Amy Jo Cousins's Blog
August 14, 2018
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
April 12, 2018
Autism Awareness Month & a Giveaway!
Welcome to RJ Scott’s fabulous month-long blog hop for Autism Awareness! You can find links to all the authors participating, and their autism facts and giveaways, on RJ’s blog, here.
Autism Fact: Autism is a lifelong, developmental disability that affects how a person communicates with and relates to other people, and how they experience the world around them.
One of my favorite things about social media is how much I’ve learned from the people who share their stories there. For me, discovering the #ActuallyAustistic hashtag on Twitter was a game changer, as I was able to follow autistic folks and listen to their voices directly. In my own family, we’ve dealt with anxiety/panic for at least three generations now, but for so long without discussing it or honoring our own experiences. When I was a child, my dad’s panic attacks and his addiction to tranquilizers to control them were not discussed until he went to rehab for alcoholism and drug addiction shortly before I was leaving for college. In my generation, we got better about talking and listening, and now with my son, I openly discuss with him and others how our anxiety and panic manifest, what techniques we use to manage them, and how they make us feel. Listening to each other relate our experiences gives us more information and respects our truths. For me, as someone who is allistic (not autistic), following #ActuallyAutistic on Twitter has been important for many of the same reasons, and I’m so grateful to have the chance to listen and learn.
Giveaway: Comment here to win an ebook copy of my upcoming Rogue release, ROGUE HEARTS, available on May 8th, with a brand new story set in Clear Lake! Over the next two years, I’ll be setting more books in the town where GLASS TIDINGS took place, and I’m so excited to write more LGBTQ small town romance.
January 20, 2018
HeartOn ARCs available for bloggers!
HeartOn (Full Hearts, Book 2) releases this week!
Request an eARC of HeartOn HERE. If you missed book one of the series, HeartShip, you can request a copy of that book too on the same form. If you’re a blogger or Bookstagrammer and you want to be notified whenever I have a new ARC available, you can sign up for my Blogger Newsletter.
HeartOn
When an injury sidelines NFL player Deion McCaskill—maybe permanently—he heads to Miami to stay with an old college teammate and his boyfriend. He packs his tailor-made suits, anxiety about the future, and the bisexuality he’s ignored for years because it didn’t fit with his drive to succeed at football’s most elite levels.
Set designer Carlos Kelly has always known he’s bi, but dating women is easier than making waves with his Puerto Rican/Irish Catholic family. His friends and coworkers from the theatre community might be almost entirely on the rainbow spectrum, but Carlos keeps things simple. Except for this heat that keeps flaring between him and the hot football player visiting his best friend.
Two weeks. Two guys who’ve never explored their bisexuality before and don’t plan on coming out, ever. One promise to let each other try out every fantasy they’ve ever had. Zero feelings involved.
At least, that was the plan. . .
If you’re not a blogger, fear not! HeartOn is available for preorder & will be out on 1/25!
AMAZON l KOBO l IBOOKS l GOOGLE PLAY
(Available at Barnes & Noble and Smashwords upon release.)
June 17, 2017
Callie, Unleashed is out at last!
Two and a half years ago, I published a dirty, emotional erotic novella (with some literary references that were mostly me entertaining myself, but turned out to be many people’s favorite lines!) called Callie, Unwrapped. I had plans to write a trilogy of novellas following Callie’s erotic journey with her ex Gabe, but then…Off Campus came out. And it was such a success thanks to my amazing readers, that I wrote half a dozen more books in that series. Which was awesome! But my Callie plans were seriously derailed.
Now, we’re back on track. And because I’m me, the planned trilogy has doubled in size to include six books altogether (because Kate and Ale, who you meet in Callie, Unleashed, and some other people needed books too!). But I’m stopping there! Probably. 
Callie, Unleashed it out at last!
Two and a half years ago, I published a dirty, emotional erotic novella (with some literary references that were mostly me entertaining myself, but turned out to be many people’s favorite lines!) called Callie, Unwrapped. I had plans to write a trilogy of novellas following Callie’s erotic journey with her ex Gabe, but then…Off Campus came out. And it was such a success thanks to my amazing readers, that I wrote half a dozen more books in that series. Which was awesome! But my Callie plans were seriously derailed.
