Three Day Weekends Are a Cruel Juest

[itsallovernow]

Whenever we get a three day weekend, it just makes the following week all that more exhausting. I'm just sayin'. For those of you who didn't get it off, take some comfort in that. (Not too much, because I'd be lying if I didn't say I loved me some three day weekend, even if it was full of obligation).

I continue to be allergic to the furnace, and when I called Sh. to tell her this and she asked why I didn't just get it cleaned, or vaccuum it out (neither of which makes sense to me logistically, although I realize that both or either are possible), I was forced to admit that the furnace and the tiny room/closet that houses it reminds me too much of the boiler room in The Shining and I feel better just leaving well enough alone. She loves me, did not laugh, and agreed that the closet (she lived her too, before I did) has bad juju. But I should still clean the furnace.

While I'm still two eps behind (technically three, but I saw 1x04 and not 1x03), I'm still so excited to see people talking about and loving The Sarah Connor Chronicles. A show with women! About women! And robots! And the future! And the apocolypse! What's not to love?

It reminded me, as many things do, of how important it is to have female role models. This thing happens when we talk about the way that we as fandom can disenfranchise women, the way we both expect more of female characters and also condemn them. The double standard we lay on them of having to fullfill all our own desires, and simultaneously never being good enough for our beloved, flawed male characters. It makes me angry, and yet I get it. Hell, I do it. I am not a huge fan of Sam Carter as written, but I'll stand behind Sam as a character despite the flaws because she is a woman in a man's world and she mostly rocks it. (Plus, truthfully? I find Jack and Daniel so hard to take that Sam tends to shine in comparison. It's just that I'm not a huge fan of blondes:) Or the military:)

I get a little angry when I put forth my "if there are no women" in the story hypothesis and get the "it's about the story not the gender" argument in return because the truth is that we as a society constantly strip women from the story. We as storytellers strip women from the story, and as viewers and readers, when we accept that, we're complicit. We allow mothers to be absent, lovers to only exist in context with the men in their lives, women to exist at the edges of the story and not at the heart.

I have this student, 16 or so, bright, funny and lacking in sort of interest in pushing herself forward. If there's no guarantee that she'll succeed, she doesn't even bother trying. And you know, it's not even a contest for her, not even a dilemma, not even... she doesn't even think about it? Language class too hard? Drop it. Science class too much work, drop it and get the easy A in summer school. And I finally lost it, told her that being afraid to fail, never pushing yourself was never, evern going to serve her well. She needs to see women out there, girls out there, who struggle and risk and succeed. She needs something or someone with a hand on her back and a boot to her ass telling her to have a little fucking faith in herself, to not accept the easy road, to not be proud of it.

We tell these stories, and we, in fandom, celebrate these stories of women, but we also deny them in equal measure everytime we write them out of the narrative. Everytime we say that it shouldn't be about gender, it should be about story because your story is tied intimately to who you are, the twists and turns of your DNA as much as your heart and mind.

I realize I'm not making a logical arguement connecting these things, but I... mostly I'm just thinking in my head that the "genderless" arguement doesn't work for me.

I've got other things to say about why it's disingenuous (this is not the word I mean. Well it is, but not in the context in which it's coming across. Maybe "fair" is what I mean. cofax7 called me on the word, and C is many fabulous things and never, ever disingenuous) to condemn fandom for its interest in sex and sexually driven stories, but that's a post for another day. We follow our biological imperitive, all the way down to our stories, and fic is largely about getting off - for some it's the emotional orgasm of plot or characterization or more time spent with those characters that make us swoony, but for the rest of us it's the actual getting off, the physical release, the breathlessness of fucking that happens in combination with a certain type of vulnerability. We know these characters, their wants and desires, we inhabit them in our heads and when they get some, in a way, we're getting some - and it's... easy. It's safe. It's satisfying. It's always fucking gratifying. And how often can you say that about real life sex?

