True Love

Posted by —

0

This Valentine’s Day, I thought I would talk about true love for a little while.

I took a course on Jane Austen while I was in college, taught by one of my favorite professors. One day in class, we were talking about a somewhat dramatic episode in Austen’s life. At a house party near Christmas, a comfortably well-off friend of the family around her age, with a good reputation, proposed marriage. She accepted, only to refuse him the next morning. We don’t know what she was thinking. If she ever wrote about it in letters, they have been lost to us. Some of my classmates immediately started to clamor that maybe she was in love with someone else, that she was unwilling to compromise her romantic ideals, that she didn’t love him… And my professor just looked around at all of us with the look on her face, familiar to us by now, of a woman who was tired of hearing the words “love” and “Jane Austen” in close proximity.

“She knew she couldn’t get married and continue to write.”

“She could have…”

“She absolutely could not have,” my professor said. She reminded us of all the reading we’d done about life in the early 19th century. The endless chores, how long everything took, how even if you had servants you needed to be constantly checking up on them, how once you had children they had to be taken care of. There would be parties and balls to go to and to throw, and all of that would now be her duty, not a diverting pleasure. Sensing that we were still resistant to the idea, she lowered her copy of the biography we were reading.

“You cannot be a woman with a family and an artist at the same time. You must choose between being the best mother you can be and your creative life. It is possible to do both, but not both equally well. You have to understand,” she said, looking around at each of us, mostly girls, hardly worthy of being called women yet, “that you must choose.”

Here was a brilliant, successful scholar, respected in her field. We knew from other conversations in class that she had a child, now grown. She knew whereof she spoke, and she was telling us that if we thought we could do it all, we were going to break our own hearts in the process. I will never forget the impatient gentleness in her voice. It should have been obvious to us. It clearly was not.

Perhaps it became obvious to Austen as she lay awake that night, over two hundred years ago. Perhaps in the rush of the moment, she couldn’t have done anything but say yes. But then she must have realized. And so she chose.

It’s an easy choice for me to make right now. I don’t have children who need me as much as my writing does. My relationship isn’t suffering. It doesn’t seem to hurt my friendships much that I say, “I can’t come out this Friday – I’m writing.” I know they would all love it if I actually produced some work I let anyone read, but I’m going to just gloss over this. (Manuscript, I’m still mostly ignoring you…)

The Princess Bride, an anthem of our time if ever there was one, has a lot to say about true love. True love is magic, true love is the worthiest cause of all. In the movie, it’s two people in love with one another. But one’s true love does not have to be another person.

My true love is a cause no less worthy for being between me and myself. My true love is writing. Creating. Taking the things I have in my brain and transmitting them to words on a page. I’ve always done it. I used to scribble in notebooks before I could make words. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that, it was much easier then.

There are other people I love. I’m in a solid, wonderful relationship with someone who likes the craziness and waking up in the night finding that I’m hunched over my computer, and the occasional wails of, “I don’t know what goes in the middle of a book any more!” I’m lucky. I’m grateful. But it feels like a betrayal to be so clear that there’s this overwhelming need in my life that has nothing to do with another person. Even though everyone has things they love so much.

I’m not going to feel guilty about it. My family, friends and boyfriend all love me, and writing is such an intrinsic part of me that if they love me, they love the fact that I write, too.

Attention!

Posted by —

0

Everybody to get from blog!*

Henceforth, this blog shall be known as inthebookfort.com. I feel very comfortable here in the book fort, and decided to stay. It’s enough to make me wish I could draw, so that I could make a nifty image of a book fort. At some point I hope to use all my books to build an actual fort-shaped thing out of my books, but that won’t happen for a while yet. I hope you continue to read, comment, and enjoy my ranting. Eventually I’ll get around to actually writing and posting some book reviews, posting that list of strong female characters, and of course, continuing to write about my epic quest to live a balanced, creative life.

*If you have never seen The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!, you owe it to yourself to track down a copy, sit someplace comfortable, and howl with laughter for an hour and forty-five minutes.

Feel the love. Or else.

Posted by —

1

Unrelated tangent: George Lucas, you managed to create something I love with all my heart. For that, I thank you. But as I used to say about my ex-boyfriend’s mother, just because you gave birth to it doesn’t mean I have to like every crazy thing you say.

Moving on.

