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Posts Tagged ‘gender trouble’

Jim Hines on Correia and MacFarlane

So, there’s this.

As I said in the comments on Jim’s LJ, it took me a while to read the post, not because it’s long (though it is) but because my AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH meter kept maxing out and I would have to go away and breathe for a while before I could read any more.

I just . . . ye gods and little fishies. If you’re trying to respond to a piece on gender, and right up front you tell everybody that you’re assuming the person you’re responding to is a man and you can’t be bothered to check and see whether you’re right — even though the bio is right there at the bottom of the page, waiting to answer your question — then that’s pretty much a red flag of “Nobody should bother to listen to me on this topic.”

Because you just reinforced MacFarlane’s point. Yes, sure, she’s talking about the default of non-binary gender — but sweet baby Jesus, if we can’t even get past the default of male gender, then the problem you’re trying to dismiss is even bigger than she’s saying. Correia makes it clear, over and over again, that he is uninterested in putting anything other than the straight white male default into his stories unless there’s a “reason” for it. And apparently, “people like that exist and would like to read stories in which they exist” is not a reason. Their identities have to be plot-relevant, yo, or it’s back to the straight white men (because that isn’t a political act at all, natch). Doing anything else will make science fiction BORING and then people will STOP READING IT and that’s why the genre is DYING. Because the way to make it thrive is to cater to the comfort zone of straight white male gun-loving conservatives: only non-binary people want to read about non-binary people, and presumably only black people want to read about black people, etc, so let’s stick with what’s safe, shall we?

I mean, sure, there’s money to be had in catering to that demographic. Correia is probably not wrong that he makes more money from his writing than MacFarlane does (though I don’t agree with the follow-on implication that this makes him right and him her wrong). But the notion that the future of the genre depends on not rocking the boat? That including the full range of human diversity is automatically a MESSAGE — but restricting that diversity is neutral and value-free?

Bull. Shit.

Take care in reading the comments on Hines’ site. He says they’ve been “civil,” but there are a lot of Correia’s fanboys in there, waving the flag of their ignorance on matters of sex and gender and so forth, and straying very close to the border of getting banned.

Trans activism, language, and Yuletide

I know, I know — that’s a very motley assortment of things to stick in one post. But I’m going out of town tomorrow, and the rest of today is liable to be very busy, so I’d rather combine them than let one fall through the cracks.

The serious and important one first: I have signed on to this statement in support of trans-inclusive feminism. Because I know several people for whom this is not a matter of theory or debate, but their daily lives, and anything I can do to make that easier for them is absolutely worth doing.

Signing a statement is a minor thing, but I hope that mentioning it here is a larger one. And yes, I am thinking about ways to reflect this in my writing.

On a lighter note, my post at SF Novelists this month is “Lingua universalis fantasiae”, on the tendency of fantasy worlds to default to a “Common Tongue.” Comments on that post should go over there on SF Novelists, por favor.

Finally, and most frivolously, Yuletide nominations are open. Yes, I know it’s only September; we’re on a leisurely schedule this year, rather than cramming everything into November. The Yuletide member community is here as usual, if you are looking for more info and discussion.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/597578.html. Comment here or there.

Lady Trent Supports the Ada Initiative

The Ada Initiative, which “supports women in open technology and culture,” is running a fundraising drive. They’re currently about seventeen thousand dollars short of their goal, with four days to go.

I read the reviews for A Natural History of Dragons, and I see a lot of readers mentioning how much it means to them that Isabella is a scientist, and how resonant they find her struggle against the restrictions placed on her gender. As much as I’d like to say that struggle is over today, let’s face it: we as a society aren’t that perfect. Women still face obstacles on that path, and harassment at the end of it; especially in the open-source tech world, there’s a lot of lower-level primate chest-thumping that makes the environment kind of toxic to women (and to men who like the idea of having women in their community). That’s one of several things the Ada Initiative — named for Ada Lovelace, of course — works to counteract.

So if this is the kind of thing that matters to you, and if you can spare a bit of money, please consider donating. There was a matching donation offer from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, up to $5000, but I think we may have burned through that already, or near to it — the meter had more than twenty-five thousand dollars to go when I saw that announcement yesterday. But it’s still true that if you donate $128 (whether in a lump sum or installments), you get this lovely pendant, which is indeed “schwag done right.”

