I wasn’t able to attend the South Bend march yesterday (stupid job) but my wife was. She took some pictures.
Tag: feminism
On holding back
If you’ve been paying attention to my posts lately, or to my Twitter feed, you can probably guess why I didn’t post yesterday, and I suspect you’d be right. I’ve been trying to write about it and I’m not quite there yet, for a variety of reasons. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please forgive the vaguebooking; all will be made clear soon enough.
Instead, let’s talk about something how I’m either too old, too liberal, or both to play video games any more. Despite shit-talking it when it came out, The Witcher 3 went on a steep-ass discount a few weeks ago– I got the game and both expansion packs for $20, if I remember right– and I was in a period of mourning the lack of video games in my life at the time and so I went ahead and picked it up. I mean, fuck it, right? This thing got Game of the Year awards from basically everybody, and I’ve been wrong before, right?
Nah.
The Witcher 3 is exactly the game I thought it was before picking it up; it is not only bad in all the ways I thought it would be bad, it manages to be worse than I thought it was going to be in several critical areas. I have been gaming for a very long time, so it is likely that I have played a more misogynistic game than this one at some point or another, but I can’t recall what that game might have been. This is a game that very, very badly wants to be taken seriously, but the overgrown adolescents who coded it think that “serious” means that you get called a cunt everywhere you go, and mistake adult content— there are lots of tits, oh so many tits, and oh so many whores, and so many of the swear words– for adult complexity.
I would probably have really loved this when I was sixteen. That’s who it’s aimed at, and regardless of the actual chronological ages of the designers, it’s who it was made by. There are bits of the gameplay I do enjoy, but I commented to my wife this morning that the game’s greatest feat is managing to remain perfectly balanced on the razor’s edge where I’m enjoying it just enough that I’m still playing, but it’s not actually good enough to make me forget the parts that make me want to quit– so I’m still playing, but I hate the game for maybe half the time I’m playing it.
I don’t mind the stabbing. I don’t even mind the crafting and alchemy, which is normally a part I do my best to ignore in most games. It’s whenever I’m not in control of the character– ie, cutscenes– that I want to throw my PS4 out the window and cultivate a new hobby.
Blech.
On gestures, meaningless and otherwise
I got my first tattoo at a place called the Jade Dragon in Chicago. It’s a pretty famous tattoo parlor; there’s pictures all over the walls of various celebrities who have gotten work done there and there are billboards for the place all over town.
At the time, much like now, I was bald and had a goatee. In between my tattoo and the tattoo the friend I was with got, we ducked into a bar next door so that she could have a quick drink. It was her first tattoo too, and hers was a lot bigger than mine was, and she wanted a touch of liquid courage.
A guy at the bar, also bald and bearded, wearing a denim vest over a black T-shirt, made eye contact with me, did some sort of fist-pump gesture, and yelled “Skinhead! RAAH!” at us. We got the hell out of there– I told my friend to steal the fucking glass her drink was in if she needed to– and went back next door to get her tattoo done.
You get a T-shirt if you spend more than a certain amount on your tattoo, and the place is overpriced as hell so just about everyone qualifies for a free shirt. It’s got the logo of the place on it and a bunch of symbols all over the place. I figured they were just random flash tattoos. The shirt looked cool. I wore it as often as I wore any of my other shirts, I suppose.
Fast forward about a year. I’m chatting with this girl online and we get to talking about tattoos. I mention that I’ve got one and tell her it’s from the Jade when she asks where I got it.
“Ugh,” she says. “Don’t go there. The place is run by neo-Nazis.”
I flash back to that guy in the bar next door. And I do some research, and I discover that I’ve been wearing a shirt covered in white power symbols for a year. Luckily for me, a shirt covered in obscure white power symbols, as I’ve been wearing them on the South Side of Chicago and that could have ended up going very, very poorly for me.
The shirt is thrown away on the spot.
I am on an L train heading somewhere; hell if I remember where any longer. There’s a mom with several kids in the back of the train. The kids are being loud– not ridiculously so, but they’re clearly excited to be on the train and I get the feeling that they’re not from Chicago and this might be their first time. The train is maybe a third full; a few dozen people, perhaps. Some jackass starts yelling at the lady about how loud her kids are being and how she needs to keep them under control and it gets very creepy and threatening very quickly. The rest of the train car goes dead silent.
I unleash my teacher voice on the poor stupid bastard and redirect his attention from them to me. I am still bald and bearded and I’m wearing a black trenchcoat. I basically order him to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and not say another word until either the family or him is off the train and then stare at him until he complies.
