Empathy Is Not A Disability

In news that should come as a shock to exactly no one, I can be kind of an asshole. What may come as a shock, depending on how long you’ve known me, is that I’m arguably less of an asshole now than I used to be. In my teens and early twenties, I said and did a lot of things I now find abhorrent, sometimes out of carelessness and not knowing any better, sometimes as a result of having internalised a bunch of toxic bullshit, but sometimes just because I was being an asshole. And the thing about being an asshole – or one of the things, anyway – is that, even when part of you knows exactly what you’re doing and why, there’s another, louder part that doesn’t give a shit, or which conveniently chooses to reserve your shit-giving capabilities until such time as being an asshole is definitively proven to correlate with Having Fucked Up. Being human is not an exact science, and some things can only be learned the hard way, by making a wrong call and gauging its wrongness in retrospect.

Consider the following small act of assholery, performed when I was sixteen:

During a conversation with a close friend – and for the life of me, I can’t remember the specifics of the conversation; only that we were talking about another, mutual friend who’d been having a hard time – I said, in a somewhat offhand way, as though it were obvious, “See, you’re more sympathetic, and I’m more empathetic. You see what’s happening to [friend], but you don’t really feel it the way I do. We’re just different like that.”

Part of me really believed this; or at least, believed it sufficiently in the moment, in the context of that particularly complex relationship, to have said it out loud. Nonetheless, even had it been an entirely accurate judgement – which, for the record, it wasn’t – saying it like that was still a dick move. I can’t even call it a backhanded compliment, because in my mind, it was very clear that empathy was the more desirable trait. I was rather asserting a form of moral superiority over my friend: my kindness is better than your kindness, my understanding of people more intuitive. The irony of making such a claim in a knowingly hurtful way wasn’t wholly lost on me, but I felt slighted by her, and so couched a negative judgement in language which pretended an objectivity I didn’t remotely feel.

My friend was visibly irritated by the remark; hurt, as I’d secretly wanted her to be, and forced onto the defensive. I don’t remember the rest of the exchange, but that moment has stuck with me. Even though I knew the comparison was an insult prior to speaking, it wasn’t until afterwards that I really understood what it meant to have said it anyway. I’d been an asshole, plain and simple: the opposite of empathetic, at least where she was concerned.

Reading Amy Sterling Casil’s recent SF Signal guest post, Special Needs in Strange Worlds: We Are All Disabled, therefore, this incident sprang instantly to mind. Says Sterling-Casil:

I have a severe, lifelong disability that could have cost my life on several occasions. It’s the reason I write what I do and am who I am. But it also means I can’t write the kind of thing you’re often presented with as reading material.

What’s my disability? I’m 5’6″, pretty much fit, active and healthy. Decent eyesight for an old lady. Okay hearing despite numerous loud concerts and shows during my youth. I don’t even have cancer or heart disease after smoking like a fiend nearly all my life. My liver even functions, although it shouldn’t.

I’m very fortunate.

But I hear you. Even when I don’t want to. I feel you. Even when I don’t want to and shouldn’t. I am empathetic. That isn’t the same as “sympathetic.” Many who are like me don’t make it out of their late teens and early 20s because of associated risky behaviors.

That sound you hear, dear reader, is my gritted teeth grinding together.

Let me put this bluntly: empathy is not a disability. Even if I take Sterling Casil at her notably unsourced word and accept her premise here – that empathy, as a specifically defined condition, is a direct, causative (rather than correlative) factor in the suicide and/or death by misadventure of young people – that does not make it a disability. Depression, along with various other mental health conditions and disorders, can be a form of disability, but whether we define it as such depends largely on who “we” are and our reasons for doing so. According to the UK government, for instance:

A mental health condition is considered a disability if it has a long-term effect on your normal day-to-day activity. This is defined under the Equality Act 2010.

Your condition is ‘long term’ if it lasts, or is likely to last, 12 months.

‘Normal day-to-day activity’ is defined as something you do regularly in a normal day. For example – using a computer, working set times or interacting with people.

By this definition, I am – or have been – disabled, and yet I have never identified as such. Partly, this is because there’s an enormous cultural stigma around the acknowledgement, diagnosis and discussion of mental health problems as, well, actual problems. Even during my worst depressive episodes, it would never have occurred to me to think of myself as disabled. It’s a relative of the same prejudice which biases us towards assuming that disabilities are necessarily visible things, like missing limbs or striped canes: if a stranger can’t tell there’s something wrong with you, this logic goes, you must be totally able-bodied. Note, too, the wording: able-bodied, as though disability doesn’t apply to minds. But while I’m all for a more lucid, open dialogue about mental health stigma – or many such dialogues, even – it would be counter-productive to insist that anyone who fits the above definition (for instance) refer to themselves as disabled, regardless of their own beliefs or preferences.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, there’s enough anti-disability sentiment in the world that, for many people, being open about an “invisible” disability can have real consequences: the loss of a job or promotion, for instance. Words, too, can have a powerful impact on our sense of self depending on what they mean to us and – crucially – the circumstances of their application. For instance: I identify as queer, both because it’s a useful shorthand for expressing two facets of my personhood (bisexuality and genderqueerness) without requiring that I specify either, and because, growing up, it wasn’t a word I ever heard used as a slur. But for other people, that’s not the case, and the fact that I’m happy to self-identify as queer doesn’t mean I’m going to foist that label on someone who thinks of it as an insult. By the same token, however, I don’t appreciate being told, as happened recently – and by a straight person, no less – that it’s offensive and wrong of me to call myself queer, because it was once an insult. (This person, who was in all other respects a charming, lovely individual, literally fled the room rather than continue the conversation when I suggested that, as I was talking about myself, perhaps I should have some greater say in the word’s applicability than he did.)

All of which is a way of saying: if identifying as disabled is going to cause someone more problems, practical or emotional, than it solves, then I support their right to avoid the term without accepting that the concept of disability must therefore, of necessity, have negative connotations in all cases. The diagnostic applicability of a word is not the same as personal acceptance of it, and in keeping with the vital Hippocratic sentiment of first, do no harm, I’d rather err on the side of the individual.

But, as it happens, I do disagree with Sterling Casil: because while I might, on the basis of personal experience, accept the idea that empathy can be a correlative factor in depression, and is therefore potentially relevant to individual disabilities, I do not for a red hot minute believe that empathy alone, as described by Sterling Casil, is a separate disability. Sadness is not the same as depression, no matter how intensely we feel it, regardless of where it comes from. Sadness can be part of depression, certainly, but on this point, I’m putting my foot down: the two words are not interchangeable.

I first started to think – maybe you’re not just “sensitive,” Amy, maybe you are truly different –when I was at the Denver Worldcon in 2007. Wow, almost 10 years ago! I ended up as the “expert” on a panel on what I’ll call gene therapy…

Afterward, a young man came up to me, as if I was some kind of expert. This scared me; I soon realized it was he who was scared.

“Do you think they’ll come up with a cure for autism?” he asked.

“It’s possible,” I said. “A lot more likely than for something like Down Syndrome even though there is no single cause for autism.”

 My son Anthony was born with Down Syndrome. This young chap would never know that, nor would he care if he knew.

First: the only reason “this young chap would never know” about Sterling Casil’s son – assuming he doesn’t read her post now, of course – is because she didn’t tell him, not because of his autism. I don’t fault Sterling Casil for declining to share such a personal piece of information with a complete stranger, but I fail to see how his ignorance is somehow remarkable when she was the one who opted not to remedy it.

Second, and far more importantly: the assertion that the man “would [not] care if he knew” is, quite frankly, so much offensive, inaccurate bullshit. Dear Amy Sterling Casil: making a snap judgement about a stranger’s capacity for compassion on the basis of their autism doesn’t make you “sensitive” and “different”, especially when you uncritically replicate the assumption in print – it makes you an asshole.

The young man wouldn’t meet my eye. He said, “My wife and I both have autism. We want to have children but we don’t want them to have it.” Uncharacteristically for someone with autism, he touched my arm.

As Jim Hines has already pointed out, not everyone with autism is touch-phobic. This is, again, a bullshit judgement.

He was so very frightened!

And this, right here, is the point where I saw red. Because, look: okay. People have different writing styles. And maybe, if I’m being very charitable, this sort of construction is part of Sterling Casil’s; not having read her before, I wouldn’t know. But to me, everything about this simple statement screams paternalistic condescension, and thereby betrays the awfulness of her assumptions. This isn’t a calm judgement, but an exclamation: he was so very frightened! The use of the double qualifier, so very, instead of just one or the other, and especially when followed by an exclamation mark, is a construction you commonly find in children’s books, not in reference to grown adults. It’s minimising language, the kind of thing you can imagine being said of Tom Kitten or Timmy fallen down the well: he was so very frightened! And then there’s the absolute narrative certainty of it: he was, not he seemed or he looked. Nothing in Sterling Casil’s previous description of the man speaks to visible expressions of fear: contextually, it doesn’t feel like the right word at all.

Maybe it’s just a literary failing: poor sentence construction utterly unaffected by subconscious bias about what autism is and how it functions. But somehow, I doubt it.

“There’s a reason God made autism,” I said. I had already come to believe this was true.

“I don’t believe in God,” he said.

No. Okay? No. This is an asshole thing to say – a dick move of the highest fucking order. It doesn’t matter if Sterling Casil believes it to be true: if she really felt the man was “so very frightened” of his own autism, of the mere prospect of passing it along, why on Earth would she think he’d find that assertion comforting? Never mind the declarative, false assumption that the man shared Sterling Casil’s faith sufficiently to be comforted by it in the first place: he’s asking about a cure, and you’re telling him God doesn’t think he needs one? Wow.

Here’s a thought: if you can’t set aside your personal faith, or lack of same, in order to comfort someone with different beliefs – or worse, if it never even occurs to you that this might be the best approach – then maybe what you’re feeling isn’t empathy, but arrogance.

Some time later, I realized. He came up to me because of who I am, and said what he said, because of who he was. And my response was made for the same reasons.

I’ve read these sentences about forty times now, and I still can’t decide if they’re meant to imply that the entire exchange was preordained in some sense, or if it’s just a pointless acknowledgement of the fact that our personhood necessarily impacts our actions. Either way: um.

Autistic people have massive gifts. They are able to do things, think, and see the world in amazing ways. One of my favorite films, one which we view in some of the classes I share with students, is The Temple Grandin Story, starring Claire Danes. Temple’s wonderful teacher, portrayed in the film by David Strathairn, tells her mother (also wonderful, played by Julia Ormond), that Temple is different from other children. Both mother and teacher agree that Temple is: “Different, not less.”

On the one hand, yes: being autistic doesn’t make you lesser than anyone else, and it sure as hell doesn’t preclude being talented. And certainly, an autistic perspective can have some decided advantages over a neurotypical one, depending on the person and the context. (I say can rather than does, not because neurotypical is better more often – it isn’t – but because different people are always going to have different strengths and weaknesses in different settings, regardless of attribution.) But on the other hand, I can’t quite shake my suspicion, especially given the film comparison and her earlier, stereotypical assumptions, that Sterling Casil is romanticising autism as the diagnosis of savants.

This conversation with the autistic young man was one of my turning points. It was then that I realized my perceptions really were different from most others. I had the opposite of autism. And even more: we are all different.

Again, as Jim Hines has already pointed out, empathy is not the fucking opposite of autism. That some autistic people might not express their empathy in ways that are easily recognised by neurotypical persons doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, or that autism is somehow defined by a lack of it. The fact that Sterling Casil implies this to be so is doubly concerning when you consider how quick she is to associate an absence of empathy with sociopathy:

I suppose what bothers me most, now that I do understand these things, is that there is so little value in our society to the humane core that is inside nearly all of us. I see clearly, and hate, the sociopath who pulls our strings, making us dance to their wicked puppet rhythms. How many stories, how many films, how many TV shows do they get? It’s exhausting.

Right. So, just to be clear: some people are absent a “humane core”, which Sterling Casil associates with empathy, but which “the sociopath who pulls our strings” presumably lacks.

UM.

A few psychologists call people like me empaths. I brought up “sociopaths” because like empaths, sociopaths also readily perceive the feelings and motives of others. Unlike sociopaths, empaths have no desire to harm others.

I would be deeply interested to know which psychologists Sterling Casil is referencing here, as her sentence construction leans on this vague reference to academic authority in order to support her subsequent claims about sociopaths. Given that sociopathy, contrary to the assertions of Steven Moffat, is itself a highly flawed, disputed and arguably outdated term, I’m inclined to view this whole claim with a suspiciously raised eyebrow.

Some of us experience barriers and risks because we are so easily influenced by the feelings, ideas and emotions of others that we may lack a strong sense of self.  We are also highly susceptible to substance abuse and other forms of risk-taking behavior. There’s little to no scientific research done on us and nobody but we few survivors genuinely understands how difficult it is to be this aware of others and their feelings and motives.

The bolding and italics in that last excerpt are mine. Self-diagnosis of mental health conditions is one thing; inventing an entire condition seemingly out of whole cloth is another. The language Sterling Casil uses to describe empathy in the first half of this paragraph is both vague to the point of uselessness – what the fuck does that mean, “some of us experience barriers and risks”? – and worded to sound like an actual, academic definition; and yet, in the very next sentence, she admits that no such thing exists.

One researcher who has published a significant body of work is Dr. Ron Riggio at Claremont McKenna College. Ron believes that empathy is an essential leadership trait.

A quick Google search about Dr Riggio yields, among other things, a 2011 article whose concluding statement would seem to be the exact opposite of Sterling Casil’s claims about empathy – namely, that it’s a discreet and specific disability. Having spent the rest of the piece discussing the three different types of empathy invented by someone called Mark Davis – Perspective-Taking, Personal Distress and Empathic Concern – Riggio concludes by saying:

In reality, we all have some level of each of the types of empathy. The key is to understand the ways that we are empathic with others, and to realize the strengths and limitations of each type of empathy.

