Happily Ever After

Photo credit: Mirror Images by Rina

I participated in a project over at Fat, Smart and Pretty about what it means to be a selfish woman. Go over, have a look at what I said and maybe even join if yourself if you're so inclined.

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So anyway, I got really behind on the Buffy season 9* comics once the kid moved in last year and I'm only starting to catch up right now. I bought the two most recently-released compilations which still leaves me way behind, but I'm catching up.

*The comics are now being treated as new seasons of the TV show. 

I'm pissed off because when I left off it looked like Buffy and Spike might be getting together. You know, so we could all move on with our lives, stop retreading the same ground about how a woman who's prevented six apocalypses somehow wants and deserves a "normal" relationship (as if that wouldn't bore her to tears), and they could have some happiness while saving the world. There was some lovely progress made in their relationship in the last few episodes of the TV series and then he died heroically only to be resurrected on Angel. So the characters never really got a chance to see how things might go with that healthy-ish relationship they were heading towards. And we've had over a season of the comic, and still nope.

Am I really annoyed because a comic book I've fallen behind on reading didn't go the way I expected? Not really. But I think this reflects a larger problem in pop culture. Writers, producers, whoever seem to think that happily ever after is boring. That after a couple gets together, there's nothing left to say from a narrative perspective unless they start thinking about splitting up.

The last year of my life proves that dramatic stuff can happen to happily married people. Not that parenting traumatized children would make for entertainment, because there's a lot of fucked up shit going down. But that's just a fr'instance. 

Just off the top of my head:

• Nick & Nora did a splendid job of solving mysteries in The Thin Man movies and they were happily married. 
• Amy & Rory Pond joined The Doctor on many adventures. 
• The later Star Trek series could've featured loads of married couples since they allowed families on ships. I can only think of the O'Briens and oh, yes, Worf and Dax got married at some point.
• That couple on Green Acres got into lots of wacky adventures
• Wash & Zoe on Firefly

But how many more shows fizzled once Will They Or Won't They turned into They Did? Moonlighting did it most spectacularly, though Cheers managed to course-correct after letting couples get together. How have Castle and Bones fared? I don't watch them, so if you do, let me know in the comments.

And how many shows, etc. totally pissed off their viewers by drawing out the romantic tension for. fucking. ever? I'm looking at you, How I Met Your Mother.

It's this fetishization of riding off into the sunset together. Once you've found your soulmate, nothing interesting could possibly happen to you except for the possibility of losing that person. Not only is this total bullshit, but it feels steeped in sexism. Like it's a holdover from the days when women quit their job the second they got married and become full time homemakers and made it their mission to keep their home as peaceful and drama-free as possible for their man who went out into the world doing big, important things every day. But the husband's life is boring as shit too because he has a family to think of, so he's unlikely to take bold career risks or have a dangerous job (like spying).

Do I think that Buffy & Spike are totes made for each other? Eh, maybe. Would I like to see what some (non-fan fiction) writers can do with two characters with super powers who fight evil and get on each other's nerves while sharing strong chemistry and affection? Sure, that would be interesting. Am I sick of seeing happily paired off characters being stuck as boring supporting characters at best? Hells yes. Have I had it with fictional characters staying unattached because writers don't know what to do if they can't include a romantic subplot? Fuck yeah.

Definitely something to think about as I work on my own fiction.

What are your thoughts? If you can think of any TV shows, books, movies, etc. that feature married or paired off characters whose relationship isn't the main source of drama, please let me know.

Fetishes That Probably Are Not

Over on KPQuePasa.com, KP (who is a dog trainer) has a very funny story up about her neighbor's dog. In case you don't feel like going over there before continuing here, the dog pees on her and she yells at her neighbor (who does not know that she's a dog trainer):

"I'm not working today.  I should NOT be getting peed on!"

Which of course had my filthy mind going places, including fetish films involving people getting peed on by pets. And if that's a thing, do NOT tell me because I have enough problems and don't need to know that about he world in general or about you in particular.

And now I'm thinking of other things that could not possibly be fetishes, but would be hilarious if they were. Such as:

• Early cell phones. "Ooh, baby, watch me talk into this big gray brick with an antenna."
• Spinning (spinning yarn on a wheel or the exercise bike in the gym thing)
• Hand knit socks - as an extension of foot fetishes, I mean. Once you start wearing hand knit socks, you see no reason to go back to store-bought, and that;s not really kinky. Unless you knit dirty pictures into the pattern, which...I'm not even going to check. I know it CAN be done, so it probably HAS been done.
• Running with scissors
• Eyebrow threading
• Gargling
• Wearing old Kleenex boxes on your feet a la Howard Hughes.
• Rearranging furniture (Oh, Jeebus, now I'm imagining Joe Manginiello in a tank top moving my couch and there is no way that's not sexy.) Oh dear, where was I?
• Cleaning out the closets ("Put that in the donate pile, baby.")
• Hand puppets. OK, that probably is a thing. Not thinking about it.
• Antique clocks ("Ooh, it's about to strike the hour!")

OK, your turn. I know you can add to the list.

This Is Not How It Was Supposed To Be

Yesterday was supposed to be my first Mother's Day as a mother. It was not.

