Two more good posts critiquing Dr. Horrible from a feminist P.O.V.: one at The Hathor Legacy, and one at Rebecca Allen’s place. There’s a lot of good discussion going on in their comments, as well.

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Here’s a relevant quote, from an interview with Joss:

Q: I’ve been reading some criticism (insert audible gasp here!) of “Dr. Horrible” about the lack of a strong, empowered female lead. They claim that Penny is merely a prop for Dr Horrible and Captain Hammer to fight over.

What are your thoughts on that?

Joss Whedon: […] Yeah, Penny is not the feminist icon of our age. And yes, she does exist in the narrative as part of Doc’s fate — but everyone in the story is there to move the story. Is she less real than Hammer? (Is ANYTHING?) We gave her a cause so she wouldn’t JUST be the Pretty Girl but the fact is, neither Doc nor Hammer gives her the attention she deserves — Doc’s crush comes before he has the slightest idea what she cares about. Which is not uncommon. It reminds me of “Sweeney Todd,” the Judge and Sweeney singing “Pretty Women” — a beautiful duet with no insight whatsoever. Just images.

But we shoulda gave her more jokes.

Joss is right that Penny needed more jokes. Dr. Horrible’s mocks the cliches of supervillains, and the cliches of superheros — but there are practically no jokes about the cliches of the Polly Pureheart girlfriend. It ends up feeling as if the video sees that the supervillain/superhero roles need to be questioned critically (by which I mean, “pointed at and mocked”), but takes the Polly Pureheart cliche seriously.

In a story that’s all about the funny, Penny never gets to be funny. I don’t think the feminist audience necessarily wanted to see Penny kick ass, or to live happily ever after, or not to make stupid choices about men (like sleeping with Captain Hammer). I myself would have been happy if her character was as funny as the other two leads. (And the normal-human, straight man role can be made funny; think of how hilarious Jane Curtin was on Third Rock From The Sun).

Joss is right, of course, that all characters are there just to serve the story. And given this story, it would have been hard to make Penny as rich¹ a character as Dr. Horrible or Captain Hammer. So yeah, to avoid making Penny a sort of boring would have required a bit of above-average writing. But there’s nothing wrong with the audience expecting and wanting above-average writing.

(By the way, Felicia Day is completely capable of being funny — check out the internet sitcom The Guild, which Day writes and stars in, if you haven’t already).

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Finally, the official online comic book, which was written by Joss’ brother Zack, and beautifully drawn by Eric Canete. It’s got a “funny” prison rape joke — Captain Hammer warns readers not to be criminals, or else you’ll “go to prison… with this guy” (illustration shows freakishly huge, muscular prisoner, telling his much smaller cellmate “you have good bone structure.”).

A few points:

1) People might be tempted to defend the rape joke on the grounds that it’s told by Captain Hammer, and that’s just the sort of boorish humor we expect from CH. That’s true, but in the video the humor in all of CH’s comments is that CH is a total ass and saying utterly appalling, awful things. In the comic book, it comes across as the comic book telling a generic prison rape joke, rather than making fun of the person telling the joke.

(Compare this to the prison rape joke Faith makes early in the Buffy episode “Who Are You?,” in which the joke is played as unfunny and appalling.)

If the intent was to make fun of how boorish Captain Hammer is, then the script failed to get the point across.

2) As Liss says, “the jokes normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape and thusly perpetuate the rape culture.” Why would anyone want to contribute to that? Similarly, from the SAFER blog:

You know why we can’t make fun of rape? Because doing so trivializes the pain inflicted by rape, and that contributes to a general cultural attitude of not taking rape seriously or holding perpetrators accountable. That type of culture makes rape more common.

3) Even if you don’t give a shit about all that, why would any writer who’s not a hack tell a prison rape joke? I can’t imagine a duller, more played-out cliche.

1. Note that rich doesn’t mean “realistic” or “deep,” which none of these characters were! (back)

This is one of my favorite pages.

Have you heard of Fat Princess? It’s a new video game,¹ which Feminist Gamers ² describes as “a TF2-like³ capture-the-flag game where the point is to feed your princess enough cake so that she grows really fat so that the opposing team can’t carry her back to their castle.” Apparently the game mechanics are well-designed and innovative.

Liss at Shakes is pissed. (Curtsy my friend Bill, who despite being fat himself is pissed that Liss is pissed.)

