Lisa Paitz Spindler, Danger Gal

Broadsheet blogger Judy Berman today came out to being a geek.

I recently had to admit something to myself: I am, it turns out, a geek. I finally came to terms with it earlier this week, after drinks with female friends. We had been catching up and talking shop when someone mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of a sudden, we were all shouting over one another, recounting our favorite episodes and most loved and hated characters.

Despite the fact that Berman used a very cool Kevin Smith quote,* I spent a good few minutes trying to ferret out why her post left me feeling disaffected. Shouldn’t I be glad that more and more women are owning up to their geek interests? (yeah) Shouldn’t I be ecstatic that there’s a much larger female presence at geek venues like Comic Con? (hell yeah) So what’s my problem?

I re-read the post a few times and kept coming back to an angle that initally flew right under the radar:

One friend floated the idea that the show includes just about every kind of guy a girl geek could possibly be attracted to.

To each her own, obviously, but this is not why I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I love that show for these reasons: Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Tara, Fred, Darla, Drusilla.

Buffy can kick arse six ways to Sunday, Willow has the power of the universe at her fingertips, Cordelia has more self-confidence in her pinky finger than most women will ever have, Tara lived a life of authenticity, Fred has one of the biggest brains on the planet, and Darla told the world to suck on its outdated idea of “good little girls.” But Berman and her gal pals would far rather talk about how dreamy Angel, Spike, Riley, and Xander are.

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This week’s Danger Gal Friday profile is a little bit different: Margaret and Helen, two “best friends for sixty years and counting.” Margaret and Helen are both in their 80s — and have started a blog set up by Helen’s grandson. I’m dubbing them Danger Gals because they speak their mind. From their About Us page:

My name is Helen Philpot. I am 82 years old. My grandson taught me how to do this so that I could “blog” with my best friend Margaret Schmechtman who I met in college almost 60 years ago. I have three children with my husband Harold. Margaret has three dogs with her husband Howard. I live in Texas and Margaret lives in Maine.

These two women, but Helen especially, have a lot to say and they’re hilarious saying it. Helen’s grandson set up the blog for them because he “wanted to capture her words and stories for our family to have as a tribute to her for many years to come. I told her it would be like scrapbooking with a computer. . . I thought it might give her something fun to do with her friend and keep her young at heart. I think it is working.”

I hope these two are for real, I really do.

If you’re a McCain supporter, a word of warning: You likely won’t enjoy Helen’s point of view. She does have a way with words and I admire both ladies for voicing their opinions. I respect that they’re mastering blogging technology in their 80s. I hope that when I’m that age I’ll be just as spry.

It’s hard to choose a favorite quote from Helen, but this is right up there on my list:

I am 82 years old (83 in December). It’s time to hand the reigns over to the next generation and hope that we did a good job raising them. To Senator McCain I say, with love in my heart, sit down and shut up. You’re beginning to look like an ass and your answers sound like a cross between Barnie Fife and Floyd the Barber. And no matter how many times you start a sentence with “My friends” if you end it with a bunch of stuff that really doesn’t make sense… well eventually someone like me is going to call “bullshit”…

You just can’t teach an old dog a new trick… even if you put lipstick on it. Change is needed. I know because I am a fat, old dog. For too many years I’ve been eating more pie than I should. Jenny Craig had me doing pretty good for a few years but eventually I started eating pie again. John McCain has been part of the Republican party in Washington for 26 years. It doesn’t matter what he has been saying the last few months, eventually he’s going to eat the party pie again. He’s old. I’m old. That’s what we do. We don’t suddenly switch to salad.

It’s OK. We’ve been part of the greatest generation. We had our turn. Now we get to sit back and enjoy our pie while someone else worries about the calories. The new guy has the energy and the new ideas. Senator Obama, I hope you’re up for the challenge.

One more thing for Senator McCain before this old bird goes to bed. Ronald Reagan is dead. Let it go.

You go girls!

