All Eyes on Me

I got a copy of that biography of V.C. Andrews by Andrew Niedermann from my library. I’m only a chapter in, but it presents disability as a very influential factor on her life and work— how she was affected by her own, how much her defensive and internalized ableism made it into her writing. While I didn’t necessarily expect that, it makes sense, and shows a sensitivity about her that I wasn’t sure I could expect from a male writer.

The one thing that remains to be seen that may make or break the thing for me is whether or not he has an understanding of her, for lack of a better term, “girl rage”— the sense of simultaneous visceral wonder and injustice Andrews was so good at capturing that made her appeal to young girls, who found their impending womanhood to be simultaneously a great power and a terrifying vulnerability. That’s how that Casteelkidsstolemygrocieries writer so eloquently characterized it, and that’s the quality she always felt was missing from the Niedermann ghostwritten books. I wonder if he’ll have any sense of it. It’s so fundamental to her work but he never really managed to capture it, and I’m curious whether it’s because he just failed at doing it, or if he couldn’t really understand that it was there.

October Review Challenge, #11 - "What is the most personal moment in your work?"

So until very recently, I observed a firm rule to never put too much of my own personality into my work. Let me be very clear what I mean by that— obviously all artistic work comes from the self of the artist, in a way all art is self-portraiture. But I believe that really good stories come from empathy and imagination. So I never wanted anyone to read anything of mine and feel like I wasn’t creating fully-realized characters with their own identities and voices, just me speaking for myself through them. I think that’s the mark of an immature artist who lacks the ability to put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. For this reason, I had a rule that no character I wouldn’t make any character that could be seen to be too much “like me.”

I broke that rule with Leah Lucchesi, the main character of Dream Machine. For an experiment, and following Tina Fey’s lead in my inspiration for the piece 30 Rock, I allowed her to be a pretty direct self-insert. Though I have kept her to be as unflattering a representation as possible to keep it from being self-serving, exaggerating all my own worst qualities to make her difficult, self-centered, and boy-crazy beyond even my own levels.

That means there is SOME stuff about her that is personal; Leah, too, likes Marvel actors, finds showering to be work, and thinks writing is the hardest job in the world, but it tends to the superficial. I’ve only alluded to actual meaningful things about me with her, such as how she’s uncomfortable when she feels out of control, and her fear that if she weren’t attractive nobody would give her a chance. I’ll probably do more with that eventually, but so far it’s been only the lightest touch.

The personal moment I’d like to focus on is from Mrs. Hawking part VI: Fallen Women— a moment that was actually personal to a fault. In one of the darkest Mrs. Hawking scenes ever, our hero confesses the physical violence in her marriage. With no constructive way to vent her rage and frustration, she would hit the Colonel in an effort to provoke him into fighting her back. She indicates it was a perverse attempt to prove to him that she could beat him in a fight, which would have risked exposing her secret and endangering all her work.



That part, thankfully, is not the personal part. But she explains her anger at how hard she has to work in order to be physically dangerous when you’re a woman— particularly in comparison to men. She talks about how a woman has to completely transform herself to be able to be stronger than what a man who doesn’t even try is just naturally. Which is something that personally infuriates me, and something that I think a lot of gendered violence comes down to.

It has a rawness and a realness to it. But the first time Bernie read my draft of that scene, he said “That is the first time I’ve ever read something of yours where I felt it was just you talking, not your character.” And that isn’t good; that is something I’ve been avoiding my whole writing career. I had to really work to make it feel like it wasn’t just me the author grinding the action to a halt to soapbox. Even though I do believe it’s something that makes sense for the Mrs. Hawking character, it had to really feel like her voice, like something she’d talk about in that moment. That’s why personal significance in subject matter isn’t enough. It has to be in the service of creating people who are more real, not less.

I went to the Counter-Protest to the Straight Pride today, and I just want to record some thoughts.

