A troll is someone who posts off-topic, extraneous, or inflammatory messages with the intent of provoking an emotional response or disrupting the normal discussion.

– Live Science

Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web from Gawker. I often wonder who these people are in real life, especially the ones who troll on bereavement pages. How do these people exist?

Word Of The Week: Doxing, from Fritinancy. Is doxing okay when it comes to trolls? Sometimes, I think.

Online Anger: Where It Comes From and How to Control It from The Good Men Project. Oh no! Someone on the Internetz is wrong!

Trolls’ Online Comments Skew Perception Of Science from Live Science. Not the news I wanted to hear.

Definition of ‘Concern Trolling’ from Wise Geek

Cyber Bullying Category on Wikipedia, of which Troll is one entry.

THE ART & SCIENCE OF MODERATION – FREE SPEECH VS FREE AUDIENCE from Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog (Part 2), explaining the 1-9-90 rule.

Science Says: Nasty Commenters Can Destroy A Website’s Brand Over Time from Co.Design

How Nasty Comments Can Change The Way We Think from Gawker

How Online Trolling Is The New Punk Rock, from Esquire

Trolls On Twitter Do Not Necessarily Represent America. America will be glad to hear that, from Mother Jones

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

– Kurt Vonnegut

So Necessary When Disagreeing With People Online — some logical fallacies in poster form from Fuck Yeah, Feminists!

What do trolls get out of all this time on the Internet? “When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.” from Explore.

For hobby trollers: An Idiot’s Guide To Free Speech from Jezebel

Why do trolls argue so badly? Don’t they get more practice than anyone? How Arguing Can Undermine Rationality from FTB.

My number one stain-related tip, tried and tested, is keeping a bottle of soda water in the pantry for when coffee is spilt onto carpet. As soon as the coffee is knocked over, pour a good amount of soda into the whole mess (which will feel counterintuitive, granted), and the coffee will bubble to the surface. You’ll then be able to wipe the whole lot up with a towel. The carpet will be good as gold.

This probably works for other beverages and other fabrics. I’ve only tried knocking over coffee. Onto carpet.

Doesn’t work for electronic devices, unfortunately. And only works if you refrain from using the bottle of soda water as a drink.

I have yet to try these ones:

30 Ways To Nix Stains Using Pantry Staples from Home Sessive

Have you tested any stain removal techniques?

It happened about ten years ago now. I was waiting for a workmate outside a mechanics’ early one morning, just before work. I was waiting to give him a lift to work, since his own car needed work. I sat in the driver’s seat parked nextto  the curb, in the central part of a small New Zealand town: an eerily silent part of town because it was just after eight in the morning, and the main shops didn’t open until nine.

I remember thinking hard about something as I waited: most likely the day’s teaching load. I was probably stressing about whether we were going to make it to staff briefing on time, because he seemed to be taking ages in there.

I remember hearing an ambulance approach, not from my direction. It appeared at the intersection about 50 metres ahead of where I sat, safe in my car. When I say I ‘heard an ambulance’, I’m not even sure it had its siren on. It may not have, since the reason for a siren is to wend quickly through heavy traffic. There was no heavy traffic.

I wondered what had happened right there in front of me, but I know I didn’t ponder on it for very long because we did make it to work on time and I was soon caught up in the general busyness of a teaching day.

Later that afternoon I learned that a young man had been knocked off his bike in town. I’d assumed suspected head injury, broken bones. But he was dead.

The boy had been cycling towards the boys’ campus with his helmet hanging off his handlebars when he ran a red light and got knocked down by a small car.

When I look back with ten years of hindsight, I feel sure that I saw the boy. I saw his helmet hanging off the handlebars, his arms folded across his chest, bolt upright and infallible  I see the small car clearly, too; it’s the same size as mine. With just a few minutes’ difference, it could have been me who knocked the kid off his bike and killed him.

It wasn’t a Movie Death Scene. What strikes me is the complete and utter silence of it all. There are no feminine shrieks, no Hollywood soundtrack, no heavy thuds, edited in later. No gathering crowd. Complete and utter silence.

This morning I took my four-year-old daughter shopping. At the first shop we bought a worm farm. Despite the name, a worm ‘farm’ isn’t the great hulking thing you might imagine — it’s a couple of plastic boxes with some knick-knacks and an instruction booklet inside.

My daughter watched me lift one off the pile of worm farms at the shop, and manoeuvre it into the trolley. “Be careful, mum,” she said. “That’s heavy.”

“No, it’s okay,” I told her. “It’s large and awkward, but it’s not heavy.”

Next stop was the hardware store, where I bought two 20 kg bags of chicken pellets. The young woman at the counter asked if I needed help getting the feed to my car. I’d already lifted the feed from a low pile on the ground and up into the trolley, so I’m not sure why she thought I needed help pushing the trolley to my car. I accepted that it might be store policy to ask, but wondered whether they would’ve asked me if I were a strapping lad.

Right outside, the Lions club was frying up sausages and bacon. I’d parked next to their caravan. With no imminent customers, a man in his 50s or 60s asked if I needed help with my chicken pellets. I politely declined. And at this point I’ll emphasise that I appreciated the offer. If I’d been ill, or 80 years old, or if I’d strained my back I would have been very glad of the offer, and if I’m lucky enough to make it to an advanced age, I hope there’ll be volunteers about the place to help me with my pellets, because they only come in 20kg bags. There’s no 5kg alternative.

On the other hand, if a healthy woman in her mid-thirties can’t lift 20kg, she’d better get weight-lifting, because with a 10 percent natural decline in muscle mass over each decade of life, the chances of her being able to lift herself out of the bath when she’s 80 are looking slim. Is a man in his late middle-age really that much more conditioned than a woman in her mid-thirties anyway?

I thought no more about it until I pulled into our driveway at home, and realised my four-year-old daughter had been watching everything, because she said, “Mum, you take in the light bags. I’ll run inside and tell Dad to lift the heavy ones.”

I made a point of hefting the goods myself, saying loudly, “Look at me! Aren’t I strong!” I think I even said, “Women are soooo strong!” at one point.

Still, she looked skeptical. I think a gender lesson has already been learnt somewhere, and reinforced today.

Related: Girls Lift 3000 Pound Tractor Off Dad.

So, this came through my Facebook feed.

It makes a change from inspirational quotes, and home-made posters with quotes attributed to Einstein, but something’s not sitting quite right with me. This often happens with memes on social media. I shudder a little and I’m not always sure why until I think it through.

The person who originally posted that picture to Facebook annotated with:

“Very true,I’ve seen it in a prison doco,so bitchs it’s time to pull them pants up lol”

EVEN IF this nugget of fashion history is true — and I’m not sure it is — this sort of thing bothers me for the following reasons.

