L.J. Writes

I'm not a fan of Sherlock. The show has clever references and is visually well-crafted, but Watson's Throwing Off the Disability in the first episode turned me off big time and I have seen little from subsequent, passing views that there is anything there to interest me.

Nevertheless, when my visiting mother-in-law wanted us to watch The Abominable Bride special I went along with it. Well actually I was like, "Wait, how about Suffragette?" at the last minute but my husband had paid the VOD system by then, so The Abominable Bride it was. Besides, it turned out that our subscription doesn't carry Sufragette anyway.

( Spoilers for The Abominable Bride )

The Abominable Bride left me fairly confirmed in my opinions. (Which is what experience usually does to opinions anyway.) Sherlock is a slick, smart show that draws a lot of drama from the relationships between its well-defined principal characters. It doesn't go much deeper than that, though. This holiday special, like the show itself, doesn't have much in the way of self-awareness or moral authority, and that in a nutshell is why Sherlock doesn't interest me.

I read the Pern series only in part and badly out of order. A long time ago, and we're talking around two decades, I found Dragonsdawn and Dragonquest in a bookstore and read them one after the other. I found them a) to have some good ideas, b) boring in the execution, and b) skeevy as hell in places.

( Discussions of rape and reproductive coercion. )

Fast forward to the present, where chordatesrock got a bout of nostalgia about the series and asked if I wanted to read the series, in proper order this time. I decided to see if that made things better, and hoo boy. If I thought the abusive relationship dynamic in Dragonsdawn was bad, Dragonflight would deliver much, much worse.

Following on the discussion of the highly rapey Sky Maiden and Woodsman story, I looked through my niece's copy to see it for myself. It was just a standard telling, but there was a page at the end of the book talking about the "lessons" for children. I read it, wondering if it put the problematic elements of the story in perspective.

I don't have the book with me anymore, but here's the general gist of the note:

( Rage. So much rage. )

This is just one book among thousands, of course, and it does not by itself create culture. I wouldn't even care if it weren't part of a consistent message we are bombarded with, over and over from all directions. There is no need to censor the media we consume, but there is a need to question them. The only harm is in pretending that stories told to children are apolitical, because acceptance of the status quo as "harmless" is itself political.

In a case of synchronicity, chordatesrock put up a post about lazy genderbends just as I was searching out title ideas for a series of genderbent ATLA short fics. (This is an idea I played around with in an earlier post about genderbent fanart.)

I thought it would be cool to quote some sort of poetry in the title, so I started looking for gender imagery in poetry. I learned that androgyny was a major recurring motif in the poems of William Blake, including notably Jerusalem, where I found this promising line:

For the Male is a Furnace of beryll : the Female is a golden Loom.

So I thought of something like "Golden Furnace" or "Loom of Beryl" or both to signal the switch, but neither seems evocative enough. "Gold and Beryl" might be workable if I can't think of anything else, though it's a bit obscure. i don't think most readers would associate gold with the feminine and beryl with the masculine without having the reference explained. "Hammer and loom" is also a contrast that comes up, but ends up feeling vaguely Communistic as a title. Or maybe abstract the imagery a little, like "The Fire and the Weave?" Except, um, fire has a pretty specific meaning in my chosen universe. "Spear and Mirror?"

( ARGH )

So at current my title candidates are:

1. Single Nature's Double Name
2. Of Beryl and Gold
3. Valley Under Heaven's Arc

...None of which feels right. Maybe I'm overthinking (and over-researching) this. Maybe I should keep reading the Dao De Jing to see what else I find, or go with something more obvious. This is the hardest I've ever thought about a title and it's frustrating.

Last week GQ ran an article about the MRA conference that took place last summer. The responses in the comments section were predictably hilarious, with MRAs turning out en masse to cry about how unfairly they were portrayed as creeps and cranks.

And you'd think, since they're out to defend themselves in a public forum, that they'd actually succeed in making themselves look better than the article did, right? Yet somehow they managed to make themselves look even worse.

But then again this is the "movement" whose flagship site has Janet Bloomfield as their communications director: Janet "JudgyBitch" Bloomfield, the woman who managed to get herself booted off Twitter. I repeat: Their communications director cannot hold onto a Twitter account. That should give you an idea of how good MRAs are at presenting themselves as good and reasonable people.

Amid this stewing mess, one comment caught my eye because it was purportedly about facts. It was by Alison Tieman, a "Honey Badger" (woman who supports MRAs) mentioned in the main article. She was citing a bunch of rape statistics to argue that rape was not a gendered phenomenon and that men are raped at the same if not higher rates as women.

( It just goes downhill from there )

Remember, that was just one set of statistics. This is just a tiny look into the contortions MRAs use to bolster their vision of reality. And when you point out the ways they're wrong, they throw out wild speculation as fact and/or engage in distraction and bullying tactics. Or they accuse you of rape because, well, why not? After all the point for them is not the facts but maintaining their worldview at all costs. I feel almost sorry for them, that they have to resort to these tactics to have any peace of mind.