sniffleheim:

fairestcat:

bear-with-hat:

fairestcat:

I think it’s safe to say that Marvel’s been listening.

The latest Marvel NOW title to be announced is an ALL-FEMALE X-Men team of Jubliee, Kitty Pryde, Storm, Psylock, Rachel Summers and Rogue.

I am SO THERE.

Dammit, Marvel, I don’t need any more comics on my subscription list

Not disagreeing that this is cool, but even here on this cover the ladies are sexualized. One case of boobs and butt, two cases of legs spread wide apart (though one can be hand waved as crouching) and one boob window. Sigh.

And see, I see 6 women in costumes with pants, sleeves and in all but one case gloves, in other words the kind of practical outfits one might actually fight in.

In two cases these are brand-new costumes that replace costumes of the hi-cut leotard variety. I’ll grant you the boob window (although I’d wear the HELL out of that top), but in comparison to Storm’s costumes over the last decade+ it’s an amazing improvement.

In terms of boob and butt shots, I assume this is referring to Kitty, in which case I really disagree. I’ve seen a tendency lately to conflate any drawing of a woman from the side with the back-breaking boob and butt pose. Kitty is standing in the classic heroic pose, sideways to the page with her torso slightly turned towards the viewer.

The most problematic pose on this cover is definitely Betsy. Although at least of all the characters there she’s the one it would be most plausible to see sitting like that, as I think of her as the kind of character who uses her sexuality as a weapon.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, no, this drawing isn’t perfect, but it’s much closer on the spectrum to sexy and badass than to sexual and objectified. And, also, PANTS. OMG ALL THE PANTS.

Plus there’s the fact that all these women who can have outfits zipped right up have outfits that are zipped right up. If Adi Granov was drawing this cover, for example, they’d all be zipped up only to below the boobs. 

Also while it can be argued that Betsy’s pose is “problematic”, I wouldn’t class it that way. Her “You start it, you’ll get it” expression combined with the fact that her unsheathed sword is explicitly between the viewer and her vagina makes the pose so much less about HAHA HER LEGS ARE SPREAD and more about if you touch her it’ll be the last thing you do.

It’s actually quite cleverly done, particularly given her new characterisation as per Uncanny X-Force is angry revenge queen.

So totally agreeing here. In fact, i love that it shows that you can still play with sexuality without turning it into, say, new!52 Starfire, for instance.

(via madgeekyworld)

(via beanarie)

greenscrewdriver:

urlgrayhot:

strbrryseason:

01. because women can’t like action or science fiction
without there being any ~female~ things tied into it.

I hate the reboot. I do. I love it for some reasons but I hate it. Arg I really can’t. 

OUCH WOW WHAT FUCKING YEAR DO YOU THINK THIS IS LINDELOF

I FUCKING TRUSTED YOU MAN

~LOL HOW DO WE WOMEN? MAYBE WE SHOULD BABBY. YES BABBY GOOD IDEA, BRING WOMEN. ALL WOMEN BABBY. WOMEN DoN’T STORY OR CHARACTERS THAT IS FOR MANS. YES GOOD JOb WELL DONE MANS.

AND THIS WAS FIVE MINUTES INTO THE FIRST MEETING?

GENE AND MAJEL OUGHT TO COME THE FUCK BACK AND SLAP YOU ALL

You know what would have helped? Having more than one major female character in your goddamned movie.Especially one who didn’t have to play love interest to one of your dudes.

(via professorwolfjwolf)

gobeautiful:

alipop:

I remember when I was doing Rent and I was too thin, and I was doing that on purpose because I’m dying, I’m a HIV+ drug addict. I remember having to eat raw food and doing all this work to make sure I could stay thin… And I remember everyone asking me when I was doing press for the movie, “what did you do to get so thin? You looked great!” and I’m like, “I looked emaciated.”

It’s a form of violence in the way that we look at women and how we expect them to look and be, for… what’s sake? Not health, not survival, not enjoyment of life, but just so that you can look ‘pretty’.

