a sense of joy and then a panic

And while I'm at it, this is the (incomplete and unfinished) real (ok, like 15% conjecture) story of Immigrant Girl, because sometimes I like writing about the moons circling the planet instead of vice versa. It's a story that I think about a lot because of everything it encapsulates about gender roles and sexism and the way systems are built to put women second, even if! Even if there are good guys in the picture. 

----

She emigrates when she's young. Her father's a big fan of Martina Navratilova, and one day he manages to introduce his little daughter - then a wannabe ballerina - to the star; the star says she should give tennis a shot. The little girl takes to the sport, loves it, commits to it. She's got a good backhand and a punishing work ethic. She knows she's not going to be the absolute best, but she'd like to make it to the top 50. Because she's ambitious, but realistic. An Aries. Strong-willed. So strong-willed that she travels through war zones to get to tournaments. And very stubborn. So stubborn, so Miss Independent, that when a rich boyfriend - some member of a Middle Eastern royal family, so they say - insists that she quit tennis to prepare herself for married life, she breaks up with him. Who the hell does he think he is? 

She qualifies for the Sydney Olympics when she's 21. She's on the up-and-up, and she's all discipline all the time. Others on the team tell her she has to come check out this supposed superstar-in-the-making, the one all the girls think is cute. What she sees is an 18-year-old going ballistic in practice. "That guy? Real great," she says, rolling her eyes. But he is cute, and he starts singing Backstreet Boys songs in her direction, trying to talk to her all the time. She doesn't know why. She's just trying to play tennis. Unfortunately, she loses in the first round - singles and doubles. Now she's got little left to do but cheer on the rest of her team. Cute Boy makes it all the way to the bronze medal match, then chokes inexplicably. Afterwards, he's inconsolable. She goes to talk to him. They end up talking a long, long time. On the day of the closing ceremony, he kisses her.

Whatever, she thinks; I'm still just trying to play tennis. The men's and women's tours only occasionally overlap. But Cute Boy, who it turns out has never had a real relationship (that explains a lot), is head-over-heels in love, and soon they're training together, trying to align their schedules as much as possible. She knows he could be extraordinary, if only he would practice more. All she can do is throw out his videogames and set an example. Hours upon hours on the practice court, every day, trying to get her technique right, trying not to envy the way her boyfriend just seems to instinctively "get it." They play mixed doubles at the Hopman Cup in Australia and win one match, lose the second. God, she wishes she could hold up her end of the bargain, be a better partner for him - and her own pride. His friends nudge him that they don't know how his dorky ass got so lucky, but the last thing she wants is to be some tennis babe who can't actually play. She knows what she has to do; she doesn't need a damn coach telling her. One coach actually ends things with her because she's so stubborn. But she's getting there. For the first time, she makes it to the third round of a Grand Slam, and loses to the eventual champion. She's ranked 70-something. She will make it to her goal. She will.

Then she gets injured. Her damn foot. It's always been a problem, and she's aggravated it practicing so much. She gets surgery in a last-ditch, Hail Mary attempt to fix it. It doesn't work. She tries to get back on court, but the pain is overwhelming. The doctors agree: her career is over.

She's devastated. Depressed beyond all measure. She's only 23 and this was her life and that's it, it's over now. While she's in a catatonic state at home, her boyfriend makes a radical suggestion in the hopes of cheering her up: come on tour with him. Doing what? He makes something up: be his press manager. It's ridiculous, but she takes it more seriously than anybody expects, applying the same ruthless discipline to his press engagements and pouring all her fighting spirit into cheering for him from the stands. He soon says he needs her to come to every tournament. He says she keeps him calm; that he loves her. And she loves him, so she agrees. At least he's finally practicing more now. He plays the Hopman Cup with their country's best female player and they win the whole thing; she's sidelined, and it sucks. The next year he wins his first Grand Slam - they rent a house together in London with his coach, and she does the cooking - and then everything starts happening very fast.

She moves in with her boyfriend. His coach isn't sure about her outsized role in his life - he's got limitless potential and has to focus on his career, he says, not a girlfriend. Things get tense and words are said and by the end of the year, her boyfriend has fired his coach. The press blames her for this supposed disaster. One loudmouth former player even calls her a Svengali, suggests that she has torpedoed her boyfriend's career, tells her to get back in bed where she belongs and leave the tennis decisions to the men. She is furious - who the fuck does this fucker think he is? - and when she's asked for comment, rips the asshole a new one, then vows never to speak to the press again. Fuck them all. Her perennially nervous boyfriend - she was always the tougher of the two of them - is too stunned to say anything, even though it was his decision.

