feminist blogs

From: Kabhi Kabhi Mere Dil Mein, Yeh Khayal Aata Hai...,  Deepa D.'s blog  Link to: I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, by Deepa D. An excerpt: The Western publishing industry has the luxury of being able to support the base camps of crappy first novels and cliché-ridden genre fiction hacks and niche-marketed speciality books that creates the momentum for the breakout book, the genius author. If you

You know what’s fun? Where fun equals needless and bizarre? Particular products, apparently picked at random, being marketed as just for the dudes. I mean, we are all probably familiar with companies making special pinkified versions of their products for the girlies, like tools! and tape! and… earplugs! (Lots of gendered goodness through that Sociological Images link, thanks to @Chromiee on Twitter for it.) But let’s delve into the differences in how gender is here enforced for men and women.

For instance, tissues. I’m not certain that tissues need to be gender specific, but apparently Kimberly-Clark, manufacturers of Kleenex, are.

Last year, I was casually walking down an aisle at my local supermarket when a tissue box caught my eye. ‘Ooh,’ I thought. ‘Giant tissues. I would like some of those.’ I took a closer look at the box. Lo and behold, the box said ‘MAN-SIZE tissues’ in big manly letters. Not for me then. Pardon me for asking, but do the rest of us not sometimes get a lot of snot and not want to bother with tiny little tissues only good for three blows? Or is it only manly men who blow out large manly chunks of dead cells from their noses who merit MAN-SIZE tissues? Do the tissues come extra tough for an extra masculine blow? Not only that, but the two box patterns one could choose from were cricket equipment and an old-style map of the world. So, what, playing sport and exploring are for men then? Just… why?

So, because I was a bit amused and because I am a Scary Feminist™, I took down the number Kimberly-Clark provided on the box for feedback. I called them up, feeling a bit silly, and told the woman on the customer service line about misogyny and compartmentalising and cricket and marketing and assumptions and I want giant tissues, too! I must have gone on for a while, because:

‘So, what exactly is your complaint?’

‘Uh. The packaging and the man-size messaging is full of misogynistic messages. If you changed those things, it’d be really good and it’d invite women to buy your product.’

‘Okay. Thanks for calling. I’ll pass that along to the marketing team. Thank you very much.’

The tissue boxes are still in my supermarket, if you were wondering.

The point is: when it comes to gendering non-gendery products, womanhood (and femininity! because they are the same thing!) is so often coded as bad. And it’s not just women who get hurt by this sort of thing; there is never any room for non-binaries in this world of rigid binary gendering. This is just another way to keep anyone who doesn’t conform to binary gender out in the cold.

The girlie versions of these products are coded pink and sparkly and such by way of setting girls and women up as a subgroup. We need special things set aside for us, because the things for regular people (read: men) just won’t do. It’s that idea of the default human again, which we see in medicine and sport (it’s always pointed out when it’s a women’s cricket team, because “cricket team” itself is always male) and all sorts of areas in society. We are a special subgroup for marketers to exploit.

Dudely versions of these products don’t cater to men as a special subgroup. The dudeification of products – that is, where it’s a case of specifically targeting products at men and boys rather than just assuming only men would by this stuff – relies on the disparagement of women. No girls here, we have manly products, you don’t want to be associated with that girly girl crap! Sometimes it’s merely in the unnecessary exclusion of women. That’s the case with Nutrigrain cereal being marketed as Iron Man food, which will help boys grow up big and strong (because that’s what you always want as a man, and never as a woman, right?). Then there are companies that like to make it explicit. For instance, you can go check out the charming Yorkie chocolate bar featured over at Shakesville the other day (with the slogan ‘it’s not for girls!’). Then you have the violent and full-on hateful; Cara blogged on rape-promoting pencil sharpeners back in 2007. Women can be used just as one pleases, from exclusion to counterpoint to objects on which it’s just fine to spill one’s hate.

It’s about setting women on the outside: women are to be a subset of humanity, to be catered for specially or to be the standard of that which the real people ought not to want to be. And, as ever, those who don’t fit the sex/gender binary don’t exist. Excuse me while I go dig out my old handkerchiefs.