Now, we’re back on track. And because I’m me, the planned trilogy has doubled in size to include six books altogether (because Kate and Ale, who you meet in Callie, Unleashed, and some other people needed books too!). But I’m stopping there! Probably.
February 10, 2017
The End of Samhain, Take Two
Samhain is closing, so back up your library now!
You may have seen the news on social media yesterday. Samhain Publishing is officially closing their doors. Yes, they said the same thing a year ago, but this time we have official dates issued, so we’re pretty sure this one is for real!
Here’s what you need to know:
1) READERS, BACK UP YOUR LIBRARIES! If you’ve purchased any books from the Samhain website directly, please make sure to download those books before February 28th when their site will go dark.
2) All Samhain books will be taken down from outside vendors (Amazon, Kobo, et al.) starting right now. BUT DON’T PANIC. Because…
3) All Samhain authors are getting their rights reverted back to them beginning March 1st. This is great news. Stressful, yes, because Samhain authors have a lot of work ahead of us, but getting our rights back was the ultimate goal, so I’m very happy about this.
What does this mean for the Bend or Break series? Good things!
1) EBOOKS will be back on sale at all vendors as soon as I get my rights reversion letters. I’ll be self-publishing these, and will have them ready to go the instant my rights are returned.
2) PAPERBACKS may take a little while longer because I have to learn how to do those or hire an outside formatter, but I’ll be busting my butt to do so in an effort to get them back up ASAP too.
3) EXPECT to see more: box sets! sales! foreign translations! I’m super excited, you guys, about the possibilities.
4) NEW BOOKS IN THE SERIES. When this whole Samhain closing/not-closing confusion began, I decided to stop writing books in the series because I declined to give control of more of my intellectual property to a company I believed strongly would be out of business soon. I’d started writing a book about Varun, Tom’s bisexual co-worker and friend in The Girl Next Door, and had plotted out stories for Andie from Nothing Like Paris and another Tom and Reese novella. Setting all of these stories aside made my heart hurt and I can’t tell you how excited I am to get back to work on them! I’ve made some other commitments in the meantime, so I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be working on them, but I’ll definitely be writing more books in this universe.
5) 2017 SIGNINGS: I have a decent amount of stock to bring with me to NECRWA in April and RT in May, so you will still be able to get signed paperbacks from me at those conferences. Plus, I’ll have Glass Tidings!
As for questions about cover art (I know! I love my Kanaxa covers and hope to be able to keep them!) and other details like the timing of the rights reversion letters, we’re still waiting to hear. Feel free to join me in my reader group on Facebook, where I’ll probably chat about that kind of thing as I get updates.
And finally, thank you! Thank you for reading these books and loving them. Thank you to Amanda and Jacob at Samhain for holding down the fort this past year and for handling this final closure with grace and speed. Thank you to my brilliant editor Christa Desir for her never-ending insight and organizational skills, and to my glorious cover artist Kanaxa for her breathtaking art. I can’t wait to keep this series going, you guys.
xoxo,
AJ
September 20, 2016
I’m Gonna Shrink This TBR If It Kills Me
I’ve been working hard in the past month to wrangle the TBR folder on my Kindle under control again. I’m embarrassed to admit how many unread books I have–had!–on there (*whispers* It’s significantly north of 200.), but I’ve made progress! I swear I have. Mostly because I’m not allowed to buy anything new until I get this sucker down to reasonable proportions. Anything under a hundred books will do. I’m also about to dive into a diverse romance reading challenge, so I figure now’s a good time to clear the decks with a book rec post. I read all kinds of great stuff! Have a look, and enjoy. 
Imma Shrink This TBR If It Kills Me
I’ve been working hard in the past month to wrangle the TBR folder on my Kindle under control again. I’m embarrassed to admit how many unread books I have–had!–on there (*whispers* It’s significantly north of 200.), but I’ve made progress! I swear I have. Mostly because I’m not allowed to buy anything new until I get this sucker down to reasonable proportions. Anything under a hundred books will do. I’m also about to dive into a diverse romance reading challenge, so I figure now’s a good time to clear the decks with a book rec post. I read all kinds of great stuff! Have a look, and enjoy. 
