Mary Sue: because women aren’t supposed to be heroes

ikoniI was reading this fabulous essay by Comic Book Girl, Mary Sue, what are you? or why the concept of Sue is sexist:

So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.

God, what a Mary Sue.

and it reminded me of an experience I had at WinCon 1999: I had just got hold of a copy of Vonda N. McIntyre’s wonderful novel, The Moon and the Sun (1997), and was full of how great it was. At a relevant panel, I mentioned it – to be greeted (to my surprise) with howls of derision from the women the audience, about how terrible it was because the hero, Marie-Joseph, has too much. She’s a composer, a mathematician, a fair artist, and she has a sea monster for a friend. As Catherine Asaro points out in her review

Science fiction is replete with the idea of the polymath — a protagonist talented in many diversified disciplines. This isn’t coincidence; in real life, artistic and linguistic gifts often pair with scientific or mathematical talent. The math-physics-music constellation is perhaps the best-known combination. Science fiction writer and Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, for example, is also a Ph.D. physicist, linguist, composer, and musician. The character of Marie-Joseph fits right into this tradition. McIntyre gets her personality down well, with sharp details, such as her fledgling attempts to quantify natural phenomena with equations. In essence, Marie-Josephe is struggling to derive chaos theory far ahead of its time. I found her a likable genius, unaffected and humble, with charm, integrity, and humor.

I remember a similar reaction to Segnbora in The Door Into Shadow – not the more usual one of defining her by having been raped, but a complaint that by the end of the book she has a magical sword that will cut anything, she has the Flame, she has Hasai – she has too much.

But she’s the hero. No one made that complaint about Herewiss. But (back to Comic Book Girl):

The idea that woman has to “earn” any power, praise, love, or plot prominence is central to Mary Sue. Men do not have to do this, they are naturally assumed to be powerful, central and loveable. That’s why it’s the first thing thrown at a female character- what has she done to be given the same consideration as a male character? Why is she suddenly usurping a male role? “Mary Sue” is the easiest way to dismiss a character. It sounds bad to say “I don’t like this female character. I don’t like that this woman is powerful. I don’t like it when the plot focuses on her. I don’t like that a character I like has affections for her.” But “Mary Sue” is a way to say these things without really saying them. It gives you legitimacy.

Is there any useful way to use the trope “Mary Sue”?

Excluding women

Years ago, I sat on the bus reading a Stephen King novel. I can’t remember which one, but it was one of five I’d got out of the library having discovered I really quite liked King and wanted to read more. It was about two and a half inches thick in paperback. Five men got on to the bus, and one of them sat down next to me and “noticed” my book. At length. And that I refused to be distracted from reading it. He commented that as it was such a thick book it was probably religious. (Yes, I don’t know, either.) He went on from that to suppose out loud that because I wouldn’t be distracted from my book I too must be religious. He was not exactly sober but not incoherently drunk. I had, of course, been thoroughly distracted from my book and was figuring out where best to get off the bus that was close to home but handy for a public well-lighted space, and had decided on the bus stop nearest the Scotmid supermarket (open til 10pm) halfway down Leith Walk. I didn’t take my eyes off the page until the bus was almost there: I stood up, rang the bell, closed my book, and moved to the bus door. The man who had been talking to me had realised for the first time that the book was a horror novel, and set up a brief but unpleasant barracking of abuse based on the grounds that I had “pretended” to be so religious. I got off the bus. They did not follow me. The incident was over.

Few things provoke a man gripped by anxious masculinity like the idea of a woman reading, at least a woman reading anything beyond patriarchal assignments in man-pleasing. As any female bookworm can attest, almost no public behavior you can perform is more likely to get men to bother you and demand to know what you’re doing than simply reading a book.

– Flying monkeys: why they suck, and why they must be opposed

The above is the opening paragraph of Amanda Marcotte’s blog about the incident in which a 15-year-old atheist posts a pic of herself holding a book by Carl Sagan, given her for Christmas by her “super-religious mother”, and because she is a female-type atheist, Reddit explodes in male assholery – an ugly example of how some men hate women. Not merely because so many men made so many ugly comments advocating that she should be raped, but because those comments got upvoted by hundreds of other men. Literally. Hundreds of men, most of whom presumably were members of Reddits atheist community, read a comment advocating the rape of a teenage atheist and liked it enough to click the upvote button. There are downvotes on those comments too, but far outnumbered. For those men, Reddit’s atheist community is for men and about men: no woman has any business feeling part of it.

