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WisCon: Saturday
Hmm. Let's see. Early on Saturday, I got up to meet ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
deepforestowl for breakfast. Our table was attacked by The World's Largest Fluffy Pancakes!!!1!11!twelve!!, but other than that, it was a great meal, with a lot of eyebrow-raising flirting. (Hey, deepforestowl, we didn't have eyebrow sex this WisCon).
Then, at 10:00, we went off to a panel called "Porn Crushes the Patriarchy".
Erotica for women is coming into the mainstream -- novels from the pioneering Black Lace line are now available in trade paperback editions, shelved among the romance novels, which have long been described as 'porn for women,' and several major publishers (Harlequin, Avon, Kensington, etc.) have begun lines of women's erotica in the last couple of years. Publishers go where the money is, but what made the market favourable for erotica right now? Who's buying the books? Was the renaissance encouraged by online publishers such as Ellora's Cave? And does reading (and writing) porn really crush the patriarchy?
It was a good panel, with a lot of really interesting background information. I confess that I don't really read much in the way of porn, so there was a lot of stuff that I didn't know. But some of the things that were cited were a bit mind-blowing for me. The idea that the publishing industry has been weirdly "protecting" women from porn (with the excuses that "women don't want to read sexually-explicit lit") wasn't obvious to me. And yet, the most hardcore books seemed to be some of the hottest sellers. And someone cited a statistic that said that something like 80% of men won't buy a book if the author's name is female. Wow. Just wow.
I think I most appreciated Mary Anne Mohanraj's contributions to the panel. She really tried to make the panel ask thorny questions. Do editors have an obligation to reject the really blatant stereotypes, even if the stereotype porn is really hot? She talked about some interesting cases. The Gor books, of course. As Mary Anne said, many WisCons have discussed the problematic nature of the Gor books. But she mentioned another writer (whose name I forget) -- a woman who seemed to delve into similar content and, as Mary Anne suggested, was actually really hot writing. What's the difference, she asks? Why is the one okay and the other not? (She also made the point, repeatedly, that she felt that she was speaking from a side of the discussion that she's not usually speaking from).
I certainly grok the point. I've recently read a batch of trans porn (long story) and I found myself really bothered by the fact that some of the stories I thought were hottest also had some of the most problematic race issues.
There was also a lot of discussion about why there are strong reactions to female characters in male/male slash. Someone made the comment that male/male slash in one of the few places where women can read sexual content without female characters being the object of sexual desire. I think there was also a brief discussion about -- hmm, I'm blanking on how it was described -- but I interpreted the line of discussion as being the lit equivalent of Laura Mulvey and the filmic gaze. People were talking about how women were very familiar with seeing stories through a different set of eyes.
Anyway, it was a good panel. Afterward I met up with kalmn for lunch, and we had burgery food in a restaurant that, if it had had red shag carpeting, would be a clone of my parent's basement in the 1970s.
After lunch, I was pretty torn about panels. I had a hard time deciding between "Disability in SF and Fantasy" and "Fat is Not the Enemy". I chose the latter, and met up with cool people like epi_lj, okoshun and porcinea.
You can rarely find any media outlet lately that doesn't have some mention of the 'obesity epidemic' somewhere, and fat people are often the targets of societally condoned discrimination. Although this attitude is most prominent in Western societies, unfortunately it is beginning to span the globe. The fat acceptance community is becoming ever more vocal, and the mainstream media is beginning to notice. If you're fat, or an ally of someone fat, how do you work for empowerment and real change? As Liz Henry notes in a recent guest post on Body Impolitic: 'Radicalizing yourself to body acceptance and the complete refusal of fat-shaming could save your life.'
The panel had good bits and bad bits. sparkymonster started off with a good set of fat acceptance 101 points. I think she's also the one who made the comment, in response to the question, "what do I say to parents whose child is in the 95 percentile?", that someone has to be in the 95 percentile, or the percentage system isn't working the way it's supposed to.
