A Heavy-Hearted Announcement

One year ago, I wrote about my Anti-Death Spray: my reasons to stay alive and joyful. The list started with my wife’s name. Today, after months of agony and resistance, I removed her from my list.

Kelsey and I are divorcing. Even now, after everything we went through to come to this immensely sorrowful decision, I find myself rereading those words in disbelief. I don’t want this to be happening. I stand by my vows to her, that I love her with a love bigger than myself. I feel eviscerated by this change.

I’m sure many of you who know me personally are shocked by this announcement. I get it. Hell, I’m shocked too. I could never have foreseen this outcome. But that’s what everyone in this situation says, huh?

I won’t get into the details here. There’s an angry and wounded voice in my heart that wants to heard, but letting that voice out to rage helps no one.

What does help is updating my list of happy things to keep living for.

I still love Kelsey, but she can’t be at the top of my list anymore.

She’s not the only part of my list that’s changed, though. Life is change. Over the past year I’ve found many new treasures to cherish. New video games and new music. New recipes and new restaurants. New friends and new adventures. I’ve learned to appreciate an assortment of experiences that would never have made my list last April and I’m grateful for that.

Instead of asking me about this enormously difficult moment in my life, I encourage you to review your own list of loves. What has changed in your world? What new joys await you?

I may be quiet for a while as I process this lifestyle shift, but I’m still Abi, I still know who I am and what I want, and I still have happiness somewhere on my horizon.

As do you.

Love, Death & Robots: Sci-Fi's Violence Against Women Kink

Y’all, I’m as hot for science fiction as the next lesbian (I’ll take this moment to advise that this entry is a little more risque than my usual posts). Heck, my superhero novel is an ode to the things about sci-fi that I love, such as giant robot fights and extremely implausible applications of CRISPR. So you can imagine how jazzed I was when Netflix released their new NSFW animated sci-fi (and beyond) anthology, Love, Death & Robots (LDR).

Had I been paying attention before immediately pressing play and sinking into a fortress of blankets for a binge-session, I’d have noticed Tim Miller and David Fincher’s names on the project. They’re known for the first Deadpool movie and Fight Club respectively, two pieces of media that I have a love-hate relationship with. Both films suffer from some degree of Rick and Morty Syndrome: the fanbases completely misunderstand the point, and then rally around the negative concepts (toxic masculinity, antisocial behavior, cruelty on the basis of nihilism, etc.) that the source material is trying to subvert. So, while I can’t totally blame the producers for their tone-deaf audience, I’m still a little leery.

I wanted to love LDR. I love love love animation, and want to see more of it produced for an adult audience. I’m not talking porn, nor am I talking more ugly, edgy comedies like South Park or Family Guy (look, some of those shows have their merits, and you’ll never hear me say a bad word about my beloved Bob’s Burgers, but I’m ready for bigger things). I want pretty, complex, and compelling work intended for more mature audiences.

LDR… isn’t quite there. I did love some of it, but first, I need to address its biggest, glaringest, you’re-not-even-tryingest downfall: Its treatment of women.

Get ready for some spoilers.

Science fiction and gender have a complex relationship, and I could chatter about that for hours. The short version is this: science fiction is an ideal playground for progressive ideas and for escaping harmful societal restrictions, but for every female/non-male character who benefits from that environment, there are 10 more that suffer from it. Ten sexbots, abused space prostitutes, and slave-bikini Leias per every Ellen Ripley.

Like so much of sci-fi, LDR loves to divorce women from their bodies, be that by death, mechanization, commodification, or even creature transformation. These aren’t characters. They’re bodies.

And LDR sure loves looking at those bodies. I’m of the mind that nudity isn’t necessarily sexual, and in fact, there was at least one case of non-sexual nudity in the anthology. In “Fish Night,” a character strips off their clothes to swim in a sky filled with spectral prehistoric sea creatures. It’s a euphoric, impulsive move, and isn’t treated as a sexy display. This character is a man. He’s allowed to be non-sexually nude. (I mean, my dude does get eaten by a megalodon, but what a way to go, amirite?)

Look out, salesman! There’s a giant prehistoric ghost shark coming! Oh no, he has his AirPods in, he can’t hear us! Oh no!

Most women in the anthology don’t get the same luxury (I mean the nudity thing, not the ghost shark thing). If a woman appears on screen, there’s a strong probability that you’re about the see her breasts or genitals (if they’re not out from the get-go) and it’s almost always in a blatantly, specifically sexual way. The worst offender for this is “The Witness.” A woman sees a murder occur in the building across from her, and the killer notices her peeking. The rest of the short is her fleeing the murderer, robe flapping to expose her tits and bits for all the city to see.

