The Worst Filing System Known To Humans

-Punk (5) A Song of Ice and Fire (2) Affect (9) Alienating My Audience (31) Animation (27) Anime (17) Anonymous (3) Anything Salvaged (15) Art Crit (41) Avatar the Last Airbender (2) Black Lives Matter (1) Bonus Article (1) Children's Media (6) Close Reading (90) Collaboration (1) comics (29) Cyborg Feminism (3) Deconstruction (10) Devin Townsend (2) Discworld (1) Evo Psych (1) Fandom Failstates (7) Fanfiction (28) Feminism (23) Fiction Experiments (13) Food (1) Fragments (11) Games (29) Geek Culture (28) Gender Shit (1) Getting Kicked Off Of TV Tropes For This One (11) Gnostic (6) Guest Posts (5) Guest: Ian McDevitt (2) Guest: Jon Grasseschi (3) Guest: Leslie the Sleepless Film Producer (1) Guest: Sara the Hot Librarian (2) Guest: Timebaum (1) Harry Potter (8) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (3) Has DC Done Something Stupid Today (5) Hauntology (6) Homestuck (18) How Very Queer (35) hyperallthethings (10) hyperanimation (1) Hypercomics (10) I Didn't Ask For Your Life Story Sheesh (24) Illustrated (37) In The Shadow Of No Towers (1) It Just Keeps Tumblring Down Tumblring Down Tumblring Down (9) It's D&D (2) Judeo-Christian (9) Lady Gaga (5) Let's Read Theory (3) Lit Crit (19) Living In The Future Problems (11) Lord of the Rings (4) Mad Max (1) Madoka Magica (1) Magic The Gathering (4) Manos (2) Marvel Cinematic Universe (17) Marx My Words (15) Medium Specificity (15) Meme Hell (1) Metal (2) Movies (33) Music (26) Music Videos (21) NFTs (10) Object Oriented Ontology (4) Occupy Wall Street (3) Pacific Rim (2) Paradise Lost (2) Parafiction (6) Patreon Announcements (15) Phenomenology (4) Poetry (6) Pokemon (3) Politics and Taxes and People Grinding Axes (13) PONIES (9) Pop Art (6) Raising My Pageranks Through Porn (4) Reload The Canons! (7) Remixes (8) Review Compilations (6) Room For You Inside (2) Science Fiction Double Feature (30) Self-Referential Bullshit (23) Semiotics (2) Sense8 (4) Sociology (12) Spooky Stuff (41) Sports (1) Star Wars (6) Steven Universe (3) Surrealism (11) The Net Is Vast (36) Time (1) To Make An Apple Pie (4) Transhumanism (9) Twilight (4) Using This Thing To Explain That Thing (120) Video Response (2) Watchmen (3) Webcomics (2) Who Killed The World? (9)

Reload the Canons!

This series of articles is an attempt to play through The Canon of videogames: your Metroids, your Marios, your Zeldas, your Pokemons, that kind of thing.

Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

For Asterion, or Why We Need Monsters

"'Hermaphrodite --1. One having the sex organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics of both male and female. 2. Anything comprised of a combination of diverse or contradictory elements. See synonyms at MONSTER.'

...she stared down at that word. Monster. Still there. It had not moved. And she wasn't reading this word on the wall of her old bathroom stall. There was graffiti in Webster's but the synonym wasn't part of it. The synonym was official, authoritative; it was the verdict that the culture gave on a person like her. Monster. That was what she was
."  --Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, from the chapter "Looking Myself Up In Websters"

"What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Can he possibly be a bull with a man's face? Or will he be like me?"  --Jorge Luis Borges, "The House of Asterion"

Hybrids. Chimeras. Monsters. Humanity has always been fascinated with beings that straddled the line from one thing to another. We seem obsessed with metamorphosis and transformation, with things that are suspended between states.

So why is it, I wonder, that there aren't more of us monsters running around?

Well, partly because monsters tend to be opposed by some sort of Theseus. Now, if you're not familiar, Theseus is the hero that slew the ravenous Minotaur in his labyrinth, the fearful half-man, half-bull, half-god son of the king of Crete. (The Minotaur was bonus sized, presumably. Don't think about it too hard. It'll just make your head hurt.) And, since then, the Minotaur has recurred as a symbol of the outsider, the strange hybrid, the monster. He's one of those figures that those who feel cast out of society adopt as a symbol of their own experience.
Remember when I mentioned Picasso's minotaur porn
This is what happens, albeit obliquely, in Jeffrey Eugenides's staggeringly brilliant novel Middlesex. The story is narrated by an intersexual individual named Cal. Intersexuality, or, if you really are setting out to offend people, "Hermaphroditism," is a blanket term for a number of medical conditions that result in a mixed set of male and female sexual organs or, less obviously, a weirdly mixed set of chromosomes. The point is that intersexual individuals are, one way or another, biologically in between--hybrids.

For Webster's Dictionary, and for Cal, this means being a monster.

Eugenides makes a point of underlining this idea with several important references to the Minotaur. The rather unfortunate creature's trials and tribulations are connected to Cal's, and the reader comes to understand some of the burden of being in-between.

It's a burden that has often been felt historically. Consider, for example, the resistance in America to interracial marriage. What a striking example of the fear of those who are in between states. Or compare the fear of transexuals and the fear that if one does not "pass" there may be deadly consequences. (Can you believe I wrote this article a week and a half before Tuesday's?) There is plenty of historical reason to be concerned about the potential violence of someone's reaction if they take issue with someone's swapped gender. Or consider how bisexuals have been cast out of both the straight and the gay communities. The narrative from both groups often is "Pick a side." Don't, in short, be in between.

Or consider what happens when you try to merge two academic fields.

That probably raised a few eyebrows.

In a way, it should. Dual majors are not beaten to death in the streets for daring to dress in a lab coat while reading Proust, after all. There's a whole other order of magnitude there that makes internal academic politics seem a little, well, petty.

And yet, when it's your livelyhood on the line, I'm sure it doesn't seem trivial. And from what I've seen, Academia isn't exactly friendly to monsters. Some of this will inevitably depend upon where you are, but I think it's significant that we're in a moment when people are beginning to branch out and explore mixed disciplines like art and engineering, music and neuroscience, literature and evo psych, and so on. This sort of branching, if the professors I know are right, is still rather dangerous. Some of the people I've talked to have been advised to avoid interdisciplinary research entirely until they achieve tenure--a system put in place to prevent professors from being persecuted for their political positions or teaching methods. Yes, daring to branch out of one's field can be as dangerous at an institution as, say, speaking out against the Vietnam War or rampant consumerism. Yikes.

This makes a lot of sense when you simply consider the divide between Science and Liberal Arts Theory. The Liberal Arts have leveled a whole bevy of charges against Science--against its misogyny, its ties to imperialist ideologies of cultural superiority, its blindness to its own bias, and so on--and in return Science has returned fire with the charge that the Liberal Arts consist solely of meaningless relativistic mumbo-jumbo. Frankly, both charges have merit to them, and it would serve the fields well to talk over some of these issues. But the trench warfare between the two camps is worsened by a language barrier, as both sides have in the last century (or possibly even the last half century) not just embraced but actually leaped onto their own jargon and humped it furiously. Both fields are now in a common-law marriage with incomprehensible gibberish. There's no way to communicate across disciplines.

