When your super-liminally racist society ends up being destroyed by the only black characters in the game, who are depicted as violent, white-people-hating, child-murdering savages, you’re just confirming the racist white peoples’ ideas about black people and presenting them as true.

Centering a story about people of color fighting against racist oppression on a white person and making that white person the agent of the fight’s success is racist. Showing people of color as needing a white person on their side in order to win is racist. Transforming a group of people of color into a group of white people halfway through the game is racist. Yes I understand that in the game’s setting of 1912, Irish people were not understood to be white yet. But it’s 2013, Irish people have been white for all of living memory, and the game is set in a giant flying city where people can shoot flocks of birds out of their hands. I didn’t realize that the glue holding this fantasy together had to be racism.

(Here’s your historical accuracy: Irish immigrants coming to the United States at the turn of the 20th century were treated almost as poorly as the newly-freed African Americans. When presented with a racist system that privileged whiteness, Irish people worked hard to assimilate into white society, including perpetuating racism against people of color themselves. This is what racist systems do: they reward people in the system for keeping the system alive.)

When a revolution happens, yes sometimes the leaders become corrupt with power. That usually happens AFTER the power-grab is secure, not mid-victory. Also nothing Daisy Fitzroy does in the game, including shooting a crying kid, is as damaging to as many people as the day-to-day oppression perpetrated by Comstock’s society. I get that given the game’s setting, it’d be kind of boring to sit around and wait 10 years to see Fitzroy’s evolution into The Godfather or whatever (side note: WOULD PLAY), and it’s unfortunate that this game has no mechanics that allow for jumping forward in time…

This was cool: the open auction where people bid on jobs for less and less pay — a thing that has happened before in US history and which we’re close to enacting again (like debtors’ prison). It’s almost like this game could have had a lot to say about power structures and the deification of rich white men. Where was my Occupy Columbia? …Oh right, it was divided on race lines and immediately fell apart (because black women can’t lead? because a strong black woman pushing for change is “just as bad” as the regime she’s trying to topple? I feel like the game thinks it’s delivering a good and interesting message but none of its actual messages are good or even new).

An equally big swing-and-miss: A game showing oppression at a citywide scale eventually drills down into the individual impact of poverty and just how desperate it makes people, the horrible choices being poor can force you to make. If the game hadn’t utterly abandoned the Vox Populi halfway through and dismissed their leader as “deserving” Comstock, this game could have been an amazing gut-punch for the middle class folks. I feel like if the game wasn’t so eager to immediately showcase how “bad” Columbia was, it’d have been a much more nuanced journey from judging the behavior of the rebels to understanding what actual desperation feels like. Instead I spent several hours with a lot of people who were either overtly terrible, labeled terrible, or were revealed to be terrible as a surprise twist.

About that twist: for a game that made sure to hold my hand and overly-explain just about every concept in each setpiece, the actual story and ending of the game felt extremely hurried, which in turn made it seem half-baked and like this wasn’t something that was thought through enough. Alfred Hitchcock famously explained the different between suspense and surprise as showing the bomb under the table at the beginning of the scene or just presenting the scene and then the bomb suddenly goes off. Could have stood a bit more bomb-showing throughout the rest of the game, rather than, “SURPRISE HERE ARE A BUNCH OF IDEAS OKAY YOUR MULTIVERSE DAUGHTERS ARE DROWNING YOU NOW AND SOMEHOW THAT FIXES WHATEVER THE PROBLEM IS THE END…OH WAIT I GUESS THAT DIDN’T FIX THE PROBLEM BECAUSE IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE YOU’RE STILL ALIVE.”

(Young straight white dude game devs are becoming old straight white dude game devs and thus the pretty big-titted girl is now your daughter-love-object not your erection-lust-object, whoops.)

At one point Elizabeth wonders if she’s wishing these alternate universes into being. While that turns out to be false (the truth instead being the current state of DC comics) I actually would have loved that to be true. I love the idea that Fitzroy’s mid-fight behavior and failed revolution are because when a white girl raised in a racist society imagines a reality where the poor black people win, she can’t help but do it in the most racist way possible.

I just cannot get past the fact that the game took so much time to set up this extremely oppressive culture and then worked very hard to make me not care about what happened to anyone in it and then stopped focusing on it entirely.

Why do the twins care so much about saving Manhattan? I mean, I get *we* lived through 9/11 but they didn’t, so why does the bombing of a place we never go to in the game matter so much more than all of the people living in Columbia? For a game set in US history, this was the one piece of the game that actually stank of US entitlement. Who gives a shit about the city off-screen, let me save the city in front of me, yeesh.

[note: this began life as an IM conversation, hence the occasional second voice]

I hate Cameron’s writeup of Mattie’s work. Hate.

The assertion that enthusiast or commercial games writing needs to be more academic in order to be “better” or “more valid” or whatever words Cameron wants to use…fuck that argument, it is classist and bullshit.

Counterpoint: he’s not saying MLA citation. he’s saying hyperlink other writers? Like Lana Polansky did in the piece he linked as a good example.

I get that it’s possible to suggest playing teacher for your audience and linking around to other stuff but that’s not what he’s saying, he’s saying it needs to be more academic, that is the language and frame he chose for this, and it’s a fucking bullshit frame to the highest degree. It is the policy of some sites (but not many game sites) to embed reference links, so why is this not a criticism of the policies of Polygon and PA Report and Kotaku? Why is this “Mattie Brice isn’t writing validly enough for me”?

“Let me be honest: I don’t think online games criticism could be hurt by mimicking academic standards a little.” …Cameron dug himself DEEP into that trench.

Counterpoint: but immediately followed with “t the same time, no. I’m not calling for works cited pages or proper in-text citation. I want articles that acknowledge that others have written on the topic.”

If the practical outcome he wants is, “more embedded links inside games writing,” there are ways to do that that aren’t “I, a PhD candidate, am going to demand that games writing mimic academic standards ‘a little’.” Do you see that? Do you see how this is a white guy coming down from the mountain to tell all the little brown girls they aren’t writing smart enough?

I get you can look past the general tone and see all the ways he chipped away at that original block so it’s not QUITE shaped like THAT, because it’s not about you. I am GROSSED THE FUCK OUT by the overall tone of this piece and so, being kind of nauseous, it’s harder to be like, “oh well I guess he didn’t mean EXACTLY that”.

I think he chose a really silencing oppressive framework for his point to be made in and I think it’s one that specifically puts him completely at odds with Mattie’s public persona and work. A cis white academic man telling a poor trans woman of color how to “mimic academic standards a little” is the kind of context that Cameron seems to think requires hyperlinked citations in order to be valid, especially since he wraps up with asserting that her essay amounts to LITERALLY NOTHING BEING SAID since she didn’t put any links in for him to click on.

And then leaning on that transphobic GROSS response to Mattie’s other piece like no no, see, his point is the legitimate one and Mattie is what, too stupid to understand it? Not academic enough?

(And to play Cameron’s own nitpick game: in his essay he calls Mattie’s essay as an essay over and over, but keeps holding it to the standards he laid out for criticism.)

Making up rules for grading someone else’s writing and then grading it with those rules publicly and co-opting someone else’s really deeply personal essay and holding it up as a teaching lesson for the internet at large is a shitty thing to do. It’s the kind of thing you to do to shitty people who you don’t care if they’ll ever talk to you again…it certainly is completely lacking in any tone of considering Mattie a peer.

“So for Brice, experiential writing and using her voice to speak and and [sic] claim that she exists is rebellion, period.” Cameron dismissing that in particular was revolting, it’s just so gross, I feel so badly for Mattie.

“How could Brice’s essay not have been made better by actually dealing with the arguments of her interlocutors?” I am reminded of times that feminists have refused to show up for panels or debates with really hateful anti-feminist people because they didn’t want to position themselves as just one side of a two-sided argument, as if thinking women don’t deserve bodily autonomy is somehow just one valid opinion versus another. They didn’t want to validate the other side by deigning to consider their arguments, because they aren’t actually valid…and I feel like Cameron’s suggestion that Mattie have to deal with everyone who fucking disagrees with her every time she opens her mouth…it borders on abusive, honestly.

Also it’s so intensely blind to the kind of ‘arguments’ Mattie receives, I mean, I see what I get and I’m a hetero-married cisgender upper middle class white person. It’s amazingly, simultaneously showing off how fucking little Cameron knows, and silencing as fuck toward Mattie. This is that dude who opened his “response” to Mattie’s Would You Kindly with the “thought exercise” that trans people should just not transition if they didn’t want to get abused so much, that’s the dude Cameron thinks Mattie should be thinking about and responding to and engaging with in future writings…I guess for Cameron’s amusement?

What must it be like to be able to completely divorce a single idea from the toxic transphobic person who put it forth and be able to actually respond to it in any non-draining way? Who the fuck has that superpower?

And then to cap all this shit off with “I am totally on board with experiential writing and I think it is a valuable partner to game centered criticism.”

fuuuuuuuck you man
fuck you
omg
fuck you five times

Sure, as long as it’s cited to his satisfaction, engages with whichever abusive jerks Cameron wants to see engaged in, and doesn’t actually require the reader to deem the lived experience being written about as valid all on its own.

And again: OVER A FREE PERSONAL ESSAY SHE WROTE FOR THE BORDER HOUSE, A COMMUNITY BLOG.

Anyway.

Some notes:

1) See how it’s “ONE fatty’s guide” not “THE…” Everyone gets to be a special snowflake when it comes to their own lives. Just because I like doing Crossfit at my gym doesn’t mean all fat people (or all ANY people) have to like it, should like it, should do anything other than what they wanna do, etc.