(For any man reading this who is less than inclined to pay attention to women pointing out that this is a problem originated by men, here are a couple of posts by men on what is wrong with this from a male perspective: Nerds and Male Privilege and Pix Pls. Go away and look at those and don’t bother us.)

I cherish my right to be pseudonymous on the Internet, and defend the right of anyone to be as pseudonymous as they choose – to quote again this neat list of reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet:

* Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution
* Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence
* Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, aquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it
* Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers
* Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children
* Because it’s the custom among their Internet cohort
* Because it’s no one else’s business

That last is and should be the strongest one. But as I have said before, I opted to be pseudonymous, as many other women do, because I had found that using my legal name gets me all kinds of crap. Because my legal name is obviously a woman’s name, and Yonmei, while based on my legal given name, isn’t. The default assumption made online is that you are white/male/straight/cisgendered/American – and generally you have to be very upfront clear that you are not any of the above before people will move away from what they perceive as “the norm”. One of the reasons I like this blog is because although we have men blogging here (*waves*) the default assumption made is that if you blog at a feminist blog, you’re female. I like not getting the instant crap from men who haven’t even stopped to think for one moment about what I’m saying, they just hate women. But I don’t actually want everyone to assume I must be male, and have to come out as female over and over and over again. (People who assume I must be male after reading what I write generally declare it’s because I’m sharp-spoken and upfront about what I think. I think this attitude in women is usually called being “bitchy”, and when identified as a woman I’ve usually been identified as a bitch.)

Kate Harding wrote a response to the men who advocate that women use non-gendered pseudonyms:

Finally, if your solution to sexist abuse on the internet is, “Just don’t let anyone know your gender, or see a picture of you, or ever mention where you live” (as one of the first commenters on Watson’s post suggested), you are so fucking awful, I can’t even. It’s not just that you’re putting all the onus on the targets of hatred to change so that bullies won’t have to, or that you’re conveniently ignoring situations, in almost 20fucking12, where a woman might want to have her picture and contact info on the internet for, I dunno, business reasons? For example? And it’s not even that you’re representing yourself as someone who’s clearly more internet-savvy than the lady blogger in question, but you apparently don’t realize that a highly motivated person can pretty easily discover the identity behind a pseudonym. No, it’s that you’re arguing that abuse of women online would solve itself if only women disappeared from the internet.

Oh, of course that’s not what you’re saying! I know, I know. In the scenario you describe, sexist shitheads would know that there were still women out there–it wouldn’t be as though around half the human race had just vanished!–but they wouldn’t know which specific screen names deserved to have their hotness assessed, their gender mocked, their ideas dismissed, and their bodies threatened. So they wouldn’t even need to bother with all that! PROBLEM SOLVED YOU’RE WELCOME.

Know what, dude who thinks this? You’re probably the awfulest. That’s all.

Kate’s right: while there are all sorts of reasons why anyone who prefers to be pseudonymous should have that preference respected (and sites that do not respect it are discriminatory against women and against other minority groups) but yes: being pseudonymous can also be a disadvantage. You’re not building an online reputation linked to your legal name under which future employers can find you: advantage if future employers are likely to see that reputation as a reason not to hire you, disadvantage if they’re looking for evidence of expertise in writing, analysis, and social media.

And the key reason, for a lot of women, why we don’t use our legal names on the Internet: the sexist abuse from men that is accepted and upvoted by other men.

feminist science fiction submissions

икони цениsubmission guidelines

Pink Narcissus Press has issued a call for submissions for a new anthology of short science fiction. ‘Daughters of Icarus’ will feature stories exploring gender roles in society, using the medium of science fiction. Stories of any length, by authors of any gender, will be considered. The deadline for submissions in 31st May 2012.

Guidelines for submissions can be found on the Pink Narcissus website.

source: lancashirewritinghub.co.uk

Recent feministsf and social change

Recently I read two feminist sf books that had strong themes of social disruption and social change, This Shared Dream and The Highest Frontier. Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier was fabulous and I recommend it to everyone! It’s about Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, a fantastically privileged young woman, one of the “Cuban Kennedys” starting her freshman year at a university on a space station, at a time when Earth is being covered in solar-plating and the Death Belts are ever-widening. Over the course of the book many, in fact most, of the characters have some reason to explain their disability or disabilities — in Jennifer’s case, selective mutism — and the politics of that deep social integration of disability politics and people with various impairments blew my mind (and made me laugh). I loved the weird tech based on 3D printers; the futuristic Internet (and busting the ToyNet monopoly!); everything about the alien ultraphyte invasion; and the way characters slip between talking, emailing, texting, and things like “brainkissing” and simulations. There were echoes of all the politics of Hurricane Katrina, and the political battles between scientific thinking and the future equivalent of Creationists. If you have any involvement with academia you may enjoy Slonczewski’s intense critiques of teaching and university administrations.