Adulting 101 – Lisa Henry’s voice is what made this book work for me. I haven’t been in the mood lately for books about 18-22 year olds, probably because I read so many of the in the past couple of years and my reading tends to go in phases. But I love it when an author nails a particular character’s voice, and that was what sold this book for me. I also maybe over-identified with Jai just a tiny bit (self-sufficient loners FTW, y’all), even if it’s true I’ve never been blown by a no-filters kid in a porta potty.
FIT – Loved it! This Rebekah Weatherspoon book made me want to go to the gym, which is not my normal state of being, tbh. I knew this one would be dirty, and it is. Deliciously so. What I didn’t expect was how funny it would be. I was cracking up while reading it, and THAT is a gift. Humor is hard to write. If you can work humor and hot sex in the same book? I am 100% sold. Plus, the heroine is big and curvy and I loved her. I’ll be reading the rest of the trilogy, for sure.
Play On – This prequel novella to the Glasgow Lads series is super angsty. These university boys are all kinds of messed up in their heads, but the caretaking they give each other is sweet and lovely. Fergus and John’s story in Playing for Keeps was more my speed, tbh (lots of fabulous religious and sports Glaswegian history!), but this definitely sets up the rest of the series.
The Devil’s Doorbell – This anthology of erotic short stories includes some of my favorite authors under possibly the best title ever. I’ve read the Anne Calhoun, Jeffe Kennedy and Megan Mulry stories so far and I loved all three. Megan Mulry’s story is f/f, yay! (With, um, bonus players. *winks*) I’m always happy when collections mix up their gender pairings. More please! I also particularly enjoyed the mix of role-playing, dirty sex with strangers, and theology in Jeffe Kennedy’s story “Exact Warm Unholy.”
Between Hearts – I’ve only read one story so far from this anthology of debut authors, and “Snapback” by Keller Ramsay was ultimately pretty damn charming. Also, there’s kissing in the rain, which always gets a yes from me. This story is framed as a look back from the present day (and that won’t work for everyone as we’re left with only the beginning of the story in the present), but the heart of “Snapback” is about how Jamie realizes he’s in love with his best friend Adam the summer before they go off to college. And that story is sweet as hell.
Everything I Left Unsaid – Molly O’Keefe is a favorite of mine. This book has a whole lot of dirty phone talking, some physical labor that made me tired just reading it, a woman on the run, and one helluva cliffhanger. The sequel is already out, so if you loathe cliffies, you don’t have to wait to read the next book! I really liked how this book takes place almost entirely in a ratty trailer park, without any glamour and with boxed wine and cheap booze. The people and the place were earthy and real. Did I mention the dirty talking?
Rite of Summer – If you don’t like open relationships in romance novels, this one is not for you. I loved Tess Bowery’s story of two boyhood friends who have been making their way in the world as a composer/violinist partnership and somewhat rocky romantic pairing too, until they meet an artist whose temporary addition to their bed changes everything. Bowery does a terrific job up ratcheting up the tension by including news of a real-life police raid that resulted in the arrests of dozens of gay men, and the deaths of several. I was freaking out for chapters on end, terrified someone I loved was going to die. I’m a fan of pretty much anything historical that either focuses on people who aren’t lord/ladies or manages to convince me of a realistic HEA for LGBTQ MCs. That book did both! Top notch.
Waking Up Alive by Emma Shortt – I mean, HELLO. DAT COVER. I didn’t even know what the book was about when I ran to Amazon. But it’s a zombie apocalypse story, so I damn near peed my pants in excitement. This book is terrific. The heroine is a scientist, holed up and science-ing her way through the hordes. The hero is a cop who has a super competent, zombie-fighting female friend. Who’s not a bitch or competition or killed! I really like how these two negotiate their relationship as it develops from cautious friendship to love, and there’s some cool zombie lore too. Loved it.
Beauty and the Blacksmith – Somehow I haven’t actually read Tessa Dare yet, I think because she came to my attention after a years-long Regency binge, when I’d gotten burnt out on the genre. I realized I had four of her books on my Kindle, but hadn’t opened any of them yet. So I’m diving in. The Beauty and the Blacksmith was delightful. I totally enjoyed this story of two adults who realize they’re more than interested in each other despite being of different classes and (somewhat) calmly figure out a way to make it work. Competence is one of my turn-ons, and this story had it in spades. Also, sex in the smithy. Dirty, dirty blacksmith sex. Yup. Gimme more please.
