Teacup Tempest: Kira at goodreads wrote a review of Julie Cross’ Tempest, pointing out several damning passages reveling in its condemnation of a “man-hating feminazi” straw character (while complaining that misandrists are scum, that “man-bashing” is sexist and makes her want to scream, and that she’s had “young men look at [her] with genuine fear” because she’s a feminist, which… uh?). Dan Krokos, represented by the same agent as Cross, enters the field and uses [Club of Mansplaining]. It is ineffective! He and a bunch of other YA authors flipped their shit on twitter (many of whom having since deleted their tweets; Krokos’ and Cross’ agent Suzie Whatsherface speed-deleted her goodreads account). My favorite of the lot is Lauren de Stefano trotting out this little tidbit:
STEFANO. I’d even venture to say GR makes 4chan look like a hallmark card from my own loving granny.
It’s funny how pretty much everybody who uses 4chan as a hyperbolic analogy knows nothing about 4chan. I’ve never seen Nazi symbols and porn posted on goodreads. Have you?
Carrier of the Wank: Stephanie at goodreads left this Amazon review for Leigh Fallon’s Carrier of the Mark (is it a book about a deadly contagious disease? No?), the substance of which being that it’s a tiresome Twilight clone with closely similar passages, characters, and plot. If you call that shit a plot. Fallon absolutely lost her shit and sent out this e-mail to somebody:
There is the stupid cow from Goodreads who has been real nasty and keeps doing up really bad reviews of Carrier, then gets her friends to go in and ‘like’ her bad reviews so that that review will be pushed up to the top of all the lists. Now she’s put it up on Amazon! She is a disgruntled old cow who doesn’t like me and how I got published. There’s no point in saying anything about her or responding (she loves that) but what we can do is push her review back down the list by bringing all the good reviews back to the top. How do we do this? Well at the end of each review there is a little button where you can say whether you found the review helpful. Click YES on the good reviews. The more reviews you click YES you click on the good reviews the further down the list that bitch will go. If you leave a comment on the good reviews, that helps too. She’s already got over 20 of her buds to YES her review so we will need to find more people than that to YES the good reviews. There are about 8 pages of reviews (that’s about 7 reviews or something like that) so we can bury this horrible toe rag down the very bottom if you help me out.
As far as I’m aware, you don’t have to have bought anything on Amazon to get your vote to count. You just need to be a registered user. It only takes about 5 mins to go through all the reviews and YES the good ones. I’m not asking to dickie with the system or anything, it’s just moving a horrible review from the top spot. It’s so long, you have to scroll for ages until you get to the good ones. I’d really appreciated it help on his. I’d also love if you could maybe gets some friends or family to do the same.
Thanks a million, guys. You’re the best.
Leigh
Fallon being, as you can see, the very epitome of class. She has since admitted that she did in fact write this e-mail (and some drama-loving person leaked it to Stephanie, apparently). Perhaps she believes that, to write books for teens, you must behave like one.
BONUS! Breaking straw from Jamie McGuire. Also, yes, a YA author.
Eoin Macken and the Sexuality Plane: up until now I didn’t even know who this man is. But apparently he’s a big thing. He posted this story (screencap in case he deletes it again) on his blog thinking… I’ve no idea what went through his head, apart from “fuckloads of homophobia.” To cover his ass–too late, buddy–he insists “This story is not meant to offend anybody.” Oh?
“Thank YOU sir”. And It pats me on the arm. PATS ME. Then saunters off with a wiggle of a well fondled fat arse. I can’t move, my body won’t obey me because it hates what I’ve become. [...] and finally I understand, there are worse things than death. It’s called living homophobic purgatory.
I feign sleep for the entire journey, anything to avoid eye contact with my queer tormentor, even when It strokes my arm to offer me what must be a drugged pre poured glass of juice. I stiffen but don’t react, doing a fake sleep mumble. It’s the hardest fucking non sleep I ever do. And you thought I was going to give out about the baggage handlers losing my life affectingly important bag or the potential public molestation at security. Nope, this was much worse. The flight with the gay air hostess, there has to be an AA group for sufferers surely, if not I will be opening one soon. And It grabbed my bum on the way out.
Macken is so puzzled as to why people think he’s a homophobic turd. So puzzled. It’s satirical! It’s fictional! It doesn’t mean anything! It’s just a story. Portraying TEH GAY as predatory, potential date rapist, and dehumanizing a gay person as an “it”? Aw nah. Satire. Comedic even. Deep, man, deep.
