My quick thoughts about Battlestar: Galactica, which I have just finished catching up on:

Good:
1. So many strong female roles! A female president (even if she usually defers to the Admiral in matters military); several female fighter pilots; a female commander (even if she is morally, ah, misguided, her gender is clearly not the issue), at least one female surgeon…
2. Deft handling of the abortion issue.
3. One of the lead roles is a Latino - in a sci fi show?! Hooray! (I honestly can’t think of another show where this is true. Not one.)
4. The entire question of “am I a real being, or just a construct, a machine?” - applicable to any number of groups over time and extremely well done.

Bad:
1. Everyone’s last name is whitewashed, “normalized” in a way. While I respect the idea that race is less important than what colony you come from in this world, it seems to me that one could just have easily used last names which “read” as certain ethnicities, cross ethnicities (so, call Laura Roslin - oh - Laura Ramos; call the Adamas the Adachis; etc.). Then again, maybe I just “read” names like Roslin, Adama, Tyrol, and Biers as white, and no one else does?
2. In any case, why give Edward James Olmos such a very white son - especially since his actual son is also in the series, but playing another character? I’m not saying that Jamie Bamber makes a bad Apollo, but I feel like there’s a certain amount of “in space there are only white people or otherwise people we will now pretend are white because hey it’s space” going on. Would it really be so weird to have two Latino male leads?
3. There are no happy, normal family relationships until season 3, and that relationship takes a very gendered slant (Cally stays home with the baby and frets about the child’s health, while Tyrol tries to press them both into working too hard). I realize that we’re at war, etc., etc., but since the BSG world is clearly much more gender-equal than ours, would it be too weird to show us a family that works in that context?

Ugly:
1. There are only two black men with speaking roles. One is a Cylon working to harvest the eggs of (white) human women for their crazy breeding schemes, and one is traitorous (having been tricked by the Cylons). This does not seem… uh… equitable. Black women get by a little better, since they have both Dualla and Elosha, but that’s not a lot of screen time either.

All in all I think that BSG does unusually well with gender issues and clearly is making an effort when it comes to race, there’s still a long row to hoe…

Hey, look! More depressing news coming out of my home state!

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on a controversial late-term abortion procedure, a Cincinnati Republican has reintroduced legislation to outlaw all abortions in Ohio. Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. hopes his bill will become the vehicle for overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which legalized abortion.

I didn’t know much about this guy prior to these events, as he’s not my representative– he covers the eastern segments of Cincinnati, such as Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and Mt. Washington. However, a quick skim of his campaign website makes a strong case in my mind for him being an asshole.

This is, of course, not the first time he’s tried this; in 2005, another bill banning all abortion in Ohio was introduced by the same legislator. Luckily, it didn’t pass; unfortunately, another anti-abortion bill introduced around the same time did, and was signed into law by the outgoing Republican governor only a few weeks before our current Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, took office. As a result, “it is the public policy of the state of Ohio to prefer childbirth over abortion to the extent that is constitutionally permissible”, and “None of the funds appropriated to administer [health assistance for poor Ohioans] shall be used to counsel or refer for abortion, except in the case of a medical emergency” (HB 239, as sent to the governor and signed into law). In effect, there’s discrimination against allowing poor women in Ohio to have access to a full range of reproductive choices, including abortion, since the procedure is often expensive and can’t be subsidized by any governmental funds below the federal level in Ohio.

Reading the comments on a Cincinnati Enquirer blog post on the subject made me feel vaguely sick. Relatively safe in Oregon, which just passed laws granting domestic partnerships and subsidizes reproductive health care for patients under a certain income level, it’s always a shock when I take a quick glance at what average people in Ohio are saying. There’s so much work to be done in educating people that abortion rights are deeply necessary to offering women free choice in their reproductive health, and with more and more of the people in my generation fleeing the midwest, how are we ever going to manage it?

Time to go write to my state representatives. You should write to yours, too.

I came across this link via Feministing’s Weekly Feminist Reader (a weekly weekend trove of articles and news on feminist [and queer and class and race] issues) and was intrigued:

[Anti-choice protester Joseph Logsdon] will get a chance to prove in court that police violated his rights when they arrested him during a protest outside a Cincinnati abortion clinic.

Ah, the home town. I grew up in Cincinnati, which is considerably more conservative than my current home, Portland (and, as my father likes to say about his own hometown, Dayton OH, “an excellent place to be from“). Still, the article itself didn’t immediately scream “anti-choice bias!” at me. Feministing offered up the link in the following frame:

An anti-choice protester wins his appeal after being arrested outside a clinic. His lawyer said, “It struck a very positive tone for a pro-life protestor [sic]. In most courts around the country, they are treated like they are maniacs.” Gee, wonder why that is?