So this is her life now. She arranges interviews and manages hotel bookings and keeps the trains running on time for her boyfriend's super-career, and most importantly, she is his rock in the stands. He still doesn't have a coach; she's all he needs, he says. She hears the snide comments - "when is he going to dump her for a hot skinny model?" "he's such a pussy that he can't break up with her" "she just sits on her ass and does nothing but spends his money" "I guess she must give good blowjobs" - and tries to act like they don't matter. He tries to repay her in diamonds - his mother says he spoils her, but she knows the woman understands what she's given up to be her son's emotional stabilizer - but tethered to a man is not exactly how she envisioned her twenties. At least her tennis life continues vicariously through him. After the tennis, they decide, she'll call the shots - but for now, his career has to come first. Except he's so good that his career shows no signs of slowing. Nor does he show any signs of wanting to slow it. As the competition gets tougher, he starts working with coaches again. And he asks her to step back from being his press manager, to let a professional do it. He says he doesn't like that she always has to be the bad guy. She knows it's the right call - that this empire she helped build from scratch in his parents' living room has now outgrown their ability to manage it alone - but now what does she have left except fist-pumping in the player box? She's 30 now. She's a 30-year-old glorified cheerleader.

That year her boyfriend realizes that I-love-you-very-much diamonds aren't enough. "Just wait until after the Olympics," he begs - he's trying for that gold again, for the third time now - "Then we'll do anything you want." Marriage, kids, even his retirement if she's sick of the tour - but she would never ask him to do that. He doesn't win singles gold (sigh) but does win doubles gold, and he keeps his promise. She's decided: she wants a child. She wants their child to be able to watch him play. Pregnancy comes quickly and they find out at the Australian Open that it's twins. She's struck by the terrible thought that there is no way she can stay on tour with him with two babies in tow, and it feels like her career is ending all over again. He insists they'll make it work (somehow?); her not being with him isn't an option for him, either. He loses in the final - another painful loss to his rival - and has a breakdown on the podium, and she's totally helpless to help him.

The pregnancy is difficult, but she stays on tour. She knows he needs her; she knows he's praying her delivery date will come between major tournaments. She watches him win in Paris in the rain, and although she's on the verge of passing out, watches him win in four hours without taking a bathroom break in London in July. The on-court interviewer chastises him for putting her through so much. "I know," he says, with more guilt than she's ever heard in his voice. Almost immediately afterward, they head to the hospital, where it's his turn, finally, to spend two weeks sleeping on a cot, waiting for her. A few weeks after their daughters are born, he's due to play a tournament in Canada. Nothing's changed; he still needs her to be there in the stands. The doctors say it's safe, so they pack up the babies and go. She's so. Fucking. Exhausted.

At least Cute Boy has a private jet now.

Nothing's changed, but everything's changed, too. Sometimes she still comes to watch him practice, to make sure he's practicing, but more often she's with the children, and after she has another set of twins a few years later (seriously? she's thinking), she's got to cut back her time on the court even more. He jokes that she doesn't even know who he's playing next; she rolls her eyes. Of course she knows. At major tournaments, she still commands a small army of nannies, children, and suitcases - sometimes she forces one of his coaches to help, and they always do, because she wears the pants in the family; the press says so, so it must be true. But she and the children stop coming to smaller tournaments - the girls can't be homeschooled forever, and the tour is year-round - and it does make her a bit nervous, after years of never spending a night apart. But she has contingency plans, because of course she does. She immediately befriends every model, actress, Olympian, princess that tries getting too close to him, neutralizing the threat before it even becomes one. She trusts him, but she's realistic. She has been on enough corporate-sponsored awkward double dates with other sports couples that have later divorced to know that she has to be proactive, and she is nothing if not proactive.

