Getting rid of women is NOT a way to get rid of misogyny

So, I've been reading Iron Man fiction through the delicious tags. And I stumbled on the existence of some fiction described as "Tony/Pepper slash" (what?)... where Pepper is played by Shia LaBeouf. The problem with that is that she's already played by Gwyneth Paltrow. The basic concept was discomfiting and somewhat annoying - faint whiffs of misogyny in the air, or am I just imagining that? As someone used to living in fandom, and reading lots of slash fiction, I have become familiar with the get-rid-of-the-icky-girls attitude towards canon women who are thought to get in the way of the slash (although it sometimes applies, with even more virulent hatred, even when in canon they were simply potentially in the way - when their offence, in essence, was in existing at all). But hey, I said to myself. Maybe it's just someone with a jones for weird AUs. Maybe accidentally getting rid of the only female character was a side-effect. I scrolled on.

But then today I accidentally clicked on one of them. this begins with the cheery injunction, "See this post for reasons why Shia LaBeouf is 893523524968x better as Pepper Potts than that Paltrow woman. With pictures!" Okay, is anyone else getting pissed off? I ordered a cup of tea to go with my misogyny and clicked. After all, there's no chance that it's not misogynistic, but there is the chance that they at least have some reasons, right?

Silly me. Wrong! All the reasons why LaBeouf is "better" in the part of Iron Man's PA than Paltrow... are pictures. Except the first one, which gobsmacked me into incoherent rage with the apparently wholly unself-aware declaration, "You know what gets rid of misogyny? Getting rid of women."

I'm sorry... WHAT?

Try making Iron Man played by Michelle Rodriguez. That would get rid of misogyny (or at least some of it), provided it wasn't done the same way DC and Marvel historically handle female heroes. Getting rid of the sole female character, even if she weren't in the least intelligent or interesting, would not do anything like getting rid of misogyny. You know who else has had ideas about getting rid of women?

• the military!


• the Shakers!


• various sports organisations!


• those little boys who throw things at you and call you names from their clubhouse which is adorned with the sign reading "NO GIRLS ALOUD"!


• the governments of various countries!


• the Catholic church, and following their sterling example, a lot of other churches as well!


• the business world! They made the model efficient by installing a contraption known as "The Glass Ceiling"!


• the Good Ol' Boys Leagues that work by secret handshakes and nepotism to give men jobs!


• Gentlemen's Clubs, some of which offer cigars and some of which offer the sexual favours of prostitutes who may or may not have been the victims of human traffic!

Need I go on? Getting rid of women doesn't get rid of misogyny - it allows it to flourish; it allows women to be more expediently devalued and dehumanised. All getting rid of women does is postpone the heterosexual sexual encounters until such time as the misogynists who are not gay leave the No Girls Aloud zone.

Advertising-free free webspace?

My Dad is looking to make an organised website of regional resources for the disabled in his region, and I was wondering if anyone knows of free webhosting resources? We're coming at it from the perspective that space with banner ads is worse than nothing at all, but he hasn't got the funds/time/know-how to purchase webhosting for it (given the minimal cost it's likely he could get a mini grant for it, but he doesn't really have time to apply for one, let alone investigate it, at the moment). My webspace already contains lots of slash stuff, so that's right out.

Choosing the setting for an original m/m story

DILEMMA.

Hypothetically, if I ever wanted to publish an original gay romance novel, it wouldn't be wise to set it in the town where I live. Finland isn't very big, and setting anything here - even if it wasn't in town here; there just aren't that many universities and it would certainly be recognisable, maybe even to people who haven't even been there - is as good as giving the characters the names of the real people who inspired them.

So, you know, there are universities everywhere, right? Just set it in Anycollegetown USA at Anonymous University? EXCEPT that my experiences of universities in the US are confined to on the one hand, a small and exclusive liberal arts college, entirely in the language and literature departments (Amherst), and on the other, a not-so-great state university... mostly in the science departments (Alabama, ranked 150-somethingth).

But the only single thing I've spent any length of time studying is sociology, and my experience seems to indicate that the discipline is treated differently in North America. Certainly Alabama doesn't even have a department, and Amherst lumped it in under anthropology (which... well... *insert debate*). For that matter, my idea of how a large North American research university handles higher degrees in the social sciences is... practically non-existent, because I'm 100% certain it's really not like it is here, where the department has only one full professor and like, six lecturers and six doctoral candidates, or something like that, and the entire institute is held in a house (rather, an ex-residence) the size of the house I grew up in (no seriously - no, seriously).

So if I want to set it at Anonymous University, I'd probably have to change the department that my characters work in, and then I wouldn't know enough about the academic side of their subject. I could just recruit a full-time North American informant with experience of some university subject or other, of course. Volunteers to the left. And if I want to set it at a New England liberal arts college, I'd have to change the department, too. I could probably manage something, though. I have a bit of knowledge of the academic side of anthropology and folkloristics, I suppose. It would be fun to write about someone writing their thesis on, like, the black metal scene (someone's doing that in folkloristics at Åbo Akademi, or they were a few years ago).

Redamo