Let’s see if we can’t get them over the finish line.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/595727.html. Comment here or there.

a thought on racebending and genderbending

Which is to say, casting female performers for characters who are canonically male, or actors of color for characters who are canonically white.

Look at Hollywood. Look at TV. Look at how frequently they remake or reboot or sequelize existing narrative properties (for a host of reasons, not all of them terrible, but we won’t get into that here). For crying out loud, we’ve got three separate Sherlock Holmes franchises in progress right now.

If you don’t turn Starbuck female — if you don’t cast Lucy Liu as Watson — if you don’t make Idris Elba Heimdall — if you don’t break the mold of those existing texts in ways that will let in under-represented groups — then your opportunities for having those groups on the screen in the first place drop substantially. You’re basically left making them minor new characters, or else cracking the story open to stick in a major new minority character (and people will complain about that, too). Because all those stories we keep retelling? They’re mostly about straight white guys. And the stories that are new, the ones that aren’t being retold from one or more previous texts, can’t pick up all the slack on their own. You make Perry White black, or you make a Superman movie with no black people in it above the level of tertiary character.

Which isn’t automatically a problem when it’s one movie. But it isn’t one movie: it’s a whole mass of them. Including most of our blockbusters.

So either we chuck out the old stuff wholesale (and as a folklorist, I entirely understand why we don’t do that), or we rewrite it to suit our times. (And as a folklorist, I entirely understand that too — and I cheer it on. Go, folk process, go!)

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/594044.html. Comment here or there.

What we talk about when we talk about pockets

Originally posted by at What we talk about when we talk about pockets

This post is about pockets, feminism, design, autonomy and common sense. Please feel free to repost or link to it if you know people who’d benefit from the discussion.

A few weeks ago trillian_stars and I were out somewhere and she asked “Oooh, can I get a cup of coffee?” and I thought “why are you asking me? You don’t need permission.” But what I discovered was that her clothes had no pockets, so she had no money with her.

Mens clothes have pockets. My swimsuits have pockets. All of them do, and it’s not unusual, because, what if you’re swimming in the ocean and you find a fist full of pirate booty in the surf? You need somewhere to put it. Men are used to carrying stuff in their pockets, you put money there, you put car keys there. With money and car keys come power and independence. You can buy stuff, you can leave. The idea of some women’s clothes not having pockets is baffling, but it’s worse than that — it’s patriarchal because it makes the assumption that women will either carry a handbag, or they’ll rely on men around them for money and keys and such things. (I noticed this also when Neil & Amanda were figuring out where her stuff had to go because she had no pockets.) Where do women carry tampons? Amanda wondered, In their boyfriend’s pockets, Neil concluded.

I then noticed that none of trillian_stars‘ running clothes had pockets. Any pockets. Which is (as they always say on “Parking Wars”) ridikulus. Who leaves the house with nothing? (It’s not a rhetorical question, I actually can’t think of anybody).

We fixed some of this by getting this runners wrist wallet from Poutfits on Etsy — it holds money, ID, keys … the sort of stuff you’d need. Plus you can wipe your nose on it. It solves the running-wear problem, but not the bigger problem.



Clickenzee to Embiggen!

The bigger problem is that people who design women’s fashions are still designing pants and jackets that have no pockets. In fact, this jacket we got last December has … no pockets. It’s not a question of lines or shape, it’s a question of autonomy.



Clickenzee to Embiggen

So I’m asking my friends who design women’s clothes to consider putting pockets in them, they can be small, they can be out of the way, they can be inside the garment, but space enough to put ID, and cash and bus tokens. And maybe a phone. (And if you can design a surreptitious tampon stash, I’m sure Neil & Amanda & a lot of other people would appreciate it as well.)


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three conversations at once

I have other things I should be doing, but wshaffer made a very good point in the comments to my last post, so I’m back for another round. And at this point I’ve made a tag for the grimdark discussion, because I’ve said enough that you might want to be able to track it all down.

To quote wshaffer:

The thing that strikes me about the grimdark discussion is that there are multiple different-but-interlocking conversations going on at once. One is an argument about whether “realism” is grounds for granting a work a higher degree of artistic merit. Another is an argument about to what extent realism actually requires focusing on the darker and more unpleasant aspects of life. And the third is: supposing that we grant that the historical prevalence of misogyny and rape requires that they be addressed in realistic fiction, are there ways of portraying them that do no themselves reinforce misogyny and rape culture?

