The Desert Mermaid

This is originally a tweet thread I did in response to a tweet declaring that "male" and "female" are "natural categories." This fascinates me with my Space Place job; people are STILL indignant about the reclassification of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. I think The Pluto Thing is a really useful abstract example of how categories are the ways HUMANS conceptualize nature--and how it affects things socially.

I like that we anthropomorphize Pluto--humans seem to be built sociably, evidenced by our readiness to treat objects as people. And, I hasten to point out, humans do not always treat people well.

So people's indignation at the "disrespect" for Pluto does show a subconscious worry that now that Pluto's in a different category, it will be treated differently.

Which is, frankly, kind of ridiculous. Like, what the fuck are humans gonna DO to Pluto? invalidate it? Stuff it in a locker? Deny it healthcare? Make it illegal for it to open a bank account? Bomb it? (Okay, we could totally bomb it, but WHY.)*

But Pluto's defenders don't really think it through; they just perceive it's in a "lesser" category now (even my fellow Space Placers refer to its reclassification as a "demotion"), and that's as far as they go because they know that humans treat different categories differently.

I've had kids ask if Pluto blew up. It kind of makes sense if they hear adults complaining about how Pluto's "not a planet anymore." Last night a family member asked if it's still included in the solar system if it's not a planet.**

But Pluto's the same thing it's always been; and we've just changed how we're talking about it!

I think the reclassification reflects our expanding knowledge--we've discovered a bunch of things like Pluto and unlike the things we call planets, so this is a whole new category! And we're willing to change it! But our change in its categorization, people perceive, is a change in social status.

People who argue about there being "natural categories" or "scientific reality" seem to ignore the point that it's all humans interpreting it, with our dumb little caveman brains that are still trying to work out if this reality is going to kill us or not.

"It's a FACT" okay, what are you gonna do with that fact, bruh.


*Though astronomers did joke that it's a good thing the New Horizons mission was already underway because it would have been a lot harder to sell a Kuiper belt object than "It's the only planet we haven't visited." Which just goes to show the recategorization changes how we interact with it!

**Answer: Yes, it's just in a different category of Solar System Objects!

gwalla linked to a great article by Dr. Nerdlove about this whole Gamergate idiocy. For a long time I've been unable to say much coherent about it, because I get paralyzed by bafflement. Like, "Is this really a productive way you want to spend your time? Is harassing random women so important?" and then I get all slack-jawed and just stare in incomprehension.

But that article helped clarify something for me--and I have to say, I can sort of understand some of it, in the context of the rise of Geek Chic.

I grew up in the last decade when geeking was still marginal. I had all sorts of interests that got ridiculed by classmates--sci-fi, fantasy, Star Wars, wizards, pirates, aliens, conlangs--hell, books in general. I didn't get bullied for it,* but I did get bothered for it. And--just as important--there was no Official Geek STUFF. If I wanted cool wizard or sprite costumes and props for my dolls, or Super Mario earrings, or the One Ruling Ring, I had to make them myself.**

And suddenly I hit college and started hearing people self-identifying as geeks and nerds. Geekery started to become cool. And it was, honestly, KIND OF WEIRD. Those people who had pointed and laughed at me for writing fantasy before now suddenly declared that they were ALWAYS fans of the Lord of the Rings, just as much as I had been. Naturally, I viewed that claim with some suspicion. And what made it more confusing was that suddenly I was being marketed to, with geek products and replicas of cool stuff I liked, which is sort of surreal if you're used to being ignored by marketing. You assume that the marketers are disingenuously catering to your interests without actually caring, which is often true, but that's often true of all marketing. But the disingenuousness in marketing means you find yourself cynically assuming that NONE of these "new geeks" REALLY shares your interests--that they, like marketers, are just full of shit--because a lot of them spent years either ignoring them or outright telling you they didn't.

And then it gets tangled. Being excluded became part of geek identity, because it's a good way to cope when you are being excluded. But at the same time we want to tell ourselves we are better than our excluders. So now, when "they" are all starting to realize that the stuff we're interested in IS PRETTY DAMN AWESOME and want to join in, we have a choice. We can let go of the part of geek identity that treasures our own marginalization, accept people who refused to accept us, and share our cool stuff--or we can laugh maniacally, yell something about how the tables have turned and now WE are the excluders, and turn into the same jerks that we were trying to get away from.

