Pixel Scroll 12/27 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fifths

(1) ORPHAN BLACK TEASER. BBC America says Orphan Black Season 4 has started production and will be shooting in Toronto through March.

Tatiana Maslany returns to her Emmy®-nominated role as multiple clones in 10 new episodes in Spring 2016.

Season 4 of the drama will see leader-of-the-pack, Sarah, reluctantly return home from her Icelandic hideout to track down an elusive and mysterious ally tied to the clone who started it all — Beth Childs.  Sarah will follow Beth’s footsteps into a dangerous relationship with a potent new enemy, heading in a horrifying new direction. Under constant pressure to protect the sisterhood and keep everyone safe, Sarah’s old habits begin to resurface. As the close-knit sisters are pulled in disparate directions, Sarah finds herself estranged from the loving relationships that changed her for the better.

 

(2) UNDERSTANDING CONTRACTS. Fynbospress provides a wide-ranging introduction to contracts for creators in “When do you need a contract?” at Mad Genius Club, a post that does much more than merely answer the title question.

This isn’t just for court; this is when you’ve submitted a rough draft to a copyeditor and found out they only did the first third of the book and the last chapter , or when you paid a cover artist $500 and they returned one proof of concept, then stopped answering emails. This is for when the small press gives you a horrid cover, no release press, and you have some real doubts about your royalty statements. This is for when you’ve agreed to turn in a sequel, and you find out your spouse has cancer, and nothing’s going to get done that’s not medically related. It’s for when you get the avian flu and aren’t going to make your slot with your editor, and aren’t sure you could make a pushback date, either, or the house washes away in a flood and you weren’t even thinking about when your cover artist finished her painting and wants paid.

(3) NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS. Lela E. Buis in “Safe spaces and personal self defense” conflates safe spaces with the convention antiharassment policies of which she disapproves.

Reading through the proposed convention policies, safe spaces apparently mean that no one can annoy you. When some evil lowlife approaches and says something that disturbs or upsets you, then you should be able to just say “no, go away” and they are required to do so. It means that you can cruise through the convention experience without worrying about anything. If anyone fails to do what you ask, then all you have to do is complain to management and they’ll take care of the lowlife who’s bothering you, pitching him/her out on the street. This is really an ideal situation, where nobody ever has to hear things they don’t want to hear, or deal with situations they don’t want to be in.

However, when you always depend on management to protect you, then you’re not taking personal responsibility for your own well-being. You end up with no self-defense skills….

(4) CHROMIUM SÍ IN AMERICA. “Here’s How Captain Phasma Got Her Silver Armor” explains Andrew Liptak in an intro to a video at io9.

Gwendoline Christie has certainly made her mark in the Star Wars universe as the silver-armored Captain Phasma. This short video shows where that armor came from, and it’s hilarious.

(5) NO SPOILERS. Joe Vasicek’s spoiler-free first impressions of the new Star Wars movie at One Thousand and One Parsecs.

Was it campy? Yep. Was it rife with scientific inaccuracies? Oh heck, yes! Were parts of it over the top? Yeah, probably. But these were all true of the original Star Wars, too. The stuff that really mattered was all there: good writing, solid plot, believable characters, awesome music, and that grand sense of wonder that drew us all into Science Fiction in the first place.

(6) SPOILERY AND FUNNY. Emma Barrie’s “The Confused Notes of a Star Wars Newbie Who Felt Compelled to See The Force Awakens” is a high comedy journal of watching The Force Awakens.  Paragraph two only spoils the original Star Wars trilogy, so that’s safe to quote….

Even as a member of the uninitiated minority, I did know some basic stuff about Star Wars, because how could I not? My birthday is May 4, so there’s that. I knew Darth Vader is bad and has the voice of Mufasa. I knew Han Solo is a person (though I thought it was Hans Solo). I could definitely pick Chewbacca out of a lineup. Princess Leia is Carrie Fisher (whom I primarily associate with hating that wagon-wheel table in When Harry Met Sally). She has those Cinnabon hair swirls and at some point wore a gold bikini (info gleaned from Friends). Lightsabers are kind of like fancy swords. Darth Vader is Luke’s dad.

(7) SPOILERY AND SERIOUS. David Brin was greatly relieved to find things to complain about in “J.J. Abrams Awakens the Force” at Contrary Brin.

Okay we saw it.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens (SW:TFA), on Christmas Eve.  And although I am lead author — and “prosecuting attorney” — of the book Star Wars on Trial, and hence a leading critic of the series, I must admit that:

(1) The newest installment of the franchise — directed by J.J. Abrams under Disney management — has none of the deeply objectionable traits of Episodes I, II, III and VI that I denounced in that controversial tome. Abrams and Disney shrugged off the lunacies George Lucas compulsively preached in those vividly colorful-yet-wretched flicks….

(8) SPOILERY TROLLING. Nick Mamatas is like one of those basketball players who in the parlance can create his own shot. If there was nothing in The Force Awakens to complain about, Nick would not be inconvenienced in the slightest. His review is at Nihilistic Kid.

Like any Star Wars film, it makes little sense. I’m not even talking about the inexplicable political economy of the galaxy that has both intelligent robots and people hanging out in tents with dirt floors, or the horrifying reactionary theme of an entire galaxy being held a prisoner of fate by about a dozen closely related individuals.

Is that last part so unrealistic, Nick? Think of Queen Victoria’s family ties.

