beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

The thing about all these gender words is
if I want to stand up and say the system is daft and wrong
that somehow makes me something within that system.

Gender is a silly game and I do not want to play?
Oh well, agender or nonbinary, pick one and play there.

It's like declaring everyone looking at a cricket game is playing at deep cover or third man.

I have been reading some old Marked to Reads
and I happened to find a whole lot of kidfic in a row.

I do not believe literature as a whole needs even one more fic
that kills the mother
off screen
before the plot really gets going
jut to deliver some symbols of tiny vulnerability
for two guys to look after.

Seriously, quit that
especially if you're going to use alien tech ANYway.

What's so difficult about some mother turning up and saying 'your turn' and going off to their career?

Or hey, possibility, a mother who is still involved?

Bereavement is not the only way a guy can get involved in raising a kid.

And if you're going to use glowy sci fi as an excuse for children without messy relatonship conversations
why include a woman at all
if she's going to be killed off?




I could buy the Pegasus galaxy as somewhere with a need for genetic diversity
small populations, long time isolated, might be extra welcoming of strangers
but if they've got cultural standards built around that they may as well have a plan to give the babies back to their fathers once they meet some minimum standard of independence, handily matching whichever age the writer wants to write about.


Jut put some work in and stop killing women.

The thing that makes conversations about gender and media difficult to have
is that, in an ideal world, I'd want gender to be a nonbinary system, a gender spectrum, with no particular weight or pressure to so much as pick a position on it, let alone be stuck there.

... but I am aware that this ideal world is based on what would make the world most comfortable for me, and other people want to do their own thing, so okay, I guess, they can play this two sided thing, if they particularly want.

( Read more... )

We have to start by engaging with the dominant paradigm, but I get so tired of it when it is being a really intolerable paradigm.

There's no room for anyone in this thing, why even prop it up?




So what this adds up to is, the Doctor has potential to be my ideal character. All Time Lords do now. Because they can demonstrate in one continuous person the utter irrelevance of packaging.

But, because they are on the whole written by binary people in a binary system, it seems annoyingly likely they won't.

And yet it's still progress, because parity is at least twelve more Doctors away, so this is a place to start.



It's just kind of wearying knowing that saying this out loud is... pretty likely to start an argument on the fundamentals. Like, gender. What is even up with that?

So I've been thinking about the bit where a woman raised by women in an all women place finally meets a man and is like oh wow how strange what even is it, with or without the I like this part.

And, like, have you seen women?

Even just afab cis women?

Have you seen all the shapes at the olympics? Because there are many, many shapes. There are short women who are skinny all over, there are tall women who are large all over, there are curves but not necessarily, there are women doing shotput who I feel more superheroes should look like but know they won't because them and the hammer throwers are, like, emphatically not Power Girl shaped, even though their discipline is mostly power.

And even the whole facial hair situation, it's really variable on whatever gender, and now there's shaving, so, depending on culture, unlikely to be relevant.

Basically as long as they've got their underpants on they're just, you know, maybe sort of stocky, not very femme, but not actually entirely novel or surprising.

And the other way around, okay, past a certain point women are more notably new shapes, but men can be soft shapes too, it takes a lot to be a mindblowing new view.

And, like, we're used to society and language categorising everyone as one of two things, so we divide them up at a glance, however rude that is, and however often we're really getting it wrong. But if you live somewhere that just doesn't, you just wouldn't.

Like Leckie's Ancillary books. That's the only time I can remember right now I've seen this done plausibly. Though Bujold's Athos had a go.

Like society is really invested in the idea there are clear and obvious differences between two binary genders, but, you know, no.

... this is one reason monosexuals puzzle me deeply, but it's their thing, I'm not being judgey. I'm just kind of confused at the idea that the attractiveness of biceps or shoulders or muscles all doing stuff together somehow depends on which gender category they're in. Or, like, hands. Hands are awesome. Why are they variably awesome based on plumbing? I can see why personality might put you off, but I really don't get it about gender.

But still.

If man gets washed up on island of women, I figure he's probably just going to get called sister a lot, until he gets assertive about pronouns.

Unless of course she finds out she's fine with that.

So, I read a story where the Earth's entire colonisation effort was something like thirty women, and they were going to get implanted with preserved embryos on their first day there because they might be the whole hope of survival for the human race.

... which bothers me on several levels.

( Read more... )

Obviously if everyone is women you do what the computer tells you and grow whatever was frozen well enough. Er, whoever.

How long would they keep up the Ladies Only plan?

I mean if the plan is to get as much genetic diversity as possible out of the frozen embryo stores in the ship and there's some kind of time limit on that, you'd want to make sure there's plenty of wombs to go around. Would you get everyone out in a single generation?

