A First-Hand Account of Objectification By a Woman

The theme of objectification is one of the main ones in contemporary feminism. A common criticism of media is that it objectified women. Rape isn’t just an act of violence, but an act of objectification. While it may not be explicitly implied, since this term appears mainly in feminist discourse you may decide that this experience is unique to female. The problem is, once we decide a problem is uniquely-female we become blind to the errors.

I’ll first define ‘objectification’ both in the arts and in personal interactions, and what I mean by ‘uniquely-female’. Criticism of feminism has sadly been dominated by people like those from A Voice For Men, who view the whole thing as a sort-of conspiracy to ruin males’ lives. I don’t believe their perfectly-ordered universe. Rather, it’s just possible that some feminists – like all humans – err.

Defining Objectification:

Wikipedia has Martha Nussbaum’s criteria for objectification, which is excellent in understanding what it is. Coped directly:

Instrumentality – treating the person as a tool for another’s purposes
Denial of autonomy – treating the person as lacking in autonomy or self-determination
Inertness – treating the person as lacking in agency or activity
Fungibility – treating the person as interchangeable with (other) objects
Violability – treating the person as lacking in boundary integrity and violable, “as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.”
Ownership – treating the person as though they can be owned, bought, or sold
Denial of subjectivity – treating the person as though there is no need for concern for their experiences or feelings

In the media/fiction, objectification occurs when a character doesn’t have agency. By that, it means it doesn’t have personal drives or wants or needs. Instead, they have a very specific, narrow role. Often, ‘objectified’ characters will supposed to be central to the story. For example, a cashier who appears for one scene isn’t objectified since they appear only in one scene. Interchangability and having a minor role isn’t a sign of objectification.

What makes a character feel real and interesting is their interior – wants, needs, personality and actions/reactions derived from these. Objectification reduces a character for some specific use that makes them interchangeable with an object. It is the removing/ignoring of the interior of a character. An objectified character cannot drive the story and is dependent on the external world.

Better to be a dildo in use than a discarded dildo

Examples include the female characters whose role is to be pretty. Their role is no different than that of a picture or of a potted plant. Notice how this doesn’t say women can’t be pretty in media. Rather, when a female character contributes nothing but her looks she becomes an object. She has no interior. Another example is the ‘strong female character’ archetype, when a female character’s only role is to kill people and do stuff to advance the plot. Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens is an excellent example. Such a character is a tool for the writers to move the plot, but the character doesn’t add anything else besides advancement – she has no unique reactions or worldview or desires.

Objectified characters are objectified by storytellers, not their traits. A character can be dependent and ‘weak’, like Yuno Gasai from Future Diary yet she’s not an object. That’s because while she depends on a male for emotional stability, her role isn’t to move the plot. She exists on her own, has her desires and personality which translates into such toxic love.

Notice the difference in roles and how central they are. It is not about how the character will act in real life – Rey is clearly ‘stronger’. What’s important is their role in the story, whether they do a single thing, whether they’re a storytelling tool or are themselves the source of the story.

In real life, objectifying people is on a scale. You can treat people like tools to achieve certain objectives. For example, being friends with someone only because they give you free rides. Here, the friend becomes an object who doesn’t exist and has value in and of itself, but for the objectifier exists for a specific purpose – free rides. This is classic Deontology. Overall, thinking someone is good only for sex and raping them are two things on the same scale. Both deny the agency of the person and see them only as a means of achieving a specific purpose. The rape only adds violence.

Objectifying people in personal interactions is treating them as means instead of ends.

Uniquely Female:

In feminist discourse, people either talk about problems as experienced by females or discuss problems as if only females experience them. It’s a blurry line. In general, the latter form shows how men and women experiences the same thing, differently. For example, due to rape statistics, women experience the fear of rape far more commonly than men. Discussing a problem this way doesn’t mean men don’t get raped – only highlights how differenlty women have it.

I want to puke

In general, this is an excellent tool to explain why we need feminism. While men and women can suffer from the same things, they don’t suffer in the same way. Both genders suffer from the beauty standards, but beauty for women means something more than just being sexy. Most of their social value depends on that. Notice how a lot of female actors are young and beautiful while there is more variety in male looks. Notice how comments about female artists keep returning to their beauty.

The problem with the former style – ‘only females experience this’, is that it causes an erasure of other individuals’ experience. I specifically chose that word, because the problem with this erasure is not that it hurts men – but it that it hurts people and writes off their suffering. This article in Elite Daily is an excellent example discussing a problem as if only females experience it. I will critique it in another time.

A First-Hand Account of Objectification By a Female

The purpose of this is mainly self-therapy. Also, opening this wound is partly to encourage others to open theirs. This isn’t a ‘we don’t need feminism’ statement at all. My experience doesn’t cancel the high rape statistics, slut-shaming, constant objectification of women in the media and other issues.

The reason I present this story, except for my own sake, is that in a discourse that constantly frames men and male heterosexuality as aggressive we forget there are people behind it. We move from discussing the problems of high rape statistics to saying we should approach every stranger as if he’s a potential rapist. Put yourself in the position of the victim and you don’t have to justify yourself. Yet, without you seeing it, you cause great suffering. All the supposed structural oppression means nothing at this point.

How me and my ex met doesn’t matter. The important details is that I was 3 years older than her. She was in school. I was in the first year (or second?) of my military service. Both of us were weirdos. Look at this from outside, and it seems as though I’m in power. As the stereotype goes, I was the big man who found a girl with zero self-esteem. I’m older and was male, so supposedly I had more privilege.

Only this isn’t exactly what happened. The black dog bit me in the military and my depression was severe. I nearly comitted suicide and self-harmed almost on a daily basis. Sex was a hard thing to do. I could do some of it, but I needed more time to maintain erection. What this meant is that while we could do various activities, I had to be a little numb through it all. Remember, I was on the brink of killing myself and I had guns to do it.

