Yea, I'm Alive

And I have a lot to do.

So it goes.

Desire & the Pill

It is no secret that some women who take birth control pills lose interest in sex. They have been reporting this side effect to their doctors since oral contraceptives came into wide use 40 years ago.

I'm so happy I have an IUD..

Oops - We're Excluding Our Best Candidates!

Weight limits designed to screen out unfit Army applicants are excluding some of the strongest candidates and will be relaxed, the MoD says.

Under previous regulations, men with a body mass index (BMI) of over 28 were barred from joining the military.

The threshold has been extended to 32 - two points above the World Health Organisation's definition of obesity.

The kicker?

This "relaxation" of the "rules" only applies to men:

Meanwhile, the limits for women will remain the same at 28.

This was *after* they realized that "bigger" people were often stronger, and could perform a wider number of roles. Hence, recruiting "bigger" people was in the UK Army's best interests.

I guess "big" women are just a lot scarier than "big" guys....

(via bfb)

Healthcare in America

I finally went to the doctor to see what the hell's wrong with me. Basically, she said, she had no idea. She gave me some antibiotics, some super cough syrup, and some kind of inhaler to help the inflammation in my chest.

So, $150 later, all I know is I was pretty sick, I'm getting better, and nobody's sure why.

At least I got some drugs, eh?

Oh, Dear

There's nothing so disheartening as receiving an email from a new project manager that reads like it's been written by somebody who's barely literate.

Doesn't exactly inspire much faith.

Fat: Still a Feminist Issue

In classrooms around the world, girls swap tips on how to eat less, how to ratchet up their exercise and how to mimic those perfect bodies they see staring out at them from music videos, TV, the catwalk, magazines and billboards.

Somewhere, they know that these bodies aren't quite real - that they have been enhanced by surgery, lighting, camera angles and digital manipulation. But no matter. The deluge of visual images that wallpapers our world has seeped into every consciousness. It has changed the way we view our bodies and what we can and should do to our bodies, including those of our children.

Read the Rest

On Writing the Female Protagonist

In the course of my writing "career" (such as it is), I've run across quite a few male writers who've told me that they have a lot of trouble writing female protagonists, and it was something they had to actively work on. I always found this fascinating because though my short stories are often female POV (though not always), my novels always have mixed POVs, men and women, and I never gave it a second thought.

One of my most exciting character POVs in book 2 of the fantasy saga is the POV of a rational misogynist, a guy who really does believe women are infantile and inferior; and the trick has been to make him interesting if not sympathetic and have him carry a POV instead of just being a spear-carrier. I'm having lots of fun with it. And I don't find it terribly tricky. I know really great guys who are closet misogynists and can rationalize those feelings from here until Sunday. So it's not like I don't have examples to draw from.

So what's up with the male writer fear of writing up female protagonists? Or is it only strong female protagonists that are scary?

I dunno. I set down my free copy of Hickman's "Mystic Warriors" when the protagonist's wife "purred" at him on page four (this was the fourth time she'd done something stupid like that in as many pages). I don't know how many male writers' SO's "purr" at them, but my guess is: not many. So I don't know where this guy's ideas about all that came from. Maybe he thought it made for a more exciting opening scene.

Maybe this has to do with the old, "We're all used to reading books about men," thing. You know, the old saying that boys and girls will read books about boys, but only girls will read books about girls, because reading books about girls is "Girly." Being a woman, I have no trouble writing about women, and reading a lot of books with male protagonists, having male friends, and generally moving in male-dominated circles fills in the other half, so I have no trouble writing about men. I listen to and talk to men all the time.

But I just don't buy that men don't hang out with women. I mean, don't men have female friends besides their SOs? Don't they read books with female protagonists?

Then what's so difficult about getting into the female POV without it all coming out like Heinlein's robotic-sounding Friday or any of his other cardboard female characters? I mean, women are just people. What's so tough about writing about people?

I don't think you have to have an intimate knowledge of cramps, tampons, and hair products in order to write good female characters.