I don’t disagree with Feministing’s basic point here (at least, not their basic point as I read it)– anti-choice protesters generally support a lunatic platform that is hugely detrimental to women’s health. They linked in their blurb, too, to a recent post on the incredibly creepy memorializing by “pro-life” activists of violence against abortion providers– a connection which is maybe a little alarmist in this guy’s case, but definitely not an unreasonable parallel to draw when discussing the trend in louder and more daring anti-choice protests.

That said, I don’t see the fact that Joseph Logsdon won his appeal as a feminist issue one way or another, except in that we should be celebrating our civil rights.

While his lawyer casts it as a recognition of the sanity of a “pro-life protestor[sic]”, a quick read of the actual article implies instead that the decision just dealt with whether or not Cincinnati police violated the protester’s constitutional rights when they arrested him for trespassing at the clinic. A read-through of the decision itself [PDF download] also inclines me to believe that the court decided rightly in this case, although my opinion is, admittedly, informed by a non-lawyerly understanding of the law.

See, the case isn’t about whether or not anti-choice protesters are nuts. It’s about whether or not the Cincinnati police should have arrested Logsdon for trespassing at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic (side note: this clinic is a scant two miles from where I went to high school), given that they weren’t present when the trespass occurred and (allegedly) ignored the input of witnesses when making the arrest. The case also isn’t a blanket statement of approval for Logsdon, an unqualified “win”: it just says that he should– and will– have the chance to argue his side of the story in court. My resident lawyer not-quite-lawyer says he seems unlikely to win the actual case. Plus, I have to admit here to a certain wariness towards the Cincinnati police when considering whether they might have ignored someone’s civil rights. After all, in 2001 their apparent disregard for a young black man’s rights sparked race riots.

So where does that leave us? In short, I wouldn’t be too quick to say that this decision was a bad thing, let alone a decision that set back women’s rights or supported anti-choice activism. All the decision says is that protesters have civil rights, too, even when they do some stupid things. I can’t disagree with that in good conscience, just as I can’t look too negatively on the ACLU defending the Phelps from a charge of “flag desecration”. The Phelps have an incredibly hateful, vicious, ridiculous message, and we should all wish they’d pick a more decorous way of presenting it, but they still have a constitutional right to say what they do. Likewise, Joseph Logsdon may be protesting in favor of a miserable women’s health policy and a culture of enforced conformity and religious oppression, but he has a right to be treated fairly by the police.

I’m not trying to say Feministing hates the constitution. They don’t. But their presentation of this case is a little misleading, and while I hope Logsdon stops harassing the people at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic, he at least has the right to make his case in court. And that’s the way it should be.

My excellent friend Friar Yid has a terrific skewering of Pat Boone’s latest sexist and moronic column on WorldNetDaily. (I won’t link directly to either of those since I don’t want to be seen raising idiots’ Google rankings—if you care, you can find links and lengthy excerpts on the Friar’s blog.) In a nutshell, the erstwhile rock singer Boone claims that strong women only exist by contrast with men who are weaker than usual:

Consider the women, in our day, who have become the heads of state in India, Pakistan, Israel and Great Britain. Question: Is it likely that these very accomplished and brilliant women would have attained these positions if there had been men in evidence who seemed equally or perhaps even better qualified? … Don’t get all defensive, ladies; hear me out. I’m praising and complimenting you here. Thank God for you!

It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this (except with great humor and brilliance, as is Friar Yid’s wont) except for the fact that lots of people take crap like this seriously and those of us with an ounce of sense are left to flail our arms wildly and wonder: What the hell?

Commence wild arm-flailing on the count of three. Ready? One…

There have been, what appears to be, an influx of ‘security alerts’ at the Claremont Colleges, an increase that seems to be congruent with the recent escalation in threats of violence on campuses nation-wide after last week’s the shootings at Virginia Tech. Although the threats here have been mild – robbery, an attempted break in, grand theft auto, stalking, and a possible attempted abduction – they do garner attention from the students and administrators of a group of colleges that pride themselves on being extremely safe places for to work, study, and live. While Asian American and immigration activists vocalized critiques of the insensitive media reporting about the Virginia Tech Shooter’s race and immigrant status I can’t help but wonder why the Claremont Colleges isn’t engaged in a similar dialogue about race-based discrimination in crime reporting. With the goal of starting a discussion about racial-profiling at the Claremont Colleges, I intend to consider how we might go about identifying this tendency and examining why racial profiling is normalized at the Claremont Colleges

