Modeling Clay

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

When I was in college, one of my best friends made a middle-class salary from part time modeling. I tried out for it, but I was turned down, because I was a little short. Mind you, this was Portugal in the eighties, and I was five seven and a size seven, which means in every group of women I was usually the tallest by a head. Except when I was with this particular friend, who was half Italian (from the German border) and who was six feet tall and blond.

The person that they wanted on the runway, selling clothes to Portuguese women had in fact nothing to do with Portuguese women.

In fact, considering that some of the models modeling men’s clothes are women, (and very oddly vice-versa) I’d guess that most of the models on runways today have nothing to do with men.

Of course being rejected for the job, immediately made me feel worthless and ugly and totally destroyed my life.  Also, another thing that destroyed my life, and the reason I’m living in a cardboard box under a bridge is the fact that I looked at that runway and saw no one that looked like me.

So I knew I’d never amount to anything, right?

Which brings us to models of another kind. Role models.

I’m not going to look for it, but last week an article from the Telegraph caught my eye. It was about how Britain now has some sort of minister/secretary/whatever for science. And she’s a woman. This will immediately (implied, to great rejoicing) increase the numbers of women/girls/female creatures in all branches of science.

I don’t know what to say. Except maybe W(inning) T(he) F(uture) people?

What is this obsession with role models and with someone you can identify with in all walks of life and in literature too?

And no, btw, I don’t think that having a woman in charge of science something or other will result in hordes of people of vaginitude storming the halls of science. Seriously – how would that work?

Kid, playing with dolls on carpet. Looks up. Sees adult woman giving boring speech. Sees that she’s minister/secretary for science something or other. Puts doll down. “Mom, you must give me a test tube set, for I now know that because bureaucrats do science stuff, and one of them is a woman, I too can do bureaucratic science stuff! Forget the test tube, buy me a rubber stamp.”

We’re assaulted with this type of strange magical thinking at all levels.

Girls need role models.  Minorities need role models.  People don’t read because there’s no one like them in the books. If I look around an organization and everyone there is blond and tall, they’re putting me down, because I’m not, and now I know I’ll never be successful.

Because totally what counts is if people match me on the outside.  Well, it is what is important if I want to borrow their clothes a lot.  For other things… not so much?

In school they used to tell us we needed more women teachers so girls would have role models. Now, of course, no one says anything about the dearth of male teachers.

In the same way, we’ve been told ad nauseum that we needed more women heroes in books, so that girls could aspire to being heroic. No one is saying anything about the complete dearth of male anything in books these days. Instead they say “boys don’t read.”

So, let’s talk about reading and role models in books.

When I was little I was very aware of male and female stories. Male stories (often swiped from my brother) were about adventures and exploration, about killing the bad guys or at least hurting them very badly. They were fun. Female stories were about friends and feelings and oh, my heavens, clothes. I could enjoy those too, in a certain frame of mind. Not all of them. I never got the thing with the bullfighters and mourning them forever.

However, I really liked, oh, Tom Sawyer (a boy book); The Prince and the Pauper (an in between book); Tarzan (boy books); The Countess of Segur (Girl books, and btw, dealing with surprisingly modern themes for fairytales, including spouse abuse); The Adventures of Captain Morgan (boy books); The Little Princess (Girl book.)

That last one, btw, could have been a boy book too, but my brother hated it with a burning passion. I think it was because it’s your classical Cinderella story and there’s a lot about how she was mistreated and then rescued from it all because she was deserving. I loved it for the adventure and the stealth involved in bringing the happy ending about.

What I’m trying to say is this – in my head at a very young age, I classified books as “boy” or “girl,” but it rarely had anything to do with the sex of the protagonist. What it had to do with was with the feel of the book and the virtues it relied on.

I don’t remember once – not once – thinking I needed a role model in a book, or thinking (even) that there must be someone like me in the book for me to enjoy it. Heck, Captain Morgan hated a lot of things, but he hated Portuguese most of all. He set fire to their ships and put them to the sword. Reading the books (mind you, by then I was 12) I thought “okay, it makes a certain sense since he’s a dedicated anti-slaver and at that time Portuguese ran slave ships. Also, you know, nations have disagreements. He was English and hated the Portuguese. These were imaginary Portuguese. No real Portuguese were harmed in the making of this book, and I certainly hadn’t been harmed.

The Three Musketeers (a boy book) held forth that Frenchmen were the pinnacle of civilization. Well, they would. They were French. It didn’t make me like them any the less.

But, you’ll say, what about the virtues girls are supposed to learn from books? Should these be masculine virtues?

I think that learning to be good to those who are weaker; kind to those in need; self-restrained; logical; protective which are the virtues those books embodied don’t hurt women. What about the more female-like books? Well, they taught the same virtues, except that you did all of that while in snazzy clothes, something I don’t exactly object to either.

The only difference I see is that women in real life tend to be “no holds barred” fighters, while books for men tend to teach restraint, more than books for women do

Restraint is usually the better road.

I don’t understand the idea that in books; in positions of power; in professions you need to see someone like you to make sure you can go there. Perhaps this is odd in me? Even if there were no woman writers, I’d still want to be a writer. The relative dearth (not complete, but relative) of women writers in her class didn’t hurt Jane Austen after all.

And I’ve loved books where the voice character was a very heterosexual male. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress comes to mind.

You see, as far as I’m concerned, books exist for one reason: to make it possible for me to experience a narration/life/point of view from behind someone else’s eyes instead of my own.

Story? Nah. I can watch story on a screen. But watching story is not the same as living it, as feeling sweat drip, as having that itch behind your knee just as you’re going into battle. Only books can let you live it.

Which is why the obsession with “having one of me” in a book (and its mirror image of having to be a certain race/sex/orientation to write about that) is maddening. If I wanted to stay locked behind my eyes, dude, I wouldn’t read books.

Are there really people so narcissistic that they just want to read about themselves, forever?

Or are they looking for reinforcement and idealization. “Look, that’s me on the stage, and I’m six feet tall and blond.”

Perhaps that’s why the modeling industry in Portugal, in the eighties, loved my friend. Or perhaps it was because she made the clothes look good.

And perhaps there are really people who love seeing themselves reflected mirror-like on the books they read. Or perhaps – perhaps – this is all nonsense and people just like characters that engage them and carry them along, no matter what they look like/are like.

And perhaps the obsession with making sure there’s someone for the reader (particularly women, for which I think we should feel insulted. Do they think we lack imagination?) to identify with by mirroring what we think these readers are is a peculiar insanity of the elites.

Like the idea that having a woman science “minister” will immediately make little girls forget everything and want to be scientists.

Because if all the push in schools, in the media, in stories, can’t make them do it – yeah, sure – the bureaucrat with a science title will surely bring about utopia.

 

304 thoughts on “Modeling Clay”

  1. Data point of one: My son was working himself through the entire Hardy Boys series book by book. He’d read one a week or so. Then I gave him book’s about E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter. His appetite for reading is now ten times what it was before and he will read every one of these books that he can get his hands on. He calls the Hardy Boy’s books “junk” and doesn’t understand why he was so into them before. He wishes he’d known about these other books sooner.

    Here’s my question: Why are these books some kind of forgotten secret? When did this type of character become verboten, because it looks like it’s been systematically erased…. Is there some kind of conspiracy between publishers, book stores, and teachers? I mean I couldn’t help but notice that the local library had Darkover, but not this stuff. Seriously, what is going on here?

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    1. I think one of the more mundane reasons much of the early science fiction and fantasy canon is underrepresented is that it was a niche genre from the perspective of librarians for such a long time. Growing up, anyone that wasn’t a heavy sci-fi fan knew nothing of the genre. Most of the libraries I grew up in in the 80s had an eclectic and recent sci-fi section, as if the people buying the books had no idea what to put in besides Tolkien, Asimov and Clarke, so they picked whatever looked trendy at the time. “Old school pulp novels? Nobody would be interested in those.” Even as the genre has become more mainstream, the older works are still being neglected in favor of Tolkien and the YA fantasy / supernatural romance / dystopian novels.

      Although as I write this, another contributing factor may be that early sci-fi tends to be represented in the educational system by H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury as those are ‘educational’ (read: politically correct). The more entertaining, less ‘educational’ works tend to get swept under the rug.

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        1. My path to being a voracious reader started with the big illustrated Time-Life books on WWII. Afterwards I picked up anything non-fiction on the war, starting with a lot of the stuff that falls into the already-mentioned ‘adventure, action and heroism’ category, true stories about the Commandos and the Marines at Guadalcanal and the like. I remember being stuck on vacation for a while at an aunt’s house, and while she didn’t have anything historical, buried amongst the romance novels were a few World War 2 spy fiction books (I remember Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone) which had the action and adventure and heroism. After some time of that, it was “if you like that, you’ll probably like…” for some of the tamer James Bond stories and other early Cold War spy fiction, and then on to The Hunt For Red October and Red Storm Rising and other then-modern techno-thriller stories. And, from there, someone said “if you like that, you’ll probably like…” and handed me a copy of Starship Troopers…

          Anecdotally, this seems to reinforce the ‘boys tend to like action, adventure and heroism’ route. And my bookshelf still gets new non-fiction World War 2 books (though they tend to be more thorough histories) alongside the new Sci-Fi.

