There’s a new post up over at Chasing Ray with Part 1 of the What A Girl Wants Gang’s holiday gift book recommendations, and as usual this inspires/reminds me to repost one of my responses to an earlier WAGW question over here.
Colleen asked: “Are girls missing out on something by not having a kick butt heroine to look up to? Is it all just testosterone for boys and girls don’t need it? Should we find our heroes elsewhere? Am I wrong to pine for a world where girls can have a superhero birthday party with only female characters and everyone knows their names?”
It’s easy to remember the superheroes that meant a lot when I was a little kid. One of my earliest journal entries relates with alarm that Bruce Wayne is capchurd and Robin is going to be diceed. Somewhere there’s a photo of a seventies Halloween party featuring Batgirl (me) and two Batmen. And I am a member of the Superfriends generation: “Wondertwin powers: activate!”
But once I got past childhood TV memories, I was drawing a blank. Surely, there were stories with kickass female characters that were meaningful to me. Surely, I hadn’t gone through adolescence and young adulthood devoid of larger-than-life fictional role models. I started muttering out loud, trying to return to my past self, as I have so often when responding to Colleen’s great questions in this series.
Come on, picture that first group house you lived in when you moved out of the dorms, early freshman year. Hasper the Friendly House. Okay, I see it. One housemate is in the kitchen, doctoring Ramen. Another is bent over the coffee table, making chain mail. And there I am in the papasan chair, and what am I reading? “Oh my God. Sword and Sorceress.”
Sword and Sorceress, in case you don’t know, is a long-running anthology. It was created and originally edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, began in the mid-eighties, and was specifically designed to address the lack of strong female characters in sword-and-sorcery fantasy. And for a while, it was my highest literary ambition to get a story into one of its volumes.
So why was it so hard for me to remember S&S, as I used to affectionately abbreviate it?
In short, because soon after that I learned to be ashamed of my affection. Series fantasy was irredeemably cheesy, higher-brow pals explained. “And have you noticed,” snickered a friend who worked at Borders, “that all the Mercedes Lackey fans have weight problems?”
Fat acceptance was a foreign concept to me then. So was the idea of embracing any and every kind of story that spoke to me, regardless of whether or not it came from an Approved Genre. Mentally, I put S&S into a box and shoved it so far away from my self-concept that it nearly took a regression exercise to get it back. Now I’m thinking I should take another look.
I did recall, easily, one authentic comics superheroine, though she certainly won’t be showing up in middle or high school libraries any time soon. I discovered Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist in my early twenties.
I remember showing an issue to my comics-loving boss (who has since gone on to write many excellent graphic novels, btw). He flipped through it with interest, handed it back with a smile, and said cheerfully, “That was not designed for me!” He was right, it wasn’t. Hothead lives up to her name. If men invade her personal space, for instance when she’s riding public transportation, she responds by chopping off their encroaching limbs. Hothead does have calmer moments — relaxing with her cat, Chicken, or listening to the spiritual insights of her lamp, Lampy. (Lampy is actually a deity who also answers to “Donna Summer.”) When the female characters in mainstream superhero comics get you down, Hothead is an excellent restorative.