Hey you know that the dominant system of transphobia sees trans women as men and trans men as women right. So like, fearmongering about men affects trans women. And misogyny affects trans men. We’re on the same page right.

7 From the Women with Jo Alexis of Happy For No Reason

Jo Alexis is a songwriter, producer and vocalist of over 150 songs for her many projects including Alexis/Alexander, Happy For No Reason and her latest, GALEXI. Often compared to Sinead O’Connor, Sarah McLachlan & Bjork, she not only brings great hooks to enchanting melodies but her vocals leave the listener wanting more.

As a prolific songwriter,  Jo has recorded in Nashville, Los Angeles, NYC, Philadelphia and Portland with some heavy hitters like Brad Rabuchin (played with Ray Charles) and Jef Lee (played with Roberta Flack.) She’s also shared the stage with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary and she’s had a song placed in the video game “Reactor/Master Ground 3.”

We got the chance to speak Jo Alexis about her music, career, and opinions in this edition of 7 From the Women. So, let’s dive in:

What Have You Been Working To Promote Lately?

“Canaries (Hot Summer Night)” is a raucous sing-along drinking song, like the rat pack with a female lead!  It is from my newest LP by Happy For No Reason, my jazzy folk band. We finished recording and mixing and making the music video during the pandemic which was challenged us to work remotely. However, a musician who I deeply respect told me that my lead vocals were “too aggressive” and it sounded like I was yelling. So, I bought a new microphone and redid my lead parts alone in my bedroom. I also learned how to use Logic, the DAW (digital audio work station) and spent many hours putting together the flute (Mark Pritchard) and piano solos (Matt Weiers). Those jazz cats had so many takes and it was quite a fun undertaking to put them together.  We shot the music video in Portland but our director, animator and script writer, Christian Bolorinos, was in Barcelona. So we FaceTimed with him during the shoot which actually worked out really well! So far, we've hit 135k views on FB!

Please tell us about your favorite song written, recorded, or produced by another woman and why it’s meaningful to you.

Wow! So many good ones so I’ll go with my favorite artist and my favorite song of hers- Joni Mitchell’s, “A Case of You.” I love the new version they released recently: ”Archives, Volume 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971)”  On Disc 5, there’s an incredible version with her and James Taylor on guitar in December 1970, live at the Paris Theatre. It is so amazing to hear them together like this and her voice is truly perfect - remarkable really. My Mom used to play Joni's records and I learned a lot of her music on the piano as a kid. And of course, I tried to imitate her voice in all of the nuances. Joni was my God as a young girl and I see now that I was not alone in that worship…

What does it mean to you to be a woman making music/in the music business today and do you feel a responsibility to other women to create messages and themes in your music? 

I strongly feel the pressure to be a more upstanding, responsible member of society. I really have to call on ALL of my grit to stick with it and keep believing in my dreams. I am so clear that all I want to do is write songs and make records yet I feel burdened to prove my worth with the mighty dollar. 

I also feel a responsibility to other women and girls to be fully myself, especially as a mother of a special needs child. Many of the moms in my community devote 100% of their life energy to their child. It is tempting! However, my motto is a good mother models the possibility of pursuing and succeeding in what she was born to do. Fingers crossed.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? If so, why or why not? 

I definitely consider myself a feminist. I hear that feminism is the radical concept that women and men are equal:) My Mom is an activist and she raised me right with a community of women who taught me the importance of loving yourself and speaking your mind. I went on marches for the ERA and served cheese platters for women’s hang outs. I think people are afraid of feminism because they are afraid of female power. 

What was the most challenging thing you have had to face as a female artist? 

I think women musicians including myself are subjected to looksism in a strict way both from society and internally.  People want you to look a certain way but not if it makes them uncomfortable. I recently had a friend tell me my outfit was too sexy so I had to remind her that Beyonce isn’t holding back. And looksism is deepy connected to ageism- at a certain point, the music industry stops taking older women seriously based on her sex appeal and age. Let’s change that, yes? We are clearly just humans who make choices about our lives and hopefully in 2022, women get to do that in a strong, expressive and solid way.

