Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Exit Sandman

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This first appeared in the Chicago Reader.
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Neil Gaiman, who edited the 2010 installment of The Best American Comics, occupies a prominent but strange place in the history of the form. His Sandman series (1989-1996) was hugely popular and critically acclaimed. Although set in the traditional DC Comics universe—with walk-on parts for everyone from Hellblazer’s John Constantine and members of the Justice Society to obscure villains like Dr. Destiny—the book was original in tone and appeal. In place of steroidal underwear fetishists done up in primary colors Sandman offered pale, thin Dream, who wore somber contemporary or period garb and angsted rather than fought his way through unhurried, character-driven fantasy narratives, strewing portentous bons mots in his wake.

In short, Sandman was goth.

Superhero comics mostly appeal to guys who’ve been reading them since they were 12. Goth, as any Sisters of Mercy fan will tell you, often appeals to girls. Sandman offered enough pulp adventure to keep many young male readers—myself included—interested. But it reached beyond that fan base. As Best American Comics series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden note in their 2010 foreword, Sandman “single-handedly upped the ratio of women reading comics.”

Trouble is, Sandman only increased the number of female readers as long as those readers were reading Sandman. The book didn’t change the demographics of the industry as a whole. Though highly respected and popular, the series had remarkably little influence.

Certainly there were loads of Sandman spin-offs. DC has, following Gaiman, shown some interest in fantasy-oriented series—the currently ongoing Fables for example—and independent titles like Gloomcookie and Courtney Crumrin followed a goth-oriented, female-friendly path. But these efforts were marginal. Overall, post-1990s, the mainstream comics industry first drifted and then scampered towards massive, complicated stories mostly of interest to a male, continuity-porn-obsessed fanbase. Gaiman moved on to writing novels (notably, sophisticated fantasies like Neverwhere and Coraline), and the formula he created was largely ignored. Instead of creating goth comics for girls, American companies chose to stick with insular cluelessness and let the Japanese have the female audience. Manga comics, especially those aimed at girls, exploded in popularity here. And that, in case you were wondering, is no doubt why the Twilight comic adaptation isn’t drawn by homegrown artists like Jill Thompson or P. Craig Russell or Ted Naifeh but by Korean illustrator Young Kim, in a manga style.

Gaiman’s influence is weak even when it comes to Best American Comics 2010. One of the oddest things about the book is how little it has to do with its editor’s oeuvre.

I mean, yes, it’s possible to make connections between Sandman and some of the selections here. An excerpt from the lyrical The Lagoon, by Chicagoan Lilli Carré, plays on goth tropes and the meta-contemplation of storytelling in a Gaimanesque way. The dreamlike pacing, melodramatic romance, and kissing skeletons in Lauren Weinstein’s “I Heard Some Distance Music” might also be seen as at least elliptically referring to him. And the heavy-handed cleverness of a passage from David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp—a billboard advertising firmamint for diarrhea, for instance—points to one of the less appealing aspects of Sandman. A more positive echo can be found in the first selection in the book: an excerpt from Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple, and Gary Panter that fuses superhero goofiness with literary smarts.

The American mangaesque style, arguably descended from Gaiman, is represented in a few places, such as an excerpt from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Still, there’s nothing in this anthology that you can look at and say, “This wouldn’t exist without Neil Gaiman.”

That’s OK though. Sandman had some serious problems, one of the most prominent being the inconsistent, generic, and even shoddy work of some of its pencilers. The visuals throughout this volume are much more distinctive and engaging. Theo Ellsworth’s “Norman Eight’s Left Arm,” from Sleeper Car, sets crude figures against detailed natural backgrounds to create a look that’s half clip art, half woodcut—a lovely complement to his surreal tale of woodland creatures, weeping gnomes, and gambling robots. John Pham channels Chris Ware to create an elaborate, fractured board-game-like layout for his tale of despair and neurosis among spindly, cosmically marooned characters in a Sublife excerpt called “Deep Space.” Comics canon standbys like R. Crumb and Ware himself are represented with visually pleasing selections. And sometimes when the art isn’t so great—as in Dave Lapp’s charmlessly clunky “Fly Trap” or Michael Cho’s bland, text-cluttered panels for “Trinity”—there’s at least a consistent visual style.

