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After System Collapse and Rapport, I can’t help thinking about how completely and utterly insane ART and Murderbot’s first meeting was from ART’s perspective.
UplandGatewayOne, the station where they met, is ART’s home station. In Mihira and New Tideland’s system. Which is deeply anti-corporate. SecUnit even notes at the time that there aren’t any security or bond companies there, so nobody should be looking for escaping SecUnits. Iris and Matteo, for all the anti-corporate missions they’ve been on, have never even seen one, which means Perihelion most likely hasn’t either. They’re not deployed on transit rings except in GrayCris-paying-to-murder-people situations, and when they are, it’s a big deal accompanied by a lot of alarms and screaming and panic.
And one just kind of strolls across the private docks without setting off the weapons scanners. Wholly unnoticed.
So there was already no legitimate explanation for a SecUnit being here. That’s point one. Which means it has to have an illegitimate reason.
And ART’s paranoia is easily on par with Tarik’s, generally speaking. Even though it’s never encountered a SecUnit before it has to be aware that this could be an attack by a corporate. Except the SecUnit’s got no drones, no additional weaponry, no armor, and it’s wearing cargo pants and a hoodie. Which would seem to suggest that it’s supposed to be mistaken for a human – okay, maybe that explains how it got across the transit station a tiny bit? Not really. But at least it accounts for the lack of screaming.
But there’s no point in it trying to pretend it’s a human now, if this is the prelude to some kind of attack. It’s not like ART is a passenger transport, and these are the private non-commercial docks. It can’t get on board without trying to hack the lock, and it can’t get too far from its handler without frying itself, so it has to do whatever it’s doing before ART leaves the transit ring. Whatever attack is coming, it has to be soon. Like, right now, soon.
And it just pings ART directly.
Not even… trying to hide its presence as a potential hostile MI a little.
That is… possibly the most stupid prelude to a code attack it could have made? And if it had been trying to pretend it was human to persuade ART’s crew (who aren’t even here anyway) to give it access to the ship, it just blew its cover. What the hell is its human handler thinking? They’re really bad at this.
And then it asks for a ride–which, again, is hilarious if it thinks it can gain entry that easily–wait. What the fuck? It’s offering several hundred hours of entertainment media as a trade.
There is no human handler.
ART doesn’t even have to check the governor module at that point. No human would imagine that transports watch television. Possibly, no other bots besides transports would know that they do, because transports are famously not-communicative. Nobody could have instructed it to say that. The only way the SecUnit itself could have gotten the idea that this approach might work is if it tried it before and it was successful.
Okay, so what we know for sure is: This SecUnit is a rogue, and it talks to transports.
And apparently it’s hitchhiking?
This raises so many more questions than it answers.
Where the hell did it come from? How did it get across the station without setting off any alerts? Why was it chatting up transports before now? How did it even get several hundred hours of entertainment media downloads? And why the hell would any sentient being, let alone a rogue SecUnit, want to hitchhike to RaviHyral? A crummy little moon which has nothing on it except for mines.
ART’s explanation of, “I was curious about you,” for letting Murderbot on board is the understatement of the millennium.
This is the equivalent of a frigging walrus ringing your doorbell.
I saw a post by @captorations the other day that was joking about the fact that Gideon doesn’t know she’s a Jesus figure and that John is the only person who knows how wild this is: “ah fuck I have a Jesus now.”
But humour aside, how much must this have freaked John out? Imagine creating baroque space catholicism as a sort of grasping trauma response to the circumstances of your having become a godlike eldritch thing involving a nun who was very much trying to fit you into a Catholic metaphysics, enjoying the power and aesthetics of that for 10k years but never believing your own hype, theologically speaking, only to have the universe deliver to your doorstep your miraculous child, conceived without you having had sex with her mother, lying incorrupt with a chest wound, and apparently the focus of some kind of nascent worship…
Okay and I’m gonna totally sound like my mom for a second here but it’s interesting that soooooooo many women in entertainment have careers based on “embracing their sexuality” but the vast majority of men in entertainment base their careers on like … being people…. and like maybe there’s a reason most men don’t seem to find going on stage in underwear “empowering”…? Bc it’s not…?
