crankyAnd people wonder why I spend so much time wanting to set the world on fire.
I think it's very telling that the people who say it's wrong to want representation in fiction are almost overwhelmingly white. If I want to read about white people having amazing adventures and doing incredible things, being heroes and villains, simple and complicated, handsome and hideous, loved and hated, all I need to do is pick up a book at random. There is a literally 90% chance that I will get all those things from whatever book I've chosen, especially if I'm going for the "classic literature" of the science fiction/fantasy/horror world. 90%! And that may honestly be low-balling the number! If I were a straight white man, of course I wouldn't see any issue with representation in fiction—I'd be on every page I turned! Even as a straight white woman, I'd be on a lot of pages, even if half those pages would have me either naked or screaming (or both, if I had happened to grab a Gor book). There's no problem with representation here!
But I've never been a straight white man. I've never been a straight white girl, either. I was a bisexual kid with a lot of questions and not very many answers, and it wasn't until I encountered ElfQuest that I actually felt like I saw myself on a page. No, I didn't think I was an elf, although I sort of wished I was, because elves are awesome, but it was Cutter and Leetah and the rest who introduced me to the idea that I could love boys and girls, and not be a bad person. I wasn't indecisive or wicked. I just had a lot of love to give, and my set of criteria for who got it wasn't based on gender.
Let me restate that: I was already bi. I had already been attracted to girls, guys, and a kid in my class who went by "Pup" and refused to be pinned down to either gender (and my second grade teacher never forced Pup to commit either way, which was pretty damn cool of her, given that this was the 1980s). Books did not make me choose my sexuality; books told me a) that my sexuality existed, and b) that it was okay, it was natural, it was not proof that there was something wrong with me. And especially in grade school/middle school, sexuality is invisible in a way that very little else is. No one knew I was queer until I came out. It wasn't even a matter of openly hiding it; sex wasn't on the table, I didn't feel like sharing, I didn't share. No one knew that I was different. Everyone thought that when they read their books about little white girls having adventures, they were reading about me, too.
You know what's not invisible? Race. "I don't see race" is bull. When we read those books about little white kids having amazing adventures, we knew that it was white kids having adventures, because adventures are for white people. At the age of eight, we all understood that our non-white classmates were not represented in the books we read, and very few of us had the sophistication to jump to "this is a lack of representation." Instead, we jumped to "I guess Oz doesn't like black people." Because books shape your view of the world, books remake you in their image, and the books we had said little white kids go on adventures, little kids of any other race are nowhere to be seen.
This is a problem.
So some of us grew up, and for whatever reason—maybe it affected us directly, maybe it affected our friends, maybe it was just pointed out—we started trying to show a world that looked more like the world we actually lived in, where everything wasn't a monoculture. And for some reason, this is being taken as a threat. How dare you want little Asian kids to go on adventures. How dare you want queer teenagers to save the world. How dare you imply that transwomen can be perfectly ordinary, perfectly competent people who just want to not get eaten by the dinosaur that's been eating everyone else. That's selfie culture, that's diversity for the sake of diversity, that's wrong. And after a great deal of consideration, I have come to this conclusion:
If that's what you think, you can go fuck yourself.
That's not politic, and it's not nice, and it may cause a couple of people to go "what a bitch, I'm done," but I don't fucking care. Because I am tired of people needing to thank me for making an effort. I am tired of receiving email that says it was distracting when so-and-so turned out to be gay, or asking why I have Indian characters in three separate series (and the fact that having an Indian woman show up and never speak a line is apparently enough to put Indexing on the same level as Blackout for some people just makes me weep for humanity). I am tired of "oh you feel like you're so open-minded" because I write about gay people, bi people, poly people, people who are exactly like the people that I know. I want to be unremarkable for my casting choices, and only remarkable for my characters being awesome (because let's face it, my characters are awesome).
A lack of representation in fiction leads to a lack of self-esteem, because selfie culture is important: we need to see ourselves, and the people who keep trying to dismiss that as somehow selfish or greedy or narcissistic are the ones who've had a mirror held up to them for so long that they don't even see it anymore. White becomes so generic, so default, that it's not mentioned when describing a character ("blonde hair, blue eyes" vs. "oh, she's black, of course, that's the biggest thing"). Humanity is huge and diverse and amazing, and saying that only a small, approved sliver of it belongs in fiction is a dick move. If diversity is distracting, it's because it's so rare.
We can fix that.
December 8 2013, 19:13:28 UTC 3 years ago
December 8 2013, 19:59:56 UTC 3 years ago
Anyway, switching from stories to real world - my real world, that is - I am interested in computers. I studied computer science. Among other things this involved a maths prof telling our class that women tend to have more trouble with the subject than men, and five minutes later telling a female student her answer to a question was wrong, when in fact it was correct. Also, quite frequenty being treated as if I had two heads when I tell people I'm a programmer, because it's OMG SO UNUSUAL for a woman not to be ignorant about tech.
I like programming not BECAUSE it is "male" (my mother is WAY more computer-literate than my father, so that idea didn't even occur to me before ending up nearly the only girl in a computer science class), but because that kind of problem solving appeals to me.
I don't like babies, not BECAUSE liking babies is "female", but because they fall somewhere in the uncanny valley for me, and besides I'm terrified about messing up the life of someone who is dependent on me.
I like seeing women in "masculine" roles because it gives me a right to exist, and I ALSO like seeing men in "feminine" roles because it shows that being "feminine" is not too icky for men to be.
I can understand frustration about lack of positive and interesting representations of more traditionally feminine women, as opposed to women who are action heroes. I'd like to see more stories that feature women as protagonists, and shaping the story, no matter how. (I remember a wonderful scene that involved a princess who had just gotten out of an unwanted bethrotal taking steps against a repeat: By looking for a husband on the basis of "is he not old enough to be my father, and does the resulting alliance give my country access to a seaport?". She sent out a guy to do the actual negotiating, but it was her decision.)
But I've seen discussions of that turn into female characters who kick ass "men with boobs", and saying that all female characters should be gentle and nurturing because that's how women ARE, and the latter is denying women like me the right to exist. This bothers me a lot.
Sexism is a load of bullshit. It's pretending that there exist only two boxes of traits and interests, and any person can fit only one of them. It's monumentally stupid. Punishing people for showing interest in something from "the wrong box" is in my view bullying and evil, but it is, sadly, completely normal.
December 9 2013, 20:24:32 UTC 3 years ago
Princess, I know just what you want for a betrothal gift!
A seaport?
Uh, no, a string of pearls as long as you are tall!
Yawn.
Fabulous book. Fabulous author.