The police incited a lot of violence. I saw no particularly indication of trouble started by the protesters they seized even when they were quite close by to me. But I was not afraid of the police. I cannot really explain why. Maybe I was detached; I have been so burnt out with anxiety lately maybe I didn't have any fear left. Maybe I'm buried too deep in my privilege, and in my bubble I just could not conceive of being in real danger. Maybe this was incredibly stupid of me and I am just mind-bogglingly lucky that they didn't arrest or hurt me.

But men have never in my life treated me with the kind of patronization, aggression, or objectification that so many women as a group are subjected to. It just... doesn't happen to me. Ever, basically. And it didn't today.

Maybe it was my appearance or behavior. I am a small, conventionally attractive white woman who did not look queer, or Black Bloc. I am not much of a yeller or a chanter. I mostly just marched and stared. There was more than one cop I stared at until he looked away. Perhaps I was completely non threatening. Perhaps my privilege as that aforementioned kind of white woman was all consuming.

But when the cops rushed through their own barriers at nearby people dressed for Black Bloc, for no provocation that I could detect, sometimes they pushed right towards me. It did not frighten me. I didn't feel any need to move. They stepped around me as if I were a wall.

I keep replaying it in my head to see if I was being an idiot. Should I have been more afraid? Why wasn't I? I don't know on either count.

Tonight on a whim I decided to take a real crack at putting together a drag look. I've wanted to do it for a while now, but thus far the only practical progress I'd made was ages ago. But I saw a really cool drag king look on the Internet and it inspired me, so tonight I brought my developing drag persona, Alexander Brandy, out to play for the evening.

Since I cut my hair, that issue with the look was taken care of. What I really needed to practice was the makeup. I'm familiar enough with the principles of drag makeup— use dark colors to make features recede, and light colors to make features stand out —but I don't have much practice, and the bit I do have I'd only done previously in the service of beauty makeup. So I watched a tutorial of a drag king doing his paint and roughly followed along. I went darker than I usually do, in an effort to broaden and deepen my features, in an effort to carve away the softness and make things a little coarser in a way we associate with masculinity. In my effort I darkened my eyebrows, widened my nose and forehead, carved out my cheeks, extended my sideburns, and broadened my jaw. It's always tricky for me to make contouring not look like just dirty smudges on my skin, but it tends to show up better in pictures than in person.













I also put on my men's clothes, which are unfortunately too large for me, but tried to take them in a little bit with pins— enough to make them appear to fit, but not so much they emphasized my feminine body shape. I'm not exactly a curvy girl, but my waist definitely pulls in. There is also the issue of my decidedly unmasculine proportions. While Phoebe likes her petiteness, Alexander is a bit self-conscious of his size. So to make him look a little more manly, we made an attempt to pad.

I didn't bother to bind my breasts, just smushed them with a sports bra, since they're not that obvious anyway, but my chest seemed weirdly hollow for a man. I have NO pecs, which while a bit surprising given the kind of workouts I do, I actually am quite pleased with; I like the look of how I have kind of big arms and a very small, narrow chest. But it looked wrong on Alexander, so in an effort to make him a little more swole, I stole one of the bustle pads out of the Hawking costumes and stuffed it into the sports bra just under my collarbones. (That thing has been an ass and now a chest!) I'd already had the padded bra I cut in half for shoulder pads and put them in as well. I'm not sure how well-balanced they were together, but I think it's the right direction to work in. A vest and tie completed the look. Nothing fits great, though, and I think I look a bit too "hippy" in the full-length shots.





I am vain enough that if I'm going to look like a guy, I want to be a cute guy. I just do not have the proportions to be the kind of guy I find attractive, even with the pads. Also what I find most beautiful in women (which I shoot for in my regular look) tends to be pretty diametrically opposed to what I find most beautiful in men. I may be able to shoot for that "delicate chiseled modelesque" kind of handsome, but my makeup skills will have to improve.

I also tried the look with facial hair, defaulting to the goatee with the jawline beard, a look I often like on men. I was aiming for something a little more Tony Stark-esque. Instead I seem to have turned myself into a young Hans Gruber. Not what I was expecting, I have to say.









Guess we know who I'd have to do for Snatch Game. Or whatever the drag king equivalent would be. "Chust anotha American cowboy who's seen too many movies?"