So… not what Sterling Casil is asserting, then. In fact, I can’t find a single piece of Riggio’s that categorises empathy as a disability at all, nor can I find any such claim made by another academic. No, Sterling Casil doesn’t explicitly argue that empathy as disability is Riggio’s thesis, but he’s the only authority she mentions in her entire piece, and as such, I’m inclined to think she’s gone looking for piecemeal opinions to support the idea that her particular brand of empathy makes her special, rather than acknowledging that empathy is a thing that most people have, but which they express in ways not necessarily identical to her own.

It seems to me that assuming strong empathy to be a unique, special and rare quality possessed only by a “few survivors” is a failure of empathy and imagination both.

Even a hundred years ago, those with autism were so isolated and so misunderstood that the chances they would have the freedom and safe lives to build, make and create were slim and none.

Again, where the hell is Sterling Casil getting this from? I’m not denying that many people on the autistic spectrum have both struggled and experienced discrimination at various points in history as a result of their condition, but as the term autism has only been in use since 1911, discrimination against the autistic as a specific group is a very recent phenomenon. More likely, as per the earlier example of different skillsets and perspectives being strengths or weaknesses in different contexts, their treatment was much more contingent on intersectional markers like gender, race and class (as, indeed, is still the case): a wealthy male aristocrat with idiosyncratic behaviour was much more likely to be accepted on his own terms, for instance, than a poor woman who did likewise. This generalised assumption of victimhood is so historically unsophisticated as to be fundamentally inaccurate – just another way in which Sterling-Casil badly misunderstands her subject area.

Our lives have changed and grown because of the FLK’s (Funny-Looking Kids) and FAK’s (Funny-Acting Kids). They are precious, valuable, essential.

What in the actual fuck is this nomenclature doing in a supposedly pro-disability piece? By all means, let me know if I’m missing something – if these are terms affectionately coined and used by those with disabilities in reference to themselves – but on the face of it, situated in the utter mess of this article, my reaction is one of stunned disbelief.

Humanity will deserve to leave this planet and go to the stars, and we’ll be able to survive and thrive—because of people like me.

On the basis of this piece, I beg to differ.

(This is an asshole thing to say. I’m aware of that. Let’s call it a little contextual irony.)

How can I possibly say we are all cripples?

Oh my god.

When a physically able person sees someone in a wheelchair and feels “sorry” for them, they should consider the different perceptions that wheelchair enables them to have. They see and hear things those who stand and walk do not. They get to live a different life. Different, not less.

I am not physically disabled, nor have I ever been. But I’m pretty fucking sure that, however positively or negatively one feels about using a wheelchair – about whether it’s something you “get” to do, as opposed to a thing you have to do – it doesn’t grant you magical powers of intuitive perception. Rather, I’m given to understand, the things one hears in a wheelchair that other people don’t aren’t secret universal truths, but condescending assumptions about their capabilities, ableist slurs and abuse, a whole lot of height-related awkwardness, and patronising platitudes from people who want to use their existence as an inspiration. Everyone lives a different life, but that doesn’t mean there’s any utility in erasing the complications that particular disabilities, and our attitudes towards them, frequently present. Acknowledging the fact that people in wheelchairs can live rich, full lives on their own terms doesn’t mean there aren’t wheelchair-specific problems still to navigate, or that it’s wrong for some people in wheelchairs to wish they didn’t need them.

The opposite of feeling instinctively “sorry” for a disabled person isn’t assuming they’re totally happy with their lot in life and the unique perspective it affords them, but is rather to treat them like a fucking person: that is, to not make judgements about how they might feel about themselves – or anything else, for that matter – on the basis of first appearances and their membership, visible or otherwise, of an enormously diverse group.

I wrote one well-known story called “To Kiss the Star,” about a young woman named Mel Armstrong, wheelchair-bound, blind and spastic with a heart defect. Mel won the lottery to be housed in a hardened spaceship —to get a perfect, near-immortal cyberbody—and travel to the stars. Hot damn! Mel doesn’t want to go. She’s in love with John, a handsome young man who’s been visiting her out of a partially misguided idea of charity. John’s been lying to Mel, as people will do. By the end of the story, it’s clear who the real cripple is. Not Mel – she can and will go to the stars.

The “real cripple”? A minute ago, that was all of us – but now, all of a sudden, the word has acquired a decidedly negative inference. John is the “real cripple” – the person who’s ultimately wrong and defective, despite being able-bodied – and do I really have to explain why that particular construction is still situating disability as a bad thing? UGH.

As Toni Morrison perhaps did not say, but I believe her to have said, so in my world, she has said, “I write in order to find out what I know.”

As Amy Sterling Casil perhaps did not say, but I believe her to have meant, so in my world, she has said, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

Now, after writing this, I understand why I am so little satisfied – these days, even disgusted – with fictional stereotypes. These stereotypes are an imposition of a limited, false image or idea on others. I like to think that some day, these falsehoods will no longer be sold as “entertainment.”

Stereotypes like autistic people being bereft of empathy and disabled persons having emotional superpowers, perhaps? DO GO ON.

Differently-abled or abled like the majority on the ability spectrum, we can learn how to use the senses we do have better. Just as those who have lost their sight experience greater perception in other senses, and just as those who use wheelchairs see the world from a different perspective.

Dear Ms Sterling Casil: being blind does not make everyone Daredevil, because not everyone who loses their sight does so in the same way, at the same time, under the same auspices. Also: enough with the wheelchair perspective! It’s starting to feel perilously like a height joke.

Viewed with the strongest perception that we can have at any given time, there is not one of us who is not a “cripple.”

And when everyone’s super, no one will be.

Also, uh. You realise there’s still a need to make specific accommodations for people with specific disabilities, right? That the issue doesn’t magically disappear if you randomly declare everyone disabled?

To overcome our mutual disability, it isn’t about the so-important “I” or “me.” It’s about “we.” It isn’t about what you want, it’s about who and what you are as well as everybody else.

We’ll never get off this planet, much less do the part life has given to us, if we keep on thinking about our isolated selves.

In other words, nobody should talk about their particular problems or specific needs, because treating disability as an amorphous, generalised concept is much more useful than acknowledging those it affects as individuals.

Money’s one thing, Vernor. Getting over our damn selves and feeling what others feel and respecting that: quite another.

YOU DON’T SAY.

Here’s a moral for you: Assholes can still exhibit empathy in other contexts, because being empathetic doesn’t magically stop you from being an asshole – even and especially when discussing your own empathy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shove my face in a pillow and scream.

ETA: I’ve gone through and changed Sterling-Casil to Sterling Casil, as I’d evidently been spelling my interlocutor’s name with a hyphen that doesn’t belong there. Just because I think she’s wrong doesn’t mean I can’t get her name right.

Star Wars Redux, ft. SARCASM

Warning: spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, much rant.

As keen followers of this blog may be aware, I recently went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens and enjoyed it immensely. In fact, I wrote a review to that effect, because having opinions on the internet is kind of what I do. I was therefore not surprised, on waking this morning, to discover that someone had left a comment both quoting and linking me to a very different review, presumably by way of tacit rebuttal. This is not an uncommon occurrence: indeed, for an opinion-monger, the existence of other people’s contradictory opinions is something of a Bethesda special. To whit:

As such, before leaping down the perpetual Someone Is Wrong On The Internet rabbit-hole of online counterarguments, it’s necessary to understand that you can’t object to everything; there simply aren’t enough hours in the day or, indeed, fucks to give. Contrary to what some might make of the fact that I periodically respond at all, my methods are not indiscriminate, and by and large, negative reviews of a thing I enjoy fall short of my personal yardstick for engagement. If I wasted precious energy yelling at everyone who fails to share my taste in films, I wouldn’t get very far in life, and especially not when the film in question is so culturally omnipresent as to provoke every conceivable flavour of reaction.

But oh, internets: this review. It was left in my comments, and even having mocked it in the traditional manner, I can’t pass up the chance for a more detailed response.

The author, Laurie A. Couture, is an advocate of something called “paleo parenting”, a phrase guaranteed to make the eyelid twitch, as well as “a holistic parenting and alternative education coach.” I mention this, not because I feel that someone’s profession should disqualify them from having an opinion, but because it strikes me as being deeply ironic that, for someone who professes an alternative approach to dealing with teens and children, Couture mentions the friendzone, that most mainstream of sexist bastions, in her first paragraph.

To quote:

Did you notice the contrast in Star Wars: The Force Awakens?… the contrasts between the heart-skipping chemistry between the mature Han and Leia vs. the hollow, parched dynamics between the young Rey and Finn; the contrast between the strong, proud, compassion of General Leia vs. the hostile, aloof and disconnected Rey; and the contrast between the confident, masterful and tender Han Solo vs. the bumbling Finn who repeatedly sacrificed himself for a woman who only “friend zones” him in the end.

Now, look. Okay. Let’s pretend, for a moment, that the friendzone isn’t a hugely misogynistic concept that gets trotted out as a way to blame women for failing to reciprocate the romantic feelings of certain entitled men, as though women aren’t fundamentally entitled to say no or, indeed, to want platonic friendships with members of the opposite sex. Let’s pretend that this is in any way an objective, non-sexist complaint to make, and address it on those grounds: how the fuck does such an accusation apply to Rey and Finn?

It doesn’t, is the short answer, because even if you accept the friendzone as an actual thing, and not just a bullshit, shorthand way of saying “the hero didn’t get the girl, so it must be her fault”, it literally doesn’t apply here. Finn is not romantically rejected by Rey, because he never propositions her in the first place. Their final scene involves Rey kissing an unconscious Finn’s forehead, telling him goodbye as she goes off to find Luke Skywalker – certainly, she calls him a friend in this moment, but given that they aren’t in a romantic relationship, and as we have every reason to believe that Rey will eventually return with Skywalker, there’s no sense in which her departure – as urgently necessary as it is – can be construed as rejection. Nor, as per the other oft-cited criteria of friendzoning, can Rey be accused of having “dumped” Finn for someone else: there are no other candidates for her affections, nor does she say anything to make us think she dislikes him.

Quite the opposite, in fact: Rey demonstrably cares for Finn, having “repeatedly sacrificed” herself for him, too. But let’s just pick at that wording a moment – “repeatedly sacrificed himself”, as though the fact that Finn didn’t let his new friend die only makes sense if he wants to sleep with her; and, more, as though the fact that he acted with that goal in mind makes Rey a bad person for failing to reciprocate. If this is the bar that must be jumped to establish the romantic/sexual certainty of a pairing, what are we to make of the similar risks Finn takes to save Poe from the First Order – or, indeed, the risks Poe takes to save Finn in turn? As Couture makes no reference to queerness in her review, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that such an interpretation never occurred to her. In order for her thesis to work, the exact same behaviours must take on radically difference significance depending on the gender of both subject and object: Finn saving Rey must mean he wants her romantically, but Finn saving Poe can only be platonic. To which I say: utter bullshit.

More, however, is to come:

The two generations of us who are old enough to have been alive when the original three Star Wars films emblazoned their genius into our pop-cultural legacy appreciate the nostalgia of Han and Leia’s warm embrace… However, the youngest generations, the Millennials, as well as the first arrivals of the yet undefined new cohort, are internalizing very different messages about love, connection, sacrifice and the beauty and richness of both maleness and femaleness. They aren’t looking to the mature characters as their role models or heroes –

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the combination of ignorance and fan-policing that went into making this paragraph. Not only is Couture completely eliding the role of the prequel films in making Star Wars a generational constant, but she’s effectively arguing hipster-logic: that her nostalgia is better and more authentic than our nostalgia, because she’s old enough to have seen the originals on the big screen. Never mind that a staggering number of Millenials  grew up watching Star Wars on VHS and DVD, played with lightsabres and Death Star Lego throughout our childhoods and were therefore already invested when the prequels came along: you don’t get to determine how “correctly” someone is performing fandom based on their age or the point at which they started.

And where, exactly, is Couture getting the idea that none of us – that nobody younger than her – is looking to the mature characters as role models or heroes? Does she think that liking Finn, Rey and Poe somehow magically precludes a love of Han, Luke and Leia – that our enthusiasm for a new dynamic is somehow an inherent betrayal of the old, instead of a context-appropriate response to a thing we love? Has she assumed that her dislike of the new characters must necessarily correlate to young people disliking the old ones? Or does she honestly think so little of the young as to inherently doubt our capacity for identification with older characters, even when we’ve grown up with them?

What makes this even more ridiculous is her fixation on “Millenials” in particular, rather than – as I suspect she really means – teenagers in specific. Because Millenials, aka Gen Y, were born – as even a cursory search could tell you – between 1980 and the early 2000s, which puts the oldest of us well into our mid-thirties: even Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, who play Rey and Finn, were born in 1992, making them both adults in their early twenties. The only Millenials left in their teens are those born after 1997; which is to say, vastly less than half. Which renders Courture’s use of the term – or rather, her argument itself – decidedly out of touch; as though she’s so used to thinking of Millenials as “those troubled teens” that she hasn’t bothered to notice we’ve grown up.

But I digress.

…but to the young and anxious Finn and Rey, who embody the new unhealthy gender dynamic: The young female who believes she must be hostile, rejecting and cold in order to assert her strength and relevance and the young male who clumsily acts as if he must apologize for his existence, his maleness, his intellect, his emotions, his needs and his pain while he chases after the type of female who will only confirm his sense of irrelevance.

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodruigez:

I mean. Look. Okay. I could make an argument about how Rey being “hostile, rejecting and cold” is completely understandable, given her isolated, hardscrabble existence and early abandonment, but I won’t, for two reasons: firstly, it sidesteps the criticism that, regardless of any internal narrative justification, this is still the type of character we’re being presented with; and secondly, because it’s such a reductive, selective view of the character as to be wildly inaccurate.