I’m constantly telling girls all the time, “everything’s airbrushed, everything’s retouched, to the point of just that it’s never even asked, and none of us look like that.”

- Rosario Dawson

just gonna bring this back.

Especially with everyone saying the same thing to Anne Hathaway, who’s also been pointing out that her character is literally starving

(via beanarie)

peetaslongbun:

Oh hey look, a 12 year-old just grasped the main concepts of The Hunger Games more accurately than most media networks.

(via lezzerlee)

ladderax:

ussrosalind:

kstipetic:

Here is a thing I made to help you art.

Thank you Kristina! I understand how to art now. :D

I love it. 

(via kraken-queen)

rememberyes:

onyellowpaper:

How stripping off to play Helen of Troy on the London stage changed the way I feel about my body

It’s October. It’s dusk. It’s the second week of rehearsals for The Trojan Women, a modern version of Euripides’ tragedy in which I’m greedily playing three different roles: Cassandra, the maddened seer (a teenager in red-and-white striped long-johns); Andromache, trophy widow of the city’s most decorated soldier; and Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand dicks”.   

I’m standing in a dirty office in the old BBC training building on Marylebone High Street. There are dirty blue carpets on the floor and dirty great fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There are six other people here. They’re all dressed; I’m in a bath towel that I’m about to let fall to the floor. Nobody knows yet, but I’m not wearing any knickers.

Yesterday I did this scene topless but kept my leggings on. I’ve never had so much eye contact in my life. Today, I’ve resolved to go the whole hog. As I wait for my cue, I feel an utterly primal feeling of fear and wrongness that seems literally to be coming from between my legs. Christopher Haydon, our director, is expecting me to wait until we get into the theatre before I disrobe completely, but I know if I do it too many times with my pants on, I’ll never be able to take them off. I just want to get it over with. 

The towel drops. I don’t look down. I put my knickers on backwards. Afterwards we joke that where Chris was sitting, right in the line of fire, will be where I tell my dad to sit when he comes to the show. ‘Hi Dad,’ I wave at the plastic chair, sick to my stomach. ‘Hi.’

On the way home I text my friend Matthew from Morecambe and tell him what I did with my day. He texts back: “It’ll never be this bad again.” I don’t believe him, even for a second. I don’t feel relieved; I don’t feel brave; I feel like a sparrow that’s banged its head on the patio doors. But it turns out he’s right.

“I saw @louisebrealey’s pubes last night. The play was good too,” tweeted a critic from What’s On Stage magazine the day after Trojan Women opened. Although none of them have so far felt the need to share the experience on social media, a lot of other people besides this charming man have also seen my pubic hair in the past two weeks. In fact, more people have seen my pubic hair in the past two weeks than in the previous two decades combined.

When I first read Caroline Bird’s fierce, funny script and saw the stage direction: ‘Helen drops her towel; she is in no hurry to get dressed’, I felt a bit ill and wondered if the scene would have the same impact without the nudity. But Helen of Troy’s towel is not just a towel; it’s a gauntlet. She drops it to embarrass her mortal enemy; to show that – although her life’s on the line – she’s not going down without a fight. Crucially her nakedness also lets the audience see how bold, how beautiful she feels. It’s not about pubic hair. It’s about power.

Still. The idea of standing naked anywhere in public scared the shit out of me. The idea of standing naked in my own bedroom in front of someone who wants to have sex with me scared the shit out of me. The idea of standing naked in a theatre the size of a corner shop, five feet from the audience, whilst pretending to be Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman on the planet? That sounded like a very bad idea indeed.

“But you’re an actress!” said my best friend when I told her I was afraid. “Yes,” I said. “An actress, not a stripper.” I’ve been doing this for ten years and I’ve never even had to get down to my underwear. It’s not something you sign up for with your Equity card. (Although now I think about it, my bare buttocks were once pressed so hard against a very frosted glass door – in an awful thing with Martine McCutcheon – that the glass broke and my bum was, in both senses, cut.)

