Who Mourns for Marie?

Aside from going to one production in the Richland High auditorium when I was about 12 (and which I may have slept through part of, since 12-year-old boys generally don’t care much about ballet), the only version of The Nutcracker I’ve ever seen is the PNB Stowell-Sendak version.  It was a bit shocking in recent years to discover just how different the “traditional” Nutcracker is, both in art and, surprisingly, in plot.

Having just seen the new PNB version of The Nutcracker, with new art by Ian Falconer and the traditional choreography/plot by Balanchine, I now feel qualified to offer a comparison between the two, because I know you care what I think about it, and because I might as well add “art critic” to my list of hats that I’ve worn on this blog.  Note that this is obviously my opinion, and tastes may vary.  I’m also doing my best to avoid a “change is bad” perspective.

Obviously, if you want to see this without any spoilers or foreknowledge, then don’t keep reading…

Art

As might be expected when switching art designers from Wherethe Wild Things Are to Olivia the Pig, there’s a significant difference in set design, color scheme, costumes, etc.

This is obviously much more of a personal taste than most things, which is why I’m putting it first, but I certainly preferred the old art scheme.  There’s nothing WRONG with the new art, certainly: it’s bright and cheerful, it’s cohesive, and it looks good.

There are some nice touches, too: Drosselmeyer’s coat lining is the same as Clara’s dress; the main entryway looks very nice, and there’s a neat trick with three drawn chairs and one real one; the costumes are quite well done (for some reason, the flowers in the second act particularly caught my eye; the long skirts were very light and floaty (some sort of organza?) that made for a nice effect you didn’t see elsewhere in the show); and the set for the second act was one giant confection.

However, it just seems to lack the… richness of the Sendak designs.  Both fit their respective plots, though (more on that later), and wouldn’t fit the other if they were reversed, so it works; I just don’t like it as much.

Also, the Chihuly Winter Star was entirely underwhelming.  I’m not a huge Chihuly fan to begin with, and it did look nice, but this certainly didn’t merit accolades like ”amazing” or “dazzling”.

Technical

There were a couple high points in the new production that I thought topped the Stowell/Sendak version.  First, this production plays more with the full-stage screens that can be opaque or translucent depending on the lighting, which gets used to great effect, especially in the keyhole scene at the beginning.  And the sleigh at the end is simply spectacular, and is well beyond anything the Stowell/Sendak version did.  Also, if you look closely through the glass doors in the back of the room in the first act, you can see snow falling through the trees, which is a very nice touch. (Emily pointed this out to me.)

However, the rest of it pales in comparison.

While fun, the film that plays during the overture isn’t really necessary, and feels like a sop to people who can’t enjoy ballet for what it is.

The Stowell/Sendak version had those screens at the beginning of the acts and the end of the show which seemed to be solid, with windows partway up that they opened for Clara’s bed and the ship, and the doors at the bottom for the skit at the beginning.  It was a cool effect, and I’m sorry to see it go.

Second, while the new Mouse King certainly fits the “seven-headed” description from the original text better, it simply looks paltry compared to the gigantic Mouse King of the previous version.  With the head on one side of the stage and the tail coming in from the other, it was a great illusion of an ENORMOUS Mouse King, and a not-that-much-larger-than-the-other-mice-(although-with-significantly-more-heads) Mouse King just isn’t as impressive.

And finally, the growing room.  This just simply was not as good.  Not a huge difference in some of the surrounding furniture, although I seem to recall the Stowell/Sendak version making a slightly smoother transition.  And the giant suspended dancing clock can be cool or goofy, depending on your tastes (I liked it), and there’s nothing like that in the new version.

But the tree.  Oh, the tree.  In the new version, it looks like most of the tree “texture” is actually projected onto the tree with a light, and the tree itself is a big piece of fabric.  That does make it easy to lift it smoothly upwards and have additional fabric come out of the folds below, and the result is fairly pleasing.  But.  But!

The old tree, and the way it gradually unfolded and got bigger and bigger until it swallowed almost the entire back of the stage, and how solid it seemed?  That was magnificent.  In the program, Balanchine is quoted as responding to criticism regarding how much of his budget he spent on the tree (half of it) by saying, “The tree is the ballet.”  It’s still true now, and seems like it perfectly exemplifies the difference between the two productions.

Plot

I realize it can seem a little funny to talk about plot in a ballet, where at least half of the show is simply throwing the dancers out on stage to do their thing, but the changes, as minor as they seem superficially, actually add up to a huge difference in the themes and meaning of the ballet.

