I game.

I also work for a living and deal with worrying about getting fired, but I game a lot nowadays. And gaming eats a significant portion of whatever bandwidth I have between work and the things I do to keep me sane from work.

One of which is gaming. Have I mentioned that?

Gaming, ducks, means RPGS. Role playing games, the pen & paper and funny dice kind, not your Zeldas or Final Fantasies or what have you. For the first time since I was an itty-bitty trans gamer, I’ve been consistently getting a lot of gaming in.

One of these days I’m going to write about what it’s like to hit the table as both genders. Of course, three years ago people would actually have read it. Now? Who cares?

C. L. Minou went from being a D-List internet blogger to a has-been that never was. Or something.

Right, no pity party here. So, I play yer traditional Dungeons and Dragons clones, but for the last year or so I’ve been interested in what folks like to call Story games. RPGs, you see, that focus on storytelling and not tactical positioning. It’s interesting, and creative, and possibly a new genre of story telling.

So I hang out here, Story-Games.com, and it’s a nifty place, if a bit obscure for the newbie. And lately they’ve been having a discussion about getting more women involved in gaming communities.

This is a good thing. Women have a lot to contribute to gaming. I endorse it.

And of course the thread isn’t really being about including women.

I don’t know how many of the folks on the thread identify, but there’s sure a lot of butthurt and dismissal and…oh, WEV.

This is why it’s hard for me to blog lately.

‘Cos the fight is so bloody draining, and I have such limited bandwidth. And somewhere a while back I lost my fastball, and I don’t think there’s anything I can say that people care about.

And yet…not writing wears on me. I think about it. A lot. I miss the days of this place being a real going concern. But the inertia is so high.

Plus, I painted myself a bit in a corner here; I feel like I can’t expand the focus of the blog to other things in my life, can I?

Wait.

I guess I could.

I have to think about this…

Anyway, if you care about gaming and women in gaming, take a look at Story Games. And stay there! It’s a very cool place. Including the folks on the thread. Even if we have the irony again of a thread about women being dominated by men’s very special feelings.

I don’t much go for the ultimate fighting; about the only fighting I do of late is with polyhedral dice, which don’t hurt anybody. (Except the d4; that nasty little tetrahedron is the gaming geek’s caltrop of choice.) The one martial art I studied was the one with no attacks.

But now comes Fallon Fox to the bar. Or octagon. There’s something geometric involved. (Maybe a d4. Ouch!) So it turns out, she is trans! And a fighter in Mixed Martial Arts.

Of course, she didn’t set out to be a trans fighter in Mixed Martial Arts. She’s a female fighter in Mixed Martial Arts.

According to most people.

Maybe not Steve Crowder. (O my ducks, beware, for that link goes to Fox…)

Unless you were born and raised a woman, you don’t go around hitting chicks.

It’s only natural for human beings to get squeamish at the sight of a lifelong male pummeling dames mercilessly, but it’s not an argument. So let’s use a scientific one! Surprisingly, human biology is not the homophobic, intrinsically anti-transgender medium that leftists would have you believe.

So let’s assume for a second that one can completely change their genetics (rather than the likely reality of having merely pushed certain, inconvenient gene expressions at bay) after having Bobbitt’d their wiener. It is still undeniable that for this person’s entire life, that he had the hormonal profile and capabilities of a man. This is of course to say nothing of the ligaments, bone density and overall musculature that has been built over a lifetime of… well, being a man. Let’s just talk hormones for a second.

Well! Biology may not be homophobic, but I know somebody who is.

So let’s assume for a second that one can completely change their genetics (rather than the likely reality of having merely pushed certain, inconvenient gene expressions at bay) after having Bobbitt’d their wiener. It is still undeniable that for this person’s entire life, that he had the hormonal profile and capabilities of a man. This is of course to say nothing of the ligaments, bone density and overall musculature that has been built over a lifetime of… well, being a man. Let’s just talk hormones for a secondWell! I think I just threw up in my mouth, which is still a more pleasant image than the ones Steve fed you.

I won’t keep the Fox regurgita…right, forget I said that. I’m going to stop quoting now. The rest is as bad, talks about musculature, and the amount of hormones in your body. Even if we were to posit any of that to be true (and it’s a bit dubious), let’s check two things:

• Ms. Fox has a body that is currently no more capable of producing testosterone than any other woman’s.
• Ms. Fox has been that way for more than two years.

Which is, you know, good enough for the International Olympic Committee!

