Choosing To Battle

by Annabeth Leong

Hi! Thank you for giving me the time and space to have a rest from posting here. I’ve missed you all and am happy to be back. :)

The idea of choosing one’s battles immediately associates to restraint for me. When I tell myself to choose my battles, I usually mean, shut up for now. But to be honest, I wish I chose to fight more often. It’s very rare that I say something I regret. Far more common is having left things unsaid, having failed to defend myself.

So in honor of that, I’ll talk about a couple times I’m really glad I spoke up. These incidents are small, but I’m happy when I think about them. They make me sound wittier than I usually am, too, and I wish I could be like that more often.

***

I’m 16 or so, at a fancy shopping mall I would never normally go to. I’m waiting for someone, I think. Anyway, I look in a store window and see a gorgeous suede skirt that I really, really want. I walk inside to look more closely, and the salesperson can feel how strong the desire is. She asks if I want to try it on, and I agree.

I never shop, so I don’t know my size. “Medium?” I guess. I perceive myself as a medium-sized person, based on my experiences of walking around with other people. The medium, however, even unzipped, won’t go up past my knees. I trade it back to her for a large. That one won’t pass my thighs. I try an extra large, and it won’t pass my hips.

“Do you want to try something else?” the salesperson asks.

Something about the whole interaction is really irritating me at this point. It’s not about the label, it’s that they obviously can’t actually sell this thing to me--there’s probably not much of anything that they can sell to me. Why go through the charade? This store isn’t for me. It’s not for a lot of people.

“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t shoot enough heroin to shop here.” I walk out, head held high.

Writing the anecdote down as an adult, I don’t mean to be insensitive to those who are struggling with addiction. If I had it to say now, maybe I’d just say, “Maybe I’ll be back once you start actually making clothes for everyone.” But 16-year-old me was onto something. It’s a real problem that clothing retailers aren’t serving a large part of the population, that it often costs more to buy larger clothes, and that attractively designed clothes often aren’t available for larger people.

I only experience this problem a fraction of the time, and I know there are people who struggle with it a lot more. But I’m not sorry I said something. I’m glad I didn’t give that store any money or let them make me feel bad about my body. And I try now to pay attention to this, to buy clothes from places that offer a full range of sizes, because even if I can fit something, I don’t want to support stores that are leaving out lots of other people. I don’t do that perfectly, but it’s a battle I want to choose.

***

I’m 16, stocking shelves at the bookstore where I work. An older man starts asking me questions. Where’s the religion section? Where’s the biography section? Have I heard of this author? Have I heard of that author?

At some point, my spidey sense starts to tingle. This dude is creepy. He’s leading me deeper into the store, cornering me in the back. I leave and go back to stocking shelves. He finds another reason to ask me questions. He lingers in the aisle watching me.

Finally, he speaks up. “I find you very attractive,” he says.

And there are so many times in my life when I’ve frozen in the presence of men, especially predatory ones, but this time the feeling that surges through me is contempt. My head snaps up. With my nose ring and nerdy glasses and thrift store clothes I can’t believe this dude can’t guess that I’m in high school. “I find you very old,” I shoot back, and he flees.

How many times in my life have I wished for that same fire! But too often I’ve been poisoned by the feeling that I have to be nice and gentle, only to endure all types of creepy and aggressive behavior. I am the person who remembered to say please when asking the man trying to masturbate on me in the movie theater to go do that somewhere else. I wish I chose my battles more often in this venue, and that I spared people’s feelings less. I’d be better at defending myself if I did.

***

For a lot of my life, I’ve been known for my patience. But I don’t want to be known for that, because too often patience has made me take a raw deal. It made me stay in a miserable marriage, endure a bad situation at work for literally years, put up with all sorts of behavior that I shouldn’t have to put up with.

On a smaller scale, but one that still matters, I’m that person who winds up taking on lots of unpaid work, serving as de facto counselor in every group I join, driving people to the airport at 4 am because I can’t figure out how to say no.

