Media, Culture, Technology

Author: AVeryStrangeHoard

How I Met Your Victorian Society

I’ve been taking a Victorian Sexualities class this semester. And throughout I’ve been surprised by the connections between Victorian society and our present-day society. For example, both involve radical changes in technology, concern over family values and morality, and a large amount of coded talk about sex. Although a lot has changed and the conversations differ in content, many of the anxieties of the Victorian era, especially around sexuality and gender, seem to pop up today. One of the places where I was surprised to find myself suddenly thinking about the Victorians was the TV show How I Met Your Mother, created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

The unmarried woman was a big concern for the Victorians. The growing number of single women in Britain was in conflict with the traditional role of women as wife and the mechanisms of inheritance and property. William Rathbone Greg wrote “Why are Women Redundant?” in 1862 to address this problem. He believed that it was in women’s nature to marry, so that if they weren’t marrying, it was for unnatural reasons: bad temperament, desire for work, and a lack of eligible men. I think the Robin, one of the two female protagonists, is the modern day manifestation of a similar fear. Most of her characters’ conflicts have to do with whether she wants a man or a career. So which will she end up with? And if a man, who? The show spends a lot of time dwelling on which path and which man is a better choice for her. This focus on marrying off the single women strikes me as very Victorian. Her role as a woman is also complicated through her non-traditional portrayal of gender. Robin has a lot of traditionally masculine characteristics, and the show wants us to see them as such. Her drinking scotch and smoking cigars makes her a ‘bro’. As does her lack of desire for children or for commitment.

Set against Robin’s gendered identity, Lilly’s performance of womanhood becomes the other half of the binary. Lilly wants a husband and children. For most of the show she is a kindergarten teacher. Her character has nurturing and maternal instincts that Robin seems to lack. Though Lilly isn’t always traditional, she is aligned with the traditional ideals of womanhood as mother and wife. Just as Greg was thinking about what the proper role for women was, How I Met Your Mother proposes these two ideas: Robin or Lily. In addition, Wilkie Collin’s book The Woman in White sets up a similar binary with its two main female characters, Laura and Marion. Laura is a traditional woman—quiet and passive—while Marion is frequently compared with men—rational and stubborn. This concern over what makes a woman is also in our consciousness today. Certainly How I Met Your Mother’s women are different from those in the Victorian period, but we are still trying to figure out what gender means—especially for women in relation to marriage. What is the ‘natural’ role for women? Is there one?

Another Victorian trope that has found its way into the show is that of the potential (or definite, depending on how you see it) homoeroticism of male friendships. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest is packed with jokes about gay sex. In Wilkie Collins’ work, there is a pattern of homoerotic love being expressed through the desire for the same woman (see, for more on this, Carolyn Dever’s “The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives.”). In How I Met Your Mother, the bond between Ted and Barney has similar coding. The greater importance of their relationship with each other over their brief and unimportant heterosexual bonds mimics that of men in Victorian literature. Their strong and foundational love and care for each other is greater than that of marriage—which is shown as shallower. Add to this Ted and Barney’s mutual love for Robin and you have a Victorian love triangle. The homosocial relationship is, perhaps, coded in their desire for Robin. The questions that Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde asked are still concerns today: What is the role of homosocial relationships? Is marriage still the most important relationship if the ‘bro code’ is supposed to come first? Or does the show’s narrative framework suggest that, despite the importance of homosocial bonds, marriage wins out in the end? The whole point of the framing narration is, after all, to tell an audience of children about their family history or what—for lack of a better world—their inheritance.

While I believe that a lot has changed since Victorian society, it seems odd to me that so many of the questions they were grappling with are still valid today. Have our thoughts on marriage changed so little? Or have we returned to a time of these odd hypocrisies? Morality, family and marriage are central concerns while sex and sexual deviance are both immoral and everywhere. I don’t have a claim, or a ‘so what’ to answer these questions. I think the pattern is worth some thought however. The Victorians were trying to adjust to changing gender roles and ideas of sexuality. So are we today. Our society is in the process (hopefully) of rearranging how we think of gender and all of its institutions. Do we look to the Victorians for help perhaps? How come we’re still so stuck on these issues?

There’s No Place Like Home

Wow. Gone Home shattered all my assumptions about video games. But before I get into that let me offer two disclaimers. One, this is, in fact, the first video game I have every played from start to finish (unless you count a round of Super Mario Kart) and the first video game I have ever owned. Second, I will be talking about my personal life in connection to this game. If that makes your skin itch, I’m sorry.