I’ll start with this latter point first, because honestly – what film was Couture watching? A Rey who was utterly “hostile, rejecting and cold” likely wouldn’t have bothered to rescue BB8 from being turned into scrap; but if she had, she’d certainly have sold the droid without a second thought when offered a literal fortune in exchange. Instead, Rey walks away from riches to keep BB8, fighting off multiple attackers in the process. Yes, she snaps at Finn in the middle of a firefight, when she has no idea who he is, but after their escape from Jakku aboard the Millenium Falcon, the moment the two of them share in celebration of their success – smiling, laughing, utterly joyful and exhilarated, talking over the top of each other in mutual awe and excitement at their achievements – is the antithesis of the character Couture is describing. That Rey asserts herself around strangers is both a survival mechanism and a product of her upbringing, certainly, but it doesn’t stop her from being emotional, kind and caring in other contexts, nor does it diminish her capacity for joy. Her awed, wistful, almost fragile admission on arriving at Takodana – “I didn’t know there was so much green in the whole galaxy!” – is likewise at odds with Couture’s concept of her.

The current abundance of Strong Female Characters in wider media, like our habit of assessing their worthiness via an incredibly flawed definition of strength, is – I agree – a problem, and one I’m happy to discuss. But only by the most forced, reductive reading of Rey can she be shoehorned into this category: her compassion for Finn and BB8, her delight in new places and experiences, and her clear affection for those around her must all be ignored in order to construct such a reading, and as such, I reject it utterly.

I am similarly outraged by Couture’s gross mischaracterisation of Finn as “the young male who clumsily acts as if he must apologize for his existence, his maleness, his intellect, his emotions, his needs and his pain while he chases after the type of female who will only confirm his sense of irrelevance.” At no point in the narrative does Finn do any of these things: both Rey and Poe – and, indeed, the entire Resistance – are quick to praise Finn’s talents. As such, he spends much of the film being congratulated by virtual strangers for being a good person and a skilled fighter: his delight in Rey’s piloting the Falcon is just as sincere as her appreciation for his gunning, a specific praise also offered by Poe. In fact, the only characters to whom Finn’s emotions, needs, intellect and pain are viewed as negatives – as obstacles, even – are the villains: Kylo Ren, Admiral Hux and Captain Phasma, who curse his rejection of their brainwashing, speculate his need for forcible re-education, and who view his intrinsic humanity as a betrayal of their ideology.

That being so, beginning with Finn’s escape from the First Order, the entire film can arguably be viewed as a rejection of every stereotype of toxic masculinity Couture claims Finn embodies: in defiance of those who want him to remain a cold-blooded killer, emotionless, lacking both initiative and personal needs, Finn seeks out people who recognise his kindness, his joy, his intelligence – it’s his plan, remember, to flood the Falcon with gas when they think they’re under attack, and Rey who agrees to it – and his personhood, never once questioning his loyalty or his value despite his Stormtrooper upbringing.

As for Finn “[chasing] after the type of female who will only confirm his sense of irrelevance” – well. Canonically, Finn neither initiates nor attempts to initiate a romantic relationship with Rey during the film, making this a spurious claim rather than an established fact, never mind how this interpretation slights Rey. As such, it’s worth remembering that every narrative marker of closeness and sacrifice used to subtly ‘pair’ Finn with Rey – their shared delight in each other; the planned rescue; the moments of physical contact – apply equally to his relationship with Poe. Thus: unless you’re either homophobic, hypocritical or both, it’s impossible to argue that the potential Finn/Rey pairing exists on a somehow more exalted, steadier footing than Finn/Poe potentially does, as they both derive from identical gestures.

There is an additional, more insidious contrast in Star Wars 7 that expands these unhealthy gender dynamics to the darkest realm of the Dark Side: The insinuation, through dialogue, struggle and drama, that Kylo Ren’s invasive use of The Force on Rey, a woman, was more violating than when used just as violently on Resistance pilot, Po, a man. Likewise, violence against males was presented as collateral damage and even suggestively comedic, while Rey’s vulnerability to harm was always the cliffhanger.

Ignoring the apparent paradox here – that, having spent paragraphs insisting Rey is hard and strong, Couture now hinges this complaint on her vulnerability – I think this is a long bow to draw. While I agree that, culturally, we have a deep-seated tendency to normalise violence against men, trivialising their pain – and especially when that pain is inflicted on men of colour (like Poe) by white men (like Kylo) – while sensationalising violence against women, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here; or rather, if it is, I don’t think Couture has the right of why. Given that the film’s big showdown is between Rey and Kylo, it makes sense that we’d spend more time on his interrogation of her; though again, I’m puzzled by the insistence on her vulnerability as a factor here. Even when Finn and Han show up to rescue Rey, she’s already in the process of rescuing herself, to say nothing of the fact that, in the final scenes, Rey is seemingly the one character whose survival we’re never called upon to doubt: it’s Finn who’s left behind, bleeding and possibly dead, while Rey has her duel with Kylo, and Han who engages in the fatal attempt to try and win Kylo to the light side.

That the bulk of the collateral damage in the film is wielded against men is a result of sexism, yes, but not the way Couture thinks: there are simply more men present, period. Or rather, if there are more women among the Stormtroopers than Captain Phasma, their uniforms effectively obscure their gender, and while I agree that having more ladies in the background would have been a nice thing, even if all they were doing was getting shot at, I don’t agree that this is part of some big, weird conspiracy to diminish men by portraying them as a majority. If there is a complaint to be levied about the way Poe’s torture is handled compared to Rey’s, I’d be more inclined to view it as a problem of race than gender, or at the least, of occupying an intersection between the two. There is, after all, a lamentably well-documented history of the medical establishment and culture generally treating POC as being more natively impervious to pain than white people, and that’s something our analysis should reflect.

On the surface, these media and cultural messages seem benign to the general population: Are they not “empowering” women? Even if hostility, aloofness and rejection were the definitions of being “empowered” (which they are not), what are these cultural messages depicting about men? Are boys being showed role models of men being “empowered”; their needs and feelings important to be considered? Is male suffering and violation treated as egregiously wrong as female suffering and violation? Are boys shown men who are confident, competent, masterful and who are also respected for being vulnerable? Are boys shown males being loved for who they are rather than given only brief admiration for when they “change” or sacrifice their bodies? Or are boys primarily shown men in roles of being shamed, of being dangerous, of being mocked or of being beaten or murdered as punishments for their “badness”?

As much as it frustrates me, I always find it unutterably sad when feminism is blamed for the failings of patriarchy, as though the fight for gender equality, and not the specifics of its original imbalance, are responsible for enforcing toxic masculinity. As such, Couture’s complaints are difficult to address, not because they lack answers – or, necessarily, merit – but because, as her later statements on the subject make clear, she’s hellbent on blaming feminism for misogyny’s evils, and has thereby conflated the two.

Thus: while it is entirely relevant to ask about the negative messages men are receiving from visual media, you can’t divorce that question from the wider context – namely, that men, and especially straight white men, are still responsible for creating the vast majority of films while simultaneously occupying the majority of roles within them, to the point of being grossly, disproportionately represented. To cite a recent statistic, only 7% of Hollywood directors are female, with the same study finding that 80% of films made in 2014 had no female writers at all; while in 2014-15, less than half of all speaking roles on broadcast TV went to women. Indeed, in picking Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the subject of her ire, Courture conveniently ignores that it was both written and directed entirely by men, for all that she seems eager to blame its failings on the false empowerment of women. (One of the three producers, Kathleen Kennedy, is female, but set alongside director/producer/writer J. J. Abrams, fellow producer Bryan Burk and writers Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, the odds, to paraphrase The Hunger Games, are not exactly in her favour.)

As such, when Couture argues that “the incessant derision of males and the promotion of female hostility is having serious repercussions for our culture,” she’s making a fundamental error, assuming the relationship between the two phenomenons is causative rather than correlative: that female empowerment is causing a dearth of positive representations for men. In reality, they come from the same source: that of patriarchy and its toxic, narrow, harmful concept of masculinity, which is always constructed at the expense of women. The pushback Couture identifies – that of female anger, which has both positive and negative expressions – is not responsible for the decades of sexist stories that portray men as emotionless, disposable and domestically incompetent, but is rather railing against it. Hook, line and sinker, she has bought the MRA myth that feminists are responsible for every evil patriarchy has ever wielded against men, and so is helping to perpetuate it.

Consider these claims, for instance:

The consequences go beyond mere entertainment laughs. The incessant derision of males and the promotion of female hostility is having serious repercussions for our culture: Natural boy behavior is pathologized in schools, causing boys to be prescribed mind-altering psychotropic drugs in epidemic numbers. Young men are subverting higher education as campuses have become increasingly hostile to young males, viewing them as sexual predators and obstacles to women. Empirical research has shown that sexual and domestic violence by females against males is equal to or has surpassed male violence against women. While innumerable organizations and campaigns are in place to empower girls and women, and to bring attention to violence against females, there are no such counterparts to empower boys and men and bring attention to violence against males. Most tragically, 80% of all suicide victims are men and boys.

Let’s address them one at a time, shall we?

Point the first: What, exactly, does Courture mean by “natural boy behaviour”? The fact is, we socialise boys and girls differently from birth, while biological sex is a spectrum rather than a binary. As such, we have a great many cultural myths about gendered behaviour as innate that are really the product of social conditioning, and which frequently work to the detriment of boys and girls. For instance: while active boys are sometimes over-prescribed medication on the basis of their gender, girls with genuine mental illnesses and learning difficulties are being underdiagnosed for the same reason: a socially constructed idea of how they “should” behave and what the condition “always” looks like. Medical sexism is a pernicious thing: now that an entrenched masculine stereotype for boys with ADD/ADHD exists – and with the symptoms that most often present with boys held up as the yardstick for ‘normal’ presentation – the conditions themselves are seen as fundamentally masculine, leading doctors to miss their presentation in girls.

Point the second: According to a recent White House task force, one in five university students in the USA experiences sexual assault on campus, while in the UK, one in three female students is assaulted or abused on campus. Disproportionately, the victims of these assaults are female, the perpetrators male, and while that fact should by no means be used to diminish the experiences of male victims or those abused by women, it should stand as a factual rebuke of Couture’s irresponsibly dismissive language, which seems to treat the entire thing as a fiction conjured for the sole purpose of disadvantaging men. Never mind that study where one third of college men admitted their willingness to rape a woman if they thought they could get away with it, an admission made largely because, if the word ‘rape’ wasn’t actually used, the men in question were much more likely to endorse the behaviour. Even when the victims are male, as in the Joe Paterno case, universities have a less than stellar track record in dealing with rape and assault on campus. It’s endemic, it’s awful, and it’s unutterably misogynistic in its treatment of everyone involved, and if Couture’s big takeaway from the scope of the problem is that it might encourage women to see men as obstacles, and not the fact that sexual assault is happening with such frequency, then I can summarise her position in two words: rape apology.

Point the third: While it’s certainly true that rates of domestic violence against men tend to be under-reported, especially when the perpetrators are female, the recording of such data is, at present, highly politicised, with great variation in the results produced. What is demonstrably true, however, and directly counter to Couture’s assertion, is that certain campaigns and institutions exist do to empower and help men who experience such violence, though not in greater or equivalent numbers as those that exist for women. There are men’s shelters, charities that provide free counselling to victims of violence and sexual assault regardless of gender (I used to work for one), and there are innumerable men’s rights groups actively discussing the problem – though whether the rampant misogyny of many such institutions ever translates into actual help, I’m not sure. But certainly, if we’re pointing fingers at who created the toxic masculine stereotype that “real men” are neither victims nor ask for help, then I’m going to put the blame squarely at patriarchy’s feet, and note that, rather than being opposed to helping such men, it’s frequently  feminists who are first in line to do so.

Similarly, in point the fourth: the fact that 80% of suicides are men is not the fault of feminism, but of patriarchy, and for the exact same reasons listed above – the insistence that men be emotionless and strong rather than seeking help leaves them feeling as though they have no other way out. While there are an increasing number of campaigns designed to address this, there’s still a way to go: but “the promotion of female hostility” has absolutely zilch to do with their tragic necessity.

Boycotting media sources and walking away from campaigns and institutions that promote disunity and hostility between females and males or that exclude males from empowerment, concern and protection, is the fastest way to make systemic changes.

Clearly, this is a sentiment I agree with; I just have zero faith in Couture’s ability to apply it with any degree of intelligence. In fact, her determination to shoehorn Finn and Rey into fitting a preconceived mould has lead her to miss the obvious: that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is utterly opposed to toxic masculinity. As male heroes, Finn and Poe are both kind, selfless and considerate of others. They don’t objectify women, but respect, accept and befriend them as equals. They don’t hide their emotions, but are overt in their concern for their friends and for each other. While skilled, they don’t brag or boast or needlessly start fights, but use their prowess to defend the people they care about. It’s Kylo Ren, the villain, who lashes out when angry; who represses his emotions; who’s afraid to be seen as weak. Finn, Rey and Poe succeed because they seek help when they need it, come back for their friends, and open their arms to strangers.

And if Couture really can’t see that – if she’s determined to view youthful self-determination, gender equality and kindness as some bizarre attack on men?

Then it’s her loss, not ours.

Jurassic World: A Summary

Jurassic World is a film that attempts to highlight the dangers of crassly commercialising dinosaurs by… well, crassly commercialising dinosaurs.

The irony of this was apparently lost on the writers.

Look: I get it. You wanted an excuse to make a dinosaur that was bigger than a t-rex, but you couldn’t be bothered looking up giganotosaurus or spinosaurus and anyway, that whole Meddling Mad Science angle is so appealing, why not go there instead? So you wrote an excuse for it into the script about how Kids These Days with their internets and their rap music are just so jaded that only bigger, better, newer dinosaurs can hold their attention, and then you spent the whole film explaining why building bigger, better, newer dinosaurs with Meddling Mad Science is, in fact, a terrible idea. But before all the carnage and death, when you were showing us the excited younger brother dragging his disaffected sibling through the park – and I’m sorry, but even with the 3D glasses on, it still looks like a plastic model in the panning shots – you made the mistake of assuming your actual audience is just as jaded as your fictional one. As such, you didn’t bother with a slow reveal, or a sense of wonder, or any sort of visual tease with the dinosaurs at all, which is more than a little disappointing for those of us who’ve been waiting for this film since 1997 (The Lost World was okay, but Jurassic Park III never happened, shhh). Everything was presented as ordinary, mundane, boring, right up until it all went to shit; and even then, your CGI indominus rex wasn’t a patch on Jurassic Park’s t-rex, not least because you couldn’t be bothered to keep the size and scale of it consistent, so that it gets noticeably bigger or smaller depending on the scene –

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the sexism.