ETA: It isn't that I don't get the desire to tell a story that is "story" driven, that's ultimate satisfaction is in the care and weave and weft of the characters and their journey. Nor do I think that's any less of an imperitive to writers in fandom, nor should it be. It's more that... the questions of WHY sex is so prevalent in fic seems to me fairly obvious, and not something we should be ashamed of. I love a good story. And I love a good story with good sex. And I don't read romance novels anymore because I'm rarely interested in the story of a romance unless it's got an extra... something that intrigues me (and honestly, I'm usually just turned off by the tropes, but the characters and their genres, and this... tonality that the women characters have even in newer books that makes them come across as... softer and I don't know, weaker, somehow than I want them to be. I'm actually kind of happy that "erotica" is now becoming more mainstream (although some of that still takes the same old silly tropes but uses "cock" instead of member, but I'd still rather read about a cock, I guess:) I guess I just want to do a little championing of the fucking in our fic. Which shouldn't be in opposition to "gen" fic. But should rest happily side by side, complementing it:) (I'm usually happy for the gratuitous sex scene, I must say. I don't understand readers who skim the sex scenes. I should, and I don't condemn them, but I just don't understand it.) However, as I do think that fic largely serves a different purpose for the reader (if not always for the writer) than regular books do, I do realize it's totally a case of YMMV and reading fic for what you want to get out if. Again, it's kind of like sex. You go into it saying, " I want to read X, Y, and Z", and when you get those things, you're generally pretty satisfied, and sometimes when LMNOP gets thrown in to, it's like your birthday and Christmas and the Feast of St. Vigius all rolled up into one:)

I get story porn. I get characterization porn. I get plot porn and casefile porn and emo porn. And mostly, really, really get porn porn:) (Also, please keep in mind the narrow, shallow pool of what and where I read - my primary fandoms either had stellar authors, sex in canon, or intensive recs list that kept me away from most of the crap. I know for a fact that art and sex can exist together, and maybe me being spoiled is what's got me defending fandoms interest in sex writing. And again, I'm not defending it against gen. I'm all for Gen. Just giving it a little of it's own.)

Comments

[raithen.livejournal.com]

ok, it's too late for me to say more than GO YOU! For not letting women take the easy way out, and for doing the heavy lifting with more than one woman you touch in your tutoring.

[cofax7]

Placeholder here to ponder the use of "disingenuous" without getting my back up. (Since I assume I'm one of the folks doing that challenging.)

I do tend to agree with the rest of your post, though. *g*

[life-on-queen.livejournal.com]

It's also a reaction to the sexually immature or sexually neutered narratives that most genre (at least in the past) put forward - sex fic, that is. Because, really, what's more natural when faced with characters that fancy each other silly than to put them in bed together. If most interpersonal encounters in genre storytelling weren't so entirely contrived to keep characters apart, people would be less interested in seeing people shag.

As for stripping women out of the narrative, word to all of that. As I get older, I'm simply not prepared to work as hard as I did as a kid to find something redeeming in stories where the characters I identify with are marginalized or absent - hence my entirely diffident response to Stargate and SPN.

Also since gender (or represntations of gender) are fundamental to character and character is fundamental to story, any argument about narrative that starts "it's not about gender, it's about story" is automatically bollocks IMO. Even something like The Assassination of Jesse James - with three whole female speaking roles and less than 50 lines of dialogue (counting grief-striken wails) between them in a three-hour movie says something about gender (although more about the people who made the film).

[hossgal.livejournal.com]

I very much agree with you where (I think) you say that the issue is complex and that you don't want to be putting down gen. (And that even as you don't prefer gen, that has nothing to do with your regard for people who prirmarily write gen.)

(And that's actually a bit more generous than I can be towards 'ship fic in the aggregate, double good for you.)

But.

Everytime we say that it shouldn't be about gender, it should be about story because your story is tied intimately to who you are, the twists and turns of your DNA as much as your heart and mind.

For me, my gender is not the most significant or basic thing about me. For me, my gender (and who I sleep with, or that I'm sleepign with anyone) is far less intimate to me, than other things.

So part of the whole gen/not gen divide, for me, is looking for stories that reflect what I think is important, and (to a certain extent) what I value.

Another part is that there is so. damn. much. sex in the stories - or in my circle/my fandoms. While yes, it is a part of many adult's lives, imo, fangirlsnboys write about sex and don't write about solving mysteries, flying space fighters, or fighting demons. In that sense, gen is in opposition to 'ship fic, because while sex & other stuff can go together, in my experience, the other stuff generally ends up getting short shrift.

