Pixiepalace

When was the last time you had to find a new doctor? Do you remember the process you went through to find that doctor? Did you get to speak to any doctors before going in to have full-fledged appointments with them? Or did you simply call the receptionist and get an appointment where you ended up in an exam room with someone you’d barely met three minutes ago poking at you and asking very personal questions?

It seems to make so much sense that a prospective patient should be able to meet or speak to a doctor before deciding to become an actual patient and be examined by them, doesn’t it? So why is it not the way our medical community works?

Call up your doctor’s receptionist and ask for an appointment to meet the doctor, just to talk. Such an appointment would probably only need something like a fifteen minute slot (you can say a lot in fifteen minutes) and no nurse or exam room at all – simply a few minutes with the doctor in their office or over the phone. Most likely you will be met with confusion at such a request and an “our office/Dr. Smith doesn’t do that kind of thing” response.

Why is that? A doctor is someone who you’ll need to share your most intimate secrets with. Who is really only going to be able to do their job well if you are comfortable with them and who you are only going to go see if you have no ambivalent feelings about. How are we, as patients, expected to form that kind of trust relationship so quickly with someone we aren’t even really given the chance to meet?

Whenever I need a new doctor (which has been frequently in the last five years, as I have moved twice to new states and have a chronic condition that requires me to have a set of doctors at all times), I do research first and find a list of people who might be the right fit for me.

I have a pretty good idea at the point about what I’m looking for in each type of doctor that I need. My regular doctor has to be able to explain things clearly and simply to me, they have to respect me and my unusual issues (ideally, they will have heard of my condition before I walk into their office and mention it), and they have to be willing to work with my other doctors. On the other hand, my neurologist doesn’t have to be able to explain things so well, but he or she does have to make me feel confident in the treatment I’m receiving, like they understand my specific condition and like they do not consider me a fascinating science experiment.

Once I’ve found a few possible candidates, I start making phone calls. I ask every receptionist if there is some time that I can call and speak to the doctor or if the doctor can give me a call back. Never has this question been answered in the affirmative. I’m starting to believe that doctors simply do not have telephones.

After that, I ask for an appointment to meet the doctor – one that will only consist of talking and will have no examination as part of the appointment. I have only once ever been told this was possible, and it still required me to go through the whole weighing/blood pressure/pulse/temperature thing as well as spend ten minutes discussing my medical history with a nurse. If I was only there to meet the doctor, why do I have to share every intimate detail of my life with some nurse I may never see again if I decide not to return to this office?

For nearly every doctor I have ever had I have had to start by making an exam appointment. While examining someone may be a perfectly amiable way to meet a person from the doctor’s point of view, sitting there going through the “who are you and why should I trust you?” questions in my underwear is not a particularly good way to make me feel comfortable or inclined to return.

I don’t feel like I’m crazy in wanting to get to have more agency and comfort when it comes to meeting and choosing a new doctor, either. A doctor is someone that I am expected to share every single intimate detail with, especially when something is going wrong, and someone that I am expected to be comfortable with looking at and touching every inch of my body, no matter how private or sensitive.

Is it so much to ask that I be able to speak to such a person before committing to this kind of relationship with them to make sure that I believe that I can trust them and feel respected by them, even when spread nearly naked on a table in front of them? I don’t think that it is and I find the fact that our current medical establishment treats patients like such a thing is insane absolutely disgraceful. If there is anything that indicates a disrespect for the patient, it’s this attitude that the patient doesn’t even have the right to speak to a doctor and decide if they are comfortable before being expected to strip down and submit to whatever exam is recommended.

Dear everyone in YA publishing,

*Please* can we get some books about scrappy poor girls with lots of character instead of an endless string of books about debutants and girls “suddenly thrown into the lap of luxury” and the like? They’re fine once in a while, but I’m more than a little tired of a constant parade of “poor little rich girl” stories and photo covers with tacky prom dress-clad models (including many who are trying pretty pathetically to look historical in their tacky mall prom dresses).

Please, somebody go back and remember that some of the best stories have been about overcoming challenges that have nothing to do with pretentious boarding schools or arranged marriages to Venician dukes or not being able to get this season’s “It” bag because your mother has decided to cancel your sixteen credit cards in a cruel and completely unwarranted bout of insanity.