This ‘public service announcement’ reminds me of that whole ‘leggings are not pants’ campaign to get young women to stop wearing a certain kind of lower-body clothing. Most recently the fashion police have turned their disapproval towards yoga pants. Apparently some men think women wear yoga pants outside yoga class because they like to turn men on. The entire problem with this whole assumption is that strangers wear clothes for no reason to do with you. And the same goes for young men and their low-riding jeans. I can’t know the motivation for young men wearing their pants down low, but I suspect it’s entirely to do with fashion and the folk etymology of prison-sex is not helpful. Prison fashion does not equal general fashion. If so, we’d all be getting around in striped pajamas or green tunics or whatever. (I haven’t visited a prison lately.) I suspect the baggy pants fashion in young men has something to do with wanting to appear bigger generally, for the same but inverse reason that women generally prefer pants which de-emphasise size. It also leads to a more stereotypically manly gait, I suspect, in order to keep them up. Low-riding pants expose the band of your underwear, which considering the $40 price tag on a branded pair of men’s daks, at least mean you’re getting your money’s worth, if ‘money’s worth’ equals ‘showing the world how branded you are’. Whatever the case, we need to butt out of other people’s fashion choices. ‘Better dressed’ is subjective. This includes the fashion choices older folks find ridiculous. It will always be so.

Then there’s the trivialisation of prison rape. While this meme is ostensibly about ‘consensual’ anal sex and willingness to give it via pants signals, I don’t think it does a single damn thing to foster awareness of this serious issue in prisons: that a lot of sex is not in fact consensual. This fact won’t be fixed by wearing pants high. So this advice veers dangerously close to victim blaming, and reminds me of slut-shaming, and to saying, ‘Well if you’re going to wear such a short skirt you’re kind of asking for it, aren’t you.’

UPDATE: I had been trying to put into words another, niggling reason why this meme annoys me. Then I read the article ‘Men’s Rights’ at Reasonable Conversation, and a few sentences reminded me of the low-riding trousers meme above:

The act of male rape has been used for centuries as a way of degrading men because being penetrated is associated with…wait for it…being a woman. Prison rape is a gigantic problem as men looking to establish dominance over other men sexually assault them, but it’s not a case where men’s rights are being violated in some systematic fashion because of their maleness.

So, while rape is always very, very bad, the meme seems to be upholding this idea that penetration, especially anal penetration, is emasculating. A gender-switched analogue would be advice to women against showing cleavage, because this is used by hookers in red-light districts to show that they’re available for sex.

Yes. And?

It’s ‘common knowledge’ that women talk more than men.

Except we don’t. Women Don’t Talk More Than Men, So Why Do People Say We Do? (from Slate).

The problem with everyone saying women talk more than men, is that in certain situations women can get to feeling bad about saying anything at all. So let’s quit it with the ‘women are verbose’ jokes. Any joke based on an error of fact has no basis at all, and only serves to perpetuate false stereotypes.

In fact, I’d like to see an end to ‘women are X’ jokes, and also to ‘men are X’ jokes. Comedy requires more talent and originality than that.

See also:

• To Be A Woman And Speak Your Mind from Stacked
• The “Language” Gene and Women’s Wagging Tongues from Scientific American
• Men Talk More Than Women, According To Rats, from Lost At E Minor, in which rats are not people, but interesting nonetheless.
• “What Does A Woman Know Anyway?”: Sexism in debating from The F-Word, and more on sexism in top-level debating from The Guardian.
• “Out of the top 100 podcasts in their system, 71 are hosted by men (many by two or three men), 11 are hosted by women (of which three are just 60 seconds long), 9 are co-hosted by a man and woman, and 9 are either NPR or BBC news aggregation podcasts with alternating hosts and reporters, or it’s unclear who hosts.” – from Explore.

1. Scientific American explains in this article the difference between two major theories on intelligence: Either you believe intelligence is incremental (you can get smarter when put into the appropriate environment), or that it’s something you’re born with (an entity theorist).

One thing is clear, however: If you believe that intelligence is incremental, you’re likely to do better than if you don’t.

2. Further evidence that IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence from io9

3. Where Are All The Female Geniuses? from Scientific American. (Short version: They’ve been there, just not recognised.)

4. 10 Supplements You Can Take To Enhance Your Intelligence from io9. I’d take this with a grain of salt, though I keep hearing about these supplements all over the place now. Anyone tried them?

5. So you think you’re smart? Well prove it, from io9. “Despite nearly a century and a half of testing and decades of neuroscience, you can’t prove you’re intelligent.”

6. How Do You Spot A Genius? from Scientific American. “Genius seems to arise from a mosaic of forces that coalesce into a perfect storm of eminence. Innate ability, personality, circumstances and an unusual level of motivation all play a role.”

7. The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn’t Always the Smart One is a book I’d like to read. See a related article from the book’s author: Common Misconceptions About Intelligence III: IQ Tests Are Unreliable from Big Think. Kanazawa argues that “intelligence is no less real than height or weight, and its measurement is just as reliable (or unreliable).” As I read in the articles above, however, the very definition of ‘intelligence’ is the more debatable issue.

8. Ozy Frantz adds this as a disclaimer at the beginning of its* article Deconstruction Intelligence: ‘Obviously, people have different mental aptitudes and capabilities! I want to put that right up front because people tend to get confused and assume that if one says “I’m not sure intelligence is a singular thing” one actually means “…because no one has different cognitive abilities at all!”’ He then very intelligently breaks down the different aspects of intelligence in a less-heard kind of way: Sounding smart, credentialing, knowledge, memory, reasoning ability, creativity, executive functioning, rationality and desire to know.

*Ozy Frantz requests non-binary categorisation, genderwise. I don’t know the possesive form of ‘zie’, sorry. Feel free to school me on that one.

Sunglasses Inside, from Endless Origami

I recently visited the optometrists not because I’d left my glasses on a bus, or sat on them or because they fell apart but because I was overdue for an eye-examination. ‘Overdue’, when I got there, means ‘over a year since the last one’. If I’d known it had only been that long I wouldn’t have bothered.

Anyway, for the first time since I started wearing glasses at the age of 21, my prescription hasn’t changed this year. Well, technically, I’m sitting right between two prescriptions. The optometrist tells me to stick with the slightly weaker one so my eyes don’t get lazy, or something. HE KNOWS ME TOO WELL.

He also told me that my eyes will have ‘settled’ now, and next time I need a new prescription it’ll be for multifocals because old-age eyesight will start to set in in my mid-forties. THINGS TO TELL A 34 YEAR OLD.

Here’s the good news: glasses technology has evolved in the last 20 years. I remember my grandmother’s bi-focals. They looked like normal glasses except for a really obvious halfmoon shape of different glass positioned smack bang in the middle of each lens. Using these early bi-focals required very strange contortions of the neck, and also of the face (for some reason). I’m glad I’ll never have to wear those things. There’s nothing like the old-fashioned type of glasses to give you an old-lady look. (Also known as the ‘cranky librarian’ look, for which they’re probably useful.)

