Posts in the "Who" Category

• Gender Roles: Welcome to the DMZ

  Dolls or action figures? Gender roles in popular culture.

  It’s always struck me a little odd that people who get so worked up about negative feminine gender roles in pop culture generally have very little to say about negative MASCULINE gender roles in pop culture.  Maybe I just don’t get it because I’m a man, and we all know men are dumb–just look at pop culture icons like Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, pretty much any male sitcom lead, or any commercial with a (male) boss and (female) secretary.  Men are barely capable of farting, let alone going to the bathroom by themselves. 

  But don’t worry, being called ‘dumb’ won’t hurt any man’s feelings, because men don’t have any–as we know from pop culture.  Men don’t have feelings, or if they do and they express them, they’re weak and soft.  Men are like wrestlers or gangsta rappers, violent and angry and incapable of complex thought or emotion. 

  No, men are pretty much surface swimmers.  They don’t think with their big heads, just the little ones.  They’re horndogs enamored of appearance above all and try to sleep with anything warm with a pulse, like James T. Kirk or, I don’t know, pick a Charlie Sheen character.

  Now, to borrow a phrase from Great and Glorious Leader Obama, let me be clear–I’m not claiming these stereotypes are baseless, or even always untrue.  What I’m unclear about is, why are the people who protest these negative stereotypes always focused on the women’s side?   Men are being disrespected, too.  Does that even register?

  For instance, to this audience, one of the biggest issues (you should pardon the pun) is the size of (more…)

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• If Only it Weren’t for Those Squeaking Noises!

  Dolls or action figures? Gender roles in popular culture.
  

  Carol Wolf is the author of Summoning, whose hero, a female, does not squeak, but does bite.

  What a pleasure to be living in the Post-Buffy age!

  In the late 80s, the splendid film The Princess Bride was badly marred by the scene where the hero Westley is attacked by giant rodents, and his true love stands by making squeaking noises, and fails even to pick up a stick to help him. The good news is, no one would tolerate such a character choice anymore. And that is a measure of our progress with gender roles.

  This may not be entirely due to the inroads Buffy the Vampire Slayer made on our collective consciousness, but Buffy was certainly a big step in the right direction. When Buffy struck the evil bad guys, as she did so often and to such good effect, she did, however, still make those squeaking noises.

  Guys might grunt, when they hit someone, though usually you don’t hear the grunt because of the crack of their fist hitting whatever it was they hit. But guys, even boys, don’t make squeaking noises when they hit something, and girls, and even women, do. But still, we’ve come a long way.

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• What if all the male characters posed like the female one?

  Dolls or action figures? Gender roles in popular culture.

  And so we come to gender roles in popular culture, about which many things could be said, but my housemate (a man) sent me the image below to get the ball rolling. I’ve seen a few variations of it kicking about the internet, but this one was especially pertinent given that it depicts comic book heroes.* And it does serve to highlight the general ridiculousness, and narrowness, of how women are portrayed in the media and popular culture.

  

  Gender roles is a topic that comes up over and over in conversation with friends, but it feels like it’s been more prevalent than ever in recent months (or perhaps that’s the influence of Caitlin Moran’s deeply excellent How To Be A Woman, a must-read for everyone, wherein she speaks upon Brazilians and the size of knickers amongst other things. In fact, if I could just quote from Caitlin Moran for the rest of this post, it would make life easier. She also makes me feel better about using copious quotas of exclamation marks).

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• Roll out the roles

  Dolls or action figures? Gender roles in popular culture.
  

  Paul Tobin (he has a moustache now, though)

  This week we’re discussing gender roles in popular culture. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart (and my writing) for a number of reasons.

  It’s fair to say that I’m known for writing female characters. Spider-Girl, Annah Billips from Gingerbread Girl, Black Widow… and a host of others. I enjoy the hell out of writing female characters for two main reasons. First… I simply enjoy the hell out of women. It may possibly have something to do with my theory that women are pretty and smell nice. And another reason I like writing female characters is because it’s a step outside my comfort zone. I’m male. When writing a female character I have momentum from the very beginning, because I start by entering what is, for me, a fantasy world. I’ve no idea what it’s like to be a woman. Well, I have some ideas. Men and women are amazingly similar after all, and even some of our dissimilarities need to be tossed out when writing in the role of the opposite gender. One BIG mistake that men make when writing female characters is to make women relentlessly female. A big mental check-mark I have in my head is the “bathroom” test. Men and women pee differently. We do. But if I’m writing a female character, and I write a line of, “She went to pee, which she did by sitting down, because she is a girl and that’s how girls do these things,” … then I’ve failed as a writer. I’ve written a female character from a decidedly male perspective.

