Sunday, December 03, 2006

Goodbye to Fanboys (for the moment)

So, I'm procrastinating because I have homework that's due tommorrow but the work is damn boring because it's all about kids books and the class isn't that hard, so it feels like busy work.

So, I'm procrastinating by clicking on links at When Fangirls Attack and I run across this:

and the girls women thing is 30 years old. Most people today don't care. Most women I know still refer to themselves as girls, have girls night out, refer to movies they like as chick flicks. We don't need 30 year old feminist garbage, we've moved beyond it. People are people.


There is so much that could be said in response to that, but for the moment, I simply must congratulate spiderrob8 on accomplishing something I had previosly thought impossible: I am so ready to go do my homework now.

Explaining for the umpteenth time why Mo Willems and Sandra Boynton rock my world suddenly sounds infinitely more appealing than it did ten minutes ago.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't understand. What could have possibly been preventing you from expounding on the awesomeness of Willems and Boynton?

Mickle said...

The fact that I don't really get to expound upon it, but instead must simply list about a hundred kids books that I think are good, and add little notes as if I was going to forget which book was which.

Like I said - busy work!

Ok, not really. It's good practice for people that haven't been working in the children's section of a bookstore for several years. But since my cousin was frighteningly accurrate when she remarked to me this summer that I was like Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail, for me it's busy work!

Timothy Liebe said...

RE That NEWSARAMA thread: Tammy often refers to an letter she read a year or two back in HORNBOOK or SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL where a male librarian crabbed about feminists and said, "You've won - now all you have to do is cash in!" So now, every time some journalist asks if she'd still write "books about girls" if she'd known originally how it'd "limit her audience", or is told she'd probably get a movie deal if she didn't write "books about girls all the time", or we're told that WHITE TIGER #1 is "pretty good for a 'girl book'", Tammy snarls to me, "Yeah, we're just 'cashing in' all OVER the place, aren't we?"

Look, I'm a straight white male who's going to be fifty in a few months, and I'll admit there are times I quail at the thought of my traditional SWM privileges being seriously threatened. But at the same time, my parents raised me to be fair-minded within the limits of their (and my own) inherent prejudices, to be at least somewhat ashamed that those prejudices existed, and to make some effort to combat them. These days that kind of belief is sneered at as "patronizing libburulism" - but back then, my Religious Conservative parents, and others just like them in our community, merely considered it "being a good Christian American."

People like those you quoted, and way too many people in charge of things these days (including TOO many self-identified "Christian Americans"!), seem to never have learned that, or to care. It's like there's a fundamental disconnect between what they allege to be, and what they clearly are - which is, frankly, a bunch of spoiled brats squalling that they'll have to share their toys with the other kids.

Sorry if this post is kind of meandering, Mickle - I drove from Syracuse, NY to Toronto yesterday afternoon to bring Tammy home from the last leg of her 41-day(!) book tour, and we drove back home to Syracuse today (about a six-and-change hour trip each way, no matter what Google Maps claims). So I'm kind of exhausted, which is never a good time to be reading the Newsarama or CBR board postings. But you're right - there's a LOT that's wrong with that statement and the underlying attitude, and I felt that way even before I co-wrote a female superhero with my feminist author wife.

Best,
Tim Liebe
Dreaded (and pooped) Spouse-Creature of Tamora Pierce
- and co-writer of Marvel's White Tiger comic

Mickle said...

Timothy - rant all you want.

I'm hardly one to complain - even if I wanted to. :)