The Responsibility to Educate

One of the things that happens when you write about Stuff is that people ask you questions about Stuff.  

About a year ago, I wrote about the portrayal of Batwoman, Kate Kane, femininity, etc. and received a lot of comments on that post.  One of the comments (if you don't feel like reading the link) got angry at me for calling Kate Kane a femme (I think the commenter misunderstood, personally, because I was only calling Batwoman a femme) and we got into a "discussion" about gender theory.  I asked the commenter to inform us, since she (self-identified as a she) was very angry and not very clear.  The response I got was that it's not her responsibility to educate.  I agree.  In fact, I said:

I'm not here to delve into the trenches of critical gender theory, I'm here to use my background of critical gender theory, my love of pop culture and comic culture, and my personal experiences to rant, rave, and/or praise the comics (and comic-related things) that I read and see.

The same stays true (though obviously expanded from comics).  Obviously, writing the blog  - and ranting a lot on twitter - means I want to share my viewpoints with a larger audience.  And to that extent, I always welcome questions and conversations.  

But how much are we - whatever the we is that's being tokenized - expected by people to educate just because we exist?  If someone says a homophobic comment, do I have to tell them why they're being a homophobe, or can I just walk away?  Is it my responsibility, as self-identifying gay person, to step up?  Is a straight person expected to step up, too?  I honestly don't think they are.  A straight person may choose to say something, but I think that if they were to walk away there would be a lot less judgment on them.  

I hate to say that it feels like it's very much "us vs. them", but it too-often does.  And sometimes the us are part of the them (I am white and I have white privilege, and that means I will often be part of Them, and that's something I deal with) and that's something a lot of people have the ability to ignore.  

When I talk about a comic book or video game's portrayal of gender and sexuality, it's because I choose to.  But a lot of times, particularly when talking about issues of non-binary gender identity, I feel like it's because I have to.  There aren't enough people saying these things. 

I thought about this question a lot over the last weekend, at PAX East.  I was frustrated - not by anyone in particular - by this idea that you have to speak up when something negative occurs, that you have to work to educate the community, because they won't educate themselves.  Why won't they educate themselves?

Because they don't have to.

I think about Audrey Lourde's The Master's Tools a lot. I think about the heavy gender assumptions that go along with a lot of the critical gender and sexuality pieces I read about things I'm interested in.  I think about all of the very feminine teenage girls on television who are coming our or defying labels, and I think about Franky Fitzgerald and how she's one of the most radical characters on scripted television since Lieutenant Uhura.  

Franky Fitzgerald, from series five of Skins.

It makes me think I have a lot to say.  But that's my choice.  Right?

Sexuality in BSG.

I'm a bit behind on my comics because of my week long moving process, so I'm going to write about something else, instead. The title does say "and pop culture," after all. If this goes well, I may have some more non-comic posts in the future, especially during slow weeks.

Okay, so this came up in my post about female friendships in comics. I said not to get me started, but then James asked if I would start. So here we go.

Boo!

Actually, I've talked about this a lot with one of my friends. Who would we like to see as The Token Not-Straight Character in BSG? The obvious choice is Starbuck, which is why Starbuck would be a no go (Billy would also have bee obvious). I personally vote Eight, but Eight 's line seemed to be particularly defined by her relationships with men, so meh! Dualla would have been good, or Roslin (though I loved the Adama/Roslin romance, and how it portrayed in a beautiful, tender, realistic way the development of love, romance, and a sexual relationship between older people) or Hot Dog (nope, had to spawn a kid), or Tory or... well, lot's of people.

But we eventually decided that the best would have been Lee. Why? Because it would have messed with peoples' ideas of what gay men "should" be. He's a soldier (suck that, DADT), a statesman, and a hero. He's a "manly man," and not overly effeminate (not that there aren't effeminate gay men, and not that I think there's something wrong with effeminate gay men, but if you want to mess with peoples' preconceived notions of stereotypes, you don't want the butch woman to be the lesbian - Starbuck - or the effeminate man to be the gay one. Not that there was an effeminate man on the show. Besides maybe Baltar. Cough.) Also he's a dude, and most Token Gay People tend to be women, and they're only Token Gay during sweeps week, so they can mack on other femmey women for ratings. Personally, I hated Lee. He was probably my least favorite character of the entire series, but a lot of that was because of his relationship with Starbuck, so maybe I would have liked him better as The Token Gay.

So now that I've rambled about who should have been the Token Not Straight Character, let's look at the ones we did get (spoilers):

1) Six, particularly her Caprica and Gina versions. Caprica really only had a threesome with Baltar and Three, so I don't think that should count. I'm also not sure that was Caprica, but I got confused by all the Sixes. You know the one. On the ship. In the bed. With Baltar and Three. She was a bad guy. And Gina detonated a nuclear bomb and killed a bunch of people. After having been tortured and raped for awhile (and was only Not Straight in the extended cut). Neat!

