Away from home...

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.

Princess Unchained

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the character Princess Leia in George Lucas' Star Wars epic. Specifically, the bizarre incongruity of putting the character in a metal bikini for no real reason other to, well, frankly, ogle Carrie Fisher's pretty figure in a skimpy outfit.

In the post I wrote that;

"...Slave Leias are troublesome...because they have the effect of (making the Leia character valued because of) sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing (the female characters) based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies."

The whole macguffin of Star Wars, women, their bodies, and how they come together seems to have returned with the new Lucas flick, The Force Awakens with Ms. Fisher, again, in the middle of it.

Fisher isn't happy that she has been slammed by viewers for "not aging well", and is pretty pissed off that - unlike her co-stars Hamil and Ford - her value relative to the new film is often being weighed based on her looks.

(It's worth noting that a hell of a lot of this goes back to the ridiculous but bog-bro-standard of a woman's sexual desuetude increasing with age, a stupid idea I've discussed here before...)

Why bring this up? Because the Boy and I went to see her new film last week.

I could go all Siskel and Ebert on you here, but why? You know what it was; a Star Wars flick. X-wings and blasters, "I have a bad feeling...", droids, alien critters, good Jedi and bad Sith.

Overall we both enjoyed it. It was good popcorn entertainment and a fun diversion, which is all I'd ask from a popcorn film.

The plot rolled along nicely with the minimal required fanservice, the two young leads were well written and well acted, and even though you'd think that after the first TWO times the Empire would have learned about the whole...ah, but I won't spoiler that part in case you want to go see it.

Here's the thing, though. The most challenging and intriguing thing about it - two words I'd never have thought I'd ever say about a Lucas film - was watching Fisher and Harrison Ford, the two of the oldest actors on screen. They've been mailing it in for so long that I'd almost forgotten what made them stars back in the day. But together they provide what modest throw-weight there is to the tale and, as such, do the best work they've done in a long time.

Ford's Han Solo was spot-on; trying to be the same "scoundrel" that makes him feel like he's still got some remnant of his youth and the sort of swagger that captivated the Princess when they met.

But...he's also smart enough to know he's kidding himself. Years and sorrows have slowed him down. He knows that he's slowing down and that the things he's running from are catching up to him. He knows that while he can't stop running that he can't run fast enough to escape his past and his grief, and that's as grievous as what he's fleeing.

All the while Ford doesn't lose the essential core of the guy. It's an older Solo but still Solo. Good work...but Fisher's older Leia was as good or even better.

I've read reviews that called Fisher's performance "perfunctory" or "embarrassed" but I disagree completely; her restrained work is perfect for the part. Leia is scarred as her lover is scarred, but her way of dealing with that is to lock down. She withdraws inside the austere senior officer and faction leader, all too aware of her responsibilities, just as her ex retreats into his feckless bad boy all too heedless of his.

Fisher conveys this by using her older looks and body to great effect. She wears the strained face of someone who lives with the constant fear of agony, a veteran trooper who has taken the big wound. She moves slowly and cautiously as someone who expects at any moment to be spitted on the spear of old pain that she knows from experience will stagger her and drive her to her knees.

She's damaged, just as he's damaged, but her scar tissue is formed in stillness as his is in motion.

As a couple they're terrific.

(Selfishly, I wish that there had been a little more sexual desire, some sexual tension, but expecting adult sexuality from a Star Wars flick is like expecting grand opera from friggin' Care Bears; you know it ain't gonna happen.)

Together their work shows the viewer that all their emotions are still there but that both have wrapped those emotions away in deep storage because they hurt too much to be exposed. They hate the baggage each of them carries while loving the person almost - but not quite completely - buried under the baggage. They're still in love but given their griefs and, more particularly, their disparate reactions to their griefs they can't stand to live with each other.

