annoyed
jimhines has collected links to a wide range of responses and rebuttals. You don't need to read them all, but they're still a good, overwhelmingly unhappy view of a bad situation. I recommend reading at least a few of them, because it'll help you understand what's going on, although for many people, the important points are:1. This article came after several instances of sexism in the Bulletin.
2. The Bulletin is the official publication of SFWA*, which makes it look like organizationally condoned sexism.
3. It's 2013, for fuck's sake.
One of the things that Resnick and Malzberg, as the authors of the piece in question, objected to was that people were unhappy that they were defining their peers as "lady authors/editors" and "gorgeous." These are, after all, factual definitions! A female peer is a lady peer. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman. Don't women like being told that they're beautiful? Aren't we supposed to be precise when we talk about people? And to this I say sure, except that your precision is unequal and belittling. "Bob is my peer, Jane is my lady peer" creates two classes where two classes do not belong, and humans are primates, we're creatures of status and position. Give us two things and we'll always start trying to figure out which is superior to the other. Right or left? Up or down? Peer or lady peer? What's more, adding a qualifier creates the impression that the second class is somehow an aberration. "There were a hundred of us at the convention, ninety-nine peers and one rare lady peer."
No. Fuck no. "Bob and Jane are my peers." Much better.
As for the appearance thing...yeah, people often like to be told when they look good. But women in our modern world are frequently valued according to appearance to such a degree that it eclipses all else. "Jane was a hell of a science fiction writer...but more importantly, she was gorgeous according to a very narrow and largely male-defined standard of conventional beauty." All Jane's accomplishments, everything she ever did as a person, matter less than the fact that she got good genes during character generation. You don't think that burns? You don't think that's insulting? "Bob knew how to tell a good story, and he did it while packing an impressively sinuous trouser snake." What, is that insulting? How is it more insulting than "Jane could really fill out a swimsuit"? It's the same thing. If my breasts define my value to the community, you'd better be prepared to hold up your balls for the same level of inspection—and trust me, this is not sexy funtimes inspection, this is "drape 'em in Spandex and brace yourself for a lot of critique that frankly doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with how well you write, or what kind of human being you are." Don't like this idea, gentlemen of the world? Well, neither do the ladies.
It's very telling that you'll get people saying, again, "author and lady author are just true facts," but then getting angry when you say that fine, if they want divisions, it needs to be "male and female author." No! Male is the default the norm the baseline of human experience! How dare you imply anything different!
I, and roughly fifty percent of the world's population, would like to beg to differ. It's just that women get forced to understand men if we want to enjoy media and tell stories, while men are allowed to treat women as these weird extraterrestrial creatures who can never be comprehended, but must be fought. It's like we're somehow the opposing army in an alien invasion story, here to be battled, defeated, and tamed, but never acknowledged as fully human.
Does that seem like a lot to get out of the phrase "lady author"? It kinda is. But that's what happens when the background radiation of your entire life is a combination of "men are normal, human, wonderful, admirable, talented, worth aspiring to," and "bitches be crazy."
Am I disappointed that these sentiments were published in the official Bulletin of the organization to which I belong? Damn straight. It shows an essential lack of kindness on the part of the authors, who felt that their right to call me a "lady author" and comment on my appearance mattered more than my right to be comfortable and welcomed in an organization that charges me annual dues that are the same regardless of gender. Maybe if I got a discount for allowing people to belittle and other me? Only then I would never have joined, because fuck that noise.
At the same time, SFWA is a wonderful organization that has done and is doing a great deal to help authors, and moves are being taken to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. My membership is up for renewal at the end of this month, and I'm renewing, because change comes from both without and within. I am an author. I am a woman. I am not going to shut up and slink away because I feel unheard; if anything, I'm going to get louder, and make them hear me. (Please note that I absolutely respect the women who are choosing not to renew their memberships; voting with your dollars is a time-honored tradition. But everyone reacts differently. For them, this is a principled stance. For me, it would be a retreat. I am the Official SFWA Stabber, and nobody is making me retreat.)
One of the big points of the Resnick/Malzberg article was "anonymous complaints." Fine, then: I am not anonymous. My name is Seanan McGuire. You can look me up.
(*The Science Fiction Writers of America.)
June 7 2013, 03:06:34 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 7 2013, 04:10:16 UTC
Now:
Much of what you're describing falls under the category of "false equivalency." It's the same argument used when people complain about female comic book characters being oversexualized blow-up dolls who would break their spines if they actually assumed those positions. Here's a comic strip that says it better than I can:
http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/b
"Men and women are both ______" only works when the categories are absolute. Let's look, for example, at the Simpsons. That's a case of "bumbling husband constantly rescued by resourceful wife," right? Except that Marge is always stated, in the universe in which they live, to be an absolute stone-cold fox. Homer, who is in no way an ideal man, somehow got the most beautiful woman in Springfield to marry him. And we see this pattern play out over and over again: 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.
Men are ALLOWED to be bumbling, to be fat without it being a character flaw, to be a little impulsive. A show with four men and one woman is balanced, while a show with four women and one man is "meant for chicks." It works very similarly with race: one person of color to four white people is an ensemble, four people of color to one white person is a niche market. Given that the human race is overwhelmingly NOT white and male, this is an issue. So saying "I saw a male character who was _____" does not erase the fact that female characters aren't ALLOWED to be that thing.
The issue here is not that straight men admired women's looks. It's that they defined professional women, in their field of work, by their looks, and when they were called on it—initially nicely by some people, not so much by others, but there is no one Way of Women that dictates first response—they didn't apologize or back off, they doubled down. They said "this is thought policing," and "this is censorship," and used the word "abattoir." That isn't how you make people play nice.
I am very impressed by your devotion to your nieces. You sound like a good father figure, who has their best interests at heart. Allowing them to be defined as people, not "lady ______" is the way to help them have a world where they ARE defined as people. And this, unfortunately, is part of the process of getting to that world.
June 7 2013, 04:11:21 UTC 4 years ago
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
June 7 2013, 04:37:53 UTC 4 years ago
(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.
June 7 2013, 06:43:36 UTC 4 years ago
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.
June 7 2013, 16:45:41 UTC 4 years ago
So, yeah, consider that line retracted, please; it was wrong and I am dumb.
June 7 2013, 05:05:30 UTC 4 years ago
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.
June 8 2013, 05:16:08 UTC 4 years ago
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.)