1. Links of interest (It turns out I can live without Twitter longer than I can live without my Google reader). Keep in mind, I make no pretense of being “newsy”, so some of these are pretty stale in blog years.
Laura Vivanco gets interviewed for a fantastic piece on romance by the Yale Herald (why does a student newspaper succeed where so many major media outlets fail?), and offers a sharp critique of the Carroll article I mentioned last week at Teach Me Tonight.
Carolyn Crane is a member of the League of Reluctant Adults and she is exposing their secrets!!!
Why Are there No Fat Vampires? from Womanist Musings.
“Can Authors Balance Privacy and Publicity in the Internet Era? at Nathan Bransford — read it for the comments. And Magdalen talking about the same thing on the very same day.
“The Adulterous Wife”, Toril Moi’s negative review of the highly anticipated new Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier translation of The Second Sex in the LRB. Moi’s piece isn’t just a review but a fascinating comparison between the two translations and meditation on the problems of translation.
The Era of Casual Fridays, (via (from Books, Inq.) a blog by Mark Richardson, professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto and Robert Frost scholar, meditates on the profession of English, asking
Is it possible to be compromised, even corrupted, by what we write and read and teach, and by how we write, read, and teach it?
In “What’s Up With All the Romances?” the Witchy Chicks ask why romances get all the shelf space in the supermarket, Walmart and even bookstore. Something I’d never considered, so used I am to thinking of romance as the underdog.
AnimeJune’s Instant Classic, “How to Exploit the Dead For Fun and Profit” criticizes the trend of new paranormal twists on old favorites novels.
Author Emily Bryan is continuing her series Regency Men Undressed, and she’s down to the underthings.
Harlequin Spice author Victoria Janssen’s blog had its first birthday Friday. Happy Anniversary, Victoria!
Janicu is offering helpful advice about BEA and the Book Bloggers’ Convention, talking about bookish spots in NYC to visit and admire.
A number of personal posts floated my boat these past days:
Harlequin Presents author Kate Hewitt talks about the personal memories that inspired The Greek Tycoon’s Reluctant Bride. It turns out Ms. Hewitt, whose married name is Mrs. Thermopolous, IS the reluctant bride of a Greek Tycoon. Kidding!
Mandi of Smexy Books told her tale of true love over at Fiction Vixen. It’s very funny!
2. Flurry of Posts on the In Crowd … Katiebabs and then Karen Scott and then Mrs. Giggles posted on the question of an “in crowd” in romance blogging. Sarah Tanner followed up with the question of bloggers responding to comments. Everyone else has put their own spin on it. Here’s mine.
For me, the fact that blogging has made me feel like part of a community is one of the most surprising things about it. (The other surprising thing is that I am developing a research interest in popular romance scholarship. This is a bit afield of the biomedical ethics I have been working on the past several years, but I’ve hatched a scheme to connect vampire romance to bioethics in a totally unexpected and bloody way). I wonder sometimes if one of the needs Romland meets for me is to seem to have a group of girlfriends — not couples friends, and not colleague friends, — in a way I really haven’t since I was an undergraduate. It’s fun.
As for being snubbed, I guess my feeling is you can’t make people notice you or admire you or like you. The other side is that they can’t demand it of you either, which is a big relief, to me at least. We all owe each other a basic level of respect if we cross cyberpaths (though we can and do argue about what that entails in specific cases), but beyond that, nada.
Of course, sometimes we won’t get that respect, and sometimes we’ll fail to give it. We’re human beings, some of us humaner than others. This is where the thick skin is so important, even more online than in real life, for obvious reasons.
I was surprised how quickly Katiebabs’ post turned, on Karen’s blog, into a discussion of DA and SBTB, because to be honest, I don’t think big blogs have any sort of monopoly on in-group formation. I mean, you have the Katiebabs/Book Smugglers/AnimeJune Clique (SBAK). Don’t think it’s a clique? Fine. When’s the last time Ana invited you to her place in the UK? And how about those SoCal bloggers? It’s so exclusive I would have to move 3000 miles to join it!! Then there’s the m/m clique — you know who you are. There’s the SPRS Mafia (led by SarahF. and Eric, but An Goris is the Enforcer). And Kristie(j)’s clique is so exclusive no one even KNOWS who is in it.
So it was a bit of a non sequitur to me at first that the discussion went to the long thread at Karen’s about DA and SBTB. My theory is that people trying to make sense of what it means for there to be leaders in the Romanceland community. When I post on something, my few hundred readers, which includes few if any people of influence or standing in the industry, assume it is some random woman’s opinion. When someone at DA or SBTB post, their thousands of readers — which include many influential people in the romance and book publishing industries — assume it is a representative opinion. There’s a difference. The level of sophistication about the industry, the influence, the connectedness, and the visibility beyond the Romland blogosphere of SBTB and DA and others seems new (and I argued it is here). So people are going to talk about them. Like I am doing right now.
I have nothing helpful to actually say about it, but those questions are more intriguing to me than in-groups, which are like the weather — unpredictable, impossible to control, and boring to talk about.
3. What I’m teaching this week (sort of a mini rant)
I’ve mentioned on the blog that most everything I teach and everything I do in my consulting work is very controversial and fraught. Here’s an experiment in talking a little about one of those things on the blog.
We’re finishing an abortion unit in one class. The textbook has one article from a feminist perspective, and it’s by a “pro-life feminist”. By my lights, a feminist perspective has to acknowledge the gendered nature of the issue, the fact that only women become pregnant and bear children, that in most societies the burden of early child care falls disproportionately on women (whether in unpaid or low paid domestic labor), that women’s status as feminine is linked with their status as mothers in a different way than men’s status as masculine is linked with their status as fathers, and that there is gender injustice in most societies. There are lots of pro-choice arguments in favor of abortion that aren’t feminist and I teach at least two of them. I think the feminist pro-choice point of view is so important that I assign an article on e-reserve, but it boggles the mind that I have to do this.
But back to the pro-life feminist piece. I am happy to teach a good anti-choice article from a feminist, just as I teach a range of other anti-choice essays, but I have never found one. The “feminist pro-life” essay in the textbook is so riddled with falsehoods (recycling pro-life movement myths about “post abortion syndrome”, and links between abortions and cancer, for example) and lapses in logic (i.e. that recognizing that we should support women who choose to bring unexpected pregnancies to term with public funds if necessary somehow implies we should prevent those who choose to abort from doing so; or that, because 19th century feminists were pro-life, so should 21st century feminists be.) that I have to ask myself whether my rationale that it is a useful way to explore commonly held falsehoods and faulty arguments is strong enough. I think it’s the last time I’ll teach that one.
4. Personal
I hope you had a good Valentine’s Day, if you wanted to, and I hope you successfully ignored it, if that was your desire. My husband bought me something I’ve wanted, an electric tea kettle, and made me a pot of tea. We get our tea from Upton Tea Imports. We don’t do a lot of romantic things for Valentine’s Day. We’ll have to take whatever measure of comfort we can in our phenomenal sex life. (Kidding!) (Wait… Not kidding!) (Erm. Ahem.)
Doug Fieger, lead singer of the Knack (and Jewish, I might add), the band that brought us “My Sharona”, is dead at 57.
Some of you may recall “My Sharona” from the shit 1994 film Reality Bites, starring Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder. Yours Truly remembers “My Sharona” from the 45 I bought in 1979.
As for blogging, I have lost my reviewing mojo. Yes, I wrote that snarky review on Friday, but that’s different. I have a host of half-finished reviews. I still want to read, and I still want to blog. But I hope the reviewing slump passes.
I’ll have to write a review this week for Keishon’s TBR challenge. My book is Kathleen O’Reilly’s first (I think) book, a 2001 Jove historical called Touched by Fire starring the challenge’s February theme, a virgin hero.
I am running a contest. Winner can choose four books from a selection. But you have to write a purple prose paragraph to enter. Warning: the thread is already a brain bleeder.
HAPPY WEEK!
Thanks for the linkage!
I love your list of links because you always include at least one post that I missed.
We don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day, either, but I always use it as an excuse to buy nice chocolate.
Great links – thank you! Lots of things to think about.
I think if I had to write long and thoughtful reviews about even 1/4 of what I read, it would slowly suck the joy out of reading for me…
Thanks for the link!
And I am SO THERE for the virgin hero reviews. I have a very small collection of those, and would love to add to it. (I also have a collection of male prostitute romances, which numbers only two books.)
@Victoria: Male prostitute romances are prevalent in m/m romance, if you’re looking to expand that collection. I can think of a couple of virgin hero stories from m/m, too.
The poster of a fat Edward had me rolling!
Oh yes, my top secret clique is so hush hush. Email me and we can talk about you joining.
Another illusion shattered. There’s an in-crowd and I never noticed because it would never occur to me to think of this entire thing as anything approaching something like a fandom…
On steriods.
/sarc
No, actually, it doesn’t surprise me at all that even a discussion about the in-crowds within the larger community would end up being a discussion about the “fan” followings of various large, well-known sites. It’s something that’s happened for years, starting back when All About Romance was the one mostly being talked about. The only difference is that today there are a lot more big, little and in-between sites as well as blogs out there.
I love link posts – especially when I’m not spending too much time outside and therefore looking for cool things to read.
Re: the abortion unit – your class sounds very interesting. I remember having class discussions that touched on this issue in college but the variety of arguments and perspectives in the material was a little bit lacking.
Wait!! I have a clique?? *laughing* I don’t have a clique – or if I do, it’s anyone who reads romance – doesn’t have to have a blog – just read romance – or anyone who has ‘issues’ with electrical/electronic type stuff like ebooks or VCR machines or DVD players or cell phones (when I haven’t used mine for a while I forget how to turn it on) – or has cats, especially a Destructo Type cat like one of mine that I have a love/hate relationship with – or works and has any work type issues – or has watched, might watch, is thinking of watching or has heard of – North and South, or Westerns, or Last of the Mohicans, or So You Think You Can Dance, or is trying to wean themselves off The Bachelor or who continually break purses ’cause they carry too much stuff in them, or have sons – sons they like to make fun of in a motherly type way. Or feel like a really bad mother because they aren’t exactly sure which house their son lives in.
Or has car problems – anyone with a car is in my clique. I can relate to car issues. Or pens – I have a mighty fine pen collection, but then I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that yet. Or people who have designed their own North and South mugs. I have two of them now. And a mouse pad. I have a N&S mouse pad – from the final scene where he is actually almost kind of smiling. Or boggle!! And Free Cell. Anyone addicted to those is in my clique.
I’m so far out of the in-club that I don’t even know where it is!
ROTFL, Kristie.
I think SarahT made the best point I’ve read so far that what creates a true clique atmosphere is when people start referring to things going on obliquely without giving names or links. If one doesn’t know what they’re referring to, one is automatically left out of the loop.
While I honestly believe that what we’re talking about here is mostly perfectly normal fan type behaviors, I also recognize that some sites appear to be more heavily “clique-ish” than others simply because they serve as larger community meeting places with a larger number of regular visitors. More regular visitors mean more possibilities for cliques to form and flame-ups of all kinds to happen. Again perfectly normal behavior.
The problem is that in turn many of those regular visitors have their own blogs… and on the Internet that means they can instantly share “the news” that comes their way, sometimes in a very inperfect way.
Intentionally or otherwise, the ripple effect can be extremely unfortunate and misleading both to individual sites and the community at large.
Do you know how long it took me to phycically FIND a book featuring a virgin hero? Oh sure, I had a rather extended list to go by, courtesy of Keishon’s posted link for an AAR listing of all and any theme, but to FIND one? OMG, I was buried by the books in my TBR before I finally came up with BLUE MOON by Jill Marie Landis.
“There’s the SPRS Mafia (led by SarahF. and Eric, but An Goris is the Enforcer)”
What’s SPRS? Society of Professional Romance Scholars? Are they the pedagogical wing of IASPR?
Jessica, you are dangerous. I was sure it was SarahT who said something a post and now I can’t find it. My head’s so full of stuff from all the links I followed from this post that I can’t remember who said what. Sigh.
@BevBB: Muahhhhhhh!!!! Maximum dizziness achieved! (I think it WAS Sarah, maybe at Katiebabs’ post.). Thanks for your comments, Bev. The voice of wisdom, as usual.
@Laura Vivanco: It’s not the academic wing, honey, it’s the militant wing’s secret police. So secret even regular IASPR members don’t know of it.
Or… I could have just fucked up.
@Lynn Spencer: It IS an interesting class to teach, although things can get heated very fast. It’s important to me to try to create an open atmosphere for all different viewpoints, from the most conservative to the most liberal, but finding intelligent representatives of all the different positions is not always easy.
@KristieJ: Do you see this, people? Do you SEE??? She is trying to throw us off the scent with all these red herrings. She’s sneaky, that one.
@Amy: I used the AAR list, too. Luckily the O’Reilly was available in Kindle format. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.
@Chris: You’re right — I should lower my review bar even further, but then, I’d have to dig a hole to put it under the ground.
@Nicola O.:Uhh, club? What club. Who is talking about a club? *shifty eyes*
Found it. It was Mrs. Giggles.
ok. You know, I don’t think I have ever seen the phenomenon to which you are referring (unless the bit of goofing around I do in this very post and comments counts). But if I did, I would comment asking “what are you guys talking about?”
You mean, you were sworn to secrecy but now that you’ve let the whole world know about the secret police of the militant wing of IASPR, you may not come back intact from the Popular Culture Association conference?
@BevBB: While I’d love to take the credit for making that excellent point, that honour belongs to Mrs Giggles!
ETA: I see you already found it!
To be fair, it seems to happen more when fans tangle with review sites in defense of their favorite authors. I’ve seen it go in the opposite direction, too, though, i.e. towards authors and by fans of the larger review sites. OTOH, passionate fans have a tendency to take no prisoners and be quite direct so it doesn’t happen all that often but it does happen.
Occasionally authors will indulge themselves in posts that name no names, apparently in the interest of perserving their careers. Which is understandable, except the reader of such posts can end up wondering why, as in why the writer bothered to write the post at all and why the reader is bothering to attempt to decipher it.
Unless, of course, one is already in the know. o.O
@BevBB: I also feel a bit bad for people who aren’t on Twitter when conversations are referenced in the assumption that “everyone” followed them.
@SarahT: Oh, god, yeah. Especially in situations where tempers are probably already high, which is what we’re talking about if we’re honest.
140 letters a pop does not make for an adequate way to pass information when one is emotional to begin with, I don’t care how one slices it.
As a quick, fun way to chat normally, sure. As a fast way to find out something in a pinch. Okay. I’ll buy that. But for passing heated gossip and innuendo? The risks and implications boggle the mind.
Oooh, I’ve never been part of a clique before! All it takes is a quick trip w/your kids to Disneyland and we’ll make you an honorary SoCal blogger
@Lori: LOL! Actually, I’ll be in San Diego in the fall. So a SoCal bloggers meetup in San Diego in October would really make me happy!
Noting it in my book. We have lots of folks in the San Diego area now, so I’ll spread the word!
