"It is hard to imagine any other group of people in the United States today who could be so crassly maligned in a public setting without arousing immediate protest." - Daphne Patai writing about the group defamation of men in her 1998 book Heterophobia
How Political Correctness and Mainstream Conformity Have Wrecked An Eccentric Genre of Literary Fine Art
by James May
Part One of Two
[Note: this is an unedited first draft]
"Hard as it to believe, somewhere right now, a white, straight male is explaining to a woman or POC (person of color) what they =really= meant." - Steven Gould, science fiction (SF) author and president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA)
"I've been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word 'privilege,' to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon." - John Scalzi, SF author, winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, five time nominated, three time winner of the Hugo Award, Nebula Award nominee and president of the SFWA
"SFF is, alas, dominated by white westerners" - Aliette de Bodard, science fiction and fantasy (SFF) author , five-time nominated, two-time winner of the Nebula Award and two-time nominee for the Hugo Award, SFWA member
I'm increasingly less likely to pick up a book if it is another straight white dude story." - Kate Elliot, Nebula-nominated SFF author and SFWA member
"sounds like something a straight white cis dude does, secure that his position and privilege will always be there." - Veronica Schanoes, Nebula nominated SFF author and SFWA member
"The law is made by rich, selfish, shitty people - mostly white, mostly men - with cockroaches for hearts. Fuck their 'rule of law.'" - Saladin Ahmed, Hugo and Nebula Award nominated SFF author and SFWA member
"I'd say most white men should come with TWs (trigger warnings) for unthinking privileged arrogance, but that's like saying books need TWs for 'contains words'." - Rose Fox, SFF editor, SFWA member and Publisher's Weekly review editor
"All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics." - Southern Poverty Law Center.
*
Frankly, I find it troubling that any American in the 21st century could write such shocking drivel as those quotes above. And there are hundreds more in this book, and those hundreds only a fraction of what I found in doing research. We're talking about literally thousands of quotes over the space of mostly only three years. The anti-white, anti-male tone of them is dismal, shameful and unrelenting and it is daily.
In the remarkable space of only a few short years, an ideology of paper-thin intolerance, powered by a concoction of group defamation, inflammatory dehumanization theories and full of other assorted mischiefs normally associated with hate groups has infused the core institutions of the science fiction community's fans and writers. That includes what amounts to racial incitement and incitement to hate men. The origins of this sociopathic ideology will surprise you as well as explain the nature of its antipathy. I am talking about Third Wave (intersectional) gender feminism, the newest fad in which bigots operate and the middle class can enact their grotesque slumming in the imaginary oppressions of a group which self-defines as anyone not straight, white and male.
The cult of gay third wave feminism which has gripped the heart of the SFF community is anti-male, anti-white, anti-heterosexual, anti-Western and anti-Christian. In that sense, it is a form of cultural self-loathing. People are not looked at as individuals but instead as being great groups of millions of individuals who fit a scenario of being either an oppressor or oppressed. Actual individual events or behaviors mean nothing. We are talking about a pre-determined moral ethos where one's identity determines one's morality, an ability to accurately perceive the world about them, and spirituality or lack of it. One's racial and sexual "privilege" is an albatross, a scarlet letter, a mark of Cain. Being normal is considered abnormal and even a form of social hostility and aggression. Third Wave feminism has nothing to do with "feminism" and would more rightly be called a lesbian liberation ideology with a racial-colonialist kicker.
Racialized gender feminism is a thing completely apart from the equal rights feminist movement we all know about, though this brand of feminism often sells itself to the public as exactly that. It also sells incredible falsehoods awarded the sheen of credibility by the use of fake academic semantics which operate much like Orwell's Newspeak. In the course of research I have come to regard Third Wave gender feminism as nothing more than a racist, sexist, supremacist cult which occupies much the same intellectual and philosophical space as do the modern KKK and neo-Nazi white supremacist movements. Although radical intersectional feminism claims to oppose systemic and institutional oppressions, those systems and institutions are seen to reside in the very identities of heterosexual ethnic European men and so can be seen for the same crass biological hatred typical of anti-Semitism and white supremacy.
In microcosm the rise of this politically correct culture gone mad is a case study in how hate speech can not only be mainstreamed but made to seem noble, even necessary. This has been accomplished by people who knowingly and unknowingly work under a false flag obsessively concerned with social justice. What you will find in this book is anything but social justice, but instead one of the most oddball cults to ever rise from a literary movement. This cult is obsessed with the idea that men have an either conscious or unconscious regard for women and homosexuals that ranges from disdain to outright hatred. Any literary character or casting decision in a film in the least way regarded as mishandled according to bizarre ideological rules is regarded as woman hatred or homophobia. It is equally obsessed with the idea ethnic Europeans hate non-whites, and the same irrational suspicions apply. This obsession trumps any interest in an SFF element in the genre's literature, TV and film. The issue of so-called "diversity" is the Holy Grail. At the same time, this so-called social justice movement is alone in featuring racially and sexually segregated physical spaces, reviews policies, awards and anthologies.
Any fictional presentation found wanting in terms of the lack of women, gay or non-white characters invites swarming behaviors on blogs and Twitter that have all the characteristics of an inquisition or witchhunt. To violate radical gender feminist etiquette, or even pre-violate it, can and has led to the loss of editing jobs and awards-hosting gigs. The editor of the SFWA's in-house magazine lost her job - not for embezzling funds - but for the extraordinary reason of having the word "lady" used to describe a woman editor of the 1950s together with a painting of a comic book character named Red Sonja in her chain-mail bikini on the magazine's cover. The world of morality has taken a sudden odd detour, and one which mysteriously only ever finds men, whites and heterosexuals to be at fault.
Intersectional feminism in SFF acts like an Inquistion which wants to know whether you boil your rice with salt or not. There is no live and let live but instead an intolerant, narrow, specific and dictatorial ideological world view which sets itself up as the gold standard which all others must measure up to. The standard is a hierarchy based on nothing more than race and sex; the more intersections of one's oppressions, the truer one's words. A man disagreeing with a woman is sexism. A white woman disagreeing with a "WoC" - "a woman of color" - invokes power-privilege arrangements. Naturally, it is gay women of color who are the ones who create these rules and who are appealed to as the last word in such matters, the final arbiters, as if they are jurists.
John W. Campbell and British SF Award nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew who is gay and Asian writes of another author "Of her fiction that I've (painfully) read it's all cishet all the way down. She's also the kind of 'feminist' who thinks uterus = woman. Yeah. I wouldn't call her an outright TERF, but she does do the - super cis-centric thing." One Hugo-nominated well-trained male "ally" who regularly Tweets with Sriduangkaew has Tweeted "this hetero white male guy really wants the Patriarchy to burn, and burn to ashes."
These flame-ups are remarkable for the bitter acrimony involved, almost as if some book or film has wandered into one's living room and delivered a personal insult or slap to the face. There is a consistent sociopathy and near-hysteria attached to the most trivial violation that amounts to an extraordinary overreaction to say the least. These hysterical events are often accompanied by "trigger warnings" for the presence of the most routine subject matter, such as the discussion of violence in a book, or even the disabled, as if one will experience an LSD-like post-traumatic flashback. These flare-ups are virtually on a weekly basis, but bitter complaints are not only expressed on a daily and even all-day basis but amount to rants by many people that last months or even more than a year or two when it comes to Twitter. Some figures in the SFF community behind all this are highly regarded even though they aren't even writers, instead known only for a constant stream of racial and sexual complaint and so put on science fiction convention discussion panels for no other reason. Most of this bizarre behavior dates from the beginning of the mass popularity of Twitter as a social media platform in 2009.
The silliness is so far advanced that authors claim to want to "de-white" their libraries, boycott all-male or all-white convention panels and even ask people to not read books written by "straight, white, cis males" in favor of "stories by women or people of color or LGBT writers." Any push back against this insanity is naturally portrayed as confirmation homophobic, women-hating, white racists were there all along, angry at giving up the dominance of their male "patriarchy" and racial "centrality."
The Orwellian air of madness that lies behind this entire social justice movement is that it is as obsessively dedicated to the eradication of group defamation and harassment based on race and sex as it is expert at employing sophisticated rhetorical and even academic arguments whose sole purpose and outcome is group defamation and harassment based on race and sex. This is a movement that is as proactive in introducing racial and sexual harassment policies into its community arena as it has been in leading the way in conspicuously violating the spirit of such policies and creating an unprecedented amount of institutional bullying and group defamation based on nothing more than the race and sex of the targets. This radical feminist-based ideology is dedicated to demanding rules from society while at the same time making themselves exempt from those rules using mumbo-jumbo power/privilege theories based on a hierarchy of race, class and sex. The most prominent individuals in this movement are far worse caricatures of racist, man-hating heterophobes than the straight white men they hector in their millions with trivial straw man gripe and hokum sheathed in scare quotes from dawn til dusk. All of this stems from an era when women and blacks didn't have the right to vote in America, a simple observation at the time there were such laws, but thrown into the realm of hateful and nutty conspiracy theories and even silly excuses for discrimination when acted upon in the 21st century.
It would be no exaggeration to say 10,000 Tweets and blog comments negatively profiling men, whites and heterosexuals as an entire group have been generated by scores of the worst "social justice warriors" in SFF over the course of any 12 month period during or immediately prior to the beginning of my writing this book. For a social justice movement, that is extraordinary, to say the least, and the very thing that gives this movement that sheen of Orwell's "Ministry of Peace." Considering the institutional placement and support of the people involved, that is the very definition of mainstreaming hate speech. All of that is powered by the equally Orwellian madhattery of stealing away the neutral meaning of words like "racism" and "hate" by applying those transparently self-serving power/privilege theories where the "marginalized" can never be "racist." Intersectionalists in SFF hide behind that transparent lie as a shield to chatter endlessly about whites. There are always two sets of rules for these bigots and it's no coincidence who creates those rules. With many of the authors in this group, you'll see it's a close thing whether they are more professional at being writers or victims; certainly many of them have a self-evident boredom with the literature itself in favor of being drama queens and gossip columnists whose main talent is inciting hatred.
That dual face of obsession and self-immunity is one you will see endlessly repeated in this book to provide cover for obnoxious racist and supremacist comments. That is aside from the obvious con game that supremacists always say they have benign intentions. The truth is that supremacists are far more guilty of immorality than their targets, since their targets are mere demographies falsely transformed into immoral ideologies.
What's really behind all this is an ideology which takes an entire group of humans they don't like based on their race or sex, defines them as an oppressive -ism and then declares they are against the -ism and oppression. However there is no instance in the history of the world where all men or women or an entire ethnic group are always wrong. In order to get to that con game you have to create demonization theories that defame an entire group using rhetoric that seems logical or has a surface plausibility to it at first glance. An analogy to a blood libel like "white privilege" is an example of that; it is meant to stick in a manner using myths, stereotypes and circular logic so that it cannot be washed off. In that particular example, racial "privilege" is meant to act as a fake institution to mimic and replace one that actually existed, such as Jim Crow. "Privilege" becomes an -ism that is not an -ism, a white supremacy that doesn't exist.
In portraying this culture I have purposefully limited myself mostly to institutional figures in the core SFF community. To do otherwise would be cherry-picking and exaggerating a fringe to push an agenda; this is anything but a fringe. The sourced and linked quotes here are arranged around the officers of esteemed literary organizations, award nominees, editors, serial convention panelists and organizers, and influential bloggers. Less well known figures are included if they regularly interact with and are firmly supported by the larger players.
This book isn't about fannish arguments or politics. Each has been around as long as there has been anything like a fandom, which stretches back 100 years to flame wars in the letters sections of old Munsey pulp magazines. This is about identity-hatred. Anyone who portrays that as "politics" is lying to themselves and to others. Just because racial and sexual resentments that take down vast swaths of humans are clothed in language about "social justice" doesn't magically turn biological hatred into justice or politics any more than Orwell's "Ministry of Peace" practiced conflict-aversion Buddhism. In this movement within SFF, unprincipled and contradictory semantics and arguments abound, each dedicated to selling a con game. A racially segregated room becomes a "safer-space." A literary award only non-whites are eligible for is called "diversity." A women's-only anthology is portrayed as being "inclusive."
There are scores of science fiction writers - big and small, hard genre and mainstream - who for reasons unknown to me who have decided to ignore core fandom and its writers and institutions. There is no central gathering place for such writers and with the death of SF magazines they have chosen a more direct relationship with their fans by making it all about the art and business of creating and marketing SF. They mostly don't blog, go to SFF conventions or use Twitter and they certainly are not on mad crusades about race and gender.
This book doesn't concern itself with them but with the dying embers of a core SF community that once created great art and set the benchmarks for quality and authoritative direction and curatorship of what those benchmarks might be and which once produced such things as the Hugo Winners and Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies of the '60s and '70s.
That's all gone now. The WorldCon that produces the Hugo Awards and the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) that curated the Hall of Fame volumes remain but have been stripped clean of talent and the means to cultivate that talent by insensate political correctness that points in the opposite direction of art. An obsession with social justice has crippled the ability of SF to present art, or in some cases, even SF itself.
Today's core of SF has instead decided to take up causes - for reasons both hateful and well-meaning but naive - that resembles an army of hysterical Martin Luther King's endlessly marching through Birmingham and poking at chimerical windmills in an analogy of Orwell's eternal wars in 1984. In this case a hyperpoliticized cult of racialized gender feminism is leading the charge and the literature itself is being thrown aside in a welter of conformist trash and political conveyance. In this new wave of SF, Jim Crow, black baseball leagues and women's suffrage are still alive and well and an additional endless supply of manufactured oppressions serve as a saber-rattling casus belli to ensure the army never stops marching and the foe is given no rest.
The array of oppressions consists of exaggerating the definition of racism and sexism until the most trivial, statistically distorted and even non-existent acts cause a storm of acrimony the supposed offender has little chance of escaping from. In this new core SFF community there is as much enthusiasm for Tweeting about "What I've Learned From Two Years of Collecting Data on Police Killings" or "America is the land of opportunity. Just don't get sick. Don't be black or brown. Don't be a woman. Don't be poor" than there is for Mars landers or SF literature. Hugo Award winners retweeting quotes from Angela Davis and complaints of "racists" excluding characters of color from fiction are routine. You're as likely to get a link to a story about the Los Angeles Police Dept. shooting a homeless man as you are something about SF literature. The worst of SFF's social justice crusaders show a marked tendency to create a complex meticulously constructed delusional fantasy world where they are not only under assault by mysterious "systems" but involved in a larger struggle of good vs. evil. The obsession with and at times sheer hatred for men and whites is startling and shows every sign of genuinely unstable people. Still others seem to be garden variety racists and bigots.
In this new core SF, blogs and Twitter feeds read like insane war-diaries from Sarajevo, a Voice of America radioed over the Iron Curtain or a religious call for a crusade against the Turks. The problem is there are no Turks or wars, cold or otherwise, and in their place are tens of millions of faceless human souls unlucky and unfashionable enough to be men, ethnic Europeans and heterosexuals. In the stampede to be gendered 1960s Freedom Riders on their way to Biloxi or Selma, SF literature lies on the floor, trampled, broken and dying. Ironically, this is no planet of humans on display but one of alien oppressor colonialists versus brave and plucky rebels.
The quotes in this book are a mere sliver of what's out there when it comes to anti-white anti-male comments. Were that avalanche of hate speech directed at Jews, black folks and gays, the Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center and GLAAD would be all over this movement. The sheer obsessive hostility of some of these Twitter feeds is astonishing. Though this social justice movement reserves for itself a great moral clarity and purpose, it has in fact created a fear culture that operates in a moral fog itself created by a clever shell game of privilege theory the KKK must look on with envy and admiration.
Since this is a culture of people who make a great show of supporting anti-defamation, the constant racial incitement and incitement to demonize men at times seems morally insane. Part of the dissonance is explained by the fact the con game being sold is that a white and male demographic is in and of itself considered proof of the existence of an ideology that is hostile to women, non-whites and gays. Over and over again you find innuendoes about the past and present of SFF like the "undue prominence to stories by white men" given with arched eyebrows and conspiratorial assumptions but with no proof to back up the assertion. How could there be proof - there is none. Considering the alternative is the ridiculous idea of a decades-long conspiracy, such an assertion is based on the lie of a demographic as a tacit ideology, usually backed up by other skewed statistics and exaggerated ideas about how Jim Crow and woman's suffrage might relate to something as innocuous as SFF literature. Naturally, a radical racialized gender feminist ideology assumes misogyny and racial hostility as endemic. The irony here is that innocent demographies in history are often turned into tacit and even hostile ideologies the better to demonize them. If one wants to make a case for woman-hatred or racism I'd expect them to make that case rather than do the equivalent of pointing at a demography of Jews, men and blacks and coming away with conspiracy, hostility and stupidity. Conflating demography and ideology is a classic tactic of bigots, and especially so in this movement. Radical feminists critique men and whites as an entire group. Push back against that specific radical feminist ideology and its defenders claim you are opposing all women and non-whites. Radical feminists are not big on critical thinking and facts and that is the main reason they refuse open debate and carefully monitor, ban and delete commenters on their blogs and block folks on Twitter.
To demonstrate how much of that moral fog intersectionalists operate in and the fraud they perpetrate when it comes to their judgments about racist misogynist white men, I will show how corrupt this social justice movement is. The point of the list below is to not only show there is no opposite to it (nor has ever been) from the so-called oppressive and marginalizing demography of straight white men but that such a thing is forbidden. I will show all of the below exist and have widespread institutional support among within the entire social justice movement:
Racially segregated rooms and dinners.
Review-censoring whites.
Webzines devoted to promoting the interests and demographic presence of women, non-whites and gays.
Lists of editors and authors who are non-white, gay or women.
Publicly asking for help to "de-white" their library.
Boycotting all-white or male convention panels.
Calls to go one year without reading men, straights and whites.
Radical feminist based all-women and all-queer anthologies of SFF.
Alt-history fantasy racial and sexual revenge anthologies and short stories which take out historic whites.
Promoting or signal-boosted literature according whether the author or characters are women, non-white and gay.
Promoting black #Afrofuturism hashtags and having an Afrofuturism art and literary movement including symposiums.
Black SFF societies and symposiums.
Teaching that whites have “culturally appropriated” (culture theft) from non-whites.
Memory-holing any non-white institutions of slavery or colonialism in history.
Academic ideology and theory which stipulates all men hate women.
SF awards for women, non-whites or gays only or which heavily weight them in a mission statement.
Promoting “white savior” theories because they are tired of whites saving the day.
Creating hashtags and writing blog posts that claim any whites who mistake one non-white for another at a convention is a racist.
"Safe-space" websites so non-whites can dialogue without the interference of whites.
Writing about the random demography of SFF as an ideology exclusionary towards women, non-whites and gays.
Express race and sex-pride at lists of awards nominees.
The Orwellian irony at the heart of that list is that the social justice movement is - in principle - bitterly opposed to such practices. In fact the the movement justifies its existence by stipulating that has all been occurring in SFF for 100 years and seeks to undo such racism and sexism. The problem is they do that by doing far worse than anything they can factually show ever existed. The social justice movement in SFF has mitigations and excuse notes for teacher for everything on that list, which is what makes them corrupt and reveals who and what it is which created this cult under false pretenses mainstreamed into the consciousness of naive helpers. It is a moral shell game of stupid. The important part is all of that is always expressed within the context of the endemic racism, homophobia and sexism of straight white men. It's important because were most of those things to happen without the hate speech and larger institutional discrimination it is doubtful if anyone would care; I certainly wouldn't.
Typically this double standard about group defamation is wrapped in power dynamics, as if racial incitement was just fine when the Nazis were still an insignificant group or in regard to the modern marginalized American neo-Nazis and KKK. But we know this movement doesn't believe that - quite the contrary - they exaggerate such things to the hilt. So what does this social justice movement in SFF believe? What are their standards, their rules, their principles? That's the mystery, and one where goalposts have legs so that the targeted demographic can never catch up.
That was written by Bahar Mustafa, a woman in the U. K. who unbelievably called someone "white trash" on the Goldsmith University student union welfare and diversity Twitter account of which she is a student officer. Mustafa created a controversy when she disinvited straght white male students from attending a meeting about diversity. Withing this ideology, "racism" is not only defined as "white" but in a passive sense from which no whites can escape.
The strangest thing about this social justice movement is that it appears to be based on the same concept as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against DEFAMATION and the Jewish Anti-DEFAMATION League. Where the problem comes in is these social justice warriors take that word "defamation" and use privilege/marginalization "punching up" theory to make racism appear where there is none and no racism where it is obvious. Comments after comment from within this movement make it clear many think their so-called oppressed and "marginalized" can do no wrong no matter how in your face anti-white and anti-male the comments are and straight white men can do no right no matter how lacking in quotes their rhetoric is. Try and imagine the Orwellian spectacle of anti-defamation leagues in fact being pro-defamation leagues and you can begin to grasp the oddball nature of this movement and why it so resembles Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate." Much of this is caused by throwing rules which embrace us all to the side of the road rather than having a dedication to and faith in them.
Part of that weird disconnect lies in attributing racism, misogyny and homophobia to anyone who observes the success of this ideology's affirmative action initiatives. The problem there is the entire social justice culture from the SFWA presidents on down make their commitment to affirmative action where identity trumps the literature clear in comment after comment. They make no secret of that whatsoever and accuse others of racism for the apparent mere act of reading those comments. Typically, this movement wants to have this argument both ways.
"Historically, there haven’t been enough avenues for POC, women, disabled writers, and others to flourish... numerous people have been working on and promoting efforts to promote diverse voices in the field. Those efforts continue. I anticipate that this groundswell of efforts to boost the voices of the marginalized will continue and I have every intent to help promote those efforts wherever I can." - SFF author Laura Mixon, wife of then SFWA president Steven Gould
If you pay close attention to how intersectionalist use the term "progressive," you'll find it invariably literally means their own racial and sexual identities. A forward-thinking outlook is embedded in themselves.
What is one supposed to do with hundreds of quotes like that from SFF's core players - pretend one didn't see them? Pretend we can't imagine how they'll vote for awards? Pretend they don't mean what they say?
Although you see lots of posturing about equality and there is the usual fetishistic strands of such things to the point they become an empty cargo-cult, there is something else going on here. Mid-century liberalism has been infiltrated by a feral hatred of human beings based on what they were the day they were born. This hatred has adopted the cant of that mid-century liberalism and seamlessly mixed in those semantics with its own sociopathic formulas and demonization theories to the point where the mere act of being born is to take on an oppressive ideology, and one that must be fought against. In truth, this is nothing more than the same drivel that was parceled out in European beer-gardens in the 1930s. Given its aggressive nature combined with how often you'll find the word "safe" used as in a "safe-space," there is more than a hint of madness about the entire movement. For me, the entire affair resembles Hitler Youth more than social justice, and that's because at the bottom of this is nothing more than old-fashioned biological hatred and sociopathy dressed up in fakery about a non-existent institutionalized lobby of women-hating, racist, homophobes. That fakery is in turn supported by naive do-gooders who haven't noticed their enemies have no actual names, only a race and sex.
In its most fundamental sense, the social justice movement is a group of people claiming to critique an artistic medium but which in fact critques an ethnic group and sex and in a way that is negative 100% of the time; that is group defamation. The fundamental divide is between people who see that and object to it, and those who claim it's not the case or see it as a balancing of accounts and settling of old scores. The problem there is group defamation based on race and sex is always wrong; there are no exceptions. Pretending a race or sex is an ideology when there is no sign of one or saying it's just "politics" in order to excuse such behavior is an act of immorality and failure of judgement. The convenient sidecar to these critiques is the claim only straight white men can be racists, sexists and bigots. Only men can be guilty of sex-hatred - misogyny; there is no such thing as misandry. That poses the question of why an ideology has such ready-made rhetorical disclaimers in the first place. Within gender feminism, the entire concept of "privilege" is already set up so that morality always slides away from targeted groups so as to reside solely within feminist ideology and its identities which are the polar opposite of the straight white male. Identity - one's race and sex itself - literally becomes a moral ethos.
But it was not always like that. Conformity by way of the entrance of mainstream American pop cultural thought paved the way for the almost undetectable bleeding in of the unprincipled phenomenon at first known as political correctness, and then as something else.
*
Let's separate science fiction literature of the last 100 years into two eras: from 1912 to the late '60s, and from the late '60s to the present day.
The distinguishing characteristic of the first era is one where science fiction was published mostly in magazines, and the editors were lovers, scholars and sometimes writers of science fiction. Whatever's the case, they certainly knew their business. They fed an American appetite which embraced and perhaps even craved the rapid technological change and new information coming to light as a result that formed the basis of a new adventure fiction where the sole cohesive motto was anything can and will happen. Similarly, readers of science fiction at that time were, generally speaking, increasingly educated connoisseurs of a coalescing genre, aware of the difference between how their beloved literature was looked down on or ignored by literature with a big "L" as the century progressed, and perhaps even taking a pride in that fact. SF of that era was marginalized and ghettoized because, heading into the '20s and beyond and contrary to the trend prior to that time, all the mainstream crowd came to know about SF were things like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and later, in the '50s, monster films aimed at teenagers.
Within that first era there are three more distinct eras. First is the Munsey Magazine era which produced the seminal SF novel A Princess of Mars (serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in 1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Second is the beginning of the era of magazines which specialized in fantastic literature. That era started in 1923 with Weird Tales Magazine and in 1926 with Amazing Stories, the latter the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. The third era is the era of editor John Campbell at Astounding Stories Magazine starting in 1939, which produced Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt and Isaac Asimov, and changed everything - the so-called "Golden Age" of SF.
The most notable difference in regard to editors and publishers during the second era beginning in the late '60s is the beginning of the culmination of the slow transition from magazines and paperbacks in the early 1950s to the increasingly hardcover and paperback publishing of science fiction. It was also marked by the presence of editors and publishers increasingly distant from a concern for and knowledge of the genre's history and evolution. Those later editors were also increasingly concerned with a more generic marketing of SF to a more mainstream crowd who had come to SF, not from literature, but from watching Star Trek and Star Wars.
Bridging the gap between the two eras, the novel Dune, by Frank Herbert, was published in hardcover in 1965 and did more than any other single novel to bring SF literature into mainstream best-seller lists. In an afterword in a 2010 Ace Paperback edition of Dune, Frank Herbert's son Brian Herbert writes that when his father published the third in the Dune series, "'Children of Dune' in 1976, it became a runaway bestseller, hitting every important list in the country. 'Children of Dune' was the first science fiction novel to become a New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback, and sales reached into the millions. After that, other science fiction writers began to have their own bestsellers..."
A good start... and then a year later, just as SF was seemingly recovering from Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and '50s monster films, came the special effects break-through Star Wars, released in the Spring of 1977. I misread how the mainstream public would eventually react to Star Wars. In my mind, Star Wars borrowed heavily from SF literature; not in its plot, but at the edges of that plot - the wonderful world of mile-long star ships, real language barriers and mind-bendingly advanced technologies taken for granted as part of the scenery, to name but a few. In the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, one of those "edges," the sequence with the Imperial Walkers, became the centerpiece of the film. Star Wars captured SF's innocent sense of wonder and, to me, the general public had responded to those edges and that wonder, not the plot, which was hackneyed and trite, and nothing new. I believed those edges would lead fans of the film to the literate core of SF for which those edges were a contextual backdrop to reimagine our humanity and literature itself. I still believe that the reaction to Star Wars was because of those "edges," but that's not the legacy of the original Star Wars, however much I might argue those "edges" were the true star of Star Wars. In fact, the true legacy of Star Wars didn't serve to open up the world of SF literature to the general public, but began a slow slide to close that door forever, in film, TV and literature, and worse. There were to be no "Fondly Fahrenheit," "The Big Front Yard," "This Moment of the Storm" or To Live Forever in that future, other than an incredibly rare foray into lyrical artistry like Blade Runner.
During the early winter of 1977 Spielberg released his SF mystery and cinematic masterpiece, the exquisitely edited and staged Close Encounters of the Third Kind. CETK borrowed its inspiration less from old movie serials and SF literature and more from the eerie tone and even music of the TV show One Step Beyond, which debuted in Jan. 1959, the same year The Twilight Zone did. Though very successful in its own right, CETK's more literate theme was far overshadowed by Star Wars. Star Wars would eventually have as great an impact on SF film and literature as J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings did on fantasy literature starting at the same time as CETK and Star Wars. Before the end of the '70s, Robert E. Howard's Conanesque Sword and Sorcery had dominated fantasy literature for almost a half century. Unlike Lord of the Rings, Star Wars was not in fact its own sub-genre, but the fact it sucked in all around it amounted to the same effect. SF literature didn't get the credit for its own innovations, Star Wars did. As a direct result of Star Wars, the Star Trek franchise was relaunched in 1979 with the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and is still with us today. Were it not for Star Wars, that likely would not have happened, and SF literature itself would have taken a far different course.
The next seminal SF film event of that era was the 1979 film Alien, which eventually spawned a mini-industry and several sequels and brought monster films firmly out of the ghetto and into the mainstream through sheer filmmaking brilliance. The last 2 game-changers (released on the same day) were The Thing, (1982) based on the 1938 Hall of Fame short SF story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr. writing as Don A. Stuart, and Blade Runner, (1982) based on Phillip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner's "cyberpunk" art direction forever changed the landscape of both SF literature and film. I call them "game-changers" though neither was particularly well thought of or profitable at the time. 1982 also saw the release of the very well received and profitable E.T. the Extra-Terrestial and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
By this time it was clear that with the increased budgets and filmic talents involved, there was a new mainstream acceptance and credibility for SFF films once relegated to an era of children's matinees where adult films were shown in the evening. The dreams of a closeted and once rejected group of hard core literary SF fans were coming true and it turns out they should have been careful for what they wished for. For the first time in its 70 year history, the SF literature which had powered this new moment in the sun would find a new generation that would not only fail to bring SF out of its ghetto of magazine pulps, but gut that ghetto until nothing was left but an analogy to polished literary versions of 1950s monster films more influenced by the screen than the literature itself. Mom and pop had come to SF after having spent decades laughing at it, if not throwing it in wastebaskets.
What had prevented that happening decades earlier is somewhat counter instinctual. Especially at the start of the Golden Age of SF, people in the know came to understand that they could find a type of literature that offered something of a refuge from mainstream sensibilities, that something extra, some extra nuance. But SF had a reputation of being the complete opposite of that and so mainstream prejudice and it's tendency to not flock to a thing without some type of larger consensual approval insulated SF until the good-stuff-is-where-you-find-it movement of the counter-culture '60s. Star Trek and then Star Wars gave that sheen of cultural approval so one could read and watch SF without being laughed at as some weirdo, a thing real eccentrics - confident of their own tastes - could've cared less about. The more the mainstream stayed away the better. But the other counter instinctual thing in play was the human desire to share secrets and to make their weirdo hobby acceptable, to see it respected and honored and on the big screen and best-seller lists so as to confirm their good tastes. The two cannot exist side by side for very long.
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Probably the single major factor that has contributed to the sense of the acceleration of the death of SF as a literary genre in a strictly artistic sense is because the '60s - due to a massive thirst for SFF, as well as other factors - had 3 or 4 decades of prior SFF just as massively superimposed on it in a mass revival in a way no other decade has. Writers like the almost Victorian Edgar Rice Burroughs, Abraham Merritt, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft (and their imitators) and many others, were being commercially marketed as if they were living, producing authors. In some few cases careers were resuscitated, (E.E. Smith, Leigh Brackett, A.E. Van Vogt) albeit briefly, others coaxed out of their non-fiction endeavors by the eventual lure of big paydays that would come somewhat after the '60s.
Not only did this revival probably treble the perception of the '60s as a great decade for SF, it set a standard no succeeding decade could ever hope to measure up to. In the early to mid-'60s, SF as old as 1912 was being marketed, not as creaky classics, but in a contemporary sense, if one squinted one's eyes only a little bit. Despite the fact that Burroughs' prose had become somewhat stilted, his vision was nevertheless so modern and fun it still held great traction. If we go back 50 years from today - 2014 - the best work of Larry Niven and Roger Zelazny and others still seems modern.
In addition, the fact that only the past great and near-great were being mined, either as individual stories or as individuals, magnified the effect of a wonder-decade even further, as the drudgery was mostly left behind, pre-edited. In a normal scenario, those decades of the '30s, '40s and '50s had that drudgery right there, and you had to go through it to get to the gems. By the '60s, those gems had been polished and sorted for you. By contrast, the not-so-great of the '60s seemingly occupied a smaller percentage, adding even further to the sense the '60s was awash in greatness.
At the time no one seemed to question why a comic book (because of paperback sales) like Conan the Barbarian would become stunningly popular in 1970, 35 years after the character's creator had died. You will always have something like that: they're still making Star Trek films today, almost a half century after the TV series, and Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Superman seem to never quite go away. But the '60s leading into the '70s saw a large distortion of that. It was more of a wholesale living revival than a respect for the classics of the genre. In some instances the old work was more popular than it ever had been when the authors were still alive. That was certainly the case with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
The old pulp magazines were mined to exhaustion to supply SF anthologies and best-of collections by authors like C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton were marketed right next to new authors like Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven and Harlan Ellison even into the mid-'70s. Even a baker's dozen juvenile 1940s Capt. Future stories were published in paperback by Popular Library. Generally speaking, the '60s was a decade that saw pop culture entertainment previously considered low-brow and produced for niche markets cross over into mainstream consciousness. Today you still see SFF work popular within their niche markets but which are not capturing the public's imagination. Rather than pollinating the mainstream, that mechanism is working the other way around.
In the 1960s comic books saw a similar revival with a Batman TV series and characters from WW II like the Human Torch, Capt. America, the Sub-Mariner, the Green Lantern, and the Flash all having new life in re-imaginings of their characters. The whole thing was a rather odd phenomena powered by the fact the SF magazine genre was still only 40 years old and the furthest extensions of that genre only going back another 15 years or so. Given how small the clutch of good writers and stories had been up to that point and the enormous energies generated in the '60s, the effort to present the whole - the old and the new on a single plate - was easily matched by a seemingly endless enthusiasm and appetite for fantastic literature. To contrast how much was encompassed and what that body of work meant, going back 40 years from today brings you back to 1974, but with much less enthusiasm today for that more recent body of work, though with far more writers and novels to choose from.
I don't want to make this all seem like publishers had some abstract dedication to artistry. A buck is a buck, and the Burroughs craze that kickstarted SFF in the '60s came about because Ace Paperbacks found the original Burroughs magazine stories had fallen out of copyright. Ace also published an unauthorized edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings based on a copyright loophole. Had Ace not published Burroughs in the '60s, it is interesting to think about how the entire landscape of SFF might have changed.
However, one thing is certain: without Star Wars, the wave of novelizations of that film and Star Trek would never have happened, nor would the conformism of mainstream sensibilities ever overwhelmed the genre. The risks of offering eccentric visions to mainstream TV and film audiences aside, the sheer cost of filmic special effects has dictated a TV and movie galaxy inhabited by stock plots and aliens with ridges on their foreheads otherwise indistinguishable from humans. Since the early '60s, there has been no appetite in television (and never was in film) for producing more nuanced SF projects.
Today, literary works of SF that are solidly core genre in ancestry and draw in mainstream interest are non-existent. In the realm of fantasy, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series stubbornly draws on the history of its own non-mainstream genre and can be said to be a contemporary culmination of 7 decades of work mostly influenced by a fusion of J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard's Sword and Sorcery. Martin does not pander to mainstream sensibilities or attention spans and seems to have had no interest in what a mainstream audience might think. Martin's work is one of the very few modern examples of core genre reversing a recent trend and dictating to the mainstream what the field is rather than the other way around while at the same time attracting massive mainstream interest beyond fans of epic fantasy. The reason Martin's work has found such traction is for the obvious reason it is the best written epic fantasy of its generation with the possible exception of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy of the '80s. Though a brilliant work, Vance was simply too eccentric to be read by the mainstream, and Vance's great strength - his prose stylings - would be difficult to translate to film.
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The problem with not having a living past respected or on display in SF is that new authors will reinvent the wheel and have no sense of benchmarks for achievement. While that may work fine for 14 year old readers just entering the genre, the overall level of quality won't be enough to sustain any excitement because in the end those new readers are being marketed to by recycled mainstream conformity, not being presented with a hall of fame context of Bradbury and Heinlein.
Trends and modernity move on, and I am not suggesting Top 40 songs from the '40s or '60s should be pushed on the radio - that can work fine for a few years, as it did for SFF in the '60s, but pushed too far that would be static nonsense - a drag on progress. Nevertheless, one should have a sense of what got you to the present and build on that, and realize that fundamental artistry and creativity will always be relevant in the sense of an evolution. Even worse than ignoring that idea is transforming artistry and creativity into some kind of political crew cut with incorrecthought shaved off. It is up to both readers and creators to maintain a thread to their own past, otherwise one gets to the point of re-celebrating a nifty Gothic cathedral and very cool flying buttresses. That is worse than being static - it is a falling back.
There is nothing like what happened in the '60s happening today in SFF, unless you count tacking '60s TV shows like Dr. Who or Star Trek onto your literature and adding in zombies and vampires so blandly polished they seem like orphans. Authors given a second wind in the '60s like Abraham Merritt, Otis Adelbert Kline, Edmond Hamilton, William Hope Hodgson, Henry Kuttner, and E.E. "Doc" Smith have all sunk back into obscurity. There is no similar wave of nostalgia for the past today - quite the contrary. Those of today's authors and fans infected by gender feminism laugh at and even despise old school SF, not for its lack of artistry, though that is often the claim, but for incorrect politics and also racism and sexism.
A similar thing happened with New Wave SF in the early '60s, perhaps best represented by the patronizing but very good SF anthology Dangerous Visions, edited by SF author Harlan Ellison and published in 1967 - but there was never the sheer hatred for the past one so commonly sees expressed today. The '60s New Wave would never have entertained the idea of not publishing Golden Age SF due to its immoral so-called racism and sexism as is the case today. Although that New Wave certainly influenced new SF, it eventually merged with its own past, having failed to entirely turn away the respect and enjoyment of SF from the first half of the 20th century.
There is an analogy to that New Wave today, but, like the '60s fine art movements, it treats SF as if it is a conversation piece, a mere conveyance, almost an afterthought, for what really matters: social justice, identity politics and gender abolition feminism - the same thing really. Today's New Wave represents a cultural, political and most importantly a moral break with the past, and unfortunately, a break with the eccentricity and artistry that characterized that past.
A surfeit of inartful but politically correct literature is the result, typified by this short interview with Paul Cornell (who has unsurprisingly written Dr. Who TV shows and novel tie-ins) that represents a comic book-ization of SF that sometimes makes Edgar Rice Burroughs look like Shakespeare, together with an equally childish obsession with diversity, blind to the use that topic has been put as a camouflaged and bigoted attack platform, not the least target of which is SF's own past.
The difference between new SF and old is the difference between principle and identity, though the new racialist politically correct (PC) school claims the exact opposite. But it's the same old form over substance redneckery where tucking your shirt in and keeping your hair short assumed good behavior and morality would follow. What you did wasn't as important as whether you looked like you would do it. In intersectionalism word policing has replaced shirt tails and diversity short hair. You can be a racist, sexual supremacist, genderphobe or religious bigot as long as it's the right race, right sex, right gender expression and right religion. Principle never enters into it. In the '60s kid grew their hair long and wore work shirts that were conspicuously not tucked in to emphasize this very point, a thing lost on the fools who consider themselves the descendants of that revolution against appearance, form and conformity. Morality has once again become a matter of identity and appearance. That is how you can attack someone for using a gendered slur while defending people who murder others over cartoons and then go back again to attacking anyone who resents Christ in a tank of urine as art.
In the politics of the new SF, you will find in this book that the new baseball strike zone depends on who you are, and what you look like, expanding and contracting as needed. In his book Under the Moons of Mars (1970), SF historian Sam Moskowitz, writing of how Edgar Rice Burroughs depicted characters in A Princess of Mars, "that the outward form of a creature, no matter how bizarre, is not the measure of his value." You can forget all that when it comes to today; that "outward form" is now a religion worshiped by people ostensibly bitterly opposed to outward forms. In true Orwellian fashion, black has become white.
So, what is an artistic movement without a hall of fame? What is a society with no museums? Worse, what is a society that regards what got them to the present - their museums - as a hall of shame? What happens if Renoir, Picasso and Da Vinci become persona non grata due to new politics, censored out of mainstream acceptance, their names chiseled out of a wall like ancient Egyptian dynasties fallen into disfavor?
In his short 1975 essay titled "Ten Years of Nebula Awards," SF author Gordon Dickson writes "the conditions that produced such consistently good and unusual writing are still at work. The instinct to experiment, the sense of responsibility, the fascination with the human spirit and its possibilities, the community attitude, all are currently being put to work by new people even as they are being kept at work by the old." Well, you can forget about all that. Any sense of responsibility and fascination with the human spirit in terms of the Nebula or Hugo Awards is dead, and the community attitude is more like a central committee one conforms to or is punished by. It is probably no coincidence Dickson wrote stories where higher principle supercedes taking a side such as Tactics of Mistake, nor that such work was capable of nuance such as "Soldier Ask Not," and "Call Him Lord," and that he used prose in those works where every sentence mattered.
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Anyone who situates themselves as morally superior to half of all human beings on Earth by nothing more than virtue of what they were the day they were born is not only a supremacist but a sociopath. If they make that into something of an insistent crusade they are likely a psychopath. Given the remarkably hostile and even hysteric quotes of both the founders of gender feminism and its most compassionate followers today, psychopathy is a suit which fits this ideology perfectly. The later racial add-on - so-called "Third Wave" or "intersectional" - only adds more remarkable anti-white racism and hatred. Third Wave Gender Feminism takes no pains to disguise its bald-faced disdain for men, heterosexuals and whites. Its own self-assurance it can never be guilty of sex-hatred, genderphobia or racism provides a free-fire zone for hate speech and a fertile field for quotes.
The default position of the social justice crusade in SFF that there is a movement which opposes the inclusion of women, gays and non-whites in SFF is false. There is no proof of such a thing, no evidence of such a culture-wide rhetoric now or in the past.
The bald-faced lie at the bottom of this fake feminist movement is that it bitterly opposes a men's rights and white supremacist movement in SFF which literally doesn't exist while intersectionalism in fact perfectly mirrors the ideas behind each of those.
What there is proof of is resentment because of the racial incitement and incitement to hate men passed off as social justice innate to Third Wave (Intersectional) Gender Feminism.
The use of the word "feminism" is what's causing a problem right out of the starting gate. When Americans hear the word "feminism" they usually think of equal rights for women, or in other words, women who want an equal starting line. That's not what the feminism behind this social justice movement in SFF is about at all. This version is not based on an equal start but on equal outcomes. That is a problem in and of itself. What makes it worse is the idea of equal outcome is based on bizarre psycho-sexual lesbian feminist texts and theory which began around 1970 based on various critiques which emerged from among themselves and looking at European writings ranging from Marx to Virginia Wolfe to Simone de Beauvoir but which most of all became increasingly plucked from empty French intellectualism.
That fusion increased with the writings of gay feminists such as Judith Butler 20 years later who had in turn based her critiques on that European structural/post-structural intellectualism with a few added names. In between was the influential black gay feminism represented by Audre Lorde and her racialized view of gender feminism which later turned into "third wave," or "intersectionalism" and gained more influence around 1990. Gender feminism concerns the views of American lesbian ideologues regarding the nature of sexuality, especially in respect to how normal sexuality is nothing more than a socially constructed ideology created and used by men to oppress women for millennia. The animus from these feminists aside, it's hard to take that seriously. It sounds more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers than human nature.
The French Queer Theory largely set in motion by Butler that the "performativity of gender"[1] consists of "an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates" reads like the Monty Python sketch where a high-rise building created by a magician/architect only remains standing as long as its residents believe in it. What more amazing coincidence than lesbian ideologues concluding heterosexuals only believe they're straight because they've been told that over and over again. The societal shaming effect of that moreover then produces Butler's "compulsory heterosexuality."
The gender feminist idea that I anticipate, therefore I am in conjunction with Butler's idea that may produce "an hallucinatory effect" has more to do with Butler's own hallucinations brought on by anticipation than thousands of years of human history. It's just more delicious fantasy cooked up out of exactly nothing which says I reject homosexuality (including my own) by reciting cultural mantras like the warding of demons, tacitly passed on to me by other heterosexuals (particularly men), and that I similarly daily remind myself of my heterosexuality or I may forget... or something. The only thing Butler leaves out is pentagrams and my demon familiars.
This post-structural semantic gibberish about "performativity" being the repetition of performance which creates identity and reality is a thing Butler borrowed from French intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and which amounts to providing a propaganda tool to fight the propaganda which is reality.
"... it was to Foucault that most queer theorists turned. This was perhaps because Foucault saw little stability in identity politics and believed that the individual was created through and by discourse, which itself was created by systems of knowledge power." - April S. Callis (2009): Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory, Journal of Bisexuality, 9:3-4, 213-233
Note the use of the word "systems," a thing crucial to intersectionalist thought in the sense radical feminists use the term since it amounts to a wall which keeps them out but doesn't exist; all rabble rousers need a Mukden.
Butler apparently means heterosexuals codify, regulate and reaffirm heterosexuality as if they are afraid it will go away and homosexuals will appear instead. It's hard to tell what Butler is talking about at any given time. Reading her work is like the uncertainty principle in action where lite-beer both tastes great and is less filling.
The tie-breaker of course goes to success and that is defined by that which can reproduce and defend itself, not evolutionary cul-de-sacs. To understand the true worth of feminist theory, you only have to imagine it bereft of the very men it hates and existing in a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere full of "comfort women."
[1] All Butler quotes there are from her 1999 preface to her 1990 book Gender Trouble.
One can get a glimpse of a more pragmatic view of prose like Butler's in "Transgressing the Boundaries" by Christopher Hitchens from the May 22, 2005 Sunday Book Review in the New York Times.
The emergence of the politically correct and diversity-obsessed race and gender pie-charting of modern SF literature according to some bizarre radical feminist theory is going to tend to suck the fun out of a genre that is somewhat dedicated to the idea of fun. What would have happened if the Golden Age magazine SF of the '40s and '50s had been purposefully race and gender pie-charted for diversity in a type of affirmative action initiative? I suspect you could scratch one Golden Age due to an institutionalization of mediocrity where race and gender trumps art, and writers are pushed into an arena they are not ready for. That's aside from infusing that new demography with insanely hostile and just plain insane gender theory with no scientific or historic basis and with a sidecar of racial hostility.
But don't confuse this new wave with the New Wave of SF and counter-culture of the '60s. While fronting itself as progressive, the new PC want to reinstitute a thing like the Fredric Wertham-driven censorship of the Comics Code Authority, a thing the '60s was determined to dismantle. But this new wave isn't driven by a wrong-headed fundamental idea of violent comics, video games or sexy book covers causing violence or juvenile delinquency, but first and foremost by identity-hatred which stipulates a lack of racial and sexual diversity and healthy role models will cause a type of gender-based juvenile delinquency.
"'Partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4" above the knee are not allowed.'"
No, that's not from the exhibition guidelines of a late 19th century Chicago art gallery whose patriarchy wants to steal women's Joanna Russ pencil-boxes or part of the '50s self-censoring Comics Code. That is part of today's feminist driven guidelines for what a video gaming convention allows when it comes to "booth babes." As you'll see later on, SFF is now a feminist Frank Frazetta-free zone as is the entirety of the Golden Age of SF due to heresy and a lack of orthodoxy. By those standards, mixed martial arts champion Ronda Rousey's fighting outfits would be banned, although she could probably break the arm of everyone at the convention.
This bizarre gender feminism is dedicated to ending a system of male dominance (sexism) and is fixated on a more fluid view of human sexuality as a means to achieve that. As nuts as that sounds, you'll see that belief echoed in quotes time and again. It is the single most fundamental belief of this odd brand of what styles itself as feminism which often falsely presents itself as a continuation of equal rights feminism. The goal of radical feminism is to ensure there is a separation between the meaning of sex (biological) and gender (cultural expressions associated with each sex). They're not talking about something as obvious and true as dresses and pants but about the core (false) "performative" identities of each sex itself, which they maintain default to a much wider natural androgynous spectrum, a far different thing. There is no such thing as masculine and feminine in radical feminism as a natural occurrence; they are political ideologies and an artificially restricted spectrum of sexuality that must be done away with and heterosexuality itself said to reside in the realm of an ideological or cultural gender performance, like a dress, rather than in biological sex. However, much of this thought contains distinctions that amount to no more than semantic and intellectual gibberish, though apparently wide gaps to those involved. It should come as no surprise this ideology was created by lesbians for lesbians from a splinter movement of the wider 1960s American feminist movement.
These sexual social constructs are what Simone de Beauvoir is referring to in her seminal 1949 book The Second Sex when she writes "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine."
"Political lesbians... were the ones that said that all women can be lesbians and that heterosexuality is compulsory under a system of male supremacy." - lesbian feminist Julie Bindel, radfem collective, An Interview With Julie Bindel, Aug. 29, 2015
Gender is said to express nothing fundamental about women or men. Of course these are all self-serving, convenient and meticulous rationalizations from people who are in no way in touch with reality. Men and women aren't going to fundamentally relate to each other differently by an exchange of clothes. You can't wish heterosexuality away with goofy theories, and people who assert the fundamental nature of reality itself is oppressive have issues, to say the least. The idea men and women wouldn't know each other unless they're told is too stupid to entertain. Yet that is exactly what radical feminists assert is the case - that for 7,000 years civilizations have been fundamentally dedicated to oppressing women by micro-managing their perceptions of motherhood. In the world of de Beauvoir, pregnancy equals chains, like a butterfly forever prevented from emerging from its chrysalis.
"The discovery is, of course, that 'man' and 'woman' are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. Culture as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy." - Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, 1974
This new wave changes the meaning of words so that nothing becomes racism, sexism and misogyny and then that nothing is said to stimulate more sexism and misogyny; it then completely accepts Wertham's mechanisms of cause and effect. As you will see, something as innocuous as chain-mail bikinis is simply unacceptable to this group. This is not a group fighting for inclusion and addition, though that is the exact claim they make, but fighting to eliminate anything that offends their political sensibilities as oppressive, and that is virtually the entirety of Golden Age SF, if not the entire world, it history and its "patriarchy." In fact, in PC feminist history, SF between Mary Shelley and Ursula LeGuin simply disappears by reason of lack of decency.
I expect a lot of pushback about this book, but the truth cannot be weaponized against itself, only hypocrisy can. The trick feminists use is to act as if SFF - like comics and video gaming that have also been under assault - have violated some tacit human rights or diversity mission statement which never existed. SFF is a pop entertainment medium. It is shaped by and marketed to those who have an interest in SFF, not who doesn't. SFF has never had the financial clout, central organization nor desire to shape or market itself as some generic fun for the whole family. Even TV networks don't hype their own line-ups as being for everyone, though they would certainly like every show to have as wide an appeal as possible.
SFF has never had anything like a network and with ad dollars to engineer itself into the American consciousness. It is not an international diamond consortium trying to create a market which doesn't exist or the East India Company convincing Englishman they suddenly like tea. Intersectionalists are essentially asking why a soft drink doesn't have more ads with gay and black people because gay and black people like soft drinks. The problem is SFF isn't a soft drink and it's stupid to pretend it is and that everything is for everyone; culture doesn't work like that. You can't will a demographic into existence which isn't there any more than you can will more black or white basketball and hockey players or rap artists and rodeo clowns into existence. No one is keeping anyone out of SFF other than the random currents of American culture itself.
Equal rights feminism and the civil rights movement were based on actual laws which acted to discriminate. Intersectional gender feminism is based on animus and paranoia and the willful misreading of historic and current cultural events to create a race-gender war and conspiracy which doesn't exist. The fact it so blithely asks questions here but never there and sees these statistics but never those is proof it is looking for a fight, not reacting to one. In addition, concepts of institutions and systems a
The astounding paper trail of quotes representing the bald-faced bigotry of this movement speaks both to the ironic awareness of its own racial and sexual privilege and invulnerability and also the sheer stupidity of its naivete. Don't for one minute think the worst of these bigots don't have a sense of what they can get away with or earn and spend like coin due to their racial and sexual identities. That is precisely the reason SFF authors, bloggers, Tweeters and editors remind people of their intersectionally approved and oppressed ethnic and sexual identities, especially mixed-race authors who don't look remotely Arab or black.
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When Jack Vance, one of the greatest writers of SF and fantasy, died in May of 2013, one of SF's new breed of racialized feminists, a Frenchwoman of mixed Asian descent named Aliette de Bodard, multiple nominee and winner of SF's highest awards, the Hugo and Nebula, Tweeted, "I don't actually think I've read any Vance. Should I?" De Bodard is not a gender feminist per se and sits far more on the intersectional racial end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, this entire race-gender movement marches in lock step when it comes to supporting each other. Anyone who persistently and ideologically throws down the straight white man is in. Any straight white man who publicly supports that is in, but only as an "ally," like a second rate cut of beef. SFF author Chuck Wendig announced he was "trying to be a good ally" but feared he was "mansplaining" instead and may not be a "particularly good" "feminist" although he thinks of himself as one and so decided to keep his "LILY WHITE MANSTICK" out of things properly left to those who are not men and not white. Like a one-man Comics Code Authority Wendig decided to self-censor. For a speculative fiction author to engage in something like that is mind-boggling. Are we to have all-lesbian juries, all-male? Who writes history books? Are we to have a power-privilege-o-meter?
Everyone else who is not an "ally" is not only out but defaults to homophobic, racist and sexist, whether by virtue of opposition to the defamations of intersectional gender feminism or by mere privilege. Those are the broad strokes.
Had Jack Vance been a non-white gay woman, de Bodard would've sent up rocket flares when he died, since she is well acquainted with the most obscure women, non-white, non-Western authors in SF and fantasy. De Bodard represents a culture within SFF that fetishizes a black mid-list SF author like Octavia Butler whose influence and talent compared to Vance is minimal but whose race, politics, and gender represents a trump card. Vance represents the complete opposite: devoted to word and artistry to the exclusion of all else. And yet Vance has been enrolled in a de facto supremacist ideology by radical feminism by fiat and so is of no interest to them whatsoever other than an example of a smotheringly oppressive patriarchy. Aside from that, an SFF writer who has never read Vance is like an Egyptologist missing a dynasty or two. It's betrays a rather stunning disinterest and lack of knowledge of one's own literary ancestors and history of one's own genre.
On her blog and Twitter, De Bodard never ceases recommending literature according to the race and gender of those writing it; whether they're actually any good or not seems immaterial. It shouldn't be any surprise that in this new climate, de Bodard is relentlessly nominated for awards based on her own patronized and pandered to racial identity and that of her stories rather than her skills, which are nominal.
Some people saw this coming years ago, such as Gary Westfahl:
"In all the science fiction of the last half-century, the influence of the pulp tradition is, to any knowledgeable reader, not merely palpable but overwhelming. It would seem an era that science fiction scholars would be eager to study in depth.
"In the case of science fiction, the process of excluding the pulp magazines from the history of science fiction can already be observed in a number of critical studies, some of them well respected, for reasons that demand little discussion. Stories from the pulps cannot qualify for preservation on the basis of their literary quality, which is uneven at best, and given our contemporary commitment to diversity, the literature of the pulps appears to be discomfitingly and overwhelmingly white, male, North American, heterosexual, and middle class."
The truth about SFF's politically correct is they don't admire any part of America's past but condemn it wholesale, the whole ball of wax. The same is mostly true of America today, which they routinely portray as an oppressive, misogynist and racist gulag.
What is an art community that doesn't know who its Jack Vance is? In the visual arts, what if the greatest expert on Van Gogh died and an artist said, "I've heard the name 'Van Gogh' but I've never seen the work; should I?" Aside from the laughingly obvious fact the answer wouldn't depend on a dead artist's race and gender, as is so painfully obvious with now deceased Octavia (one true cross) Butler, the answer depends on what you imagine a world of artistic endeavor looks like that doesn't know Hemingway, Hendrix, Rembrandt, Lloyd Wright, and by extension Frazetta, Shelley, Poe, Heinlein, Lovecraft, Wells, and Burroughs. Some of the people on the wrong side of that answer are as predictable as machines:
SFF author Michael Swanwick addresses this issue at his blog in a post titled "Losing Our Literary History." In it Swanwick writes:
"...somebody reported attending a panel of fantasy novelists at Comic Con where a reader asked if any of them were influenced by Lord Dunsany. None of the writers had ever heard of him."
To me, if that's true, it's stunning. Dunsany is a key voice in the evolution of fantasy literature and people who were fans of that literature used to be connoisseurs; without Dunsany there is no H. P. Lovecraft. When fandom failed a half-century ago there was the fan/historian/editor/writer to pick up the slack and and bring back into focus a lost voice such as Lin Carter did with Robert E. Howard and many other fantasy authors, and Sam Moskowitz did with William Hope Hodgson. What is a fan who has lost the ability to connect the dots in the evolution of his own genre? Worse, what kind of a writer is that? For an SFF writer to not know who Jack Vance is is like an architect not knowing what the Chrysler Building is. What will that architect build?
The first commenter in that Swanwick post was quoted in a blog post it inspired blogger and SFF author Michael Flynn to write titled "Crimes Committed Inside Other People's Heads," which touches on much of what I write about here.
Part of that quote, in speaking about why some people may choose to not know about people like Dunsany goes:
"And then there's racism, homophobia, antisemitism, and any number of other bigoted attitudes lurking in those old stories and stories. No, thanks. Then there's the issue of how much early SF/F is decidedly Western. Euro-centric, US-centric, and all about the superiority of anglo white men."
It's outright falsehoods and attitudes like that that are the source of the tone of my own book; I have no patience, none at all, for the anti-bigot bigot or people who can't figure out why the innocent demographic of Arabic literature is so Arabic, as if that's an act of racial exclusion or supremacy then followed by an accusation and guilty verdict. Flynn's response is far more patient and reasonable than am I. Very strange people abound who review SF films and TV shows using rhetoric indistinguishable from the KKK, as if daring people to call them out. As you will see in this book, there is almost a sub-genre of blog posts with titles like "Lucy: Why I'm Tired of Seeing White People on the Big Screen." Seeing as how this is all done on the presumption white people don't want to see black people on the big screen, there is more than a little insanity afoot in stipulating such defamation is anti-oppression. There is little doubt people with severe psychosis and racial and gender hatreds are using the camouflage of anti-oppression to gain surprisingly large sympathetic and compassionate followings.
"Want non-white, non-Eurocentric, fantasy that's really fucking good?"
And this thing such people have about the word "Western" - as if it is some drunk traitorous hobo passed out in the gutter - is something I don't understand. Among radical feminists, the word "non-Western" is treated like a savior or cure, a mantra recited to ward off evil, though for some oddball reason they won't actually go live there. There is a constant assertion by adherents of this ideology about the myth that the non-West is more "non-binary" sexually friendly; a powerful attraction for radical feminism. Aside from that, the usual charge is one of Western cultural and linguistic centrism. Bollywood is Hindu-centric and Samba music Brazil-centric; so what? Why are they never taken to task? The easy answer is they're not white, and that tells you the true unprincipled and racist natures behind these complaints. But even worse: what happened to the science fiction?
Am I supposed to actually believe an author - an Asian one - from Singapore for example - in and of itself represents some sea-change? It's a dangerous bit of racialism: if I can imagine the positive based on nothing more than race and geography, it enables the negative as well. Stipulating race, sex and geography conveys a difference, but only a positive one, is childish. In fact if identity diversity can be said to convey what passes for innovation, it can also be said to convey boredom or lack of originality. Once you go there, everything is on the table, including Asians are stupid. It's the reverse of a racial smear, but with the same double-edged logic in play.
The Orwellian stupidity you'll always see attached to anything radical feminism promotes is their mindless addiction to diversity. The reason it's Orwellian is because of the single-minded lack of diversity with which it's applied, or rather, where it's never applied. Since it is a shill most pushed by the new more racialized version of radical feminism, it should come as no surprise they give themselves a dispensation from the glorious benefits of diversity, which becomes a worthless concept when applied to any demography that is non-white, female or gay. Non-diverse diversity is par for the course for people with empty heads. Asking why there aren't more so-and-so in SFF is as fanatically stupid as asking why there aren't more Asians in the National Football League and then obsessively working to bring that about no matter the damage to the sport itself or insults to the now racist players, coaches and owners.
Diversity as it is expressed from within SFF's feminist intersectionalist cult is accompanied by so much anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual sentiment I'm surprised more people don't see it for the obvious con game it is. We have all of us in our lives had people say "Try this. It's different. You might like it," and it's never couched in ideological jargon that is by an amazing coincidence so racially and sexually hostile.
Diversity is a racialist feminist shill. If you think about the wide variety of viewpoints of America's pop culture expressions of films, literature and music and then see how falsely narrow that becomes within intolerant feminist dialogues the idea of diversity becomes perverse. The supposed idea is that an increase in gay, women's and non-white perspectives increases one's perspectives and yet at the same time the only perspectives truly welcome within intersectional feminism are scrimmed through an ideological lens that is routinely narrow and provincial as it is hysterical. However, which perspective is welcome is itself a matter of perspective.
"What about two-spirits or other indigenous third/other gender roles?
"Non-indigenous people have no right to an opinion on this issue."
What is ultimately the point of this feminist declaration? Well, they claim it is to expand one's horizons, a laughable idea considering the source and its consistent mixture of arrogance and lack of sophistication.
Being gay, female or non-white is no guarantee of anything like individuality or lack of it, or wisdom and experience. If it were, it would be a thing embraced by - surprise - racists and supremacists, not humanists, since the argument could be turned around to maintain race and sex can also guarantee "there's not going to be anything new," or "uninteresting. Period," as does Tor.com podcaster Justin Landon elsewhere in this book, himself a staunch advocate of intersectionalism and it's anti-white, anti-male and anti-Western mopery. Landon's ignorant reflection of that intersectionalist diversity argument is called "social justice" or racism and sexism, ironically depending on your race and sex. That disturbing truism tells you everything you need to know about the depravity and bald-faced stupidity of intersectionalist thought. Intersectionalism is a decadent cult that routinely confuses culture and demography with ideology and art. The refrain that a mere demography and even heterosexuality itself is a supremacist oppressive ideology is tiresomely replayed by this paranoid cult again and again:
"I would like to talk about the class position of women - in what way women are, by virtue of being women, a class that is exploited by men. I want to talk about the basis of that exploitation, the role of heterosexual ideology in maintaining it and the power of lesbians for breaking it." - Lesbians and the Class Position of Women," Margaret Small, 1975
The usual dense coating of irony about anything an intersectionalist says is that diversity is supposedly dedicated to magically increasing the variety of viewpoints but intersectionalism in SF just as clearly has no interest in diverse points of view given its penchant for censorship and intolerance. The entire movement is an exercise in sheer stupidity. SF's modern gay feminists like Brit Mandelo freely admit to the differences in old feminism and new by writing about "the changes in both mainstream and fandom feminisms to address race, class, sexuality and all of the others parts of 'self' that haven’t traditionally been given enough attention." Well, they are now, and it's a sewer.
Buried in all this is always the notion that for the targets of radical gay feminism to critique that ideology in turn is being anti-gay. But the irony there is precisely the fact I am not doing what radical feminism itself does: critiquing an entire demography, which again ironically meets radical feminism's own definition of a genderphobia - a thing they have and I do not. Critiquing this silly ideology is no more critiquing lesbians than critiquing the KKK is critiquing whites. Both share the equally silly notion they speak for all lesbians and whites, a thing which moves me not at all. The days of racists and bigots hiding behind and shrieking "misogyny," "racism" and "homophobia" are over. The view of this book reflects that of the words of radical gay feminist Rita Mae Brown in the Vol. 1, 1972 issue of The Furies in an article titled "how a female heterosexual serves the interests of male supremacy."
"When I speak of Lesbians and Lesbian communities, I am not speaking about all Lesbians everywhere. I am speaking about those women who have developed a political ideology, who have committed themselves to the destruction of male supremacy..."
It's too bad she can't extend that thought to men and heterosexuality and as I do to women and homosexuals, none of which constitute an ideology or a thing which can be morally critiqued.
Another smear you'll see a lot of in quotes in this book is that of white and male privilege, perhaps the single most obsessive ideology in the core SFF community today. It is a concept SF's new Freedom Riders are more than happy to address on a daily basis:
By an amazing coincidence, SF's Twitter feeds which deliver such epiphanies are amazingly anti-white. You will see no desire to see the "elegant experiment" referred to in that N.Y. Times piece applied to their own Twitter feeds when it comes to SFF's social justice warriors. The irony of addressing bias from a community itself so biased flutters away on the wind.
The original promotion of white privilege within this intersectional ideology was pointed at white feminists, as most famously expressed in an essay by black gay feminist icon Audre Lorde titled "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." It's no coincidence SFWA president John Scalzi wrote a controversial post about white privilege nor that it was preceded on his site by yet another two part guest post by a gay feminist from Sri Lanka which quoted Audre Lorde. Even later, Scalzi linked us to a post titled "Intersectionality 101" by Ahir Golpadas which mentions the "multiplicatively privileged," describing that from yet another Lorde quote as being "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure." Intersectionality - intersecting, multiplicative vectors of oppression - is the other end of the spectrum from intersecting vectors of privilege.
The entire idea is a rat's nest of mumbo-jumbo meant to maximize the oppression of one group at the expense of another by portraying systems that measure exactly nothing. The intent is nothing more than a smear meant to make one an accessory after the fact either to guilt or innocence, morality or lack of it, strictly on the level of one's racial and sexual identity, not what individuals actually do.
The essay from which that Lorde quote is pulled cleverly pulls the trick you see throughout this book: that of demonizing the "norm" as being where "the trappings of power reside." Conversely, "deviance" is said to be "the primary reason for all oppression," and by extension, morality and wisdom. That's an old stereotypical fantasy - the idea the rich and accomplished are secretly hapless morons and the poor streetwise sophisticates full of secret knowledge who know the real deal. Outside of movies, the truth is more along the lines of what you see is what you get. People don't live in mansions because they're morons and nor do bureaucrats live in studio apartments because of a lofty disdain for money.
That observation about norm/deviance in and of itself is not the problem. The problem lies in how it is used as a cudgel to attach and detach morality from entire racial-sexual groups in a hierarchy of privilege/oppression. Used as it is in the SFF community, it is nothing more than hate speech used in much the same way as gods/devils hate speech used by the Nazis against the Jews. Clothed within an anti-oppression narrative to give it the sheen of credibility and even nobility, it is precisely why hate speech is so dangerous and how it is mainstreamed into the public arena. Were Lorde talking about something as obvious as Jim Crow - an actual system - there would be no problem. The problem lies in the fact it is meant to update and replicate a multiplicative Jim Crow stipulated as an actual system but which doesn't exist. Aside from that, a theory which embraces the idea normality is oppressive has that Orwellian stink about it common to all queer theory.
There is a new moral ethos in town and we're not talking about something as old-fashioned as needing a tattoo or losing one's virginity to be cool, we're talking about the adoption of identity - by proxy if necessary - to be moral and avoid immorality. Why is anyone surprised people are scrambling to essentially be black, feminine and gay. It's a hierarchy of morality and it is taken very seriously in some circles. A cul-de-sac is now success and success considered a cul-de-sac. It's a stunning new form of virtually institutionalized bigotry which monopolizes morality and shaming rather than the power it has no access to. Morality is a good substitute for power. Ask the apostles. But what if it's not morality? And what if it eventually gains power? We've seen what happens. This is why hate speech is at once so dangerous and so clever. At its far end this is the dismantling of rules, a strike zone, law and our Constitution. Only some flags are shameful and get banned. Only some groups are smeared - others: never. The legal privileges of Islam across N. Africa and the Middle East are never discussed by intersectionalists, nor its colonialist history.
Orwell would be proud because success is failure and failure success, normality itself evil. It's reverse-engineering Martin Luther King's colorblindness as now laughable, with unforeseen results as a new elitism that is far more clever and weaponized than a starry-eyed teenage John Lennon listening to blues records. Lorde's rhetoric sounds all fine and good until you look how it has actually been used. We've brought back the guilt and shame of race and sexuality... in reverse. In its most innocent form, this can be nothing more than a fear of being seen as normal and middle class, a fate to be avoided at all costs for some. Some SFF authors are so clownishly politically correct when it comes to accepting the notion of "privilege" they decide "butting out" of their own civilization is the better part of valor. Say good-bye to a jury of your peers.
It's always about the genre.
*
At some point I think you have to accept the fact you're dealing with a cult of people who are poorly educated and of poor character and who cannot think clearly. You have people with a heightened interest in the male/female pay gap and how often women don't get promotions who are just as disinterested in the far greater male suicide rate and who's actually lying in military cemeteries. Their interest in murder and assault follow similar racial and sexual fractures. Am I really supposed to take such so-called neutral observations seriously? They are evidence of third-rate minds and a poorly thought out system of morality. A credible human would talk about all those things at once.
"One rule is that nostalgie de la boue - i.e., the styles of romantic, raw-vital, Low Rent primitives - are good; and middle class, whether black or white, is bad." - "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," Tom Wolfe, New York magazine, June, 1970
White privilege is based on a false assumption of an American "transparent preference for whiteness" that is in no way transparent, since it implies mere demography equals a kind of white supremacist ideology that is systemic. On the other hand intersectionalism's transparent ideological bias against straight white men is self-evident. This is a cult which has no problem whatsoever telling you what a white man is who cares only about criminal assaults against whites as opposed to blacks. But ask an intersectionalist what a woman or black man is who cares only about criminal assaults against women and blacks and their eyes roll up into their heads. #BlackLivesMatter becomes an Orwellian hashtag with a great smell about it.
SFF's politically correct are stipulating there must surely be examples of Adolph Reed's generic racism somewhere in America, branding that "white privilege" and transforming it into a factless charge of an institutionalized white supremacist ideology that is then nothing more than a de facto extension of Jim Crow. Intersectionalism powers that idea of privilege by presenting befuddled racial statistics stripped of context such as truly equivalent control mechanisms to which might ensure comparisons are apt. What instead happens are self-serving comparisons of apples to oranges such as conviction rates without using prior criminal records or cultural patterns of drug dealing taken into account.
"When someone claims that the criminal justice system discriminates against African-Americans, this can have many different meanings that show up differently in the data and have different policy implications." - "Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab"
In even more instances statistics and event are simply ignored. Were one to have only social justice Twitter feeds and blog posts in SFF to go by, one would think America is an apartheid state which gives free rein to the murder and rape of anyone not a straight white man. Why then are we surprised a four-time Nebula Award nominee portrays America as an "apartheid" and a John W. Campbell Award winner describes America as a "white supremacy"?
Meanwhile radical feminism seems hopelessly unaware of the fact their own demonizing theories and semantics bear all the hallmarks of a supremacist and bigoted ideology of politicized hatred. In all the research I did for this book, I never once saw these social justice warriors mention higher sentencing for men than women for the same crimes or the much higher male suicide rate. On the other hand, in the SFF community's Twitter feeds, statistics that show any bias against women or non-whites are a flood, and daily. There's a reason for that. Their feeds are also full of any news story which mentions the disappearance, beating or unlawful arrest of any non-white. Like history itself, were one to judge America by intersectional Twitter feeds in SFF, you'd have a view of life so distorted as to be unrecognizable. Stressing the importance of individuals within an out-group as opposed to an in-group is classic bigotry and supremacy and starkly outlines the alliance between actual bigots in SFF and those radical chic flak catchers "allies" who have adopted that behavior by proxy, that sort of nostalgie de la boue. In the Orwellian world of intersectionalism the concept of collective guilt and innocence is a principle with wings attached:
*
The truth is that intersectional gender feminism not only takes innocent demographies of whites, males and heterosexuals and treats them as if they were ideologies, they portray them as sociopathic and pathological, as if they are virtual criminal syndicates.
White privilege is a self-reinforcing circular black hole of logic where whites are said to benefit from their disdain for non-whites. Unlike a Jim Crow country, there is no way white privilege can be measured or predict anything, it's just an assumption of white racism thrown at over 200 million Americans defined as "white" (and therefore a racial culture and ideology) like paint at a wall to see what sticks. As such, white privilege is nothing more than a demonization theory whose intent is dehumanization.
White privilege is no different than asserting Jewish privilege - namely, asserting that all Jews favor their own Jewishness above all others and so it is far easier for a Jew to operate around other Jews than non-Jews. Put like that, white privilege has the stink about it it deserves.
"Privilege" is core to contemporary gender feminist thought that I will show is the main driver in this ideology within core SFF. "Privilege" is also heavily used in rhetoric to dismiss the opinions of men, ethnic Europeans and heterosexuals as coming from a position too privileged to really contain any insight. In 2014, white privilege smacks more of the Mark of Cain or the religious idea a group of people are sinners than it does reality.
What makes "white privilege" so insidious is there is a surface plausibility, a modicum of truth and sense behind it. It is not just a racial slur but a persuasive slur, and why it qualifies as a demonization theory. What makes it persuasive is it appeals to the same mixture of compassion, revulsion and logic one might feel towards Jim Crow and is indeed drawn from Jim Crow itself. Where the fantasy steps in is white privilege is a Jim Crow without laws, rules or boundaries of any kind. It is a house without walls or roof one is made to live in. Being a thing without a true measure, it can be anything one wants it to be. The other clever aspect is that to deny or resent it is to tacitly admit one still needs to work on one's privilege. The target is not allowed to resent white privilege in the same way one can a racial slur although that is exactly what it is, no matter what useful idiots say. As I mention elsewhere, one tell-tale clue is how this theory of racial privilege is never used elsewhere. If it is such an interesting and compelling bit of social science, why not? Like "rape culture," white privilege is nothing more than insane voodoo social science. There is little doubt there is such a thing as Muslim privilege legally baked into countries throughout the Islamic world. You'll never hear an intersectionalist talk about it, or the fact it largely derives from Arabic and Islamic colonialism. There is a reason for that: you are looking at a con game. What is never talked about sheds light on what is talked about.
*
What does an artistic community look like that is unaware of it's own history, and what will it produce? What does an artistic community look like that rejects art history in favor of obsessively poring through Regency England to find a "person of color," replacing important work with work by gender or race, pretending they were there all along submitting SF stories to the Munsey Magazines 100 years ago when they weren't, fighting when they didn't? What happens to art when all that identity puffery replaces art and reality itself? Extend that out to its logical extension: when you watch classic films, do you then only really pay attention to the gay actor, the black one, the Jewish one, the woman, the Latino, no matter where an actual expression of talent lay? What art or literature will such a community produce, who will it give awards to? Perhaps the Tiptree Awards, for feminists, the Carl Brandon Society Awards for non-whites and this blog post titled "Best of '13 - My Favourite Books by Women" and all female Kickstarter anthologies will give you a taste.
Don't expect the oppressive racist sexist patriarchy which supposedly engenders such a thing to have an equivalent - it's so much more fun to pretend they do and tilt at windmills in order to hide identity addiction and instead pass it off as the Devil made me do it. In other words - men: don't try this at home - it's unethical, discriminatory, exclusionary, immoral and sexist. Predictably, the racist white male patriarchy is the only source of come-one-come-all literary awards. re mangled and exaggerated to suit, not to address the meaningful presence of those ideas. The idea mistaken racial identity is "institutional racism" is such a self-evident falsehood as to destroy the concept of institution or "racism." The fact an eventual Nebula Award winner is trying to sell such nonsense is meaningful. It's meaningful because intersectionalists are not attacking individuals but instead entire racial and sexual demographies. When members of those groups push back intersectionalists point to that as proof of pre-existing animus but which intersectionalists themselves created. It's a con game, not reality. One doesn't walk into an ethnic neighborhood, yell ethnic slurs and then use the anger one has created as proof the neighborhood has a problem based on their ethnicity.
*
"... contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.
"This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the 'civil rights movement' wasn’t a movement against a generic 'racism;' it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South." - Adolph Reed
That quote by Reed is crucial in understanding the fundamental con game this feminist movement was founded in:
"It is time we developed a more cogent and relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships not yet considered in our institutional politics. It is time we gave attention to defining a theory of politics which treats of power relationships on the less formal than establishmentarian grounds of personal intercourse between members of well defined and coherent groups – races, castes, classes and sexes. It is precisely because such groups have no representation in formal political structures that their oppression is so entire and so continuous." – gay radical feminist Kate Millet's essay titled Sexual Politics, 1968, published prior to her book of the same name.
In a larger philosophical sense, what Millet is talking about is no different than doing away with due process. She is stipulating the existence of things that don't exist in a real institutional sense and so of course it follows one can be accused of immorality and even criminal connivance that doesn't exist in a real sense, such as the concept of "privilege." It shouldn't suprise anyone feminists on college campuses across America are trying to do away with due process amidst hysteria about the crime of "rape culture." What's more obvious that calling an initiative to "fight gender-based violence" on campus "No Red Tape"? What isn't obvious to these benighted people is that presumption of innocence disappears; eventually that will include their own.
"When Millet talks about "The phantasy of the male victim," she is literally throwing equal protection and legal rights out the door. Are we surprised SFF’s feminists so often laugh at the idea men or whites can be victims and spread hashtags about #ImaginaryMisandry even while seminal radical gay feminist Charlotte Bunch wrote "Lesbianism puts women first"? For an ideology so convinced of its equality and concepts like "supremacy," gay feminism doesn't even seem to understand its own actions or the meaning of words. By any definition ever known to mankind, including its own, gender feminism is guilty of both sex-hatred and supremacy.
In law misandry is real, in gender feminism it cannot exist. How does one measure "power relationships" or "white privilege"; what can they predict? The easy answer is: nothing. However they can be used as a club with just enough surface plausibility to fool weak-minded people or simply those with racial and sexual animus in order to beat straight white men over the head with.
"Feminist Frequency (Anita Sarkeesian) Verified account @femfreq There’s no such thing as sexism against men. That's because sexism is prejudice + power. Men are the dominant gender with power in society."
In actual law, of course there is such a thing as sexism against men. But by the time you reach Millet’s 1968 quote about "the white man’s imperialist racism," you’ve entered SFF in 2012-5.
"... radical lesbian feminists focus on the problem of heterosexuality as the pivotal core of women's oppression… By the late 1970s black and Third World feminisms emerged as a critique of the white privilege inherent in feminist theory itself." – The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World
Sperring's comment is typical of the empty gibberish, paranoia and irrational hostility of Third Wave Feminism. The only thing that seeps through is the almost feral hostility common to many of the quotes throughout this book. The crucial distinction being ignored and the origins of this con game is that equal rights feminism and the Civil Rights movement acted against actual laws. Third Wave Gay Feminism acts against heterosexuality and "whiteness." It is a supremacist hate movement, not "feminism."That's because radical feminists are George Orwell's degenerate kids, not Golden Age SF author Robert Heinlein's liberal pragmatists.
Although modern feminist cant routinely characterizes American literature and film as racist and sexist and lacking in diversity, the reality is they are far more diverse and far less racist and sexist than the preferred haunts of the main racialized feminist drivers of PC.
What is a literary movement that recommends reading based on whether the author is gay, non-white or a woman? An example of the mindset in play is this Tweet by Tor.com blogger and ardent gender feminist Liz Bourke:
Here is the innocuous comment Bourke finds so hilarious:
"It says much about the current state of fandom that a lookback on the best writing of 2014 starts with the number of books by women, authors who identify themselves as women, authors who identify themselves as men and men. I suspect next year we'll see a breakdown of the number of minority authors Liz has read. Whatever happened to the good old days when people were content to read books and didn't care if the author was from Mars or from Venus."
