This Post is About Badminton, Kinda

My senior year of college, once winter was officially gone, one of my housemates or neighbors bought a backyard games set from Walmart on a whim. And that's how I spent half my senior year playing badminton. I'd played occasionally before, like you do as a kid because—let's face it—badminton has a certain amount of whimsy built-in. Elegant rackets like the wings of dragonflies! A winged ball! That's called a shuttlecock! That makes a very satisfying thunk when struck in the sweet spot!

We even held a tournament once, though our careful brackets and fabulous prizes quickly devolved into "take a sip of your beer when anybody scores" and "this ribbon says, 'I Can Dress Myself.'"

There is a very poorly taken photo of me from this time. I have a racket in my hand and am going in for a spike shot. I'm wearing a long-sleeved grey t-shirt and an ankle-length denim skirt that looks as though it was made from a single pair of jeans. (It was not, but such were the fashions of the day.)

And it turns out, this is perfectly in line with the new badminton dress code as described in the New York Times: female badminton players are now required to wear skirts.

Naturally, as the Times hurries to explain, this is being called out as a sexist move. An extra wrinkle is that badminton is played by lots of Muslim women, who currently play in long pants. Pants would still be permitted, but only if a skirt is worn over them. And not a sheer skirt.

The reason for the change? According to Badminton World Federation deputy president Paisan Rangsikitpho:

“Hardly anybody is watching,” he said. “TV ratings are down. We want to build them up to where they should be. They play quite well. We want them to look nicer on the court and have more marketing value for themselves. I’m surprised we got a lot of criticism.”

So, just to be clear: sports marketing value = skirts = harder to play in for religious or physical reasons = women have an extra obstacle to playing well in comparison with men. Way to sell me on the integrity of your sport, sir.

But don't worry! A woman is wiling to go on record and say this isn't sexist! We're in the clear! Former world champion Nora Perry: "Being a woman myself I do not think that the rules in any way discriminate against women."

I guess I missed the message from the Feminist Hive-Mind saying that being held to different standards because I am female is not actually discrimination. Possibly because, um, that is pretty much the textbook definition of discrimination.

Pilot Versus Ballerina

Sometimes, if you are not a cis white dude, life will up and smack you in the face for not being a cis white dude. Even if all you are doing is sitting around typing crappy prose on your laptop.

I was doing just that when the love of my life started scrolling through the updated avatar clothing selections on Xbox Live. "Hey!" he said. "They have a cool jobs section!" And for a moment we delighted in the stereotypical avatar costumes: astronaut, farmer, doctor, pilot, professor.

They were so stereotypical that I was suddenly worried. "Switch to my account," I directed. "I bet you can't be an astronaut if you're female."

"Why would they be different?" he responded. "I bet they are the same."

We checked. They were not.

Astronaut was the same. Professor had been switched to scientist -- in a pencil skirt and lab coat with sassy red flats, rather than a tweed suit and black dress shoes. That raised an eyebrow slightly.

And then, we found ballerina. Ballerina, it seems, had replaced pilot.

And not just one pilot: a male avatar allows you to be either a commercial pilot (spiffy navy blue uniform) or a private pilot (spiffy brown leather bomber and khaki pants).

A female avatar means you can be a ballerina, but not a pilot.

Is this reflective of real life? Maybe if you are a girl and also five years old. But I kind of wanted to be a pilot at age five, so clearly the omgballerina desire is not innate to five-year-old girls.

Let us visit the website for the US Department of Labor! That's where they keep the statistics.

The number of dancers, male and female, employed in the US in 2008 was approximately 13,000. And this is without knowing how many dancers are specifically ballerinas (as opposed to modern dancers, belly dancers, nightclub dancers, etc.), which is undoubtedly a smaller number still.

The number of pilots and flight engineers, male and female, employed in the US in 2008 was approximately 116,000. That figure is higher almost by a factor of ten.

Exaggerated scenario one: if we assume both professions split evenly on gender lines, then you still have nearly nine times more female pilots than female dancers. It is much more likely that you are a female pilot than that you are a female dancer.

Exaggerated scanario two: assume all dancers are ballerinas, which is clearly ridiculous, but bear with me. Where is the statistical point where you have a better chance of being a ballerina than a female pilot? In short, plug 13,000 into 116,000 and see what percentage comes out.

11. Eleven percent. You have a better chance of being a ballerina if less than eleven percent of pilots are female.

Of course, these statistics are just an illustration, because the avatar costumes are not about reality. They are about social norms, and policing gender boundaries. Girls should want to be ballerinas, because ballerinas are super feminine. They shouldn't want to be pilots (and boys should want to be) because pilots are super masculine.

Feminine, in this case, means: cultured, graceful, thin, and sexually unobtainable.

Masculine, in this case, means: gruff, rational, arrogant, and aggressively sexual.

In addition, as the love of my life pointed out, pilots make a significantly higher amount of money than ballerinas, with a significantly lower chance of on-the-job injury. (According to the BLS, professional dancers have one of the highest chances of being injured nonfatally at work.) So women are expected/encouraged to choose a profession in which they must conform to an impossibly high physical standard, with very little monetary recompense.

I have flown planes. I have taken ballet. Flying is much more fun. I would love to dress my avatar in a bomber jacket and black boots -- like I dress in real life.

But apparently that's not very feminine.

Epilogue

Some facts we learned in the course of tonight's research:

• Googling "female pilot uniform" brings up quite a bit more porn than you would expect. Yes, even more than that.
• Googling "male pilot" brings up a lot of whales (oh, I get it) and no porn. At least, not before I got tired of scrolling down.
• Googling "manly pilot" introduces you to early aviation pioneer Charles Manly. So that's pretty neat. No porn, though you do get a cartoon of shirtless anime guys kissing.
• Googling "man" does not bring up Don Draper in the first three pages. We kinda thought it would.
• Googling "men" gets three images of Don Draper on the first page alone.

Nathan Rabin Fails at Modeling and as a Human Being.

It may seem like a clever move to self-deprecatingly refer to your own article as a "lousy blog post", but it doesn't mean the phrase does not ring true. If there is one set of ads I would purge from all the internets given the chance (and the POWER), it is the marketing campaign spat forth by American Apparel. They look like the stalkerish photos taken by serial killers and kidnappers, or else they have contorted models into poses that look not merely painful but even injurious, or else they have weird classist vibes that I try very hard not to ponder at any length. They are train wrecks, and so naturally I can't not look at them.

Which is also why I read Nathan Rabin's recent AV Club post: "Death by sexy: a middle-aged man in an Eat Pray Love promotional T-shirt auditions to be an American Apparel model."

I thought there might be some small bit of revelation in it, some piece of information that could illuminate a corner of the world. And there was, but not in the way I wanted.

Our Author dresses in his worst clothes. He makes fun of the female models while praising their looks, and ignores the male models entirely. He describes the aesthetic of AA ads as being uncomfortably close to child pornography, but appears to have no problem finding this sexually appealing. He talks at length to one hopeful model in particular -- and this is where my bit of revelation comes in.

Martha (a pseudonym) is seventeen, and has been modeling for four years. Let that math sink in a little bit. She is described as "Giddy with the hubris of youth," but she's not the one throwing Greek tragedy terms around and attending modeling auditions as a whimsical prank.

No, Martha is here to get paid. She doesn't model full-time, as she's soon to be a senior in high school, but her mom's been unemployed for two years and modeling helps pay the rent every month.

