Sexism, the current SFWA kerfuffle, and "lady authors."

First, I'd like to note that I'm the father figure to 3 girls. My mother adopted my bi-racial nieces after my sister lost custody, but I did most of the actual raising. I am very protective of them, and they are my main reason for me to get up in the morning. Once, when the oldest was in the 4th grade, I had to stop myself from going down to the school and punching a 9 year old boy who called her the N word. It is my overriding goal in life to raise them to be smart, tough, honorable people. While I despair sometimes when I see or hear them acting too much like the grouchy, smart-ass that I am, over all I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

Now that I have that out of the way, I'm going to stick my neck out here and say firstly that men have to put up with their version of this every day. They are judged, mocked, belittled, and rejected every day in just about any medium you can think of, How many tv shows depict normal men? Not sexy, dangerous, super cops or bumbling, stupid, slobs, but normal, decent, masculine men? For every normal, intelligent man character I can name you a hundred Al Bundy's or Peter Griffin's. How about commercials? Every, and I mean every, male is a fool that must be corrected by his wiser wife.

What about depictions of men of the covers of books that mainly target a female audience? Don't they tend to show men in ways that are idealized by that audience? The only dudes I know with 6pacs tend to be gym rat D bags.

And I don't care. I'm a big boy. Or maybe I'm a dinosaur (lady bad, dinosaur good?). I was raised to not sweat the small stuff, because God knows you're going to be peppered with it all day, every day. Or maybe my inner child has grown a callus.

I wouldn't talk about a female author or editor as 'Lady'. I know they wouldn't like it, and I don't like to give unwitting offense. Giving purposeful offense is another matter. I can make a grown man cry when they deserve it and have no qualms about doing so. If I'd been in charge of all this I might have handled it differently however. These are older men from an older culture. I seriously doubt they meant to be rude. Couldn't they have been taken aside and told privately that some people felt hurt by their speech? In business they teach you to praise in public, but punish in private. Sure, you pay dues to be a part of the thing, you should have a say in how it's run and who get's to be a part of it, but couldn't it have been handled a little more discreetly?

Just from a quick reading of the posts over there it feels like a parody of a diversity and anti-sexual harassment seminar from Portlandia has erupted into real life. Instead of telling the two older guys "Hey man, you don't refer to women as Lady anymore, not like that. It's kinda like calling an African-American colored", instead there seems to be howling, cries for blood, and worse of all, the forming of committees. Are people really like this? What used to an annoyance and poor taste is now deemed inexcusable evil. Seems like now every slight is a reason for the convening of the Peoples Panel for the Prevention of Outrage and a public hanging.

But Maybe I'm a dinosaur. Maybe I'm just used to hanging out with a rougher crowd whose feelings aren't so easily bruised. Maybe all those years of working for former mobsters and Hell's Angels really have done something terrible to me. Maybe the culture of public, political protest has permeated all the way down to the individual level without me noticing. Maybe I'm now a foreigner here, the boarders having moved past me unnoticed in the night. Maybe this is all just so much BS, the problem of middle class, American white women. Who knows? I'm too tired to think about it any more.

I want my nieces to grow up smart and honorable. But I also want them to grow up tough. I want them to feel like they don't have to take crap from anyone, but I don't want them to sweat the small stuff either. And I hope I didn't offend anyone here. God, it's incredibly tedious that I can't be certain any longer whether i have or not. It feels like I'm trying to re-learn a language I thought I knew, but the rules of grammar change every week.

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I think you're missing the point a bit. They, as far as I've been able to tell, WERE called on it more privately, and chose to then print something about how they were being censored.

And, well, the authors who made the statements may be old enough that some old-fashioned attitudes can be expected, but surely there was SOMEONE between them and the thing actually being printed who was young enough to have been expected to have more modern sensibilities.

Thank you. Not being a member, I didn't read the original article so I've mostly gotten all of this second hand from various sources across the net. I guess, for me at least, it seemed a case of a couple of older farts using language they didn't understand was offensive then being testy when called on it. For me, being a man and standing a ways back from it all, I was struck more by the outrageously outrage of mostly educated adults than a couple of old farts being old farts.

But like I said, maybe I just come from a rougher background than most of the people posting about this. Insults - intentional, accidental, friendly, or cruel, were something I just assumed were a part of life and you ignored it or dealt with it and moved on. All this fret and bluster seems a bit strange and milquetoast to me.