In ten years’ time, however, I fully intend to be of an age where I can get away with wearing my glasses on a chain around my neck. Being short-sighted, I am always wearing my glasses on my face, so you may wonder about the need for a chain, except I live in Australia, and I very inconveniently require two pairs of glasses at all times — inside glasses and sunglasses for outside, to brave the harsh sunlight. Australian sunlight is harsh, winter or summer.

I have lost so many pairs of glasses over the years, juggling this huge inconvenience, and the reason I haven’t needed a new pair in two years now is down to one reason and one reason only: I wear my goddam sunglasses inside. Inside supermarkets, pharmacies, petrol stations. I tried those glasses that darken automatically for a few years, but they don’t work when you’re driving because they don’t work behind glass, and when you’re driving is when you need them the most. So those kinds of glasses are useless. Thanks though, to all the non-glasses people out there who have suggested them. ‘Transitions lenses’ also don’t darken up very quickly, resulting in tears streaming down the cheeks, if you’re like me, of Northern Irish and Scottish ancestry, with ‘very large pupils’. (An optometrist told me that once as he leaned in close. It might’ve been romantic, if not for the little torch.)

I am well aware that some people consider wearing sunglasses inside the height of rudeness. But there we have it. If you see someone wearing sunglasses inside, it may not be because they have a migraine or because they fancy themselves some sort of rock star in training. They may just be blind as a bat and sick of losing their expensive inside glasses.

1. A History Of Geeky Glasses from Jezebel

2. A list of Glasses Tropes from TV Tropes, touched on here, in a Persephone Mag review of ‘New Girl’, and here

3. Exercise Your Brain (Not Your Eyes) To Keep Your Vision Healthy, from io9

4. Experiments show we quickly adjust to seeing everything upside down from Guardian Science

5. Have Poor Eyesight? Maybe you should’ve played outside more as a kid, helpful but too late advice from Good

6. What does the world look like when you’re colour blind? from Boing Boing

7. Conquering colour-blindness with glasses from io9

8. Girls Who Wear Glasses On Halloween from The Hairpin

9. Would you ever wear Google glass? Here’s some stuff about it from someone who has worn it. (It? Them? Why drop the plural? Jezebel doesn’t know either.) They might not necessarily look geeky. They might actually look stylish. Even if you would wear such things, Cancer fears could prevent Google glass from ever becoming a phone, from Quartz. Others are more concerned about privacy issues, since someone wearing Google glasses would be able to record every interaction with you, and you wouldn’t know. As a glasses wearing individual, this is slightly concerning.

10. What do you think of 3D movies and their awesomely fashioned glasses? Here’s what I think: They give me a goddam headache. As the Film School Rejects point out: Skipping That 3D Movie To Save Money? You May End Up Paying For It Anyway.

1. Everyone Gets Their Own Belief, from Seth Godin

2. Ted Kaptchuk talking about The Placebo Effect, in interview with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand. This is a really fascinating interview. I highly recommend it.

3. Why Placebos Work And How You Can Use Them To Get Things Done from Lifehacker

4. Treating Depression: Is there a placebo effect? from 60 Minutes

5. Placebos work better on stoics from Scientific American

6. Could a no-cebo effect explain Medieval Europe’s Dancing Plagues? [excerpt] from Scientific American. (I never knew there was such a thing, but now you mention it I’ll have it explained anyway, thanks…) Also, using the no-cebo effect to make your curses really work, from io9

7. Forget the Placebo Effect: It’s the ‘Care Effect’ That Matters from Wired

Inspired by this post at Gender Focus, which is in turn inspired by this post at xoJane.

• Chickens all lined up in a row along the fence, enjoying a dust bath, next to the dog (their stand-in rooster)
• My four-year-old’s original and eccentric clothing combinations, and the way she dances because she feels so beautiful
• The return of Mad Men, and the ability for us here in Australia to download it very soon after it’s aired in America, in which case I get to read all the commentary!
• Having a dream, then waking up and realising it would make a great story. Working on said story inside my head, regardless of whether I’ll get around to writing it.
• Picking up feathers on walks with the four-year-old, who asks when we get home if I can ‘turn them into a bird’. (Because I am a SUPERMUM.)
• Seeing the fourth chicken come back at regular intervals, knowing that she wasn’t eaten by a fox after all. (Still a mystery where she goes.)
• Autumn weather in and around Canberra. AWESOME time of year, with beautiful colours on the trees.
• Rediscovering certain 90s TV shows which are otherwise too embarrassing to mention.
• An excellent bookclub book… for a change.
• Trimming the hedge, knowing I won’t have to do it again until next season.
• Rain and thunderstorms
• New Zealand has marriage equality! I’m from New Zealand! I feel proud!
• Here in Australia, reminding myself that the anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Aboriginal bigot is not actually Prime Minister.
• Finishing a very big art project which I thought, at regular intervals, would never ever come to an end
• Watching an interview panel of Australian graphic novelists, learning that one and a half years on a single project is nothing compared to six.
• Spending time with friends at friend’s new house while kids make a ‘grass-clipping man’ outside
• Buying garlic in bulk, then peeling cloves with my daughter, squishing it up and storing it in the fridge in olive oil
• Realising I’m too late to do the same with sweet basil, because a chicken has beaten me to the pot and is now using it as a nest
• Letting a huntsman spider live on our ceiling because it cleans out the worse spiders
• Watching a brown and white, long-haired, slightly overweight Border collie run through very long grass, jumping high like an Olympian. Hearing my daughter giggle with delight because she’s only tall enough to see its ears.
• Delicious apples from the neighbour’s tree, and the smell of cloves throughout the house
• Realising that our house is the one that smells constantly like soup, which in turn reminds me of a line out of the film Juno, which I also love.

1. non-working MOTHERS

Chet’s father was employed in the postal service and became a middle-class, senior supervisor. Despite his dad’s relative affluence, with seven offspring to feed and educate and a wife who did not work, there were still many times in Chet’s childhood when he was hungry.

- Affluenza, by Oliver James

The second sentence above annoys me, even though it comes in the middle of a rant about materialism with which I agree, because a woman with seven children works, dammit. She doesn’t do PAID work, and she doesn’t ‘work outside the house’. Although Oliver James is arguing that women should be paid for motherhood because it’s as worthy job as any other, he does the cause no favours by employing this ‘mother doesn’t work’ language. There are genuinely people around who believe that being a mother is not a form of work, but simply a relationship. Until everyone realises that mother, particularly to very small children, is an occupation and not just a family relationship, the status of stay-at-home mothers is unlikely to improve.

