Which is, you know, what they have been doing all along with Belville, a rather grim dystopia of pink cottages, ponies and jodphurs. Only now they’re going to do it in lavender and aqua! There’s a great critical article about the problematic nature of this line at the Mary Sue.

I have mixed feelings. From the Business Week article, it does look like Lego are working hard to look at what girls want and need out of toys, rather than just spraying pink on ponies and hurling it at them, machine-gun fashion. But while I agree that yes, my six year old would probably prefer to play with the LEGO Friends mini-figs that look like real girls instead of little yellow barrels with faces, I’m also concerned that as with Belville, this new line will be an excuse not to be as inclusive as they could be in the standard Lego sets.

Anyone who gets me started on the topic is well acquainted with my rant about how something like Harry Potter, a property that appeals equally to boys and girls, becomes horribly boy-heavy once it turns to Lego, and you have to buy hugely expensive sets to have girls like Ginny, Hermione and Luna included at all. This happens across the board – female characters are massively outnumbered by male in almost every Lego set going, and there are whole lines that feature no female characters at all, or one female character for every 8 or so men.

The Castle theme, I believe, has one damsel (which I’ve never seen on a toy shelf) and a whole bunch of male knights, guards, peasant farmers, etc. Because medieval history, totally for boys, am I right? (Even Merlin does better with female characters.) And yes, there are some very cute female characters (like Cleopatra!) in the current range of minifigs you can buy as Lego lucky dip, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to buy those for my daughter because again, so many more male characters than female, and I could spend a fortune trying to get her that damned Cleopatra. It’s not like she needs more boy minifigs.

My daughter, up until now, has dealt with this lissue by taking actual bricks with faces on and building them outrageous crinoline frocks which can be swapped between heads. I also bought her a bunch of not-Lego (some other brand) which is capable of producing fairy tale/princess type Lego (Girl’s Dream) which isn’t utterly revolting, though sadly the bricks don’t fit together as nicely as the “real” brand. On the other hand, they have sets with MORE THAN ONE GIRL IN THEM. The pink, though. Oh, the pink.

Our girls should have toy options other than ‘everything is pink’ and ‘all the characters are boys.’

The lack of female minifigs doesn’t just say that Lego doesn’t care about whether girls buy it or not. It also says that Lego thinks that boys should mostly play with boy characters. Which would come as news to a certain 8 year old boy I know, who was so annoyed that his enormous Atlantis Lego set came with only one female character that he made her the captain, to make up for it. And okay, maybe he’s not typical 8 year old boy, I accept that. (But oh, wouldn’t the world be a better place if he was?)

Toy makers have a responsibility. They do. And one of the most interesting pieces of child psychology in that article, which leapt out at me, is that according to their studies, girls (mostly) play in 1st person, and boys in 3rd person. Which suggests to me that you could have a better balance of male and female characters without it affecting the boys’ game play at all, or threatening their masculinity, or any of that jazz. You could chuck in a few more female submariners, knights, Star Wars characters, witches, ninjas, and so on. If boys don’t need specific idealised avatars in their play (as this article suggests the Lego psychologists believe) then surely it would be a good thing to encourage them to play with a variety of characters.

The girl characters don’t have to have pink princess dresses, or fairy wings. Lego has actually designed some great female adventure characters (Raeli has a female archaeologist that I bought for myself, before she was born). There just aren’t enough of them.

I worry about this new girl Lego line, not because they’re giving young girls a redesigned minifig with handbags and breast curves, but because it’s an excuse to make the LOOK ITS FOR BOYS Lego lines even more male heavy, and that not only makes the girls who like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Medieval Castles, Atlantis, Cities or just plain building shit with bricks feel completely excluded, but also works as yet another societal tool programming boys to believe that girls aren’t people.

But it’s not all doom and gloom out there. The new DC Super Heroes line of Lego has just been launched, to tie in with the upcoming Lego Batman 2 game. The first wave includes a set with Wonder Woman (packaged with Superman and Lex Luthor) and one with Catwoman (packaged with Batman). Yes, you heard me right. Lego with Wonder Woman, and Catwoman, and you don’t have to buy a set with 12 other (male) characters in order to get access to them.