Tales from the Inner Sanctum contributor Michael May is starting a new feature on his blog and it’s partially my fault :

One of the things I want to do here in terms of content – or whatever we’re calling it – is to explore more of the female heroes in comics and other kinds of storytelling. Lisa Paitz Spindler has a really cool feature on her blog called Danger Gal Friday, and – with apologies to her – I want to do something similar here. I’m not going to commit to a weekly feature, but I’d like to profile some of the great heroines.

This makes all the hard work worth it, since one of my reasons for starting up this blog was to celebrate strong heroines. May obviously gets that. We crossed paths a while back when I profiled Wonder Woman. The thematic parallels between Romance, especially Paranormal Romance, and Comics continues to intrigue me.

The Romance genre is so often judged on 30 year old bodice-ripper books, but I continue to maintain that it’s got Feminist cred. Case in point, SBTB just posted the obituary of Ms. Barbara Lantz, Romance writer and founder of the Tuscon Saguaro Romance Writers RWA chapter. I’m posting the obit here from the July 3 Arizona Daily Star, but you can also see it (and numerous comments) over at SBTB. [Emphasis below, mine]

Barbara Lantz was a romance writer.

Not the bodice-ripping, Fabio-loving, heroine-in-need-of-rescue type of romance writer. Turns out the slender pulp paperbacks with swooning women and muscular men on their covers were more the fantasy of the men who published them than the women who wrote them.

Lantz wrote sweet, believable American tales about capable women who, in the course of their lives’ adventures, met honorable men worthy of their love….

Members of the Saguaro Romance Writers agree the genre has gotten a bad rap over the years, mostly due to silly marketing ploys and cheesy book covers. In reality, they say, romance is a respected, well-read and lucrative genre.

“It’s the most feminist of all literature because it’s the only form of literature where women are guaranteed to win and come out with an emotionally satisfying finish,” [Maureen] Caudill said.

Hat tip: SBTB

Yesterday over at my group blog, Writers at Play, we were talking about how marketers sell products to women. Most of the time they (1) make it smaller (there’s a naughty joke there, but I’m not falling for it), (2) make it pink (and another joke I’m not falling for), (3) put rhinestones on it (you really go there?) or (4) put Hello Kitty on it (oh, that’s just too easy). Sometimes marketers actually use sex, like when using a hot construction worker to sell Diet Coke or x-ray vision to sell Bud Light. (Click on over to Writers at Play to see those commercials).

Now Sarah Haskins is poking fun at the marketers, which they deserve after thinking that a demographic who makes up over half the population is a “niche market.” See the video below. Broadsheet is right, Jon Stewart really should hire Haskins.

I know that the usual topic here has something to do with science fiction, but since I do sometimes post about feminist issues, I think this is apropos. Earlier today, CNN posted the article “8 Ways To Be A Happier Mom” in conjunction with its content partner Parenting.com. While most of the advice here isn’t necessarily bad advice, it’s advice that should apply to everyone, not just mothers: be vocal about asking for help when you need it, get your zzzzs, re-prioritize, live in the moment, see the forest for the trees, connect with other people and be grateful. Still, I have three bones to pick with this article.

(1) The article points to a University of Michigan study that examined mothers’ attitudes toward childcare — the article doesn’t specify, but from the context I assume this study was of stay-at-home mothers. The mothers were asked to rate certain activities, and: “on their list of pleasurable activities, moms rank child care lower than eating, exercising, or watching TV. . . And kid care rates only slightly higher than housework, working, or commuting!”

I venture that this is a common attitude by most people, not just most women or most mothers. This is the high point of the article for me, that at least we’re acknowledging how unrewarding childcare can be at times. I didn’t say it isn’t valuable, I’m saying it’s difficult. I’m looking forward to the day when stay-at-home mothers upon re-entering the workforce can put “childcare” down on their resumes and not be penalized for it. I’m a working mother and I pay almost a grand a month in childcare costs. It’s valuable, people. It’s worth something.