(9) A FAN OF PEACE. I thought Hank Green was a science fiction fan (among other things) yet he exhibits a practically unfannish lack of interest in quarrelling with his fellow fans about Important Genre Definitions.

(10) FIVE IS ALIVE. At The Book Smugglers, “Jared Shurin’s Five Terrific 2015 Titles That’ll Tie Awards in Knots”  actually contains seven titles. Did he think nobody would count? Or was he worried File 770 wouldn’t link to his post without a “fifth” reference? Never fear, Jared, your praise for “A Small, Angry Planet” deserves to be shared.

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

It lurked (and won The Kitschies) as a self-published work at the start of 2015, but as far as the ‘stablishment is concerned, this utterly glorious, brilliantly progressive and undeniably joyous space opera didn’t exist until the UK release in February and the US release soon after. It has been on multiple ‘Best Of’ lists (Waterstones, Guardian, Barnes & Noble), and hopefully that translates to even more well-deserved recognition. The awards scene is dominated by a) Americans and b) traditional publishing, so this book’s… er… long way… to market should hopefully pay off with further acclaim.

(11) SMACKIN’ WITH THE PUPPIES. George R.R. Martin finally froze comments on “Puppies at Christmas” after two days spent duking it out with trolls. Martin’s last entry in the discussion might also be taken as a reply to the coverage here the other day:

When people behave badly (in fandom or out of it), or do things that I find immoral or unethical, I reserve the right to speak out about it, as I did about Sad Puppies 3 last year.

When, on the other hand, I see behavior I regard as positive, I am also going to speak out about that… regardless of whether my words are going to be “spun” to suit someone else’s narrative. So far, what I am seeing on the Sad Puppies 4 boards is a step in the right direction… a spirited literary discussion that includes everyone from Wright and Williamson to Leckie and Jemisin. That’s good.

If it turns into something else later, well, I’ll revise my opinion or raise objections. But I am not going to deal in hypotheticals. Right now what I see is people talking books.

(12) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • December 27, 1904Peter Pan by James Barrie opens in London.
  • December 27, 1947 — The first “Howdy Doody” show, under the title “Puppet Playhouse,” was telecast on NBC.
  • December 27, 1968 — The Apollo 8 astronauts — Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders — returned to Earth after orbiting the moon 10 times.

(13) RESTATE OF THE ART. “How Weinstein Co. Distribution Chief Erik Lomis Rescued 70MM Cinema For Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’” at Deadline Hollywood.

Lomis had an 18-month lead before Hateful Eight would hit the screen, and he promptly began scouring eBay and interfacing with film warehouses and antique collectors across the country “pulling the equipment, checking it and Frankenstein-ing it together. Configuring the lens took six months alone. They needed to be adjusted to today’s stadium auditoriums, which from the booth to the screen have a shorter throw versus the lens on the older machines which had a longer throw due to the sloping floor auditoriums,” explains Lomis. For the first six months, Lomis was picking up 70MM projectors at affordable prices, but once word slipped out that it was for a Tarantino film, collectors tripled and quadrupled their asks.  Essentially, to make three solid working projectors, one needed to pull parts from as many as five projectors.  Gears, shafts, bearings and rollers were the typical replacements. At times, these parts were manufactured from scratch off original blueprints. On average, Schneider Optics made a lens a day during production to restore this antiquated technology.

(14) SIR TERRY. Rhianna Pratchett  in The Guardian“Sir Terry Pratchett remembered by his daughter, Rhianna Pratchett”.

…The reaper came for my father much earlier in his life in the form of Death from his world-famous and much-loved Discworld novels. Death was a towering, cloaked and scythe-wielding skeleton who had a penchant for curries, a love of cats and TALKED LIKE THIS. We got a number of tear-inducing letters from fans who were nearing the end of their lives and took great comfort in imagining that the death that came for them would be riding a white horse called Binky. Dad had done something with more success than anyone else – he made Death friendly.

For me, as for many of his fans, it was his gift for characterisations like this that made his books pure narrative gold. Dad was a great observer of people. And when he ran out of actual people, he was a great imaginer of them. Both his grannies come through in his witch characters, while there’s a fair chunk of me in Tiffany Aching and Susan Sto Helit, Death’s adoptive granddaughter. …

(15) THE JAVA AWAKENS. “Designers Create Star Wars-Themed Coffee Concept” at Comicbook.com.

Graphic designer Spencer Davis and product designer Scott Schenone have come up with “Dark Brew Coffee House,” a concept that imagines what a Star Wars-themed coffee shop would look like.

(Lots more thematic imagery displayed at Dark Brew Coffee House.)

Dark Side coffee

(16) DARK OUTSIDE. Then could we change this to the Darthburger?

[Thanks to DLS,and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Shao Ping.]

242 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/27 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fifths

  1. Tintinauz The trick in equally objectifying men is when you look at men in comics and video games, their portrayal is of a male power fantasy, not something that women are going to necessarily see as hot.

    If you want to read a series which does a good job objectifying men in a sexualized way while the main female protagonist sees herself as dumpy check out the UF Sentinel Series by Suzzanne Johnson. Book 1 is Royal Street. Here the men are kickass sex objects. I think the some of the characters are a bit less cardboard cutout than in MHI but the I can’t decide which of 3-4 men to be with is annoying as hell once she gets over I don’t know why they want me I’m not sexy or powerful. Book 4 Pirate’s Alley is the final one I’ll read as the author took a turn I can’t morally forgive. I was drawn to the books for the mix Hurricane Katrina with magical going-ons. The author does a great job with New Orleans post-Katrina and I could picture how supernatural beings would fit right in.