Her husband's best friend hires his former coach - the one who thought she was just an over-employed diversion - in a desperate attempt to squeeze the most out of his own potential. Soon his best friend has left his wife and child to focus on his career. She's disgusted - who does he think he is, treating the mother of his child like that? She cheers for her husband extra hard when he plays his best friend in a tight match, and his best friend turns and yells at her to shut up. Like men telling her to shut up has ever worked! She knows that her husband is silently freaking out, but she can't help it - she yells back, "crybaby!" He complains to the umpire; calls her "unbearable." After the match, her husband yells at his best friend in the locker room for going after her, then comes back to the hotel and starts a fight with her. They have to play the Davis Cup together the next week - how could she start this now? Because she's the tough one, damn it, even if she's not the one on court. And because maybe, just maybe, it makes her nervous that his best friend has left his wife for a 19-year-old who can keep up with him on tour. But that fear is ridiculous. He's not his best friend. He made that clear years ago when he fired the coach who dared suggest that his career - his amazing career - was more important than their relationship. "If you tell me to quit, I'll quit tomorrow, no problem," he says, and goes off to win the Davis Cup. Meanwhile, the press pillories her again, this time for being low-class. Whatever, haters. They have no sense of the ugliness being yelled from his opponent's player boxes, and his parents and coaches are all so bloody nice that it's up to her, the hot-blooded immigrant, to stand up for her husband.

She teaches the children her native language, which her husband doesn't understand. He's never even been to the country where she was born, but eh - he isn't missing much. After the boys were born, he didn't do as much to help. As much as they hate to admit it, he has to squeeze the most out of the time he has left too, and he was in such a tizzy after the girls were born: way more focused on diaper changes than on his tournaments. He can't afford to do that now, and she doesn't blame him. He's still as hands-on as he can be. He still lets her bring a sick child into bed with them on the eve of important finals. So hands-on that it's while he's running a bath for the girls after a loss in Australia that he twists his knee and tears his meniscus, requiring surgery. She tries not to think about the surgery that ended her own career what feels like a lifetime ago, to just be strong for him when he worries irrationally that he might not wake up from the anesthesia. He does wake up, but recovery is difficult in all the familiar ways, and after a series of poor false starts, the doctors tell him to take a longer pause if he hopes to actually let it heal. They know, at this point, that a pause might last forever. She tries, as always, to reassure. It's taken her fourteen years, but hey! She can wear heels again. Except he doesn't have fourteen years. On crutches, he asks her seriously: does she think he can ever win another Grand Slam? It's been four and a half years, and now he's on injured reserve. Her answer is unequivocal and immediate, because she is realistic, but ambitious: yes. 

Katy Perry's Grammy's performance of "Dark Horse" was visually fucking great, but the song didn't come across so well.  Which is not to say I think Katy Perry is any great vocal talent... but I really love this song, it deserves something steadier.  I've been listening to it on repeat today.  So here you go, enjoy this super kitschy lyrics video.  Aside from the central question, "So you wanna play with magic?" the best lines belong to Juicy J: "She's a beast / She'll eat your heart out like Jeffrey Dahmer / be careful, try not to lead her on / shorty's heart is on steroids cuz her love is so strong / she's sweet as pie but if you break her heart, she turn cold as a freezer."  Which of course, goes back to my favorite nursery rhyme: "And when she was good, she was very, very good / and when she was bad, she was horrid."

There's a lot of hate for Katy Perry -- do you ever feel like a plastic bag? -- but she's one of my favorite Top-40 pop stars.  I think I just really enjoy her imagery.  I really like "Roar." The video is quite great.  Any video that has a tiger eating an asshole earns points from me.  I love "E.T." for being as creepy as a Top-40 can be without being, you know, (too) rapey.  Then there's the songs I don't like that much, like "The One That Got Away" and "Part Of Me," but I'm still like, okay, that's an acceptable pop song that's a little different, has a little bit of an attitude.  Still have fun videos.  I like the girl, what can I say.  And I was not expecting to, considering she started off as a Christian artist.  It's okay, she's evil now (title is from a disappointed Christian, but I mean it sincerely!).  She's with the Illuminati.

And then there's "Hot N Cold."  Oh, how I love "Hot N Cold."  The veil, the raccoon eyes, the hair in her hip-hop scene.  In my alternate reality I wear pink matte lipstick, see.  I feel like Katy Perry would wear my fictional make-up line, Frantic.  And then the lyrics, of course. Yeah, you PMS like a bitch.  I would know.



On a related note:

Are you ready for a perfect storm?

Well, are ya, punk?  

"Miles and miles of perfect skin, I swear I do, I fit right in.  Miles and miles of perfect sin, I swear, I said, I fit right in, I fit right in your perfect skin."
- Hole, "Reasons to Be Beautiful"

This is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I'm actually going to respond to it: Can Male Writers Successfully Write Female Characters? Rod Rees defends his female characters in a way that makes you really appreciate Cormac McCarthy's refusal to write female characters, because he just knows he can't pull it off.  Because if there's one thing worse than a man who claims all women are incomprehensible, it's the man who claims to understand all women!