Even when he makes awful choices, you’ve got to admire Gaiman’s eclectic enthusiasm for a comics world that has so little to do with him. I cordially loathe Derf’s nostalgic hagiography of punk rock. Peter Kuper’s indifferently rendered anti-Bush commentary is as vacuous as it is predictable. And one earnest account of a national disaster per book is fine—either Katrina or 9/11, please, but both makes it look like you’re straining. Still, I found it pleasantly disorienting to see all of the above clumped together under a single editorial imprimatur.

Of course, not-something-you’d-expect-Neil-Gaiman-to-like doesn’t really constitute editorial vision. Gaiman actually cops to the lack of coherence in his introduction, saying that what he likes most about comics is that it’s “a democracy, the most level of playing fields.” Foolish inconsistency is the point—a celebration of “the biggest secret in comics: that anyone can do them.” And yet there remains a curious lacuna in Gaiman’s collection. Critic Stephanie Folse (aka Telophase) picked up on it immediately. After reading the collection she e-mailed me to say that it ironically “reinforced that . . . I don’t much like slice-of-life stories, autobiographical fiction, surreality, or political ranting in prose or comics. . . . Escapism all the way for me!”

Personally, I like surrealism, and can make my peace with slice-of-life, autobiography, and political ranting in at least some contexts. But I get Folse’s complaint. There are lots of different kinds of comics represented in this book, but intelligent, imaginative, escapist Gaiman-esque pulp for all genders isn’t here.

Maybe it’s the nature of the project. The Best American Comics series aims for a literary bookstore audience. Still, if you’re going to invite Neil Gaiman to be your editor, it seems like you might sneak in a few pieces for his fans, however scarce that kind of work is these days. Gaiman’s Dream wasn’t perfect, but he did have a dark, melancholy charm. It’s sad to see him abandoned so utterly that even his creator seems barely to remember him.

I Just Live Here

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This first appeared in March, 2011 on Splice Today.
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Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere has been chosen as the novel everyone in Chicago is supposed to read for the One Book, One Chicago program. So what the hell; I’m in Chicago. I did my civic duty and read it. And having finished it, I was left with a question. Why?

I’m sure Gaiman’s novel made sense back when it was released. It was a novelization of a Gaiman-penned BBC series, first of all, and novelizations make sense, if by “sense” you mean “dollars and”. And besides, it’s always the right time to release standard-issue genre product. Richard Mayhew is a rumpled but/and appealing Londoner with a mundane job and an overbearing fiancé. Then he is pulled into the mystical magical world of London Below, therein encountering an attractive damsel in distress and quests and beasts and, well, you know the drill. Richard goes down into the down below and discovers within himself Hidden Depths. As a reward, he gets everything he ever wanted in his mundane existence—promotions, perfect wife, etc. But he turns it all down to go back to the magic world because he is no longer the mundane yob he once was but a big fat hero. Yay!

So as I said, at the time it made sense. People read narratives like this at a brisk pace; the supply must be replenished. Gaiman churned one out, it was consumed and everyone was happy. Fair enough.

But there are a lot of books in the world, and even presuming that One Book, One Chicago has to pick a couple of them a year, so perhaps they’re running out—it’s still hard for me to figure out what made Neverwhere stand out. Even though my local Borders just went belly up, I bet I could still sneak in by a back door and find, amidst the scattered boxes and debris of the inglorious retreat, at least a dozen volumes scattered about forlornly in the urban fantasy section that are indistinguishable from Neverwhere.

I guess there are various possibilities. Maybe somebody on the selection committee is just a huge Gaiman fan. Maybe it’s linked to the stage play of Neverwhere, which is supposed to be opening in Chicago—synchronicity and all that.

Or maybe (and this is my favorite theory) the appeal is the book’s bizarre lack of sex.

Urban fantasy is a fairly eroticized genre: at this date, post-Twilight, it’s a hybrid of fantasy/horror and romance; all heaving angst and tortured bosoms with time out for fairies. Gaiman’s book is considerably more chaste while still being basically obsessed with throwing shapely lasses our hero’s way. It’s got the tantalizing tingle of lust without ever admitting its baser instincts (which might raise unfortunate questions in the minds of the censorious.)

