Too early in the morning for this

Joanna Russ on Edmund Cooper's Gender Genocide (1972):

...When Rura goes out on another mission, and again can't fire her gun, she is gang-raped... taken to MacDiarmid, claimed by him to replace his dead wife, ordered to be quiet (some authors seem to think this is standard wooing procedure), slapped, and told: "You have entered a man's world. You have much to learn" (p.84).

From the most offensive song on top 40 radio (2007, but inexplicably playing on the radio all this week):

Shush girl, shut your lips
Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips

(no subject)

I just started reading Justine Larbalestier's "How to Ditch Your Fairy," which I'd previously been avoiding because it looked like a fluffy cotton-candy kind of book. What I didn't expect was that it's a fluffy cotton-candy kind of book about privilege, and how it's often invisible to those who have it.

I remember coffeeandink posting about Supernatural, and other TV shows that attempt to use monsters or aliens or vampires to talk about racism in a metaphorical way, and how that doesn't work if your TV show demonstrates skanky race issues when it comes to the humans and the black guy always turns out to be evil, or else dies. So what's interesting about "How to Ditch" is that it does talk about privilege metaphorically -- this is a world very much like our own, but many people have fairies to bring them extraordinary luck in specific situations. One might have a clothes-shopping fairy, or a parking-space fairy, or a getting-out-of-trouble fairy. And this is a specific kind of privilege that's sometimes visible to the person who has it -- but sometimes very invisible.

But "How to Ditch" doesn't erase issues by turning them into metaphors. The characters struggle with issues of nationalism and cultural hegemony when a cute new boy from far away transfers to their school, and while the book seemingly has everyone in New Avalon existing in a happy diverse rainbow (I said it was a fluffy book), at least it assumes that people of color are going to be teachers, celebrities, or the cute new boy from far away. Not bad for a fluffy book.

But at this point I'm less than 100 pages into it, so, I'll see where it goes from here.