Look, folks, I get it: this is controversial, even among us, the trans. There are many reasons why you might not want to compete in women’s sports, provided the you in this sentence is a woman of trans experience. Were the world as we wish it to be, and there was equality between all, well, then, no worries. But it ain’t. There are very good reasons for women to still have segregated sports, and segregated spaces. Though it needn’t have to be this way; I remain unconvinced that there isn’t a woman anywhere in the world, no matter what her path to womanhood was, who couldn’t learn to throw a knuckler well enough to pitch at least long relief, or pass well enough to play point guard for five minutes, or goalie for sixty. I myself would do away with segregation by gender and just go with rational divisions like weight class or fastball speed, or acting ability if you like soccer. (Meryl Streep could make any side in Europe a contender! I kid, folks, I love the beautiful game.)

What isn’t a good reason is the crass, knee-jerk, gender essentialism of folks like Steverino up there (sadly mirrored, sometimes, by folks on what should be the side of the angels. Or cupcakes, if like me you don’t believe in angels.) Nobody should beat up on anybody, male or female, is what I says; unless, of course, everyone’s signed up for it in some polygon of some kind.

And for the record, taken with a large amount of salt, and the realization that I eat like crap and have had a milestone birthday in between: I am a shade of what I used to be able to do, prehormones. It’s damn near impossible for me to keep my weight down, let alone lower it. Things that I used to lift without even thinking about it are now major problems sure to cause me pain down the road. I walk slower, breathe heavier, and if anything my larger frame is a hindrance, because I lack the muscles to push it around.

It’s been four years now since my own surgery. Food for thought.

In the meantime, check this out. Yours mostly truly got her creaky Gen-X self interviewed by the very bright, very awesome folks at The Student Journal, in the UK. Apparently we are big, not so much in France (hélas!) but in l’Angleterre. Seriously, it was a fantastic experience and helps reaffirm my belief that you Millennials are the last best hope of Earth.

Jesus, I mean to write about this soon: the always awesome Fannie on the Ultimate Fighter who has had to out herself as trans.

Hey, we have  new pope! I guess the blessing I got (me and 10,000 folks in St. Peter’s Square) from Pope Emeritus has expired!

Enjoy the links. I’ll see you all again soon.

Boy, things sure haven’t changed since I was last here…

*bump*

Didn’t remember leaving that there…

*cough*

Sure is a lot of dust here…

*CRASH*

Ouch! That’s where I left the desk…

Greetings ducks, and Happy New Year, which is what the title of the post says. I think. I’m listening to Jacques Brel as I type this, but that doesn’t make my French any better.

So! I thought I’d drop by the old haunt and see how things are going. It seems everything is functional, so I gave the old girl a new look. Bit less cluttered, bit more modern. Hope you enjoy it.

At this point, every time I’ve threatened to come back and start writing, I’ve lied. So this time, I’m announcing…my retirement! That’s it! I absolutely won’t have anything to say ever again.

Well, except for this, which the Guardian was gracious enough to ask me to do.

Which means I’ve already lied! That could actually work out…

Like anything, it’s just the beginning of the rest of your life, but that’s the point, isn’t it? To begin to really live your life. I’m not going to even bother talking about all the things that are happening to your body. By now you know the details, gruesome, enlightening, and even delightful; if our readers want to know them, they’re a click away.

Check it out!

(Where O where have you been, C.L.?)

I’ve been to love, ducks. Love love super lovey love. Although I might not be for much longer, after that sentence.

Also, work. Work is good. I’m glad I have it. But it does eat into one’s blogging.

And D&D!

(Pause while my one remaining reader flees.)

So, OK, I’ve been busy being amorous and financially fit and pretending to be a sorceress. (What? you were expecting a hobbit?)

What else?

Some of it is being busy. And some of it…some of it is that I lost a lot of faith.

The last year or so has left me (and some of you, I’ll wager) feeling a lot more hopeless about…everything. Social justice. The world economy not crashing or reforming itself into the latest take in feudalism. Everywhere you go, at least in this country (and a bunch of others), the forces of reaction, of kyriarchy, are on the march and nothing we do seems to slow them.

Here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., our choices basically amount to voting for the guy who wants to drive the car off a cliff, and the guy who just wants to drive it out to the middle of the Mojave and wait for things to turn up.

And I think I lost a little confidence because of that. In the idea that what I have to say will matter to anyone. Even to readers of blogs. Because what can I say that Liss or Amanda or Sady or…well, lots of folks haven’t already said, and better.

I’m still not sure I know the answer to that. But maybe I’m willing to give it a try again.

So….I’m back. Kind of.  For a while. Hope you enjoy the show.

And stay tuned for some announcements soon.

For the most part, I don’t approach movies with any particular ax to grind, so I don’t default to a feminist or a queer reading of most movies. Usually, individual movies will suggest the critical tools that are most useful to understanding their value (or lack thereof). For example: my main cinematic drug of choice is horror movies. By their very nature, horror movies suggest psychoanalytic readings. Freud works. So does Lacan. I tend to use Jung when I approach horror movies, because I think he best explains the enduring appeal of horror movies even after they’ve lost their power to actually scare the viewer. You could use a feminist scalpel to dissect horror movies, or a sociological scalpel (especially given the interesting tendency of horror movies to mirror the social climate of their milieu), but these are secondarily useful, given that horror movies are specifically attempting to manipulate psychological effects in more radical ways than other kinds of movies. I also think that the greatest movies reward multiple approaches.