The old adage is write what you know and living in a house with two hi-achieving, confident and very ambitious teenage girls and having an intelligent and thoughtful wife (who happens to be beautiful to boot!) gave me, I thought, something of an insight into the female mindset.

Beautiful to boot!  I'm sure that makes her easier to try to understand.  Based on his descriptions of them, his female protagonists tend to be young, feisty, and ready and able to market themselves to men.  They admire their breasts in the mirror, use their sexual wiles to get themselves out of a tight corner (the backseat of a Volkswagen?), and call themselves "a lush thrush with a tight tush."  Rees protests that women do, indeed, objectify themselves.  And yes, many women do - many women are constantly preoccupied with their bodies, but about 80-90% of the time, such preoccupation comes from a very scary place of self-hatred and envy.  Even my most confident friends say things like, "bad news, I got fat :(" and when they tell their mirror selves, out loud, "I look hot," it's to combat the years and years of negative internal dialogue, their relatives' nitpicking, their boyfriends' secret stash of porn featuring women that look nothing like them, and of course, that ol' bugaboo, the media.

Rees also protests that women - grown-up women, that is, in the "visceral world of adult fiction" - use their sexual wiles.  Yeah, also true; some women do.  But again, it's accompanied by a whole host of other issues: flashbacks to uncomfortable/negative/non-consensual sexual experiences, fear of "something going wrong," and of course, the above body shame.  There's also the issue of personality shame: "I'm too awkward," "I scare people away," "no one likes me," "I'm not popular."  I'm not saying guys don't have this too - they do - but that this is a real insecurity experienced by many, many women (pretty much every woman I know) who are under pressure to be the kind of socially-adept coquettes that Rees apparently thinks is standard adult female behavior.  And as I argued in my essay on Shirley Jackson, women who fail to play the social roles assigned to them rarely if ever appear in fiction, and almost never as heroines.  This doesn't mean there's not a hunger for them, among both men and women, which is why fucked-up, maladroit women like Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Lisbeth Salander have proved so popular, and why I've got high hopes for Sonya Cross on "The Bridge."  The issue, for me, isn't that Rees writes about women who don't exist.  I'm sure they do, somewhere - there's a lot of women in the world - and they're probably fucked-up in ways that Rees can't imagine.  The issue is that female characters like his are so obviously a male fantasy, and all they really do is contribute to the huge pile of excrement that is The Portrayal of Women in Media.

What it comes down to is this: spending your life looking at women does not give you insight into what it's like to be a woman, to think like one, to act like one.  All it does is enable you to create avatars who fetishize themselves.  When temporarily transformed into a woman for a movie, Dustin Hoffman came to the astonishing conclusion that the world was full of interesting women that he had not deigned to talk to, because they didn't meet "his" standard of beauty - because he had been brainwashed.  This is a really important discovery that more men need to make.  To some extent, it goes both ways, but men have more social tools at their disposal: wealth, power, seniority, wit, or even just being "not creepy."  By in large, women are still defined and judged by their physical characteristics.

Once female writers venture into the more visceral world of adult fiction they find this stereotype doesn’t work and hence struggle. Just a thought.

The stereotype, by the way, is the "ideal" heroine who doesn't "see herself as an object of male sexual interest" and doesn't "use her sexual charisma as a means of achieving an objective."  This is probably the most woeful, enraging assertion of all, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Rees hasn't read a lot of books, or stories, or songs written by women.  I mean, if he's really suggesting female writers write female characters who have no idea they're objects of male sexual interest, he really needs to listen to Courtney Love's entire ouevre, for one, and Catherine Breillat's, and Sylvia Plath's.  Believe me: we know.  And actually, there are female writers who write his type of self-fetishizing female characters: teenage girls writing bad fanfiction, copying what they've seen in some romance novels, some erotica, and male-gaze sex scenes.  He's got plenty of company. 

Here is a thing that needs to stop:

1. Girl violates some group norm (usually liking/going after/not repudiating a guy who is "off limits," but this varies).
2. Group organizes revenge/punitive attack on girl that almost always involves rape.
3. Girl commits suicide for multiple reasons (shame, hurt, desire for revenge).
4. Girl becomes horrible, terrifying, evil ghost that picks off group members one by one.*

For one, it perpetuates and universalizes a single narrative/understanding of rape and its consequences - namely, that it is the most horrible thing that can ever be done to a woman, so much so that it actually drives her to kill herself and become a vengeful spirit in order to kill everyone involved in wronging her, like a Lifetime movie on paranormal crack basically - and for two, it is really lazy writing.  I immediately lose interest in any new plot that involves this storyline, although I do retain a reluctant soft spot for Shutter, probably just because it was the first I saw of this type. 

