io9 pal Katayama writes the popular Tokyomango blog and has recently published a series of pieces on Japanese men who marry cartoon characters (she's covered this phenomenon for the New York Times Magazine, as well as in the BoingBoingTV segment above) . Dismayed over the oddly serious, and occasionally insulting, responses from Western audiences, she recently analyzed the idea of "Japanese weirdness" over on BoingBoing. Katayama writes:

Why do so many love to gawk at this mysterious, foreign "other" that is Japanese culture? There are plenty of strange things going on in the US too, but when it happens in Japan, it's suddenly incomprehensible, despicable, awesome, and crazy. This fascination doesn't just end with angry commenters, either. Over the last couple of decades, it has spawned a huge industry of magazines, blogs, and products themed around Japanese culture marketed to Westerners by Westerners who are also obsessed with Japanese culture . . . [But the fact is] that none of this is meant to be taken seriously. One important premise of Japanese popular culture is the commitment to have fun and not take offense. Japanese humor works on many different levels and its nuances can be hard to explain to people who didn't grow up with it.

If you're one of those people who watched our wedding video between the man and his DS girlfriend and said things like: "He's such a loser" "He takes it too seriously LOL" and "God help this poor soul" - not to mention the racist comments about Japs and nukes and one-inch dicks - you just don't get it. You're not in on the joke. You're the one taking it too seriously, and you might be imposing your own biases and hang-ups on someone else's situation.

Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you're all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.

I think her comments here apply to far more than videos of Japanese men marrying anime characters. She's talking about a strong tendency in Western culture to misinterpret Japanese goofiness as something seriously weird. In science fiction, this misinterpreted humor is used as a way of showing an "incomprehensible" or bizarre future world.

Obviously some of William Gibson's early works exhibit this fascination with Japan, as does the movie Bladerunner. These days, Western SF has also turned its eye toward the "weirdness" of China (think Firefly, or Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age) and India (Ian McDonald's River of Gods). And in recent indie flick Moon, our abused clones were manufactured by a Korean company. Is the West doomed to misunderstand the Eastern present as some weird version of the future?

via BoingBoing

Slate's Juliet Lapidos says Battlestar never lived up to the feminist agenda that its detractors accused it of having. If you'll recall, the new series' transformation of the macho pilot Starbuck from cigar-chomping dude to cigar-chomping chick caused a huge ruckus. And certainly many of the women on the show have mastered traditional male roles within the military and politics. But, argues Lapidos:

There's plenty to make a feminist squirm. Perhaps because science fiction has historically appealed to men who don't leave home much, the genre has often used alien mores and alien technology to rationalize pornographic depictions of near-naked women. (Think Jabba the Hutt forcing Princess Leia to wear that ridiculous gold bikini in Return of the Jedi.) Battlestar is no exception. When Cylons die, their memories download into an identical-looking body on a resurrection ship. This process, almost without exception, happens off-screen for the male Cylons, but when a fembot dies she flies through a vaguely fallopian-looking tube then wakes up nude in a vat of goo. Overtly, these are birth scenes. But they are hypersexualized-with lingering thigh-shots and orgasmic-sounding gasping . . . [Also] rape is a trope on the show: Starbuck finds herself in a bizarre insemination farm on the Cylon-occupied planet Caprica, and Adm. Cain orders some cronies to rape and torture a Cylon in "Razor." Naturally the show doesn't condone rape, but it's discomfiting that the writers drop sexual violence into the script so often without comment. If nothing else, this pervasive threat-directed only at women-negates the idea that Battlestar conjures a gender-blind universe.

Some of Lapidos' points are good - she points out that most of the strong female characters are sick or dying, and notes that Cally is a weird throwback to hysterical women of the Victorian era. She also explains that while men like Adama and Tigh have enduring friendships in the show, we see few women with such relationships to each other. Still, I think she's missing the point when she says that the show isn't feminist because the women are sexualized and because the story is not "gender-blind." And that's because the gender politics of this show cannot be understand without looking at how men in it are treated.

Men Are Sex Objects

While I think it's debatable whether the tubs of goo are the place where women in the show are sexualized, there can be no doubt that the male characters are treated like sex objects at every turn. Maybe the scenes with the naked hybrid in goo, or Cavil waking up in goo, are not very sexy. But certainly a shirtless Lee or Helo is. And they are shirtless a lot. For no reason other than to titillate us.

Not only that, but Lee is treated like a worthless slut by Starbuck, who constantly uses him for sex and then discards him for a hunkier, more marriageable guy (Anders). And Lee isn't the only man who is treated like a piece of sex meat for women to toy with.

