Up Front by Emma Hart

In polite conversation the other day, I discovered my counsellor was in the CTV building on the 22^nd of February last year. Suddenly I felt like I shouldn't really be bothering her. She had, as it turns out, only just started work again. 

Just after Christmas I had a nice chat with a friend I hadn't seen for a while – not since she moved to Sydney and a life featuring a lot more sleep and less medication than she was having here. She'd only come back for Christmas – and Christchurch greeted her with a massive aftershock that closed the airport. 

And it was good that we got that barbeque at a friend's house in before his block's sewage system packed up yet again and they were back on the chemical toilets. 

Yes, it seems odd to be commemorating the anniversary of something that's still happening. We should all be coming together, but this isn't that sort of party. Today, we'll all find our own paths. The only wrong attitude is not to understand that. Some will go to the official commemoration in the Park. For many, that will be too much. Some will avoid the news. For others it's a sign we haven't been forgotten. There will be flowers, in rivers and traffic cones. Many will observe the silence. For others, there has been too much silence. I will make words on virtual paper, because that's what I do. 

And sometimes I wonder why. I can't speak for the People of Christchurch: no-one can. I'm grateful no-one asks me to, and I can do my grieving in private without censure. I can only tell my story, and those of my friends. Those who left, those who stayed. Those who screamed at every after-shock, those who stood firm until they ended up in counselling a year later. Those whose properties were almost untouched, those who have found the battle with EQC and insurance companies more stressful than a vertical acceleration of 2.1gs and hundreds of discernable after-shocks. 

To speak only for myself, to not use the camouflaging "we", makes me feel intensely vulnerable. For me, there have been things more stressful than the earthquakes in the last year, but every one of those things has been aggravated by plate tectonics. Some, I honestly believe, would not have happened without the February Quake, and so it has changed my life forever. And I still have my house – rotted-out kitchen floor aside – and my family. What I don't have is the person I used to be. That's not, of course, necessarily a bad thing. 

In September, I urged people to come down and See. I said it was time-limited. That time is up. We don't have a re-build, we have a knock-down. Christchurch-that-was is gone. Nothing is yet-to-be. I want my city to rise again, and I want it done properly, with a central city and proper infrastructure. You can draw all the pretty plans you like, but with no strong leadership and too much in the hands of private landlords and insurance companies, and government departments signing long-term leases in the suburbs, it isn't going to happen. I don't want one craft-beer bar in Woolston and the next one in Addington. I don't want to live, no offense, in a tiny little Auckland. I want to live in a Wellington where the weather isn't shit. No offense. 

Maybe I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong. I'd also like my thirteen-month-old contents claim settled, and someone to come and look at my rotted-out kitchen floor. No, that's not true, I'd like someone to come and do a refreshingly competent job of replacing it. I'd like the school run not to take an hour and twenty minutes. (See above, re: Auckland.) I'd like to be unable to credit the rumour that the least-damaged houses are being fixed first, in order to make the numbers look good. I'd like to be able to go for a walk without constantly watching my feet on the broken footpaths and dodging around fencing and shipping containers. We all want things we can't have, some of us more viscerally than others. 

Such pessimism feels like bad manners. It's not that bad. We've been lucky. People are worse off. Things will get better. And today would be the perfect time to reflect on how lucky we've been. I can only speak for me, and I'm going to have a cigarette.

You know how sometimes you read something really stupid on the internet*, it annoys you, and then every time you run across a discussion on the same issue you get reminded of it all over again? That happens to other people, right? It's not just that I need therapy? 

Recently, friend Tallulah pointed me at this, which we'll come back to in a moment. What probably isn't reasonable is that it made me spend about half an hour trying to find this again: Hollywood's Five Saddest Attempts at Feminism, just so it could make me all pissy again.

That's five female characters, all of them from spec-fic. This 'strong female characters' trope gets thrown at sci-fi and fantasy more than real-world based stories, and maybe that's fair. If you're creating a world, after all, you're not constrained by a realistically-misogynist society. Your girls really can do anything, and come from anywhere. But this? If I might summarise with perhaps an unfair degree of paraphrasing: 

-          good things: these women kick arse. Physically. Violently. All of them.

-          bad things: they have weaknesses. They fall in love, have babies, need help.

Srsly? Is this our image of a feminist heroine? To be strong she has to be infallible, and standing up to her ankles in intestines? This whole piece seems to be based on the trope that Real Women Don't Wear Dresses. (We get this a lot with amateur spec-fic writers at Bardic Web. You can tell when someone's writing a Strong Female Character because she always wears trousers, she kills people, and she can't cook. Which isn't sexist at all.)