I understand that most Asian horror stories make revenge the driving force, and I understand that most Asian horror stories involve female evil spirits, and that this leads, "obviously," to rape-and-revenge.  It's not unlike the recurring theme in American gaming/comics/fantasy/sci-fi where the strong action heroine has only become strong because she was once raped.  But really: if you must have revenge, and you must have a female evil spirit, there are other paths to take.  Look at the entire Whispering Corridors series, which at least has girls committing suicide and becoming wraiths for other reasons, because of different wrongs.  I would say don't look at all the performance-oriented movies where the big wrong is "you scarred my face!" or "you took my spot as the lead in our girl band!" but at this point, I would rather sit through that kind of a movie than another rape-and-revenge.

* Similar, but distinct: the group kills the girl during or in the immediate aftermath of the attack (c.f. The Maid).  Similar because rape-and-revenge is still an overtone, but distinct because she doesn't actually get any chance to respond to the rape particularly, and she doesn't commit suicide.

Katie is my favorite character of the Paranormal Activity franchise.  For a while I had a default icon that was called "because she looks like Katie."  She was the reasonable one (compared to her boyfriend Micah) in PA1, with a delicious darkward turn as she becomes possessed and kills Micah, as if telling him in the most ferocious terms, "see, this is what happens when you don't listen to me, dumbass."  PA2 reveals that she became possessed because her brother-in-law Dan "sicced" the demon on her - it was to save his wife and son, but still - and Dan gets his comeuppance and "Katie" gets "her" revenge when she comes to their big fancy house, demon-possessed, to kill Dan and Kristi (his wife/her sister) and take Hunter (the infant son).  In PA3, Katie is a child who gets dragged (literally) into Kristi's bad-idea-of-the-year "friendship" with the demon - she and Kristi both end up at least somewhat possessed and in the care of their evil witch grandmother Lois*.


I really love PA1, enjoy PA2 mostly for the big "Fuck U" it allows Katie to give, and am not such a fan of PA3.  I think this is because I didn't like the story that the creators (who changed from movie to movie) eventually laid out to explain what happened in PA1.  Witchcraft - especially of the matriarchal "coven" variety - in horror always sets off an alarm in my head: "this is a women-are-evil story."  That's accentuated in the Paranormal Activity franchise by the special importance given to the firstborn son, who everyone will go to extreme lengths to protect and who is apparently Blue Moon rare (girls in this family are basically throw-aways, especially if they can't be broodmares).  By contrast, Katie is sacrificed by her brother-in-law because she's nothing to him - she is an expendable, mother to no one.  Dan's teenaged daughter from a previous relationship, Ali, is the only one who says "hey, this isn't fair to Katie," and Ali is also safely tucked away on a field trip during Katie's rampage.  And while I liked the potential that Paranormal Activity had to be Katie's Good Girl Gone Bad (kind of Laura Palmer in reverse) story - even if witchcraft and a special son had to be involved - PA2 and especially PA3 show that there's nothing unique about Katie.  The same thing happens to her sister.  They get possessed and go bad because they're women (and I will note that the possession scenes always read very "rape-y" to me), the end. 

There's a perspective shift too.  In PA1, Katie and Micah are both leads, and you're in each of their headspaces; because the "paranormal activity" revolves around Katie and she's an adult, she might be more the main character than Micah.  PA2 is very decentralized - it's also very shallow in the sense that it's in no one's head in particular, and all the characters are ciphers.  In PA3, the boyfriend of Katie and Kristi's mother, Dennis, is the lead.  Katie and Kristi are children and not especially emotive ones, and their mother Julie is a non-entity.  The next closest thing to a character in PA3 is Dennis's male videography buddy.  It's interesting that in PA3 Katie and Kristi are basically there to be "creepy little girls" with incomprehensibly creepy behavior - "little girls are creepy," as my roommate says - whereas there's nothing creepy about Hunter, the baby boy in PA2, and the audience is simply meant to feel protective of him ("that poor baby boy," etc.).  PA1 sets itself apart from its sequels because we actually get to be in the headspace of the eventual-possessee, to see her as a three-dimensional human being instead of just a "creepy little girl" or a blank mother-type placeholder (in Kristi's case - who is Kristi?  God knows!). 

