Boys & Their Toys

Mistress Krista is reading The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. The main argument being that men's fear of women makes men more conservative.

Hm.

First let me throw out the term "femiphobia" as a way of naming this anxiety. Femiphobia is the male fear of being feminine. The underlying premise of my book is that the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This imperative to be repudiate everything feminine – whether it's external or internal – is played out as much in politics as in personal life.

In politics – where there is an enormous potential for personal gain or ruin – what this leads to is a concerted effort on the part of candidates to disavow the feminine in themselves, and to project it on to their opponents.

OK, I'll go with this. This interview was posted about the time of the last presidential election, and watching Kerry and Bush play the "Who's the real man?" game was fascinating. When you run on a platform of fear and terror, being a "real man" is going to look attractive to a lot of people. The problem comes during peace time, when all those guys you taught that being a violent asshole meant he was a real man turn on the home team. I'd be out a lot of guy friends if they all bought into this view of masculinity.

The problem with our current notion of masculinity is that it’s a definition of manhood based on domination. The problem with definition of manhood based on domination is that domination can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state – it is dependent on having somebody in the subordinate position, which means that you may be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow, unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control. This definition goes back to the ancient Greeks, and it makes masculinity a precarious and brittle achievement – which has to be constantly asserted. It has to be proven over and over again. It is the ultimate Sisyphean pursuit.

Yes. Much like trying to be a "real woman." If you buy into that bullshit, it's going to be something you pursue until you die, and because you're aging the whole time, and "real women" are forever young, you're screwed. It's why we've got botox and liposuction, and the boys are playing that game now, too. Remember what a big joke it was that Kerry'd been botoxed? A little too "fem" for some?

The worst thing an ancient Greek politician could be accused of is being a binoumenos, which loosely translated means "fucked male."

And we have similiar terms today. Funny, how the guy "playing the woman" is seen as less of a person. If women were seen as strong, intelligent, rational, capable people, would being told he was "acting like a woman" be seen as insulting to a man?

In American politics – both in the 19th century and in the present – it is a short step from seeming gilded to looking gelded. So there is an effort to adopt a persona of primitive masculinity. And the important thing to remember is that this is a makeover of style and not of substance. These are still wealthy members of the ruling elite, but their class is now camouflaged by virtue of this re-masculinization.

Which is an interesting point: Bush and the neo-conservatives tend to be all-talk sorts of men. Men with old money who'll never have to see war, violence, poverty, or a battlefield. As much as they tote the idea that they're not "girly men" I know a great number of women with more "masculine" attributes than these guys display. Going fishing does not a warrior make. And a good thing, too, because unemployed warriors tend to make trouble.

Have you seen that movie "Fight Club"? That’s a movie about white-collar men who are unable to affirm their masculinity, [men] who live in a corporate hierarchy, and need to appropriate brutal pugilism that is their fantasy of working class masculinity. I think it relates, in part, to the inchoate sense that working as a paper shuffler, or as a bureaucrat, or in a cubicle, that there’s something unmanly about that. The popularity of boxing in the 19th century is actually about middle-class men who were drawn to the sport.

I'll agree that that's what part of Fight Club is about, getting back a sense of self in a world that tells you you're shit. But I don't know that that's all about men. To me, Fight Club was a reflection on our buy-more, be-better culture. We're being coddled and told that if we have enough Ikea furniture, we'll be whole, healthy, and empowered individuals, when in fact, what some of us may need to do to feel whole is sell everything and go backpacking the world for three years and help AIDS orphans in Lesotho. These guys just so happened to find strength and purpose in beating the crap out of each other. Judging yourself in how well you can respond in a fight is a pretty classic measure of your self worth, whether (I would argue) you're male or female. Knowing you can defend yourself if threatened, not just intellectually, but *knowing* because you've been in a fight, inspires a real confidence in a person. It's confidence you can't buy for $49.95 from an infomercial.

This is where his inarticulateness actually becomes an advantage – because in American culture, there is a disdain for intellectuality. And that disdain is a gendered disdain – men who are intellectual are seen as somehow less manly. And so if somebody speaks too well, or too articulate, his masculinity is called into question.

