International Women's Day: Be Bold For Change

Today is International Women's Day, an event that is probably more necessary now than at any other point in my lifetime.

(Oh, and just to forestall the usual bullshit: there is an International Men's Day, it is on November 19^th every single year and if you cared about serious discussion of issues peculiar to men instead of using the idea as a gotcha at the mean feminists, perhaps you'd have taken the five seconds necessary to Google it and not need me to tell you).

I mean, where to start? Pay disparity is a hardy perennial, of course, and the theme for last year's IWD Pledge For Parity campaign; the Global Gag Rule was reinstated, putting the lives of potentially tens of thousands of women at risk; last year's US election will be keeping Gender Studies academics in textbook material for decades; and, for reasons beyond sane comprehension, the revelation that Emma Watson has breasts and can still call herself a feminist has shocked the civilised world.

I was raised by women. My dad was around but he had to travel a lot for work: he was an engineer, it was the aftermath of Thatcher's Recession and the only job he could get meant a massive car journey to the next county over so the raising of me, the actual teaching of me to be a person, mainly fell to my mother and two grandmothers. I love my dad and we get on great now but the simple fact is that a lot of who I am came from those women.

Both of my grandmothers have passed on but I think about them a lot: one solid and practical, the other rather more flighty and jovial. I couldn't begin to list the lessons they taught me, the ways they helped me become the person I am.

So there's a reason I take women's issues seriously. I've known a lot of men who don't and I've often wondered what their lives must have been like to be like to think like that. Yes, these are usually the sort of men I shouted at in that parenthetical who think its unfair for women to have a day and not men even though it isn't and we do.

Fuckers, is the technical term, or misogynists if you're being polite, which I very rarely feel the need for these days (thank the paternal grandmother for that one, my mother's mother was very much the one for proper manners in all situations).

This year's IWD campaign is simply about being bold, about providing the leadership you can in the space you occupy. Whether the person doing it is in a position of power or getting involved in some project at the local level, its an act of rebellion and empowerment to create whatever change you can on whatever scale you can.

Because we just saw the largest co-ordinated protest march in history by women on every continent over a single issue. Feminism, like every liberal philosophy and movement, has some tough years ahead and I know, as a white man, I am speaking from a position of enormous privilege and being mildly queer doesn't take that away. We literally live in a world where even admitting on tape to sexual assault doesn't stop a man being elected President of the United States. I can't imagine a world where Donald Trump could have said that shit about grabbing my genitals and it be okay.

And that's why today is necessary, possibly more necessary than its been in a long time, but to quote the immortal words of Norman Stanley Fletcher: “Don't let the bastards grind you down.” 

Now That's What I Call Patriarchy 2017 (part one of infinity)

cartoon by Norwegian artist Bloom

Let's talk about abortion because I'm a white man and apparently that means I'm the only person qualified to do so!

(content warnings: abortion, unwanted pregnancy, misogyny and death)

"No one has more respect for women than me, I made
murdering them my first policy priority!"

If you ever wondered what “The Patriarchy” was you'll never get a better illustration than this: seven wealthy white men behind a desk signing an order that will limit access to abortion for women around the world. I mean, if you saw that in a TV show you'd accuse the writers of being too on the nose.

And the fact is that less than halfway through its first week the Trump administration has shown where its priorities are. They don't have a full cabinet yet, they have almost a whole roster of international ambassadors to appoint, there's a growing rift between the White House and the intelligence agencies, serious ethical and legal issues from the election still unaddressed, the list goes on.

But no, first order of priority goes to screwing over women around the world. The contempt of it is appalling. To force doctors in non-governmental organisations to choose between giving a patient full informed consent over their care and continuing to receive funding is ethically wrong.

Women will die because of this executive order. Some will die because of unsafe abortions carried out because they didn't know the safe options. Some will die in childbirth because of complications that make a safe birth impossible. Some will die by their own hands, don't imagine they won't, force someone into a situation of inescapable desperation and its inevitable some will react that way.

And you can believe me on this because I'm a white man and that makes me an authority on everything to do with a woman's body. 

Female characters: Equal opportunity flaws

This post started as a rant against the use of the phrase “strong female character”, that meaningless buzz phrase trotted out when comic companies deign to advertise one of their female properties. It can mean anything: that the character is physically strong, that she's emotionally resilient or that the writing is going to be of consistent quality. You just don't know and some clarity would be nice. That's bad enough but it occurred to me there's a second problem with the phrase:

Strength ain't that interesting.

What's more we know this: the standard template criticism of Superman is that as a physically invulnerable, emotionally perfect individual there's not really anywhere to go with the character. Superior interpretations of the character (at least the ones I've connected with) introduce a flaw of some kind: All-Star Superman confronted him with his own mortality; New Krypton turned him into an unwanted lone peacemaker between humans and Kryptonians; and For Tomorrow presented him with a genuine crisis of faith.

To break this down to pure theory: a character's flaws, whether they get over them or fall prey to them, generate more plots than their strengths. If Hamlet weren't a ditherer his uncle would have been dead by Act 2 and we'd be missing some of the best speeches in the whole Shakespeare canon.

As to female characters probably one of the comic writers most praised for their female characters is Greg Rucka who, you may have guessed, is a man. I'm choosing to highlight him over, say, Gail Simone or Kelly Sue deConnick because when a man writes a woman its put under a huge microscope by female fandom and often (unsurprisingly) found wanting. Rucka, though, has not one but two female characters who are regularly held up as a sort of gold standard for writing women in comics: Renee Montoya and Tara Chase.

