In praise of fanworks (or: GAH, sexist sci fi, GALATEA SMASH!)

Today is Lashings' last day in Edinburgh! BOO! It's been an amazing ride, and we can't wait to write all about the good (99%!), the bad (one incident in particular) and the downright ridiculous (pudding, anyone?). But while we're all packing away our Thatcher costumes and preparing to put on our very final Edinburgh show (8.30pm tonight, so you've still got one more chance!) here's a post cunningly written the weekend before we left...

Posted by Galatea

This post was inspired by an epic chat thread that ended up eating most of Sunday July 29 for quite a few Lashers! Many of you who've seen Lashings perform have probably seen our 'Sci-Fi Skits': basically, a set of gleefully shambolic two-minute mini-plays where we act out some of our favourite science fiction and fantasy films, TV shows and books, but with the gender ratios reversed (Nigel gets to wear the lovely pink dress and pretend to be Hermione, Kristine Kochanski, multiple Dr Who companions, etc., the rest of us get to wave swords around and shoot laser blasters at each other. It's glorious).

(Almost, but not quite, as glorious as this picture:)

Image from Chuck Cook Photography's photos of Comicon 2011.

 [Image descripton: Twelve people are lined up on a staircase, dressed in costume as the characters from DC Comics' Justice League -- but all male characters are played by female cosplayers, and vice versa]

The chat on Sunday started because I got furiously angry after taking a silly internet 'Which book character would you be?' quiz that asked me to state my gender as the opening question. When I put 'female', I got Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings. When I went back and changed my answer to 'male', I got Superman. (There was, quelle suprise, no non-binary or 'other' option). Well, put me in a silly-looking helmet and call me a shieldmaiden if that doesn't really sum up the reason that I wrote the Sci-Fi Skits in the first place! The exact same set of answers with one gender box ticked will score you an iconic, globally-recognised hero, the star of any number of versions of his own story, who always wins through and saves the day. Tick the other, you'll get a minor character, a failed love interest who gets to do some cool things (but only while concealing who she really is), and then finally gets her big Crowning Moment of Awesome upstaged by Legolas bullying an oliphaunt (yes, I know that's not how it happens in the books. No, I don't care). I've posted about this kind of thing before, I know -- but sulking about gender-based obnoxiousness in fictional texts isn't something I intend to quit any time soon.

So to relieve my feelings, I stomped off and wrote a new Avengers Sci Fi Skit and happiness was restored (I have a feeling that Cleopatra being the Hulk and SMASHING stuff is going to be the highlight of my Edinburgh experience this year!).

Men, Women, Chainsaws and Why I Still Miss Buffy

Posted by Lilka

[Trigger warning: Use of misogynistic language, in the post and the links. I discuss sexist portrayals and violence against women in the horror genre, including sexual violence, and have embedded a video that depicts some of these things. Some of the film descriptions I link to may also be disturbing or triggering. At least one of the linked videos is NSFW (the others, it may depend on where you work!).]

[Spoiler warning: I potentially spoil some minor plot points in The Vampire Lovers, Shambleau, Jenifer, Deadgirl, Carrie, Teeth, Misery, and Bride of Frankenstein. Major ending spoilers for Perfume and Martyrs. Some spoilers for Supernatural, especially in the embedded video, but nothing from the last couple of seasons. Almost all links contain spoilers.]


So, I'm a fan of horror. Movies, books, comics; anything that promises me a creepy doll, a supernatural menace, an eldritch abomination or just a really good scare, I'm there for. And I feel sympathy for people who raise their eyebrows when I mention this. One friend said to me, “Oh, I'd like to get into horror fiction too. It's just so hard to find the good stuff that isn't all blood and rape,” and I could only agree with them. While I would say horror is no more prone to Sturgeon's Law than any other genre, horror's usual subject matter means that the crap is often, well, crappier; more violent, more gratuitous, more enraging, more difficult to read or watch. Horror fiction is by its nature often reactionary – it's about the intrusion of the abnormal into normal life and (usually) the eventually re-assertion of the status quo. That being the case, it's not surprising to find the annals of horror fiction littered with bad guys who are in some way othered: demons dressed in S&M gear, predatory lesbians (link NSFW), really offensive metaphorised representations of people of colour.... And of course slasher movies are particularly infamous for the tendency of the victims to be black, sexually active or generally behaving in non-societally approved ways.