After some months of this, my ex decided to dump me. This is objectification and no celebration of bodily autonomy can make it any different. My ex couldn’t see the difference between a vibrator and a person. You throw away a vibrator when it doesn’t function and doesn’t get you an orgasm. You don’t do this to a person. I was reduced to only my sexual function and my ability to maintain an erection.

When I hear complaining about being looked at, about being approached to because you look good and therefore objectification, I laugh. No one wrote you off. No one reduced you. People only acted because they found you attractive, but there was no active reduction of your other traits. If anything, approaching and getting to know a woman because she looks good is the opposite of objectification. In this scenario, the male wants to enjoy other traits of the person besides how they look. In my case, my sexual function was the reason I was erased.

At this point, any discussion of my male privilege are irrelevant and not helpful. The privilege of being male didn’t help me, since nothing after this actually helped me this. The end result was trauma – suicide, military service, sexual objectification, abandonment, self harm all come in the same package. I had no way to heal.

This isn’t a call to arms to defeat feminism. I wouldn’t be able to open this wound unless I soaked the idea that the patriarchy is also rigid on us males. Rather, I want to encourage males to open up their wounds and make interiors visible. We cannot only talk about women as victims when they can cause trauma. We cannot dismantle ‘toxic masculinity’ unless we let males actually deviate from it – which includes opening of wounds, some of which are caused by females. In truth, if you want to get rid of ‘toxic masculinity’, you’ll have to look at these wounds and not write them off so quickly.

I still hold this depression. It’s not as strong, but it’s there. It left me with a gaping wound and my already messed sexuality is even more messed than now. If the narratives I got were that true, that females were so powerless such a thing couldn’t happen but it did. Clearly, we need to move on from the absolution of male privilege. Reality, once again, proved itself more chaotic than our ideas.

Nowadays I’m not too angry. I’m too far gone with my damaged sexuality. All I can do is help others.

TumblrInAction, Feminism and The Straw Men

Look, I love TumblrinAction. The things they post are hilarious. They’re so disconnected from reality and logic, so dying to protect their little worldview that they will lash at everything. I talked to religious people who stick to their dogma, but it’s never like this. The religious often have a sense of doubt and humility. They think, “God shows me X and Y. The rest isn’t up for me”. The posts on TumblrinAction are different.

Check this picture. This person is sure he has to resort to fanfiction because gay people are so hard to find in literature. Now, of course there will be less gay people than straight ones in literature. There are less gay people overall. It’s how I can’t expect Jews to feature in a lot of books, because Jews are a worldwide minority (Actually, they do have a presence in literature for some reason but that’s a different discussion). I only have to Google ‘Gay Literature’ and I get a huge Wikipedia article that even links to a page about gay literature from Singapore.

In this one, they rail against nature. You were born blonde? Too bad! You appropriate cultures and are a racist! It’s funny how quickly this degenerates into saying people are X because of what they were born with. Isn’t that how racism works?

As hilarious as that subreddit is, we need to remember this. No matter how good an idea is, it can still attract morons. We will still eat our favorite type of food just because it has the potential to attract flies.

TumblrinAction is useful in displaying what went wrong with social justice. As an idea, it’s not bad. There’s no reason why one group should have more power over another because of illegetimate reasons. There’s no need to discriminate people based on skin color or sex or body structure.

Social justice, at its best, makes us question assumptions about society. Racism and sexism are dogmatic. They do not encourage discussion. They promote the idea that individuals belong in a certain group and that determines their value. These are inherent traits that can’t change. These are not fluid categories that change, nor do they have scientific basis. Sex exists, but it’s not our only trait. Race is complete pseudoscience.

Social justice should make us these question these assumptions and categories. It should question the main narrative, offers a new one but make sure the new one is also open to criticism. If you criticize something but refuse to check the flaws in your alternative, you do not care about improving things anymore. You only care about gaining power.

It’s similar to the Left/Right axis. The purpose stops being improvement or solving problems and it become defeating some enemy. That’s what we see in a lot of social justice discussions today. They’re not really discussing specific issues, but just look for ways to push the narrative of victimhood. That’s why EverydayFeminism publishes an article about how focusing on female pleasure is misogynistic (because it might! Just might put pressure on her) or the article about “People say Islam is homophobic because of racism”, sweeping away any evidence.

Criticism of these people can easily degenerate into what they are. If the only social justice content you encounter is from TumblrinAction, you’ll become just another raving extremist. I haven’t seen it in the subreddit itself, but I’ve seen people react this way to the content that gets published there.

A guy on Facebook keeps ranting about feminists, how they are all full of hate and uses examples from crazies on Tumblr. The irony is, MRA’s rarely talk about raped-males and such issues in a way that’s not a weapon against feminism (Dear MRA’s: Male victims of rape aren’t weapons in your silly little war). He cheered for the removal of feminism from history lessons. Apparently, since feminists offended him now it’s okay to remove facts from history lessons. There was even a post which could be summed up as “You got raped because it’s your own fault”.

This is not a person who believes in equality and is frustrated with what feminism became. I’m not going to get on anyone’s ass just because they don’t label themselves feminists. I tackle ideas, not people. Still, this is an example of a person who doesn’t care about equality or anything. It’s about defeating the feminists, the so-called hateful bigots. Issues aren’t discussed. Rather, he posts rants about feminists or by feminists and use it as proof they’re out to get our precious fluids.

We must be wary of being too attached to our ideas. The purpose of our ideas is to be useful. If an idea isn’t true nor useful, it must be discarded no matter how much we love it. Ideas are supposed to serve us. We shouldn’t serve ideas. The question rises: Some people will stick to ideas that only benefit themselves and might harm others, no?

Of course, but this is a different discussion, of selfishness vs. community. Even if what drives you is pure selfishness, you still need to avoid getting attached to ideas. You might miss ideas that will benefit you more.

Schrodinger’s Rapist or: Stranger Danger 2: Electric Boogalo

There are all kinds of problems with Schrodinger’s Rapist. It’s fairly logical, but it only states obvious things that don’t further our understanding. It’s a nice-sounding buzzword, too. As far as trying to reveal greater truths about the existence of rape culture, it’s a failure. In order to reveal rape culture, you’ll have to reveal something. This is just Stranger Danger with a feminist paintjob.