Whether or not this played into the selection, there’s no doubt that, as far as love and women go, this book is a marvel of bad faith male fantasy. Almost the first thing we learn about Richard Mayhew is that he “had a rumpled, just-woken-up look to him, which made him more attractive to the opposite sex than he would ever understand or believe.”

Richard is rumpled, attractive, and humble. On the strength of those qualities, and those basically alone, we are to love him, especially if “we” are women. The narrative proceeds to throw at him girl after girl: Door, the pursued heroine; Hunter, the sexy lesbian leather-encased bodyguard who takes a pronounced liking to him; Lamia, a goth hottie, and Anaesthasia, a young girl who guides him about for a few pages.

Richard never gets anywhere near consummation with most of these women; his clueless continence is why they all look upon him with such proprietary longing. The exceptions are instructive though. He sits on a bench with Anastasia beside a hot-and-heavy couple who (magic!) can’t see them. Shortly thereafter, Anastasia gets killed, allowing Richard the opportunity to soulfully mourn her and erase that pesky hint of uncomfortable eroticism. In another incident, the goth hottie Lamia actually kisses him—and she then turns out to be a vampire, suckling the life out of him like an evil inverse mommy. Sex is death! (Though maybe not an entirely bad death; there are a couple moments in the book where Richard seems a little nostalgic for the vampire and what she was offering.)

The one woman Richard actually does sleep with (always off-camera and in memory, but still) is his bitchy, high-powered girlfriend Jessica. Jessica has numerous sins. She drags Richard to art galleries and drags him shopping and wants to make something of him. We are supposed to despise her for this, though, really, it’s hard to see how one could not want to make something of Richard. For he is, in all his attractive, slumpy glory, about as boring a character as I have ever encountered in literature. If he has ever had a single real interest or thought or passion, Gaiman does not allow said interest, thought, or passion to disturb the still perfection of Richard’s rumpled vacuity. Richard does collect little troll dolls, it’s true—but Gaiman takes pains to inform us that this is largely accidental, and has nothing to do with a real interest in troll dolls. Richard’s only actual attribute appears to be a kind heart. In the absence of any personality, though, it’s hard not to see this as tacked on.

Anyway. The point is, Jessica wants to change him, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong. And so we have Neverwhere, the entire purpose of which is to pry Richard from those predatory, improving arms; to make Jessica break her engagement with him so he can leave Mommy and grow up…or never grow up, as the case may be. And so London Below opens up and takes Richard in, offering him a teasing erotic smorgasbord and the adrenalin high of conflict. And when he returns, Jessica comes crawling back, begging him to be her fiancée again, so he can dump her. With sadness, of course, and delicious superior regret. Paid her back, the bitch—and he was even sorry about it!

At this point, you’d think Richard would celebrate maturity by going out and screwing someone. Someone is offered (she’s from Computer Services)—but no. Not that life for our boy. Instead it’s back to London Below, where, presumably, more exciting adventures and more chaste eroticism await. Richard’s a rumpled, drab Peter Pan; Neverwhere is Never-Never Land with the spark of imagination swapped for very slightly more sex. It’s a poor trade, but maybe it’s what Chicago is clamoring for. How should I know? I just live here.
 

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Ghost World

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Caro’s been busy with real life things, so hasn’t been about here much. We miss her though, so I thought I’d reprint this comment about Ghost World. I think it’s from about the first thread she ever commented on.

So I got home and read Ghost World through again, looking specifically for three things: disaffection –> emotional maturation/emotional resonance, the gaze of the adult male, and the unreliable Nabokovian narrator. (Google sends me to Comics Comics quoting Clowes referencing the latter in TCJ #233 in relation to David Boring so we do have evidence that he knows the phenomenon.)

A lot of people here have pointed out that dynamic between disaffection and really tumultuous emotional moments as what makes the book resonant for them. My recollection of Enid had been “archetypal disaffected grumpy teen.” I actually didn’t get that much at all this time, and I think it’s the way the conversation here has underlined the distinction between Barthian disaffection – which is really a kind of psychic paralysis that bears only a metaphorical relationship to “real” experience – and pop-cultural ironic distance, which is a pretty common subject position. I admit the latter is there, but it didn’t feel “disaffected” in that light. It’s more a cultivated disconnection –“this thing that matters to them? It so does not matter to me,” – and it felt entirely self-protective rather than truly detached. She didn’t feel like she was “searching for an identity” and coming up “nowhere.” She felt like she was fearing adulthood and coming up adult anyway.

