PLEASE GENDER-SWAP EVERYTHING, BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TERRIBLE YOU ARE YET

THE LAST OF US

The world has been overrun with zombies, as usual, and the only people who survive are rugged individuals and bands of armed mercenaries.  You play as an ordinary tween girl, El, tasked by a boy you love and trust with protecting a headstrong middle-aged man, Joely, who may hold within his delicate body the key to human salvation.  For the first half of the game, you must use your skills to keep him safe, though eventually you trust him enough to give him his own pistol and he assists you during fights.  You grow to bond with your grizzled middle-aged companion through a series of incidents, while stubbornly denying that he is nothing more to you than a surrogate for your own father.  When you are gravely injured, Joely feeds you and brings you medicine, but while he is on his own he is captured and held by the tween leader of a cannibal cult, forcing you to torture and kill the cult members you capture before mounting a raid on their compound to rescue him.  

In an innovative twist, you are briefly allowed to play as Joely (though admittedly only while El is incapacitated by injury).  The writers have gone out of their way to present the men in this game as having their own agency and goals, a laudable change from the passive wriggle-and-squeal tropes of men in video games.  Also refreshingly, no one suggests that the cannibals will abuse Joely sexually (perhaps because of his age), only that they are likely to eat him.  The violence, however, is still quite shocking: especially when you play sidekick, the animations have you stabbing girls many times in the eyes, neck, and groin to disable them.  The context cues of the game ensure that whenever El kills a girl, you know you are killing a human being with personal relationships to her sisters-in-arms, and one of the last human survivors of the apocalypse--all the more distressing because the game frequently requires you to kill all the girls in an area before you can progress.  

The visuals, writing and music in the game are all top-notch, but it suffers from being mired in a survivalist fantasy that has always been about honoring and privileging feminine skills at the expense of masculine ones.  The world of The Last of Us is designed to make technological consumerism, lawn-mowing, and high-shelf-reaching look like ridiculous, obsolete skills; mending, cooking, conflict resolution and child-rearing are the valued skillsets of the post-apocalyptic age.  It gives me pause that so many of our modern fantasies are about this type of world.  It seems to presage a generation of women dreaming about a world where they can be respected for their base animal qualities, without having to worry about male concerns or social pressures.  I shudder to think about the position of men in such a world.  

Portfolio Rejects

So it's time once more to try and go get a job, doing art or something else.  Meaning time to look over my drawing folder and see if I think any of it is fit for the eyes of potential bosses.  None of this is, to my mind.

This won't do on account of how it's sexy fanart. Plus the 

anatomy seems weird, like her neck is too bendy or something?  

Probably worth a redraw.

Unfinished, plus it doesn't really demonstrate the compliant spirit 

I associate with successful employment.

This is a picture of a developmentally-unfortunate dragon.

WHEN I LIVED IN THE PALACE

Remember when Ursula was talking about how she used

to live in Triton's palace? I wanted to see her young and dangerous years.

ZIEGFELD GIRL

This one is a bit nude, plus I think I can do the lighting better now.  Redraw!

YAY FOR DOLLS

Surely you cannot submit paper dolls, particularly paper dolls 

you've made of yourself or anime characters.

STRIPER

I'm worried that this one (of popular Shadowrun 

were-tiger Striper) is racist, and also about the lighting again.

Potential employers must never know that I routinely fill

character commissions for D&D friends.

Much pride still in my Doom emoticon set,

but it is possible to notice that the anger balloon

is pilfered from...I think a Sailor Moon game?

Runcible Rape

So, if you're a person, you're probably aware of the latest spasm of insane nonsense in Republicans' ongoing battle against women who have bodies: Todd Akin's assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape were rare enough to be a non-issue in outlawing abortion, because the wombs of women who were victims of "legitimate rape" had a mechanism by which they would "shut that whole thing down."  This fantasy must be a great comfort for anyone who is genuinely troubled by the idea of a woman suffering through an additional humiliating, expensive, life-threatening ordeal after a traumatic assault, yet who must still demand that such a woman be prevented at all costs from accessing safe abortion services.  Akin was at first roundly decried by all sane people everywhere, then right-wingers demanded that we shut up about how terrifying it is that this idiot is allowed to make laws on health care and science and that we ought to only talk about how bad the economy is.  After that, a number of defenders of the sanctity of life until birth emerged from their Morlock caves, and now we have a media "debate" about "legitimate rape" just as we had a "debate" about going to war in Iraq, torture, global warming, et al, ad nauseum.

I am, by nature, an internet feminist, and so in this case I want to discuss issues of language.  When Akin laid his giant head on the sympathetic lap of Mike Huckabee the day after his moronic remarks, he explained that he had misspoken, and that by "legitimate rape" he had of course meant "forcible rape", rather than something that was worth the little ladies getting all het up over.  This term, "forcible rape", has a long history in the anti-abortion fight, most recently when Paul Ryan and Todd Akin forcibly inserted the phrase into a bill which would have denied any federal funding for impoverished women's abortions unless they were victims of rape.  "Rape" not being rapey enough, the co-sponsors made sure the bill read "forcible rape."

