Pixiepalace

I read this fascinating article about testosterone and competition in games yesterday and it got me thinking about a lot of things. One of the biggest things that struck me as I read was the discussion of player behavior after a victory. The paper talks generally about how “if there is some way for winners to communicate, losers are subjected to degrading displays of status.” The author discusses how this kind of crowing about a victory makes the losers feel worse and tends to cause them to stop playing the game. That got me thinking about gender dynamics in competitive games like this where the players can communicate with each other. And realistically, there are very few competitive videogames these days where the players don’t have the ability to easily communicate either through text or voice based chat systems. I think that extrapolating from this article can help explain one of the big, and yet basically ignored, problems with bringing more women into “hardcore” gaming.

The language of smack talk itself is extremely problematic from a woman’s point of view. A lot of it is extremely gendered and sexual in nature, and women never come out on top when it comes to smack talk language (pun intended). Losers are told they are “pussies”, that they “play like a girl” and to “bend over and take it” or “suck it” (there are worse ones, but I don’t feel like filling my blog with them). Winners have any number of euphemisms for testicles, “stuck it to them/you” and are “The Man”. It’s pretty clear that being a girl is a bad thing in the culture of competitive videogames, at least metaphorically. So what happens when the player in question actually is a girl or a woman?

To begin with, it’s sometimes hard not to feel unwanted and unwelcome in a culture filled with this language. To be the woman who can push past that and play with the big boys anyway (again, pun intended), you almost have to be willing to be twice as good as anyone else and able to somehow reconcile being female with that skill. Some do this by talking as much smack as the guys, in their sexist language, thus sort of adopting the mantle of “one of the guys”. Others basically stay silent and just let the guys josh each other about being beaten by a girl. Some almost get apologetic about being female, as if they have so internalized the language that they themselves are ashamed of being women (thankfully, this seems to be more and more rare as more and more women gamers gain visibility).

Many women (although not all) play a different kind of social game in their everyday lives than most men do. Deborah Tannen has explained how for many men (although, again, not all), social interactions are about forming and negotiating a hierarchy where the most dominant reach the top and it’s not very desirable to be on the bottom. Women, on the other hand, strive for connections. It’s not that they don’t want to be or think they are better than the next person, it’s that it’s very important to at least keep up the facade of a level playing field. It’s why apologies are so vital to female relationships, they allow things to return to the status quo by (implicitly) acknowledging a wrong done or invoking empathetic feelings.

This comes into play for some women when they lose and are “subjected to degrading displays of status.” For some women, this almost violent dressing down is actually painful. Because of the impulse they have to avoid social conflict, it’s actually a very distressing experience to be so spoken to. In female relationships, women will often assume that such responses are somehow their own fault, and this reaction becomes so ingrained that it carries over into other experiences. Add to that the gendered language and such an experience can easily go from distressing to frightening.

And then you’ve probably lost that player, and rightly so. We’re taught as women to avoid frightening situations, not to fight back and to stick together. So no matter how much fun the game itself might be, if the community provides a frightening experience for the woman, every instinct she has is probably going to tell her not to stay and not to come back. And then we come to what happens when a woman sees such things happening to other people.

When a woman sees something like that happen to her friend, she’s likely to be distressed like her friend, although to a lesser extent. And she’s going to leave with the friend. They’ve learned this is a dangerous place to stay away from. When she sees it happen to someone else, there’s a good chance she’ll empathize and realize that it could easily happen to her. And then, again, you’ve lost her (and that time she didn’t even have to have the experience, just witness it).

We’re taught to avoid danger and that danger is everywhere. And for women, avoiding danger makes a lot of sense. Games may not pose a real, physical danger, but they can cause us to feel that way. And why would you want to feel that way if you don’t have to? This doesn’t mean that games shouldn’t be competitive. Competition is good and women like competition as much as men do. And it’s not to say that games that allow communication are bad. Communication adds a lot to a game’s appeal, as MMOs and Facebook games prove daily. It’s just to say that perhaps there’s more to attracting and retaining female players than just making more appealing games and marketing to them better. The attitudes of the gaming community itself also needs to change.

One of my biggest pet peeves is bad customer service. As far as I’m concerned, there’s really never any excuse for it.

Let’s be clear here about what I mean by good customer service, though, since I’m not sure everyone has the same definition. I consider customer service to be not so much about making the customer happy as about giving them the best service possible. It simply isn’t possible to make every single person happy all the time. Sometimes people have impossible problems (“my computer has smoke coming out of it and I have to finish this project by tomorrow!”), sometimes it’s not feasible for the company or the customer service rep to truly help the person such that it will make them really happy (“but I sent the check! why don’t you have a record of it?”), and sometimes people are just in bad moods and want to take them out other people (“look, if you can’t produce a purple plastic purse for me in the next five minutes I’ll scream!”).

None of those things, however, are excuses for bad customer service. No matter how annoying the customer or how outrageous their demand, they should always be treated with respect. Doing so also gives you the right to ask that customers treat your customer service reps with respect. It’s really a win for everybody. Good customer service means happier, more satisfied customers who are more likely to give you return business and happier, more contented employees who do more work at a higher quality.

Unfortunately, customer service is one of those things that people seem to only understand is important when they are on the customer side of the relationship. Everyone wants to receive good customer service. This doesn’t mean everyone wants to be pestered by store employees and read to from canned scripts when calling customer service lines. Those things aren’t indicative of good customer service, they are indicative of companies more concerned about their bottom line than their customers (which really doesn’t make sense when you realize that they only have a bottom line because they can attract and keep customers).

