I also want to say that the ‘‘conceptual superweapon’’ thing ignores a pretty important detail, which is that these weapons are still nowhere near matched in power. That guy being excoriated on the internet for talking openly about his issues, I feel for him, but an unfair comment on the internet is not getting raped and publicly shamed for speaking out about it. Scott Alexander being dissed by his female friend is not dying in childbirth because of bullshit abortion laws. In the aggregate, it’s comparing an atomic bomb to an assault rifle, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to grasp that, or think it’s relevant to his argument, concerns me.
I agree the idea that gender equality is a zero sum game is one of the most fundamental problems of all, and I do put some of the blame on certain feminist attitudes, namely the ones that treat male allies with suspicion and dismiss their concerns. Which is exactly why that article about mistrusting all men pissed me off so much. Men absolutely have a stake in feminism, but many feminists keep acting like they don’t, like men need to be doing things for us instead of with us. It’s all wrong, both strategically and ethically.
I actually do get where they are coming from–in attempting to change culture (including the perceived “rape culture”) they hope to create an environment when it isn’t even okay to even write or think about the concepts that they are opposed to–they are believers in security through obscurity.
I remember another indecent at John Scalzi’s blog (shut up, elucidator.) He often posts stacks of ARC books that have been sent to him and allows comments/suggestions on which ones he should take a look at. One post included the latest book by Richard K Morgan, and several people were enthusiastic about that, when someone said:
“Did I miss something? Cold Commands has the (anti-) hero ordering a gang rape of a woman that lasts two chapters. At the end, he then kills her once they are done with her. Can someone please explain how this is acceptable?”
The enjoyable part was the Richard K Morgan showed up two posts later. (The risk of posting to a top SF blog is that the writer you are complaining about may be reading your posts.)
Can you explain to me what actually happens in the book, for context? I’m going to assume it’s not the author reveling in the idea of murder and gang rape. As described though, I’m going to stay as far away from it as humanly fucking possible. Also, in my circle, responding publicly and individually to reader complaints of your own work is generally considered unprofessional. In the very least it puts the author on the defensive and you are at an extreme emotional disadvantage which is not a good position to be in, because you’re more likely to embarrass yourself and alienate your fans. I’m literally talking about nitpicking with individuals in comments sections, not An Open Blog Post to People Who Hate My Shit.
I’m comfortable writing about sexual assault because I’ve experienced it. If someone gets pissy about my depiction of sexual assault or PTSD, I at least have experience to fall back on. Even in the wildest SJW’s mind, I have a ‘‘right’’ to cover that topic. But writers have to stretch themselves, and I found myself in a quandary when I had my male protagonist tortured. It seemed the most likely outcome is that he would break down and tell the bad guys what they wanted to know (which in this case would mean selling out the woman he loves.) Since psychologically breaking someone is relatively easy and common, I didn’t want to give any lip service to the idea that if he really cared about her, he wouldn’t give them the information. Because one of the most traumatic things for torture victims is when they are made to be complicit in the harm of a loved one. But when I wrote it that way, my beta readers hated it. They didn’t want reality, they wanted good storytelling. They wanted a hero that found a way to transcend human frailty.
To be perfectly honest, I can’t fault them for that. I’m doing a complete overhaul of the character arc, particularly as it relates to that scene. I managed to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t feel like throwing real life torture victims under the bus.
I probably put way more thought into this than the average genre writer. And at some point, it’s still going to bite me in the ass. I just know it. Writing these days feels increasingly like a political minefield. Books have always been controversial and divisive, but in the era of internet outrage it’s increasingly more easy to drum up controversy out of nothing.
As an aside, when the YA Twitter chick announced, ‘‘The Black Witch is the most offensive and dangerous book I’ve ever read,’’ my knee-jerk response was, ‘‘Jesus, lady, you need to read some more books.’’ If you haven’t encountered something more dangerous than that you probably don’t fully understand the value of literature.
That is, what I think is being lost in all of this. The understanding that provocation and boundary pushing in the arts is often a tool for change in and of itself. A bunch of fascists in Spain totally hated the liberal relativity of surrealism, so it was used as a tool for social activism against Franco’s regime. Guernica is a political statement, not just for its subject matter but the very form itself.
From my memory of “The Cold Commands”, the anti-hero is recounting or remembering an incident in his past in which he helped free a slave caravan, and then allowed/encouraged the freed slaves to torture and rape the slave-dealer (a woman). And at the end, I think he regrets not stopping the rape.
But it’s been a few years since I read it, so I may be wrong about some of those details.
Many people seem unable to wrap their heads around the notion of writing about something without it being an act of advocacy or apologetics. They seem to be saying some things and ideas are literally unthinkable and unspeakable. They have always been around, only that a generation or two ago they were mostly conservative fuddyduddies. Now there’s a new crop.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around the opposite notion, that you can make any meaningful change without talking about the shit that needs to change.