This is a sad, sad, time for America if this was really true. If all men disdained intellectual pursuits, I couldn't stomach sleeping with a guy ever again, let alone have any guys friends. There is nothing so unnattractive as somebody who doesn't think about things. And that bothers me about the culture of American masculinity. You see more and more guys blowing off college, and yea, they'll often make just as much money as a woman with a college degree, but not for long. She'll likely go up, but if he's fired, you just look and see how many jobs out there that pay more than 20K a year that *don't* require a 4-year degree. There will still be an old-white-boy club at the top, but if the trend of "boys being dumb is cool" is really true, you're going to get a lot more male have-nots at the bottom.

The gender gap is about men becoming more conservative. It isn’t about women becoming more liberal. Now, the feminist movement, in a way, did effect a kind of liberalization, especially when it came to issues of gender. But I think, in many ways, presented as another kind of threat to men. What you see is that men become significantly more conservative...In other words, men are much more conservative than women are liberal.

The argument confuses me. So, women are staying the same in their attitudes, but men are becoming more conservative? Does this mean women were always conservative? Or are they really not conservative at all, but faintly liberal, as a whole? I'm also interested that he believes the feminist movement only effected a "Kind of liberalization" that seems to only have effected issues "like gender." So, like, "those gender issues" aren't important?

And all the trends I've heard have put America as a whole moving more toward the conservative, not just men. I could be totally wrong, and I'd love to be, but I haven't seen anything in "the real world" to back up this argument of boys-only conservativism. If this was true, women could turn all the elections liberal.

We have an administration that is, almost, congenitally incapable of acknowledging any mistake because to acknowledge a mistake is to really risk their manhood. To acknowledge a mistake, especially a mistake that involves failure to listen to advice – the proverbial refusal to ask for directions – imperils their manhood. And so, instead of this kind of behavior being pigheaded arrogance, it’s framed as manly resoluteness.

Which I call "idiocy."

You poor boys, growing up thinking you've gotta be assholes to get respect. Much like us poor girls, thinking we have to be idiots to be loved.

Crazy world. It's good to be grown up now.

I keep hoping everyone else will do the same, soon.

Revenge of the Venom Cock

Here's Touched By Venom(!) a new fantasy novel, teaching us all to Respect the Cock:

Right away, I noticed their erections. Truth, I'd been looking for them, as had Waisi and Kobo's twins, Rutvia and Makvia. All four of us poked each other and tittered. Behind us, Mother yanked on Waisi's and the twin's braids with her strong potter's hands. She even yanked on my own scabby bristle, causing instant tears. We paid heed. Unwise whilte in the presence of so much masculinity to mock the phallus.

Yeli's Dono still pranced beside me like one crazed.

"Lookit the thize of that one!" he bellowed. "That'th a cock, hey-o!" He tugged on his own little thing beneath his dirty loincloth.

A venom cock, they're called. I'd heard the words grunted respectfully among pottery clan man. I'd also heard the words mentioned by women wearing a carefully blank expresssion cultivated to hide opinion. Understand, women do not rever the venom cock as men do. They see it for what it is: an uncontrolable reaction to an impending event, and a slightly foolish reaction at that.

If I ever write some dumb shit like this, please oh please make fun of it at a Con. Read it aloud at panels and parties. And if you don't want the publicity, don't fucking give us all such a bad excerpt!

I recommend this for my next Clarion Peeps read aloud. We're getting bored with In the Shadow of Omen. There are only so many sharp, pointy breasts and info dumps about argriculture that you can take before you just have to find another goofy read aloud.

Have fun! hey-o~!

There's Nothing Quite Like...

Doing crunches while holding a 20 lb free weight behind your head.

You sure will feel that the next morning.

Ah, Whiskey and Writing

It doesn't get much better.

Pure coincidence that my protagonist keeps ordering whiskey everywhere she goes, like those characters in Golden Age SF who were swilling coffee and chain smoking...

Pure coincidence.

THIS BOOK MAKES ME VERY HAPPY

Even if there are only 3 Arya chapters.