It’s not that I want to be unkind. It’s just that when everyone around me is admiring my martyrdom and self-sacrificing nature, that’s a good time to look at why the hell I’m sacrificing myself so much.

So the point of all this is that, for me, I want choosing my battles to mean choosing to fight more, not less, to speak up rather than to restrain myself.

The Betas' Lament

by Jean Roberta

[Scene: twelve white guys sitting on folding chairs in a circle, looking uncomfortable.]

First Guy: I’ll start. My name is John Green, and I’m a beta male.

Second Guy: No you’re not, man! You’ve just been beaten down when you were too young to know how to fight back. If your girlfriend in high school dumped you to go out with some hotshot football player, is that your fault? I bet you could show her a better time than he could. Am I right?

[All the guys grunt their agreement after glancing very quickly at First Guy’s crotch.]

Second Guy [realizing the dangerous path he is on]: I mean, I’m not gay or anything. I’m just saying.

Third Guy: I can’t get a job because of all these refugees who’ll work for two cents per hour.
[All the guys grunt sympathetically.]

Fourth Guy: It’s not just refugees. Let’s call it what it is. Niggers and spicks and chinks and fuckin Indians are taking our jobs.

First Guy: Whoa! Watch your language, man.

Third Guy: Yeah. I mean, I know what you’re saying, but you can’t call people degrading names nowadays.

Fourth Guy: Why not, if they taking our jobs? And I didn’t even mention the women. They’re all hiring nannies to raise their kids so they can have “careers.”

Fifth Guy: We can’t even get laid any more because if we make a move it’s called “rape.”
[Several guys nod their heads vigorously, while some look more uncomfortable than before.]

First Guy: It’s not really rape if she wants you.

Fifth Guy: But they call it that! Some of them even say we have a “rape culture.”

First Guy: Women who want sex don’t call it rape.

[All the other guys stare at First Guy.]

While the Angry Men’s Group ponders First Guy’s comments, let me introduce you to two characters in an early story of mine, “When Less Is More.” (This story is still available in my collection, Obsession, from Renaissance Publishing.)

Alighieri, who preferred to be known by his family name because of its long history, was awakened by the late-afternoon sunlight that carelessly penetrated the olive-green burlap curtains of his bedroom. Like melted butter, the light poured itself over Spondee’s blonde elf-locks as she stretched a white arm across Alighieri’s darker back. She preferred to be known as Dee, and preferred not to be known as the child of two much-published members of the English Department in the local university. “You awake?” her man growled tenderly.

“Mmm,” she smiled, admiring the discreet muscles in his chest as he rose on his elbows. The couple had spent the whole weekend eating, fucking and sleeping, and they were now as mellow as old wine.

“I want to watch the BBC version of Twelfth Night on the TV in the front room,” the host informed his guest, “and I want you to lie across me.” Dee sat up as gracefully as a dancer. “Don’t put your clothes on,” he added.

Dee was pleased because she loved being naked in the daytime.

She didn’t, however, like complacent men. “I must really enjoy your company,” she teased him. “I’m missing the women’s floor hockey.” The young man couldn’t think of a witty comeback for that so soon after waking up, so he wisely held his tongue.

Soon Alighieri, who had the dark beard and chest hair of a werewolf, was seated on his cool leather sofa with Dee stretched across his lap. His hands rested promisingly on the two firm globes of her bottom as her nipples brushed the leather upholstery while she adjusted her head and arms into a comfortable viewing position.

“Now you see,” he explained, continuing their previous discussion, “a position like this isn’t hard to arrange, and it contains so many possibilities. There’s so much I could do to you.”

Dee snorted. “If that scared me,” she asked him logically, “would I lie here?”

“Mighty woman warrior,” he acknowledged, almost sounding respectful. “But you know I would never really hurt you.”

“You know I’d get back at you if you did,” she countered.

