22
Jan
2010
Kameron Hurley
“Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but human.”
- Robin Morgan
Archive for the ‘The F Word’ Category
15
Jan
2010
Yes, Girls Play Video Games
Oh, the Alistair love!
BioWare writers do know how to woo the geek girls (me included. I did, uh, in fact, do a google search on this topic which led me here for, uh, personal reasons?). We’re always around playing your games, you know, you just don’t hear about it until we finally get something that’s, you know, actually made for us.
Donutman767: i? never realized so many girls played this game until i read the comments
kingkarlone: You can thank Allistair? for that.
Alistair Dragon Age love here.
19
Dec
2009
16
Dec
2009
15
Dec
2009
Blood & Women & Swords, OH YEAH
Why yes, I’m a sucker for women with swords… isn’t everyone?
One of the big issues I have with a lot of ye olde Sword & Sorceress type stories is that the women hauling around the swords just aren’t that scary. I can’t explain this except to say that, you know, I’m a fan of the cheesy awful that is Conan, and… I’m looking for a heroine that can kick the shit out of him.
Best Served Cold‘s heroine, Monza, is that heroine.
This book was an easy sell with the cover, but not so much the first few pages. The first 11 or 12 pages are kinda dull, really. Insipid people, insipid conversations, completely generic fantasy lite setting. Seriously, the setting was making me yawn. But according to the cover copy, this was a pretty solid rampaging revenge story, so I stuck it out.
I was not disappointed.
By page, what, 36? you’re going, “OH HOLY FUCK YO!” and Abercrombie gives you the big book opener you need to have to drive a revenge plot. You know, the thing that somebody does to you that’s so terrible that it can drive the whole bloody book all the way through. And trust me, it’s tough to justify the blood in this book. The big book opener goes a long way toward getting you there.
This book isn’t for everybody. It’s savagely brutal (I’m not making apologies for GW gore ever again). The people are decidedly unlikable. They’re the types of people who would survive and thrive in a world at perpetual war, and that means they are NOT NICE. So if you’re looking for nice people in bad situations, well. This isn’t it.
But they’re *interesting* people, and that’s what kept me reading. The cast is classically well done (reminded me of when I read my first Dragonlance novel… in a GOOD way). Folks are always backbiting, backstabbing. There are constantly shifting alliances and folks trying to play people off other folks. Old wounds and past events come into play. They’re wacky, driven, crazy folks, and I enjoyed watching them bicker (that said, there were some rather useless “fan fiction” scenes which added nothing but character squee. But not so many that I threw the book out. Just enough to roll my eyes).
I loved the main character, Monza, our sword-wielding heroine, primarily because she was not nice or honorable, and she was very, very scary. She’s out for herself. There’s no huge realization or change at the end. Just sort of a slow ebb and flow that made the ending satisfying but not syrupy. I loved, loved, loved the reversal between her and her initially optimistic sidekick. I found the fact that she’s supposed to be very good looking rather annoying (I do wonder how truly model-looking anybody in this world would look, but then, attractiveness is relative, so who knows what her face really looks like out there?), but Abercrombie made up for this with a few very nice, telling details about what it’s like to be a woman leading men (no easy comraderie with your men, who might take a pat on the back as come-on; always have to be the hard ass to keep from seeming too soft and having guys take advantage; always careful who you sleep with [if you sleep with anyone at all], etc.).
And that brings me to another plus for this novel. At one point, the team on board for the revenge plot has three women and three men. The balance shifts as the book goes on, but I was genuinely startled to realize that there was an entire scene central to the plot (a torture scene, no less!) which consisted entirely of female characters (our heroine, a mercenary, a poisoner, and a courtesan). Yes, it sucks that something like that is so surprising. But still neat when it happens. You just don’t see it a lot in fantasy epics.
The book was plotted like a dream, and I keep paging back through it to look at what Abercrombie did with this plot. My biggest complaint, as noted, was the bland fantasy lite setting. Incredibly disappointing with a well-plotted story like this with such great characters, brutality – and have I mentioned the plotting?
So, if you’re looking for new weird, this is not your cup of tea. But if you like strong female heroes, bloody battles, complex and twisted anti-heroes, and… if you just want a good, page-turning romp with cool but nasty folks, this is definitely the book for you.
Recommended, with aforementioned reservations.
04
Dec
2009
On Being a Mother and an Artist
70-80% of art students are women.
70-80% of art in galleries is by men.