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    2. I can’ t tell you why, but I agree. The old stuff is more vibrant as well, they tend to be whiz-bang stories.
      And if your son has access to an e-reader he can find a lot of those authors on Gutenberg.org, they have a good collection of old Analog and If stories.
      By the way, not all the stuff there is great, some of it is forgotten because it is not great.

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      1. Will note that while e-readers like Kindle and Nook are more bookish, all those Gutenberg e-books display just fine on your computer screen. I split my reading about 50/50 between Kindle and desktop.

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      2. That’s the big problem I’ve seen in the Son’s reading lists – there is pretty much no emphasis on action. (He’s currently wading through buckets of gore in Ringo’s Black Tide series.)

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        1. Action is depreciated in literature as oppose to character development. (Do the characters change; if they do, then it’s literature.) (That just popped back into my head from I don’t know how long ago–8th grade?)

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    3. I devoured the Hardy Boys back in 2nd grade and really wish someone had handed me Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, etc. I think part of it is how long ago they were published and part of it is soem *cough liberals* cough *SJW* *cough* hate them for being “Politically Incorrect” and “Insensitive”

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      1. They’d hate the Dumarest books too. I don’t know E C Tubb’s politics, but he sure doesn’t come off as a liberal. Men are men, women are women. Violence is sometimes neccessary. The bad guys are cyborgs who share a collective mind and wear red. The early Dumarest books are in (rather expensive) e-book editions, but you can still find used copies in bookstores too.

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      2. An interesting aspect of the Hardy Boys books (along with Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Ken Holt, the Bobbesy Twins and others) hinges on their having been constantly re-written for contemporary audiences. As a result we can track the variations in vocabulary, sentence structure and thematic elements over the decades.

        In general, the books in those series became dumbed down generationally.

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    4. Besides what others have said here, I think* there was an effort by later Sci-Fi writers to bring the genre into the mainstream by emulating it. Many of the older writers mentioned how they were seen as pariahs, and I think that many, especially the less successful of them, thought they could get themselves out of the ghetto by doing so.

      * My opinion only. My opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of this blog (how does a collection of data have an opinion?), the blog owner, reality, or anything imaginable in four-dimensional spacetime. :-)

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      1. Ellison always bemoaned that Sci-Fi was ghettoized and declared that everyone should do what he did and secretly transfer his books into the “fiction” aisle. (as a wannabe librarian I often reflected that if you want people to find your book you shouldn’t put it in a section where no-one looks for it)
        He made a conscious effort to mainstream his books. I’m not sure that he succeeded, but he always wrote all over the place as fiction and SF anyways.
        I wonder if the real mixing of genres was actually from adventure-fiction writers trying to cash in on the ready-made fanbase from SF, and if the Genre Benders in SF ever paced up and down on the rug cussing under their breath when they figured that out

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    5. Why are these books some kind of forgotten secret? When did this type of character become verboten, because it looks like it’s been systematically erased….

      The answer to your first question is embedded in your second question.

      The answer to your second question is that masculinity is being attacked.

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    6. Hardy Boys are what got me into reading, so I’m not going to call them junk. I can’t remember the progression from there… I think Sherlock Holmes short stories and Tarzan. A lot of other kid stuff along the way, like Encyclopedia Brown.

      Then I found some of the Heinlein juveniles and McCaffrey’s Harper Hall books, and my conversion to the Dark Side was complete.

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    7. Why [are such books effectively suppressed among the prog subculture]? Partly because the “visualize whirled peas”/”there’s never a justification for violence” crowd can’t stand ’em. And they talk so purty that others who tag along with that crowd are convinced because they want it to be true; rainbows, y’see.

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    8. Even though they were horribly dated when I read them in the late 70’s, Tom Swift books were a lot of fun. And I was young enough then to believe you could make a robot play tennis with just a few vacuum tubes.

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    9. This reminds me; my kids about 3d grade got turned onto the Lloyd Alexander books by an excellent teacher– The Book of Three, Prydain Chronicles, etc, and that led them into many other exciting books including Conan, Steven King, Philip K. Dick…..

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  2. When I was a kid, I had several role models on TV: Sgt. Harris from Barney Miller; Michael Evans from Good Times; Raj from What’s Happening; Billie from Lou Grant; and John Boy from The Waltons.

    Three black men, one white woman, and a white man. How scandalous! Didn’t I know that role models were supposed to be exactly like me? As a young white male, I couldn’t possibly identify with any of them but the Virginia redneck!

    Ah, but they WERE like me: every one of them was a passionate writer. And that was what inspired me. Fool that I was, I saw them as people, not as demographic groups.

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  3. The theater group I write for has a woman writer just like this. I heard her haranguing a producer a couple of years back about our upcoming show: Because the script for the second (main event) half of the show had no women characters, it was imperative that scripts for the first half be heavy on strong female characters. In addition, the women must be not only ‘strong’ but also ‘sympathetic.’

    Had I been the producer, I would have told her to pound sand. (Pure self-interest; people who tell you what scripts or stories you can present eventually try to tell you what stories or scripts you can write. And I won’t put up with it.) As it happened, the producer she was talking to is a defrocked big-L libertarian and gently told her that, as a principled non-sexist, he pays no attention to gender balance in scripts one way or the other.

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    1. “…as a principled non-sexist, he pays no attention to gender balance in scripts one way or the other.”

      Perfect! I’m stealing that!

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          1. Great article Mary. Libertarianism has a lot going for it but there are points where it fails.

            I always wanted to ask Milton Friedman (one of my heroes) would he be OK with Papa Smurf being used to market crack cocaine on a Saturday morning kids show.

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      3. [after great rustling in the groundling crowd, FlyingMike get pushed forward] Um, OK, that makes this timely – we knew you needed a new official frock, so we Huns, well, gathered appropriate source materials, and well, sewed you this new usaian frock.

        So you are no longer frockless.

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            1. Assuming you mean aiguillette, they’re 3/16-inch (about 4.76 mm) diameter gold colored cords for the service aiguillette; at least according to my old copy of AR 670-1 (Wear and Appearance of the Army Uniform and Insignia–what, it’s digital, it’s not like I lugged one home or something). It’s tied over one should and with a knot hanging down.

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              2. The old-fashioned version ended in a slender metal spike – and the original purpose was to be used in the event that an enemy’s artillery position was overrun – to spike the cannon. Pound the little metal tip of the aigliette into the touch-hole which fired the primitive cannon and thus ruin it, at least temporarily. It was an essential part of an officer’s battle-rattle, back in the day.

                Yes, I paid attention to all those military heritage spots that were broadcast on AFRTS – why do you ask?

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  4. Then again, as a young boy, I wanted to be like Roy Rogers, “Sky” King and any of the Cartwrights. Pity the last – I grew up looking like Hoss.

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    1. As long as you didn’t develop “the Cartwright curse”–all their girlfriends (and Ben’s wife (wives?)) died or married someone else!

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  6. No one is saying anything about the complete dearth of male anything in books these days. Instead they say “boys don’t read.”

    Or that it’s only fair after boys have benefited for millennia.

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    1. Funny that every oppressed minority always cries for equality when what they really want is to turn the tables. Equality be damned, their goal is always to become the oppressors they struggle against.

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      1. Human nature. The ‘get even’ thought process is a strong one, which is why the first laws tend to revolve around how said ‘getting even’ can (and more importantly cannot) be accomplished. “No you can’t kill him because he happened to look at you crosseyed”. The ‘eye for an eye’ was one of those limiting factors. Forgiveness and treating people as well as you, theoretically, would treat yourself are more advanced concepts, ones that a lot of people can parrot but don’t seem to actually grasp.

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      2. I wouldn’t put it quite like that. Every oppressed minority always cries for equality. Some (often small) percentage thereof has the goal to become the oppressors. The SJW’s of every stripe would like to help them.

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          1. I don’t know. But it seems they spend much time trying to oppress, or help other oppress, much of the populace.

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          2. Because there’s not enough real problems in the world (famine, pestilence) and we have slaves (robots, combines and chemically powered plows etc.) to do most of the hard work of surviving (getting enough to eat). So they’ve got all this energy and no useful outlet.

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          3. Cheap moral egoboo. In fact, it’s been shown in the lab that if you give people chances to buy “green” products and then have them play a game for money, they are more likely to lie and cheat at the game. So — by filling their moral quota up that way, they can be less moral the rest of the day.

            Some of the older ones may have been involved in movements that actually had something to do and felt at loose ends — and minus that egoboo — when it was over, so they fudged up an excuse to keep it up.

