TV, teen girls, and feminism matter, or, still wiggins about my Buffy essay pubbed at Salon

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Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, female adolescence, feminism, hero, Salon, superhero

Any time you can transform hundreds of hours of binge-watching your favorite TV show into a paid byline, life is grand.

Last week, my essay about Buffy–edit, my word-geeking about the greatest show to ever feminism–was published at Salon. I’ve never been published at Salon before. I’ve never had work published anywhere with as much reach. The fact that I hit such a milestone on the hem of one of Buffy’s still-fabulous leather trenches is delicious.

But honest to god, it was just so fun to write.

Single moms rockin it = cliche? “These are not my laws, these are not my rules…”

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Ani DiFranco, cliche, doing the best I can, hero mom, I'm No Heroine, single moms are superheroes, superhero

That apron doubles as a cape, yo. Photo (slightly cropped) by Flickr user mirsasha (Creative Commons license).

Yesterday I read this phrase: “…the cliché of the single mom as superhero…”

Everyone wants to be a superhero and no one wants to be a cliché, right? So my initial reaction was, ew. My initial reaction was righteous anger.

A couple hours later, my reaction was, omg I’m a cliche I’m deleting my whole blog!

A couple hours after that, I remembered why I called this blog single writing mom in the first place. Because SWM. Which usually stands for “straight white male,” and of which there seem to be trillions and gazillions and quintillions, and more every day. And you know what? There are lots of single writing moms, or at least lots of single working moms. TONS of us. And maybe I don’t have a whole lot of new stuff to say about being one. Maybe I’m just one of the tons—not a superhero at all, just one more in a line… But in my efforts to connect with the tons of us I know are out there, I wasn’t finding a lot of blogs.

You know why? When you’re a single writing mom, you don’t have time to write a !@#$ing blog. So I decided to make time, and to make a little joke about how there are as many SWMs as there are SWMs, and here we are.