Like several of the other beta males discussed here lately, Alighieri is a nerd, and he feels as if this is the logical consequence of being the distant descendant of a famous writer in the Italian Renaissance. Dee, on the other hand, is a proud rebel against academic parents.

Alighieri keeps making moves that he hopes will give him a dominant position in the relationship, and Dee keeps making counter-moves. He can’t complain about a lack of sex, but she always keeps him off-guard.

By the end of the story, he has reached an epiphany: he cares more about her than she does about him, and that is a problem with no solution.

While writing this story, I really felt for Alighieri. I wished I could give him a happier ending, but that would have felt artificial. He’s creative, he’s intellectual, he’s attractive, and I probably would have been glad to meet him in my youth, but he doesn’t fit Dee’s concept of a “real man,” and therefore he is bound to lose her eventually.

If Alighieri existed off the page (and surely there is someone like him in the real world), I hope and pray that he will learn to be philosophical about the disappointments of life and the apparently irrational nature of taste: every person wants what s/he wants, even if this makes no sense to anyone else.

I hope Alighieri won’t join the Angry Men’s Group and complain that women in general have ruined his life, along with all the other members of “minority groups” who no longer know their place. I really hope Alighieri doesn’t start asserting White Pride (he’s barely white, but logic doesn’t seem to be highly visible in these groups) and proposing to bring back slavery, or genocide. I can only hope.

Question for Discussion: Which guy in the group do you think has the best sex life?

Breaking the Barriers of Imagination

By Annabeth Leong

“You can’t be Luke Skywalker,” my cousin informed me. “You’re a girl, so you have to be Leia.”

I remember being confused by this, though I don’t remember the logic I used in my argument. As an adult, I would explain my confusion this way: none of us had Jedi powers, and yet it was possible for us to pretend to be Jedi. None of us flew spaceships or had light sabers or blasters, and yet we could pretend we did. None of us lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and yet that wasn’t stopping our flight of fancy. None of us were wookies, and yet one of my cousins was pretending to be Chewie.

Given the staggering acts of imagination already involved, why couldn’t I also imagine myself to be Luke, who happened to be a boy? Couldn’t I be girl Luke? Or couldn’t I be boy Luke for the course of this game of make-believe?

“No,” my cousin said, in response to whatever version of this I managed as a young child. “You’re a girl, so you have to be Leia.”

Leia. Donut hair head Leia. Not a person with a lightsaber. In fact, by this logic, there were no people with light sabers whom I was allowed to be.

It may sound silly, but it was one of my childhood’s deep hurts, a warning shot about all the things being a girl was going to mean for me, all the ways it was going to limit me and keep a lightsaber out of my hands.

I am a person inclined by nature to obey rules, though you might not guess it from who I am today. So, once I acquiesced to my cousin, I acquiesced in general. I never tried to dress up as a boy again.

Until (drum roll, please) last Saturday night, when I went to a costume party dressed as Illidan Stormrage, the part demon part night elf antihero from World of Warcraft (and star of the current Legion expansion).

The way I see it now, as an adult, I don’t eat demon hearts to gain power, though I can pretend to. I don’t have bat wings or horns. I didn’t tear my eyes out in the middle of a maddening apocalyptic vision, nor did I regain my sight through the use of dark magic. I don’t know how to fight with two fel-infused warglaives, and I don’t know how to fly. Given all these things, the smallest part of the leap of imagination here is that Illidan’s preferred pronoun is “he” and mine isn’t.

I can’t tell you how powerful I felt dressing as him. Some of it was that this costume freed me from the sexy/non-sexy dichotomy that seems to overshadow efforts to put on a character as a woman. I wasn’t dressing attractively or unattractively. I was dressing as Illidan, as a person who puts power above all else (and who gains a weird but largely irrelevant sex appeal in the process).

One of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve played with gender is that part of what I feel while using she/her/hers is a constant sense of my sexiness or lack thereof defining me. It’s interesting and important as a woman (and as a society) to think about how to step out of that. It’s also wild to step into another gender, even just for a costume, and feel that change and fall away. (That’s my sense of this thing—your mileage may vary).