You don't want to go too far down that line, of course, because then you end up with the opposite problem. Your character doesn't count as a strong female character because they're "not really a woman". 

Finally we have the wo-man, which are male characters with breasts... The wo-man is written exactly as a man with all his interests, attributes, entanglements and characteristics except he/she has sex with male characters. Interesting. Starbuck, in BSG, the gods love her, is a good example. Wo-man to the soul. Is she a strong female character? Not really. The subtext here is, to be strong you have to be a man.

Got it? Kara Thrace isn't a woman, because she has "male interests". Like drinking and smoking and flying and bar-fights. Got it? If you wear a dress, you can't be strong. If you have short hair, wear trousers and smoke cigars, you can't be a woman. Increasingly it seems that the only way to guarantee not being accused of "not being able to write female characters" is to actually not write female characters.

Maybe the problem is that we mean different things when we say "strong". I'm definitely in the "strong writing" rather than "strong biceps" camp, though I'm also not going to take having a gun or wearing a tight shirt as necessarily a sign of weakness. And I think "strong" is utterly the wrong word. 

Sloppy or clichéd writing of female characters has never bothered me as much as it does with LGBT characters. But oddly I've never seen people suggest that a gay man isn't "strong" unless he keeps proving his butchness by mowing down aliens with an Uzi from the back of his Harley. I just want them to be believable and real. A character is "strong" if the writer makes me care what happens to them. Which is not strength at all, but depth. 

I want deep characters, of any gender and sexual orientation. And I honestly don't think Molly from Sherlock is one. She strikes me as an NPC who's been given a bit more depth because the plot demanded it. There's nothing wrong with that: look at the way Ianto blossomed through Torchwood from being a borderline-butler to the most interesting character in the ensemble. Molly could become a deep character, but for me she still has too much blank space.

What exhausts me about these arguments over strong, feminist female characters is that they're all based on this idea that some women are realer than others. Some count more. Molly Hooper isn't "the one who counts". We all bloody count. There isn't a list of traits that make a female character "feminist". Just make her a fucking character. Make me care.

 

 

 

*Yes, I said sometimes.

When my brothers were small, my family lived in the North Island. Luckily, by the time I was growing up, we'd moved to Timaru. No, genuinely, I'm not being sarcastic. Stick with me here. 

When she moved back to South Canterbury my mother wasn't just moving back to her family. More importantly, she was moving back to her friends, my "aunts". 

There were three of them: Aunty Winne, Aunty Bev and Aunty Jean. All teachers. They were friends from their college years until they died; a thought which now rather awes me. My closest friends know far too much about me now. Give them another forty years... and I just have to hope I die last. 

Aunty Winnie was the one I knew the least. She died of emphysema when I was still a child. I remember her as slightly prim, with a penchant for jigsaws and wearing her cardigans draped over her shoulders. She was the bridesmaid at my mother's first wedding though, the one Mum's parents and sister refused to come to, so she obviously meant a lot to Mum. 

Not that it would have been hard to be the quiet sensible one in company with Bev and Jean. Jean was my favourite of my aunties, and possibly one of my favourite people. She was warm and flamboyant and a living contradiction of every stereotype about Scottish people. Well, except all the ones to do with alcohol, parties, and extravagant story-telling with higher values than strict accuracy. My favourite story of hers involved all of those things, the Robbie Burns statue in the Octagon, and the police. She used to sit me on her hip and dance around her kitchen with me when I was little – something my mother, much as we loved each other, would never have dreamed of. Jean wouldn't think twice. She lived life hugely, or not at all. 

Jean had a precious bluntness too. After my mother died and we were cleaning out the house, I dug out the box of letters and telegrams she'd kept from when her first husband died, leaving her in a town where she had no ties, with three pre-school children. In it was a letter from Jean, full of genuine effusions of grief and love and swearing.  Also, though, there was Jean's practical bluntness. She'd talked to Winnie and Bev and they were all worried that Mum didn't have enough money to survive. The others considered the issue too delicate to raise. Not Jean. Tell us what you need, she said, and we'll do it. Send the boys down. (Somewhat oddly, Mum and Jean both called their eldest children Nigel. That I can't fathom.) 

Jean's old farmhouse was the only place I could be happily sent for a holiday. I felt safe and loved, and I could play with the dogs and get lost in the garden and fall in the swamp all I wanted. (That's "once", as far as the falling in the swamp thing goes. It's exactly as much fun as it sounds.) I was, with assured childish logic, going to marry Jean's youngest son. And while I didn't realise it at the time, those days Lincoln and I spent setting fire to his secret laboratory were the only time my mother ever got to herself. That's what aunties are for. 