I will perservere.

Bathroom Etiquette

STOP URINATING ON THE GODDAMN FLOOR.

Now, I don't mind if a guy uses the women's restroom, particularly when and if all the men's restrooms are occupied. I've used one of the men's restrooms here before when I really had to pee and they were cleaning the women's restrooms (we have three men's bathrooms and three women's, each a private room).

I don't even mind him coming in and putting up the toilet seat and leaving it up. Doesn't bother me. I have no problem putting a toilet seat back down.

What really fucking bothers me is going into the bathroom, finding the toilet seat up, and a HUGE PUDDLE OF URINE in from of the toilet bowl, perfectly positioned so that when I sit down, my feet will rest in a HUGE PUDDLE OF URINE.

If you can't pee standing up, pee sitting down. I will not think less of you. You will not lose masculinity points. Sit the fuck down if you can't fucking aim.

I suppose I should be happy that he at least put the toilet seat *up* instead of leaving urine all over the seat for me.

This is the *second time today*(!) this has happened. The first time, I put a huge wad of paper towels in from of the bowl to soak up the urine. The second time I went in *someone had shoved the paper towels into the corner of the bathroom* and then PROCEEDED TO URINATE ALL OVER THE FLOOR AGAIN.

And I'm about to clobber the person who leaves two squares of toilet paper on the roll and doesn't change it, too. I have a suspicion I know which woman in the office is doing this. It drives me far crazier than it should.

Ah, work stress. All of the sudden, the little things IRRITATE ME MORE.

I need to go clean my fucking shoes. What is this, 16th century London?

More Reasons to Be Strong

Something I don't pay enough attention to with the whole workout/weights routine is how much easier it makes everyday tasks. For the last four months, I've resolved to take the stairs every time they're offered, even when I get off at weird train stops and realize I have three flights of stairs to climb, even at the airport, when I'm carrying my luggage for the weekend. Add in two daily 15 min walks at work, 20 minutes of free weights every morning, and 2-3 times a week at the gym, and you're going to notice some functional fitness results.

When I was taking the boxing and MA classes, I was going in 2-3 times a week and doing my morning weights, but no walks, no stairs, and wasn't eating enough. I felt like I was going to die most of the time. Trying to add in jogging days was great when I ate enough, and exhausting when I didn't.

It's easier to crouch down and get stuff out of the fridge and get back up again without effort. I don't get winded on the stairs. I sleep better. I have more energy after workouts so I can come home after a shitty, stressful day like this one and have just enough left to blog, work on my novel, prep dinner, get my workout clothes set out and packed for the next day, and spend one last hour socializing. After a day like today, even listing those things feels tiring.

I've got a lot of things that I need and want to get done these next couple of months, and thinking about it all at once has been really overwhelming. I've scaled back and am working at taking it all a peice at a time. "This," and then, "this," and then "this." It's the only way to get it done. If I sat here and thought too long about it, I'd go hide underneath my covers and spend all weekend sleeping.

And with that said, I'm going to go work on God's War...

Revenge of the Binge, Redux

Why does this not surprise me?

Two studies in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience show that when animals are stressed, deprived and exposed to tempting food, they overeat, with different degrees of interaction. The powerful interplay between internal and external factors helps explain why dieters rebound and even one cookie can trigger a binge if someone's predisposed to binge.

Anybody who's been (or is) a binge eater (me) will tell you that when it's real bad, it's like trying to resist a drug. When I go cold turkey and I'm highly stressed and dieting, resisting junk food (highly sweet, highly salty, high carb), my whole body starts to shake and I can't think about anything else but the food I'm craving. This will last anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour. Now that I'm eating better, the withdrawl behavior doesn't happen anymore, and I've gone from binging (tons of food, say, 3-5,000 calories in some instances) to craving (a chocolate bar).

I still associate the cravings with stress (I ate chocolate last night, but wasn't "hungry." It was definately stress eating), but I've gotten to the point where because I don't deprive myself the rest of the day, I'm less likely to chow down when the stress eating does come up.

Ideally, I'll find other alternatives to deal with said stress. Working on that...

