All art is at once surface and symbol

The 6 Male Characters Women Never Get to See in Movies

This is one of the best feminist articles I've read in a while. I especially lol'd at #2.

I was looking up articles from a college database (Points of View Reference Center), and my Composition II professor allowed me to use fanfiction for the topic of my paper. Go figure, lots of newspaper articles on E.L. James and 50 Shades popped up. I mainly skipped over them, but then I came across an innocuous article called "What is fanfiction.net?" from The (United Kingdom) Times. Yet another 50 Shades article. I skimmed over it for a while, then came across this:

( Bolding is mine. TW for Eel denying rape in her novels. )

Since I found the article at a college-specific database, I unfortunately can't link to it. But I can tell you the source: Times, The (United Kingdom), Apr 12, 2012, p5, 1p

On the Importance of Magical Girl Heroines & Weaponized Femininity

Bolding is all mine, nomnomnom.

The Magical Girl genre is essentially a genre which explores the female Heroine’s arc, the female coming of age story, and the womanhood narrative with varying degrees of success or failure — but it gets explored. I’d be hard pressed to name a whole lot of series that allow women to play every single archetypal role in the heroic book the way say, Sailor Moon does. Because Usagi Tsukino is a regular girl who is sort of clumsy and a bit of a bad student, but kind and loving and sweet. She is the “regular young girl” who begins a journey into becoming a powerful woman. She might initially play at being the virginal Princess type, but let’s face it — her future child drops out of the sky, and there’s never any sort of real play at insinuating she’s a bad person because she grows up. Usagi is a Warrior, a Queen, a Mother, a Lover, a Friend, a Sister - the Heroine of the story. She saves her own boyfriend/consort’s ass regularly from the bad guys. Essentially, she’s the hero, and the story is about her.

It’s more complex than that, of course. Her weapons are pink and shiny and come in the form of compacts and wands with heart and moon shapes. She wears a sailor fuku, she’s got long flowing hair, she’s feminine, beautiful, and when she doesn’t trip first, she’s going to kick your ass in the name of the moon (and love and justice). Being a girl is her weapon. Being feminine and a woman is her weapon. Some of the other Scouts have other presentations of themselves and their genders, but that’s just it - womanhood and girlhood, and gender, and sexuality, and so on — has a spectrum. It’s all there.

+

Kyubey isn’t the devil. Kyubey is the society we live in, which takes up and preys on young girls at vulnerable times in their lives, and asks them to be perfect. Society asks girls to fight against evil, the icky, awful, and impure, and it keeps asking until we say yes. Yes to being beautiful, and perfect, and good, and pure, and sweet, yes to being a nice young lady, yes to fighting everything that is bad and evil and dangerous - to fighting the things that threaten us and our friends.

Except there’s a catch. We’re fighting ourselves. What they don’t tell you, society, or Kyubey in this metaphor, is that there is no way to prevent yourself from becoming what you started out fighting. You lose, in this scenario, every time. At some point, a young, “emotionally volatile” girl grows up and becomes a woman. One day, you hit puberty, or maybe you haven’t yet, and someone leers at you, or looks at you wrong, or calls after you and you are suddenly made aware of the fact that being a woman is dangerous. Growing up means something incredibly different for girls than it does boys.

( And this part has PMMM spoilers. YES. THANK YOU. This is how I see Sayaka. )

You become a witch or a bitch the day you fight back. And even if you don’t fight back, you’re going to become a witch or a bitch eventually. That’s the unfortunate truth of growing up female — sooner or later, society will betray you. And while you might not become Walpurgisnacht, it can be as simple as a hiss in your ear, or a seething message in your inbox. You’re an emotionally out of control girl, you’re evil, you’re bad, you’re a slut, a whore, or a bitch, or hysterical, or over reacting. You become a woman in a society that hates women. And if and when you react, you get tossed straight into the bin of evil terrible things.

Sorry for copy-pasting so much. This is just my way to convince you to read the entire essay. :P So go go go!

Okay, now that I've taken a few deep breaths, let's play a game inspired by Maureen Dowd's twitter, 'cause it's awesome.

Instructions: Take a favorite book or imagine your favorite video game/movie/webcomic/etc. was a book. If its original creator was a guy, genderflip him and give his book a stereotypically girly cover. If a female creator, genderflip her and give her book a badass/decent cover that accurately shows what her book is about.

( Here's a few examples I made to get you started. :) )

Tissa David, who died on Aug. 21 at age 91 in New York, was one of the world's great animators and a woman whose artistry is peerless in the traditionally male-dominated animated-cartoon field.

