Girls with Big Books

Princess Leia Organa

We all know about the wonderful princess Leia from Star Wars. I don’t think there is any need to say too much about her; I would suspect that anyone who visits this site knows fully well why she belongs here. I’ll just give you short recap though, if it by any chance is needed.

Leia is a wonderful example of someone who might start out like a the damsel in distress type of character, but is far from helpless. She is portrayed all throughout the movies as an incredibly courageous, headstrong, intelligent and capable woman.

She is apparently an accomplished politician. She can lead forces into battle and organize rebel soldiers. She’s an excellent marksman and she also seems to possess great strength, being able to strangle the massive Jabba the Hutt with a chain. She has a sharp mind and she can deliver wonderfully sharp little insults as well.

Side note: I realize that a lot of what I’ve said, as well as a lot of what I’m going to say, applies just as much to Queen Amidala from the new movies. But I won’t be mentioning her anymore in this post, because I generally pretend that the new movies don’t exist. I like to pretend that they are just some huge prank played on all the people who have waited for parts 1-3 since the eighties, and that any day now we will get to see the new movies. So Amidala doesn’t exist, even if she does happen to be in the video below.

We love women like her. We do not love the following video. The following video is concentrated pain for almost any Star Wars fan. And the part with Leia is by far the worst to me (and I have to admit that I kind of liked Vader and the Stormtroopers dancing Thriller. Seriously, Vader doing pelvic thrusts, how could that possibly be wrong?).

The part with Leia and the other girls is just… I have no words. I just feel that they could not possibly have chosen a worse song for them to dance for. Seriously, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”?

Now I know that this is considered to be some kind of feminist anthem because. And I guess that it can be, since it depicts girls who do what they want instead of what society expects of them. And that’s good, and I guess that fits with Leia too.

But other than that it just doesn’t fit. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” seems to be about frivolous girls who care very little about anything but moments of fleeting fun. Leia on the other hand has an enormous sense of duty and honor, and she seems to spend as much of her life as possible doing the things she feels are truly important.

Leia was royalty on Alderaan. In all likelihood she could have just stayed there and had as much fun as she wanted to, but she didn’t. Instead she chose to be very actively involved with the rebellion in an almost suicidal effort to save the galaxy from evil. Now they have her character gleefully dancing around looking ditzy, while mouthing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”.

It is painful. There should have been more pelvic thrusting Darth Vader instead. Seriously.

Some time ago I wrote about Kate McAlpine’s Large Hadron Rap, and mentioned how unusual I think it is to see any intellectual music.

A comment on that post mentioned Alanis Morissette, giving her as an example of an intelligent singer. Now, I’m not saying that’s necessarily wrong; she might be very intelligent. I honestly don’t know much about her, so I have no idea. But I don’t think that her music seems all that intellectual.

The song that, of course, comes to mind is the popular Ironic. It’s an entire song dedicated to misusing the word “ironic” by stating that a bunch of situations are ironic when they are merely unfortunate or coincidental.
A lot of comedians have already ripped that song to shreds, so I won’t reiterate their points too much. Here’s one of them that you can listen to instead:

And I usually find popular songs just as stupid as that Alanis Morissette song. Sometimes it goes beyond stupid though, like with Katie Melua’s Nine Million Bicycles.

In it she sings “We are twelve billion light years from the edge / That’s a guess / No one can ever say it’s true / But I know that I will always be with you” and that’s just a very bad thing to sing.
Not because twelve billion isn’t a very accurate figure; I will accept that since twelve is the monosyllabic number closest to 13.7. But what really does bother me is that she says that it’s a guess.

I love science and I it bothers me that many seem to have a very bad grasp of what science really is. Creationists, homeopathic “doctors” and other quack “scientists” thrive on making people believe that science is just some vague guesswork presented as truth. I don’t think we need singers who add to that belief by claiming that astronomers “guess” that we are a certain distance from the edge of the universe.

But Melua really came through and vindicated herself. When physicist Simon Singh wrote a piece in The Guardian criticizing the song, and giving an idea for alternative, more correct lyrics, she reacted wonderfully.

I would guess that very many entertainers would just scoff at his criticism, thinking that he is a boring old man talking about things that no one cares about. But not Katie Melua; she apologized and admitted her error and actually recorded a version with the “corrected” lyrics. Now, that version will never be a commercial success, but I love it. And watch this next video if you want to hear it too.

Now that’s the kind of musician that we need more of. That she did this says a lot about her.

There are a lot of great female authors out there, but for some reason they are often hard to remember. One of the few how stand out immediately in my mind (among contemporary writers) is Danielle Steel, and she’s not exactly the kind of writer I feel the urge to write about on this site.

I don’t know why it is that it can be so much easier to remember great male authors when trying to think of some writer I admire. Maybe it is my own fault, or the fault of a culture that promotes male writers better. I don’t know, really.

However, one female author who is easy to remember is J.K. Rowling, who wrote the extremely successful Harry Potter books. I can’t say that I’m a Harry Potter-fanboy at all but I do feel that Rowling deserves a mention here, for several reasons.