Let's be clear: this girl is helping keep a roof over her family's head.

Mr. Rabin doesn't care.

He wants to talk about her photos:

She then rifled through her portfolio. It was remarkable how different she looked in each photo. Her fresh-faced, well-scrubbed look of pure Americana was eminently mutable. It was as if her face and body were unformed and unfinished and could only be completed by a stylist and photographer fitting her into their predetermined vision. She could be whoever they wanted her to be.

In short, she's a good model. This is her job. Our Author, who is in no financial straits himself and who has already admitted his own inability to look like anything other than what he is (a writer), nonetheless feels perfectly comfortable looking down on this girl:

She noted sadly that Abercrombie & Fitch wanted to buy one of her photographs, but she didn’t have the rights to the photos they wanted to buy; those were held, I suppose, by the photographers who took them or the modeling agency or the clients that bought them.“Shit, man. I could have been an Abercrombie & Fitch model,” she muttered.

I tried to console her. “Eh, I’ve done a lot of campaigns with them. They’re not so great.” But she did not pick up on my sarcasm.

This girl is hard up. She is at a crossroads of several systems that have let her down: the crappy economy, the copyright system that allows other people (very probably male people) to hold the rights to images of her body, images that could have eased the financial burden on herself and her mother.

Meanwhile, over in the Land of Astonishing Narcisissm, Our Author is sad she doesn't laugh at his joke.

This erasure of Martha and her human experience is a colossal failure on the part of Our Author, both as a writer and as a human being. The whole post started with this paragraph:

It’s hard not to be moved by the print ad’s haunting images of desperation and sadness. Who were these emaciated young people with their gaunt flesh squeezed into gold lamé leggings, their dead eyes pleading for mercy and compassion? Why did a major chain choose advertising redolent of child pornography from the '70s? Were these runaways all right? Had Charney forced them into lives of prostitution, drug dealing, and pornography? Should I purchase American Apparel clothing, or report its owners and advertisers to the proper authorities?

There seems to be some acknowledgment here that American Apparel models are victims of systemic failure. And -- how lucky for his story! -- the intrepid journalist's impression that AA models look desperate and hungry proves to be actually true in real life. This narrative arc should write itself: "I thought Americal Apparel models looked desperate and exploited -- turns out, they are actually desperate and exploited."

But Our Author seems to forget all his concern for these models as soon as he actually meets on in person.

Is that whole early paragraph just a joke? There is a huge disconnect between Our Author's empathetic response to the pictures early on, and his total disregard of Martha (not to mention all the other models auditioning, who barely rate a description). What exactly is supposed to be the purpose of this piece? Rabin claims that he "wanted to experience the weirdness of an open call for American Apparel models firsthand." But we don't hear about anything particularly weird -- unless your definition of weird includes Nathan Rabin, a bald white dude who likes movies.

This is what happens once Our Author's number gets called for the audition:

The gentleman strained mightily to force a smile and nervously asked, “Do you have any questions for us?”

Yes! Now was my chance to uncover the location of the underage models being kept in cages and forced to be sexy 20 to 23 hours a day! I was in a position to demand answers! I was going to take this whole house of cards down with me and expose the shocking, scintillating, titillating truth.

But “Uh, no, I guess not” was all that came stumbling out of my mouth.

It's funny because . . . because exploitation is funny? Because women in cages are funny? Because a journalist failing to be a journalist is funny? Because there is a gap between Our Author's lurid imaginings of being a writerly hero rescuing sexy teens and his actual ineffective behavior? Because disappointment on every level is hilarious, apparently?

At press time, the most recent comment was: "Nobody cares and this is a shitty story." Which sums it up pretty well.

A Bechdel Test for Historical Romance

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Bechdel test and what it reveals about the film industry. And there's been at least one post I could find on a Bechdel standard for video games as well, which is interesting, even though I could dispute a whole bunch of points in the post (such as: whether or not fighting is acceptable as interaction between female characters). And it goes without saying that many movies and games do not pass either the original or Bechdel 2.0. There's a recent Bechdel variation for dance music (a song has to be about something other than "drunk behavior and hookups") and one for the television industry, which says that in order to pass every episode of a show has to have two named female characters who talk about something other than a man.

And then -- of course -- I got to thinking about romance novels. How might the Bechdel test apply?

Oh, sure, romances are jam-packed with female characters, usually -- but usually those conversations revolve entirely around men (or marriage, or babies, which are weak passes for that third rule, in my opinion). And I tend to read historicals and especially regencies, where women's official lives historically really did center around marriage and family and only the lower classes had that tawdry making-a-living thing to consider but we don't really write romance novels about the lower classes unless they end up in the upper classes at the end.

Of course, the whole point of the romance genre is the union of hero and heroine, however that is accomplished. It's important to remember that the hero spends quite a bit of time talking about the heroine with other characters. It's not like the heroine is a secondary consideration the way a female character can be in, say, an action flick. And so maybe the Bechdel test needs to be tweaked for romance novels the way Daniel Feit tweaked it for video games.

All this goes back to the age-old question of whether or not romance novels are feminist texts, or tools of the patriarchy. Whether they subvert or support gender roles and the accompanying expectations. This question is entirely unanswerable, because for every romance novel that does the former you could name one that does the latter. I have come to believe that reading and writing romance novels are very feminist acts. Because there is nothing that the chauvinistic, patriarchal elements of literary culture devalue more than romance novels and the women who read them. You don't need me to tell you this -- every romance reader has had that moment of revelation, where a new acquaintance sees a shelf or coffee table sporting a sunset-hued, mullet-bedecked, cleavage-revealing cover and gets that "I'm mentally taking a step back" gleam in their eye. They see a romance novel and question your taste, your intelligence, and your connection with reality. This is starting to change, thankfully, but even now the experience is far from rare.

Romance novels are written for women, and by women, and many millions of women get together in the world or on the internet and talk to one another about them. In some sense, then, it hardly matters what the texts themselves say, or even whether they're any good (and let's face it, not all of them are).

But sometimes, you read about a hero who's a little too alpha, or a heroine who's a little too self-sacrificing, or you start to worry about the dearth of LGBT characters (who tend especially to be erased/effaced in historicals, though increasingly less so in contemporaries) and you remember the rape-y romance days of yore and realize that we should probably still keep an eye on things from a feminist standpoint.

So what would a Bechdel test for historical romance novels look like? One thing the original Bechdel never really gets to address is what counts as a conversation. Imagine two ladies in a drawing room: "Tea? Yes, please. I like your dress . . . So how do you feel about [insert dudely protagonist here]?" Technically a pass -- but it feels like a cop-out. Yet a startling number of movies fail even something this simple -- which is where the test proves that it is powerful, even when it seems overly simple at first glance. To really separate the wheat from the chaff we need something as revealing about historical romances. Where is the point at which today's historicals have a tendency to let down modern readers?

Where else? Sex.

I'm going to keep the first rule pretty much intact: a historical romance should have at least two female characters.

The second rule of the original Bechdel, that the two characters talk to each other, may need a little more clarifying when we consider novels, which tend to be much wordier than movies. (Get a load of Captain Obvious here.) It's nearly impossible to think of a historical romance where two female characters don't talk to one another, since the divide between gender roles is usually much starker than in either contemporary romances or the modern, real world. We need something more specific.

I would suggest that we begin by considering the absence/insignificance of the Evil Other Woman.