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      3. Partly a perception problem. “Getting even”, to _feel_ “even” to most people, generally requires in practice getting ahead, which is why arguments escalate.
        Same reason why in making compromises, to actually meet someone halfway you probably have to feel that you’ve gone 2/3 of the way toward their position.

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  7. Why would Captain Morgan hate the Portuguese? The Brits and Portuguese are supposed to be buds. And I don’t think the real Captain Morgan had any real issue with slavery. He hated the Spanish though.

    Regarding “role models”, with the left can’t comprehend is that people are individuals and the only thing social manipulation — which invariable involve major lies at some point — can do is make things worse.

    If someone has something in their head they are going to get it out regardless of their sex or race unless stopped by oppression, and even that’s often not enough.

    Grace Hopper wasn’t stopped and she was living in the “bad old days” before feminism. Heddy Lamarr got a patent for a type of SONAR in 1942.

    Slave women eventually ended up running the Ottoman Empire.

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  9. I love variety. People who are like me and people who are like I would want to be but still similar enough that I could aspire to become like that, those are both nice at times. But then it’s also good to have people who are as different as possible from me (okay, maybe not in their morals if they are the good guys, a big government loving tree hugging vegan lesbian who thinks firearms should be totally banned and generally manages to talk her enemies into submission and other fantasy fulfillment stuff – wrong fantasy for me, that – is maybe not a protagonist I can learn to love, not easily anyway, especially not if she is presented as a paragon of virtue everybody should be like… but give her as the protagonist’s best childhood friend or sister, one the protag is usually more or less exasperated with – and whose attempts to reason the bad guys into submission usually end the way they mostly would in real life – and she might be okay).

    So I do love to read about Tarzan and John Carter, and the white cowboy who needs to save the lone widow from the evil cattle baron, and the black cowboy who becomes a well respected and liked lawman would be great if I could find that book (history section maybe, seems to have happened at least once in real life), the basement dwelling nerd who discovers the big conspiracy online and finally has to start acting in the real world too, the Zulu warrior, the black police woman, the French swordsman… admittedly running across Finnish characters written by non-Finns can be fun (especially since they are often sorta funny to a native Finn :D), as well as finding fat middle aged spinsters who are not just a random walk-in characters to be made fun of, but I have never thought I should start complaining that there are not enough Finnish and spinster characters (not to mention the combination – well, has anybody ever read a book where the positively portrayed protag is a fat middle aged Finnish spinster who works blue collar jobs and keeps cats? See. I am being marginalized and something. *Sniff*).

    But mostly I just want a protagonist I can like, not a whiny loser (unless he shapes up during the story), not an immoral criminal (same thing applies, unless she shapes up during the story and finds her conscience) and not one who is just an observer. I want somebody who acts, and maybe evolves for the better during the story if he didn’t start as plenty good enough already (like John Carter – in the books, in the books!). And I think the traditional alpha male heroes (if that term is still used) do have, in some ways, the most universal appeal, the good old “the women – and presumably the gay men – want him, the men want to be like him”. And maybe to be led by him, not everybody wants to be the boss but if you are one of the, er, born underlings then the idea of maybe being friends with this great leader can become a very nice thing to imagine. :)

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    1. Well, there is Stand Still, Stay Silent, if the webcomic has not killed everybody yet.

      Honestly, you sound like the protagonist of a cozy, or someone about ready to give fairies trouble, or a space colonist.

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      1. Heh. I actually did once find one series of cozys, or close enough, where the protagonist is an older former cleaning lady. Possibly a Swedish author. I no longer remember the names, not the books or author or character, as they were something I found in library several years ago. As far as I remember the one I read wasn’t bad (I know I read just one, I think it really was a series), although I was a bit disappointed because the author had made her a _former_ cleaning lady, she had retired after having won a lottery or something. And she didn’t use her former occupation even once to spy or anything, so the ‘cleaning lady’ part was just something the reader was told about, not something which was used in the stories.

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    2. I think SSSS is either by a half Finn, Half Swede, or a Swede that spent a long time living in Finland.

      As for the desired historical example, Bass Reeves. My knowledge of late nineteenth century lawman of the west is hardly exhaustive, but even I can remember a few off the top of my head.

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      2. Yes, I know I have seen something about a very successful black lawman in the west and thought that the story should be turned into a fiction, it might make a very compelling movie or novel (or both).

        Finn/Swede might also be somebody of the Swedish speaking Finnish minority.

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        1. Yes, I know I have seen something about a very successful black lawman in the west

          Bass Reeves who was appointed U.S. deputy marshal for the Oklahoma Territory by Issac “The Hanging Judge” Parker (real person) of True Grit fame.

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          1. The girl in True Grit may have been inspired by that guy who had his family killed at a similar age, who then became a lawman and hunted the killers down over the course of years.

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        2. Let’s check the author bio on the website:

          ” I’m a Finnish-Swedish lady, born in Sweden… and living in Finland … and now I’m currently living in Sweden again for a little while.”
          http://sssscomic.com/index.php?id=about

          The character Taru Hollola may be a spinster, and there are a fair number of cats in the story.

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    3. Have you read the Mrs. Pollifax books by Dorothy Gilman? The first book is “The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax” and it’s about an elderly lady who finds retirement and old age boring, and decides to apply for work with the CIA. She gets hired as a courier, and has rather more adventure than anyone had expected.

      Amusingly, Emily Pollifax’s career was much longer than I believe Ms. Gilman anticipated–Mrs. Pollifax is an elderly woman when the first book came out in 1966, and she’s still working for the CIA as of the last book in the series, published in 2000. Ms. Gilman died a couple years ago, so the series is complete at 14 books.

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      1. I found the politics noxious when I read them in the 80s. Just like The Cat Who, which my older son loved and devoured at age six/seven, I read them if they were around but hated the politics.

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        1. Do you recall what you thought was noxious about the politics? It’s been a little while since I’ve read the series, but I thought the first half (mid ’60s through ’80s) was spy vs. spy Cold War adventure, with Mrs. Pollifax firmly on the American side of things.

          I don’t recall a particular political bent beyond that; I’m not saying it’s one of my favorite series ever, but I thought the protagonist was interesting, in a Miss Marple meets James Bond sort of way.

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          1. I guess I blew over the politics – a skill I think you have to develop if you’re going to read voraciously. Mostly remember her for getting CIA arms training, becoming a most black belt, and surprising multiple bad guys with it.

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            1. You should have read the Reader’s Digest condensed versions. In that case, they condensed out the stupid bits, as I recall. :) Of course, when Gilman really started going hard left, RD stopped reprinting her books.

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    6. Yeah, there is hardly a man able to enjoy any of those Miss Marple (or, for that matter, V.I. Warshawski or Temperance Brennan) stories. For that matter, the Hercule Poiroit stories are unaccessible to anybody not a Belgian man, nor are Sherlock Holmes’ adventures of interest except to Englishmen.

      Perhaps the advocates of such positions lack the capacity for empathy?

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      1. Well, if you’re a white straight Christian male, you must LIKE non whites, gays, non-Christians, and females or you’re a bigot.

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        1. It’d be weird for a straight male to dislike gays and to dislike females. Who’s left to like then but other males? That sounds rather gay.

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          1. While I think you’re joking, I’ll just say that we have to LIKE characters who aren’t like us.

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            1. While I think you’re joking, I’ll just say that we have to LIKE characters who don’t like us.

              There. Fixored it fer ya.

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  10. I was thinking about this when I went to see the latest Captain America movie during the summer. Now Captain America and I have almost nothing external in common. He’s a boy; I’m a girl. He’s tall; I’m 5 foot 2. He’s blond; I”m dark, going gray. He’s physically fit; I’m a potato. He’s young and beautiful; I’m getting older. But on the inside, Captain America is everything I want to be. His purity of heart drives daggers into my own reluctant virtue. He’s one of my role models.

    Another of my role models is my mother. Externally, we are similar, and becoming more similar as I age. But on the inside, she is my model for what to become. She has always been a person driven by love to give. And as she gets older, she is becoming moreso … doing partial caregiving for 6 people and contributing to her community in other ways also. She has a religious faith that demands helping others and she’s really living it, not just writing a check to charity, not content to rest on her laurels in her elder years … yet you’ll never see her in a novel or screenplay.

    Is that enough diversity in role models? Heh.

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    2. “But on the inside, Captain America is everything I want to be. His purity of heart drives daggers into my own reluctant virtue.”

      Hear, hear! It’s the same way for me, and also with the Legend of Zelda videogames – Link’s dogged determination and courage are something to be aspired to.

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    3. It’s long been understood that dads/daughters and mothers/sons have special relationships. A lot of that is role modelling, not only for the cross-traditional-gender virtues one needs to be a rounded person, but also for desiderata in future mates.
      Part of growing up is becoming independent about picking additional role models.

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      1. Hey! I don’t consider the ‘slept for a long time’ bits canon.

        Cap was first put together during WWII by some folks whose background was not in ‘rights of the accused’. So the depiction of his counter intelligence work against the Axis powers would not pass scrutiny by today’s whiners, assuming they were being fair.