Baltar, who is practically the embodiment of weakness and emotional hysteria, is repeatedly used as a sex toy by cylon women like Number Six, Tory, and Number Three (D'Anna). When Baltar is held prisoner on the cylon ship, he's virtually a sex slave. The cylon women keep him locked in his quarters, where he's never allowed to get dressed (he wears an awful robe the whole time) and his main duty (other than being horrifically tortured) is to sexually service Number Six and Three - often at the same time. And given that he looks terrified and cries practically the whole time, I don't think he's living out a sex fantasy. I think he's being sexually tortured and enslaved.

Other men who are used for their bodies include Anders, who is one of Starbuck's playthings; Tigh, who is Ellen's sex toy; and Gaeta, who is horribly used by Boomer on New Caprica.

Men Are Abuse Victims

Starbuck bashes Leoben's face with her fist, repeatedly. She waterboards him. She screams at him and throws him out an airlock. She does not rape him the way the human men rape the female cylons, because Battlestar Galactica is not a gender-blind universe: It is a universe where the genders are equal as workers, but still bear their slightly different historical burdens. And so women torture men, but not in exactly the same way men torture women. The cylons torture Tigh nearly to death on New Caprica. They even put out his eye, destroying a classic symbol of male virility and dominance.

And although men are not raped in the same way women are, I would argue that Baltar's torture by Head Six, as well as his torture on the cylon Base Ship, are very close to rape. What do you call it when Three physically brutalizes Baltar until he screams in agony, and then makes him have sex with her later? It is not erotic. It is violent and horrifying.

Women also rape each other. In last week's episode, Boomer escaped from prison, then beat the shit out of her sister Eight, Athena. She then tied Athena up and put her in a storage locker where she could watch Boomer have sex with Athena's husband Helo (who can't tell the identical cylons apart, and believes he's sleeping with his wife). It's a shocking and disturbing scene precisely because it's a form of sexual torture.

Also, one of the most harrowing rape scenes in the entire series is ordered by a woman - Admiral Cain - to be visited on her one-time lover Six. After she discovers the woman she's been dating is a cylon, Cain has her thrown in the brig and orders the prison guards to torture and rape her. The horrifying result, when we see the traumatized, raped Six lying on the floor of her cell and refusing to eat, is the first moment in the series when we truly understand why the cylons are often right to hate the humans.

The multitude of these scenes does raise the question of why BSG shows so many women being raped during torture, but not men. I think it's because as long as we don't have artificial wombs, a feminist world will never be completely gender-blind. One of the central fixations of this show is reproduction. The human president at one point outlaws abortion because she wants to increase the size of the ailing Fleet. And the cylons are constantly trying to figure out how to reproduce "naturally" without using the resurrection goo. This desire to use women as vessels for reproduction shows up in the way men and women are treated when they are prisoners of war.

Although men and women are equal on Galactica, there is one crucial difference between them. When you dehumanize a female prisoner, you turn her into a battered womb. When you dehumanize a male, you simply beat him any way you can.

Male Friendship Is Predicated On Violence and Drunkenness

There are no long-term close relationships between women on BSG, and there is only one long-term relationship between two men. Admiral Adama and Commander Tigh are the two highest-ranking officers on Galactica, the ship that leads the entire Fleet, and they are buddies from way back when the humans fought the cylons the first time around.

Their friendship is touching at times, but they seem incapable of expressing affection towards each other unless they are destructively drunk. And most of the time, their comraderie is shot through with rage and mistrust. They spend more time beating each other up than any other two characters, including humans and cylons at war with each other. And of course, it also turns out that Tigh is a cylon, so our only enduring friendship is not between two human men, but between a man and a machine. Because Tigh turns out to be a cylon, this one example of male friendship is also founded on a betrayal.

It is truly hard to say which gender has it worse in this situation. Is it more awful to be a woman in a world where women never have close relationships, or to be a man in a world where the only way you can express brotherly love is through violence?

Male Leaders Are Often Weak and Make Decisions Based on Intuition
I have always disliked Roslin's character, partly because she's a female leader who gets religion and bases her leadership on feelings. But viewed in the context of male leaders like Adama, Zarek, and Baltar, Roslin's weak-minded reliance on emotion puts her smack-dab in the middle of the old boys' club.

Adama is a great military leader, but he frequently lets his feelings for his son Lee and (almost) daughter-in-law Starbuck get in the way of good decision-making. Last season, when the Fleet was being menaced by cylons, he held up their mission for a whole month while Starbuck traipsed around in a ship with Helo and a sizable crew questing to find Earth, based on a vision she had. During that mission, Gaeta loses his leg, indirectly leading to his later mutiny with Zarek. He also appoints Lee head of the Pegasus after Admiral Cain is shot, which turns out to be a terrible idea because Lee isn't ready for a leadership role.