Mothers, themselves, can often refer to themselves as ‘unemployed’, when in fact the true definition of ‘unemployed’ should not be extended to mothers who have a full-time job caring for the young, not unless they’re registered job seekers who hope to then employ an outsider to work in loco parentis for the day shift. (Which is not a value judgement, by the way, on mothers who choose to do just that.)

My suggestion: … with seven offspring a a wife who did not do paid work…

2. ‘OUR WIVES AND MOMS’

Stop calling us ‘wives and moms’ is from Salon, regarding President Obama’s tendency to talk to men, rather than to women directly, about their wives, mothers and daughters.

What’s in a name?—The Controversy Over “Manholes” from Inequality by (Interior) Design

3. ‘OLD LADY’ AND OTHER GENDERED WORDS USED AS INSULTS

It’s been around forever. Or at least since 1964.

“Tea used to be considered a beverage for sissies and old ladies. However, nothing could be further from the truth.” excerpted from To The Bride, 1964.

I’m sure every man here has, at least, once been called a girl as an insult. And every woman here would have overheard it. Maybe you’ve even wondered, as I have, why being a girl, or being a sissy, is such an insult. Likewise ‘old woman’.

4. ‘FEMALE DOMINATED’ WHEN DESCRIBING PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

Michio Kaku gave a talk called “The World in 2030″ which I should have found fascinating but which I instead found infuriating, not least for his assertion that ‘The Internet is now female’. Why? Because 51% of internet users are women and girls.

This reminded me of the question ‘Why Do Female Authors Dominate YA Literature?‘ posed by The Atlantic. Answer: They don’t. Ladybusiness pointed out that if women made up 40% of any other area in life then everybody would be congratulating women for almost achieving equality.

Let’s hit ‘female dominated’ on the head in relation to anything close to 50/50. This obfuscates the unfortunate fact that women are still far, far underrepresented in almost everything important, well-paid and influential.

5. JOURNALISTS POINTING OUT ‘ABSENCES OF GROOMING’ WHEN REFERRING TO FEMALE SUBJECTS

The Guardian recently reported on Lionel Shriver’s latest book. It’s not unusual for reporters to describe the way a subject dresses and acts, and that is true of both men and women working in creative industries, even when a photo is attached to the article.

What’s different about the way women are treated, however, is that first it seems mandatory to mention a woman’s appearance when a man’s appearance is more likely to be mentioned only if his image is unusual. Second, it seems okay to talk about what a woman hasn’t done (according to the journalist’s expectations) rather than what she has done to create a brand or a particular image for herself. In Lionel Shriver’s case, her lack of make up is worthy of comment:

But Big Brother, like Kevin, can only serve to fuel the cult of personality that has grown up around Shriver, a figure of fascination whose makeup-free complexion has become the female equivalent of Tom Wolfe’s statement white suit.

These are not equivalents. The difference between Shriver’s ‘makeup-free complexion’ and Tom Wolfe’s ‘statement white suit’ is that Tom Wolfe wore the white suit precisely in order to be different — he could have chosen to wear a regular office suit, and might therefore expect the white one to become his signature, to his benefit — whereas the choice for women seems to be ‘either conform to society’s very high expectations of you, spending valuable time in the bathroom, and money on overpriced cosmetics produced by companies with dubious ethics’, or we’re going to build it into your image for you.

In short: we are still talking about women’s beauty failures, even in ostensibly feminist articles such as the one in The Guardian.

1. A simple theory of why so many smart young people go into finance, law, and consulting, from Marginal Revolution

2. The Trouble With Bright Kids from Harvard Business Review

3. Why Do Some People Learn Faster Than Others? from Wired

4. Why clever people believe in silly things from Cosmos Magazine

5. Eureka! When A Blow To The Head Creates Sudden Genius from The Atlantic, and also A Knock To The Head Made Me A Musical Genius from The Guardian

6. IQ Myth Debunked By Canadian Researchers from CBC News

5. How Exercise Can Help You Learn from NYT, about ‘muscle memory’

6. What Will It Take For ‘Smart’ Appliances To Take Off? from The Next Web

7. Wearing A Lab Coat May Make You Smarter from OMG Facts

8. Reading Can Boost a Child’s IQ by More Than Six Points, from Galleycat

9. The Illusion Of The Gifted Child from Time Ideas

10. Why Your TQ Can Matter More Than Your IQ. (Yes, there’s TQ now.) From HBR

Where were you September 11, 2001?

I was living briefly in a holiday park during off-season, because that was my teaching practice year, in which student teachers are sent to lucky-dip parts of the country to try and teach get through teachers’ college. I was sent to Nelson.

The camping ground was pretty deserted, which was great, but then an entire crew of foresters turned up, from way up north. The group was entirely made up of young men in their late teens to early twenties, and they were from north of Auckland. They seemed to smoke a lot of pot. They had a casual attitude towards ownership of kitchen items, and the washing machines were perpetually in use due to the soaking of perspiration-soaked overalls. One of them broke into my cabin one night; not because he had ill-intent, but because he was drunk, and thought his cabin mates had locked him out of his room as a joke after taking a leak. He came to apologise to me the following day, looking sheepishly at his boots. And that’s probably all you need to know about them.

I woke up one morning to find their cook preparing breakfast in the kitchen. “Have you heard the news?” he said. “The twin towers got bombed.”

I have to admit I didn’t really understand what this meant. First, I was half asleep. I wasn’t even too good on American geography and important buildings and I couldn’t have even pointed the Twin Towers out to you on a map. But it soon sank in when I got to school, and all the students with American connections had been pulled out of class to spend time talking events over with the guidance staff.

When I arrived home that evening I joined my fellow campers in the TV room. Man, did those guys watch some crap. I was lucky to see anything apart from soaps and reality TV shows, but this one time they were watching the news. That week is memorable for scenes of the planes bombing the buildings, over and over again.

All I heard from the young men was, “Cool!” and “Woah, awesome!” and other expressions of delight.

I don’t understand that. I have never understood. I’m tempted to put it down to a guy thing, but every now and then I come across a woman who either enjoys destruction to the same extent, or who pretends to, perhaps, as a badge strength. I don’t know.

Charlie Jane Anders, who appears to be a woman, writes for io9, and introduces a series of paintings like this:

We love watching cities being crushed, blown up and swept away — it happens in a lot of this summer’s biggest movies. There’s just something so viscerally thriling about structures coming down in flames.

When she uses the phrase ‘we love’ I wonder if she’s speaking on behalf of the team at io9, or about her perceived target audience, or perhaps about people in general. And now she has me wondering if the seeing of large things being destroyed has a thrilling effect on most people, and if I’m just a loner here, thinking instead of how bad that must be for the environment (usually). Or just plain old what a waste.

Some years ago I sat on the grass in a park with fellow CELTA students. We each ate our lunch. Despite the shared aim of becoming English language teachers, I doubt it’s possible to meet a more diverse group of people. Nevertheless, there we all were, thrown together for a very intense month, and there we sat on the grass, not making much in the way of conversation. Real conversation tended to happen after hours in the pub. This was in London. (I learned that this is the English way.)

