Inktober 2018 Part 1. Roles and Representation
This year for Inktober, I'm working off the theme of 'roles' which refers specifically to 'roles for women'.
It's nothing groundbreaking, but Inktober is about challenging oneself, and there's a bunch of points of genesis for this theme. The basic challenge for me is to imagine female characters in roles beyond reducing them to sexual objects, or indeed, sexualizing them at all and moving beyond the 'virgin-whore' dichotomy, which is apparently a thing, albeit it's a Freudian psychoanalytic theory that I imagine is contentiously contemporary when diagnosing male impotency issues.
In conversation with my sister, some years ago, she also revealed to me that I have just about no female role models or females I admire in my active memory. What I mean by that is that if you just name 10 of your primary school friends, doesn't matter which year, just the first ten that come to mind, you'll probably in most circumstances find that it's a cognitive strain. Like for me, to name female influences on me philosophically requires strain even though there's female public intellectuals and comedians I like, like Toni Morrison, Ariel Levy, Esther Perel, Brene Brown, Susan Jacoby, Chimomon Ngozi Adichie... all of whom I've watched deliver keynote speaking engagements and enjoyed and gotten something out of it. But honestly, they don't come near to occupying the territory in my mind that Abraham Lincoln, Musashi Miyamoto, Marcus Aurelius, Rumi, Nietzsche and the Yagyu's do.
Nor do I need them to. If I was just to pick one of those dead men from the list and try my derndest to immitate them and live up their example, I'd consider it a life well lived - except perhaps for Nietzsche, I'm not sure if on a personal level, his life was worth living, though I'm grateful for the works he produced.
I digress. The sad fact is, if you asked me to name influential female Monarchs, that's an easy task. If you asked me to name female historical figures I admire... I come up short. So there's a challenge for me, but I'm not averse to the notion of discovering a woman who really shapes my philosophy and outlook on life, particularly one that could supplant any of my dead idols. I suspect though, it's a tall order because women were largely excluded from history, except in the case of Monarchies.
But is even that true?
As I learned in marketing, most people might recognise, or even recall the piece of Trivia of who was the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean solo - Charles Lindbergh. You probably can't recall the second person to do so, because nobody cares. But you may surprise yourself that you know the third person to complete a solo transatlantic flight. Which seems strange, because if nobody cares about the second flight, why would people care about the third? Because it's Amelia Earhart.
So I actually don't know if this theme wise will be challenging or not. What I notice or at least, suspect, is that it's an exercise in noticing what we do and do not notice. An exercise in selective attention.
I figure arguments about 'representation' are akin to, if not just the mirror image of arguments about 'censorship'. Namely, these are important issues when it regards children, and I can jump right on board. Children should only be exposed to material as their physical, mental and emotional development become ready to handle it. Likewise, seeing diversity represented in popular culture I figure is quite important for people under the age of 12. Above that I'm not so sure.
So in the case of censorship, people who take to social media and advocate people stop listening to Jenny McCarthy about vaccines, or Jordan Peterson about sexual politics, are generally arguing on behalf of someone else - somebody who doesn't possess the critical faculties to dismiss the ideas championed themselves but instead will adopt the arguments wholesale and start spreading them like a virus. It's seldom if ever, 'please stop giving these people a platform because I can't find a way to disagree with them.'
Same same for representation. People advocating for depictions, if not representation by women as say... a head of state, are generally not arguing because they literally can't imagine it being possible and are daring the public to disprove them. I feel women by and large, can imagine being heads of state. The argument for representation then becomes wanting to spare some (hopefully child) the mental effort of having to imagine a female head of state, a female super hero, etc. because they at some point in the past went through their own process of recognizing there was no law of nature that said they couldn't.
That's what I assume is going on though. I certainly hope it's the case that pre-Julia Gillard, my female friends from high-school and university weren't thinking that a female Prime Minister was conceptually impossible.
And from the other side, I can testify to my personal experience, that not only was a female head of state not conceptually possible to me. It was so conceivable that I was shocked anybody made a big deal of it when Gillard deposed Rudd, at the time it seemed far more pressing for all that it was at the expense to the Australian public of the mining super profits tax. History has proved me wrong. Nobody cares that they were disenfranchised of billions of dollars, they care that Rudd was a dick. And good as Gillard was as a Prime Minister, and shocking as the latent misogyny that was brought out of the shadows was, I'm not sure if all her achievements combined outweigh the net present value of the capitulation to the mining sector, which was a party-wide effort.
And so to on the subject of personal experience, when I was watching Hannah Gadsby's Netflix Special and she mentioned the 'Virgin-Whore' dichotomy, and also I believe she said more than once women were reduced to 'flesh vases for their dick flowers' it bumped up against my lived experience.
Namely, the concept 'art history' and 'whore' don't connect. I couldn't recall any pieces with whore's as subjects. Narratives sure, but not depictions of whores. (Which Ironically, I saw Gadsby deliver a talk at the NGV on Picasso, where she was much kinder to him than in the special, but most of the talk was about a piece that featured prostitutes as the subject, however to me I don't have a strong association between Picasso and the history of Art. He's just an artist to me.)
But I figure there must at the very least be a bunch of pictures painted of Mary Magdalene. I just can't recall having seen any.