The other part of the power, though, wasn’t about Illidan. It stretched all the way back to that time I tried to be Luke. When I bound my breasts and put on a muscle shirt printed with tattoos to match Illidan’s, I felt like I finally had an answer for my cousin, three decades later. You say I can’t be Luke? You’re wrong. I can.

I’m not exactly sure if I was girl Illidan or if I was stepping into the role of boy Illidan or nonbinary Illidan or something else. That matches another part of what I’ve learned in my timid attempts to play with gender. Once I step outside the lines, I’m not always sure where I’m putting my feet. Not all questions need to be answered immediately, though, and what mattered most was how good I felt in my costume, how strong.

I said in a comment earlier in this topic cycle that I think one reason Halloween has historically been important to queer people is that it gives you a chance to step outside societal lines, and it eases some of the consequences for doing so. That’s certainly true for me, to this day. I’m not sure where I’m going with gender explorations, but dressing as Illidan Stormrage gave me a relatively safe way to do things I’d been too scared to do when it wasn’t Halloween.

Standing Up for What I Like

by Annabeth Leong

When I look up “guilty pleasure” on Google, I get this result: “something, such as a movie, television program, or piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.”

Despite my tendency toward guilt, I reject the concept of the guilty pleasure. I believe in owning what I like. When I stand up for that, I’m standing up for myself.

It interests me that this definition is so focused on cultural products (movies, TV, and music). My first association with “guilty pleasure,” probably thanks to advertising, is chocolate. I’ll talk about food first and then get to culture.

So, I have been studying Danish for the past six months or so (I am planning a trip to Copenhagen). In the course of that, I’ve encountered a lot of word lists, and these often turn out to be unintentional packages of cultural assumptions. I was studying a list of words labeled “Food,” and suddenly found myself learning a lot of Danish words that I personally would have filed under “Religion:” “temptation,” “sinful,” “guilt.” I was in a very practical mindset—I wanted to learn food words so that I can order things in restaurants when I get to Copenhagen—and so the intrusion of these moralizing words really rubbed me the wrong way. A chicken sandwich isn’t temptation, it’s a piece of food. Neither is a piece of chocolate sinful.

I think it is a sickness in our culture that we’re putting these religious words onto the act of eating. Health and morality are becoming conflated, and health is taking on a twisted form in the process. For example, there seems to be a widespread belief that you can tell whether someone is healthy by looking (for example, by judging whether or not the person is fat). That, however, is scientifically incorrect. I’ve read many studies about how thin people sometimes have trouble being taken seriously by doctors who assume that they are fine because they’re thin. On the other side of things, there are plenty of fat people who are healthy in all kinds of measurements (cardiovascular health, etc), eat well, and exercise.

A little over a year ago, I got very sick with vertigo and lost 30 pounds in about a month. While visiting my doctor to talk about my illness, I mentioned the weight loss because I was concerned about it. A drop that sudden seemed like it might be dangerous in some way. His only response was to say that he wished he could get vertigo, too! That, for me, was a powerful illustration of how twisted our culture has gotten about food and weight.

There are some great books on this subject. One that I’d recommend is Linda Bacon’s Health at Every Size. Bacon talks about the importance of listening to your body when eating.

There is nothing inherently wrong with eating ice cream. It’s probably not a good idea to eat when you’re not hungry because that hurts, but if you wait until you’re hungry I don’t see what’s wrong with eating whatever you want (unless you have a disease such as diabetes). I like a wide variety of foods—from french fries to kale to hot wings to lentils to chocolate to chia seeds and beyond. I wouldn’t call any of them a guilty pleasure.