As Valentine’s Day rolls around again, we are inundated with the yearly outpouring of commercials, status updates, and angst surrounding this special day. Every restaurant in the city has special menus, prix fixe dinners with wine pairings, stores are covered with red hearts and little bears in cunning shades of white and pink. The world is filled with sappy pop songs, heart-shaped containers of candy, and ads for discounts on lingerie.

My problem with Valentine’s Day is that it doesn’t actually make anyone happy. One party in a relationship (usually the man) is worried he’s not going to ‘screw it up.’ He’s not going to acquire the right present, or he doesn’t know where his girlfriend wants to go for dinner, and ohgodohgodwe’reallgoingtodie. The other party, usually the woman, is worried because of what the holiday means. Because if it isn’t observed correctly, the relationship is doomed! It means he doesn’t love you! It means you’re a failure as a lover! It must be a PERFECT NIGHT. So, we have a situation in which everyone is anxious, and nobody wins. I have never either heard of or experienced a Valentine’s Day where both parties were truly happy with how things went. And believe me, I’ve heard about some failures that were doozies. Even when things go well, the feelings are of relief, not joy.

And never mind couples. If you aren’t in a relationship, this day usually makes you feel like a bitter failure, as everyone in the world besides you (it seems) is off celebrating happiness that you don’t share. This isn’t always true, or isn’t always true to that extent. But it can cause a pang. In the interests of full disclosure, the best Valentine’s Day I’ve ever spent was by myself. I ate lobster alone in my apartment in front of one of my favorite movies, then took a bottle of sparkling cider and a box of strawberries into the bathroom and read a book in the tub.

It’s a holiday, like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, designed to sell stuff. It doesn’t celebrate anything in particular except “love,” defined as, “romantic congress between two people, both of whom should be prepared to spend lots of money, or else they’re doin’ it wrong.” Statistics show that there is a spike in breakups right around Valentine’s Day. People buckle under the strain of everything their relationship is supposed to be, and everything they’re supposed to be in the relationship. Key words here: supposed to be.

A relationship is a complicated organism. Its success or failure as a going concern can’t be reduced down to the behavior on one arbitrarily chosen day. Love is expressed, or not, a thousand different ways between people who have decided to be together. No one is perfect. There aren’t any rules you can follow that will make you a good partner. If you don’t feel it to begin with, no amount of behaving is going to make things better. And if you do feel it, you don’t need one particular day a year to let you show it.

Random Thoughts of a Thursday Morning

Posted by —

0

1) My hair is wavy most of the time, but occasionally I will wake up with these banana curls that please me no end. They always come out in the shower, but I have to wonder how they get like that while I sleep. Yes, I sometimes find my own hair charming. No, I don’t think that’s wrong.

2) Reading Sarah Rees Brennan’s tumblr page is often the only reason I stay awake in the morning. My phone is my alarm clock, so when I go to turn my alarm off I have a tendency to go, “Oh my bed is so warm and cozy, I’ll just stay here and axe having a productive morning. Sounds like a great idea!” But instead, I check Twitter to engage my brain an extra teensy little bit, and then Sarah’s posted something, and I click on the link, and by the time I’m done reading, I am too awake and amused to go back to sleep. So thank you, Sarah, for providing this excellent service to your fellow humans. Also, your books are good too.

3) I can’t decide whether to read more Terry Pratchett now or to give myself a break. I don’t want to burn out, and there is just so much good stuff to read. But then I think over what I might read instead and all my brain does is go, “But it’s not Pratchett!” and then I read Pratchett and my brain goes “So…much…Pratchett…erglp.” And then I think over what I might read instead and my brain goes, “But it’s not Pratchett!” My poor brain.

4) Hazel Rowley’s biography of the Roosevelts irritates me. I stopped reading halfway through, and I don’t think even the siren call of another book on my spreadsheet is going to help. Perhaps I need a new tab for the books I couldn’t finish/haven’t finished yet. This, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Meaning of Night, Black Sun Rising, Lonesome Dove…

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn’t, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I’d be found in a corner. That was who I was…that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.
- Neil Gaiman (found at booksandnerds via Sarah’s tumblr, linked above)

I didn’t get to do this. My parents, prolific and dedicated readers themselves, believed in pre-emptive strikes. “Is that a book? You can’t bring a book to this. Why not? Because we can’t bring our books, so you can’t, either.” On the other hand, there were places I was allowed to bring my books. To small dinners with my grandparents, to the theater for before the show, to doctors’ waiting rooms, to most meals… I had it pretty good.

