IN WHICH The Girl Breaks Codes

BBC Night - the night in which I watch British shows with my grad school friends - had hit a lull for a few months. We had run out of episodes of the shows we often watch and hadn't come across a good, new one yet. Instead, we had spent a couple months of our get togethers re-watching mini-series we had already seen and trying out dissatisfying shows. But then we read this description on Netflix: "When former codebreaker Susan Gray spots a hidden pattern in a series of murders, she enlists her wartime friends to try and track down the murderer." Codebreakers! Smart women working together! Crime solving! We immediately knew The Bletchley Circle was the show for us.

While on the surface The Bletchley Circle appears to be a show about a group of women investigating a crime on their own, the show mainly revolves around the after-effects of war. We are first introduced to the four main characters when they work in Bletchely Park, the British government's site for codebreakers during WWII. I think one of the reasons I was so drawn to the show was because I loved The Imitation Game, and you can see the Turing machine working away in the background. A German Enigma also becomes useful at one point in the show. Due to their high intelligence, these women worked out of Bletchley finding patterns in Nazi communications and were instrumental in the war.

However, the timeline quickly jumps forward seven years. The war is long over and lives have returned to "normal." We get to see how differently people react to life after the war, and how both men and women are affected. Susan, the main character played by the wonderful Anna Maxwell Martin (see her in North and South, Bleak House, Death Comes to Pemberley), has since become a housewife and mother. Her husband is a vet whose leg was injured by the war. Within this one marriage, we see two drastically different reactions to the end of the war. Susan's husband relishes the quiet, almost boring, job that he now has with the government. The trauma of the war and his handicap has led him to avoid risks of any sort in his current life. Susan, on the other hand, misses the excitement of the war. She's genius-level smart, but her intelligence was only considered useful during the war. Once the war ended, she had to return to a more traditionally female role. On top of that, Susan can't even tell anyone about her important role in the war due to the Official Secrets Act. Her husband seems to have never noticed that she's smarter than the average crayon, and once this becomes obvious, he is clearly emasculated by the concept.

We see an interesting juxtaposition of ideas about women as Susan starts her investigation of a series of murders based on patterns she notices in the news reports. When she first introduces the idea to her husband, he thinks she is being ridiculous, but the only way she can get someone higher up to listen to her is through her husband. To placate her, he uses his government connections to get a meeting with the police. The police inspector is actually willing to give her the time of day because of his suppositions about her part in the war, being a military man himself. So again we see a respect for women's intelligence when related to war, but rarely outside of it. Of course, when her first clue doesn't pan out, no one will give her the time of day a second time. However, this gives her a great excuse to collect her former codebreaking friends and solve it themselves.

The murder mystery, without giving too much away, also ends up relating back to the war. This time we see the disturbing psychological effects war can have on people. A man who probably had some issues to begin with is then traumatized by a horrifying event in the war. Seven years later, he is still reacting to that trauma. In addition, the show portrays what people within the military might do to protect their wartime secrets.

Overall, I recommend The Bletchley Circle not only because it has an interesting mix of characters and mystery, but also because it takes an good look at how war doesn't end when the fighting stops and the position of women both during and after WWII.

Warning: The first series of The Bletchley Circle is excellent, and the first two episodes of Series 2 are good, but stop there. Things fall apart in the last two episodes of Series 2. It's best to pretend those don't exist.

IN WHICH The Girl Buys a Pronoun

"How may I pronoun you?"

Apparently, I'm fixated on gender recently. I read Rachel Hartman's Shadow Scale, the sequel to Seraphina, last week. While I enjoyed the story overall, the one part I can't out of my head is the treatment of gender pronouns by one of the book's nations. Who wouldn't obsess over an interesting grammatical innovation?

Gender identity has gotten a lot of attention lately as people start to talk more openly about what gender actually means. Many people today accept gender as something defined by society and tradition rather than sex. Our ideas about gender roles have changed, at least slightly, over time, and are likely to continue changing. As we come to see gender as malleable, we can also see why people may identify themselves as a gender different from their biological sex or somewhere on the spectrum between sexes.

