In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: December 2015

Tamir Rice

No indictment (That’s a NYT article, by the way). And the took the opportunity to say that the child looked older than twelve (he didn’t; adults need to learn what twelve looks like, and regardless, it isn’t a capital crime to be older than twelve), We can’t second-guess the cops, he said.

Emmet Till was 14 and goofing around. Tamir Rice was 12 and playing, like kids do. The state-sanctioned murder of black children in the US continues.

Meanwhile, in NYC a nice white lady pointed a toy gun at cops and was apprehended unharmed, and in Cleveland, a white man armed with a rifle can walk around a black neighborhood unmolested by cops, because Ohio is an open carry state. Unless you’re a black child carrying a toy gun.

You know, I’m trying to track down a transcript of the press conference and can’t find one–I can find a transcript of McGinty’s remarks, but not anybody else.

REVIEW: Quake 4 (2005)

Don’t read too much into this, but this morning was the only time we could upload today’s episode. So if you didn’t have a satisfactory Christmas morning, here’s some feminism and carnage to make your day slightly more interesting…

FEMINIST GAME REVIEWS
“QUAKE 4” (2005)

OVERVIEW ► released in Q4 2005, “Quake 4” is a sci-fi military shooter, depicting humanity’s counterassault on the home planet of hostile aliens. the game was notable for being the first to license the id Tech 4 engine, first used in “Doom 3” to portray realistic lighting in videogames. chronologically, the game is the sequel to “Quake II”, part of a franchise known for raising the graphical bar with each new instalment. upon release, the game was praised for its visuals, but derided for failing to innovate beyond its cookie-cutter gameplay and narrative. ultimately, the game’s adherence to formula led to the franchise losing market dominance, thus allowing rival franchises to supplant it.

VISIBILITY ► for a game about humanity’s survival, women characters are oddly absent. apparently, women of the future are blasé about defending Earth. the entire human fleet appears to employ one female officer. her presence is limited to radio messages, with little bearing on the game’s plot. the only females visible in-game are hovering cyborgs who try to kill you. not the best message to send to potential female fans or buyers. even prior instalments like “Quake III: Arena” featured female characters, albeit often sexualised. “Quake 4” is a conspicuous step backward. where the game does shine is in depicting male characters. they hail from a range of backgrounds, as should be expected of a global war effort. such characters are shown to be more than background noise. as a squad-based shooter, the game depicts them as vital to humanity’s victory.

AGENCY ► though limited to male characters, the game makes a visible attempt to break stereotypes often seen in the gaming industry at the time. minority characters are portrayed as equally educated and combat-effective. some are depicted as doctors or engineers, a rarity in gaming. the first engineer encountered in-game is an Asian-American bloke (because of course), but he proves just as good at combat as his peers. whilst the game’s comic relief comes from a stereotypically cowardly European, even he is depicted as vital to humanity’s fate and victory. the game’s sole female character fares more poorly. her only visible presence is when hostiles destroy her dropship (and her thankless role). though it completely ignores the existence of women veterans, the game at least makes an effort to portray male characters in believable ways.

PROGRESS ► despite success in sales, the game’s failure to innovate contributed to an overall perception that the series was running out of fresh ideas. a more innovative follow-up called “Quake Wars” saw release in 2007, but proved unable to compete with new shooters like “Gears of War”. ironically, “Quake 4” paved the way for new sci-fi military shooters like “Gears of War”, the latter proving popular as it tried more new ideas. “Rage”, an attempt to build on the tech that powered “Quake 4”, saw release in 2011, but was again derided for lack of meaningful innovation. though the “Quake” franchise is currently moribund, some publishers have shown interest in reviving old id Tech properties, such as “Doom”. should “Quake” enjoy a reboot someday, it would be a chance for the franchise to prove its relevance to today’s modern, diverse gamers.

The game had fans in its day, but nowadays the franchise survives solely in the form of an online title even its supporters hate. The main reason we reviewed Quake 4 was frankly for its retrospective and nostalgic value – in an era of games that acknowledge women’s existence, games like Quake 4 seem positively antiquated. On the upside, it does boast some of the prettiest violence we’ve ever seen…

In our fourth and final episode, we’ll jump 8 years into the future and cover a game where a mistrustful black dude and a Chinese Harvard graduate must learn to cooperate to stop WWIII. But in the meantime, we’re already working on next year’s material. We’re committing the next 6 months to a feminist playthrough of Deus Ex: Human Revolution – basically a feminist commentary on every level in the game, as we play from start to finish.