Now that was mean, because this post is all about the minor irritation I get from all those headlines:

8 Essential Sites for Cyber Monday
9 Low-Fat Holiday Desserts
Top Doctors Spill 10 Big Health Secrets
10 Commandments You Should Not Break

Every time I go to the supermarket for food I see the women's magazine covers at the checkout: Seven Ways To Drive Your Man Crazy! Ten Perfect Diets! Grrr.

Why all that fascination with numbered lists? Is it because those are about the easiest headlines to make if one wants to tie together lots of pretty unrelated bits?

I shouldn't complain, because my headlines tend to have nothing to do with the posts themselves which makes me cry when I try to search for something in the archives. They are mostly just clever goddessy quips.

(And now, a brief digression from our ongoing Diocletian working session, which continues here and here.)

Someone emailed me last night about Sarah Palin. “Do you think she’s going to run for president?” my correspondent asked.

Of course she’s going to run for president. She’s already running for president.

I knew that the day she resigned the Alaska governorship. Some people thought she was really retiring from politics. Not me. I watched the video clip of her resignation speech and knew exactly what was up.

“I’ll be damned,” I said to myself. “She’s Andrew Jackson.” Literally. I said those actual words.

I say those same words to myself almost every time I see her on the news. Latest report: thousands of people lined up around the block in some little town, waiting for her to sign their book. People crying. Women bringing their babies, bringing pictures of their menfolk who are deployed in Iraq.

It reminds me of the story of Andy Jackson’s Inauguration, with the people climbing through windows and standing on the furniture in the East Room. Broken glass trampled underfoot; huge punchbowls of lemonade on the White House lawn. A joyous mob of rednecks and riff-raff.

Jackson was pretty uncouth himself. He may have been backwoods nobility by his own lights, but to the East Coast elites, he was practically a caveman. He and his wife Rachel were Scotch-Irish hillbillies, the kind of people who lived in cabins and chewed tobacco. Their marriage was a bit off, too: they had probably cohabited before getting hitched, with Andrew chasing off Rachel’s first husband with a pistol. John Quincy Adams got all sniffy about that. “A convicted adulteress,” his supporters called Rachel. A “common harlot.” They said Andrew Jackson’s own mother was a prostitute too, a British camp follower who’d married a mixed-race man somewhere in those godforsaken backwoods. That was early 19th-century speak for “trailer trash.”

But the people loved Andy Jackson. Adored him. He was the first truly populist, grassroots political figure in American history.

He was also, it must be said, a horrible man. A genocidal white supremacist whose Indian wars and forced removals were what we’d now call ethnic cleansing. He was also a slave owner, a bellicose imperialist, and a demagogue who vastly overstepped presidential authority. Nevertheless, he was a hero to the common citizens of his time and place. And the populist democracy he brought to Washington was probably his greatest (albeit occasionally dangerous) contribution to American politics.

I don’t know how successful Sarah Palin’s political career will be, but I do know she’s tapping into the same vein of popular resentment and working-class sensibility as Jackson. The amazing thing is that she’s a woman. That’s a first in this country: a female politician who functions as an inflammatory, fire-in-the-belly populist hero. A female Andrew Jackson! If she weren’t so politically divisive, I’d say we should put up a plaque.

Unfortunately, I don’t like Palin’s political views much more than I like Jackson’s. I wish to hell she were a liberal, or at least a Democrat. Then I could enjoy this with equanimity. As it is, it feels kind of like watching a woman become the head of the mafia. Part of me is going, “oh, hey, a woman…” But on the other hand, it’s still the mafia.

I will say this: if liberals (or Democrats) want to discourage Palin’s popularity, they need to stop with the double standards and the misogyny. The folks who make up Palin’s base may be misinformed on policy matters, but they’re not necessarily stupid. They can see quite well that Sarah Palin is no nuttier than most of the other clowns in the political circus, especially the Republicans (with a special shout-out to our Democratic Vice-President, who is a talking donkey.) They can also see that despite this basic kinship of clowns, Palin is nonetheless singled out as if she’s some kind of unique inbred sub-normal mucus-dripping monster from outer space.

