First, let’s compare what happens when I tear apart women for racism/misogyny/homophobia:
meet Charlaine Harris: misogynist, racist, talentless - 6 comments, no wank
ann bishop misogynistic homophobic turd - 5 comments and 31 comments respectively, no wank (except some whiny shits on RPG.net crying about anti-white racism, but that’s not related to Anne Bishop specifically)
To what happens when I do the same to men:
R. Scott Bakker: Prince of Misogyny – 82 comments, tons of wank, author has personally linked it twice (the second time months after the fact!) and plops down the raging butthurt every time without fail; slavering neckbeard fanboys attended to circlejerk author and show up here to mansplain and tone argument the shit out of everything. Author believes “accusations of misogyny” (which he even acknowledges happen regularly, and in a more self-aware person that might have given one pause…) has damaged his sales. Score!
Joe Abercrombie’s THE LAST ARGUMENT OF KINGS and the rape of lesbians – 38 comments, no wank directly on this blog, but plenty to be found on Westeros.org. Synopsis. In this case, the author actually admitted he didn’t think it through/that writing a shrill man-hating lesbian who only exists to be raped is really pretty fucking offensive. No fear, the fanboys told him he was wrong!
Jim Butcher: chauvinist AND talentless–stunning combo! – 65 comments, tons of wank; slavering neckbeard fanboys attended to circlejerk author and show up here to mansplain and tone argument the shit out of everything
What should I take away from this? That neckbeards have shitty impulse control, and are generally more immature than say people who read Anne Bishop and Charlaine Harris? That they are more defensive, easier to rile up, and more likely to personally identify with the works they read (such that charges of -isms become assaults on their sterling characters)? I mean, just look at all this, isn’t it really embarrassing to watch? The Butcher troglodytes, the Westeros hissy fits, and of course the whole Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist thing. They all react in exactly the same way too, with gendered insults and cliches like “feminazi” or “man-hating” or “crazy bitch.” I’ve also come under some fire in the past for eviscerating Harry Potter–if there’s butthurt that compares to that of neckbeards it’s Harry Potter fandom, who will hear nothing but that JK Rowling is the goddess of all social justice ever and her writing is undiluted literary gold and eat death if you dare say otherwise–but it’s not like Harris has a small fanbase either. I don’t know the figures, but it’s likely that Harris earns more than Joe Abercrombie and R. Scott Bakker put together, seeing that she’s got a TV series based on her dreck and everything.
Also:
- A useful comparison is the Strange Horizons incident around Liz B. Woman reviews shitty fiction that fanboys like; fanboys lose their shit, etc etc. And that’s for some godawful tat that began its life self-published, not Abercrombie/Rothfuss/Bakker/Martin. Neckbeards truly are illiterate subcreatures.
- Now compare: some random fanboy getting angry at John Walker, a man, of Rock Paper Shotgun for some reason. Note the lack of “you’re crazy”, speculations as to Walker’s mental condition/whether he requires medication/whether he has been sexually assaulted.
Links of interest!
Yuri no Boke is my new favorite thing. It is a blog about lesbian things. Films and anime. Especially appreciated because such media can often be male-gazey, icky and shitty as fuck; highlights of the ones that are not those things are much appreciated. Also, yuri subtext from anime. It’s kind of hard to find anime that’s actually out-and-out yuri, come to think of it. I like her views on shounen, too.
Nic of Eve’s Alexandria explains tone argument to a neckbeard. Salutations, Nic; you have more patience than I.
Politeness is a red herring. You see, your *tone* was polite, but the *content* of what you had to say was not: it was rude and aggressive in the extreme. From the very first comment you left on the post, you belittled her argument and dismissed her experiences, and demanded that she focus on you instead. What you were saying to her was: “Why are you wasting your time talking about something as trivial and boring as whether one of the core works of genre fantasy, beloved by millions and imitated by genre writers for decades, contains insidious racist assumptions that don’t affect me? Why are you bothered about a silly thing like whether fans of these books dismiss and attack anyone attempting to point this out, and thus dismiss and attack your right to participate in discussion about the genre? Why don’t you talk about something much more important instead, like how you’re being really mean to me?” The fact that you didn’t swear and use allcaps is irrelevant.
Bolding mine. Hallelujah! Beautifully summarized.
Analogue: a Hate Story by Christine Love is out! $15 and DRM-free, just as promised. I hope to have a first impression post up soonish. For what it’s worth? So far, quite excellent. It has an interesting, unusual take on the generation ship idea, and features Korean characters. Lovely art, lovely soundtrack, lovely writing.