Uncovering Ray – Genderqueer romance for the win! I really enjoyed Edie Danford’s NA romance about an idealistic, scholarly frat boy and the diner server he meets and convinces to move into the frat house’s garage apartment. Lots of unexpected sweetness mixing with the tough choices of a young person who’s stuck and lost and trying to figure out how not to be. Ray is a great character, but the frat boy Wyatt is the one who stole my heart.
Never Loved – If Charlotte Stein writes it, I read it. I loved this story of two misfits, the giant, burly, tattooed guy who scares himself more than he scares the heroine, and the woman whose trying to figure out what to do with all her newfound freedom after a childhood of controlling abuse. It’s Charlotte, so these two are super hot and super messed up, and I loved every minute of it.
Love Me Tenor – I’m an Annabeth Albert fan. This is book two in her series about all kinds of singers. Book one (Treble Maker) took place at an a cappella competition and this book follows a secondary character from that story on to a reality show about competing boy bands. Interracial romance between two guys who start getting all protective of each other even while each guy is still pretending he can’t stand the other one. They’re sweet as hell.
So Sweet – I’m not normally drawn to the “sugar daddy” idea in m/f romance, because the power dynamics of that set-up trip too many of my this-is-not-okay buttons. (Oddly enough, straight-up sex work doesn’t affect me in the same way at all.) But I enjoyed the way Rebekah Weatherspoon’s heroine draws a bunch of boundaries right off the bat, and the hero pays attention to every one of them. They’re hot, they’re emotional, and I’m ready for book two.
Winter Kill – There are a handful of writers whose mastery of atmospheric setting just slays me. Harper Fox and Josh Lanyon are at the top of that list. This murder mystery/FBI-cop romance set in the Pacific Northwest just oozes rain and pine and frost at midnight. Lanyon’s a terrific writer and hits a lot of spot-on notes about the complications of colleagues getting involved with each other and the nature of small town life here. The story behind the rapidly multiplying dead bodies was perhaps a little bit too complicated for the length of the book, but I rolled with it because, well, it’s Lanyon. I just love reading her books.
Skin Game – Cara McKenna is one of my favorite authors ever. Skin Game is an odd book, but I really like it. Not a traditional romance, in that there are sex scenes taking place between all kinds of different people during the course of a Survivor-like psychological experiment in the wilds of Alaska, I was nonetheless totally sucked into the weird competitions and the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Plus, I honestly wasn’t sure who the main characters of the story were meant to be until pretty close to the end. I knew who I was rooting for, of course, but even then, McKenna surprised me by managing to make me root for people I didn’t think I liked. Twisty, strange, and definitely hot, if you’re up for something different, I rec it.
Rag & Bone – KJ Charles is another autobuy author for me. I usually try to hold off on reading her books when they release (although I always buy them immediately) because I know as soon as I read the latest one, I’ll be back to waiting impatiently for the next new Charles book. Rag & Bone takes place in the Magpie Lord universe, although you don’t have to have read those books first to enjoy this one. I do recommend reading the short story “A Queer Trade” about how Ned and Crispin first met however. And if you’ve read the Magpie series, you’ll enjoy the glimpses you get of some of your favorites in this one. As always, Charles’s words are exquisite, her magic both clever and loathsome, her worldbuilding magnificent, and her characters break your heart. I loved the interracial couple in this book and the differing awarenesses of the challenges that brings to their relationships. Plus, Ned’s paper trade, and his rag & bottle shopkeeper neighbor totally fascinate me. All around highly rec’d, as always.
A Gentleman Never Tells – My first Eloisa James! How is that possible? I am slower than I look sometimes. This book was witty and sexy and delightful. Lizzie Troutt’s husband died in his mistress’s bed, a humiliation which leaves her 100% determined never to go through that nonsense again. This book made me want to play cricket indoors with a smoking hot Regency gentleman. *fans self* A 99 cent novella!
Launch the Hunt – Book one of a shifter series, with all kinds of remote wilderness wildlife showing up in this one, I’m pretty sure. I really liked the idea that all these different shifters interact as humans in a small community that hunts and fishes, meaning they need to be aware of where the different shifter species are at all times to avoid their hunting (as humans) harming their friends in animal form. Plus, both heroes in this book are in their thirties or forties (I don’t remember their exact ages & I’m avoiding going to check so I don’t end up rereading the whole thing!) and I’m really in the mood lately for grown ups. I’ll be reading the whole series, thank you.