"J. K." Rowling

First of all, she seems like a real nerd, and we like that. Seriously, anyone who has ideas that are as geeky as the universe that Harry Potter inhabits in their heads, score big points with those of us who like nerds.

But the effect she has on other people is even more important.

Obviously, her success has encouraged a lot of young women to pursue their author dreams, and that’s a great thing. Especially if she manages to inspire and encourage the nerdy type of girls, because honestly, can there be anything hotter than a woman who writes nerdy fantasy or science fiction books? I have a hard time imagining anything sexier.

But I actually think that the most important thing about her is her name. Continue Reading »

I know that I’ve been writing a lot about xkcd lately, but I felt the need for one more post about it.

One of my favorite girls from the comic that I haven’t mentioned yet is Joanna, the girl with the EMP-cannon in the strip “Pix Plz”. Sometimes I feel that we need girls like her in real life, to handle the obnoxious Internet-goers, and make the Internet more welcoming to female nerds.

So, in tribute to her and to xkcd I tried to draw some fan art depicting Joanna. I’m really not good at drawing, but I thought that if I start posting a few things I draw, it might make me practice and get better.

Joanna

And why is she wearing goggles, you might ask? Well, of course it is because she’s a blogger! She is making a fashion statement and foregoes the classical red cape though.

Original: Continue Reading »

I feel the need to write a short little post about one of my favorite historical nerds, the intriguing Lady Lovelace, in case this site has any visitors who do not know about her.

Ada Lovelace

Yesterday I wrote a post about webcomics and comics in general. I briefly mentioned xkcd, a webcomic that is extremely popular among nerdy people.

I want to pay special tribute to xkcd, because I think that Randall Munroe, who creates this minimalist stick-figure strip, has a great ability to think up the best in nerdy girls. The women in his comic are usually so intelligent and nerdy that they look rather sexy despite being nothing but a few simple black lines.

One of the nerdiest, sweetest, silliest, most romantic things I’ve ever seen

The one above depicts a girl who must be the most romantic geek ever, and one of my favorite fictional females. Original found here. 

There is plenty more where that came from. Here are some other examples of my favorite girls: Continue Reading »

I have always loved reading typical newspaper comic strips. Unfortunately though, a lot of it them are pretty bad and unentertaining and, more relevant to this website, usually seriously lacking in any interesting female characters or creators.

Cathy, with her trademark explosive perspiration

One of the few cartoons created by a woman I saw in newspapers published around where I grew up was Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy. And that is a really bad strip. I have rarely found much humor in it, and most of the time it is concentrated on nothing but perpetuating stereotypes about how women care only about shopping, their own weight, food and weddings. Men, on the other hand, care about nothing other than technical gadgets. Women are of course not interested in those.
Continue Reading »

Over the last few days we’ve been posting articles with thoughts about the girls we like and don’t like on TV and in video games. That is a series of posts that will continue and examine other media as well, but today we wanted to bring you a YouTube-video instead.

It is an insanely popular video, so at first we saw no reason to put it up here too. But when I found out that some of my close friends hadn’t even heard of it yet, I felt that I had to do my part in bringing it out to the unfortunate people who have yet not heard it. Thus I present to you Kate “Alpinekat” McAlpine’s “Large Hadron Rap”:

I don’t like rap at all, but if more of it had lyrics like these I might listen to it more. And Kate McAlpine is really the kind of girl that Girls with Big Books is all about. Continue Reading »

Video games have always been plagued by the fact that people write what they know.

Writing what you know is usually a good thing, but the custom did somewhat hinder the development of interesting female figures in video games. Not to overly stereotype, but for most of the history of video game development, the developers have been men with a high probability of being single. So the developers haven’t had all that much knowledge about women, so there just haven’t been very many female characters, and the ones that have been have tended to be very boring stereotypes.

History of Video Games – From Bad to Better

For much of video game history women mainly appeared in the role of the helpless damsel in distress, like for instance Princess Peach from the Super Mario-games. The girl was nothing more than a plot device; a MacGuffin to search for, to keep the game moving forward, with little or no personality of their own.

Princess Peach - Professional Damsel in Distress

After that came many appearances of an opposite stereotype; the violent, buxom vixens. While the damsel in distress type of character is cute, innocent and helpless, the violent vixens are always overtly sexy, scantily clad and very effective killing machines. They are usually just as two-dimensional and boring as their helpless counterparts.

Vinyl Goddess from Mars - No, really

Continue Reading »

The web is filled with articles written by people who praise women in the entertainment industry based solely on their beauty. They profess their love for various women for no other reason than that they look good.

Now, we here at Girls with Big Books appreciate beauty too, but we want more. Beauty isn’t really important, and besides, the entertainment industry is filled with nothing but beautiful people, so it’s such a boring thing to concentrate on.

We want openly intelligent and preferably nerdy girls, because that is what we find attractive. That’s why we are beginning this series of posts about our favorite nerdy girls, to help promote that and to balance all those articles about people’s girls who are hot in a more traditional sense.

Today we begin with a couple of examples of what or opinion is about some women we see on TV. Continue Reading »