ShitRedditSays, a subreddit dedicated to catharsis. Mocks straight white cis males who say shitty things. Due to the things they quote/link, trigger warnings of ALL sorts apply.
Larry of OFBlog’s opinion on the Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist brouhaha.
Recently, there was a post that took another blogger to task for his depiction of her native Thailand (and his views on Islam and near-slavering over this “Girls of Geek” calendar). [...] Pat in his response to the Requires Hate posts does anything but acknowledge his obliviousness to how his words showed a callous disregard for a complex situation. No, the narrative there is that he was just pointing out an uncomfortable “truth” about the sex tourism industry over there (while neglecting to point out or being very unaware that sex trafficking is a very serious problem in both the United States and his native Canada). Of course, the way he put it was taken as very condescending at the very least, not just by acrackedmoon, but by several others who read it. But what happened is that there was no communication to hint that hey, ya know, maybe a native’s perspective might just be more valuable in this case than someone who, like the people in the Holiday Inn commercials, think that they “know” a culture or society just because they visited a few places over a period of days, weeks, or months.
[...]
Yet what’s even more disconcerting than the spewings of those who use the sexist terms of “shrill,” “harpy,” and of course the ubiquitous “bitch,” are those who feel that they should lecture her on her “tone” when it is precisely because of the trangression against “polite talk” (read “the deference of ‘inferior’ races/women to their white male superiors) that women like them are heard at all.
Indeed.
Zach
/ February 4, 2012Bakker’s most recent diaper baby fit also prompted this
Zach
/ February 4, 2012“this” being yet another exploration of the idea that the concerns of anyone who isn’t a bourgeois white male is the unnecessary politicization of the text that therefore ruins the fun for sf/f’s “rightful” escapist audience.
acrackedmoon
/ February 4, 2012Ugh, Black Gate. They let that men’s rights activist or whatever guy post, don’t they? Theo or something? And lol, no. Le Guin doesn’t write what you’d exactly call “apolitical.”
Zach
/ February 4, 2012Exactly – Le Guin is hardly apolitical AND Mieville is hardly writing unimaginative/uncreative “low fantasy.”
Ahhhh Leo, the cimmerian guy! That was a gem of an essay right there.
Zach
/ February 4, 2012Wait, ok… Theo and Leo are two different good-old-days-of-fantasy-missing reactionary guys. Yikes.
Anyway Mieville had some good thoughts on this subject in Social Text recently.
acrackedmoon
/ February 4, 2012Yep, there’s more than one of them, aha.
Every time I see a picture of Mieville I feel obliged to notice how very, very buff he is. Thanks for the link!
Gourmet Neurovore
/ February 4, 2012Every time I see a picture of Mieville I feel obliged to notice how very, very buff he is.
Indeed. I’m pretty sure that if the novelist Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny ever came to pass, he and John Steinbeck would be pretty near the top.
Zach
/ February 4, 2012No problem – thanks for your blog! It’s great watching these guys flounder about when they get called out.
M Caliban
/ February 4, 2012It’s odd that they’d attempt to pit Le Guin against Meiville in the issue of whether fantasy and science fiction are political and cultural artifacts. They both come down rather heavily on ‘yes, they are.’
Le Guin’s quote is specifically how people with various strong political beliefs will tend to always interpret some tropes in the same way, with little attempt to understand how they’re used within specific texts.
I’d say that Le Guin’s comment takes Meiville’s as a given. She’s not saying, “Don’t bother to look at a book through a cultural lens.” Rather, she’s assuming that readers do look at books through a cultural lens and saying, “Don’t be sloppy about it by letting your political biases dictate your reaction.”
M Caliban
/ February 4, 2012China Mieville? I love that guy. Not surprising that he’d be against the ‘it’s just fantasy!’ crew.
M Caliban
/ February 4, 2012I think it’s a demographics thing. I was first introduced to The Southern Vampire Mystery services when my mother started reading them. She’s a woman in her sixties. The majority of bookclubs also tend to skew heavily to 30 and older women, and they’re also the bulk of fiction buyers in the USA. (Older men tend to read more non-fiction. Younger men don’t tend to read.)
Alternatively, ‘dark and gritty’ fantasy tends to have more readers who are younger and male. This is especially true for the online fan sites, which tend to be dominated by guys.