I would have respected this whole “LEGO cares about girls” spiel a hell of a lot more if the interview in the Business Week article had mentioned that, as well as providing a new line with aqua bricks and yellow handbags and cocktail glasses in trendy swimming pools, they were also releasing freaking Wonder Woman Lego in traditional yellow blocky minifig shape.

Um yes, and the moral of the story is? My daughter is so getting Lego for her birthday. But not the kind with handbags.

Reviewing and Writing as Women’s Work

Nicola Griffiths on how the gendered gaze affects our perceptions of how “hard” or “soft” science fiction actually is (and how sexual it is).

Madeleine Robins on the insidious, internalised cultural pressures of “nice girls don’t brag or draw attention to themselves” and how that works against promoting your own books as an author.

Sherwood Smith on the gender imbalance in SF reviewing and how Important Books tend to be those on Manly Subjects of Manliness and yet books about/by women mysteriously turn out to be Not Important, and isn’t that an odd coincidence? Also, how important it is to realise that if your literary tastes differ from the accepted standards of what is Good, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with you. In closing, in response to Madeleine Robins’ post, she also points out that the mythical women who don’t push themselves forward enough (and are therefore responsible for people not realising women can write good books) tend to be highly criticised by society when they actually do push themselves forward. Yes, still.

Owlectomy on how a gendered perspective of a novel’s subject can absolutely mess with your instincts about whether it is worthy of an award, and it can screw with you even if you are a woman and a feminist. Her description of the Joanna Russ Fairy is epic and must become a staple of critical language:

And the Joanna Russ fairy said, “If you think that family and love and grief are not inherently important topics, you might as well put some zombies in your Pride and Prejudice and be done with it.”

Juliet McKenna on how insidious Default/Lazy Sexism can be, and how easily people slip into the idea that fantasy is a genre for and about men.

Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct on reviewing as a woman, reviewing marginal and mainstream work, and why we need more diverse critical voices.

Miscellaneous but Still Awesome

A powerful essay by Farah Mendlesohn about the work of Diana Wynne Jones, her literary influence, and why she was so terribly important as a writer. (not all that unrelated to the previous section, now I come to think of it)

Nisi Shawl on Race, Still - essential reading for anyone in the genre. And yep, this one’s not all that unrelated either.

Diana Peterfreund announces that Errant, the medieval-awesome-women-with-unicorns novelette that was one of my favourite pieces of short fiction last year, is available as an e-book. If you didn’t get hold of the antho it was originally in (Kiss Me Deadly) then I can recommend this one very highly.

Image found thanks to Ragnell – I have seen this fantastic cosplay group around the web all over the place but this is the first time I saw so many of them in one image. It may well be the awesomest thing I have seen in many months.

I have been invited to join this year’s Tiptree Award jury. I think anyone who has been following my blog for any amount of time would realise how much this means to me! Certainly anyone who, ahem, listened to the most recent Galactic Suburbia would be in absolutely no doubt (for those keeping score, I was invited between the recording of that podcast and the uploading, how’s that for coincidence?)

So yes. I am delighted to join Karen Meisner, James Davis Nicoll, Nisi Shawl, and Lynne M Thomas for many long and crunchy conversations about gender this year. Hooray!

In the meantime, here is a delicious mix of tidbits from the internet over the last week or so and some great things I’ve been listening to while catching up on the housework, supervising trampoline time, and sewing an Alice in Wonderland wallhanging.

Ben Peek wrote a post which completely blindsided me, about an author who embodies perseverance, “the one who to me sucked up the bad times and pushed through them, and the one who should stand as an example for new authors…“ The twist is, it’s me!

N.K. Jemisin writes about gender assumptions/associations surrounding epic fantasy, and why anything that deviates from the masculine norms of the genre are seen as suspect. There are some brilliant, intelligent comments about gender, romance and the male gaze. Lovely stuff.

Alisa posts about Twelfth Planet Press award eligibilities for the coming awards season. Have you nominated for the stuff you can nominate for yet? Don’t forget that all of us who were at Aussiecon can nominate for the Hugos this year. Would be lovely to have some Aussie names on that ballot.

This amazing, powerful post by Juliet Jacques about being a trans woman and a football fan really affected me, to the point where I read through her whole year’s worth of columns about transition. I can really recommend these for anyone looking to educate and inform themselves about some of the issues affecting people trying to transition. I found it a real eye opener, and she’s an entertaining and funny writer with it. Plus, football fan!