So. Any way, that's my take on it.

- hg

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

Much applause for everything you've said about female characters and role models. I was 20 years old before I met a flesh-and-blood female role model (in the sense that this was the first woman I'd ever met who was doing the kind of thing with her life that I wanted to do with mine; most of the other women I knew up to that point--however much I admired many of them--were housewives and public school teachers). Up to that point, all of my role models were fictional--and I wonder if this may be the main reason I cling so hard to female characters even still.

I won't tell anyone that she shouldn't prefer stories about male characters, or simply "story" regardless of gender, but I would encourage every woman who does to at least give some consideration to why that is.

And clearly I need to watch TSCC!!! I hear nothing but good things, and the kind of good things that most push my narrative buttons. My problem is I never saw the Terminator films in the first place, so I was behind from the outset and I keep getting further behind every week. I think I need to make catching up a priority, though!

[vee-fic.livejournal.com]

we as a society constantly strip women from the story

Concur. If "it's not about the gender," then why are women so absent? If stories are written with no regard to biological sex, then why are all the stories still about men?

I'm curious about your yoking that thought to your defense of sex in fiction, however. (Unless you mean to create a backhanded point about how particular flavors of slash also make women absent the same way that plot stories can.) If the only way women can get into a story is via her body as a sex object, I say no thank you.

And anyway, I can only assume we read for different reasons, or with totally different protocols. Because I usually find sex stories (het or slash) boring, the moreso the more of them I read in a row. I could tolerate it more, when it was more commonly pairing + action in a single story; but pairing by itself, even pairings I endorse, is thunderingly predictable and dull to me.

[fourteenlines.livejournal.com]

I'm with you all the way on women in fiction. If there isn't a woman I can love, I'm just not interested. When I did that fandom census thing, it turned out that something like 90% of all my stories were written from a female POV, and the other 10% only existed because of John Crichton. *g*

(I use my GO WOMEN GO! icon just for you.)

[belledewinter.livejournal.com]

I agree with what you said.

We can't strip women out of the story they're in - they have to be tough and strong and wonderful and not stop being women. We need them as female role models, to know that we can do absolutely anything, even if they are flawed (because, who isn't?). Gender should not be attached to a series of traits that can automatically stereotype a character as 'the girl', but you can't look at a character and completely ignore if they are male or female (fine, in some sci-fi cases they are neither, but - you know).

Of course gender matters. It's not all we are, of course, just a gender. But why does it have to be put out of the equation if it's an important part to who we are? Also - romance fic is so popular because most of the time it's 'the part we are not getting' in those shows, and we want it. Maybe it's even the only element we lack to make the story perfect.

And I probably didn't make much sense. XD

[(Anonymous)]

(I'm usually happy for the gratuitous sex scene, I must say. I don't understand readers who skim the sex scenes. I should, and I don't condemn them, but I just don't understand it.)

Because I find most sex scenes about as interesting as reading about/watching someone using the toilet to relieve themselves. I really don't want a detailed description of a character's bowel movements even if it is part of the biological process, happens regularly (we hope), and provides a physical release.

Hope that helps in understanding.

[raksha38.livejournal.com]

Hi, you don't know me. I ended up here to read your fics, then go off and tell other people how awesome they are and how they should go read them. Then I found we both had pretty much matching takes on SG-1, so I've lurked a bit since then :)

But with this post, I'm compelled to comment. YES to everything you said! Oh my Gods, I am pissed at fandom right now. It's just fucking ridiculous. I've ranted about this at length on tielan's LJ recently.

Also:
I find Jack and Daniel so hard to take that Sam tends to shine in comparison.

You should know that I have tears of joy streaming down my face right now. Not only have I found someone who loves Cam and Vala, but you don't like Jack and Daniel! I thought I was alone! So very, very alone. Gods, I hate those guys.

[ceedeeandco.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. On the one hand, I agree with you completely about the usefulness and importance of role models for girls and young women, in both real life and the media. I also agree with you that (most) stories lacking any female characters are annoying and absurd. (I read a nonfiction history book a while back, published in... let me check... 1997, which really got to me on that level. Sure, guy, maybe the limited roles of women make them largely irrelevant to your thesis, but they were still there, and at the very least you might remember you're writing about men with wives who got arrested two days after they did. Three women mentioned in the entire index, and two of them because he was quoting from their contemporary accounts. Sheesh.) Uhhh... where was I?