(2) Maybe my priorities are just messed up, but this doesn’t ring true for me: “‘Making $60,000 more in annual income has less of an effect on your daily happiness than getting one extra hour of sleep a night,” says study author Norbert Schwarz, Ph.D., a professor of psychology.’” Um, no. Especially when gas prices are $4/gallon.

(3) Just martyr yourself during the week, kay? You can take the weekends off from that:

So how can you sneak in that extra hour or two? Misha Sauer, mom of 1-year-old Riley, says her husband takes over on the weekends so she can sleep in. “It makes a big difference in the way I feel,” says the Culver City, California, mom. “And I’m more willing to do something active, like take my daughter to the park. If I’m tired, the most I can do is sit there and read to her.”

So, she’s a stay at home mom, which means she works in childcare all day. Her husband works in something else all day. But I assume it’s only her getting up in the middle of the night. I guess the thinking is that she can sleep in? She can’t. She’s got a 1 yr. old and a second child, both of whom are probably awake by 7am. She’s running around all day, he’s likely sitting at a desk. Why can’t he get up at night?! Hmmm? Wait, I see the difference now. He’s using his brain all day, while she is not. Right?

While I’m up on my soapbox, here’s an article by The Guardian “Is this the end of the stay at home mother,?” which instead wants to elicit an emotional reaction akin to “OMFG! The sky is falling! Cthulhu is going to eat you!” But let’s quote Tina Downham, former headhunter and now a “full-time mum” (since I work, does this mean that I’m not a mother during 9-5? Does this in turn mean that my stretch-marks magically disappear during those hours?) says:

“Looking after children is the biggest job you will ever have. If you put them in nursery you get the worst of them – at the beginning and the end of the day. How do you ever do any bonding?”

I don’t believe in the Mommy Wars; I think that mostly the conflict is manufactured by the media. Most real-life women understand that whether you work in or out of the home, we’re all still working our tails off. I’m not sure Downham does though, unless she really meant to imply that working mothers can’t bond with their children, that bonding only happens between 9-5. Let’s just give her the benefit of the doubt, shall we?

Let’s see Downham’s whole story though:

One day she picked her daughter up from nursery at the 6.30pm cut-off time and Holli, then three, said, “Mummy, do I have to be the last one here?’ She realised it was time to quit. “It makes me feel sick when I think about what I had to juggle.”

Downham’s problem wasn’t that she worked, it’s that she had a crappy commute. I’ve been there, I’ve had the nasty 90-minute commute. I understand where she was in that moment. I just wish she weren’t using the bonding excuse, though, to justify a life choice that makes her happy: being home with her kids. She’s doesn’t need to justify that at all, let alone denigrating working mothers in the process. Faced with this same dilemma, we moved to another city where housing costs were lower, extended family was closer, and the whole family could be sitting down for dinner at 6pm. It was a drastic solution, but we both wanted more family time — and it shouldn’t come down to one of us having to give up our professional lives if we didn’t want to and could avoid it. If you’re happier being at home, more power to you, but there are other choices available. The only options are not binary and mutually exclusive.

Other parts of this Guardian article were very interesting, such as the idea that what we think of as the “classic nuclear family” isn’t all that classic, and that Joy Gower’s quote was poignant:

“My husband did not approve of his wife going out to work. He thought that if you had children, it was your duty to stay at home. I did enjoy bringing my sons up, but I also wanted to be me. I was glad that I could be there for all the sports days, but I do look back now and see that I was oppressed. There is some sadness and regret. I was capable of a lot more.”

Over at Dear Author this morning, there is some great discussion on the independently minded heroine in the Romance genre titled “‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ or how the independent heroine challenges Romance.” The discussion has led to the working inside vs. outside the home decision that all mothers have to face at some point. One of the many good points raised is the differentiation of the kinds of autonomy: emotional, financial, professional. This is a vital distinction. I would caution not to sacrifice the latter two for the first one. I’m not so much advocating the pitfall of “having it all,” but I am saying that we women should safeguard our financial and professional security. If you’re going to take yourself off the official job market to get your Ph.d. in motherhood, keep in touch somehow with the market so your resume doesn’t have an 8-10 year hole in it, which could mean you’re unhirable. Also, you haven’t been paying into Social Security or contributing to a 401(k) during that timespan. Get a good life insurance plan for the hubby in case the unimaginable happens.

