But Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur is by Francesca Lia Block — an author whose 24 spellbinding magical-realistic novels have fascinated many thousands of girls and boys since we read her award-winning Weetzie Bat young adult series as teenagers — and this book marks her first foray into the prescriptive realm. I was curious about what kind of dating advice we'd get from the creator of the stories that taught me so much about the hot, subversive, dazzling potential of love and sex when I was in my teens – so curious that I decided to put aside my prejudices about books with the word "dating" on the cover and find out what kind of mythological beasties my friends and I are.

Divorced with two young children, Block reentered the single world later in life via online dating. This experience seems to have been exciting and traumatic in equal measure, and she has drawn heavily on her own experiences in order to devise the book's categories. The chapter that describes the male types in detail is full of girlfriendishly confidential and funny stories, and the descriptions of these types who feature in these stories ring true, though they sound a bit ridiculous taken out of context: "My Garden Elf friend was helping me shop for a vintage Chanel suit," for example, or "I liked the Urban Elf very much. But I was still rebounding from my Satyr and was soon distracted by yet another Satyr; my relationship with the Elf fell away."

But after I got past the inherent oddness of thinking of men as Giants and Werewolves, I was shocked to find how accurately Block was describing many of my exes. I experienced the same feeling of "instant relief" she describes herself as having felt after devising the system: "I recalled all my failed relationships, and when I looked at them through the lens of mythology… I felt a sense of order. Of course the Satyr left me. Of course I couldn't stay with a Faun. I was a Wood Nymph! It was like trying to date the wrong astrological sign."

Skeptics might wince at this comparison – after all, not everyone believes that the position of the stars at the time of our birth determines our essential natures. But even the most rational-minded among us has to admit that people do have essential natures. It might not matter so much whether we call someone a "Pixie," or a "classic Aries" or a "Myers-Briggs ENTJ." Also, trying to figure out what type you and your friends and your significant others are is fun. Tomboyish and energetic, with an underlying seriousness? You may be a Brownie. Passionate, ambitious, and likely to channel your anger into art? You're a Banshee. Do you love beauty, and often insult people without meaning to? It's likely you're a Mermaid. Does your crush have an intense gaze, a lean, athletic body, a comfortable bed and a great stereo? Watch out – you may have a compulsively seductive, never-faithful Satyr on your hands.

The system isn't without its weak spots. A gay friend (who I think is probably a Centuar-Faun) happened to be sitting in my kitchen when this book arrived; he's a longstanding Block fan, but he honed in immediately on how much less useful the system is for predicting the outcomes of same-sex matches. (Block provides a chapter, but acknowledges that a whole other book would be necessary to encompass all the possibilities). And the chapter about female types lacks the specificity of the chapter on males, probably because Block dates men, and only has firsthand experience of what women are like as friends. I had to combine two types to arrive at a description that seemed like it fit me, which Block says is common, but which made reading the chapter about pairings a bit less satisfying (sort of like when Susan Miller told me I had to read the monthly Astrologyzone predictions for both Libra and Aries, but I digress.)

Nevertheless, I found myself recommending the book to friends and bringing up its advice as we chatted about our relationships – and to my mind, anything that brings a fresh perspective to those conversations is worth the cover price. I also chatted briefly with Block via email about how she devised the system, her favorite breakup music, and what the future might hold for a Mermaid-Banshee/Centaur pairing (I was just curious).

How do you think people come by their mythological types? Are we born Mermaids or Werewolves, or does a combination of nature and nurture make us what we are?

I think it is definitely a combination, with, perhaps, a little more emphasis on nurture in respect to my system because in my book I'm primarily talking about how types relate in the venue of dating and often our dating persona is something we create, either consciously or unconsciously. As we get to know someone deeply we discover their true nature, which is, literally, as much about nature as nurture.

What are some red flags — detectable from an online profile or a first glance alone, let's say — that the creature you've got your eye on might be a Satyr?

Satyrs often have beautiful, soulful looking eyes, sexy voices and physical style and grace and they can throw you off. Don't just get carried away by what you see at first. Everything comes down to behavior and actions, not what someone says or how they appear but what they do.

Does he call you back? Is he attentive? Does he keep his wandering eye in check? Is he kind? Does he introduce you to his friends and family at the appropriate time? Is he sexually and emotionally respectful?

I loved the celebrity examples of different types of creatures, or different type-pairings, but I wondered, as I imagine many readers of your fiction must've wondered, what type you'd say some of your characters were. (Of course, some of them are literally Fairies or Vamps!) What's Weetzie, or Cherokee, or Violet, or Claire or Emily in Pretty Dead? (Um you don't have to answer all of these. But I'm curious about all of them!)