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• Flickering Light

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.

  When I first read The Open Boat in high school, I was going through a pretty rough spell in my life, and I remember thinking that Stephen Crane nailed it in depicting human struggles in the face of a completely uncaring universe. In fact, I even thought he let the universe off easy and hadn’t taken it far enough; there might be some huge cosmic intelligence out there, but calling it “ambivalent” was much too kind—it was as capricious and vindictive as any hostile Greek god, only without the occasional generosity or semblance of human kindness. (Like I said—it was a rough, rough patch).

  But even without my dark outlook superimposed over the reading, that story really still stood out against a lot of the other literature we read. The spirit of survival and endurance, the heroic effort in the face of tough obstacles that we so often laud and celebrate in literature and in life, seemed small and mean in the face of natural forces bent on destroying the characters. There is no benevolent aid or even attention to their plight—just them, the frothing ocean, and the very real likelihood of death. (more…)

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• The Art of the Self-Negating Prophecy

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.

  I once heard an interview with an old reporter. They asked him what was, in his opinion, the most important thing he’d learned in his career. His answer was; “No trend ever reaches it’s ‘logical conclusion’. I find this quite comforting, as the ‘logical conclusion’ to all of the grim environmental news we get paints a pretty depressing picture. Certainly it has been fodder for any number of dystopic science–fiction scenarios, and I’m quite confident that these will continue to be produced. In fact, I wish them the greatest success.

  Personally, I do not want to live in some post ecological catastrophe world. I doubt it would have the internet, or good coffee. And then there’s the whole eating other people thing. I’m told people taste like Spam™. To Hell with that. I hate Spam™.

  Luckily, I don’t really think it’s going to happen. And not because the librul media is trying to destroy jobs and take away our assault weapons. If anything, I think the ecological problems are severely under-reported, because most people are too stupid to care. No, if these terrible things fail to materialize, I firmly believe that it will be because of the science-fiction depicting it in various horrible ways.

  There are people, a lot of people, who don’t think about long term consequences. They cheerfully pour seventeen tons of pig manure into the river behind their house every day and never give it a second thought. But show that same person a movie (Yes, yes, I’m sure there are pig farmers who are voracious readers. I’ll bet they write poetry too. I got news for you. The other pig farmers mock them) about an ecological disaster brought about by improper waste disposal, and there’s a chance he might think twice before dumping. Maybe. But his neighbors will think about it. As will the people downstream, and their legislatures.

  There is a story about a researcher who went to some out-of-the-way jungle somewhere. There was a local stone-age tribe who he employed to find a particular flower. He explained that the flower was yellow. They had no idea what he was talking about. They had no word for yellow, and were completely unfamiliar with the concept. The researcher patiently explained what ‘yellow’ was and provided examples. He said that almost instantly they came back, very excited, exclaiming; “This ‘yellow’ stuff is everywhere!”

  I think of writers of science-fiction disaster novels as analogous to that researcher. They patiently explain some astonishingly new concept, show us what to look for, tell us where to look, and try to extrapolate what could happen if we let things keep on going the way they are going.

  When the writer his his job successfully, we put down the book, look around and exclaim. “Holy cow! This stuff is everywhere!”

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• Catastrophes create new frontiers

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.
  

  Bradley P. Beaulieu

  There’s something very primal about creating a catastrophe of any sort and writing about it, either on the upswing of some impending disaster, on the downswing, or even well afterward. It’s natural to wonder what things would be like if things went to hell in a handbasket. Years ago it was the Red Scare and the threat of nuclear winter. Nowadays things are trending more toward eco-disasters. But in many ways it boils down to the same thing: stripping away the structure of our society and see what would come of it. It’s not nearly so simple as creating a Lord of the Flies analog, because in most of the better disaster tales, the characters know what they’ve lost. Shades of the old world can still be seen, even while the world crumbles.