“But you’re slim!” she insisted. “You’ve nothing to worry about.” Ah. That old chestnut. Slim women don’t have insecurities about their bodies. Slim women don’t have cellulite or thread veins or knees that always seem to look grubby. Slim women aren’t allowed to be frightened about taking their clothes off in public. Because they are slim.

I have psoriasis. My belly and back sport red scaly patches, a bit like eczema. You can’t catch it. Loads of people have it. But it’s not pretty and it leaves a funny sort of leopard-print pattern on your skin when it deigns to go. From sixteen to eighteen I was covered in a crust from collarbone to calf. (It came back with a vengeance when I was homesick on my first telly job, a three-year contract with Casualty. The make-up artists on the show photographed it for their files. Desperate to leave, I went to see the man in charge and lifted up my top. I’m pretty sure that was the first time anyone had flashed him to get out of a job.)

 Like thousands of other women – and thousands of men – I also have stretch marks. I grew four inches one summer holiday and the skin on my 13-year-old bottom neglected to keep pace. Ever since I’ve had white lines that circle the slopes of my thighs like terracettes. Normally I don’t give them a second thought. But normally I’m not naked in public.

In the BBC series Sherlock I play Molly Hooper, the awkward, besotted morgue mouse with the Christmas-present bow in her hair; not Irene Adler, the feline dominatrix with the slash of a red mouth and the flawless arse. (I almost got to stand in as Irene at the read-through for A Scandal In Belgravia; but on the big day Lara Pulver was free after all.) My point is that when you act on television, you’re obliged to think about how you look in objective terms. It saves time, and tears, because how they say you look is how they say you’re cast. So I learned very early on that I’m not “telly beautiful”. I’m “girl-next-door”. I’m “quirky”.  

The theatre, though, is a different world. Actors pretend on stage, audiences pretend in their seats and, together, if everyone stops disbelieving hard enough for long enough, we might magic up something amazing. In the theatre I can be a nine year old on a swing; I can be a sex-mad teenager in platform heels; I can be from Sunderland.

In the theatre, the logic runs, I can be Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. My 69-year-old friend George, not realising we were doing an update of a Greek tragedy, tried to help: “It’ll be fine, you’ll be wearing a mask.”  

In the end it was fine. I realised playing Helen of Troy was impossible, like playing the idea of a woman. So I ditched the surname. In my head, I’m just plain Helen.

Horror films scare me witless but I absolutely love them. It’s the same story with acting: I find it frightening but the fear makes me feel; it makes me feel alive. And while you’re screaming your head off, you’re definitely not dead. The prospect of standing in front of people with nothing on and feeling great about it was alien, horrific, and completely intoxicating.

I really wanted to know what it felt like to be that woman. Not the psoriatic sixteen year old who looked in the mirror and saw The Singing Detective. Not the apple-cheeked student who spent all three years at university with a jumper tied round her waist to hide her bum (they were the dark days of high-waisted jeans). And not the actress who, last week, finally put two books on cellulite in the recycling. Not her. Not me.

Last night an elderly audience member asked me after the show if I thought I’d given away something precious by letting people see my body. I didn’t know how to answer her, but it made me think. The fact is, I’ve gained way more than I’ve lost. I stand there every night, totally naked, with people gawping or giggling or gasping and looking away, and I feel okay about it. I feel good about it. Some nights I even feel bold and beautiful. I do, however, feel a bit uneasy about how I got there.

 Exposing myself to 75 strangers a night has made me think a lot about what psychologist Susie Orbach calls  “body terror”, the chip in your brain that tells you your body isn’t good enough but if you buy this cream, eat this thing, do this exercise, you can look like Rhianna and you will be happy. The idea that to be beautiful you must have one specific body: poreless skin, endless legs, tits that would get stuck in a champagne glass.