The rest of the charming Twitter conversation of phantom persecution goes like this:
Nebula nominee Kate Elliott: "So tempted to respond: You mean the good old days before racism and sexism were invented?"
Bourke: "And good old boys didn't need to worry about criticism. Well, bless their hearts."
Elliott: "Course they didn't have to worry. They EARNED it."
Blogger Cora Buhlert: "And of course all the books worth reading just happened to be written by straight white cis men."
Buhlert refers to the comment as "comedy gold." The only racism and sexism these women actually show resides in their own words. That Orwellian lack of self-awareness is a thing you will see repeated over and over again in this book. As far as I can tell the feminist definition of "racist" and "sexist" is anyone who would talk about non-whites and women the way feminists do whites and men. The problem for feminists there is that when it comes to the core SFF community they can't come up with any quotes to match their own obsessive sociopathies. In doing research for this book, over and over again I found mountains of Tweets and retweets from SFF authors like the one below:
Who is Schanoes talking to there? At this point it is more than obvious, as is the fact they number in their tens of faceless millions and lack Schanoes own moral judgments. In this community, straight white men are talked about more like a plague of privileged and oppressive overlords than fellow human beings.
Twitter has played a seminal role in this bizarre social justice movement. Gender feminists and their "allies" use it to either openly display mental breakdowns or publicly weep about whites and men.
"Jeanne @fangirlJeanne @Finickii I have anxiety and bi-polar depression. I think a lot of us suffer from mental illness either because of this kind of social conditioning or it just makes pre-existing conditions even worse."
That's a woman with 100 Tweets a day over 6 1/2 years which are obsessively anti-white and anti-male. She adds "If anyone knows an essay that talks about this very specific forms of PTSD related to racist misogyny, please link me." I'd say 240,000 Tweets is its own explanation.
*
Another favorite theme of intersectional dogma that rolled in on the wave of racial resentments that fused intersectionalism into radical feminism in the first place is the concept of "cultural appropriation." What it really is is yet another one-sided demonization theory centered around anti-colonialism meant to light up whites and the West. To no one's surprise we find "A Much-Needed Primer on Cultural Appropriation" at the feminist site Jezebel. It's sub-titled "WHEN IS IT OKAY," and of course the real answer is when you're not white. However femspeak logic runs in circles. The article quotes a law professor, perhaps because stealing is wrong: "'Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission.'" Who's permission is never made clear, though who should ask is always made clear when it comes to the cult that deals aces from the bottom of the deck that is intersectionalism: the ever mischievous culture-thief and plunderer of nations, the straight white Western male.
"To elaborate: 'This can include unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It's most likely to be harmful when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects.'"
"Cuisine"? What portal must one pass through to eat black beans and rice on the same day?
Another woman is quoted regarding the "...'ongoing dehumanization of Indigenous peoples.'" Coming from a cult which dreams up no-escape clause theories exclusively to dehumanize ethnic European heterosexual men, one can only laugh at the shifting meaning of words and logic in the hands of an intersectionalist. Even funnier is a feminist pretending they understand the principles behind law, which they may be surprised to learn does not consist of rigging the game in advance. As in all radical feminist thought, "cultural appropriation" is a one-way street of no-logic and white men are always going against the traffic and so of course they crash into things a lot. Naturally intersectionalists have to provide escape clauses for themselves about oppression and in turn have to make entire chapters of non-white colonialism disappear without a trace. Without such loopholes cultural appropriation is a tide that runs completely counter to what daffy feminists assert. Trust me, when an intersectionalist writes "Colonialism historically removed power from minority groups," that will never be Europeans as victims. That is literally tabu in intersectionalist rhetoric.
Naturally we also shouldn't be surprised that when Western white authors DON'T include the non-white or the non-West, that is considered erasure and exclusion. That's why whites need the gentle hand of an intersectionalist and their writing the Other workshops to guide white Westerners through the tricky minefields of ethics, morality and goodness. Here's some advice from a feminist that has that wheedling arrogance typical of the whine of jet aircraft engines:
"If you're going to learn about other people's cultures and traditions, approach it from a place of respect. Go to the people who live that life and treat them as the experts. Listen to others if they say you're stepping over your bounds. Show humility. Ask questions in a respectful way. Don’t try to 'improve' cultural elements just because that's easier than understanding it fully. Above all, practice empathy. And that's a pretty good lesson for us at any age."
Will do. And don't forget to say "Captain, may I?" and work out at the empathy gym under the close supervision of a moron or Shaolin kung-fu monk.
After reading all that, one shouldn't be surprised intersectional SF is to the Golden Age of SF what Penelope Pitstop and Wacky Races is to Warner Bros. cartoons. About the thousandth time you've read about "a fresh infusion of writers who are not white or straight or able-bodied," you know something has gone terribly wrong. "Able-bodied"? Who in this world can possibly translate that for me?
Visit more insanity where Jezebel writes about the monster it helped create in a post titled "Feminist Students Protest Feminist Prof for Writing About Feminism." Somehow their attempt at a satirical title falls flat.
"Shanley Kane retweeted Lauren Chief Elk @ChiefElk Jun 26 Who has talked about settler colonialism, and two-spirit people in regards to equality in regards to the land you illegally occupy today?"
Lying and ignorance are endemic is this racist gay feminist cult: "11 Native American Tribes, Including The Two Largest, Prohibit Gay Marriage" That's going to happen when an assumption of morality or lack of it is based solely on race and sex - not facts, not humanity, not actual events.
*
I'm trying to imagine how literature or SF fits into that and I can't. I can't imagine anyone thinks SF has had good heterosexual years. SFF editor Jonathan Strahan responds "Which, though it's not the heart of my reading, is good for us all."
Really? Why? Does NASCAR benefit from more gay or non-white drivers or just better drivers. In fact if you prioritize the former you end up with fewer of the latter, a mechanism too obvious for the PC to understand until they need a plumber or computer technician; then it becomes blindingly obvious to not let your fingers do the walking through the non-white or gay pages and instead search for the best man to do the job. Although it is common to see the PC in SFF compile lists of gay, female or non-white editors and writers, the idea they would ever resort to such a list to dial 911, asphalt their driveway or repair their car is too stupid to entertain.
The funny thing there is in Strahan imagining there is any difference between queer and feminist when it comes to the demagogues of the SFF community.
The problem with those Tweets doesn't reside in the Tweets themselves, but in the idea if anyone else does it (and in fact whites, men and heterosexuals in SFF do not ideologically promote their own identities) it's racist and supremacist. The other problem is it is stipulated there are in fact such anti-non-white racist and supremacist currents in the SFF community, but there is no institutional opposite to those Tweets within the SFF community - none at all. No one is Tweeting "Buy American SF," or "White Men in Horror now..." Yet it is asserted by the race and gender ideology that lays behind the political correctness within SFF that that is exactly the case and that it is WRONG to do so. It is a lie to say that type of white male advocacy is happening, and an easily proven lie. Not only that, it is a paranoid lie, since it can be so easily shown the only supremacists engaging in supremacy are the politically correct themselves. One has to be delusional to maintain a thing is true when you can't produce evidence of it and yet indulge wholesale in that act yourself, strewing about hundreds of quotes to that exact effect. Not only is no one advocating white literature, men can't even use the word "lady" without the second retweeter, the Hugo-nominated Foz Meadows, yowling against bigotry by employing her own with "old white guys," a rather eccentric methodology to be sure, and one where hypocrisy becomes a positive binding principle. In fact the racialized language Meadows uses is as common on her side of the fence as it is uncommon on the so-called racist other side of the fence, as you will learn in this book.
And that's the key to understanding this whole culture in SFF, the accusations of racism and sexism based on steps over a paper thin line created and aggressively monitored by the PC and then routinely massively violated only by them. Meadows will use old black women in that same pejorative sense exactly never, because she and her entire cult of PC doublethinkers are hypocrites. Their most overt bigotry becomes nothing, someone else's nothing becomes overt bigotry, their institutions and trends become a single person and a single person the PC despise becomes an institution, trend and entire community. It doesn't bother me in the least when the gay feminist author of the Nebula nominated Hild writes insulting stereotypes about "angry white boys sitting around in their white-wall buzz cuts eating white bread and watching Leave It To Beaver." What bothers me is I know she'd never write that about black boys; that's the issue - the sick hypocrisy you see from this cult over and over again. And again: where is the science fiction? When did it become identity fiction and storming the Bastille?
As you will learn over the course of this book, segregation is diversity in the daffy world of social justice warriors, and heteronormative is a curse word and symbol of oppression. In contrast, an accidental book display that is all men is treated by the PC as segregation, a purposeful segregation in fact only the PC indulge in.
Saying the world is racist, homophobic and misogynistic, and you are not, so you must have your own anthologies doesn't really wash. Nor does it disguise naked racial narcissism and supremacy or even bigotry. Group defamation to fight non-existent group defamation - segregation to fight non-existent segregation - convenient. The tie-breaker is that those being accused by the politically correct have no names, just skin and gender. Bad people are confused with people, and it is no accident that bigots do that. It is a smear tactic to take down entire ethnic groups and disguise a wholesale disinterest in the genre itself.
However, those politically correct in the SFF community indulging in willful segregation have names. There is no question of the possibility of confusing them with their larger group: feminism is not a problem, fake gender abolitionist feminists who are bigots are. People who heavily self-identify as people of color aren't a problem, the racists among them are. Gay folks aren't a problem, gay bigots are. That distinction is not given the other way around; there are no bigots who are men to fight, just men. No white racists, just privileged whites. So you have opponents - entire demographies stipulated as virtual ideologies - that are systemic without systems and racial "privilege" where there is none, and skin and gender villains without names, the better to keep rancor alive.
Yet that gigantic lie is what fuels the feminist movement in SFF, even though the truth is it is only actual institutions that are the difference between sitting at home and being sent off to a concentration camp, the right to vote or not, the right to enter a restaurant or not. When feminists are reduced to using pie-charts to record these mysterious "systems" and "institutions," and those charts only look here but never there then you know you are being sold a lie. Intersectional feminism is a sexually supremacist and racist hate movement and a fraud.
*
"Third Wave" and "intersectionalism" are interchangeable terms that refer to the same thing: a racial kicker to radical gender feminism. The essential idea is that a black lesbian feminist is twice the outsider compared to her white counterpart. Lesbian feminists in turn originally saw themselves as twice the outsider as heterosexual feminists, which is why intersectionalism was explored as implicit in the very early concept of radical white feminism though not fully applied until the late '80s when black feminists began to assert themselves in numbers and in their own voice. In truth "intersectionalism" is also interchangeable with radical feminism today. It is a true hierarchy of victimhood and oppression where those at the bottom reside at the Orwellian top, and the competition is fierce for that moral highground of most oppressed.
Within this newest expression of PC which can be seen to be radical feminism - so-called "Third Wave" and "intersectional" because of the modern added element of race - it is as easily assumed white men are supremacist racist homophobic women-haters as it is equally assumed non-whites, women and gays can never display such traits, or that if they do, it doesn't really matter because of power dynamics like privilege. Intersectionalism is a stacked deck for the weak-minded and troubled distributed by insane con men. Though intersectionalism pretends to be political it is in fact a biological hatred. That is revealed by intersectionalism's obsession with racial and sexual identities and claiming they are political and social constructs. It's just more of the con game meant to disguise rancid racism and sexism as a political struggle; it is a biological struggle typical of supremacists. Consistent with that con game, intersectionalism creates false oppression hoaxes and uses them as a casus belli to wage war on their political opponents. Intersectionalism, although it pretends to be based on facts, doesn't exist on a level of logic and but on the level of a biological moral supremacism which screens itself behind nonsense about social justice and oppression.
"I remember always looking for people 'like me' in media.
"That’s not too surprising, is it?"
As you'll see, to an intersectionalist, if you're white it's not only surprising but considered racism. Otherwise... not. That itself isn't surprising since mistaken identity is considered a "racial micro-aggression" and "institutional racism" to this new bunch of lunatic SFF authors. Meanwhile, in a whirly-gig of double standards and hypocrisy, straight out racial advocacy, segregation and even slurs are just fine. SFF's intersectionalists willfully confuse Adolph Reed's "generic racism" with non-existent systems and institutions. Stipulating whites are racists in the absence of such systems is just the other side of stipulating blacks are lazy criminals and reveals the true motivations behind all this. The reason intersectionalism gets away with this and the KKK doesn't is because the KKK has no anti-oppression echoes to hide behind and so fools no one; intersectionalism has that camouflage and fools a lot of people.
SFF's version of intersectionalism is of a current more conspicuously fused with the 1960s Second Wave gender feminism (as opposed to Second Wave equal rights feminism) based on French Queer Theory, eventually critiqued, promoted and Americanized by Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. Other than the Butlerian dimension, intersectionality doesn't concern itself all that much with white gay feminism (more the other way around) and cares even less for heterosexual equal rights feminism, both of which in fact it often and sometimes bitterly opposes. As Charlotte Bunch put it in the first issue of The Furies by the lesbian collective of the same name in 1972, "Race, class and national oppressions come from men, serve ruling class white men's interests."
Bunch adds: "We are committed to ending all oppressions by attacking their roots - male supremacy." That is what radical feminists mean by "sexism," not profiling or making fun of women.
In that same issue, a woman named Sharon Deevey wrote "I had never questioned or thought of heterosexuality as an institution. Now, I began to understand that everything I had thought was 'natural' was a vicious lie maintained to keep women down... As I experienced the combined exhiliration of loving a woman and knowing I could change, I thought all women would come out, change and be as happy as I was... I realized that every fuck is a rape even if it feels nice because every man has power and privilege over women, whether he uses it blatantly or subtly. My 'liberated' husband kept me down."
By the time you get to her view about the "perversion of heterosexuality," realize that rhetoric sits close behind the bulk of the most looked up to and respected voices behind this movement in SFF. The binary as immoral and the non-binary as a cherished ideal is referred to time and again. How that wacky theme became central to the core SFF community is the story of how false oppression clothed in other fakery about a new Jim Crow and women's rights became mainstreamed under false pretenses and shoveled out to naive do-gooders. The semantic gibberish involved is considerable. In the old days, you used to have this thing called "lying." In the post-structural world, you have this:
"[A]rguing about what words (ought to) mean is not a trivial business - it is not 'mere words', 'hair-splitting', or 'just semantics' - when these arguments are over what I have called socially contested terms. Such arguments are what lead to the adoption of social beliefs and the theories behind them, and these theories and beliefs lead to social action and the maintenance and creation of social worlds. (Gee, 1996: 15-16)" - from Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research by Christina Hughes, 2002
Even Butler defers to the new racial fusion when she states in 2009 "There is no bona fide feminism, for instance, that is not also anti-racist." With that added dimension, more of the older circa 1960-1990 Second Wave feminists who've embraced Third Wave Intersectionalism no longer see misogyny as a global event dominated by straight men but as an event (as did the at the time anomalous view of the all white Furies) dominated by white straight men, particularly in the sense of imperialism and colonialism. With the Third Wave that kicked off around 1990, morality became more than ever a question of identity than what you actually do, as when Butler states in 2006 "understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important." Although Butler adds "That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements," we are closer than ever to coming to a place like today where some identities can do no wrong and others no right, expanded out to include a racial element nowhere in evidence in Butler's 1990 book.
Were Butler to try arranging a gay pride parade in Dearborn, Michigan let alone any Muslim country in the world other than Turkey, she'd quickly find the reason she is assaulted or thrown in a foreign jail is not because of the baleful influence of white Western males but because of a lack of it. She would also learn Hamas has no interest in gender studies or queer theory. Fast forward to today and the "progressive" rape culture feminists don't see called ISIS is handing out pamphlets in Iraq called "'Question and Answers on Female Slaves and their Freedom'" which is reported by CNN the same week feminists are ignoring Iraq and excusing a rape hoax at the University of Virginia and spinning new Dept. of Justice statistics also released that week that reduce the 1 in 5 rape myth to about 7 in 1000 because feminists just know "rape culture" is an epidemic.
Days later, in a fit of unaware stupidity in which feminists use rape statistics like pirates use the skull and crossbones, feminist Samantha Reid reverses course and criticizes depictions of sexual assault victims that "reduces them to a statistic." Reid goes on to argue it is wrong "To argue that the number of cases of sexual assault would need to be higher to warrant action on the part of legislators," which basically throws reality out the window since one strengthens laws or the enforcement of those laws in the face of an epidemic of lawlessness, not the lack of such a thing. And let's forget the fact feminists have been arguing the exact opposite to bolster their claims of a "rape culture." In other words at least this one women has now abandoned the basis of her original complaint but still wants the same reaction. Ms. Orwell has now decided that a "'non-crisis'" can't be referred to as a "'non-crisis'" because it is still a crisis even when it is not. The continual straw man feminists use about "even one rape is too many" proposes there are people okay with a certain number of rapes and ignores the fact law enforcement is already designed to capture, prosecute and punish as many criminals as it can. As is always the case with this branch of feminism, heaven and earth, logic and reason, and as many goal posts as it requires will be moved to ensure the straight white male remains in its cross-hairs and rape culture remains intact. When one is certain a thing is there, all that is necessary is to keep digging, not declare the other digs a failure.
That was also the same week there were mass protests across America and as far away as London over an anomalous and by no means clear death of a man in Ferguson, Missouri at the hands of a police officer while the beheadings of four Christian children in Iraq at the hands of ISIS drew almost no attention from politically correct witch-hunters. They were the wrong identities, and in PC, identity creates and destroys reality and sustains myth. In SFF there are idiotic posts of race-deaths by SFF authors like Jim Hines about #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter when it's pretty clear which lives, books and voices matter and which do not. There are fewer things more stunningly stupid than watching middle class white authors acting as blithe proxies for the feral and distorted racialist world views of The Nation of Islam or The New Black Panther Party just because they are naive enough to believe in a con game.
"Feminist-lesbianism, as the most basic threat to male supremacy, picks up part of the Women's Liberation analysis of sexism and gives it force and direction. Women's Liberation lacks direction now because it has failed to understand the importance of heterosexuality in maintaining male supremacy and because it has failed to face class and race as real differences in women's behavior and political needs. As long as straight women see Lesbianism as a bedroom issue, they hold back the development of politics and strategies which would put an end to male supremacy and they give men an excuse for not dealing with their sexism." - Charlotte Bunch, The Furies Lesbian/Feminist Monthly, January, 1972, Volume 1.
The truth is that, at least in terms of the main driver of the social justice movement in core SFF, not only is the ideology in play that of gender abolition feminism with a racial kicker, but if you used the word "lesbian" in place of the word "feminism" as used in the non-fiction rhetoric, you'd be right more often than not. This is a highly politicized view of lesbianism that has nothing to do with equal rights. Any time you hear a social justice warrior in SFF use the word "feminism," they are most often referring to a worldview sieved through the lens of non-white lesbianism. Whether purposeful or not, the word "feminism" has always given a sheen to radical lesbian intersectionality that has allowed it to go to places in terms of societal acceptance it otherwise could not. The fact such "feminists" are often less than forthright when addressing the general public and that their male and female "allies" seem to be less than aware of what's actually in the buckets of water they carry for intersectionalism only multiplies that slipperiness. I use the word "feminism" in this book with that caveat and because the people involved so often do. The two names most often mentioned in my research in terms of being ideologically iconic role models were Joanna Russ and Audre Lorde, both lesbians - Russ white, Lorde black. It is that fusion which drives the social justice wave in SF today.
In the massive amount of reading I did in researching this book, not once did I read a so-called "feminist" mention Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinham, Germaine Greer, or the National Organization of Women. They're considered outdated, transphobic, homophobic, privileged racists crippled by heterosexuality. Instead the names I ran across were Joanna Russ, Donna Haraway and Audre Lorde, who all advocate a lesbian-centric view of the world and one dedicated to abolishing gender binaries as being fake and oppressive.
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"The term 'rape culture' was originally coined in the 1970s. The term appeared in Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, published by the New York Radical Feminists Collective in 1974, and was explored in depth in the 1975 documentary Rape Culture." - Amanda Taub, "Rape culture isn’t a myth. It’s real, and it’s dangerous."
You don't have to be a genius to figure out that an ideology which demonizes the white straight male as a single entity is devoted to the identity most opposite: the non-white gay woman, but it does help to be a useful idiot. It also doesn't take a lot of brains to figure out that the sheer level of vitriol aimed at what are essentially manufactured oppressions needs a combination of sociopathy and mental health issues to power it. It helps to have receptive naive people allow that sociopathy to be falsely mainstreamed into their consciousness as a natural continuation of the civil and women's rights movements of the '60s.
Intersectional gender feminism is this odd duck of a racial and female supremacist movement that makes the extraordinary claim that it's anti-supremacist. That right there gives you a crucial insight into the weird stew of delusion and hypocrisy typical of every square inch of intersectional rhetoric. In its worst possible historic application, supremacist Nazis expressed their superior morality by exterminating Jews while Jews were murdering precisely no one. The KKK expressed their superior moral ethos by oppressing people who were oppressing no one. Supremacist thought accompanied by its ever present penchant for group defamation is always dangerous for the same reason hate is always dangerous.
Generally speaking, within core SFF, there are no separate currents of feminism, white or heterosexual; all defer to this particular brand of gay racialized intersectionalism. It is important to understand that not only to account for the often feral hostility, but why the unmoving focus of intersectionalism is white heterosexual masculinity. The obsession white heterosexual feminists in SFF have with women of color to prove their loyalty is so fawning, hysterically overprotective and deferential it frequently reaches into the absurd. Their adoption of intersectionalism is by proxy rather than the visceral emotionalism and experience that creates such ideologies, though the sheer hostility for straight white males is a common dial tone when seen from the outside looking in. The entire ideology in core SFF gives a new slant on the term Frank Herbert used in his SF novel Dune, "Butlerian Jihad," because the centerpiece can be seen to pivot around Butler's seminal book plus race.
That also creates the rather odd equally present dial tone of white middle class women slumming in an anti-white racism in which they confess to their own racism and privilege in what becomes an amusing type of politicized disciple/priestess relationship which at times amounts to an almost mindless racial worship of a type of street cred as it were, complete with a stunningly idiotic race/gender hierarchy of who talks when and where and who listens. As you will see, this hierarchy of listener/listened-to suffuses feminist dialogues within SFF. What is actually said means very little compared to the race, sex and gender preference of who is saying it. Naturally, as an oppressor, straight white men reside in the sub-basement of this hierarchy, and their words mean very little except to the extent they are willing to be "allies" and unwittingly parrot queer theory ranging from Simone de Beauvoir to bell hooks. When bell hooks reflects Judith Butler by writing "Queer theory helps everyone to understand gender as performance" white men can and do jump.
More recently Butler said: "Gender Trouble was written about 24 years ago, and at that time I did not think well enough about trans issues. Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore 'unreal.' That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported. I did not mean to argue that gender is fluid and changeable (mine certainly is not). I only meant to say that we should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world."
Translation: if people are born trapped in the wrong body then this destroys the theory propagated by French Queer Theory that gender is a social construct, which is the fundamental basis of their entire ideology. So the Simone de Beauvoir who kickstarted this whole ideology is wrong; one is born a woman. No normal human ever needed that translation in the first place. Radical feminism is a personality disorder if not a mental health crisis based on shifting realities which are themselves determined by feelings and not science.
With the added intersectional dimension of postcolonialism, in the end, all this brand of gender feminism has accomplished with its dehumanizing scapegoat tactics against straight white Western men is the full realization that even a provisionally racist and sexist America never did: the static and unprincipled institutionalization of identity until they are nothing more than Devil and God, stretching back through history and forward in time. The problem there is you exchange partners and become nothing more than the idealization of the monster you claim to fight. SFF author Nisi Shawl says as much when she writes "Isolation and stasis are primary means of exoticizing people," a thing she ironically does as commonly as she asserts she doesn't.
*
That's a double heaping of irony to go along with these two Tweets by two SFF authors right next to each other:
The "brilliant" is built in and preordained, and that is determined by identity, as is any interest in the genre itself. The defense is that others are making them do this. But that's not so - it's a pitiful excuse for individual identity narcissists and supremacists to express their innate narcissism and the moral supremacy that is their birthright; literally their birthright, since their sense of morality has nothing to do with morality or principle - far from it. The dearth of any Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Men is simply too obvious for MacFarlane to understand. She confuses an accidental innocent demographic within a hobby with her own obsession with her identity being discriminated against and excluded within SFF literature and her identity's moral righteousness. These are people who have no understanding of or use for a thing like the U.S. Constitution; they have no principles whatsoever - their own bodies are their principles. The fact is that only a tiny percentage of people are gay, so any legitimate representation within SFF will be self-limiting, not a sign of bigotry. Nor is not buying into gay fantasies about a world of "Women Without Men - especially one brought about by genocide - being a bigot. This is not a movement that says "I am a lesbian, let me in," but an extremely ideologically driven, aggressive, sociopathic and proactive movement.
This idea of demography as ideology is not accidental since radical feminists like Kate Millett wrote [1] in Sexual Politics (New York: Avon, 1971) "All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy." It then goes without saying any group top-heavy in men is an ideology, not a random event. There are no men who are not guilty, as there is in law; there are only men who reject being men and so may be patted on the head as allies.
In intersectional gender feminism, everything they set themselves against, no matter how random or natural - a skewed male or white demographic, the natural attraction between men and women - is stipulated to be not only ideological and political, but oppressive. And as is the case with gender studies academics where education takes a back seat to an agenda, so too in SFF does the alliance of gender and racial bigots and their middle class social justice d0-gooders put social justice ahead of story and talent. The funny thing is that by stipulating the need for her anthology, MacFarlane is as much as admitting this is an ideological and political gesture that puts art in the back seat. In fact it won't be "brilliant" other than in being politically correct.
Millett's ideas, such as an end of "normative" heterosexuality, are echoed by SFF's new ideology again and again, not least by MacFarlane herself in a post at Tor.com, the web site associate of the largest publisher of SF in the world, Tor Books, titled "Post-Binary Gender in SF: Introduction," a virtual manifesto which calls for an "end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories." That is a straight line shot from Millett and radical lesbian feminism to today. That is all being falsely mainstreamed as equal rights feminism to clueless male (and women) water-carriers - so-called allies - in the SFF community who see themselves fighting for the equal rights of women rather than understanding their own marginalization to a second-class status, which is what the word "allies" means in the hands of a gender feminist.
Ironically, "normative" in the sense Millett means it refers to heterosexuals making a moral judgment about homosexuality in terms of what is valued, ethical and moral in society, reducing it to a poor and unwanted second class citizen. It is only natural one should not want to have moral judgments passed on oneself wholesale, but to throw out all morality (which is what cultural relativism does) with the bathwater is even more problematic. That is only worse when one turns around and enacts one's own supremacist ideology on the false notion that nature or a demographic is an ideology.
In the book footnoted above, author Jacqueline Rhodes further adds "according to Millett, a 'Sexual Revolution' would bring about eight conditions: the end of sexual repression; unisex temperament and behavior; reexamination of 'masculine' and 'feminine' traits; the end of 'sex role and sex status; the end of the oppression of the young 'under the patriarchal proprietary family'; 'bisex,' or the end of normative heterosexuality; the end of 'hatred' sexuality (violence, warfare, etc.); 'the attainment of the female sex to freedom and full human status.'"
By that standard, men are not only not fully human, but a drag on humanity as a whole. This is also part of the whirly-gig here-today, gone-tomorrow rhetoric that at once embraces the idea there are and are not innate differences between men and women, put at the service of an agenda, not coherent logic. How they can teach the many self-contradictions inherent in this brand of feminism in colleges is something I don't understand. Intersectional feminists clearly believe in innate differences, but if a heterosexual male academic in public life in any way parses that as a negative (which is inherent to any argument about difference), rather than as an eternal positive, he is likely to be fired. The truth is an extremely sociopathic cult is positioning itself as the portal which speaks for all women, all non-whites, and all homosexuals and through which all straight white men must submit their every move for approval. Needless to say, it is like Jews and blacks being asked to submit themselves to the nice judgments of the KKK.
Even the idea of the "natural" male sex drive becomes ideology in the mad world of feminism:
"From a feminist standpoint, however, this is nothing but male supremacist ideology. Far from being 'natural,' phallic sexuality is a moral and political activity. Men's sexual behaviour is not caused by hormonal dictates. It is because the penis serves the ideological function of symbolizing 'human' status that it is so heavily charged with erotic energy, and not because it is driven by testosterone. Men must keep using it because they need to keep proving that they exist, that their 'humanity' is inextricably entwined with penis-possession; women must be constantly used by it to prove that men exist, that the sum total of a man is his penis, what the penis can do it ought to do. Anything and everything must be subordinated to penile activity if men are to be what phallic ideology requires them to be." - Denise Thompson, Radical Feminism Today (2001)
And of course it then follows that Thompson asserts "Pornography is the ideology of male supremacist masculine desire writ large and shameless. It is the clearest, most unequivocal expression of male supremacist ideology in existence."
One of us is crazy.
According to the Gender and Education Association "Heteronormativity is a term used by social theorists in order to discuss the way in which gender and sexuality are separated into hierarchically organised categories. It has become one of the most important ways of thinking about sexuality within the academic study of sexuality. Theorists have argued that a discourse or technique of heteronormativity has been set up, and subsequently dominates, social institutions such as the family, the state and education."
The "theorists" the GEA links to are Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner and they write in "Sex in Public," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, Intimacy. (Winter, 1998), pp. 547-566 "By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent - that is, organized as a sexuality - but also privileged."
The authors add "... heteronormativity is a fundamental motor of social organization in the United States, a founding condition of unequal and exploitative relations throughout even straight society. Any social theory that miscomprehends this participates in their reproduction"
It's no surprise how often feminists in SF bring up the idea that everything is political. There is an agenda behind that. When it comes to ending the dominance of heterosexuality Berlant and Warner write "We are trying to bring that world into being." The odd dissonance there is the people you'd think most invested with the idea of live and let live instead seem invested in the laughable stupidity of not only setting themselves up against a benign culture they portray as immoral but one which demonstrably is all that stands between them being thrown off of buildings by the very people who benefit from the umbrella of their "PoC" protection racket.
In response to this sort of rhetoric, blogger Robert Stacy McCain writes "Anyone who believes feminism is about 'equality' is so hopelessly stupid that I doubt they could read or comprehend this sentence. Feminism isn’t about equality. Feminism is about hate. As Jim Goad says, every word of feminist rhetoric is intended to 'degrade, humiliate, and demoralize men,' and this is especially true as regards feminism's deliberate demonization of male sexuality."
As you will see in this book, that statement is 100% accurate. Among the thousands of profilings of men in the SFF community as a whole I ran across in my research, those profilings were 100% negative. The same is true of whites and heterosexuals. It is an unrelenting drumbeat of sheer disdain and especially so towards every aspect of work from the mid-century Golden Age of SF. Conversely, women, the idiotic intersectional "PoC" (people of color) and QUILTBAG portrayals are 100% positive and so too is their literature - any and all of it; it is the right literature. Art never enters into it, though that carrot is constantly waved about. Heterosexuality is often talked about as if it's a Model-T or the Charleston, a dinosaur that doesn't yet know it is extinct.
I use the term "PoC" in this book because it is intersectionalspeak. It is an idea born of writing things like an "international community of peoples of Color, a human community which includes two-thirds of the world’s population," as does the black, gay, intersectional feminist activist Audre Lorde in her 1986 essay "Turning the Beat Around."
It is not a term I use myself or even consider a real grouping of people. The idea of "people of color" has no real world application but it does reveal the obsessive and provincial PC mindset that divides the world into whites and everybody else not white as if there is an unspoken war of Jim Crow and apartheid that crosses continents, oceans and centuries and in which whites occupy an intersectional space that is immoral, inferior and oppressive. "PoC," as much as anything, is a term that reveals the resentful racist supremacist core of intersectional thought. Whenever you read the the term "PoC" in other than an academic or satirical commentary on intersectionalism itself, you know a bad smell has entered the room.
That Tweet above represents the death of a literature, and it is an attitude that has been institutionalized at all levels within the core SF community. Far from being the endpoint of diversity, it is the casual and oblivious other side of the mainstreaming of bigotry. "Books by men feels weird." How does one even process that from within a literary movement; how did it come about? What is a group of aggressive anti-oppression crime-fighters doing in SF? Intersectionalism smacks of a group of unemployed vigilantes who sit around and make up crimes and laws that don't exist in order to create business, or in this instance, make a case against a targeted group. This is a group of villagers with torches whose existence is permanent and pre-dates Frankenstein's monster. The line between that and candlelight vigils over rape hoaxes is a very thin one.
If intersectionalists have no monster they'll simply make one up, and so you have white privilege, rape culture and micro aggressions and paper-thin, self-serving, one-sided definitions of racism and sexism. And there is also conveniently no threat of libel or of filing a false police report when you accuse millions at a time of false crimes, although such a thing does often go by the name of "group libel" in Europe. It is also telling how this all neatly side-steps the criminal justice system or proving the existence of discriminatory laws. Just say the Golden Age of SF was racist and sexist and it just is; they'll get back to you on the non-existent details later. Meanwhile, "3 books by men feels weird." No trial, no actual charges or proof of anything, just SF with a lot of men who happen to be white, heterosexual and not disabled or overweight. The charge is non-whites aren't in SF's future worlds because white men don't care for them to be there, just as they erase women who have "always fought" and "PoC" from medieval Bohemia. No proof of that erasure, or fighting for that matter; nevertheless the charge not only sticks but gets bloggers like Kameron Hurley Hugo Awards.
One of the most amazing bottom lines that is claimed is that following social justice warrior dogma will make you a better person and expand your outlook. That is so observably false I really don't know what to say. The reason for that falsity is that intersectional claims for inclusion not only demonstrably exclude people but rely on demonization and dehumanization theories to which an amazing amount of thought has been given. There is nothing casual about radical feminism and its racial caboose when it comes to it targets.
The fundamental core of radical feminism was created by lesbians for lesbians. The issues you see most talked about in the social justice movement in core SFF all derive from that core and not from equal rights feminism: rape culture, gender abolition, white privilege, male gaze, patriarchy, misogyny, intersectionalism, toxic masculinity, heterosexuality as oppression, trigger warnings, The Bechdel Test (Dykes to Watch Out For), heteronormativity, gender as "performance."
Like neo-Nazis, the KKK, the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party, radical feminism is a supremacist ideology whose main business is group defamation.
*
To truly understand this movement within SFF, you must understand these folks are engaging in these segregationist behaviors precisely because they claim they are under siege - excluded, oppressed and discriminated against. What the PC themselves do is otherwise prohibited, proscribed and censured if their unholy focus, the straight white male does it, and in fact the PC go whack nuts at anything with too many white people, heterosexuals or men. If the PC just did their thing and stopped with the racial and sexual attacks, no one would really care. What do I care if some women want an anthology? There's been stuff like that in years past and I never thought twice about it, but then those books weren't put together by some brute morons arrogantly telling me to check my privilege and accusing me of centuries of oppression.
What is the core issue here is that the topic of diversity or equality is being used as camouflage to enable supremacy and segregation by a cult of the politically correct who are closet racists, heterophobes and misandrists. But since diversity is virtually never discussed outside a framework of the moral failings of straight white men, equality and diversity are nothing more than a Gulf of Tonkin, a Mukden.
In terms of laws that discriminate against women, that would be a somewhat natural process. After all, if there are laws which benefit men to the detriment of women it is only natural to single out those who benefit. Intersectional gender feminism is a horse of a different color. It stipulates white heterosexual men and heterosexuality in and of themselves constitute the equivalent of women not being able to inherit property or testify in court. The white straight male is an analogy to a legal Jim Crow which never goes away, carried within its very whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality. The oppressions of gender feminism by the "patriarchy" are manufactured from bizarre theories, and sheer animosity is the other dead giveaway. One can understand a certain amount of anger and frustration over legal discrimination. One can also expect that to be in keeping with the levels of success attained in fighting that discrimination. There is nothing like that in gender feminism. The hostility is endemic, visceral and fundamental, not what one would expect of cause and effect.
There is also no end game or goal ever declared: men must stop acting like men seems to be about it. There is no right to vote to aspire to, no mission accomplished. There are no Jim Crow laws to banish, and instead ever shifting, invisible and growing goal posts called a New Jim Crow.
The new PC creation, so-called straight white men, are being scapegoated for doing precisely nothing - indicted and declared guilty as an entire group, both living and dead. Proof that diversity is being used as a shill lies in the groups intersectionalists never target: namely, themselves. You'll hear a politically correct intersectionalist call for diversity in the NBA, Brazilian samba music, delta blues, romance fiction, lesbian roller derby and Indian and Asian film about the same time the sun coughs and dies. Diversity in intersectionalism is nothing more than a false flag under which to attack whites, men and heterosexuals.
Diversity and equality are being used as a red-herring; in 100 years of American SF there has never been an orchestrated anti-diversity anti-equality movement, quite the contrary. Simply saying that is not so and then pointing to isolated anecdotes and anomalies doesn't cut it. When writers of any persuasion wanted to come into SF, they came in - end of story. Here is a perfect example of how bringing up racism while indulging in it at the same time is excused:
Using extreme radical anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual feminist viewpoints to interpret SFF novels as "dehumanizing" and "sexist or racist" doesn't mean they actually are. In fact Hines himself adopts and uses the dehumanizing, sexist, racist and demonization language of radical feminism more often than he can find its opposite number within core SFF. It is that dissonance which so frequently makes the PC in core SFF look so foolish. What they can never understand is that portraying 100 million straight white men as an ideology is bald-face bigotry and racism. One may be "calling out" racism when critiquing individuals; critiquing a race is racism itself.
In ever-suspicious feminist terminology, "erasure" and "sidelining" most often actually means not present, and not present then is said to be purposeful exclusion and once again an innocent demography becomes, not only an ideology, but an oppressive Jim Crow-like structure of segregation. The problem there is it is all a lie when it comes to SFF. It is the argument of a faintly paranoid, stubborn and willful child. And what kind of a moron writes about the perpetuation of "colonialism." I'll tell you who: people who have drunk a lot of bell hooks kool-aid and Kate Millett snake-oil. Who in their right mind believes white heterosexual men have ever had a tacit cultural agreement to "sideline" and erase the disabled, aside from two SFWA Hall of Fame short stories like "Call Me Joe" (1957) by Poul Anderson and "Flowers for Algernon" (1959) by Daniel Keyes plus the famous "Waldo" (1942) by Robert Heinlein. What fools like Hines can't grasp is that, like gay SF, themes built around the disabled are self-limiting.
Couching all this hatred and supremacy in words like equality and diversity makes any pushback seem like it's against women's rights or is pro-segregation or invites swinish remarks about an "Aryan Happiness Defense Front" the PC can never use two hands to find actual quotes to prove is a trend. Ironically the only group in SFF chipping away at equal protection or formally indulging in racial segregation are intersectionalists themselves. When it comes to something like racially segregated awards, rooms or anthologies within SFF, those are 100% on the side of gender feminists and their naive following of social justice warriors.
By sheer osmosis radical feminism has been mainstreamed to the point it reminds one of the Star Trek TV episode where post-holocaust barbarians recite the preamble to our Constitution by rote, the original meaning of the words lost. In fact Hines is a man in rags uttering "E Plebneesta," but in his case, he has stupidly thrown aside the principles behind our Constitution. Instead, Hines' principles and law is that men are wrong and women right and he constantly parrots that like a machine, never wavered by rules that might benefit us all, and, like radical feminists, with no interest in the concept of shared human failure.
In that quote above, Jim Hines is talking about blog of Requires Only That You Hate (RH), the most racist anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual blog in the history of SFF, and he's excusing it. Hines is excusing it because it mirrors his own way of working. In that post he takes exception to being called "rotten meat" by an editor and not understanding how anyone Hines knows could work with someone like that. Meanwhile Hines routinely defames over 100 million white America men as a matter of course. At no point does Hines mention the racial defamation RH indulged in in the vast majority of her posts. When Hines writes "Abuse and harassment are unacceptable," what he really means is he has a double standard for those words. What "harassment" means in the gay non-white Ladyland of intersectional orthodoxy Hines has adopted as his own is disagreeing with a racist gender feminist. And why be surprised the woman throwing around remarks about an "Aryan Happiness Defense Front" left sympathetic comments [now scrubbed from the internet] at what is no better than an Asian version of Stormfront.
The dissonance is stunning. In Holland a man is prosecuted "'on charges of insulting a group of people based on race and incitement to discrimination and hatred,'" a thing you'll see throughout this book. That man - Geert Wilders' - remarks about "'fewer Moroccans' in Holland" eerily echo the hopes and collusions to act on those hopes of social justice warriors for fewer old white male dinosaurs in SF together with the lament they were ever there at all.
The irony is delicious and straight to the point since SFF's feminist inspired social justice warriors hate men like Wilders while at the same time making him proud by mimicking what they call his hate speech. Intersectionalists call their own hate speech "anger at books that rely on racist tropes" and "pointing out racism and sexism." The problem is prominent social justice bloggers at the web site associate of the largest publisher of SF in the world leave sympathetic comments at sites that write "... we consider buffaloes especially stupid as animals go. The perfect analogy for white men" You have this stunning remark about "you, white person, probably straight cishet and able-bodied, have put everyone in their place and are left standing atop a pile of bodies" written by the SFF feminist who created the #illridewithyou hashtag for Muslims before the deadly Sydney Siege was even over. And what topic is she discussing there? Yup, the woman who made the crack about white men and buffaloes who was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award by the same morons who got rid of U.K. TV personality Jonathan Ross as a Hugo presenter because a feminist former Hugo nominee literally cried on Twitter about a "White Dude parade." And here's a N.Y. Times best-seller who holds writing workshops for non-whites only: "White male privilege cares ONLY about white male privilege, and there is no goal except maintaining that position of power." "Inciting racial hatred" is a thing you'll find in this book over and over again.
When Hines writes RH has a right to "anger at books that rely on racist tropes," not one single work of fiction RH reviewed comes anywhere close to matching her own feral and aggressive racial defamation nor that of the core SFF intersectionalist community for that matter. There is an ocean of difference between sheer hatred and an author inaccurately portraying a medieval Asian society. Given RH's rhetoric, suggesting the latter is "racism," or they violated a radical feminist definition of "sexism" is simply laughable. The bottom line is that both Hines and RH conspicuously put themselves forward as anti-racists. That's where the insanity enters.
RH's now shut down blog is the literal embodiment of the mechanism of collusion that has overtaken SFF: a sociopathic non-white radical lesbian feminist who is a racist, sexist supremacist merely uttered the word "oppression" and middle class white heterosexual social justice warriors eager to fight crime wherever they found it transformed her neo-Nazi-like Asian Stormfront web site into a credible voice of wisdom when it came to the most intersectionally oppressed person in regard to all the PC's most favored checkmarks. Those checkmarks were the homophobia, racism, sexism and lack of privilege experienced by the opposite number to the straight white male. It never occurred to the social justice warriors to imagine where the ideological basis for the hideously distorted version of all of those checkmarks came from or that they might not even exist in the real world in anything like the form they were presented in. That's where we stand today: hysterical sociopathic racists and middle class cis-het social justice warrior drama queens bending the knee in a perfect goofy alliance.
The problem with all that is how much this ideology sets back normal gay and non-white folks, making them look bad and creating hostility towards them. The inevitable question is the same as one asks of Muslims about terrorists: where are the voices of moderation. But it's not the business of gays, non-whites and Muslims to police the actions of an immoral criminal element among then any more than it is for whites to answer for the modern KKK or Nazism or Christians and Jews for other Christians and Jews. It is not an easy problem to sort out, and is only one of the reasons hate speech is so dangerous and toxic.
Other than instances where one can point to actual laws that benefit one group over another, the answer lies in not ceding hate to an identity but in all of us seeing it as a thing independent of race and sex, a thing healthy communities do as a matter of course, as does our laws. The first thing to do there is to adopt a race and sex-neutral definition of hate speech, a thing the SFF community has no interest in doing, as you can see from their promotion of one-sided race/gender convention harassment policies even as they merciless harass people in social media according to their race and gender. The great perceptual failure here is that Americans have a very hard time wrapping their heads around the fact people are all human and prone to the same human failures. They just will not accept the idea of a supremacist ideology emerging from women, gay folks or non-whites, no matter how clearly the evidence shows this to be the case. Unsurprisingly, neither will this particular feminist ideology accept the idea men, straights and whites are NOT supremacists.
RH's blog symbolized the short sprint between the two interlocking and mutually supporting streams of hate and social justice do-gooders in which the core SFF community has now accepted an Orwellian ideology that is as fundamentally racist, sexist and supremacist as it claims the exact reverse to be the case. Naturally nothing but confusion and hatred is going to emerge from such a stew, and it has, in spades. Today you have the dismal and laughable sadness of SFF authors and bloggers embracing hate speech in the certainty they are fighting hate speech, egged on by a crew of other sociopathic RHs who engage in the most outright sexist and racial slurs while frothing at the mouth at common slang terms as being misogynistic "gendered insults" or even the word "lady" reacted to like the n-word.
As I said, this could all be cured tomorrow if the core SFF community would embrace failure as a principled thing residing on a human level and adapt a race and sex neutral approach to successful and failed value systems. The problem is that doesn't suit the intersectionalist drama queens and their racist handlers. Instead they choose to distort the English language to find ideologies where they are not while ignoring others in plain sight. Even better would be if they'd come to understand social justice is not core to SFF in the first place. The fact they do in fact find it so is a clue to why this is such a problem and the obsessive natures of the people promoting it. The stupidest irony is the very old school SFF authors social justice crusaders and their racist allies decry the most had the most principled literature. Yet the fact that white and male demographic was skewed is used like a weapon to present an ideology and series of oppressions that not only never existed but tended to run in the opposite direction in what was mid-century liberalism.
Some of SFF's intersectionalists make no secret of the fact they care nothing for the literature itself when it comes to awards:
Why be surprised that same daffy woman wish-lists books for a Hugo nomination she wishes she'd read? She can smell the mutual stink of political correctness the same way I can can read her Tweet above. The truth is I never needed admissions that "I have a majority of female nominees. That was deliberate." to catch that odor. It simply stinks, and it's as rancid as pretending pushback against feminist racists is the same as a racial ideology, or is "politics." Disliking racial slurs is not "politics." Her ladyworship's Hugo nominations for short stories are 18 women, 4 men, at least one gay. I honestly have no idea why she felt the need to read the stories. She's essentially admitted nominating stories for the author's bio. They should have that as a category: "And the award for Best Bio goes to: a black disabled blind lesbian with OCD, ADHD and PTSD." That's sounds like insulting satire, but it's actually what intersectionalists do, and it amounts to a veritable quote, as you will see as you get deeper into this book.
Then read this Orwellian comment below from Nussbaum that's part of a Twitter Storify. She takes it for granted life's not equal based on zero evidence of a specific "system" and rights the ship by applying specific inequality, as can be seen above. These are writers who routinely use the word "system" and have no idea what it means. As best I can figure out it means "my paranoia."
So this woman is going to right the ship by employing purposeful systemic discrimination. Now that's a mind, and it has that same overweening tone of arrogance and moral high ground common with intersectionalists. Why be surprised - they're supremacists flogging an ideology of female supremacy based on their own mindless fears and the incredible notion that men hate women. The funny thing is that at the end of the Storify she can't figure out why in the world racist sexist privilege theory fails or what the Bill of Rights might mean.
"Wherever life is complicated, and life is usually complicated, wherever political developments or the relations between states begin to unfold in a way that is difficult to comprehend, certainly difficult for ordinary people to comprehend, there is a temptation to see the hidden hand at work; hidden forces that cannot be identified. The only way that many people can explain what is happening to them is as the result of a conspiracy of hidden forces, and that fantasy has enormous appeal, and there are ruthless, cynical people who are willing to exploit that." - David Cesarani
*
To understand the full measure of how much modern SF writers don't understand the meaning of their own words, this is part of LoneStarCon 3's harassment policy:
"Discrimination is not limited to gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or physical/mental disability."
That is part of a PDF linked to from SF author and former SFWA president John Scalzi from a post on his blog titled "My New Convention Harassment Policy." Keep that PDF in mind as you read this book and try and not shake your head off your shoulders doing so. In order to understand that, you must understand the people quoted in this book routinely interact with and support each other on social media.
As you will see, the SFWA doesn't even respect its own sexual harassment policy.
"SFWA is dedicated to assuring that the use of and access to the Venues by SFWA members is free of all forms of harassment, intimidation and discrimination on the basis of race, age, sex, gender, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, disability, medical condition, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, marital/domestic partnership status, or citizenship."
That is patently false. SFWA members and the larger core community hide behind phony mitigations about "white privilege," a "patriarchy," innuendoes and myths about "social justice" not at all in evidence to unleash a torrent of abuse at men, whites and heterosexuals on a daily basis via Twitter and blogs. Unsubstantiated and hysterical claims such as mistaken identity being "institutional racism" as does black Nebula-nominated author Alaya Dawn Johnson are not only common but institutionalized. In that linked piece Johnson claims that today "prejudice abounds: Whitewashed covers, hostile dismissals of 'identity politics' and 'political correctness' as a barely veiled attempt to silence us, all-white panels on diversity, all-white anthologies of 'the best' science fiction and continual institutional barriers to traditional publication based on appeals to marketability that really reflect the publishing houses' disbelief in the power and appeal of black storytelling." The problem there is that rather than addressing the people allegedly actually doing those things, the whole is simply smeared onto all whites. And there are no ideologically "all-white anthologies" in SF. People like Johnson simply change white or male demographics to ideology while ignoring the spate of ideologically segregated initiatives which reside entirely on the side of intersectionalists. Suggesting pushing back against obvious racism is trying to "silence" anyone is the semantic gibberish that is par for the course. These are truly amazing people. You'll see in this book that straight up anti-white racial insults are just fine but mistaking one person for another is "institutional racism."
The truth is that the SFWA not only openly supports racial and sexual defamation, harassment and incitement, but its rank and file members frequently indulge in it, and on a daily basis, and some of that verging on hysterics. When we remind ourselves this is an organization dedicated to advocating for its authors and promoting the genre in general, that's absolutely mind-boggling. In point of fact, the default ideology of the SFWA isn't markedly different from Charlotte Bunch's early '70s radical lesbian feminist collective The Furies. Throw in the later racial hostility of intersectionalism as an added priority and that's pretty much it.
Racial supremacy anti-supremacy is plusgood:
I really appreciate people who display a sincere racial empathy for my racial blindness and general inferiority. It's nice to be cared for, especially when they assure me they are "very sincere."
Of course there's no more reason to try and divide up morality among the sexes or ethic groups than there is using height. That's where the con game of power-privilege punching up theory comes in - it allows you to do exactly that, but only if you ignore reality as well. For example it is well established among the social justice warrior crowd that a spirit of revenge against former enslavers or colonial masters is okay. That is of course unless it involves revenge for Englishman or Portuguese plucked right off of their own coasts by Moorish corsairs or for Islamic colonial Spain.
As in all formalized expressions of bigotry, smear tactics are baked into the ideology behind all this. In her 1975 book Against Our Will, seminal radical feminist Susan Brownmiller writes about criminal rapists that "on the shoulders of these unthinking, predictable, insensitive, violence-prone young men there rests an age-old burden that amounts to an historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force." Invoking the Greek Achilles' Myrmidons, Brownmiller adds "Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued... police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed."
There is your "rape culture." No man escapes that black hole of logic, nor could a thing like our Constitution ever emerge from such a mind or ideology.
The counter-argument that both sides feel righteous carries no weight. This book is based on principles well established throughout the fabric of our society, not my personal moral ethos. I'm talking about everything from the principles behind law to a baseball strike zone. I'm talking about The Golden Rule, goose/gander, fair play, rules, and treating others like you would like to be treated. Group defamation based on what you were the day you were born is always wrong - there are no exceptions. If I negatively profile and defame ethnic groups, I expect to be criticized for it - at least if I have any sense of honor, self-awareness or brains. More significantly, this book shows the benchmarks for what the PC themselves consider racism, sexism, genderphobia and supremacy and records how often the PC violate their own rules. Not only do I show how often the PC violate those rules, but how they are virtually the sole source of such bigotry in the core SFF community.
What you will find in this book is a cult of people who have no true interest in a thing like our 14th Amendment's equal protection even while they claim to be moved by it, just as they use the words "racism" and "sexual harassment" in an Orwellian sense because of being by far the worst purveyors of each in, of all places, a literary movement dedicated to pop culture SF. Intersectionalism is a cult that does not understand they are using rhetoric that dismantles the very principles that protect Americans. When no one can look to institutions or law and trust them to be open and fair, it will become every man for himself. Any society large or small will be destroyed just as doing the same thing to a strike zone would destroy baseball in minutes. You wouldn't even have a game. Everyone would pick up their bats and make a new game elsewhere, but this time based on their own huddled and fractured groups of race or sex. Give enough people institutionally protected status and eventually everyone will claim that for themselves as well, with no "hegemony" to rail against, a Tower of Babel in its place. When there is no strike zone there is no game, no way to communicate. Further behaving as if SF is the Supreme Court vs. some woman-hating homophobic apartheid-like Jim Crow Alabama country in the '30s is daffy, and exposes strange and even psychotic obsessions rather than reality.
An Orwellian corruption of the meaning of words at the behest of a silly ideology is the key factor that has turned the core SFF community into two warring camps. There simply is no cultural consensus on what the English language even means. In the world of punching up/privilege theory - like the gender feminist-driven view of sexuality itself behind all this - anything can and does mean whatever you want it to mean at the time. There is no fixed definition of what a "racist" is any more than there is of what a woman or man is.
In fact, one is not allowed to make any comment whatsoever.
Stirring up racial animus and resentments towards men in an odd way to go about social justice. Doing it in SFF is just odd.
*
If you have any doubts about pre-ordained brilliance or lack of it, read these Tweets by Alex MacFarlane over a negative review of a use of dialect in a story from the PC diversity thunderblast anthology, Long Hidden, which she apparently hasn't even read:
"Disappointed, as someone in the @strangehorizons reviewing roundtable, to see a review of Long Hidden that's dismissive of dialect. ...and draws attention to 'diversity vs. quality' bullshit ...I'm looking forward to reading Long Hidden"
Like I say elsewhere: why even bother reading literature if race and gender is going to determine praise and awards or lack of them? When praising or lambasting fiction, it's clear the PC often don't even read what it is they're going on about. That's certainly true of the Golden Age SF they despise.
In the context of that, MacFarlane Tweets:
It never seems to occur to MacFarlane that the reason English seems hegemonic to her is because she lives in England, or that she never criticizes other languages such as Arabic, the most linguistically and culturally deadly language in that hemisphere. There is a simple solution for MacFarlane, Hopkinson and others who deride English: move somewhere else. I can promise them that if they walk around Jakarta or Rio de Janeiro only speaking English they won't be able to catch a bus or taxi let alone worry about having to clean their ears of English in a land of hegemonic Indonesian and Portuguese. But they won't do that. That's because all the PC preening about "diversity," when it comes to actually immersing themselves in the wonders of people of color and the non-West, is something they want nothing to do with. When it comes to the PC in the SFF community, words like "hypocrisy," "supremacy," "racism," "bigotry," "sexism," and "prejudice" literally have no meaning. Taken as a whole, the context virtually always interprets such semantics as "not me," or "white men," which explains why the PC indulge wholesale in rancid naked racial and sexist supremacy and racism. One of the authors in Long Hidden, Lisa Bolekaja, begins a post about her story:
Charming. The morality of racial supremacy and innocence always is. I have no beef with the idea of murdered natives, just with the fact that in PC narrative those "murdered Native"s never hail from the "enslaved" Balkans, "stolen" Greece or Spain. When I say never I mean never. In Bolekaja's world there are literally no "various racist" Ottoman "immigrants." And for an American, Bolekaja seems to be unable to figure out Minnesota and Wyoming were not built on the backs of slaves nor that there is anything inherently racist about Europeans compared to the rest of the globe. Gunpowder is not racism, it is the winning hand, or at least it is if you are a Arab, Mughal or Ottoman.
Now, read these quotes from the heart of the SFF community if you can stomach them.
Here's more, retweeted by Aliette de Bodard:
Well, after you read the blog post in question, what does "enjoyed" even mean anymore when the top priority is actually a stew of gay, extremist feminist or non-white authors? What kind of literature is that in terms of MacFarlane's "'diversity vs quality' bullshit"?
Will they say "I 'enjoyed' nominating that author for an award?" This is not artistry, this is artistic corruption, the very thing this culture's "quest for diversity" claims can never happen because the talent's simply there. But where is "there?" In fact, talent becomes completely irrelevant. That is especially so within a backwash of endemic hostility towards an improper identity since so much of this is expressed in terms of an anti-oppression narrative. In what world are you going to reward your oppressors? The easy answer is that you're not going to, and instead indulge in segregation and discrimination, aside from ignoring SF literature for its own sake.
That quote above is from a post ironically titled "How We Win" and begins with the all too familiar stupidity " Trigger warning: slurs, ableism, racism, sexism, transmisogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-semitism, colonialism." The author who goes by the name Arachne Jericho had their views openly supported by John Scalzi when he was SFWA president.
One hears this word "marginalized" routinely parroted as if illegal immigrants come to America to write dystopian SF and black people have been walled off from the sacred themes of Flash Gordon by white supremacists. Whatever the case, the burden and mission of SF's crew of radical chic uplifters in regard to their always angry charges is clear: there's a lot of Heinlein in the oppressed and downtrodden and that course entails catchers taking a lot of flak, including their angry charges calling them "privileged racists" every day.
"Crossed Genres @crossedgenres Dec 3 The 'Golden Age' of SFF contained absurd amounts of racism, sexism, etc. in its most revered works. So no, we wouldn't publish those books... We said if presented w/ those works new & unpublished, we wouldn't publish them. The fact that they were published means racism/sexism was more openly accepted back then. That doesn't make it okay. They shldn't have been published"
By "lost/buried" what they really mean is imaginary people they made up out of their head. What better straight out example of how art takes a backseat in favor of segregating literature and engaging in discrimination based on radical intersectionality's paper-thin rules of racism and sexism few straight white men could pass? In addition to that, Crossed Genres is as much as saying they will censor any stories written in a traditional style of SF which do not represent its own pie-charted hierarchal rules of race and sex. Read this essay by Alfred Bester called "My Affair with Science Fiction" and tell me who you'd rather hang out with. Given how effortlessly intersectionalist dehumanize the people Bester describes, the essay actually highlights the brightness and humanity of those mid-century SF writers and shows the brutal stupidity and lack of grace inherent in intersectionalism's disciples.
The free expression and diversity such people insist on from other venues is nowhere evident in the venues of the PC themselves. In effect Crossed Genres is arguing their own fiction should not only be ignored but excluded.
Keeping in mind the wide support this attitude has in the core SFF community and which leads to this ideology sweeping awards, if you're an SFF writer, but the wrong identity, and an identity which is being pummeled by the president of SFF's most influential literary organization as being on the wrong side of a glut of anti-oppression narratives, what's the chances you're going to enter that arena? Why even bother? And if you're a reader of SFF, wrong identity, what's the chances you're going to lose interest pretty quickly once you've visited the blogs of your favorite authors and learned you're no favorite of theirs, by virtue of simply existing; that you're "racist as fuck" and too stupidly unconscious of your racial privilege to examine it properly? What if you just want to write or read some science fiction?
That incredible miasma from Crossed Genres amounts to burning a museum. Thanks to radical queer theory whatever role core SFF once had acting a role as curators or guardians of its own legacy has been trashed. These fools have declared a Year Zero where all badthink from a previous era must be discarded so a glorious new era of social justice can emerge. Only someone with a severely blunted mentality could imagine SF ever represented social injustice and must be purged, yet that is exactly what Crossed Genres is arguing.
This is a cult of identity which claims institutional discrimination and exclusion but which also claims the lion's share of today's Nebula and Hugo Awards nominations; how can both be? One gay and ardently intersectional woman recently got 5 Hugo nominations in a single year. And that's not including awards and anthologies set aside for non-whites, gay folks and women. As I mentioned, there are no awards set aside for whites, men or heterosexuals, and yet all the rabble-rousing acts exactly as if that is so.
And what about kids? When kids are getting a dose of America as a "white supremacist patriarchy" to go along with their steampunk and zombies that's a problem. When an author of young adult novels about magic elves has a website with language like "hugs and kittens" right alongside words like "cis," "cissexist," "transphobic," "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," "cis gender," "able-bodied neurotypical," "privilege," "colorblindness," "genderblindness," and are told to "examine" their "privilege" and a word like "diversity" is used in a sense it is interchangeable with "white racism," and that's all on one single page, that's a problem. When notions of nobility and justice and the concept of right and wrong itself is being sold as residing in a skin or gender, that's a problem.
What you see staring back at you from that page on the blog of Jim Hines that acts as a clearing house for social justice warriors is the rhetoric, bigotry, supremacism and madness of venerable and influential radical lesbian gender feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Charlotte Bunch, Joyce Trebilcot and Kate Millett combined with later racialized intersectionalist versions like bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw. Given the nature of Hines' fiction and non-fiction, his blog's cartoon header of him as a goblin staring at what can easily be parsed as one lesbian caressing another is far from symbolic. If you don't know who those feminists above are or also names like Judith Butler, Audre Lorde and Donna Haraway, then you have no hope of understanding what is at work today in the core SFF community. And try reading this from Millett's sister about how nuts Millett was. It's a common affliction with gender feminists. In fact one might argue their ideology arises from trying to reconcile their madness by painting society as the thing that's mad. That's where my compassion for mental illness evaporates - when it becomes focused on my skin and sex, and that of millions of others, all because of the selfish narcissism of these very strange people. I will not have equal protection whittled away because of phantasms.
You would have to be a fool to maintain gay people are not discriminated against in America, but you'd have to be equally foolish to see that as anything but a human failing, and to counter it as such. Instead you have a tiny fraction of gay women who have created a supremacist ideology that stipulates heterosexuality is unnatural, immoral and oppressive and men inferior. Radical queer theory then hides that within an anti-discrimination movement the same way anti-Semites hide within anti-Zionism and have encountered stupendous success by riding women's suffrage like a Trojan Horse.
When a middle-aged guy who's the author of kids fantasy novels is cluelessly parroting the most radical anti-male, anti-heterosexual and anti-white rhetoric of Dworkian intersectionalists, that's the very definition of mainstreaming. In this case what Jim Hines is normalizing as something we should all aspire to is toxic and supremacist insanity that believes men, especially white men, are the very devil, and that normal relations between men and women is a construct created to maintain the power and centrality of men. That's some pretty heady stuff, even for science fiction and fantasy let alone children, each of which default to mature and sensible compared to the unrestrained delusions of radical intersectional feminism.
Hines may as well write "loren ipsum" in all his blog posts about social justice. I can tell what his stand will be 100% of the time without even reading his work merely by knowing which side straight white males are on. Those are the same odds you get from the Ku Klux Klan. Read how clueless the view from an internet cave is, and how precisely the opposite of reality:
One thing you'll see in this book again and again is people within core SFF conspicuously self-identifying as gay, a woman or non-white in a highly politicized way and attacking an equally politicized identity of heterosexual ethnic European men in their millions. They do so alongside claims they are a marginalized and oppressed group under institutional attack in SFF but they rarely provide evidence of such attacks by way of names and quotes, but since when do neo-Nazis or the KKK name Jews or blacks when all are at fault? In that environment, to be Jewish or black amounts to both a name and a quote.
The so-called attacks against the PC are generally along the lines of SFF literature being in English, a white Table of Contents, a male-heavy book display, anomalous, anonymous, unquantifiable or decontextualized sexual harassment, and passive scenarios they portray as "microaggressions." The dumb satire there is those supposed attacks against the PC are not as pointedly racist, sexist, dehumanizing and demonizing as those which come from the PC themselves, unless you're dumb enough to see a white Table of Contents, microaggressions or all-male book display as a cross-burning.
The PC never discuss their politicized identities or "diversity" in a live-and-let-live manner but instead in the context of attacks on straight white men they often call with disdain "cis-males," "privileged," "heteronormative" or members of the "patriarchy" using academic terms straight out of a half-century of radical lesbian feminism. In an exacting reverse manner also based on race and sex, the PC never criticize women, gays or non-whites with the same group defamation and negative profiling they do to straight white men in what amounts to a perfect God/Devils scenario. Any profiling of a PC group is unrelentingly positive, that of straight white men just as unrelentingly negative. As of 2013/4, this ideology has overwhelmed the core SFF community.
"The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women's 'innate' need for men. Lesbians literally do not need men (even for procreation if the science of cloning is developed)." - feminist Charlotte Bunch, 1972 (Founding Director (1989) and as of 2014 current Senior Scholar, at the Center for Women's Global Leadership, Rutgers University) Member of the National Women's Hall of Fame, selected by United States President Bill Clinton as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights.
[1] Jacqueline Rhodes, Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem (State University of New York Press 2005)
*
The title of Audrey Lorde's 1979 essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" perfectly encapsulates what at the time wasn't even known as Third Wave Intersectional Feminism, though it would come to hijack and dominate the use of the word "feminism." As what amounts to a racial caboose to Second Wave gender abolitionist feminism, it has successfully mainstreamed its concerns into SFF's core institutions as SFF's pet ideology and made huge inroads into American society itself. As you read my book consider these words by Lorde and you'll find them a perfect match with the ideology centered in SFF core fandom and its default interest in "poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians" that supersedes a mere consideration of genre or artistry.
"What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?
"If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought."
Short version for SFF: black lesbians and their ideological concerns are the main go-to gals when it comes to who are the most important and credible voices. It explains why you see white feminists in SFF defer in all things to non-white feminists, as you see again and again in this book, even to the point of mindlessly trashing all white people. To do otherwise is to risk estrangement, irrelevance and that cutting edge. When you see a woman writing someone "totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian" 15 years after the end of a civil rights movement where people prayed whites would dismiss special racial characteristics you are talking about a woman embracing white supremacist theory without a hint of awareness. Lorde's own idea of the moral, spiritual and intellectual supremacy embodied in her own identity comes dripping off the pages. When Lorde adds "Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic," she comes off like a sockpuppet for neo-Nazis.
The obvious conclusion is that faceless millions of white feminists are "super-invested" in racism. Devout intersectionalists like Miss Kane never see the contradictions in such statements, the race to the top of Moral Hill is evident.
The centerpiece concept - "privilege" - which one encounters again and again in SFF, is older than most know, and again predictably can be found in the words of a radical gay feminist like Marilyn Frye from 1980: "'I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual — that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice. In 1972 Charlotte Bunch was already writing about "privileged behavior" which would "serve ruling class white men's interests."
''There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and this pressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied, that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.' - Marilyn Frye, 'A Lesbian's Perspective on Women’s Studies' speech to the National Women's Studies Association conference, 1980"
That "...one of your privileges being not to notice" is the logic one finds in today's PC SFF conversations again and again and again. It's the circular black hole of a kafkatrap that explains what doesn't exist.
As you'll see later, such bizarreness is reflected in articles at The Guardian that claim the future of SF is a "queer" one. In addition, the associate website of the largest publisher of SF in the world has an article calling for the end of the depiction of normal "binary" sex in SF literature. This isn't about being gay, black, or a feminist, but about it being demanded others completely buy into their most bizarre fantasies and insensate prejudices, including claims of being neither a man nor a woman. Strange things are being dragged into strange and inappropriate places.
In 1997 radical gender feminist Bonnie Zimmerman wrote "'I believe it can be shown that, historically, lesbianism and feminism have been coterminous if not identical social phenomena.'"
And there is this:
"'The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference, something we are born like or gradually develop into, but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination, in particular through the way it channels women into marriage and motherhood. Similarly, lesbianism has been defined not just as a particular sexual practice, but as a form of political struggle — a challenge to the institution of heterosexuality and a form of resistance to patriarchal relations.'" - Dianne Richardson in 2000.
That's feminism now? Well, yes, it is. And try saying homosexuality "is seen not as an individual preference, something we are born like or gradually develop into, but as a socially constructed institution" and watch how fast you're branded a homophobic bigot.
In the insane world of gender abolition intersectionalism, normal sexual relations is seen as an oppressive ideology. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a cult which maintains everything is political believes simply being a man defaults to an ideology, as does being white, or accidental skewed demographics, but only white, straight and male ones. Given the oppressive nature intersectionalists believe springs from those things, we are left with the daffy premise that nature itself is a patriarchal ideology that amounts to an evil dictatorship bent on suppressing the true and noble nature of women, especially non-white gay women. Indeed many radical intersectionalists believe the true nature of women not only defaults to gay but is a requirement to truly qualify as a feminist. As you will see from the quotes I cite from the very heart of its institutions, these themes are echoed within the core SFF community again and again, ranging from ardent intersectionalists to others (mostly men) who repeat the most bizarre dogmas of intersectionalism without even being aware such a thing exists or where their rhetoric comes from. It shouldn't come as a surprise that such a cult at once maintains the mutually exclusive views that lesbianism is a question of choice as well as an immutable characteristic one is born into. Intersectionalism considers the idea of a cure for being gay ridiculous bigotry while they suggest that very thing themselves with their rhetoric about lesbianism and the idea heterosexuality is a social construct. The truth is radical gay feminists openly admit sexuality can, is and should be chosen.
Feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote a seminal book on radical feminism published in 1970 titled The Dialectics of Sex. On pg. 11 she writes "... the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supercede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labor would be ended by the elimination of labor altogether (cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken."
On pg. 56 Firestone adds "... to eliminate the incest taboo we would have to eliminate the family and sexuality as it is now structured. Not such a bad idea."
The fact all this insanity in the core SFF community represents a lesbian activist ideology that itself can at maximum only claim to speak for 2% of the U.S. population is freakish. Paring that down in terms of actual folks participating in promoting intersectionalism is easily statistical zero. In short, the vast majority of lesbians probably don't care about intersectionalism and the insane views of gender feminists.
It's true intersectionalism has many white male and female adherents, but it's evident from the rhetoric the majority of those use they are unaware of the true depths of the ideology they push or even its true form at all. Instead they seem to be willing to accept at face value that oppression exists without delving into what a gender feminist means by oppression, which can be almost anything, even English.
Read what the people at the SFF Strange Horizons webzine consider important in this "The Diverse Editors List." It is a must read of as a bizarre example of sheer obsession with race and sex and the "underrepresented," a word of considerable Orwellian gibberish. The list represents the typical race to the bottom to see who has the most intersections of oppressions who then rise to the top rung in this daffy upside-down world all about the rockets and dragons and the literature. The fact they call the list "Diverse" only adds to the Orwellian stink. #SegregationIsDiversity. Their diversity is as shallow thin as plastic wrap. This is how you spell "obsession":
"2. Underrepresented genders and sexualities
"34 people (60.7%) identified as a member of at least one of the QUILTBAG groups. Regarding sexual orientation, 15 of them mentioned 'queer,' 12 'bisexual,' 3 'gay,', 2 'asexual' and 1-1 'lesbian' and 'pansexual' each. (The numbers do not add up in this category and the following one because one person could use one or more of these terms.) 14 people (25%) specified they were non-cis or non-binary gendered; there were 10 mentions of 'genderqueer', 2 of 'agender' or 'neutrois', 2 of 'genderfluid' and 1 of 'trans* man' and 'trans woman' each.
"Out of all respondents, 24 (42.9%) referred to themselves as a 'woman' or similarly feminine-gendered term (Filipina, Latina). This probably underestimates the number of women among the participants, because some cis straight women (and men!) did not specify their gender, and some people who identify as a variety of genders including 'woman' only used a more general term: usually 'genderqueer'. To circumvent this issue, I also created a category of 'underrepresented genders' - only genders, not sexual orientations. This category contained 41 people of the 56 (73.2%)!"
But obsession isn't the main problem with this movement. Destroying the means to make art isn't in itself hateful. The main problem is the sheer disdain and sociopathy these people have for straight white men and which they hide behind the laughable idea they are being targeted and oppressed.
And it's the mainstreaming of this sick ideology that is so sad. Even pop singer Taylor Swift claims "Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born," though - like many social justice warriors in core SFF - you can bet money the idea she knows the origins of that hovers around 0%.
*
"Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices." - radical feminist Marilyn Frye
"The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist." - Sheila Cronan, January, 1988 issue of the N.O.W. Times
"sexuality is the dynamic of control by which male dominance... maintains and defines male supremacy as a political system." - "Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: Pleasure under Patriarchy," Catherine A. MacKinnon, Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Jan., 1989), pp. 314-346.
"Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice." - Ti-Grace Atkinson quoted by Ann Koedt, author of Chicago Women's Liberation Union pamphlet, "Lesbianism and Feminism," 1971; Stevi Jackson, Sue Scott, Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader, Columbia University Press, 1996
Don't for one minute think I am cherry-picking lunatics from the fringe of this movement. The voices I cite are front and center and are respected career academics at schools across America and in many cases seminal iconic influences. As you'll see, in the SFF community, Twitter is the comments section for posts no one ever wrote, things that never happened and positions no one takes. In core SFF, Twitter is nothing more than straw man scare quotes multiplied into infinity by crass racism, sexism, profiling and supremacy, slandering straight white men and discriminating against them based on the same protocols as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The only way to fight these moronic sociopathic lies, sophomoric trigger warnings and micro aggressions is to do what journalist Heather Mac Donald calls "delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement."
The scam in play and one which benefits the bigoted and fools the naive is that the so-called "social justice" movement has come to associate identity with the concept of right and wrong itself. Within intersectionalism, it is not events, not actual systems and institutions that matter but one's skin and sex. Being a woman, non-white or homosexual in and of themselves define anti-oppression. Being a straight white male defines oppression. This is a holdover from the days when there were actual systems and institutions that were oppressive defined by laws and quotas. The transference has happened because gender feminism falsely claims to be a continuation of equal rights feminism and the anti-white element claims to be acting under a "New Jim Crow" and even an actual white supremacy. Both those claims are false and typify the whole conflict between identity vs. principle. The idea merely being a man or white each in and of themselves constitutes an oppressive Jim Crow-like structure is lunatic, especially since it is spread out not only globally but far back in time. In the case of this imagined oppressive patriarchy it stretches back into recent pre-history.
*
"All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics." - Southern Poverty Law Center.
As you read this book, keep that quote in mind, and pay close attention to how many people I quote in this book are well-placed in SFF's core institutions. Orwell's lesson of 1984, which was essentially that, for example, a thing like the KKK will come at you unaware if you have perceptual blind spots that are vulnerable to semantics (rearranging the meanings of words) and shallow appearances, has come to pass in SFF.
Orwell's novel is frequently misunderstood as a warning against fascism or totalitarianism but such things plainly existed already and there was no reason to engage in a near-future perceptual shift that moves the playing field to England. The only reason to do that is to warn how a thing comes at you, not the thing itself. Orwell is talking about the mainstreaming of hate speech under a guise of nobility and from a direction one least expects it. He needed to engage a future scenario to make that slippery slope argument. The intersectional movement in SFF is a pitch perfect demonstration of Orwell's plea to being societally aware of perceptual traps. When you have an unprincipled doublethinking rabble-rouser widely looked up to in the SFF community who writes "It's that tolerance that disturbs me," there's trouble coming. The simple reason for that is this movement in SFF maintains that racial incitement is wrong... except when it's not. It depends is not exactly a binding principle one can pass onto one's children, especially when what it depends upon is determined by "punching up" moving goalposts created by a sociopathic ideology of hate in such a way its target can never quite kick a field goal through them.
Author Daphne Patai in The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (1984) maintains Orwell "overestimates the value of Newspeak as a static language of repression, for much more likely is the slow distortion of language that complements an entire ideology; a phrase here, a word there." In the end, whether such semantic gibberish emerges full-blown like Esperanto or is slid into blind spots over slow years is not the point; how much it is resorted to in order to distort reality is.
SFF's PC brigade worships identity over principle, the classic sign of racists and bigots. Principle and identity don't mix - they are oil and water. A baseball umpire and law operate under principles. Modern politically correct SFF core fandom operates under a hierarchy of racial and sexual identities; it is a virtual religious inquisition and your choice is to be either the correct racial and sexual identity or apologize for not being so. In the contemporary SFF community, your very skin has been politicized and mortgaged to the hilt. This book is not about people who violate my standards and principles, though they do - it is about people who set standards and then routinely violate them.
In the insane world of PC feminism, their rules often conflict, as is to be expected in a cult which uses a hierarchy of identities rather than ideas. A Second Wave gender feminist like Kate Millett has no racial component to her ideology and so has no problem writing in the 2000 preface of her book Sexual Politics "Fundamentalist Christianity constantly thwarts feminism, and fundamentalist Islam has built its entire political program on a new subjection of women." A new Third Wave racialist intersectionalist can't and won't do that because of a perceived (falsely) racial element in regard to Islam, even to the point a feminist SF convention like WisCon throwing out Guest of Honor Elizabeth Moon over her writing a piece about Islam and replacing her with a black intersectionalist like Nissi Shawl. Why should we be surprised an ideology that is intellectually insane sees women-hatred in the West in cloud formations while defending a religion that has discrimination against women embedded in its very ideology and in cultural custom and practice?
*
Here is the short version of the above. Once you understand this, you'll be able to read these people like an open book.
First truism: The fundamental ideology of Social Justice Warriors is '60s-'70s radical lesbian feminism, a splinter of the so-called "Second Wave" of the feminist movement. Around 1990 race (and therefore also colonialism) was added, the so-called "Third Wave," also called "intersectionalism." There is absolutely no doubt of this first truism. I have no way of knowing but I would guess at least a simple majority of social justice crusaders are unaware of the origins of their own adopted core ideology.
Second truism: There are two fundamental beliefs that drive gender feminism. The first is the idea that heterosexuality - the "normative" - is oppressive to lesbian feminists in both a real discriminatory sense, but also the sense of moral judgments. These radicals extend that out to mean all women, e.g., the Patriarchy, marriage, etc.
That ties in with what's next. The second belief is the important one: the "performative." Although radical feminists believe it is bigoted to talk about a cure for lesbianism, the core belief of radical feminism is that heterosexuality must be cured. When that is accomplished, all will be well. The "performative" refers to the idea that heterosexuality is literally a performance; a social, false and artificial construct. The self-contradiction inherent in this thinking doesn't seem to faze this ideology; why then isn't lesbianism false? So heterosexuals and men by default are both "privileged" and oppressors.
With the addition of race, that became "white privilege." "White privilege" was first promoted by Robin Morgan in her 1970 anthology of essays Sisterhood Is Powerful, and also later in the '70s by influential gay feminist Charlotte Bunch, Andrea Dworkin, and black gay feminist Audre Lorde but really came into it's own around 1990 with Rebecca Walker (daughter of Color of Purple Walker) and with Kimberle's Crenshaw's Critical (legal) Race Theory addition and also Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." Judith Butler's hugely influential book Gender Trouble, which is about the French Queer Theory behind all this, also came out in 1990. There you have it in a nutshell.
"Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett's extraordinary book Sexual Politics, women did not think of themselves as oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted, still do not. But the women's movement as a radical liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the appearance of those two books." - Andrea Dworkin in the introduction to her 1974 book Woman Hating.
The Morgan anthology included the Redstockings Manifesto which includes this: "All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women... We call on all men to give up their male privilege and support women's liberation in the interest of our humanity and their own."
