Bizgirl is Bizman! And probably not even a librarian.

In a strange case of blog transvestism, it turns out that Bizgirl, a purported colleague that I linked to and who linked to me, is a man, man. A concerned reader let me know today. The article doesn't mention whether he made the librarian part up either, but I wouldn't be surprised. I became disillusioned and started down the primrose path of deep cynicism early, when at the age of twelve I was upset and more than a little confused to discover that my favorite romance writer, Jennifer Wilde, was a 300 pound man who looked like a swarthy Michael Moore. I didn't understand how (or why) a man could so realistically create the inner life of narrator and plucky heroine Marietta Danvers, who was always getting herself kidnapped, swept away and ravished, usually with some signficant historical event as a backdrop, just like Flashman. In Love Me, Marietta, she is forced to get it on with white slavers, her master when she is an indentured servant, a pirate king, Native Americans, the French Navy, and, ultimately, her soul mate. (She forgives her soul mate - he only forced her because he was so insanely in love with her! - and they live happily ever after, until she is carried off by some other group in the sequel. Russian trappers, I believe). Her spirit and virtue, because it is always against her will, remain intact, and she is absolved from any sort of moral responsibility or trampiness. One benefit of Wilde's work is that I learned a lot of history, which was, remarkably, meticulously accurate.

I hope Bizgirl reveals his reasons for inventing Bizgirl's identity because I'm curious. I guess he doesn't owe anyone an explanation, although if I were his wife the whole situation might give me pause. The internet is rife with such fabrications, and his was fairly harmless as they go. I've always suspected that Belle Du Jour, the blog of a London call girl, was a man. Was it just for kicks? Was he practicing and gearing up to write a New Zealand style Bridget Jones? Although Bizgirl won best blog of the year in New Zealand, I thoughy the blog was really kind of innocuous and bland and didn't do much to either harm or help librarian stereotypes.