The Stowell/Sendak version is generally regarded as being a bit darker than the usual Nutcracker, and not without reason or with reference to just the color palette.  But perhaps “grown-up” would be a better description.

Rather than just being the kindly godparent that he is in the standard Nutcracker, the Stowell/Sendak Drosselmeyer is vaguely sinister, and Clara is appropriately cautious of him.  He clearly doesn’t like how shy she is with him, and eggs Fritz on in some of his misbehavior (which I also actually like better than the way Fritz is simply pretty much a jerk in the new version).

One of the biggest losses to me is the Pirlipat scenes.  These are the small skits both right after the overture (which Clara dreams), and again when Drosselmeyer is presenting his gifts.  In both cases, Clara is given a clear warning of what the Mouse King can do to her (we’ll set aside the gender and body image issues of being “turned ugly”), and it’s Drosselmeyer who orchestrates this.  It’s not clear if it’s intended to be a discouragement or a warning, which adds to the sinister feeling.  (From the original backstory, it would definitely be more of a warning, but that would make Drosselmeyer better than people in his position, who tend to simply throw the heroine into their cause without really warning them what they’re up against, lest they refuse to participate.)

Despite these warnings, though, Clara still chooses to attack the Mouse King to rescue the Nutcracker, which makes her actions much braver than they are in the new version, which has no such warnings.  And that bravery is a big step in her growing up, as shown by her change into an older version of herself directly after.

Drosselmeyer’s edge also makes him a perfect choice for the menagerie that Clara and the Prince visit in the second act.  First of all, the Pasha (who is clearly intended to be a dream version of Drosselmeyer) makes much more sense than the Sugar Plum Fairy, who we’ve never met before, so we get some much needed continuity (it also lets Clara dance the pas de deux with the prince instead of the Fairy, which also makes much more sense).

Second, the use of the Pasha in the second act, along with the ending, also provides some actual meaning to the second act.  Much as Drosselmeyer set up the circumstances for Clara to “grow up”, he’s there in the second act to show her the temptations of being older.  And in the end, Clara demonstrates that she’s still just a child at heart when she’s unable to give up those temptations in the face of her responsibility to get on the boat, and the dream ends with her back in bed as her younger self again.

In contrast, the new version has none of this meaning.  Clara remains the same age, the Sugar Plum Fairy is just there to show Clara some fun, innocent things, and then the dream ends.  The whole thing can be summed up by “There’s a party, and then Clara has a dream with mice and candy.”  It’s wholly insubstantial, and ultimately unsatisfying. 

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So there you go.  Don't get me wrong, the new Nutcracker is still fun!  It's still quite a spectacle, and I definitely think it's worth seeing at least once, if for no other reason than to make up your own mind.  And you might even like it better!  I won't judge.  But to me, the new Nutcracker is a bit of a disappointment, at least in comparison to the old one.  That may simply be a coincidence of comparison, and this one may be way better than other traditional versions.  But as it stands, this definitely feels like a step down.

Unfortunately, I doubt we'll be seeing the Stowell/Sendak version again for quite some time.  They spent 4 years and a lot of money to do a good job putting this together, so they're hardly going to swap it right back out (nor should they!).  It would be nice to see it back at some point in the future, though.  Not only on its own merits, but because it's also just fun knowing that we had one of the most distinctive Nutcrackers out there.

Continuity: Why is This So Hard?

As an avid SFF reader, I’m deeply accustomed to extensive world-building, plotlines spanning multiple books, and characters by the bushel.  In fact, at this point, single-volume stories almost seem simplistic and bland by comparison.  (Almost.  To be clear, there are still plenty of books that aren’t part of a series that I enjoy.)

I mean, some of my favorite series (Wheel of Time, Honorverse) span over a dozen books (in fact, the latter is right around 20 books, and probably has at least 5 to go).  That’s a lot of room for plotting.

Of course, reading series like this can cause some problems in the long run, even aside from the aforementioned issue with shorter stories.  (Not to be confused with short stories, which are clearly an invention of AP English to sap all interest in reading from innocent high schoolers.) 

(No, I did not enjoy my time in AP English.  The year was kind of spoiled when the first thing we read from the textbook was a lengthy discourse on the evils of wasting time reading “escapist” fiction, since clearly “realistic” (or whatever term they had for it) fiction was the only valuable thing to do, as it would lead to a better understanding of human nature and result in magical self-improvement, which is clearly the only reason to read.  We then spent much of the rest of the year reading inane short stories and finding the symbolism.  I found myself neither understanding human nature better nor improved in my self, except in making sarcastic quips.)