"Let's run it on down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It just could make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and white women–with men relating to that as best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant, or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or 'coin' as well). Goodbye to all that." - Robin Morgan, "Goodbye to All That", 1970
"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." - 'Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?', spring 1973, keynote address to West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, printed in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 178." - Robin Morgan
"All men benefit from structural sexism. Men bragging about moderate views doesn’t make them intelligent, it makes them unaware of privilege." - feminist video game developer Brianna Wu of Gamergate fame
This ideology sees itself as an analogy to Jim Crow and straight white men the oppressor. Intersectionalism openly calls for the destruction of gender distinctions, the nuclear family, our current gov't, the church, heterosexuality itself, marriage, capitalism and paring down the white majority in all arenas, including as a nation. Radical feminism's icons say that right out in quote after quote, and have done so for 50 years. To say this cult is implacably hostile, aggressive, racist, sexist and supremacist is accurate. Every single word an intersectionalist says should make perfect sense to you now. Here is as good a summation as any you'll find:
"Gender creates the differences between the sexes. It celebrates inequality and it glamorizes the subordinate status of females - therefore gender is the embodiment of sexism. Without gender, we’d be androgynous in terms of fashion, and it would be much more difficult to notice one’s sex at first glance. How do groups of people oppress other groups if they aren’t able to tell themselves apart from the other? Gender’s intended purpose is to clearly mark the subordinate class from the privileged class."
In French Queer Theory gender is a fictional and artificial cultural construct of the patriarchy. There's also this:
"'I am a radfem. I want women’s liberation and the destruction of patriarchy. . . . I think men who do not support feminists are misogynists. I am a gender abolitionist because gender is a social construct that oppresses everyone.'"
The idea if we all dressed like hockey goalies with voice-boxes to disguise ourselves would end all oppression is too deliciously mad for words. So-called gender "performance" such as mascara, bustles, rolling a pack of Marlboros into a t-shirt sleeve, tight pants or high heels do not replace gender or disguise it but enhance it. If we all ran around naked we wouldn't default to androgyny or eliminate what these madwomen call a "patriarchy" but remain the same. Gender is not a "social construct," it is a socially constructed flourish which ranges from powdered wigs to pantaloons but which always says the same thing as creatures slaved to our biology. There is no solution or semantic or intellectual wiggling around this, no matter how profound the passion of lesbian ideologues. Queer Theory essentially cherry-picks men like Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss and the views of other European intellectuals about subjects like incest and its effect on the the idea of the exchange of women in kinship marriages as a medium of barter emerging from pre-history to provide a fake rationalization of sexuality that deviates from the norm. The fact those intellectuals themselves seem to have cherry-picked what they wanted to see from facile studies of primitive tribes doesn't seem to enter into it. What radical feminists prize is the pseudo-academic justifications for their obsession with crossing the gap being nature in culture in a way most convenient to themselves. Water is never quite wet in such a world.
*
Political correctness began in America as an informally situated world view of cultural relativism which defined the world, and whose moral ethos is based on, a hierarchy of identity (race, sex), rather than egalitarian principles - identity, not principle, determines right from wrong. PC has had a strange, twisty, and accidental evolution in America, but it can today at times to be seen to be a virtual ideology, and one that is constantly chasing its own splashes.
It should not be thought intersectional gender feminism is solely responsible for the climate we see in SFF today. One need only read Christopher Hitchens' 1993 review of Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint to see that. However intersectional gender feminism is ideally suited to take up the loose reins of PC, gather them together, and exploit them under a single one-stop shopping ideology of oppression dynamics. Intersectionalism is a perfect storm of an ideology perfect for its time, a time of ruthlessly using the changing demographics of America for its own purposes.
Basically PC is a form of lying - a denial of reality politically put at the service of people who heavily identify with what they see as history's also-rans: the oppressed, the so-called marginalized. More properly put, the identity-based cultural relativism of PC acts more as an enabler and breeding ground which empowers the shifting realities of things like Qutbism, gender intersectionalism and Critical Race Theory than as an expression of those things themselves. The confusion lies in "PC" sometimes being used as an interchangeable term to express the common currents or agendas of such movements as a type of con game. I say con game because each of those three ideologies shares the commonality of reconciling their own failures and estrangements with reality by resorting to blame. Those failures became someone else’s oppression and lack of morality. PC is therefore a belief in collective guilt and punishment contrasted with collective protection and innocence.
The sum total of that equals straight, white, male and Western. The difference between oppression and blame is the difference between Jim Crow and racial "microaggressions." These ideologies are always a form of bigotry and resentments, but are passed off as anti-oppression movements which are then seamlessly piggy-backed onto and mainstreamed into actual past women’s and civil rights or anti-colonialism movements. That's the con game. Within all three examples, the aggressive bigotry of its proponents is foisted off onto millions of others as oppressors, and that is how you have the Orwellian prospect of, for example, the anti-racist racist.
It's not hard to figure out that in the dynamic driving an ideology dedicated to the idea of the oppression of gay non-white women the unrelenting focus of its obsession will be straight white men. In SFF, gender feminists who've taken up this cause pull no punches in letting us know "If your writing is full of white men, it’s shitty writing" in a post that laughingly leads with the word used as the great hate-filled disguise of the Trojan Horse of this movement, the word "diverse." Were the ideological movement in SFF not centered around lesbian feminist ideology, there would not be so much conspicuous rhetoric devoted to seeing heterosexuality and men in a negative light. It makes no sense for a rights-oriented movement to speak in such terms.
That is usually accompanied by false narratives such as the following:
The words "uncomfortable" and "marginalized" are used almost in a scientific sense, as if they are self-evident truths, though the idea a literary movement like SFF displays or ever has displayed such truths is laughable. The examples the SFF's defamatory gender feminists use are more themselves examples of marginalization and discomfort than any proof they can show, since those examples always amount to portraying straight white men as racist, women-hating homophobes. As always with gender feminists, their use of a word like "toxic" simply amounts to men or anyone who pushes back against their daffy theories and thin-skinned personas. As for doors being "solidly closed," that's a straight up falsehood and explains an awful lot about the imagined oppressions of gender feminists. People observably using negative racial and sexual profilings and stereotypes to combat those things when they can't show anything like that aside from themselves is plain goofy. The truth about SFF "historically" is the same truth as that which drives Field and Stream and Cosmopolitan Magazines. It has nothing to do with white heterosexual supremacy or exclusion. Someone somewhere is always a minority when it comes to marketing. That doesn't mean they've been "marginalized." People with agendas often point to skewed demographies to make accusations, and there are always skewed demographies - everywhere you look.
As of today, PC is an interchangeable term - especially in the SFF community - with third wave (intersectionalist) gender feminism, which is a far more accurate and applicable though unwieldy term. The single never-shifting focus of intersectionalism's hatreds is the now famous straight white male.
In the same way white supremacists might hide within contemporary Confederate historical societies which reenact battles, and anti-Semites hide within anti-Zionism, so too do intersectional gender feminists hide within the Civil Rights, women's rights and gay rights movements. In fact intersectionalists are racist, sexist supremacists. It is not surprising naive middle-class do-gooders in SFF have been fooled by this supremacist and sociopathic movement that sells itself as an anti-oppression movement. Intersectionalists have had decades to perfect their supremacist rhetoric into something that makes their bigoted and even paranoid accusations sound noble. Neither should it surprise anyone that this overall movement within SFF is comprised of bigots and their "allies," since that is the natural outcome of mainstreaming hate into a public arena with its share of gullible people.
What is surprising is that those naive do-gooder allies never question the origins of and motivations behind things like "white privilege," "rape culture," "heteronormative" and the "male gaze." The bottom line is the ridiculous idea the SFF community is in need of an "anti-oppression" movement fighting against a kind of Jim Crow and where the oppressor is mysteriously always a straight white male should make light bulbs go off but never does. This anti-non-white, anti-women and anti-gay oppression within SFF is a fabrication that perfectly serves the purposes of a cult that has unreasoning resentments against whites, men and heterosexuals and encourages its naive middle class allies to man the barricades. Without those naive allies (useful idiots really) manning those barricades and lending this bigoted movement an air of mainstream normalcy and credibility and acting as a front as it were, intersectionalism never could've sunk its roots so deeply in the core SFF community.
Within gender feminism, heterosexual men are inferior and oppressors, period; it is nothing more than a cult of female worship. One is considered much more the oppressor if you're white. In fact non-white gender feminism looks down on its white allies as well. Within this anti-oppression movement in SFF, the voice of non-white and gay men is minimal, which should be another clue as to what is going on. To whatever extent they exist they also have taken up intersectional cant, not that of one that is at once gay and male. In fact such a separate movement doesn't even exist. Articles at Time Magazine titled "Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture" may explain why.
Intersectionalism within SFF is often portrayed as liberal vs. conservative thought, but this is fakery. This is intersectionalism's depraved focus on straight white men - period. Intersectionalism's binaries are men vs. women, whites vs. non-whites, and gays vs. straights. This is a hatred of one's very biological existence. Any pushback against this very specific ideology is portrayed as the harassment of women, or sexism.
"Terms that are opposite in meaning thus strengthen each other through their opposition." - "'Nazi Gods' and 'Jewish Devils': The Dehumanizing Rhetoric of Nazi Propaganda" [5]
"'There is no word whose power to move is more implicitly trusted than 'progressive'.'" [6]
Morality is distributed accordingly and that is where intersectionality crosses from the egalitarianism of the first wave and part of the second wave into out and out supremacist thought, no different in principle than the white supremacy intersectionalism supposedly opposes. The fakery involved is intersectionalism's successful pose as a voice which speaks for all women, all gay folks, all non-whites and all liberals. Intersectionalists within SFF also claim the word "feminism." While it is not true feminists outside the SFF community are inevitably intersectionalists, virtually every person within SFF who claims the word "feminist" is in fact an intersectionalist. And the tip off there is this continual thing about "straight white guys," which is not only intersectionalism 101, but in the same way the Jews and the blacks is neo-Nazism 101.
That brings us to one of the internet's more stupid and empty internet memes: Godwin's Law. The reason Godwin's Law is moronic is because it unknowingly stipulates only Nazis will ever be racial supremacists, rather than seeing this as a shared human failing - an intellectual space that has nothing to do with a specific race or sex, country or culture. It's not a surprise identity addicts dote on Godwin's Law; such people have neither principles nor imaginations. In fact in a stunning surprise, comparing one thing to another is helpful. Unsurprisingly, the old school of SF made its bones playing with such principled perceptual shifts shorn of identity. Godwin's Law also implies that the result of hate speech either results in flat out genocide or nothing at all. There is nothing in between, so one must never use an example of the mechanisms of hate speech Nazis used. In short Godwin's Law in actual practice serves to dismiss someone as hysterical.
Third Wave Intersectionalism is basically a melding of Derrick Bell's Critical Race Theory of the 1980s and the Second Wave Lesbian Activist Gender Abolition Feminism that began in the late 1960s typified by Kate Millet or Shulamith Firestone. To say the latter culture was and is insane is an understatement once one starts to read their writings. It's pretty clear that the culture war in SFF and in this country is a result of a fundamental shift from principle being behind law and morality to having identity determining morality. That of course is a natural multiplier from one criminal to millions at a go. It is the same shift in Nazi Germany that saw one Jew going to prison for burglary to all Jews going. The fact intersectionalists talk about their gender identity theories of "biological fixity" like a science makes it all the more absurd. The simple reason for that is none of these academics are scientists and nor are the intersectionalists in SFF. They see what they want to see through the power of sheer madness, obsession and narcissism, as well as the willful throwing aside of anything resembling a principled and fair moral ethos. With these people, you can forget law except inasmuch as it benefits them. Meanwhile there is "the immense task of replacing all the misogynist, genocidal, biocidal practices men have ordered our society with for eons." That's just for starters: "the very first measure to adopt is to take all men out of all positions of decision-making immediately, and actually out of any kind of social, professional position whatsoever." That quote is on the fringe, even for nutty intersectionalists, but not as much as one may think.
"'Patriarchy, although it takes different forms in different cultures, always depends on the ability of men to control women through heterosexuality...' - Joyce Trebilcot"
This is more about Trebilcot from the blog of Robert McCain where he quotes a selection from an essay by Trebilcot titled "Craziness as a Source of Separatism" from a 1988 book For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology.
"I begin with a brief description of the events I label 'being crazy.' I am remembering my life of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was in my late twenties. . . . There were two stages. First, intrusion. Men — male voices — would overhear my thoughts and want to get in. The second stage was control. The invaders not only wanted to get in, they wanted to take me over once they were in . . . This then is the core of the craziness — invasion and control, and the threat of invasion and control."
As you can see from quotes like that, intersectional gender feminism is based on a core of academic activists who have turned their psychotic breaks with reality into a cogent ideology to explain, reconcile and justify those breaks. Let's not forget iconic gay feminist Audre Lorde "had been in psychotherapy for thirty years."
It's no surprise paranoiacs with mental health issues centered around gender issues see the normal world as one giant conspiracy theory meant to specifically single them out and discomfit them. It's no surprise they see normal sex, healthy relationships and families in the worst possible light. By posing as equality feminists, this amalgam of racists and gender supremacists hide within traditional anti-oppression narratives that in fact have little to do with them. In the delicate reality of an intersectionalism full of trigger warnings, oppression can and does mean anything, most often things that are trivial or mad to the point of disbelief. Despite that, this core of academics have been extremely successful in mainstreaming their madness directly into the heart of SF with the help of some unbelievably naive people. And of course what that means is that otherwise normal but naive people are acting as conduits for sociopathic behaviors. Does that sound familiar? It should.
So how does one identify this fakery in SFF? It's simple: people who go out of their way to obsessively single out humans as white, straight, and male and profile them negatively 100% of the time are not liberals or Marxists - they are bigots hiding within liberalism, the same way anti-Semites can hide within anti-Zionism. Intersectionalists are a mirror image of white supremacist web sites which spend their days singling out Jews and black folks for special attention. Imagine that as a literary movement within SFF, change black and Jews to white male, and you have intersectionalism. Aside from the fact most intersectionalists self-identify as such, any time one hears talk of "cis-males" and "white privilege" one is sure to be listening to a gender feminist intersectionalist, which is itself a byword for racial and sexual defamation.
The reason the concept of male and white privilege gets so many people angry is because it is so obviously a concocted demonization theory cooked up by an ideology that is hostile to whites and men. All demonization theories are purposeful one-way streets constructed so that some form of implied immorality or incompetence can only affect a targeted group. In normal forms of criticism one attacks hard institutions and law backed by ideology that favors a certain group, e.g. the right to vote, Jim Crow. In demonization theory, the targeted group is itself treated as an ideology and institution, with privilege based on what they were the day they were born, as if they are an unfair law. One can change laws and institutions, one can never change one's skin or sex. The end result is a targeted group is forced to confess to their sins as best they can while silently enduring whatever discrimination is meted out by feminists who otherwise dote on their icons like Audre Lorde who use terms like "smug whiteness" in her 1986 essay "Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting."
In the absence of laws that favor one group over the other, a healthy society criticizes individuals with actual names and by their actions. In an unhealthy society, one criticizes race and sex. The trick intersectionalists use is in maintaining that wherever whites and men are in numbers, racism and sexism are present like a natural Jim Crow-like law that follows them wherever they go - the more white men, the more racism and sexism. Any misbehavior by any one member of the targeted straight white male group is smeared onto the entire group. In normal terms, all that is usually looked at as simply people who don't like Arabs, black folks, men, etc. One black criminal becomes black crime, one Arab terrorist becomes Arab terrorism, one misbehaving white or man becomes white racism, privilege or misogyny. Terms like "smug whiteness" have no real meaning other than race hatred.
When people like intersectionalists get together and form supremacist groups and pretend their own ideology is nonexistent and that a demonization theory like white privilege is simply a natural observation of a real phenomenon, trouble follows. Any pushback against such targeted group defamation is portrayed as just more proof of racism, sexism and the presence of an ideology. That's why intersectionalists in America consistently portray any disagreement with them as "right-wing," "conservative," "reactionary," anti-women, anti-gay, anti-non-white, etc. Disagreement is hate, bigotry, racism, homophobia, and sexism. Intersectionalism has been perfecting these theories and rhetoric since radical feminism emerged in the 1960s and there is nothing casual about them. Intersectionalists, even if it is just one person, consistently maintain they speak for all non-whites, all gay folks and all women.
As you'll see later on, an anthology such as Women Destroy Science Fiction uses the word "women" to make it seem like it represents all women. In fact the Table of Contents shows the authors involved were all radical intersectional feminists, and gay far above their actual presence in larger society. To oppose or laugh at such an anthology is therefore to oppose and laugh at all women, though intersectionalists are probably close to statistical zero of all American women, not the 50% of all humans on earth that is being falsely portrayed. On top of that is the falsehood the anthology does not promote an ideology, but simply the act of existing as a woman. The built-in satire there is gender feminists depict the mere act of being a man as an ideology while themselves exhibiting every evidence of people with borderline personality disorders.
Intersectionalists lump all non-whites under the term "people of color," PoC, the better to imply an unbalanced racial dynamic that follows and benefits whites wherever they exist, and acts against PoC wherever they exist, no matter how divided by culture and continents they may be. One black lesbian feminist SFF writer therefore speaks for the most injustice and has the most credibility when it comes to speaking about oppression. It's like a cult of priestesses with a racial and gay hierarchy. It's no coincidence that intersectionalism was created to address the oppressions of black and other non-white, mostly gay women, or that such voices are considered the go-to people - the experts - in the SFF community. It is also no coincidence the low man on that totem pole is the straight white male, the human being that is a vessel into which is poured the world's and history's racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, genocide and general oppression. Of course in order to get to that place it is necessary to edit history so that colonialism appears here but not there, PoC appear here but not there, and women warriors appear here but not there, and do this but not that. In truth, Americans taking it upon themselves to provincially designate millions of people overseas as existing first and foremost as opposites to whites in a sort of proxy American-centric Jim Crow racial war is offensive and arrogant, not to mention itself racist. Who put these fools in charge of all such matters as designated race experts is for them to tell you. Intersectional logic continually opposes itself: they call fear of terrorism "Islamophobia" but a mass smear of "misogyny" somehow never equals androphobia. What is a good principle one minute is an empty principle the next. What is completely credible as a mechanism of cultural failure one day is a laughable chimera the next. It all depends on your race and sex, not on an actual binding principle. It is a form of lying.
Intersectionalism is a form of lying, where fictional myths are attached to politicized ethnic and gender identities as whole groups, and in which individual members of those groups either benefit or suffer, are puffed up or deflated - by association of race, sex and sexual expression. Intersectionalism is a form of lying because it ignores or exaggerates real world and historic events to suit positive or negative racial and gender profiling. In that fiction, intersectionalism is a false conveyance of egalitarianism meant to spare or prop up the egos and feelings of the historically oppressed in those equally false binaries: white/non-white, gay/non-gay, man/woman, First World/Third World, West/East. Those binaries are false because they distribute and withhold morality and even reality based on the unchanging characteristics of groups, not on individuals, not on culture; wrong group, wrong morality, even wrong reality. Intersectionalism is a form of lying because were it as principled as it claims to be, it would hold all humans to account, to the same standard. But in truth only the straight white male is targeted for intersectionalism's special principles. One of the most bizarre aspects of intersectionalism within the SFF community is that, though intersectionalists take no pains to hide their ideology and its actual name, or the focus of that ideology, it is virtually invisible. The fact that every winner of the 2013/4 Nebula Awards was a devout intersectionalist pushing intersectionalist literature, even bragging about no straight white men winning, fell on mostly clueless ears.
What intersectionalism does is substitute their own identities for the principles behind law and also appoint themselves prosecutor, judge and jury. In short, they are never wrong. The straight white male is never right. An Asian gay woman can (and in SFF has) say whites are as "stupid" as "buffaloes" with zero recrimination in the SFF community. A white man can (and in SFF has) say a black woman is a "half-savage" and be (and has been) booted from a literary organization. That same black woman can (and does) light up whites on a daily basis via Twitter and have four Nebula nominations to show for it.
"Jessica ValentiVerified account @JessicaValenti I trust women."
Why not just say "I trust whites"? One of the funniest and most revealing things about a dumbed down version of radical feminists like Valenti is they'll often portray anyone (even women) as Men's Rights Activists (MRAs) in a way where the insult and immorality attached to the idea is obvious. The just as obvious fact is that such feminists are looking in a mirror, and so insulting an denouncing themselves.
That is not a system of rules, morality or ethics but willful ignorance, lack of fair play and discrimination. In a principled forum, either both skate or both suffer. Core SFF today is not a principled forum but backed by a neo-KKK orthodoxy, and virtually every convention, webzine, literary organization, core author, and blogger in SFF plays by these non-rules, either falling into compliance by their own stupidity or, in an act of cowardice, by allowing themselves to be bullied. If you don't play by these rules, you're out, at least out of the core SFF community, and it is as simple as that. If you do play by the rules, you may be thrown some crumbs, but if the 2013 and '14 Awards season are any indicator, pickings will be slim for the identity on the wrong side of history and everything else.
The racist and sexually insulting comments within SFF in terms of authors and influential bloggers are made almost exclusively by intersectionalists and their supporters from WITHIN core SFF institutions, not anonymous nobodies on the fringe. That is not an opinion but a matter of public record. The number of racist comments by so-called anti-racists outnumbers those of so-called misogynist racists by many times. Intersectionalists get away with this by the simple expedient of promoting the idea there is no racial and sexually neutral definition for bigotry, racism, sexism and supremacy because of power differentials:
Good-bye equal protection. Culture creates laws, and left unchecked, it's only a matter of time before the overturn of reason and fair play we've seen in core SFF is reflected in mainstream American jurisprudence where the same mechanism is also taking hold.
There's your equality; a gender feminist - Anita Sarkeesian - in that quote who has no understanding of equal protection. How are you going to ride that into a future of justice, law and order? And does this marginalize the racism of American neo-Nazis because they themselves have been marginalized? Who keeps racist power scores? Does one's racism ebb and flow according to job title or political office - stardom, poverty? Are you less a racist between jobs?
Intersectionalists also construct sexism and racism by the simple expedient of redefining it to mean almost anything, such as sexism and even "misogyny" embedded in the English language itself or racial "micro-aggressions." In a fascinating insight into how self-serving intersectionalists think, hatred itself or my rights become a matter of "pedantry," and "heterophobia, or cisphobia" hypotheticals.
Radical feminists play on the sympathies of well-meaning people by constructing artful oppressions they coincidentally can never document enacted by people they can never name. By simply saying the entire world is racist and sexist to the benefit of white male heterosexuals, there really is no need to name names. The straight white man is guilty by virtue of skin, sex and "privilege" and his racial and sexual opposite conversely oppressed and innocent in the same unprincipled whirly-gig of idiocy.
Aside from its obvious immorality, the truth is that bigotry is self-limiting when it comes to solutions because it stipulates solving a problem requires merely getting Arabs, Jews, blacks or whites to stop acting like Arabs, Jews, blacks or whites. In other words if you decide straight white men are the problem no other solutions will ever occur to you.
If one limits oneself only to Nebula and Hugo Award nominees during this last 5 years of the upsurge of intersectionalism, it is not an exaggeration to say the racist insults and demonization from those who follow PC intersectional orthodoxy outnumbers their imaginary opposites by 100 to 1. The con game sociopathic radical gay feminist theory is playing in the SFF community is blatant and enormous, and they have been just as blatantly and enormously successful at achieving immunity and even sympathy for their unbridled bigotry while SFF struggles daily to escape the imaginary shackles of Jim Crow.
There is nothing that reveals intersectionalism as a racist, sexist, supremacist cult more than it's distribution of morality according to race and sex. In intersectionalism misogyny is as pervasive as misandry is a UFO sighting to be laughed at. Homophobia is as present as heterophobia never is. There is Islamophobia in big bundles despite a massive trend of terrorist attacks, but no such thing as Christianphobia despite an utter lack of them. White people are as racist as non-whites never are. The idea of the failings of a stipulated white culture that can't be even shown to exist is as fully embraced as the idea black culture could experience such a failure is not only summarily dismissed, but dismissed as racist. Men are never harassed and nor is there such a thing as male-bashing; there is only women-bashing. While an SFF author like Daniel Jose Older will write at The Guardian that "Lovecraft peopled his fiction with hordes of swarthy, child-killing and abjectly stupid black and brown people, while women are almost non-existent," one can see that exact mechanism playing out in non-fiction social media of the PC in SFF everyday, as well as a disdainful analogy to that together with an obsession with race in Older's own fiction. The difference is that social media is filled with hordes of genocidal colonialist, women-hating and genocidal white men that are proudly displayed as not present in anthologies, awards and one's reading habits, as you will see later on. With his usual lack of self-awareness, Older adds "My SFF community is mostly black and brown..."
In short, intersectionalism is everything it claims for others. It is a thing of childish clownishness and the faith of bigotry, not a thing a thinking adult can take seriously.
[5] Sutter
[6] Kelly M. Sutter citing R.M. Weaver (1985). "The ethics of rhetoric."
*
There has been an increasing onset of political correctness in SF in this latter era, especially since 2009, and that is the main focus of this book. Conformity and a lack of creativity and vision are one thing - and that has certainly played its part in the demise of SF - burning literature is another. The presence of persistent racial and gender animus (under a rubric of anti-bigotry) has been so great as to often rise to the level of hate speech. For that to happen to a genre with the legacy and warnings of George Orwell in his novel 1984, and with a principled liberal tradition within SF once years ahead of mainstream society is disturbing. However, that liberal tradition is seen by the politically correct of today as "promoting hetero/cis-normative sexist and racist ideas." Traditional mid-century liberalism and even anti-defamation have become "right-wing" and "conservative," even "bigotry."
Robert Heinlein insisting to his publisher on diversity in one of his novels to the point of writing an or-else "I will not do business with such a firm," is met by the predictable Tor.com and Mitch Wagner with "let’s keep in mind what’s missing from this cast: Asians; disabled people; non-Americans of any kind; lesbians, gays, and the transgendered; Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or representatives of the other major world religions."
Ahead of his time magically becomes behind the times by a cult which seems certain by virtue of smug condescension they would've been on the right side of every event in history from deserting Cortes and going over to the Aztecs to being a cavalryman who would've shot Custer in the back of the head. The truth is Wagner not only risked nothing in his post but ingratiates himself within SFF. Heinlein on the other hand took on genuine career and financial risk. At Tor, that is reversed in a manner that is disingenuous at best.
When you read award-nominated SF author Charles Stross write in the comments of that Tor.com Heinlein piece "there's no equivalent of the American Black experience of abduction and systematic dehumanization with its subsequent (and incomplete) progress towards full civil parity," it is clear the man has never even read a history book, let alone got to the point of fantasizing about killing Cortes in his sleep. It is yet another fascinating insight into the mind of PC water-carriers and how they throw a provincial American-centric net of Jim Crow over history as often as they yank it away according to a racial agenda.
What one can admire about a water carrier like Stross is his ability to write "John W. Campbell was an obnoxious racist (consider that Heinlein wrote 'Fifth Column' [actually 'Sixth Column'] to an outline drafted by Campbell and toned down the racist/eliminationist invective against the Yellow Peril!)" The fact the Japanese would actually bomb Pearl Harbor, attack Wake Island, invade the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaysia amidst many other military offensives beginning less than a year later is typical of the lack of awareness of any intersectionalist, all of whom agree reality itself is racist. Of course we could always imagine John Campbell's racism itself caused WW II. Only an intersectionalist could pretend the War in the Pacific never happened because it looks bad on any decent civilization's white privilege resume to be at once correct and successful. It reminds me of dead cartoonists who wrote about the violent intolerance of Islam subsequently killed by said Islamists and accused of either death by suicide or death by causes unknown. It's no coincidence Stross would write something like this about derailing a conversation: "If this was a discussion of feminism, it'd be 'mansplaining'." The implication there is if a woman derailed a talk about building suspension bridges it'd be what... womansplaining? But somehow, it never is - not in intersectionalism. Principle which rightly turns things on their heads is tabu in feminism. When Stross writes about "highly offensive slurs based on a perceived group identity" you know you've crawled all the way down an intersectionalist rabbit hole.
The term "progressive" has been hijacked to mean, in the case of today's core SF community, whatever the far extreme of radical gender feminism decides is best for itself, which falsely becomes what is best for all women, America, and even the world. In truth we're talking about nothing more than parochial addled racism and sexism repackaged as new and improved and now under new management by a supremacist cult.
Figuring out the source of all the hostility and crusading zeal in SFF was a matter of tracking the repetitive semantics and themes back to their ideological source. That journey takes one down through layers of thought blithely termed "liberalism" and then "political correctness" and then "feminism" and "anti-racism" to something quite weird, specific and startling. In terms of 2014, probably the strain of feminism that most closely resembles that adhered to by SFF's community would be something like The Feminist Wire, with its emphasis on non-white and gay women. It's probably safe to assume most of the people in SFF who support the broad goals, concerns and ideology of that particular branch of feminism are unaware of its specificity and only see a bowdlerized version stripped of its ideology and origins reduced to anti-racism and anti-sexism but with the hostility, paranoia, sociopathy and supremacy intact. That is most certainly the reason for the constant dissonance and Orwellian contradictions with reality we see due to adopting a thing like one wears a Che Guevara t-shirt rather than knowing anything about Guevara and his ideology itself.
Radical gender feminism has been so seamlessly blended with and mainstreamed into modern political thought that many well-meaning so-called "allies" are completely unaware of the origins of the very ideology they promote. To the merely politically correct, privilege and gender-fluidity issues are not seen as coming from their true source such as feminists like Audre Lorde, Kate Millett, Judith Butler, Charlotte Bunch, or Simone de Beauvoir. Instead they go from gender feminist origins through a less threatening lazy sieve of a "feminist and anti-racism activist" like Peggy McIntosh, hazily and falsely seen as emerging from the civil and equal rights women's movement and from simple observation.
From there Beauvoir to McIntosh continues on to something like "On Racism and White Privilege" at a Southern Poverty Law Center "Teaching Tolerance" project site. There, the very similar wording from Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1988) is used but uncredited, and McIntosh's name nowhere to be found, so that even the tamer end of the gender feminist origins of white privilege disappear. That is the very definition of mainstreaming, and in this case mainstreaming hate speech, ironically at an organization dedicated to opposing hate speech. The text of this post (excerpted from a book) is spread all over the internet.
Compare these sentences:
"When I cut my finger and go to my school or office’s first aid kit, the flesh-colored band-aid generally matches my skin tone." - from White Privilege: The Perks, Teaching Tolerance
"I can chose blemish cover or bandages in 'flesh' color and have them more or less match my skin." - Peggy McIntosh, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
"When I buy hair care products in a grocery store or drug store, my shampoos and conditioners are in the aisle and section labeled 'hair care' and not in a separate section for 'ethnic products.'" - from White Privilege: The Perks, Teaching Tolerance
"I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair." - Peggy McIntosh, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
"My skin color does not work against me in terms of how people perceive my financial responsibility, style of dress, public speaking skills, or job performance." - from White Privilege: The Advantages, Teaching Tolerance
"I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do." - Peggy McIntosh, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
"People do not assume that I got where I am professionally because of my race (or because of affirmative action programs)." White Privilege: The Advantages, Teaching Tolerance
"I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race." - Peggy McIntosh, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
I'm not sure how daffy one has to be to claim oppression because you can't find peanut butter and sliced bread in Cairo, Egypt today or 8 Diagram Pole Fighter starring Gordon Liu in a video rental in Minneapolis in 1990 or watch the Superbowl in Rio de Janeiro in 1985. Among radical feminists, belaboring the obvious and calling it insight into systemic oppression is par for the course, with the addition only the second of those 3 is seen as a problem. The mindless addiction to diversity from gender feminists is never applied anywhere but in their own preserves, leaving them immune to the eye-blinking irony of their own concepts of "privilege." Should I complain if I move to India and can't get a cheeseburger as easily as New York or can't find pork chops in Egypt? There is nothing but empty-headed parochial animosity behind the poorly thought out concepts feminism considers an epiphany. If one wants to watch Flamengo play Palmeiras live in Des Moines you're just going to have to get over it; you can't.
Next stop along this road is Christmas toys and "No Gender December," a thing I mention later on. By this time we're a long way from queer theory and de Beauvoir and her notion "One is not born a woman." Judith Butler's gender troubles and "performative" sexuality is distant. Dworkin's madness not even a memory. Foucault and his "deployment of sexuality" is invisible and the totality of their voices are barely heard whispers, if heard at all. And yet the bottom line goal of separating men from morality and women from their humanity and the theory which separates each from their sexuality and empowers that is still in place. And so you come to an article called "Son of a Geek" in the Seattle Daily News. There a women writes her soon to be born son will emerge in a "gender war" and that in his future "his privilege allows him to ignore injustice—or think that he can ignore it. But sexism is still a threat to him, in that he could very well become a perpetrator of it." The writer dotes on the idea of a young man being an "ally to women in the community," though there is never a hint of that working the other way round and she cluelessly finishes thinking she is in a "fight for equal rights," when her "gender war" is anything but that. She is in a Foucaultian war of gender smoothing and with an agenda at stake she has no idea of, and one where biology and Mother Nature disappear into magicians's smoke.
If you want to understand how this ideology in SFF thinks, read "The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler" by Dr Geoff Boucher, PARRHESIA NUMBER 1 • 2006 • 112 – 141. You'll find the same obsessive and peculiar notions and theories about the "other" "Oppressed individuals not only factually do subvert power, they also should subvert power..." The obvious problem there is: what if you only imagine you're oppressed, as if one needed to understand an ad with a bikini is neither oppression nor hate speech. The dissonance of this feminist cult is ever present. If you actually read their essays and Twitter feeds and write about what you read, the same people who claim you get all your information from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh will suddenly berate you for not doing that. Suddenly they'll be asking why you're "stalking" them or why you're reading what you hate. Research becomes being "creepy." Aside from the fact I can't know I disagree with the material unless I read it (a favor intersectionalists won't do for the Golden Age SF they pillory by using remarks not in evidence about the field's "racism and sexism"), it never occurs to these people I have read this material because of a wider interest, spotted disturbing common denominators, and decided to connect those dots by making a case rather than making stupid assumptions about millions of people. That is not a pre-existing bias but called discovery.
Here is an example of how today's mainstream feminists carry water for a cult while being completely clueless what that water actually is or where it came from:
Marcotte's man-hating heterophobic wellspring is an "e plebneesta" secret from her that's been combed out until it seems like social justice. Since "rape" equals "men" in Marcotte's adopted ideology, her opposition to men is self-explanatory.
"Please watch this short video of @chescaleigh explaining 5 useful tips for being a good ally!" - Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency
"1# Understand your privilege
2# Listen and do your homework
3# Speak up but not over
4# You'll make mistakes! Apologize when you do
5# Ally is a verb"
When the Southern Poverty Law Center is going the Foucauldian route where they have to stop themselves "from groaning" while "a white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied appearing, employed, college-educated, never-incarcerated young man" defends his right to equal protection and not be smeared with goofy slurs straight out of the radical lesbian feminism of Audre Lorde, you know their skills are complete as it were. Such a system of "myriad" rules and laws based on self-serving racist intersectional theories of hierarchical oppressions will break this country in two. Conversations that go "we can’t stop trying to break down systems that keep only a certain type of person in power" are plain dangerous because of its dehumanizing, degrading and scapegoating rhetoric. It is the same mainstreaming of racism that has affected Jews in the past as that "certain type of person." Once one heads down this road, using "God and Devil Rhetoric," [2] and with the backing of credible public institutions, no one knows where it will lead.
White privilege resembles the "infestation metaphor (which) implies that diseases cannot exist without properly damaging or contaminating the hosts in which they reside." [3]
"By this definition, devils terms would include unprogressive, dishonest, and primitive. Furthermore, any rhetoric that uses devil terms would suggest a hindrance of progress and lack of truth. The devil terms are given their persuasive nature because of their opposition to god terms. If god terms set the highest standards of perfection, then their opposing devil terms must therefore be of the lowest quality and existence." [4]
That mechanism is a microcosm and pure essence of mainstreaming and advancing radicalist thought while camouflaging it, as well as explaining how bigotry, racism and even madness can seem to be noble and just. The mechanism implies people advancing a bigoted agenda in alliance with people who genuinely think they act in a noble cause. That latter is easy to do when the bigoted origins are stripped away.
That's because going along for the ride in the invisible back seat are insane theories of how heterosexuality is a fake construct and both it and families must be destroyed, but now re-packaged as civil rights, anti-racial privileges and anti-oppression. Why should we then be surprised the core SFF community so often seems to be using racist and even insane sociopathic rhetoric as "anti-racism," or deny the mechanism by which bigotry infiltrates and mainstreams itself into anti-oppression movements? It is no coincidence intersectionalism is orthodoxy in core SFF social justice thought, or that such a weird obsession would show itself in such a weird arena since any arena it occupies is part of a blanketing world of oppression. Neither is it a coincidence that within that narcissistic identity obsession traditional SF would take a marginalized back seat to gendered semantic and gender-fluid awards-sweeping SF novels, racial revenge stories and gay urban fantasy minus the fantasy. "Greek and Roman mythology, Chaucer" get thrown into the same back seat. Predictably, significantly and cluelessly, the alternatives offered at Teaching Tolerance are "the literary offerings of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, or Audre Lorde." As usual, the provincial and racist cult of intersectionalism never asks any nation they perceive as non-white to throw down their own literary traditions. In that case the exact opposite initiatives are in play and the whole declared an UNESCO world heritage site to be preserved.
The irony is that intersectionalism's oppressions are constructed fantasies while their own bigotry, racism and supremacy they laugh off are very real. It never occurs to intersectionalism's well-meaning allies how quickly the word "privilege" spread about and became commonplace in SFF's public arena or to question where it came from. That process has been so smoothed over it seems a natural part of a self-evident truth, a thing that was always there, though the theory of privilege and the specific way it is bruited about by intersectionalist rhetoric is just as self-evidently a self-serving tactical smear created by bigots.
The go-to "PC" ideology of the SFF community today is without a doubt the gender branch of "intersectionalism" - gay, largely non-white radical feminism - a thing that at its fundamental roots is rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-heterosexual. "Intersectional theory" is described as "the study of how different power structures interact in the lives of minorities, specifically black women," but there is also a heavy emphasis on gay women. It is a meeting ground with Critical Race Theory, and for some odd reason, has doggedly attached itself to SF.
Read this article with the unintentionally accurate title of "Set Truth on Stun: Reimagining an Anti-Oppressive SF/F" for a further introduction to the modern SFF community as well as the thought-proof glass set between the contents and the title. It's a rather remarkable round-robin straight from the Ministry of Love that clearly sets out the chagrin the participants feel at the idea of "a plethora of books by and about white, middle-class, educated people," as if they are discussing the best way to slay an obnoxious Jewish dragon in the neighborhood. This is not science fiction, oppressive or otherwise. It more resembles the "Women's Gender Studies" department at Depaul University with its interests in "intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality; cross-cultural perspectives; violence against women; women in the Middle East; lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender identities and politics; autobiography; queer theories; immigrant women; globalization; transnational feminist perspectives; antiracism; gender and education; feminist theories and politics; gender and family violence."
This animus is supposedly in reaction to an institutional bias and exclusion based on anti-gay, anti-non-white, and anti-women sentiments together with advocacy of white male heterosexual supremacy in SF now and in its 100 year history as a recognizable pop culture genre. The problem there is that there is no such demonstrable movement or trend within the SFF community's institutions nor has there ever been. The quotes that might prove such a thing are so lacking that the whole thing amounts to nothing more than a feeble and even paranoid conspiracy assumption based on the where-there's-smoke-there's-fire theory of the innate and endemic immorality of the so-called "white straight male," a phrase that is a mantra within the PC SFF community and one easily interchangeable with "vampire." If one went only by the rhetoric of the politically correct within the SFF community, one would think there's an informal Jim Crow and anti-women's suffrage movement trending. The truth is gender intersectionalists project their own paranoia and conspiracy theories about bad people out to get them onto the whole world. The hostility and logic of intersectionalists never quite meet up, though the hostility and the identities they attack always do. In the real world this also known as buck-naked racism.
The truth is more like a tight-knit group in the SFF community's core institutions addicted to racialism and identity and the idea of distributing morality along those lines to pander to their own ideas of identity-supremacy. More specifically, it is the supremacy produced by radical gender feminism, which passes itself off as equality feminism but which sees - not only SF's Golden Age - but men and heterosexuality as a millennial-long political and ideological oppression. Identity/diversity is a never ending drumbeat, ostensibly at the service of anti-racism and anti-sexism, but in reality something far more like racism and sexism themselves.
The level of dissonance between what is claimed and assumed and what is shown as factual is typically a wide gulf.
What is actually absurd is to claim "absurd amounts" of such things as existing but not be able to provide examples. One thing I ran across again and again in my research was how common this claim about the Golden Age of SF was. The problem is "absurd amounts" would then contain a fairly large number of classic SF stories famously known for their racism and sexism. In fact there is not one single title of a story or lists of such stories that are ever put forward as shining examples of the Golden Age's bigotry. What are these "revered works"? What is put forward in its place instead is the simple fact white heterosexual men wrote those stories. Why make a list if it's pretty much everything?
"Historically, there haven’t been enough avenues for POC, women, disabled writers, and others to flourish... numerous people have been working on and promoting efforts to promote diverse voices in the field. Those efforts continue. I anticipate that this groundswell of efforts to boost the voices of the marginalized will continue and I have every intent to help promote those efforts wherever I can." - SFF author Laura Mixon
The pointlessness of this crusade is only matched by the obsessive and defamatory nature of it. And "disabled writers"? Really? What in seven hells is this woman even talking about? You'll learn later in this book who it is Mixon considers to have blocked off those avenues. Unsurprisingly, they are human beings afflicted with both being men and white.
[2] "'Nazi Gods' and 'Jewish Devils': The Dehumanizing Rhetoric of Nazi Propaganda," Kelly M. Sutter, A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Department of Communication of Boston College May 2008
[3] Sutter
[4] Sutter
*
Even the New York Times is in on the privilege/patriarchy bandwagon, so successfully has the rhetoric and exact semantics of intersectionalism been mainstreamed:
"...in the universe of thoughts and words, there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom."
Apparently it's now settled social science. And note the Butlerian/Foucauldian and now mainstreamed use of the term "natural order," minus the radicalism behind the idea. Calling racial and sexual attacks a "critique" is as mindless as saying GLAAD, the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League fend off "critiques" in a way that is "panicky" and "obnoxious." Of course none of that is a problem in the dissonance of power/privilege theory that tears at law and equal protection until the word "racism" becomes "critique" and back to "racism" once again... depending.
The pyramids, paintings, science and gothic cathedrals are not the "supremacy of men" but a 6,000 year old tacitly agreed upon KKK-like misogynist ideology full of winks and nods ranging from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to space shuttles and atomic power. Good to know we'll have no fast attack nuclear fleet aircraft carriers in our future, as, like the native Americans white men destroyed, women and PoC are too moral to stoop to the crass act of inventing a Gatling gun or army corp. Who needs forklifts? They are the devil to use and maintain in a 15 degrees below zero grocery freezer warehouse anyway. Mr. Scott, I presume having never worked in a freezer warehouse or visited the maintenance area, unwittingly invokes the famous 1973 feminist SF short story by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) "The Women Men Don't See" by trading that out for the expansive view on television of the Women That Aren't There Men See. Mr. Scott needs to turn off his TV and internet and go to the nearest freezer warehouse and there he'll find the so-called "patriarchy" is doing just fine. Order-fillers muffled in freezer suits don't make TV shows, though they do suffer like the dickens, a thing the non-existent women would do if they but had the privilege.
As is usual, that Times piece shows one is not allowed to disagree without being portrayed as "panicky" and "obnoxious." The truth is reality itself becomes panicky and obnoxious, and the freezer warehouse and a thousand other things I could mention become fabulous myths, though they exist unseen by insulated idiots who write for the N.Y. Times and never question where their table salt and frozen food comes from. That default to stupid and immoral bit of mind reading where it is a given I fear a loss of power I never felt I had in the first place is straight out of radfem 101. It's the Orwellian black hole of a kafkatrap I can't escape from. The more I deny my privilege and sexism the more proof it is I am a privileged sexist, and throw in a racist too. While you're at it, a homophobe and Islamophobe too.
There is no better example of a self-serving circular black hole of Orwellian paranoid logic than Kate Millett writing in Sexual Politics "Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning."
By that standard I could argue I don't see aliens because aliens have conditioned me not to. It's the same goofball argument you see over and over again from social justice warriors.
Convenient. Don't be surprised that same woman Tweeted "getting on a boat & going to the other side of the world to massacre & enslave a 50,000 year old people: now *that's* a lifestyle choice." The point there is this: you will never, and I mean NEVER hear an intersectionalist use that type of rhetoric about "getting on a boat" when it comes to the Arab-Berber 7 centuries-long invasion and occupation of Spain; or Mughals or Ottomans. You can tell as much about who this league of group defamation never targets as much as by who they do target. Suffice it to say - supremacists don't target their own supremacist notions. If they're not Conquistadors, redcoats and American frontiersmen, they don't exist.
The truth is gender feminists confuse crime and bad people with an ideology. They first make the idea of crime, human cruelty and bad people a male-only affair and then separate out crimes against women from all other crimes like breaking-and-entering or murder. The next step is to turn any crime against a woman as being not only an ideology of sexual prejudice, but one in which all men share. For some reason men commit crimes against other men for reasons completely apart from doing so to women, much like saying America's war with Japan was because of racism and that with Germany one of principle. It never occurs to feminists why a heterosexual male criminal would sexually assault a woman rather than other men or what the results of rape statistics are in a 96% heterosexual world.
Is Mr. Scott at the Times maintaining men were so arrogant in believing they could split the atom they just did? Is this post-structural "performativity" where I anticipate, therefore I am? Is hubris then the mother of invention, or just mothers? It's interesting to know that the entirety of the Third World, or indeed any manifestation of endemic failure, can be written off as a lack of self-confidence, performativity and luck made worse by oppression. Like the concept of success, credit is also given and withheld according to a racial and sexual agenda. If you're the right race and sex within intersectional thought, any sign of success is innate. If you're the wrong sort, success is always built on someone else's back and at someone else's expense via appropriation and oppression.
The mistake Mr. Scott makes is the same one as the people in E.M. Forster's short 1909 SF story "The Machine Stops" make. That story is a warning about, not larger technologies which serve humankind, but technologies which destroy the cohesiveness of personal relationships and experience, as well as our relationship to and perception of reality itself. In a room without doorknobs, no doubt Mr. Scott's view of the world parsed through an idiot box is somewhat different than that from the top of a volcano or the Inca Trail. People who are out in the world have little time or motivation for posting pictures of a sandwich they just made or info about a TV show they just watched onto Twitter or Facebook. In reality, failure is its own explanation, but not in intersectionalism, where reality is kneaded, massaged and smoothed out with cultural relativism. It's the same doltish mechanism of childish prejudice that produces "mansplaining" and "misogyny" with the same hand it banishes "womansplaining" and "misandry." But the truth is whoever DIDN'T race to discover the North and South Poles weren't prevented from doing so by anybody, and the people who did need apologize to no one.
As I allude to elsewhere in this book, it'll be interesting to see TVs shut off and pie-charts drawn up along with plans to invade Veterans Hospitals and raise the diversity from 2.3% women to 50%, and show us that Iwo Jima wasn't "a reflection of natural order" but a plot and manifestation of male greed - wanting to hog all the death and sacrifice for themselves. In the new world order, war will be abolished anyway. If not, I'm looking forward to someone else doing the dying and canal-building for a change. I could use a civilizational break. And I'll need the rest once reality again impinges itself on feminist daydreams and I have to rescue them from some slave pen an empire-building nation which doesn't watch TV or understand gender studies puts them in. When the machines and TVs and democracy stops, just look under the hood. You might not like what you see. That's because in the world of intersectional feminism, reality itself is rude, dismissive, ignorant, arrogant, racist and sexist.
No one says "Go West, young man" anymore because the West is a racist patriarchal Anglophone hegemony. The truth is the exact opposite, so I'd change that to "Go outside, young man." Yes, it's true. Doorknobs do have a use. I know - I invented them. The irony that is reality depicts the exact opposite of what the PC imagine: a steady flow into the West with no reciprocity back out to the non-West. There is never an answer as to why millions of so-called "people of color" immigrate into a white supremacy, other than a shitload of pitiful self-serving excuses that wouldn't fool a child.
As just one example of how intersectionalist culture despises reality and reality despises them right back, in doing research for this book, I not infrequently ran across people laughing at Elizabeth Taylor depicting Cleopatra in a movie. The presumption there is that Cleopatra was in Africa and therefore black, or at the very least semitic. That's like saying the Ottomans and Mughals became Greeks and Hindus or the people who designed the Empire State building default to native-Americans, as does their architecture.
What reality dictates is that Cleopatra ruled from Alexandria. That city was founded by and named for a Greek, and a Greek dynasty established to rule Egypt. That dynasty did not intermarry with the population at large, which is any case wasn't black anyway. Intersectionalism is a denial of reality put at the service of race and gender egoism and supremacy. It was not Sudanese or Arabic that was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world in antiquity but Greek. The worlds's history is far more complex than intersectionalism's sophomoric visions. Another Greek, this time an ethnic Albanian born in Ottoman Macedonia named Mohammed Ali I mention below, established the 1805-1953 Egyptian dynasty named for him. He ironically exterminated the aristocratic linguistic and ethnic Turkish Mamluks who themselves had ruled Egypt for 250 years until they were defeated by the Ottomans in 1517. The last real king of that dynasty, King Farouk I, was Albanian, French and Turkish and the great-great-grandson of Mohammed Ali. What's the bottom line of all this digression? When intersectionalists laugh at the idea of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, they are laughing at themselves, their childishly provincial ideas about perception, and reality, because chances are Taylor may have looked a great deal like Cleopatra, unless you think King Farouk was a black African simply by existing on African soil or Mexican TV soaps are more Aztec than Spanish and European American.
The great hypocrisy of racialist intersectionalism lies within the page I saw the last sarcastic "Why Elizabeth Taylor was the most authentic Cleopatra ever" guffaw, including the Orwellian and unaware "Black Twitter..." in the title of the Huffington Post article that Tweet is in. The page has Twitter jokes about white people culturally appropriating black culture, like "Dreadlocks: Apparently Not Just For White Hippies and Backpackers Anymore." According to their own sense of humor, just saying "Black Twitter" should be good for a laugh; it ain't. One black female Tweeter unconsciously criticizes herself by writing "The creativity of #blacktwitter never ceases to amazes me" directly below a Tweet by another black women "Miley Cyrus shows the world a new dance called twerking. You've Never seen anything like it." If white folks turned such comments around to black folks driving cars and using computers, it would be considered racist. These are people too stupid to imagine what sarcastically saying black people show the world how to use the internet sounds like. Or why stop there? What about microphones, cars, atomic power or anything else racialists have painted a white face on?
The grand stupidity is that if black Nubian colonizers move in they become "Egyptians," but if Europeans or Arabs, Kurds or Turkish colonizers move in they are never quite Egyptians, with the exception of the suddenly black Cleopatra and the Library at Alexandria we can presume was also staffed by sub-Saharan Africans from out of nowhere. That racially skewed and self-serving racially supremacist perception of fair play once again shows where the true impetus of political correctness comes from, and it's from racial bigots and supremacists hiding behind social justice while themselves screaming about bigotry and supremacy.
Due to the Saharan Desert and bottlenecks of the cataracts of the Nile, there is no reason to believe the demographic make-up of N. Africa would be any different now or in ancient times. When you think of ease of passage in terms of trade routes and armies, it's pretty clear Egypt was far more exposed to cultures of Syrian Arabs or Kurds, N. Africa, the Gulf states, and southern and S. E. Europe. However the bottom line is a racialized cult in which, whether it's discussing Trayvon Martin or Egypt, the phrase I don't know gets thrown onto an ash heap somewhere, along with logic and reason. At CNN an article critical of Ridley Scott's "whitewashing" casting of Exodus states "The most obvious error in this sort of casting is the historical one: Inhabitants of ancient Egypt and Israel simply didn't look like Christian Bale or Joel Edgerton" but without once making a case for that. During the reigns of men like Tutankhamen and Ramses II you repeatedly see detailed caricatures of their enemies on canes, sandals and wall panels that show sub-Saharan Africans and Assyrians. Why would Egyptians make such portraits if they looked like them?
Meanwhile SFF social justice warrior Damien Walter calls being against the casting of a black actor Idris Elba as James Bond a "racist rant." You also have clever remarks like "If the idea of a non-white James Bond makes you angry, I have some terrible news for you about Jesus," as if Jesus was a sub-Saharan African rather than a Nazarene indistinguishable from millions of Southern Europeans, and people thought Jesus was a Nordic Viking rather than the simple truth that everyone knows where Jesus came from. Intersectionalists are experts at straw man arguments which start out stipulating things no one actually believes. And of course complaining about a black Human Torch in a film based on the Fantastic Four comic book is a "racist backlash." Intersectionalism is a cult that in principle should bitterly complain about the career of an actor like the Egyptian Greek Orthodox Catholic then Muslim Omar Sharif who has played American Jews, white Orthodox Russians, Argentines, German soldiers, Spanish cowboys, a Mongol, Austrian royalty and a Hindi submariner. As always, what intersectionalism conspicuously leaves alone says as much about it as what it attacks; it is a cult that is endemically dishonest. If an Egyptian can play a Jew there is no reason a Jew cannot play an Egyptian. If Idris Elba can play James Bond, there is no reason an Octavia Butler character cannot be made into a Japanese or Polish character if one of her books came to film. We all know the chorus of complaint that would erupt from SFF's brigade of two-faced racebending and gender were that to take place.
What that hilariously means is that within these pathetic PC appeals to logic and principle the more one uses intersectionalist rhetoric right back at the PC, the more angry they get at their own racist rants, and the louder the accusations of racism, ergo intersectionalism considers itself racist. But that's a principled argument and intersectionalists are addicted to the opposite of that - identity and hypocrisy. The opening of perception and insight is in presenting the Greek dynasties I have written about; intersectionalism is the closing of perception at the service of wishful thinking and racial and sexual disdain and even hatred. That style of ferreting out perception is also one of the strong points of SF literature in its more sober expressions. Cults of identity-worship are incapable of making simple comparisons - using metaphor or analogy - which is why they so often trip over their own landmines. In intersectionalism, words and ideas literally don't mean anything. It's just a lot of garbled gibberish chanted while using a lodestone to unerringly bring you back to the Western straight white man.
Radical feminists are the last people who should be writing SF. In the Orwellian space radical feminists operate in, their greatest enemy is themselves. How people can be dumb enough to whine about "cultural appropriation" from a self-titled self-contradictory "Black Twitter" shows how intersectionalist SF is the opposite of classic and perceptive Golden Age SF and also how they confuse ironic humor with one-sided racial insults. In intersectionalism, every bit of its so-called logic is one-sided. Radical feminists have their hands full with their doxy fantasies the Library at Alexandria was full of black scholars. It's no surprise then that intersectionalist non-fiction rhetoric already qualifies as fantastic literature.
The other funny contradiction is that as you read this book and click through the links you will find that a women's racist and gay cult of ideological supremacy harasses straight white men 24/7 on their blogs, at conventions, at awards, and on Twitter and yet claim they are the ones harassed when in fact the level of harassment on the other side of this affair is minimal compared to the astoundingly obsessive output of PC intersectionalists. Radical feminists literally do not understand what they do or the words they write.
In reality there is a sharp divergence between sex and race-obsessed intersectional gender feminism and the egalitarian feminists who want equality before the law and in cultural custom and practice. By "practice" I mean not being laughed at if they want to drive a semi-truck or be a bush pilot, or told they can't hack it. Gender feminists use that word "feminist" because there is a certain amount of shallow commonality. But the idea gender feminists don't hate, fear and obsess on men is as ridiculous as the idea they are after equality and inclusion and fleeing oppression.
The reason I brought that all up is that the theme of colonialism/postcolonialism is a subject I constantly ran into in researching intersectionalists. The significance of that within intersectional rhetoric and semantics is that the dynamic between the colonizer and the indigenous is permanently frozen into a historic white oppressor non-white victim scenario, though history shows that is plainly not the case. "Indigenous" never means Welsh, Albanian or Spanish. Colonizer never means Mughal, Arab or Aztec. In fact throughout the entirety of Europe, there are no peoples intersectionality considers indigenous and their cultures sacrosanct from outside interference in the way the entirety of the Third World is. History itself has been racially pushed, pulled, distorted and segregated by anti-segregationists who speak of "truth to power." There are no truths in intersectionalism, only a constant stream of racially and sexually pointed lies and distortions.
"Women who are Pirates in a phallocratic society are involved in a complex operation. First, it is necessary to Plunder--that is, righteously rip off - gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us. Second, we must Smuggle back to other women our Plundered treasures." - SIN BIG By Mary Daly, The New Yorker, February 26, 1996
*
The award-winning Aliette de Bodard is typical of today's SF writers. She is keenly interested in - not the evolution of SF literature as an art form in the style of the old-school scholars, readers and writers - but in something quite different: the race, gender and gender preference of SF writers. In an interview at LucReid.com for Nov., 2, 2012, de Bodard mentions SF's poor representation of "POC/female/non-US," and that she's "disquieted by how SF, which should be the literature of the mind-blowing and mind-opening, tends to over-feature characters from a certain background (overwhelmingly male, white..." This is a tired refrain that has gone mainstream within the SF community. Are black men over-featured in the National Basketball Association at nearly 80% in a country 14% black? Of course they are not - they are simply people. Then how much less is that true of ethnic European SF writers in a country in which their majority has ranged from almost 90% to today's 2/3. And that's aside from the accidental manner in which hobbies are formed. And why forget mid-century SF was created by de Bodard's "male, white" Americans?
Worse, when one supposes one's own identity is some kind of star, that is likely to lead to work that doesn't extend much further than that identity and will be one-dimensional, not "mind-blowing." There is nothing in SF to suggest it has suffered from a monotone of themes because writers are white. Conversely, there is nothing to suggest not being white is inherently and literally new blood, or that blues music suffers from a lack of whiteness and has some higher undefined goal that can only be achieved with racial diversity. It seems odd and stupid to codify the idea that good and bad baggage comes with skin, especially in some consistent pattern. Here is a book description of what one can safely assume is mind-blowing goodthink SF:
"On a South Asian-settled university planet, tensions are rising. The first interstellar war has just been declared; the pure humans (or at least a segment of them) against the genetically modified humods and the aliens. The players in this game are complex, and the average citizen doesn't really understand what's going on. They just want to go on with their life: go to work, go home, make love to their wife. Or wives. Or husbands. Or indeterminate gender human and/or alien partners."
It should come as no surprise that art suffers when what you look like trumps what you do. I'm trying to imagine a person who thinks the mere act of not being white, Western or a man is either "mind-blowing" or "mind-opening." I can't imagine that but I can imagine that logic is considered the bedrock justification for classic racial supremacy when turned on its head. SFF blogger and Tor.com podcaster Justin Landon remarks about an anthology that happens to have all white writers "...there's not going to be anything new here." Once that Pandora's Box is opened, I can say the same thing about blacks or Arabs.
To me, such thinking is not only the direct opposite of mind-opening, in its farthest extensions it can be dangerous. Once one has established such concepts can reside in skin color and gender, what else can I imagine does, what other associations can I make - greed, laziness, gross stupidity? Can I segregate morality itself? You better damn well believe you can, and that is being done within the SFF community today with its bizarre tarring and feathering theories like "white male privilege" and "rape culture," constructed so one's immorality cannot be washed off.
SFF author Kate Elliott addresses the issue so:
I in turn find it odd that Elliott can't tell the difference between those who promote naked racial and gender advocacy and those who don't. I'd like her to name even one SFF novel that was purposefully "exclusionary," in the same way today's PC operate; it doesn't exist. Bald-faced idiocy, almost unimaginable arrogance and supremacist hatreds are not only not in short supply with the PC, they are a consistent profile, and SF literature itself sits on some back-burner. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Hugo-winning intersectionalists continue to be consumed with artistry to the exclusion of all else...
"'Doctor Who's' next Doctor cannot be a white man."
There is a string of quotes from de Bodard that speak to the new kids on the block and where their interest lies. The new Dr. Who on the TV series being a "white middle aged man," left a "sour taste" in her mouth, and she's disappointed the cast of the Sherlock Holmes TV show is "lily-white," and that escapist shows like HBO's Game of Thrones are "geared to white patriarchy."
It goes without saying that if I said seeing yet another black man scoring the winning basket in the NBA left a "sour taste" in my mouth, I'd be pilloried as a racist - and rightly so. For some reason, perhaps an addiction to identity and disdain for principle as well as whites, the excuse matt is pulled out when any extremist faux-feminist, non-white or gay person makes such racist remarks.
As if to make sure she is not misunderstood, de Bodard retweets a link to an astonishingly racist blog post by one Sunny Singh titled "An Open Letter to White Friends: How Not to be a Racist (Even Unconsciously)."
Singh, like many of SFF's own PC wits, maintains that Martin Luther King's content of character, or "'race blindness' is actually a form of racism." The original Tweet de Bodard uses is by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, a minor SFF personage whose blog posts are unremittingly hostile to white people. And that's when she's not retweeting racist links about how ethnic Europeans can wise up like "18 Things White People Should Know/Do Before Discussing Racism http://fb.me/6xBEOC7kL" A better title would be "18 Things Racists Should Know Before Selecting Out Human Beings as 'White' as the Butt of Endless Complaints." Should I write "18 Things Loenen-Ruiz Should Know Before Operating White Inventions"? The racial arrogance of these people is as amazing as their utter cluelessness they are doing anything wrong.
De Bodard is far from a lone voice when it come to her disinterest and even racial disdain for the writers of SF's earlier era as well as today, not to mention an abstract interest in the literature itself. SF writer James Worrad describes the SF "genre's caucasian bloat." Fellow Hugo and Nebula Award nominee Saladin Ahmed echoes this interest in an article at Salon.com titled "Is 'Game of Thrones' Too White?" as if he can't figure out what it sounds like to ask if the Arabian Nights is too Arab while as much as saying Arabs are supremacist xenophobes and racists.
Ahmed's grasp of Middle Eastern history is unsurprisingly as loose and apologetic as it is racialist and racist:
Then you have cry-baby little racist shits writing posts titled "Daenerys Targaryen is back to 'save the coloureds'" I'm somehow supposed to take seriously with hashtags at the top like #ALLWHITETV. How such a mind can complain of "Game of Thrones continuous problem with race" without the least hint of awareness is emblematic of how often failure is self-explanatory.
Striking the same tone, Kate Elliott states that "law is for the benefit of white people," complains "the secondary roles are (white) men" in the film Pacific Rim, "Hollywood's obsession w/ white casts," that "white guys in Hollywood film ARE interchangeable," and that "White male privilege doesn't need to describe the world that caters to it," Hugo and Nebula nominated amateur author Nora K. Jemisin asserts that Robert A Heinlein and "most of science fiction fandom" are "racist as *fuck*." And again - where's an interest in SF? Jemisin also portrays whites in history in which a "demographic minority of the human species constructed an ingenious system allowing it to dominate most of the planet. (Diabolical… but ingenious.)"
N.K. Jemisin's disdain for Heinlein is as well-known as the idea is extraordinary that a forty-something professional low-level bureaucrat and amateur author has a right to possess such disdain for a game-changing world famous artist like Heinlein. That level of mutually exclusive thought gives one an insight into the level of sheer delusion, ego and arrogance which powers this odd stew of political correctness. In that PC world, there is no brilliant art - only brilliant politicized identities.
Saladin Ahmed's Tweets are as deft and quick to pull the trigger on blog posts that decry too many white directors, a new too white film about Egypt, Game of Thrones' "racist portrayal of foreign cultures" as they are to ignore gays in Egypt sent to prison. And don't ask Ahmed why no woman or Christian can be president of Egypt by law or why Ridley Scott's film "Zionist" film about Moses was banned there. Needless to say, an interest in genre or balance is far down the list of Ahmed's concerns. Like all intersectionalists, Ahmed rides white people like bucking broncos.
And what's Ahmed's beef? The American Nazi Party has decided to cast a white woman as the lead in a movie based on a Japanese cartoon. SFF author Madeline Ashby - who once apologized to the audience for being on an all-white convention panel writes "What you don’t do is cast a white woman in a Japanese woman’s role." You'll see social justice feminists obey that principle by calling anyone against a black James Bond a racist. Surprisingly, Ashby says that's fine cuz Idris Alba is English. And don't forget Hugo-winning Kameron Hurley's admonition that "There's no voice more damaging than that of a middle-aged white male who's well-off and denies your existence." If such a person existed outside of Hurley's fevered mind I guess that would be damaging.
The truth is there is no principle behind any of this; it's whatever some daffy intersectional feminist points to at the time. They'll reverse themselves tomorrow and no one will ever know why other than some vague sense we're being exposed to the same Golden Rule the KKK employs. Ahmed's Twitter feed whines about whites like a jet engine. Read the first Tweet below and then another about a completely innocuous film trailer which once again suggest social justice warriors don't understand the meaning of words, least of all their own racist drivel.
Basically, every time you see an intersectionalist review a movie or book, it's scrimmed through a lens that is so distorted by hatred and irrational phobia the world is unrecognizable. Imagine what it's like inside their heads. Then imagine these people as being looked up to as sound sources of wisdom and nominated for literary awards. I don't think I exaggerate in writing that people who support the tenets of intersectional radical gender feminism are supporting paranoia. Intersectionalism basically stipulates America as a whole is a hate group.
"Angry Disney fans create their own ethnic princess after latest film features ANOTHER 'generic' white female" - the U. K.'s Daily Mail
Ye gods, imagine that horror. Although many SFF authors are selling the defamation of ethnic European heterosexual males alongside their rocket ships and goblins to give themselves a boost, it remains to be seen how long a career can be sustained even in the climate that infests SFF's core institutions.
Intersectionalists talk about whites, heterosexuals and men the way the KKK talks about Jews. In Nazi Germany no Jew did a single thing to a non-Jew yet it was perceived not only that such individuals existed but that it was always a negative interaction and represented all Jews as a collective. There was never a positive interaction. For a Jew to do that meant they weren't really Jewish or that they were a "good Jew."
Although no "diabolical" white person in America is doing one single thing to Jemisin or Ahmed, neither give white people any peace, choosing to talk about whites as if they are a single person, or a collective threat based on the most spurious of claims.
True to the unprincipled nature of intersectionalism and its inability to make simple comparisons, Jemisin makes a case for her own removal from SFF and that of her ideology by writing "It's that tolerance that disturbs me — that willingness for the SF community to welcome all comers, even if they’re frothing hatemongers, and not just tolerate them: give them awards, put them on decision-making teams." The dissonance between what intersectionalists say and what they do is always stunning. They routinely describe themselves without the least hint of awareness.
In addition these are people who just can't figure out rewarding writers for their work in social justice has nothing to do with SF.
The gender feminist angle that always rides alongside that racial intersectional viewpoint is the same: In the feminist world bad men are typical men, and there are no typical men in a positive sense - EVER. In the real world a flasher or a rapist is called a criminal and treated as such. In feminism anything positive a man does is assigned to them as a human trait, not male, and they become an "ally." For gender feminists men are a collective threat based on the most spurious of claims. It is a meticulously constructed world of hate and fear, microaggressions and trigger warnings against a collective enemy
Talking about groups in such a way and in manner that is negative 100% of the time is sheer paranoia. No one in SFF is oppressing gay and non-white people or women. There is no sign of a supremacist collective of white heterosexual men aiming to discomfit women, PoC and gays. And if there were there would be no reason to portray that group as comprising all men and heterosexuals any more than there would be to see black criminals or the New Black Panther Party as representing all blacks. There is no Jim Crow, New Jim Crow or Jim Crow 2.0 in SFF nor has there ever been. For the SFWA and other do-gooders to take on such obviously paranoid fears and defamation is stunningly stupid. Throughout this book you will not only see whites and white men talked about in the sense a demographic is too Jewish, but in a manner that is portrayed as only ever being a negative and spiritually, morally and intellectually empty thing. An accidental straight white male demographic is never a good thing. A purposefully segregated non-white or female demographic is never a bad thing, literally portrayed as a needed "safer-space" from the immorality of straight white men or existing because of the purposeful exclusion of non-whites, women and gay folks.
Considering the vast swaths of morality this brand of feminism reserves for itself, the only thing that emerges from it is a sense it is willing to destroy the goose that laid the golden egg of SFF, but the moral imperatives behind law and civilization itself. Intersectionalism is the Golden Horde minus the horde and with a dross of fools's gold. In doing research for this book, I was often struck by how much these voices seem like Lord of the Flies without the need of a desert island. I just don't see any excuse for human beings to indulge in this sort of rhetoric in 21st century America. Much of the silliness reflected in this book verges on the superstitious.
Before all this paranoia started a few years ago, there was no cluster of people obsessively writing about the inadvisability of being non-white, a woman or gay. The feminist paranoia since that time behaves as if that was not the case. What this silly movement puts in place of that is the mere stipulated existence of straight white men. That demography is substituted for ideology and that ideology substituted as a rationale for articles about white privilege and male saviors. A foe is created from nothing. Third Wave Gender Abolition Feminism rationalizes itself into existence in SFF. Imagine if the mid-19th century English initiative to end slavery in N. Africa had just one little hang up: there were no slaves. Imagine the bewildered looks and increasing frustration eventually turned to anger from N. Africans when they were constantly exposed to bootless charges, innuendoes and eventually attempted punishments together with faux-academic papers along the lines of N. Africans Therefore Slavery.
*
A blog post with its share of ignorance and sophistry by the U.K.'s Jonathan McCalmont titled "Annoyed With the History of Science Fiction" from Nov. of 2012 shows that today's meeting ground between the type of fawning and even bigoted political correctness and lack of an appreciation of the genre's history that Aliette de Bodard displays is neither an anomaly nor coincidence. Anyone capable of occupying that inadvisable crossroad will have nothing to add either to art or to science fiction. Suffice it to say, talk of "lionize the popular white guys," as if old SF were an informal KKK, while presenting not the least bit of proof to back that up in an article that criticizes assumptions and lack of proofs is childish. That is especially so from an ocean and several generations distance.
The fundamental tenets of radical gay feminist intersectionalism have been absorbed into core SF without the least hint of awareness by many of its water-carriers. As for the tenets themselves, they are unquestioned; it is simply assumed an oppressive racist patriarchy existed then and still exists now. When it comes to keyboards and an internet connection that sees all and knows all, the fact de Bodard is French and McCalmont English means nothing when it comes to the nuance of mid-century American culture.
McCalmont's article has other weird straw man assumptions, as if saying "one account" is a footnote to prove SF's "historical marginalisation of women," which never occurred, actually did. Why would I be surprised there is no explanation for something that never took place since the assumption it did is rooted in the assumed immorality and even racism of SF authors portrayed as "popular white guys," rather than an actual event, as if race plus gender is a self-explanatory substitute for an event. In the politically correct culture within SFF, it most certainly is self-explanatory; unfortunately we also call that racial and sexist bigotry and profiling. An innocent demography becomes a menacing, oppressive and exclusionary ideology simply by existing. How can one refute such a charge? By racially dispersing?
Welcome to the witchhunt called "diversity." Racial and sexual clusters come to represent an assumed lack of morality. Dilution comes to represent morality and those representing that dilution come to be the face of morality itself. Minds, thoughts and actions cease to have meaning. It is the triumph of identity over principle. It is cheating by dealing from the bottom of a deck stacked so one demography never has a winning hand and the other never loses. This is why - for example - you will never see middle weight boxing or romance fiction treated as demography as suspicious ideology. This is a con game dedicated to attacking one race and one sex only, disguised as fair play and social justice.
Old SF didn't marginalize women any more than boys' adventure pirate stories did. The narrative that treats early century SFF magazine publications like an informal gay and women-hating KKK is a straight up lie with not a single fact to support it. It ignores the larger field of magazines that did cater to women. Those pulp magazines are never seen as having marginalized a male readership for the simple reason they didn't; it was simply marketing. Imagine if we applied some silly male supremacist lens of suspicion to Cosmopolitan Magazine. Do we really need stupid pie-charts noting how few men have been on the covers? Would a sudden interest in Cosmopolitan by men today represent male exclusion retroactive to any preceding era when men showed no interest? Can you imagine foolish and paranoid men persistently Tweeting Where were the men in Cosmo culture in the '70s?
People are not being excluded from SFF - the numbers simply aren't there. If they were you could neither hide them nor exclude them - they would simply publish and read themselves, just as was the case when SFF started as a hard genre in America 100 years ago, which was itself a natural and accidental expression of mostly male cultural interest that had nothing to do with race or excluding women.
It's important to note that 100 years ago, there were other genre stories and series taking place at that same time with as female an audience as SFF's was male. Laura C. Mallonee writes "The Stratemeyer Syndicate published 85 new girls’ series between 1910 and 1920 starring young women who played basketball, drove cars, helped the poor, solved mysteries, and even made movies."
That's in the exact same time frame the Munsey Magazines were pushing the SFF marketed to males (I know - sad) that would blossom into the first American SFF genre magazines with Weird Tales in 1923 and Amazing Stories in 1926. There were accidental expressions of culture all around and girls and women had their cut, but feminists like Ursula K. Le Guin want to make it seem like that era was in violation of an Inter-Parliamentary Union Mandate Diversity Pie Chart. People like McCalmont, Le Guin and all the rest either simply ignore that or don't know about it. As you'll see throughout this book, the phrase compared to what is of no interest to feminists who prefer their cart before the horse. To no one's surprise, it doesn't actually go anywhere. The truth is, these stupid assertions have been debunked time and again.
Damien Walter's "overwhelmingly white, male perspective that dominated the genre" can be seen for the sheer stupidity and mindless innuendo of suspicious racial behavior that it is. So old SFF was marketed to men and boys; so what? Are Cosmo readers female supremacists... and racists? What about Ebony Magazine an Field and Stream? Is that allowed? Big Damien and his flock of warrior maidens are watching you to see if you boil your rice with salt or not. Modern feminists are concocting an institutionalized entitled male hostility towards women SFF writers from 100 years ago which simply didn't exist and is not in evidence. How does Frankenstein become a literary classic - affirmative action? How does Francis Stevens become published 100 years ago - by wearing a veil? Do the initials in C. L. Moore equal misogyny, or did she not want to be caught out by her boss, as is her claim? How does one measure these things? Why go straight to women hating? Gee, why would radical feminism do that?
The idea SFF was some exclusion zone is a weird fantasy concocted out of thin air. The interest in magazine SFF was started by literally a handful of people in the first quarter of the last century. People today act like it was some project that had the gravitas and scope of the League of Nations. In fact SF pulp mags had all the gravitas and larger interest of a carnival sideshow. SFF itself was marginalized and would be for decades. Some parents took one look at the crude covers of the early SF pulps like Amazing Stories and didn't want their kids reading what they considered trash. Isaac Asimov's own parents frowned down on him reading the pulps. But today it's just easier to make up oppressions that never existed and so bigoted, patronizing and smugly moralizing Twitter conversations like this are as common as dirt today, and the smug morality is off the charts. "Writers could have been writing a truly diverse landscape ALL ALONG." They could've written their stories in Sanskrit or while naked too. What the hell does that even mean? Was the old-school anti-Sankrit and nudity?
I have the answer: sheer goodthink and betterness and failing to understand "exclusive" is spelled "r-a-c-i-s-t."
Can anyone name me a time when SFF authors publicly colluded to not read books by women and non-whites and bragged about doing so in addition to promoting books because they were written by whites and men? Well the ironic stupidity is that is exactly what didn't happen in the past but is happening today, and I have the quotes that show that. And the people doing it never shut up about being anti-racists, anti-sexists and anti-supremacists. What you'll find is that if intersectionalists have race and gender neutral definitions for the harassment, sexism, racism, genderphobias and hatreds, slavery and colonialism they're always bleating about, they are undetectable.
There is no proof other female authors tried and failed to bum rush SF while women authors Francis Stevens, C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett held open the door from 1915 to 1943, as if there were some bouncer saying "Dese tree is enough." McCalmont's article is laced with enough identity puffery and deflation to wreck its credibility in other matters. I included it because, as one of the less egregious examples of identity wisdom, it shows to what extent such a thing has been mainstreamed to the point it is now simply part of SF's non-fiction landscape. And why wouldn't it be when the falsehood that SF "has a track record of systematically marginalizing and downplaying the importance of non-white, non-straight, non-male authors" has attained the status of historic fact by virtue of a sheer racial disdain and suspicion only matched by its inability to actually document such a system.
The purposeful exclusion of non-whites, women and gay people from SFF is an urban myth. The truth was they simply weren't there. Arthur C. Clarke was gay (though not out) and he was famous in the '50s. Samuel R. Delany - gay, out and black - was published in 1962 when he was 20 and received Nebula Awards when he was 24 and 25. In other words he was immediately accepted and honored. Ursula K. Le Guin was published as soon as she started writing SF in the early '60s and novels published in 1969 and 1974 each won both Hugo and Nebula Awards. Joanna Russ was gay and out and her SF was published when she was 22, in 1959. She won a Nebula in 1972 and a Hugo in 1982.
It's not like SF's history is a mystery. Everett Franklin Bleiler's 1998 book Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years : A Complete Coverage of the Genre Magazines Amazing, Astounding, Wonder, and Others from 1926 Through 1936 is a compendium of story synopsis.
The result of all this is that an oddball radical feminist racialist slant has come to be so thrown over SF that one cannot discuss any aspect of the field without also addressing the failures of heterosexual white men. Think about that for a second. That unholy segue is a detour off a cliff, a bizarre obsession that has nothing to do with SF literature. The even more oddball thing is that no one seems to have noticed the replacement of SF itself with this bizarre ideology, as if it is a completely natural delusion and hallucination. Oh yeah, science fiction and cis-gendered white men. What? You don't get that?
Does McCalmont not question his own rhetoric which assumes an intersection between race and a literary movement? Does he not question the lack of facts to make such a case? Does he not question whether such an association may be wholly imaginary, or where his own racialized awareness of projecting such an unnatural intersection comes from? Does he not question why, if there is such an intersection, authors from Burroughs to Heinlein to Vance didn't use a shared ideological rhetoric similar to that of McCalmont's own, or that of political correctness itself, or that the latter two may have their own natural intersection, and in fact be one and the same? For all this talk of unconscious this and examining that, the PC might be advised to examine their own backyards of bias and prejudice devoid of principle and full of identity and leave those of others who show no signs of such bizarre projections alone.
Why does no one question where this racialized and sexualized PC rhetoric is NOT used? Isn't a good idea a good idea? According to the depraved logic of SF's social justice warriors, Delta blues would be better with an infusion of whites and Latinos, and boxing better with more whites; basketball too. Surely if there is a binding principle at work then Indian Bollywood films, Arabic literature and Brazilian Samba music and a thousand other things must all fall under the same suspicions of tacit racism, exclusion and demands for diversity, yet they do not. The reason is because the idea this is all part of some principled endeavor that knows no boundaries of race, culture and nation is a shill and a lie.
Am I to believe that no one who writes about SF has ever written about Egyptian film, Taiwanese soap operas or Brazilian Samba music? Where is the rhetoric of lionize the popular Arab/Asian/black guys? Like a soap bubble, touch it to move it in that direction and the logic suddenly pops out of existence. Suddenly that natural association of race and SF looks as stupidly foolish and uncovered as the focused racism of an unholy obsession that it is, and the unholy obsession in play is the Western straight white male; all others globally get a pass.
