KJ

Links to previous days! Arrival Day / Day One / Day Two / Day Three

This was a programming-free day, because I decided to sleep in and take it easy rather than rush to any of the panels. It was the correct decision. Although I feel much better today than I did at the start of the con, being sick the entire time did put a crimp in my con experience; I didn't sleep as well, had much less energy than I wanted, and my voice was pretty thrashed by the end of every day.

So, anyway, after a casual breakfast, packing up, and checking out, renay and I said goodbye to justira, who had an earlier flight direct out of Madison, and went to the sign-out, where Nay added to the autograph collection in her copy of Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing. It was delightful to join her for this leg of her quest, and to see the reactions of such women writers as Pat Murphy, Alexandra Erin, and Nisi Shawl. I also got Kelly Sue DeConnick to personalize the copy of Bitch Planet Vol. 2 that I bought on Friday.

Then, after a flurry of goodbyes, Nay and I hit the road to Chicago. The drive to the airport was mostly uneventful -- only a little more traffic than on the way up to Madison -- and we are now safely ensconced at our respective gates, waiting for the planes that will take us away from con space and back to real life. Even if the con experience wasn't exactly the one I would have asked for, I'm still so glad I went, and I absolutely plan to make the pilgrimage again next year. If I met you there, I hope to see you again, and if I didn't meet you, I hope I do.

So, Saturday. We decided to forgo 8:30am panels, instead having a quiet Starbucks breakfast, then running into butnotdegeneres in the lobby on our way to check out the art show. I did go to a 10am panel, on crowdfunding (hashtag). I took a lot of notes on that one and will try to write it up at some point.

We followed that up with a taco lunch, and then I had to run back for my first panel of the day: It's OK Not to Like Stuff, where we talked about the delicate art of having unpopular opinions on the Internet, particularly as a critic. Although there were only three of us, we developed a great rapport, and afterward, the mod (crosberg) expressed sadness that I live too far away to come replicate the panel at C2E2 next year. The hashtag for that one didn't get too much action, sadly, because it was a fun discussion of how to navigate negative reviews, how we communicate differently when we're being a critic as opposed to when we're being a fan, and how to tactfully disengage when someone insist that you must be wrong not to love the thing they love.

My next stops were a panel on the ever-evolving SF/F canon (hashtag), which may become the fodder for arguments and discussion at a later time, and an entertaining group reading featuring Charlie Jane Anders, Mark Oshiro, and more robot sex than expected. After dinner, I dropped by the Tiptree Auction; branewane was in top form as auctioneer, just as she was last year, but the highlight of my time there BY FAR was the auction for a bottle of lube autographed by Zoe Quinn on behalf of Chuck Tingle (final sale price: $125).

My last event of the day was my third panel, about fanfic. The description was a little broad, so in our pre-con email discussions we decided to make it a conversation about the connections between fanfic and historical fiction (using Hamilton as a jumping off point), and about older canons like Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen that still have transformative works being made about them. It was a pretty lose panel with lots of audience participation (and a fun, active hashtag, where afranklinhudson helpfully posted links to many of the fics and other works mentioned). Also during that time period was the panel I was saddest to miss, on the joys of Leverage, so I am very glad that it was live-tweeted by a number of people.

It was a good day but also a long day, so after a quick nightcap at Michelangelo's followed by a pass by the Floomp, we are back in our room, typing away on our computers and recovering from a day of talking and sociability (at least I am). Looking forward to tomorrow, but for now I am happy to relax for a bit.

Happy International Women's Day!

I hope that today's events lead both to a continuing groundswell of the progressive actions that have been going on for years but came into focus for many more with the Women's March in January, and to a greater recognition of International Women's Day in the United States. Interesting reading: this Slate article on the history of International Women's Day, which discusses its roots as a day of strikes and pro-worker action through a defanged and commercialized holiday somewhat akin to Mother's Day. (Also an excuse for self-styled wags and MRAs to complain that there's no International Men's Day. Which: 1. shut up; 2. November 19th, in case you actually care; 3. It's during White History Month and Straight Pride Week, duh.)