Then there was the panelist who went into a bit of a long-winded explanation about how she woke up one day and realized that she was fat and that she didn't like it, so she dieted and exercised and now she's a lot thinner, but it was because she wanted it, not because she had internalized fat-phobia. And I was a bit surprised that that point wasn't being questioned or challenged. I wonder, in retrospect, if people were just a bit speechless.
Now, I don't think of myself as a good champion for size acceptance. I'm not fluent enough in the arguments or facts. But I do try to stand on the side of size acceptance, and I couldn't stand the direction that the panel suddenly headed. So I raised my hand to ask a question: essentially, I wanted to ask if the people who really are fat-phobic and diet-obsessed would also describe themselves as dieting/exercising "for them". And, if so, how does one really trust that one hasn't deeply internalized certain social messages?
I don't know that the point really landed, though. Soon, we were discussing something else. After the panel, Diet Lady came by to tell me that she feared that we didn't really answer my question, but that since it was clearly something that I was struggling with, I was just going to need to trust my instinct. She also took a moment to reassure me that I "looked fine" at my current weight. I forced a smile to my face and said, uber-politely, "Thank you for your input." I don't know why.
After the panel, I had a brief chat with porcinea who brought up a really good point about how it's one thing to reject fat shame, but another thing to embrace fat joy.
I skipped panels for the next timeslot, and hung out a bit with lcohen. She was trying to prep for her panel at 4:00 about when "being out and proud" becomes "non-consensually including someone in your sex life". I was happy to say nonsensical things about the similarities and differences between seeing "a man in a dress" in public versus seeing someone in BDSM gear (the example of leading a partner around by a leash was the typical example). I kind of felt like the example in the book -- kissing a same-sex partner -- wasn't as good an example, because the kiss can be transient, and one can just turn one's head. As we were chatting, Ian and imnotandrei joined us.
Then I went off to "Fighting the Good Fight with Limited Resources", which I enjoyed. I mentioned this panel in a post a few days ago (and about how the panel topic leaked into The Dinner That Made Me Want To Stab Things!).
It's incredibly easy to feel overwhelmed when there are so many problems in the world that have to be addressed, and as we get older, we often lose the confidence that there will be enough time to effect change. Add physical and financial limitations, and the process gets even more daunting. How can we target our efforts without draining ourselves? Let's discuss strategies.
Suprisingly, while the panel seemed to be organized and structured -- the panelists had prepped over a lunch together -- I found it a bit dry. I think there was a touch too much of the "...and I just burned myself out" story. I loved nadyalec's contributions. One thought, in particular, seemed charming: the idea of writing thank-you notes to people who do event organizing or information consolidation. "Thank you for your effort compiling the GLBT bowling and curling events lists. Your list helped me find the perfect event for a date with a new partner." As nadyalec recounted in the panel, some times his notes were some of the only positive feedback that those organizers ever received.
When audience question time arrived, I asked about Gender Oracles (credit to Raphael Carter for the term): do they fit in to the structure of things that help conserve political energy and is the idea more broadly applicable? Answer: Yes! I like easy questions.
After that panel, I met up with epi_lj and okoshun for dinner. We were off in search of Not Quite Perogies, but the Not Quite Perogie place had closed. So we had burritos (and I had that really nifty Wisconsin Root Beer), and chatted about things we'd seen.
After dinner, I had reached my "other people" saturation point. I could tell that I wasn't great conversation at dinner, and so I decided to return to my room to recharge my batteries. I had a quick nap, except that when I awoke from the nap it was midnight. I popped up to the party floor, and wandered around. I talked for a while with boxofdelights, lcohen and jiawen. We found ourselves in the elevator area, in those strange plastic-wrapped hallways. But the conversation was really good, and we could see people going to and fro. After a while, lcohen and boxofdelights called it a night, and jiawen and I continued to chat. It was good to get to know her a bit better; I think I managed to sound intelligible, even though I'm just all-around a terrible conversationalist. I'm usually the one you find at parties talking to the ficus.
Jiawen made some comment about the con suite being closed and when I expressed my skepticism, she pointed out that it was just a bit before 4:00am. Me, I had a 10:00am panel, so I thought it might be a good idea to crash. And crash I did.
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