Men are do-ers in the Paranormal Activity franchise.  Micah is dense and foolish, but he is the macho take-charge investigator - and this trait of his is sort of mocked in PA1 as Micah bombastically insists that "no one comes into my house and fucks with my girlfriend" and Katie's just like, "you don't have power here" (his defensive reply is something along the lines of "don't tell me I have no power").  In PA2, Ali is the investigator, but she's not an actor, and she apparently wields zero influence over any other character, making her relevant only as an info-dumper.  Dan, the brother-in-law, is the only actor, and shows piss-poor decision-making - firing the maid for saging the house, ignoring video footage that he himself arranged, and ultimately transferring the demon to Katie.  Dan is actually absent during most of the movie (when the women of the house are being afflicted with paranormal activity), and it falls on him to make up for his failure to be the responsible man of the house by saving Kristi and Hunter and sacrificing Katie to the darkness.  Dennis, Katie and Kristi's would-be-dad, is neither a dolt nor an asshole, and is more of a protector for Katie and Kristi than their own mother.  He's heroic and self-sacrificing, a sensible investigator, and the good-guy foil to the human villain, the evil grandmother (there are no human villains in PA1 or PA2, and I think this does change the dynamic of a horror story - just ask Stephen King).  And of course then there's the biggest do-er of them all: the demon.  With all the marriage talk in PA3, the demon is definitely male.  But whereas the human men of Paranormal Activity all (arguably) mean well as they try to fix this situation that their women thrust them into, the human women are either corruptible to the extreme or just irrelevant, and in all cases unable to even try to protect themselves or their loved ones.  Their bodies are the battlefield for the war/pissing contest between the human men and the male demon. 


The demon always wins, and it's through the demon that the human men are killed by the women in their lives.  The visual effect is different, though: on screen, it's psycho bitches on the loose (with the only really affecting death, at least for me, being Micah's at the hands of "Katie").  It's too bad that Katie's actions at the end of PA2 probably aren't Katie's at all.  I would have preferred her to be taking revenge on Dan and Kristi - if only subconsciously, if only with the last smidgen of Katie that still existed within the bloody Katie-shell - but it was probably just the demon being demonic en route to obtaining that precious little boy. 

"Jennifer's Body" - Hole
"Arsenal" - Kidneythieves
"Climbing Up The Walls (Radiohead cover)" - Sarah Slean
"Behind Blue Eyes (The Who cover)" - Sheryl Crow

First, a study finding that "almost twice as many Americans would prefer to have a son rather than a daughter."  If you actually look at Gallup's report, though, this has been pretty typical since 1941.  Basically, it's because of men - 49% of men prefer a boy while 22% prefer a girl, and 31% of women prefer a boy while 33% prefer a girl.  For some people (not all) I think there's a little bit of "I want someone like me" involved in this kind of thing, both for psychological reasons and because you "know" how to raise someone of your own gender.  Like when my mother was pregnant, she wanted a girl and my dad wanted a boy - or rather, he "expected" a boy because he "could not believe" that he would not have a boy.  But women seem to have less of this than men.

This, however, is interesting - "both male and female Republicans are more likely to want a boy than are their gender counterparts who identify as Democrats."  Education level is also interesting - among respondents with a high school diploma or less, 44% prefer boys and 25% prefer girls; among postgraduate respondents, it's 32% for boys and 33% for girls. 

Anyway, the Atlantic suggests that while Americans may - like other cultures/societies - prefer boys to girls, they don't actually do anything to try to get more boys.

Second, Texas is trying to decide whether or not to allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans to have a confederate flag license plate.  The vote is delayed because the ninth member of the DMV board died and they have to pick a replacement.  Nine other states already have allowed the group such a license plate, and they sued Florida when Florida said no, leading a federal judge to decide that Florida was engaging in "viewpoint discrimination."  (My mother said "In that case I'm going to get a license plate that says the Tea Party are fuckers and if they say I can't have it then I'll sue Nebraska for viewpoint discrimination)  Jerry Patterson, a son of a confederate veteran, spoke in favor of the license plate by arguing that confederate veterans served honorably in the Civil War, just as he did in Vietnam:

"Not all things in Vietnam were done in a manner that I'm proud of. I served in Vietnam but I'm not proud of what happened. This is history and any time you commemorate history and those who served honorably, be they... the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I think they should be honored.”