I love things like this, because they simultaneously clear up a bunch of confusion in my head, and make it possible to see things I couldn’t before. Let’s take her questions one at a time.

(more…)

gritty vs. grimdark

Yeah, I’m still thinking about this topic. Partly because of Cora Buhlert’s recent roundup. The digression onto Deathstalker mostly went over my head, since I haven’t read it, but she brings up a number of good points and also links to several posts I hadn’t seen. (Though I use the term “post” generously. I have to say, when the only response you make to this debate is “meh” followed by links to people who already agree with you, you might as well not bother. All you’re doing is patting yourself on the back in public.)

So I’m thinking about our terminology — “gritty” and “grimdark” and so on. What do we mean by “grit,” anyway? The abrasive parts of life, I guess; the stuff that’s hard and unpleasant. Logistics and consequences and that sort of thing, the little stony details that other books might gloss over. It’s adjacent to, or maybe our new replacement for, “low fantasy” — the stories in which magic is relatively rare, and characters have to do things the hard way, just like us. Hence laying claim to the term “realism”: those kinds of details that can ground a story in reality.

But that isn’t the same thing as “grimdark,” is it? That describes a mood, and you can just as easily tell a story in which everything is horrible and doomed without those little details as with. (As indeed some authors do.) Hence, of course, the counter-arguments that grimdark fantasy is just as selective in its “realism” as lighter fare: if you’re writing about a war and all the women are threatened with sexual violence but none of the men are, then you’re cherry-picking your grit.

What interests me, though, are the books which I might call gritty, but not grimdark. I mentioned this a while ago, when I read Tamora Pierce’s second Beka Cooper book, Bloodhound. The central conflict in that book is counterfeiting, and Pierce is very realistic about what fake coinage can do to a kingdom. She also delves into the nuts and bolts of early police work, including police corruption . . . I’d call that grit. Of course it’s mitigated by the fact that her story is set in Tortall, which began in a decidedly less gritty manner; one of the things I noticed in the Beka Cooper books was how Pierce worked to deconstruct some of her earlier, more romantic notions, like the Court of the Rogue. But still: counterfeiting, a collapse in monetary policy, police corruption of a realistic sort, etc. Those are the kinds of details a lot of books would gloss over.

Or an example closer to home: With Fate Conspire. I was discussing it over e-mail recently, and it occurred to me that I put a lot of unpleasantness into that book. Off the cuff, it includes betrayal, slavery, slavery of children, imprisonment, torture, horrible disease, poverty, racism, terrorism, massive amounts of class privilege and the lack thereof, rape (alluded to), pollution, fecal matter, and an abundance of swearing. All of which is the kind of stuff grimdark fantasy revels in . . . yet I have not seen a single person attach that label to the novel. Nor “gritty,” for that matter, but I would argue that word, at least, should indeed apply. A great deal of that story grinds its way through the hard, unpleasant details of being lower-class in Victorian London. Realistic details, at that.

Of course, the book has a happy ending (albeit one with various price tags attached). Which makes it not grimdark — and also not gritty? Or maybe it’s that I was writing historical fiction, not the secondary-world fantasy that seems to be the locus of the term. Or, y’know, it might be that I’m a woman. One of the posts Buhlert links to is from [personal profile] matociquala, who — unusually for this debate — names some female authors as having produced gritty work, and Buhlert takes that point further. This is a highly gendered debate, not just where the sexual abuse of characters is concerned, and if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re only looking at a fraction of the issue.

I’m sort of wandering at this point, because there’s no tidy conclusion to draw. You can have grit without being grimdark, and you can be grimdark without grit, but doing either while being female is rare? Not very tidy, but something to keep in mind. I think I’d be interested in reading more gritty-but-not-grimdark fantasy, from either gender. Recommendations welcome.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/580211.html. Comment here or there.

Batman had it easy

Only just now remembering to link to it, but this months’ SF Novelists post is “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” in which I challenge the notion that so-called “gritty” fantasy is a) realistic and b) superior on account of its realism.

(Both that post and the rest of this one discuss sexual violence — quelle surprise, given the obsession gritty fantasy has with that topic — so if you don’t want to read about them, click away now.)

This is part of a much larger discussion floating around the internet right now, which I keep encountering in unexpected corners. The most recent of those is “The Rape of James Bond,” which makes a lot of good points; toward the end, McDougall talks about her own decision-making process where fictional sexual violence is concerned, and whether you agree with her decisions or not, her questions are good ones.