I was amazed...until I remembered that George Lucas had nothing to do with writing this thing. Anyway, this was perhaps the first time I've ever seen one of these SW flicks where the characters 1) felt like actual people and 2) drove the story along. It felt like an actual movie instead of a toy commercial written by a 12-year old. I think a huge part of that was the age of Ford and Fisher, and the knowledge of the actual pain and suffering that the blasting and slashing were inflicting.

The characters they played in the earlier films were young people having "an adventure" for other young people to enjoy.

In this one they're still "adventuring"...but at the heart of the adventure, like a hidden knife inlayed with old blood, is mortality. Age and pain have taught them that "adventuring" has a deep and sorrowful cost.

The two young actors in the piece are their yesterday and our today, strong and brave and striving for today's bright crown of honor and glory.

The two older actors are tomorrow; the slave standing behind us holding above our heads that crown and whispering into our ears alone the reminder that beyond today is the inescapable nightfall of age and death.

And as important as the quest for, and the brightness of, that light is how we face the darkness.

I Know What I Like

The exhibition itself sounds like a little bit...not little, really; a great big yawn:

"...most of the objects in this exhibition, which covers both iconophobia (hating images) and iconoclasm (doing something about hating images: namely, bashing them with something hard, corrosive, explosive or sharp). It is an engrossing lesson in the ways that the clash of ideologies can produce violence and concentrate it on a work of art, like the sun through a magnifying glass."

One of the objects on display, though, is anything but a yawn.

Ridiculous? Yes.

Uncomfortable, both as furniture and as the-woman-as-household-object?

Yes.

But not a yawn.

I'm afraid where much post-Impressionist art is concerned I'm more than a bit of a Philistine. I just Don't Get It. The Portland Art Museum presented an exhibition of the work of an artist that included four vacuum cleaners inside a plastic rectangle and a circular pile of bronze-colored sacks of something that was functionally indistinguishable from a sandbag mortar pit.

I laughed.

The point of the Tate Gallery's exhibition is that artwork like the contorted lady above was once considered anything but laughable - that it was and is at the heart of this clash of ideologies:

"...on 8 March 1986, International Women’s Day, two angry activists poured viscous paint stripper on the face and neck of the figure in Allen Jones’s Chair, a caricature-sexy female lying on her back and forming the base of the eponymous chair. The result looked distressingly like the effects of an acid attack on a real person; one thinks of the awful experience of two young British women in Zanzibar at the hands of Muslim extremists only this summer."

That's all very tidily awful but, sadly, I can't look at Plastic Clarisse, the Semi-Nude Chair, and have any other thought than "Gee, the spiky stripper boots sure look like an uncomfortable headrest to me."

I guess I just don't know about Art.

(Shakes head)

Posted (almost) without comment, the images released with Playtex's "Fresh + Sexy Wipes" ad campaign:



Don't have a beaver? How 'bout this, then, you dirty boy:



And we know how much you like that plump, juicy, delicious peach...



So you mean the whole time the secret to getting all that freaky action was to carry around a pack of those fruity-smelling baby wipe things to swab my junk with? Christ on a crutch, how come nobody told me that when my kids were still in goddamn diapers?!?

I...I...there's really no words for this that these gawdawful ads don't say, is there?

Princess in Chains

Bear with me. This one is a little complicated, and self-indulgent. It's something that's been floating around in the back of my mind for a bit and will take a little exposition. Okay? Here goes.

It started with this post at Geek With Curves where Amy Ratcliffe talked about

"...the "fake geek girl" joke isn't funny anymore. This ad sends the message that girls aren't wanted. I feel it also perpetuates the belief that we must question geek girls. If you want to be really extreme, you could say this comic encourages people to stop girls who are wearing Star Wars shirts and quiz them about the movies to ensure they've earned the right to wear it.

This shouldn't be a thing. But it is. This very discussion comes up semi-regularly, and it's disheartening. It seems that there are still enough people whose knee jerk reaction to meeting a geek girl is to question her "cred."

And that actually took me back to a related post that John Scalzi (whose typeface I am unworthy to set) put up at his blog Whatever back in July:

"Because here’s a funny fact: Her geekdom is not about you. At all. It’s about her.

