Long Weekend Open Thread

I have some things gelling in my mind, and I’m throwing them out here for your dissection.

I’ve had that Popehat thread on my mind this weekend, and I’ve been watching the US news about the assault on abortion access.

Pecunium said, in the Popehat threat, that the thing creepers do that is underlyingly wrong is that they assume consent (of course I’ll fuck you), when a reasonable person would assume non-consent (who the fuck are you? don’t touch me). Really, the only time a person can reasonably assume consent is in the emergency response mode. Assume an unconscious person would consent to your intervention to save his or her life.

Assume an unconscious person does not consent to your performing sexual acts upon them. Assume that a person you’ve never met before is capable of deciding whether or not to have sex with you, or even talk with you.

And then, Ami Angelwings wrote that brilliant piece on why creepers don’t like the term “creeper”. To paraphrase, they know exactly what it means, it means GAME OVER. It means, stop trying different cheats and angles, stop trying to twist rules of interaction, stop trying to re-define what words mean. You’re done.

So what’s festering in my back brain is this: anti-abortion activists are behaving like creepers. What they want outweighs, in their minds, what anybody else wants. They know that people have a constitutional right to abort. They’ve heard the “no”, and they don’t like it. So they’re creeping. They’re redefining words, they’re coming in the side door, they’re inserting legal cheats into trojan horse legislation (budgets, for fuck sake!).

They’ve heard the vast majority of Americans, of women, assert their bodily autonomy, and have decided that they can’t be trusted with bodily autonomy, because they’ll choose wrongly.

So it’s almost a coherent opinion that’s formed in my brain, and I’m interested in what the rest of you think about it.

In dudespeak, when a woman calls a man “attractive,” she means “interesting.”

Funny, when I call a man “attractive” I mean “has a pretty face and/or a great body”. If I think a man is interesting the mysterious ladyspeak term I use is “interesting”.

Random music geek randomness – I have the new and really-final-for-real-this-time Ministry album, and it’s great! Won’t be out till September, but when it does come out, definitely buy it if you’ve ever liked Ministry in the past.

Also, pecunium, did you see this shit?

http://www.popehat.com/2013/07/01/why-does-talking-about-creepers-and-harassment-make-people-so-angry/#comment-1074689

Dude keeps conflating harassment with assault, and although a charitable reading would be that he’s just a complete idiot, I am not feeling inclined to be charitable. I think he wants the boundaries blurry and women blamed for not making them more clear so that it’s easier for people to get away with boundary crossing.

Shorter comment: People have a right to be sexist! Leave them alone and stop trying to make all spaces more tolerable for women!

On top of that, he’s all like “Why not just ban women from those spaces or stop holding those conventions? That’s the best way to reduce rape in such spaces!” (not verbatim, but you know what I mean.)

Pressuring someone to adopt the absurd conclusion is a telling sign of being self-serving and dishonest. And shifting the goalposts as well.

BTW if someone is doing a mass invite I vote that we invite this guy too.

http://www.popehat.com/2013/07/01/why-does-talking-about-creepers-and-harassment-make-people-so-angry/#comment-1075010

From a link at the bottom of that page, an extract from a dudely author’s attempt to write from the perspective of a female character.

She regarded her breasts as her second- and third-best features, having, as was often remarked upon by her admirers – many of her regrettably few admirers – big breasts. But then Odette was a very big woman, so it was natural that she should have breasts to match her great height and her equally great girth. Still, never being one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Odette gave a wiggle and was pleased to see that her untethered breast jiggled in quite a charming fashion.

Apparently he was very offended that female beta readers pointed out that this was not a realistic depiction of the way women look at ourselves in the mirror, and he feels feminism is to blame for this refusal of women to see ourselves from the point of view of a male observer and pretend that view matches our internal monologue.

See, this is why although I love some SFF I go out of my way to avoid most of the male fans (and writers too, really). It’s also part of why so many women love Pratchett, because he would never, ever write anything that stupid, because he is aware of the fact that women posess subjectivity.

Also! One of the things that kept striking me when reading that thread was the fact that some guys get really offended when women point out that we can in fact often read both ill intent and the fact that certain men don’t understand that we’re people with a fair degree of accuracy. It’s like they think that years of experience in interacting with men and observing the extent to which initial impression A usually correlates with later actions B and C doesn’t in any way allow us to draw conclusions based on initial impressions with a higher degree of accuracy than, say, some dude who didn’t even witness the interaction in question but who’s convinced that our interpretation must be wrong because reasons.

Also now I want to find all the omniscient breasts guy’s writing and re-write the particularly ridiculous bits with a male protagonist to illustrate how stupid they are.

“Rod regarded his reflection in the full-length mirror. He had always considered his impressive six-pack and even more impressive bulge to be his most important attributes, but upon further musing prompted by recent comments from admirers he had to conclude that his ass was in the running for first place too. Turning away and then twisting to gaze coquettishly over his shoulder, he admired his butt’s perfectly rounded shape. Granted that he was a muscular man – very muscular, full of muscles in fact – but still, his glutes were huge. Rod gave a quick wiggle and was delighted to see that due to the remarkable tightness of his glutes his ass remained ripple-free. Smirking in delight, he contemplated how he could put his personal bounty to use.”

Actually, when I had read “Revelation Space”, the first book I read by Reynolds, I thought to myself “this is great, lots of female characters and they’re all people!” right before I realized how sad it is that one notices this…

But whereas Reynolds has plenty of female characters in his books and really write them as regular people, Banks, whenever he writes from a female POV, comes across a little bit like that quote.

I’m reading some Iain Banks right now, and there were some… oddities. It wasn’t quite enough to through me out of the book, and otherwise the characters seemed to be existing as complete characters. It’s just that around mirrors they seemed to temporarily become male.

There was some in-story justification for mirror obsession. Body-swapping, etc. But it came off as very, very male-gaze oriented.

With a character that a few chapters back we had learned was raped.

Everything else about the book had been just perfect up to that point. And then, thud.