Who
is... Donna Barr? Donna
Barr has been drawing since 1954, writing since 1962, published since 1986,
and publishing since 1996.
She has a Bachelors' Degree in German, and
is a veteran of the United States Army (1970-1973).
Readers worldwide
follower her THE DESERT PEACH, STINZ, BOSOM ENEMIES, HADER
AND THE COLONEL, among others.
She is recognized by her peers as
a pioneer in the field of drawn books and their use in new technologies of distribution
and reproduction. She is a contributor to the world's largest webcomics site,
moderntales.com, and its affiliate
sites.
She achieved her lifetime career goal in 2004 when her life's
work -- past, present and future -- has been accepted as part of the San Diego
State University's Library's Special Collection, and will be available to students
and professors for research, and to the public for exhibits.
She can
be emailed at barr at stinz dot com (remove spam barriers). She answers. Keep
the sentences short.
"I love you -- You have a Bad Attitude!" -- Howard Chaykin to Donna Barr (who's still trying to figure out what THAT was about) at SDCC
I was reading a collection of reviews of James Thurber's work. Not everything Thurber wrote during his life could be published. He had his own version of Mark Twain's A Pen Warmed Up In Hell. He had to be dead a while before language like that could come right out where peope could read it without looking over their shoulders for their minister or their great aunt.
In one of Thurber's letters he's talking about the chances a guy has to have sex in his life if he doesn't find the One Girl. For today, with birth control, the low estimate would startle a junior high student. But he does say that one kind of guy will get it a lot more than that, a guy who really works at it: the Gash Hound.
Considering what's going on in our industry right now, with old industry hacks putting their hands up the young female colleagues' skirts, I just had to share the term. Along with Horn Dog and Total Creep and Baggy-assed Old Pervert.
I'd also like to -- reluctantly -- share a genre of books and ideas out there that may throw some light on this kind of rat behavior. It's fan-driven, and it's specifically in the gamer gang. (And no, I'm not telling you where to find them: I'm not giving any of them a chance to make a dollar off this site).
There's the idea running around right now that Girls Are Like Video Games. Some guys who can't win the games and aren't Getting Any are stating that video games are made to make you try, but designed so you can't win. And that therefore women are just the same.
I don't need to go into the rest of the idea; you've all seen it in the emails. How To Get The Girls! Break Down Their Resistance! Cut The BullShit! MAKE Them Want You! They Really Want You -- Make Them Admit It! Leave The Lid Up On The Toilet!
Why the hell would any guy who was getting any be sharing how he did it with anybody else? Especially geeky guys like him? If he ever got his hands on a girl he'd be blowing her image up into five or six girls in his own head and proclaiming himself top stud without ever getting out of the basement. These books are nothing but theory. They might as well be religious texts, for all their connection with reality.
These guys even claim that ANY woman really wants a man, even if she's said she's a bisexual or a lesbian. Hey, if a woman is approached by one of these guys, telling him ANYTHING to make him go away is fair. And then there's my theory (see My Theories, below) that nobody's really one thing or another, it just depends on the person. And no doubt these guys have been told, "Go away, I'm a lesbian," and then seen the same girl with another guy. The video geeks are just jealous they're not getting any.
And now we come to: "Break Down Their Resistance?" "MAKE Them Want You?" Why don't they just come right out and title these things with a little more honesty:
"How To Rape Your Neighbors And Colleagues And Get Away With It!"
There's more than a few males who think the way to get a girl is to tackle her. This might have worked in Australia 1500 years ago, but it's only going to get your butt arrested - or later outted -- around here (Thurber mentions his old editor, Harold Ross, who thought if you just took a girl down like a quarterback she'd Love You Forever, but he did it in public and only looked really bewildered when the girls laid there laughing at him. Remember the "laughing.").
The present-day screeds are full of the ideas that are running around among the video gamers, that you have to force your way to get what you want. That no girl doesn't NOT really want it. "No means no" means "That's just level 11 and what are the moves to get there?" to these guys.
Video games are the male version of trying to understand sex. Struggling upwards to a single goal and beating out all the other competition? In some sort of tunnel or single highway? I don't even have to make the comparisons. A guy who does nothing but play these things, especially a guy who gets really frustrated losing at them, may be the same guy who gets really frustrated because he's not making it with the real females. Though whatever made a guy think that if he sits in a basement manipulating his joysticks is going to get him laid involves a kind of wishful thinking even I'M not capable of, and I'm in the commie book industry.
This hooks up with the Human Breeding Strategy, which is a particularly ugly one, but it's how humans are built. Ever wonder why it is that human males kill so many of their females and young? I mean, it's nuts. The statistics are crazy. Why the hell would any animal kill that many of its females and young if it wanted to be a successful species? At the huge human rates, when compared with other animals? Killing young not one's own isn't unusual, especially among primates, but killing the only part of the species that can actually HAVE young?
Let me try a theory of my own: somewhere the human got a quirk in its DNA. The way it works with humans is like this: "If I can't have her, no one else will." We've all heard that line; it forms the backdrop for folk songs and movies. What that means is, "If that female isn't available for me to spread my Y-Chromosome, then if I kill her, no other male will be able to spread his."
