Today, I’m going to post a trifecta of neat stuff in three short entries, staggered through the afternoon and evening.
The first thing is an entry about sex & sex work in science fiction, which is smart and interesting, but which is totally eclipsed by the cleverness of this quote/proposal. Thene writes on Aaru Tuesday,
I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.
Hear, hear.
*
But it would be unfair not to give you a taste of the smart, interesting entry, too. Thene’s entry looks at sex & sex work in science fiction and fantasy. “There’s a lot of supposedly ‘speculative’ fictions where it’s still 1958,” she says.
Summarizing one story that poses an SFnal frontier, she writes, “It’s 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers’ prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There’s also, of course, this narrative about how ‘vices’ of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness.”
She quotes the story to illustrate her point:
There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets. […] There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell sex or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos… [emphasis hers]
And her smart analysis: “Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you’re appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You’re using the gender-neutral word ‘worker’ to mean ‘man who pays for sex’? You’re drawing lines between ‘untamed’ rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) ‘corrupt’ those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?”
(Hat tip: Ide Cyan at Whileaway)
* * *
UPDATE: Check out this “Shortpacked” cartoon, which Myca pointed out in comments.
Go here.
;->
Oh, my God. I need to replicate that in this entry if at all possible.
Teh awesome. It overflows.
*le blush*
One thing LAS raised in the comments over-yonder is that there’s a distinction between appropriating sex work for glamour, or out of sheer idiocy (CS Lewis :/) and seriously, mindfully engaging with sex worker rights in an sfnal setting. I’m still thinking I’ve never seen the latter done. Can you think of anything?
Oh, my God. I need to replicate that in this entry if at all possible.
Poof! It is so.
Golf clap. I’ll never understand why the comic book world flocked around Miller’s writing. Near as I can tell, all Miller does is tear down the setting and convert it into the same damned parable about heroism.
Every character is either
a) a superhuman unfeeling heroic psychopath. Miller’s attempt to worship the classical concept of heroism, instead of our modern ideas of justice and mercy.
b) the evil version of same – an inhuman, monstrous villain whose mind is beneath contempt.
c) an acolyte of a hero. They’re just needed to push the plot along.
d) weak. Weak characters are politicians, psychologists, bureaucrats, scientists, villains, etc. Always petty, corrupt, coddling, backstabbing idiots who get in the Hero’s way.
The same rules apply to women, except that when they’re in (a) they suck at it, so they need the male, studly versions to come and save them.
Combine that with a degree of sex and violence that shocked even jaded comic-readers, and you’ve got the Miller success-formula. That, and lots of narration.
That’s all he does. He takes the traditional heroic stories and rips out the modern ideals, converting it into a neocon fantasy of Good Vs. Evil, where Good is represented by cold, hard, brutal, absolute power, and everyone not on the side of Good is either Evil or a cowering weak fool inadvertently (or deliberately) aiding evil.
Whatever. I just wanted the space to rant about Miller, and this seemed as good a spot as any.
But Miller’s Robin didn’t die, and wasn’t a whore.
I have yet to read Frank Miller, but assuming Sin City is true to the novels, I also have to point out that the one female who is not a sex worker is a lesbian. And she dies. (After getting her hand eaten off.) The quote that goes along with her introduction goes something like: “I don’t know why she’s a lesbian. She could have any guy she wanted.” Is the audience supposed to laugh at the stupidity of the character narrating, or wonder the same thing? Oh, did I mention that when we first meet her she is completely naked? There are so many problems around this one lesbian character, that I can’t even wrap my head around analyzing it! But I am curious about the treatment of lesbians in sci fi, since I don’t know of any other examples.
But Miller’s Robin didn’t die, and wasn’t a whore.
horsepucky. have you read DK2? aside from being possibly the worst comic I have EVER read, the whole “Catgirl anatomically impossible camel toe pose every 3 panels” bumps her well into a proper Millerwhore.
