This is from io9, the new blog for women who like science fiction. I think. Anyway, here is the cover of a pulp novel from 1971:
I will not post the excerpt cuz I figure I should instead send you all over to io9 and you can read it there. It was their scoop, after all.
Showing posts with label BOOKS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BOOKS. Show all posts
Monday, January 7, 2008
Ah Yes, 1992 WAS An Awesome Year, Wasn't It?
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Tuesdays With Kyle
[Alternate title: "I like to quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."*]
I've been writing back and forth with my friend Kyle, and warned him I would poach from our emails. We were discussing the differences between Second Wave and Third Wave views of sexuality, and I came up with this gem:
The old line was, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Today we might say, "A woman needs a [partner-of-any-gender] like a WOMAN needs a bicycle."
Y'know--women don't really NEED a bicycle, but some women WANT a bicycle and enjoy having one, but if it broke or got stolen or whatever it would alter her life rather than ruin it. And a woman without a bicycle isn't looked at as weird. (Though people think it's weird that I literally don't know HOW to ride a bicycle, which is probably symbolic of something or other.)
Kyle was also more eloquent than I on the pros and cons of "I, Slut" so I thought I'd quote him as well, which will cut down on the self-absorption here:
I love what she's saying, but think it could be carried to its logical and unflinching conclusion: some people may go through an occasional "slut phase" which may be good for them and that should absolutely be their prerogative. Some people may choose to make sluthood a perfectly stable and happy way of life, and there's nothing wrong with that choice either, all things being equal. I just get the feeling that she's sort of still implicitly paying lip service to the notion that being a slut is deviating from some more "normal and healthy" state, kind of like Carnival is healthy, but only once a year. I think that's absolutely true for some people, but [The Ethical Slut authors] Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt might not agree with the sentiment.
Well said. I have never actually read The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities. I do know that the authors define a "slut" as "a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you." Which sounds pretty keen. Personally, consensual non-monogamy (aka the "open relationship") is not something I'm looking for, but I admire the people who make it work.**
Hooray for emails that get those blogger juices flowing!
*(George Bernard Shaw)
**When it's actually an open relationship and not just a guy saying, "I'll jerk you around while I screw other people."
Monday, November 26, 2007
Crisis of Faith
Time to get autobiographical again:
Semi-recently, I hit it off with a guy (friend-of-a-friend) at a party. We exchanged numbers, agreed to get together the following Friday. Awesome!, I was thinking. I felt like a normal person. Someone who could make a date without hooking up! Then I took him home with me.
I wasn't sure why. Moreover, I wasn't sure why I felt bad about it. My friends, the next day, pooh-poohed my ambivalence--which meant something, seeing as I am probably the sluttiest* among them, and they are mostly relationship types. I think part of it was that they liked the idea of me dating this guy, and I was already sensing it was not to be. But also I felt weird because I wasn't sure WHY I brought him home. It was totally my doing, but the situation did not demand it--I wasn't feeling particularly randy** and, as I said, I'd been excited by the chance to NOT hook up with someone. I believed he'd call. I later pretended to think that, because I'd slept with him, he now wouldn't call...but actually I was 10% hoping he wouldn't. And I spent the day genuinely feeling BAD about sleeping with him, and, of course, bad about feeling bad. (My specialty.)
I was thinking about it this morning. And then, providentially, a link via Feministing to the blog of a Women's Studies teacher at a community college. This particular entry recounts his students' reactions to Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism, which I have sadly not read (because, as I've said, I grew UP on feminism and am only now actually reading theory), though it's next on my list. Anyway, here he describes the response of one student, who's sexual past sometimes had her labeled a slut:
Some of those choices brought her pleasure, she says; others brought her humiliation and hurt. But all brought her further along the road towards becoming a feminist. And reading this section in Full Frontal Feminism moved her deeply. She felt validated. Rather than getting another lecture about her complicity in her own exploitation, from Valenti my student got much-needed affirmation that, in her words, “it’s okay to fuck — and it’s okay to fuck up. We can learn from our fuck-ups.” Nothing I could have said meant as much as what she read in Jessica’s book.
