Sidetracks - March 23, 2015
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ladybusinessSidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.
➝ If you're into short fiction and you haven't heard of Quick Sips by nerds of a feather, flock together Short Fiction Correspondent Charles Payseur, allow me to introduce you! Not only does he review tons, he also manages to be like a human aggregator for new issues, which is like 50% of my problem with keeping up with new short fiction (do I miss the days of fandom newsletters? I do, I do). I don't think he's covering everything and also there's the human limitation, but he manages to highlight a lot and the reviews give me a pretty good indication of whether or not I'm going to like a thing. Highly recommended.
➝ Here is a great article about women in podcasting that I found via Ana. There's a video embedded in this article that talks about how groups consider lower voices more authoritative, which probably shouldn't have been a surprise to me, but was. With podcasting, I'm finding that my favorite podcasts are mostly by women or have women as co-hosts. I really like this of podcasts by women and I really hope it continues. I do need to replace my film podcast, though. Anyone know any women-led (or as co-hosts) film podcasts?
➝ Lighten Up, a comic essay by Ronald Wimberly is stark and excellent.
➝ Via
➝ I saw a trailer for SCORE: A Film Music Documentary which looks great. However, the second thing I noticed is that I counted one woman, and a parade of never-ending white dudes. Sigh.
➝ Monica Lewinsky's Brilliant TED Talk Takes On the Internet's "Culture of Humiliation" is a good article and the talk itself is brilliant. I remember this whole thing with way too much clarity. I was an Arkansan, so it was inescapable. This talk is really thoughtful, heartbreaking, and honest. How brave she is.
Book Acquisitions
Purchased: Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic SF by Jetse de Vries, A Passage of Stars by Kate Elliott, The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
Gifts: No Proper Lady by Isabel Cooper, Games of Command by Linnea Sinclair, Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike by Kelly Sue DeConnick & Emma Ríos, Rat Queens, Vol. 1: Sass & Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Roc Upchurch (from Ana! ♥)
Added TBR: Meeting Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon (via Kailana), Nova by Margaret Fortune, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon by J. Richard Stevens
I really don't want to make this Sidetracks all about Andrew Smith, but I do want to talk about a few of pieces responding to his interview.
➝ Tessa Gratton wrote a post asking that we keep talking about sexism in YA in the light of Smith's comments. Gratton talked to Vice after Smith's comments went viral, and Vice produced a write-up containing some carefully selected quotes from Gratton. To clarify, she made another post disclosing the full answers she gave to Vice, which provide a wider picture of how she feels now.
➝ Phoebe North's post mentions that 'it’s the banality of his comment that’s wearying.'. She also talks about how women are othered and taught that their experiences are not for public consumption. For me, it means everything to have this acknowledged while we're talking about Andrew Smith's comment.
Yes, Smith's comments may be short and seem fairly innocuous if you compare them with the sexist comments of authors like V. S. Naipaul or the barrage of hate mail some public women face. But Smith's idea that women are so very different he has trouble understanding them well enough to write them is probably one of the most constant problems of everyday sexism that woman face.
I have listened to grown men tell 101 "different" jokes where the punchline was essentially 'Women are weird'. Often these jokes were told in professional surroundings. This led to work culture where every time I deviated from typical male behaviour I was regarded as odd. I got unofficial black marks against my name. I learned pretty quickly to stop speaking out. Men also felt comfortable talking about sex, and their fantasies about women, in detail in these environments in front of me and my female colleagues. The women I worked with would never have brought up those subjects in front of our male colleagues men even though workplace culture clearly encouraged frank discussion of sex. We knew they would find that female gaze weird and we didn't want to spend months fending off "banter" about what we'd said.
I'm so tired of being told on a daily basis how weird I am, how bizarre, simply because I'm a woman and other women, like Phoebe North, are clearly tired of that, too. So, there's a wealth of history that influences how some women are responding to Smith's comments. And being unaware of that history is why some male commentators are struggling to see why Smith's comments are so aggravating for female commentators.
➝ Hugh Ryan, the reporter who asked Andrew Smith 'Where are all the women in your work?', wrote some follow up comments. The worst piece of criticism I read about this whole situation claimed that Ryan's question was provocative click bait and I think Ryan's response disproves this claim. Cause, yeah, asking a male author, who has written at least one book that treats a female character poorly, a question about his female characters is such underhand journalism. >.>
➝ Finally, Anna Ursu created Kindness, Sexism and This Infernal Mess, a Storify collection of a conversation about kindness vs. respect that grew out of discussion about Smith's interview.
➝ Courtney Summers is holding #ToTheGirls, a chance to send a message that girls are 'seen, heard and loved', on April 14th. This seems like a great initiative for The Friendship Zone to get involved with.
➝ The Bailey's Prize longlist has been announced. I'm excited about the longlist this year which makes a change (I've struggled to get really interested since it changed from being The Orange Prize). However, it's a huge shame that the longlist of twenty books only contains five chromatic authors. So far, there have been a lot of very white UK book prize lists in 2015.
➝ The Stella Prize has announced its shortlist. This is a prize I always mean to get more into so maybe I'll check out some of the titles this year.
➝ I can't finish this week's Sidetracks without linking to the amazing Terry Pratchett
➝ Let's end of the lightest of possible notes with a space unicorn and space cat. Tiny cat astronaut helmet! They should absolutely be the animal companions in the next big Disney film.
Re: Paul Kidby art
Date: 2015-03-24 10:45 am (UTC)Re: Paul Kidby art
Date: 2015-03-24 11:25 am (UTC)https://twitter.com/PaulKidby/status/577096296768606209