Choice demographic.
“So there’s this great article on Salon,” I’m saying.
“Yes..?” says Jenn. She’s tapping and clicking at the iMac, putting pictures of arcane technical gear into seemingly arbitrary places on a giant white field.
“You remember Stargate? You know how it became a TV show?”
“Vaguely.” We’ve got our Buffy, our Angel, our West Wing, and I guess we won’t be watching Futurama much anymore. —And Farscape, whenever it manages to be on. But I digress.
“Well, it used to be the number one syndicated action hour whatchamacallit on TV. Hot enough that they were actually talking about doing another movie, a whole series of movies. They were talking a new Trek.”
“And?” She’s peering intently at the computer screen. Tap. Click.
“Well, the producers decided being number one wasn’t good enough. See, the audience was tilted female—”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Space bimbo?”
“Yup. And killing the sensawunda exploration plotlines in favor of dark ’n’ moody conspiracy theories. So the fans’ favorite actor left in disgust, and they let him go, and now the fans are revolting, the ratings suck, and the plans for a movie are pretty much on hold.”
“Idiots. Why do they keep screwing things up like that?”
“I dunno. Hey. What’s that?”
She tears her eyes away from the screen for an instant. She’s using the stylus tonight, with the drawing tablet. She swears by it these days. Makes me feel old-fashioned. Give me a keyboard and a mouse any day, please. —Besides, it looks anachronistic, that plastic pen, the paperless tablet, and her Dickensian fingerless gloves. But I digress. “It’s an issue of Bitch.”
Which, of course, is rather obvious. What I’d meant by asking “What’s that?” wasn’t so much “What’s that?” as “I see you’ve recently acquired an issue of Bitch; might I inquire as to why—assuming, of course, there is a specific purpose?” It’s just that “What’s that?” seemed more efficient. More fool me.
Luckily, it hinges on Dicebox, so Jenn’s eager to talk about it. “It’s got an article on black women as characters in science fiction,” she says, “so I picked it up. I haven’t read it yet. I have all this work—”
“Mind if I?”
She sighs. “Just leave it where I can find it.” Moves a speaker—I think it’s a speaker, it’s round and wedge-shaped all at once, and on a weird wire cradle, but it looks like it has some speaker cones in there somewhere, and it’s the sort of matte black that’s really popular with serious hi-fi gearheads—anyway, she moves the speaker a smidgeon to the left; nudges it back. So I pick it up. Flounce on the bed. Flip open the magazine. Mermaids on Coney Island, fatsuits as the new blackface, a comparison of mary-kateandashley and My Evil Twin Sister, an intriguing interview with Allison Anders (I’d always thought Gas Food Lodging was overrated, but that’s neither here nor there)—and Harriet the Spy? From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
Hold the phone.
“I loved Harriet the Spy,” I say.
“What?”
“Harriet the Spy. I loved it. There’s an article in here about the gender gap in young adult fiction. Lamenting how we’ve fallen from the heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when you had books like this with characters like Harriet or Claudia and writers like Louise Fitzhugh and M.E. Kerr. Christ, I’d completely forgotten her. She rocks. Is That You, Miss Blue? All those books.”
“I remember,” says Jenn. Apparently, I’d bored everyone to tears a few weeks ago by pointing out to all and sundry that The Royal Tenenbaums was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game, 20 years later.
“It seems I’m an anomaly.”
“Oh?”
“Boys aren’t supposed to like reading books about girls. I had no idea Harriet the Spy was a girls’ book.”
“It is.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s just a fucking awesome book about, about being a writer and too smart for your current circumstances and just starting to figure out how to manipulate the wider world around you and . . . ”
“But it is a girls’ book.”
“Yeah, well, fine, I understand that. But it shouldn’t have to be.”
Jenn yawns and stretches. “Boy, am I glad we dropped a half-gig of memory in this puppy. These files would be impossible to work with without it.”
“Of course,” flipping more pages, “the backlash is that everyone thinks boys don’t read enough, and so there need to be more books for boys, and so more books are written with boys as heroes or narrators.” There are exceptions; there are always exceptions. (And it’s an utter coincidence one of those was written by someone I know. So there.) “Even Kerr’s written mostly from the point of view of boys lately, and you remember Island of the Blue Dolphins?”
“Yes…”
“They wanted him to change the sex of the heroine. He had to convince them it was based on a true story.”
“Geeze.”
“‘Why have young males been left out in the cold when it comes to publicly funded libraries? I think it’s because most librarians are female—or gay…’”
“Who said that? The writer?”
“No, she’s quoting a Canadian educator. Ray Nicolle.”
“Jerk.”
“Yeah. And—”
“What? What’s so funny?”
I’m giggling because I’ve reached the point in Monica T. Nolan’s article (“Harriet and Claudia, Where Have You Gone?” and it’s not online yet, so go grab issue no. 15 of Bitch and read it your own dam’ self) where she ties it all together: “The publishers of YA books must woo male readers, and—like the quintessential heroine of the ’50s teen romance—have embarked upon a never-ending quest to win a boy’s approval and gain the status and sense of self-worth they crave.” I’m giggling because suddenly, it all makes a twisted sort of sense, the whole Stargate fiasco—of course being number one in the ratings isn’t cool, if your viewers are primarily girls. The icky, uncool, clingy side of fandom, the obsessively thumbnailed gallery side, the slash-fiction writing side, the side of fandom that insists on making comparisons to Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and David Copperfield, as the Salon article takes pains to point out: the girly side of fandom. Of course that’s uncool. You want to hang with the in-crowd, the geek-kings, the choice demographic as Ferris Beuller would put it: the fickle, disdainful 18-25 males who think Seven of Nine is hot and argue about conspiracy theories and don’t buy all that much, which is why advertisers are so keen on snaring them, which all makes sense if you stand on your head and think about it with high school logic. Junior high school logic. The Stargate producers just wanted to be cool, man.
Screw the chicks.
“Yeah,” says Jenn, as I’m trying to convey this epiphany to her. “That’s nice, but—”
“Fuck,” I say, waving my arms around. The cats are getting nervous. “It even explains that crap about NBC thinking they have to skew their comedies male next year. They’ve been making too many shows for women. Like Ed. Jesus!”
“Hon,” says Jenn, still peering at the screen, “you’re starting to rant.”
“But,” I sputter.
“Why don’t you go write all this down? And let me finish my work, okay?”
Well, it does all make sense. It does.