If that wasn't bad enough, the university system is structured to economically support a limited range of departments and, within those departments, to support only a few tenured individuals who must, as the saying goes, "publish or perish." In that kind of environment, there will naturally be a tendency for the departments even within the Liberal Arts or the Sciences to battle for space and funding.

Now, in this kind of environment, how do you think a bright, up and coming Minotaur look to the humans and the bulls?

Like a damn traitor, that's how.

And none of this addresses the hideous gawping moat between the Ivory Tower and the junkyard of popular culture. The term "graphic novel" allows us to study Maus like it's real literature, and 1984 is a dystopian satire, not a science fiction novel, god forbid.

So, although my comparison of academic monsters to us social monsters might seem strange, I think it really makes perfect sense.

And exploring the gap in academia helps us understand why monsters are so absolutely essential in all areas of society.

There's a character in T.S. Eliot's massive disjointed masterpiece The Waste Land called Tiresias. He shares a mythological past with the Minotaur, although his story is one of metamorphosis rather than existence in a chimerical state. He began as a man, was transformed into a woman, transformed into a man again, blinded by Hera and given prescient visions by Zeus. Because... well, because the gods are dicks, frankly.

In Eliot's poem he occupies the center space between the other characters and, appearing in the middle section of the poem, ties the work together:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits   
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,   
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,   
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see   
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea...

In Tiresias I think we can glimpse the importance of monsters and Minotaurs. There is a certain magic to being between states, a certain throbbing tension that suggests whole possibilities. It doesn't have to result in stasis, as it does for Eliot, or with suffering, as it does for so many of the individuals cast out from our society by their hybrid natures. No, monsters are the emissaries from foreign lands, the translation dictionaries between two disciplines or ways of life.

There's something to be said for walking a mile in another person's shoes, but there's also something to be said for walking that mile with two different people's shoes.

Not literally, of course.

You will injure yourself.

Society needs monsters; desperately, in fact. So many of the problems we face can only be approached from the perspective of a Minotaur, because both bull and human concerns need to be addressed. And will the monsters be ridiculed? Will they have trouble finding work? Will they be pepper sprayed and beaten in New York and Oakland, in their high school locker rooms, in their dorms where they think they are safe?

Oh yes.

Oh, very certainly.

But I charge you, each and every one of you, to find the monster inside. Guys? Try on a skirt. Girls? Try on some baggy cargo pants. Scientists? Try talking to some sociologist and gender studies folks. Artists? Try talking to some scientists. Non academics? Try reading some theory (not Foucault or Saussure or one of those lunatics--start with something relatively fun like Barthes).

Try doing something a little bit monstrous.

You never know, you just might like it.

And besides, I would hate to see the Theseuses of the world win. Wouldn't you?
"Would you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus. "The minotaur barely put up a fight."
If you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave me some kind words in the comments below.

Notes:


1. Seriously, ASK before labeling an intersex individual. People are rightfully touchy about a set of terms that has been traditionally used by the medical establishment to treat them as freaks and medical curiosities.

2. Why are girl's clothes so much less functional than guy's clothes? Seriously. Whenever I wear anything feminine my pocket count is slashed in half, at minimum. It's very frustrating.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Performing Draculinity: Spike the Dragon and Gender Norms


My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has a strong feminist message. From what I've seen, that reading of the show has become pretty well accepted across The Webtubes, even if there are still some holdouts that aren't picking up on the obvious. The show has one of the most positive range of female characters I've ever seen, with a whole range of occupations and interests that are all considered mutually acceptable. And, of course, the mane characters (oh the puns, the puns) are all shown to be quite capable, sometimes more capable even than their male counterparts. Rainbow Dash, for example, can fly rings around basically everyone, and Applejack, although not, I think, as strong as her brother is consistently shown to be exceptionally physically capable. (The others don't seem to have particularly comparable male counterparts, but they all are regularly shown as exceptionally talented in their areas of interest.)

And, of course, their personalities make for some cool graphic design:
Yes, I'm going to keep milking this one.
Generally, my articles about the show have focused not on these elements (of harmony? Sorry, sorry), which to me seem fairly obvious, but on the subtext and social impact of the show. One of the great results of the show's unintended internet following is the message it sends that it's ok for guys to like girl things, like the show itself. And, that the show's messages are generally, if not universally, being taken genuinely to heart.

But as much as I love the show, and as positive as I think its impact on culture has been, we haven't exactly gotten an explicit analysis in the show of male gender roles--there simply aren't enough prominent male characters. We've gotten a bit of cool, if subtle, commentary with Big Mac, who seems to fit into the stereotype of the Strong, Silent Male but periodically shows an unashamedly emotional side (he clearly deeply loves his sister Applejack, for one thing, and is shown crying when she leaves during her flashback in Cutie Mark Chronicles). And we've gotten some other incidental characters, but besides that there's been a bit of a dearth of male characters, and, as a natural consequence, there hasn't been anything explicitly in the show about performing masculinity.

Until episode 21, that is.

This episode, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, is about Spike the baby dragon going off to seek others of his kind, so that he can better understand how to be a dragon.

Note the way I word that: he's not just going off to learn about dragons, but how to act like one, how to properly perform draculinity.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the idea of gender performance, let me run through the concept. According to sort of broadly accepted social convention, people who are of a certain gender--a gender based on their physical, biological sex--are naturally meant to display certain traits, act in certain ways, and dress in certain clothes. But modern queer and feminist theory suggests that this is simply a performance based on social convention--and to a large extent, it is. There's nothing about my penis that prevents me from wearing a skirt, for example. (Well, alright, it can be a bit awkward if the skirt is too tight and you know what let's just scratch this line of thought and move on, yes?)

But it's important to perform properly because people who don't perform their gender correctly are often ostracized, bullied, and sometimes assaulted or even killed. This is why trans* rights are so important: a transsexual in America, and in, I suspect, most other countries across the globe, is under pressure to pass as whatever gender they feel they are. Those who do not pass run the risk of physical assault, sexual assault, discrimination in the workplace, and murder.

So, one of the cornerstones of the theory of gender performance is that these social constructs hurt men and women--sexism negatively impacts both (or all) sexes.

One of the shortcomings of the last few waves of feminism is that the problems with masculinity when applied to men were kind of ignored. And in fairness, we guys honestly do have it significantly easier in most regards. But, as my first article on Ponies and Feminism pointed out, it's an oversight that is starting to be rectified, thankfully, and things like My Little Pony are helping.

So, now that I've gone through that lengthy diversion (sorry, incidentally, to anyone who already knows the theories I'm talking about, I'm just trying to fill any newcomers in) let's get back to that first weird thing I said: what do I mean when I say that Spike is learning to perform draculinity?

Well, Spike knows he's a dragon, and he wants to act like a dragon should act. He wants to be normal. He also knows that if he doesn't perform draculinity correctly he'll get made fun of, both by his pony friends and by other dragons. Heck, some of those dragons are pretty scary, and there's a definite threat in the episode of the bullying becoming violent--and it's not played for laughs, either.

Some of this starting to sound familiar?

The episode really isn't doing a lot to hide its metaphors. The Ponies in this episode, somewhat fittingly, represent "femininity," and the Dragons represent "masculinity." (I put the terms in quotes, like on The Pony Wheel, to signify the fact that they're social constructs, and exaggerated at that.) And once you see that metaphor, a lot of interesting things emerge.