Oh, right. I agree with you about all of that. However, it really gets my back up whenever anyone, anywhere starts making assertions about gender and its importance to identity or personality. My gender is not all that important a part of my personality. It's really, really not.

I would rather read about or watch a male character who I have something else in common with than a female character who I don't, because gender is very, very, very low in my hierarchy of significant commonalities. I just don't want that character to be living in some sort of weird men-only alternate universe.

(Note, this is Cee speaking. Dee, if she ever actually used the journal, would agree with you 100%, with the exception of the sex. Speaking of which, I haven't addressed that, but I'm running low on time, so never mind.)

Addressing the feminism stuff more than the pr0n stuff

[boosette.livejournal.com]

I grew up on the X-Files (Scully and Reyes are way cooler than Mulder and Doggett), I grew up on Inspector Gadget and Alegra's Window and Eureka's Castle. I grew up on The Secret World of Alex Mac and I Love Lucy (which I will defend to the death as a feminist work) and Dear America and American Girl and A Little Princess and Mathilda and the Saddleclub and the Thoroughbred books and The Witch of Blackbird Pond and the Cimorene books and Tamora Pierce and Dragonriders of Pern and lots and lots of documentaries (that brought in piles and piles of female experts. And Shark Week. I idolized the women who got in those cages.).

(I somehow managed to miss them as a kid, but I'm tearing through Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula LeGuin right now. As an adult I've fallen in love with Dead Like Me and Farscape and SG1 and Firefly and Avatar: the Last Airbender. And I fell in love with George and Aeryn and Chiana and Zhaan and Sam and Janet and Zoe, Kaylee, Inara and River and Katara and Toph and and and -- )

Times when the Bible was the only reading material around? I skipped straight back to Ruth and Esther. I never got why people disdained Mary Magdalene. (I grew up in a pretty very Christian household and church promised the Bible being the only book available.)

I guess I was also supremely lucky to have parents who told me I could be anything I wanted to be - so of course I choose to charge into the middle of one of the Old Boys' Clubs*. My parents - my whole family - expected me to be smart, to talk back, to ask Why? (Unless I was doing the why why why thing for the express purpose of annoying them but that's another story for another day) I never learned how to sit demurely in class or withhold my opinion or generally be ladylike - I still won't sit with my legs crossed in most circumstances. People have told me since freshman year of high school that I "Am Intimidating To Boys". (I joke about giving off anti-boy pheromones.)


I guess what I'm trying to say ultimately is that it just never occurred to me that girls and women shouldn't be the primary protagonists, narrators, heros. Stories about boys bored me - I didn't want to read or watch boys kicking butt - I wanted to read about girls kicking butt. (One of the reasons I really didn't like HP at all -- I always thought it would have been more interesting if it had been Hermione's story instead of Harry's.)

I still want to read about girls and women kicking butt -- it shows more in my original fiction than in my fanfiction. Original fic - the first character I write in any given 'verse has consistently always been a woman or a girl. She usually remains my primary protagonist throughout the story; trios are 2XX:1XY, quartets usually 2XX:2XY or 3XX:1XY. In my fantasy/Not Earth 'verses, I try my very hardest to show women really and truly being equal with men. My sole On Earth 'verse is about feminist issues and girls growing up in a sexist, oppressive fundamentalist Christian environment (which was present in my life early on - not at home, but from the schools I went to).


So when I break down the stories I've written in fandom, I am Really Weirded Out to find that I'm writing mostly the guys. I think, perhaps, that part of the reason is that I do not want to fail the women I have come to love by writing them badly -- I personally have much less to lose by writing a mediocre Jack O'Neill than I do by writing a mediocre Sam Carter. I do know with certainty that the way I gravitate to the guys in fandom is something I'm uncomfortable with as a writer and is also something I'd like to change about myself.

Anyway. /longwinded. (Here from metafandom, btw.)


*(Homeland security, for anyone interested, and I've just seen one of my first instances of sexism in The Real World and it stings, even though it's not directed against me. Oh good god what am I getting myself into?)