I keep getting lost down the rabbithole of these links. I agree with your thoughts about in-groups. The analogy, applied to SB and DA never seemed apt. Leaders really is a better term.
Okay, color me very curious about this bioethics and vampire romance scheme! Are you being funny? I really hope not!!!
Also, thanks for the shoutout!
Honestly, things like this annoy me. The whole “in-crowd” talk, I mean. I can tell you I’ve felt excluded in one way or another by all of you. Yes, every single one of you.
Do you mean to make me feel excluded? I’m sure not. But you did. Why? Because I wasn’t right there when whatever topic/event you were discussing happened. That means I am, by the very nature of the incident, excluded. Yes? Yes.
I’m sure many of you have felt excluded from things I’ve blogged/tweeted/facebook updated as well. Especially because, as Jessica noted, I’m part of the SoCalBloggers and we meet up as often as possible. How many times have one of you seen a tweet or a post about us getting together to talk Romance over beer and thought – or said – JEALOUS!
Any time you put a group together there are going to be cliques. We all have likes and dislikes, as well as thoughts and opinions, that match others. Like gravitates to like. Hence, cliques. The truth is, I hardly ever agree with Jane at DA about books or opinion pieces. Do I want to spend all my time with someone I can’t agree with anything on? No. I don’t want to spend all my free internet time (which is very limited these days) arguing all the time. I want to laugh and joke and have a good time.
Which is why I gravitate toward other bloggers who do the same. Plus, I happen to know many of these bloggers in real life. Or I’ve met them in real life. It’s much easier to connect with someone once you’ve met them, don’t you think?
Did you notice that in all of this talk about in crowds and cliques Book Binge wasn’t mentioned even once. Should I be upset by that? Or think, “OMG, no one loves me”? Because I don’t. I honestly don’t care. Because I don’t need validation about myself from blogland. I’m perfectly fine the way I am.
@Jessica:
I’m available in October. We’ll make you an honorary member yet.
How much of this is about “in crowds” and how much of it is about Jane and Sarah being perceived as spokespeople for the online community and, to some degree, the genre (especially with Sarah and Candy’s book)?
The hostility pouring out toward Sarah, especially, seems kind of perverse to me, given the fact that she’s done a lot to counterbalance the public perception that Romance and its readers are just unthoughtfully yapping boxes of estrogen.
I realize that in such an environment it’s useless to point out all the ways in which both have worked to increase, rather than decrease, the representation of readers’ voices/blogs.
But it does leave me wondering whether all this is about being part of a perceived group or about how a few bloggers seem to be transitioning into more mainstream acceptance and circulation. Is there a line across which the “we” becomes the “they,” for example?
@Carolyn Crane:
I am serious. everyone talks about blood and HIV/AIDs related to vampire. Undeniably, there is something to that.
But there’s something else: a bioethics point of view, things that were once certain, namely beginning of life and end of life, are now totally up in the air. We can’t even agree on how to define death. let alone how to diagnose it. I think the vampire status as un-dead (not alive, not dead) is attractive in part as a working out of some of these 21st century biomedical issues.
As for the SBTB/Da thing, it is truly bizarre. Sarah Tanner’s post never mentioned them, and neither did anyone in the comments, but all of a sudden someone comments, like the 40th comment, to “defend Sarah Wendell”. I was thinking, “WTH? Is this commenter responding to the wrong thread? Maybe she means to be posting over at Karen’s? I am sure we could do a psychoanalysis of this phenomenon, but I’d rather do one on vampires.
@Lori: Oh, that would be fab!
@Holly: I was sort of goofing around on those same lines when I mentioned the different “cliques”. I agree we all feel out of it sometimes, in any community.
I would be glad BB was not mentioned (yet) — it probably means you are above the drama.
But clearly a nerve was hit, as KB had a shitload of comments on it, and so did Karen, and so did Sarah.
@Jessica:
I knew you were goofing around and I was just basically agreeing with you (in my own catty, round-about way).
Re: Jane and Sarah
it’s funny, but I’ve always thought Sarah and I could be great friends. She just strikes me as the type of person I could sit down and have a beer with. But I’ve never had any personal interaction with her.
@Jessica: What are you referring to on Sarah Tanner’s blog?
Robin —
yes, yes yes, — you can tell from my post I agree with much of what you say, but some of your word choices ( “Hostile”, “in this environment”, “useless”) don’t feel fair to me.
It was Angela James’ first long comment. Sorry.
@Robin: To quote what Jessica said in response to your points: yes, yes and yes.
When people refer to “bigger romance blogs”, I automatically assume they mean high traffic ones such as DA and SBTB. I’m sure Karen Scott gets plenty of traffic also, but I wouldn’t really describe her as a romance blogger in the same way that DA Jane and SB Sarah are.
With reference to the comment thread at KKB: the general consensus there seems to be that people prefer DA over SBTB, with a few of us (including me) saying we are reticent to post in the comment threads at DA because dissension is not always welcome. I don’t see this as a personal attack on SB Sarah. Karen solicited people’s opinions and we gave them. I would also venture to say that Karen’s audience is not necessarily representative of SB Sarah’s core audience in any case, so she can probably take it with a pinch of salt. If her stats are still good, she’s obviously delivering what her fans want.
As long as neither DA Jane nor SB Sarah claim to speak for me, or try to tell me what to think, I don’t care whether or not they’re considered by many to speak for romance readers. The Smart Bitches book has definitely brought a lot of positive attention to romance readers from the media, and long may it continue.
I wrote my post on comments because it struck me that a lot of people in the threads at Katiebabs’ blog and at Karen’s don’t like it when a blogger never responds to comments. It was a topic which came up in the threads, but was overshadowed by the discussion on “in crowds”. I wanted to explore it further, hence my post. There was definitely no hostility towards either DA or SBTB which is why I was surprised by Angela James’s comment. I specifically said I didn’t expect a blogger who gets a lot of comments to respond to each and every one.
When the subject of “big” and “small” blogs comes up, particularly in a negative context, I notice that very few people are willing to name DA and SBTB.
I am going to shoot myself in the foot here.
But surprisingly no one has mentioned Michelle Buonfiglio of Buy the Book romance blog. Isn’t she considered as big as DA or SB? And again, what is considered “big”? I could say that I’m big time because of the mount of traffic I get each day which is quite substantial.
I also can’t help but bring up that there is this feeling of the older more established blogs who formed before 2007 put themselves on a different plane than the new bloggers that formed around 2008. Just my opinion…
@Jessica: Oh, huh. I didn’t see Angie’s comment as about Sarah, per se; I saw it as providing an example of someone who quite famously never comments on posts and the reason why. Because it felt to me that there was a perception in the thread that responding to comments was the polite thing to do and that not responding is a breach of blogging etiquette. And yet for some of us, responding to comments in the midst of a discussion carried on by others can feel like it’s imposing on the flow of the conversation. Although if Angie’s comment was intended as a defense of Sarah, given the thread at KNB, I could certainly understand that, too.
@SarahT: When the subject of “big” and “small” blogs comes up, particularly in a negative context, I notice that very few people are willing to name DA and SBTB.
Huh. I’m always struck by how rarely (if ever) SB and DA make posts taking other reader-bloggers to task at all or invite commenters to.
@katiebabs: Does Buonfiglio even consider herself a blogger in the same way the rest of us are? I have the impression that she has always kind of aligned herself with the media (Lifetime or whatever syndicated deal she had before that)? Is that not true?
@Robin:
She has her new blog at Blogspot because Lifetime let her go for whatever reason, probably due to the Economy.
And I know for a fact she thinks of herself as the main spokesperson for the romance genre and bloggers are beneath her. Based on my experience and the way she treated me when I met her, and what she did at that Princeton conference, I really don’t have a high opinion of her.
@katiebabs: I definitely took issue with the remarks she delivered at the Princeton conference, because they seemed overtly dismissive and mischaracterizing of others working on Romance, some of whom were presenting at the same conference and even on the same panel. Otherwise she’s been somewhat of a mystery to me.
@Robin: “Huh. I’m always struck by how rarely (if ever) SB and DA make posts taking other reader-bloggers to task at all or invite commenters to.”
But what about in the comment threads? There was also Jane’s post on Laurie Gold.
I’m honestly not trying to start an argument with you, Robin, but it’s not as if DA or SBTB have never posted anything negative about publishers/authors/RWA, and so on and so forth.
I think we read different posts at KKB.
Most of Karen’s post was defending “the big blogs”. It was also quite complimentary of them, referring to their success, how hard they work, the novelty of Jane’s interest in e-publishing, etc.. At the very end Karen asked, “if you guys had to pick either Dear Author or Smart Bitches to visit, which would you pick?”
Is this taking other bloggers to task and inviting readers to?
In that thread, I saw a LOT of compliments of both DA and SBTB, and some criticism. I don’t think anyone who contributed to that thread would deny what you’ve said about the contributions Sarah Wendell has made to the genre.
I guess the question is whether it is ever ok for one blogger to criticize another blogger? It sounds like your answer is “no”.
And another question is, is there a point when you are perceived not as a blogger, but as more of an industry blog, so that criticizing feels more like talking about an company than a person. (like that commenter said, comparing SBTB to Bookslut — “I don’t think of them as part of the community, rather outside stimulus that the community reacts to like a publisher blog, or an author’s blog.”)
@Jessica: Actually, I think you nailed it for me with this:
I tend to look at both SB and DA as industry blogs now. That’s how I have them categorized in my Google Reader and though DA still claims to be “for readers by readers” I feel they’re more a “for readers by readers about industry stuff”.
I come here because you put up posts that are well thought out and intelligent about the romance genre from a reader standpoint. I think DA and SB have crossed the line from reader blog to industry blog.
@SarahT: Yeah, that post about Laurie’s purported ownership of “DIK” was in defense of reader-bloggers, in fact.
Obviously, people can blog about whatever they want, and obviously there are legitimate questions around inclusion/exclusion/legitimacy, etc.
I’ve no intention to argue over this, either, Sarah. DA and SB have both been outspoken and critical about many things. And the comment threads are direct interactions between individuals, subject to all our moods and issues and histories.
All I’m saying is that two blogs that people seem to think are the “big” blogs (whatever that means) have not built their reputations on the backs of other reader-bloggers (in fact, I think they’ve actively tried to help build the community at large). That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to criticize them or the blogs, but when people go on about how mean or horrible Jane and/or Sarah are/is, that always comes to mind.
@Jessica:
I think this is a lot of what has happened with both DA and SB. But from the beginning, despite her compliments, Karen intertwined her comments about the blogs with Jane and Sarah, and I think that enmeshment continued into the comments. Much of it seemed to me quite personally directed.
And hey, that’s people’s right — we can go at each other full-force if that’s what we want. But my question would be at what point does that seem like scrapping for position (which I think is non-existent, anyway)?
@SarahT:
I was tempted to post about this in the Karen Scott thread but then I saw that that thread turned into a review or critique of DA and SBTB, and I thought if I posted there it could have a chilling effect similar to the one authors often have in discussions of reviews of their books. So I decided not to say anything there, especially since I am not a poster there. But since I am a regular poster here I will comment on this now.
I can’t speak for anyone else at DA but I’m not sure what more I could do to make people feel welcome to post their opinions than I already do.
I regularly invite anyone who mentions they are planning to read the book I am reviewing to come back and comment in the comment thread of the review, whether or not their opinion differs from mine.
I make a concerted effort to reply to posts although it is time consuming for me (the few times I have done Tuesday opinion pieces that went to over 100 comments, replying was exhausting, and that is probably one of the reasons that I don’t write more opinion pieces).
I even invite the drive by commenters who say “this review sucks” and nothing more to elaborate on their opinion — although these days, I don’t get many of those.
And then there is the fact that DA is a group blog and therefore we post a variety of viewpoints and don’t always agree with one another ourselves.
In the Karen Scott thread someone (I think it was Tara Marie) mentioned that a line in Sarah F.’s review of Force of Law about a great forced seduction scene contradicted Jane’s post about irredeemable traits in heroes and rape being one. It was interesting to me that Tara Marie saw this as a double standard, because I saw it as an example of how Jane allows dissent.
In the same irredeemable traits thread, Robin and I both posted opinions that contradicted Jane’s, saying that we have few boundaries when it comes to irredeemable traits in romance protagonists.
Recently when Jane was squeeing about how much she loved Archangel’s Kiss by Nalini Singh, I posted a comment with a dissenting opinion. And I could give many more examples.
Jane doesn’t speak for me anymore than I speak for her. We don’t all march lock-step at DA; we don’t think with one hive mind. So it’s amazing to me how often people either think we do, or else think that we don’t but should (the latter was what I took out of Tara Marie’s comment — that either Jane or Sarah F’s opinion should not have been posted, because they contradicted one another).
Personally I would not be interested in blogging at DA if I had to be a mouthpiece for Jane, or if I had to look at her as a mouthpiece for me.
The thing is, we all have opinions over there , and we wouldn’t blog if we didn’t enjoy expressing them. Sometimes we agree with each other, and sometimes we don’t. When we agree, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are piling up. We’re just expressing what we think and even then our opinions don’t match up 100%. I think if we stopped expressing those opinions we would lose our readership. Blogging is built on opinion.
All of this is just to say, although I don’t speak for anyone else, that I want our readership to feel that dissent is welcome. I know I welcome it myself.
I’m not convinced there is an “in-crowd” but there are cliques. Heck, anytime a group of people get together, cliques are bound to happen. They just do.
Jessica, if you want to be a part of the “exclusive” So. Cal. Bloggers clique – all you have to do is come out and visit us
Heck, Lisabea is an honorary member and she lives in New England.
Janine said:
You do make it clear that you welcome comments, and as an occasional commenter on DA, I also appreciate the fact that you usually respond to those commenters. In fact, overall DA is one of the increasingly few places where I feel comfortable making a comment, and RRR is one of the others.
While I’m not sure how to define an “in-crowd” as it pertains to blogging, I would agree that there are certainly cliques and sub-groups that can feel very exclusionary. But so what? To me it is no different than how you interact with people in the real world: you spend time where you feel comfortable, and if you feel excluded or out of the loop, move along and find somewhere more congenial or interesting.
@Robin: Thanks for your perspective. It’s funny to me that you would characterize critique of SBTB or DA as “scrapping for position”.
For me personally, there may be another psychological reaction you may not have considered: a fangirl who is disappointed that one of her favorite sites has changed in a way she doesn’t like, very similar to a fan reaction to an author when a paranormal series goes south. I would never put myself on a par with SBTB or “scrap” for position in any way. I see myself not as jealous but as a disappointed-but-hopeful-for-the-return-to-glory-days fan.
@Janine: I agree with your assessment of the dynamic at DA, but I also work in an environment many have characterized as “adversarial” and am extremely comfortable with all kinds of strong disagreement and debate. Sometimes, after a meeting or class I think went GREAT, and was so productive, I’ll find out someone else thought people were “angry and hostile and rude”.
I think folks just have different levels of comfort, and there’s no way to make everyone comfortable when different things make different people comfortable.