I think I ought to go write something else. Or take a shower. Or something. (Brain hopefully goes, “Pratchett? We can take a little more… Erglp!”)

Keeping Track

Posted by —

3

I keep track of the books I read.

It started because I home schooled, and my mother recorded everything I read against the day we’d have to prove that I was an educated human being instead of some kind of feral sociological experiment. At some point early on in high school I took over the recording, and at some point during college, I took all my faithfully kept Word documents and turned them into one large spreadsheet of my reading habits, a monument to Bibliophilia run amok. (I do not remember exactly when I did this, but I have a strong suspicion I was avoiding a paper at the time.)

Whenever I turn the final page of a book, I open my spreadsheet and enter the author, the title, and the date it was completed. There are other columns for rereads, for whether I read it on my Kindle, whether I’ve entered it on Goodreads, or if I got the book from the library. This ritual means something to me. It makes finishing a book more final. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment. Sometimes the only reason I finish a book I’m not loving is so that I can add it to the spreadsheet. It motivates my otherwise fickle reading brain. I read a lot, and I’m usually reading, and I know I will forget otherwise. On three memorable occasions, my spreadsheet stopped me from buying a book I’d already read. On one even more memorable occasion, I realized I’d bought and read a book two separate times while I was entering it, for the second time.

It isn’t just a list of what I’ve been reading. It’s my biography. A small sampling is below.

November 2003: I read The Crimson Petal and the White, my favorite book, for the first time during a bout with pneumonia.
2004: I wasn’t recording dates that year, but I read Timeline (Michael Crichton) and Oracle Night (Paul Auster) that year.
August 2006: The last book I read before I start college is Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel.
August 2008: I blast through the first four books of A Song of Ice and Fire, only managing to finish the fourth one out of sheer momentum.
January 2010: I read Swan Song and love it so much I am late to things on purpose because I’m hanging out under a streetlight.
June 2010: I find the Pendergast series, and love it so much I read all ten books in twenty days.
January 2011: I only read the first two Harry Dresden books. I reread them in a week and a half. I was living in another country, so much newness going on I can’t bear a new book for the first couple of weeks. Then I read Shogun. It mirrors how I feel.
January 2012: I read Wodehouse, Pratchett, and Bujold, all for the first time, all on the recommendation of our affectionate correspondent.

There are a few books I only read because someone I really liked at the time wanted me to. I know how much I like an author’s writing based on how many of their books I read in a row. There are a couple on this list I don’t remember at all. I’ve read some a dozen times or more. I used to leave all the rereads off, but I add them now. This is about more than simply recording what I’ve read. My spreadsheet has become the witness to how I’ve spent my time, and what I cared about. Every entry is a story.

Books hold memories for those of us who read them religiously. They are our palimpsests, our reliquaries. They know our secrets. A book is a time capsule of everything that happened while we were reading it. I look at the book, and it sets off memories. I keep track of the books because I’m writing myself down.

It’s been a while!

Posted by —

0

Hi, Blog! I missed you! I have been neglecting you terribly, but I promise there are good reasons.

I now have a Real Job, which I’m happy about for a number of reasons. I like the work, I like the people, and I think I’m settling in well. The drawbacks are that I don’t have the time to write as much as I did. But I’ll try to post more again.

I also just started watching The Tudors. I have never seen any of it before, by popular request. I have been fascinated, nay, obsessed by Tudor England since I was an ickle girl. My friends didn’t want to hear me snarling, “That’s historically inaccurate!”* However, our long-suffering correspondent turned the first episode on. We’d been talking about it, you see, and he wanted to know if the stories were true. I made it into the first shot. “Those windows are double-hung! They didn’t have double-hung windows in Tudor England!”**

Our long-suffering correspondent is now off in the kitchen, snickering quietly to himself.

But I’m enjoying it. Though the women in Tudor England have an astonishing lack of body hair.***

http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/416779.html

Fantastic blog post from a writer I like very much. I would add that I think the decision to treat women badly in TV shows and books is because a lot of men (the key demographic for a lot of the media under discussion) are programmed from early life not to hit girls, and that violence against women is bad and wrong and horrible. So it’s done with so little thought because it’s an easy way of upsetting or discomfiting your male audience, raising the stakes. It’s a cheap shot.

*While frothing at the mouth, no doubt.
**There was definite frothing at the mouth.
***All right, all right. I’m done.

