Some background first: as a small child, before I knew any better, I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager. I loved the idea of the human race fixing itself, ending oppression, and setting off for the stars! It was only after I grew up that I realized how much of the sci-fi genre revolved around reactionary cultural enforcement.
Now, like many a jaded feminist nerd, I am dismayed by the dearth of good sci-fi and resentful of the stealth-advertising bombardment for the latest Star Trek movie. Even though it is already in the DVD dustbin, there is still a flood of viral advertising, stealth marketing, and astroturfing demanding that all sci-fi fans go watch this lens-flare-laden asshole fest: Apple has peppered its site in Star Trek screenshots [1], NPR did two news stories on it, HISHE [2] went gaga over it shortly after their merger with Starz. Then there's the marketing tie-ins with Nokia, Verizon Wireless, Esurance, Kellogg's, Burger King, Intel Corporation, Mattel, Hasbro and Fundex Games which promoted the film via its playing cards, Monopoly, UNO, Scrabble, Magic 8-Ball, Hot Wheels, Tyco R/C, 20Q, "Scene It?" and Barbie lines. Barbie! For a Star Trek movie that has only one recurring female character!
For all that cash spent on promotions, the movie's sales lagged behind The Hangover and Sherlock Holmes. Over at Amazon.com, it ranked 11th in rentals, right behind Bride Wars and Fireplace - Fullscreen Edition.
Not that anyone is complaining about its flagging performance. The dudes got more boys-only space exploration, and Paramount got to reboot a long-standing dudeboy franchise with even less ethics (somehow) than the original [3].Outside of the movie's inevitable march to obscurity in a few years, the only other positive thing that has come from Paramount's multimillion-dollar fratboys-in-space culture blitzkrieg was a brief and painful encounter that I had with one of its trailers. My complete revulsion to that trailer and the entire culture that it celebrated caused my mind to instantly crank out a fascinating rebuttal. Over the next few minutes, whole worlds, characters, people, technologies, lifestyles and ships formed in my mind. None of it I had seen before. Perhaps this is what Jill was referring to when she talks about the power of obstreperal rays? Or perhaps my brain had finally found a productive use for all the hours of crappy TV that I absorbed as a child. Either way, I couldn't write it down fast enough. I hate to say it, but Star Trek (or rather my loathing of it) got me writing my own sci-fi. If you want feminism from a genre laden with male exclusivity and violent cultural enforcement, you have to make it yourself.
Unfortunately, time is not plenty. I write when I can, and after months of slow progress, the first long chapter is nearly finished. I'm currently debating whether or not to post it online when it is finished. On the one hand, I want to get some feedback on my first attempt at fiction writing. On the other hand, I don't want some dudebag stealing the world that I invented, filling it with a bunch of beta-male assholes and selling it to Paramount. J.J. Abrams already has plenty of shitty material to mangle even further.
So as a substitute for the time being, I have created a list of prerequisites that I believe a feminist sci-fi story, or any sci-fi story for that matter, would need to meet in order to not suck more than a black hole:
- No more British colonialism
Star Trek was notorious for this. In one episode the flagship, commanded by a British captain, had to interrupt inspection of a colony in order to hunt down a renegade ship piloted by a rebellious Irishman. The episode ended with two Irish guys singing war ballads while sloshed. Damn those Irish! Even in the future they make terrible servants to the Queen! - Get some actual good guys
You know why so many sci-fi stories have bad guys riding around in spiky black ships while also being dressed completely in black? Do you know why their dastardly plans never seem to evolve beyond "kill everyone" and "vengeance"? Because the good guys are suchassholesbad-boys that the audience can't otherwise identify the antagonist. If you have to stick your protagonist across from a cyber-Hitler in order for them to look good, you need to get a better protagonist. - Have a lead character who isn't a token-minority
Sci-fi has progressed to the point that they will occasionally tolerate a black man, Asian man or white woman in a semi-important role. But would it really kill them to show some variety to humanity in a post-poverty, post-patriarchy future? Try having a black lesbian woman as a starship captain. Hell, at this point having a short person in a leadership role would be groundbreaking. - Pass the Bechdel Test
Have more than two ladies, and have them talk to each other about anything that isn't a man. This an absurdly low hurdle, yet most sci-fi can't pass the Bechdel Test. - Stop raping and killing off your female characters
This staple of crime novels finds many copycats in sci-fi. If you ever meet one of these writers from either genre, punch them. - Have a strong female character who isn't a robot
If presidents and CEOs can be in relationships and have longstanding friendships, then your non-token-minority female leads can have lives and be human too. Preferably one of their friends will be female, and they can have conversations with them about things that aren't men. - Have a strong female character who isn't longing to get married
The world doesn't need another Twilight in space. Fortunately, the Bechdel Test cuts out most sci-fi series which fail to do this. - No coming-of-age dudeboys
Talk about beating a dead horse. If I have to see one more affluent rebel dudeboy with "potential" (and shiploads of daddy issues) rising to defend the human race, I'm gonna rip my own head off! - No more evil matriarchies
This Patriarchal propaganda is common among fantasy authors as well. The coming-of-age dudeboy must defend the human race from the evildark elvesaliens which are ruled by a manipulative evil queen, dressed in black or red. The motives behind the queen's actions are never given, and her rise to power is never explained. After all, she is not a character, but an antifeminist symbol to be utterly reviled. Her inevitably gruesome defeat at the hands of the young dudeboy ensures that the rightful Patriarchal order of violence against women is restored in the end.