I spent so much time on food because it’s of great concern to me that there’s so much misinformation and moralizing out there about it. It bothers me that people feel so free to shame each other over food, body size, health, and everything related, and I feel that comes up even in supposedly benign phrases like “guilty pleasure.” I have been stunned by food packages that say things like, “Great taste without the guilt!” I am disturbed that the ideas of great taste and guilt have been so closely married.

I also wanted to talk about culture, though. It’s worth thinking about why I might call certain things guilty pleasures, and why I reject that.

At one point in my life, I might have called reading romance novels a guilty pleasure. I snuck them in the bookstore where I worked, but never had the courage to come out and purchase one. And that’s very much because of the definition I quoted up top—my idea that romance novels weren’t held in high regard.

But why weren’t they? I bought stacks of pulpy science fiction and fantasy novels and felt absolutely no guilt about doing so. It wasn’t a writing quality issue because I wasn’t ashamed of reading poorly written speculative fiction.

Honestly, I think sexism is the answer here. Romance novels are for the most part written by women, and as such they have the reputation of being trashy, unrealistic, and stupid. Some of them certainly are—but so are some of those science fiction books I was reading, too.

When I started to get wise to that, I realized how important it was for me to stand up and claim what I liked as a smart person and as a woman. I made myself go to a brick and mortar store and buy a stack of romance novels (until then, I’d only been willing to buy them online or through e-readers). The first time I did it, I felt foolish and ashamed. I followed up by reading the books in public, on an airplane, at a tech conference. I noticed how that made me feel. I made a point of doing these things until I stopped feeling weird about them.

If I’m going to read it, I’m going to own that I read it. If someone tries to make me feel guilty about it, I have a lot of questions for them.

Then there’s music. I identified as a goth or as a cool kid for a lot of my life, and as such I never listened to pop music. When I was getting divorced, though, I went through a period of exploration, questioning why I did or didn’t do various things, why I identified in various ways, and so on. In the process, I discovered that I loved Kesha. Immediately, I noticed people trying to shame me for listening to her music, which they perceived as shallow or lowbrow. Again, I asked myself why. You’re not going to tell me that every Bush or Foo Fighters lyric is deep and meaningful, and yet I never felt shamed for listening to those bands… Interesting.

So again, I decided to stand up and own that I liked this. I used to tell people that Kesha made my spirit music. I went to see her at Lupo’s in Providence, at the very first concert where she headlined. I saw her again on her Warrior tour—twice, actually—and bought VIP tickets the second time. I came out covered in blue and gold glitter and felt amazing because that’s how it feels to embrace your real interests without fear. I wear her shirts proudly. That’s not a guilty pleasure at all.

(As a side note, Kesha is of even greater importance right now because of the horrible situation she’s involved in with the producer “Dr. Luke.” She is fighting against sexual harassment, abuse, predatory contracts, you name it. I absolutely believe that dismissing her and her music as lowbrow or silly contributes to an environment where the concerning details of her case aren’t taken seriously. Kesha’s art has meant so much to many people, including myself, and she’s being very brave in a situation where there’s a serious power imbalance. It feels more important than ever to refuse to accept any shame in relation to her work.)

Confessions of a Sociable Hermit

by Jean Roberta

Writing this post has been a challenge. Maybe it’s because I always post after Annabeth, whose posts tend to express startling but authentic emotions in carefully-chosen words. How to follow that?

Connecting with other people has also been a challenge for me, although some of them (including my spouse, Mirtha, who has known me intimately for over 25 years) tell me I have a knack for it, especially at social gatherings. Small talk: I do that.

Maybe it’s because, according to some schools of astrology, I have a “cuspal” personality: born early in the sign of Virgo and therefore an introvert, I show traces of Leo, the performer of the zodiac. I do like performing, and therefore my long teaching career hasn’t felt like torture, as one of my fellow graduate students described it to me some time in the early 1980s.

This person was one of those with whom I didn’t really connect. I could sense her anguish at feeling pressured to perform for an audience of students when she only wanted to be a lifelong scholar doing research, and writing articles on literature. I wished I could have found a way for her to do that exclusively and get paid for it, but alas, I was not in charge of the Ivory Tower or any other corner of the world.