Let’s talk about Karen’s chirpy, passive-aggressive exchanges with her sons and husband. Let’s talk about how, when Zach’s girlfriend asks him to send her photos from his week away so she won’t forget what he looks like, then tells him she loves him, and Zach replies by basically shouting YEAH BYE and noping out to the car, she still stares adoringly after him, as though this is a thing an actual, emotionally invested girlfriend would do. Let’s talk about how Zach then spends the first half of the film staring creepily at every teenage girl he encounters. Let’s talk about Karen’s assumption that of course her single sister is going to want kids – not if she has them, but when – and the way she breaks down in guilt-inducing tears on the phone because Zach is just so mean to his little brother sometimes and why isn’t Claire there to make him play nice?  Let’s talk about Claire being criticised in the narrative for being trepidatious around a pair of kids she’s too busy to mind and hasn’t seen in seven years, as though she’s not doing her sister a bigass favour by taking them in the first place. Let’s talk about how Claire is apparently so clueless despite her high-powered job that not only can’t she remember how old her nephews are or how long it’s been since she’s seen them – as though this information never came up when the trip was organised – but when she’s out hunting them down, she unironically asks if Owen can track their scent, as though this is a skill that actual humans possess.

Let’s talk about how, after that one meeting with the executives we never see again, Claire is criticised by literally every man she encounters regardless of age and rank – Larry, her underling; Masrani, her boss; Zach and Gray, her nephews; Owen, her (ugh) love interest; Hoskins, the obligatory InGen douchebag who isn’t eaten by raptors anywhere near soon enough – and how not a single fucking person treats her as competent. Let’s talk about how the narrative never even tries to portray her as good at her job, given the whole ‘let’s send people into the indominus rex paddock before activating the tracking beacon that would’ve told me it was there the whole time’ fiasco that literally causes dozens of deaths and the ruin of the entire theme park. Let’s talk about how, when she finally does do something awesome by rescuing Owen from a pterodactyl, her nephews respond by asking who Owen is and, even though Claire just did something totally badass while Owen lay on the ground, he’s the one they want to stick with for protection. Let’s talk about how, when Claire has the similarly good idea of leading the t-rex out to fight the indominus, she somehow ends up lying behind it on the ground in an actual swimwear model pose, having spent the entire film steadily shedding clothing. Let’s talk about the needlessly protracted, gratuitous death of Zara. Let’s talk about Zach telling Gray not to cry about their parents getting divorced, even though he only found out about it himself that fucking second, because guys aren’t meant to do that, damn it! Let’s talk about how, in accordance with this dictum, the only other people who cry on screen are women.

Let’s talk about what the fuck the scriptwriters were even on when they wrote this mess, sweet Christ on a goddamn bicycle. Because even without all the shit mentioned above – and it is, as Dr Ian Malcolm so famously said, one big pile of shit – the script is more full of dropped threads than an amateur’s sewing basket.

The whole thing about Zach and Gray’s parents getting divorced? Never mentioned again. Zach’s girlfriend? Never mentioned again. The reason for Zach’s apparent lack of commitment to said girlfriend? Never even discussed. The opening gambit about Claire not wanting kids, which is – one charitably assumes – meant to evoke the same claim originally made by Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park? Irrelevant, given that, unlike Alan, Claire doesn’t then spend the whole film bonding with Zach and Gray; in fact, they barely communicate, and the boys end the film liking Owen more than her. (And don’t even get me started on the very salient contextual difference between one half of a lovingly married couple playfully bringing up the subject of kids with their male spouse, who eventually changes his mind, and a single professional woman being pressured to want children by a sibling who, to make the whole thing even more ironic, is going through a divorce.) The reason for Dr Wu’s apparent defection to InGen? Never explained. Owen’s status as a navy guy who somehow got tapped to work as a fucking dinosaur behaviouralist despite the fact that, as far as the script is concerned, he’s never even worked with animals before? Not explained. The thing where Gray is apparently smart enough to know everything there is to know about the park – and can apparently repair and jumpstart a decades-old Jeep he instantly identifies by make and model, Jesus Christ – but still somehow believes that his brother once killed a ghost to save him? I literally cannot even.

And okay, look. I get that a not inconsiderable portion of the internet has become rather swoony on the subject of Chris Pratt’s Captain Tight Pants transformation, but the scene where he’s introduced fixing a classic motorbike outside his charming bungalow while sipping Coke from a glass fucking bottle like he’s recreating Dylan O’Brien’s Teen Vogue photoshoot, and then proceeds to get all up in Claire’s business by making at least one horrible innuendo, mocking how terrible she was on their date and grinning because she’s a corporate suit who doesn’t understand the animals or like getting her hands dirty, while she stands there in what is effectively a jungle wearing a pristine white business suit? Yes, hello: nineteen eighty-four called, it wants its Romancing the Stone tropes back.

I mean, come ON.

 

Actually, scrap that: Romancing the Stone was a better film than Jurassic World, not least because it had a sense of its own ridiculousness, as well as – case in point – a scary gang boss who loved romance novels. And, you know, actual chemistry between the two lead characters, instead of the cardboard bickering that’s meant to pass for that between Pratt and Howard. Which, in fairness, is less their fault than it is a consequence of the utterly abysmal script, which riffs shamelessly on the original film with zero understanding of what made it work. (Hint: it wasn’t a Jimmy Fallon cameo.)

In Jurassic Park terms, then, here’s how bad the characterisation in Jurassic World is: Claire is a female version of Donald Gennaro, the bloodsucking lawyer famously eaten while taking a shit, who spends the whole film being alternately condescended to and hit on by a hybrid of Dr Ian Malcolm and Robert Muldoon, aka Owen. Their chemistry is dismal, their one kiss is worse, and both of them get less emotional development and catharsis than Blue the velociraptor, who’s probably just grateful – given that her siblings are called Charlie, Delta and Echo – that she wasn’t named Foxtrot.

Cool gyroscopes, though.

Paul Cook On SF: In Which I Lack The Ability To Even

You know, as strange as it may sound given how much time I spend ranting on the internet, I actually live a rich, full life, one in which I regularly leave the house and talk to my friends about a wide range of things that do not, in fact, suck. I’m also a fairly busy person, especially right now, what with finishing up a new novel, writing various reviews and columns, tending my seven-month-old son and – oh, yeah – the fact that we just moved house. So even though I still make time for online shenanigans, the number of articles I read in full, per day, has dropped dramatically, which leaves me feeling like some sort of digital meerkat, briefly popping up into the bright, popcultural sunlight of the internet, then ducking back down into the subterranean warren of Shit I Actually Need To Do, No, Seriously, How The Fuck Is It September Already? And most of the time, it’s a policy that serves me well.

But invariably – and with a regularity that is fast depleting my finite stores of dispassionate, well-reasoned criticism – there comes a day when I poke my head above ground and encounter a fresh, steaming pile of bullshit, such that I start gritting my teeth and channelling Kat Stratford from 10 Things I Hate About You.

And today, we’ve hit the trifecta: this spectacularly douchey, concern-trolling, woe-is-my-unrecognised-talent Facebook post by John Ringo lamenting John Scalzi’s Hugo win, Mike Krahulik’s PAX announcement that he regretted ever discontinuing their rape-apologist Dickwolves merchandise, and – my personal favourite – an astonishingly incoherent post by one Paul Cook over at Amazing Stories on When Science Fiction Isn’t Science Fiction (which, surprise! turns out to be if it contains romance elements and is therefore written for ladies).

And I mean, OK: so Ringo is an entitled, embittered asshat, and Krahulik is the same foot-in-mouth, mostly jerky dude he always was, though with an increasing glimmer of self awareness and repentance, and those are definitely things worth talking about – as, indeed, many people are already doing. Once upon a time, I’d likely have gone in to bat about them myself. But like I said, I have limited ranting time these days, and so instead I’ll stick with responding to Paul Cook’s piece, because, seriously? Are we still having this same damn conversation about “real” SFF and why romance isn’t part of it?

We are?

I wish I was, rage comics dude. I really wish I was.

Right from the outset of Cook’s piece, it’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with some pretty deeply-ingrained assumptions about the genre. To quote (my emphasis):

Most writers who publish in the science fiction field stay within the usual parameters of the field, continuing their careers writing what no one would doubt as standard science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein to name but four, wrote and published their works as science fiction, with the occasional foray into the fantastic–but not outright fantasy. Heinlein did write Glory Road which was science fiction using fantasy tropes that no one would mistake for aspects of a regular fantasy novel. That is to say, Heinlein’sGlory Road isn’t at all like one of Robert Jordan’s epic fantasies nor does it resemble the Arthurian fantasy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s classic (and truly excellent novel),  The Mists of Avalon.

That said, some writers who might have started off in science fiction soon reveal their true selves when they start publishing what they really want to write about.

Or, in other words: Cook’s definition of “standard science fiction” doesn’t include any “outright fantasy” elements (though it can include “fantasy tropes” PROVIDED nobody could mistake the story for being a “regular fantasy novel”,  meaning either “epic” or “Arthurian” fantasies). This definition appears to be sacrosanct to Cook, because when, in his estimation, SF writers deviate from “the usual parameters of the field”, they’re not just mixing it up, evolving the genre, exploring new narrative possibilities or otherwise striving for originality – no. They’re revealing their “true selves” and writing “what they really want to write about” – language which not only couches their deviation as a betrayal of SF, but which actively suggests their former use of the genre was somehow all a cynical act; that they never really wanted to write SF at all, caring only for their subsequent stories and not their original SF works, as though the latter output was merely a misbegotten firstborn left to fend for itself after the arrival of a long-awaited second child.

He then proceeds to list the authors to whom he thinks this wildly prejudicial and utterly bizarre characterisation applies. Namely: Gene Wolfe, Lois McMaster Bujold, and duo Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; he also complains about “steampunk writers… shifting over to writing about zombies,” and while he names no names in that instance, the paragraph in question is accompanied by a picture of Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker cover, which would seem to indicate at least some measure of dissatisfaction with her work in particular.

Clearly, then, Cook feels strongly about what constitutes real SF – but despite how negatively he’s characterised such genre-hopping dilettantism, that doesn’t mean he necessarily hates the works in question; just the fact that people keep calling such books SF, when in his mind, they’re not. So what does he actually say to defend his position?

Of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, he says this (my emphasis again):

 I can tell you that these books–masterpieces as everyone seems to think they are–are actually medieval/Arthurian fantasies. In fact, there is virtually no real “science fiction” in these books other than various tropes… Severian’s travels and adventures and storytelling (Book Two has a long fairy tale inserted in the middle of the novel that goes absolutely nowhere and adds nothing to the novel) are straight out of a YA rite-of-passage fantasy…  The earth does not wobble on its axis (as it would if the moon were gone) and without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life. These things don’t matter to the fantasist. They didn’t matter to Wolfe.

Now, conceivably, that first backhanded disparagement – that people only “seem to think” Wolfe’s books are “masterpieces”, implying that Cook thinks they’re anything but – could just be the product of poor grammar, as the insertion of a comma after the word masterpieces would strongly imply that Cook agrees with its usage; and in either case, I don’t particularly care. Cook is, after all, entitled to his opinion about the merit of various books, and especially given that I’ve read no Wolfe myself, I’m hardly abristle at this possible slight to his honour. I mention it only because, if intended as a slight – and I suspect it is – it contextualises Cook’s subsequent judgements as belonging to a series of negative ones. In which case, the remark about the book resembling a “YA rite-of-passage fantasy” is clearly a disparaging one; and this sets off warning bells for me. Similarly, his subsequent assertion that proper details and scientific research “don’t matter to the fantasist” is jarring, as is the simultaneous inference that true SF always gets such things right. Being able to pick holes in the worldbuilding of a given novel might well demonstrate its structural failings, but that doesn’t mean the book belongs to a different genre. Off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of fantasy novels whose authors take extraordinary care with their inclusion of real-world details, just as I can name multiple SF stories that show a comparative lack of care for science. The whole idea of FTL travel and wormhole jumps, for instance, is just as handwavium-based as Wolfe’s decision to ignore vulcanism and a wobbly Earth axis, and yet I doubt that the inclusion of either element would irritate Cook to the same degree. Whatever: as I already said, I don’t really care what he thinks of Wolfe’s work – but I do care that he thinks sloppy worldbuilding is somehow a symptom of fantasy-writing.

Onwards, then, to his criticism of Bujold. This is where the real problems start, and in such an offensively baffling way that I can’t help but quote the whole paragraph (emphasis mine, again):

Another writer well-praised (from every corner) is Lois McMaster Bujold. Her great work is the Miles Vorkosigan series. These are supposed to be military science fiction stories, but they are really at their core Romance novels. At first, they were military science fiction novels of a higher order than most. But the romance elements creep in very early on. Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the corridors. All of this is right out of Alexander Dumas. True, these intrigues and flourishes do happen in the real world (or they used to), but Bujold, over time with novels such as Miles in Loveand Cordelia’s Honor, you can see that Bujold is a closet romance writer. Not that this is a bad thing, but some of us aren’t that interested in romance. For me, personally, it takes much of the dramatic urgency out of a story if the hero is already married or if during a skirmish comes back to canoodle or wine or dine with his beloved before rushing back to the fray.