God. I have a lot of feelings about this subject. Does Catch-22 endorse war? Uncle Tom’s Cabin is insensitive to slaves?
And the thing about how white people can’t touch issues related to people of color also pisses me off. Any movement is reliant on people in relative positions of privilege to bring attention to these issues, and I might be more understanding if my former Facebook Feed hadn’t been filled with screeds against white allies for not doing enough to address the problem of racism. While I had people screaming at me for trying to have conversations with Trump supporters, I also had people screaming at me for blocking the racists, because as a White Ally I have a responsibility to be uncomfortable on behalf of black people and facilitate dialog with their oppressors. We (anyone trying to help facilitate the equal treatment of any marginalized population) are damned no matter what we do.
I often think about the two dudes and the donkey when it comes to issues like this. If you write all of your characters as white males, a group of people complains about that. If you put in some female and POC characters but the characters are treated as normal people, a different people call it “whitewashing” the characters and those characters need to face discrimination. If you add discrimination, yet another group of people complain that white people shouldn’t be trying to write about the problems POC that they aren’t qualified to talk about! Are you familiar with racefail? Or Requires Hate?
Infighting between SF fans and between SF writers? Yeah, pretty common. We fight so much because the stakes are so low.
You probably aren’t even aware of the whole SadPuppieskerfuffle that has been burning for years now. To put it succinctly, a group of right-leaning, mostly self-published writers and fans decided that the voting base for the Hugos had been taken over by the worst kind of SJW (a mischaracterization, I think–as I’ve shown here I think that those worst SJWs exist, but I think that the Hugo base ain’t them) and attempted to take them over by pulling a Boaty McBoatface on a voting system that–up until the kerfuffle–had always been gameable but mostly wasn’t because of “the honor system”–until these right wingers without honor showed up.
But are they real SF fans? Do they honor Ursula LeGuinn and Phillip Jose Farmer as demi-gods? Do they wear mourning to mark the day Larry Niven first met Jerry Pournelle?
Talking about blowback interpretations of media, Spice Weasel, you might find this one interesting, too. This tread has had me thinking of something I ran across last year when–never having watched My Little Pony but having seen references to and memes based on it often on the net, I was finally curious enough to begin researching the show. I soon came to a response by the creator and producer of the latest version of the series to someone who watched a short video preview of the series then wrote a post about how racist and homophobic the show was. Revisiting the posts today, the response post produced over 600 replies (the original had far fewer, but only because the poster closed the thread when she saw the responses weren’t going her way) and most of them were talking about how much they liked the show, but some of the posters were agreeing about how racist it is, such as this:
“Yes, the ponies are all different colors–but those colors include blue, purple, and pink. That’s fake diversity, based on the premise that blue, purple and pink are nice colors to look at but that brown or black are ugly colors that girls wouldn’t want to look at. That kind of exclusion is problematic.”
A show about pastel ponies is “problematic” because there aren’t enough black or brown ponies around. And check out the posts by Janine deMada, especially this one. Anger over lack of representation in pastel ponies. There is nothing that some people won’t be offended by.
Sometimes you do not get to choose. My impression is that writing is not so much making stuff up as it is a matter of finding the story and making the elements work together. There is some perception, I think, that writers are god-like with respect to their works, but I do not believe that to be true. A story has to work within its framework, themes and internal environment, which is much the same as with music or painting.
An artist is limited by the medium and often must pursue difficult avenues in order to get out what they want. And, really, some of that shit, if they could not get it out of their heads, they might well turn to personal extremes. Art calls for pain – the alternative is something like Thomas Kincade.
This might sound strange, but it’s more like I’m reliving my own pain through them than inflicting suffering upon them. Okay, I felt guilty when I had to revise the torture scene like 20 times, because it was like, every day, there was poor Fel, being tortured again…
But generally speaking, writing is me playing with different parts of my own personality, different aspects of my own experience. I haven’t had the shit burned out of me in a political prison but the core of the experience, terror, guilt, helplessness, shame… it’s universal. eschereal is right, you have to draw on your own pain to write anything worth a damn. It hurts like a bitch sometimes, but it’s also necessary. I’m terrified of the kinds of things my characters experience. It allows me to confront (or relive) my fears in a controlled environment. In many cases I am driven to sort through my own trauma. What my story ends up being ‘‘about’’ usually kind of just happens on its own, and in many cases has served as a wake-up call for me about an issue I need to deal with. I am always surprised. But one of the central challenges of writing fiction, I think, is finding that universality of human experience in what might on the surface look like very specific and unique circumstances.