The exact same mechanism is in play in regard to historic colonialism. Within PC rhetoric and complaint in SF, entire empires disappear from the face of the map, leaving only British redcoats and American frontiersmen. The great wonder is that anyone with half a brain has ever fallen for this con in the first place. Yet SF's core institutions are as awash in this bigot parade devoid of morality, thought, fair play, logic, or principle as they are singularly devoid of Mughals, 100 years of romance fiction marketed to woman, questioning black SF symposiums, and Afrofuturism. Simply look at what is NOT being attacked to see what IS being attacked. And let's have no silly arguments these things fall outside the purview of SF; intersectionalists within SF never shut up about global culture. That natural intersection of race, gender and SF is revealed for the silly and bigoted con game that it is.
In fact it couldn't be an odder intersection if all SF was parsed through an interest in horse racing with the attendant assumption the authors were all gambling addicts and their stories metaphors for run, place and show. It's a revisionist history pulled straight out of Joanna Russ's most paranoid brain cell and happily believed in by every correctly politicized author that eagerly self-identifies with the racialist/genderized also-rans of history as every last place nag that ever ran at colonial Pimlico.
The truth is the entire phenomenon is a tribute to the creeping slippery slope of mainstreaming hate-speech; seeing the world scrimmed through a con-game vision of the most bullied, failed, jealous, resentful and even mentally ill among us with the most bones to pick off a carcass. Even stranger yet is these corpse-stripping vultures of historic low self-esteem claim to be acting out of the highest noble human emotions of equality, anti-racism and anti-sexism. In truth people are being sold vast tracts of swampland, each replete with its very own Brooklyn Bridge, by authors and bloggers whose greatest talent is expressing daffy demonizing theories of racialized and sexualized disdain. SF no longer has a history of rocket ships and alien worlds, but one of oppressing gays, women, non-whites and the non-West. Unhealthy obsession let me introduce you to inappropriate place. Let's be honest: if you look at SF and see white straight male you're probably doing the same thing with table salt, cloud formations and the inside of your eyelids. The juncture between arrogance and ignorance is a completely empty space.
What will happen if psychotic squirrel hunters come to be SF's historians? Must we then listen to how Heinlein chittered and tacitly conspired with Burroughs to hide nuts? Given all this, why would anyone be surprised by the presence of anthologies of childish colonialist racial revenge fantasies pretending to be SFF, such as We See A Different Frontier (2013) and Long Hidden (2014) I mention below? In SFF's new new wave, we don't see strange new worlds but backward-looking alternate history retro-visions of how last place nags come in first place, such as Vylar Kaftan's 2013/4 Nebula-winning short story "The Weight of the Sunrise" I also discuss below, where noble never-conquered Incans contribute to a slave freed from visiting Americans and then becoming history's black Marco Polo. In such a climate, why wouldn't futuristic SF be dying a slow death in favor of historic fantasies that redress old grievances by populating the past with runaway pregnant slaves such as in Tanarive Due's "Free Jim's Mine" in Long Hidden? That's not exactly "Afrofuturism."
Or how about populating stories with 7th century bi-sexual game-changing women in the non-fantasy, non-SF but perfectly lesbian intersectional Nebula-nominated novel Hild. How about a 17th century East India Company Englishman assassinated by a steampunk bird as in Shweta Narayan's "The Arrangement of Their Parts" from We See A Different Frontier? It is typical of the ironic unawareness and racist wishful thinking of intersectionalism that the Englishman is killed at the height of the ruling colonialist Muslim ethnic Mughal Empire at a time the East India Company had little presence and no power in India. Immoral skin doesn't wash off, so why bother with dates? Just project white immorality forward and backward in time at will; that's the very meaning of "static." Within intersectional mythology, "Diabolical… but ingenious" whites attain the status of the eternally conniving Jew.
This idea of the static freezing of racial and sexual identities into a legal anti-oppression that hasn't existed for a half-century is the great failure of liberalism in the 21st century and the trough of lies and shit radical intersectional feminists eagerly dine at. Take a black guy in a Jim Crow county on the issue of race and he's always going to be right for the simple reason he's been made a legal second-class citizen. By extension whites on that issue are always wrong. Intersectionalists have seized on that era and not only frozen it but extended to the present and far back into history and also into social arenas it was never an issue.
A principled anthology interested in colonialism as event rather than race would've had a Mughal killed. You damn well bet the new breed see a different frontier, and it's not in the future but in a rearrangement of history's parts to suit pouty faces tired of "white saviors." Within intersectionalism there can be "tedious generic white guys" but never tedious generic black women; them's the rules, and they point in the precise opposite direction of principle and instead into a crass racism with a smear of delicious jam on top.
What is more idiotically dim-witted (or obvious) than smearing some bowdlerized version of Jim Crow over fantastic literature where cis-het white males are hopping devils with pitchforks and calling it "diversity"? I can't imagine anything more stupidly racist than coming up with a theory about "black sports saviors" because I'm tired of black folks making the winning score.
The ironic idiocy built into intersectionalism once again comes to the rescue as we see the reality that replaces the mystical steampunk bird that assassinates the dirty Englishman. An actual East India Company representative wrote he "believed that he might never have pulled off the Subsidiary Treaty of 1800 had he not found the Nizam three items for which he had especially asked: a particularly intricate piece of clockwork 'with cascades and fountains represented by glass set in motion', 'an artificial singing bird ... an automaton, set with jewels." Even stupider, the "Nizam" he is talking about there is the non-indigenous, Islamic colonialist Nizam of Hyderabad, India, a thing invisible to intersectionalists because of the blinding color of red coats, though at that time the EIC were no more than allies of the Nizam, not his masters.
Then there's WSADF's "Pancho Villa's Flying Circus" by Ernest Hogan, an alternate history reversed out like Kaftan's so we have the aspect of a landscape "littered with burning, crashed American aeroplanes." The total effect of WSADF is little different than having an anthology of "anti-colonialist" Christian authors reversing out Islamic conquests from Alexandria to Spain to Constantinople, perhaps in an alternate history where the Crusades took permanent hold and order and progress reigns throughout the Middle East and I can change up a quote I give a few paragraphs below: This is Whiteland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here.
Given Elizabeth Moon being booted out of her Guest of Honor slot at WisCon 35 for merely questioning the 911 so-called "Ground Zero Mosque." In a stink of irony she was replaced by gay black intersectional feminist Nisi Shawl who one could argue is far more obsessively condescending in her views of whites than Moon is of Muslims. With Locus shutting down a Muslim oriented April Fool's joke, we know how such an Islamophobic anthology would be received. The problem with this strange brew of PC is that these phobias mysteriously only work in one direction. Christianity is never so lovingly protected as is Islam, though Islam itself should be radical feminism's worst nightmare. Within this PC world, there literally are no marginalized voices that are Coptic, Greek or Spanish and nor are they ever - EVER - spoken of in a postcolonial sense in an SFF community rife with complaints about colonialism; in intersectionalism there is only ever one colonialism and it is white.
The truth is both sides are accusing the other of being ignorant racists but only one side has a dictionary, facts, history, and quotes.
Anytime you see someone making laments about history's marginalized voices because Luke Skywalker is ethnically European, heterosexual and male, you're looking at someone with more than a few loose screws. If this sick social justice warrior ideology spent as much time looking for reasons to get along with people as it did in finding cracks to separate out people into hostile camps, there would be no problems in SFF.
The totality of these parts is that, rather than making a case for a mid-century male dominated KKK within SFF, an excellent case has instead been made for a KKK in pig-tails in the right here and now, and one doling out literary awards for "Best Hood."
I'm not surprised McCalmont is confused, or that he thinks Heinlein and others need an asterisk next to their names for racism and sexism or perhaps just sheer stupidity and lack of enlightenment. SF in its higher expressions is dedicated to using principle to enact perceptual shifts that expose the emptiness of identity, not worship it. For example, if you visit a web site that is no different in principle from a white supremacist site like Stormfront, but which calls itself "anti-racist," and you blithely leave comments on the site without a hint of self-awareness, it is not society in need of repair but your own perceptions, and that is what SF is: a repairer of perception. Any time I see someone writing a disclaimer about Heinlein as problematic, I know I've run into someone indoctrinated by third wave intersectional gender feminism, which is passed off as the new Age of Reason. In fact it represents a sinking back into the dark.
McCalmont writes Orwellian perceptual traps like "...is it really any surprise that science fiction struggles with issues of diversity and inclusivity when the history of the field appears to have been completely dominated by white middle-class Anglo-American men?"
In fact SFF doesn't struggle with anything of the sort if you discount morons who make stuff up out of their heads they can't actually document or make a case for.
Once again you have the smear of an innuendo of a racial conspiracy while ignoring the fact such demographics in cultural pastimes and lack of them are their own innocent explanation, not a plot. The fact McCalmont would never apply this to rap music is revealing as is the fact that rap music is black because it is black. It continues to be black because of the same non-reason, not because it "struggles with issues of diversity" or because Irish dancing suffers from a lack of a theoretical and mythical demographic that wants to be Irish dancers. McCalmont's proof of that is those mythical other dancers aren't there. Proof of rap's struggles with its own racial intolerance then lies in the absence of white rappers? McCalmont seems to feel that all innocent cultural demographics that ever created a thing guarantee their own moral dissolution by continuing to do that. If fact those things are called "traditions," not the KKK. The KKK is the KKK, a thing too subtle for those indoctrinated by the paranoid suspicious hyper-politicized feminist ideology McCalmont is so clearly awash in.
You see this empty intersectional argument of "underrepresentation" in cultural interests again and again, and again and again that false argument only ever touches the Western, the male, and the white. How asinine is an ideological stance when you can make it fall to pieces simply by asking if the NBA or romance fiction needs diversity? Are white men underrepresented the NBA? How about Asians? The idea is completely moronic.
McCalmont (supposedly representing the views of others) portrays a mid-century creative surge of innovation as the "reactionary stuffiness of so-called Golden Age SF." Exactly what are innovators being "reactionary" about? Golden Age SF didn't represent a coddling of the Gernsbackian '30s but a determination to move away from it, symbolized no better than by McCalmont's "toxic" Heinlein. How is "weird" or "speculative" fiction either a sign of a reactionary, conservatism or xenophobia? In fact the Golden Age of SF worked in precisely the opposite manner McCalmont suggests.
The mistake (and racist at that) which McCalmont makes in writing about the baleful over-influence of "straight, white, middle-class, Anglo-American men" is that there is an implied constancy there, either due to inherent qualities of race and sex or due to white male supremacist ideology, both of which are foul assertions to make. McCalmont and his crew of intersectionalists simply cannot grasp those men were different, each from the other, and not bound into some mysterious matrix of DNA and disdain. That's intersectionalism, not mid-century SF. McCalmont's appeal to the idea of there being such a thing as an "over-influence" of a race or sex in any cultural expression is mysteriously only ever said to be true of heterosexual whites and men. Therefore McCalmont's claim isn't based on a binding principle one can equally apply to all sectors of society but on intersectionalism's serial harassment of anything whites and men do. In McCalmont's daffy world there is never such a thing as an over-influence of heterosexual black men in blues music or white lesbians in Roller Derby. In short, in McCalmont's world there is no such thing as equal protection, without which blacks couldn't live in a white area of town and women vote. McCalmont's Tower of Babel not only ignores the fact there may be other towers but that it is a society-killer, at least modern society as we know it.
McCalmont's portrayal of "Joanna Russ as one of the greats of the field" is maudlin. Russ's influence is as "toxic" as McCalmont elsewhere falsely maintains Heinlein's was. In purely artistic terms Russ is pretty much nobody. It's no surprise McCalmont's claim for Russ's greatness lies in Russ's sex and opening up SFF to feminism, which in fact has nothing to do with SF or art. Nor is it a surprise that McCalmont confuses genre with an "agenda."
McCalmont gives the intersectional game away by mimicking the gender feminist cant that places art on the back porch when he writes "We choose to celebrate Joanna Russ because we want to believe in the future she symbolises and by choosing to celebrate her instead of the authors we inherited, we are remaking the history of science fiction in our image and making our ancestors work for us." McCalmont may be remaking SF but the remake has nothing to do with SF, unless the insane echoes of Andrea Dworkin is SF now.
And for McCalmont and others mystified by what Robert Heinlein's contribution to SF was, Heinlein himself states it best in a Sept. 1941 letter to Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr.:
"It seems to me that the popularity of my stuff has been based largely on the fact that I have continually enlarged the field of S-F and changed it from gadget motivation to stories more subtle in their themes and more realistically motivated in terms of human psychology. In particular I introduced the regular use of high tragedy and completely abandoned the hero-and-villain formula."
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Here's how the stupid works in a post written by Lord of the Pie-Charts, feminist SFF author Jim Hines, titled "Gender Balance in Hugo Nominees." The first commenter gives us this elegant synopsis of the perceptual, intellectual and moral failure of men, together with proof of their stubborn intransigence:
"Sadly, calls to broaden reading horizons tends to fall on deaf ears. Aside from indignantly insisting that they don't even notice the names on the covers of the books they buy (which begs the questions of whether or not SFF books by women have equally appealing covers and are put out in the places in bookstores where they’re most likely to be found), people can always come up with a lot of circular and non-falsifiable explanations for why male writers get the lion's share of the attention in the SFF genre, or point to a handful of very successful female fantasy writers, often writing juvenile F, as examples of how sexism isn't a thing."
Using "they" in that fashion while bragging about their acute hearing endemic to their sex when it comes to bias is primitive to say the least. It verges on hate speech when a community devotes its institutions to serving up and supporting a daily dose of it. This person is not a they, but they are talking about no less than the failings of half of all humans in America, if not the world. Doctor, take your own pills. That passage - and the post itself - is an excellent example of how failure is its own explanation and not that of a single other human being in the world.
#DiversifyTheNBA Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
"Justine Larbalestier @JustineLavaworm So what's really going on when folks say there can't be POC in historical texts? I suspect they just don't want to think about race."
"Kate @anti_kate @JustineLavaworm & the same people are often fine seeing everyone in say ancient Egypt played by white folks"
It must be wonderful to be so much more wonderful than everyone else and be an anti-racist while negatively profiling a race called "they." It amazes me any adult could write such drivel. One shouldn't be surprised an ideology passionately devoted to the idea critiquing people by their skin and sex and which specializes in exactly that is moral and intellectually insane. Why should anyone be surprised an ideology founded on a phobia of men stipulates men have a phobia of women? It was in reading such remarks in doing research that "swinish" became one of my favorite new words.
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When it comes to the distribution of reality itself, as opposed to radical feminism's concerns about race and gender-based individual morality and spirituality, it is typically according to an analogue of a favored nation status, since this type of PC so often includes the Third World. Within this paradigm, since one must embrace two mutually exclusive thoughts, namely a belief the Third World is fully equal to the West while also in reality acknowledging one would never leave the West and raise one's family permanently in the Third World, it is a classic expression of Orwell's doublethink. It is virtually a break with reality itself to somehow gerrymander it or lasso it like a cowboy to explain away the mass movements of people into the West and not out of it until that very real trend completely disappears. What kind of ideology ardently defends a neighborhood it would never live in and an equality that never manifests itself? It should go without saying only extremely ignorant people or those with mental health issues can routinely leap-frog reality in order to satisfy some personal whimsy. It is also no surprise then how often reality itself seems racist to intersectional gender feminists.
#Conservativesf Futures that assume behaviour based on western culture maleness is the best kind and that individualism is the answer
— Kari Sperring (@KariSperring) February 18, 2015
The problem with that bit of nonsense is that it is semantic fluff that is never actually acted upon. Sperring's feet tell more truth than her lips, and that is consistent throughout intersectional maunderings about the depraved West by an amazing coincidence intersectionalists will not only never leave but instead flock to. Sperring would no more pull up shop and move to her non-existent superior cultural paradigm than she would give up her right to vote.
This break with reality is the source of the endless mitigations and excuses to wave away that reality the PC expend most of their energies on. Certainly this break which prioritizes race and gender over reality is the single most fundamental tenet of intersectionalism itself, and its most dangerous flaw. One does not destroy useful institutions or promote dangerous failure essentially over some imaginary low self-esteem on behalf of millions of complete strangers a continent or ocean away. When all this is contrasted with the need for sharp perceptions worthy SF literature demands that will take one in precisely the opposite direction of PC, it is self-evident no worthy speculative SF literature can emerge from such a culture of endemic and even virtually institutionalized failure of thought and rank, hostile and willful stupidity.
Especially in the case of the QUILTBAG community itself, were they to move to the Third World their quality of life would drop precipitously, and yet these very people defend the fantasy that Wisconsin, Germany, Nigeria, Egypt, Nepal and Guatemala are more or less interchangeable parts. As they say, that way lies madness, so it shouldn't come as any great shock intersectionalism is a cult of madness and upside-down racism and bigotry, since it is fundamentally at odds with itself and reality. How much of a break with reality does it take to complain one lives in a racist patriarchy one won't dare leave while fundamentally defending those places one won't go to? "It is what it is" and "compared to what" aren't phrases you'll find in intersectionalism, nor "live and let live"
On the other hand, the Golden Age SF writers this book will show are so hated by intersectionalism as racist and sexist patriarchs were pragmatic rationalists. They came, they saw, and that conquered. Reality dictated their thoughts, not silly egos, and they subverted political identities they didn't particularly maintain in the first place in the name of serving the story. Golden Age SF authors grew up in hard times, sometimes on dirt floors. They were still close enough to the rhythms of daily life to understand fire, water and wind. They did not complain about concocted realities but put themselves to exploring its implications. They certainly were not racial and male supremacists who had an endemic resentment towards women or expressed an overt hostility towards gay folks. Only a psychotic would accuse dead strangers of such a thing based on zero quotes. In other words, Golden Age SF authors were fairly normal and forward-thinking human beings, what you might expect of people who had pretensions towards artistry and perception in the genre's higher expressions. It should be further pointed out those authors represented a statistically irrelevant group of, at most, several handfuls of influential authors who were somewhat eccentric xenophiles by nature.
In looking at SF stories from 1912 to 1960 there is no great trend toward overtly politicized stories based on current events. In fact it's rather remarkable how much SF seemingly tried to pretend WW II wasn't happening. When B-25s were flying from aircraft carriers dubbed "Shangri-La" in April 1942, Astounding Science Fiction was publishing Robert A. Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon. The following month which saw The Battle of the Coral Sea saw the first Foundation story by Isaac Asimov. During the Battle for Stalingrad in Aug. of '42 Heinlein published "Waldo." As the Battle for Guadalcanal drew to a close in Dec. '42 A.E. Van Vogt published "The Weapon Shops." That trend continued in Astounding with "Mimsy Were the Borogoves (1943) by Lewis Padgett (C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner), "Judgment Night" (1943) by C.L. Moore, "City" (1944) by Clifford Simak, "First Contact" by Murray Leinster as the war in Europe ended in May, 1945, and A.E. Van Vogt's The World of Null-A as twin atomic bombs ended the war with Japan in Aug. 1945. Not only did Golden Age SF writers set out to explore human problems rather than white or male problems, they sufficiently divorced their themes from real world events to make that precise point. The fact intersectionalism sees that in the opposite way but without proof to back that assertion up leads one to believe the PC are getting a whiff of their own self-obsessions and supremacy, not someone else's.
Actually you're living in a world of literature, symbolism and myth with a clear purpose. SFF is not meant to be a census or pie-chart. SFF that splits groups up according to contemporary provincial views doesn't work. One must invoke a type of futuristic classicism. To do otherwise has a clang of discordance as idiotic as having people wear bell-bottoms in ancient Rome or a far future. Put all that in the context of a type of Third Wave feminism that is nothing more than hate speech directed at men and whites and any claim to artistry dives into a trench.
Within the SFF community the manner in which intersectionalism is expressed is as direct as it is brutally ignorant: intersectionalist authors well-placed within SFF's institutions single out the straight white male obsessively, usually at least weekly, but mostly daily. That mythical straight white male usually has no name but is expressed in terms of the entire group of tens of millions. Profiling ensues and it is negative 100% of the time. The profiling takes the form of a wide variety of demonization theories that assert the straight white male is basically the source of all that is wrong in the world. The cis-hetero white supremacist patriarchy is intersectionalism's public enemy no. 1 and he occupies the lowest rung in a core SFF that has eliminated meritocracy.
"Feminism is an ideology of madness, denying the fundamental reality of human nature. Feminists enable ('empower') the irresponsible woman by offering her the convenient scapegoat of patriarchy - 'male supremacy,' 'misogyny,' etc. - as the all-purpose explanation for every misfortune she may suffer." - Robert Stacy McCain
Retweeted by Cecily Kane, of the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show website and podcast:
Gender identity, gender expression, biological sex and sexual orientation are all different things. pic.twitter.com/ZE4QsL7GyW
— Common Gay Boy (@CGBPosts) May 4, 2015*
Within the mandates of intersectionalism, one is either an oppressor or oppressed, and groups are talked about as if they are a single person, a single hero, a single criminal, and also stretching forward and back in time. One's social credibility depends on one's group. Once morality or immorality is painted onto a group, it is accompanied by that spreading back or forward in time; one can inherit morality or immorality itself. A given group can never be wrong, another never truly right. PC legitimizes every expression of a proper group's culture or intellect as fully equal in what is called cultural and moral relativism. There are no individuals in intersectional theory and so of course no real interest in law other than in preemptive laws that protect or attack whole groups, such as intersectional maneuverings in regard to college campus "rape culture" to deny men due process. Under "Sexual violence" the U of Michigan website on abuse now lists "discounting the partner's feelings regarding sex" and "withholding sex and affection" in the same paragraph as "using objects and/or weapons to hurt during sex." Gender feminism has no interest in the prosecution of individuals after the fact but in group pre-crime.
The title of a post by a black female lawyer at the Washington Post about a false rape claims "we should automatically believe rape claims," later changed to "generally" after the bitter response the article deserved. The author is a lawyer (later changed to NOT a lawyer) who "typically writes" about "gender inequality," apparently without understanding due process or equal protection. Intersectionalism is a Rorschach test where any inkblot is always a straight white male. Like Requires Only That You Hate's later discussed web site, the original Post article's title was scrubbed from the Wayback Machine internet archive using robots.txt, although you can see the original title at Real Clear Politics which linked to the original article and which is embedded in the html title. None of that is surprising; almost everything intersectionalists put forward is a lie, distortion or itself some form of supremacist bigotry or crusading inquisition based on those falsehoods and stereotypes. By intersectionalist standards, our entire criminal justice system is an inconvenient and bold example of victim shaming, just as all exercise books are fat shaming and telling children to not play with matches is children shaming. Aside from all that, the implication that lying in the name of the truth, in this case rape culture, has that stink of Orwellian doublethink you'll find throughout this book. There's nothing Orwellian about that to radical feminists, who see rape as a mass crime by all males.
Any untoward act by a man against a woman, or even an insult, is always systemic. If a man hits a woman, under the law, a single person is prosecuted. In intersectionalism, that becomes men hit women. All men therefore become de facto criminals-in-waiting or women-haters. Intersectionalists have no use for a thing like a court room. They are only interested in legislatures, where mass acts of legal discrimination and protection can occur before an actual criminal act. That's because in intersectionalism, men are a criminal act - guilty til proven innocent.
Even being ignored is a form of abuse or harassment as echoed by feminists like this: "Selena Deckelmann says: I give talks, organize and spend a lot of time in conference booths, I frequently have to deal with conference attendees ignoring me and asking questions of male colleagues standing next to me because they think that I am non-technical." The definition of sexual harassment has been extended out to the edges of the solar system.
Radical feminists can't even talk about a book like Gone With the Wind as representing a single individual mind. No. It somehow represents a larger wistful nostalgia for the antebellum South when uppity black folks knew their place. I've run across that sort of thing again and again in researching this. That same mindset is conspicuously never attached to black crime or Islamic terrorism, quite the opposite.
Once you understand the collective nature of radical feminist theory - meaning judgments based on what you were the day you were born - you'll understand intersectionalists never see the individual of an unfavored group as acting in isolation. They are incapable of it. Everything is systemic, like privilege, even if unconscious. Intersectionalists are not just advocates for their own cherished groups, they are supremacists. They are supremacist because they never advocate for or segregate themselves without at the same time contrasting their own nobility, oppression and superior spirituality against that of the straight white male. It's the crucial difference between a ladies night out and an analogue to a thing like the KKK. Saying "Oh, look, you went and made us have this all-radical feminist supremacist SF anthology by cutting us out of the picture" and pretending it's just a no-dog-in-the-hunt women's slumber party is nonsensical. When you realize these people consider a thing like marital rape an actual problem in America, or indeed any sex, you realize how crazy these people are, and fully deserving of the name "cult."
Generally speaking, intersectionalism sees the success of a proper group as indigenous, deserved, and protected. The success of an improper group is seen as hijacked, lucky, generic and up for grabs. That's how mid-century American SF becomes a literature for the world and African literature invoked by the West becomes theft, cultural appropriation. PC itself hijacks and appropriates legitimate anti-oppression movements and narratives. PC is bigotry turned on its head and put at the service of social justice as anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia. But then, when has institutional bigotry ever not claimed justice for itself?
Intersectionalists, in keeping with their addiction to identity over principle, are prone to self-contradictory positions and viewpoints. It is not unusual for intersectionalists to contradict themselves in a single Orwellian sentence. They cry for diversity while showing no sign of such a thing within their own insulated cultures, cherry-picking the world around them for gender and race like themselves, even practicing gender and racial advocacy while portraying accidental majority demographics which resemble intersectionalism's own segregated precincts as racism and supremacy. Intersectionalists are the perfect expression of Orwell's doublethink: the anti-racist racist, the anti-sexist sexist, the anti-supremacist supremacist. Coming from an SF legacy, it only makes intersectionalism's perceptual lapse all the more stupid. Intersectionalists also share an addiction to occupying moral highground, even against each other. Given their tendency to hysteria over nothing, it suggests commonly shared personality disorders.
Intersectionalism has a set of dehumanizing demonization theories that are anti-white and anti-male and designed to do nothing more than smear onto the group which is its target. The three best known are "white privilege," "rape culture" and "cultural appropriation."
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Another tell-tale sign you're dealing with radical gay feminism as the core doctrine in the SFF community is how often you hear (mostly women) people talk about "agency." Agency isn't as simple as giving a woman something meaningful to do in a story but once again comes to us from Jacques Derrida and the poststructualists via Judith Butler. The "performative" idea is that through repetition, the presence of women - in a book for example - will eventually work to include women in every nook and cranny of literature and then society through a type of linguistic and visual normalization. Reality is produced by consciously willing it into being and is seen as a revolutionary and subversive act to break the chains of societal constraint. However this corrupt idea would mean that the last 7,000 years of history may well have seen a matriarchy rather than a male dominated world if woman had chanced on the idea of using societal illusions to ensure their dominance instead of men. In that case it would've been oppressed men willing themselves where they were not through repetition until they became fully equal to women. It's no surprise that we once again encounter a self-contradictory idea that is more about (literally) wishful thinking and convenience than reality. Fifty years after the feminist revolution freezer warehouses across the nation are still virtually 100% men. The truth is that men have innate diverse, aggressive and wide-ranging interests that have nothing to do with willing them into reality. The idea that cultures separated by oceans all stumbled onto the illusory secret of oppressing women through heterosexuality and convincing them they can't be equal is daffy.
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As I mentioned, in keeping with its child-like tendency to dichotomize the world, PC in the SFF community have created that non-existent entity known as people of color in which it is stipulated all PoC share some common morality or experience whether they are a Catholic teen-aged Amerindian Guatemalan school-girl or a 40 year old Sikh tuk-tuk driver in Amritsar, India. This commonality trumps all national and cultural boundaries. No ethnic European can ever share this commonality with PoC. Within this silly paradigm, no white SF author can ever truly get inside the head of any PoC, no matter where they are. On the other hand, intersectionalism presumes the tuk-tuk driver from Amritsar and the Guatemalan schoolgirl have special insights into each other's natures. Conversely, intersectionalists argue all PoC - awash in Western and white culture imperialism - have insights into the entirety of Western thought and how whites themselves think on any issue.
Read this post called "Using Asian Culture As Props" by feminist fantasy author and blogger Jim Hines for the full measure of stupidity and the racial hierarchy which determines who speaks and who shouldn't.
It is common to encounter people in the SFF community who insist ethnic Europeans can't write about such and such a country because of postcolonialism, exploitation, racial privilege, and other insanity. Predictably, that never works the other way around. It's a stacked deck all around and in this game women, gays and PoC always draw aces and straight white men always draw a two. There is no binding logic or principle but only identity.
As I mentioned, "PoC" is not a thing that exists in a vacuum; it was a term created to specifically contrast all non-whites in opposition to whites, with the racism of the one and being on the receiving end of that racism by the other posited as a consistent and global phenomenon. By sucking all nuance and gray areas out of the world, intersectionalism literally reduces that world to black and white, a permanent state of colonialist and anti-colonialist war. Of course in order to get there one must eliminate any colonialism or imperialism intersectionalism's PoC ever themselves indulged in, which explains why PC history is not only stripped of context but of large swaths of history itself. Since intersectionalist history is so often memory-holed, it's no surprise the politically correct version of history is almost unrecognizable to normal people, since it is mostly a fantasy construct. Mughal, Aztec, Ottoman and Islamic colonialism disappears. Singapore and Somalia are postcolonial but Spain never is, and Singapore and Somalia only count the white Western colonialism, not Islamic or PoC.
Men and women, gay and non-gay, are similarly arranged, but in a cascading hierarchy of priorities and identities only the PC truly understand.
Intersectionalists cannot express their own identities without it being at the expense of straight white men. Intersectionalism by its very nature cannot stop its racist negatively pummeling's of human beings because of their European heritage, cannot stop making sexist remarks about men, cannot stop making bigoted remarks about heterosexuality.
PC is powered by faith and treats paradigms of successful or unsuccessful outcomes as a thing to be manipulated to suit its paranoid world view and egoism, not to pursue success or avoid failure. It is the extent of the successful perception of a group that defines success or failure, right or wrong, not success or failure, not right and wrong themselves. Of course this is all limited to the soft social sciences; gender feminists haven't yet figured out how to turn gold to lead, or make cars run on hubris, but it is not from a lack of trying. It should come as no surprise that intersectionalism is racist and sexist, and Orwellian doublethink and Kafkaesque to its very core.
Those are the rules of intersectionalist thought, and they are very real. They are promoted, discussed, formed into theories, and acted upon, as I will show in this book. Intersectionalism assumes as a default that white Westerners are racial supremacists and don't care for non-whites. It is further assumed white Westerners are homophobic and that men in particular, especially white men, don't like women.
Like the term "PoC," I mentioned earlier I use the term "feminism" because intersectional third wave feminists self-identify as such. I do not regard them as "feminists" any more than I regard neo-Nazis as advocates of equality or justice or as "men." In fact I rarely mention what I regard as legitimate feminism, which to me stands for a search for equality before the law and in cultural custom and practice. The reason I rarely mention what I regard as a legitimate form of feminism is because I don't see it as a problem within SFF or America. Legitimate feminism attacks institutions, faux feminism attacks men, who are falsely portrayed as a de facto ideological institution in their millions, past and present. Real feminism has nothing to do with sexually and racially defaming heterosexual ethnic European males. It is wise to remember to distinguish intersectionalism from the less narcissistic and more equal rights-oriented traditional feminism. Certainly intersectionalists have made no secret of their hatred of traditional feminists, not to mention an expertise in semantic gibberish. It's hard to imagine what's nuttier than writing "And side eye to the 'rational' and 'calm' comments. That is racist and sexist. Don't let it happen again." When you're at that level of hyperawareness, what isn't racist and sexist?
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If you look at political correctness in its broadest possible strokes, it is an artifact dedicated to explaining away the fact that America is not only the most sophisticated top to bottom country in the world, but that ever existed. In that sense PC is a monstrously distorted form of politeness insisting on modesty along outwardly imposed racial and sexual lines to the point of hallucination. Pile together Paulo Freire's Critical Pedagogy, Sayyid Qutb's Qutbism, Derrick Bells' Critical Race Theory and third wave intersectionalism, and what you find are the same common denominators: people who align themselves along racial, sexual and national identities and exhibit a type of history-based low self-esteem.
This is expressed by rhetoric formed from those ideologies that express self-pity, excuses, mitigations, and explanations including racism, luck and privilege to prove a first place team is in fact not a first place team. But since feet tell the truth more than lips, it's a simple matter of observing what people do, rather than what they say, and none of these ideologies will stray far from the most ardent object and cultural artifacts of their resentments, and that is the ironic source of those resentments. Were such people to adopt a more humanistic view of the world and its successes and failures, which are after all human, they would feel more invested. That is because human weakness and success is the legacy of us all, not some. In my opinion, the vast majority of people in the world do feel so invested. The ideologies of resentment and blame which are also ironically ideologies of sexism, racism and supremacy, are a tiny minority of human beings.
As I alluded to above, one of the most important aspects of the PC community in SFF (particularly among those who identify as "allies") is the fact they seem to be literalists. Intersectionalists are incapable of making simple principled comparisons, or understanding satire, which is not surprising for people who are identity addicts, and may even explain that addiction.
You repeatedly see the PC fail to understand any type of metaphor or analogy and also use them improperly, such as asserting using a common vulgar slur like "bitch" denotes the presence of active women-hatred in both the person using the term and also in terms of a society having such hatred embedded in its linguistics. The fact the PC will then use such terms themselves either unconsciously ("dick") or actively ("mansplaining," "dudebros") is lost on them. In PC lingo there is no sexual or racial equivalent to "whitesplaining," "mansplaining" or "dudebros"; there is no blaxsplaining or cisbroads. In intersectional thought there is literally no opposite to the statement by at the time SFWA president Steven Gould "Hard as it to believe, somewhere right now, a white, straight male is explaining to a woman or POC what they =really= meant." The simple reason for that is that Gould would consider it racist. Then there's the idea of someone who Arabsplained how she "can’t stand white belly dancers" because justice and peace and the love and equality. If anyone wrote they can't stand Asians playing the violin or Arabs the electric guitar the response would be obvious. The problem is nothing is obvious to the PC.
This appears to be a form of metaphor autism. If you can see the sense in that you're smarter than I am. There is a mountain of such Tweets I could list. The fact people are engaging larger principle entirely escapes famous Jeopardy champ Chu. Suffice it to say, the 14th Amendment and our Constitution is not built on acknowledging all diseases that ever existed simultaneously or their equal protection. However it is built on precedent. The sadness is how much company Chu has in that thread. Feminist renegade Camille Paglia may be referring to a similar thing when she writes "poststructuralism, with its compulsive fragmentations and dematerializations, is incapable of recognizing cultural transmission over time." You only have to read this Chu piece about America's so-called inability to figure out the difference between Sikhs and Muslims to understand how far gone that guy is.
For some oddball reason Chu attached himself to the fringes of the social justice warrior movement in SFF and would Tweet such blithering idiocy as "'Racism' is a specific, single system invented at a specific time in history - Atlanticization in 1500s" or juvenile racism like "I'm starting to get reflexively pissed off at white folks who self-ID as 'Irish' specifically to play the 'I'm a minority too' card..."
A classic example is how the PC engage in the Orwellian act of stridently insisting on harassment policy language about race and gender while actively engaging in daily harassment based on race and gender. Even a child could understand that comparison. One thing is never quite like another unless it's bludgeoned into place with a rhetorical sledgehammer and wishful non-thinking.
The PC seem to be literally unable to recognize racism among non-whites or misandry among women even when they are expressed in a far worse manner than racism among whites or misogyny among men. The fact the PC see such things in one place but never another can only be termed bizarre, especially since they claim to have such a heightened sense of such hatreds. In fact intersectionalists have detailed rhetoric worked out to explain away such simple comparisons. It is for such fools Orwell directed his sarcastic depiction of those prone to fall into self-evidently weak perceptual traps such as The Ministry of Peace.
Literalists in the sense I use the term will only ever see racial supremacy in one race, which is of course as close as one can come to the Ministry of Peace in reality. In all my research, the PC not only seem to be disinterested in tools of self-criticism that might work to help them engage in perceptual shifts and stand outside themselves, but to actively oppose them, despite their clueless one-sided mockery of the concept of self-criticism known as checking one's privilege.
Intersectionalists can only see a thing like a neo-Nazi frozen forever in one racial identity, which perhaps explains why intersectionalists are prone to resort to the empty meme of Godwin's Law, which explains precisely nothing and in fact strips an argument of the ability to use tools of self-criticism and simple comparisons of value systems to shed light on matters. One continuously sees the PC compare simple disagreement with them as itself being like a racist and sexist supremacist group that yearns for the good ol' days of Jim Crow and women barefoot and pregnant.
As you will see in this book, the very specific language and narrow range of focus of intersectionalism is remarkable for its consistency of ideological vision and clear purpose. The other consistency is how intersectionalists seem to hunt out the highest possible number of ways they can be seen as victims. If there is such a thing as an addiction to self-pity, intersectionalists have it in spades. It is a mad world where white middle-class hausfrau SFF authors obsessively write things about their own books like "I would really, really, really, really like a woman of colour on the cover." In the old days that was called prayer and confession, but intersectionalists don't worship a god but instead the lowest person on their fetish totem: the non-white gay woman.
For myself, I make a clear distinction between "politics" and hatred. No matter which side you're on when it comes to abortion, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, communism and a host of other societal expressions, they are legitimate dialogues. Demonizing people because of their ethnic heritage, sex or sexual expression is neither "politics" nor legitimate. You cannot demonize whites for Jim Crow, slavery or Japanese internment in WW II any more than you can demonize Arabs for terrorism, blacks for crime or gay folks for pedophilia for the simple reason so many had nothing to do with those things. We live in the 21st century and pretending any group which ever benefited from racial prejudice or war should have a shoe fitted to them forever is stupid. There may have been actual and real ethnic privilege at times in history for whites, Japanese or Arabs but there is no reason to spread that beyond their historic boundaries and freeze them in place or drag them far into the past or future. That is simply hatred. What social justice warriors in SFF do on their Twitter feeds with old headlines about Nelson Mandela or black riots in America is no different than obsessively posting stories every week about Japanese atrocities in China. Talking about historic crime and freezing it in place are two different things. One doesn't slap Japanese and German tourists but intersectionalists essentially single out straight white males for that special sort of attention and call it "social justice." All the toxicity in SFF isn't about "politics" but can be traced back to one single thing: the demonization of people based on what they were the day they were born. Eliminate that, kick out the bigots hiding behind "politics" by using SFF convention rules about harassment and this divide would be over tomorrow. There have been divisions in SFF about actual and real "politics" for 100 years, and they have never produced the divide we see today. That's because that divide wasn't based on a photograph, nor the literature for that matter.
When you see intersectionalists writing lame non-comparisons like "mixing politics in Hugos = bad. My doing the same = fine. Unless you think I'm wrong too?" you know the con game is afoot. Defining anyone who opposes being defamed as a group as then having a right-wing ideology on a par with intersectionalism's actual ideology is a convenient lie. The truth there is that an apolitical writer like Jack Vance joins the white patriarchy by the mere act of existing. Demography does not equal ideology. Claiming straight white men who resent intersectionalism's daily demonizations default to "conservative," "right-wing," or "Mens' Rights Activists" is as stupid as stipulating homosexuals become a de facto anti-heterosexual ideology because of the existence of GLADD which itself then becomes anti-heterosexual by the mere act of resenting anti-gay defamation.
The attraction men and women have for each other is visceral and instinctive. It is certainly not hate, nor is it even love-hate; it is love. That's why the majority of humans raise families. To whatever extent there is failure within such relationships, it is not a failure of men or women but of people. It never occurs to these fools that for every time a man has a romance with a woman, by statistical weirdness, a woman has a romance with a man.
Extremist intersectionalists use Jeddai mind-tricks to explain it's all about hate and the failures of men, especially white men, and the moral and spiritual supremacy of non-white women's queer culture. Now compare those two things and then drape them over literature as a movement and tell me what you see. The one is the traditional literature of the human spirit, the other rancid bigotry, self-obsession and supremacy. Considering intersectionalists see men as equaling misogyny, it's not hard to understand their obsessional suspicions about anything too straight, too white, or too male. By that standard, Golden Age SF is nothing more than a gulag, even unread - and it is unread. Why bother reading it - the jury's in.
Intersectionalism operates much like anti-Semitism in that heterosexual ethnic European males are considered the height of all that is and has been wrong in the world. The Western straight white male is the obsessive never-shifting focus that is relentlessly stalked. Reading the Twitter feeds of some women in SFF is an exercise in non-stop rants against white men. When it comes to intersectionalism, anything that is too white, too straight and too male is not only automatically granted the status of an institution, but an ideology, by innocent demographic alone. To an intersectionalist, ten straight white men in a room represents a purposeful de facto racial and sexual grouping that is set against women, PoC and gays and must undergo diversity. The reason intersectionalism is not seen the same way as anti-Semitism is that it purposefully allows itself to be confused with equal rights feminism, an anti-oppression movement based on real historic legal discrimination. That is why anti-Semites like to hide within anti-Zionism as well.
As I mentioned, the other similar con game intersectionalists run is that of the power dynamic theory which means gays, women and non-whites are never sexist or racist because even when they are, they are punching up. Any time you hear race/gender intersectionalists use that phrase, or something about "power differentials," you know they are trying to fix the game, eliminating rules while claiming to abide by them.
one last thing: "racist against white people" isn't a thing, @elissabeth is trash, and fuck your favs pic.twitter.com/rVuhA7g49o
— Shanley (@shanley) November 21, 2014It is a con, and it is a purposeful con backed by supremacist ideology. The theory is these marginalized can't be racist or sexist because they have no power to act on such bigotry. That is false unless you believe Nazis weren't Nazis until they had institutional power or all modern KKK should be let off the hook until they become mainstream. What the power/privilege con game in effect does is clear the way for a free-fire zone of unbridled bigotry on the most spurious of excuses while laughingly appealing to anti-racism. What it amounts to in reality is racial and sexual bigots thinking they're fooling anyone. And let's connect some dots between that madness, Kane's Modelview site and Hugo and John Campbell Award-winners:
It unsurprisingly starts out: "Since the civil rights movement, white people have exploited every opportunity to conceal their colonialist legacy and longstanding (ab)use of white supremacist power."
To say Hurley and Samatar have problems is an understatement, since I'm not sure how ignorant one has to be to deep six the Civil War or Northwest Ordinance or support the idea the post-Civil Rights era is "white supremacist." In fact the ethnic European West these people despise so much is the only global culture that has ever come to grips with its colonialism or abolished slavery. Ottoman, Arabic and African slavery was ended by Europeans, not by Ottomans, Arabs and Africans. The anti-Ottoman Hashemite Arab Revolt that Lawrence of Arabia fought with in WW I had slaves with its fighting forces. The phrase "compared to what" is not high on the list when it comes to this type of pointed stupidity.
So, white people get into everything. Now even "Diversity and Inclusion" is going through some mind-bending Orwellian metamorphosis at the behest of sheer hatred and its thesis all roads lead to whites rather than the padded cell it belongs in. Seeing award-winning SFF authors support that explains an awful lot about the disintegration of those awards in a racial and sexual sense as well as artistic sense. According to yet another award-winning SFF feminist fish-basket Mary (only one award went to a white male) Robinette Kowal, Racism makes you less creative. I agree, and would add it signifies an idiot incapable of the simplest abstract thought.
The author self-describes as "Kẏra is a Chinese-Amerikan trans woman working to create space for radical racial justice through technology where progress has been limited to liberal white feminism. She serves on the board of directors of the Free Culture Foundation and founded the Empowermentors Collective, a skillshare, discussion, and support network for trans, disabled, and queer people of color who share a critical interest in race, gender, and technology" so that's all very reassuring. Oddly enough there is little diversity and inclusion on Kyra's Twitter feed.
Really? Why?
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Intersectional feminists misuse the example of, say, black folks in an old Jim Crow county who didn't care for white folks. It's true that is not equally racist because black folks couldn't act on that and had good reasons to resent whites; it is not a he-said, she-said with two sides to the story. Where the con game comes in is in dragging that Jim Crow county into the present and in falsely portraying all of America as a 1930 Jim Crow county; using words like "institution" and "systemic" that were legitimate in an old Jim Crow county is not legitimate now. Contrary to what intersectionalists assert, racism and sexism today is indeed a story with two sides, and an equal opportunity employer that has diversified. Intersectionalists despise dictionary definitions of sexism and racism because, to a gender feminist, those things only ever mean men and whites. I understand what real Jim Crow was. I do not understand the idea America or even the entire world is a Jim Crow for women and PoC.
I'm sure it was; 230 million white people require a lot of energy to stave off, excepting the underground railroad you chanced upon consisting of a noble enlightened and insightful anomalous minority who just happened to nominate you for Hugo and Nebula Awards. Next, Ahmed engages a tag-team partner and deftly alerts us to the fact there was no "theft, blood and slavery" among Africans and Arabs except when Arabs enslaved Africans wholesale, which was puzzlingly only ended by evil white countries built on "theft, blood and slavery."
I have two multiple choice questions for Coates and Ahmed: Who participated in slavery as an institution?
A.) European nations B.) African nations C.) Arabic nations D.) All of the above
Next - who ended slavery globally and who had to be forced to end it: A.) European nations B.) African nations C.) Arabic nations
And of course Ahmed hasn't figured out that being an Arab within an Arab Al-Qaeda wouldn't save him from being murdered outright for the same insulting dissent he so dotes on in America, or even for the mere fact of being gay. Somehow the myopia of intersectionalism never quite sees the lack of gay pride parades within Islam.
The exception there is when "people of color" invade Europe or partake in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Then a "Europe devoid of people of color" is not only acceptable but promoted, and to point out otherwise "starts with R- and ends in -ism." If Tolkien has "easterlings" based on something like an actual historic event like a 9th century Arab army sacking St. Paul's Basilica and St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome that's white racism. One must be particular about how one makes a "Europe devoid of people of color." Void the armies and slavers and keep the peaceful merchants and traders and ix-nay on the "easterlings." Funny how MedievalPOC never finds military PoC like say, squatting in Spain for a kazillion years.
In fact in intersectionalism "racism" is a word that mysteriously only lights on the shoulders of ethnic Europeans. Considering how fast and loose the politically correct play with the word "racism," a rejoinder might be to say "I don't know if they're racists but they sure as hell don't like white people."
Just as significantly, groups favored by intersectionalists are never looked at as needing diversity, but instead offered protection for their very lack of diversity, like a UNESCO world heritage site; plus they never do bad things, or if they do it's not really their fault but that of colonialism, sexism and racism. The self-serving two-faced con is openly stated by diversity advocates:
What that in effect means is that any cultural expression perceived as white "demands" to be diversified into. On the other hand any non-white space must not be diversified into; it is sacrosanct. That is not logic but animus. It is projecting one's own racism into the minds of others. The proof of that how often these same people will point out how "people of color" are the majority on Earth. The truth is there are gigantic swaths of global media featuring "people of color." The fact they are not also squatting in America and Europe is meaningless; they exist - one needs only to find them and enjoy them. And of course from that immunity it's just a short hop to this immunity:
Intersectionalists do in fact institutionalize their own self-segregation, and one that is never in need of that diversity. It is the world view of madmen. Intersectionalism only differs from modern neo-Nazism in its particulars; in principle they are one and the same. Each is built on sociopathy and resentments that leap out at you from quotes. Neither has faith in the human spirit. A thing like that is jealously guarded and distributed according to race and gender expression. The smug moralizing of intersectionalists secure in the morality of their own identity is another thing that leaps out of their quotes. There is no cogent system like a moral ethos being referred to by intersectionalists in their public conversations but a thing more like we are us and they are men and they are wrong.
When you consider that intersectionalists probably account for near statistical zero of all women in the U.S., the way they've mainstreamed their hate-speech and paranoia into mainstream America must be considered a remarkable achievement, although stealing from the already laid groundwork of legitimate feminists, gay and civil rights activists has played its part in magnifying that achievement and clearing the way for intersectionalist rancor. That is intersectionalism's great strength: it operates within a false flag of an anti-oppression movement, hiding within a liberalism where the biggest victim is allowed the biggest voice and most credibility. But in fact intersectionalism does not believe in racial or sexual equality and says as much straight out; it is racist, sexist and supremacist to its very core. The only real oppression intersectionalism experiences is the oppression of the reality of the failure of its own ideology. Rhetoric that might in retrospect at times seem indistinguishable with modern intersectionalism has been around for decades now.
When the feminist WisCon SFF convention started up in 1977 they made no secret of what it is they were; but they were a thing apart from the core SFF community. Today that core community basically is WisCon, a thing that core community is mostly as blithely unaware of as it is determined to embrace.
Probably the great difference between now and then is the racial refinement. However, the truth is that the accidental apologist called cultural relativism that cropped up in PC years ago has allowed what were once seen as fringe lunatics to have far greater credibility than ever. That's because within PC there is literally no such thing as anyone other than straight white men being crazy or stupid. Right and wrong are not only turned upside down but exchange places, with Mother Nature and reality coming in a distant second, now relegated to the also-ran status only mad and failed systems of thought once occupied. The great irony there is that intersectionalism cannot exist outside the very white supremacy it stipulates and hates the most, since it is within that false gulag from which springs intersectionalism's very ability to exist by way of Western notions of law, human rights and the U.S. Constitution. In short, intersectionalism never quite touches any part of reality. In even more terse language, intersectionalists are intellectually insane. Were they to express themselves in the non-West they so dote on they'd be thrown into very real gulags.
Being fundamentally supremacist, intersectionalism operates much like other versions of supremacy born of low self-esteem and failure that must logically reconcile their own lack of success vs. the successes of those groups they have set themselves against, much like Qutbism does for example. The great failure is that such ideologies based on supremacy never come to understand that they themselves define and explain their own failure; that is precisely what a lack of tools of self-criticism implies - buying into supremacy is self-defining, a watch-word for stupidity. The usual logic goes that the opponent can build dams and spaceships but is spiritually and morally inferior and owes their success to brute force, luck and oppression.
In that sense it operates almost like a messianic religion except in the case of intersectionalism the messiah they wait for is themselves. It is the anti-oppression narrative of the plucky underdog one often sees in SF: the morally superior Fremen with their secret knowledge biding their time like rats in the walls for the moment their hidden talents will overcome their colonialist masters. Entertaining enough in SF, but in real life a form of paranoid delusional insanity. Intersectional gender feminism only survives by lying to itself about Western white males while in reality staying as close to them as possible. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, were gender feminists to experience real non-democratic oppression, they would disappear in a puff of smoke in the time it takes to put a bullet in one's head.
Blogger Richard Fernandez remarks that the PC believe "they are better simply persons than the rest; able to make moral judgments no one else can. Their self-regard is almost erotic. They’re in love with themselves. Or to paraphrase one (of) the president’s (Obama's) campaign lines: 'we are the people the world has been waiting for.'" Messiahs indeed - and gross narcissists with artificially constructed group identities.
The problem with intersectionalist views of the world is that it is not observation speaking but wishful self-serving thinking born of hate, jealously and resentments. Given its obvious sociopathies it is perhaps no surprise how often intersectionalists hold mawkish Twitter conversations full of enemies of "they" while claiming to have a heightened sense of empathy and compassion even while indulging in obvious cold-blooded hate-speech. There's not a whole lot that can be done for minds that claim compassion while wishing an SFF author who used a common vulgar slang term should "die in a fire." The further irony there is that intersectionalism is the very sort of culture that would put a bullet in their own heads were their ideology to freely express itself since violence and intolerance is implicit in its dogma. There is nothing truly like a Constitution, human rights, empathy or compassion in gender feminism.
Intersectionalism tends to be fascinated with its own assumed intellectual supremacy and perception, but a similar cult of endemic low self-esteem and failure also produces essays like Sayyid Qutb's "The America that I Have Seen," one of the least perceptive and outright moronic documents by a so-called intellectual you will ever read, and one that would be fitting for intersectional writing, which is as routinely devoid of logic and reason as it is full of sneering disdain for white men.
This theme of a failed attempts to reconcile itself with reality is what one typically sees on intersectional Twitter threads and blogs, and in great profusion. Intersectional writings tend to have the tone of a self-satisfied arrogance of a Napoleon, but written by people with uneventful lives in fairly boring and low-paying jobs, or even housewives, and often admitting to clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorders and post traumatic stress syndrome. Intersectional Twitter feeds are monuments to boredom, mental health issues and self-centeredness.
Another thing to note is these are people tied at the hip to the idea of enjoying being victims, since they so clearly are not victims, despite confused claims "The view from beneath is always clearer." Rather, they are women living at the apex of civilizational protections of the rights of women. But within an ideology that possesses no tools of self-criticism, no compared to what, it is what one would expect. One can always measure the tranquility of a person's existence by the triviality of their criticisms. By that standard, intersectionalists not only live sheltered and peaceful lives, but historically so. In short, intersectional response to their own social status amounts to little more than hysterical overreaction, as if one needed that pointed out regarding people who wish fiery death on men who utter swear words. That is also highlighted by intersectional response to sexual assaults as making all men on Earth accessories before and after the fact, rather than operating as law and fair play do and limiting crime to actual criminals. In its place gender feminist intersectionality offers demonization theories that reach out and smear all men and whites, such as "rape culture" and "white privilege."
For a cult so ardently against racism that attaches crime to all black people and terrorism to all Arabs, intersectionalists are more than willing to do that exact thing to straight white men. Intersectionalism has the same credibility in 2015 as an anti-slavery movement. Obviously when you have no slavery you're going to have to make some up and to do that you will have to redefine the very word "slavery" as a start. That is where racist "micro aggressions," "rape culture" and "white privilege" come from. No crisis? Just create one. From there all these racial and sexual supremacists have to do is find enough naive middle class social justice warriors to promote their bigotry and fake oppressions. When you're listing heterosexuality itself as an oppression you know you are not only dealing with liars but with psychologically damaged people.
The great falsehood about this entire weird movement within SF is to think of it as liberal vs. conservative, though it mostly is portrayed as exactly that. The oddity is that the non-PC SF writers most targeted see themselves as being targeted by liberal marxists or something. Though the people attacking them are not shy about using the word "intersectionalist" to describe themselves, I have yet to see a single author under the gun use that term or evince the slightest awareness of what it is they are up against.
But this is not rocket science. Liberalism does not default to the hysteric paranoia of lesbian ideology, nor is conservatism set up to even think about such things, let alone oppose them. The reason conservatism is seen otherwise by radical feminists is for the simple reason intersectionalists assume opposing them on any issue as opposing their race or sex itself since intersectionalism's own issues always derive from race and gender.
The most fundamental tenet of intersectionalism is race and gender, and how they intersect as targets of oppression. What's more obvious than to see race and gender pretend to naturally intersect with SF? That betrays an obsessive compulsion, and from where; not mutual intersections, but stiffly inappropriate and unnatural ones. Despite such clear mechanisms of identity-hatred, you still have this type of increasingly hollow bleating:
What's amazing is that anyone would try and maintain such a nonsensical talent at mindreading at this point in a patented con game with a stacked deck of Newspeak definitions of words that would try the patience of the Sphinx. I am not "uncomfortable" with the reality of intersectional bigotry but contemptuous of it. And again you see intersectionalism's penchant to attribute disagreement to bigotry and ignorance rather than entertain the notion that intersectionalism is itself not only depraved but aggressively so towards millions of complete strangers defined only by their skin and sex.
In truth there is nothing the least liberal, egalitarian or tolerant about intersectional third wave feminists. For a taste of that, go to Adele Wilde-Blavatsky's Twitter feed and scroll down and down, and you'll see how an ardent feminist simply wasn't enough of a racist bigot to fit in with the third wave. Then read this post "On the Hounding of Adele Wilde-Blavatsky" for context. Blavatsky is in favor of things that some might see as fairly radical, like the wholesale dumping of the terms "Mr." and "Mrs." across Europe. But there's a big difference between that type of feminism and simply hating people. As Blavatsky herself puts it, "Intersectionality has been hijacked." Wilde-Blavatsky may be goofy enough to believe in "patriarchy and misogyny," but not nearly goofy enough to satisfy her comrades, which is saying quite a lot. That's because Wilde-Blavatsky remains closer to the equal rights end of feminism, a thing her bigoted former comrades have no interest in. The intellectual content in this bitter battle is often quite high.
Enjoy "Stop it with the feminist whitesplaining," which starts out with "Lord, protect me from the attentions of well-meaning white women." Enjoy what that would be called if it began Lord, protect me from blacksplaning black women. The post is from Latoya Peterson of Racialicious fame, a women who has the amazing talent to always find the faults in millions of whites and no one else. Then there's "Dear White Feminist."
What Blavatsky really means is the word "feminist" has been hijacked. At its core Third Wave Intersectionalism is about lesbian and non-white supremacy, not "feminism." Intersectionalists don't hide their disdain for white First and Second Wave Feminism. Some in the SFF community don't care for their "white allies" and openly admit "I do not care for white people period." To be honest, to me, it comes off like a radical splinter of a neo-KKK in SFF that has broken off from its parent group. The amazing thing about the person who wrote that is that she and her supporters (like Jaymee Goh - "seconded") in the comments section consider anyone who points out such bald-faced racism as themselves being "harassed," such as K. Tempest Bradford.
If you follow intersectionalists in SFF enough you'll find white feminists always and almost automatically defer to black feminists:
The funny thing there is, since intersectionalism is based on a hierarchy of biggest victim, white feminists themselves become forever relegated to the status of useful "allies" in the same way both groups relegate men to that status by virtue of lacking real world experience in oppression and from being in possession of too much "privilege." In reality all this amounts to is the smug arrogance of nobodies looking down their noses and dispensing the wisdom of their streetwise ways at as many people as possible while simultaneously vying for the lowest privileged and highest moral ground. The terms "oppression Olympics" is entirely apt. It's like the Three Stooges where Moe gets slapped, slaps Larry and Larry in turn slaps Curly. Curly turns and finds no one to slap. Curly is the straight white male but also the one who slapped Moe in the first place.
Though a nuthouse looks much the same from outside, the break between white and black feminists is so profound one can come to the conclusion intersectionalists use the word "feminist" because they find it useful; they certainly don't believe in it. When you drag in issues like being gay, transgender, postcolonialism, the disabled, racial privilege and even one's weight as "vectors of oppression," that's not feminism, even with women at its heart. By that standard, any group of women who do anything whatsoever is "feminist."
The reason I invoke Orwell's 1984 and the term "Orwellian" so much in this book is because how much rides on the perception of that single word - "feminism." It acts like a shield to deflect thought. The history of feminism in America in the last 100 years has gone from something I support to a thing I find insupportable. How then can such a movement use the same word? Well, it does, and to great effect - as camouflage. The far extreme of radical feminism is so far gone it's dropped out of feminism altogether. It takes racism, sexual bigotry and women's supremacy and imposes words like "diversity" and "social justice"; it's like biting into a brick covered in chocolate frosting.
The thing about Orwell's 1984 intersectionalists absolutely cannot grasp is the transference of a behavior from one set of identities to another; they just can't see that. They cannot grasp a beneficial face as opposed to a beneficial thing. Use the words "social justice" or "anti-racism" enough and it's like a form of self-hypnosis. Talk about wheel-chair access and allergies to scented products enough and one can indulge in obscene group defamation, racial slurs and blood libels until one is blue in the face while waving a flag of "anti-oppression." That is a world of identity trumping principle. It cannot see. Orwell wasn't warning about fascism or totalitarianism; why would he do that? Those things already existed. Why put 1984 in the future rather than the then current Soviet Union or past Italy or Spain? Orwell put it in the future because he had to do that to engage the perceptual shift and imagine a new face to fascism. The benign semantics of "Big Brother" or wheel-chair access - the Ministry of War or Peace - what's the difference? And that's the question central to 1984: what is the difference? The answer is: quite a lot if you're not paying attention. Orwell is telling us "noble" is a thing, not a word, not a face - no a skin, not a sex. Principle vs. identity. One leads to human rights, the other to a dystopia. Intersectionalism is a dystopia selling itself as human rights.
During the cultural revolution of the 1960s the opposite truth was in play. Liberalism saw very real oppressions and lack of rights codified in law. It was conservatism that was the cauldron of identity freaks. It gave answers like "because I said so" and argued for the Vietnam War because if an American was doing a thing it was by definition right. There was no legitimate answer to stupid obsessions like keeping one's hair short or tucking in one's shirt.
The line that divides intersectionalism from liberalism or a thing like white supremacy is one of research, knowledge and perception, not inaccuracy or exaggeration. Calling intersectionalism "feminism" is the same divide which exists for people with a casual knowledge of Islam and tend to lump it all together, rather than talking about Qutbists, Wahhabis, Sufism, Salafis, Ibadis and arguments about the first two Caliphs compared to the first four.
One can call all Egyptians throughout history by the name "Egyptians" and ask who the guy is who keeps mentioning "Mamluks" but the Mamluks existed, whether one likes it or knows it or not, and they were not "Egyptians" any more than Cleopatra was or Mohammed Ali, whose 150 year dynasty ended with President Nasser. Ali was an ethnic Albanian Ottoman born in Macedonia. The bottom line is names are important; that is why Orwell created "Newspeak."
"PC, "liberal" and "feminism" are terms that don't truly serve. I at times use them in this book in deference to the knowledge gap. "Intersectional" or "gender feminism" is far more accurate but also covers much of the same ground while at the same time distinguishing liberalism from the supremacist cult intersectionalism is, although I admit the more radical feminism is successful in mainstreaming their ideology into the liberalism the less meaningful such distinctions become. In fact this book is about the mechanism whereby fake social justice camouflage and semantics has been used to insert intersectionalism into the SFF community.
The difference is one of labels to a certain extent, but despite the closing gap, it's still a mistake to blend "intersectionalism" into "PC" and more so "Left" in the same way it would be to blend the KKK into "conservatism" or Ali into "Egyptian." The huge difference is the KKK doesn’t possess the anti-oppression camouflage that enables intersectionalism to mainstream hate-speech. The fact so many anti-PC people continue to use the term "liberal" is a testament to that camouflage. The KKK can’t hide, intersectionalism can, for the simple reason they don’t look like the KKK or have the same targets; shallow appearances based on American history is everything in intersectionalism - blindfold it, and without millions to defame, it disappears. But in fact intersectionalism does use the same rhetoric in principle as white supremacy. Unless one thinks the Dem Party is an analog to a KKK which demonizes heterosexual ethnic European men, it's time to start using correct names; this is a specific ideology.
Whether people know it or not, every single pro and anti-PC blog post in SFF today is about intersectionalism - not liberalism, not Leftism, not socialism, not Marxism. Both the Hugo and Nebula winners in 2014 was the result of core intersectionalism and its obsession with gender/racial identity in its most fundamental application and desires, not the Democratic Party.
The bottom line is I learned the term "intersectionalism" from the people who are the subject of this book, and they make no bones about what they are in that regard. People can keep calling them "Egyptians" but they may be "Mamluks" or "Albanians." In fact in that analogy of labels, they are. Jaymee Goh, responsible for co-founding the insane anti-racist racially segregated "safer-space" at the WisCon SF convention has the Orwellian blurb at the head of her Twitter feed "third world intersectional feminist writing sff... for great justice. steampunk postcolonialist." Goh's feed is emblematic of intersectionalism since "great justice" in intersectionalistspeak means rancid and unflinching bald-faced racism and supremacist bigotry. We're talking about a cult that is "asking that the hero of your fiction be somebody other than a straight white male" but without being able to ask or answer what that same thing is when you ask the hero of the NBA playoffs be someone other than black.
Intersectional gender abolition feminism is a host of self-contradictions that add up to nothing more than narcissistic and supremacist semantic and intellectual gibberish. These are women who maintain heterosexuality is false or even compulsory. The ideology has no answer for the contradiction that if heterosexuality is fake than so too is lesbianism. Gender feminism maintains binary heterosexuality can be and must be cured in order to minimal the cultural gender markers by which men oppress women, but consider "curing" homosexuality to be bigotry. That is what one might expect of a self-serving psychosis trying to pass itself off as some natural reflection of reality. In "Judith Butler addresses TERFs and the work of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond" you have Butler talking about... something.
The last important part of intersectional thought to mention is another constant drumbeat, this one borrowed from Gramsci Marxism and retooled for race and gender - the idea of a "hegemony." It's not at all uncommon for PC feminists within SFF to use that exact word. In the case of PC intersectional thought, unlike Gramsci's "bourgeoisie" hegemony, they are more concerned with how it applies to the opposites to their own identities, with the idea of white, Western, male and heterosexual as defining the "norm," the "normative" - the hegemony - and constantly rail against the idea. It shouldn't come as any surprise the PC merely propose to replace their perception of a hegemony with one of their own. Useful idiots are useful in this regard. It's no surprise intersectionalists see the accidental Western male Anglo hegemony as a single purposeful ideological KKK-like organism and their own PC ideology as a naturally occurring intersection of interests they just happened to stumble on on their way to being oppressed.
In the "contributors round robin interview" for the anti-white racial revenge fantasy anthology We See a Different Frontier, you have this exchange:
"Aliette (de Bodard) asks Djibril (co-editor Djibril al-Ayad): For me, We See a Different Frontier is an important watermark in genre, presenting the perspective of the third world/the colonised instead of the usual (white) Anglo-American hegemony. As someone who lives in the UK, how do you relate to this hegemony, and what do you think should be done to counter its effects?"
Al-Ayad answers "In the UK we're used to hearing people say that focusing on underrepresented voices is like some kind of politically correct affirmative action, at best patronizing and at worst 'reverse racism' (sexism, mutatis mutandis…). This lets people ignore and normalize the dominance of white, straight, Anglo, male voices, such that anything near equity is seen as dominance of the other."
In short, England is a hegemony and Africa isn't. What's the divider? Reason? Logic? No. Race? Yes. 'Nuff said. It's pretty clear de Bodard doesn't understand why Japanese people are in Godzilla films, what marketing is or even what a country is.
At Strange Horizons SFF webzine, the ever-complaining Rochita Loenen-Ruiz wonders "...how there can be a reconciliation in SF if hegemony fails to recognize, acknowledge, and welcome the work and contribution, not only of women in SF, but also the work of women of color, the work of non-Western writers, and the work of those of us who identify as LGBTQ."
To me that's like asking how there can be a reconciliation within Delta Blues if the black male hegemony fails to recognize, acknowledge and welcome the work and blues music contribution of white women, non-Western, and the QUITLTBAG community. It's not even a legitimate question and the idea of a "reconciliation" doesn't even make any sense since Delta Blues need not even acknowledge such nonsense and will continue to serenely sail along within the confines of the culture which created it and reconcile itself with no one and nothing. Unsurprisingly intersectionalists make no such demands on Delta Blues for diversity. That's just as well since black blues musicians would simply ignore such nonsense.
To say radical feminist intersectionalism is a toxic, sick and even mad culture is completely accurate. And the important point which adds to that toxicity is - like doddering old fish-wives in a gossipy small village - there is no issue globally which intersectionalism doesn't consider it's business and territory to make pronouncements over. That only highlights how much this cult memory-holes whatever it finds inconvenient.
Leaving people alone is not in the radical feminist picture and variety is most emphatically not the spice of life. What you'll learn in this book is that fake notions of diversity and inclusion is a Trojan Horse to camouflage the most insane intersectional gender feminism. The number of lesbians in this PC movement in SFF is far above the national average and far higher than gay male voices. That is not a demographic accidental spike but one that has been ideologically maneuvered towards in a type of affirmative action and segregation, in contrast to the straight white male demographic common in SFF which is random and non-ideological, though the opposite is maintained via constant arched eyebrows and murmuring innuendoes from intersectionalism itself. Ask yourself in what world "feminism" defaults to lesbianism, or SFF defaults to either one for that matter? In truth intersectional supremacists in SFF don't represent lesbians or women any more than the KKK represents men or whites.
This movement in SFF has happened because we have abandoned the principles behind law and notions of right and wrong and instead substituted race and gender in their place. What you'll find in this book is the most beloved illustrator in the history of SFF - Frank Frazetta - is now persona non grata, as is Heinlein, Asimov, Frank Herbert and the entirety of SF's Golden Age. Why? Supposedly because they were homophobic racist women-haters, though there is no proof of such a shared ideology. The real truth is because they were heterosexual ethnic European men.
"The way I would define radical feminism is that it recognises male domination as the enemy, as the problem. The relevance of Lesbianism to that is that Lesbianism is a refusal to participate in heterosexuality which is the chief way women are subordinated to men." - Denise Thompson, Lesbian Network, 1992.
As a final note, third wave intersectionalists consider traditional heterosexual feminists to be defunct, old-fashioned, out of touch and irrelevant, and in fact white straight women have frequently been stigmatized by their "queer" non-white counterparts out of the movement.
You can always tell as much about what an intersectional gender feminist chooses to talk about as what they conspicuously choose to never talk about. That is how you spot a con game. If colonialism and postcolonialism are such important topics, why is only Western expressions ever talked about? Why is only Western involvement in slavery discussed and why is the fact the West ended it globally never mentioned? If diversity is so obviously beneficial, why is romance fiction, rap music and middle-weight boxing never brought into such a dialogue? Why is the fact homeless people are overwhelmingly men or that the male suicide rate 4 times that of women never brought up? That is not a reflection of social justice, but of racism and supremacy. That is a form of lying. This is the thinking behind why a Hugo and Nebula-nominated SFF author is always called "Arab-American" rather than the Arab-Irish American he actually is. There's no juice in the latter.
Some people need to have their shared humanity put on them in the saddest of ways. A "self-proclaimed 'militant feminist'," a woman named Julie Burchill at the U.K.'s The Guardian once sickeningly wrote about male suicide "For a start, it's a phony panic, catering to that lowest of modern male desires - to be a victim... That young men succeed in suicide more often than girls isn't really the point. Indeed, the more callous among us would say that it was quite nice for young men finally to find something that they're better at than girls." Sixteen years later she wrote about her own son's suicide and suddenly - too late - both men and women became humans. One wonders if her son ever read The Guardian. One wonders if people in SFF will ever understand the same sickening con game they are being sold where morality and one's humanity is embedded in race and sex. I for one see no humanity in "militant" feminism for the simple reason it is an ideology of hatred.
Let me state a simple truism about hate speech successfully mainstreamed into the public arena: on one end is biological hatred, the other "social justice." In between are the gullible, the naive and the useful idiot. To be successful hate speech must always use some plausible rationale for employing a double standard for an in-group and an out-group. That's how hate becomes nobility.
*
SF's supposed history as one of institutional racism and sexism is a straight up fantasy. In a post at i09 Jess Nevins writes about SF's racism that "The science fiction pulps were particularly bad in this regard," but without giving any examples. Looking at Nevins Twitter feed reveals why a webzine like io9 would tap Nevins for an opinion. Like the other PC in SFF, he seems to believe men are morally inferior:
There's no proof such a thing is true and it seems ignorant to smear so many people. The fact someone who passes themselves off as an academic in SFF makes such lazy stereotypes makes it even worse.
In fact SF pulp stories 1912-1960 concerned themselves neither with race nor racial and gender supremacy. Race and gender simply wasn't a topic of any particular interest and "not present" isn't the same as exclusion or supremacy and neither is a demographic majority. I'm not sure what Mr. Nevins expects of a tiny insulated genre like SF in a country that was then almost 90% white and in which 90% of black folks in 1912 still lived in a deep South where by far the worst Jim Crow laws and anti-black racism and violence occurred. For example, in 1912 the state of Minnesota had already had anti-Jim Crow laws for many years. Tuskegee Airman Joseph Gomer, who grew up in Iowa, claims he didn't encounter segregation until he entered the army at age 22 in 1942 and headed south.
According to the Tuskegee Institute, 94% - 3,240, of a total of 3,446 black lynchings, and 81% of all lynchings 1882-1968 occurred in the former Confederate States. 84% of those lynchings were of blacks. Outside that area, 77% of lynchings - 689 of 895 - were of white men. 27% of all U.S. lynchings were white. 44 black men a year were lynched for 80 years, although that tended to be bundled up in the early decades of the 20th century. The same regional pattern is generally true of Jim Crow laws.
The bottom line is that if you wish to make such a case for a racist SF, one need only produce the stories rather than make assumptions that paints 48 states and a small cadre of SF writers with one brush. The truth is far more nuanced than the bigotry of the PC permit. Given the internet's propensity to ferret out every last shadow and skeleton in a closet, the lack of facts to back up intersectionalist claims about racist and sexist mid-century SF are rather stunning. As I mention elsewhere, intersectional evidence usually consists of a simple demographic as proof of guilt and supremacist ideology, or complete anomalies like Samuel R. Delany's pathetic invocation of George Schuyler's 1931 Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A. D. 1933–1940, a novel and author which, in SF terms, are nothing from nowhere.
Other than an individual case by case basis, which is how all people should be judged, there is no hint of an across the board disdain for either women or non-whites in old-school SF. SF was after all a young adult boys' genre of adventure fiction. It was no more exclusionary towards women than a woman's clothing boutique is exclusionary towards men. The reason there were almost no black SF authors is for the stunning reason there were almost no black SF authors submitting, not because they were being rejected. The idea the few female SFF writers had to use aliases because of women-hating misogyny is a foolish intersectionalist fantasy meant to demonize men, not reflect reality, or a shared commonality of human weakness.
The eventual informal membership of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America in the '60s and '70s counted 5 women among its 15 members and 7 of the 24 stories presented in the 5 Flashing Swords anthologies which showcased the group's work 1973-81 were by women.
Mary Gnaedinger- a person who knew her SFF - edited the much-loved SFF pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries for its entire 1939-53 run. The fact Gnaedinger was a woman was immaterial to me. The fact she was a human being who schooled me in what was worthwhile fantastic literature was what mattered. FFM was basically a reprint pulp and so it acted in much the way a museum does since Gnaedinger's primary source was the SFF archive of the old Munsey magazines 20-30 years earlier.
SFF writer and member of fandom Henry Kuttner married SFF writer C.L. Moore, who had previously made her own mark in SFF. Together they co-authored important SF stories. C.L. Moore herself claims she used her initials when she first started because of her boss who looked down on pulps as trash. SF author Edmond Hamilton married SF author Leigh Bracket. In a 1975 interview Brackett says she was welcomed into the field in the early '40s with open arms. That same year, in the introduction to "The Best of C.L. Moore," SFF author Lester Del Rey wrote about a standing ovation for C.L. Moore at a Denver SF convention a couple years earlier. SF fandom and readers certainly knew who these women were. In the 2010 book Listen to the Echoes by Sam Weller which is a series of interviews with Ray Bradbury, Bradbury credits Leigh Brackett with being his "great teacher" and considered her a better writer than Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Earlier on Leslie F. Stone had a number of SF stories published in the 1930s in Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories and there were a few others associated with that SF genre magazine era such as Lilith Lorraine, Minna Irving, Claire Winger Harris, Lucile Taylor and Sophia Ellis.
Outside the fan oriented genre there are so many magazine publications and novels dating back to the Victorian era one can't list them all, but would include Hope Mirlees and Evangeline Walton, who published fantasy novels in the '20s and '30s. Other names one might be familiar with are Charlotte Gilman, Inez Gillmore "Angel Island" (1911) and Jesse Kerruish "The Undying Monster" (1922), the latter two reprinted later on in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in the late 1940s.
In 1905 The Indian Ladies' Magazine in Madras, India published a short story called "Sultana's Dream" by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein, which comes complete with an "air-car" and passages like "You need not be afraid of coming across a man here. This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here." Although that passage is a breezy 100 years before Twitter, it is eerily prescient of quotes you will find in this book. The boringly PC SF author Cory Doctorow referred to it as a "masterpiece."
1869 saw the American publication of The Princess of the Moon: A Confederate Fairy Story, by Cora Semmes Ives. There is a scene where a Confederate soldier named Randolph transported to the moon (á la Edgar Rice Burroughs' Confederate John Carter transported to Mars) encounters a maid, complete with "blushes." "Should you be seen here, your death is inevitable: such must be the fate of any of your sex who look upon me before my marriage, except the one destined by my grand-mother to be my husband. He is to appear on my eighteenth birth-day, but until then I am as one dead to the world." That is remarkably similar to a scene from Burroughs' Pirates of Venus, serialized in the fall of 1932 in Argosy Weekly. The hero Carson Napier is stymied by a similar problem about the woman he loves, Duare, Princess of Vepaja: "They may not even see or speak to any man other than their blood relatives and a few well-chosen retainers until after they have reached their twentieth birthday. Should they transgress, it would mean disgrace for them and death for the man." Burroughs' own father served in the Union cavalry during the Civil War and Burroughs himself in the 7th cavalry, albeit as a drudge.
In another scene "Randolph, unable to resist such charms, immediately gave expression to the devotion he felt, and declared he could not survive separation from her. It was impossible to resist such entreaties, and the princess by her drooping eyes and blushing cheeks confessed what her timid lips could scarcely utter."
In Pirates of Venus you have this scene: "I came closer to her. 'Look at me, Duare; look me in the eyes and tell me that you do not like to hear me tell you that I love you!' Her eyes fell. 'I must not listen!'" Later Duare confesses "I always wanted to talk to you..." Burroughs's stories almost always had a romance at their heart and some cultural barrier that prevented love from being communicated in an easy manner, the better to draw out tension amidst intrigues, battles with men and monsters, and miraculous escapes. "Drooping eyes" communicated love in many an early scene in a Burroughs novel, a frustrated love not openly expressed til near the end. It's a theme generic to romance, since living happily ever after doesn't mean as much if not sieved through a crucible of prior unhappiness.
In 1868 the American corset-burning feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps published the first of her after-life fantasies, The Gates Ajar, which sold "100,000 copies."
Marie Corelli published a religious-inspired fantasy with some elements of SF, A Romance of Two Worlds in London in 1886. "I gazed upon countless solar systems, that like wheels within wheels revolved with such rapidity that they seemed all one wheel. I saw planets whirl around and around with breathless swiftness, like glittering balls flung through the air—burning comets flared fiercely past like torches of alarm for God's wars against Evil—a marvellous procession of indescribable wonders sweeping on for ever in circles, grand, huge, and immeasurable."
Gloriana, or, The Revolution of 1900 was a near-future novel written by Lady Florence Dixie and published in London in 1890. This is from its preface: "'Gloriana' is written with no antagonism to man. Just the contrary. The Author's best and truest friends, with few exceptions, have been and are men. But the Author will never recognise man's glory and welfare in woman's degradation." Once again this is eerily reminiscent of #NotAllMen over 100 years later, though at least Lady Dixie had actual institutions to tilt at, not windmills.
In 1892 Elizabeth G. Birkmaier's fantasy novel Poseidon's Paradise: The Romance of Atlantis was published in America. It precedes the more famous adventure fantasy The Lost Continent (1899) by Englishman C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne. Each invokes the mythical Greek figure associated with a deluge by Zeus in featuring a protagonist named Deucalion and each novel ends in the drowning of Atlantis.
Noted English author Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, writing under the pseudonym of L.T. Meade co-authored The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899) with Robert Eustace. The novel is one of several the pair created and presages the later criminal syndicate mysteries of Sax Rohmer's The Mystery of Fu-Manchu (1912/3) and Abraham Merritt's Seven Footprints To Satan (1927).
In 1897 West Coast author and career newspaper writer, journalist and editor Frona Eunice Wait published Yermah the Dorado, which is a pre-Columbian fantasy set 11,000 years in the past.