Her fans think this is down to anti-conservative bias, plus some class snobbery. I think it’s mostly sexism, plus some class snobbery. Either way (or both), the snobbery is coming through loud and clear. Which does not bode well for Democrats.

What Democrats (or liberals) ought to be doing is studying what it is that makes Palin so popular. They might start here, for example. They might also think about why and how Palin’s womanliness appeals to so many people. Because it does, and not for the reasons you might think.

Here’s a tip, offered gratis to everyone on the left: repeating over and over again the pet phrases and canned insights you’ve picked up about Palin and her supporters from other leftists (Bible Spice/purity queen/racists/white resentment/teabaggers) is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “lalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU lalalalala.” It might play well on the blog circuit, but it’s not helping you understand what’s really going on.

Assuming you want to, of course.

Author Leslie Sanchez has made a name for herself as a political analyst and former presidential advisor. She’s been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and appeared as a pundit on ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox News, among others. [1]

Her recent book, You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, and the Shaping of the New American Woman, studies the impact of these women on the 2008 presidential campaign.

While her analysis is interesting, it’s far from objective. By inserting heavy-handed conservative judgments at every opportunity, she alienates and mocks readers who might disagree. The book, though thoroughly researched, reads more like a long op ed piece than legitimate journalism.

The quoted passages and reference materials do offer insight to the prevalence of sexism during the race. “Rush Limbaugh, speaking of a particularly unflattering photo of Clinton, … asked: ‘Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?’” Though, he claimed aging men look “more authoritative, accomplished and distinguished.” Then, discussing Palin’s appeal, he said “she’s not going to remind anybody of their ex-wife, she’s going to remind men, ‘Gee, I wish she was single.’” (p.50-51). While Limbaugh is one of the more inflammatory pundits, many others described Hillary as too cold, and Palin as “exceptionally pretty,” and “a real honey.” (p.47) Even Michelle Obama, an accomplished lawyer and activist, had the media focus on her wardrobe and physique (particularly her arms) more than anything else.

“According to a poll of women conducted for Lifetime Networks after the 2008 election, ‘65 percent of women – majorities in every demographic and political group – said that male and female candidates are held to different standards on the campaign trail.’ Women thought it was easier for a man to be ‘taken seriously by the voters,’ or to be ‘covered seriously by the media.’” (p.125) Americans also frowned upon Palin as a working mom more than Obama as a working dad, and tended to view racism as a bigger problem than sexism.

Sanchez presents interesting points in this way, but veers into dangerous territory when revealing her biases. For one, she claims that any women who supported Hillary in the primaries, but didn’t switch teams to vote for Palin, were anti-feminist. “[My feminist friends] assumed that, as a career woman, I would be naturally offended by certain of the governor’s policy convictions. I was dumbfounded, and I turned the question around on them. ‘How could you not support Palin?’ … Didn’t the ’sisterhood’ mean anything to them?” (p.78) This superficial standpoint emphasizes only the biological similarities between the candidates, ignoring the fact that Clinton and Palin are political and ideological opposites.

The patronization and sexualization of women headed toward the White House was phenomenal last year, and You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe couples valid arguments with revealing research. Still, Sanchez’s overt conservatism blurs the line between fact and opinion, and her casual, inconsistent writing style leaves much to be desired.

Sources:

[1] Leslie Sanchez Official Site: About Leslie Sanchez

[2] Sanchez, Leslie. You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

I feel like an idiot always pointing out the elephant sitting on the couch and merging with the throw pillows so very well that nobody else sees it. In this case it has to do with the fact that the state of Massachusetts, the Sodom and Gomorrah of all liberalism, has never sent a woman to the U.S. Senate. NEVER.

We don't discuss this, just as we do not discuss the fact that there has never been a female president of this country. Even feminists don't discuss this, except to point out that ofcoursethey'dloveawomanbut...there's something too wrong with the particular candidate.

And it is hard. I admit that. Perhaps Martha Coakley is not the candidate one should vote for. Perhaps Hillary Clinton wasn't the candidate, either. But somehow we manage to discuss all that without really discussing the fact that women are not in power in the highest places of this country. Some feminists argue that focusing on the top doesn't help, that we must focus on the bottom rungs of the society only and help the women there. That way the whole edifice gets turned over.