Would never say your or anyone's emotions are invalid, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. Emotions simply are, yours, mine, anyone's. You can no more banish or change them than you can tell someone not to think of an elephant.

For the record, I consider walking on the moon to be ground breaking, discovering X-rays to be ground breaking, Not writing a book or starting a business. And I don't give a good dam who does it, man, woman, or color blind, left handed, siamese twins from outer Mongolia, just find me the next person that will make the next big breakthru.

All writing is, to one degree or another, wish fulfillment. Whether it's a man writing about slaying the dragon, a woman writing about an amazing romance, or the other way around, or something else entirely. Write to make your heart sing, whatever the story, and I would never, never belittle it. My glass house doesn't stand up so well to thrown stones and all that.

And please, for the love of God, don't envy me or any man. I'll let you in on a secret, though it's not likely to make you feel better. Like me, most men I've ever met are miserable bastards. Most of us end up working ourselves to an early grave, and it feels like we fail at nearly everything we turn our hand to: relationships, careers, what have you. It might seem there are scads that have achieved 'success', whatever the hell that means, but I can count the number of men that I've ever met who were happy on one hand with a finger or two left over.

Want to know the real reason it seems the boys have somehow won out, gotten over on the other team? We fake it. We shove it all down, put on our game face, and keep plugging away even though inside we feel like losers, like it's all falling apart and we're just a paycheck away from chewing on the end of a shot gun. Stoicism is hell on the ulcers, but it still seems preferable to wailing our anguish in public, crying "Why lord, why?!" All this public expression of anger may seem strange to me, but the emotions themselves aren't alien. In that at least we are all kin, even though we two might be from different branches of the family tree. I hope you are better at finding happiness and 'success' than we are.

... the flawed male somehow gets the overly idealized pinup girl to be his wife and companion, and she never leaves him, and she never blames him for his flaws...

Truth be told, I've always found this to be stupid and offensive, at least as much as the idiot husband thing. Broadly speaking, couples tend to be pretty close in both looks and temperament. Whenever a show does this I'm generally repelled to the point I can't watch. Only thing worse is the stick thin 'super models' eating those sloppy meat bricks they call burgers in the Carl's Jr. commercials. The only way you get to be 105 lbs. is by winning the genetic lottery, working out every day, and NEVER eating one of those.

But sex sells doesn't it, even if it's stupid. There must be something in the marketing research that tells tv exec.s to put stupid Homer with smart, sexy Marge ( I can't believe I just wrote that last part) even if you and I find it so dumb as to be offensive. At that scale greed tends to trump bigotry or stupidity.

I'm not laughing with Homer or the Family Guy dad. After a while I'm repelled by them. To me they seem to be nothing more than pathetic losers that everyone is allowed to poke fun at. I like 3 Stooges humor as much as the next guy, but you can't serve only one dish and call it a buffet. I just don't bitch so much about it. I turn the channel. It is what it is, I yam what I yam, and life is too full of other stuff to waste time on such small potatoes

Thing is, though, what is "small potatoes" can be really giant honkin' huge potatoes to someone else - and this is the tricky part, no one has the right to say what size someone else's potatoes should be.

(okay, that metaphor escaped me briefly there. You get the idea.)

See, here's the thing - if a guy like you (or like me, for that matter) doesn't like the media depictions of a male on, say, Family Guy or The Simpsons, we're allowed to change the channel. We're allowed to see other guys, like the dudes on White Collar or the guys on Castle or the guys on any of a billion other shows. Holy hell, the character of Lennie Briscoe on Law and Order is still on TV twenty-odd hours a day somewhere despite the fact that the show is off the air and the actor who portrayed him has sadly passed away, and that guy's hardly anyone's ideal of a male model (I love Jerry Orbach, but it's true).

Now keep changing the channel and find me a female character who isn't "conventionally attractive." Find me three. It's going to take you a while longer than it would take me to find three dudes who aren't fat buffoons, so perhaps the example you're using here is a bit unduly skewed, don't you think?

But even leaving the media discussion and its potential speciousness aside, we don't get to decide what other people should feel. That sounds like a pretty easy-to-comprehend and justifiable principle, dunnit? If someone cries at the end of E.T. (my father has never let me live that down), even if you don't feel sad, you don't go around going "Look at that dork, crying at a movie, what a nerd."

