my cluttered life

If I've been incommunicado - or incommunicado-ish - for the past few days, it's because I've been too busy cleaning up junk (both virtual and physical) to really keep up with anything.

Anyone who's visited me can attest to the books we have almost everywhere - my grandmother's shipment is now sitting on the dining room table because I haven't found a place to put them. I admittedly haven't put forth much effort because I know I'm not keeping all of them, even though it seems wrong to sell them (anyone need lightly used ufo/weird stuff books free? Anyone? Bueller?) Shelving books = keeping, so I'm trying not to go there unecessarily. I need to get rid of some things because it's junk like this that attracts the grocery gnomes :P

Also finally organized my email into something resembling coherence, but only in passing.

Not sure where I was going with this except to mildly vent.

administrative:Open ID

I know a few people read this who don't have LJ accounts - if so, and you want to have an ID, I just found out that OpenID is available. This way you can post without having a Livejournal account but you won't show up as "anonymous" either.

writing, gender, and stuff

She doesn't post often, but posts well: just found another thought provoking article over at Brutal Women about the disappointment when fictional female-dominated societies turn out not to be, so much. I've not read the book in question, but she makes some interesting points - the society described reads as "female-dominant" only by virtue of there being more women than men, and the men are given great freedom to use and abuse due to their "rare" status:

Great! A female-dominated society, and girl babies are still greeted as gutter trash. One royal husband also abuses his wives and brutally rapes one of them. And guess what? Because he's a guy, he goes unpunished.

How does this fulfill the "things can be really different?" school of spec. fic.?

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional writer or gender studies student. However, I dabble in both and got to thinking - how would one create a fictional women-dominated society? I wrote a storyline once that involved a female-dominated society of evolved ants, but it wasn't that challenging - ant colonies ARE mostly female; in most species males only live long enough to mate. How to write it with people? Could women really be dominant without being a numeric majority? What would be different, and what would stay the same?

Maybe I've just not read a really good story on this theme - I am new to reading sci fi. Readers, writers - any suggestions beyond what's in the Brutal Women comments?

...and some really bad writing

Eurgh. Scooter Libby* wrote erotica. And it's crap, truly crap. I'm not going to pick apart every comma and apostrophe (Susie Bright did a better job of that than I ever could have) but even his note to Judith Miller is purple - violently purple, or magenta, or something else like that.

What's even more disturbing is his choice of subject matter - beastiality and incest (I think I can safely ask for a collective "eww"!). Read excerpts at your own risk.

* For non-Americans - Scooter Libby was the Vice Presidential aide who just got indicted for perjury, among other things. I have no idea how he got the name "Scooter".