Here continues my musing on some tropes that frequently recur in my writing! Specifically, analyzing my tendency to use what I refer to as "Soft Masc" protagonists-- "a male character with a presentation that is fairly normatively masculine, but with a preponderance of personal qualities that were traditionally coded as feminine" --and how that manifests.

Continues from part 1.

Skills and Abilities:

The key factor of how I couch the skills of these characters is that they possess a certain charisma— the ability to make people like, respond to, and sympathize with them is extremely important to how they pursue their goals. Of course this is not necessarily a gendered thing, but because it lends them to having the managing of relationships at their forefront, they often take the feminine caretaker, peacemaker, or emotional support roles.

Nathaniel’s skills are primarily interpersonal— talking, convincing, wheedling, distracting, ingratiating, lying, peacemaking. He serves as both the face and the glue of his superhero team, a role which is usually filled by a female character. He is specifically not very good at martial stuff, in defiance of masculine expectation. His charisma is from sparkling wit, friendly bearing, and a puppy-like effort to please.

Aidan’s skills are presented dichotomously. On one hand, he is honed into a seriously dangerous warrior and becomes quite good at it, which is very masculine coded. On the other hand, he serves as the inspirational figurehead of the rebellion due to his ability to court people projecting their dreams onto him, which is more feminine. His charisma lies in his unique dichotomies of strength and fragileness, power and softness, that make people fall in love with him.

Tom Barrows is also a strongly interpersonal operator, using his ability to read others and connect with them in order to make his way. Again there is some personal charisma at play, but it is lower key than Nathaniel’s Life of the Party type or Aidan’s Wounded Beauty. Not to mention the fact that he is an extremely skilled dressmaker.

Robin somewhat relies on interpersonal skills to maneuver, but more because HE IS A CHARISMA MACHINE LIKE A ROCK STAR. He is presented as fit and dexterous, with martial hobbies, and an aptitude for physicality. He is almost as physical a character as Aidan is, though not as great a warrior. Simultaneously, his privilege has insulated him from having to learn many hard skills, and attention is drawn to just how useless he is in many ways.

Justin is somewhere between Nathaniel and Robin. He has his brother’s Life of the Party presence with Robin’s showier, more arrogant edge. His skill set is similar to Nathaniel’s—and though he is not quite as empathetic, he still has something of his brother’s ability to pick up on the state of those around him.

Values:

Nathaniel’s value shift is a major part of his journey as a character. He begins with very expected masculine values for a Victorian man— being the head of a family, martial strength, responsibility for the lives of others, admiring soldiers and the empire, the established social order. But while he maintains some of those, much of his story is about coming to deconstruct the problems of patriarchy and shift his values so that he stops being complicit.

Aidan is quiet and wounded, with a longing for a peace he’s never known. He is in something of a Maslow’s crisis for most of the story, where the needs to survive, heal, and protect others consume him to the point where there is no time for him to really discover who he is in the absence of struggle and trauma. He dislikes the attention and spotlight his position as figurehead of a rebellion has brought him, not to mention the necessity to make himself into a warrior and inflict violence. But likely he would prefer some quiet, creative pursuit, like baking or poetry, far out of the public eye, had the circumstances of his life been kinder.

The chief fascination and calling of Tom’s life is the making of beautiful clothes, dresses in particular. His experience with and connection to feminine circles where there are not often a lot of other men have given him a particular appreciation for the wisdom of women. Otherwise his values are fairly normatively masculine, particularly courage, hard work, and cleverness.

Robin is afflicted with some level of toxic masculinity. He cares about showing off, asserting his dominance and superiority over other guys, getting laid, and indulging in his entitlements. Getting over it is his major character journey.

Justin’s a bit of a wildcard. I actually conceive of him as having a slightly more enlightened attitude toward Victorian social mores than some men of his time. For all that he’s a ladies’ man, he never deceives, manipulates, coerces, or uses, nor does he really look down on any women who are interested in a fling. But he does have a pretty hefty dose of Victorian patriarchy, and assumes he knows better than most other people, partially because of his status in the world.