In Gotham Central and later as The Question, Rucka put Renee Montoya through the emotional wringer: combating alcoholism; the death of her partner; the ethical dilemma of avenging his death when the law proved insufficient; and, not least, being forced out of the closet and having to confront the reaction of her staunchly traditional Catholic parents. There was also her use in setting up Batwoman's past in which she was both the love of Kate Kane's life but by being closeted also represented an act of deception Kate had made the active moral decision not to engage in despite it robbing her of her lifelong dream. These issues drove the personal evolution of the character for close to a decade between Gotham Central #1 and the character's disappearance following Flashpoint and the New 52 reboot.

With Tara Chase in Queen & Country, Rucka went further, and we have a character who is almost entirely made of flaws. Tara is a genuinely competent, even gifted, MI-6 agent but as the series progresses we learn that not only does she have significant emotional flaws but that she was selected as an elite “Minder” agent because of them: they make her a more effective weapon in her handler's arsenal but cause her enormous pain as a human being.

Both of these characters are praised, not universally of course, and under certain interpretations of the phrase they could certainly be called “strong female characters” but that's not what makes them most interesting. I'd rather have meaningfully “complex” over meaninglessly “strong” any day. 

Male feminist rantings: The bleak, existential horror of Wartune

Here are my vital organs, please stab one!

The two reasons I count myself as a feminist:

Reason one: I am, or believe myself to be, a decent human being and so want to treat the other human beings in a decent fashion. As I believe that gender should not be a barrier to this behaviour I classify myself as a feminist.

Reason two: I am a geek and what's more a geek who is mostly straight. Therefore the perception, both inside and outside the geek demographic, that some of our interests are for “men only” kind of pisses me off. It is an exclusionary mindset that does nothing more than create self-fulfilling prophecies:

“Women don't buy comics!” Yes, they do, but they're turned away in droves by the big companies ignoring female talent and marketing their female characters as fetish objects.

“Women don't play wargames!” Yes, they do, and there would be more of them doing so if the community at large didn't treat them as outsiders or as personifications of the “nerdy girl” fantasy, if they just treated them as (God help us) gamers.

“Geeks don't get girls!” Yes, they do, in droves by just being decent human beings around the lady folk. However, if you're going to repeat this bloody stupid sentiment you will look like an entitled dick who thinks a woman should get in bed with you just to show social conscience rather than as a considered and consenting action based on things like attraction, friendship, mutual respect or some other interaction of your actual personalities.

“Women don't play computer games!” Again, they do, but when the most iconic female protagonists are marketed purely on their sexual characteristics (Lara Croft, Bayonetta) you are losing more potential female customers than you gain.

It is a well known fact that nothing says "medieval
fantasy setting" quite like a latex bikini

And so we end up, finally, at Wartune: a free browser game whose adverts turn up on any games-based forum you care to name. The image at the top of this post is actually the most restrained one I could find with some simple Google-slinging. Yes, the woman is impractically dressed and you don't need my Red Cross training to notice the sheer number of vital organs and arteries her armour exposes.

Example number two gets “better”, completely dumping any sense of the game's ostensible fantasy setting to have a woman in a bikini (and anyone who thinks it's a Dead Or Alive character is probably right) and a strapline containing one of the worst erection gags I have ever heard and I have seen every episode of Up Pompeii.

So how does this all relate back to my point about the exclusionary aspects of fandom? Example number three:

She's Korean, on her artist's side

Here we have the full panoply of the problem: The character art, as with the last example (and doubtless the first, though I can't identify that one) is plagiarised. This is, I am told, a character from a Korean MMO called Forsaken World. This one says “Adult Gamers Only” twice but some versions of the ad have “Male Gamers Only”. One of the ads even has the strapline “You deserve an orgy.”.

What may not be plain from all this is that the game is not pornographic. Clicking on the link will not take you to dark, sybaritic pleasures of the binary code. Wartune is a Real Time Strategy Role Playing Game. There is some turn-based combat and even, I shit you not, a farming sim mechanic. What is consciously lacking in the player experience are titties of any kind (okay, there may be cow-milking, I didn't go too far in researching this particular aspect).

What this amounts to is a company creating an Age Of Empires-style RTS with some basic JRPG combat mechanics and marketing it through images of scantily clad women. And even worse they don't even go to the trouble of commissioning art of their own scantily clad women but steal them from all over the place. This company has made a conscious decision to lie about its product because expecting of men to follow a link promising them boobies is a surer bet than coming out and announcing a free to play RTS/RPG.

As a man, I am insulted by the idea that quality is unimportant to my consumer experience so long as some primitive sexual reflex is stimulated. Not even satisfied, just stimulated, this company literally thinks it can lead me by the cock towards its substandard product. As a straight(ish) man with quite a few female friends I am embarrassed that this is how the larger culture sees my relationship with them. As a geek whose female friends are by and large also geeks I am enraged that they should be consciously excluded and their custom tacitly declared worthless in favour of mine.

And what pisses me off the most? It bloody works for them! There is no worse aspect than that. These corporate behaviours continue and are repeated throughout the culture only because they produce positive results. That's how capitalism works in practice. If a large enough section of the gaming population looked at those ads and thought “Well, that's a load of sexist shite!” they would disappear but enough people have clicked on them, stayed to play this Age Of Empires knock-off and handed over money for the higher level benefits (and these don't include titties, either, before anyone thinks any element of honesty went into this marketing strategy).

So, yeah, a company has made enough money to maintain a free to play RTS/RPG by betting on male gamers being sexist and easy to please.

Fuck.