In the hyper-masculine realm of popular video games, violence is king. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Diablo, etc. Games are marketed to men and use female characters as pawns to drive the story and to develop the male protagonist’s character. Women in games are not independent or their own characters, but are rather devices marketed to men. This often means that the female character is killed just to give the male character depth or purpose. In addition there is the completely unacceptable sexual violence in Grand Theft Auto where players are REWARDED for raping women, blatantly encouraging rape culture. As someone who has witnessed this problem and who had a mother who purposely kept video games out of the house for this reason, I didn’t realize that there were games out there that were interested in women and their lives. To my surprise, after five minutes of playing Gone Home (developed and published by The Fulbright Company). I was completely hooked on this emotionally complex and intellectually challenging game. It requires players to contemplate women’s lives (their whole lives–not only their connection to men, or their male or masculine personas, but women as they live and struggle in a patriarchal society).

From the start you are playing a young woman: Katie. And you are most interested in the life of your younger sister, Sam. You return home from a semester abroad to your family’s new house (they moved while you were away), and find the house strangely empty. The ‘game’ aspect involves your solving the mystery of where your family is. You walk through your house and learn about your life and the lives of your family members. Understanding the characters and their lives is crucial. There is no enemy. There is no specific goal or quest. Character development drives the game forward. To my amazement, this development is largely focused on Sam’s non-traditional views of gender and her budding relationship with Lonnie, an older girl in her class. As the game is set in 1995, they exchange mix tapes of early female punk rock and write a zine about knocking out the patriarchy. From Sam’s experiences of oppression and prejudice to the fact that THERE ARE TAMPONS IN THE BATHROOM, the game strives to provide a holistic view of a family and specifically a daughter in transition and turmoil.

Even better than that, this game made me feel. I moved from Massachusetts to Virginia after my freshman year in high school. I was suddenly the only openly queer student in a small private christian school. I had two older sisters. I was intensely angry with my parents. Walking through Gone Home felt like walking back into that time in my life. I read notes from Sam to her parents because they weren’t speaking. I heard Sam talk about being bullied in school. I relived how hard it is to be different in a new place with a family you don’t feel connected to. My family was much less religious than Sam’s but I still felt like outsider. This video game made me reflect on that time and forced me to look at it from a different angle. This self-examination was not what I expected to face in any video game. I hadn’t expected that a video game could make me cry with happiness at its conclusion.

The depth given to these characters in the game is astounding. Here is new a way to explore the experiences of a queer identity, to feel how horrible it is to be invisible. The game not only gives historically accurate references to the lesbian community and culture at the time but also has definite connections to present-day queer experiences. The journal entry “A Very Long Phase” talks about the experience of coming out and the powerful impact of each person’s reaction. Sam’s parents simply deny that she is a lesbian (though her identity is never specified, I use lesbian for simplicity) and believe that it is a phase. Unfortunately, this is not unusual even today. Women, especially those who are queer identified, face the challenge of people believing (1) they just don’t know what they’re doing, (2) they’re doing it for male attention, or (3) eventually they’ll get married and everything will be normal (Please, just don’t let women bond with women! If men aren’t involved, IT CAN’T BE REAL). This intersection of sexism and homophobia adds to the struggle of women to be treated with respect, as someone with agency and knowledge.

So I know that this review was more of a love fest than a proper review, but that’s how I feel about Gone Home. This emotional and complex game goes beyond entertainment. It is not a time waste, or useless. Gone Home, if you’re willing, will entertain you and make think about who you are. If you have the time, I absolutely recommend that you play this game. Before I played it I never thought I’d really enjoy video games, or that they were more than a diversion. But after? I think I’m going to search for other games like this. I want more.

Orphan Black

It’s not easy to be a feminist and watch TV. I don’t deny there are shows that are making strides in their representation of women and non-normative people, such as Orange is the New Black, Parks and Recreation, Bob’s Burgers, etc. But despite these shows, television seems stuck in a rut. Though there is a lot available, shows stay rigidly within their genre and tend to market towards one single demographic. Cop shows work one way, sitcoms another, teen dramas are different from soap operas, and soap operas are different from prime time. So although the shows employ many different lenses, they remain clustered around a few primary ideas, showing but not embracing diversity in characters or life narratives. Watching through a feminist lens traps you in wanting to praise and encourage a show for the progress it does make but feeling disappointed by the conservative structures that TV can’t seem to let go of.

