hrj

I decided to take in a single day at Baycon, since I have a bunch of catching up around the house to do this weekend. One of my planned hanging-out buddies cancelled, so it was just me and

scotica with occasional intersections with the downstairs tenant who had gotten a ride with me. I managed a small amount of bumping into folks and chatting. The programming was a bit disappointing though. It seemed like there were more program slots where there wasn't anything much of interest than there were where I had to make decisions between items. A few too many "generic con panel on standard topic X" and moderators who contributed to off-topicness rather than guiding things back on-topic. But at least the day ended up with a couple of unintentionally-amusing panels. (In the same way that historic-theme movies can be unintentionally amusing.) The panel on historic female pirates (the Baycon theme for this year was pirates) inspired

scotica and I to review our "historic movie/fiction fallacies" checklist. We got as high as 21 checkbox items, although we invented some new pirate-specific ones. Just as a sampler:

* Pre-modern women couldn't own property
* Pre-Christian society was non-sexist with gender equality
* Because modern women set a premium on personal independence, historic women must have been attracted to occupations like piracy in order to pursue freedom from oppression and personal fulfillment.
* All historic societies considered it bad luck to have a woman on board ship.
* I know all about historic societies because I've worked Ren Faire.
* Oral tradition and folklore transmit historic data in a perfectly unaltered and unbiased form.
* There was a consistent and universal "pirate culture" across all of time and space.

I confess I allowed myself to be egged on to a leading question with side bets on the panel's answer. After the panelists had listed off a handful of anecdotes about "actual historic Viking women pirates" I asked about what sources I might use for further research into this topic if I wanted to dig deeper. You'd think that after we'd been told about some highly specific examples, the proposed reading list would be a bit less vague than "sagas and runestones". (I'm afraid it was about the level of specificity that the bet had predicted.) I'm all for people researching and educating about non-traditional women in history. Unfortunately you don't research and educate by rattling off a string of vague unsupported and unsourced claims.

We were hoping to bump into

klwilliams at some point, but concluded she must have been hanging out in room parties somewhere with all her famous author friends. (pout)