(By the way, just to be clear, I don’t blame my teacher for this.  That sort of thing is clearly what the AP English exam is intended to cover, so it’s completely understandable that it’s what we covered.  But understanding that didn’t make it any more tolerable at the time, and so I compensated by sitting in the back and making the aforementioned sarcastic comments with the person next to me. (Quietly, of course; I wasn’t trying to be disruptive.)  (And when I wasn’t accidentally dozing off.))

First of all, I’m very likely to catch most foreshadowing and hidden clue drops, which makes it hard for the plot to really surprise me.  In fact, at this point, I’m generally mentally flagging things that aren’t foreshadowing, just because they’re suspicious and might be.

(The solution for this is probably to plant a ridiculous number of red herrings, or (or even better, and) have the obvious answer actually be the right one.  That would drive me nuts, but in a good way.  Much the same way I probably would have found it hysterical if (spoiler alert!) Mark Watney had actually died at the end of The Martian.)

Second, you start seeing the same tropes over and over again.  My current pet peeve is the lack of reasonable communication between characters.  I get that sometimes people need secrets or an information asymmetry to keep the plot going, but seriously, sometimes you just want to skip that whole part, because it never goes well, except it does in the end, because it just serves to make the plot more complicated for the heroes without ever totally derailing them.

(The solution to this one, of course, is Dangerously Genre Savvy characters, or real, plot-altering problems due to lack of communication.  Star Wars was a well-placed antenna away from Obi-wan’s failure to tell Luke the truth about Vader resulting in a COMPLETELY different story.  (I’m going to assume there’s no spoiler warning needed for that, although I will question how that antenna hadn’t already been knocked off by garbage or whatever coming out of the chute previously.)  Similarly, (this one does get a spoiler alert!) Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is basically, as far as I can recall, all about the heroes actually carrying out the villian’s plan, only to avert it at the last moment.  These things get SO CLOSE to real consequences, but then don’t actually follow through.  Granted, they’d be different stories if they did, but still.)

But more importantly for the purposes of this - now wildly digressive, even for me – post, you get used to authors who can actually keep their continuity straight, and who might have actually plotted a few things out ahead of time.

Unlike, say, certain TV shows that clearly had no idea what they were doing beyond a certain point that came way too early into their run.

Like, say, Lost.  Or Battlestar Galactica.  Just to name a couple from personal experience.  (I’m sure there are plenty others.  I hear Alias went way off the rails a couple seasons in, for example.)

(Just consider this a global spoiler warning now.)

Lost started off so promisingly, with lots of good ideas.  But then it gradually became very, very clear that there was no real plan or set mythology, just some good ideas with no real resolution thought out ahead of time.  I still refuse to rewatch this show because of the utter debacle that is the last season.  (Incidentally, I still think that, plot details aside, the ending of the Mistborn trilogy is what the ending of Lost should have been.)  Every time I get tempted, I remember the stupid flash-sideways, and the fate of, like, the world (I think, still not exactly clear on that, because they did a terrible job of explaining, well, anything), coming down to fisticuffs, and I’m so disgusted that it washes all temptation away.

BSG wasn’t quite so bad, and actually had a solid plot up through the midpoint of the second season.  (The Pegasus storyline was fantastic.)  New Caprica was a decent storyline, too.  But after that, things were REALLY a mess until the last few episodes, and I still don’t buy that Hera was worth risking the entire fate of humanity over.

One thing I did enjoy, though, is that they actually followed through on the “obvious answer is the right one” in the end, though.  It’s more apparent on a rewatch, but the show was hitting on the religious angle from the very beginning, and consistently through the entire show.  I’m really not sure why it surprised so many people in the end.  I guess you can find it unsatisfying, but that’s not the same as it coming out of nowhere.  (The Night’s Dawn Trilogy has a similar plotline.)  So that’s one thing it does have going for it.

My gold standard for continuity throughout a show (aside from Fringe, apparently) is Babylon 5.  Say what you will about the special effects (which weren’t that bad for the time) and the acting/scripts (it was deliberately designed to be a bit more stage-theatrical than most shows), the backstory, characterization and plotting was simply first-rate.  I mean, JMS even planned out ways to remove each and every character seamlessly and plot-consistently from the show if need be (and in some cases, even bring them back).