Now, "forcible rape" is a bit of a poser, as a phrase something like "close proximity" or "unexpected surprise" or "personal friend."  It modifies a noun by placing before it an adjective which is a central defining characteristic of that noun.  "Rape" means sex which is forced, coerced, produced through threat or violence.  Now, I'm not against differentiating between different circumstances of rape via categorical adjectives, if it helps break the idea of stranger-rape being the typical case, which arguably phrases like "date rape" or "acquaintance rape" do.  But the very use of the words "forcible" and "rape" in conjunction suggests that people who use it believe that there are other species of rape which are important to distinguish from this type.

Indeed, the one which anti-abortion campaigners suggest as an example of non-forcible rape is statutory rape.  Now, I haven't thought much about statutory rape since I stopped wanting to have sex with teenagers, at around age 19, but I think I have a pretty good handle on the right-wing objection to statutory rapes being included in the category of "rape" for the purposes of judging victims' merit.  The idea is that that slutty teens (abetted by the satan-worshipping lesbians at Planned Parenthood) will be so keen to get free abortions that they will (falsely, it is assumed) accuse venerable older men of consensually raping them, so the state had better at least ask the teens to display some vaginal bruising to back up their accounts.  Again, this is a fantasy of female evil created by anti-abortionists to escape from the knowledge that they are hurting children, rape victims, and women in general with their stance against modern fertility control methods.  Statutory rape is not a perfect legal construct, but it codifies the idea that extreme power imbalances, such as those that exist between children and adults, create a coercive atmosphere in which the child's consent is not legally meaningful when compared to the adult's coercion.

Anyway, all this is to suggest that, when you see the phrase "forcible rape" used as though it were a serious concept, you might well want to substitute "runcible rape," because "runcible" is a delightful nonsense word created by Edward Lear, and "forcible rape" IS A NONSENSE TERM CREATED BY POWERFUL SOCIOPATHS.

Men Ain't Call Me Shit

My enthusiasm for blogging has been on the wane for some time, but nothing has been quite as boner-killing as the recent outpouring of feminist bloggers' litanies of death and rape threats they have received from readers.  This mirrors a lot of my experiences with the feminist blogosphere, in that it's an awareness-raising campaign about an apparently universal female experience (rape threats when you express a feminist opinion online) that has never happened to me.¹

I have two main reactions when my whole sphere suddenly lights up with solidarity over how men are always treating you as primarily sexual objects.  First, there's the reaction of horror at the malice these women experience, which makes me genuinely fearful about blogging and being in public.  Later, as I read more and more and learn how widespread such campaigns of internet terror seem to be, I begin to wonder what on earth is so wrong with me that apparently no one wants to choke me with cocks for my opinions.

It's a real headfuck.  The consciousness-raising, solidarity-promoting campaign to reveal the extent of the abuse other women have suffered in silence makes me feel pressured to either self-censor my own lack of abuse or attempt to compete with other feminists in the victimhood stakes.  While I often feel alone in my (patently dickish) reactions, I know I'm not alone when I feel pressure to conform to feminist narratives of victimization, because shit like this crops up from time to time.  I have a great horror of becoming an editor of my own experiences to match the narrative of a group I ache to belong to. 

I'll try and work on my failures of empathy. In the meantime, I think I can advance an explanation of the origin of rape threats themselves, which many feminists seem to be crying out for.  In brief:
1) Everyone feels massively threatened by the current climate of fear and despair, even male sexists.
2) Powerless male sexists feel that the feminist narrative has totally won out and they are disenfranchised, making attempts at civil disagreement futile.  Feminists, despite feeling themselves embattled and fearful, are perceived to present male empowerment and female disempowerment as universal rather than situational and relative. 
3) Powerless male sexists cast around for ways to silence feminist arguments they feel are so wholly baseless (due to their own experiences as embittered social rejects) that they cannot engage with them intellectually. 
4) Because women have a sex, sexists settle on the notion of attacking their ideological opponents at this point of weakness.  Historical styles of disciplining misbehaving women are employed, which mostly hinge on women's desirability as sexual objects.  Men who advance opinions which are similarly objectionable to reactionaries receive a different style of threat--threats of violence toward themselves or their loved ones, accusations of homosexuality, or threats towards their jobs.  Men perceive the problem of threats as a lamentable characteristic of public life, while women perceive it as a problem of their gender. 
5) Real patriarchs continue to live blissful lives unfettered by consequence while the rabble tear each other to pieces. 

1. "Ah, privilege!" cry the feminist bloggers.  "Your existence has been so privileged that you may even regard our identification of your privilege," they add, "as simply a way of dismissing any experiences which contradict our narratives."

A RACE PUN

Is fashion the most racist industry operating today, you guys?  It's hard to think of another one where racism is so vertically-integrated, from globalist-racist textile manufacture to elitist-racist high fashion, to aesthetic-racist beauty standards in magazines. 

