More on genderflipping

After last week’s post on genderflipped covers, my friend Flit dug up an article she remembered reading about a a bias study regarding female playwrights. The article is well worth reading, but for the TL;DR folk among us (sorry, I only just learned that TL;DR meant “too long; didn’t read”, so now I have to use it at least once), the take-away is “in an as-controlled study as is possible, it turns out women discriminate against female playwrights more strongly than men do, even though plays written by women make…

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Genderflipping covers

So Maureen Johnson, YA author, threw down a gauntlet a couple of days ago regarding the way books are marketed and asked her jillions of Twitter readers to gender-flip some of their favorite book covers. To make a cover that might have been offered up if the book was by a person of the other gender, or was gender neutral (initials instead of full names. She’s written a terrific article about the whole problem of gendered covers here, and it is truly worth a read. Really truly honest to God.…

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the essential kit

crowdfunding across the universe!

Two things: first, the most awesome car commercial ever made: Second, and completely unrelated, a friend of mine is running a crowdfund project for a performance piece this summer that my sister and other persons of my acquaintance will be performing in. It’s in dire need of support, with seven days and 75% of the way to go yet. Perhaps you will go support it because I have just shown you the most awesome car commercial ever made (*hopeful*! O.O), or maybe just because you’re awesome, or maybe you can…

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Recent Reads: Astonishing X-Men (Warren Ellis run)

ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve ever read, and less than any X-story I’ve ever read, including what I considered to be the god-awful Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely run that culminated with Cassandra Nova. The art in GHOST…

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the essential kit

extraordinary people

So I was reading something–probably Kate Elliott ()’s fabulous The Omniscient Breasts–and some guy was commenting (to paraphrase), “Why would anybody want to read epic fantasy about women, who basically got married at fourteen and stayed pregnant their whole lives and never went five miles from where they were born?” I find the blindered attitude behind that to be staggering. I mean, unless this guy is working under the delusion that actually every male in history has left home, become a knight, discovered he’s the lost orphaned king of the…

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