I don’t know that the Millennium trilogy is composed of “great” movies. Almost certainly not. But I do know that they are specifically tailored to a feminist viewpoint. And when they are subjected to a feminist critique, they are a serious muddle. On the one hand, they cast Lisabeth Salander, their title character, “the girl”, as a defiantly queer heroine who spits in the face of the patriarchy. On the other, they cater to the fantasies of middle-aged white men by providing them with a secondary protagonist to act as a surrogate. This is most obnoxiously played out in the first film when, seemingly out of character, Lisabeth, decides to become sexually involved with Blomqvist, the male protagonist. Given the systematic abuse of the character both in the text of the first film and in the revealed back-story in the second, this stands as a stroke fantasy for Blomqvist’s middle-aged het male identifiers. Blomqvist is a necessary character from one other point of view, too, given that most of the men in these movies are such monstrous avatars of misogyny that he functions as a kind of apologia. At least these films are smart enough to let Lisabeth Salander stand as the heroine of the story, though she tends to vanish from this role from time to time in the second movie. I note on my own blog that Lisabeth strikes me as Holmes to Blomqvist’s Watson, and Holmes sometimes vanished from his stories, too, all the while remaining as the driving presence.

The depiction of rape in these movies is troubling, though. Not just because it depicts the act in elaborate, loving detail, but because it builds the whole plot of the second movie around the event. You can make an argument on the evidence of the first film alone that the rape scene is both gratuitous and filmed in such a way as to titillate the audience (one of my correspondents thinks that Rapace was “posed” during this sequence to suggest some level of enjoyment; I don’t know that I agree, but I can see her point). The second film’s treatment of the event using the footage from the first film has the unfortunate effect of defining Lisabeth Salander in relation to it. It also details further instances of abuse in her past. So instead of embracing the character as a complicated and brilliant, it defines and motivates her as a victim and casts the film and series in the role of the rape/revenge fantasy.

At least the second film doesn’t go down the absurd path of Lisabeth and Blomqvist’s sexual relationship, which is a relief. Hell, the two don’t even share the screen together until the very last scene in the movie. I’ll give the movie props, too, for depicting Blomqvist as a kind of a sad sack white knight who doesn’t quite get there in time to save the damsel in distress. This film, like its predecessor, let’s Lisabeth be a badass all on her own. It also surprised and delighted me by reinforcing her queerness. There’s a ridiculously hot sex scene near the beginning of the film between Lisabeth and her ex-lover that goes beyond the usual soft core fondling and kissing for a straight male audience. It’s a scene that has some level of authenticity. It doesn’t hurt that Noomi Rapace doesn’t fit the image of a straight male fantasy. I love that she has unshaved underarms, for one example. And the tattoos and piercings, too. (As an aside, there was some dumb college student in the audience when I saw the film that could be heard to audibly go “ew” when the shot of Noomi Rapace’s underarm came on screen. Suck it, tool; she’s not there for your jollies). One other nice thing about the queerness of the character is that it rebukes the occasional and ignominious depiction of gays in crime fiction as murderers and psychos (think Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train* or Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs). I mean, there are plenty of queer detectives in print; not so much in movies and television.

In the final analysis, I enjoy these movies on a gut level, because if I think about them too long, my mind might talk my gut out of its enjoyment. They are thrillers first, after all, and though they’re pretty conventional thrillers, they still manage the odd set piece to set the pulse a-racing and they provide unusually interesting characters. There’s an image of Lisabeth at the end of the second movie that’s brutal and defiant at the same time and it might just summarize the series’ central appeal. Rape her, beat her, shoot her, bury her in the ground, it doesn’t matter. She’s indomitable. Men cannot destroy her. I’m looking forward to the third film.

Also, The Silence of the Lambs strikes me as the touchstone for the Millennium pictures, given that Lisabeth Salander is a close cousin to Clarice Starling.

This is also a post to say that my Tiger Beatdown commitment is likely going to be lessened soon and I’ll be writing more for my own blog again! Um, hooray?

This is also a post to say that one of the reasons I can’t even be bothered to put up a link post to my recent stuff (though have you seen the cool widget on the upper left? It’s pretty good at finding me!) is that the new job keeps me hopping and I’m remembering why it was so damn hard to write when you work full time; because you come home completely burnt-out, even when you really like your job.

This is also a post to say that the other reason you see less of me of late is because I am ridiculously happy because I have met a wonderful person and we are too busy coming up with ways to make each other joyous for me to have any creativity left for writing.

