Why the War on Pink?

First, let me put something straight. I'm not going to squawk about gays or breast cancer or bullying victims. Nor is this going to be a defense of a color that I really don't like all that much. It's simply a question that needs answering.
And the question is: why is it so wrong to let little girls be little girls?
I've become aware of a small but very loud string of outrage over products marketed for girls: in particular, the glittery, rhinestone-studded dress-up clothing and pretend accessories. For reasons I do not understand, these people do not believe it is in girls' interest to 'force' them to pretend to be fairies and princesses, with tea parties and tiaras, high heels and wands. They laud Merida as a proper Disney role model, and scorn all the others.
And, so far as I can tell, they scorn them simply for their pretty dresses, attractive faces and eternally manageable hair. Oh, and having princes.
Now, the hair issue might just be envy (I know that when my hair blows in the wind, enjoyable as the feeling is, I always end up with a frillin' witch-nest of tangles) and the princes are just a feministic sneering at the idea of a woman needing or wanting a man. But come on! Down on princesses for nice dresses? For heaven's sake! Unless you're writing A Princess of Mars and everyone walks around in jewels and fighting harnesses and nothing else, coming up with the jewel-toned clothing for your royal maiden is half the fun! Even if your character is a butt-kicking fighter and would rather wear a dagger than a reticule, she can still like dressing up on occasion!
But it's not just the pretty things these people dislike. It's the whole idea of letting girls...be girls. Yes, little girls will wiggle out of their clothes and run around butt-naked. (Or switch clothes with their little brothers. Outside. In the back yard. On top of a climbing platform five feet off the ground.) Yes, they fart. They're messy, and they like to play in the mud. They are, in many ways, like boys. But they're not boys, and they shouldn't be made to feel they have to be like boys. They have their own quirks, and they should be allowed these quirks.
A girl given the chance to draw will probably draw bunnies and flowers, ponies and unicorns, princesses and fairies. Not because she's been taught to draw those things. Because she wants to. Because she likes these things. A boy, on the other hand, will draw guns and tanks and explosions and bloody fights and dinosaurs and lightsabers and bullets hitting people...again, not because that's what he's been taught to draw, but because that's what he wants to draw. Both of these are examples taken from my own childhood. I loved drawing unicorns and horses, princesses and fairies--still do, actually. So did my sisters. My brothers, on the other hand, covered their papers--and, on one memorable occasion, the closet door--with battle of all sorts. Guns were most prominently featured, but there were monsters and space ships and sometimes swords, often explosions, and usually casualties littering the ground.
This was not because we were taught 'boy stuff' and 'girl stuff'. Our toys were not segregated. We did not have one box with Barbies, baby dolls, and sparkly dress-up clothes marked 'Girls' and another box with toy weapons, cars, trains, and action figures marked 'Boys'. The toys were all jumbled together in one box--well, not the Barbies. Those were mine and I had a box that they and their clothes were supposed to go in--and everyone could play with them as they desired. But they didn't play with them the same way.
I remember playing with Gary's cars one time: there was a bad guy, and a hero, and a pretty lady, and her sweetheart. I don't know entirely how Gary played with them, but I can assure everyone that there was not a pretty lady and her sweetheart. Ever. But there were probably a lot of crashes and explosions.
Gary, Peter and Davy loved explosions. They built their block houses and then blew them up with terrific bangs. Even when computers entered the equation--Lego Creator then and Minecraft now--they always found ways to blow stuff up. Their favorite component was, and is, the dynamite.
I built houses. I learned how to make flying carpets. I spent my whole turn customizing my character to look nice. (And I still do that. My favorite feature about Skyrim is how carefully I can tweak my characters to look just the way I want.) My sister recently squealed almost loud enough to be heard in the next county when we got the latest Minecraft additions and she discovered they had added recognizable flowers. She then spent her turn revamping her gardens. Davy, who had built enough exploding houses to level a small kingdom, cheered over the new fish.
Girls and boys are different. I know that's not politically correct. But it's true. And it's meant to be that way. Girls will grow up to be women. In a perfect world, they will grow up to be wives, mothers, nuns, queens, and the quiet rulers of their homes. This does not mean they cannot work outside their homes; this does not mean they cannot garden, spin, sew, dye wool and flax, make jewelry, organize, write, draw...but it does mean they should not feel they should choose between family or career. Women have the gift of nurturing and caring. They should not be told this gift is demeaning, because it is not.
Boys will grow up to be men. And in a perfect world, they will grow up to be husbands, priests, kings, warriors, and masters of every trade imaginable. And above everything else, they will grow up to be fathers. They will be loud and noisy and boisterous, they will enjoy farts and belches in a way women will not, they will enjoy a good fight as much as a good conversation. And that is as it should be.
Men are meant to be the movers and shakers. They are meant to wander over the world, starting and ending wars, exploring distant lands, hunting, fishing, farming, cutting down trees, making cars and steel, quarrying rock and building cities. Their minds are wired and their bodies are built to let them do this.
Women, on the other hand, are meant to keep their homes. They are meant to bear children and keep order over an unruly household. They are meant to be the decorators, the cooks, the nurses, the comforters, the disciplinarians, the keepers of small animals, the tenders of flowers and garden plots. There is a reason our minds are as active and as confused as they are--it is meant to help us keep track of the chaos of a home. And it is not demeaning! Why on earth would it be demeaning to be absolute queen of your own domain, as opposed to the sweating servant of someone else? (And ladies, if you are not the unquestioned, unchallenged, ruling queen in your homes--something is wrong!)
But this good and natural course of things is despised as degrading. We decide that, knowing better than the umpteen-million generations who went before us, that we can reverse these decisions. Women Are As Good As Men! We Can Do Everything They Can! And so on and so forth, ad infinitem, ad nauseum. So women force themselves to do tasks they are not truly suited for and demand that men perform tasks they are not suited for.
And they insist that this insanity begin in childhood. So they try to convince boys to play with dolls, they carefully avoid toys with 'gender' association, and they scream at the sight of a little girl in pretty clothes. As a result, boys do not develop the skills and mindsets they will need as men, and girls grow up confused as to their true task in life. Boys get the impression that masculinity in men is wrong. Women are convinced that femininity of any sort is wrong. So we end up with men who are either wimpy or hate women, and women who hate men and themselves. We end up with the broken hearts and homes of the hook-up culture, epidemics of venereal disease, and the bloody mountain of tiny corpses that results from abortion. Women are actually more degraded now than they have been since the time of Christ.
And yes, I agree this needs to stop. It must stop, and soon, before the world crumbles--because it will. When there is no foundation, the house cannot stand.
There won't be an easy way to mend this problem. But maybe we can start at childhood.
And we can let little girls wear pink.

