Oh, look. A terrible news article about a subculture.
So the M&G did an article on ICON, the recent gaming convention up in Jo’burg. It’s about as awful as you would expect, only worse. It makes it sound as if all the women were walking around in revealing outfits with their tits falling out, and that the main attraction of the con to women is the possibility of attracting a horde of desperate nerds no matter how shy or unconventionally attractive they are. Not, you know, participation in any of the games, or the purchase of cool toys; those are for the smelly man-children running around and whacking each other with rubber swords.
Here’s where you can read this wonder of modern journalism in all its glory. Use of latex and bleach is recommended if you have a gentle and sensitive nature or are allergic to fail.
Since I appear to be kind of half maybe possibly not actually logged in to the website, and I have no idea whether it’s eaten my comment, and if it hasn’t eaten my comment it has almost certainly eaten the paragraph breaks in my comment, thus rendering it unreadable, here it is again:
This is yet another “quirky human interest” article written by a clueless mainstream journalist who briefly encounters a subculture and then regurgitates a hopelessly confused mess of whatever they found most memorable. But it’s a lot worse than average.
I came here expecting to get a bit annoyed about the conflation of LARPing with the SCA, or the portrayal of all LARPing as MEAD-style boffer LARPing. But the horrible and sensationalist gender stereotypes on display here kind of eclipse the geeky details.
I disagree that the article helps any of the hobbies it features. It tells men “these subcultures welcome sexist jerks” and tells women “stay far away from here unless you would enjoy wading through a cesspit of sexist jerks”.
I was there, I wore normal clothes (like a lot of other women there, who I guess were not exciting or exotic enough to be mentioned), I had a great geeky time and nobody was rude to me. But if all I knew about ICON came from this article, I would avoid it like the plague.
I know women who dress up at cons, sometimes in revealing outfits, satirically and non-satirically. I know a lot of the women from the T&A RPG team. I may have to agree to disagree with them about the feminist implications of dressing up in revealing outfits at cons, but that’s a whole other post — and on the whole I think they should wear whatever the hell they want and not be assumed to be wearing it for the benefit of dudely eyeballs. Our differences of opinion notwithstanding, I think it’s safe to say that the satirical element went so far over the reporter’s head it may have ended up in that giant football dirigible floating over the city.
(In non-ranty post-ICON news, I have giant blisters on my hands from screwing my giant alien’s legs in, but it was so worth it. It looks totally badass. 
)
P.S. The really annoying thing about this is that in South Africa roleplaying isn’t that male-dominated anymore. OK, maybe the nationwide roleplaying diaspora — all those tiny cells of friends who have played AD&D all by themselves since high school and never talk to other roleplayers — is male-dominated, but the larger communities centered on e.g. ICON or CLAWs at UCT are full of women and have been for over a decade. And they’re not just “girlfriends and sisters”; they write LARPs and modules and organise things and come to conventions every year. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that is seriously misrepresenting the community.
A thought experiment
Suppose that you host a party at which you serve soup. The soup consists almost entirely of vegetables, but you add a small amount of chicken stock. During the party, a few of your guests complain that they are vegetarians, and thus find your soup unpalatable.
Assuming that you don’t have some kind of personal vendetta against vegetarians, which of these do you consider to be the more reasonable response?
A. Apologise; offer some kind of assurance that you will remember that some of your friends are vegetarians the next time you make soup.
B. Complain bitterly that the vegetarians are hurting your feelings by making you out to be some kind of horrible anti-vegetarian bigot, when you clearly didn’t intend to offend them, and when everyone knows that you have absolutely nothing against vegetarians and treat everyone equally whether they are an omnivore, herbivore or insectivore. Complain that you couldn’t possibly have been expected to remember the vegetarians, since there are so few of them. (Go off on a tangent in which you contemplate why so few vegetarians come to your parties; conclude that they must have some genetic reason to dislike you.) Complain that the vegetarians are being oversensitive — it’s just a little bit of chicken stock; it’s not like you slaughtered a cow on the table in front of them — and tell them that they should have just shut up and eaten the soup.
Show your working.
