Escaping the Trunk

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged very much recently is that I’ve been so damn busy. I went away for a while to a lake up north, where I worked on the story in this subject heading as well as a couple of others (I even did some foresighting work, if you can believe that). The good news is that all of the stories I was working on were requests from other people — this one came from Rudy Rucker. In his words on the story, Rudy called it “a profound and richly felt piece so closely rooted in reality that it barely feels like SF,” and “an important story-essay on women’s rights.”

This story actually came about as a consequence of my involvement in the Strategic Foresight & Innovation program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Initially, I wrote a fictional essay about the fall of Shenzhen from a systems theory perspective, invoking Donella Meadows and Jamshid Gharajedaghi and Clayton Christensen. It was an interesting exercise, one that I delayed starting for too long because I was stymied and had been working on my novel re-writes. I was in desperate need to write some short fiction, so (as I have done before) I turned in some instead of turning in a straight paper.

The story linked above has been cut significantly from that first essay, and a new subjectivity has taken the POV position within the story because the footnotes and bibliography and conceptual framing for systems theory has been removed. It took me a long time to re-frame the story appropriately, but I finally settled on a woman in the Quiverfull movement. Quiver-minded people follow Psalm 127:3-5:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

I felt that a Quiver-minded woman would be uniquely positioned to speak to China’s only child policy, because while she eschewed any form of birth control, the women of China are legally obligated to embrace it. I’ve always been fascinated by reproductive policy, and I thought it would be interesting to bring this dichotomy into focus. I also knew it would mean delving into two worlds that I knew very little about: the factories of Shenzhen, and the farms and households of Quiver-minded families.

Conditions in both environments can be terrible.

The reasons for this should be obvious. In the worst of both cases, rigid patriarchy oppresses women who live almost barrack-style, endlessly performing the same tasks during their sixteen-hour days for very little reward and with little opportunity for open communication or self-expression. I recommend reading No Longer Quivering for insights into the consequences of the Quiverfull lifestyle, and this Fortune City post about working conditions in Shenzhen. (Or you could just read Cory’s latest, For the Win.)

This isn’t to say that I’m some sort of moral authority on either subject. I’m typing this on a Mac, which means I’m a consumer of Foxconn products, products made in factories where conditions are so awful that suicide is a regular occurrence among employees. I also don’t think that the entirety of the Quiverfull movement needs to die. Mary Pride, the author who in many ways began the movement, has since spoken out against Biblical patriarchy. Some might see this as a reversal, but to me it’s a more nuanced understanding of one’s own opinion and its consequences. I felt that I hadn’t really nailed the voice of this story until I read Pride’s post.

I also think that there are a surprising number of connections between the Quiverfull lifestyle and the DIY maker/crafter one espoused at BoingBoing and elsewhere online by avowed atheists. Having a lot of children (some Quiverfull families can have more than twenty) means learning how to stretch a dollar (that’s putting it mildly) and learning how to make consumables as cheaply as possible. In particular, I was fascinated by the women of the West family, who have turned their DIY expertise into a profitable video series for the Christian market. (Their blog is great, too. Warning: music.) Here’s a taste:

This isn’t a lifestyle that I can see myself living, but it is one that I can respect, and it’s part of how I found my way into the story. Personally, I find the idea of life without birth control horrifying, in a screamingly awful “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” kind of way. But part of being pro-choice is believing in the sanctity of the choice. Our bodies are ours to do with as we will. Anything less is slavery. And slavery takes more forms than we know.

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The other day, my husband and I caught a trailer for The Expendables, which is the cinematic result of a mad scientist’s attempt to mix the mitochondrial DNA of every American action star from the 1980’s into a sweaty, tattooed, bulging-veined chimera. We first saw this trailer during Kick-Ass, and my comment at the time (aside from my ceaseless laughter, which I think unnerved a few of my fellow theatre-goers) was: “Wow! It’s like the ’80’s mated!” As usual, my husband had a more measured reaction: “No action movie can claim to be complete unless it has Sygourney Weaver.”

Which got me wondering: if someone made a movie like The Expendables with a cast of female action stars, what would it look like?
Read the rest of this entry »

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I saw Splice last night, and I’m glad I did. It’s not as shattering as District 9 (last summer’s surprise SF hit), but it is genuinely horrific without being visually explicit. It makes a lot of reference to the Frankenstein story, but it’s actually positioned somewhere on the Ira Levin/David Cronenberg side of the horror continuum. The most terrifying things happen offscreen, and but the violence you do see is both quick and intimate, and the creature effects are juicy. Despite some glossed-over science, it’s still a lot smarter than most of the dreck that bobs up in theatres and, as Peter remarked when we left the show, “At least it portrayed scientists as capable of meaningful relationships.”