2) I don’t work out to be thinner, look “good”, get “in shape”, or any of the other reasons people (especially women) are told they’re supposed to be motivated by in the gym. I work out because I like seeing what my body can do, how much weight it can lift, etc. But that’s actually all a nice side-effect — the main reason I go, and the reason I go regularly and keep dragging myself in there in the pitch blackness of winter, is because if I don’t get a certain amount of endorphins & sweat into my week, I start to unravel. Gym 2-3 times a week: Feel great! Skip for a couple weeks: Crying all the time! The gym membership is expensive; anti-depressants and doctors are moreso.

This post is for people who are curious about my experiences with CrossFit, so I can stop trying to go over all this while at various social events that are better spent talking about literally anything else.

WHAT IS CROSSFIT?
I think you can sort out the basics yourself.

YEAH BUT WHAT’S IT *LIKE*?
So here we go: Crossfit was really difficult for me at first psychologically. A lot of the stuff you do is very similar to gym class activities from middle and high school. If reading that just made your feelings wince, I’m right there with you. It was really hard to shake the idea that everyone else in the gym was making fun of me behind my back or judging me for being the slowest, the weakest, the fattest, THE WORST.

I have only ever worked out at my gym, so I can’t guarantee you a great time everywhere, but part of the underlying “deal” with Crossfit is the most relentlessly unshakable positivity I have ever encountered. Did you do well? Everyone claps for you. Did you finish last? Everyone claps for you, probably louder and harder because more people have finished their workout and thus are available for clapping. There are a *lot* of high fives at my gym. Everyone knows everyone’s name, we introduce ourselves to new/unfamiliar faces, and then we cheer for each other. “GET ON THAT BAR, COURTNEY!” is a thing I have had yelled at me across a room more than once.

WHAT ARE THE WORKOUTS LIKE?
You work out in a group — it’s sort of a combination of an exercise class and a personal trainer. The trainers are there, and they correct and guide you, they’ll help you scale down or up as you need, correct your form, and cheer loudly for you. Everyone else (sometimes a few of us, on weekends it’s like 40 damn people and kind of intense) works out around you, claps for each other, shouts encouragements, and occasionally makes nonverbal sounds as needed. (Sometimes I do kind of need to say, “gyaaaaaaah” at the kettlebell.)

The workouts themselves vary, but the important thing is: EVERYTHING can be scaled down. Which was and continues to be important for me, since I sit at a desk all day and I sit on a couch playing video games or watching TV most nights, and so I was not in any shape to be slinging weights around when I started. I could barely do a squat (I still can’t do a proper one). I couldn’t do a real pushup (still can’t). I couldn’t do a pullup (…that may never happen). And that’s okay! There’s other stuff you can do! Other people will probably scale that stuff or other stuff or whatever too! The important thing is, it’s your workout and you are destroying it. Part of that is doing stuff you can actually DO and still walk the next day.

…also you will probably not be able to walk normally the next day after your first workout. Or at least, I COULD NOT. The human body can do just about anything ONCE. Part of scaling the movements is making sure I’m doing stuff that is a challenge, but not so much of a challenge that I overdo it and can’t go back to the gym in a couple days. I’m there to be there, to see what I can do that day, and to keep coming back and keep doing things.

I KEEP HEARING ABOUT BURPEES?

A burpee is when you drop down into a pushup, stand back up, and then jump and clap your hands over your head. I think they’re slightly less brutal if you’re short? But they’re brutal. At Crossfit you do a lot of them (along with squats).

The first WoD I did at my gym involved burpees, and beforehand I said, “oh I hate burpees” and the guy next to me turned around and said, “No you LOVE burpees!” That…kind of sums of Crossfit, for me. If you’re at the gym and want to be there, why tell yourself you hate the stuff you’re going to do there? It’s easier in a way, for me, to just let myself attack the workout and like it, rather than tell myself, “ugh this is terrible” the whole time. It’s one of the few times in my day my brain is capable of being nice to myself no matter what, and I love that feeling.

WHAT’S A “WOD”?
There’s a lot of lingo to learn, some of it Crossfit-specific, some of it more general weight lifting jargon. Crossfit focuses on the Olympic lifts, the clean & jerk and the snatch. There are a bajillion variants on those: the power clean, the squat snatch, the hang squat clean…plus variants on the jerk, like the press, the push press, the split press…lots of words! I think the last month or so is when I’ve finally stopped having to ask EVERY TIME what the lifting series we’re doing that day translates into. Muscle memory takes time, it’s a lot to pick up and memorize, and it just takes a while.

The “WoD” is the Workout of the Day. (Yes, it’s pronounced “wad”…once you start talking to people about your snatch, you kind of get past the double-entendre giggling.) An hour-long Crossfit session is only maybe 15 minutes of “workout” (sometimes as little as 7 minutes). My gym’s routine is warmup -> skill or strength work -> WoD. The WoD is a set of movements that you do in series, sometimes as a set number of rounds, sometimes as many rounds as possible (an “amrap” if you will). It’s nice because even if the WoD is a bunch of movements that I don’t feel particularly good at, I can tough it out because it’s only 9 minutes or whatever.

Some days, the warmup is the hardest part. Some days I overdo it on the strength work and have to play it safe on my weights for the WoD. I listen to my body and make decisions based on what I think I can do, not what I wish I could do.

SOMEONE TOLD ME THERE WERE SPECIAL SHOES.
If you go try out a free workout at a Crossfit gym, don’t wear normal workout shoes. Typical athletic shoes have a lot of padding, especially around the heel, which means your foot isn’t flat and it’s resting on foam. You want to lift weights while standing on concrete, not a foam mattress. Converse Chuck Taylors are a popular choice, as a Vibram Five-Fingers. (I’ve done both, I prefer the Five-Fingers for traction and balance but they’re more expensive.) There are Crossfit-specific shoes, and lifting shoes, and as with all things if you want to spend more money there is someone who’ll let you do that, BUT. Really just some cheap flat sneakers like the Chucks should treat you okay.

DON’T YOU ALL EAT WEIRD?
So the stuff covered above basically encapsulates, “Courtney doing Crossfit, months 1-6.” I wore appropriate footwear, I did my (scaled) movements and weights, I learned the lingo. In October, I decided to try out eating “Paleo”.

Lots of people who do Crossfit choose to follow that diet. Lots of people who do Crossfit choose not to. I continue to (mostly) adhere to it, because because it has resolved some pretty painful digestive health issues I was having.

Also, I’m privileged enough to have access to and funds for local farm shares for vegetables and meat, so Paleo is really easy and relatively inexpensive for me compared to how I was eating beforehand. That’s definitely not the case for lots of people, for lots of reasons. I think one of the reasons so many Crossfitters can be found online being shitty and obdurate about How Much Better Paleo Is And If You Don’t Eat That Way You’re Deficient is because Crossfit is itself a really expensive hobby and sometimes rich people forget that not everyone else is rich.

The downside of the Paleo/Crossfit overlap is that while I never have to worry about someone talking to me about losing weight at my gym, they do talk to me sometimes about their diet. There was definitely some fat-shaming promotion around the gym’s 30-Day Paleo Challenge that I participated in…which is weird, since nothing about Crossfit or Paleo is what I would consider a weight-loss plan. (I gained 10 pounds over the first month of Crossfit because muscles are heavy and Paleo is very direct about using delicious, delicious fats when cooking.)

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CULT.
“Yeah, but it’s a GOOD cult!” is the in-jokey response, which you can probably buy on a t-shirt somewhere. But yes, a hyper-friendly group of people with special food, special shoes, and weird special words that makes you pay money to spend time with them; it’s not an unfair assessment. It’s a cult I happen to like being in, but again, I wouldn’t blame anyone for staying far, far away.

SO WHAT DOES YOUR BODY LOOK LIKE NOW?
I think you have missed the point of this post and need to go fuck yourself immediately!

December 1, 2012 (Day 1)
December 2, 2012 (30 Minutes)
December 3, 2012 (Baby baby baby)
December 4, 2012 (Nothing happened today)
December 5, 2012 (Pizza)
December 6, 2012 (Tutorial)
December 7, 2012 (Date Night)
December 8, 2012 (Mom)
December 9, 2012 (Scream)
December 10, 2012 (Sleep)
December 11, 2012 (Teddy)
December 12, 2012 (Twelve of Twelve)
December 13, 2012 (Pinterest)
December 14, 2012 (Lunchtime)
December 15, 2012 (Begin)
December 16, 2012 (Vomit)
December 17, 2012 (Gameplay)
December 18, 2012 (Trash Night)
December 19, 2012 (Sick Night)
December 20, 2012 (Grammar Test)
December 21, 2012 (Overwhelmed)
December 22, 2012 (Train game 1)
December 23, 2012 (Daddy)
December 24, 2012 (Christmas Eve)
December 25, 2012 (Train game 2)
December 26, 2012 (again again sick again)
December 27, 2012 (Opinionz)
December 28, 2012 (Visiting)
December 29, 2012 (This Cornado loves you)
December 30, 2012 (Game of the Year)
December 31, 2012 (The Last Day)

You can play Saturday’s game here, and Sunday’s game here. I’ll put them all on one page and organize things a bit better at some point soon, but I don’t know how or when. I will probably add a new blog post for every game, because I would want that as a reader/player, but I also might forget. Who knows!

(Also, you may have noticed that the entire freaking blog looks different now, and there’s an ad at the top of the header, and there are occasionally Amazon links around. Blogs are expensive! I’m selling ooooout! Deal with it shades, etc. One upshot of this is you can actually email me directly now (oh ho ho) via courtney at superopinionated dot com. If that address fills up with spam and death, oh well, at least my personal inbox is still safe.)

