No Country For Bitch Flicks

I have a guest post up at Bitch Flicks: a review of No Country For Old Men, part of their Best Picture Nominee Review Series. You should read it.

Not Like Those *Other* Christians...

It's all too easy to be both a feminist and a misogynist, especially in the early stages of your feminism. Recognizing that the world is rigged against people of the female persuasion, you refuse to play the role forced upon you by the very fact of your (assumed) femaleness. You cast aside make-up and dresses and pink and all other things coded “feminine” in our society. You do “masculine” things and hang out with masculine-type humans. Maybe you even start bad-mouthing women who wear make-up and dresses and pink, because the fact that they buy into these products means they are perpetuating their own oppression. Not like you, who have seen the fnords of cultural misogyny and know that masculine-coded things are Good and feminine-coded things are bad.

...Whooooops.

The real reason you are bad-mouthing those silly ladies and their silly skirts (and I speak from a place of painful personal experience) is that you desperately crave the approval of non-feminist men. The patriarchy has instilled in you the idea that Getting Men's Approval is the only way to validate your existence. It's like the patriarchy is a dream within a dream: once you recognize it for what it is, you think you've escaped it, but actually you've only peeled back one layer – you're still stuck in the dream. Actually, it's worse than that, because there's this whole kyriarchal onion of layer upon layer upon layer of assumptions and bigotry and -isms; but let's stick with this first layer for a sec.

So you've recognized that the kyriarchy's expectations of Woman are ridiculous, contradictory, labyrinthine, unfair, and impossible to meet. Good for you. Trouble is, you've responded just the way the kyriarchy wants you to respond: by rejecting Woman altogether. You're still buying into culturally-ingrained misogyny; you've just granted an exemption for yourself. You're out to prove to the misogynists that you're Not Like Those Other Women.

I think/hope I have at last reached a point where I don't reflexively do this, or if I do I catch and correct myself; but I've noticed myself doing the same thing in a different field: I keep wanting to prove to non-believers that I'm Not Like Those Other Christians.

I'm on a progressive message board, prefacing snarky comments about mainstream Christianity with, “Speaking as a believer...”. I'm telling new acquaintances that I'm about to start a master's in theology, and I immediately add that my school is very progressive and pro-QUILTBAG. I play down the Christian aspect of my identity and play up the Jewish side for the benefit of secular communities that tend to conceive Jewishness as a cultural rather than religious identity.

I'm no longer saying, “I'm a woman, but woman-haters should approve of me because I don't buy dresses and I don't wear make-up and I hate romantic comedies. I'm Not Like Those Other Women!” I'm saying, “I have faith, but secularists should approve of me because I believe in evolution and I'm pro-choice and I don't think I have a monopoly on spiritual truth. I'm Not Like Those Other Christians!”

Now, there's a very important distinction between these two kinds of disavowals. The feminine-coded things I'm disavowing are not inherently bad. Dresses and make-up and rom-coms are inherently value- and gender-neutral. They're not somehow intrinsically masculine or feminine or good or bad (though you could certainly make an argument for the intrinsic badness of most recent movies with Katherine Heigl in them) – they come to be seen as m/f based on arbitrary patriarchal prescriptions, and whether we designate them Good or Bad is our response to this coding.

Denying evolution, though? Denying womb-owners their bodily autonomy? Dismissing other faiths as inferior to yours? I'd argue that these are, in fact, inherently bad things. When I as a Christian disavow them, it's not equivalent to when I as a woman disavow value-neutral feminine-coded things. It's equivalent rather to being a man with a lot of misogynist male friends, hitting on women by telling them earnestly that I don't objectify and dehumanize them, I'm not a rape apologist, I don't blame women for provoking lust in men – in short, I'm Not Like Those Other Men.

But you know who overwhelmingly doesn't need to hear that this stuff is wrong, because they already know it? Women. And you know who does need to hear it? Misogynist men. “Pro-choice Christians exist!” is not a message non-believers particularly need to hear – it's one that anti-choice Christians need to hear, desperately and urgently.