One of the single greatest works of literature, in my opinion, is the Pullitzer-winning Maus by Art Spiegelman. It’s a comic in which the author attempts to recount his father’s experience of the Holocaust while also paralleling his troubled relationship with his father in the present day. By the end it becomes really meta as his cartoon generates success and he is grappling with achieving success based on the exploitation of pain. In this simple black and white cartoon, the Jews are mice, the Americans are dogs, the Nazis are cats… it sounds so facile, but the effect is profound. Because by the end of the book, you aren’t thinking the Holocaust is a thing that happened to those people over there. The Holocaust is part of the human condition. Those people are us. And I’m also sorry to say, the Nazis are us too. I’ve never ended a book with an emotional impression that profound, but what Spiegelman did is he used his own pain, and the pain of his father, to eliminate the experiential lines between human beings and get down to the core of what we all are.
He deserves the Pullitzer, is what I’m saying.
And yes, the first draft might be a free-for-all but eventually you have to get down into the nitty gritty of storytelling. It’s not sexy, but my current project is cataloging every scene in my book in an Excel spreadsheet that marks the turning points, polarity shifts, conflict, crisis, climax and resolutions. (Hat tip to Story Grid.) I don’t particularly want to torture Fel, but the basis of all storytelling, as one author put it, is to ‘‘run your protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at them.’’ So I’m seriously looking at my spreadsheet going, ‘‘by this point in the novel he has to be in X place with regard to his redemption arc, which means action Y is not going to fit with this scene.’’ I have to figure out how to hit those critical story beats while still remaining true to character. By that point in the process, his torture has a specific purpose beyond personal catharsis and beyond just making the reader feel something. Writing is both a highly creative, emotional endeavor and a specialized technical skill, and I think a lot of would-be writers freak out and give up when they first are confronted with the latter part, because it is a shiiiiite ton of work. Four years I’ve been working on this shit, but I knew nothing about craft when I started this mess, so I’m hoping the next one goes a lot more smoothly.
That is indeed a thing many unreasonable people appeal to. And that’s a problem.
Relevant, from the article:
Now the feminists would say that I too have a superweapon called “patriarchy”, and that they’re just continuing the arms race. This is true, but it doesn’t lead to a stable state like what the guns rights advocates claim would happen if everyone had guns where we would all be super-polite because nobody wants to offend a guy who’s probably packing heat. It leads to something more like a postapocalyptic anarchy where everyone has guns and we’re all shooting each other. If there’s a conflict between a man and a woman, and the people involved happen to be old-fashioned patriarchalist types, then the man will automatically win and everyone will hate the woman for being a slut or a bitch or whatever. If there’s a conflict between a man and a woman, and the people involved happen to be feminists who are familiar with the memeplex and all its pattern-matching suggests, then the woman will probably win and everyone will hate the man for being a creep or a bigot or whatever. At no point does everyone become respectful and say “Hey, we’re all reasonable people with superweapons, let’s judge this case on its merits instead of pattern-matching to the closest atrocity committed by someone of the same gender”.
It also seems to me that the patriarchy is sort of an accident, where men ruled because they were big and strong and couldn’t imagine doing otherwise and their values just sort of coalesced over time, and the struggle seems to be getting them to realize it’s there. Whereas the feminists know all about discourse and power relations and so on and are quite gung ho about it and they’re staying up late at night reading books with titles like How To Build A Much Deadlier Superweapon (I assume this book exists and is written by Nikola Tesla).
I’m all for mutual superweapon disarmament, but I’m not sure I like the whole mutually assured destruction thing as much. My history, and I think the history of a lot of people who are liberal and pro-choice and so on and so forth but really wary of feminism and social justice - is that we spent our college years totally supporting social justice and helping out in the superweapon factories because it’s our duty to fight rape and racism and so on and since we were nice respectful people obviously the superweapon would never be used on us. Then we got in some kind of trivial disagreement with a woman or a minority or someone, or we didn’t want to go far enough. Then they turned the superweapon on us, and it was kind of a moment of “wait, this was sort of the plan all along, wasn’t it?”
My point is that we should not do this. That we shouldn’t just round to the nearest cliche. And I think that that is, well, exactly what you (and nearly everyone else) did in this case.
Maybe when he goes out of his way to explicitly address and refute the pattern, to make it clear that that’s not what he’s saying? That’s usually when pattern-matching stops being okay. When there’s no way you can address or even attempt to assess an issue without being branded a misogynist, no matter how far you go out of your way to say, “Do not pattern-match me to the nearest stereotype, I am not saying that”. My beef is not so much with you as it is with the media covering this, but when on one hand you dismiss what Scott Alexander says about pattern-matching to the nearest misogynist as paranoid, then do exactly that, then I have a problem with it.
That’s the same percentage as in high school AP comp sci classes, and more than the percentage of comp sci college graduates. If company resources are being spent on practices which are legitimately discriminatory for the sake of an equality that makes no sense, that’s a problem. Probably not a huge problem, but a problem. And the much bigger problem of not even being allowed to talk about it without, well, this happening.
Hmm, really? I guess I got the context wrong. My bad.
If the culture is this reflexively knee-jerk aggressive towards any wrongthink, that’s a problem.