If you could collaborate with any other female artists, who would you choose?

If you could form an all woman super-group who would play in it:  Chaka Khan on drums, St Vincent on guitar, Christie McVie on keys & MeShell NDeogocello on Bass, of course.  And I get to sing lead!

What do you hope to share with other women in the industry with your music?

I would love to tell other women and girls that your voice is important. Your poems and musicality is unique and needed in this world. And you are not less, worse or inferior to men- simple but true! I wish young women could know their worth. Also, don’t give up!  I love being a band leader in both of my projects(all men) and getting to work with incredible musicians all of whom treat me with the deepest respect. There are plenty of amazing men out there who greatly value women. And, it is important that I value myself.

Find Jo Alexis via:

Website / Facebook / Spotify / YouTube / Soundcloud

Subscribe to Jo Alexis’ mailing list here.

Wonder Woman: Earth One, Vol 2 - Part 1

I’m going to break this into a few parts, because it turned out I had a bit to say. I’ll start with my overall impressions, then dive into the spoilery recap.

General thoughts: Next verse, same as the first.

Grant Morrison purports to want to explore Marston’s ideas, but he’s more interested in the kooky, kinky trappings than the sentiment behind them.

Marston was radical and progressive in his time. Writing in the 1940s, he told his readers that women were men’s equals — and even superiors! — in every way. He told young girls there was no limit to what they could do. His stories promoted love over hatred, peace over violence, rehabilitation over retribution.

If Morrison had taken that bold sentiment and reimagined it through a lens of modern society and feminism in 2018, he might have had a compelling story to tell. Instead, he takes Marston’s ideas as he understands them and transplants them wholesale into a time in which they’re no longer radical and progressive, but rather backward and out-of-step with modern intersectional feminism, and then proceeds to ask such deep, incisive questions as “yes but realistically could we actually replace all world governments with a matriarchy?????”

He never truly deconstructs any of Marston’s ideas, just parrots phrases like “submission to loving authority” a lot and raises questions without ever making a decent attempt at answering them. To be fair, part of the problem is that he’s simply trying to do too much at once: juggling parallel stories in Themyscira and Man’s World, an interrogation of the Amazons’ philosophies and the introduction of three new antagonists and the tensions they cause, all within a limited page count, Morrison is unable to devote the necessary time to properly developing any of them. It’s no wonder the result is so half-baked.

But hey, just throw in a bunch of vagina planes and a dusting of kink and watch as everyone crows over how subversive he is.

Yannick Paquette’s artwork is still beautiful. His page layouts are still dynamic and expressive, and his character designs are still lovely. Diana in particular gets a variety of very cool outfits, including a beautiful modest costume for a trip to the Middle East.

But he still can’t shake his tendency towards drawing women’s bodies in weirdly-contorted poses with bizarre pornfaces. Wonder Woman shouldn’t look like she’s orgasming as she’s leaping into battle, ffs.

Oh, and the series is still being edited by noted serial sexual harasser Eddie Berganza. HASHTAG FEMINISM!

Let’s get into the recap.

Content warning for some skeevy mind control content and general discussion of the gender essentialist, body-shaming, TERFy attitudes of Morrison’s Amazons.

The story opens with a flashback to 1942, with Paula von Gunther leading a Nazi invasion of Themyscira, and god I’m already so tired.

idk, I mean, I get that Nazis were a major Golden Age antagonist, and Morrison is harking back to that. But there’s a broader historical and cultural context to consider. Cartoonish Nazi villains in patriotic WWII-era American comics carried very different associations than they do in 2018, in the midst of a presidency steeped in white supremacy and hate speech, on the eve of a midterm election in which a record number of neo-Nazis are standing for office, at a time when hate groups are surging, when migrant children are being separated from their families and held in detention camps— just. Not a time when I want to be reading about cartoonish super-Nazis, personally.

