Life Under A Rock

So PJreads wrote that they’d like to sign up for the read-a-thon, but I’d have to read either Ursula Le Guin or Sheri Tepper.  And I was like, “URSULA, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, URSULA, because I have read enough Tepper for the rest of my LIFE!”

And PJreads very rationally asked which books I had read, to which I responded:
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall
Beauty
The Fresco

And as for why those books put me off Tepper forever, well.  You may now read something that I wrote between my junior and senior years of college.  Mind you, I wrote this for FUN.  Also:  spoilers for all Tepper novels involved, as well as the Joss Whedon film Serenity.  Which was sorta new back then, which explains why I still cared about it.

June 25, 2006

So, I read Sheri S. Tepper’s Gibbon’s Decline and Fall Thursday and Friday; as usual, I enjoyed it—but it suffered from Tepper’s typical problems.  The easy and obvious and stereotypical misogyny for one; for another, the plot that exists merely to provide a vehicle for Tepper’s social agenda, not to serve an actual literary purpose.  Also, her complete disregard for the sanctity of human life.

And yet, I still enjoyed it.

Anyway, I was doing the dishes earlier, and started just kind of randomly comparing Gibbon to Serenity.  Both are about futuristic societies where some outside force is trying to control the population; but Serenity treats this as a bad thing, and Gibbon totally doesn’t.

In light of some of the things Tepper said about men and women in Gibbon, I found this interesting.  I don’t have the book with me (I turned it in earlier today), and I was speed-reading through it (it was pretty interesting), but I remember Tepper writing about urges.  Basically, she was talking about how we’ve sanctified urges:  we’ve turned them into “natural” rights—the “right” to fuck, the “right” to kill.  We celebrate that which is most animal in our nature:  our drives.  I can’t remember exactly how she put it, but basically, we don’t applaud our wisdom, or value that which we strive for—thought—because we place all the emphasis upon fucking and killing.

Tepper obviously finds this annoying.  From what I’ve gathered from my (admittedly limited) reading of her work, this is a pretty constant theme with her:  the evolution of humankind from mindless, fucking animals to creatures of pure wisdom.  She finds our animal bodies problematic; her solution is to remove the animal body.  Remove the urges, remove the problem.  The way she brings about this change varies from book to book, but the change itself is relatively constant.  Somehow, some way, an outside force comes in and changes humankind, and everything is better.

Compare this with Serenity—where the driving force behind the plot is the idea that you cannot try to change people, cannot try to make them better.  You have to let them struggle, and find their own way.  At least, that’s what Joss said it was.  Anyway, the “problem” to be solved in Serenity?  Could very well be a solution in a Tepper novel!  “The Pax”—the drug that killed all the residents of Miranda and created the Reavers—would, if it had worked, been just the kind of thing one of Tepper’s benevolent aliens would have concocted.  “Calm the population, weed out aggression”; in Serenity, this is the goal of a malignant, evil regime.  In Tepper, those would be the words of the heroes.

Now, I keep coming back to this idea of male and female, of the “right” to urges.  Joss identifies himself as a feminist, and I do believe that he is one; however, he’s one who hasn’t really given a whole lot of thought to the logical extension of some of the things he promulgates.  I mean, think about Buffy:  she’s a sexy little superhero!  Hurrah!  Well, that’s very nice—but it still assumes that being a sex-object is desireable.  It still assumes that the highest thing a woman can aspire to be is an object of lust.  I don’t believe that Joss’ goal was to reinforce that idea; I won’t insult him that way.  However, I think that he and Tepper have the opposite problem:  he’s an artist first and a social critic second; she’s a social critic first and an artist second.  His art is much better than hers, obviously—whether her social criticism is better than his is a matter of opinion, but it’s definitely deeper and more complex. oHo

Anyway, the thing is…Joss is a man.  He’s a feminist, but he’s a man.  A white man.  A white man who obviously grew up in some kind of privilege, since he’s third generation Hollywood and he went to a British boarding school.  So…there are a lot of things that, if he didn’t do some very deep analysis of his life and his privilege, would end up in his work.  And that’s pretty obvious, on all three of his shows.  Buffy is the worst:  black people are to Buffy what the red shirts were to the original Star Trek. And do not get me started on the First Slayer and the seventh season!  Also, although I think that the character of Gunn was very well executed, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only major black character on Angel was a “kid from the streets.”  I think that they handled it well, and I don’t feel that it was insulting—Gunn really was a complex, interesting character.  However, a bunch of white people came up with a street thug as their only major black character.