I’m almost afraid to ask, since I’m trying desperately to shrink my TBR, not blow it up, but…what are you reading? Gimme your best recs in the comments!
July 26, 2016
Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good ~ Why I Loved the Gender-Swapped Ghostbusters
I’m trying to figure out how to describe the feelings I got while watching the new Ghostbusters this past Sunday morning. I wrote a post once about what it would feel like to have a chance to vote for a woman for president and I described my life of observing politics, only I gender-swapped men and women. That made the surrealness of our daily lack of representation in politics startlingly clear. Because that was fun, I’m doing it again, only this time it’s Hollywood in my sights, not the presidency…
Growing up as a boy, you love going to the movies. Sitting in the dark with your friends and family is a magical experience and your memories of your favorite films fill your imagination for decades to come. Not until you are older do you realize that nearly all of your movie heroes are women.
This doesn’t feel weird, most of the time, because pretty much every person in a visible position of power is a woman. Presidents, judges, news anchors, congresswomen, CEOs…almost all women. When you’re little, a single man might manage to break through here or there, but not until you’re in college will there be more than a handful of men visible on any given playing field. And even when you’re older, men rarely make up more than 20% of the power brokers in any political/creative/business arena.
Movies are no exception. Men are vastly less present in the industry than women. Those who want to produce/direct/write movies find it incredibly hard to get hired by studios that will give a hundred-million dollar film budget to a woman who’s made a couple of music videos. Men who want to act get paid less money and are almost exclusively allowed to be beautiful, not powerful. The expression, “He probably slept his way to the top” will be tossed at most them for decades. There will be far fewer roles for those men, and fewer becomes a vanishingly small number when you talk about men over the age of forty.
Don’t get me wrong. Men are in some movies, of course. The love stories. The rom-coms. Some kids’ movies. But even then, even in the movies that theoretically star animated boys, somehow the female secondary characters manage to get more dialogue than the boys. This might be because, in general, most films have women in about 75% of the speaking roles, and 83% of the background crowds in any given scene. When men make up 17% of the people in a crowd scene, that is seen by viewers as an even split between men and women. If you make the background scene 33% dudes, people will complain that there are waaaaaay more men than women in the scene. (Strangely enough, if men/boys speak in classrooms for 33% of the total time, that’s perceived as them trying to dominate the discussion too. Isn’t that weird?)
Teen movies are a strange kind of haven where you at least get to see a fair number of men achieving screen time, even if the plots of most of those movies do revolve around which girl the boy will end up falling in love with. Also, there’s a weird stretch in the eighties where every movie will manage to work in a shower scene or some other unrelated-to-the-plot reason to show a naked hot dude, but you mostly ignore that.
If a big, splashy biopic is made, it’s sure to be about a woman, which is obviously to be expected, because women do all of the important stuff that makes history and guys mostly clean house and shop. But still, it seems to you like at least a few guys must have done something worth making movies about, right? Like, maybe men’s stories just aren’t getting told because women are taking up all of the space in the metaphorical room? “Don’t be ridiculous,” you hear. “These are just the historical facts. Moving forward, perhaps more movies will be made about men, now that men are starting to do things worth making movies about. But you can’t rewrite history to include men when they didn’t do anything worth writing about.”
Action movies are the worst. I mean, duh, of course action movies are awesome. But seriously, you’re lucky if they give one role to a man in any of the ensemble action movie casts. God forbid that guy not be hot as hell and under thirty. (It creeps you out that most of the rom-coms too insist on casting twenty-five year old guys with women in their fifties, because men over thirty are what? Unattractive? Too old to play the love interest? No joke, that shit is creepy as hell.) Finally, finally, in one of the superhero team movies, they let you see a man in a role where he kicks ass and holds his own, even if he does still have to do it in skintight clothes that show off his chest and his ass.
