Tag: feminism

Awesome female characters: an addendum

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

This was gonna get scheduled for later this afternoon, but the post I wanted to write this morning sort of fell apart in the writing, so I’ll do it now.  I totally forgot somebody yesterday:

Unknown11.  Helen Parr/Elastigirl (THE INCREDIBLES)

The Incredibles is one of my favorite movies, and the announcement that it’s finally, finally getting a sequel caused no end of glee around here.  I still can’t figure out how making it didn’t cause Marvel to sue the hell out of Pixar, who wasn’t owned by Disney yet in 2004, because it’s transparently a rip-off of the Fantastic Four, only they made the Human Torch a baby and brought in the Flash instead.  I mean, hell, their daughter combines invisibility and force fields as her powers.  Those two things do not naturally go together!  Give me a break, here!

Whatever; it’s the best Fantastic Four movie ever made, so I don’t care.  But this is supposed to be about Elastigirl.  She’s got the second-best moment in the movie.  For the first, oh, third to half of the film or so, she’s kind of portrayed as a wet rag, content to blend in and have a home life and just be quiet, and other than her desire to be rooted for once in their lives she’s kind of a naggy, boring sort of character.  She’s a soccer mom.  Soccer moms aren’t supposed to be interesting.

And then she discovers that Bob is off on an island somewhere, and she decides to go after him.  And her kids sneak on board the plane with her, and she finds them– just after deciding that maybe she needs to have that superhero costume on after all.

(Goes and looks)  Oh, hell, it’s on YouTube:

I love, love, love this moment.  She’s literally talking to her babysitter at the beginning of the clip.  Full Mom mode.  Then she notices the missiles, and bam.  The superhero in her takes over like it’s a goddamned second personality, and for the rest of the movie Helen Parr is a ninja.  You really have no idea what she’s all about until this point in the movie; you’ve seen her flirt with Bob for a few minutes at the very beginning of the movie and then next to nothing until now, when you suddenly figure out that not only is she really is the Mr. Fantastic of the family– she’s the smart one, too, and there is a ton of stuff that she’s better at than her husband.

I kinda wish the clip started about a minute earlier and ended about a minute later, after she’s explained to her kids exactly how they’re going to survive the mess they’ve found themselves in– because the integration of the “mom” personality into the “superhero” personality is really interesting– but god do I love this character.

And, yeah, second favorite moment.  The fifth through seventh seconds of this clip are my favorite moment in the movie:


(Also: I don’t remember who suggested Veronica Mars, but I totally should have included her, too.  I thought about Sarah Connor but I already had Ripley, and they struck me as real similar, so I just kept Ripley.  Also, Starbuck.)

10 awesome fictional females

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized23 Comments

I think I’ve stolen this idea from someone, but I’ve been kicking it around in my head for over a month now and have completely lost where it came from.  Despite thinking about it for a month, I’m still pretty sure I’ve forgotten about someone.

This list is in no particular order.

1.  Leia Organa, STAR WARS18lr3b0ga56o5jpg

This will surprise no one, and shouldn’t.  And no, not because of the slave bikini.  Okay, maybe a little because of the slave bikini.  Honestly, the Leia of the later Star Wars books has always been more interesting to me than the Leia of the movies, because they move away from “Princess” Leia and more into “uber-competent intergalactic diplomat, badass Jedi grandmother Leia” who is way more interesting.  Rhundi from The Benevolence Chronicles is at least a little bit based on this later Leia, although Rhundi is less of a politician than Leia is.

92.  Ellen Ripley, ALIEN franchise

Also from the “should surprise no one” category, and in fact the first name I came up with when writing this.  Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley should have killed the idea that women can’t carry action films stone cold goddamned dead after Aliens.  She was even good in the bad Alien franchise movies.