Opioids or endorphins (the brain's "feel good chemicals") play a key role in our liking of food. Yet external substances such as heroin and morphine mimic endorphins by binding to the same receptors in the brain, produce a sense of reward (among other functions). The researchers compared how binge-eating rats versus non-binge eating rats responded to drugs that either turn on opioid receptors (butorphanol, which treats pain) or block them (naloxone, which treats heroin addiction).

From the rats' responses to these drugs, Boggiano and her colleagues inferred how stress and dieting change the brain's opioid control of eating. The binge eating occurred after rats experienced both foot shock (stress) and cyclic caloric restriction (dieting). Either caloric restriction or stress alone were not enough to produce changes in food intake, but stressed and underfed rats ate twice the normal amount of Oreo® cookies, which rats find rewarding. In other words, animals subjected to both stressors became binge eaters, confirming how strongly these outside factors interact to change eating behavior.

Dieting + stress = binge behavior.

Well, yea.

I'm going to go finish up my breakfast now.

(via boingboing)

In Which the Protagonist Realizes It's November

I sometimes forget that I can be a hack writer when I want to be. I once produced 50 pages in about 12 hours, which, when I break that down, doesn't seem possible. But it got done.

I realized at the Con when VanderMeer asked how many pages I had of God's War that, in fact, I barely had 150.

If it's going to 400 pages and done at the end of the year, this is a problem.

Did about ten today, trying to get more out before bed. Hoping to bump that up to 15-20 on really good days (like weekends) and keep at the 8-10 mark during weekdays. It's doable, but exhausting. And yet, I know that if I don't do this this fucking thing is going to linger. I've always got to put outside pressure on myself to get big projects done, or I'll spend years dithering over them.

I also discovered that my gym's fall schedule includes a 6am boxing class on Thursdays. It's the only one they've got.

6. a. m.

Sweet fuck. I can afford to get to work late once a week, and then do the Friday self defense class, and hey, look at that, I'm back in the self-defense game again.

Fuck, I want to get back into it. I'm aching for it. Now I just need to get my body up to it. I accumulated a gross sleep debt this weekend.

We'll see how it goes.

6 fucking am.

Who the hell gets to class that early?

Oh, wacky people like me who overcommit.

Dear Day Job: Fuck You

7:30 am conference call??????

Four more daily reports for the client (IN ADDITION TO THE FIVE I ALREADY DO????)

Since when do I have to work for a living? What's this all about?

Fantasy Women

I'm not particularly fond of writing about beautiful women.

Let me explain.

I went to a panel on Sunday about images of women in fantasy art, and the panelists pointed out the current trend on fantasy covers of of portraying women as strong and muscular, though still half-clothed and with breasts as big as their heads. This being fantasy marketing, both men and women portrayed on covers are, in general, going to be traditionally "beautiful." And beauty in this culture, alas, constitutes a very narrow type.

I wandered the art show at WFC and saw what passed for strong-chick art. I half-heartedly looked through the prints to see if maybe the male artist had protrayed a "real" warrior-woman type. You know, clothed, with practical breasts, practical armor, and a look on her face that said something other than "Come fuck me, or hey, I'll fuck you!" I wanted the, "I'll kick your ass, buddy. I've seen more of the world than you could possibly imagine," look. And I didn't get it. That sort of look is too intimidating, I guess.

And looking at these images, I thought, you know, these aren't the sorts of women I write about. Even the desert women I write about wear more clothes than these women, and of course, have smaller breasts and shorter legs, and they tend to be tan-to-black, not pearl white. In fact, my favorite characters aren't beautiful at all. Not just Lilihin the plain-faced scullery maid in one of my books, but my favorite character in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is a girl described as "horse-faced."

I'm always very careful with my use of beauty in my fiction. Beauty, that too-pretty beauty, is by its very nature rare. That's what keeps everybody trying to be like that type. If what we collectively decided was "beautiful" was something everyone already was, our diet and cosmetics industries would crash. So now we've got beauty clones, everybody going cocaine-thin and blond and getting boob jobs.

And I'm not terribly keen on clones.