In the past week, three security alerts have gone out across the Claremont Colleges that give descriptions of suspects. The first alert described an incident where a man in a car summoned a student from the sidewalk and made several attempts to coerce her into his car. The suspect was described as “an older male with gray hair and a slightly receding hairline. He was wearing a short-sleeve blue and white striped shirt and a gold signet ring with initials.” The second incident describes an attempted break in to a residence hall. Although the suspect was confronted and claimed that he was “trying to reach his girlfriend,” the only available description of the man is that he is an “African-American male in his late twenties/early thirties.” The third report was for “suspicious behavior,” and describes several men in a car – who appeared to be following a student – simply as “of Hispanic descent.”

The suspect from the first security alert, it is safe to assume, was white, because his racial identity was not deemed to be of importance by either the student who reported the incident or the campus safety officer who took down her report. White privilege, after all, is invisible for a reason. In the second and third reports, how is it that all those involved thought it justified to describe the suspects only in terms of their perceived race? My best guess: Claremont College students (assuming that a student reported these incidents), who are overwhelmingly white, embrace the racist notion that all brown people look the same. Markedly, in the case of the second alert no one can claim that they didn’t get a good look at the suspect. In regards to the third incident, it is important that we examine racialized accusations not as inconsequential crimes, but as physical manifestations of enculturated racial stereotypes. This is not to say that stalking threats do not merit appropriate judicial response; rather, it is crucial, when presented with incidents such as these, that we thoroughly investigate the racist ideological roots at the heart of racial profiling.

In a culture that indoctrinates women (or rather all white people) to fear men of color as violent sexual predators, we create artificial “security alerts” that meaningfully impact the lives of women and men of color. When campus administrators (and society at large) tell women to “Trust [their] instincts, better to be safe than sorry,” without first asking why whites tend to label men of color as ‘suspicious,’ ‘threatening’ or ‘dangerous’, we can’t expect much more than the proliferation of racist ideology, racially-motivated discrimination, and in fact, an overall artificial increase in ‘security alerts.’ This is why our prisons are bursting at the seams with people of color; dominant white society has the ability to label people of color as lazy or troublesome at best and as threatening or violent at worst, without ever investigating the racist foundations of such “instincts”.

None of this is meant to undermine the importance of security alerts to the maintenance of safety at the Claremont Colleges (I myself often wish that safety threats against LGBT populations at the 5C’s were more widely distributed); rather, I hope that we might challenge ourselves and the larger community to investigate the racist underpinnings of crime reporting on our colleges, and its implications for the lives of individuals and anti-racist activism.

So there’s this television show called House. You might have heard of it: FOX medical drama, Hugh Laurie, Tuesday nights at nine. Well two weeks ago, towards the beginning of April, we were treated to a special episode cleverly entitled “Fetal Position” wherein Emma, a pregnant photographer hospitalized with a stroke and other serious symptoms, faced the classic dilemma of a) terminate the pregnancy and save herself or b) risk her life in an attempt to save the baby. She picks b.

“You’ll both die,” Dr. House tells her, but Emma refuses the abortion, even with the prognosis of two days left to live. The rest of the episode is, of course, a scrambling attempt to cure Emma and allow her to keep the baby, wherein we’re treated to touching moments such as empathy from another doctor and the fetus reaching for House’s fingers during one of the surgeries. Awww. Or Ewww depending how you look at things. Miraculously, Emma and her baby both live.

So allow me to pose a riddle:

Q: If “Fetal Position” aired today, how would the moral dilemma be different?

A: Terminating the pregnancy would NOT be an option because abortions this late in the term are now illegal regardless of whether or not the mother’s life is as risk.

The Supreme Court ruled on this ban yesterday. No late term abortions, and no legal exceptions for when the mother’s health is in danger.

It’s possible you didn’t hear about it in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy on Monday (CNN hasn’t even reported on this yet, as far as I know). If anything, the media has so far downplayed the ruling. So if you’re interested in the details, here are a couple of articles I dug up:

• Denying the Right to Choose
• Doctors Weigh Next Move on Legality of Abortion
• Abortion Law is Upheld
(googling “supreme court abortion ban” will inevitably bring up more)

I’m not about to start an abortion debate, but I think this particular issue goes a little beyond whether you do or do not believe a fetus is a life. It’s about the government denying a woman a life-saving procedure.

So what’re we going to do about it?