We were nonetheless civil to each other. A lull in lunchtime conversation didn’t mean much. And then I broke the silence by asking a classmate called Jenny a question about her lunch. Something about what was in her sandwich. Or similar. Honestly, I don’t remember what I asked her. What I do remember is that she looked at me with totally unexpected horror.

“Did you just ask me how much I weigh?” she said, obviously angry. I had snapped her out of some sort of reverie.

“No,” I continued, unperturbed at the time. “I said what’s that in your sandwich.”

“Oh.” She told me what was in her sandwich and things proceeded normally after that. Except they didn’t. From then on, things felt slightly off-kilter.

You see, I’m not convinced she was convinced that I hadn’t asked her how much she weighed.

In turn, I was slightly offended that she would even think I might ask something like that. Anyone who knows me at all would understand that’s not a question I would ask.

The course ended, we friended each other on Facebook, and about a year later I was having a social media cleanout so I unfriended Jenny. When I thought of her, I thought of us sitting in Kensington Park that fine day, misunderstanding each other. Sure, there were other things that weren’t quite right between us, but I have since wondered how often in life our memories and impressions of people are founded on an imaginary versions of events; on things misheard, on conversations wholly imagined, inadvertently turned into memories.

I wonder how often we are misheard or misunderstood and are never even told about it.

Anyway, I still think of Jenny whenever that specific kind of miscommunication occurs.

RELATED

Nightmares About Your Partner? They Actually Affect Your Relationship.

One could make the argument that, with the Zooey Deschanels and Mila Kunises of the world, we have begun to turn our affectionate sights towards a woman who is intellectually nimble, who makes jokes and keeps up with the boys in a way that challenges them. But even a cursory analysis of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope reveals her to be acerbic only in a non-threatening, sweet way. She challenges you, but only the way a pillow fight might injure you. She remains soft, warm, filled with girlish interests and hyper-feminine clothing which serve to balance out her more sardonic humor or biting wit.

from Thought Catalog

One could also make the argument that the phrase Manic Pixie Dreamgirl has lost all meaning.

But I’m not going to argue that. So long as there’s a concept it needs a phrase to describe it. I keep seeing it over and over in films. Here’s the definition on TV Tropes. Still, I agree that Jezebel has a point: we need to be careful when using that term.

1. Teaching Plot Structure Through The Short Story, a lesson plan and related resources from ReadWriteThink

2. Panning For Gold: The Fate Of Short Fiction In A Novelistic World from Lemon Hound

3. Why Does The Short Story Survive? from Atlantic

4. 5 Ways To Shorten Your Short Story from Writer’s Relief

5. Short stories are far more than premises for ‘twists’ from Guardian

6. O. Henry On The Secrets Of Writing Short Stories from Open Culture

7. Five Mistakes When Writing Short Stories from WR

8. Why Write Short Stories At All? from Lit Reactor

9. How To Write A Short Story from The Kill Zone

10. Real Life Diagnostics: Pacing and Character Arcs in a Short Story from The Other Side Of The Story

I really love this film: great animation, great artistic style, wonderful soundtrack, quirky humour. This film could be SO DAMN GREAT. So tell me, why the fuckity fuck does Wes Anderson have to go RUIN it by inserting anti-equality bullshit into the storyline, of what is already an outdated but classic story?

I’m about to argue that this is not really a film for kids, which is strange and counter-intuitive, since the book upon which it is based is undoubtedly a book for emergent readers. This is a film for adults who loved Roald Dahl as kids.

As is often the case with films, the screenplay is freely available online.

MOVIE POSTERS

Movie posters are important because they form a media in their own right. In the first one below we have The Smurfette Principle at work with ten male characters to one female (Mrs Fox). I can’t even say that Mrs Fox is a ‘female feisty’. She’s being led by her husband, leaning back in classical dance style, safely in the arms of her husband. While a sophisticated audience will know after watching the film that this is an ironic take, since Mrs Fox is more sensible and moderate than her hair-brained husband, this is not apparent from the poster alone. Is ironic sexism suddenly not sexist? I always argue no.

So is the one below any better? With Mrs Fox almost hidden by her husband? Maybe, since the gender imbalance is at least halved: the ratio is now four to one.

The French decided not to bother with Mrs Fox at all. This is perhaps more honest, since Mrs Fox exists only as a minor character, with speaking roles to match.

Here’s a snapshot of all the posters from a series, in which girl viewers are reminded that girls can be anything, especially if their brains are hidden behind those of a man.

It’s easy to miss how few female characters exist in stories ‘peopled’ with animals. As Janet McCabe wrote after a large scale count of gender representation in children’s literature:

“The persistent pattern of disparity among animal characters may reveal a subtle kind of symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery.”

CHARACTERISATION IN FANTASTIC MR FOX, THE MOVIE

The first page of a screenplay is especially telling because these blueprints offer a thumbnail character sketch, and offer up what the filmmakers feel  are THE most important points about the characters:

Reading the script, I notice something I didn’t when watching the film (which I’ve seen a handful of times now): That Mrs Fox wears men’s trousers. Why is that? Why is it important?  Someone at the Overthinking It blog makes a very good case for Fantastic Mr Fox being all about penises. Strange as this sounds at first, BY DICK, THEY ARE RIGHT! It’s important that Mrs Fox wears The Pants because Fantastic Mr Fox is feeling emasculated.  But here’s the thing: I’m not sure WHY Mrs Fox has to be wearing the man pants. I’m not sure why at all, because as you can see from the get-go, Mrs Fox shrugs and agrees to do as her husband tells her. This relationship continues most the way through the story, until the fairly mild berating scene after Mr Fox actually endangers the lives of the whole community by being a stupid dickhead. Mrs Fox makes Mr Fox feel important. That’s her role in the relationship. On the very next page Mrs Fox asks Mr Fox, ‘What is a squab?’ Mr Fox replies ‘You know what a squab is. It’s like a pigeon, I suppose. Anyway, it’s a type of bird we can eat.’ Mrs Fox asks the questions. Mr Fox does the explaining. Throughout the script, Mrs Fox is ordered to do a lot of shrugging whenever her husband suggests something dangerous or unlikely.

The sophisticated viewer understands that this is a good example of what pop-culture has come to describe as ‘mansplaining’. It’s a poke of fun at Mr Fox, who doesn’t even know what a squab is himself, despite his insistence on explaining it to his wife. But what of younger viewers? What would they make of Mrs Fox’s constant submission to her husband?