And finally this is a post to say that I will have real posts up soon. Because I’ve been away too long

And yet, as phallocentric as these kinds of books are, they don’t hold a candle to the male literary lights of the same period. I usually read more than one book at a time. I have a long commute to work, so I usually have an audiobook going in my car in addition to whatever print book I’m carrying around with me. (As an aside, I always, always have a book with me; it makes waiting in lines ever so much more tolerable). Right now I’m listening to John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. I used to read a lot of Irving after falling in love with Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp. I fell out with him in the late eighties, and this is the first of his books that I’ve read since A Prayer for Owen Meany. It’s been a while. Twenty years or more, I think. The thing that put me on the outs with Irving was the penis game, invented by one of my friends in college, which places an over and under on how many pages it takes for any given John Irving novel to use the word “penis.” I had forgotten about that when I put in the first disc of A Widow for One Year. It didn’t make it out of the first track before the word “penis” appeared. Twice. I’m lucky I didn’t wreck the car.

I don’t read a lot of literary fiction from the second half of the 20th Century. It seems like affluence had a disastrous effect on the male writers of that generation, and where the writers of the 1930s and 40s (your Faulkners, your Steinbecks, your Fitzgeralds) were all taking swings at the fences, it seems like the writers of the fifties, sixties, and seventies were obsessed with their cocks (I’m looking at you, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon). Give me genre outliers like Philip K. Dick or Jim Thompson any day of the week.

Of course, the irony of all this regarding Irving and A Widow for One Year is that the back of the CD box lists it as “Women’s Fiction.” Oh, REEELEE? Well, whatever. We’ll just have to see about that.

Also, the fangirl in me couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t mention the completely awesome graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke based on the first of the Parker novels. It’s the bee’s knees.

From my perspective, there are two elephants in the room in regards to this movie. First: For a decidedly queer movie from a queer filmmaker, there are surprisingly few queer people in front of the camera. As in none. Second: The plot twist that drives the second half of the movie, in which Julianne Moore’s character, Jules, has an affair with Paul, Mark Ruffalo’s character, is a cliché, and an obnoxious one at that. The movie actually does deal with both of these issues, but it’s debatable whether it deals with them successfully.

Taking them one at a time:

While I don’t demand that gay characters be played by gay actors, its galling to see an entirely straight cast playing gay characters in an era when Newsweek magazine is decrying the “fact” that gay actors can’t play straight characters (and why doesn’t this impediment flow the other way? Hmm?). The timing of the movie is unfortunate in this, and it’s compounded by the fact that Cholodenko is herself a lesbian and would presumably have no blinders on when it came to straightwashing the movie. It’s obvious that she’s aware of the problem because she comments on it directly in the text of the movie: When quizzed by their son about why they prefer gay male porn, Jules explains that in lesbian porn, the actresses are all played by straight women. “It’s so inauthentic,” she adds. This is probably the funniest line in the movie, given the casting, but it’s also kind of a bitter pill. On the other hand, the actors Cholodenko does have are so good that it suggests that there were no better choices available.

The second issue is more vexing, given the underlying patriarchal meme that all a lesbian needs to turn straight is a good fucking from the right man. Fortunately, this is demolished by the movie–Jules repudiates the idea that she is somehow straight and she repudiates Paul in the end, too–but should it have been raised in the first place? I don’t know. In the context of the movie, it does rise organically from this particular story and these particular characters. Jules is demonstrably having a mid-life crisis even before Paul shows up, and such people often do stupid things. This is compounded by the fact that some lesbian women actually DO occasionally have sex with men, even once they’re in touch with being lesbian, and this is NOT indicative of some latent heterosexuality (or even bisexuality), so the movie could claim some level of verisimilitude if it wanted. I just wonder if it couldn’t have explored Jules’s crisis in some other way. It might not have, given the film’s plot for Paul: he wants a family and he wants Jules and Nic’s family. This comes to a head when Nic rages at him that it’s HER family and he can bloody well go out and get his own. It’s a terrific moment, and it wouldn’t be possible without Jules’s dalliance with him.

In any event, it’s a lot to think about. Fortunately, the movie grounds all of this in a very closely observed depiction of Nic and Jules’s marriage, the details of which suggest that the movie as it actually plays probably could NOT have been made by a straight filmmaker. The way Jules and Nic behave with each other betrays too much knowledge of lesbian culture, from the therapy-speak they sometimes use to the details of their sex life together. The second funniest moment in the film comes when Nic pulls a big comforter over herself while Jules is goinq down on her: “I’m cold,” she says. “I’m suffocating!” Jules replies. Oh, and there’s the vague disappointment visible when they realize that their children are totally hetero. Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of marriage, and a timely one at that. It suggests that Jules and Nic’s marriage is exactly like anyone else’s marriage, which is to say that it’s like no one else’s marriage at all. Because no two marriages are alike.