I hate Frank Miller. alot. like “I’d only save him from drowning if I thought I could extort a promise from him to never write or draw another comic again.” so I’m arguably biased, but I’ve repeatedly said the quality of a Frank Miller work is inversely proportional to the number of panels he’s required to write for a female character. Which is why 300 is pretty much the only good thing he’s ever written (although Geof Darrows makes Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot worth reading.) I’ve never read anything Miller did that wasn’t done better by someone else. I am quite aware that his work like DKR established a market for more mature titles and every comic fan ever owes him a debt of gratitude for it. We also owe Stan Lee an even larger debt of gratitude, but that doesn’t mean the man can write dialogue worth a damn. Historically important does not mean intrinsically good.
He writes Batman as Marv in a cowl. Which misses the fucking point. GOD I hate him so much.
Also, you know the real unnerving thing with the test, though?
Star Wars, as a collective body, probably fails. Return (arguably the best one, though I prefer Empire) DEFINITELY fails.
Not saying it isn’t a valid test, mind you. the scifi paperback writer is a species that is utterly incapable of disguising their psychological issues for even 30 seconds. It would be far more amusing if it weren’t so stomach curdling most of the time.
karpad,
I don’t know what term you’re looking for here, but “scifi paperback writer” isn’t it. Maybe “sex-obsessed misogynist pulp writer.”
Scifi paperback writer? You’re including, oh, Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany and lotsa others who really don’t belong on your list. Sex-obsessed misogynist pulp writer? John Norman (of Gor), Frank Miller (who I’ve never heard of until today; personally, I was amused by the principle, not the name); and Piers Animal-fucking Anthony. (Among others, doubtless.)
*
Michele,
Lesbians in SF is a huge conversation that I can’t really cover in a single comment.
Brief advice: Start with Nicola Griffith. No, but really — her books are GORGEOUS. She rarely writes about men, which allows her to do what L. Timmel Duchamp calls create a sexual economy that only involves women, something imagined without male influence. She’s… really amazing. Some of her short stories are transcendent.
Here is her website: http://www.nicolagriffith.com/ . Her most celebrated novel is called Ammonite.
*
Thene,
Well-rendered sex workers in SF. I’m POSITIVE that there are some, but now that you mention it… everything that would fall into the category has flown out of my brain…
If you want to look at some obnoxious female-authored stereotypical sex workers, check out the Blending series by Sharon Green. They’re… sort of fascinating books, but really misogynist, and really bad. And fun reads anyway, for whatever reason.
Will ponder more. Interesting question!
Thene,
Oh, duh. Here’s one I linked the other day to this site: “Kill Me” by Vylar Kaftan.
Vy has another story in the works that’s got a well-portrayed sex worker, but it’s still making the submission rounds. I’ll let y’all know when it gets published if it is published online.
Again, I’m positive that there are other books and stories that have well-rendered sex workers. Nothing’s occuring now.
thanks… i don’t usually read much sf, but i’ll definitely check that out.
now, should i be embarrassed to admit that although i find sin city to be despicably misogynistic, i still think it was beautifully filmed and i own it?
the problem, Mandolin, is that “sex-obsessed pulp writer” is a narrow definition: too narrow. I’ve never heard Peirs Anthony described as pulp. crap, but not pulp. Frank Miller has NEVER written pulp, and I was referring specifically to scifi and fantasy, which while it has pulp to be sure, is not generally the genre implicit when “pulp” is mentioned. And the issues in question flow from even writers who are respected and end up in hardback first. For fantasy, It’s pretty easy to read where the late Robert “fans think I walk on water” Jordan’s issues were.
virtually every scifi author leaves their personal baggage on display. it’s part of the appeal of the genre. Some people have creepy sex-obsessed issues, others have technophobia (too many to count), or unrelenting idealism (Asimov springs to mind). Most people can list scifi authors they know for a fact they ideologically agree with (Michael Moorcock, for instance) and others they ideologically loathe due to their being, for example, slightly to the right of Satan (Ayn Rand, David Weber). These aren’t small names that only output boilerplate, a male equivalent of the trashy romance novel.