I'm past insisting that I'm Not Like Those Other Women, but in this context I'm still insisting that I'm Not Like Those Other Men. The trouble with this defensive self-exceptionalism is that it doesn't challenge the status quo – it reinforces it.

7 Reasons Why I Love "The Day The Earth Stood Still"

The Retro-Futurist Production Design

Okay, so it's not Metropolis (I LOVE YOU METROPOLIS MEET ME AT THE ALTAR AS SOON AS THEY LEGALIZE HUMAN/MOVIE MARRIAGE), but it's still got a pretty snazzy aesthetic. The smooth white uniformity of both the spaceship and the robot Gort prefigures Apple products by about 50 years.

The Amazingly Non-Annoying Movie Kid

Everyone hates kids in movies not aimed at kids. We all agree that Terminator 2: Judgment Day was marred only by the obnoxious brat and his even more obnoxious haircut. Movie kids, as a rule, fall into two equally unbearable categories: Whiny Brat and Smug Prodigy. Little Bobby Benson, though, sidesteps this rule. As a good-natured, obliging, happy kid, he's not at all whiny or bratty, and he's curious and inquisitive without being precocious or smug.

The ~Deeply Subtle~ Christian Allegory

Klaatu's first words to humankind are, “We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill.” He assumes the name Carpenter (OH I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE), teams up with a Jew, and suffers little children to come to him. He's distrusted, demonized, and eventually assassinated by the authorities. He gets resurrected and delivers a message to all humans that leaves the decision of how we act in our own hands, and then ascends to the heavens. Yes, it has all the subtlety and finesse of a chainsaw, but I saw E.T. a billionty times as a kid – I'm a sucker for a hamfisted Christ allegory.

In Places It's Hilariously Dated

This isn't always to the film's credit: for a movie with such a progressive, let's-all-join-hands-and-sing-kumbaya message, it's remarkably light on people who aren't rich white American men (my favorite class of people in movies!). And how creepy is the scene where Klaatu gets into the elevator with Helen, knowing full well that the power's about to go out and she'll be trapped in the elevator with a man she doesn't trust? THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES. Funnier are the more naïve signs of its times: the fact that Helen willingly leaves her son in the care of a strange man (after asking her boyfriend, “Do you think it's all right?”, to which my brain cannot possibly avoid adding “to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie...”); the doctors who complain that Klaatu's advanced medicine makes them feel like “third-rate witch doctors” and then light up cancer sticks inside the freaking hospital.

Claude Rains Almost Played Klaatu

As good as Michael Rennie is, I have a bit of a thing for Claude Rains, so I would have loved to see this happen. On the downside, it would have totally screwed up the first verse of “Science Fiction Double Feature”, which is the best song in Rocky Horror and if you disagree you are the Mayor of Wrongsville, the President of the Society for the Promotion of Wrongness, and the Supreme Leader of Wrongistan.

“Klaatu Barada Nikto”

I used to have a hoodie with “Klaatu Barada Nikto” on the back, but then the K fell off, and I was like, “I can't walk around with 'laatu Barada Nikto' on my back, everyone will think I am a DORK” so I peeled off all the other letters and then I found the K and I was like dammit. I guess the moral of the story is, tidy your room, kids.

It's Basically Plan 9 From Outer Space Done Right

Plan 9 From Outer Space is one of my comfort movies, right alongside The Final Sacrifice on MST3K and any of the Disney pics from the early '90s. I love the shit out of that ridiculous frickin' movie and would quite happily watch it every day for the rest of my life. The Day The Earth Stood Still has more or less the same plot as Plan 9 – aliens, concerned that nuclear-age humanity is going to blow them all to kingdom come, descend to Earth in order to stop that from happening – but dispenses with the continuity errors, ill logic, and golden Ed Wood dialog. Which, okay, makes it sound like it's missing all the good stuff, but I promise you, this is a fantastic movie.