2) Three. But she got boxed, so that's some negative reinforcement for you. Also the whole threesome thing, which could be done in a very interesting "we don't think of relationships the way you do, you backwards humans" way, but wasn't.

3) Admiral Cain. But only in the extended version, and oh yeah SHE WAS A BAD GUY. Ahem, caps lock. A brutal killer. Shot people in the head for disagreeing with her. Super.

4) Hoshi. But only in the web series. The lone example of a decent portrayal of a non-straight person, if only because... well. Besides becoming Admiral at the end, he didn't really do much. Or express opinions. Or have screen time.

5) I saved the best for last. Felix "I'm Bastard" Gaeta. I lied before when I said Lee was my least favorite character. Gaeta was. To be fair, I hated Gaeta right from the very start, even before his whole mutiny thing. Oh and the VP to Baltar thing. He was a slimey, jealous bastard right from the start. And then he was VP to Baltar, and responsible for the death of how many people (I so loved the moment in the web series when we found out about that)? But it's okay, Felix, you didn't know. He was willfully blind, to the detriment of everyone, and I can't stand that sort of character trait. He's, arguably, one of the least sympathetic characters in the entire series. And if you felt sympathetic for him for anything but the whole leg-loss situation (which he then used as an excuse for later behaviors), please tell my why. I'd really like to know. I was actually satisfied when he was executed, which is saying something. So there we go. Plus he was only Not Straight in the web series, which was, coincidentally, the only time we saw a same-sex kiss on the show. Props for it being between two men, but boo because one of those men was Felix Gaeta.

There we go. That's what we were given. And here's why it was disappointing:

One of the beautiful things about BSG is that it was able to be an allegory for and a mirror in the face of our own society. It made us think about things. Things from the very obvious "what would you do for food" to the nature of what makes us human. It tackled subjects like torture,, terrorism, religion, democratic process, and abortion in very cutting edge ways that managed to both remind us of our culture and yet be something totally different. It made the bad guys monotheists, and then made them not as bad as we thought. The moment Roslin made abortion illegal was when this really hit home for me. I loved her. I wanted her to be my president. She was obviously, in my mind, the sort of liberal-leaning, civil-rights-loving, ass-kicking woman I wanted to my White House. And then she took away a woman's right to choose. She did it for a reason, and that reason was explained well, and her thought process was painful (kudos to Mary McDonnell), but here she was doing the exact opposite of what I thought she would do.

And it made me think. When you've only got forty-thousand people left, what's more important? The species or personal freedom? (I still say personal freedom, but that's okay.)

If they can handle the most divisive topics of our time in such a brilliant and bold way... why was everyone heterosexual? Why were the people who weren't heterosexual relegated to the web series and extended cuts, and why were most of them bad guys?

Rick Berman's old answer to the question of "why is everyone in Star Trek straight" was that it was a non-issue. It was evasive, since the complete lack of any representation in the twenty-fourth century made that non-issue a glaring oversight. But Ron Moore never said that. He even talked about including sexuality in the show. And it was a very sexual show, which focused several episodes on storylines revolving around, in no particular order: Starbuck and Lee, Starbuck and Sam, Helo and Athena, Chief and Cally, Chief and Boomer, Baltar and Women, Adama and Roslin, Cat and Random Drug Guy, Adama and Roslin, Billy and Dualla, Lee and Dualla, Starbuck and Leoben, Starbuck and Zack, Tigh and Ellen, Baltar and Caprica... I'm sure there are more. Storylines that were central to the entire arc of the series.

And so... and so I'm left unsatisfied. Could you imagine an episode where Roslin outlawed homosexuality? After all, if the survival of the species is tantamount to her, so much so that any pregnant woman is required by law to carry to term, you'd think she'd follow with the whole "homosexual relationships tend not to produce offspring so easily" thing. There could have been debates, gay couples that showed up with their kids, arguments about surrogacy and adoption, et cetera et cetera. It's not like they didn't have time for this, there was pretty pointless episodes/storylines along the way that could have been replaced with that storyline.

Maybe it would have turned into a Token Gay Storyline. And maybe not, because the writers on BSG were some of the best writers out there. Like I said, the tackled pretty much every modern issue interestingly and in a way that was obvious without being preachy.

So it would have been nice to have someone besides the villains, the barely-there dude, or the deviants be the people in same-sex relationships or having same-sex hookups or even just declining a Baltar advance because they're not into guys. It would have been nice to have something beside the usual parade of negative portrayals.

I guess I should at least be happy Cain wasn't pregnant.

Exactly.

Friends and Special Friends.

One of Gail Simone's responses to the whole Cry for Justice #2 thing (you know the one, where Hal gets backed into admitting he had a threesome with the Huntress and Lady Blackhawk) was that it's troublesome to see people write strong female friendships in a way that inevitably lead to sex. Like two women can't just be good friends with each other, because if they're that close they obviously must have some sort of sexual interest in one another.