Although I'm wearing red today, and ate breakfast at home instead of going out as I often do on workdays, I haven't varied my routine much otherwise. I contemplated not working, but since I'm on a major deadline and had a couple of meetings, I decided it would inconvenience the wrong people without sending any useful messages. I felt a little bad about it, but I also firmly believe that every person needs to decide this sort of thing for themselves. I have heard and sympathize with some of the criticisms that not every woman is in a position where they can afford to take a day off work and/or care-taking; I think that's legit, but I've also seen too many women -- and by this I mean the well-off white women who could most likely take the risk -- use that criticism as an excuse not to participate. In the end, if trusting women is important -- and I believe that it is -- then we need to trust women to evaluate their own lives and know what actions are appropriate for them. We can critique the larger meaning of an action without getting too bogged down in the choices of individual women. I'll be interested to see if any statistics come out about the aggregate effect of Day Without a Woman, and if the strike tradition continues.

(Post title is from a Peter Gabriel song, "Shaking the Tree".)

You've probably noticed that I've written very little about this presidential primary season -- my last and so far only post on the subject was in November. That doesn't mean I don't have thoughts, of course. I've shared plenty on Twitter (by far my most active social media presence these days), and sometimes Tumblr posts as well, and it's all but taken over my Facebook feed (although I took a break from posting election-related content myself from about March through Clinton mathematically clinching the nomination). But my journal hasn't really seemed like the venue to share them. Until now.

Because there's no way I'm letting a milestone like this go by without marking it down for posterity. On Thursday night, July 28th, 2016, I had friends over to watch Hillary Clinton become the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major political party, giving her a very real shot to become the first female President of the United States of America. We cheered and we cried and we broke out a bottle of champagne. As I watched her speak, I thought about the generations of women who worked and fought and died for this moment. I watched women and men basking in the glory of a victory they may have never expected to see. I looked at the faces of girls in the audience, rapt with attention and brimming with possibility. I took it all in, and I relished it. Sure, it's not exactly a surprise -- this has been the anticipated outcome of the 2016 Democratic primary since at least 2008 -- and yet there's a part of me that couldn't believe it was happening, that still can't quite believe it's real.

I've always hoped to see a woman become president in my lifetime, but for many years I assumed that the first female president would be a Republican. My reasoning? It seemed more likely to me that a moderate Republican woman (think Elizabeth Dole, or Christine Todd Whitman) could attract support from moderate Democratic women than the other way around, and that such support would be necessary to offset the people who simply couldn't vote for any woman as president. Also, any viable female presidential candidate would need to project a tough image: in particular, be a strong supporter of the military. And until not so long ago, those were policy positions associated with the Republican Party. So I thought it made sense that a centrist Republican would be more likely to break through this particular glass ceiling.

And the truth is, I would have raised a glass to that theoretical Republican, too. Chances are I wouldn't have voted for her, but I still would've cheered her accomplishment. The fact of a woman, any woman, being poised to take the highest office in the land is a blow against sexism. A small one, to be sure, if the woman in question campaigned on a regressive platform. But a blow nonetheless. And whatever you think of Hillary Clinton, her policies, and the trajectory of her political career*, you cannot argue that she hasn't made promoting equal rights for women and girls a priority throughout her life.

This isn't the end of the battle, of course. Electing a female president wouldn't end sexism any more than Barack Obama's election ended racism. We need more women and people of color -- especially women of color -- at all levels of government, from local positions to the White House and beyond, before we can truly say that we've won anything. (I think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her vision of an all-female Supreme Court.) But just as Obama's candidacy was an important step along that path, so is Clinton's, and I hope we can hold this progress going forward.

*Which is not something I intend to argue about here. I'm happy to have substantive debate about Clinton as a politician and a candidate on another day, but that's not the point of this post. This is a moment to celebrate, for me and millions of others, and I intend to make the most of it.

Some of you may remember the long meta post about Final Fantasy X-2 and some of the criticisms commonly made of it that I wrote a few years ago. ladybusiness asked me to update and repost it, and it's now up!

In Defense of X-2: 2014

Here's the thing, about the recent announcements regarding Lightning Returns.

You all know that I'm a huge FFX-2 fan, so it's not like fanservice or character redesigns or playing dress-up dolls are deal-breakers for me. I might have rolled my eyes a little bit at Lightning Returns and her five million outfits, and I think it's more than fair to ask if a Final Fantasy game with a male protagonist would have ever included such an aspect, but it doesn't bother me really.

