KJ

I had thoughts on the article about the agent who asked two authors to de-gay their YA novel (a story which has now come under dispute by the agent in question; my thoughts on the resulting pushback are best summed up in this tweet by Scott Westerfeld, but I digress). It turns out that renay also had thoughts, and we bounced those thoughts around and off each other, and we posted the results over on ladybusiness:

http://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/15574.html

Your thoughts on our thoughts welcome!

I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that the NPR SF/F Top 100 list that I posted about the other day has morphed into yet another book meme, for the most part without any critical commentary. (I was, however, happy to see an entry on NPR's Monkey See blog that calls out the list for its maleness and mentions the YA ban as a partial reason.) There is eruthros's call for nominations to create a Top 100 list of speculative fiction works, at least one goal of which is to promote more diversity, but the call requests nominations across all forms media. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. I wish someone would do a book-focused list targeted at fandom.

But, well, I never met a book meme I could resist, so here you go. I make no claims to this list's legitimacy as a canon or source for reading recommendations. Bold if you've read, italicize ones you fully intend to read, underline if it's a book/series you've read part but not all of.

( Huh, I've read exactly half, not counting partial reads. )

The latest entry in the area of "readers vote for the best of science fiction and fantasy books" lists is brought to you by NPR. The call for nominations went out in June, and the official list of nominees was released today. If you're interested in voting, you can do so here.

Whenever confronted with a list like this, I almost always have the same first thought: "Where are the women?" So I downloaded the list, and did a little number crunching. My next thought was to compare these results to the Tor.com poll I posted about earlier this year. It's difficult to compare directly, for lots of reasons -- the NPR list is curated and all-time, while the Tor.com data comes straight from the reader nominations, no filter, and only covers the last decade (2000-2010). On the other hand, the NPR poll has stricter genre rules: no horror, no paranormal romance, and no YA, and those exclusions cut out a lot of prolific women right off the bat (no Anne Rice, no Charlaine Harris, no J.K. Rowling). So, lots of factors at work here, and if I were better at statistical analysis, I would be better able to account for them, but I'm strictly an amateur here. ;)

Okay, caveats done; what did we learn?

• Out of 237 books/series on the list, 52 were written by women, or 22%


• Out of 167 authors with at least one book nominated, 37 are women, which is also 22%


• At first glance, the Tor.com percentages look better: 41% of the authors nominated were women, and 38% of the nominated books were written by women. But only 24% of the top 50 books in the Tor.com poll had women authors or co-authors. Since I don't know how many books were culled from the NPR nominations to make the official list, it's hard to say which is the more relevant number to compare.

So for now, not much to say, really. I just wanted to put this on the radar. With luck, I should have something more thoughtful when the poll is done. Watch this space.

I always meant to get back to the Tor.com poll on the best SF/F books of the decade that I posted about a little while back, but it took awhile for them to compile the results and then the topic fell off my radar. So anyway, they released the final top ten about a week ago. Two books by women were among the finalists: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke, one of the top ten from the beginning, and Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey, which benefited from a last-minute surge.

If you check out the entry above, there are several entries analyzing various voting patterns. Tor also provides a Google spreadsheet with the complete data, but that is more than I want to mess with right now. Maybe another day. Anyway, as you might expect, the stats post I'm most interested in discussing here is the one that breaks down the votes by the author's gender. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here are the highlights:

• 41% of the authors who received at least one vote were women


• 38% of the books that received at least one vote were written by women


• 24% of the books in the top 50 were written or co-written by women


• 12% of the books that received at least 100 votes were written or co-written by women (3/18)


• 44% of the books in the top 50 have a female protagonist or at least one major female viewpoint character

I might argue with their results on that last point, since I'm not convinced that books with mixed-gender ensemble casts (like the Song of Ice and Fire books) ought to count. As one of the first commenters on the post points out, ensemble casts also include men. As well, many of the books marked on that list have co-protagonists (such The Time Traveller's Wife); they are about women, but they are also about men. The commenter's similar analysis on the percentage of books with male protagonists ends up with a count of 46/50 -- a staggering 92%! Which makes that 44% look much less encouraging.

Still, the patterns among the authors honored are interesting, and it's not surprising that we find fewer women as we go higher on the list. On the other hand, I like seeing the list as a whole approaching 50/50. It would be interesting to see how the gender breakdown would look on similar lists from the 1990s, 1980s, etc., as well as to see how it trends in the future. Especially in light of the (record?) high number of women garnering Nebula nominations this year.

