Holding Out for a Hero

by Allison Pang

Starting this one out with a video, partially because it's sort of the 80's epitome of what we think we're looking for...and also because Bonnie Tyler was clearly high on something.** All of her videos are completely batshit crazy, and I find that amusing.

*ahem*

Anyway - heroes/heroines - I've always been of the mind that no characteristic is really off limits as long as it adds to the story, and as long as it makes sense to the character as a whole - genre limits not withstanding. These are the things that make the characters interesting and relatable.

But I guess that's sort of the point so many of the earlier posts this week have been making. (Though there are limits. Making your hero near-sighted is fun. Giving him a raging bout of the shits? Not so much.) But again, this often comes down to why people are reading/watching movies/playing video games. And that varies from person to person and moment to moment.

Some days I want heroines that are vulnerable that  I can identify with. Sometimes I just want to watch Indiana Jones kick some Nazi ass in some impossible fashion. So I don't really think I can pinpoint the exact spot where the line between reality and wish-fulfillment is crossed. After all, are these heroes and heroines the ones we're  really picking out for ourselves? Or the ones being forced upon us by the media? And does it make a difference?

(As an aside note? Bad boys vs the heroes? Yeah - there's a reason there are so many popular anti-heroes out there - simply because they allow us to desire that which we know is NOT really good for us in real life. Angel? Bland unless he was evil. Spike? Come, blondie bear vampire, plz to be getting into my vagina now. K, thx, bai.)

*ahem*

Also - sometimes heroes/heroines that are *too* good are boring. Perfection is boring. Most of us can't obtain it, so why do we want to read about people who *always* have the answer/save the day? It's like the old days when I used to play Champions of Krynn (*really old days*) and you had to make sure you never let that Karl asshole carry any of your money, because he would tithe 10% of it in EVERY town you went in. Or Casavir from Neverwinter Nights 2. Dude just went on and on about his dead family and Old Owl Well. No wonder most players went for the evil rogue. At least he had a personality. And a pet wolf. I don't know. I can't stand playing with paladins in my games. Blah blah blah, I'm soooo tormented, because I have to be sooo good, but inside I'm raging on the pit of despair and any moment I might become a FALLEN PALADIN. Oooh. In which case I'll sleep with you. Because, you know. I'm fallen. How 'bout that armor? WAT.)

Anyway, yeah - I'm rambling because I don't have much of answer. Though I do have one question - do we put heroines on a different pedestal than our heroes? Particularly in romance, but even in other genres, there still seems to be a bit of a stigma on women's sexuality. Sleeping around can apparently quite easily be forgiven when the hero does it...but the heroine who has one night stands? Bit of a no-no, I guess - and one that really drives me crazy. (So, the hero can be a raging man-whore, with a string of broken hearts for the last 2000 years. 2000, because, see, he's broken inside and has never known true love. Until he meets...*her*. But damn, she slept with one other person, so therefore she's some sort of hussy. Huh?)

So, dear readers - is there a double standard when it comes to heroes vs heroines? What flaws are deal-breakers for you?

** Incidentally, I might have been a little high when I wrote this post, due to Ye Old Painkillers and my Lousy Back. Forgive me.

Wolves at the Door

by Allison Pang

For some reason this is an extremely difficult post for me to write. It shouldn't be, really - there are so many people out there that do wonderful things, or go beyond the call of duty to put their lives on the line for others. It should be easy to find something to celebrate in that.

Maybe it hits a little too close to home for me. My husband is in law enforcement, and there are certain realities to living with that that most people either cannot or will not ever understand. (And the same can be said for the military, or any sort of emergency personnel - firefighters, etc.)

A lot of that perception is clouded by Hollywood, of course - men who can shoot the gun out of the villain's hand and rescue the girl without breaking a sweat. It's romantic to see in slow motion - white doves flying everywhere as the hero steps through the doorway with his leather trench coat and his cigarette drooping from his lower lip, wolfy snarl curling his mouth as he proceeds to kick ass and take names.

It makes for nice entertainment, anyway.

There's an excellent essay out there where the author indicates that there are three types of people in the world - sheep, wolves and sheepdogs.

It's not about the "sheep mentality" of following the herd and not thinking for yourself so much as it is your personal capacity for violence.

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.


And of course, this isn't to say that every member of sheepdog society is to be held up on a pillar of nobility, either. There are plenty of jerks out there in every walk of life and in every job. And sadly some sheepdogs may actually be wolves biding their time. Most aren't. But a sheepdog has to deal with a lot of crap from the sheep as well. Most people don't trust cops, for example. We find their rules to be an inconvenience or their methods more brusque than we'd like. We look for ways to avoid them when we don't want them, but we're terribly grateful they're around when we need them, aren't we?