Harris’ audience might be bigger, but it’s less likely to spend time hanging around on internet fora for SF/F, and those that do are less likely to see being a woman as a source of intellectual weakness.
acrackedmoon
/ February 4, 2012To be fair there’s also a difference of platforms: I’ve seen Anne Bishop ardently defended on LJ, for ex, where fannishness tends to congregate and produce some of the most unfortunate rabidity (see HP).
M Caliban
/ February 4, 2012That is true. Harris fans can be just as defensive. And then there are specific ‘True Blood’ fans who haven’t read the books but hate Tara Thorton, a black woman character, and have been asking for her death for several seasons now.
acrackedmoon
/ February 4, 2012Spoken too soon! Bishop rather than Harris, but quite something. She co-owns Westeros.org, which I suppose strengthens the “shitstains of a color” theory.
saajanpatel
/ February 6, 2012Wait, she’s proud to be a woman but she sees justification for an entire society engaging in misogyny because she dislikes your review of a mediocre at best fantasy novel?
acrackedmoon
/ February 6, 2012Not-Earth logic is something like that, yes.
Nathanial Barnhart (@Skynjay)
/ February 4, 2012Your only counting 38 comments for the Abercrombie post? That ran for two threads on Westeros. Give your self credit for about 400 more, at least.
acrackedmoon
/ February 4, 2012It also ran for a bit on a different forum, Kevin’s Watch. Which is even less moderated and grosser than Westeros, which should tell you something.
Emil Söderman
/ February 4, 2012At least in the case of Abercrombie and Bakker there’s also the fact that they are kind of common subjects of discussion (a poster flippantly described westeros.org’s literature board as “arguing about Bakker”… Which isn’t too far off base) your argument was brought in as a part of a discussion/argument which had been going since, well, Bakker was published. (it’s where Bakker’s infamous sockpuppetry took place, for instance) I don’t know about Harris or Bishop, but in the case of Bakker and Abercrombie you were (percieved to be) entering into a discussion that had already been going on for some time, with the different camps already established. IIRC your blog was brought into the discussion because someone (can’t remember who) had already made basically the same argument.
The different demographics thing is probably true, also I suspect the different… networks? Basically for good or ill you’re in the “neckbeard network”, you comment on them (us?) and they (we?) read your comments, link them around, etc. etc. Not that it’s watertight, but I suspect the really hardcore Harris fans hang out elsewhere, and aren’t neccessarily aware of your blog. (which isn’t to say the reason the neckbeardsphere isn’t aware of your blog isn’t because there’s a bunch of fuckwiths saying angry things about it all over the place)
There’s also, I suspect, a matter of classification. I know over here the Harris books were labelled under “detective novels” or “horror” rather than “Fantasy”. (then again, I work part time at a public library, and they tend to shelve things were the readers are)
RE: Mieville, We’ve actually had this discussion a bit, but an interesting thing with Mieville is that while he’s very much a socialist and very much a genre writer he’s not really… Engaging? With socialism in his fantasy books. That is, he’s writing about a very “cool”, “classic” kind of socialist struggle in eg. Iron Council. An idealized-romanticized man-the-barricades kind of socialist fantasy. Like he wanted to be there for the Paris Commune and is sad that he missed it. It’s all very top-hatted, monocle-wearing kind of capitalism that’s presented. (Mind, I think Mieville is self-aware enough to know this, he clearly loves the genre of say, monster-hunting as much as he does his politics) but I think it’s kind of interesting. He’s in his own way as reactionary as Tolkien, but what he’s longing for is the age of the Paris Commune, the Springtime of Nations etc. rather than kings and crowns. (which isn’t to say I don’t find his particular preferences far more to my taste than Tolkien’s)
Zach Rosenberg
/ February 4, 2012I think you raise an interesting point there, Emil, and I concur with a lot of what you said on Mieville. For some reason, though, there are aspects of him as a person that severely bother me. Given members of my family were trapped behind the Iron Curtain and suffered from the pogroms, seeing him being (from what I saw of his posts at Lenin’s Tomb) rather apologist for the early Soviet Union, as well as proudly wearing a sickle/hammer T-shirt. If one can (and I suspect, with success) accuse Tolkien of having severe rose tinted glasses over England, I think the same argument could be made towards Mieville in regards to the rose-tinted glasses and all. Really, I like Mieville’s works (Especially the Scar), but I find he has issues in writing anything resembling believable characters or dialogue and sometimes fails to take advantage of the ideas he brings in.
