Back to Narnia

I'm having troubles adjusting to a virtual schedule. Just then I almost missed a tutor meeting because I got stuck reading a book. Thankfully Brendan was like "don't you have a meeting?" and I was like "karp!" then I woke my laptop and hurriedly clicked on the zoom link.

This is the second time something like this has happened. (First time was worse, I am too embarrassed to talk about it though).

Anyway, Brendan and I watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe last night using our shiny new Disney+ free trial. I've seen the movie before but Brendan hadn't, and then I was shocked that he'd never read the books! He relied on the old BBC adaptation for most of his murky memory of the storyline. So when Mr Tumnus charms Lucy to sleep, and then she wakes up hours later to find the lights off and Mr Tumnus crying in the corner being like "I'm a bad faun"...well, let's just say we re-interpreted the scene with whole new vibes.

And then we started singing "I'm a bad faun" to Billie Eilish's Bad Guy. Thanks to channel 9's non-stop aus-open promotion of "Doctor Doctor" (which I call the non-consensual doctor show because he kisses a girl who asks not to be kissed in the promo!!). 🙄

Seeing Narnia again was so nice. I don't believe in God but I believe in what Aslan stands for. And Edmund is such an arse!!! (but he atones - we all have our moments). I have a new appreciation for Lucy and we both figured that Brendan is most like Susan (very obvious). Also, Peter rides a unicorn into battle. A unicorn! I have a funny quote about unicorns but I'll get to that later.

So then I felt like reading The Magician's Nephew again because Brendan kept asking me origin questions while we watched the movie. I read a chapter, and then remembered I have an old biography of C.S. Lewis that I bought at a book fair once and that was what I was reading when Brendan reminded me that I should be in my zoom meeting.

I was flicking through the biography because I started wondering why C.S. Lewis always had at least one boy and at least one girl in his books. The children he writes about always have platonic, opposite-sex friendships. He never writes about just two boys, or just two girls. And the relationships are always platonic (though it helps that they're usually relatives). It makes sense when the kids are younger, but in the only book where the kids are older adolescents (Susan and Peter in Prince Caspian) everything is still remarkably unromantic, whereas the movie actually introduces sexual tension between Susan and Prince Caspian (yes I know this seems like a pretty liberal and unnecessary embellishment to the actual storyline, but come on - both of them are attractive teenagers, and they probably have a great deal of respect for one another, Susan being the Queen of Narnia's Golden Age and Caspian being the rightful heir trying to restore the kingdom and it's old magic, as if there wouldn't be some chemistry).

When Diggory (the boy-protagonist in The Magician's Nephew) first meets Polly (the girl protagonist), he tells her he's been crying (it's also very obvious) because his mum's dying from cancer. Which is nice - you all know how I feel about boys and crying (they should do it more). C.S. Lewis' own mum died when he was around nine and the biography I'm reading suggests the loss of his mum really made him yearn for that missing connection, and both his two relationships as an adult were with much older women, one of whom had cancer. It also, in some ways, froze his memories of childhood to the time before his mum died and also his emotional development. Maybe that's why his narrative voice is so relatable to children.

*Funny unicorn quote*
Brendan and I were talking about careers one night and I said I wanted to be someone who could do and understand all the data work if she wanted to, but also had the language and communication tools to sell that to a business and the judgment and strategic mind needed to be a good leader. To which he said -

Brendan: That's called a unicorn. They don't exist.
Alice: I want to be a unicorn! What would be my unicorn name?
Brendan: **CENSORED**

Sorry Brendan looked over my shoulder just then and said I'm not allowed to quote him.

Anyway, other updates:

• I subscribed to the newsletter of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and now I'm stuck on this HUGE LOOOONG email chain that someone (who's research I've read) started asking for interesting things to read about covid19 and feminist economics
• the emails are in a very friendly, familiar tone, so it sounds like a tight-knit feminist economist community in the US and then there's just random me down here in the Pacific
• they advertised an online panel event on the impact of covid19 which actually sounds really interesting until I discovered it would be at 3am my time

There has been a lot of more general discussion about how to value care work after this crisis. Care work - including healthcare - is the most essential job in any country's economy right now, yet because it's been traditionally female-associated, economic markets have always under-valued it. Sigh, without going into a full-blown rant about free markets - we all know that markets only work if there are no externalities or distortions!! And yet women have, since time immemorial, bore the brunt of care work in the household with the momentous positive externalities of this sacrifice never being recognised in economic markets - women's care work is the reason why we even have economic agents in the market, because they were raised by females! Yes I know John Smith gets to maximise profit and brings home wages that pays for his wife and family but his family wouldn't exist without Jane Smith, and arguably his economic agency would be greatly curtailed without Jane's household labour and emotional nourishment too. 

The positive externalities of care work (and emotional labour) has been so grossly ignored by the market (in its current iteration, still a very patriarchal institution) that some men actually walk around belittling these virtues, not realising their agency and wellbeing is directly secured by the emotional investment of females around them and those who care to care. Imagine if there were no females in the world, or more broadly, no one in the world with feminised traits, so that reason, order, logic, individual gain, utilitarianism, aggression and dominance governed relationships and exchanges. 1000000000% guarantee the world would NOT BE a better place.

Ok, I promised not to rant but my *oh-so-scary* feminism got the better of me.