I don't always understand why my husband does what he does, to be honest. Not that I'm not inordinately proud of it. I am. But I know I couldn't do it. On his first night out on the street as a rookie, he watched a man bleed out and die right in front of him. The man in question had been dating a girl and her brothers didn't approve. They lured him to their high rise apartment under the guise of friendship and threw him off the balcony.

He doesn't talk about many of his cases with me - but when he does, I listen. I hear about the 8 month old baby being raped by family members. The Asian girl he found in a flipped over car, stabbed multiple times in the chest. The woman beaten half to death with a frying pan by her boyfriend...and who refused to press charges even though he'd been arrested prior for attempting to assault her daughter. The snob who decided that it was worth a call to the police to complain that his neighbor wasn't raking her leaves and just what were the cops going to do about that? (Yeah, sometimes sheep are stupid.)

Dealing with the dregs of humanity on a daily basis is soul sucking in the worst way imaginable. I see his frustration all the time - particularly with the sheep who would prefer to stay in their own private wool bubble, ignorant of anything but what is in front of them.  I see his despair that there seems to be so very little left in the world worth protecting.

The beauty of the essay is that it's quite clear that we don't have to remain where we are. Sheep can become sheepdogs in moments of need - one only needs to see a mother lay down her life to save her children, for example. But how much better would it be if the sheep helped to not only protect themselves, but also each other?

All it takes is an awareness of what's going on in the world...and perhaps a good shearing.

Heroes of Various Shapes & Sizes

By KAK

In the face of great adversity, 

a hero will display uncommon courage and the will for self-sacrifice.

Behold my hero: 

Wha? Every woman knows courage is required to rock summer attire. After spending winter in gluttonous hibernation, something is definitely going to be sacrificed. Hopefully, it'll be limited to my personal comfort and that second helping of Black Forest cake (with extra Kirsh, naturally).

Girdles -- Keeping the Junk Stuffed in the Trunk

As a teen, I scoffed and sneered at the reinforced mummy wrappings. Underwear was matching soft cotton panties and bras -- the sort of pairings that stood up to locker-room scrutiny. As a twenty-something, the only restrictions I believed in were control-top hose and their power to defeat elephant ankles. As a thirty-something, I embrace block-and-tackle kink-free bondage gear. Far beyond corsets and control panties, I continuously test the durability of thigh molders, high-waisted muffin eliminators, bat-wing busters, back-fat smoothers, and under-bust support shelves.

 Shapewear -- Fighting Gravity One Cellulite-Riddled Appendage at a Time

I'd like to take a moment and thank my undergarments for regularly having the wherewithal to contain all of my gloriousness. But lo, should there ever be a blow-out... shield your eyes. The defeat of these unsung heroes will scar everyone within the blast zone.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a lovely canary halter dress is calling my name. First, I need to wrestle my way into a full-body deprivation suit. 

The Amazon in My Office

by Laura Bickle

Wonder Woman oversees my writing.

Okay, slight exaggeration. I’m sure that the *real* Wonder Woman would have much better things to do than watch me stare at the computer screen, shovel cats in and out of my lap, and swill Coca-Cola. I’m sure that she’d have no interest whatsoever in my barely-legible index cards, my swearing, and the crunching noise my broken backspace key makes. She has better things to do than watch me work – things like saving the planet from alien invaders or plagues of mutant robots.

But she still watches me write. Not her, but a sixteen-inch Wonder Woman replica doll, perched on my desk. She’s powerful, fearless of my mistakes and indecision. She doesn’t snicker when I read a run-on sentence aloud. Being plastic, she’s not terribly judgmental.

I've admired her since I was a little girl, when I got my first Wonder Woman doll and pored over her adventures in comics. I admired her - she always made her own way, leaving behind a very nice gig as a princess on Paradise Island to go fight evil in our world. Wonder Woman wasn't a fainting, helpless little fleur in need of perpetual rescue  - she was brave and brilliant, self-reliant and powerful. And beautiful and gentle. She had a career and a secret identity and a love interest she rescued every other week - what more could a girl want to be?

She was intended to be that way, an ideal of what a powerful woman can be. She was created by a psychologist, William Moulton Marston. Marston was also the creator of the lie detector, which flowers nicely into the idea of her lasso of truth. He created Wonder Woman to be a feminist ideal for young girls. And she certainly inspired me.

She still does. When I sit down at the desk, I feel a bit different. Like Diana Prince becoming Wonder Woman, I’m transformed into a writer. It's a subtle change, but I feel as if I'm in command of this little world I'm creating.