Good customer service requires truly respecting your customers and genuinely wanting to help them. Some examples of good and bad customer service:

Your cable goes out and it doesn’t appear to be because of any of your equipment. You call the customer service line to report that it’s not working and ask for it to be repaired. The customer service rep consults their computer and doesn’t find a note about your area, so they put you on hold briefly (less than three minutes) and call the repair coordinating office to see if anything is happening in your area that hasn’t shown up on the computers yet.

They come back on the phone with you and say that yes, someone is looking into it and the expected repair time is currently four hours. They apologize for the inconvenience, thank you for calling to let the company know the cable was out and tell you that if you call back after the cable comes back on, the company can refund your bill for the time it was out. You ask why they can’t do the refund right now while you’re on the phone and the rep explains that the company requires it to be done after the blackout is over so that the proper amount of time can be credited. That way, if it’s only out five hours you get that amount of credit, but if the problem ends up taking ten hours to repair you can be properly compensated for that time. The rep then asks if you have any other questions. You say no, thank them and hang up.

This was a good experience, even though your problem wasn’t fixed. You and the rep were both treated with respect, the problem was treated as real (even though the rep had no record of it to begin with) and procedures were explained when you requested them to be.

You are in a serious accident, but not seriously hurt yourself, and your doctor suggests you see a mental health specialist about your experience. You call each of the doctors recommended and find that your health insurance doesn’t cover any of them. Your doctor suggests that you obtain a list of doctors in your health plan and they will suggest someone from the list, to prevent that from happening again. You call your health insurance customer service line to obtain the list.

You get a voice recognition program first that has trouble recognizing your voice, but eventually get to an actual human customer service rep. The rep immediately asks for your identification number, birth date and name. You give this information and after a moment of silence, the rep asks you how they can help you. Slightly annoyed already, you explain that you need a list of mental health practitioners that are covered by your plan. The rep says you have the wrong department and transfers you, which causes you to wait on hold for a few minutes for another customer service rep.

You explain what you want again. The rep responds with “what do you need to see one for?” Taken aback, you stammer and ask why it matters. The rep gets exasperated and explains slowly that it will help narrow down the list. You state that you’d rather not go into your mental heath with a stranger on the phone. The rep seems annoyed, but doesn’t argue.

They then ask how you would like the list, since it’s “really long”. You ask what your options are. The rep says they can read it out to you (although clearly they don’t want to) or they can fax it to you. You don’t have a fax number. You ask if they can email it to you. The rep sighs and says sure and asks for your email address. You carefully give your email address and ask for them to repeat it back (having little confidence that they were listening). They seem to have it correct. They ask if there’s anything else you need and when you say no, immediately hang up. You go to check your email more than a little annoyed.

This is a very bad customer service experience. Even if you went into the call in a good mood, you ended up angry and throughout the call no one was treated with respect. Your requests were treated as annoyances, you were asked for personal information that you should never have been asked for and information that you should have been asked for in the wrong way and you became so annoyed that you started to treat the rep as if they were incompetent.

Unfortunately, the second call is becoming more typical of my experience as companies cut funding and training from their customer service departments, outsource to people who have no way of hoping to help the people who call them, and gain monopolies and other forms of control such that people have no choice but to remain their customers, bad service and all. Money is poured into marketing (and we see how well that seems to be working) and taken away from actually providing a good product and service to customers.

This is not a good way to do business and it’s not a good environment in which to be a customer. Being a customer doesn’t make you a lesser being. Everyone is a customer. Even CEOs are customers to someone, and they expect good service when they are customers, so why do they provide anything less to the customers they have? This is what I really don’t understand. No one is just a customer service rep or just a businessperson. Everyone is on the other side of the counter sometimes and when they are, they want good, compitent service.

They want cashiers who are efficient and able to do things like process returns without having to wait ten minutes for a manager, they want sales reps who don’t pester them to buy extra things but do find them what they want and make useful suggestions, they want reps who are willing to try and find the solution even if they don’t have it. They want to be dealing with trained employees who are respected enough by their companies to be allowed to think for themselves and do things. And companies should want employees who are loyal to the company to because it respects them and gives them enough leeway to find solutions or to hand customers off to people who can when necessary.

Customers who have good experiences talk about it. They tell their friends. I know that seems like a myth, but especially in this day and age when such experiences are all too rare, it’s true. I can’t tell you how many repeat customers I had and I saw the people working around me get because we provided great customer service when I was a bookseller. People would not only come back, they’d bring their friends and talk about it. I’d have strangers walk up to me and say “my friend said you were so nice and helpful to her last month when she needed a birthday gift for her niece and I remembered that, can you help me?” And I saw that happen to the people around me too. I also saw customers leave upset talking about never coming back and heard customers repeating horror stories of what happened to them or someone they knew. Bad stories get around too, you see. And both types also get Twittered, updated as Facebook statuses and blogged about.

The thing is, if you give me good service, I suspect you might care about me. If you fail to give me good service, I know that you don’t care about me. And thats really what it’s all about. I want to give my money and even work for companies that care, even abstractly, that I am their customer or their employee. I don’t want to give my money to companies to actively don’t care about me. So that’s the challenge. Show your customers you care, and they’ll care about you. Show them otherwise, and you might find that they respond in kind with that too.

Related Link: Marvel Divas: Bad Customer Service

A recent School Library Journal article stated:

“Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored—at least for now—due to its language and homosexual content.”

This statement was thoroughly backed up:

“But Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.”