I grew my underarm hair for the occasion because I wanted to be naked on my terms. Or it was something else to hide behind. Or I wanted to make a point, that you could be beautiful with hairy arm-pits. I don’t know, really. The thing is, women feel like we have a choice about shaving, but we don’t. Not really. It’s not any sort of real choice. It’s a choice between looking normal and making most potential lovers gag. All but one man I told was openly appalled. My ex said, ‘That’s disgusting, you’ll look like a Minotaur.’ He’s a funny man. I was nervous about it. Up to the last minute I wasn’t at all sure that I wasn’t going to shave it off in the secret shower behind the loo roll-holder in The Gate’s toilet on press night. But a weird thing happened: I started to like it. When you can see my pubic hair as well, it looks kind of great – like it matches. Like a hat and gloves. Like it’s meant to be there.  

We all know the bleached, waxed, sprayed, toned, sliced, photo-shopped people we see every day aren’t real. It’s not how we are. It’s not how we’re meant to be. It’s rubbish. But it’s insidious rubbish. It’s hard not to want to look, well, better. And, as an actress, I’m part of the problem. Actors are illusionists. We feel like we have to be; we get work based on what we look like. I know which angle I look best at. It’s the angle I present to photographers. It’s the angle I’m presenting in the photo with this piece.

I don’t want the young women who look up to me because I’m a feminist and I’m in a TV show they love to feel like they somehow fall short. So I should have stood on stage as Helen of Troy, flaws and all, and thumbed my nose at body terror and body fascism. But I couldn’t; I just wasn’t brave enough.

I knew that to do it, I’d have to pull off the mother and father of all confidence tricks. I’d have to treat my psoriasis with steroids and hope they worked; I’d have to try and tone my thighs; and, if the lighting looked like a Tube train or a shop changing-room, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

In the end it involved a lot of pluck, a little plucking, fourteen hours on a Pilates machine, a pink spotlight pointing at my breasts and actually pumping up the fitness ball my mum bought me one long-ago Christmas. (I opened the box. It came with a free exercise VHS.) In the minute and a half it takes to do a quick change from an distraught, weeping Andromache into La Belle Hélène, our stage manager Jess sluices body oil on my back in as non-erotic a fashion as possible while I smear make-up over my scars and cake on mascara.   

It’s getting easier. I’m not sure if the audience can still see the lines on my legs and the leopard spots on my belly and the dimples on my bottom. But the more times I stand out there, the more normal it feels to be naked and not shy; the closer to Helen’s boldness I come; and the more it doesn’t matter if they can. Maybe at some point I’ll even look down.

At some point I should also probably tell my dad I get naked in this play. He’s coming tomorrow. ‘Hi, Dad, if you’re reading this. Hi. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when to close your eyes.’

The rest of you, you take your chances.

A shorter version of this article appeared in The Times newspaper on December 11th 2012 

Copyright Louise Brealey 2012

All photographs are Copyright Mary Turner 2012 (please credit if you reblog)

Louise Brealey might be the one completely likable member of the Sherlock cast. I love her more than most of my family.

Louise Brealey is amazing and i lurve her.

dementes:

FHM, Virgin and Zoo: The 12 Days of Misogyny - Comment - Voices - The Independent

Sexism has had a truly outstanding run over the past 12 days, with retailers, magazines and businesses falling over one another to demean, insult and offend women in the run up to Christmas.

FHM kicked things off with a fashion feature  in which it told men “it’s never acceptable to wear your girlfriend/mother/victim’s socks”. Then, just as they thought they had the market cornered in normalizing gender based violence, enter Virgin Mobile with its advent calendar website gimmick, featuring an image of a man covering a woman’s eyes from behind with a gift box held in his other hand. The caption read: “The Gift of Christmas Surprise…Necklace? Or Chloroform?”

Keen not to miss out on the action, Zoo Magazine muscled in with a picture on its Facebook page showing a model split in two at the waist, with readers asked whether they preferred the top or bottom half. Reasons given by men in the comments for choosing the lower half included “cause two holes are better than one”, and “cause it doesn’t have the ability to have its own fucking opinion”. Others specified the top half because “it can still make me a sandwich”, whilst one commenter suggested that if one hole wasn’t enough, you could just make another one.

Finally a woman sent us a picture of a greetings card she’d found on sale for 13-year-old girls, emblazoned with the words “If you had a rich boyfriend, he’d give you diamonds and rubies. Well maybe next year you will – when you’ve bigger boobies!”