You’re so happy to see a man killing it as a superhero, you rush out to the store, ready to buy T-shirts and toys for your son (secretly for you to play with too, admit it). But at the store, you can’t find the male superhero anywhere. Five hundred choices in figurines and pajamas and beach towels and Lego kits featuring the women from the film. You go to seven stores before you can find anything with the guy on it. You have to make your son’s Halloween costume from scratch at home because hardly anyone is selling those. Just the girl versions. And you still only get to see a dude as a second-tier character who never gets his own movie.
You were a grown adult, by the way, when they finally made a spinoff movie from the batwoman series with a man as the main character. You were damn excited, because you’d been waiting for that for what felt like forever. A male superhero at last! Well, not exactly a superhero. More of an antihero. Who cared? A comic book movie about a man, yay! But when the movie finally came out, it sucked. The dialogue was awful, the dude was in a skintight pleather catsuit the entire time, and they made his whole character laughable. They cast a great actor in the role, but the whole movie (made by a team of women by the way, producers, screenwriters, directors all…like there aren’t men in Hollywood who are talented and would kill to work on a comic book movie?) stunk. It tanked. And no one will risk money on another solo superhero movie starring a man for more than a decade, because clearly the audience won’t go see superhero movies about men. Men just can’t carry a movie like that.
They will, however, make plenty of shitty superhero movies starring women in the same decade, along with some that are meh, and others that are awesome. Somehow neither the meh nor the shitty female-driven superhero movies will make anyone afraid to greenlight another woman lead.
They will, no joke, make a movie with a talking raccoon and a tree with a three-word vocabulary before they make another superhero movie starring a man. You can’t make this shit up. (This movie will be great, but seriously? They can figure out how to market that, but not a solo superhero movie with a man in the starring role?)
The revival of interest in superhero movies when you’re middle-aged is great fun, even as you get frustrated watching them spin off movie after movie (again) featuring the famous female superheroes, without ever giving a man a chance in the starring role.
“Next year,” the movie studios promise you. “Or a couple years after. That’s when we’ll make a superhero movie starring a man. The market just isn’t there yet. People won’t go to the theater to watch a man as a superhero. But we’re getting there.”
Meanwhile, right about this time, some people will start doing some unusual stuff with the annual Hollywood festival of remakes and sequels. They will start putting men in roles that have previously been filled by women.
This generates the teensiest bit of controversy.
At first, you maybe question this too. “Why not just come up with our own new material starring men? Why mess about with remaking all of this cool women stuff that we loved when we were kids?” Then you will go back and watch some of the stuff that you loved as a kid. And you will still love parts of it. But hoo boy, the shitty, stereotypical comments about men and their body parts and their presumed stupidity and how the average male role in a movie could also be played by a tallish floor lamp will really get on your nerves now that you’re forty-four years old and have learned a thing or two about sexism.
They take one of your favorite space movie series Of All Time and they start messing with it, putting a man in the starring role of the next film in the series. Giving him the secret space knight powers and making him the one who knows more about the spaceship than almost anyone, even the roguish woman who plays the smuggler antiheroine. You will damn near hyperventilate with excitement at the idea, even as the women who grew up with the original are complaining that the filmmakers are just catering to identity politics and men who won’t stop complaining about not seeing themselves in movies. “Why don’t you just go make your own movies, men, if you want them? Why stop trying to take over our childhoods?”
Women will point to the one male co-star of the original space movies. “Besides, see?! You had him? What are you complaining about? The prince was an awesome character!” But that dude was never around in the action scenes in the climax, he never got to fly a damn spaceship (no men did, that was a job for women only), he spent half his time in one movie in a bronze Speedo, and he was mostly treated like a cranky control freak who might lighten up if only some woman would throw him a bang.
(When you see the actor who played that male character on screen in the new space movie and he’s a GENERAL and he’s wearing CLOTHES for the whole movie and he’s a man with gray hair and gravitas, you might cry, just a little.)
You think the new space movie is pretty fucking great. You’re kind of embarrassed that you get choked up a bunch of times watching it, but it’s unbelievable. Not only do they have a man in the starring role, but there are men all over the place in the background too. None of this 17% bullshit. The first person you see at the barricades to defend the village against the bad guys is a man. There are male fighter pilots climbing into planes before the big battle scene. The quirky wise character is a man, and did we mention the star of the whole damn movie is a man? You seriously didn’t know how much it was going to move you on a deep, emotional level, seeing women share the screen with a man in the starring role in this long series of space movies.