If you're aiming for ten thousand colonists, even if you have multiple births routinely and soak the risk, that needs a really big first gen pool. So you'd want to keep up the embryos plan for multiple generations, without losing any of the earlier generations. You could do that with donor sperm and embryos. Or with a lot of social stuff to make sure your great grandchildren are still interested in decanting old world people.


also one of the mathier pieces says "the consequences of the increased medical risks of late childbirth have not yet been considered." It wanted to stretch the generations on a generation ship by having kids around 40, but, wow is that a biggie to leave out of your math. I mean, your chances change substantially over time.

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But only the first 200 would be volunteers who up front believe themselves willing to act that way. The future survival of the human race would depend on their reproductive behaviour. Their choices would be severely constrained.

And to get all the embryos out of storage in the shortest generations they'd need to get their daughters to act the same way. Which seems... unlikely.

( Read more... )



Hard science fiction that sets out a space colony as that baby focused without thinking through how they're actually going to feed the babies is just bad.

I mean, maybe they all get pregnant before they've got a crop going on the grounds that if they starve to death it's all one anyway, but... no.



Also the science problem in the novellette I read was far less interesting to me than the social consequences of the background setup. ( Read more... )


I think one big factor for viable colony size calculations is something like, if we send people who act pretty much like people of that cultural background do, how many do we need?

Like, we'd need to include murder rates from somewhere.

You do not get perfectly behaved people. No matter how you filter them at the start.



And the cultural changes would be massive even in the first generation kids. I mean how many immigrants feel like they don't really understand their children?

And if the future of the human race depends on women's reproductive choices, it's kind of more likely to work if you start with what those choices *actually* tend to be. First gen you could filter for people that want big families - though not for people that want big families once they start having them and are surrounded by them - but second gen will do as they will.

How do you design a colony socially so it does what you need genetically?



Clue: you do not stick thirty women on a one way trip and keep them pregnant from the first month they get there.




Hard science needs to at least glance at soft science or it requires the ridiculous.

I have been reading all the things about Buffy because 20th.
... many people are not particularly fussed about evidence if it gets in the way of their preferred reading, especially if that evidence is a 'ship.
I mean you can read Willow and Buffy as single in the last season, and learning to love themselves etc etc, but in Willow's case you have to ignore the actual sex scene, and Buffy ends the show by saying I Love You to a guy, it's just he happens to be on fire at the time. But single. Because feminist.

It is not in fact more feminist to be single. The trick to writing feminist relationships is to make them actually about the woman and her needs. Stuff like putting her career first and listening to her and doing what she actually says she needs and being emotionally supportive. In an ideal world stuff like woman sees guy thinks he's worth pursuing and does so successfully. Because then it's about her choices. The only things that are not feminist about relationships are when it's about what a man wants and can talk her into, and it reflexively centers the man. And oh look, with Willow, real easy to avoid, seeing as there's no man in there. And yet, plural times, I seen this interpretation.

There's nothing wrong with being a wife or mother, it's just when people are ironed flat to fit into stereotypes of those roles there's a problem. Just like there's nothing wrong with being a woman who kicks arse, but there's problems when she's flattened out into being just that (and second best at it). And the makeup thing? Makeup is fun for everyone, all people have the option to paint themselves colors, even if the guys mostly stopped at nail varnish. What is no fun is sticking women in the double bind where their character hates girly things and never spends time on them yet somehow is perfectly made up at all times, or ironing them flat into painted up pretty and then hating on them for vanity when they do the only stuff the story allows them.

Also feminist is giving men a full range of feelings and a wider range of wardrobe options and centering girly things for everyone. Because men get ironed flat too, and it's creepy weird.

And then there's single point authority through competition for dominance vs networks of multiple expertise in cooperation. The latter, apparently, is feminine? Because humans really like to sabotage themselves? I mean women compete, don't get me wrong, but the ideologies that say someone has to be lone loner lonely grimdark, that's apparently patriarchy. Because reasons.

Ugh.

But everyone who can stand up will stand up, could have the power, will have the power.

That's a much better and more effective way.

And that ending would not have been undermined if everyone walked away in one big polyamorous group, or got their emotional support with a side of romance as well as all the regular platonic stuff, so I don't know what show the reviewers were watching, but I like my one better.

I get really tired of fanfic's tendency to swap out women.
When a show has only women of the week and the guys go home together, the slash is simples, and rarely has to bother swapping out women.
But the more women are in the story in the first place, the more some fanfic decides what a story really needs is to just reattribute their everything to a man.

I've read fics that were just episodes but with their preferred pairing instead of a woman.
I even liked them cause I hadn't seen that episode yet.
Felt icky when I realised.

