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Thanks to the Mary Sue I found this – Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes than You, a Tumblr which takes examples of super cute superhero cosplay done by real little girls, and turns them into sketch designs for the superheroes themselves. What we get, refreshingly, is superheroes that are designed to be people, rather than sex objects. Hooray!
Who’s Afraid of a Pixie Cut? Bitch Magazine takes on the policing of celebrity hair, and particularly the way that a beautiful woman choosing a short haircut can create panic, suspicion and even suggestions of mental illness.
Strange Horizons looks at the breakdown of reviews, reviewers and gender in the SF community last year. They then updated to include a few more review sources. The commentary from i09 is also worth reading.
Peter M Ball tells you that you do not back up your work enough. He also gives some great advice on Going Into Business as a writer, over on David McDonald’s blog.
Speaking of writing advice, Tobias Buckell has some clever things to say about Rewriting and Reinvention.
The Australian Women Writers site – which has made for brilliant reading this year, I am loving the monthly updates about reviews – reports on the inaugural Stella Prize night.
Via Holly Black, this Tumblr post “for all the women I have loved who were dragged through the mud” talks about the unfortunate misogyny displayed by women in fandoms towards female characters. If you’ve spent any amount of time in the supposed feminist and feminine space of any slash-friendly fandom, you’ve probably seen some hateful commentary or fic which made you feel bad about loving female characters. Why is it that so many creative, intelligent women prioritise the narrative of beloved male characters over the women in their lives, and are so keen to throw female characters of a favourite fandom under the bus in order to focus exclusively on the men in the story? This is a brilliant, detailed and thoughtful examination of why this happens, and why it’s a problem.
What I liked best about that post is that she only deals glancingly at the common theory that it’s about sexual jealousy (OMG that character so doesn’t deserve his love, I would treat him better) as there are many other more probably and weighty reasons for this ingrained hatred and unforgiving nature towards female characters.
Sofia Samatar looks at Joanna Russ in the beautifully titled post: “Joanna Russ Laughs Like Medusa.”
Sophia Stewart, the real creator of the Matrix, wins a billion dollar law suit to prove her material was stolen in the creation of the hit movie – which is especially important because it has been under-reported in mainstream media, and because Sophia is an African American woman. Which is something to remember next time you hear people saying that science fiction is all about the white dudes.
Speaking of gender issues, Wikipedia once again becomes a lens showing the sexism and the invisibility of women in our culture – in this case, it was discovered that the list of American Novelists had been deemed “too long” and thus the women were slowly being edited out of the list, moved over instead to the sub-category of “American Women Novelists.”
The funniest piece of vandalism from our election year in Australia so far: Abbott’s number of illegal boats was changed overnight to reflect the correct usage of the term ‘illegal.’
The blokes behind the Wombles TV show talk about being Wombles for fun and profit.
Terry Pratchett is still with us, and still writing. I enjoyed this interview with him very much.