This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan also blew me away. It made me think strongly of Woman on the Edge of Time, but sort of in reverse, or in reverse somewhere from the middle in a fractal way. Its timestreams are a bit confusing. The heroine, Jill, is in a slightly nicer future than ours, and others that might have been “before” ours — but she keeps remembering other streams, the ones with Hitler, and the assassination of JFK, and the times when she and her siblings played on the Infinite Game Board which was infused with Substance Q…. She, her siblings, and her parents as well as many people around them are in an unstable position in the timestream, trying to improve it but experiencing confusion and loss, mental breakdowns (and confronting deep ethical issues) around what it means to adjust the history of the world. Meanwhile, Dr. Eliani Hadntz drifts in and out of the story and through the timestreams, a fabulous and enigmatic mad scientist. I liked it that Jill and her timestream aren’t in an actual utopia, but just come off as strangely privileged and lucky in a world where there *is* still war and horror. Aside from the politics — I deeply enjoyed the scenes of memory and childhood and the atmosphere of the dream-like Halcyon House that holds so much meaning for Jill’s family — especially its attic.

Highest Frontier and Shared Dream had a couple of interesting commonalities beyond being about deep disruption and people collectively trying to figure out how to bring about social change. (So resonant with current Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.)

Both books have a sort of Magical Stuff, a macguffin that sets off events and catalyzes people — in both cases, something that makes people *wiser by contagion*. Contact with Jennifer’s wisdom-pheremone-emitting plant research project in Highest Frontier, and contact with Substance Q, makes people wiser and more empathetic, expanding their minds and their ability to put themselves into another person’s shoes. Wisdom also makes people act with more altruism and as part of a collective. And it makes them choose to engage in direct action!

Both books also turn to reform of existing systems as their hopeful solution for social change. (Echoes for me here of Cory Doctorow’s For the Win & its focus on unionizing.) In Highest Frontier the radical reform is over voter registration and electoral politics. In Shared Dream, perhaps a bit hilariously and unbelievably for some people… it’s the United Nations and the World Bank. There is a lot to argue with there but it’s great food for thought and discussion!

Hercules and the Feminist Separatists

This post is a snarky recap of the 1994 television movie Hercules and the Amazon Women starring Roma Downey (Monica from Touched by an Angel) as the sexy man-hating Amazon queen Hippolyta, Lucy Lawless as her fierce and obedient number two Lysia, and of course Kevin Sorbo as Hercules and Michael Hurst as his li’l buddy. I meant to put this film on as background noise while I graded, but little did I know I was about to watch a cautionary tale. I was enthralled and delightfully appalled by this campy film cautioning against sexist behavior in men because you might drive women to become bands of scantily clad separatist warrior chicks.

This film is on Netflix if you’d like to watch along with me. The screencaps here are curtesy of Mary Crawford’s Vices and Miroir d’Arc Archives.

Hercules and the Amazon Women begins with three white villagers bumbling through the jungle in pursuit by unseen monsters. Ferns shake and the men are snatched away velociraptor style. Clever girl! One man is sucked into a sand pit. Only the villager Pithus escapes.

Continue reading »

Anne McCaffrey: 1 April 1926 – 21 November 2011

Anne went to Paradise:
That was only fair.
Aged Grendel followed her,
And armed her up the stair.
Fáfnir and the Wyvern,
And Melusine du Paon,
Stood with Jabberwock at the top
To welcome Anne -

Then the Three Archdragons
Offered out of hand
Anything in Dragon’s gift
That she might command.
Edith’s eyes upon her,
Kenneth’s guiding light,
Tolkein’s sword against her heart,
Anne said: “Flight!”

Anne told us dragontales, blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.
And while the Weyrs of Pern and Harper Hall remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto April’s Anne!

MA in advanced linguistics. PhD in badass.

Back in the 1960s, when Star Trek was new, it was genuinely radical – admittedly in a radical-as-dreamed-up-by-a-straight-white-guy way – but there was a black woman on the bridge who was an officer who could and did – in the cartoon Trek at least – command the ship. There was an Asian officer: in a Cold War world, there was a Russian officer. Looked at from the perspective of nearly half a century, this is a limited and US-centric radicalism – but for its time, it was revolutionary.

