a sense of joy and then a panic

I don't know who this commentator is (other than the guy that takes over for espn3 in the evening in Paris), but this is what happens when you're commentating on a match you don't care about and you're all alone in the booth.

First we have some off-topic comments in an attempt to keep amused [he also talked about the plight of pigeons wanting to eat on the court and being denied, but I missed that one]:

"... she should go to drama school after she quits tennis.  She's certainly pretty enough.  [Long silence]  Anyway, first game of the third set..."

"And Wozniak can't get her hairdo where she wants it. [...] All her hair's come completely out of her bun now, so she'll have to put up with it flapping around her back. [...] Must be a distraction if you're worried about what to do with your hair, but maybe she can put it out of her mind. [...] Very good service game from Wozniak, whether her hair is doing what she wants or not."

Add some nice dry disdain:

"Well, that was a pretty horrendous backhand."

"Oh, she's gonna try a practice shot.  'Oh, that's how you do it.'  Just a reminder.  She's only hit about 5 million in her life."

And finally we reach straight-up pessimism:

"Poor mum.  Oh dear.  She must have been through this so many times.  Her daughter is 28 years old and has been on the tour forever and played so many matches like this.  It's all too much for the Russian.  I don't know if it's all too much for Mrs. Dementieva in the stands, but her daughter is suffering."

"A sudden rush of double faults in her last service games, but what can she do now."

In the end, disturbing croaking sounds begin:

"Excuse me, my voice is going."

At least he doesn't say "that's a fault" after every serve that doesn't go in, as if we can neither see the match nor hear the linesperson squawk.

ETA: His name's Richard Evans!  And he thinks it's time for a little bit of dinner and a glass of wine, so forgive him if he says goodnight!  Yeah, goodnight, Richard Evans.  You take care.

"The Amy Bishop Case - Violence That Art Didn't See Coming" - The New York Times.

Women who kill are “relegated to an ‘exceptional case’ status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant,” Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in “The Female Serial Killer,” an essay included in the anthology “Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation” (1994).

Ms. Skrapec was writing at a time when Hollywood seemed preoccupied with women who commit crimes — in productions like “The Burning Bed,” the 1984 television film in which a battered wife finally sets her sleeping husband aflame, and “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which a pair of women go on a outlaw spree after one of them is threatened with rape.
Both are essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excesses by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them.

Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma, just as male depictions of female violence are locked in the noir demimonde of fantasy, the slinky femmes fatales once played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner more or less duplicated by Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America. The number of female neurobiologists may still be small, but girls often outdo boys in the classroom, including in the sciences. Women now make up the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges. And the tenure struggle said to have lighted Dr. Bishop’s short fuse reflects the anxieties of many other women who now outnumber men in the work force and have become, in thousands of cases, their family’s principal or only breadwinner.

“Everything is about power,” Patricia Cornwell maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.”

No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is “socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. “She is ‘special.’ ”

When I asked her what she made of the case, she drew an implicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson’s narrator: “She is a sociopath and has been enabled through her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment.”

Her assessment comes from beyond the realm of predigested doctrine. It echoes the blunt assertion made by Ms. Cornwell: “People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men.”

Justine Larbalestier has a post about "how many readers seem to hate female characters more than they hate male," spurred by Sarah Rees Brennan's post about how we all "tend to be harder on women." 

A long time ago (10 years-ish), my best friend told me that based off the characters I had written, either I had a huge problem with women or she did.  Ironically she is now the one who jokes about being a misogynist, but then again I was writing Mary Sues.  I've thought about the whole problem of female characters - especially written by female writers - a lot over the years.  

I write mainly male characters.  Never an all-male cast, but mostly male characters.  I continue to struggle writing women.  Part of this, I'm sure, is because a lot of the things I liked growing up were really male-dominated (I mean, this show is what shaped my adolescence, for better or for worse).  Not a whole lot of impressive female characters in sight - except, of course, in Xena: Warrior Princess, which I still love (my favorite character is Callisto the psychopath, in case you're wondering).  

Xena Tangent: Xena was so much cooler than Hercules: The Blah Blah Blah.  I don't think it was because all the major characters were women, because I didn't even realize that until a lot later - it was more like, all the major characters were interesting characters who had hella rollercoaster lives and developed as people and all that.  Xena and Gabrielle got so far beyond hero and sidekick, probably because Xena used to be evil and Gabrielle wasn't just comic relief.  I suspect this happened because the hero-sidekick motif is very male and the writers didn't know how to slide Xena and Gabrielle into it.  And because they were travelers they couldn't sit at home and talk about men to fulfill their own gender motif.  So the writers actually had to make characters!  Wow!