Notice, for example, that it's Rainbow Dash, one of the most "masculine" of the mane six, that first challenges Spike's own dragonhood--his manhood. Rarity, one of the most "feminine" characters, accidentally makes it worse by describing him in feminine or childish ways.

The ponies as a group take on a generally feminine role when juxtaposed with the dragons, with even Rainbow Dash running with the others rather than fighting the teenage dragons.

And, in my favorite sequence, Twilight Sparkle tries, and fails, to find information about the dragons. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the scene is a direct allegory of the difficulties women's studies has with the study of masculinity, but I certainly see echoes of that problem in the scene. Twilight knows all sorts of things about Ponies, but the most she knows about Dragons is that they're scary and dangerous. Not a direct analogy, certainly, but there's a parallel there, to be sure.

Oh, and there's this little exchange:
Rainbow Dash: I'm telling you, we'll never pass for a real dragon!
Rarity: Oh, pish-posh! This costume is fabulous, one of my finer creations.
Twilight Sparkle: Shh! [hushed] We'll never pass if they hear three voices coming out of one dragon! Now come on, let's go! 
[Ahem]

Yep, there's Twilight and Rainbow Dash talking about... passing.

No, I don't think it's seriously a reference to passing as a transexual.

But it is a hilarious coincidence, and I couldn't resist pointing it out.

Anyway, as I've pointed out with other critical analysis, saying "this text is talking about X" is not the same thing as saying "this text is an allegory for X." I wouldn't try to carry the comparison between masculinity and draculinity much further than I have here--it probably won't work past a certain point. After all, dragons mature based on greed, which is pretty weird and not really analogous to how men develop psychologically and biologically. (I know some might disagree, but those people are arguably morons.) It's not really going to work as a one to one mapped parallel.

Still, it works just well enough to lead to a particular moral:
"...Now I realize that who I am is not the same as what I am."

Our performance is not ourselves, nor does it have to be. Spike comes to recognize that he does not have to perform draculinity, he just has to perform himself. It's the message that the rest of the show gears toward girls, but with a male character rather than the normal female cast. The message of the show, sometimes explicit, sometimes just present in the nature of the characters themselves, is that there are lots of different ways to be, and you don't have to perform to someone else's script.

If you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave me some kind words in the comments below.

Incidentally, I'm planning on writing another Pony article soon. It will be about the character development of the different characters as described... with SCIENCE! The plan is, I'm going to play a drinking game with some friends, where each time one of the mane six displays a quirk in lieu of actual character development, the person assigned to that character takes a drink. We'll use a breathalyzer and record the results. And I'll write a blog post as we go. In this way, we shall determine the relative character development in the show, get plastered, and get a giant, ridiculous blog post that attempts to approach scientific standards but ends up missing them by a mile.

The trouble is, we need some quirks. So. What are measurable character quirks for each of the mane six cast that we can use to examine the show? Our drinking game rests in your hands, good citizens of The Interblag.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Reader's Rights: The Idea Preservation Imperative

I believe in the power of ideas. In fact, I would actually go even further than that: I believe in the preeminence of ideas. They aren't quite as important as human life and comfort (although there are some exceptions) but beyond that, creative thoughts are incredible gifts.

I've already talked about the act of finding value, especially as a creator and a critic, in even the most unlikely of places. And, what's more, I've written a couple fan fiction pieces that attempt to put into practice my prattling: one based upon Twilight, the other based upon "Manos" The Hands of Fate.

This book definitely exists. Really.
It should be obvious from this, I think, that I hold fanfiction in a particularly high regard; on the same level, in fact, that I hold more traditional forms of critical analysis. Both occupy the same space in culture when it comes to interacting with ideas. They use similar techniques of analysis, similar methods of picking things apart, often act as either homages to good works or dismantlings of bad ones. The fact that they engage the reader in different ways does not, ultimately, make them different processes. It's just that fanfiction ends up creating its own complete text at the end that someone else can analyze, whereas criticism just holds a mirror to the original. In a way, fanfiction might be considered more productive, in the end, than criticism because of the way it produces something new that can be built upon in the end.

You can write a fanfic of a fanfic, but you can't write a fanfic of a critical essay.

Probably.

Well, alright, maybe Godel Escher Bach counts as a fanfic of a critical essay. Ah.

Anyway, the point is, these types of texts are important because they uncover and preserve good ideas. But unless you've got a narrow exception like Godel Escher Bach or the notes to The Waste Land or an Umberto Eco essay, criticism doesn't do the one thing that fanfiction can, even though it's using largely the same processes.

It doesn't take that golden, glowing kernel of an idea and nurture it into something new.

And that's a power that we have an imperative to put into use when the original author of an idea can't put that idea into use.

See, sometimes, for whatever reason, a creator cannot or will not explore one of their ideas to its fullest extent. This doesn't even mean that something has fallen through the cracks, necessarily. There's nothing in Scorsese's recent film Hugo that strikes me as conspicuously omitted--it's a tight film, as my collaborator Leslie the Sleepless Film Student would say. But there are still ideas there that could be explored from another angle. The nature of the Great War could certainly be explored further, and the trauma driving the Stationmaster (it seemed clear to me that he was shellshocked, no?). This is an area where fanfiction can serve perhaps more effectively than criticism, because it allows the viewer to not just analyze the character's psychology but to add to it and imagine, in more detail, just what his history and experiences are made of.

So, this is an area where fanfiction can fill in some gaps. It's not exactly what I would call an example of the sort of moral imperative I'm talking about, though.

Something like writing a "Manos" The Hands of Fate fanfiction is.

What makes the difference is that what good ideas there are in "Manos" are in danger of being lost. The film itself is already in rather poor condition, and I doubt anyone has watched it recently without the hilarious commentary of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew. If there are any creepy moments at all in "Manos"--and I assert that there most certainly are--they are in danger of vanishing, and what we might learn from the film could be lost.

This is where the Reader's Right of Fanfiction kicks in. We've got an idea on the verge of vanishing into the cultural haze, a certainty that the creators of the film (if any are still alive) will never revisit the film's ideas, and a platform--The Internet--where fans can share and explore their takes on the film. In that situation, readers have an ethical right to take everything in the film and run with it, copyright be damned.

The Idea is preeminent above all else.

But, alright, "Manos," though I love it so, isn't the kind of sparkling gem that's going to convince a lot of people, I suspect. So, let me use an example that has a few more fans, and is a bit closer to my heart, though it's still not exactly what you might call an elite masterpiece of artistry.

I'm talking about the storyline for the game Magic: The Gathering.

For the uninitiated, it might surprise you to know that Magic has a pretty intricate backstory--one I've been following for quite a while now. The idea is that there are countless worlds, each unique and magical, that make up the Multiverse known as Dominia. These worlds are closed off from one another... unless you are a Planeswalker, a being capable of stepping through the void between worlds, a being capable of exploring the Multiverse in all its wonder.

