worryingly jolly batman

The NPR specfic meme:
( etc etc )

47/100, a solid score on any reading list, IMO.

I actually got into a mild Twitter allocation lol, whoops, altercation with @neilhimself (very mild, he wisely chose not to keep fighting my bored-at-work-on-a-friday stream of tweets) and chattycheese about this list, which allowed me to sort out what really annoys me about it, which is primarily this: there are far fewer women than there are men on this list (and vanishingly few people of colour). This by itself is a problem, but what I think is characteristic of this problem is that the women who are on here are very much canonical. They're the women who write the books that always appear on these lists; The Mists of Avalon and Frankenstein and The Handmaid's Tale are as inevitable and, in their way, as uninteresting, demographically speaking, as Lord of the Rings, Foundation and, sigh, American Gods (It's not that I don't love Neil Gaiman, because I really do, it's just that can't we agree that maybe The War for the Oaks is as interesting and influential if not more so than Neverwhere, for pete's sake?) In all of these kinds of top 100s, these books will always be there. They are tremendously influential in the genre, and they're extremely widely read - although they're not necessarily good, I don't think genre fans would throw away Anne McCaffrey and Misty Lackey, or David Eddings and Piers Anthony.

But ... then there are the spots that are, hm, not so serious; not so solid; not so inevitable except of course they are, because they always get filled with the same stuff: Miscellaneous White Dude. It's always The Sword of Truth and never The Ruins of Ambrai. It's always Old Man's War and never China Mountain Zhang. Twelve zillion books by Robert Heinlein and none by Octavia Butler (a freaking crime). Michael Moorcock, not Elizabeth Moon. The Codex Alera, but not the Crown of Stars. Brandon Sanderson but not N K Jemisin.

I feel like I'm not articulating this very well, and at the end of the day I've long since decided that lists that don't adequately represent women and people of colour well are not worth my time in terms of trying to find books I actually want to read. But I'm pretty bored of having this represented to me as inevitable (because they're all canonical; well, so is lots of other stuff!) or an adequate representation of the demographics of either the good stuff or the industry generally (emphatically not true). Sigh, IDEK.

Unpopular feminist opinion: that some feminists enjoy knitting does not render knitting a feminist activity. Discuss.

[Because I'm linking this elsewhere, a refresher: you can comment here anonymously, with a Dreamwidth account, or using your OpenID identity from your home blogsite. Not all sites support OpenID but Livejournal, Wordpress, and Blogger all do, as well as a bunch of others.]

I am not by nature a frugal person. In fact I'm a bit of a spendthrift, inasmuch as someone on my budget can be. However, in one area I am pretty cheap, and that area (naturally) is cooking. I don't buy brand name olive oil, I eat canned tomatoes 9 months of the year, and I don't remember the last time I cooked a meat like steak at home (and since steak at home would be a serious event, you better believe I remember it most of the time). I save that extravagant eating for when I'm not home (even though, reasonably, that's much less cost-effective). I am the past master at substitution, I hate doing a shopping trip specifically to try a recipe and will avoid for ages cooking something that I can't make from the typical contents of my pantry.

All this being the case, it will not surprise you to hear that separating eggs makes me crazy. Yes, there are many things that one can do to use up egg whites or egg yolks, but frankly in the moment I rarely have the time or inclination to do these. Who wants to make meringues on top of whatever it was you used five egg yolks for? And egg yolks are even worse: I do like custard, but there are seasons in which it just isn't appropriate. Plus yolks don't freeze like whites do, and I have all these icing recipes that ask for one egg white. It makes me go a little wild-eyed (OK, not an unusual expression for me.) So one of my ongoing life quests is to find many recipes that pair well with each other, in glorious culinary polyphony. Here's a pairing I came up with this weekend that's going straight into my repertoire.

Summer Pasta & Chocolate Meringue Melts

I think these recipes go with each other rather nicely as a summer menu, although admittedly I think pretty much anything goes with these biscuits. It'd be a nice date meal (I think. What's dating like? It's been so long I barely remember.)

These two recipes are what I made for dinner today. I made the biscuits and then decided to do something with the yolks, which I think is a pretty convenient order. I very slightly adapted the biscuits from Brownie Points, who originally got it from Alice Medrich.

