The military, gender, and social expectations: A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

 Picture, in your mind's eye, a General.  Capital-G, "General."  Some idealized vision, that you would craft out of Play-Dough (that's the saying, right?), for a military leader.  Now, behold my psychic powers.  You doubt me?  Hah!  You pictured Colin Powell, didn't you?  What feat of uncanny mental prowess allowed me to type this true statement, before you read it, not even knowing who you are?  Obviously, I possess the powers of the mystic.  Right?  Or, not.  Colin Powell would have been the specific figure, in all likelihood, even before his recent passing, because he is the modern, American cultural icon of, "General."  Along with Norman Schwarzkopf, he ascended to that position from the first Gulf War, but unlike "Stormin' Norman," Powell managed to retain his stature.  It is worth noting, as a point of culture and history, that the American vision of "General" was and remains a black man.  Culture of "white supremacy?"  When one of the most universally celebrated figures in our polarized era, politically and culturally, and the Platonic ideal of "General" was and remains a black man?  Empiricism matters.  Yet that is not today's main point.

There are many traits that made Colin Powell fit a culturally-based understanding of "General."  Note my phrasing.  What we think when we think of a military leader is, in some sense, culturally based.  Otherwise, the observation of Powell's race would not be an observation, right?  So what was it about Powell?  Not his politics.  That which can be readily observed, and which were observed before anyone knew anything about his politics.

Stolid.  Stoic.  Smart.  The personification of gravitas.  And if you're honest, there's something about the fact that he was physically imposing.  A beer gut is not imposing, but he carried himself, as a not-very-small person in a way that conveyed solidity.  Gravitas.  Being a big guy helps with that.

This works as a play on words, but it speaks to how people see each other.  Gravity, according to the Einstein model, is as follows.  Mass warps space and time.  Greater mass has more of a warping effect.  However it works, though, mass "creates" gravity.  -as.  Funny how the linguistic analogy works.  It was not necessary for that linguistic analogy to work, and it does not always work.  A beer gut does not convey social "gravitas."  Yet a large physique-- and for men, but not women, that can even include some flab, hint hint, social construction!-- can, within a range, convey "gravitas."

And Colin Powell was within that range.  He did not have the "jolly, fat man" physique, which undercuts gravitas, despite size.  He did not have the short-man issue, which dramatically reduces a man's ability to be taken seriously.  Height discrimination is very real, very measurable, and one of those things that is just fascinatingly unpoliticized.  The tall, whispy-thin physique?  Age-dependent.

What about Eisenhower?  One might speculate about his image in the television or social media era, but... the guy beat Hitler.  So if he looked like a bit of a beanpole as an old guy, does age, along with the Hitler-beating thing, mediate the physique?

There's a line from "Cottonseed," by the Drive-By Truckers.  A Cooley song, because Cooley writes all their best.  "They're all just loudmouthed punks to me, I scraped meaner off my shoe."

However mean anyone was, Ike scraped meaner off his shoe.  When a soldier ages, if he maintains the warrior-monk lifestyle, he's going to go beanpole, but Ike scraped meaner of his shoe.

That said, in the era of the image, Colin Powell walked out of central casting, as the saying goes.  He looked the role.

I don't.  I'm a schlub.  I look like a schlub, from whom you avert your eyes to avoid the optical nerve damage of looking at a schlub.  We, schlubs, are invisible that way.  If someone pointed to me (or really, most professors) and said, "see that guy?  He's a two-star General..."  or even a Colonel, you'd call that person a liar.

Colin Powell?  He'd get a call-back without having to make a trip to the casting couch.

Yet a lot of this is based on our cultural understanding of the physical image of a General, and who the fuck cares what a General appears to be?

Consider.  Let's say we have a new war to fight against a dangerous enemy, and you can bring one General back to life to lead the fight.  Powell, or Eisenhower?  Powell looks more like a General because of the imposing physique thing, and the wokestirs would demand that we bring back the black guy because everything has to be about race (seriously, the CRTers will call you a racist if you suggest picking Ike, but fuck them), but if you go by their CVs, Powell beat Saddam Hussein and Ike beat Hitler.

