I Think People Who Are Good With Numbers Should Make More Money

And yet, women office accountants don't often make much more than I do. But looking at some of this spreadsheet bullshit that our now twice-fired accountant used to do, I'm wondering why the hell women accountants don't get paid more.

I wonder how much better it used to pay when more men did it?

I remember my mother telling me that for years, the bosses where she worked used to argue that the reason men got paid more for doing the same work was because they were being paid a "family" wage (even if they weren't married), and women were just going to go out and get married and have a guy with a "family" wage "support" them.

I suppose women who were working were assumed 1) not to have a family or any reason to spend money (the whole "women just work for pin money" deal) 2) not to understand that getting paid less for doing the same work sounded like something out of the "seperate but equal" south.

Women & Weight Training

Kudos to Heather for pointing me toward this site that provides a bunch of info for women who are interested in/new to weight training.

Good info on weight, sets, reps, nutrition, and tips for training before and after pregnancy (and for those interested: working out actually tends to *decrease* the discomfort of monthly bleeding and cramping, which is yet another great reason for me to stay on track).

I particularly like the photo of her pushing her car.

It Feel Like All of My Limbs Are Going to Fall Off

Sitting around the house, eating sushi and drinking beer, reading the second-to-last book of Zelazny's Amber series (one of the few old-school SF authors who actually writes women-as-people) at my new digs (pictures coming soon) in the designated reading room full of bookshelves... yea, life is good.

Overdid it a little at the gym. I think all my limbs are so sore they're gonna fall off.

I mean, in a good way. Just think of how buff I'll be. Yea.

Life is good.

I love wireless internet, too.

It's amazing, the luxeries you can pretend to afford when you're not terribly worried about leaving around an inheritance.

I intend to die in debt.

But man, I sure will have had a lot of fun.

Burkas May Reduce The Risk of Unwanted Pregnancy

Better resolution graphic
(via cara)

I Have Given In To the Bread Products

And they are good.

It really is a binge eating issue. I've tried to just eat one of something, you know, moderation, when it comes to bread products, but I just can't. I either have to do what I'm doing, which is "no bread products!" and then have a cheat day once every couple weeks in which I eat a number of bread products, or have absolutely no bread products at all, which is tougher.

I hate this strange compulsive behavior. I need to go buy more books.

"Our Stories Aren't All Tragedies"

Lots of places in Africa even have cities:

I felt as if I had been invited under false pretences. I should have been born in a poverty-stricken village, brutally circumcised with a blunt, unsanitised knife with other five-year-old girls, then, a few years later, kidnapped by child soldiers, becoming a sex slave of a rebel commander before escaping dramatically and trekking through the dry bush for miles and months until I was rescued by foreign aid workers, "rehabilitated" and adopted by a gracious American family. I would end up triumphant and grateful in the US and living to tell my story; which is, of course, a story worth telling.

Speciman Dayz: He Should Have Sold off Each Novella and Then Gone & Written a Real Book

Let me preface this by saying that I really like Michael Cunningham. I've read The Hours more than a dozen times, and am, in fact, constantly involved in re-reading it. It just sits next to my bed, and I read a few pages every now and again, and when I finish, I start over.

When his latest came out, I was thrilled, and B bought it for me in a nice shiny hardcover.

And then I realized my worst fears had come true:

A literary author was doing a whole book of genre.

It's a three-part story, the first being a ghost story, the second some sort of crime or mystery story, and the third... a science fiction story.

Perhaps I'm supposed to be surprised that

1. The ghost is... in the machine!!!

2. Terrorists are... children!!!

3. Robots... are people too!!!

I figured that once I got to the end of the book, it would all make sense to me. I would see some sort of Grand Pattern besides the obvious repetition of the bowl, men & machinery, and lots of Walt Whitman quotes.

Whereas the linking in The Hours was slightly more subtle (in fact, the parts that bugged me the most were when he tried to make it UNsubtle - the ending was too neat a connection, and I don't know that we needed long passages from Mrs. Dalloway in the Mrs. Brown sections, but hey), this one pretty much layered them on thick and then... ended.

Now, for a literary novel, maybe that would be Ok. Well, no, it wouldn't, cause it had no resonance. It didn't hang together. And when you're doing genre, you expect certain conventions. You expect the ghost to be exorcised. You expect the crime to actually be solved. You expect some sort of rousing Science! adventure and illumination of the human condition. And, because you're being given all three together, they better have an internal resonance beyond the very obvious "all the characters have the same name," and "there's this bowl," and "There's some Whitman quotes."

