Stuff that bothers me about MFMM part 1

This is not polished at all but I’m posting it anyway. I might do a better version later.

Stuff that bothers me:

Phryne Fisher the savior and spokesperson for all sorts of marginalized people, always saying the right things.

I’m going to start by talking about “The Blood of Juana the Mad” (s2.8) because I just saw it and it’s fresh in my mind.

So, first of all: I think Beatrice Mason is autistic. I could also see autism + OCD, or maybe OCD by itself, I don’t really know enough about OCD to have an opinion on that. But anyway, something along those lines.

One the one hand, I love that Phryne is understanding and tries to connect with Beatrice. And joining Beatrice in doing something “strange” (she was leaning her forehead against the wall, because she was tired and overwhelmed) is a great, simple, powerful way to do that. (It is literally what the essay of wonderfulness that I was just gushing over recommends– or part of it, anyway.) And I love that Mac stands up for her too– the gist of it being “she’s strange, but she is reliable, she is in touch with reality, and she does genuinely good work.” I love that Beatrice is right that people are following her and plotting to steal her research, that that’s not just paranoia.

I… not love, I guess, but approve, that she is bullied in very serious, scary ways, because that is realistic. It’s good to see bullying taken seriously and not written off as basically harmless. And oh, anti-skills! (as this blog calls them) “It’s polite to accept an invitation,” Beatrice says… an invitation from a bully, which was actually a malicious lie, and resulted in her spending the night on a couch in the men’s dorm, drugged unconscious, and having people accuse her of sexual impropriety. But it’s polite to accept an invitation, and she thought he might actually be serious about apologizing, so she went. Somebody taught her to accept invitations, and didn’t teach her that she might need to say no sometimes, or how to decide who to trust. Somebody thought they were teaching her social skills (though they might not have called it that in the 1910s) and they ended up teaching her the opposite of a skill.
…And someone who hadn’t already been exposed to that concept might not see it that way, yeah? They’d just see it as her being ridiculous and overly literal? I don’t know what to think about that. My sense is that we’re supposed to have sympathy with her over this, but it’s hard to tell.

What I don’t love– well, that essay I mentioned is addressing parents dealing with toddlers. Doing that to an adult verges on being flippant and condescending. It could seem like Phryne expects this one largely empty gesture to do all the work of gaining Beatrice’s trust. And– I think Phryne says something like “You’re right, sometimes there are just too many people and too much noise, and this is relaxing”?– acting as if she feels the same way Beatrice does, when she clearly doesn’t, can seem like Phryne is belittling Beatrice’s situation.

The other thing I don’t love is Phryne’s impassioned speech near the end of the episode, about how wonderful Beatrice is and how she deserves to be in medical school. (I wish I remembered it more clearly/actually had the DVD myself, but I don’t, so I’m afraid I can’t go into too much detail.) I don’t like it for two reasons. I don’t like that Phryne is the one who gives it, as opposed to Beatrice speaking for herself or defending herself (and I think this is part of an overarching pattern, like I said way back at the top of this post.) Second, I don’t like that anyone gives a speech like this at all. For me, it’s answering a question that isn’t worthy of an answer. Obviously Beatrice deserves to be there. She got accepted in the first place, after all– despite the various biases the professors might have against her– and she is functioning as a student and passing her classes. Getting accepted, getting passing grades, and not doing anything flagrantly wrong, like cheating– that’s all the standard any of the other students are held to, to keep their positions. You do not need to be beautiful and wonderful and brilliant despite your flaws to get to stay in medical school. You just need to pass your fucking classes.

The fact that Beatrice is weird enough to get labelled as really off somehow, as crazy, despite the fact that she is basically successful at dealing with with her daily life and her classes, should not change that. No one should need to justify why she is there.

—–

Zoom out one step.

When I was ~~liveblogging~~ live taking-notes-on this episode, because I didn’t have internet access, I referred to Phryne as the Designated Idiot Whisperer as a pithy way of putting point number one, because I was also still thinking about her cousin (if I remember correctly?) Arthur from “Murder in the Dark” (s1.12).

Now, the way Phryne treats both of them is like 90% WONDERFUL. What I’d like is some more detail. Rather than Phryne just always being kind and insightful and Right and saying the Right Things and being an example to the other characters– I’d like to know why she feels the way she does about this. We can guess that it’s likely something to do with Arthur– she’s known him since she was little, he’s probably the first person with a mental illness/intellectual disability/etc. that she met. But, (as is important to point out on a regular basis, murders of disabled children being as common as they are) being related to someone who has a disability does not automatically give you sympathetic and positive feelings towards your relative or people like them. So, how did Phryne come to feel the way she does? What makes her so determined to be a friend to everyone who needs an understanding friend, even when she doesn’t have firsthand understanding of their situation?