“The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as “geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple.”

“Scholastic defended the move. “Authors are often given the opportunity to make changes in the books to meet the norms of the various communities that host the fairs,” adds Kyle Good, a Scholastic spokeswoman, explaining that the title will, however, be available in the Scholastic Book Club catalog.”

Scholastic responded to this article quickly. Their response gave the impression that they were having a very visceral reaction to having been called out for censoring a book:

“School Library Journal inaccurately stated that we censored the book. We review thousands of books each year and only a limited number can be carried in our channels.” – Kyle Good commenting on the SLJ article and the same comment was repeated verbatim on the Scholastic blog with pictures of their Book Club catalogs featuring the book to reinforce the statement

“Scholastic does not censor books. We review thousands of titles each year for our book clubs and book fairs, and we are committed to a review process that considers all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents. In an interview with School Library Journal, Scholastic stated that we are currently carrying Luv Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle in our school book clubs. We also said we were still reviewing the book for possible inclusion in our book fairs. Having completed our review of Luv Ya Bunches, Scholastic Book Fairs will carry the title in our spring fairs for middle school. Scholastic is proud of our long history of providing books that will appeal to the wide range of interests and reading abilities of children in the many diverse cultures and communities we serve. Luv Ya Bunches is just one example.” – On the Scholastic blog later, after much outcry arose in response to the SLJ article

The controversy over the book has been covered all over the internet, so I’m not going to go into it. Besides, as much as I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a really important issue, I don’t think that the reasons the book were censored are the most interesting part of this whole thing. I think that Scholastc’s knee-jerk reaction to a word is the most interesting part.

Scholastic repeated and vociferously claimed that they do not censor books, that they did not censor this book. But they have not countered or refuted any of the specific claims of the article, despite being repeatedly asked and given the chance to do so. Given that, it’s hard not to assume that they are, in fact, true statements concerning what occurred. And if that is the case, than Scholastic needs to dig out their dictionary (they publish several, so they must have some laying around they could check).

The word “censor” has a few meanings, but two particularly apply to how it is being used in this context. Seeing as I don’t happen to have a Scholastic dictionary on hand, I’ll provide examples of definitions from multiple other sources. The first is it’s meaning as a transitive verb.

- “to examine and expurgate” (American Heritage)
- “to examine and act upon as a censor or to delete (a word or passage of text) in one’s capacity as a censor” (Dictionary.com)
- “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable or to suppress or delete as objectionable” (Merriam-Webster).

The second is one of the word’s meanings as a noun.

- “an authorized examiner of literature, plays or other material, who may prohibit what he considers morally or otherwise objectionable” (American Heritage)
- “an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds” (Dictionary.com)
- “an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter” (Merriam-Webster).

So now that we’ve got a good definition, let’s look back at the evidence stating Scholastic was censoring Love Ya Bunches.

1. The publisher has a “review process”, which rejected Love Ya Bunches on the grounds that it had “offensive language and same-sex parents”. According to our definition, any “review process” that rejects a book on the basis of “offensive” content of any kind, whether it offends them or not, is censoring.

2. Scholastic says “authors are often given the opportunity to make changes in the books to meet the norms of the various communities that host the fairs”, which implies that they want the author to “expurgate”, “suppress”, or “delete” whatever it is that the “review process” determined needed fixing. Again, that matches our definition of “censor”.

If a censor is someone who “examines” media “for objectionable matter” (such as offensive language and same-sex parents) “in order to suppress or delete” said objectionable material (like, for example, asking the author to change it or refusing to carry it in a certain venue), then it seems that Scholastic has no leg to stand on in their claims of not censoring. In fact, it sounds like Scholastic censors everything they carry, it’s just that not everything is found to have “objectionable material”.

Words matter, and as as publishers and proponents of education Scholastic should know that. In fact, they should be among the first to stand up and defend language and encourage proper usage and respect for words. You can’t pick and choose – if you’re going to be a champion of something, you have to defend it even when you don’t like it. That means that even when you come up against a word you don’t like, if you claim to care about language the way Scholastic tries to through it’s educational publications and programs, then you have to accept and even defend it anyway.

That’s not to say that review processes and boards don’t have their place, because they do. But don’t rail against it when someone accurately calls them on being censors. Being a censor doesn’t have to be a bad thing A mom censors a TV show when she decides her three-year-old shouldn’t watch The Sopranos and changes the channel, but that doesn’t make her wrong for having done so.

Words are important and it’s worth defending them, even the ones you don’t like.

I’m a small woman. In many ways I like this. I fit in airplane seats comfortably. I can buy kids’ t-shirts, which are always cheaper. But being small isn’t always easy. One problem that isn’t serious but is very annoying is that I am unable to comfortably play the vast majority of videogames for very long. Most controllers, computer mice, headsets and even keyboards are not designed for hands and heads as small as mine. My hands are not unnaturally small, either. They are proportional to my size (which means they are larger than those of most children and you can usually buy gloves that fit me without having to look too long). And my head is normal too. I can walk into a store and buy a hat that fits without a problem. Yet electronics remain an issue.

I have become increasingly convinced that more women need to be in the business of designing and creating videogame and computer hardware. I believe this about most electronics, actually. The reason I say this is that the vast majority of these things are designed for people with large hands and large heads and in our culture men tend to be larger than women. Since the vast majority of computer engineers are still men, I’m guessing that one part of the problem is that they are designing for themselves. What’s comfortable for me is usually not comfortable at all for my husband and what is comfortable for him is often either almost unusable for me or gives me hand cramps pretty quickly.

