Monday News: Dish TV battles networks, Daniel Handler and racist stereotypes, rewriting Barbie, and an interview with Jody Ellen Malpas

JanetPublishing NewsBarbie / cable / diversity / gender roles / marriage / publishing / racism / satellite television / sexism / stereotypes / streaming5 Comments

Conflicts Between Pay-TV Providers, Networks Could Result in Permanent Blackouts – With all of the attention on the pending Comcast Time-Warner merger, you may have missed the ongoing conflicts between Dish Satellite and quite a few channels, from Turner Broadcasting to CNN and possibly CBS. In some ways, though, what’s happening in satellite may be an even bigger issue, because according to this Variety article, if Dish continues to cut ties with high profile channels, “it could quickly fracture the pay-TV edifice,” which will affect cable television and even streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus.

Satellite operators are the most vulnerable distributors because of their heavy reliance on TV, and have the greatest incentive to push back on Turner and others, he said. But at the same time, he added, Dish and DirecTV stand to shoot themselves in the foot in the near term if they drop popular channels, because that would fuel further subscriber losses. –Variety

What Daniel Handler’s National Book Award Comments Say About Publishing – I’ve been reading the various analyses on Daniel Handler’s racist jokes at the National Book Awards ceremony, looking for one piece that encapsulates the whole situation comprehensively. There have been a lot of pieces that focus on Handler’s admission, apology, and promise to match donations to the We Need Diverse Books campaign, and several good ones on the way Handler’s comments reflect broader diversity issues in publishing. This piece at Lee and Low Books is a good example of that second approach. Moreover, in the comments section, Anne Sibley O’Brien mentions Jay Smooth’s 2008 video on talking about racist behavior, which is still relevant. 

In addition to the pieces cited in the article, I suggest A Call To Action from the Melville House blog, which has a great quote from Chris Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel & Grau, who says, among other things, that “[t]here’s a serious problem in publishing, which makes it hard to take it seriously when big publishing pretends toward a higher set of values than its largest retailer.” He goes on to talk about the values demonstrated by the laughter that met Handler’s comments (and apparently Handler is a friend of Woodson). Back to Lee and Low’s post, the heart of the argument articulated begins here:

But what I really want to talk about is not Handler himself (who, yes, has issued a short apology via Twitter, the first choice Apology Outlet for all those who have made tasteless jokes) but the larger publishing community. Because the joke may have been Handler’s, but the environment which made a joke like that permissible is everyone’s problem and responsibility. It’s well known and well documented that publishing is, to put it lightly, homogenous. According to Publisher Weekly’s most recent salary survey, around 89% of publishing staff identifies as white/caucasian. That means, in a country where nearly 40% of the general population is comprised of people of color, only 11% of publishing staff are—and, I’d venture a guess, probably even less when you start looking at management roles.

Publishing is also notorious for being totally out of touch with diversity and race issues. Take a look at the low numbers of books published by/about people of color over the last 18 years: . . . –Lee and Low Books and Melville House blog

Help make Computer Engineer Barbie better! – Those of you who have been following the Barbie computer engineer scandal may be familiar with this development, but if you’re not, this is pretty cool. The 2010 book hit the national radar after a Disney screenwriter named Pamela Ribon came upon the book and wrote a blog post on it. In the wake of Mattel’s apology and the book’s recall, the woman who runs the website Feminist Hacker Barbie offered a challenge to “fix a page in Barbie’s book.” Check out the site to see some of the changes that have been posted. As Ribon put it,

“People on the Internet have made hundreds of different versions of this book now because of Feminist Hacker Barbie’s site,” she says. “I mean, give the Internet a problem and it’ll fix it, with a lot of flare.”

That site — Feminist Hacker Barbie— was created by Kathleen Tuite, who works in the computer science field and as an independent consultant in Santa Cruz, Calif. . . . She says a friend posted a call-to-action on Facebook seeking women programmers to help crowdsource a hack to make new text for the book. –Feminist Hacker Barbie and NPR

My husband was no match for the fantasy hunk in my erotic novels… so I’ve ditched him, says bestselling writer of steamy fiction Read more – Yes, this is the Daily Mail. And yes, this is one of the worst titles EVER for an article. And it’s largely a ridiculously hyperbolic and salacious and as far as I can tell largely untrue title. I would not have posted the article at all if the interview with Jodi Ellen Malpas were not at the heart of it. But once I read her comments, I felt that there is an interesting issue here, namely the way that the independent successes that women are experiencing in writing Romance — a genre focused on the solidification of a permanent relationship – can destabilize real-life relationships.

Malpas’s comments, in particular, draw attention to what can happen when a relationship founded on traditional gender roles cannot withstand the reconsideration of those roles in the face of the wife’s success, and in Malpas’s case, a greater sense of independence and “liberation.” How much of an issue is this for women successful in the Romance industry? Is Malpas unique? I don’t know, but since I came into the Romance community surprised by how many authors and readers felt the need to promote their own “happily ever after” relationships, it’s a strikingly different narrative.

‘I was 23 when Aaron and I got married, so we were both very young,’ she says. ‘I didn’t really know who I was. I got on with being a wife and mother.

‘But over time I started to feel that something was missing – my normal everyday life had become a routine. I was bored. I guess that is what couples mean when they say they’ve grown apart. Aaron couldn’t understand why I wanted to write my fiction and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t understand.’ –Daily Mail

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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