At Amazon.com the blurb for Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 gives us this:
"Partners in Wonder revolutionizes our knowledge of women and early science fiction. Contrary to accepted interpretations, women fans and writers were a welcome and influential part of pulp science fiction from the birth of the genre. Davin finds that at least 203 female authors, under their own female names, published over a thousand stories in science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1965."
That speaks to the truism that radical feminists constantly assert things about the Golden Age of SFF not in evidence. A white male demographic will suffice. Here is another truism: within intersectionalism the enemy's demography always translates to an ideology.
Idiots like obsessive racial ideologue Daniel Jose Older writes "sci-fi and fantasy have always been a very white, very straight, very heteronormative, male political project. A very colonial project... . By not publishing black authors, by not publishing books about black people, that’s become the message by default. Whiteness being the default has been the message." Older straight up doesn't know jack shit about what he's talking about.
The interviewer in that piece adding "80 percent of all award winners are still white dudes writing about white dudes" is just more silly demography as ideology, and in the case of SFF intersectionalists always mean some goofball white male supremacy they've made up out of their heads.
*
Can you tell me whether the following quote is from Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984 or an intersectional feminist?
"The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others."
SF has been infiltrated by a group of people, reaching into SF's highest institutions, who hide behind notions of "social justice" to disguise their own racial and gender animus, while accusing others, overwhelmingly by gender and race, and not name, of that very same thing. This has clearly even ranged into people with mental health issues who believe men have used normal sex to control women for thousands of years. Anti-male, anti-ethnic-European rants in the SFF community publicly expressed on Twitter are often all day, daily and last months at a time, and the people involved conspicuously share in intersectionalism ideology and express these rants using the semantics peculiar to intersectionalism. Sometimes the terminology and phrasings involved are so arcane as to be almost indecipherable. From time to time intersectionalists exhibit every evidence of psychotic breaks or nervous breakdowns on Twitter or their blogs, and that's when a "third world intersectional feminist writing sff" isn't indulging is raging hypocrisy by also writing about "white tears" and "not caring about" "which white people are innocent of racist acts." That person - co-founder of WisCon's demented racially segregated "safer-space" Jaymee Goh - calls all that "great justice" and "anti-oppression work."
"You know, whiteness is a hell of a drug. It really is." - K. Tempest Bradford, co-founder of WisCon's safer-space.
No one should be surprised intersectionalism reflects some of the same general principles as the American Nazi Party. Intersectionalism is racist, sexist and supremacist. It is arrogant. It is intolerant. It has no interest in law or equal rights and in fact uses power/privilege theory to abolish equal protection for others. Intersectionalism is paranoid and hateful. It has invented a whole new set of demonization theories based on empty European intellectualism and American radical lesbian ideological excuse notes from teacher. Despite it's bleating, intersectionalism produces nothing, no new thoughts, new and interesting intersections and perceptual shifts. It is painfully dogmatic, illiberal and sluggish, and above all unaware. It is incapable of true satire, expressing irony or of employing metaphors. Intersectionalism is narcissistic, obsessive, self-contradictory and full of semantic gibberish. Intersectionalism routinely lies about history and current events with the goal of propaganda. It has no interest in literature or the arts except to advance its world view and stifle those it disagrees with. In fact intersectionalism is almost brutally illiterate, especially in its lack of art appreciation. Intersectionalism is manic in its myopic outlooks and identity centrism. The narrow spectrum of its provincialism and exposure to and experience with other world cultures is the opposite of what it claims for itself. In terms of events, intersectionalism uses an American-centric parochial lens analogous to an identity laden Jim Crow it smears over the entire world and its history. It considers any contact with its own gay, non-white and female identities to be in itself mind expanding and an exemplar of a range of diverse thought. In fact intersectionalism is conformist and static in its thinking. It is hypocritical to the point of delusion in that it regularly encourages acts for itself it forbids in others, setting up rules only others must obey. Its hatred of men, whites and heterosexuals is phobic, endemic and feral. In short intersectionalism is exactly the sort of ideology one might expect would be created and taken up by people ranging from the insane and sociopathic to merely stupid, conceited, ignorant and uneducated.
Intersectionalists in SFF like Rochita Loenen-Ruiz routinely engaging in virtually non-stop racist defamation and then writing "Fully engaging in war against evil and malice, while fully engaging in healing and protecting the vulnerable spirit" has an air of Orwellian lunacy about it. Posts like "Kameron Hurley: Surviving The Game (Writing As Business)" put up the same week as "Guest Post: Author Kameron Hurley on Gender Roles in Fantasy" has a similar air of unreality about it. I'm pretty sure no successful business model talks about sexually and racially defaming your audience with a dose of supremacy sexual obsession on the side.
To get a stark glimpse into how the minds of this privilege politburo operate, read this almost unbelievably self-serving racial and sexual supremacist gibberish from Loenen-Ruiz which would forever put straight white men at the beck and call of this truly sick ideology. The fact it is being presented under a rubric of justice, compassion and empathy makes it all the more sick. This is not compassion but the dead eyes of a shark:
"Focus shifts to: how can we work together to bring about change? How can we help to elevate the position of the other?"
"Privilege acknowledged means a willingness to focus on the other. A willingness to de-center the narrative. It's not about you."
"Unquestioned privilege is selfish and focused on the self. The self is centered."
"Acknowledgement =/= to being ashamed. Instead, ask yourself how you can use that privilege to benefit the less privileged ones."
"Acknowledgement is knowing you possess/benefit from institutional and structural biases. The objective isn't to shame people but to bring people to the point where they acknowledge they do have privilege and power."
The arrogance it takes to move from the Philippines to Europe and lay down a new racial-sexual morality to all of the West is stunning. It would be different were she talking about the needy and the sick but in this ideology the morally needy and sick are straight white men and all their works.
Why so many such people are drawn to SF is anybody's guess, but it's killing the genre, and the literature they're producing and reading is the worst in the history of science fiction, at least in America. In an era of rampant relativism, no one should be surprised madness and paranoia are being mainstreamed as reasonable. Intersectionalism is notorious for giving full weight to the most hysterical fears among its coterie. What could be more obvious or neurotic than people who provisionally claim an interest in SFF who never express that interest without hysterically defaming tens of millions of ethnic European heterosexual men? For want of better words to describe such a bizarre and focused obsession, that's just plain nuts. Given that, it's no surprise a simple majority of over 50% of the intersectionalist women in SFF I've researched openly admit to mental health issues in a country where 6 to 9% of people ever claim to experience such things. Quotes like "the rate of antidepressant use in this country among teens and adults (people ages 12 and older) increased by almost 400% between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008" and "23% of women in their 40s and 50s take antidepressants, a higher percentage than any other group" are suggestive, but of what?
If the top echelon of today's SF writers which emerged from core fandom are so unaware of their own genre's history, even hostile to it, not to mention the inadvisability of prioritizing the social identity of the author over the work itself, one can easily see one reason why there is so little good SF being created today. The multiple award-winning Aliette de Bodard once Tweeted "I know aliens in SFF started out as the equivalent of POC natives in a colonial narrative frame, but still..." De Bodard's assertion is flat out nonsense. And why wouldn't her scholarship be shoddy in this regard if she doesn't even know who Jack Vance is? I'm still stunned by that.
De Bodard continues on with "the 50ies and possibly 60ies went through a phase of white american centrism, I think? (my timeline of authors's a bit hazy)" Considering de Bodard has never actually lived in America, I'd say a hazy timeline isn't her problem but the absurd suggestion there was such a thing as ideologically and supremacist white SF. Nothing exists in a vacuum, so exactly what is she comparing this to - the halls of justice in her head? Within the tenets of intersectionalism, any move an ethic European male makes is suspect. The straight white male is a fixed point on an intersectional map of immorality that never for one moment wavers and where the rest of the world is not present and accounted for.
It's like some insane upside-down world where any marginalized group has a special dispensation from the Pope to act as racist as they want and people avert their eyes, like the criminal no one saw in the old Damon Knight SF story, "The Country of the Kind." The fact this is happening in SF makes that all the more ironic. We no longer take the trouble to respect principled morality tales that define all of us as flawed but instead give the SFWA's Nebula awards to idiocy like Rachel Swirsky's defamatory "great justice" literature "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love." That's an ocean of talent and principle away from the days when the Science Fiction Writers of America oversaw the three-volume SF Hall of Fame anthology. The country of the kind now exists as a literary artistic space of institutionalized brutality in a hideously dystopian Orwellian sense written by people too lacking in perception to understand that.
Of the 48 stories chosen for the anthologies that make up The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970 & 1973) none are about conquering and colonizing analogues of indigenous peoples. Only nine stories have aliens at all. Following this theme of racial and politically correct disdain for their own literary ancestors and using skin as a data point, SFWA member and SFF author and editor Carrie Cuinn in a Sept. 2013 post on her blog ludicrously states an even worse falsehood that there was "a time when SF writers hid their racism by attributing negative stereotypes to aliens instead of non-whites..." Again, that is patently not true, but the perception of it among modern SF writers and fans is very real; lies carry weight. If these remarks I've mentioned are how modern SF writers feel about the earlier era of SF, it is no surprise they have entirely turned their backs on it, and in doing so, brought the evolution, if not the very creation of its art, to a dead halt, if not death. One could easily replace Cuinn's "aliens" with "white straight male" and put pointed questions as to who it is who is hiding their bigotry, if not psychosis.
A 2009 article at io9 predictably titled "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like 'Avatar'"? mentions John W. Campbell Award-winning and Hugo and Nebula-nominated black SF writer Nalo Hopkinson's views "that the main mythic story you find in science fiction, generally written by whites, 'is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it.'" None of those Hall of Fame stories mentioned above measure up to io9's and Nalo Hopkinson's racially defamatory assertion. "A profoundly racist world" isn't really that if it's only ever another race's bigotry but instead that of the profoundly racist culture making such assertions. Once again the modern SF author's politically approved and even sought out racial disdain and scholarship by virtue of skin as PhD together with an actual ignorance in that scholarship of her own genre is evident there. Hopkinson's assertion is more flat out nonsense, seemingly motivated by racial animus, not a dispassionate survey of the actual history of SF, as even a cursory look at any Top 100 list of SF novels will show. I09's use of Hopkinson stinks more of ask a blaxpert to interpret and blaxsplain the real meaning of a so-called "white" literature and confirmation bias by a hostile intersectional author than pragmatic observation. If intersectionalists want to constantly refer to mansplaining and whitesplaining then they have to take it on the chin for blaxsplaining too. It is the same paradigm: if I were to use PC logic and racially/sexually loaded forms of argumentation and ownership (a thing I find moronic), I might say I don't need black folks interpreting my own literature back at me. I don't believe in such nonsense, but intersectionalists do... depending on which way the race/gender wind blows.
I defy io9 to show me these "main mythic" stories since their and Hopkinson's claim amounts to nothing more than whites do negative things. Why bother reading those old stories; since they were "generally written by whites," one can assume the racism and colonialism is a built-in part of the landscape. In that sense, one skin is the scholar and the other data. Why even leave the house? Just give these fortune-tellers skin colors and all will appear in their crystal balls. The idea old school SF was some evil Hitlerian version of a 1929 issue of National Geographic doesn't hold any weight. When people rarely shut up about white folks and their profiles of those white folks are 100% negative, that is its own history and carries its own weight.
Given how much the PC talk about old SFF as colonialist derived, I've yet to see an intersectionalist make a case for it. That as much as anything should tell us the idea resides on the level of an urban myth. If one is so certain of such a thing, facts to back up that certainty should be close at hand. If they're not, how does one come to such conclusions in the first place? As in all things intersectional, disdain precedes an event, and that disdain is prejudice and bigotry and malice.
In any event, when did racial defamation and profiling in which only one version of it - "When will whites..." - become as okay as this same culture asserting "When will blacks... " would be straight up racism, and hilariously doing it in an anti-racist post? Does this culture have any principles or rules whatsoever - or brains? It seems to me that if you're making a case for an anti-racist atmosphere then setting precedents that tacitly approve of such language while forbidding it at one stroke is a case of Orwellian stupidity. Racism is a language and once you start using it that way you're going to open a Pandora's Box. In law, courts look to precedent to establish custom and practice. If some idiot starts in with "When are blacks... ?", and points to io9, what's io9 going to say - it's wrong? Based on what principle? And at what point do adults look at SF, see a torrent of race, race, race, and start to realize you have some weird people dragging some weird stuff into some weird places?
And notice the undertone of assumed racism that accompanies an act mainly by "whites." What then is that implication of race as a driver when applied to acts mainly by blacks? The false assertion in that piece rings as hollow as saying the main hobby of black Americans is crime.
And who runs io9? Surprise - two QUILTBAG intersectionalists - one of them transgender. So, turning the tables, I can run my own Devil's Advocacy posse: when will morally supremacist intersectionalists in SF stop writing racist articles? Or worse, when will men pretending to be women stop doing such and such? See how that works? It's called "goose/gander" and is the underlying principle of all law. There is more direct racial bigotry in io9's ill-chosen title than there is in the entire length of Avatar. Throw in the article itself and it's nothing more than a senseless witchhunt driven by some vague animus that champions skin, not the merits of ideas.
The ideas above together with the myth women authors were excluded from SFF is just another feminist hoax from a cult noted for creating hoaxes which operate much like a Reichstag fire.
Though intersectionalists in SFF bleat daily about tolerance, one can see live and let live is not in the cards at a place like io9 and the larger core SFF community infested with anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual bigotry. As is par for the course throughout this book, what is dumber than being the source of such articles while pretending non-existent articles titled "When Will Transgender Stop Making Blog Posts About SFF" exist? This is a truly upside-down and backwards cult where principle and the Golden Rule are fabulous chimeras from a lost mythology. Here is some of the almost unbelievably clueless stuff one can find daily with this crowd:
The stupidity never stops:
America is not an ideological white male supremacy. Once again these daffy warriors cannot tell the difference between a simple demographic reality and a supremacist culture or ideology. Intersectionalists acknowledge profound differences between men and women when it suits them and pretend such differences are nonexistent when that suit fits. One of most bitterly humorous things about this entire cult is that their enthusiasm for insisting people not attack other people because of their race and sex is only exceeded by their setting the most conspicuous precedent for normalizing such behaviors on social media platforms. Intersectionalists are their own worst enemies in a war against themselves.
That's the hilarity. Rhetoric that amounts to a tiny percentage of what social justice warriors themselves do is supposedly the motivation behind all this. Besides that, try Tweeting what intersectional ideologues do but changing only the race or sex and you'll find what intersectionalists do is not allowed.
Anyone who's ever looked at a white supremacist web site knows one common thing they do is to have a sidebar which features any crimes black folks have done against whites. That is a perfect reflection of what many Twitter feeds do in the core SFF community about any crime by whites against blacks. The added difference is intersectionalists commonly included white on blacks crimes from the Jim Crow era, which is bizarre when you think about it in terms of normal human beings but perfectly understandable when you understand what it is you're dealing with in SFF; it is obsessive.
And one thing you see over and over again in intersectional dialogue is the preponderance of males in crime and war but without the obvious flip side of that revealed below:
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Look at more nonsense and shoddy facts based on gender and race rather than scholarship in an article by yet another devoutly intersectionalist SFF blogger, the Hugo Award nominated Foz Meadows, a women who never shuts up about "white privilege." In a Huffington Post article Meadows claims Arthur C. Clarke is one of intersectionalism's demons:"three straight, white Anglophone men" who somehow benefited from Jim Crow, unequal pay for women and an era prior to the decriminalization of homosexuality, though Clarke was an Englishman who had nothing to do with Jim Crow and was also gay. And did women get paid less for SF stories in pulp magazines?
Intersectionalists don't know anything about SF's old era. Meadows assumed the worst because white men were involved and called it research. I have another name for it. Meadows' research is the same research men in beer gardens used to discuss Jews. Needless to say, Meadows' criticism of Vox Day in that article while indulging in the very rhetoric she finds reprehensible in Day is an example of the Orwellian musings that make the PC so lacking even a shred of credibility, not to mention once again shoe-horning in their unhealthy intersectional obsessions into a weird place. Only intersectionalists in SF would bring up 3 SF authors and go straight for skin and gender rather than SF. Shouldn't this bizarre crowd be working at the United Nations? To an intersectionalist, "fair play" has to do with merry-go-rounds as a system of logic.
Ironically, the woman who writes about white men the way Nazis wrote about Jews also fails to mention one of her other three white criminals - Isaac Asimov - was Jewish, and so was discriminated against in a variety of ways including when he applied to college. Of course you'd actually have to RESEARCH that before making false comparisons and lumping Asimov in with a good ol' boys club of happy KKK. If you want to know anything about SF, especially Golden Age SF, the last people to ask are intersectionalists.
Meadows' logic is delusional. She claims "stories about a future in outer space populated entirely by white people, who constitute a global minority" is wrong (and as if it was done on purpose by a white supremacist hegemony) while ignoring the fact that in actual reality that is precisely what has been the case since the first man went into space over 50 years ago. Somehow Meadows thinks that both the reality and fiction that reflects that reality is a "political decision, " lacking in "diversity," if not flat out racist. What in the world does being "a global minority" have to do with it? IT HAPPENED! Was the space race all about race? Well, it was in the empty mind of a intersectionalist, who see tacit racial conspiracies in their sleep. As I've said: reality itself is racist to intersectionalism.
Brazil, Germany and Italy have dominated the soccer World Cup. They are a global minority. So what? Meadows is not a very smart woman and nor are racist gender feminists. Their disdain, racism, sexism, and general bigotry far precede actual events. All intersectinalists need to predict a future event or depict one in history is have the race and gender involved. Guilt or innocence follows. By a massive coincidence a world of immorality is always the same race and gender. Here is another example of Meadows' intellect and loose grasp on what this thing called geography is, or the difference between a book and a film:
What in the world is she talking about? Is Hollywood the capital of Earth? Now we're measuring the Earth for film-casting? India is the largest producer of films. Why don't they fall under the withering racial glare of daffy intersectional gender feminists? In the hands of women like Meadows, diversity isn't a principled idea or goal, it's a sniper's rifle. Meadow's stat doesn't even make any sense. Russians are white - we don't make films for them. And what percentage of India films have a white cast - none? Have they no global feminist film debt? What about Chinese language films - are they operating at a diversity deficit?
I wasn't aware that all nations were making films for all nations and must adjust their casts accordingly. Someone call China and Egypt and tell them their films aren't up to U.N. madcap intersectionalist guidelines and that their books may be films - and vice versa. Guess what - Hong Kong films are 100% east Asian. Go launch a mega-Tweet at them. Plus they made Dangerous Liaisons and set it in Shanghai in 1931 - cultural appropriation! And I want Godzilla back. As usual with an intersectionalist, some tacit hostile racial conspiracy attached to the most base supremacist motives is in play. When someone in that thread challenges Meadows she replies "Look at it this way, then..." And there's the problem. A feminist will always shift gears to ensure the straight white male remains in the cross-hairs. This isn't about reacting to an observation but about attacking a pre-determined target.
Cricket teams from India, New Zealand, Australia, and Pakistan have dominated their World Cup for decades. So what?
Predictably, Meadows' cult is the one that makes hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks and then exemplifies that by setting up Kickstarters for all-women SF anthologies and hoorahing literary awards for PoC, because as Orwell's canary in a coal mine Tweeted, #SegregationIsDiversity. Diversity for who?
The truth is that Meadows is either too stupid or too disingenuous to admit that, if this is all about a principled commitment to diversity, why the specific targeting of anything Western, straight, white, and male while Bollywood, samba, Egyptian TV, Chinese soaps, and middle-weight boxing skate clean away unchallenged. In light of that, Meadows' use of the word "global" is pure clownishness. The fact this woman got nominated for a Hugo is a disgrace.
The amount of sheer stupidity and lack of logic intersectionalist attach to global cultural expressions reveals a penchant for racism and sexual bigotry, not an interest in the mechanism of cultural exchange. For example, Brazilian soccer is as routinely better than American soccer as American films are better than Brazilian films. It's a matter of cultural investment, not the one-way smear called "cultural imperialism," or "cultural appropriation." If you look at Brazilian players on club teams all over the world, they are overrepresented. So what? Meadows has no interested in that larger reality; she is interested in letting straight, white, Western men have it with both barrels. Her rhetoric constantly stinks of manufactured double standards to make sure her feminist cross-hairs never waver or are affected by anything as decadent as fair play and an honest and balanced reporting of facts and larger context. How about choosing 3 "marginalized" identities at random and getting them a Hugo nom? That's pretty much what intersectionalists do anyway.
Meadows is typical of an intersectionalist and how they think, which is to say - not at all. Maudlin and mopish cant and wisdom such as this retweet are par for the course; empty aphorisms you see over and over again:
Well, the gold standard for intellectual vacuity is certainly making up for that now.
If we shift this over a bit, it can be revealed that, though intersectionalist thought is supposedly set upon binding principles, it is in fact a con game where the improper identities are set up to lose coming and going. E.M. Forster's A Passage To India is one of the most famous novels in the English language. Forster was gay and his novel is multicultural, multi-racial and set outside the West. Does Forster get any PC points for that? Not on your life. Forster is still the wrong identity. Even the "Anglo" language itself makes his novel suspect today. If anything, to an intersectionalist, Forster is guilty of immorally mining Third World culture, the act of so-called "cultural appropriation." So, put in diversity, ignore it, bake a pie out of it - it doesn't matter. What matters is what you were the day you were born and to what extent you are willing to kowtow to an inquisition. Talent by way of a "meritocracy" is as mercilessly tossed aside with a LOL as proper skin and gender depicting proper geography in a proper way is a good review.
As if celebrating her own brainlessness, Meadows follows that up with a post on her own blog titled "Hypocrisy, Race and Literary Gentrification." Needless to say, it is a must read. It's all about how the word "hypocrisy" disappeared from the English language, worshiping racists, and calling total strangers without any names racists by skin alone. Suffice it to say writing about non-white SFF writers while writing about a "white writer’s appropriation of black culture" is about as clueless as cluelessness gets. The message is as long as you breathe the right fire no one in the PC community particularly cares if you know up from down; you're the right kind of people, and that's all that matters. The problem for the genre is that this is a collection of profoundly unhappy and broken people endemically at odds with and hostile to the world and everything in it but themselves and their pet identities. No one in their right mind behaves like intersectionalists.
I can understand why someone like the Nebula nominated SFF author and virulent radical feminist Veronica Schanoes would occasionally retweet this:
I cannot understand what mileage a culture of people get out of Tweeting stuff like that every day and all day, and they most certainly do. In the world of gender feminism, the 19th century is today's headlines. Reading Schanoes' Twitter feed, you'd think she was doing it from an internment camp, and she has plenty of company, and they never stop, not for one day. What kind of people go on about slavery every day like it's a headline? The kind of people who've had their poisonous sociopathy academically pandered to for decades now. If you want to know what old-school academics powers this noxious cult lodged in core SFF as its new orthodoxy, you have your reading cut out for you:
Andrea Dworkin, Diane Richardson, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Simone de Beauvoir, Peggy McIntosh, Ann Jones, Joanna Russ, Jenny Kitzinger, Donna Haraway, Bonnie Zimmerman, Kate Millett, Sandra Harding, and too many to more than touch on here.
Read "Why Modern Feminism Is Illogical, Unnecessary, and Evil" at Psychology Today.
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And of course I'd be remiss in not mentioning the filthy little 2012 intersectionalist racist ditty titled "Straight white male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" written by an intersectional devotee, SF writer John Scalzi at his blog "Whatever" when he was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Scalzi thinks America is an Alabama Jim Crow country circa 1920. In one single stroke the presumption of innocence of an entire group of human beings is gnawed away at and that group demonized using the intersectional feminist ideology of a cult of supremacy and hatred.
The mainstreaming of racial and sexual hate-speech from within SF's highest institutions is far advanced and becoming embedded to the point where it will be difficult to ever root out. It's not surprising a man who has openly supported the most vicious racists in the SFF community on his blog, sometimes giving them a guest platform, would write such a post. Neither is it a surprise Scalzi parrots the lesbian race/gender privilege theories of Audre Lorde and her "shamanic power" without a hint of awareness.
Being without access to higher principles, Scalzi's too stupid to understand he is as much as saying Arabs in the Middle East and Asians in China default to a pack of privileged racists by the mere act of existing as a majority demography. There's your intersectional morality.
And again, this is science fiction. Obsession, meet weird place. The irony that dogs the footsteps of all purveyors of intersectionalism is that Scalzi claims he acts out of the desire to make a better SFF community, and yet he is arguably the cause of more bitter acrimony than anyone else within SFF since he came onto the scene. Of course that is going to happen when one sells blithe racism as community and justice. One could justifiably assert SFF's intersectionalists are morally insane.
The sad racist sickness about the theory of white privilege is that for it to sustain itself, one must assume at least a majority of ethnic European Americans value and trust their own skin above that of any other ethnic group. Since no one could possibly know what's in the hearts and minds of well over 200 million Americans, white privilege can be seen for the concocted racial slur that it is. The fact you cannot measure white privilege or use it to predict a thing makes Scalzi's assertion it is as obvious as "gravity" all the more ignorant. That's like saying black crime and Jewish greed are as obvious as gravity. In the end all it is is inciting racial hatred by clueless people who think they are promoting harmony.
The only thing that's obvious is the fact racial and sexual privilege works in the opposite fashion than Scalzi writes about. In SFF one can make the most rancid public remarks about men, whites, heterosexuals, the West and Christians with immunity, particularly if you are a woman, non-white, gay, non-Western and Islamic. SFF author Elizabeth Moon never would've lost her Guest of Honor spot at the intersectional feminist SF convention WisCon had she made her rather innocuous remarks about Christians rather than Muslims. In fact no straight white man can survive in the public arena making the exact sort of racially and sexually inflammatory remarks that are at the heart of the fraud that is the so-called "social justice" movement in SFF.
The truth about a culture capable of indulging in a thing like white privilege is there is no way a thing like equal protection and our 14th Amendment can emerge from it. That is true across the board when it comes to a rat's nest ideology like gender intersectionalism. When you admire someone like Audre Lorde, you haven't even advanced as far as Hammurabi's Code.
Just so you know the score, in 2009 Scalzi allowed SFF personage (and 2000 founder of the Strange Horizons SFF webzine which features Rochita Loenen-Ruiz's anti-white posts) Mary Ann Mohanraj a startlingly problematic guest post where she asserts "White privilege is a way of saying that in a racist society... being white gets you privilege." No surprise that Mohanraj dotes on poetry by Audre Lorde or that she quotes Lorde (who remember is a supporter and colleague of Andrea Dworkin) in that very post. Lorde was also one of the earliest proponents of what we today call - surprise - intersectionality. In the same essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" in which Lorde accuses white feminists of "racist patriarchal thought," Lorde quotes Simone de Beauvoir. It's no coincidence Scalzi wrote in 2013 "Back in 2001 a small online science fiction magazine became my very first publisher of my science fiction: Strange Horizons." Together, Scalzi and Mohanraj have done more to introduce and advocate the hateful racial version of French Queer Theory into SFF than anyone. In a few short years the SFWA has become indistinguishable from a racialized lesbian gender studies institute for SFF literature. The Hugos is right behind.
Meanwhile - surprise - The New Republic lists the mass love-in fusion of gender and race feminism - Simone de Beauvoir and Kimberle Crenshaw - as topping their feminist section of 100 years of thinkers. Between the two of them, they'd squeeze the straight white male thin enough to fit into the fourth dimension if they could.
In a 1975 "dialogue" with feminist Betty Friedan titled "Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma," de Beauvoir said "In my opinion, as long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed." More than one author accuses de Beauvoir of seducing underage girls, and de Beauvoir had her teaching licence in France revoked as a result of such charges. De Beauvoir further states "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction."
This echoes Andrea Dworkin's "We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family" and also "Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses." One doesn't have to be a genius to connect the dots and uncork the depravity and sheer hostility that lies behind the default ideology adopted as orthodoxy by SFF's social justice warriors.
There are obvious problems with allowing children their own head without adult supervision. What if they want to explore the Amazon or eat paint? While pretending to have no agenda feminists closely supervise exactly that and the difference between a gender feminist parent and child abuse is nominal.
"Study Finds Sexual Health Education Should Begin As Early As Age 10" - Feminist Newswire, Feminist Majority Foundation Blog
Dworkin is the moron who wrote in her book Intercourse (1987) "In Europe, women were persecuted as witches for nearly four hundred years, (which was 300 years in her 1974 book Woman Hating) burned at the stake, perhaps as many as nine million of them—untold numbers accused of coming to men, having sex with them, causing them to ejaculate: at night, when the men slept" and follows that up in the same chapter with the stunning insight that for women "getting fucked and being owned are inseparably the same."
Childishly conflating one word with another like "owned" in favor of an equally childish agenda is part and parcel of the semantic buffoonery intersectionalists in SFF are famed for. Basically gender feminists chide, gerrymander, push and pull at words, history and reality itself until all matches their own madness.
Dworkin's claim is that over 60 women a day were killed as witches across Europe for four centuries. That would for sure leave a mark and account for many downcast shy girlish glances.
In that earlier work, Woman Hating, Dworkin devotes an entire chapter to the subject called "Gynocide: The Witches" which takes up one-sixth of the book's actual text. To say it is disingenuous is an understatement. In that remarkable chapter Dworkin also claims a society of "neolithic" "matriarchal" "fairies" existed in England into the 17th century who were "sorcerers." Dworkin further suggests the women being persecuted actually were witches in possession of "esoteric magic." Of these "covens" Dworkin writes "There may have been an actual continental organization with one all-powerful head." Upon a "neophyte" joining "she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine, drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which would have considerably improved all aspects of her earthly existence." Telepathy would've indeed been a boon in medieval Europe, particularly in reading the minds of men about to burn you at the stake. I'm actually not surprised medieval Europeans would kill telepathic witches on sight who were in possession of magic and who hung out with a "fairy race" of sorcerers which "concealed their dwellings in mounds half hidden in the ground." That would scare the crap out of me.
Dworkin finishes "Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture, woman-centered, nature-centered —all of their knowledge is gone, all of their knowing is destroyed." So they actually were witches. Given that, I'm not surprised a patriarchy arose to protect us from a coalition of matriarchal Hobbit-sorcerers and flying mind-reading sorceresses. For all I know they were vampires as well. As Dworkin writes, "A lot of knowledge disappears with 9 million people" to which I say thank God for that.
A blurb by Audre Lorde on the back of Woman Hating goes "To see where we are going we must understand where we have been. Woman Hating is a much needed and long overdue addition toward that understanding." Lorde apparently thought Lord of the Rings was real. That wouldn't surprise me given she thought crazy white man-phobic radical feminists who heard man-voices trying to invade their heads were "tools of a racist patriarchy."
On a blog which claims it "exists to challenge the oppressive forces of white, heterosexual, and male supremacy," the blogger states "Lorde and (Alice) Walker, and also Andrea Dworkin, have been far more influential in teaching me what radical feminism can do in responsible theory and activist practice." To which I might add racist witchcraft and "neolithic" Hobbit lore. Why not just rant about a tribe of matriarchal Bigfoots?
Unsurprisingly, at SFWA's own web site, Mary Ann Mohanraj lists her favorite authors as "Joanna Russ; Ursula K. Le Guin; Virginia Woolf; Audre Lorde; Judith Butler; James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon; Samuel Delany." There is no art for art's sake reflected there, but only Mohanraj's own identity, a thing she chastises whites for but who show no sign of such a thing relatively speaking. If whites and white men fit the false stereotypes intersectionalists in SFF strew about there would have been no Russ, Le Guin, Woolf and Delany. Conversely, were SF a reflection of intersectional notions of literature, there would only be themselves. If you boil this all down to human beings, that doesn't work. What does work is forgetting the racial and sexual identities these people drape themselves in as oppressed victims, boil them down to human beings, and see their bigotry for what it is without excuse notes for teacher.
According to core SFF intersectional doctrines so popular today, it is a given that America is a white supremacy, a thing so commonly asserted by SFF authors you can find such quotes virtually daily. No one seems to question the racism inherent in such theories or why race is so front and center in SF in the first place. The fact Mohanraj herself is the one using rhetoric that may reflect that of a racist and supremacist is never even considered.
The strange truth about Scalzi's confusion between white trash and white privilege and his parroting of this intersectional demonizing theory is that within SFF's core institutions, the white male privilege intersectionalism is obsessed about works in precisely the opposite direction, because it defines morality - right and wrong itself. If one has the proper racial/sexual identity, a person can utter the most blatantly racist and sexist remarks not only without censure, but with the sheen of a noble Nazi-hunter. To have the wrong identity means using the word "lady" reveals an already predetermined welter of immoral societal offenses ranging from misogyny to homophobia to racism. Twitter feeds and blogs throughout core fandom daily stink of witchhunts, innuendos, accusations, racial and sexual defamation, and constant historic reminders of the endemic depravity of ethnic European heterosexual males. Right identity buys an awful lot.
The amusing take-away from all this is the blithe assumption of equality by people who actually look up to some daffy woman who blurbed a book as "much needed" which documents a matriarchy of magic leprechauns in 17th century England which passed on their sorcery to European witches that men found so threatening they launched a centuries-long genocide to wipe them out in their millions. I don't know how many levels of stupid it takes to arrive at that basement but if you're looking up to someone like that you must reside at the center of all idiocy in a sub-basement somewhere underneath Hades. Needless to say I won't be interested in reading literature by such intellects nor am I surprised such minds are blithering racists who consider themselves to be anti-racists.
"It has been clear that dealing with men divides us and saps our energies and that it is not the job of the oppressed to explain our oppression to the oppressor." - Charlotte Bunch, The Furies Lesbian/Feminist Monthly, January, 1972, Volume 1.
"Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought." - Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007.
In doing research for this book, I saw close variations of that expression many times in the SFF community, never credited, or even with an awareness of where the expression had come from. The passage below by Ginny Berson from that same issue is another example of that same-page awareness that is still rooted in radical feminism today and which you will find reflected in plenty of core SFF rhetoric:
"The base of our ideological thought is: Sexism is the root of all other oppressions, and Lesbian and woman oppression will not end by smashing capitalism, racism, and imperialism. Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy. Lesbians, as outcasts from every culture but their own have the most to gain by ending race, class, and national supremacy within their own ranks. Lesbians must get out of the straight women's movement and form their own movement in order to be taken seriously, to stop straight women from oppressing us, and to force straight women to deal with their own Lesbianism. Lesbians cannot develop a common politics with women who do not accept Lesbianism as a political issue."
Within the new feminism, one can only wonder what exactly it is they like about literature amidst their weird obsession with skin color:
In addition to that, when someone Tweets "Would it be racist if someone made a similar list of Caucasian authors?" Hughes replies "in the industry we call that 'a masthead'" That is a perfect expression of demography accused of being a racially huddling ideology while an actual racial huddling and segregation becomes necessary. It's a con game. The fact so many found Hughes' riposte clever speaks to a lack of wit, not its presence.
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You don't have to cherry-pick to find such attitudes within science fiction fandom. Read just about any blog or webzine dedicated to SF and you'll find some manifestation that the art of it has been pushed to the back of the line in favor of racial bigotry and sexism promoted as social justice. The SFF community is laced with intersectionalism's bizarre buzz-words and cant. Other institutions within SF have followed suit, SFF conventions publicly extorted into men-demonizing sexual harassment policy statements conspicuously displayed on their web sites with threats of black-balling them. The whole point of that is to circumvent due process while treating SF conventions like they're a Hell's Angels bar and replace law with radical feminist law. Of what use is due process when it comes to dealing with a "rape culture"? The guilt is plain and marked out in advance. And you can consider the organizations behind the Nebula and Hugo Awards a lost cause if you love the art of literary SF, not to mention the Constitution of the United States of America. SF sometimes seems SF-less and we are again talking about some very weird people dragging their obsessions into the most inappropriate venues, and one where SF conventions have become "rape culture" alley.
Read this for the elevated level of multi-blog hysteria, resignings and feuds that goes into action like a rapid response police force engendered by one social misfit who terrorized and endangered them all and their gender happiness because taking a guy aside at a convention and having a short talk isn't as much fun as a no-knock warrant, "ethics," resignations and boycotts from drama queens. I presume at the end they had a fireworks display and burned a giant straw man. Intersectionalism is a cult dedicated to delusion and straw men.
If you Google "women can't write space opera" what you get is a lot of blog posts which assert people say women can't write space opera. It is a self-reinforcing hysteria typical of radical feminist thought. In short, there is no trend of anyone saying women can't write space opera. It's all part and parcel of a cult which can't tell the difference between its own fumes, an anomaly, and an actual system or institution. Imaginary discrimination then provides the engine and authority for intersectionalism's own very real discrimination and segregation it falsely portrays as imposed from without. It's a willful paranoia that at the same time can ignore it's own torrent of defamation of white straight men that must amount to scores of daily quotes from within the membership of the SFWA alone about men do this and whites do that, and all of it bad. That's no straw man, that's a thing I only have look at Twitter feeds to find at any time of the day. As usual, Gould's retweet is the very thing he constantly asserts but can't find outside of his own and other insulated like-minded cult-like Twitter feeds. Quotes and facts in evidence mean absolutely nothing to radical feminist ideology. It is a cult of manufactured oppressions only they can see. So in place of facts intersectionalists show the oppressiveness of straight white men by its shadow in a series of trigger warnings about "rape culture," "white privilege," gender and heterosexuality itself, rape hoaxes, skewed demographics, distorted statistics, innocuous group photos of white people, the "male gaze," Western centrism, the patriarchy, "cultural appropriation," the "white savior industrial complex" and other assorted childish stupidities of far more interest to this cult than mere science fiction.
In a typical fit of ironic unawareness, SFF author and SFWA member Mary Robinette Kowal Tweets back "Yeah. Everytime I hear 'Women can't...,' bullshit instantly comes to mind," a thing I agree with 100%. The difference is I can actually document the bullshit in quotes. For example, I can actually document that Kowal never writes anything negative about women or positive about men, a thing that escapes her insightful nature about what is and what isn't "bullshit." The same rings true for this entire crowd of intersectional nuthatches. They are as quick to defend central Africa and SE Asia as a varied landscape of culture as they are to depict Western whites as a borderless omni-lingual ant colony with a single hive-mind which by an amazing coincidence comes off as a stereotype of a gay-hating misogynist Jim Crow gum-chewing sheriff with mirrored sunglasses.
As if to highlight SF's devolution, the feminist SF convention called WisCon, first held in 1977, has re-introduced institutional and formal racial segregation in America, having both an informal off-campus non-whites-only dinner and an officially sanctioned "safer-space" for so-called "people of color" only. For all of black and gay SF writer Samuel Delany's complaints in an article I mention elsewhere, he was never roped off at a Nebula Awards presentation. Why not just have a separate criminal justice system?
Note the names of the co-organizers of this sad "safer-space": K. Tempest Bradford and Jaymee Goh. Bradford called a white woman on Twitter "cracka ass cracka" and created a website called "Angry Black Woman." In the "About" section the site declares "white people fear us" as it also laughingly asserts it is "anti-racism." The earlier mentioned Goh is a foreign national from Malaysia living in America who has referred to white people on Twitter as "sour dough-faced" and retweeted remarks about their "white tears," mentions "lately every week is white stupidity week," and that when it comes to "white supremacists," she lives "in a land of them." During the 2013 Wiscon Goh Tweeted "Come join us for delish Nepalese fudz and non-white company!" Turn that around to "white company" and you'll really see some tears considering the amount of blathering that goes on that acts as if Golden Age SF did exactly that, as if blurbs on old SF pulps read "Come join us in white cis-lunar space!" The double standard is ever present and enormous; it is a con game. Bradford and Goh have literally thousands of words on the internet singling out human beings as "white" and giving them their special attention, all of it unrelentingly 100% negative portrayals. In the Tweet below, Bradford retweets Goh's garbage about "white fears":
You'll notice there's nothing in this book about black, women's or gay fears. I don't believe in talking about humans like that. I go after words and deeds, and the actual people involved, not entire groups of millions at a time.
It should surprise no one that Goh describes herself as an "intersectional feminist" in her Twitter bio. Goh routinely Tweets things like "we are not aware that white supremacy is even real today" and "Malaysians are often ignorant of such issues, esp since we get white supremacist impressions of US minorities." Neither is it surprising that a cult of racial and sexual supremacy is so intellectually senile.
I'm pretty sure the word "hypocrisy" needs a new definition; one with armor plate, because if these are anti-racists, what exactly is a racist.
And how many articles do I have to read where awards-nominated and winning SFF authors like Aliette de Bodard, Nisi Shawl, K. Tempest Bradford, N.K. Jemisin and Mary Anne Mohanraj give me permission to write SFF about non-whites, lecture me on the act, and give me step-by-step instructions on how to do so because it's all about the science fiction and not at all about intersectional race-baiting? I can't even imagine the sheer racial bigotry, obsession, arrogance, and disdain it takes to indulge in something like that. And three of those are from right in the heart of the SFF community: the Science Fiction Writers of America's own website, the blog of the then current SFWA president, and Tor.com, a web site associate of the largest publisher of SF in the English language. Of the other two, Jemisin is a multiple-Nebula Award nominee and Bradford a Wiscon SF convention organizer and panelist. Amazing. Really it is just amazing to see something like that institutionalized anywhere in America, let alone a literary community of artists. That is so stunningly off the rails I don't know what to say, really. The post by Mohanraj hosted by then SFWA president John Scalzi is particularly offensive. If someone had told me I'd ever see such an incredibly offensive and obsessively racist post so casually presented in the heart of the SFF community I'd have told them they're crazy. And what makes it all so blatantly offensive is how equally blatantly such posts violate their own so-called standards on what comprises racist behaviors. Were a white person to write such racially patronizing posts they would be called racial supremacists, and quite rightly so.
There is no other side of that theme. There is no how to write whites. There is also the bizarre idea all people not white have some commonality with each other, but specifically unavailable to whites.
That's satire above, but a truism among gender feminist senility.
The truth of all this writing for the other nonsense is it's a strictly racial one-way street, and here's K. Tempest Bradford herself on the same ignorant reason that is always given: "Because white, able-bodied, straight, white men are pretty easy to grok given that media in this country is all about them, I doubt I'd have a problem creating a character with some or all of those traits." So in the very article Bradford cautions about a "handful of cliches," she's figured out enough about 100 million American white men by watching TV and surfing the internet to accurately profile them. Given Bradford's own racist remarks about white folks, I'd say the TV is inside her own head. It's always the same: PoC know white, whites don't know PoC. Convenient if you're a supremacist. Throw into that mix that Bradford and her colleagues' profiling's of straight white men are 100% negative - never positive. And when I say "never" I mean exactly that. In such a world, the word "obvious" simply doesn't exist. If the word "obvious" did exist, it would be pretty obvious who the racists are: tens of millions of people known only by their skin and sex or several score of radical supremacist hate-mongers with actual names and quotes to mine.
The smugness in the title of Nisi Shawl's post at the SFWA website entitled "Transracial Writing for the Sincere" is not only reflected in the post itself but in every conversation about this subject in the SFF community. It brings to mind a definition at "Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law center.": "Racist beliefs include things like... 'White people make better teachers.'" I would also point out another quote that goes racism "claims to find racial differences in things like character."
I'd like to hold a workshop for de Bodard, Shawl, Bradford, Jemisin and Mohanraj called "Dying like the 'Other." It's all about teaching them how to stand outside the Selective Service Administration and protest feminist-style until they have the "privilege" of being able to sign up for the draft at 18 by law and spend the next decade hoping they won't be sent off to a tropical island to get stabbed in the guts with a bayonet. I could use a break.
The oddest thing about this group of people is how their conspicuous interest in fighting racism, sexism and a lack of diversity within SFF is only matched by their enthusiasm in actually indulging in those very acts, or ignoring a lack of diversity in Vet's Hospitals when that suit fits. On top of that, I can find no provisionally opposite ideological body of people with quotes or activities with SFF's institutions that come even close to matching intersectionalists own identity-laced and racially and sexually disdainful rhetoric.
Exactly what is all this push-back about? It's as if someone fitted out the KKK with pig-tails and said "you're good to go!" because they don't look like racists and so apparently can't be. However the PC culture within SF has ready-made convenient and Orwellian answers on why they are absolved of racism and sexism. "Racism is outcomes, not intentions" is the bottom-line gibberish of a loop hole, which enables out and out bigots to not be, and people who are not to be tarred as racists. Intersectionalists devote a lot of thought making sure every last loophole is closed when it comes to whites:
More black hole logic designed to ensure no white can ever escape the racism carved into their DNA. Conveniently the same logic-pudding ensures these imbeciles are never racist, even when they spend their time concocting spinning wheels of anti-white theory.
In order to bicycle-pump something out of nothing, intersectional thought commonly redefines "racism" until the shoe fits. In this post called "Gaming’s Race Problem: GenCon and Beyond" at the always reliable Tor.com, the post's author A.A. George gives us this quote:
"'The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that... Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it's still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on.'" –Scott Woods, author and poet."
In other words "racism" is whatever it needs to be for intersectionalism to keep its home fires burning. Why not just add dreams? George's post mentions "well-meaning" but racially ignorant whites in a way he never would about non-whites, and so self-defines his own post as racial intolerance and supremacy passed off as I just wanna play too. George also once again exhibits his own ignorance about dragging odd obsessions into inappropriate places and then being surprised at the reaction. The truth is that if you use George's own standards, he is a far worse racist than the strangers without quotes but the right skin he talks about.
"I have seen more energy, debate, and engagement by gamers on the minutiae of rules and trivia than I have on the weighty topics of race and gaming. Gamers will spend endless days and millions of words fighting over the pros and cons of the Wacky Wand of Welding, but when a person of color brings up issues of race and diversity in the community, too many gamers roll their eyes and say, 'Oh not again. Why do they have to be so politically correct? Can’t they just have fun?!'"
Well? Can't they? The answer is no, they can't. Not until intersectionalism's bizarre world is bowed to. George simply can't figure out the "Wacky Wand of Welding" is genre and "race and diversity" is not. Saying it is doesn't make it so.
The thing about Tor.com is the vast majority of their posts are fairly neutral genre stuff. But then they have these obnoxious Stormfront-type anti-white racists and goofball lesbian supremacists who use the most outrageous slurs and demonization theories against whites, men and heterosexuals which are backed up to the hilt by Tor's moderators. Similar innuendos, negative profilings and stereotypes against non-whites, gays and women would not be allowed in a thousand years there. For some reason Tor thinks people are just going to sit back and accept these double standards. The amount of goodwill Tor fritters away to pander to a core group of fringe lunatics is enormous. Only Tor knows how many people have been banned and hundreds of comments deleted and over wanting nothing more than fair play. The short fiction Tor.com publishes is another matter. It is routinely politically correct race-gender garbage more appropriate for the lunatic The Feminist Wire.
In intersectional thought, "'Not all white people'" becomes a "pointless quibble," though that "quibble" is the basis for all law. But then, when it comes to the daffy intersectionalist artichoke called "cultural appropriation," then it's "Yes, only white people." Here's more semantic gibberish along those lines if you're in doubt about standards being waved off and double standards enforced. When one is dedicated to jumping through Orwellian hoops of logic that says one needn't be a criminal to be a criminal, while acting the criminal is a form of innocence, the effect can be quite devastating to a literary community. Its devastating when one can't tell the difference between one's own delusions and real oppression.
Suffice it to say that anyone who writes about "'sexist/racist/homophobe'" in the sense of a men, whites, and heterosexuals-only mechanism is suffering from bigotry by the very casual, automatic, and unthinking use of the phrase itself - not dispelling it - because it is stipulating failure is a matter of one's sex, sexual orientation, and race, not one's shared humanity. In other words, intersectionalists are not only analogues to white supremacists, they literally share their views as well.
Given the torrent of sexist, racist, and heterophobic remarks that emanate from SFF's institutions , and the lack of it from some imaginary other side (which is a matter of record, not opinion), I'm not surprised the PC feel the need to have pre-fabricated arguments by way of underarm deodorant rhetoric to deflect their own torrent of bad smells.
Comments like this one below are as common as dirt in the SFF community:
You will never, and I mean never, see a comment like that about terrific men; not from either side of this debate, and that tells you all you need to know about the fundamental dishonesty involved. Modern gender feminists are amazingly stupid people. They claim to want to abolish gender distinctions but act like law and fair play are Barbie's skirts Ken can never wear due to Ken's severe privilege slope.
Let's say you have a short burglar who targets one of many houses in a neighborhood cuz it's painted a red they find absurd, and a tall burglar who targets the same neighborhood but finds green absurd. Independent of their height or the color of the target, that simple paradigm that illustrates each is - in PRINCIPLE - doing the same thing is beyond the intellectual capacity or perceptions of an intersectional third wave feminist. Or they could just be indulging in self-serving lies. Take your pick - donkey or mule - you won't ride very fast on that nag. That's why redacting only one or two words from intersectional rhetoric confuses one as to whether you are visiting the web site of the American Nazi Party or the blog of a social justice warrior in the SFF community. Aside from that, neither one has much to say about science fiction, because whether it's golfing or hang-gliding, computer tech or SF conventions, it's all about moral and immoral politicized and hated identities, isn't it? That's the world of such minds.
I can feel great art and literature oozing out of SF's new generation already, not to mention perhaps re-fighting World War II and the entire civil rights movement all over again. Racism and bigotry don't suddenly become something else because of who's doing it or because it becomes trendy. Orwell warned of calling slavery freedom, and hate love. Buffy the vampire-slayer didn't. Anyone who thinks a flat out racist can't have pig-tails and talk about allergies to scented products and wheel-chair access is crazy or so naive the difference becomes negligible.
Well, I would Mr. Naam but I truthfully have no idea what you think the word "bigotry" means. Given the upside-down tenets of intersectionalism, I'm going to have to assume you mean it in an Orwellian sense, like the "Ministry of Peace." Given that, I sense your future isn't really all that appealing. The true fact is Naam is barking at shadows. The idea bigotry is entrenched in SFF that discomfits women, gays and non-whites is a factless brawl the PC have with their own minds. On the other hand, the relentless focus of people like Naam is no myth but an easily documented reality.
"Foz Meadows @fozmeadows For serious, my online writers' group just had to check a spreadsheet of 20-odd people to see if any of us is straight. Answer: one is." "The diversity is strong with us" the Hugo Award-nominated Meadows adds in typical Orwellian social justice Newspeak. That is not diversity, that is a lake with one species. But then see how these typical intersectionalists define "diversity" as essentially not white. Surprise. "The white, cis, straight, male, Anglophone, western experience." "Cultural imperialism." "I was raised facing West, speaking and reading words in the language of the colonisers." "...people who are not on the axis of privilege in Western Anglophone countries (POCs, women, LGBTQ…)"
Really? I'm to believe women and LGBTQ are more privileged outside the Western English-speaking world? In what anti-white-straight-male racist supremacist fantasy world of bigotry does that occur? And does anyone ever challenge these obviously false remarks by people like Aliette de Bodard? No. That is not even allowed. It is a given they are true, not matter how self-evidently false. But can any human being tell me in what non-Western, non-English speaking country in this world "woman, LGBTQ" have more privilege than in the West? No. In fact, the precise opposite is the truth. That nonsense doesn't even merit being worthy of being called an opinion. It is horseshit. There is routinely no basis in fact for the obscene racial paranoia one finds in the poisonous ideology behind Third Wave feminist dialogues.
That round table discussion at the feminist SFF book review site The Book Smugglers has rhetoric that could've come right out of Audre Lorde's 1979 keynote speech at the National Third World Gay and Lesbian Conference, including its title "When Will the Ignorance End?" When you get to the point where you can't tell which one produces phrases about "transphobia or ableism or classism" and "beyond racism, beyond ageism, beyond classism, and beyond homophobia" and throw in the fact that this round table is at a site and with authors supposedly with an interest first and foremost in SFF one once again starts to see a weird obsession dragged into a weird place. All of it seems fueled by racial and sexual resentments and animus looking for oppressions that don't really exist in order to justify that resentment. No one's forcing these people to involve themselves in Western genre SFF nor do they have some implicit moral right to have that culture alter itself and move towards them or be accused of bigotry. Their own Orwellian phrase about "cultural imperialism" only cuts one way although respect is a two-way street, as is logic and fair play. Once again you have people talking about the West as if it's an airport and the people who created its culture merely baggage handlers for the Third World while the non-West is talked about like a sanctified sealed UNESCO World Heritage Site no Westerner has a claim to whatsoever. The arrogance and racism of that round table is startling.
"Intersectionality is absolutely necessary!" coming from a "queer Filipina" recently emigrated to Australia sounds more like "cultural imperialism" and "cultural appropriation" to me than her hapless Australian neighbors who allowed her in; and now wants them to carry her baggage. I just don't understand the mentality of people who go precisely where they're the least likely to find the things they claim to want while constantly creating cultural, sexual and racial divisions demanding respect and giving none. What's more odd than people guaranteeing their own "marginalization" and then complaining about it? There is no lack of non-Anglophone non-whites in the Third World. "Politeness" is not a word any of these people seem to understand unless it's me in their own claimed homeland. Playing Devil's Advocate, one can see even while this round table talks of the crudity of "people correcting Singaporeans, Nigerians, etc. on their usages and accents" these folks seem to have no problem barging into other cultures and effectively doing exactly that. And, as always, where's the SF?
"... intersectionality is key! We can’t hope to solve any of this if we don’t take into account multiple axes of disenfranchising." - Aliette de Bodard
As usual, the irony lies thick about these heavily racialized conversations and their accusatory tone. It simply never occurs to these people the only ones formally arranging themselves into racially confrontational dialogues is themselves. Graceless and seedy are probably the words to describe people arranging their ranks according to colonialism. Playing Devil's Advocate and turning such round tables on their head would probably reveal comments like Intersectional feminism in SFF operates much like a harem in old Mughal India or Turkey. Men create the empire, feminists connive and whimper to get their favorite babies put forward as favorites. Every time I hear the words "cultural appropriation" I laugh.
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Intersectionalists in SFF never shut up about social injustices and their Twitter feeds are alight dusk til dawn with such concerns past and present and on a global scale. The problem is it's so heavily racialized in terms of whites solely oppressing non-whites that the world today and yesterday is unrecognizable. The childish paradigm of that Alabama Jim Crow county from 1930 is spread about without regard to any principles whatsoever. And to push back by, for example, pointing black slaves were sold to Europeans by black Africans is to invite recrimination and rebuttals, and not very bright ones at that. Intersectionalists have no interest in non-white on white or white on white colonialism and slavery.
Using politically correct rhetoric about America being financed by slavery then reveals West and Central pre-colonial Africa being built on slavery, both in terms of selling and having slaves. However that self-evident logic doesn't fly in intersectionalspeak for the reason that it depicts the Atlantic slave trade in terms of a larger human failing rather than the intersectional obsession with targeting whites, which then shaves off their black partners without which there never could've been such slavery.
Another amusing failure of logic is how often intersectionalists insist on N. Africa being considered part and parcel of the larger African continent in terms of black folks or "people of color." Given that the Portuguese were colonized and enslaved for centuries by N. Africans before the Portuguese obtained the upper hand and started setting up posts on the African coast - buying and selling off their former tormenters - that perceptual shift which reveals other layers of reality so common in old-school SF is neither wanted nor practiced by intersectionalists.
What Arab Muslims did to Spain is a fair analogy to what Europeans did to N. America and yet intersectionalists talk about them as if they are completely different things, or better to say, they don't talk about Spain at all. You don't have to be a genius to figure out daffy and clueless white middle class social justice warriors are essentially adopting the views of anti-white ethnocentric racists who have no principles whatsoever in such matters. Normans can invade England and England Ireland and into a racialized memory hole it goes. Although Egypt's Christian Copts are the colonized indigenous remnants of pre-Islamic Egypt and cannot by law be president, you will never hear a social justice warrior mention that in terms of the favorite words of the politically correct: "indigenous," "colonized," and "oppression." Never. In all the research I did for this book looking at thousands of Tweets and blog posts that were a cavalcade of Third World injustice, never once was that mentioned. There is a reason for that, of course.
To understand the level of disingenuousness surrounding the issue of slavery, take this UNESCO page about the "Transatlantic Slave Trade." It states: "The transatlantic slave trade is unique within the universal history of slavery for three main reasons: * its duration - approximately four centuries * those vicitimized: black African men, women and children * the intellectual legitimization attempted on its behalf - the development of an anti-black ideology and its legal organization, the notorious Code noir."
Those are all false, as anyone who has ever read books about world history knows. How in the world can one simply ignore the massive trafficking in slaves by Ottomans, Hindus, Mughals, Fatimids, Aztecs, Arabic Caliphates and many more? The N. African trans-Saharan slave trade alone lasted almost 14 centuries without a halt.
Let me tell you something about how Africa was looted. By the time the transport of slaves to America was outlawed in 1807-8 (though smuggling continued), Europeans had still not penetrated into the interior of Africa, other than S. Africa, where slaves DIDN'T come from. That means that without the partnership of sub-Saharan (many of them converted Muslims) Africans and Arabs/Berbers, perhaps 90% or more of the Atlantic Slave Trade would never have existed. Slaves were almost entirely purchased from Africans and Arab-Berber Muslims on the African coast by Europeans. SFF authors like Saladin Ahmed need to go look at a map of Nigeria, figure out why the north of the country is Muslim and then imagine who it was who was sent to the Americas as slaves. Why is the Yoruba goddess Iemanja still worshipped in Rio de Janeiro and not the Koran? Why is there no Islamic tradition among New World slaves? The simple answer is Muslims don't enslave Muslims. Europeans would not have cared whether African slaves were Muslims or not.
As for wealth in the US, how was Minnesota or Wyoming built on the backs of black folks? These people are either such liars or so ignorant of the history they are so eager to cite they are useless. I'm stunned by how often these people distort history while claiming to speak truth to power and peering into cracks they claim I can't or won't see.
The point is this all exists on the level of human failings, not that of Europeans. Does that mean we should ignore localized expressions of racial supremacy like Jim Crow? Of course not. But neither should we take a 1930 Alabama Jim Crow county and smear it all over history and makes history's failings a whites-only affair. The participation of Africans in the Atlantic Slave Trade is a clear indication slavery doesn't exist on a level of some imagined racial supremacy, as if anyone who's read a history book needs to be told that. People take and hold slaves because they CAN.
Africans tormented and enslaved the Portuguese and Spanish for centuries. When that turned around the Portuguese and Spanish in turn tormented Africa. The history of the world is not one of human rights, but of grand competitions and war. It is stupid to imagine racial motivations where they don't exist, or in turn imagine they don't where they do, for example, native Americans vs. Europeans. When Cortes came to Mexico why did he find an empire where slavery was endemic? Cortes in turn enslaved the Aztecs after he besieged and sacked the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan 7 decades after the Ottomans besieged and sacked the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in an act that directly caused Cortes to be in Mexico in the first place when Europeans sought alternate trade routes now cut off by Ottomans.
Different cultures have different customs about who can enslave who; it's not all cut and dried by race. There is no reason to call everything a ball or a strike. There are balls and strikes and nuance and layers of complexity. The English and French have conquered and looked down their noses at each other for centuries and no one says a thing about racism. They do the same to an African and suddenly rocket flares go up about racial supremacy. The truth is Ottomans were incredibly haughty and disdainful of Europeans; they colonized and enslaved them mercilessly. The Mughals and Hindus looked down on the early British in India, and eventually the British towards them; slavery was endemic in the everywhere.
People are confusing cultural and racial supremacy with the true supremacy: armies and gunpowder. The fact is that, while the PC claiming everyone but themselves are de facto racists who deny agency to any non-white, the truth is it is intersectionalism that cherry-picks colonialism and slavery and treats Africans and native Americans like they are too simplistic to embrace all of human endeavor, both good and bad. Cortes vs. Aztec was empire vs. empire. Rogues and pirates always make some excuse to loot someone. If they can loot their neighbor they'll do that. If the Pope or Islam say no they'll go elsewhere. That is reality, not the daffy bowdlerized, censored, chopped and edited cartoonish version of history intersectionalists routinely present.
The point is let people be guilty when it's time for them to be guilty and let racial privilege be shown when and where it actually existed rather than gerrymandering history by race like a congressional district to cover this and uncover that. Using a philosophy of actual racial supremacy that falsely stipulates Europeans are morally inferior in order to shine a light on racial supremacy is about as stupid as it gets.
The truth is the mainstreaming of intersectionalism and its incessant hate speech is doing more to whittle away our 14th Amendment than any imagined white supremacy in America.
The childish attraction of binary outlooks in terms of the modern core SFF community reveals it is addicted to oppression/anti-oppression, good vs. evil mechanisms and outcomes where no institutions to account for that are evident, such as was true of Jim Crow or women not being able to vote. In the actual case of Jim Crow and voting, whites could do this and blacks not that, women could not vote and men could. In those cases a dual outlook was natural.
Failing to show such systems but with the dual outlook intact reveals the bigoted witting and naive unwitting adoption of supremacist ideology disguised as anti-oppression, not anti-oppression itself. In order to power that disguise, history in general must itself be reduced to such binary opposites with all nuance sucked dry. Jim Crow and women's suffrage must be dragged into the present and fake systems and institutions of discrimination and oppression created to account for that such as white privilege and rape culture.
Distorting old real oppressions and falsifying new ones is how intersectionalists arrive at both an old and modern SF exclusionary towards non-whites and women. Jim Crow existed in America ergo SF was Jim Crow; colonialism was powered by technology ergo SF is colonialist; not voting meant women's pencil boxes taken away and their writing actively suppressed. That is further smeared over all of history and how non-white colonialism and slavery disappears and Jim Crow spread back through time and across oceans. An intersectional alternate history fantasy story about 17th century India targets the British though the Mughals held were at the height of their colonial power and so becomes nothing more than a transparent anti-white racial revenge fantasy. Jim Crow morphs into the New Jim Crow by way of cherry-picking and connecting anomalous events, distorting accidentally skewed demographics, creating racial "microaggressions" and treating them as "systemic" and "institutional." Women's suffrage marches on using similar ploys.
The inevitable outcome is transparent hypocrisies which decries a Eurocentric outlook on SF and fantasy even while intersectionalists promote a strictly Eurocentric outlook on colonialism in regard to SF's origins in a so-called "colonial obsession." What is telling there is intersectionalists assert colonialism in SF just as often as they fail to actually provide examples of such an "obsession." At that link, Noah Berlatsky has a post titled "Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People." Berlatsky writes, "John Rieder in his eye-opening book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science-Fiction notes that most scholars believe that science fiction coalesced 'in the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century.'"
However, hopping from H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds to '80s and '90s films and books as Berlatsky does makes no such case. It would be hard to imagine a genre like SF not having aliens invading the Earth. Doing so doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a colonialist mindset. Most often monster stories are just that - monster stories. There is no reason to group them into "anti-colonial" or even stupider, "a justification for imperialism." Colonialism is endemic in human history and there is nothing "white" about it. Don't be surprised Berlatsky interviews the ineffable Mikki Kendall, yet another Twitter warrior on the fringes of the SFF community famous in that community for only one thing: lighting up whites. Thank heaven Louis Farrakhan didn't take to Star Trek or he would be on SF convention panels. Or rapper Azealia Banks:
However, in truth, figures analogous to Farrakhan and Banks do in fact exist in SFF and there are more than enough water-carriers like Berlatsky to give them a voice and even censor reasonable rebuttals. They are by no means rare and their rhetoric about whites far surpasses any interest in SFF, which becomes nothing more than a campfire around which to discuss the shortcomings of ethnic Europeans. Banks added she can't wait to leave America, which reminds me of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign when Boko Haram answered Banks' own #TakeBackOurGirlsBokoHaramRewardInvolved campaign. Throw in enough of Tom Wolfe's flak catching radical chic and you have a mini-industry, and one where "feminism" mysteriously sounds just like race-hatred and hate speech and where people try and pass off fake academic positions, presentations and talks with footnotes that amount to everyone knows.
In a classic instance of a Eurocentric epic fantasy like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings which does depict an analogue to non-Western colonialism like his psuedo-Islamic "easterlings," it is immediately dismissed as racist, and so reality itself becomes racist at the behest of an anti-white, anti-Western ideology. In intersectionalism, there is only one colonialism and it is white and Western in the same way whites and men have cornered the market on gender hatred and racism.
The fact is, just because SF was for boys, doesn't mean girls were shut out right next door. Whether or not there were rocket ships involved devolves into pedantry as misdirection:
"But squeaky-clean domestic romances remained the more socially acceptable reading choice until the turn of the century, when publishers like The Henry Altemus Company concluded that 'girls as well as boys love adventure.' The Stratemeyer Syndicate published 85 new girls' series between 1910 and 1920 starring young women who played basketball, drove cars, helped the poor, solved mysteries, and even made movies. Most of all, they went to college. The historian Jane S. Smith has noted that less than four percent of college-aged American girls attended university in 1910, 'but it was a rare heroine of fiction who did not take a room on the campus green, where she studied biology and Latin, drank cocoa with her kimono-clad chums and upheld the school traditions with moist-eyed fervor.'
"These books captured the spirit of the Suffragettes, who in 1913 marched on the Washington Mall to demand women's equality. The popular Ruth Fielding Series (1913-1934) was about an orphan living with a mean uncle who disapproves of her desire for a future outside the home. Smart and ambitious, Ruth works hard in school, goes to college, wins a film-writing contest and even starts her own production company. In book #15, Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound (1919), the narrator explains, 'Marriage was something very far ahead in the future, if Ruth … thought of it at all.' When Ruth's boyfriend Tom proposes in book #19, Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence (1922), she feels that 'to do as Tom wished would utterly spoil the career on which she had now entered so successfully. Tom, like most young men in love, considered that a girl's only career should be a husband and a home…she wanted to live her own life.'"
No one was stealing anyone's Joanna Russ pencil boxes; haters are going to hate and that requires no quote marks or research. If men screamed they weren't included in Ruth Fielding's adventures and screamed some more about today they'd be rightly looked at as the hysterical clowns they are for invading sacred women's spaces and put on meds. I'm trying imagine me whining about not being more central to gay feminist SF. We're talking about marketing and cultural interests no different than Field and Stream and Cosmopolitan, not discrimination and exclusion. Perpetually aggrieved people with an agenda are selling a false narrative and not doing their homework.
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One of the other reasons for the dearth if not death of good SF is that the same crowd which has no idea who Jack Vance is has seen every episode of Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire-Slayer and Dr. Who, and all the Star Wars and Star Trek films. For the first time in its history, SF literature is more influenced by film and TV than by the literature itself, and that was the true and sad legacy of Star Wars. An interest in SF was galvanized, but it was a mainstream conformist interest, and rather than SF literature taking over the mainstream, the mainstream engulfed and smothered SF literature. It should come as no surprise that a callow, shallow and conformist literature would emerge from such a cauldron of combined political correctness, endless writer's workshops, mainstream redneckery, and children's TV shows. Don't look for A Canticle for Leibowitz to emerge from this crowd - not unless it has face-eating zombies and goggled gender-flipped private dick feminist heroine-ninjas flying around in blimps.
The sum of it all is that literary art itself takes a back seat and dies from lack of attention. The truth of the matter is that the new generation within SF that dismisses their literary ancestors like Heinlein and Asimov as racists and misogynists has not one-tenth the artistic talent, not to mention any proof to back up their empty assertions that any SF writer from SF's Golden Age Campbellian school hated either black people or women. Expanding on what I wrote earlier, Leigh Brackett is one of my favorite SF authors and one from that genre's golden age. She was given co-screen writing credit on The Empire Strikes Back and worked on the Humphrey Bogart film The Big Sleep. In a 1975 interview Brackett said the following about coming into SFF:
"Everybody in the field welcomed me with open arms. All the other writers and editors and everybody were just great because we were such a small clubby group in those days that if you found another nut case that you could talk to, it was great."
In 1975, in the introduction to The Best of C.L. Moore, veteran SFF author Lester del Rey wrote:
"I sat in the audience at a World Science Fiction Convention banquet, listening to Forrest J. Ackerman announce a special award that was about to be presented to a writer. As is customary, Ackerman was saving the name of the recipient for the climax. But he mentioned a story called 'Shambleau' and never got to finish his speech. As one, the 2,000 people in the audience came instantly to their feet in unanimous tribute—clapping, shouting, and craning to see a gracious and lovely lady blushingly accept the applause. Many in that audience had never read the story. But everyone knew about it. And everyone knew that Catherine Moore was one of the finest writers of all time in the field of science fiction."
Does that sound like a community of misogynists?
The idea that the field of SF ever rejected or hated women is a straight up lie, and black gay SF author Samuel Delany was certainly given his due with praise: 4 Nebula and 2 Hugo Awards in the 1960's. Delany's colleague, arch-feminist Joanna Russ, who broke into SF in the same time frame, was so obsessed with her own politicized identity I'm not surprised she simply assumed men shared it. In fact, Russ's main straw woman bullet points from her 1983 book, How to Suppress Woman's Writing, is straight up paranoid. Why Russ was ever attracted to SF in the first place is a mystery for the ages, but there is little doubt she holds a god-like status among intersectionalist SF writers today, who apparently believe men think women should play tennis in long skirts and have their pencils taken away. Russ's essay is still referenced on blogs and Twitter within the SFF community on an almost weekly basis, because the "white man."
Keeping in mind Russ's two bullet points, "Deny that a woman wrote it" and "Assert that the woman in question is eccentric or atypical," I wonder what SFF's intersectionalists make of arch-racist and misogynist H.P. Lovecraft defending Mary Shelley in his 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature?" Something tells me the words "eccentric" and "atypical" will do flying cartwheels to iron the starch out of that white privileged male. Given the quotes you'll read in this book, there's little doubt SFF's cartwheeling crew of intersectionals consider any decent white straight male an eccentric anomaly indeed, the proverbial "decent guys" as opposed to just "women," who are all decent by default.
It's no coincidence that the theory of white male privilege is routinely canonized by that current crop of intersectionalist women writers in SF by way of Peggy McIntosh's equally paranoid 1988 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," or that McIntosh is a radical feminist. The idea that Russ with her bullet list, McIntosh with her bigoted trash or women who could adore either one have otherwise loving feelings for men is as silly as the idea that bigotry only comes in two forms: swastika and hood, and each male-only. Suddenly diversity takes a deep dive of disinterest when it comes to that.
White privilege is meant to predict only one thing: that straight white males are pariahs and immoral jerks interested in nothing but maintaining their own power. WP is a mark of Cain, a scarlet letter, a Star of David in the Warsaw ghetto, a heated brand put on the forehead to stigmatize and mark a criminal past, and make sure that criminal will profit no more from his crimes.
It is no coincidence that Liz Bourke at Tor.com - the web site associate of the largest publisher of SFF in English - quotes SFF author N.K. Jemisin and herself writes:
"'Because the "fantasy" most EF (epic fantasy) delivers is of white male power & centrality, as much as dragons. That *is* conservatism, now.' We can agree that conservative, here, is fundamentally concerned with not changing the present default cultural narratives of who gets to hold and use power, how, and why. For our genre, for our culture(s) in the US, UK, and Europe, that's white (heterosexual) cisgendered men. Often persons who don't fit these criteria who hold and use power anyway are portrayed as wrong, anomalous, wicked. (There are plenty of cultural narratives floating about concerning the moral and occasionally physical degeneracy of non-straight-white-men. Plenty.)"
It's no coincidence the "sleeps with monsters" is from a quote by iconic radical gender feminist Adrienne Rich, a woman who believed in the concept of "compulsory heterosexuality" imposed on women by men. Here's Adrienne Rich from her 1980 essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence":
"I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring. Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range..."
Bourke is at once engaging in racial shaming, defamation, and asserting a tacit racial conspiracy that crosses decades. These are people who willfully misunderstand the word "demographic." Of course the stupid irony there is Bourke writing about an agreed upon literary racial supremacy she can in no way document while Bourke herself uses the word "agree" in what amounts to her own confession, and not that of anyone else. Meanwhile, Bourke openly advocates women's fiction, a thing she unsurprisingly portrays as wrong in principle but can't figure out because she has no principles. That is simply a failed mind. The other fact that escapes Bourke is the open and public intersectionalist conspiracy on Twitter and blogs to maximize the profile of women and PoC at the expense of intersectionalism's great white whale, the straight white male. If Bourke's looking for a tacit racist and sexist conspiracy, she only needs to read her own words, not entertain the dipsy idea there is now or ever has been a white male equivalent to intersectionalism's own debauchery in SFF.
The stupidity is the same as always: Bourke lights up a bunch of white men - a demography - as an ideology while pretending her own gay feminist ideology doesn't even exist. Bourke is not a demography - she does not represent all women. I am not confusing all women with her nor defaming them as a group but quoting Bourke's actual words, a thing she cannot do for a century of white male fantasy writers. There are no standards in play here that can benefit all; only bias and a disdain for whites and men passed off as intellect and observation.
Bourke makes no secret of what it is she does, she just can't figure out what it is she does. Needless to say, if her ideology deserves a place as an alternate and marginalized voice, the PC are arguing so does white supremacy. Being anti-everything, intersectionalists reveal the truth about themselves by being anti-irony when Nebula-nominated SFF author Kate Elliott Tweets "We are the true racists and sexists for talking about racism and sexism. That is the new discourse." The fact she Tweets that at Chauncey Devega, one of the white man's greatest supporters on the internet, is as usual lost on the doxy Elliott. At the time Devega had a piece at the Daily Kos typical for him called "Dear White Folks, Please Stop Being So 'Surprised' When White Cops Shoot Unarmed Black People." Why Elliott and Devega are lost is neither can make a stretch to figure out what a piece would be titled Dear Black Folks, Stop Being So Surprised When Black People Commit Crimes. Similarly, when intersectionalists like Elliott write about a desire for "exploring the repercussions of conquest & colonialism," they really mean only white and Western colonialism. The rest of history's colonialism exists on the other side of the event horizon which is the black hole of intersectional minds, a place where information and reality disappears. The moronic built-in satire there is how much women like Elliott castigate the false narratives of history while advocating a false narrative of history. Again, the simplest analogies that might act as a tool of self-awareness and self-criticism is totally unavailable to these identity addicts, though that type of shifting of perspective is the meat and potatoes of SF. Intersectionalists hate the idea of Eurocentric epic fantasy as much as they do colonialism that is NOT Eurocentric. Even while they deny Europeans the right to write from within the legends and history of their own cultures, intersectionalists not only never question why Barbarossa is in Turkish children's books but declare it just and fitting, and that's if you can get them to admit that Barbarossa's ships with holds full of Christian slaves even existed.
Jim Hines wrote about the SFWA bulletin controversy I later discuss "I have trouble buying the idea that the real problem isn’t the sexism, but people pointing out and criticizing the sexism." He's wrong; it is exactly that. Sexism is some amorphous cloud of nonsense made up by radical feminism and which is so stringent no male could pass without a gender studies course; you can't see it unless you put on drunken feminist beer-goggles. The same is true of race. Black intersectional feminists K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl hold actual classes instructing white people on how to write the "other." Only a fool would maintain the entirety of Golden Age SF was racist and sexist or that intersectionalists weren't.
The routinely bizarre SFF author Kameron Hurley (later bizarrely awarded two Hugo awards for making up nonsense) had to literally make up racially and sexually defamatory nonsense and put it in bullshit quotes to make her own point about the bulletin affair:
"So. I get it. The world used to agree with you. You used to be able to say things like, 'I really like those lady writers in this industry, especially in swimsuits!' and your fellow writers, editors, agents, and other assorted colleagues would all wink and grin and 'agree with you, and Asimov would go around pinching women's asses, and it was so cool! So cool that he could just sexually assault women all the time! You used to be able to say, 'Black people are fine. As long as they are clean and don’t live in my neighborhood,' and your friends and colleagues would wink and grin and agree with you. You’d say, 'Gay men are gay because they were abused, and all lesbians are really bisexual and just need the love of a good man,' and hey, it was Ok, because no one disagreed with you."
When one has a case to make one does not need fake quotes to make it nor does one cite voices inside your head. That leads one to wonder exactly what it is aside from sociopathy, resentment and perhaps even mental health issues that drives such passion and certainty since it is a thing feminists in SFF cannot show in real quote marks. Swinish remarks like Hurley's together with her vacuous double-Hugo Award-winning post called "We Have Always Fought" and feminist rhetoric about male privilege reveals a world of doublethinking delusion. In fact my draft office, military graveyards and 5,000 years of human history inform me feminists are a protected and privileged class of people rather than the elite warrior class of superior morality and insight they imagine. Feminist racialism added in reveals that when Cortes came to Mexico he found slavery, colonialism and an empire run by men much like the one Cortes himself represented. In real world terms, gender feminists have never done anything but complain.
Opposing faux feminist bigotry is not bigotry nor is it opposing feminism or women. To me there is a clear difference between egalitarianism and bigots who hide within an egalitarian anti-oppression movement who don't advocate for women's rights but instead are supremacists who oppose men to the point of a phobia. To me, that is what radical extremist intersectionalism is and that is largely what the activist intersectionalist movement within the SFF community is, and that is the movement I am talking about, not feminism. (And I might add as a side note that the voice of male gays within the SFF community is virtually absent, probably outnumbered by gay activist females an easy 4 to 1.) There is nothing wrong with anyone in the world wanting equality, but I see a big difference between that and continued rhetoric about "white-male-dominated" sub-cultures - the so-called "white patriarchy" - as if a simple demographic is the equivalent of a racial and male supremacist ideology. And there is also a difference between a bad man and men, as if any adult should have to point that out.
The new crowd will point out that same Samuel Delaney writes in his 1998 article at the New York Review of Science Fiction titled "Racism and Science Fiction," that editor John Campbell rejected one of Delany's stories "with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character." Keep in mind that Campbell's modern detractors openly admit they can't relate to "overwhelming white, male" characters and constantly advocate for people who are gay like they are, black like they are, female like they are. Marketing considerations that ironically mirror the very identity cherry-picking of art by today's generation aside, if Campbell is racist and sexist, he has plenty of company. For those who care to look, there is a flood of racial comments from within the very institutions of SF today far worse than any Campbell quote. That leaves one in an Orwellian world where actual racist quotes from within modern SFF are considered social justice and dubious quotes from Campbell mark him as being in an informal fraternity of KKK-like dimensions. That is what happens when identity is used to mark out a moral ethos instead of an actual principled moral ethos. Tolkien's The Silmarillion was rejected as "too Celtic," but trust me, when the PC want to assume racism in one spot and marketing in another, their bias goes wherever it wants to. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were one big happy racial campfire, just like pre-Columbian America and all of Africa.
On Natalie Luhr's blog often devoted to SF called "Radish Reviews," one page alone has links to posts titled "The Worst of White Folks," "White Folks" and "Why Being a POC Author Sucks Sometimes." That page is typical of Luhrs' blog. If one page on a modern blog alone has that kind of action, one can easily extrapolate out a world that makes Campbell look like a rank amateur if he is to be seen as a racialist bigot. That's not including Luhr's page "This Week In Racist Bullshit."
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I think the reason you're seeing this odd spectacle of intersectionalists as a kind of Orwellian anti-defamation defamation league is because they are an alliance of genuine anti-white and anti-male bigots and naive crusader do-gooders. Tom Wolfe called these mau-maus and flak catchers. Both are making a case - one out of hate, the other from uninformed compassion - that SFF is a kind of Jim Crow county but which includes women and gay folks too.
In an actual Jim Crow county, it would not be defaming white people to point out law and privilege benefited them as an entire group. In a fake Jim Crow county where laws are replaced by accidental demographies, assumptions and innuendoes, it is in fact defamation to say that about whites. And in this new fake Jim Crow country, add in men and heterosexuals.