Forget how Human Revolution is one of the most ambitious titles ever developed. To our knowledge, no reputable YouTuber has ever done a feminist playthrough of any game, period. Here, some MRAs have done superior work – one of them even does detailed anti-feminist playthroughs of his favourite games, something you can’t help but admire when you realise how much effort and talent that requires, versus your average ranting fanatic uploading crap to YouTube.

Here’s a shot of what you can expect in 2016. For now, goodnight, good luck, and be one with the Force.

Untitled

No indictment in the death of Sandra Bland

Trigger warning: racist violence and death, police racism

The Texas Grand Jury has decided there will be no indictment in the death of Sandra Bland against anyone–not any of the police officers, not any of the jail officials or workers, nobody. They decided it was perfectly plausible that after she was stopped for changing lanes without a signal who had a new job, and then was arrested after Brian Encina, the officer failed to follow proper procedures and claimed she assaulted him, she “became despondent” and hanged herself with a plastic bag because her family couldn’t come bail her out immediately.

Encina’s dashcam footage didn’t show Bland assaulting him; it did show evidence of what we can call extreme irregularity, with visual objects vanishing and reappearing even though the audio proceeded uninterrupted. It showed Encina demanding that Bland put out a cigarette and ordering her out of her car for reasons that he declined to specify. It showed him trying to pull her out of her car. It showed him pulling out his taser and screaming that he would “light her up.” According to witnesses and Bland herself, Encina slammed her head into the ground. And she was arrested, we’re told for “kicking” Encina.

Yeah, well, I would kick someone who assaulted me, too.

I feel completely confident in saying that this is all bullshit, and that if Sandra Bland had been a white woman, she would have gotten a ticket. If that. She should never have been taken from her car in the first place, and her blood is on Encina’s hands even if she did commit suicide, which I don’t trust for a moment. And now the entire racist legal system that declines to indict, as well.

Leia Organa: Undercelebrated badass

Leia Organa often gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop where the casual Star Wars fandom is concerned. Most attention focuses on the cinnamon-roll hairdo and/or the bronze bikini. In honor of last night’s release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Nicki Salcedo gives Leia her due, celebrating her uncelebrated badassitude. (And providing me with my new rough-day mantra: Was your home planet just destroyed? Then pull it together, young Jedi.)

Ritual without gods

I’m an atheist, and I always have been. I’m a third-generation atheist, moreover; my parents are atheists, and so were/are most of grandparents. But unlike my parents or my grandparents, I was raised without any Jewish observance in my life at all, mostly due, in my opinion to various family schisms and my parents not having good associations with those celebrations (cf family schisms). But I’m also a folklorist, for a certain value of folklorist, at least, and tradition, ritual, ceremony, all seem to me to be important elements of being human. Not the most important elements, no doubt, but important to me nonetheless.

I’m thinking about this because I just went to the Bat Mitzvah of the little girl I babysat/nannied for when I was in graduate school, lo those many years ago (she was two months old when I started). I found the ceremony moving, as I usually do at ceremonies of people close to my heart, and that made me think about what I wanted for myself and my son.

When I was pregnant I was looking into Bris Shalom, the secular humanist Jewish alternative to Bris Milah, and I found the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, essentially a secular humanist shul in New York City. I am particularly intrigued by their Bar/Bas Mitzvah program, in which the kids focus on learning about Jewish history, heritage, and literature and presenting their studies to the congregation, as well as taking up some kind of activism. I like that idea; I like the idea of preserving Jewish identity without requiring a belief in the Jewish God. And I was certainly raised to consider social activism part of my Jewish heritage.

I consulted with their rabbi, and developed a naming ceremony for my son presided over my uncle, an anthropologist who feels similarly about the importance of tradition and ceremony. I have made small, private rituals for myself to mark important anniversaries, but this was the first time I included family and some friends (mostly family). Everybody was very supportive and it meant a lot to me, and my uncle gave a great talk about my son’s name and its history and famous namesakes. I spoke a little about his middle name and having named him after my grandfather.

I know I’m not the only unbeliever here (I’m pretty sure), and I’m wondering what others do vis-a-vis ritual and ceremony. Are you just as happy to be free from it? Do you observe any even without believing in them? Have you adapted any to be more meaningful to you? And you know, I’m interested in what those who do believe in various gods and religions think and feel, too.