(At least, not if you're not an utter jackhole. You're not, are you? You don't seem to be. If you are, please do say so so I know not to bother continuing.)

But in this instance, that's what you're doing, Chad. Saying "Well men have a right to be offended at some stuff too" is utterly irrelevant to the fact that you're also saying "So stop being offended and feel the way I feel." The unspoken - and all too often unconscious - addendum is "I know what is best and should be emulated, and if you disagree with me you are clearly a fool."

And calling people fools is no way to change anyone's mind, in my experience.

(For the record, I'm not trying to accuse you of calling anyone a fool with malice aforethought; like I said, it's often an unconscious addendum. I have been guilty of it myself on many, many occasions and will almost certainly do it again in the future. I am certain that Seanan will back me up on this based on the number of times I have disagreed with her about comic books.)

You aren't offended. That's fine. You have other things that bother you more than this. That's also fine. You're a grown-up, you've earned the right to have your own opinions. You haven't earned the right to tell someone else what their opinion should or shouldn't be, and "Men don't have it perfect either" is by no means a reason to ignore the fact that, as a general rule, female authors deserve to be judged as authors, not as women who happen to write. What offends you has absolutely zero bearing on that, because you're not a female author, and like it or not you have no dog in this fight.



Also, Marge is a fox and anyone who says otherwise is clearly a fool.

I'm not going to agree with Chad here, but I do have to take issue with one thing you wrote.

Not being a female author does not mean I don't have a dog in this fight. Everyone who can appreciate a good story without worrying about the author's plumbing has a stake. Not nearly as large a stake as those authors, true, but any effort to unfairly marginalize an author or class of authors has at least some negative effect on the readers. I can't measure how much poorer my young adulthood would have been if, for example, C. J. Cherryh had just accepted that science fiction was a boy's club and stuck with teaching, but I would have lost something.

I wish this wasn't an issue. It's going to divert effort that could be used for feeding my need to read. But I wouldn't think of asking Seanan to back down or chill out. I'll be cheering her on because it's the right thing to do. Also, it's in my long term best interests, even if it might just the tiniest bit frustrating in the short term.

...this is really off-topic, but on the burger, not true. I was 105-110 pounds until I was about 24, and I ate LOTS of burgers and candy and other things. I was, in fact, piling on calories under doctor's orders. Nor did I have some weird disease. I just flat had a metabolism that was TOO high (they wanted me at 120-130, and people occasionally accused me of being anorexic).

That's not to say that I think that all the stick-thin models in question are eating those, but some of them might be and could.

Of course, if you eat like that, you are going to have one HELL of a call to reality when your metabolism flips over, which mine eventually did. Oof.

Another thing about the "goofball husband" trope: most of the time, the husband is the comic lead, the star. The wife is usually just the straight man, the one who's not fun. The male actors get the best role because of the trope, and the trope helps to reinforce the idea that this is how it works.

And if the husband is the straight man, is the comic ever the wife, or does that task go to the kids, the neighbor, the coworker, etc.? Does any female actor get to be Lucy these days? (I don't know; I'm really not in touch with what the world of sitcoms is like in any detail.)

Oh, and if anyone tried calling my girls 'Lady' in the way we're talking here, I wouldn't have to do anything about it, the 2 older ones at least would laugh at and mock the poor jerk into the next county. The guy would have to check in his man card and would never show his face around here again. Acid tongues those two, and too smart for their own good sometimes. I think they frighten most of the boys at school. Again, I blame myself.

Yada,yada,yada. Your point is that we shouldn't be upset with these poor old guys raised in a different time and they surely didn't know.

But they did. They've lived through the same period of time I have...they know about the social changes. They just prefer to go on doing what they've always done and claim that because they didn't MEAN to step on toes, the toes weren't really stepped on, and it doesn't really hurt, and anyone saying "You stepped on my toe and it hurts!" is being mean to them. Poppycock in the original sense.

I hope your nieces grow up tough, smart, and honorable. And I hope they grow up knowing that they--not you, not me, now anyone else--get to decide what the "small stuff" is, and what crap they won't take.

I'm going to say this as politely as I can.

No. Not just no but oh hell no. You are not just wrong here you are fractally wrong.