(Who is Keanu Reeves what remake I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT)

God of Speculative Fiction

Christian fundamentalists, militant atheists, and some of the more irresponsible corners of the media like to paint Religion and Science as two discrete forces in a binary opposition. To scientists, this narrative asserts, faith is a mendacious force wilfully blinding people to the truths of scientific endeavor and the methods of rationality; while religious believers bury their hands in the sand of the like-minded community or seek to discredit the facts that would falsify their faith or at least render it unnecessary.

Needless to say, I despise binary oppositions with the white-hot hatred of a thousand suns, and this one is an especial desk-denter. I'll not insult my readers' critical thinking skills by explaining how you can totes believe in God and evolution at the same time!!eleventy (though if you've stumbled upon this blog, say in a Google search for “rob bell gay” [spoiler: he's not!], consider fine-tuning your reading comprehension skills before commenting, ta very much).

Christian writer Alister McGrath observes that university Christian groups are often populated primarily by science students, and my own experience bears this out. I think there's an argument to be made for the intellectual humility of scientists, as opposed to liberal arts students like myself who arrive at university convinced that, if we don't already know everything worth knowing, we certainly will after three/four/ten years of studying Latin/gender studies/ancient Sumerian. McGrath's explanation, though, is that “scientists are used to talking and thinking about reality in terms of models, in terms of partial and conceivable representations of reality, and thus have little difficulty in handling the same tools when speaking and thinking about God”.

The same, I believe, applies to speculative fiction fans. Whereas the practice of scientific inquiry endows a way of conceiving reality that can be transferred to thinking about meta-reality, sci-fi and fantasy provide images that we fanpeople can use as our models for conceiving God. (And, before you ask, I have indeed uttered the sentence, “Dammit, Jim, I'm a speculative fiction fan, not a scientist!”)

It's not just that fantasy's Big Three – the writers whose worlds even haters of fantasy are familiar with: Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling – are all Christians whose culturally-ubiquitous works incorporate and recreate aspects of Christian mythology. It's that speculative fiction has a unique power to tap into our deepest longings, magic wands and talking animals and interstellar travel and time travel and epic quests and all the things that are OMG SO FREAKING AWESOME and I WANT TO GO TO THERE: things that transcend our everyday reality and echo back to our little earth-bound time-bound physics-bound lives some small taste of eternity. If you believe in the Christian story, with its great cosmic happy-ever-after, then it makes sense that you'll experience some profound yearnings for better, cooler, more miraculous worlds than our own.

For example:

Talking about God the Holy Spirit is difficult. This is the aspect of God that lives inside every believer. (If you thought the concept of the Trinity was a head-scratcher, consider that one of the persons of the Trinity is also a zillion persons. HEAD ASPLODE.) People just don't talk about the Holy Spirit as much as they talk about God the Creator and Jesus Christ, because it is one baffling concept. Here are some of the models I use for thinking about the Holy Spirit:

• my dæmon

• my Patronus

• my Iron Man armor

• my Spidey-sense

• my Green Lantern ring

• the Force

All images taken from nerddom; each one something every geek has longed desperately to have; each one partial and inadequate as a model, but taken together representing something of the power and awesomeness of literally having God living inside of you.

I think the parallels between fandom and Christianity are striking. How do we respond to Middle-Earth? Some with indifference; some with hostility; some with passionate love and longing. Some people are cautiously interested in the story itself, but grow to despise it on account of the intense nerditry of the fanbase. Some people are introduced to it by their friends, while others find it on their own. Some people are switched off by the story as presented in one medium, but love it in another. Some people think it is a load of crap and can't believe grown humans are wasting their time on a pointless fantasy world.

To those on the outside, the intensity is often alienating. But to those within the fold, all things are given through the connection that we share based on our deepest longings and the magical world that, for brief moments at a time, promises to meet and surpass them.

