Tag Archives: feminist

March 13, 2021 · 1:03 PM

Oops! Not Feminist

Hey. I’m back. Let’s pretend I’ve been blogging for the last three years, okay? But if you’re curious: In my farewell post on November 8th, 2018, I said I would go back to blogging if my YA novel, Hellbound, ever got published. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not being published… by a publisher. But it is being published by me. So I figured I’d share a little bit of the process.

A couple things have happened in my life. My second child, Ari, was born last August.

He’s doing well. Warren is now four years old, but is also somehow ten feet tall. I’m teaching virtual English and reviewing podcasts on Twitter (@BexGoos). And I also have my own podcast that I do with my husband (called Not Again!). Yeah… a lot going on.

So Hellbound. I decided to self-publish after I realized that going the traditional publishing route with this book was probably never going to happen. Even though I wrote it before Lucifer, and The Good Place, and the Hellboy remake… well, that’s all people will see now. Plus, people will probably lump this in with all those fallen angel novels that were popular for a while. For this and many other reasons, I decided to self-publish. With that in mind, I set out to reread Hellbound for the first time in years. And… yikes.

This is not me being self-deprecating, okay? I am genuinely surprised that an editor wanted to get this published at one point. The story is okay, but the writing… you can tell I wrote it when I was nineteen (twenty?). It’s quite juvenile. On top of that, I realized that I unconsciously wrote the novel as a brainwashed drone of the patriarchy. There were so many problematic aspects, and I actually had the gall to consider myself a feminist at the time.

I considered the book itself to be a feminist work! So I updated it as best as I could. The first thing I had to do was pull back on the patriarchal nonsense. Then I had to modernize it because a lot has changed in ten years. I find this stuff fascinating. Maybe I’m the only one? I’m just gonna list the things that had to change to address both of the aforementioned issues. The book will be on sale later this month!

To make it more feminist…

  • Original: The two godlike deities that were echoes of humanity were both men. (I was like “Oo one of them is gay! Edgy!” God, twenty-year-old, me. Shut up.) Now: Tor remains male (as far as all-powerful godlike entities can have sex or gender). His sister Lux is a gay woman (Though, again, she is an all-powerful godlike being; she’s probably pretty open-minded when it comes to relationships).
  • Original: Almost every woman who gave birth to a Re-du-Tor died in childbirth. Tor would literally just kill women with his penis. And I never once thought, “Should women be considered disposable?” Now: It’s a fluke that Aiden’s mother died in childbirth. All the other women who gave birth to Res-du-Tor “prayed” for such an encounter, seeing it as kind of an honor. Like being visited by a deity. It’s not a perfect fix, but I had to work with what my idiot younger self gave me.
  • Original: I specifically noted that Aiden’s sister in her hellhound form looked “sleek and female.” Please be careful about rolling your eyes too hard. They might get stuck that way. Now: I took that piece of description out. Good Lord. I just deleted it. After I unstuck my eyes from being rolled back in my head.
  • Original: Tor (Aiden’s father) had created some kind of replica or clone of Aiden’s mother? It was because he loved her and couldn’t stand the idea of letting her go, but the question of her free will was one that I did not give more than a second’s thought to. Now: I made her more of a shade than a clone, and I implied she existed because of her own will mixed with Tor’s love and loneliness. I also made it clear that Tor couldn’t actually touch her or be physically intimate with her. Again, not perfect, but… I worked with what I had.
  • This doesn’t quite fall under the umbrella of feminism, but it still is important to admit how many subconscious biases were ingrained in me. I used to have a line that Nicolette looked like an “angel” with her “blonde hair and blue eyes.” I thought nothing of it for so long. And then one day, I reread it (this was actually years ago), and I was like… wait… Am I saying that I am pro-Aryan race? My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor for Pete’s sake! So I took that part out.

To modernize it…

  • I removed all mention of Facebook, though I had to keep in some form of social media site. So I just made one up called ConnectMe. ConnectMe will never become obsolete because it doesn’t exist. Fun Fact: I reused it for a different book that will likely never see the light of day.
  • I removed all mention of asking for directions and replaced it with using an app.
  • I had to change Elysia’s alarm clock (yes, a physical alarm clock) to her phone.
  • No one looks for the time anywhere other than their phone now, although I think they might still look at a clock if they are in a classroom.
  • I removed some mention of listening to the radio since a lot of cars have Bluetooth or USB hookups for phones now. I know some people still listen to the radio, but it’s rare to see that exclusively.
  • I had to take out a conversation about Trogdor, which broke my heart. I love Trogdor. But he is a reference the youths of today simply will not recognize.
  • I changed the high school students’ physical paper notebooks to electronic tablets. Most schools have gone 1-to-1 on electronic devices by now. Pens and pencils are the way of the past.
  • One of the main characters, Nicolette, got a part on a TV show. But streaming wasn’t a big thing at the time. Yes, Netflix and Hulu existed, but it would still be several years before people started “cutting the cord” entirely. So I updated it to her getting a part on a streaming show.

So that’s that…

Now I have to begin the arduous and cringey process of combing through the archives of this blog and unpublishing the posts that are not fit for human consumption.