So, how about this kerfuffle over the Bitch Magazine recommended reading list of YA literature? It's been all over the Internet for a couple of days now, and it probably deserves a more thoughtful post than I have time to write tonight. But this story hits me in so many places that I live: as a reader, as a writer, as a feminist, as a free speech advocate, as a librarian, as a long-time reader of and some-time subscriber to Bitch. In the end, I couldn't just let it go by.

The background: over on its blog, the magazine's librarian posts a list of "100 young adult novels that every feminist should add to the stack of books on their bedside table." As such lists always do -- as, in fact, I would argue they are meant to do -- it raised questions of what's on the list and what's off and why, and there was lively debate in the comments. So lively that the magazine actually decided to take three books off the list.

Cue the author outrage. For a number of reasons, but I think the big one was this, as articulated by Maureen Johnson in comments:

But I have been incredibly disheartened to see your process for removing books. It mirrors EXACTLY the process by which book banners remove books from schools and libraries--namely, one person makes a comment, no one actually checks, book gets yanked.

The parallel isn't exact, because the editors stated that they did read, or re-read, the books before deciding to remove them. But the comparison is still a fair one, particularly in the appearance of a single critic having the power to get a book off the shelf, or in this case a recommended reading list.

As I put my librarian hat on, I have to wonder if they really thought through the purpose of the list, or about what the selection criteria ought to be. Any librarian will tell you that, before you start collecting materials, you have to have a selection policy: a set of guidelines that you use to decide which books belong in your library. These policies exist for two reasons. First, they help you choose the books to buy. Equally important, they give you a baseline to help you respond to challenges when they arise. Then, when someone comes to you with a concern ("This book is too violent! This book is triggering! This book is not feminist enough!"), you're prepared with a defense, even if you ultimately decide that picking the book was a mistake. The quick capitulation (especially since the stated reason for removing the books was concern about triggers, which could easily have been rectified by adding warnings to the list) is what leads me to to believe that there probably was no formal selection criteria.

Some folks have criticized the original author of the list for posting it without having read all the listed books. I'm less sympathetic to this argument. No librarian has read every single book in their library, or even on the "recommended titles" display; it's simply not possible. To a certain extent, we have to rely on the judgement of others: reviews, back-of-the-book synopses, word of mouth. Yes, I have even been known to judge a book by its cover. But all this just strengthens the argument for selection criteria. When you can't answer a challenge with "I read the book, and therefore I can say it is appropriate for these reasons", you need to have something more specific, more detailed than "my friend read it and said it was good." Which is how the initial defenses for having added the books to the list in the first place read to me.

Librarians take risks in content choices every day. Sometimes, avoiding controversy is the best route to go for yourself, for your institution, or for the community you serve. But when the controversial path is chosen, I really think that we owe it to ourselves, to readers and to writers to stand by those choices, not to cave in to the first or the loudest complaint. We are the defenders of knowledge, and we are at our best when we act like it.

Somehow I've gotten very behind on television the last few years. Fortunately, DVD-by-mail services are a good way to catch up, and one series that T and I are watching right now is Mad Men. We started awhile ago, then got stalled when it took GreenCine (from which we recently switched to Netflix) six months to send us the second disc of Season One. Maybe because of that, it took us a little while to get sucked into it. But we've finally finished the first season, and now we're looking for more.

( Some thoughts on Season One, with spoilers for that season only. )

Obviously the show and the setting both are dripping with sexism. After we watched the first couple of episodes, T expressed surprise that I was able to watch a show where the sexism was so blatant. In another kind of show, it would indeed bother me, but I actually think it handles the sexism quite well so far. It's a corporate office in Manhattan in the 1960s; of course the people who work there are going to be blatantly racist and sexist (and homophobic, and anti-Semetic, and...). Anything else would feel unrealistic. But it's never presented as a good thing or as something to emulate, and sometimes I get the idea that show is forcing us to question how much has really changed in the last 50 years. Some things, yes, of course. But sometimes I look at the Young Turks and see a gang that would be perfectly in place walking down Wall Street today. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a feminist show, but it has some interesting things to say. Regardless, I would much rather watch a show that is self-conscious about portraying the dark side of a particular time and place than the blatant but unconscious sexist portrayals that we see in a lot of modern media.

Though I haven't talked about it much, I've continued to follow the various Proposition 8 trials and tribulations with great interest. Right now it's at the appeals stage; the hearing was about a month ago, at the federal courthouse about a block from my workplace. I happened to head that direction for lunch that day -- not on purpose, just by chance -- and I walked right through the anti-equality protest that had set up shop. One of the protestors was a man with a bullhorn who proclaimed that the morning rainstorm represented "God's Judgement on the city of San Francisco".