Jim Hines had some pointed things to say about the ‘self publishing ebooks is totally the way to make a career sing like a canary’ people and the way that ‘ebooks are the future’ so often gets turned into a bashing of commercial publishers and their methods.

So that’s the links done. Now for the listening…

The latest Salon Futura podcast has a great round table discussion about small press publishing featuring our own Alisa Krasnostein (plus Sean Wallace and L. Timmel Duchamp) – those of you mourning the lack of a Galactic Suburbia episode this week (sorry, we’ll be back with all guns blazing next week!) may like to check it out. There’s also a cool interview with Ann VanderMeer about her editorship of Weird Tales which was great to hear, especially the bit where they both start talking about Peter M Ball and unicorns.

My Big Finish obsession has been continuing apace. I have been relistening to all my Ace and Hex plays, and really enjoying the first two seasons of the 8th Doctor and Lucie Miller, which were designed to fit the tone of New Who a bit more firmly than the monthly series. They’re fast paced, funny and character-crunchy 50 minute episodes, with some fantastic casting. The whole first season is great, though the quirky Horror of Glam Rock (featuring Bernard Cribbins before he joined RTD’s Who crew) by Paul Magrs is a stand out, as is the exceptional two part finale, Human Resources.

I’m currently on the finale of the second season, which features a return of the Sisterhood of Karn and (quite possibly) Morbius, though I haven’t yet heard him with my own ears. The standouts for this season were Max Warp, a quite stunningly outrageous Top Gear parody with spaceships and Graeme Garden, and the comedy-romance-tragedy of The Zygon Who Fell To Earth (featuring Tim Brooke Taylor and Steven Pacey), but I also really loved the creative anachronisms of Dead London and the splendid historical heist story Grand Theft Cosmos. The return of the Headhunter, who is officially my favourite female villain of Doctor Who’s history, was a cause for much glee.

Elsewhere, I also discovered the Big Finish Comedy Podcast, which was released fairly recently as a limited series of 5 minute episodes to promote the Mervyn Stone mystery novels by Nev Fountain, which revolve around a script editor of a defunct cult sci-fi show of the late 80′s, who also solves crimes. The podcast is a great introduction to the character and his world, and over the course of about half an hour of bite sized, highly entertaining interviews (the conceit is that this is a DVD extra for “Vixens from the Void”) presents and solves the mystery of who killed the actor who played the quirky translator robot Babel J. It’s very funny, featuring among other things the note-perfect tones of Nicola Bryant, and absolutely free.

There is more, I expect, but I’m sleepy, and it’s school tomorrow!

So, this one gets me where I live. The overly gendered toy market and the advertising that goes along with it is a constant frustration for me, as a mother of two girls. We’re not just talking about pink or blue packaging here. There is a huge divide between the products created for girls and those for boys, and this vid shows something about how confronting that can be for parents who actively think about this stuff.

Boys, in Toydepartmentworld, get to be warriors or builders. Even the building toys that are mostly directed at them are often quite violent in the story that goes along with them, or the advertising associated with them. Girls, meanwhile, get to be sparkly princesses or shopping queens.

The ads targeted at children are gross parodies of the gendered advertising aimed at men and women. The whole thing seems designed to create the four wheel drive and fashion magazine purchases of the future. Which, of course, it is.

The vid quite rightly points out that pushing these kind of tight, limited gender boxes on children at such an early age can have quite awful and far-reaching consequences. At a time when they are learning how to be human and how to find their place in society, a time when everything they learn gets soaked into their consciousness like a sponge, two of the biggest messages they are internalising is that boys must be strong, violent and controlling, and that girls must be pretty, glamorous and domestic.

It’s not just advertising. Of course it’s not just advertising. Our children are absolutely complicit in this rigid stereotyping of genders. I feel at times like de-brainwashing Raeli from the ideas about gender she and her friends come up with in the playground is a full time job. It’s like they spend their entire lunch break sitting around and wilfully constructing the most limited and small minded social constructs for themselves.

Already, at three and four and five, they voice messages about what boys and girls are SUPPOSED to do, how they are SUPPOSED to behave, and what is allowed to them. I’ve had to deconstruct some ridiculous theories, and drives to and from school often contain conversations about whether boys can wear pink, whether boys can have long hair (her Dad & grandfather have long hair and she has never thought this strange, but if she sees a man in the street with a ponytail she gets confused. This makes no sense to me) but also odd things like whether girls are allowed to wear things with stars on (wtf?).