Honorable mention here goes to Dana Barrett from Ghostbusters, which is actually my favorite movie with Sigourney Weaver in it, and Gwen DiMarco from Galaxy Quest, which is probably Weaver’s most underrated role.  But Ripley is easily her most iconic and her best role, and certainly her best character.

willow06013.  Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

Yes, both of them; my blog post and I get to set the rules.  Truth be told I think I prefer Willow slightly to Buffy; the character has a more interesting arc over the course of the show (and the episode pictured in the picture here was at least a minor part of the evolution of that character arc) but they both belong together.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite television series of all time, basically, right up there with M*A*S*H, and I miss the hell out of it.  I’ve never been able to get into the comics or the books, both of which are still coming out, at least partially because I hated Angel so much toward the end and I refuse to admit that anyone from that show is still alive.  But it wouldn’t take much to get me to read more about Buffy or Willow.

Zoe4.  Zoe Washburne, FIREFLY

Do you know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed. You can look it up later.

Why not, stick with the Whedonverse for number four.  I love all of the characters in Firefly, but Zoe was the glue that held the rest of the cast together, and I wish to hell she’d gotten her own TV series somehow.  Or a movie.  Or anything, really.  Where she brings Wash back from the dead with the sheer power of her own awesomeness, because I’m still pissed off that Wash is dead.  If I ever meet Joss Whedon I’m going to hug him and then punch him in the mouth and tell him that was for Wash, and then while his security guys are hauling me away and beating me up I’m going to try and kick him and tell him that was for Tara from Buffy.

Joss is a dick, is what I’m getting at here, but Zoe was an amazing character and I wish I’d had more chances to see more of her.

INVIRONMAN_29_CoverWoM5.  Pepper Potts, IRON MAN

Little-known fact: for most of the existence of the character, Pepper Potts and Tony Stark were not  an item.  In fact, over the 40-some-odd years since the character debuted (created by Stan Lee, by the way) she has spent almost all but the last seven or eight married to someone else.  Pepper was always interesting to me because she was immune to Tony’s bullshit; the womanizing aspects of the Stark character just bounced off of her.  Pepper was what kept Stark Industries moving when Tony was either off fighting bad guys or just being a drunken idiot, and when she finally got her own armor for a little while (I’m actually not sure if the Rescue persona is still a thing; I don’t think it really is) it felt like something the character had earned.  (Incidentally, random Iron Man note: they’re making a big deal about Thor becoming a woman and Captain America being a black guy; Iron Man has already been a woman and a black guy and he did both in the eighties.  So they’re making him an asshole instead.  Sigh.)

anzQONH6.  Monica Rambeau/Captain Marvel/Spectrum/Whatever (Marvel comics)

Monica Rambeau doesn’t get enough credit. Hell, Monica Rambeau can’t even keep a proper superhero name.  She’s been one of the umpteen Captains Marvel, she was… Photon, for a while, I think? and now she’s Spectrum.  Here’s what you need to know about her:  She has led the Avengers.  You know how they complain about there not being enough women and people of color in comic books and in comic book movies?  Monica Rambeau led the goddamn Avengers.  And not the cheap-ass West Coast or Great Lakes offshoot teams.  (I kid. I love the Whackos unreservedly.)  No, she was in charge of the honest-to-goodness Actual East Coast God Damn Avengers, and she should have had three movies by now.

Okay, choosing a panel from Nextwave was probably kinda disrespectful, but god I laughed like an asshole when I first read that comic.

VeGnt7.  Éowyn, THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

“I am no man.”

Understand something:  I have read The Lord of the Rings at least once a year since I was in second grade.  I have the inscription on the ring tattooed on my left leg.  I have bits of the book memorized.  And the one thing that the movies did not get to fuck up was Éowyn’s reveal in The Return of the King. I was terrified going in that they were going to give that scene to Arwen, since they’d made such a big deal of pumping up her role in the rest of the movies.  I would have burned down the goddamn theater.

Took down the Witch King.  By her damn self.  Badass.

Éowyn maybe should be higher on the list.

Arya_Stark_48.  Arya Stark, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

I’ve been rreeeaallll vocal about my unhappiness with the later A Song of Ice and Fire books, right? And I’m not happy with them.  Not at all.  ASoIaF has degenerated more severely than any other mega-series I can remember reading, and as a lifelong science fiction and fantasy fan I have read a lot of them.

