Unfortunately, due to family obligations, the beginning of South by Southwest, and trying to cram in a ton of work before South by Southwest, I’m not completely caught up on “Battlestar Galactica”. I did see last week’s placeholder episode, but I didn’t see last night’s. But that doesn’t mean you should treat this thread as a free-for-all of discussing last night’s episode. Don’t worry about spoiling me—-I need an excuse to avoid following a thread so that I get some paid work done.
In lieu of writing about last night’s episode, then, I’ll address this blogpost that came out on March 5th at Slate’s XX Factor. Juliet Lapidos is telling us to set aside the belief that “Battlestar Galactica” is feminist, just because it’s the one show on TV that I know of that has really exploited its sci-fi premise to imagine a world where women actually have equality. She tepidly accepts that this is a step in the right direction before going whole hog on how bad it is. I agree with some of her criticisms, but the more I thought about it, the more I think what bothered me about the post is she seems to get everything backwards, starting with her basic premise, which is that the show is retrograde sexism with a few feminist bright spots, whereas I think the show is very feminist, with a few blindspots that stem from the writers being mostly male and mostly stuck in sci-fi conventions. You cannot brush off Starbuck and Roslin so easily—-these characters are more than feminist flourishes, but also an attempt to gender-fuck the original show. (Boomer, too, in case you forget, was originally a man.) More than that, the writers have done a remarkable job on not allowing latent prejudices to make the female characters a little less-than. It’s not just that Roslin’s smarter than Adama, and Starbuck’s craftier and more skilled than anyone ever, and Sharon/Athena is both a genius pilot and technician, and that Six is smarter than a famous scientist like Baltar, and that men and women tend to have the same mix of lust and love-yearning when it comes to sex. It’s the ease at which they portray women moving through their world, which is a remarkable fictional achievement because it doesn’t really have a real-world corollary.
Lapidos, I think, gets a lot of stuff backwards, beginning with this:
Perhaps because science fiction has historically appealed to men who don’t leave home much, the genre has often used alien mores and alien technology to rationalize pornographic depictions of near-naked women. (Think Jabba the Hutt forcing Princess Leia to wear that ridiculous gold bikini in Return of the Jedi.)
Maybe she’s trying to be generous, but I actually think, when you’re seeing pornographic depictions of women in non-pornographic entertainment, it’s not because the creators presume an all-male (and all shut-in) audience, but because they’re cultivating an all-male audience. A seemingly small difference, but one with major ramifications. There’s nothing about sci-fi that is inherently masculine, even if it’s inherently appealing to geeks, who aren’t necesssarily shut-ins, as she implies. There’s plenty of female geeks, even if they’re invisible in a culture that accepts a lot more diversity in men than in women.
No, the abundance of sexualized women without sexualized men in sci-fi (as well as comedies, mysteries, horror movies, video games, you name it) isn’t a mere result of a male audience, but a way of signaling to a male audience that this is for them, and they are not, in any way, going to run into threats to their heterosexual manhood by watching it.* Depending on the circumstance, it signals to female audience members to stay out or accept second class status. This is as true of “Star Wars” as it is of Judd Apatow comedies where schluby guys end up with smoking hot women. Notably, the nekkid lady syndrome also comes along with a whole buttload of stereotypes about women’s inadequacies—-women can be smart but not funny, funny but not pretty, smart and hot but not playful, etc. Taking that into consideration, the way that a few female characters on “BSG” that are hyper-sexualized (okay, mostly Six) is actually pretty different. Six is unworldly beautiful and prone to wearing skimpy clothes. She might also be the smartest character on the show and she’s got a twinkly sense of humor. She owns every room she walks into, and has a disturbing charisma. She’s one of the most textured characters on the show, in direct contrast to how smoking hot ladies tend to be nothing but eye candy, to the degree that even putting an otherwise smart character in smoking hot lady clothes often means you shut off her brain. My take on this is that Six is supposed to be a constant reminder that Cylons are robots, because everything about her is excessive—-she’s the most super-human Cylon.
Battlestar is no exception. When Cylons die, their memories download into an identical-looking body on a resurrection ship. This process, almost without exception, happens off-screen for the male Cylons, but when a fembot dies she flies through a vaguely fallopian-looking tube then wakes up nude in a vat of goo.* Overtly, these are birth scenes. But they are hypersexualized—with lingering thigh-shots and orgasmic-sounding gasping. Cylon ringleader Ellen Tigh’s resurrection in this season’s “No Exit” is among the most egregious: Covered in gelatinous lubricant, she writhes and moans. On realizing that a Peeping Tom robot has been observing the whole process, she gets a creepily post-coital look on her face.