The story is tight, with not very much filler, which is what happens when you PLAN THINGS OUT AHEAD OF TIME.  All in all, it’s like a book on the screen.  It’s marvelous.

So why can’t more shows do that?  Why is this so hard?

I mean, I get that it’s a little foolhardy to plan out an entire 5-season show in today’s TV environment, but wouldn’t it, y’know, help to at least have a list of your core mysteries/ideas, what they mean and how they’re resolved, and the big plot points you want to hit?  Is that generally going to turn out better than just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks?

Because to me, the latter way leads to madness, or at least an audience pissed off that you’ve suddenly dropped the numbers, that the smoke monster is pretty much nonsensical and self-contradictory, and the Island is actually so packed with people and structures and ruins and landmarks that it’s a wonder the characters can walk five feet without tripping over an Other.  And then they all die.

What the heck, Lost.

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Applesauce.

It’s fall!  And along with the glorious return of college football (and the NFL, I suppose), the inevitably miserable end of the Mariners’ season (made only more miserable by the what-might-have-been surge that simultaneously misses the playoffs while ruining the chance for a good draft pick), the tragic end of summer, decorative gourds, and the occasionally delayed start of the school year, fall means apple season!  And truly, there is no finer fruit than the apple (including gourds, decorative or otherwise).  (Yes, I'm aware of the difference between culinary and botanical fruits.  I just don't care, because taking things overly literally and/or using the wrong or contextually inappropriate definitions is a prime wellspring of my humor.)  

There’s a reason it was the fruit of the forbidden tree, right?  Right! Because they’re irresistible.  I’m pretty sure that the serpent didn’t really have to do much convincing other than bringing the apple to Eve and letting her take a good look at it.

Of course, apple season wasn’t always such a source of celebration, unless you like cider (and who could blame you for that?), as explained (hopefully accurately, since I've done no fact checking of this whatsoever) here.  (What?  Something good came out of Prohibition?  Well, there's the 21st Amendment, but that argument reeks a bit of either a grandfather paradox or the trope where a tyrant sows the seeds of his own destruction.)  But fortunately for human civilization, we eventually wound up with some very good apples, which are quite obviously my favorite fruit in the whole world.

Well, apples and grapes.  My two favorite fruits are apples and grapes.  And pineapple.

My three favorite fruits are apples, grapes, and pineapple.  And watermelon.

Amongst my favorites are such diverse fruits as apples, grapes, pineapple, watermelon, strawberries, satsumas…

Okay, I just like fruit.  Well, except for avocados.  And mangoes.  And kiwis.  So I like most fruit, but not all of it.

ANYWAYS.

In honor of apple season, I thought I’d make a list of my favorite apples, because why not?  Apples are good, and Washington makes a lot of them.  So here we go:

1)  Red delicious

For those of you who didn’t just close your browser in disgust, let me explain.

For 49 weeks out of the year, red delicious apples are absolutely at the very very bottom of my list.  In fact, they’ve fallen off the bottom of the list into a compost heap made of terrible foods, UO merchandise, and MRAs.  They’re incredibly mushy, and mealy, and taste funny, and no one should ever want to even touch them, let alone put them in their mouth..  If I were stranded on a desert island with the only thing to eat being a barrel of out-of-season red delicious apples, I suppose I would probably eat them rather than starve to death.  (And in fairness, they’d probably be better than the potatoes Mark Watney wound up with (if you don’t already get this reference, searching for it will probably be a spoiler).  I probably just would have given up and died then.)  But it would be a very tough decision.

However, for the other three weeks of the year, when red delicious apples are truly in season, they are by far the most glorious of man’s creations.  They are crisp.  So wonderfully, fantastically crisp.  And juicy.  And delicious.

They are magical.

But only for those three weeks.  God help anyone who eats them outside that narrow window.

2)  Anything in apple pie

I don’t think this really requires much explanation (pie!), and it may be cheating a bit, but it’s my list and I’m doing it anyway.  Because pie.

3)  Granny Smith

I’m actually not a huge fan of things that are just sweet; I prefer a little bitterness or sourness to go with it.  Coke over Pepsi, Sour Patch kids over plain gummi bears, Shocktarts (do they still make those?)  over… well, SweetTarts still have some tartness to them (obviously), but not as much as Shocktarts, so the analogy still holds (barely).  Whew!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly going to turn down sweeter things if they’re on offer (because I’m not an idiot and I have a giant sweet tooth), but if I’ve got a choice, I’ll likely go with something a little less straight-out sweet.