  2. For anybody playing along at home here is a fun game to play with MHI: gender swap Earl Harbinger. Earl is the tough leader of the most elite Monster Hunter platoon. Let’s make him Pearl.

    A related example…
    “This week slim redhead Tim Peake, 43, begins his mission to the International Space Station, Later, we’ll be talking to father-of-two Tim, pictured here in a stunning blue flightsuit, about the challenges of raising a family whilst pursuing a successful career with the European Space Agency, and what products he’s using to maintain his smooth skin and youthful complexion in the harsh artificial environment of the ISS.”

    Out of off of Facebook

  3. A lot of you are missing the part where the narrator/character is a -kid-, and a male, and straight.

    No, he is not a kid. He is an adult.

    I was a kid once, the first thing a guy generally looks at is ‘Do I want her?’ The answer to that question is almost always ‘yes’, because kid = stupid + hormones. So you’re objecting to an accurate portrayal of a normal male response to that female character.

    Remember what Jim was saying about how you are universalizing your personal experiences? This is an example of you doing that. Some men reduce a woman to her sexual attractiveness the instant they meet her. Many do not. Assuming that this is an “accurate portrayal of a normal male response” is actually just you projecting your prejudices upon the world.

    When meeting a male, the first thing a kid looks at is ‘can I take him?’, by the way.

    No, it is not. I’m sure some young men think that way, but it is by no means universal. In fact, I would seriously doubt it is all that widespread. You appear to, once again, be taking your personal experience and projecting it as the norm, when the experience of the numerous other people here is nothing like that. I would suggest that many people would find a view of life that involves assessing whether one can “take” every male one meets as being fairly bleak.

    To put this another way, the view of women and men that you are asserting is universal is something that many of the people commenting here find quite alien. They simply don’t recognize this as a normal or even and acceptable way to behave. Most of us have been young. Many of us have been young men. And yet what you describe as being how young men think is completely at odds with our experiences. Why do you think that is? Could it possibly be that the way you believe young men think is actually not the norm?

  4. I was a kid once

    Literally everyone here was a kid once. So telling us that all kids think like you did when you were a kid, as if you’re the only one with experience to draw on, is a pretty shaky argument.

    the first thing a guy generally looks at is ‘Do I want her?’ The answer to that question is almost always ‘yes’, because kid = stupid + hormones.

    Even were this as true as you think — and it’s not — that doesn’t mean that virtually every woman said kid meets will be described in centerfoldy terms. After all, most women said kid meets will be more normal-looking.

    When meeting a male, the first thing a kid looks at is ‘can I take him?’, by the way.

    I could swear I was a kid once, and on that basis can assure you that this isn’t so. It may be the first thing you think of, but please don’t assume that your experiences are universal.

    It does intrigue me, though — if this is literally how every male the narrator’s age views new male characters they meet, are the male characters introduced as consistently in defeatability terms as the women are in terms of hotness? If not, perhaps neither are as crucial to the writing of books as you seem to think. If so, then my already-low interest in MHI has dropped even further.

  5. Kurt Busiek on December 29, 2015 at 1:22 pm said:

    It does intrigue me, though — if this is literally how every male the narrator’s age views new male characters they meet, are the male characters introduced as consistently in defeatability terms as the women are in terms of hotness?

    Not all of them I think but the love interest’s boyfriend is (it’s OK the hero gets to physically attack the boyfriend and throw him off a ship – such is the course of true love). From the end of the section where ‘Grant Jefferson’ is introduced:

    “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I thought he was a pompous ass from the moment I had met him, and I felt the primal and instinctual need to beat him up and take his lunch money.
    But the real reason that I hated his guts was that he was Julie Shackleford’s boyfriend.”

  6. Not all of them I think but the love interest’s boyfriend is (it’s OK the hero gets to physically attack the boyfriend and throw him off a ship – such is the course of true love).

    That’s not at all like treating a woman as a prize to be won. :rolleyes:

    And, once again, I am struck by how often LC’s protagonists seem to think and behave like grade school bullies.

  7. The Phantom:

    All the objections so far boil down to “how dare that man portray women in the completely normal and expected way that every guy on Earth does!”

    Please, do not include me in this.

  8. I am struck by how often LC’s protagonists seem to think and behave like grade school bullies.

    In that particular case, even the protagonist himself thinks in those terms — he wants to beat the guy up and take his lunch money.

    Perhaps we’ll be told that this is how all kids think when they meet a woman’s boyfriend, by someone who was a kid once and therefore knows better than those of us who skipped childhood altogether.

  9. Tintinaus:

    “The trick in equally objectifying men is when you look at men in comics and video games, their portrayal is of a male power fantasy, not something that women are going to necessarily see as hot.”

    To be honest, I have more problems with objectification. It is that it is so stereotypical. When I read about “the male gaze”, I always feel weirded out, because it is not my gaze. The idea is that every male has the same ideals of attraction. What they should find as attractive and how they should feel about that attraction. How about, as an example, a male that is attracted to that woman and wants to feel objectified? Does not exist.

    The Male Gaze is a conformist view of how a male is expected to see and feel about attraction, what their ideal of women is supposed to be. It is a limiting template that irritates me.