        With the fall of the Axis, the Soviets were right there as an evil power with an aggressive intelligence program. It made as much sense to tell the same sort of counter intelligence Cap stories.

        Then when the commies have the pull to forbid that, they rape the character with the whole ‘the real one was frozen for years’ retcon.

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        2. You may not like Cap’s hibernation, but I think overall it was a good thing. As Coulson says in The Avengers, sometimes what’s needed is old-fashioned. And Cap is a way to get that “corny” stuff about patriotism and loyalty in front of people without having to look ironic and self-deprecating. He really does believe all that “stuff”. It’s unthinkable that he wouldn’t. And accurate portrayals of him nudge the reader or viewer into becoming a little more willing to take it all seriously.

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                1. Yeah, I love the guy. He’s hilarious. I wish I could draw like he does – in the sense of ‘quick sketch = awesome.’

                  I’ve seen his youtube channel. Rhys and I were watching him and seriously, the process could be described as ‘blot, blot, big blot, then dragon.’

                  I ran across this one today and BWA HA HA HA HAHA it made me think of Yama, and Damien Walter, and pretty much every single SJW troll out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if their self image were somewhat like that, privately. (I mean, with them wishing horrible painful violence on those that disagree with them this is NOT a stretch.)

                  It would be remiss of me not to share.

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          2. Now, after generations of Nazi symp cognates raping things to hades and back? Maybe.

            In the fifties or sixties or seventies when they started wrecking things? No.

            If you’d pulled Rogers from hunting Nazi sympathizers in WWII, and dropped him into the WoT, he likely would have been fine to gung ho for everything Bush proposed for fighting the war. One gets the impression that the people doing comics at the time were quite sympathetic to the terrorists, and thought Bush extremely evil.

            Furthermore, they didn’t have the guts to defend the Nazis as they would defend the terrorists, or the rigor to complicate their storytelling with a just depiction of the legal system. (Marvel Civil War and twisting second amendment issues into pretzels to handle them from a civil rights framework.)

            In short, it’d require them to have more credibility than MZB claiming opposition to rape. I’ve no confidence in them.

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        3. Just a note: Stan Lee brought Cap back with the “frozen in ice retcon” long, long, -long- before Marvel even slightly abandoned its strong anti-communist stance of the Silver Age.

          The explanation for the retcon? It’s more that Stan felt that since the Avengers (the original comic) was aimed at little kids reading comics in the early 60s, they wouldn’t no or care about the 50s era stories that hadn’t sold well and had been aimed at an audience that had largely abandoned super-heroes for other genres.

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          1. Iron man was a primary locus of Marvel’s anti-Communism. Early and recurring foes included not only Soviet superspy The Black Widow but the Titanium Man and The Mandarin (although it might well be that he was symbolic of the internal corruption flourishing under Chinese Communist rule.)

            Soviet communism made an occasional appearance in the Fantastic Four in the person of The Red Ghost and his band of apes. Spiderman (esp. under Steve Ditko’s guidance) epitomized the tenets of enlightened self-interest which are required to maintain capitalism crony-free.

            Fin Fang Foom was clearly a metaphor for aggressive SE Asian communism.

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          2. I must concede that point.

            I have to admit that there are very large chunks of comic history that I am largely ignorant of.

            I almost talked myself into a counter argument with the following flaws. It ignored the constraints alternatives would have to meet. It ignored how much of what we know now about how the soviets operated is hindsight.

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        1. And not even that anymore. Marvel’s going to depower him (or might have already done so). Falcon will get the shield and cowl.

          At least for a couple of years.

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    5. ” His purity of heart drives daggers into my own reluctant virtue. He’s one of my role models. ”

      Aristotle observed a long time ago that we like characters who are as good as we are, or somewhat better. While he included more than moral goodness in that, it did include that.

      Explains a bit perhaps about why some people don’t like him.

      Like

  11. Being a devil’s advocate for a moment (I get a nifty prosthetic tail. Don’t judge me!) there is a minor affect I’ve observed in real life — subconsciously, people hire others like them because they feel more comfortable This could be gender, could be culture. So it isn’t so much an individual can’t do the job, it’s the person hiring would rather have someone who can do the job AND is more like them. Not role models, but mental maps. (Has happened to me. In one case I overcame the unconscious bias, in one case I didn’t. Every one in the hiring chain liked me except the top person, and I Just Wasn’t Like The Rest. Och weel, you do what you can.)

    And as for books–I have no problem riding shotgun with someone who doesn’t look like me. I will confess that reading lots of cool Golden Age SF peeved me a bit when NOBODY was like me, and the vast majority of the women were really dumb and clearly there just to be rescued. Occasionally smart, but then they would lapse and sound like June Cleaver and I lost interest. A *bit* of variety is nice.

    Oh, and Pohjalainen — read “Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper. The main character is a dumpy grey-haired academic spinster, and SHE WINS! (Cats were not mentioned. They were on Mars. I don’t *think* she was anti-cat, anyway.)

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    1. perhaps I’m influenced by the fact most women of Latin ancestry hate me on sight? or I’m the exception that proves the rule.
      Weirdly was never bothered by the “lack of people like me” in books. And the Heinlein wife and mother characters always seemed strong to me, perhaps because I read them like the women in my family. And of course, everyone who read Have Spacesuit and knew me at nine, says I WAS PeeWee. (Though my son who didn’t know me at nine had the same insight.)

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      1. Well, the few that didn’t have two-dimensional cookie-cutter girls-to-rescue just made the others more obvious. (I would consider Heinlein mostly outside of Golden Age). Good writers like Schmitz and Piper made me say “waitaminit, why don’t they ALL do that!”

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      3. Different people get inspired by different things based on their circumstances. I once read a piece by someone who was boosted when young by the number of minorities in the Earthsea books. iirc, the individual in question also liked Star Trek in part because of the presence of Uhura.

        Of course, if the article writer hadn’t already had an interest in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, then the presence or lack of minorities would have meant absolutely nothing.

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        1. That’s kind of amusing when one considers that In Earthsea, those of darker-hued skin… are not minorities.

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          1. Yup, she inverted the racial trope, which is not difficult, since all you have to do is change who’s invading whom. Not like real-life didn’t provide configurations of every hue for that. . . .

            The irony of life is that now that she’s revisited Earthsea to haul it into line with later views — the pale-skinned, blond-haired people turn out to have been the ones in the right all along.

            (Don’t read them. Earthsea consists of the first three and no others.)

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          2. That was more or less the point made in the article. Most sci-fi and fantasy back then – at least to the person who wrote the article – automatically seemed to suggest that everyone was white. In Earthsea, not only were there some people who weren’t white, but the vast majority of people weren’t white. It wasn’t just a “token minority” thing. For the writer, it was apparently one of those mental-click moments.

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      4. This is only tangentially related*, but when you mentioned “women of Latin ancestry”, the person that comes to mind is my friend Karen Garcia**. She looks like your classic Latin beauty (straight, dark hair, and a face that wouldn’t look out of place in a Zorro film), while her husband looks like your typical white American. But in fact, Garcia is her married name; she’s from Pennsylvania, while her husband Juan** is from Puerto Rico (and all his siblings are MUCH darker-skinned than he is). It’s always amusing to see them together and to know that if I had had to guess which one was born in Puerto Rico and which one in Pennsylvania, I would have been completely wrong.

        * But since when has that ever stopped a Hun?

        ** Pseudonyms, of course, to protect their privacy.

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    2. I second Omnilingual. I forgot she was a “dumpy grey-haired academic spinster”, but I don’t pay much attention to such things.

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    3. Where did you get the idea that Martha Dane (of “Omnilingual”) was dumpy and grey-haired? [Smile]

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      1. I think it is where Martha is observing the newscaster lady who is young, blonde, and shapely and wryly thinking she is none of these things–which is just as well because the obnoxious schmoozer then leaves her alone in peace to commune with her Martian wordlists ;-D

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        1. If that’s the scene I remember, she also thought the “obnoxious schmoozer” would have paid attention to the reporter even if she looked like the “Wicked Witch of the West”.

          IE that obnoxious guy would do anything to promote his career.

          IIRC there was also the idea that Martha couldn’t advance the schmoozer’s career (and her success might harm his career). [Smile]

          Still, Martha Dane wasn’t concerned about “how she looked” and was more interested in translating Martian. [Smile]

          Oh, considerining the idea of “role models”, I doubt the SJW would consider Martha Dane a “role model”.

          Martha Dane smoked. [Very Very Big Evil Grin]

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    4. As a natural devil’s advocate myself, I completely understand.

      Part of it is that for some people, the ‘mental map’ of ‘people like me’ is confined to gender, skin color, and sexual orientation. Whereas a lot of people these days no longer use that as a mental map, probably because they grew up in a diverse environment and identify with the people they grew up in. The internet also helps; I have no idea what gender, race, creed or nationality the player that has my back in is unless they tell me.