Finding out what happens with Arya– and maybe, maybe Tyrion, although absolutely nothing remotely interesting happened with him in the last book– is one of the very few things still keeping me invested in this series.  It is entirely possible that when The Winds of Winter finally comes out in 2028 that I will just read the Arya chapters and then give the book to my wife.

Maisie Williams is pretty fucking awesome, too.

lyra_and_pantalaimon_by_febreizh-d2036249.  Lyra Silvertongue, HIS DARK MATERIALS

This is fan art, I think; I decided that since the His Dark materials movie series so seriously screwed up the books (unavoidable, unfortunately, if they wanted it to sell any tickets– and they still didn’t sell any tickets) I needed to find a picture of Lyra that wasn’t from the movie.  The interesting thing is I’m not sure how to talk about her other than to say that you need to read the Dark Materials books right now so that you can learn about Lyra and how awesome she is.  I love these books unreservedly; a snippet from the third one was actually read at my wedding, and I keep trying to come up with a way to make a good tattoo out of a compass, a knife, and a spyglass.

hermione_granger_2_by_gaietta25-d56vh6f10.  Hermione Granger, HARRY POTTER

Hermione was the best thing about the Harry Potter books.  Everyone knows that, right?

Okay, good.

Honorable Mentions:  Scarlett O’Hara (GONE WITH THE WIND), Katniss Everdeen (THE HUNGER GAMES,) Lady Polgara (THE BELGARIAD), She-Hulk (Marvel Comics), Barbara Gordon (DC Comics), Mara Jade Skywalker (STAR WARS), and no doubt any number of others I’m forgetting.

In case you’re wondering if my mood’s improved

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics7 Comments

Note to men:  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for how you act toward and around women.  Not the women.  Not the women’s fucking clothes.  You.

Fucking idiot asshole scumbags.

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Yes, this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

Chuck Wendig appears to have disabled “official” reblogging, so I’ll do it unofficially with an excerpt and a link:

I understand that as a man your initial response to women talking about misogyny, sexism, rape culture and sexual violence is to wave your hands in the air like a drowning man and cry, “Not all men! Not all men!” as if to signal yourself as someone who is not an entitled, presumptive fuck-whistle, but please believe me that interjecting yourself in that way confirms that you are. Because forcing yourself into safe spaces and unwelcome conversations makes you exactly that.

Thing is, it is all men.  We’ve all pulled some bullshit of some variety or another at some point in our lives, and we’re all enmeshed in the sickness of our society.  No fucker is innocent, and I include myself in that.  It’s all of us.  And it needs to fucking stop.

On math and feminism and societies

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Politics3 Comments

Feeling a little grab-baggish today.  First things first, watch this.  Shut up and do it, dammit, it’s Saturday and you can spare eight bloody minutes:

You didn’t watch it, did you?  Jerk.  Fine, I’ll sum up:  the fella in the video is a British physicist, and he demonstrates a couple of interesting properties of infinite series: first, that the sum of 1 -1 +1 -1 +1… out into infinity is actually one half.  Then, to further screw with our brains, he demonstrates that the sum of the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5… is negative one twelfth.  Which is completely absurd, but the demonstration he works through is elegant and relatively simple even for non-mathematicians (which, for the record, is a category I’m including myself in) so long as they have some recollection of how algebra works.

I came across this here, at Phil Plait’s awesome Bad Astronomy blog.  The article touched off a bit of a shitstorm in the comments and elsewhere on the Interwubs for what is probably a perfectly obvious reason; it doesn’t make a speck of logical sense.  The math concepts being applied are apparently actually useful in string theory.  The problem, of course, is that most of the people involved in the argument don’t have the faintest goddamn idea what they’re talking about– which, surely, is the first time something like that has ever happened on the Internet.  This makes the argument not terribly enlightening.