I'm not actually a military specialist.  Maybe top honors should go to Charlemagne, Alexander, Genghis Khan, or I don't fucking know.  This is not actually my research specialty, but in an elimination-style tournament, Ike took out a tougher player.  He scraped meaner off his shoe.  The Cooley principle applies.

Regardless, basing your choice of which dead General to resurrect in my stupid, hypothetical, impossible sci-fi premise on socially-constructed images would be absurd.  Kind of like the question I posed to you.

So.  Would you pick someone who looks like me?  Not me, obviously.  I'm totally unqualified for it.  But someone who looks like me?  I look like a schlub.  I am a schlub.  Could a schlub be the General in charge of a war?

Consider Ender's Game.  The whole premise of the book was training kids in battle tactics so that Ender Wiggin, thinking he was playing a war game, would in fact be acting as the General in a real battle, wiping out the "buggers," a sentient alien species.  Engaging in an act of genocide to fight a war.

A child as General.  Why?  Because the real work was strategic.  There was some minimal leadership involved, which was why Ender, not Bean, was the leader.  Bean was smarter, but Ender being a child didn't prevent him from solving strategic problems because he was a way-off-every-chart-that-didn't-involve-Bean genius.  (Bean was... something else.)

So could there be a socially constructed image of military leader as "chess master?"  Why not?

And if that were how we constructed our image, what would "central casting" be?  Probably not Ender, or Bean, but maybe not Colin Powell either.

Me = schlub.  If someone told you I'm a military officer, you'd call that person a liar.  If someone told you I'm a damned-good chess player... that'd fit.  I'm way out of practice, admittedly, but if you can't tell from my regular references and analogies to the game, I know a little something about it.  At my best, I was, not the greatest ever, but I knew my way around the board.  I'm a professor.  If someone pointed to me and said, "that guy's a professor," well...  I'm a schlub.  I'm nothing and nobody.  Central casting?  I'm too schlubby and optical-nerve-damaging to be "central casting" for anything.  Yet, that kinda fits with academia, so you'd probably believe it.  Chess is a relatively common passtime for academics, and even those who do not play actively were once hobbyists.  It's a nerd thing.  There's a whole, big bundle of nerd hobbies, and I'm a walking stereotype.  I know what I am, and I'll never rise above.

If the cultural image of "General" were "chess master," that would be, essentially, "nerd."  Think of "president of your high school chess club."

Now, you're thinking about swirlies and such, but that's a very different set of images.  And that's the point.  Bobby Fischer.  Chess legend.  Is this guy your image of great, military leader?

I'm guessing "no."  Yet before Kasparov or Carlsen, this guy was the world star of chess.  The man.  The legend.  The looney-tunes asshole.  But a genius with few peers.  He was not a military historian or military theorist.  Chess and war are not the same, despite the ubiquity of the analogy in fiction, and the assertion that the chess master must be a great battle strategist.  Yet, it takes very little to imagine Fischer devoting his aptitude to war and being very good at it.  Had he spent his time studying and thinking about actual war, he could have been a scary-good military tactician rather than just the world's most famous nerd.

And this leads us to ask, what if we constructed our image of a military leader differently?  We could.  Do what General Fischer says.  He knows how to win.

And yes, Bobby Fischer did walk out of central casting for chess-nerd.  Magnus Carlsen?  Not so much.  He doesn't look quite like the jock who gave Fischer swirlies in high school, but he doesn't look like he'd be quite so easy to give a swirly to.  He'd still kick my ass in chess, in addition to just kicking my ass.

I suck at everything.

Yet once we shift, at least hypothetically, to an image of "General" as chess master, the type of image for central casting can shift in a wide variety of ways.  And that's where we're going.  In this very roundabout way today.

Chess is a predominantly male hobby.  Why?  Could it be otherwise?  If so, and if our image of "General" were "chess master," then an image of the military leader from central casting would be very different from the image based on imposing physicality, right?

