quite disconcerting to see the women co-operating (if reluctantly, in the probably vain hope of being paid one day) in the production of such a blatantly misogynistic film.  The men, needless to say, are unconscious of any such irony... with the possible exception of Gilderoy, who never manages to raise much resistance despite his qualms.  The only woman who seemed uncowed by the relentless male dominance in the studio is the surly secretary Elena, whose legs and bum Gilderoy furtively stares at when following her down a corridor.  Part of his transformation is when he learns to be rude and dismissive towards her. 

Silvia (one of the voice actresses dubbing the dialogue, hired for her ability to scream) is being sexually harassed by the same director who claims to be making an important meditation on the victims of witchcraft trials.  At one point, she sarcastically equates his wandering hands with the hands of the inquisitors that searched for witches' marks.  She says she is marked.  He has made her feel that way.  The producer harasses her too, bullying her for more realistically terrified screams, ignoring her thoughts on characterisation, putting her down with savage rudeness, suggesting that she gets jobs by performing sexual favours for casting directors, etc.  When she is performing in the sound booth, the producer sneers that one of her screams sounds more like she's faking an orgasm.  He disapproves of his Director 'directing with his dick', but he clearly also blames the women who have to suffer his attentions.  He evidently senses that she's trouble, that she may well refuse to accept more harassment and thus cause them trouble, because at one point he tells Gilderoy that "there's poison in those tits".

Silvia confides to Gilderoy that she has been used and cheapened, made to feel like a whore.  It is implied that she may have been coerced into sex, though she may be talking metaphorically about the way working on the film has made her feel.  (It is also possible that the conversation is a dream of Gilderoy's, since it seems sexually charged in an unlikely way.)  In any case, Silvia rebels and erases the tapes of her own performance before disappearing.  Another actress is hired on the strength of her looks, after the producer and director skip through a series of photographs of applicants (front and side views, so they can judge the women's bodies... despite the fact that they're hiring a voice actress who will not be seen) and see one actress that, according to the director, "would give a dog a hard-on".  The actress, however, proves unable to provide satisfying screams.  The producer tells Gilderoy to go and get her ready by making her cry.  In a moment that represents his tipping point, Gilderoy succumbs to the order/temptation to torture the woman, in a passive and technical way entirely in keeping with his repressed and nerdy character, by sending increasingly loud feedback into her headphones.  Under orders, he turns up the volume, despite her cries.  It's reminiscent of that experiment where, under the comforting impression that scientists (complete with authoritative white coats) were giving them orders, students happily administered electric shocks (as they thought) to other test subjects.  But this isn't just about the brutalising effect of authority upon a compliant subordinate, this is specifically about the exercise of male power over a woman reduced to material.

The whole film is about the men reducing women to bits and pieces.  They are made into their voices, spouting lines written by men.  Their bodies are cut into pieces on the screen, to the bored professionalism of the producer and the salivating delectation of another sound engineer.  Those female bodies, represented in the sound studio, become melons and radishes and cabbages, stabbed and hammered, rotting in a bin.

There are other potentials.  At one point, Gilderoy entrances Silvia by showing her how he can transform her voice... but the moment is immediately squashed by the intrusion of the filmmaking process.  There's another scene when, during a power cut, he reduces the entire company - men and women alike - to gasps of wonder when he makes a light bulb emit the sounds of a UFO.  At home, Gilderoy uses this trick for "children's programmes".  (I can't help thinking about those eccentric geniuses at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop here... especially since the film is obviously set in the 60s or early 70s.)  Again, the moment is sadly curtailed once the lights come back on.  The commercial imperatives of the work make the prolongation of such a magic moment impossible.  The lights come up and the director snaps back to business.

Ultimately, Gilderoy's sympathies with the women - which he, in his passive way, can only express via troubled frowns and quiet communications when the other men aren't looking - come to nothing.  His nightmarish internalisation of the film entails a woman sneaking up on him the darkness of his own bedroom and attacking him, whereupon he overpowers and dismembers her.  He literally takes on the persona of the violent man, suppressing the vengeful woman, whose antics so shocked him when he first saw a clip of the film.  His guiltly co-operation in the exploitation of female bodies and voices has brought him to internalise the terror of female revenge and the fascination with the idea of violent suppression, with the reduction of the female menace via violence.  This, of course, is the whole meaning of the film he's been helping to make... the abused witch/woman returns for revenge (as did Silvia) and this is a terrifying threat that must be put down.

The female scream echoes through the film and through Gilderoy's mind, waking and sleeping... but the effect of this is not ultimately to engender sympathy, or a refusal to co-operate in the film.  Rather the scream becomes Gilderoy's own scream, confronted by women.  He says, early in the film, that he's "never worked on a film like this before".  Does he mean a film that involves being surrounded by women?  Has he ever been in a recording studio filled with young actresses when dubbing those nature films and kid's sci-fi programmes?  It's strongly implied that he's an unmarried virgin who lives with his Mum.  Repeatedly, members of the Italian production team more-or-less force him to consume articles of the fruit that has come to symbolise female flesh.  This is also an echo of the primal temptation, of course, but with woman made the fruit itself rather than the tempter.

There's a problem, of course, in that Berberian Sound Studio, just like the film-within-the-film The Equestrian Vortex, is told almost entirely from the male perspective.  The women characters in Berberian Sound Studio are reduced to the figurative meat in the grinder of misogynistic entertainment and male privilege, just as are the women in the Berberian Sound Studio itself... and just as the women characters in The Equestrian Vortex are reduced to literal meat.



ADDENDUM:

There's a very good review of Berberian Sound Studio here, by my old buddy Simon Kinnear... who is a proper cineaste and who can therefore actually say something intelligent about the film as cinematic art.  Unlike me.

Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields

A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:

...we're not being encouraged to think there's something wrong with this person [River]: it's the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It's the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.

It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html

I don't agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it's still excellent.  Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable... depressing but irrefutable.

I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced).  Personally, I'm coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren't racists or sexists don't need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things. 

Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or 'old Legohead' as I always think of him) for putting this my way.