Weetzie is Pixie/Fairy. Witch Baby is a Wood Nymph/Banshee. Cherokee is a Pixie/Mermaid. Violet is a Wood Nymph/Vamp. Claire is a Dryad/Fairy.

Charlotte from Pretty Dead is a Mermaid. Emily is a Brownie. Thanks for this question!

I know you've written a book of poetry about an ex-lover, and obviously all fiction writers draw on their personal lives for inspiration. But even so, was it hard to be this personal about your love life? Was the experience of writing this book different from writing others? In a way, in spite of its prescriptive format, I felt like it contained peeks at what a more straightforward memoir might look like. Have you ever considered writing one?

I feel comfortable revealing my truths through my writing because I have the protection of lyrical language and literary structure. In other words, if I reveal something personal in a way that has some beauty and order I gain perspective on it and distance from it. I also consider the fact that my truth may help someone else. I have written a memoir about my first year as a mom called Guarding The Moon and I'd consider doing another.

You clearly know your way around heartbreak — How do you deal with breakups? Any recommended methods of coping, favorite music, etc?

Lately it has been about continuing to go out and meet new people, doing a lot of yoga, relying on my friends and writing about it. I can't listen to music when my heart hurts, unless it hurts with the joy of first love and then I can listen to sad music and cry easily. I like "Breathe Me' by Sia for a good cry. Also "Morning Yearning" by Ben Harper.,"Mad World" by Gary Jules., Michael Franti's "Hey World."'I like Frightened Rabbit's "Floating in the Forth," "Ava" by the National, "Nothing Compares 2U-Sinead O'Connor, "Thank You,," Alanis Morissette and "Love Should" by Moby.

What's your take on a Mer-Shee/ Centaur pairing? Just um randomly curious.

Just randomly, huh? He'll think she is sexy and admire her power but he might be intimidated by her unless he's found his own success through his art. She should try to tone down her ego and work on expressing love. support and compassion to the females in her life, as much as the males because it will be a way for her to find love and compassion for herself and be more ready for a healthy relationship with this attractive but sometimes difficult type. Good luck.

Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide [Amazon]

Earlier: Weetzie Bat: The Book For Girls Who Ended Up Taking A Gay Dude To Prom
F Is For Francesca, And I Wish I Were Her

A 2006 study showed 56% of blogs are created by women, and this created a a certain amount of buzz about the Internet as a new bastion of women's representation, in contrast to the old boys' club of the mainstream media. But according to a new Technorati report, 67% of bloggers are now men. As Marian Wang of Mother Jones points out, that's a worse imbalance than at American newspapers, where 63% of staffers are male.

So why aren't more women saddling up the WordPress pony? Dr. Melissa Clouthier has some annoying ideas! She writes,

When it comes the arena of ideas, the women who blog are not typical women. Over and over, the women who blog are tougher. Like the shotgun wielding Western expansionists of yore, women bloggers take shots and can shoot back.

I guess I could be flattered that Clouthier thinks I am some kind of Annie Oakley, but I'm more concerned that she thinks women who don't blog are wilting flowers. That said, I do agree with part of her explanation (despite the fact that she's defending conservative ladybloggers from "'enlightened' male liberal commenters and bloggers." She writes that "just about every conservative woman blogger, including me, has endured horrible personal, violent and sexual insults." And, she continues,

Most women simply do not want to put up with this garbage. They feel threatened and they worry about their safety and the safety of their children. Michelle Malkin had to actually move after her personal information was plastered on the web. She is a mother. She has children. There are nutjobs out there and in this business, there is a very real risk to personal safety. It's something guys just don't have to deal with as much.

I'm not a mother (and I do detect an unpleasant whiff of moms-are-special rhetoric in Clouthier's words), but I have felt unsafe as a result of responses to my posts. In general, both commenters and emailers are respectful, but I have been called some nasty names, as have other of this site's staffers. Are female bloggers more vulnerable to this type of harassment than male ones? Certainly men in the media receive plenty of threats, insults, and unconstructive criticism. However, I would wager that they get fewer comments on their looks, their weight, their sex lives and how all these things relate to their opinions. A female blogger, especially a progressive one, always gets a certain number of trolls who tell her she must ugly, lonely, and (horrors!) fat, and you don't have to be some kind of sissy to decide you don't care to subject yourself to this kind of hazing.

After this reasonably fair point, Clouthier goes off the rails into gender essentialism. She says,

In addition, women often don't like the intellectual jousting. Part of it is gender wiring. Men see verbal sparring as a testosterone-fueled challenge. Women see degraded communication and hostility. When they put an idea out there, it seems aggressive when someone rips the point of view to shreds. And, it is aggressive.

