Amazingly, a secret posted at fandomsecrets has inspired something good: the creation of transfans. To quote from the profile, transfans is "a fandom community for transgendered/genderqueer fans and allies interested in the combination of transgender issues and fandom."

It's teensy right now--I don't think it's being promoted very extensively--and it would be great to see more people join. (Just to be clear, I'm a member but not the creator/mod.)

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I've just started watching "Charlie X," the second TOS episode, and all I can say is: ( this )

I'm having a very interesting discussion here with executrix about whether a particular character should be described as "camp." (The post is friendslocked because it has details in it about a course I'm teaching, and I don't want any students somehow stumbling across it. Also, it contains some spoilers for Blake's 7--vandonovan, you shouldn't click.)

Anyway, I'm realizing that I don't have a sufficiently clear sense of what "camp" means. I think that, like porn, I know it when I see it. But that's not really very useful in a discussion.

So, how do you define "camp"? How is camp different from, say, male femininity? (It is different, in my view, but the difference is turning out to be hard to pin down.)

Personally, I think key elements of camp are playfulness and a certain self-awareness--I don't think you can be camp by accident, and I don't think you can be camp without having fun at it. That's not really a definition, though. That's just a couple of characteristics.


Poll #1095459 A Bonus Poll for B7 Fans
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

1) Is Kerr Avon camp?

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The conversation in this strip will be familiar to all too many of us in fandom (and not just comics):

The terrible threat of tokenism!

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1) Netflix has lowered their subscription prices. When does a company ever lower its prices? I am happy. Also, I discovered the "Watch Now" option--with my subscription I get 18 free hours of online movie-watching per month. This means I can watch my beloved Red Dwarf reruns whenever the mood strikes me. I'd forgotten how witty Rimmer can be. *loves him* (And yes, I mean Rimmer, not Lister. Whom I also love, but Rimmer is often funnier.)

2) I bought comics yesterday, but I am meh about all of them. Even X-Factor. Except for the bits of X-Factor that seriously annoyed me, but that's another post.

3) Also yesterday, I read Michael Nava's novel Goldenboy, which is part of a mystery series featuring gay defense attorney Henry Rios. Somehow I'd never read this one despite adoring the other books in the series.

There's a charming romantic subplot which fascinates me because of how the lovers, both men, behave. They declare their love for each other after a single night together. They have sex in the bathtub by candlelight. They cuddle. In short, they do everything that many fandom folks insist Men Don't Do.

Which isn't to say that every male character would do those things. But men aren't all the same. Some of 'em are real romantic softies. (Love poetry? Pretty much invented by men. Which, yes, happened because writing of any kind was dominated by men until the twentieth century, but still.)

We do a disservice to our characters, and to ourselves as feminists (we are all feminists here, right?) if we reinscribe the stereotype that all men are inarticulate, emotionally-incompetent lumps of testosterone. That idea isn't only bad for men, it's bad for women, because it essentially gives men a free pass to act like jerks on the grounds that they can't help it. (And I don't just mean in romantic relationships, either--I mean men as fathers and brothers and sons, friends and co-workers. So it's not just a problem for straight women.)

4) There's a very thoughtful review of Deathly Hallows here at Asking the Wrong Questions, one of my favorite blogs. Abigail Nussbaum takes a good hard look at the politics of the books, which is something I haven't seen much outside of hardcore fandom. (Spoilers for DH, of course, and also vague and incidental spoilers for A Series of Unfortunate Events.)

5) Finally, my poll on reading and commenting is providing very interesting results. So I wanted to say a couple of things to anybody who reads my posts:

Comments on fic are loved. A brief comment that just says "I liked this story" is a million times better, as far as I'm concerned, than silence.

Constructive criticism of fic is welcome. Always.

Please don't feel reluctant to comment if I don't know you. I make posts public because I want people to read and reply to them. I like to have discussions and to bounce ideas back and forth. Plus, LJ is pretty much my social life, and the more the merrier. (Unlike IRL, where more people = Kit goes away and hides.)

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I found this in Giant Size X-Men #3, a 2005 compilation of early X-Men issues. Apparently this "pin-up" was included in X-Men #9.

( large-ish image under the cut )


I'm kind of amazed by Jean's body in this image, and by how enormously our society's standards of female desirability have changed in just over forty years. Okay, Jean's legs are still waaaaay too long, and her little Cinderella twig-feet are just inexplicable. But she's got hips! And breasts that, although strangely drawn, aren't wildly out of proportion to the rest of her body! She has a figure that almost resembles that of an actual woman.

Also, she's completely clothed in a costume identical to those the men wear. Unlike in modern comics, she's not in a little bathing suit while the guys have head-to-toe body armor.