A quick google produces this:
I've never to my recollection, seen any of these pieces before. From what's visible in this screen grab, I'd assume two could be considered less devotional to flirting with licentiousness and masturbatory aide. The rest do look devotional to me, and I would have assumed the subject was the Madonna.
So I guess, this is it: I would have to defer to someone like Hannah Gadsby with an art history degree that these are indeed all just flesh vases for dick flowers. I don't notice it. I don't notice the difference between these and pictures of the virgin Mary, lady of Guadalupe.
Thus I arrive at a suspicion, that what really is the intractable issue, is the usual suspects - attention, focus, confirmation bias and management by exception.
For example I don't particularly notice this:
But conversely, I do notice this:
In the former, I don't notice anything wrong with scantly clad hot women, it's just wallpaper to me. As the Vandals observed in their song 'Girls turn 18 everyday' and in turn, there is so much of this content being produced, there must be a model debuting in her first photo shoot somewhere in the world, at every second of every day. It plasters instagram, pinterest, tumblr, tinder, snapchat, magazine covers, newsagents and supermarket aisles. It's ubiquitous and everywhere, and I don't have to stop and pleasure myself every time my eye is drawn to the image of a woman exhibiting fertility cues.
In the later case, I do notice it, and it seems 'trendy' to me, the whole Gender Non Conforming crowd, even though in absolute terms, it's a very niche scene, not really a crowd at all. I just happen to be on the periphery of it, and get some exposure. But it gets my attention because it's out-of-the-ordinary. It's an Amelia Earhart in a world saturated by Wilmer Stultz (whom you've never heard of because he wasn't the first man to fly across the Atlantic). People within this scene feel oppressed and underrepresented, people outside of it that don't notice how much T&A imagery they are drowning in feel it over-represented and like the whole world is going to that twilighty place from that zone show.
...at least, that's what I suspect may be happening. I don't know, I'm sufficiently interested to do some digging in the backyard of my mind. For starters it was not hard to come up with a list of 31 roles women could play that aren't 'virgin' or 'whore'. Here's the first 7:
1. Athlete. A no-brainer, for centuries and across cultures women have played sports and competed in competition. Yes, they were banned from the original Olympics and other sporting religious festivals from Greek Antiquity. Other cultures I simply don't know. The history of sport is too broad and deep.
But with pretty much the sole exception of Tennis, female athletes do not enjoy the same status as men in sports. And certainly not pay parity, hence you have the Australian national netball team, or even the Opals (basketball) all having to hold down separate jobs while being expected to compete at a world class level. Men comparatively do have a much easier time of simply working out, training, practicing and exercising full time if necessary to be competitive, and enjoying leisure time if it isn't.
What to do about pay parity in sports is a head scratcher, I don't have the cognitive energy or inclination to do anything about it, but it does raise interesting questions: is the female 100m sprint final actually less interesting than the men's 100m sprint final? I don't know. I feel it's a matter of fact that it is definitely slower, but what does that matter to an audience? I guess it is qualitatively more exciting to be witness to a world record being smashed, than to watch a heat where no record has been broken. Is Flo-Jo less exciting than Usain Bolt?
In Tennis, broken down to a 'per game' basis, women are paid more than men, given they play best of 3 matches where men play best of 5. However, the earning opportunities are the same, so 'per game' doesn't really hold much water. There though is the truly egalitarian thing to dispense with segregation of the sexes in competition altogether? My intuition is that nobody would welcome that, in Tennis or most other sports. There Serena goes from being one of the most dominant players of all time to a competitive athlete who is notable for being a woman in a male dominated sport. I don't know enough about Tennis to speculate any further, and probably am overstretched as is. Best to stick to AFL and Basketball.
Sports is a good place to start though, because there's heaps of representation by females, yet it is on the financial and social status side, heavily unbalanced in men's favor. Curiously, when I went through my own gender studies journey eight or so years ago now (informal though it was), I did pick up a book in a store one day for a perusal that pointed out that sports, by the necessity of segregating the sexes has been at the forefront of trying to actually determine what defines the sexes as different. It's tricky, it turns out.
2. Knight
There's heaps of historical precedent for women going to war, fighting in the front lines etc. It's actually a role that up until very recent history probably decreased as war scaled up and prosperity increased. At any rate, historically speaking one doesn't have to look very hard or far these days to come up with a long list of warrior women.
Which is to say, yeah, you can easily establish precedent for women going to war, but it's still exceptional. It is exceptional, but not exactly rare in narratives either. Whether contemporary or going back. Ironically many of the warrior women of history I heard about through Simon Bisley, whose collection of pinups NSFW can be seen here. But there's Artemis, the Amazons, Mulan, Joan of Arc etc. and in fantasy Brienne of Tarth, Daeny, Eowyn, Arwyn... if I were to branch out into all the fantasy series I've read, it would get fucking boring.
