September books

 I actually read more than 2 or 3 books in September! Love that journey for me.

Immediately after Remember Me?, I read She's Come Undone, which was a mistake. It's just so horribly sad and depressing in a way that is in no way hinted at in the rather quirky summary. Wally Lamb is a good writer, and I cared about Dolores and wanted her to be happy, but yikes. Dolores is aptly named; the author points this out quite obviously in a patting-himself-on-the-back-for-being-so-clever way, and puts her through all sorts of sad situations. There is sort of a happy ending, at least, and Dolores finds the love she so craves. I did find the 1950s-70s upbringing interesting. Massive, massive trigger warnings for rape of a child, grooming by a predator, domestic violence, mental illness and institutionalization, fatphobia, nonconsensual sexual situations, semi-manipulated abortion, death, sex, homophobia, predatory lesbian trope, AIDS, stalking, religious abuse, alcohol and drug mentions/usage, binge eating and eating disorders, stillbirth, racism from an elderly character, infidelity. There's probably more but that's all I can think of. I left it behind in Mexico with a note telling my family not to read it (there's no way my Christian parents can handle that kind of story). Cover notes: I actually picked this up due to the interesting cover and title. It's actually the title of a 1970s song. 3 stars (4 stars for writing + 2 stars for story). 

Immediately after flying back from Mexico, I flew to New York to visit my sister and her family (I have a nephew now and he's the cutest baby in the world). We mostly hung out and went to restaurants and

bookstores. I bought Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from Westsiders Rare & Used Books (such a fun bookstore). This feminist utopia is a reread for me, and I love it. Read my previous review here, and my mini essay comparing it to The Left Hand of Darkness here. It's so interesting how she points out that a lot of what we consider gender or how women naturally are is a result of the patriarchy and its gender roles (this was written in 1915!). However, I noticed this time how eugenics-y the book is: the Herland women are all white, despite being in a hidden part of South America or something, and they've deliberately bred themselves to be strong and tall and good at stuff and resist disease and smart, etc. I didn't really realize it until I read a quote from CPG that said that white men and women need to come together to improve the lower races, or something. All the great 19th and 20th century white feminists were all racist as hell, unfortunately. Anyway, I do like this book, but be aware of the racism and eugenics-y ways of thinking. It's critical of capitalism, the patriarchy, and Christianity (but rightfully so, imo). Loved the misandry though. 4 stars, keeping. 

Another reread this month was James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. These are fun PC satires of classic fairy tales, and it's funny to read how the tales were transformed. For instance, Red Robin Hood and the wolf chop up the woodcutter for being so sexist and speciest as to think RRH needed his help with the wolf. Per usual, one isn't sure whether Garner is poking fun at capitalism etc. or PC culture itself. I reread this one because I'm giving the series away. Trigger warnings for fairytale-typical violence, I guess? 3.5 stars, giving away. 

My last read for September was The Chickens Are Restless, a The Far Side comics compilation. I love Gary Larson's The Far Side so much. I got this from the thrift store, and I'm pretty sure I'd already seen all of these (although there were some comics I didn't remember seeing before). These are classics for a reason. I wonder, if I were to walk past all the faculty office doors at my school, how many would have a TFS comic taped to it. Probably a lot, in the sciences. 4 stars, keeping.

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness & Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

Gender and Science Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland both deal with alternately gendered societies, but in different ways. Herland is a country that has been peopled only with women for hundreds of years; the women become pregnant independently, through asexual reproduction. The Left Hand of Darkness takes place in Winter, where everyone is genderless, except during their mating periods when one individual becomes male and one individual becomes female in order to reproduce. These lands are seen as very strange by the protagonists, who are men from our society/world.

The authors of both these books were women, which is unsurprising considering how in-depth and concerned with gender and its role in our and the alternate societies both stories are. In contrast, male SF writers such as Burroughs and Bradbury have written SF stories where the male themes of exploration and colonization/domination take place on Mars, a newer Wilder West. Many men who wrote SF have used the genre as a way to satirize their cultures or human nature, but they have not dealt with gender anywhere near as much as these two authors have. But then, men don't really have to deal with gender the way women do.

Broadly, female SF writers use SF as a way to imagine a differently cultured world, a different society, where gender does not shape the people, their destinies and their culture the way it does in our world or society. They want to explore worlds where gender is a non-issue: Gilman because there are no men and as such only one gender with nothing to contrast with, and Le Guin because no one has a gender and everyone is the same. To me, these books earn their science fiction status not because they take place on other planets (only Le Guin's does), but because they deal with the soft sciences: sociology and psychology.

Ballroom dancing and male-dominated society

I took several dance classes when I went to UCLA, partly because I have always wanted to learn and partly so that I would do some exercise during the week and not turn entirely into Jabba the Hut. The class was once a week, and I bought black and white loafers at my favorite cheap shoe place on Westwood Boulevard since tennis shoes were strictly forbidden and I knew I'd get blisters if I wore heels (and I'm tall enough as it is anyway). I took East Coast Swing the first semester (Winter '11), Ballroom basics the next 2 semesters (Spring and Fall '12), then Beginning Salsa (Winter '12), then Intermediate Salsa (Spring '12). The same instructor taught all the dance classes, a petite yet tough lady named Jackie. I loved it. I got to be pretty good, too (by which I mean you probably wouldn't die of secondhand embarrassment while watching).