      I attend a con in a major city every year. Often, there are also sports fans from the local pro teams in for games as well. The con-goers, regardless of what they look like, are ‘people like me’ much more so than the sports fans, at least during the con.

      It could also be that for some people, ‘people like me’ is defined by political beliefs…

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      1. When I grew up Finland didn’t have people who didn’t look like me and talk my language, the first time I saw ‘others’, if you use ethnicity as the basis for who is and isn’t, was when I went on my first trips abroad when I was fifteen and sixteen (with family and with my friend’s family, no way my parents’ would have let me go without adults before I turned 18 – and I did go on my first InterRail trip only when I was 20).

        But maybe because of that I was perhaps more aware of the differences between my countrymen as individuals. And since I was odd I came to think of myself first as that, and only secondarily as a Finn. And finding others like myself, well, when they seem to think in similar ways and like similar things what color they happen to be or what their mother tongue is or where they live doesn’t matter all that much (matters a little because different backgrounds do mean there is more of a chance for misunderstandings, but if the geek/nerd/odd culture part is similar enough to mine not all that much).

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      2. I used to be active in fandom. Had a pretty good time, even at Darkover, where you’d think a conservative white male would be made to feel unwelcome.

        I remember, decades ago, a Balticon where one hotel that was being used also had a convention of professional bowlers. Now, anyone accustomed to the Fen in those days would be excused for thinking that those two groups would mix like oil and water, but by midnight you couldn’t tell who’s party was who’s.

        There is almost no such thing as a Mundane. Everybody has their quirks. And anyone who can’t be motivated by the experiences, heroism, struggle, what-have-you of somebody who isn’t their ethnicity and gender is too damaged to be saved anyway.

        Which, sadly, describes most of the GHH/SJW tribe.

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    7. I get a nifty prosthetic tail. Don’t judge me!

      Request denied. Hmmmm… I’d give you a 9.5. Almost perfect, but half a point off because you haven’t found a way to make it swish. I can’t award a to a tail that just hangs there.

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    8. I get a nifty prosthetic tail.

      This heah is a family blog and we don’t condone braggin’ about gettin’ tail, be it prosthetic, prehensile or natural.

      Next time you want to set a GHH afire, remind them that “vagina” is derived from the Latin word meaning “sheath” — that it to say, it’s primary purpose is a place to stuff your sword. So, it would follow that all those who focus on woman as vagina have embodied her as a sheath for some man’s sword …

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  12. Here’s a good example: Guardians of the Galaxy. SJWs were ripping on it for having a male protagonist and for the minority actors in the movie not “being racial representatives” (Do we have an eyeroll smilie? Because I want one right now). Meanwhile, in the real world, the movie was Marvel’s best performer among females. Not to mention all the female Thor fans I’ve met lately.

    Of course, despite what the SJWs want to believe, most women can appreciate a good-looking, heroic guy.

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      2. There was certainly a lot of mmmmmming during the gratuitous shirtless scene in Thor 2.

        You know, if Marvel made Captain America and Thor’s Shirtless Vacation, it would probably be the first film to make $2 billion at the box office. ;-)

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          1. However, in the demands of gender equality, I would also demand a sequel, starring Black Widow, Sif and Jane Foster. ;-)

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              1. Sif is Thor’s wife in the original mythology. Female friend in the movie. Jane Foster is his human love interest in the comics and movie.

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                1. Or another way to put it – Jane Foster is portrayed by Natalie Portman. And Sif is portrayed by the brunette who showed up at an awards ceremony last year wearing a dress that didn’t have a low-cut back – because it had no back at all (the cut of the dress detoured slightly when it reached her rear end to provide the bare minimum of public decency).

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                  2. Ms. Dougan was a forerunner, perhaps, but based on various images it appears that her outfits typically had *something* that started at or about the waist, and proceeded down from there.

                    Jaime Alexander is the actress who plays Sif in the Marvel movies. And she got some attention at the premiere of Thor 2 for her outfit. This is an outfit that was worn in public, so it’s *technically* SFW. But you still might want to be cautious about who’s looking over your shoulder if you take a peek.

                    http://heavy.com/entertainment/2013/11/thor-jaimie-alexander-see-through-dress/1/

                    http://heavy.com/entertainment/2013/11/thor-jaimie-alexander-see-through-dress/2/

                    It’s basically the left and right side of a dress… connected by sheer see-through panels that go all the way from the neck to the hem line.

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            3. You just gave me a flashback to an online spoof sequel to “Brokeback Mountain”, called “The Fur Traders.” Starring Whats-her-name1 and What’s-her-name2.

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              1. I always thought that heiress was a little too flighty for a shrinking violet like Doctor Pym. I also read him as a guy more inclined to like a little ethnicity in his woman; van Dyne was too much of a WASP.

                Given Marvel’s history of ill-conceived pop-culture derivative (Dazzler, Shang-Chi, Rocket Racer e.g.) characters, I wonder how long until they introduce the new super-duo: Social Justice Warrior and her ward, Glittery Hoo-Ha.

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          3. Of the three I like Captain America best. To me Captain America looks like what a superhero should look like. Okay so I have a military kink.

            By the way, does anyone know how Nick Fury lost his eye?

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                  2. Whoever it was didn’t miss, and he’s still here.

                    Clearly, knifing Nick Fury isn’t a good idea even if you DON’T miss.

                    (…. I mistyped that as “Nick Furry.” Oh, please, no.)

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                2. IMO Joel was trying to be funny. [Smile]

                  In the comics, apparently during WWII Nick Fury had a near miss with a grenade which caused minor eye damage which later caused him to go blind in that eye.

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            3. What I want to know is how Nick Fury Jr. lost his eye. Sr. was white, and had been an army noncom in WWII (Sgt. Fury’s Howling Commandos). I don’t remember how HE lost his eye (if I ever knew), but what I want to know is how come his kid has the same problem? It’s not inheritable, unless the Marvel Universe is even weirder than I thought.

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              1. Jr. is the one played by Samuel Jackson? I’d like to know that too. If his father was white then his mother must’ve been very dark.

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                1. The movie Nick Fury is based off of the Nick Fury in the “Ultimate Marvel” comic books. That Fury was made explicitly to look like Jackson (with the actor’s permission), and an agreement was made at the time to give Jackson first shot at Fury if the character was ever used in a movie.

                  Fast forward to Iron Man, and Jackson finally gets his chance. And since lots of people are now more familiar with a black Nick Fury than they are with the original white guy in the mainstream Marvel setting, a decision was made to create the new “Nick Fury Jr.” character to replace the original Nick Fury.

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              2. I know who the character is even though I’ve never seen him. Did they ever show him *with* the eye? Or did he have the eyepatch when he was introduced?

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        2. _Avengers Beach Party_. Beef- AND cheese-cake in abundance.

          And I really didn’t need to inflict that image of the Hulk in a purple thong on myself:-(.

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                    5. I’m guessing that “Next Avengers” was loosely based off of the characters on the team in the Spider-Girl comic book?

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                    7. Oh, and while I do generally agree with the DC Animated Rules, Marvel Animated Sucks! sentiment, I do take exception where Avengers: EMH is concerned.

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                    9. @junior: It had some decent stories, but the character designs were all over the map. Stand Wasp and Black Widow next to each other and they don’t belong in the same cartoon.

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      3. *laughs* I actually like the guys who play Thor and the new Captain Kirk not only because they’re cute and pretty good actors, but because they don’t seem to have a problem playing roles that involve them being the movie’s effective buttmonkey (for the first Thor, and both Star Trek reboots.) Chris Pine has a very good “God hates me I am doomed” expression.

        It is also because I know I will laugh that we tend to go for DVDs instead of watching these things in the cinema. We can pause the movie while I laugh.

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    3. “for the minority actors in the movie not “being racial representatives” ”

      Well, they need reliable grievances. So they have carefully arrayed omitting minorities, pandering to stereotypes, and not being representative of minority experience. Between them, they’re covered, they can always find a complaint.

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  13. It’s true that young people need role models. What is not true is that they need role models in a specific role (except perhaps a parental role). Where they need role models is where their interests lie, because those who fill the ranks of their interests are the ones who they will try to emulate.

    This is the reason I get so agitated by athletes and such who rant when someone tells them they need to be a better role model. “I didn’t sign up to be a role model!”, I’ve heard. What I’ve never heard anyone tell them in response, though (and it may have happened, I just have never heard it), is, “Tough. By being where and what you are, you’re a role model anyway, and if you act like a jackass all the time, you’re teaching kids to act the same way, so shape up or go do something else.”

    My primary role model was my father. He wasn’t in a role I ever wanted to be in, the things that fascinated me were things he never cared about, but those things don’t matter. What matters is how your role model acts, what he does with the hand he’s dealt, and how he treats others. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never measure up, but I can keep working on it.

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    1. Well, one can also be a role model in a negative sense: no man can sink so low that he cannot serve as a dreadful example.