Elyce Deconstructs "Fight Club"

What is even more interesting re the gaze than how the film plays it out is how it turns it around. Instead of having a narrator constantly gazing at his femme fatale or sex object (a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for one), Fight Club has him gaze at his hypermasculine alter ego, Tyler Durden. Both the protagonist and the camera linger over Brad Pitt and his buff bod—as well as over the many other men who must strip to the waist when they fight and the pumped up army dudes. This goes even further as the film fetishizes blood, scrapes, and bruises (and I’ll get to kinkiness presently), but first…

It Ain't Easy Being a "Pale Male"

Yea, right.

On the contrary, men at Fortune 100 companies commonly complain that due to diversity goals, women actually have an unfair advantage. "Every company I've worked at goes out of its way to hire or promote women to senior level positions," says an upper-middle manager at a major food company. He adds with a sigh, "It's not easy being a 'pale male' in today's corporate world."

Where do these guys get these impressions? Not from the stats:

Yet recent research and statistics tell a different story, suggesting that the glass ceiling remains firmly in place. It's been 10 years since the U.S. Government's Glass Ceiling Commission released its findings that while women had 46 percent of America's jobs and more than half the master's degrees being awarded, only 5 percent of all senior manager positions were filled by women. What's more, female managers' earnings were on average a mere 68 percent of their male counterparts'.

And, some reasons for it, which I see everyday here in Grande Latte Enema Land:

- Different standards are used to judge the performance of women and minorities.

- Their corporate culture assigns lesser value to women and minorities.

- The "good old boy network" is the biggest discrimination barrier to career advancement.

- Because women and minorities are less willing to play the political game, many choose to leave the corporate world entirely.

Not really new stuff, but fascinating that men's impressions of women's levels of seniority in the workplace are a lot higher than the actual levels women achieve. It's that old 1/4 rule. Anytime a room is composed of 1/4 or more women, people will say that at least half the room is "full" of women.

Read the rest

It Gets Better & Better

HONOLULU -- A state lawmaker has suggested Hawaii's public schoolteachers be forced to weigh in as part of the fight against obesity in students, KITV in Honolulu reported.

Because teaching kids it's OK to discriminate is cool.

This gets into all those tricky arguments about who decides what "fat" is, and what about medical conditions and... and... oh, forget it! Just oust the fatties.

Note that they're not advocating testing cholesterol levels or resting heart rates. It's never really about health. It's about all that nasty, disgusting fat.

Next up: plastic surgery for teachers who don't appeal to Aryan beauty standards!

The Writing Game

As mentioned earlier, I heard back from the Agent about my fantasy novel, The Dragon's Wall. She's incredibly enthusiastic about the whole project, thinks it'll make a great series, but thinks it needs a total overhaul.

Now, that might sound really great, but I had to hide in my room for two days getting over the initial "rejection" part of it before I could think clearly and re-read the e-mail again with a cooler head. When somebody tells you your book really doesn't hit its stride until page 200 and she's fully expecting it'll be about a year's worth of edits, well, you're going to cringe. You're going to cringe quite a lot.

But for all that, she really likes the book. And I ran into her at a con, and I really liked her. I'd love to run the whole series with her. So there are a lot of positives.

Yet I honestly had to sit down and have a mental conversation with myself about whether or not I was going to do this. I had to ask myself: am I just being delusional? Is it worth spending another five years on this book, potentially taking away time from other books that I might work on? Am I just fooling myself? Should I just move on to something else?

Which is a dumb question to ask about a book you've already invested five years in. Escalation of commitment. You just have to keep going.

Because the thing with the first book in a series is that if you can nail that one, if you can sell that one, and it sells well, you've got a series. It's possible you can lock it in, so long as they don't all suck. You may even be able to support yourself for a couple of those years (if you're lucky) on writing alone. And, of course, you may wow everybody and have 500 people show up to all your signings and have huge fan clubs and be able to buy a big house.

I mean, there's that.

But let's be rational, shall we?