I honestly don’t know which is more painful: Cook’s efforts to try and say that really, it’s OK Bujold writes romance even though he doesn’t like it, or the totally oblivious sexism with which he undercuts this assertion. In remarking that Bujold “tips her hand” by including “romance elements” – which, he says, involve an “attention to detail that only women would find attractive” – he characterises romance as being a wholly feminine genre, such that, when he goes on to say that “some of us aren’t that interested in romance”, it seems pretty clear that by “some of us”, Cook means men.  Whether intentionally or not, he therefore manages to dismiss Bujold, one of the most respected and multi-award-winning SF writers out there, as not being a real SF author because she actually just writes romance and romance is for women only. Which makes his subsequent remark that all her “attention to detail that only women find attractive” is “right out of Alexander [sic] Dumas” all the weirder: I mean, what’s he trying to say with this? That Dumas only wrote for women, or that he was also a closet romance writer? It just doesn’t make any sense, and yet the insult to both women and romance is so palpable it left me staring at the screen in disbelief, jaw clenched.

On closer examination, though, it’s his final sentence that actually worries me most: specifically, the admission that it bores him “if the hero is already married”. It’s clear this description is meant to accurately summarise romance stories as a whole, but as even a cursory perusal of the genre would make plain, nothing could be further from the truth. The Happily Ever After is where, barring cameo appearances in future volumes, romance stories stop – it is emphatically not what constitutes their defining narrative structure. The Vorkosigan books, by contrast, feature both sides of the story: we see the characters meet and fall in love, but because their romantic, pre-HEA friction isn’t the defining aspect of the narrative, but rather just a single facet of a larger story, we also see them afterwards, getting on with their lives together. So while the series definitely contains romantic elements, collectively, the books aren’t romance novels. I don’t say that to defend Bujold against the accusation of writing romance, because I don’t believe there’s anything lesser or pejorative about writing romance instead of SF (and I certainly don’t believe it’s a women-only genre; female-dominated, maybe, in terms of readership and output, but that’s hardly the same thing, and a separate point besides). No: what bothers me is that, when Cook says he doesn’t like to read about married heroes who take a break from fighting to “canoodle” with their sweethearts, it feels like an admission that he prefers his (male) heroes to be single and to lack a romantic attachment to the women in their lives. And this is a very different thing: because whereas Bujold’s decision to portray happy, realistic, functional marriages necessarily involves male characters who treat the women they love with respect, Cook seems to be against that – because all that kindness and love and icky lady romance gets in the way of the action. And that makes me wonder: does he, then, have no issue with SF stories where the hero is a womaniser, someone who sleeps with various sexy maidens while in pursuit of his duty and doesn’t care enough to see them again afterwards, but who still cares just enough to be Tragically Wounded if they end up dead? Maybe I’m being uncharitable because this paragraph so profoundly rubbed me the wrong way, but even so – and especially given his citation of Heinlen, Clarke, Sturgeon and Asimov as stellar examples of real SF authors – I can’t help but feel that what he’s really objecting to in the Vorkosigan books isn’t the use of sex or romance, or even necessarily of marriage, but to the presence of female love interests who influence the plot in ways other than simply sleeping with the hero, and to the use of heroes who think about the women they love as partners rather than sex objects.

In talking about Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s novels – a paragraph which, once again, I’m forced to quote in full – Cook becomes even more disparaging about romance (my emphasis):

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s novels in their Liaden Universe® (from Baen Books) are also romance writers. Like the Vorkosigan novels, they begin as space adventures in the military science fiction genre, but their latest installments are romances only barely disguised with science fiction tropes and conceits. Lee’s and Miller’s stories in this series are carefully written, but I’d call them science fiction-lite because there really isn’t much tension in these stories. It’s as if, now that they’ve found their niche and their considerable audience, they want to play it safe. True, science fiction as a whole is indeed part of Romance Literature (if we go all the way back to the 18th century when novels were invented in England, with the Gothic novel leading the way), but some writers, by dint of their nature, turn to romance or the western or whatever. I’ve read several of the books in the Liaden Universe® and to me they are romances in disguise–with the couple coming together with a calm sense of inevitability rather than one preceded by blood, sweat, tears and some sort of significant loss. True, no science fiction or fantasy writer has the courage to end a novel the way Hemingway does in A Farewell to Arms, but then ours is an escapist genre. Which is also why we don’t have a Hemingway or Faulkner in our midst–but that’s another story.

By this point, the repetitive assertion that romance or romance writers are “disguised” or closeted somehow is really starting to wear me down. I find it depressing – but not actually surprising – that even though, in the very first paragraph, Cook is capable of acknowledging that SF stories can contain fantasy tropes without actually being fantasy novels, presumably because he wants to establish the credentials of his favourite authors as being beyond reproach, he spends much of the rest of the post categorically denying the idea that romance tropes can similarly exist in SF stories without causing the book in question to magically switch genres. The idea that Lee and Miller chose to write “science fiction-lite” by amping up the romance – and more, that this decision was a way to “play it safe” – is more than usually laughable given Cook’s simultaneous inference that it ruined the books; which begs the question, safe from what? Ridicule and accusations of selling out? Clearly not. I don’t even have the energy to try and unpack what’s meant by the claim that “some writers, by dint of their nature, turn to romance” – by what nature, exactly? There are so many things this could mean, all of them contextually pejorative, one of the least of which is the idea that “by dint of their nature” is a not-so-subtle code for “by dint of being born female, or having an interest in women”. At absolute best, Cook is simply so enamoured of SF as a genre that he’s inclined to view any departure from it by SFnal authors as not just a bad decision, but an actual character flaw – hence it being in their “nature” to revert to writing “romance or the western or whatever”. Which makes the fact that he then goes on to praise Hemmingway and Faulkner as being braver, better writers than anyone in SFF  all the more mind-boggling (never mind being an assertion that opens up a whole different can of worms).

Finally, he expresses his distaste for zombie stories mucking up steampunk and SF, and once more manages to throw in a gendered barb: “I have no interest,” he says, ” in reading about zombies, fancy dress balls, smooching warriors, or star-lit dinners on the terrace overlooking a waiting army about to go to war” – a remark which neatly mirrors his complaints about those pesky romantic details that “only women” like.  And that would be the end of it – except that, of course, he also manages to make an ass of himself in the comments. When confronted with accusations of sexism, Cook becomes angry, remarking that Lee and Miller, “competent as they are, are writing disguised romances” – which manages to be a more overtly disparaging slight about romance than he makes in the actual article.  He also refers to the romance elements in their books as being their “true predilections” – because clearly, if an SF writer writes romance, they mustn’t care as much about SF! The fact that he also claims to be “very precise in my wording, or I try to be” is, under the circumstances, rather heartbreaking. But it’s his response to accusations of misogyny that proves the most telling:

By accusing me of being a misogynist, you shut down all possibility of an informed analysis of any woman’s work. That’s a refuge I’ve seen critics in literature take for over 30 years, at least since the mid-1980s. It doesn’t work that way. Any work of art can be criticized, regardless of the gender of who wrote them, painted them, composed them, etc.

And I just… I don’t even know how to respond to this. Because Cook has said, right there in his own, apparently “precise” words, that Bujold’s work involves “the attention to detail that only women would find attractive” – details which Cook himself feels are detrimental to the story, and which he plainly states are a hallmark of Bujold’s romantic credentials. This is unequivocally a sexist remark, and the fact that Cook doesn’t recognise this fact – let alone understand that his disparagement of romance as both feminine and lesser is similarly gross – is the main problem with his piece. But the idea that misogyny is some kind of card that critics play to shut down the possibility of an informed analysis of women’s work? What planet is this guy even on? OF COURSE any work can be criticsed, regardless of the gender of the creator; that’s not in dispute. But that doesn’t mean that Cook isn’t being sexist in his analysis: and when he complains about the fact that accusations of misogyny have effectively been ruining criticism for thirty-odd years, it makes me wonder how many times in the past someone has called him out for sexist behaviour, and he’s chosen to interpret that as meaning “you can’t critique female writers because you’re male and therefore biased”, when what they’re ACTUALLY saying is “by all means critique female writers, but be aware that your internalised, negative assumptions about women, romance and femininity are influencing your judgement in unhelpful ways”. Like, seriously? Thirty years of viewing misogyny accusations as a tactic for dodging criticism rather than, you know, a legitimate fucking complaint about sexism in SFF, and he’s never once sat down and thought, Huh, maybe they have a point? Christ on a BICYCLE.

And then it gets worse:

I’m correct here. The books I mention as romances are romances. They are also very “light” in gravitas and absolutely devoid of metaphor.

More anti-romance bullshit! Because romance is light, devoid of metaphor and totally lacking in gravitas, AMIRITE LADIES? And obviously, the best way to prove you’re not sexist is to call romance a female-only genre and then disparage the shit out of it!

The last great sf story that, to me, resonated with metaphor was Terry Bisson’s “macs” which was about American’s natural desire to kill someone who’s harmed us.

Oh.

Well, THAT’S not profoundly unsettling. (Note also, please, that the story in question came out in 1999, which means that, by his own admission, Cook hasn’t seen anything worthy in the genre for nearly fifteen fucking years.)

 I know I’ve offended you, only because I have had an opinion.

No, it’s not because you had an opinion; it’s because the opinion itself was offensive bullshit.

DeAnn, please, please explain to me what “ground” Lois Bujold has broken with her writing. She’s writing in the 1940s Astounding tradition of space adventures tinted with romance. That’s it. If you want ground breaking, read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar or his The Long Result or his Shockwave Rider. Don’t bore me with telling me these mediocre writers are ground-breaking. They’re just writing pulp fiction–pure entertainment. Lift away all the standard tropes and conceits from Bujold’s writing and you have stories where we know the hero gets his heroine and all will be well. Our writers have lost the courage to tell a story such as Thomas Disch’s Genocides or any one of Philip K. Dick’s novels. But, then, publishers publish what they think sells. Thus, romance, thus zombies. But that’s my opinion. And the fact that I have a divergent opinion makes me the most hated person on the internet.

And in this final comment, despite all his earlier protestations that being a romance writer “isn’t a bad thing”, Cook finally gets angry enough to be honest: Bujold breaks no ground with her stories – she is, in fact, “mediocre… pulp fiction – pure entertainment” – and romance is only popular, not because it has any merit, but because “publishers publish what they think sells”. And isn’t it interesting how, with the sole exception of Marion Zimmer Bradley, every single person Cook has held up as an example of brave, exemplary writing is an old white guy from his generation? Talk about being stuck in the past.

Dear Mr Cook, if you’re reading this: you’re not the most hated person on the internet. Michael Brutsch couldn’t even claim that much, and he might actually have deserved it. Nobody is sending you rape or death threats; nobody is telling you, in graphic detail, the things they’ll do to your children or pets in revenge for what you’ve said (though all those things have happened to women writers just for existing on the internet, let alone saying anything controversial). All they’re doing is sharing their opinions of your opinion, as they – we – are entitled to do; and because we think your opinion is bullshit, you’ve elected to view our response as persecution. You aren’t being persecuted; you’re being argued with, and the fact that you can’t tell the difference is a sign of the privileged echo-chamber in which, until now, I suspect you’ve spent your fannish life. I’d tell you to grow up, but seeing as how, the last good story you read was apparently written almost fifteen years ago, one suspects it wouldn’t help. As far as I can tell, your tastes are so firmly fixed in the stories of your youth that every development undergone by the genre since then is something you’ve elected to view with suspicion. And that wouldn’t bother me, but SFF is my genre, too, and I’m sick of watching bitter old men try to claw away and disparage everything about SFF that’s welcomed me and drawn me in by saying that it isn’t really SF; that the genre is changing, not because the audience and the world are changing together, but because shallow people just want to make money. I’m sick of it, and so I’m arguing against your opinion – at length, in my own time, even knowing that, unlike you, I am actually risking a genuinely abusive backlash by doing so, because that’s what happens to women on the internet when the really ugly trolls catch wind of us.

So why am I bothering, then?

Because I fucking belong here and you will not make me feel otherwise.

Old Men Yelling At Clouds: SFWA Sexism

Warning: some talk of rape, explosive ranting.

As an Australian who now lives in the UK, I’m used to hearing about publications, conventions, writers’ groups, book giveaways and other SFFnal coolness that I can’t actually buy, attend or participate in on account of their being located in or otherwise restricted to the US of A, a country I tend to envisage as one of those freaky undersea fish with a luminous, prey-attracting barbel that lures you in with the promise of democracy and culture and New York, and then savages you with its monstrous teeth, fascism, bigotry, and New York (a city I’ve never visited, but which I nonetheless feel qualified to make jokes about Because Television). What this means in a practical, everyday sense is that, even when certain American things become accessible online in whatever manner, I tend to forget that fact, and so place them in the same mental box of Unattainable And Irrelevant Stuff that contains my failed attempt to learn algebra and the location of our iron. Thus: whenever I see someone talking about the SFWA, I feel a brief surge of enthusiasm – SFF! Writers! Things I like! – that transmutes into apathy the exact instant I remember that, as someone who is neither American nor published in America, I’m ineligible to join. I paid minor attention to the recent presidential electiony-thingy, largely because, as a reader of John Scalzi’s blog, it was sort of hard to miss, but otherwise, both the SFWA and its affiliated bulletin have existed wholly off my radar.

And then I read this. And this. And this. And the article uploaded for comment here – that is to say, the recent piece in the SFWA Bulletin by Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg, two old white guys in their seventies who I’ve never heard of before, but who are evidently horrified by the prospect of Teh Womenz having an opinion about either SFF generally or the SFWA in particular, and especially one that’s critical of them. I managed to get a whole five sentences in before I started bristling, when Resnick said:

In my starving writer days, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, I wrote a couple of hundred words in what we euphemistically call the “adult field”. A lot of us did. You, me, Robert Silverberg, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, even Marion Zimmer Bradley (a woman). No one ever said we couldn’t, no one ever tried to stop or censor us.