Fictional Reality

Posted by —

5

I’m annoyed at Laurie R. King. Those of you who know me will be shocked, shocked, I tell you! She’s one of my favorite authors. I respect her a great deal. Her Mary Russell series, the exploits of a young woman who becomes involved with Sherlock Holmes in his retirement, has been a touchstone for me ever since I read the first book about ten years ago. I respect King as a writer, and I follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Therein doth the problem lie.

“Mary Russell” has her own Twitter account, maintained by King herself. (It’s not a fan account, as she has occasionally linked between the two on her author’s Facebook page, which is how I found the Twitter account in the first place.) I don’t like this very much. It feels too cute to ask us all to believe that this character, set very firmly in her time, is still alive and well, along with Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, and John Watson, nearly a full century after the books are set. A lot of people seem to like it, though, so I’m happy to leave it alone as a concept. However.

About a week ago, @mary_russell tweeted, “Just because a body was woman found on the Queen’s Sandringham estate our phone won’t stop ringing. Holmes and I may have to visit Mycroft.” My eyebrows raised. Certainly not in the usual vein of her tweets. I thought for a moment that King decided to make up a tale to have us all follow, so that she could later write a book about it. Fun, I thought! But it still wasn’t sitting right with me, so I googled. Then my mouth dropped open.

It actually happened. A young woman, later identified as a teenager, found dead and possibly murdered on the grounds. And Laurie King thought it would be “cute” to have Holmes and Russell on the case, as it were.

Subsequently, Holmes has gone down to London for a consultation, and a few other tweets have happened, including these from yesterday and today:
“Just heard from Holmes and reading between the lines it appears Brother Mycroft is asking Holmes to hie off to Sandringham. I may join him.”
“Although neither of us actively pursue cases these days, but…I’ll not leave Holmes to do this alone. If I go silent that is the reason.” “Holmes will consult again today, but not go to Sandringham (Mycroft and I had a few words). Really, the local constabulary will handle this.”

I can’t tell you how offended I am. A woman–now we know she was a 17-year-old girl–is found dead, and King is using this as a way of padding her Twitter feed? A girl died, probably scared and alone, and King’s response is to tweet about it as a fictional character and claim some role in the case? I’m appalled. Half the people following her probably don’t know it’s real. They think, probably, that it’s a fictional turn. One woman tweeted back that she’s worried for Russell and Holmes, and wonders if this is going to make it into another memoir. I can see how it would make for a good Russell/Holmes story. You could write a dandy story with the possibility of royal involvement, danger, scandal on the Queen’s estate, there’s a lot to be done with it. But that would be fiction, and this is real life.

It’s one thing to have Russell tweeting from 2012. Her immortality, such as it is, is only conferred by the limits of her fictional existence, but it’s cute enough, I suppose. I love the idea of characters coming in and out of our world, it’s a main plot point in one of my nebulous novels. But this goes beyond the limits of decency for me. By all means, make up a fictional case and have Russell get as involved in it as she wants. Make it up. But for pity’s sake, don’t use a real tragedy as a jumping-off point for your interaction with your fans, claiming agency where none exists.

It’s about time.

Posted by —

1

The holidays ate my brain. I’m back now. All I have left to go is New Year’s, and that’s my favorite one. It doesn’t feel like a “holiday.” New Year’s feels like a celebration of time itself, respect for its power. We don’t do that often enough in this culture. We’re always talking about how we don’t have time for this, or that, or the other thing. We have all these gadgets and gizmos designed to help us get stuff done faster, we focus on teaching kids good “time management” skills, (always have the image of someone trying to herd a gaggle of old-fashioned alarm clocks) we obsess over how we’re spending our time as if someday we’re all going to be asked to give an accounting of our days, and we better have made good choices.

“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”  – Mary Oliver

The truth is, the only person who’s going to care what you do today is you. Well, you and Mary Oliver, maybe. A lot of writing books talk about the importance of walks, the importance of boredom, the importance of letting ideas come to you, of sitting and really puzzling over an idea or three until they come together. I bombard myself so thoroughly with outside noise (present company included although, blog, I love you) that those pieces of perfectly useful advice are usually laughable. There’s e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Ravelry, online journals of friends, blogs of strangers, so many opportunities to fill my brain with other things! Even worse, the things I should be doing…