That would be lovely, except for the fact that the social hierarchies are anchored at the top, not at the bottom. They are like upside-down houses and if you want to dig into the foundations you need to do that at the top of the edifice, odd as it may seem.

Then there's the argument that just voting for women isn't necessarily good for feminism and I agree with that. But note that just voting for liberal guys may not be good for feminism, either, and they should be held to at least as stringent a measuring rod as the women are. I do feel that they get a pass, even from feminists, whereas women are taken apart and checked out with a magnifying glass. Bad choices in the past? Scrap her! No experience? Scrap her!

None of this should be taken as an endorsement for Martha Coakley. My aim is to point out the context in which we discuss female candidates, a context which pretends that the playing field has always been equal and that there is no special value in electing more women in general.

As far as sensationalist headlines are concerned, this one ranks pretty high. But it’s not altogether an inappropriate one to use in describing this story, although I do find it a little ironic that I chose to write about this after Thanksgiving holidays — a time specifically set aside for gastronomic excess.

This morning, CNN’s website featured a story on Lincoln University, a historically black college that has instituted a different take on the physical fitness requirements many schools implement for their undergraduates. Like many private and public institutions, Lincoln requires their undergraduates to meet a certain physical fitness requirement in order to graduate. However, unlike other schools, Lincoln is basing their distinction between “fit” and “unfit” students on body mass index (BMI), and are requiring students who have a BMI greater than 30 to take a special physical fitness class, called “Fitness for Life” that meets three times a week and includes aerobic exercises like water aerobics and Tae Bo.

For those of you who are unaware, BMI is an index used by health professionals to determine one’s general health. It is calculated by entering one’s weight and one’s height into a formula that generates a score can then be compared against what a healthy person’s “expected” score should be. Heavier people would, of course, have a higher BMI than lighter people of the same height. The BMI score can then be categorized against indicators of health:

BMI Categories:

• Underweight = <18.5
• Normal weight = 18.5-24.9
• Overweight = 25-29.9
• Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater

As a researcher in the biomedical sciences, I can tell you that BMI remains a basic tool in the toolbox of physical trainers and body composition phyisiologists, primarily because BMI is so simple to use. Compared to more accurate measures of determining a person’s body composition (i.e. how much of their body is muscle, fat, etc.), BMI requires only a tape measure and a scale, making it one of the easiest numbers to calculate in the field. In fact, BMI is so straightforward to calculate that free BMI calculators abound on the Internet – here’s one that I regularly use to monitor my own BMI.

But, here’s the dirty truth about BMI that health professionals are loath to reveal: it just isn’t a very good measure for determining a person’s health.

It turns out that the label “healthy” has nothing to do with appearance and weight; rather, it has everything to do with cardiovascular health. Folks with a lot of fat tend to carry it in their midsections (abdominal if it’s under their skin around their bellies, visceral if it’s built up around their internal organs), and this fat is directly linked with increased health risks, such as hypertension, atherosclerosis and heart disease. That’s because more fat in your belly area means that you have more fat built around your internal organs, making them work less efficiently. In addition, more fat around your belly indicates you’ve got more fat throughout your body, including fat built up on the inside of your blood vessels reducing their diameters (like a drain slowly clogging with hair), making it more difficult for your heart to pump blood through them.

And really, therein lies the rub: it’s not that the fat is directly making a person unhealthy. In fact, both men and women need a fair amount of fat in their bodies to maintain health — indeed, for women, more than 20% of their bodies need to should be made up of fat to avoid problems with menstruation. Instead, what makes an overweight person unhealthy is the amount of work their heart has to do to keep pumping blood through their bodies, particularly as vessels get blocked with fat deposits. Eventually, their heart becomes too weak to generate the extra force to keep blood pumping away, and it fails.

In other words, folks with high BMIs need to reduce their body fat and strengthen their hearts, in order to stave off the progressive risks of cardiovascular disease. But notice, I didn’tsay that folks with high BMIs need to lose X number of pounds or hit a target weight (or BMI). A person’s weight is a convenient measure of fat, but it relies on an assumption that people have a generally constant (or predictable) amount of weight that is due to muscle or bone — which is untrue — such that any increases in BMI are due to excessive weight from excessive fat.