So if Mr Fox is feeling emasculated, his very own submissive wife has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Why the ‘men’s trousers’? Might it be because wives are blamed for men’s feeling powerless… whatever they do? Just by their very existence? To a sophisticated audience, this husband/wife relationship is exaggerated and silly; of course we understand that Mrs Fox is the one who really wears the pants. This is why we saw her wearing the pants in the opening shot, naturally. But a younger audience? No, all they will see is a power imbalance. As highlighted by the script Mrs Fox’s man-pants are indeed very important to the story, but the audience would have to be familiar with the phrase ‘wearing The Pants’ to understand the symbolism.

anachronistically OLD-FASHIONED GENDER ROLES

Part of me is willing to let this slide. Roald Dahl had this book published in 1970. But a sign on a windmill reads ‘Bean Inc (since 1976)’ and makes me wonder when this film is set exactly. Gender roles were already shaking up even in 1976, so creating a 1950s world genderwise is an unnecessary anachronism. This world is a divided one, in which men do almost all of the talking, making all of the decisions. When women appear at all, it’s only because a gender segregated milieu dictates their existence.

From the script:

‘Fox and Mrs Fox dart through a hole under a painted fence; race along a thin trail next to the garage; crawl beneath a window where a blonde woman serves an early dinner, dealing hamburgers like playing cards to three little, blond children…’ [because women serve dinner] Twelve fox years later, ‘Mrs Fox stands at the counter-top stirring something in a bowl with a whisk. She is dressed in a paint-splattered, cream-colored, Victorian-style dress’.

Badger, Beaver, and Stoat L.L.P are a law firm of three men.  The secretary is an uneasy female otter who peers in at the men’s conversation from the outer office. I find this symbolic.

My question is this: When film makers have the leeway to create AN ENTIRELY FICTIONAL WORLD, why do girls so often get the short-shrift? In an ENTIRELY FICTIONAL WORLD, POPULATED WITH TALKING ANIMALS, why can’t girl viewers see woman-animals as lawyers? Why do lawyers’ female secretaries still have to peer in at the action from the other side of the door?

perpetuation of rape culture

Are you for reeeeaaallll???? Yes, I know. Stay with me. Or maybe I can let the script speak for itself:

That, folks, is what you call ‘slut-shaming’: basing a gag on the idea that it is insulting to a man to insinuate that his wife had sex with lots of partners (‘the town tart’) before marrying (like a good girl should). ‘Let’s not use a double-standard’, Fox reminds the sleazy rat, in a self-conscious, ironic nod towards the fact that this is a sexist insult. He doesn’t get to finish his sentence however, as he tries to explain that his wife ‘marched against the’ (unspecified feminist issue, we’re to guess). As I will keep saying, every time I watch a film that is ostensibly for kids or young adults, ironic sexism is STILL SEXISM.

So how is slut-shaming part of rape culture? I’ll leave that to Jessica Valenti of the Nation to explain:

‘What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.”’

Sex and shame is the reason why revenge porn sites exist.

Having a high partner count is an asset for a man. Whether most women will admit this or not, a guy’s perceived sexual experience is attractive to them. While many a woman might act shocked at a man’s admitted number of lovers, secretly she’s pleased. His “vast” sexual history tells her that he has been heavily pursued by other females. Intra-gender competition kicks in. If she can tame him, she has defeated all the women who have come before her.

- Role Reboot, The Difference Between Bad Girls and Bad Boys

See also: One woman’s Crusade Against Revenge Porn in lieu of actually visiting a revenge porn site. Note that there is a proliferation of revenge porn sites showing pictures of naked women, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a revenge porn site showing pictures of naked men. Because for men, having sex is not shameful. It’s manly. Ergo: no revenge.

Back to the film in question, although increasingly unnecessary and anachronistic, it IS okay for big-budget stories about men, featuring powerful men in traditional manly roles to exist in this modern world. BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF WOMEN. And certainly not in films based on children’s books, in which it’s easy to assume THAT THIS FILM IS FOR CHILDREN. Which it is, of course. It’s a family film. Real cuss words are replaced with ‘cuss’. There’s no sex. There’s comic violence.

women are decorative, AND INTERESTED IN THE SUPERFICIAL

We have only Mrs Fox to run with, because there are no other female characters in Fantastic Mr Fox who say more than a few lines. So all of the messages about women must come from her.

Mrs Fox is there to give the okay to the floral curtains that Mr Fox holds up for her approval, after buying a new house without her. She’s interested in keeping things clean. We see her vacuuming in the background of the action. ‘Oh no, Foxy. It’s filthy,’ she says much later, of a metal ladder.

When Mrs Fox is not cooking, clearing the table or hoovering the floors, she paints landscapes. Because women are arty. ‘Fox looks at Mrs Fox’s canvas. It is a picture of the pond and landscape ahead, but in severe weather with black clouds and lightning bolts. It is signed Felicity Fox. Fox raises an eyebrow. Fox: ‘Still painting thunderstorms, I see.’ A sophisticated audience will understand that Mrs Fox’s depiction of a thunderous landscape, over and over again, is a metaphor for her warnings which continue to go unheeded by her reckless husband. She paints because she has no voice. A younger audience might see only that painting is for girls. Or worse: that girls are only good for painting.

Mrs Fox has ‘beautiful’ fur. She glows when she is pregnant (a gag because it is literal).

Except every now and then Mrs Fox gets another role. She gets to be ‘the voice of reason’. Decorative female in movies often get to be the voice of reason, but don’t let that fool you into assuming she gets heard. Because she doesn’t. Instead, she gets to say [coldly]: Lower your voice, Ash, while her husband gets the funny, ironic, satirical lines. Straight woman, funny man. A familiar trope. (Mrs Fox is looking ‘coldly’ more than once. While Mr Fox is ‘pained’ and ‘surprised’ and otherwise animated, the script dictates that Mrs Fox says things ‘coldly’ and ‘quietly’.)

Throughout the story, Mr Fox lies to his wife about his chicken-stealing adventures.

MRS FOX: Where’d you get this chicken?

FOX: (shrugs) I picked it up at the Five-and-Dime last night on my way back from–

MRS FOX: It’s got a Boggis Farms tag around its ankle.

FOX: (hesitates) Huh. Must’ve escaped from there before I bought it.

It’s clear that Mrs Fox knows what’s going on. But is there a bust up, eventually? A confrontation between lying-husband and ever-patient wife? Yes, thank goodness. What does she do, though? She scratches him in the face. This should be somewhat cathartic:

MRS FOX: Twelve fox-years ago, you made a promise to me while we were caged inside that fox-trap that, if we survived, you would never steal another chicken, goose, turkey, duck, or squab, whatever they are. I believed you. Why did you lie to me?

FOX: (simply) because I’m a wild animal

MRS FOX: You’re also a husband and a father.

Except I’m reminded that in real life it’s still women who are so often blamed for/expected to ‘tame’ their ‘wild’ men by expecting them to live up to their roles as reluctantly responsible husbands and fathers. I’m not sure why this scene irritates me, but I think it’s because this false gender dichotomy so often forms the basis of nagging-wife gags.