You are still getting shafted in the merchandise sales, mind, because they make way more toys and clothes with the female characters on them, but it’s getting better. Slowly, you feel as if it’s maybe getting better.
Then when Hollywood remakes the ghost movie, they don’t even play around. They gender-flip the whole thing and give all four of the starring roles to men. (A whole lot of women lose their collective minds about this.) They duplicate some not cool racial problems from the first movie, which sucks, but the men. The men in this movie aren’t scenery. They don’t talk about what girls they like or dating or sex at all, except for a couple of pointed jokes (see below). The men don’t wear clothes that sexualize them, they don’t fight ghosts with moves designed to show off how sexy they look while kicking ass, and they are all 100% competent in their areas of expertise.
They even give the “dumb secretary” role to a woman, which is pretty hilarious, because lots of female moviegoers won’t understand that even that gender swap is a commentary on the flaws of the original. Like, not until women saw themselves in a role that reduced them to pretty, dim-witted scenery did they get how offensive that stereotype was, amirite?
Things aren’t perfect. You will have plenty to criticize about these new gender-swapped movies where men finally get to be onscreen in some of your favorite franchises. But there’s something magic about it nonetheless. Even though you do hope they make more original content for movies and TV with men in the starring roles, it’s amazing to have this second childhood, to relive your youth with all of the original excitement and adventure, but this time, people like you are saving the day and starring as the heroes.
It doesn’t make up for a lifetime of waiting, but it’s a step in the right direction.
And that’s why I love the new Ghostbusters movie so much. Why I loved The Force Awakens. Why I can’t wait for the new Wonder Woman movie and have crossed every body part possible in the hopes that it doesn’t suck and set the whole female superhero game back another decade. Why I make a point of calling out movie and toy makers if they’re ignoring the merchandising opportunities for the female characters in their films. Why I’ll be buying Ghostbusters merch for any kid whose birthday comes to my attention this year, boys and girls. Why I’ll buy it for myself or for my kid. I don’t even like tchotchkes. We live in a small, two-bedroom place with a couple thousand books and two people. There’s no room for stuff. But I swear I’m going to go buy some Ghostbusters T-shirts and toys, because I know it’s harder to greenlight pictures without the accompanying merchandising deals. And I’m going to go see the movie again this weekend, because maybe Ghostbusters only came in second place on its opening weekend, but I bet it’s got legs.
And I’m going to cross my fingers and keep hoping for more gender-swapped, race-swapped, queer-swapped remakes of my childhood favorites. Yes, I want more original material. More #ownvoices and less white-washing in all casting. But damn, y’all who got to grow up seeing yourselves all over Hollywood’s biggest movies? That was some fun, huh? I’m totally okay with revisiting my childhood for a while and getting to do the same, even if I’m 44 now. I can still tap into that sense of wonder and pride, no problem. Wanna go to the movies with me? I’ll buy the popcorn.
[Yes, I know I skipped over Ripley from Aliens and Buffy and a variety of other movies. I was also glib and snarky. My only goal was to give people a sense of how surreal it really is to grow up without media representation of your gender and to be detailed without being encyclopedic. (Pretty sure I failed on that last point.) If I wrote this same piece with a focus on growing up without representation of your race, sexuality, disability, or other marginalizations, it would be even more surreal.]
July 21, 2016
99 cent sale!
☆☆☆ 99 CENT SALE ☆☆☆
Warning: OFF CAMPUS
contains cranky roommates who vacillate between lashing out and licking, some male/male voyeurism, emotional baggage that neither guy wants to unpack, and the definitive proof that sound carries in college housing.OFF CAMPUS is on sale for 99 cents! And NOTHING LIKE PARIS, book two in the series, is on sale for $1.99, both for a Limited Time Only!
☆ OFF CAMPUS ☆
Kindle: http://amzn.to/29Od7C9
Nook: http://bit.ly/1KSdgLt
iBooks: http://apple.co/1UaWoKa
Kobo: http://bit.ly/1N055mo
☆ NOTHING LIKE PARIS ☆Kindle: http://amzn.to/2a25esw
Nook: http://bit.ly/2a2AWac
iBooks: http://apple.co/29FGcjn
Kobo: http://bit.ly/29OFOx5
