Grabapple.net

OK, I’ll admit; not the hugest fan of Spiderman. Or any superhero. But if you read any comics whatsoever, they’re pretty hard to avoid.
Which is why I know that Spiderman’s girlfriend/wife/whatever is a nice girl named Mary Jane, who, as far as I know, has never starred in a porn film.

Anyway, it helps to filter the latest happenings in fanboy wankery through an inisightful feminist viewpoint such as Wonder Girl’s.

And it’s thanks to her that I found a link to this little bit of Mary Jane fanboy collectibilia that answers the crucial question: how can we reveal our utterly infantile and assholish attitudes towards women that will fully explain why no actual woman would want to touch us?

Ta-dah!

Oh wait..here’s a better look.

What you can’t see, unless you want to go to the website of the soft-porn version of the Franklin Mint that’s selling this crap, is that she’s also barefoot.

So let’s recap:

–Usually normal-looking female character pornified via big-boobing, stripper wardrobe, and back-breaking (and impossible!) submissive pose? Check!

–Female engaged in menial task that the male in her life should by all rights be doing for himself…and getting some weird sexual thrill out of it? Check!

–Female…shudder…barefoot while doing said task? Extra double check!

–Pitiful fanboys on the comment boards of the retailer’s site thinking said degredation is not disturbing but “hawt”? Extra triple check!

The damn thing’s apparently sold out. Despite the fact that any self-respecting woman who saw it ensconced in pride of place on her date’s coffee table would be completely excused for running far away, fast.

When faced with such a massively clueless bit of offensiveness, sometimes there is only one way to get your point across: turn the tables.

And so, I give you this lovely creation of artist logansrogue, featured on devildoll’s blog:

It may not be pretty, but it had to be done.

…is what I have for Lynda Barry. I don’t think Jesus approves of eating boiled cabbage either, for the record.

Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women. — Nicole Hollander

I haven’t been able to put my finger on why I wasn’t blown away by the much-hyped Y: The Last Man series. It’s an interesting premise (all men and male mammals mysteriously die, except for one man and his male pet monkey. Cue chaos). And the writer Brian K. Vaughan, works hard to show a variety of women characters, and to not make his male survivor a macho superstud in any way. But it still seemed a bit shallow and overwrought to me, and I couldn’t figure out why.

Blogger Bookseller had some good critiques. She points out that the only “radical” bit about it was putting a man in a traditionally female role; the sought-after prize being pursued by others while trying to find happiness and love. The rest, unfortunately, has been fairly dull. Although there are so many female characters, many of them strong, smart, etc. etc., they all feel interchangeable. I have no sense of them as people, even when their tortured backstories are revealed. This may be partly due to the character design, which seemed to give everyone, male and female, rather bland “comics people” faces and bodies; this works ok in a superhero comic, becaues you have the costumes and masks to give the main characters interest. But what that means visually in this comic is that it looks like a Superman world where all the heroes have left and it’s nothing but blandly-drawn extras.

In the presence of really strong writing and dialogue, the bland inexpressive faces might not have mattered as much, but Vaughan isn’t writing to that level, so every “emotional” scene comes off as staged and fakey.

Y has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of praise, and is quite likely to be turned into a movie, and maybe it’ll even be a decent one. But I don’t think Vaughn quite understands what kinds of issues he’s really dealing with when he takes on gender power struggles and the history of sexism.

It doesn’t help that “world without men” scenarios have been done before, and done better, and done by women–in sci-fi stories like Herland, The Female Man, When it Changed, etc.

It’s especially disappointing to read Vaughan after so recently reading the story “The Matter of Seggri” in Ursula K. Leguin’s The Birthday of the World. Next to his thinly-plotted adventure tale, with its ersatz and unbelievable “Amazons” and anguished supermodels, LeGuin’s exploration of what a flip-flopped world with women on top would really be like shines with intelligence, compassion, and honesty.

Her women are not any more admirable as dominators, but they are infinitely more believable. LeGuin took the same conceit that Vaughn used, wondering what it would mean to be a scarce man surrounded by women who want him for his body, and reveals the downsides with a wisdom and precision than Vaughn is unable to match. Seggri is a world with about 20 times as many women as men, and so men are rare, precious, and confined to “castles” and forbidden to do anything but play sports and have sex…provided they’re good at both. No reading, no art, no science is allowed to them (because “what goes to the brain takes from the testicles”), and they can never leave their compounds or choose their partners. We see this system from both male and female sides; the vague guilt and justifications of the women, the horror of the lives of the men, deprived of personhood and agency exactly as so many women have been and still are on Earth.