Sexuality:

Nathaniel, Aidan, and Tom are all straight. Robin and Justin aren’t quite.

Aidan’s sexuality is complicated by years of rape and abuse by women. He experiences the trepidation around sex and intimacy which we most often see in women who are survivors. He is sexually drawn to women, but has to first disentangle the trauma from his sense of his own sexuality. Because of the matriarchal culture of his world, his socially expected role is that of the receptive rather than the aggressive partner, which in the real world is often assigned to women.

Nathaniel’s romantic and sexual history is fairly standard for a man of his time, place, and station. He is straight, fell in love with a woman he was attracted to, has been happily married to her for several years, and has two children with her. He might very well have been a virgin when he got married due to his particular value set, and he is to this day a little bit of a prude for similar reasons. Other than having perhaps an unusually equal partnership for their setting, his romantic life and history are totally normal and socially sanctioned for a man like him.

Tom Barrows is also pretty standard and straightforward. He is not terribly romantically experienced but it is attributed to his workaholic tendencies leaving no time for relationships. The way he falls for Alice is a bit naïve and boyish due to this inexperience.

Robin I picture as a Kinsey 1 or 2— mostly attracted to women, but drawn to the occasional man as well, with sexual experience of both in his background. Again this is something he shares with my conception of Justin Hawking. These are the two of my characters for whom “playboy” is the most intrinsic part of their identities, so I find it interesting that I found myself disinclined to make either of them as straight as might be expected. I think of hypersexuality as a highly masculine-coded trait, so this mitigates it a bit. And I think it adds an unexpected kind of sexiness on top of the other qualities that make them attractive. This may simply be my own taste.

For once, Robin is the least normatively masculine. I would say Nathaniel here is probably the most.

I notice that I tend to use sexuality as almost a “balancing” factor. If my hero has many non-traditionally masculine qualities, I use straightness as a way to bring some presence of traditional masculinity in the character. If the character is more normatively masculine overall, I often push them towards the other end of the Kinsey scale in order to keep them from being too traditional.

Also, if I’m honest, “hot butch guy who’s like 85% straight” is a type of mine.

To be concluded in part 3!

MJ Rodriguez as Luna, from Instagram @MJRodriguez7

Thanks to a ticket generously offered to me by niobien, I saw "Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women" at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge this week. It was described to me as kind of like the Vagina Monologues, in that it was a series of personal narratives of real people that were turned into dramatic pieces, but in this case from transwomen. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I found it to be a really excellent show, where you literally laugh and cry.

The thing I thought made it so strong was it dealt with a wide diversity of transwomen. They really did demonstrate how personal and individual a gender journey is, even within those who are ultimately exploring the same identity. Some were butch, some were femme; gay, straight; young, old. Some knew that they were women their whole lives, some came to it as a later step of their personal evolution. Some had no problem with sex work, some strongly disapproved. Some cared about the physical reality of their bodies, some felt their truth transcended it. Some wanted to be out and proud as trans, some just wanted to be able to walk down the street without anybody noticing anything about them. These various aspects in various combinations gave each character her own specificity, which conveyed an incredible humanity. That was the best part of it to me-- that everything was so human.

You may be inclined to think that was just because it was drawn from actual people, not made-up characters. But I think it was because the piece seemed to be put together in the interest of telling the stories of THESE WOMEN IN PARTICULAR-- not representing TRANSNESS AS A CONCEPT TO ITS COMPLETE DIGNITY TO THE WORLD. If you know what I mean. There did not seem to be a lot of concern of "Are we taking all the precautions to be as correct as possible for educating the people?" A lot of trans narrative I've read, including personal ones, are very concerned with this, sometimes to the detriment of the story because it turns it into kind of a dry, technical lecture.

Now I totally understand why people end up doing that-- transness is so widely vilified and misunderstood, there is definitely a need to prevent misperceptions, stereotyping, and anything else that could damage the ability of actual trans people to live their lives. But I kind of appreciated that the ladies were not trying to give me a gender studies lesson, but rather to just talk about themselves, their journeys, their feelings, their lives as trans people. The transness informs every part of it, like, trans life in practice rather than just in theory.