Don't point at me and call me crazy. For years I asked where males came from. Not what the're useful for NOW -- but where the model came from in the first place. Remembering that old ontology-recreates line, I figured that it went something like this: viral attack/defense/final symbiosis. What else is the sperm and the egg but one creature using another to reproduce? Recently I ran into a lay-level description of sexual strategies in the animal world that mentioned the origin of the male sex: they figure it was originally a viral attack. Just like that. Now I don't have to try to figure that one out any more. I can go on to more important things, like how to get an espresso stand up here that sells bubble tea.
They've also figured out that all a male really does is attempt to cookie-cutter its Y chromosome, and the use by the male of the X-chromosome is kind of candy and flowers -- a bribe to get the girl's attention. The female will test the holy hell out of the male to find if he's got a good box of candy, or at least as good a little box of candy as a male can come up with (there's less of it and it's kinda gooey and melted, but it's something). So the next time your girl is driving you crazy putting you through hoops, just be happy that she's interested in you enough to drive you crazy. Would you rather she ignored you? Or that you were failing the tests? If she asks you to stand on your head in a creek and juggle fish with your feet you should at least try. It's what you're there for.
Don't be like the fan-boys who get snubbed once and quit. You don't want to end up writing books that claim the girls Really Want It even if they say No. Or even worse, jumping young female comic-book artists in the back halls of the San Diego Convention Center.
Hey -- who's up for forming hunting teams and roving around catching these guys doing this to our female colleagues? Not to beat them up or anything, but to stand and point and laugh at them.
At least nobody would be ignoring them then.
Flash! Any female out there in comics been butt-jumped or threatened with losing her job if she doesn't put out, just email me at barr at stinz dot com, and I won't have to write an article next time -- I can just post the letters. Let's post these guys' names on a Wall Of Shame. Let's put on funny hats and point at them at shows. Let's share -- and laugh our butts off -- at their clumsy ill-timed dorkweed attempts at mating. And if you'd like to share just how BAD the guy is in bed, or how pointless his courtship is, or how pinhead obvious his attempts, please be graphic and detailed! Nobody and nothing survives laughter. NOBODY. (How about t-shirts? "So-and-so licked my fingers at DorkCon!"). The older males in this industry don't like us and don't want to treat us decent anyway. How about making them FEAR us? It's so much more fun.
Even better, let's give them their own panels at SDCC and APE and let them 'SPLAIN how it's all justified and they're just poor innocent misunderstood guys and the girls were asking for it anyway. I would truly love to hear their sides of the story.
I'll bring the popcorn. The thing with the toilet lid? I don't know what guys think it is, because they seem to be fixated on it. But the reason the women want the lid down is because PISS STINKS. And the stink SPREADS. And gets into the walls and carpets. Yes, we can see why infringing on the male urge to mark territory might be resented: but if you want to do that, go out and find a tree. This may be hard if you're in Texas, but then try some pin oak bushes, if Dubya leaves you any.
You guys may LIKE sniffing each other's piss-stink, but if you make the house stink of your piss, then you'll either NOT get your deposit back when you move, or you'll lose your equity when you sell the house. Okay? Jeeze. It always amazes me the simple things we have to EXPLAIN to guys. READER RETURNS: After a little confusion, between me and Joe Palmer, re my comment about the guy having AIDS: "(After) my ten year's worth of experiences of having AIDS I can guarantee there are only highly unlikely circumstances in which that scenario could possibly happen. All of those would involve the person licking having sores, abrasions, infections, or cuts inside her/his mouth as well as the other person having a bleeding cut or recently smearing their hand with a bodily fluid.
Life is good, even! with new and short-term challenges such as lovely side effects of new medications and the nightmares I've encountered with Medicare's prescription drug program. Thanks for asking."
My answer: "We know that, Joe. But anybody who would lick a girl in public -- God KNOWS what else he's been up to without using his brain. Or a condom. In private and publicly."
To which Joe replied:
True enough I suppose, Donna. There's a great percentage of men who don't wash their hands even after using a public washroom.
And from Craig Howrie, of Warp Two Comics in Edmonton, Alberta:
"Longtime lurker, first time commenter. Glad to read your thoughts on this sexual harrassment topic that's exploded lately. You're spot on with your take, too. I'm a manager of a comic shop up in Canada and can attest to the strange pseudo-confidence of fanboys. These wannabe Bruce Waynes need to be hauled out into the ring to be pointed at and laughed at. Just wanted to say 'I get it!' " SCHILL: REVIEWERS! Want a free downloadable ebook of my books at www.lulu.com/desertpeach? barr@stinz.com and ask for the key URLs. And if I don't know you, I gotta see your creds. Warp Two Comics in Edmonton, Alberta. No website, but lots of word of mouth. Go buy stuff off them. Movie Review (kinda): Brokeback Mountain. I haven't seen it yet (it'll be a video in the library soon, because this library even ordered Girls Will Be Girls and I gave them a copy of Lady Snowblood), but hearing the plot and listening to some of the dialogue, I rolled over laughing. Come on, any of us writing about male-male relationships know what we get accused of by a particularly cross-eyed bunch of fan-girls: Slash. It's not called Slash, by the way, because of the old Kirk/Spock punctuation. It's caled Slash because of what the fan-fickers do to the original copyright. I keep getting manuscripts of their work, where they go to town on somebody else's characters. These obsessive humorlous fannettes must be having a FIELD DAY with that movie. Although... if the characters are already torn by their homosexuality, what are the Slashers going to do with THAT?