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  14. How about “I Will Fear No Evil?” How does that protagonist count?
    I would read anything I could get my hands on as a kid. Public library was tiny, and mom wouldn’t let me “waste money” on books unless they were at a garage sale. I never understood the draw of the girl books at all. Three Musketeers was one of my favorites, then I found John Carter! Never identified with Deejah Thoris till I read Number of the Beast. Liked that version.

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  15. I think that, as usual, the left has the arrow of causality backwards.

    You can’t *make* someone a role model, people in the public eye *are* role models.

    Charles Barkley said:

    I think the media demands that athletes be role models because there’s some jealousy involved. It’s as if they say, this is a young black kid playing a game for a living and making all this money, so we’re going to make it tough on him. And what they’re really doing is telling kids to look up to someone they can’t become, because not many people can be like we are. Kids can’t be like Michael Jordan

    He was wrong then, and this attitude of “we need to make role models for $disadvantagedSocialGroup” is wrong.

    People in the public eye *are* role models. People don’t want to go to the NBA because they think Charles Barkley was cool, Charles Barkley was in the NBA AND was cool.

    Nominating a woman to be a minister of Science and Technology doesn’t tell little gurls they can be scientists. It tells them the can be ministers.

    Putting women in space suits and blowing them all over Florida and the Caribbean tells them they can be astronauts. Well, for a short while anyway.

    But more importantly than telling you what you can or cannot be, role models tell you how to be. When you see someone like Charles Barkley spitting on people and getting in fights AND NOT GETTING CENSURED FOR IT it tells you it’s ok to spit on people and get in fights. When you grow up watching the people your *parents* hold in high esteem for their ability to sink a putt, ride a bicycle fast, put a ball through a circle, or be President and these people are also philanderers and drug users as well as engaging in acts of violence or other crimes then it’s likely that you yourself will grow up to believe that you too can be those things.

    Role models aren’t made, they’re the people kids look at. Parents, teachers and school administrators certainly demonstrate day in and day out how to live as an adult, but it’s even more how the people *they* look up to that teach children about what is valued and desired in a society.

    Which is basically why *any* professional athlete should be fired for misdemeanor acts of violence or drug use, *any* felony act, and in general should have have a morals clause in their contract. And any judge who says the can’t enforce the morals contract ought to be hung by the neck until *almost* dead, then drawn and quartered. This goes double for any union officials who insist on anything other than the “guilty until proven innocent” standard for teachers who are preying on children.

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    1. The risk of being blown all over Florida is part of the job of an astronaut. While putting a woman in a spacesuit may be a stunt for the Progressives in charge, for the people who put on the suit, it’s no joke.

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      1. There’s risks and rewards for everything.

        But I’m willing to bet that dying in the breach is much more unattractive to women than to men.

        Especially the sorts of men who are willing to sit on top of an alloy bottle of toxic, highly explosive chemicals and toss a match.

        And yeah, I’d do that. In a heart beat.

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      2. Housemate was telling us about something he’d read, about some Red Cross volunteers defying the order to go to Africa’s Ebola zones. The ones who did that, he said, knew they were going and not coming back, and were doing this because of their willingness to die for what they believed in, to help people. They seem to be making a difference, my housemate said.

        To me, those are role models. Brave people I can salute.

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    2. It’s okay for one potential role-model to fall from grace if kids have a multitude of role-models to choose from. However, a side effect of the destruction of traditional values and the elevation of diversity and ‘everyone’s a winner’ over achievement has been the destruction of the concept of heroes and heroism which has led to the loss of a lot of good potential fictional and real role-models. All that’s left are entertainment figures (like sports stars) and whatever the kids can find on their own through reading / TV / video games, which may not be appropriate for younger kids as a source of values.

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      1. Fictitious role models have their drawbacks. I couldn’t go to Sherlock Holmes and ask “how do I talk to girls so they won’t think I’m creepy or pathetic?”. Nor could Batman tell me when “no” really meant “try harder”. Nor how to interpret a woman’s behavior.

        The absence of a real-life father, or a good father-figure, in a boy’s formative years can have lifelong detrimental consequences.

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        1. Nor how to interpret a woman’s behavior.

          No one can. Whenever a man figures it out, they change it, and women all sign a contract that says they won’t tell the truth about it.

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            1. But when you start doing a destructive analysis to figure out a universal model, the population of survivors tends to converge on one that doesn’t like what you are doing, and doesn’t want to help.

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            3. And it changes from moment to moment. But it does that for EVERYBODY. The trick is to become such friends that you can tell MOST OF THE TIME what she/he wants, and they will forgive you when you are wrong.

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              1. works that way for the most part with hubby and me. Tell him I want a loaf of squashy bread and he knows exactly what I mean. Then we’ve been married 13 years.

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              2. Ding ding ding! Correct.

                …. Oh, gads, could that be part of why some folks are trying to destroy the ability of people to form friendships? Because it’s a building block for real love?

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          3. “and women all sign a contract that says they won’t tell the truth about it.”

            Well, all except one… and the one changes. That way, even if we’re told by the one telling the truth, we won’t believe it.

            It’s been that way for thousands of years. I understand the contract (with the one exemption) was the basis for Cassandra in Greek mythology.

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        2. I didn’t want to go with that specific example, but I’m glad someone brought it up.

          However, celebrity role models like sports stars may as well have the same drawbacks as fictional ones.

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      2. Civilis:

        It’s okay for one potential role-model to fall from grace if kids have a multitude of role-models to choose from.

        Ben Hartley:

        Well, one can also be a role model in a negative sense: no man can sink so low that he cannot serve as a dreadful example.

        To fall from grace, to be held as a *dreadful* example, these are things we don’t do any more.

        A football player runs a dog fighting ring, including egregious treatment of the animals, and HE IS DEFENDED. Does a few (too few IMO) years in prison and is back to a multi-million dollar lifestyle.

        Another football player knocks his fiance out and gets a 2 game suspension until a new video surfaces showing that yeah, he hit her, then they “indefinitely” suspend him.

        Is it any wonder than a bunch of utter shitbags in Stubenville sexually abused the crap out of a drunken young woman?

        Or that their tribe stands up for them?

        Their role models are a bunch of thugs and goons of the LOWEST sort, and we throw money and women at them.

        It’s absolutely critical that when a *role model* does something to fall from grace we hammer him like a railroad spike.

        We don’t do that any more. “The Donald” is presented as a good businessman, Tiger woods is still swinging a club, Vick is playing football.

        And yeah, there’s a concept of redemption, but there is no redemption for the damned, and some things *should* damn you forever.

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        1. Not only was the two game suspension pathetic, but it’s been noted that drug abuse will get you a *four* game suspension. There’s a joke floating around that involves the NFL commissioner being informed that one of the players his been “poppin’ Molly”. The commissioner assigns a two month suspension, until he’s informed that ‘Molly’ is actually slang for a drug. He then changes the suspension to four months.

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        2. To steal someone else’s line: Roger Goodell did not indefinitely suspend Rice because he saw that video, Goodell suspended Rice because you saw the video.

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    3. Quite. The prog problem is carelessness with words. They say “be a role model” when they mean “be a better role model” [than you are, or than you will be if you don’t think about the fact that you are.]

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    1. Well, Wen Spencer’s Wood Sprites has the nine year old girls. Nine year olds, girls or otherwise, tend not to have the leverage or stolidity of muscles and skeleton to be a match for an adult.

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      1. Neither do 14 year old Okie girls. That said, raise your hand anyone who wants to get into a fight with Traveling Faye from Larry’s Grimnoir books/

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        2. I’m more for the “run for your life” response, though if Faye decided I needed to die I’d just die tired.

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        1. Would the female leads from Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey qualify? (You could say it’s the same character, since 50 Shades was Twilight fanfic, originally….)

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          1. I can’t say I read them but from what I have heard about them yup — although I don’t think I’d call either part of the Western canon

            I’m thinking of dead white male (or their enablers) stuff created to maintain “the patriarchy”.

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            1. I know of someone who had in their sig a claim that Twilight had destroyed an entire generation of feminists.

              We should be so fortunate.

              The issues a hostile analysis finds in Twilight can in general be found in quite a lot of romance.

              What pushes a readers buttons at one point in their life may have no relation to what ideology they adhere at another.

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              1. I kind of think Twilight might be creating a generation of feminists i.e. young girls looking for heroes only to find either good-looking guys who laugh at them or pudgy guys in khaki pants who think they are supposed to behave like something from The Hangover.

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                1. Women aren’t looking for heroes. They say they are but they’re really not. Heroes are rough, battered and damaged. Heroes are masculine not metrosexual. Women want show dogs.
                  This generalization applies to average feminazi types only. The Ladies of the Gun are obvious exceptions. I would posit that the exceptions should not be referred to as mere women but as Ladies and thus deserving of Heroes.

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                  1. Women aren’t looking for heroes.

                    “Life is short, Pride is for ever, Chicks dig scars.”