The challenge of course becomes not to sexualize them, which of the four mentioned above only Brienne of Tarth is described and depicted as non-beautiful, homely. Fantasy doesn't quite fit the virgin-whore dichotomy trope, it's more a princess-warrior trope, with most modern characters nominally bridging the divide like Eowyn and Arwyn, mythical antiquity creating a compartmentalized divide between Artemis, Athena and Venus, and yeah I guess you can have the farmers daughter down-to-earth type like Ygritte, or Asha contrasting with a more fragile character like Sansa, and this is a well worn trope but I'm not sure it fits the whore-virgin dichotomy in the narratives sweaty faced teenage boys with no social skills are reading. None of my experiences reading fantasy or looking at art ever inculcated this dichotomy.
Malcolm Gladwell did this interesting talk on using algorithms to predict and perhaps ultimately write movie scripts which in part, the algorithm appeared to suggest that audiences react to damsel in distress scenarios. So there is that, and there is also the fact that there are no classical martial treatises written by women.
Personally what I find most interesting to speculate on is whether women think about chivalry? Specifically a code of conduct for the powerful, a form of self-regulation. Chivalry is almost certainly romanticized, I would be inclined to put my money on Germaine Greer's description of a 12 year old child being married off to a 30 year old professional psychopath, as a more apt description of the reality of knights and maidens. But I would suspect that chivalry was also not nothing. Not mere propaganda or lip service. It certainly wasn't in the Japanese feudal context.
I cannot alas, do much speculation. There's no material I can recall that suggests women have an analogous self-imposed code of conduct, that goes beyond practices that are morally reprehensible in and of themselves like reputation destruction and what not.
3. Ogress
One domain women are certainly not excluded from, is the monster category. Whether it be Ogress, Sphinx, Vampire, Banshee, Harpy, Siren, a bunch of Eastern ones I can't be bothered to look up and of course most notably and almost universally: Witches.
I chose Ogress because it's real easy to avoid sexualizing an ogress. But there's two things to notice about representation here also.
Ogresses don't really feature in any popular fairy tales, though the back of my brain is tickled by some vague memory that Baba Yaga beyond being a witch is also an Ogress, and she does eat people. But Puss in Boots has arguably the most famous Ogre, as antagonist, who is tricked into turning into a mouse and eaten.
Despite male monsters serving as antagonists stretching back to antiquity, with Chronos devouring his children, the Cyclops, the Minotaur etc. all the trolls under bridges, heartless giants, giants up beanstalks etc. Bowser kidnapping Princess Toadstool/Peach... little boys seldom identify with, nor grow up aspiring to be Ogres, Giants or Bowser. I mean maybe it'll turn out that Harvey Weinstein or Trump always wanted to be an Ogre, but by and large, representation in this domain I suspect does nothing along gender lines.
The protagonist seems to be what matters, the Marios, the Saint Georges, the Persueses and Oddyseuses.
Secondly, nobody seems to care much about representation of antagonists at all - unless it goes wrong. If an antagonist unsympathetically and inconsiderately reinforces a stereotype. I do see women wanting to become Witches, and some small number of Men wanting to identify as Wickans (or whatever) and I will never understand them (the men).
I would guess that being a witch is to many women, more interesting and more empowering than being a damsel in distress. But no Ogresses, no Harpies, Banshees, Sirens... some Gorgons, but that seems to be a latter reclamation done with some cerebral effort.
I wonder if anyone would find it a refreshing narrative if a gallant young knight had to slay a dragon to rescue a maiden or princess, by design of the princess.
Of course, you can simplify this into the Red Sonja narrative, where you have a metal bikini warrior babe who will only accept a suitor that can best her in combat.
That of course still sexualizes women in the narrative, and the ogress and most other female mythical monsters remain undesirable.
I suspect they speak to men's inherent fear of women which attests to their survivability. With myths like the Gorgon, Siren and other changelings or metamorphoses it speaks to me at least a deep fear of conflicting desire and danger. That what you are drawn to might devour you.
That's the male perspective. Since nobody advocates for more representation of horrific women that are entirely unsympathetic and one dimensional evil though, to me it's more the interesting question of whether in arguments of representation, it's ever an argument accepting a greater variance, rather than an argument desiring a greater upper threshold.
The damsel, maiden is a passive entity in most narratives, she is no knight in shining armor. But nor is she an ogress, banshee, harpy, gorgon or witch.
4. Post Apocalyptic/Cyberpunk Brigand
My ex pointed out this reminds her of herself, and now I can't help but see it. I feel in my illustration I skirted a line with this one on the sexuality too. Is she too attractive? I weighed up depicting the character as emaciated, but felt it then makes strapping a radiator as improvised body armor unrealistic if they can't forrage or steal their basic caloric needs.
When I drew this, it wasn't hard. There is no shortage of precedent or examples of this character archetype. So much so, I could probably just keep drawing them for all of Inktober. They are a sci-fi fantasy trope.
What I thought about most was an article reviewing the prequal comic Imperator Furiosa which, I don't disagree with the article. I'm sure the comic is terrible. But I can't really sign on the dotted line with the complaint either. I never really got the hype around Furiosa, and I went into Fury Road hyped, specifically hyped up by my feminist friends online. I wrote about it at the time in a long and proven unpopular post and given that it seems to be eyeball kryptonite, won't rehash the effect Furiosa had on me again here.