(Have I ever ended a prayer to God, you ask, with the words “I leave it entirely in your hands”? I HEREBY INVOKE WHATEVER IS YOUR COUNTRY'S EQUIVALENT OF THE FIFTH AMENDMENT.)

On Norway

My heart goes out to Norway at this time. All the people who lost their lives, all the people mourning loved ones, all the people whose world was rocked by this violent atrocity – may peace and comfort be with you all.

It's my prayer that we in the world can look to this horror and learn from it, so that some sliver of good can be forged from the hurt and death.

I hope other countries – particularly the US – will be moved to take seriously the threat of terrorism from fundamentalist Christianity.

I hope Islamophobes will be led to understand that Islam is no more an inherently violent religion than Christianity is, and that religiously-motivated acts of hate and murder are always the work of sick individuals twisting and distorting the name of Love.

I hope moderate and progressive Christians will feel compelled to speak up, condemning unequivocally the brutal distortion of our faith and all the inflammatory rhetoric that paves the way for actions like Breivik's.

I hope Europe will take to heart the terrible cost of far-right extremism, especially those parts of the continent that seem to have forgotten what happened last time it was allowed to gain a foothold in the West.

Come on, humankind. Let's try to do it right this time.

Fat Acceptance, Thin Privilege

Naturally I have nothing but respect for the hard-working medical health professionals who make our NHS the flawed yet wonderful institution it is; but I gotta say – sometimes, doctors are d-bags.

I think of the nurse whose sex-ed advice plowed over my somewhat embarrassed insistence that I do not sleep with men and have no intention of so doing; the doctor who prescribed me The Pill for my skin condition and a couple months later told me icily that I'd put on weight and should exercise more; a dozen forms and pamphlets that frame sexual activity exclusively as hetero P-in-V (“the only 100% sure way to prevent pregnancy is to abstain from sex entirely” – both heteronormative and profoundly unimaginative!).

Of course, for every story of indignity and humiliation suffered at the hands of healthcare professionals, I have one of excellent treatment – the doctor who so readily put me at ease when I shamefacedly reported my first yeast infection; the nurse who ran the metal speculum under the hot tap before bringing it anywhere near me (if there was never a furious second-wave feminist screed entitled Speculum, somebody missed a trick) – but the fact remains: doctors can be real assholes.

It's not always entirely their fault. They're the products of the med school system, which – like everything else in this sad, mad, wonderful world – is susceptible to humankind's penchant for Othering and oppression. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but doctors don't always know best: how many Victorian women were diagnosed with “hysteria”, the complaint of being female in a very male-dominated society? How many housewives of the 1950s and 60s were psychoanalyzed with spurious mental illnesses just because they didn't find being a housewife entirely fulfilling? How many trans* and genderqueer individuals face hostility from the doctors they have to somehow convince of their gender identity? I don't think it's the words of a kook, therefore, to suggest that sometimes doctors talk total shite, especially about queer people, PWD, and fat people.

Fat Acceptance (FA) is probably the newest aspect of the social justice movement to me, and initially I looked on it with doubt. Hadn't I always been told that fat = bad? That fat ≠ ugly I was prepared to accept as jiving with basic feminist values, but medical health professionals are always reiterating that fat = unhealthy. There's the increased risk of heart failure; there's the late onset diabetes; there's the obesity epidemic, and my God won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?!

Actually, though... read FA websites. Learn that the correlation between size and health has never actually been proved to exist, and that you can be fat and healthy (or thin and unhealthy) at one and the same time. Realize that, even if there is or might be a correlation between an individual's size and eir health, it is not a moral issue and you have absolutely no right to be judging em for eir (horrible phrase) “lifestyle choices”. Think critically about the multi-bajillion-dollar diet industry, which operates on a cycle of convincing people that they should hate their bodies and spend all the money they can on the latest diet regimes that will not work because the idea that everyone can obtain any body shape they want through diet and exercise is A COMPLETE LIE, and that is a feature not a bug. Start to notice the fat-shaming in which our culture is engulfed, in constant pop-culture messages that fat equates to greedy or gluttonous or comic relief or unsexy or disgusting or immoral or just bad, bad, bad.