Me, I’m inclined to trust the experts– while I agree that neither answer makes a drop of intuitive sense, I’m also sympathetic to the counter-argument that infinity itself doesn’t actually make a drop of sense to our non-infinite brains and that therefore “this doesn’t make sense” isn’t actually a valid knock against the math.  In fact, if I’m being honest, I find that argument fascinating.(*)  The guy in the video also points out that you’re right that if you stop at any point along the sequence, yes, you’re going to get a certain number, either 1 or 0 in the first instance and something really big in the second– but that if you extend the series to infinity, a concept that doesn’t rightly fit in our brains, you get these wonderfully unexpected results.  It’s cool.  And he’s kind of adorable.  So go do what I said and watch the video, because I know you didn’t watch it the first time.

—————————-

Complete change of subject: I need a feminist, or at least someone with a bigger vocabulary than me, to ‘splain me something, and to do it out of the goodness of her or his heart, because I’m perfectly aware I can research this myself but I’d rather ask the Internet for some reason:  is there a specific term for a society that is patriarchal in practice but not by law, other than “de facto patriarchy”?  Like, a single term?  The example I’m thinking of is America, obviously, where there are no longer any laws preventing women from, say, high office, or corporate boards, or other offices of high power that are currently occupied either nearly exclusively or literally exclusively by men, but that nonetheless all or nearly all of those offices are occupied by men.

To phrase it differently, I’m looking for a term or set of terms that distinguishes what I’ll call for the sake of argument a “hard” patriarchy– where women are literally not allowed access to positions of power via specific religious or legally enforceable and punishable prohibitions, from a “soft” patriarchy where the barrier is culture and not law.  Note that in a practical sense the effects can be exactly the same, which is why “de facto” and “de jure” would work if they weren’t phrases and not individual terms.

And maybe also you can see why I’m not trying to stuff this into a Google search, too.  🙂  Anybody got anything for me?

——————————————

(*) We’re gonna leave my inconsistency re: theology there aside, although now that I’ve noticed it I may think about it harder later.

On teaching and money (and Miley and Sinead)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Politics, Teaching1 Comment

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I am– forgive me for knowing about this, much less bringing it up– kind of really enjoying the Sinead O’Connor/Miley Cyrus thing going on right now.  The first one was just interesting in an intellectual sort of “hey, this happened” kind of way; the second one interests me as a writer.  I knew Sinead O’Connor was kinda fucked up but I wasn’t aware she had a bitchy side and I certainly wasn’t aware that her bitchy side was awesome.  The second letter has this wonderful sort of “Ok, look, we can end this now, but here are my knives if you are foolish” sort of feel to it, as if O’Connor has absorbed Cyrus’ semiliterate trailer trash Twitter response to her initial letter, shrugged, and moved Miley to her mental “destroy” file.  The phrase “you have one last chance” doesn’t appear anywhere in the letter, but it should.  I really hope there’s a third.

I mean, Christ, the line “You could really do with educating yourself, that is if you’re not too busy getting your tits out to read” is art.

I voted to approve the contract, but I’m not terribly happy about it.  Oh, it’s not bad, as they go– we’re getting a small stipend this year basically just for the hell of it and we actually get our first real raise in seven years (two whole percent!) next year, that is assuming we don’t get placed in one of the two lowest evaluation categories.  More money is good.  I like money, even if 2% after having frozen salaries since 2007 is kind of bullshit.  It’s still better than the no-money we’ve been getting on the last several contracts.

The problem is that this round of negotiation really has driven home one important fact for me:  That two percent hike got eaten by inflation years ago.  We are never really getting a raise again, and by “we” in this case I basically mean all of Indiana’s teachers.  I get a yearly pay raise at my fucking minigolf job, people.  The way things used to work, we got yearly step increases until you hit sixteen years of experience and after that you’re depending on actual increases to the pay scale (ie, “raises”) for any further increase in salary.  What this meant is that if you stuck it out long enough eventually everybody made the same amount– sixteen years is a long time, granted, but it leveled you out sooner or later.