But the part I found the most striking was where she talked about reactions to Skyfall and the first encounter between Silva and Bond.

Cut in case you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid a spoiler.

Not Being a Creeper: Two Examples

John Scalzi has posted An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping, i.e. how not to be that guy women avoid at cons. He’s got a number of good points — but I wanted to follow up by giving two examples, of situations I’ve been in where it could have been creepy and wasn’t.

See, sometimes you get guys responding to this kind of thing by wailing that they’ll never be able to compliment a woman again, or whatever. And that just isn’t the case. You can say nice things to a woman, or even touch her — or even try to hit on her! — without weirding her out. Here’s how.

Example 1: the sweet fellow at the concert

link dump

Two more on gun control:

American gun owners are under siege

The Second Amendment and the fantasy of revolution

Several on gender:

Kickstarter project for another Gamers movie (which is going into this category because of this update)

Rundown on the Readercon debacle

Finding That a “Dynamic” Pose is Defined by Gender (comic books, and not surprising, but the redraws really help hammer the point home)

Victoria’s Secret vs. Dove (a very striking contrast)

Just Another Princess Movie (an interesting analysis of Brave, that says it is not just another princess movie)

Awesome photos:

Imgur set

National Geographic set

Music humour:

“Early one day, a C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar . . .”

The truth about oboes

And now my browser can stop weeping for mercy.

If a picture is worth a thousand words . . . .

. . . then we’re nearing a novel’s worth of argument here.

A while back, jimhines posted shots of himself posing like women on the covers of books. ocelott followed up with a compare-and-contrast of men’s poses vs. women’s, again with attempted reproduction.

Well, now Jim has done the other side of the equation, posing like some male cover models (from romance as well as fantasy). As he points out, not only are the poses less uncomfortable, their mode of objectification conveys power rather than sexualization. And those are really, really not the same thing.

And, for an encore, there’s Emily Asher-Perrin’s article on Tor.com, “Hey, Everyone — Stop Taking This Picture! (No, I Mean It.)” And, um, yeah. Quit it with the butt shots already.

If you can look at those things and still not think there’s a problematic pattern . . . oof. I think the kindest interpretation I can put on that is “willful stupidity.”

Death threats are part of the game we play

Whether you paid any attention to Christopher Priest’s rant about the Clarke shortlist or not, you should go read Cat Valente’s follow-up post, about what would have happened if a woman had said anything even half that scathing.

This is the reality women live with online, and sometimes in person. It isn’t even just a thing that happens when we yell at somebody, when we criticize something, when we get angry. It can happen when we say anything the reader doesn’t like. Express a political opinion? Post pictures of yourself online? Root for the wrong sports team? “Bitch, I hope you get raped to death like the ugly cow you are.”

Because for a frighteningly large segment of the populace, that’s what you say to shut a woman up. It’s a knee-jerk reflex, like swatting a fly.

How large of a segment? Who knows. Any number larger than “pathologically unwell people who are or should be seeing a mental health professional” is too large. And they’re loud. They swarm the internet, they take over the comment sections on various sites, they poison the water and drive out the good, and for whatever reason, we let them get away with it. We don’t band together like we should and say, start acting like a human, instead of something out of Lovecraft.

(I’m laying off the hyenas, out of consideration for my commenters.)

Sometimes we say it. Some of us do. I don’t do it often enough because, to be honest, I stay away from comment threads most of the time. When I see things like the response Jim Hines dissects, my hands go cold, my fingers start shaking, and whether I respond or not I spend the rest of the day chewing that piece of foul-tasting meat over and over and over again; it’s easier just to avoid the trap. But I need to go to bat for human decency more often. We all do. Again and again, until we’ve sent this malignance howling for the shadows.

Have I gotten death threats, rape threats, any of the hatred Cat describes? I haven’t, actually. But the sad thing is, I know that isn’t because I’m a nice person who doesn’t deserve it, a good, demure woman who doesn’t need to be put in her place.

It’s because not enough people are reading what I write. Give me a bigger microphone, and the sewage will come to swamp me, too.

We need to cut this shit out. The men who spew this kind of thing need to get over whatever misogynistic reflex makes them say it, and the rest of us, men and women alike, need to keep telling them so until they do. I don’t know how we do that — I don’t know how we get it through their skulls — but we have to try. Even the attempt is a form of support for the ones drowning in the bile, and they need all the support they can get.