So where the problem comes in is those old Jim Crow laws - those hard edges - are gone. So are anti-suffrage laws. Lighting up straight white men on innuendoes and manufactured oppressions is group defamation of the same sort GLAAD and the ADL is set up to oppose.
Notice how bigots always try and pretend there is some excuse to make their defamation merely an objective observation as if - for example - Jews and gay folks benefited from an imaginary ideology that ties them all together in the way a Jim Crow county tied all whites in that county together. Bigots say gays will seduce your children and that Jews control the world's finances. Our new intersectionalist bigots say straight white men benefit from privilege. The Hugo-nominated Foz Meadows went so off the rails about this assumption in an article at the Huffington Post about the "privilege" enjoyed by SF authors Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov she had to retract the article and heavily edit it 2 days later. Clarke was gay and Asimov Jewish and himself suffered from quotas in college. "Three straight, white Anglophone men" disappeared from the article.
I think the reason this gay feminist intersectional ideology is so much in vogue with the radical chic is because it is one stop shopping to cover women, gays and non-whites.
The problem is that even the naive flak catchers show signs of obsessive fanaticism and in between them and the bigots are many who openly admit to crippling mental health issues. The common denominator with all three is it is self-evidently false to say mistaken identity is "institutional racism" or that an oppressive patriarchy, misogyny and privilege even exists. Also, one does not ignore male murders in a TV show and go nuts at the rape of a women or go nuts at protein shake ads with a slender woman in a bikini. One does not go nuts at blacks shot by police and ignore whites. That is simple supremacy and why you see these insane #BlackLivesMatter hashtags. Social justice warrior ideology is run through with supremacy, racism and bigotry and deserves its status as a group of anti-bigot bigots, anti-racist racists, anti-sexist sexists and anti-supremacist supremacists. Social justice crusaders are a combination of really hateful, really crazy and really stupid people.
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During the 2013 dust-up at the Science Fiction Writers of America's in-house bulletin over an article by Michael Resnick and Barry Malzberg in which they pointed out an editor from the 1950's was "beauty pageant gorgeous" there were no less than seven responses from Dworkian blogs and commenters which racially insulted the two men: (Samantha Henderson's Blog) "two old white guys," (Foz Meadow's blog) "old white guys," (Trisha Sebastian at the Geek Out About blog) "white straight male," (Anna Zabo Tweet) "old white guy bullshit," (Rachael Acks' blog) "Old White Men," (Kate Milford's blog) "old white guys," (Ferret Steinmetz's blog). Surprise, all of them consider themselves intersectionalists. One can imagine the response if the word "black" or "Jew" was substituted. The idea those seven people would ever write "old black women" in the same pejorative sense is an insane fantasy that would stretch any piece of fantastic literature ever written to the breaking point. Simple comparisons literally don't exist in the world of the PC. And that's the con game in play. This insane feminist ideology cloaks itself in phony anti-oppression narratives in order to let fly with rancid hate speech directed at nothing more than one's race and sex on the thinnest of excuses.
Jim Hines listed the blog responses of what can best be described as 76 grief-stricken souls just nearly missing being thrown into a pit of doom that would bring them back to Raquel Welch's 1,000,000 B. C., when old dinosaurs ruled the earth. Unsurprisingly, their names are more noted for regular frantic hysterics, crying jags and manufactured drama than as artists. The total professional output of Malzberg and Resnick probably surpasses the 76 by an order of 10, which predictably confirms fringe lunatics don't interface very well with the real world.
You don't have to be a genius to figure out a "smart-dressed sir" like Rachael Acks considers a young lesbian to be to the moral and perceptual superior to "old white men." In intersectionalism's moral ethos, Acks in turn is not quite as moral as she would be were she black nor, like the rest of them, would she ever dare use "old black lesbians" in a pejorative sense - NEVER.
Meadows' piece is particularly idiotic since in principle she by far violates the precepts she criticizes in her post. As an aside, Mike Resnick claims the title "'Lady Editors', was given to Barry and myself by Jean Rabe, our female editor."
Taking an intersectionalist like Acks as just one example, she once Tweeted what might be an innocent or even humorous remark if anyone but an intersectionalist did it, in reference to some Facebook post she didn't like: "Oh god white people please just stop." The fact is you will never see an intersectionalist write Oh god black people or Arabs just stop. That is absolutely tabu, presumably because intersectionalists think it would be racist. The fact that buckets of such remarks are made by this weird feminist cult about whites but not the other way around not only exposes the rancid hypocrisy of intersectionalism, its intellectual failure, but also that in principle intersectionalists are demonstrating in a back-handed fashion they believe what they routinely do is wrong. It is that transparency of intersectionalism's agenda that not only shows how rancid it is but childishly stupid.
Meanwhile, in Tanya B. Avakian's 2010 review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips, Avakian writes "Alice Bradley grew up brilliant and miserable, with a starlet’s looks, the mind of a genius..." to absolutely no fanfare or crying. Don't expect any cries of Avakian as a typical middle-class middle-aged white woman used in the pejorative sense of stupidity and immorality being inherent in that description. The idea the Foz Meadows would drag out her blunted wit and suppressed pencils and go after Avakian is a mad dream. Avakian has a protected identity - an identity protected from hate speech - and one that institutionalizes hypocrisy, because right and wrong isn't what you do, it is literally embedded in who you are. In the SFF PC community, "bigotry" is literally a word that is no longer race and gender neutral. If your mind is that far gone, exactly what kind of literature will you produce? The easy answer is that people with the minds of spoiled bratty lady of the flies children will produce a pie-charted pre-teen steampunky zombie world of bi-sexual ninja girls to match. They'll never respect let alone produce something like the United States Constitution, but what is fair play compared to having your cake and eating it too?
The overreaction to the SFWA bulletin affair smacked of a hysteric nervous breakdown rather than a measured response one might expect of a literary community. For a group of woman convinced of their fierce equality, SF's feminists seem prone to starting at shadows.
And keep in mind, these people are objecting to a word that was not used in an insulting manner. They then signify their objection by using race in a negative sense. People capable of that kind of defamation and hypocrisy will never create great art, especially in a genre whose best works have so often in the past specialized in overcoming those types of idiotic perceptions. And the blogs with those comments are linked to from SFWA member and feminist fantasy author Jim Hines' blog with not only not a peep of disapproval but with pride.
But then Jim Hines is the man who took one look at "a photo of past, present, and future WorldCon chairs, taken in 2012" and "was struck by how overwhelmingly white" and male it was, and decided racism and sexism was at work. In that same post, Hines' then bizarrely admits he's "not personally aware of any recent examples of people explicitly refusing to let women and PoC participate in the convention-planning and conrunning process," yet he continues to insist there's a "problem" with racism and sexism in SF. SF fandom today is loaded with paranoid unsourced stuff like that, and the literature is suffering accordingly, from neglect, ignorance, lack of principles, racism, sexism, hate speech, and stupidity. To a mind like that, the National Hockey League must be a de facto KKK. Hines is too stupid to understand the difference between random demographics or simple bad luck and an actual ideology.
The truth is Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick never knew what hit them, referring to it as some generic PC "liberal fascism." In fact what hit them is what the people (almost all white men) under fire to this day don't understand: it was Butlerian/Dworkian radical lesbian gender feminism. The truth is that Malzberg's and Resnick's sole crimes consisted of being straight white men and not subscribing to the tenets of gender feminism. Neither man did anything wrong. In gender feminism, they are wrong in the sense of being encased in their own bodies is wrong. The right identity not only carries morality and lack of it, but knowledge as well. What put the two men on the chopping block was the false feminist assertion that their very specific ideology is equivalent to larger American accepted cultural custom and practice and should be in play in the SFWA.
Of course, feminist ideology accepted as the benchmark for proper behavior is exactly what happened and that was the end of the SFWA as anything other than a feminist laughing stock whose ideological ancestors claim there were fairies in England, that rape, normal sex and the incest taboo are used by men to control women, and that Mother Nature is "performative," like Halloween. So let's have more incest everybody - it will free all women from the shackles of Mr. and Mrs. stuff. If people like Jim Hines and John Scalzi would actually read books written by the feminists they support, they would understand these people like radical feminist Shulamith Firestone openly say that "By eliminating the biological family and the incest taboo, the feminist revolution will enlarge the opportunity for real heterosexual love." In fact Firestone reveals her enemy isn't political but biological and her goal has much less to do with love than hate.
This specific brand of gender feminism set loose in SFF clearly states over and over and over again that women are oppressed by the taboo against incest in society and that the nuclear family must be destroyed. That is an ocean away from the right to vote or be included in an anthology. There is no doubt the vast majority of women and more traditional feminists don't agree with the feminism of Church, Dworkin, de Beauvoir, Lorde, and Trebilcot. The problem for SFF is intersectionalists are not traditional feminists, but instead some very troubled people. Whereas most people believe a taboo against incest is an innate and instinctive desire of human society to not suffer from inbreeding, gender feminists believe incest is precisely where "performative" culture diverged from a natural human penchant for incest. "(Jacques) Lacan explicitly endorses Levi-Strauss's conception of the transcendental law at the origin of human sociality as the incest taboo; he writes that “the fundamental or primary law, the one where culture begins in opposition to nature, is the law of the prohibition of incest” (Lacan 1992 [1986], 66–7)." This is one of the fundamental concepts of gender feminism, which is sometimes called "psychoanalytic feminism," because it is based on the ideas of Lacan and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
The truth is the more you read about that stuff the more it descends into psychological babble that's cherry-picked to explain why insanely sociopathic bigots aren't that at all and instead it's the entire world which is sociopathic and bigoted and has always been so. That would be except for native-Americans and Africans who never raped, plundered and enslaved just like everyone else. While held to be like anyone else, the intersectional racialist element of gender feminism shreds humanity from PoC until they're little more than lucky wide-eyed leprechauns adrift in a world of meanness.
What's stupider and more revealing of a sudden change of landlords than a melt-down over saying a women is attractive and an innocuous painting that would only offend someone who's nuts? The stupid is embedded in a new sheriff who's in town saying that sexist lawlessness is all over with and so is the heterosexual binary too and stinking patriarchal nuclear family that's kept insane feminists down and out since the Garden of Eden. The most hilarious aspect is men attaching their wagon to feminist queer theory because they don't actually understand the theory behind it. All they see is the other end of it where women claim looking at a painting is like compromising their right to vote or Jim Crow and the men nod their heads and start chiming in about about rape culture and smashing the patriarchy. There's a sucker born every minute.
The idea all women would be equally offended by that issue of the SFWA bulletin is too stupid to entertain. The in-your face-racist comments you will find in this book by the very people who objected to Malzberg and Resnick puts these people beyond stupid.
As for Jim Hines, as one of the unwitting lead water-carriers for radical lesbian gender feminism, he is the gift that never stops giving. Before the bulletin dust-up, Hines had written a series of posts about book cover "imagery that emphasized women as sexual objects." For that, Hines got a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. The rot of intolerant intersectionalism was already far advanced. Hines is an expert as pretending he is reacting to his dispassionate view of the world around him. The truth is more like a man who has adopted radical feminism, staked straight white men out on anthill and then set about finding reasons for doing so. It's no coincidence a man intent on finding reasons to take offense so often finds them.
In this post called "Detcon1 and Diversity," Hines begins his never ending hunt for invisible white witches "In talking about diversity in SF/F fandom, I’ve pointed before to convention committees and staff that are mostly or exclusively white, and often male-dominated. This isn’t uncommon, and it’s part of a larger systemic problem with fandom and genre." For an author, Hines has no notion of what the word "systemic" means, although it could easily be ascribed to his constant intersectional racist quacking about ghosts in the machine. Naturally Detcon1 has a "Diversity Advisory Board" because intersectional ideology in SFF is all about the SFF and not at all about its bizarre hyper-focus on race and gender. Once again the simple fact of too many whites and men is "systemic" racism and sexism and given the type of scrutiny intersectionalists give no other groups in the world. By now, the reasons for that should be obvious. Hines doesn't believe in the principles of law, the court system or fair play. Researching Hines' non-fiction remarks reveals a man who consistently takes the position that straight white men should listen while their provisional opposite talks, because when it comes to things like racism and sexism, everyone knows there's only one side to those stories, which is - surprise - racist and sexist.
As if intersectionalism needed to be torn apart by its own hypocrisy any more than I already have, this concept of men unreservedly listening to and believing whatever women say is another constant demand in intersectional dialogues within SFF. At least until women stop listening to women. In the summer of 2014 a women against feminism movement popped up on the internet and suddenly feminists didn't believe in their own cant about listening, but instead basically said these anti-feminist women ranged from ignorant to idiots. So which women do I unreservedly listen to? Must I listen to feminist Andrea Dworkin when she writes "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women" in her 1987 book Intercourse? Or feminist Sheila Jeffreys: "'Male supremacy is centered on the act of sexual intercourse, justified by heterosexual practice.'" Or how about radical feminist Charlotte Bunch: "The Lesbian rejects male sexual/political domination; she defies his world, his social organization, his ideology, and his definition of her as inferior."
And then there's the racial segregation at Detcon1. No doubt to discuss "diversity."
There are no such white rooms and yet Hines bleats about PoC not being made to feel sufficiently welcome. How welcome does Hines feel to visit Suite/Room 6903?
The even more bizarre spectacle is people like Hines unwittingly taking up the cause of intersectional racial and lesbian supremacy without the least hint he is aware of participating in the demonization dogma intersectionalism specializes in. Or there's this bit of hilarity from SFF personage Paul Weimer (as PC a guy as there is in the SFF community when it comes to being a well-trained intersectional seal) when the so-called "Hobby Lobby" ruling came from the Supreme Court: "Some days, this hetero white male guy really wants the Patriarchy to burn, and burn to ashes." It's amazing how much intersectional gender theory he packed into a single sentence. Useful is as useful does. And that speaks to a lot of what is at work here. When you can encapsulate the lesbian feminist ideology of Charlotte Bunch in so few words and have not the faintest clue of who she is or what you're actually expressing, that is the very definition of mainstreaming and the classic "useful idiot."
When that same moron writes "It’s not the politics, its the quality of the work that I care about," and then writes elsewhere about "new and formerly inhibited voices (primarily women, genderqueer, and minorities)," he's right, it's not the politics. But it sure as hell isn't the quality if he's pushing identities on the premise white men default to bigots on zero evidence. "Inhibited"? By who? The idea these water-carriers for insane radical feminism are un-inhibiting those oppressed groups is farcical. The entire crew openly express contempt for reading work by too many straight white males.
Weimar should try and join The Feminist Wire collective, or get nominated for a Tiptree or Nebula Award, then he'd learn all about racism, segregation, discrimination, diversity and exclusion. It shouldn't come as any surprise Weimar is responsible for this odious little paean to political correctness:
"Thanks to the rising popularity of fantasy fiction, riding, in part, on the wave of Game of Thrones‘ massive success, many of science fiction and fantasy’s old paradigms and forms of have gotten a new look by virtue of new and diverse styles and varieties of stories, new and formerly inhibited voices (primarily women, genderqueer, and minorities), and new or formerly under-utilized wellsprings of inspiration. Elizabeth Bear, one of the many authors at the center of this paradigm shift, calls this 'Rainbow SF.' As Science fiction readies its generation ship to move beyond the white-heteronormative-males-conquer-the-galaxy pastiche, popular fantasy is beginning to look beyond the faux-medieval western European that remained so popular throughout the genre’s formative decades. And this doesn’t even include the rise of World SF, as fiction from markets and voices beyond North America and England begin to be heard in the field."
It's pretty clear Weimar doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. There have been plenty of settings in SFF's "formative decades" set outside the West. The problem is that even when that is recognized, the authors get accused of cultural appropriation, racism, othering, inauthenticity and whatever circular and self-sealed aces intersectionalists have up their sleeves to guarantee they never lose. All Weimar is doing is reciting by rote what he reads on Twitter and anti-male lesbian SFF blogs, unaware of how much these people despise him and seek to marginalize him right out of SFF. Weimar is completely unaware of the source of the insanity he promotes. As for SFF's formative years from 1912 to 1940 in terms of fantasy-oriented settings, they are not "faux-medieval" but inspired by a host of global cultures. Robert E. Howard was the single most influential fantasy author from the late twenties to the late seventies and there was hardly a culture he didn't touch. Before Howard Abraham Merritt was the most influential fantasist and he too ranged about quite a bit. In fact, unless Weimer considers the "genre's formative decades" to date from the early eighties, I have no idea what he is even talking about. It is humorous however to see him parrot the sexual and racial distaste radical feminists have for "white-heteronormative-males" like a macaw sitting on a perch in a reversed-out negative of a KKK living room.
Even more surreal is a dude pretending to be a woman Tweeting that. According to radical feminism, Wu's tone-deafness, sheer hostility and arrogance is typical of guys:
"Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal @bjwanlund @GlennF With respect, if you're 'neutral' that's privilege, not wisdom. Dudes can choose to sit it out. I can't."Wu is fond of supporting this paranoid intersectional garbage view of the new racism that argues against itself even as it argues for itself:
This is in response to what a single daffy principal at a graduation ceremony said, not 220 million white Americans.
"White folks please understand, this is what I've been talking about. It's easy to recognize BIG racism... white sheets/hoods, lynchings, calling people nigger. But that's not the majority of racism in America, right now. Most of it is subtle marginalization. Stereotyping. Profiling. Coded language. Microaggressions. 'Minor or excusable' slights that add up from childhood and change how you view the world... and inform you about how the world views you."
There's your terrible system that can't be measured and supposed anti-defamation with the usual "White folks" addressee by a cult which would call any such drivel starting out with Black folks "racist."
Following a murderous racial atrocity, here's an insight into how feminists in SFF like Natalie Luhrs see themselves as transblack voices which take orders from their betters and retweet them, and how those racist betters do exactly what SFF's feminists do while saying it's wrong: smear a crime onto an entire race:
"Lakeyma Pennyamon: He said, 'you rape our women' and this is would be a great opportunity for the supposed 'intersectional' white feminists to proclaim 'Not In Our Names' and begin a conversation about how whte womanhood and purity is frequently mobilized to justify violence against Black people - Black men in particular - but instead there's crickets... Hmmm... I don't feel particularly betrayed because I never had faith in the ability of white people to actually support what they proclaim to believe but it is almost farcical how navel-gazing mainstream white feminism is, especially when they expect women of color to come out and support their liberal-ass projects. You all raised hell about a Georgetown student being called a slut by Rush Limbaugh but when Black people are actually harmed by a dynamic propelled by your identity yall ain't got shit to say."
Using actual culture-wide institutional racial incitement to fight racial incitement not in evidence as other than an anomaly is typical of intersectionalism's eternal con game.
*
For another glimpse at the silly lengths these very weird people go to, read this Twitter thread about refusing to be on panel discussions if it's all white guys. I'm trying to imagine a middle-weight black boxer doing the same about black and Latino boxing cards or a white NASCAR driver about a white pit row and all I can imagine are straightjackets. Trust me, these people live in a world so insulated from reality they have no idea how naive and even crazy they sound. That Twitter thread is an amazing read in a cult of amazing people who've been sold anti-white, anti-male snake oil by a supremacist ideology to the point these remarkably naive people honestly think they're marching in Birmingham alongside Martin Luther King rather than the truth that they are carrying water-hoses for the core tenets of a radical feminism that could easily qualify as a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Apparently author John Green in that Twitter thread believes SFF is a Jim Crow county and he must drive in a car caravan to Mississippi. The problem for the SFF community is that in this alternate Mississippi, the KKK is leading the caravan flying under a new flag with new colors. In days not long past this was called doing the Devil's own work.
The reason intersectionalists don't have something like "The White Privilege Conference" designated as hate speech is because of intersectionalism's great achievement in passing their rancid sociopathy off using glib faux academic social science gibberish as fighting the good fight against racism, homophobia and women-hatred. Reading that Twitter thread and watching useful idiots doing the work of an ideology with a visceral hatred of them is stunning. Why don't they just join the New Black Panther Party? When John Scalzi asks us to "bone up" on intersectionality, he is in essence asking us to join in a movement endemically hostile towards straights, whites and men.
While we're at it, let's call racism what it really is.
The entire social justice movement in SFF is fond of pretending there are dragons out there and also fond of reminding you they are not one of them. When in the history of America has an ideological movement ever talked about a thing like rape as if there is a large bloc of people in favor of it other than actual rapists? PC Twitter feeds often amount to nothing more than pompous declarations they are against murder, as opposed to the great swath of Americans in favor of it.
In the entire history of SF, I doubt anyone has ever written anything as satirically lunatic as Scalzi's hoe-down invoking "white privilege," Hines' clueless racial witchhunts and Weimer's fawning ode to the very intersectional bigotry which makes him Public Enemy No. 1. These are people who live in a world where no racist quotes equals racism and racist quotes equals no racism. How one arrives to that world is to explain the exact dimensions of ignorance and stupidity and goes a long way to explaining the precipitous fall of SF literature.
The other issue that angered intersectionalists about the SFWA bulletin dust-up above was the cover art that depicted a comic book character named Red Sonja in a chain mail bikini. Again we mine Avakian's review for irony as she writes about Tiptree taking up SF, writing "...in Tiptree’s case the talking squids and chain-mail bikinis are entirely apropos."
Aside from that, it is now understood there will be no more such covers on the SFWA bulletin, yet another sign that more of SFF's history, this time in the form of old school illustrators such as Frank Frazetta, Earle K. Bergey, and Kelly Freas, are now persona non grata in a climate-controlled intersectional orthodoxy. In fact it's safe to say that when it comes to extremist feminism, the entirety of the history of SF is persona non grata. But SF is nothing if not rebellious and rather than bow to the whims of a stiff-necked nunnery it will simply do an end around and leave the SFWA and its intersectionality high and dry, deserted by all but those who demonstrate Orwell's goodthink. Even the Tiptree these intersectionalists hero-worship wasn't such a humorless and intolerant redneck. Tiptree wrote satire; modern faux feminist SF is satire.
When abstract fine art took over museums in America over a half century ago, finally morphing into social justice warriors like SFF's crowd today, realist painters didn't disappear once their most prominent institutional support dried up but went elsewhere. Today there are more such painters than have ever existed in America. In SF terms I am a fan of neither extreme, as one subverts and circumvents SF entirely with boring and bigoted race/gender stories and the other is too conformist, literal and linear for my tastes. The reason the Golden Age has its name is because of a sweet spot it occupied that was a nice mix of commercial and editorial constraints and fine art. Just as the visual fine arts was considered an alternative and refuge from commercial magazine illustrations, so I found mid-century SF in literary terms. No doubt SF's own obscurity and the knowledgeable connoisseurs that comprised its readership acted to at once give free rein to ideas and techniques while providing enough editorial oversight to not give us the equivalent to Jackson Pollack works of paint dribbled off the end of a stick. That sweet spot is what is missing from SF today and instead of SF's institutions giving us Pollack, we are being given the view of fantastic literature strained through the hysteric and paranoid maunderings of extremist so-called feminists and their bizarre hypocritical ideology of narcissism, inquisitions and faint-hearted triggered palpitations over exactly nothing. Intersectional fantastic literature is a literature of concocted post traumatic stress syndromes and exclusion waved around like a medal of honor while featuring the victimhood of the writers themselves or those writers acting as proxies for "marginalized voices." You couldn't create a stupider or more benighted body of work if you tried. Until intersectional writers and their crazy day-long anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual Twitter manifestos are excised from SF, you can consider SF's core institutions a stinking corpse no one with a sense of smell or talent wants to get close to.
Here's what happens when too many white men and their SFF accidentally coalesce in one place. Intersectionalism's radar-like interest in the printed word and genre goes into high KKK/patriarchy gear:
"1. Natalie Luhrs @eilatan Jul 16 SFF peeps, kindly look at this list and the archives and tell me if you see what I see, alley-cat vulgarity aside? http://www.mystgalaxy.com/Reviews-Patrick
2. Kate Elliott @KateElliottSFF Jul 16 @eilatan that's a trick question. RIght? ;)
3. Liz Bourke @hawkwing_lb Jul 16 @KateElliottSFF @eilatan @jennygadget So. Are we all seeing a BAG OF DICKS?
4. Kate Elliott @KateElliottSFF Jul 16 @hawkwing_lb @eilatan @jennygadget Diversity now means 'lots of books by different men.'
5. Ann Somerville @ann_somerville Jul 16 @KateElliottSFF @CoraBuhlert @hawkwing_lb @eilatan @jennygadget do any of those authors even have a tan?"
No, that's not a reversed out version of a white supremacist web site - they're fighting racism and sexism.
"My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!" -Flavia Dzodan
It's pretty obvious people with pretty deep-seated sociopathies have found that if you just mention "human rights" and "social justice" next to their bigotry and racism everything's just fine. The fact these very strange people can't tell the difference between white people and a white supremacist ideology speaks volumes. It's no different than persecuting all lesbians for the psychotic lesbian supremacist ideology of radical gender feminists Charlotte Bunch, Kate Millet and Audre Lorde. The fact social justice warrior embrace radical feminism as their default orthodoxy spells out more volumes, and all of it witless garbage.
Given the addiction social justice warriors have with dividing the world into whites and PoC and then doling out morality and shared traits accordingly, read this from SF Mistressworks, written by the ultra-PC feminist parrot Martin Wisse:
"As a genre planetary romance has always been a bit dodgy, an evolutionary offshoot of the Africa adventure story, with a lot of the same racist and colonial assumptions built in. So you have cringing Gandymedian natives, mysterious jungles and alien drums, crazed halfbreeds and all those other tropes recycled from Tarzan. Just because the native races are now Martian or Venusian and coloured green or red instead of black or yellow doesn't make the assumptions behind them any less racist. There's still the idea that the various alien races encountered have existential qualities that each and every member of such a race shares."
If you can make heads or tails of that nonsense you're smarter than I am. The truth is if everyone was white Wisse would jump on that as well. You can never win with an intersectionalist because they have no steady principles or a moral ethos but only favored oppressed identities that swirl around those things like a flock of dumbbells. People like Wisse could find Jim Crow in rock formations. I'm not sure why he was "mansplaining" Leigh Brackett's racism there. Perhaps one of his priestesses can straighten him out, cuz "The world really doesn't need many more white men in its stories."
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In this retweet, Scalzi lets us know months after the bulletin fiasco that he - and others - can't figure out the difference between equality for women and intersectionalists who want their anti-male politically correct bizarre world views enforced while portraying any reaction to those views as being part of a "global issue of women-hating":
Once again an intersectionalist insults men over a comic book cover with big breasts that is no different than comic covers have been as long as there have been comic books and is surprised when she is insulted back. Intolerance: meet intolerance. Marjorie Liu skips from that "very non-threatening" takedown of a comic book cover by Janelle Asselin to the male reaction as a "deju vu" example of "sexual harassment," "misogyny," "male amnesia," "sexism," and "patriarchy," to "the rest of the world" - namely: Afghanistan and its "'rape cases, acid attacks, burning girls’ schools, cutting the nose and ears off women, beating women with lashes in public, executing them in public, accusing them of adultery.'" Liu asks and answers the rhetorical question "... are the roots of that violence the same? Yes." Some unknown number of guys on the internet (8, 15, 28?) who don't like goofy fake feminists coming after them equals all men equals "patriarchy" equals the Taliban. Once again we have a writer who uses words like "non-threatening" but doesn't know the meaning of them.
Asselin's Dworkian gender feminist inspired moral offense is directly reflected in the language of the Comics Code Authority which censored comic books beginning in 1954 and lasting until it began to be slowly dismantled and chipped away at in the early 1970s amidst the now ironic sexual revolution: "4. Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities."
Global "women-hating" is a lot of mileage for a flat tire of a comic book cover of a woman with a large chest, unless one is prone to sheer hyperbole to inflate your car tires. Liu finishes with the patronizing and supremacist disclaimer that this all "doesn’t mean that all men are terrible," and then shows it is nothing but a disclaimer by following that with "the larger culture of misogyny." Men everywhere probably thank Liu for those crumbs. The truth is there is no such thing as "misogyny" the way intersectional feminists stipulate its blanket existence but Liu is certainly a misandrist.
The humorous thing about this is that Janelle Asselin absurdly talks about the anatomy of a made-up super hero as "unrealistic." It's difficult to know exactly what to say about that level of dissonance, but don't expect any treatises from Asselin about why anyone reads comic books about people and super powers that don't exist but who need under-wire support. Why not just write a post about how unrealistic it is to never show super-heroes defecating or taking eye-exams? No word on what these completely daffy women think about Sophia Loren or Raquel Welch although we might safely assume those actors were clueless tools of the patriarchy that feels a bizarre attraction to women that can only be explained as hate, at least if you are nuts.
The obvious intellectual failure here is so easily entertaining the idea that one half of the human race is ignoble and "women-hating" with as much ease as casually dismissing the possibility of men-hating. There are 3.5 billion men in the world and breast-offended Janelle Asselin's equally weak disclaimer "I’m not saying men are the worst thing ever" begs the question of when such women will be truly treated equally in terms of being just as capable of misandry as men are of misogyny. The rhetoric practically screams as much when it comes to the innate nobility and innocence of women. The fact this brand of faux feminism dismiss misandry as a mythical chimera shows its real interest is in supremacy, not equality. In real-world terms, the idea that 3.5 billion women have no equality when it comes to hate, love, jealousy, stupidity, brilliance, ignorance, kindness, vapidity and loyalty is too stupid to think about. Only supremacists and idiots put forward such things, not egalitarians.
An SF author who can't figure out a concept as simple as equal protection isn't going to be able to write anything much beyond "vomit zombies."
As if you needed more of a tip-off, when Liu writes about "sexual harassment in the comic book industry" in terms of "we’re sexually harassed, threatened with rape, groped on the convention floor," she clearly makes no distinction between "we're" and women that actually happened to, or men who did that and men who didn't. Despite her disclaimer, Liu isn't making a true distinction between men who do bad things and men, but she is making a clear distinction between her own innate morality and that of men. Extend that out to law and rights and if Liu wrote a Constitution it would concern itself only with female victims.
In Liu's world, and that of Asselin, there is no sense of criminals and non-criminals, but the sense of a criminal conspiracy in which men - all men - are an accessory to a crime; that's what "patriarchy" means in intersectional theory. Men are one striding single figure, women another. One bad, the other good. There are no individuals - not really. You can always tell what's going on with people who talk about a gender or ethnic groups when they not only talk about them as if they are a single person but one where whatever happens to one happens to all, no matter how removed in distance or time, and with morality or lack of it firmly established in that single identity.
The idea that Liu has written for Marvel Comics is nothing less than pitiful. Stan Lee wasn't some politically correct feminist nuthatch but told true lessons in principle and morality and ones quite frankly beyond Liu's ability to grasp.
A pragmatic egalitarian would, in the long run, show an equal interest in crimes committed by and against both men and women, and use names, not default to politicized identities. That is what our system of law and our Constitution aspires to. A supremacist will show a peculiar and one-sided view of the world and that person's rhetoric will reflect that. Liu's vision works in a manner directly opposite to law. On her Facebook page she laments that offenses against women are "always judged on an individual basis, rather than looking at the big damn picture." In other words she despises law while essentially advocating not only racial and sexual profiling but punishment. Is she suggesting mass round-ups and witchhunts by sex? Liu takes it on herself to decide what are "depictions of female comic book characters that are derogatory, thoughtless, over-sexed, and misogynistic" while presenting us with these covers of her SFF novels with a buffed shirtless man, and women in skin-tight pants, topless, and with corsets. What is the precise dividing line between art that is correctthought and misogyny? Is it a cup size, the ratio of waist to hindend? And who decrees the difference between what is acceptable and "a product of the same terrible hand"? Hyperbole, do your stuff.
Liu once wrote "White male privilege cares ONLY about white male privilege, and there is no goal except maintaining that position of power."
That's a conspiracy of no less than 100 million people folks, and it's presented with the same facility as it is accepted by this same PC culture to conversely never say such a thing about gays, women, Arabs, blacks, Asians, Hispanics or Jews. Exactly how many hundreds of times does one need to hear about the failings of the white straight cisgendered male before obvious becomes obvious? How does that NOT equal racial and sexist bigotry when the PC use an apparent principle where a simple use of the word "lady" or a mention of a women writer's looks or comic book cover art equals "misogyny." Probably a clue would be only when a man does it, not Tanya Avakian. The words "fair play" have taken a deep, dark, dive to some abyss, and the double-standard is a chasm.
And keep in mind, this is the same culture that writes sophomoric posts like John Chu's about the ignorance of white people mistaking one Asian for another being "racial micro-aggressions" "that felt like tiny stabs to my gut." With that as a baseline, one can only wonder what prediction of the sun exploding Liu would lay at my feet if I profiled 100 million Asians as acid-throwing Taliban cuz some Chinese guy mocked a feminist, cuz Liu hasn't dumped some illusory racial micro-aggression on white folks, but delivered a profiling broadside. As for John Chu, he acts like people came up to him, confused him for Gordon Liu, started singing "Kung-Fu Fighting" and then actually did try and stab him in the guts with a giant sword with rings in it. Meanwhile, feel the micro-love Chu has for whites here in the retweet below with anti-white, piled on anti-white, piled on anti-white, piled on anti-white, because SF is all about complaining about white people:
Mistaken identity is not only a "micro-aggression," it is also intersectionalspeak for "erasure":
Naturally, K. Tempest Bradford takes the non-existent bull by the horns with "Erasure Comes In Many Forms – A ReaderCon Report." Why pass up a shot at The Hegemony and the very interesting theory only white people mistake people for someone else. Why? They're white. 'Nuff said.
Another tip-off to the PC mind-set in play is a commenter on Liu's post who writes "My apologies for those of my sex who think and do this crap." Would he apologize for male burglars? What about white ones, or black or Jewish? Does that commenter expect black men to apologize for crime? What about reparations? For my part, I'm not apologizing for a single thing anyone does or ever did on the basis of some superficial resemblance to me. Nor do I accept racial demonization theories like "white privilege" painted onto me together with some absurd idea I am racially and sexually fighting to maintain a "position of power."
I'm surprised that these faux feminists are surprised how unwelcome they are in genres they wish to transform into their own image, rather than being happy with their own slice of the pie. They accuse old school SF and men in general of being obsessed with some bizarre analogue to bigoted and supremacist feminism though there is no rhetoric, stories, awards or anthologies they can point to that would make such a case. Meantime the daily self-fascination, unprincipled, and endless naked advocacy for their own female, gay, and PoC intersectional identities coupled with demonization theories of straight white men is a torrential downpour. There is no ideologically purposeful white, male, heterosexual demographic huddling equivalent to these:
* Spectrum Awards
* Goldies Awards for Lesbian Literature (Speculative Fiction Category)
* Lambda Literary Awards (Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror)
* Queer Horror Awards
* James Tiptree, Jr. Award Winners and Shortlist
* Lesbian Science Fiction
* GLBT Fantasy Fiction Resources
* 50 Most Important LGBT Comics Characters
* Changing Images of Trans People in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
* Transgender SF
* The Complete History of LGBT Video Game Characters
* The Gay and Lesbian Conundrum in Anime and Manga
Asserting an accidental mainstream demographic equates to that list is nonsense. Furthermore, it's obvious what takes precedence there and it is not SFF. It's equally nonsensical to suggest whiteness, heterosexuality or being male in mainstream SFF amounts to the same thing as the political consciousness of that list. SFF is clearly the priority in classic SFF, not politically stumping for white straight males. Saying that's not so and stipulating the entire world and heterosexuality itself is a political act over and over again doesn't make it so. Demography and ideology are two completely different things. What you'll find consistently missing when it comes to the PC within the SFF community is a simple yet crucial thing: principle - actual and real principle. The woman in Part One of that article linked to above makes a good point about "significant changes in the visibility and legal status of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people." The problem is the sheer hostility and defamation with which that is expressed to make elbow room within SFF washes away my compassion and shows why Andrea Dworkin in outer space or Middle Earth is neither all that compelling nor entertaining, especially when it takes the form of the new intersectional genre of racial and sexual revenge fantasies in vogue as I write this. Equality, visibility and diversity are one thing, group libel and idiotic supremacy another. Sitting at a table isn't the same as coming into a room with elbows flying about how I'm a racist homophobic misogynist at birth.
No, it's so; it's a conspiracy to maintain power. Is every top scorer in the NBA playoffs black? Oh, lord, what "terrible hand" conceived that? Someone call Laurie Penny so she can call out the NBA. Meanwhile artistry is thrown aside in favor of something else:
"Retweeted by Kate Elliott Aliette de Bodard @aliettedb · I have finished @KateElliottSFF's Spiritwalker trilogy. Will post later, but wow. Such a beautiful universe, feeling lived in" "I hadn't realized how utterly refreshing it could be to be reading an epic fantasy where the experience of women was up front and centre."
And when that's up front and center, what happens to artistry that's shoved backwards by people institutionally awarded for - not talent - but simply being a particular identity and making empty noises Jim Crow still walks the land? The easy answer is the death of a genre. Stories are not independent of the artistic medium which conveys them. In fact it is the use of the medium, the weight of the prose, which is celebrated by connoisseurs, not a story that could've been a cartoon or movie.
It's no surprise how often great novels lose something in their adaptation to film. Basically, what the PC do is reduce literature to story, adapt it to film in their heads, and worse, do that same thing as writers. When race and gender become more important than the words, that is failure.
The reason movie tie-in novels have such a dismal reputation is they are being written based on a film. They exist from the ground up as a thing asking no literary questions and so of course they can have no literary answers. Such novels tend to be flat, dry, matter of fact and bland. PC SFF in effect is an entire body of genre literature that exists on an artistic level that is conformist and sit-commish. PC SFF writers are writing tie-in novels to the social justice war movie being fought outside a literary environment. It is certainly possible to address these issues in a wonderfully literate sense, but when one's priorities are askew, the chances that's going to happen are pretty slim. When one asks political or even hateful questions, one is not going to get an artistic answer. Such a thing is anathema to the higher principled perceptual questions good SF requires, and what you're likely to end up with is a Jonny Quest cartoon where Jonny and Hadji change places, because changing places was the driving question asked and pervading an entire body of literature instead of an artistic one.
Artistry is a thing all can share in - shitty writing and story-telling will not draw people to a genre other than in regards a very tiny and insulated group who are willing to overlook that in order to see themselves in a mirror. The Tiptree Awards has been going down that route for years and no one wants the SFF they're selling. Mainstream that and you mainstream the death of a genre to whatever extent it is successful. And again, the stupid upshot is this is done by people who claim identity-advocacy was ideologically enforced in SFF for decades, reaching back 100 years, and that it is wrong to do so. The problem there is that never took place. The artistry of the work speaks for itself, just as the amateurish identity-literature of SFF's core writers speaks for itself. Women won't destroy science fiction - racial and sexual bigotry that laughingly rents out the word "feminism" will.
And what do you do when art and talent has been marginalized?
Oh, and white people shouldn't make manga comics because race and culture are trademarked.
*
Aside from those considerations, when it come to the entry of the mainstream, SF literature itself has become almost irrelevant, squeezed dry for its most shallow ideas and thrown aside like a husk. In its place are nuanced tropes like steampunk goggles as an essential part of a genre. The fact that wardrobe has become confused with genre and creativity tells you this has not come to a good place.
The other problem with SF today is in regard to where modern SF literature gets its influences from. As I suggested earlier, at one time in its history, SF literature looked as if it might conquer television and film. SF anthology television shows from the early '60s like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, though with their nearly weekly requisite of the monster, nevertheless were often influenced by the more literate artistry of short SF stories. The Twilight Zone in particular adapted or borrowed from such pulp genre authors as Jerome Bixby, Ray Bradbury, Damon Knight and the husband-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. Veteran genre author Richard Matheson was the writer on 14 episodes of The Twilight Zone. The Outer Limits episode called "The Man Who Was Never Born," starring Martin Landau, is a lyrical SF television masterpiece, and many of The Outer Limits' episodes actively pursued a feeling of whimsical poetry and artistry.
With the advent of TV shows such as Lost in Space and Star Trek in the late '60s, and a decade later, the first of the three original Star Wars films, the idea that SF literature would ever conquer mainstream film and TV died a slow death and in fact, the literature of SF itself was conquered by Buffy and Dr. Who, not to mention zombies in their millions. In the few cases Hollywood has adapted literary SF, it has misread its literature and history. Phillip K. Dick has something like 8 Hollywood adaptations of his stories while the far more deserving, entertaining, and important Robert Heinlein has only had one true adaptation of one of his novels. That was the 1984 film The Puppet Masters, based on Heinlein's 1951 novel. Dick endlessly retreaded the same who am I theme. Heinlein outdid Dick's entire output in terms of variety in Heinlein's first 3 years of writing.
When scholarship is lacking, what happens is a thing becomes famous for being famous, and not for what it is. That is certainly what has happened with Dick and with the 1985 SF novel Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game is perhaps the most overrated novel in SF history. On "best-of" lists, Ender's Game sits in the number one position of best SF novel of all time more than any other single SF novel. No connoisseurs of an earlier era would have made the mistake of giving such an average SF novel such high marks for artistry.
Bestselling NY Times and John W. Campbell nominee Larry Correia called Ender's Game "one of the most pivotal works in sci-fi ever." I defy anyone to tell me in what manner SF literature pivots around Ender's Game, an average SF novel for its day. There is not a single innovation within the novel or even sense of being at the leading edge of SF of the time, or any time after 1940. To resort to Well, it's just that good, is ridiculous - it's not. The problem is you have to have some sense of what came before to know that. I have no problem with people liking the book - and they most definitely do - but to say it is important lacks merit.
The ability of the now mainstream average SF reader to themselves discriminate without help is something that is lost. The fact that such fine SF novels as The War for Eternity (1983) and its sequel The Black Ship (1985) by Christopher Rowley, the seminal Eon (1985) by Greg Bear, In Conquest Born (1986) by C.S. Friedman, The Dragon Never Sleeps (1988) by Glenn Cook and Palace (1996) by Katherine Kerr and Mark Krieghbaum have sunk without a trace should tell you something is amiss. One of the greatest and most ambitious novels in SF history, the Night's Dawn trilogy (1996-99) - actually one long novel - by Peter Hamilton, has been given short shrift by the modern SF community. The three parts of the Night's Dawn series were amazingly ignored by both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The same thing happened with Hamilton's two part novel Pandora's Star (2004) and Judas Unchained (2006). The problem there is that it seems to be lost on the SFF community that there is not a single SF writer alive who can do what Hamilton can with SF. That's a pretty strange oversight for the Nebulas to make, seeing how it is an award given by other SFF writers. It should be pointed out that George R.R. Martin can do what Hamilton can, but his tour de force is in his Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. Martin's first 3 volumes in that series were all nominated for Nebulas, none winning. 3, 4 and 5 were nominated for Hugo Awards, none winning. A strange fate for both Hamilton's Night's Dawn and A Song of Ice and Fire, possibly the two most seminal works in at least the last 20 and perhaps last 40 years. In terms of ambitious scope and the realization of that ambition, each is unsurpassed in latter day SFF in their control, effortless creativity and massively innovative reimaginings of their genre's themes. In that sense, each can be said to demonstrate a canny historic awareness and overview of space opera and sword and sorcery.
At the same time Hamilton's first volume in his Night's Dawn series, The Reality Dysfunction, was being ignored by the Nebula committee, Kate Elliott's King's Dragon (1997) was a nominee and also up against A Game of Thrones by George R.R Martin. Hamilton and Martin on one side and Elliot on the other point up the difference between the innovative use of archetypes and boring stereotypes, original and complex world-building, and sloppy and confused appropriation of an alternate medieval Europe, and polished and assured writing with amateurish writing that's not yet absorbed the lessons of some writing workshop. What the committee of supposedly professional writers saw isn't what I saw. Hamilton's was actually an historic seminal event in the long flow and evolution of SF literature, the other entirely forgettable and of no consequence.
Infinity Beach (2000) by Jack McDevitt, perhaps - along with Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980) by Frederik Pohl - one of the greatest SF mysteries ever written, was ignored by the Hugos but given a nomination by the Nebula Awards. That lack of consensus has increased as the years have passed and highlights the inability of modern SF fandom to discriminate the good and lasting from the trendy and bad.
Charles Platt in a 1989 essay titled "The Rape of Science Fiction" (an illuminating essay) quotes David Hartwell from Platt's own Patchin Review in 1983 as writing "There is in my experience no discernible audience within the science-fiction readership for high-quality work not written by a familiar name." That is the very definition of an inability to discriminate on one's own.
In 2009 The Guardian published "1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy." The list of well over 100 books is as demented as whatever definition they chose to use for fantasy, which is apparently none. It is the single most ignorant such list I have ever come across in its apparent randomness. The fact the list was compiled by "the Guardian's Review team and a panel of expert judges" makes it all the more bewildering. We find The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton listed under "Crime." That surpasses a lack of discernment into straight out retardation. The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne are under "War and Travel."
*
Read this first paragraph from Palace by Katherine Kerr and Mark Kreighbaum and tell me what you see:
"He stood where he liked standing, alone on the edge of the crowd and watching, above the crowd, too, on a ramp halfway up and curling round the dome of the Spaceport terminal. Checking tickets, carrying luggage, herding children, sapients rushed past in both directions, but no-one more than glanced his way. He was hidden in plain sight by his clothes, the finely tailored but utterly undistinguished suit of a merchant. Pale soft shirt, grey short-tunic, and a slashed kilt of the same grey - human trousers, graceless wear for a stub-ugly species, did you no good when you carried a tail, even a short stump of one like his. In one hand he held a sample case, splashed with colour and the name of an importing firm. Inside lay jewellery, artificial amber from the planet of Souk, opals from Kephalon, providing him with both a cover story and money to live while he got his real job done."
That is authority, art, and craftsmanship in some 160 words. It is a self-assured info-dump, foreshadowing, back-story, world-building, character and plot crammed into a single paragraph. The rest of the novel follows suit. Had it been a SF author typical of today, the novel would've been twice as long, if not multi-volume. It's no surprise to me that before the internet and digital publishing fully realized itself, paperback copies of the quickly out-of-print "Palace" were fetching 50 to 75 dollars on Ebay. Thankfully Mark Kreighbaum wrote a sequel by himself called "The Eyes of God." Then - nothing. Other worthless series go on for 6, 7 and 10 volumes. Lois McMaster Bujold, writing in a time-frame just previous to "Palace," has received 4 Hugos and been compared to Robert A. Heinlein, though she has never written anything as finely crafted as "Palace," let alone shown the creativity or game-changing influence of Heinlein.
In only the second scene of Joe Abercrombie's much heralded 2006 debut fantasy novel The Blade Itself, we have the prospect of some 800 words being used to let us know a man has a painful limp and to show him moving along part of a corridor and down 16 stairs. 800 words. That's 1/10 of a short story. At about 190,000 words, The Blade Itself is a touch longer than The Fellowship of the Ring, Dune and The Mote In God's Eye. Why? The Two Towers and The Return of the King clock in at about 160 and 135k respectively. As good as they are, at around a million words, the first 3 volumes of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series is twice as long as the entire 3 volumes of Lord of the Rings. Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn is about 1.2 million. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is less than 50,000 words. It seems the weight of prose has been considerably diluted over the decades. In the case of Martin and Hamilton, I think one could argue the expansive word count has been put to good use. With others, not so much.
*
Here is the opening to "Black Destroyer" by A.E. Van Vogt, from the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction:
"ON AND ON Coeurl prowled. The black, moonless, almost starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. It was a vague light that gave no sense of approaching warmth. It slowly revealed a nightmare landscape.
"Jagged black rock and a black, lifeless plain took form around him. A pale red sun peered above the grotesque horizon. Fingers of light probed among the shadows. And still there was no sign of the family of id creatures that he had been trailing now for nearly a hundred days.
"He stopped finally, chilled by the reality. His great forelegs twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that grew from his shoulders undulated tautly. He twisted his great cat head from side to side, while the hairlike tendrils that formed each ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the ether.
"There was no response. He felt no swift tingling along his intricate nervous system. There was no suggestion anywhere of the presence of the id creatures, his only source of food on this desolate planet. Hopelessly, Coeurl crouched, an enormous catlike figure silhouetted against the dim, reddish sky line, like a distorted etching of a black tiger in a shadow world. What dismayed him was the fact that he had lost touch. He possessed sensory equipment that could normally detect organic id miles away. He recognized that he was no longer normal. His overnight failure to maintain contact indicated a physical breakdown. This was the deadly sickness he had heard about. Seven times in the past century he had found coeurls, too weak to move, their otherwise immortal bodies emaciated and doomed for lack of food. Eagerly, then, he had smashed their unresisting bodies, and taken what little id was still keeping them alive.
"Coeurl shivered with excitement, remembering those meals. Then he snarled audibly, a defiant sound that quavered on the air, echoed and re-echoed among the rocks, and shuddered back along his nerves. It was an instinctive expression of his will to live.
"And then, abruptly, he stiffened.
"High above the distant horizon he saw a tiny glowing spot. It came nearer. It grew rapidly, enormously, into a metal ball. It became a vast, round ship. The great globe, shining like polished silver, hissed by above Coeurl, slowing visibly. It receded over a black line of hills to the right, hovered almost motionless for a second, then sank down out of sight."
*
Van Vogt's 1948 "Resurrection" ("The Monster") shows the amazing economy of 8,000 words in tandem with expansive ideas presented in the form of intriguing little mysteries.
"THE GREAT ship poised a quarter of a mile above one of the cities. Below was a cosmic desolation. As he floated down in his energy bubble, Enash saw that the buildings were crumbling with age.
"'No signs of war damage!' The bodiless voice touched his ears momentarily. Enash turned it out.
"On the ground he collapsed his bubble. He found himself in a walled enclosure overgrown with weeds. Several skeletons lay in the tail grass beside the rakish building. They were of long, two-legged, two-armed beings with skulls in each case mounted at the end of a thin spine. The skeletons, all of adults, seemed in excellent preservation, but when he bent down and touched one, a whole section of it crumbled into a fine powder. As he straightened, he saw that Yoal was floating down nearby. Enash waited until the historian had stepped out of his bubble, then he said:
"'Do you think we ought to use our method of reviving the long dead?'"
*
Here is the opening to "The Weapon Shop" by A.E. Van Vogt, from the Dec. 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction:
"THE VILLAGE at night made a curiously timeless pictures. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City, and made what the telestats called - he remembered the phrase vividly - 'a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.'
"Fara believed that utterly. The street before him with its weedless, automatically tended gardens, its shops set well back among the flowers, its perpetually hard, grassy sidewalks, and its street lamps that glowed from every pore of their structure - this was a restful paradise where time had stood still.
"And it was like being a part of life that the great artist's picture of this quiet, peaceful scene before him was now in the collection of the empress herself. She had praised it, and naturally the thrice-blest artist had immediately and humbly begged her to accept it. What a joy it must be to be able to offer personal homage to the glorious, the divine, the serenely gracious and lovely Innelda Isher, one hundred eightieth of her line."
There are writers who have a lot to say, and need to edit down their prose to fit it all in. There are writers who have very little to say, and use a lot of words to hide that fact.
*
Here is the opening of The Weapon Makers by A.E. Van Vogt, from the Feb. 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction:
"HEDROCK ALMOST FORGOT THE SPY RAY. IT CONTINUED TO glow, the picture on the screen showing the Imperial conference room as clearly as ever. There were still men bowing low over the hand of the cold-faced young woman who sat on the throne chair, and the sound of their voices came distinctly. Everything was as it should be.
"For Hedrock, however, all interest in that palatial room, that courtly scene, had faded. The icy words of the young woman spun around and around in his mind, though minutes had now passed since she had spoken them.
"' - Under the circumstances,' she had said, 'we cannot afford to take further risks with this Weapon Shop turncoat. What has happened is too important. Accordingly, General Grail, you will, as a purely precautionary measure, arrest Captain Hedrock an hour after lunch and hang him. The time sequence is important, as he will, as usual, sit at my table during lunch, and also because I wish to be present at the execution.'"
*
This is the opening to Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett, first published as Sea-Kings of Mars in the June 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories:
"Matt Carse knew he was being followed almost as soon as he left Madam Kan's. The laughter of the little dark women was still in his ears and the fumes of thil lay like a hot sweet haze across his vision—but they did not obscure from him the whisper of sandaled feet close behind him in the chill Martian night.
"Carse quietly loosened his proton-gun in its holster but he did not attempt to lose his pursuer. He did not slow nor quicken his pace as he went through Jekkara.
"'The Old Town,' he thought. 'That will be the best place. Too many people about here.'
"Jekkara was not sleeping despite the lateness of the hour. The Low Canal towns never sleep, for they lie outside the law and time means nothing to them. In Jekkara and Valkis and Barrakesh night is only a darker day.
"Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead sea-bottom. He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled. Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and the whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world."
*
As an example of a prose stylist from SF's fantasy cousin, here is the opening to "The Seven Geases" (1934) by Clark Ashton Smith, a man who wastes no words while seeming to do the lavish opposite:
"The Lord Ralibar Vooz, high magistrate of Commoriom and third cousin to King Homquat, had gone forth with six-and-twenty of his most valorous retainers in quest of such game as was afforded by the black Eiglophian Mountains. Leaving to lesser sportsmen the great sloths and vampire-bats of the intermediate jungle, as well as the small but noxious dinosauria, Ralibar Vooz and his followers had pushed rapidly ahead and had covered the distance between the Hyperborean capital and their objective in a day's march. The glassy scaurs and grim ramparts of Mount Voormithadreth, highest and most formidable of the Eiglophians, had beetled above them, wedging the sun with dark scoriac peaks at mid-afternoon, and walling the blazonries of sunset wholly from view."
*
Here is the beginning of Chapter One of Sofia Samatar's A Stranger In Olondria (2013):
"As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels' and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing. I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards."
Why is the river like a "cataract of roses?" What makes the beaches "melancholy" and the sea "sad?" What purpose does telling me about "clarity of light" have? Why do I care people have caps of "white squirrel fur?" What do almond blossoms and goddesses have to do with summer? In 125 words Smith moves. In 238 words Samatar goes nowhere, and with the promise of more. In 233 words Brackett moves. In 256 words, here is the opening to The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany:
"In their ruddy jackets of leather that reached to their knees the men of Erl appeared before their lord, the stately white-haired man in his long red room. He leaned in his carven chair and heard their spokesman.
"And thus their spokesman said.
"'For seven hundred years the chiefs of your race have ruled us well; and their deeds are remembered by the minor minstrels, living oh yet in their little tinkling songs. And yet the generations stream away, and there is no new thing.'
"'What would you?' said the lord.
"'We would be ruled by a magic lord,' they said.
"'So be it,' said the lord. 'It is five hundred years since my people have spoken thus in parliament, and it shall always be as your parliament saith. You have spoken. So be it.'
"And he raised his hand and blessed them and they went.
"They went back to their ancient crafts, to the fitting of iron to the hooves of horses, to working upon leather, to tending flowers, to ministering to the rugged needs of Earth; they followed the ancient ways, and looked for a new thing. But the old lord sent a word to his eldest son, bidding him come before him.
"And very soon the young man stood before him, in that same carven chair from which he had not moved, where light, growing late, from high windows, showed the aged eyes looking far into the future beyond that old lord's time. And seated there he gave his son his commandment."
That is not white prose nor is it black. It is not less interesting because Dunsany is white nor is Samatar's more interesting because she is black. I understand what Samatar is doing here, and I enjoy that kind of thing; it is what William Morris, George McDonald, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft have done before her. The problem is she is not doing it; there is no intuitive inside-out understanding in play but rather outside-in. It is forced and ill-considered - words for the sake of words. It is not purple prose but drifting adjectives and orphaned metaphors. When I wrote about awards earlier, it brings to mind this reaction of reviewer Amal El-Mohtar at the unreliable Tor.com to A Stranger In Olondria:
"This is a book that rewards lovers of prose style and evocative description..."
In fact, in my opinion, it is and does nothing of the kind. For that kind of prose, you have to go to Morris, McDonald, Dunsany, Smith, Lovecraft or... Jack Vance. But if you don't even read him because he is an "old white man," one of the "overwhelmingly male, white," what will take place? To understand the full context here you have to understand who Amal El-Mohtar and Sofia Samatar are and what their interests are. To cut to the chase, their interests are much the same as Aliette de Bodard. In the name of politicized race and gender identities, de Bodard, El-Mohtar, and Samatar are more than willing to fill an entire generation with empty literature.
A writer like Vance is the antithesis of intersectional SF literature. An intersectional SF novel will be so filled with the very provincialism SF seeks to soar away from it becomes mundane, if not unworkable. As in the case of the non-fiction writings of intersectionalists within SF, story and drama become so subverted to politicized reaction, disdain and identity they become unworkable maunderings and treatises. No intersectionalist could ever have written something like Dune or The Mote In God's Eye; you can't hide the level of hostility and self-pity intersectionalism brings to the table or expect it to reside at the center of a great SF novel. How many different ways can you say straight white men are bad and women, gays and PoC good and smear colonialism and Jim Crow over it? As I wrote earlier, that explains why so much intersectional fantastic literature has no use for SF beyond a near-future and frequently and vengefully revisits alternate history to rewrite the final score, like a time travel story about going back in time and murdering Hitler. The difference is the intersectional Hitler who genocided all good things is a colonial straight white male, subject to various scenarios of assassination and humiliation, retrofitted into a second class status. More traditional intersectional fantasy inhabits the same artistic space in that it vaguely mimics medieval tropes and inverts them to suit. One can easily see that, if you are a white male SF writer, the further away from core SFF fandom you stay the healthier your career will be.
The problem there is such inversions either become too fantastic or parochially not fantastic enough. Intersectionalists themselves might say the world will accept a genre of dragons before they'll accept a genre of women killing them. Is that unfair? That poses the question of whether reality itself is unfair and the conundrum that such thoughts often power fantasy. The retro gripe and hokum can achieve delusion and stretch into non-fiction such as in the case with the bewilderingly celebrated (and later Hugo Award-winning) blog post "We Have Always Fought" by the Kameron Hurley. The fact Hurley says "I've got a master's in history" verges over into the simply stupid.
I'm amazed that Hurley thinks she has any principles or standards at all, or a moral ethos for that matter. What Hurley and her informal defamation league have in their stead are moving rhetorical goal posts attached to a sniper's sight that remains unerringly fixed on straight white men.
Read this by lesbian feminist Charlotte Bunch from 1972 about the historic delusions of gender feminists that perfectly mirror Hurley's weird concoctions:
"The first division of labor, in pre-history, was based on sex: men hunted, women built the villages, took care of children, and farmed. Women collectively controlled the land, language, culture, and the communities. Men were able to conquer women with the weapons that they developed for hunting when it became clear that women were leading a more stable, peaceful, and desirable existence. We do not know exactly how this conquest took place, but it is clear that the original imperialism was male over female: the male claiming the female body and her service as his territory (or property)."
Hurley's real expertise lies in anti-male gender feminism. When you compare Hurley's post to this article by Harvard teacher and PhD. Artemis March, the similarities are no coincidence, nor is their similarity to Charlotte Bunch's imaginary pre-historic matriarchy:
"It's about undoing the erasure of women, gender-balanced social worlds, the sacred conceived and imaged as female, and of scholars who dare to see and tell Another Story. It's about countering the erasure of those whose research threatens the monopoly of the patriarchal story and its alleged innateness and universality ...by distorting and disappearing our past, they have ravaged and purloined our present and our future. Disappearing acts have gone on for millennia, and they are going on right now, right in front of us. They can be blatant and concrete, as in the absence of women on our currency, our stamps, and the paucity of female statuary in our public life... Male entitlement, sole male authority, and male control over women are not god-given or 'how things are,' but integral to an historically finite, socially constructed type of socio-political system that's been around for only a few thousand years.
"You would never know that Old Europe points to Another Story behind the patriarchy. Instead, they slide it into their one and only Story—the Androcentric Story, in which all societies and cultures are assumed/projected to have been formed by men, about men, for men, and organized around hierarchy and domination."
That sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking by a woman trained in sociology and turned into historic fact. The reason for a paucity of "female statuary" is because we used to celebrate success. That was before cultural relativism did away with report cards that hurt feelings by rewarding success. In today's intersectional world everybody deserves a statue and in fact radical feminist post-structural thought is dedicated to teaching us to be embarrassed by success and to build statues not only for merely existing but for outright failure. The truth is if these yowling hypocrites took their bizarre dogma to heart and ditched all straight white male technology and societal advances in whatever room they were in, they might be lucky enough to be living in a slave pen made of stone, blinking at lightning and wondering as to its nature as well as the nature of those lights in the night sky.
The truth is gender feminists are neither biologists or archaeologists. They see what they want to see and advance what they want to advance. Wishful thinking on such an ideological level is also known as "propaganda." Intersectionalism is based on myths, innuendos and disdain. And that disdain is the only thing biological about gender feminism.
The dismaying thing is the accolades and incredible number of hits Hurley's post got, which demonstrates there is a great appetite out there for people for whom feeling good not only trumps reality but despises it as an analogy of a virtual Jim Crow. That stupidity and bootless anger can be exploited, marketed into and destroy a literary genre. It is also a sign this cult marches in precisely the opposite direction of Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, and all because of the "Man" part.
Nic Clarke, in his review of Olondria at Strange Horizons uses Samatar's empty paragraph as an example of "'This! This is why you should read it!'," calling Samatar's prose "glorious." And once again, you have to understand what Strange Horizons is and where its interests lie to understand the context. Pie-charts anyone? How about "white supremacy"?
Behold, coincidence of coincidences retweeted by SFF author and Nebula Award nominee Kate (White Men) Elliott:
And, yes, it's for A Stranger In Olondria. The crowd that cries loudest for diversity shows no sign of such a thing within its own precincts. That's something for others to indulge in, by the request of others who don't.
And they're not kidding. Why don't they just Tweet "Hey, everyone. She's black!!" This is an indication you can expect the same awards treatment for A Stranger In Olondria as you can for Ann Leckie's 2013 SF novel Ancillary Justice and the attention amounting to a devotion it has drawn from intersectionalists for its use of gender pronouns. And you may as well add Hild to that list, as it is also pressing all the same Yay! Diversity/intersectional buttons. Given the atmosphere of racial animus, supremacy and advocacy, the truth of the matter is that if Samatar's novel wins any awards, no one will ever truly know why, aside from the rewards points administered for diversity, race and gender; an elegant stew for art. Personally if anyone ever promoted a novel of mine because I had dark skin I'd ask them to stop doing me favors and stop patronizing me with pats on the head because I wrote a widdle novel all by my widdle self. However it's important to avoid "white nerdbro-ville."
I am not suggesting you will not see worthwhile SFF novels nominated for awards in such a climate, although the chances are increasingly slim. What I am suggesting is that "worthwhile" and "art" are not interchangeable terms in such a climate and the people most happy with that don't even pretend otherwise. When reviews of a book concentrate on where a novel does NOT take place or what gender or race the author or character is NOT then what you do NOT get is art. In my world, art is a race and gender-neutral term. That is not so in the world of identity addiction, and that throwing aside of principle is why you have, in principle, authors getting nominated for awards and SFF non-fiction essays that are nothing more than blatant racial supremacists and gender bigots. Meanwhile, people who are no such things nevertheless occupy that space by default. They have no names - only skin and gender. Saying "Embracing multiple voices in any art is crucial to the vitality of that art" is hopelessly askew when put in terms of race and gender because "vitality," like the morbid use of the word "vibrant," quickly becomes mixed up with "good" and identity, as this book amply proves. Talking about "the danger of a small gene pool" is gibberish since not only is it observably false in history when it comes to innovation and true variety but such logic is never applied to delta blues or jazz. These folks see whatever they want to see and present whatever they want to present. None of it makes any real sense because there is no underlying principle in play. There is no such thing as a racial "imbalance" when it comes to art. As usual the entire thought process ignores the fact of how SF ever came to be so popular in the first place if there was an "imbalance that... favored white men." Art has a will of its own and you cannot social engineer it or pronounce it racially naughty.
When you look at the Twitter feeds and blogs of the worst rabble-rousers within the SFF community who happen to be gay, intersectional, Latino or black, it's amazing how lacking in diversity their own worlds are. Although a random search of straight white male Twitter feeds will reveal they are the most diverse demographic in terms of their wide-ranging interests, intersectionalist are selling the exact opposite story. The feminist WisCon SFF convention is not only proof of their disinterest in diversity but they double down on that by having an even less diverse demo in their racially segregated "safer-space." Intersectionalists are routinely the biggest liars on Earth.
Keep in mind, this is an element within SFF that pillories SFF for its white authors and characters from 50 to 100 years ago in a country that averaged a demographic almost 90% white. SFF's PC machine also claims those authors and its audience had a racial obsession with seeing themselves. Looking at the Tweets and blogs of SFF's black activists reveals people who somehow manage, in a country 14% black, to find and recommend every nugget of black culture within America. These are people who deride Eurocentrism while awash in Afrocentrism. Gay, Latino and intersectional voices within SFF reveal the same thing: no diversity - willful segregation - identity narcissism. In small minorities that range from 2% to 14% there is far less justification for what they do than what they claim is a de facto KKK did comprised of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edmond Hamilton and Robert Heinlein. Add to that there is not a sign of racialism or racial self-obsessions within the work of old school SFF authors; neither is there hate speech. Someone needs to find a dictionary and look up the words "demographic" and "supremacism." They'll find they are quite different things, especially when one lives in glass houses.
Perhaps the single most amazing and telling fact about the politically correct racialists of SFF's community is that, for all their talk of white supremacy, they clearly don't understand that the term "racial supremacy" is a race-neutral term. It doesn't get any more Orwellian than that. If one adopts that race-neutral truth and applies a definition of racial supremacy using principle rather than Orwellian logic, it is painfully obvious that racial supremacy is not only orthodoxy within SFF institutions, it points in precisely the opposite direction from what SFF's racialists imagine.
Here is a writing workshop hosted by the earlier mentioned Marvel Comics writer and New York Times best-seller Marjorie Liu called "VONA Voices: Writing Workshops for Writers of Color," for people who aren't white, taught by people who aren't white. What in the world they are thinking of I really can't imagine, but I again point out that Liu once wrote "White male privilege cares ONLY about white male privilege, and there is no goal except maintaining that position of power."
Now, if you throw out women and minors and limit yourselves to Americans, this woman is stating something on the order of 100 million white men who don't know each other share a an obsessive and single-minded common goal to oppress others determined by their race and sex. That is so stunningly racist and prejudiced I can't even wrap my mind around it. If someone working for a comics company said that about black folks they'd be fired in about one day. Liu skates off untouched.
If we single out groups based on what they were the day they were born and treat them like a single bad person, or assign rank motivations or an ideology to them, that is hate speech. Dressing up such speech in "colonial agendas" doesn't change that fact. The idea being white amounts to an ideology is stupidly offensive. Somehow SFF's Social Justice Warrior Klan can understand that truth when it comes to non-whites, women and gay folks, otherwise - not. Phantom institutions and ideologies are the hallmark of bigots.
The fact there are no writing workshops for white people is simply too obvious for people with stunted or even racist intellects to grasp. Even more brutally stupid is the fact that if there were purposeful white workshops, the ones in the segregated non-white workshops would be the first ones whining about racism. In fact even an accidentally all white writing workshop or SF convention panel invites recrimination, calls for diversity, apologies, informal boycotts and solutions. The problem there is there is no problem to start with and where there actually is a problem - namely with the segregation-mad PC - is promoted as "diversity." The upside-down nature of the logic involved smacks of madness because one actually does have to be either mad or a straight up liar to suggest purposeful segregation is diversity and an accidental demographic is some form of de facto segregation. Try and imagine these people boycotting boxing, rap and the NBA until there's more white diversity and then try and imagine flying to Mars on the fumes of your own stupidity.
The hilarious irony is the only workshops that are meant to be all white are formed by the PC themselves when writing about the other. Intersectionalists have no problem with those being all white in the same way they suddenly love Eurocentrism when it comes to colonialism. Being PoC and erased and segregated from those scenarios becomes a positive boon for the simple reason intersectionalists are feral liars and racist supremacists. You will never see an all PoC panel discussion at an Afrofuturism SF conference on the topic of writing the other that is not 100% directed at whites. You will never see a PoC sign up for a writing the other workshop nor hear complaints about such workshops as being too white. That is as it is meant to be in the daffy world of SFF's politically correct and condescending hate groups.
Then you have this writing SFF oriented scholarship by Writing Excuses for anyone who happens to not be white. Tellingly, one of the teachers is K. Tempest (cracka ass cracka) Bradford and there is also SFF author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who once Tweeted "Can someone please think about the white people?! Ugh." because Writing Excuses is all about solutions and not at all about racial moral supremacy. "Inadvisable" is a word that comes to mind. Even more telling, Bradford isn't even a writer. Given her racialist profile in an SFF community where she's also not even a regular blogger, it's pretty clear her expertise is in being considered a blaxpert and blacksplaining white literature to whites, to borrow some intersectionalist rhetoric.
When I read this stuff I sometimes think I'm in some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare where David Duke hosts a writing workshop in Africa all about world peace while he tells them they're all racial supremacists and need white diversity and to settle down and David Duke knows what's good and will end all racism by doubling down on even more racism and segregation. A person like Bradford is never far from making Orwellian self-contradictory illiterate statements in only two sentences:
Given the word "lady" is an intersectionalist call to arms, it's not hard to imagine what might have happened had two "old white men" said something about black tears. One can only wonder what bizarre and insane double standard is in play in the SFF community when using the word "lady" and a sword and sorcery painting of Red Sonja in a chain mail bikini is sexism and misogyny and racial slurs equals racial harmony. If these people are not crazy then I surely am.
The mass hysteria of "cis" white and male phobia that has overtaken core SFF is only marginally less weird than a cult that believes spaceships will soon arrive and carry them all away. If the oracles at ancient Delphi suffered hallucinations from oxygen deprivation then what is it that is sucking at the brain cells of people who insist we must #JustListen to any women or person of color just because while they issue public appeals to help "de-white" their library and assemble lists of non-white authors we should #JustRead? I would imagine the level of thinking of the average social justice warrior pre-dates the rise of civilization but I have no proof there was less oxygen at the time and I do have proof civilizations actually arose. Were this group of radically feminist infused crusaders representative of the populations around the Tigris and Euphrates one could make an excellent argument civilization would never have risen at all.
It doesn't help when you have so-called actual scientists Tweeting this wretched trash:
They may be scientists but they've yet to figure out where establishing a precedent for shared racial guilt leads, or even what the concept of fair play is. Aside from that one gets the sense they have no understanding of their own history in which that "dreadful reputation" ignores the brutal ambitions of Caesars, Napoleons, Caliphates and Co-Prosperity Spheres. It is not a "dreadful reputation" but a winning one in an historic sea of national competitions and conquest. The intersectionalism which redefines that as a sort of historic global Jim Crow of innocent PoC sultans and nizams is ironically too stupid to survive outside a slave pen without the historic reality of where and why that reputation actually came from. Undermine it and one would live a real alternate history SFF novel with the shoe on another foot, or rather boot - a boot which has no interest in human rights or abolishing slavery. ISIS is plain evidence those boots still exist.
Without the very culture these daffy scientists despise they'd be dealing with the privileges of their actual masters, not some idiocy they made up out of their heads. Extend intersectional gender feminism out to its logical conclusion and the West ceases to exist as an independent series of states. Virtually every tenet of social justice crusaders seems intent on undermining the West and throwing it down. That should be no surprise since radical feminists have been calling for exactly that since they created their ideology a half-century ago. The problem there is they have never once examined the consequences of their ideology and where it leads since it was born in a sea of unreality where armies and empires disappear and the innate goodness which is the direct opposite of Anita Sarkeesian's "toxic masculinity" takes control and goodness reigns. It's no surprise gender feminism has never once addressed the concept of a military or the reality of a Pearl Harbor. Modern feminists pretend military cemeteries don't exist. My own philosophy is you may not know the rules but the rules know you. Has no one ever questioned the psychosis of people attracted to a cult which is a biological cul-de-sac and historic extinction event? Has no one ever questioned by radical feminists are what they are? Shorn of their nonsensical and persuasive social justice jargon they would be otherwise seen as a Doomsday Cult. What kind of cult calls for the end of the very institutions which assures their survival while defending the least criticism of an Islam that did not choose to become peaceful and end slavery but was made to by virtue of a "dreadful reputation."
*
Here is the opening to the short story "The Sword of Welleran" (1908) by Lord Dunsany:
"Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among the shadows of the crags. I have never seen a city in the world so beautiful as Merimna seemed to me when first I dreamed of it. It was a marvel of spires and figures of bronze, and marble fountains, and trophies of fabulous wars, and broad streets given over wholly to the Beautiful. Right through the centre of the city there went an avenue fifty strides in width, and along each side of it stood likenesses in bronze of the Kings of all the countries that the people of Merimna had ever known. At the end of that avenue was a colossal chariot with three bronze horses driven by the winged figure of Fame, and behind her in the chariot the huge form of Welleran, Merimna's ancient hero, standing with extended sword. So urgent was the mien and attitude of Fame, and so swift the pose of the horses, that you had sworn that the chariot was instantly upon you, and that its dust already veiled the faces of the Kings. And in the city was a mighty hall wherein were stored the trophies of Merimna's heroes. Sculptured it was and domed, the glory of the art of masons a long while dead, and on the summit of the dome the image of Rollory sat gazing across the Cyresian mountains towards the wide lands beyond, the lands that knew his sword. And beside Rollory, like an old nurse, the figure of Victory sat, hammering into a golden wreath of laurels for his head the crowns of fallen Kings."
*
This is the opening to the short story "The Dark Eidolon" (1935) by Clark Ashton Smith:
"On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer. And out of the shadows, the older gods had returned to man: the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes. And the elder demons had also returned, battening on the fumes of evil sacrifice, and fostering again the primordial sorceries."
Many were the necromancers and magicians of Zothique, and the infamy and marvel of their doings were legended everywhere in the latter days. But among them all there was none greater than Namirrha, who imposed his black yoke on the cities of Xylac, and later, in a proud delirium, deemed himself the veritable peer of Thasaidon, lord of Evil.
"Namirrha had built his abode in Ummaos, the chief town of Xylac, to which he came from the desert realm of Tasuun with the dark renown of his thaumaturgies like a cloud of desert storm behind him. And no man knew that in coming to Ummaos he returned to the city of his birth; for all deemed him a native of Tasuun. Indeed, none could have dreamt that the great sorcerer was one with the beggar-boy Narthos, an orphan of questionable parentage, who had begged his daily bread in the streets and bazaars of Ummaos. Wretchedly had he lived, alone and despised; and a hatred of the cruel, opulent city grew in his heart like a smothered flame that feeds in secret, biding the time when it shall become a conflagration consuming all things."
*
This is the opening to "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" by H.P. Lovecraft, completed in 1927:
"Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver- basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place."
*
Even the opening of this nothing short story from a 1936 issue of Weird Tales called "In the World's Dusk" by Edmond Hamilton has a fundamental power and directness lacking today. It is an oxymoron of dream-like clarity that so typifies old SF. A modern SF writer might extend it out to 800 words.
"The city Zor reared its somber towers and minarets of black marble into the ruddy sunset, a great mass of climbing spires circumvallated by a high black wall. Twelve gates of massive brass opened in that wall, and outside it there lay the white salt desert that now covered the whole of Earth. A cruel, glaring plain that stretched eye-achingly to the horizons, its monotony was broken by no hill or valley or sea. Long ago the last seas had dried up and disappeared, and long ago the ages of geological gradation had smoothed mountain and hill and valley into a featureless blank.
"As the sun sank lower, it struck a shaft of red light across the city Zor into a great hall in the topmost spire. The crimson rays cut through the shadowy gloom of the dim, huge room and bathed the sitting figure of Galos Gann.
"Brooding in the ruddy glow, Galos Gann looked out across the desert to the sinking sun, and said, 'It is another day. The end comes soon.'
"Chin in hand he brooded, and the sun sank, and the shadows in the great hall deepened and darkened about him. Out in the dusking sky blossomed the stars, and they peered down through the portico like taunting white eyes at him. And it seemed to him that he heard their thin, silvery star-voices cry mockingly across the sky to each other, 'The end comes soon to the race of Galos Gann.'
"For Galos Gann was the last man of all men.
"It probably shouldn't come as any surprise that SFF's most important authors all had one thing in common: that authoritative, opinionated, unique voice that revealed something of their inner natures. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance never failed to infuse their work with a heightened sense of their distinct selves.
*
During the 1950s, at the height of the first SF craze in Hollywood, though there were scores of SF films, virtually none were adapted from the hard-core genre SF literature in the pulp magazines. There were no Foundations, Weapon Shops or Heinlein characters to be found. The easy answer to that is that, far from being a literature of rocket ships and monsters, the sophistication of SF literature was far in advance of the average mainstream audience for Hollywood films. A mainstream audience in 1943 was simply not ready for nuanced stories like "The Weapon Shop" (1942) by A.E. Van Vogt or "If This Goes On-" (1940) by Robert Heinlein. The vocabulary of SF literature alone was already so far advanced that it would be years before mainstream audiences - ironically helped by Star Trek and Star Wars - would have ready access to understanding SF's terminologies in an easy enough way that explaining things wouldn't get in the way of story.
I want to emphasize that again: WW II SF was probably at least a quarter century ahead of mainstream film in terms of the breadth and sophistication of its viewpoints. Other than style points, and though it is today sold as bumpkinry, WW II-era SF is still easily as sophisticated as either SF film or literature today. In fact there has never been any sub-genre of SF as fundamentally childish as the young adult zombie and steampunk of today, which are also fundamentally repetitious rather than edgy by default, due to an ignorance of the past history of its own genre. Again, any edginess is due to stylistic faddism, because old ground is being unknowingly mined over and over again and called "new." There is nothing wrong with each generation having its own voice, but one must recognize the difference between faddist concerns and fundamental artistry, and to do that you must be a historian of your craft.
The 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune is a case in point when it comes to an increasingly sophisticated SF vocabulary educating mainstream audiences. Dune was compromised beyond hope of success by the simple fact the film's writers didn't trust mainstream audiences to understand the nuances of the original novel. 20 years later that had all changed and the SF Channel's presentation of a sophisticated, layered and very well done 4 hour adaptation of Children of Dune met with a great success it could not have achieved in an earlier era. However there was never really any follow-up to that paradigm of borrowing from and trusting great SF literature. To this very day, with a few exceptions, Hollywood stubbornly insists on writing original screenplays for SF films and the result is an unending line-up of shallow snooze fests.
So in terms of a mass audience, they are more sophisticated today in their ability to appreciate genre SF. Having said that, they are still a mass audience, not an elite closely engaged with an artistic appreciation that goes beyond a mere vocabulary to a love of the genuinely eccentric. That is always true of any hobby; there is always a core die-hard group of fans. However the question eventually becomes: where is that core coming from - what brought them to SFF. Was it Jack Vance or Star Wars? I think the answer is increasingly obvious that it is film, not literature that informs today's elite group of writers and fans. The new stink of PC is obviously a factor that degrades SFF much further. If your combing Jack Vance or Poul Anderson for sexism or a lack of diversity you have essentially destroyed them as artists. New writers addressing those concerns come pre-destroyed.