I do my best, though I tend towards moderation rather than militance. I try to respect her tastes and interests, while encouraging a wider variety of options. Not that there are many options, because there are so few gender-neutral ANYTHINGS in a child’s universe. At nearly six years old, Raeli can spot something marketed at boys a mile off, and she won’t have a bar of it. I bought a pair of Batman t-shirts yesterday because they were cool, and Raeli is crazy about Batman cartoons – one was plain black with the bat symbol on it, and I thought it would work just as well as a Batgirl shirt. The other was dark blue with the Bat-family on the front. Raeli liked the picture, but she decided no, those were boy shirts. Of course, they were, but I had been hoping she would like them anyway! No such luck.

I’m hoping by giving them to Jemima instead, Raeli will get jealous and ask for them back. Look at me, encouraging competitive female behaviour!

Mostly we work on Raeli as subversively as we can, encouraging her in a variety of interests and tastes, and jumping on any sign of ‘girlclone’ attitude when it emerges. I’m not prepared to be a those parents who forbids Barbie from the house or whatever (luckily I haven’t had to deal with Bratz because I honestly don’t think I could stomach it) but I do try to pick and choose things like Barbie quite carefully, and think about which messages the dolls send. Even if buying presents for birthday parties, I’d rather give a Barbie who has a job than one who is there to shop until she drops.

I also loathe the Barbie movies, mostly because the characters are kind of creepy looking, especially the older women (who look like Barbie with creases painted on), but I have let her take them out from the library (because she’s allowed ANYTHING from the library) I did buy Barbie and the Three Musketeers for Raeli last Christmas because I still think it’s awesome and surprisingly subversive that they told the story with an all-female cast, but this year she wants Barbie and the Nutcracker and A Mermaid’s Tale. She puts like 4 things on her Christmas list, she’s not exactly being unreasonable. The stories aren’t awful, and the girls in them are quite active. I’m going to suck it up and let her have them.

She’s also getting the Powerpuff Girls movie. And a Mister Maker book. And a trampoline. I won’t restrict her interests, but I do work really hard to make sure she has as wide a variety of influences as possible. I was delighted this year by two major wins – she started agreeing to wear trousers (possibly this coincided with me starting to do the same) and she officially went “out” of her PINK IS AWESOME phase also I’m pretty sure she is actually pretending to not like pink that much because she wants to stand out from her friends. This is a lie I am happy to support because how awesome is it that she actually wants a point of difference?

How many kids feel alienated from their peers because they don’t feel like they fit the rigidly limited definitions of gender? How many pretend to love the things they are “supposed” to love? How many beg their parents for particular toys, because they’re popular? How many hide the interests they actually have, or never even discover them because X is for boys and Y for girls? That’s without even getting into the hellish problems that must be faced by kids for whom gender isn’t an easily identifiable binary.

School programs work pretty hard to be gender neutral, as does an awful lot of culture aimed at children: TV shows, books, etc. Even those aimed squarely at boys or girls often try to ensure there is wider appeal in them, or that there are strong role models of either gender available. The toy industry, though, lags way behind. Merchandising is often far more starkly gendered than the shows or movies that inspired them.

The Harry Potter books and movies have mass appeal for girls, but you wouldn’t know it from the toys. Harry Potter Lego rarely features female characters, and when it does, they are severe minorities – might get one in a huge Lego set, but almost never can buy individual girl characters. I was outraged to see that the truly awesome Quidditch Lego set only featured male players. Where’s my Angelina Johnson mini-fig? The most common characters I see on shelves are Harry, Draco and Snape. All awesome characters, but… (the other big Harry Potter Lego set at the moment is the burning Weasley house – apparently Ginny is there to be rescued.)

There are very few male characters in the toys aimed at girls, and very few female characters in the toys aimed at boys – which not only helps to segment the genders but also limits their storytelling possibilities. It means their imaginary worlds are going to be weirdly segmented – is it any wonder so many classes end up with boys on one end of the playground and girls on the other? Is it any wonder so many teenage boys and girls have no idea how to talk to each other? Or that so many “romantic” stories aimed at adults seem predicated on the idea that men and women are different species?