This understanding and acknowledgement of varying gender identities is starting to be seen in colleges. It is not out of the ordinary for a student to request a different name and/or pronoun from what is on the roster sheet at the beginning of a semester. Many schools are introducing gender-neutral bathrooms, and campus groups have made more effort to bring awareness to the faculty and students. In the orientation at the beginning of this semester, one such group came and talked to the faculty about gender identity. One suggestion they provided was to ask each student what name and pronoun he or she would like to go by on that first day. This is why I was so struck by a country whose customs require you to ask each person you meet which pronoun he or she prefers:

"You use cosmic neuter for a stranger, Abdo insisted. And he's a stranger until you've asked, 'How may I pronoun you?'"

However, the issue in America is not just a lack of understanding and acceptance of different gender identities, but a lack of pronouns. The English language doesn't accommodate unknown or indeterminate gender. We have he for males and she for females, but no gender neutral pronoun for people. No cosmic neuter like in Porphyrian. We often deal with this in two ways; we use it, which is inappropriate - and insulting - for humans, or we use they, which refers to more than one person. We can use he or she, like I did earlier, but that is just bulky. Our language encourages gender to fit into distinctly masculine or feminine boxes and excludes everything else.

The Porphyrian language in Shadow Scale addresses this issue by having a variety of gender options:

"Sounthlanders can't speak it, said Abdo sleepily. Too hard for your flimsy foreign minds. There are six genders and seven cases. . . naive masculine, naive feminine, emergent masculine, emergent feminine, cosmic neuter, point neuter."

Vocabulary adapts to the modern world constantly. For example, words like hot mess and selfie have been added to the dictionary. Nevertheless, it is very hard to change the more basic structures of the English language, such as pronouns. I feel like if people can accept that literally often means that something is not actually true, they can eventually adapt to a new pronoun or two. It will be interesting to see how English does or does not adapt in respect to gender over the next decade or so.

In Shadow Scale, we also get to see a character who has changed her gender identity and, therefore, her pronoun choice as well. Seraphina, the main character, encounters Camba for the second time without recognizing her because she had appeared masculine earlier:

"I racked my brains for the Porphyrian verb Abdo had taught me, a polite inquiry that didn't even exist in the Southlands. 'How may I pronoun you?' I hazarded. Camba smiled warmly and inclinded her stately head. 'I pronoun myself emergent feminine,' she said in Porphyrian, then added in my native tongue, 'Or I do now, at last. On my Day of Determination, I declared myself naive masculine. I was already ityasaari; it embarrassed me to be even more complicated than that.'"

Interestingly enough, Hartman also implies that this culture allows people to pick their gender on a celebration day, Day of Determination. However, we can see that in any culture it is difficult to be different from the expected.

The pronoun question is just one intriguing and progressive aspect of Hartman's Seraphina series. Plus, it's about dragons. Go read it!

IN WHICH The Girl Needs a Man

You mean women can work, drive, and even open tough bottle caps??? Who knew? Apparently, not the 1950s. Not that this is surprising. It is, however, entertaining to see ads from the 50s and 60s.

So I was looking for a new paper topic for my class, one they might find semi-interesting - a treat for getting through my enforced discussion of free speech in response to terrorism. Granted, my idea of interesting is usually very different from a college student's. I was looking for an article about the abundance of phrases like "man up" or "be a man" in commercials. Oddly enough, I couldn't find a good news article about this topic. You'd think there would be tons. Get on that, The New York Times. In the search, I came across this article, "26 Sexist Ads of the 'Mad Men' Era That Companies Wish We'd Forget." I was tickled by all the ads. So we are going to write about whether gender stereotypes have actually evolved or not in the last fifty years. Yay! At least they might laugh at a few ads.

Now, I just need some ads from today that display current gender stereotypes for comparing and contrasting purposes. Don't worry; I have some ideas. I'm always up for suggestions though.

Coincidentally, while writing this post, I was watching the Parks and Recreation "Pie-Mary" episode, which just happened to revolve around gender stereotypes during elections. Hilarious! 

“Where are the Male Men? You’re ridiculous. And men’s rights is nothing.”

"There is no bigger defender of gender equality than Leslie Knope. And my husband Ben is a progressive champion of women’s rights." ---- "Babe, the oven’s ready. Chop, chop. Time to get baking. Daddy want pie!"