One out of every four sentient species is a victim of domestic violence
I have seen various discussions online about colonialism, and of course, these make me think about colonialism in SF—especially the kind where our planet becomes someone else’s colony.
Stereotypically, in these kinds of stories, the aliens are either Bad Guys or Good Guys. If they are Bad Guys, they dominate the planet by sheer brute force, disintegrating anything that stands in their way until (in American SF) our plucky heroes find the aliens’ weakness and create a glorious victory for humanity, or (in British SF) everyone dies. If the aliens are Good Guys, then they are protecting us from the baser elements of our nature until we can rise to full membership in the galactic community. The problem with the stereotypical Bad Guy scenario is that historically, colonial regimes among humans never1 act purely with brute force; an effective colonial administration knows how to co-opt at least some of the natives. The problem with the stereotypical Good Guy scenario is that it uncomfortably resembles a justification for real colonialism: the aliens in these stories are, so to speak, taking up the little green man’s burden.
Thinking of Good Guy aliens made me think of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (formerly titled Xenogenesis); I had read these books when they first came out around twenty years ago, and recalled them as a well-written and original take on the whole alien-invasion theme. The aliens in this series are the Oankali, who arrive on Earth shortly after nuclear war has wiped out most of the human population. Their schtick is to exchange genetic material with other species, so that the descendants of each contact with a new world acquire new traits. To this end, they scoop up as many nuclear-war survivors as they can and prepare them to become parents of human-Oankali hybrids. The main character of the series, Lilith Iyapo, is charged with training other humans to survive in Earth’s recreated wilderness and mediating between them and the Oankali. Over and over through the series, the Oankali remark on a “contradiction” built into the human condition: that we are both intelligent and hierarchical, and that without an injection of some Oankali genetics, this combination will doom us to self-destruction. So: Good Guy aliens. More or less.
I reread Dawn looking for stuff about colonialism, but what struck me about the book, instead, was the gender politics.
- Victims of domestic violence are frequently confined and stalked, unable to move freely, right? Lilith spends the first book on a spaceship and in the opening chapters, she can’t even open a door.
- Most of the humans that Lilith trains hate her for being a collaborator with the enemy. She refers to herself as a “Judas goat”, but I was reminded of a not-uncommon pattern in abusive families: Dad beats both Mom and the kids, but the kids resent Mom for not standing up to Dad.
- Control of sexuality and reproduction is one hallmark of domination in male-female relationships, and indeed, the Oankali decide whether or not Lilith is fertile, without even asking her opinion.
And consider these quotes (page numbers are from the trade paperback edition of LB):
“We… do need you.” Nikanj spoke so softly that Joseph leaned forward to hear. “A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape….” (p. 153)
Isn’t that one of the classic excuses for sexual assault? “She was so attractive, I couldn’t keep my hands off her.” And savor the irony of humans trapped on a spaceship being told “you’ve captured us”.
…It reached out and caught his hand in a coil of sensory arm. “I won’t hurt you. And I offer a oneness that your people strive for, dream of, but can’t truly attain alone.”
He pulled his arm free. “You said I could choose. I’ve made my choice!”
“You have, yes.” It opened his jacket with its many-fingered true hands and stripped the garment away from him. When he would have backed away, it held him. It managed to lie down on the bed without seeming to force him down. “You see. Your body has made a different choice.”
…
“Let go of me.”
It smoothed its tentacles again. “Be grateful, Joe. I’m not going to let go of you.” (pp. 189–190)
Ten pages earlier, Lilith had intervened violently to prevent one human from raping another. In this scene, though, an Oankali commits what in a human-on-human context would be clearly recognizable as date rape, using the rationale he said no, but he didn’t really mean it—again, a classic—and Lilith just watches approvingly.
In spite of all this, the Oankali do come off as generally sympathetic characters. Perhaps they give me this impression because the human characters, throughout the series, are frequently brutal to one another—more often for the sake of conventional crimes (banditry, kidnapping, etc.) than over anything directly involving the Oankali. Like I said, the Oankali are Good Guy aliens. More or less.
PS: Butler also wrote a novellette, “Bloodchild”, that examines human-alien family dynamics from a different angle. I recommend the Lilith’s Brood novels, but I think “Bloodchild” is one of the finest SF stories ever written.
1 Well… hardly ever.
Getting the point
The Seven-Year-Old had been spooked by a book he had been reading in his bed, and I was looking for something to distract him from his fears. I picked up Sally Miller Gerhart’s Wanderground, flipped through it, and then thought better of offering it to him.
“This probably isn’t a book for seven-year-olds,” I said, recalling that although the world the book portrays is bucolic, some of the stories within are less so. “It’s a book about a bunch of women who live without any men.”
The child, who had seen the map in the frontispiece, asked, “Is ‘Dangerland’ where all the men live?”
“How did you figure that out?”
(I do actually recommend Wanderground… to grown-ups. For the purpose of this book, puberty is probably a necessary condition of grown-up-hood, but not a sufficient one.)