Honestly, there were probably a lot individual positions represented that some people would find problematic. Many of them used controversial terms to describe themselves. One woman's first step on her gender journey was becoming a really accomplished drag queen. Another resented the idea of other transwomen who weren't willing to commit to genital surgery. But I kind of liked that the piece didn't judge any of them for it. Not because I necessarily thought all of their positions deserved to be beyond critique, but because their imperfections and vagaries made them that much more human. These were NOT object lessons on gender theory-- these were the stories of real people's real lives.

There also wasn't a huge emphasis on negativity. They DID talk about some of the dangers trans people faced-- they mentioned the murder rate of transwomen of color, for example, but not much other violence, like sexual assault, for example. I wonder if they should have talked about more. But on the other hand, it reminds me a bit of how there are no lesbian date movies because lesbians in film always die, so it's nice to be able to give a lot of time to happy stories of marginalized people. And they did talk about struggle, in a lot of very personal and individual ways.

I believe five out of the seven actors were actual transwomen, while the remaining two were played by men. That kind of surprised me. I wonder if any of the actresses had a problem with that, though from perusing their social media and stuff they all seem to be very proud of the project, and there were also transwomen involved in other aspects of production. In theory, I believe it's basically an actor's job to pretend to be something they're not, but with so few roles for trans actresses, I sincerely hope it was because they just couldn't find enough of them to fill all the roles. For the record, all the actors were great.

Overall, I highly recommend it, and I'd even be open to seeing it again, in case anyone would like me to go with them.

Kind of had a breakthrough this weekend in the justification of one of my theories. I prize analytical thinking really highly (and in fact have been called upon to teach it in recent years) and as such I like to come up with codified assessments to assist in my understanding and interpretation going forward. Usually they’re about the craft of storytelling; sometimes they go a little broader than that, but most of the time it’s me working out my thoughts on how people convey ideas to tell stories.

I spend a lot of time thinking about female gaze. It’s my pet feminist issue, and I work to specifically tell many of my stories from that perspective. Female gaze encompasses a number of dimensions, but one of the most fundamental ones is how men are regarded as objects of attraction. And I have long believed in my gut that the key component of female gaze is vulnerability. By which I mean, that to the feminine perspective responds powerfully to the presence of vulnerability in the regarded object—perhaps even is drawn more strongly by it than anything else.

For example. Between a man who is beautiful, and a man who is equally beautiful but demonstrates some kind of vulnerability, be it physical or emotional, I would say most women are more likely to find the second man more appealing. Even between a beautiful man and a somewhat less beautiful man with greater vulnerability. Still the second one will be more appealing.

I have mountains of anecdotal evidence. Everywhere from the popularity of hurt/comfort and angst scenarios for male characters in fan fiction written by women, to the development of my own obsession with Captain America. The Steve Rogers character in the comics always bored the hell out of me, because he was so perfect and without texture. But the character in the film? A heartbreakingly gorgeous man with fears, insecurities, uncertainties, and even some feminine encoding? THE RECIPE FOR SEXUAL OBSESSION. Apparently!

(As a side note, I love, love, love this essay on how much feminine encoding the MCU portrayal of Captain America actually has. It articulates a bunch of things I felt and fell in love with about that version of the character.)

I didn’t come up with that idea on my own. I encountered it in an article several years ago that I can’t seem to find today. In that article, it mostly was examining that idea from a sort of BDSM context; if I recall correctly, it was about how femdom expressed. That part of it I couldn’t speak to, at least partially because I don’t think they supported their assertions that well. But that central IDEA, that the female gaze reacted so strongly to vulnerability, that part rang true in my bones.

So I’ve believed that for a long time on a gut level. But as a theory, I really couldn’t intellectually justify it except that it felt right. Which is not sufficient for analytical conclusion. Even “I have evidence that this phenomenon happens” is not the same as being able to articulate the REASON why it happens. And I couldn’t. After all, what’s to say it isn’t just a preference of SOME women? If I’m going to generalize it broadly, I need to be able to attribute it to something about the straight female condition.