I Should Be: (A short list*)
- writing a story
- keeping a paper journal
- writing a blog post
- working on the novel
- researching for the novel
- controlling myself from starting new stories just now
- revising something
- reading a “good book”
- reading a “fun book”
- reading the paper
- watching a movie
- catching up on that TV show I like
- knitting
- cross-stitching
- quilting
- tidying this mess of a place
- doing the laundry
- figuring out dinner
- running errands
- making lists
- keeping up with all the little Shoulds that crop up in a day
- seeing a friend I haven’t seen in a while
- boxing some stuff up to give away
- losing weight
- doing research
- volunteering for a cause I believe in
- looking for ways to make money with my art
- looking for ways to make money
- searching for a job
- deciding what I want to do with my life
- thinking deep thoughts
- being brilliant

And somehow, I should do all of this today, or I am an utter failure. A frowny-face on the Good Behavior Chart stuck up on the front of the Refrigerator of Life, looking vainly at the gold and silver stars all the other kids got. (Because of course I think everyone else is better at this than I am, oh how I make myself laugh.)

Nothing on the list above is insurmountable. Shoulds aren’t necessarily bad. Like jealousy and lists on the internet, Shoulds just mirror what we want, so that we can see it clearly. But Shoulds are insidious. Even if I’m doing one thing on my list of Shoulds, I’m not doing any of the others at that moment. I struggle with this all the time, (there’s that time-word again!) the physical inability to be in two places at once. Some of these activities are easily combined. I can write in my head while I do the laundry, and then go run and transcribe some thoughts when I finish. But mostly, I need mental space to do a lot of these things, and many of them don’t combine so easy.

We all have our own Shoulds. I, for one, would like to release myself from their tyranny. To stop making the things I love into mere boxes to check as I try to justify what I’m doing with my life. Join me, and together we will rule the galaxy! (At least, we should…)

So in celebration of time this coming year, I will do my best to enjoy engaging in its passing, no matter what I’m doing. I only get this time once. I am determined to make the best of it, even (or perhaps especially) when I’m sitting, doing nothing, staring up at the sky.

“Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”  – Shel Silverstein

In the end, no one really cares what I do but me. I’ll live my life, as well as I can, within the constraints and possibilities offered by each day. So, off I go into the wild blue yonder. First, though, I think I should eat something and put a book in my bag. In case there are queues in the wild blue yonder.

*I edited this post half a dozen times so far to add items to the list.

Do better.

Posted by —

5

Dear Kevin,

I thought about responding to you in the comments, but found I had far too much to say.

You are part of the problem. I appreciate that you feel you’re trying to “help” by telling me, essentially, that I’m whining into the wind, and nobody cares, and it’s never going to change anything. (Nobody is here defined as “white male creators of media,” because I assure you, a lot of people care very deeply.) That I shouldn’t wait for an “apology from the king,” and that women need to write our own stories and find our own audiences. So, we should be good little girls and go sit in our corners and be quiet, hmm? Scribble for ourselves and each other in our own communities, and be satisfied with that. First of all, those communities already exist. Your charming assumption that I need to be educated on how to create them shows me just how much you actually pay attention, as much as you claim to “sympathize” with me. I am sensing an uncomfortable shift of the shoulders, here.

“Speaking out” is an incredibly important part of changing something. It’s the beginning of change. The personal is political, power to the people, how do you think that happens? If we all just bow our heads to the authorities and scuttle off to our corners to lick our wounds and write our indie stories in a fog of bitterness, it doesn’t. Sharing experiences, realizing that others have the same problems, the same feelings, that’s so powerful. It adds fuel to the fires within us. Because other people feel the way I do. They have the same discomforts, the same needs. You should know this, given that you claimed authority on social movements and change. (You were wrong, by the way. Change only happens if the mainstream acknowledges you. It’s true of the Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement, right on back down to Constantine converting to Christianity and before even that. There have always been fringe societies operating differently, no one calls them change. They call them crazy. And I have to tell you, personally? As a woman? I am tired of being called crazy.)

Now, you may not be totally happy with what I’m speaking out about, it may be putting your back up in unfamiliar and uncomfortable ways to see lots of posts on and discussions of the state of the female in creative media, how women really oughtn’t be simply sex objects or princesses in other castles, and deserve more attention and depth. By the way, I am so grateful to you for saying “it’s good reading,” and you “like discussing it, sharing it with others.” Wow! Oh, I feel so respected. This next point is important, Kevin. I am not doing this for your entertainment, or anyone’s entertainment. Remember when you so patronizingly said, “You have to dedicate yourself to a worthy cause”? I am dedicated. You just aren’t fully comfortable with the cause, even if you do “get” it.

