What is "the female gaze" in fiction, anyway?

There's an interesting article at Shattersnipe about Female Fantasies, that is, fantasy novels written by women, that feature "the female gaze."

The author, fozmeadows, starts with the concrete notion of the male gaze in genre fiction: that men are initially depicted based upon what they can do, but women are initially assessed on their physical attractiveness, their sexual attributes.

Fozmeadows then goes on to say she likes books written from the point of view of "the female gaze," but never goes on to define what that is.

If I am to take women at their word, as writers of that great genre of the past 30 years, the romance novel, the female gaze assess men based upon their capacity of providers and defenders (their physical attributes being only part of that, and their sexual abilities more or less irrelevant until the heroine has assented to granting him access), and assesses women based upon the threat they present to the heroine's ensnaring a man.

This is what sells, after all.

As near as I can tell, what Fezmeadows means by a "female gaze" is one in which women are assessed based upon what they can do, and men based upon what they are.

Weekendy goodness with catblogging.

Peering out from their prison.

It was a stay-at-home weekend, for which I was grateful. We got mucho yardwork done, and I got injured in the process. I seem to have been in a mood to hurt myself this weekend.

First, I cut the back of my hand while reaching into the sink. Then, I got a splinter in one finger from the handles on the wheelbarrow. Later, while I was disassembling a rusted shelf frame with a sledgehammer, I lost my balance and slammed my shin into a lower strut. At first, this merely hurt. A few minutes later, though, it felt wet, and I spotted a huge bloodstain on the shin of my jeans. The injury was tiny but deep, and I may have bruised bone in the working.

Later, I made macaroni & cheese with Maytag Blue instead of Parmesan and first scalded the back of my other hand with molten cheese sauce, and then while putting the ramekins into the oven brushed the back of my arm against the upper oven rack.

I have got to stop hurting myself like this. I'm not emo. If I was an animist, I'd suspect the universe was getting back at me for the wonderful, mind-boggling, curiously illicit-seeming (although it was legitimately up-and-up all the way) rendezvous I had had the night before. Of that, I can't say more in public.

Sunday, I hurt myself less, spent a lot of time driving Myself, Kouryou-chan and Omaha hither-and-thither: haircuts, monthly warehouse grocery run, library run, Omaha had an evening meeting.

I finished playing Prey on my new computer. Is it possible for a computer to have too much cooling? Wish never seems to get much past 38C (100F), and even running Prey all-out (two processors, GPU demands set to maximum) it barely cracked 47C (117F). I'm not inclined to overclock, so the five fans and Harley-Davidson sized CPU radiator now seem excessive to me. Still, they're all surprisingly quiet.

The cats are now fully healthy, as you can see. Rambunctious and a bit obnoxious, but otherwise fine. Neither is as cuddly as Dinah ever was, but both will tolerate a hug now and then.

Yoga for wimps and it still hurts!

Yoga for Wimps is a simple book full of simple photographs of people in various yoga poses that aren't supposed to be challenging. The idea is that you can start with these and, if they work for you, you keep doing them and get serious. Someone bought me the book many moons ago, but now that I'm working at home I seem to have more back pain, so I tried out one of the exercises for back pain.

It seemed simple enough: lie on the floor, on your back with your legs up on a chair or couch such that your hips and knees are both at 90-degree angles. Lay your arms out at your sides at a 45-degree angle, palms up. Flex your back so all of it is touching the floor. Touch your thumbs to the floor. Hold for five minutes.

At the end of five minutes, my right arm, but not my left arm, felt like it was on fire. It's probably all the mousing. I'm looking into what I can do to reduce that pain, because that's just not acceptible.

WIP: AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHH.....

This is from the current story in progress:

The door opened and Mariah stood in it again. She walked over to the observation window and followed Cheyenne's gaze. "Just one question, Cheyenne." She turned. "I've always seen you in your social body while you've been on the ship. Did you always wear it when you were on the Avalon?" Cheyenne nodded. "If you did, why were you on Station M, in your combat body, when the Sinox attacked?"

Cheyenne turned her eyes up, shock in her expression. Mariah smiled, showing her teeth with those beautiful, frightening canines.

That's where the story ends. You know what's frustration? I don't know the answer to Mariah's question, either!.

Gaaaaah!