The interactions of these Planeswalkers, the normal beings that inhabit the planes, supernatural entities, and the core mechanics of the Five Colors of Magic knit together to create a  complex, fascinating fabric of a narrative. And certainly, many of the individual threads are broken in one way or another, what with plot holes, dumb storylines, bad writing or editing, and so on, but generally the storyline is a compelling thing for one reason. To borrow the words of my good friend Jon of Everyday Abnormal:
"I've followed from the beginning. Somewhere, somehow (probably from Richard Garfield sitting in on one too many Planescape sessions), WotC stumbled onto an amazing, unique fantasy world... one that was all fantasy worlds. It was a setting that offered up nearly limitless storytelling possibilities. There were ups and downs, but there were amazing concepts and wonderful stories told within it."
Yep, that about sums it up. It was a world that was all worlds. The potential there is astounding.

Or, it was.

Until the novel line got cancelled a few months ago.

Whoops.

The game will go on, of course, like my heart (ahem), but there doesn't seem to be much hope of us getting the kind of detailed narratives that held the storyline together in the past. I could be wrong, of course, but as of now, the actual long form stories--and even short stories, according to the Creative Director--are things of the past.

Now, are you starting to see why I think this idea of the reader's rights and duties to preserve an idea is so strikingly important?

A little over a year and a half ago, I helped to kickstart a fan project known as the Expanded Multiverse. The idea was to take the spaces in Magic's narrative that couldn't be feasibly filled by the creative team, and fill them in ourselves. The lofty goal was to create a secondary fan-generated canon that was cohesive, well written, and in-line with the established world and stories. A few days ago, when we first got the news that the novels were effectively as over as The Internet (although we didn't hear the news from Prince this time...) I concluded that the Expanded Multiverse was done for as well.

And then, as I got to thinking, and as I read some of the other responses from people on the forums, I realized that the exact opposite is the case: the Expanded Multiverse is more important than ever. The cards aren't going away, the settings aren't going away, the game will continue to explore at least an outline of a plot each time new cards are released... so, we effectively have all the tools we need to build a storyline ourselves.

Now, of course, it's important to recognize what this does NOT mean. It doesn't mean a reader is entitled to mooching off a creator's money. JK Rowling has apparently said that fanfiction is acceptable to her as long as no one charges for it, and that seems to me an ethical model. After all, what I'm advocating here is the primacy of ideas, and limiting access to those ideas by slapping a price tag on seems rather counterproductive, even without considering that you are kinda ripping off someone else's stuff. That ethic, of course, carries over to my own work: I take the Creative Commons license on this site very seriously.

So, I would never suggest that those of us involved with the Expanded Multiverse should get paid (unless Wizards of the Coast decided to throw some money our way, which, hey, I'm not going to say no to, necessarily). But we are still doing an important thing: we're ensuring that the bright kernel of an idea, all the bright fragments of thought that make the storyline so powerful, don't go to waste simply because the company can't economically justify printing books that only a handful of people read.

It's also not a condemnation of creators. As I mentioned with Hugo, there's nothing in this ethic that implies a failure on a creator's part, simply a lack of a particular path chosen. Sometimes that is certainly the result of lack of skill, but the imperative to explore otherwise lost details is not an insult in and of itself. (And I really wish authors would quit taking it that way.) If anything, it's a gesture of respect to someone that created an idea worth exploring.

So, this is, perhaps, a manifesto of sorts for one of the core reader's rights. There are others that I've got bouncing around my head, but this should suffice for now. I need to stop talking and let you get to work.

After all, there are so many ideas out there waiting to be explored; get out there and explore them!

If you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave me some kind words in the comments below.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Fridgefull of Data: Women, Comics, Sexism, and Sociology

THE SETUP

This one will require some backstory. And quite a few links.

(Backstory that will be redundant to anyone on the Whitechapel forums. Feel free to skip these bits if you've tromped over here from over there.)


It started with a fascinating blog post by Paul Duffield, the brilliant artist of the webcomic Freakangels and all-around swell guy. He happened to post this article to the Whitechapel forums where--

Wait, no, that's not really the place to start, is it?

Arguably, the real beginning of this current saga is with DC comic's relaunch of their entire line of superhero comics earlier in the year. Although the often nasty (as Duffield's piece describes) battle between comics and feminism has raged on for quite a bit longer than that relaunch, it was this relaunch that, as far as I can see, essentially torched what white flags were flying with its laser eyes and signaled the renewal of hostilities. Why? Well, remember the article I wrote on body language and character design, and how fundamental those things are to the message of a work?

DC should have read that article:

Old Harley Quinn vs New Harley Quinn. Spot The Differences!

The comparison above is taken from the blog Zannidify (for god's sake, click the link so that I feel less guilty about stealing the image!), and I think it does a good job of expressing some of the myriad ways in which the relaunch has reportedly taken a sledgehammer to the knees of quite a few beloved female characters. (Well, and it restored Batwoman's ability to walk, which was also not particularly well received because you know what let's just move on for now, mnyes?) Issues such as the depiction of the sort-of-villain Catwoman and the hero Starfire rapidly set of a firestorm of criticism, accusations of sexism, counter accusations of a different kind of puritanical sexism, slut shaming, and so on and so forth. It quickly became apparent that the issues that had been so handily codified by DC went far beyond DC itself to the whole comics industry.

Or, well, it sort of became apparent.

If you've met People of The Internet (or, hell, People of The Just About Anywhere, honestly) you'll have noticed the tendency toward anecdotal evidence. Again, I point you to Paul Duffield's article for a more in depth explanation of the phenomenon. Suffice to say that Duffield decided, well, how can I get some actual quantifiable data on this subject?

So, what he did was, he looked through his own collection of comics and the comics collections at two stores in his area, and he recorded the gender distribution of the creators.

I'll let his graphs speak for us both:

Yikes. That is rather dramatic data, wouldn't you say?

Now, I'm going to take another swerve off of the main topic again to briefly go into lecture mode. Again, anyone not in the mood for sociology lectures can go ahead and skip to my own data section below. What Paul Duffield used, when presented with this information, was something called the Sociological Imagination. This is a core idea for the field of Sociology, and although it's not necessarily an easy concept to sum up, I think Duffield's analysis shows it in two ways:
  • He went beyond anecdotal evidence to actual data--in other words, he moved beyond personal experience and psychology to a broader picture of a culture as a whole
  • When presented with the data, he didn't just pass that data on but came to conclusions about what might be at work--he looked at the underlying mechanics of the information he saw.
From my perspective, this sort of methodology is dramatically important not just because it shows that he actually is arguing about real facts but because it also shows one of the ways in which science and the liberal arts can work together to arrive at a conclusion. The liberal arts says, "You know, I think there's a bias within this culture that favors men over women," and science says, "Well, let's see if we can't come up with some ways to qualify that." It really works quite well until the liberal arts decide that perhaps there might be some bias in science itself and everything goes to hell, but that's an entire other article.

If you haven't read his article yet, (and if not, why the devil haven't you? Get over there, knave, before I tell Lord Humongous to put you in a headlock again) you might be wondering about my second point about data, and about that pie chart for "self-published collection" up there in the graphs.

Well, part of the sociological imagination is the ability to see data and not simply come to a broad conclusion like "Boy, things sure look pretty bad, huh?" but to use data as a source of insight into the deeper mechanics behind things. Just looking at publishing distribution actually doesn't tell us much more than "there is a problem."

But what happens if we compare that data to self-publishing comickers?