You all know the EOW. She is beautiful, but in a slutty, shameful way, and is frequently described with the word "overblown" or something similar. She's catty and competitive and gossipy and immoral and blatantly attempting to steal the hero from under our heroine's nose. Sometimes she's an ex-lover, sometimes she's a current soon-to-be-jilted mistress, sometimes she's just after a man she wants and doesn't care whom she has to hurt to get him. (One of my favorite tricks of Julia Quinn's is that the Evil Other Woman in three of her novels is the same woman, Cressida Twombley, née Cowper, and she's more of a social than a romantic rival.) And usually, when the EOW is around, there is a scene with her and the heroine where she reveals what a completely rotten person she is underneath that sexy façade. I'm not saying a good old-fashioned argument can't pass this part of the test -- I'm as big a fan of the epic takedown of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as you're likely to find -- but it's critical to note that Lady C. is not a romantic rival, and that most of that conversation is about Elizabeth herself and what she does or does not want. Whereas with the EOW, you get a polarizing, binary system along the familiar lines of virgin/whore, with the hero blithely existing as a prize for women to cut one another's throats for.

In short, I don't think that should count. So, part two: two female characters have a conversation that is not about their mutual sexypants feelings for the hero.

And now, the third part, which is the tricky bit. I think even historical romances should be judged on their level of sex-positivity.

There are two kinds of sex in historicals: hero/heroine sex, and the sex everyone else is having (premarital sex, adulterous affairs, homosexual sex, orgies). For the purposes of this analysis, we are going to ignore rape, pedophilia, and the like -- because it doesn't count as sex anyways, does it. DOES IT.

NO IT DOES NOT.

Ahem.

Hero/heroine sex is always good, redemptive, and/or irresistible. If there are hero/heroine sex scenes that are unsatisfying or creepy, these are 'fixed' in the course of the plot. (For instance, in Mary Jo Putney's The Rake, where the heroine thinks the hero is only attracted to her when he's drunk.) But the sex between secondary characters, or between the hero/heroine and other characters in the past, can be presented as good, or terrible, or dirty, or immoral, or any number of other things. These secondary sexual scenes provide a much clearer window on the sexual morality of an individual book, much more so than the scenes between hero and heroine.

For instance, in a romance I finished recently, a secondary character was being blackmailed by the heroine's father. The victim's secret was that his dead older brother, the heir to a title, had preferred to sleep with men. When the heroine learns this, she is shocked and appalled and disgusted. And I felt a little let down, because the heroine and the hero had spent about half the book struggling with their inability to be in a room together for five minutes without clothes flying off and orgasms happening all over the rug. Who were they to judge someone else's attraction? I know, it's historically accurate for people of the early nineteenth century to consider sodomy appalling. But we do not live in the early nineteenth century, and there's plenty of room in romance for a little anachronism. There always has been.

Another example: Cheryl Holt's A Taste of Temptation, which opens with one of the more tired romance-novel clichés out there: our heroine is applying for the position of governess, and is cornered and groped by the hero's half-brother. Our hero, despite having just lectured his half-brother to stop groping servants and being such an idiotic horndog one page earlier, calls the heroine a flirt and a trollop and has her booted out of the house without letting her explain that being flirtatious and being grabbed are not the same thing. They never get around to clearing this up, because later they get too distracted by accusing one another of liking sex, as though liking sex were something you didn't want in a romantic partner. (Side note: while looking at reviews of Cheryl Holt's other books, I found one that supposedly has a really wonderful historical treatment of a lesbian romance. The book is in the mail, and a report is forthcoming.)

A case on the opposite side: Gail Carriger's paranormal steampunk romance Soulless, which I cannot recommend highly enough. At the end the sexy werewolf hero ends up sans clothes and surrounded by a coterie of frivolous gay vampires, who keep finding excuses to drop things so he'll have to bend over and pick them up. And our hero smiles, and knows what they're up to, and indulges them anyway. Silly vampires, he seems to say -- go ahead and ogle. It does not freak me out, or threaten the very fun sexytime I shall have with my soon-to-be-wife.

The third criteria, then, goes something like this: sex between the hero and heroine should not be presented as morally superior to every other kind of sex. Sex itself is not inherently dirty; it is a human need. Hero/heroine sex can still be special and mind-blowingly awesome -- because we all like reading about awesome sex -- but it is not in a separate, special moral category of its own.

This means: a secondary character trapped in a loveless marriage is not automatically vilified for having an adulterous affair. Homosexual sex is not presented as inherently horrific, or at least it should not horrify our main characters. A hero does not get jealous if the heroine has had satisfying sex before she met him, and the heroine does not consider the hero's greater sexual experience a moral failing that her true love/sexual purity must correct.

So there we are, a rough Bechdel for historical romance: 1. Must have at least two female characters. 2. Who talk about something other than their mutual sexual interest in the hero. 3. Whose sexual relationship with the heroine is not presented as intrinsically more moral than other sexual relationships.

Authors I can think of off the top of my head who pass this test quite frequently: Julia Quinn, Loretta Chase.

Vodka is for Lame Babies -- Take My Word For It

Previously on this blog, I wrote about Caskstrength's troubling rules for drinking like a man. Today, we're looking at the first of those rules: No vodka. Vodka is not manly, says Caskstrength.

"How so?" you ask.

It just isn't.

I have harped on this for too long so I’ll make it crystal fucking clear, there is nothing manly about Vodka. Almost all domestic vodka is in fact industrial alcohol mixed with water. Vodka can only be sipped neat or taken as a shot, and even then, it is still kind of for lame babies.

This guy begs to differ:

And that's pretty much the whole of Caskstrength's post. There's only two things you can think about when vodka comes up: James Bond, and patriotic Russian/Polish people. The first doesn't count because apparently he only drinks vodka in the movies and screws up the cocktail name -- obviously, this makes James Bond a total wuss, despite all the shooting and the sexing and the well-tailored suits. Wait, are well-tailored suits still manly? They weren't for a while, but now they're back, at least until I hear otherwise. Gender-specific trends are so confusing.

As for the Russians and Poles (and Finns -- shout-out!) who claim to love vodka, well -- they really just want an excuse to talk about their home country. Because all Russian people were born in Russia, and Polish people were born in Poland, and they have no business being born in America like real Americans are:

As for the Russians and the Polish, you know how every time one of those guys are telling you how great Vodka is there is a ton of, “do you know how great my country of origin is? Because I am proud of it and want to talk about it a lot.” Don’t be that guy, don’t listen to that guy.

In fact, the strangest thing about this post is what it leaves out: vodka is not manly because it is girly.

Evidence: vodka is the key ingredient in that most feminine of cocktails: the Cosmopolitan. My mother recently praised my love of vodka tonics, because they're low-calorie cocktails, relatively speaking. A friend once assured me with great authority that the Greyhound, a mix of vodka and grapefruit juice, was considered the diet cocktail of choice for some sorority or other. Flavored or infused vodkas are largely not considered "real drinks," which is to say they are effeminate, like chocolate martinis and such.

When Caskstrength says that vodka is to be taken neat or not at all, what he's saying is: don't drink vodka cocktails like many many women do. Unless it's a White Russian, of course, because of The Dude. Unless you're in a bowling alley, because then you've become That Guy.

So many rules -- how will I keep them all straight?

The Drink-Like-A-Man Trap.

One night, four of us ended up at Seattle's lovely Mistral Kitchen for dinner, because the rumor mill had it that the cocktails were pretty good. The rumor mill underestimated by a mile.