So let's get into A Desolation Called Peace.  This is a sequel, so I'm going to run through a lot of stuff, very quickly.  Unfairly so, because I'm really focused on something that stuck out like a sore thumb in this second book.  Sex/gender in the military.  It was written to stick out, so it is reasonable for me to analyze it to fucking death, but I gotta get through a bunch of stuff first.  After all, I write these posts with the presumption that whoever actually reads this stuff probably hasn't read the books.  (Which is silly, because nobody reads these posts.  I'm just fartin' around on a Sunday morning and rambling about an interesting book, and nitpicking the stuff that bugs me because what else am I going to do?  Update my syllabi?  Fuck, I gotta do that soon.)

Anywho, this is the sequel to Arkady Martine's very buzzy A Memory Called Empire.  That one won the Hugo, and many other honors, and it was pretty cool.  Here's the deal, in brief.  The big, honkin' power in the galaxy is the Teixcalaan empire.  The Emperor, Six Direction, is dying.

Quick explanation.  Teixcalaanli names are constructed as follows:  first, a number, then a noun.  Why?  'Cuz it's cool.  C'mon.  It's cool.

Anyway, Six Direction is dying, and he doesn't have a proper heir.  Succession crisis.  Whenever shit happens with Teixcalaan, they do what empires do.  They expand and annex.  There's a big space station/society gettin' nervous.  Lsel Station.  They are trying to maintain independence, and not have a twitchy Teixcalaan expand and annex them just 'cuz.

The prior Lsel Ambassador, Yskander, was a shifty bastard, but he was willing to do whatever it took to keep Teixcalaan from annexing Lsel.  Since Six Direction was going to die without a proper heir, here was Yskander's plot.  Lsel has a fancy technology, which they call imago devices.  Basically, they record all of your memories, so that when you die, those memories are preserved, and they can be given to the next generation, and so on down the line.  With a small civilization like Lsel Station, it preserves skills, their pilots keep getting more and more badass, and so on.

Yskander offers Six Direction an imago device, to record his memories, which would then get implanted into a clone, so that he just sticks around.  No succession, problem solved, in exchange for Six Direction leaving Lsel alone.  The problem (or rather, one of them) is that Teixcalaan has a big taboo on technology that enhances mental functioning, which imago devices do, so amid all of this, Yskander gets his ass killed.  That sets the plot set in motion for the first book, when he is replaced by the new ambassador, Mahit Dzmare.

Mahit shows up on Teixcalaan, trying to solve Yskander's murder and keep the succession crisis from resulting in Teixcalaan going nuts and annexing Lsel.

That's the absurdly brief explanation of A Memory Called Empire.  Cool book.  I could nitpick, but I can nitpick damn-near any book.  Was its buzz beyond what it should have gotten?  Probably, but it was still good, and worth reading, and since I read the sequel, any grumbling I do must be put in that context.

So let's get to A Desolation Called Peace.  In order to understand this, you need to understand the resolution to A Memory Called Empire.  In order to convince Teixcalaan not to annex Lsel, here's what Mahit does.  She knows about some scary aliens out near the edges of explored space, and says hey.  Look over there!  Six Direction publicly suicides himself, and names a not-too-scary successor, who had been on reasonably friendly terms with Mahit-- Nineteen Adze-- even though she helped kill Yskander, and she goes along with it.  So, Nineteen Adze is the new Emperor, and she says, hey, let's go fight those aliens, "Lsel, who?," Lsel tries to keep its head down, and Teixcalaan goes to war with some scary aliens who are basically the Fungus Borg, and I don't care what anyone else says, that's what I'm calling them.

Critters with a hive mind, connected by fungus.  I'm calling them the Fungus Borg.  Go get some athlete's foot spray from the drug store, and problem solved.

Anyway, now we're in Book 2.  A Desolation Called Peace.  War, actually.  Nineteen Adze has sent a fleet to go fight at the front, where a colony has just been wiped out, and there is an order for an intelligence officer to go try, maybe, talking to the Fungus Borg.  (If she knew, she'd stop off at CVS or Walgreen's on the way.)

The intelligence agent will turn out to be Mahit's Teixcalaan liaison from Book 1, Three Seagrass, who decides, for some fuckin' reason, that Mahit could help, so she plans a roundabout journey to Lsel to pick up Mahit, and I do mean, "pick up," they head off to the front, try to learn the language of the Fungus Borg, shenanigans happen, and eventually there's a not-quite-arrangement, because you can't exactly have a peace treaty with fucking Fungus Borg.

