Aesthetics

 

I used to be self-conscious about the fact that I have a very visual imagination and that I need an aesthetic that appeals to me, to be able to really get immersed into a piece of media. If I don't like the drawing style of a comic, I can't read it, no matter how amazing the story is supposed to be. If the setting of a book makes me feel and see nothing but grey, I find myself skimming through it. Only movies that allow me to notice tiny aesthetically appealing details, such as the way a strand of someone's hair curls or the way a flicker of light is reflecting on the surface of the river, are completely immersive for me.

For the longest time, I felt like this wasn't something I was allowed to focus on or need. Even though some media is largely visual, the pressure to not care about what things look like is huge sometimes, as if liking a certain aesthetic means you're vain or that you would automatically judge people by looks in real life. This type of thing is really easy to say if you're not very visual, or you happen to like a more grotesque aesthetic, because no one will think you're vain for liking something "ugly". Actually people seem more likely to think that the deepest stories lie behind an aesthetic that would be considered traditionally unappealing.

And it's easy to say if you're neurotypical.

After discovering that I'm autistic, many issues in my life have made more sense, and so does this one. My brain type explains why my aesthetic includes so many things that a lot of neurotypical people would consider "kitsch" and thus boring or vain. For me they communicate different things, because my brain responds to them enthusiastically.

Glitter and softly flickering lights stimulate my brain in exactly the right way. Looking at them is essentially stimming for me. So are characters with big emotive eyes where you can count the eyelashes and the pen strokes, and clothes with a lot of tiny details in them such as pearls or lace with a consistent pattern, and the contrast between dark woods and a starlit sky and how each branch of the trees contributes to the whole picture. These types of things make me feel absolutely delighted.

Basically, it's very hard to get into a story, or anything, when you're understimulated. And for me the visual aspect is very important, and it's not because I want real people to look like fairies or something. (Obviously no complaints if they do.) The things that my brain needs from visual media say absolutely nothing about how I treat real people. The fact that I have a hard time reading a book with an unappealing font or a cover that ruins the visual experience of the world or the characters for me, doesn't make me a bad reader.

This is not about "not vibing" with something. This is about some media actually being inaccessible to me, and other people with different neurotypes, in a way that is just as real as someone being forced to read in a foreign language. Yeah, you might understand a word here and there, but overall you wouldn't be able to comprehend what you're reading.

My brain is just a little bit particular and a little bit more detail-oriented than average.

I don't ever again want to think that movies like Red Riding Hood or Crimson Peak are a "guilty pleasure" for me. There's nothing cheap about their aesthetic. There's nothing to feel guilty about in liking a movie that has an aesthetic and the level of detail that makes me so immersed that I forget the rest of the world exists.

English and Writing Gender

 

My blog has basically been in a coma for a long time, and it annoys me, so I'm going to try something: From now on I'll sit down every Wednesday (because I rarely have obligations on Wednesdays at the moment) and I'll just write whatever is on my mind. No matter how trivial it may seem to me.

So, what's on my mind right now? The English language and the views on gender that the language itself carries and how other languages (in this case, Finnish) are sometimes just... not translatable at all, or parts that seem tiny but aren't, are not translatable because some mindsets just don't translate well when they are ingrained in the language.

In short: It's impossible to write in English (and many other languages) without drawing attention to people's gender. It's impossible to not see gender. Even if you decided to refer to everyone as they, people would wonder why you'd do that, so the attempt to not draw attention to gender would actually draw extra attention to it.

As a nonbinary person who grew up never having to think about pronouns, because there are no gendered pronouns in my native language, it's understandable that this bugs me to no end.

In my debut novel "Unitytöt" (Dream girls) one of the main characters originally belongs to a species that has no sex or gender. So, I ran into a problem when I was translating the back cover summary into English. The character in question, Venna, acquires a human form in the story, and appears female. I imagine that, if the characters spoke English, they would refer to Venna as "she" and I don't see why Venna would have any disagreements about that. BUT if this story had originally been written in English, then Venna's species would naturally refer to everyone as some equivalent of "they" because they have no gender. And then, as Venna appears as a girl and experiences no conflict about that, she would be called a she, and that would be a change. But in my book there is no change because no such pronouns exist.