This weekend, however, I think I finally was able to do that. And I think the root is in violence against women. One in three women will experience violence from her partner worldwide. Straight women are drawn to one of the greatest possible dangers against them. These two simultaneous facts makes any indication that a man will not be dangerous to them INCREDIBLY attractive. And I think the presence of vulnerability we tend to read as a sign of that.

Now, of course it’s not necessarily an accurate sign. But here’s the logic that I think applies. Men are not socialized to show vulnerability. Of course everyone has it sometimes, but they are encouraged to hide it. Specifically, they are encouraged to cover vulnerabilities with aggression. It’s that aggression that makes them dangerous. So there’s this sense that the willingness to admit and show things like fear, insecurity, or weakness marks a man as on the opposite end of the spectrum from aggression— and therefore, safe.

I would argue that any kind of indicator of what traditional masculinity would characterize as softness— sensitivity, femininity, delicacy —can fall under the heading of “vulnerability display.” These are also things men are culturally “not supposed to show” and they often face ridicule for these as “not befitting of a real man.” So, for example, a man who admits having qualities that are considered traditionally feminine is making himself vulnerable to attacks from other men who would perceive him as weak and unmasculine because of them. Therefore, that man’s willingness to own the qualities that could encourage others to attack him is perceived as making himself vulnerable.

Of course not all women are the same. We don’t all have exactly the same feelings, attractions, or even totally identical social encoding. But I think that this is why so, so many women are interested in stories where men cry, experience powerful emotions, are uncertain, or “in touch with their feminine side.” Not all women; we are not a monolith. But a large number, given what we do share from our experience of existing in the world as women. And I would suspect that of the women who DO NOT find themselves drawn to vulnerability, they are the ones who do not have as strong a concept of the problems stemming from traditional masculinity.

So I think I finally have a thesis on this that I can actually support. You may disagree. But I really do believe this. Vulnerability is the key component of female gaze because it acts as an indicator of an absence of the kind of masculine aggression that is most dangerous to women.

Saw the new Ghostbusters this weekend. I admit I went with a fair bit of trepidation, given some of the early indications, but after all the backlash from jag off internet misogynists, I was going to throw money at this thing whether it sucked or not. So I went in the first weekend to register at the box office, and my verdict is that even though it is technically flawed in many ways, I had a blast just enjoying the fun of this extremely delightful film. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!

Now I actually believe the first Ghostbusters is a really good, lightning-in-a-bottle kind of film, and I am generally not a fan of remakes, especially of lightning-in-a-bottle classics that don’t really bear comparison. But the fact of the matter is, we’re in a culture that is reimagining existing IPs almost entirely right now, and if they’re going to do it, it makes sense to actually try and put a fresh spin on those IPs. Giving women a presence in a context where they didn’t get to be is about the best possible way to achieve that, so even bearing all that in mind, I was definitely going to support this film.

The charm of the movie lies in the characters, as I would argue any truly engaging storytelling does. Based on the marketing I was afraid we were going to get “female equivalents” of the original cast, which I thought was a bad move— particularly since that seemed to be at fault for relegating the one black Ghostbuster again to the only non-scientist role. But they were actually all fairly unique and interesting, with relationships I cared about. Kristen Wiig’s Erin was chased away from her fascination with the paranormal by public derision and the desire to establish a respectable reputation in scientific academia. Her childhood friend and former partner Abby, the Melissa McCarthy character, is a fearless eccentric dedicated to proving her paranormal theories and showing the world that ghosts are real. Kate McKinnon’s Holtzmann, easily the breakout character, is a hilarious mechanical genius with a skewed point of view and buckets of awkward, out-there charm. Leslie Jones’s Patty Tolan is a tough, practical optimist who’s an expert in the history of New York City and rolls to adapt to deal with the weirdness around her. (You may be interested to know that the trailers cherry-picked all of only a handful of Stereotypical Sassy Black Woman moments, and I found her to be much more of a witty, insightful comedic presence. Others may disagree, and she could have been less stereotypical than she was, but I thought she was way more nuanced than the commercials suggested she’d be.) Easily the best moments are when these characters are hanging together doing Ghostbuster stuff, and you wanted to just watch them figure out their shit as they go and use cool gadgets to bust spooks. All the performances are good, and special mention goes to Chris Hemsworth, who is both hot and hilarious as basically the airheaded bimbo they hire as a receptionist because they like looking at him!