I understand that most people have a wound of some sort, whether hidden or openly displayed, and that I usually can’t help anyone else beyond acknowledging what they have shown me. In several cases, I’ve been aghast when the person I’ve been trying to console decides that their pain is my fault, or the fault of a whole demographic to which I belong (women, old women, mothers/parents, white folks, Americans by any definition, queers, feminists, leftists, the smart-ass, phony, intellectual class).

In too many cases, I have tried to move the earth while standing on it. An angry person in my life (my late ex-husband, each of my blood relatives, to various degrees) has demanded acknowledgement, an apology or some help from me. They have demanded that I make amends by confessing to something I didn’t do, as far as I know (which means that if I did it, I must be really delusional). They have pointed out how selfish, dishonest and unreasonable I am. To keep the peace, I have vaguely admitted that I have been self-centred, like all other people I have ever met. I have apologized for giving the wrong impression. This confession is never enough.

I suspect that after I have left this world, some of the people who thought they knew me will feel cheated: I have escaped without paying for my crimes, once again. They will still be in pain, and they will still believe I am the perpetrator. How could I get my work published, so many times, when they haven’t? How could I be relatively healthy when they aren’t? How did I hang onto a job that pays a living wage when so many others are chronically unemployed? Why am I not being roasted over a slow fire in Hell? (I assume that a fundamentalist Christian version of the afterlife for sinners is not real. I could get a rude awakening in my eternal sleep.)

In a recent guest appearance on OWN (the Oprah Winfrey television channel), Susan Sarandon tactfully discussed several of her failed past relationships by saying that some people, including herself, try in their innocent youth to overlook huge differences between themselves and their Significant Others, but such deal-breakers always destroy the relationship, sooner or later.

I had some great sex with men when I was younger, and I remember the thrilling discovery that this is one service that most men are happy to provide for women – and most of the men I knew were more generous and considerate in bed than anywhere else. Unfortunately, every live person has to get out of bed some time, and that was when the double-binds began closing in. If I didn’t keep a clean-enough apartment (or I wasn’t willing to clean the digs of the guy who had invited me in), I was considered a slob. If I immediately began cooking and cleaning, I was apparently trying to manipulate him into a suffocating domestic arrangement. If I was attending university, I was pretentious. And in any case, I was a girl, so in the eyes of a male observer, my plumbing gave me a kind of biological stupidity which I could never overcome.

If I had just had mind-blowing sex with my current partner, I was a pathological slut. And when the criticism began driving me away, I was told that I was fickle, unstable, prudish, frigid. And an ugly dog on whom the guy should never have wasted his time.

Like Susan Sarandon, I think I have developed some common sense re other people since I was young and unreasonably hopeful. I no longer expect to get along well with people who have nothing in common with me, and especially with those who express a grudge against my “type,” however they define it, and expect me to agree with them.

In the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by the compliments I get from anonymous students on the evaluation forms that are always handed out at the end of a semester. I am overwhelmed because – no matter how many compliments I’ve had from students before – I always find them irrational to some degree. Most of the courses I teach are mandatory for most students, and many of them have learned (are learning) English as adults. Many students dread the class, and with reason. I teach grammar and poetry, both of which are unpopular with undergraduates in general. Yet I have been told, over and over, that I am hugely popular with students. At the same time, I never feel a cool breeze from any of my colleagues, who sometimes invite me to lunch and ask for my advice. It seems I was born to be a star in a small corner of the sky.
-----------------------

Imagination FAIL!

Dear fancy schmancy digital art magazine to which I am subscribed,

Sexy = half-naked female.

FAIL! This is the message you have been putting out consistently since I first became a subscriber and with this month's issue, you have once again seriously disappointed me. I have been a loyal buyer of your magazine ever since the fourth issue. I was blown away by the amazing artwork and tutorials on digital art packed in each issue. Never before had I seen a magazine dedicated to sci-fi, fantasy and horror 2D digital art. You were the first, the best, the most unique computer graphics and I just had to have you!