One of my writing buddies agreed to look at the book again, and I think I'll haul it to a writing workshop sometime this year. It's a lot of time and attention, but it's my baby, and I want to get this one out there. Maybe I really am delusional to sink so much into it, but really, what else am I going to do besides write? This is what I do. I'd be bored otherwise.

I wrote up a response to said Agent and said she should expect to see a heavily revisied version of the book sometime later this year - after I'm done drafting God's War, of course. GW has about 100 pages to go (yea, I've discovered my max fiction rate appears to be 100 pages a month). My computer's broken again (it keeps automatically restarting everytime it gets to the "login" page"), so who knows how things'll go, but that's what they make those yellow legal pads for.

So here we go again, playing the writing game, gambling that if I do good rewrites, Agent will like them, then Agent will find Publisher(s) who like the book (or require, of course, MORE REWRITES), and you just keep writing, and keep hoping you're getting better at it, and hope that sometime, somewhere, something will roll over and it'll all just hit.

Of course, it may just be a continuous upward slog, but I really hope there's a hilltop somewhere that I can get to the top of and something, somehow, some aspect of the game, will get easier.

I'm not counting on it, though.

Working Computer

Jenn got my computer hooked up to her old PC monitor, so I now have a working computer. I was starting to go a little nuts with the other half-baked solution I came up with. I haven't even finished paying this little number off, and the LCD screen up and died on me.

This monitor's a lot bigger, though. Makes for better computer playing, though the setup looks a little ghetto...

What I'm Doing This Weekend

Writing like a mad woman. I've got that damn God's War draft to finish, and I'm going to look over some of those rewrite suggestions for the fantasy saga that the Agent gave me, and see if it's salvageable.

If I can get that damn fantasy saga right, well, it's a great investment. It's seven books.

Wouldn't that be sweet?

State of the Union

Ah, the pissing gallery:

Straw feminists (I am not a real feminist and I cater to men's opinions of me)

Ide's Place (I'm just a reactionary idiot)

It always makes me sad when I upset long-term posters I respect, like Ide Cyan, and likely many more who haven't been vocal about how upset they are that I seem to have posted an opinion that that doesn't appear to be hard feminist left.

Here's my deal, though:

I believe people are inherently good. I believe people can have civil discussions. And I think we can do it all together. Maybe that's old-school hippie talk.

Ide asked me if I'd gone nuts and burned my Joanna Russ books. Quite the contrary. The horror of Russ's story, "When It Changed," is that the only way women will ever be seen as fully independent human beings is if men are dead. And that when and if men ever come to a women-only world, that they'll still see women as infantile, as objects, as children.

That's pretty fucking horrible to think about.

And it's offensive to both men and women.

It assumes men will never see women as people. And so it assumes feminism will fail.

Because it's not only women's minds we need to change, women we need to educate, but we need to engage with male friends, lovers, fathers, brothers, etc. and teach them what rape culture is, that sexist jokes aren't OK, that sharing household work and looking after the kids is part of being an adult, not a woman. There's already a general shift in men's attitudes toward women. If you look at how men over 40 treat you and how men under 40 treat you, whoa boy, yea, there's a differece. Try it out. I know I've noticed it.

We need to raise feminist women *and* men, because we can scream at the top of our lungs about how shitty it is to be oppressed, but until we start educating people - men and women - about what that means to us, we're screaming in the dark.

So when I see a blog that was open for general discussion start talking about exclusion, about limiting its audience to "radical" female feminists only (who gets to decide who those women are?), I get pretty worried. And that's OK for me to express that opinion. And it's cool to be challenged on it.

For me, it's not an issue of one thread on one blog. I took that idea and I ran with it. I'm a fantasy writer. That's what I do. I take an idea and I see how it could possibly effect everything else. And the ramifications worried me.

I got through an abusive relationship with a man, and then I recreated myself and found a voice. And I'm all about encouraging other women to do the same. And educating men about how that shit just ain't OK.

There was a fascinating question on one of the threads about whether or not I'm homophobic, which I found pretty funny, because I'm mistaken for a radical feminist lesbian boxer by people on the far right.