It's swell that you don't find what was said to be important enough to be offensive. Get on with your laid back self. Be as un-offended as you please. It's terrific you are all tough and rough and don't get your feelings hurt. Rock on.

And, I mean this sincerely, I think it's great you care about those girls.

However- you're still wrong.

Because, that stuff you said about hoping they don't take any crap from anyone? That's what this is about, people standing up and saying 'nope, that's crap'.

And that part about how you don't want them to sweat the small stuff? That's the part that can undermine their confidence in their own judgement, the part that can make them wonder if someone will have their back when they call out crap. That's the part that can make cherished, strong, smart girls and women hesitate- what if this person they trust and look up to thinks the insult they object to just isn't that big a deal? What if he (and it's so often he) shrugs or sighs or tells them to toughen up because, hey, he thinks it's small stuff not to be sweated.

I just took out the sentence that started with "I'm sorry you find this tedious" because no matter how tired you are of remembering not to carelessly say something insulting you are not one hundredth as tired as I am of hearing thoughtless insults. You know what's tedious? I'm 57 years old and we are still having this Stop Treating Half The Human Race As Other conversation. Still. It's 2013, we have rovers on another planet but it's somehow soooo hard to remember we treat people like people even when they have ladyparts.

You know what's not tedious but heartbreaking? I'm seriously afraid that when your beloved nieces are my age the human race will still be having this conversation and people will still be acting like it's a huge hassle to remember not to be casually insulting about gender. And race. And class.

Also, what you might see as 'small stuff' might very well loom large to a child or a teenager, because it's their first time encountering something and they don't have the experience or the neural connections to deal with it in the same way an adult would.

The first time you drop your ice cream can be devastating. The tenth time, when you know you can acquire another one if you want, a mere annoyance.

On the flipside, they might see something you deem important as 'small stuff' because they don't have the context to see that particular word, or thing someone said, or thing someone did, was actually part of a larger problem, or meant more than they understood it to.

Chad, I'm going to take Seanan's admonition to assume that you wrote this in good faith seriously. And because I'm taking it seriously, I'm going to explain you exactly why she had to make that admonition. Short form: you've got a full Troll Bingo card there -- the ways in which you phrased many of your statements are far more commonly used by men who are not arguing in good faith, and many women have been sensitized to those statements by having seen them used over and over again in comments intended to shame and belittle their concerns. And on the Internet, if you do a note-perfect imitation of a troll, nobody can tell that you're not one.

In detail:

First, I'd like to note that I'm the father figure to 3 girls. My mother adopted my bi-racial nieces after my sister lost custody, but I did most of the actual raising. I am very protective of them, and they are my main reason for me to get up in the morning. ... It is my overriding goal in life to raise them to be smart, tough, honorable people.

Troll Bingo square: See, I'm a FEMINIST! Here are my credentials!

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say firstly that men have to put up with their version of this every day.

This is a two-fer. You have the Brave Stance square and the "Men are victims, too!" square in the same sentence.

What about depictions of men of the covers of books that mainly target a female audience? Don't they tend to show men in ways that are idealized by that audience?

As Seanan points out, this is the False Equivalence square. Jim Hines has done a good job of deconstructing this particular false equivalence (short version: the muscular dude on a book cover is a male power fantasy figure, not a female romantic one), and there's quite a bit of other reference work to that effect readily available. That you haven't encountered any of it mostly indicates that this isn't something you have to worry about.

And I don't care. I'm a big boy. ... I was raised to not sweat the small stuff, because God knows you're going to be peppered with it all day, every day. Or maybe my inner child has grown a callus.

Troll Bingo square: "You're just so OVER-SENSITIVE! Why can't you grow a thicker skin?" With a side accusation of immaturity (the "inner child" thing).

These are older men from an older culture. I seriously doubt they meant to be rude. Couldn't they have been taken aside and told privately that some people felt hurt by their speech?

Troll Bingo square: "He didn't MEAN anything by it, he's just CLUELESS. Why can't you be NICER to him, cut him a break?"

Part of becoming an adult is learning how to adapt to changing circumstances. These circumstances have been changing for forty years. It's a little late to deploy that line now.

Aaand LJ just said that my comment was too long, so I'll have to put the rest of it in another response.

