This post was somewhat delayed by illness and other ailments (I ask you, is it fair to be sick with a bad cough and be eating soup and have a tooth break? On soup? As Jubal Early would say, “Does that seem right to you?”)
Anyway, illness and so on did not diminish my squeee! at reading this news
Kristan Hoffman had a very good blog post called, “The problem with ‘no means no.’“.
Brian D. Buckley had a good post called, “Is Star Wars Sexist,” based on the Bechdel Test. As I commented there, I don’t think the test automatically makes Star Wars sexist, but one thing does occur to me about the “Princess Leia is a strong female character” argument.
Leia Organa is:a princess. She is intrepid, intelligent, and she tends to require rescuing. When she is requiring rescue (one time being held by a chain while wearing a metal bikini) she is defiant, but she doesn’t rescue herself. And she eventually falls in love with one of the rescuers, even though he is not of appropriate social station for her to marry.
So, she is in essence yet another of the Martian princesses who drive the plots of a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books by constantly needing to be rescued.
The Lord of the Rings books fail the Bechdel test, too, but I’ll take Eowyn as a role model, thank you. 🙂
And Laura Stanfill had a really great event at Powell’s Books. You can read about it here.
Thanks for the shout out! Looking forward to checking out the rest of these links, Anthony.
My goodness! I read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in a modern lit class in college and, since many of the other authors whose works we were reading were dying around the time that we read their novels, I assumed that he was already dead. (I’m not joking, either. Kurt Vonnegut is the only one that I can remember off the top of my head, but there were three or four total.)
And I’m with you on Eowyn. She’s a deserving role model. : )
Laura: I don’t do posts of links as often as some people, mostly because I don’t follow that many blogs. It would be the same blogs over and over. But, every once in a while, there are some that I really want to share.
Bryna: It’s also easy to lose track of whether he’s alive or not because he never does anything public (other than publishing the occasional novel). He’s in his seventies, and a few years ago he published Inherent Vice, which I’ve written about here many times. Highly recommended. But, you never know. The book before that was Against the Day, which I’ve never been able to finish.