How not to offend me
I am not offended by jokes about sex. I make them all the time. I can think of many women who I’m pretty sure would say the same.
There is a long-running debate about sexism within the FOSS community and the IT field in general (the most recent notable incidents are RMS’s emacs virgins joke and the infamous Ruby porn presentation, but similar issues have come up in the past).
To categorise this debate as a clash between prudish, delicate flowers who disapprove of sex and porn (and who are usually contrasted with hip, younger women who are more sex-positive), and “the guys”, who are used to talking freely about sex with other guys, is to completely miss the point.
I do not speak for all women. I’m sure that some women feel uncomfortable whenever sex is mentioned at all in a professional environment, and that some women don’t find sexist humour to be a big deal, or even personally find it funny. This is my individual take, in response to recent posts on CLUG Park.
For me, this has never been about porn or jokes about sex being inherently offensive to women. It’s about speech and behaviour which belittles or degrades women. This is often the case with jokes which some men make about sex — because, quite frankly, our society is fucked up when it comes to that particular subject. A lot of mainstream porn features rather ugly and insulting caricatures of submissive, slutty women and dominant, abusive men, and I personally would not like to have those stereotypes waved at me in the middle of a tech conference. I don’t care what gets anyone’s rocks off, but it disturbs me when people introduce their creepy porn into their normal interactions with people in a non-sexual context.
But it doesn’t have to be explicitly about sex. Jokes about women not knowing what they want, having to be cajoled into sex because they don’t really like it, being stupid, being ignorant of technology, liking pink stuff, liking chocolate, wanting their boyfriends to talk about their feelings, saying they want honesty and not really meaning it, being bad drivers, wanting chivalry and equality at the same time, being on the rag, always being attracted to jerks and never Nice Guys, wanting to trap their boyfriends into pregnancy or marriage, being welcomed in a male-dominated field or hobby because now the men can get dates, not liking comics or computers or sci-fi, not understanding things their boyfriends like, not existing (because there are no real women on the internet), being fashion-conscious, taking an hour to get ready, being gold-diggers, or just generally being mysterious and unfathomable creatures entirely unlike normal people (read: men) really piss me off.
This kind of commentary is harmful not because of the seriousness of any individual incident, but because of the cumulative effect. Some of those things may not seem like a big deal to you — they shouldn’t be, and they wouldn’t be if I only encountered those stereotypes rarely. The reason they’re in my list is that I encounter them all the time. It is impossible to read the comments on any major internet forum which is mostly frequented by men without wading hip-deep in this crap (which is why I very seldom read comments on sites like Reddit, Digg or Slashdot anymore). I used to reply to these comments. Then I stopped, because arguing with half the internet is frustrating and pointless.
(Yes, I feel the same way about stupid jokes about men being immature, having uncontrollable sexual urges, obsessing about Star Wars, obsessing about boobs, obsessing about sport, being unable to cook or do shopping or tie their own shoelaces, being hypochondriacs, not asking for directions, being unable to talk about their feelings, being promiscuous, fearing commitment, etc., etc..)
On the whole, I have observed the worst such behaviour on US-centric websites, and most of the complaints about sexism that I have encountered online were written by American women. In my limited and subjective experience I think the South Africans I know are considerably more progressive. I have found my local Linux community to be welcoming and friendly. I don’t think this is because anyone is making a special effort not to offend me.
Do you think that not being sexist means singling out women for special treatment? Sexist behaviour is what singles women out. Treating someone as your equal includes not continually telling jokes about the ways in which people like them are inferior.
ETA:
I am not going to provide a forum on this blog for blog-post-length comments from persons with whom I have no interest in entering into a dialogue, based on bitter past experience of attempting to do so. Those persons are most welcome to post their responses within their own internet spaces.
Get off my side; you’re making it look stupid.
Update (April 2009): Holy crap! The IEC really did get their site updated for the elections. I almost fell off my chair. The election results are inexplicably only available as PDFs that you have to download, but hey — baby steps.
So, if you live in South Africa and have The Internet, you probably already know that the IEC website is crap. It has been crap for years. It used to be bizarrely malformed in anything that isn’t IE, and lots of people complained.