Now, this could also be fixed by the companies that market and sell these products realizing that women (and children and even smaller men) use their products as well and might buy more of them if they were more comfortable to use. I honestly believe that more women might game if it was easier to get smaller game controllers. I’m not saying that all women are little or that game controllers are sexist or even that women are consciously not playing because the controllers are too big for them, but I do know that I’ve met more than one woman who lists among her reasons for not enjoying videogames “they make my hands hurt”. I think it’s more an issue of the people creating and selling the products not thinking about it.

The most common reason I hear for not designing videogame electronics with smaller people in mind is that the core market for the videogame industry is young men, who by and large don’t have a problem with the size things come in now but would have issues if things were designed for smaller people. I find this argument to be kind of dumb because it is based on the assumption that you can only make things in one size. Console controllers, computer peripherals (mice, keyboards, controllers, etc.) and headsets can all be unplugged and interchanged without it making any difference to the system itself or to the game. So why couldn’t there be different sized peripherals to choose from?

It is possible to find smaller PC peripherals these days, but they are still very much in the minority (in a wall of mice at Best Buy I found two mice small enough for me and both were basic “laptop mice”). They are often of lower quality as well. I have yet to find a headset that fits my head that is of a higher quality than those I had with my discman in high school. This may have something to do with the fact that I have yet to find a headset priced over $25 that fits my head. But it is possible to at least find some options. When it comes to consoles it becomes nearly impossible. To find a smaller controller you must locate a third-party company that makes one, since none of the actual companies that make the consoles make smaller controllers, and then hope that it is both still being made and available somewhere. To get me a small XBox 360 controller, my husband had to go on eBay and pay more than $50 for one because only one company ever made any and they aren’t making them any more.

It may seem like this is a specialized concern, but it really isn’t. Women make up 50% of the potential market and children’s games come out on these platforms too. If it was easier and more comfortable for women to play, it’s likely that more would. It would also make family gaming more possible, since you could play games with your kids more easily on the same console you play Halo 3 or Mass Effect on. If consoles are more versatile, that makes them more marketable. I can imagine an X-Box 360 ad showing a guy playing an FPS with his buddies, shifting to the guy playing a cartoony adventure game with his kids and wife, shifting again to show the wife playing a puzzle game via X-Box Live with online friends and lastly shifting to the couple playing an RPG together. It could be a “build your own system” package that comes with a customizable group of controllers and a game chosen from a small selection or a push from Microsoft to show off the options their awesome peripherals give you. It won’t work if the controllers are only comfortable for the guy, though.

I also know that what I’m proposing costs more, but the potential gain could be huge. If the gaming industry really wants to reach a new segment of the market, a segment with incredible buying power and the willingness to spend a lot on entertainment if they feel it’s worth it, they need to do better than pink controllers and Pop-Cap game ports. Women are a huge potential market. HUGE. But even if you start making games for women (real games for women, not pink dress-up games), it’s not going to work if women can only play them for short periods of time before getting painful hand cramps. Think about how to take the basic building blocks of the industry – the very hardware the games are played on – and make it more accessible and fun for women. And that means not only getting more women to design the hardware, but getting more women in more shapes and sizes to play with it and give feedback.

“But to malign writing for killing women when killing said women is a way of giving them the ultimate praise, of saying they’re the most important part of the life of a given character, hardly seems to be sexism to me. If anything, it is merely guilty of being an overdone plot device.” – Neal Bailey

Ok, so I’ve heard the argument that killing, raping, maiming, whatever a character as motivation for another character is actually a compliment to them because it shows how much they are loved before, but this goes a step beyond. The above quote is from a blog post. “Women in Refrigerators” is a phrase coined by Gail Simone and refers to the trend in comic books where female characters are killed or assaulted and seriously disabled somehow in order to provide a motivation for the male heroes in their lives.

I’m not going to argue that attacking the loved ones of a hero provides him or her a strong motivation, but I do have to wonder what villain in their right mind would possibly want to make a superhero that mad at them. I mean, seriously, do you really want a grieving husband or wife with superpowers coming after you? Really? That might deserve being thought through a little more before you actually attack his wife or her husband. But it’s motivation, and from the writer’s point of view, that’s the important point. I get that. And there can be times when it works. They may have had Joker shoot Barbara Gordon as incentive for Batman to hunt Joker, but she’s become a better character for it having happened. That event isn’t remembered as being about Batman, it’s remembered as being about Barbara.

And that’s the key point here. Women are people too and their motivations and hopes and dreams are their own. Yes, just as men are motivated by what happens to their wives, girlfriends and mothers, women are motivated by what happens to their husbands, boyfriends and fathers. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem to matter. Female heroes rarely have family members stuck in refrigerators. And when the men do, it’s often forgotten after a few issues (Ralph Dibny may have morned his wife until he joined her in death, but more often it feels like the writers have forgotten the incident even happened a few issues later).

If a woman is her own person, even if she’s just a background character we never got to know, it can never be the “ultimate praise” for her to be killed to show that she’s the most important part of someone else’s life. Yes, it is possible for someone’s death to be the most meaningful thing that ever happened to them, but that involves them owning their death. It’s not that the person has to exactly choose to die, but they are personally ascribing meaning to their own deaths when they die (think of saints, dying for their beliefs with God’s name on their lips). These women aren’t given the chance to do that and have no ownership over their fates. They are victims, period.