For fuck’s sake, people. That is a person on the other end of the things you say. Remember that. And summon up the basic compassion to care.

three links on gender in fandom

Dear Wizards: Why Failing Less at Gender in 5E Would Be Good For Your Bottom Line

The Girl Geek Community is Hidden, Ever Wondered Why?

“Geek girls” and the problem of self-objectification

And for a bonus, the tumblr Escher Girls, which I may or may not have linked to before, but is a brain-liquefying collection of everything that is horribly, horribly wrong with the visual depiction of women in comics/anime/gaming art/etc.

It isn’t on par with the political issues we’re facing right now, but I see no reason why I can’t decry sexism in multiple forms at once.

Pick-a-mix

I had a bunch of things I meant to post yesterday, but ended up getting all political instead. (I am heartened, though, by the news that at least some organizations are seeing a funding surge. And there’s at least one doctor advocating for civil disobedience when the law would threaten the rights and well-being of patients.)

But! The point of this is to post the other stuff!

I neglected to mention this on the 16th, but I have my usual post up at SF Novelists, talking about audience expectations, and whether it’s better to be wrong or right about where the story is going.

Next, I’d like to point you at a friend’s Kickstarter project, for The Urban Tarot Deck. The existing art for this is pretty awesome; I own a print of the Princess of Swords, and kniedzw has the Magician. I’ve been hoping for years that he’d be able to finish the deck (and must confess to a hope that if this project is a success, he’ll finish his Silhouette Tarot, which I like even more). So mosey on over to take a look, and if you like what you see, send a few bucks his way.

(Okay, full truth? I am sorely tempted to shell out silly amounts of money to be on one of the remaining cards. A bunch of the models for the existing cards are friends of ours, and I love what Rob did with them; it would be nifty to see what he’d do with me. But, um. Kind of silly amounts of money, for something I cannot even pretend is a business expense.)

Third, cogent analysis of why John Carter tanked. I confess that if anybody ever makes a movie of my books, I would love to have control over various aspects . . . but then I see what happens when somebody with no distance from the subject gets to run the show, and I reconsider. I’d like to believe I would be sensible enough to listen to other people’s advice, but who knows? I might be just as short-sighted and detrimental as Stanton was.

Fourth, fellow geeks of a certain stripe may be interested in the trailer for a live-action Rurouni Kenshin movie. I have to admit, watching it breaks my brain a little; I’ve been a fan of the anime for (ye gods) nearly half my life, and Suzukaze Mayo is the voice of Himura Kenshin. The guy in the trailer . . . is a guy. (When a friend told me they were filming a live-action movie, I asked, only half-joking, whether they were going to cast a woman as Kenshin.) But there are things flashing by in the trailer that have me bouncing in my seat; does that gatling gun mean we’re going to get Aoshi and the Oniwabanshu stuff? I must watch and see. 🙂

And, to make five (non-political) things, I leave you with The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions.

Your one-stop shop for SCREAMING RAGE

So I’ve been mentioning lately the situation surrounding women’s rights in the United States (and sometimes elsewhere) — a situation so appalling, that word is utterly inadequate for describing how I feel about it. The best I can do is to point you at Soraya Chemaly’s “Legislators: Women Are Not Cows and Pigs,” which contains a handy run-down of the various pieces of jaw-droppingly retrograde legislation being pushed by conservative extremists. It’s all there, from the suggestion that we should put a woman’s life at risk rather than remove a dead fetus from inside her, to the idea that an employer should be allowed to ask why his female employee wants birth control pills, and then fire her if she says it’s to prevent pregnancy.

I wish I were making this shit up.

I am not as good at eloquent rage as Cat Valente is. (Go read that post for a fairly accurate picture of my current internal state.) But I wanted to say, that fundraiser I’m doing? I attached it to the WoT blogging because I thought, this stuff usually has more success when it’s got some kind of result attached to it, even a silly one. But really, the point isn’t for me to eviscerate WoT merchandising. The point is to raise money for the people fighting back against these attacks. The point is to help Planned Parenthood provide health care to low-income women (though that doesn’t help much when the state of Texas knowingly chucks those services out the window), or to make sure battered women have a safe place to go.

If you can spare any money for a cause like that, please do. And do the things that don’t require money, too: contact your legislators. Speak out. Make it clear that women are not farm animals, that we have a right to privacy and control of our own bodies, that our sexual behavior is no business of the state’s. Fight back.