I enjoy stories where running into beauty is rare, and it's something my protagonist hasn't got. I love traditionally unbeautiful protagonists because it means they have to work harder than everyone else. The one beautiful boy in my last book uses those looks to forward his position. The beautiful woman in book two does the same, with a far more dark-hearted intention. Characters without beauty need to have more and better strengths - physical and mental - than those with beauty. It's been marked often in real life that "traditionally beautiful" women are more likely to get a position than, say, a fat or obese or "ugly" woman, though the beautiful one may get stuck there if she doesn't play her cards right.

So while listening to the audience talk about the allure of fantasy, about how they wanted to pretend - just for a moment - that they were small, dainty, beautiful women (with large breasts), I was thinking about why I would write a fantasy book that didn't have beautiful women characters. At heart, I think I just do believe that beautiful characters are less interesting. You can do fantastic things with it, as Chuck Palahniuk did in Invisible Monsters, but I'm more interested in how women (especially) make it when they're considered unbeautiful by the cultures they're in (and, neccessarily, each of those culture have a different view of what that is, of course). I heard yet another lament about an author who wrote a black female protagonist and ended up with a blond caucasion women with a crew cut on the cover of her book. The blond was considered the more "saleable" beauty. But that's not what the book was about.

And that's when you get to the sticky problem of book content vs. book cover marketing. There's still this idea in the publishing industry that a busty woman will sell a book more quickly than a sleek, tasteful, intelligent cover (which says a lot about the associations being put on the overly-sexualized female body. What lies inside must be fluff, unintelligent, not serious). People will argue that sex sells, but if that's so, why aren't there more naked men on covers, like in the romance genre? I still nearly fall out of my chair during that scene in Fight Club when Brad Pitt answers the knock at his bedroom door in the buff. He's like a Greek statue come to life. If sex sells, why don't boys sell it?

One artist on the panel pointed out that her female nude pictures will sell equally to men and women, but when she paints a male nude, she's just cut the audience for that portrait in half. Men, especially straight men, are far more unlikely to buy a portrait of a nude man, even if they find it arresting. There's just too much of a stigma against men viewing other men. Naked men are scary to other men, or scary in their non-scariness, in their vulnerableness. I wonder if naked men are taken more seriously than naked women, or if the real problem is that they aren't...

Though I, personally, enjoy the current trend where we're moving away from dainty female heroines and celebrating an image that at least appears to be more substantial, the images are still often undermined by bad armor and their lack of clothes. Instead of the virgin, we're getting the whore.

But I don't think it has to be that way. We don't have to have an either/or. There are dainty little women in real life who feel put off and pressured to be big, strong women, and big strong women who feel they have to small and fem in order to be "real women." I don't know why fantasy images can't be as diverse as women in real life.

Little Jane Eyre is as formidable a heroine as, say, Tamora Peirce's Alanna (also a not overly beautiful heroine, despite the cheesy violet eyes) or Aud or pretty much any heroine Octavia Butler writes. The trouble with illustrators marketing fantasy women to the widest group of readers possible is that what we end up with is a big-breasted blond aryan every damn time. There's nothing wrong with these big-busted blond aryan women, but I'm not sure that this is really the image everybody wants in their heroine.

You can argue about the marketing of fashion magazines: marketed to women, all with beautiful airbrushed women on the covers. But women's magazines sell us fantasy more than fantasy fiction does. They sell us cosmetics, clothes, and plastic surgery. It's their business to give us fantasy women.

And I don't know that fantasy fiction is selling us fantasy in the same way. I think it markets adventure in places that don't and can't exist. And most of us don't really believe we're going to wake up tomorrow with magic powers.

But lots of adolescents (and many older women and some men) wake up thinking we'll look like a fashion model, if we're just disciplined enough, if we just work hard enough, if we just eat less, exercise until we throw up, stay calm, give up all else. And for most of us (98%), that's not true.