Fuck. She died the day before my birthday, too. I may not be overly familiar with Tissa's work, but I adored her animation in "Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure" and from what I read in John Canemaker's book, she was absolutely hardcore. She survived bombings, starvation, crossing the Hungarian border, language barriers, and she challenged the animation industry by proving that a woman can be a great animator. ("In America, animation was a jealously guarded men's field," she said. "So girls should be assistants, inkers, painters—not animators.") Kudos to you, Tissa. Hope you're having fun in the afterlife.



Edit: There's plans for a new Raggedy Ann & Andy movie.

I only have this to say: Please please please please please please PLEASE don't be like the live-action/CGI "The Smurfs." Though I won't complain about Neil Patrick Harris having a good role. ;D Maybe as Andy... Fuck, now I can't unsee it.

Okay, one more thing. Live-action doesn't sound like it'll bode well, but I hope they can make the puppetry/CGI work without suffering from Uncanny Valley Syndrome. There... are some things that just work better as 2D animation. :/

Another day, another teeth-gnashing brush-in with my mother. Today I thought it would be better if she got out of my life. When I realized that, I cried.

I've got to stop reading 50 Shades for a while. Not only do I fear it's affecting my writing what little I've done anyway (I almost typed, "and my subconcious agreed" and I cringed) it truly upsets me that this tedious creepy novel is put on the pedestal as something revolutionary, ground-breaking and feminist when it isn't. I was able to cope with it with Twilight, 'cause it's an easy comedy target and I couldn't get past the first chapter of the first book without getting bored. But I'm up to Chapter 16 of 50 Shades, and somehow it crawls MUCH more under my skin, probably due to me actually reading the material than other people's commentary/sporks/MSTs on it.

Is fandom a vocal minority? Because everything I learned about writing smut came from the Internet and fanfiction, not published novels. In fact, I often prefer fanfiction smut to "official" erotica. Usually in the former, the prose is better and between characters I was connected with and grew to know and love, not Alpha Dude and Gorgeous Virgin who have Mills & Boon sessions once every chapter. Plus they introduced me to a whole world of kinks. The bad smutfic were also easier to make fun of and laugh at for the same reason.

I guess what's really getting under my skin is that people are still under the impression that women can't enjoy porn ever (I hate the term "mommy porn"), and it makes me want to wave my arms and cry, "Are you blind!?" The people lauding 50 Shades for being ZOMG SOOOOOO KINKY!11!!11 would be fucking shocked if they were introduced to the fanfiction archives of the Internet. Even if you leave the Internet out of the equation, it amazes me how much people just don't read. Lady Chatterly's Lover? Fanny Hill? Do those books suddenly not exist anymore? The Story of O and the works of Anaïs Nin existed LONG before E.L. James stepped into the scene as "ZOMG A WOMAN WHO WROTE A FAMOUS EROTICA NOVEL!11!1!" Even shitty bestselling erotica beat her to the spot; o hai, Anne Rice and the Beauty trilogy.

When a hotel replaces copies of the Bible with 50 Shades, you know we've got a problem.

The series is spreading like goddamn HIV. This wouldn't bother me so much if everyone acknowledged this was just fantasy, but 50 Shades treats the abusive relationship between Ana & Christian as the ideal, and tons of women reading the books believe it. They truly believe Christian is this amazing and wonderful hunk because he acts like a serial killer. They think they'll be able to find their own "bad boy" and "change" him. And if he doesn't, they blame themselves because women should be responsible and obey their man.

Jesus. Either men must be douchebags to be seen as desirable by fangirls, or every single one of them is an evil rapist. I'll rant about that double standard another day.

Each time I think of giving up writing, I look up and see shit like 50 Shades and House of Night being best-sellers, and I feel like Peter Parker after he tried to quit being Spiderman in the second movie. But the way my family life has been going, I barely sum up the energy and I feel like shit. Whee.

‘Brave’ To Focus On Mother-Daughter Relationship, Will Overlook Romance

In the TIME article, there is a key paragraph that states:

Brave’s medieval Scottish princess, Merida (voiced by Boardwalk Empire‘s Kelly Macdonald), almost never wears princess clothes. Instead, she rides a horse and shoots a bow and arrow. Her mom, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) insists she follow tradition and let the eldest sons of the heads of the kingdom’s clans compete for her hand in marriage. But Merida doesn’t tell her mom that she’s going to pick her own husband, as princesses sometimes do in films. This is a fairy tale without romance. Merida tells her that she isn’t marrying anyone. Then she fights bears. But mostly, like all teenage girls, she fights with her mom.

I approve of this.

Originally posted by lovelycudy at The shaming room

Happy International Women's Day, even though looking at my work and "upcoming" ideas for stories (ha, like I have a future in that), I feel like a failure as a feminist.