  10. Frankly whether it’s the male gaze or female gaze my eyes glaze over when reading.

    What makes someone sexy to me is how they treat others, their intelligence, and their creativity in day-to-day problem solving. Many of my friends (male & female) are the same and we were like that even as teenagers. Yes some of my friends find certain looks sexy – butt, abs, boobs, hair, eyes, legs but what’s sexy is different for each one of them and changes with age for the most part. #notallmen #notallwomen

  11. Leaving aside the Phantom’s….ah…idiosyncratic view of universal perceptions…I gotta say, the whole “all the women in the restaurant are jealous of her hotness!” thing has always been weird for me, because I am very, very bad at telling when people are hot.

    It’s probably tied into my mild face-blindness, but while I know if somebody is attractive in a way that I personally like, I have a very hard time guessing if other people will find them attractive. (Vin Diesel yes! George Clooney….no idea! Can’t pick Robert Redford out of a line-up!) And it’s much, much worse with women. Absent any markers that they’re significantly UNattractive, I’m pretty much guessing, assuming I bother to guess, which I usually don’t.

    So if a gorgeous woman walked into a restaurant, I am sad to say I probably would be unaware of it. (Now, if she were dressed like a 50’s beauty queen, I’d notice THAT. If she was wearing great clothes well, that I understand better. Well-put together, I get, but nobody ever seems to mention that.)

    (Of course, the other problem with this scenario is that it assumes all relationships are the same, and does not allow the possibility of one where I nudge my husband under the table and jerk my chin to our hypothetical beauty queen and go “eh? Eh?” and get “eh!” back, which is rather more likely. But I’m as likely to do that over an interesting hat, so I’m not sure if it counts.)

  12. (Of course, the other problem with this scenario is that it assumes all relationships are the same, and does not allow the possibility of one where I nudge my husband under the table and jerk my chin to our hypothetical beauty queen and go “eh? Eh?” and get “eh!” back, which is rather more likely. But I’m as likely to do that over an interesting hat, so I’m not sure if it counts.)

    This sounds remarkably like conversations my husband and I have had in the car, stopped at a red light, the one of us pointing out to the other Hypothetical Beauty Monarch of Either Gender crossing the street. Or, indeed, Hypothetical Fashion Monarch. We both get distracted by fabulous cloaks.

    You know what I appreciate and don’t see enough of? A book that involves a happy relationship and absolutely no plot point spurred by threatening that relationship with sexual jealously/”love triangles.” Watching the characters in that happy relationship work together as a team is so much more interesting than “Oh, please save me, the author’s going to use this just-introduced character to make Main Character insecure about their marriage, aren’t they? Please no?”

  13. Wow, some of y’all are really going all out to make my point for me. Getting right into the ‘you’re not representative of men you pig!!!’ yelling thing.

    In deference to the non-yelling people, thank you for being civilized. Welcome change, and all that.

    My favorite bit of yelling so far is this one from Peace Is My Middle Name: “Do you honestly believe that every male human on Earth thinks and acts like that towards women? That does not jibe with my experience in any way.”

    Well I think that way myself, and I always have. So far, no major complaints from the distaff side.

    Do others share my opinion? Don’t care. Because free country. You don’t like the book, it’s cool.

    Wanna call me a beast because I did? Seems kinda intolerant. Clashes with your name. Might want to change it to something like “Yelling Person Who Likes To Tell Others What To Do”, less confusing y’know?

    Somebody else above accused me of moving the goalposts by inserting the word ‘mere’.

    Defn. Sex Object: “a person regarded by another only in terms of their sexual attractiveness or availability.”

    So is Julie Shackleford a desirable character to the narrator? Yeah. Is she ‘regarded only in terms of her sexual attractiveness or availability?’ No! Not even by the narrator. Being attracted to another human being does not reduce that person to an object, not even in conservative message fic.

    Sex object is a pejorative term, used incorrectly in the original comment I objected to, and we are now at 160+ comments of you guys freaking out that I called him on it, with no end in sight. What. The. Hell?! people.

  14. @Hampus Eckeman: re the male gaze.

    When I read about “the male gaze”, I always feel weirded out, because it is not my gaze. The idea is that every male has the same ideals of attraction.

    My understanding is that the ‘male gaze’ is a theoretical construct, a claim about a certain set of ideologies, not saying anything about any individual (which is what the Filers keep pointing out to The Phantom).

    And what the Phantom talks about with “every boy/man feels this way” is that theoretical construct. He accepts is as “natural” which is how one tells a successful ideology–it’s become naturalized, normative.

    Laura Mulvey originated the term and theory as a way of talking about how film operated in terms of spectatorship.

    Some explanatory links: Looking and the gaze

    And, like every theoretical construct, the definitions/constructions have changed over time: “From feminist theories of female spectatorship forward, the idea of the subject as ideal rather than as a historically or socially specific being has come under serious scrutiny. One of the central tensions between older and current theories of film and media spectatorship is that between the construction of the ideal spectator and the recognition of the multiple subject positions and social contexts from which we view films. The concept of regressive cinematic viewers, who are encouraged to represss their identities and to identify with the screen has been replaced by a broader set of models about the multiplicity of gazes and looks that mediate power between viewers and objects of the gaze.”

  15. There has also been work theorizing the female gaze (lots of discussion of that with regard to Twilight–just google “female gaze Twilight” and a bunch of stuff pops up.)

    a 1982 chapter by Mary Anne Doane on “theorising the female spectator” in an academic anthology on film. Warning for major academic prose!

    And of course this all gets even more complicated once you push away from the idea of (straight) male or female spectatorship to consider gay, lesbian, bisxual, or queer gazes…..