Recently the IEC dramatically improved the situation by adding a browser check to their main page, and redirecting any browsers that don’t identify themselves as IE to an apologetic note which explains that the site doesn’t work in anything except IE. Please note that they had time to add Google Chrome to the list of other browsers — but not to actually fix the damn site; something which you might think is not rocket science, or very expensive to do, especially in this age of out-of-the-box CMSes and web development frameworks.
Of course the site still works in Firefox, exactly as badly as it used to — and the browser check is trivially circumventable. All you have to do to see it in its full malformed glory is navigate to any internal page. If you’re feeling energetic, you can make your browser lie in its user agent string. Be prepared to reload frequently — not only is the site atrociously designed and basically unmaintained (how long is that <\table> going to be there?); the server is a bit dodgy.
Now, people have been complaining about this crap for years, to little effect. Nobody seems to be particularly interested in fixing the problem.
Earlier today several people I know posted links to DigitalApartheid.com, a new site created by someone who is fed up with the state of the IEC website. As much as I agree with the purported goals of the site, I am not impressed with the way it has gone about achieving them, for several reasons.
One: the site instructs visitors to email or fax a form letter complaining about the site to various employees of the IEC. Form letters are crap. Form letters say “I’m not capable of articulating an intelligent opinion about this; I’m with that guy, so I copied what he said.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they were forwarded straight to /dev/dustbin at the IEC; I know that’s what I’d do.
Two: the form letter is full of bad punctuation and grammar. Badly written complaints make you look stupid.
Three: the form letter compares the site’s exclusion of non-IE users to apartheid, and states that the writer is contemplating not voting unless the site is fixed. Here’s where we go off the deep end.
Seriously? You really think that the inconvenience that you experience at this site because of your (admirable and sensible) choice to use a browser other than IE is comparable to decades of racist government oppression?
Dude. Maybe you should get some perspective.
Most people in South Africa don’t have access to computers. The IEC website is not the only — or indeed the primary — source of information about the elections. This information is not being denied to you — if you can’t access it in your browser (and you can, really), you have the ability to get it in some other way, just like all those computerless people.
I do want the IEC to fix their site — but bombarding them with ridiculous hyperbole isn’t going to make them do it. There are plenty of intelligent things to say about standards compliance and FOSS, and why they are important. If you’re going to send a complaint, please do it in a way which doesn’t make you — and by association everyone else who uses an alternative browser — look like a raving nutjob.
Schrödinger’s minister
So Trevor Manuel has simultaneously resigned and not resigned. We’ll finally know his state when someone peeks into his office and collapses the wave function. I made this joke purely for the sake of generating an interesting title for my post, and I apologise.
Hellboy 2 was awesome; it’s really nice to be able to say that about a cinema movie for a change. Abe’s makeup was better than in the first movie. I liked the story. I’ve heard of some people saying it’s not very “Hellboy” — but the tragic decline of the pre-human magical races (and their continual attempts to get Hellboy on their side) is a major theme in the comics (”lovecraftian horrors from space try to eat the world” is the other one).
Abe has his own comic spin-off! I have ordered the first trade, but publication appears to have been delayed. I’m also getting the Lobster Johnson trade — I may as well collect the lot.
I am reading the InuYasha manga. Scanlations are funny. It’s very rare for fan translators to have a flawless grasp of English grammar — and they have a tendency to be obsessively faithful to the original text, so if they encounter something difficult to translate they prefer to provide a half-page explanatory footnote than to pick an equivalent but not identical English phrase. Also, since this is generally a youth-friendly manga, I’m pretty sure that InuYasha doesn’t keep saying “fuck” and “bitch” in the official English translation.
I have installed Privoxy at home, and cleaned up some of my previous hacky ad- and cookie-blocking measures (huge blacklist in my browser, mostly pointless since I was not accepting cookies by default and thus only using the whitelist; huge wodge of domains in my hosts file, etc.). The first advantage that Privoxy has over all this crap is that it understands wildcards. Thanks to this, I will not have to allow cookies from every single LJ/Blogger domain individually. And for my next trick, I hope to be able to tell Privoxy to extend the life of LiveJournal’s cookies beyond the session — I’m not a prolific poster, but unless I am logged in (with openid), I keep running into the infuriating new adult content filters[1].
