Subversive, or at least Interesting, Magazines

So, yesterday at my appointments (I had some medical things done) I found myself rummaging through Women's Weekly, Women's World , and Women's Wonderfully Internalized Gender Roles and thinking about leaving the Saveur and Cook's Illustrated issues I had, just so that there would be some other options. That got me to thinking about leaving issues of non-stultifying magazines around at doctor's offices and waiting rooms. Maybe I should have bought that pile of back issues of Asimov's someone was selling the other day.

So, what sorts of magazines would work for this kind of thing? Not Outre', but at least less... normative, I guess.

"Mary Sue as Feminist Icon" ; a Meta Rec

So, some of you have heard me rant about my problems with the concept of Mary Sue. I've seen it applied to just about any female canon character with any agency, brought forward as support for the postulate that OFCs are never worth reading, and generally used as a damper on writing about female characters by female authors. Not least since I've seen people use the gender of the term as evidence that women write more self-insert characters and therefore write less well than men do, I've sometimes contemplated making a post about the antifeminist implications of the term "Mary Sue" in its current usage. But, put bluntly, I tend to lose my nerve, decide I'd just produce a firestorm, and not write it.

fairestcat has written the essay I've been dreaming of, and hers reaches further than mine would have and is better than mine would have been. "Mary Sue is the woman who asks for and gets everything she wants," Fairestcat says, and I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly.

I don't see fairestcat's point as being that bad writing should be excused and not improved upon (as many of the responders have charged her with), but that Mary Sues are presented as the nadir of writing, when there are really many other and many worse ways to write badly, and that some of the reasons for the particular infamy with which Mary Sues are regarded are societal rather than artistic. That's my take on it, anyway.