Rather, in terms of the review, and all the complaints about how unpleasant the backstory was, gratuitously so, and rightly questioning the judgement of the creators as to who wants to dig into that stuff... I began to question in the thought experiment of what Furiosa's backstory could possibly be, that she is fleeing Imotep Joe with a bunch of supermodel contraband in her tanker truck. And furthermore, how women in general speculate they would fare in a post apocalyptic scenario with the breakdown in society?
I imagine the breakdown of organised human societies, rule of law and economies would be particularly rough on women. Returning to near pre-historic, pre-literate fuedal states and hunter gatherer lifestyles to me, implies not just a lack or absence of democracy, but a reversal of the democratization of everything women have won for themselves in the modern era.
This trope is a domain of representation that to me, foreboads a terrible underpinning, not a triumph of egalitarianism. All female motorcycle gangs in a toxic wasteland isn't I would guess a big 'fuckyou' to the predominantly male captains of industry that fucked up the planet, but a response to very very bad social conditions 'enjoyed' relatively speaking, by very few of the future female population. It's a form of representation that borders on the irresponsible, given that I suspect if I consulted an anthropologist, I suspect becoming an apocalypse amazon might turn out to be a terrible strategy for surviving and thriving.
5. Skater
Self explanatory, though growing up as a kid, a magazine informed of the difference betwixt a surfer and a surfie, with the later being the pretender that wanted to affect the lifestyle of a surfer, without actually being required to surf.
I don't know if there's a similar distinction in the skating world in terms of terminology. But I did notice passing through Japan, America en route to Mexico, that 'Thrasher' shirts are the current mass produced must-have item in young women's fashion. I doubt there has been as many decks sold to enthusiastic young women as there have been shirts.
Plug 'skater' or 'female skater' into a pinterest search engine and you mostly get pictures of young women with skater affectations, not skating. Just backward caps, baggy jumpers and often posing with a skateboard looking cute or hot or whatever. But no real subscription to the lifestyle.
I'm not a skater myself, but skating is important to me. Some people read the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian etc. I read, almost exclusively Jenkam magazine. Which is both a bastion of offensive and vulgar journalism focusing on juvenile subjects, and an interesting lens through which to watch the times a changing.
They cover among other paper's Becky Beal's study of the masculinity in skating culture and how it parallels jock culture in many ways. And they do more journalism where they examine themselves under a microscope. And the tension is real.
For any woman drawn to skating, I don't think there are any real obstacles to getting on a board and having fun. But skating is environment dependent, so where it gets territorial, I can see the gender-based tension possibly arising, depending on the culture.
So the interesting questions are to me - what is that culture? and who has to move where to truly include women? I have trepidations about solutions that center around sanitizing a culture and insisting it play fair. I would like to see, not just in this domain, a more equal footing among men and women.
6. Trucker
The most popular piece of the week (I think) and I'll be honest, surprisingly so. I gained a bunch of truck enthusiastic followers onto my instagram account that I expect I will lose when they realize this is the one and only piece of trucker tribute art I have ever done, or am likely to ever do.
My interest here is in dignified menial labor, and a pursuit of equality in non-high status occupations. Plug 'trucker' into Pinterest for some reference art, and I barely got any actual visuals at all. What I got was a torrent of protest memes that suggest truckers are the most oppressed people on the planet.
I've always assumed that Trucking is a fairly low skill, capital intensive, well compensated, undesirable occupation. Put those together and I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what road one figuratively goes down to literally become a truck driver.
So I guess for me, it is but one avenue that represents the lack of breadth in most discussions about female representation. But having said that, I did not come up blank trying to recall times I've seen women operating a truck on film. One coming from my earliest movie memories in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, a character I looked up to confirm the fidelity of my memory was called 'Large Marge'.
Thus far, not only have I found it not challenging to find roles that break away from the virgin-whore dichotomy, but I haven't found it hard to recall examples of such. In fact and practice in all my explorations of the long history and tradition of pin up art, Venus idols and the history of the female form and representation, it is not hard to find diversity and representation. The efforts are constant and persistent, just not popular.
I know the argument for why this is, it's the result of conditioning of females from childhood by the patriarchy to perform their gender in a certain way. This is possible, if I don't regard it as plausible, in the face of counter-evidence and counter arguments. I'm not satisfied by such a shallow answer at any rate and it deserves more exploration. Which I'll do for the rest of Inktober.
7. Blacksmith
So I wrote the crux of this piece up on instagram, and it's that apparently in anthropology studies of cultures across the world, the division of labor produces almost no universally traditional gender roles. In some cultures sewing, textiles and needlework is for the women, in others women are forbidden from doing so. and so on. There's no reliable division allegedly between the hunters and the gatherers except for two exceptions - one being metal working (smelting, smithing etc) and the other being the hunting of large marine mammals.
But even in this case, I was able to recall women being represented as blacksmiths and metal workers in contemporary culture. Again these are exceptions, but exceptions that garner attention. And my shallow (I guess) understanding of the importance of representation is in setting precedents, role models. Having said that, with the example of a blacksmith in the Monty Python affiliated movie 'Erik the Viking' based on the children's book of the same name by Terry Jones, both of which made an impression in my childhood. Having a male blacksmith represented really didn't compete with all the male vikings. Nor has any depiction of a smith ever given me an itch to cast and hammer out my own blade or horse shoe or whatever. I guess again it's dignified menial labor. Good honest work that leaves one built and ripped.