Why Limit Steampunk?

This quibble has been niggling at my mind for a while: why is all steampunk Victorian?
It's a fascinating era, to be sure. And I can see why the age of the Industrial Revolution would lend itself nicely to a world of wild inventions. But there was more to the past that the Victorian; more ages that might work equally well.
 Why not try for a Renaissance Steampunk? Say Leonardo da Vinci put his inventions into action, most of them actually worked, and this kicks off a wild inventing spree in Italy. Alchemists figure out chemical reactions that actually work. Some decry this as black magic; others find it interesting and get into it themselves. Inventors scramble to find sponsors--the Borgia popes and Frederick Barbarossa II. Travel is revolutionized, and people question whether their flying machines should be used for conquest or to help spread the Word of God.
Or try an Ancient Greek steampunk. Believe it or not, steam power was actually invented in Ancient Greece, by an inventor named Heron. His little steam engine never got above being a toy...but imagine triremes and chariots powered by steam engines. Imagine the war engines of Archimedes--and what he could have come up with if he'd survived that siege! Imagine the ancient world if the inventors got a little more credit--and took their work further.
Imagine steampunk technology in colonial or Exploration times. Why not send Christopher Columbus on his trip across the Atlantic in a silken balloon?
And on the supernatural side of things, why limit Steampunk to werewolves and vampires? Not all stories do this, admittedly; one of my favorites, Tales of the Brass Griffin, (unfortunately discontinued) admirably mixes the more common fantasy races into the setting of the world. But take it further! Perhaps the realm of Faerie objects to the spreading of technology and iron everywhere? Perhaps Faerie takes advantage of a world growing blind to their presence? Would the Fae realm be fighting to survive...or enjoying the changes?
Maybe that dashing young man romancing solitary girls by night isn't a vampire at all, but the dangerous Ganconer. Perhaps a riverside town is haunted by strange songs that rise from the depths of the water each night, as nixies and river-nymphs congregate. Perhaps whispered tales are told of a stray 'cart-horse' roaming the area: in reality, a Kelpie seeking prey. A wood is carefully avoided by those old folk who remember the stories of it; but the youngsters and newcomers don't believe the tales, and enter freely--only to find that the stories are, in fact, true. A wealthy factory owner tries to buy out a town and farmland to put more mills on, and kicks off a war with the Fae beings who live in the area...but are they fighting for the farmers, or will the farmers and townsfolk just get caught in the crossfire?