I'm not trying to idealize the portrayal of women in 60's comics (for one thing, the fact that they made a pin-up of Jean means she's being depicted primarily as an object of desire) but in some respects, this is better than the way most female characters are shown now.

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You know what I hate?

The word "emo."

At least, I hate it in its current expanded usage as a term with which to mock any display of sorrow. (Note: I'm mostly going to be talking about fictional characters here, but I do wonder whether "emo" gets applied to real people, with real grief, in the same way.)

Now, it's one thing to mock characters who make a lifestyle out of their pain. Angel's a fair target, and so, maybe, is Batman (because endlessly brooding over your murdered parents becomes a bit excessive after, say, thirty years). Movie!Superman's (and movie!Spiderman's) schtick of "I can never be with the woman I love because OMG I cannot reveal my identity and put her in danger" may deserve a cruel laugh or six. Even my beloved John Constantine spends a little too much time feeling bad because he's got no friends. (John, it helps to be nice to people. And to not drag them into situations involving demons.)

But what I'm talking about is sticking the "emo" label on characters who are unhappy for damn good reasons. I just saw Pietro (aka Quicksilver, a Marvelverse mutant) called emo for crying over his dead wife (and I assume she'd died fairly recently, because their child was still quite young). Another comics scene that I found very moving, in which Superman grieves for the loss of his friendship with Batman, got relentlessly mocked at scans_daily, with the e-word used more than once. (Yes, these are both comics-related, and in fact scans_daily-related, examples, because that's mostly where I am fannishly at the moment. But I know I've seen the "emo" label used this way--to describe grieving characters--in a lot of different fandoms.)

I have to admit, I have a personal grudge against "emo." A few months ago, a story of mine in which the main character had just experienced the ruin of his very identity and all his hopes got a comment describing the character as "emo." Now, I don't think the commenter actually meant it as an insult, but it was still a way of dismissing the character's pain, of treating it as a kind of self-indulgence.

I don't get it. I mean, I have theories about why it happens, but I don't get the emotional mechanism behind the "oh, this character's crying, OMG emo haha" response. Maybe it's partly about gender--I've never seen a female character labeled emo.¹ Because of course we all know it's okay for girls to cry and carry on, but men must manfully bear their pain like soldiers. (And before anyone complains, I used the terms "girls" and "men" deliberately, okay?) Maybe it's related to our current cultural impatience with grief and depression--we're supposed to get over this stuff quickly, via Prozac if necessary. Maybe it's a defense--if we laugh at sad characters, we don't have to risk identifying with them and uncovering our own sorrows.

I want to re-emphasize that I'm not claiming that characters never overindulge their own sadness, or that writers never try to manipulate the audience with tear-jerking plots (think dead!Jean, or dead!Tara, or those eighty-chapter angstathon fanfics where poor Xander crawls from one soul-scarring trauma to the next). But it bothers me when people respond to realistic grief with a laugh and a sneer. And, to be frank, it worries me, too, because I wonder if it extends over into real life and affects how we deal with flesh-and-blood people in pain.

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¹ Note, also, that my examples of truly mockable "emo-ness" are all male. I couldn't think of a single female character whose sorrow seemed ridiculous or exaggerated, so it may be that I'm equally gender-biased here.


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I'm a real nosy parker, so once again I'm asking you all to tell me about your sex lives. Or, in this case, your sexual fantasies and gender identity.

This poll is for women (biologically female regardless of gender identity) only, and is also only for women who enjoy reading or watching male/male erotica, such as boyslash, gay porn, etc. Please do not take this poll if you're a man or if you don't like male/male erotica. Thanks.

No one can see your individual answers, and if you comment (please do!), you should feel free to do so anonymously if you'd like.

( cut because the poll is kind of long )

Back in December, Rep. Henry Waxman published a report showing that the content of 11 out of 13 federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs includes considerable untruths. These programs mislead kids about the likely failure rate of condoms, the frequency of HIV infections, and the emotional consequences of sexual activity. They tell them that many women become sterile and have lifelong psychological problems after a legal abortion. Some materials even contain errors in basic science, such as the number of chromosomes in a human sperm or egg cell.

And, just in case anyone was in doubt about how this ties in to the social agenda of the religious right, many of the programs also promote the most retrograde gender stereotypes imaginable.

The following excerpts from course materials are taken from the February 2005 issue of Harper's.

( color me appalled )

Somehow I missed this story when it first happened, so I'm glad that Harper's included these little excerpts. The magazine notes that the Bush administration is paying $167 million per year to fund abstinence-only programs. My tax dollars, and yours (if you're American), are paying to brainwash vulnerable teenagers.

There are no words for my disgust.

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