@Wendy: that damn Lisabea. She’s one of the people who snubs me.
Thanks, Aoife. It’s frustrating because I want people to feel welcome to post at DA, yet I also have human limits and the time available to me is one of them. I think if Jane took the time to reply to every comment, she would not be able to produce nearly as many reviews and opinion pieces for the site.
Sometimes in life, you try your hardest and it’s still not enough. I probably should shrug this off with a “You can’t be all things to all people.” It’s always useful to be reminded of that. But I do want people to feel welcome at DA.
@Jessica: I just want to note that I did not “characterize critique of DA or SBTB as ‘scrapping for position.’” What I said was that “we can go at each other full-force if that’s what we want,” but at what point does that (i.e. “we,” i.e. all of us reader-bloggers, going at each other) look like “scrapping for position.”
Oh, I’ve seen that comment numerous times on DA threads and made about DA.
I actually think there’s a certain overexposure problem with any media, and I feel it periodically with different online venues. IMO there’s an ebb and a flow to all of this “popularity” thing with all blogs and websites. I take breaks all the time from the online community, as I’m sure many of us do. And we all have our favorite and not so favorite blog choices, although I think sometimes the reality of that gets skewed based on where comments gravitate or where controversy is or how vocal any of us are about which blogs we love or hate. Which is one of the reasons I tend to see the “polling” mechanism on particular blogs as more divisive than anything else.
But it’s really the comments directed at the bloggers personally, way more than at the blogs themselves, that have motivated my comments here. More than a few people see DA and SBTB as synonyms for Jane and Sarah, respectively (Karen came pretty close to saying that outright, IMO). I’ve actually seen people call DA “her,” referring, I can only assume, to Jane.
@Jessica:
That is a good point. I’m not always comfortable with conflict, and I sit out a lot of discussions because of it.
Re. the discussion at KKB, I don’t have a problem with critique of SBTB or DA — however , I wonder if it needed to be framed in a “which of these two do you like better” way. “What are your likes and dislikes about these blogs” would have been more constructive IMO. Why does it have to be a competition?
@Robin: thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood you.
In your opinion, is there any criticism to be made, on any grounds, by anyone, of anything about DA or SBTB, that is not generated by, and thus delegitimated by :
a) jealous insecurity
b) an ad hominem, “hostile” attack on Sarah or Jane personally, or
c) the subjective, flighty, and unreliable opinion of a blogger who doesn’t understand the “ebb and flow” of the internet?
I’d make up a drinking game — everyone down a shot when Robin admits that a criticism of DA or SBTB is “fair” — but I don’t want to be sober for the rest of my life!
@Jessica: Jesus, talk about unfair characterizations.
Oh, and lest I be accused of dodging the question, of course I think there are fair, non-ad hominem criticisms of DA and SBTB. Hell, I have my own criticisms of the blogs, and I contribute to one of them.
I also don’t appreciate you putting words in my mouth, re. letters a) and c) of your question.
@katiebabs:
Oh… my… word. o.O
Oh, and not that it needs to be said (although perhaps it does), it doesn’t matter what I think of the “fairness” of a critique. Opinions will differ on that. But if others have the right to make those critiques, I have the right to call foul on what I don’t think is fair.
@katiebabs: Oh no, You’ve discovered our sekret!
Well, I suppose I could make a response to this topic in our pre-2008 language now:
¡ǝןqıssod sɐ ƃuoן sɐ ɹoɟ ǝnuıʇuoɔ ʇı ʎɐɯ puɐ ‘ןןɐ puɐ sʍɐןɟ ‘ʎʇıunɯɯoɔ ǝɔuɐɯoɹ ǝɥʇ ǝʌoן ןןıʇs ı ‘pıɐs ʇɐɥʇ ˙ǝq pןnoɥs ʇı ʎɐʍ ǝɥʇ ‘oɯı ‘s,ʇɐɥʇ puɐ sןɐnpıʌıpuı ɟo ǝʌıʇɔǝןןoɔ ɐ s,ʇı ˙sǝɔıoʌ ɹıǝɥʇ ןןɐ ɟo ǝʌıʇɐʇuǝsǝɹdǝɹ ǝɥʇ sı ʎʇıunɯɯoɔ ǝɔuɐɯoɹ ǝuıןuo ǝɥʇ ǝsnɐɔǝq ‘ʎʇıunɯɯoɔ ǝɔuɐɯoɹ ǝuıןuo ǝɥʇ ɟo sǝʌıʇɐʇuǝsǝɹdǝɹ ǝɥʇ ɐp puɐ sqs ɹǝpısuoɔ ʇ,uop ı ˙ʇɐɥʇ uɐɥʇ ǝuǝɔs ƃoןq ǝɥʇ oʇ ǝɹoɯ s,ǝɹǝɥʇ ˙ɐp puɐ sqs ʇnoqɐ ƃuıǝq dn spuǝ ƃuıƃƃoןq ʇnoqɐ ɔıdoʇ ɐ ʍoɥ ɥʇıʍ pǝɹoq ǝʇınb ɯ,ı
@Maili: LOL! I need special glasses to read. Nice.
@Robin: I’m sorry Robin. I honestly thought (a) and (c) were fair characterizations of comments you made at, for example #27 and #48. I take it back.
@BevBB: Why’d you have to bring that up? I wasn;t going to touch Katiebabs’ comment with a ten foot pole!
@Maili: How did you manage that??!!
I love Romanceland too!
@Jessica: http://www.flipmytext.com I use it to torment my husband when he needs crucial information.
For those who couldn’t be arsed to turn their heads upside down to read it, here’s what I said in my previous response:
“I’m quite bored with how a topic about blogging ends up being about SBs and DA. There’s more to the blog scene than that. I don’t consider SBs and DA the representatives of the online romance community, because the online romance community is the representative of all their voices. It’s a collective of individuals and that’s, imo, the way it should be. That said, I still love the romance community, flaws and all, and may it continue for as long as possible!”
@Jessica @BevBB
But you have to admit it is amusing and new twist on the same whine
surrreeeeeeee maili
you the evol leader of bad thoughts, ‘the old guard’ ::coughaarcough:: called it Maili’s Clique once upon a time *g*
and I am sure still damn llb for ever inviting me to review for them ::innocent blink::
I was banned from AAR for life because of that whole DIK blog drama and I’d been posting on the AAR message boards since 1998. Talk about the “cool kids” throwing me in a locker and walking away.
@Jessica:
Hey, I didn’t touch it, Jessica. I was stunned speechless by it.
Well, almost. Ah, shut up.
@Sybil:
Yeah, once I stop giggling, Sybil. Or groaning. I’m still trying to decide which to give into at the moment.
Heh, considering I just spent almost the last two weeks on my blog condensing the last four decades of my reading life, more or less, into ten authors who’ve changed my reading tastes the most and that included talking about the last fifteen years or so of interactions online with various and sundry who get mentioned here and there in passing – amusing doesn’t even cover it. (where is an eye-rolling emoticon when one needs it?)
@katiebabs:
Then why are you talking about 2007/2008 as some kind of dividing line, Katiebabs? Really, I’m honestly curious. I know your blog may be relatively new but there are plenty of individual reader blogs around that have been around for years. So, why that dividing line?
good to see that you aren’t letting it bother you katie
I’m interested in #3. (If that’s okay with everyone, sorry to change the subject and all.)
I’ll freely admit that my study of the philosophical arguments around abortion ended pretty much in the 70s with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s A Defense of Abortion — I’ve never gotten the image of the concert violinist strapped to her (me?) out of my mind! — and so I’m literally 35 years out of date. In the 80s I lived across the street from a Planned Parenthood office that routinely had picketers out front. I was always bothered by the men in those groups — why do they even get an opinion either way?
But I am surprised to hear that there’s no better pro-life argument from a feminist perspective. I don’t want to try to come up with one, and I can see how tempting it must be to argue that it’s somehow damaging to us as women to have abortions (I don’t endorse that, btw, just see it as a cheap shortcut), but surely some feminist has done a better job than that you’ve described, Jessica.
(Not that I doubt you — as I say, when I last studied this stuff, Gerald Ford was giving the State of the Union! — it just seems interesting.)
To tie this in with romance fiction, I know that polarizing politically charged issues — economic theory, Red v. Blue states, etc. — are anathema to romance novels. Part of that is because (from what I’ve been told by a former employee at Harlequin) the majority of romance readers are politically right of center. (I have no idea where romance authors would come down.)
But there is a clarion call for more feminist dogma (used, here, non-pejoratively) in the crafting of romances — particularly in the presentation of women in romances. It’s a shame that we can’t have heroines who are politically active, for example, but I’m sure that would be problematic for publishers concerned with the bottom line.
Set me straight here — isn’t feminism about women having their own opinions, power in their own lives, control over their own bodies? And if that’s right — does that preclude a pro-life position because, as Judith Thomson so ably pointed out, we don’t have control over our own bodies when we are obligated to support another life even for a relatively brief period?
But we (I’m in this group, for sure) want each woman in a romance novel to have a backbone and a mind of her own and a healthy sense of her romantic and sexual and social self. I (personally) don’t think that results in a very narrow range of potential heroine types or experiences; while I agree the 25-year-old virgin heroine has some splainin’ to do, I do think that a woman whose social development has been deferred in favor of a career, or because of life circumstances, can still be acceptably self-determining even if not very experienced in the bedroom.
We’re never (again?) going to see an abortion in a commercially published romance novel, if only because it’s too charged politically for the genre. But I can imagine a heroine being pro-life and still a feminist — I just can’t imagine her insisting that every woman has to be pro-life.
Which gets back to your point about feminist pro-life arguments being like hen’s teeth . . . or real life 25-year-old virgins.
I dream about being part if the cool crowd. I’m thinking about moving to Socal just so I can be in a clique.
@Sybil: Be nice.
@Magdalen: You’de be surprised at the legs that Thomson article has — it’s in the anthology I teach and is considered a “classic”.
The feminist pro life argument in the text is by a woman who runs Feminists For Life, Serrin Fostor. She;s no philosopher, and it shows. There is one other pro life argument I can think of, by Celia Wolf-Devine (click here to read it, open PDF) which I will probably use. Wolf-Devine contends that if women really understoof feminine virtues such as caring, they would see that caring for their fetuses is a core part of that.
Then there are moderate pro choice pieces from people like Lauri Shrage and Rosalind Hursthouse, which are much more convincing than any absolutely pro life argument.
What I mean by a “pro lifer” is someone who not only would not have an abortion, but who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize abortions. Since we know from recent history in this country and elsewhere that criminalizing abortion has little effect on the rate of abortion, and no effect on access to abortion by women of means, but disastrous effects on reproductive health for poor women, I just find it difficult to reconcile the desire to criminalize abortion with feminist principles. I have no trouble at all with the idea of a feminist working very hard to reduce the number of abortions, or working to build supports for women who want to carry their fetuses to term and raise them.
Who is making this call? readers?
So, any choice any woman makes in any context is “Feminist”? What’s feminism then?
Is this controversial?
I doubt it, too. If anything, attitudes in the US have gotten more conservative around the issue in the last 30 years. Pronatalism is very strong in the genre — even heroines who do not become pregnant almost always think abotu it, or indicate in some way that their lives will not be complete without becoming mothers. Femininity, sexuality, and fertility are so strongly linked in the genre (and society) that abortion just flies in the face of that. the birth of a child is the true consummation of the HEA. It is almost always implied as a future desired event. That’s my theory anyway.
What is this nice you speak of ::innocent blink::
@katiebabs:
‘Fraid I can’t agree with you on that at all Katie!
I’ve been blogging for five years now and I get JUST AS excited when I find a new blog today as I did back in 2005. To put it quite honestly, when you say this:
“I also can’t help but bring up that there is this feeling of the older more established blogs who formed before 2007 put themselves on a different plane than the new bloggers that formed around 2008. Just my opinion… ”
I think you are talking out of your – well – hat.
I doubt very much whether Wendy or Rosario or Sybil or Keishon or anyone else that’s been around since pre 2007 think of ourselves that way and to be honest, I’m somewhat peeved that you would make such a statement.
When I first started blogging way back when, Maili welcomed me with open arms and I will ALWAYS love her for that. And I remember how warm she made me feel and whenever I find a new blog, I try to make them welcome to the community.
Because that’s what it is – as Jessica pointed out – it’s a community and whether some have ‘lived’ in the community longer than others, doesn’t make the ‘older members’ of community any different. Me – I am thrilled by all the new members.
[Sorry Jessica] – but ZOMG! MAILI! You are made of 100% awesome! I could not stop laughing out loud like an idiot.
<3 <3 <3
Now. Back to … other stuff.
We all know I'm not that bright. And I have the attention span of a goldfish. So sorry, all, I only skimmed comments. If that. Hit some highlights though, I think.
Re: #3- do you have access to Westlaw or Lexis, Jessica? You'd think there'd be some intelligently written pro life/ anti choice [however you want to term it] articles… of course it might take a lot of searching. Or you know, random journal article. Even if it's not the person's personal beliefs, you'd think there would have to exist at least one intelligent well written one out there.
I'm also totally curious about the bioethics + vampires thing. You'll have to poke me or something if/when you ever post about that.
As for the rest… *shrug* I have no idea. But at this point it's a source of entertainment. Case in point, Maili's comment. And… well whatever.
Also, I heart you for linking to Kate Hewitt's post. Going to read that now.
Oh – ok, can't resist. Cannot… wrap my head… around this "2007" split. Rly? Rly?! 2007!?!!?
Anyway. Ok. (Sorry am distracted by Johnny Weir and the tassel) O_o
But KristieJ, that is what makes you … and Azteclady … and Katiebabs (please, forgive me everyone for stopping here because I know so many many more of you are the same) … that is what makes you Y O U! I’m looking at “Pieces of Sky” (thank you Kristie J), looking at the Goodman I haven’t quite read yet, thank you Kristie J … I adore Rosario (and exsqueeze me Rosario, enuff with the VacKay: I want some reviews!) … but I do not think Katiebabs is speaking out of her what was it you called it? Her hat?
I totally know what the cut direct is. I know what it is to have (or more “see”) someone glom onto something and not give attribution to the little peeps. I personally think this is a community and a community that evolves and is quite marvelous … and maybe I wouldn’t have chosen 2007/2008 as a “line in the sand”. But I think I know what katiebabs is talking about … can’t remember who I made this comparison to, but some of this smacks of All About Eve and now that my dear old-movie loving dh has all the channels he wants, I’m sure I’ll see it for myself and refresh my memory.
Am I making any sense? Perhaps just to myself!
I don’t think I am getting it Janet W. Because some people are asshats that overrides the greater number of people who aren’t?
And who cares about the few that aren’t? Why let someone glom onto something and not give attribution to ‘the little peeps’? That is what a blog is for – to give everyone a voice.
If a person sees something wrong – why not call it? And where is it written that everyone needs to like everyone?
So what am I missing?
Jessica — I am totally outmatched here, but I’ll try my best.