( guh-orgeous )

The pasta I MacGuyvered a bit. Yesterday I made fresh pasta for the first time in my life, inspired by these really good videos, and I pretty much made it to that recipe. I liked it because it's not focused on specific quantities, but on the right textures; use one egg for every person you're serving, salt in proportion to the eggs, and play the flour by ear. I'm guessing that, like bread, this method means that different humidity levels are easily accommodated. I also really liked that it didn't call for a pasta machine - as it happens we do have one, but I dislike the concept of requiring a machine for something people have been doing by hand for a very long time. Apart from anything, I don't have the cupboard space for a pasta machine, an icecream machine, a pastry blender, a food processor, a Kitchenaid, etc etc. Anyway, so this is what I made yesterday, and it was very very tasty, although slightly thick.

Today I was looking at my two left-over egg yolks and I thought, I wonder if you can do pasta with just yolks. I googled and hit Seven-Yolk Pasta Dough at the Smitten Kitchen (I love Deb, so should you), which seemed pretty promising. So I went ahead and made pasta with two egg yolks and two eggs. I can't give you exact quantities, but I probably started with a mound of about a cup and a half of flour? Maybe two cups? I did use the pasta roller for this lot, although I actually found that I didn't like the end result so much - I think I went a little too thin for my taste, and the pasta ended up kind of unforgivingly thin, meaning it cooked really REALLY rapidly. This was a big pain. However, the pasta itself was still delicious and totally worth the effort, and it was faster than rolling by hand. I urge you guys to watch the videos, read the recipes, and have a play; it's no more time-consuming than making bread and just as fun. I started making the pasta after 7:30, and was eating by ten to nine.

I made farfalle (bow tie) pasta, which is really super easy and looks cute, as well as some fettucine that is sitting in my fridge.

Bizarrely, I got my sauce recipe from some weight-loss forum, I guess because cottage cheese is a diet food? Apparently? (Really? IDK. It is delicious, though.)

- Side anecdote: after reading a series of posts at THM by Maia (and one or two by Anne Else, a food blogger I also love) on "Good" Food "Bad" Food (start 28 August) in which she makes the salutory point that a food by itself doesn't count as good or bad, I felt pretty weird reading a bunch of posters sent to a Labour party electoral office made by primary school students in which they thanked the LP for fruit in schools, saying things like "fruit is good because eating it makes you skinny." And not once or twice: three or four times on each of three posters, made by three different rooms - Room 2, Room 4 and Room 5. Really? This is what we want to teach our seven year olds - that "fruit makes you skinny"? That that's what important about a balanced diet? I found it pretty sickening. I am a fan of fruit generally and like every good freedom-hating liberal I'm a fan of educating people about the relative merits of different foods, but I'm not sure "it's good cos it makes you skinny" is the right message - in fact, I know it's not. The word "skinny" was specifically used more often than the word "nutrition" and about as often as the word "health". This is a bit of a problem (apart from anything else, eating fruit is not going to magically make you skinny! At all! That's just not true!) Oh well, another generation with a dysfunctional relationship to food, par for the course, I suppose. (Note: I feel like as a fat feminist I need to disclaimer this stuff: I don't think that people who are slim have a dysfunctional relationship to food and I don't partake in that "real women" bullshit. I have a dysfunctional relationship to food all on my lonesome (not the kind that makes you slim).)

SO ANYWAY. I did find this recipe on a diet site but it is a pretty delicious summer recipe and since fresh tomatoes are finally a) a decent price b) ripe in the supermarkets, I absolutely had to make it. With some variations.

Summer Pasta
Serves a very hungry 1, moderately hungry 2, 3 or 4 as a side, I suppose.

Ingredients
2 tomatoes
fresh basil
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup cottage cheese
salt & pepa
pasta

( method )

The Hand Mirror wants you to write to your local MPs to tell them to support Steve Chadwick, and so do I.

Listen up: it's vital not to get complacent about the state of abortion in New Zealand. There is a wide misperception that we have abortion available on demand. We do not. After a terrible defeat in the late 1970s, what we have is a law which says that women may only have an abortion if it threatens their health. Of late this bill has been interpreted in such a way that mental health is also considered - but women still have to see two consultants and get them to approve their decision about what to do with their own body. Bloggers at THM have written tonnes about abortion and accessing it in New Zealand under their abortion tag, but the long and the short of it is that abortion is tough to access here and it's worse for poor women. Even if you don't think having an abortion should be made legally easier (for I feel that, irregardless of the legalty, having an abortion will always be a difficult decision for any woman) the social inequities must be fixed, and this bill should help.