No one else on the train says a word. One person– a white guy, maybe in his mid-fifties– nods approvingly at me. I get off the train a stop early at the same place the family does in case he decides to try and follow them. The mom thanks me. The guy gives us the finger through the train window. I blow him a kiss.
My wife and son and I go to hang out with some of our friends a few days after America decides to elect a fascist. One of our friends is wearing a safety pin on her shirt. I am not wearing one on mine. I think about that family on that L train, and wonder about that safety pin. Were they supposed to look around for someone wearing a safety pin, to appeal to that person for help? If it’s winter, does the safety pin move to the outer clothing, or does it stay on the shirt, where you can’t see it under the coat? And if the person wearing the safety pin stands up and makes herself visible, or speaks up and makes his voice heard, is the safety pin really making any difference? Who is it there for? Is it a reminder to ourselves? A signal to other people that we are virtuous? Both? Neither? If it’s not combined with action, does it really mean anything at all?
My friend has five children. Those kids need to know to stand up, and she’s teaching them how. And she walks the walk and talks the talk. She will stand up. The pin represents something real, on her. I wonder how many others that’s true for. How many people are just trying to make themselves feel better? And do I have any right to criticize anyone else for making a small gesture that makes the world seem a little less bleak than it has recently?
I probably do not.
There is an American flag on the wall in my office. America decides to elect a fascist and I find that I can’t stand to look at it any longer. I order a rainbow flag from Amazon and hang it over the American flag, without taking it down.
I still believe in the things that America is supposed to represent, but I’m not sure the Stars and Stripes represents those things any longer. The rainbow flag is better. It expresses my ideals more concisely.
It’s on the wall in my office. No one but me and my family is ever really going to see it. I leave it there anyway, because I need the reminder. So, for that matter, does my son, once he’s old enough to understand what it means.
I find myself looking forward to the day when I can take it down.
REBLOG: Open Letter to My Fellow Geeks, by Kate Chaplin
I met Kate at Starbase Indy last year– we were booth buddies. You need to read this.
In which bustin’ makes me feel good
… which, holy shit, that’s a double entendre, isn’t it? And it took me 32 years to notice it? Okay, now my childhood’s ruined.
Here’s the clearest indication that I enjoyed Ghostbusters: the main characters’ names are Abby Yates, Erin Gilbert, Jillian Holtzmann, and Patty Tolan. The receptionist’s name is Kevin, and I don’t think he had a last name.
I need you to understand this about me: I don’t remember the names of fictional people. I can read entire books and be able to describe the plot in close detail and have trouble recalling the main character’s name. I can almost never remember the names of any of the leads of movies. And I know all five of the major characters in this film. First and last names. That’s freaking amazing. It shouldn’t be the case, but it is.
I didn’t initially want to see Ghostbusters, not because I thought it would Destroy my Childhood– that’s not a real thing– but because I thought it was an unnecessary remake. The first film is sacred to me, but its sacrality has not led to me seeing the second film more than perhaps twice, so I can’t really pretend I have any loyalty to the franchise. And there are no Marvel superheroes in this movie, so ignoring it would be well within my established prior practice. Then I looked around and decided I’d rather change my mind than be on the same side of some of the people who agreed with me about not seeing it, and then I laughed my ass off at the first trailer. And then I saw the movie on opening night, a thing I haven’t done in, literally, years.
This movie’s funny as hell and you should watch it. If Kate McKinnon isn’t the funniest motherfucker alive– can I call a woman that? What if she’s gay?– I don’t know who it is, and Leslie Jones is funny as fuck too. Also notable is Chris Hemsworth’s performance; I’ve enjoyed his Thor but I seriously had no idea that the guy could be as funny as he is in this movie.
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the putative leads yet, Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig. I know little about Wiig, but I’ve seen McCarthy in other stuff and she has annoyed me. Honestly, I thought the two of them were among the weaker bits of the movie. They have their moments, certainly, but they don’t do “smart” as well as McKinnon does– she is the perfect mad scientist– and many of McCarthy’s lines in particular read like the kind of dialogue that dumb people write for smart people to say. “You did not disclose that the vehicle in question would be a hearse!” or whatever it was, for example. Wiig forgets that she’s supposed to be a physicist about fifteen minutes into the movie and there’s no real need for her to remember it since someone has to be the straight woman and be the butt of all the ghost-vomit jokes. I didn’t dislike her, but she’s not a reason to see the movie.
I do find myself wishing that Patty could have been an academic– either also or maybe flip her role with one of the other women. I think the idea of a Ph.D candidate in New York history working for the MTA could have worked, for example. But Patty is a fun character and the Sassy Black Woman stereotype we were all worried about is dialed back about as far as it can go.