                    Yes, they are. Heroes *survive*, they might not always win, and eventually they might not even come home.

                    But they always go, and that’s what we will always need.

                    If you just want someone who will wake up beside you when you get old, you can get another woman to do that.

                    Or hell, a succession of dogs.

                    But the world wasn’t always a comfortable, hip pocket of $BigCity where there’s always a cop and there’s no real violence and there’s an all night drug store open every mile or so. The world is the sort of place where *still* people get mauled by tigers mountain lions, where trains still hit people [1] , and where suicide bombers run blockades in trucks filled with explosives: http://www.stlmarines.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/LtGen-Kelly-Speech.pdf

                    That last there? That’s now *Men* lean in.

                    We need those heroes. They have useful genes. We need (usually) men dumb or strong or brave enough to run into burning buildings or go out in the sleet and the snow to start getting the power back online. We need people who will dive into a lake to save a stranger’s child.

                    So maybe not all women look for heroes, but enough do that we’ll keep getting them.

                    And when they stop looking? Well, that’s “Bad Luck”.

                    [1] go here http://americandna.org/rah1961.htm and search for about About fifty years ago. Then go here http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10867783

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                    1. Of course women want heroes. Even us city girls know the value of Heroes! Captain America was from Brooklyn after all! I was born and raised in Brooklyn. My husband is a country boy, even though we live in the suburbs of a large city. He spent summers on the family farm with his grandparents. He’s a very can do kind of person. He’s thorough and chivalrous, kind and laughs at my jokes.

                      Personally I’d rather not wake up with another woman . I spent too many years sharing a room with my sister. ;)

                      Liked by 1 person

                  2. Women aren’t looking for heroes.

                    Depends; do you mean the result that they’re looking for is roughly that embodied by a hero, or that the characteristics they’re looking for are a hero?

                    Part of why so many relationships suck so bad is that women want a hero, at least a hero for her– but the same unhappy twerps that managed to destroy their own lives, and who spent the last fifty-ish years urging age after age of women to do the same, are telling them that the showdogs are what they need to look for.

                    So now you’ve got the ones that listen choosing dishrags, and the ones who don’t mistaking demonstrations of physical strength (usually with brutality) for all the other important types of strength.

                    And a lot of those girls don’t have an strong males in good relationships in their lives. :(

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                    1. There is also the matter of investment. Women who fear the tyranny of cooking simply won’t make the investment.
                      Caring for a hero is hard. If he’s still active, there will be long hours of waiting and worrying never knowing his status. If he’s home from the wars, his head might not be. The nightmares and flashbacks are just a few of the internal scars they carry. This is very hard on a relationship.
                      Show dogs are easy. All style and no substance. No emotional or physical wounds to be treated. Well trained in the all pervasive feminist claptrap that passes for education.
                      I don’t know what I’m driving at. It just seems to me that she doesn’t want one until she’s in her late thirties with a string of bad relationships and broken marriages behind her.

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                    2. So, outside of the women who already have a clue– when life hits her so hard that she finally gets the idea that the way she’s going doesn’t work?

                      Kinda late. I feel sorry for the ones that listen to “everyone” and never notice that those who are happy and stable didn’t….

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                    3. This suggests another reason why they don’t want kids reading tales with heroes — it isn’t just that boys might “want to be him.”

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                    4. And if the girls look for the thing they rejected, and are happy– then it might mean they made the wrong choice way back when.

                      That they rebelled against the RIGHT way to do things, and did the wrong thing. That it was, in an identifiable way, their fault.

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            2. How about Emma? Or the girl in Northanger Abbey (whose name I’ve forgotten). Jane Austen isn’t male, but definitely a classic.

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          1. Parker couldn’t handle female characters. I kind of like the Spenser books but Sunny Randall just doesn’t work for me.

            And his female characters usually don’t come across as little girlish.

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        3. Well, the one girl does start to get a bit broke by all that happens…

          Seriously, part of the noise over the ‘strong woman’ matter is people picking and choosing what they think counts as strength. (In Persona 4, none of the female characters has the Wild Card. Weak, dependent, misogyny etc…)

          Romances marketed at teens, especially mass produced ones, might well be good fishing grounds for such.

          That said, your definition of western canon may be narrower than I was thinking. I was assuming I only needed to exclude anime and such. (Chichi in Dragonball falling behind the upgrade curve was one thought.)

          I think of self denial as a strength. There are those who apparently see it as a weakness, the result of being enslaved in some way.

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          1. In Persona 4, none of the female characters has the Wild Card.
            ———————

            Yeah, but three(!) of the female characters in Persona 3 ultimately end up with it. So out of P3 and P4, we’re currently at 2 guys and 3 girls.

            :P

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            1. P4, IIRC, has one playable guy, and two non-playable.

              P3 has male and female versions of the main character, and I’ve the impression that some of the follow on stories give it to a couple of robot girls.

              I think I read that in P2 all the playable characters had the Wild Card.

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              1. P1 and P2 didn’t worry about linking arcanas to specific characters. It was all handled in a different fashion. They also split the gender of the main characters rather evenly (the main character of “If”, the pre-Persona persona game is canonically female).

                P4 only has the main character with the Fool arcana. *Spoiler*, who you can apparently create a social link with in P4G, has the Jester.

                P3, of course, ultimately ended up with both male and female protagonists for the main section of the story. Aigis has one in The Answer. And Elizabeth, the Velvet Room attendant in P3, has her arcana change to The Fool at the end of P4 Arena.

                If, P1, and P2 are all grouped together, as the characters from the previous games turn up in the later games as non-playable characters. P3 and P4 are both grouped together as well, with non-playable characters appearing in both games. There might be a link between the two groups of games, but it’s not as obvious.

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            1. Some SWJ define strength as evil and then whine that only evil women are allowed to be strong. Really. If the villainess lounges about and gets daddy’s henchmen to poison the hero, that’s strength because she’s not obeying society’s strictures, and if the heroine drags him out of the city and finds the magic herb to cure him by venturing in the dread forest — that’s weakness because it’s socially acceptable.

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              1. Some SWJ define strength as evil and then whine that only evil women are allowed to be strong.

                Of course. And it’s no different than describing a clear summer sky as tangerine orange. So how should you treat someone who seriously insists that the color of a clear summer sky is tangerine orange?

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                1. That brings up a philosophical question that used to bother me when I was a kid, until I figured out the answer. Say we both point at the sky and call its color by the name “blue” — but the color that I’m calling blue, I perceive as tangerine orange. (Or rather, the color that *you* call “tangerine orange”… because I call that color “blue”.) And the reason I call it “blue” is because that’s what my parents told me it was called. Unbeknownst to me, my parents have normal color perception and see the sky as the same blue color that everyone else does, and I’m the only one seeing it as orange and thinking that that color is called “blue”. Since everyone is using the same name for it, how could I know that they’re perceiving it the same way I do?

                  The answer I eventually came to is: it doesn’t actually matter. Since everyone agrees that the sky is a color called “blue”, when I hear someone say “blue” I know they mean “the color of the sky” and so we can communicate. We might perceive it differently, but when we use that word we both mean the same thing.

                  On the other hand, someone mistaking “evil” for “strong” is not someone you can communicate with, because they don’t mean the same thing as you at all when they describe a character as “strong”.

                  “There’s glory for you!”

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                  1. One of the vile things about deconstructionism is that it allows the individual to subjectively determine reality hence leaving it to him to determine what it is you mean when you say it.

                    Just one more way to destroy civilization.

                    If definitions are not commonly agreed upon there is no communication. Democrats depend on this i.e. “He wants to cut taxes that means he’s racist”.
                    “They question the claim that an unborn child is not a person. They are warring on women”.

                    The types who define strength as evil are worse than fools in that they don’t mean what they claim. What they mean is that strength for you is evil. Strength for them is good. The moment you see them for what they are their attacks start hurting a lot less. You truly start not wanting to associate with them any more than is necessary. You start understanding that you really are better than they are. You start seeing them, well, like Dr. Smith in Lost in Space.

                    Your example as to how a person with an abnormal color perception handles the meaning of blue is exactly how things are supposed to work.

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                2. e. So how should you treat someone who seriously insists that the color of a clear summer sky is tangerine orange?

                  Clozapine, Chlorpromazine, haloperidol?

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              2. Mary | September 10, 2014 at 10:38 pm | Reply

                Some SWJ define strength as evil and then whine that only evil women are allowed to be strong.

                …hmm. Yes. Sounds like a good reason to tell your standard SJW to go pound sand.

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              3. I think the ones who irritate me the most are the ones who declare total bitchiness to be strength, then tell people, “You can’t handle a strong woman” when she gets called on it.

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                1. I seem to recall a recent SJW article where some GHH Complained about the term Bitch, which she said meant a strong, independent woman, being used as an insult.