In light of this report from the CDC that almost a quarter of new HIV cases are people under 24 and over half of them don’t know they’re infected, a couple of things:

1. Federally funded abstinence-only programs began with, shocker, the Reagan Administration. Clinton actually spiked funding toward the end of his second term, increasing funding tenfold from 1997 (when it was $9 million) to 1998 (when it was suddenly $96.5 million). G.W. Bush continued to increase funding for abstinence-only programs to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for every year he was in office. “Between 1996 and federal Fiscal Year 2010, Congress funneled a total of over one-and-a-half billion tax-payer dollars into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.” In W’s last year in office, the federal government funded abstinence education to the tune of $176 million dollars.

2. President Obama cut all federal funding for abstinence-only education, but then revived it again as part of Obamacare. So from 2010-2014, we’re funding $50 million dollars’ worth of abstinence-only programs with federal tax dollars (and yes, all $50 million was used in 2010 and 2011).

3. People in the US currently impacted by this gap in sexual health education range roughly from ages 13-34 (assuming you get sex ed sometime between grades 6 and 12). People who got the full brunt of abstinence-only education range in ages 13-29.

4. Dismaying, upsetting, but not at all shocking that that age group is such a high percentage of new HIV cases, and that they don’t even know they’ve got it.

—-

When I was in seventh grade (1993), our science teacher asked the boys to leave the room. (I think they went off with our Physical Education instructor? I don’t remember. The boys just DISAPPEARED.) There was some awkward giggling. I think our science teacher demonstrated how to properly put on a condom (I feel like I’ve known my whole life to pinch the air out of the tip?). It actually doesn’t stand out all that much for me, because my mom had already bought me many fine books about girl puberty and boy puberty, and I was pretty sure I was never going to want to have sex with anyone, ever, especially not the jerkwads at my school. I already knew I wasn’t supposed to be embarrassed about sex and I knew it wasn’t a big forbidden thing, I just also knew it was not something I was in any ol’ hurry to go have. It wasn’t a big deal.

What I do remember is someone asking how lesbians have sex, which was immediately followed by one of the girls in the class asking, genuinely, “what’s a lesbian?”

I don’t know if our teacher couldn’t answer or if we just thought she would get in big trouble for answering, but one of my classmates, one of those awful girls who picked on me (they all picked on me), looked at the teacher and said, “oh don’t worry, I’ll tell her, she’s just really sheltered.” And then this horrible little puke of a girl said, “A lesbian is a girl who wants to have sex with another girl.” And when the original question-asking girl wrinkled her nose and went, “ew!”, the girl who I was hating less and less every second shrugged and said, “Some girls like having sex with other girls, I guess. It’s not a big deal.”

And That Was The End Of That.

(well, except kids still wrote “dyke” on my locker throughout the rest of middle school, but I think that was more to do with asserting my lack of desirability as a sexual creature, a friend, or a lab partner than with anything against queer people (which I also was and am).)

Anyway, my point is, in the near past it was possible for a child to get access to and retain quite a bit of information about sex and sexuality. Kids are capable of understanding the difference between “grown up problems” and “who am I gonna play four square with at recess” problems. If you treat them like beings capable of thought, they will think and make informed decisions.

And we, as adults, are fucking it up. We have been, we still are, and these kids and young adults are paying the price. Round of applause, everyone.

(photo by Paolo Massa)

Very brief post to point y’all to a small Twine game I made. There is reading and clicking and functional depression. (Is that even a thing? I’m making it a thing.)

Enjoy, or don’t.

Where to begin.

So I went to a conference-esque thing over the weekend. I’m not gonna get into any specifics about names/titles/locations, because that’s not the interesting part to me (although I’m sure if you’re a shit, you could probably use the information in here to figure that sort of thing out, so to repeat: that is not the interesting part to me, and no amount of “was it this person? was it this place?” will MAKE it interesting to me).

Pretend this is like a fairy tale story I’m telling you, but in the original purpose of fairy tales, to teach the young what to be afraid of about adulthood. Back then it was mostly arranged marriage and now it’s mostly any gathering of more than four adults who don’t know each other very well. But this fairy tale is real and it happened to me! Exciting!

Where were we? Conference-esque thing! In another country and in a remote locale where I mostly don’t speak the local language very well and the locals mostly speak English okay-ish. VERY scenic. I became aware of and was invited to participate at this thing (we’ll call it EveryConf) when I attended FooCamp last year and one of EveryConf’s organizers was there and came up to me and said, “Courtney I run a thing called EveryConf you have to come to it.” And I said okay but then my work schedule got in the way so I had to back out and since I didn’t have a job when this year’s EveryConf invite went out, I figured, “networking opportunity”, and registered.

THE FIRST WARNING SIGNS:
One of the “deals” of EveryConf is I guess the organizers envision it as a sort of summer camp for adults. (There were structured group activities and one of them was coloring. Where Was The Sand Art, I ask you.) Adult Summer Camp Activities aren’t really my thing, but they also aren’t something I’m gonna refuse to participate in and thus ruin someone else’s enjoyment. I was there for the talking-to-interesting-adults and learning-new-shit-from-smart-people, and so if I had to tolerate some “two truths and a lie”-style activity time to get that, well, eh, I was already registered.

However, between the “send us some surprising truths about yourself!” email and one of the organizers tweeting about assembling both Cards Against Humanity decks AND PowerPoint Karaoke slides, I started to get an itchy sensation of discomfort. Not because any of these activities is wrong or bad! But because a lot of these activities are framed around people trying to be funny for each other, and when they’re trying to be funny for a room full of people they don’t entirely know…things can go off the rails in a spectacular variety of ways. We all are raised in roughly the same toxic sludge, and so in a moment of panic/anxiety/”oh god oh god why is nobody laughing yet”, it can be very easy to grab the first idea that pops into your head and use it as a joke…which is often the type of harmful bullshit about other types of people that I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to unlearn and distance myself from and remove from professional events such as EveryConf.

But! I was already registered, I’d paid my hundreds of dollars, I had arranged travel…it would be fine, right? It would be fine. After all, to say something at this point would be LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO BE UPSET ABOUT, and while I’m accused of that consistently, my default is to attempt to let everything go and only speak up when on the verge of tears/vomiting. This obviously wasn’t THAT kind of situation, so chill Courtney, it’s all in your head.

MORE WARNING SIGNS
I get to the EveryConf site. This place is so remote I can’t even get my cell phone to do the expensive roaming thing. There is WiFi but the organizers won’t give out the password, since the “point” of the conference is to “be present” with the people at the event. This theme came up a couple of times in the talks too, this “disconnecting” so as to connect better with people around you, and please allow me to call bullshit on it here:

This is fucking bullshit and so lacking in intellectual rigor I’m tempted to compare advocating for “disconnecting” in preference for those in proximity to you with otherwise-intelligent people deciding not to vaccinate their children. (A) This idea supposes that the people in proximity to you aren’t fuckheads you want to get away from, (B) this is an idea that is only possible because of the existence of THE MOST AMAZINGLY LIFE-CHANGING THING TO HAPPEN IN OUR LIFETIMES aka the internet, and declining to participate in this thing in favor of only using the old way of communicating with people is such a hardcore-Luddite position to me that we’re back to the vaccines thing (I mean while you’re at it, why not abandon the telephone, too?), and (C) when I am in another country surrounded by strangers, don’t you fucking dare take away my only connection to people I love and trust aka my support network — or at least, don’t do that without providing ANY means of replicating said support network if I need it. (And when I say “I” here, I mean “anyone”. I’m sure there’s lots of reasons beyond mine that someone would want to know who on-site they can talk to if they have whatever problems they have (which again, wide and varied and beyond my knowing).)

(Someone more eloquent than I am wrote a whole article about the bullshit that is “going offline”, by the way, and you should read it:

“But this idea that we are trading the offline for the online, though it
dominates how we think of the digital and the physical, is myopic. It fails
to capture the plain fact that our lived reality is the result of the constant
interpenetration of the online and offline. That is, we live in an augmented
reality  that exists at the intersection of materiality and information,
physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off
and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” to mean offline: Facebook is real
life.”)

At one point during the very relaxed and enjoyable hangout time that happened before everyone showed up and EveryConf officially began, one of the organizers said, “Probably the most not politically correct thing we’ve got planned is Cards Against Humanity.” Again, CAH isn’t inherently bad or nuttin’, but last time I checked, the ONLY people saying “politically correct” these days are Men’s Rights Activists, white supremacists, and other fuckheads who think “freedom of speech” means “freedom from criticism”. But hey, I just got there, I was just meeting everyone, people seemed to like me, and I’d just had a 10-minute conversation with this very dude (who is the dude who invited me) about trying to get more women in attendance at tech events. This guy is on “my” side! Why would I go embarrassing him in front of people by being all, “and what do you mean when you say ‘politically correct’ exactly, 1990s Time Traveler?” Right? Let it go, Courtney, it’s cool, it’ll all be fine.

WAIT FOR IT…
Then EveryConf itself started, and with it, the “ice breakers”. Again, not my cup of tea, but not something I’m gonna sulk in the corner about like a high schooler. One of the activities involved breaking into small teams and each team asking other teams a set of questions. One of the questions that each team had to ask other people was, context-free, “Which is more powerful: thrust or lube?”. This is apparently a physics thing, when applied in an actual physics context, not in a “a bunch of grown ups who may or may not know each other interacting at an event they all paid money to attend” context. In this context, it’s juvenile and unnecessary. I rolled my eyes and let it go: new here, want to get along, trying to meet interesting people, have paid hundreds of dollars in registration and travel, let it go Courtney it’ll all be fine, etc.

