Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

Originally posted by lavenderfrost at ...WTF.

I'm reading "Airborn," by Kenneth Oppel. It's excellent. I'm fairly sure that if I let myself pick it up again tonight, I won't actually sleep much. It's exactly the kind of SF I like the best - an alternate parallel universe, with differing technology that nevertheless holds together and makes sense.

And yet, the feminist in me can't help but notice that this excellent author, writing for the youth market and winning awards doing it, STILL isn't writing female protagonists. The story is told in the first person, from the POV of the cabin boy, and the female in the story is a wilful, bookish rich girl on a quest who pulls him in.

In other words, she's a smart, capable princess, in a secondary role. Her main job seems to be to get the protagonist in trouble that he can then get them all out of - or at least, the secondary plot is about him getting them out of that trouble.

There aren't a lot of young adult books written in the last thirty years with a female protagonist. (The His Dark Materials trilogy is one, though a boy comes into prominence in the second book; the Kate Pearson books are others. And the author of Ella Enchanted is another, but her protagonists are based on fairy tales and are either princesses, or destined to become princesses. I'm not sure if it counts.) Most of the others - The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke's books, Harry Potter, etc, etc - all male protagonists, even when the author was female. There are strong girls there - but they're always bookish supporting characters like Hermione. She's just as much a literary trope as the princess - in fact the bookish princess is not limited to Belle in the fairy tale world.

Maybe I should start writing for teens after all. Mind you, I'd be likely to simply cast a Hermione type in the starring role, because my favourite female characters are always like her. Annarisse was, Velvet less so, Eklaa in the new book is a lot like that. I understand that character type very well.

It's depressing. We've come so far on the road to equity, but our literature still has a glass ceiling hiding behind its historical genre roots.

And I have links for you. So there!
Dear Pixar, please make a movie about a girl who isn't a princess

On Rape and Men, which all the wonderful men on my friends list still need to read. I truly believe that most of you are That Guy, and like some of the commenters said, it's pretty sad that I feel the need to acknowledge guys as good just for not being raging dickheads.

Thirty-nine-year-old singer and mother of three Faith Hill is on the cover of this month's Redbook. Except that her image has been photoshopped into a completely different look from the real her. Arm fat, tummy fat, back fat, the lines of love and laughter and life, a great tan - all gone. No wonder women end up striving for unattainable weight goals, never satisfied by their appearance.

Be sure to follow the annotated link at the bottom for exactly what they did to the picture.

Thanks hillarygayle for the link, and whoever she got it from - wayfarersgirl, I think.