As I said in Bill’s comments, I guess I should be pissed by Fat Princess, but honestly I have a hard time giving a shit; it’s just people trying to be immature and offensive, because that kind of thing is funny. (And it is.)⁴

These kind of fat jokes are rebellion for the gutless — offensive enough so that people can pretend to be daring, but not so offensive that they’re risking pissing off anyone who matters. Fat jokes today are what Polish jokes were in the 1970s.

Fatophobic crap like “Fat Princess” is more effect than cause; it’s a reflection of an anti-fat culture, and when the culture changes then the sheep who made “Fat Princess” will move on to some other target.

UPDATE: Excellent post at Feministe, by a game designer.

1. By the way, I’ve got no patience for the people who say “c’mon, it’s just a game.” So if that’s all you’ve got to contribute, then take your anti-intellectual cliches elsewhere, please. (back)
2. In the thread at Feminist Gamers, I thought the folks discussing creating a game called “Arm the Princess” were on to something, but it would be better if instead of the Princess just fighting to repel invaders, she was fighting to kill off her parents and rule the land herself (that’ll teach them to try and marry her off). And why is the princess in “Arm the Princess” so thin? Make her fat, please! (back)
3. For the record, I have no idea what TF2 is. (back)
4. Years ago, someone — I think it may have been bell hooks — pointed out how ridiculous it is that people argue about “is ____ offensive or funny,” as if these are mutually exclusive categories. (back)

This is the second poll I’ve seen recently showing that California voters may not want to amend their constitution to keep marriage bigoted. If this remains true in November, then we’ll have two states in which same-sex marriage is legally recognized.¹ That’ll be two states in which lesbians and gays married and the sky didn’t fall.

I wonder which state will be next? New Jersey? Connecticut?

Quote from the article under the fold.

Read the rest of this post »

1. Two and a half, if you include New York. (back)

Mandolin’s poem “The Oracle on River Street” has won third place in this year’s Rhysling Awards, for the category “short poem”! Congratulations, Mandolin! Yay!

Ta-Nehisi discusses why race matters when people address Blacks as “nigger”:

I never thought that because Toby Keith made a record called White Trash With Money, that somehow gave me the right to address random white people in the fashion. I never thought the fact that there was a magazine called Heeb gave me the right to address my Jewish buddies as such. More to the point–I never wanted to. So this is what I don’t understand–What’s the big beef? Why is that in “Blackworld” the normal laws of human interaction somehow don’t apply? I don’t get white people who have a hard time with this–you call your mother “Mom,” I call her Ms. Phillips–same deal here. Nigger means one thing when used amongst a group of people with similar experiences, and something else when used by people outside of that experience.

In a follow-up, Ta-Nihisi quotes one of Megan’s comment-writers:

The only reason the word “nigger” is such a taboo — and yet is used freely among blacks — is because keeping it a whites-only taboo is a way for blacks to intimidate and dominate whites.

All this reminds me of this cartoon of mine, from years ago:

(Larger version of cartoon here.)

When I say there are spoilers, I mean it. Go and watch Dr Horrible before you read this post.

I’m still very unsure how to read Dr Horrible’s Singalong blog, and the thread at Feministe reveals that there are many ways understanding Dr Horrible’s story.

As an origin story I appreciate it; I’d even say it was well done. Not just that there was a lot of the funny clever stuff that I’d expect (the appearance of Bad Horse was pure genius), but showing villains as having origin stories as well as heroes is a cool way of undercutting many of the tropes of an origin story.

I can also appreciate a straight political reading of the story (which is encouraged within the storyas both Penny and Dr Horrible directly discuss how to create change). I don’t really mind that the wet liberal who gets sucked in by those in power dies (although not necessarily realistic, as a metaphor it shows the likelihood of that strategy working). I also don’t disagree that nihilist, individualists often put their ego before the change they are trying to create and do harm without doing any good. But I don’t think any of that says anything particularly substantial, without an alternative (The Chain, Chosen, Graduation, Anne, Prophecy Girl, Jaynestown - Joss does know the alternative).

One of the big questions for me is the depiction of Penny, as the only substantial female character (and it didn’t pass the Bechedel test). I actually dislike the ‘Joss writes strong female characters’ idea, because it is so often referring solely to the female characters who are capable of beating someone up. As someone who was always more interested in Willow than Buffy and Kaylee than River, I appreciate his ability to write interesting female characters, more than his tendency to write so-called ’strong’ ones. The idea that the most important female characters to depict are those that can beat up the men who are trying to abuse them, comes perilously close to victim blaming. It’s very satisfying to watch Buffy killing Angel at the end of Becoming II, but the death of the robot at the end of I Was Made to Love You, is just as true statement about relationships.