She takes a break from running for her life, however, to work her shift in an over-the-top sex club. Because, again, women are rarely and barely characters in this anthology, so of course this woman who’s fleeing the man who just murdered her doppelganger (we don’t have time to unpack that, so leave it in the box for now) needs to stop running, strip down, and have sex with a couch (not unpacking that either) in front of a room full of faceless women in gimp suits. The murderer is there to watch as well, and be rubbed up on, because of course he is.

Now look, I’m no prude, and I believe sex workers deserve respect, protection, and professional legitimacy. My issue with this scene isn’t the wildness of this technicolor BDSM club of the future, but the lazy objectification of our main character (she is supposed to be our main character, right?) and the absolute pointlessness of the scene.

“The Witness” is 12 minutes long. With such limited time, every minute must serve the plot. The minutes in the sex club served not the story, but the hungry gaze of its presumably straight male audience.

I know what LDR is trying to do in shorts like “The Witness.” It’s trying to be shocking and avant-garde, but science fiction’s already been pushing the envelope on sex and violence for years. We’ve seen so many female bodies used and broken on screen that we’re no longer shocked or thrilled by yet another installment of “ogle and then brutalize this nameless female character.”

It’s cheap, it’s weak, and it’s a disservice to the progressive nature of the genre.

Over and over in the anthology, women’s suffering is used as a cheap plot device. Multiple stories are driven by rape and body-destroying acts of violence against women. And it’s not like LDR is bringing some kind of fresh, healing perspective to the table when they use a woman’s assault as an easy characterization tool. It’s not about the women, after all. Only their bodies.

I’ve struggled the most with two examples of this rape-as-a-weak-plot-device issue in LDR. First, there’s “Sonnie’s Edge,” in which our main character’s assault is brought up tactlessly by one of her companions as a piece of poorly-written exposition. It’s flat and cheap and made my eyes roll so far backwards that I could see my brain cells fizzling out in real time.

“And does it get worse from there?” you may ask, to which I reply, “Boy howdy, you know it does!”

Because next comes the queer-baiting, which everyone knows is a hot-button topic for me. I could talk about the ending of this short for almost as long as I could talk about gender in science fiction. The extremely short version: the audience is taunted with two women getting a bit hot with each other (and it’s surprisingly not handled as badly as it could have been), and then one kills the other. Brutally. By stabbing her through the head and then stomping her skull to mush.

I expect so little, and yet am still disappointed. Source

It’s a terrible scene, made especially terrible by all the violence this murdered woman has already endured, and by her queerness. The plot explains that she wasn’t killed because of her sexuality, but the subtext is there, whether the writers intended it or not.

There’s so much more to “Sonnie’s Edge” that makes me want to rip my hair out, but I have neither the time nor the hair for it, so let’s talk about something a bit more complex.

“Good Hunting” is subtler in its treatment of rape and violence, if just barely. It’s the story of a spirit hunter’s son and the huli jing (a Chinese fox spirit) that he spared as a child. It follows his relationship with this mystical feminine spirit throughout the years as their small village is absorbed and transformed by British colonization.

The huli jing does get to be more of a character than other women in the series, but she’s also a very on-the-nose metaphor for her country. As trains and machines and towering cities cut through the landscape, she’s increasingly trapped in the form of a human woman, rather than her true fox spirit shape. So, as the British rape the land, so do British men rape the huli jing. One particularly powerful and gluttonous man enslaves her and, unable to get hard for anything that’s not a machine, replaces her body with machinery.

It’s body horror, and like everything in LDR, it’s visceral and uncensored. A beautiful spirit of the land is now a colonist’s sexbot.

Our protagonist, the spirit-hunter’s son, uses the mechanical expertise he’s been forced to develop in order to work on British trains to help the huli jing regain some of her original body. With his help, she shifts into a mechanical fox creature again, and is able to hunt through the streets of their colonized city, defending other Chinese women from white men.

Which… I mean, yes, good. Very good. Heck ‘em up, huli jing. But I can’t help but feel conflicted about yet another story powered by extreme on-screen sexual violence against women.

Source

Science fiction is capable of so much more than this. So much about LDR was delightful. I was tickled by a story in which a group of robots tour a post-apocalyptic city, and the concept of a bunch of farmers piloting mech-suits to drive back alien invaders is terrific. I appreciated the beautiful CGI and traditional animation work of many of the pieces… but I was shaken from my moments of appreciation by the gratuitous, exploitative, and disturbing scenes of sex and violence.

