Geekery

Sigh. My long distance internet crush continues. Annalee Newitz posts fabulous cultural criticism in so many disparate places that I have no idea whether or not I manage to follow it all, but I'm often impressed and amused with what I do read. You can find her on her website, Techsploitation, at her weekly Alternet column, on the Table of Malcontents* for WIRED blogs, with occasional posts on SciFi television at MeeVee, and sometimes blogging to promote the book she co-edited, She's Such a Geek. You can also find her in print in many places, doing book readings mostly in SF, and occasionally making guest appearances on Cranky Geeks. Anyway, she's a brilliant queer feminist science and technology writer and commentator and sci-fi and horror fan. That's hot.

She's done a series of really great feminist analyses recently and I wanted to point you toward her analysis of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (emphasis on the his). I think she overstates the perversion of science - Pullman's dark matter didn't ever seem to me to have anything to do with actual dark matter to me and I wrote it off as one of the premises of an alternate universe rather than an attempt to define a real astrophysical phenomenon in religious terms. But her analysis of the gender and sexuality politics of the series is spot on and needs to be said more. Though I enjoyed the books a lot, it's bad when this is what what we set up as our example of a female heroine and a coming of age story.

And speaking of feminist analysis of pop culture, Newitz also has a very good point about an inappropriately transphobic and anti-feminist throw-away line on Veronica Mars last week. While I wasn't paying close enough attention to catch that particular line, which was obviously stupid, the whole premise of last week's episode was a bit offensive to me. First of all, it was all about a guy being a virgin who goes to comic book conventions [yawn]. So they make a bunch of unfunny jokes about nerds and Battlestar Galactica, which is silly because the show and Veronica both seem to like Battlestar in general. He meets this great girl, who happens to be a prostitute that his friends have hired to help him lose is virginity. He believes he has genuinely connected with her, so he buys her out of prostitution, and then is so obsessed with the fact that she's not a virgin that he can't date her. Which just pisses me off because it reinforces the whole idea that women must be pure and perfect in order to have a relationship with them. Which is dumb. Get over it, or at least try to deal and don't act as if its perfectly OK to be all judgemental about something you knew going into he relationship. Issues of young adult and especially female sexuality are hugely important and difficult in VM, and it's one of the only shows I know of that talks about rape and recovery and actively making serious choices about the sexual issues facing young women. It annoys me that there's still this image of the 'slut' (ugh, and the feminist) hanging over the show that they feel like they need to bash every once in a while. Plus, I want more of Mac. She's the kickass female computer whiz sidekick and just plain awesome.

Also, today Newitz broke the absolutely devastating (to me at least) news that, according to Whedonesque, Joss Whedon is no longer writing and directing the Wonder Woman movie. Yes, we all knew that this was taking a long time and that he has many other projects that he's working on. And as Newitz has posted before (quoting from Charlie Anders at othermag), the comic book version of Wonder Woman isn't as exciting as it could be (Joss, could you at least help out with that?). But I was really excited to see the campy old TV show that I remember watching in reruns as a very young child transformed into a kickass movie with a strong, intelligent, complex superheroine, which is one thing that Joss Whedon is good at and which I don't trust other writers and directors to bother to do. Somehow I doubt that they'll hire a woman, but that's really the only scenario in which I could picture getting excited about the movie again. It was such a perfect Whedon project.

*Table of Malcontents drives me crazy! The blog itself seems to be a group blog vaguely reminiscent of Boing Boing with an abiding affection for zombies, tentacles, and steampunk, which is pretty cool. The problem is, it's edited by John Brownlee who is the main contributer and often comes across as a sexist prick. He seems to think he's just being funny, but he consistently includes in his posts unnecessary, throw-away comments that are decidedly anti-woman. The most recent example is this post about Valentines Day and his crack about desperate women. It's certainly mostly harmless, but also unnecessary and unfunny. But the fascinating thing about the blog is that everyone else who posts on it is a woman and brilliant and interesting. He jokes about it here in this post about lap pillows. They all seem to get along and like each other, which indicates to me that perhaps John Brownlee isn't actually a sexist prick, but the fact that I don't know him personally and I only get snippets of his personality in TOM posts, makes it seem as if he is. I love Eliza Gauger's beautiful Victoriana posts and of course Annalee's insightful commentary. I wish I could read it without the unnecessary sexism.