The writing, unfortunately, is not great. It doesn't have the philosophical underpinnings of the original-- check Moviebob's excellent exegesis on it in this video. It’s packed with great ideas that are either not fully explored or could have used an extra pass in the script editing process. The biggest problem to me was how choppy and weird the pacing was. The whole movie smacks of something that was cut up and reassembled in the editing room due to last-minute fears and insecurities. They would talk about doing a thing or a thing happening, then the very next scene things would sort of happen just as they talked about it—I can’t quite articulate what the problem was, maybe too little conflict, maybe too predictable, maybe too much telling with the showing, but it was somehow odd. Also, it was clear a lot of stuff got cut out, which led to weird transitions or total lack of any kind of sensible explanation for how we got from point A to point B. It also meant a lot of things never got the payoff they deserved. I liked the idea of making Patty a historian of New York, giving her a particular expertise even though she wasn’t a scientist, but it didn’t lead to anything substantive enough. There was this suggestion that the villain, who was pretty underdeveloped, was sort of the dark-reflection of Erin and Abby, which is a very interesting idea, but it was never realized in any way.

But the whole thing was a ride for me. Once things got going, I found myself having so much fun laughing at the jokes, enjoying the character interactions, and cheering at the cool busting action. It made me not really care so much about the inconsistencies. There are lots of little low-polish things— a lot of the dialogue and humor was clearly improvised, and a lot of it goes on a bit too long, there are subplots that really don’t make sense, and the final act is a logistical clusterfuck. But it was so damn fun. Getting to see cool female characters bust ghosts made me clap and yell and throw my fists in the air. Holtzmann's dual-weilding proton guns was one of the coolest action bits I've seen in a flick in years. And I’d like to point out that with the exception of Kate McKinnon, all the actresses were older than the original actors were in Ghostbusters ’84. That meant a lot to me, with my morbid fear of age-related feminine obsolescence.

And moreover, it’s going to mean a lot to kids. It might be an emotional rather than critical response. Bernie rather insightfully said it might be like Pacific Rim was for him-- a movie I found to be utterly ridiculous but he found a spiritual experience. But that means kids will feel it even more strongly. And not just little girls who are crying out for girl heroes. When I saw it, there was a little boy in the audience just down the row from me— LOSING HIS SHIT IN GLEE at every cool thing the ‘Busters did. It made me so happy. Not just for his infectious joy, but because it flew in the face of every asshole executive who ever declared that boys can’t be interested in or identify with girl heroes. As in_water_writ said, those are HIS Ghostbusters. For a whole new generation of kids, their Ghostbusters are women. And that makes it a blast despite any imperfection.

And I know I have terrible taste in music, but I actually like the new theme song cover. 😁

For the past several weeks, I've done basically nothing except work and watch RuPaul's Drag Race. It comes from not leaving the house much except for job stuff and not having the energy for much beyond TV. So I've watched the seasons available through Amazon Prime of Drag Race and quite enjoyed them.

Drag has always been kind of fascinating to me. While I'm not particularly up on queer culture in any way, this part of it appeals to me because I like how it plays with the arbitrary nature of gender markers. Yeah, X, Y, and Z are traditionally considered indicators of femaleness, but look, a man can put them on just as easily! And vice versa. That kind of detachment from gender norms makes me smile. Drag is of course not the same as actual gender fluidity, but I like the idea of temporarily tossing your gender to the wind and being a different one for a while.