Some of the best stories have had to do with overcoming hardships like finding ways to afford necessities, escaping enslavement or crushing prejudice, and coping with the basic and universal truths of growing up (achieving greater independence; increasing responsibilities; changing relationships with parents, siblings, friends and romantic interests; etc.). There are so many great stories that have *nothing* to do with being pretty and rich and privileged and some of those stories are so incredibly valuable.

Little Women has been a classic almost since the day it was published and the girls in that story have almost nothing. The book *starts* with a comment about there being no money for Christmas gifts and one of the most memorable moments in the book is Jo selling her hair to have money to pay for her mother’s trip to nurse her sick father who has been away fighting in the Civil War. No riches here – just character building through family and life experience.

Today it seems like YA shelves are filled with series books about private academies with cute uniforms and too much money to spend on dances and teas, flouncy historical fictions about second daughters who need to marry rich men for vague reasons that are never fully explained and (inexplicably) normal girls who are suddenly thrown into lives of lavish wealth and excess for reasons that are somewhat unclear and probably don’t matter anyway. Many of the books feel more like excuses to drop the names of designer labels or describe fancy parties with corseted women and dashing Darcy-clones than like actually interesting stories.

Most of us do not wear Chanel dresses to drink too much with our dreamy boyfriends and historical fiction tends to be more interesting when there’s more to it than a couple of bratty girls in corsets flirting too much and trying to get proposed to fastest. Story matters and for a good story, you need conflict. I’m absolutely not saying that a rich girl can’t have conflict enough in her life for a good story, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to work a little harder to show it to me. A poor girl has conflict built into her daily life, even when her family and friends are as loving as can be.

Besides, I really want stories that illustrate that there’s more to life than Dior dresses and making sure you have the handsomest guy on your arm for the party. I want characters with depth and personality, characters I can relate to and sometimes even aspire to be like, characters who I can learn from. I want more than fan fiction and ads for Vogue and everything in it.

There is so much possibility out there, please tell a more varied set of stories! I am tired of every cover having a fancy gown and every description including the words “incredible wealth” or “exclusive boarding school”. Give me some public school girls, some scrappy inner city kids, some farm girls, maybe even some soldier girls and characters with *gasp* jobs at retail and food-service places. Give me stories about the kinds of people I see every day and the kinds of girl I might have been had I lived in another era.

From an avid reader

I miss Stan Berenstain. Since his death, his son Mike has been writing the Berenstain Bears series with Jan (Stan’s wife, who has been writing the series with Stan since early on) and what used to be a great series about common childhood experiences like sibling rivalry and bullying and bad dreams has become filled with constant preachy Christian titles.

Now, I don’t have anything against Christian books or anything, but I liked that it was a more or less secular series that any kid could read and relate to. Now new titles are all about finding the Christian version of God, learning to pray and going to Sunday School.

I thought there were a few issues with the series before (the book where Momma decides to get a job is a particularly problematic title), but most of the time it did a good job of keeping Brother and Sister on equal footing without making them the same person and of respecting the feelings and troubles of children without vilifying their parents or teachers. That’s (sadly) not something that I find nearly enough. I simply want to continue to be able to recommend and count on this series for those great qualities.

True, all those good titles are still there, but now almost every new title coming out (and new titles are often the ones that monopolize the shelves in bookstores) are these super religious ones. That’s simply kind of disappointing. And I guess that’s what I wanted to say about it today.

This is something that I wrote on Google+ in response to this article and I felt it was worth reproducing here.

Geeks are a somewhat insulated community and while they often trot out the “I’ve been persecuted” thing (and it’s often something very real that they’ve experienced elsewhere), it’s not something they are generally dealing with inside of that insulated community.

Geeks may have been picked on in high school, looked at funny or laughed at in college, etc., but when they are together as geeks they can appreciate each other’s geekiness and generally don’t pick on each other for it. Walk around GenCon and you’ll see that for the most part, even strangers are sharing their love of whatever game or anime or science fiction series with each other, not laughing at each other for those very things.

Female geeks, however, are not afforded that same respect. They get treated like they don’t understand the most basic of things, like they couldn’t possibly appreciate the awesomeness or complexities of whatever it is they are passionate about and, often, like what they like is “cute” or somehow lesser than what “real” geeks like. Even when it isn’t so explicit, there is a distinct feeling of being a second-class citizen within the community.

Female geeks often experience the very kinds of prejudice and outsiderness inside the community that the geek community so reviles when someone outside the community does it to one of them.

How is the pillar effect that girl geeks experience substantially different than when the popular crowd is nice to the nerd in high school in order to get homework help, but never really invites him to the parties or lets him sit at their lunch table?