Meanwhile, Zarek and Baltar embody the weak-willed but power-hungry types who lurk behind true power trying to influence by manipulation. In Baltar's case, that often means sexual manipulation, especially when he creates his army of devoted fangirls. Zarek first manipulates the Fleet by claiming victim status when he's in prison, and gains political power for this reason. Then, during the mutiny, he secretly slaughters the entire Quorum rather than trying to lead them.

These are not male leaders whose strength and honor cast long shadows over a series of weak and ineffectual female characters. Instead, they are weak and compromised, ruled by the same hysterical emotions that women were once accused of possessing in such quantity that it disqualified them from leadership roles.

Men and Women Are Equals on Battlestar Galactica
If we define feminism as the critique of a world where men unfairly wield power over women, then BSG is post-feminist. In other words, that critique is no longer necessary in the world of BSG: The show more or less successfully depicts a universe where women and men are equal in the realms of work and family. However, BSG was not made in a post-feminist world, so there are all kinds of hiccups where you get retrograde characters like Cally, or naked cylon chick fetishism, that are relics of our own society, which still so desperately needs a feminist slap upside the head on a regular basis.

But I strongly believe that BSG should be considered a contender for the status of feminist story in the genre of science fiction - and indeed, in any genre of television. And this isn't just because it depicts women in positions of power, honor, and competence, but also because it depicts men as possessing the same weaknesses and flaws that women do.

The project of feminism isn't just about changing women's roles in society, but to change male roles too. You cannot have one without the other. That's why feminism, to my mind, shouldn't preach for a gender-blind society, but rather one where men and women share the burdens of life equally. As long as we are reproducing the old-fashioned biological way, it will be impossible for us to be gender-blind. But at least, in BSG, we get glimpses of what it might look like to live in a world both women and men can be commanders, fighter pilots, presidents - and both men and women can be sex objects, suffer from emotional overload, fear the physical wrath of the opposite sex, and gain power via subterfuge and manipulation.

Feminism, as BSG makes clear, won't turn us all into saints. It will just make us all capable of achieving the same levels of social power, as well as the same nadirs of social humiliation and defeat.

While some of the essay is a bit of a stretch, author Tim Mitchell does raise a number of interesting points for genre hounds. He explains why it's significant that the Mimic movies are located in an urban environment (vs. the deserts of Tarantula and Them!), and he has a lot of terrific observations about how the Mimic movies express fears about transgenic animals and crops. And, of course, how they express fears about other things too:

In “Mimic 2,” Remi cannot find a boyfriend who understands her but nevertheless cannot shake the sexual designs of a male Judas Breed insect — a suitor that Remi understands better than her human suitors because of her background in entomology.

Check it out.

Pictures of Insect Men [via PopPolitics]

As a whole these stories are far more inventive than most science fiction you see on TV or at the movies nowadays. I'm not here to bash all SF film and TV... but it seems there's an inventiveness, a vitality, in written SF that you don't see as much in TV and movies.

Unfortunately, that wild creation is long gone from written science fiction as well, says classic SF author Norman Spinrad:

Norman Spinrad in the SFWA Forum sees SF writers as becoming more conservative as their audience decreases. They are writing tired space operas and tedious technophilic "hard SF," retro science fiction for the graying, fannish core readership, rather than trying to reach out to the rest of the world.

In other words, the same thing ails science fiction in both books and movies/TV: an obsessive audience of aging fans, who prefer lovingly described toys and rehashed science fantasy plots to anything new. The solution isn't a different medium, but a bigger and/or smarter audience. Image by Annahiltunen.

Written Science Fiction [Balancing Frogs]
Reflections on science fiction, writing and the publishing business [Twin Cities Daily Planet]

Rather than buying her sister's affection with $175 jeans and red wine, Jamie would try to set boundaries for Becca—and impress upon her the repercussions for bad behavior. Becca might still act out, but we'd believe she liked 70s punk and Broadway musicals. In fact, everybody would have a believably complex personality, not just the appurtenances of one; a show can buy all the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and New York Dolls songs and vintage GTOS it wants, but these aren't a substitute for good writing. The word "Good!" shouldn't be the first to spring to a viewer's mind when a character collapses after being poisoned.

Because Jamie wouldn't be working for the Berkut Group, she wouldn't have a boss like Antonio, who plays the Wise Black Man one week, and the Scary Black Man Threatening A White Woman the next. Ruth's authoritative manner and short haircut wouldn't immediately rate the questioning of her sexuality ("Is she a lesbian?").

Would it be a better show? I don't know—but I think I'd rather watch it than this one.