Which is why I chose the language I did, and not “sex-obsessed perverted pulp writers.” I was speaking more broadly than “the creeps who want a magical world where their self-insert character is lusted after by space whores and they kill the evil emperor who looks like their father”
My ideological agreement with a writer doesn’t make them pass the test. (Mieville :( , and outside of Night Watch you can take Pratchett for a true feminist. He has the opposite problem to Miller, I think – the more women he’s involving, the better he gets.) And yeah, there’s nothing pulp about Mieville, and he’s beyond brilliant as a craftsman and thinker – he just has a blind spot wrt his own lurking misogyny. He’s even spoken of thinking ahead about how he uses gender in some contexts (such as writing the blood-sucking mosquito-women in The Scar and making it clear that they weren’t just generic she-monsters), but he’s not thinking it through where it matters.
@karpad
Not read the second volume. The first one bugged me enough.
*I should say, the better he gets at gender. Pratchett’s Night Watch is a brilliant book, it just fails the Frank Miller Test so makes my head ache.
If you want to look at some obnoxious female-authored stereotypical sex workers, check out the Blending series by Sharon Green.
Oh, gods, Sharon Green. Here I thought I was the only one who had stumbled across her work (at age 15?). There is a woman who believes in the BDSM stereotypes of what women want. I believe that the only reason she was ever published is because of the type of porn (Normanesque, at times) that she writes.
Actually, the one series I remember from my adolescence that I put down out of sheer prudishness that I always wonder if I should pick up again was Spider Robinson’s Callahan books.
The story is initially set in a bar. An Irish bar. It’s remarked that everyone is male, and simply observed that there must be some sort of aura of “no girls allowed” over the place. Female characters do come and go, though. Still, it’s heartwarming, sappy sci-fi/fantasy about human problems.
And then, abruptly, he stopped writing about Callahan’s, and started writing about Callahan’s wife’s place. Lady Callahan ran a similar establishment, in that it was a sappy magical place about human problems. But her place was a brothel. And one of the key points of the book is that it treats selling sex like any other service job. It tried to be nice about it, describing how it was a really nice, well-run establishment, but it struck me as mostly wish-fulfillment by the author, how he wished the sex industry could work – to the point of it starting out with a girl trapped in the typical abusive ho/pimp relationship before she makes it to the “house”.
Yeah, I couldn’t finish that book.
“Most people can list scifi authors they know for a fact they ideologically agree with (Michael Moorcock, for instance) and others they ideologically loathe due to their being, for example, slightly to the right of Satan (Ayn Rand, David Weber).”
First, I’m not sure why ideology = issues. Second, I’ve no idea why you think it’s not similarly detectable what the obsessions of mainstream authors are. Third, I still don’t think you’re picking a representative sample of SF people, while at teh same time you’re making a really broad claim that’s going to encompass a lot of work you’re not talking about.
Related link on a friend’s blog.
Second, I’ve no idea why you think it’s not similarly detectable what the obsessions of mainstream authors are.
Iain McEwan. *winces* But, am I the only one who has little problem enjoying, or artistically appreciating, authors whose ideology I do not share? Tolkien, for instance.
Another thought about sci-fi sex workers: I can think of two otherwise decently, neutrally, non wish-fullfillyly portrayed ones – Tricia from Promethea and Niki from Heroes – who are overcoming alcohol addiction. Stereotype much?
edit:
Ampersand, from that link-of-link there:
*headdesks at all the appropriation* Wow. So if I can come up with some spurious analogy, I could claim I was a doctor, or an airline pilot, or a movie star? I could try that now. I have to do everything a dozen times before I get it right, so I must be like a movie star. I understand everything about movie stars now and can use them in my writing however I like, isn’t that great?
Hear that? I bet some of his best friends are women, too!
“But, am I the only one who has little problem enjoying, or artistically appreciating, authors whose ideology I do not share?”
No, and it’s a problem that equally effects literary and SF people I know and work with. Both groups have detractors who say that’s an unacceptable reason for setting aside someone’s work, and both groups have people who say, “Yes, but why spend my time reading [whoever] when there are so many wonderful writers to read who don’t portray women as walking pussy? It’s not like I’m going to run out of books to read.”
UPDATE: Ah, misread you. And no, there are plenty of people who enjoy books from whatever perspective. I assume most people fall in between. I like Wagner, I don’t like Mein Kompf.
