This, Right Here, Is The Problem

Penny Arcade strip for 14 October 2013.

This, right here, is what the male gaze looks like; and this, right here, is also why it’s a fucking problem.

Orange is the New Black is a Netflix original show about women in prison. Though not without problematic elements, as pretty much everything spawned by our culture is, it nonetheless stands head and shoulders above so much else on offer in its portrayal of a wide variety of complex, interesting women – women of colour, trans women, poor women, criminal women, disabled women, mentally ill women, queer women, immigrant women, religious women, atheist women – with a depth, compassion and, above all, narrative primacy that exists almost nowhere else on television.  It’s a clever, well-written, engaging show, and it’s doing something important.

So, naturally, its value is immediately reduced to being a source of hot topless chicks for straight dudes to gawk at.

AUGH.

I have, as I’ve previously had occasion to mention, been reading Penny Arcade since I was about fifteen; which is to say, for twelve damn years. Sometimes, as has been well-documented by this point, they fuck up; increasingly, they also try to make reparations for fucking up, too, but that doesn’t give them a free pass when they do it again. Part of loving something as an adult is thinking critically about it, and I’m going to say it now and loudly: if you feel tempted to drop me a comment telling me I’m a humourless feminazi who doesn’t understand jokes or men or comedy, or to point out, in overly patronising tones, how Gabe first describes the show in panel two and why this makes it all better, as though I’m incapable of reading and understanding words without your guidance, prepare to be blocked, mocked and quite possibly banned, because I am not here for your bullshit.  Because when I started reading this strip and saw that Orange was mentioned, I felt a surge of hope that Penny Arcade was actually going to do something fucking decent, like respectfully spruiking the kind of show we desperately need more of as a culture, only to find that the whole thing ends up infantilised and sexualised and awful.

Here is the joke: that guys like looking at boobies more than they like empathising with women.

Here is the joke: that female nudity is a trump card, more important to men than the lives and personalities of women themselves.

Here is the joke: that without female nudity, the show wouldn’t be worth watching for either of them, because ultimately, all its other positive attributes are secondary to, suborned by, the overwhelming prerogative of the male gaze.

Shit like this is why, when female cosplayers spend hundreds of hours painstakingly hand-crafting costumes to dress up as the characters they love, the first response of so many douchebag asshats is to photograph their tits, ask them about their sex lives and otherwise act like bodyshaming, racist trolls – because why else are these women there, if not for male gratification?

Shit like this is why Disney apparently thinks that animating individual female faces is so hard that they can only have one or two ladies per film, because “they go through these range of emotions” and “you have to keep them pretty”, because god forbid a female character look anything other than 100% flawless all the fucking time.

Shit like this is why the character modeller for Lightning, the lead character in FFXIII, went out of his way to describe how Lightning’s tits are going to go up to a D cup in the sequel game so that she’ll fucking jiggle on camera.

Shit like this is why Seth MacFarlane thinks it’s fucking hilarious to include a song called We Saw Your Boobs at the Oscars, reducing rape scenes and nuanced performances to nothing but male titillation because BOOBIES, amiright fellas?, so that when someone like Scarlett Johansson says, “You work hard making independent films for fourteen years and you get voted best breasts,” it gets lost beneath a metric fucktonne of skeezy reporters asking questions that are by turns inanely sexist and sexually invasive.

Shit like this is why J. J. Abrams thinks its OK to include a wholly gratutious scene of Carol Marcus in her underwear in Star Trek: Into Darkness, because if Kirk is a womaniser, then OBVIOUSLY it makes sense that a female character would randomly undress in front of him.

Shit like this is why, when Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy to prevent contracting a ferocious type of breast cancer which not only killed her mother, but to which she has an extremely high genetic susceptibility, creepers and misogynists crawled out of the woodwork to talk about how ugly and unfuckable a life-saving operation that was none of their fucking business had made her.

Shit like this is why women are routinely shut down by sexist, sizeist fucks who think that telling us we’re fat or ugly must necessarily invalidate whatever point we’re making, because if a woman isn’t conventionally pretty, then she has no right to take up space by speaking.

Shit like this is why women are routinely mocked by sexist, skeezy shits who think that finding us attractive must necessarily invalidate whatever point we’re making, because if a woman is conventionally pretty, then she must also be stupid, and can take up space only so long as she stays silent; unless, of course, she’s an evil manipulator out to trick men with her beauty, in which case, she’s probably a whore and a user and a fake geek girl, and oh my god, I cannot even keep writing this stuff, because I already did this, and can we even go a fucking WEEK AND A HALF without some new bullshit example of geek misogyny cropping up to remind me that my eloquence is less relevant than my cup size? Christ on a fucking BICYCLE.