Life is long, I may take to a forge yet. So too can the ladies.
You can see the artwork come out as I go through Inktober on my instagram account here. I hate instagram.
It's nothing groundbreaking, but Inktober is about challenging oneself, and there's a bunch of points of genesis for this theme. The basic challenge for me is to imagine female characters in roles beyond reducing them to sexual objects, or indeed, sexualizing them at all and moving beyond the 'virgin-whore' dichotomy, which is apparently a thing, albeit it's a Freudian psychoanalytic theory that I imagine is contentiously contemporary when diagnosing male impotency issues.
In conversation with my sister, some years ago, she also revealed to me that I have just about no female role models or females I admire in my active memory. What I mean by that is that if you just name 10 of your primary school friends, doesn't matter which year, just the first ten that come to mind, you'll probably in most circumstances find that it's a cognitive strain. Like for me, to name female influences on me philosophically requires strain even though there's female public intellectuals and comedians I like, like Toni Morrison, Ariel Levy, Esther Perel, Brene Brown, Susan Jacoby, Chimomon Ngozi Adichie... all of whom I've watched deliver keynote speaking engagements and enjoyed and gotten something out of it. But honestly, they don't come near to occupying the territory in my mind that Abraham Lincoln, Musashi Miyamoto, Marcus Aurelius, Rumi, Nietzsche and the Yagyu's do.
Nor do I need them to. If I was just to pick one of those dead men from the list and try my derndest to immitate them and live up their example, I'd consider it a life well lived - except perhaps for Nietzsche, I'm not sure if on a personal level, his life was worth living, though I'm grateful for the works he produced.
I digress. The sad fact is, if you asked me to name influential female Monarchs, that's an easy task. If you asked me to name female historical figures I admire... I come up short. So there's a challenge for me, but I'm not averse to the notion of discovering a woman who really shapes my philosophy and outlook on life, particularly one that could supplant any of my dead idols. I suspect though, it's a tall order because women were largely excluded from history, except in the case of Monarchies.
But is even that true?
As I learned in marketing, most people might recognise, or even recall the piece of Trivia of who was the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean solo - Charles Lindbergh. You probably can't recall the second person to do so, because nobody cares. But you may surprise yourself that you know the third person to complete a solo transatlantic flight. Which seems strange, because if nobody cares about the second flight, why would people care about the third? Because it's Amelia Earhart.
So I actually don't know if this theme wise will be challenging or not. What I notice or at least, suspect, is that it's an exercise in noticing what we do and do not notice. An exercise in selective attention.
I figure arguments about 'representation' are akin to, if not just the mirror image of arguments about 'censorship'. Namely, these are important issues when it regards children, and I can jump right on board. Children should only be exposed to material as their physical, mental and emotional development become ready to handle it. Likewise, seeing diversity represented in popular culture I figure is quite important for people under the age of 12. Above that I'm not so sure.
So in the case of censorship, people who take to social media and advocate people stop listening to Jenny McCarthy about vaccines, or Jordan Peterson about sexual politics, are generally arguing on behalf of someone else - somebody who doesn't possess the critical faculties to dismiss the ideas championed themselves but instead will adopt the arguments wholesale and start spreading them like a virus. It's seldom if ever, 'please stop giving these people a platform because I can't find a way to disagree with them.'
Same same for representation. People advocating for depictions, if not representation by women as say... a head of state, are generally not arguing because they literally can't imagine it being possible and are daring the public to disprove them. I feel women by and large, can imagine being heads of state. The argument for representation then becomes wanting to spare some (hopefully child) the mental effort of having to imagine a female head of state, a female super hero, etc. because they at some point in the past went through their own process of recognizing there was no law of nature that said they couldn't.
That's what I assume is going on though. I certainly hope it's the case that pre-Julia Gillard, my female friends from high-school and university weren't thinking that a female Prime Minister was conceptually impossible.
And from the other side, I can testify to my personal experience, that not only was a female head of state not conceptually possible to me. It was so conceivable that I was shocked anybody made a big deal of it when Gillard deposed Rudd, at the time it seemed far more pressing for all that it was at the expense to the Australian public of the mining super profits tax. History has proved me wrong. Nobody cares that they were disenfranchised of billions of dollars, they care that Rudd was a dick. And good as Gillard was as a Prime Minister, and shocking as the latent misogyny that was brought out of the shadows was, I'm not sure if all her achievements combined outweigh the net present value of the capitulation to the mining sector, which was a party-wide effort.
And so to on the subject of personal experience, when I was watching Hannah Gadsby's Netflix Special and she mentioned the 'Virgin-Whore' dichotomy, and also I believe she said more than once women were reduced to 'flesh vases for their dick flowers' it bumped up against my lived experience.
Namely, the concept 'art history' and 'whore' don't connect. I couldn't recall any pieces with whore's as subjects. Narratives sure, but not depictions of whores. (Which Ironically, I saw Gadsby deliver a talk at the NGV on Picasso, where she was much kinder to him than in the special, but most of the talk was about a piece that featured prostitutes as the subject, however to me I don't have a strong association between Picasso and the history of Art. He's just an artist to me.)