  16. Camestros Felapton on December 29, 2015 at 1:52 pm said:

    Kurt Busiek on December 29, 2015 at 1:22 pm said:

    It does intrigue me, though — if this is literally how every male the narrator’s age views new male characters they meet, are the male characters introduced as consistently in defeatability terms as the women are in terms of hotness?

    Not all of them I think but the love interest’s boyfriend is (it’s OK the hero gets to physically attack the boyfriend and throw him off a ship – such is the course of true love). From the end of the section where ‘Grant Jefferson’ is introduced:

    “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I thought he was a pompous ass from the moment I had met him, and I felt the primal and instinctual need to beat him up and take his lunch money.
    But the real reason that I hated his guts was that he was Julie Shackleford’s boyfriend.”

    What, not a “primal and instinctual need to beat him to death with a tire iron”?

  17. Phantom, did someone actually call you a beast or a pig? I missed that. Certainly that would be uncivilized.

    On the other hand, we do seem to have gone from “Point this out to me! How did you read this in this book!?” which seemed to be where your original comment was going, to “If you don’t like it, don’t read it.” Which, since I have been seeing people bend over backwards to say “It doesn’t mean you can’t read this and enjoy it,” seems to mean you’re in agreement with the majority of commenters that it is perfectly okay to enjoy this.

    People may not enjoy it for their own reasons. You asked about them. People told you. That doesn’t mean they think you’re a bad person–and indeed, if anyone said outright, in so many words, that you were bad, please point it out, because that would be dirty pool.

    Of course, so would assuming that “disagreeing, and here’s why” is the same as calling someone bad…

  18. on December 29, 2015 at 5:18 pm said:

    My favorite bit of yelling so far is this one from Peace Is My Middle Name: “Do you honestly believe that every male human on Earth thinks and acts like that towards women? That does not jibe with my experience in any way.”

    I am sorry that my statement, quoted in full here, came across as yelling. In future I shall consider my words more carefully to attempt to convey reasoned disagreement.

  19. robinareid:

    I think I’m missing out on some background knowledge, because I understand absolutely nothing of that quote. Thank you for the link though.

    But what I really meant is that I myself is irritated by the way media represent men and women. I feel it limiting and can seldom identify with that “male gaze” as I’m supposed too. It is a norm imposed on me.

  20. Nope, I’ve read all of Peace’s comments in this thread. Never called anybody a beast, and honestly, Phantom, if you think the statement “this does not jibe with my experience” is the same as “telling someone what to do…”

    …wow.

    Can you state, exactly, what you felt “this doesn’t jibe with my experience” was telling you to do? ‘Cos I’ve read it like five times, and I do not see any orders there. I would probably not have perceived that as yelling, but I certainly would not have perceived it as an order to do…something.

  21. Peace Is My Middle Name,

    It is nice of you to be considerate, but in this case it is a waste of time. The Phantom is just trying to make himself a victim so he can walk away with a shred of pseudo-self dignity.

  22. robinareid: That comic was great! My english is good, but it is not always good enough for academic language. If you introduce more philosophical terms or those related to social sciences, I’m often lost.

  23. The Phantom: Wow, some of y’all are really going all out to make my point for me. Getting right into the ‘you’re not representative of men you pig!!!’ yelling thing… Wanna call me a beast because I did [enjoy the book]? Seems kinda intolerant.

    Who called you a pig? No one. Who has yelled at you? No one. Who called you a beast? No one. Do you think that you might perhaps be hypersensitive to being disagreed with, and that’s why you’re imagining that people have said things they haven’t actually said?

    The Phantom: My favorite bit of yelling so far is this one from Peace Is My Middle Name: “Do you honestly believe that every male human on Earth thinks and acts like that towards women? That does not jibe with my experience in any way.”

    That’s not yelling; that’s articulate discourse. I think you are indeed hypersensitive to the fact that people are disagreeing with you.

    The Phantom: Well I think that way myself, and I always have. So far, no major complaints from the distaff side.

    But that’s not what you said before. Before, you said that view was universal, that all men view women that way.

    All the objections so far boil down to “how dare that man portray women in the completely normal and expected way that every guy on Earth does!”

    So again, you’re moving the goalposts.

    The Phantom: Somebody else above accused me of moving the goalposts by inserting the word ‘mere’.

    That’s what “moving the goalposts” is: changing your original statement once someone points out the flaws in it.

    The Phantom: we are now at 160+ comments of you guys freaking out

    The only person I see “freaking out” here is you. You’ve made numerous false accusations of people calling you names, you’ve accused people of “yelling” when the comments to your statements have been nothing but articulate, polite, and well-reasoned, and you’ve repeatedly attempted to ret-con your statements after people pointed out the errors in them.

    You might want to spend some time considering why you would choose to engage on a blog when you are unable to keep your cool or make articulate, well-reasoned statements in response to other peoples’ comments. Really, you’re sort of proving the point that Puppy arguments are illogical and irrational.

  24. @Peace, don’t apologize. Ursula is right. You were not “yelling.”

    @Phantom: Come on. Peace asked you an honest question, and then offers hir personal experience. (Using gender neutral because I don’t remember what gender Peace is.) That hardly constitutes “yelling.”

  25. @Peace Is My Middle Name: What, not a “primal and instinctual need to beat him to death with a tire iron”?

    Yeah, I was snickering at the lunch money crack *because* it so (unconsciously) deconstructed the idea of a “primal and instinctual” need by introducing a specific socio-historical behavior!

    I’m willing to allow for the possibility of a slight amount of self-conscious irony in the phrasing, but still…..