This shit is also quite popular among the few authors who have female protagonists. After all, you can't have a woman beating up a Patriarch, that would be too scary! Better have a chick fight instead. - No femininity-based utopias
Femininity-based utopias play the good fairy to the evil matriarchy's wicked witch. Femininity-based utopias are where the author displays their idealized concept of women's subservience. Cue lots of polite barefoot and pregnant ladies sewing while naked and living in grass huts, but in the future! Femininity-based utopias never have any real ability to defend themselves. Their "physical inferiority" is constantly played up by the author, who makes it a point to show how their entire society exists only at the discretion and pleasure of the dudeboys who rule the rest of the messy "real" universe and wield all the political and technological power. If the author is in a particularly vile mood, the dudeboys will commit horrific war crimes against the women of the Femininity-based utopia before nuking them from orbit, at which point the story devolves into snuff porn. - No institutionalized rape
No pornography, no prostitution, no Suicide Girls analogues, no BDSM. Those are the mainstay of reactionary cultural enforcement, as summed-up best by Phiogistic on IBTP:
"This year I have started reading some male SF writers again. And you know what? It’s painful. To read a book in which the author can envision interstellar and inter-cosmic travel, aliens, colonies on Mars, post-apocalyptic civilizations that live in giant clock towers, and still drop casual references to prostitution and pornography, is painful. Yes, I am looking at you Neal Stephenson. Yes, I am looking at you John Varley. To me, when you drop these comments, and they add nothing to the story at all, do you know what you are telling me? You are telling me that even with your brains as big as planets, you still can’t envision a world without the institutionalized rape of women. You have to assure your male readers, 'In the future you will still be on top, big boys! Some women may be space-ship captains, but this heresy will always be made up for - there will always be a caste of women available for you to rape and assuage your tender egos! Things may change in the future, but not -that- much, never fear!'
And this is what you are telling your female readers: 'You may have somehow infiltrated this male world of words and rocket ships, but you will never escape the boot in the face. Never.' " - No Amateur Porn
I have yet to read a sci-fi story that needed a sex scene, and I have yet to read a sex scene that didn't play out like amateur porn. Do your audience a favor and can the sex trope. - Stop describing the look and measurements of your female characters.
After you cut out the amateur porn, you will find that you don't need to do this anymore. - No institutionalized genocide
I'm sick of planets blowing up, and billions of people being wiped out in a nanosecond, only to have the protagonists barely take notice. Wouldn't an advanced and enlightened society do something to curb such horrific uses of technology? Hell, wouldn't they notice? Are you trying to write a story about the future, or about the modern day UN? - No Happy Housewives
This is 2150, not 1950. At the very least slavery should be outlawed and robots should be doing all the drudge work. - Have uniform uniforms
Our modern dress codes exaggerate slight physical differences between the sexes to highlight gender-based class boundaries. If men and women are actually equal in the future, then uniform types wouldn't be different between the genders.