One day maybe those years at home raising the next generation will count as work experience on our resumes. That probably won’t happen until a whole bunch of men start becoming stay-at-home dads and they experience it first-hand.

But really: All the moms? Same team. The media? The other team. The Mommy Wars are propaganda, don’t give into it.

Case in point: Want to look ten pounds slimmer? Wear a girdle. What is this, 1953? You say it’s not my mother’s girdle, but I don’t buy it.

Over at io9, Annalee Newitz has written a post about “What Chicks Don’t Like About Science Fiction.” If you’re a woman and you like your Science Fiction extra crispy, thank you very much, go chime in as a commenter. The discussion has turned to what kind of market share women have in the genre, which led me to the Broad Universe statistics page. Digging in to these numbers has highlighted a few trends I didn’t quite quantify before.

more cat pictures

In 2007, of the number of forthcoming books as reported by Locus almost 40% were written by female authors. That was up about 8% from 2000, and I feel comfortable saying that we could gain that much again in half the time if the trend continues. So, by 2012 half of Science Fiction writers could be female.

Of the various writing awards in the genre, the Philip K. Dick, Hugo and World Fantasy awards are still quite male dominated. From 1990-1999, 1 woman and 10 men were awarded the Philip K. Dick Award. In the same time frame, 13 women and 28 men won the Hugo. However, in that same time span, women closely edged out men in winning the Joseph Campbell award (6 women, 5 men) while 19 women and 21 men won the Nebula. There are two Campbell awards, so I’m unsure which one this statistic refers to, but if it’s the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, that award is a little unique in that winners are chosen by a jury — and in 2006 three of the eight jurists were female.

In 2001, the National Science Foundation reports that a nearly equal number of women and men read Science Fiction magazines and books: Out of 823 women and 751 men in the data set that 28% of women and 31% of men read Science Fiction. So, of the approximately 1,500 people in the data set, 230 women and 232 men read Science Fiction.

While researching the statistics in this post, I came across a transcript of a speech that Hugo and Nebula award winning author Nancy Kress gave in 1993 where she provides and excellent overview of how Science Fiction has changed as a genre and how female characters and writers have factored into the equation. One great quote:

If true equality presume that all, or most, readers will respond to a work of fiction solely on the basis of its quality, no matter what gender wrote it or what gender are the main characters, then no, we don’t have equality within science fiction. And we never will, because people don’t read only for literary quality. They read to see themselves in books, people they can identify with. And for that to happen, many people need to see someone of the same gender as they are in the central role in order for the identification to fully happen.

I think that needs to be on a t-shirt or something.

In a recent CNN interview, the actor who played Cyclops in the X-Men movies waxes on about how a guy’s clothes should never be wearing him and how sexy his wife’s neck is, but most especially about fatherhood, role models and how sex appeal is really about confidence not age:

What does your wife find sexy on you?

A button-front shirt with [baby] spit-up on the shoulder. That means a guy is taking care of the kids and is a good father — that’s sexy to a woman. The adult version of rose petals and champagne is if I let my wife sleep in and I get up to change the baby’s diaper, feed the kids, and do the dishes…

Who inspires you?

Paul Newman. My middle name is Paul, and my grandfather once said I was going to look like Paul Newman. That stuck with me. Beyond being a good-looking guy, Newman is a great actor with a long career, and he’s got a life. He’s married with kids and lives in Connecticut, sells popcorn and marinara sauce, and gives the money to charity…

Don’t you agree that guys have it easy — they are considered “distinguished” as they grow older?

I don’t think it’s guy-specific. As women get older, they become more comfortable with themselves. Susan Sarandon is the poster woman for that. A lot of guys fantasize about being with women who are in their forties or fifties.