As all of us know intuitively, some people have large (heavier) bones, and some people have small (lighter) bones. Some people have lots of muscle, and some have very little muscle. BMI assumes a generic percentage of each person’s weight is due to bones and muscles, but it’s quite easy to fool BMI by having non-average bone structure or muscle. Even moderate athletes who do strength training will have more than the typical person’s muscle. Since muscle weighs more than fat, athletes tend to weigh more than non-athletes, and since BMI is blind to what kind of tissues make up a person’s weight, it will classify an athlete as having a higher BMI as a non-athlete of the same height. In fact, a superior athlete like Arnold Schwarzenagger, in his heyday, would have been considered obese (or even morbidly obese) according to the BMI scale. Moreover, a person’s appearance has as much to do with one’s genetics (and age) as anything else; even people with good cardiovascular performance may appear pear-shaped or even have some abdominal fat; the fat alone doesn’t make them unhealthy.

Which is why many of us in the scientific community use BMI with a grain of salt. BMI data are so easy to collect that patients can be sent home with a scale and can be taught to collect the necessary numbers on their own. But BMI is an imperfect measure of health; what we really should be looking at are measures like body fat percentage, which directly measures how much of a person’s body is composed of fat (versus muscle and bone), allowing us to accurately determine a person’s risk factors for disease. Or for that matter, we should measure performance on aerobic tests (such as running or swimming) to determine one’s health. 

Unfortunately, our society’s close reliance on BMI has helped encouraged a weight-conscious culture that associates weight (and therefore appearance) with health, producing an unhealthy (pardon the pun) obsession with losing weight without actually promoting cardiovascular health. Weight loss pills fill the aisles of pharmacies, and gastric bypass surgery and liposuction is abused by dilettantes looking to squeeze themselves into the latest Vera Wang fashion. Even shows like “The Biggest Loser” celebrate shedding pounds, but spends comparatively little time teaching contestants about reducing heart rate, blood pressure, or cholesterol — the true culprits for a larger person’s poor health prognosis.

Which all leads me to the article that prompted this blog post. Lincoln University wants to enroll students with a BMI greater than 30 into fitness classes. These classes will probably promote education on healthier living, but are also an institutionalized fat camp, designed to put students through an aerobic workout designed to help them shed pounds. On the one hand, I believe it is important for students to receive an education on physical fitness in college (and even in high school), and a class that teaches students about exercise and nutrition will help those who need a “wake-up call” about their health and encourage them to for their own fitness. With the obesity epidemic the way it is in America, twenty-something students need to know the grim prognosis if they can’t walk a flight of stairs without being out of breath.

That being said, I think it is completely unjust for Lincoln University to target students with high BMI’s for this fitness class. Even though school administrators have taken steps to address the imperfect measure of the BMI (by taking waist circumference, which will be lower in athletes with high BMIs due to increased muscle mass), the current system of targeting students with high BMIs is just a grown-up version of the same schoolyard antics: let’s all point and laugh at the fat kid. As a society, we’re titillated by the mental image of fat people doing aerobic activity — how else do we explain the popularity of shows like “Celebrity Fit Club”? Mandating that “fat” students take fitness classes is just another way of telling overweight people that they are different, lazy, unworthy, ignorant or stupid, and altogether deserving of our finger-pointing. As a society, we blame the overweight person for being overweight, and in so doing we lose sight of the definition of “healthy”.

We assume that people of “normal” weights don’t need this kind of aerobic training, yet how many of your “normal weight” friends can run a 5K in under 30 minutes? How many eat the proper balance of protein, fat and carbohydrates each day? How many have a systolic blood pressure below 120 and a heart rate below 90? How many of your “normal weight” friends smoke, drink, and engage in other risky behaviours that could compromise their current and future health? How many of your “normal weight” friends lack sufficient upper body strength to perform 20 push-ups?