I want to believe these are the death throes of an old way, and we’ll break through into something better. But that won’t happen if we don’t fight.

fundraising reminder

In the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke — and when I’ve been reading articles like this one on funding cuts in the UK for domestic violence shelters — it seems an opportune time to remind everybody about the random little fundraiser I’m doing.

More details at that link, but the short form is that, as a part of my ongoing analysis, if you donate to a women’s charity — you choose which one; it could be a shelter or rape counseling or pro-choice or anti-discrimination or whatever — and send me the info, I will buy used copies of various bits of Wheel of Time merchandise, and blog about them for your entertainment.

Because I’m really tired of feeling like we’re backsliding on women’s rights, like the Overton window has shifted to the point where we’ve got a major presidential candidate speaking out against all forms of birth control, and people cheering him for it. So I hope this encourages some of you to donate to a worthy cause.

Things Not to Say

Hey, guys?

If you are upset about something, and you want to yell at somebody about it, it’s worth taking a moment to make sure you’re yelling at the right person.

For example, do not blame the author for Amazon’s decision to ship print copies of a novel two weeks before the sale date, but not to send out the e-books at the same time. Aside from the fact that retailers aren’t supposed to ship anything before the street date, the author has precisely ZERO control over what Amazon chooses to do. (And is probably even more upset than you are, because that potentially screws her over in career-affecting ways.)

And if you are upset about something, take a careful look at how you’re expressing your feelings.

For example, is it productive to call the author “stupid,” “greedy,” “ungrateful,” or “a narcissist”? Probably not.

And it is definitely not productive — nor even okay — to call her a “bitch,” a “whore,” or a “cunt.”

Seriously. The person on the other end of that e-mail you’re about to send? Is a person. One who, in this case, has no actual control over the thing you are upset about; she didn’t cause it, and she can’t fix it, and she’s upset about it, too. But even if those things weren’t true . . . what the hell, people. How fragile is your world if the UTTER APOCALYPTIC DISASTER of NOT BEING ABLE TO GET YOUR E-BOOK NOW NOW NOW justifies heaping misogynistic abuse on the person who produces the thing you love?

Please. Be smart enough to aim your criticism in an appropriate direction, not at a fellow victim. But more than anything . . . act like a human, not a hyena.

The Wheel of Time Plan — including bonus fundraiser!

Okay, so after some reflection, here’s the plan.

I’m going to delay posting about the novels until later this year — probably starting in September, with two posts each for The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight. The first post will be pure reader reaction (as pure as I can make it, anyway), and the second will be analysis.

In between now and then, I will post about related WoT things. Which ones? Well, that depends on you.

There is a companion book, a short story (which I think is in the companion book), a role-playing game, a video game, and some comic books. I own the first (and therefore possibly the second), but none of the rest, and unlike the usual novels, I can’t obtain them from libraries. Ergo, investigating these things would require me to shell out money as well as time. But, on the other hand, I don’t actually want to solicit money from you guys for what amounts to a random hobby project.

Stick a pin in that for a second, and follow me down a divergent thread, which is that I am deeply furious with the retrograde stuff going on right now in the United States with regard to gender and reproduction. I won’t get into specifics, because I don’t want to turn this into a political thread — but that collided in my head with some of the complaints I’ve made about gender in this series, and lo, an idea was born.

It goes like this: donate to a charity that supports women and/or their right to control their own bodies, and I will subject myself to assorted bits of Wheel of Time merchandising for your entertainment.

It looks like it’ll cost me about $25 a pop to obtain the RPG book and the video game [edited to add: used copies of both], so let’s set those as our minima: if you guys raise twenty-five dollars, I’ll read and report back on the RPG, and if you raise fifty, I’ll do the same for the video game. Seventy-five gets you a more fully-baked version of my homebrew hack for a Wheel of Time RPG, and a hundred gets you a solemn promise that I’ll play the entire video game, come hell, high water, or my complete suckitude at first-person shooters. And if you raise $150 or more, I’ll even hunt down the comic books — which are a rehash of New Spring and The Eye of the World, rather than new material, which is why I’m putting them last.

Donate to a suitable charity — you pick which one — and e-mail me a copy of the receipt at marie[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com. I’ll keep a running tally. There’s no immediate deadline; this part of the project is intended to occupy me through August, so you can donate at any point before then. But do feel free — nay, encouraged — to signal-boost. At a time like this, when a congressional representative can think it’s even remotely excusable to convene a panel on the topic of birth control and stock it entirely with men, I’d like to see women’s rights get a bit of support.