The trailer would have you believe that Splice is a straight-up monster movie, an updated Universal feature from the days of Karloff and Chaney. It’s not. It’s one of those rare movies that centres on an intelligent but deeply troubled woman, and the consequences her obsession and lack of moral compass. We see stories like this all the time involving men, so it’s nice to see this one told about a woman. Women form the core of the story; in a reversal of traditional horror film conventions, the men are just there to get fucked and splattered when the plot calls for it. That doesn’t mean that the women do everything right all the time and the men don’t (far from it), but truly multi-dimensional characters have flaws and make mistakes. Main characters don’t have to be heroes. They just have to hold your attention.

In short, go see it, even if you’ve been waffling. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. I was.

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You might not know this about me, but I went to prom with another girl. She wasn’t my girlfriend. We weren’t dating. I just wanted someone to go with me, and due to pure social fuckery and indecisive bullshit on my part, none of the males in my romantic life were really available (nor was I available for them).* She agreed to go after I blurted out an invite, and we actually had a good time. We ate a nice dinner together, danced to utterly pedestrian music at absurd volume, and sacked out in her bed that night. If we had only been in love, it would have been a perfect date.

At no point did anyone tell me this wasn’t allowed. Not her parents. Not mine. Not my ASB rep. In fact, I don’t even recall wondering whether it was allowed or not. The concept of “allowed” never entered my mind. Maybe that was because my high school had already make it clear that they took all sorts. Or maybe I just honestly never expected it to be an issue, and amid finals and hormones and the afore-mentioned social disasters going on in my eighteen-year-old life, it got lost in the shuffle.

That’s not the case in Mississippi, where Constance McMillen’s high school shut down prom rather than allowing the openly lesbian student to attend with her girlfriend. When sued by the ACLU, the school re-opened prom, but parents of the school’s other students organized a private party, and Constance’s “official” prom was only attended by seven people.

This isn’t just hate, it’s spite. It’s petty spite. It’s ignorant petty spite. It’s PIG-ignorant petty spite. I could throw out more adjectives, but there’s one other P-word that describes what went on. Privilege. These (pig-ignorant, petty, spiteful, hateful, moronic, dastardly) townsfolk were privileged enough that they knew they could get away with this. That’s what privilege does: it shapes who you are and what you do, by (and this is the most important part) creating your possibilities for you.

I was privileged enough to have a lot of possibilities open for me. My prom was nine years ago. I went with another girl. It’s strange, and very sad, to think that something that was a foregone conclusion for me then could be such a problem for another young woman now.

*Story for another time.

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BB Offworld has a great essay on why there should be more female leads in games:

Ultimately, though, I need games to have a few more girls in them because it’s just downright *weird* that they don’t. Girls are pretty much an epidemic. We get everywhere. We do all kinds of stuff. There really are an awful lot of us around. That we still run out of entries for the Great Gaming Leading Lady Pantheon before we run out of fingers – Samus, Lara, Jade, Faith, Nariko, April, Yuna, the chick from Urban Chaos… – is just plain odd…

One of the great things about ‘geek’ is that it’s a gender neutral term. The price of entry is knowledge and enthusiasm, and anyone who can pay is welcome – regardless of sex, age, race, sexuality, religion, political affiliation or haircut. It’s one of the things I love most about this industry, and one of the things that frustrates me most about the products that represent it. We’re a diverse, welcoming and non-judgmental bunch, in my experience, but our games make us look like an outreach programme for the Ayran Nation.

And if that weren’t enough for you, try this vid, which asks why more women aren’t interested in blockbuster console titles:

So, here’s what would be cool: A Grand Theft Auto game with a female lead. One where she’s not a hooker, stripper, or waitress. Can she still be a con artist? Hell yes. Can she still beat up/shoot up/blow up cops, thieves, or whoever else she wants to? Absolutely. But she has to operate in an open world where gender has consequences. That means she’ll get hit on. All the time. GTA prides itself on gritty realism, and it’s time that realism got, well, real.

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Today, I thought that I would share this article on the death of rave culture and how Frederic Jameson predicted it, originally posted by Bruce Sterling. But then at Scalzi’s I saw, this, er, piece on why human penises look the way they do. Which led to this particular money shot:

Hopefully you’re thinking as an evolutionary psychologist at this point and can infer what these survey data mean: by using their penises proficiently as a semen displacement device, men are subconsciously (in some cases consciously) combating the possibility that their partners have had sex with another man in their absence. The really beautiful thing about evolutionary psychology is that you don’t have to believe it’s true for it to work precisely this way. Natural selection doesn’t much mind if you favor an alternative explanation for why you get so randy upon being reunited with your partner. Your penis will go about its business of displacing sperm regardless.

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He gets it, that whole “unfair representation of women in power” thing.

(Obviously, the man’s a genius — everybody knows that. I visit Beyond the Beyond when I’m feeling too clever by half and want to be reminded how comparatively insignificant my intellect and imagination are. But I find that the posts I enjoy most aren’t about spimes or NOTworks or architecture fiction, they’re the ones that remind me that fetishizing what a woman wears in relationship to her abilities as a leader contributes not only to an unsustainable economy, but a limited vision of female empowerment in general. You do not have to be a Ph.D. in gender theory to understand this point. You simply need to be observant, which is one of the things Mr. Sterling does best.)

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