The bottom line is that all of us have something we can learn from a “Fitness for Life” class, and if Lincoln University wants to promote health in their student body, they should require all students to perform to a certain standard in a physical fitness test, regardless of BMI. If students can’t demonstrate sufficient fitness, then they should be enrolled in the “Fitness for Life” class, again, regardless of BMI. If, as the school states, this new mandated class is intended to promote physical activity in our nation’s youth, than that opportunity should be extended to all students based on their fitness (or lack thereof) – not based on an imperfect, sloppy measurement of health that even health professionals should eschew.

And why does this story hit so close to home? Well, those of you who have followed this blog for some time probably know that I have struggled with my weight for my entire life. Being Asian made it all the worse; all of my APIA female friends were stick figure thin, while I felt alien in my curvaceous skin. The message couldn’t have been plainer: growing up, I simply knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. As a child, I was encouraged by my parents to be academic; consequently, I grew up with virtually no emphasis on productive physical activity. I didn’t play a sport, and only through my high school’s physical fitness requirement did I learn how to do distance running. And although I was teased my whole life for being large (or endomorphic, or Reubenesque, or any of those other euphemisms used to try to soften the blow of being called ”fat”), I didn’t know how to make the lifestyle changes I needed. For the first 25 years of my life, I concentrated on trying to tip the needle of my bathroom scale and only ended up running myself in circles. I don’t even want to recount the dark thoughts I had at the bleakest points during my struggle with my weight.

This past January, I found myself at my heaviest and in the worst shape of my life. My turning point was when I needed to walk up a small incline near work to go to a local get-together. The incline, barely more than thirty feet in elevation, caused me to be out of breath. I was only 26 years old. 

From January onward, I decided to make a change in my life, and one that would stick this time. Rather than to focus on pounds, I have educated myself (with the help of an incredible physical trainer friend of mine) on cardiovascular fitness and appropriate nutrition, and I have prioritized physical activity in my life. I learned about heart rate and blood pressure, about the benefits of different kinds of aerobic training, and even started to lift free weights to improve my muscle mass. And yes, now that I have been on a schedule that involves nearly daily cardiovascular activity and strength training, I have lost more than 40 pounds. But, more importantly, I have raised my systolic blood pressure (I was hypotensive and prone to dizzy spells indicating a weakened heart), reduced my resting heart rate by nearly 30 beats per minute (the lower the better), and corrected an anemia that prevented me from donating blood (I am once again a regular blood donor).

And as for that little hill that caused me to start on my physical fitness journey? Let’s just say that last month, I climbed the tallest mountain in Southern Arizona.

That’s not to say that I’m done — far, from it. The biggest change in my life is that I now look forward to the physical activity that I have incorporated into my daily schedule. I am motivated by fitness goals, and I celebrate my fitness milestones however private they may be. For the first time in my life, I am within “normal” (or athletic) ranges for weight, body fat percentage, hip-to-waist ratio, and heart rate, and I finally feel in control of my own health.

Yet, I am still a curvy girl, and I probably always will be. But I bet you this: I could probably run rings around several of the extra-skinny girls who go to my gym, many of whom are so fixated on the “thin is in” mentality that they can’t maintain a two-minute sprint on the treadmill and refuse to perform any strength training with anything heavier than a 2lb-weight. Those girls might be thin, but they haven’t spent much time improving their health.

Which leads me to the biggest lesson I learned this year as I got into shape: no amount of name-calling, finger-pointing, or social mockery will help an obese person get into shape. In fact, the last thing an overweight person needs is ostracization; you simply cannot shame a person into getting fit. Frequently, overweight people are saddened, embarassed, or frustrated by the health risks associated with their obesity. They aren’t overweight because they don’t care about their health or their appearance — they are overweight because they don’t know what they can (or should) do to fix it. Meanwhile, those who indulge in name-calling and giddy pleasure over insulting the “fat” people amongst us do so out of insecurity — because every person suffering from low-self-esteem feels better if they can make another person feel even lower.

If we’re going to overcome the obesity epidemic in America, we need to divorce health concerns from superficial appearance, and focus on educating America — all of America — on what they can do to get (and stay) healthy. We should make everyone want to get in better shape by supporting, not berating, those who aren’t. But, we must also remember that overweight people must choose to make a change in their lives. That choice cannot be made for them, neither by Lincoln University administrators nor by overgrown schoolyard bullies.