Okay, yeah, it's tempting to dole out some poetic justice. But I want to actually be better than that, like I tell myself I am. Especially since the only thing I have to give up is my outcast status. In the end, it doesn't even matter that people who laughed at the things I liked in the past are now saying they always were fans of those same things.*** It's not like it's a zero-sum--I am still allowed to enjoy Star Wars even if they also enjoy Star Wars. Even if they like all the WRONG Star Wars things, well, that's their problem.

So what I'm saying here is, I can understand that knee-jerk reaction. But I also know that we can override it. And if we do, we'll prove that geekiness not only has the coolest toys, but we also are cool people.

Who would ever have thought that geeks would be cool?


*As far as I know. I was a bit oblivious to things that, in retrospect, were attempted bullying. Obviously not bad, but still.

**Possibly this is why so many geeks are also pretty good at crafting.

***If they were, then I'm unimpressed at how they failed to admit it and made fun of me, but then I realized that if they were then they were too scared to admit it and I feel kind of sorry for them. And if they weren't always into it, then they've just figured out that my toys really ARE cool, which is a positive step. And if they're cynically bandwagoning, well, whatever.

I keep trying to write up a commentary about one of the most interesting fantasy tropes: the Religion Is True trope. Mostly because I've been fleshing out some of the mythological beliefs of OGYAFElanders,* although it's also because I just read Tamora Pierce's Battle Magic and realized that I've been ... slightly disappointed with the direction the Circleverse has been going in for the last couple of books (this one and Melting Stones) on account of this specific trope.

I always liked the Circleverse because the religion, while a central part of the story, was not indisputably, unambiguously true. You had the temple dedicates praying to and swearing by and honoring the gods, but unlike, say, Tortall or Lord of the Rings or David Eddings' books or the Young Wizards or even goddamn Zelda,** in this world they don't do it because the gods regularly drop by the local waffle house for a short stack or leave helpful voicemails for the heroes or bequeath Our Heroes with Mystical Crysticals. Hell, it's entirely possible that the Circle gods don't even exist, and it's just humans ascribing random occurrences to them.

Y'know, like this world.

And don't get me wrong. I fuckin' like all the Religion Is True examples I listed up there. You can tell some great stories with a premise like that. Hell, I'm even working on a Scatterstone installment featuring some True Animism. But even then, making folklore True actually removes an important aspect from the people in your story: their unbridled creativity.

Now, y'all may know I'm an atheist. I grew up an atheist. My big adolescent revelation wasn't so much that I was an atheist as it was the realization that other people weren't. And while that did lead to a good bit of WTFing on my part--wait, you all BELIEVE this?!--and I do think there is a lot of harm to be gotten out of religion, I also think that religious mythology is fascinating. You can learn a lot about people by the myths they come up with. The stories teach important ideals. You can see the way the mind works in magical thinking, anthropomorphism, spiritism, and just-so explanations. And of course, they're really damn inventive. It takes a lot more cognition to make up a story than to report it.***

I don't think I'm the only one who finds this a bit of a gap. Terry Pratchett (of course) explores it a lot. Discworld's got a sort of symbiotic nature of folklore and humanity--like in Hogfather or Small Gods, where the fairies and gods and Anthropomorphic Personifications are real and concrete, but were born of and fueled by collective human imagination. And even Tortall suggests that the Immortals have a similar backstory, though it seems once they're dreamed up they become independent of humans. But those all still have concrete representations of those concepts. The Circle books were the first time it felt like it really was like our world, where it really was all abstract.

And that was the model I used for OGYAFEland, where there are a bunch of different religions/folklores/mythos ... es ... that are not objectively True, but that influence the thoughts and actions of the humans. It looks like how I see the world. And while it's cool for Pierce to change that around, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was a little disappointed when the Circle Religions started to leak into reality.


*And I just recently had a FABULOUS idea for a short story set in OGYAFEland, god DAMMIT who turned on the Inspiration Fire Hose?