Emily Gould would disagree. On More Intelligent Life, the writer and occasional Jezebel contributor writes about becoming "the kind of person I can't bear: the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn't project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood." Maybe she just needs to get her "gender wiring" checked, but she writes persuasively about a type of girl-on-girl "intellectual jousting":

This critic believes it is her job to tear down women who are "off-message" because there is only so much publishing space allotted to women, and so more attention for them is less attention for her and other worthy types. This critic lives inside us all, but she is also embodied, occasionally, by real people. One of them, an online "feminist" columnist, once wrote a supposed defense of "women's voices" that dismissed something I'd written because the photos that accompanied the essay were of me lying (rather unprovocatively, to my mind) in bed. She'd said that the question wasn't why my voice was being heard–the implied answer being, presumably, my bed-lying ways–but why others weren't, "in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women's writing voices."

Gould and Clouthier are alike in one respect: they both conceive of a special status for women's discourse. Clouthier apparently thinks women are naturally nice and non-aggressive (which: bullshit), but Gould's statement is more complicated. She sees the columnist she discusses above (that would be Salon's Rebecca Traister, and if putting feminist in quotes isn't a "joust," I don't know what is) as part of a kind of female representation police, a group that jealously guards a supposedly finite female canon against unworthy interlopers. Do these police exist? Maybe, kind of — but I think Traister's piece is far more than an attempt to kick Gould out of the sandbox. She wraps it up with the line, "So rather than being troubled by the fact that Gould [...] has the spotlight, why not question why so few other versions of femininity are allowed to share it?"

I'd say, rather than being troubled by the fact that women criticize each other, why don't we embrace it? Yes, some girl-on-girl criticism is a form of misguided feminist gatekeeping, and no, we shouldn't expect all women to offer a comforting vision of our gender. But women's criticism of other women is too often discounted as cattiness, as infighting — men's writing of the same stripe would often be said to present "ideological" or "political" objections. I understand that Gould is talking about a very specific form of criticism, but I'd like to be able to participate even in that form — taking to task someone's representation of "women like me," without feeling like I'm committing a special female sin. Women supporting each other is often held up as a solution to their underrepresentation in all spheres, and it's an important one. But we also need the freedom to speak out against each other when we want to, as men have always done. We need the right to be "tough," in Clouthier's words, without second-guessing ourselves — and without holding ourselves to special standards just because we're women. When we have that right, maybe the world of blogging — a very critical one, but productive nonetheless — will be more open to us.

Where Are All The Lady Bloggers? [Mother Jones]
Why There Are Fewer Women Bloggers [Dr. Melissa Clouthier]
What Are Women Fighting About? [More Intelligent Life]

Just as Gould is infuriated by all those "Scary Sadshaws," wandering around in search of baubles and boys... [I find it] maddening to have to wonder — Carrie Bradshaw-style — if Gould's story would have run had she not been beautiful, and maddening to then hate oneself for having had to wonder that at all.

But perhaps most maddening is the way the buildup of critical attention to a piece like Gould's — or to a cultural phenomenon like "SATC" — only affirms that certain kinds of women, and only those kinds of women, are worth elevating to begin with, in part because of the delight people take in tearing them down.

And this:

No matter how angry you felt about Gould's piece, it was almost impossible to read the comments and not feel terrible: for her, about her, and about yourself for having even peeked. The process is exhausting, and not good for anyone, especially women who get stuck with some lame avatar they feel does not represent them, but whom they do not particularly feel like burning at the stake just for having been clever, lucky or talented enough to wind up drawing a spotlight.

Another Pretty Face Of A Generation [Salon]
Related: The Times Magazine Dapples Sunlight On Its Memoirist [NY Observer]
Exposed [NY Times Magazine]


Earlier: 5 Things About That Times Magazine Piece On Masturbatory Blogging
The Problem With Chick Lit

"I'm worried," she says. "Jana is beautiful and younger, and Bob is Bob, but you, you I worry about. You need someplace to go."

But it's hard not to think: "well, Trader Joe's, obviously!" In the movie, he would meet a younger, liberally tattooed ingenue, one of those twentysomething girls in that stage where you're grappling with what comes after precocious, and they would fall in a sort of resigned kind of love. And my friends would go see that movie, just so one of us could eviscerate it on the internet, because there has to be some way to retaliate against the uncomfortable suspicion that being young and beautiful is actually, in this economy and in life, such a necessary scam if you happen to be a female. We should all get to be as deeply pathetic as T.L. Shine!