Missing the point
Scene: A father is reading And Tango Makes Three to his three-year-old son.
Father: “…Roy and Silo taught Tango how to sing for them when she was hungry. They fed her food from their beaks. They snuggled her in their nest at night. Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.”
Three-year-old son: No. One of them has to be the mommy.
Maybe he thought it was a commentary on Leviticus
At shul today, I noticed a guy reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality during the Torah reading.
Think of it as evolution inaction
Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, believes that human evolution is still happening because, after all, some couples have more children than others, thereby changing the frequency distribution of alleles in the gene pool. So he and his colleagues went over some statistics from the Framingham Heart Study (going back to 1948) and discovered a few heritable traits that were associated with higher fertility [PDF]. From this, they vaulted into the pages of Time magazine with this stunning extrapolation:
If these trends were to continue with no cultural changes in the town for the next 10 generations, by 2409 the average Framingham woman would be 2 cm (0.8 in) shorter, 1 kg (2.2 lb.) heavier, have a healthier heart, have her first child five months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later than a woman today, the study found.
Why yes. And if human cultures had remained static for the past four centuries, we would also expect that the average Framingham woman of 1609 was 2 cm taller than her 21st-century counterpart, 1 kg lighter,…
I looked at the actual paper (which as of this writing is not yet behind a paywall) to see if this was dumb science or just dumb science journalism, and as far as I can tell, the fault is in the science. For instance, the authors, in their conclusions, speculate that “we might have found larger effects of evolution on the levels of sex hormones and related traits had they been measured”… as if human beings have done nothing since 1948 to affect the levels of their own sex hormones.
The process of natural selection pushes a species toward a local maximum of fitness relative to its environment. (When you speak of an organism’s “fitness” in an evolutionary sense, you always have to speak of its fitness relative to some environment, just as if you talk about the dollar “declining” in value, that decline is always relative to some other commodity.) If the environment is changing more rapidly then the evolutionary effects that adapt an organism to it, then the evolutionary effect might as well be noise.
Do these guys have an insight too subtle for me to appreciate, or are they just thick?
via Hacker News
Pornonomics
The authors of Freakonomics, pimping their next book, regale Sunday Times [UK] readers with the heart-warming tale of Allie, a prostitute with a heart of gold and a Visa card to match. The authors mention the precautions she takes to keep herself safe from her clients, her frustration with keeping her occupation secret from her family and friends, and her realization that she had to move into a completely different career before she lost her looks. In the midst of all that, the authors declare:
[T]he real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career.
Jonathan Kulick gives this the snark it richly deserves:
I look forward to reading the entire chapter, so I can find out why more men don’t choose to become high-end gay escorts. It has to be much easier than waiting tables or accounting or laying pipe.
I, personally, am puzzled as to why the Freakonomists are so puzzled by the choices of non-prostitute women, but treat the johns’ motivation as self-evident. The vast majority of men who hire $500-an-hour prostitutes can also afford enough therapy and what-not to become attractive to the women who seek, ahem, noncommercial romantic relationships. If they’re not getting those relationships, well, that says something about their capabilities and priorities, doesn’t it?
Personally, if I had to choose between waiting tables for $10 an hour and pretending to love creepy men for $500, I’d go for the tables.
Democrats grow spines, gonads, teeth
Many progressives, myself included, have been concerned that (a) Democratic politicians are so used to losing that they will continue to act like losers on the floor of Congress, even when they are in the majority; (b) with war, the economy, and health care at the front of most people’s minds, Obama and the Congressional Democrats will push LGBT issues to the back burner until, umm, half-past never.
So let me give credit where credit is due: the House passed a bill to extend Federal hate-crimes protection to gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people, and the Democrats played hardball to get it passed—they attached the hate-crimes extension to a defense-appropriations bill and dared the Republicans to vote against the whole bill.
The article quotes Senator McCain, of all people, saying that “elections have consequences”. Elections damn well should have consequences and this particular consequence is most welcome.
Michel Foucault to the pink courtesy phone
News coverage of the controversy regarding whether or not track star Caster Semenya is “really” a woman is giving everyone a crash course in postmodern gender theory. Can one’s chromosomes determine once and for all whether a person is “really” a man or a woman? Nope. Shape of genitalia? Nope. Hormones? Nope. Now that we’ve reviewed the general issue of how subjective sex attribution can be, I’d like to focus on who, in this case, gets to be the subject.
In tough cases any rule for determining sex is going to be arbitrary, but whose arbitrary rules are governing Ms. Semenya? Nobody (of course!) cares about her own opinion regarding which sex she belongs to. The judgement of the family and community in which she was raised also counts for nothing. The laws of the country where she is a citizen do not apply.