It’s a good thing I don’t watch Merlin to start with. Subhuman worm.
On matters more serious and interesting: Gender Imperialism @ The Biyuti Collective
It has been and continues to be a challenge for me to resist the Western, imperialist constructions of gender. This conflict has been my *only* source of gender confusion and dysphoria. Before I was kicked out of my dad’s house, I was perfectly comfortable with my gender. But as I became entirely surrounded by the Western gaze, with no refuge, I began to feel discord with my gender and body. I have spent years struggling with my gender only to realize that the issue was not about my relation to my body but my relation to how the West views my body. My gender dysphoria was the result of Western imperialism.
[...]
My gender identity, and its expression, exist outside of the Western construction of gender. It is the product of a culture that, while it has a colonial past, is its own.
I won’t comment on because I’m not qualified to, but it makes for enlightening and sobering reading. I’ll also note that applying the lingo of western social justice to concepts which are not of the west is, to say the least, inaccurate: “kathoey”, contrary to popular belief (and why does it continue to be a popular belief? Why can’t westerners engage in a little research), doesn’t simply mean “trans.” It is an umbrella term that includes, yes, cis gay men.
A little bit on how I see privilege and white power working, even in Korea.
I’m often asked, Why would you come to Korea? Koreans talk about their country being no bigger than a booger (우리나라는 코딱지 만큼…) or no bigger than a palm (우리나라는 손바닥 만큼…). Why would I come to a place most Koreans can’t leave? Well, the answer is because I’m privileged. That’s the answer. The humiliating aspect of that answer is its correlation: I can leave whenever I want to. In other words, I can go home. I have a place to go other than here. I can return. That’s what Koreans see me as sometimes, but especially when they’re annoyed at me. They are confronted with privilege. And they sometimes take it out on me. It’s not racism. Try telling that to many white people in Korea, though.
I’d have to be a real dick to deny this privilege. That guy yelling “Yankee, go home” at me is reaching for something to say at all in the face of my belligerent presence in his life. He was being a dick, but he can’t speak English and he yelled the one insult in English he knew might hurt my feelings. The power he feels that oppresses him in a daily manner is a problem with Korean culture, centuries of oppression. Shit I don’t get. But I’ve added another element. Now he has to play soccer, on his day off, with a white guy who reminds him of a specific and painful lack of privilege and I’m going to knock him down, too. I’d be a dick not to expect some sort of response.
See. Now if only more white expats understood this. This is why when they are told “Get the fuck out; go home” and it’s not racism or even xenophobia but a justified gesture of those who’ve had fucking enough from their kind and have to put up with some more. It’s the frustration you feel because everyone around you is treating these people better because they are white while furiously internalizing imperialism. White presence intrudes, disrupts, and colonizes. It always will unless the balance of power is redressed, which won’t happen any time soon, if ever.
People whining bleating over anti-white racism need to shut the fuck up. That means absolutely everyone. You can go home. You can refuse to read this blog.* You can go join the Aryan fucking Nations. But you don’t get to yell “racist!” without expecting to be called an ignorant, useless waste of space and crybaby with a martyr complex.
*See also: most of the buttmad exhibits plus this. “Vector for racism” lol. Cry more.
Kitty (@calixti)
/ January 5, 2012Uh-huh. God forbid readers be CRITICAL of a book. Everyone knows a reader’s job is to exhibit slavish devotion!
This does make me kind of nervous about my somewhat-critical review of Anna Dressed in Blood though. :/
saajanpatel
/ January 5, 2012The essay is good, but I find it a little weird how this guy talks himself up so much like he’s stronger than the entirety of the Korean male population.
I do credit him with pointing out that racism can be reaction to privilege. I’ve experienced something similar in Taiwan, inner city DC, and a similar but different prejudice being a young visitor to India.
Obviously being an Indian in Southeast DC (with honestly trivial issues barring one mugging) was nothing compared to the kids I worked with thinking they’d get kicked out of a restaurant in the Georgetown area b/c they are black.
Inverarity Pynchon
/ January 6, 2012Heh, I blogged about Leigh Fallon myself. I may make the next SBD post about authors behaving badly. Then again, I’ve read enough for one week.