I wasn't depressed, because as Allie of Hyperbole and a Half so beautifully explained, depression is when the feeling are dead. Instead, I was feeling lots of feelings, in random order in varying intensity. The 24-hour crazies, if you will. 

So I spent the day rolling with it, knowing that it would pass. I communed with the couch and read some Buffy fan fiction, and don't even bother judging me because I know what some of you do for fun, so mutually assured embarrassment. 

I made his Awesomeness start watching Angel, now that we're done with Buffy--we laughed and said, "I'm Batman" every time he did anything Batman-like (brooded, brooded on top of a building, stepped off of a roof while wearing a long coat/cape). I mean, really, how did I not notice that Angel was so Batman the first time I watched this show?

I stayed off Facebook and Twitter, so if you posted anything of note there this weekend, put it in the comments, or I'm not going to know it.

And go read The Bloggess' Mother's Day post. So totally right on.

Noises That Are More Annoying Than Cicadas

Photo credit: borazivkovic

So the 17-year cicada-pocolapyse is coming, and we're all supposed to be freaking out about the racket. I started to, but then I realized that maybe it'll drown out some of the other annoying noises I'm subjected to all day. Such as:

• Car horns, honking to let someone in my building know they're there. Because why use a cellphone when you can annoy dozens of people?
• The engine of the Access-A-Ride mini-bus*. I always know it's 10 pm because I can hear it idling outside as it drops off one of my neighbors. Seriously, how do the riders stand the racket?
• Children running up and down the hallway screeching. Because running around outside on a nice day would just be crazy.
• People standing in front of the building hollering up to someone on one of the upper floors. Not because the person isn't already on their way down. But because it's fun.
• People blasting music from their car stereo. Because the time to introduce me to their favorite song is while I'm trying to watch TV.
• Any conversation held outside of my building. All flirting sounds 50% more lame when you're partaking in the conversation.
• The car alarms. Oh my god, the car alarms. Which people only have because it gets them a discount on their car insurance. Nobody in a city reacts when a car alarm goes off because they go off all the time. Like when a kid bumps into a car. Or all day long when acorns keep falling on the car. All day long. And yet it shuts off after three minutes, so there's nothing the cops can do about it.

*NYC Transit's on-request bus system for the disabled. Cheap and inconvenient.

Any cicada- or noise-related thoughts?

De-Punking Punk

Photo credit: skinhead_reggae

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is having a big exhibit of punk fashion. This prompted New York magazine to ask if this is the most un-punk thing ever to happen to punk.* Upon careful consideration, and viewing of Robocop 3**, I have to say no. 

Punk has been commodified and exploited in non-punk ways for decades. Hell, if Robocop 3, Max Headroom***, Escape From New York and the Mad Max movies are to be believed, the one thing we won't run out of in the future is hair gel. Bad guys will be wearing their mohawks and spiked hair proudly long after civilization has collapsed. 1980s films de-punked punk long before the Costume Institute ever had a chance.

Of course, the super important thing is what everyone wore to the Met gala, celebrating the big exhibit. If you were old enough to wear it the first time around, can you pull it off now? Do the kids these days have a prayer of making it work at all? So many inquiring minds wanted to know that Tom & Lorenzo's site was brought down by the traffic. Jezebel has a nice roundup of the outfits--love Jessica Pare's outfit. And Madonna killed it, of course. You can check out Tom & Lorenzo's detailed analysis of certain outfits here. 

Few of the men even tried. How hard is it to find a plaid tuxedo jacket when you have a team of stylists working for you?

Whose outfit did you love/hate?

*They also have an amusing punk glossary, and a discussion of UK punk vs. US punk in which they talk about how punk used to have such a sense of humor and originally wasn't about being rude and obnoxious****.

**Is there anyone who wasn't in Robocop 3? CCH Pounder, Jeff Garlin, Stephen Root. The guy who plays Grumpy on Once Upon a Time is in it, fer chrissake.

***How brilliant was that show? Netflix has the DVDs, but it's not on Instant Viewing. It is SO going on my queue. Gotta re-watch it and see how much of it we're living. At least it's still legal to have an off switch on the TV. Of course, so many of us sleep with a smartphone next to the bed, so why legislate it?

****Which reminds me of the time I was in Picadilly Circus and dared to sit the fuck down by myself to rest my feet after walking who knows how far across London. I started writing a postcard to have something to do and a punk got right up in my face and shouted something like "Dear Mum, Having a lovely time, wish you were here," and then rushed away before I could tell him to go fuck himself. If that's what you think passes for cool, I think you're doing it wrong. 

Yes, I know that Sid Vicious would probably do that sort of thing, but he's dead now and may have killed his girlfriend, so maybe we use those nice boys in The Ramones as our role models, m'kay?

Which reminds me of the time in the late 80s or early 90s when Johnny Rotten invited MTV cameras to follow him around for a few hours and them cursed them out when they showed up to protect his punk-cred. THAT may be the most un-punk thing that has ever happened to punk.