Besides the general kyriarchical mess, though, there are two things that make it tough for me specifically as a female fan of horror, and it's those that I'd like to talk about more in this post.

Street Fair

Posted by Sally Outen

5.15. Time for that early-morning wolf-whistle – as regular as clockwork, and more of a certainly than breakfast. Every day, walking through the city centre, I'd pass the same bus stop, and get the same reaction from the same guy – at least, I assume it was the same guy – I never looked directly at him. I never even changed my pace. And I never found a convenient alternative route into work, and I never complained to the police. I didn't feel threatened. I felt embarrassed, and sad, and puzzled – because it was just such a weird situation. Every day, the same thing. Every day for months, the whole time I was working an early shift.

I'm not a feminist, but..

Posted by Sebastienne


It seems like "feminist" is a dirty word these days.

"As feminists in the twenty-first century, we spend a lot of time trying to reassure people about how we’re not the scary kind of evil, militant, hairy-legged feminsts you read about in the Daily Mail." (Vagina Dentata, Galatea Gorgon)

And I know it's important to let people self-define - they are best placed to know their own gender, race, or sexuality, after all. So if fewer and fewer people are comfortable calling themselves feminists..

Surely I should conclude that feminism is on its way out, as a term? Just as many Black women, sick of mainstream feminism's focus on Whiteness, embraced the term womanist, today girls and young women who believe in gender equality are rejecting "feminism" as too extreme to describe their concerns. They're turning to terms like "egalitarianist" or "equalist", or not even using terms - on a case-by-case basis they'll engage with an unequal world: "I'm not a feminist, but I find that sexist".

It feels as if it would be against my code of self-definitional ethics to tell these women that they are feminists, however they self-define - I wouldn't say it to a womanist, so how can I say it to these women? - but there's a difference, a core difference which means I think this is a special case: the cultural construction of feminism.

The popular media are taking feminism away from us. Media constructions like "Harriet Har-Woman" suggest that a conspiracy of second-wave radical-feminists are trying to privilege women over men. It's so easy, in a world which privileges maleness in almost every arena, to construe the redressing of the balance as unfair - to describe quotas or special funding, imperfect tools but the best we have yet found to address the problem, as "positive discrimination". As if, because we cannot create a gender-equal world overnight, it is not worth striving for; as if the tools we have to hand which occasionally give the appearance of disadvantaging men are somehow worse than the endemic oppression experienced by women.

The worst lie of all, the one the underlies all the above, is the idea that feminism's work is finished. That women and men are equal under law, therefore anyone still self-defining as a feminist or attempting further legislative change must be a female supremacist. This completely ignores the vital hearts-and-minds work yet to be done, not to mention facts like these:

• We've had equal pay legislation since 1970, but women in the UK earn 83p to men's £1


• 72% of the effect of the government's cuts is going to fall on women


• Do I even need to mention the cultural construction of girlhood?

I don't want to go around forcing this label on the young women who have rejected it. But what I do want to do, so desperately, is show them how they have been duped. How - even if the word feminism has had its day - we do not live in an equal society.

I'm not that keen on the word feminism myself - it has, perhaps, been too much tainted by its intertwining with the aims of white, middle-class, cisgendered women - and it's certainly not up to me to define the terminology of the future. But, given the ease with which a lack of language can lead to oppression - think of the discourse surrounding women's lack of appropriate terminology for their own sexual organs and experiences - I'm nonetheless concerned that "feminism" is being taken away from us. Without a named movement to give us solidarity, we're just individuals fighting a seemingly impossible burden of oppression.

If only "anti-oppression kyriarchy theorist" were catchier.. I've always wanted a term that centred intersectionality before any particular oppression. Maybe I'm just a Lasher?

Getting Dressed

Posted by Annalytica

The transcript for this video is under the description on YouTube.



I wrote the sketch “Getting Dressed” to highlight one of the many ways that our culture invites women to feel bad about ourselves: namely, the social acceptability of commenting on a woman’s choice of clothing, in a way which can be really quite vicious. In this post I want to explore this issue further. Comments about clothing are obviously related to comments about women’s appearance in general, and there are other issues about the pressure on women to change not only our clothes but our very bodies. I don’t want to play down in any way the importance of body image issues, and I hope that they will be discussed elsewhere on this blog by others. For me personally however, clothing is a source of more anxiety than body image, so that’s what I’m going to focus on here.