This thing with the breast enlargement bothers me. Not just the fact of it, but the way it was presented, the tee-hee-nudge-wink grossness of it, the idea that whether Lightning's breasts jiggle is the most important thing about the game, the fact that it's Lightning being sexualized in this particular way. In her original characterization, Lightning broke out of many of the female character stereotypes that have plagued Final Fantasy games in the past, so to see this change is really frustrating.

Take this news and combine it with the lack of female playable characters in FFXV (which hasn't been officially confirmed but seems highly likely) and the redesign of Stella from this to this, my faith in Squeenix is pretty much shot.

I will still probably buy and play Final Fantasy XV; I will still probably not get Lightning Returns unless I ever manage to finish FFXIII-2, so nothing has changed for me, really. But it's all very disappointing, and getting worse.

Locus Magazine has been running a series of polls on the best speculative fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. The lists of novels came out a few weeks ago, and since I am incapable of looking at a list of books without wondering how well women authors are represented, I downloaded the lists and crunched some numbers. I was especially curious because, unlike most polls along these lines, Locus ran the science fiction and fantasy polls separately, and I was curious to see how that would affect the results as compared to the Tor.com and NPR lists from 2011.

Some big, fat caveats before I start. Although Locus asked their readers to vote for individual books instead of whole series, some people voted for series anyway, which created some double-votes. Locus also ran the entire project via write-in and didn't do any kind of corrective or normalization work -- some books are in both the sci-fi and fantasy lists, some books are on the lists for both centuries, and some books are duplicated with author name misspellings, title variants, etc. (Locus updated the lists on their site to correct for the wrong century error, but I had already started working with the uncorrected data, and I decided it didn't make enough of a difference for me to want to start over.) Finally, I only included books ranked above zero (books that received more than one vote), both to make the dataset more manageable and because so many of them were duplicates of titles higher on the list.

Okay, all that said, how does it look?

20th Century Lists:

Science Fiction - Out of 389 titles, 65 books were by women*, or 17%. Only 8% of the books in the top 50 were by women. Out of 191 individual authors, 38 were women, or 20%. The woman with the most books on the list was Lois McMaster Bujold, with 7. 12 women had more than one book on the list, as compared to 66 men.

Fantasy - Out of 374 titles, 79 were written by women, or 24%. In the top 50, 16% of the books were by women. Out of 194 authors, 47 were women, also 24%. The woman with the most books on the list was Ursula Le Guin, with 7. Of the authors with more than one book on the list, 14 were women and 59 were men.

21st Century Lists:

Science Fiction - Out of 183 books on the list, 34 were by women, or 19%. Of the top 50, 16% of the books were by women. Out of 109 individual authors, 28 were women, or 26%. The woman with the most books on the list was Gwyneth Jones, with 4. There were only 4 women with more than one book on the list, as compared to 30 men.

Fantasy - Out of 169 books on the list, 53 were by women, or 31%. Of the top 50, 29% were by women. Out of 108 authors, 39 were women, or 36%. The woman with the most books on the list was, once again, Ursula Le Guin, with 6 (only Terry Pratchett had more). 7 women and 19 men had more than one book on the list.

( Look, pretty graphs. )

I had expected, going in, that women would be better represented in fantasy than in sci-fi, and better represented on the 21st century list than the 20th century one, and both of these expectations held true. I had thought about combining the genre lists to do an overall analysis, but there was too much duplication in the data for that to make sense. A lot of books were on both lists -- "The City and the City" by China Mieville even made both top ten lists for its century -- and I decided I wasn't up for weeding them all out. I have always found separating these genres to be difficult, and it's getting harder as the genres fragment and spread. There are questions, too, about the gendering of the genres. Are women more likely to be pegged as fantasy writers and men as science fiction? Take Anne McCaffery -- the Pern books are technically science fiction, but since they're about dragons, people often put them in the fantasy category, and the vote for her books was split over the two categories. (Now I want to find all the books that are listed in both categories for their years and see if any patterns emerge.)