We’re working on our own idea of acceptable compromises. We encourage Raeli in loving AstroBoy and Batman along with Disney princesses, and I do my best to find Lego and other building toys that are coded as neutrally as possible, so she won’t back away from them. Her Dad encourages her interest in robotics. Thanks to trock, she has got over her fear of Daleks, though I fear the Sontarans (Humpty Dumpty men!) will always be terrifying to her. She shares loads of interests with her boy friends, even as she and her girl friends play pop stars or fairies. Oh, and yes, she doesn’t watch kids shows on commercial TV – because even a three minute ad slot can aggressively undo weeks or months of good work.

The government has done a good job in restricting the junk food ads in those time slots, but they haven’t gone far enough. The gendered advertising aimed at children is quite despicable. It’s not a good enough defence to say that this is what kids want, and this is the marketing that appeals to children. Of course it is. Do you know what else appeals to children? Eating sweets until they’re utterly sick. Red cordial. Going on the jumping castle right after eating birthday cake.

I’m prepared to have my daughter play with Barbies, but I don’t want her exposed to media that tells her that the point of Barbie is the hair, the clothes, and the looking pretty. The movies, creepy as they are, don’t do that. They tell solid stories with girls as the main protagonists, which allow female characters to be active. When Barbie movies have better gender politics than the advertising of the dolls – isn’t that a problem?

Come to that, why is it that companies are allowed to market products to young children ANYWAY? If they’re going to do so, which is in itself morally dubious, shouldn’t they have the same responsibility as the makers of children’s programming to include educational content, and to actually think about the messages they are sending to young minds? Beyond ‘make them beg their parents to buy this thing.’

What I want for my girls is to have as many choices as possible. They’re going to face sexism, sure – worst of all, they’ll probably be complicit in it at various stages of their lives, no matter how hard I try to educate them. How is it that toy advertisers and manufacturers are being allowed to perpetuate incredibly old fashioned and confining social values for our kids? It feels like there are whole generations being actively trained to form a (yet another) backlash against feminism. Because, of course, institutionalised gender roles are good for business.

This is why I could never stomach Mad Men. The world it portrays never completely went away, and everything about the advertising industry seems geared to bring it back, worse than ever.

Since having kids, my view of womanhood has changed considerably. I’m conscious of the fact that my concerns are different from classically ‘masculine’ concerns, and are inadequately handled by much of the SF that is out there by male authors. If I want SF that truly appeals to me, I have to hope for more women to come into the field. In the same way, we need more POC…well, really any POC would be nice, actually.

As with racism, I think sexism nowadays is often unconscious. People won’t say to themselves ‘I won’t try that book because it’s by a woman,’ but they will say, ‘I won’t try that book because I like the ones with x, y, and z in them and this book has got j and m.’ And how can you argue with that? People can and do read what they want to. But I think that if you are a white male and everything you read is written by a white male, then it might be worth asking yourself if you shouldn’t consider expanding your tastes somewhat. Some tastes are acquired, but you can’t acquire a taste for something that isn’t on the shelves.

It’s so refreshing to see someone discussing the “well women write less SF so obviously have less representation in SF awards” concept but rather than leaving it at that (so that the responsibility falls on the female authors who don’t write SF or not enough of it) actively talks about why this might be the case, and why, as SF publishing shrinks, it is the women who get squeezed out first.

This topic was picked up over at Torque Control, both the lack of female winners of the Clarke Award but also the minute number of female SF authors published in Britain, and why this might be happening. The discussion in the comments has become rather epic, and while I don’t agree with quite a few of the opinions expressed in said comments (you can probably guess which ones as you read through them) I think the conversation itself is important.

While I’m on a gender theme (heh, you know it’s so unusual around here) I also ran across an excellent post at Geek Feminism about the culture of hating female characters in geek/fan communities. This is a topic I have seen discussed in various places this year – Sarah Rees Brennan has been particularly vocal at the criticisms she receives about her heroine, Mae, as compared to the general response to her hero, Nick (hint: he behaves far more badly and is a million times sluttier, but she gets the vitriole for kissing more than one person, for expressing opinions, etc.)

