The other day, I was sent an ARC of a book coming out later this year, and the author asked me what I thought about a specific character in the story.

Apparently, this character had been getting a lot of hate from reviewers and such like.

Anyway, I read the book, and I must say, I totally loved the character. She was bold and brassy, she could be abrasive, and had a bit of a foul mouth, she was forthright, she loved sex and wasn’t afraid to say so, and she knew what she wanted and had no qualms about going after the object of her desires.

In short, my kind of heroine. The anti-Mary Sue.

However, I suspect that even whilst we’re collectively screaming blue-murder about vanilla Mary Sues polluting the Romance landscape, some of us secretly hate sexually assertive women. (more…)

A blog post that I wrote back in 2005 is causing some stir over at Black Planet.

It was the one about woman-on-woman hate.

Reading the comments has been fascinating for me. It seems that every woman on there has been the victim of maltreatment at the hands of other women, at one time or other.

What I’d like to know is, where the hell are all the women who are doing the hating? (grin)