The cocktails were more than good: they were fantastic. Maybe the best cocktails I've ever had: well-crafted, unique, and utterly delicious. And because the list was only eight items long, and because we'd all ordered different drinks in the first round, and because nobody was driving anywhere for the foreseeable evening's future, we managed to taste everything on the menu in the course of an hour and a half.

The bartender Andrew noticed, and graciously allowed us to taste something he was planning to put on the new menu due out the following week. It was something that had the smokey taste of whiskey, but none of the burn, and we just could not figure out how he'd done it. So we asked, and he was kind enough to explain the process and a bit of the chemistry and all of us were starry-eyed and dazzled.

It was a lovely evening, and as soon as I got home I subscribed to the feed on Caskstrength, Andrew's blog. For a while, it was perfect -- he talked about creating a Tom Waits-inspired cocktail, and chainsawing ice, and other such specifics. He introduced me to the word "dipsography," writing about drinking, which is a much-needed coinage in this new cocktail renaissance of ours. Then, just when I thought the blog and I were bestest buddies, or at least could talk intelligently between one another, this post came up, introducing a short series of posts: ten rules for drinking like a man.

Also known as: ten things you can say to make Alicia's head explode.

The only thing I can do is take them apart one at a time, beginning with the intro post.

Problem No. 1: Man = Ideal

When people say, "drink like a man," they never bother to explain that this is for a given value of "man." It's assumed you know this value already: a man is strong, rugged, powerful, successful, and so on. In a word, man is an ideal person. For a woman to drink like a man, she must first disown her own identity. She cannot be soft, quiet, passive, sweet, or fruity. Of course, she has to be all those things, because she is female, and those are the ideal feminine qualities. So if she doesn't drink like a man, she deserves scorn. If she does drink like a man, she deserves scorn.

As Caskstrength's Andrew has it:

The world of drinks, drinking and bars fit nicely into 2 small compartments: ” T.G.I. Mc Flingers in a strip mall,”  or, “Don Draper,” where do you stand?

No options there for a woman, because when Don Draper is the gold standard a woman will always be found lacking. (Especially by Don Draper himself.)

Drinking like a man: it is a trap.

Problem No. 2: Men drink, women don't.

A quote:

Men, It isn’t your fault no one taught you what to drink.  We are going to fix that now.  Ladies, if you see a man break any of these rules you can be assured he is egotistical, close minded, weak, lacks creativity and thusly a bad fuck.

Ah, the age-old double standard for alcohol consumption: men drink, and women don't. Women are not to follow these rules themselves, that sentence implies -- they should be occupied analyzing what a man's choice of beverage says about him as a person and a lover (by which we mean, ultimately, father). Because of course something like romantic compatibility can be reduced to the simplicity of a set of rules no more complex than your average teen-written internet quiz.

But I pose to you, evaluate the man who has placed a menu in front of you offering up an, “X-TREME MANGO MOJITO,” do you really trust him with with high quality and impeccable  taste?

This sentence brings up an interesting point: often, people order from a cocktail menu. A menu is pre-designed, pre-arranged, and the person ordering from it is discouraged from asking the menu item to be altered. What the woman is supposed to do is critique the man she's dining/drinking with (though, as we've seen, she's not really supposed to be doing any of the drinking). She's not encouraged to critique the person who put an X-TREME MANGO MOJITO on that menu in the first place, although there is a strong case to be made that it is the taste of the menu's creator that should be faulted. To fault the person who orders from the menu, and not the menu itself, seems to ignore the larger context in which the drink order occurs. The same goes if women are supposed to reward the person who orders a "manly" cocktail -- and we still don't know what that is -- but not to reward the creator of the menu. She is supposed to ignore the larger context, as if it didn't exist.

In the same way, she is supposed to keep herself clean and thin and mostly hairless. She is not supposed to ask why women have to be clean and thin and hairless, when there is no correspondingly significant pressure for men. She is not supposed to ask what this system does for her personally -- she is just supposed to follow the rules.

Telling women to focus on the immediate situation rather than the larger context is often also a trap.

Problem No. 3: Turns out all this is geared toward one specific dude.

I left a comment on Caskstrength, to this effect: "Hey, dude, this kinda leaves the ladies out in the cold, cocktail-wise. Know what I mean?"

And he replied -- very graciously, I might add -- that the series was directed at a personal friend, for personal reasons.

Which is very sweet, helping out a friend like that. I also have a friend, and this friend is terrified of kittens. So, rather than personally helping this person conquer their fear of kittens, or even writing a post explaining how to help this specific person conquer their specific fear of kittens, I have written a post that details all the ways in which kittens are harmful and should be thrown out the window of a moving train.

I have another friend, who is a woman. This woman -- let's call her "Balicia" -- has been on the wrong side of way too many "here's how to drink/think/read/write like a man, because we all know men are teh awesome" conversations. She doesn't mind learning how to drink/think/read/write better, but it really bothers her when "better" = "like a dude," because it is a very short step from "traditional masculine-coded areas of know-how are an ideal everyone should strive for no matter their gender" to "men are inherently superior because of a wiggly thing between their legs."

You see how this works. It's Refute-A-Thon 2010 all up in here.

Because if I don't try and speak out on things like this, they will drive me crazy. Andrew at Caskstrength is truly an authority on his topic. His knowledge is beyond vast. He may well be one of the best bartenders of our generation; he is certainly the best bartender whose drinks I have ever had the privilege to consume. And when someone whose work I admire turns around and says something so regressive and hurtful, well, it makes me feel like I've been stabbed in the back, just a little.

Here's the list of upcoming posts:

Rule 1: No Vodka Rule 2: No “Tinis” Rule 3: No Light Beer, unless… Rule 4: Jack Daniel’s Is For Pussies Rule 5: Read the Cocktail List Rule 6: Cash, the Etiquette of Dollars Rule 7: Own Your Drink and the Glass It Is In Rule 8: Order Champagne, Often Rule 9: Own a Flask And Good Home Barware Rule 10: Know Your Limits

I can hardly wait.

Women Like Writing, But Nobody Writes Like Women.

Internet personality quizzes are my Achilles heel. I enjoy finding out what interval best embodies my complex individuality (major 7th, as it happens) and what the shape of my letter A's says about me on a fundamental level. If I'd been around in the late eighteenth century I would have been totally into phrenology, though it pains me to admit it. But there's something eternally seductive about the idea that my self is just a code waiting to be decrypted. I'm always looking for the key. So when Twitter alerted me to the existence of I Write Like, I jumped all over it. Into the machine went my favorite part of a blog post on my recent honeymoon in Helsinki.

I write like Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Um, really? I tried again, with a snippet from my rant about Red Dead Redemption.

I write like Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This was going from bad to worse. I broke out the big guns. And by guns I mean penis -- I put in the steamy sex scene from my historical romance work-in-progress.

I write like H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Obviously I should be working on a Cthulu love story. As Maggie Stiefvater said, "Kraken are the new vampires."

But wait. I had put in a sex scene -- and a very purplish one, at that. We've already seen Dan Brown's name, and someone else on the internet has gotten Stephen King, so modern (male) genre authors are totally bring-uppable. Is Lovecraft really the closest thing this site could get to a romance author?

Online I found an excerpt from Danielle Steele's The Journey, and put in a goodly chunk of text.

I write like Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

At this point I was getting a horrible feeling that whoever built this site did not think women could write anything significant, memorable, or worth imitating.

Of course, modern romance authors are still kind of ghettoized, sure. So I went classical, and pulled the start of chapter 38 from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. The one that begins, "Reader, I married him." Who does Charlotte Bronte Write Like?