I’m going to tackle it from various points.

First of all, the language switch. This is the quote from Rebecca Watson with the sexes switched:

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a woman who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of girl—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Dear women, you are Schrodinger’s False Rape Accuser, or Rapist, or Heartbreaker, or Run-Away-With-Child-er, or Mugger. I’m afraid, too.

What if made this a race issue? Schrodinger’s Black Mugger. Assuming black people commit more crimes (for whatever reason – class or genes or rap cred or because of biased reporting), wouldn’t it be reasonable to think a black person is Schrodinger’s Mugger until he proves otherwise?

Schrodinger’s Rapist is true, but its logic also encourages distrust of women. Even if you confine it to rape, males still get raped. Even if it happens less often, it does. Men being in power doesn’t matter. It’s not going to make the experience of a raped male any better.

Schrodinger’s Rapist is also an extension of Stranger Danger. Stranger Danger is an idea that should’ve been discarded long ago. People remember it when they want to ‘keep their children safe’ (=locked in the house with only a math textbook) and forget about it when complaining about how antisocial everyone is.

Stranger Danger is promotion of asocial behavior. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t respond when they talk to you. They’re all out to get you. What people forget is that everyone is a stranger until you get to know them, including the parents. The baby simply didn’t have any control.

Strangers might hurt you. Asocial behavior is certain to hurt you. Isolation is a common factor when it comes to depression and depression is a common factor when it comes to suicide. Stranger Danger didn’t contribute anything.

Stranger Danger (Schrodinger’s Rapist) also fail because it’s not only strangers who hurt us. These strangers have probably been brainwashed with being asocial, too. It’s often people we are close to who hurt us the most. Rape occurs more often by familiar people rather than strangers.

That makes perfect sense. If you want to rape, it’s easier and safer to do it with someone you know, who trusts you. They will be less resistant at first. You already know how to interact with them and how to coerce them to having sex. You can guilt trip them later. If you’re the dominating person in a social group, they will less likely to accuse you.

The idea can cause more harm than good. It will make women fearful of strangers, but it can make them more lax with familiar people who are most likely to rape them. Where does the circle end though?

It also misses the point. By telling people not to act like rapists, you’re actually telling rapists how better to conceal themselves. A person with little regard to consent doesn’t need to be told how ‘not to act like a rapist’ but why rape is so wrong.

Acting like a rapist and raping are two different things. A person can have an aggressive, loud behavior. He can even care little for personal space and accidentally touch you, but it doesn’t mean he’s a rapist. It means he’s loud, obnoxious and doesn’t care much for personal space. It doesn’t mean he’s inconsiderate (or sadistic) enough so he will harass you.

The only surefire way to tell if someone is a rapist or a sexual harasser is when they actually do it. We should not teach people how not to act like a rapist. We don’t people not-acting like rapists, but we want them to not rape at all.

I also saw a claim that talking to people who are currently in the middle of something – reading a book, on the laptop, browsing Facebook on their phone is rude. I fail to see rudeness in initiating social interaction. It’s rude to keep pushing if a person tells you s/he’s busy, but it’s possible that this person is browsing Facebook because there’s nothing to do on the train.

You will get hurt less by telling a person who approached you to leave you alone then by not being approached to at all. Loneliness is more damaging than we think. The fact some people won’t leave you alone is rude, but is a different story.

(Here’s some Hypocrisy With Natalists moment: You think it’s rude when guys approach you while you’re reading a book, but think it’s fine to force people into existence? That kid you just forced into existence and wants to die suffers way, way more than you.)

If Schrodinger’s Rapist is supposed to make us understand better the fear women have of rape, it fails. It’s Stranger Danger in disguise. It’s actually worse than Stranger Danger. Its main message is that you can’t trust anyone. In some ways it’s true. Anyone can hurt you. The key word is ‘can’. It’s possible they will and it’s possible it won’t. There is one thing that’s guaranteed – loneliness, isolation and fear of communication will hurt you no matter what.

The Right to Die

Without the right to die, there is no right to live.

The right to live means your life is yours. No one is allowed to take it from you. This right relies on the belief that life belongs to the individual. That’s why we find murder so horrible, but also why many are against capital punishment.

A duty is something you must do. You do not have a choice to give up a duty, unlike a right. People have the right to drive cars today, yet it doesn’t mean they must. Therefore, the right to live means you’re allowed to live, not must.

A person doesn’t choose whether to be born or not. Life is something that is forced upon us. The paradox is that we cannot chose between life and death unless we’re already alive. In order to choose, you have to exist first.

The problem is, if you choose not to live there is no easy way to do it. All suicide methods are painful. The quickest suicide methods are the most painful, while the less painful ones take a lot of time.

This is a terrible place to be. The damage from a bullet that missed the brain is horrible. Chocking on helium might not be so painful, but it takes time and the result of failure is equally horrifying. Either you’re living with a memory of trying to kill yourself, or you have brain damage.

Why force people into this position? A person didn’t choose to live. If the person finds that life isn’t satisfying or worthwhile, the person sees no way of improving his situation then he deserves a painless death. A person may not even be interested in improving. It could be that once you look back at your life, you decide you don’t want to carry that past anymore and want to die.

Suicidal people are trapped. Either you continue living and continue suffering, or you do something painful that might get rid of it. You do it all because two people were certain it was a good idea to force a child into the world.

Sure, everyone suffers in their life but not everyone finds the suffering worth it.

Suicide will hurt others, too, but is that a good reason?

We don’t expect a person to have sex with another if he doesn’t want to. Witholding sex is hurting. Sexual frustration can do its damage. Yet we don’t expect the attractive person to have pity sex just so the unattractive person will feel better. In fact, we push for saying that no matter how you act, nobody owes you sex.

I agree with this, and that’s why I take it further. Nobody owes you their life. A suicide of a close person is painful, but what would you prefer for that person to stay and stay in pain?