Predictably, our highlighting of these issues, all of which have now been officially apologised for, met with the usual stream of “what’s the big deal/get a life/protest about something that matters” responses. Is it really a problem if FHM sticks a rape joke in the bottom corner of an article about what socks to wear? Is it a big deal if a greetings card tells 13-year-old girls they need to grow their “boobies” to catch a rich man? Should we be concentrating on more important things than Zoo splitting a woman in half and musing over which bit is best? What does it matter if Virgin Mobile runs an offensive ‘joke’ that seems to make light of rape and domestic violence?

As several people pointed out, it matters because of the tragic case just last year of a man who used chloroform to rape his new wife after she refused to have sex with him. It matters because we are reaching the end of a year in which we have seen what can only be described as a torrent of reports of sexual assaults, paedophilia and abuse going back decades, many of them excused or ignored precisely because of a culture that made light of and normalized such incidents. But regardless of whether such events had hit the headlines recently, it matters because of the twelve thousand women whose stories we have collected this year, poignantly, heartbreakingly testifying to the real-life consequences of the situations and crimes these adverts mock and excuse.

Think that greetings card is just a harmless joke? Tell it to the 15-year-old girl who wrote “I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing.”

Think the FHM ‘victim’ joke was just a ‘banterous’ gag? It wouldn’t sound funny to the woman who told us “I have become so used to cat-calls, offensive jokes and even being followed that it doesn’t really register… I’ve been trapped by guys who have pushed me up against walls or grabbed my wrists in order to get attention. You can’t go out without being grabbed.” It is precisely the normalization of the idea of female victims in mainstream culture like this that made the same woman continue: “Even writing this now I am embarrassed because I feel like I’m making a big deal about nothing.”

And no, the Zoo magazine ‘split her into pieces to dehumanize her even further as you objectify her’ and Virgin’s ‘wouldn’t it be completely hilarious if he incapacitated his wife so he could do whatever he wants with her’ gags aren’t ‘lighthearted’ or ‘harmless’ either. Think dehumanizing women in the public sphere, portraying them as sex objects and victims of men and simply vessels to be fucked or abused or turned into a great big joke is completely harmless? Tell it to the office worker whose boss referred to her by asking a colleague “if big tits has come in yet”. Tell it to the woman who was asked by her boss in front of 30 colleagues “If I ‘wax my crack’”. Tell it to the girl of 10 who was walking home from school when “two older boys said ‘show us your tits’”. Tell it to the child of 13 who didn’t even understand when two men in a white van asked her if she had “a tight pussy”. Tell it to the woman who reported being groped by strangers “at least once a week and often much more, regardless of what I wear, where I am, how I behave.” Tell it to the woman who declined to talk to a group of men and was pursued down the street by them, shouting “rape!” Tell it to schoolgirl who was “beaten by her boyfriend” and whose “friends asked her if she was going to stay with him until after the prom so she’d have a date”.

These women might never hit the headlines. But imagine telling it to every single one of them, and have a long, hard think about what they might say, before you come telling me it’s not a big deal.

fozmeadows:

Image taken from tumblr.

Recently, SFF author Tansy Rayner Roberts wrote an excellent post debunking the idea that women did nothing interesting or useful throughout history, and that trying to write fictional stories based on this premise of feminine insignificance is therefore both inaccurate and offensive. To quote:

“History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.

But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider “primary sources” simply didn’t think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

This does not in any way mean that the female contribution to society was in fact less interesting or important, or complicated, simply that history—the process of writing down and preserving of the facts, not the facts/events themselves—was looking the other way.”