Now?  Anyone in my district who makes more money than me right now is going to make more than me forever, and anyone under me– particularly anyone unfortunate enough to have started in the last few years since even step increases became impossible– is going to make less than me forever.  There’s no merit pay of any kind that can increase salary– not that I even think that’s a good idea, mind you– and no bonuses for good performance.  There’s only the stick; you don’t get any raise of any kind if you end up in the lowest two evaluation categories, but it’s not like you get more money if you get a superior ranking.

It’s unfair in a way that I really, really don’t like.  Teaching is already a career with effectively no mobility– a teacher is a teacher is a teacher and while most districts do name team leaders and things like that (a job I’ve held myself on a few occasions) there is no actual salary increase attached to that.  As a teacher, I’ll never be anyone’s boss unless I move to administration– which isn’t teaching.  There’s literally no way to be promoted.  Which means that the fact that there are teachers in my district who not only make ten grand more than me but will make ten grand more than me forever really stick in my craw.  Similarly, I’m mentoring a first-year teacher this year; I make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than she does and I will make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than her forever, until she wises up and realizes that spending her entire life making $32,000 a year is untenable.  (She gets a raise to $34,000 in 2014-15; the poor schmucks stuck in the bottom two pay steps get a little bump.  But she’ll be stuck there forever.)  Once she realizes that she can make better money and have much less stress in her life doing something else, she’ll be gone, and she’ll be replaced by another 22-year-old making the same $34K that she did until she quit.

Note, also, that while teachers making more than base pay will be quitting a lot, or retiring, they will only be being replaced by teachers making base pay.  Which means that you travel far enough down the road– and I bet it won’t be more than seven or ten years– and something perilously close to all of us will be stuck at that base pay level.  Which people will put up with until they have kids, then they’ll move on to jobs where they’re actually treated like educated professionals, and kiss teaching in a public school district goodbye.

Which is a feature, and not a bug.  This is what they want, and this is what state law is written to do.

I fucking hate Indiana.

This one has some bad words in it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music, Politics15 Comments

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(First things first: if you need context on the picture, go here.  This post is gonna be sorta grab-baggy; it should make sense by the time I get to the end.)

Let’s start by griping about nonsense.  Y’all know the song OPP, right?  If you don’t we can’t be friends anymore.  One of hiphop’s classic anthems; it came out when I was a sophomore in high school and therefore I will have it memorized until I die.  The whole song is about infidelity, but because it doesn’t have any bad words in it and the writing is clever it got played at high school dances all the time.  Combine that with the call-and-response and what you end up with is hundreds of teenagers hollering about penises and pussies in public with none of the adults noticing what’s going on.  It’s wonderful.  It contains this verse:

As for the ladies, OPP means something gifted
The first two letters are the same but the last is something different
It’s the longest, loveliest, lean– I call it the leanest
It’s another five letter word rhymin’ with cleanest and meanest
I won’t get into that, I’ll do it…ah…sorta properly
I say the last P…hmmm…stands for property

It doesn’t stand for property.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from school when I encountered a picture-perfect example of why I bloody fucking hate terrestrial radio:  they played OPP, and they bleeped out cleanest and meanest.

They bleeped two words that rhyme with the actual name of a human body part that half of the human race has, in a song that is entirely about infidelity.

This makes sense on no levels at all, and makes me want to punch the shit out of everyone involved– like, “hit you until my hands break off at the wrists” level of pummeling.  I goddamn hate bleeped songs.  I feel like if you think as a corporate entity that you need to bleep part of a song you shouldn’t be playing it at all.  Ideas are more dangerous than words, you stupid dumbasses.  But this is a new level of stupid– even if I was willing to entertain the suggestion that the word “penis” needed to be sanitized from the airwaves, the suggestion that words that rhyme with penis should also be sanitized is so damn dumb that I’m literally in pain right now while I’m complaining about it.

Stop making me use italics, U93.  I fucking hate you.