Instead, this 18-year-old is going to be examined by “a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a psychologist and so forth” (Ms. Semenya, if the psychologist asks you if you played with dolls as a child, say yes), who will put her through “chromosome testing, gynecological investigation, all manner of things, organs, X-rays, scans”. These worthies will report their judgements to the International Association of Athletics Federations, which will decide whether or not Ms. Semenya qualifies as a female athlete. Does she get five points for a vagina, lose a point for facial hair, gain another ten if she menstruates, with 100 points needed to qualify? Or is this like figure skating, where the American, Russian, French, and British judges will each score her based on some combination of technical merit and aesthetic judgement, and then her average score will determine her fate? Nobody is saying.
No objective procedure—no medical exam or legal certificate or other kind of attestation—could have settled the question before Ms. Semenya competed and thus prevented her from suffering this indignity. The only thing she could have done was avoid falling under suspicion in the first place. So, girls, pay attention: If you want to become an international track star, it’s not enough to be the fastest woman on two legs. You have to be the fastest lady.
Pain considered harmful
I would have thought that the pain of unmedicated childbirth has very little in common with the pain of getting woken every three hours by a crying infant, not to mention the pain of one’s plans interrupted by a pre-schooler’s fourteenth tantrum of the day, not to mention… you get the idea. And therefore, I would have thought that suffering one of these pains does not really prepare you for the others, except perhaps through the psychology of misaccounting for sunk costs.
But hey, what do I know? I’m not a university professor who is also one of the most influential midwives in Britain.
“A large number of women want to avoid pain. Some just don’t fancy the pain [of childbirth]. More women should be prepared to withstand pain,” he told the Observer. “Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.”
…
“Over recent decades there has been a loss of ‘rites of passage’ meaning to childbirth, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively,” said Walsh. Patients should be told that labour pain is a timeless component of the “rites of passage” transition to motherhood, he added.
Snark aside, one can certainly make a case that in general, anaesthetics are overused in labor and that patients should weigh the risks against the benefits. But replacing a foolish orthodoxy (“the more medical interventions, the better”) with a foolish counter-orthodoxy (“if you take the epidural, you’re a bad mommy”) is not progress.
via eyelid
Femme-inism
Narratives of transsexuality aimed at a general audience, both in print and online, are a genre unto themselves, and one of the conventions of the genre is the tone, directed at cissexual (i.e. non-trans) readers, of “please understand me, because if you understand me, then you couldn’t possibly condemn me”. The refreshing thing about Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl is that it breaks that frame, and tells us “please understand yourselves, because if you understand the prejudices that our culture has taught you, then you can learn to respect me”.
For example, consider the issue of “passing”, which consumes a lot of the literature devoted to transsexuality. (I have to include something I myself blogged five years ago in this indictment.) Serano points out that the language of “passing” puts the focus on the trans person, who either succeeds or fails at “passing” as his or her self-identified gender. But it ignores the role of other people who pass judgement (ahem) on the people they encounter, and who stigmatize anyone whose gender presentation they consider deviant. (Gender-noncomformant cissexuals sometimes run afoul of this stigma1, but we don’t usually describe their experience as a failure to “pass”.) Taking for granted that everyone else will acknowledge your self-identified gender—assuming that if someone does misidentify your gender, then your peers will agree that the problem is with them, not you—is one aspect of what Serano calls “cissexual privilege”.
With insights like this, Serano attacks the received wisdom of many communities: not just mainstream “straight” society and media, but also the medical establishment, the “queer studies” world (Foucault and his intellectual descendants), lesbian and queer communities, and the feminist world.
With regard to feminism, she has critiques of the “feminism is all about the specialness of women, by which of course we mean women who have been raised as girls” faction of the movement (no surprise there), the “let’s measure feminist progress by how many women are becoming doctors and lawyers” faction, and the “let’s deconstruct the gender binary and live androgynously ever after” faction. But she comes not to undermine feminism, but to improve it.
Serano’s model of sexism, I humbly suggest, is worth adding to the Feminism 101 curriculum. She distinguishes between traditional sexism, the belief that masculinity is superior to femininity, and oppositional sexism, the belief that men should be masculine and women should be feminine. A woman (i.e., someone universally regarded as female—let’s bracket the trans issues for a minute) who takes on a stereotypically female role benefits from oppositional sexism, but is harmed by traditional sexism. A woman who goes into stereotypically male endeavors benefits from traditional sexism (e.g., higher pay and prestige) but is harmed by oppositional sexism. A “manly man” benefits from both, and an effeminate man is harmed by both. This tension explains why trans women encounter extreme reactions and trans men are barely noticed by mainstream society, but it also explains a lot of other things about the way sexism operates in society, even among cis heterosexual men and women. (For instance, Serano observes that the modern feminist movement has done a lot to fight oppositional sexism but not so much to fight traditional sexism, and suggests that this is why many straight, cissexual, femme women will say “I’m not a feminist” even as they enjoy many of the rights that feminists have won for them.)
Which is why this is a book that everyone should read, regardless of their gender, how masculine or feminine they are, their attitude towards transsexuality, or their attitude towards feminism itself.
1 If I recall correctly, one of the very first Dykes To Watch Out For strips was about how a butch dyke should respond to a woman who rebukes her for being in “the ladies’ room”.