Suicide prevention is inheritenly selfish. People who don’t want you to kill yourself want it so they won’t experience grief and loss. That’s okay, because loss is terrible. Yet, if you truly cares about the well-being of a person, you wouldn’t try to ‘prevent suicide’. You would listen to the person and try to understand him. If you start off with the conclusion that suicide is bad, you’re not interested in listening.

Also, how do we know that the grief the people will feel is not as bad as the cotinous suffering the suicide person feels?

Euthanasia will actually ease the pain. Instead of impulsive suicides that will suckerpunch everyone, people will be able to prepare. There will be a date, and people could say their final goodbyes. It will also be cleaner, and the body can easily used for medical research or organ donation.

Nobody owes you anything, true. The world doesn’t owe you sex and it doesn’t owe you a fulfilling life (it also doesn’t owe you help in giving birth). If this is all true, then suicidal people owe us nothing and we shouldn’t prevent it. If we want to have a compassionate society that recognizes the pain of these tragic deaths, we need to have enough empathy to realize it’s okay to die.

Most people who object to this right, in my experience, have been successful and well-adjusted people. They assume that since life is working well for them, it therefore works well for everyone. It’s not. Some of us are born with a chemical imbalance, in the wrong environment, or made a series of mistakes we don’t want to carry any more.

We did not choose to live in the first place, so let us choose to die.
Let my people go.

Melanie Martinez – Cry Baby

Melanie is late to the game. There has been a wave of Pop singers who sound like a response to the abundance of empowerment anthems. You know this style has been bled dry when Sia tries to write a vulnerable song about alcoholism and ends up ripping off “Titanium”.

Lana Del Rey was about the darker side of hedonism and hot bad guys. Tove Lo sang about the loneliness that finds even the sexiest women. Although they made great albums, Martinez feels like the true beating this genre needs. Tove Lo and Lana still sang like beautiful people. Melanie is the voice of the outcast.

Thematically, the album has more in common with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Its structure is similar to the famous album by these two. The songs don’t tell a story as much as they show a psychological journey of a character, who starts off as Cry Baby and ends up as Mad Hatter.

This is not the trouble of a beautiful girl who just needs to choose a different environment. Melanie’s protagonist is an outcast who finds rejection wherever she goes. On “Dollhouse”, she finds no warmth in a family that’s fine only on the surface. On “Carousel” and “Soap”, she’s rejected romantically. The former deserves special mention. It’s one of the few songs where the hopelessness of love is considered.

The rejection climaxes in “Pity Party” and “Tag, You’re It”. In the former, Cry Baby realizes she has nobody. On the latter, someone finally notices her and it’s a sexual predator. Eventually, she uses the same innocence and tenderness she had in the title track for rebellion. Poisoned “Milk and Cookies” get rid of the asshole. The ending is optimistic – she rejects society and its superficiality on “Mrs. Potato Head” and finds joy in “Mad Hatter”.

Superficiality is a big deal here, and in Pop music. How we look, in fact, is a plague that still infects women. Female musicians will still get praised more for their looks than men, as if it has any bearings on the quality. On Little Mix’s “Black Magic” music video, a change of clothes suddenly makes the guy interested.

Melanie is obsessed with how we use fancy covers to hide things. Almost every song here involves bad things having a nice cover, from the dollhouse that hides a dysfunctional family to the poisoned milk and cookies. That’s where Melanie’s childish aesthetic comes into play.

The whole album uses childish aesthetic to express dark themes. The music is the same. The melodies have a nursery rhyme-like quality. Nothing is actually aggressive or loud. “Worth It” is more abrasive musically, but then comes the chorus of “Milk and Cookies”.

While this aesthetic is often brilliant and Melanie sounds like a visionary, it also highlights how inexperienced she is. There’s a reason The Downward Spiral wasn’t Reznor’s first album. Melanie swings between being obvious and delivering just the right line. On “Dollhouse”, you get lines like “Pose with your brother, won’t you be a good sister?”. It’s brilliant in the way it creepily hints at sexual harassment. Then she bluntly states her Dad is having an affair.

She doesn’t stray from the concept, and that’s good. Only two songs feel slightly out-of-place. “Training Wheels” is a love song that’s great on its own but lacks the darkness that will connect it to the rest. “Pacify Her” is the sort of thing I’d expect from Lana Del Rey and Tove Lo. For a brief moment Cry Baby is an attractive girl that can steal others’ boyfriends?

“Mrs. Potato Head” has been already highlighted by many as the best song on the album. It should’ve spread like wildfire through Tumblr and become a meme. It’s an even better anti-beauty anthem than that Manson track. It has no subtly, it doesn’t need any. Someone need to sing “No one will love you if you’re unattractive”. It’s not about plastic surgery, but about our worship of beauty. We wouldn’t need plastic surgeries if we wouldn’t worship beauty like this. It’s also one of the softest songs on the album, and that only makes it cut deeper.

There will be weirder Pop albums, but Cry Baby is the one we need now the most. Its musical backdrop is unique, but not very attention grabbing. It exists to go along with Melanie’s ideas, but she doesn’t expand on them. The most attention-grabbing thing musically is the bass drop in “Soap”, which uses bubbling sounds. The album doesn’t need an overblown sound. Its smallness fits with the childish atmosphere.

The rough edges prevent it from being a classic, but it’s still a brilliant Pop album. It doesn’t even come close to being a “singles with filler” album. The singles are actually some of the weaker tracks. Melanie manages to create a persona of her own and not just create a collection of great songs, but a sequencing that works. It’s also another step forward from the bland empowerment we’ve been plagued with. I wonder what will replace Melanie’s brand of depressed Pop.

4 dollhouses out of 5

Margaret Atwood – Alias Grace

Shitty authors often fill their books with useless details. It’s a sure sign the book is bad, but it’s understandable. If you have no idea what works, just throw everything in and hope something sticks. The problem with this shotgun approach in novels is that novels are whole pieces, and so it’s hard to isolate the good parts. Some good authors fill their books with details, and then chop off what doesn’t turn out to be a buried gun (see also: Chuck Palahniuk). Why do talented authors leave a lot of details is puzzling.