[1] This is what self-policing enforced by vague threats and imprecise rules looks like. Anyone who thinks they might occasionally mention sex in a post (i.e. is a normal person) sticks these on their entire journal, just in case. And of course the anonymous reader is assumed by LiveJournal to be a minor, and subjected to the most extreme filtering by default. I’m an adult. Why do I have to wrestle with childproof caps on my interwebs?
Beware of the Leopard
Last weekend I went hiking with Hodgestar, Hodgestar’s Mom and Neil in the Vogelgat nature reserve near Hermanus. It’s lovely — isolated, almost entirely empty of people (it’s a private reserve with a limited membership), and full of fynbos and frogs. I have photos, which I should upload. There are several little huts where you can stay overnight; we stayed at Leopard Camp.
I have new hiking boots, which made my hiking experience a lot more pleasant than the previous one. Getting them was a bit of an adventure; they were a hurried, last-minute purchase, and the first pair I got did not fit as well at home as it seemed to in the shop and had to be exchanged. The second pair is really as waterproof as advertised, and very comfortable. I have ended up with a men’s size 8; I see that shoe sizes are exactly as reliable as clothing sizes.
I have read Grass, which is really good. I am currently reading the third Digger book (after work while waiting for Hodgestar) and His Dark Materials (at home, because it is borrowed (thanks, Katherine!)).
HDM is a lot better than the movie. All the bizarre and inexplicable things that happen in the movie happen for logical reasons in the first book. It also has an actual ending, which is a great improvement. Part of the movie’s incomprehensibility can be blamed directly on the scriptwriters’ removal of all overt religious references — since a key element of the plot (why everyone is so upset about Dust) hinges on a purely religious concept. Seriously, how did they think that they could just take that bit out, and have the whole thing still make sense? Yeah, they do sort of allude to it, but no satisfactory explanation is given.
Is this an “atheist” series? Uh, not so much, except possibly in the eyes of people who conflate atheism with criticism of religious institutions and their teachings, or with “hatred of god”, that notorious strawman belief system I’m not entirely sure can actually be found in the wild (except in isolated individuals who aren’t very sane). The books are certainly scathingly critical of the Catholic Church, which is presented as a Bad Guy throughout, and it looks like god very much exists in the setting and is turning out to be some kind of supernatural villain.
I will reserve final judgement on the series until I’ve finished the last book, but so far it’s OK, and a fun, quick read. Most people seem to find the second book a bit dull; I think I agree. The switch in protagonists is a bit jarring. I don’t find Will Parry very likeable, especially in comparison to Lyra.
At work I have installed Ubuntu Gutsy on my MacBook Pro. Almost everything worked out of the box (although there’s a lot of functionality I’ve never tried out), but I had to upgrade to the Hardy kernel to get sleep to work. Now I’m installing Debian Etch in a VM (using KVM/Qemu). So far, so good.
Hodgestar and I got ourselves a data projector for Christmas. It’s very nice. And now I’m off to watch Farscape.
ETA: I forgot — I have bought Creatures of Rokugan and Emerald Empire (recent L5R 3rd Edition sourcebooks). I haven’t had much time to read them yet, but they look pretty good. CoR is a bit dry and lacking in pictures and explanations, and both books unfortunately suffer from AEG’s usual proofreading issues, but EE looks like a really awesome setting resource. The bit I did manage to read finally clarifies the issue of meat-eating in Rokugani society, and I’m hoping for a resolution of the leather stupidity as well. Vassal families have finally been updated! (Of course, I reserve the right to ignore some of this information utterly if it josses my campaign.) The book has lots of wonderful in-character commentary in the form of extracts from the diary of Doji Barahime, a snarky Crane Clan courtier.
I forgot — comics!