That begins to suggest another possibility:
"Following up on a suspicion, I dived into my giant pile of self-published comics collected at conventions over the years to find percentages of 47% male, 49% female and 4% ungendered/uncertain – an almost perfectly representational proportion. Are we seeing a picture of equal representation at grass roots, but mostly-male where the money and jobs are? These statistics suggest that the answer is yes, and although the data is limited I made sure to use a sample that, if anything, should provide a more representative image than a true survey might."
This isn't a particularly long passage, but it's a great example of what I'm talking about: Duffield took the information he had, added more data, and explored what that suggested. His article goes into quite a bit more detail about what all of this might mean for the industry as a whole, and I won't attempt to summarize it here, but this should give you a taste of how the process works.

Which means that it's time to come to my side of things.

THE EXPERIMENT

Looking at the information Paul Duffield had uncovered, I wondered to myself just what the gender distribution was in comics theory and criticism. This struck me as important, as theorists do have some sway over how people interact with comics. It might take a while for their attitudes to really seep into culture, but, well, the way literature is taught now essentially consists of New Criticism with a little bit of things like structuralism and deconstruction for flavor, even though generally the methods aren't often taught under those names. Critical theory that emerges now has the potential to shape discourse for the next half century.

If that discourse contains heavy gender bias, we could see the emerging field of academic comics study strongly affected by these ideas, even if the industry and culture make efforts toward gender parity.

To explore the gender distribution, I decided to look at two peer-reviewed journals I was less familiar with (the fascinating ImageTexT and the relatively recent Studies in Comics, which I can't access in full text but which seems similarly intriguing) and the online journal Sequart, which I'm significantly more familiar with. My impression, like Duffield's, was that there were quite a few female authors. I was sure I remembered some on Sequart, in particular! But, memory is faulty, and I wanted to rigorously check my memory against the facts.

To do that, I went through the articles in the journals and recorded several pieces of information about each of them. This information was:
  1. Volume Number.Issue Number
  2. Number of the article within the issue
  3. Whether the author was (m)ale, (f)emale, or a (c)ollaboration between people of both genders
  4. Whether the piece was a theory (a)rticle, a (r)eview, and, in some cases, an (i)ntroduction or an (o)p ed piece (the latter only showed up in Studies in Comics, the former only in ImageTexT.)
  5. Whether the issue was on a particular topic or not
For Sequart I knew from the outset I would not be collecting the issue numbers and volume numbers, because Sequart isn't divided up that way. And then, much to my disappointment, I decided not to bother collecting any of the other information, either. It was pointless. You'll see why in a moment. I'm including the data in spreadsheets at the end of this article, but I'll do a quick runthrough here.

ImageTexT surprised me. Even as I collected data, I got the impression that the writing contained within the journal was fairly equal between genders. The numbers painted a different picture, however. Only 30% of the total pieces were written by women, and of them only about half were theory articles as opposed to reviews, whereas a full 70% of the pieces by men were articles. I'm honestly not sure how important that review/article distinction is, but to me it suggests that not only are women less involved in the journal's writing, they are also less involved in the creation of deeper theory.

This didn't quite satisfy me, though. My impression of equality had to come from somewhere, I thought. (Actually, not a reasonable thought, it turns out, but one that held true for ImageTexT, at least.)

With that thought in mind, I took down the gender distribution within each issue. What I found was quite surprising. The most recent issues have complete, or fairly even, distribution between male and female authors. The earliest issues, on the other hand, are sometimes dominated almost exclusively by men. The one dramatic exception to this trend is the issue on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality, which was dominated almost exclusively by women! The impression I get from this is that ImageTexT is striving for gender parity now, which is, of course, great. But, I have to question their methods somewhat. It worries me a little that the gender and sexuality issue is so strongly tilted in the other direction; it is reminiscent of the tendency toward consulting women on only women's issues, people of color on only racial issues, queer folk on only LGBTQ issues, and so on.

Still, one of the mantras I try to repeat to myself is DO NOT EAT YOUR ALLIES. There's no sense in tearing into them for not being perfect. I think it's clear, from the distribution of the last issues, and from the fact that the editorial board is strikingly inclusive, that ImageTexT is making an effort. I applaud them for it.

The Studies in Comics journal similarly started out abysmally, with only two articles of their first issue being written by women. Overall the journal only has a 27% showing of women, partly because of the low turnout in that first issue and partly because, well, they've only ever gotten to about 35%, so it's not like there's a lot to counterbalance things. I can't speak to the content because I don't have access to the journal, but it generally does not seem to be doing as well as ImageTexT. This is a relatively new journal, though, so we might give it some time to catch up. Interestingly, again women had less theory articles than reviews, but the difference between them was a bit smaller, and both men and women wrote more theory articles overall. I'm honestly not sure what that means about the field as a whole or Studies in Comics in particular.

Which brings us to Sequart.

Hooboy.

I mentioned earlier that I was absolutely sure, totally convinced, that there were a few female writers on staff there, or at least sending in articles to contribute.

Turns out there are two.

Two articles, that is, by two different women. Out of 414 articles. For all time, ever. That's a 00.5% female authorship for this site that is, according to its slogan, dedicated to promoting comics as a form of art. There's no point in even collecting data on that--there is only a sample size of two for women's articles, after all.

That's just inexcusable.

Now, feeling a bit shaken by this, I decided to look a bit more closely at the actual content of the archives. It turns out that all of the earliest pieces are written by one Julian Darius, who seems to have built the site up from his own initial blogging. Not too shabby. But it did get me thinking about the editorial board there and how it might influence the parity of the site in the opposite direction of ImageTexT and Studies in Comics, both of which have more diverse (if not equal) editorial boards.

Now, this is a realm I'm nervous about entering primarily because of Duffield's points earlier about the accusatory nature of much of this discourse, but I have to wonder a little bit about the tenor of some of Darius's articles. I find it interesting, for example, that he did not include gender parity as a possible reason that comics have failed to gain respect in his lengthy (and, honestly, quite good) article on the subject. In fairness to Darius, he's actually done a numerical analysis of DC's relaunch not unlike what I've been doing here, but besides offering the tallies he gives little commentary (remember what I said about sociological imagination?), and he somewhat downplays gender disparity as a problem, what with target audiences and so on.

And, of course, there was that article early in the archives where Darius defends the rape of a female character in DC's big, multi-character crossover event Identity Crisis. The article is pretty problematic. And by problematic I mean that it actually disturbed me quite a bit. There's a certain dismissive flippancy to the article that really is not in any way appropriate to the subject matter. I'm hesitant to mention this, of course, because I'm not sure it's reasonable to use this article, written many years ago, as an indicator of Darius's editorial strategy, but I also can't ignore the fact that since that article was written only two women have ever written for the site. It just seems like an indicator of the basic lack of interest Darius has in gender studies, which would be less problematic if he wasn't the driving force behind an entire comics theory journal.

Even more troubling is the fact that a little less than 5% of the articles on the site deal with sexuality as a primary focus. This isn't gender, even--just the idea of sex, and often the idea of sex in superhero comics. One of the (by my very rough and subjective estimation) 19 articles is Darius's article on the infamous Infinite Crisis rape scene; another is the sole article by one of the two female writers. So, we've got the opposite problem ImageTexT had: women are almost completely absent from the conversation on gender and sexuality in comics.

