I am the 51% (Or, where are all the women?)

Women outnumber men. This is true of the planet as a whole and true of the United States. The most recent U.S. census shows that while the numbers have moved a little bit toward balance in a generation,  the population is still predominantly female. It has been since we first started counting the census here.

Nevertheless, our culture puts men in central roles. Male characters overpopulate fiction, where even background characters are frequently male default. Even when I did a Google search for "ratio of" the search suggestions all started with "men to women" instead of the other way around!  It's so commonplace for stories to be about men that it didn't occur to me until adulthood that it was out of balance with the world around me. I hadn't minded reading novels with mostly male characters because the characters were interesting and the stories were good.

Of course, there have been notable exceptions all along. The first ones that spring to mind are the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which aren't fiction, and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Sweeping out a few more cobwebs from my brain, I seem to recall that the Oz series by Frank L. Baum had lots of female characters -- from Dorothy and Glinda to Polychrome and the Patchwork Girl -- having adventures.

It becomes much more difficult to think of a movie that isn't a "chick flick" that has more than two or three female characters lost among a cast of male characters. Unfortunately, there is a gender desert between movies with dominantly female casts and movies with typical casting. When the disparity started tickling my awareness, I started looking for entertainment where the cast was reasonably balanced at around fifty-fifty. Ensemble television shows seem to do better than the movies.
One show that I like, Leverage, does fairly well. The main cast is a group of only two women to three men. However, the minor and incidental characters are just as likely to be women as men. (Minor characters are also likely to be cast with "minority" actors in the roles.) After all, why not have a woman bartender and a male kindergarten teacher? Unless the choice becomes jarring to the audience in a way that is distracting to the story, it makes sense to me to populate fiction the way the real world is populated.

The world of books is somewhat better. Female protagonists are likely to have the support of other female characters, while still having male characters important to her story.

The reality of everyday is that workplaces and social places frequently slope to gather greater numbers of one gender or another. In a public crowd, I see a distribution that matches our census numbers. Socially, I interact with more women at this time. My workplace has shifted from one side to the other over several years, for no particular reason. When similar distributions happen in fiction, it may be intentional, to forward the mood of the story or tell us something about the main character. I'd like that to be the rule and not the exception. We shouldn't be forgetting to include over 50% of our human population.

"Undefined"

"Undefined"

I crave the white silence
the quiet room
and the weightless light
Prism's colors before they shatter
and sound in slumber

I crave the unwritten page
without lines
before my stain
thoughts in chrysalis, still without wings
words in slumber

I crave the blank future
the undefined
unraveled fate
memory untethered, scattering ashes
buried past

©Cris de Borja 2004

Sustainable Reading

No paper -- virgin tree pulp or recycled -- is directly used in a ebook. Electronic publishing conserves the water and other resources of book manufacturing, and transportation costs, too.

I'm a reuser and recycler, and conservation is important to me. Being able to hike through the green velvet shade of the North Cascades National Park, only a few hours away from my home in a busy city, is one of my deepest pleasures. My love for natural places inspires me to be an aware consumer. I find that while some things require a weighing of several factors on a case by case basis, most of the time, conservation is a matter of good habits.

Book buying is one of those rare case-by-case choices. As much as I love hardcover, paper books, I also love being able to have a book with me for the bus, lunch breaks, and waiting times. Other people might fill those times with social networking or game apps; I would rather be nose-first in words. I used to choose mass market paperbacks for this, but now I have a Nook ereader, and I love it. It's a basic model. All it is is an epub reader. All it is is the book -- just electronic!

Ebooks do something important that physical books can't: they save trees. Books typically are not printed on recycled paper, because with each recycling, wood and paper pulp break down to a shorter staple length. Short fibers mean a lower quality of paper that is often fluffier and can tear more easily. While recycled paper is perfectly suited for single use applications, such as household paper goods and restaurant disposables, it may not be an ideal choice for a book intended to be handled and read repeatedly. Non-wood sustainable alternatives such as bamboo paper, cereal straw paper, hemp paper, and waterproof paper have not caught on enough to replace fine papers made from virgin tree pulp.

Of course, there is a little bit of a trade off because once a book is in your hand, it is done stamping its carbon footprint -- until you move residences, that is. In contrast, an ereader is an electronic device that needs to have its battery recharged. However,an epaper ereader such as mine uses very little power. Mine can last up to a week between charges, and when I do charge up the battery, I do so overnight, when energy demand is lower.

It is sometimes a hard choice. I have to admit that sometimes, with authors or stories that I love, I "eat my cake and have it, too"! The beloved hardcover goes on the shelf at home, where it can be enjoyed in pristine condition. The epub edition goes with me, out into the gray, messy world, making my day a little more cheerful.

The Secret of the Incomplete Book

We moved when I was eight from the house that my father built to a "fixer-upper" that was in the boundaries of a better school district.  The shabby house in the upscale suburb came with the previous owners' smelly shag carpet, hideous wallpaper, and garage full of odds, ends, and half a shelf of books.

The books interested me for being books, but they were mostly kids books -- Seuss and other early reader books -- in as bad of shape as the house's roof. There were a couple of Hardy Boys Mysteries that I passed over. There were also two or three of Carolyn Keene's classics featuring spunky heroine Nancy Drew.

The first one that I read was mostly likely The Secret of the Old Clock, the first book of the series. I don't remember which book it was, but I do remember that it had a mystery of its own: it was completely missing the last chapters of the book! They had not been torn out. It was a defective copy, somehow bound without the remaining pages. I was left at the cliffhanger ending of the physical book's final page, certain and unsure at the same time that there was more to the story.

I pestered my mother to take me to the library. It was downtown, and we were in a distant neighborhood. In the days between, I picked up the book often, checking the binding, reading the last paragraphs and assuring myself that the ending just had to be missing. Once I was able to get the library's copy, the first thing I did was compare the two books.

I read the finale of the story with relief and excitement. Then I read through the rest of the series, in order as much as possible. The library didn't have all of them on the shelf any of the times that I visited. I never knew if one of the "missing" books would be there. Every rare visit to the library offered that mystery to me, too.

The series continued being published long after my interest waned. My reading level was already beyond Nancy Drew when I started reading the series. We didn't buy books often, and with the library geographically incompatible with my reading hunger, I often read my older sister's English class assigned reading novels. There was one other source of books in the house: my mother, the other reader.

Tucked away in her nightstand was a nice, thick book: a collection of three books by Daphe Du Marier. It included Rebecca.