One of the other activities involved coloring different tiles as a group, to be assembled together the next day. For no reason that I could tell, a guy at my table (white, middle-aged) started doing his “impression” of how Asian non-native English speakers pronounce their Ls and Rs.

Yes, really.

Everyone else at my table looked away, shifted in their chairs, kept coloring, someone cleared their throat, someone else next to me said, “oh, geez” under their breath. I said, “That’s racist”, in my normal (non-hushed) voice. Captain Hilarity pretended not to hear me and wouldn’t look at me, but he stopped. Nobody else at my table said anything for a while, and when they did, it was to change the subject.

This is when I should have left, when I look back on things. Not even because of Captain Hilarity, but because I was surrounded by people who wouldn’t speak up even at the most pathetically simple, unthreatening example of racist bullshit. That’s not only not my crowd, it’s not a crowd that deserves my energy, and I should have bailed then.

KABOOM
And then the PowerPoint Karaoke started. (PowerPoint Karaoke is when you stand in front of a slide deck you haven’t seen before and have to make up a talk based on the slides.) Some of the slide decks (again, made in advance by the event organizers) had funny themes (adorable dogs, delayed-animation .gifs) but almost all of them had at least one or two slides with sad double-entendres, or text over images to imply a different (sexual) context, or pictures of animals mating. (Or sometimes all three. Bonus!)

Yes. Really.

So we’ve got a “not politically correct” organizer of an event with zero policies in place about boundaries or behavior putting together organized/regimented group activities that all feature juvenile sex jokes, and now this group activity about to happen features individuals trying to be funny on the fly in front of a group of people, some or all of whom they just met.

If you can guess what happened next, you get a gold star.

What happened next is Captain Hilarity got up there and said the theme of his talk was, “my time in prison.” And I groaned and my tablemates said, “what?” and I said, “we’re about to be treated to a lot of ‘hilarious’ rape jokes.” and they scoffed and said, “really?” And that’s exactly what he did. The first two slides were about yearning for freedom, and then three minutes or so about being raped by a man.

And everybody laughed. And the organizers did nothing, said nothing.

Yes. Yes, really.

The group had gone in the course of a few hours from, “one person I know and lots of new faces who I’m interested to meet!”, to, “the man who made a joke out of being raped, the rest of the crowd who laughed, and the organizers who didn’t stop it.” Oh, did I mention that the FooCamp where this EveryConf organizer met me is one of the places where I gave this talk? So, the one person in the room who knew I’m a rape survivor, the person with the power to get people to stop doing things, just let Captain Hilarity and Friends have their fun, and I was fresh out of places to turn for any support.

In part because I was already kinda up to HERE with the juvenile tee-hee-hee-SEX! bullshittery, in part because I’d been traveling for two days and was low on sleep, and in part because I was naively thinking I’d get to attend an event without having to steel myself against the possibility of someone behaving so poorly, so publicly, without consequence, I ended up frozen in my seat in the back of the room getting more and more nauseous. My hands started to shake, and all I could do was quietly break down why what Captain Hilarity was doing was bullshit in as analytical a way as I could, to keep myself from crying. The guy next to me would nod along and say, “yeah, I know, this is really gross.” I think he thought he was helping, but I just kept wanting someone to take the mic away. I wanted it to not be me, for once, to have to leave the crowd and stop being a person and start being a fun-killer. I wanted someone to speak up on my behalf because I was afraid that the only thing to come out of my mouth would be angry sobs, and I was a little afraid these people would laugh at that, too.

Instead, everyone laughed and cheered and clapped for Captain Hilarity. I continued to shake a little and feel that empty, swirling feeling in my stomach that I only ever get when triggered or harassed. (That nauseous lack of appetite lasted for another three days.) Eventually I went back to my room, cried, dry heaved a little, and felt very, very alone. And I very, very badly wanted to be able to connect with someone who wasn’t near me. I wanted to be able to email my spouse (or, dare to dream, hear his voice), or text my friends, or reach out on Twitter, or basically do anything to remind myself that this isolation was temporary and that I wasn’t alone in feeling what I felt. You know, all that shit the internet is fantastic at. Connecting. I weighed the likelihood that I could pack up and start getting myself back home that night. I decided to stay long enough to give my talk Saturday, eat whatever food I could get down, and leave bright and early Sunday morning.

THE CALL OUT
It just so happened my talk was about why I made my Twitter bot, The 101-A-Tron. I actually already had a slide in there about how sometimes people don’t think about the impact of what they say on the people they’re saying it about. And so I decided to add in a couple of lines about Captain Hilarity’s rape joke set and the crowd’s participation in it.

“I think if you asked these kids using the #faggot hash tag if they hated gay people or something, a lot would say no…just like I imagine if I surveyed you all about whether you found the act of a person getting raped to be funny to you, you’d say, “of course not”, and yet I found myself surrounded by a lot of you last night laughing it up while someone made jokes about being raped. I call this the ‘can’t see the trees for the forest’ problem; you think of these groups of people as being Out There somewhere, and can’t conceive that an individual from that group might be within earshot…” And I moved on with the rest of my talk, and I only ALMOST cried and my voice didn’t break too much, I think.

My talk was close to the afternoon break, during which I decided I was having more fun beating the game Dungeon Village on my phone than I was being surrounded by the people who laughed, so I skipped the last batch of presentations and only popped back into the main room right as things were wrapping up before dinner. Several people came over to me and told me they liked my talk and that they were really grateful I said something. “I thought it was just me who had a problem with it”, over and over. One woman said something about, “I get off-color jokes, but when you get into potentially triggering territory, it’s not okay”, and I almost asked her if we could go somewhere private so I could cry on her, because by then I was grateful to be around someone who even knew what triggering *was*.

The EveryConf organizer, who created an event full of juvenile sexual jokes to help people “connect”, knowingly invited a rape survivor to said event, and then let someone tell three minutes of detailed, vulgar, descriptive jokes about being raped by a man without doing anything about it, sought me out and told me he was really glad I said something. “I felt so uncomfortable when he was doing that, it was not okay at all”, said the man who invited everyone to EveryConf, was its emcee, and undoubtedly had the most authority of anyone in the room to define and enforce the boundaries of what was or was not acceptable behavior at his event.

This is when I knew I would never be coming back to EveryConf, and that I’d be privately warning away anyone I knew and liked from attending. Again, not because of Captain Hilarity: there will always be Captains Hilarity in the world who you will encounter (and sometimes, you will BE him, even on accident). I won’t be back because when you create an event, you take on the responsibility of what happens there, and the EveryConf organizers have failed in that responsibility and don’t even seem to realize it. I do not think you are responsible for everyone’s behavior or anything puppet-master-ish, but I think you are responsible for defining the intellectual “space” everyone’s behavior is conducted in. You create and enforce the boundaries. You define what is okay and what is not. And if you refuse to own that power, then you are an unsafe event runner, and I don’t trust you.

THE AFTERMATH
After dinner, there were multiple activities planned that the organizers refused to name or describe in advance. Just, “everyone meet at X place at Y time, and something cool will happen.” Given EveryConf’s track record for spontaneity thus far, I had zero faith that they would handle things well if they went off the rails again, so I didn’t participate the rest of the night. I finished beating Dungeon Village, got another fitful night of sleep, woke up before dawn, packed, and got the fuck out of there.

The EveryConf organizers clearly know on some level that they fucked up. My point of contact with the event emailed me yesterday, and while my mom raised me better than to reproduce private emails on the internet, I feel the need to summarize the high points as part of this post-mortem on How Not To Handle This Sort Of Thing:

(A) apologizing for Captain Hilarity’s behavior
(B) attempt to explain/justify Captain Hilarity’s behavior
(C) thanking me again for speaking up
(D) noting with pleasure that I didn’t “bring the mood of the afternoon down” while speaking up
(E) acknowledging that it’s not my fucking job to do this stuff and it sucks that I had to
(F) claiming that this happened as a consequence of the “openness” he strives for at EveryConf
(G) offer to refund my money because he knows I didn’t get what I wanted out of the weekend

Again, that is only a general summary, and the only reason it’s here at all is because I do think the EveryConf folks are trying to do the “right thing” here, and I think that lots of conference organizers are likewise trying to do that, and so I want to break down a little why I have problems with this approach, as a learning exercise. If I could figure out a way to do that without giving a bit of detail about how EveryConf is trying to resolve the situation, I would do it that way instead.

In case you’re looking at this going, “what, this is fine.”…No. First, let’s talk about “openness”. I think I get what they’re going for — free-flowing exchange of ideas, some of which conflict but are allowed to coexist. You can’t have that sort of openness when it comes to respect for other attendees, where some people are openly respectful of others and some people openly aren’t. When you hold your event’s doors open to “all”, you are going to have to make some calls about who those doors are closed to — because they WILL be closed to some people. If folks knew how to act right no matter their differences, it would be a very different world and this would be a very different blog. So who do you pick? Do you pick the people making your event a potentially unsafe place for other attendees? Or do you pick the people who felt unsafe?

In this case, they’re picking the first option, it appears. Don’t get me wrong, I am totally taking them up on that refund. But I’d much rather have gotten an email that went something like:

(A) letting me know he’d talked to Captain Hilarity directly about his behavior
(B) apologizing for not speaking up himself at the time
(C) thanking me for speaking up instead
(D) regret that I had to do his job for him
(E) confession that the EveryConf organizers are rethinking how they handle boundaries around content
(F) invitation to talk further if I have any other feedback
(G) expression of hope that EveryConf can course-correct enough that I’ll be enthusiastic to attend next year

But instead, we have the refund and assertion that the event and I didn’t get along for mysterious, uncorrectable reasons. Rather than change the event, it’s way easier to just cash me out and assume I’ll never come back, and thus won’t be there to risk bringing the mood down again. Maude forbid the MOOD be brought down when people act way, way the fuck out of line. Gotta make sure people feel warm and happy when you’re calling them out for making you feel cold and angry.

