Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

I do believe all babies should be loved and wanted.

I am a big fan of family planning.

This does not mean, however, that I believe all babies must be loved and planned, or worse, must be planned to be loved and wanted. It's how I hope to do things, if biology doesn't intervene. But I know of at least two families who are actively avoiding planning, and they clearly love and want their children and are doing a beautiful job with them. I am not prepared to condemn this approach out of hand.

Also, wanting your children is a thing I advocate in general, most hours of most days. But if you want to sell your loved, wanted children to any passing Mongol horde some days, this does not make you a bad parent, and it does not make them less loved and wanted.

(Some of you should check with me before contacting the Mongols, however.)

matociquala comments, in her lj, that "like all right-thinking perverts," she hopes to win a Tiptree. I think this makes me a wrong-thinking pervert: I have been bending over backwards to avoid making statements about gender in my fiction. Most of my stories that have a boss-subordinate relationship in them feature women in both of those roles. Why? Because this is how I can avoid making statements about gender and power, when I don't want the story to be about that.

I suspect that some of the things I see as avoiding statements about gender might be seen as statements about gender: that having women as the math professor and grad student, for example, might be considered a statement in itself. This frustrates me. "Women can be math grad students, become math professors, and have female grad students of their own," is a statement about gender in the sense that, "Most men have an X and a Y chromosome," is a statement about gender: true, but not all that interesting just now. No, it's worse than that. It's on a par with, "Some men like cheese."

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I just don't think, "People vary; deal," ought to be considered a statement about gender, or at least not an interesting one. "It's kinda complicated; deal," oughtn't, either.

*I think I have discovered the ultimate in Norse gods, but the proof is too large to fit in the margin of this livejournal. No, but seriously, I think I mentioned this before: Loki's brother Byleist. What does he do? None of the sagas seem to know. Why? says me. Because he is the introvert-god, that is why. What was lacking in the Norse pantheon but abundantly present in the Norse? Introverts. Hermits. People who mind their own business. This is Byleist's thing. His younger brother is loud and gregarious and makes a spectacle of himself, but who needs that in a god? All it does is get him [spoilered] by [spoiler] the Deathless, so [spoilers] have to [spoiler] him, and even then he's kind of screwed, and his brother has to come fix it.