But I figure there must at the very least be a bunch of pictures painted of Mary Magdalene. I just can't recall having seen any.
A quick google produces this:
I've never to my recollection, seen any of these pieces before. From what's visible in this screen grab, I'd assume two could be considered less devotional to flirting with licentiousness and masturbatory aide. The rest do look devotional to me, and I would have assumed the subject was the Madonna.
So I guess, this is it: I would have to defer to someone like Hannah Gadsby with an art history degree that these are indeed all just flesh vases for dick flowers. I don't notice it. I don't notice the difference between these and pictures of the virgin Mary, lady of Guadalupe.
Thus I arrive at a suspicion, that what really is the intractable issue, is the usual suspects - attention, focus, confirmation bias and management by exception.
For example I don't particularly notice this:
But conversely, I do notice this:
In the former, I don't notice anything wrong with scantly clad hot women, it's just wallpaper to me. As the Vandals observed in their song 'Girls turn 18 everyday' and in turn, there is so much of this content being produced, there must be a model debuting in her first photo shoot somewhere in the world, at every second of every day. It plasters instagram, pinterest, tumblr, tinder, snapchat, magazine covers, newsagents and supermarket aisles. It's ubiquitous and everywhere, and I don't have to stop and pleasure myself every time my eye is drawn to the image of a woman exhibiting fertility cues.
In the later case, I do notice it, and it seems 'trendy' to me, the whole Gender Non Conforming crowd, even though in absolute terms, it's a very niche scene, not really a crowd at all. I just happen to be on the periphery of it, and get some exposure. But it gets my attention because it's out-of-the-ordinary. It's an Amelia Earhart in a world saturated by Wilmer Stultz (whom you've never heard of because he wasn't the first man to fly across the Atlantic). People within this scene feel oppressed and underrepresented, people outside of it that don't notice how much T&A imagery they are drowning in feel it over-represented and like the whole world is going to that twilighty place from that zone show.
...at least, that's what I suspect may be happening. I don't know, I'm sufficiently interested to do some digging in the backyard of my mind. For starters it was not hard to come up with a list of 31 roles women could play that aren't 'virgin' or 'whore'. Here's the first 7:
But with pretty much the sole exception of Tennis, female athletes do not enjoy the same status as men in sports. And certainly not pay parity, hence you have the Australian national netball team, or even the Opals (basketball) all having to hold down separate jobs while being expected to compete at a world class level. Men comparatively do have a much easier time of simply working out, training, practicing and exercising full time if necessary to be competitive, and enjoying leisure time if it isn't.
What to do about pay parity in sports is a head scratcher, I don't have the cognitive energy or inclination to do anything about it, but it does raise interesting questions: is the female 100m sprint final actually less interesting than the men's 100m sprint final? I don't know. I feel it's a matter of fact that it is definitely slower, but what does that matter to an audience? I guess it is qualitatively more exciting to be witness to a world record being smashed, than to watch a heat where no record has been broken. Is Flo-Jo less exciting than Usain Bolt?
In Tennis, broken down to a 'per game' basis, women are paid more than men, given they play best of 3 matches where men play best of 5. However, the earning opportunities are the same, so 'per game' doesn't really hold much water. There though is the truly egalitarian thing to dispense with segregation of the sexes in competition altogether? My intuition is that nobody would welcome that, in Tennis or most other sports. There Serena goes from being one of the most dominant players of all time to a competitive athlete who is notable for being a woman in a male dominated sport. I don't know enough about Tennis to speculate any further, and probably am overstretched as is. Best to stick to AFL and Basketball.
Sports is a good place to start though, because there's heaps of representation by females, yet it is on the financial and social status side, heavily unbalanced in men's favor. Curiously, when I went through my own gender studies journey eight or so years ago now (informal though it was), I did pick up a book in a store one day for a perusal that pointed out that sports, by the necessity of segregating the sexes has been at the forefront of trying to actually determine what defines the sexes as different. It's tricky, it turns out.
2. Knight
There's heaps of historical precedent for women going to war, fighting in the front lines etc. It's actually a role that up until very recent history probably decreased as war scaled up and prosperity increased. At any rate, historically speaking one doesn't have to look very hard or far these days to come up with a long list of warrior women.
Which is to say, yeah, you can easily establish precedent for women going to war, but it's still exceptional. It is exceptional, but not exactly rare in narratives either. Whether contemporary or going back. Ironically many of the warrior women of history I heard about through Simon Bisley, whose collection of pinups NSFW can be seen here. But there's Artemis, the Amazons, Mulan, Joan of Arc etc. and in fantasy Brienne of Tarth, Daeny, Eowyn, Arwyn... if I were to branch out into all the fantasy series I've read, it would get fucking boring.
The challenge of course becomes not to sexualize them, which of the four mentioned above only Brienne of Tarth is described and depicted as non-beautiful, homely. Fantasy doesn't quite fit the virgin-whore dichotomy trope, it's more a princess-warrior trope, with most modern characters nominally bridging the divide like Eowyn and Arwyn, mythical antiquity creating a compartmentalized divide between Artemis, Athena and Venus, and yeah I guess you can have the farmers daughter down-to-earth type like Ygritte, or Asha contrasting with a more fragile character like Sansa, and this is a well worn trope but I'm not sure it fits the whore-virgin dichotomy in the narratives sweaty faced teenage boys with no social skills are reading. None of my experiences reading fantasy or looking at art ever inculcated this dichotomy.