ETA:  It was brought to my attention that my presentation might be “exaggerating” the ban, as it refer to second/third trimester partial birth abortions–and whether the removal of a fetus through a C-section-like procedure (the issue on House that I mentioned prior) would be okay or not under this ban isn’t totally clear.  The NPR article I linked to above shows a concern from doctors that the actual meaning of “partial birth abortion” (not a medical term) is not as specific as it could be.  So not being a doctor myself, I can’t say for certain that the way that pregnancy would have been terminated would have technically been illegal.  But it certainly raises the issue.

A quick post, while I’m traveling:

I’ve now passed three separate chain bookstores in the Toronto airport which have, in their magazine stands, sections labeled “Women’s Interest”. One opposes this with “General Interest” (a particularly disconcerting dichotomy, as it implies that women are a separate subset from “people” rather than a part of it), and the other two with “Men’s Interest”, which is at least an understandable contrast to make. There are, after all, magazines intended explicitly for women– Women’s Day, etc– and magazines intended explicitly for men– GQ, etc. What boggles my mind is the fact that magazines like Wired, Laptop, and Car and Driver all wound up in the Men’s Interest section, while the Women’s Interest section included only magazines like Good Housekeeping, Martha, Lucky, and other cooking, shopping, or housekeeping-related magazines. I don’t think Wired; even has a disproportionately male audience– do bookstore employees really think that technology interests men so much more than women that they’re willing to risk alienating potential buyers? I feel like I should grab a copy just out of protest.

For class I’ve been reading Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, a book of collected essays. Particularly, “Pornography and Persuasion on Attic Pottery,” by R. Sutton.

One of the first things Sutton does is sum up two modern attitudes to pornography. They’re “peitho,” persusasion, and “catharsis.” The first claims that porn is bad because it inspires people to objectify and dehumanize women; the second claims that porn is, at the very least, a necessary evil because it releases tensions that would otherwise boil over into rape and worse. I was already aware of this line of argument; I usually fall on the “catharsis” side of things (ignoring, for the moment, issues of actual working conditions and exploitation of women — these things are much more complicated than simply “porn: good or bad?”).

Interesting, Sutton brings up what is today often called “romantica” — sexually explicit romance novels. These are typically written by women, pornographic in detail, and depicting heterosexual relationships of a wide variety of types. They really do run the gamut from “strong man subdues feisty woman, makes her pregnant, puts her in kitchen” to “strong woman has sex with many men, rejects traditional family, pursues own goals” and everything in between. Unlike Harlequins, which are usually not very explicit and very formulaic, these novels are focused on the many and various things that different women, you know, want.

But somehow in my experience young women don’t want to admit to reading them, or even try them.

I wonder why. Why, in the world of sexually liberated co-eds, is it okay to say “yeah, I watch porn,” but it’s not okay to say “yeah, I read trashy erotica”? Is it because written romance/porn is so stereotypically bad? But porn videos are almost entirely bad (I had the misfortune of watching some of “Pirates,” a supposedly incredibly high-budget porn movie, and all I can say is that damn that was soulless). And yet there is some “good porn,” in the sense of porn with high production values and so on. So why is it difficult for many young women to accept that there is good trashy erotica?

I think that part of the issue might be that we are still, as a culture, uncomfortable with feminine desire. There is great pressure for erotica writers to conform to a more Harlequin-like story. And there’s great pressure for porn directors to keep putting out the same kind of video, blond girls with bad boob jobs and Ken-doll men and all. Our culture has designated “ways that it’s okay to lust,” and there are two: the Harlequin model and the porn model. Neither are created by women. Neither really address the desires of most of the population, or at least, I would be shocked if they did. We are uncomfortable with female desire on female terms, and we are just as uncomfortable with desire that does not fit into our tidy little categories. So young women reject romantica along with all the rest of “romance novels” and embrace male-focused porn which is, let’s face it, not really addressing the desires of men, let alone women.

And that pisses me off!

I came across a very interesting interview with Will Wright in Popular Science today, dealing with his upcoming game Spore. The game, which has gotten quite a bit of press during the development stages, has a fascinating concept— you manipulate an organism from the earliest stages of its evolutionary history to the highest levels of space-based civilization. In the middle of this otherwise-excellent interview, though, the following exchange appears:

The Sims experiences have appealed strongly to a female contingent, more so than pretty much anything else. Do you think this is going to have that same appeal, or is this a more masculine game? It felt that way to me.