At the very least, feminism is about women being allowed to make choices for themselves. So that would exclude choices made for them by fathers, husbands/partners, society, etc.
Can a woman’s own choices, when made entirely outside any controlling influence, be anti- or non-feminist? Yes, if those choices are designed to diminish or restrict the rights and powers of other women specifically. So I don’t think any woman, regardless of her political persuasion and legislative agenda, would be a feminist if, say, she was elected president.
(And I have a completely wacked-out theory about women in traditionally male-dominated professions who *say* they support other women in that profession but then *behave* in ways consistent with a general belief that actually the men in that profession are better even than themselves. But I digress.)
The controversy about feminism and romance heroines that I’ve seen boils down to this: Wouldn’t it be better if heroines were not valued for chastity and sexual inexperience — and thus devalue themselves when they were no longer “pure” or sexual novices — but instead were appreciated (and appreciated themselves) for being sexually confident and experienced without any hang-ups about that experience. In other words, could we get rid of the assumption that women are “sluts” if they have slept with sufficient men to be considered experienced, particularly in light of the fact that men with the same degree of sexual experience are not devalued, but instead lauded for being “studly.”
(Oh, and you can throw in some back-and-forth on sociobiology, whether heroines have “issues” with their prior sexual experience, whether women in fiction are valued or derided if their sexual experience had nothing to do with emotions, and other aspects to this debate.)
I think there is some inherent tension between the creation of an internally consistent character (e.g., the heroine) who has a credible story arc in the course of a romance novel resulting in an HEA while still making her all that we would wish an exemplar of feminist principles to be. I would prefer that we allow fictional characters to be a little flawed, a little messed up, maybe confused / inexperienced / conflicted, whatever so that we can watch her figure it out during the course of the book.
I also believe each book has to be judged on its own merits. If a heroine is sexually experienced, completely comfortable with her own body and is responsible for her own sexual pleasure, but the book is boring — it’s still a boring book. As a consequence, I don’t think the romance genre is a perfect fit for a feminist agenda. No reason not to phase out the wimpy dishrag heroine who derives her sense of self and value from how the hero feels about her. But a book with an implausibly virgin heroine can still be a satisfying romance. (IMO)
My theory about the abortion issue is that, in a contemporary romance, a heroine might have had one but we’ll never hear about it. It’s too “women’s fiction,” by which I mean it would be a life event made by a heroine for her own reasons. This is not inconsistent with your theory — which is of course completely right!
As I feared Sybil, I sounded ridiculous! I’m going to try to retreat without making it worse … in my honestly sketchy view of Romlandia from 2004*ish on, I think that both KristieJ and Katiebabs are right … and that’s all I’m a gonna say on the topic.
@katiebabs: Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you get your start “blogging” with one of those pre-2007 blogs?
Or was I not supposed to bring that up?
@Holly:
You are correct Holly. And it is probably better if I say nothing else because it’s not coming out the way I want it to, unless I explain it in more detail or in person. Sorry, if what I wrote irked people.
@katiebabs: Honesty I’m more confused than irked. I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to intimate.
Why on earth would you do that Janet W? You didn’t sound ridiculous, I prolly just didn’t understand.
Or maybe we just have a different view. I totally agree things like that happen, I just don’t think it colors ‘romanceland’ or everyone in it. If I do something – good or bad – I can’t expect that to reflect on romanceland as a whole. Just me…
Each person owns their own stupidity as well as their own wins.
@KristieJ:
This is the biggest mystery to me of all. the Maili I know is a mischievous PITA
@Magdalen: Feminism is a a way of looking at systems, not a single women’s choice. So the fact that a woman has made a choice without overt external coercion is not enough to make it her choice “feminist”. Feminists are not interested in individual women and what they choose — or at least not theorists like me –rather, we are interested in the context of choice.
So, for example, on one level, the choices women make in their careers seem totally “free”. But a feminist looks at two institutions: the family, and the workplace, and how they are structured to frame the choices. If the “ideal worker” is someone who can make a full time, non-interrupted commitment to the workplace, then the ideal worker is constructed as someone without significant dependency care responsibilities. In our society, the people who have significant dependency care duties are women (whether of children or the aged or ill). Again, look at the way labor is structured in the heterosexual family: women do more domestic labor. Look at wages: women earn less (because they do part time work, have interrupted careers, and also due to outright discrimination). Look at courtship: women tend to marry older, which means their careers are behind their man’s. You have to look at the big picture, and not at an individual woman;s choices, to see how it fits together. Etc. Etc. (this is way overdetermined)
So.. when a woman has a child and “decides” to take time off, of course, she “want to”, but she also does it, because (a) she makes less, (b) she is further behind in her career than her husband (age), (c) she is socialized, and it is tradition, and it is what her mother did to want to stay home with her child (the husband isn’t), etc, etc.
The problem with this is that it results in a system in which women chronically earn less, and are penalized unfairly in divorce, relative to their household contributions. Women are systematically disadvantaged as a group by the way the systems of work and family are set up.
As a feminist, I want women, and men, to have a REAL choice. That means that the workplace and family should be structured so that dependency care does not threaten economic havoc for women, and is a live and vital choice for men. This is changing, and I am glad for it.
When I think about heroines, I am back to the world of individual psychology. Their motives and traits have to gel for me, their decisions have to make sense within the narrative. I don’t know what a feminist heroine would be, except for a character who self-identifies as a feminist in the text. I appreciate your points about the feminist heroines, because I obviously haven’t done as much thinking about it as I should!
@Janet W:
@katiebabs:
So, in an effort to combat cliques, you’re both going to leave us hanging with very little information to go on… which in turn just perpetuates the problem of some being in the know and some not.
Okay, fair enough.
But here’s the deal, please understand that you don’t have to explain in specifics beacuause this is in reality about overall patterns of behaviors. That have already happened before in one way or another and are going to happen again in the future. The people and meduims change, the behaviors do not. Doesn’t diminish your pain but it also doesn’t diminish the pain of the people who came before you or the ones who are going to come after.
If nothing had ever happened before, we’d all still be doing all this on the old Usenet newsgroups… and believe me, it would not be pleasant. Nice does not begin to describe that medium. Vocal, though.
Just remember that the only true way we have to combat the repeated, um, unpleasant behaviors is to bring them to light in order to understand our reactions to them as a community. We can’t help with the understanding if we don’t know what’s going on or whether it fits with previous patterns.
@KristieJ:
I love finding new reader blogs, particularly new individual reader blogs.
Of course, there is a trade-off. The more of them I find, the less time I have to actually read, comment or, heck, post.
As in all things, it’s a balancing act.
@Jessica: I love this discussion; thank you for initiating with your post at #3. I feel I should send a check to your employer for the credit-hours of independent study on feminist issues I’m getting here!
As you can tell, I’m poorly educated in these areas. My experience has been far more influenced by individual psychology and far less influenced by cultural norms, whether they were imposed by my family, my peers, or the general culture in which I grew up. (And that’s actually significant, as I was born in 1956, so my perspective on feminism is going to be different from yours, or from my sister’s, say, who was born in 1945.)
Also, I was very lucky to be raised in a family with a strong image of the general intelligence and specific capabilities of women. Among myself, my mother, aunts, sister, and first cousins there are a total of 8 advanced degrees — 2 JDs, 1 MD, 2 PhDs, 3 MAs — among 8 women. The only one of those women without a college diploma is the youngest, born in 1964. I’m the second youngest — so that’s a lot of higher education for seven women born between 1919 and 1956. And I could have extended that back to my mother’s parents’ generation, where we had a composer, a sculptor, an author, and a woman who would have had the highest score in mathematics at Cambridge only they didn’t confer degrees on women in 1910 — all born in the 19th century.
All of which isn’t relevant, as you say, to feminism as a study and/or movement. You’ve helped me to see that I do approach these issues from a more empirical angle, primarily that of individual psychology. I think I was probably cocooned by the relative level of achievement within my family, and the fact that the women in my family may all have had their “issues” but they never doubted their own worth as intellects and/or as workers.
I have also been sheltered from the economic realities you write about. When I went to law school in 1992, women made up 40% of the class; it’s now over 50%. It’s true in the legal workplace there were fewer women partners, solo practitioners, and judges, but even that’s smoothing out a bit. It doesn’t help my relative ignorance that I don’t have children; I can only guess at the limitations that child care places disproportionately on women in the workplace.
But what interests me here is how I’ve been ignoring the institutional discrimination of women — even in the 21st century. The Ledbetter case absolutely floored me, and yet why should it have? Could I really have been so naive as to think that the legal work my aunt did in her 40-year career as a civil and employment rights lawyer just solved the problems of women in the workplace? I’m embarrassed to admit this, but apparently so. I think I had begun to see it less in gender-specific terms, but more in class and economic terms. I believed, for example, that Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed, was true for men and for women because it was about the working poor and not merely working poor women.
I’m not defending my ostrich “head in the sand” perspective. And the challenge now, particularly as I shift from being a lawyer to being a writer (and hope to be a published author), is how to reeducate myself so that I can blend a better appreciation of feminism with my current awareness of the individual psychology of women in professional settings.
Do you have specific books to recommend to help me see feminism in the 21st century? (Now I *really* owe the university whatever they pay you to supervise independent study.)
Incidentally — and I do this solely because the Internet can warp tone and voice — I hereby attest that the above-comment is 100% sarcasm- and irony-free, including this attestation.
I don’t understand what Katie is referring to. We were partners for a while when she first started blogging and I thought things went well. She is and always will be my Wing Commander!! Her and Sula *g*. A couple of issues came up in SF that hurt a bit (I’ll be glad to share what if anyone cares), but hell – I get my feelings hurt to one extent or another on an almost daily basis by people I love and care about and get over it and after helping Katie get her start and on her feet, she had a strong enough voice and enough to say that she started her own blog. And good for her and more power to her. I’m proud of what she’s accomplished. There was no argument – no fight – no hard feelings on my side certainly. There can never be enough voices – each one different and unique. But then Katie, for you to say that myself and others who have blogged longer consider ourselves on some kind of different ‘plane’ confuses me. I’d like an understanding of what this plane is – that’s all.
Seeing as you mentioned Ledbetter, have you read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth? It’s from 1991, but she outlines a lot of legal cases involving discrimination against women, in the workplace, on the basis of what they were wearing (too sexy, not sexy enough, not professional enough, etc etc.) Re sexuality, I think Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs is worth a read (here’s a review of it in The Observer). From a UK perspective, I’m wondering what Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement is going to be like.
Jessica probably has some much better recommendations, but those are books I’ve come across as I’ve been trying to read more about feminism.
@Laura Vivanco: Thanks, Laura — it’s great to get caught up with all of this. When my aunt left EEOC (where – no big surprise here – she was discriminated against on the basis of age), I rather lost touch with that sector of the law.
Will chase up these books — thanks.
@Magdalen: thanks for sharing your experience. I’ve been meaning to blog some of what I am teaching this semester (teaching feminist phil — not the abortion class, another higher level one), maybe I’ll do it.
I’m using two texts, Jennifer Saul’s Feminism: Issues & Arguments
Oxford University Press (2003) which I highly recommend for an extremely balanced, readable, shortish introduction to a wide array of issues in feminist theory, and Feminist theory: A Philosophical Anthology (Cudd and Andreasen, Blackwell, ) which I don’t recommend for anybody who isn’t seriously turned on by theory and philosophy.
@Magdalen: thanks Laura!
@KristieJ: Thanks for sharing your take on things. I hope everyone comes to some understanding on this.
Magdalen, I’m somewhat taken aback that a law student in the early 1990s managed to get through three years without being exposed to critical legal studies or feminist legal scholarship. Either of those lines of thought and research would have challenged some of the assumptions you describe in your post#80. I did research in the mid-1980s on the prevalence of women in top 20 law firms, and it’s true that the number of women in law school, as well as the proportion who were junior associates, grew exponentially after the mid-1970s. But there was a noticeable difference in the relative proportion of men and women who made it to partner. Women left firms at a much higher rate. I doubt that had changed much by 1992.
I am slightly younger than you, but I was in grad school in the 1980s (and college in the late 1970s and early 1980s), and the extent to which the feminist movement was white and middle-class was pretty much accepted, even if the consequences of that homogeneity were hotly debated.
On to possible books. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has written a number of books on women and work: The Time Bind and The Second Shift, as well a collection of essays called The Commercialization of Intimate Life. The essays cover a wide range of issues and are a good introduction to gender/work/household topics, and there are a few that touch on class (e.g., professional US women who hire immigrant caregivers who have to leave their children in the home country with their own caregivers).
Jane Mansbridge’s book, Why We Lost the ERA, is also very good. Obviously dated now but still relevant, and explains Phyllis Schlafly about as well as anyone has.
Jessica, have you run across Faye Ginsburg’s book on conflict over abortion in a midwestern community called Contested Lives? I haven’t taught it in a while, but she’s a terrific anthropologist and I remember it as a nuanced portrayal of both pro-choice and pro-life women and men.
@Sunita: You’re right, I didn’t take any courses on critical legal studies or feminist legal scholarship. I went to the University of Pennsylvania (a school I was lucky to get into, frankly; I doubt I could be accepted today) and graduated in 1995. Lani Guinier was on the faculty then; her book Becoming Gentlemen was published in1995. If she or anyone else were teaching these classes, I never signed up for one.
But it was a subject under discussion by the students. I actually disagreed with Guinier’s thesis that there was something about the institution of law school that prevented women law students from excelling. I see now that I was doing precisely what Jessica has shown me: looking at the individual psychology of men and women rather than at cultural limits and prejudices. But at the time, it bothered me (in my late 30s) that Guinier hadn’t accounted for age in her research. I saw a very big difference between traditional-age men and women, true, but I also saw a very big difference between traditional-age students (regardless of gender) and older law students.
The majority of the traditional-age students were middle class; many were legacies with one or both parents alums of the school. Among older students, there was (it seemed to me) a wider range of socio-economic backgrounds and sensibilities. Older students often had a different range of reasons for attending law school than did younger students.
Here’s the tension for me between feminism — and of course I continue to acknowledge that I need to learn a lot more about this — and the perspective I already have based on individual psychology. When I was in law school, some of what Guinier wrote about did occur. A certain professor might use the Socratic method of asking students to explain this case or that. If a student wasn’t able to answer, it was an awkward situation. Guinier argued that because the professor was male, female students suffered disproportionately compared with their male classmates. There are statistics that showed that at graduation the top twenty-five students mere more likely to be men than women.
Here’s what I observed. A male student embarrassed in class by the Socratic-method professor got angry at the professor. A female student in the same situation was more likely to internalize those feelings. Thus she might doubt her abilities, her intelligence, her worthiness to be in law school. The older the student, the less they reacted negatively to the professor.
I also felt that the very top grades were earned by students more inclined and better able to reduce their lives just to law school, thus eliminating the distractions of friends, family, and romances. More men seemed to want to do this than women. As getting the very top scores didn’t significantly increase the odds of getting a clerkship or good job, maybe women were making a better choice in having a more balanced life while in law school.