The thing about referring to a woman embracing her sexuality as “upholding the patriarchy” is that it’s falling into like twelve discourse traps that the feminists of the past already fought their way through.
Time to read just a sprinkling of feminist theory!
Marliyn Frye’s 1983 essay Oppression should not be at all controversial to modern radical feminists; its conclusion is that men are not oppressed as men, even if they experience deprivation for other reasons or are oppressed as other identities. But when I first read it in my feminist philosophy class in the mid 2010s (right before reading Crenshaw’s essay on intersectionality, which complicated Frye’s conclusion) the part that stuck with me was Frye’s evocative metaphor of a birdcage:
Consider a birdcage.
If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way.
It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
Frye used this metaphor in the context of explaining the twin pressures to not be a slut AND not be a prude, illustrating how women are kept caged by a society that justifies punishment for both sexual availability and lack of sexual availability:
It is common in the United States that women, especially younger women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all right. If she is heterosexually active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for being loose, unprincipled or a whore. The “punishment” comes in the form of criticism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as an easy lay by men, scorn from her more restrained female friends. She may have to lie to hide her behavior from her parents. She must juggle the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous contraceptives.
On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is fairly constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and pressure her into it and pressure her to “relax” and “let her hair down”; she is threatened with labels like “frigid,” “uptight,” “man-hater,” “bitch,” and “cocktease.” The same parents who would be disapproving of her sexual activity may be worried by her inactivity because it suggests she is not or will not be popular, or is not sexually normal. She may be charged with lesbianism…
It’s been forty years since this essay was published, but the situation hasn’t improved all that much with regard to the slut/prude double-bind. Women are pressured to be modest AND pressured to be sexy. If you’re good at balancing these pressures, or if your personal style falls naturally (“naturally"🤔)between them, you may not even notice you’ve been caged. You may look at a woman in modest Mennonite dress and assume she has succumbed to the pressure to be modest; you may look at a woman in a push-up bra and a miniskirt and assume she has succumbed to the pressure to be sexy. But consider: did you yourself succumb to the pressure to be neither?
I had to dig back over ten years to find this comic by @rosalarian, but I’m glad I found it, because it encapsulates the problem pretty perfectly:
ALT
There is pressure to be sexually pleasing to men and there is pressure to NOT be sexually pleasing to men. This is not some "men want you to be slutty and feminists want you to be a prude” thing: BOTH of these pressures come, ultimately, from the patriarchy! The unifying theme is that women’s sexuality should be entirely under male control; women should never make choices about their sexual expression based on what they personally find gratifying. They should entirely restrict their sexual behavior to whatever the nearest representative of patriarchal power happens to want in the moment, whether that’s saving themselves for marriage or stripping for the camera.
The reason women are more likely to have careers based on “embracing their sexuality” is they’re more likely to be forced to justify trying to look extremely sexy on purpose. Trying to look extremely sexy (and sexually available) on purpose is not limited to female pop stars by any means, but Sabrina Carpenter aggressively dressing like a pinup is political in a way that Harry Styles in leather pants with his tits out is not.
So it’s time to drag out another classic of feminist theory: Deborah Tannen’s 1993 article There Is No Unmarked Woman.
(It’s a very short article and I’m reproducing nearly half of it in this post, so I encourage you to read it in full.)
As I amused myself finding coherence in these styles, I suddenly wondered why I was scrutinizing only the women. I scanned the eight men at the table. And then I knew why I wasn’t studying them. The men’s styles were unmarked.
The term “marked” is a staple of linguistic theory. […] The unmarked form of a word carries the meaning that goes without saying – what you think of when you’re not thinking anything special.