As well, and I know this is a cheap shot, but telling me, “Bella is such a bad female character that guys find her repulsive” is the blinking neon sign over the seedy motel of your hypocrisy. “Guys” wouldn’t care about her, wouldn’t know about her, if so many women hadn’t begun yelling so loudly over the Twilight books. “Guys” hopped on the Twihate bandwagon because those books were such extreme and egregious examples of misogynistic, idiotic, underestimation of young women and men that it was safe to dislike them. Twilight is safe to hate, too, because it doesn’t threaten any of the media traditionally aimed at men. Also, Twihate scored them serious points with the ladieez.

You say change happens slowly. I agree. Some changes take longer than others. This change wouldn’t be hard to accomplish, in a practical sense. The incubation time on a Hollywood blockbuster is about two years. Novels are generally published about two years after acceptance. For comic books, much less time. For television shows, much less time. We’re all a captive audience for the seriously hyped media. Things could get better tomorrow, and yet, they are getting so much worse. Everyone was so excited for the DC reboot, and what did we get? Tell me. Cast back in your mind to the shocking, insulting reboots of the female characters, at a time when more women than ever are becoming interested in comics. That’s change, all right. That’s overt sexism. That’s practically violence, on the level of pen and ink. “Get away, girls, we only see you as sex objects, don’t you DARE come in to our tree house.”

I don’t give a flying fuck about apologies from the king. I saw this particular emperor naked a long time ago. They’re meaningless, anyway. It frustrates me when my male friends tell me, “I feel like I need to apologize for my penis.” I don’t want that. No one should be made to feel lesser because of their gender. NO ONE. WHICH IS MY POINT. It is not pie-in-the-sky idealism to want my characters to be better written. To be given more depth, more complexity, more lush details so they stand apart from their backgrounds. I don’t want all female characters to be written as sword-wielding monoliths, I want them to be written better, so that I can see them, so that if they are kidnapped or raped or murdered horribly, as sometimes stories demand that they be, I feel something for them other than distaste at the actions and wanting to shake it off as quickly as possible. Because so many of them are worthless, now. It hardly matters. Violence gets more gory, we are desensitized to it, because the characters – male and female – are so poorly written we would hardly care otherwise. It’s like making one’s barbie dolls have sex, plastic bumping against plastic.

And all this, I want for the men in my stories, too. So that all characters are worthy of each other. So that we can move away from cardboard cut-outs. This is a change that could happen right now, if the creators were worthy of their creations, or their audiences. They can be. I know they can be. These are smart people, men and women, but mostly men, I know. They can write better, dream bigger. Make room for others.

There is nothing wrong with me wanting this right now. Because I want it for all of us, so very badly. And don’t you dare tell me I have to convince anyone that I’m a person. “Proving” to the menfolk that I can be just as interesting and important to a story as they are is horrid, because they know. They have wives, and daughters, and mothers and sisters, and they’ve loved strong, interesting female characters in their time as much as I’ve loved the strong male ones. They know. Oh, they know. They just don’t want to admit it, because they would have to work harder. Which is short-sighted and stupid, because I have money to spend like any one else. I just don’t tend to spend it on media aimed at women, because I find that tripe the most insulting of all.

This is an important debate, there are so many sides to it. But at the end of the day, we want the same thing. We want good, entertaining stories with strong characters. I am just increasingly unwilling to settle, on my side of the gender balance. And one final word. Perhaps men will always see women as “women first.” I am willing to state that biology does play a part. But before you dance too far down that essentialist excuse for a path, please remember that those strong, good, female role models you had saw you, the whole person. They did not make a hundred different assumptions about who you were and what you were capable of, simply based on your gender. Just think about that. Think about how our best relationships are not based simply or merely on gender. We see the person beneath. I want more to see. And yes. I want it now. No one should have to wait to be a person.

I thought for a long time before I pressed the “Publish” button on this post. Hell, I thought for a long time before I started to write this post. Worried that it wouldn’t be “nice” of me. That it might hurt your feelings. That other people I know are going to think less of me for such a direct response, or attack, or something. To hell with that. You can take it. You have most of the heroes and superheroes on your side.

All my sincerest regards,
Miranda

I am a woman.