This is a brilliant passage from Autobiography of Mark Twain, dated January 24, 1906, about what patriotism and responsible voting means.

“But we don’t have to vote for him.”

Robinson said “Do you mean to say that you are not going to vote for him?”

“Yes,” I said, “that is what I mean to say. I am not going to vote for him.”

The others began to find their voices. They sang the same note. They said that when a party’s representatives choose a man, that ends it. If they choose unwisely it is a misfortune, but no loyal member of the party has any right to withhold his vote. He has a plain duty before him and he can’t shirk it. He must vote for that nominee.

I said that no party held the privilege of dictating to me how I should vote. That if party loyalty was a form of patriotism, I was no patriot, and that I didn’t think I was much of a patriot anyway, for oftener than otherwise what the general body of Americans regarded as the patriotic course was not in accordance with my views; that if there was any valuable difference between being an American and a monarchist it lay in the theory that the American could decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn’t; whereas the king could dictate the monarchist’s patriotism for him—a decision which was final and must be accepted by the victim; that in my belief I was the only person in the sixty millions—with Congress and the Administration back of the sixty millions—who was privileged to construct my patriotism for me.

They said “Suppose the country is entering upon a war—where do you stand then? Do you arrogate to yourself the privilege of going your own way in the matter, in the face of the nation?”

“Yes,” I said, “that is my position. If I thought it an unrighteous war I would say so. If I were invited to shoulder a musket in that cause and march under that flag, I would decline. I would not voluntarily march under this country’s flag, nor any other, when it was my private judgment that the country was in the wrong. If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that—but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”

Twain’s autobiography is fantastic and I highly recommend it (although it’s also heavy, so be careful not to drop it on yourself, it could probably break a foot without too much trouble!). This passage is one of the most brilliant ones I’ve come across and I simply had to share it.

For some reason the children’s publishing world loves abridged classics. Every major publisher has a series of them. Some publishers even specialize in them. It seems that just about any “classic” work of fiction is eligible for abridgment too, regardless of the length, intended audience’s age, or even the “reading level” of the original. As long as it’s old enough to be considered a classic, it’s probably going to be abridged. The problem that I have with abridgments is that it makes an assumption about fiction that I take issue with. It assumes that the work is most valuable and most appealing because of the story told, not because of the writing, language, format or anything else. But a book is not just a story.

To better understand what I mean by this, try reading the text of a great picture book removed from the book, just written out like this blog post is (Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon work great for this). Is it the same as reading the book with the pictures, the page breaks and the design elements that give the book personality (even the ones you might not consciously think about as you read, like where the text is placed on the page). The story might still be good, even without the rest of the elements that make it a picture book, but it’s not the same experience at all.

Another way to think about it is to consider remakes of films. Both versions of a movie might be really good, but they aren’t at all the same. The original Oceans 11 may have essentially the same plot as the remake, but they are far from the same movie. Not only are the scripts different, but the actors, cinematography, sets, lighting, directing, everything is different. What remains the same is the plot, but that doesn’t make them the same, or even equivalent, movies.

So how does this all relate to abridged classic books? When you consider what makes a classic a classic, it’s actually not usually just the story (although the story certainly matters). Little Women isn’t perennially popular just because it’s a good story about four sisters growing up. Part of what makes it such a great book is the writing and the voice – when you read Alcott’s book, you’re hearing her fictionalization of her own teenage years and those of her real sisters and it shows. Her love for her family, her values, her passion and her struggles, and her real understanding of the nuances of how hard it is to be a teenage girl, a sister, a daughter and a friend. Just pulling out the events and abridging them loses those nuances and that voice, because they aren’t that present in the events themselves, but are present in how she writes those events. It’s not that Meg wanted a silk dress that’s so interesting (just telling us she wanted a silk dress but they couldn’t afford one makes her sound pretty selfish), it’s how Alcott describes her quiet longing for the dress and her worries over her family’s situation that tell us who Meg is, why it matters and why we should care.

And being old enough to read a book (or appreciate it being read to you), often indicates the maturity level needed to really appreciate the story as well. Obviously, this isn’t always true for kids that read very early, but for the average kid, it’s pretty reliable. Books mean more to us when they’re read at the right time. For example, one of my favorite books ever is Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. I read it for the first time my freshman year of college and a big part of why it meant so much to me then is that it spoke to a lot of what I was going through at the time. I could have read it in middle school if someone had given it to me then, and I might even have found parts of it interesting, but it wouldn’t have meant that much to me because I wouldn’t have been able to relate to it.

