The Dancing Bear Expose, by Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs is the creator of the popular blog Pen-Elayne on the Web. She was a founding member of Friends of Lulu, an organization dedicated to increasing the involvement of girls and women in comics, as readers and creators. She is married to inker Robin Riggs, with whom she shares two cats, and has odd love/hate relationship with Hillary Clinton.

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5 Responses

  1. Vinnie Bartilucci says:

    "Pow! Zap! Women can write and draw!"I, of course, bristle at the "Pow Zap" part far more then the "women can write and draw" part. Talk about not being able to get past a mindset…You pretty much DO have to remind people that women are writing comics. Heck, the general public doesn't know much about comics at all, but one of the things they (think they) know is that they're written by boys, for boys. Any news item that disavows them of that little truism is a good thing.When people say things like "Where's all the (x) in (y)" they're referring to the "Big Show". Yes, there are many women in comics, but the general public only knows of DC and Marvel characters. When someone asks where the women in comics are and you hold up a copy of A Distant Soil, the average person thinks, "Oh, so she had to start her own comic to get a shot. Where are the women working on the REAL comics?"Gail making it to the big boys (you should pardon the expression) is great news. It's much better news than Jodi Picoult being brought in as a hotshot on the book, and writing Diana as a naive tourist who doesn't know what a credit card is. She can and should be used as a gateway drug for the masses. Get a person into the store with the promise of a woman writing Wonder Woman, and then show them the barely-countable OTHER books created and worked on by women. Alas, that would require some marketing savvy on the part of the LCS owner. That is, more marketing savvy than "Wow, a lot of people are coming in for that comic – I better raise the price!""Is a deep-seated self-loathing behind the impetus to "Yes, but" women onto hamster wheels where we must run to stay in place (i.e., in the media's sights) no matter how much success we've achieved? "As any hamster will tell you, all you have to do to get off a hamster wheel is to step to one side. It's also the best way to get around a roadblock.

  2. Marilee J. Layman says:

    In SFF fandom, we have a special award for gender-related books — The James Tiptree, Jr. Award:http://www.tiptree.org/(One of my buttons: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.)

  3. Anonymous says:

    The fact that women need to fight for something already proves inequality is inevitable; the same could be said for racism. Here's the logic: We are equal, therefore, we need to fight for equality… Does that sound right to you? We are equal, hence, we need not fight for equality. This is purely observational and if you take insult to it, then so be it. The truth always hurts.

  4. davy says:

    from the time immemorial I've always been hearing 'men only do things to get female attention' like develop civilzation, or 'when they can't get female attention they do bad things' like become terrorists and serial killers no-one bats an eye on these male dancing bear beliefs (generated by women putting themselves on a pedestal) as if men cannot hope to be independent and self fulfilling. This irks me I daresay more than your dancing bear theory irks you. It stems from the fact that women have achieved important parity guidelines with men for some time now, (including wages if only you'd minus the women who have young children or choose to be housewives, which is most appropriate and logical),and even surpassed men when it comes to degrees granted at any level. Much of this has been due to purposeful re-engineering of the society akin to (but somewhat different from) affirmative action at the behest of ( and at some cost to)men yet women like you have the nerve to complain when despite this running start (dreamt of by us in the quest for racial equality circles) they have not been able to become equal drivers of the society or the economy( There have only been one and a half true self propelling female entrepreneurial billionaires worldwide. Oprah and JKR don't count because they had too much of a random social phenomena luck factor involved, and Meg Whitman rode the coat-tails of Ebay's founder)

    • mike weber says:

      What nasty things did your Mommy do to you while she was working full-time to support her family (probably because your Daddy scarpered)?(BTW: note proper use of parentheses and insertion of break between pragraphs to enhance readability.)