Like Vaughn, LeGuin puts a man (or all men) in a female role, but unlike him, she doesn’t pull her punches as to what that means in a system without gender equity; i.e., loss of bodily ownership. What I found most unbelievable about Y is that Yorick would be anything but a prisoner; in a world where he was the only possible hope for continuing humanity, he would be locked up and forced to contribute sperm for the rest of his life–and not by having sex, either..far too risky. It would be nothing but glass jars and porn mags for him, except maybe for the occasional experiment with a carefully-chosen, genetically-desirable partner. His own wishes would be seen as mattering not at all next to the needs of his society.

To a woman raised in a society where her uterus (or any of her body) is hardly ever considered her own property to do with as she likes, this is utterly evident and predictable. But it’s as though Vaughn can’t quite admit that anything like that could ever happen to a man. As though he can’t quite imagine the full extent of it–or doesn’t want to. I don’t think that makes him a bad writer, just one unable to see past his own privileges.

So So Silver Age has more.

Marjane Satrapi (author of Persepolis) has a blog now! I’ve updated her link on the right. But the coolest thing is that you can see the (French) trailer for the animated version on her Myspace page. It says “coming July 27″, and the English version was recorded the same time as the French, so I’m hoping that means we’ll see it this summer.

Also exciting is that there are 3 sequels that haven’t made it to the U.S. (WHY?) and so there’s that to look forward to also.

…I’ll just say, “Son…they took a whole lotta drugs.”

Via CartoonBrew

Have you ever searched for videos on Youtube using your hometown as the search term? It’s kind of like Googling an old boyfriend’s name. What you learn may alarm you, frighten you, or just make you glad that you dumped him before he took up an interest in 17th-century snuff pots.

My hometown is Arlington, Texas (Fun Central!tm), a place situated exactly between Dallas and Fort Worth, the tertiary, southernmost point in the sprawling, suburban, SUV-choked megalopolis that calls itself, rather uncreatively, The Metroplex.

Once a humble farm town, Arlington has become the biggest city in the US that refuses to invest in public transit, and has a long history of pimping itself for any entertainment monstrosity that will bring in the tourist bucks; Six Flags, the porntastically named Wet n’ Wild, Dubya’s boondoggle of a stadium for the Texas Rangers, and now, the new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys.

A-town is overrun with gridlock, potholed and falling apart in some places, beset with smog, and priding itself on a “lake” that is nothing but an oversized pond. Just down the road from Six Flags is a deserted mall, a place I remember shopping in with my mom, that could now be used in a zombie-movie remake with almost no changes whatsoever. Arlington is also home to the other UTA, a place where I held one of the worst jobs (and the lowest pay) of my professional life. The university buildings dominate what remains of downtown, and have all the charm of cracker boxes. They were built in the 60s and 70s and lovingly insulated with that wonder fiber, asbestos; insulated so well that the city fathers eventually decided removing it would be more dangerous than leaving it in. Which is why, if you work there, you have to get a hazmat permit to drill holes in the wall. (This is ABSOLUTELY true).

The GM plant has laid off most everyone, the jobs in Dallas and Fort Worth are getting fewer, and the traffic never improves. Arlington is a place you sleep and grocery shop, but…that’s about it. Culture, good music, entertainment that doesn’t cost you 50 bucks at the door is elsewhere.

It does have a lot of chain restaurants, though. And my childhood memories. So I’ll always like it, even if just a little bit.

But as Youtube is teaching me, there are a lot of aspects about it I never knew.

For one, it’s home to a very enthusiastic trainspotter, so much so that his (I assume it’s a he) videos are the most common results under a search for Arlington. If you ever want to know what the Amtrack 22 heading to Dallas via the Center St crossing of the UP Dallas Sub looks like, you’re all set.

There are also quite a few promotional videos for SitMeansSit, a local dog-obedience outfit. I wonder if they understand how very weird it is to name your business with a riff on an anti-rape slogan. I don’t really want to think about the implications of that.

There are many other attractions in Arlington. There’s Frosty Wooldridge, who fancies himself a 21st century Paul Revere..except he’s not warning us against the British coming in the dead of night, but the Mexicans coming to invade us…though we invaded them first…though…hmm. Basically, he’s a racist jerkoff.

Need a tattoo? We’ve got you covered. IN INK!