Here is a fucking exercise for you, geeky straight men of the internet: STOP MAKING YOUR JUVENILE OBSESSION WITH BOOBIES THE PUNCHLINE TO EVERY FUCKING JOKE YOU TELL. STOP REDUCING US TO BODIES AND OVERSEXUALISED BITS BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO FUCKING COWARDLY TO TRY SEEING US AS PEOPLE WHILE YOUR FRIENDS ARE LAUGHING. Because I, and other women everywhere, are fucking TIRED of your bullshit. Feminism holds that you’re better than this; that you’re 100% capable of treating us respectfully, and not just slaves to some hopeless caveman impulse beyond intelligence or reasoning. WE KNOW YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

So step the fuck up, and PROVE IT.

ETA the first, 15.10.13: Given the number and variety of abusive/sexist/troll comments currently incoming, I’ve currently opted to let them through rather than trash them outright, not to give a platform to such people – I’m still blocking the actual commenters from returning – but to demonstrate what the issue is. As the old saying goes, the comments on any post about feminism invariably justify feminism, and this is turning out to be no exception.

ETA the second, 15.10.13: aaaaand we’re back to screening comments again. GODDAMIT, INTERNET.

ETA the third, 16.10.13: As more than one commenter has suggested that the correct – nay, obvious – interpretation of the strip is a mockery of objectification, rather than a reinforcement of it, I decided to head over to the Penny Arcade Facebook page and see what the faithful readership there was saying about it. Behold my complete and utter lack of shock at the responses to the strip:

 

ETA the Fourth, 28.10.13: Have changed “transwomen” to “trans women” in the first para, as it was pointed out that the former usage was Othering.

I Am So Very Tired

I am so very tired, you guys.

I am tired, not of arguing in favour of equality, diversity and tolerance, but of having to explain, over and over and over again, why such arguments are still necessary, only to have my evidence casually dismissed by someone too oblivious to realise that their dismissal of the problem is itself a textbook example of the fucking problem. I am tired of being mocked by hypocrites who think that a single lazy counterexample is sufficient to debunk the fifteen detailed examples they demanded I produce before they’d even accept my point as a hypothetical, let alone valid, argument. I am tired of assholes who think that playing Devil’s advocate about an issue alien to their experience but of deep personal significance to their interlocutor makes them both intellectually superior and more rationally objective on the specious basis that being dispassionate is the same as being right (because if they can stay calm while savagely kicking your open wound, then clearly, you have no excuse for screaming). I am tired of seeing false equivalencies touted as proof positive of reverse sexism and racism by people who don’t understand that Lin punching Robin is not the same as Robin punching Lin if Robin is an adult pro-wrestler and Lin is a five-year-old child.

In short, I’m tired of being a female geek.

I am tired of hearing about sexual harassment and assault at conventions.

I am tired of the constant sexism, racism, bodyshaming, harassment and belittlement faced by female cosplayers who are either deemed to be too pretty to be real geeks or not pretty enough to cosplay; who are exposed to racism and told hey’re asking to be sexually harassed by dint of wearing costumes that are overwhelmingly designed for male titillation.

I am tired of being told, either overtly or through oblivious privileged ramblings, that women make for bad writers; that we ruin genre with girl cooties, aren’t as good at proper literature, have no place in comics, shouldn’t play video games and make boring subjects in either case – which is why, whenever we do sit down and create stuff, we are reviewed less than men, encouraged to adopt male pseudonyms, and frequently accosted with rape threats, death threats, bomb threats and graphic threats of pet mutilation (but then, that’s also how women are treated just for existing in the public eye). Also, we can’t review for shit – even commenting on geek culture can earn us rape threats – and if you happen to be a WOC, queer, trans, fat, disabled and/or anything other than straight, conventionally pretty and white, the amount of shit you’ll cop on a given day that intersects with of all this is astro–fucking–nomical.

I am tired of watching the trainwreck of godawful sexist and racist fuckery that is mainstream comics right now; tired of hearing about the elision of LGBTQ characters and the unrepentant vitriol of misogynistic fans.

I am tired of whitewashing, not just on book covers, but in far too many cinema adaptations, no, seriously, I could do this all day, what the fuck is wrong with people.

I am tired of hearing, yet again, that women don’t game; that when we do, we suck because we’d rather be out “shopping, gossiping and talking on the phone”, and are only doing it to try and impress men anyway; that sexism, sexual harassment and rape culture are acceptable within gaming; and on, and on, and on.

I am even tired of writing this post, because there are hundreds, literally hundreds more links in my folders on these sorts of problems just in SFF alone, and that’s before I start talking about these issues in a broader social context. I am tired of arguing with people who cannot be fucking bothered to do the research, where “research” means “typing literally three fucking words into Google and reading what comes up”, and who instead leave angry, page-long rants in the comments any time they see someone make a reasonable fucking claim – like, for instance, that sexism still exists – without providing umpteen links to support that statement, even though spewing their poorly-reasoned vitriol all over the internet must take five times as long as actually looking that shit up to begin with.

I am so. fucking. tired.

But I am not giving up.