To drag out a good quote of hers:

"What IS it about female friendship that is so scary or impossible to imagine that it's so rare in comics? Honest to god, and I"m not talking about this book here, but it's something I've thought of often, it's just utterly baffling to me how poorly female-to-female non-sexual relationships are realized.

We have tons and tons of historic bromances in comics, but I really had to invent a superhero female friendship for Diana because she didn't really have one outside of Donna. How dumb is that, in seventy years of stories? The Jla, the Avengers, all that stuff, hardly any lasting friendships between two women.

Once again, JLI was ahead of the game with Fire and Ice. But the vast majority of female team books are of the dumbass Charlie's Angels mode, where everything is about fake lesbian posery and talking about men, as if the characters don't exist without them.

When I wrote bop, we went almost five years with no serious romantic subplot quite intentionally, with the idea of showing that women can actually have real friendships and arguments and all of that range of emotion without having to connect it to guys for it to carry weight and validity. And I think it worked, I think people understood that Canary and Zinda and Babs and Helena loved each other, genuinely loved each other. I think that was the pure joy of the book, really.

Why is that such an unbelievably rare thing, not just in comics, but in all media?"

Yeah. Seriously. Unless it's in a show, movie, or book specifically targeted towards a female audience. Certainly anything aimed towards the male gaze has a lack of them, and even "neutral" things, like, um. BSG (okay, arguable if that's a neutrally targeted show, but that gets into the whole women-liking-scifi thing and I'll save it for another day). Even BSG has a lack of female friendships. Tigh and Adama's friendship is one of the core relationships of the series. The [heterosexual] romantic relationships certainly are, and ended up being the most important plot points of the arc, by the end. (Don't even get me started on sexuality in BSG.) But there was no strong female friendship, despite having lots of strong female characters hanging around.

I'm conflicted on this one. On the one hand, I absolutely agree with what Ms. Simone is saying. In comics (and other media intended mainly for men), female friendships are rare unless there's some kind of sexual subtext involved. On the other hand... I ship it.

What I mean by that is something I've talked about before: subtext. I'm a Xenite. That's arguably one of the strongest female friendships in pop culture history. But if you asked me if they were having sex with each other, I'd say "yes" in a heartbeat and not feel a tad guilty about it because I ruined the portrayal of a strong female friendship. In my mind they remain great friends, because ... what's that quote? Love is friendship set on fire. Word.

Here's the thing. I'm not just a woman, I'm a gay woman. (I know, shocking.) And as a gay woman, I have been pretty much starved for representation in the media. Disney princesses end up with Disney princes. Everyone on TV, everyone was trying to be in a relationship, make a relationship work, or dealing with the hilarious hijinks of having a relationship (depending o the type of show), and all of those relationships were heterosexual. Even the cross-species love (Kermit and Ms. Piggy) was still straight love. Every movie I remember watching, re-watching, and eventually wearing the VHS tape out on had a heterosexual relationship at the center of the story (with the exception of maybe Mary Poppins, but I'd argue that).

I completely understand the frustration with turning close female relationships into sexual ones. But at the same time... I'd like to see some ladies lovin' each other. Even now, even post-Ellen, post-Xena, post-The L Word, we're not really well represented. (Yes, I'm a regular reader of AfterEllen.com, why do you ask?) And if we are there, we're usually chaste. Don't believe me? Compare the amount of times you saw Bianca Montgomery kiss one of her girlfriends (let alone get into bed wit one) to the amount of times you saw her sister Kendall get her freak on with various dudes.

Shuttup, I watched All My Children for the lesbian. Sort of like how I watched The OC for those 8 episodes where Mischa Barton's character (um, I don't even remember her name) was dating Olivia Wilde's character (Alex!). Sort of like how I've seen pretty much every movie on the Required List of Lesbian viewing, because it's not like there's a lot out there to go through. Sort of like how I spent hours back in 2001 downloading Real Media clips of the first two seasons of the British show Bad Girls because.. you guessed it: lesbians.

Or bisexual women.

Anyway, my point is that sometimes I really do think the women ought to be together. Not always, no. And I absolutely agree that there is a lack of strong female friendships pretty much everywhere ever (Sex in the City and its genre copiers are exceptions, but all of those women were also defined by their search for men). But sometimes, you know. I just ship it. And maybe I'd like to see some women in comics hooking up with other the same way guys hook up with women. We've got a lesbian leading a comic, let's see how long it takes her to have the amount of sex the current Batman has had in the pages of his older Nightwing and Titans titles. Let's see how long it takes her to kiss someone.

I know that Ms. Simone wasn't saying women who are friends can't have sex with each other (in fact she explicitly said that earlier), and I know that my point of view is vastly different than the intended audience (men), so the above should be read with a grain of opinion-salt. I don't want all female friendships relegated to the dregs of "heh heh, that's hot" land, but sometimes I really enjoy the chemistry between two characters and would like to see them get together.

Preferably without a guy involved, though.