They need to sing at the subtle subtext level, not the blandly obvious.

And The Guardian found somebody to do a blandly obvious review of it that reads like it was written by an eighteen-year-old for a class project. And even s/he remarks at the end: "the issues are so close to the surface that the narrative feels like shallow waters overlying the reefs and shoals of Philosophy 101."

Yea. Like having somebody say "Look! See the connections!" and you want to bang them over the head with the damn glass bowl and go, "So what?"

Maybe it's my bias against lit writers trying to do genre, but you know, I've read some Margaret Atwood, and she doesn't totally bug me. This didn't totally bug me either, but it also had no real resonance for me, unlike, say, an Atwood, or a genre writer doing lit fiction, like, say, Harrison's Light. Those hung together for me, and created something more than their parts.

This was really just disjointed parts.

“Only My New Powers Can Save You, Padme”: Female Victimhood & Male Sacrifice

I was reading an article the other day about Kate Winslet. It was the usual sort of interview where the interviewer felt it necessary to spend half of the interview talking about Winslet’s weight and how much “slimmer” she is now and what an icon she is for non-slender women and blah blah.

In any case, it got me to thinking again about Titanic.

See, there was always something about Titanic that didn’t make sense to me. I mean, besides the silly dialogue. See, I was one of those Crazy Teenage Girls who saw it eleven times in the theater. It helped give me the courage to ditch my loser boyfriend and buy a one-way ticket to Alaska.

I mean, hey, Kate could do it. Why couldn’t I? I had that fire! That passion!

I completely understood why young women went crazy for that movie. James Cameron plotted the old cliché man-saves-woman from herself script, but with a twist. See, all the guy really does is tell her she’s cool, which she already knew, and then he dies. The rest, she pretty much does herself. If he lived, it would have been an entirely different movie.

And you know, a lot of people feel like they’ve got a script to follow, a perfectly coiffed fem life to live with the family-perfect boyfriend, when secretly, you don’t really want any of that bullshit at all.

At any rate, here’s what didn’t make sense to me:

Titanic blew up the box office and make a shitload of money. Now, when a movie does that, what happens afterwards is that a bunch of people usually make copy-cat movies to try and get in on the same audience Titanic found.

So where’s all the movies about a strong woman with real breasts who’s inspired by an aimless drifter hero to live a great big life?

After Buffy died, they’ve been trying wildly to figure out the formula and make another winning series: teenage girl with supernatural powers battles evil. Unfortunatley, Buffy was a little more than that, which is why stuff like Tru Calling and etc. keep getting cancelled.

But where are the Titanic ripoffs?

Now, I’m not talking about those men-sacrificing-themselves-to-save-women shows, like, say, Anakin going all nuclear cause he has to “save” Padme, when she would have been just fine in childbirth all by herself. I mean, that whole sacrifice thing always sorta bugged me, because it’s a “romantic” expectation that’s not good for men or women. It encourages men to “save” women who may be terribly toxic and encourages women to wait around to “get saved” instead of actually starting their lives (I’m a hopeless romantic, and was stuck with this idea for years). Ideally, I’d like to see a “romance” where two people bump into each other, improve each others lives, and then go on their way.

But hey, I’ll take a Titanic rip-off, too. I’ll take a movie where a gutsy heroine is shown the value and adventure and potential of her own life, and inspired to be better. It doesn’t even have to be a guy who inspires her. Under the Tuscan Sun is a great example.

So where are the gutsy heroines inspired to greatness? Or just bigger, better lives? Without immediate, traditional, romantic entanglements that turn it syrupy?

Long, Bookish Weekend

Took Friday off work, and spent the entirety of the weekend shelving, buying, and reading books. Also got out another chapter of God's War and did some editing. Did I mention I spent almost $200 on books?

And I wonder where my money goes...

P.S. I also went to the gym this weekend, and Katharine is right: I can indeed leg press my own body weight. I am now, however, quite sore. In a good way.

On Male Desire

Brendan's take:

I've been following the various and sundry reactions on feminist blogs to the now-infamous Dove "real women" ads, and have been waiting for someone to raise the question, to me obvious, about how advertising and beauty culture affects not just the self-image of women, but also the way in which straight men relate to, understand, experience and express their own desires for women. That conversation seems to have begun....