Posted by —

9

I started writing a post about an hour ago. I had eleven hundred words before I knew it, and they were some of the angriest words I have ever put to page. Writing about nerd male privilege and being a “geek girl” just after seeing Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is perhaps not the most effective recipe for a balanced response to my subject. I am an angry person, it turns out, but after a first very ranty draft about the dregs of behavior geek girls have to put up with, I took a step back and established what I am truly angry about, in my little corner of the big and angering subject, “Women in fiction and its environs.” What I’m most angry about is the stories. Angry about the way women are treated in the stories I love. I should know. I am a woman.

I am betrayed by the stories I love. Betrayed, belittled, ignored, used, punished, raped, tortured, and killed. I have little clothing, and less agency. I am a plot device, a cliche, as much a part of the hero’s journey as the Totem or the Mentor, and about as well-rounded. I have worn many names and many outfits, my hair has been raven, fiery, chestnut, and golden. I have been femme fatale, ingenue, princess, whore, with and without the heart of gold. I am reviled when I am strong, I am ridiculed when I am weak. I am a woman.

I am betrayed, too, by the world I inhabit in my life outside of stories. The world of geeks and nerds, the world of swords and sorcery, ships and starships. The realms of fantasy, science and fiction are still a boy’s club, though it gets better. Oh, how it gets better too slowly for me. I was raised on Batman and Star Trek, a legacy that brings me joy to this day, this very minute of writing. But there are shadows in the corners of my eyes, monsters in the alleys of the City of Invention that I love. For I am not striding down the streets, chest thrown back, my chin raised. My hand is not on the hilt of my sword, no challenge to all comers is present in my eyes. I am a woman. I am in danger here.

My presence as protagonist is bewildering to the men around me. As a woman who loves what they love, I am a woman, who loves what they love. I have no right of my own to their inheritance. I am a victim of my genetics. I am here on sufferance. It took Star Trek three separate series and nearly seventeen seasons on the air before someone had the guts to write a female captain. Janeway is the most reviled of the Star Trek captains, for reasons that in other series made Picard and Kirk heroes. She, on being born a woman.

My opinions in the outside world are suspect and apparently easily shot down. I am accused of minding the shocking objectification of women in games, movies, and TV shows just because I’m a girl, as if there is a whole class of problem I just wouldn’t have to bother about, if I were not female. That, in fact, my concerns and questions about the role and treatment of women in geek media are so much noise to be listened to with a long-suffering expression and an uncomfortable shift of the shoulders. As if to say, “I know this is wrong, but I don’t want to have to stop loving what I love…” I understand you, you know. I understand all too well. I am a woman.

My love of so many stories is a double-edged sword. They mean the world to me, and yet I am forgotten. Tintin, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, they are nearly bereft of women. As if there is only, or ever could be, one woman. “The” woman. Is it any wonder women are at each other’s throats, when the wisdom of stories tells us there is only room for one of us? In rich and vibrant worlds, expansive enough to hold dragons and magic rings, or spaceships that soar through the air, technology as if by magic, there is no room for more than two or three female characters?

I exist on the edges, in the subtext, and behind the scenes. I am a cackling crone when I work magic, an untrustworthy minx when I am clever. Perhaps I am unbalanced, insane, a slave to my urges and emotions, like Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Harlequin. Perhaps I am Lady Macbeth, forever washing my hands of the sin of ambition, rotting in the dungeon of public opinion with Cersei Lannister. Or Desdemona, proven trustworthy too late, as death is the punishment for even the imagined indiscretions.

I write, and I read, and I try so very hard to be brave when I come to my keyboard. Brave enough to write complex, capable people. Brave enough to say that a character can be a woman and not spend the entire book being a woman. That she, like her male counterparts, can simply be who she is. Brave enough to define a woman by what she does and says, rather than by how other characters perceive her. Brave enough to make her more human than a Disney Princess with a dark past. But it is a frightening place in the City of Invention. I must be special, but not too much. I must be likable, but “strong.” To survive, to have any hope of surviving, I must make men want me, and women want to be me. But not too much, or else I will be accused of being a fantasy. I have news for you. All of this is a fantasy.

I walk through the streets of the City of Invention with my chest out, and it does not matter what size or shape that chest is. My chin is raised, and there is a challenge in my eyes to all comers. Try and stop me. Try and distract me. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will resurrect me. We must fight this fight until we win. We who claim to represent truth more fully than life itself.

I am a woman. This is my story, still untold, though such things get better. Oh, but they get better too slowly for me.