Naturally, I was curious about how these lists would stack up to the Tor and NPR polls. The NPR list of 100 included 15% books by women, with no women authors in the top 10 and only one in the top 20; every single Locus list did better than that, even the 20th century sci-fi list. But then, my issues with recent NPR book polls, their choices and methodology, are pretty well documented. On the other hand, in the Tor poll, 38% of the books that received at least one vote were by women, 24% of the top 50. Since I excluded books that received only one vote from my analysis, this isn't an exact comparison, and the Tor poll is 21st century only; when you compare only those two lists to the Tor data, it's not too far off -- the fantasy list is about the same, the sci-fi list somewhat lower, and maybe the difference would balance out, especially if I could find a way to include the single-vote books.

I'd need data from many more polls to be sure, but it interests me that, for all their issues, free-for-all polls like the Locus and Tor lists tend to provide better representation of women authors than curated polls such as the NPR list. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad, in the end.

I would like to have some grand pronouncement to make here about What It All Means, but at the moment, I really don't. But I do feel that it's important to get these kinds of numbers out there, to remind ourselves that lists like this come with built-in limitations and prejudices**, which will never go away if we don't examine and talk about them.

*Not including two books co-written by a man and a woman.
**Of all kinds, not just gender, of course. I don't feel qualified to run these lists through other representation metrics, but race, for one, would sure be interesting.

Today was tea and snackies and the library with SE, then dinner with T, then the new series of Top Chef -- is it too soon to say that this cast looks promising? Then Nate Silver was on The Daily Show, and can I just say how much I love that one of the emerging narratives from this election cycle is pundits versus mathematics, and by just how much mathematics is winning?

Also, it looks like we will have 20 women Senators in the 113th Congress, and while some part of my brain is yelling at me ("20%? That's a freaking disgrace is what that is, why are you so happy?"), the rest of me is very, very happy.

I will likely have more to say about these things when I am not sneaking in my post for the day before I have to run off to bed. 'Night, all.

Some of you may have noticed that I am incapable of looking at a list of books and wondering what percentage of those books were written by women (evidence here and here) so when Nay asked me to help her crunch the data on a project she was doing for ladybusiness about the gender breakdown of speculative fiction reviews on book blogs, my answer was "Where do I sign up?" I futzed with Excel and made her some charts, and the post with her results went up yesterday. It's some pretty fascinating (and sometimes discouraging) stuff. The upshot is that, while the overall percentages don't look too bad (about 40% of the authors reviewed were by women), there seem to be stark differences between the reviewing habits of women and of men.

If this topic interests you, I definitely recommend checking it out.

I posted earlier today about the Women of Dragon Age Challenge. Over on Tumblr, there's been a little bit of a discussion about the choice of the Bechdel Test as a criteria for submissions. I have some thoughts -- of course I have thoughts; any discussion of the Bechdel Test is like catnip to me -- but I didn't want to hijack the post advertising the challenge, so I've come over here to talk about it instead.

One of the things I love about this particular challenge is that it explicitly references Bechdel and requests that every story pass. I have said before, and continue to believe, that the Bechdel Test is not primarily about evaluating the quality or female-friendliness of any one particular work but about looking at larger patterns in media. But still, I do think it can be a really great tool to apply to our own writing, because it makes us really think about our choices. Which characters do we write about? What do they talk about? And why?

To use a Dragon Age example, let's say I decided to write a story about Aveline and Brennan, discussing a man they arrested and the crime he committed. Is that a conversation about a man, or is it a conversation about work? I would tend to say that it's the latter, which would allow it to be considered it a Bechdel pass, even if the criminal is the only thing they talk about. But let me take a step back and ask another question: does the criminal have to be a man? Is there some reason intrinsic to the story I'm telling? Or did I make him a man because we tend to think of male as the default? Did I pick a minor male NPC because he fit into the story better than any other NPC available, or was he just an easy choice? Could I have made the character a woman, or chosen a female NPC, without any fundamental change to the story? And if the answer is yes, then why not do it?

I'm not saying every story can or should pass the strictest version of the Bechdel Test, especially not short stories, and especially not in fanfic where we are limited by the characters presented to us in canon. But I appreciate that we can use this challenge, and others like it, as an opportunity to look at our work a little more critically.