Malcolm Gladwell did this interesting talk on using algorithms to predict and perhaps ultimately write movie scripts which in part, the algorithm appeared to suggest that audiences react to damsel in distress scenarios. So there is that, and there is also the fact that there are no classical martial treatises written by women.
Personally what I find most interesting to speculate on is whether women think about chivalry? Specifically a code of conduct for the powerful, a form of self-regulation. Chivalry is almost certainly romanticized, I would be inclined to put my money on Germaine Greer's description of a 12 year old child being married off to a 30 year old professional psychopath, as a more apt description of the reality of knights and maidens. But I would suspect that chivalry was also not nothing. Not mere propaganda or lip service. It certainly wasn't in the Japanese feudal context.
I cannot alas, do much speculation. There's no material I can recall that suggests women have an analogous self-imposed code of conduct, that goes beyond practices that are morally reprehensible in and of themselves like reputation destruction and what not.
One domain women are certainly not excluded from, is the monster category. Whether it be Ogress, Sphinx, Vampire, Banshee, Harpy, Siren, a bunch of Eastern ones I can't be bothered to look up and of course most notably and almost universally: Witches.
I chose Ogress because it's real easy to avoid sexualizing an ogress. But there's two things to notice about representation here also.
Ogresses don't really feature in any popular fairy tales, though the back of my brain is tickled by some vague memory that Baba Yaga beyond being a witch is also an Ogress, and she does eat people. But Puss in Boots has arguably the most famous Ogre, as antagonist, who is tricked into turning into a mouse and eaten.
Despite male monsters serving as antagonists stretching back to antiquity, with Chronos devouring his children, the Cyclops, the Minotaur etc. all the trolls under bridges, heartless giants, giants up beanstalks etc. Bowser kidnapping Princess Toadstool/Peach... little boys seldom identify with, nor grow up aspiring to be Ogres, Giants or Bowser. I mean maybe it'll turn out that Harvey Weinstein or Trump always wanted to be an Ogre, but by and large, representation in this domain I suspect does nothing along gender lines.
The protagonist seems to be what matters, the Marios, the Saint Georges, the Persueses and Oddyseuses.
Secondly, nobody seems to care much about representation of antagonists at all - unless it goes wrong. If an antagonist unsympathetically and inconsiderately reinforces a stereotype. I do see women wanting to become Witches, and some small number of Men wanting to identify as Wickans (or whatever) and I will never understand them (the men).
I would guess that being a witch is to many women, more interesting and more empowering than being a damsel in distress. But no Ogresses, no Harpies, Banshees, Sirens... some Gorgons, but that seems to be a latter reclamation done with some cerebral effort.
I wonder if anyone would find it a refreshing narrative if a gallant young knight had to slay a dragon to rescue a maiden or princess, by design of the princess.
Of course, you can simplify this into the Red Sonja narrative, where you have a metal bikini warrior babe who will only accept a suitor that can best her in combat.
That of course still sexualizes women in the narrative, and the ogress and most other female mythical monsters remain undesirable.
I suspect they speak to men's inherent fear of women which attests to their survivability. With myths like the Gorgon, Siren and other changelings or metamorphoses it speaks to me at least a deep fear of conflicting desire and danger. That what you are drawn to might devour you.
That's the male perspective. Since nobody advocates for more representation of horrific women that are entirely unsympathetic and one dimensional evil though, to me it's more the interesting question of whether in arguments of representation, it's ever an argument accepting a greater variance, rather than an argument desiring a greater upper threshold.
The damsel, maiden is a passive entity in most narratives, she is no knight in shining armor. But nor is she an ogress, banshee, harpy, gorgon or witch.
4. Post Apocalyptic/Cyberpunk Brigand
My ex pointed out this reminds her of herself, and now I can't help but see it. I feel in my illustration I skirted a line with this one on the sexuality too. Is she too attractive? I weighed up depicting the character as emaciated, but felt it then makes strapping a radiator as improvised body armor unrealistic if they can't forrage or steal their basic caloric needs.
When I drew this, it wasn't hard. There is no shortage of precedent or examples of this character archetype. So much so, I could probably just keep drawing them for all of Inktober. They are a sci-fi fantasy trope.
What I thought about most was an article reviewing the prequal comic Imperator Furiosa which, I don't disagree with the article. I'm sure the comic is terrible. But I can't really sign on the dotted line with the complaint either. I never really got the hype around Furiosa, and I went into Fury Road hyped, specifically hyped up by my feminist friends online. I wrote about it at the time in a long and proven unpopular post and given that it seems to be eyeball kryptonite, won't rehash the effect Furiosa had on me again here.
Rather, in terms of the review, and all the complaints about how unpleasant the backstory was, gratuitously so, and rightly questioning the judgement of the creators as to who wants to dig into that stuff... I began to question in the thought experiment of what Furiosa's backstory could possibly be, that she is fleeing Imotep Joe with a bunch of supermodel contraband in her tanker truck. And furthermore, how women in general speculate they would fare in a post apocalyptic scenario with the breakdown in society?