And I don’t really see why they necessarily need to be this story? The battle serves to illustrate how Amazons combat and… “rehabilitate”… their adversaries. Paula ultimately serves as a plot device. Couldn’t that maybe have been achieved without Nazis?

Anyway, Paula announces that she is claiming the island for the Third Reich, and Hippolyta is like “lol no”.

Okay, that part I like. Evil army storms the island, backed by guns and warships, surround a half-dozen barely-armed women… who all but roll their eyes. ‘Pfft, children. Fine, if you want to play this game…’ And the evil army can only gape in bewilderment as the women proceed to take them apart in minutes.

But this is where it gets weird.

The Amazons fire a purple ray at all of the Nazis, which… makes them all drop their weapons and start screaming “YES!” orgasmically?

Hippolyta tells Paula that the soldiers “will be taken to the Space Transformer. They will be transported to Aphrodite’s world where Queen Desira and her butterfly-winged Venus Girls wait to purge them of their need for conflict. They will be taught to submit to loving authority. They will learn to embrace peace and obedience. They will be as happy as men can be.”

Paula attacks Hippolyta, rips off her magic girdle and heaves a great boulder over her head— wait, were we supposed to know that Paula had superpowers? That seems like something that should have been flagged.

She effortlessly takes down the Amazons who rush to the queen’s defence and takes a moment to cackle villainously. “Behold the pride of Germany! The ultimate daughter of the thousand-year-empire of Adolf Hitler!” To which Hippolyta— okay, I like this part, too.

Hippolyta calmly gets to her feet and puts Paula in a stranglehold. “We are the Amazons of myth, my dear! I am Queen Hippolyta eternal.” She swiftly and efficiently brings Paula to her knees.

But, welp, never mind, it’s about to get fucking creepy again.

Hippolyta forces Paula into “the Venus Girdle”, a device that “charges every body cell with vitalising currents and harmonises the brain, encouraging obedience.”

Paula: Let me go! What is that? What are you doing? Hippolyta: The Venus Girdle? It charges every body cell with vitalising currents and harmonises the brain, encouraging obedience. A dainty thing, is it not? Paula: I won’t— I won’t— You can’t control me— you can’t— can’t make me— make me... oh… make me…

Paula: nmmuhhh… What’s happening? My Nazi ideals— slipping away— they— they don’t make any sense now… I— I thought— I thought— I was strong. What’s wrong with me? I’m so weak— I must be weak to wish to serve weak, cruel men— like— like Herr Hitler— I— I— Hippolyta: If you truly long to be a slave to the ideas of others, well… we can find a loving mistress to help you explore your desires in a healthier context. Paula: Yes. Yes! My queen— [sob] —how can you ever forgive me? How wise of you to know— to know this is all I ever wanted! Hippolyta: Devote yourself to me by following the Amazon Code. Go with out sweet Mala to Improvement Island. There you will come to know yourself until the Venus Girdle is no longer required.

Paula: But all I want is to serve you, my queen! I love you! Please don’t turn your back on me!

Basically, Hippolyta forcibly uses a mind-altering device on Paula that alters her brain chemistry to make her placid, compliant and suggestible, then immediately washes her hands of her.

So… let’s talk about this, because I think it strikes at the heart of the problems with Wonder Woman: Earth One.

Queen Desira, the Venus Girls, magnetic golden Venus Girdles that “harmonise the brain” — all these things are drawn from Golden Age Wondy comics cowritten by Marston and his collaborator Joye Kelly. Marston played with mind control a lot in his stories, and not all of it came from the bad guys.

Morrison’s bold, subversive approach to these story elements is to export them wholesale into the present day and force us to feel uncomfortable about them.

In other words, he’s taking some of the weirder and more fucked up story elements from a collection of comics that are widely agreed to be very weird, and then plonking it before your readers and asking, ‘hey guys, have you ever considered… that this might be weird and fucked up???’

There’s nothing clever or insightful about that. And there’s certainly nothing groundbreaking about a cis white male writer imagining a fictitious feminist dystopia where women strip away men’s free will.