There's little doubt in my mind that with today's special effects, adaptations of books such as The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, The Mote In God's Eye by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven would be box office gold. Instead we've been recently treated to ill-advised junk like Elysium, After Earth, Pacific Rim, and Oblivion that don't even have the saving grace of being childish fun. Of adaptations of original SF stories, there have been the recent klunkers Total Recall, Cloud Atlas, The Hunger Games, Ender's Game and more zombies in World War Z. What a waste of money and energy that all was. Mainstream junk for mainstream minds. Although I use the term "mainstream" in this article in the seemingly pejorative sense, I have nothing against mainstream works per se - you'll not find many people who enjoy mindless pop culture more than do I. What I object to is when the mainstream focuses its attention on fine art, infiltrates it rather than respecting its imperatives, and dilutes it into nothing, the lowest common denominator.
One must respect true eccentricity rather than attempt to impersonate it and end up with a group of so-called artists who are all iconoclasts - a self-contradictory proposition. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has had a real taste of SF could enjoy the garbage that was the Tom Cruise film Oblivion. What's worse is to see such empty work decades after SF stories like "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester, "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny or "The Big Front Yard" by Clifford D. Simak. This is not progress.
Worst of all lately was the opportunity to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars in 2012. What emerged was John Carter and yet more evidence filmmakers will not trust original material, think they can do better, and wreck a film. John Carter so little resembles A Princess of Mars it can be honestly said that, like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, a film adaptation of the novel has yet to be made.
Director Ridley Scott's long-awaited return to his Alien universe came with 2012's Prometheus. Prometheus delivers some remarkable visions with some maddeningly complex hints at its far edges but with a rather less remarkable story. However, even nuanced confusion doesn't seem all that bad nowadays.
Despite the occasional cinematic SF success story, that success is still achieved in mainstream terms, not in terms of the literary source material itself, whether it be adaptations of SF novels or original screenplays. Hollywood has mostly been unable to capture or understand what it is SF literature has to offer. Probably the closest Hollywood has come to capturing the combination of high tragedy and poignancy amid the unique circumstances SF can deal in are things such as some few of the original Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and perhaps 2 or 3 episodes of the original Star Trek. I think it's fair to say the repackaged Star Trek pilot episode presented in two parts as "The Menagerie" and an episode titled "The Empath" touch on an artistry unique to SF that goes beyond mere monster-of-the-week.
Blade Runner, (1982) also qualifies as a challenging and multi-layered experience that goes beyond the usual shallowness of filmic SF, although it is not at all true to the original 1968 Phillip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. But generally, the transition SF made around 1940 from the roaring '30s, perhaps best represented by Robert Heinlein, never really took hold in Hollywood's SF. In fact SF film and TV are probably further away from more nuanced depictions of SF than it has ever been.
After an all too brief flirtation with trusting mainstream audiences to have an appreciation for a more subtle and literate brand of SF, TV and film producers have decided to green light bland, generic, and lifeless projects that reflect more a poking about in the wallets of audiences and seeing what makes dollars fly than showing authoritative visions.
As of today, we're at the point where many social justice SFF authors and even publishers are under informal boycotts, especially Tor Books. Given the love SFF fans have had in the past for Ace Paperbacks and DAW, how could such a thing happen from fans who passionately love SFF? The obvious answer is that the worst rabble-rousers have no careers to risk in the first place. But editors should be asking themselves exactly what it is they're doing and why they're slitting their own throats. Towards what purpose?
The simple perceptual failure here is that this social justice movement lacks the critical moral and perceptual skills to understand it is in fact a hate movement. Radical racist feminists will never be able to create a thing like the Twilight Zone and its simple morality tales and perceptual shifts taken directly from the era of short SF 1940-60. A show as simple as TZ employed powerful moral lessons week after week from 1959-64, and they drifted into American consciousness when the end of TZ coincided with the end of Jim Crow in America. Rod Serling was a man known to have constant battles with network censors as he attempted to promote his own ideas of social justice at a time America needed them, not this fakery and hate speech being passed off as social justice by racists making anti-white remarks on Twitter from within their own cluelessly racially segregated spaces with hashtags like #TellPOCApartGame.
The Twilight Zone and Golden Age SF were not racist and sexist and in fact ran in a precise current each joined with, helped created and contributed to which engaged powerful perceptual shifts in a way SF in uniquely suited to do. It's telling a fear culture of hate sees that in precisely the opposite way. Intersectionalism doesn't hate the Golden Age because it was racist and sexist, it hates it because it was dominated by a demography it despises - whites and men. And it shouldn't be forgotten TZ was one of the most staggeringly popular American TV shows of all time. Today's SJ culture simply cannot grasp their identity addiction runs in precisely the opposite direction of an anti-Jim Crow movement. Had today's SF movement in been represented in something like TZ, one can imagine Jim Crow would've lasted years longer. TZ also conspicuously dealt with identity, but in a principled way that lay behind equal protection, not in a way that would end it as would this radical hate movement today were it given free rein in a speculative future society. The people who make up the core of this movement in SF today run on hate, and that's all they do. They have no grace, talent or expansiveness in their hearts or brains to ever create a TZ or a Golden Age of SF. Rod Serling never would've been capable of writing "Yes, misogyny - LOL misandry." That's no different than writing "Yes, whites - no, blacks," or asking "which of these is human?" Well, old SF did ask that last question and the answer was "all of us." Social justice warriors with their punching up, privilege, marginalization theories and powered by phantom Jim Crow as an excuse answer "only some of us."
*
As I write this in late 2013, and through to the end of 2014, the erudite scholar/editor/writer concerned with the art and evolution of SF literature is a thing of the past. Children's sub-genres have emerged such as steampunk, or paranormal romance and novels where political correctness trumps art. Authors are not only being blatantly promoted far past their actual competence merely for being a certain social identity, but even being nominated for SF's top awards in the name of social progress and diversity.
No art can survive such a scenario. On top of all that is the sublime amateur now self-publishing ebooks with covers using Filter Forge, typography that should be called Iron Man Italics and design principles and art worthy of a six year old. People who are those amateurs, including book reviewers, like to cast the issue - not in terms of professional as opposed to amateur, but commoner versus a self-appointed aristocracy, as does this blog post called "The Decline and Fall of the Book Reviewing Empire." That is a mistake, and in my opinion, being willfully disingenuous.
The result has been rather something like a cee-ment pond school of literature and book cover design with glittering italic art deco type that reminds one of refrigerator magnets, lemonade stands, velvet paintings, bored amateur housewives and monster truck rally posters than it does a heady new age of fantastic literature. The percentage of SF worth reading from self-published unknown amateurs is about what one would expect from the phrase unknown amateurs, which is to say nearly zero. The idea a novel like Frank Herbert's "Dune Messiah," with it's carefully crafted weight of prose and stunning ideas is going to emerge from an electronic flea-market bereft of editors is ridiculous. Most self-published cover design is as home-spun as a state fair butter sculpture and one can expect the contents will reflect the cover. That poses the question of what someone is who can't tell the difference between a butter sculpture and the seated colossi of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, or worse, someone who will reproduce the latter in butter, perhaps with a miniature chainsaw. The only thing Amazon, Photoshop and computers have enabled when it comes to SF is to have horrible fan fiction once relegated to mimeographed trash out of a garage now made available to global release at the push of a button. The result is butter sculptures of Ramses II minus the slightest whiff of irony or humor. The fact SF has become victim to such technologies possesses its own irony, and reminds one of the possibly apocryphal stories of New York City shoe-shine boys giving stock market tips just before the great crash of 1929.
There are plenty of complaints today about the demise of gatekeepers - publishers, magazine editors- who are portrayed as entities which kept out the very people doing the complaining. But the truth is those gatekeepers largely worked, at least for the readers, and that is because there is such a thing as experts and professionals. There is no record of brilliant SF stories or writers that exist but were never published. That should be obvious given the fact the vast majority of SF that has been published is unexceptional. The bottom of the barrel has been scraped many times.
For some reason, when it comes to things that have less obvious concrete expression in terms of craftsmanship or artistry, such as writing, conceptual art, photography or typography, everyone suddenly becomes an expert. No one who had never played the piano would think of jumping onto the stage of a piano concerto and announcing they could play (and the entire audience as well) but that they are being unfairly kept off the piano keyboard, portrayed as commoners by an unfair and elite group of snobbish gatekeepers. The arrogance of saying such things doesn't make them true, and less concrete expressions of artistry is not an invitation to a free-for-all just because you don't have to learn how to pick a banjo or take engineering classes. The craftsmanship and professional artistry of an experienced typographer or photographer is no less real than that of a cabinet maker, as any typographer will tell you who's gone through Amazon's gap-toothed muddle of self-published book covers or photographer will tell you with eyes trained managing 500,000 image files when they see a badly managed one. When it comes to things like typography or photography, everyone's an artist - no training, vetting, experience or study required. That obviously encompasses writing.
With the digital age, things like publishing, photography, graphic design and pop music have all taken hits. This has not resulted in a golden age of democratic artistic expression so much as it has in goal posts so muddled that amateurs reinforce other amateurs and the unseen years of experience once taken for granted in those arenas are become essentially worthless because there is no oversight or a guild-like dedication to quality whatsoever. It is the equivalent of giving everyone a Bachelor's Degree at age 18. Throw in political correctness and sheer arrogance and it more resembles the dictatorship of the proletariat become a cult of millions of iconoclasts who then take writing and typography classes from other amateur self-appointed professionals and terrible art spreads like the computer virus it most resembles. This is not setting up SF for a Golden Age but for a killing field of mom and pop speculative literature minus the speculative and literature and heavy on the mom and pop. The fact Twitter and blogging is now considered de rigueur for an SF writer doesn't speak so much to a need to publicize one's self as much as writing that cannot stand on its own merits.
Art, in terms of an actual expression of talent, is not a democracy, a right one is born with, nor will it ever be. One does not learn to climb mountains by taking helicopters to the top. There is no reason to treat the public arena as if more intellectual and less visual and concrete expressions of art is a democracy either, unless one enjoys mediocrity. The art of the unseen, as one might call it, makes those expressions of art vulnerable to fraud and personality cults in a way commercial illustration, for example, almost never is. If you don't want your mother building a skyscraper why would you want her to write an SF novel or take photographs just as likely to fall down? The idea there is no such thing as elite artists is as ridiculous as destroying the means to recognize an elite artist.
With the powers of the connoisseur who could easily discriminate between the good, the bad, and the ugly now a thing of the past, SF as an art form is at its lowest ebb in the last 100 years. It is no coincidence that what are considered the greatest short stories and novels of SF are lumped into a 20 to 25 year period starting around 1940. It is no coincidence there is little to match that output from the last 20 to 25 years, and of what little there is, much of it is ignored. SF is suffering. Part of it is the lack of authoritative story-telling, part of it trendy political correctness, much of it is conformity. The four Hugo nominated short stories for 2013/14 are an utter disgrace when it comes to artistry. Beyond that, they are arguably more about homosexuality than fantastic literature. From 1940 to 1955, there were an amazing 35 pieces of short fiction selected for the SF Hall of Fame anthology that are still considered all-time classics. Imagine 35 such stories going back from today to 2000. If they exist someone's decided to keep it a secret.
People still remember and are talking about Hugo-nominated short stories in the 20 years between the mid-'50 and mid-'70s. Virtually no Hugo nominated short stories from the last 35 years are remembered. That tells you two things: the first is the obvious suggestion the stories were better. The second is there is a disinterest in such stories in the last 35 years, the focus having shifted from the stories themselves to an audience more interested in SF film and TV.
That latter shouldn't tell the whole story, because readers of SF from the earlier era were also steeped in TV and film expressions of SF. It may be a question of prioritizing one over the other. SF before the '70s seems inoculated from pop culture, as if it conspicuously ignored it, or even looked down on it. SF of today not only uses absurd dialogue plucked right out of TV and film, it also practices what is called "diversity." There are two reasons for that: one is the insane pressure to do so or risk being linked to an old and less just version of America. The other is SF writers for some reason act as if they are an SF TV show or film, with a demographic mainstream audience they must play to for market reasons. The interesting thing there is that old school SF did practice diversity, but it was when there was an actual interest in other cultures, not because of a mindless tokenized pressure to do so. SF today is undergoing an identity crisis - literally. Intersectionalism has so poisoned the pool when it comes to a cast of characters that the most innocent depictions are not only suspect, but prone to replacing actual plot. Cordwainer Smith's 1962 short story "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" would probably be dismissed today as PC, as perhaps might be The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (1957), and that robs us all.
The irony there is the PC claim such stories didn't exist in the first place - not from that era, itself suffering from a reverse taint. But contrary to Carrie Cuinn's earlier cited falsehood there was "a time when SF writers hid their racism by attributing negative stereotypes to aliens instead of non-whites...," what there was in fact was a time when SF writers shifted our perceptions of the alien to attribute positive and questioning associations to the other and anti-oppression narratives so one's shared humanity could emerge, which is the opposite of the way supremacy works, the very supremacy given to Golden Age SF which is as false as intersectionalism's own supremacy is true.
You will never see intersectionalist SF writers creating stories which claim for the straight white male a shared humanity - quite the opposite. Intersectionalists are so awash in the moral and spiritual cuteness of their own identities they are incapable of writing a thing like The Midwich Cuckoos or "The Ballad of Lost C'mell." Intersectional fiction works to demonize identities, not work towards unveiling them. Golden Age SF writers were clever in engaging in perceptual shifts that masked identity and which acted as tools of self-criticism we might lack for ourselves and so leave our biases exposed. Intersectionalist SF not only doesn't bother in camouflaging identities, it highlights them, as the 2013/4 Nebula Winners I later write about shows all too well.
"Your people do not have enough political power even to talk to us. I will not commit treason to the true human race, but I am willing to give your side an advantage. If you bargain better with us, it will make all forms of life safer in the long run." - "The Ballad of Lost C'mell."
"'Look,' he said, 'suppose we consider this thing from a more civilized standpoint — after all, this is a civilized country, and famous for its ability to find compromises. I'm not convinced by the sweeping way you assume there can be no agreement. History has shown us to be more tolerant of minorities than most.'
"It was the girl who answered this time:
"'This is not a civilized matter,' she said, 'it is a very primitive matter. If we exist, we shall dominate you — that is clear and inevitable. Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that. And then, politically, the question is: Can any State, however tolerant, afford to harbour an increasingly powerful minority which it has no power to control? Obviously the answer is again, no.'" - The Midwich Cuckoos
That is a shifting of identity, not a demonization of identity. It clarifies rather than reproaches.
No matter how honest an interest in SF for SF's sake a woman SF writer has, any woman SF writer is tainted - negatively affected by the whirlpool of radical feminism by the simple fact intersectionalism claims them for its own, as it does any anti-oppression narrative. That alone might explain why so many women SFF authors maintain a strict distance from core SFF fandom: guilt by association.
Today, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine has less than one quarter of its peak 1983 circulation of 100,000, even though America's population has soared since then from 233 million to 316 million. Virtually the same numbers and peak year for Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction began with a print run of 70,000 copies in 1949 in a country of only 150 million people. Today its circulation is maybe 13,000. A pulp magazine of the '30s like The Shadow had monthly circulations of 3oo,ooo. The juvenile Amazing Stories of the 1940s had similar numbers. When it comes to bestselling all-time SFF authors, if you're hard genre, the older or more dead you are the higher your sales, or you can be younger and alive and hog the rest selling mainstream versions. Of the top 67 books on this Top 100 list of best all-time SF, none date from after 1999. Of the next 33 only 7 date from 2000 or later. It's like someone shut off a tap, and it's not hard to figure out why: creeping conformism and radicalized political correctness isn't exactly capturing anyone's imagination. Here are Publisher's Weekly best-selling SF books of 2012:
1. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Tor. 100,387
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Broadway. 50,593
3. Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. Lucas Books. 31,543
4. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Del Rey. 27,220
5. Star Wars: Apocalypse by Troy Denning. Lucas Books. 26,140
6. Dune by Frank Herbert. Ace. 25,532
7. A Rising Thunder by David Weber. Baen Books. 25,348
8. HALO: The Thursday War by Karen Traviss. Tor. 24,936
9. HALO: Glasslands by Karen Traviss. Tor. 24,932
10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Ballantine. 24,120
That is your creaky redneck uncle's list of what he thinks is SF, not that of a free-thinking connoisseur of the genre. If it were human it would sit on a porch smoking cornsilk and waiting for someone to tell it what to like next week. If it were a room it would have game consoles instead of doorknobs. If it were the '60s the list would include the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea paperback movie tie-in by Theodore Sturgeon and the virtually forgotten 1967 novelization of The Avengers comic book The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker, all at the expense of Zelazny, Dick, and Vance. The problem is there is no Zelazny, Dick, and Vance today and what little of it there is is written by people with little to say as artists and who are more interested in having you check your racial and gender privilege than developing a unique authoritative voice. Why the hell wouldn't people flee into the past or Halo and Star Wars?
Only one is a contemporary novel not originally a movie, radio or video game tie-in. Dune and Ender's Game date from 1965 and 1985. Considering who David Weber is, that is a 100% rejection of the politicized heart of SFF's institutions. It's also a pretty clear rejection of SF literature and proof that whatever group of SF-buying readers largely informed by the literature itself that once existed has pretty much dried up. Despite its deserved stature, to a conformist crowd, Dune is today largely famous for being famous and that is much more true for Ender's Game. In other words that list does not represent a readership that informs itself and sets benchmarks from amid a tight-knit huddle of literary connoisseurs with the mainstream following their lead - quite the opposite. In doing research for this book, about the time I read the thousandth racially obsessive and smugly moralistic Tweet like "heaven forfend we start talking about POC in history" from an award-winning core SFF author manning the barricades of a racist America, I had long come to understand why no normal healthy human being would want to read a single word by such creepy and insulting people.
That list is representative of a readership which is itself either told what to read or is informed by mainstream film and video games. Even those within that politicized politically correct group of those authors and hangers-on who comprise what is left of hardcore fandom frequently have dissertations on their blogs like this one about Buffy the Vampire-Slayer and rape, a perfect amalgam of conformism and obsessive intersectionalism. Their Twitter feeds are full of admiration for and intimate acquaintance with children's video games and vapid TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who. That is not so much a knock on pop culture expressions of SF as it is the act of confusing where those expressions came from in the first place.
You cannot expect SF TV, film and video games to continue to innovate and carry on a tradition they never originated. Without new SF literature to inform them they must become static and stagnant, rather than a world of possibilities and shifting sympathetic perspectives. This is not a question of high brow vs. low brow SF culture but where low brow SF culture comes from in the first place and how much it possesses the innate ability to sustain and reimagine itself in SF terms. In my opinion it has none. SF literature doesn't need a thing like Star Trek, Buffy and Battlestar Galactica - they need SF literature, and it's gone. The earlier quoted A.E. Van Vogt story "Black Destroyer," together with another in that series also published in 1939 called "Discord in Scarlet," are alone responsible for 2 seminal TV/film events: Star Trek and the 1979 film Alien. Van Vogt received an out of court settlement from the producers of Alien and is sometimes acknowledged for his influence on Star Trek. Those Van Vogt short stories published in paperback as Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) is Star Trek minus the miniskirts and beehive hair-do's, and one entertaining book.
The problem there is that SF literature and media are no longer occupying parallel evolutions where the media side of SF drinks from the well of literature to refresh itself. Instead SF media threatens to subsume its literary parent in a way there will be little left to drink from. With no fresh infusion of ideas, SF media has little choice but to recycle itself, and that's what you're seeing today, especially in SF films.
As you can see from that Publisher's Weekly list, the current crop of SFF writers are having virtually no impact, which may be a clue that lighting up your fans as a bunch of privileged racist sexists on blogs and Twitter feeds right across the spectrum of the SFF community doesn't really sell books. And let me be very clear about this: that bizarre racialist and sexist cant comprises the majority of the most institutionalized and awards-nominated authors within SFF today, including a web site associate of the largest publisher of SFF in the English language. This might be a good place to insert the word "STOP." Add to that the fact that promoting the actual work itself by race, gender, and correctthink pushes the entertainment value of an SFF novel into a backseat and art right out the door. Intersectional SF? Good luck selling that hostile hunk o' shit of a Volvo with no engine to the mainstream public. And in the second tier of best-selling SF which might be represented by the Top 100 at Amazon, there is no sign of our PC crusaders. In fact on several occasions checking the Top 100 SFF at Amazon during the months taken writing this book, I found not one social justice warrior author - not one. The PC are C-list authors, winning awards for anti-straight white man fiction but in reality writing drudgery.
At the time president of the Science Fiction Writers of America John Scalzi thinks it's no problem starting a name-calling crusade with a post titled "Solving My Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit Problem," which is about a blogger he doesn't like. The immediate problem there is that the people Scalzi supports in the SFF community, (which would include his own rhetoric) are at least as racist, sexist, and heterophobic as the blogger in question. The crusade is that Scalzi and his followers will donate money to charities and organizations which benefit the opposite of Scalzi's immoral racially privileged "sour dough-faced" "cracka ass cracka" "straight white male": gay and non-white folks and women. The message that Scalzi is sending is that human beings singled out as women are not only more important and moral than men, but oppressed by them; that human beings singled out as non-white are not only more important and moral than whites but oppressed by them; that human beings singled out as gay are not only more important and moral than straight folks, but oppressed by them.
As in the case of his post on white male privilege, and seemingly without the slightest awareness, Scalzi is parroting the theories and rhetoric of radical Third Wave Black Lesbian so-called Feminist Intersectional thought. [Note: Scalzi later asks us to "bone up" on intersectionalism, as you will see]
And again I go back to my analogy about paying attention to certain identities in film, and later in this book, who one gives literary awards to. Are we now to not give to charities we perceive as too white, too privileged, too male? What in the world is this literary community thinking about by promoting such trash, especially since it is presented in the context of justice and a higher degree of thought and perception? In fact it is neither just nor intelligent but brutally stupid all around. It is nothing more than purposeless divisiveness that separates out human beings into fractured and competing identity-Towers of Babel.
In case anyone's old-fashioned enough to be paying attention, this is in complete opposition to the principles law and our Constitution are striving to attain to. The SFF community, steeped in this very intersectionalism, is not striving to attain victory but striving to undo it.
The politically correct real estate is so exclusive, even radical fake feminists at #reclaimintersectionality2014 are hurling racial slurs at one another simply to occupy some imagined moral high ground in a hierarchy of splintered identities with little room at the top.
And there is this:
Why should we be surprised the SFWA, which gives out the Nebula awards, gives them to who they do, since the same push-back against the same human being singled out as an immoral identity and foe must surely be done within the literature itself? Scalzi's enemy blogger was eventually booted out of the Science Fiction Writers of America for allegedly racist remarks. Using the exact same standards and principles in regard to employing a language of racial bigotry, I can think of fifty more that should accompany him, including Scalzi himself and the current president of the SFWA.
The other unconscious message Scalzi is giving is also a mirror to what the SFF community does as a whole: it takes one person who may be racist, anti-gay and sexist and reconstitutes that into a trend against which the entire SFF community must organize on an institutional level and fight. Scalzi's act is the perfect paradigm of an outlier and anomaly on the fringes of the SFF community blown up many times beyond its influence and number of ONE so that something that in fact no way exists on an institutional level within SFF can be portrayed as such. Lightning strikes and the PC all put on helmets. That's how they justify anti-racist remarks and theories about "sour dough-faced" "cracka ass cracka" immoral and racially privileged male heterosexuals to the point racially segregated dinners and rooms and gender pie-charts are called for and implemented. Batten down the hatches! Alongside that is claiming the reason why SFF lacks diversity is not an accidental expression of demographics, but fear and bigotry. I myself never realized the full fun dimensions of science fiction and fantasy literature. E.R. Eddison and A.E. Van Vogt must've been as short on brains as they were full names.
The earlier mentioned SFF author Larry Correia had his own version of a pie-chart in the run-up to the 2014 Hugo Award nominations. It seems not everyone likes being called a racist sexist homophobe merely because they wake up in the morning.
In this post about awards nominations by SFF personage Cheryl Morgan, there's not even a pretense of considering artistry over race and gender. And of course says Morgan, "top of my list is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie." In that world one doesn't even need art to be produced, just the race and gender of the producers. Morgan writes "There are works that I would love to read before I nominate," to which I say, what in the world for? Towards what purpose?
Meanwhile, the now shamed and exposed 100 million sexist and homophobic male whites of America represented by their racial privilege and a single blogger avoid the SFF community like cockroaches when the lights are turned on. Asimov's SF Magazine, Analogue SF and Fact, and the Magazine of F&SF should be aware the president of SF's main literary organization is trying to snuff them out altogether by emphasizing the two "F's" in "SFF" stand for "Fun and more Fun." Yes, "STOP" is the perfect word, unless you someday want to be standing in front of the headquarters of NOW, the NAACP and GLAAD and selling your SFF novels out of the trunk of your car. Or perhaps someday those three organizations will recognize the costs of your Pyrrhic victory and donate money to the Science Fiction Writers of America every time an angel gets its wings. If the word "demagogue" didn't exist, it would have to be invented for a man like John Scalzi and his brigade of race and gender.
Within the SFF community then, you have the odder than odd spectacle of a bigoted racist and sexist supremacist movement taking root based on the claim they are fighting that exact thing, but which doesn't and never did exist. Throw in the fact this supremacist movement denies the reality of what it is and instead takes onto itself a profile of an oppressed egalitarian victim fighting immoral oppressors of Klan-like dimensions and we cross the border into Superman comics Bizarro world. The utter madness at the heart of this lunacy lies in the addictive intersectionalist idea that the straight white male in his millions is automatically granted the de facto status of an ideological racist and sexist supremacist regardless of actual actions or events. Conversely, a small easily identified cadre of individuals centered around the identity of the gay non-white woman is automatically granted an immunity from the perception of such supremacist behavior, no matter how steeped in that supremacy members of that ideology actually are. That is the power of identity and why it is such a perceptual trap and why holding identity above principle, even law, is so dangerous.
SFF's intersectionalist bizarre strawman obsession with painting ethnic Europeans as racists is a parade with no end:
Whoever said it did? And how about a time when "EVERYONE" colonialist was European does not exist? Why then be surprised Elliott produces this:
"Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic rewrites European history drastically; most notably forcing various north African tribes to flee their ancestral lands in the face of disaster, centuries prior to the events of Cold Magic, creating a heavily multiracial European society. Magical, steampunk, feminist novel about determined young women of color fighting to protect each other? Yes please."
Let's turn that around to determined young white women fighting to protect each other from Turks or Moors in a heavily multiracial African society and you guessed it, that's racist and supremacist. But that's intersectionalism. Don't even bother thinking what someone would be called who wrote an alternate history where Africa had a "heavily" white contingent because that would be straight out of white racist fantasies that whites built the pyramids and erase PoC and blah, blah, blah.
Why wouldn't Elliott be adept at rewriting history? Her view of actual history is no less fantastic than her insipid fantasy novels and their equally insipid and obvious agenda of mindless female and race-worship. The funny irony built in to this insane ideology is that the colonialism-which-must-not-be-named already saw "north African tribes" trying to create a "multiracial European society." It was called the conquest of Spain, the sack of Rome, the conquest of Sicily, the two sieges of Vienna and the fall of Constantinople. When the Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque I'm pretty sure the only Europeans saying "yes please" were called "slaves" and "traitors." The fact this swinish feminist ideology censors entire swaths of inconvenient history while claiming an especially nuanced truth-to-power view of it is clownish. Even more idiotic is the very genre of epic fantasy Elliott gives a "one big 'Fuck You'" to is based on making sure she didn't end up in on an Istanbul slave block being auctioned off to some khedive in Cairo. Had the European males she so clearly hates been successfully undermined by such a feminist ideology, SFF's daffy feminists might today be trying to sell their Queers Destroy SF anthologies in Algiers, if not had their ancestral lines extinguished altogether. There is a reason there are statues to Sir Francis Drake and no statues to insane Cornish fish-wives kidnapped into slavery by Turks in the 17th century.
Or let's use a real example from an innocuous book review at Tor.com where doing an Elliott-style (and indeed typical SFF tradition) revamping of a historic demographic brings anti-white racists crawling out of the woodwork for another author doing essentially the same thing, but without Elliott's racialist agenda. That doesn't stop race-baiters from attaching an agenda to the work that so clearly doesn't exist. Oops! Wrong demographic. Nor is there a larger ideological framework such as Elliott so clearly works within in the SFF community. Typical white erasure of non-whites is simply assumed to be at work. A commenter writes:
"where America ("Columbia") was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals' And now my immediate reaction was 'ack, it's a frontier story where American Indians have been literally and completely erased?!'"
Then the racial feeding frenzy starts and we have 277 comments, courtesy of intersectional racial and racist doctrines of bald-faced bigotry and double-standards they'll complain about in the exact opposite celebratory direction if one of their's de-whites Europe like Elliott actually does; in that case it's a noble enterprise. And after Europe, the library...
"I was trying to de-white my reading list a little bit, and was searching for writers of color..." - SFF author Andrea Phillips
"... equality is a synonym for White middle-class man... Change of terminology, then, can be a highly important political act." - Feminist author Christina Hughes on how the term "social justice" may be preferable. (2002)
*
For various reasons, some of it the sad and untrue stereotyping and profiling by contemporary identity politics, some of it the unwillingness of Hollywood and television to use SF's literature, there is a disinterest in SF's past, and so SF is essentially starting all over again. This time, SF literature is being influenced by analogues of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon once said to comprise SF in an earlier era but which was never really true, criticism of Hugo Gernsback and the roaring '30s of SF notwithstanding. Needless to say, Star Trek, Buffy and Dr. Who is not a crucible from which great art will emerge, or any art for that matter when it comes to literature. Ironically, if you read the original story the Buck Rogers comic strip was based on, Armageddon 2419 (1928) by Phillip Francis Nowlan, it is a fairly sophisticated SF story, certainly ahead of its time.
If one looks at the Nebula and Hugo winners for Best Novel handed out in 2013, the future looks bleak. The nominees themselves were a pantheon of political correctness trumping art. The Hugo winner was John (white privilege) Scalzi's Redshirts, based on (surprise!) Star Trek from almost half a century ago, and an idea that was a two minute throwaway in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), and even that idea was edited out of some releases of the film. One man's "edited out" is another man's award-winning SF novel.
The Nebula Award winner was 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. An ambitious enough novel, but one far more ambitious than Stanley's comfort zone could even approach, and one we've seen before. Robinson is a good writer, but not in this way. Nevertheless it had just enough gender-fluidity to probably make the intersectional grade. As I write this post in late 2013 early 2014, the present day field of SF is an empty conformist desert of zombies, steampunk, mid-list writers all vying for attention, self-publishing amateurs, short stories the authors can't even give away, and award-nominated novels that are so poorly written they read like unedited fan fiction. And that's not including the works that have political and social, racial and gender complaint, blame and self-pity embedded within the work itself.
The exception is the U.K., where good SF novels are still being published. Though the U.K. itself is awash in political correctness, its SF institutions, less centralized than in the U.S., are not. Ian McDonald, Iain M. Banks, Tanith Lee, Alastair Reynolds and especially Peter Hamilton have no equals in the United States with the exception of the aging Jack McDevitt and George R.R. Martin. That short list of Brits is also aging and there is no new blood coming in to take their place. Or I should say, there are no storytellers worth reading coming in to take their place.
If you pit the nominees from the last Nebula and Hugo Awards against the best in England, the difference rises to the level of amateurs vs. pros. Let's be honest: what pro with artistic intent and integrity would want to associate with the current paranoid complaint-brigade that dominates SF's institutions in America, or write Star Trek, Dr. Who and Star Wars novelizations or their analogues complete with "vomit zombies?" (Hugo and Locus nominee Leviathan Wakes 2012 S.A. James Corey). Even the daffy Captain Future stories by Edmond Hamilton from the 1940s written for teenagers didn't have vomit zombies.
Starting a century ago, Americans created modern SF with a will and energy that eventually stunned a world. Americans now seem just as intent on dismantling that font of creativity. Americans today seem embarrassed by the almost effortless successes of the past, perhaps because so many have come to despise the identity of those that created the genre.
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"Singaporeans are still psychologically colonised." - Joyce Chng
When you see something like this, SF fandom should start running for the hills. It's an anthology called We See a Different Frontier and subtitled on the site, " A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology" Here's more info:
"Edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad
Stories by Joyce Chng, Ernest Hogan, Rahul Kanakia, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Sandra McDonald, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gabriel Murray, Shweta Narayan, Dinesh Rao, N.A. Ratnayake, Sofia Samatar, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Lavie Tidhar and J.Y. Yang (and Sunny Moraine)
Cover art by Carmen Moran
Guest preface by Aliette de Bodard
Critical afterword by Ekaterina Sedia"
If you're unfamiliar with the names, you shouldn't be. Some of them are the most committed anti-white, anti-male, anti-American, anti-Western serial racialist complainers when it comes to the SFF community. In fact, of the 15 names I recognized, all 15 qualified. If you doubt that disdain exists, here's the blurb promoting the contents:
"This anthology of speculative fiction stories on the themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism focuses on the viewpoints of the colonized. Sixteen authors share their experiences of being the silent voices in history and on the wrong side of the final frontier; their fantasies of a reality in which straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males don’t get to tell us how they won every war; their revenge against the alien oppressor settling their 'new world'."
Welcome to Intersectionality 101, where its adherents will proudly bleat about the Sudanese colonization of 8th century B.C. Egypt as loudly as they will weep about the Sudan itself being colonized. Whether one's voice is "silent" or not depends on your skin, not actual historic events. In intersectionalism, a Greek is never colonized, an Arab always is, though both had giant historic hands in the act of colonization. That is the blithering racist idiocy behind WSADF.
All I can say is, unbelievable. Whoever wrote that is sick in their heart and their mind - sick with hate. Change only a few words around and that could've emerged from a Nuremberg rally in 1933. "Silent voices" that never shut up for one minute about the shortcomings of the straight, white, male. How any human being could parse this as anything but straight up racial profiling, animus, defamation, hate-speech, stereotyping, racism and bigotry is beyond me to comprehend. Give them a few more awards, interviews, guest-blogs at webzines and seats at SF convention panels. That'll discourage them and raise the profile of SFF as one of pure fun.
If anyone wrote a blurb like that taking down women, black folks, or queer culture, these same people would come down on them like a ton of bricks. And of course, no one within the SFF community does come down on those groups in a similar fashion, but such hateful blurbs like that act as if people do. As is usual among such people, a smokescreen of justice is used to disguise and justify plain old-fashioned racial and gender prejudice and supremacy. The fact the blurb for that anthology racializes colonialism as whites-only while ignoring history's other examples should be a clue that all is not blind in justice-land.
Co-editor Djibril al-Ayad makes no secret of WSADF's intersectional roots and so we shouldn't be surprised who the villain of these revenge tales is.
"Put out a call for stories about the experience of colonialism, or about body politics, and the overwhelming majority of the best stories submitted will also care about gender, race, sexuality, class, ability and every other angle of privilege and discrimination. I couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of intersectionality than this. It’s wonderful. We just can’t talk about 'feminism' or 'postcolonialism' without including gender, sexuality, disability, class, Anglocentrism, and many other vectors of privilege."
For emphasis al-Ayad adds about WSADF that "...if the truths those stories tell shock and alienate the privileged reader?"
"Fuck that reader."
It's also worth noting that for an anthology purposefully devoted to "history," and "truths" the remark about "white males" winning every war, aside from its blithering racism, betrays a racialist culture completely ignorant of history, and why, as you can see from this Tweet from "Naijamerican" SFF author Nnedi Okorafor on a different issue:
I'm not sure how many hoops of unreality one needs to jump through to sustain that view. Even worse, you can probably lay down money Okorafor isn't thinking about Arab colonialism or black slavery. Aside from that, where in the world does this woman think printing presses were - or weren't - and where they come from? Does she understand what "science" means? If anything, European colonialism would've greatly accelerated SF "African lit," though it wouldn't really have been African or indigenous any more than a tuxedo, would it? No matter how many ways you look at it, that's a no-go empowered by wishful thinking.
Why should we be surprised one of WSADF's authors, Sunny Moraine, displayed the same disregard of reality as the anthology in calling murders by an insane killer in 2014 "gender terrorism," while also ignoring the fact four of the six dead were men. If you were a person who knew nothing about history or those murders, the story you'd get through the fractured lens of race and gender-based political correct bias and bigotry would amount to a lie, and Moraine's concoction is symbolic of how history comes down to us through the insane lens of intersectionalism. Ironically, many of the Tweets and blogs you read by those who subscribe to intersectional ideology in SFF aren't all that different from murderer Elliot Rodger's manifesto in terms of the relentlessly focused hostility and self-pity each display.
And read this loving ditty by WSADF author Sandra McDonald for a jolt. It's about an SFF literature course and complains about "... white men that Professor X’s list is so fond of. We (and I count myself among the students) are the multitudes: colorful, vibrant, struggling with class and economic issues, experimenting with sexuality and gender, demanding of social change. We deserve more than the narrow range of authors he’s serving up in tried-and-true fashion." That translates to more gay and black authors. And yes, McDonald wrote "vibrant." To say I feel sorry for whoever this teacher is is an understatement, because they have no idea what's coming, although the core field of SFF is getting the full effect, and in more ways than one when it comes to "experimenting with sexuality and gender." Don't worry, when it comes to Marion Zimmer Bradley you won't hear anything like old bi-sexual woman used in the same pejorative sense that implies an innate failure of morality embodied in one's sex that was used with "old white men" Malzberg and Resnick for the crime of having the word "lady" (inserted by their female editor) in the title of a piece they wrote. Supremacists don't work like that and you'll never hear the PC complain about a list of black men. Suddenly principle appears and group defamation vanishes... until tomorrow. Needless to say, the MZB affair attracted 1/100th of the outrage the "lady" affair did. I'm not surprised: it's the closest thing to an ideology married to "rape culture" intersectionalists have ever found in the SFF community, and it turned out to be their own culture. Their own gee whiz check out NAMBLA culture. Gee whiz let's bend gender and all the norms. Gee whiz, isn't SF literature fun, and all about the entertainment and artistry?
The never-ending daily dose of intersectionalism on Twitter, SFF author Kate Elliott retweets this:
That brings you to a post by Dennis R. Upkins titled "Accessing the Future." Upkins quotes co-editor of We See A Different Frontier, Djibril al-Ayad, where he asserts "the most finely tuned pieces of work in a given social/progressive theme are also, always and inevitably, intersectional. Put out a call for stories about the experience of colonialism, or about body politics, and the overwhelming majority of the best stories submitted will also care about gender, race, sexuality, class, ability and every other angle of privilege and discrimination. I couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of intersectionality than this. It’s wonderful. We just can’t talk about 'feminism' or 'postcolonialism' without including gender, sexuality, disability, class, Anglocentrism, and many other vectors of privilege.
"From this perspective, we want to reach the same audiences with our intersectional content that mainstream publishers target. But we’re absolutely not asking our authors to target their stories, based as they are on a variety of experiences, backgrounds and perspectives including culture, language, race, sexuality, health, at an imagined, homogeneous, white-male-cis-het-abled-American readership. People outside that mainstream need to read stories that matter to them too, and if the truths those stories tell shock and alienate the privileged reader?
"Fuck that reader.
when you live under white supremacy & Islamophobic paranoia, the line between supporting free speech & bolstering hatred is so thin.
— Sofia Samatar (@SofiaSamatar) January 7, 2015*
In old-school SF, principle trumped identity, and that was the theme of many of the stories - to ignore appearance and see through to the heart of a thing. Today, identity kicks the crap out of principle, and ideas of right and wrong, and nobility itself, are distributed and scrimmed through a sieve of race and gender. To me, it is depravity institutionalized, not to mention complaint, blame and self-pity. It is pure hatred, revenge and spite being promoted as art and literature.
Even the mainstream 1982 film E.T. the Extraterrestrial highlighted SF's unique ability to force principle into one's consciousness over identity. The E.T. of the film, looked at only as a visual, could be seen as ugly, misshapen and vaguely threatening. And yet we come to cheer E.T. against humans. Why? The reason why is because cultural markers such as Jew, white, gay, black have been stripped away. We cannot profile E.T. and so are forced to accept or reject it's morality based on what it actually does - principle - not biased stereotypes of identity. That's old-school SF, and it's nowhere to be found today. Quite the contrary, SFF's new generation of rabble-rousing identity freaks not only ignore the lessons of their own genre's history, but of WW II and the Civil Right's movement. The part of E.T. that intersectionalism might be said to focus on is the children as identity: they are always smarter and more moral than the adults. Their very identities embody all that is right. Fine in a movie - dangerous in real life. There are separate lessons to be learned there.
Today's generation doesn't remove cultural markers to highlight failure as a human or individual event, they work them right in the stories, and the stereotypes of immorality, racism, complaint, accusation and colonialism that go along with them. In this new version of E.T., the alien is a red coated gender accurate male with a pith-helmet, and immorality is segregated accordingly, to be seen, not as an event, but as the failings of an ignoble race/gender to be contrasted with one that is noble. According to SFF author Daniel José Older, himself the co-editor of yet another SFF "post-colonial" anthology like We See a Different Frontier called Long Hidden, American film has seen one too conspicuously noble "white savior" too many, so let's blackwash history while we make sure we don't "whitewash" SFF book covers. The latter is a stupid thing to do, the former is even stupider, since it racially gerrymanders reality like it's a voting district, not to mention the racial hostility. Addressing the latter is bringing up a problem, the former is racial animosity couched in the guise of bringing up a problem that never existed. If you like your fun in SFF in the form of colonialist racial revenge fantasies hidden within some phony notion of "diversity" and bringing up problems, then fun is definitely on the horizon as a "final frontier," along with the falling sales figures that go along with such fun.
To the surprise of no one, Older's dumb enough to write you're ignorant if you don't believe "Tolkien wasn’t thoroughly writing a political book about the supremacy of western culture." I guess that's obvious if you're obsessed with supremacy yourself.
Read the submission guidelines to Long Hidden's follow up called Hidden Youth for the full flavor of an insane racialist central committee obsessed with their own goodness and distorting human history into a Jim Crow county to confirm their own goodness.
I might make another analogy that the reason a generation in the 1960s was so disheartened was that they saw the Vietnam War in the same sort of light of identity vs. principle. What had been a country that had fought the right fight, the good fight, in WW II had come to believe that if America did a thing it was by definition right or good, rather than taking hard looks at what it was actually doing. America was misled by its own appearance, and so badly it committed war crimes. That same thinking is how mid-list SFF authors get bumped up to "brilliant" simply by way of their identity or appearance. I understand bigotry is a human failing and will always be with us, but that is hardly an excuse for giving bigots literary awards or anthologies for their race and gender expression.
The Jim Crow laws dismantled a half century ago are coalescing once again, this time in an intellectual and philosophical space, and, along with conformity, being mainstreamed right into the heart of SFF by heartless and clueless bigots who care more about what an author's identity is than what they can put on a written page by way of artistry. When you can't even understand the lessons of a film like E.T. or the fantasy film The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and a thousand other things I could mention, what can you understand? SFF's new progressive crowd thinks of itself as anti-bigots, but in fact they are the people who persecuted a boy with green hair and showed themselves only by keys tinkling on belts and searching flashlights for the bulk of E.T., in an analogue to Anne Frank. Now they search for permanent cracks in the morality of the straight white male and engage in witch hunts and moral analogues to Nazi Race Theory like "white privilege."
Some of those people listed are making careers, not based on their art, but on racial and gender bigotry. No one should be surprised Aliette de Bodard wrote the preface to We See A Different Frontier. You have to be insane to think art can emerge from such a scenario. The fact that Tor.com, Locus and Publisher's Weekly have given positive reviews to this inadvisable leaflet only drives more nails into the coffin of SF literature. As if to drive home yet one more nail, reviewer Lois Tilton at Locus writes "There is a sad irony in the fact that these stories have been written in English, arguably the most dominant imperialist tongue since Latin, which still exercises its influence from the grave of history."
Again, unbelievable guilt-tripped rhetoric. Naughty English. If I said that about millions of people force-fed Arabic across the Middle East and half the Mediterranean in a far longer historic time-frame than English, I'd be fitted with a KKK hood. In fact virtually all non-Arab Muslims and Arabic-speakers are colonized, but you'll never hear SFF's racial bigots tell non-Arab Muslims to "decolonize" and Arabs to "deimperialize." That's strictly racial memory-hole territory there.
Simple comparisons are beyond the reach of people who choose identity to parse right and wrong rather than principle. Again, the idea true art can emerge from such an idiotic 1930s beer-garden of blatant racial bigotry is laughable.And again, guess who identity-nepotism gives awards to and for what? In that context, what does "agrees with me" even mean?
And here's a guide to one-drop art in a blog post titled "Crowdsourcing The Essentials: Non-US, POC Sci-Fi and Fantasy?"
Why would anyone be surprised We See A Different Frontier author Lavie Tidhar used Twitter to shame Hugo Award-winning and Nebula Award nominated SFF author Mary Robinette Kowal (herself an unending font of racialized political correctness) into retro-censoring an already COMPLETED AND PUBLISHED story together with a public apology for having "perpetrated racist and colonialist tropes" by using the phrase "diminutive half-breed" and advancing the famous "myth of the psychotic half-breed who is ultimately defeated by white magic," because who doesn't know that one? Are these frickin' people brain damaged?
These are not literary questions and so we should not be surprised when we don't get literary answers by way of an actual literature, but instead something quite different, and it looks a lot like a Spanish Inquisition of mentally retarded racist pedants.
As I write this in 2013/14, the biggest SF novel being promoted by the politically correct crowd is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. And what's the big interest from SF's PC crowd in this novel? According to Foz Meadow's review at A Dribble of Ink blog, it's because Leckie has "done something totally unprecedented in my experience of fiction: made a deliberate decision to use feminine nouns and pronouns as a neutral, genderless default, even in instances where a character’s biological gender is known to be male, the better to reflect the narrator’s language and culture" and "that the world of Ancillary Justice is populated largely by POC, with no evident taboo."
I say, "so what?"
And as you've seen, Meadows isn't exactly into research; when it comes to such usage of pronouns, it's old hat, and by half a century. The difference is those old stories didn't put forward their ideas in terms of radical lesbian activism and its obsession with gender-fluidity and defaming heterosexual men in 1,001 innuendoes as Leckie's "white straight cis guys" and so are of little interest to today's intersectionalists. It is the difference between an abstract and artistic interest in an SF idea and pandering to racial and sexual hostility from within a gulag constructed of delusion and hatred. The delusion rests on the fact that a cult that claims to be under racial and sexual attack is by far the main source of such attacks. For every remark within SFF's institutions by an author or editor disparaging of non-whites, gays or women, I can find 100 such remarks disparaging of heterosexuals, whites and men. That is not an opinion but a matter of public record and easily shown and proven.
To highlight the perceptual failure of this cult, think about the words "neutral, genderless default." One would think the person writing them has some interest in that subject and understands what the words actually mean. Given the fact this cult of intersectionalists have no "neutral, genderless default" for words like "racial bigotry" or "sexism," Meadows is doing nothing but leading a cavalcade of self-satire that promotes its own Orwellian ignorance without the least hint of self-awareness.
"Foz Meadows @fozmeadows For serious, my online writers' group just had to check a spreadsheet of 20-odd people to see if any of us is straight. Answer: one is." "The diversity is strong with us" she adds in typical Newspeak.
The predictable racialist and general identity addict Liz Bourke at Tor.com hysterically declares Ancillary Justice in a fit of overblown bombast to be one of the "best space opera novels ever." As far as I can tell, what Bourke really means is that the best space operas ever written weren't written by false-flag feminists hostile to white "cis-dudes." By all means, let this woman continue to review books. You can certainly cover a lot of territory if you really don't have to read books or think about them, and instead look at a photo of the author for guidance. If you're interested in the universality of art, go elsewhere.
Bourke is arguably as intellectually dishonest a reviewer as there is in SFF. Gender feminist dogma centered around race is her be-all and end-all. The truth is Ancillary Justice clocks so far down a list of all-time space opera that it doesn't ever register among hundreds of other similarly indifferent SF novels. It's not a particularly ambitious novel but what is presented is clearly beyond the ability of Leckie to handle. When I read it it reminded me of similarly obtuse and jittery prose in the B-side of an old Ace Double that left one feeling as if you were trying to envision the work through distorted amber. This is not a question of a bias against women. In my opinion C.S. Friedman's 1986 debut SF novel In Conquest Born probably is one of the better space operas ever written, and far more clever, ambitious and precise than Leckie's novel, which is also plain boring. Ancillary Justice is a pretentious delivery driver that forgot the pizza. Were it not for being pushed by gay feminists together with that ideology being the pie-of-the-day in core SF, you never would've heard of Leckie's novel.
One shouldn't be surprised at Tor's bloggers. During the run-up to the 2014 Hugo voting they blatantly engaged in censorship in reviewing "Best Novelette." Two of the nominees are by intersectionalists, which is a dogma I regard as supremacist, racist and sexist. Should I then censor all mention of the stories? Give the outright racist comments associated with work that was not censored, six of one and a half-dozen of another thought of as a great gulf is yet again a sign of the intellectual collapse of modern SF's institutions. The best SF pierces such foolishness. Only the worst conformist redneckery gasps at marijuana while sipping whiskey, which would put modern progressive SF somewhere between "Okie From Muskogee" and the mid-Victorian era.
Read this post at Tor called "Science Fiction and Fantasy 101: Thinking Academically About Genre." The use of the word "Academically" is a farce, as the post is hopelessly compromised by an addiction to PC diversity. That post isn't SFF 101, but identity and PC 101, which, as art, is empty. It's hard to figure if the post's author is really that unaware or simply that blithe about their agenda. Either way the result is the same: a disaster for the genre if followed and an introduction to precisely nothing. The tip off is when the author writes "The SF/F 101 books of the 1940s and 1950s are not likely to be as accessible to 21st century readers. Especially readers from diverse backgrounds looking for themselves in the genre."
In other words the false accusation is the by now tiresomely familiar one that there was a purposeful self-fascination built on race and sex in mid-century SFF and which is continually stipulated as immoral. Then, people who wish to do the same thing are portrayed as innocent but disappointed darlings for being robbed of a natural desire to see themselves and suddenly it is not immoral, and nor is the purposefully segregated fiction they themselves write and promote. This is more of Orwell's upside-down cake force-fed to naive people by naive people who have no principles. Principle becomes identity and identity becomes principled in a whirlwind of endemic stupidity.
When the post's author Michael Underwood adds "We cannot keep pointing people at Heinlein, Asimov, Brooks, and Tolkien forever and expect those works to resonate as strongly with people born fifty years after the books were written" he means they are deprecated in terms of race and sex, not style or artistry. It's like ignoring the mid-century N.Y. Yankees World Series teams because they were white. That would not be a fan of baseball but a fan of identity where baseball is thrown onto a backburner, the same as in SFF. The truth is SFF's PC crowd despises the entire history of America for the same reasons. In PC rhetoric, "idea" and "race" exchange places while they pretend they have the exact opposite interest and agenda. Wrong race becomes award-winning SF author Charles Stross's idiotic use of the term "monoculture" and right race becomes "vibrant" and "mind-blowing" Afrofuturism. Intersectionalism's portrayal of American and European society as a racially bland monoculture in need of diversity to liven it up is a constant drumbeat. For an adult to portray the most sophisticated cultures that ever existed as a monoculture is so absurd one suspects active retardation must be at work. But anyone who has read Stross's non-fiction comments knows he and his PC community will defend as vibrant the stultifying Arabic culture that lays like an extinguishing cultural blanket from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of India. Compared to the multi-linguistic Europe, the Middle East seems like a true monoculture.
None of that stops this same crowd from going on about women authors like Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, nor should it in a normal context. It's the cherry-picking about when one does that and when one doesn't that's the problem. And of course what would a PC post be without that Orwellian element I mentioned that acknowledges the PC want to see their own identities while simultaneously lighting up SF's Golden Age as racist supremacists for doing that. The difference is there is no proof the old school ever did that, but there is proof the new school does; the author of this post says as much, and so does that audience. In fact they never shut up about the desire for one and inadvisability of the other, though they are in principle the exact same thing.
In regard to Ancillary Justice, forgetting the fact a thousand year old android that has worked with humans for hundreds of years can't tell the difference between a man and a woman, Ancillary Justice is the politically correct intersectional racialist's dream world of fewer white people, men taken out of the spotlight and gender, gender, gender. Those things in and of themselves are not art let alone drama. And considering the source is the equally predictable and tiresome Foz Meadows, who never stops complaining and never shuts up about white male privilege and the shortcomings of men, you can well imagine the actual quality of Ancillary Justice is irrelevant. And why wouldn't it be in a culture of bigotry falsely paraded as justice where questions of talent, right and wrong, good and evil, and nobility itself are determined by race and gender?
And on a personal note of taste, yanking a reader right out of an SF novel by using a provincial trend-of-the-week is the opposite of what SF is supposed to do. Why not just have the android's former spaceship run on the Tiptree Fusion Drive and called the "Puffington Host" or "S.S. Joanna Russ" and give me an Aug. 2013 five-day weather forecast for Miami? And it'll be interesting to see exactly how interesting gender pronouns are when the idea is padded out into a trilogy. The humorous thing to me is that Leckie's fans think something like gender-flipping represents some startling perspective shift that'll yank me right out of my perceptual socks and that Leckie's novel is therefore a seminal event. What would really be both a seminal event and startling perspective shift is if the PC culture within SF represented by the writing workshop conformist droning of an insect actually wrote SF worth reading. Today's average SF author may be 10 times the technical writer Edgar Rice Burroughs was, but they are 1/10 the unique, authoritative, visionary and original story-teller he was, and that is where the fly sits in the ointment. Conformity doesn't equal art - never has and never will. The word "conformity" isn't a synonym for "boring" but one certainly leads to the other in matters of art.
You can start handing out the Nebula and Hugo nominations for Ancillary Justice right now (Leckie publicly laughed at me for writing that). In fact, you don't even have to read the novel. Meadows' finishes her review by saying "if it doesn’t garner the author a Hugo nomination, I’ll be very much surprised." No less than will I. Ancillary Justice scores high marks all around for everything that matters to SF today, which unfortunately has nothing to do with art, writing, talent or competence. Leckie's novel will do well in awards because intersectionalism and its race, gender and diversity is the go-to ideology within core SF fandom. But not all the helping hands in fandom will ever raise Leckie's novel beyond its actual merits as SF, which is less than nominal.
In fact in terms of story-telling Ancillary Justice is impenetrable, obtuse, confused, amateurish and conformist. Dialogue like this is supposedly an insightful treatise on imperialism: "Imagine your whole life aimed at conquest, at the spread of Radchaai space. You see murder and destruction on an unimaginable scale, but they see the spread of civilization, of Justice and Propriety, of Benefit for the universe. The death and destruction, these are unavoidable by-products of this one, supreme good." Unless you were born yesterday, that's a white man's burden sleeping pill of a yawner fit only for juveniles. Out in the real world, it's funny how entire PoC empires like Mughals and Ottomans disappear in the uninsightful intersectionalist world of privilege and gender studies. They used to say SF was nothing more than cowboys and indians in outer space. It still is - postmodernist postcolonialist-style.
Four paragraphs after that you have this: "The gender thing is a giveaway, though. Only a Radchaai would misgender people the way you do." Or, I might add, Buck Rogers.
"I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through non-Radchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people. I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai--never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound (trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned, tied). Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn't need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home."
That's fascinating SF, if you like some transgender to go along with your rocket ships written by a middle class cis-hausfrau slumming in ancillary oppression and adopting radical gay feminism by proxy. Leckie's novel reminds me of tourists who take tours of the shanty towns in Rio de Janeiro. Yup, start handing out the awards right now.
The funniest thing about treatises on empire-building from such sources as the West and man-hating intersectionalism is that the more successful radical feminists are at undercutting the success of the West, the more certain it is the demise of the Pax Americana will enable empire-building and slavery to once again walk the Earth. You'll never see the PC writing SF about that for the simple reason they don't have the brains to extrapolate how their own desire to tear down the fake patriarchy will wreck them on the rocks of a real one.
Ironically, selling women is exactly what ISIS in Syria/Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria are doing as they exert more and more military control over vast swaths of territory, including cities with tens of thousands of people like Mosul, Iraq and Borno, Nigeria. Using intersectional lingo of sex and race, the truth is the greatest purveyor of human rights in the world are the very straight white males radical feminists undermine and harass non-stop. It won't be sign-holding feminists that rescue those women but European armored divisions.
For all of intersectionalism's boasting about the nuance of nouns, they don't understand what words actually are, nor the simple descriptions of a building. In the midst of intersectionalism's constant postcolonial bleating, somehow the Alhambra in Spain is invisible, the Taj Mahal become Indian Hindu, and I guess the Empire State Building native American. And these are the people taking childish stabs at writing SF literature that is supposedly "mind-blowing." When you can't even control your own mind, how are you going to inform mine - with a philosophy based on endemic stupidity?
Time and again what we're seeing with SF novels today is overartful wordsmiths or conformist writer's workshop drudge where a talent for sheer story-telling seems to have all but disappeared. Leckie's novel is particularly exploitative and pandering since it is purpose-built to appeal to a transgender community Leckie herself is no part of.
The sad truth is that even a '30s horror hack writer like Hugh B. Cave had more fundamental power to hold a reader's attention than do the bright stars of nothing today. Perhaps if they spent less time complaining about everything under the sun on Twitter and more time pounding out 800 short stories Cave claims he did in the '30s alone in addition to 40 novels over his career, "privilege" and a "meritocracy" would come to be seen in a different light. You can call Max Brand a white privileged cis-male all you want: he also wrote 500 novels and 500 short stories in 25-30 million published words over approximately 30 years. In truth that is what the PC call "privilege" really is - hard work, discipline and talent. What the PC regard as talent is really complaint and wailing.
Let's be brutally honest here: Ancillary Justice is on the Tiptree Awards shortlist pre-read, so corrupt and fallen in is this culture when it comes to art and identity. Why not just cut to the chase and give a "Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Tiptree Retro-Award" to all women who ever lived? (Note: I was correct about the nominations, as you'll see below.)
The upshot is that a completely mediocre and forgettable SF novel like Ancillary Justice will almost certainly be nominated for a Hugo and Nebula award at a time when ha-ha funny Kickstarter projects are making all-women anthologies with the cluelessly ironic title of Women Destroy Science Fiction. It's a stupid straw man argument to simply say women will destroy SF; there is nothing inherently factual or true about saying such a thing. Women can write SFF and that has been proven. Having a couple of guys say they can't is no reason to start a segregationist crusade. Statements against straw man themes no one is actually saying are a favored thing of the resentful women of intersectionalism:
That would indeed be an odd idea if anyone outside her own head were asserting it. In fact in my research for this book the only people who ever did assert such a thing were intersectionalists. To fully understand the whirly-gig of logic SFF's ever-complaining feminists engage in, Elliott writes yet another straw man about "the egregious sexism of suggesting women in the past were nothing but sex objects" that in fact only her own silly doctrine ever stipulates. Elliott adds "I would like to see better realism in historical shows, but it would include things people would not believe," to which I add, like the oozing buckets of non-white colonialism and slavery that continually escape her heightened intersectional insight of history as a Jim Crow county.
That Kickstarter having a title like "Extremist Intersectional Narcissists Destroy SF" would be much closer to the truth, strip away the sarcasm, and reveal the contemptible delusion that these women are in any way just the girls on a girls' night out. This doxy literary pajama party is permanent by default and choice, and so is its segregation. The biggest lie in this project is that this supremacist segregation is unwanted and has been forced on them and is a thing they'd rather not do. Even the organizers of lesbian music festivals aren't that dumb, or dishonest, and that's exactly what this book project is: a lesbian SF festival. Taken as a microcosm of the future of SF, were these "women" to have their way, you would have fiction that is terribly politicized, terribly bigoted and just plain terrible.
At NPR, perhaps the at once most hostile and least productive voice in SFF, K. Tempest Bradford, has a piece titled "Women Are Destroying Science Fiction! (That's OK; They Created It)" In it she falsely claims "this issue is one part of a long, ongoing conversation about what constitutes 'real' science fiction and whether women are inherently any good at writing it."
I've noticed repeatedly in intersectional rhetoric how one good woman or one bad man become they as quickly as they become a lone wolf or anomaly when that shoe fits. Then the next day one person becomes a trend or even systemic and an institution when that fits once again. Intersectionalists are so unprincipled and completely intellectually dishonest one can say that is the only aspect about them that is "mind-blowing." The idea Mary Shelley is "They" is as nonsensical as the PC idea of racial and sexual ownership of culture which also comes and goes at will depending on rightrace-wrongsex.
In fact the real issue is one of people rejecting a hostile, boring and bigoted identity supremacist queer-culture version of SF, not SF literature simply written by women. Bradford mentions a "famous speech given by author Pat Murphy back in 1991" without mentioning that speech is from WisCon; a notable lapse seeing as how the entire project stinks much more of WisCon's peculiar politics than it does the girls. That was 4 years after Murphy won a diversity Nebula for Best Novel for this vapid junkery while the far more important and better Eon by Greg Bear wasn't even nominated. Then there's this inadvisable Nebula winner only 2 years later.
The shill here is in Bradford claiming "women are writing — and have written — some of the best science fiction available." Since intersectionalists are not simply women any more than the KKK is men, Bradford is claiming territory that actually exists but which she does not stand on or for. The idea Francis Stevens, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett or Andre Norton are in any way part of the intersectionalist movement's history is ridiculous. What Bradford in fact means is the peculiar SF written according to the political imperatives of queer intersectionalism, which is not only a heavily radicalized, distorted, genderized and politicized brand of SFF, but one often completely devoid of science fiction or fantasy.
The constant disingenuousness is in asserting "women" is interchangeable with "intersectional queer culture." Bradford unintentionally reveals the Orwellian semantics in play by writing "if women keep writing the kind of science fiction they want to see more of, and keep calling it science fiction, the room for that kind of science fiction expands within the genre." Replace "women" with "supremacist queer culture" and realize what she's really saying is if I keep calling a donkey a horse long enough, it'll run in the Kentucky Derby. Of course it'll never win and so there'll be even more calls for segregated anthologies because men are rejecting women when the simple truth is the mainstream public has no interest in the forgettable and bizarre SF represented by the Tiptree Awards. The whole idea is as goofy as calling a lesbian music festival the Billboard Awards and then claiming the reason the festival exists in the first place is because the mainstream doesn't like music performed by women. The reality is that women in music are doing just fine and so are women SF authors who put the literature before a heavily politicized version of shiny bent gender and a hysteric phobia of straight white men.
The idea I am rejecting women's SF literature as inferior because I have no interest in reading extremist, supremacist, narcissistic, gender-caked intersectional literature endemically hostile towards me is silly. That's like saying a Jew who doesn't read white supremacist neo-Nazi literature for fun doesn't like gentiles. Not only is this Women Destroy SF project not women's SF, it's not even feminist SF, since sexual identity-addiction and self-fascination has nothing to do with feminism. Just because one says otherwise is meaningless; it is what it is. The purposeful Orwellian employment of words in play here possesses an irony unintended and unglimpsed by those promoting coal which is a diamond if you stare and wish long enough and hard enough. For all intents and purposes this is Orwell's "Ministry of Love," but with no tongues, no cheeks, and lots of lesbians and thoroughbreds. I even hesitate to use the word "lesbian" since there is nothing innately hateful about being gay. This is a movement of hateful human beings, and that is the level at which they fail, not as women, gay folks or feminists.
Since Women Destroy Science Fiction is a militant gay intersectional women's initiative which flies under a false flag of representing 50% of people on earth, what the message really is that if the SFF community doesn't increase the profile of gay women within SF beyond its actual 2% of the pie, they're going to do their own thing and call all men bigots, as if they don't already do that 24 hours a day anyway. Hardly a threat.
"Lesbians literally do not need men." - Charlotte Bunch, 1972
The failure I am addressing in this book is the failure of human beings. It is not the failure of women, gays and non-whites any more than the KKK and neo-Nazism is the failure of whites or men. Bigotry exists in the human condition. The fact that intersectionalists claim to speak for all non-whites, gays and women means no more than Nazis who claim to speak for whites. Intersectionalists purposefully do that so books like this can be said to be targeting PoC, women and gays. In fact what this book is targeting is words, and, in their own terminology, the named targets are diverse. I am targeting bigotry, intolerance and hate-speech, not skin and sex. The fact radical gay feminists claim to be speaking for all women even as they stipulate heterosexual sex is a form of slavery moves me not at all. They are insanely troubled and bigoted people. The fact they have been successful in mainstreaming their fake oppressions and insanity into the United Nations and universities and colleges across America doesn't move me either.
The intersectional movement within SFF gives women, gay folks and feminists a bad name by the simple act of appropriating those words as if they speak for such folks. Intersectionalism within SFF is a splinter group powered by nothing more than sheer run of the mill human hatred that in a very real sense has nothing to do with the identities and anti-oppression movements they've chosen to hijack to camouflage their animus. Intersectionalists even hijack the word "queer," as if they represent the entire community, but as you can see from this post at Tor.com called "Queering SFF Pride Month: Wrapping Up the Extravaganza" as just a symbolic example, gay men are an almost non-existent tiny fraction of intersectionalism. It's just another example of how intersectionalists appropriate words like "gay," "women," and "feminism" to puff themselves up and put on as diverse a face as possible, pretending to represent far more than their slim and parochial agenda could ever hope to. Intersectionalists appropriating those words is as swinish as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's "Freedom and Justice Party"; under MB rule, you're going to find little freedom or justice if you happen to be an Egyptian woman or Christian Copt.
Despite their claims of "diversity," the fact is there is no welcoming space for gay men within the goofy intersectional world of Amazonian supremacy. Opposing intersectionalists is neither opposing women, gays or feminists. Intersectionalism is a particularly virulent form of bigotry and supremacy typified by blogs like The Feminist Wire. Like intersectionalists within SFF, groups like The Feminist Wire claim to speak for far more groups than they actually do, in order to maximize their credibility. At some point, you'd think these people might figure out one can celebrate being gay, black, and a feminist without dedicating one's self to defaming whites and men; others certainly have. That is understandable in a Jim Crow-type scenario; lacking that, it is foul. Creating a virtual Jim Crow where there is none in order to unfairly target groups is foul.
The rhetoric from intersectionalism surrounding the Women Destroy Science Fiction anthology is so full of contradictory comments, undocumented strawmen and mindless stereotyping about an imagined enemy it's hard to keep track of them all. Vandana Singh in a post titled "Shattering it to bits: Women and the Destruction of Science Fiction" writes WDSF "is a great start toward a newer, richer science fiction."
If femininity in and of itself is capable of encompassing such a thing then one must equally entertain the notion it is not, that is it capable of conformist provincial science fiction. Singh of course indulges in the by now mindless but assumed as real myth that in the "white cis male" Golden Age of SF "Space-faring heroes colonize and exploit other worlds, mimicking without engaging with or critically examining the problematic history of colonialism here on Earth" as if everyone knows has become an academic footnote. Singh adds more cheap and racist psychology about old SF "Natives exist to provide exotic color, to be conquered and rescued, and to be uplifted through the magnanimity of the white heroes, to whom they can never be equal. Women and non-human animals play similar roles in these fictions." The truth of statements like that is they are far easier to concoct and write down in a single sentence than they are to research and back up. Since this book adequately shows intersectional research to consist of too many of the "white cis male" in any given place at any given time, why bother. In short, Singh is making stuff up out of her head. By the time you're done reading Singh's drivel you'd think old-school SF was a KKK. Again and again you see this premise put forward and it is never backed up by actual stories. The only person Singh has pegged in that post is herself, not hundreds of human beings living and dead bound by no ideology Singh can factually document; there is only race and sex put in evidence, and Singh's own lack of ability to reason. One can easily see the innate moral supremacy intersectionalists harvest for themselves in Singh's statements compared to a stereotype of white men she never names but speaks about as if they are one ignorant hayseed compared to Singh's refined judgments. The truth is Singh can't figure out she never shuts up about women and complains about SF that never surrounded itself with male supremacist ideological rhetoric that would mirror her own. She is literally making up phantoms, but ones that look suspiciously like her own mirror.
Since half of all SFF is written by women the idea purposeful segregation somehow represents diversity is simply dumb. What that anthology really is are the heady delusions of radical feminism gathered together in an inadvisable bit of crowd-sourced affirmative action. The sad thing about posts like Singh's is that when they recommend more information on the subject of diversity it is strictly funneled through a viewpoint of intersectional feminism that shows no interest in diversity in its own realms. At the end of the day, when you read people like Singh, you learn more about feminist arrogance and supremacy than anything else. Singh should perhaps consider her own demonstrable intellectual failure resides not in the stars or in men but in herself and her own heady bias, if not simple inability to think clearly or document her nonsense about "Space-faring heroes."
The truth about having this type of thing destroy SF lies in a far more nuanced mechanism of identity-addiction and hatred I have presented in this book. That destruction, by way of checkmarking and pie-charting literature, will in fact destroy SF if it is successfully mainstreamed into SF's core institutions, and the rot is already far advanced. Laughing on a sinking ship of mindless identity-advocacy with equally stupid straw man arguments about "girl cooties" seems stupid and ignorant, if not outright moronic. And when you look at who is associated with this Kickstarter, it's pretty obvious it's just intersectional supremacy looking for a straw man Mukden to say they made us do this.
Given the reality about this Kickstarter, calling it SF in some kind of a neutral literary sense borders on perversity and the idea this anthology simply represents the other half of the world is ridiculous. Here is the lie you see associated with this stuff again and again, this time courtesy of SFF author and editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia:
"As for the speculative scene in general, it has been encouraging to see that despite some calls for the quick removal of the Wimmen and Darkies that are staining the pure speculative scene with their cooties, a lot of people are interested in seeing the field open to a wider audience. Go form your own Aryan Happiness Defense Front for Writers because the darkies and the women they are coming..."
The built-in irony behind that swinish fantasy is the only entity in SFF that resembles a supremacist hate group is intersectionalism itself. It is not mythical reactionary conservatives institutionalized within SFF writing racist comments that shred the principles behind our 14th Amendment like "CAN SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE WHITE PEOPLE?!!" but Garcia herself. I'm always stunned by the thought such people somehow think of that type of racially bigoted remark as anti-racist and also the sheer volume of people just like Garcia in the core SFF community.
There is no call within SFF for the removal of "Wimmin and Darkies" but there is an increasing realization and dislike of exactly who intersectionalists are and what incredible racial and sexist bigots they are. On the other hand, bigoted supremacist intersectionalists make no secret of what they wish removed, and right on the web site associate of the largest publisher of SFF in english when they write "I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories."
That's aside from open collusion by intersectionalists to read less fiction by white straight men and more by gay non-white women. That sounds very much like a "Happiness Defense Front for Writers" to me, especially in light of the complete absence of such opposite behaviors by people who don't even exist. It's the perfect exemplar of how intersectionalists create fake oppressions and fake narratives about "diversity" to camouflage their own supremacist distastes for whites, men and heterosexuals, a subject intersectionalists mysteriously never shut up about and discuss far more than fiction. Given how firmly intersectionalists believe humanity is riddled with race and women-hatred, the tie-break goes to actual bigoted quotes, a thing SFF's intersectionalists dominate 100 to 1. When does obvious actually become so? Gender feminists try and sell the lie that to be against their very specific and targeted ideological racial and sexual defamation is to somehow indulge in that act, which is like saying the Jewish Anti-Defamation League is actually Stormfront.
The reality of the gender feminists in Women Destroy Science Fiction is more along the lines of Morena-Garcia-like quotes like this from famous feminist author Susan Brownmiller in her 1975 book Against Our Will:
"It (rape) is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear... Rather than society's aberrants or 'spoilers of purity,' men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known....when men raise the spectre of the unknown rapist, they refuse to take psychologic responsibility for the nature of his act."
Fast forward to 2014 and the president of Brown University, Christina Paxson, substantially agrees:
Given the origins of such rhetoric, the words of our Constitution, and plain common sense, in my opinion that's not social science but demonization theory no different than that perpetuated against Jews at Heidelberg University in 1936.
As an aside, I find it amusing to see Brownmiller eating her own cornflakes and not recognizing them: "I find the Aptheker thesis severely limited. Aptheker and the Communist Party understood rape as a political act of subjugation only when the victim was black and the offender was white. White-on-white rape was merely 'criminal' and had no part in their Marxist canon. Black-on-black rape was ignored. And black-on-white rape, about which the rest of the country was phobic, was discussed in the oddly reversed world of the Jefferson School as if it never existed except as a spurious charge that 'the state' employed to persecute black men."
Men are criminals... period. All of them... accessories. There's your science fiction by the girls, who by an odd coincidence are more interested in protecting "Wimmen and Darkies" from white male hunter-killer teams that also form a "rape culture" than rocket ships. And you will see that fear and defamation of men supercedes any interest in SF and in fact has come to dominate SF's institutions, being sold as a shill of equality and diversity. The only good news is that SF fans don't read SF to read about "rape culture" or the failures inherent in being a man, white, or heterosexual. SF's gender feminists will destroy themselves before they destroy SF, though they will leave the core in ruins before it's all over.
"No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction."
No, that's not a from a dystopian nightmare of an SF novel written by Phillip K. Dick. That's the great French feminist intellectual Simone de Beauvoir talking about liberating women in a 1975 "dialogue" with feminist Betty Friedan titled "Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma" in Time Magazine.
In reading gender feminist theory the one thing that leaps out at you again and again is the idea of gender as a social construct, rather than a thing that is innate and natural, and it's not hard to figure out why. Gender feminists obsessively hyper-identify, not only with the idea of being a woman, but in the sense of an us vs. them paradigm, and they see women as being on a six thousand year old losing streak. If gender is a construct, then the simple solution is to deconstruct it. It also explains why gender feminists consider the mere act of being a man not only equivalent to an ideology, but a particularly oppressive one. There are kinder, gentler, subtler versions of demonization theory, but which lead to the same place. And let's not forget Twitter threads like the one below, which needs to be read to believe the sheer racial animosity and graceless stupidity:
*also staring at this* pic.twitter.com/FPWdjnCJdi
— Lauren Chief Elk (@ChiefElk) January 28, 2014*
In her book The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology, Daphne Patai writes that in 1984 Orwell "misses seeing the political dimensions of the gender roles apparent in Nineteen Eighty-Four for, while clearly depicting a world run by men preoccupied with power and domination, a world in which not a single woman is shown in a comparable role, he never addresses the issue of sex roles and gender stereotypes.
Not writing a book Patai wishes was written is not the same as a critique of it. That doesn't stop Patai from writing that book for Orwell and then falsely comparing her concocted feminist aspect of it to Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937):
"Swastika Night and Nineteen Eighty-Four are both primarily about the interactions of men. Burdekin addresses this issue in her expose of the cult of masculinity; but Orwell, taking the worst male type as the model for the human species, seems to believe that the pursuit of power is an innate characteristic of human beings. Thus Orwell's despair and Burdekin's hope are linked to the degree of awareness that each has of gender roles and patriarchal power as social rather than biological facts.
"The main contribution of Nineteen Eighty-Four to modern culture probably resides in the catchy names, such as Newspeak and doublethink, that Orwell invented for familiar phenomena. But Orwell cannot and does not provide a name for the key concept that explains the Party's preoccupation with domination, power, and violence: These are all part of what Burdekin calls the cult of masculinity. Because Burdekin is able to see and to name this phenomenon, her depiction of a totalitarian regime has a dimension lacking in Orwell's novel. What Orwell can only, helplessly, attribute to human nature, Burdekin traces to a gender polarization that can degenerate into the world of Swastika Night, with its hypertrophied masculinity on the one hand and its Reduction of Women on the other.
"Male egos and female bodies; male persons and female animals; these are the extremes of which an ideology of male supremacy is capable. As Orwell uses the Stalinist framework to launch his attack on totalitarianism, so Burdekin uses the Nazis as the focal point of her attack on the cult of masculinity. But she makes clear that the Nazi preoccupation with manhood was itself merely an extrapolation of a quite routine gender ideology. Unlike Orwell in his idealized portrayal of female maternal figures, Burdekin recognizes that it is but a small step from the male apotheosis of women as mothers to their degradation to mere breeding animals. In both cases women are reduced to a biological capacity, out of which is constructed an entire social identity. While Nazi ideology overtly expressed this preoccupation with gender roles, recent studies have noted the centrality of male dominance and the 'masculine principle' in all forms of fascism. Burdekin only needed to exaggerate the male supremacy she saw around her to envision Europe after seven centuries of Nazi domination as engulfed in the cult of masculinity.
"Thus, in Swastika Night, phallic pride has become the overt organizing principle of Hitlerian society. Through her dystopian fantasy, Burdekin thus gives dramatic form to something Virginia Woolf had written some years earlier: 'Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.' We cannot yet define the precise contours of the connection between political power and the male gender role, but that there is such a connection is self-evident. The very fact that the exercise of power utilizes a vocabulary associated with male, but not female, gender roles points to this: Control, dominance, strength, aggression, force, authority, all these terms routinely employed in discussing power (both power over others, and power to do) also figure prominently in stereotypes of the male personality. Orwell was vaguely aware of some such connection, for he identified the label 'Fascist' with 'bully'. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell treats political power in a social vacuum, without reference to the fact that such power is exercised by males to the exclusion of females and that it is also exercised in the home. The idea of a female revolution is not in and of itself a panacea. Burdekin is right to warn, in Proud Man, that unless it challenges the key concept of 'importance' it might simply mean a 'reversal of privilege' but to refuse to address the issue of gender roles is to circle fruitlessly around the problem, viewing it as an 'essence' rather than as a particular social configuration."
The feminist disavowal that the "pursuit of power is an innate characteristic of human beings" is part of the women as Bambi innocently napping in some lady version of the Garden of Eden wherein war, hate, lust, and all other negative manifestations of humans is not addressed with the normal pleas for diversity but the exact opposite: the idea is graciously thrown over to a suddenly respected mens'-only club on the notion these things reside solely in men and their poisonous masculinity. There will be no pie-charts in this regard, just one big chunk of raw meat that reads 100% Grade A male. Once again a feminist shows they have no understanding of how something like our Constitution works, equal protection, or even their own bizarrely mutable logic and wishes. That once again betrays a bias crafted from wishful thinking whose purpose is to exonerate all women from anything negative and lay it at the feet of men, besides stipulating the world would be a much nicer and more peaceful place to live if only men would stop acting like men and act more like the women's pie-chart of 100% peace and wisdom.
Other's have called Swastika Night 1984's "lost twin," echoing Patai about "the inextricable link between misogyny, patriarchy and fascism." Why not just add in banking, all wars and kings ever and blacksmiths who made swords?
It never seems to occur to Patai that this brand of feminism is also primarily about the interactions of men, or rather, bystanders complaining about the interactions of men based on the mutually exclusive idea women are at once equal and prevented from being equal and so prevented from having equally meaningful interactions. Say what you will about patriarchy, it has never been such an imposing and blanketing institutional force as to prevent individual women from exploring the Amazon jungle, inventing a new rifle in their workshop or marching off to the North Pole. The idea a patriarchy can inculcate a lack of motivation almost literally down to the last woman from amidst a population of millions doesn't carry much weight. It also never occurs to Patai that if it is credible to talk about the innate failures of tens of millions of men then it also opens up women to the same analysis. In truth Patai's character assassination of Orwell is nothing less than the character assassination of all men on earth.
