In reponse to a thread going around on Tumblr about young girls being told to cover up, this atheist was actually moved to spouting Bible verses. This interpretation was in a book my mom had about a feminist reading of the Bible, though I have, let's say, spiced it up a little.

"But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." (Matthew 5:28-29)

This is a revolutionary passage because it upends the idea of the woman (or child, dear God) as a temptress. It's a giant middle finger to the conventional "wisdom" that it's a woman's job to keep herself modest and out of the way of men because men can't be held responsible for their own gaze, urges, and actions once they have been "tempted" by the sight of a female body.

Here Jesus is saying, basically, no, fuck that and fuck you. You've committed adultery and you're the pervert if you've looked on somebody with as an object for your sexual gratification. And no, that's not the same thing as feeling an attraction, I'm talking about what you're doing with that attraction--as something they're doing to you, making it their fault and giving yourself license to treat them as dirty and wrong.

What's that, you have no control over where you look? You have no control over your thoughts and actions? Why then, you're saying your eye is damning you to hell because no, you do not get an exemption from basic personal responsibility by virtue of owning a dick and if your eye does something, news flash, that's you.

But if your eye literally has a will of its own and it's making you sin, then why not cut it the fuck out, man? Yeah, I mean literally. You talk about it like it's demonically possessed and not under your dominion. Well, are you going to let a part of you drag you down to hell? Rip it out! I could say the same for a few other body parts, too. Better missing a few bits in heaven than all of you in hell, eh?

Do not give me this nonsense about having no control over yoursef. Take some responsibility and grow the hell up.

This is anti-purity culture, anti-dress code, anti-slut shaming, anti-body policing rhetoric. Each person takes responsibility for their own thoughts and actions, and no one gets to use the whiny excuse that another person made them act inappropriately just by existing.

Jesus fucking Christ, people, it's been 2,000 years. Let's get our act together.

I have been meaning to do a Mad Max: Fury Road post approximately forever since I've seen it (and you won't convince me there was a whole world, history, and civilization before it came out), but everything kept coming out as FTBRRLT MUST MARRY IT AND HAVE ITS BABIEZZZ. The only halfway coherent thoughts I got down were in a discussion with overlithe, so I decided to repurpose my comments into a blog post.

My thoughts on Fury Road are many and tangled, but one aspect among many is that it took and demolished common sexist tropes. Here are three major ones I can think of:

( Spoilers, of course )

These three, Plucky Girl, Damsel in Distress, and Women in the Fridge are the major tropes that Mad Max: Fury Road did an excellent job of dissecting along with a whole host of toxic assumptions about women and men. The best part is, as Charlize Theron (Furiosa) said, the movie didn't even have a feminist agenda; the story is feminist by way of being honest and truthful, simply by presenting women as people. I've read stories with feminist agendas and they tend to be dreary and moralizing as agenda-driven fiction tends to be. (Legend of the Last Princess, though a concept, is representative of the type.) The latest installment of Mad Max is driven not by agenda but by truth, and that's why it is among the best feminist films of all time.

Today a guy who is not a client but discussed a few details of his case with me called from a break in his police interrogation, saying how he was being pressured to confess an incident he hardly remembered. I gave a bog-standard answer, that he shouldn't confess to anything without speaking to a lawyer. He went back and forth on this and I listened with half an ear while playing Candy Crush. Then he admitted he'd  called me to calm himself down and not for actual legal advice.

There was a time when that would have warmed my heart. I'd have been thrilled at being useful and appreciated. Instead I felt irritation that he's calling up a lawyer he never retained or paid as though I were a friend, like I'm just waiting around in the middle of the workday to soothe his fears and tell him everything's going to be all right.

I'm not sure why I no longer act like a beaten dog around perfect strangers. Maybe it's because I have better boundaries now that I've been freed from the idea that my value lies in serving and pleasing others. Maybe it's the experience of being similarly used for support and knowledge by people who don't reciprocate. Being in a stable relationship may have helped me gain actual self-respect, too. Maybe it's just a function of getting older and ornerier.

Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, I'm glad of this change. It doesn't mean I'll never be exploited again, but with these emotional signals in place I'm likelier to avoid exploitative situations or leave them.

Valentine's day was lazy and wonderful. I spent it with the spouse doing nothing productive or glamorous, sleeping in, playing the mobile game Princess Rush side by side (ironically it's a game about fairy-tale princesses beating up on Prince Charming), and eating homemade canafe for dinner while watching Deep Space Nine. As I once told a friend, marriage for me is like having a sleepover every night with the best friend I ever had. I am grateful every day that I have such a wonderful relationship with such a wonderful person.

The awesome that is our marriage is a direct result of my husband and I having feminist beliefs. I use "feminism" here in the primary dictionary sense of gender-egalitarian thought. It also works in the sense Mary Shear wrote, "the radical notion that women are people." I couldn't have married my husband, nor would our marriage be so happy, if it weren't for this idea. Let me count the ways:

( Possibility, Flexibility, Freedom, and Humanity )

These are the gifts feminist thought gave us in our relationship: The possibility of a relationship starting int he first place, flexibility in assigning family roles, freedom to be ourselves, and the ability to relate to each other as human beings. Of all the reasons for me to be a feminist, this is the most selfish and the most fulfilling, that I was able to muster the courage to make a lifelong commitment to the love of my life, and to shape our lives in a way that brings us both joy. We are two imperfect people trying to build our lives in a way that works for us, and we are helped every day in that effort by the radical notion that we are both human beings.