Also, isn’t the Black Gate quote a bit at odds with what he said about the lack of allegory in his works? I do realize there’s probably a gap of time, but still.
trevoresque
/ February 4, 2012I’d be curious to see links to Mieville’s Bolshevik apologetics. I’m not really familiar with his views on the early Soviet Union, but I know there were a fuckton of different ideologies involved before the Bolsheviks crushed any element interested in democracy or bottom-up organization. I was under the impression that many Jews were involved with anarcho-socialism, for example, and that the pogroms at the time came from the more authoritarian groups. Is this inaccurate? I’ve only recently started reading about Russia in the 20th century.
November 2011 interview: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/feature-interview-china-mieville/
“…the tradition of socialism out of which I come has been utterly critical of the Soviet Union for decades, and sees it as no kind of desirable outcome.”
Gourmet Neurovore
/ February 5, 2012Yeah, I could be wrong here, but I suspect that he’s got quite a bit more sympathy for, say, Lech Walesa than Wladyslaw Gomulka.
Next Friday
/ February 5, 2012Hm.. He goes into some length about what his Marxism is NOT, but says nothing about what it IS, except for this tiny bit. If it was an interactive interview, that would’ve been the next question.
Emil Söderman
/ February 4, 2012^ There’s definitely an element of rose-tinted glasses RE: Mievile, and I agree that his strength lies in concept and plot rather than characterization.
That said, I still like Mieville’s books a lot. Partially because as a student of history I like when fantasists step out of the medieval.
Zach Rosenberg
/ February 5, 2012Damn, I wish I had links…it’s honestly been years. Though I have heard Mieville isn’t exactly a prince as far as anti-semitism is concerned though with some support of possibly anti-semitic parties. I do apologize, though, for being unable to supply much by way of proof as it was several years ago that I saw it linked. However, I know he’s a frequent contributor at Lenin’s tomb, and sees the man through incredibly rose-tinted glasses (even some schools of Marxist thought that reject the Soviet Union still hold Lenin in an annoyingly idyllic view).
I agree with Emil on Mieville there, though. The man is incredibly creative. I think, however, he’s a better worldbuilder than writer. His prose isn’t really that great and his dialogue, honestly, is hideous at points (he suffers from the school that thinks peppering it with constant profanity at times makes it ‘adult’) and he doesn’t really write women that well. One complaint I had of Perdido Street station is Lin is basically there to be abused and victimized to add pathos to the story. Bellis is a good character, but there is that note how she’s so easily manipulated by several men solely because lust for them doesn’t let them think straight on the issue and allows her to be led around.
That said, critiques of him aside, I do think he is a remarkably creative and intelligent person, even if I find some of his views disagreeable or abhorrent., and the genre is better off for having him write in it.
Next Friday
/ February 5, 2012Frankly, I find this enamorment with Lenin quite disturbing. The best Western socialists can come up while addressing his actions is hesitant, “Oh, he made a few mistakes…” One would think that millions of dead and millions fleeing the country in all directions possible would be an indication the man was doing something wrong. But I guess it’s all good and fine as long as he scared the western govt’s enough to agree to start social programs that they otherwise wouldn’t even think of.
Zach
/ February 5, 2012anti-zionism does not equal anti-semitism.
saajanpatel
/ February 5, 2012Yeah, I remember he said he didn’t want Lin to be the rescued damsel in distress…so he made her a Woman In Fridge instead.
I have to disagree with the prose, I really like his style, though I agree the dialogue usually feels cursory.
The socialism thing – in the past I remember being a little weirded out by the religious overtones he seemed to be using to describe a society that underwent a socialist revolution. The Lenin shirt thing reminds me of the Che shirts everywhere.
Someone better versed in history can correct me, but I distinctly remember Che praising the idea of prison labor camps in the name of revolution?
Gourmet Neurovore
/ February 5, 2012Che was just a dick in general. Seemed far more enamoured with the concept of revolution than with revolution for anything in particular.
faustusnotes
/ February 6, 2012oops! I just put a comment that was meant to be a reply to this, but didn’t thread it. Stupid counter-revolutionary threading technology!
Dr Nic (@bibliolicious)
/ February 6, 2012Salutations, Nic; you have more patience than I.
Yeah, and look what it got me: a reply that misses all my points while patting me on the head for being nicer than you. ;-)
Sigh. I should know better than to engage, really.
acrackedmoon
/ February 6, 2012Heh, I’d say it was worth a try, but…
faustusnotes
/ February 6, 2012I read Che’s diary of the revolution and it’s quite easy to lose count of the prisoners he executes without trial or cause during the initial period of military actions. Revolutionary hero and war criminal.