[…]
Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision carried meaning. Every style available to us was marked. The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don’t have to, and in this group none did. Unlike the women, they had the option of being unmarked. Take the men’s hair styles. There was no marine crew cut or oily longish hair falling into eyes, no asymmetrical, two-tiered construction to swirl over a bald top. One man was unabashedly bald; the others had hair of standard length, parted on one side, in natural shades of brown or gray or graying. Their hair obstructed no views, left little to toss or push back or run fingers through and, consequently, needed and attracted no attention. A few men had beards. In a business setting, beards might be marked. In this academic gathering, they weren’t. There could have been a cowboy shirt with string tie or a three-piece suit or a necklaced hippie in jeans. But there wasn’t. All eight men wore brown or blue slacks and nondescript shirts of light colors. No man wore sandals or boots; their shoes were dark, closed, comfortable and flat. In short, unmarked.
Although no man wore makeup, you couldn’t say the men didn’t wear makeup in the sense that you could say a woman didn’t wear makeup. For men, no makeup is unmarked. I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men’s. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.
The woman in the teal shirt and jeans in Rosalarian’s comic thinks she is unmarked. She judges the other women for ‘marking’ themselves. But she, too, is marked; she cannot escape the patriarchy cage simply by splitting the difference between slut and prude.
Similarly, OP is comparing Sabrina Carpenter’s marked-ness with the way male celebrities are unmarked. OP imagines that Sabrina could base her career on “being a person” if she ditched her slutty pinup style. But do more modest female artists actually get to do that, as a rule? There are a million articles and studies about discrimination against women in the music industry. Plenty of stories exist about the forced sexualization of female artists who actively did not want to be sexualized. But OP isn’t digging into any of those:OP is most distressed by the female artists who are vocal about choosing and controlling their own sexual expression. And that, unfortunately, means OP’s concerns are 100% aligned with the patriarchy on this issue.
There’s a surface-level feministy reason for this, in that if you are distressed about women getting forced to be sexy when they don’t want to be sexy, you’re afraid that a different woman saying “Actually I really enjoy being sexy and I’m doing it on purpose” is going to provide convenient cover for the victimization of the unwilling.
But that kind of concern has always been a cop-out. If women aren’t allowed to say yes to sex and sexiness, then you are not actually advancing the cause of female sexual autonomy. You’re just saying that the patriarchal pressure to NOT be a slut is more acceptable to you than the patriarchal pressure to BE a slut.
You have to reject both pressures. The pressure to dress sexy, the pressure to dress modest—they are both the patriarchy trying to control women. Neither is legitimate.
If a woman is less of a person because she’s too sexual, the patriarchy is winning. If a woman is less of a person because she’s not sexual enough, the patriarchy is winning.
If a woman is less of a person for literally any reason, the patriarchy is winning.
Do not let the patriarchy win!
I need to add because I think this keeps being lost about feminism in the early 2000s of embracing sexuality: men fucking hated it
Because it was not “I am sexy and available to men” it was “I am sexy. I know I am. I know I don’t have lower my standards or be grateful for attention or give my attention to anyone who seeks it. You want me. Too bad. I don’t want you. I am not doing this for YOU. If I go home alone at the end of the night out that is not my failure. That is YOURS. Because you don’t have access to me because I dress a certain way. I like how I look and your attention is worthless to me.”
And men knew that and FUCKING HATED IT.
This is when you got pick up artists teaching negging and the rise of incel culture because “easy girls” weren’t easy. Because women could and would laugh at them and they felt threatened
The male response was: “why do you look sexy to me if you aren’t giving me sex!? That’s lying!”
They were furious
So the people who look back at that time and call it “slut feminism” or “bimbo feminism” derisively are narrow minded in my opinion
Was it perfect? No. But slut marches and the like were a thing for a reason. And it did threaten the patriarchy
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who’s my best friend in the world and recently he was like “you’re too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!” and I was like “a niece might be more up my alley” and he just got more excited and said “ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful”
ALT