Plus, there’s the professor’s own psychology. I had Elizabeth Warren for a class and we got talking one day. She’d had a male colleague at another law school who didn’t use the Socratic method; he preferred to be more informal with his students, more relaxed. Warren, on the other hand, insisted that everyone be prepared for class. She called on people far more often than she allowed students to volunteer; if you were unprepared, you got thrown out of the class.
But what the male colleague finally realized was that Warren actually wanted her students to be as smart (or smarter) than she was; he didn’t. He felt like he was in a competition with his students, and so he subtly put them down, even in a non-Socratic method class setting.
Now, I went to an Ivy League law school with really smart students. I don’t think I was seeing a lot of institutional discrimination (of race or gender) although feminist issues did arise for me personally (I have some great stories…) while I was in law school. But when I couldn’t get a job, I’m pretty certain it had nothing to do with my gender but everything to do with my age (and a little to do with my appearance).
The worst sexism I experienced in the workplace was from women partners at the prestigious law firm I was an associate at (another great story how I got that job given that I was unemployable while in law school…). Which only reinforces my unconscious bias toward personal psychology and away from the very real issues you and Jessica are concerned with. If successful professional women spout feminist rhetoric to my face but turn around and unconsciously favor the male associates, do I look for a psychological explanation or an institutional explanation?
And if the individual psychology only explains so much, and feminism only explains so much, is anyone working on a “unified field theory” that combines both approaches?
Thanks for the book suggestions, Sunita (and Jessica and Laura). I can see I’ll have my work cut out for me.!
As a battle hardened veteran of the workplace feminist wars of the 70s and 80s, I can say with no doubt that the worst sexism I experienced was at the hands of men in positions of power. I started working in broadcast television in the early 70s, worked up to a position of heavy responsibility with no authority, was paid paltry wages and dealt with overt sexism on a daily basis. No shit. Anecdotally, a couple if things I’ll never forget were incidents where men were trying to convey how valuable I was by insulting me. I think as the years went by and the courts frowned on overt sexual discrimination, men learned to go covert. I don’t believe a man would tell a woman in a performance review “if I had to hire a man foe your job I don’t know where I’d get the money.” That, in his mind was a big compliment. No shit. Things got better in the 80s when they could no longer be overt, and the titles and authority happened. Better pay, but never gender equity when it came to salary. I left the industry in the mid 90s after having my ideas ignored until a man presented it as his own. Ah, then it was a brilliaint idea.
I currently work in a woman centric business where I know what I’m dealing with. Now my biggest worry is ageism. Yes, I still have a sense of humor but my enthusiasm for fighting the workplace gender wars us seriously depleted. Good luck, young women. Go forth and fight the good fight. After all, I’ve got a 30 year old daughter.
” But when I couldn’t get a job, I’m pretty certain it had nothing to do with my gender but everything to do with my age (and a little to do with my appearance).”
Magdalen, if your appearance had anything to do with it, don’t you think that’s gender discrimination by another name?
Jessica, I’m cranky with you. This could have been a great post about feminism and education, and instead I’ve had to wade through a bunch of pointless masturbation about who are the top bitches in romancebloglandia – which is like being king of a dunghill. If it wasn’t for a handful of academic/thoughtful bloggers like yourself, I could hold the entire bunch of wannabe and actual megabloggers up as proof to the haters that Romance is a shallow genre for shallow minds. The spectacle of a bunch of alleged grownups arguing about who’s in the cool clique du jour is unedifying and boring, especially when our gracious hostess here has thrown out such strong meat for discussion. Ptui.
“Go forth and fight the good fight. ”
Yes, indeed, Diana. Unfortunately today’s young things are too busy scratching each other’s eyes out to realise if they don’t keep fighting for the rights already bedgrudgingly recognised, those rights can and are taken away without the slightest conscience.
Yes indeedy, sometimes I am cranky about today’s young things lacking a sense of modern feminist history. They should have more understanding and respect for what we went through to make it easier for them. And yes, now I sound like your crabby aunt Myrtle.
Young women, you STILL don’t have pay equity and that makes me want to cry.
@Diana: “you STILL don’t have pay equity and that makes me want to cry. ”
Did you think when you were younger, like I did, that all this crap would be sorted out by the age we are now? That women would have full equality and no one would suffer discrimination any more because we knew that shit was wrong?
It’s so disheartening to see how far we’ve gone backwards in so many areas, not just in women’s rights, although that’s hardly the worst of it.
I don’t care if I sound crabby or like anyone’s goddamn aged aunt. This shit is wrong, and the fight’s not even half done.
Well yeah, I did think it would be better. Back then I had a sense of righteousness and forward momentum. It has definitely stalled out. Media buzzwords like “glass ceiling” and “mommy track” (gee thanks, Newsweek) are still in play. I’d like to see a resurgence of outrage and feistyness in young women who on the whole are too complacent. Get mad, get proactive…you’re getting screwed! My daughter, educated by her foaming-at-the-mouth mother, is a decent crusader. And jeez, she’s 31 already.
I have to admit, though, that my generation was not completely innocent in the slapping each other around department. We did tend to rally round when one of us was stomped on by a big male foot.
Jessica : W00t Jessica!
Diana : Also W00t Diana, for training the next generation
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The rest of this… ye gods, it’s a blog about blogs that blog without blogging directly about blogs that blog directly about those who blog both directly and indirectly about the practice of blogging either directly or indirectly about blogs that have some indirectly indicated relationship through blogging. And I have somehow let it sucker me into adding to the daisy chain. There’s something both irritating and seductive about all the half-formed “meta” here.
@RfP:
As usual, you;ve put your finger on it.
Quick note to Diana and Ann — Thank you for sharing your POVs, and I agree there are some disappointments in a younger generation that sometimes seems to think cosmetic surgery is the height of empowerment, but I would hesitate to paint an entire generation as ungrateful. When I think about my students, who voluntarily sign up for my feminist theory courses, and the students on my campus who are putting on the Vagina Monologues, or the fraternities doing a sleep out for Rape Awareness, or the students in the Student Women’s Association, or the many young men and women I have met who may not be formally organized with feminist movement, but who strive to make the world a more equal place, and to not lose ground…
@Ann Somerville:
It never ceases to amaze me that there’s always someone that thinks it’s a spectacle to even discuss a problem… thereby making people feel uncomfortable about even offering their opinions on something they feel strongly about.
On something that caused them real pain.
Now that’s a perfect example of a pattern of behavior, folks. This topic is more important than that topic because it’s more intellectual and grown-up.
@BevBB: I pretty much think there’s nothing not worth talking about. Human beings in community talk about other humans being in community. We do it in RL, so I find it odd that people think it’s odd to do it here. At my uni, we will talk about who got promoted, who didn’t, who got a better job offer, who hasn’t been around lately, who we need to catch up with, whose department is on the chopping block, who is the President’s favorite.
In my neighborhood we talk about who got divorced, married, whose kids are going what, who rocks at soccer, who rocks at making pies, whose chili sucks, who has been snotty lately, who has gained weight, who ran a half marathon, who got a new Prius, who needs a cheering up.
This is normal human behavior to me. It can be done well or badly, but it’s what human beings do.
As far as feminism, I could write lots of posts on feminism, but I get the sense that in the romance community, feminism is not exactly a welcome subject. So I don’t do too much of it. Also, selfishly, because it feels like work, because I care about it, and because arguing with people about it on this blog will make this blog another terrain of contestation in my life, something I probably shouldn’t court if I want to make it to my two year anniversary in August.
@Ann Somerville: The appearance issue. This is a tough one to parse. At the time that I was interviewing, I was approximately 15 years older than the average traditional-age student. And I was oh, probably 150 pounds heavier. So — was I being discriminated against because I was a woman, fat, or old? Or all three?
Here’s what I know: slender, pretty, traditional age students — even ones with worse grades and less articulate communication skills — had no trouble getting job offers while I got none. I have a friend who did much better in law school than I did (moot court, law review editorship, etc.) but she was also older and heavier than her peers, plus she’d had Bell’s Palsy, and so had an odd asymmetry to her face. She should have been a great catch for any law firm, but she didn’t find it a lot easier getting a job than I did.
I concluded, at the time, that the 20 minute on-campus interview was a beauty contest of sorts. Lawyers (a single senior associate from a small firm; a partner and associate from a larger firm) would meet with the students, ask a few questions, then meet with the next student, lather, rinse, repeat until the end of the day. On that basis, all they really know is if a student “looked” like they might fit in – and that really amounted to whether a candidate looked like other candidates the firm had hired that year or in the past. Next thing you know, all the summer associates are roughly the same age/body type. But both genders, of course, and all racial types. (One thing is for sure — if you are a good looking lawyer of color at a large law firm, your picture will be in their marketing materials.)
I did not look like other candidates they had hired. I was about the same age (or older) as the lawyers sent to do these 20 minute interviews, and I was articulate and confident. I should have been a more desirable candidate than I was; I finally decided that offering me a summer associateship was a bit like hiring a senior lawyer for that position, and no one does that.
Based on the fact that traditional-age women did not have problems getting multiple summer associateship offers, I would have to say that it was not my gender per se that was the basis of discrimination. On the other hand, an older fat male might well have done better than me.
This is precisely why I have a hard time ascribing *everything* to gender-specific discrimination. Maybe everything but the legal profession works that way, but what I saw in the law was not institutionalized bias and discrimination against women lawyers. And the bias I did see was subtle, covert, and almost always unconscious. All anecdotal evidence, but I saw what I saw and experienced what I experienced.
This is the kind of situation where I think it’s good to think about the problem in terms of intersectionality. I came across the term on a feminist blog during a discussion of race, I think, and it’s useful precisely because it doesn’t try to prioritise one aspect of the discrimination that one person faces. Instead it acknowledges that a person can face multiple but overlapping and intersecting discriminations. So, for example, the way a black woman is discriminated against, is often likely to be different from the ways in which a white woman is discriminated against, and different again from the ways in which a white disabled woman will be discriminated against. At least, that’s how I understand it. You can’t just point out one single aspect of the discrimination in many cases, but that doesn’t mean that sexism isn’t one of the aspects of it. Maybe Jessica or someone else who actually knows the theory properly can explain it better (for my benefit too!) but there’s a good summary of it here, and also a Wikipedia summary here.
The way you write this makes it seem that you think “institutionalized bias” can’t be “subtle, cover, and almost always unconscious.” I don’t think that’s the case. The report of the McPherson Inquiry defines institutional racism as:
The Inquiry was looking at racism within a police force, which is why there’s the bit about providing a service to the public, but the relevant point for this discussion is that the discrimination can occur “through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and [...] stereotyping” and persist because of “the failure of the organisation openly and adequately to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership.”
This kind of “thoughtlessness” was apparent in some recent planning for the New York State Bar Association’s annual meeting (the description comes from Jill, at Feministe):
“the way a black woman is discriminated against, is often likely to be different from the ways in which a white woman is discriminated against, and different again from the ways in which a white disabled woman will be discriminated against”
And look! I just demonstrated some of my own unthinking assumptions. The way I’ve written that sentence, a reader is supposed to understand that “black woman” and “white woman” mean “black non-disabled woman” and “white non-disabled woman” but because non-disability is the norm, I’ve left that implicit. That’s a problem, because there’s a suggestion there that “white disabled women” aren’t “white women.” It’s not dissimilar from the way that “tennis championship” is often used to refer to a men’s tennis championship, whereas “women’s tennis championship” is used to describe women’s tennis championships. That sets up men’s tennis as the norm, and women’s tennis as different enough to need to be “marked.” And the verbal marking is important because it reflects wider problems about how women athletes are viewed and reported and rewarded compared to male athletes.
@Laura Vivanco I’ve seen some patronizing things out here in law-land, but that NY Bar material just confounds. I’ve seen similar things and get continually frustrated by the notion that female professionals must be having problems because of something about themselves that they need to fix rather than a system that itself needs fixing.
I’d love to see some more time dedicated to fixing items such as paying female associates what they pay the males, mentoring female attorneys in firms to the same extent males are mentored, or family friendly office policies for people of both genders. And while I’m at it, perhaps someone at one of these seminars could point out to interviewers that comments such as, “You’re not pretty enough for window dressing and if you’re too smart you’ll scare off the men who do the heavy work,” are not appropriate. BTW, that last is not from decades ago. One of my good friends was fed that gem in an interview around 2002 or so.
Ah, the joys of intersectionality. Magdalen, I can certainly understand why your experience would lead you to ascribe the way you were treated to age rather than gender. But it’s also frequently the case, as Laura V points out, that when you have more than one attribute that is the object of discriminatory behavior, it’s often difficult to separate which type of discrimination is operating, or how much of each type is operating (it’s often more than one, as you suggest in your hypothetical example of an overweight male of your age).
I have immense respect for people who go back to law school more than 5 years out of college. The first year is designed to weed people out, which is really annoying when you’re old enough to see through to the underlying motivations. I don’t know anyone, male or female, who enjoyed that experience.
I can understand why you underestimate the role of systemic discrimination given your anecdotal evidence. But also keep in mind that while the younger women who were apparently more attractive to the recruiters were hired more quickly, that doesn’t mean that once they got to their big fancy law firms they were treated equally. I would be very surprised if they were.
And props to getting in to such a great law school and being taught by Elizabeth Warren. What an amazing woman; I am envious.
Wow, what an interesting discussion. Laura Vivanco, I think, recommended The Beauty Myth. Susan Faludi’s Backlash, which came out the same year, still repays reading as well. I noticed an Amazon review described it as “aggressive.” Why didn’t they just come right out and say “shrill”?
Rachel Potter’s post on AAR about “Modern ‘Romance’” is interesting in light of this discussion, I think. Although it’s more complex that this, the idea that sexually liberated women who “act like men” are depriving themselves of true love strikes me as “backlash” in Faludi’s sense. Plus that “all men” are like the pick-up artist “community.” I’m sure there are men who think of women that way, but I don’t know any.
Here’s a link from a political blog I visit regularly, in which race and gender intersect with the law field.
@Jessica:
It’s been 48 hours since this was posted and I’ve spent a good chunk of those 48 hours pondering how to respond and whether to do so at all. I haven’t come up with a good answer though. I still feel thrown for a loop. I’m stunned that you would speak to any commenter on your site this way.
@Liz Even though some things have improved, I agree that Backlash still resonates. Whenever a woman achieves something, we still get the naysayers trying to “put her in her place”. I still remember how sad I was when I read that book for the first time in college and realized that I could easily think of modern-day parallels for the Reagan-era examples given there.
@Laura Vivanco: I like the idea of intersectionality. I recall recently someone (NPR, most likely) was doing a piece recalling Shirley Chisholm’s running for president in the early 70s, and from the comments made by black male politicians, it seemed pretty obvious that Chisholm was discounted more as a woman than she was appreciated as a black.