The relevance of this statement to the creation of SFF stories cannot be understated. Time and again, we see fans and creators alike defending the primacy of homogeneous – which is to say, overwhelmingly white, straight and male – stories on the grounds that anything else would be intrinsically unrealistic. Contrary to how it might seem at first blush, this is not a wholly ironic complaint: as I’ve recently had cause to explain elsewhere, the plausibility of SFF stories is derived in large part from their ability to make the impossible feel realistic. A fictional city might be powered by magic and the dreams of dead gods, but it still has to read like a viable human space and be populated by viable human characters. In that sense, it’s arguable that SFF stories actually place a greater primacy on realism than straight fiction, because they have to work harder to compensate for the inclusion of obvious falsehoods. Which is why there’s such an integral relationship between history and fantasy: our knowledge of the former frequently underpins our acceptance of the latter. Once upon a time, we know, there really were knights and castles and quests, and maps whose blank spaces warned of dragons and magic. That being so, a medieval fantasy novel only needs to convince us that the old myths were true; that wizards and witches existed, and that monsters really did populate the wilds. Everything else that’s dissonant with modern reality – the clothes, the customs, the social structure – must therefore constitute a species of historical accuracy, albeit one that’s liberally seasoned with poetic license, because that vague, historical blueprint is what we already have in our heads.

But what happens when our perception of historical accuracy is entirely at odds with real historical accuracy? What happens when we mistake our own limited understanding of culture – or even our personal biases – for universal truths? What happens, in other words, when we’re jerked out of a story, not because the fantastic elements don’t make sense, but because the social/political elements strike us as being implausible on the grounds of unfamiliarity?

The answer tends to be as ugly as it is revealing: that it’s impossible for black, female pirates to exist anywhere, thatpixies and shapeshifters are inherently more plausible as a concept than female action heroes who don’t get raped, and that fairy tale characters as diverse as Mulan, Snow White and Captain Hook can all live together in the modern world regardless of history and canon, but a black Lancelot in the same setting is grossly unrealistic. On such occasions, the recent observation of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz that “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s 1/3rd elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they (white people) think we’re taking over” is bitingly, lamentably accurate. And it’s all thanks to a potent blend of prejudice and ignorance: prejudice here meaning the conviction that deliberately including POC, female and/or LGBTQ characters can only ever be a political action (and therefore an inherently suspicious one), and ignorance here meaning the conviction that the historical pervasiveness of sexism, racism and homophobia must necessarily mean that any character shown to surpass these limitations is inherently unrealistic.

Let’s start with the latter claim, shall we?

Because as Roberts rightly points out, there’s a significant difference between history as written and history as happened, with a further dissonance between both those states and history as it’s popularly perceived. For instance: female pirates – and, indeed, female pirates of colour – are very much an historical reality. The formidable Ching Shih, a former prostitute, commanded more than 1800 ships and 80,000 pirates, took on the British empire and was successful enough to eventually retire. There were female Muslim pirates and female Irish pirates – female pirates, in fact, from any number of places, times and backgrounds. But because their existence isn’t routinely taught or acknowledged, we assume them to be impossible. The history of women in the sciences is plagued by similar misconceptions, their vital contributions belittled, forgotten and otherwise elided for so many years that even now, the majority of them continue to be overlooked. Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie are far from being exceptions to the rule: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Leise Meitner and Emmy Noether all contributed greatly to our understanding of science, as did countless others. And in the modern day, young female scientists abound despite the ongoing belief in their rarity: nineteen-year-old Aisha Mustafa has patented a new propulsion system for spacecraft, while a young group of Nigerian schoolgirls recently invented a urine-powered generator. Even the world’s first chemist was a woman.

And nor is female achievement restricted to the sciences. Heloise d’Argenteuil was accounted one of the brightest intellectuals of her day; Bessie Coleman was both the first black female flyer and the first African American to hold an international pilot’s licence; Nellie Bly was a famed investigative journalist, not only travelling around the world solo in record time (in which adventure she raced against and beat another female reporter, Elizabeth Bisland), but uncovering the deplorable treatment of inmates at Bedlam Asylum by going undercover as a patient. Sarah Josephine Baker was a famous physician known for tracking down Typhoid Mary, tirelessly fighting poverty and, as a consequence, drastically improving newborn care. And in the modern day, there’s no shortage of female icons out fighting racism, sexism, homophobia and injustice despite the limitations society wants to impose on them: journalistMarie Colvin, who died this year reporting on the Syrian uprising; Burmese politician and activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent some 15 years as a political prisoner; fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban for her advocacy of female education; and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman, who jointly won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for their work in support of women’s rights.