Pin-up art = even more half-naked female (but never any males).

FAIL AGAIN! When I received this month's issue in the mail, I could only roll my eyes and try not to gag. A whole issue devoted to female pin-up art? Why? Don't you people already publish enough images of sexy gals using big guns/swords to tear apart the bad guys? Why do you insist on doing this? Why do you cling to the idea that only half-naked women make for good art subjects? Science fiction, fantasy, and horror consist of so much more! Like aliens and hunky men in spandex and rocket ships and hunky men in leather and unicorns and hunky men in tights and monsters and did I mention hunky guys in loin clothes! Yeah, occasionally you publish a cover with a cool dragon on it, and there was that one time you put a man on the cover. Remember that issue? It was a samurai, dressed from head to toe in armor. The very next issue, my subscriber's copy showed up with a cover image of a buxom blond in a too-tight t-shirt canoodling with a robot and on the inside your editor crowed to high heavens about how groundbreaking you'd been by putting a guy in full armor on the cover just the month before. NOT! Throwing me one image of a guy in armor does not equal groundbreaking when the ground is already littered with images of half-naked women in seductive poses. Seriously, why don't you get this?

I don't know what your problem is, fancy schmancy digital art magazine. It's not like you don't have plenty of women on staff. Even your current editor, is female. Yet your female contributors consistently put out sultry images of women with distorted proportions and barely-there wardrobes and not once do they give me a hot guy in leather pants or a loin cloth. In all the time I've been subscribed to your magazine, and I can only recall one -- yes, just one -- image of a sexy male. It was a reader contribution, a lovely piece done in art nouveau style. Why don't we see more of that? For that matter, why did you limit your pin-up issue to just women? Why not show us a few images of male pin-ups? Surely you can't tell me such a thing doesn't exist.

Don't get me wrong. I love the technical information in your magazine. Seeing how such amazing artists put together beautiful pieces of digital work is a real learning experience, and one I am willing to pay good money for. But even your technical articles aren't free of gender bias. The series of articles you did on anatomy for artists tended to focus on female anatomy to the exclusion of males. Hell, you even did an article on animal anatomy, but I do not recall you doing an article explaining the very important physical differences in male and female human structure.

Are you afraid of losing readers if you include pictures of men? Is that what the problem is? Because let me tell you, you're about to lose this reader right now. The time is coming for me to decide whether or not to re-up my subscription to your magazine. Honestly, I'm torn over whether I should spend the money. You're not cheap, you know that. And while I love learning about digital art, I hate being constantly snubbed and insulted. The last time I wrote you guys a letter on this matter, I sent it in and you did publish it, but nothing came of it, not even a direct answer from your editor. This time I can't be bothered to contact you directly, because I know you're only going to do two things -- Jack and shit.

One of these days, there are going to be enough artists out there who have grown tired of the never-ending titty-parade, and these artists are going to come together and start to produce meaningful works of male pin-up art. In fact, these artists will be recognized as pioneers in the pin-up genre, and eager fans like me will finally get what they've been clamoring for all along -- images of sexy man wang on a monthly basis for a reasonable subscription cost. Hell, maybe I'll even join them. I think I've learned enough from your schmancy fancy magazine to put together a hottie or two...

Whaddya think?

Sincerely,

Helen

*****

And that's it for me folks, my final mad feminist rant here on OGG. It's been wonderful fun, but changes in my workload have required me to move on. I'll miss making my weekly post here, but don't worry. The absolutely fabulous Kathleen Bradean will be joining OGG next week. She'll be appearing here on Tuesdays and Michelle Houston will be taking over my spot on Fridays. If you miss me, you can always find me over at www.cynicalwoman.com or at www.heatflash.libsyn.com. Thank you all for reading, and I'll see you around!