Times Magazine Dapples Sunlight On Its Memoirist [Observer]

1. The other day I thought I had genital warts. I have long felt I was more than long due to contract some sort of venereal disease, so I greeted the thought with rational calm until, at some point over the weekend, I began to imagine that the warts actually hurt, and that if I ignored the pain too long I could potentially die from them. That feeling — actually a hangover — soon passed and then on Monday I received an Gchat message from an old friend saying "I have genital warts" — or more accurately, "Answer your phone or I'm going to have to send you a crap email" — and we hadn't fucked in six months. I immediately thought, what a fun post, "The Guy That Gave You That Particular Strain Of HPV Is Actually The Guy You Fucked Half A Year Ago" …and felt glad. And then the bump went away. I think it was an ingrown hair. [Told you! -Ed.] All of which is an overshare-y way of saying: There is clearly something cathartic, something beyond exhibitionism, to this oversharing stuff; do you not see it? All of us occasionally fixate on our own mortality. I am not a neurotic person, perhaps because these days, I am quick to convert those dark feelings — and seriously, what do we have to be so fucking dark about? — into text. Whatever the fear or fate — herpes, date rape, bankruptcy, failure — there's something worth laughing about there.

2. In her piece, Emily totally skipped the part where she was going to become a yoga teacher because she wanted to "help people." She told me this one evening over pinot grigio and scallops, and I thought, "what a complete crock of shit." But I think yoga is a good thing and that Emily does want to help people; I would simply rather she tell me jokes than lead me in meditation. So thanks Emily: "Project Gayway" is my new favorite show, and the line "Josh and I sat together on the couch, and I put my head on his shoulder in a completely friendly, professional way" made me LOL.

3. When the time came for Emily to collect the books and bras and other miscellaneous possessions she'd left at Josh's house she actually referred to them as "Emilyana." Emily's self-absorption is a joke that, although it got less funny, is now funny once again. It is the human condition to be self-absorbed. But it is not the human condition to lack empathy, as narcissists supposedly do. (Inasmuch a emotions are real, empathy is real, and serves to temper our selfishness and make life worth living.) If I'd written such a story for the Times magazine I would have tried to write it smellier and drunker and more self-lacerating, and because fewer people might relate to it, you could see in that my own form of narcissism, who knows. Like Nietzsche said, there are no facts, only interpretations, and the thing is you don't have to buy into his interpretations of things if you've gotten to the point where you find misanthropy sort of boring.

4. I Used To Have This Theory, About Nick Denton. He left the media and created Gawker so NO ONE COULD EVER AGAIN LEAVE THE MEDIA; they would be too preoccupied with the mundane trivialities and their respective trajectories up the Zeitgeist index and the ceaseless trade of imaginary currency to notice NO ONE IS MAKING MONEY IN THIS FUCKING BUSINESS ANYMORE except Nick Denton. To quoth The Idiot, again:

"Such omniscient gentlemen are to be found pretty often in a certain stratum of society. They know everything. All the restless curiosity
and faculties of their mind are irresistibly bent in one direction, no doubt from lack of more important ideas and interests in life, as the critic of today would explain. But the words, "they know everything," must be taken in a rather limited sense: in what department so-and-so serves, who are his friends, what his income is, where he was governor, who his wife is and what dowry she brought him, who are his first cousins and who are his second cousins, and everything of that sort. For the most part these omniscient gentlemen are out at elbow, and receive a salary of seventeen roubles a month.

Now they get paid by the page view.

The people of whose lives they know every detail would be at a loss to imagine their motives. Yet many of them get positive consolation out of this knowledge, which amounts to a complete science, and derive from it self-respect and their highest spiritual gratification. And indeed it is a fascinating science. I have seen learned men, literary men, poets, politicians, who sought and found in that science their loftiest comfort and their ultimate goal, and have indeed made their career only by means of it.

5. But no, there is more to it than all that. People need people. Even Denton, who can be very kind now that he has found love! Loneliness and alienation are only really fun when you find someone else who's into Kafka too. That's the whole fucking point of the myth of Narcissus. People want company, community, friendship, connectedness, they want to be needed, they want to be loved, and love exists — I like to say love = verisimilitude of love + time — and the problem with the Internet and New York is that there is way too much verisimilitude and never enough time. But I have known Emily, and all you guys, for a year now, and my fondness is real and genuine and not, I hate to break it to you, borne of narcissism.

Blog-Post Confidential [NY Times]

For starters, it's pretty easy to put together a Stevie Nicks costume in five minutes at any Salvation Army. It's sort of like the adage about what you're supposed to wear for your wedding, except instead of "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue," it's more like "Something old, something black, something fringey, and some kind of a shawl or cape or corset or top hat or sparkly beret." The theme of NOTS 18 was "Nightbirds," and in the song "Nightbirds" Stevie actually gives specific instructions for how to replicate her signature look:

"And then the summer became the fall/ I was not ready for the winter/it makes no difference at all/Cause I wear boots all summer long ... Eye makeup dark and it's careless ..."

Keeping this in mind, I applied Bennett's makeup very carelessly.

