sexism: context matters

[piranha]

i've been catching up on the latest SFWA debacle, and OMG, so much fail. i wouldn't know where to begin if i addressed the events in question, even though i am fuming about many of the things i've read. so i'll just talk about one thing.

what struck me is that so many people STILL do not get what's sexist when talking about women's looks in a professional context. the clueless comment: "but it's a nice compliment! it's not crass and demeaning! he didn't mention her tits!".

guess what? compliments should please the person at whom they are directed. they should not make that person uncomfortable. they should not objectify that person. they should be appropriate to the context in which you are talking to / about that person.

let's say Joe Random writes: "I once met this beautiful woman, Jane Doe, a really amazing fantasy writer at the World Science Fiction Convention".

what and to whom is he writing? email to me as a friend, recounting past crushes? or is he penning a piece on the accomplishments of female writers in an industry magazine?

the former is none of my beeswax -- my friend Joe Random can have a looks-based crush all he wants; its his private fantasy.

the latter is sexist. what Jane Doe looks like is irrelevant to her abilities as a writer. putting it as the very first attribute indicates that what matters most about Jane Doe is how she looks and that she looks good. it's not appropriate for an article talking about women's contributions to science fiction. whether any particular woman is fuckable in the writer's eyes (however nicely you dress that up) is not part of her achievements. it's not relevant to buying Jane Doe's books, or voting for her for an industry award. it is merely one more tired blow in the long, seemingly never-ending series of blows that reduce women to objects that matter only to the "male gaze".

i don't want to see it in an article on the accomplishments of female science fiction writers. it marks Joe Random as a person whose professional opinion i will now downgrade for sexism. (and that's not "censorship", for crying out loud.)

if this is what you grew up with as acceptable, wake up: the world has been changing and you have apparently managed to adjust to all the myriad other changes without quite as much defensiveness. blacks are no longer relegated to the backs of buses either. so deal already, dammit. no, just because some woman you know wasn't insulted by a similar compliment does not make it ok (chances are she didn't want to make a fuss, and grit her teeth and smiled instead of telling you off). you've grown old, now grow wise. yeah i know, it's a lot of work. me, i think making half the human race feel valued is worth it.

---

oh, and Russell Davis? your comments are closed, so i can't tell you personally: what an unholy mess of an article, complete with tone argument (let's all be calm and reasonable now). guess what? we are. nobody has formed an actual lynch mob; radical feminist hordes are not storming the offices of the SFWA, pitchforks in hand. while i agree that most of us are probably sexist now and then (we're deeply immersed in our culture and our culture is profoundly sexist), sexism is not "natural"; it did not come about because "we're human and we sort both our interactions and our memory by sense, type, preference/non-preference". yes, humans objectify as part of conceptualisation in general, but that does not inevitably result in sexism. Camille Paglia notwithstanding, sexism is socio-cultural; many gender stereotypes differ by culture.

final tip to science fiction writers: research matters. don't mansplain on the net about the "natural" cause of sexism if you don't even grasp the distinctions between "sex" and "gender".

Comments

[sara]

...I have no interest in mob-forming when I could instead walk away in disgust.

I read some of the SFWA crap last night and...yuck. Just yuck.

[eagle]

I am reminded of the NY Times obituary for Yvonne Brill, which they have now cleaned up. The first paragraph of the original obit was "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children." They took a ton of media flack for it being sexist and changed it.

This is much milder than some of the stuff happening in SFWA and the NY Times still felt obligated to rewrite the article. Because, really, this sort of thing is not acceptable.

It's not even just about the sexuality aspect of it, although the "male gaze" problem is a particularly toxic instance of it. It's more generally about only measuring women by "female" things, like starting the obit of a famous rocket science by talking about her cooking and her child-rearing practices. That's what I think people don't get: it's not that she didn't do those things too, but the observation comes in a cultural context with a ton of baggage. The cultural assumption is that those were the things she was best at, since she was female, and to talk about them is to reinforce that stereotype, to everyone's detriment.

[piranha]

ah yes, that - i hadn't known about it, but it popped up during the discussions. and you know? if the NYT can get a clue and rewrite an article, who the fuck are mike resnick and barry malzberg to double down instead? i seriously cannot believe the heaping pile of self-righteously justifying bullshit they regurgitated in response to some relatively mild criticism.

i also don't wanna hear any more "well, that's how they grew up, so it's understandable that they have these old-fashioned attitudes". no, it's not unless they lived in a hermitage out of human contact for decades. we all have to grow with the times, and we all do, in a myriad of aspects. they haven't changed their sexist ways because they haven't wanted to change, because their hairy, white asses were coddled back then. privilege is damned hard to give up, yes, but we all have to do it because it's the right thing to do.

that said, something i had to give in to is that it's perfectly ok IF a woman considers her contributions to her family as most important in her life, even if she is also a rocket scientist, and that we need to respect that. or a man, for that matter (sexism can cut in many ways).

[eagle]

It could be that the NYT changed it because they figured out that they were wrong, but I suspect this is one of those places where capitalism can be moderately helpful. I think it's more likely that the NYT changed it because they were pissing off people who give them money, and companies employ people to tell staff to fix things or not do things if they're creating unwanted controversy, whether they believe in what that controversy is saying or not.

Malzburg gave up on writing SF some time ago and is no longer really economically involved in the field to any significant extent. Resnick is, but I'm not sure his readers are, by and large, going to have any reason to know all of this happened; the connection between his comments here and his book sales is pretty indirect. You almost have to be Orson Scott Card to materially affect the sales of your books with non-book things you do (and apparently OSC is still one of Tor's best-selling authors).

I think, for better or worse, they're pretty much entirely isolated from practical (at least economic) consequences for saying whatever they want. So this reaction may actually (sadly) be more honest than the NYT's.

[flarenut]

Occasionally something about a male writer will have a side note in it about their Manly Prowess at this or that Manly Sport or other endeavor, or their rippling biceps, but it always seems to come across as "you just thought they were a great writer, but wait, there's more" rather than "let's forget about what she did to become successful and just write about how she dressed." Part of it is that for men extracurricular or appearance-based stuff seems to be regarded as an accomplishment rather than a personal trait.

[piranha]

or he might even put on a great BBQ, and he coaches little league! IMO that's usually playing into a power fantasy -- "and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound". that's also why pictures of half-naked, muscular men on SF covers are not equivalent to pictures of chainmail bikini babes. they, too, are a power fantasy FOR men, not a sexual one for women.

there is objectification of men too, of course, as one can easily see when looking at romance covers (and gay porn! oh man). but i would have thought SFF did not see itself as a male equivalent to romance. well, most people i know don't see it that way. in any case, while i just roll my eyes at yet another chainmail bikini babe on a fantasy novel cover (as much as i roll my eyes at yet another naked male torso on my homoerotic romance), the SFWA bulletin is not a fantasy novel, but an industry trade magazine.

[flarenut]

It reminds me of the story of a college friend who went to law school and was initially surprised to find that all the men who were working on the law review were involved with someone, while she couldn't imagine finding the time to sustain a relationship. Then she went from admiring how these guys had their lives so thoroughly together to recognizing that, duh, it's much easier to find the time and focus for law review when someone else is doing the laundry, cooking the meals, making the bed, taking notes when you miss a class...

The valence of pretty much every life detail is different. (And you know something, that was 30 years ago. But some people still haven't learned.)

And yeah, for a trade journal. (Although then again I think of some of the ads I've seen in trade journals...)