Mar. 1
5:29 PM
Women In Horror
February was Women In Horror Recognition Month, an event founded by Hannah Neurotica, editor of Ax Wound, which I've mentioned here before. While the WIHRM website has been quiet the facebook page has been positively jumping all month and has enough links to keep even the speediest reader busy for quite some time. Initially I had hoped to make several posts throughout the month but got sick, got busy with novel revisions, and so forth, and when it looked like February wouldn't give me as much free time as I had hoped I decided to wait until March 1st to make a post. Not because I don't think horror needs a month to recognize women working in the genre, which would be akin to arguing that we don't need Black History Month or something similarly naive, but because women in horror need to be recognized all year along, especially when even in WIHRM stuff like the SFX fiasco crops up.
Of course, posting for WIHRM in February and acknowledging women throughout the year aren't mutually exclusively--I should have squeezed in a post or three as well as making this post-WIHRM entry, but if there's one thing people can do it's admit when they could have done more and try to do better next time, as I certainly will, rather than simply making excuses and leaving it at that. I've talked about my disappointment in certain arenas of the horror community where gender is concerned before but acknowledging there's a problem isn't the same as doing something about it, and just blogging about this sort of thing can help combat it so I'll certainly be trying to be more proactive about it. From Mary Shelley to Shirley Jackson to the present it's absurd to imagine horror without women, and not just as fictional blood-spattered victims--not two weeks ago I was talking to a very well respected American horror writer who lays full credit for his writing horror in the first place on Ellen Datlow, who, in my opinion, is the single most consistently awesome horror editor working today, and one of the best editors out there, period.
So that's my clumsy attempt to articulate both my support of WIHRM and the importance of maintaining a similarly informed perspective throughout the year. In the short term, I need to finish this Caitlin R. Kiernan novel I've been working my way through and check out the Blu-Ray of Near Dark now that I've got the equipment. What about the rest of you--been reading or watching anything good recently?