On the bright side, that one exception is actually a pretty awesome article. It's an excellent piece of analysis on gender normative behavior in comics and the resistance deviation gets from fans whose brains are apparently too ossified to comprehend a woman acting in a "masculine" way, but are still flexible enough to accept people with lazer eyes. It's especially interesting as a four year old analysis from back before the brouhaha surrounding DC's relaunch and its rather -hrm- striking depictions of female characters. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any other articles by her elsewhere, which again doesn't strike me as a signal of hope. Not that I think she's been stuffed into a refrigerator somewhere, of course, but if women who write about comics tend to write one or two articles and then vanish, well... when you compare that to how prolific Darius and many of the other Sequart writers are, you begin to see how the conversation could become totally dominated by men.

I think what it shows most dramatically, though, is that memories are horribly flawwed things. I was totally convinced that somewhere, sometime I had read a Sequart article by a woman. It was only when I actually checked the hard data that I discovered my error.

This is the revolutionary power of an approach to the liberal arts that blends in scientific ways of looking at information. It can totally overturn your perceptions.

And I think the results show that things are potentially significantly worse than we may have suspected, even if they are getting better over time.

Now, this isn't the end of the discussion, of course. There are a number of other journals which I do not have access to, or which I don't know how to mine for data. I have no idea how to begin syphoning data from The Comics Journal, for example, but it looks fairly promising at a glance (I wasn't familiar with the journal until my lovely assistant Sara found it for me). If anyone has a method for sorting through the data, please let me know. At any rate, I think it's a good sign that one of the first columns I happened upon on the site was this intriguing article about male superhero costumes and homophobia. It's seldom these days that I run across an article on comics and gender that prompts more than a few seconds of analysis--I've seen most of it before, typically. But this article manages to go beyond basic feminism into the only now emerging feminist analysis of masculinity. That's pretty cool. But, again, I don't really have a way of sorting through the site for data.

I also don't know if my numbers are strictly significant, as defined by psychology, sociology, and statistics. You would have to ask someone who actually knows statistics for that. In fact... do any of you know statistics? Are my findings significant?

In fact, let's make this a little bit interactive, shall we? I want to hear from you, my fair readers. What do you think we can do with this information? Is there something I've missed that we should throw onto the spreadsheet? Another journal you have access to? Share it in the comments and, if you have the time, put together some data for yourself. I'll do a follow up article when I think I've accumulated enough interesting information to warrant a return to the ideas we're discussing here.

I've put together two spreadsheets that include my data. One is a base copy that only I can edit (marked STATIC) but the other can be edited by anyone on The Internet. So, although I have a backup in case something goes horrifically wrong or some troglodyte deletes all the information, anyone that wants to add their own information or their own interpretation of the data can easily do so. Wikidiscourse? Perhaps.

The Static Google Doc
The Editable Google Doc

Like I said, this isn't the end of the discussion. But with the standard of sociology in hand we can perhaps enter a new phase of the discussion that breaks information down not by anecdotes but real, tangible facts. From that, all we need is to embrace the sociological imagination and explore what might be going on and, potentially, how we might solve these social problems.

Heaven help me, I really went overboard on this one. If you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave me some kind words in the comments below.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Mapping Sex in the Stars

Lately I've been toying around with a new way of graphically representing sexuality. I think I've finally hit on something that is at least presentable, but I thought I would present it in a rather novel way. Rather than simply throwing it up and explaining what it all means, I thought I would show the process that led to its creation. This will, I hope, accomplish two goals: exploring how a graphic designer solves design problems, and exposing some of the ways that graphic design decisions can shape an argument, or a worldview, or an identity. The article will therefore have two types of lessons:

Design Lessons--how art gets made
and
Truthiness Lessons--how "truth" gets made

It all started when I posted this article on asexuality on my Google+, with some passing remarks about the difficulty of static, concrete identities. In response to the article, my good friend (and frequent comment writer here on the blog) Timebaum started this little exchange:
 
David Baum's profile photo
Timebaum  -  Gotta love the little-thought-of third point of the General Sexuality Triangle. And if that isn't already a thing, I suggest you make it in an article.
Feb 27, 2012   
Sam Keeper's profile photo
Sam Keeper  -  It's just tricky because it's hard to decide what to include.... I'm not sure I would be up to the task of sorting it out.
Feb 28, 2012  -  Edit   
Sam Keeper's profile photo
Sam Keeper  -  Especially since "Pansexual" actually doesn't fit very well into any existing scheme...
Feb 28, 2012  -  Edit   
David Baum's profile photo
Timebaum  -  The way I see it, I think most people probably see the sexuality spectrum as a line, with Homosexual on one side, and Heterosexual on the other. However, I think that it's really either a triangle (with the third point being Asexual) or even a pyramid (with the fourth point being Polyamory). I don't think the 4-point Pyramid really works, though, as I don't know if Polyamory really fits in the the others. Regardless, I think the Triangle works pretty well, and it's at least an improvement.
Feb 28, 2012   
Sam Keeper's profile photo
Sam Keeper  -  Well, but the problem is, something like Pan functionally doesn't fit because the whole point of pansexuality is that it bases sexual attraction on nonsexual personality characteristics. Furthermore, where would you put someone that is romantically attracted to women but sexually attracted to men? They would end up occupying two different points. And yeah, poly is another possibility, as is gender expression.

I have to wonder if Kinsey didn't, in some ways, do more harm than good by passing down to us this spectrum mindset when maybe a better model would be a constellation...

.....

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Hmmmm...

Thus began a project that would only add to my general sleep deprivation. A few snippets from the conversation struck a chord with me: the idea of mapping things on a triangular spectrum, the idea of finding a way of mapping multiple types of sexualities onto the same chart.

And, of course, there was that one word:

"Constellation."

There seemed to be such poignant potential in that one word. Sexuality, I thought, is a beautiful thing. Why not express it as points of light in an imaginary sky? What a great way of moving past simple categorization and scientific measurement to an emotionally resonant expressive model! It's sexuality as expressed not by psychiatric medicine (no offense, Timebaum) but by artistic sentiment.

Of course, not all of this went through my mind in so many words, but it was there nevertheless. It just seemed intuitive to me. But there's an underlying logic to decisions like this that are not necessarily apparent even to the artist making the creative choices, which, I suspect, helps reinforce the myth of the magical creative moment. This is Design Lesson Number 1: Inspiration is a cognitive skill. That flash of an idea came to me because I have worked to strengthen the neural connections that support this particular problem solving heuristic. Non-artists often seem to have this idea that what we do is magical and comes from some secret place in our souls, but really all we've done is strengthened the parts of our brains that enable creative problem solving.

It also introduces Truthiness Lesson 1: Minor decisions can totally reshape our understanding of reality. All it took was Timebaum's suggestion that I add in a third point to prompt me to rethink our conception of sexuality. What if you could be somewhat bisexual but also mostly asexual? Or, to split things up further, what if you could separate other sexual characteristics? These decisions are pernicious because they are also often invisible. I suspect that if you asked someone who wasn't aware of asexuality how they would map sexuality out they would suggest a spectrum with gay at one end and straight at another. (Or straight at one end and hellbound on the other, I suppose.) It's just common sense, after all. But Kinsey made a decision, when he first described sexuality as a spectrum, to label the two ends in that way, and, with that decision, shaped what common sense was.

But enough of this intellectual drivel, let's get to the first pretty picture. Even I'm tired of my own writing by now.