Like, if you really want to be subversive with Marston’s Wonder Woman, how about you start by hiring a woman to write it? Why not see what this iconic feminist hero conceived by a cis white man in the 1940s and written almost exclusively by cis white men for over 75 years might look like if she were reimagined and reinterpreted by LGBTI women, by women of colour? By the women left out of those original comics?

That would be subversive. Morrison is just being a smartarse.

So yeah, Hippolyta turns her back on the helpless, brainwashed, lovesick Paula and walks over to Diana, who’s defied her mother’s orders and run down from the palace to get a glimpse of the action. She’s full of questions; Hippolyta brushes them off with the usual (for Morrison’s Amazons) ‘men are shit’ line.

There’s a moment where Paula and Diana meet eyes from across the beach, and each asks, “who is she?” Diana is simply curious; Paula is instantly lovestruck.

Paula: That girl… the image of my queen.

This looks like foreshadowing, but spoilers: it goes absolutely nowhere.

Sidenote: If the Amazons deal with invaders by brainwashing them, why did they want to kill Steve Trevor in Volume One?

Cut to present-day America, where a room of faceless men discuss the threat posed by the Amazons and their superior technology, which they assume extends to deadly weaponry. The only in they have with the Amazons is Wonder Woman, and to get through her defences they’ve called in “an expert in female psychology”, aka a misogynistic monster.

Doctor Psycho: Gentlemen. She may be strong and tough and smart and beautiful… but she’s just a woman. I never met one I couldn’t break.

Oh, goody.

Cut to a cute splash page of Diana playing baseball. She gets a lot of great outfits in this book.

She’s also clearly making an impact in Man’s World; her face is plastered across every magazine, and people flock to hear her speak.

A Q&A sessions serves as a thinly-veiled opportunity for Morrison to answer some of the criticisms of the first book. His response leaves something to be desired.

“Amazon training can make any of you into a Wonder Woman,” says Diana. We teach a system of physical and psychological health and vitality. The grace and beauty of Aphrodite, the skill and wisdom of Athena.”

Woman: What about Wonder trans women? Is there room for people like me in your utopia? Diana: There’s room for everyone. The Amazon Code was evolved by women over thousands of years and outlines a progressive, pacifist way of living and thinking that anyone can follow.

I’m sorry, but that’s a fucking bullshit answer. It’s a weak, superficial gesture towards inclusiveness that conspicuously fails to express any real support or solidarity.

And depressingly, this is 100% in-character for Earth One Diana, because Morrison’s Amazons? are absolutely TERFs. As with the mind control content, Morrison has exported Marston’s 1940s binaristic gender essentialism unchanged into the 21st century in order to ask searing questions like ‘hey but what if??? the idea that women are genetically more suited to ruling??? is simplistic and flawed?????’ But the most he’ll engage with the genuinely insidious implications around the exclusion of trans and nonbinary people is a smiling noncommittal, ‘Are trans people welcome? My friend, everyone is welcome! No further questions!’

Morrison’s Wonder Woman displays a profound disregard of context. He ignores not only the cultural, historical and individual contexts that shaped the original 1940s Wonder Woman, but also the contexts of the time in which he’s currently writing and the cultural space that Wondy has come to inhabit today as a feminist and LGBT icon.

Removed from context, Morrison is simply taking a hero who traditionally hails from an advanced utopian society, taking another look at the views that society actually espouses, and reframing her as a well-meaning but naive hero from an advanced but deeply flawed and unsettling society.

In context, he’s doing exactly what Brian Azzarello did in turning the Amazons into murderous man-hating monsters, just with more kink and vagina planes.

Woman 2: Umm, there’s a lot of stuff on social media about how you dress provocatively and promote an unrealistic body type, which is basically setting a bad example for women. I mean, the stuff you do is amazing and all, it’s just… does any of the criticism bother you? Diana: I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ‘unrealistic’ body shape. My own body is the result of diet, exercise and… um… sophisticated genetic engineering. Otherwise, I dress as I please.