So there you have it. More bridges burned because I can’t take a fucking joke, amirite? Hell of a way to connect with people. The moral of this story is: don’t do this shit if you run an event. Don’t pretend like everything will be fine and everyone will be relaxed and groovy and that all of their boundaries will be your boundaries will be each others’ boundaries. That is a really naive set of assumptions to make. Don’t abdicate all responsibility for running an event as if you’ll never have to handle a problem; plan out how you’ll handle different types of problems in advance. Be a grownup. Be aware that when you sexualize content in a room full of professional adults, it makes shit weird and uncomfortable for lots of people — and the people it’s NOT uncomfortable for, you probably are going to have other, more serious boundary problems with, so consider not inviting those fuckheads in the first place.

If you want to get a group of people together to laugh at two zebras mating and giggle at jokes at the expense of others because they’re “SO wrong, tee hee!”, you can do that! It’s called a group vacation! Don’t sell me a ticket to it.

Obviously Captain Hilarity avoided me the rest of the time we were in the same room together and never apologized, not that I would expect anything different from such a gentle man as he.

(photo by TheGirlsNY)

I sometimes run into people on Twitter who could use some basic information for various subjects. I usually end up either quoting people my consulting rate if they want more of my time or telling them to learn to use Google (or both), and while that saves me some energy, it doesn’t really…help much, beyond giving me an opportunity to reassert my boundaries around what is and is not my job on the internet.

And so I created a Twitter bot.

Here’s what it does:
Random person on twitter: “blah blah rape joke blah blah”
Random person #2: “@randomperson yo that is awesome, LOLZ”
Me: Hey, @101atron tell @randomperson about rape jokes and why they aren’t cool, please. cc @randomperson2
101atron: @q0rt @randomperson @randomperson2 http://bit.ly/S1g5nY

It’s a bot that looks for people tweeting at it using a certain pattern and keywords, and when it finds tweets that match that, it replies to all users included in the message with a link to a relevant article or website.

How To Use the 101-A-Tron:
at-reply to it, @101atron, using this pattern: “@101atron tell [username] about [keyword]”. You can put words in front of that pattern (as in my above example: “Hey, @101atron…”) and you can put words after it (eg: “…and why they aren’t cool, please.”). You can include multiple people, so long as their usernames come after the pattern (eg: “cc @randomperson2”). As far as the 101-A-Tron is concerned, it’s [noise][pattern][noise], so as long as you don’t mess up the pattern bit, it’ll work for you.

All of the keywords for the 101-A-Tron are kept here. Whenever I update the keyword list, I will have the 101-A-Tron announce it on Twitter.

This is not a comprehensive list of ANYTHING, EVER, it’s just stuff that I’ve found myself having to dig out and link to people over and over. There are entire swaths of activism and social justice and progressive stuff that are missing right now. While I hope this is a useful tool for many people, at the end of the day, it’s still my bot, and I’m not putting something in the keywords that I wouldn’t use. (Sorry to everyone getting ready to email me a bunch of men’s rights links.)

But! I absolutely don’t think that this collection of resources should be static. If you’re like, “oh I would love to be able to one-button link people to [awesome resource]”, or if I’ve overlooked some additional great information, or if it’d be way easier to have a certain keyword be phrased a little differently, please email me and let me know. Not because I think you have to or nuttin’, but if you want to, I am very excited to get those emails. Likewise, feel free to criticize gaps in my link set or call me out if I’m linking to bullshit, or …really, any and all feedback related to this project is welcome and appreciated.

(graphic by Sean MacEntee)

Here, I did your homework for you.
[wtf is ableist language?]

Instead of retarded/herp derp/etc
[why retarded is ableist]

[why herp derp is ableist]

1. bad
2. uninteresting
3. boring
4. nonsensical
5. not worthy of attention
6. awful
7. silly
8. ridiculous
9. illogical
10. terrible

Instead of crazy/insane/mental/etc
[why it’s ableist]

1. bad
2. illogical
3. erratic
4. nonsensical
5. ridiculous
6. uncontrolled
7. unpredictable
8. too much
9. strange
10. unusual

Instead of lame
[why it’s ableist]

1. bad
2. boring
3. frustrating
4. a waste of time
5. tiresome
6. unoriginal
7. uncreative
8. disappointing
9. embarrassing
10. tedious

Instead of dumb/stupid/idiot/etc
[why it’s ableist]

1. bad
2. poorly thought-out
3. illogical
4. incorrect
5. ridiculous
6. unthinkable
7. a waste of time
8. silly
9. trifling
10. pandering

I’m making this post mostly so I have something to link people to going forward whenever I have the bandwidth to point this stuff out. I know it takes practice and thought. I’m still practicing, too. I welcome any and all call-outs if you see me using ableist language around town or on the internet.

(graphic by AuthenticEccentric)

I went here and clicked on “Report this project to Kickstarter” at the bottom of the page and selected “not a project”:

—

Per the Kickstarter FAQ: “Kickstarter is not a place for soliciting donations to causes, charity projects, or general business expenses.”

And per this project’s FAQ, they are fundraising to operate their website business for a year, including paying for, “rent, wages, health insurance, utilities”, which is otherwise paid for by advertising space they sell on their site.

Also from this project’s page, “if it doesn’t work [we] will be fine. We’ll keep going just like before…”

So instead of selling ads to cover business expenses, they’re using Kickstarter to cover those very same expenses? How is this a project? What creative work is being produced here?

How is this not providing funding for business operating expenses, something explicitly forbidden by Kickstarter?

–

Maybe there is some grey area here that Kickstarter just hasn’t clarified yet on their Project Guidelines page. That would be kinda cool, since I have plenty of talented friends who make web comics who I’m sure would love the opportunity to use Kickstarter’s fantastic service and fund-raise living expenses so they can make comics full-time.

But as it stands, that’s not what Kickstarter’s guidelines are, and I know people who’ve had projects rejected because Kickstarter forbids, “Fund My Life”-type projects, projects that allow creative people to not have to worry about money (as in this case, advertising money) and just create stuff. I don’t…quite…understand the difference here? So I’m hoping the Kickstarter team can clarify.

(photo by Loren Javier)

The original design.

The most recent cover.

Yes I waited until The Avengers wasn’t #1 at the box office anymore to write about it, I like being contrary.

So! Because this is me, it’s time for some:

BACKSTORY
Joss Whedon is a person that exists, and he writes lots of stuff, some of which I have a very strong personal history with, and some of which is Dollhouse. He also sometimes directs things, most notably the Firefly movie, which felt exactly like two hours of television just on a really giant screen. Oh also he kept himself busy during the WGA strike by ensuring Neil Patrick Harris will be able to make money off of fan conventions for the rest of his life. He has a small army of self-identified Whedonites, and they’re very easy to identify because they assume any critical thinking applied to Whedon’s work means that you don’t like/understand it/him/them. I used to be one of them, so I probably have the lowest tolerance in the room for that kind of, “well, he’s not for everyone,” bullshit.

Whedon got together with the guy who wrote PCU and hashed out the story for an Avengers movie, and then Whedon wrote the screenplay.

Avengers? Yes, Avengers. (I’m not even going to try, you can fall down your own comic wiki rabbit hole.)

Meanwhile Back In Marvel Headquarters, someone had the idea about ten years ago to make solo films for a bunch of their characters and then make an ensemble movie with all of those characters in it. That is why there have been three goddamn Hulk movies in the last decade. And because this is Marvel doing it, it’s gone pretty well and made them enough money that the new Marvel Headquarters will be made of bricks of $20s. Also someone at DC is furiously weeping that they never managed to get the Whedon-penned Wonder Woman film off the ground. (Which yes, was a thing for a while, and yes really, Whedon was like, “yeah, I’d love to do it, I have a script, they won’t call me back.”) (The actual lesson here, as always, is that DC Hates Money.)

And so all of that culminated into The Avengers coming out and making near-literally All Of The Money. Which is cool, because we’re supposed to like it when things don’t actively suck, but is also probably going to be less cool in the long run, because we don’t like it when they make things like Daredevil or Elektra. I guess? And that seems inevitable now, because it’s been “proven” that superheroes are a profitable intellectual property (as MOVIES, obviously, nobody’s talking about effin’ COMICS here) and so they’re green-lighting mother fucking Ant Man, yes really. And they will keep green-lighting until we stop showing up, which means they’re going to put out a season of terrible, terrible superhero films, maybe two seasons, before they finally stop. Superman Returns, Spider-Man 3, and Green Lantern will look like Citizen Kane by the time this is over. I know we all know this, but still. (Also, Spider-Man 3 was the only one of that cycle I actually liked. AND YET I CALL MYSELF A FAN, HOW DARE I, SAM RAMI, BLAH BLAH, BLAH. Yes, I know, child. I know.)

BUT WHAT OF THE FILM?
What was this thing that we all paid hundreds of millions (h-half a billion? the last time I checked?) of dollars to stare at? Was it actually any good? Was it flawless?

…it was not flawless.

And that merits some discussion, because the shit we stare at and put into our minds does actually have some impact on us and our construction of ourselves and our world. Can we accept that as the lowest of low bars to pass over together, hand-in-hand, for the rest of our time together? The things we do and consume and celebrate carry some significance? Good! Glad you’re with me on this.