But personal absence aside, I think I can speak for the general male experience insofar as I still have a "sense" of what's supposed to be attractive, even if I tend to experience it negatively through a sense of "Huh. That doesn't work for me at all". This is what I can tell you, truly- men, especially younger men, will lie to you. They will lie their asses off, because the lies they tell about what they want is part of how they keep their sense of masculinity together. If women feel forced into a tiny range of appearance to feel desirable, then men feel forced into desiring only that small range. In public, bullshitting in a group- especially a mixed group, or a stereotypically masculinized one like a locker room- men will sing you the balled of the 18 year old blonde anorexic cheerleader, as often as not. Those who do not will think themselves daring for professing a liking for women with curves, or else will talk up one of the well-known and accepted kinks of desire- "Goth Chicks" is an old favorite.

Now you take that man out of the locker room or away from a large group of his friends, or you let him age 10 years or so in a lot of cases, you buy him some beer and you ask him again. What he will likely tell you, if he's lucky and hasn't totally internalized what he's heard, is that the women he actually finds attractive are a good bit different, or at least more widespread, then the American cultural norms. Britney Spears, back before things got real bad over there, was someone most guys could agree on. Someone like that becomes the public face of male desire, the only one that can be talked about in a general sense. The public discourse on what men want becomes either the recitation of the unreachable idea of the moment, or else becomes channeled into the arid landscape of "fetish" discussion. Goth Chicks, MILF, etc. The guy you're talking to now might have a thing for his slightly overweight, glasses-wearing coworker with that cute-as-a-button nose , who can name every episode of his favorite television show and shares his secret, shameful passion for televised rodeo. Good luck getting him to talk about THAT in front of his friends. Or a researcher. Or an advertising exec.

Read the rest

Thoughts on Intelligent Blogging

Blogging can be a very lazy pastime. You flick through random blogs on your blogroll and maybe some on other people’s blogrolls, skimming over thoughts and opinions and then posting your own half-thought-out opinions on their opinions. You pick up notes and quotes and reactions and post-post-post, then the “work” day’s over, and you head home and don’t give it a second thought.

I have been a seething mess this month on the subject of my moving. I’m angry at my roommate and her SO. I’m mad I had to do everything myself. I’m mad because my poor boyfriend tried to help and ended up throwing out his back. I’m mad that I can’t say I’m mad because it’s not my roommates’ fault that they couldn’t help me. It was a matter of timing, and when the upstairs apartment went empty, they’d already had their plans for the summer made, and nobody would be home for a week before and a week after the move. There's really nobody to be mad at. I'm just mad in general.

I sucked this up like a good roommate, told myself it was what it was, just a matter of timing. But carrying the entirety of a household up two flights of stairs and trying to make a house livable for three people, all by myself, really made me angry. And tired. And sore. I've been in pain of one kind or another for the last three months. That hasn't boded well, either. Being in pain tends to make me angry, too.

When I get angry, my knee-jerk posts become more plentiful, I cease bothering to think through other people’s arguments before posting them, and all sorts of supposedly “insightful” commentary goes down the drain. I get angry. I get lazy. I get tired. I switch off all my internal bullshit filters.

I had a couple of people very close to me, people I trust and respect, tell me my blogging was getting reactionary and ill-thought-out. I was losing some of the sharp wit and actual argumentative reasoning skills that make pointing out people’s bullshit so much fun.

It was suggested that some of this may be because I’m a part of “the feminist blogging community,” and as my hit count’s gone up, I’ve gotten lazier and more reactionary. There’s a reason wackjobs like, say, Ann Coulter get big audiences. There’s a carwreck voyeurism about it that keeps you clicking for more.

My first thought was, “We have a community?” But it’s true, there is. We’ve got the feminist blogs site, we’re on each other’s blog rolls, and there’s a circle of us who all cite each other. The faux feministing site was a great parody for good reason.

What that means is that instead of this being Kameron Hurley’s blog, it was becoming a Feminist Community Blog.

Don’t get me wrong: being part of a community is great. You get to “meet” lots of fascinating people. Unfortunately, you also get so comfortable with everybody’s ideas, you see the same ideas espoused so often and with so much ire, that you start believing them all wholesale and not questioning or interrogating them. They become your whole world, because it’s all you’re reading.

Ideally, this blog should be a neat amalgamation of thoughts and opinions – my thoughts and opinions – on feminism, fat acceptance, science fiction and fantasy books and film, martial arts & boxing and fitness in general, and women & warfare.