Volume One made it clear that all Amazons have the physique of supermodels, and when they encounter the diverse body types of the women in our world, they are disgusted and respond with body-shaming insults. Here, Diana again avoids voicing any actual support (she doesn’t say that all women’s bodies are beautiful and valid, she suggests that her body type is not unrealistic), while also throwing out eugenics as a reason for the lack of body diversity among the Amazons. Oh good, I was hoping we’d get more Nazi parallels!

Finally, a militant white feminist stands up and observes that if the Amazons are capable of half of what Diana says they are, then they could dismantle the patriarchy overnight — so why is Diana wasting time giving philosophy lectures? “You can control people’s minds with that lasso of yours. Like you did with that dude on TV— so why can’t you put a lasso ‘round the whole world?”

Afterwards, talking to Beth Candy, Diana’s like, ‘gosh, Beth, I’ve never seriously thought about world domination before, but maybe it is time to consider stripping all mortals of their free will, dismantling all nations and compelling everybody on the planet to bow down before Amazonia.’

Then Diana gets on her mental radio and calls her mother, confessing her doubts about her mission.

It was around this point in the book that the Amazons’ dialogue began to grate on me. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was at first. Every line read like a ceremonious pronouncement. They used antiquated syntax and words, like “whole systems … must o’erturned be” and “she did, without due caution, this, her island home, depart!”. Even Diana would become infected with it whenever she was speaking to them. It felt like they weren’t so much conversing as they were reciting… 

...verse… 

oh my god, that motherfucker.

Surely he hadn’t.

I scanned the dialogue again. I double-checked it.

He had.

Grant Morrison, that obscenely pretentious wanker, wrote all of the Amazons’ dialogue in dactylic hexameter.

For fuck’s sake.

After finishing her call with Diana, Hippolyta learns that somebody has vandalised one of the temples with the symbol of “a backward-turning sun”, i.e. a swastika. Unseen by everybody, Paula breaks into Hippolyta’s palace.

you feel like this man understands you better than anyone else, but it seems what he understands is how dangerous he is to you. there's nothing to only understanding someone's damage. and now you wonder about damaging yourself, maybe so you'll understand him more; don't. if you know you're too kind to fully get away from him then talk about it to someone, so that there'll be someone to stop you. it's serious, you'll end up killing yourself. don't kill yourself over a man who mostly knows (1/2)