Reply, part the second:

Just from a quick reading of the posts over there it feels like a parody of a diversity and anti-sexual harassment seminar from Portlandia has erupted into real life.]

Troll Bingo square: "Help, it's the PC Police! Nobody can say ANYTHING any more for fear that somebody might get their little fee-fees hurt!"

It's amazing how many people think it's okay to sneer at requests for common courtesy by calling them "political correctness". Is it really that important to you not to have to choose your words for NOT hurting other people? Also, "Portlandia"? Unless there's a SF/F reference there that I'm missing, that's just breathtakingly nasty. It reads like "Only Evil Libruls would even CARE about something like this."

Are people really like this? What used to an annoyance and poor taste is now deemed inexcusable evil. Seems like now every slight is a reason for the convening of the Peoples Panel for the Prevention of Outrage and a public hanging.

I suspect that the reason it looks that way to you is an illustration of the 15% Principle. (Context: studies showing that in a college classroom environment, if women contribute more than 15% of the class discussion they are perceived as "dominating the conversation".) You're used to a world in which women, people of color, gays, etc. never spoke up about hurtful language and discriminatory attitudes -- they just bit their tongues until they bled. Now some people, some places, are starting to call out this kind of behavior, and your perception is that they're EVERYWHERE and nobody's SAFE from them any more! You'll get used to it in time, just the way people are getting used to hearing gay men talk about "my husband".

But Maybe I'm a dinosaur. Maybe I'm just used to hanging out with a rougher crowd whose feelings aren't so easily bruised. Maybe all those years of working for former mobsters and Hell's Angels really have done something terrible to me. Maybe the culture of public, political protest has permeated all the way down to the individual level without me noticing. Maybe I'm now a foreigner here, the borders having moved past me unnoticed in the night. Maybe this is all just so much BS, the problem of middle class, American white women. Who knows? I'm too tired to think about it any more.

Troll Bingo square: "This is too HAAAARD! And I don't have to think about it, so I'm not going to, so there!"

God, it's incredibly tedious that I can't be certain any longer whether i have or not. It feels like I'm trying to re-learn a language I thought I knew, but the rules of grammar change every week.

Troll Bingo square: "But why do I have to change? Why can't things just be the way they're SUPPOSED to be?"

I saw your comment last night, took a deep breath, and decided to wait until today to respond. If I hadn't -- or if you'd said what you said on my journal -- you'd have gotten a much angrier version of this explanation. I seriously suggest that you think about the way you came across to a lot of the people who will have read this, and go look up "Troll Tropes" and "Sexism Bingo", and try to integrate that information into your future responses on this type of topic. It'll save you a lot of worry about whether or not you're offending anyone if you know how the people who do offend us talk.

Totally awesome summary.

But Maybe I'm a dinosaur. Maybe I'm just used to hanging out with a rougher crowd whose feelings aren't so easily bruised. Maybe all those years of working for former mobsters and Hell's Angels really have done something terrible to me. Maybe the culture of public, political protest has permeated all the way down to the individual level without me noticing. Maybe I'm now a foreigner here, the borders having moved past me unnoticed in the night. Maybe this is all just so much BS, the problem of middle class, American white women. Who knows? I'm too tired to think about it any more.

This may also fall under the "Aren't I cool? *Preen, Preen* Wouldn't you like to hear more about all the intriguing stuff I've done?" Bingo square. Most things in his post are about *HIM*. Most things in Seanan's post are about an *us*, and an us he is raising girls to be a part of. Maybe he should give them this to read and ask them how and where they prefer to be,

Chad,

I've read over this whole discussion, and I'd like to respond to things you've said throughout.

First, you make a lot of completely valid points.

Yes, the current societal system hurts men too, hurts them a lot. Any feminist worth her salt knows that. And no one ever said being a man was easy, not by a long shot.

But to be honest, when you bring that up here, it feels like derailing. It sounds like the white guy who jumps into a discussion of racism with a story about the time he was hassled for being white. Not untrue-- just not actually relevant to the current conversation.

Being tough is good. Not sweating the small stuff is good. But the old line about sticks and stones is a lie-- words do hurt.

More importantly, it seems like you're lacking some context on this. There's a long history of oppression here being referenced by this one discussion.