In which I pretend to be a statistician

Since there’s recently been another round of discussion about gender balance (or imbalance) in SF/F, I thought it might be a nice time to collate a bit of data I’ve been wondering about for a while.

Generally people tend to perceive a particular group as being gender-balanced when it’s about 25% female, and if you get up to 40%, they think it’s dominated by women. So it’s useful to ask myself: if my instinct is that a short story market — in this case, Beneath Ceaseless Skies — publishes a lot of women, am I right?

Cut to spare you lots and lots of numbers.

three links, and some thoughts

It is apparently Feminism Day in the internets. (I know why, actually — it’s a particular stage of ripples from an earlier much-discussed incident — but I’m not going to try to trace the lineage; I’m just here to provide the links.)

First up, something most of my personal friends understand, but worth spreading as a public service: “A Straight Geek Male’s Guide to Interaction with Females.” It’s the basics, nothing more, but it never hurts to remind people of them.

Second: the L.A. Times on, well, one of the fastest ways to piss me off royally, aka Men Who Explain Things. You know, the patronizing jackasses who presume they know more about Topic X than you do, even when they don’t. Bonus rage points for the fact that, while some of them sometimes do it to other men, it is frequently directed at women. (Includes a fabulous anecdote of the best shut-down possible. Alas, it is not often possible — but it must have been satisfying when it happened.)

Third: a lengthy post from synecdochic on “Don’t Be That Guy.” Very long, but useful not just in identifying the male behaviors that put women off, but offering suggestions for how “allies” (other guys who notice the problem) can help out. I’m sure somewhere in the three pages and counting of comments, multiple somebodies have pointed out that the suggestions do often involve a man speaking on a woman’s behalf because she won’t be listened to, but — as I believe the poster acknowledges — sometimes that’s regrettably necessary. Ultimately no woman should ever need a man to step in and speak for her, but if him doing so gets us a step closer to that day, I won’t discourage it.

. . . but you know, it’s odd. Many of the experiences that last post talks about, I just, well, haven’t experienced. Not often, anyway. And I can’t help but ponder the confluence of factors that makes that so.

Partly, no doubt, it’s causal factors. I’m not curvy and I don’t tend to dress in anything remotely resembling a revealing fashion (LARPS notwithstanding), ergo I’m not as likely to have the “my eyes are up HERE” problem. I associate mostly with guys who are legitimately Good Guys, and therefore unlikely to patronize or dismiss me. (Half of them are better feminists than I am.) Etc.

Some of it, though, has to be perceptual. In other words, I do encounter such things, but I don’t notice them. I’ve said before that I must have run into more than two or three sexist teachers in my educational career, but I guess I just steamrollered over the others without noticing. Because on the one hand I can’t think of more, but on the other, I can’t find much evidence in my life of sexist assumptions and behavior holding me back. I’m having a hard time articulating what I mean by that; I don’t mean I’m immune. Situations where I was hampered externally, sure, those no doubt have happened. But I have rarely felt inferior, inadequate, what have you, as a result of my gender. I actually believe it’s true when I say that I went from Great At Math to Sucking At Math, not because I felt like I couldn’t do it, but because I didn’t feel like doing it. And sure, my loss of interest partially coincided with one of the identifiably sexist teachers — but only partially. I never felt incapable. (Nor was I, if I managed to pass AP Calculus by doing all the homework the night before the test.)

At cons? I suppose many of the writers I hang out with there are women. If I tally up a mental list of the people I anticipate seeing when I go, it’s definitely skewed female. Then again, this is more likely to be a problem of interaction with strangers or new acquaintances than with established friends. But if there have been room parties/dinners/whatever where a guy was checking me out or behaving like he had a right to something from me or dismissing my words, I just . . . haven’t noticed. And have not, so far as I can tell, let it affect me.

And you know, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, yay me! I can haz self-esteem. On the other, maybe I’m missing out on opportunities to push for change, to make a difference, to call people on their bullshit instead of ignoring it. (Or maybe it is undermining me after all. You can be oppressed without noticing your oppression.) How much can I trust my own perception? How much good do I do in a broader sense by shrugging this stuff off?

I don’t particularly know. But at the very least, chewing on these questions is good for me.