The latter years of Jean's life weren't quite so much fun. Her health and her husband's deteriorated and they had to give up the farm. She didn't long outlive him. That's not how she'd want me to remember her, though, so I don't. I remember my mother driving me home when I was about fourteen and saying, with obvious delicacy, "You don't want to believe everything Jean says. I think if that story were true I would have heard it." And even back then I could say, "I know that, Mum, and it doesn't matter." She worried about Jean's influence on me a whole lot less after that. 

My Aunty Bev is the last of them left now. She spoke at my mother's funeral beautifully, of being there when Mum met her first husband for the first time, of their travels in Australia. Not, of course, the same stories she'd regaled us with a couple of years earlier when we gathered in Hanmer for Mum's 80^th birthday. Then she'd really let rip with tales of truck drivers and fruit pickers, and showed us photographs from their trip around eastern Australia before the Melbourne Olympics. My mother was mortified, in a particularly delighted way. That, too, is what aunties are for. And it still doesn't matter if the stories are true. 

This Christmas, my son sat in slight mortification in rooms where my best friends were telling stories. That's what aunties are for. The lying bitches.

Recently I ran across a discussion between acquaintances of mine on Facebook, about how a single gent should approach women. I'd like to thank the particular gent whose discussion it was for allowing me to use it as the jumping-off point for this column, which seems to be sorely needed. Nonetheless, this should not be taken as criticism or endorsement of him or any of the other participants.

So. This column will be written with het-cis-vanilla-monogamous people in mind. What the fuck is wrong with you straight people? The thing about women? Is that they're from Earth. And the thing about men? Is that they're from Earth. They're not aliens. Alienating you from each other was a strategy to sell shitty books. Why do you need tactics for talking to girls? Why do women need to know what to do with "feminine men"?

Many women complain that the men they meet are brutish bastards.

The fuck? Really? Where are you hanging out that ALL the men you meet are arseholes? Even your male friends? Oh wait, you don't have male friends, do you? What with men being aliens.

I assume this woman and her friends live on the same planet where this is true:

It's simple, if you're nice, you end up alone. If you're a creep, you get the girl, but you won't keep her... The only way a nice guy seems to get anywhere is if the woman makes the first move.

Ah, yes. Nice guys finish last*. Here's a hint. If you genuinely believe that women only like jerks, you're saying two things. One, all women are stupid. Two, every guy you know who's in a relationship is an arsehole. And if you genuinely think that? You're not a nice guy. You're an arsehole. (To the addendum in the above, if only creeps get the girl, no woman is going to make the first move on a nice guy.) 

Here's the thing about women – and I say this as someone who both is a woman, and occasionally hits on them. They're people. And just like non-vagina people, they're all different. Every woman's experience is as valid as any other's. Ergo, one woman's account of her own interaction with men is, I'm sorry to say, completely fucking useless to you if you're not dealing with that woman.

If I try asking a woman out for coffee and acting interested, there's a high chance she'll feel threatened and nervous. Such is my experience, not just a feeling gained from "reading feminist bloggage". 

Let me tell you a story. I was trying to remember how men had let me know they were interested in me, back in the mists of the nineties when stuff like this used to happen. And it's all a bit vague, but this I do remember. It was a nice day, I was in a good mood, walking along Colombo Street smiling to myself. I crossed the road, and met the eyes of a man walking the other way. He smiled back at me. 

Half a block later, he caught up to me and said, "You know, you should be careful who you smile at." And then he asked me for coffee, and I accepted. We went to the Garden City Café, had some coffee, chatted, I told him I was engaged, I finished my coffee, thanked him and left. At no point did I feel in the slightest bit threatened. I still remember it, because it made me feel flattered and happy. 

And I understand that another woman might not have been as comfortable. I understand that I might not be the best benchmark for what's "threatening" to women, being as how I've failed to feel threatened while actually being physically and verbally threatened. But a woman who is scared of every man she meets is also not the best benchmark for what's "threatening" to women. 

And if you were trying to indicate interest in me, what matters is what you know about me. And, the above example aside, by the time you're trying to get me to go out with you, you should have talked to me enough to have some kind of idea of what I'm like. Because what you want is to go out with me, right? Not "a woman", me. You're attracted to the individual person I am. Same goes for every woman. We're all unique fucking snowflakes, alright? You want any chance of her saying yes? Treat her as her, not as "a woman". All women are terrified all the time to the same extent that all men are brutish bastards. 

Neither men nor women are psychic. We won't know you're interested unless you do something to indicate it. And there's an awful lot of space between doing nothing, and sexual harassment. (In fact, one of the creepiest things you can do? Hang close by all night, and never say anything.) 