There’s no need to put a cover on Alias Grace. Buried in it is a brilliant mystery novel that uses it genre to create meaning, not just to create a puzzle. Atwood made a career of exploring the female experience, and the novel is almost the definitive one about our perception of women.

The phase ‘benevolent misogyny’ sounds crazy, and too bad the other term to describe it is ‘victim privilege’. These things exist, though. When people perceive you as lower than them, some of the ways they treat you differently will benefit you.

The perception of women was so narrow that it even excluded some terrible prejudices. Since women are viewed as pure until someone has sex with them, the idea they can be violent didn’t occur to people. The only reason Grace has a chance at redemption is because she’s a woman. No one thinks James may have been innocent, or cares what his reasons are. Boys will be boys, and James is just a boy who couldn’t control his violence.

The question of whether Grace is innocent or not isn’t answered, because the definitive answer isn’t the point. The point is what’s reader answer is and how much of it is based on Grace being female. The purpose of the puzzle is not the right answer but to examine our reactions.

Sexism is more complex than just making one group feel bad. Sexism goes both ways, with positive ideas about an oppressed group stemming from them being considered inferior.  Atwood realizes that and this is why Atwood is one of the best authors on the subject.

Even in her comfort zone where she writes about discrimination, she’s still great in it. Her treatment of the subject is never black and white. There are sexist pigs. There are women who accept their position in society. There are men with savior’s complex. The contradicting sexism takes place in the same mind. Dr. Jordan seeks to help the outcasts and the insane. When you give him a woman desperate for love and an ugly servant, he’s regressing to the sexism he grew up with.

A common problem in Historical Fiction is that the authors give the historical characters a modern mindset. A third wave feminist in the 1800’s looks silly unless we get a reasonable explanation how she stumbled on these ideas. It’s like a person who talks about digital property before the internet was invented.

Atwood avoids this flaw. She knows that people who grew up in a sexist environment will think sexist thoughts, including women. I’ve seen plenty of women spit misogyny, such as slut-shaming and victim-blaming today. Of course Grace will buy into her role as a woman, and of course Dr. Jordan will treat ugly women in disgust if that’s all he knows. Thankfully, as time goes on and events pile up, events that challenge these perceptions take place. That’s Grace’s murder role. It’s there for people to question their ideas about the sexes, both the negative and positive.

These ideas are fully explored, so at least Atwood’s shower of details isn’t meant to cover up a lack. It doesn’t make it any less puzzling. It’s not a difference in prose style. Even at her most maximalist Atwood retains a gift for sentences that flow easily. She overcomes the challenge of writing in a less modern style, but unnecessary details remain unnecessary no matter how easy they are to read.

Everything little thing is described. These are not the purposeful descriptions of McEwan. Atwood has no modus operandi for choosing what to describe and what not to. The effect is similar to the shopping lists of Dragon Tattoo. They revealed nothing about the characters. Women had an obsession with appearances back in the day, but these aren’t descriptions that are focused on the beauty of things.

If Atwood wanted to express the characters’ obsession with things looking good, then she’d focus on the beauty of things. The shopping list is a static technique. It exists to give you a blueprint of how a room looks like, but it’s only important so you’ll understand the characters’ movements. Beyond that, telling us the color of the rag is unimportant unless the color or the rag has importance.

Less annoying are the words of wisdom that are dropped between paragraphs. There are many quotable moments, but they feel like they came out of an unpublished Words of Wisdom. I’d love to read a book like this by Atwood. Every novel I read by her paints an intelligent women, but it’s not believable when it comes out of Grace’s mind. She’s portrayed either as enigmatic or simple-minded. Intelligence isn’t a trait, so why do these pieces of wisdom tell us about the character?

The fairly-complex structure isn’t as harmful as these techniques, but it also feels like an unnecessary complexity. The exchange of letters is interesting, but they belong in a story more focused on Dr. Jordan. His main role here is to show a contradictionary sexist mind. He has an interesting psychological arc that gets drowned in too many descriptions and fear of exploring him. He never becomes the presence that the men had in Life Before Man. He exists to show us how Grace looks from the outside. There are too many passages on his life in general that are more than necessary to show he exists beyond the plot, and not enough to make him like a hero of his own story.

The news clippings in the beginning of chapters are better. In fact, Atwood should’ve used them more. She could have used a variety of clippings to show the subtle differences between sexist opinions. She has enough negative capabiliy to paint sexists as human beings while not justifying them. More clippings would allow her to experiment with the sexist mind.

The flaws in this novel prevent it from being great, but it’s still a success. Atwood is too good at prose, so even the filler writing is pleasant to read. The treatment of Atwood’s favorite subject is also the best she did so far, and it’s only over-writing that keeps this behind Cat’s Eye. Atwood said she doesn’t see herself as a feminist writer, but her literature is the ideal feminist. She doesn’t present a cliched narrative of bad men and angelic women (which is just another form of sexism anyway). She uses feminisn to question how think about sex and gender roles. There’s a lot to learn from her.

3.5 simple murders out of 5

Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men

Chick Lit is a dirty word. Reading other reviews of this novel, many expressed fear that this would be Chick Lit and therefore a waste of time. While I didn’t have the fortune of reading Chick Lit, I heard it’s full of romance and character drama. Why is that considered so bad while Game of Thrones is praised for being ‘surprising’ is unclear. Maybe it’s just our society’s fear of femininty.

Femininity is a big issue in The Summer Without Men. The novel does live up to its title. There’s a moment where, instead of a teenage boy meeting the teenage girl it’s just her friends trapping her. Even the best female singers sing about wrecked relationships, while Marilyn Manson writes about metaphysical rebellions. We could definitely use a story to show us women can have a life outside relationships with men.

It happens in real life, too. I met many ‘tomboys’, women who’d rather be one of the boys and only get along with fellow tomboys. The subtle bullying of Cat’s Eye makes an appearance. The whole premise of the novel is, what do you when the opposite gender rejects you?

