Category Archives: Feminism

Ann Leckie is Hacking Your Brain

How the @ann_leckie’s #Ancillary books use language to hijack the reader’s biases and turn them inside out.

I just finished Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy, and it’s really good. If you go in for science fiction that makes you think and you haven’t read it yet, you should go do that now. I’ll wait.

There are a whole lot of reasons why the series is among the best fiction I’ve ever read, but I’m going focus this post on just one.

Radchaai culture – the dominant culture in the books – has no gender. People are still female and male, like always, but that’s a minor detail, like being right or left handed. Fashions in clothes, hair, cosmetics, etc. are the same for everyone, with minor adjustments for body shape. There’s no difference between female people and male people in social or professional settings, and it would never even occur to most Radchaai that there could be.

The specifics of sexual relationships do obviously vary according to anatomy, and females presumably still get pregnant and bear children while males do not, though maybe technology takes care of that. The books don’t really go into specifics. Beyond that, though, there’s no difference between the genders.

This is not because the Radch is some sort of progressive-utopian, hyper-rational, Star Trek-style meritocracy; quite the contrary. There is enough inequality of wealth and status to make Jane Austen blush, and people find all sorts of reasons to look down on and even to hate others, including money, ethnicity, religion, language and accent, family and social connections, and so on. It’s just that gender isn’t one of those reasons.

As a result of the lack of gender, along with the author’s spare physical descriptions, the reader doesn’t know whether most of the characters are female or male. They’re just people. The only time gender becomes a thing is when the protagonist is dealing with a foreign culture. It’s invariably awkward, because the protagonist is constantly afraid of mis-gendering everyone, which just serves to illustrate how completely not-a-thing it is in Radchaai culture.

That, by itself, is really cool, but it gets even more interesting.

The lack of gender in Radchaai culture necessarily extends to language – if people don’t really distinguish between female and male, you can’t have separate pronouns for “she” and “he”. It would be like forcing English speakers to use “she” for right-handers and “he” for left-handers – nobody would have any idea who was who or which pronoun to use. Lots of present-day Earth languages are (mostly) gender-neutral like this, with one pronoun representing both “he” and “she”, often with another for “it”. Examples include Finnish, Persian, Malay, and Chinese (sort of). Also Klingon.

If the author were writing in one of these languages, that would be that. Every character would be referred to by the pronoun hän or t¬ā or ghaH or whatever, and nobody would have a problem. But the author didn’t write in a gender-neutral language; she wrote in English. In normal English, we use “she” to refer to female people (and animals, robots, etc. Also, ships) and “he” to refer to males. That obviously doesn’t work for Leckie’s novels. So how does she handle the problem?

She could use “he”, traditionally used in English for people of unspecified gender. There’s also the singular “they”, the ugly workaround “s/he”, and new alternatives like “ze” or “xe”. None of these are particularly satisfying, and all but “he” read as super-awkward on the page. Leckie doesn’t use any of them.

Instead, the pronoun she uses for all of her characters, male and female, is “she”. And it’s not just pronouns; it’s also “mother”, “daughter”, “sister”, and so on.

This leads to some (deliberately, I assume) jarring language, including “She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain.”

That’s where the brain hacking comes in.

When a writer introduces a character, she can’t possibly describe every detail, so the reader has to fill in everything the writer doesn’t provide, and the reader will fall back on her own expectations to fill in those details. Until the writer tells the reader otherwise, a character named Detective Smith is probably a middle-aged white guy in a cheap suit, maybe with a five-o’clock shadow, a thick Brooklyn accent, and an alcohol problem. Similarly, the military ship captain is another middle-aged white guy, this time with a wiry build, short graying hair, and ramrod-straight posture. They’re stereotypes.

While stereotypes do vary somewhat from person to person, they’re pretty consistent across a given culture, and they are almost invariably male. Male is the default, even for roles that could be filled today by either gender – cops, doctors, professors, soldiers, random drivers on the freeway. It’s only when you get to traditionally female roles like nurses, schoolteachers, or parents on the playground that the default changes.

In the Ancillary books, the reader knows pretty much upfront that almost all of the characters could be either male or female, and Leckie doesn’t usually give much physical description to tilt the balance one way or the other. Normally, the reader would fall back on stereotypes based on the character’s title, job, social position, etc. to form a mental picture. Ship’s captain, system governor, station administrator, head of security – probably all male. Horticulturalist, servant, tea server – maybe female?

But in the Ancillary books, even though the reader knows that any given character could be female or male, there’s still that “she”. Every time a character is mentioned with a pronoun, it’s “she”, not “he”. The reader starts to imagine every character as female, even the ship captain, the governor, the station administrator, the head of security. The author gets into the reader’s head, hacks into the reader’s existing biases, and turns them around. The default becomes female.

Once you’ve gotten used to the effect, it doesn’t seem strange at all. When you’re inside the world Leckie has created, reading along, it seems perfectly natural that the sea of faces staring out at you from the page is mostly female. And it’s not some hidden subtext thing – Leckie is able manipulate readers’ biases even when they know they’re being manipulated. It’s all much subtler and more effective than an angry feminist polemic (not that I don’t love a good angry feminist polemic).

Best of all, the effect doesn’t go away when the reader leaves the book and comes back into the real world. It weakens over time, but the female cop, the female captain, the female doctor all seem a little less unexpected, a little more normal.

All that with not much more than a pronoun, a choice to see the power of “she”.

I Voted

I filled out my ballot today, and I voted for Hillary Clinton.

There are lots of other decisions on the ballot, many of which will have more practical effects on my life. I urge everyone to carefully consider everything on their ballot – it’s all important.

But in this post, I’m only going to discuss my choice for President.

Above all, I voted against Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve this country in any capacity, let alone lead it, and I will waste no further (virtual) ink on him.