I learned a lot from these classes: how to dance, obviously; how to follow; what to do in different circumstances. It was while dancing in one of the Ballroom dance classes that I realized how the culture of ballroom dancing directly parallels a male-dominated society like ours, especially the way it was in the past (which obviously makes sense considering the former arose from the latter). In ballroom dancing, the man leads. The man makes all the decisions, and the woman has to follow and go along with whatever he wants to do. If he wants to twirl her, she twirls. It's his decision. If she wants to twirl, she has to wait until it occurs to him. If she doesn't want to twirl, she's kinda out of luck unless she's willing to speak up ("hey, I'm getting kind of dizzy"). He moves her where he wants to go. He is supposed to have a firm hold on her. The firmer the hold, the better/stronger the lead.

The man always walks or moves forward, while the woman moves backwards. She can't see where she's going; the man decides where they're headed. I had a guy I was dancing with ask me once, "Isn't it weird to be always walking backwards?" "No," I replied, "I'm used to it." And that's how it is, in a male-dominated culture like ours. You are used to things always being a certain way, with men always being in charge and making the decisions. You get used to being the one who has no say, who does whatever the other has her do, who follows, who doesn't make decisions. You get used to being controlled, to always having the short end of the stick, to this world not being for you.

Girls would dance together if there weren't enough guys or if they just wanted to dance together (this happened more often than guys dancing together, which only happened a couple times as a joke), but one had to take the man's part (the Lead) and one had to take the woman's part. The rigidity of the gender roles stayed in the couple, despite their both being the same gender. Men could dance with two women, but I never saw two men dancing with one woman (I never took tango; that may be A Thing there; idk). I guess that as long as you have a Lead it doesn't matter how many he's leading.

The culture of ballroom dancing doesn't really prepare you for the real world, either (at least my classes didn't). The instructor always decreed that the men had to ask the women to dance (men lead and make all the decisions, doncha know). We girls had to stand there and wait for guys to come up to us and ask us to dance; we couldn't go up to and ask them. The most we could do was make eye contact with a guy we wanted to dance with and smile encouragingly. I'll bet that's what it was like to date in the olden times. Interestingly, when I went swing dancing with some friends at a local dance studio, I was ill-prepared for it because I just sat there and waited for guys to ask me to dance, which generally didn't happen. Hardly anyone asked me to dance because I was new and didn't know anyone, and on top of that and being really shy, I didn't ask anyone to dance because it felt wrong, like I was breaking the rules. My instructor had hammered it into my head that The Men Do The Asking. This did not apply in the real world (my friends asked guys all the time), and it left me sitting on the sidelines, feeling awkward and longing to dance but unable to due to antiquated rules I had internalized. In this way, the rules I learned in my dance classes actually hindered me in real life.

I realize there is an interesting point to be made about my instructor being a woman and teaching us the very traditional-role-y ballroom dances. Women often internalize and then turn around to teach the next generation the very same rules that cage them, that put them as lesser. When my teacher taught us the moves, she'd generally take the man's part and show us what to do with a volunteer girl from the class. (She would also sometimes have a guy who was a good dancer lead her in order to show us what the ladies were supposed to do.) The instructor was the leader of our class, and women who are leaders often have to take on male qualities because in the traditional mindset, leader=male.

Also, in classes where the guys outnumbered the girls, there would be a mad rush to ask girls to dance in order to avoid being left without a partner (the instructor made sure those who hadn't danced previously got to dance the next time). It was amusing and kind of amazing to see guys run or jump up to one and breathlessly say "hiwouldyouliketodance". One felt almost powerful, at that point (and there is so little power for women in ballroom dancing). This also didn't really help prepare me for the real world because in the real world, guys were not falling over themselves to ask me to dance (or on a date, I guess is the real-world parallel).

There is something that was positive about the dance classes' rigidly enforced gender roles and rules. The instructor was adamant about men doing the leading and asking, but she was equally adamant about the men being responsible for the women they were dancing with. It was the men's responsibility to make sure they didn't steer their partners into other dancers, or step on their toes, or make them dizzy by twirling them too much, or dropping them during lifts, or dipping them into other people, or crash into others or the wall, etc. If anything of that sort happened, it was automatically the man's fault. Many times I'd step on a guy's toes accidentally and apologize (the ingrained rules of my primary culture were stronger than this one's), only to have him say, "No, that's my fault; I wasn't leading you correctly."

Our male-dominated culture has men leading all the time, but outside of feminist circles you will rarely hear the blame placed on them. Wars and crime and economic crises and poverty and so forth occur under the watch of or are done by the group in charge (generally white heterosexual men, especially those who are rich) but they are almost always blamed on other people or seen as things that Just Happen ("don't get raped" instead of "don't rape"). Sometimes the bad things are blamed on others, on those not in the Group In Power (the U.S.'s economic state after George W. Bush being blamed on Obama, or the 'deterioration of our society' being blamed on feminism or secularization). We still have the male bias and domination without at least having the sense of responsibility, of acknowledging that it's their fault because it happened on their watch, when they were in charge, because they were in charge (and they're almost always in charge). If you're going to be in charge, at least own up to how much responsibility you have.

Not that I want Chivalry To Come Back, or anything. Just everyone be good to one another. And realize that what you've been taught, and the society we live in, is often messed up. But even in that (despite that?), you can find beauty and joy. I really did love dancing. I think I'll start up again.

Male Bias

men and women, boys
and girls, and husbands and wives
we always come last