First off: what does it mean to "like" a character?  Is it the same thing as "liking" a person in your real life?

I.  Liking Characters: The Art Critic.

There are some characters I like watching that I wouldn't ever befriend in real life, and there are some characters that I appreciate for being richly developed, interesting characters even though if they were real, they'd be pretty despicable people (like Schillinger on Oz).  I am of the opinion that if all the characters are richly developed and interesting, a good deal of this female-character-backlash goes away.  Sometimes this looks really difficult.  HBO shows make it look really difficult because just one of their major characters would totally blow the minds of the suits at the big networks.  But making characters that are all at least believable as people and not as cartoonish stereotyped instruments of social control is not actually that hard. 

Good Example: Law & Order, The Original Series.  I like all the "A.D.A. babes," and especially Abbie Carmichael (who says things like "That pathetic excuse for a woman has a hole in her soul" and "I've got a solution that'll make everybody happy.  No deals for anyone.  Let's hang 'em all.").  I don't think Dick Wolf & Co. work very hard on the lawyers or detectives - or the murderers and witnesses as far as that goes - yet they always come across like actual people and engaging, workable cogs in the big Law & Order wheel.  Fontana was a racist dick of a detective but he was still a good character. 

• Most everybody on Battlestar Galactica is three-dimensional, interesting, engaging, and at least a little bit sympathetic.  Even the "bad guys" have tangible reasons for making their choices.  Everyone's a plausible human(oid) being. 
• You don't have to have a lot of women on the show for those women to be good characters.  Sons of Anarchy basically only has Gemma and Tara, both of whom are good characters that the show couldn't survive without.  Gemma is extremely flawed but that's what makes her so fun to watch.

Bad Example: Law & Order, SVU.  I realize I am in the minority here, but holy crap, I hate every character on this show except for Fin and Munch.  They're the only ones who have any real life to them, any possible soul.  Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler are ridiculous as characters.  Utterly ridiculous.  Not because they're "bad people", but because they're unrealistic, stereotypical, over-written characters that never develop and never pay their dues, karma-wise.  Their flaws are "romantic" flaws.  Olivia gets too attached to victims; Elliot punches perpetrators.  In the real world, both would be fired.  They defy my ability to suspend disbelief.  They weaken storylines that are already on life support.  That is bad characterization, and it may actually be caused by trying too hard to make "complex" characters.

• A lot of times, female characters on male-dominated shows are just plain bad characters.  I don't like Cameron on House; my mother doesn't like Cuddy on the same show.  It wouldn't help if they were gender-switched - Cameron, for one, already has a male counterpart (his name is Chase) who I also don't like and is equally vapid.  House and Wilson are the best-written characters on the show.  I don't think anyone would argue with that.  We can argue about why Cameron, Cuddy, and 13 are written so shallowly, but the fact remains that they are written shallowly.
• Sometimes all the male characters are also terrible.  CSI: Miami and Bones are my examples of that one.  Nothing on God's Good Earth will help Calleigh Duquesne or Horatio Caine.  Of course, these shows are also immensely popular, which means I am out here on a limb saying WHAT THE FFFFF. 
• And female characters on female-dominated shows are not necessarily works of art either.  Meredith Grey?  Carrie Bradshaw?  Ally McBeal?  Right.  Meredith only became interesting to me when she started showing serious mental and emotional "flaws" because that's when she became an actual character. 

II.  Liking Characters: People's Choice Awards.

But when we get into things like fandom wars and fandoms like Harry Potter, I realize that "good characterization" is not at hand.  This is all about the knee-jerk, sometime-immature gut reaction to a character that often remains to the end - whether they're well-made, realistic, three-dimensional characters or not.  For example, Cally on Battlestar Galactica is a complex, many-motived character.  I also disliked watching her character because she was so anti-Cylon, and that kind of blind prejudice - while sad, and true, and understandable - is a real turn-off for me, and I was never going to cheer "for" Cally the way I cheered "for" Athena and Helo, for instance.  That's the kind of reflex that fandom gets into wars over.