Another example from my life would be Anne of Green Gables. I clearly tried to read it too young and found it massively boring. To this day, I’ve never managed to get all the way through it because my impression of it being boring is still pretty strong. I’m sure it’s a fabulous book, though, because it’s got so much history and so many devoted fans and has inspired so much passionate scholarship for so long. I just have trouble appreciating it because I encountered it at entirely the wrong time. I could read it, but when I attempted it, I just found that I didn’t care enough about what was in it to do so at the time.

Basically, my point is that I think that if you want to give people the best chance of enjoying a book, you should give them both the real book and try not to give it to them too early. First impressions last a long time and if they remember having read The Secret Garden and not really caring about it in third grade, chances are they aren’t going to try it again in fifth when they really might enjoy it. Abridgments come in here because they make it very easy to give books too early and it’s a lot harder to have a passionate positive reaction to one because there just isn’t as much to love and the writing typically isn’t as remarkable.

So what do I think people should do to get kids to read classics? First and foremost, don’t make a big deal about them being classics. They’re just books. Second, try to give them around the right time. This involves some thinking ahead. Why are you giving this book? Did you love it as a kid? How old were you? Try to give it at around that same age. Does the kid in question love the topic and you think they might really like the book (Treasure Island and the works of Jules Verne are often given for this reason)? Flip through the book and think about if it’s something you think the kid could actually read right now, based on what you know they are already reading. If you think it’s going to be too hard (or even if you aren’t quite sure, but think it might be), but you don’t want to wait because the kid is really interested in the topic right now, give it to them in an audio book format. That way the “reading level” can be somewhat above their skill level and they can still enjoy it. Audio books are awesome and most popular classics are available from multiple readers, so you can find one you like if you really want the right audio book.

Make sure to think about why you want them to read the book before you get it. Do you want to share a favorite book with them? Share the book you loved, not an abridgment which might not even have the elements that made you love the book. Do you think it’s a great work of literature and that they should read it? Consider what makes it a great work. Remember, Shakespeare isn’t famous because he wrote great stories (he didn’t – nearly all of his plays are retellings of stories from somewhere else), he’s famous because of how he told the stories. Do you think reading classics would be “good for them”? Just don’t. This is never a good basis for buying a kid a fictional book. Think about how you felt about things you were given because they were “good for you” when you were a kid. They usually aren’t popular with the kid in question, and you’ll probably remember feeling that way if you spend some time to think about it. Classics are awesome, but give them because you think the kid would like them, not because they’re some kind of literary vitamin. And if they were some kind of literary vitamin, it seems unlikely that an abridged version would have the same benefits as the actual, orgininal book, doesn’t it?

If you watch a movie or cartoon or pick up a comic that involves a group of main characters you’re likely to find a mix of people in that group. Some white guys, maybe a black guy or an Asian guy, a girl or two and possibly a pet or sidekick of some kind. The stories involving groups like this vary. They could be solving mysteries or saving their planet or just kicking bad-guy butt. Regardless, one thing is virtually for certain – the girls will all have romance somehow worked into their description or plot.

I call this the Reverse Jane Austen Principle. The name was the result of an attempt to explain this issue to someone asking me questions about comic books. In trying to explain it, I found that the simplest way to phrase what I was saying was this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged by the entertainment industry that a female character in possession of a name and a ringless left hand must be in want of a boyfriend (and the name is really optional).

The characters aren’t always (or even often) exclusively there to be someone’s romantic interest or to moon over boys, often they have very interesting characters beyond this and frequently they’re interesting, powerful characters in their own right. But that romance thing does seem to always be there, which is not always true for male characters who have equally interesting, powerful character descriptions.

This means that you get things like the Justice League cartoon from a few years back, which had seven main characters, each a powerful hero. Of the seven, there were two who were women. Hawkgirl fell in love with Green Lantern during the course of the show and had a very complicated relationship with him and Wonder Woman got pretty squarely paired up with Batman, although they never did anything about this romance and all indications showed more affection on her side than his anyway. Of the three men remaining, everyone already knows that Superman is already taken by the mostly off-screen Lois Lane, J’on J’onzz is still busy mourning his dead wife (and probably considered too alien for a romance anyway) and Flash is something of a chronic flirt who never has a date. Even when they opened up the League and had more than enough female characters they could have paired those guys up with, they clearly never felt the need to do so. But Hawkgirl had to pine for GL even after he started seeing someone else and Wonder Woman was paired with Batman even though it made no sense for either of their characters.