This is why I like Granny Smith apples.  All that delicious tartness is just marvelous.  (Yes, I also really like those caramel-sour apple suckers.)  Plus, Granny Smith apples tend to be reliably crisp.  Which is good, because while a crisp apple is the delicacy of the angels, a mealy, mushy apple is the devil’s food.  (But not Devil's Food, because that stuff's GOOD.)

4)  Gala

Gala and Fuji apples often seemed linked to me.  They look fairly similar, they’re both quite common, and they’re often stocked near either other.  They also don’t taste too dissimilar.  To be honest, there’s nothing particularly special about either of them; they’re both perfectly adequate.  They’re the “Meets Expectations” of apples.  The J.C. Penney’s of apples.  The Applebee’s of apples.  They’re what you eat when you want an aggressively average apple adventure.

However, in my experience, Galas are, on average, much more likely to be crisp than Fujis are, and that gives them the nod.  Because, and I cannot stress this enough, mushy mealy apples are an abomination, and should be killed with fire.

5) Any of the less-common varieties

Pink Lady, Fiesta, any other random new types of apples, I’m looking at you here.  Some of these are pretty good (in fact, Pink Ladies are probably good and common enough to deserve their own entry, but five is a nice round number), but they’re just not around enough to really merit a slot.  I do appreciate that the apple industry is continuing to come up with new varieties.  Innovation!  It’s where it’s at.

Anyone want to chime in and risk apple blasphemy by disagreeing with this list or challenging the superlative fruit-ness of apples in general?  Or will you all do the right, just, proper and beneficial thing and agree with me? Remember, silence is absolutely not consent in 99.9% of all circumstances, but I’ll take it as such here!

Memorable Halftime Shows

With the impending commencement of college football, I thought this might be a good time to not only remind everyone how to use common sports discussion terms and why marching band is awesome, but to also reminisce about some of the better shows that I got to be a part of.  Sadly, I have had minimal luck finding video of these shows (although I have some on VHS(!) and DVD at home), so while I can link to (some of) the music, you can’t see the marching along with it.  (If someone turns up links, I will be extremely happy to update this.)

Appurtenant Equity

The book I’m currently reading has an interesting conceit (it’s also just a really good book, and that seems to be a common opinion):

The language in which most of the characters think and interact (helpfully “translated” into English for your reading convenience, of course) has no genders.  And I don’t just mean gendered nouns like in Romance languages.  I mean that there are literally not different pronouns for different genders of people.

Instead, everyone is referred to as “she”.

It takes a few pages to realize what’s going on; at least, it did for me.  After all, it could just be that the characters you meet initially are all female.  However, as the main character is mentally switching languages, she notes that she’ll now actually have to account for gender in her speech (which, incidentally, she’s really bad at recognizing), and you wind up reading a sentence that goes something like, “She was male.”

I spent the next couple of chapters trying to discern if each character was actually male or female, despite them all being referred to as “she”.  As I recall, you’re actually only explicitly told about a couple, and I’m honestly not sure you ever know about the main character.

Meet a new character: Are they male or female?  Two characters get romantically involved: What genders are they?  I’d struggle to parse their words, to scry using their actions and behaviors.  And then I realized that I had a shortcut.

I stopped caring.

Because why does it matter what gender these characters are?  What does it matter if the captain is a man or a woman?  Or the main character?  Or the ruler of the largest empire in the known universe?

Seriously, what does it matter?

In all honestly, the characters are written such that most could be either, and that’s probably deliberate.  So why waste time trying to determine something that doesn’t actually have an impact on the story?

Because it’s really hard not to, that’s why.  To be honest, rather than not even thinking about the gender of each character, I’ve just slipped into a default of assuming that everyone is female, mostly because of the pronoun choice (including those we actually learned are male, because it’s hard to remember who they are when they keep being referred to with feminine pronouns anyways).  It’s not ideal, because I’m still mentally assigning a gender to all of the different characters, rather than truly not caring, but there are far worse things than a sci-fi world where all of the characters are women.

(And incidentally, I think choosing to use “she” instead of “he” or “it” or some made-up pronoun was a fantastic choice, given the likely audience.  Sci-fi is highly (though certainly not exclusively) male-dominated, in character choice, authorship and readership, and female authors and strong characters can get a lot of blowback.  Instead of Gamergate, it’s Sad Puppies, but the same misogynistic principles apply.  (You may think I’m making that name up, and I wish I were.  But then, I wish I were making the whole concept up. I’m not.))