And in this case, I think what's going on with readers/viewers hating female characters that they would like if they were male can be mostly explained when you consider that it's mostly female readers/viewers who hate female characters.  No, this isn't the reason I disliked Cally, but it is why I used to dislike Starbuck.  [Yes, I disliked Starbuck!  But good characterization won me over and now I love her!]  I used to think this was self-hate/jealousy (and part of it probably is) but then I started wondering if male readers hate male "Gary Stu"s - the male equivalent of the Little Miss Perfect Mary Sue.  I suspect that a fair number do.  I mean, they hate those all-star male athletes with the supermodel girlfriends and the championship rings.  I will submit, however, that women are probably much more likely to fall into the trap of comparing themselves to female characters, because that is what we are supposed to do, measure measure measure.  So yes, this winds up tying to self-hate and jealousy, but in more roundabout way. 

Harry Potter Tangent: We call Ginny a slut because she's popular with boys.  We wouldn't hate Gino if he was popular with girls, no - not because Gino is a boy but because we can't be said to have "lost" a "competition" with Gino.  We might call Gino a manwhore.  But there's no reflexive high-school-mean-girl dynamic triggered by what Gino accomplishes or how handsome Gino is. 

So to remedy this problem, a lot of times creators try to make ultra-"relatable" female characters, so their female audience will think the female protag is "just like me."  But that's asinine.  The only female character I ever related to was Laura Ingalls.  You know why?  Because there was a big deal made in the early books about Laura having brown hair and being jealous of Mary's blonde hair.  And I'm a brunette.  So, so arbitrary - and because of this fickleness the gamble of relatibility is very likely to fail.  For example, I hate Jo in Little Women.  I know I'm supposed to relate to her, but I related to Amy.  She was girly (I wore a lot of pink) and was the youngest (and I was always the youngest in any group).  Oops, turns out she's "evil."  See?  So then you get what Bella Swan: no defining characteristics, so every girl could see herself in Bella.  But that's exactly the wrong direction to go.  Don't whittle your characters down to some lowest common denominator!  Define them more!  Make them deeper!  Don't worry if your readers can't see themselves in those characters!  If they're strong, three-dimensional characters, it won't matter! 

This is how part II relates to part I: Good Characterization Heals All Wounds.  This does not mean making them all "kick ass."  Like I said above, Meredith became interesting to me once she became flawed.  I mean, hello, she was already the wunder-surgeon despite never needing to try who all the guys were in love with.  She "kicked ass," all right.  Didn't do a whole lot else.  And then her mother died and she tried to commit suicide and pulled away from McDreamy and sniped and she became truly flawed, not just Hollywood-makeup flawed (Of course, by then the whole show was in such a massive downhill shitstorm that I stopped watching anyway, but that wasn't Meredith's fault).  I didn't like Elizabeth in Pirates of the Caribbean for very churlish reasons (why is she so super-cool?  it's not like she does anything) in the first two movies, but she was my favorite character in the third because she seemed to be taking such huge leaps forward as a mature adult.  I love the part where they're at the pirates council thing (it's been a while) and Sparrow sees her and is basically like, "fuck me."  I was like, in your face, Jack Sparrow!  Elizabeth has come into her own, bitch! 

And I realized that I was really just waiting for her to become a fully-realized person, not just a token girl.  Sometimes this never happens.  Sometimes cookie cutter token girls remain just that, and while they're in so-called "development limbo," they're not people in any meaningful sense.  They're blow-up dolls. 

And God Said, Let There Be Wank.  And There Was.

I can see where this is going.  It's going in the direction of "women can write science fiction just fine!  women can use hard scientific concepts just like men can!"  Which, of course, is absolutely true.  I'm not going to comment on the idea that men and women write science fiction "differently," because I don't read science fiction enough to provide evidence, but I really doubt that's true in any meaningful way.  

I just want to add that it's also ok (for boys and girls alike) to suck at science fiction.  Or to take no pleasure in science fiction.  I don't write science fiction because I am just no good at science.*  I can identify fossils, and that's about it.  I know this is terribly un-PC to say (which is part of the problem) - but I am so tired - oh, so tired - of being made to feel that science and math are the world's only worthy pursuits, and inevitably fiction's only worthy pursuits.  There was some quote I found a while ago on some blog - a woman my age saying "our mothers wanted us to know that we could do anything, but the message we took from that was 'you must do everything'." 

I grew up with a mother who refused to accept that I did not want to go into scientific endeavor.  Why?  Because like many progressive women her age, she didn't want me to "feel like I couldn't do science because I was a girl."  My mother's biggest cause isn't feminism, but she is a knee-jerk progressive in that regard, a product of an upbringing that told her the best thing she could do was marry rich, and the only jobs she could hold were secretary, nurse, and school teacher.  When I was a kid there was a big backlash against teachers - especially in science classes - who would only call on boys, and there was a lot of progressive encouragement for girls pursuing science.  I read articles about it in this little progressive-preteen-girls magazine (yes, I know), New Moon, saying "it's cool to love science!"

