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feminism

Room for the Life

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Room for the Life
Tour of Life

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The women’s lib movement (or movements, really) of the Seventies are a battlefield you could write several blogs about. Feminism was becoming impossible to ignore as a mainstream presence, with books like Robin Wright’s anthology Sisterhood is Powerful and Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class coming to light.. Whatever position one was going to take on gender, it would have to be a reaction to feminism in some form.

A couple entries ago we made it clear that Kate Bush is at the bare minimum not a conscious feminist. Her work is useful for women’s sexual liberation and art, but Bush’s beliefs are broadly conservative. I’ve gone on at length about Bush’s soft spot for men — she’s generally inclined to treat them well and make them paragons of beauty and virtue. Sometimes she’ll even do this at the expense of failing to call men out when they commit immoral acts, as we’ll see in “Babooshka.” Bush is a heterosexual woman, and one with an unusually positive view of men. One of the primary effects of this preference is that her songs predominantly feature conversations between men and women, often of a romantic or sexual nature (or both). It’s a terribly heteronormative dynamic, although one Bush will push against at times.

“Room for the Life” is that rare thing in Kate Bush’s early discography: a song presenting a dialogue between two women. You’d think this would be particularly refreshing, but there’s something odd about “Room for the Life”: nobody ever talks about it. That’s not to say there’s not a single person in the world who doesn’t enjoy the song — it’d be astonishing if in the four decades since The Kick Inside was released nobody had liked “Room for the Life.” But the song is hindered by the fact it’s not any good. It’s easily the worst track on The Kick Inside: ham-fisted, embarrassing, and just plain forgettable.

Musically, “Room for the Life” is a trainwreck. Its verse blends into the rest of The Kick Inside, offering little in the way of standing out, and the chorus does little to liven up the song, with its tepid use of beer bottles as an instrument only succeeding in making the track sound flaccid. The worst comes at the end of the chorus, with Bush chiming “mama woman aha!” obnoxiously. This culminates in the song’s outro, with Bush imitating… what is she doing here exactly? Percussionist Morris Pert’s boo-bams (a kind of bongos) bring a light world music flavor to it, amplified by Bush’s grating “OO-AH”s. It’s one of the most tasteless moments on an otherwise sophisticated record, and releasing a track like this instead of “Frightened Eyes” is a downright baffling move on Bush’s part.

In addition to its musical tastelessness, “Room for the Life” is out of touch. Bush has identified herself with male artists, admitting that a lack of interesting female songwriters was the reason (she cites Joni Mitchell, Billie Holliday, and Joan Armatrading as exceptions).…

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Embracing Intersubjectivity

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Prologue

A young woman is featured at a freethought conference and speaks on communicating atheism through blogging, then later on sexism within the atheist community. She has her say, makes some points (namely, that just because other female skeptics don’t recognize sexism within the skeptic community in their own lives and work, that said sexism might still exist), and afterwards basically goes on with her life. Later, she spends time at the bar in the hotel chatting and generally having a good time, and when at four in the morning she decides she needs some sleep, she finds herself alone in an elevator with a man who takes the opportunity to ask her to his hotel room for coffee.

(A word to the wise: an offer for coffee at four in the morning is rarely about a desire for caffeine.)

Later, the young woman records a vlog about her experiences at the conference, and as an aside relays this experience, ending with, “Guys, don’t do that.”

Hence Elevatorgate.

This is the story of how I became a feminist.

First, let’s clear the air

“Feminist” is the kind of terms that comes loaded with huge amounts of baggage, and it’s not my place here to define it or to throw up walls about who does or doesn’t get to claim the mantle of the term, or to apply that term to others. Virtually everyone in polite discourse agrees broadly with the idea that “women should be treated equally to men,” or “women should collect equal pay for equal work,” or “women should have strong role models in media,” so hopefully we can address issues slightly more sophisticated than those Gloria Steinem was fighting for in 1972 or so. (Hell, even the complementarians among right-wing American Christian evangelicals would broadly agree with the idea of legal equality between men and women; they’d just cover themselves with the fig leaf of “different roles” based largely on terrible ideas of biological essentialism and determinism.) We can start with the hoary old cliche of “the radical notion that women are people,” and move on from there, can’t we?

Also, I recognize and respect the opinion of those who claim that a man, particularly a white, cisgender, Western-educated man, can by definition not be a feminist, although I disagree. If your politics means that you consider me a feminist ally, rather than a true feminist, I’ll accept that label instead. While this is the space in which I’m telling a story about myself, I fully believe that stories such as mine should be decentered, and offer it here for what I presume to be a largely male, cisgender, white audience.