You can, if you like, enjoy watching toddlers Tae Kwan Do the crap out of each other.

If that makes you feel guilty, you can watch this video about Camp Impact summer camp for homeless/needy kids. About 2 minutes in, you see a lemur!

“But forget lemurs,” I hear you saying, “what about REPTILES?” Oh, we’ve got that covered too. Meet Tell Hicks, Reptile Artist.

Only one thing can top that, my friends: some footage of a half-dozen idiots getting their truck out of a muddy ditch accompanied by some highly appropriate music (I salute this video’s editor). It seems to sum up so much about the place and the people that shaped my growing up. The Mrs. Baird’s thrift store snack cakes; the rumors of Satanists that plagued our local parks; Nickel Beer Nite at the previous incarnation of Arlington Stadium.

Good times, except that they really weren’t; oh well. Maybe better ones might come along. In the meantime, we can all bask in the glow of our friendly neighborhood Elvis impersonators riding minibikes.

I was having a hard time figuring out what to say about Anna Nicole Smith’s death; not because I followed her career, but because her life was short, sad, and severely messed up even though she had a face and body that got her the kind of male attention most women think they would love to have.

But then I went over to Twisty’s blog only to find she’d summed up what bothered me about Smith’s death in one graceful angry bit of prose:

…the entire beauty industry’s primary product..is a pernicious, often debilitating insecurity. This neurosis is as brilliantly marketed as the “cure”: the obsessive purchase of absurd clothing, “scientifically formulated” toxic glop, devices that torment, and harrowing surgeries the sole purpose of which is to advertise one’s status as a receptacle for male incontinence.

If any doubts linger as to the sinister essence of the feminine directive marketed by the beauty industry, I urge you to consider the painful case of poor Anna Nicole Smith, dead of femininity at age 39. Blonde bombshells are disturbingly disposable.

Feminimity* kills, especially if you’re really really good at it.

*Feminism 101 definition: “Feminimity” is something feminists define not as being a woman, but as playing a role, acting and living the way you think “feminine” women are supposed to. As opposed to just actual women, who are women regardless of whether they wear pink, skirts, makeup, or heels. Any drag queen can be feminine. Which might lead us to ask, what is the reason for believing women need to be “feminine” to be real women? Susan Brownmiller wrote an excellent book about just that.

Man, I love those old Brisk commercials, especially this Rocky one.

But the Karate Kid and James Brown ones also rock.

I love a good birth story.

I can’t think of a better example than the birth this morning of laborpayne’s baby boy. She’s a career woman, mother of several (I can’t keep track, possibly six now!) kids, and a doula and homebirth advocate.

Her beautiful pictures of herself in labor and her amazingly coherent blogging DURING labor (jeez!) are just awe-inspiring. I just want to quote the bit that stuck out to me:

I have to stand upright for each contraction- the pain is worse if I sit or god forbid, lay down. My body wants to be upright. Everyone I’ve shown my birth space to, keeps saying, where’s the bed? I won’t birth in a bed, perhaps a squat or on all fours if I don’t feel like standing. I’ll do what my body tells me when the time comes. Now my job is to get through each contraction that comes faithfully every 10 minutes- the downward pressure is all encompassing- like diving into the deep end of a pool.

And I couldn’t help thinking…yes, why do we have beds in our birth spaces at all? Why not some sort of comfy couch with bars for pulling on and squatting, and a well-cushioned floor for all-fours and kneeling? Why not a rope with handles (this was something I saw in Spiritual Midwifery that I dearly wanted at my birth but couldn’t figure out how to do) hanging from the ceiling, so I woman could pull down on it?

I wish I could commission a study of birthing furniture that would actually help women rather than hinder them. What would the optimum birth space look like? I think laborpayne has the right idea.

What’s funny is thinking about that, the optimum space would look more like a gym than a bedroom. But then, since labor is labor, is work, that makes perfect sense.

Congratulations to laborpayne and her new son, little Josiah.

***

Update: did a little googling. Here’s a description of a “woman-led” birth center design, with pictures, but honestly, I think it’s basically a fancy hotel room…the center is still the bed. Though the birth tub room is pretty bitchin.’

Here’s an interesting midwife study in process that looks at the concept of “Birth Territory” and its affect on laboring women.

Ooh, and here’s a similar study out of New Zealand and Australia (NZ has some kickass midwifery practices, I’ve heard).

Sony Classics animation studio is doing an animated version of Persopolis…and they have stills online!

Courtesy Bookslut.

Hot damn.