I write like James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Like hell she does. (For one thing, she lived about a century earlier than Joyce.) I put in the opening paragraphs from the same book.

I write like Charles Dickens

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

At this point I started to go a little crazy, throwing anything and everything into that damn white frame on the site and growing increasingly sure that my outrage was more than just a figment of my imagination. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own:

I write like Oscar Wilde

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Virginia Woolf, Orlando:

I write like H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

By analogy, then, I write like Virginia Woolf, I guess, but this thought was merely a damp handkerchief against the vast Sahara of my frustration as I kept going.

A poem from Emily Dickinson:

I write like James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale:

I write like James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth:

I write like J. D. Salinger

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

If you've noticed there's an elephant in the room, sipping tea and wearing an empire-waist gown and arguing that the choice of who to marry is screamingly important when it's the only real choice you get to make in your entire life, you're correct. I'd been avoiding putting anything by Jane Austen in here, because honestly it would break my heart to see Jane Austen writing like James Joyce, or Dickens, or frakking Lovecraft. But the question had to be answered.

Jane Austen's beautiful, perfect opening scene from Pride and Prejudice:

I write like Jane Austen

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Okay, that passage is pretty famous. I kept going.

Persuasion:

I write like Jane Austen

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Emma:

I write like Jane Austen

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Mansfield Park:

I write like Jane Austen

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Northanger Abbey:

I write like Jane Austen

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Sense and Sensibility:

I write like Jane Austen

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

In conclusion: no female author has ever produced anything important unless they are Jane Austen.

A sly thought occurred. I went back to the Gutenberg Project, and looked up the truncated and very sarcastic History of England that Austen wrote in her youth. I entered this passage:

"The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians, but as he was a YORK, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man. It has indeed been confidently asserted that he killed his two Nephews and his Wife, but it has also been declared that he did not kill his two Nephews, which I am inclined to beleive true; and if this is the case, it may also be affirmed that he did not kill his Wife, for if Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York, why might not Lambert Simnel be the Widow of Richard. Whether innocent or guilty, he did not reign long in peace, for Henry Tudor E. of Richmond as great a villain as ever lived, made a great fuss about getting the Crown and having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth, he succeeded to it. "

I write like James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Damn it.

Prostitutes, Villains, and Video Games: A Rant

Let's talk about video games, and the ladies in them. And by ladies, I mean prostitutes. Back in 2008 (Ye Olden Dayes, it seems), Rockstar Games took a lot of heat on account of Grand Theft Auto IV, particularly the fact that within the game, you could hire a prostitute, have sex with her, kill her, and retrieve your cash. To many people it felt -- oh, what's the right adjective -- heartless. To many other people, it was hilarious, and titillating.

At the time, I was mostly indifferent. There are so many other issues with the Grand Theft Auto universe (racist stereotypes, the Madonna/whore complex, gratuitous violence and destruction), that it felt like the only proper response was the same one you see when you look up the goofs for the disaster movie The Core on IMDb: "Since almost all of the 'science' in the movie is entirely erroneous, we are prepared to accept that the movie's universe *must* have entirely different rules - it's the only possible explanation. It's just for fun."

I shrugged and went on with my life. And recently, Rockstar Games put out a very impressive Western, Red Dead Redemption. The critics have been gushing. And one of the things you tend to see as you explore this world is a man abusing a prostitute (wearing a white corset and black stockings, because she's Ye Olde-Tyme Hookere) and threatening to kill her. You then have the option of killing the guy, in which case your honor rating goes up, which means nuns might later hand you amulets that prevent your enemies' bullets from doing too much damage. (There's that Madonna/whore thing again!) You also have the option of killing the girl, but you lose honor for doing so.

It felt as though this was a clever way for the gamemakers to atone for the offense their earlier game had caused. And then, I learned about this:

This is much, much worse, even if you watch the video on silent and miss all the little catcalls the two narrators throw at this totally fictional, voiceless, doomed woman ("That's some hot stuff going on there"). Even when you realize the narrators are much more upset at the death of their equally fictional, equally voiceless, equally doomed horse than they are at the death of the woman they dragged out here to kill.

The primary reason this is much, much worse than killing prostitutes in GTA is very simple: this is now an Xbox Achievement.

Gamerscore is a fascinating phenomenon. Achievement points are accumulated by playing games: finishing a story, a part of the story, getting a certain number of kills, or anything else the gamemakers thought to include. Getting an achievement does not actually earn the player anything except a digital badge and an ever-increasing score, visible to the other players on Xbox Live. It is about pride, and competition, and a mark of enthusiasm. And since the number of achievement points possible on a given game is public, there is a strong drive to get all the achievements possible within the scope of a particular game.

Watching a woman die in an explosion of blood and splatter is worth 5 points. This is the lowest Xbox achievement value it is possible to have, except for one brand-new, snide achievement in Split-Second that is worth 0 points. (Reminds me of this post on the ever-amazing Tiger Beatdown.)

In GTA, you can kill the prostitute, but you have no real incentive. The cash values are pretty small, and there are plenty of other ways to earn money. You have no incentive at all that extends outside the world of the game.

But with this achievement in Red Dead Redemption, the gamer's pride is at stake. Completionists are going to throw that woman LITERALLY UNDER THE TRAIN for five measly points just so they can say they've got every achievement in the game. This woman is now a sacrifice.

But she's fictional! you will say.

You do not get the achievement if you hogtie a man and throw him under the train. It is very specifically gendered.

But the achievement's called "Dastardly!" you will say. Obviously it's a reference to Snidely Whiplash! It's funny!

You know what would have been funny? If you tied the woman up, put her on the train tracks, and a heroic blond Mountie rode up and rescued her and carried her off into the sunset. But no, this is a dark game, a game about justice and violence and killing people who deserve killing -- so the woman has to die.

And this is an important and not-yet-perfectly-untangled knot in the history of narrative. When you read a book whose morality is questionable -- Lolita, for instance -- you might get so put-off by the story that you can't even finish the book. If you do finish the book, you still cannot be held accountable for what happened in the course of the plot.

With a sandbox game, like GTA IV or Red Dead Redemption or Fallout 3 or to some extent my beloved Fable 2, you are definitely responsible for some (though usually not all) of the main character's choices. The protagonist's morality reflects back on you in a way that movies or books can't, not even books of the Choose Your Own Adventure variety.  Now, with Fallout 3 and Fable 2, being evil comes with an in-game cost: in the latter, for instance, you can sacrifice 10 people in the Temple of Shadows and get a corresponding achievement, but there is also an achievement for NOT sacrificing at the Temple of Shadows and for saving the Temple of Light instead.

There is absolutely no in-game cost to the Dastardly achievement in Red Dead Redemption. If you pull out your shotgun and shoot a townsperson, the law pursues you for a little while; same if you steal a horse. But hogtie a woman and leave her to be squished by a train -- nobody bats an eye.

