Enthusiastick Journal

OK, so, theferrett writes about sex a lot. Its one of the things that draws people into reading him. Sex sells, as they say, even in the world of internet blogging where there's nothing actually for sale.

He riffed a little bit today, based on a conversation he was apparently having with a friend, and wrote several of the most true things about sex I have ever read in my goddamn life. And I don't get the sense that this was the result of prolonged meditation on the subject. This is just offhand thought. But you should read it anyway. In my opinion its good stuff, and true as Hell.

My thinking about sex is pretty thoroughly weird, and largely informed by the likes of Dan Savage, who not everyone agrees has his head screwed on straight about many, many things. That being said, I am only too happy to add theferrett to the list of people who shares my way of thinking on this most interesting of topics.

This post has been brought to you by drunken late-night phone calls (received rather than placed, for once.)

One of the nice things about getting settled into this apartment in Somerville and getting accustomed to the idea of being in Boston for a while is I've been able to gather most of my things around me. My tangible possessions. There's still a half-full storage shed of my stuff out in Chicago, if you can believe it, but most everything else that I care a whit about is here, now. That includes a good chunk of my books.

Consequently I've been re-reading my collected trades of the Books of Magic, a highly underrated Vertigo comic. They're really quality; good stories and compelling characters and just the right amount of occasional funny dialogue. And I've been thinking a lot about the character of Molly O'Reilly, the female romantic lead and sometime-foil to our hero Timothy Hunter. Tim, for the uninitiated, is sort of a precursor to Harry Potter. He's a bespectactled dark-haired adolescent Brit who discovers out of the blue that he is destined to become the most important and perhaps most powerful magician of his age.

And Molly is Tim's girlfriend, whether he knows it or not. Part of what I love about the story of Tim and Molly is that both of them have an equal role to play in it. In a story with a character as epic as Tim it would be the easiest thing in the world to have Molly be a footnote, but instead she is an independent character with a significantly more forecful personality than Tim's got. She doesn't dominate him, although she does spend a good bit of time winding him up. But while Tim spends much of the early series passively reacting to things, letting the magical world impact upon him, Molly goes out and grapples proactively with these forces she doesn't understand. She is a problem-solver.

She's even got a hint of magic all her own, although obviously its nothing nearly so grand as Tim's fabled destiny. The O'Reillys are reportedly a people with a long history of being touched by the Fair Folk, and as a result Molly has a Sight of sorts, a gift with prophecy and vision that gets her into trouble all her own. Shortly after Tim's fourteenth birthday the two characters' story arcs diverge and run in parallel, Tim bobbling along and having adventures fall into his lap in America while Molly goes on a quest in Faerie. Again the dichotomy is palpable: Tim has a vague idea where to go but he has to be nudged into figuring out what he wants every step of the way, whereas Molly simply conceives of a goal and then sets about getting it the Hell done.

In the end that's why I like her so much. Molly is a number of my Strong Woman fantasies rolled into one. Passive-agressive dork that I am I get positively giddy reading about Molly's exploits. She likes Tim from the start, she picks him out, and then she helps shape him into the companion she needs him to be. And if that means telling other people Tim is her boyfriend even when he hasn't come around to the idea yet, then that's fine. If it means haughtily demanding that Tim take her out for ice cream even when they're fighting demons in the very depths of Hell, that's fine too. You can call me a sucker, but I think that's fantastic.

And so, in the words of JD from fourth season Scrubs, let's hear it for Mollys everywhere. I think sometimes that they may be the only hope for chuckleheads like me.