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          3. Interestingly, nobody ever, EVER portrayed Chichi as weak. Or Videl. They were vanilla humans, but their husbands obeyed them (Videl, I think managed to get Gohan not to fight any more once they settled down – there was a scene I vaguely remembered where she goes, “You promised…!” and he goes “I know, I did. I’m not going to. Old habits though…”

            Bulma I think was an even more highlighted example. I think it was the mere fact that she wasn’t afraid to smack Vegeta down that she was the one that Vegeta married. I remember glimpsing a scene where she says Vegeta needs a bath after a training session (with Goku, I think) and he starts to yell at her. She swipes a finger over his chestplate, cutting him off, holds it up to his face, and turns away, still holding up that finger. He shuts his mouth, bows his head, and glares at her back … as he follows her quietly inside. Next scene is of her dropping his clothes into the washing machine, and telling him that she’s leaving clothes outside for him to wear. Brief scene of him glaring up at the shower head, hot water pouring down. The clothes are … not to Vegeta’s liking but he’s wearing them anyway. I think this was before they actually got together too.

            For the most part, none of us could actually figure out how the heck she netted him and had their two kids.

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            1. Two ways of looking at it– either she’s crazy to bully him around and he’s impressed, or behaving that way without a bit of fear is a heck of a lot of trust and he’s responding to that.

              How often do you think Vegeta ran into someone who didn’t curl up when he yelled?

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              2. *laughs* probably never, and it’s probably why he responds to it. It’s probably one of the more volcanic relationships in terms of potential fights, but … other than him occasionally snapping and growling – token protests from someone like Vegeta! – he never does more than the token grumble.

                I think it’s also because she doesn’t seem impressed with what he is – I mean, Vegeta’s the prince, if not king of his race, towering arrogance and ego and all. He could turn her to ash, and her response is a slight frown. That’d make him blink.

                The thing is, what Bulma is doing is pretty much what the Japanese ideal woman is supposed to be able to do – be a vision of silk, grace and beauty, with a skeleton of steel and a will that would make mountains bend… without resorting to the crass emasculations that our modern day ‘bitch= strong woman’ types do. She’s not as obvious as ChiChi is about it since ChiChi’s more the traditional example (and oddly, more muscular about the whole thing as well)

                For a shonen anime revolving around ridiculous epic battles all aimed at boys, I don’t think any of the men in the stories went after ‘weak women’. Videl’s father Mr. Satan supposedly worshiped the ground his wife walked on, and doesn’t seem to mind her fighting saiyans. Goku and ChiChi’s marriage may have been part of a misunderstanding but he did well by her anyway and was visibly affectionate. And so on. It’s probably easier to count the men who DIDN’T go after the amazons than list the ones who did.

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        4. Alas, “lacking in character” and “objective” do not belong together. Especially if talking with SWJ who can find weakness in everything. Including characters they only vaguely remember. I remember one insisting that all the female characters in Le Morte d’Arthur. Mind you, they’re all the ones with magic, but she insisted they always used it in service of some man — though she couldn’t name one. I pointed out Lynnet using it to keep her sister and Gareth from anticipating their vows, and she insisted all the rest were, naming no one and giving no account of what they did.

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      3. But they’re cute! (And very, very smart–and hard working, and inquisitive, and curious–and computer hackers; almost at the level of the aliens in John Ringo’s maple syrup war books.)

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        1. But somewhat weak in close combat.

          Seriously, I wouldn’t cast stones at their character. For how old they are, they held up fairly well.

          The setting has a lot of ‘weak in close combat’ types who really need body guards to keep them alive.

          Given the circumstances of the younger siblings, I’m actually fairly worried about them over the long term.

          The books so far have been written on fairly thriller time scales. I’m worried about all the ugly things certain to brew up near the younger siblings, and if they can prepare in what little time they may have.

          So, I guess many kudos to Wen Spencer.

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    2. Check the Iliad–are those strong or weak females? Arthurian romances — are those strong or weak?
      Lord of the Rings–Galadriel is major or minor? She certainly is strong. Arwen Evenstar is minor, but is she weak?
      I guess I can’t tell what you want by objectively weak.

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      2. OK, the point of feminism is that Western lit has been written with the intent to show women being incapable of independent thought, decisiveness or leadership to keep them in their place.

        I never read the Iliad but it is my understanding that the goddesses generally get their way over the gods. Concerning Authurian romances, look who beat Merlin and Morgan le Fay was certainly willing to take the initiative.

        Tolkien has Éowyn fight as a shield-maiden and kill the witch-king.

        To me, it seems the classic Western writers did not seek to demean women or to imply they have a lesser character than men.

        Now, the progressive-run motion picture industry is a different subject.

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  17. Am I the only one who for a sentence there thought her friend made miniature representations of equipment or buildings for trade shows, prototyping, marketing, etc.?

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  18. When I was a lad, I knew something about certain of my female ancestors and relatives.

    Whether by hearsay, or my own observation and analysis, I knew some had character I wanted to emulate.

    ‘No female role-models’ is either a case where a person has never been exposed to anyone worth spit, or they don’t count the examples they do have because of a difference in values.

    I was aware that people with qualities I admired had feet of clay, that I needed to be careful to pick and chose. (I would say “Some of them were Democrats” except that this was a horse I started beating much later in life.)

    If one can imagine composite role models from knowing what is good and bad in people, one need never whine about fiction not catering to one’s needs for such.

    I do suppose that unimaginative fools do need positive role models also.

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  20. The most pernicious aspect of the obsession with role models has been the proliferation of “teachers” of color: people running classrooms for no reason beyond the melanin content of their epidermis. In some cases these are decent people, in some they are horrible (probably a consequence of knowing they are in jobs which they lack competence to perform) but what they are Enn-Ohh-Tee is Teachers.

    Generations of young kids suffer incompetent classroom instruction from “people who look like them” rether than receive inspirational instruction from people who look different.

    All other things being equal, a teacher who looks like you is probably better than one who doesn’t … but all things are N-O-T equal and the saliency of the Appearance Element is far less than the Competency and Inspirational elements.

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      1. Such as this lovely example.

        How many grammatical errors can *you* spot in the piece? I spotted one unambiguous error (“were as much in the dark about grammar as me“) and one poor word choice (“some teachers feel there was no need”…the rest of the paragraph was past tense, so why “feel” instead of “felt”?).

        At least she’s not teaching anymore.

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  21. The “How To Train your Dragon” books can be recognized as “Boy” books because of such things as character names like Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, Fishlegs, Snotlout, Dogsbreath the Duhbrain, Valhallarama and Gobber the Belch.

    The moral lessons learned, such as courage, loyalty, protection of others, self-sacrifice, discipline, the advantages of ingenuity over force … are those gender specific? Are the Harry Potter stories better for Hermione Granger having a Hoo-Ha (and worse beacause Harry has a willie?)

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    1. It may be bad form to answer rhetorical questions*, but I’ll do it anyway. No, the Harry Potter stories are better for Hermione having a brain (and a spine), and worse because Harry has a year of being a whiny teenage brat. (I was sooooo glad when book 5 was over.)

      * … Or is it?

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        1. In fairness to Rowling/HP, he did have legitimate issues that year, he wasn’t whinging for trivial cause. Getting alienated from his father figure, dealing with puberty, directed studies under a “mentor” who clearly has a) unmerited animus toward Harry and b) no discernible talent for teaching, a government directed conspiracy to discredit him (ever notice we never see Dolores Umbrage & Lois Lerner in the same room?) and a gang of homicidal maniacs out to get him — all while trapped in a hostile environment moght serve to paralyse even the most resiliantly raised soul.

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          1. Well, since my mother was complaining that it was too accurate, I suspect her dislike was a compliment, in a way.

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    2. The virtues are non-sex-specific, but their focus is. Men (and boys) have traditionally been taught that their virtues are in the service of their comrades-in-arms, women, and children. Women (and girls) have been taught that the listed virtues are in service of their husbands and their children, and to a lesser extent their extended families.

      I tend to think that those foci make sense given biological realities (which, IMO, include psychological differences stemming from millions of years of selection for different behaviors in the sexes), but such differences tend to set the SJWs and GHHs off. To them, there is no biological reality. All is “social construct” and “patriarchal oppression”:-(.

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  22. Haven’t thought back to my childhood but now that I think of it, when I was in grade school I loved reading the Tintin comics. Actually, there was fierce competition to check it out of the school library, IIRC.

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    1. There must be a special tolerance for stupid in young males. I loved Asterix and I READ Tintin. My kids too. My kids remember Tintin. They know the plots are stupid and all, but they REMEMBER them. I mercifully expunged them from my memory as soon as I read them. (Dinner time conversation was about this.)

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      2. Believe it.

        Mecha shows tend to be all sorts of physically dubious.

        The standard stories tend to be built on certain emotional truths, which surpass the physical falsehoods.

        If you will not fight, you lose the battle.

        Doing something with conviction tends to be better than flailing about halfheartedly trying to find the best course of action.

        Sometimes you have to keep trying.

        Losing can be worse than the cost of fighting.

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