[Original emphasis.]
Now, I'm no adolescent, and my recent history does not involve "humiliation and hurt," per se, but it's good to remember that just because I write a stupid blog and have long been people's Feminist Friend, that doesn't mean my every action--and reaction--has to be exemplary. I'm still not quite sure which I'm talking about--the hook-up or the regret--but both are instructional. Frankly, getting laid used to be difficult (thanks Dalton and Wesleyan!), and I think I'm still not used to the idea that I could like a guy without immediately boning. I have, once or twice this year, not-been-in-the-mood, which is a new experience. But I don't recommend screwing out of habit. And that's my lesson of the day!
*I know, I know.
** I know, I know.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Speaking of books...
Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature today. She's the 11th woman to win this prize! So today's a big day.
Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a pioneering feminist work. Lessing herself rejects the term "feminist," and has basically said that feminists want to get rid of men, but we'll forgive her because she's 87. However, the Swedish Academy (ie the folks who gave her the prize) call her "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." She was famously deemed "unfeminine" when the novel came out in 1962, to which she responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”
Full disclosure: I didn't know who she was before today. Now I'm pretty sure I'm gonna run out and buy her book. Yay female Nobelists! Too bad she didn't get that $1.6 million when she had more time left to spend it.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Words words words
This is great! Please EVERYONE let me know what books you loved, as a child/youth, that informed your understanding of sex and gender. Was anyone else out there a Marion Zimmer Bradley fan? Those books gave me a LOT to process.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Book Wyrms
The Guardian had a feature last week in which women discuss what book opened their eyes to feminism. It's a good read.
As for me: I've been a feminist at least since I was 5 years old* and, I grew up in a feminist household against which, aside from baseline adolescent obnoxiousness, I found little reason to rebel. (The world outside provided plenty of jerks--I didn't need to create them at home.) To probably-misquote Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, regarding England's ability to have liberty without formulating lots of theories about it first, "They like freedom because it's freedom." So it's not really until the past year or so that I'm actually READING feminist texts. (And I can't stress enough how great Manifesta is.)
So. My first influential book? Dealing with Dragons. But I don't like the new cover as much as the one from MY old copy:
Anyway. I reached this book in, I think, 4th grade? Patricia C. Wrede wrote the kind of stories I didn't know I'd been waiting for--smart, witty books with smart, witty heroines. There are four in the series. Dealing with Dragons, the first, introduces us to Princess Cimorene, who is sick and tired of being a princess--she has to take embroidery and country dance lessons, and generally sit around being silly and proper. Rather than moping, she sneaks in fencing, Latin, and magic lessons on the side (until she gets caught). When she discovers she's been betrothed to a really annoying prince, and after some advice from a talking frog, she runs away from home and becomes the personal assistant of a fascinating dragon named Kazul. (Kazul is also female, but gender differences are apparently irrelevant amongst dragons.) She then has adventures, kills things with swords, fireproofs herself, melts some wizards, helps some friends, and makes a lot of chocolate mousse. In future books she goes on to find love and all of that, all in the course of her regular adventuring, and all with a level head.
The books are great. The writing is vivid and mature, and often very tongue-in-cheek, with winking references to famous fairy tales. (In one book we meet a man who is clearly a Rumplestiltskin, but who has become SO overrun with kids he's changed his name to Herman, in the futile hope that mothers will manage to guess it.) Two of the books are from the POV of a woman, two from a guy, and all are filled with wonderful powerful female protagonists, all of whom are in someway unexpected, all of whom casually and simply deviate from whatever norms and stereotypes govern them.
If you like YA fiction, read them! If you know kids who do, give them as gifts!
And you can always throw in some Simone de Beauvoir while you're at it.
*More on this some day.
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