This strikes me as the most fair criticism, but it also skips over the fact that the camera lingers over male bodies in various states of undress as well. It’s fair from equal, though, so I’ll let her have this one. I don’t care if something is sexualized—-in fact, go ahead, appeal to my prurient side, or even use sex to make me uncomfortable (which was, to my mind, the point of the Ellen awakening)—-but just make it equal, please.
But it seems to me her argument is based on the fact that the show observes the same double standards of beauty and who has to be sexual objects (though less so than other shows), and so she kind of pieces together some other, weaker evidence to back her up. And I’m not so keen on this.
Cally’s death is an example of a worrisome trend: The main female characters are all dying, dead, or not human. Ellen, Sharon, D’Anna, and Tory Foster—all strong female characters, have all turned out to be Cylons, and Starbuck was recently revealed as a half-Cylon hybrid. Adm. Cain, for a time the highest ranking officer in the military, was assassinated; Cally was murdered; Dee, Capt. Lee Adama’s neglected wife, committed suicide; and Starbuck’s rival, Capt. Louanne Katraine, pretty much did, too—she sacrificed herself while guiding civilian ships through a dangerous star cluster. The president, perhaps the most-talked-about example of Battlestar’s great female leads, is dying of breast cancer. In isolation, none of these cases has much significance. But taken together they suggest a troubling, if unintentional message: Women—the human ones, anyway—just can’t hack it when the going gets rough.
To me, this is evidence that female characters are as important as the male ones, honestly. The main determinant on who is a Cylon, it seems, is who is important enough to be one. The show wraps up everyone’s storyline by killing them instead of relegating them to the background, and they do this to raise the stakes and remind the audience on a regular basis that survival really is in question. My bigger quarrel is not that they have so many female main characters who are in danger of going Cylon or dying—-again, these are evidence that you matter, not that you don’t—-but that minor characters that don’t get Cylon’d or killed all seem to be men. If pilots are mix gender, why can Marines who march around all the time be mixed, too?
This one bothered me a lot:
Even more insidious than the lack of female friendships are the casual threats of rape made throughout the series. In Season 2, a “Cylon interrogator” attempts to violate Sharon, a Cylon pilot and the only East Asian on the show, but her husband Helo intervenes in the nick of time. In this season’s “The Oath,” Helo fights with a mutineer—“Frak you,” he says (that’s Battlestar‘s four-letter-word variant), and the mutineer responds, “Sorry, I’m saving myself for your … wife.” He means it. Rape is a trope on the show: Starbuck finds herself in a bizarre insemination farm on the Cylon-occupied planet Caprica, and Adm. Cain orders some cronies to rape and torture a Cylon in “Razor.” Naturally the show doesn’t condone rape, but it’s discomfiting that the writers drop sexual violence into the script so often without comment. If nothing else, this pervasive threat—directed only at women—negates the idea that Battlestar conjures a gender-blind universe.
You see feminists push this idea a lot—-that rape is a special form of assault so terrible that it can’t be used as a plot device in fiction, you know, unlike murder. I don’t like this, because we already see more murder onscreen than rape, and rape is infinitely more common in real life. I don’t condone casual depictions of rape, because rape is tolerated in our culture, and you add to that by making it Not A Big Deal onscreen. (In contrast, you can probably get away with showing murder casually, because most people don’t make the leap to murdering casually, but not so with rape.) But if you make a point of portraying rape as this unbelievable horror, then I’m cool with it. I figure, as long as you’re being responsible, you’re raising visibility of an invisible crime. When feminists blindly condemn all use of rape as a plot device, they make rape precious, and that bothers me, because it’s not precious. In fact, I’m getting upset writing this, because I think it’s actually that counter-productive to make rape too precious to be shown onscreen. For fuck’s sake, the show depicts genocide.