I’ve spent some time in a couple of Asian countries. Yes, white people get treated very deferentially, and they love it, then occasionally you run into someone who (gasp!) doesn’t like white people, or they’re just having a bad day, and they’re rude and nasty to you, and most white people are all “OMG Asians are so racist!”
Also, in the limited time I was overseas, I studied the language where I was living, and at least learned to read street signs and carry on very simple conversations. I knew a lot of ex-pats who lived there for years and never learned more than a few words.
(Then they come back here and gripe about immigrants who don’t learn English…)
acrackedmoon
/ January 6, 2012Oh yeah, he does come across as the Mighty because… size counts for everything? And tall people don’t exist in Korea? (I don’t know about over there, but we have girls going toward 180 cm over here–that’s six feet–and they are still in school.)
BUT ENGLISH IS THE WORLD LANGUAGE OMG whereas whatever language of the place they expat’d in is, like, completely unimportant and only spoken by… oh wait, expats living in China do the same thing. Lulz.
E F
/ January 6, 2012Have I mentioned how much I love it when you update and give me a break from the white man-children who are clogging up the rest of my day? So much love; if I were straight I’d have turned queer again.
The entitlement of authors who feel that the creative freedom which allows them to write their dreg does not extend to their detractors is both staggering and disappointing. Don’t they know how much worse it makes the entire writing community look? Don’t they know how being a douchebag will effect their sales if they’re already getting comically bad notices? I swear people get published just so they can troll.
saajanpatel
/ January 6, 2012The airline story I think was meant to show the perspective of someone with a huge ego and possibly some closeted self-hate…BUT the line at the end with the ass grabbing I think fucks this up.
I can see his claimed intention, and I definitely know people who would make up stuff to exaggerate the story “He was all over me, he touched me, etc.” but with one POV we are left only with confirmation of his fears. Is this attendant really willing to risk his job for a little ass grab? Last I checked that is more a straight guy thing.
As my sister once said, straight dudes get scared because they hate the idea they’ll get treated the way they treat women. She also mentioned how she finds it hilarious how a lot of these homophobes aren’t attractive and have nothing to worry about. ;-)
acrackedmoon
/ January 6, 2012I know, right? It’s not even about looks either: most of them when they open they mouth become unattractive really quickly (sometimes even before they start with the homophobia).
Next Friday
/ January 6, 2012I wonder how many people went to Amazon and added their Yes to Stephanie’s review. Last I checked the counter was somewhere at 500+. I also liked the way the e-mail was called ‘private’. DF sends it to organize family and friends and their dog to boost her ratings and it’s still PRIVATE? Just how exactly did she think it would end?
acrackedmoon
/ January 6, 2012I know I did. >:)
Lal
/ January 9, 2012692 now and hopefully climbing.
Next Friday
/ January 6, 2012And about Korea… well, not so much about Korea, but I can relate a lot. It was a major blow when at the age of 11-12 I realized, that I’d be forever stuck behind the freaking Iron Curtain, while some ‘approved’ people would come and go and write their silly travelogues, and that would be the only window to the world for the likes of me. And the tourists would come, gawk, and go, etc. Race as is meant nothing, while ‘white’ passport meant everything. With ‘white’ passport you can go ANYWHERE and do ANYTHING.
Lauren DeStefano (@LaurenDeStefano)
/ January 7, 2012Hey – Lauren here. I wanted to clarify that the comment in question was taken out of context and had NOTHING to do with the Tempest review, or any review, and I’ve been spending the last two days tracking down any mention of this and trying to assure my readers that I in no way meant to bully or attack or be a part of this. If you’re so inclined, please read what I’ve said here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show.html?id=248683171&page=5#comment_42890096
acrackedmoon
/ January 7, 2012You do realize comparing goodreads to 4chan is pretty asinine, though, completely independent of the Julie Cross brouhaha? I’m not even saying that as someone who gives a shit about goodreads but as someone who thinks comparing a place where racism/child porn/et al flies freely to a place where they don’t is pretty fucking stupid.
janinmi
/ February 14, 2012Eoin Macken is “big” only in the sense that he thinks far too much of himself and his “talents.” Dude isn’t even scenic. :) There was so much fail in that “fiction” of his that I had to run out and get another bucket to keep it from flooding my house. Argh.
Do please keep doing what you do — SF/F/H desperately needs reviewers who call writers out when they bring the fail, and you are certainly doing that in an entertaining and thoughtful way. Thanks for blogging.