So, my question was how to refer to Venna in the summary, because the context doesn't seamlessly translate. You could think of it in multiple ways. I could refer to Venna as they, but that would feel misleading to me, because she ends up having a feminine identity in her human form, and I don't want to trick people into thinking there's "real" nonbinary representation where there isn't. Basically, in English you only refer to people as they, if they are nonbinary or something similar, or if you don't know their gender. And the latter doesn't make any sense in the summary of my novel. So, I ended up referring to Venna as she in the summary, even though that's not technically true in the beginning. I'm not a 100% satisfied with that, but it seemed like the only option. Because in a language where everyone is constantly gendered, the only way to not draw attention to it, is to gender everyone. That is SO weird to me, but I couldn't think of other options. It's only the back cover text anyway, and you don't want to draw attention to anything that isn't actually relevant to the story.

Then there's another one of my stories, where the made up fantasy culture has a concept of gender that doesn't make any sense in English either. Basically, they don't have a concept of gender, only sex, because that's relevant for reproduction. They have no women's or men's clothing, jobs, or any kind of gender roles. Yeah, some things are more likely to be done by one sex than the other, but they don't really think about it that much. Music is a big part of that culture, so yeah, they do note that men are more likely to sing the lower voices in a choir than the women, but it's not like they make a big deal about it. Everyone just does what they're inclined to do. However, intersex people are still pretty rare, so most people have a binary concept of sex, for the most part. And here's the part where my story doesn't translate to English:

They don't care if they don't know someone's sex.

That's very easy to write with a language that only has one third-person singular pronoun. That's how I was easily able to have a character whose sex isn't known by the viewpoint characters, but no one cares.

See how this is easy to write when everyone is a "hän"? I didn't think about it at all. But when I started to consider the possibility of translating the story, it suddenly became clear to me, that if these characters spoke English, it would suddenly become clear that this one person's sex isn't known. Because people would have to call that person "they". When everyone is a "hän" and no one has gender roles then no one knows whether someone's sex is known by someone else or not, without specifically asking something like: "Hey do you think this person is a boy or girl?". But if you call other people "she" and "he" then by calling someone a "they" you make it evident that they look too androgynous for you to guess.

During the course of two novels, one character notes that they don't know this person's sex, and one other character notes that they thought it was different than what someone else thought, but these things are more like a passing thought, or an afterthought created by a specific situation. (There doesn't seem to be many such situations.) It's not something that affects their social interaction, because nobody has a concept of gender identity. Everyone treats everyone the same and while there may be some average differences in men and women, that's what they are, they are averages and people are not really aware of them much, anyway. They don't really think in terms of "men tend to sing lower voices", but rather "people with a lower voice sing these parts". If someone pointed out that these people with lower voice are mostly men, they would go like "true" and move on. It's not really something they think about, because there's no discrimination by sex. They don't need to think about it.

The only way to make this story work in English would be to call everyone "they". I see no other way to translate this culture, because if there are pronouns that refer to people's gender or sex, it's impossible to not care about what that is. The problem would be, that it would take a bit of time for the average English-speaking reader to get used to everyone being called they. It's not intuitive to most people. But it would be the only way that makes sense.

I don't know if you can tell, but this is very frustrating for me. It feels exactly like trying to shove a rectangular block into a round hole.

I love English, but I hate gendered language. It's so unnecessary for the most part. Even in my own case, it's like... I have to choose a pronoun now, after growing up assuming people aren't magically so different that you have to point it out constantly when you speak about them? I'm a she?? I'm a he?? I'm a they?? What the heck does that even mean, like really? It all feels like completely unnecessary role playing to me.

I love to think back on my first English class at school when I was 9. Because no one got it, so you can't just blame the fact that I happen to be autistic, for me not getting it. Everyone looked so confused for having different pronouns for boys and girls. Everyone thought it was weird. People kept mixing the pronouns up long after the first class. And I hate being essentially forced to adapt into this mindset, English being the lingua franca and constantly coming out of all our devices. I don't hate English, I really do love it, I think it's a beautiful language, but I really dislike this aspect of it. (I know French and some other languages are even worse.)

I do respect people's pronouns, but I LOVE that in my native language and every day life I don't have to think about them.