“how to make you self-destruct. there are people who can help him, and you shouldn't be one of them, because you would hurt yourself for him. don't try to "get" him. in the end he will be a small dent in your life, you can't imagine that because the light is too bright now, but please don't lose yourself for a man that's already lost. (2/2)”No I know. I have a therapist. The truth is he sent me an email. Just two small emails a week ago Saturday that said sorry about what he called me to Natalie (a friend, I have no idea what he’s talking about) and that he’d make it up to me if he could. I wasn’t going to answer but then later that night I responded I need time, leave me alone. And then it was itching my mind, and then Wednesday my friends said some stupid shit. They didn’t mean to, but they were tactless in public about it. It’s hard to explain it just started escalating while I sat there dumbfounded that they would just causally start talking about something that was literally like, traumatic to me? And it scratch the itch and my the itch bigger and this weekend like an I D I O T I send him an email. A long rambling email where I told him if he reaches out, it’s harder for me to want to stay away, and I want to stay away because it’s the right thing because he’s dangerous to me and also because that’s what he wants me to do, but at the same time I don’t want him to stay away because it doesn’t feel right. It was basically a plea to leave me alone for my own sake, because it wouldn’t take much for him to get me alone tbh. And that was Sunday morning. And I pressed send, and I was like “woo, I feel better. It was dumb but he’s never going to respond and now the words are out.” But that’s not what happened. I started obsessively checking my emails AGAIN after I got over that. It’s literally the only way he can contact me now and my therapist was like “block his email” and I was like “yeah yeah” and I haven’t. And it makes me sick to my stomach how much I want him to reach out again, when I know it’s never what I’m going to expect. So that rambling post was me taking out frustrations. I’m not going to go find some meth. But I know he was right. He’s a danger to me because maybe I would try it with him. I was so convinced I would never, and all he had to say was “yeah you would” and it like pulled some wool from my eyes. That I sought out this dangerous man in the first place, he knows something true about me that my well meaning friends don’t. I remember the day that conversation happened that I went and told a friend and started saying how he told me he thought I would try meth and she cut me off and said “oh my god but you never would” like he was a jerk for saying it, and I hadn’t even said that he said it like a warning, and I wanted to tell her how it actually sounded true. When I told my therapist, he nodded and was like “well, I’ve seen many many many people try drugs because they’re around someone who does them. He’s probably seen people try it after saying they wouldn’t” and it was like a relief. I didn’t go through a normal break up with a normal person, and it’s really altered something in me and most of the people in my life aren’t really equipped to help me. I’ve had a few people reach out to me who have experienced something similar, losing someone to meth or heroine, having to deal with a sudden break up with them or even a slow painful one. They understand the complex feelings, the weird pain it causes. You just wish this person would just stop, and they can’t and you know they can’t but you ache for them even when they have hurt you. He lied and belittled me. He also stayed away more than you would expect, or that my therapist led me to believe. I think he wants the right thing for me more than the wrong thing. And it’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen a person descent into meth, but it’s freaky. They talk in coherent sentences that don’t make sense. When they’re high they’re manic and fucked and mean and loving it, when they’re coming down they’re bizarre and disjointed and confused and nervous, when they’re craving they’re harsh and raw and in pain and desperate. It’s like talking to a waterfall, it’s like talking to someone who says all their words backwards. It’s not fun. How do you explain to someone who’s never seen it and wants you to stay away because they love you and they know he’s bad for you? How do you say “he’s turning himself into something inhuman, someone has to help him” and there response is somewhere between “let him he’s garbage” and “this is just who he is” with a mix of “you’re just frustrated you can’t help him.” Yeah no shit. I’m not letting him destroy his life, I’m living with the knowledge that he already is. It fucking HURTS. Sometimes I just want to talk about it. I want to talk about how it hurts as a human being, not as former lover. But it’s ok, I have coping mechanisms now. I have a therapist. I’m keeping the scary shit away from the people who aren’t equipped to help me and saving it for my therapist who can. I write all this, as embarrassing as it is, to admit between funny post about pussy and weed, that I’m still deeply hurting for a meth addict man who is just a laundry list of “how could you date this person if you’re into radical feminism,” so that I can maybe help even one person. I don’t know what, to validate their feelings, or articulate them, or give them a warning. Don’t do it. Don’t date him or her. Meth is as bad as they say, and it’s not in small ways. It’s in big over your head ways. You can’t know unless you see it, and seeing it is really, really traumatic. It’s really scary, it really flips your world on the side. You can learn about yourself in other ways. Tumblr is the easiest thing in my life. It’s easy to open tumblr and write funny posts. It’s easy, it requires no effort or care. I don’t care about tumblr. So when it’s like a switch and I use it to just ramble feelings out, I don’t care. I don’t care even its embarrassing: guys I’m healing from a traumatic break up with a meth addict. It fucked me up a little. Thanks for sticking around when I get weird about it.Your ask was important and it shows understanding and care, and I appreciate it. I’m going to be fine. I’m already ok in so many ways. It’s just that it isn’t a straight line, so when it bubbles up again I’m frustrated. You’re right that he’s right that I’m right about what he’s right about. He’s dangerous, he knows he’s dangerous. Honestly, if I ever tried meth and he found out I’m sure he would be furious. Can you believe that? Like a father would. That’s how I feel. I’m furious he’s killing himself slowly. But he was that person long before me. That’s why he knows and that’s why he’s gone. That’s why there are one thousand walls between us now. It’s better this way.