But I do guarantee this — if you’re contemplating making that change, take it from me: it was the best choice I ever made for myself.

Advocacy Group Decries PETA's Inhumane Treatment Of Women I love the Onion. That is all.

Some stats on domestic violence at RollingOut.com giving light to the impact of Rihanna and Chris Brown.

Please read Chally at Feministe on the chilling Maguindanao Massacre.

Disgusting statistics about food and starvation in the United States.

A must-read at the Nation about how to save journalism.

When I first laid hands on Gail Carriger’s Soulless (Orbit, 2009), I began to wonder if the book had been written specifically to irritate me.

1. To start out, the novel is urban fantasy. Already we’re on bad terms.

2. Also, there are vampires.

3. Too, werewolves.

4. And romance!

5. In case that’s not enough, Carriger mixes in a Victorian setting and a hint of steampunk. Neither of these inherently annoy me, but combined with items 1-4:

6. The novel is heavily weighted down by trendy genre elements.* In my experience, this usually leads to books that are poorly constructed, badly integrated, and the literary equivalent of a chess club stereotype wearing star-shaped sunglasses – trying much too hard to be cool.**

Soulless should be like combining salmon and chocolate while I, in this metaphor, am an ichthyophobe with no sweet tooth. However, it appears that skilled chefs can pair salmon and chocolate. And sometimes a novel that’s full of everything wrong can go terribly, tragically right.

Soulless is the first book of the Parasol Protectorate, with the next book, Changeless, due from Orbit on March 30, 2010. The novel begins when a young Victorian woman, Alexia Tarabotti, finds herself alone in a library with a vampire. For any other unmarried miss, this situation would be frightening. However, Alexia has no soul which means that vampires can’t eat her and, in fact, her touch temporarily turns supernatural creatures into humans.

There are three types of supernatural creatures in Carriger’s universe: werewolves, vampires and ghosts. Werewolves come in packs, and vampires come in hives, but somehow this vampire doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. Alexia gets caught up with the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, or BUR, in helping to investigate this strange appearance as well as a number of strangely coincidental disappearances.

In the interview at the back of the book, Carriger reports having asked herself, “if immortals were mucking about, wouldn’t they have been mucking about for a very long time?” She considers the cultural implications of supernatural interference: “Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functioned on werewolf pack dynamics… [and then I] realized that if Victorians were studying vampires and werewolves (which they would do, if they knew about them)… technology would have evolved differently. Enter a sprinkling of steampunk…” (p. 364)

In my opinion, most traditional urban fantasy fails because it doesn’t consider the long-term, global ramifications of its conceits. This isn’t helped by the fact that a great deal of urban fantasy poses a secret underworld filled with werewolves and vampires (or fairies and elves) who covertly affect the real world. Small-scale stories revolving around this conceit can be fine, but secrets are difficult to keep, and many stories pose so many supernatural events of such import that it strains credibility to believe that magic could remain a secret. Buffy – to take an at-hand example – made a joke of it. But non-humorous texts are out of luck if they want us to believe that people die every night from vampire bites and yet no one ever notices.

Carriger’s world is one in which vampires and werewolves are fully integrated. They interact with and affect politics and society, and in turn are affected by them. For instance, there’s a post specifically designated for a werewolf to advise the Queen, but simultaneously the alpha werewolf is constrained by high society mores.

Soulless also benefits from the fact that Carriger doesn’t seem to have approached the elements of her book as disparate. As she says, Victorians investigating magic lends itself to steampunk; one genre element follows from another, creating the sense of a fully integrated world.

The novel’s action-oriented main plot takes place against a Jane-Austen-like background. Alexia, the product of her mother’s first marriage to a – gasp – Italian, is a spinster with a number of unflattering traits, such as her blunt speech and tan complexion, all of which make it clear she’ll never find a proper English husband. Nevertheless, she falls in love with one of the country’s most eligible bachelors, the werewolf alpha Lord Maccon.

No, wait. She doesn’t fall in love with him. She can’t stand him. No, I’m sorry. I mean, he can’t stand her. Wait. He’s in love with her – that’s it. It’s just that he’s strong and manly, but also messy and uncivilized. While she’s proud and intractable, but also busty and tenacious. Wait, are we reading Pride and Prejudice with Werewolves?