I like that the interviewer asked not only what Marsden found sexy, but what the woman in his life found to be sexy — turning that gaze around for the audience.

This week’s Danger Gal Friday profile is of Major Catherine Li, from Chris Moriarty’s Science Fiction novel SPIN STATE, a Philip K Dick Award and Prometheus Award nominee.

Since I’ve recently started reading the sequel, SPIN CONTROL, I realized that I never have profiled Catherine Li. Mostly this is due to the fact that this book is so dense — it’s detective noir hard science fiction with a gender and sexuality subtext — that no review or profile I write could successfully cover the scope of it. But I’ll do my best.

First off, I wasn’t kidding about this being hard science fiction. The core technology in the story centers on quantum entanglement, and Moriarty did her homework with seven pages of end notes citing scientific papers on the topic. I read this book way back in 2005, and compared it as many have to Richard Morgan’s ALTERED CARBON:

Morgan’s and Moriarty’s debut books are often compared to one another, which is why I read one after the other. UN Peacekeeper Catherine Li is a clone, and she’s covered that fact well, but maybe not well enough when she’s sent back home to solve the murder of physicist Hannah Sharifi — from the same clone bank as Li. There are definite similarities between SPIN STATE and ALTERED CARBON, but they’re vastly different books. I especially liked Moriarty’s concept of “streamspace,” effectively a virt environment like the Matrix, but one enabled by quantum entanglement. And yes, I had to read this book with a dictionary in hand, but that’s what I liked about it.

Catherine Li fits the Danger Gal profile in several different ways. First off, she breaks with many hard science fiction and detective noir stories by just being a female protagonist. She’s actually in charge of getting to the bottom of the mystery, rather than being the girl sidekick with a gun.

I don’t have the book in front of me as I write this, but I also seem to remember Li being vaguely Asian, as is Hannah Sharifi since the two of them are clones from the same source. Li’s appearance doesn’t fall in line with the typical stereotype of what’s deemed as feminine attractiveness, either, namely that she’s shaved her head. This plays well against the gender and sexuality issues in this novel encapsulated by Li’s affair with Bella, a beautiful pawn of the Syndicates and the UN, and Li’s on-going relationship with Cohen, an artificial intelligence who “shunts” into humans of both male and female genders.

So, in Li we have a protagonist who challenges gender, ethnicity, appearance, and sexuality expectations. That’s a superfecta of story elements I haven’t seen very often. (See if that word show up on Free Rice. . .)

This was a challenging read that I enjoyed. This book takes on the big Science Fiction “What if?” question on both scientific and social issues. So far I’m about a quarter into its sequel, SPIN CONTROL, and enjoying it just as much. Li and Cohen evidently show up at some point in the sequel and I’m looking forward to that. I’ve included links to two more reviews of this book, for those who want to know more.

Off the Shelf Review by Paul Witcover
Eagle Review by Russ Allbery

I rarely dish about celebrities, but since I’ve talked about parenting issues a few times this story seemed apropos. The Hollywood Rag celebrity blog recently quoted some anonymous source as reporting to Time and InStyle of the Pitt-Jolie partnership that:

“Brad gets up really early with the children. He changes diapers and gets Zahara and Shiloh fed and dressed for the day. He takes this responsibility very seriously.

“While Angie was busy filming Brad was superdad. He got into the routine of getting up with all the kids, getting the Corn Flakes for breakfast and getting them prepped for school. When Brad dresses the kids, he lets them pick whatever they want to wear, even if it’s weird or mismatched.”

So, doing what mothers have been doing for generations makes Brad Pitt “superdad.”

I know quite a few dads who do all these same things, my own husband included, which I think is one of the sexiest things on the planet. Let’s not label them superdads, though. Instead, let’s celebrate the few couples who equitably split parenting roles between them and not along traditional gender roles. I have nothing against traditional gender roles so long as those involved actively choose that, but let’s also not overly praise men for doing things women have been doing all along with hardly more praise than flowers once a year on Mother’s Day.

Let’s just all grow up and do what needs to be done, regardless of gender.