@Mandolin
I think it depends on whether they rub your noses in it. I enjoyed Ender’s Game (yeah, it’s adolescent pulp, but it was fun) even though I know that Card is a bit of a nutbar. I liked some of the Pournelle/Niven team-ups, but Pournelle loves to get didactic and is really similar to Miller in the way they paint every character as a Strong-Jawed Hero That Does What It Takes (even if it involves horrible, horrible things) held back by the Weak Stupid Liberals.
The most painful book I read all the way through was Fallen Angels, which was a perfect mix of the worst of Barnes, Pournelle, and Niven. The story was one-part Barnes’ idiotic fan-service (sci-fi conventioneers save the world) one-part Pournelle’s liberal-bashing (the Evil Dark Lord is Ralph freaking Nader) and one part random Niven weirdness (walking along on a glacier with a bunch of naked Inuit while being gently roasted by an orbital microwave beam).
I find that if I know enough about an author’s ideology, and I disagree with it strongly enough, that I can’t bring myself to read their books. Of course, the iconic example of this is Orson Scott Card.
I’ve been accused of wanting to censor Card and burn all his books when I say this, or been told that I don’t have the right to decide whether or not I want to read something on the basis that the author thinks that lesbian and gay people should be arrested just for being lesbian or gay.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either taking an author’s views into account like this or ignoring them when shopping for books, though. I don’t really care if anyone else reads Card, I just won’t.
First, I’m not sure why ideology = issues.
Ideology is a part of issues. you seem to be drawing an assumption that emotional baggage is necessarily bad. Ideology forms and is formed by psychology. and the incidental display of ideology (especially when ideology can be as broadly defined as “boundless optimism” as I did previously) is just as revealing for the inner workings of a person.
Second, I’ve no idea why you think it’s not similarly detectable what the obsessions of mainstream authors are.
They often are, I never made a claim to the contrary. But SF is often more stark about it. Fiction often has a component of wish fulfillment to it. “This is what I think would be cool.” I’ve never seen anyone so flatly detached from the process of writing that it’s merely an exercise in grammar and trying to write what they think will sell, even if the author finds it interminably boring. In addition to being fiction, it’s fiction with a whole new world to describe. In doing so, you have to say what you think “would be cool” if it were true, not just for some family or the cool nightlife of your protagonist in the seedy underbelly, you have to describe EVERYTHING as what you think is interesting. Interesting and good is usually a fairly slim line that blurs regularly.
Third, I still don’t think you’re picking a representative sample of SF people, while at teh same time you’re making a really broad claim that’s going to encompass a lot of work you’re not talking about.
Well, I’ve read SF from more than 32 authors in my time, and more often than not I’ve been able to pick out details of what the author considers “good,” which if my memory serves 32 is the minimum sample to produce a statistically valid study, so I’d say it is representative. But I’m being glib.
Yes, I’m sure there are SF authors who DON’T have 70 pounds of psychological baggage they’re dragging around. I know there are. I’ve read some. I’ve read SF where I truly couldn’t get inside the author’s head, and the only personality trait I could determine was that they have a fantastic imagination. But I don’t feel I owe it to some imagined plighted scifi author offended at the idea that a critical reader could crawl around inside their head and find what they think to scale back my phrasing to the point that I’m either saying nothing at all or narrowing what I’m talking about to EXCLUDE most of what I’m talking about. Broad strokes aren’t a bad thing, especially since you’d have to be straining credulity to read my comments as “Every person who has ever picked up a pen or tapped at a keyboard to write a work of science fiction is a sex-crazed pervert misogynist who only writes scifi because they knew if they tried to fulfill those fantasies, they’d be arrested for child rape.”
Does the person who came up with the Frank Miller Test know that he is the creator and writer of the Martha Washington Series as well as the brains behind Marvel’s Elektra character?
a) I didn’t know, no.
b) I’ve never dug into it too deeply, but I don’ t think much of Elektra, and I don’t know a thing about Martha Washington.
c) That doesn’t change the problematic nature of Sin City, any more than the gender-wonderful Carpe Jugulum changes the problematic nature of Night Watch. He still created a world in which the male characters were relatively varied whilst virtually all the female characters were sex workers. That’s still strange, creepy, and implies he has no interest in speaking to a female audience.