In Clint/Coulson fics after Age of Ultron, well, the vast majority simply aren't after Age of Ultron, but the ones that are? I'm mostly left trying to decide if it's creepier when they give the farm to Coulson or make Laura Clint's sister.

Probably the sister thing, considering, but in the general case it's just creepy to erase a woman and give her everything to the nearest pretty guy.

It's also annoying because so unnecessary. I mean Coulson makes some little speeches in Agents of SHIELD season one that imply he had to choose between wok and raising kids, and then Clint turns out to have kids, so the poly fic really ought to write itself. But I haven't even seen a handful of those. Just the erasure.

I get fed up of het fic due to the increased tendency to get icky patriarchy all over everything, but this is not an improvement.

I'm kind of feeling like I should retrain myself to only read fic with women in, because wow am I fed up of white men getting all the stories.

But I'm in the habit so somehow the fic that grabs me is all white men all the time. Which is embarrassing.

When canon gives us awesome women doing things, or even mediocre poorly written token women doing things, it's really important to keep them around. And do better with them. Like we have been with the men for some decades.

We can write so many more interesting lives. We don't need to treat what they've already got like scraps to be fought over.

The thing that bugs me about dance is how gendered it can be. I mean, a song comes on, the DJ says girls on one side guys on the other, and even if he is clear we’re just choosing sides for the length of the song and anyone can stand anywhere, it’s still sides. I stay seated. Cause otherwise I’d be dancing somewhere in the middle.

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I'm pretending I'll start writing again any time soon, and this one 'verse I've been thinking on just doesn't assign gender, they wait until someone declares themselves. So I've been wondering if to stick with 'they' or to make it more obvious something unusual is going on by using unusual words. Except not always recogniseable are the unusual words. So, poll.

It just occurred to me what bugged me about the women in the... last half dozen books I read by several different male authors.

Women as prizes are never women who choose between different options.

It's obvious once I've seen it. But when I was reading it was all from a male point of view and the most that happens is they compete for a woman but then something happens to take one out of the running and the other mourns for a while and then claims his default prize. It's never like in romances where there's the nice guy and the dangerous guy and a woman has actual opinions on both of them.

Women as prizes happen in the exact quantity required, exist long enough to prove they're worthy of their guy, and then just fade into the background.

It's creepy.

Now I have a sudden urge to rewrite something a bit more Pride & Prejudice... except I've not read that in a really long time and I'm not even sure I mean that one. So it's not my sort of rewrite that I'd be good at. Boo.

But also I was reading about the roles of women historically and how marriage was more about wealth and power than about love and it just struck me again how duty gets devalued by the romantic love narrative. I mean Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy because they die, but also because their stupid hormonal messing around gets other people killed. And yet there's a lot of people under the ridiculous impression it's romantic. Also any story where the lord runs off with the servant girl. It's all very well as far as it goes, it elevates the servant girl's social chances and is a much better gig than just getting the attention without the marriage, but there's a reason that a good aristocrat cares about his wife's wealth. Aristos are the boss of a really large number of people. They need money to maintain their estates, which means employing and feeding a whole lot of people, as well as doing things necessary to the community and being a good landlord. Yes there's not much guarantee they'll be good lords, but if they're good, they need the money for their people. Like reading the word Lord etymologically derives from Loaf Warden. There's the dude with enough bread for everyone. Marrying poor is bad not just for him but for potentially really large swathes of the country. That's not happily ever after, that's not romance, that's just ignoring duty for personal desire.

And yet that's a really difficult point to push, given how uphill it is against current standards.

Checking out someone's prospects is just trying to ensure neither the married couple nor their children will starve. And when a family was pretty much a business organisation, say with farming or weaving or any other thing, the extended family would be relying on strong marriages to keep everyone in eating.

Leaving all that behind, say to ride off on horseback somewhere, would be a bit like leaving with the company car, still on hire purchase, belonging to the company formed with relatives, and never seen again while not a breath of payment comes back.

Doing that for romance just means burning through your assets twice as fast, with more mouths to feed.

And if they're only your assets as part of a complex web of family investments, well, that's just rude.



So I don't get what's so wrong about going looking for a good investment prospect, seeing as you want to continue to eat without taking more than you return in food off the family table.



And the kind of fantasy adventure novel where the prince goes undercover and comes back with some pretty young woman who is at best trained to run a family business the size of an inn or a smallholding... it's like promoting the secretary to CEO because true love, it's really unlikely to work out well for tens of thousands of people.

... promoting the personal assistant to CEO because she's been running the company really well for years anyway is just a good investment.



But choosing the prince because he's a prince has a lot of drawbacks too. I mean, politics involves actual backstabbing. And if the kingdom falls apart you know who they'll blame, fairly or otherwise. And the new girl at court has absolutely no useful contacts.