I think we want to read about people who we admire in some way, who are like us, who we believe we can be. And for fantasy to sell the same image about what constitutes a beautiful and desirable person in the same way a fashion magazine does feels really false and unhappy to me. There's more than a pretty face that one can emulate to be a fucking heroic person. In fact, the face has very little to do with it. Beautiful, unmarried, unblemished faces speak to me of blank slates; they're faces that haven't seen very much of the world, very little pain, very little sorrow. It's age and wisdom and the features slightly off kilter from our beauty-norm that make me look twice.

Hell, I'm biased, sure. I want better fantasy art.

And yet what's been done with the Dove ads and the new Nike ads does, I believe, illustrate that there's a market out there for something that sells shit, sure, but does so in what I hope is a slightly less damaging way, something that tells you to celebrate yourself instead of hating yourself.

On the one hand, we have the fantasy women with wings and unicorn horns and tails, stuff we'll never be and will use as inspiration for Halloween costumes. On the other hand, why can't I find my hard-core fantasy women, the ones with the shining eyes, the battle ax dripping blood, the sensible clothes, and the cool "yea, I'm strong, fuck off" expression on her face? Somebody I can look at and say "Yea, I want to be that strong. I want to have that kind of heroic character. I want to save the world."

If we're really dealing with fantasy images, images of everything and everyone that could ever exist, sprung from millions of imaginations worldwide, why do so many of those images look alike?

Insert: Infodump

Wow, that sure is a whole lot of narration I just shoved in there.

I Need Some Bloody Fucking Coffee

Stayed up until 2am on Friday drinking beer, eating pizza, and socializing. Tried to get to the room for some reading and relaxing time on Saturday, but ended up running into a Big Relationship snafu with B and spent two or three hours on the phone putting out relationship fires and then another two or three hours talking to Jenn about how the hell to handle these sorts of weird communication issues in the future, and by breakfast on Sunday I was so physically and emotionally tired that I was amazed I managed to make my breakfast date on time, let alone speak in whole sentences.

I'd say about half the weekend was great, half was so-so. Met great people, which was the highlight. The dealer's room was cool too. I missed the Thursday programming, which looked like it was a lot better than some of the subsequent programming. There wasn't a lot to choose from, but that's understandable: the reason every other nametag at the Con was somebody you knew because you'd read their work or their blog, was because they were all there to do business. Lots of agent/publisher/writer meetings, and parties. And beer. And parties.

So my $150 didn't stretch terribly far. I think I was also incredibly ancy during the entire Con. Meeting a ton of people you've only known via blog was weird, and I think I was more nervous about it than I knew I was. If that makes sense. There's this strange disconnect moment when you realize the people you're talking to know a whole lot of wild and woolly "facts" about your life. Not that they care, it's just weird.

And I'm still very tired, and not making sense. I cleared up some more stuff with B last night, and cleaned my entire room.

Now I have a novel to finish.

Woot.

About Three Steps Away from Quitting

Wow, I'm really starting to hate our client.

Post-Drunken Blogging

Lots of beer, meeting people you've only known through blogs, and eating pizza at 2am will result in some very strange dreams.

Had a great tour of Madison with some folks, finally got to meet the VanderMeers, chatised Matt Cheney for not blogging while at the con, and met a ton of people at the parties whose names and/or work I knew, which is always a surreal experience.

Not much to report, except that the pizza at Glass Nickel Pizza is really fucking good, and they deliver until 2am.

Oh, and all these people I'm meeting are cool, of course. But I mean, it's a Con, that's expected. heh heh

On the Road Again

Whooooooooooo hooooooooooooooo!

World Fantasy Convention, Madison (that's Wisconsin)

No, I'm not there today. Got bills to pay. But I will be heading up there tomorrow after doing some remote reporting for work from home. Me and Jenn should be there just in time to catch lunch, register, and maybe hit a 2pm panel, though we might get lost in the Dealer's Room en route.

We're staying at the Hilton Madison, with a water view, because dammit, if I'm going to travel, I'm making this a proper vacation.

Hopefully, we'll get there just in time for a good, old-fashioned Wisconsin riot.

I must say, I'm looking forward to it!