I imagine the breakdown of organised human societies, rule of law and economies would be particularly rough on women. Returning to near pre-historic, pre-literate fuedal states and hunter gatherer lifestyles to me, implies not just a lack or absence of democracy, but a reversal of the democratization of everything women have won for themselves in the modern era.
This trope is a domain of representation that to me, foreboads a terrible underpinning, not a triumph of egalitarianism. All female motorcycle gangs in a toxic wasteland isn't I would guess a big 'fuckyou' to the predominantly male captains of industry that fucked up the planet, but a response to very very bad social conditions 'enjoyed' relatively speaking, by very few of the future female population. It's a form of representation that borders on the irresponsible, given that I suspect if I consulted an anthropologist, I suspect becoming an apocalypse amazon might turn out to be a terrible strategy for surviving and thriving.
5. Skater
Self explanatory, though growing up as a kid, a magazine informed of the difference betwixt a surfer and a surfie, with the later being the pretender that wanted to affect the lifestyle of a surfer, without actually being required to surf.
I don't know if there's a similar distinction in the skating world in terms of terminology. But I did notice passing through Japan, America en route to Mexico, that 'Thrasher' shirts are the current mass produced must-have item in young women's fashion. I doubt there has been as many decks sold to enthusiastic young women as there have been shirts.
Plug 'skater' or 'female skater' into a pinterest search engine and you mostly get pictures of young women with skater affectations, not skating. Just backward caps, baggy jumpers and often posing with a skateboard looking cute or hot or whatever. But no real subscription to the lifestyle.
I'm not a skater myself, but skating is important to me. Some people read the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian etc. I read, almost exclusively Jenkam magazine. Which is both a bastion of offensive and vulgar journalism focusing on juvenile subjects, and an interesting lens through which to watch the times a changing.
They cover among other paper's Becky Beal's study of the masculinity in skating culture and how it parallels jock culture in many ways. And they do more journalism where they examine themselves under a microscope. And the tension is real.
For any woman drawn to skating, I don't think there are any real obstacles to getting on a board and having fun. But skating is environment dependent, so where it gets territorial, I can see the gender-based tension possibly arising, depending on the culture.
So the interesting questions are to me - what is that culture? and who has to move where to truly include women? I have trepidations about solutions that center around sanitizing a culture and insisting it play fair. I would like to see, not just in this domain, a more equal footing among men and women.
6. Trucker
The most popular piece of the week (I think) and I'll be honest, surprisingly so. I gained a bunch of truck enthusiastic followers onto my instagram account that I expect I will lose when they realize this is the one and only piece of trucker tribute art I have ever done, or am likely to ever do.
My interest here is in dignified menial labor, and a pursuit of equality in non-high status occupations. Plug 'trucker' into Pinterest for some reference art, and I barely got any actual visuals at all. What I got was a torrent of protest memes that suggest truckers are the most oppressed people on the planet.
I've always assumed that Trucking is a fairly low skill, capital intensive, well compensated, undesirable occupation. Put those together and I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what road one figuratively goes down to literally become a truck driver.
So I guess for me, it is but one avenue that represents the lack of breadth in most discussions about female representation. But having said that, I did not come up blank trying to recall times I've seen women operating a truck on film. One coming from my earliest movie memories in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, a character I looked up to confirm the fidelity of my memory was called 'Large Marge'.
Thus far, not only have I found it not challenging to find roles that break away from the virgin-whore dichotomy, but I haven't found it hard to recall examples of such. In fact and practice in all my explorations of the long history and tradition of pin up art, Venus idols and the history of the female form and representation, it is not hard to find diversity and representation. The efforts are constant and persistent, just not popular.
I know the argument for why this is, it's the result of conditioning of females from childhood by the patriarchy to perform their gender in a certain way. This is possible, if I don't regard it as plausible, in the face of counter-evidence and counter arguments. I'm not satisfied by such a shallow answer at any rate and it deserves more exploration. Which I'll do for the rest of Inktober.
7. Blacksmith
So I wrote the crux of this piece up on instagram, and it's that apparently in anthropology studies of cultures across the world, the division of labor produces almost no universally traditional gender roles. In some cultures sewing, textiles and needlework is for the women, in others women are forbidden from doing so. and so on. There's no reliable division allegedly between the hunters and the gatherers except for two exceptions - one being metal working (smelting, smithing etc) and the other being the hunting of large marine mammals.
But even in this case, I was able to recall women being represented as blacksmiths and metal workers in contemporary culture. Again these are exceptions, but exceptions that garner attention. And my shallow (I guess) understanding of the importance of representation is in setting precedents, role models. Having said that, with the example of a blacksmith in the Monty Python affiliated movie 'Erik the Viking' based on the children's book of the same name by Terry Jones, both of which made an impression in my childhood. Having a male blacksmith represented really didn't compete with all the male vikings. Nor has any depiction of a smith ever given me an itch to cast and hammer out my own blade or horse shoe or whatever. I guess again it's dignified menial labor. Good honest work that leaves one built and ripped.
Life is long, I may take to a forge yet. So too can the ladies.
You can see the artwork come out as I go through Inktober on my instagram account here. I hate instagram.
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