The article is rather brilliant in the way it dissects the kind of violent and ugly fan response to Gwen from Torchwood and River Song from Doctor Who, and is particularly pointed in the way it compares qualities they share with the male leads of those TV shows, and the way those qualities attract far greater negative response when displayed by a woman. I hadn’t even realised how many similaries there were between Gwen and Captain Jack, though I have long been uncomfortable with the invective used against her character, and not only by the Jack/Ianto shippers, though there is a long tradition of misogyny from slash fans, who often view female lead characters as a threat to their preferred pairing. I remember that when I was hanging out on the edged of the Harry Potter fandom, the levels of hatred and vitriole pointed at Ginny, Hermione and Tonks was somewhat boggling, even before the epilogue came along.

(I have a theory that people are more likely to blame the perceived failings of female fictional characters on the characters themselves rather than the author/writers, and this is certainly a prevailing trend in many fandoms)

The article at Geek Feminism very cleverly addresses the glorification of loudly despising female characters, and the way this can actually have an effect in real life as well, in cultures where women often get to “play with the boys” by dumping on other members of their own gender. Also the frustrating double standard where female fictional characters are often simultaneously criticised for acting “like men” as well as acting “like women”.

Food for thought! And now I go to clean the house.

Over at the Voyager blog, I talk about my favourite fictional cities, and ask what your favourite SF/fantasy city is!

Someone on my LJ (hello anonymous person!) sent me an awesome link to this great “redesign Wonder Woman’s costume” art contest.

I also found (via @thirtysix on Twitter) a brilliant essay on the incidental misogyny in cyberspace, and the way that gaming businesses have failed their female customers. It’s an incredibly intelligent piece which includes a historical perspective on gaming & female characters in games, from the POV of a woman.

Over at Twelfth Planet Press, Alisa unveils two of the beautiful books she has coming out in time for Worldcon, with design by the ever talented Amanda Rainey: Bleed by Peter M. Ball (the sequel to the hugely successful fantasy noir Horn) and Glitter Rose, a boutique collection by Marianne de Pierres, the queen of Australian science fiction.

Amelia’s first zomromcom novel The Loving Dead sounds all kinds of awesome and if I hadn’t already pre-ordered it, I would be doing so on the strength of this podcast! The discussion of Kelly Link’s influence on how zombie stories can be told was also really interesting. Also the most recent zombie contingency plan I read was in a Glee fanfic. They get around!

The gang discuss the growing divide in the scene between short and long fiction as one is increasingly published by small/independent presses and the other by mass market. While I agree with this discussion in the main, I do think it should be pointed out that the one area this seems to not be true (and is becoming less true if that makes sense) is YA. I’ve been saying for the last couple of years that some of the most interesting work in spec fic seems to be coming out of the YA field. I’ve also noticed more and more mass market short fiction collections emerging from that field – they might have trashy titles and seem to be mostly about vampires, zombies, boyfriends and prom dates, but they are also featuring some of the most respected writers in the field, such as Holly Black, Libba Bray, the Larbalesterfelds, and so on. I see these books popping up in places like the local Big W (the closest thing Australia has to a Wal-Mart, I think) and can never resist picking them up, because even though sometimes they will have a bunch of cheeseball Buffy wannabe tales in them, there is almost certain to be a couple of real gems, and even the average stories are a lot more readable to me than the contents of an average issue of F&SF.

This is particularly noteworthy, I think, considering the massmarket paperback release of Kelly Link’s YA collection, Pretty Monsters. I’ve seen it a few places and didn’t buy it because I knew I had all the stories, but since then the very existence of that book has (quite appropriately) been eating my brain, to the point that I know next time I go into town I am going to pick it up. It’s a freaking Kelly Link book, and seeing it on bookshelves in my home town instead of having to order a pretty hardback from Small Beer Press is all kinds of awesome. I regularly lend out her first two collections, and I know that this is a book I will regularly press into people’s hands. So yes, I’m going to be buying it.

I’m actually completely in the mood to reread Kelly Link’s body of work, and not just because of Gary Wolfe reminding me how awesome Magic For Beginners was.

Another point of interest was the discussion stemming from the MindMeld, and Jonathan’s question as to how to discuss the accepted history of the SF field without being horribly sexist by definition (my paraphrase). I always find it odd when default white males such as the quoted Mike Resnick use the ‘history was just like that, I don’t have to think beyond it’ argument in defence of why some books are classics.