Geekdom is personal. Geekdom varies from person to person. There are as many ways to be a geek as there are people who love a thing and love sharing that thing with others. You don’t get to define their geekdom. They don’t get to define yours. What you can do is share your expression of geekdom with others. Maybe they will get you, and maybe they won’t. If they do, great. If they don’t, that’s their problem and not yours.

Be your own geek. Love what you love. Share it with anyone who will listen."

Why all this geek love?

Well, because at heart I'm still the same sci-fi and wargame nerd (or geek, call the thing what you want to) I was in high school. An older, more confident, fatter-and-slower geek, but I still get a kick out of building models, playing wargames, and reading and watching everything from fantasy to sci-fi and beyond.

And, being someone who loves women, I love that there are women who love those things, like Amy, and hope that they can get the same love back from them that I did and do.

And so it ticks me the hell off when I read about the sorts of people that Ratcliffe and Scalzi talked about - or run into them, which is worse and, fortunately, something that hasn't happened lately.

And this, in turn, got me thinking about my son's turn away from George Lucas' Star Wars universe and how its left me as the only geek in the family who actually cares that the new Clone Wars episode is coming along tomorrow.

And that, in turn - remember, I told you to bear with me - led me to thinking about how women are portrayed in science fiction/fantasy and, specifically, in Lucas' universe, and from there to one of what I consider the real problematic images in the canon:

Slave Leia.

Let me preface my next section with this; I'm a het guy. I like women, and as part of that I think women are lovely to look at and I enjoy looking at them. Pretty, shapely women are, well, pretty and shapely. And a pretty, shapely woman in a skimpy, form-fitting outfit tends to reveal more of that shapely prettiness. And I had when the first trilogy was filmed and still have a bit of a crush on Carrie Fischer, a strong, smart woman who has toughed her way through some tough days.

So on those criteria, Carrie Fischer...in a metal bikini?

Success. TOTAL success.

But.

If I stop being all testosterony and starting thinking with my large head it's not hard to recognize several problems with the entire idea of Slave Leia and especially the image of Leia/Carrie in her alloy undergarments.

First, in a created universe notable for its prudity, how come Carrie was the only one prancing around Tatooine in her beach wear? I mean; desert, sand, sun(s)...but no Luke in speedos? Leia is the only one who gets to show some skin?

WTF?

Well, you and I both know why TF; it's because the boy-geeks wanted to see Princess Leia in her undies and George was catering to them. Like a LOT of other tropes in fantasy and science fiction, this one is pitched directly at The Boys.

Which would be fine...except in doing so it tells the Girls that they are supposed to be eye-candy.

Sure, Leia is an action heroine; she shoots and swings from a rope and rescues her lover (okay, well, love, then, since we never get to see the couple exchange more than a chaste kiss or two). But so is Harrison Ford and he never strips down to his jockeys or whatever the hell the guys in the Star Wars universe wear for skivvies. He's supposed to be female eye-candy fully clothed.

Leia gets to strip.

It's not hard to see a message there.

But in context the message is even cruder.

That's the second point; in the context of the movie Leia's near-nudity makes no sense.

Let me run quickly through the two main reasons I think this.

2. The critter who is making all these wardrobe decisions is a ginormous space slug. Presumably Jabba's notions of sexual attractiveness do not encompass female primates, so the point of shoving the last Princess of Alderaan into a bronze Brazilian tanga probably isn't to inflame Hutty lust.

2. And nowhere in the story do we get any idea that the natives of Alderaan have a particular nudity taboo, so if the point is to humiliate the proud Princess we have no way to get that. In fact, if that WAS the idea - and the censor wasn't an issue - why not just chain Leia up in her skin? But since the censor clearly IS an issue, why not put her in ostentatiously Victorian rags? Or a clown suit? Or half a suit of stormtrooper armor?