And what I find troubling (…well, ONE thing I find troubling) is that so many are describing The Avengers as a “perfect” superhero film. I mean, it’s really fun. There are explosions and various characters fight various other characters in a manner not unlike the way we used to crash our action figures of those characters into each other when we were children. There’s a sexy redhead who gets into fights the way the boys do. There’s a black dude who is less acting as a character and more just acting as his fame-persona, and that’s actually better. All of that, bee tee dubs, describes the modern masterpiece, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (Which you should totally check out sometime. Take a drink every time you think an action sequence is about to end, and keep chugging until the action sequence is actually over. Try not to destroy your liver that way. Good luck, Joes.)

What I’m saying is that a lot of us find a lot of the shit in The Avengers, “cool”, but we like that stuff because we either saw some/most of the movies leading up to The Avengers (again: genius move, Marvel, I hope you promoted whoever thought that up), or because we grew up reading some/most of the comics about these characters, either solo or in teams. Or, if you’re me, you saw it because you knew the internet would have a lot of fun taking the movie (and the press surrounding its release) and shaking it up into a thousand different gifs, references, and memes. If you’ve never watched a movie or TV show because you wanted to keep up with Tumblr then I don’t know how to explain it to you, Gramps, but there it is.

…okay, okay, I also went because whenever The Hulk smashes up a bunch of stuff, some part of my brain turns into this baby.

But I was a Prime Audience; a lot of us were primed and set up to like this shit. Which is fine! It’s okay to like things! But it’s less okay to pretend that the things we like are magically blessed *because we like them*. The movie actually is not all that REMARKABLE. If anything, I’d say it barely edged by in the, “actually giving a shit about the people/events on screen,” category, and only then if you are truly unfamiliar with Whedon’s work and his relationship with character death. (Everyone who was surprised by the fact and style of Coulson’s death, go stand with your nose in the corner and think really hard about your failure. Try to do better next time.) I thought maybe Maria Hill might be the person to inevitably, suddenly die, but hey, they recast her character as a white Canadian, so I figured she was probably safe. (It’s a Whedon project, there can’t be more than one person of color around or else his (very, very white) fanbase might get nervous.)

I’m trying to balance “ahem, problem” things with nice things so here you go: I appreciated Whedon’s blatant obsession with reflections, I found it to be very appropriate for a comic book film, and far less tiresome than Ang Lee’s split-screens in The Hulk. (Note: I have not seen all of that version of The Hulk, just enough to be like, “whaaaaaa”.) I do think that movies about superpowered weirdos arguing with each other may be the sweetest of sweet spots for Whedon’s aesthetic, to the shock of nobody. Also, I would assume in part because he didn’t originate these characters, this is the first time in a long damn while I wasn’t able to be like, “the violent loner”, “the brooding sexy man”, “the ‘not pretty’ pretty girl who’s really smart”, “the tiny conventionally attractive badass woma–oh wait.”

OH WAIT.

There’s a whole snitfit about, “why is Black Widow even in this movie”, and (1) because she was in Iron Man 2 so they kind of had to use her and (2) due to that, why would you put ANOTHER WOMAN on the team, I mean god, this isn’t a chick flick, and (3) shut up let’s talk about her being in it instead of debating whether a different woman should even be on the team at all. THIS IS THE ONE WE GOT. Which is kind of the base of the problem…one of the bases of the problem. Here, I’ll take it in segments.

SEGMENT ONE OF THE PROBLEM
Women aren’t a monolith. (Yes, that’s my fucking catch phrase these days. Learn it, love it, live it.) There are lots of us. Having “the girl” on the team means that she gets the impossible, unenviable task of “representing” women. It means that her appearance and behavior become a message from the film to the viewer about “women” instead of “this one individual woman”. It’s not cool, I know! But that is what happens when you have a token minority instead of true diverse representation. Nick Fury kind of gets away with it due to his authority over the team and the fact that he’s Samuel L. Jackson, although I was disappointed that he had to report to a bunch of disapproving white people in the movie. It felt a little weird, but then I actively don’t pay attention to anything about SHIELD in the comics, so what do I know? My point is that when the only woman with more than four lines of dialog is running around with her costume half-unzipped*, it makes it hard to say that this movie is doing anything particularly different than um every other anything ever. Yawn.

SEGMENT TWO OF THE PROBLEM
Joss Whedon has never un-learned how to write Buffy, or he just won’t stop because people keep clapping their hands together and going, “Yaaaaaay you did that thing that time, let’s crown you King of Feminists!” and I’d imagine that feels pretty good, so he just keeps on beating that particular horse. I wish someone would point out to him that in the phrase, “strong female characters”, the word “strong” does not have to refer to literal physical strength, but eh, that would involve growing as a person, and why would we ever ask or expect that from a creative dude? Yeah, bro, we get it, there was a time when the idea of a tiny sexy lady fighting on TV was a revolutionary idea. That revolution has passed. Rejoin us on the front lines, please.

*
Because really, this is what she wears when she first shows up:

And then the rest of the time it’s this:
If your argument to this is, “But there’s not even *very much* cleavage!” then you, too, get to go stand in the corner with your nose against the wall and think for a while.

As a comparison, the rest of The Avengers:
Papa Kirk was commander of a starship for 12 minutes and saved 800 lives…and then he became Thor.

Even Hawkeye is like, “this CGI shirtless guy is not doing it for me.”

*Two buttons unbuttoned*, Banner? Slut alert. (PS a significant portion of Lady Internet has decided these two are boyfriends, dealwithitshades.gif everyone, never let it be said I didn’t keep you informed about the important things.)
[snerk]

what is that, a metal priest collar?

Look, even the bad guy is rather conservative in his realness:
(If you were ever like, “I wonder what it would look like if Harry Potter got sorted into Slytherin and grew up?”, well now you know.)

That’s like SO MANY DUDES, right? And then just this one fierce bitch:

So while each guy gets to rock his own look and that’s cool, lots of dudes in the audience can be like, “I’m more of a Thor than a Hawkeye, yay Thor!”, ladies in the crowd get to go, “I’m…nothing like that one lady on screen and oh, there doesn’t really appear to be much more in the way of ladies. Yeah, I got nothing. Maybe I’m the one working that one console, who got killed along with all the other people who clearly did not survive during the Hulk breakout/Loki escape/Bad Guy Invasion, even though the only death anyone mentioned was Agent Coulson? Maybe I look like Agent Coulson’s kinda-girlfriend, the cellist, who never appears on screen? WHO KNOWS.” …I guess you could also be Pepper Potts, who delivers all of her dialog while wearing short-shorts? (Which, to my utter amazement, I can’t find pictures of online right now.)

Also blah blah aspirational male bodies vs sexualized female bodies blah blah you know this already. (And if not, I’ve got a corner with your nose’s name on it.) (Or, maybe check out some of the Suggested Reading, link at the top of the page.)

So, MY POINT, like I ever have just one, is that while The Avengers was a super fun way to eat a bucket of popcorn, *I think we can do better*. I think that the tiniest veneer of feelings on top of the normal action hero bullshit is a far cry from “perfect”, and if it’s “perfect” for the source material, then IT IS TIME TO EXAMINE THE SOURCE MATERIAL AS WELL. It may come as a surprise to you, but comics kind of suck in a lot of ways, and many of those ways involve the comics themselves being alienating to people who are not grown up life-long comic fans. THERE IS NO MYSTERY, IT IS EXPLAINABLE. And when, “But that’s how Black Widow *always* dresses!”, is the argument I get, even from Respected Comic-y Type People Who In Theory Know Better Than Me, I have to roll my eyes and just yell, “REALLY?” a lot, because REALLY? Uuuuugh, laziest of lazy arguments. The way she’s always dressed is shitty, then. Ta-fucking-da.

Also, problematic (racist, sexist, mind-numbingly simplistic, pandering to white male anxieties and power fantasies, I could go on) source material just opens the door for problematic film execution, and that’s on Whedon. Nothing in the script demanded that Black Widow’s ass get reaction shots when she goes and talks with Loki, and yetttttttt. (Yes. Really.) It’s tiresome, it’s boring, and it’s not the best we can ever do.

One hopes.

–Margaret Powell in Below Stairs, her memoir about working in service as a kitchen maid and cook during the 1910s.

…but it might as well be about Mitt Romney and the GOP, really.

Whatever.

Anyway, so I am a terrible person who tends to assume that if a large number of players like something, it’s awful. (This is where I do that fake-sneeze thing and say “Mass Effect” instead of the sneeze…I don’t know now to write that elegantly, though. Actually, I have the GDC flu that was going around, so I don’t know how to do *anything* elegantly right now.) And I had heard that the new game from thatgamecompany, Journey, was good, and then I spent a lot of GDC hearing from people whose opinions I respect that it was really, really good. I think it was when Leigh Alexander insisted that I either buy a PS3 or come down to NYC to play the Journey on *her* PS3 that I felt myself start to be like, “oh, wow, so this game is probably kind of bullshit, huh?”

And it’s not bullshit or like well it is but it’s not Journey’s fault. It’s just that there are like three things to that game and they are:

1) Visuals
2) Story
3) Multiplayer

The visuals are actually great, really really great. I didn’t know sand could be so awesome, truly. But I’m pretty sure we’re all trying to get past the notion that games should be sold based on their graphics, right? Or do we just say that when we don’t actually like the game, I can never keep track. Anyway, the idea that the game is the bestest because it’s pretty feels a little thin to me, especially since I’m currently playing through Uncharted 1 right now and the facial expressions on everybody are blowing my mind and that game is like sooooo old. (Uncharted is also probably the most effective thing ever to convince people that jetskis suck. Which… they do, they pollute the air and the water and the vibrations kill coral and shit. Now that I write this, maybe Mass Effect’s shitty Mako is secretly a campaign to get people to stay away from 4-wheeler recreational vehicles?)

