Naked Female Lady Bones

"As long as he loves me he'll answer his crime

The door stays wide open, I know that he's mine"

 

Caro Emerald - I Know That He's Mine

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Girlfriend: "You have this [body scan of herself] in X-ray mode. It's only showing bones."

Boyfriend (panicked): "Naked female lady bones!"

Freefall #3141

(minor interpersonal spoiler alert)

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Running an Illuminatus through the tutorial for a screenshot for my last post (don't you love how committed I am to my art, gentle reader?) reminded me The Secret World doubled that tutorial length with the Legends relaunch. Since 2017 players' first introduction to the game is narrated by two voices, one good, one evil. No bonus points for guessing which sex is which.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

 

I've also been watching Last Tango in Halifax recently. Not my usual cuppa' but the dialogue's refreshingly apt to its setting and the acting's far better than you'd expect on television. Hell, it only took the notion "Cadfael gets hitched" to lure me in. Still, after a few episodes I can't escape the realization that Jacobi plays the only positive male character, a caretaker daddy figure who spends most of his screen time buying his daughter a new car, bringing his fiancee a meal, forgiving his first wife for sabotaging his relationship with one of their friends in their teens, etc. The other men are introduced as

- a teenage boy who falls off his dirt-bike then stops riding it so as not to worry his mother

- a husband who crawls back to his wife after separating because he fell for another woman

- a conniving twit trying to blackmail his female boss over her lesbian relationship

- a brother-in-law falsely accusing a female of her husband's death

with the flip-side:

- a saintly black lesbian betrayed by a male friend

- a career woman who can't ever be blamed for her selfishness because she's overworked

- a lush who broke up a marriage but is nevertheless shown browbeating her male fling over his insecurities

- a strong woman who not-quite-murdered-her-husband but it's-ok-he-was-bad

Special mention must go to the brief fling between that last and an asshole of a man half her age, after which she gets a few raised eyebrows and snide comments and a new boyfriend who realizes she's available, and the young man gets beaten to a bloody pulp by his fiancee's brothers for cheating on her and is thrown out of the house by his own mother for being nothing but trouble. Special special mention to the scene in which he's literally crawling on his bloody, broken hands and knees, groaning in agony, a beggar before his middle-aged fling for the mercy of a couch to sleep on. Special special special mention to his every scene afterwards revolving around everyone continually sneering and condemning his broken, pathetic self, immobile for trauma, for... in retrospect, what crimes exactly?

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Freefall is a very interesting hard Science Fiction comic mostly revolving around the rise of artificial consciousness with a secondary interest in space travel and terraforming. The author also happens to love old-fashioned humor (pratfalls and Benny Hill chases included) so perhaps unsurprisingly when he started writing a romance he fell back once or twice on the stereotype of the male making nominal blunders so the audience can side with the female "putting up" with him. It's cute. Right? When he panics at having seen an image of his girlfriend's body without her explicit notarized consent... even though having it accidentally e-mailed to him and closing it upon seeing the first x-ray in no way consitutes voyeurism. His guilt reassures us that he's a good guy. Good guys self-flagellate and grovel at women's feet. It is *ADORABLE* for a man to be so heavily indoctrinated into self-hatred that he reflexively panics at the thought of satisfying his own instincts, even by accident.

 

You don't get to blame such storytelling and directing decisions on the media when the pretext of male guilt sells so well, in every medium, year by year. To paraphrase and repurpose a quote by Ayn Rand I've used here before, there's no way to rule innocent men, but creating so many rules that they cannot be observed allows you to cash in on guilt. For almost a decade now I've chuckled inwardly at men's exasperated rejoinders to the latest accusation by women of some make-work crime against the fairer sex, at men's desperation to fit themselves once again to the latest set of arbitrarily moved goalposts from uncrossing your legs on the subway to somehow being complicit in how many groupies throw themselves at multibillionnaires. You're missing the point. It will never be enough. You will never be compliant enough. She doesn't want you to perform any particular feat of chivalry to her expectations. She needs you to fail. She needs you to be guilty. She wants to hang a noose around your neck, because that's what instinctively reassures her of your service to her in perpetuity. The point of female disapproval is to instill slavishness, to cast men perpetually in the role of beggars and penitents.

Why should she wait for you to actually do something wrong when she can bank on our instinctive plains-ape favoritism, our presumption that her voice is by default pleasant and good while yours is by default ugly and evil, your every action, every thought, every breath a crime for which she will secure penance and recompense, in which you, by the informed wrongness of your sex, are deserving of abuse and outright physical torture and can expect only to be mocked for your suffering while she claims the moral high ground.

The whole point is to fabricate a reality in which you always have a crime to answer for, and all she needs to do is leave the door open and let you do the legwork of subjecting yourself to her condemnation.