This snippet sets off alarm bells on two counts: that prejudicial ‘even’ before Marion Zimmer Bradley’s name, and the despicably telling (a woman) after it, all put there to tell us that a woman did what we did (even though most women didn’t), so therefore our defence of it is justified. So, let’s be clear: I’m a twentysomthing woman, which means that Resnick and Malzberg aren’t talking to me – they are, instead, complaining about people like me to people like them; which is to say, to themselves, as the whole piece is a dialogue between them. Nonetheless, the fact that I’m the hypothetical subject of their ranting gives me the right of ranty reply. Which I intend to exercise. Vehemently. In detail.

I supplemented that income by editing a quartet of tabloids, like The National Enquirer – only worse. Never got busted, never got censored, never got castigated. Ditto with a trio of men’s magazines I edited.

Pardon me while I laugh hysterically at the idea that working for two of the most lingeringly sexist, misogynistic types of publication, in a position of editorial power, in the fucking seventies, and boasting about how nobody ever called you on your bullshit back then, as though this is somehow proof of the fact that bullshit neither happened nor deserved to be stopped when it did, constitutes an intelligent argument.

[I wrote] the “Tales of the Velvet Comet”, a four book series about an orbiting brothel. Sold it to a lady editor. Never heard a peep of protest from anyone.

Christ on a fucking bicycle. Three paragraphs in, and we’re already dealing with Poe’s Law levels of delusional self-justification. I could make a drinking game about this article: take a shot every time the author deliberately highlights the femaleness of the women he mentions, the better to explain how these ladies never said I was sexist, so clearly their silence at a time when dissent could’ve seriously impacted their careers constitutes an impartial, absolute assessment of the non-offensiveness of my work, as well as speaking declaratively for all women, forever. Plus and also: an orbiting brothel? Seriously? Way to boast about perpetuating a trope that we here in the actual future think is both shitty and overused.

…I wrote The Branch, a rather blasphemous novel about the true Jewish Messiah who shows up about 50 years from now, which perforce had to prove that Jesus was a fraud. No one objected. I even sent copies to Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart [two ancient televangelists, one now dead]… Apparently neither of them were offended enough to even protest on their radio shows.

Wow. That’s a compelling defence, isn’t it? Two bigoted, Evgangelical rightwingers with probable antisemitic tendencies thought your efforts at debunking Judaism were A-Okay, or at least not utterly blasphemous? One of whom, Swaggart, became infamous for his ‘I Have Sinned’ speech, wherein his deeply hypocritical and sadly repressed dalliances with prostitutes* were brought to light? Yes. Clearly, these are well-adjusted, intelligent men whose failure to criticise the work you sent them unsolicited in a bid to orchestrate some cheap, sensationalist publicity is proof of your possession of an unassailable moral high ground. Do go on.

These days it’s difficult to go to a movie – or even turn on the cable TV – without seeing a bunch of naked bodies and a bunch of blood.

So it’s understandable that I thought the days of censorship were long gone.

Truly, the fact that you can see sexually objectified ladies on The Cable and get your old guy rocks off at the push of a button nowadays is a sign of social progress, while women offering public criticism of your shitty, dinosauric attitudes is exactly the same as an erasure of your civil rights.

Take a look at the cover to a recent edition of The SWFA Bulletin, issue number 200. There’s a warrior woman on it. Not a hell of a lot different from a few hundred warrior women who have graced the covers of our field’s books and magazines ever since C. L. Moore (a woman)

Drink.

created Jirel of Joiry. I think the warrior woman is wearing boots, but [though] it’s pretty dark and shaded in that area, I know she [sic] displaying less flesh than just about any bikini you can see on a beach in the country today.

This is a bit like a modern employer throwing his hands up and saying, ‘Seriously, what’s the problem? I only fired her because she was pregnant! Employers like me have been firing knocked-up broads like her since the 1920s!’ Newsflash, Mr Resnick: the fact that something has a long and prominent history doesn’t make it OK. Plus and also: the fact that your ‘warrior woman’ is displaying only moderately less flesh than a beach babe despite being depicted in the mountains, in a chainmail bikini, in the fucking snow, is a textbook example of why we need Women Fighters In Reasonable Armour (and many other things like it). Don’t fucking lie to me: that isn’t armour she’s wearing, and she’s not a warrior woman: she’s a masturbatory fantasy from your misspent youth, and now you’re trying to act as though the past fifty years of equality never actually happened.

A group of younger writers and fans object to her presence on the cover of the Bulletin and they’re making quite a bit of noise about it.

Firstly: it’s not just young people objecting to this fuckery. Go ask some women SFF writers in your age bracket – hell, ask some men with more sense than arrogance. My father’s nearly a decade older than you, and he’d look askance at this idiocy with all the dignified side-eye of his eighty-one years.  And secondly: yes. We are making noise. That’s what fans and writers do – we talk about things. Much like you’re doing now, in fact.

…it was our editor, Jean Rabe (a woman)

Drink.

whose decision it was to run it.

Women are not a goddamn hivemind, Resnick: one does not speak for all. Trotting out your sad string of Ladies Who Liked My Stuff isn’t some magical, argument-melting spell that renders your critics invalid.

It was also Ms Rabe’s request that you and I do a couple of Dialogues (issues #199 and #200) on the history of women in the field. We addressed lady writers in the earlier issue, and lady editors and publishers in the later one.

Drink.

Drink.

And we seem to have offended some members every bit as much as the cover art did.

Why?

By having the temerity to mention that Bea Mahaffey, who edited Other Worlds in the very early 1950s, was beautiful. (Which, according to every man and woman who knew her then, is absolutely true.) After all, we’re talking about an editor, not a pin-up model, so how dare we mention her looks? What business does that have here?

Fucking none, you moron. That is the actual point. We don’t care whether your assessment of her looks was accurate or how many goddamn witnesses you can find to back you up on that, even if we question you separately: have you ever described a male editor as handsome, or dropped in some extra verbage about how Tolkien was a doll? And on the extremely unlikely offchance that you can dig up one op-ed from 1962 where you vaguely referenced, in positive terms, the physical prowess of a young Stephen Donaldson, are you honestly claiming obliviousness to the long-lived and still ubiquitous double standard whereby women’s looks are deemed in some fundamental way to be representative of our competence (or lack thereof), whereas men, even in those rare instances when their appearance is remarked upon, aren’t held to anything even vaguely resembling the same standard?

For example, no-one ever mentioned JFK’s looks, do they?

Well, shit. I guess you are. And I just love how your single male counterexample is President Kennedy – that is to say, the ruler of a country, with all the associated press appearances and media coverage that necessary entails, and a man whose affairs actually impacted on his office, and are therefore materially relevant when discussing him. Yes. That is totally comparable to talking about the bodies of female writers and editors when it has no bearing whatsoever on their contribution to SFF.

So, Barry, just off the top of your head, what’s your opinion… of a writers’ organization that will let me say ‘fuck’ in these pages… but has some members that want to censor the word ‘beautiful’ and the thousandth painting of an absolutely generic warrior woman?

OK, you do understand that there’s a difference between saying ‘referencing her looks was unnecessary, and perhaps inappropriate given your evident obliviousness on the subject of sexism’, and ‘NOBODY IN THIS PUBLICATION SHOULD USE THE WORD BEAUTIFUL IT IS AN UNWORD AND BANNED FOREVER’, right? Nobody is censoring the word ‘beautiful’; we’re simply suggesting you needn’t have used it when you did. Similarly, if I say ‘stop threatening me with that knife’, I’m not saying ‘ban all knives’. I’m saying there’s an important contextual difference between chopping up carrots for dinner and my physical endangerment, and if that’s a distinction you’re either unwilling or unable to make, then I don’t want you anywhere near my kitchen.

Plus and also: the fact that your sexually objectified, ludicrously attired and probably frostbitten warrior woman is here deemed ‘generic’ – that is to say, so commonplace as to be normative – is part of the fucking problem. You know why? An actual warrior would be wearing armour, not a teenage boy’s wet dream of chainmail bikinis. And don’t even think of using Conan as a counterexample here: Conan is a male power fantasy who exists in a world without plate armour or chainmail, and where his lack of clothes therefore makes some species of sense; your covergirl, by contrast, clearly has access to proper protective gear but has, for mysterious reasons attributable only to penis-logic, elected not to wear it.

Let’s see what Malzberg has to say.

The question is whether those who object to Warrior Woman or ‘beautiful’ adjectivally applied to a woman are merely displeased or whether they want repetition censored. That isn’t clear to me and your description of these events leads me to infer that it isn’t clear to you either.

A cogent opinion! Huzzah! Points for Barry!

I don’t like the objections myself, and I find them offensive. Then again… I feel they have the right to complain loudly and often about those two examples… just as you and I have the right to complain loudly and often about what I take to be (dare I use the word) their stupidity.

Fair dues, there. For making actual sense, Malzberg earns himself the right to at least one non-sarcastic response from me.

But then again, if they want to shut us down… no more Woman Warriors and no offensive description of a beautiful woman as beautiful, well then there is a problem.

And here it is: while I can’t speak for everyone (see above re: women have no hivemind), I can say that, personally, I feel incredibly frustrated whenever the word ‘censorship’ is trotted out in these debates, not only because it has very grave and serious connotations that tend to obscure the issue at hand, but because it doesn’t accurately represent the desired outcome. If your actions stem from a problematic perception of women, forbidding those actions without altering your perception would achieve nothing. What we want isn’t for you to sit there, believing exactly as you do now but growing increasingly angry and resentful at being unable to express yourself: we want you to actually see us differently, such that you no longer view your past behaviour as acceptable, and subsequently never do it again.

It’s not censorship we want. It’s a change in your perceptions. Not self-censorship, which implies your original attitudes are simply repressed and waiting to bubble over: actual change, so that when you hear women say ‘please don’t depict us in chainmail bikinis, it’s demeaning and awful and contributes to terrible stereotypes that still demonstrably affect our treatment within SFF communities’, you respond with sympathy and respect.

There are, however, exceptions to this. We most definitely want to censor rape threats and racist slurs, for instance – not only because hate speech is illegal, but because allowing it within SFFnal communities creates unsafe, threatening environments for those of us who are subject to it, while simultaneously sending the message that bullying and abuse are OK. You have not engaged in hate speech here; therefore, we do not want to censor you. We do, however, want you to actually listen to us, and take on board the fact that what you’ve done is regressive and offensive.

What is somewhat disturbing, of course, is the anonymity (at least to me) of the complainers…

Hopefully, then, you’ll appreciate this very non-anonymous response, as well as everything else that’s been said on public blogs and otherwise under real names.

Oh lord, it’s Resnick’s turn again. Brace yourselves.

I went to the local Barnes & Noble superstore and began studying cover art.

And a lot of it abounded in bare, raw, pulsating flesh, totally naked from the neck to the navel. No question about it. It’s there for anyone else to see – and of course, since such displays seem to offend some of our members, to picket.

You know where I found it?

In the romance section. I’d say that just about every other cover shows a man’s bare torso… Clearly these are erotic covers, designed to get a certain readership’s pulse pounding.

As far as I know, no one’s tried to censor the publishers… Not even our moral SFWA crusaders.

Jesus, stop. Mike Resnick is officially banned from using words. Seriously, where the fuck do I even begin deconstructing this hot mess? With the fact that the abundance of bare-skinned cover art is not, in and of itself, proof that said art is desirable, positive, or OK? That’s like saying that because you can find a lot of brutal rape videos on the internet, it’s fine that you made your own brutal rape video in your basement. With the fact that there’s a big fucking difference between depicting sexualised images of both men and women on the covers of stories that are actually about sex, and depicting sexualised images of women alone on the covers of stories that have nothing or little to do with sex, except inasmuch as the male audience is being encouraged to construct objectifying fantasies? With the fact that, actually, there’s a growing movement of romance readers lobbying for different book covers, or who actively critique said covers as ridiculous, offensive, or just plain silly; and that, once you’ve complained about the anonymity of your detractors, you lose the right to make judgements about which movements they do or don’t support? Seeing as how, you know. You don’t actually know who they are?

…consider just how many muscular, near-naked Conan types have graced our covers over the years without nary a voice raised in protest.

*headdesk* He went there. He used The Conan Argument. First, and as stated earlier: Conan is a male fantasy. Objectified women are a male fantasy. Presenting one as the opposite of the other is about as useful as saying steak is the opposite of lamb: you aren’t making a meaningful distinction, and if the issue is trying to feed a vegetarian, you’re not even remotely close to understanding the actual problem. Second, Conan is of the past; your ‘warrior woman’ isn’t. While you might be able to scrounge up one or two recent SFF releases with naked man-torso gleaming on the cover, they’d be a drop in the ocean compared to female objectification in the same timeframe, and when you compare both those things to the constant sexualisation of women elsewhere in society, your ‘warrior woman’ is reinforcing some seriously problematic shit that Conan and his briefly popular bretheren don’t even remotely approach.

Over to you, Barry!

Our Warrior Woman protesters and enemies of the adjective… fall into the category of what Right Wing radio talkers call ‘liberal fascists’, and I cannot disagree with that description… I agree wholly with at least one [radio talker], Sean Hannity. He says: ‘The difference between the so-called liberals and conservatives is that the liberals want to shut us down. They truly do not believe that we should have airtime. They truly believe that we should be banned. We do not feel that way about them. We don’t like their positions but we acknowledge their right to expression. They do not extend us the same courtesy.’

Sean. Fucking. Hannity.

Take a moment to savour the balls-out insanity of both this segue and its implications.

Sean Fucking Hannity, who pals around with Neo-Nazis. Sean Fucking Hannity, who gives airtime – and therefore legitimacy – to a guy who believes that one of America’s biggest mistakes was giving women the vote. Sean Fucking Hannity, who once described a female Democrat as looking like a “a slutty flight attendant”. Sean Fucking Hannity, whose panel featuring “absolutely everyone who might have something relevant to say about women’s health” was composed entirely of men.

Listen here, Malzberg. Listen close. You know why some things get banned? Because they’re fucking dangerous. Because they hurt people. On a scale of Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh, Hannity might not be as utterly batshit as some of his colleagues, but that doesn’t make his views any less fucking dangerous. I’m happy to let the opposition speak, but not when their words, or the words of those they support, encourage the erasure of my rights, or the rights of others, or help to incite violence against innocent people. You want to make this a left wing/right wing debate? Then acknowledge the fact that you, as of right this fucking second, are on the side of the racists, the misogynists, the bigots and the isolationists.