Well, cool.  It is.  Except my mother got all ready to march me into the school system like a little token warrior - she was fiercely defensive of my ability to do math, for instance, and continues to put Lincoln Public Schools on her blacklist because they put me in a remedial math class for a semester (I tested out of it the next semester).  I don't know if this is because she thought I had been discouraged from pursuing math and science - my worst academic memory of fourth grade is undoubtedly crying during a math test because I could not make the numbers work and was the last one to finish, but the first one to finish in the class was my best friend, a girl, and I certainly don't remember any negative associations with girls and numbers.  But anyway, my mother evidently thought I needed to believe that I could excel at science (and math), and love the fuck out of it too. 

Didn't happen that way.  What I loved, what I excelled at, was English.  I was okay with history too.  This I knew from a very, very young age.  For my mother, however, admitting this became tantamount to defeat of the entire progressive feminist cause.  Around ninth grade, it became a subtle imperative (my mother's not an imperative type of parent) that I become a scientist, apparently only to show that I could (thank God she accepted that I hated sports, or else I would be cursing my way through volleyball).  I suppose in many ways this is why I found kinship with the children of immigrant families, who were also under tremendous pressure to excel at those bastions of American knowledge and become a doctor, an engineer, or a scientist of some kind.  Part of that stereotypical Asian-American push is in the money.  Part of it's in the status.  But the part my mother can relate to is pwning the American establishment, so to speak: you told me I couldn't do it - well, just watch my daughter kick your kids' asses! 

I didn't kick anybody's ass, except at fossil identification.  I want to do something with politics, I said.  Well, you can be a scientific consultant for governments, she said.  But I don't like science, I said.  And she ignored.  I want to write, I said.  Well, you can write like Michael Crichton, she said.  But that's not what I like to write about, I said.  And she ignored. 

Believe me, many of my female classmates were good at science.  And they certainly got many more congratulatory handshakes for excelling in the oh-so-macho Domain of Men, science, then I ever got for being good at, you know, English.  Because English isn't challenging, anybody can be good at English.  English is for the weak, i.e. girls, and if you're good at English all you're proving is that you're a girrrrrrrrrl.  Which is, of course, a lie - especially in my high school's English department.  Thank God for that English department, for the teachers that told me it was fine - more than fine - to be good at writing and analysis.  For my favorite English teacher, who said that I wielded the written word like a sword.  Eventually I developed enough pride in those pursuits that my mother could stop feeling so ashamed that she did not have a scientifically-minded daughter.

So just putting that disclaimer out there: I don't write science fiction; not because I'm a girl, but because I'm not good with scientific imagination.  There are guys that suck at it too - just like there are guys that suck at fantasy and girls that suck at fantasy (Stephanie Meyer, for instance, sucks at fantasy).  So I'm not hot on the idea of being a supposedly retrograde woman because I write fantasy.  I will write you a bad-ass political fantasy.  But I will stick to magic and the paranormal - and there is nothing wrong with that.  I think the larger problem is the perceived intellectual superiority of science fiction over fantasy, and all the associations of masculinity that go with that - the whole "fantasy is for ladies and girly-men" idea.  Which is of course why everybody wants to claim science fiction and stay the fuck away from fantasy - we all want to consume symbols of power, right?  It's bullshit. 

* I actually have received an A in every science class I've ever taken, and I do have a minor in environmental science.  I also watch nature documentaries (although Werner Herzog's relatively un-science-y ones are my favorites), go to science museums, and read articles about scientific discoveries, especially regarding astronomy and biology.  In other words, I'm happy co-existing with science and enjoy it from an educated layman's perspective.  But I don't have the knowhow or interest to make plausible FTL spaceships,aliens, or even plausible weaponry.  I suspect this is because I'm lacking in the final level of science knowledge as taught by my high school chemistry teacher: application.  What I lack is  scientific imagination - and quite frankly, I'm ok with that. 

Cabin Fever is billed as a horror movie (Hostel's Eli Roth directed it), but, well...


I think that's how Eli Roth says "fuck it."

Also, this photo shoot is pretty much the working definition of lame as fuck.  Especially this one.  "Hail to our newest smart, opinionated, chic First Lady!"  Oh, gag me.