It should also be about me and my writing. Because that’s why I started it. I have a life I want to live, a person I want to be, and that’s why this blog is here, to document that journey from here to there and everything in-between, including the long road that is writing books and begging somebody to buy them so you can pay off your student loans. Cause you're writing books anyway. Might as well get paid for them.

And I’ve been so knee-jerk pissed at everything that I’ve done less commentary and more “Fuck this!” linking.

In fact, most of the fun of the blog was starting to go. It was becoming “The world is so fucked up!” instead of “Look at this neat thing! How can we make it better?”

A lot of that is because I’ve been really fucking angry at the world, angry at my living arrangement, angry at the people around me, angry at myself.

And I need to calm the fuck down and think clearly again.

I also need to finish my goddamn book. I need to write about 100 pages in the next 11 days. And I'm nervously waiting for an agent's letter about whether she wants to see the rest of the fantasy saga (this is the last agent I'm trying before I'm tabling the book), and I'm a lot more anxious about it than I should be.

This is the last shot that book gets. I'll be trying to sell the next one in December.

No pressure.

Damn, I'm tired.

Blog Down

Hm.

Considering some things.

Workbook

It occurs to me that there's a book I should be working on.

The house is mainly moved. Down to the elliptical machine and the gardening table on the back porch. Then I need to clean the shit out of the place.

Cleaning can happen later. I'm tired. I want to sit in bed and read.

Phone, internet, and cable are, I've discovered, a bundled deal, meaning I won't have any of those things until Saturday.

Fun.

Am also down to my last $37. I'm really not sure how that happened.

Fun X 2.

No Thigh-Firming Cream Neccessary

Found here.

Apparently, the same company who owns Dove owns Slimfast. Somehow, I'm not surprised. I'm going to go live in a little cabin in Alaska and write books.

100 Most Powerful Women in the World

I'm interested in how they defined "power." Sad that they felt they had to do a whole separate one for women because they'd put so few in a "100 Most Powerful People in the World" list. And I think we're still doing "Most Powerful Men" lists, so hey, fair's fair.

Interesting, anyway.

Faux Feministing

You gotta give the boys props:

Feministing (original)

Feministing (faux)

Fucking hilarious. It's a fantastic parody site - check it out (and don't forget to read the comments! They even use the word "fucktards"! Yay!).

I'm reminded of an interview with the band Nirvana, when they learned that Weird Al wanted to parody their song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

"You know you've really made it," one of them said, "when somebody wants to parody you."

Does This Stuff Creep Anybody Else the Fuck Out?

Just... creepy.

Book Deals: Pre-Order, Dammit!

I had the opportunity to take a fiction writing class with David Marusek in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1999, when I started my junior year of undergrad work at the U of Alaska. It was a genre writing class, meaning we were a little collective of folks writing mystery, SF/F, romance, adventure, thrillers, and the like.

It was a damn fine little workshop, and the first time I got to work with a real, published SF author who understood genre. David was awesome, but the turning point for me was the last night of class when we all went out to a local place and talked shop and traveling and life and etc. over cokes (for me, anyway: I was 19 at the time) and tortilla chips. David was a Clarion grad, and I mentioned off hand to him that I'd applied a year or so before and been rejected. I told him I was thinking of applying again when I was 25.

"Don't wait," he said. "Apply to both. Use some of the stories you wrote for class."

There's something about having somebody you respect who believes in you that gets you up off your ass and gets shit going.

I applied to both Clarion classes. I got into East no problem, and got on the waiting list for West. I reserved my spot at East and hung around hoping I'd make West. Eventually, when some of the Wests moved to East, I was able to get on board, so I got to spend 6 weeks in Seattle with an amazing group of folks. The experience was huge. It changed my whole life. I gained a wealth of amazing buddies. I traveled around the world visiting some of them. It rocked the house.

Now, nearly 6 years later, David's first novel, Counting Heads, is *finally* coming out.

He's blogging about the launch, and you can pre-order a copy here.

Drunk & Unpublished

Wow, that sounds familiar.

Can you really do a "guerrilla poetry" reading... at the local Wal-Mart? Oh, Indiana, red state and fast-food haven neighbor of mine...

Quote of the day:

"I don't know if I'm a good poet. Even when people tell you are good, you still don't really believe it," Powell said. "It's like kissing -- a person will tell you you're a good kisser while you're kissing them but there is never any way to tell."

"If A Woman Was Running From a Burning Building, What Would She Think About?"

I love The Onion.