There are two possible conclusions here. One is not convincing enough and the other isn’t explored. Mia looks at her rubble and builds a house. That’s nice and all, but we’re just told that it happens instead of seeing it.

Siri employs a style similar to Paul Auster. It’s an introspective style with more telling than showing. It creates a maze of thoughts that you’re supposed to swim through and come up with something of your own. The key to making the style works is to make the narrator unreliable and deeply flawed.

Narrators of such stories tend to have an emotional affliction they can’t get over. It clouds their judgment and so we get two different versions of reality. One is presented in the details. The other is in the langauge and sentence structure. These are often obsessive characters, going over certain details over and over.

By presenting these characters as flawed and often the opposite of heroic, we’re invited to try to find the reality beyond the character’s perception. Mia lacks such an internal struggle. She has a psychotic episode, but we’re told that instead of being shown. In Catcher in the Rye, we’re not told that Caulfield has PTSD but we’re shown it by seeing him going over and over his brother’s death. A maze of thoughts tells us how reality is while showing us who the character is by his choice of langauge.

I never got an idea of who Mia is. What is her complex? What are her priorities? What is her worldview? She’s supposed to have had a psychotic episode, but the prose is clean and precise. It makes it easy to read, but I’d expect someone in an emotional turmoil to not be very coherent. The rambling style was necessary in those aforementioned novels because a character with emotional problems would be too busy venting them then making sure his words make sense.

The closest she come to doing that is breaking up the structure. She moves from topic to topic, rather than follow the typical “this happened and then this happened”. This works because the novel has a few different storylines that stand on their own, but that’s not a way to express Mia’s character. It’s just a way to make us take each individual story on its own, rather than try to make sense of the chronological order.

The stories themselves, while good, don’t rely enough on the rambling narrator tool. Stories with rambling narrators aren’t eventful. It’s less important what happens and more how it affects the characters. The action in this novel doesn’t, if it’s psychological, with Mia’s psychology.

There are two main arcs. One has a group of old ladies slowly dying out, and the other a group of young girls who are just entering the teenage wasteland. At this point, the novel is less about Mia and more about these characters. We get Mia’s opinion of them, but we also get some showing.

Siri needed to decide whether Mia gives us only her point of view, or whether she’s an observer who just reports what she says. We get something in the middle, which means it’s teasing without the orgasm. The arc with the old ladies is well-meaning, but is doomed from the start. One of the old ladies’ secret is that she makes quilts with hidden, profane images.

Siri was, what, 55 when she wrote the novel? There is the perception that old people are all prudes, but making them be into profanity doesn’t add any more life to them. The cliche of the Dirty Old Man or the old woman who seeks a sugar daddy are boring. If the only proof we have that this old lady still has life in her is her interest in profanity, then I don’t think she has much life in her left. Profanity is attention seeking. True rebels don’t care.

Profanity is impressive when you’re young, but by the time high school started it lost its charm. You occasionally get people who know how to use it, like what Bring Me the Horizon did in “Happy Song”. Most people, including the character in this novel, use it for pathetic shock value. When Abigail showed Mia that she put naked women in hidden in the quilt, I did not see an old lady with life still in her. I saw an old lady whose horizons are now so limited she can’t imagine anything more exciting other than profanity. By the way, this novel was published before Bring Me the Horizon’s album.

The almost-teenagers work better, but they deserve a whole novel to themselves. They are forced to write about the incident of bullying from the perspective of everyone else. This is a brilliant idea. How a character writes about another can tell us about both, and if an author is going to tackle this idea head-on we can get some serious character development.

Siri doesn’t do it. All we get is some snippets. They’re interesting enough, but again it’s all just teasing without even foreplay to compensate. There’s an attempt to understand the bully just like the bullied. It’s an interesting take that recognizes the cruelty of bullying, how these little thing produces social retards. It also tries to understand why bullies start in the first place. Many of them are sure they’re in the right and that the bullied just has a superiority complex. Siri touches that, but not enough.

There are off-topic digressions which don’t contribute much and reinforce the feeling this is just a collection of notes for an incomplete novel. Siri at least puts effort into writing her notes. Her prose flows smoothly and whenever she sinks deep into Mia’s psyche it gets better. The beginning is powerful, throwing us right in the middle of heartbreak and all the self-pity and anger that accompanies it. If Siri would let her loose a little and let Mia ramble, this could’ve been a great novel.

The Summer Without Men is too written-well to be bad. Even if everything in it is left unexplored, everything is interesting enough to make you want to do something with it yourself. The prose is pretty good and it’s short enough so it doesn’t drag. A good choice if you want a light read that’s not stupid, but that’s it.

3 summers out of 5

Of Feminism and Mad Max: Fury Road

While I spent a few paragraphs in my review of Fury Road discussing feminism, I want to delve deeper into it. It’s been a huge talking point, and it’s a beautiful flaw. The misinterpartation of feminism is so gross and overdone in this film, we have a lot to learn from it.

Feminism is the promotion of women’s equal rights so they’ll be equal to men. The key words here are ‘equality’ and ‘women’. While feminism is concerned only with women, it doesn’t mean it’s automatically against equality. It just highlights how females experience discrimination. There are people who say feminism is another word for female supremacy. While this is an obvious straw men, Fury Road would make you think it’s right. It’s ironic that Sarkeesian, the feminist you love to hate also saw the film as not feminist at all.

In Fury Road, all the female characters are on the good side. There is not a single female character among the bad guys. There plenty of faceless mooks, and none of them are female. It’s not a co-incidence. There are around 7 females around this film, so this is not just a case of a few characters slipping through. There are only two male good guys. One of them is a bad guy who does a 180. The other one, Max, who remains morally gray until he fully joins the girls.

Already, we have a very unequal representation of the genders. One gender represents goodness and badassary. The other one represents vileness, cruelty and tyranny. The film makes sure you’ll know gender has a lot to do with it.

The bad guys are defined by masculinity and represent the patriarchy. One of the bad guys is called Rictus Erectus. Immortan Joe’s most terrible crime is keeping these breeders and forcing them to bear him children. We see that male children are valued much more (Erectus being sad that he lost a baby brother). There are only war boys, and they deserve to get to Valhalla.