Now I'll admit that, being as I'm in a relationship, I'm speaking from a position of privilege. But I am also really good at starting relationships. I must be, because I've certainly done it a LOT. The beginnings of my relationships seem, from hazy memory, to involve a lot of alcohol. That's the Kiwi Way, right? My current partner insists I just bowled up to him at a party and snogged him, while dressed as a Playboy Bunny. I don't remember this, but it does sound like something I might do. 

One thing I do know, though. No matter how someone might have approached me, there was no way I was going to start a relationship with someone I didn't physically desire. Surely, no amount of niceness should persuade anyone to date someone they don't fancy. What would be the point? And there is, unfortunately, buggery-fuck all you can do about that. Sorry. 

 

*Not necessarily. But they don't get up from the table until everyone is finished.

September

Come back from a trip to Wellington very aware that I need to find a cheaper way of distracting myself. Think, what I really need is a short-term job doing something completely different - i.e. not writing. That'd be nice.

Two days later, see an Electoral Commission tweet that they're hiring election day staff. That. Ideal. Make the application, which is suspiciously easy. Get a couple of referees prepared to testify to my general fine upstanding pillarness.

October

Employment contract arrives in the mail. Ace. All job applications should involve no CV and no-one bothering to contact my referees.

Start reading my Personal Instruction Manual. Have to keep stopping to snigger like a teenager. I have a Personal Instruction Manual. I wish. Man this is well-written. If you're out there, Technical Writer for the Electoral Commission, Well Fucking Done.

Having slight qualms about restrictions on my public statements. I was completely okay with not advocating for a party or candidate because I've never done that, but an issue? Probably best to just not say anything political publicly. When I tell this to a friend, he says, "Really? Did ACT pay you to do this?" But it's only a month, and this is seriously looking like the most boring election campaign in ages. How bad could it be?

November

Seriously running out of other things to write columns about. There's only so much porn you can link to. Theoretically. I suppose.

Extensively study my PIM on the plane on the way to Wellington. Spend the next five days in various states of inebriation. Still, sort of revise by having several conversations with friends about the stuff none of us knew. Devise several frighteningly feasible ways to carry out small-scale voter fraud.

Have training two days after coming home, so a day after sobering up. Arrive feeling like I know nothing. Leave feeling like no-one else knows anything. Realise just how long it's been since I had to deal with "normal people".

Our polling place manager did the same polling booth last year. Tells us to vote in advance because we won't have time on the day. Can tell how busy a booth is expected to be by the staffing level. There are eleven of us.

Spend more and more of my time bitching about politics to journalists. Those are private conversations.

The Teapot Tapes

Okay, wait a minute, what the fuck just happened? How is anyone managing their photo opportunities this badly? How do you not notice something like that? How... Goddammit, can't say anything. Luckily, my Twitter feed is saying it all for me. God I love social media, it's the only thing getting me through this enforced silence.

Hipsters for Goldsmith

OH COME ON!

 You fuckers are trying to kill me.

Election Day

Get up at seven a.m. Look like a half-developed negative of myself. Haven't had a hypoglycaemic attack for two days. Pack in enough food to feed a teenage boy for nearly an hour.

Spend the next hour and a half building furniture and signage from cardboard kitsets. Finish with ten minutes to spare. A queue has formed outside the door. Quite excited.

Ten minutes later, have cleared the queue and the polling place is empty.

By lunchtime, every time a voter comes in they're confronted by a row of six people at tables absolutely desperate to issue their vote. So. Bored. Meanwhile, there's a constant queue for Special Votes, and at the end of the night we can't get them all in the box.

Partner comes up to vote while I'm on my break. Vent a bit. "And people keep saying, 'Gosh, that was easy!' It's the EasyVote Card. It's right there in the name! It's not called a Total Fucking Pain in the Arse Vote Card."

By about three, have discovered why the tables are made of cardboard. Turns out the signs behind us, that say which electorate we're issuing votes for, are invisible. As are the signs on, and behind, the ballot boxes. This happens, over and over again:

Me: ...and when you're done, the papers go...

Voter: *walks away*

Me: IN THE PORT HILLS... fuck.

Voter: *comes out of the booth, walks past the Port Hills boxes, shoves votes in the Chch East boxes*

Me: *head thunks dully into cardboard table*

About four p.m., in yet another quiet patch, a sweet sort of burning leaves smell starts drifting in the open doors. Later, we find seven ALPC votes. They're even in the right fucking box.

Booth closes. Count. Counting is fun. Find self counting NZF votes three times. Inside of head while sorting votes goes "Nope nope nope nope Fuck nope nope Fuck nope nope..."

Leave polling place fifteen hours after arriving. Partner picks me up. "Do you want to hear the bad news?"

"Do you mean, 'Do I want to hear the bad news first?'"

"Um. No."

"Fuck."