I want to know because, first of all, it’s interesting! It’s background, it’s character development.

And second of all, because I think the story of someone who’s always right is far less helpful for changing people’s minds than a story about someone who learns how to do the right thing, and has reasons for what they do. Everything I said about the show dealing well with social issues– every time, Phryne is on the “right” side like it’s automatic, like of course she is, it’s obviously the right thing to do. And from a certain point of view it is obvious and it should be automatic.

But getting to that point of view is not something everyone does.

Unlearning all the stuff that your society, your family, your literal teachers all teach you about which people are worth paying attention to and which problems are real is not easy, it is not automatic. It takes effort. It also takes a certain amount of letting go of Being Right and Always Doing the Right Thing in favor of listening to people who are different from you, and putting what they actually need and want ahead of your desire to be consistent and right.

Phryne is a great example of caring about bigotry and working against it. She’s no example at all of what to do when you accidentally make things worse instead, or when you come across a situation you don’t understand, or when the person you’re trying to help disagrees with you about what you should be doing– all things that, in the real world, will happen sooner or later, no matter how much you care, and no matter how much you try to be aware of what you should do.

——

Edit: So I sort of conflated what Phryne says to the murderer near the end of the episode, with what she says to one of the students earlier. Oops.

Lately I’ve been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

which is a lovely Australian show about a lady detective in Melbourne, in… sometime in the 1920s? It’s based on a book series, which I haven’t gotten to read yet.

Why you should watch this show, very briefly:

Very exciting and complex mystery plots with lots of romance on the side
Eye candy galore
There’s a lesbian recurring character! She’s a doctor, and she goes around in gorgeous suits with her hair pinned up.
It deals with trauma/PTSD in a reasonably respectful way
It tries to talk about other ~social issues~ and is generally okay about them, e.g.
- There are several characters with other mental illnesses, who are certainly portrayed less badly than they might be, even if I don’t like everything about it
- The doctor from point #3 is lauded for giving out honest information about contraception, and unsafe abortions are a plot point a couple of times
- A scientist who’s racist and pro-eugenics is the villain in one episode
- In terms of representation of people of color, I wouldn’t put it above “okay”. I think there’s only one recurring character who isn’t white. But he is pretty cool.
- There are recurring characters with ties to socialist/communist organizations, who are still considered good people
- The main character deals with various kinds of sexism
- Lots of other Cool Independent Women who aren’t recurring characters, though unfortunately, due to the nature of the show, a lot of them turn out to be involved in sordid murder plots. But really, there’s an impressive number of women-owned businesses.

Later: what bothers me about it.

Today in I don’t know

I initially assumed that both Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear) and Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That?) were women. (They’re both men.)

I’m used to the majority of the people talking about these things being women who are abuse survivors. So I’m kind of wondering why the big famous books are by men. There have to be women out there who have both personal experience and Respectable Work Credentials on this topic, right? Why haven’t I heard of them?

Taking a break with random vaguely unpleasant TV commentary

I’m thinking about Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) from Suits, Zoe (Jennifer Beals) from Lie to Me, and Lillian (Maya Rudolph) from the movie Bridesmaids. What do they have in common (besides that I watched them recently so I remember them?)

The characters are all canonically mixed-race (we meet Rachel’s and Lillian’s parents on screen, and Zoe discusses people being racist against her parents because of their relationship)
I thought they were all white until it became a plot point that they weren’t.

Now, that degree of obliviousness might be just me.

But I think it says something that you have to be that mixed to be thought of as mixed. In the US we have a history (thanks to slavery) of considering anyone with any African ancestry as completely African. I feel like this situation is a mix of that, plus a general desire to cast only very conventionally attractive actresses and the racism involved in what’s considered conventionally attractive.

A thing that’s awkward:

Lots of things– video games, stories– are written with the assumption that the person reading/watching/playing them is a man.

This shows (among other ways) in the inclusion of female love interests.

As a bi/pan/whatever woman, who is currently in a relationship with another woman, having a female character as a love interest is fine and normal for me.

But the fact that I’m comfortable seeing myself as the main character in these things doesn’t make the straight-men-as-default thing less fucked-up. I sort of feel bad for being willing to go along with it.

Because I started compiling this list in my head anyway:

Things that are exceptionally cool about the Jacky Faber series:

There are queer characters. Some of them are nasty people, but some of them are awesome and are among the main character’s closest friends. They have desires and relationships (though most of the relationships are offscreen. I sort of wish the author would let Higgins say more about his love life than “I made many friends at Harvard and we spent a lot of late nights discussing poetry, wink wink.”)

In later books, there are POC characters, for whom the same applies (African-Americans, some Native Americans, and the main character also spends one book in various parts of southeast Asia, but I haven’t read that one in a while so I can’t tell you exactly who’s represented there.)