All these want talking about in a serious way, but high fashion is a particularly interesting case because it has a special quality, which I'll term "hipster racism".  Hipster racism is that style of racism which stems from the belief that through personal sophistication and irony you have transcended racism, and that henceforth no interpretation of your actions as racist can be valid.  This posture need not be informed by any kind of self-reflection or critical knowledge, just a belief that you can't do wrong if you mean well (or mean nothing).  The hipster racist knows that he is not a racist in his heart, because he is nothing in his heart, a valueless, empty point from which explorations can be launched.  Thus he frees himself to use racist language or imagery in the name of freaking out the squares. 

Avant-garde fashion is, by definition, obsessed with being shocking and unfamiliar, in exploring the heterotopia.  But in an information-dense environment, getting your shock from something that's new is very difficult, and so fashion often goes instead to the well of the socially-unacceptable.  So we get rotating collections of anthropological curiosities, sexual outrages, political bogeymen, obscene wealth inequity, the homeless, addict chic, grotesques. The atrocity is aestheticized and monetized.  And if you got upset, you had fallen for the hipster's trap: Gotcha!  You were holding something sacred, weren't you!  Thinking something was important, when in fact everything is arbitrary and nihilistic!  LAME.

All this is why I'm a just a little bit surprised that Dior shitcanned Galliano, rather than commissioning him to create a fall collection inspired by the legacy of Hugo Boss.

I got arms that long to hold you

Where I'm going I'm pretty sure I'll still need eyes to see, but--sadly? I don't know--I doubt I'll need a lot of the other body parts I collected over the years. A number of the more portable ones are already packed away, but those pictured here must remain in my room or, in the case of the torso, be stealthily abandoned in a distant public area after dark.

I decorated these when I was younger and worse and had fewer
Sharpies, so, you know, sorry you had to look at them.

Glass head appears courtesy of Pier 1.

Barbie leg at left for scale.

A keychain and...not sure why that has a safety pin. Punk rock!

Some human hair.

My closet.

Okay, so why do I have these? I'm more into skulls these days, but I think it had to do with wanting to seem dangerous, yet clever and sexy, like a serial killer. I never felt like other people regarded middle-class pacifists as sufficiently dangerous for my taste. But I also surmise that my motivations had something to do with the suggestion in Killing Us Softly that women are often depicted as disembodied parts rather than full people.

I saw Killing Us Softly 3: Son of Softly once in a college sociology class, and once in a college feminism class, and once before that in a context I don't remember.  It begins with Jean Kilbourne relating how she, a simple young woman working in the advertising department of a medical journal, happened to invent the idea of "taking ads seriously" in the 1970s when she started pinning sexist ads up on a big board in her home and then asking her friends to assist her in rendering a critical reading.  I can't really fault her for promoting a DIY approach to forming a personal philosophy, but I can't help but be irritated by anyone advancing the intuitive, anecdotal I-just-know approach to scholarship that is her stock and trade.  Anyway, she goes on to claim that violence against women is "widespread and increasing", which would have been quite a bold thing to say in 1999 since it would have so drastically contradicted so many reports and studies discussing the dropping crime rates at the time.  I imagine it's just a consequence of not updating your slideshow that often. 

Kilbourne argues, over clips of leggy women voguing as cameras follow them at a low angle, that "over and over again, just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on." Leaving aside a whole bunch of begging the question there, to what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? I guess after giving the whole thing around ten years' thought, I'll go with a) to some degree and b) somewhat. Close-up framing is basically an inevitability in image creation since, oh, ever, but at the very least since Birth of a Nation. And the way advertising works--the constant, increasingly sophisticated attempts to create, shape, and respond to consumer demands while always showing them something memorable--any part of the body that's fair game to show is going to be continually refigured and repurposed to make it new. That would probably be well and good if making a display of the perfected aspects of women's bodies weren't of such special interest to this society at the same historical moment when we seem to have reached the maximum tolerable level of equality and autonomy for the distaff and have started trying to shout back the tide.

But to what extent does this sort of compartmentalization and objectification affect women's self-conception, thereby insidiously undermining efforts at equality? When asking a question like this--essentially "is this a cultural construction or are women just like that?"--it's useful to be able to look to men. Sure enough, men are reported to experience great distress when the value of their bodies is abstracted to the dimensions of a single appendage. That level of distress, however, doesn't seem to have greatly affected their overall performance as a gender. It really seems to have more to do with, you know, choice and opportunity and all that, than whether they're humiliated in advertisements.  Because boy, are they ever.

The control of images and words is overly weighted as a tool for equality, I think, because words and pictures are fun to blether about. Controlling them seems quite easy compared to enacting policies to lessen the gulf between rich and poor, which would probably do the most good for everyone involved. But it isn't easy. Words and pictures are always going to break out of restrictions, because that's just the way people do. And I daresay, if political energy is indeed a finite resource (who knows, right? But I bet I wouldn't be so interested in the study of images if it weren't for Kilbourne) that it could be better spent studying to organize than studying to adbust. I understand, however, that my opinion may lose some of its authority when you see that I bought human hair.

Lain will be accompanying me to grad school if I can just
figure out a way to remove her head.