P.S. Yes, I'll be bringing my computer and may be doing some drunken blogging. I'll be trying to stay out of the way of any wayward cameras, as there's nothing worse than getting a candid drunken photo snapped of you at a con and find it widely circulated on the net. heh. As if I could be so lucky!

It's -5 Today in Fairbanks

Why do I miss it so?


























Ah, that's right. Now I remember...

I'm Not a Lesbian, But I Play One On TV

Some Appreciation for Rachael Ray -- From a Feminist Lesbian Boxer

Heh heh

I'm so amused.

My Brother's Price is a Ford F150

I put off reading Wen Spencer's A Brother's Price for as long as possible. Finally, after seeing it again in Locus and reading some good reader reviews, I decided to give in.

The book's about a boy about to be married in a world where women rule because live male births are incredibly rare (about one in thirty). I like keeping up with what people are writing about female-dominated societies; I like to know how they work out the world-building around it, how everything works, what things are different, what are the same.

The idea around the story, I read, was that it would be a reversal romance: the passive "heroine" looking for a good marriage would be male, and the sisters he falls for would be the active "heroes."

All this being so, I had a lot of worries about this book, starting with the cover:




























Yea. Looks like some serious role reversal there.

My second worry came in paragraph one:

There were a few advantages to being a boy in a society dominated by women. One, Jerin Whistler thought, was that you could throttle your older sister, and everyone would say, "She was one of twenty-eight girls - a middle sister - and a troublemakers, too, and he - he's a boy," and that would be the end of it.

So, even in a female dominated society, men are allowed to beat up on women without penalty because there are so many women?

Yet, I perserved. Why? Because, after the first twenty pages of as-you-know-bob dialogue set up, I really started to like the characters. I really hoped Jerin would get laid with some hot, strong, smart chick, and his sisters were all these really awesome theif/soldier trained women who ran a farm. Despite my reservations about the world they lived in, I liked them. So I was happy to hear that they planned to swap their brother for a husband for themselves. Meaning, they hadn't been laid either.

Getting laid in this society is a little trickier than you might suspect. Spencer works in the importance of a man's virgitiy before marriage by explaining that if a boy gets and STD before his wedding day, the family of sisters buying him off will choke the deal because if he's got something, then the whole family will get it. Same with the women: they pick something up, husband gets it, all the sisters get it. Oddly, this society can measure the sperm count of a man but can't cure syphilis. Go figure. Anyhow, so boys get lots of attention from their sisters. Boys, being so rare, are considered property and kept close by. Women raiding holds for boys isn't an uncommon practice.

In fact, women are so prolific in this society that it's common for women to just toss out their girl children when they have them and "try again" for a boy.

Great! A female-dominated society, and girl babies are still greeted as gutter trash. One royal husband also abuses his wives and brutally rapes one of them. And guess what? Because he's a guy, he goes unpunished.

How does this fulfill the "things can be really different?" school of spec. fic.?

Anyway, with all this worry about disease and all this aching celibacy until marriage, where, you may ask are all the lesbians?

Oh, well there's just the one. The evil river trash villain, of course. Well, one of them. And one of the sisters Jerin ends up with may be bisexual. Whatever her past, she's in love with him, of course.

And therein lies some of the most troubling bits of this book. Jerin is beautiful. All the princesses love him. Whatever you predict will happen after you read the first fifty pages of the book, does. There's not a lot of plot twists. Not much suspense. The scene changes are choppy, like the book was getting too long so transition scenes were cut. I was never worried about Jerin, his sisters, or the princesses dying or having really horrible things happen to them. I was unsurprised when Spencer ended the book with "happily ever after." It's that sort of book.

Nobody you care about is killed, maimed, dismembered, or scarred in any way. And you never believe anything like that will happen to them anyway. The plotting is really cut and dry, easy to follow. The main plot of some missing cannons and another family trying to take over the throne is actually the *sub*plot. The majority of the book is taken up with Jerin accidently getting all the princesses to fall in love with him. This ain't no Game of Thrones.

And yet you really want to watch Jerin get laid and all these women get laid and everybody get in a big bed together.

I could have done with some more explicit sex scenes, I think.

That might have made up for the fact that there weren't any good lesbians in it.