Second, let’s clarify some terminology.

I’m fully aware that there’s quite a bit of separation among the various subgroups I’ll be discussing here, and that to some degree I’m going to pretend that the atheist, skeptic, freethought, and rationalist movements are one and the same. This is to some degree an artifact of the way the different groups are incredibly porous to one another, and the lines between them are fuzzy at best.…

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Furiosa and Furiosa

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Well, it’s basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses… but yes, it’s amazingly well done.  Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques – hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc – but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is.  He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling.  The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity.  The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques.  The result is jaw-droppingly good.  It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy.  Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make “boom” noises.

I’m not going to go into much political detail.  I’ve junked most of what I’ve been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest.  It’s really good… though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far.  (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn’t quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it?  Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don’t think Maher gets it exactly right.  The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia.  In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies.  But I think the film is less a defence of ‘our’ modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins.  The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc.  Plus the Mad Max movies’ usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture.  It’s like the film is saying “see how awful we’d become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis… it’s buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out… the seeds are already there, around us”.  This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It’s still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it’s a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness.  Firstly, this is crap.  Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways. …

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“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.…

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The Worm That Cloned

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‘Airlock’ is quite a find, as it turns out.  There are some very interesting, unexpected things in it.  Not least, an honest-to-goodness flashback sequence (in dumbshow apart from a voiceover), filmed in first-person POV!  This is the sort of stylistic flourish that old-fashioned Who usually didn’t bother with.  It ain’t Kubrick, but it’s unusually ambitious by the standards of the time.  Also, Stephanie Bidmead – a Shakespearean actress – plays Maaga in a far more physically expressive way than the audios might lead one to believe.  She delivers great swathes of her dialogue – which is ostensibly directed to her fellow Drahvins – direct to the audience, staring into the camera.  Nothing like that was seen (apart from Tom’s occasional bouts) until Morgus… and even that was an accident.

Of course, charming and fascinating as it is, the story remains hopeless.  The Drahvins are a near-perfect illustration of mainstream 60s attitudes towards ‘the woman question’.  Contemptuous, we-know-better-dear, patronising smugness at the sheer unworkable, extremist silliness of ‘women’s lib’.

The race of evil alien feminists are marked out from other baddies of the era by their towering stupidity and shambolic incompetence.  Despite being ostensibly emotionless clones (drained of all proper female responses) they are hysterical and irrational.  They even have a rubbish old ship that (natch) they don’t know how to fix.  (Tsch, lady drivers!)  Their solution is to find the nearest males (be they Time Lords or pompous alien wallruses) and, in their ditzy confusion, attack them while also petulantly demanding their help.  In return, the males must simply consent to be robbed and abandoned.  Really, this would be the favourite Doctor Who episode of any MRA tosspot (consult this acute and hilarious site if you don’t know what an MRA is).

There is a strain of cut-price Brave New World-style sneering at ‘Test Tube Modernity’.  The flailing Drahvin gynococracy or matriarchy (note: their bosstrix is called Maaaaaaaaga) is steeped in the ostensible horrors of cloning.  This meshes directly with the terrified emasculation fantasy lurking beneath the surface of the story’s conception of female independence.  They produce a few males (coyly referring to “as many as we need”… ahem) and then cull the rest like excess badgers.

I’m actually surprised Steven Moffat doesn’t like this more.…

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Vixens and Saxons

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Some disjointed thoughts about ‘The Time Warrior’.  Is it sexist?  Is Linx really a girl?  And what is the correct Socialist attitude to Irongron?

1.  Men Are From Earth, Sontarans Are From… umm… Saturn?  No, couldn’t be.  ‘Saturn’ is an anagram of ‘Rutans’ for a start…

‘The Time Warrior’ is the chronicle of a failed romance.  Irongron and Linx.  The odd couple.

Made for each other.