After a beer, we headed out to the Hammerstein Ballroom.

My costume was a little bit less dramatic than Bennett's, partly because I had decided to wear my real hair instead of a wig and partly because I was born female.

Once inside, we encountered a few setbacks. The entertainment was not, at first, as awesome as we had hoped. One too many drag queens had elected to lip synch "Stand Back," which has never been a favorite song of mine. (Note from Bennett: "I LOVE STAND BACK!!!") It's from Stevie's second, more disco-y solo album, and I'm more of a fan of her work with Fleetwood Mac and her first solo album, Bella Donna, which was made when she was dating that guy from the Eagles. The great thing about being a fan of Stevie Nicks, though, is that Stevieism is a big tent. Here is my theory about the demographics represented at NOTS:

1) Theater nerd girls who just enjoy wearing capes and corsets and crushed velvet. See also: Renaissance Faire Laydies. Their favorite song is Rhiannon, of course, because it's about a witch from Welsh mythology.

2)The male equivalent of these girls. These dudes would have grown up playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading Lord of the Rings if they were straight, but instead they had to like Stevie Nicks.

3)Gays who are into the coke-addled era of Stevie. Their favorite song is "Stand Back."

4) Heterosexual couples who are into the romance of Fleetwood Mac — the idea of being in a band with someone you're in love with, and then breaking up with them in a messy, druggy, cheating-related way, but always sort of carrying a torch — and singing about it! That is hot. We saw a lot of these couples, including a few who were dressed as Stevie and Lindsay Buckingham. If I ever find a guy who is willing to accompany me to this kind of event dressed as Lindsay Buckingham, or Mick Fleetwood, or even Don Henley, I will have found my soulmate, I think. Extra bonus points if he also wants to learn the harmony to "Leather and Lace."

This couple wasn't dressed up, but they were getting really amorous in a cute way.

Outside, we caught performance artist Julie Atlas-Muz and took a picture of her as though we were the paparazzi, and she gamely played along:

The second setback we encountered was that someone stole Bennett's wig! They just came up behind him and yanked it off his head and disappeared back into the crowd!
In a moment of true STEVIE REALNESS, Bennett chased after the thief, felled him with a fierce karate kick, and bit him in the face, leaving a puddle of blood and sparkles in the dance floor. Just kidding! Actually, a frightened and humiliated Bennett just made a pathetic face and turned his cape into a headdress, making him look more like Little Edie than Stevie, but whatever. Later someone complimented the headdress as being "very Timespace" and he was happy again.

Night Of A Thousand Stevies [Mother NYC]

The edict against Julia was lifted once — in a stunt carried out during New York Fashion Week last September — but for the most part, no mention of her was made. Readers (most of them, no doubt, New Yorkers) wrote in unsolicited after the blog launched to request that we not mention her, which only served to underscore that I'd made the right decision in keeping her off our roster of blog-worthy media and cultural personalities. Except when I spotted her and her (admittedly adorable) white dog from afar at some media clusterfuck, in my mind, it was (almost) as if she didn't exist.

The thing is, Julia Allison and her sisters in conspicuous consumption and shameless self-promotion do exist, and it's getting harder and harder to ignore them. Their latest assault came via the NY Times' "City" section, which devoted some 2,000-plus words (and multiple four-color photographs) to Julia in a piece titled "Channeling Carrie" yesterday. My reaction to the piece was not unlike the expression shown on a woman shown standing behind Julia in a photograph taken at her 27th birthday party in NYC's West Village: a mixture of curiosity, uncertainty, discomfort and mild disgust. (Or maybe I'm just projecting.)

In the article, Julia practically crowns herself the new queen of New York narcissism: "If Carrie Bradshaw were coming to New York today," the Times quotes her as saying, "she would be me." To a Times reporter interviewing her on video for an accompanying web feature, she strikes a more humble note, explaining that being "compared to a character who has inspired a lot of women by opening herself up and questioning the issues that concern not just single people in their twenties and thirties but of all ages, that's a compliment."

Maybe so, but here's the question that no one seems to be asking regarding both Sex and the City and the Scary Sadshaws it has spawned: What important issues did the series identify and illuminate? What barriers did it break? What did the characters ("Carrie & Company") ever do for anyone outside of themselves? What, praytell, was so damn groundbreaking about a group of narcissistic rich white women with a love of shopping and gossiping about their sex lives? (Despite what Candace Bushnell thinks, the themes of no-strings-attached sex, female friendship, conspicuous consumption and social-climbing had been amply investigated long before she came on the scene.)