And it might be funny, if all were right with the real world. Felicity Fox’s calm throughout the confrontation is a typical demonstration of her stoicism. But aren’t interactions like that a little too close to home, in a world where women are still so poorly represented at decision-making levels? After all, Mr Fox goes on his merry way, continuing to cause mishap after mishap, running the show even after it has been demonstrated that the sensible, calm and collected wife should be allowed to take the lead. A sophisticated audience understands the parody. Meanwhile, I wonder what messages a young, female viewer might walk away with.

Later, in dire straights, Mr Fox addresses a mixed crowd:

FOX: Gentlemen, this time we must dig in a very special direction.

… Everyone starts digging, slowly but intently.

Did you notice how EVERYONE starts digging, but Mr Fox addressed the group as ‘gentlemen’? Would the opposite happen, anywhere? In which a mixed group of characters is addressed as ‘ladies’? Not to mention that men are for doing the useful, heavy work.

A sophisticated audience knows that Mr Fox is old-fashioned and benevolently sexist, not to mention completely self-absorbed. (‘I’ve done it! he shouts when everyone helps to dig them to the surface.) The unsophisticated audience understands (unconsciously, no doubt) that men are the stars of the show. Women may help, but only in the background. “Who knows short-hand?” Fox asks, after his amazing idea. Linda does, his otter secretary. Linda says two words, over and over again. ‘Got it’.

Oh, but I probably should mention that Badger’s wife get to be a pediatrician.

THE FEMALE CHARACTERS EXIST TO PROVIDE AN OTHER: MEN ARE MEN BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT GIRLS.

BEAVER’S SON (to Ash): We don’t like you, and we hate your dad. You’re too snazzy. You dress like a girl. You’re creative. Now grab some of that mud, chew it in your mouth, and swallow it.

A sophisticated audience subsequently sees Krisofferson, the super-talented cousin stand up in the face of bullying. The sophisticated audience recognises bullying, for starters. The unsophisticated audience may get this, may not, but definitely understands that being called a girl is an insult and NOT A GOOD THING. Of course, this unsophisticated reading is reinforced by every single bit of imagery, and by the fact that girls don’t actually get to do anything throughout… except pine over boys.

Female characters are referred to in relation to their husbands. Mr Fox is referred to as ‘Fox’ throughout the script; Felicity is ‘Mrs Fox’. That’s nothing special. That’s how society works. But what about:

FOX: Go to the flint-mine. Tell Mrs Badger, Rabbit’s ex-girlfriend, et al. that help is on the way.

As you can see from the dialogue, Rabbit’s ex-girlfriend doesn’t even get her own name.

As an aside, I’m wondering why the character Kylie is named ‘Kylie’. IMDb reveals that the rather hapless creature who becomes Mr Fox’s ‘secretary and personal assistant’ is named after a real person in Wes Anderson’s life — a man called Kylie — and I don’t know if it’s just because I live in Australia, but Kylie is a distinctly feminine name to me. Is this why they chose it? Is an opposum with vacant eyes who is scared of thunder funny also because he has a feminine sounding name?

Kylie tries to bite the chicken on the neck. The chicken is unharmed. Kylie shrugs. Fox kills the chicken with one quick flick of the jaws. Kylie looks horrified.

I’d be interested to hear from people living in America, even though opossums are associated with Australia, and possibly therefore with Kylie Minogue. Maybe in other countries Kylie is a unisex name. But BabyNamePedia tells me that ‘Kylie has in the past century been predominantly given to girls.’ And we all know that when male characters are compared to weak, ineffectual girls, that’s funny, right? And so easy! Ba ba boom! Instant funny.

UNQUESTIONABLY A MOVIE FOR SOPHISTICATED VIEWERS

Common Sense Media offers insightful commentary on age-appropriateness.

Parents need to know that director Wes Anderson’s dry, offbeat adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story Fantastic Mr. Fox is fine for most grade-schoolers but also has some themes and humor that will go over kids’ head.

But I’m at odds with this. Fast-paced dialogue may well go over kids’ heads, granted. And the slut-shamey gag is certainly fast-paced. At the same time, aren’t we constantly being told how impressionable kids are, that their minds are like sponges? I’m constantly reminded by my own kid that they absorb way more than we think they’re absorbing.

We’re at a strange point in history re family films. The best ones appeal to both kids and adults. Dual audience is often achieved through multi-level humour, and this humour so often relies on ironic whatever, in this case ironic sexism. The very problem with ironic sexism is that, to the younger viewer, it’s not ironic at all. I believe hipster sexism is happening with such reliability in family films because there’s the idea that women are equal now, that all the gender thingos have been fixed, so now we can poke fun at the past, in all its sexist ridiculousness. In truth, the world is nowhere near equal. Not in any way, shape or form.

This family film is basically good. But truly great filmmakers know how to crack a sophisticated joke which does not exclude half of its audience. A great filmmaker refuses to keep alive unhelpful stereotypes, perpetuating them for its young, knowing what to omit and what to keep in the adaptation of a classic.

***

In case anyone’s still interested in Wes Anderson: Illustrated Floor Plans of Wes Anderson Films. (The fourth one is for Fantastic Mr Fox.)

And you know how people keep saying that watching too much TV will turn your kid into a jerk? Well, I don’t think that’s the appliance’s fault.

This blog post was going to take a different tack. I’ve been interested in perfectionism for a long time, and  a number of months back I set up a Google alert to catch the most popular articles. Suddenly I’m struck by how ‘perfectionism’ is heavily gendered.

Instead, here’s what I got:

1. Ask Carolyn Hax: New mother struggles with perfectionism
2. This article from the Daily Mail: ‘How learning skills can be child’s play for adults: If only we made the time for learning, we could pick up a new language as easily as kids do‘ points out that perfectionism is a bad thing in language learning and is accompanied by a large picture of a woman with a blonde bob cut with a grim look on her face.
3. And although The Daily Mail is a crock of shit in general, and is ideally best ignored, here’s another article from them about perfectionism, with a very large picture depicting a woman shining a wine glass. Again, it’s a male who is quoted, and he even admits to perfectionism himself, demonstrating clearly that perfectionism affects all genders, despite the female media skew: “Mr Thompson, a math and computer science professor and a self-described ‘recovering perfectionist,’ added that perfectionism is intimately tied to fear.”
4. Pressure To Be Perfect from Essential Kids , likewise, shows the close up face of a worried-looking girl. The picture is of a girl even though the anecdote contained within the article is about a little boy.
5. This one takes the cake: the book about dealing with bitchy women at work. Much has already been said about that book in feminist world, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of the categories of bitches is the perfectionist (The ‘Insecure Bitch’, in case you’re wondering).

So what is the reason for all these perfectionism articles and advice directed squarely at women, on health and family blogs?