E-reader Ads and Gender Bias: A Rebuttal

So lately -- on Shakespeare's birthday, in fact -- there was this Huffpo post by Jason Pinter, which then meandered through the blogosphere until it reached my habitual environs (NPR's delightful Monkey See Blog). The article alleges that there are not enough books for men because of a publishing mantra: men don't read. So there should be more books marketed for men. And I got very angry and had to kill some pixelated zombies in Castlevania until I calmed down a bit. The comments are pretty evenly split between the expected "Oh man you are totally right publishing is totally sexist to dudes" and "what are you talking about I'm a man I read/I know a man he reads." And, of course, absolutely everyone heaps scorn on the romance novel, as represented by Twilight, chick-lit, and Danielle Steele. Negative bonus points for Huffpo commenter RobinSeattle, who offered the following gem: "There is almost no piece of advertising on tv that doesn't make men look like knuckle dragging hapless boobs. Feminists are silent on this sort of sexism because they are largely a bunch of intellectually dishonest opportunists anyway." On RobinSeattle's profile: comments: 6243, friends: 2.

But that's not what I wanted to pinpoint here.

One of the things Pinter laments is the way e-readers are supposedly marketed primarily to women, and cites the ads for the Nook: . . . and the Kindle:

Pinter then offers this lovely sentiment:

Why would men buy an e-reader, considering the takeaway from these ads is you can a) learn about your pregnancy after falling for Mr. Darcy, or b) become Amelia Earhart or Holly Golightly?

Yeah, Amelia Earhart's alright -- for a girl. And no man in the history of men has ever found Holly Golightly interesting -- except, you know, the dude who created her. And who needs to learn about pregnancy? Nobody important, that's for sure.

I like to think that every time a male writer dismisses the attractions of Mr. Darcy, somewhere in the world a romance novel is born.

Luckily, according to Mr. Pinter, the iPad ad gets things right:

Cool, right? They catch your attention without alienating half the consumer population. Why can't we do that? Make a fun, cool campaign that doesn't cut your audience off at the knees?

It's funny he should mention knees, because here are the full lyrics for that particular (admittedly catchy) song:

Be Be the charming type Take off your gloves And show what they hide Please take my naked wrist With your hands and fingertips

And please, baby get on your knees Don’t bare bare bare your teeth

I’ll let you pry if you close your eyes

I’ll have an answer for your wives

There goes my love There goes my love There goes my love love love love love

There goes my love There goes my love There goes my love love love love love

oh

Why be the charming kind? Oh you’ll get yours when I get mine Oh no it’s not for me If you’re too good you won’t be free

Meanwhile, the full lyrics for the song in the Kindle ad (which Pinter dismisses as "twee") are:

Silver Moons and paper chains, Faded maps and shiny things. You're my favorite one-man show. A million different ways to go.

Will you fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Painted scenes, I'm up all night. Slaying monsters, flying kites. Speak to me in foreign tongues. Share your secrets one by one.

Will you fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Now I cant think what life was like Before I had you by my side. Cant say what I'd do without you, Knowing what its like to have you.

Hidden walk ways back in time. Endless stories, lovers cry. In my mind I've been set free. Will you take this Journey You and Me?

Will you Fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Fly me away with you, My Love.

Take me away with you, My Love.

In sum: the Kindle wants to keep you up all night with adventures, words, and monster-slaying. The iPad wants you naked and submissive. Which one sounds more like a satisfactory reading experience?

Here is a list of things momentarily featured in the iPad ad above: photo displays, a romantic suspense/mystery novel by Tami Hoag, the New York Times, the new Star Trek, Ted Kennedy's memoir, and some kind of dude-heavy outdoorsy document/blog called "The Powder Report," which the user is editing. Note how many of those things are not books.

A list of things that are featured in the Nook ad: Where the Wild Things Are, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Pride and Prejudice, What to Expect When You're Expecting, The Book Thief (which if you haven't read you should do so immediately, but have a hanky close to hand). Of course, all these are also coyly referenced in the first-person female voiceover -- which then gives way to a male voiceover, which says this: "Experience the only e-book reader from the bookstore you've grown up with. Nook, by Barnes and Noble. Browse and download over a million titles wirelessly, and take your story wherever you want it to go."

The Nook ad is, of course, personal. It is designed to be this (undoubtedly fictional, but thoroughly plausible) story of one woman's history with books. And the male voiceover at the end reinforces the fact that this is one particular story, and that you (whoever you are) have a story of your own, and somehow buying a Nook helps you tell it or relive it or something. (Also: putting The Book Thief right there in an e-reader commercial is kind of hilarious for several reasons.) There is a mix here of books by male authors (Sendak, Zusak) and female authors (Blume, Austen, Murkoff and Mazel).

Whereas the iPad ad does feature both male and female hands on that pretty, pretty touchscreen, the content displays one female author (Hoag), one male author (Kennedy), a newspaper (journalism being an industry notorious for its sexism), a movie written by, directed by, and starring mostly dudes (though at least they tried to clarify Uhura's job in this one, but come on, we know it's all about the Kirk-Spock bromance), somebody's kids, and snowboarders. Moreover, the only book opened in the iPad commercial is the Kennedy memoir -- the Hoag mystery only appears as some kind of ad or banner that the user's hand never touches.

By preferring the iPad ad to the Kindle and the Nook, Pinter is saying two things. One: despite his screed against the publishing industry's neglect of men, Pinter is more interested in shiny gadgets with a rock soundtrack than in something that uses actual books, and not just the latest trendy political read. (Partly this is because the iPad is meant as a media-consumption device rather than just an e-reader -- but don't get me started on that whole mess.)

And two: gender disparity in the material (so many dudes in that iPad!) looks like equality to Pinter if you see both men and women dealing with it, and something closer to actual equality (60/40 if you count Murkoff and Mazel as one author) looks like it's skewed because the ad's protagonist happens to be a woman. The same is true of the music above: Pinter likes the male vocalist's rock song despite the lyrics, which are questionable from an advertising standpoint (how does this song sell iPads aside from being catchy?), and dislikes the female vocalist's piano melody despite the appropriateness of the song's sentiment for the product being advertised. (Shades of the recent Tiger Beatdown guest post on dude music, anyone?)

Pinter does not expect to identify with a woman -- but he expects women to identify with men. Because men are the default. (White men. Straight white men. With short hair. And guns.) All this tends to take the wind out of the whole "I don't read because publishers make books look girly" argument, which essentially amounts to "Why don't they put some explosions on the cover so it won't threaten my masculinity to be seen holding it?" Men shouldn't have to imagine themselves in a woman's place -- because that's a woman's place.

RITA: Julie Garwood's The Bride

My first form-specific look at a past RITA award winner: The Bride, by Julie Garwood. First off, I must explain that this is one of the first romance novels I read growing up. And it is definitely the one I've reread most often: probably upwards of a hundred times, easily. There are scenes and sentences here that are now part of the physical makeup of my brain.

So learning that it was a RITA winner was a delight, but no surprise. What's more, the book holds up surprisingly well considering it's now old enough to order alcohol (should the book decide it wants a cocktail). But I'm not here to review the book -- I'm here to look at how it's written.

So:

In the forward to my copy, a reissue, Garwood explains that "experts" advised her to leave the humor out of her story: "I had tried my best to follow their advice for a couple of books, but with The Bride, I simply couldn't help myself . . . I finally gave in to the urge and wrote the story as I saw it."

Nor is this the only writers' rule that Garwood breaks in the book. How well do I remember the switches of POV (point-of-view, for you rookies out there) that drive not only the humor, but the developing romance. Like so, when our heroine Jamie learns at the last minute that she is to marry Scottish laird Alex Kincaid at the king's behest. We begin with our hero:

She still hadn't caught on. Alec sighed. "Change your gown, Jamie, if that's your inclination. I prefer white. Now go and do my bidding. The hour grows late and we must be on our way."

He'd deliberately lengthened his speech, giving her time to react to his announcement. He thought he was being most considerate.