12
Nov
2009
Your Daily Dose of Privilege
How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men
Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced
And for the record, yes, I do risk assessments all the time. If you’re born female, you learn how to do this from the time you’re very small. A woman would have to live in the absolute bread basket of rich, white, young, and gated suburbian privilege to not do a threat assessment every time she walks down the street (in fact, I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t do a threat assessment every time a strange man talks to her).
We grow up with stories about how it’s our duty to protect ourselves from being raped, attacked, abused, murdered, and mutilated. And we hear stories all the time of female friends and family members who’ve been abused and harassed by men – sometimes strangers and sometimes men they love. It’s pretty clear from the culture at large that nobody else is going to “save” us from institutionalized male aggression. I’m surprised that more male commenters on the Schrodinger post didn’t seem to realize that. That’s privilege, I guess.
Why do you think I took up boxing in Chicago? Do you have any idea how much women in get harassed on the street, trains, and buses, particularly in big cities? I’d say, at least twice a week I had some guy yelling something at me in Chicago, making inappropriate or uninvited comments, or otherwise trying to strike up unwanted conversation.
“Fuck off,” works very, very well. Yes, you feel like a steely bitch for saying it. But men generally accept “fuck off” a lot more often than the nervous smiles we’ve been trained to give them. They may yell back at you, but they do fuck off. The polite, nervous “no”s never work.
It’s hard to rework your training, and I hate that so much of the “fuck off” thing has to rely on women re-training themselves. This is why posts like the above are so important. Changing the culture of male aggression means changing the way men interact with women, not just the way we respond. If you’re going to change anything, it takes concerted effort on both sides, not just boxing lessons and foul language from potential victims.
And, you know, I’ll take foul language and good right hook over that terrified nervous rabbit feeling I get when I’m trying to be polite to some stranger who thinks that because I’m a woman he has the right to poke at me.
This doesn’t happen as much to guys because 1) they’re seen as people 2) they’re seen as people who will kick the shit out of you if you keep fucking with them.
I can’t do much to change #1, but I can take some action on #2.
11
Nov
2009
Dollhouse
Oh, thank God.
YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED.
Whedon is wasting his time on this one. Think of the incredible shows he could be creating RIGHT NOW but hasn’t been for the last year and a half because he’s been hip-deep in this piece of crap.
You can love two or three series from a writer, and hate their third. It’s okay. It’s allowed. Sometimes writers fail. It happens. I would have much rather he was attempting something great, like Firefly, than this piece of crap.
Moving on.
26
Oct
2009
22
Oct
2009
This is Not My Beautiful Life…
I first noticed this phenomenon in the photos of folks I have on my Yahoo IM chat list. More often than not, women with young children would use the photo of their children as their avatar photo. The first couple times, you figure, hey, they’re just really proud of their kids. Then I saw my mom use a photo of my neice and nephew as her user pic on Facebook and I thought… huh?
On the one hand, as the author points out, it’s almost refreshing to see a focus other than me-me-me on traditionally me-centric social media sites. On the other hand… um? I’m proud of a good many things in my life, and no doubt if I ever have a child, I’ll be proud of them too, but why use the photo as a stand in for… me?
There are plenty of photos of folks with their best friends, mothers *with* their kids, fathers with their kids, and of course, whole families together that sit in as user pics. So it’s not like this is as huge a trend as the author points out. But it does come up often enough for me to go “hm,” too. I haven’t seen any fathers use pics of their children as their user photo, for instance. But I may just not be looking, or I don’t note them as much when I see them?
I wonder if it’s a mix of pride and guilt? Are you more likely to see working mothers using photos of their kids as avatars? I don’t buy that it’s about creating anonymity, as there are plenty of folks who just use objects/random scenery shots to hide behind. Is it really a flight from aging, like the author suggests? I don’t buy into that so much. I’d be interested to find the commonalities and differences among men and women alike (because there must be some guy, somewhere) who use their children’s photos for their social media pics.
I’d be interested, for instance, if it’s more likely working moms or stay at home moms who do it. Or is there a class distinction? Is it really an age difference? Do over-30s just view the web differently, and shy away from its me-centric nature more than 20-somethings? Or has our culture really shifted… now that we all have less children, we invest more in them… and more of ourselves in them, and carry them close the same way we would anything else we’d invested so much of our youth in?
Children have always been a source of pride. I just can’t ever see my grandmother posting a photo of her children as her user pic, if I could ever get her to join FB…
Novels