I've been reading and learning and realizing and thinking and noticing, and I think it's important for me to start talking about it because fat is a feminist issue: if you're a feminist, an activist, a social justice blogger, you cannot be all, “End discrimination now! Oh and go on a diet, porky.” We've all seen that attitude on supposedly feminist websites, often in the form of concern-trolling. Just cut it out. Being a feminist/SJer who castigates fat people is like being a feminist/SJer who says racist things. Not saying it doesn't happen; I'm saying it shouldn't happen, it makes no sense, and it needs to freakin'. Stop. Now.

I myself am not fat, and in this messed-up world of ours any minority cause gains credibility from privileged people talking about it. It's gross, but it's true. The white anti-racist, the male feminist, the straight queer activists – these are the people that get mainstream attention; and there goeth the thin fat activist.

When I first became aware of FA, I used to angst about my thin privilege. “People keep complimenting me on looking slender!” I would agonize. “o me misere, what shall I do? Give them a self-righteous lecture on how slimness is not a virtue, or just accept the intended compliment? BEING A THIN FAT ACTIVIST IS SO HARD!”

Whoooops!

Do you see what I was doing? I was taking the Cause I had so nobly appropriated, and making it all about me. It's a classic ally tactic: you see it in the white folks who go to womanist spaces to ask for advice on dealing with a coworker who uses racial slurs and it offends me and I feel I should speak up but I don't want to rock the boat and, oh, whatever shall I do? How can I ease my privileged-person conscience in a blaze of faux-deprecation that actually reinforces my privilege and how awesome it makes me feel?

Being an ally to any cause is full of pitfalls, but once you start to engage any deeper than the surface it's not hard at all. You just have to remember:

It's not about you. When in doubt, shut the fuck up.

FUCK YOU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE

(Warning: Expletives abound. I was extremely fucking angry when I wrote this.)

Hey, straight people, guess what?

Grow the fuck up.

I don't care how goddamn ignorant you are. I could not give less of a shit what you think. Don't ask me some fucking stupid shit question like “how come there's no straight pride parade?”, because you won't get an answer. I am fucking done with Gay 101, Feminism 101, How To Be The Greatest Fucking Ally In The World 101. Go join a fucking library. Go home and read Shakesville. Go teach yourself the basics of being a human being – don't expect me to do it for you. Either educate yourfuckingself, or accept that you're a disgusting fucking bigot.

Or maybe I will give you an answer. The answer is, “because fuck you, straight people”. You, with your fucking smug little smirks as you ask me why QUILTBAG excludes straight people, like you think you're the first fucking person on the planet to ask such a stupid fucking question. You, with your “no, I've never been called a pervert for holding hands with a girl, but I've been called names for other stuff, which is totally the same thing”. You, with your “it's okay for me to use 'gay' as a pejorative because I have gay friends, and they know I'm only joking!”

Fuck. Off. Fuuuuuuuuck riiiiiiiight off.

It's gotten to the point where I let so much shit slide, because I don't want to have some really basic fucking kindergarten-level conversation about how actually, yes, being gay defines me in a way that being straight doesn't define you. I don't want to explain to your delicate straight-person brain that having a gay friend isn't a Get Out Of Bigotry Free card. I don't want to hold your goddamn hand and tiptoe your precious straight-person feet through the concept that maybe our taking pride in marginalized identities is a pushback against you straight people trying to make us ashamed. I let it slide, because there are so many times and places in my life where I can't get away with saying fuck you, straight people.

Well, this is my space, and I'm going to say it here for all the other times I don't get to say it.

FUCK YOU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

FUCK YOOOOUUUUU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

FUUUUUUUCK YOOOOUUUU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

FUCK YOU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE!!!

Fucking fucking fuck you, fucking straight people.

FUCK YOU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

FUCK YOU FOREVER