I also voted for Hillary Clinton. I voted for her not just because she’s the least bad option, but because I believe she will be a positive force for this country. I can’t give her my full support, but then I haven’t unreservedly supported any major politician since Ronald Reagan, when I was too young to realize that every politician is a flawed human being.

For a start, it’s important to me to vote for the first woman to become President. Progress on equality for all Americans has been excruciatingly slow since, well, ever, and I believe that President Clinton will be a voice not just for women but for everyone who wants to live up to the declaration that “all men are created equal”.

I generally support the policy positions of the Democratic party, and much of the Republican platform seems downright extreme, especially compared to moderate party I remember from my childhood. But with the exception of climate change, which needs immediate, responsible action, my vote isn’t about whose policies I prefer. Given the extreme intransigence of the Republican party, I expect very little of President Clinton’s agenda to get through Congress anyway.

I want government to work, to accomplish the myriad things large and small that keep the country functioning every day. We clearly can’t trust the Republican Party with this task – they have spent the past thirty years trying to convince us that government is always the problem, never the solution, and that’s even before considering the spectacular ignorance of the party’s current candidate. The Democratic Party’s record is far from excellent – they usually advocate more government rather than better government as the solution to a particular problem – but I do have cause for hope. Hillary Clinton has more and broader experience in federal government than anyone who has ever run for President, and I believe that experience will make her an effective manager of the executive branch. When I voted for Barak Obama eight years ago, my biggest reservation was that he would lack the skills to run the executive branch effectively. His administration has been more competent than I expected – certainly better than the Bush administration – but we can always do better. That is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. She may well disappoint, but I have hope.

I do have reservations about the next Clinton administration. Bill Clinton’s policies on criminal justice and welfare reform, though universally supported at the time, have had devastating effects. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has gotten American involved in ugly, bloody conflicts across the Middle East, resulting in death and destruction across the region. Unfortunately, no public figure has been able to articulate anything better. Though broad principles apply, every situation is different in foreign policy, and right now an awful lot of those situations are going to turn out bad no matter what.

The rest of my reservations have to do with the general haze of dishonesty surrounding Clinton. The trouble is, the haze is all we can see. In all the hype about Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! or the email server or whatever else, we’ve seen a lot of things that look vaguely shifty or shady, but no investigation has ever produced concrete proof of anything criminal or even seriously dishonest. If there were something real there, we’d have seen it by now.

Lust

A rant from the intersection of popular culture and politics.

I’ve lately been playing a little Diablo III before bed to kill some brain cells so I can sleep (doesn’t work, but that’s another topic). The game’s setting leans pretty heavily on western notions of heaven and hell. Act III focuses on Sin, and the last mini-boss is Cydaea, the Maiden of Lust. Cydaea is a creature rather like a centaur, with a spider’s body supporting a hyper-sexualized human female torso, and she speaks with a pouty, sultry voice. This got me thinking – not about the game (it’s about a millimeter deep), but about depictions of lust in our culture and history.

The personification of lust (specifically the sexual sort) is usually female. From the tortured women carved in Romanesque stone to pretty much anything on the internet these days, Lust is a woman, naked or nearly so.

This seems backwards to me. In the world where I live, lust is more of a male thing.

I’m not suggesting that women are delicate flowers, fainting at the mere thought of intimate contact with a man; quite the opposite. Women are sexual beings, just like men, fully capable of wanting, having, and enjoying sex. Women are fully capable of lust.

But both historically and in today’s culture, men tend to spend more effort in active pursuit of their sexual desires, especially the purely physical sort implied by the word lust. According to all the available data, men on average have more sexual partners than women and are more likely to cheat in their relationships. And prostitution is almost entirely about male customers seeking female prostitutes.

So why is lust depicted as female?

In part, I’d argue it’s another symptom of the double standard. Male sexual desire, even when it’s on the edge, is the norm. It’s excused. Boys will be boys, locker room talk, etc. Female sexual desire is judged by a different, harsher standard. We have a huge vocabulary to shame women who violate sexual norms – loose, easy, cheap, slut, whore, etc. – but basically nothing for men.

I think there’s more, though. The blame for male sexual misbehavior often falls at least partly on the woman. The vixen, the temptress, the painted Jezebel. That’s sometimes justified – two married people having an affair are equally culpable; a single woman is not completely blameless if she’s knowingly sleeping with a married man.

But far too often we blame women for men’s boorish (or worse) behavior even when it’s entirely out of their control. Getting catcalled on the street? It’s your fault for wearing a skirt. Creepy guy grabbed your ass on the subway? Shouldn’t have worn those tight leggings. And how many rape victims feel like they’re being violated all over again when they testify against their accusers, only to have the defense comb through their personal lives to paint them as sluts? How many never testify, for that exact reason?

It’s no accident that Cydaea’s lower body is a spider and not some other demon creature. She’s the black widow who tempts the virtuous man into her sinful embrace and then kills and eats him afterward. I don’t blame Blizzard for their sexy spider-demon; it works in the context the self-serious piece of cultural fluff that is Diablo III.

Lust isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes it’s just sexy fun. But when it’s channeled in the wrong direction, when it reduces another person to a sex object without her consent, it can be quite harmful. The background sexual harassment that women experience every day takes its toll; serious sexual assaults can ruin lives (and no, I’m not talking about Stanford swimming scholarships).

Creative people everywhere, if you want to personify Lust in all its debased glory, you can do better. Make him male, because, obviously. Make him a bloated orange grotesque. Give him a mane of ridiculous blonde fur. Give him yuuuuge genitals (because art is not reality) and tiny, tiny hands.

After all the awful stuff that’s been spewing out of the presidential race, particularly this weekend, I can think of no better avatar for the destructive, dehumanizing power of lust than Donald Trump.