@Sunita: You are right that the numbers on their face suggest that although large law firms might hire as many women as men as junior associates, not as many women end up making partner. But this statistic, like Lani Guinier’s numbers for top-ranking students at law schools, fails to take into account a lot of complicating factors. The law firm I worked at operated on a two-part system: the firm was pretty passive (in those days; the economics may have changed dramatically in the last ten years) about who stayed and who left, but it did let associates know if they were doing well enough to be “liked.” I suspect the numbers of men and women who got that sort of rating were close to even. But as for who made partner, that was a very real bottleneck, and yes, not as many women made it as men. But how many women wanted it? And how many women wanted to do everything that male associates did to make partner? [The law firm did have a calculus to accommodate women taking maternity leave while still having their billable hours and years of associateship count toward partnership. I never heard anyone say the firm's math was wrong or disadvantageous to women.]
One thing I observed was that women left not specifically to have children, or have more regular hours, or because they felt they were at a disadvantage in the competition for the few partnerships being parceled out. I saw women leave because they didn’t love being a lawyer, a barracuda, a rainmaker, etc., enough, or they just wanted a job that required 50 hours a week, not 80-100. No, not all women, and yes I saw women who wanted to make partner be offered the official “we need your hard work but don’t think you’re partner material” title of senior associate. (I’ve seen that given to men, too, so I can’t say for sure if that’s the result of institutional gender politics.)
It is very hard to tease out all the factors in these situations. A woman may want to make partner, but be discouraged by a subtle sexism among the existing (mostly male) partnership. A woman may want to make partner, but unconsciously sabotage her efforts and then blame her failure on a subtle sexism among the existing (mostly male) partnership. Hard to tell those two situations apart. I suspect both occur, so how do you count them?
And, yes, Elizabeth Warren is a wonderful woman, bankruptcy expert and professor. It was a very sad day when she left Penn to go to Harvard, but now I’m hoping the rumors of her joining the Obama administration are true.
@Lynn Spencer: Amazing that these things happen in the 21st century. None of that happened to me, although some fellow women associates did take me aside to suggest my wardrobe needed improvement. (They were right, btw.)
I worked on a large class action case where our firm wasn’t taking the lead on depositions but still needed to represent our client. (Put another way, someone had to be there but it didn’t have to be anyone very important as that lawyer would have a limited role to play.) I got the assignment at a planning meeting, but after the meeting I was asked to stay behind. The partner on the case then told me to be careful about speaking at all during the depositions because sometimes I said the wrong thing or said something in the wrong way.
I knew how this game was played, so I carefully thanked the partner for the feedback. (I actually said, “I know it’s hard for you to have this conversation, and I really appreciate your taking the time to tell me this.”) But then I asked for specific instances, so that I could correct the problem. The partner looked vague and finally said lamely, “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I hear it again.” I never heard about it again.
And of course the partner was a woman. At that particular law firm, women partners were the only ones who dissed me in oblique and unpleasant ways. Not saying the male partners didn’t have negative opinions about me (I was not a star associate, and I really don’t know why they kept me on as long as they did — I was smart enough, but not nearly motivated enough), but the only times a male partner criticized me, their comments were direct and to the point and always focused on my work and not on inchoate matters like “how I said things.”
So what do you do in that situation? I do feel I was discriminated against by other women, and I don’t feel I was discriminated against by men. That’s just my experience at that firm, and I doubt it can be used to illustrate much of anything except maybe that some women’s achievements have on some occasions outstripped their self-esteem, leaving them successful but still feeling like all other women lawyers are their competition.
Understand, the very same female partner in the anecdote above had months earlier taken me out for lunch to tell me directly that she supported women in the legal profession and that I could come to her at any time for mentoring, yadda yadda. Frankly, her words were nice, but her actions told a very different story. (Other women associates, even traditional-aged ones, had similar experiences with this same woman partner. Other women partners displayed the same bias toward male associates, while there were women partners who didn’t.)
Maybe I’m part of the problem by seeing these situations in terms of individual psychology. But if I’d been going to that Bar Association conference, I’d have signed up for the “What’s Our Problem” session. I’m not convinced that all feminists actually live by the principles they espouse. And that would be a problem I’d like to see discussed.
“I’m not convinced that all feminists actually live by the principles they espouse. ”
The longer I live, the more convinced I am that the only person faster to throw a woman under a bus for their own advancement than a man, is another woman.
“I get the sense that in the romance community, feminism is not exactly a welcome subject.”
Which is my point, Jessica. Romancelandia will wank away for weeks about whether the SBs should host ads for a book about incest, but actually talk about incest? Or sexism, racism, appropriation? Any of that? No way. And some of the people here so enthusiastic about a woman’s right to wank about wankery, are the first to dismiss any serious issue and discussion as well beneath their concern, with of course, the well-publicised support of some megabloggers who don’t like anything taking the spotlight off *them*.
I love your serious posts, Jessica. There’s nothing more cheering and strengthening to me than talking to strong, clever women about issues affecting us all.
I love your silly posts as well, mind you
@ann somerville … you made some great points!
Silly, strong, clever, compassionate … and every other adjective from A through Z: Jessica’s blogs run the gamut and this particular blog and comment thread (still going strong at #108) is making me reflect on my professional life, as well as that of my college-aged daughter.
@Magdalen: From a feminist perspective, we could ask, about the situations you describe:
why is the legal profession structured (80-100 hour weeks) to discourage women, who are still most responsible for child-rearing, from rising to the top? does it have to be? I keep hoping that the increasing numerical dominance of women in law, med and business schools will create a culture shift, but it sure is slow.
why are women who rise to the top so often unsupportive of other women (they aren’t all feminists, of course)? because they see themselves as competing for a limited number of “female” spots? because they fear that they will be judged by the way other women act, in a way men are not? (Oh, ALL women are like X)
how, and how much, is individual psychology influenced by culture (e.g. by the fact that we might encourage boys to be barracudas and girls to be nice)?
Just for starters.
And to make a romance connection, as Jessica pointed out, Julie James explores some of the same questions we’re discussing in Practice Makes Perfect.
@Liz: “Julie James explores some of the same questions we’re discussing in Practice Makes Perfect.”
Oh, oh, then can you or someone then go over to this post and point out to dick (in the comments) that romances *do* explore ideas outside the relationships and romance?
http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/2010/02/romance-novels-literary-texts-or.html
He keeps insisting that romance is too constrained by the expectations of the genre to ever achieve greatness, and I keep RAGING RAGING every time he does so.
I don’t know enough het stuff (which is all he’s interested in) to rebuff his assumptions, except I know from my own reading and writing (and my gut) that he’s *wrong*. I’d like some explicit examples to throw at him, preferably by someone who knows the books themselves.
Wow, there is so much here. I am not sure I have time to respond properly, but I have a few things to offer:
@Liz: I did a review of Practice Makes Perfect which raised these issues, with the author chiming in helpfully, here.
@Laura Vivanco: Intersectionality is a concept I came across in the Critical Race Theory/Critical Legal Studies literatures, especially as used by Kimblerle Crenshaw. I recommend this essay, if you haven’t seen it (PDF).
Another Crenshaw essay that make intersectionality crystal clear to me was her meditation on the 2Live Crew scandal, a black rap group with misogynistic lyrics, which was prosecuted unfairly in Florida for obscenity. That one is called “Beyond Racism and Misogyny.”
Wendy Littleton is also excellent.
Another key source is Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
@Sunita: Yes, I have read the Ginsburg. The class I mentioned in the body of the post is a 100 level contemporary moral problems course, so, an ethics course. We read philosophers almost exclusively because they engage with the issues the way I need them to to teach critical moral thinking. So sociology, enthnography, etc, doesn’t work so well. But someone like Laurie Shrage, who has taken the work of social scientists and utilized it for ethical inquiry, works really well (1994 Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion (Routledge)/ 2003 Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate (Oxford University Press). But she’s a tough read for undergrads with no background.
@Magdalen: There’s so much there to process and think about, thank you. I just wanted to say that when you look at sexist oppression as a system that overlaps with racist, heterosexist and other kinds of oppression it becomes much easier to understand men feminists and women misogynists. With so much to gain by conforming and being male-identified, women are going to throw each other under the bus (sometimes), because our primary orientation (for heteros) is to men.
John Stuart Mill identified the unique nature of women’s oppression — that we live with and love men — in the 19th century:
@Ann Somerville: There are some people who just cannot be engaged on certain things. Such is life.
@Angela: Thank you for visiting, and for that link. Added it to my google reader.
And when I talk about being oppressed as a woman, I am not for a minute forgetting that I am privileged on any other nexus of identity you care to name, and that even what I have dealt with as a woman has been barely worth complaining about.
This reminded me of an article I saw recently, in which it seemed that it was a female manager who was obliged to pass on complaints (made by male colleagues) to her female subordinate: “My manager was the enforcer, but ultimately she was voicing the customs of the system, which in itself was corrupt and wrong.”
I don’t know the circumstances, but apart from the competitiveness among women hypothesis, that article made me think that there’s also the possibility that when male colleagues did have something to say about you “on inchoate matters” perhaps they said them to your female colleagues with the expectation that they, as women, would then pass on those comments to you.
Jessica, the link you gave to the essay about intersectionality by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw didn’t work, but I fiddled with the url and found the essay. I thought I’d mention it in case anyone else looking for the essay was getting the same error message but hadn’t worked out how to find the essay.
@Liz: When I graduated law school in 1995, the economy for law firms was pretty good. There were discussions about how law firms could compete with each other to get and retain the best associates. Surveys of junior and mid-level associates showed that what the majority of them wanted was a more “humane” (for lack of a better word) balance of work and outside life. (Whether a mid-level associate would actually have left a prestigious law firm that expected its associates to bill 1,800 hours a year (or more) in order to work for less money at a firm that only required 1,500 hours/year is another question.)
What happened, though, is that salaries went up. The starting salary for a first-year associate at the firm I worked for in Philadelphia (generally considered to be the #2 firm in that legal market, which offered smaller salaries than top-tier firms in NYC, Boston & D.C.) was $65,000 in 1995-96, and was up around $120,000 when I left in 2000. For those salaries to make sense, associates needed to work more hours and for more of the hours that they worked to be billable. (Rule of thumb on billable hours is that approximately 66 – 75% of the actual time spent at the office should be billable, so to bill 1,800 hours in a year, you had to work at least 2,400 hours, which is around 50 hours a week, assuming two weeks’ vacation. And 1,800 hours is considered minimal; to impress the partners with your drive and burning desire to be a partner, you might want to bill closer to 2,200 hours each year or more, which is edging into 70-80 hour weeks.)
Are those sorts of hours punitive on women? Sure they are. But were they established to push women out of the legal profession? I don’t think so. Maybe they were established to weed out the people (like me) who didn’t want it enough, but not wanting it enough is hardly a trait exclusive to women.
If women ran law firms, maybe the idea that firms could make associates work fewer hours in exchange for less extravagant salaries would take hold because women partners might recognize that requiring associates to work 80 hour weeks is disproportionately harder on women with children and lives outside of the office. But maybe not.
There is a tendency in professions like law and medicine to want the next generation to go through what the previous generation went through. Before law school, I worked for the NYS Department of Health. During my time there, the commissioner, David Axelrod, changed the number of hours that residents could work in a stretch without a break. (It’s known as the Libby Zion law because she died when a resident, working on too little sleep, missed a drug interaction. For more on that case, and the law, there’s an account on Wikipedia.)
Before he signed it into law, though, Dr. Axelrod sought opinions from various groups. Most adamant against the law were other doctors, some of whom actually said: I had to go through that training (including 36- and 48-hour stretches with insufficient sleep), so new doctors should have to go through that now. Thus a law designed to save lives and increase the safeguards for patients was being seen as “coddling” younger doctors.
Again — I know, this is my critical flaw in this entire discussion, and I freely admit it — I see this as a dark side of human nature. Kids know what’s fair (“you gave Johnny more than you gave me”) and that sense of fairness as always being precisely equal amounts of anything, good or bad, endures into adulthood. If established doctors had to go without sleep, then newly minted doctors should have to go without sleep. If the existing partners had to log ridiculous hours, risking their marriages and neglecting their children just to make partner, then this year’s crop of associates have to do the same.
I really hope no one reading this thread thinks I’m a “discrimination-denier.” I’m not. I’m not even saying that discrimination against women wasn’t going on at the very firm I worked at. I’m just saying that what I saw is better explained (I think) by individual psychology. But even to say, flippantly, that “your mileage may vary,” is to ignore the very things you all want me to see. Which is — and correct me if I paraphrase this badly or inaccurately — “Gee, Magdalen, your situation is interesting, but it’s hardly representative. Can’t you stop extrapolating from that to the rest of the law firms/legal profession/other professions/all workplaces and see past your own nose?”
The answer is, yes, I can. I need to be better educated about all of this. I need to start looking at situations with a keener eye for institutional sexism. I need to be more aware of intersectional discrimination.
I’m just not sure I’ll replace my current thinking, which is currently weighted toward individual psychology, with feminist thinking. And that’s just me. I’m very odd (which I mean as statistically infrequent, but you can take it any way you like), and my mileage almost always varies from everyone else’s. A fact that I explain with individual psychology.
@Laura Vivanco:
Actually, I think that interpretation would be more insulting about the women partners than mine, as it suggests they were acting as the mouthpieces of male partners. Although I don’t have a lot of respect for the particular partner I was talking about, I’m pretty sure no one put her up to it.
“I think that interpretation would be more insulting about the women partners than mine”
I’m thinking of an imaginary situation in which a female colleague of mine was told by my male colleagues that they couldn’t take me seriously because my hair was always a mess and she then came and said to me “Laura, you really need to do something about your hair being a mess.” Would she be acting as a mouthpiece? I suppose one could see it that way, but I wouldn’t. I’d see it as her choosing to pass on information to me. Is she being rude? Again, one could see it that way. I’d probably try not to assume that was her intention. Is she trying to be helpful? It seems possible, if she thinks that doing something about my hair would be good for my career. Is she helping to enforce norms about appearance which are probably somewhat sexist? Probably, yes.
Actually, Min’s mother in Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me is an example of this kind of thing. She keeps telling Min that Min has to get thin or she won’t find a husband. Min’s mother genuinely believes she’s being helpful. Of course, she’s also unconsciously perpetuating sexist body ideals, making Min miserable, and being rather sexist in her assumptions about what men require in a wife.
@Laura Vivanco: @Magdalen:
A woman, criticising another’s appearance or behaviour in order to make that other woman conform more to social standards, is reflecting patriarchal concerns/exhibiting internalised sexism, even if she’s not directly passing on a comment from a man. Self-policing is one of the least lovely characteristics of female interaction.
Magdalen, you asked “But were they established to push women out of the legal profession? ”
The answer is, they don’t have to *designed* that way to have that effect, and since the preservation of ridiculous and punitive working hours suits the dominant male culture so well, that culture is not going to change it. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not a discriminatory set up, or that, since the net effect is to exclude women from the upper echelons not only of law firms but of other venues of power and influence, society as a whole should not have a vested interest in changing it. Forcing men to adhere to this kind of working life is as damaging to them as it is to women because it hurts health, family and happiness, which are universal concerns.