Interestingly, this film shares its biggest flaw with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. TFA’s worst moments all involved the characters from the original trilogy. Similarly, Ghostbusters is at its worst when it’s trying to remind us that all of the actors from the original films (except for Rick Moranis, who quit acting years ago) supported the project. Other than the nice touch of putting a bust of Harold Ramis outside Erin Gilbert’s office, the only cameo that wasn’t insanely distracting was Annie Potts. Murray and Aykroyd, in particular, brought the movie to a screeching halt the three times they were on screen. And then once you realize what’s going on, and that they’re all gonna show up, you spend the movie watching for the next one, and it’s distracting as hell.
Other than that, though, and Paul Feig’s moderately annoying habit of cutting to Kate McKinnon’s or Leslie Jones’s reaction to every line someone else says (make it part of the drinking game) it’s a hell of a movie. The villain is interesting– he’s basically a GamerGater who has lucked into some supernatural physics– the effects are fun, and some of the shit they get up to with the proton packs and the other weapons Holtzmann comes up with are awesome fun. There’s a great stinger at the end of the movie, too, even if the film should have ended with the line “I love this town!” like the first one did.
(Yes, I know what I just said about the first movie. But they set up that line and then don’t deliver it. They shoulda, dammit.)
Also, this:
I wanna marry Kate McKinnon, guys. I know; I’m married and she’s gay. Realistically, though, if you think about it, neither of those two things really have much of any effect on my chances, so I figure I’m free to dream on that point. Then again, I’ve never seen her in anything other than this movie, so maybe it’s the possibly-straight-but-I-doubt-it Jillian Holtzmann who I want to marry. She’s not real. That doesn’t affect my chances much either, I guess.
This movie is funny and you will like it so go see it.
The end.
It Starts at Four: On Consent and Rape Culture
My son was the ringbearer in my brother’s wedding this weekend. The flower girl was, I think, the daughter of one of the bride’s cousins. To say they hit it off was probably a bit of an understatement; they were pretty close to inseparable at the bridal shower a few weeks ago and not much changed at the rehearsal or the wedding. I’d post a picture of the two of them, but I’m not about to post a picture of somebody else’s kid without her permission and plus I plan on using the word rape a lot in this piece and I don’t really feel like having my son’s photo associated with that in Google.
Here’s the thing. Everybody at the wedding was doing that heteronormative thing that people do when two little kids click and oohing and aahing about oh look at his girlfriend and all that nonsense all weekend. And that’s not at all what was going on. They were the only two kids there of roughly the same age, so they played together. Like kids do. That was it. But there were a couple of moments over the weekend and at the shower where I kind of had to pull the boy away and remind him that no, Kayla doesn’t have to play with you right now if she doesn’t want to, or don’t hold her hand if she doesn’t want to hold hands, or Kayla’s doing something else right now, I think you should leave her alone for a while, or even no, Kayla doesn’t have to sit with us at lunch, she can sit with her mommy.
Sometimes these things rolled off of him. Other times he got upset about them. And I can already see some of you getting het up about talking about a four-year-old in terms of teaching consent. No, my son doesn’t know what sex is yet. My son doesn’t have a concept of girlfriend. He knows that girls have a vagina; that’s just a word to him. It doesn’t mean anything yet. He’s four. And yet we still ended up in a situation– perfectly innocently, mind you– where at one point I told him to cut it out because he was being creepy and at another point my wife and I jointly explained to him what mansplaining was. Because he was doing it.
He’s four. And he still needs to be taught how consent works. Because when kids aren’t taught that other kids are people, that they are unique beings with agency and their own wants and desires and needs and rights, and specifically when young boys are not taught that young girls are unique beings with agency and their own wants and desires and needs and rights… well, you get this piece of shit:
And when you’ve raised your kid to be a dumpster rapist, and you’ve named him Brock Turner, for fuck’s sake, a name that if I were to work it into a script as the name of a rapist I would expect someone to tell me to make it a little less obvious, a name that is only slightly less rapey than naming your kid Ray Pist… well, when you’re that guy, you write dumb shit like this:
I’ve got a lot of responsibilities as a dad, right? One of the most important ones is to make absolutely certain that my son does not turn out to be a dumpster rapist. Because I hate to break it to you, son, but if the day comes where two other dudes find you raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and then tackle you and hold you down until the cops arrive? Your daddy is not writing this letter. Am I wholly unsympathetic toward the elder Turner? No, not entirely. He’s going through some shit right now. I’m sure he’s in pain.
I just don’t care.