The characters actually talk about slavery, despite how tempting some authors apparently find it to let their characters wander through the southern US pre-Civil War without ever meeting any slaves or thinking about slavery. The author also clearly tries very hard not to oversimplify the issue, which I am mostly in favor of, although I think he may go a little too far towards “complicated” and away from “clearly bad”. There’s one character who chooses to stay in slavery when she could have escaped, saying that she’s treated so well that it doesn’t really matter that she’s a slave on paper. I suspect that there are plenty of people who are more sensitive to this than me, who would say that that’s an offensive idea no matter whether it makes sense for the character. For myself, I’m pretty much willing to forgive the author for that in light of Angelique’s story in the fourth book, which has plenty of both slavery is horrible and also emotional entanglement, as Hitherby Dragons would call it, between Angelique the slave and Clarissa the owner’s daughter, who was raised to believe all sorts of racist things but was also raised with Angelique as basically her sister.

Bad things happen and the author is up front about them:

The main character narrowly escapes getting raped on more than one occasion, and other characters do get raped, off-screen. Probably someone out there would argue that rape comes up in these books too often to be realistic, but I honestly don’t think so. The main character is a lone young woman, with no one to protect her or take her side after the fact, in a lot of places full of unscrupulous people, in the early 1800s.
The main character has nightmares, gets depressed, and sometimes has PTSD-type recurring thoughts of bad things she’s seen. This is perfectly reasonable for someone who grew up homeless and then found herself in the middle of a war, but how often do brave adventurous soldiers in books actually get depressed? Not very often!

The main character is a complete rake and I personally find it heartwarming. You definitely can’t be under any illusions that women are pure and unconcerned with sex in these books. She falls in love and gets engaged in the first book, and goes on to flirt with or kiss five other young men that I can remember, all the while maintaing that she loves her fiance and is “trying to be good”. (And no, I am not counting the times when she flirts with people to get them to help her, or as part of a disguise, or the times when she almost gets raped. I mean five people who she genuinely likes and voluntarily makes out with.) Yes, this is kind of bad behavior on her part even though her fiance forgives her, but I am so impressed that the author allows her to have this particular fault ~~and also she reminds me of Sparkly~~ that I don’t care.

I’m re-reading one of the Honor Harrington books (Honor Among Enemies), and thinking uncomplimentary things about it.

See, there’s a rather unpleasant character in this book, and she’s a lesbian. And as far as I can remember, there’s one other lesbian character in the whole series. She’s a fairly minor character, and the main thing the narrator tells us about her personality is that she has Issues with the fact that she’s surrounded by attractive women who are straight and not interested in her. So it’s been in the back of my mind for a while that it would be nice if there were more queer characters in these books. They’re set some two thousand years in the future, after all. And it would be so easy to include a casual mention of someone’s same-sex wife or husband or partner or crush (the same way one character’s straight marriage and another character’s straight crush have been mentioned in the first few chapters). But apparently it doesn’t occur to the author to include them.

It really tells you a lot about his mindset, and now that I’ve started thinking down this path I sort of can’t stop. For instance, right now I’m reading a scene in which a spaceship that was attacked by pirates has been discovered, floating dead in space. They didn’t have any cargo that was worth stealing, so what did the pirates do? They separated the crew by gender, killed all the men first, then raped the women and killed them later.

I feel kind of weird suggesting this, because it’s creepy to try to imagine a rapist’s motivations, I guess, but… none of these truly terrible, vicious pirates has ever considered that men can be raped too? Really? They’re invested enough in hurting these people to rape all the female members of the crew, but they just ignore the men?

On the one hand, these books are pretty explicitly meant to be the 17th and 18th centuries except in space, so you could argue that it makes sense for the characters to have many of the same attitudes that people did then, just with the exception that it’s normal to have women sailors. On the other hand, thanks to my history professor’s choice of readings and Dr. B. R. Burg, who wrote a book about the attitudes of 17th century pirates and sailors towards homosexuality (and apparently did not consider it necessary to make a distinction between rape and consensual sex, but I can complain about that later) I know that at least some actual 17th century sailors were well aware that men can be raped!

Nope, I think it’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is, it doesn’t occur to the author that men can be raped, just like it doesn’t seem to occur to him to have queer characters unless it’s supposed to mean something about their personalities. It’s a bit disappointing. Things could be so much more complicated. Of course, it’s nice, it’s really nice to have basically a 50/50 split between men and women, even in the Navy, even in the Marines! It is absolutely refreshing to have so many women characters going about their jobs, being capable and awesome and not being treated in any sexist way at all. But it is a bit disappointing to realize how many assumptions the author is still making about what’s normal, when the real world is so much more complicated.