Sexuality Star Chart Version 1 (Click For Larger Version)
 My design decisions for the star chart largely stemmed from the need to merge gender expression and sexuality into one chart. I decided that, rather than go the usual path and put gay and straight at either end, I would stick male and female at the bottom end with asexual on the top. This allowed me to use particular points to indicate different aspects of sexuality. I wanted to make sure to differentiate between several types of sexuality and gender expression, so I created a point for gender and biological sex, and points for sexual attraction, willingness to play (meaning you might not be physically attracted to a person of a certain gender, but you'll play around with them because, well, pleasure is nice), and romantic attraction. I also wanted a way of showing polyamorous interest, and I decided the best way to do that would be to put additional circling planetoids around the sexuality stars. This is where the metaphor started to get kinda weird, but I liked how it looked, and I wanted to express it somehow, so the idea stuck.

For this chart, the individual would be (apparently) intersexual (note the biological sex is in the middle), slightly more male gendered, polyamorously interested in play, attraction, and romance, all slightly more interested in females and more romantically than sexually interested.

It's not a bad system, I don't think. But something about it didn't quite work for me. This is Design Lesson Number 2: Design is a method for problem solving. The problem solving aspect of art tends to be a bit overlooked in modern artistic discourse, but it's absolutely huge conceptually. I don't care how much of an inspired, creative, emotional person you are, eventually you're going to look at a piece and realize that not only doesn't it look right, you don't know how to fix it.

So, I stared at this design for a while and pondered it over, and noticed a few things:
  1. The stars are way too varied in their appearance. There's no unity to the piece as a whole because I've got that weird pointed thing, moons, that really large yellow circle and so on. A simple circle and a simple triangle are the major shapes in the work; I need to stick to those.
  2. The colors are terrible. They just look arbitrary and badly organized and bleh. There's not enough variety for it to be a balanced rainbow (a desirable scheme, considering what this chart represents) but there's too much for there to be visual unity.
  3. There really aren't enough stars, and they're too big. They don't look like stars, they just look like abstract symbols in a triangle. Thankfully, this can be solved by also solving the next problem:
  4. There's some stuff I'm missing. For one thing, gender identity isn't necessarily obvious (I don't always wear a skirt, for example) so I should add in gender expression.
I came to these conclusions because, again, I have a way of thinking about art that lets me come to decisions quickly. I run down the list of What Could Be Wrong, and I run immediately into "Is the design unified?" "Do the colors relate?" and "Is it expressing what you're trying to express?" That tells me what I need to fix to make it look better overall.

But it also catapults me straight into Truthiness Lesson 2: When you lock into a particular model, you blind yourself to what you have excluded. This is true in two ways. First, you blind yourself potentially to people whose needs are different from your own. The lack of unity is ugly, there's no denying it, but it does accomplish one thing:

It makes the chart readable to people who are colorblind.

And that actually didn't even occur to me until I started writing the article. This is a great example of how I became blind, through my design strategies, to the needs of others. And while I think there's some validity to the argument that you can't design based on every single person's needs, my point isn't that I should redesign the piece to be useable to the colorblind, or the blind, or what have you, but that I should have at least made the choice consciously. And, thinking back, that was one of my reasons for designing the chart the way I did originally, but somewhere along the several days of creation I forgot that I had made that choice.

Whoops.

What's more, as I wrapped up this first draft, I happened to run into a friend of mine that's interested in analysis of gender roles and sexuality. I asked this person what else I might include as part of sexuality.

"What age group a person is attracted to."

I was flummoxed. That had never occurred to me. Age attraction is just something that's taken as either normal or not normal--common sense, again. And, I was locked into a chart design that really couldn't effectively incorporate that information. The model I had decided upon, combined with cultural assumptions, had totally blinded me to a whole area of sexuality.

The chart also can't account for: causes of attraction (there's no difference between bisexuality and pansexuality), kinks and fetishes, domination or submission preferences, where you prefer to be touched, how hard, and so on. Again, my point is not that I should have found a way to model all of these--that would probably be impossible, or at least it would be really ugly and cluttered looking. My point is that what I chose to map was largely arbitrary and no more fundamental, in some cases, to aspects of sexuality that I excluded from the star chart. But again, once I was locked into the chart design I was blind to what I had left out.

These stunning failures aside, I slogged forward through the murky marsh of graphic design, and turned out this:

Sexuality Star Chart Version 2
There are a lot of improvements here. For one thing, the colors are less crap. That's because I started actually plotting out what colors I wanted specifically, what colors should dominate, and so on. Blue-Green and Violet were pretty important, so I made Orange my other major color for... well, reasons. If I went into that whole decision process I would be here all day, and I'm actually planning a Color Theory article for the next few weeks, so you'll just have to tremble in antici... pation for a while longer. I'll point out, though, that based on this scheme the least common and most important color is Orange, which gives Willingness To Play special prominence on an unconscious level...

It also now includes both interest in forming friendships, and gender expression, which helps fill the chart out a bit more and helps potentially clarify some of the person's sexual nature a bit more. (Incidentally, yes, this is a real person's chart, and no, I'm not telling you who.)

 Just for fun, here's mine. I'm sexually the big dipper!
Sexuality Star Chart Version 2 B
 Interestingly, in the process of putting my own chart together, I learned Truthiness Lesson 3: Take metrics with a grain of salt: they're probably better at getting you to examine yourself than anything else. You see, I don't know that my star chart is "right" or "accurate." I know that putting it together helped me to think about myself, though. I realized, as I placed the symbols, that I'm a lot less comfortable receiving pleasure than giving it, and I'm less open about playing around with someone I'm not physically attracted to. I also sort of recognized a bit more consciously that I perform masculinity quite strongly even though I think of myself as not just genderqueer but kind of ambivalently genderqueer--I don't think of myself as not just in between but in between and somewhat neutral.

None of this is a definite, last word sort of thing. It's a snapshot of how I was feeling about these issues as I put the chart together--kinda like how our labels of straight, gay, bisexual, asexual and so on can change over time, despite their definite biological basis. The definitions and our understanding of them change, and that is enough to change our understanding of reality. This chart might be a good way of exploring that, so long as people don't start adopting it like some sort of badge that defines them forevermore.

And, of course, that leads me to Design Lesson Number 3: There Will Always Be Something More To Do. Call it the perfectionist impulse. Once you're used to thinking of work in terms of problem solving and analysis, it's really easy to fall into a perfectionist model of behavior. I can think of a number of clever ways to make this better more complicated:
  • Lines indicating direction of influence, so interest in friendship could point to physical attraction to indicate a genderqueer disposition, and so on
  • An interactive version built in Flash (possibly with the help of guest contributor Ian?) that I could upload for people to play with
  • Some sort of, I don't know, orbit line thing for age ranges or...
Augh, see what I mean? It's so easy to come up with a laundry list of new things you can do with a project. Sometimes, though, you have to just let it go. Will I return to some of these problems? Hell, probably. Obsessiveness is just as much a part of my nature as polyamorous panderqueerosity. But there's a point when you have to say, dammit, this article--er, project is done! Time to send it to the presses and go to bed.

Although, every once in a while you just get an idea so good that you have to try it out.

What, after all, does a map of space naturally include?

That's right.

Space Invaders.