As I’ve mentioned, while my sexuality is about as firmly straight as you can get, my gender has always felt sort of incidental. Sure, I am definitely a woman and I’m comfortable with that, but it’s purely descriptive. If I’d been identified as a boy by society, I don’t think I’d be any more or less comfortable. So, while my straightness feels pretty intrinsic to the person that I am, my femaleness isn't. I often wonder what I'd be like if I were a boy, though I have no actual desire to be one. But I have always wanted to drag myself out and see how "masculine" I could make myself look. I think that would be a lot of fun to play that role for a little while. The technical aspects of drag, makeup, costuming, and other sorts of design, are up my alley, especially because they present a perennially interesting concept to me-- we have a problem (we need to make a male-identified person conform to feminine markers), how do we use technical skills to solve it?

I also think it’s interesting that the artifice of it is so clearly on display. In other aspects of culture related to appearance, I think there’s a lot of tendency to mask all the work and the seams involved. Oh, this model looks this glamorous all the time. She’s this thin naturally. This makeup isn’t hard to do. When in reality such images are the result of carefully composed, edited, stage-managed presentation. Even as I’m aware of that, in my own pursuit of beauty I’ve always gone for that ideal of “naturalness,” by which I mean that I look this good without accoutrement— so I would literally wake up like this. But making that possible actually means an enormous amount of work, including diet, exercise, skin-treating, and shaving. This is my real actual body, but it is certainly not like this left to its own devices. But in drag, I find it neat how the artifice is so embraced, so much part of the game. It's an interesting comment on what gender markers even are, if the strongest ones are those that any person, regardless of how they identify, could put on.

A major tenant of my feminism is that I believe that men and women are basically the same, with more variation between individuals than between the two groups at large. By nature, at least. Any overall differences you do see I believe are largely the result of socialization. We receive very different messages, both deliberately and implicitly, from the culture in which we live. Because socialization is powerful, a lot of the trends we tend to see of “how women are” versus “how men are” come to being as a result. It can’t really be proven, I guess, because there is no way to remove the effects of socialization, but I still maintain that outside of that, men and women are basically the same.

When I was in high school, I remember the first time I ever felt annoyed when somebody told me that “men are just more visual than women.” Meaning that it was just in men’s nature to respond more and be more invested in the physical appearance of potential romantic partners. Even back then I responded very negatively to the implication that men and women were just naturally different. But at the same time, I was annoyed— because at the time, that seemed to fit with my own experience.

At that point in my life I was not particularly invested in the physical beauty of men. I didn’t have much interest or take any enjoyment in checking dudes out. In fairness, I didn’t really experience much in the way of attraction to other people until I was eighteen or so. But even then, what was even theoretically attractive to me only sort of lined up with being good-looking. So I only reinforced the stereotype. And that really annoyed me.

A number of years back, however, I experimented with something. I decided, consciously and deliberately, to give myself permission to ogle men. To care about, check out, and enjoy the physical beauty of men. Not that I wasn’t “allowed to” before, but I made a point of telling myself that if I wanted to do it, I could. There was no reason that if I ever wanted to, I couldn’t look at men the same way we expected men to look at women. If I’d absorbed any social conditioning that had told me I couldn’t do that or that I shouldn’t want to, I was consciously letting go of it.

And you know something? It was like a switch got flipped. Suddenly I got what the big deal about pretty people was. It was FUN to check them out, ENJOYABLE to look at them. Now boy watching has become a favorite hobby! And as I’ve said before, it feels powerful to think that sometimes things need to appeal to my eye, that what I want to see is worth delivering on. FEMALE GAZE IS EMPOWERING, Y’ALL.

Now, I’m not saying this is uniformly a good thing to start/discover in myself. Sometimes I go overboard. I do tend to get a little bit stupid over it, and I have on some occasions crossed a line where it got absurd. Like, grow up, Phoebe, you sound like a frat boy. Objectifying people is not a great habit to be in (even if I’d argue it has it’s time and place.)

But the fact that this happened seems like pretty good support for my theory. I was able to decide that it was okay for me to do it if I wanted to. And in the absense of any restriction, real or artifical, I found that I wanted to. Not much different than a man would.

Of course all people are different. Some people are interested in this sort of thing and some aren't. But more men don't than we generalize, and probably more women would if they felt like they were allowed.