**Or even His Dark Materials--weird, if you've read the book, but while the point is that religion is a construction, it's still not a human construction: angels are a Thing, and they are Messing With Us.

***When I was a kid, it frustrated the hell out of me that everyone was trying to figure out what might have inspired fantastical artworks. "Where could the idea of mermaids come from? Could it have been sailors seeing manatees?" I couldn't figure out why it never crossed their minds that maybe somebody just thought it'd be cool to give a human woman a fish tail. Yes, I know people had frames of reference to work with, but hell, they had fish and women. All it takes is one weirdo with a bit of abstract thinking.

So my friend is an English teacher, and this year she decided to teach The Hobbit to her seventh graders. She asked me if I have any ideas about what to teach them. I think she was expecting a few thoughts. I NOW HAVE TWO SEMESTERS' WORTH OF LESSON PLANS.

Now to get a teaching certificate and go find some seventh graders.

At the moment we're discussing how Joseph Campbell's monomyth relates to The Hobbit.* I'm arguing the case that stopping at Rivendell counts as a Meeting With The Goddess. My case is that the Goddess is more a convenient archetype meant to suggest a well-known meeting of a sage guiding figure, and also that Elves are incredibly fabulous. I am glad she's more interested in my academic argument than my spurious bullshit, though, because otherwise I would have to pull out The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert as Exhibit A arguing Elrond's goddesslike qualities, and my friend is Mormon, so it would go unviewed.

Maybe we'll just skip right on to the Atonement. There are fewer drag queens involved.

(I'm always surprised at how overtly gendered Campbell's theory is. I think he's pretty cool, but to start with "The meeting with the Father Figure" and then immediately have to explain that the father figure doesn't necessarily have to be your dad or even a MAN tells me you need to find better terminology. Also, it tells me that George Lucas has always been one damned literal bastard.)


*Answer: pretty much exactly.

The Book: Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

The Basics: Portrait of a teenage pregnancy. With skillful application of nonlinear narrative, Leicht and Neal take us through sixteen-year-old Elvie's story, using flashbacks--in which she deals with a vanishing baby daddy, her best friend's overly concerned pregnancy research, bullies, the lack of a mother of her own, breaking the news to her dad, figuring out what to DO with the kid, and tranferring to Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers--interspersed with the present narrative, three weeks before her due date, when two factions of warring space aliens charge in to destroy each other with ray guns and end up blasting Hanover out of its low-orbit and right into the path of total disaster.

Wait, What?: Did I mention this book is set in the year 2074, the Hanover School is a space station, both sets of aliens have nefarious designs on the unborn babies, and there are ray guns? Yeah, there's that.

New Rule: Okay, can we all agree that we gave first-person present-tense a good try as applied to action-adventure stories and that it JUST DOESN'T WORK? I don't care how awesome your story is; if it's written in that style I will deduct points. That being said ...

There Are Two Ways To Analyze This Book: If I were feeling scholarly, I could probably get one hell of a thesis out of it. It wouldn't be a stretch to analyze how some of the implications of the world--which range from vaguely creepy to downright horrifying--form a cuttingly clever satire on the current political climate in which men plot and scheme and argue and shoot each other over uteruses without really paying attention to the girls who happen to surround them. I could definitely do that.

Or I could just tell you that this book was ASTONISHINGLY FUN TO READ. It was a silly, happy-go-lucky, action-packed chunk of WHEE SCI-FI, like some glorious form of TV Tropes Mad Lib. And a lot of these tropes manage to piss me right the hell off most of the time,* but somehow they managed to come together to make the most wonderful triple-layer frosted cake with sprinkles of a story. And for all the authors' slightly forced attempt at Teen Voice Narration, Elvie is actually a pretty cool character, with solid goals (she's going to go to a top university for space engineering to get in on a Mars colonization project), an actual sense of humor, and confidence, flexibility, and competence in a crisis. She can change her mind while still making sure it's her mind. (Bonus points for when she tells someone, "It would really help the running narrative in my head if I actually knew what to call you." I'm a sucker for metahumor.)

It could work as a stand-alone book, but I'm glad it's the first in a planned series. I am seriously looking forward to more ray gun adventures in the future.