@Ann Somerville: I think you sent me to feed a troll! But since it’s an interesting discussion, I might. And since you just made my point so articulately, I forgive you (as if you need it).
Magdalen, I am not disagreeing with you, but reframing your stories, which have added so much richness to this discussion, to suggest that the personal is ALSO the political. My story is no different. My husband and I work at the same college and both have the right to work part-time, but guess who does? Canada provides parental leave that either or both parents of a newborn can take. Guess who took it all? Were these choices shaped by our individual psychologies? Sure. But those psychologies were shaped by social pressures, too.
@Liz: “I think you sent me to feed a troll! ”
dick’s not a troll. Just an inveterate mansplainer and…well, dick
I grant you the two are indistinguishable in most lights but let’s give the poor deluded little creature the benefit of the doubt.
“those psychologies were shaped by social pressures, too. ”
Yes, definitely. While feminism is about women having freedom to make choices, how often do our choices really fit what would make us – and the society – more fulfilled and happy, as opposed to what doesn’t disturb the status quo. As I know to my cost, women who don’t conform often have a sorrowful life – and who the hell wants that for themselves or their daughters?
@Janine: I wrote my comment at #50 with a feeling of exasperated affection. It is exactly the sort of thing, if you knew me, you could picture me saying to my husband in our kitchen, my arms raised in the air, my head cocked, and a smile on my face. With him, I would follow it up with “you drive me fucking nuts, but I love you anyway.”
When I saw it upset Robin, I apologized at #55.
I never meant to be disrespectful to Robin. In fact, I never would have written that comment to someone I felt less comfortable with.
Clearly the tone didn’t come across. I should have been more sensitive to the environment in which the discussion was taking place, and more empathetic to Robin’s position. I am very sorry for upsetting you and Robin.
Hello – I’m a male (occasional lurker) who reads romance novels. I wanted to comment on the 80-100 hour work weeks and institutional discrimination. To introduce myself, I’m just over 60 and married to a similar age woman for 40 years. I’m an MD/PhD scientist and she’s a PhD professor and both make good salaries. We have two grown children. During our careers, we both “suffered” professionally by being married to each other, particularly because we could “only” work in the 50 hour range when our children were young. If I worked the 80-100 hour weeks some of my colleagues did, I would be making more than both of us combined. (This is also true for my wife.) I believe that would be a “just” outcome, because I would be a much more valuable employee, bringing in more grants, prestige, donations, students, etc, and helping my institution attract the best of the next generation of scientists. I believe my wife is in a similar position, although relatively more successful than I.
In private practice, whether law, medicine, or other professional fields, there is a substantial fixed cost that has to amortized (eg, education loans, office space, equipment), but beyond that point most everything is profit. In addition, there is often a multiplier effect of being well known and, hence, much in demand, allowing one to charge more for consultations and services. So, I believe the long hour tradition is productive for those who do it and for society. It does relatively disadvantage those who work less, but not inappropriately. Men, more than women, can get away with this pattern and still have a family. The effect might seem like discrimination, but I believe it is an accurate financial reward for the effort involved.
There are other rewards for working fewer hours and I am not sorry for the choices I made.
@Dennis: Thanks for your delurking, and your perspective. My own view is that someone has to do domestic labor — the keeping of house and the raising of children — for society to function, and for there to be full time workers, whether it is 40 hours a week or 80. This domestic labor is as valuable as anything an MD/PhD does. By far more women do it, whether paid or unpaid, than men. Women shouldn’t have to sacrifice economic security, an egalitarian marriage, career prospects, or self-esteem, to do this important work. Yet we know that, for example, the partner who earns more in a marriage has more control (because the other partner is economically dependent, and for a host of other reasons). We also know that after divorce, women face a precipitous drop in income level while men do not. (Here’s something from a late January Guardian article, “Men Becomes Richer After Divorce“). We also know that part time work is paid far worse (hour against hour) and is much less stable than full time work, and that women are more likely to do it (because they are charged with the role of child rearers).
I would like to see a world in which making the choice of taking on traditional feminine roles — roles which, whether paid or unpaid, are utterly necessary for society to function — is as cost free as possible. I would also like to see a world where men feel as comfortable as women for taking on those traditional feminine roles.
@Jessica: In our case, we shared the traditional feminine (and masculine) roles and each of us had reasonable professional success. In money terms, we each earn about half the income of a top level achiever. So, if one had stayed home and the other had become a top achiever, we would be in a similar financial position, but one of us would be much more vulnerable in the case of a divorce. That seems to me to be the inevitable result of one person specializing in something (like childcare or athletics) that has a limited period of economic productivity. In the case of a couple, a property settlement and alimony are supposed to make up for the disparity, but I realize that they seldom do.
@Dennis: My husband and I made similar career sacrifices to be together, to not let one of our careers dictate the other’s, so we could be together to raise our children. We also do not divide domestic labor by traditional gender lines. We could be at better universities, both of us, but we refuse to go unless they agree to hire the other. So far, that has not happened. We are grateful to be tenured together in a place we are reasonably happy.
I am not by any means saying that people who are not willing to put in hours should magically get rewarded, and, like you, I wouldn’t change the hours we have had together with our children for any professional prestige or foregone wealth. But I think more could be done to make these choices less stark, especially for women (for example, companies with family friendly policies do not fare worse necessarily than those without).
@Jessica: I don’t know. I felt like my cheek was stinging when I read that comment, and I wasn’t the one it was aimed at. I was reading along, understanding both your side and Robin’s, and I don’t have a problem with you asking her whether there are criticisms of DA and SBTB she considers valid, but your tone — wow. I’ve had my moments of losing my temper and being less than gracious but I hope I never treat a commenter at DA that way.
Your followup to Robin struck me as defensive, trying to back up your reasons for making the comment in the first place rather than as an expression of genuine remorse.
I gotta tell you, I can understand where you are coming from with regard to people having valid criticisms of DA and wanting to make water-cooler conversation, but I can also understand Robin’s point, because I can’t imagine that I could ask readers at DA to post whether they prefer Racy Romance Reviews to Isn’t it Romantic and not come under a rain of criticism in the comment thread for having asked such a question and thereby having pit two blogs against each other.
Nor can I imagine that if there was a comment in such a DA thread which stated (paraphrasing a comment that was made about DA, SBTB and Jane on KKB’s thread) “If someone held a gun to my head and FORCED me to choose? Probably Isn’t it Romantic. Jessica has always rubbed me the wrong way, and I find myself wanting to punch her in the mouth far more than I do Tumperkin,” that it would just pass without objections, and without people being angry at us for starting the thread.
Or that if Tumperkin stated that she had a problem with such a thread, it would be hunky dory with everyone if I just replied with “I’d make up a drinking game — everyone down a shot when Tumperkin admits that a criticism of RRR or Isn’t It Romantic is “fair” — but I don’t want to be sober for the rest of my life!”
See, when I reverse these situations in my mind, I just can’t see it taking place at DA. Nor can I see anyone at DA talking this way about an author. Can you just imagine if one of us said “This book made me want to punch Laura Kinsale in the mouth”? People would be up in arms.
So I see a double standard here, and I think Robin was trying to examine the reasons for that double standard, and whether those reasons (i.e. “DA is not a reader blog”) are unassailable, when you came at her with both guns blazing.
Proud though I am of Dear Author, I don’t have problem with people saying that to their taste, our content is too focused on e-books and e-readers, or that our reviews contain too many spoilers, or that first page Saturday doesn’t do much for them. Believe it or not, I’ve sometimes had similar thoughts myself.
What does bother me, though, is people feeling that it’s fair game to talk about my blogging partners themselves in a way they wouldn’t talk to or about most other human beings. Especially when that doesn’t even get examined, and one of us can’t even object without being openly derided.
A friend of mine has a theory that people feel it’s okay to hate celebrities in a way that it isn’t okay to hate others, and she thinks Jane and SB Sarah may have reached some kind of celebrity status in romancelandia.
If I’m honest with myself, I think it’s true that I find it easier to dislike come celebrities than I do other people.
It seems strange to me, though, if Jane and SB Sarah have reached this kind of status, since they surely aren’t rolling in the kind of money real celebrities have.
Just as it seems odd to me that so many people insist that DA and SBTB are no longer reader blogs, without the willingness to explain or analyze what is it that makes a blog focused on books something other than a reader blog.
And now that I’m wondering if my friend is right about this type of phenomenon taking place, I feel I’m faced with a dilemma. If the perception that DA is the big guy, and everyone else is the little guy makes it okay to treat us differently, where does that leave me in relationship to everyone else?
My saying something, as I am doing now, will no doubt come off to some like I am being defensive, or oversensitive, or throwing DA’s weight around.
So do I just sit quietly and accept that by association with Jane, I’m now in some perceived other plane, or clique, and shouldn’t expect anyone to treat Jane, or even Robin, or perhaps even myself, like regular people anymore?
@Janine:
“My saying something, as I am doing now, will no doubt come off to some like I am being defensive, or oversensitive, or throwing DA’s weight around.”
Yes, that’s exactly what it comes off as, Janine. If you were shocked by Jessica’s comment to Robin, I was even more so by your acting as the blog manners police to Jessica. I don’t see you jumping all over Karen Scott or Mrs Giggles or their charming cronies for the shitty way they treat their blog visitors, and if you have no quarrel with them, then attacking Jessica is rank hypocrisy.
Frankly, Jessica had a point I agree with, much as I respect and like Robin. I’ve had my own intense frustrations with her and the other DA bloggers refusing to accept the smallest criticism of Jane or the blog, and while I’m aware that you guys, particularly Jane, have been subjected to some truly foul attacks (going well above simple criticism), that doesn’t mean you have a permanent ‘get out of jail’ free.
And, no, being me, and you being you and from DA, I”m *really* not inclined to be charitable about your motives. Seems to me you exert enough power and control over at DA. Don’t push your silencing agenda here as well.
“where does that leave me in relationship to everyone else? ”
It means you’ve made your choices, now suck it up, sister. You can’t accept the status that DA gives you and then turn around and pretend you’re just a regular small fry like everyone else. You’re coming off like the Queen trying to act like one of the common herd, knowing you can run back to your palace when it gets too rough.
No doubt DA will have a stinging post masquerading as concerned comment in the next day or so, and then a day or so after that, Karen and Giggles will post about how much they’re rolling their eyes at DA again and aren’t they all so up themselves, and hey look at me while you’re doing it. Then the lesser blogs will offer their ‘unique’ perspectives, sucking up to whichever side they perceive will do them the most good, and the twittersphere will explode with catty tweets and not so subtle references to the hate object du jour.
And the rest of us will wonder if any of you lot have better things to do.
I’ve never posted on their blogs, I don’t think. I do post here, and I expected better of Jessica, whom I like a lot, and those are the reasons I decided to post here and not there.
Again, my problem wasn’t with Jessica’s point, but rather with the way she phrased it. Nor do I think DA has a permanent ‘get out of jail’ free card.
This paragraph made me laugh out loud. But your point is no doubt correct. I probably can’t look good doing anything but sucking up whatever people feel like dishing out.
Thank you, Janine, for trying.
And thank you, Jessica, for the apology this morning.
Ok, so I realise that Janine just stuck our names into someone else’s quote to make a point and that isn’t necessarily a true reflection of her view (although it would be a sneaky way of expressing an opinion) but I am seriously thinking of using that quote under my blog banner* both:
1. as a direct endorsement from DA, and
2. just to taunt you, Jessica.
(* Isn’t it Romance).
This is some comments thread! When I read this post some days ago, it had about 6 comments then I read Magdalen’s recent post referring to the feminist pro-life thread and came back there to find …… this.
Just, wow.
Janine and Robin, this is a topic about which we disagree, and about which we have found it challenging to dialogue fruitfully. Maybe someday that will change. In the meantime, it is my strong desire that we continue to have good conversations about those things we share: our love of romance novels and keen interest in seeing them taken seriously as literature.
“This paragraph made me laugh out loud. ”
Then that’s something positive to be gained from all this. And I apologise for my snippy tone (and certainly for any implied insult to Robin), because while I have a personal beef with you and your coblogger, it’s not respectful to Jessica or relevant to my objection to what you said.
But this is kind of my point. Not only is this public masturbation intellectually barren, it’s also hurtful – sometimes to people who deserve all the kicking they deserve, but also to people who do try to be fair and objective, like Robin. Where has all this navel gazing got us, other than driving people further back into their cliques, strengthening the barriers between them, and validating the everpresent paranoia? Nowhere, that’s where.
And yet the same amount of introspection about women in the workplace has created enlightenment and offered education to at least one if not more participants.
Which is actually the more profitable activity for a bunch of smart women? And isn’t it a better habit to get into, to use our combined intellects against the things that hold us down, than to use those intellects like crabs in a barrel, pulling anyone who rises up, down back into the sludge?
@Janine:
I can explain it if anyone is willing to listen. Simply take it for what it’s worth and see if it makes sense.
To me it’s similar to authors being readers unless we’re talking about their books and it always has been. The exact same problem exists for people who see themselves as more than “amatuer” reviewers, regardless of whether they’re paid or unpaid. Yes, they’re still readers, but they’ve also drawn a line that separates them from other readers, even readers who also might do very well-crafted reviews, too.
It sounds contradictory but there is a hugh difference between an individual reader posting what literally amounts to an ongoing reading journal reviewing what they’ve just read, regularly or even hap-hazardly, to a highly organized, efficiently run, multi-post per day site with many contributors dividing up the reviewing chores between them.
Sure, the blog or site is still focused on books, the contributors are still readers but that doesn’t mean that their status within the community is unchanged. How can it not be affected? How can the perceptions that others have of them as individuals also not be affected?
Do you honestly believe that Laurie Gold was unchanged from running AAR for all those years? Or that people’s perceptions of her remained static throughout? Because if you do, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
@Tumperkin:
This isn’t my opinion at all; I was just illustrating a point and FWIW, I strongly prefer not to be quoted out of context.
@Jessica:
That would be nice, but I don’t see how it will be possible so long as what Ann says is true (and I think it is), that we have to suck up the double standard of being treated differently, because people see us as different and simply aren’t willing to consider that from our own perspective, things may not look like that.
I haven’t ruled that out and plan to take it on a day by day basis as far as that. But I think it’s just the reality that a post like that “drinking game” one may cause me to walk on eggshells for a while. It’s disorienting to realize that there’s this whole topic that I can’t comment on, but everyone else can — that I just have to suck it up in silence, but on the other hand to feel perfectly welcome commenting on other stuff, esp. knowing that the gloves can come off at any time for me but not for others.
“people see us as different and simply aren’t willing to consider that from our own perspective, things may not look like that.”
I for one am acutely aware that your perspective on your position, as Robin’s on her own, are very different from how it’s seen from the outside. It’s been something of an anguished conversation between Robin and me at times.
But you really are in the same position as an author who feels you’ve been misunderstood by her readers – nothing you can say will change that perception, and railing about it will only make you look like the Authors Who Behave Badly.