If you don’t want to be known as the dumpster rapist for your entire life, one way to avoid that is to not rape people behind dumpsters. And if you don’t want to have to write letters where you explain tearfully that your son doesn’t like ribeyes anymore and there are too many potato chips in the house, you should probably raise your son to understand that women are human beings. Because here’s the thing: I don’t believe for a second that this is the dumpster rapist’s first assault. Not for a second. It’s just the one where he got caught. And based on that letter, I am casting some side eye at Dad as well.
We spend far too much time teaching our daughters how not to get raped. It doesn’t actually work; women don’t get raped because of how they dress or walk or what they drink or where they go or who they trust. Women get raped because men rape. If we want to stop rape, we stop rape by teaching young men that women are people, by not raising them in such a cocoon of privilege and internalized misogyny that they can even look at a passed-out woman and think to drag her behind a dumpster and force parts of our bodies into theirs. This young man did this because he was raised to believe that the world was his and anything he wanted but did not have, he could simply take. He knew what he was doing was “wrong” at least on an intellectual level because otherwise he wouldn’t have tried to hide while he was doing it. He just didn’t give a fuck.
Teach your sons about consent, goddammit. Start at four. Start at birth. Because rape culture is everywhere in this country, and it’s going to seep in no matter how hard you try to keep it out. It’s in the fucking air and in the water. And the only way to stop it is to teach your sons about consent and to teach them about consent early. It’s the only way this ever gets better.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t ever name anyone “Brock Turner” ever again.
On judgmental bastardry and little kids
ALTERNATE TITLE 1: Why I Need to Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 2: Why Everyone should be Glad I Don’t Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 3: Why Liberals are Dumbasses and Don’t Run Anything
The boy’s at a birthday party right now. I’m not at the party, but my wife is; as someone who has run dozens of parties over the years for young kids where the adults way outnumbered the kids, I long for the days when it was okay to just drop your child off at a birthday party and then just go away for a couple of hours, but that’s not how society– or at least the parts of it I move in– works any longer. I wouldn’t have objected to going, for the record, but I had some stuff to do around here and she volunteered. So she’s there and I’m here.
The party’s for one of the girls in his class at Hogwarts. I had been meaning all week to email her parents and ask for some details about what she might want for her birthday, and finally remembered to do it yesterday. Mom responded pretty promptly. The first sentence of the email was “Oh, she’s all girl.”
Oh.
I would kinda have liked some more specificity than that, but whatever; basically it meant go to the Pink Aisle and close your eyes and pick something.(*) My wife and I went through this fun and stupid rigamarole in the Pink Aisle last night where neither of us really wanted to get her something froofy and glittery and princessy but that’s basically all there is; I suggested a couple of different (mostly pink and purple!) age-appropriate Lego sets when my son came running over with a Barbie doll dressed as a superhero.
Just under $20, Barbie, and the boy literally picked it out. Fine. Done.
The mental subcurrent of all this, of course, is that while I don’t especially like the idea of plastering kids with this is for boys and this is for girls, it ain’t like my own son isn’t into superheroes. Of course, so is his daddy, and I suspect if I had a daughter she’d be just as able to tell you about the Hulk and Iron Man as he is, but I don’t have a daughter, now, do I, so who knows how much reinforcing of The Patriarchy I’d be doing as a parent compared to how much I’m already doing, and who the fuck am I to try and subtly condition somebody else’s kid by trying to find a toy for her that isn’t ridiculously gendered when I have never not once suggested my own son go into the Pink Aisle when he was hunting for toys for himself.
(Did you know there are girl Nerf toys? I did not know this.)
So, yeah, whatever, we got the kid a Barbie doll, and somehow I managed to turn buying a gift for a five-year-old who I think I can pick out of a lineup, maybe, into some sort of political act, because that’s exactly the sort of stupid wanker I am sometimes. And then my wife texted me from the party while I was busy hanging a mirror at home (let’s not let the gendered nature of that little detail escape us, either) to inform me that this party had blue ribbon water and pink ribbon water and she’d just heard one of the boys loudly insist that he needed the “boy water.” This was, thankfully, not my son.
So. Yeah.
That happened.
We shoulda gotten the kid a soccer ball.
(*) And I should make this explicit, too– Mom was trying to be helpful, and her point was “Don’t stress yourself out too much about a present.” She explicitly said that her daughter would be perfectly happy just to have all of her friends there. This post is about I’m an idiot sometimes, not Jeez, look at how these people I barely know are raising their kid, just to make perfectly certain we understand each other.
REBLOG: Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence
I’m not in the mood to write today, and this is more important than anything I’d have to say anyway.