When I put together this panel for GeekGirlCon 2014, I had two goals. One was to have a good time. The other was to shine a light on how our society tends to view sex and sexuality from only one perspective.
To those who attended the panel, I hope you had fun. It was awesome to see a packed house. I’d no idea we’d draw that many people to our panel. I laughed when reading the “Pool Boy” letter in preparation for the panel and I thought it illustrated our point well: this is how the stereotypical male gaze views women. (God forbid one should be over 40 and not have a bikini wax.)
But the second goal was more serious. I need to thank the questioner who asked why call it “sex scenes from the female gaze?” because that brings in all sorts of gender assumptions that may or may not be true.
It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of Barbara Gordon on my life.
I was either five or six–old enough to be in school but too young to read. I know this because I used to watch reruns of the 1960s Batman TV show and when the credit for Burt Ward came up, I could only read the “B” and the “W.” Naturally, I translated it as Boy Wonder. (Sorry, Burt.)
I loved the show, and memorized most of the taglines. especially, “Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.” But it was full of boys: Batman, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Chief O’Hara, the majority of the villains, the majority of the henchmen. Oh, Catwoman showed up every now and then and some of the villains had girlfriends, but slowly the idea sunk in that this awesome incredible world was not for me.
I watched the episode that introduced Batgirl with my jaw hanging open. At first, I was just happy to see a smart girl in the show, one who wasn’t a villain, and one who had a real job besides wife or girlfriend. (What did Aunt Harriet do anyway?)
And then her wall pivoted to reveal her Batgirl costume and my worldview was upended. Barbara was a superhero. She had a secret lair, like the Batcave. She had an awesome motorcycle.
She could fight as well as the men, though apparently she was forbidden from actually punching anyone and thus had to resort to kicks and thrown chairs. I never noticed this. I did notice that she was smart, funny, sly, and courageous. Alfred respected her, and their scenes together were some of my favorites, as he not only protected her identity from Batman but seemed to view her as the Caped Crusader’s equal.
What a revelation. It was nothing I could put into words at the time, just a deep-seated conviction that this was proof that girls could do whatever boys could. If Batgirl could be as good as Batman, then I could do whatever I wanted to do and be whoever I wanted to be.
Was the path of my life all due to Barbara Gordon and those who made her come alive? Maybe. Perhaps I would have found another role model along the way. I was already eager to do a lot of things, whether they were what I was expected to do as a girl or not.
But Barbara Gordon was the first to show me the way.
“Cinderella and the Prince were married with great ceremony. No one approved from the first, and now more often than not there was a gleam of I-told-you-so behind the King’s spectacles, and the Queen’s three chins quivered with bitter satisfaction as her predictions were realized one by one. For Cinderella and the Prince were not happy. No one had really expected them to be. You cannot pluck a kitchen girl from the cinders and set a crown on her head and let it go at that; and small feet are not the only prerequisite of a princess.” –Happily Ever After, Catherine Moore, 1930, Vagabond student magazine.
“Cinderella never asked for a prince. She asked for a night off and a dress.” –Tumblr Meme, 2014
In my first column about why geek role models are important, I talked briefly about Catherine Lucille Moore (C.L. Moore), best known for the Jirel of Joiry fantasy series, and who published in early days of the pulp magazines Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. Her very existence inspired me because she proved not only that a woman could write this kind of story and do it well but that she could do it while writing a female protagonist.
While I knew her stories back then, I knew little about the life of Catherine Lucille Moore. What I read at the time was frustratingly brief: that she was born in 1911 and also wrote under the pseudonyms of C.H. Liddell, Lewis Padgett, and Lawrence O’Donnell.
But her life story reads like fiction. Kirkus ran a terrific short biography of her last year. Some highlights:
Moore wrote for the student run magazine at Indiana University, The Vagabond, where the story quoted above was published. She was only 19 years old then but 100 years ahead of her time.
She met her first husband, Harry Kuttner, when they corresponded about science fiction. He was unaware at first that she was a woman. After they married, they collaborated extensively and the pseudonyms I listed were the result of that partnership.
After Kuttner died of a heart attack in 1958, Moore never returned to writing science fiction. Instead, she wrote television scripts.