  26. @Phantom: Getting right into the ‘you’re not representative of men you pig!!!’ yelling thing.

    Citation definitely needed.

    @Peace: I’ve been reading along all day from my phone because STUFF TO DO, and enjoying the comments — and yours as always. You are one of the last people on this comm who would yell at anybody–I admire the way you so often defuse tense situations and strive for bridge-building and mutual understanding.

    Phantom’s claims that people are yelling at him and calling him names cannot be supported–he (I gather from all his false universals that he is a cis straight man, so I’ll use the pronoun) is either exaggerating for rhetorical purpose and to claim to be a victim of the “SJW 770 vile mob” or (the least negative explanation I can think of), he is so used to his sexist assumptions and heternormativity being met with resistance and pushback that he’s reading the yelling and name-calling into the situation because that’s what’s happened before.

  27. robinareid: the least negative explanation I can think of [is that] he is so used to his sexist assumptions and heternormativity being met with resistance and pushback that he’s reading the yelling and name-calling into the situation because that’s what’s happened before.

    I think it is that he is so unused to his sexist assumptions and heternormativity being met with resistance and pushback, that he perceives any sort of disagreement to be “yelling” and “freaking out”, regardless of the fact that the disagreement here has been polite, articulate, and rational.

  28. I took a few moments and did a CTRL F on every page of the comments so far to confirm my sense of what other Filers have said: the only person to use the words “pig” and “beast” in this discussion is (tah dah) Phantom.

    So, yeah, didn’t happen.

    And he keeps insisting that we’re telling him what to think when in fact he keeps telling everybody else how to read/think about LC’s book: specifically that we’re supposed to understand that every man alive reacts in one way to a woman or another man.

    Why is it that the anti-feminists are always so insulting about men (as well as women), with the “men are just beasts, there’s nothing you can do to change it, it’s our natural primal instincts blah blah blah blah let me get my club and hit you over the head and drag you back to my cave because NATURE.”

  29. @robinareid

    My understanding is that the ‘male gaze’ is a theoretical construct, a claim about a certain set of ideologies, not saying anything about any individual (which is what the Filers keep pointing out to The Phantom).

    And what the Phantom talks about with “every boy/man feels this way” is that theoretical construct. He accepts is as “natural” which is how one tells a successful ideology–it’s become naturalized, normative.

    Thank you for this comment. It articulates my disagreement with that every man post. This assumption of a default point of view or gaze, and discomfort with alternate points of view I feel were the root of many of the stated complaints of the SP3 leadership – especially BT in his ‘affirmative action’ posts where he complained about past winners *

    Sometimes I read fiction for simple enjoyment of an action piece or puzzle, but other times it is for the pleasure of that alternate gaze. That is probably why CJ Cherryh is one of my favorite writers.

    * Though these ideals seemed more like a fig leaf in practice when the actual nominated works were examined on both SP3 and RP1 sides.

  30. @Hampus Eckeman: But what I really meant is that I myself is irritated by the way media represent men and women. I feel it limiting and can seldom identify with that “male gaze” as I’m supposed too. It is a norm imposed on me.

    Well, the quote was from a major theoretical work, so it’s going to be tough going for even native speakers. I tried to give a range of sources (I thought the comic was great–the Everyday Feminist site is a wonderful one) about the concepts, not just the theory heavy one–I mostly wanted to show that there has been theorizing about the female gaze/spectatorship for some time (over twenty years), so it’s not just the male gaze.

    The media is limiting in how it represents men and women (and even more so in how it represents people who don’t identify as either)–and in some ways, I think, it’s become even more limited now than it was when I was much younger.

    The usefulness (at least this is what I think and teach) of understanding that these beliefs and methods of representation are constructed (as opposed to normal/natural/instinctual/primal, etc.) is the insights can be shared and the system analyzed and resisted. The theorist who coined “male gaze” was (I think) trying to give us a tool to use to understand and thus resist the system that makes us think we’re *supposed* to react in the “correct” way along gender lines. So that’s why I was confused by your irritation at the concept–but yeah, if it’s irritation at the construct, then count me in as well.

  31. @Shambles: Glad it was useful!

    It articulates my disagreement with that every man post.

    What I keep wondering is how does anyone arrive at adulthood with the idea that “every X [whatever the referent is] thinks just like I do”!

    I mean, HOW!

    I was pretty young when I realized that I didn’t seem to think or want to behave the way I was supposed to (sometimes I had to anyway because I was a child and RULES–like the ones about girls never allowed to wear pants in school, even when it was well below freezing and four feet of snow on the ground–we could wear pants under our dresses to go to the busstop and ride the bus three miles to school, but those pants had to come off before walking into the school building). But clearly people thought and behaved differently than I do!

  32. Wow, some of y’all are really going all out to make my point for me. Getting right into the ‘you’re not representative of men you pig!!!’ yelling thing.

    Which point was that? The one where you said all young men are obsessed with the sexual availability of every woman they meet, or the one where you said that all young men automatically sized up every other man they met on the basis of whether they could “take them”? In response people have pointed out that your experience isn’t universal, and the depictions given in MHI aren’t “normal”, Rather, they are specific to a particular subset of men that you are apparently part of, and which most of the other commenters here don’t share. The fact that you regard such disagreement as “yelling” says more about you than you realize.

    Well I think that way myself, and I always have. So far, no major complaints from the distaff side.