I think each side is going to paint you into a box of who they think you should be, who they see you as. And I'm not going to win that one. People see you how they want to see you.

Am I a feminist? Do I believe in the equal rights of women? Equal pay for equal work? The elimination of the rape culture? Do I believe in encouraging women to be strong and smart and speak in loud voices?

You fucking bet I do.

And if you think I don't because I saw where limiting a general discussion blog to a small "in" group could lead, because I thought about all of the future reprecussions (this is what I do), then you don't know much about me at all.

I think my fascination kicks in when I realize just how much this pissed people off. It was just another rant, for me.

What nerve did I hit with this one?

Still Sick

Still sick, but working stuff out. I think the combination of house stress, writing stress, sickness stress, a bad reaction to some DayQuil that made me feel like I was in an aquarium, and the fact that really, truly, while being this sick I really, truly, shouldn't be at work just got to me.

I mean, hey, every one in my house has had a nervous breakdown at one point or another. It was my day to collapse. I spent the whole time sleeping and trying to eat mostly whole foods (been eating a lot of soup). Turns out I didn't have a fever, which was good. In a word, I felt utterly hysterical (if I was a guy, what would I call this, I wonder? Hm).

I'm just finishing up a few writing passages for ye olde writing contracte work, which'll get sent out tomorrow. I have a long post about novels that I'll be posting shortly, too.

Hope everybody's feeling better than I am...

In Which the Protagonist Has a Nervous Breakdown

I'm sicker than a dog (persistent, full-body, hacking cough, runny nose, headache, trouble sleeping), it looks like I've started running a fever, just got back an email reject from the Agent about the book (to be fair, it was very nice, and another request for a revision rather than a total reject), I am having trouble eating, I keep bursting into crying fits at work (me, yes ME), and I want to curl up into a ball and die. And my period is starting.

And I'll be 26 next week.

I'm going home now and drinking tea and watching mindless television.

Of course, even that may be more than I can bear right about now.

Note to Self

If you choose to write a writing contract piece on the origin of hamburgers, you must be prepared to spend the rest of the day craving hamburgers.

In Which the Protagonist Actually Stumbles Into Work On time

Sicker than a dog. Doing lots of novel writing. Pausing to do some writing contract work that's due Friday. My computer is still dead.

I am craving some chicken noodle soup.

Ug ug

What I'm Doing For New Year's:

Sleeping. Lots and lots of sleeping.

Well, and some writing. But that's a given.

The Old "Separate But Equal!" Argument

Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff over at Alas, A Blog has proposed creating women's-only threads there. Well, Radical Feminist Women's Threads, anyway.

Because that's what feminism is all about: creating a women's-only treehouse so we can sit up there and throw eggs at the men's-only treehouse.

Yea. That'll be real productive.

Leaving the whole "What's a radical feminist?" thing alone for now, I've gotta say, I was pretty shocked to hear this.

There are just so many anti-feminist posters here. There are way too many men here, and too many of them seem to be here for the express purpose of making feminist discussion unlikely to impossible.

"There are way too many men here" WTF??

Wow, we're in trouble.

Now, I support women's only spaces. When you're counseling women who've been abused by men, the last people on earth they'll want to deal with for awhile will be men. If they have the right counselors, that hopefully won't last more than a year or so.

Because I hate to break it to everybody: the world is composed of men and women - and even some people who are in-between - and we have to deal with all of them out here on the bus, on train platforms, at bars, in restaurants, on the street, on the plane, at work (oh yea), and at home.

Even the trolls and the assholes.

And if you can't deal with them in cyberspace, how the hell are you going to deal with them in real life?

If you're having such a terrible time with trolls and anti-feminist posters, somebody's not moderating properly. Take some advice from Teresa, and take back control of your boards.

Sure, I have a smaller audience than Alas, but I don't have trouble with trolls. Outright assholes just get deleted. I've only had to delete an asshole's post three times before he headed out for greener pastures where he could find some "radical feminists" to argue with. There are things I'm not going to engage with, stuff like "I think homosexuality is a birth defect" and "Come to my website! Feminists give the best head!"