New item!  I bring in the mail when I got home, and there was a flyer from our new wingnut Congresscritter in it.  Jackie Walorski is enough of a discredit to humanity that I’m not even terribly interested in describing why; she won her last election largely on the backs of 1) redistricting; 2) the incumbent deciding to run (successfully) for the Senate; and 3) disgusting, pathetic accusations of carpetbagging against her opponent, who grew up here (I went to high school with him) and then moved from the area to go fight in Iraq and start a veteran’s charity in DC.  It was literally true that he hadn’t lived in the area for several years, but his family still lived here and he spent the majority of his time gone on active duty and fighting in a foreign country.  Even if I wasn’t against her politics– and believe me, I am– I’d think she was scum for that.

Which made it interesting to me that most of the flyer– the bit that wasn’t a slanted short questionnaire– was all about trumpeting her bill extending whistleblower protections to sexual assault victims in the military.  Protecting rape victims isn’t generally something that Republicans are big on.  Crowing about having done so isn’t either.  Which leaves me to wonder if a) she’s trying to moderate herself a bit; b) she actually is more moderate than I’d thought; c) she’s just trying to look more moderate; or d) this is an interesting bit of microtargeting– since the flyer in question was addressed to my wife, and there wasn’t one in the mail for me.  Generally when we get these sorts of things (and they come frequently enough) there’s either one of them for each of us or it’s just addressed to the household and not to either of us specifically.  This one just had my wife’s name on it.

Hmmm.

Last but not least:  I just got into an interesting discussion on Facebook about Mike Krahulik’s latest bit of dumbassery.  (Be aware: if you don’t know who Mike Krahulik is, you probably ought not to read this part, as I don’t intend to provide a lot of context.)  The person who started the thread was saying that he was done with Penny Arcade on account of not being able to support Mike’s actions any longer, and while I agree with him that the man has gotten incredibly tiresome in a lot of ways I’m not able to pull the trigger on that just yet.  Which got me wondering about exactly what gets me to cut something I enjoyed out of my life on account of not agreeing with its behavior.  I can think of four examples:  Mel Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, and Chik-Fil-A.  In each of the four cases, I have previously really enjoyed their work (or their chicken; I hate Chik-Fil-A as a corporation but I will fight you if you denigrate their chicken.  We can hate them for their politics but let’s not get stupid here) and am no longer willing to support them in any way because of their beliefs and/or behaviors.  I kinda want to include Tom Cruise in here, too, but I was never really a fan of his so it’s not quite the same thing.

I guess the difference is hatred.  Mel Gibson hates everybody.  Card and Simmons and Chik-Fil-A are open in their hatred of gay people.  I don’t think Mike Krahulik hates anybody.  I just think he’s a sheltered geek with a short fuse, and spouting his mouth off about shit he knows nothing about frequently gets him in trouble– but I don’t think he hates anybody and I don’t think he’s trying to be an asshole most of the time.  My Facebook friend made a good point that once you’re past a certain age you either need to get better about things or own your own bullshit, and he’s right about that– but at the same time I’ve fucked up in my own personal feminism in who knows how many different ways, so I’m not always inclined to jump down the throat of somebody who seems to be trying to get better about sexuality and gender issues.  I’m just not sure how much more slack I’m willing to cut the guy if he’s not smart enough to figure out that “never talk about this shit extemporaneously, and have someone smarter than me read over my shoulder whenever I talk about it in print” is a sound policy.

Within minutes, a link to this article appears in my inbox.  For those of you too lazy to click, it’s about how Not Intending To Do That appears to be a magical fucking power that not only insulates the Unintender from owning the negative results of their actions but causes others to defend them as well.  It’s… right.  It also includes the word “kyriarchy,” which means something bad, which is sad, because it’s a fun-sounding word and I’d like opportunities to use it in public.

Thinking about this more: the bit of me that wants to defend Mike is related to the bit of me that refuses to give up on certain kids (I can’t honestly say all of them) in my classes who are for one reason or another generally assholes but seem saveable to me.  I think Mike’s saveable.  I might be wrong, and he’s a grown-ass man with a long, long cultural reach and not a fourteen-year-old, but I think that’s another part of the difference here as to why I’m not willing to lock the door on PA just yet.