So I have no problem with Penny dying, because women do die when men fight over them (this is from the New Zealand news media today, it’s being called a ‘crime of passion’). I don’t even really have a problem that she is so one dimensional, as we see her through Dr Horrible’s eyes, and it is clear that she is just an object to him.

The one thing I did object to was the shot of her in the laundromat with frozen yoghurt, presumably waiting for Billy. The idea is that Billy could have got what he wanted if only he was prepared to treat Penny like a person. If he’d talked with her, rather than built a freeze ray, she would have returned his affections. I really dislike that aspect of these sorts of geek stories, because sometimes people don’t love you back. As written it plays into Billy’s entitlement over Penny.

I do think that Penny’s death and Dr Horrible becoming actually evil was the only way the story could end, and I can see the importance of it as a story. To take us in through the eyes of a low-rent villain, and have us believe him that he’s actually the hero, until he’s not.

But ultimately, it’s not a story that interests me that much. A death ray may be a substitute for a rocket-launcher, but this story didn’t have any emotional resonance. The only person whose path was real enough to resonate was Dr Horrible. His loneliness in the last shot, and even the hollowness of getting have truth in them, but for me that is undercut because Dr Horrible’s feelings for Penny didn’t resonate, and must be, on some level, creepy.

Even more fundamentally, I come back to Grace Paley - because this story was lacking both blood and money. Now Joss has always been kind of shaky on the material reality of his stories (which was what made Firefly so strong), but he’s always written about family - actual and created. Without blood there is not heart to his story.

In comments, Daran (whose site is likely to infuriate most “Alas” readers, so don’t click through if you don’t want that) pointed out this study:

EAST LANSING, Mich. — New research led by a Michigan State University scholar refutes commonly held stereotypes that overweight workers are lazier, more emotionally unstable and harder to get along with than their “normal weight” colleagues.

With the findings, employers are urged to guard against the use of weight-based stereotypes when it comes to hiring, promoting or firing.

Mark Roehling, associate professor of human resource management, and two colleagues studied the relationship between body weight and personality traits for nearly 3,500 adults. Contrary to widely held stereotypes, overweight and obese adults were not found to be significantly less conscientious, less agreeable, less extraverted or less emotionally stable.

It’s sad that this sort of research is necessary at all, and I’m sure on this blog the reaction will be “well, duh!” But probably the research is necessary, because the fact is that employers discriminate on exactly this basis:

“Previous research has demonstrated that many employers hold negative stereotypes about obese workers, and those beliefs contribute to discrimination against overweight workers at virtually every stage of the employment process, from hiring to promotion to firing,” Roehling said.

Of course, research alone can’t change many minds, because the prejudice against fat people is not based in reason. But it’s another piece of ammo that can be used to push people in the right direction, I think.

Although this article doesn’t note it, other research has shown that the wage penalty for being fat is larger for fat women. This is seemingly because men have to be very fat to be discriminated against as much as women who are only a bit fat.

I got a complaint from someone in email that the “share” thing with the pop-up menu at the bottom of each post is annoying. Do a bunch of people feel that way? If so, I’ll remove it.

UPDATE: I’ve replaced it with a different “share” plug-in that won’t pop up unless you click on it first.

Sean Tevis, a centrist (ugh) Kansas Democrat running for the House of Reps, has a page asking for people to donate $8.34 cents to his campaign — and the page is done as a homage to the comic strip XKCD. It’s not as funny as the real XKCD, but it’s pretty amusing. (One tip, Sean: To really get the XKCD style, the hidden titles of the images should be secondary punchlines.)

I hope he wins, partly because he’d be replacing a Republican, but primarily because I want more funny geeks in national office.

(Thanks to Bean for pointing this out to me.)

This is something I just wrote in a comment, but I thought maybe I should “promote” it to a post.

That someone might see this cover at a newsstand and think “hey, this magazine I know nothing about is literally saying that the Obamas will burn American Flags in the Oval Office fireplace” doesn’t concern me. All that says to me is that “there are some idiots out there, and some of them will glance at this cover,” which is something I can live with.

On the other hand, I am bothered by the idea of Black, Muslim, and Black Muslim readers seeing this cover on newsstands, and understanding the satiric intent, but nonetheless feeling “othered” by it. Since I the cover is pretty weak tea anyway, I wish The New Yorker hadn’t published it, because the negative result — contributing to the othering of Blacks and Muslims — seems to me to outweigh both the cover’s good points.