Think about the way that sentence is phrased. How she feels about him is irrelevant. It allows for a woman to be killed for a man who adores her and considers her the most important part of her life, thus making her death the “ultimate praise”, when she doesn’t even like him or know who he is. Obviously, this isn’t the typical case. But the meaning of someone’s life, even a fictional character’s life, can’t be what they mean to someone else. What do they feel? What do they want? They must have dreams, ambitions, wants of their own. They are people and even the most minor of characters should be assumed to be the center of their own story.

Again, this doesn’t mean that they can’t be attacked or provide motivation, but it does mean that we can’t treat their deaths as existing only for the hero who is left behind. Every character has the potential to act, not just be acted upon, and suggesting that the best a woman can hope for is to be loved best by someone else takes all of that away from her. Even if we never see her own life, never see her act individually, it should be assumed that she can and does do so. She must have other people in her life, other things she does (a job, hobbies, etc.). To do otherwise is to draw a paper cut-out, not a character, and that is a disservice to our hero.

I would say that this attitude is pretty disturbing, and when only female characters are seen this way, it is indeed sexist. But it doesn’t have to be. This would be just as bad were it applied to male characters being killed to prove that they’re the center of someone else’s world, too. And if it were only applied to male characters (as it appears to be only applied to female characters here, although I don’t think the author means it that way), it would be sexism that way. But sexism isn’t the problem here, it’s lack of allowing for human agency and understanding that no one can exist solely to be part of, even the center of, someone else’s world and be considered a fulfilled human being. Being loved is important, but you need to be a person and have some kind of agency too. Otherwise you’re a doll.

It’s just about the end of National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week (September 14-20) and since I have one, I thought I should participate. I found this kind of interesting meme on a migraine site and it seemed an appropriate and kind of fun way of posting about my headache without getting all depressed about it (especially since this past week has been particularly hard in that respect).

1. My illness list includes but is not limited to: a headache that I can best describe as being sort of like a migraine but not quite that I’ve had every minute of every day for over ten years now (ten years and twenty-four days, actually).

2. I was diagnosed with: New Daily Persistent Headache

3. But I had symptoms since: It started pretty definitely on August 26, 1999, although now I think that I might have had auras as a kid and never had it diagnosed because I just thought everybody saw things like that.

4. The biggest adjustment I’ve had to make is: Learning to slow down and deal not being able to do everything I want to sometimes

5. Most people assume: “It’s just a headache.” I’ve come to hate the word “just” with a burning passion.

6. The hardest part about mornings are: Every morning there’s a moment when I first wake up when I realize that the pain is still there and even after ten years it’s still incredibly disappointing every time.

7. My favorite medical TV show is: I don’t really like medical TV shows. Not for any particular reason, I just tend to find them boring. The everyday workings of hospitals and the love lives of the people who work there just aren’t that interesting to me. I think there was a medical show with Dick Van Dyke at one point (Diagnosis Murder maybe?) that was a mystery show and I remember enjoying that, but it’s not on anymore as far as I know.

8. A gadget I couldn’t live without is: I don’t know. I’m not actually big on gadgets. Maybe my computer, if that counts as a “gadget”?

9. The hardest part about nights are: Falling asleep in the first place. I’m terrible at that. I can lay awake thinking about things forever. I’m totally a night owl!

10. Each day I take: two medications at bedtime and sometimes extras if the pain is bad.

11. Regarding alternative treatments: I haven’t had a ton of luck with alternative treatments, but I have found things that help a little (and, like most headache sufferers, I’m willing to try most things). Yoga (structured around and to help the headache) can help a little, but only if it’s already pretty good, the smell of peppermint takes the edge off the pain when it’s really bad and often makes it bearable until the medicine can kick in, head massages can reduce the frequency of the bad spikes, but are expensive. Nothing else has made a big difference for me.

12. If I had to choose between an invisible illness or visible I would choose: Well, I’d rather neither. That’s hard to say and I’m not sure I actually can choose here. I think they both suck equally for different reasons.

13. Regarding working and career: My headache has definitely changed how I went about following what I want for my career, but I’m still hoping to get there eventually. It also made working really, really challenging, both while being at work some days and in trying to justify sick days when I didn’t seem sick to the managers. And fainting in front of customers is generally a bad idea, but not something I could avoid at times. So it’s absolutely affected my work and jobs. It affected where and how I worked too, but that’s an even bigger mess.

14. People would be surprised to know: I can see some uses for some of the effects of my headache and I’m thinking about writing a story with that in mind.

15. The hardest thing to accept about my new reality is: having to realize that I have to slow down and pace myself all the time, that I have to think about everything – what I put on in the morning, what I choose to eat, where I sit in a room, etc. because it all affects what happens to my headache and the headache affects it.

16. Something I never thought I could do with my illness that I did was: Work up to a leadership position in my previous job. Given how hard it was just to work full time and how much I frustrated the managers by having to go home “sick” with a headache sometimes (and being sick longer than anyone else when I did get a cold because my body is also always fighting off a headache), I never thought they’d trust me as a lead, but they did. And, even better, I was good at it.

17. The commercials about my illness: Technically, there aren’t any, but the commercials about headaches and migraine are dreadful and I hate them a lot. I’m sure some of them will be featured on An Ad a Day at some point.

18. Something I really miss doing since I was diagnosed is: Crying without feeling bad the whole time that I was making my headache worse by crying (or by trying not to – it’s pretty much a lose-lose).