No book/story is a classic just because. It’s a classic because people loved it and talked about it and it was published and reprinted and talked about… and that’s fine. But the thing about history is, it isn’t a stagnant thing. History changes. If you want to talk about what books you loved when you were 15 or what books everyone thought were the most significant contributors to the field fifty years ago, that’s awesome, but be aware that this is what you are doing.

We don’t teach Australian history the same way we did ten years ago, or twenty years ago, or a hundred years ago. History doesn’t stay the same. It changes to adapt to new perspectives, to a broadening of priorities, and it is never ever ever a case of right vs. wrong. History is what we remember, and a huge part of that is choice. This is particularly the case in the history of literature, when the question of what is good or bad, important or indifferent, is shaped by personal taste. In the case of the history of science fiction, it was shaped by a number of choices, and many of those choices were shaped by ingrained and systematic forms of sexism and racism, and trying to ignore that in the same way it has been ignored in previous decades is becoming more and more problematic.

For a long time, there was one mainstream history of science fiction (the Gernsback continuum) which was quite rigidly defended, and a few more specific sub-histories that took on ‘special’ themes or interests (the Tiptree Award continuum being one of these, probably several others named after Shirley Jackson and Carl Brandon, and you get the general idea…) and now we’re at a time when a younger generation is pretty much demanding that all of the histories be pushed together and possibly reinvented to catch up to the 21st century literary priorities, and it is understandably challenging to some people who are used to never looking beyond the goggles of their comfy Gernsback continuum.

I’m sure at this point Jonathan is expecting me to shout at him! But I’d actually like to say how pleased I am that he is talking about how complicated this dialogue is, as the parameters and expectations change and the ground shifts from under our feet. The dialogue has fractured, and it is changing, and that’s okay, we can all be here to hold each other’s hands through the bumpy parts of the ride. It’s good to acknowledge how problematic and difficult the dialogue can be at times, as long as that isn’t used as an excuse to halt the conversation, or to steer the conversation back to the parameters. I’d much rather hear someone say “I don’t know how to talk about this now” than “let’s keep having the same dialogue we’ve been having for the last 30 years in exactly the same way.”

I really enjoyed the part of the discussion where Amelia talked about how words like ‘must read’ and ‘important’ are so very off-putting, and I also enjoyed that that the group delved into a pretty good definition of ‘important’ as far as SF books/canon is concerned – that is, how much influence those works have on works currently being written. It certainly sparks all sorts of thoughts about what classic books are more and indeed less relevant now than they were twenty of thirty years ago!

All in all I am finding the discussions “from the back deck” rather crunchy and thought provoking!

I never found the love for the Phantom, I’m afraid – it was all far too patriarchal to make a dent in my cultural stash – but this review makes me tempted to give it a try. I’m particularly excited that it’s a 19th century story and that the plot revolves around another female character. Bechdelicious! Shame it’s only a one shot.

Now the question is… is there an app for that?

Then there’s the experience of watching gendered expectations and values applied to our child, who is largely approached more as “a little boy” than as “a person”–not only by advertisers (gee, why don’t we want him to watch TV?!?) and popular culture at large but also by absolute strangers in our community and even people we love and who love us. Most people comment enthusiastically on his every masculine-coded activity or inclination and simply do not notice or acknowledge all the feminine-coded parts of his experience and personhood. And once you enter a store, whoa. My mom was blown away when she went into a bookstore’s picture book section and inquired about what’s new for a three-year-old, only to be asked the immediate routing question: “Boy or girl?” (gee, where do gendered reading habits and, ultimately, academic interests come from?!?). My partner, our son, and I recently went into a children’s resale shop to find the inscription “Sugar and spice and everything nice” over the nearly-all-pink girls’ section. It’s suffocating.

I’ve talked about this before, and no doubt will keep on talking about it – whenever  godiyeva (who has three sons) and I start in on it, we keep going until we froth at the mouth. There is nothing wrong with girls liking pink or boys liking trucks, but the immense cultural and social and commercial pressure to force children into little gender-approved boxes is enraging and frustrating.

My Dad often tells the story about when I was born, and he went down to buy some baby blankets, and the woman at the shop wouldn’t let him buy “two each please” of pink, blue and yellow, but kept asking over and over whether he had had a girl, or a boy.