She thought he was demented.

Jamie was, at first, too stunned to do more than stare in horror at the warlord. When she finally gained her voice, she shouted, "It will be a frigid day in heaven before I marry you, milord, a frigid day indeed."

"You've just described the Highlands in winter, lass. And you will marry me."

"Never."

Exactly one hour later, Lady Jamison was wed to Alec Kincaid.

According to the hundreds of writing how-to guides out there, this is wrong. Supposedly, to jump from one character's POV to another is confusing and leads to the reader gripping their head in pain and yelling AARGH and throwing the book against a wall and who will give you royalties then, hmm?

But I love and remember and admire the passage above, and every other similar passage in the book. Romances written entirely from one character's perspective (in the vein of a lot of the novels of Georgette Heyer godsavethequeen) aren't as appealing to modern readers. We like being in the hero's head; we like it when he's not some giant impenetrable mystery figure. We want him to be a person, with thoughts and worries and emotions, like the heroine is and has always been.

At some point, if you are writing a romance novel, you are going to have to switch POV. Mostly this happens between scenes, and the general rule is that once you start a scene in one character's POV you stick with that character until the scene break. But if you do it mid-scene, like Garwood, if the reader sees what the heroine above is thinking while the hero's thoughts are still echoing in the reader's -- oh, who am I kidding -- in her memory, you get a moment where it feels like there is a point of contact between the mind of the hero and the mind of the heroine. A moment where Alec's and Jamie's experiences seem to touch, unbeknownst to them, through the medium of the reader.

This is a powerful tool, and it is clear that the reason the how-to guides recommend against it is because such power could spin out of control in the hands of a novice writer. The POV switch is a tool to be used with restraint -- like garlic. Delicious, even occasionally necessary, but repellent when overdone.

The switches in The Bride are primarily used to jump between the hero and the heroine, but not exclusively. Secondary characters get a lot of play, too, which is a neat way of solving the perennial problem of the Infodump. By the time we get a few chapters in, we know how our main characters think about themselves, and about each other, and we also know how they seem to the other people around them. Handy for things like physical description and background info, but for the romance it's just as important to know that Jamie's view of herself as capable and talented is borne out by the opinions of several people around her, even when Alec himself hasn't been convinced yet.

In fact, because Garwood allows us to flit from one character's consciousness to another, she has the luxury of beginning from the POV of Jamie's father:

They said he killed his first wife.

Papa said maybe she needed killing. It was a most unfortunate remark for a father to make in front of his daughters, and Baron Jamison realized his blunder as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He was, of course, immediately made sorry for blurting out his unkind comment.

As a side note, beginning with a secondary character before proceeding to the hero/heroine is a technique frequently used by Jane Austen, most notably in Pride and Prejudice (Mrs. Bennet), Persuasion (Sir Walter Elliot). Garwood's opening technique has a sterling literary pedigree.

Lesson Learned: Rules are made to be broken.

Ready to Read the RITAs? Right!

In more than one bookstore, you can find lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners posted in the science fiction/fantasy sections. Displays of the recent Pulitzer winners are currently everywhere. Man Booker Awards, American Book Awards, National Book Awards -- these will all be noted on shelf cards or pointed out. The reason for this is simple: a good way to sell books is to convince people of a book's importance and quality. Winning a prestigious award is a shorthand for both -- plus, it makes the reader look sophisticated and intelligent when trying to hit on other humans. You know what I have never seen in an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore? A list or display of RITA award winners (formerly known as the Golden Medallion). It's the romance genre's most prestigious award -- which critics will argue is like frosting on a shit sandwich. And hitting on someone when you are holding a romance novel -- drenched fatally in pink and white, or else covered in cursive lettering, or else lounged upon by a scantily clad and heavily haired couple who may in fact be orgasming as you watch -- well, it just plain does not work. The prime cultural tone associated with romance novels is desperation, the antimatter to seduction.

Of course, this is absurd, as anyone familiar with the fine work done over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books can tell you. Romance readers are smart, and romance is no less powerful a genre than fantasy or science fiction or mystery. It has a craft, and a history, the same way any subset of literature does.

Many of you already know I've been trying my hand at writing romance, which has turned out -- surprise! -- to be hard. It's also amazing, and now that I've started I don't think I can ever stop. It has begun to rewire my brain: everything becomes a potential narrative, the start of a story I haven't learned how to tell yet. And I'm getting better -- but slowly. It is time to take a more organized approach.

Which brings me back to the RITA Awards.

From henceforth, I will be going through the list of RITA winners (focusing on the historical and regency categories, which were once the same but are now separate) and writing about each. This is not going to be merely a process of review -- there are plenty of very thorough and delightful review sites out there already (hello, Mrs. Giggles!). What I am going to be looking at, specifically, is the way the romance is written: the plot setup, the prose craftsmanship, things that leap out from a writing perspective. There will probably be many swearwords.

One of the reasons for this is a piece of writing advice I've been thinking about a lot lately: never switch from one character's POV to another. This makes good sense, mostly, because leapfrogging around from brain to brain tends to give unpolished prose a feeling of whiplash. But I keep remembering my favorite moments from Julie Garwood's The Bride, one of the earliest romances I read and in fact the first RITA winner for Best Single Title Historical. And many of those moments -- which are hilarious -- depend upon a deft switch from one character's perspective to another.

So sometimes the rules need to be broken, apparently. But we knew that. What other rules can I break, in useful ways? What rules are holding me back, or helping me tell a better story? I intend to learn from the best.

First up: The Bride by Julie Garwood (Best Single Title Historical, 1990).

After that: The Rake and the Reformer by Mary Jo Putney (Best Regency Romance, 1990).

Now Put Your Hands Up!

So lately there has been some discussion on the internet about Beyoncé, and whether or not "Single Ladies" is a feminist anthem or a pseudo-feminist anthem or just, you know, a really catchy number with some top-notch choreography and an alluring bionic hand.

A lot of this discussion -- both in the recent AV Club article and in The Sexist -- centers around the word "it" that you are instructed you ought to have put a ring on. From Amanda Hess:

Beyonce uses the dual “its” to objectify herself on two levels: first, as a sex object; second, as a wife. Beyonce asks her man to mark his territory by putting a “ring on it.”

According to the AV Club:

Beyoncé is just a passive “it” that can be claimed with a ring, and that even if the relationship is already bad, that ring has the talismanic power to guarantee a happy ending. Not to mention the idea that a ring will give the unnamed man in the story sole, permanent possession of “it,” since he’s basically just planting his flag in his claimed territory.

That's a lot of interpretive weight to put on a single flimsy pronoun. If we're going to really lay the hammer down grammar-wise -- oh, do let's! -- there are plenty of other things that support the idea that this song has a feminist slant. Beyoncé spends a lot of time telling her ex what he can and cannot do now that they're split: "Now you wanna trip . . . Don't pay him any attention . . . You can't be mad at me." Note that the ex is not allowed to actually trip -- he no longer has the right. He wants to trip; Beyoncé won't let him.

It does get a little weird in the bridge, with this line: "Say I'm the one you own." But there again is the imperative verb, and it is followed by a threat: "If you don't, you'll be alone." The ex's claim to own Beyoncé somehow does nothing to lessen her autonomy in her own mind. There's a little hint of BDSM play here, the verbal equivalent of being handcuffed to a headboard: Beyoncé wants to be a little owned. So play the game her way or she'll ditch your ass.