There isn’t an attempt to explore the patriarchy, to ask maybe they’re right. We do not get an oppurtunity to see things from the bad guys’ point of view, or a chance to see whether they did some good. We just see how vile they are. They wear skulls. They’re all mascular. They’re obsessed with violence. They view women as things. Even Gizmo makes an appearance as the fat, rich patriarch.

It is not a coherent system that just happens to be terrible. It’s just showing us how terrible a system is. There plenty of questionable ideologies out there, but that’s not because Hitler wanted to be ‘evil’. ‘Evil people’ just act out of a different system of values. The film doesn’t show this.

There is not even an attempt to make them charismatic in the villainous way. George Miller’s previous villains were odd, and pretty funny in their unique way. Even when they were cruel, they had a certain style that made them fun to see on screen. In Fury Road, Miller wants you to hate them so much you’d tatto “If I had a hammer I’d smash the patiarchy”.

Yet what is the alternative to this cartoon misogyny? Furiosa does not have a character. She’s an action heroine. She wants to do some good because it drives the plot, but that’s it. She asks for redemption, but the why is never made clear. It’s just a piece dialogue that was tacked on. She’s a pretty good action heroine – charismatic, devoid of sexuality and looks great with guns – but she’s not an engaging characters.

The wives tend to sit in the back and they all talk the same. They do help around the car a bit, but they don’t have an individual personality. The closest they come to showing some humanity is the kind-of-love relationship the redhead has with Nux, and the one who wants go back to the safety. None of these things are explored, but the format of the story won’t let them anyway.

Finally we have, among the female angels the old women. Their main role in the story is to tell our heroes to go back, and thus instigate the final scene. The final scene is great, so they do a great service to humanity. They also shove themselves in it. They have no charisma, no personality and we already have two action heroes that are good enough. Adding them is just adding more fighting women, but that’s it.

Immortan Joe is pure evil, so his alternative can only be goodness. Since the females are all on the good side, that’s their defining feature. This is not a clash of two ideologies. There isn’t even the cheap method of painting one philosophy as an evil straw men. Men are evil. Women are good.

This is not even a straw men of misogyny. There is no subversion of any norm. Misogyny was never about painting men as righteous with the moral high ground and women as evil demons. The ‘tempting women’ is a common trope, but it’s hardly the only color misogyny wears. Misogyny is often dismissing women as stupid, uncapable and thus inferior. More often than not, misogyny strips women of the ability to be good or evil. Women are just ‘things’ to fucked and then thrown away. Your average gangsta rap song will inform about how bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks.

There are red pillers who’ll try to paint women as evil conspirators, but if Fury Road is a respond to them, it’s just as pathetic. Swinging from one extreme to the next only brings you closer to the ones you hate. So you switched the genders of the Red Pill narrative, but the story is just as sexist.

As for the sexual object norm, it’s so insidious that even female heroines fall to it. Eve is a silly women that was easily conned by a snake. Black Widow’s main role is to be eye candy. There is no challenging this norm, with Furiosa being just a generic action hero and the old women completely unnecessary. Anita called this ‘cartoon misogyny’, but it’s not even that. ‘Shallow’ implies that there is minimal depth, but it’s as barren as the wasteland the film takes place in.

More importantly, the film doesn’t question the big premise misogyny relies on. Before dismissing women, misogyny assumes that sex is a factor that’s meaningful enough. Fury Road doesn’t question the importance of gender roles. It encourages it.

There is no meaningful difference between putting wome in the kitchen or in the factory. You’re still assigning them roles based on their gender and deny them their individuality. Men have been allowed to exist outside their gender for years. Even in characters where the sex is important, it’s not their whole character, like Bellow’s Herzog or Roth’s Portnoy. Get rid of the gender, and what do the wives, or the old women have?

Fury Road assigns a role to women and that is to be Jesus. That’s why there’s no room for them to develop. Developing them would mean they could be wrong, or be flawed, or think bad thoughts. These would make them seem less ‘good’. It would also make them more human and more realistic. I do not believe women are angels, and I find them to be equal to me in strength and in weakness. By turning them into angels, the film denies them the oppurtunity to be human.

Ironically, the two male characters that get some sort of character development are male. Mad Max is a fantastic hero. Despite being presented as a rugged action hero, there are plenty of moments where we see through the cracks. The distrust and paranoia he expresses at first, his jerky movements, his awkward way of speaking that points at an antisocial personality – these are small details that help establish who Max is. Max is a person who’s a family man at heart, but has been wrecked by the wasteland and turned into an antisocial animal who only cares about surviving and can’t even communicate. Nux gets a less interesting arc of waking up from the patriarchy and redeeming himself by joining the women.

George Miller was aware of this ‘feminism’ when he made the film. He says he’s now surrounded by wonderful women so he ‘can’t help being a feminist’. I wonder if in an alternative universe where Miller is not a director with groupies, he’s still a feminist. It’s easy to side with women when they’re attracted to you, but women deserve rights not because they give you sex or affection. You should be a feminist even if all women will find you so physically repulsive they will never get close to you. It seems as if Miller cares less about women as fellow people, and just rewards them for their affection. That’s nice of him, but next time he should reward them with a more honest portrayal.

So, we have another film where women are confined to a role and none of them are allowed to be fully human. It’s not even a unique role. It’s just an oversized Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Instead of rescuing a single man from his boring, they rescue a whole civilization thanks to their femininity. Maybe we overdid it. We spent so much time praising women, hoping it’ll make up for past mistakes but we kept refusing to let them share their experience. Women do need to be praised further. They need to be portrayed as the humans they are.

There are no angels and no demons, just people with different ideas.