I'm willing to admit that it's possible the problem isn't with the Scary Sadshaws but with me — perhaps, as Julia asserts, I can aspire to be both "serious and thoughtful" while also being "shallow and frivolous", although I don't see how I'd have the time — so last night, I went online and spent $300 on a box-set of every episode of Sex and the City ever produced. (It comes in a suede cover in a hue of hot pink not unlike the plastic case covering Julia's white MacBook.) I've decided to watch all 94 episodes between now and the premiere of the Sex and the City movie on May 30 — around 12 episodes a week — in the hopes that I can embrace my inner Carrie Bradshaw and figure out what all the fuss is about (perhaps I'll even learn to like pink!). At the very least, the next time I see Julia, we'll have something to talk about...although Candace Bushnell can still kiss my middle-income black ass.

Channeling Carrie [NY Times]
Web And the Single Girl [NY Times]

Earlier: Before Sex & The City, Talking About Sex Was Practically Illegal
Julia Allison Asks: What About Fashion Makes You Want To Hurl?

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. Today, YA author, former Gawker editor and 'Fine Lines' guest-writer Emily Gould rereads 'Alanna: The First Adventure', Tamora Pierce's 1983 novel about about how much tougher puberty is when no one knows you're a girl because you switched places with your twin brother in order to train to be a knight.

Alanna woke at dawn, ready for another session with Coram's big sword. She got out of bed - and gasped in horror to find her thighs and sheets smeared with blood. She washed herself in a panic and bundled the sheets down the privy. What was going on? She was bleeding, and she had to see a healer; but who? She couldn't trust the palace healers. They were men and the bleeding came from a secret place between her legs.

The reason Alanna can't trust the palace healers is the same reason nobody's ever taught her how to use a tampon: she's a girl posing as a boy in order to train for knighthood in an imaginary fantasy kingdom called Tortall.

The deal in Tortall is usually that noble families send their female children to a convent to train to be ladies and their male children to the royal palace to become knights when they're YA novel protagonist age (11 or so), but Alanna and her convenient twin brother Thom arrange to switch places — not because Thom wants to be a lady, but because the nuns also train people in how to use magic and Thom wants to grow up to be a sorcerer. He and Alanna are both naturally blessed with magical powers — they "have the Gift," as their village wise woman puts it — but Thom is more into wizardry and Alanna is more into whacking things with a sword. So she cuts her hair and traipses off to the palace in order to get better at swordcraft and concealing her gender and Thom gets to learn how to use magic.

Yup: in the Alanna books, magic exists! That makes my love for the Alanna books an aberration in the tastes I exhibited as an 8-12 year old — the years when I sat in White Oak Library every day after school and read I think literally every book in the Young Adult section as well as all of the back issues of Sassy, which were also conveniently shelved there. But I was never really that into books where magic exists. It wasn't the whiff of sci-fi twelve sided die dorkery that put me off — hello, see previous sentence, I was the biggest little dork imaginable — it was a combination of the heavy-handed seriousness, the vowel-less proper nouns and most of all, the dearth of female characters that put me off fantasy as a genre. (Put down your magical swords, dorks — I changed my mind about a lot of this later on).

But the great thing about the Alanna books is that they're not only funny and thankfully bereft of characters named Yllynwyn etc, they're all about women: specifically, they're about what it's like to be a woman in a man's world. Rereading the Alanna books reveals a simple, oft-repeated lesson: Girls, it turns out, can do everything boys do — in fact, they can do it better. (And, like, how much better is this for young girls to hear than the endless litany of designer brand names infesting some current YA, which, okay, I also enjoy reading but I'm glad I read this and not that as a 9 year old?) As the littlest knight, "Alan" gets picked on constantly, so she has to train twice as hard as her classmates and also develop her resourcefulness and wits — instead of kowtowing to the class bully, she sneaks off-campus for lessons in illicit street-fighting and eventually trounces him.

But while Alanna fights like a man, she breaks just like a little girl. Well, just this once, anyway:

'The other boys want to celebrate. They think you're a hero. Isn't that what you wanted?' She splashed cold water on her face. "Is it? I don't know.' She rubbed her face dry and looked at him. 'I threw up after,' she confessed. 'I hate myself. I just knew more than Ralon did. And he always loses his temper when he fights - I took advantage of that. I'm as bad as he was.'"

It's merely hinted at in the first book, of course — well, the first book ends when Alanna is fourteen, so! But early on, "Alan" strikes up an alliance with the heir to the throne, Prince Jonathan (she gets to call him 'Jon.') Their friendship deepens when she uses her "Gift" to save him from a magically-induced plague, which requires her to call on the power of the Mother Goddess (Tortallians have a rad polytheistic pagan religion going on) and the one witness to her magical cure hears "a man's voice and a woman's voice coming from Jonathan and Alan." This is the closest Alanna has come to being found out! Then, much later, she and Jon are embroiled in a high-stakes magical swordfight with some evil desert demons (long story). The demons magically peek into her mind and find out her secret, and they prankishly divest her of her clothes. "I may be a girl, but I can defend - or attack!—as well as any boy!" screams nude Alanna. Um, but then:

"'She looked at Jonathan. Her friend was openly staring. 'Highness,' she whispered, blushing a deep red, "I—' He pulled off his tunic and handed it to her. 'Later, just - who are you?'"