Steampunk is such a wonderful, versatile genre. Don't limit it to what's popular now!

Revisiting the Damsel in Distress

I do not think I need say that there is not a more vilified stereotype in the entire realm of storytelling than the damsel in distress. The mere mention of her will send feminists up in arms, screaming in rage. Storytellers will sneer, dismissing her as the weakest type of character.
But is she?
Here I will look at the types of Damsel in Distress one might come across--and might conceivably use for stories.

1: The Passive Damsel.

The Passive Damsel comes in two forms: the Scream Queen and the Stoic. I shall deal with these separately, since there are some pretty big differences. But what makes them similar is that both wait to be rescued.

The Scream Queen. 

Admittedly, this one deserves the scorn. This is the utter stereotype: the limp dishrag who can't--or won't--do anything for herself but wail and plead and wait. She probably won't even try to help the hero in any way, and not just because she's tied up and can't. This is a truly weak character, and should not be used. 

She doesn't necessarily look it, but I'm willing to bet she's been kidnapped.

The Stoic

While she is willing to wait for her rescuer, the Stoic is a far different sort than the Scream Queen. This type appears in a number of the 'Mars' books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, where women are kidnapped so often they probably come with carrying handles. The Stoic treats her captors with scorn and her captivity with cool indifference. She usually knows She will be rescued, and is willing to wait for him to come...but she will cheer him on if she can do nothing else, and if she can, she will fight to help him out. There is a lot that can be done with a Stoic maiden, and they are fun to work with.

2: The Escape Artist

Not the best picture, but the best I could find.

This type is by no means helpless. While she may be hoping for a rescue (Princess Mabelrose, the example I gave here, prays quite earnestly for a handsome prince to rescue her from the dragon who has kidnapped her), after she realizes that either no one is coming, or that it's nearly impossible for anyone to come, she simply takes matters into her own hands and gets out herself. This type is quite clever, manipulating her situation to enable her escape, and willing to make use of anything lying around that might come in handy. She is a tricky and wise sort, and one that can be a lot of fun to make use of. 

3: The Damsel in Distress from Hell

This is my personal favorite. This gal may have been captured, and she may not be able to escape, but by golly, whoever got her has just bitten off more than he can chew. This is the one who escapes and is recaptured so many times the villain just lets her go. Or she's the one who makes it impossible for anyone to come into her cell because she's always waiting by the door with something heavy. She need not be a feminist, sneering any rescuers to scorn, and she may, in fact, need some help to actually get out of wherever she's being held. But by the time her hero shows up, she will have paved the way for him to get in and get out, because all the soldiers will be so sick of trying to deal with her that they just get out of the way and let them go through. I make use of this character a number of times in my own stories--partly because I hope that I would be this kind of damsel in distress, should the problem ever crop up...and partly just because it's fun to imagine the resulting hijinks.

End conclusion? Don't scorn the girl who's kidnapped and needs rescuing. Play around with her and let her take an active role. Who knows? She might really surprise you!