Request and poll aftermath (cute)

[mrissa]

First, I'm going to copy a request from a friend who is a librarian. This person has a patron who wants books (preferably good ones) with the following characteristics

Comments

[akirlu]

Depending on what one means by graphic violence, there's always the Miss Marple mysteries. Definitely an older woman with no love interests, but there are these murders that keep cropping up, so, dunno.

[guipago]

I have a similar reaction to cute.

Oh you're so Cute! Hey You're cute!

my response? Yeah, I'm cute, but I can also grow some bacteria that will invade your body and kill you if I so desire. Am I still cute now?

*rolls eyes*

Cute seems to be the fall back position of someone who attempts to placate you no matter what. I don't like being called cute. Doing something cute is a whole different story.

:)

[spiralflames]

i hear ya on the 'cute'. it bugs me. to me,'bright' has the same deal. not intelligent,brilliant, insightful. 'bright'. the words left out of both? "young girl"

[retrobabble]

Yah on the cute. *grr* It doesn't happen so much now but I suspect the construction field is a darn lot like the physics field. Being called cute in this industry is like patting me on the head and asking if I'd done any shopping lately. I had to resort to nastiness (No, I didn't make a mistake. Try installing the panel the right way) or the typical male jockeying for position strategy (Back when I was working on installing tile in the bathroom, I used to do it this way) to assert that I do know what I'm doing.

[buymeaclue]

Heh, and I come at it from the other angle. No one everrr doubted my competence, but no one ever thought I was cute, either.

I lap it up.

[gjules]

It isn't fiction, but Ednah Cheney's biography of Louisa May Alcott would meet those conditions. Or possibly Susan Wittig Albert's mystery series about Beatrix Potter -- I don't think there was much of a love interest in the only one I read, except for mentions of her editor's death. Oh -- and a mouse romance. I think the first one had Hunca-Munca romancing a country mouse

[mrissa]

My undergrad physics department, when I wasn't off doing research, was a wonderful, wonderful place. I don't know if the professors set a tone that the male students followed or if we just had better male students than average, but the only gender-related problems I had at home (=GAC physics) was the occasional eye-rolling run-in with someone from another department.

[gjules]

I'm envious. Not all of our students were bad -- my problem set group was fabulous, as I said -- but there were enough of them that the behavior tended to be what one saw of physics majors as a group. And while we had some amazing professors, we also had some who, uh, well. (One of them once told me he felt that if he hadn't left his class behind in the dust, gasping in incomprehension, at least once per lecture, they wouldn't respect him.)

I love geology and earth science, so my switching wasn't to escape the deeply entrenched problems in the physics department. But it was -- like finding a new country, or something. Suddenly people were listening to me, without obsessing over the fact that I was a girl. They let me forget my gender, which is something the physics people, even some of the nice ones, never did.

In retrospect, I'm amazed I put up with as much as I did, and that I did it for as long as I did.