Kisses and writing

There's a lot of great writing going on, not the least of which a post ep for Ethon from cofax7 and a lovely series of pairing drabbles (although drabble doesn't quite do them justice) from elishavah, among them one for My Name is Earl, along with a Vala and Jack, and a Vala and Shepphard. Why yes, I am too lazy to go find the links.

Got my Remix assignment, deciding a little fear was good for my soul. I am... a tiny bit intimidated, but I don't actually know my remixee so that makes it a little easier than last time. I still anticipate much squirmy and moaning on my part, and not in the fun getting some way.

So, there's this absolutely fabulous story meme going around about Five Kisses, and I wanted to try my hand at it, so started with the obvious. But I'd really like to try something more obscure, see if the format is as fun when the characters are uncertain. I'd particularly like to do one for Vala, or perhaps Mitchell. But I'm equally intrigued at how one could do this for Earl:) Blame Eli, I was sort of kidding about wanting fic for this (although I've seen musings of Earl/Wonderfalls crossovers and that sounds fascinating. However, after Eli's brilliance, I just want more).

So, first the obvious.

( Long Ride on a Short Bus - Five Kisses in Uncharted Territory (Spoilers for S1-3) )

If You Wait Long Enough, Your Bidding Will Be Done

Hee - before you do anything else, go forth and read elishavah's Five Kisses story for My Name is Earl. It's just lovely and funny and spot on and can be found Here.

I really, really love this story meme, and other people who wished to do my bidding, or to just make me deliriously happy, would write some five kisses of their own!!

I've been trying to think of what to say in the past few days to mark the passage of Betty Friedan, and mostly I come up wordless. It's hard for me to imagine much of my experience in the world absent her work and words.

My mother raised me to be a feminist, and hard as it is to believe, that was a radical concept in my conservative town. Particularly in our radically religious and military dominated suburb where young women mostly dated cadets and got knocked up or moved into base housing or went to the state university and never much questioned anything that was expected of them. Not to say that everyone thought women should stay home, or be seen and not heard, or any of the myriad stereotypes that I'm pretty damn sure that women and girls 10 to 15 years my junior can't quite conceive of. And let me tell you, I'm not that old. But there was a pervasive attitude towards asserting strength as a woman, towards raising issues that concerned female power and position and status, let alone definitions of feminity.

Feminist was a dirty word, something fraught with a filthy edge of radicalism, of man hating. And this was from people who knew better. For me, being continuously in search of a way to go against the majority, to subvert authority without actually getting into trouble, it was easy to embrace the term, to define it for myself. I realize now that I was lucky in my parents, that their own confidence and pride in me helped me to do this. And I realize that different words mean different things to different people. But I also believe in embracing the power of words and terminology, acknowledging how much power they do have.

Friedan's work was radical because she identified a false construct of expected feminity, zeroed in on this set of expectations and identities that women were being force fed. She found out that women wanted more than they were expected to want, and that they had a vague sense of dismay, of unhappiness based upon the roles being wrapped around them. It was revolutionary in that it identified the failed social experiement, traced the roots of feminism and allowed women to own their unhappiness and offered them a set of definitions and possibilities that would let them move away from those narrowed expectations and make choices based more upon their own needs and wants.

I'd love to hear how other women - both older and younger than I am - look at the feminist movement and its impact on their lives as well as on our society. What female role models, what thinkers, scholars, artists, individuals have helped shape your life? I know there are a few women who are far more politically conservative than I am, and I'd be very interested in your responses as well because I think that social change is more about the way we live our lives than politics.

I'd say, for me, that my mother had a far stronger influence on me than Betty Friedan, but I honestly believe that if it wasn't for work like The Feminine Mystique, my mother wouldn't have been able to raise me to be the person I became.

More Kissing and Telling

Because I just so, so love Vala. Minor spoilers for SG-1, S9.

( Five Kisses Along the Way (PG-13) )