I didn’t ever get the impression that Mieville was particularly enamoured of Lenin (or any of the other revolutionary boy heroes, for that matter) – I think that judgment is easier made from teh company he keeps (on Lenin’s Tomb) than from his own writing. And I never got the sense he was proselytizing for any of that stuff in his novels, either – though obviously it informs his work, his work is not some kind of socialist polemic or tract (far from it, imo).
elodiestar
/ February 7, 2012I’ve written a lovely little story about him. He thinks it’s positively poisonous.
http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/requires-only-haidt/#comment-5705
Let’s see how long he leaves this up, my darlings. Not to worry, I’ve screencapped the whole thing and have the text all saved.
acrackedmoon
/ February 8, 2012That is beautiful and I’ve been passing the link to it all around. Everyone’s been loving it.
His responses to it are fucking bizarre though, is he… trying to lump you in with people who make fun of a dead teenager? Or… what?
Gourmet Neurovore
/ February 8, 2012Think that’s bizarre? Check out his reasons for insisting on calling you ‘the Dude’. He was referring to copyright traps of all things.
I am increasingly convinced that Bakker logic is not our puny Earth logic.
acrackedmoon
/ February 8, 2012I don’t think Bakker was ever on Earth with the rest of us. His ego’s always exerted its own gravity.
Seth J Dickinson (@sethjdickinson)
/ February 8, 2012Hi,
I’ve commented once before to express my gratitude for your work — as a feminist I think a critical eye on modern written-by-men ‘grimdark fantasy’ is really important.
As a white dude the closest I will ever get to feeling real, direct pain over these issues (rather than empathy with women or persons of color, which is important, but y’know, not the same) is a kind of intellectual angst. Nonetheless, I’ve been having trouble with issues of depiction vs. endorsement regarding misogyny lately — particularly with relation to works I’ve enjoyed in the past and now find increasingly problematic — and, although we don’t agree on everything, I wanted to ask you a few questions.
Is there a private way I can contact you? I’m worried about immortalizing my remarks forever on Google, especially as I was recently published and I have high hopes for a career in genre writing. But I would really like the chance to ask you for your opinion and see if you can help me clarify some of these issues in my head.
If this sounds weird or if you just don’t feel like being a sounding board I totally understand.
Regards,
Seth
Seth J Dickinson (@sethjdickinson)
/ February 9, 2012Also re: the heternormativity-threateningly sexy China Mieville, I had an interesting conversation with Cat Valente about his handling of gender in Perdido Street Station. I saw from your review of Embassytown that you had mixed but not awfully negative failings about PSS, and that I should really read The Scar. Do you think that Mieville’s failings in PSS re: Lin were structural, an error of plotting and intent — he didn’t want to have the damsel in distress rescued for a happy life — or that they reflect a slip of misogyny in a writer normally so aware of and critical towards society? Cat thought he had ‘some issues’ which suggested to me a broader pattern.
I may have just constructed a false binary there in which case uh
anarchy235
/ February 19, 2012I think your a fucking idiot. Why don’t you quit reading the fantasy genre and stick with lesbian erotica. That’s probably more your speed.
chadwalker135@gmail.com
166.249.130.33
IP country code: US
IP address country: United States
IP address state: Illinois
IP address city: Des Plaines
IP address latitude: 42.0255
IP address longitude: -87.8967
acrackedmoon
/ February 19, 2012You can’t spell, dear.
Zach Rosenberg
/ February 19, 2012Can someone disagree without resorting to idiotic homophobia or sexism?
acrackedmoon
/ February 19, 2012No, never.
(There have been people disagreeing with me–or even calling me out!–who weren’t homophobic/racist/sexist, but Pat, Bakker and Watts bring all the fuckwads to the yard.)
kalbear
/ February 21, 2012Just thought you’d find this interesting – Abercrombie’s response to misogyny accusations back in 2008 – and his addendum, 4 years later.
I wish more authors would take this approach:
“These days I tend to think the best policy when faced with accusations (or maybe just reviews) of this kind is to take a deep breath, mouth shut and ears open, do my best to think about it dispassionately and consider if there’s anything to be learned.”
acrackedmoon
/ February 21, 2012I’ve seen it (as well as his own response to my post about Terez, which was surprisingly level-headed and reasonable) and was very surprised. I’d say I’m impressed, but… this kind of thing–criticism tearing apart your depiction of, y’know, pretty graphic rape?–should be baseline for everyone. But hey, it still puts him head and shoulders above most similar authors, so hooray.