Soulless’s treatment of romance in its early chapters is the novel’s only major misstep. The text improves once Lord Maccon and Alexia acknowledge their romantic feelings – although there is one awkward, late-chapter sex scene that occurs in the middle of an action sequence, which could have been dramatically shortened while still serving its purpose as a release valve for romance and humor. But the early romantic sallies are winceably cliché. As soon as a male character gazes upon the heroine with a passage like–

Miss Tarabotti might examine her face in the mirror each morning with a large degree of censure, but there was nothing at all wrong with her figure. He would have to have had far less soul and a good fewer urges not to notice that appetizing fact. Of course, she always went and spoiled the appeal by opening her mouth. In his humble experience, the world had yet to produce a more vexingly verbose female. (p. 8-9)

–we readers know where we’re headed. We don’t need tingling near her abdomen or stirring he can’t explain, interspersed with fury! at his lack of manners and yet–! to guide us along the way. Carriger so facilely avoids other clichés that it’s a shame this one mars the text.

Overall, though, the Austen elements are charming. Carriger’s Victorian voice is sharp and funny. Witty observations provide a plethora of humorous clashes between action sequences and rigid etiquette. The descriptions of Victorian fashion are very nice for those readers with a weakness for bustles and lace, and I suspect I’m not the only one since the book is marketed with a Victorian dress-up doll flash game.

If there’s one weakness the Victorian voice lends itself to, it’s the underdevelopment of Alexia’s mother, step-father and sisters, who play the compliant foils for unconventional Alexia. Their insipidness is fine at the beginning of the book, but grows less convincing as their roles increase near the end. Still, this is a small complaint and easily remedied. Hopefully Carriger will toss them a few lines of character development in one of the sequels.

Other characters are created quite well. Alexia, for instance, is a fun and well-portrayed heroine, full of vigor and flaws. She, her friend Ivy, and their friendship are memorably captured in a few sentences: “Ivy Hisselpenny was the unfortunate victim of circumstances that dictated she be only-just-pretty, only-just-wealthy, and possessed of a terrible propensity for wearing extremely silly hats. This last being the facet of Ivy’s character that Alexia found most difficult to bear.” (p. 33) Lord Maccon and his assistant, Professor Lydell, are good characters as well, although Lord Maccon is at times brushed in with slightly-too-broad romantic strokes and could use a little more development within his archetype. The best character is the vampire Lord Akeldama, an outrageous gossip-monger with a penchant for gaudy attire whose underlying intelligence and immortal weariness are deftly revealed as the novel progresses.

In the end, Soulless is not a profound novel. It imparts no revelations about the human experience. I don’t expect it will change anyone’s life or that I’ll remember the plot intricacies in ten years. But it was a fun, adventurous romp that diverted me for a few hours. I might even read it a second time. I will certainly pick up book two of the Parasol Protectorate and I look forward to meeting Alexia Tarabotti again in 2010.

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*It seems possible that Carriger began writing with the intent of forecasting what tropes would be popular a few years down the line. If this is the case, kudos to her for guessing correctly.

**It should go without saying that any of these things can be done well. It’s just that while 90% of everything is crap, I find these tropes to suffer from even worse odds. Nevertheless, here are some successful examples: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (vampire), N. K. Jemisin’s “Red Riding Hood’s Child” (werewolf), Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” (urban fantasy), and Paula Guran’s anthologies of romantic fantasy which contain Coates’s “Magic in a Certain Slant of Light,” Parks’s “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge,” and Copley-Woods’s “Desires of Houses” (romance). Michael Swanwick is famous for combining disparate genre elements with strength and grace, and I was recently impressed with new writer Tina Connolly’s “Moon at the Starry Diner” for successfully condensing an epic plotline and several incompatible tropes into a short story.

[image of album cover is from here. NOTE: Slaine is not a feminist or profeminist band. They are an entirely white male Swiss hardcore band who pride themselves on not being political. (That they don't see how being european white non-Jewish, heterosexual men is political is not surprising.) To see what the musicians look like, go here. And let's see if the US and UK MRAs go after them for