19. It was really hard to have to give up: Reading late into the night. I loved being able to do that. Loved, loved, loved it. Not that I wanted to do it every night, I’d outgrown the need to do that, but I loved that I could do it sometimes. It was a wonderful luxury that I’m not sure I ever really appreciated fully. Now I really can’t do that because if I do, I’m going to be in a ton of extra pain the next day that I didn’t need to be in, so I really don’t do it. I read a little late sometimes, but never like I used to.

20. A new hobby I have taken up since my diagnosis is: I’m not sure that I have a new hobby, just more nuanced relationships with old ones. I game in new and different ways than I used to. I’ve started drawing and sewing more seriously, but both were things I did before. I’m sure there must be one (it’s been ten years), I just don’t know of it in particular at this moment. Sorry.

21. If I could have one day of feeling normal again I would: Throw a party (and probably spend the day second guessing it).

22. My illness has taught me: That I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was and that It’s important to slow down and pay attention to yourself. And that the world is full of weird smells.

23. One thing people say that gets under my skin is: “I couldn’t do that.” Yes, you could. When you don’t have a choice, you can do it. Trust me. And saying you couldn’t doesn’t make me feel better, it just makes me wish you thought more of yourself.

24. But I love it when people: manage to respond to my needs or help me without making me feel like an invalid or a freak or a china doll that will break as soon as you look at it.

25. My favorite motto, scripture, quote that gets me through tough times is: “Tomorrow is another day”

26. When someone is diagnosed I like to tell them: Remember that it’s not just in your head, and it’s going to be ok.

27. Something that has surprised me about living with an illness is: how much it affects not only every element of my life, but every element of my husband’s life as well.

28. The nicest thing someone did for me when I wasn’t feeling well was: My husband brought home flowers for me one day when he knew I was hurting a lot. They were just grocery store flowers he’d grabbed when he was there getting other things, but they meant a lot and made me feel so loved and happy. They weren’t the most important thing or the thing that made the most impact on my life, but they were a simple thing and it’s those simple things that make getting through day-to-day bearable.

29. I’m involved with Invisible Illness Week because: Being invisible sucks. People think that just because they can’t see something it must not exist (with the exception of God, who for some reason gets to not have to follow this rule even in people who otherwise live by it). But you can’t always see things, even when they are real and so those of us who can “see” them should talk about them to give them more credibility. Headaches aren’t “in our heads” or minor or “a women’s problem” or anything else. An enormous percentage of the population suffers from them, so it’s incredibly stupid that they get so little respect and have so little research done on them. They matter and those of us who suffer from them, whether we talk about it or suffer in silence, matter too.

30. The fact that you read this list makes me feel: hopeful and happy. Thank you.

Katie Zenke, Headache Sufferer

Like most girls in America seem to do, I read Little Women when I was growing up. For whatever reason, it spoke to me just as it seems to speak to most women who read it (making it the enduring classic it has remained for nearly one hundred and fifty years), despite the fact that I didn’t think I liked it the first time I read it. It’s hard to say I didn’t like it when it stuck with me so fastly and I remember the characters so well and so fondly in ways that I remember few other fictional characters. And like most girls, it seems, Jo was my favorite (although this opinion is slightly less universal than the appeal of the book generally, since many women do find other characters more appealing). I started thinking about Jo March again recently because of the introduction written by Linda Medley that appears at the beginning of the book Amy Unbounded: Belondweg Blossoming.

Medley discusses Jo and her ultimate fate at the end of Little Women quite a bit in this introduction. She states that while Jo is set up as a feminist character, her marrying a “stodgy old dope” like Professor Bhaer is a particularly unfeminist thing to do. She even goes so far as to wonder if some of “modern feminist literature has sprouted from… deep-rooted adolescent disappointment in Jo’s fate”. She begins all this musing by quoting her mother as saying (in “a tone of bitter disgust”) “Jo should’ve married LAURIE. Not that – that OLD MAN!”, to which she replies “Right on.”

This got me thinking. Was marrying Professor Bhaer a particularly unfeminist thing for Jo to have done? Was it unfeminist at all? The more I thought about it, the less convinced I was. In fact, the statement “Jo should’ve married LAURIE” feels far more unfeminist to me. So I dug out my copy of Little Women (which is dated 1911, so I’m guessing it’s the later version that we’re still all reading today).

I really couldn’t find any evidence that Jo ever wanted to marry Laurie, nor is she upset at all when he marries someone else. So why is the opinion that she should have so common (because it really is)? Do we feel so strongly that she needs to be married to someone that we have to pick who we think is the most appropriate partner for her, even if she doesn’t agree? Jo and Laurie have a great friendship that stays strong right up through the end of the book. Laurie clearly fell for Jo, but Jo never expresses any romantic ideas or feelings about Laurie. She also states a couple of times that she doesn’t want to be or marry rich, which makes sense. She has ambitions of her own (she’s a feminist, remember?), and rich mens’ wives couldn’t really spend their times writing books and things when they should be maintaining a large household of servants and keeping up appearances.

Can you really see Jo in silk gowns with bustles every day attending balls and giving instructions to nannies? It doesn’t sound like her, but it’s what Laurie’s wife would do. Amy can paint as a rich man’s wife because painting can be excused as an “accomplishment” when necessary, but you can’t do that with writing. Not to mention the kinds of things Jo wrote (remember, her stories were full of scandal and melodrama)! So, in the absence of romantic love and faced with a lifestyle that doesn’t match what she wants for herself, there would be no sense in Jo’s marrying Laurie. I can only conclude that we, as modern readers, want her to do so because he is young and handsome and rich and those are the qualities we have deemed most desirable in a husband (particularly a fictional one).