( Discussion Question WITH SPOILERS! )


*The one about how the only reason humans have civilization is because of the intellectually advanced aliens among us moving our dumb asses along, for example. That one annoys me --particularly if a defining factor of the aliens in question is that they are all male. That right there is the Unfortunate Implications trope in a nutshell.

**Fortunately, the authors seem to know that, and so does Elvie.

Mom got the Blu-Ray for The Lion King. She says it’s her favorite Disney movie, mostly because of the “Circle of Life” song. I can’t argue. That’s a damn fine song.

Only thing is, the characters in the movie don’t seem to actually believe it. For all the lip service they pay to the Great Circle of Life, you start to think that some animals, to paraphrase Orwell, seem more connected in the circle than others. And then the movie starts to look a lot like a failed Equal Hyena Rights campaign.

Think about it. In the beginning the hyenas are inexplicably relegated to some foodless wasteland. When they’re in the wasteland the king’s all “Not my problem,” but if they get hungry and come to the place where all the other animals are allowed to hunt and eat each other, the lions call it poaching and FUCK THEM UP until they go back to their barren world of exile. Why the distinction? Are we all connected by the Great Circle of Life unless we’re hyenas? What’d the hyenas do to deserve that?

So they get desperate and try to ally themselves with Scar, because he says he’s going to let them be part of the Pridelands again and more to the point god dammit they’re HUNGRY.* So they have themselves a revolution, which has a rocky start because Scar is not really about Hyena Rights so much as It’s Good To Be The King,** and then Simba comes back and is all WHAT IS THIS SHIT and sets fire to everything and presumably after he takes his place as king he dumps them back in their wasteland, and everything’s all status quo again. Which is great, unless you’re a hyena.

Poor suckers. I’d suggest they try more civil disobedience next time, but that’s a bit tricky when the people in power will just eat you. Sorry, hyenas.


*If you listen to the countermelody they sing in “Be Prepared” after they did their little goose-step, it’s kind of heartbreaking. He gets them on their side by saying they’ll never go hungry again, and then while he's carrying on about how he deserves to be recognized as the most awesome king and he'll show everyone, you hear them singing “We’ll have food / lots of food / we repeat / endless meat!”

**Yeah, the drought. If this world has no god, that means it’s a really unfortunate coincidence and all the lions’ll say that just goes to show hyenas bring drought. If it’s theistic, then apparently God’s top priority is starving hyenas, and all his other concerns—such as feeding ALL THE OTHER ANIMALS—comes a distant second.

First of all, when you get down past all the strawmen and junk science and media coverage, there is actually simple truth in the idea of evolutionary psychology: that an environment could shape the overall trends in inherited behavioral characteristics in a population. That’s established well enough in the way different species themselves behave differently.

The trouble with the science of evolutionary psychology is not just in explaining such universal characteristics, but in finding those characteristics in the first place. With every single attempt to explain Why We’re Like That, you first have to prove that we are like that—which is kind of impossible when you consider culture and neurology and individual experience and that obnoxious ability we have to rethink situations and alter our behavior—not to mention the scientist’s own bias. Me, I think the idea is fair enough, but I dare you to try illustrating it without turning into a douchebag.

But here’s the thing that interests me the most with people’s reactions to it: in all the crazy arguments for and against whatever individual characteristic we’re looking at, both sides treat the idea of an “adaptation” as, well, Ape Law. Regardless of whether someone has managed to isolate a real trait, you get one side arguing “It is TOTALLY an adaptation and therefore I am perfectly justified in behaving like an ass this way!” and the others saying “It’s not an adaptation and therefore you are not justified!”

My question for both sides is this: since when did natural selection, a process that built the vertebrate eye upside-down and backwards, put tits on boars, and left wings on ostriches, become intelligent design?