PEW PEW! PEWPEWPEW!
Hm, and this could be combined with the David Icke "Reptillians" theory to suggest that Rick Santorum is secretly a lizard being from outer space that is trying to constrain civilization by preventing sexual exploration, and... [wanders off scribbling notes furiously]

Lesson Number 0: Creativity is just a form of madness that has been put to a constructive purpose.

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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Robin Hood and Rosenkreutz

I just got some news today that shook me rather dramatically. So dramatically, in fact, that I decided to shelve the articles I was working on in favor of this one.

It just made surrealist retro 80s pastiche music videos seem... insignificant.

Somehow.

Anyway. I'll get to what that news was by the end of the article, but I'll just say, for now, that it prompted a line of thought about the nature of certain types of resistance heroes.

By resistance heroes I mean popularly admired (and reviled--this is important) individuals that oppose powerholders in society. There are a few different archetypes that came to my mind, but there are two that stand out as particularly relevant to society today.

They are The Robin Hood and The Rosicrucian.

THE ROBIN HOOD

The first of these is pretty recognizable as a folk hero. Robin Hood has worked his way into our culture fairly completely, but on the off chance that I have a reader that hasn't grown up with English folktales, the character is a rogue and an archer that battles the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and the pretender king Prince John. The iconic description is that he "steals from the rich and gives to the poor," and his end goal is to raise the ransom that will allow the true king, Richard, to return triumphantly to England.

The particulars, though, are less important to me than the archetypal construction. Let's look at the main things Robin Hood has going for him as a resistance hero:

THE ROBIN HOOD IS:
  • A single heroically talented individual
  • With a "Merry Band" of similarly talented followers
  • Who takes on powerholders through dramatic deeds
  • In order to support broadly populist goals

The Robin Hood is therefore a figure that fights power by carrying out individual, heroic deeds. This archetype makes for great cinema because it provides a central figure and a supporting cast of similarly minded and talented individuals. It has the heroism of the individual will and the collective strength of a group of likeminded people.

The advantage of this model is that it lends itself to a dramatic narrative that outsiders can latch onto. There is a natural central ideology expressed by the group and a strong entertainment value to the exploits of the individuals involved.

The disadvantages are pretty severe, though. After all, if The Robin Hood or the members of the Merry Band are compromised, the whole movement can be torn down. This makes it a fundamentally unstable system. Its greatest enemy is the Intelligence Agent or the Ruthless Assassin--in other words, individuals (usually part of a larger institution) that can either oppose the Robin Hood on his or her own terms (in the case of the Ruthless Assassin) or can compromise the Robin Hood through manipulation, hostage taking, blackmail, and general mindfuckery (the Intelligence Agent).

Examples might include:
  • Robin Hood (naturally)
  • Captain Jack Sparrow
  • Morpheus and Neo
  • The Fabulous Killjoys
  • Guy Fawkes (this will be important later)

THE ROSICRUCIAN

This is a little weirder and less intuitive. The Order of Rosenkreutz never actually existed--let's get that out of the way first. It was a hoax created by a bunch of drunken students. The idea was that the organization was composed of the finest alchemical minds in Renaissance Europe and was actively working to... well, what they were working towards wasn't exactly clear, but ever since then there's been a certain mania for the Order.

In fact, we can still see some of its influence today in modern conspiracy tales (they're often connected to the Knights Templar or the Illuminati) and, interestingly, in Masonic iconography (even though it was a hoax, the Order had a lot of symbolism associated with it that others adopted quite freely).

The reason I'm including it as a resistance hero is because when the Order of Rosenkreutz appeared on the scene the established powers flipped the proverbial fuck out. The Order represented a manifestation of what a lot of traditionalists feared above all else: the growing popularity of the mystic alchemy that was the precursor to modern science, the threat of a faceless foe united across national and religious boundaries, and the rise of heretical values following the emergence of Protestantism. So, you can see why this organization without a leader, without a structure, and without even a concrete set of goals had just about every literate person in Europe talking.

THE ROSICRUCIAN IS:
  • A faceless member of a larger organization
  • With esoteric and often vaguely defined goals
  • That draws strength from decentralization
  • And may be a copy without an original

That last point is a little odd, perhaps, but if you think of the historical Order it makes a bit more sense. The Rosicrucians that actually existed all existed because they tried to emulate another organization that they had heard of but never interacted with. The fact that this organization was a hoax--a nonexistent original--did not keep them from acting as copies. This means that anyone can be The Rosicrucian regardless of their heroic power. All you need to do is declare yourself The Rosicrucian and act in a way that you think carries out the esoteric goals, as you interpret them.

The great power of the Rosicrucian is that an individual playing The Rosicrucian can be compromised by the two villain archetypes I described earlier, but there will always be more Rosicrucians filling the ranks as people copy the original and the other copies.

The Rosicrucian is particularly weak to the Agent Provocateur--an individual who adopts the role of the Rosicrucian in order to commit atrocities that will discredit the movement.

Examples Might Include:
  • The Rosicrucians
  • The Laughing Man
  • Spartacus (by the end, spoiler alert)
  • Arguably the Viet Cong (ah, I can already feel the internet rage...)
  • V

Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the point, shall we?

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD

Staggeringly, this article was NOT just a filmsy justification for the creation of this image.

The leader of Lulzsec, Sabu, has sold out his organization. Lulzsec is functionally destroyed. What's worse, Sabu sold them out six months ago--he's been working for the FBI for half a year now. I find it difficult to articulate just the level of catastrophe we're seeing here.

What we're seeing is, simply put, the Death of Robin Hood.

Basically, Lulzsec gambled that their Merry Band of pirates could protect itself by hiding on the net while still carrying out the kind of press-making big publicity heroic stunts that made it such a power for its few months of action.

They gambled and they lost.

According to Anons the FBI threatened Sabu with the loss of his children--a claim I'm in no position to corroborate, but that I'm not particularly inclined to dispute. It doesn't seem what I would call implausible. This is the danger to The Robin Hood. If you put Maid Marianne in danger, you may find your Merry Band totally compromised. It's infuriating. It's twisted. But it's really only to be expected.

So, what's left now that Robin Hood is dead?

Well, I think what comes next is the continued move to the Rosicrucian model. The closer a Merry Band is, the more susceptible it is to either dismantling through the removal of key members or the subversion of people within the group. As I mentioned before, The Rosicrucian is less open to compromise due to the decentralized, individual nature of the movement.

This is why I suspect that Anonymous will carry on despite this setback and continue carrying out its raids and DDoS attacks. They are the Order of Rosenkreutz now: a faceless, esoteric mass of individuals fascinated with a shared loose set of ideals and icons. They are more fearful, in a way, than the relatively comfortable Robin Hood, but even in this there is a certain mystique and power. The Rosicrucian is in danger, of course, of falling to Agents Provocateur, but Anonymous has repeatedly shown that it is smart enough not to fall for the bait of people like the Westboro Baptist Church, and members can always splinter off if they disagree with the current targets.

What fascinates me about this is that we are seeing a transition from the model that Guy Fawkes worked under to the model championed by V (at least, championed by the movie version of V). Lulzsec was perhaps always doomed to failure. It is a throwback to an older model of heroic resistance that, frankly, didn't turn out so well for Guy Fawkes, either. We can perhaps take some consolation in that fact.

Robin Hood is dead.

But The Rosicrucian is alive and well in the 21st Century.
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