More importantly, The Bionic Woman is about Jamie's hot-rodded female body—there's no room for a male cyborg. Jamie is spied upon by uber-daddy Jonas Bledsoe, who steps in when she's about to have hot bathroom sex with Mr. Right Now. When Jamie complains, Bledsoe informs her that "those legs, that arm, that ear and that eye belong to me." She is a very expensive possession, a trophy wife in the way no male bot could ever be. Jamie's body is no longer her own—she belongs to the Berkut Group. Similarly, in a moment of post-coital truth telling, original bionic woman Sarah Corviss tells Jay, "I think someone hacked me," when he asks why she killed 14 agents. No matter how much power Sarah and Jamie pack, they are ultimately at the mercy of higher, most likely male, forces. Besides, watching two fembots fight = hot, which is probably why last week's footage of Sarah and Jamie is recycled. We also get to see Jamie fight a Bad Guy. She knocks him out—but ultimately must be rescued by her supervisor, Antonio.

The episode's big moment comes when Jamie, after saving a woman from committing suicide, realizes she needs a Larger Purpose in life. She tells Bledsoe she'll help save civilization as we know it, but she has to be home by 7:00 every night, can't work weekends, and needs Becca added to the company health plan. If you need any further evidence that this show is indeed a fantasy, Jamie's new boss agrees to her demands without blinking an eye.

Being possessed/getting saved by men and trying to be a good mom to her annoying little sister prove that despite the ability to run 60 mph or more, shatter brick with her arm, and bend steel with her grip, Jamie is really just a girl at heart. After all, she only breaks Mr. Right Now's rib by mistake. And her feminine nature means she loves gossip—something manly men find annoying. "I'm not a big fan of eavesdroppers," says Bledsoe when he catches Jamie in the act, no doubt forgetting that he's the dope that gave her a bionic ear in the first place.

After doing her bit to save the world (or at least select American cities) from a rogue organization trying to unleash a deadly toxic attack, supermom Jamie makes it to Becca's talent show on time, where little sis is performing a number from "Annie Get Your Gun." Which number remains unknown, as NBC in its marketing wisdom plays another song over the scene. Nevertheless, all is comfy and cozy heading into next week.

While everyone worries about the world's first cloned child, the nation's first cloned organ donor, or even the first cloned student at their local high school, it seems far more interesting to speculate on the first cloned autobiographer.

After all, if your clone wrote a memoir, what would it say? Would the experiences it recounts resemble yours?

And whose intellectual property would the resulting book be?

Stranger still, whether or not your clone managed to get everything right, if he or she (or it) came to you requesting an informative interview, complete with briefcase, tape recorder, and open notepad, what would you say? What would it feel like to be interviewed by your own clone?

Or, for that matter, to be interrogated: What if we interrogated captives at Guantanamo with their own clones - how long would it be till the first breakdowns began...?

Pursuing this line of thought one night, I found myself thinking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the monstrous offspring of a god-struck electrical scientist comes back to wreak havoc upon the family of its creator. It struck me that something altogether more interesting and exciting was bound to occur someday, when, say, a special FBI task force could be cloned from the hair samples of a criminal perpetrator, and those clones could then be sent to track down the originary bad one amongst themselves, eliminating that flawed and imperfect model, rubbing out the deviant seed from which they sprang.

Which leads me to believe that human cloning might finally give us the mythology we so strongly deserve: Cloning will make human life interesting once again.

In any case, the world's first cloned novelist will literally revolutionize global literature. It would even seem, if publishers now find themselves falling further and further behind in the game of capturing consumer attention, that the only genuine way out is to do something historically extraordinary, something everyone will remember - and that is to publish the memoirs of a clone.

The idea is already out there; someone now just has to do it.

We only need to look as far as the recent work of British author Kazuo Ishiguro, who introduced - sort of - the idea of a narrating clone - sort of - in his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. In that book, specially bred organ donors are raised in an isolated English schoolhouse, barely understanding the bizarre, if medically efficient, truth behind their everyday existence.

But where is the pathos of the clone? The emotion? Where is the first person poetry, the song lyrics?

Where is clone existentialism?

When will the clones get their Faust?

There's always Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, his catastrophically bad step into a kind of sexualized sub-genre of clone sci-fi, in which various versions of the book's narrator reflect across decades of personal experience... coming up with disappointingly little to think about.

But the question remains: Is there a literary genre appropriate to the experience of the clone? Is it, by default, science fiction? Not autobiography? What about a clone martyrology - or even a new line of travel guides, listing clone-friendly hotels near central London?

Fundamentally, though, I can't help but wonder what might happen if the world's first novel written by a clone hits the top of the New York Times bestseller list - which it would be bound to do. Everyone would read it. It could be called The Diary of Who I Almost Was. Or The Book of No One.

And if a book of clone poetry gets onto the syllabus of an undergraduate English course at an Ivy League university - what will Fox News have to say about that?

Who speaks for clones, outside the borders of science fiction - and what happens when the clones start speaking for themselves?