One of the reasons we know it was genuinely revolutionary is that Gene Roddenbury’s bosses at Paramount were virulently opposed to the idea of a black woman as a major, permanent character on the bridge – as a military officer with rank and authority. For the first two years of Trek, they refused to let Nichelle Nichols have a long-term contract like the other actors who were playing major roles: Nichols was a black woman, so she was on a two week contract and paid by the hour. Her job security rested on Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, and her income was dependent on his outrage at Paramount. (Uhura appears in many scenes because Roddenberry was determined to make Paramount pay through the nose for their racism, and did.)

The new Trek’s reboot was neither revolutionary nor interesting. The best you can say is that New Uhura was ace (actually, the best you can say is what Sarah Rees Brennan had to say, which is:

UHURA: I seem not to be assigned to the Enterprise. Please correct this error.
SPOCK: Well, I didn’t…
UHURA: You know my qualifications. MA in advanced linguistics. PhD in badass.

See?) ….But, you know – grr, argh, etc – thanks to Star Trek the Original, it is no longer revolutionary for a film to have just one major character who is a woman*, black, and not maid, mother, or crone.

As Kate Elliott says:

Did I really reach this age and be forced to watch the young James Kirk as a rebellious, impulsive boy racing a car in a chase scene down a road? Seriously? That’s it? That’s my reboot?

I wish they had let ME reboot Star Trek.

Let me start with my fantasy cast.

I looked at her fantasy cast (you should too!) and my eyes widened, my jaw dropped, I thought omg omg omg omg, and in other words, Kate Elliott should have a new job: directing and casting for the REAL Star Trek Reboot.

*There are four speaking parts for women in Star Trek Reboot. Kirk’s Mom, who disappears once she gives birth: Spock’s Mom, who disappears when her planet blows up: Orion Green Star Fleet cadet, who gets to have sex with Kirk: and Uhura, who is splendid… but why is she the only one? This gets total fail on the Bechdel test.

The memory of sexist abuse online

Ten years ago, I routinely used my real name, or some variant of it, to comment in online fora. Why not? I’d been doing that for years, in fannish circles, and no harm had ever come to me.

Helen Lewis Hasteley, on her blog at the New Statesman, has recently posted a series of three posts about the gendered, sexual, violent abuse which women bloggers receive. (“You should have your tongue ripped out”: the reality of sexist abuse online, On rape threats and internet trolls, What about the men?) There was a Twitter feed about it, #mencallmethings. It’s taken me a little while for me to remember I too have a story about that.
Continue reading »

Reading Herland in 2011

I recently read, for the first time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic utopian novel Herland, which was published serially around 1915. Herland is part of the tradition of utopian socialist novels kicked off by Edward Bellamy in 1888 with his novel Looking Backward. Herland is one of the earlier, and more famous, utopian novels depicting an entirely female society. This post details some of my impressions of the novel, reading it today.

The premise is pretty straightforward. Three young bachelors, the narrator Van, a sociologist, and his buddies Jeff, a doctor, and Terry, a wealthy womanizer, set off to see if there is any validity to the rumors of an all-female society hidden away beyond some remote mountain pass. Each man holds a different sterotypical view of women. Jeff believes women are peaceful and cooperative and ought to be protected and served, whereas Terry thinks women love to in-fight among themselves and that every woman really wants a strong man to conquer her. Van initially assumes that there must be men hidden away somewhere, as Herland is a civilized country. The three men are taken captive by Herlanders, and peacefully detained while they are taught the Herland language and culture. The men eventually tour the country and marry three women. Many long conversations ensue that compare Herland to the United States. Van comes to decide Herland is indeed the better society, and that some of the things he’d assumed were given social ills (such as poverty and war) are not necessary parts of a functioning society. Terry’s marriage ends after he tries to rape his wife and she kicks his ass. Terry is banished as a punishment, Van and his wife Ellador leave with Terry. Ellador is to visit the United States, and report back to Herland if diplomatic relations should be set up. Ellardor and Van’s adventures continue in the sequel, With Her in Ourland.

Continue reading »

Say Yes to Gay YA

иконописRachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith were told by a literary agent that their Young Adult novel would be represented — if they made a gay character straight or wrote him out altogether.

They refused.

They have written a blog entry about the gatekeepers of publishing who may be keeping gay characters out of young adult fiction, and are asking you to help change the status quo.

See what they wrote, and pass it on:

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

Darth Google. We should have known.

So, Google as the Evil Empire.

I first adopted Yonmei as my pseud towards the end of 2002. I use it now across multiple sites – Wikipedia, Redbubble, Twitter, IJ, and of course here.

