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, 02:40:19 UTC 4 years ago
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.
.
June 8 2013, 21:11:35 UTC 4 years ago
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.