You wrote: "Instead of telling the two older guys "Hey man, you don't refer to women as Lady anymore, not like that. It's kinda like calling an African-American colored", instead there seems to be howling, cries for blood, and worse of all, the forming of committees."

Here's the problem: Women have been saying that stuff, politely, firmly, and publicly, for DECADES (see that quote from Dorothy Sayers in the 40s! in another comment). OK, so these two older guys didn't get the memo. Yeah, we all have that uncle who still calls black folk "coloreds" and doesn't mean anything bad by it-- that doesn't mean it's right.

More importantly, if that uncle wrote an article for publication and talked about how he didn't see anything wrong with using the term "colored," you'd expect someone to catch that article before it hit print. You'd expect the editors to politely pull him aside and tell him he's wrong. You'd expect someone in charge to put their foot down.

The big deal here isn't just that two good ol' boys insist on thinking "lovely lady author" is a compliment (and, in the right CONTEXT, it can be)... it's that they got a piece published about it. That got read by a LOT of authors of both genders who know that shit doesn't fly. That's why we need committees. To ask why this piece got published in the first place.

(As for Resnick himself, I personally give him a pass. He's one of my favorite storytellers, but I've known all along that HE IS a dinosaur, and I'm willing to put him in the same class as that loveable uncle who can't get him mind around the fact that "colored" is offensive. But that may be just me. And I don't know the other guy.)

One more thing. As a white person, I miss instances of racism sometimes. They go right over my head because I don't have experience with the history they reference. And sometimes, when I see someone call racism on something that I think is no big deal, I wonder if they are oversensitive or blowing it out of proportion.

So I look at how others respond. If all my other non-white friends say "hell yeah, that was some racist shit!" I know that I'm the one who's wrong, who's missed something important.

So I ask you to read over all the comments on this post again. See the rage, see the hurt, see the "preach it, sister!" and the "seriously, AGAIN?!" responses to this whole thing. See that women are hurt and angry not just because of the contents of this one article, but because it's yet another skirmish in a war that we've been fighting too long.

I think you'll get it. You seem like a smart guy, and a good person. And I hope that by the time your daughters grow up, they can afford to just ignore an article like this one, because it won't be a painful reminder of the many different ways they have suffered throughout their whole lives just for being born female.

One should seriously consider that the vast huge majority of writers and directors and ad executives and what have you who are responsible for the bumbling man image are also men.

Yep.

The advertisers are the ones who drive the content on TV. Long ago, a writer-producer by the name of Tony Cherubini, who left the Big Corporate TV World for small farmer indie production and teaching TV production life in relatively rural New England, had an article about TV in the New York Times Sunday magazine. The somewhat stupid husband and the clever wife tropes are deliberate, to mindcondition the viewing audience for receptivity to the commercials and reinforce manipulative identification of empowerment by manipulation.... The advertisers are the TV customers, the audience is the product that advertisers are really paying for. There have been T shows with good ratings in terms of how many people were watching, but the audience was not the audience the advertisers wanted, so the shows went off the air....

That the demographics might not be what the commercial advertisers perceive, is a different issue. There are times of the week when the majority of adults shopping in the supermarkets local to me, are male. Some of them are probably widowed among the significant retiree age cohort, some never married, some are clearly parents--with a kid or two or three accompanying them--and they are not the incompetent-to-shop dolts one sees portrayed on TV which tends to show men going shopping, as somewhat analogous to Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ones I see, shop with the appearance of shopping being a regular activity. But, the commercial Tv ads, pretend there is no such thing as a man who normally buys cleaning supplies or cleans, cooks anything competently other than barbecue grilling outside. I am still boycotting Clorox over one of the most offensive ad campagins ever ("Mama" cheerfully cleaning up as the Happy Household Slave doing all the cooking and cleaning and serving to families of completely lazy abusive slob males. The "bathroom bowl" radio ad was the utterly vilest of the lot,with "Mama" bragging about cleaning up after her "husband and four strapping sons" who not only can't be bothered to aim into the "bathroom bowl" when pissing, but don't bother/expect Mana to "make everything neat and tidy" after they make their messes.... .

You want your girls to grow up not taking crap from anyone, but when grown-ass women refuse to take (any more) crap from anyone, you feel the need to write a long comment about how That's Not Okay and also You're Doing It Wrong.

Think about that, will you. That's as much good faith as I can give.