Part of the answer may lie here, in a response to Warren Buffet’s recent words in Fortune Magazine:

Competition may drive capitalist innovation, but Whitney Johnson of Rose Park Advisors asserts women are expected to be “nicer” and “giving,” a behavior not typically rewarded in business practice. Among other traits more likely to be exhibited by women, perfectionism plays a role in different ways for gender. Dr. Jackie Deuling at Roosevelt University of Chicago finds in her research that there are two kinds of perfectionism:  adaptive and maladaptive. Adaptive perfectionism often serves as a motivator, while maladaptive traits create self-doubt and can be demotivating. Dr. Deuling finds women are more likely to display maladaptive perfectionism. This can play a factor in workforce advancement through salary negotiations, asking for time off, and the “over confidence, under confidence” phenomenon. On the opposite side of the spectrum, men may be pressured more to perform and succeed at whatever the cost.

I don’t know. I smell a rat. This all reads to me like psycholgists blaming women’s own shortcomings on failure to achieve workplace parity, instead of an inherently sexist system.

A review of another book on perfection (which I haven’t read) is titled: Hey, high-achieving women! Here’s how perfectionism holds you back, and no, I don’t believe that’s a Jezebel-style ironic title either:

OK, ladies, you know who you are. You take such pride in your work that even mild criticism stings. You want so sincerely for your email messages to have just the right tone that it takes forever to hit send. You keep thinking about completed tasks so much that nothing ever feels finished.

If any of this sounds familiar — and if the words “good enough” make you cringe — you may be suffering from a form of the same modern-day malady that affects most high-achieving women (and plenty of men!) in the year 2013: Perfectionism.

Notice how ‘most high-achieving women’ are suddenly diagnosed with a mental illness, while men get the parenthetical add-on.

Here’s a rare nod to perfectionism in men from a PhD writer, which apparently has a different outworking, and may therefore put down to other things:

“If I don’t do this perfectly it means I’m a failure and I can’t stand failure.” This type of black-and-white thinking can be quite consuming. For example, the public speaker that’s concerned with executing a perfectly flawless presentation will usually be so self-conscious that he’s unable to be as animated and engaging as he could be. Another classic example is in sexual performance. The anxiety that comes from being overly concerned about performing perfectly well is a leading psychological cause of erectile dysfunction.

- Huffington Post

Though I should probably add that erectile dysfunction happens to women too. It just doesn’t tend to be called that.

***

The other thing I’ve noticed about these articles is that women are likewise more likely to be blamed for making you a pain-in-the-neck perfectionist in the first place.

Here’s a classic example from a review of that same book on perfectionism:

Can one negative comment from your boss or mother-in-law throw you into a tailspin?

Note that while bosses can be both male AND female, mothers-in-law can only be female. Were we meant to conjure up images of men when we thought of ‘bosses’, thereby achieving gender-balance in our criticism? Either way, that sort of language stinks.

***

For a more nuanced look into perfectionism, here’s an interesting talk to some graduate students called Taming The Shrews: Perfectionism and Procrastination In Graduate School.

And here’s one of the slides.

While gymnasts, dancers, individuals with disordered eating and professional models are traditionally female pursuits, the categories of professional athletes, graduate students, scholars/scientists and mathematicians are not.

So I’m not yet convinced it’s helpful to think of perfectionism in gendered terms, erectile dysfunction or no erectile dysfunction.

This is a fascinating concept, and something I’d not noticed until it was pointed out, by Maria Nikolajeva in Children’s Literature Comes Of Age. Earlier in the book she defines books for boys (often adventure) and books for girls (horse stories etc, and those starring girls) which these days tend to have pink somewhere on the cover. In an ideal world there’d be no such thing as sex differentiation in books. Because gender is not genre. But I’m quite radical like that.

One Swedish essay on narrative differences in books for boys and books for girls stipulated that male time is linear, while female time is circular…. Time in books for girls and in books for boys is closely connected with place. Not only is male time linear, but male space is open, as books for boys take place outdoors, sometimes far away from home in the wide world. Male narrative time is structured as a series of stations where an adventure is experienced, a task is performed, a trial is passed. Time between these stations practically does not exist. The text can say something like “after many days full of hardships they reached their destination…” The male chronotope is thus corpuscular, discontinuous, a chain of different separate time-spaces (“quants”) which are held together by a final goal. These separate chronotopes may also correspond to chapters in adventure boos: each chapter is self-contained, even if some threads can run from one chapter to another. It is easily observable in classic stories such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876) or Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price (1943).

…

The chronotope in books for girls is completely different. The space is closed and confined. The action mostly takes place indoors, at home (alternatively at school). Time is cyclically closed and marked by recurrent time indications: (“It was spring again,” “It was Christmas again”). Three classical girls’ books, Little Women (1868), Anne Of Green Gables (1908) and Little House In The Big Woods (1932), are very good illustrations. Any gaps in time can be easily filled by the reader, who knows that it takes time for plants to grow or for snow to thaw, that the school year is full of homework, that housework is the same year in and year out. Female narrative time is often extended to several years with certain recurrent points. The chronotope is continuous both in time and space. Spatial movement in girls’ books means merely a change from one confined space to another likewise confined one — for instance, from the parents’ home to a boarding school, from the heroine’s childhood home to her husband’s home, to “the doll house,” an image often used by contemporary writers trying to break this pattern; one example is Maud Reutersward’s A Way From Home (1979), the Swedish title of which is “The Girl and the Doll House.”

The female narrative chronotope is also based on our conceptions of male and female nature…Female time is circular, follows the cycle of the moon, and consists of recurrent, regular events of death and resurrection, seasonal changes and so on. … Linear male time is a product of enlightenment and is the spirit of action and progress.

…there are many deviations… As in all other areas, in chronotope structures of children’s books of the past ten to twenty years there is also a merging of male and female, a disintegration of the epic chronotope, and some bold innovations.

Nikolajeva’s book was published in 1996, so another 10 or 20 years have passed even since then. I’d be interested to know what has happened since then. Are stories for girls still mostly set inside? Do books for girls run by the moon?

In children’s literature, intertexuality is often apparent in the use of

• allusions
• irony
• parody
• literary allusions
• direct quotations
• indirect references
• and the fracturing of well-known patterns.

Intertexuality makes use of the literature which has come before, often building on it, at the least inspired by it. That Bakhtin fellow prefers the term ‘dialogics’. Whatever it is called, the meaning of a text is revealed for the reader/researcher only against the background of previous texts. Whereas ‘comparative literature’ is concerned with how one text has ‘influenced’ the other, an intertextual study considers the two texts as equal.

Intertexuality is one of the most prominent features of postmodern literature for adults, and critics have proclaimed it both welcome and indispensable. In children’s literature most intertextual links are often approached as imitative and secondary.

- Maria Nikolajeva, Children’s Literature Comes Of Age