It's been such an awful day,' she sobbed. Hesitantly the young man put his arms around her and drew her against him. 'And now you're being so kind.' She wept into his shirt. 'Not kind,' he told her. 'Grateful. Admiring. You're getting my shirt wet.'"

I was mad titillated by these books as a nine year old, and also, I suppose, empowered. Rereading Alanna now is refreshing and a little bit saddening. Back then, I accepted its message — that by working twice as hard as the boys, you can beat them at their own game — very credulously, now that I think about it. But I didn't pay much attention to the book's other implicit lesson, which is: If you show any sign of "femininity" or weakness, you leave yourself open to attack. Alanna can vanquish her demons with magic, but the rest of us are gonna have to figure things out on our own.

Alanna: The First Adventure [Amazon]
Emily Gould [Emily Magazine]

Earlier: Weetzie Bat: The Book For Girls Who Ended Up Taking A Gay Dude To Prom

Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

You'd think, based on the title of the anthology Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, that the men who've contributed essays to it have learned something from women who've dumped them. Well, some of them have! Actually, as I flip through the book again now, I can only find one essay that has a thoughtful take-away that might help someone who finds him or herself in a similar situation. It's by Ok Go singer Damian Kulash, Jr. and it's called "A Dog Is No Reason To Stay Together," but an apter title might be, "Don't fool yourself into thinking you can make a long-distance relationship work, especially if you are in a band that has just recently become successful." Damian examines his relationship with former live-in love Amanda with sober maturity. "It was love - love like you see in movies. Except in movies, relationships don't change, or grow, or slowly fall apart. They either last forever or end mercifully fast with a thrown plate and a jump cut." That sentence is exactly as good as this anthology gets.

Things with Amanda didn't last forever, but Damian's bio notes that he's now married with two dogs. Actually, almost all of the men in this anthology are married, and Damian is one of the few who don't make a big deal about it in their stories. You know that thing Neal Pollack (oh, he's in here!) does where he's like "I'm married, did I mention that I'm married, I can't be that bad of a guy because someone married me, okay?" That's a recurring theme here.

Most of these guys are comedians or comedy writers or memoirists of the "I'm a lovable loser, haha" variety - Andy Richter, Nick Hornby, A.J. Jacobs, Will Forte, and a slew of former Onion and SNL writers are represented (Chuck Klosterman, where are you?) They often begin their essays, especially when writing about high-school or college-era rejections, by marveling that any woman has ever found them attractive. "God bless arty girls and booze!" Andy Richter writes of the factors that finally enabled his college-fatty self to get laid. "During the course of the evening - aided no doubt by generous portions of cheap beer - I tricked her into liking me," is how Will Forte describes meeting his first serious girlfriend. Whenever men write about getting laid despite being outwardly undesirable, I immediately get suspicious. It's so The Game, you know? It just seems like a weird kind of inverse bragging, especially when they talk about how attractive the girls they somehow managed to bone were, especially when said girls' attractiveness is the only thing about said girls that seems to merit mentioning. Okay, boys, we get it. Even before you were semifamous for being smart and funny, you could still get some. Probably you were smart and funny even then! Um, good job!

The only thing less appealing than false modesty is outright bragging, and there's some of that here too. In 'Things More Majestic And Terrible Than You Could Ever Imagine,' Onion writer Todd Hanson catalogues a litany of women who've dumped him that reads more like a sexual highlights reel. On a list entitled 'Things positive," he writes, "Sex with two heavily tattooed punk-rock drummer chicks whose breasts bounce hypnotically as they hammer away onstage is pretty much as amazing as you'd imagined. I cannot emphasize this point enough." Wow, Todd. Two.

But bragging is still more appealing than vengeful muckraking, and there are a couple of essays in this anthology that have to be filed under that heading. These are essays that seem designed with a single reader in mind - the girl who will glimpse this book on the 'new nonfiction' or maybe even the 'Valentine's Day' table, see her exboyfriend's name on the cover, and open it up to the essay about what a terrible person she is. Damian Kulash's admission that he misses his ex-dog far more than he misses his ex-girlfriend pales in comparison to Andy Selsberg's essay 'A Grudge Can Be Art." Andy details his affair with a nineteen year old aspiring actress eleven years his junior. To be fair, he doesn't seem to be taking any pains to portray himself as anything like a decent or mature person - he acknowledges that continuing to hate a woman with whom he spent less than forty-eight hours ("and that includes being asleep together") for fucking his roommates is pretty ridiculous.