At the 39th World Science Fiction Convention in 1981, Moore was the Guest of Honor and the final person to receive the Gandalf Grandmaster Award. She also received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award the same year. Unfortunately, she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 1987.
As good as Kirkus is at detailing Moore’s major life events, it also only scratches the surface of who she was. I’ve read biographies of some of the other early SF/F pioneers — Asimov, Frederick Pohl, Robert Heinlein — but there’s frustratingly little about this woman.
I believe the lack of information and renown surrounding Moore certainly contributes to the fact that many today probably hadn’t heard of her. It also doesn’t help that most of her work is out of print and often hidden in anthologies where other writers are listed first.
In my research, I stumbled across The Vagabond stories and one frustratingly short tale in Project Gutenberg. Amazon currently has a collection of Jirel of Joiry with multiple used paperback copies starting at one penny. I suspect the market has been flooded recently by people with older editions in their basements. But there’s nothing extensive available online.
This makes me sad. Moore deserves to be remembered. I hope this column intrigues some of you enough to check out Jirel of Joiry and raise a glass to a woman who walked through barriers and made the path easier for the rest of us.
Corrina Lawson grew up reading Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and reading all she could order from the Science Fiction Book Club and everything she could buy from the spinner rack at her local drug store. This might be why she now writes fiction ranging from steampunk to superheroes to alternate history.
Picture a world without an internet, even one without cable television, and a time when a girl wanting to play Little League baseball was seen as weird. Picture a time when soccer for little kids wasn’t a thing and bookstores were few and far between.
That was me growing up in rural New England in the 1970s. In many ways, it was idyllic: plenty of places to wander, freedom that today’s kids are missing, and a great, supportive family.
But I was still the oddball, the tomboy, the girl who liked all the guy stuff. There were things I wasn’t “supposed” to do and did them anyway and things I wasn’t allowed to do at all.
So how did I go from there to a journalism career and to one of the founding editors of GeekMom.com?
I had role models.
My mom was one, of course, because she could handle anything. But she wasn’t a writer and she certainly wasn’t a geek. The women who showed me what I might become were real and fictional women far outside my immediate surroundings.
When I was six, Batgirl showed that girls could be superheroes too and Lois Lane proved that women could have a really cool job. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine first introduced me to the history of C.L. Moore, who wrote the pioneering Jirel of Joiry female sword & sorcery stories. I subscribed to the old Science Fiction Book Club and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern trilogy arrived one day. Not only could a women write short stories, they could write bestsellers in a genre that otherwise seemed male-dominated.
Because I got the other message too. Some women could do it but they were outliers. This wasn’t “supposed to be” for women. C.L. Moore disguised her gender. So did Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.).
At the time, that was okay for me. The most important part of their story was that women could do these things. That they had to “pretend” to be men just proved that they could prevail when the deck was stacked against them. I actually submitted a short story to Asimov’s when I was 15. I called myself C.L. Son, as a tribute to C.L. Moore.
What would I have done without those examples?
I’m not sure. I fear I wouldn’t have done nearly as much as I have because there were dreams I veered away from because I knew I wasn’t welcome.
I wanted to be a comic book writer. Jim Shooter had done it he was a teenager. But when I looked at the comic industry, the message I got in the 1970s was “this is for male writers.” The female names were few and far between and never wrote the most high-profile books.
I also wanted to be a sportswriter but when I was in college in the 198-s, harassment of female sportwriters was ongoing and intense.
I didn’t have the courage or self-confidence to bash my head against that wall.
But, in regular journalism, I had Lois Lane. Nellie Bly. Linda Ellerbee. Edna Buchanan. Barbara Walters. They were there. They were visible. They mattered.
And in writing, I had McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mary Stewart and later, Mercedes Lacey and Julian May.
Later, when I left journalism and starting writing prose novels, I had the wonderful luck to fall in with a whole boatload of female writers who were delighted to mentor a newbie. What I owe to them I can never repay. I can only pass it forward.
I had examples. I had role models. I had a path to follow, even if it was small.
And that’s why role models are important.
Not all of us are brave on our own. That’s why it’s important that not only to create the path but widen it for the generation after us.
Corrina Lawson is the Content Director for GeekMom.com and the author of seven very geeky romance novels. She was part of the “Romance is a Feminist Genre” panel at Geek Girl Con in 2013.