I sit and chew on a pen, staring at the Wonder Woman doll, my silent cheering squad. She reminds me to forge ahead, to be powerful. That if the entire word can be saved from hordes of alien invaders by one woman… one woman wearing high-heeled boots, no less… I can put on my own Wonder Woman boots to power through this story.

Resolutely, I put pen to paper.

My Heroes Have Always Been Close By

by Jeffe Kennedy

This is a long weekend here in the States, thanks to Memorial Day.

Some people get het up and insist we should only be memorializing military veterans. Here at Word Whores, KAK, Kalendar Whore, designated this heroes week. Leaves it a bit more open.

I've told these stories before, but if you ask me about my heroes, this is where I go.

Many years ago, before the turn of the century, there was a young woman who married an Air Force fighter pilot. There she is, posing on one of the planes.

A paragon of 1960's loveliness.

After a few years, a baby came along. Not a paragon of loveliness, but reasonably cute.

Alas, the story is a sad one. October 1, 1969 rolled around and my dad died when his fighter plane crashed, along with his wing man.

I've written about it before. How my mom and I found the field where they crashed, the trees still broken off halfway up, 25 years later.

He's one hero. One duly celebrated and gone these many years.

I want to talk about the one who had to keep living.

No one would have picked out my mother, the middle of her three sisters, as a hero. She was the pretty one; the frivolous one, the others thought. She liked nice clothes and many boys.

College meant little to her – a way to kill a year until her first wedding. Wearing the full gown and veil at 19, she held the arm of my Air Force Academy Officer father in dress blues, silver saber at his side. The row of bridesmaids frame her, fluffy in their netting. It’s easy to be a bit silly at that age. Heroism is not required.

But the years that followed grew more serious. Conflicts overseas summoned my father, his fighter plane screaming through tropical jungles while my mother waited at home. Like the first Hero, Aphrodite’s priestess secluded on her island, my mother waited for her husband’s visits. Like Leander swimming the Hellespont nightly to visit, my father would make his way across the seas to love her for a little while and leave again.

Until the day he left and didn’t return.

At 27, with a three-year-old child, a new widow can’t indulge in the dramatic gesture. The priestess became a legend by drowning herself in her grief. But, there is little romance in real life. Where Hero stood on the rocky shore, white gown snapping in the wind, and threw herself in to the sea that claimed her love, my mother packed up her bags and her child and made a new life.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like much. She had no choice but to go on as so many have to do. You pick up the pieces and continue to live, day after day. Eventually the grief recedes, the raging waves gradually falling away from the high tide mark.

My mother re-married a few years later. I played flower girl at her second wedding, sweaty bangs falling into my eyes. Now well into the 70's, this party rocked the clubhouse, my mother dancing to groovy rock in a long, pleated dress. She and my stepfather enjoyed thirty years together, rich with fun and travel. In the end, the disease that took him, slowly and cruelly, was a slow motion re-enactment of her first widowing. Where my father was gone in an instant, my stepfather died by degrees, over years. Leaving her as thoroughly widowed as before.
When my mother married for the third time, that’s when it hit me, her bravery.

“You’re so lucky,” my friend said. “Since my dad died, my mother will barely leave the house – and it’s been years! She won’t even consider dating, much less that she could be happy again.”
My twice-divorced cousin called my mom brave to marry again in a family email that made it clear that to her, brave meant “crazy.” Others called her lucky, as if finding love was a lottery she’d inexplicably won multiple times.

What no one seems to understand, what I finally realized, is that my mother’s great gift is her endless faith in life and love. She creates love and happiness for herself, her husbands and all her family.

At first, in the dark winter following my stepfather’s death, when asked if she would marry again, my mother returned the question, “who would have me?” Her record wasn’t stellar, she thought. But, never one to sit at home any more than she could have thrown herself into the sea, my mother began to rebuild her life.

A few years ago, under a setting Tucson sun, I read a poem for my mother’s third wedding. Her new husband, a widower of a 35-year marriage, held her hand. His adult son stood as best man on his other side, while his adult daughter – just four months younger than I am – watched from the gathering with her young sons on her lap.

The golden light, the scent of lilies wound through the desert air, blessing us all as we witnessed the beginning of a new life for them both. For us, too: a new family created by their joining.

That ceremony was the smallest of the three. Each of my mother’s weddings scaled down in size and complexity, in counterpoint to the richness of her life. Though the emotional weight of the lives they’ve brought to this marriage may require a steamer trunk or two, my mother and her new husband have found a simplicity in this life after death.

I’ve come to see this as the true heroism. Not the grand gesture, throwing oneself into the ocean, or eroding away under the relentless tides of grief. What takes courage is going on. The valiant pluck a seed of happiness from the brine of loss and coax it back into life. The ones who can do that, like my mother, are the ones who bring joy to all of us.