My point is that given all the above Slave Leia isn't really sensible as a plot point in the context of that portion of the story of The Empire Strikes Back. There's no reason for her to be in the metal bikini as opposed to the bounty-hunter outfit she's captured in, or rags, or a chador.

She's in that bikini purely as eye candy for us boy-geeks and the lack of context makes that crystal clear.

So...

To get back to the original point of this post; the Slave Leias are troublesome, to me at least, just because they have the effect of dividing Star Wars/geek fandom into camps based on sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing one camp based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies.

They make a woman-fan's life more difficult because - all the way back to the original image - they are based on that fan-boy snigger at "that girl showing her titties!"

And that - to me - is a problem because, frankly, it makes it about the guys watching rather than what should be her choice whether to emphasize or downplay her sexuality.

Our job is to simply be smart and civil, and enjoy the fun with her, or not, and to STFU if not. Yes, her "titties" are pretty, but they're hers and not ours. We're grownups, guys, and we really need to get over our 8th-grade selves and start treating the gals with some respect.

I know that this seems like some trivial shit at a time when a real woman can be brutally raped, and what's worse raped in such a way that the rape tool tears out her guts and she dies.

This is just silly and trivial.

But it occurs to me that this woman-sneering, fanboy-leering shit is part of a spectrum, and the kind of guy who gets a dirty snigger out of a woman in a metal bikini - whose idea of his take on Star Wars is that woman should be in that metal bikini for his pleasure and not hers - is sharing a teensy bit of the sort of disrespect for her with the kind of guy that sees her as just a body to be used for his enjoyment.

For me it turns what should be an enjoyable bit of silly fandom into another damn part of the whole business of turning women into objects and meat for men's delectation.

That's a goddamn shame.

I don't think there's much I can do about Slave Leia, or should; it's really just ridiculous pop culture when you get down to it.

But here's what I can do; I can raise my own son so that when he sees the Slave Leia image he thinks not of women in chains, of himself, not of her body as a thing to leer at but as a person, as a woman, and as heroine in her own right who lives in that body. And to respect her AND that body.

For his own good as well as hers; because the other thing about Slave Leia is that if you fuck with her she will strangle you with her own chains and it'll serve you goddamn right.

And I can also raise my daughter to expect that men will treat her with respect, regardless of whether she's wearing a bathing suit or a spacesuit, and do the best I can to give her the means and methods to be the woman she can best be. If she still wants to be a princess, why not be a princess that can kick ass?

Are you getting all this, kids? Sorry it took so long to get here, but you both need to quit fooling around and brush your teeth. It's almost bedtime.

Phone Sex

Sweet Baby Jesus fuckolally fuck I want this job.

"Hundreds of women in South Florida were among the survey recipients, their names pulled from the white pages by a private company, state officials said. They were asked to voluntarily tell the state how many men they'd had sex with in the past year, whether a man had ever poked holes in a condom to get them pregnant, and how they felt emotionally when they last had unprotected sex."

ME: "Hi, is this Tammi?"
WOMAN: Uh, yeah. Who is this?"
ME: "I'm Joe Dirt from the Florida Department of Health. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you have a moment."
WOMAN: Umm. OK, shoot."
ME: "OK. First; are you wearing panties right now?"

Government service was never like this in the Army.

God, I love Florida. This stuff makes me wish we had a Republican governor here, too.

I hear the pole gymnastics team is good, though...

So my friend Janelle forwarded this photo on Facebook:
and I have to give one of her pals (whose name - since I want to give him credit but not compromise his privacy - will call "Will") huge credit for what I thought was the top comment:

"Sure, you can get a degree from Girls Gone Wild University, but then you just end up with massive amounts of student loan debt, a job market still trying to bounce back and probably an STD. Start off with Girls Gone Wild Community College. It's just the smarter play."

And just think how much further your G.I. Bill would go there. Pay for a lot of Natty Light and see-through community college logo tank tops. Though I hear the GGWU "drunken limbo" team is offering a full ride. So, your call.

Personally, I hope my daughter finds a good trade school...