The initial attraction. The slowly dawning mutual realisation that they have much in common. They take turns helping each other out. Terms of affection pass between them: Linx is Irongron’s “brother” and will be his “general”. Physical intimacy follows, as Linx allows Irongron to see his face then almost takes his arm as they leave to deal with the android knight. Irongron gives Linx a familiar nickname (albeit a rather unkind one).  Then the inevitable falling out. Linx feels disappointed. He questions Irongron’s commitment. They squabble. There is a physical fight. Violence always changes a relationship irrevocably. An uneasy aftermath. Awkward attempts to rescue and preserve the friendship. “Thanks good toadface… er, good Linx”. Irongron helps the bound Linx in an act of residual solidarity. They stand face to face, close together, Irongron fascinated by Linx’s visage.  “I was struck down from behind,” says Linx, not wanting to lose face in front of Irongron, but also sounding almost as though he is pleading for sympathy and solidarity. Then there is the final drunken argument.  Linx is ready to move on but Irongron doesn’t like the idea of being dumped.  He does the dumping, he doesn’t have it done tohim.  “For the last time Linx,” says he, “let there be no more talk of leaving!”  But Linx makes it clear, his spaceboots were made for walking and that’s just what he’ll do.   Then, of course, the ultimate break.  Linx was going to leave and destroy all Irongron’s stuff in a final act of scorn.  The drunken, spurned Irongron tries one last time to delay the dumping.  He gets physical again.  Linx puts him down.

They were made for each other, but that itself is what makes their union impossible.  That and the inevitable social stigma against same-sex and different-species relationships (talk about a double standard!). 

Am I actually arguing for a gay subtext?  No, perhaps not.  But there is something unusually… well, ‘relationshippy’ about the way Irongron and Linx come together and then fall apart.  Linx even tries to get rid of Irongron’s friends, or at least to push them out of an inner circle which increasingly includes just him and Irongron.  Irongron, meanwhile, does a lot of tipsy complaining to his best mate about how unreasonable Linx is.

“My Sontaran doesn’t understand me.”

2.  Sexism and the Citadel

I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘The Time Warrior’ is actually fairly good on the issues of feminism and sexism (everything being very relative, of course).…

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The Real McCoy and the Forgotten (Sacrificial) Lambs

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I continue to round up my Timelash II stuff with these bits ‘n’ bobs about the McCoy years.  There will eventually be separate posts on some of the ‘big hitters’ left out below.

Paradise Towers

Very Whoish ideas. Lots of clever use of language, from the street names to the slang which incorporates degenerated formal rules, to the Caretaker lingo full of subsections and codes, etc. 

It suffers from ‘Mysterious Planet’ disease in that the production looks good but nothing looks right.

Mel’s apparently monomaniacal fixation upon the swimming pool is decidedly odd.  But, if you approach this as children’s television (which is clearly what it thinks it is) then you can enjoy it as a surprisingly sophisticated story about social entropy.

Brings to mind Le Corbusier and his notion of houses as “machines for living in”… which always had a tinge of the authoritarian about it, amidst all the utopianism of early 20th century modernism (which also always had a hidden inner core of mysticism beneath all the pseudo-rational stright lines, etc). The insistence upon a buried notion of virtue (you had to be a certain kind of healthy, high-minded, thin, modern-minded, puritanical person to live in a gleaming white box with glass walls) leads to a kind of disillusion, a bit like the contempt felt by Kroagnon. The modernists (Mies, for example) got chased out by their shadowy reflections in the utopian, mystical, ‘modern’, puritanical Nazi party and ended up creating gigantic monuments to corporate capitalism in Chicago. The cleaners seem to represent the intersection of these ideas, rounding up the “human garbage”, the unwanted elements, the uncontrolled human detritus that ruins the idealistic/totalitarian perfection embodied in the architecture.

I don’t like the ending, with all the antagonistic social groups suddenly realising they don’t hate each other after all and making friends.  Even the Daily Maily Rezzies turn out to be mostly nice, with only two of them being murdering cannibals.

Delta and the Bannermen

Dispiriting. So ill judged, so clashing that you can’t even laugh at it.

Loud, multi-coloured, sequin-covered, self-consciously zany, folksy and naff… yet there is something melancholic, even quietly apocalyptic about watching this.

You are watching Doctor Who die. The show that gave us ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ is dying. In a puddle of Diet Coke. It’s like watching George Orwell being kicked to death by Mr Blobby and the Krankies.

This taste malfunction carries over into the heart of the story itself. It’s a story about genocidal racism… set in a holiday camp and starring light entertainers. It’s like the Eichmann trial being held in Toys R Us. It’s like a bright green water pistol filled with orphans’ tears. It’s like being murdered by being force-fed party balloons.

My god, it hurts.

The Happiness Patrol

I just love this story. Last time I put it on, I spent the whole 75 minutes giggling, grinning, cheering and clapping like a loon.

This is a liberal attack on Thatcherism as a psycho-cultural style… but it also notices that Thatcherism’s rhetoric about personal liberty was pure hypocrisy.…

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