Beyond the license plate thing: this is why I hate the word "honor."  Proud of what happened and yet still have served honorably.  Actions you can't be proud of, but done in an honorable way.  I think "honorable" and all its variants should be replaced in that sentence with "obedient," or some word that signifies "did what I was told to do by people with more power than I."  Then again, pretty much every military group in the world seems to call themselves honorable no matter what they're doing, so I'm not sure ethics has anything to do with "honor" now anyway.

Salon writer Laura Miller is all about Greg Mortenson.  Lying about being kidnapped by Taliban is "a bit irrelevant" and besides, he provides "a feeling of comradely motivation and a symbol of plucky American virtue."  Oh, vomitorium, like that girl in Hanna says.  I'm getting a little "not intended to be a factual statement" vibe from this whole thing.  Readers don't react so positively: "He accused real people of being Taliban kidnappers. That's not inspirational."  And "Confusing the Taliban with the people the Taliban are trying to take over and wipe out.  Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad."  And my favorite, "Sorry, but fabrication for the sake of a moral crusade is how we got stuck in Iraq." 

Hilariously Miller then backpedals out of her essay, so I guess her essay wasn't intended to be a factual statement either.  What are we even doing here?

Also, LOL@Jennifer Weiner: "I don't think writers get to choose the kind of books they write. It's a function of upbringing, education, inclination."  Always nice to see writers blame their choices on things beyond their power.  It's like "I don't control my character!  My character controls me!"

She's angry because Jennifer Egan, who just won the Pulitzer for The Goon Squad, apparently called chick lit "very derivative, banal stuff" - full context: "There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models?... My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower."  And J. Weiner's all "And there goes my chance to be happy that a lady won the big prize. Thanks, Jenny Egan. You're a model of graciousness."  So on Twitter we now have anger that female writers bring each other down and consolations that commercial fiction and literary fiction are equally good and just write good books, readers will come and of course there's plenty of room to like everything!  Don't worry!  We all have a seat at the table!

On Bookslut, Michael Schaub points out that Weiner's written on her FAQ page, "Somebody actually asked me this at a reading once, at the Powell’s in Portland, which was not the main Powell’s in Portland, because Jennifer Egan was reading the night I was in town and not only is she a critical big deal, she also used to be a model, so which one of us do you think was going to get shunted off to the satellite store?"  Ah, passive aggressive self-deprecation.

And I'm like, well, at least sf/f isn't the only "genre" that has this drama with "literary" fiction.  Good Lord.

This article, on film schools teaching screen writers not to write female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man, inspired me to make a list of movies that do pass the Bechdel Test.  Then a theme developed among the movies that I came up with.

Candyman: Helen and Bernadette. 

Topics of conversation: Their research.  Poverty and housing developments and the way the city is divided up to maintain class segregation.  

Mulholland Drive: Betty and Rita.

Topics of conversation: Rita's identity.  Betty's auditions.  A car crash, a murder mystery.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Everyone (there are very few male characters).

Topics of conversation: Each other, the scenery, existentialism, class, disappearing into fucking rocks.

Silent Hill: Rose, Cybil, Dahlia, Christabella.  Arguably Sharon, arguably Alyssa, arguably the Demon.

Topics of conversation: A missing child.  A haunted town.  Keeping the community safe.  Religion.  Demons.  Motherhood.

28 Days Later: Selena and Hannah.

Topics of conversation: Taking drugs to not care about being raped.  The infected.  Survival. 

Suspiria: Suzy and Sarah.

Topics of conversation: Strange developments at the dance school.  The weird teachers.  Dead students.  Their investigation of the mystery.

Yes, in horror movies, to quote one Bechdel Test reviewer, "they have more important things to talk about."  Another point is how frequently women are featured in horror movies, often alongside other women.  I suspect the ratio of women to men ends up being a lot higher in horror movies compared to movies in other genres, even in unlikelier scenarios like Drag Me To Hell (female antagonist, female protagonist, male bystander - a formula that's very common in J- and K-horror), although here I focused on female friendship/partnership. 

To some extent this is as B.S.-y final girl stuff, but as these movies indicate, not always.  Maybe horror filmmakers just like seeing women on the screen.  But seriously, in a world of all-male casts, where are they in horror?  Few and far between.  I think of, like, The Sixth Sense, and The Thing.  And The Sixth Sense just has two male protagonists, but an array of female characters.  2001: A Space Odyssey?  Predator?  But get ghosts and dark magic involved (as opposed to vicious killer aliens), and it's a woman's game.  Interesting that even for the "masculine" subgenres of horror (aliens, serial killers), the most authoritative movies have female leads: Alien, Silence of the Lambs.