Dude.  CVS!

Anyway, that's the rough outline of Book 2.

This is already a fucking long post, which has meandered a lot.  I promised something about social construction of military leaders, didn't I?  I should get to that.  Eh, it's not like anyone is paying me for this blog.  Or reading it.

So Nine Hibiscus.  Yeah, that's less cool than "Nineteen Adze."  Whatever.  Anyway, the General, or Admiral, or... technically, her title is "yaotlek," but whatever.  She's in charge of the the forces at the fight.

OK, let's get into this.  Sex/gender, distributions of characters, social construction, roles and all that.

They just remade Dune again, for some fuckin' reason.  Look, I loved those books, but a) stop remaking shit, and b) yeah.  If you read the old stuff, take a look at the male/female thing.  The women are just the Bene Gesserit.  Scheming witches.  Old stereotype.  Sexist bullshit from a bygone era.  Frank Herbert was a very smart guy, and a very good writer, but kinda... fuck him.  And that's before we get into the white savior bullshit.  Fuck him.

They flipped Liet Kynes to try to remedy the male/female thing, but this is a thing in old sci-fi.  Yeah, the authors were men, and authors tend to write POV characters who are "like them," but that doesn't explain the full fucking cast of characters.

In A Memory Called Empire, you had what you normally have these days.  First, Arkady Martine is a gay woman, which is the "norm" in prominent sci-fi in the 2020s.  I don't give a fuck about your demographics.  I care if you can write, and she can write.  Since she is a gay woman, her main character, Mahit, is a gay woman.  Then, you had a cast of characters who were male, female, positions of power held by both, and so on.  Why?  Modern.  The old emperor was male, died and replaced by a woman, and so on.  No more of that women-only-in-the-background, or scheming witches bullshit.

A funny thing happened on the way to the sequel, though.  Martine went further.  I don't tend to read with a pad of paper, keeping track of pronouns with hatch-marks for a precise count of male and female characters.  Does that sound fun to you?  Not to me.  However, the balance of male/female characters was very different.  Particularly in the military-heavy setting.  Most of the characters were women.  In an interesting way.  So let's turn to Nine Hibiscus, whose name is less cool than Nineteen Adze.

Nine Hibiscus is presented to us, many times, as having come out of "central casting" for yaotleks.  Why was that always italicized in the text?  Dunno.  It was.  Anyway, the phrase, "central casting," is even used.  A bunch.  And what characteristics are given to lend her the central casting image?  She is big and imposing, and kinda flabby, but in a way that conveys solidity.  Strong.  Firm.  Big.  Imposing.

Sound familiar?

So here is what Martine is trying to do.  She is trying to upend sex/gender stereotypes with the character of Nine Hibiscus, by presenting to the audience a woman who is the central-casting image of "military leader," in the same way that Colin Powell is.  She doesn't look like Bobby Fischer.  And personality-wise, she doesn't follow the Colin Powell rules.  She has a temper that Powell would tell her to keep in check.  In so many ways, then, she is "performing male gender," by what Butler, or West & Zimmerman would describe in our terms, yet she is referenced with female pronouns.  Why?  Because Martine is trying to subvert gender expectations and social roles.  She is presenting Teixcalaan as having different gendered expectations.

With all the subtlety of a thermonuclear warhead.  If you read the book, you wouldn't need me to point this out to you.

But here's the thing.  "Central casting."  A concept of central casting is a concept of a generally agreed-upon social image for a role.  What makes central casting is a collective belief about the important traits or images associated with those traits.  That's the social construction stuff.  That big, long ramble way back at the beginning of this big, long, rambly post about Bobby Fischer?  We could socially construct an image of military leaders based on nerdy tactician.  We don't, but we could.

All that "central casting" stuff in A Desolation Called Peace?  That's the Teixcalaan social construction of "military leader."  What are the traits that they deem to be associated with the role?

The same ones we do.

Are there women with that physicality?  Sure.  Statistical distributions.

But if the social construction of the image of the military, even in that technologically advanced, futuristic military remains one of imposing physicality and size and strength, will the military be majority female?