So please, write to your MPs while Chadwick is soliciting their support. And don't be complacent.

1. I didn't want my radio silence on the terrible fail that's been going on in SPN and Bandom big bangs lately to be taken as tacit consent, so for the record (and in case anyone hasn't seen these): This post on the complicity of fellow fans in race-related fail, especially in the context of a Big Bang fic, I think is really salient. Although it's an awkward, difficult thing to do, especially for fans who aren't people of colour and don't feel "qualified" to talk abot this, I think it's really important for us to tell our friends: stop. I think you've done something wrong there. That's a hard thing to do - but, from one privileged white person to a bunch of other privileged white people, it's also our own responsibility, to notice that shit, pick up on it, speak up about it, and try to clean up our own acts instead of wasting the time of others. And note that this doesn't just apply to racefail. So on that note if you see me doing something and you think I might be showing my ass, I would rather know than keep being an ass. [Of course - of COURSE - it is also our responsibility to scrutinise our own work.]

2. Relatedly, someone in the Young Wizards fandom wrote to me about the Young Wizards Kink and Cliche Meme yesterday asking me to consider restricting non-con or to apply warnings more consistently, and I want to thank her for being a good anti-rape activist and speaking up about this. Although I ultimately felt that I couldn't ban non- and dub-con from a kink meme, I ended up screening and reposting some prompts with subject-header warnings. So first off, if I screened your prompt, that is why, and thanks for not kicking up a stink; and secondly, I'd appreciate any discussion about this (or links to similar discussions.)

3. Malinda Lo has recently written a five-part series on Avoiding LGBTQ Stereotypes in YA Fiction, which I recommend (although a bit tentatively because well, this is fandom. The idea of anyone on my flist needing to be told that there is more to gay men than being flaming and that not all bisexuals are slutty makes me lol.) In the process of that I ended up reading her post at Scalzi's blog about writing a world in which same-sex attraction and opposite-sex attraction are treated in the same way (i.e. there's nothing weird about being gay or bisexual.) Someone in the comments, which are interesting, asked whether it's ever appropriate or useful to write about minorities in exactly the same way that you'd write about majorities, i.e. without the knowledge and context of Othering, discrimination, etc. She compared it to a discussion during Racefail about the fact that having a character who in all other ways behaves as if she is white, but giving her a randomly different skin colour, doesn't do much to increase diversity. I found this a really interesting discussion and I guess I have two things to say about it:

- I think this is a classic case of why discussions about and experience of one type of discrimination, or the lack of one privilege, don't always translate. Because actually speaking as someone who actively seeks out LGBTQ fiction, sometimes I DO just want to read something where the spectrum of sexualities [and gender expressions!] are all totally A-OK and fine and wonderful. In that vein, Diane Duane's Door books should be getting a lot of props (not wrt gender expression where they're fairly traditional: this is, after all, epic fantasy.)

- Queer YA literature is crisis fiction. It is fiction read desperately and sometimes under subterfuge by teenagers who are questioning, lonely, or miserable. And what this fiction mostly is - nine times out of ten, pace David Levithan, almost all queer books written before the year 2000 - is fiction about how goddamned hard it is to be queer in the Western world. Mostly about how hard it is to be a wealthy white cisgendered queer person with typical gender expression, which is an added layer of irony. For quite a long time, in fact, these books all had devastatingly grim endings in which [for the boys, and also for transgendered people] someone was beaten to death or contracted HIV or [for the girls] the crush turned out to be straight and the parents separated them horribly or, admittedly much more rarely, somebody got raped. And frankly this is pretty friggin' miserable. Some of it could be uplifting, challenging, brilliant, inspiring, a call to arms - I don't want to bash a whole generation of queer YA fiction. And I also want to say that teens *do* need this kind of thing, just like they need books about sexual abuse and domestic violence and drug abuse and drunk driving. Teens need to know that they are not alone. That other people are going through what they are going through. And that they will get out on the other side.

But on the other hand. Teens also need romance. They need fluffy, silly, fantasy. They need bouncy, happy fiction. They need to know that unhappiness isn't going to follow them for the rest of their lives and that it is possible to be a girl dating a girl and have a normal, ordinary romance with flowers and chocolates or a boy dating a boy with a million paper cranes and ridiculous romantic gestures. There's this book by Sonya Sones called One of those Hideous Books where the Mother Dies which features - spoiler! - an adult gay couple in a side role, and although the book really isn't about them, I distinctly remember reading it and thinking "at last, a couple with a normal life." There is definitely something to be said for undermining the "monogamous permanent couple with a kid is the height of normal and the goal of an adult life" idea, BUT, as a teenager you aren't always - I wasn't always - thinking of radically undermining heterosexism like this: I just wanted a happy normal life for some people like me.