When you look at the theme of it it at first might seem kind of science-y. But the approach we’ve taken is to be very playful with the entire universe. A good example of that is the creatures. And in fact we found that with The Sims even, what women especially seemed to enjoy was the creative aspects of it, being able to make things that were theirs, then being able to share them and build stories around them, et cetera. I think the creature editor just by itself is going to have a huge appeal to female players as an aesthetic artistic expression of what they want to do. The fact that they can make something very elaborate in the game and then show it to other people and trade it with everybody, and in fact trading it is like automatic now, whereas before you’d have to put it up on a web site and the other people would come and download it and put it in the right folder and all this, now it will just be totally automatic. And anybody else playing the game might come across the cool creature you made and be able to bookmark you, get more stuff from you and give you positive feedback about what you created. So I think Spore is going to feel like a much more elaborate creative palette than The Sims did, and it’s a matter of making the environment of creatures and evolution and traveling in space not seem off-putting or too science-y but make it feel like a very natural narrative environment, where I naturally want to tell a story in these worlds. Because I think the storytelling is the other important aspect. Once I make stuff in the game, I want to now use that stuff to basically play out a story, and then share that story with other people.

Right. Because we need to gender our video games, lest some poor man be feminized by a girly-game mistakenly chosen off the store shelves, or some woman become too butch from her experience with games meant for real men. And after all, everybody knows women avoid “science-y” stufff like the plague, so we better try to emphasize aesthetics instead and downplay any science content. Men like science and strategy, but women like aesthetics and community-building trading. Duh, kids.

Sarcasm aside, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this kind of thinking emphasized over and over again, even outside of the usual gaming community. Beyond the obvious insult in Wright’s implication that the game might seem too “science-y” for women^[1] and the ridiculous pandering to gender stereotypes, this encourages people to judge games based on their gendered qualities rather than any concrete aspect of gameplay and content.

Wright makes some interesting points— the sharing and storytelling aspects of The Sims were innovative new elements, and probably did draw new players or player demographics to the game, as did the game’s ability to be customized. It sounds like Spore will emphasize those possibilities— as well as the organic, open-ended gameplay that contributed so heavily to The Sims’s popularity— and draw even more players who might have been put off by more common RPG or FPS tropes in the gaming world. The creature-creation engine in Spore (which Wright has called “Maya for 10-year-olds”) sounds like a fantastic leap in in-game character design systems. Why do any of these elements need to be gendered, though?

It’s not just offensive to gender these aspects of games— thus forcing gamers to deal with any attendant stereotypes— it’s also pretty stupid marketing practice. You’re sure to alienate someone by forcing a whole section of your gameplay into a gendered box, whether it’s those who thought they’d enjoy the gameplay but now are worried they’re the wrong gender for it, or those who are just irritated by the whole damn idea.

[1] And could he possibly make it any more insulting than by adding a diminutive “y” to the word? Back to where you were.

I’ve found another quote which supports my belief that we need, require, to establish some kind of a women’s history, one which more aptly and accurately speaks of women’s experience. Since this is, after all, a blog, I am entirely allowed to foist it upon the Dear Readers.

Women are different from men, both in the roles they have been assigned or have assumed historically and in their biological make-up. History, in short, affects them differently from men, just as they affect history differently. Their past cannot be subsumed under the history of men. What we need to recognize is not that women and men are the same — as certain political and polemical goals might suggest — but that they are different. For it is that difference that justifies, indeed requires, a history of women. (C.N. Degler, Is there a History of Women?, Oxford Inaugural Lecture, 14 March 1974)

I have often wondered whether this opinion of mine puts me too far into the binary-gender trap, whether in it lurks a continuing assumption that people will and do always fall into these two categories of “man” and “woman,” however culturally constructed they are. The idea that it does bothers me. But then I consider what he is saying. Women and men are not the same. They are two categories, like “servant” and “master,” which are largely socially constructed (I hold that I can perform masculine gender well enough to pass, despite my double X chromosomes, and therefore phenomenologically become a man; so as far as that goes I insist on sticking with “socially constructed” for gender). That does not mean that we cannot write a People’s History of This-And-Such — a Servant’s History of This-And-Such — a Woman’s History of This-And-Such. The fact that the category is socially constructed does not destroy it as a category, not historically and not today.

The fact is that people find the categories of “woman” and “man” comforting, on the whole. I often actively attempt to present as feminine. I like being thought of as feminine. I know how to behave that way, how to interact socially from a feminine perspective. I get discombobulated and uncomfortable when others treat me as more masculine than I think I am. So I continue to present a gender, despite my distrust of the gender binary. Most people do. And that means that a Woman’s History of Thus-And-So would actually be liberating, good for me and for everyone who doesn’t wish to firmly entrench themselves in the “masculine” camp, even those who choose not to perform gender as I do.

The gender binary got us here and damn it, it’s gonna be with us for a while. We might as well accept that.