Women Have the Absolute Right to Have Sex

We’re at a bar. I might hate myself, but not that much. So I’m drinking a beer that resembles soda less than others – it was Guinness or Weinshtephen, can’t remember. I wasn’t that drunk. Anyway, a girl a (gay) friend of mine knows is there. The world “revealing” doesn’t describe well her clothing. Her whole back’s exposed. She flirts with every guy there. She dances with the bartenders and the waiters. She gets free shots. The lead singer of the band calls her by name and tell her to leave the poor guy next to her alone.

To her credit, they were whiskey shots instead of vodka. The guy she was all over was also pretty big. Most girls I know prefer the skinny.

That’s going off-topic. The reaction to her from my friends is slut. There’s no depth to it. She’s a slut. She’s an idiot. She flirts with everyone and that’s disgusting. I’m supposed to not want to have sex with her because “the whole town was in her”. Gay man talks and jokes with her, but when we meet a few weeks later in someone’s house he talks about how stupid she is.

The exact same thing happened to me a year or two back. There was a time when every second or third week there was a house party. A certain girl came to most of them and she also flirted with everyone. She made out with a friend’s friend who came from overseas. Her outfit was meant to emphasize the shape of her body. My friends wanted her. They also went on and on, angrily, about how a slut she is.

What’s wrong with that?

I once got into a debate with some people on this topic. This is the main arguement. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s just a difference of personal experience.

The girl is passive and the guy is active. The girl works hard on her looks, but she’s not active in the interaction. The guy’s role is to flirt, to start conversation, to lead. He’s supposed to ‘get’ her. She’s supposed to not ‘give up’ easily. The harder the guy works, the more valueable she is. It also means that if you can get a hard to get girl, you’re therefore much more valueable. The girl is the reward.

There is so much wrong with this narrative that I’m not sure where to begin.

First off, if this narrative is true and that’s how it’s supposed to be, what is rape? After all, rape is when the guy ‘gets’ the girl, only his method is force. Since rape is awful and part of why it’s wrong is the lack of consent, it means we need consent in this narrative. However, this narrative doesn’t include it.

What actually happens in real life is not that the guy ‘gets’ the girl, but that the girl agrees to have sex, or go out for coffe, or to an Incubus live show. The girl is an actual active agent who does more than just look good. The girl also filters out the guys she doesn’t want, just as the guy filters the girls he won’t chase after.

There is no ‘hard to get’ because the girl is not something you get. Sex is not something you get. Sex is a shared activity that’s supposed to be fun for both sides, in the same way going out for drinks or to see a movie is. We may have a higher standard for sex. We will have sex with less people than people we go to watch movies with, but it’s supposed to be a shared activity. The girl also wants to enjoy this.

This narrative is also harsh on guys. It puts a death sentence on socially inept guys. If you’re not good at initiating conversations and flirting, you will never enjoy sex or the company of women. Now, I don’t mind that there may a lot of guys who will be forever alone. It’ll be right if it’s because they’re just not attractive, not because of a social mindset that views their behavior as wrong.

If a guy is forever alone because no girl was ever attracted to him, that’s okay. If he’s forever alone because he’s afraid to initiate, and girls who are attracted to him won’t talk to him because ‘it’s the guy’s job’ then it’s society that makes us against our will.

Another important thing that the narrative doesn’t touch is morality. Is there any moral reason not to have sex? Is having sex with a random person hurts anyone? I’m leaving off bad sex – rape, people who have sex just to cope with loneliness and the like. I’m talking about a situation with two people just want to have sex and there’s nothing hidden.

I don’t see how this hurts anybody. It could be I’m missing something. Until then, I will hold that just as it’s okay for a woman to meet me as friends, it’s okay for her to have sex with me as friends.

Sadly, I have this cached thought often. I see these girls and ‘slut’ comes to my mind. There’s a much stronger thought there, though. I love to see girls who flirt with every guy and aren’t afraid to show their sexuality. It’s not just because I’m socially inept and it’s good for me. I wish we could all be this social. I wish we could enjoy our sexuality without guilt. Sadly, even women thing it’s wrong for other women to have sex. I hope the future will be better.

Rape is Beautiful: Dismantling a Crazy Idea

A true test of intelligence is how well you can handle a crazy idea. Calling a statement ‘crazy’ or ‘stupid’ is easy, but the obviousness can make us think we already know why. Without basis, without understanding why a statement is stupid, it’s all just name-calling. If an idea is so obviously wrong, it will take minimal effort to point out the holes. It’s not necessary to go through the emotional turmoil

Rape is beautiful, according to Kurcaba

Actually, that title is a bait. His statement doesn’t say that rape, in and of itself is beautiful. Rather, he thinks that it’s beautiful that a child could come out of it. He thinks that pregnancy is some sort of silver lining.

I find rape to be one of the most terrible things you can do to another human being. Me and Kurcaba don’t really disagree here. You might be able to salvage a discussion over his usage of the word ‘awful’, but there’s no need to create targets when they’re here.

Kurcaba’s view doesn’t stem from misogyny. It probably stems from a deep convinction of natalism. He views childbirth as something so positive that even if it’s caused by rape, it’s a good thing.

Sadly, this was only a line. I don’t know why exactly Kurcaba thinks that. Maybe he’s well-versed in natalist philosophy, or maybe he just takes it for granted. Either way, I disagree with him.

First off, you do not ‘give’ birth. You force it. The baby isn’t given the option of refusing. Even if he grows up, he doesn’t have the option of euthanasia – suicide is still viewed as irrational and something that must be prevented. If you value consent, then birth isn’t something you should value.

Then again, you have to exist first in order to consent. So let’s go from the position it’s okay to give birth, but is it always moral and good? Isn’t giving birth to a child when you can’t raise him, is basically throwing a child to suffering?

Even worse is when the child is the product of rape. The women is not necessarily ready to raise a child. She could be in a position in life that’s not friendly to children, like high school. Second, she will still suffer from the trauma. Third, the child will be a stronger reminder of the rapist.

It will hurt both the child and the woman. The woman will have extra work, on top of facing all the emotional baggage of being raped. The child will be with a mother who’s in a position very, very far from capable of raising a child.

There can always be exceptions, sure, but all signs point that a bith out of rape is a bad idea. It’s not a chance worth taking.