Orphan Black is a show that begins to deconstruct these ideas. For those of you who have not watched it, let me give you a synopsis (unless you want to watch it right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait). Sarah Manning (played by Tatiana Maslany) is the first and primary character; the audience mostly follows her through the narrative, though in the later episodes this changes. Sarah was raised in the foster system, had an unplanned pregnancy, and ran away leaving her child in the care of her foster mother. The show begins with her return to NYC where her foster mother and daughter live, as well as her foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris). Sarah quickly learns that she is a clone, meaning that her DNA was either copied or constructed and that her body is technically owned by the Dyad group. She meets many of her “sisters” (as they call themselves) and joins them in trying to discover their origins. They attempt to sustain their lives while managing the unusual details of their existence and fighting for their autonomy against institutional and scientific control.

Through its story, Orphan Black establishes connections between the personal and the political that most TV shows don’t even attempt–and it does this while managing to maintain a multilayered narrative. Diverse characterizations for women–who are the majority of the cast–and men are central to the show. Unfortunately, Orphan Black is largely lacking in representations of people of color. The fact that a large chuck of the characters are all played by Tatiana Maslany because they’re clones is a contributing factor, but it by no means excuses the show for its white-dominated cast. This was a choice the show’s producers made, so though I praise the leaps that it is making I cannot say it does not have flaws, and I am not defending this significant gap in its representation of the human experience.

That said, Orphan Black creates a diverse representation of the female experience, including sexuality, career, class, religion, ideology, and motherhood status. Through learning about Sarah, her family and the clones–mainly Allison, Cosima, Helena, and Rachel–the audience is shown many different ways in which women live. Allison lives in the suburbs with her husband and two children. Cosima is a queer-identified student studying evolutionary biology. And Helena was raised in a convent and then brainwashed to kill people (pretty unusual, really). The audience is also shown the complex relationships between all of these women, and in particular the generational relationships of Sarah, her foster mother, and her daughter. The connections between women, such as those of motherhood or sisterhood (both biological and emotional), are major themes explored in the show. Strong bonds between women are not the subject of most TV shows at the moment, and it’s incredible to see these realistic and relatable female characters explore their relationships to each other, themselves, and the world. In addition, the show includes interesting male characters. In fact, the male characters are integral to the plot and are characterized just as the female characters are, as having different and complex identities. The show focuses on its female character while consistently bringing in male narratives and identities to complete the complex views of gender that appear in the show.

This diverse picture of identities is continued with the inclusion of queer-identified characters like Felix, Cosima, Delphine (a fellow scientist of Cosima), and Tony. I use the term queer to mean non-normative: anything that is against the traditional structures of society. Felix is Sarah’s gay foster brother who, while male identified, is welcomed into female spaces. He is not only openly gay with an actively queer social life but is defended as Sarah’s brother. His identity is not only outside heteronormative bounds, but his connection to Sarah is non-normative as well, as they are not blood relations.

The relationship between Cosima and Delphine (Evelyne Brochu) is also an amazing accomplishment of the show. After thinking about Cosima kissing her in the episode “Entangled Banks,” Delphine admits “Oh, like… I have never thought about bisexuality. I mean, for myself, you know? But, as a scientist, I know that sexuality, is a… is a… is a spectrum. But you know, social biases they, codified attraction. It’s contrary to the biological facts… you know.” This discussion of sexuality acknowledges both the social meanings and scientific ideas of sexual identity. The development of Cosima and Delphine’s relationship explores questions of identity, how identity changes, and what loving someone means. Tony, while only briefly in the show so far, queers the idea of female experience even more by being a transgender clone. His presence highlights that a female body does not always mean female person. Despite having identical DNA with his clone sisters, Tony identifies as a man and pushes against the gender binary and its limited view of sex.

Not only does the show incorporate all these identities as experiences of life, but it also connects them to political, social, scientific and other external institutions. Through the focus on reproduction and women’s bodies, the show explores how people and bodies are used in science, religion, and politics. The clones are inherently drawn into this tug of war because their bodies are the property of science. This also politicizes the lives of these women’s families. Their status as ‘object,’ not ‘person,’ raises questions about how women’s bodies in particular are commodified, often through their reproduction.