To quote again this neat list of reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet:

• Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution
• Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence
• Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, aquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it
• Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers
• Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children
  Because it’s the custom among their Internet cohort
• Because it’s no one else’s business

About ten days ago, Google celebrated its first three weeks of Google+ by mass-suspending an unknown number of accounts that violated one or more of their TOS. (Issuepedia) Google does not permit any kind of useful appeal process – if they bring the banhammer down, your best hope is to be able to complain loudly and publicly in a way that might bring your problem to the attention of a Google employee with enough seniority to be able to do something for you. If you’re not Internet-savvy enough to be able to do this, you’re screwed. Even if you are Internet-savvy enough to be able to do this, a company which regards its users as the devil and gags employees who try to advocate for their interests, may just decide you’re not the kind of person they want on their social network – not even if you work for them.

Remembering Joanna Russ – Part 1

So it’s been a few months since Joanna Russ passed away. Her novel The Female Man was either the first or the second piece of feminist science fiction I ever read (it was at the same time that I was reading Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground). The book informed a lot of the start of my political journey AND my love of science fiction.

So many people said such wonderful things about her and her work after she passed and especially how reading her work impacted them. I wanted to do something similar to commemorate Joanna and her impact on me but every time I tried to write a general post about her and her work it didn’t seem to come out right. Then while randomly going through one of my boxes of books I came across my ragged, torn copy of Russ’s Picnic on Paradise. And I realized that most of Russ’s work besides The Female Man, When It Changed and How to Suppress Women’ s Writing doesn’t get nearly as much publicity or acclaim. It’s inevitable that author’s get boiled down to certain works as time goes on but so many of Russ’s tales are so complex and interesting I want to talk about them a.k.a. ramble on about the theories and complexities of each work.

So here it is the start of a four part series reviewing/discussing some of Joanna Russ less talked about but no less brilliant works.

Part 1: We Who Are About To (Spoilers Ahead)

Continue reading »

A circle of turned-away, indifferent backs

икониCatherynne M. Valente said:

An Open Letter: “You are showing your ass in public. I cannot overstate the aptness of this metaphor. This kind of behavior is exactly the same thing as running out in the town square, dropping your pants, and slapping your pustule-laden ass while babbling about the end times.”

What Naipaul said:
Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any other writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.”

Okay, actually, he just dismissed half of the writing world – and all of the founding writers of his field, the English novel – But either way, at that point, I just have to go: “This writer may be a great writer, but if he dismisses every other writer in English, ever, as not his literary equal, well: he may be a good writer who is too prone to showing his ass in public, but he clearly has no literary judgement whatsoever: a writer who is so arrogant about the quality of his own prose that he supposes he has no equals, is not likely to be that good a writer.”

So I don’t need to read Naipaul: why trouble my mind with the arrogant second-rate?

(What would Naipaul and Ta-Nehisi Coates both, I wonder, have said of a white writer who, asked in a racist forum if any writer of color was or could be his literary equal, answered no, because people of color’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a person of color, they are not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in their writing too.” By translating sexism, which is regarded as acceptable in sexist forums, into racism, it is possible perhaps to make a sexist man of colour understand that the question is a demand for an inappropriate judgement: it insists that the person questioned either reformulates the question in their reply, or makes a bigoted judgement.)

Nicola Griffith wrote, in another context:

The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.

So, now we know there is one writer whom we need never bother to read, and the infinite universe of possible reading is still undiminished (it’s infinite): what other writers would you recommend that people read, this cloudy Sunday?

“Dirty Wordies, or, The Fiendish Thingie”, a speech by Joanna Russ

It’s an unfortunate happenstance that the Feminist SF Blog was down when Joanna Russ died a little over a month ago, so there hasn’t been a proper tribute to her here (and this post isn’t intended as such). I will miss her very much, though I only knew her through her work, and I hope that this work will live on.

I recently found an old zine containing a speech she gave in 1969, which I don’t think has been collected or republished since then, so I’ve transcribed the text of it for others to read and put it online.
Read it here — notably, if you’re curious what she had to say about “fuck”.

And We’re Back!

The site was down for a couple of months because of some kind of technical glitch (I am not a technical admin for this site, so I don’t know the inner workings of its configuration), but Janice & Laura have just been working on a fix for it & they’ve brought it back up.

Hurray!

If you can read this but hit Internal Server Errors when loading some of the blog’s pages, try reloading, and (if you can) leave a comment if it doesn’t work.

ETA: I got a malware warning about content coming from an off-site source while going back through old entries, so please tread carefully. The site is back but there might still be issues to sort out before it’s all fixed.

ETA2: Janice has removed several hidden spam links. If you have any further problems with the technical side of the site, please contact her at blogs@therem.net .