But what about historical women in positions of leadership – warriors, politicians, powerbrokers? Where do they fit in?  The ancient world provides any number of well-known examples – Agrippina the Younger, Cleopatra, Boudica,Queen Bilquis of Sheba, Nefertiti – but they, too, are far from being unusual: alongside the myriad female soldiersthroughout history who disguised themselves as men stand the Dahomey Amazons, the Soviet Night Witches, thefemale cowboys of the American west and the modern Asgarda of Ukraine; the Empress Dowager Cixi, Queen Elizabeth I and Ka’iulani all ruled despite opposition, while a wealth of African queens, female rulers and rebels have had their histories virtually expunged from common knowledge. At just twenty years old, Juana Galan successfully lead the women of her village against Napoleon’s troops, an action which ultimately caused the French to abandon her home province of La Mancha. Women played a major part in the Mexican revolution, too, much like modern women across Africa and the Middle East, while the Irish revolutionary, suffragette and politician Constance Markievicz, when asked to provide other women with fashion advice, famously replied that they should “Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank, and buy a revolver.” More recently still, in WWII, New Zealander Nancy Wake served as a leading French resistance fighter: known to the Gestapo as the White Mouse, she once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands and took command of a maquis unit when their male commander died in battle. Elsewhere during the same conflict, Irena Sendler survived both torture and a Nazi death sentence to smuggle some 2,500 Jewish children safely out of the Warsaw ghetto, for which she was nominated for a Nobel peace prize in 2007.

And what of gender roles and sexual orientation – the various social, romantic and matrimonial mores we so frequently assume to be static, innate and immutable despite the wealth of information across biology and history telling us the opposite? Consider the modern matriarchy of Meghalaya, where power and property descend through matrilineal lines and men are the suffragettes. Consider the longstanding Afghan practice of Bacha Posh, where girl children are raised as boys, or the sworn virgins of Albania – women who live as and are legally considered to be men, provided they remain chaste. Consider the honoured status of Winkte and two-spirit persons in various First Nations cultures, and the historical acceptance of both the Fa’afafine of Samoa and the Hijra of India and South-East Asia. Consider the Biblical relationship described in the Book of Samuel between David and Jonathan of Israel, the inferred romance between Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, and the openly gay emperors of the Han Dynasty - including Emperor Ai of Han, whose relationship with Dong Xian gave rise to the phrase ‘the passion of the cut sleeve’. Consider the poetry of Sappho, the relationship between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, the tradition of normative, female-female relationships in Basotho, and the role of the Magnonmaka in Mali – nuptial advisers whose teach women how to embrace and enjoy their sexuality in marriage.

And then there’s the twin, misguided beliefs that Europe was both wholly white and just as racially prejudiced as modern society from antiquity through to the Middle Ages – practically right up until the present day. Never mind that no less than three Arthurian Knights of the Round Table – Sir Palamedes, Sir Safir and Sir Segwarides – are canonically stated to be Middle Eastern, or the fact that people of African descent have been present in Europe since classical times; and not just as slaves or soldiers, but as aristocrats. The network of trade routes known collectively asthe Silk Road that linked Europe with parts Africa, the Middle East, India and Asia were established as early as 100 BC; later, black Africans had a visible, significant, complex presence in Europe during the Renaissance, while much classic Greek and Roman literature was only preserved thanks to the dedication of Arabic scholars during the Abbasid Caliphate, also known as the Islamic Golden Age, whose intellectuals were also responsible for many advances in medicine, science and mathematics subsequently appropriated and claimed as Western innovations. Even in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, it’s possible to find examples of prominent POC in Europe: Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, was of Creole descent, as was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the famous British composer, while Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole was honoured alongside Florence Nightingale for her work during the Crimean War.