I was looking for unreliability, and suddenly it was everywhere: is she really detached, or is she just pretending to be? Did that thing really even happen or is she just making it up? Her stories were always obviously, well, embellished, but this time, looking specifically for places where her narrative might be unreliable, suddenly they felt even more fictional. The trick seems to be that if it happens in dialogue with Becky, we’re probably supposed to think it happened. If Enid tells it, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The images give us clues what to hang onto and what to read as hyperbole … from there, Enid’s propensity to exaggerate and overdramatize seemed to be the thing she outgrows over the course of the story, not her ironic detachment or disaffection. She stopped protecting herself with stories, hanging on to the way when you’re a child you can fabricate imaginary events, escape into your imagination in a way that you can’t do as an adult.

But maybe it’s more unreliable than that. Maybe the scenes with Becky really aren’t the tell: Melorra by all conventions SHOULD be lying (“I’m in a commercial”, OMG Carrie’s face) but both are backed up by my previous logic, so maybe instead that Lynchian grotesque moment when you see the tumor actually is the moment where you’re supposed to say “oh, wow, all that stuff is unreliable.” Maybe there’s a level of unreality that we’re not even touching on.

Either works to some extent, and both are kind of fun, – but is not being sure whether the narrative is true or imagined really what it means to have an “unreliable narrator”? I guess it is, in a simple sense. But it’s more than a puzzle in the best literary fiction that uses the device: it’s a veil that can’t really be lifted to ever determine what’s true and what’s not . The unreliability stays in play and becomes a metaphor, often, for fiction itself, for how narrative and belief get tied together with merely some typographical characters on a page. Here it could become a metaphor for how narrative and belief get tied together with typography and image, but instead it’s really just a metaphor for adolescence itself. Whether or not Enid’s telling the truth about ANYTHING, the issue resolves when she grows up. You still end up with this basically sweet story about letting go of childhood (bracketing Noah’s reading for now), and the only real difference is at the level of close reading and whether Mark thinks I am making things up. (Pfft.) The jury’s still out on whether unreliability becomes a metaphor for the work that comics do in David Boring: it seems intuitively on tonight’s first ever quick read-through of that like it might.

 

Susie Bright and the Haters

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If anyone could pen a mercilessly cheerful paen to the erotic potential of internet hating, it would be Susie Bright. She is the sexual up with people, the Herbert Hoover of orgies — one in every pot (or, I’m sure, with pot, if that’s your thing). She faced even giving birth with a sex toy in her hand, and insists it was good for her, Caesarian and all. Every experience is a sexual experience waiting to happen. Even, presumably, the exhaustion of contemplating turning every experience into a sexual experience waiting to happen.

I’m reading Susie Bright’s Sexual Reality because I’m writing about William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, and a certified lesbophiliac (he had a card and everything. It’s in the Smithsonian Archive.) Anyway, Bright has a short essay on male lesbophilia which is about the most positive thing ever written on male lesbophilia. If there is a specialist sexual interest, chances are that there is a Susie Bright essay that is the most positive thing ever written about it. If space aliens land tomorrow and whisk us all away into humiliating sex slavery involving the surgical creation of artificial orifices, Susie Bright will have an article out on Thursday about the beauty of artificial orifices and the appendages what fit in them.

Anyway. The fact is that her article about male lesbophilia is quite good — she argues lesbophilia is about identifying with women rather than saving women or invading women’s spaces, which seems to fit Marston quite well. Someone needed to write the most positive article about male lesbophilia ever, after all, and why not Susie Bright? Same with alien orifices or dildos or incest or sex with dalmations or alien orifice incestuous sex with dildos and dalmations, for that matter. Bright’s smart and her prose is punchy; better her than Camille Paglia or Donna Haraway, that’s for sure.