Two great political cartoonists, Ruben Bolling and Jen Sorenson, write about Barry Blitt’s New Yorker cover. Ruben:

This art was explicitly intended to have a specific point. The fact that it didn’t successfully make that point — and, in fact, led many to believe it was making an opposite point — makes it failed satire.

Jen concurs:

But the sad fact is, many Americans are not informed enough to get the irony of the New Yorker cover — and not because they’re stupid; it’s just the state of our democracy.

As Mandolin pointed out in comments, we’ve seen a lot of this critique — people who themselves understood the New Yorker cover, but they just know that somewhere out there, Americans are getting just the opposite idea.

Who are these others? Where are they? Are they even 1% of the people who have seen the cover? After a firestorm of criticism based on the premise that somewhere, out there, are oodles of people misled by the cover image, shouldn’t Jen and Ruben be able to point to some actual, you know, examples? It seems to me that Jen and Ruben (and hundreds of others) have made up a boogyman — All Those Americans Too Uninformed To Understand The New Yorker Cover And Yet Informed Enough To Be Reading The New Yorker (or Political Blogs) — without having any idea of whether or not this person actually exists in significant numbers.

Is it just that lefties like me “get” the cover, but right-wingers will take it as literal? I don’t think so. Robert Hayes, the resident right-winger in our comments, didn’t have a problem understanding the cover’s intentions. Neither did The National Review.

Personally, I don’t like Blitt’s cover — not because it’s “failed satire” (Ruben’s description of a cover that has been correctly interpreted by Ruben, by Jen, by the National Review, and by close to everyone else who has commented) but because it’s not especially funny or interesting. The Millions writes:

The New Yorker, meanwhile, has always been so (justifiably) secure in its status, that neither its contents nor even its ideological leanings require an advertisement on the cover, which historically has been given over instead to a piece of art that exists simply for its own sake.

The political covers come across as jarring in this context. A couple of years ago another political cover caused a bit of controversy. The Bush/Cheney cover was a tired Brokeback Mountain rehash that got people riled up, and, as it turned out, it bumped a cover that was more topical and far more meaningful and in the spirit of the magazine.

Apparently, I may have been in the minority in this view, as the Mark Ulriksen Brokeback cover, along with a political Blitt cover, won awards.

It’s not even the political content of these covers that bugs me - there have occasionally been some good political covers - it’s their heavy-handed unfunniness that paints the magazine’s readers with a very broad brush. I don’t find the Obama cover to be offensive in the least, just easy and dumb.

More comments on the cover: Troubletown, Tom Tomorrow, Cheap Thrills, The Daily Show, and Kevin Moore.

I’m sure there are people out there who aren’t aware that Joss Whedon has written an internet musical alled Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog. I guess it’d be inappropriate to describe these people as living under a rock, since they probably have very fulfilling lives. But I’ve been very excited about Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog since Joss first started talking about it during the writers strike.¹

It was released at drhorrible.com on Monday, the second part came out today, and the denouement will be available on Friday Saturday. I’m enjoying it so far. The acting is superb - Nathan Fillion is particularly funny as Captain Hammer the cheesy uphimself hero nemesis of Dr Evil. The dialogue is very clever, and the songs are fun. The superhero as villain and villain as character we empathise with isn’t particularly original, but it’s well done. I particularly like that Captain Hammer is a corporate whore who is in with the mayor. But Joss can do better. Penny, Felicia Day’s character, is shown entirely through Dr Horrible’s eyes. While we’re supposed to sympathise him, he is pretty much a textbook nice guy. And it has yet to pass the Bechdel test (in fact there has only been one woman on screen so far). So far the characters don’t resonate in any but the most superficial way, because they have no depth. And we all know that the importance of resonance, and rocket launchers.²

In the meantime watch Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog, but also read Sugarshock, which is stronger short-silly-Joss.

PS - Yes I am alive, but I’ve been pretty sick this New Zealand winter, and when I have had time to write I’ve been overcome with outrage about local issues, and haven’t had the energy to translate them for an international audience (you can see my various rants on my blog).

1. It was so dreamy when Joss Whedon my favourite writer who I’ve loved for a decade, became Joss Whedon a militant union activist. (back)
2. ** That’s from Joss Whedon’s audio commentary on innocence (since I’m not sure that this post can get any geekier I won’t worry about revealing that I have an audio commentary pretty much memorised.) (back)