With your permission, we’d like to link to this post in the Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Carnival hosted at Heroine Content this month. If that is OK with you, please email me (avengingophelia at gmail dot com) today, as we’re publishing tomorrow.

Thanks!

Grace

And you will be delighted to know that my niece sat in front of the TV to watch the second last episode, but hardly looked at it. Why? Because she was reading a book by a certain K.E.Mills…

With thousands of years of inequality momentum and baggage behind it, the ship is slow to turn.

As for female SFF authors – the majority of my favourites happen to be females. Anyone with pre-conceived ideas that female authors are best at romance and chick-lit are missing out on some great SFF reading.

An interesting topic. I remember loving Cagney an Lacey, back in the 80s. But when I went back and looked at the first season, recently released on dvd, I found it almost impossible to watch because of the antiquated gender stereotyping — and that was with an improvement!

Likewise, Life on Mars is a real eye opener, because that accurately depicts the way women were treated, in life and in the workplace, back in the 70s. We’ve moved so far on from that, it’s a sharp shock to see it now. Which isn’t to say there’s not still progress to be made. There is. Your example of the woman bishop is one of them. And I find large pockets of the sff community still noxiously sexist. I’m still foaming at the mouth that no woman has been nominated for best novel Hugo this year. And don’t get me started on the the British natcon/awards’ track record.

On the other hand, I watch something like the new Battlestar Galactica, and I am heartened. Sometimes the progress does feel slow … I mean, if any of the female actors in BSG had let themselves get as fat as Aaron Douglas has, I doubt they’d still be working. But on balance, things are better.

But we have to stay vigilant. The old attitudes are hard to break.