Outer Limits had a stand at Dragonfire. Naturally, this meant spontaneous comic purchases. I finally received two graphic novels I ordered ages ago: Scarlet Traces: The Great Game (the sequel to Scarlet Traces) and Phonogram (an indie comic about Britpop). The Great Game is awesome, and Phonogram is enjoyable, and very reminiscent of Unknown Armies, although I would probably enjoy it more if I actually knew more (i.e. anything) about Britpop.
I also got Fables #9, which is probably the last book in the series that I’m going to get. Fables has become disappointingly dull and slow-moving, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting better. I was willing to overlook the sappy and annoying wedding storyline which many fans have complained about, but Snow White’s characterisation is getting worse — I distinctly remember her having interesting adventures of some kind in the first book; now she’s a stay-at-home mom. This is not inherently a character-nerfing concept, but it’s used that way in the books — she doesn’t even get to do anything interesting or meaningful to protect her husband and children when they’re in danger. In the last story, she hangs around wringing her hands helplessly, doing absolutely nothing constructive, and telling off her father-in-law about his lack of assistance, while Bigby heroically saves the day. What? This is the woman who, according to one of the side stories, was a kick-ass swordfighter once upon a time. Seriously, what?
The Homelands subplot looks intriguing, but it’s too little signal lost in too much noise.
I also got Fell, and it is good. I like “straight man” cop heroes who manage to hold onto their principles and sanity when everyone around them is crazy; I find this crime fiction trope a lot more enjoyable than fatalistic crime noir (which is why I don’t like Sin City).
Why I don’t like mainstream superhero comics
I read When Fangirls Attack. It’s a blog which aggregates posts relating to women in comics from the wider internet. This could encompass a broad range of issues and viewpoints, and occasionally something unusual shows up, but mostly it ends up being a lot of posts by women (and sometimes men) complaining about the portrayal of women in superhero comics. Or posts by scoffing men complaining about women complaining about the portrayal of women in superhero comics, followed by posts criticising the hecklers.
I think the complaints of the women are mostly justified, and I agree with many of their observations, but I find that I can’t get too worked up over the issue because — while there are many, many comics that I like — I don’t really like mainstream superhero comics.
The reason I don’t like superhero comics has nothing to do with their portrayal of women. I have problems with the genre which I think are much less easily fixable, because they are fundamental assumptions and conventions on which the genre is built.
The Science is Silly
Back in the dawn of comic history, the awful pseudoscientific, semi-mystical gimmicks that gave superheroes and supervillains their super powers were not as blatantly stupid as they are to us today. Classic science fiction also had some terrible science. The difference is that whereas science fiction has moved with the times, and nobody would write a story about a magical shrinking ray today (and expect it to be treated as hard SF, anyway), comics have faithfully maintained the same standard of “science” that they had in the 1930s. I find it very difficult to take magical, glowing alien gemstones, colourful energy rays and “radioactivity” completely unlike actual radioactivity seriously. It blows my suspension of disbelief.
No Ripples in the Pond
An assumption that most superhero comics make is that the world the superheros inhabit is our modern world, mostly unchanged. While the superheroes foil elaborate and unlikely plans constructed by heinous supervillains, they have no significant impact on real-world issues. They don’t get involved in world politics or wars. They mostly don’t get involved in local politics either — and if there is some storyline that addresses anti-mutant political movements or superhero registration acts, you can be sure that when it has concluded the magical red reset button will be pressed and everything will get back to normal. No matter what superheroes do, the ordinary people of the world will continue wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music and making the same smalltalk as ordinary people in the real world.
This might have worked back in the day, when each comicbook storyline had a handful of heroes and a handful of villains, in the entire world, and you could plausibly assume that their adventures did not make many waves outside the city in which they operated. In the modern Marvel and DC universes, where you can’t throw a brick without hitting a super-person? Not so much. It’s ridiculously unrealistic. I don’t think it’s possible to treat these universes as anything other than near-future science fiction. You have to show the large-scale impact that these thousands of super-powered people are having on the world, otherwise the world makes no sense. You can’t have the JLA save the entire world from destruction every second week and not have anyone notice.