It would just be nice, occasionally, if there were an acknowledgement that maybe, somewhere, somehow, there might possibly be a situation in which freely expressing sexuality might not be ideal in every way, for feminism or for women or for anybody. Does it really make sense to turn an essay on the Clarence Thomas hearing into a lament about women’s sexual repression? To turn a discussion of a date-rape gang-bang into an excited effusion about the awesome sexual agency of strippers? Surely there are some problems or some situations somewhere to which the answer is not, “Have more and better sex!”

Bright is, of course, strongly anti-censorship; it’s close to the first thing she tells us in her intro to Sexual Reality If you think that 2 Live Crew might be kind of sexist, you are, apparently, repressed and sexphobic. She concludes that same intro with an enthusiastic (of course!) embrace of the power of art. “If others didn’t write words to move me,” she says, “I don’t know if I would move. The best results of my work has been to be a muse, to inspire others to take a chance.”

I’m sure Bright sees these positions as continuous; you shouldn’t censor art, because art moves and inspires. But there’s another side to that, it seems to me. If art can move you to do great things, it can also, presumably, inspire you to actions which maybe aren’t all that great. If what we read and dream can affect us, then it can affect us, for ill as well as for good. And that certainly goes for sexual dreams as well as for every other kind. Pornography doesn’t have to be more evil than anything else…but everything else is pretty evil. Why not pornography too?
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Googling around I found out that I was right; Susie Bright really is the person to write a sex-positive piece about haters. Here she is with a nicely appreciative piece about that supreme hater, Andrea Dworkin.

Bright makes me want to read Dworkin’s novels, actually. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll hate them.

Utilitarian Review 6/23/12

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L. Nichols’ Jumbly Junderky 11, which debuted at CAKE


 
On HU

Featured Archive post: Brigid Alverson on the Beano and other British kids comics.

Dirk Deppey from the archive on Lost Girls as reactionary propaganda.

I sneer at the vaunting tedium of Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem.

Isaac Butler on Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, the Internet, and complicity: Part I, Part 2.

Ng Suat Tong on Richard Corben’s adaptation/desecration of William Hope Hodgson.

Kailyn Kent on Craig Norton and the contradictions of gallery agitprop.

Bert Stabler reviews CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I urge you to save the country by kicking a moderate.
 
Other Links

Alex Pareene on Kathryn Jean Lopez

The Boston Globe reviews Anthony Heilbut’s great new book, The Fan Who Knew Too Much.
 

Nonentity In the Holy Land

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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In one sequence from Guy Delisle’s autobiographical Jerusalem, the artist attends an exhibition of his own work at Nablus University in the Palestinian West Bank near Jerusalem.  In the opening panel of the sequence, we see a long shot of the gallery. Mostly (literally) faceless people stand around chatting while in the distance the artwork hangs on the wall.  The pictures are so far away you can’t make out any of the drawings; just tiny blank squares.

It’s an image breathtaking in the aggressive blandness of its narcissism.   There’s no effort to pretend that we’re looking at anything interesting; no suggestion that there’s a worthwhile story. We’re here solely because Delisle was here, and he was here because it’s an exhibit of his own work.  And just to emphasize the banality, Delisle has us explicitly looking at images of his own images which he hasn’t even bothered to draw.  It’s as if the effort of creating  a picture worth viewing would distract from a celebration of his own gloriously quotidian essence.  He’s made himself tiny so that he can block out everything else.

That one panel may not exactly be typical, but it is emblematic.  Jerusalem is in the well-established autobio comics tradition of low-key slice of life nothingness.  It chronicles the year French-speaking Canadian Delisle spent in Jerusalem with his family while his girlfriend worked with Doctors Without Borders.  Maybe if said girlfriend had written it, it would have had something to say, but, as it is, Delisle is basically a tourist, and he’s got little to tell us that we didn’t know coming in.  The Israelis treat the Palestinians badly — check.  Jerusalem is a giant mess — yep.  Caring for small children in a foreign city where you don’t know the lay of the land is exasperating — not something I’d necessarily thought through before, but not exactly earth shattering either.