Why would I put up with that crap? One asshole breeds more assholes.

I'll delete to my heart's content: it's my blog.

But one thing I will NEVER do is ban "all men" from my blog. That's as bad as what men do with "men's only" clubs and exclusive "boys only" military schools and "boys only" at the front ideas. Reverse sexism, silencing men's voices, is just as bad as silencing women.

I try to be a good moderator. If two people start a flaming argument, I tell them to cool down and get back on topic. I'll do that twice if it happens (yes, it's happened a couple of times), and if they don't do it, I'll tell them to go cool off and come back when they want to have an intelligent conversation. If the flaming continues (and it hasn't, yet, I have very good readers), then I start deleting (I really outta do TNH's disemvowling thing, but I haven't reached a point where that's neccessary).

Because here's a wake-up call to everybody in the blogworld:

People are going to disagree with what you say. They're even going to hate you for it. I'm sure I have "regular" readers who come over here just because they hate me so much (a lot of people on the Baen boards certainly did).

There it all was in familiar detail, the same dynamics I've seen play out over the years on so many boards where feminists have attempted to gather: the trolling, the misogyny, the endless diversion,the ongoing defenses of indefensible anti-feminist, anti-woman behaviors, and always a tiny number of dogged and persevering radical feminist militants who are relentlessly baited and goaded, to the point they respond decisively, vehemently, passionately, even angrily and (gasp) stridently, at which point all hell breaks loose, they end up accused of being "bullying" or "silencing" or "overbearing" or "domineering" or "rude" and "uncivil," to the point that, as with Ginmar, they end up leaving the boards entirely (or being banned).

Yea, it's called life. Sucks, doesn't it? The same thing will happen if you're in a group of frat boys or radical conservatives. In fact, it'll likely happen if you're in any of the southern states or 98% of the midwest. If you're the lone "feminist" (let alone "radical feminist" - whatever the hell that is, what, the ones who want a world without men? What's that mean, "radical." I don't think free healthcare, equal pay for women, better laws against rape and etc. is all that "radical") you're going to get harrassed about it. What better place to cut your teeth than online? There's less threat of physical violence, there's usually fewer people trying to attack you at once, and you have time to sort our your reply before you make a fool out of yourself.

Of course, if you choose to hang around a place where everybody thinks, acts, talks, and behaves just like you, you won't have any experience with debate, with a free range of ideas. You won't really be forced to think. You can all sit around and smoke cigars (or knit. Something tells me some of these "radical feminists" she's talking about are likely big on the knitting) and thump each other on the back for being so good-natured about being repressed by "the system." Which, of course, they won't feel they have to engage in because they have their own club.

After all, who needs to engage with the other half of the population?

What's the point of talking to men? All those men so set in their ways.... what's the point of engaging them with your ideas, getting their arguments, creating one of your own? I mean, if they can out-argue you, maybe you'll realize you need to go back to the drawing board and refine the way you speak about things, and what a lot trouble that would be!

Which means, of course, that the radical feminist voice and presence is ultimately silenced, erased.

Well, they weren't so radical then, were they? If you can't argue or ignore flamers, you must not have much of an argument.

The world is not full of sugar and spice. And worse than that - you make feminism a "woman's space" and you cut out half the people who have help move feminism forward. Cut them out and they won't see it as anything that effects them anyway. Why should they care? They aren't even allowed to talk about it. You think they're going to take it up in a locker room?

Ha.

Let's just shut down all the feminist blogs and boards to "women's only" spaces, only let women talk about "women's issues" like, say, equal rights (fooled me. This only effects women?).

Seperate spheres doesn't solve anything. It just drives us all further apart. It drives yet another wedge between the sexes, both of whom - guess what? - are human.

I hope the feminists at Alas aren't forgetting that. If they are, they're no better than the old boys.

The solution is proper board moderation, not cutting out half your audience.