The story of Journey is straight up the hero’s journey or the monomyth or whatever you want to call it. For example, you could call it Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or Ender’s Game, or basically most science fiction, most fantasy, or just in general most stories told by and/or for awkward straight white cisgender men. I do think the story is an important part of why people seem to respond so well to Journey because, much like Portal before it, it’s the kind of story that makes you feel a bit like a smartypants and you “get” it and so then you feel understood by the game because the game told you a story you already know. It’s a basic idea that is paced well and fully executed in under three hours. It’s a movie plot, and a simple one, and hooray for you for figuring it out and finishing it in one sitting.

The actual thing that makes Journey different or new is the multiplayer, and this is where I just start saying, “really?!” over and over at you, the collective “you” of the game industry. The online multiplayer of Journey involves you playing with another person who like stands next to you and can whistle and like gives you energy to float when you need it. I guess. As far as I can tell, this limited interaction with another living human being makes the game unique and meaningful and personal for a lot of players? Despite the fact that um the last time I checked what is meaningful about connecting with another person is not their physical proximity (which the multiplayer relies on and rewards) but rather my ability to *communicate with them*, which Journey completely removes, short of the little whistle thing I mentioned already. Which means that people are flipping out over the fact that someone finally managed to make an online multiplayer experience that doesn’t guarantee a million new submissions to FatUglyorSlutty.com, basically. Not to go all old-meme on you, but don’t be afraid to to dream a little bigger, darlings. Fuck.

I really liked Journey, which I realize is not coming across here. But it’s one of those games that’s so focused on universal appeal, it’s very difficult to get any sort of personal meaning out of it (for me, speaking as one person). The only time I felt really connected to my little Jawa person (yes really, you’re a hipster Jawa, complete with leggings and oversized tunic) is during the cut scene where the Jawa gets hir little scarf for the first time, and as it was sort of glowy-forming around hir neck, the Jawa looks over hir shoulder like “the fuck is going on?” and that felt like (A) a realistic sentiment to have in that scenario and (B) what I was thinking already. So I had a nice little bonding moment with my gender-non-specific hipster Jawa there. Otherwise, you’re playing as a chess piece moving from set to set, and if you know what the monomyth is (or uh have consumed any popular nerd culture ever) then you know how the game is going to play out pretty quickly. It’s definitely a good advertisement for videogames, in that I think my mom would sit through a playthrough and find it to be nifty. And as I said, nobody can verbally harass each other, so gold star there? There was a singular moment where the pacing of the gameplay did have me holding my breath and then releasing it in a gasp, so it’s not as if there’s no “there” there. So yeah, play it, but I would ignore the people telling you it’s like proof that games are meaningful or whatever hyperbolic ridiculousness. They’re just blinded by the sand graphics.

Meanwhile, my spouse, because he knows me, was like, “have you played Anna Anthropy’s new game, dys4ia?” and when I said no, he just said, “oh, you should play it…I think you’ll like it.” This is all he ever says to me when he thinks a game is really great, because he knows how I get when games are overhyped to me. (Um see above for an example.) So I loaded up dys4ia not really knowing what to expect, and in some ways it’s actually very similar to Journey. It’s short, it’s about the experience of playing it, you can’t die or fuck it up. But rather than telling me a story I already know, or telling a story that “everyone” can relate to or understand, it tells a part of Anna’s story. Rather than feeling like the story is trying to make me feel understood, I came away with a better understanding of another person. *This* is what it looks like when you make a game that’s personal, in that it’s about a specific person, not “personal” because it’s boiling down a human experience into the narrative equivalent of baby food.

You should play it…I think you’ll like it.

Yeah, me too!

I am not one for grudges but when you destroy the my social space with my closest friends, I start rocking the Scarlett O’Hara fist and telling the sunset that I Will Never Use Google Products Again. (Reference, for if you’re somehow not up on old movies that romanticized the antebellum South.)

And so with that in mind, here are the results of my experiments in washing the Google out of my hair over the last three months. (Additional reference. Apparently “explicitly racist US movies, 1939 – 1958” is the subplot of this post.)

Google Reader, you cut me deep
Eff you, Google Reader, I have NewsBlur to keep me warm at night now! This was by far the easiest transition, in part because NewsBlur actually imports your Reader feeds for you. I had everything ported over in less than 60 seconds and was back to reading my feeds. I am a strong NewsBlur convert in part because of the interface, but also because I get to be a paying customer. (There is a free version, for up to a certain number of feeds, I believe 60?) I believe there’s a sliding-scale payment structure on an annual basis. I’m sorry to be so vague on details, but I can’t find this information easily on the About, FAQ, or Blog. The developer of NewsBlur just quit his job and went full-time indie developer on the product, so I think we have more features to look forward to, fingers crossed! As it stands though, it’s still a great product already, and I recommend it highly to anyone looking to ditch Reader or just explore the big, beautiful world of RSS feeds in the first place.

Google Mail, you are tough to replace
I’ve tried a variety of web-based mail services over the last three months, with middling results. Again, I was looking for services where I get to be the customer, not the product, so that eliminated several “alternatives” (who still use the same “your information is our actual product” model as GMail). I stuck with Hushmail for a while, which presented me with a tiny Sophie’s Choice: their updated UI is a dramatic improvement over the old version (which is so hideous I can’t even), but the full feature set is only available on the old version (and the full feature set includes things like “manage folders”…pretty basic stuff). I ended up canceling and asking for my money back, because the product was unusable to me in its current form.

I’ve since switched over to Neomailbox, where the UI is acceptable (albeit based on MS Outlook, apparently), and the servers are kept in Switzerland (so I guess I never have to worry about my emails getting handed over to the FBI?). My only complaint is the complaint I have about all of these sites: they’re slower than GMail. Way slower. I also miss GMail’s habit of grouping emails with the same subject line into a dynamic thread, I won’t lie. Also, apparently nobody else has figured out how to auto-add to your contacts an email address you write to frequently so it auto-populates the To: line. And I had a nifty contact management service integrated into my GMail account (WriteThat.Name) which doesn’t work with Neomailbox. But mostly it’s the slowness that bugs me. It doesn’t bug me enough to hand over all of my correspondence back to Google, though.

Google Docs, you were an asshole anyway
My conclusion after exploring every free online document management service under the sun is: They all suck. So hard. GDocs even sucks (have you ever tried to make a non-basic Presentation? Or add a table to anything? Or just use Document like, AT ALL?) I’ve switched over to ThinkFree which is slow and kind of messy, but as far as I can tell, it only sucks as much as everything else. If someone knows of a for-pay service that is less terrible than everything currently out there, please let me know, because Jeez McCreez. Granted, the collaboration features on GDocs are really nifty, and it’s possible that a lot of people can’t live without those. I can, and so that’s what you’re hearing about. (One exception: the Form GDoc format, which is great and useful and one I have yet to find a good replacement for.)

Google Calendar, goddammit
I think I’m going to switch back to Google Calendar. The closest thing to a replacement I’ve found is 30Boxes, and that motherfucker doesn’t even have a “location” section for events you add to your schedule. I guess all of my meetings are the “of the mind” variety, eh 30Boxes? Also, while it’ll email me my daily agenda, it insists on doing it as if it’s coming from an actual 30Boxes employee, complete with a greeting and introducing themselves and a little sketch of their face. 30Boxes, you are not goddamn Lush Cosmetics, I don’t need to see the human face of your system, I just need you to shut up and give me my schedule for today. Also problematic: coordinating schedules with your spouse when one of you isn’t using GCal. I realize that my daily schedule is still a deeply personal data set, but right now it’s actively causing problems in my life, and it’s less personal than a lot of the other stuff about me that I was letting Google sell to advertisers.

Google! G’bye!
I rarely run searches through Google anymore; instead I use DuckDuckGo, which is better for reasons, because [handwave]. The times I find myself defaulting back to Google are when I need an image or video; DuckDuckGo isn’t nearly as good at refining search results in that way (or I’m bad at search. Which is possible!). But given the effort Google’s gone to recently to make its search simultaneously as insular and exposed as possible by integrating your Google Plus buddies’ data into your search results, I can at least say with confidence that DuckDuckGo will creep you the fuck out waaaay less when you use it.

So there you have it. “But what about ______?” you ask. I don’t use that. This is my post about Google services I use and the ones I ditched and how. Go spend three months of trial and error and figure out how to replace that product yourself. It is possible! Let this post live as a beacon of hope to guide you! (Also, yeah, I know, I run a blog, ergo Google Analytics. This is a WordPress.com-hosted blog, because I like to roll with as little technical knowledge as possible, so I get WordPress’s analytic thingjobs. However I just set up another site for an event and I’m totally using Google Apps and Google Analytics for it, and yes I feel dirty dirty dirty but What’s A Girl To Do. At least Google doesn’t get to make money off my mid-day “I NEED WINE OMG THIS DAY” emails to my friends anymore.)

- GDC is in less than a week, who let that happen? I was really excited to attend last year and my schedule was triple-booked the entire time and I met dozens of people that I genuinely liked (hey, for me that’s like…loving an entire nation’s population) and it was just fabulous. This year I think if given the option, I would like to stay home and curl up into a little ball and panic. Because!