Early on in the book, there’s a whole page explaining that Israel considers Jerusalem its capital but the international community places its embassies in Tel Aviv, and that there are similar disagreements over borders and territorial claims.  It’s not rocket science — I’m no expert on the Middle East and I’ve basically heard it all before.  But Delisle has himself sitting there acting like he’s being presented with some sort of complex multi-layered revelation.  “So we’re in Israel, right?”  “But Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, right?”  And then he finishes up by declaring: “I don’t really get it, but I tell myself I’ve got a whole year to figure it out….”  Either he’s stupid or he thinks his readers are.

If this were a book or a documentary titled Jerusalem, the creator’s lack of even rudimentary knowledge or insight would generally be a bug.  But  it’s autobio comics, so the less intelligence and insight on display the better.  How else to explain the studious ugliness of the color scheme?  Though there are dashes of other colors here and there, for the most part Delisle has chosen drab browns and washed out grays; combined with his blobby, undistinguished character drawing, you end up feeling like you’re staring into a mud puddle.

The blah art and the blah thinking are of a piece.  Both are in the service of an aw-shucks (hopefully) faux naivete.  Delisle is a humble seeker, drawing without flash, seeing without knowledge, letting us know the truth without the distracting accretion of talent or insight.  It’s just one man’s impressions of Jerusalem.  We learn that it’s awfully hard to find a good playground in East Jerusalem; that traffic is awful; that ultra-Orthodox Jews are intolerant and unpleasant; that the Palestinians in Delisle’s comics class hadn’t read Tintin or much else.  Doesn’t that tell us something, after all, about Jerusalem, about Israel, about the Middle East — about, humanity?

And sure, I suppose it tells us something.  Mostly it tells us that the most banal of insights can be justified by dumping a ton of human misery somewhere in their general vicinity.  Also, and relatedly, it tells us that tourists suck, and that autobio comics suck, and that, if you put them together, they suck doubly.
 

Voices From the Archive: Dirk Deppey on Lost Girls As Reactionary Art

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Dirk and various Utilitarians had a long discussion about the manga YKK. By the by, Dirk wrote this brief discussions of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls.

Indeed, Lost Girls itself strikes me as a reactionary work of art. Moore clearly approached its pornographic goals from an almost Calvinist left-wing-Anarchist perspective that viewed the enormity of sex through an inflexible set of rules and dogma that would have made any bondage disciplinarian proud. He further piled all of the sexual imagination’s strawman-style villainies upon the characters who Don’t Share Our Values — the bit about soldiers secretly wanting to fuck each other wasn’t exactly what I’d call a nuanced observation. Lost Girls seemed less like an exploration of Dionysus than a series of checklists ticking off the Various Correct Ways To Think About Sex, intent on bringing order to chaos with a determination that Cotton Mathers could only dream of maintaining. Modern porn and its appeal to our baser instincts — this is the future that Moore fears, and he damn well means to roll it back. You could practically feel his anus clench as he plotted Lost Girls out.

Unfortunately, your average Buttman video is almost certainly a far more accurate vision of the libido — certainly the male libido — than is Lost Girls. Sex isn’t a series of wholesome, socially liberating poses; it’s the monkey part of our brain in its purest essence, with all the good and bad that this entails, which is precisely why we have so many taboos surrounding it. Lost Girls had no sense of surrender to the Animal Inside Us, a necessary component of good erotica/porn, as well as an essential part of the explanation for why men and women alike so often do things in the pursuit of sensuality that strike others as utterly insane.

Lost Girls had all the eroticism of a Presbyterian sermon on the joys of the marriage act. Nevermind the catalog of kinks and positions that Moore assembled; the story’s biggest flaw is that his sense of imagination never left the missionary position. Lost Girls is a retreat into rigid dogma, which makes it reactionary regardless of the fact that said dogma is left-leaning in nature.

(Adding insult to injury, Lost Girls is also a virtual catalog of unquestioned assumptions once you stepped outside of Moore’s need to present sex correctly. I especially loved the way that Dorothy fulfilled every hick-farmgirl stereotype available to Moore at the time. Kinda dumb? Check! Jacked off a horse? Check! Fucked her dad? Check! I’m surprised that she didn’t come right out and state that her mom was also her dad’s cousin before marching off to lynch her some neegruhs while she was at it. I’d call Lost Girls any number of things, but “progressive” is the last term I’d use.)