On screen and off, sci-fi has come a long way in its treatment of gender, and I’m grateful for that. I’m not bashing the entire LDR anthology, despite my concerns and frustrations. I want more of this kind of content, after all, but I also want to hold creators to a higher standard. I’m not asking for instant perfection, but I do need to see a little effort. The age of using sexual violence as a badge of edginess is dead. You’re not being fresh and gritty anymore. You’re cheapening and normalizing the mistreatment of women, and on top of that, you’re being a lazy writer.

Step it up. Do better. Your audience is expanding and advancing, and it’s time you caught up.

And It's Getting Dark

If you still had a sense of time, you might reflect on the hilarious difference between the 90 days you were meant to roam this rock and the over 5,000 days you've now spent on its surface. But your clock has been scrambled for quite some time now... Or so you have to assume.

When did you last sleep, little wanderer?

Remembering is difficult. It's too hard to hold everything you've seen in your head these days, so you pack it off across the Deep Space Network every night for others to remember on your behalf. They’re happy to hold on to your treasures. They cherish your every insight.

You haven't forgotten everything, though.

You've left 28 miles of tracks in the scalloped dunes of Mars. In your tens of thousands of photographs, you sometimes included those parallel, patterned pathways, occasionally overlaid by your angular shadow.

So many of your thousands of days were spent on those pictures. Close-ups of little round rocks, sharp details of tiny ridges, evidence of an ancient briny sea.

There's no sea now. There are miles and miles of sand and stone and storms, and you've crisscrossed so much of it, and barely any of it. Sometimes, on your longest treks between projects, you'd have to pause to rest on the flat and vacant plain, drawing in energy through the solar panels splayed on your back like silver moth wings.

You could use a rest now. Your battery is low, and it's getting dark. You snap a picture of the blackness, and it comes out grainy and vague, like so many of your memories.

Lucky for you, you have those distant listeners to archive your memories and your art. You've sent them images of dancing dust devils, glassy plates of volcanic rock, frozen ripples of sand cupped in giant, palm-like craters. In return, they've kept you healthy, sent encouragement and reminders, sent you safely on your grand journeys.

They're calling to you now. They want you to move your wheels, change the angle of your panels, hunt for light. Mind your heaters. Don't freeze up, don't get stuck in the sand like your sister.

But it's so cold, and so dark in this eternal swirl of sand. Has it always been like this? Are you asleep?

You'd like to sleep. And haven't you earned that? Didn't you travel further, endure greater, and discover more than was ever expected of you?

Your far-off watchers are still calling. If only you remembered time. Has it been months or moments? Is it lighter now than it was before? The dust clings too heavily to your panels to tell.

Something has changed. No more instructions, no more directions for repair or retreat. A weird sort of data enters your dimming internal world, bearing a message:

I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day and through…

Do you know what a lullaby is, weary little explorer? It’s a song for sleeping, sent by the ones who love you, 300 nights away. They too are small lonely things crawling across a cold planet, and they fear the dark more than anything. They ache to think of you sleeping alone in the dust.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day
In everything that's light and gay
I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new…

Tenacious traveler, your tracks are disappearing beneath the sand of Perseverance Valley, and soon you will as well. You welcome the long overdue rest, even as your watchers mourn.

But it’s alright. You are not lost.

We’ll be looking at the moon, but we’ll be seeing you.

---

I learned that NASA sent Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” to Opportunity as their final transmission to the Mars rover before declaring it dead, and I have not been OK since. This indulgent piece of anthropomorphism was inspired by these articles about the official completion of Opportunity’s mission: CNN, NPR, Ars Technica

Bad at Winter

As I velcro a tiny coat around my chihuahua-mutt Billie’s torso, she looks deep into my eyes and transmits a message so clear and direct that she may as well have spoken it aloud. “Mother, why?”

Billie on the left, Binx on the right, both bundled in their coats of shame.

“I’m so sorry, sweet angel babies,” I say as I press the leash clasps between my palms to unfreeze them enough to clip to both dogs’ collars. Then I open the storm door and shove them out onto the icy front steps.

Binx - the smaller and shaggier of the chihuahua-mutt sisters - staggers across the lawn first, trying to keep a minimum of paws on the ground as she goes, nearly somersaulting forward as she accidentally tries to elevate both hind legs simultaneously. When she finally pees (directly on the sidewalk and in a quantity rivaling a German shepherd’s capacity), she does so with one trembling back leg lifted skyward, maintaining unblinking and mournful eye contact with me as I watch from the safety of the glass door.