    No one said you don’t think that way. What people pointed out is that thinking that way is not universal. As far as “complaints” go, have you ever stopped to think what effect your having the attitude of “sizing up” everyone else to see if you could take them might have on those around you? Your main problem, and the reason you keep tripping over your own feet here, is that you seem to have never engaged in any self-reflection at all.

    Defn. Sex Object:

    Oh, definitions, I can find those too:

    sex object
    n.
    A person regarded primarily as a source of sexual gratification.

    Note that this definition lines up exactly with how the term was used in the original comment in this thread. It was not, in fact, “used incorrectly”. Once again, something you declared to be universal turned out not to be. You might want to stop and think about that for a bit.

  33. Why is it that the anti-feminists are always so insulting about men (as well as women), with the “men are just beasts, there’s nothing you can do to change it, it’s our natural primal instincts blah blah blah blah let me get my club and hit you over the head and drag you back to my cave because NATURE.”

    This. I’ve always said that anti-feminists think worse of men then feminists (supposedly) do. Sorry, men (and all people, for that matter) are quite capable of overcoming their so-called “primal instincts.”

    As one wise sage once put it, “But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers…but we’re not going to kill…today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill…today!”

  34. robinareid: What I keep wondering is how does anyone arrive at adulthood with the idea that “every X [whatever the referent is] thinks just like I do”!

    I think it’s pretty common for children to start out thinking that they are the universe and that everything revolves around what they themselves think and feel.

    But like you, I am mystified as to how someone manages to get into their 30s, 40s, or beyond without gaining an awareness that other people commonly have different opinions and views on the world — which are equally as valid as one’s own.

    I think it requires a special sort of self-blindness (or self-delusion) to manage this lack of awareness.

  35. Nicole LeBoeuf-Little said

    You know what I appreciate and don’t see enough of? A book that involves a happy relationship and absolutely no plot point spurred by threatening that relationship with sexual jealously/”love triangles.” Watching the characters in that happy relationship work together as a team is so much more interesting than “Oh, please save me, the author’s going to use this just-introduced character to make Main Character insecure about their marriage, aren’t they? Please no?”

    Totally agree with this point. That is one often used plot device in writing and media that makes me roll my eyes. Partnerships are always more interesting than insecurity.

  36. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

    You know what I appreciate and don’t see enough of? A book that involves a happy relationship and absolutely no plot point spurred by threatening that relationship with sexual jealously/”love triangles.” Watching the characters in that happy relationship work together as a team is so much more interesting than “Oh, please save me, the author’s going to use this just-introduced character to make Main Character insecure about their marriage, aren’t they? Please no?”

    Definitely.

    And the first example that springs to mind when I read your post was Lois McMaster Bujold’s novels….Cordelia and Aral. Ekaterin and Miles. Fawn and Dag.

    Horrible things happen that they have to deal with, but never that hackneyed plot device.

  37. @Phantom

    Do others share my opinion? Don’t care. Because free country. You don’t like the book, it’s cool.

    1. Oh honey. If this is you not caring, I wonder how you would be when you did care about something.
    2. It’s not a free country, it’s the Internet. Welcome to it.
    3. And yet here you are insisting that those who didn’t like aspects of it for their own reasons of being wrongfans having their wrongthink.

    People enjoy and interpret things differently than you do. You can choose to be fine with that, or you can spend your time tilting at windmills. Your life, your choices. But try to get used to people not taking you seriously when you do the latter.

  38. From an interview in the LA Times with Melissa Roseberg

    It’s interesting, I’ve never thought of it as sex-positive as much as, again, real, grounded sexuality and the expression of it. I have zero interest in portraying female sexuality as anything other than empowering and as a very natural part of our makeup. I was not handling it with kid gloves. I’m not interested in these romantic, pretty, hand crawls up the back, thing. I really wanted a very visceral experience of these characters, it’s another facet of who they are.

    Because it’s Jessica’s story, you’re experiencing it from her point of view. Between her and Jeri Hogarth and Trish Walker, these are all characters who are sexual beings like any other women and it was very much about allowing that to be the case. Again, just being honest with who these characters are.

    One of the reasons I really liked Jessica Jones was that grounding in the characters that allowed them to be complex personalities with their own motivations, insecurities, past that informed their present, and desires for the future.

    Characters used their own agency as they navigated through the choices they faced. The main villain, Killgrave was the literal embodiment of the conforming gaze that froze self-agency and individuality.

    It’s interesting reconsider this series in light of some of today’s discussions about what is the default gaze and what it means to others when that is the only gaze allowed.

  39. robinareid we could wear pants under our dresses to go to the busstop and ride the bus three miles to school, but those pants had to come off before walking into the school building
    Teaching girls to strip in public early as its a skill we all need… I always find myself looking sideways at rules like this. It’s like the adults don’t think stuff all the way through.

  40. Speaking of “Male Gaze”, I’m currently reading Linda Nagata’s Red Trilogy, and like it a lot (I could easily see myself nominating it for a Hugo—would the entire trilogy be eligible, or would I have to nominate a specific volume?).

    However, one aspect which I find a bit irritating is that the narrator has so much of a male gaze that it’s bordering on a male leer at times. Is this basically what it takes to sell MilSF, or is this an individual choice of this author or this work?

  41. The idea of the “male gaze” is not so much, in my experience*, about blaming any particular observer as it is about describing how there are culturally-expected and culturally-comfortable points of view, right down to how camera shots are framed and what’s featured in them.