Discussions of abuse, trauma, and mental illness follow.

I read an article about human trafficking in Texas a couple days back when a section on the mental health issues of trafficked sex workers caught my eye. The first condition mentioned was dissociative identity disorder (DID), which makes sense because prostitutes as a group suffer high rates of child sexual abuse and incest (85% and 70% respectively in the study cited). This kind of severe and repeated abuse in childhood is a leading cause of DID, so it makes sense that prostitutes would have high instances of DID. I'm not only talking about pre-prostitution trauma, either. As stated in the linked rapeis.org page the average age of entry into prostitution is 13, meaning many sex workers are still children.

( Child abuse, rape and more below the fold )

A couple of days ago I got an anonymous comment on an old post about sucky historical fiction. It's certainly not the first negative comment I've received--I have received some, especially on the Zutara posts--but it is the first, as far as I remember, that takes me to task for having a "typical feminist vibe." How dare I, for instance, say a book was ill-written just because it has a racist character? (I didn't.) Why did I think it was necessary to make an ethical and feminist criticism of a rape scene written for erotic enjoyment? (...Seriously?) And the greatest sin of all: How could I unfairly expect historical accuracy of comics, and be dumb enough to think comics are a source for historical research? (LOLWHUT NO THIS is my research, bitch.)

It was a busy two days watching Legend of Korra and working, so today I finally got around to dishing out the verbal whumping that the comment so richly deserved. I don't know how the anon found that particular post, since I have reviewed much more prominent works that some fraction of English speakers are actually likely to consume, but better not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Most of all, I wonder if this means that MRAs and assorted anti-feminists have discovered my journal and I can expect our anon to bring along friends to yell at the mean feminist. I already directed the anon to my feminism tag so they can get properly outraged. I feel like I've been preparing for this my whole life, there's so much MRA bait here. How about a book review using the dread feminist construct, rape culture? The one where I pillory a romantically-minded white knight who is no doubt a Nice Guy(TM) all around? Or the one where I criticize the rhetorical tactics of the leading MRA outlet A Voice for Men?

Could I have I finally hit the big time, at least with disgruntled sexists? One can only hope--MRAs are always so hilarious to spar with.

I read a Guernica article called La Milonguera which was about the author's experience living in Buenos Aires and rooming with a milonguera, female tango dancer whom the author gave the pseudonym Romina.

I found the piece itself sort of boring and pointless, to be honest. At places it captured the atmosphere of the city's tango scene in interesting ways, and the way Romina lost her tango career to an accident was genuinely sad. From there, though, it was just one thing after another without any clear point or context and lost steam toward the end.

( DO NOT WANT )

So try as I might to view Christopher's comment in the best light, I still find his white-knight complex about Romina disturbing. This probably has roots in my own background: My father's sincere and overwhelming desire to protect me from all harm, well into adolescence and now adulthood, all too often led to verbal and emotional abuse when I wouldn't comply with his demands and, in his eyes, endangered myself. The need to protect someone who isn't in need of it, the urge to see someone who is fully capable as being helpless--those are all too often code for a need to control the person, and I know not to trust the offer of such "protection."

I'm reading Story Engineering by Larry Brooks--almost finished it, in fact. The good news is I found it pretty helpful. I'll probably review it later on, and will use the method described in the book to outline my novels in progress.

The bad news is that the book has its share of fails when it comes to sex and relationship in stories. One of these moments involves Thelma and Louise and the others involve romance in fiction. I figured I'd get my complaints out of the way before I discuss the rest of the book later on.

( I don't think that expression means what you think it means )

The point of this post isn't to say "Larry Brooks is a terrible human being and no one should read his books!" In fact, I started out by saying his book is pretty good. Rather, this post is my attempt to unpack my own reactions. Unless I work through them thoroughly I'm going to find the ignored feelings of fear and anger coming out in other, sneaky ways, so I wanted to confront and deal with them first to give the book a fair shake.

Also, tempting as it may be when I'm feeling angry or threatened, I don't think Larry Brooks is a bad guy, either. I don't know him, but he seems to love his wife and is in most likelihood a decent guy like most men are. It would be so much easier if sexism were a matter of a few "bad apples" as some would like to believe. Instead, sexism is a hard problem precisely because it's a systematic, not personal issue--so pervasive that it sneaks into all sorts of media like this book, and because good people internalize these ideas not out of bad intentions but out of inertia. I know I'm not free of sexist ideas myself because I live in a system that perpetuates these ideas. The best I can do is critically examine and evaluate them, both in myself and it others. This is one of my attempts at that kind of critical examination.

Phyllis Ann Karr's Frostflower and Thorn and Frostflower and Windbourne were published in 1980 and 1982 respectively. The sorceress Frostflower and warrior Thorn hail from the Tanglelands, the kind of gritty, dangerous pseudo-Medieval European fantasy setting that is very much at home in the eighties and which is seeing a resurgence in the aughts and teens of this century. (If the descriptors "gritty," "dangerous," and "pseudo-Medieval" remind you of anything, Frostflower and Thorn begins with a note that it was first written during George R. R. Martin's Clarke College workshop in 1977.)

( Worldbuilding, pacing, feministing )