The Reverse Jane Austen Principle means that Hollywood can’t seem to tell stories about women characters at all without injecting that bit of romance. It’s like they can’t imagine romance not being a fundamental part of any woman’s life, even if it doesn’t have to be so to men. For example, there is a movie coming out soon about a very influential Hawaiian princess who lived near the end of the nineteenth century and fought the annexing of her kingdom by the United States government. It’s called Princess Kaiulani (her name should have an apostrophe in it, but apparently they decided to drop it for some reason). The movie creates a romance for her that never existed and sets it as a major focus of the piece. In fact, the tagline is “her heart was torn between love and the future of Hawaii”. Except that it wasn’t.

I can’t think of a good biopic about a man to compare this to, actually. There are tons of movies about politicians with no injected romance (off the top of my head are All the President’s Men, Nixon and Thirteen Days, but there are tons of them). So why does the girl need romance? Every movie about Queen Elizabeth I that I’ve ever seen focuses more on her supposed romances with her courtiers than it does on her as a political leader (granted her father has the same problem, but he sort of made that bed for himself and now he’s stuck with it). Queen Victoria is the same way. She had a very long reign and a lot happened while she was queen, but the movies about her all seem to focus on her romances (real or imagined).

Comics seem to be just as bad. Unless a girl has green or purple skin (and even then it’s not a guarantee), she’s bound to be wrapped up in some relationship plot within just a couple of issues of her introduction! There was a really entertaining short run comic a few years back called Teen Titans Year One. It told some stories about the original Titans getting together and doing missions, but it sort of set them now instead of when they actually were a newly formed team (Robin IMed Kid Flash about a mission, for example). The original Teen Titans consisted of four boys and a girl – Wonder Girl. The boys all had plots involving their mentors being possessed and struggling with their roles within the group and things like that. What was Wonder Girl’s plot? She had a crush on Speedy and they went on a date at one point. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved this comic. It told a great story in a funny, fresh way. But it totally adhered to the Reverse Jane Austen Principle, too.

There are occasionally exceptions to this principle, but they are extremely rare. Nerd girls can slip through relationship-free every once in a great while, but it’s very, very difficult. Usually they have to at least be pining for someone or aimlessly feeling worthless because they don’t have a guy. One notable nerd girl exception would be Velma from Scooby Doo (she is, however, only an exception if you ignore the movies or consider the characters in them different from the ones in the cartoons). Children can sometimes manage to evade this rule as well, but even they usually get trapped by it. River from Firefly got out of it because of the kid rule (even though she wasn’t actually that young, everyone but the bounty hunter treated her that way). It’s also possible to escape if you’re either the only character or if there are so many girls and so few guys that some girls have to not be paired up. Dora the Explorer, some of the minor characters from She-Ra and Flora from The Winx Club all sneak by this way.

But, sadly, exceptions are rare. For the most part, if a female character is included, she’s going to somehow be tangled in this principle. She might be in a relationship, like Arwen from Lord of the Rings. She might start out single but end up in a relationship, like Leia from Star Wars. She might be done with him, but can’t get disentangled, like Rachel from the recent Batman movies. She might be pining for someone specific, like Elisa from Gargoyles. She might be trying to avoid the whole thing and end up caught in a relationship anyway, like Megara in Hercules. She might be just pining for romance without anyone in particular in mind, like Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. And she might be minding her own business and have it thrown at her anyway, like Captain Amelia from Treasure Planet! Regardless, it’s everywhere. Few female characters can escape it.

This isn’t to say that you can’t have amazing characters and fantastic stories that follow the Reverse Jane Austen Principle because you can. Many of the movies, shows and comics I’ve mentioned are great and totally worth watching or reading. That said, I’d really like to see this stop being such a rule. I’d like to see more movies that don’t feel the need to make sure every female character is somehow either connected to a guy or wants to be. Just because she’s not married, doesn’t mean she necessarily has to want to be (or even spend much time thinking about it, because seriously, if my planet was blowing up or something, I wouldn’t stop to bemoan my lack of boyfriend). If Legolas, Buzz Lightyear and Obi-Wan Kenobi don’t need love interests, why do most female characters created by the entertainment industry need one?

DC is coming out with a new cartoon this fall. Since their cartoons are generally really good, I was pretty excited about this (Justice League Unlimited