Considering that we've had a few drought years and need all the rain we can get, I wonder what message we're actually supposed to be taking, here.

Anyway, so the trial happened, and today we finally got some news: a punt of sorts. The Court of Appeals did not issue a ruling; instead, they sent the case back to the California Supreme Court to determine whether the proponents even have "standing" -- in other words, the right to appeal the original ruling that declared Prop 8 unconstitutional. (If you're not familiar with the standing issue, this is a pretty good summary.) If the quotes from this Daily Kos article are any indication, the Court of Appeals seem to think that the proponents ought to have standing, but given the lack of case law in California on this issue, they want the state courts to make the final ruling. Which is logical, even if it does draw the case out even further.

So I find all this interesting, as I have found all the twists and turns in this case interesting, but that's not actually why I linked to the article. Another issue that came up on appeal was whether one of the judges, Stephen Reinhardt, ought to excuse himself from the case because his wife is an executive at the ACLU. He dismissed this charge entirely, in a memo that includes this awesome quote (pulled from the Kos link, above):

My wife’s views, public or private, as to any issues that may come before
this court, constitutional or otherwise, are of no consequence. She is a strong, independent woman who has long fought for the principle, among others, that women should be evaluated on their own merits and not judged in any way by the deeds or position in life of their husbands (and vice versa). I share that view and, in my opinion, it reflects the status of the law generally, as well as the law of recusal, regardless of whether the spouse or the judge is the male or the female....

When I joined this court in 1980 (well before my wife and I were married), the ethics rules promulgated by the Judicial Conference stated that judges should ensure that their wives not participate in politics. I wrote the ethics committee and suggested that this advice did not reflect the realities of modern marriage–that even if it were desirable for judges to control their wives, I did not know many judges who could actually do so (I further suggested that the Committee would do better to say “spouses” than “wives,” as by then we had as members of our court Judge Mary Schroeder, Judge Betty Fletcher, and Judge Dorothy Nelson). The committee thanked me for my letter and sometime later changed the rule. That time has passed, and rightly so.

It would be one thing if the ACLU were actively involved in this particular case, but they aren't. The only reason to think Reinhardt might have a conflict of interest is if you assume that married couples are incapable of holding independent opinions. This is an obnoxious assumption, and I'm always glad to see it smacked down.

[Sorry if you saw the earlier version of this I deleted; I was editing it so heavily that I decided I'd better just start over.]

I finished Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry today, and although I enjoyed the heck out of it, I feel like I don't have much more to say about the events it covers that I didn't already say back when the 2008 election was happening. Although in way, having followed the story so closely at the time added to the pleasure of reading it, because I felt like I knew the players: the candidates, the feminist leaders, the bloggers, the talking heads. Another aspect familiar to me was Traister's own work; she drew heavily from the articles that she wrote about the elections, articles I remembered reading, and particularly one on being undecided between Clinton and Obama that influenced my own thinking on the issue. And although she and I came to different conclusions (she voted for Hillary, I voted for Barack), many of the emotions she described feeling about the election -- about Clinton's rise and fall, about the nomination of Sarah Palin, about the Democratic establishments failure to call out the sexism media until after the end of primary season -- resonated with me, both in my memory and now.

I did review it on GoodReads (and was the first person to do so -- it hasn't even received any other star ratings yet), and if the topic interests you even a little, I definitely recommend picking it up.

Check out this blog post by s.e. smith, which opens a discussion about why so man people "just don't like" female characters. Which may seem like old ground to some of you, but it lays the issue out so simply and well, and there are some good perspectives in the comments.

It appears the above post was inspired at least in part by this really great article about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the fact that Buffy's character is dismissed by many fans as "whiny". The article makes the (should be obvious, and yet somehow it isn't) point that if half the things that happened to Buffy happened to a male character, the fans would be filled with hugs and sympathy.

I find it telling the way that we are willing to hold Buffy to a different standard. She is a different sort of superhero than we are used to. She is young, and a woman, and was the longest superhero of her kind on the telly. But it just doesn’t seem that we are willing to give her the human space of emotion to hurt the way we do some of our other superheroes.

Why is that?

Yes, why is that? I wonder.

Every time I think Chef Tom Colicchio can't get any more awesome, he finds a way to prove me wrong.

Related: While browsing DW by Interests the other day, I noticed that there was no Top Chef community. If I made one, would anyone out there be interested? (Or if there already is one, could someone point me over there?) Let me know.