There are always going to be people - I've read their reviews - who think Boy Meets Boy is a ridiculous book that betrays queer teenagers by failing to represent their real experiences of pain and discrimination. But there are also teens who are crying out for this stuff (many of them, of course, are straight teenage girls, as Alex Sanchez recently pointed out!) Don't diss the happy ending and the happy life: for some genres, a happy book *is* a radical book.

4. Upcoming: three ways the publishing industry made me mad last week! Tune In Next Time.

So, I think I've mentioned that I've been binge-reading Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons lately, and in the process I've been shocked by how much they haven't offended me. For context, if you're not familiar with this children's book series: It was published (and is set in) 1930's Britain, in the lake districts. It follows the children of two families, the Walkers (Swallows, after their dinghy) and the Becketts (the Amazons, ditto), and occasionally a few other families as well (notably the D's and the Eels.) It's classic adventure storytelling: the kids sail around the lakes, they have disasters and find copper mines and go on adventures - a real staple of the books is elaborate games which are a really heightened and respected version of "let's pretend" games - they pretend to be explorers, pirates, cannibals; adults become dangerous "natives"; they make an uncle literally walk the plank, and have slightly less literal battles to the death. This is all fairly standard stuff, but I have become convinced that the books are unique for several reasons ( and you can find out what they are under the cut! )

So, someone just posted the usual rant about how SPN isn't sexist, even if it is it's just a tee vee show, it's a show about BROTHERS not about WOMEN, what does it matter if Dean is disrespectful to women, it's totally in character, blah blah. Anyway, I saw RED (but I'm not defriending, person who wrote this post, if you're reading) and worked this up as a comment to that post, but thought better of it. I am going to replicate it here, though, because it's kind of like SPN Feminism 101. (ETA: I wanted to add some clarification just in case. Although the original post did make me angry, nothing in it was material that was new to me, and I intended that this post be read more broadly than as a specific response to that post - more as a specific response to these criticisms, which I have heard over and over and over.)

The show is about brothers, not women!

Uh-huh. So, how come Bobby is alive (I assume: I did indeed stop watching the show after it pissed me off so much.) and recurringly present, while Ellen (&Jo) vanished into the ether,( cut for what I think are spoilers about the most recent ep or two but I don't know because I'm not watching the show right now )
In other words: if you want to defend the viewpoint that the show's just about Sam & Dean, you also have to defend the contradictions between the way the show treats guest and recurring characters of either gender.

Why does it matter if Dean's disrespectful to women? Mostly they're demons anyway. And anyway, Dean's like the lowest common denominator, he's not going to be all polite. Plus, bitch isn't offensive, lots of women I know use it all the time.

When most people use the word bitch that's true. When Dean uses the word (especially when he talks to Sam) he means bitch like "my bitch": someone submissive & sexually available to him. It's sexually degrading. Pretending that it's just like calling someone a dick when Dean says it is, well, pretending: there are no words like this for a woman to use to describe a man. (There is an increasing gender neutrality of the use of bitch in this context, but chiefly to describe feminised men like Sam.)

Frankly, as tired as you are of reading feminist posts, I'm three times that tired of reading about, hearing about, and experiencing anti-feminism - not only in posts like the one I'm writing about, but when women insist to me that they aren't feminists because feminists are all dykes and "feminism isn't important anymore"; when men tell me all feminists hate men; when my boss tells me I should shave my legs "so I can get a man" and when I say that that's sexual harassment and I really don't like it, as well as pointing out that he wouldn't shave his legs for his girlfriend, he tells me "not to get my knickers in a knot." It's shows like this - shows with ordinary guys saying rude and disrespectful things to and about women, actively and consciouly objectifying them, and perpetuating through itss portrayal of almost every woman that women are useless objects - that made this guy so surprised when he was a dick to me and I bit back. It's seeing guys talk to this like women all over the goddamn television: he thinks it's OK, and why wouldn't he? But it's not OK. It's not OK IRL and it's not OK on the show - not because it isn't appropriate for Dean's character to say these things, but it is inappropriate for the show to commend Dean (or at the very worst, not condemn him) for them.