As human beings, we’re trained both evolutionarily and societally to make judgments about things and people, and to categorize and pigeonhole.  We want to know where everyone and everything fits into our worldview.  And we create rubrics for doing so.

Above, I mentioned trying to determine the gender of characters based on their words and actions.  Did you even really question that?  Probably not, because it’s so natural to how we deal with the world.

And what was I basing those attempts at judgment on?  Men act a certain way; women talk a certain way, and so on.  Stereotypes at the most basic level, so ingrained that it takes a serious mental struggle to even realize we’re using them, let alone get past doing so.

But once you can, it’s kind of liberating, and this book actually makes a lot of sense.  Of COURSE it’s difficult to tell from behavioral or speech clues whether a character is male or female.  In a truly gender-neutral society – one to the point of only gender-neutral pronouns – most of those stereotypes fall away.

It’s hard to even describe what something like that would mean, because our language is so geared around this concept.  You can’t say something like “women act like men”, because that implies expected behaviors associated with the genders.  Everyone just acts like themselves, and there's no correlation between any given behavior and gender.  In this book, there are still class struggles, job roles, etc., and behaviors associated with those, just as there are in our society today.  There’s just no expected behaviors based on gender.

And that brings me to the stupidity surrounding what’s currently going on with Target.

(I swear, when I started writing this, I had no intention of segueing into anything; I think it’s a cool enough topic to stand on its own.  (I’m sure it’s not particularly novel to people who studied things like this in college, or who do things like this for a living, but we all come to ideas at different times, in different ways, and this is cool to me now.  And it shows one of my favorite things about SFF, which is the ability to naturally address ideas like this by being freed from the constraints of contemporary or historical society.)  But it’s such a natural segue that I can’t help it.)

I understand why people are upset about Target getting rid of gender-based labeling for kids’ stuff.  It’s a big shift that’s counter to a lot of peoples’ worldviews, and that rarely goes over easily or well.  And, of course, as with everything these days, there’s a political component to it, as well, which I’m going to blow right by.

But here’s the thing.  We want the world to be open to our kids, right?  Want them to feel like they can do whatever they want?  (In a purpose-of-life sense, not in an everyday sense.  No way my kid’s doing whatever he wants every day.  Disaster would ensue.)  Then why should we limit them based on our own preconceived notions of what’s appropriate for them to play with or sleep in or wear?  Sure, girls and boys may be different, but how much of that is nature, and how much is actually nurture?  Any why not allow those differences, if they exist, to manifest on their own, rather than forcing the issue?

I know this isn’t new.  Even before Target, there have been incredible amounts of discussion regarding the appropriateness of gender-discriminated toys (I recently saw the hashtags #stillagirl and #stillaboy, which are freaking fantastic), and I’m sure everyone has heard both sides of the argument, even if they haven’t really understood them, or even taken the time to really listen.

But my experience reading this book, the glimpse I’ve gotten of a different world with no gender distinctions at all, has really made the ongoing discussion resonate with me, in large part because even though I consider myself open-minded, I’ve realized that there’s still a lot of subconscious cultural baggage I’m carrying around without even noticing.

Toys and clothes are just the tip of the iceberg.  I normally try not to make value judgments for or about other people, but I honestly think that reducing the influence gender has on our society can only be a positive in the long run.  (And in the short run, maybe I would have been subjected to a lot less coverage of Caitlyn Jenner.  Not that I object to her decision – quite the opposite, actually – but I just got sick of seeing so much about it.  I honestly don’t think it takes anything away from her to say that it shouldn’t have been a big deal in the first place, and the fact that it was says a lot more about the rest of us than it does her.)

Every day, I see some article about how women are paid less, or about how their vocal mannerisms are considered “weaker” or “less confident”; doing something “like a girl” is still an insult; boys are mocked for interest in stereotypically “female” activities and pursuits.  This sort of thing is ingrained into our culture (and pretty much every culture).

Sure, changing language isn’t a panacea.  It’s not going to change the way people think and act overnight.  But I also think it’s significantly underrated, because language is how you deal with and interpret the world.  (This is, and will be, a whole separate blog post, so I don’t want to get into it too much here.)  And how can treating people more equally than we do now be a bad thing?

Anyways, it’s a good book.  If you’re into sci-fi, give it a look.