I might want you to shut the hell up and learn something about sexism, but Hannity and his ilk want me to shut the hell up and surrender my rights or they’ll take them by force. How dare you. How dare you even suggest, in the same fucking sentence, that your SFFnal critics are fascists for decrying your sexism while quoting an inflammatory liar whose politics don’t just want us silent, but legally disempowered?

How fucking dare you. 

Oh, look. Resnick’s talking again. Joy.

The New York Review of Science Fiction took some potshots at me because, to quote them, “Is Resnick’s space-bottled African culture ever sexist!”

First, it’s not Resnick’s space-bottled African culture. It’s the culture of the Kikuyu tribe, and indeed about 97% of the tribes in Africa.

Oh.

My.

Fucking.

God.

*explodes from racefail overload*

Really, Resnick? Fucking REALLY? 97% of the tribes in Africa resemble the Kikuyu in their sexism – 97% of African tribes are sexist?

I just. I cannot. I have lost the ability to even.

Have some more quotes, sans commentary. The lunacy really speaks for itself, and I’m losing the will to live.

Who should women want making decisions on what they are allowed to read… Andrea Dworkin? Do you want the State or Federal Government (or the Supreme Court) telling you what you are allowed in your bedroom, or with whom?…

You know, I think a lot of this brouhaha is because we’re Old White Guys… Old White Guys should only write about what they know, which as far as said group is concerned is other Old White Guys… We can’t have any black friends, because our generation was composed exclusively of slave-owners. We can’t even say ‘homosexual’, let alone define it or say it without cringing. Everybody knows that…

When all is said and done, we didn’t run the kind of diatribe you hear from almost every top-selling rap star these days…

If they can get away with censoring that, can you imagine what comes next? I’m pretty sure Joe Stalin could imagine it.

*collapses under the sheer weight of Poe’s Law in evidence, dies angrily, rants from beyond the grave*

Old men yelling at clouds. That’s all this is. Bitter old sexist, racist morons yelling at clouds and ranting about the good old days in the 60s and 70s, back when women and minorities experienced even more discrimination than they do now and had the good grace to be silent about it, all while issuing dire warnings about how, if we fascist liberals get our way, then Andrea Dworkin will be ruling our sex lives from her vagina-shaped throne adopt the smouldering ruins of democracy, burning copies of Conan the Barbarian to feed the massive coal-electric furnaces that power her mighty Dildoswords. Hoards of quivering castrati, their genitals removed with the ironic aid of pinking shears and egg scissors, will howl in the quiet darkness of this intellectual night, sharing their secretly hoarded copies of R. Scott Bakker novels for solace, all while desperately hoping that tomorrow’s meal of panfried goat uterus will be enough to sustain them through to the morrow.

What a fucking dabacle.

*I’m not being critical of prostitutes, male or female, nor of Swaggart for using them, except to the extent that it involved cheating on his wife. I’m more commenting on the telling hypocrisy and denial of a hardcore Evangelist trying to cover up his own sexuality out of a sense of shame. Whatever else you can say about the guy, clearly, he was neither happy nor emotionally healthy, at least as far as his sexuality went.

ETA: This post was originally titled Old Men Yelling At Clouds: SFWA Lunacy. I then changed that last word to idiocy, as it was pointed out to me that the use of lunacy was ableist; but as idiocy is also abelist, I’ve changed it to sexism.

Unconscious Bias On The Left Wing

Let me show you how it works:

1. A female, POC and/or LGBTQ politician/leader is appointed in your area. This is cause for celebration, because
2. while you aren’t sexist, racist or homophobic, you’re all too aware of the fact that other people – and, more specifically, The System – are frequently biased in those directions, making it harder for such candidates to be accepted regardless of their qualifications. Certainly, this new person is a definite a minority among their high-powered brethren, which suggests that
3. they must be exceptional in some way. Depending on the context, this specialness could be ascribed to any number of skills, passions or characteristics, but the most important thing is that
4. despite their gender, race and/or sexual orientation – or rather, despite the biases of less enlightened people who consider such things a handicap – the candidate has succeeded. But no matter how glad you are to see them installed, it’s important to remember that
5. the candidate did not succeed because of their gender, race and/or sexual orientation. Regardless of whether quotas and/or tokenism are a relevant in this instance (which depends entirely on the individual circumstances), it’s generally seen to be the job of obnoxious, right-wing objectors to claim, sneeringly, that so-and-so was only let in because of their gender, race and or/ sexual orientation, this being a basic means of undermining such a candidate’s qualifications from the get-go. Nonetheless,
6. it’s clear that their gender, race and/or sexual orientation is a relevant factor in terms of how they’ll be perceived in their role, no matter how irrelevant it might be to their actual portfolio. But even though these details only matter to you in terms of your being happy to see The System veer away from straight white male dominion,
7. should an instance arise (as it inevitably will) where the candidate is in a position to act (or not) on left-wing issues – and particularly where, either accurately or not, you perceive those issues to overlap with their own gender, racial and/or sexual identity – your natural expectation is for them to Do The Right Thing. And as you’ve already acknowledged that the candidate is special,
8. you’ve automatically set yourself up to hold them – albeit with the best of intentions – to a higher moral, social and political standard than their straight, white and/or male counterparts. Even if you can acknowledge that people in positions of authority must, of necessity, compromise their own values in order to maintain alliances, get work done in the long term and keep their position within the party/organisation, all that hopefulness about seeing a female, POC and/or LGBTQ candidate in the arena can turn swiftly to feelings of betrayal should they compromise on the issues you care about,
9. because they, of all possible candidates, should know better. But now they’ve gone and abused your trust; they’ve proved that they weren’t special after all – no better than their straight, white and/or male colleagues, really, and certainly worse in terms of causing you heartache, because of how they should have known better. And because you took their betrayal personally, rather than viewing it as a pragmatic (if irritating) function of their being a human in office, you can’t bear to support them any more. You’d feel like a hypocrite now, and anyway, keeping them in just to maintain diversity and at the expense of your principles would really be tokenism. And so you take the only remaining, logical course of action, and
10. vote them out of office. It’s a shame they couldn’t live up to your expectations, but maybe the next woman, POC and/or LGBTQ candidate to come along will be different. After all, is it really so unreasonable to expect that your chosen leader be a flawless paragon of virtue?

Congratulations! You have now succeeded in holding minority candidates to such an unreasonably high standard on the basis of their gender, race and/or sexual orientation that you’ve effectively recreated the same type of discrimination you were so angry about in the first place. Wash, rinse and repeat, until society collapses or insomniac authors die from an overdose of facepalm.

This tutorial/rant brought to you by politics, the internet and human nature.

Feminism: It’s Necessary

My current laptop was purchased around early March this year – an act of necessity after its predecessor suddenly carked it. Though I ported all my files across, the one thing I didn’t do – have never done, in fact, because I can’t be bothered – was save my browser settings and bookmarks. Starting afresh on the current machine, I defaulted to Firefox for the first week or two before finally conceding to the superiority of Google Chrome. After that, it was another week or so more before I bothered to set up specific folders for any links that caught my interest. Factoring in the fact that we moved house on March 20, that makes their approximate start date the 1st of April. It is now the 31st of August – meaning that my folders have been live for roughly 122 days.

Since then, based on nothing more than my daily browsing of Twitter, Facebook, blogs and news sites, the folder titled Feminism, Motherhood, Sexism and Sexuality has accrued a grand total of 208 links. That’s almost exactly 1.7 articles per day that have struck me as pertaining to the feminist debate. The first link is to a green paper on rape statistics in Camden, written by PhD student Brooke L. Magnanti – who, as some of you may recall, was revealed in 2009 to be the author of a once-pseudonymous biography titled The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The paper debunks the previously established idea that the prevalence of strip clubs in the borough directly contributes to a higher incidence of rape. The most recent link is one I added this morning: a t-shirt made by American retailer JCPenney for ‘girls [aged] 7 to 16’ which reads: “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother had to do it for me.” A random sample of other bookmarked articles includes:

• A Sexism Watch article decrying a full-page add for BBC boxed sets, the tagline of which is: Vampire. Doctor. Wizard. Detective. Lady;
• A survey of Christian men describing the immodesty and lust of women’s bodies;
• An article in Ms Magazine about the role of women in Middle Eastern protests shattering Muslim stereotypes;
• A blog post on the use of rape as a catalyst for female protagonists in SFF;
• Criticism of rape-friendly reporting in the New York Times;
• Reporting on the incident which spaked the SlutWalk movement;
• Various pieces on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape trial;
• Coverage of the blocked class action suit filed against Wal-Mart for sex discrimination;
• A piece in The Age on drag king culture;
• A scandal where Indian surgeons were paid to turn girl babies into boys;
• An exhortation to talk to little girls about their brains, and not about how pretty they are;
• A woman suing her employer over, among other things, his insistence on mini-skirt Mondays; and
• Discussion of an incident where a man at an open mic comedy night described date-raping a woman as his routine.

And this is before we cross over to my other folder on SFF, YA and Literary Culture, where a vast majority of the 274 articles bookmarked concern the portrayals of women in narrative, culture and subculture, as well as discussing issues like racism, homophobia, culture and discrimination. Some of these include:

• The problem of women in comics;
• Supernatural miracle pregnancies and the hatred of pregnant women;
• A piece on gender imbalance in The New Yorker;
• A discussion of the portrayal of women in HBO’s adaptation of A Game of Thrones;
• The differences in conceptualising ‘feminist SF’;
• A piece on the problem of women’s books being given feminine covers regardless of their themes;
• Commentary on the Wicked Pretty Things scandal and the erasure of LGBTQ characters;
• The Independent asking questions about the dearth of female reviewers; and
• A piece at the Voyager blog on defining strong women.

Feel free to look at all those links, or some, or none. There’s not a lot of coherency between them, except for the fact that they all relate to the treatment, perception and acceptance of women, whether in the positive or the negative. But they’re all things I’ve read since April this year – bookmarks of discussions I’ve had, arguments I’ve followed, scandals that have broken, cultural linchpins I’ve railed against. The creation date of some posts predate my finding them by weeks, months or even, more rarely, years; others popped up on my radar almost as soon as they were published. All are relevant to feminism, to women and to society. If I’ve had a conversation with you about anything even vaguely feminist at all this year, the chances are I’ve made reference to something bookmarked in my links folders. Possibly I might even have sent you the articles themselves, if you expressed interest in seeing more.

I didn’t use to be a feminist. As a teenager, I did the weaselly thing of calling myself an equalist, which is a way of saying that I thought women should be treated the same as men (good) but that I was afraid of being associated with man-haters who just wanted to turn the patriarchy into a matriarchy (good in principle, bad in that this is a toxic misconception of feminism). Crucially, I also thought the change in terminology was necessary because, apart from sounding more, well, equal, it seemed as if feminism itself had already succeeded to such a degree that the very word, feminist, had been rendered as anachronistic as bluestocking. Sure, I’d copped my share of flak for having short hair and acting the tomboy, but I went to school and was praised for my brains; I had equal rights with men under the law; I had the vote; I wouldn’t be married off or penalised for divorcing an unwanted husband; I could sleep with whom I wanted, use contraception, aspire to any profession I chose and wear pants with impunity. Surely all of that freedom meant that feminism had seen its use and should gracefully pass on, the relic of a bygone era?  Wouldn’t calling myself a feminist under such circumstances be an innately radical act, putting me in the same camp as those hysterical man-haters I’d heard so much about? What more did I want?

The successes of feminism thus far are many, and huge, and vital – but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to fix, nor that all the remaining problems are small. Women are still paid less than men for doing the same work. They must have better qualifications to be hired for the same job. They are still the primary domestics and caregivers for children, even when both partners work. Discrimination is still widespread. Sexism, misogyny and chauvinism still exist. Institutions like the business world, academia and popular culture are still rife with negative stereotypes, to say nothing of the progressive under-representation of  women the higher up the food chain ones goes. Yes, we can vote, and yes, we have rights – lots of them! These are all good things. But they are meaningless if we do not exercise and fight for them; if we ignore every person who impedes equality as an anomalous upstart; if we are afraid to call ourselves feminists because we don’t want to be perceived as radical; if we are content to assume that everyone thinks as we do, because it’s 2011; if we dispute the existence of anti-feminist (or anti-equalist) sentiment on the large scale of culture, institution and subconscious bias simply because we’ve never experienced it ourselves (that we know of).

Looked at in isolation, any of the articles listed above – or, indeed, any of the myriad others I’ve never encountered, or haven’t mentioned – might well seem like a storm in a teacup; a glitch on the social radar that, while dispiriting, is ultimately a minority example of behaviour that everyone knows is unacceptable. Looked at in the context of the whole, however, a different picture starts to emerge: one where, quite possibly, there are still miles and miles to go before we sleep. And that’s why I argue with people in pubs and online; why I get frustrated at having to explain, over and over and over, why I bother; why feminism is still necessary.

Because suffrage wasn’t the end of things. It was only the beginning.

The Problem With Fanservice

Is that it exists.

I am a fan of anime, and have been since I was about twelve. The earliest stuff I remember seeing was Ghost in the Shell, Akira and Vampire Hunter D, with some snippets of Rurouni Kenshin and Gunsmith Cats thrown in for good measure. The first series I ever properly watched were Evangelion, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040, Cowboy Bebop and Noir, with the Lain soundtrack providing background music to many a high school party. Later, at the start of university, I was introduced simultaneously to Ninja Scroll, Love Hina, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, which is a surprisingly thorough gamut for the range of anime narratives. Since then, I’ve been watching pretty much anything that gets recommended to me or which catches my eye, the most recent examples being Last Exile, Fruits Basket, Bamboo Blade and Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge. All of which is a way of saying: I love anime. It’s been part of my life for thirteen years, and at no point during that time has my interest for it been passive or half-hearted. Which is perhaps why it’s taken me so long to come to realise that there is, in fact, a caveat on those affections. Because when you love something deeply – and particularly when it’s a thing you’ve loved since the cusp of adolescence – it can be very, very hard to pull back and deal with that thing in a critical manner.