Non-Doctor Who Time Travel

Photo credit: Wonderlane

Have you been watching The Bletchley Circle on PBS? It's a three-part miniseries about a group of code-breakers who get together years after the war to catch a serial killer. Bletchley, of course refers to Bletchley Park, home of England's code breaking effort during WW2. 

HA and I only just watched the first episode, even though they just broadcast the last one. I'm not sure why, but we tend to let PBS mysteries marinate on the Tivo. We've only just finished last year's season of Masterpiece Mystery.

(Side note: What is up with Kurt Wallander's annoying cell phone ring? Is it a product placement thing?)

I'd already heard of Bletchley Park thanks to Blackout and All Clear, wonderful books by Connie Willis. In fact, I got so nostalgic for those books that I wasn't entirely paying attention to the show. Hell, all you have to do is say "Anderson shelter" or "the Blitz" and I'm off talking about these books. Which has got to be a great recommendation for all of her novels.

Connie Willis has written several books about time traveling historians. In this world, it's not possible to bring anything back from the past, or to travel to the future, so there's no profit in time travel. And there's too much risk of changing history to allow tourists. So it's mostly grad students going back to have a look around, and sometimes getting stuck for a while.

In Blackout and All Clear, several historians get stuck in World War 2 London, and end up having to settle in and ride out the war. There are two children (the Hodbins) who are equally  hilarious and infuriating. In Doomsday Book, a lone historian goes back to the Middle Ages and misses her target by twenty years. Hilarity does not ensue. However, in To Say Nothing of The Dog, there is plenty of nineteenth-century wackiness.

(Note: Those are Barnes & Noble links, but I listened to the audiobooks which I cannot recommend enough.)

She's written other novels, and has won loads of awards, but those are the only four I've read so far. And they're so memorable I keep wanting to give them another listen even though I know how long it would take me.

What are your favorite time travel novels? Do you have a book that you can't forget?

Women in Danger

Photo credit: cybermagik

A college friend/radical feminist activist shared this great video of Siskel & Ebert discussing the disturbing trend of horror films that put women in danger, and aligned the viewer with the killers. Do go watch them when you have half an hour--they are very much worth the time. As much as Gene & Roger disagreed about specific films over the years, they agreed on what was behind this trend. 

They said it was clearly a response to the women's movement (aka feminism) and the message was for women to get back into their old places. They called it the "women's movement," a term that seems quaint because they were in 1980. Nineteen fucking eighty. 

Have things improved? Of course not. The teenage girl getting killed in a slasher flick because she has the nerve to go out alone, have sex or otherwise act like an autonomous human being is such an ingrained movie trope that it's unthinkable to imagine film critics addressing it so directly. At least one the films that Siskel & Ebert specifically called out has been remade (the "The call is coming from inside the house" one).

I recently got an e-mail about a change.org petition requesting that networks add a sexual violence trigger warning before shows to help survivors of rape avoid watching something that could give them a flashback. I decided not to bother signing that particular petition because it's so futile. There's just too much rape and murder on TV these days that you're really safer not watching. Especially if you can't fast forward through commercials because the promos for upcoming shows will get you.

Don't believe me? Read this excellent analysis of rape and murder on current scripted dramas. The vast majority of shows include either rape or murder in their plot. The murder rate on TV is way higher than it is in real life.

(This increased sense of danger isn't helping anyone. Especially not Trayvon Martin, just to name one.)

On several occasions, HA and I have been trying to decide what to watch and when I request something relaxing, he suggests the latest episode of Elementary. Which is relaxing except for the part where someone dies almost every week.

Why do we never think of the victims in these shows? Years ago, I turned off an episode of Law & Order SVU and never watched the show again. I have a pretty high tolerance for violence--what kid raised on Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck getting Elmer Fudd to shoot them in head doesn't? But this was just too fucked up. The bad guys (which in a shocking twist may have included a woman-gasp) broke into a party of friends, forced them to have sex with each other at gunpoint in different combinations, then shot them all. The episode opened with a couple arriving late to the party and finding all the bodies. Once the Medical Examiner (or whoever) explained what had happened to the detectives, I was done.

Maybe it was because they used friends of the victims as our entry into the story, but it was impossible for me to put aside the torture and humiliation these (admittedly fictional) had undergone. You're at a party with all your couple friends and then someone forces your friend's husband to rape you. Then forces two of the (hetero) guys to have sex. And so on. And then they kill you anyway when the only reason you didn't rush them and make them shoot you in the first place was because you all thought you had a chance of coming out alive.

And now I'm supposed to forget about that and follow the good detectives as they catch the baddies, with the distinct possibilities that there will be more victims along the way. On a show that is supposed to be entertainment?

Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker. I am so over this shit. And that was something like ten years ago. 

Experts are even advising fiction writers that putting your main character's life in danger isn't a good way to raise the stakes of your story because we're exposed to so much fictional death these days that we don't care.

Let's brainstorm some plots that we'd like to see that don't involve a body count. I'll start.

• How about a nice theft? Heirloom jewelry, priceless works of art, that sort of thing.
• How about addiction recovery? Redemption, risk of failure, lots of dramatic potential.
• Maybe something with corporate intrigue? Without CEOs offing each other.

OK, your turn.