I could go on. As exhaustive as this information might seem, it barely scratches the surface. But as limited an overview as these paragraphs present, they should still be sufficient to make one very simple point: that even in highly prejudicial settings supposedly based on real human societies, trying to to argue that women, POC and/or LGBTQ persons can’t so much as wield even small amounts of power in the narrative, let alone exist as autonomous individuals without straining credulity to the breaking point, is the exact polar opposite of historically accurate writing.

Which leads me back to the issue of prejudice: specifically, to the claim that including such characters in SFF stories, by dint of contradicting the model of straight, white, male homogeneity laid down by Tolkien and taken as gospel ever since, is an inherently political – and therefore suspect – act. To which I say: what on Earth makes you think that the classic SWM default is apolitical? If it can reasonably argued that a character’s gender, race and sexual orientation have political implications, then why should that verdict only apply to characters who differ from both yourself and your expectations? Isn’t the assertion that straight white men are narratively neutral itself a political statement, one which seeks to marginalise as exceptional or abnormal the experiences of every other possible type of person on the planet despite the fact that straight white men are themselves a global minority? And even if a particular character was deliberately written to make a political point, why should that threaten you? Why should it matter that people with different beliefs and backgrounds are using fiction to write inspirational wish-fulfillment characters for themselves, but from whose struggle and empowerment you feel personally estranged? That’s not bad writing, and as we’ve established by now, it’s certainly not bad history – and particularly not when you remember (as so many people seem to forget) that fictional cultures are under no obligation whatsoever to conform to historical mores. It just means that someone has managed to write a successful story that doesn’t consider you to be its primary audience – and if the prospect of not being wholly, overwhelmingly catered to is something you find disturbing, threatening, wrong? Then yeah: I’m going to call you a bigot, and I probably won’t be wrong.

Point being, I’m sick to death of historical accuracy being trotted out as the excuse du jour whenever someone freaks out about the inclusion of a particular type of character in SFF, because the ultimate insincerity behind the claim is so palpable it’s practically a food group. I’m yet to see someone who objects to the supposed historic inaccuracy of, for instance, female cavalry regiments (which – surprise! - is totally a thing) raise similarly vehement objections to any other aspect of historically suspicious worldbuilding, like longbows in the wrong period or medical knowledge being too far advanced for the setting. The reason for this is, I suspect, simple: that most people with sufficient historical knowledge to pick up on issues like nonsensical farming techniques, the anachronistic presence of magnets in ancient settings and corsetry in the wrong era also know about historical diversity, and therefore don’t find its inclusion confronting. Almost uniformly, in fact, it seems as though such complaints of racial and sexual inaccuracy have nothing whatsoever to do with history and everything to do with a foggy, bastardised and ultimately inaccurate species of faux-knowledge gleaned primarily – if not exclusively – from homogeneous SFF, RPG settings, TV shows and Hollywood. And if that’s so, then no historic sensibilities are actually being affronted, because none genuinely exist: instead, it’s just a reflexive way of expressing either conscious or subconscious outrage that someone who isn’t white, straight and/or male is being given the spotlight.

Because ultimately, these are SFF stories: narratives set in realms that don’t and can’t exist. And if you still want to police the prospects of their inhabitants in line with a single, misguided view of both human history and human possibility, then congratulations: you have officially missed the point of inventing new worlds to begin with.

h

scifigrl47:

I have these little spikes of female rage sometimes.

I have these little moments of, ‘really, we still have to listen to this, really?’  They’re usually quick.  They’re usually gone fast. 

I do wonder, however, why it seems like every single male I follow thinks that the “Hawkeye Initiative” has gone ‘too far.’  I don’t want to point out posts, because I respect every single one of these guys.  And honestly, I wouldn’t be following them if I didn’t want them to follow me.  I like their views, they’re definately entitled to their opinions.  I don’t think any of them are being made ‘uncomfortable’ by the intent of the redraws.

But when as a group a rational, intelligent, fandom savy group of guys goes, “well, it’s defeating the purpose if you sexualize men instead of sexualizing women,” I kind of wonder what they’re seeing that I’m not.

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(via amyamychan)