Cut the woke bullshit.  The answer is no.  It will be majority male.  Once the novel introduces that social construction, that's what follows.  If Nine Hibiscus walked out of central casting, then one of two things needed to be the case.  Either central casting needed to be different from our central casting in order to explain the predominantly female military that Martine clearly wanted to write, or she needed the Teixcalaan military to have more than a couple of token men in it.

The irony, actually, is that most of the characters were a little flat in the second book, and the few interesting ones were male.  On Nine Hibiscus's ship, her second in command, Twenty Cicada, was sort of a Buddhist Spock type, so he was awesome.  Not exactly a manly man, by modern, western socially constructed images, but a fuckin' cool character.  Mostly, though, Martine was just filling the ships with as many women as possible, substituting that for "interesting character."  Sixteen Moonrise was kind of vile, but she was interesting.  Mostly, though, Martine just made a writers' decision about a female-male ratio and tried to make that ratio a character in itself.  And a ratio is not a character.  "Ratio" is a noun, so it could have been the second word in a two-word name, but the ratio was not a character.

(Side note, though:  Six Direction's clone, Eight Antidote was probably the most interesting character.  Martine needed to put more thought into her female characters, or give more page time to Nineteen Adze.)

Anyway, as a point of comparison, Seth Dickinson has actually tried this one.  I loved The Traitor Baru Cormorant, hated The Monster Baru Cormorant, and stopped the series after that, but the quick observation is that the big power in that world is the Falcrest Empire.  Their naval officers are entirely female.  Why?  Because Dickinson is woke, but at least he threw in a throw-away line about how they have some prejudicial belief about men's minds and women's minds.  OK, sure, societies have all sorts of stupid prejudices.  Could a society have that one?  I don't see why not!  Dickinson's reason for writing it was wokeness, but there was no logical inconsistency, and he recognized how he was constructing the world, so there's no issue.  The issue in A Desolation Called Peace was that Martine was constructing a society that has the exact same social image of "military leader" as we do, but doesn't follow through.  It's an example of woke writing creating a logical problem rather than including a woke construction that works, just because you can.  Dickinson had all sorts of other problems, about which I have griped elsewhere, but that one?  Actually, that worked.  It was subversion that worked.

What if Martine had constructed Teixcalaan's image of military leader as that of chess master?  Tactician?  Strategist?  Nerd?  You're on a fucking spaceship!  You're not fighting hand-to-hand (although there were references to ground-fighting), and certainly, the yaotlek isn't fighting hand-to-hand, so why not?  With that social construction, how hard would it be to write a socially coherent construction of an overwhelmingly female military, with Nine Hibiscus walking out of central casting, which was Martine's real goal?

Does that preclude having large, physically imposing women?  Of course not.  But if the socially constructed image of yaotlek, walking out of central casting, looks just like Colin Powell, you're not going to have a military with the ratio Martine wants because the social construction that gives you the image of Nine Hibiscus is an image that may very well establish her as perfect for the role, but it indicates a society that still associates "military" with traits that are strongly statistically associated with maleness.  Not because those traits have a socially constructed association with maleness, but because they are biologically associated with the male biological sex.  Not talkin' gender identity here.  Just physiology.

Am I nitpicking?  Completely overanalyzing here?  Martine's goal was a subvert-gender-sex-expectations kind of thing, but you can do that without internal contradiction, and unless we move completely into the realm of postmodernism and "everything is socially constructed," she pushes it too far.  And no, we're not going full postmodernism/social constructivism around here.  Some things are socially constructed.  Some are not.  Analyze appropriately.

Well, I just rambled a lot.  The dead emperor's clone is cool, Buddhist Spock is cool, I dunno what to say about the Fungus Borg and the collectivist thing, but whatever.  One of the characters really did nail Mahit, and I don't mean Three Seagrass.  (OK, yeah, she nails Mahit, but they both needed it.  They had a bad day.)  Mahit is a shit magnet.  I don't really grock the character, or at least, I don't grock her appeal.  She's a shit magnet.  Yskander was the cool one, and I'd rather read a prequel about him.

Get crackin' on that, Arkady!

Anyway, music.  Otis Taylor, "My Name Is General Jackson," from Definition of a Circle.