As for the new fling, he is an accessory like her lip gloss and designer jeans. Twice Beyoncé tells her ex, "Don't pay him any attention." She refuses to let this become a dude-versus-dude match, a competition between the ex and the new guy where Beyoncé is a property that can be earned. She always brings it back to the ex's failings in his relationship with her, before this new guy was ever around: "Cause you had your turn / And now you're gonna learn / What it really feels like to miss me."

One of my favorite moments in the video is when Beyoncé literally brushes off the new guy as unimportant:

The video really does make this all about Beyoncé. She is the entire world -- there is no one else here, no ex, no new guy, no set or props even. There is no dude here to enjoy her sexy dance -- the camera doesn't even care about the backup dancers (who are Beyoncé clones). And yeah, the video is sexy -- because hot damn, Beyoncé can move. Her body is powerful, strong, in constant motion. She displays her control of her body as much as she displays her body itself.

The editing style -- editing being the visual equivalent of grammar -- is part of what makes Beyoncé seem so powerful here. The takes are really long for the choppy ADD world of music videos, and there are plenty of tiny barely visible jump cuts that exist to make the takes seem even longer than they are. Mostly the stays moving, bobbing slightly forward and back and turning occasionally so that the viewer is constantly forced to reorient on the figure of Beyoncé, always near the center of the frame. When the camera does zoom in for close-ups, they focus exclusively on her face.

For contrast, let's look at two other megahits whose videos are polar opposites of "Single Ladies" (assuming things can have more than one polar opposite BEAR WITH ME HERE). The first: Britney Spears' 10-year-old (really? wow) "Oops! . . . I Did It Again" video.

Here are three stills:

This is so male-gazey that it creeps me out. Shut your face, astronaut man!

Viewed after "Single Ladies," it's like watching a train wreck -- quick cuts, shots of Britney lolling on a bed making orgasm-legs, slow-motion shots of just her body in red vinyl, extreme close-ups of various parts of Britney's body, the smiling astronaut and his NASA buddies for whom she's putting on a show. Britney doesn't so much dance as strike a series of poses. And there's at least three of her: dancing Britney (full shots), singing Britney (shot from the boobs up), and lounging Britney (flat on her back and shot from above). You never know where Britney "really" is and you don't know what Britney really wants -- which of course is the upshot of the song, after all.

An even more extreme example is provided by the opening thirty seconds of Kanye West's "Gold Digger": The lingerie-clad woman is reduced to a series of images of her parts: face, boobs, hair, ass, all overlapped at seizure-courting speed. (And then the parade of pin-ups begins.) As for Kanye, he doesn't even turn toward the camera until about halfway through the video. Makes me wanna do this the whole time:

You show him, bubblegum-tongue lady.

First Attempt at Feminist Deconstruction, Or: Never Thought I'd Say This, But Geri Spice Is Right.

So here I am, trying to enter the feminist debate. I have virtually no credentials, unless you count obvious and average lady-parts. Oh, and an inability to shut up when I am angry. So: I am a little miffed, today, by a piece in the Guardian that purports to explain "how the 'new feminism' went wrong." Let's state at the beginning that there is a lot of goodness in this essay -- specifically in how the sex industry and mass culture have created a new and sneaky kind of sexism that brands itself as empowering. This is a useful thing to remember, in a world where they make high heels for infants.

But (and I am going to quote at length) there are some moments that make me raise a dainty finger in the air and chirp, "Question?" Such as:

The young girl's penchant for pinky "girliness" reflects not a belief in essential femininity but an early brand awareness. Her belief that the pickers on the next level favour "girliness" is reinforced by everything she sees. Today's girly isn't passive, but sassy and self-defining.

Completely sold on the myth of "self-invention", today's woman believes herself in control of her life, from birth to the present day. There's no governing philosophy, just an urge to assert her will. She doesn't know what she's doing, but she's damn well doing it.

Heaven help those of us who live our lives without a governing philosophy. We just go around asserting our will all over the place. How will we know what our day means?!

I'm also not convinced that this idea of self-branding is all that new. Seems to me like Queen Elizabeth was all over this about five centuries ago. And it does imply a certain craftiness in our young women and girls that I find appealing. If we're borrowing the appearance of girliness as a strategy, it's a step up from the idea that we're doing it out of some unconscious attraction to pink and ruffles. There are worse things to be than "sassy and self-defining."

Because this is an essay about women and feminism, we have to start talking about sex -- and that means we have to start talking about strippers:

The Equality Illusion is full of grim statistics illustrating pay differentials and the point that poverty often has a "female face". As Banyard demonstrates, it isn't difficult proving that women are more oppressed than ever; the difficulty now is getting them to admit it.

Natasha Walter can't quite. Living Dolls does an excellent job of exposing the brutal reality behind the sex industry's increasingly sophisticated façade. It reads much more convincingly than The New Feminism; she's describing something real. Yet, when it comes to it, she still can't say that any of these things are wrong: "There is, of course, nothing intrinsically degrading or miserable about women pole dancing, stripping, having sex with large numbers of partners or consuming pornography. All these behaviours are potentially enjoyable, sexy and fun."

Yet even in her own portrayal, there clearly is something intrinsically degrading and miserable about pole dancing. It's not about sex, says one of her interviewees, but the illusion of power. Each man wants to believe the no-touching rule has been breached for his exclusive benefit. If women were liberated, pole dancing wouldn't exist. Why not condemn it outright?

Everybody say it with me now: When you outlaw pole dancing, only outlaws will dance with poles.

Natasha Walter is right not to vilify pole dancing, because pole dancing is not the issue here. Pole dancing does not keep women's wages lower than men's. Pole dancing does not tell women they are less human than men are. But pole dancing does happen amidst a cultural power dynamic that privileges the physical pleasure of men over the humanity of women. Pole dancing in the privacy of your own bedroom to please a committed partner is not the same as pole dancing for strangers because you have no other means of paying the rent and buying food. But again: this is not pole dancing's fault. It's just that pole dancing is more interesting to talk about than complex social issues we haven't resolved yet because we've only even been talking about them for a century, if that.

Which brings me to the best part of the essay:

In spite of what is now claimed, feminism has never been about empowerment through choice. You can't simply opt for power – power isn't a fridge or an elliptical training machine. Any strategy in this consumerist register is doomed to fail.

Now there is a point. Is power a limited resource? Is there only so much of it that can go around? And what kind of power are we talking about? The power to speak is not the same thing as the power to be heard or listened to, but they are not unrelated either. If you can't opt for power, how do you go about getting it? Do you earn it? Whose approval do you need? There is an unnamed authority lurking here, which makes me feel ill at ease with Charlotte Raven's thesis.

And feminism is not about empowerment through choice? News to me. In fact, I've been citing this as a major tenet of feminism for a decade now. Perhaps I am wrong? It would not be the first time. Are we back to the definition of feminism as believing that women are as fully human as men? Because doesn't that imply choice?

If awareness returned – if modern woman were no longer disassociating from her pain and victimhood – all her decisions would be different. The things that hurt us would never seem "potentially enjoyable". We wouldn't wear silly shoes, blog about our sex life, worry that our babies are upstaging us. Most importantly, we'd resist the temptation to caricature ourselves. We'd lose the Nigella-esque pinny, the Price-esque lash extensions; the Belle-esque pose of erotic empowerment would seem inhibiting. We'd recover our desire for the missionary position with the person lying next to us.

They can take my silly shoes when they pry them from my cold, dead feet.