Jo knows what she wants and needs much better than we do, though. She meets Professor Bhaer halfway through the second part of the book (which was originally published as a second, separate book). They don’t fall in love right away. They develop a friendship through sharing interests, having great conversations and just generally getting to know one another. This is clearly an adult friendship, whereas Laurie’s friendship with Jo is one of those “we’ve been friends since childhood” friendships. There’s a different quality to it. Friendships in adulthood usually grow because of common interests or activities, whereas childhood ones are often started because of proximity (you make friends with the kid next door even if you don’t really have much in common, because it’s convenient and you’re too young to travel to find someone who shares your interests). This doesn’t make one type better than the other, but it does make them different.

Not only do they develop an adult friendship, but Jo and Professor Bhaer both actually develop romantic attachments to each other. Jo pines for him when she is separated from him, even though she doesn’t believe (or even imagine) anything romantic will ever come of their relationship and clearly Professor Bhaer dreams of Jo. The professor’s proposal isn’t particularly romantic in a conventional sense, but the whole scene with them discovering that they love each other as they stand in the rain is marvelous. Clearly this is a happy match for both. Even better, it is a match that will make both happy – they understand each other and will be able to support each other in their dreams and their work. Not only will Jo be able to keep writing, but she will have a husband who understands, encourages and supports her along the way (a rare thing for the time period).

I think that in choosing to marry the man that she loves and who will understand and support her in her dreams, Jo is doing something very feminist. It is not unfeminist to get married, just to get married to someone for the sake of being married (because you’re supposed to be a wife). Jo makes her decision for all the right, feminist reasons and, in the end, everyone is happy. I think that the reaction women have today of being disappointed that Jo married the professor instead of Laurie has more to do with our romantic ideas about love and marriage than about feminism. We look at Jo and the choices we believe her to have had and our cultural teaching tells us that you choose the man who is young, handsome, rich and romantic, not the man who is older, maybe not so classically handsome and not rich at all. Ideas of who you are actually in love with or who might make you happy don’t really enter into it (it’s generally assumed you will fall in love with the former anyway). But they should, a feminist examination would say that you look at the person for who they are, not what they look like or how rich they are.

I honestly believe that Jo is a great feminist character and that choosing to marry Professor Bhaer is one of the most feminist decisions she makes in the whole book. Little Women is a realistic story. The characters are supposed to reflect life. I’m glad that one of the most important fictional icons for girls in this country since the mid-1800s has been one who made decisions based on what she wanted and needed and, in following her heart, managed to find love. She may not be perfect, but no one is in real life either, so perhaps her very imperfections are what make her such a great icon. And if you need more proof that she made the right choice of husband, Louisa May Alcott wrote two more awesome books about Jo and Professor Bhaer and their lives together: Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Both are well worth reading!

Power fantasies are a big deal these days. As much as videogames might come under attack from the media and activist groups, they also draw in new players from all around the world every year and many games are understood to be such fantasies. Tons of research has been done on power struggles in social interactions and communications (Deborah Tannen is the best writer I know of on this subject) and superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman are often seen as healthy male power fantasies. In short, we understand that men want to be strong and able to beat up bad guys and save the world. And if you think about it, the appeal is pretty easy to see. Why wouldn’t a guy want to be someone who’s able to be always in control, always able to protect the people he loves and unquestionably always on the side of right? So here’s the tricky question: what is a woman’s power fantasy?

The feminist answer would be “the same thing”, but the reality is always more complicated than that. Yes, women want those things too. That pretty much goes without saying. Except, sadly, it needs saying because many people don’t understand that a woman would want to protect her loved ones and be able to retain control of a situation and be always doing the right thing as well. So the question becomes, why do women want those things too? More than that, why do women need them?

Something that I forget a lot of times is that while women live lives always having to be somewhat on alert, always careful, men not only don’t have to do that, but they very often aren’t even aware that women do. Jennifer de Guzman wrote a brilliant post on her LiveJournal about this that really articulates it well:

As I wrote in my reply, I am kind of astounded that some men don’t see why physical empowerment would clearly be attractive for women. I think it’s intriguing to note that women often like the hot women who kick ass as much, if not more, than men do. Here’s what I think is behind that: As women, we are nearly constantly aware of physical threats. And those threats often are of being violated sexually. When I used to go to campus for night classes and people warned me to “be careful,” what they are saying was, essentially, “avoid getting raped.”

Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened? What if all the rage you feel about women being victimized and brutalized could be channeled into pure, righteous ass-kicking? And, because you’re a woman, you could possibly do that ass-kicking without being seen as a testosterone Steven-Seagal-esque meathead. Ass-kicking fantasies for men are more about proving and retaining power, I think. For women, they’re about finding and asserting power when they’re not expected to have any.

That’s exactly it. That’s a really big reason why women, and even little girls, need power fantasies and superheroes of their own. But as brilliant as this post was, what made me really think about this was the reaction it elicited from Michael May over at Amazon Princess:

That makes so much sense I’m ashamed I never thought of it, at least not in those terms. I’ve been operating under the hypothesis that the attraction of Wonder Woman for women has a lot to do with confidence (and argued that that also makes her attractive to men – or at least to men like me), but Jennifer’s thoughts go deeper than that and explore at least one of the reasons why Wonder Woman can afford to be so confident. She’s gorgeous and she can damn well take care of herself.