Natch, the point is that “BSG”, in my opinion, handles the topic responsibly, which means treating rape like a crime of power and not that of a man who just got too horny and lost control. Every single rape or attempted rape is tied directly to male domination or control of women’s bodies. They show them raping prisoners because that’s what torturing prison guardsdo. The only way they could have been more responsible is to show that they rape male prisoners, too, so score one against the show. I particularly liked that forced pregnancy is shown as rape, because I agree that mandatory childbirth is a form of sexualized violence against women, and that people who, say, protest at abortion clinics are part of the rape culture. This especially added poignancy to the abortion ban that we’ve since found out Dr. Cottle ignores pretty much completely. (Go, Dr. Cottle!) My take on the sexual violence is that the humans once had a male-dominated culture, but they have had political and professional equality for women for a long time. This strikes me as realistic—-a culture like that would indeed grant women a lot of freedom, but there would still be some threads of rape culture that hadn’t been rubbed out entirely.
If anything, the most disturbing sexism that’s crept into the show is the patriarchal sentimentality about pregnancy. It’s not that people are attached to pregnancy—-I would be, too, if I were in their situation—-it’s just how over the top it gets sometimes, to the point where it takes you out of the story. I could accept that Caprica Six’s miscarriage was a tragedy without devoting an entire fucking episode to it. If our culture were less sexist about these issues, it’d be easier to swallow, but as it stands, it’s grating. But my main problem with it is that it’s boring. When I step back, I have to admire that they try to portray a gender-neutral approach, where men have equal investment in domestic things as women.
I’m skipping over her complaints about how no women have friendships like Adama and Tigh’s. No other men do, either.
I’m honestly not sure what to think of this:
The most retrograde character is Cally, an air-maintenance specialist on the flight deck. For years, she’s harbored a girlish crush on her boss, Chief Tyrol, to no avail, until, at last, a breakthrough happens thanks to a broken jaw: Cally wakes Tyrol up from a nightmare and in a fit of angry confusion, he beats her to a pulp. Remorseful, he visits her in the hospital, and shortly thereafter, they marry. This sends the implicit message that the way to a man’s heart is through his fist—a heartily un-feminist concept—but the strange circumstances surrounding Cally’s marriage are less offensive than her death scene.
I’ve never liked that storyline because it didn’t know what it wanted to be, mainly. Did they want to show how victims of domestic violence rationalize the violence? They’re not inaccurate, but the problem is that it wasn’t a domestic violence incident—-it was a bona fide mistake. Chief beat Callie up because he’s all disturbed due, we find out, to the fact that he’s a 2,000-year-old Cylon. He was sleeping. He has no real responsibility for his actions. Taken out of the context of a culture that also tolerates domestic violence, the story seems to be that Callie exploited Chief’s remorse to get him to marry her, because Callie sucks. I don’t have a problem with showing a clingy, desperate woman guilt a man into marrying her, because that happens all the time with both genders and all sexual orientations. But if they could have only found another way for him to do something unfair to her, because a beating just seems like domestic violence, though in this one bizarre, sci-fi case, it’s not.
She goes on to list all the other ways that Callie sucks, and yep, Callie sucks. She even sucks in stereotypical ways. But the problem with certain stereotypes is that everyone in the group gets cast that way, and I don’t see the point in pretending that no women ever are manipulative and hysterical. The problem is suggesting that we all are. I always got the impression that different planets had different sexual mores, and some were more sexist than others. Capricans are sort of the “liberal elite”, and therefore the most feminist. I always took Callie’s character to suggest that some people hail from more conservative planets, and so it makes some sense that Callie would have specific neuroses that stem from that. I don’t think they failed at the attempt to show that different cultures produce different people at all, since I picked up on that.
*Funny story: Last night, because it was free with the badge, I went to check out a burlesque show at Emo’s. I’ve not seen one in years, and was curious to see if it had gotten any better with time. (Yes.) I’m not mentioning this because I want to debate the feminism of burlesque (I don’t think it’s “feminist”, but it’s also not drenched in misogyny like strip clubs are), but because at the end of the show, the two male emcees came out wearing nothing but aprons and some official junk-covering, and they did a little strip tease that was actually pretty funny. But all these dudes standing in front of us, as soon as they realized what was going on, turned tail and practically stomped on us trying to get out. Because Teh Ghey is catching, you know.
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I’ll add that the guys running out were all the more comical, because they accepted other premises—-that talent is more important that skinniness, that women being goofy about sex is fun—-that are usually also treated as threats to straight maleness. They had no problem clapping loud for the fat lady who did a barnstorming sexy dance celebrating scotch and bacon (definitely top three in the performers), so I was actually surprised they thought Teh Ghey was catching. Who knew?