It hasn’t got better. Many, many things have got better for girls and women (and boys and men, it has to be said) as far as gender constraints, since I was born in 1978. But many things haven’t got better, and many things have got worse and worse and worse. Walk into a shop, and try to find something that is actually gender neutral, whether that be an item of clothing or a toy. They exist, but they’re getting harder and harder to find. Sure, you can give your daughter fighter pilot Lego and your son fairy wings, but why does every purchase have to be part of a gender revolution?

Why is it so easy to tell which children’s toothpaste is intended for girls, and which for boys? Why is it that only the TV tie in merchandise tends to have a balance of male & female characters within the same range of toys?

I had to buy a present for a boy’s birthday party the other week and I ended up paralysed in Big W. Raeli had instructed me to get him something like a dragon or a truck, ‘something boyish’ but I just couldn’t move – everything I found that seemed appropriate was just so awful or violent or so strongly coded masculine that it made me want to smash my fist into a wall (must be all the testosterone coming off those Transformers figurines) and yet everything else was just so girly that Raeli would be mortified if I made her give it to him. This wasn’t a boy I knew well, it wasn’t one of  godiyeva‘s sons, whom I can shop for in a heartbeat (greek myths, human body, soccer).

The more I thought about it (obviously far too much) the harder it was, and the crosser I got. Eventually I caved and ran away from the toy section altogether, breaking my two-months-of-no-book-purchases (it doesn’t COUNT) to get a nice gentle Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs book, and a sticker book based on the upcoming How To Train Your Dragon movie. (there were no dragon toys in the entire store or I would have followed Raeli’s instructions to the letter)

I chose a monster gift bag, and a Superman birthday card. I left the store feeling vaguely dirty and more than a little harassed.

At the party, filled with kids and parents I didn’t know (I’d never even heard this kid’s name before Raeli got the invitation, it was someone from her old daycare), I watched as the presents were unwrapped. Transformers, trucks, cars, basically every gift I had considered and rejected were provided. I guess we all shopped at Big W (oh that made me feel grubby too, but there are no other toy shops locally, it was that or Woolworths!). The grand prize, the gift that obviously delighted him most, was a “bell” you put on your bike that makes it sound like you’re over-revving a motorbike. Cute for the first ten seconds, deeply disturbing thereafter.

For all my issues that come from raising two girls in a fairy princess world, I’m genuinely glad I don’t have to spend more than the occasional birthday shopping trip in the camo-print skulls-and-crossbones motorbike-revving section of the toy store. Give me fairy wings every time.

Things that make me happy:

Raeli declaring that she’s a bit over pink, and likes other colours too. (this is a lie, by the way, but a kind one)

Raeli rampaging around the back yard, chasing a soccer ball and kicking it with strength and confidence.

Raeli declaring that she wants to go camping, and building tents in every room of the house until her Daddy cracks and borrows a tent.

Raeli arranging her fairy wings and her brand new dressing gown so she can wear both at once.

Raeli deciding after a year or more of refusing to wear trousers (with occasional lapses if said trousers are pink) that yes, jeans are actually pretty awesome and sometimes the most appropriate thing to wear.

(there are many things to do with gender roles and expectations that Raeli does that breaks my heart a little but this is not that blog post)

Jem in stripes, bold colours rather than pastel: orange, green, navy, red, purple

Jem and her cute plush soccer ball

People out in public mistaking Jem for a boy even when she is wearing a pink hat (heh pretty sure that would never have happened a generation ago).

My girls and their friendship with  godiyeva‘s boys – Inigo sternly telling Raeli she should say ‘Jemima’ not ‘Sister’ so the baby can get used to her own name (he totally called Oscar bruvver for YEARS); Oscar declaring to his babysitters that Jem is the most beautiful baby in the whole world; Felix running over for hugs, calling Jem ‘Mima,’ and ‘Baby.’ They fight and sulk at each other, but they are also very close, and their play is very rarely a fight between boy and girl coded activities – they’re just as likely to have Oscar being the princess and Raeli being the knight. Except when Oscar is Wolverine, or Jane from Jane and the Dragon, or Herakles… (he likes to dress up a lot)

A fantastic conversation I had with a Dad at the aforementioned birthday party, about his kids (one girl and one boy) and how close they stick together out in public, what good friends they are, and how much his son loves wearing his fairy wings. The delighted feeling of ‘oh, it’s not just us.’

Other parents’ sons wear fairy wings too!