    One of my favorite examples for throwing this into sharp relief is the video for the song “Oblivion” by Grimes. It shows a delicate, waifish young woman in a variety of strongly masculine environments (locker room, motocross event, with football players, in a mosh pit)… and it feels very different from what one might expect.

    In my early teens, we lived in a small town where if you wanted decent television reception, you had to get cable. Even so, my mother didn’t get cable for several years. When I asked her about it later, she said it was because there was no way to get the basic channels without also having the then-new MTV included. “I was raising a 12-year-old daughter,” she said. “I didn’t want those images to be flooding into your consciousness at all hours.” When I look back at it from my current perspective, I’m grateful to her.

    * born and raised Northern California San Francisco Bay Area, took film studies at UC Santa Cruz, graduated from a women’s college

  42. microtherion: I’m currently reading Linda Nagata’s Red Trilogy, and like it a lot (I could easily see myself nominating it for a Hugo — would the entire trilogy be eligible, or would I have to nominate a specific volume?).

    The Trials and Going Dark both came out this year, so either of those, or the trilogy, would be eligible. I’ve got The Trials on my Hugo shortlist right now and have been debating whether to nominate the trilogy instead.

    I think there’s been a bit of anti-series backlash since The Wheel of Time was nominated a couple of years ago — but Willis’ Blackout / All Clear won the Hugo as a duology in 2011, so who knows whether people would be receptive to The Red as a trilogy? I think a lot of people want to avoid the series nomination thing becoming a common occurrence.

    (speaking of which, books 1 and 2 are $1.99 each on Kindle right now, with the whole trilogy for $12.97)

    microtherion: However, one aspect which I find a bit irritating is that the narrator has so much of a male gaze that it’s bordering on a male leer at times. Is this basically what it takes to sell MilSF, or is this an individual choice of this author or this work?

    I didn’t find it that way at all — remember, half his team is female, and he never regards any of them as anything other than non-gendered team members. Yes, he does have a romantic relationship with a woman in the first book, and with a different woman in the 2nd and 3rd books, but I don’t think it’s excessive. If I ever go back and read it again, I will have to see whether I notice it more.

  43. microtherion – However, one aspect which I find a bit irritating is that the narrator has so much of a male gaze that it’s bordering on a male leer at times. Is this basically what it takes to sell MilSF, or is this an individual choice of this author or this work?

    I finished reading The Trials and Going Dark a few weeks ago and The Trials is on my short list too. I noted any number of things about the way Nagata writes and particularly appreciated her choice to describe everyone as if there was no default for Caucasian or for male. The narrator is sexually attracted to someone outside his unit in the first book, which is then used to explain how sex between members of a linked unit is unthinkable. In my recollection, while the narrator goes on to have a sexual relationship with three other characters, that first instance is the only one that I’d consider if I were to analyze whether Shelley employed a male gaze.

  44. @Tasha Turner: “Teaching girls to strip in public early as its a skill we all need… I always find myself looking sideways at rules like this. It’s like the adults don’t think stuff all the way through.”

    That’s similar to what creeps me out about those high school “cheerleader car wash” fundraisers, in which several attractive teenage girls dress up in skimpy clothes, take over a random parking lot for an afternoon, and gyrate at every passing car to rustle up business. Feels too much like they’re training to be underage prostitutes for me to feel comfortable… um, giving them my business? How do I express that without sounding completely slimy and perverted, and who on earth ever thought that kind of fundraiser sounded like a good idea?

  45. @JJ:

    I’ve got The Trials on my Hugo shortlist right now and have been debating whether to nominate the trilogy instead.

    Is it likely, if both the trilogy and individual volumes get nominations, that the Hugo administrators will consolidate these?

    I didn’t find it that way at all — remember, half his team is female, and he never regards any of them as anything other than non-gendered team members.

    The novel explains this as basically a form of chemical castration being applied the soldiers. If that effect has not kicked in yet, there are scenes like:

    Jaynie’s getting dressed when I step out of the shower. I look her over. She’s maybe five eight, lean, with small, pretty breasts already hidden under her T-shirt. Her skin is dark, but not as dark as Yafiah’s.

    Civilians are not subject to these restrictions:

    Bibata makes me think of pure and ancient bloodlines. Her skin is dark black, darker than Yafiah’s, and her face is strong and beautiful, with a high forehead, flirtatious dark eyes, and lips that slip easily between a teasing smile and a threat.

    And in the second volume, in the middle of a lot of things to do / people to kill / days to save, there is:

    The door opens and it’s Delphi. She’s wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms.
    Jaynie is right behind her, dressed in a tank top and panties with a pistol in her hand.

    Maybe I’m just applying a selective reading to the text, but compared to the treatment of race and gender that Cheryl S. noted above, the sexual orientation of the protagonist seems rather conspicuous to me.

  46. Getting right into the ‘you’re not representative of men you pig!!!’ yelling thing.

    *plonk* (grav-4b1e05d5d5e554f9923485570054ea47, for those playing along at home)

  47. Lexica :

    One of my favorite examples for throwing this into sharp relief is the video for the song “Oblivion” by Grimes. It shows a delicate, waifish young woman in a variety of strongly masculine environments (locker room, motocross event, with football players, in a mosh pit)… and it feels very different from what one might expect.

    I remember reading somewhere some commentator suggesting that, watching it in conjunction with the lyrics, the singer was riffing off the tension between her own sexual attraction to men and the masculine and her awareness (based on a sexual assault) that they could easily kill or badly hurt her. She was showing a female gaze, but putting it in a real, potentially dangerous, environment rather than fantasy beefcake.

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