Anyway, I'm sure plenty of people have written about this, but I really haven't read enough "scholarly review" of horror movies.

This will be longer than my assessment of True Grit, because this one had a way greater emotional impact on me.  Whereas True Grit was like a friendly slap on the back, Black Swan was like a punch in the face.

I thought this wasn't really about ballet at all - I read it as pretty clearly about "the young woman in society."  All the contrary messages that Natalie Portman's character Nina receives - be strong, except your weakness is perfect; be sexual, but then you're a whore; live a little but keep up your obligations; you're sick but how good that you lost weight; if you're the chosen one it means you're great and special but everyone will hate you; be perfect, but lose control; be the White Swan and the Black Swan (and there are only two options!) - are not reserved for ballerinas, let me put it that way.  I thought Portman did a great job exemplifying the uncertainty and awkwardness that often results from living in this pressure cooker.  I really felt for and empathized with her character, which meant I had a strong emotional connection to the movie as a whole.  I don't know if director Darren Aronofsky sort of fell into doing more than he thought he was doing (it sounds like he thought he was making a movie about how women are jealous of each other and back-stabbingly competitive), but I liked the result.  I really enjoyed the ballet scenes, especially the final surreal performance of Swan Lake at the end, but I did ultimately think that ballet was just a medium.  Just like each movie in the South Korean Whispering Corridors series (which fixates on similar topics) uses a different medium to explore the same subjects - ballet, art, choir, pick your poison - and by the way, Whispering Corridors: Wishing Stairs is the ballet movie, and it's pretty good and creepy.

Speaking of creepy, I liked the way they handled the "creepy scenes."  I loved that they didn't pause to explain or dwell on them - lets you sit there in the moment, with Portman's character and the only information she has - but I'm a fan of that kind of thing: weaving the "supernatural" so much into the fabric of the text that you can't differentiate it as supernatural at all, and you're just living in a world where reflections and paintings move on their own.  My favorite effect was definitely the whites of Portman's eyes turning red.

I think any child psychologist and anyone who's read Reviving Ophelia or Ophelia Speaks and such will be able to see each development in the movie coming - for one, all the language of "control" and "perfection" has got to be straight out of some How To Deal With Adolescent Girls handbook, special emphasis on the Eating Disorders and Self-Harm chapters.  Hell, "Perfect" is even an Alanis Morissette song: "Be a good girl/ You gotta try a little harder/ That simply wasn't good enough/ To make us proud."  It's old stuff to me - I was a teenaged girl not too long ago, and I went to a girls' college where I roomed with perfectionist ballerinas, one of whom had a textbook perfect-and-skinny mother as well as an eating disorder - although I grant that I was an over-analytical teenager, but also possessing of perfectionist impulses, especially when it came to grades and pleasing teachers (but not being a teacher's pet! it's a delicate balance), keenly aware of judgment and competition, and highly critical/hateful of my appearance and body.  Another of my roommates (not the ballerina) and I used to rock out to Courtney Love (she was the one who first recommended this movie to me).  This movie didn't "teach me" anything, although having it all bundled together and thrown in my face was a fairly exhausting experience.  I don't know how much of it is "old stuff" to people who are not so close to the issue, though, so for that reason I'm glad it's getting good reviews and the theater was packed with confused people laughing nervously during the masturbation scenes.  Or maybe people are aware, but think "well, not my daughter"?  Yeah, I've got news for you, folks.

This is a 2007 video that sockkpuppett (Luminosity) and sisabet made for Vividcon - the theme is the depiction of women in Supernatural, and the song they used is "Violet" by Hole (which should tell you in what direction the video's going).  It's extremely graphic - but of course this was all on the CW - and potentially triggery.  It's called "Women's Work."


As I don't watch Supernatural, I defer to cofax7 for some extra words: "I've been aware for the entire time I've watched the show that there were problems with the presentation of women, but this vid really provides the ammunition for that argument. Because even if the male deaths total the same number (which I don't know), the fact is that they are filmed entirely differently: they are clothed, the camera doesn't linger on them, they're not swimming, in bed, in bedclothes, bathing. Women in peril are sexy, and in a different way than the Winchesters in peril. Dean on his knees is sexy not because he is in peril, but because we know he's going to get up and kick ass in just a moment, because the show has identified him as the Hero. Whereas none of the women have that protection in the text."  More commentary on sisabet's LJ here.