It’s not a coincidence.

And as for Firefly…well, on the one hand, Inara is the most “respectable” character on the entire ship.  On the other hand, she is considered “respectable” by the Alliance, the bad guys, and Mal is constantly calling her a whore and voicing some pretty old-fashioned ideas about sex work—i.e. that what she’s doing is wrong because it’s emotionally meaningless, etc.  And so.

But…none of that was what I wanted to talk about…I just got distracted.  To make a long story short, Joss has good intentions and he definitely has talent, but he’s still a white guy and he still thinks and acts and writes like a white guy.  And so Serenity…well, Serenity.

I like Serenity, and I think it’s very important to remember that it was released in 2005, while Gibbon’s Decline and Fall was published in 1996.  Serenity is, to some extent, a product of the Iraq war:  it comes from a time when the government said “We’re going to save them from themselves!” and then…destabilized the entire world.  That’s a simplistic view of the matter, but I think it’s reflected in Serenity: telling other people what to do is bad!  You can’t change them!  You have to let them make their own decisions, even if they’re monumentally bad decisions!

I originally hated this “lesson,” although I couldn’t quite articulate why; I think it had something to do with “I’m not going to let a bunch of people drown if I know how to fucking swim!”  Later, I came to like it more.  Now that I’ve read more Tepper, I’m starting to find it very interesting, from a feminist level.  On one level, Serenity seems more feminist than Gibbon:  Serenity is the one advocating freedom of choice, lack of repression, etc.  And yet…as Tepper points out in Gibbon—whom does it benefit if “the urge” is a “right”?  If you have a “right” to fuck and to kill, whom does that help?  And the answer is usually (almost always, actually) men. If you have the right to fuck anyone you want and have as many babies as you want, whether or not you are actually able to care for them, who benefits from that?  Not women.  Under such conditions, women typically have too many babies, get stuck taking care of them, and men go on their merry, merry ways.

That, too, is a simplistic view of the matter—but it has some merit.  The “right” to destroy yourself does not end up destroying both sexes equally:  women usually get stuck holding the bag.  The baby bag, that is.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence, then, that a man wrote Serenity and a woman wrote Gibbon.  In Serenity, human nature is something that cannot be changed and so must merely be accepted; in Gibbon, human nature must be changed, because inequality is unacceptable.  Serenity, for all its rebel outlook, is in reality quite conservative:  accept this, for you cannot change it—and it would, in fact, be evil to try.  Gibbon, for all its evil overlord overtones, is actually very radical:  we do not accept this, and we will change it—no matter what the cost.

Then, too, there is a very different idea of what makes us “human.”  In Gibbon, Tepper is ready to throw out sex completely.  Sex is something that causes a great deal of pain:  it is an urge that takes up too much of our time and must be discarded.  And I must say that, as an American and a feminist, my first reaction to this suggestion was not favorable.  Orgasms, gone?  No!  Sex, gone?  No!  As a feminist, I automatically consigned Tepper to the worst ring of feminist hell:  a body hater.  She, I thought, was no better than Aristotle, or Aquinas, or any of those other dead white men—she loathed the body, and wanted to make it less “disgusting.”  And I’m still leery of the suggestion because of that, but…I think she has a bit of a point.  As an American, so much of my life is bound up in sexuality.  Am I pretty?  Am I desirable?  Would he fuck me?  Would I fuck him?  Sex is, to some extent, the center of my universe.  And for what?

If we took sex away, think of all the things we could do!

I’m not really advocating that, of course. But…I see Tepper’s point.  It does run our lives, and it does, to some extent at least, ruin them.  The urge, the urge, we pay dearly for the “right” to satisfy that urge!  And really, why?