But his parting shot is still kind of stunning in its naked vindictiveness: "I do know where I'll see her eventually: on a reality show. She is genetically and socially engineered to tear through one of those setups like an erotic tornado." There's no way the intervening years could've changed this girl, of course. After all, they haven't changed Andy! Some boys will never learn.

*Full disclosure: the "guy" is the fiance of my best friend and former Jezebel contributor "Heather" and he is not a jerk at all; in fact he is much better and nicer than I ever imagined he would be when he brutally ass-raped the first piece of mine he edited back in the day (;-) Ben!) so that fits right in with my thesis. Also, sorry Emily, for writing this. It needed to be done. That was some fucked Up ish. And readers, sorry for all the "meta." It's Friday. That is my only excuse.

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. Today, YA author, former Gawker editor and 'Fine Lines' guest-writer Emily Gould rereads 'Weetzie Bat', Francesca Lia Block's 1989 novel about a punk Los Angeles alternafamily.

It's the dreamy 1980s magical-realistic Los Angeles of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat series, and even if it never existed, I would like to go live there, in a world where everyone drives vintage cars and lives in a "cottage with one of those fairy-tale roofs that look like someone has spilled silly sand" with "roses and lemon trees in the garden."

In the Weetzie Bat books, the jacaranda is always in bloom, and every character is forever going to the beach to drink pink champagne and eat something with avocados in it. Also, the books are about a teenage girl with a bleached-blond flat top named Weetzie who lives with her gay best friend Dirk and his boyfriend Duck, who sleep with her so she can have a baby named Cherokee because the love of her life, whose name is My Secret Agent Lover man, doesn't want a child, but everything works out okay and they end up all raising the baby together. Can you believe that, in 1989, someone had the audacity to publish Weetzie Bat as a book for teengagers?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we start unraveling the story of Weetzie, let's meet her creator, Francesca. I remember staring at her author photo on the jacket of my first Weetzie book - a gift from my own personal Dirk, fittingly - and wondering what on earth was going on with this witchy lady?

She wasn't beautiful, at least, not in any traditional sense of the word. She had a long nose and a long, skinny face with maybe a little bit too much makeup on it. But the come-hither look in her eyes and her gauzy shirt - wait, could you even sort of see her nipples? - made a big impact on teen me. This was clearly a lady who knew what she was talking about when she described "a kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat." She had probably spent her teenage years in the coolest clubs, "sitting next to the dj booth watching the Lanka girls in spandy-wear dancing around."

Rereading some of these pie a la mode descriptions now, they seem a little bit over the top and hard to take seriously, but those were different times, weren't they? Tori Amos was on the radio and those Neil Gaiman Death comic books were in everyone's backpack. For some people, the early 90s were about torn jeans with waffle-knit thermals underneath and flannel, but for a subset of girls, they were also about lace arm-warmers and curlicues of eyeliner drawn halfway down the cheek. There was something frilly and poetic going on, something ... sentimental? Because, as much as Weetzie Bat was about getting drunk at a gig and making out with a guy who smelled like "leather and beer," they were also unabashedly about love. Soulmate love that lasts forever because that's what you wished for (while rubbing a golden lamp, no less!). Weetzie Bat was a fairy tale for the kind of girl who wanted to be too tough for fairies but maybe still had a few blown-glass figurines of them somewhere in her room.

Sassy magazine (of course!) loved the books, calling Block's voice "minimalist yet poetic," but rereading them now, that 'minimalism' is only thing about them that sometimes bothers me. Major revelations and plot points whiz by in a haze of jacaranda blossoms and sunlight, like when Dirk tells Weetzie he's gay and she says, "It doesn't matter one bit, honey-honey."

But that breeziness is also Block's greatest strength: of an early bad-news sexual experience of Weetzie's, she writes only, "she kept her eyes on the bare bulb until it blinded her." By the end of the 70-page book, AIDS and infidelity and suicide and childbirth have all been dispatched in this simple style - and it pretty much works.

On the last page, Weetzie and Dirk and Duck and Secret Agent Lover Man are raising the next generation of Weetzie Bat book characters - their children Cherokee Bat and her half-sister Witch Baby - and everyone is living, if not happily ever after, happily, in fairytale LA. As she surveys her complicated family, Block writes, "Weetzie's heart felt so full of love, so full, as if it could hardly fit in her chest." At thirteen, it was so comforting to read about a world where that kind of love could persist in spite of all kinds of obstacles. Fuck, it's pretty comforting now.

Weetzie Bat [Amazon]
Emily Gould [Emily Magazine]