  I haven’t written much in this vein, but one of the appealing things for me about the disaster tale is that it’s reductive. It strips away so much from the characters that it removes a lot of the distractions of telling a story in modern day. It allows the author to focus in on the things we find most important. If traditional science fiction can be described as taking an idea and asking: what changes because of it?, then the disaster tale can be said to strip away almost everything and ask: what’s left? (more…)

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• Earth Threatened by Fiendish Enemy: Ourselves!

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.

  I once made a short film called End Times, about the release of nanobots, designed to eat oil spills, that in fact eat everything. A few shelters are quickly shored up against the oncoming onslaught, and the film is a scene between one of the winners of the lottery for a place in one of those shelters, and his uncle, who wants to give him the books he will need to continue human civilization. The scene that explored what books you choose to send forward with the remnants of humanity, to continue our civilization, when you have a very small weight allowance, while the young survivor arrives at the belief that the civilization that destroyed itself should be left behind and forgotten, is quite out of date now. The uncle would hand the kid a handful of flash cards, and of course he’d already be taking his computer with him.

  And in fact, if there was such a disaster, there wouldn’t be a lottery, there’d be a whole lot of murder. When I learned that the U.S. government built a city a mile under a pasture in West Virginia, complete with a lake, so that when the balloon goes up, our three branches of government (and their families, and, no doubt, their close personal friends, and without an iota of doubt, about five hundred young female staffers) would be safely preserved, I wrote a play about the day when the “government” emerges from its shelter a couple of hundred years later, when it’s safe, to announce to the survivors, “Here we are! We’re back! Here’s your president, and this is your vice president, and we are your representatives . . . ” I didn’t get very far beyond the mutant survives shoving them back in their hole and dropping a mountain on it. And stay there!

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• Green Is The New Red

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.

  ***WARNING***  THIS COLUMN WILL GET POLITICAL, PROBABLY IN OPPOSITION TO YOUR OWN POLITICS!!!!  ***WARNING***

  Okay, I felt that warning was necessary because just about every writer I know, from grad school to writing workshops to friends who are writers, is a hard-core lefty.  And I am not.  And because my experience has taught me that arguing with a lefty about things like ‘man-made global warming’ usually ends with them getting red-faced, vein-bulgingly angry before they call me names and storm off, I felt the warning was a good caveat to those who would read further.

  And one more thing–this may get intense, so stay until the end for a treat! 

  Now come with me, if you dare…..(mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!) and let’s look at ‘eco-tastrophy’!

  (Actually, fantasy is the best place to discuss ‘eco-tastrophy’ because, frankly,  ‘eco-tastrophy’ IS a fantasy!)

  Let me clarify why I think ‘man-made global warming’ (MMGW) is a ridiculous concept, a hoax of greater scale than anything I have seen in my life time: (more…)

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• If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.

  The ever inspirational Maria Popova (@brainpicker) today tweeted this gem, which inspired the title of my blog for this week. And today, with tributes flooding in for Maurice Sendak, it also seems an appropriate day to think about the call of the wild things.

  Aged seven, I intended to be a vet. In view of a general aversion to anything involving gore, this was always destined to be a distant aspiration, but me and my best friend of the time harboured strong delusions of becoming the next David Attenborough and walking the planet in search of Amur leopards and the like. I would still like to walk the planet in search of Amur leopards, but I’ve realized that a life of surgery, even upon cute furry things, is not for me. I have however become a gardener, and it’s a constant surprise how much enjoyment it brings me.

  

  ... the local wild things also like hanging out in the garden (any excuse for a cute fox picture must be taken)

  Yesterday the folk over at Pornokitsch put out a call for favourite childhood reads, and I cited The Animals of Farthing Wood – a story about a group of animals who have to band together and seek a new home when their habitat is destroyed. This also got me thinking. I might have added Watership Down, but the tragedy of furry rabbit deaths makes it too heartbreaking a book for a favourite. I wouldn’t define myself particularly as a writer of eco-tastrophy, but considering the evidence, it does seem inevitable that I would end up being influenced by environmental issues. (more…)

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