Quick hit: This is not a thing that happens

Content note: rape and rape apologia

Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You don’t accidentally fall on somebody and penetrate their vagina with your penis. I can’t believe this defense flew, and after only 30 fucking minutes of deliberations. Who thinks this? Who thinks “Gee, it is totes reasonable to think that he tripped and fell on her and his semen was only inside her because of a previous sexual encounter and she’s lying when she says she woke up to find him forcing himself on her, because ladies are just batshit like that, she’s probably doing this for funsies”?

Some days you wake up and read the news and realize exactly how much misogyny is operating in this world, and it’s too early to have a drink. I’m going to go make tea now.

Today’s horrifying news

In today’s (well, I read it yesterday) horrifying news, a Tennessee woman is being charged with attempted murder after trying to self-abort with a coat hanger when she was 24 weeks along. After she began bleeding profusely her boyfriend rushed her to the hospital where she was delivered of a 1.5 pound baby who will need medical assistance for his entire life. I can’t find any report on her health, which is pretty upsetting, given how dangerous what she did was, but she’s being held in a detention center.

Everything about this is horrifying to me. I can only imagine the desperation a woman must feel to sit in a bathtub and try to self-abort with a coat hanger, particularly at 24 weeks, so far along. I can only imagine what it feels like to be responsible for a baby needing medical assistance for the rest of its life, or what it feels like to be that baby. This is what we said would happen all along when abortion was made hard to get. Nothing is telling me whether this woman tried to get an abortion earlier, or what obstacles stood in her way, but I just don’t believe that if she was desperate enough to abort at 24 weeks with a coat hanger she wouldn’t have preferred to have done it much earlier and more safely.

And I’m horrified that nobody is questioning this statement in the linked article:

According to local news reports, detectives investigating the incident found Anna Yocca allegedly made “disturbing statements” to hospital staff where she was admitted after using a coat hanger to try and terminate her pregnancy.

Why were police investigating in the first place? Who called them? Why weren’t her statements covered by doctor-patient confidentiality? Are we going to go back to the days of septic wards and women refusing to tell their doctors what happened?

I used to go to pro-choice rallies where women wore buttons with pictures of coat hangers on them and the slogan “We won’t go back.” Well, we’re here.

Holtzclaw going to prison

Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma cop accused of raping at least 13 women, women he selected because they were poor and black and he didn’t think anybody would care about them or what they said, has been found guilty on enough counts by an all-white jury to send him to prison for 263 years. Sentencing is later, I’m not sure when.

I am relieved and disgusted that I have to be relieved. And I admire and salute every single woman who came forward against him, and I believe them all, including the ones whom the jury did not.

If you want to talk about it, here’s a place to do so.

Edited to add that I got this information from reading my Twitter TL, because no mainstream news outlets were covering it. The first person I saw break the news was Roxane Gay.

So. Trump.

I thought I hated that motherfucker twenty years ago when he was just an egomaniacal racist magnate. Little did I know he was also a fascist waiting for the right moment to bloom. And let’s make no mistake. I don’t throw the word “fascist” around lightly. I don’t use it to describe everyone to the right of Che Guevara. But I’m sure as hell using it now. We have the narrative of decadence and decline: America (by which we mean the US, of course, because what else of interest or importance could there possibly be on two continents?) was once great, but has been debased by multivarious outsiders and corrupt insiders with their degenerate ways. We have the promise of ultra-nationalistic rebirth: make American great again. We have the condoning of violence against those who disagree (“Maybe he should have been roughed up”). We have the uneasy coalition of traditional elites and these radical right-wingers. We have the racism. One wonders what Robert Paxton would say.

Should we talk about this fascist motherfucker? Banning Muslims from the US is a fascist idea. Interning Japanese-Americans is one of the US’s many shames, not a model to follow (make no mistake; according to his campaign, Trump means that Muslim Americans currently traveling abroad would not be allowed to come home). Requiring all Muslims to register is a fascist idea. And don’t for a minute think that the rhetoric Trump is pushing isn’t fostering the kind of violence described in this article about anti-Muslim attacks, or what this little girl in the Bronx experienced the other day. Those brownshirt-wannabes are Trump’s foot soldiers, make no mistake.

I know some people feel that if he takes the Republican nomination, it will all but guarantee a Democratic victory. I’m not so sure about that. Fascism can be quite popular. Indeed, that is part of its power–it’s a populist regime. So I’m not so sanguine. I am…concerned.

Edited: Now Trump is saying Muslim Americans who travel would be allowed to go home. Let me see if I can find the thing I read last night saying the opposite. Found it.