If you're looking for a good place to raise children it's a hell of a gamble.



So 'romance' in fantasy novels is frequently a series of very poor choices, creepily presented as destiny with an ongoing lack of apparent choice.

I dislike it.

Last night I was reading GURPS Banestorm
and it just wound me the hell up
that they've cherry picked history to end up with two thousand years of AU that's more sexist.

Not just because the 20th century worked out quite differently.
They've just erased women in two easy steps.
The first one goes something like 'it is a historical fact that most warriors were men' and the second one just conveniently ignores the 'most' and continues as if history were entirely shaped by dicks.

Even the most masculine focused history books I've read included Boudicea and the Iceni.
But the gaming AU version? Rome! Rome forever!
Conquer the multiverse with some frozen in amber single most sexist moment, where nobody struck back ever.

And which is more exciting to play? Do you want to bestride the continent as the single most efficient war machine history has ever known? Or do you want to be the tiny tribe on an island in the arse end of nowhere that stood up and made them burn?

Banestorm takes little bits of Earth cultures and dumps them via storm portals onto a whole other planet, where they can develop differently. Or, for gaming purposes, not develop.

But it takes the most sexist stereotypes of the most sexist centuries, and then ignores the fact that each and every moment is one of dynamic change. Women didn't just sit around for nineteen hundred years on every continent entirely content to be told they could not. Women did. Women did all the things. Pick a thing, and women have done it. Led armies? Pirate queen? Queen regnant? Founded universities? And yeah, spun and wove and embroidered, made lace and knitted, but you know the fibre arts weren't so heavily gendered when they were a widespread industry. And see 'peace weaver' for another highly respected alternative. Or abbess, how about that, head of a joint house where male religious did what they were told. I know very little history and I know all those things. And it can't be that there's no room in the game book for the because it took me all of a paragraph to write them out.

So pick up your random bits of Earth culture and dump them next door to orcs if you will, but realise you could be taking them from an Anglo-Saxon era where men and women both could be 'lords' or 'throne worthy', could be land owners and bread winners, defenders and diplomats. Even if you want Christianity, you could have the Celtic version where women were (at least closer to) equals. In this timeline sexism won, imperial and religious both, but why keep that?

A few centuries later you could have the survivors of the Black Death, pulling together to survive, with women doing all the work because there weren't enough people left to make a fuss about it. Sure, before and after that they were locked out of a lot of paths, but for a while they were everywhere because that was the only way to survive.

And you know what happens when you've got a few thousand humans on an alien planet surrounded by orcs? Because history suggests it's not bloody sexism. See world war 2 for the most recent model. Necessity isn't just the mother of invention.

Plus GURPS specifically says the Banestorm pulled people from the crusader era, without considering that if all the fighty ones and many of the males have buggered off to go hit the neighbours, the villages back home getting portaled over could have a bit of a different balance going on. More Maid Marions than usual. Actually fewer Norman knights. Play through that as if the cross coated never came home and what could happen?

So you can pick your bits and pieces of societies from all over, take them from moments where women were already doing things, and weave together an alternate history where sexism died.

And it's more interesting, richer, more varied, gives you far more game possibilities, and isn't something we've seen a billion times before.



Are there RPG sourcebooks specifically about women? Templates for famous historical women, that sort of thing? There should be.

Maybe I should make one.

I'm reading a multi book series that keeps baffling me in its basic assumptions about human nature. Granted, some of the beings think they're not human, but since they can have kids with humans I'd say close enough.

Part of the problem is how all the main characters are of the same generation and vaguely matching inclinations, old enough to have sex but not having children yet. And they rule their people. They don't have elders to answer to or be advised by, they don't have children around to actually actively look after, they just have the plot (mostly shagging, some politics. I've got a shelf full.)

But a lot is that the author doesn't seem to buy their own premise. They've said that this society is matrifocal, that the men go visiting other clans to have sex and make babies, but then come home and help raise their female relatives kids. But they haven't really followed through on it. Every single thing they write is about how these guys are rubbish fathers who abandon their children. There's nothing at all about female relatives or their descendants. They've not made the emotional shift in their own heads.

So okay, set sex aside. This is difficult in our society and in this subgenre of writing, but seriously, stop thinking about sex.

In our society men are expected to make their wife their primary emotional attachment, ( Read more... )
There's still a book left to go, maybe somebody somewhere is doing the thing where brothers help raise nephews in the society that is said to consider that standard.

But at the moment it just seems like the writer failed their imagination save and couldn't do that first thing, separate out the sex and love, and shift their emotional perspective so other forms of love are just as important.

... it's a romance and shagging series, of course they can't.
*sigh*