Because that’s what it gets treated like. Instinct is handy, but dude, it’s not some kind of rule that God encoded into DNA as part of The Perfect Plan. Evolution is a process, but it’s not an efficient process, and there’s no trim end product with all the RIGHT traits. You can trick animal instincts so that they work against the animal. Some instincts may be maladaptive, or obsolete, or just kinda there. And fortunately, especially for humans, evolutionary traits can be overridden. Me, I’ve got a nice big brain full of culture and experience and analytical ability and empathy, all of which help me to analyze an impulse to do something, decide if it is the right thing to do in this situation, and then act according to that decision. And shit, everything from scuba masks to ski jumping, cooking to medicine, is a flip-off to evolution. Why is the behavior so sacred?

Basically, I don’t fucking CARE if rape or war or murder are adaptive, instinctive behaviors. That has no bearing on whether they’re things you can or should do. You want to use what natural selection gave you? Fine, dammit, you’ve got a good three pounds of complex neurology sitting just inside your head to work with. Use it. And quit saying that natural selection is Ape Law.

So my brother finally got me to watch a few episodes of There Will Be Brawl. I was operating on the principle that I don’t usually go for Grimdarkification (except when my brain gets away from me …), but then neither does he, so if he liked it I might too.*

… Okay, it’s pretty well-done. It’s the first time anyone’s struck the balance between absurd and engaging in a grimdark Nintendo story. The nods to Brawl itself—especially the suggestion that the ousted characters from previous SSMB games were outright murdered—assure me that the filmmakers really like their subject. And the minor-key Mario music’s a nice touch.

On the other hand, I am now a lot more afraid of Kirby than I ever was of Hannibal Lecter.** And I can’t unwatch it.


*Then again, if I were still an anthro nerd, I could probably do a long thesis analyzing whether fan-generated Grimdark like this is more parodying, serious, or both, or examining why people get such a kick out of subverting happy innocuous childhood stuff into Sin City. (Of course you get a kick. But examining why—now that’s an academic’s dream.)

Granted, I have a hard time believing Sin City itself isn’t a parody, so I might be a little biased.

**I honestly didn’t see it coming when they foreshadowed with the whole “eat your guts and walk around in your skin” comment there. Then I just about died laughing.

Lately, I’ve been reassessing my life again, as is the wont of each person from time to time. And while I took an inventory of my head, I found something was missing:

My ON NOTICE board.

Remember the ON NOTICE board? It’s the board Stephen Colbert puts first offenders on. If they are nice they get taken back off of it; if they do not heed the notice and continue to do things he dislikes, he will move them to the DEAD TO ME board.

I like that system. It gave the offenders notice that they had done something wrong, and invited them to correct their behavior if they so chose. It has a philosophy in there that you wouldn’t expect from a character purporting to be a narrow-minded self-serving pundit: second chances.

Lately, though, I haven’t been using my ON NOTICE board. I’ve been skipping directly to DEAD TO ME.

Nobody is very good at giving second chances. We’re not built that way—animals wouldn’t get very far if they didn’t learn the first time around to watch out. Or, sometimes, people will give second, third, fourth, fifth, infinity-plus-one chances when it’s clear it won’t get used for redemption. Keeping it in the middle—judging when to give someone the ability to explain themselves, to correct the problem, or at least to see that it doesn’t happen again, and judging when that’s not going to work—is difficult, and lately I’ve been going with the simple solution of offering no second chances to anyone, including myself.

That’s turned out about as well as you might expect.

I’d forgotten that people can change. I’ve always been careful to make verbal judgments conditional on change—I have always been conscientious about saying things like “I hate it when people cut me off in traffic” or something rather than “I hate people who cut you off in traffic,” because it always seemed rather sweepingly general of me to suggest that this person’s sole attribute on which I should base all judgment of their character from the time of their birth to the time of their death was half a second at rush hour. But I have been ignoring my careful words and hating the people anyway—from the extended family for their transgressions to the world at large.

I don’t like that. I don’t want people to feel that one mistake will make them dead to me. I want them to be able to admit that something they did might have been a mistake without making them think they’re irredeemable. I want to be able to do that myself, actually, to myself. We all make mistakes, and paying lip service to that effect is not enough. I want to really live it.

So I am dusting off the ON NOTICE board. I reserve the right to skip directly to DEAD TO ME for grave mistakes, but for the most part, I want to start using this thing again. It’ll save a lot of time and blood pressure problems further down the road.