The questions of religion, science, and politics, however, do not end there. The show explores the relationships between these political institutions: where their goals overlap, when they’re in contest, how they view each other, and how their ideologies construct worldviews. This complex look at social institutions in connection with the individual is what makes Orphan Black such a smart and multi-layered show. Orphan Black is not trying to show the audience a single way to live, but is instead asking us to examine how the world around us works and what our place is in it. It shows life not as a contained event, but as connected to and influenced by larger external forces. This is exciting to me, that a popular television show would express such a complex world view.

Orphan Black is by no means the only example of television with diverse identities or political implications. Nor is it perfect, with every identity accounted for, and all voices heard. However, it is a show that attempts to establish the connections between personal and political lives. Its characters show a range of life experiences and identities and build relationships outside of a heteronormative structure. The show stands out against the Normative and promotes a more complex understanding of an individual’s relationship to society. In short, I think it’s worth a watch.

For more Orphan Black information, click here!

What Is Feminism?

When writing a column about feminism the first thing I would like to do is be clear: What do I mean by feminism? In society and the media today, feminism is rarely given a clear definition. Feminists, however, are clearly implied to be ugly, single, man-hating lesbians. No one is sure what feminism really is or does; it’s just clear you shouldn’t want to be a part of it. Though I don’t deny that there are some man-hating, lesbian feminists, the theory of the movement is focused not on Men or Women, but gender.

Gender is the performance of either masculine or feminine characteristics. I say performance, not because gender is not real, but because it is public. Gender is how you publicly identify, either as man or woman. People do this in almost every way: clothing, hair, voice, ways of moving, how one sits, etc. And being a man or woman comes with a heap of responsibilities! Men are expected to be emotionally closed, always into sex with women, and career-driven so as to provide for their eventual families. Women are expected to be over-emotional, mother-ready, and simultaneously sexually available and sexually pure. Our society is steeped in this gender binary. And in this binary, feminine traits are seen as inherently degraded or degrading while masculine traits are praised. When men act like Men they are celebrated, but when women act like Women they are belittled for the performance.

The easiest example of this double-edged sword is the virgin/whore complex. A woman should have sex, but not too much sex and not outside of monogamy (or marriage), and only with men,  etc., etc., etc. But there are other places in society where we can see the gender hierarchy at work: English curriculums, for example. I challenge anyone to look at the books they read for high school English and not find the vast majority to have been written by male authors.

So how does this binary oppress people? There is no Patriarchy Headquarters. No Ivory Tower of Male Glory (though there is the Washington Monument, but that’s another story). The patriarchy is all around us, in our TV shows and movies, our politics, our schools, our families–even in our relationships and our sense of self. It’s there every time someone says, “She needs to get laid,” “He’s a pussy,” “Don’t be a bitch,” “Look at my big strong baby boy,” “That’s my sweet little baby girl,” or “When are you going to get married?” Patriarchy is at work every time we employ gender to assume something about a person’s character. It’s there every time we assume gender at all. In fact, it’s so engrained that we can’t even refer to someone without gendered pronouns. Once your gender is defined, then many other things about yourself become restricted: what you can wear, who you can have relationships with, even your personality.

This is where feminism comes in handy. Feminism is about confronting in ourselves, and deconstructing in the world, the uses of gender. You may say then why feminism? Why not humanism? And you’re right that feminism doesn’t just deal with women but also men. In fact, feminists don’t think that gender exists. Gender only exists because we use it. There is nothing inherent or true about gender. However, the way our culture employs the concept has a tremendous impact on society today and in the past. Man has always been the gender discussed. So much so that man literally means all humans. Men have had their stories told in film, television, history, and politics to the exclusion of all others. Because of this normalization of masculinity, men are often not even identified by their gender. Women, however, have their identity reduced to the fact of their gender daily. Women’s voices have been ignored and belittled as have so many outside the mainstream, white, male, heterosexual discourse.

So here’s my main point: Feminism is not about women being better than men. Let me repeat that: Feminism is not about women being better than men. Feminism is about listening to the voices that have been silenced, marginalized, and excluded by the gender binary and its inherent male-centric attitude. It’s about trying to push beyond the gendered portrayal of humanity.

So let me be clear. In this column, I plan to examine the role and rules of gender. As a feminist, I plan to look into how society teaches and learns gender, how this binary excludes other voices, and how the restrictions of gender identities disenfranchise all people.

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