(In case anyone’s still interested in this whole mess – I spoke to Mieville about his whores after the Weird Symposium and summarised his remarks here).
Interesting.
I find Mieville unreadable on a line level (for which I feel guilty already :( ) so I haven’t read Iron Council. I dug through Perdido Street and stopped. I know the fault is mine, not Mieville’s. Politically, I’m sure I’d enjoy the books.
Anyway, I fear I’m therefore at a disadvantage in discussing it, but the conversation you report was fascinating.
“It’s also, I feel, touching on appropriation; using a real-world group (sex workers) to explain your politics, your stories, your world.”
Well, okay… and there are writers who will argue that no one should ever write outside their own group and the default, but it’s a sentiment that’s mostly fallen out of vogue (rightly, I feel).
Heh. If you think that David Weber is to the right of Satan, where do you place
Jon Ringo? And why do you think that Satan is so far on the right, anyway?
As for ‘Night Watch’, are you sure that most of the women are prostitutes? The
Agony Aunts are muscle, one of the seamstresses is a real one, the protagonist’s
wife is definitely not one, and one really has to stretch the definition for
Vetinary’s aunt. And frankly speaking, that book was set in the ‘bad old times’.
If anything, the recent Ankh-Morpork books show women with more power
than they would be likely to have in a similar society.
On the other hand, the female friends with whom I’ve discussed ‘Thud’ think
that the scene of the policewomen hitting town is proof that Terry Pratchett has
no clue about women. I just thought it was bad and pointless.
Mandolin: No guilt. Line level communication is vital, and some people are just determined to make it difficult. I adore that foul habit of never using a one-syllable word when a four-syllable word will do, but it’s not for everyone.
Yeah, that one’s thorny, especially when it involves a group that’s also a massively charged issue. I’m just uneasy with seeing the female body taken and used, by a man, as a philosophical prop. Seeing ‘meaning’ ascribed to sex work. The world would probably be sadder if no one wrote out-of-group about it, though.
Petar: I said in the original post that with Night Watch (as I was with Iron Council), I was taking the central ‘past’ part of the book as being separate from its present-Disc bookends – because Sybil and Angua aren’t present in the main story at all. The Agony Aunts are working in the sex industry – just as enforcers rather than whores. The ‘real seamstress’ and Vetinari’s aunt are both referred to in jokes about prostitution – they’re not sex workers, but they’re treated as being potentially sex workers. And having every single woman who was not in the sex industry being assumed to be so was kinda annoying.
Yeah, and how fucked-up is it to equate prostitution with the ‘bad old days’? Is that how sex workers see themselves, do you think? Is it even true that prostitution – indeed, that male entitlement to sex – decreases as society gets to be, on the whole, a nicer place for women? (The UK answer to that is a resounding no; the sex trade is booming and becoming ever more culturally acceptable, just as the government’s finally been forced to implement real equal pay legislation). Besides, saying prostitution will All Go Away After The Revolution (as Ide Cyan pointed out in comments on the original post) totally lets men off the hook – men as individuals (and as a class) are not innocent machine-cogs when it comes to sexism. They could give up their entitlement to sex any time they liked. Many do. Others don’t.
I agree with you about Thud!, but I don’t think that’s him not getting women so much as not getting young women who socialise that way; cool story here, but when Equal Rites came out (long before Discworld was famous), it was read aloud on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 and a fair few feminists wrote him nice letters about it, some of whom addressed ‘Terry Pratchett’ as a woman. I think you’ve got to get bonus Male Feminist Author points for that.
“I adore that foul habit of never using a one-syllable word when a four-syllable word will do, but it’s not for everyone.”
Actually, so do I. My criticism of Mieville is different… I feel like he’s trying to capture the Victorian tone, but falls short.
It’s not really the time and place for me to indulge my language snobbery, though. ;) I agree with you re: political use of sex work, and its thorniness.