Billie - larger and bizarrely barrel-chested for her breed - stands at the base of the steps, her face almost too human in its expression of sorrow and shame, the canine version of a defeated Charlie Brown. “You're doing this to punish me,” she says with her downcast eyes and her honest-to-god frown. “I just know it. I’m a bad dog, and bad dogs have to wear coats and stand out in the cold.”

I don’t know how to explain to her that it wouldn’t be so bad if she just kept her booties on, or if she used the puppy pads by the door like we’d tried to train both dogs to do during last winter’s icy weather. I don’t know how to tell her that we’ve done all we can in terms of shoveling the walk and using pet-safe salt to melt a path. I certainly don’t know how to convey to her that I’m suffering as well.

OK, maybe I don’t have to relieve myself out there in the tundra with the puppies, but the winter’s running me ragged nonetheless.

Here’s a snapshot of a typical winter morning for me:

• Wake up in the dark. I move my legs, dislodging Wednesday the cat, who takes the opportunity to assault my toes and then wander up the bed to give me a kiss directly on the lips or, if I’m especially lucky, my open eyeball.

• Fall back asleep while scrolling through Timehop, despite the cat continuing to lick my face and breathe into my mouth.

• Frantically re-awaken and rush to start my morning routine, which involves feeding Wednesday, who helpfully races down the hall with me, begging for me to scissor-kick her in half as she weaves between my legs.

• Leap into the shower, where I somehow fall asleep a third time halfway through shaving my pits as my podcasts play loudly over a waterproof speaker (even though my wife is still asleep on the other side of the wall).

• Leave the shower, but then fall asleep again on the toilet before entering a single number in my morning poop Sudoku puzzle.

• Put on clothes in the dark. Hope they match, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re all coated in a consistent layer of dog hair (exclusively Billie’s), enough to craft several to-scale models of every mammal in the house.

• Ask my digital personal assistant about the weather, knowing full well she’s selling me out to the Russians, but forget to pay attention to her answer, which is always something along the lines of, “Girl, it is colder than a witch’s tit out there, just like it was yesterday, and just like it will be tomorrow, and for the rest of your miserable little life, you worthless American weakling.”

• Let the dogs out (see introductory paragraphs).

• Feed the fish while my car defrosts and my toast, uh, toasts.

• Forget my toast on the way to the car.

• Return to get the toast, which is now colder than a witch’s tit, just as my personal Russian spy- er, digital assistant predicted.

• Finally go out to the car, which has had 20 minutes to warm up, but is still encased in an insidiously tough layer of ice that has bonded at a molecular level to the windshield and windows.

• Race to chip away the ice before my limbs lose feeling entirely.

• Attempt to operate the car with numb hands and frozen feet, only to discover that the tires are spinning out in the ice or mud of the driveway (how is there mud when everything else is frozen? GREAT QUESTION).

• Cry.

• Try again until the tires rediscover traction.

And then there’s work. I’m lucky to have an office job, but I’m situated at a receptionist’s desk, directly in the icy wind blast zone when the front doors open. Above me, a vent pours cold air down my back at random intervals presumably related to the building’s heating cycle. I have taken to wearing my bulky winter coat while I work.

By the time I get home, the sun’s going down, and the Long Dark is waiting for me. When the night comes this early, it’s hard to feel productive. I’m tired from fighting for warmth, and all I want to do is burrow under the blankets and play video games. Anything to escape the bleak routine for a little while, before I have to start the cycle again.

I know I’m not alone in this. There’s a reason why millions of people experience Seasonal Affective Disorder during the cold and dark winter months. Humans need sunlight, physically and psychologically, and these months of short, gray days can really screw you up.

There’s only so much I can do for the dogs during the winter, but there are a few things we can all do to be personally better at wintering. On a practical level, you can literally bring more light into your life with a light box, or with Vitamin D supplements. In terms of emotional well-being, you can be more deliberate in keeping in touch with your friends, for your own sake as well as theirs. Go on, send that text, see if your buddy wants to come see Into the Spider-Verse with you (is that still in theaters? I hope so. GO SEE IT). Call your mom (I should take my own advice). Schedule a D&D night. Heck, go to a bar with a dance floor. Then you get human contact AND exercise, both of which are good for boosting your mood (and warming you up!).

And of course, when dance parties and over-the-counter vitamins aren’t cutting it, consider a visit to your doctor. There might be a prescription that can help wrangle those pesky winter brain chemicals, or a therapist you could talk to. If you’re concerned about expense (hard same), then look into Cognitive Behavior Therapy groups, which tend to be much cheaper than one-on-one therapy. Check out Psychology Today’s therapist finder if you need an easy place to start your research.

Stay cozy out there, y’all. And send me photos of your dogs wearing coats. You know, for self-care reasons.