So, yes, women do want and need superheroes. Little girls need superheroes. This isn’t to say that boys don’t need them, but why can’t we have both? If there can be three ongoing comics at the same time about Batman’s adventures in Gotham, surly there can be a little more room for real superheroines! There are so few comics highlighting superheroines (and at the rate Marvel’s going, fewer all the time) and the ones that do exist often feel like the neglected side projects that either got hastily put together while the writers focus on their real stories or are assigned to second-string artists and writers and never promoted in any way, giving them no chance to gain a real following. Even flagship characters get dropped and forgotten (how many times has Spider-Girl lost her book? when was the last time one of the DC editors even mentioned Wonder Woman’s book publicly?).

Women deserve more heroes. We deserve more games with heroes we can see ourselves in (and yes, if you read the above you’ll see that we do like them beautiful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they all have to be naked and have DD-cup breasts, beauty is more complicated than that). We deserve more comics with kick-ass heroines. We deserve heroines with real female friendships, since women do occasionally interact with each other. I’d love – *LOVE* – to read a comic that passed the Bechdel Test, but since Birds of Prey ended I haven’t found one. I’d love to see as many little girls running around pretending to be Batgirl, Spider-Girl, Wonder Woman and Supergirl as I see little boys running around pretending to be Spider-Man, Superman, the Hulk and Batman. Maybe if more guys saw that girls could be heroes, more women would actually be safer in real life too. You never know.

Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook
Norm Feuti
2007 (Hyperion)

I worked in retail for a very long time (almost ten years, starting when I was in high school), and like most people who have done so, I can tell you that it’s a very mixed experience. In some ways it’s really nice – you have flexible hours, often you can have a lot of fun with your co-workers, and very occasionally you get to feel like you really, honestly helped someone. In a lot of ways it’s not so nice – you don’t actually get paid that much and still have to clean up weird things sometimes, retail stores don’t have holidays off so you almost certainly have to work at least some of them, and many, many customers treat retail employees like they are some kind of incompetent hired help that need only be barely tolerated and certainly not treated as human.

Still, we live in a consumer society that has yet to completely forgo the need for brick-and-mortar stores with flesh-and-blood customer service employees to wait on customers hand and foot. As much as I would love to be able to get corporations to realize and appreciate the value of their first-line customer service representatives and salespeople, that’s not going to happen any time soon (in fact, it seems to get worse rather than better every day). Likewise, I’d like to convince customers to keep in mind that the people behind the counters and on the sales floor wearing name tags are normal, regular people just like them who deserve respect. I’d like for it to become understood that when you treat someone well, they will be more likely to give you better service, even if they never meant to give you poor service in the first place. People just like being treated with respect and respond to it.

The best book that I’ve ever found speaking to the experience of working in retail is Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook by Norm Feuti. It is funny and packed full of useful information about working in retail environments. Feuti sprinkles the book with excerpts from the run of his comic strip, Retail, which focuses on the staff of a fictional department store and the things that happen to them. Feuti uses stories from his own experiences working retail as well as stories submitted from readers in creating the comic and that wealth of knowledge clearly contributed to the book as well. The book covers everything from getting hired to the different aspects of the job itself and even common retail myths. There’s even a section on retail employee etiquette (“How Not to Be the One Everybody Hates”).

One thing that I wish is that I had known more about what I was getting into when I started working in retail when I was fifteen. This book would have been perfect. It’s a fun, easy read and it speaks directly to the reader about things that will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked retail. I would absolutely give this book to any teenager working retail, even if they’ve been doing it for a while. Even for the retail veteran, it’s a good read and sort of a comfort. It assures you that your experiences aren’t unique, that the good and the bad of retail happen everywhere, and that maybe if you can laugh at it the bad days won’t be so depressing. And when you’re a teenager, it’s a lot harder to believe that things aren’t depressing or that you aren’t alone. I think this book might even make more of a difference to some teenagers (and even some adults) than Feuti even imagined.

People are what they are. I don’t see customers, as a group, changing for the better any time real soon. There are gems and they stand out and make your day. I still have favorite customers and moments from my experiences that I’m sure I will remember for years to come while most of the bad customers are forgotten. Still, the fact that most hours consisted of ten customers dismissing me out of hand as useless or stupid while one spoke to me as a person isn’t forgotten even if the faces themselves are. In my experience, most retail employees really do care and really are trying to do the best they can, but sometimes, you just have to plaster on a smile and pretend. That’s when you need this book to remind you that you aren’t alone.

- Publisher’s Description
- The Official Retail Community

- Norm Feuti’s Blog

- Buy it from Amazon

On July 15th, a position paper by former president Jimmy Carter was published that discussed his reasons for severing all ties to the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s an amazing piece and I highly recommend reading it. Mr. Carter explains that he can no longer be a part of a religion that views half of the population of the world as inferior to the other half. He explains that this institutionalized sexism is used far too often as an excuse for atrocities.

There is a whole section of the paper briefly touching on some of the ways that sexism around the world is affecting lives and he states that “It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society.” He goes on to say:

“It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population. We need to challenge these self-serving and outdated attitudes and practices – as we are seeing in Iran where women are at the forefront of the battle for democracy and freedom.”

Carter acknowledges how difficult it is for current leaders to challenge such deeply ingrained social mores, but he calls on them to work to change these truths anyway. He calls the cherry-picking of bible verses to justify sexism selfish and “in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions – all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God.”

To be honest, I never thought much about President Carter before. I knew that he was involved in human rights issues and that he won a Nobel Prize, but he was out of office before I was born and so I never paid that much attention. This kind of a call for action is well worthy of attention, though. I hope that it helps to make the difference in the world that it asks for. It certainly made a difference to me.