- I’m in the middle of buying a house, and I’ve either been in the beginning or middle of buying a house since last summer I shit you not. This is the third? fourth? property my spouse and I have put an offer on, and the second one where we’ve gotten to this point…this point being “we are supposed to close this week but the lender still hasn’t delivered a mortgage commitment letter and I kind of have to assume we’re just not going to get this house ever.” Last time the deal fell apart horribly and expensively and soul-crushingly, and this time I can kind of FEEL the deal falling apart in real time, and I’ve started psychically checking my email just as the next upsetting missive from our bank shows up. I’ve had a blog post written in my head since last September with the title, “Home Ownership: Day Zero,” and I yearn to be able to write it and put a happy ending on this shittacular process. YEARN. (Downton Abbey, what have you done to my generation’s verbs.) Anyway, I’m trying to make my pain funny for you to read about, and I feel like the bourgiest asshole wah wah I can’t buy property the way I want to, but truth: This process is humiliating and terrible and fuck you, housing market, fuck you, banks, it is not at all a mystery to me why nobody is buying homes right now, given that the process is full of bullshit and lies. [sarcastic jazz hands]

- There is so much going on right now that I just can’t write about yet, because while they are events and problems that weigh on me a lot, they aren’t actually things that are happening to me directly, so it’d be the dickest of dick moves to blog about them. But the entire home purchasing waking nightmare situation is kind of cake in comparison. Or actually not, but whatever, the conclusion: there is lots of stuff across the spectrum happening that I have no control over, but which all impacts my life significantly. To the shock of everyone, I hate not being in control. I WAS AS SURPRISED AS YOU ARE.

- However, knowing all of this and being able to articulate, “oh yeah I’m really concerned about X, Y, and Z things,” has not prevented my body from doing it’s usual body thing and internalizing all of my stress and short version: Panic attacks sometimes! Slightly longer version is…boring, and involves going to the doctor and having a heart attack scare because the signs of stress and the signs of recent cardiac arrest are really similar, as I joked about on Twitter. I debated trying to blog about anxiety while in the throes of a panic attack, and I’m kind of sad I didn’t, since the mental math that you find yourself doing while freaking out is both OBVIOUSLY WEIRD and yet COMPLETELY UNAVOIDABLE. I had forgotten how freaking HARD life becomes when your brain is working against you. But accuracy in reporting: It took me um maybe five hours to go from realizing I should call my doctor to actually calling my doctor (her booking nurse was in a meeting and THEY MADE ME CALL BACK you have no idea maybe but omg I ALREADY PICKED UP THE PHONE ONCE AND THAT WAS SCARY ENOUGH GEEZ) and then when I found out my doctor was on vacation I needed another person (again hours later) to remind me that you can get appointments with another doctor in your doctor’s practice and just…it is so hard to take care of yourself when everything is scary and you don’t trust yourself to do anything. And I swear they may have given me sugar pills but it is really powerful to be able to tell yourself, “If I start to feel my grip on reality slipping, I can take this pill and I will be able to breathe normally again.” (Also I don’t think it’s a sugar pill. But who knows! Placebo effect I love you!)

- So since I’ve had to research therapists all of a sudden (my not-my-doctor doctor’s visit resulted in me getting what I can only call The Mom Look from not-my-doctor and a stern suggestion to go talk to someone while all this crap is going on…”all this crap” being my life I guess…sidebar: It’s a distancing thing, and I kind of need to tell myself that these events, even though it’s pretty much my whole day every day, are temporary. Is it healthier to say that your entire life is crap, or tell yourself your “actual” life doesn’t normally involve this kind of thing?) but anyway I was in the middle of a sentence…Researching therapists! Were You Aware: therapists mostly don’t take insurance now? Also they cost a lot. Those two facts together had me concluding, “Fuck this, I’m just joining a gym instead.” So I’ve started doing CrossFit! And by that I mean I did a class on Saturday and I still can’t stand or sit without pain. And yet it was fun, and mostly I interpret the pain as, “you sit at a computer too often; you are very weak.” So I assume it’ll get a little easier over time, and at least it’s a hard thing I have control over. (Also: muscles!)

- In the absence of an actual house to lose my mind over, I’ve started losing my mind over Pinterest. My spouse is mystified by the mechanic of Pinterest, because he says he’s not a person who enjoys collecting things. I find this borderline-insulting, since I live to get rid of stuff, not *keep* stuff…but I do totally have a physical file at home with inspiration photos, as well as a multi-tiered folder system on my laptop with digital photos I’ve saved over the years. It’s not a collection it’s PERSONAL REFERENCE. I have no idea how that’s a distinction. Pinterest is basically an open fire hydrant of pictures and ideas and in some respects it reminds me of Google Reader’s much-missed (by me) social functionality, which is the nicest thing I can say about anything on the internet. Check out my boards if you want.

Writing a conclusion for this post? Do you need that? This is basically like we just had coffee or something, but for free and not actually in person or anything.

Trigger warnings for discussion of eating disorders, self-mutilation

The very short version: Black Swan is the most important movie ever made, for my personally. I’m not saying it’s the best example of any specific type of film-making, or that it’s my favorite movie, but the fact that this film got made and distributed is the most important thing cinema has ever done for me. Watching it was watching an artifact of genius, and the very particular kind of genius that articulates ideas and realities that I already almost fully understood but hadn’t yet put together and synthesized into a real thought for myself. Black Swan is an expression of one of the most fundamental and personal experiences of my entire life, because it is a thorough and empathetic documentation of what it is to be a woman in the society I live in.

The very long version: Black Swan is a really complicated film, and I think the reason it succeeds on *any* level is because for all that the film is doing, there is still a clear meaning and story behind everything going on. I saw a quote from the director a while back about how a some themes people were saying the film covered weren’t actually there or some shit, and that it was just people putting themselves into the work and not the work itself…I don’t know, it was kind of a dumb quote which is why I’m not putting in any effort to track it down. My point is — no fucking shit, living vs. dead authors, etc etc etc, and obviously I don’t think at any point anyone involved said, “let’s make a movie that’s secretly the most feminist fucking thing to ever be mass-marketed to American audiences.” What I’m saying is, if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman, and what society does to you as a woman, this movie is like a goddamn documentary of most of the major forms of psychological torment that ladies go through just by being ladies.

Okay some high-level stuff – I’m a white cis-gendered woman and I’m writing ALL of this from that perspective, and while I might usually try and scrub my language a little bit more, it is impossible for me to write about this film without writing about myself. That’s kind of the whole point – that it was intensely personal for me, but personal not because it was about that time I got beat up at school or my first boyfriend or my various hairstyles; it was personal because it turned every shitty thing that we as a culture excuse away under Lady Issues into a narrative that is possible for anyone (read: dudes) to understand. Black Swan creates an experience for the viewer of being a woman, regardless of the viewer’s gender. But it also does a lot more than that, and so I’m just going to start breaking this down:

The Pretty Ballerina Story Angle
On a very superficial level, the story of the film is good, interesting, well-written and well-executed. The acting across the board is phenomenal, the direction is at a level of creative-yet-not-trying-too-damn-hard that most people will never be at, and the film just *looks so perfect*. The color palette for everything, from the clothes to the set design, is like the inside of a dancer’s rehearsal wardrobe. My only complaint is that I didn’t see enough ripped to shit holes in everyone’s legwarmers and sweaters, but maybe in this particular company, they pay enough that dancers can afford to throw out their warm-up clothes once they’re rags (yeah, right). I liked that the main characters were double-cast, right down to them being listed that way in the film’s end credits — the script executed the “play within a play within a film” conceit very well, and I never found myself wincing at the dialogue or predictability of the plot (I’m looking at you, Inception). So if you just want to see a film about ballerinas and their psychological trauma, the film definitely delivers that.

The Body (Horror) Angle
It’s no mistake that a story about a ballerina works as a template for a larger story about women’s’ experience — so much of being a woman is performance, and ballet is in a way a translation of the subtle non-verbalized rules of “successful” femininity that we’re all socialized with into an formalized system. To be a good ballerina, you have to literally transform your body, and you have to start really early if you want a shot at being remarkable. (A casual friend in high school told me a story once about how from ages 7-9, she slept on her stomach with her knees pushed out and the soles of her feet together, so her bones would grow into proper turn-out position while she slept. Ballet!) The disordered eating shown without comment in the film is not by any means a problem that limits itself to ballerinas, nor is the constant self-evaluation and self-comparison to the bodies of other women that motivates it. Much is made of how hard the main character, Nina, works, and a good chunk of the movie is spent either watching Nina watch herself in mirrors, work by herself, or work with others on her choreography. The camera in these scenes focuses in on Nina’s body parts and her movement, moving quickly through space to try to keep up with her turns and jumps. For the first time in cinema I finally had some sense as a viewer of how goddamn hard it is to dance ballet choreography.

And then there is the touching. Everyone touches Nina. Not affectionately, but to control or correct her body in various ways. The choreographer, briefly. The director, constantly – and when he isn’t touching Nina, he is verbally abusing her for not moving her body correctly. Almost every scene with Nina’s mother features her scrutinizing Nina’s body and criticizing it or what Nina’s “done” to it (compulsive scratching). When that isn’t enough, her mom grabs scissors and cuts Nina’s nails (and thus sometimes cuts Nina). I cannot think of a more direct symbol of a character’s agency than their hands – the things they use to interact with the world. Nina’s are grabbed, controlled, tied down, and cut by others, until she takes to (fantasizing about) mutilating them herself. Also, one of Nina’s key struggles in the film’s is to get enough privacy and space to masturbate, to touch herself on her own terms. This happens once, possibly, although Nina’s mental state is deliberately so muddled that the viewer is left unsure what, exactly, happened (if anything).