And stop it with the miniskirts in space. That shit doesn't work in zero-g. - Have a meritocracy
Let protagonists earn their positions of power, instead of inheriting it, falling into it due to luck or cheating, being hand-picked by the current ruling elites, or chosen by some arbitrary traditional esoterica. We don't need Sorting Hats in space! - Know what Post-Apocalyptic actually entails
There are countless post-apocalyptic sci-fis, and the only accurate one that I have ever seen was Wall-E. After the human race falls, there won't be a bunch of boot-camp dropouts partying with beer, whores, cars, and functioning high-maintenance weaponry. In reality the elites of the post-apocalypse would biff off with anything still valuable and functional, while the boot-camp drop outs would starve to death on Earth along with everybody else. - Stop wasting resources on morons
Even in today's military, groundings and collisions are career-enders for U.S. warship captains. So forget about a future where multi-gazillion dollar spaceships are handed over to risk-taking assholes who callously blow them up in every other movie. - No gendered spaceships
It's creepy and bizarre enough when a Frenchmen asks a tourist if they have "mounted" the Eiffel Tower. It's even more screwed up to hear Kirk go on and on about treating a spaceship "like a lady" before blowing it up a few hours later. - No More phallus-shaped spaceships
Please, enough with the phallic warships. They're stupid. It has also been done so many times now that it is ancient. So please, just stop! Seriously, it's getting to the point that CGI space battles are becoming NSFW, unless your work is being Sigmund Freud: - Toss out the kill-or-be-killed Patriarchal propaganda
This one is a mainstay of traditional "hard" sci-fi: the misguided idea that sentient beings can only survive if they are violent, aggressive, fearful and paranoid enough to out-shoot the rest of the universe. If their logic was true, then the world would currently be ruled by the Taliban. That the world is not ruled by warlords has not stopped hard sci-fi advocates from insisting that violence and warfare is the only way for future space civilizations to go. In reality, such paranoid, aggressive and warlike civilizations cripple themselves through infighting and lack of innovation, creating the opportunity for more stable and less aggressive cultures to band together against such warlords and develop means to marginalize them (see the Great Wall of China if you need proof). Sci-fi writers should leave the kill-or-be-killed crap to the first-person shooters. - Be original
This part is hard, because there are a lot of tropes out there that everyone is used to hearing and taking for granted. If you're going to go out on a limb and write something that is actually progressive, you might as well be interesting too. - Take a critical look at society
The current trend is to dump on stories for being overly critical of society (see anvilicious). The argument goes is that if a story is going to view society critically (read: not rocking out to white male privilege) then its morality needs to be presented in a subtle fashion (read: edited out entirely) so as to not hurt the reader with thinking or pangs of conscience. Progressive stories, even those without a Greek chorus, will be decried as overly preachy when they reject the violent misogynist norms of the genre. However, if writing a smart and incisive story leads to dudeboys whining that it is too "anvilicious", then you might as well drop the anvil anyway. - Have Good exist!
I want to see a sci-fi book which includes a bright future that is antithetical to the powers-that-be of our times. I want to see a future that would match Dworkin's vision from First Love:
"There would be a new social order in which people could live in a new way. There would be this new way of living which I could, on the edges of my mind and in the core of my being, imagine and taste. People would be free, and they would live decent lives, and those lives would not be without pain, but they would be without certain kinds of pain. They would be lives untouched by prisons and killings and hunger and bombs. I imagined that there could be a world without institutionalized murder and systematic cruelty."
In other words, I want to see what sci-fi is capable of beyond space ships and blinking blue lights.
Feel free to add to this list. And if you have some recommendations for decent misogynist-free sci-fi, please send it my way! I've already found Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy & Utopia and its blog but I need to narrow down their list some more. Also, I'm really burnt out on sci-fi books being labeled as feminist but then diving into the crap listed above. If it isn't at least as radfem as Daughters of a Coral Dawn, I won't even look at it.
[1] Complete with not-so-subtle footnotes on the bottom of the page telling people that the movie is available on iTunes.
[2] If you haven't seen How it Should Have Ended before, I recommend watching their Twilight and Texas Chainsaw Massacre shorts. They are infinitely better than the originals!
[3] Of course, Newsweek does not count Kirk's treatment of all women as sex trash cans as unethical. Rampant sexism was of course one of the few aspects of the original Star Trek series that wasn't lost in the franchise reboot.
Copyright July 2009 by F*ck M*sculinity