Indie podcasts I’m listening to right now (the non-indie ones don’t need my help):
1. 10ish Podcast (To Ten Lists, Comedy, Fun Facts, Explicit)
2. The Green Horizon (Audio Drama, Sci-Fi, Comedy, Explicit)
3. Doomsday: History’s Most Dangerous Podcast (History’s Greatest Disasters, Graphic Content)

The Socials/Support Sites:

Find me on Twitter and Instagram @BexGoos
Buy Me a Potato
My Website: www.potatoladypodcastreviews.com
Everything else: https://linktr.ee/PotatoLady

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November 16, 2012 · 4:32 PM

Taylor Swift, Mary Sue

The long awaited post by Liz is here!  I want you to know that everything from here on is going to be her material, with the exception of the one drawing I did.  Be nice, as this is her first post here.  Any comments you leave will be directed to her, and responded to by her if she deems them worthy.  Without further ado, Liz’s post!

Half of my preposterously superfluous degree is in literary theory. So, today, I thought I’d share two brief examples of the various readings an academic might apply to your writings, should you produce an insanely good book, or an insanely popular waste of arboreal destruction. As an example, I am going to use a poorly written character with whom you are probably familiar:


Taylor “Bubbles” Swift

For those of you unaware, Taylor Swift is the above wooden plank. Critics have called her “charming,” “sweet,” “the girl next door,” just a shrug, and “inoffensive.”* She’s meant to be some sort of musician, but the writer that penned her into existence failed to specify a genre. (Although, from her lyrics we might discern that she sings the sort of Pop that lulls her audience into a false sense of security while she steals their money.) The fact that she’s a musician, however, is an insignificant detail of the character. Now that you’re acquainted with Bubbles, let’s get knee deep in theory!

*Bex said that.

A Feminist Reading:

This would probably be the most troubling analysis. From her dialogue (“I love Karlie Kloss. I want to bake cookies with her!”), to her lyrics (“Abigail gave everything she had to a boy / Who changed his mind and we both cried”), Taylor hardly seems a paragon of gender enlightenment. Her primary preoccupations appear to be boys, the fact that she won’t wear the same dress twice, boys, and hoping that a ghost doesn’t sneak up on her to undo her nose job.

Also: boys. She never refers to her temporary male obsessions as “men.” Unless the 22 year old has a dark secret to share, this implies that the reader is meant to see her as considerably younger than the grown woman she is supposed to be. “But her songs are from the perspective of a teenager!” says nobody whose taste is good enough to be reading this blog. Shut up. I’ll get to that in four seconds.


This infantilization is common in badly written female characters and it sends the message that she is inexperienced, only fulfilled by men (sorry, “boys”), and virginal, to the detriment of virtually any other characterization. In other words, some asshole has written the Christian Right’s perfect woman into existence. It doesn’t matter what age or what level of experience she’s meant to possess; her carefully constructed image and not-so-carefully constructed musical drivel exude a coy yet artificial innocence that is devoid of any relatable personality.

This is not to say that the women you write shouldn’t enjoy baking cookies for boys. Or that they can’t be relationship-obsessed, offensively inoffensively good looking, sexually innocent or void of any complexity. But to do so without any awareness of the  feminist implications makes your character – and the rest of your work – pretty easy to attack from this perspective.

A Freudian Reading:


As you may recall from two paragraphs ago, Taylor is a one-dimensional character with virtually no human fears, aspirations, or anus. This would make it somewhat difficult for a Freudian scholar to reduce the entirety of her mental and emotional existence to her childhood (yes) sexuality.

I kid, of course. Freudian scholars never have trouble with that.


Freud was surprisingly prolific for one so addicted to cocaine and incest, making it impossible to sum up his writings here. For simplicity’s sake, a good place to start this type of analysis is with a simple question: “Why is this character so super depressed about sex?” While the answer may seem obvious (humans sometimes have to do things that are not sex, and that is super depressing), it is
actually quite complex. “But my characters aren’t depressed!” you might shout to nobody who cares or can hear you. Well you are wrong, and probably deeply (subconsciously) concerned about the feelings you exhibit towards breadsticks and your sister.

The root of Taylor Swift’s sexy depression is that she’s made a living by being repressed. And extolling the virtues of said repression. See, the central conflict in her life is murky and variegated, and her lyrics plumb the depths of human existence. Sometimes boys don’t notice her, and she really wants them to notice her. And sometimes, terrible women steal the boys who don’t notice her, or boys
notice her and then stop noticing her.

The point is, her incessant yearning for a four-year-old musical theater fan’s idea of romance is almost disquietingly chaste, and that can only mean that she is repressing her baser urges. To bone, is what I’m saying. I could provide some evidence here in the form of any one of her extremely boring quotes, but I won’t. You get it. She’s a terrible character and you can do better.

Word of the Day: Repression (n) – the ego’s ridding itself of unacceptable desires and ideas by dumping them into unconsciousness.

So that was Liz’s post you guys!  I have nothing to add except that you should read this comic by The Oatmeal.  It’s long but it’s worth it.  It describes my thoughts and my life really well.  I’ve got two comics lined up for my next couple posts, so be sure to check back!  And really don’t forget to thank Liz!  She worked really hard on this.

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