Crossovers Have Made a Mess
Part of the reason that these universes exist is that the two big publishers wanted all their heroes and villains to co-exist in the same world (and smaller publishers have followed suit). This has not only created the logically inconsistent setting described above, but because it was done retroactively, all these heroes don’t even have a sensible, unified source for their powers. All their individual origin stories have been smooshed together. What’s worse than one bad pseudoscientific gimmick? A hundred bad pseudoscientific gimmicks, which have no business all being true in the same world, all put together. So we have alien superheroes, radioactive-spider-bitten superheroes, genetically mutated superheroes, magical superheroes and mythological god-like superheroes all in the same setting. Boom goes my suspension of disbelief, repeatedly. Nobody even attempts to explain how all these (sometimes mutually exclusive) power sources interact — which is probably a good thing, because if they tried, it wouldn’t be pretty.
Starting from Scratch
It’s not impossible to get away from these problems and still have superhero comics. I recently read some stories that George R.R. Martin wrote for the Wildcards shared-world superhero setting (I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for these books). This setting was conceived as a world with many superheroes from the start, and it shows. There is a unified power source (an alien virus). The gimmick is made more realistic with the addition of some scientific plausibility (the virus killed the overwhelming majority of the people it infected; most survivors had completely useless and usually unpleasant mutations; only a tiny percentage got super-powers). Superheroes influence the politics and culture of the world (I don’t know to what extent this is true of the whole series, but one of GRRM’s stories heavily featured real-world politics).
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to fix the existing big-name comics. Their fans are too attached to the existing mythology, despite its silliness. (Just like I’m attached to Star Trek — a setting which has the same problems when it comes to science. I often wonder what Star Trek would look like today if the creators of The Next Generation had decided to “re-imagine” the franchise, Battlestar Galactica-style, instead of making their show a direct sequel to the original series and doing a lot of creative retconning.)
It looks like Marvel is trying to fix things by rebooting some of its storylines with the Ultimate imprint. I don’t know if they’re going far enough — they’re competing with their original storylines rather than replacing them, at least for the moment — but it’s a good start.
Stuff…
Long time, no blog.
About L5R
My L5R campaign seems to be running well so far; after the initial deer-in-headlights I think I’ve remembered how to DM. Two sessions so far; the third one will feature all of my players (now that exams are over).
It makes an interesting change to have a party not focused on combat (two soft-hearted shugenja; one courtier moonlighting as a yojimbo; one currently absent monk). So far most of the plot has revolved around ghosts, since we have just passed the night of the dead. The campaign is expected to focus on the investigation of magical crime. Of course, it will probably go off on a total tangent, as campaigns are wont to do.
About gay marriage, zOMG!!!1eleven
There’s a lot of running in circles, screaming and shouting in response to the new Civil Union Bill. I can’t say that I’m happy with the form that this legislation has taken — an unnecessarily complex, convoluted and redundant one — but it’s better than nothing.
I wish all the people who are convinced that The World Is Going To End would donate all their stuff to charity. I mean, if we’re going to be wiped out by a flood for our brazen wickedness tomorrow, they’re not going to need any of it.
I also wish that SA had not taken the route of making most religious marriages almost automatically recognised as legal marriages (with all the paperwork quietly and conveniently done in the background). I think if people had to go to home affairs to apply for legal marriage status explicitly, as was done in communist-era Poland, fewer people would have trouble separating the concepts of religious and legal marriage. And then maybe there would be less wailing and gnashing of teeth, and more chilling out and leaving other people to their alternative social customs. Or maybe I’m being overly optimistic.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I like cats
So… having once again laboriously cleaned congealed cat spray from various places in our corridor, including the spines of all of the textbooks on the bottom shelf of one bookcase, I solemnly swear that if I ever get my hands on the stray tomcat who sneaks into our flat at night to nick our cats’ food (I can hear that it’s him, because he crunches the pellets really loudly, but he has excellent hearing and flees in a (justified) mad panic if the bed so much as creaks), he’s getting the Righteous Cold Shower of Pavlovian Conditioning. I don’t care how pitiful and fluffy he is.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