“knowing that the gloves can come off at any time ”
Actually, Janine, that’s how I felt when I was allowed to comment at DA – at any point, Jane or you would use your massive power to slap me into next week for crossing over some invisible boundary (and of course, that’s what happened on the end.) So..not so much with the sympathy there, or with any whining about not being allowed to participate. None at *all*.
Better the gloves off, claws out, so people can see them from the start, than the veneer of polite discourse masking a real agenda of ripping each other down, don’t you think? I’ve always preferred it that way, personally.
@Jessica:
I think what you may be perceiving as “not exactly a welcome subject” could very well simply be a complete lack of interest in taking part in discussing it online, which is not necessarily the same thing. But how to explain…
@Ann Somerville:
You know it’s funny but I could’ve sworn I’ve seen quite a lot of serious discussion of many issues on the larger blogs/sites… AAR, DA & SB included, which generally leads to plenty of controversy and uproars and which is what usually leads me to stop going to most of them.
Not because I don’t want to discuss the issues, mind you, but here’s the thing about issues – after awhile it does start to become a case of seen one, seen them all and one can almost predict what the arguments are going to be.
And then there’s the time factor which invariably impacts controversial issue-oriented discussions. Just look at this thread. 132 comments and counting and it’s not even all that controversial. These days I rarely visit blogs that generate comment threads of more than a dozen or so on a good day on purpose simply because I just don’t have time for it.
So, I guess what i’m saying is that when I get online to discuss the books I read, my first choice isn’t in-depth discussions of controversial issues that may or may not impact on my day-to-day life. Because, yes, I read them to get away from real life. Not to support causes.
If I’m supposed to be doing anything else, then call me empowered because I refuse.
All that said, none of this is meant to imply that anyone else shouldn’t enjoy the discussions of said controversial topics and, in fact, when I do have time, I thoroughly enjoy scanning through and learning from some of them. Some of the time. Others I ignore completely.
Actually, I’m not a huge fan of gloves coming off, because in my experience it is usually at that point that any semblance of courtesy or coherence disappears.
BevBB said:
Yup.
Janine – lighten up. My comment was plainly jocular in tone.
As for this:
From my perspective, this simply doesn’t hold water given the lengthy comments from you on this thread. Which are fine by me incidentally. I don’t want to stop anyone commenting. But for me, the suggestion that you are being silenced in some way is frankly risible.
@Ann Somerville:
I was laughing partly at the thought of my 900-square foot abode as a palace and the image of myself roaming its rooms in royal attire, a crown atop my head. It was a funny post, even though I can’t get on board with that view of myself.
Thank you for that.
I don’t disagree with that at all.
@BevBB:
But what makes you think we see ourselves that way? How is a review here on RRR any more “amateur” than a review on DA?
How did we draw that line? When did we draw it? Can you tell me what was the turning point? Did it happen on day one, when Jane and Jayne posted their first reviews? Did it happen yesterday?
I’ve been with the blog since 2006, when we didn’t have many readers, and I don’t honestly see a major difference in the way I write my reviews or my comment thread posts. I had my style from the get go, and it was different from Jane’s and from Jayne’s, and their reviewing styles have not changed much either. If you gave me a review I hadn’t read before from 2006 and one from 2010 by the same reviewer, I’m not sure if I could tell when they were written except by the date the reviewed book came out.
But DA was a prolific blog from the beginning (owing to Jane and Jayne’s fast reading) and no one said we weren’t a reader blog back then.
Maybe it’s just a matter of focus, because where you see organization, I often see chaos, like spelling errors in the posts that I have no time to correct, or the picture getting left off a review, or a new review posting on an older date page accidentally, which happens often enough. Maybe it’s the difference between an outside view and a behind-the-scenes view.
I do agree that perceptions have changed, but I don’t think it’s because of our organization, or because we have a lot of contributors. There are other blogs that have or have had those qualities — the DIK ladies blog for example, or TGTBATU, that aren’t perceived the same way. And SBTB doesn’t have as many contributors, yet it also gets perceived differently. I think the reason for the different perception boils down to the fact that we have a big readership.
No, I don’t believe that, and I wasn’t trying to say that. I have no doubt that Laurie changed over those years, although not being her, I can’t say how. Everyone changes over a span of ten years though of doing anything. But by the same token, you also can’t tell me that if you or Jessica blog for ten years, you won’t be doing it or relating to it a bit differently than you did in the beginning.
This is the real crux of things IMO. Perceptions of us have clearly changed. IMO more so than we have. But of course, if people view us differently and treat us differently as a result, we are going to react to that. So I see it in a chicken-or-egg light. Did we change, or are people’s changing perceptions of us forcing us to respond and react differently than we might have in the past?
@BevBB: I worded that badly: actually, in my experience, nobody wants to talk about feminism. And yes, absolutely, romland is full of important discussions about important topics.
@Janine: I hear what you say, and I understand and support your choice to spend your online time where you feel comfortable.
@Aoife: Different strokes for different folks, as you are reminding us.
“in my experience it is usually at that point that any semblance of courtesy or coherence disappears.”
Perhaps if women put more value on honest debate than the “semblance of courtesy”, the gloves coming off wouldn’t be such a threat.
But since the claws are there, gloved or not, I was merely stating that I prefer to know the quality of the people I’m dealing with, than to be fooled by a ‘nice’ facade and then find them scratching my eyes out later. What’s always so amusing to me as an outsider is to watch people who are apparently so friendly and polite to everyone, reveal their inner bitch when they’re cornered. What’s bemusing to me is how easily everyone forgets the mask being dropped afterways, and persists in talking about that individual as one of the ‘nice bloggers’.
But this is barren, so I’m dropping it. So not interested in defending my online interactions to anyone else this week.
@Ann Somerville: I wasn’t asking for nor expecting your sympathy.
@Tumperkin: Okay.
@Janine:
“I wasn’t asking for nor expecting your sympathy.”
No, but posting this kind of thing:
“I just have to suck it up in silence, but on the other hand to feel perfectly welcome commenting on other stuff, esp. knowing that the gloves can come off at any time for me but not for others. ”
You clearly expect *someone* to feel sorry for you. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why we should.
If you don’t expect sympathy, then quit whining, woman.The whole “it’s lonely at the top” schtick is getting way old.
@Liz, I just saw your reply to dick over at TMT and I cheered. Thank you!
@Ann Somerville:
No, I honestly don’t. I was replying to Jessica and attempting to explain, why, despite her expressed wish that I continue posting on book topics, I don’t feel quite as welcome here as I used to.
@Ann Somerville:
An outsider? I thought you were a romance author, just one I’d never heard of.
“just one I’d never heard of. ”
Funny, because you and I have participated in the same discussions any number of times. And as an m/m author who’s not even in the wolf pack of *that* genre, let alone that of wider Romance, yeah, I’m an outsider compared to you, Miss Mega Commenter. Everywhere I look on blogs, you’re there, pretty much as you are now, disdainful and dismissive.
How can you never have heard of me and simultaneously know I’m an author? If you mean you’ve never read my stuff, then please, say that plainly instead of trying to erase my existence.
Not engaging further with you, Bev. It’s not worth my energy.
@Janine:
Do author’s perceptions of themselves as readers change the fact that when they’re talking about their own books they’re the author?
Does it truly matter that you see yourself as another reader when you have to function as the reviewers, moderators and/or administrators of the blog/site while talking to readers/visitors on it?
Or you better be able to do so if you want the site to continue to function properly and maintain its level of success.
Wrong choice. Jessica is an academic, which is whole other class of animal that’s also a reader in the grand scheme of things.
I would compare you to me, but I don’t review and the roots of why go back to this very concept. I decided a long time ago I wanted to remain only a reader. I meant it because of the pitfalls I saw even then happening with certain sites. And AAR was only one of many.
Yes, I can tell you what the turning point is because it’s always the same but I’m not sure you’ll believe me. It’s the point where you accept that there are standards for reviews that you have to strive for and uphold. And rightly so, it’s just that once a site/blog/enterprise or even an individual makes that a goal to strive for, it is automatically set apart from the average reader.
Notice I said the average reader. Yes there are readers who apply a type of standard to the reviews they do, but not all of them do. Many of them simply chat about what they read and call it reviewing. To not recognize that distinction is just as bad as not respecting the author of the book when appropriate. If I have learned nothing else from being subjected to all those reviewing discussion over the years, I have learned that much.
Think about it, the moment anyone does that, they’re not simply reading to be reading – it’s work. With a purpose. Doesn’t matter whether it’s organized chaos or military precision. Doesn’t matter if they’ve done it the same way from the beginning or if they slowly changed their technique over time.
It’s not about what the standards are, either. That’s irrelevant because those “what are the standards?” discussion go on all the time, too. It’s about the mindset that there are/should be standards in the first place.
Now tell me you don’t believe that reviews should be done to a standard of some kind of excellence, Janine, or that your visitors/readers don’t come to DA because they trust it to uphold that standard… whatever it is. I might believe you if you’re convincing enough.
You haven’t heard me say that those aren’t perceived that way, too. You originally asked if someone could explain how a blog run by readers could no longer be perceived as a reader blog. If you go back and look at what I said, I think you’ll see it applies to a lot more romance blogs/sites than just DA.
Oye, back to the years thing. Wasn’t this where I came in? Or was that another thread? I’ve lost track.
I agree that the reason DA is treated differently from other multi-reviewer blogs is the size of the readership. But if we back up a step and ask *why* it has such a big readership, I think it is because it is successful at covering such a wide range of subjects and interests. And it seems to me that even if that range is shared by a number of contributors, Jane is the most identified with it because she posts across the most issues, she has authored (I think, I haven’t counted) the greatest number of posts, and she feels the most present, day in and day out. That doesn’t mean her contributions are the only or even the most valuable ones. When it comes to reviews, I think the range of reviewers and the differences you all exhibit is a huge strength. But on all the other stuff, especially the industry and ebook stuff, Jane’s voice is the most distinctive to me. It also means that she becomes a go-to person for the industry, and she has been really prescient in anticipating the ebook explosion. As a result, your original reviewer blog has morphed into something much bigger and more influential.
So DA does lots of reviews, which draw readers, talks about the industry and ebooks, which draws readers, and occasionally wades into Internet Kerfuffles, which draws readers. And all of you at DA, whether you participate in everything or not, get identified with whatever people are thinking DA is at any given time. I understand why that becomes frustrating, when you clearly are very careful *not* to participate in certain discussions. I have noticed over the years that some contributors never show up to post in certain types of comment threads.
But I don’t think you can escape the everything-in-DA=everyone-in-DA that readers attribute, whether it’s fair or not. It’s just something you have to figure out if you can live with.
@Ann Somerville: The only time I remember seeing you comment on the same thread as me was a couple of weeks ago on Teach Me Tonight. The only reason I knew you were an author was because of that thread and because I looked up your site after it. So, I should’ve more properly said that I’d never heard of you before a couple of weeks ago.
Otherwise, your feelings of being an outsider are your own problems, I guess, since I was simply asking for clarification because I was confused.
While I’m sure a bunch of readers would like to see this thread die, I’m going to wade in anyhow. Normally I rarely comment unless the blog topic is related to a specific book. But Janine, you seem to genuinely want to understand why some of us see DA (or SBTB) as something other than reader blogs. So I’d like to offer my perspective, for whatever it’s worth.
I have contributed a guest review to DA at least twice. I really labored over those reviews because I was fully aware that a substantial number of people would read what I wrote (as opposed to the 2 dozen or so people who read my own blog). To me, it’s not so much that your reviews are different or in some way exceptional compared to other blogs, it’s that your readership is so huge. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, there are those in the industry who pay attention to what is said on DA. Jane now regularly appears on panels at conferences. Sometimes publishers provide books for you to give away in contests. And now there’s a DA blogger bundle for sale at Harlequin. All of this just serves to put DA on a different plane than the one many of the rest of us sit on. It’s not a better (higher) plane, just different. And so I think you yourself get lumped into that by being a reviewer there, even if it’s not your intent to be perceived as anything other than a reader/reviewer.
Rightly or wrongly, that’s is just how *I* see it. I hope that helps.
@Sunita:
Yes, the magazine aspect also so very common on the most popular reviewing sites. Or is it the most popular magazine sites that also feature reviews? See, I’m not sure that the two things aren’t part of the same formula that play off each other. Sunita is very right that DA is extremely unique in its approach to the industry, though, which could be both good and bad in terms of this discussion.
Bev:
I was referencing you earlier comment where you described us as:
You also described us as as people who have:
That suggests that we not only see ourselves differently, but that we set out to separate ourselves. And since I don’t agree with either of those descriptions of us, I was challenging those descriptions.
Now, if I understand correctly, it sounds like you are conceding the point that we don’t see ourselves differently, and saying that it isn’t about how we see ourselves, but about the fact that we have standards.
I do agree that we have standards, but I’m not convinced that that having any kind of standard, regardless of what it is, by itself is what makes us something other than a reader blog, or causes us to be perceived differently by the community.
So many things can be considered standards. Running a spellcheck before one posts is a kind of standard. So is putting up a graphic with each post. There are plenty of blogs where one or both these things are done on a regular basis which are still viewed by most people as being reader blogs.
At Dear Author, we had the standard of the letter-to-the-author review format from day one, yet most people didn’t consider us something other than a reader blog back then.
Re. other blogs,
It sounds like we are discussing two different things. You’re on the topic of what makes any site no longer a reader blog in your own eyes, and I respect that you’ve put forth your definition.
I, on the other hand, got on the topic from following up on the topics Jessica brought up and the links she posted, where DA and SBTB were specifically mentioned as being no longer reader sites, to the point where IMO it’s considered fair game to talk about the people who blog there in a very different king of tone.
I was trying to get at what makes SBTB and DA something other than a “reader blog” in the eyes of the community. And I do think that they are perceived differently now from the way they once were, and from the way some of the other blogs I’ve mentioned are perceived.
Anyway, thank you for your willingness to discuss the topic, because it seems that for most everyone else it is just open and shut, DA and SBTB are different, but most people seem to have no interest in pinning down the reasons for it.
@Sunita & @Phyl: Yes. I agree with everything you said. I see it as being more about the size of our readership than not, and about the fact that Jane has struck a chord with many readers and made some contacts in the industry.
I’m not crazy about that, but I’ve been living with it for a few years and think I can continue to do so. It’s being treated differently than other bloggers that’s newer, and frankly worries me more on behalf of my blogging partners than on my own behalf.
@BevBB:
not sure if this needs to be said, but I will anyway — I am a total amateur when it comes to anything romance related. I have no degree of any kind in literature and far less experience as a fan than anyone else on this thread.
Thanks, Bev, Ann, Sunita, Phyl and Janine for continuing the conversation.
@Jessica: So, if I’m a blogger, reader, writer *and* have a literature degree, I can haz cookie?
Strikes me that you and other bloggers I admire are amateurs in the most wonderful sense – you do it for love. Not power, glory or free ARCs, but simply joy in sharing and discourse. Keep it up, kiddo.