This incident needs to be memorialized in our language. She needs a Law or a Principle or a verb. I don't even know what it would refer to, but it should exist.

And the guy who wrote the ferret article has chimed in.

That article needs to be read. It's pretty awesome. He details the entire dialogue, which is a post-coital discovery of ferrets for no apparent reason:

Shiona then tells Shadow Bear how she once read about ferrets in a book she took from the study of her father. "I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats," she says. "Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population."

Ohmygod that is so hot.

Finally:

Wow, that is some bad dialogue. It stands out as clunky and awkward even by the standards of romance novels. That's because Edwards didn't write it. I did.

That's a great article. And I can't even call the slams at romance novel writing gratuitous, considering the man just slogged through an Edwards.

She needs a Law or a Principle or a verb. I don't even know what it would refer to, but it should exist.

ok, so the Edwards principal is when you, say, reproduce the Magna Carta, call it your own work, then push forward (fake?) family members to smite all doubters, and then go on to liken yourself to a downtrodden tribe (to which you have seem to have no relation, but also seem to have profited mightily from via your writing, which - see above) and then continue to try to suck pity for simply coming up with the simile at all and then...

I vote for naming this whateveritis hubri-plagaris [yes, going snobby latin, but this angers me]. And making it a vice, not a law.

And I'll quit being all offputting now and go back to making inedible chili.

Ugh. Lorrie Moore just made me throw up in my mouth a little.

We've already made it, eh? Nice to get that news.

I do think she has a point about boys getting left behind by school agendas these days - it's a complaint I've heard from friends with sons in the public school system. But it's not as if we live in this wonderful world where equal rights for women are a given and gender-based discrimination is a thing of the past.

I always wonder, when after a period of trying to equalize things for one group, the other, previously advantaged, group says that now they're the ones who are losing out, if it's a matter of them being pushed aside or if they take being advantaged as the standard and anything less is a loss.

The political moment for feminine role models, arguably, has passed us by.

So we get 30 years of feminine political role models and it's over?

Kate Harding at Shakespeare's Sister has a great response to Lorrie Moore.