But.

I hate fanservice so fucking much.

Anyone who’s ever watched anime knows what I’m talking about. For anyone who hasn’t, allow me to demonstrate the scope of the problem as follows:

Yeah. About that.

To be clear: I still watch anime that contains fanservice. Partly because, in the case of shows I knew and loved prior to the revelation of my hatred, it doesn’t taint my appreciation of them; partly because fanservice does not, by itself, make the rest of a show terrible; but mostly because there isn’t an alternative. While there’s certainly anime out there that lacks fanservice, it’s a definite minority and can be tricky to find, particularly if you’re wanting to watch a show with multiple female characters. Fruits Basket and Nadeshiko, for instance, while both awesome and non-fanservicey, are also examples of male harem shojo, meaning that the female protagonists – respectively Tohru and Sunako – are effectively lone women surrounded by gorgeous men, the extent of whose Regularly Demonstrable Sexiness tends to hinge on bishie sparkle, cross-dressing and occasional shirtlessness. Which is, of itself, noteworthy, because I can’t think of a comparable genre/form that regularly creates male harems or caters to female sexual fantasies that way. What strikes me in the comparison, though, is that moments of male sexiness are almost never built into costume design in the way that female fanservice is. The practical upshot of this is that while Fruits Basket looks like this:

and Nadeshiko looks like this:

Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex still has to spend a season like this:

while Cowboy Bebop’s Faye Valentine gets to wear this:

To highlight the disparity further: both Fruits Basket and Nadeshiko are romantic shojo, meaning that they are specifically aimed at women and actively concerned with relationships – in other words, the type of show you’d most expect to get fanservicey if it were written for men. But Ghost in the Shell is a cyberpunk political thriller with existential undertones, while Cowboy Bebop is a hard SF drama about bounty hunters in space.  Which begs the question: if that’s the base level of fanservice in shows that aren’t aimed purely at men and which don’t have any inherent investment in sex, romance or relationships, then how bad does it get when those elements are also in play?

Internets, allow me to introduce you to Hyakka Ryoran Samurai Girls. It looks like this:

It’s shows like this which make me love Boobs Don’t Work That Way so very much. And that is the only good thing I will ever say about Samurai Girls.

The strongest attraction anime has for me is the profusion of female characters doing every conceivable type of awesome thing. They are hackers, warriors, starship pilots, psychics, mages, priestesses, ambassadors, thieves, bounty hunters, police officers, mothers, students, friends, sisters, daughters, alchemists, mechanics, cooks, wives, dress-makers, geeks, villains, heroes, anti-heroes, athletes, goddesses, demons, chosen ones and unchosen ones, carpenters, cleaners, queens, doctors, psychologists, nurses, witches, waitresses, writers, gunsmiths, swords-fighters, shapeshifters, teachers, confidantes and lovers. They are everything, and what’s more, they are everything equally, as though there were never any question that a top-level military submarine might have a female captain or an experimental space station be populated by as many women as men. I cannot describe the thrill of elation that went through me as a teenager when, after channel surfing one night, I landed on SBS and caught the last ten minutes of what I only later learned was an episode of Gunsmith Cats. Still new to anime, I was amazed by a cartoon that depicted violence, but flat-out hooked by the idea of one where the gun-toting, badass protagonists were women. I didn’t notice the fanservice, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have known what to call it. What mattered was the ladies themselves: the fact that I was watching, not just a show where women did awesome things, but where their ability to do so went unquestioned.

Here’s what saddens me about anime: that shows like Samurai Girls pass the Bechdel test at the same time as their visuals undermine everything that it stands for. So do Full Metal Panic, Azumanga Daioh, Lucky Star, Love Hina and just about any other shonen-oriented, slice of life or female harem story you care to name – but all while upskirting, side-boobing, cleavage-enlarging, skintight-wearing, fetish–enabling, proportion-warping artwork creates a visual dissonance with characters whose dialogue, friendships and personalities would otherwise stand on their own merits. Even in shows which don’t pass, like Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Cowboy Bebop, lone female characters who are tough, multifaceted, intelligent, complex, competent and believable still end up drawn like Playboy bunnies for reasons that have nothing to do with plot and everything to do with pandering to a horny male fanbase. This isn’t just an argument about unrealistic portrayals of women (though that’s certainly a parallel concern), but of what happens when you draw beautiful girls for the sole purpose of sexually objectifying them – and worse, when doing so is deemed to be such an integral part of a given culture that you not only start to expect it, but make allowances for it. Because anime is just like that, and how can I say I like anime if I’m going to criticise it? Isn’t that like saying I like fruit, then bitching about strawberries?

No, actually. It’s like saying I enjoy sex, then bitching about rape.

Some of the shows I’ve listed are ones I love; others I’m ambivalent towards, or actively dislike. But in almost every instance where I’ve ever stopped watching an anime, the reason has nothing to do with a dislike of the plot, premise or characterisation, and everything to do with how the women are treated. Samurai Girls and Full Metal Panic both have plots and settings that appeal to me; in both cases, I’ve turned away, furious, because I can’t stand to watch another upskirt shot or listen to another hatefully forced conversation about women’s boobs or underwear. And then I see something like this:

and end up angry all over again. Because, look: I know that poster’s meant as a joke. And I have a sense of humour! But for female viewers, fanservice is not gravy. Fanservice is sexism’s way of making us accept our own objectification for the sake of a good story, even where the story would be just as good – if not considerably better – without it. Because ultimately, the logic behind all fanservice can be boiled down to the following sentiment: that female characters, no matter how powerful, awesome and complex, are at their most interesting and relevant when drawn to look fuckable.

And to that I say: FUCK NO.

Poem/London Burns

The dreadful ease with which a fire starts,

that match-head flick and short, sharp scratch

that brings the sparks like shrapnel shards

and sets the world ablaze.

  .

We choke on smoke, the London sky a failing lung

consumptive with the greed and deeds

of men who run, and men with guns,

and humankind who, hungry, hunt,

and wanting, wreak

 .

but do not speak

a language easy on the tongue.

 .

When rhyme and reason mount the curb

and see their foes, and will not swerve,

and better men who stood to save the things they loved

are knocked instead to early graves

we ask ourselves where parents were –

what bridles checked might otherwise

have reined the rage and spared their lives –

 .

when everything is going up in flames.

 .

Elsewhere, a po-faced banker knots his tie

and strangles like a Tyburn son

in auto-erotic ecstasy; but then he kicks the chair away

and jerks and spasms in the throes

of sex and death and – look, who fucking knows?

But that’s the joy of double-dipping, chaps:

the money breaks, and and then its spenders snap.

 .

And everyone is asking why,

as though some word or magic curse

could tell them how to steer away from worse.

But in the rubble, born and grown by greed

that burns both ways, and fear, and hurt, and need

Dame Trickledown is turning deadly tricks

for stolen gold

 .

and newly-bloodied bricks.

Provoked by this news article.

Romance, Strength & Femininity

Recently, N. K. Jemisin wrote an excellent piece on the limitations of womanhood in fantasy.  Together with Kate Beaton’s take on Strong Female Characters, Kate Elliott’s discussion of gender and culture, and Overthinking It’s analysis of why strong female characters are bad for women, the essay illuminates an increasingly problematic disjunction in our treatment of femininity. The success of feminism means that women can now choose to live beyond the confines of their traditional roles; but despite/because of that freedom, there’s a fearful sort of disparagement reserved for women who still elect to be wives and mothers, or who shoulder the bulk of domestic duties. As though, somehow, feminism has made all such occupations redundant; as though a perfectly equal society is one in which nobody ever has to get married, give birth or do the washing-up. Doubtless there’s some who’d call such a world Utopia, which is fair enough. But here in reality, being a stay-at-home mother isn’t the same as being anti-feminist, and the definition of a strong female character is not exclusively one who eschews domesticity – or love, for that matter.

Commenting on Jemisin’s post, one woman remarked:

“Sure, the romance narrative is helping sell the books, and I freely admit I eat that stuff up, but… reliance on that central romantic narrative undercuts female power pretty dramatically. The entire story basically becomes a failed Bechdel test, even if it passes technically.”

Which is another way of saying that romance in narrative is innately anti-feminist. Frankly, it’s a sentiment which terrifies and chills me, not least because of the way in which it echoes the historical discrimination against working women who dared to get married. Find a man, this logic went, and you loose your credibility: married women should be (or are, depending on your preferred flavour of sexism) incapable of devoting time, effort and intelligence to anything other than marriage itself, and therefore can’t be trusted in the workforce. The modern version is subtler. In this scenario, women shouldn’t (or don’t, depending on your preferred flavour of feminism) need men to fulfill them; positive depictions of male/female romance contradict this tenet by linking happiness with heterosexual  romance, and are therefore anti-feminist. To be clear: the overwhelming preference of our culture for embedding marriage as the standard Happily Ever After is still problematic, as is the marginalization of happy non-hetero love and the idea that singleness is always the same as loneliness. What I’m objecting to is the idea that being romantically involved with men is, by itself, enough to undermine the feminist worth of female characters.

Imagine a group of macho men disparaging love as ‘chick stuff’ and an affront to masculinity, calling their married friends pussy-whipped and questioning the manhood (not to say intelligence) of any man who changes his lifestyle for the sake of a woman; the whole ‘bros before hos’ nine yards. Ugly, right? Then imagine a group of modern women disparaging love as a means of patriarchal control and an affront to feminism, calling their married friends submissive backsliders and challenging the feminist cred (not to say intelligence) of any woman who changes her lifestyle for the sake of a man; the whole ‘housewives and breeders’ manifesto.

Yeah. Still ugly.

To wax briefly lyrical, love is the great leveler: if you don’t lose your dignity at some point during the process, then I’d contend that you’re doing it wrong. Sometimes, and as treacherous an idea as it might seem to our sensibilities, loving another person does fulfill us in a way that nothing else can; nonetheless, love is not our only means of fulfillment, nor even – necessarily – the most important. Love is unique; it fascinates and enthralls. As countless narratives from Harry Potter to Pride and Prejudice have been at pains to point out, neither love nor loving is a weakness. Which isn’t to say that love is never destructive, ill-conceived, fleeting, hurtful, wrongheaded, violent or stubborn. It can be all that and more – but the saving grace is, it can also be exultant, glorious, unexpected and gleeful. Contrary creatures that we are, it can sometimes even be all those things at once. To quote e.e. cummings, whose wisdom in such matters is unparalleled:

‘and being here imprisoned, tortured here

love everywhere exploding maims and blinds

(but surely does not forget,perish,sleep

cannot be photographed,measured;disdains

the trivial labeling of punctual brains…’

That being said, I’m not about to issue a blanket indemnity for each and every romance ever written. Just as many real-world relationships are abusive, one-sided, airheaded and/or undertaken for all the wrong reasons, so too can narrative relationships turn toxic. The vital point here is whether the author intended the relationship to be positive or negative or somewhere in between, to what purpose, and whether or not they’ve succeeded. In this as in so many things, your mileage may vary; but more of that shortly. Assuming momentarily that adherence to feminist canon must always be the rubric by which we gauge the narrative success or failure of fictional relationships (it’s not, but that’s another post entirely), failure on that count isn’t the same thing as failure overall. By which I mean: a story which deliberately chronicles the ups and downs of a negative relationship is not automatically anti-feminist. But wait, you cry: weren’t you asserting only moments ago that positive relationships were the problem? Well, hypothetical reader, I’m glad you asked me that, because the sad fact is that some proponents of this view will have you coming and going. Negative hetero relationships are called anti-feminist because, nine times out of ten, they show women being mistreated by men, which – yes – is awful, but frequently on purpose, which is to say, the mistreatment is written deliberately to raise exactly this point; which is to say, a point that some commentators – not many, but enough to notice the pattern – persist in missing. But positive relationships are still called anti-feminist, too, because isn’t it just so contrived and backwards and cliche that a heterosexual woman might fall in love with a man, or want to? Why is it even necessary?

Look, you got me: it’s not necessary (or at least, not necessary to everyone). That doesn’t make it irrelevant, and it certainly doesn’t make it unrealistic. I mean, dragons aren’t necessary, and they’re still fucking awesome – but hey, if you don’t like dragons? Maybe read a unicorn book! Or something.

This is why I get irked when novels – or more specifically, their romantic plotlines – are reviewed in line with this somewhat warped version of feminism. To directly refute the Jemisin commenter, you do not fail the Bechdel test by having your heroine fall in love, even if it’s with an awesome, powerful dude; but perhaps you do fail at writing a feminist heroine if, for whatever reason, love turns her into a doormat and her love interest into a douche without any indication that this is, in fact, suboptimal. Similarly, to play something of a strawman argument – and without wanting in any way to suggest that lesbian relationships aren’t legitimate, beautiful, awesome things – having your heroine fall in love with a lady does not automatically make her more feminist than if she falls in love with a dude; so why would heterosexuality prove a feminist handicap? So often in these debates, I feel like narrative context becomes optional in assessing a story’s merits; we get hung up on whether or not the heroine is making the same choices we would under the same circumstances when the whole point is that the story’s not about us.

Returning finally to the subject of strong female characters, then, wives and mothers of any kind are no more anti-feminist than kickass warriors in skintight leather with multiple sexual partners are the feminist ideal. Suggestions to the contrary may well be a fault of terminology; despite appearances, the strong in strong female character doesn’t refer exclusively to physical attributes, but rather to strength of character – interesting, three-dimensional ladies with a range of capabilities, backgrounds and interests being, for my money, a far more workable and compelling definition than just ladies who can fight. But then again, I’m happily married, so I guess that means my life fails the Bechdel by default.

Rats. And I felt so strong, too.