The reality is that endless mitigations and excuse notes from teacher covering 6,000 years are not as convincing as the notion that success defines itself, and failure as well, and that those who can do a thing will do a thing. The sub-title of Patai's book is "A Study in Male Ideology" and at no time does she make a case such a thing exists, since it apparently crosses thousands of years, rivers and forests, nations and oceans, and is a thing separate from either culture or ideology. In arguing the male mystique is a cultural construction and not natural, Patai ends up arguing for the exact opposite. Patai's "androcentrism" seems to be rather favored by the gods, which is about the only thing she doesn't throw in as having it in for noble women. It's possible that Patai and her quoted reinforcements all instinctively recognize that gender feminists and their politically correct semantic gibberish, totalitarian bent, brutal lack of insight and principles together with their academic excuse factories are the very sorts of people Orwell warned against in 1984.
The question is also posed of who is "hypertrophied," who is practicing a "Reduction" since it is Patai who admits to Orwell dealing in "human nature" and therefore a larger shared human experience separated only by strength and reproduction rather than stipulating those are irrelevancies that can be done away with by culture and social engineering, only then arriving to that shared human space. And all that is aside from the implied immorality of men vs. women. Patai's beliefs come much more out into the open just a little further on:
"In keeping with his general disregard of the issue of gender roles, however, Orwell also avoids noting that the Party slogan, 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,' has always applied as an expression of male dominance over women. Knowledge of women's past has repeatedly disappeared into 'memory holes,' which is why we have needed to rediscover women's history; and why in 1983 Joanna Russ needed to publish a book called How to Suppress Women's Writing, to teach us again things that Virginia Woolf had taught us more than fifty years earlier in A Room of One's Own, and still others before her, always to have their words disappear, barred by 'gatekeepers' from becoming known and recognized. Orwell is blind to the fact that the political manipulation of language did not require twentieth-century totalitarianism or modern technology. Language, including his own, was already such a weapon and had been wielded for centuries by patriarchal society. Newspeak and doublethink are not necessary to make certain things unsayable, unknowable, perhaps finally unthinkable. Ideology need only pass itself off as reality and contrary perceptions can be occluded.
"As long as manipulation and domination were exercised by men as a group against women as a group, Orwell saw no need to protest. When, however, the relations between the governed and the governors so altered that Orwell saw the possibility of men like himself becoming the victims of censorship and domination, these became spectacularly visible to him. Orwell never seems conscious of the strongly masculine narrative voice evident in so much of his writing (though I believe it is a major factor in his appeal to other men); similarly, he does not seem to have been aware that his indictment of human behavior in Nineteen Eighty-Four is in fact an indictment of male behavior. Gamesmanship is its epitome, for here we have domination pursued for its own sake and not for any practical or material objective. Orwell could not name the ideology of which his own views were a part, but his novel has much to contribute as an allegory of hypertrophied masculinity. Given his habitual disparagement of the female and his acceptance of a male model of behavior, Orwell could not analyze the dynamics of the pursuit of power. Although he called into question many social, political, and economic conventions, he accepted learned male behavior as the human norm. While depicting an essentially masculine ideology (of domination, violence, and aggression), Orwell made the common error of confusing culture with nature [emphasis mine].
"We should clearly recognize that Nineteen Eighty-Four contains no indictment of how human beings behave but only of how men in a particular tradition have behaved. What we know of power is linked to the male domination of society. We do not, cannot thus far, know what kind of society we would have if it were not dominated by males who are personally dominating females. No novel with female protagonists could ever have been so readily accepted as describing the generally human, but the identification of the male with the human norm is among the conventions of an androcentric society that is only now being seriously challenged. The totalitarian nightmare, from this perspective, is neither merely a particular political configuration nor an inevitable human construct but rather a possibility inherent in the cultural polarization of superior male/inferior female. Nineteen Eighty-Four warns us against the incursions of big government, against the loss of freedom implicit in the pursuit of power, but it does not warn men against themselves. It does not show Winston Smith coming to an understanding of O'Brien's love of power, his expression of dominance, by recognizing the cult of frustrated masculinity at work in himself. On the contrary, the novel, like Orwell's other work, fosters disdain for women, argues for their inferior consciousness in comparison with men's, and encourages the reader to enjoy the superiority of the protagonist's conscious, protesting, male position. We are meant to admire Winston's courage and take his defeat seriously; Julia's fate hardly matters. Far from demystifying the values implicit in his novel, Orwell takes them as a given and blames 'English Socialism' on the one hand and 'human nature' on the other. Orwell could have stripped bare the ideology of masculine supremacy and challenged us to confront it in all its consequences. But had he done so, he would have radically undermined his own position in the world."
"When Patai writes "only now being seriously challenged" the words "only now" are crucial, because Orwell was unwittingly writing a novel about eternal war at the beginning of a real world era of European peace that has now reached some 70 years. Why is that important? It is important because in some 14 prior centuries war was so endemic in Europe that continentals might refer to the peace between the 1870-1 Siege of Paris and WW I as a long peace. Given that and the other crucial reality of a transition of 6,000 years of humankind surrounding the Mediterranean Basin being on a more or less permanent war footing of physicality versus an increasing era of push button warfare, the term "androcentrism" reveals itself less as an oppressive ideology of patriarchy and more as an oppressive reality of circumstance. An environment where a women fights a 250 lb. man with a sword is different than fighting that same man while each is in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft. People will build statues to men in the former era, in the latter era, that could change. The irony of a "male domination of society" finally being "seriously challenged" is that has itself been brought about by men of peace and those who created the fundament of a Bill of Rights. Ideology is not the same as circumstance is not the same as demography. That brings us to the intellectual failure of how radical feminists in SFF view a male or white Table of Contents as an ideology of segregation rather than circumstance or demography while falsely portraying an anthology like Women Destroy Science Fiction as a circumstantial reaction to ideology rather than the supremacist ideology the anthology actually represents. In fact men have consciously gone against Patai's contention Orwell would not "have radically undermined his own position in the world." The easy conclusion is that supremacists would never do such a thing and would instead produce a thing like our Constitution. That Constitution emerges from a human rights culture, not one of male supremacy, and Women Destroy Science Fiction from supremacy, not a human rights culture. By the same token, Golden Age SF put failings on a principled human level, not the lie feminists spread about that it was "cissexist" and "white" in a disdainful supremacist, segregationist and ideological sense. When you read some idiot Tweeting "And of course all the books worth reading just happened to be written by straight white cis men," that is just what it is: an idiot.
I love how Patai uses "inferior consciousness" without a hint of self-awareness. And once again you see the gender feminist theory that a randomly created language like English has ideological misogyny embedded right into it. All language is Orwellian Newspeak from the point of view of a real and politically aware woman. In fact if English has misogyny built into it so do clouds.
By the time you get to mind-reading about Orwell's "gender ideology" and "an insightful discussion of the role of womb envy in the maintenance of misogyny and patriarchy, see Eva Feder Kittay, 'Womb Envy: An Explanatory Concept,' in Joyce Trebilcot, ed., Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory," you know you're arrived to the shamanistic disinterment of a feared foe followed by a ritual burning of the dead corpse to disperse and discredit his male mojo. Patai's book is nothing more than a unilaterally crowd-sourced disembowelment using shoddy feminist theory that itself amounts to little more than men are bad.
Patai is no gender feminist in the Dworkian sense but it's plain they share a common belief system where "masculine" and "ideology" occupy the same intellectual space, and so of course in Patai's eyes Orwell is a "misogynist" by technical knockout, as are in a sense all men, and perhaps even Mother Nature herself conforms to the definition of an ideology, or is even herself a misogynist.
In truth Patai and Dworkin differ mostly in terms of how rabid, hostile and paranoid one is and how aloof is the other. In the end their minds are never far from James Tiptree, Jr.'s "linkage between the behavioural expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male" and "play-predation" view of sex from "The Screwfly Solution" (as by Racoona Sheldon) rather than mutual love. There's something broken there, and it's probably not all men on earth. Feeling raped and being raped are two completely different things, but not in the mind of a gender feminist. It is worth noting the subtle macho topsy-turvy echoes of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) when a Tiptree character who is a woman writes "Being killed selectively encourages group identification.… You see how sane-headed I am." It is also worth noting that Tiptree - Alice Sheldon - was a far more subtle, sane, humorous and bright person than the average '70s academic gender feminist. Though Sheldon asked many of the same questions, she didn't claim dogmatic answers and nor did she do so with hatred but with probing if cynical satire.
The idea gender feminists only have to undo Mother Nature herself to finally have their place in the sun has the elegance all simple-minded self-serving thought does. What seems to be lost on feminists is the fact the more war is taken out of society the more the roles of women increase. Introduce war and those roles becomes less diverse. The problem there is that unless China, Russia and America all agree on the efficacy of gender studies at the same time, one is likely to conquer the other and render the question of male aggression being natural or a construct moot.
Ironically, men are the sole arbiter of this, so the insightful James Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon) is quite right to have one of her characters ruminate about this. In her 2010 review of "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" by Julie Phillips, Tanya Avakian uses a quote from Phillips' book where a Sheldon character fears what war might mean for women:
"'The women's movement is doomed… Women have no rights… except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them… we'll be back where we always were—property.'"
While Burdekin explicitly addresses the subjugation of women, Patai sees a lot of guys in 1984 and calls it the same thing, with the added element that Orwell was too dumb to ferret out his own work. As in all intersectional maunderings, 10 men in a room amounts to an exclusionary patriarchy by default. That's how old school SF boys' fiction defaults to sexism and misogyny and, by the way, in a manner 10 women in a room never does. For some reason, mind-tricks are eternally put on display to attribute a completely different mechanism at work dependent on your sex or race, one that is eternally benevolent, the other eternally menacing. A thing like racial or sexual segregation is no longer despised by universal agreement but seen as hateful in one instance and "safer" and desirable in another by engaging in Orwellian semantic gibberish.
And what can one say about Patai parroting a cult which stipulates as a fundament "it is but a small step from the male apotheosis of women as mothers to their degradation to mere breeding animals." That is not reality but a lesbian gender feminist reconcilement with a psychotic break with reality and the typical idea that heterosexuality itself is a means of oppression, disdain and even hatred rather than love and procreation. Motherhood is not a male apotheosis, conspiracy, or the shackles of a "male gaze" but the apotheosis of nature itself, a thing which gender feminists are at odds with and despise from the core of their being.
Taken to it's furthest extension, intersectionalism is a biological, geographical and cultural suicide cult which bewilderingly maintains it is natural rather than a cul-de-sac of an ideology where nature amounts to an ideology set against women. Intersectionalism takes history's also-rans and routinely concocts modes of equality not actually seen in the world. Doing so, gender feminists firmly believe they are not introducing failure into paradigms of success but merely diversity and justice. Try that in sports and a first place team would disappear. For some reason that doesn't fly in Ladyland.
Success defines itself and is made so by those who attain to it, not by those who don't on the maddening assumption they just will by virtue of identity. This is the source of intersectionalism's stance on illegal immigration; the introduction of a last place team intersectionalists would not only never live among but be quickly marginalized by if they did. For all their love of the marginalized, their lands are the last places intersectionalists will go to live. It is that doublethink that makes Patai's takedown of Orwell so delicious.
According to Patai, Orwell's seminal novel, by virtue of not possessing a feminist gaze, lacks "dimension" compared to an earlier novel no one's ever heard of (See: today's Nebula Awards), but which does have a feminist gaze. Out of all that, the false comparison that each novel is primarily "about the interactions of men" emerges, which is a connecting description so general as to have no meaning. Substituting identity for principle then reveals Orwell's novel is at once concerned with feminism, unconcerned with feminism and also anti-feminist in the typical here-today, gone-tomorrow weather vane of intersectionalist patter so common in today's core SF community. In fact in this world there is nothing NOT about gender feminism and the failings of men and Patai reveals more about herself than she does Orwell or 1984.
Patai's treatment of Swastika Night and 1984 is also a perfect analogy to today's SF novels being given awards, not for artistry, but for the very gender feminist correcthink Orwell warned against. In each scenario, art simply dies, and so there is that aspect when one talks about "lacking dimension" and reducing all art to political propaganda, (in the same way the entire male sex is an ideology) even to the point of critiquing work for being insufficiently political. Saying the "key concept" in 1984 is a "cult of masculinity" and by extension all SF if not the world contains the same "key" is ludicrously provincial, insulated and obsessive.
The lesson of 1984 is that perfectly sound minds can be intellectually hobbled by bizarre resentments and animosities passed off as justice and reality the way a card sharp deals aces from the bottom of a deck. Probably the most clueless statement by Patai in her book is "Christopher Hitchens's assumptions about what Orwell could not possibly have said, thought, or felt reveal a key phenomenon in the Orwell myth: the compulsion to overlook or ignore those writings of Orwell's that tend to undermine the purpose one is trying to make him serve."
'Nuff said, doctor. Now go heal thyself.
The reason I gave this section so much scope is because it is a microcosm of what is happening today in core SFF: a woman with a feminist agenda takes an important SF novel like 1984 and reduces it to a feminist agenda which has nothing to do with 1984. The man who wrote the novel is portrayed as an enemy of women as is the plot itself. The SF aspect sits on a back-burner, neglected, wrangled out of its own genre in favor of a bizarre obsession which reduces everything in the world to itself and its narcissistic tendencies a few dozen handfuls of women project onto millions of men alive and dead. Unsurprisingly, if feminists simply read the novel they might not act like a Big Brother of eternal manufactured wars.
Another reason I write about Patai's book is because it reveals the same gender feminist cant so common in SFF was already around almost 3 decades ago in feminist academic circles, and Patai's footnotes and quotes in turn reveal an older ancestry. The rhetoric of Patai's book is not only orthodoxy in today's core SFF community but mainstreamed there and beyond to the point it is part of pop culture, and concepts like "privilege," the "male gaze" and "rape culture" have been seamlessly blended into the fake narrative that yanks the Civil Rights movement into the present and falsely attaches the concerns of gender feminism as if it was there with Martin Luther King all along.
An example of that blending is how the word "erases" used by gender feminist SFF author Sunny Moraine and others takes the place of doesn't have and so invokes a purposeful straw man of exclusion and segregation which in turn enables this free-fire zone towards straight white men: "If your writing is full of white men, it's shitty writing. If your writing erases any sexual or gender identity other than straight cisgender people, it's shitty writing." The idea writing which simply doesn't have such and such a gender or ethnic group is "shitty" carries no weight whatsoever; Orwellian semantic reinforcements are called. That is a true Ministry of Love, pretending to compassion while unloading a broadside of naked bigotry. The post is symbolic of the intersectional camouflage which uses the word "diversity" four times while finishing with the target of what prevents that, "...dude. Dude. Dude." There's your nutshell. As I repeatedly point out, the word "diversity" is never used by gender feminists outside the context of the failings of tens of millions of straight white men. That being the case, diversity being a goal in and of itself can be seen for the lie it is.
The coda to that is the current trend of gender feminists to concoct racial and gender "micro-aggressions" and also blend that toxic brew of manufactured resentments into the Civil Rights narrative. You can get a taste of that in this article called "The Microaggression Farce" by Heather Mac Donald. As you'll see in that unbelievable article and throughout this book, racism in America is kept alive by the simple expedient of continually redefining what racism is. It's worth noting that if such microagressions were all black folks in America had to worry about in the last century there would have been no need for a Civil Rights movement in the first place. Part of the petition that resulted from the insane farce at UCLA Mac Donald writes about included this bit of madness straight out of an Orwellian novel today's intersectionalists in SF are themselves too much the victims of to satirize:
"Students consistently report hostile classroom environments in which the effects of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of institutionalized oppression have manifested within the department and deride our intellectual capacity, methodological rigor, and ideological legitimacy. Empirical evidence indicates that these structural and interpersonal microaggressions wreak havoc on the psychophysiological health and retention rates of People of Color."
Given the incredible levels of retrograde failure intersectional dogma demonstrates and laughingly promotes as progressive, it's not hard to imagine America slipping into a bizarre dark age were this to be institutionalized into length and breadth of American culture. Core SFF in intellectual terms already resembles a cave without electricity or Magna Cartas. The bovine attitudes shown in Mac Donald's article by an institution of higher-learning represent nothing less than the destruction of the U. S. Constitution in favor of one where rule of law is replaced by the rule of race and gender propagated by an inquisition that uses fear, lies and shaming as a court. The mechanism is always the same: one concocts fake racism in order to clear the field for attacks against straight white men. It is a paradigm that is the KKK's dream come true, but which it has no access to. That's why the new intersectional KKK doesn't seem like one, but it is. The "intergroup dialogue" which Mac Donald mentions in her article is nothing but an Orwellian title for KKK. The bottom line is that the groups most trying to make a case for their equality are in fact making an excellent case they have yet to fully come to grips with the age of enlightenment or even the Library at Alexandria. On the flimsy excuse they are mainstreaming compassion and justice, intersectional political correctness is by far the single largest source of continual, formal and institutional hate speech in America today. Mac Donald's article is as extraordinary as any you'll ever read on the subject and that madness has hollowed out core SF literature to nothing more than a treadmill of hate speech. "I really think that black people are absolutely stunning" is something only black people can and do say. Using the theory of power privilege, for a white person to say such a thing is solid KKK territory. In fact a race supremacist is a race supremacist. As Mac Donald points out about that linked video, people who assert "the most important thing about an individual is his racial and ethnic identity" portraying being asked about their racial identity as a microaggression is another in the circular black hole of a stacked deck which always deals aces to anyone not a straight white male no matter what. The eternal goal is not addressing racism but showing what jerks 230 million white Americans are, especially men. "At @SFWA's #NebulaAwards, only one award went to a white male and that wasn't one of the ones voted on by the membership.#diversityinSFF"
*
George Orwell writes in a letter about "a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted." If one replaces "fuhrer" with a thing like intersectionalism, it seems to fit. Intersectionalism is not only an ideology built on falsehoods but on sociopathic and pathological ones. Anything becomes anything in that world; whites become black, men become women, history becomes one enormous Jim Crow battle of oppressed women and white vs PoC. Anything which goes against the narrative, such as non-white colonialism or slavery is sent into a memory-hole. Reality is fluid in such a way the real world disappears. When a white woman passing as black states the larger white community "don’t really understand the definitions of race and ethnicity" it's pretty clear that is not only privilege theory but one where there are no definitions of anything. Reality becomes not only what you point to at the time but based on race and gender so that a stacked deck prevents one race or gender of ever being correct. The fact that woman is white is just one example of the many hair-raising stupidities and self-contradictions built into intersectionalist lunacy. One could easily argue the mainstreaming of hate speech and lunacy has not only literally driven an otherwise normal woman mad, but apply it to otherwise sane flak catchers in the SFF community. Germany has shown an entire culture can be driven mad. Not only am I not surprised Rachael Dolezal pretended to be black, this book predicts such behaviors. When anything is anything, an intersectionalist like Mikki Kendall can transform a dead-on accurate replica of a "1911A1 .45 automatic" into "toys" so a 12 yr. old child shot by the police can be death by racism. Pointing out that fact can be transformed into "worthless racist bullshit." Anything is anything in intersectionalism as long as it's a straight white male. Racism is "anti-racism," and facts are "racist."
The response to Dolezal by the feminist intersectionalist community undermined all the nonsensical arguments they've been selling. It was corrupt in the first place. If there is no such thing as a typical woman there can be no question of a woman trapped in a man's body. Emblematic of this is an article at The Guardian called "I became a black woman in Spokane. But, Rachel Dolezal, I was a black girl first." It's written by a women named Alicia Walters who claims in her profile she "was born, raised, and survived as a black girl in Spokane, WA." In a passage which destroys transgender thought, Walters writes "If blackness can simply be worn or performed, then every white woman with a weave and a cause, every white girl with a snap and a little attitude, can supplant the lived experiences of what it is to become a black woman." She only adds to her hypocrisy by mentioning "... black identity cannot be put on like a pair of shoes" but later writing as a teenager "...I wore bright, creative clothing; I embraced my love of dance, of song, of sports." The reason you see that hypocrisy echoed throughout this book is such people simply gauge their own identity as always right and moral, which of course means you never have to think. Every identity addict like Walters is another brick torn from Western civilization. It's not coincidence Germany and Japan immolated themselves in WW II. They became convince they couldn't fail because of who they were rather than by reasoned assessment. Even to the extent the Japanese may have realized they couldn't match the Americans, they thought America would spiritually cave. To the end Hitler thought if he could make it costly enough for the Allies in operations like the Battle of the Bulge the Allies would sue for peace, and he was never able to intellectually reconcile his views of the Soviets as inferiors with the disaster which had overtaken him in the East. Hitler mistook his very identity for success and that of others for failure.
"K Tempest Bradford @tinytempest The reason why anyone would say 'if transgender is a thing then why isn't transracial a thing?' is inherent belief that trans folk are..." and blah, blah, blah. In anything is anything land, intersectionalists fall into traps they set for others on a regular basis.
*
Intersectional gender feminists don't talk to each like they do to the public. The rhetoric you will find inside Women Destroy Science Fiction as opposed to the hype about it outside (as symbolized by the title) is completely different. Here's a harsh dose of reality: the base premises of gender feminists are more starkly insane than the most radical Islamic views on sex and women, and that's really saying something. Given that, it's only natural gender feminists want to pass themselves off as just the gals and any opposition to them as being anti-women, homophobic and anti-feminist. It's a form of intellectual bullying and a thing you see frequently in their Tweets and on their blogs. As I've said, that is the reason that anthology uses the word "women." Intersectionalists find it convenient to pass off and confuse their insane racist gender-fluid supremacy as being the same as equal rights feminists or simply all women on Earth. The truth is that calling this anthology Women Destroy Science Fiction is the same as Islamic fundamental supremacists or the KKK having such an anthology specifically based on their ideologies and calling it Arab or Southern Science Fiction. It is lying and it is willful lying and towards a purpose. Were it otherwise, lesbians would be about 2.5% of the anthology's contents. In fact it is far higher than that. Does it need diversity? You'd better damn well believe it doesn't.
Intersectional feminism is not a case of feminism having a few bad apples. Gender feminism has nothing to do with equal rights feminism and their academics have stated outright and for years they have no interest in simple equality. They don't want equality in a corrupt patriarchal system where heterosexuality is considered the norm. Gender feminists want to destroy heterosexuality as the norm and in its place say whatever their deluded fantasies encompass are as valid as the nuclear family, more so if you read their quotes, since gender feminists consider heterosexuality a form of slavery and a system of oppression, "that heterosexuality is crucial to maintaining male supremacy (Charlotte Bunch - '72)."
It's not hard to get the impression that radical gender feminism is an ideological mechanism to reconcile and explain away the phobias and psychosis of the worst of them. Thus does the entire world become a thing broken and disheveled, laid at the feet of a scapegoated patriarchy that includes all men in that broken world. One doesn't have to be a genius to figure out putting a cast for a broken leg on the wrong leg might lead to an infection rather than a healing process. A cult of psychotic and feral blame will never get anywhere but to further increase the failure innate to such a cult. Since nothing becomes healed, ever more meticulous fantasies of oppression are called for. Put all this in the context of the credibility of anti-oppression rights movements and institutionalize it in academia, pop culture and gov't, and it becomes plain dangerous. Put all this into SFF as an obsessive, hateful and racist centerpiece and the literature fades into the background to become nothing more than a tin can for feminist sour lemon juice. One anti-feminist named Robert McCain puts it like this:
"They are psychologically and emotionally damaged in some way which makes it impossible for them to cope with their disappointments and, rather than try to repair the damage, they seek instead to console themselves by striking exaggerated postures of victimhood and engaging in extremist hate-talk against men. And this — feminism’s function as a substitute for psychiatric treatment — explains why they can’t stand to have their narratives scrutinized or contradicted."
In my mind that mechanism has nothing to do with being gay, but instead is a human failure we see with ideologies which create and harbor resentful sociopaths which choose a group and then scapegoat them to explain away their own hatred and ranges from Nazism to Sayyid Qutb to Rwanda.
The bottom line is that mainstream intersectional gender feminism (and it has successfully inserted itself as the mainstream in feminism today) is built from the ground up as a bigoted, racist, sexist and supremacist movement, not a fringe of feminism gone awry. Naturally they don't see it like that; they consider themselves heroes in a fight against oppression. However the only way they can maintain that view is to do away with traditional definitions of racism and sexism, if not principle and reality itself. Gender feminists make no secret of the fact they have no use for a thing like the U.S. Constitution except to manipulate it to their advantage and eventually throw it down. "We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to destroy the structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws..." - Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (1974) Intersectional gender feminism bears the same rough resemblance to equal rights feminism as neo-Nazis do to Jeffersonian democracy.
Robert McCain writes about the most credible form of feminism today, gender feminism: "Confronted with what feminism actually means, the normal woman’s reaction is no different than the normal man’s reaction: They’re horrified by the anti-human totalitarian hatred implicit in this doctrine. The naive liberal who calls herself a 'feminist' in 2014 is much like the naive liberals who, in the 1930s and '40s, joined Communist front groups because they believed the dishonest Popular Front rhetoric of 'peace, 'justice' and 'civil rights.'"
Nebula-winner Rachel Swirsky's disingenuous essay in Women Destroy Science Fiction she finishes with "We're here. We’re fifty percent of you," predictably inflates her own ideology from statistical zero to 50% ; what 50% - how is it presented? People know hostility when they see it and Swirsky pretending as if she doesn't project that hostility is ludicrous. As usual, the fault is the intersectionalist's audience which is the world and their ignorant bigotry, not the miserable ideological bigotry of intersectionalism itself.
The same is true of the 29 personal short essays that are part of the anthology. Taken as a whole, these women seem clueless that the totality of the message is that men are, at best, unfair, lacking in perception, and spiritually and morally inferior. That comes through from even the most benign of them. But of course they are not all benign; there is the usual "white straight man's world" and "misogynistic culture."
*
For more on how stupendously boring intersectionalists can be when pretending their weird obsessions are simply SF, read this sleeping pill at Tor.com by Alex MacFarlane called "Post-Binary Gender in SF: Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany." Considering how easily intersectionalists make fun of John Norman's admittedly moronic Gor series, MacFarlane and Delany make Gor look like ready-made batter for June Cleaver's cookies. Keep in mind, this is a culture that will take you to the cleaners for using "transgendered" with an "-ed" rather than "transgender." Why? Who the hell knows?
Take note of the tone in how an anti-bigot writes, including a response from an acquaintance about "Awful Cis People" that would presumably be awful if it were Awful Homo People or Awesome Straight People:
"A. Dally MacFarlane @foxvertebrae · I will sleep pleased at this middle finger raised to bigots."
Provided she has a dictionary, a flashlight and a clue, otherwise she can just super-glue her finger to her own forehead. Intersectionalists are people persons, as long as you're the right people.
Diversity as sold by SFF's PC warriors is a crock, usually expressed with a dose of racism; its valuable mechanism is never explained, nor is it ever explained why diversity is so valuable only for endeavors dominated by straight white men and no one else. Anytime you prioritize quotas over success, the result is failure. It's not a question of diversity - which is fine - but a question of how diversity is introduced. Add to that a cult of endemic intellectual failure, which is what intersectionalism is, and the result is not only failure but wholesale destruction. One can point to a bombed out building whose walls are still standing and say "Look at that building," but it's not really a building anymore, is it, nor is dismantling a building renovation if you can't rebuild it.
When an indifferently written average novel like Ancillary Justice gets a tidal wave of "Oohs" and "Aahs" and Peter Hamilton's ambitious space operas get the "What... when?" treatment, it's pretty clear SF has fallen into a hole. It's just as clear the reason for that as of 2014 lies in requesting "more lesbians" the same way an old Saturday Night Live skit is about "more cowbell."
Even aside from that, the truth is that Ancillary Justice covers decades old territory treated as new and groundbreaking. But that's what will happen when you have a culture of supposed SF fans that has blacklisted its own history. Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy was new and groundbreaking; no one before or since has done that, but his innovation was strictly on a literary level, so who cares. I don't expect anyone to have a compendium of seminal SF novels in their heads with which to judge such things. Neither do I expect people to make sure they never do.
The laughable result is a literature built on a framework of group defamation - negative racial and gender assumptions and profiling in the name of not doing that; about as strange an activity (and clueless) for an artist to engage in as one can imagine. That is not art but a funeral for intellect. When one reads the non-fiction writings of Ann Leckie on the subject of intersectionalism and one realizes she literally and ironically has no gender-neutral definition for the words "bigotry" or "sexism," and you add in her novel partially based on the supposed societal impact of gender pronouns and her own enlightened awareness of that, you are attending that funeral. Given her gender paintbrush, one might wonder if Leckie is making an argument that women should no longer be allowed to vote.
I get the joke of the Kickstarter project already, and I'm not laughing, because reading shit science fiction that demonizes me doesn't make me happy. Good literature is not written by good identities but by good writers. Women are good SF writers - why wouldn't they be - but not if you start essentially picking them at random while adding a sort of queer affirmative action. In yet another layer of nuance, Ann Leckie isn't being given a chance to be thrown into a crucible where she can reflect and have a chance to improve herself as a writer; she's already there according to the wind at her back. Like the overwhelming majority of Tiptree Award nominees Leckie will almost certainly find herself among, in a few years down the road, chances are her name will be forgotten. That's what happens to trend-of-the-week writers who never get any editing tough-love. They leave the echo chamber and no one wants what they're selling because not only is it boring but they can't write. Leckie wishes she had face-punching misogynist racists like John Campbell and Frederik Pohl for editors. Can we even say Robert Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt and Larry Niven would've even existed without Campbell and Pohl? Who do writers like Leckie have? The have an intersectionalist wind tunnel blowing them forward they can never truly leave. Not only that, just massively publicizing an intersectionalist author's own racist quotes could arguably end their careers before they even started. As Martin Petto points out at the LA Review of Books, "With all this extravagant praise so early in her career and already locked into a publishing strait jacket of sequelitis, I do wonder how Leckie will evolve."
SFF author Kate Elliott thought Petto's post "reeked of white male privilege" for the simple reason it compared a woman writer unfavorably to a man, but Petto himself never makes that distinction; he is talking about the writing. It is Elliott who leaps to her conclusion. The stupidity there is Elliott is implying this is a thing that could've been predicted in advance via that "privilege," and in fact that is false. One can explain a thing after the fact and retro-engineer it so it appears to make sense, but if one can't use Elliott's gimpy model to predict a behavior and outcome beforehand, then it is simply the wishful thinking of racism's confirmation bias. This is once again a demonstration of how intersectionalism falsely portrays being white and male and the attendant privilege as the equivalent of something like Jim Crow. In a Jim Crow county I could predict a black man couldn't walk into a whites-only restaurant. I can't predict a thing from white privilege. Elliott knew Petto would behave in such a manner, but only after he did it.
SFF personage Cheryl Morgan proves the dangers of identity advocacy in a post on the page of that very Kickstarter project by writing "Women have, of course, always been destroying science fiction. Scholarly works such as Justine Larbalestier’s THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES IN SCIENCE FICTION show this to be true." Anyone familiar with Larbalestier's "scholarly" work knows it is heavily based on information SF feminist author Joanna Russ ran across, which was the actual and real scholarship of SF historian Sam Moskowitz in the form of an anthology. Worse, Larbalestier put the cart before the horse: namely, that men are bad and women good in SF's history and then was completely unable to make a case for it, though apparently spending months sifting through a library's collection of old SF pulps.
The obvious conclusion is that Morgan's bias is so great, the reason Larbalestier's work is considered worthy or "scholarly" rests entirely on the fact that Larbalestier is a woman and an intersectionalist. In this PC culture within SFF, there simply is no wrong done by anyone who is a favored member of the multiculture. Filters of balanced discrimination and critique are thrown right out the window. Larbalestier's examples culled from the pulps, again mostly inspired by others, are ridiculously obscure anomalies. If one wants to engage in that type of thing, put the cart in back of the horse and limit yourself to some control mechanism like a 10 year run of one magazine's cover stories or a hall of fame anthology rather than hopping about cherry-picking garbage no one's ever heard of and which influenced no one.
It takes an Orwellian audacity and dislocation from reality for Larbalestier to then be able to Tweet this intellectual collapse:
That is a mind that literally cannot process its own horrendous bias.
For a stunning insight into the way Larbalestier's mind works, there's this post called "Who is My Audience?"
This advocacy for gay and female literary voices and their affirmative action placement within a literary movement will in fact destroy SF. It is not because lesbians and women can't write SF - that has nothing to do with it. It is because the talent pool is so small - sometimes 2% of humanity - and is combined with boring subject matter and pushing first time or simply bad novelists; the level of work can't do anything but fall and fail. Just look at the nominees for the Tiptree Award over the years and look at the nominees for the 2013/14 Nebula Awards, and the year before as well. That is not literary excellence - that is an affirmative action pie-chart.
As in case of the lesbian music circuit in America, the no. 1 priority there is you must be a lesbian. Music is no. 2. It is no knock on the level of quality of that music or a surprise that the level of artistry substantially lags behind the larger music scene. It can't do otherwise because the talent pool is about 2% of what would ordinarily be available. That is the other side of pie-charting literature, the percentages no one talks about. Mainstream 2% by fiat and watch a literary movement collapse. The irony there is feminists assert a literature without half the people, namely women, will never fully realize itself. Intersectionalism's Orwellian response is to take even more people out. When you are asserting a percentage of all literature paid attention to MUST be female, gay and non-white, you are sticking a fork in literature to see if it is done, but you will burn it to a crisp. When it comes to opinions about literature, this is a cult of people that simply cannot be trusted.
Here N.K. Jemisin Tweets about a "Summer Reading List" as if it's actually a summer reading list. Given it's Jemisin's and K. Tempest Bradford's idea of intersectionalist literature, I could've predicted the list myself using only the race and gender of the authors:"N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin · 10 Titles You Should Add To Your Summer Reading List http://jane.io/1liQhNo Gah! Just saw this. :) by @tinytempest"
Bradford hilariously writes in intersectional Newspeak "The science fiction and fantasy I love best includes all three of these elements in equal measure: engaging characters, expansive, immersive worldbuilding, and speculative premises that reach beyond easy answers and well-worn cliches. These books fit that bill." The truth is those things take a backseat. In fact what Bradford meant to say is supremacist literature guided by black female intersectionalists. And remember, this whole movement is predicated on the notion straight white males were doing this for decades. In other words, it's wrong. Not in #SegregationIsDiversity-land. Needless to say, what's actually in the books is almost an afterthought.
The silliness of Bradford and all intersectionalists is they reserve the sole right to advocate by race while declaring anyone they don't approve of who does the same thing as racists. It's a con game that wouldn't fool a child, in addition to the fact intersectionalists are the only institutionalized racial advocates and bigots in the SFF community, which is otherwise devoid of supremacists.
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The result of all this are conversations by adults I frankly never believed possible:
2. Paul Weimer @PrinceJvstin @beth_bernobich yes, you have the 'right' to write the book, if you do it with care and well.
3. Beth Bernobich @beth_bernobich @PrinceJvstin I'm also thinking about me, a white woman, taking up space and stories that aren't mine to tell.
4. Paul Weimer @PrinceJvstin @beth_bernobich well, I had a similar wondering post-Hugo awards about whether my voice in genre was worthless as another hetero white male
5. Paul Weimer @PrinceJvstin @beth_bernobich I was told in no uncertain terms that it was bollocks for me to think that way.
6. Beth Bernobich @beth_bernobich @PrinceJvstin Agreed w/ the bollocks. We just need to keep in mind our own privilege as we tackle the subjects."
Just "another hetero white male." Honestly, I have never met such people in my life and had no idea they existed, but I am sure I could sell them shares in Mars. There's nothing like stereotyping an entire region as white supremacist militia. Bernobich must think Minnesota is some enclave of white militia. Her Orwellian use of "throughout" and "ferguson" in one sentence is also typical of PC grammar, which is devoid of thought.
"I started writing a near future SF novel with with mid-west states in rebellion bc they protested against equal rights. Am thinking I was nowhere near blunt enough about the racism existing RIGHT NOW throughout the US. #ferguson" - SFF author and SFWA member Beth Bernobich. Ferguson is in reference to the Summer 2014 shooting death of an unarmed black 18 year old by a police officer.
It is amazing to watch these people justify their continual bald-faced racism:
Bradford again: "why is it always white dudes who think they are being so 'brave' in publishing crap designed to be hurtful that had little artistic value?"
The retweet below by John Scalzi is an oft used bit of straw man satire in typical scare quotes surrounding a thing no one actually says that engages the willful intellectual failure of a cult of identity that seems to have no idea what equal protection means or any phrase that begins "regardless of..." It is obscenely stupid:
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The level of Orwellian cluelessness within the PC community in SFF is staggering. Here, SFF author Chuck Wendig is retweeted by K. Tempest ("cracka ass cracka") Bradford:
10 minutes later Bradford retweets Wendig again:
That poses the obvious question of how one tunes out one's own ability to think and reason, let alone read one's own words 10 minutes apart. There's your anti-racism, bewilderingly expressed in the form of a racist comment and retweeted by yet another anti-racist with a history of anti-racist comments... in the Orwellian sense.
In this post called "I Am A Racist And I Am A Sexist And Probably Some Other -Ists, Too," Wendig projects his provincial views on the world while really only describing himself. Wendig's insights into American "Islamophobia" are straight out of a stereotype factory. Given recent events in Egypt, by Wendig's definition of Islamophobia, not only are the majority of Egypt's 85% Muslim population Islamophobes, but worse than Americans. The same week as Wendig's post the United Arab Emirates released a list of 82 terrorist groups far harsher than Europe or America, including two Muslim organizations in the U. S. the American gov't uses as outreach groups. In short, Wendig's post amounts to nothing more than showing off his intersectional brainwashing to SFF's central committee for goodthink. Wendig's spectacularly unnuanced views on race and sex in America similarly read like he got them off a combination of the internet, American TV and film, and the Huffington Post. It's the usual Vashti's Bigoted Intersectional Cave where, using the shadows on the walls from across an ocean, Wendig can detect white "privilege," "a straight white dude" and "not straight, non-white, and non-dudely" people. Somehow, Wendig manages to touch on every moronic intersectional talking point without ever touching reality. An easy thing to do seeing as how the ideology he promotes by proxy was created by people trying to reconcile their own psychotic breaks with reality and bigoted paranoia. In that sense, Wendig's ocean isn't really the deal-breaker since his PC American cousins in core SFF are themselves several oceans removed from reality. What's one more?
Using the Twitter hashtag #WeNeedDiversityInBooks, Wendig writes "because as a heteronormative white dude I've got like, 15,000 books that talk to me already." I don't have any idea what he's talking about. Does Wendig maintain the mere act of being white constitutes an ideology, or is it that ethnic groups share racial traits? Are white people talking to Wendig - like drums? Do black NBA scorers talk to black people more than white? Are there then too many black scorers? You don't have to ask too many rhetorical questions like that to figure out the nature of the Mad Hatter party you've dropped in on.
First of all, if gay folks are 5% of people, that's just self-limiting, not a conspiracy of hate. Secondly, Arabs and Latinos, Indians and Africans don't have books with themselves in them? There's an entire world of nations that have that. If the idea is Europe and America need to do that, why don't those other nations need to reciprocate? Again, it is the conspicuous and one-sided targeting here - the double standard - that is so troubling and so ever-present in the daffy world of the politically correct.
So what? The percentage of white middle-weight boxing champions has been less than that for years, and 12% of the National Basketball Association's Top 25 all-time scorers are white. So what? I could care less. But don't look for Malinda Lo or any of those PC folks to Tweet that or anything remotely like it. This isn't about fair play - this is about racial advocacy flying a false one-sided flag of justice and equality where if one side indulges in overt racial narcissism it's just fine but if there's an accidental white demographic majority somewhere it's KKK-time. What about China and Africa? Do we need to put out Twitter alerts? These folks constantly do this same thing globally and in regard to other cultural interests and art forms but they are conspicuous in singling out anything white and Western and just as conspicuously leaving the rest alone.
Speaking of the NBA and double standards, a controlling owner of the Atlanta Hawks named Bruce Levenson announced he was selling his interest in the team due to a "racist" e-mail he had once written. In reading the e-mail, it exactly mirrors the racial rhetoric and arguments for diversity in SFF by intersectionalists I present in this book. The only difference is that races are reversed. Other than that and the specifics, that e-mail could've been written by Jim Hines, Daniel Jose Older, or any number of people in SFF. The fact that one man gets ousted from a business for what gets others awards and accolades in the SFF community is too stupid to support. Levenson's e-mail contains the following:
"— it's 70 pct black — the cheerleaders are black — the music is hip hop — at the bars it's 90 pct black"
That is the exact rhetoric the PC in SFF use in regard to SFF conventions, panels at those conventions, authors and the characters in SFF novels. It's not racist when the PC do it. They were some sane voices about the affair, but none of them within SFF, where they go straight for the racial jugular. ESPN columnist Jason Whitlock wrote about a radio show he once had:
"We had the task of maintaining a show that remained relevant with black listeners while being inclusive of white people. At my direction, we made a concerted effort to cultivate white males as regular callers to the show. When it came to on-air contests, radio remotes and special events, we made a special effort to be inclusive of white men. As someone who has an affinity and passion for discussing racial and cultural issues, I made it a point to only discuss those issues when they really mattered and not turn the shows into Malcolm X Unplugged. The music we played going in and out of commercial breaks was closely monitored and was intentionally peppered with the rock music I enjoy (a lot of Bon Jovi)."
Radical feminist ideology within SFF can't or won't grasp the difference between the realities of marketing and the KKK, nor are they capable of recognizing their own racialist language when they read it, although they achieve the neat Orwellian trick of hating it just the same.
Here is another series of Tweets that left me with my mouth hanging open. SFF authors Kate Elliott and Justin Larbalestier discover a novel by a black women named Ann Petry called The Street. Australian Larbalestier writes "I definitely want to push The Street into the hands of everyone who denies that systemic racism and misogyny exist." The Street is... a NOVEL! From 1946!! The smug sanctimoniousness of intersectionalists combined with their arrogance and complete lack of brains is unfailingly stunning. Larbalestier brilliantly sums up her all-knowing suspicions about everyone who isn't her and her 5 hysterical intersectional friends by asking and answering "why is such a brilliant novel as Ann Petry's The Street (1946) little known outside African-American Studies?" "We know why The Street isn't more widely discussed."
The answer to that lies in knowing the racist minds of tens of millions of people an ocean, a continent and decades away while one's own obvious racism, stupidity and sexism sinks into a bog of unknown depths of ignorance. I have rather happier news for Larbalestier: Germany and Japan surrendered... a year before The Street was published. But Australia should maintain its system of racistwatchers in the Solomon Islands, because I read a comic book about Japanese troops still holding out and why deny Japanese imperialism? The idea Larbalestier and Elliott are actually published authors is mind-boggling. Larbalestier once wrote "Asimov can’t write. Neither can (Arthur C.) Clarke." 'Nuff said.
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Ann Leckie seems to agree her novel is nothing to write home about and writes so in a post on her blog that also admits she is engaging in a type of affirmative action as well as safe-space from the immoral "white, straight, cis dude." The funny thing there is I don't think Leckie's intellectual failure is because of her being a white, straight, cis broad but because she is an individual who can't think. Where Leckie and I disagree is in the destructive power of engaging in identity art when it becomes orthodoxy in a literary community, not to mention straight up racial and gender bigotry. Like so much of the rhetoric from the politically correct, Leckie's post is an Orwellian expression of anti-racism and anti-sexism racism and sexism. I suppose it's possible I missed the justice in making an analogy of an America where "Women and POC and LGBT" get a punch in the face every time they sit down to eat, "routinely assaulted" by "white straight cis guys," but I doubt it. Seeing the world divided into criminal and victim, with white straight men thrown into a de facto misogynistic and homophobic KKK is creepy and bizarre childishness and bigotry. On the level of political and social commentary, Leckie's post verges on the paranoid. Her analogy is most certainly naive and ignorant.
And just so we aren't confused about who Leckie thinks are the [redacted] of the world she puts "white straight cis guy," "white straight cis guys," "non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-guys," "white straight cis guys," "white straight cis guys," "white, straight, cis dude" all in that one post. I just love anti-racism and anti-sexism. In one fell swoop, Leckie takes out 100 million white male Americans, too unaware of herself to understand her profiling is no different than writing about "kikes" or "jungle bunnies." No matter how you cut it, it is a treasure of a post. Just replace Leckie's charming prose with "Jew," "black," or "gay" to get the full effect of what it is you're really seeing. This is all part of the routine stupidity of social feminists wherein they teach us that demonizing one's sexuality is wrong by demonizing one's sexuality.
Given all that, it's no surprise Leckie finishes by stating that anyone (assuming only males dislike her novel) that is not on board her novel is making "a move straight out of How to Suppress Women’s Writing," referring to Joanna Russ's equally creepy, childish, bigoted and paranoid feminist tract. There's not a chance anyone disagrees; they just hate women and want them pulling carrots in a field.
Given that, why would it surprise anyone that multiple SFF award nominee Kameron Hurley would claim 3 times in one week that some unknown percentage of Americans would like to see her dead, "that a lot of people would like to" drag her "to death behind the back of a truck," and then write "There’s difference between 'I don’t like person X because we disagree on tax law' & 'I don’t like person X because they’d like to kill me.' I do hope folks can tell difference. Course, it’s easier to put 'wants to kill me' down to 'politics' when it’s not you they’re gunning for."
In addition, Leckie admits she is promoting naked identity advocacy, presumably because it is wrong. Leckie's culture promotes an analogue to a non-existent white patriarchal supremacy they hate because they are unprincipled Orwellians that fantasize about a world without men and calling for an end to heterosexuality being a literary default on the web site associate of SF's largest publisher. Extend out Leckie's safe space to it's logical end and it's no surprise the feminist WisCon literally has a "safer-space" for non-white women, or that they recommend books based on race and gender even while they revile the idea in general principle, but granting themselves a free pass. It is no shocking surprise that a successful and idealized version of SFF's PC culture is the very racist, supremacist, intolerant, bigoted, segregated, discriminatory and gender-phobic mythical entity they are so set against, nor that that enemy is a windmill they have turned their fellow human beings into. If men actually did all the things Leckie and her comrades themselves do intersectionalists might actually have an argument, and men would be trying to make them wear skirts to their ankles and without the right to vote or even go outside. Don't expect Hurley or Leckie to sign up for the draft in an act of protest any time soon.
In addition to that, if people like Leckie, Jemisin, Hurley and Mikki Kendall swore off saying anything about white men for one year, what in the world would they do? It would be like having withdrawals.
There is a steady stream of stuff like that last Tweet from Intersectional Social Justice Warriors. The problem there is you don't see that type of thing the other way around outside something like Stormfront. I'm trying to imagine an SFF convention or mainstream pop culture site giving a platform to a white person who would write electronic rap music and basketball is ours even if it has been blackfaced. And once again the claim is this is anti-racist rhetoric.
The question isn't whether there is or isn't a systemic problem there but in thinking the solution somehow lies in racially defaming 230 million white people. Worse than that is the Orwellian thinking that so readily imagines the racial failure of one side with as much alacrity as it summarily dismisses the possibility of a racial failure of the other side. One cannot stipulate the one without lending credence to the other. The truth is that it is as wrong to associate whites with a white individual criminal as it is to do the reverse, but the PC only do that in reverse, and PoC skate away as often as white folks fall through a hole in the same ice. The sum total reveals more about the racial bigotry of the people who assert such nonsense than it does about tens of millions of black or white folks. People are fond of pointing out that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. That doesn't include people who look right at that history and ignore it.
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Following their nature of self-contradictory doublethink, I am often amused by Orwell's PC children when they illogically argue "We have always fought" and for women in military SF with as much enthusiasm as they studiously ignore the fact they don't have to sign up for the draft and are in no hurry to change that. I should remind you that this all comes from a crowd that persistently reminds us that SF should reflect the real world and that a failure to do so is "anti-realistic" and "not the world I live in." For women to inhabit that military future, I assume they will be central in doing away with a male-only military draft. Since there is no sign among feminists they care to change that, that SF future must be far distant in time indeed, and perhaps in another galaxy far away, if not alternate universe. Diversity, meet bullshit.
As an aside, the funniest thing about Foz Meadows' review of Leckie's novel is that a world where you can't tell if someone is black, white, gay or male is the only way a person like Meadows and her PC cohorts in SF would ever be capable of treating the real world around them fairly or in judging art. Given the fact they'd have their favorite punching bag and raison d'être taken from them, they'd be bereft. They claim to wish for such a future, but they would hate it, since they would then have nothing to do since they don't actually produce anything anyone wants. Be careful what you wish for. Just keep it in the novels, like the military draft.
As for literature, consider this: on her website Ann Leckie writes "every aspiring writer ought to read Hal Duncan’s posts on writing." That brings you to this post called "How to NOT Cut Adjectives." Read that exercise in pedantry and then realize how political correctness hamstrings either person from recognizing a bigot when one is standing right in front of them and you have a perfect combination of today's SFF "literature" and why it is anything but. That is unless you consider conformity written by people who literally see the concept of right and wrong as being based in their political identity literature. What's the moral of that story going to be? Sorry you weren't born like me? If that's the case, great SFF is all around you, as well as eleventy kazillion dragons. The thing I used to love about the genre of Sword and Sorcery was the conspicuous absence of dragons, multi-volume quests where the young hero never finds anything but boredom, and obnoxious sniffing and braid-pulling. I'm supposed to like the heroes, not continue reading in the hope they'll die. Second note to writers: fantasy is the opposite of prosaic boredom both in terms of content and sensible prose. If I wanted sensible prose and to be bored I'd read instruction manuals, not "The Ship of Ishtar."
One gets the feeling that modern SFF writers don't understand the difference between content and the ability to deliver that content. It is not invention or good writing that makes for great novels but great story-telling. You can write about passive versus active voice or adjectives, first person omniscient, and foreshadowing and info-dumps all you want but Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, C.L. Moore, Ray Bradbury and E.E. "Doc" Smith won't fare very well in those terms. Yet each is in some respect a kingmaker, practically comprising their own genre. SFF is the deliverer of insensate and eccentric magic, not a sensible workaday world, except insofar as SF's Golden Age from 1940 to 1960 conspicuously and more sedately contrasted itself against type coming out of the hyper-reality of the pulps of the Roaring Thirties. But sedate is not the same as conformity, and those more workmanlike authors such as Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov and Henry Kuttner still delivered marvelously eccentric visions even encased as they were in their newly found verisimilitude.
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Here is a reviewer discussing her SFF year in review at The Book Smugglers:
"I gave 3 books a perfect 10 – fewer than the two previous years – and only one of those to a book published in 2013 (Ancillary Justice). I read a whopping 112 books written by female authors, amounting to 75% of my reading and that’s pretty awesome. The vast majority of what I read was Speculative Fiction (25 were Scifi – a lot for me), 36 were Middle Grade (24%, fewer than last year) and 50 were YA (33%). I am SO not impressed with the number of books with PoC protagonists (about 20 or 13%) or by authors of colour (14 or about 9%) I’ve read this year; I am equally disappointed in myself about the number of books with LGBTQ protagonists I read (12 or 8%) which just goes to show how the best intentions are nothing if you are not alert and conscious of what you choose to read. Goal number 1 for 2014: be more conscious about choosing what I read so that I can truly read more diversely."
Yeah, that's "pretty awesome." After that spot on impression of someone addressing a pre-teen literary politburo in China in the 1960's, her blog partner, who for some unfortunate reason also does reviews for Kirkus, adds this about the books she had read, and she puts Ancillary Justice as her second favorite of the year:
"Just 29 featured books with POC protagonists, and a shocking 7 books were written by authors of color. Only 11 books featured LGBTQ main characters. Clearly, I have a lot of work to do next year to fix this huge deficit. On the bright side, 96 of the books I read were written by female authors (76%)."
Clearly shocking awesome sauce. In whatever dark hole art has been thrown into, someone should administer the coup de grace and stick a fork in it. And when you're done with that, do the same for the words "alert" and "conscious," because apparently Stormfront has a cute little pug-nosed cousin with pig-tails and slightly different interests. It is unbelievably odd to read teen banter Dear Diary rhetoric like that. It is so casually stated and so unaware of itself amidst language that reads like a 12 year old girl with braces. It's like a Barbie doll with a recording that says "Ken and I don't go around Jews" or Pokemon talking about white privilege. If there are people who think anti-oppression movements don't go overboard and themselves become a problem, to me, the above is proof they do, because that type of speech is being blithely mainstreamed, not just into the heart of the SFF community, but into America itself. Take that type of speech and thinking and extend it out to it's logical end game and tell me what you see. To me, it is precisely its lack of self-awareness and consciousness of itself that makes it so dangerous.
Remember, this is the politically correct culture that screamed bloody murder against Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg across scores of blog postings shrilly asking what being female had to do with being a good editor. That's not principle, that's simply naked identity advocacy where the right and wrong of it is the male and female of it, and by extension, the gay and straight of it and the white and non-white of it.
In that type of rhetoric, you have all but arrived to a place where both morality and talent are plucked away from one set of politicized identities and inserted into another set like a bicycle tire pump. It is pretty clear there is something to fix and the implication both of the immorality that led to that need to fix something as well as its less than "awesome" source is all but stated outright. Are these two pre-teens unaware that half of all SFF published is by women? Why the underground railroad? Oh yeah, less than half of all SFF reviewed is by women, so that oppressive gulag has to go. Trust me, it'll be something else after that.
There is a point where an innocent and perhaps even noble concern about diversity crosses a line and becomes something else entirely, shorn of actual events, carrying on long after it needs to carry on, a victim of its own momentum, institutionalized, made rigid, eventually changing positions with the thing it strove to fight against. Were it up to the PC SFF community America would still be dropping bombs on Berlin. That is a thing that needs to be guarded against, perhaps by making some effort to declare a goal of some sort. Recognizing that half of all SFF being written by women might be a good start. Otherwise it goes on and on long after there is something that needs fixing, even when the supposed underdog comes to occupy institutions and have little left to tilt at but windmills. Bereft of actual events, all that's left is identity rancor, and in some cases, that's all that may have been there in the first place, since anti-oppression movements make excellent hiding places for something other than noble goals.
Generally speaking, things like black websites, black caucuses, black TV channels, black magazines, black beauty contests in the year 2014 are looking stupider by the year, while at the same time having an unprecedented presence. So too do the Carl Brandon Society, gay, non-white, and female-only literary expressions look foolish. Such things look less and less like a reaction to racism and sexism as Jim Crow and black baseball leagues, opposition to gay marriage and unequal rights for women fade ever further into the past. They look more and more like the naked racial and gender expression advocacy, racism and sexism they profess to fight against but which doesn't exist in opposite form.
There is no sense of goals or when there might ever be a "mission accomplished." The fact that half of all SFF is now published by women and the complaint from intersectionalists within SFF are louder than ever should tell you something else is going on. For example, the Carl Brandon Society is commonly referred to as a "pro-diversity" organization, which it is not. The Carl Brandon Society is a pro-people of color organization, since it has no interest in diversifying specifically non-white SF conferences, societies, webzines, or anthologies. It is not practicing what it supposedly preaches because it is not preaching that in the first place, nor are any of the other identity-laden initiatives within SFF; that is a shill to mask group narcissism and supremacy, project that narcissism and supremacy onto others who have no interest in such things, and then forbid it as bigotry and exclusion, while themselves feigning disinterest. It is quite the con game at worst, and intellectual self-delusion at best. In what world of perception is the word "other" so jealously guarded by women, gays, and PoC while simultaneously talking about one's supposed opponent - the straight white male - as if they were aliens? In what world are complex theories of bridge-burning seen as bridge-building? Perhaps something like a principle is in order, one that recognizes common humanity and with that, common faults, desires and greatness.
Read this paragraph from Nisi Shawl's "Reviewing the Other: Like Dancing about Architecture":
"Besides getting reviewers to put things in, I sometimes have to ask them to take things out. Unintentionally problematic references do appear. Often it only needs my fresh eye to spot a reviewer's equation of darkness with badness, or an unfortunate resonance between a reference to monkeys ('more fun than a barrel of—') and representations of blacks as subhuman primates, or words such as 'gypped' used in ignorance of their origins as racial epithets."
"Fresh eye" indeed. What ocean of ignorance is needed to guard against a symbolic usage of "darkness"? I'm pretty sure when kids are scared of the dark it's not because they're racially insensitive and that muggers don't operate in broad daylight in exacting proportion to how racially enlightened they are. And considering that comment comes from within an identity-based PC culture that uses "white," not as metaphor, but in a literal ethnic sense, and in the negative, 100% of the time... ? That is no mere faux pas brought about by day-dreaming and in need of a friendly copy-edit but active racial supremacy. Shawl's "fresh eye" isn't a fresh eye at all but a better eye by default - by virtue of race. The dissonance of fighting for equal rights while attacking groups of millions at a time by virtue of their skin and sex is something this prehistoric coterie of intersectional feminism doesn't get.
A round-robin discussion at Strange Horizons SFF webzine around Shawl's piece has John W. Campbell Award-winner and SFF author Sofia Samatar begin talking about the "other" by reasoning away principle in favor of race-tinged wishful thinking:
"I'm not entirely comfortable with the language of '_____ the Other.' To me, it suggests a level playing field, as if the problem is simply that people are different from each other. But actually—as Nisi points out—there is a dominant paradigm, and this dominance is the problem."
Notice how Samatar and Shawl always use the term "dominant" rather than "mainstream." This is not an attempt to find solutions or build bridges but is simply a racial beatdown with the ground rules laid out at the beginning so a humanity they have artificially divided into two racial streams can never meet on equal moral ground. It is classic supremacist thinking couched in Orwellian semantic gibberish. I could've predicted how the round-robin would go by merely reading the names involved. The reason it is semantic gibberish is that the people involved in this discussion claim a heightened global/historical awareness together with an equally heightened awareness of "the master narrative" which "is an empire narrative, consuming diversity as fuel for its mono-cultural reign, often a reign of terror which, through the magic of brilliant art, is eventually normalized." A white reign of terror - great. However there is pointedly never a mention of the single most successful monoculture colonial project of empire ever enacted within the geographical frame of reference: Arabized and Islamicized cultures. It is simply as if it never occurred.
There is no interest in that "master narrative" for the simple reason their claim to an informed global and historical interest is bunk. Even while they claim academic mind-tricks to stave off ethnocentricity, they operate from within a provincial mindset in which Arab literature and thousands of Arab-language TV shows and films melt away from their consciousness, to be replaced by their real interest: Europeans vs. people of color. Since the relict of Arab colonialism is neither European nor victim, it is simply ignored as not fitting into their purview, though it is inextricably intertwined with their subject. As usual, it is not an objective interest in an immoral "master narrative," but a master narrative segregated by immoral race. In this world, even obvious Arabic colonial architecture that almost certainly supported a slave trade becomes a wishful and wistful indigenous "A lost city reveals the grandeur of medieval African civilization" and the master narrative is turned on its head. Were that European colonial architecture, trust me, there'd be no "grandeur" or invisible colonialism about it and slaves would start popping out of the woodwork with the attendant wailing. If it's the wrong race, then you get this:
There's something absolutely bizarre about racially segregating what is purported to be racist colonialism. It's a denial of reality and the institutionalization of hypocrisy. Trust me, these folks have no bad associations with the Taj Mahal. That's because white folks weren't in on that one. Imagining such people writing perceptive SF is imagining people using tin cans and string as phones. There's just no intellect there.
When, in that round-robin, L. Timmel Duchamp claims "I love resistance to political dominance, and especially to dominant narratives," that in fact depends, since it is a "love" severely circumscribed by identity in direct proportion to how many "elite white males" are involved, because that is the core "dominance" that is always returned to. Duchamp will never evince an interest in subverting the dominant narrative in an Arab, Muslim or black culture. The concept of "othering or erasure" is used in an Orwellian memory-hole sense throughout the round-robin, as it must in a supremacist narrative that distributes and withholds morality according to select identities. Being "assaulted, disappeared, reconfigured" exists only for me, not for thee, though the truth is clearly otherwise, especially when the claimants engage in the act themselves.
Orwellian thought abounds in this round-robin, as when Sofia Samatar (who often fetishizes diversity) is angry about the "excessive awe" of "the fetishizing the 'ooh diversity!' review" and says "I'm always cast down when I read a review that doesn't say much of anything beyond 'there's a diverse group of authors represented here.' As if diversity is its own reward, as if what people are (a thing to be consumed) is more important that what they say."
Well, duh! (to coin a phrase). Solution? Stop doing it then. If Samatar really believed what people say is more important than their politicized identity she wouldn't be retweeting "Yaaaaaay! Afrofuturism" but instead Yaaaaaay! Literature. The truth is this is a group trapped in a web of their own making. They Orientalize themselves and the "West" and do the same to their own fiction to the point where half the word length isn't devoted to moving story but inserting shiny exotic foods and language phrases that must then be partially contexualized and explained while I fall asleep. They then claim puzzlement when someone acts "As if diversity is its own reward." There is no reward to the shallow diversity of race and gender these people sell so I'm not sure why they're perplexed. If your big deal and star performer are things like a character who isn't white and male and a story set outside the West, that's not really much to write home about is it? At some point you're going to have to deliver an interesting story or put up with This is great - they're not white! "Yaaaaaay! Afrofuturism." By the time the Orientalized/bi-sexual checklist on the Vietnamese space station is filled out it's sleeping pill time. An entire story that's a racial/real-world cultural info-dump goes over big in National Geographic; not so much in SF.
If one wants to present an actual insightful cultural context, it must be more along the lines of the beginning of The Gods Must Be Crazy, and not a mere changing up the decor of a living room. The former is the story, moves the story. The latter a meaningless sleeping pill showing off a thin veneer of precisely nothing. It's no more insightful than going to a Mexican restaurant one day and a Middle Eastern one the next. The same goes for gay or intersectional SFF: "Look, it is gay/woman and look! - no gender pronouns!" The brilliant introduction to The Gods Must Be Crazy shuns such shallow cultural markers in favor of digging into human markers in a cultural context - a far different thing. One is narcissism that thinks it is interesting by default. The other actually is interesting.
One must tell a story, not present shiny pebbles, and shiny pebbles mixed with being a platform for racial attacks is all the word "diversity" means in the SFF community. However even a steady diet of brilliantly told stories like The Gods Must Be Crazy will pall in short order. You simply can't build an SF genre around such things; one must destroy obvious cultural markers and address our common humanity or a literature will die from lack of interest. In this sense, the quest for shallow racial and gender diversity has quite the opposite effect. In a very real way, the scenes in The Gods Must Be Crazy involving the Coke bottle and its migration through the Kalahari village are classic SF in terms of employing perceptual shifts centered on a known cultural marker. The prosaic Coke bottle is the shopping list from Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz; misunderstood and transformed into a mystic object full of myth. Take the cleverness of those scenes away and instead present look, they're black - diversity, and you got nothing. I'm not interested in the color of who finds Miller's shopping list.
Unless culture or even ethnicity is specifically engaged as a topic (which can get quite boring) characters must default to generic in order to highlight the larger human fabric and allow one to concentrate on that. It also ensures one is actually presenting an interesting story involving human nature and its relationship to the topic at hand rather than a mirror that acts as a story - a boring story.
Samatar also enjoys fetishizing loving paeans to white folks:
"... the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There is always one more thing." - Toni Morrison
Samatar and SFF's intersectionalists have never once left a shred of doubt as to what their "fave" is. I have my own quotes from that speech:
"Racial ignorance is a prison from which there is no escape because there’re no doors. They are the petulant ones who call themselves proud, and they are the disdainful ones who call themselves fastidious, and they are the mean-spirited ones who call themselves just. They thrive on the failures of those unlike them... They are the ones who know personal success only when they can identify deficiencies in other racial and ethnic groups. They are in prisons of their own construction: and their ignorance and their stunted emotional growth consistently boggle the mind."
Intersectionalists are quick enough to distinguish individuals from their larger group when it is a group they favor. The same distinction is not granted the other way around. And yes, that inability to make such a simple comparison does "boggle the mind."
Once again you have an intersectionalist who's created a monster by never talking about actual SFF and can't quite figure out what's going on. By an amazing coincidence, Ahmed often has his name attached to articles that dote on whites, like his remarkably disingenuous post titled "The Great Internet Debate Over Not Reading White Men." Where would anyone get the idea these people don't like whites? That aside, the immense stupidity of Ahmed requires that to read non-whites, I'd have to do research that would be pretty much like apartheid color-coding lingo in order to figure out who's who.
Like virtually all social justice warriors, Ahmed is known for only one reason - his hateful comments on Twitter. By the simple expedient of non-stop daily rants which hide behind the issue of human rights or liberal vs. conservative, and also blocking other Twitter users, what is essentially a combination of racists and useful idiots coalesce into what is an informal hate group which grows and grows as it constantly acts to draw in even more like-minded people who are either other bigots themselves or people susceptible to being buffaloed. They use racial innuendos, myths, skewed statistics and demographic anomalies to do nothing more than spread hate speech and incitement.
In a country with free speech, there's really nothing one can do. Because of Twitter, these people have instant real-time access to virtually every celebrity, corporation, gov't agency, college, and media platform in America. Psychotic and sociopathic virtual shut-ins who have the capacity to dole out 80 or 150 hateful Tweets a day has proved a disaster for the core SFF community given the swarming and shaming tactics involved. Obsessive people who openly admit to serious mental health issues such as depression, ADHD, panic attacks and OCD are unsurprisingly common among this crowd. These are not healthy happy people proud of their country and community but broken individuals with little real-world experience who obsessively identify with a small in-group by race and sex - often by proxy - and then let the rest of the world have it. This is not a happy SFF community but one of fear, paranoia and neurosis, and the often pitiful and amateurish literature it produces reflects that by way of an increasing number of ideologically driven racial and sexual revenge fantasies, with the sole target the straight white Western male. Why am I unsurprised such authors as George R. R. Martin and Peter Hamilton have such a minimal presence on Twitter? The less they say the less exposed they are to making some trivial remark that will be jumped on as heterosexual white male privilege by what is nothing more than a gang of delusional lunatics.
Here is another round-robin called "Monday Original Content: Non-Western SF Roundtable." It is a who's who of intersectional complaints about white people. You have Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Requires Hate, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Ekaterina Sedia. It perfectly encapsulates the spectrum of circular one-side arguments that make sure whites and the West always lose no matter what. The rhetoric is as bereft of principle, logic and reason as any you will find in SFF. It should then come as no surprise the level of thinking is about that of a group of 12 yr. olds all competing to belabor the obvious. These are people who think it is an epiphany that people in Guatemala know more about their country than a guy in Wisconsin and who literally cannot grasp the exotic is a matter of looking at a unknown culture that works both ways. It makes for a remarkable read. There is never a shortage of wishful thinking or racial bigotry in intersectionalism. You easily could have titled that piece "We Think White People Are Assholes" and just left it at that, because at the end of the day, that's the most real and true bit of information that is conveyed.
Twitter feeds at the edges of this community are filled with the most insane hate filled rants that last all day and seemingly months on end. They interact with Nebula and Hugo nominees in a deluge of animosity towards straight white men but often just Tweet bile at no one in particular. They all meet at some point in what amounts to a club or racism united by semantics such as "privilege" and "marginalized" that are muttered like mantras.
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Continuing such activities on the thin rhetorical question "Are Racism, Sexism, Etc. Still a Problem These Days?" doesn't cut it. In a country of almost 320 million people, and especially from within a obsessively racial and sexually politically charged atmosphere as exists within SFF, one can see what one wants. The issue is and should be one of institutions that work to discomfit women, non-white and gay folks, not whether every last sexist and racist has been hunted down. To do otherwise risks a free-fire zone of complaint and rabble rousing til the sun dies by people who are themselves demonstrably bigoted, biased and prejudiced. In a real world of human beings rather than simply noble and ignoble identities, one cannot continually stipulate a failure of value systems and human nature being so conspicuous in one identity at the same time one completely rejects the idea in another identity.
That same Book Smugglers web site that was pie-charting its literature by political identity had a guest post by one Lizzie Barrett with the hilarious Orwellian title of "Removing Bias in SFF Awards." Lizzie states the following:
Presumably we'll know that when all SFF is published by non-white gay women, unless the pre-teen Hogwarts brigade can come up with a percentage higher than 100% to attain to, like eleventy kabillion per cent. If Lizzie's culture takes over the West her descendants will be digging a copy of the Magna Carta out of the mud and thinking it's a shopping list. Orwellian language like Barrett's, especially since it gathers into itself a presumption of being expressed out of a sense of justice, or even love, boggles my mind. The fact she declares an enemy by racial and gender profiling and stereotyping that cannot number less than 100 million people (and many more if you are talking about outside America) and does so because she is against such bias makes that a perfectly Orwellian sentence. "A few more hundred years" also wonderfully evokes Orwell's permanent state of war in 1984. You don't have to be a genius to see the racially obsessed fanaticism of bell hooks or Melissa Harris-Perry standing behind such remarks. It seems we have more than a little Third Wave Intersectionalism mixed in with our Harry Potter.
For a taste of how insanely racist, sexist, unprincipled, self-absorbed and just plain bizarre intersectionalism is, read this 72 point manifesto presented by a small group of protesters to Dartmouth University in Feb. of 2014. It begins:
"We, the Concerned Asian, Black, Latin@, Native, Undocumented, Queer, and Differently-Abled students at Dartmouth College, seek to eradicate systems of oppression as they affect marginalized communities on this campus. These systems--which include racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism--"
Notice anyone missing? Sound familiar? It should. It's the de facto rhetorical supremacist orthodoxy of the politically correct within the SFF community. That manifesto is also deranged and out of touch with reality. If I hadn't read it with my own eyes I'd never have imagined people capable of writing such a document existed.
It's not hard to come to the conclusion that this is a culture with failure baked right into it, or even insane. You can pretty much take the tenets of intersectionalism as comprising the opposite of our Bill of Rights and Constitution, though intersectionalism is put forward as the pinnacle of high-minded justice. That is what makes these people true Orwellians. Racism is equality, hate is love, bigotry is justice. These are not people who should or can be writing SF novels; these are people one writes SF novels about - dystopian ones. And yet in this Orwellian world, intersectional racists and their "allies" are being nominated - and winning - genre literary awards. You couldn't get more topsy-turvy if you gave neo-Nazi supremacists literary awards.
It's no coincidence that the former president of the SFWA urges us, "please bone up on the concept of intersectionality." John Scalzi's link brings you to a worm-ridden neo-Nazi-like PDF - an essay by Ahir Golpadas titled "Intersectionality 101" that could've been written by Mad Magazine in the 1960s. Golpadas hilariously lists vectors of oppression "to include age, attractiveness, body type, caste, citizenship, education, ethnicity, height and weight assessments, immigration status, income, marital status, mental health status, nationality, occupation, physical ability, religion, sex, sexual orientation," with black intersectionalists at the top of the food chain. And all at the expense of the intersectional devil who resides at the bottom of the well, "the multiplicatively privileged," the "'white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.'"
Why not pattern baldness and corns? So that's what you get as a free prize with your box of SF postcolonial cereal nowadays, the "white/straight/cisgendered/able defaults" where being thin and in good health is a vector of privilege and oppression to reside next to the unlucky charm of being a white straight male. In terms of its core institutions, one could easily argue SF is dead on the strength of this paragraph alone. Golpadas might have saved themselves some trouble and simply listed "Planet Earth."
The part in interior quotes that ends in "'secure'" is Golpadas quoting the radical gay black feminist Audre Lorde, who of course supports Andrea Dworkin who in turn calls for the destruction of the "nuclear family" and considers normal sex as "'...the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.'" By an ideological and academic sharing of theories, Scalzi is also asking us to "bone up" on perverts like Simone de Beauvoir as well as a host of women who are demonstrably insane.
It appears Scalzi bit off a bit more than he can chew. At best he is bizarrely asking us to take up the cause of radical gay black activist women to cure male women-hatred, at worst he is supporting the destruction of his own family, the idea of his oppression of his own wife and the end of SFF if not the entire nation as an insane "patriarchy." Don't forget matriarchal Hobbits in England until the 17th century and 9 million witches burned, possibly for cavorting with Hobbit "sorcerers," which Dworkin actually does suggest led to the deaths of at least some English witches. Scalzi blithely accuses his detractors of guilt by association by the intersectional ploy of maintaining anyone in opposition to gender theory themselves constitute an ideology, which it does not. Therefore Scalzi can hardly excuse himself of his prominent promotion of and thereby association with anyone from Andrea Dworkin to Charlotte Bunch. What Scalzi hasn't quite figured out is he unwittingly shares and promotes the view that heterosexuality is a political and ideological pogrom against all women everywhere. Considering he himself is the author of a demonizing theory like "white privilege" that in the past has used the same smear principles to initiate pogroms, the Orwellian irony that is superglued to PC in SFF is a permanent fixture.
The idea the psychotic philosophies of Andrea Dworkin and Audre Lorde will solve the non-existent problem of diversity, oppression, "gender essentialism and misogyny" in SFF is as sick as the philosophies themselves. Why not just appoint David Duke to an anti-racism committee?
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In a post reviling SF authors Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick as "Bitter old sexist, racist morons" over the SFWA bulletin dust-up, the lucky logic-machine known as Foz Meadows ends her post by stumbling over the intersectional tripwires and tiger traps she herself help lay and forgot about:
"This post was originally titled Old Men Yelling At Clouds: SFWA Lunacy. I then changed that last word to idiocy, as it was pointed out to me that the use of lunacy was ableist; but as idiocy is also abelist, I’ve changed it to sexism."
Here's more from our anti-racist:
"Old white guys. What are going to do with them?"
Ummm... ask them not to say "lady" or they're lady-haters? If Malzberg/Resnick are Meadows' benchmark for what comprises "racist," then Meadows' own rhetoric easily surpasses theirs when it comes to that. Keeping that in mind, it's no surprise that in the SFF community's current Orwellian climate, she was nominated for a 2013/4 Hugo for best fan writer - none at all. Racism is justice.
Idiocy has no bounds in intersectionality:
Wu indulges in non-stop racial incitement and mindless stereotypes about whites. His Tweet below is as racist as asking black people to think about crime.
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Writers of Colour beat Scalzi's Golpadas to the punch by simply including the entire planet. Fear of white science fiction buys you this, from an announcement titled "Science Fiction Through Lens of Racial Inclusiveness."
"'Alternative Futurisms,' which will launch in September 2015, will bring together African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American scholars, artists and writers to examine the colonial roots and legacies of science fiction and the power of speculative fiction as a tool for social change.
"Science fiction fans and scholars are rethinking what counts as science fiction,' explained Sherryl Vint, professor of English and co-director of the SFTS program with Latham. Vint is co-principal investigator of the Sawyer Seminar with Latham and Nalo Hopkinson, professor of creative writing and an award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy.
"'The canon is not monolithically white,' she added. 'Questions of social justice are emerging, particularly with regard to colonialism, borders, DNA, and profiling. Our seminar will elicit and sustain dialogue among the many peoples of color who are using speculative techniques to combat systemic racism and will seek to displace the hegemony of the post-racial imaginary with a range of ethnic futurisms.'"
You better believe they're rethinking what counts as SF, because what that all translates to is no SF and multiples ways of asking "What's wrong with straight white men?" With crews like this, any time you hear the phrase "social justice" it's time to duck and run. Since SF has no colonial roots or legacies, it'll be fun watching so-called academics make them up out of thin intersectional air. One thing that's swell is that the KKK have apparently experienced lots of diversity recently and one would hardly know them but for the same old gripes.
Meanwhile visiting the Twitter stream of any intersectional gender feminist reveals a world without diversity unless you count the Snidely Whiplash of that world, the straight white whale.
What intersectionalists don't understand is that once you use rhetoric that assumes morality and competence - or lack of it - can reside in a race or sex, or further extending that out to proprietary ownership of culture, that is a language that will cut both ways. Once opened it is a Pandora's Box one cannot control. Intersectional thought has no moral compass, no principles, by which it can be controlled once it goes beyond intersectionalism's own precincts. That isn't really a surprise since the base principles of intersectionalism are based on delusional psychotic breaks rather than a cogent philosophy. There's a difference between a system of thought based on reason and logic and meticulously constructed fantasies to explain away your own madness, shared hysterias, and reality itself. It would be different if this cult ever innovated things people wanted and used but their sole innovations lie in the area of constructing ever more bizarre mechanisms of complaint. Now we're up to "abelisms" and "trigger warnings."
It should be a clue that a cult afraid it will fall frothing to the floor or have an LSD-like flashback merely by reading about slavery and colonialism are people one should ignore and stay away from rather than giving Nebula Awards to and asking for advice about how to deal with the troubles of the world. When your sole solutions are extremely unlikely scenarios that always lay the blame at the foot of thin white heterosexual men it's probably the time to break out straightjackets.
People who claim I use feral criminal rapists as if they were hunting dogs in order to sew fear into the hearts of women and soften them up so I can more easily break them to my will are being given PhD's at respected universities and moving government policy to deny due legal process to men on that basis. Inspired by such academics, women in SF who claim I metaphorically punch them in the face at random in a sudden berserker rage due to male heterosexual whiteness and keep files for the FBI because I want to drag them behind a pick-up truck are being given Hugo Awards. A woman who claims entire continents are out to get her and that SF editors literally rape her identity is being given Guest of Honor posts at SF conventions. A woman who doesn't know where babies come from and claims they are an anti-racist also claims white men have the brains of buffaloes is being lauded for her cutting edge SF. The last two presidents of the SFWA claim 3.5 billion men are out to get 3.5 billion women and that adopting radical black lesbian supremacist feminism is the solution. As if you needed one, the other clue to these mad obsessions is when this all somehow equals science fiction. Meanwhile what SF they do write is like the fucking Jay Leno Show.
By intersectionalism's own precepts, they are as much as stating that SF is a province created and owned by white Western male heterosexuals and that any others who take hold of it are engaging in "cultural appropriation." One cannot engage in double standards and expect those put out by them to respect such a thing. More likely such standards will be employed to bite back, and the provisionally oppressed - more protected than they will admit to - take two steps backwards for every one forwards. In other words, intersectionalism cuts out the very constitutional foundations that most protect the so-called "marginalized." Intersectionalism doesn't guarantee diversity but instead encourages others to adopt intersectionalism's own views. Since intersectionalism's ostensible opponents have been top dogs throughout recent human history, it's hard to imagine intersectionalism as anything but a suicide cult which creates real enemies out of imagined ones while ignoring the real ones who would most endanger intersectionalism's most marginalized. Intersectionalism's default view of Islam being unfairly profiled by "Islamophobia" is only one example. The truth is that were WisCon held in Egypt, the entire convention would most likely be hauled off to prison. Far worse would happen in any number of Islamic nations, yet it is America that is branded as homophobic and Islam handled with delicate intersectionalist gloves. If anything highlights the delusions of radical feminism it is their love affair with Islam. You can repeat that general paradigm when it comes to intersectionalism's default views of identity that frequently forces it to see failure as success and success as failure. Not least of that is the view that the Third World is a land of unlucky rocket scientists and great literature and the West a racially stupid monoculture of decadence that needs a heady infusion of new blood - proper identities to right the ship. The problem there is that if a ship needs no righting it is a good way to sink it, and therein lies the death of SF, since intersectionalism is constantly looking for solutions where there are no problems.
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Read this post where a woman blogger addresses what she sees as an imbalance when it comes to women and reviews. She takes exception to the explanation for that imbalance given by the London Review of Books. The LRB review ends like this:
"Counting women is one way of looking at the problem. For the counters, the answer is a quota. A women's edition. Positive discrimination of one type or another. But counting then trumps all other considerations. The LRB's way — which isn't to say it's the best way or that it doesn't have disadvantages — is to publish women writers in the same way as male writers — as writers."
The blogger reacts to that with this:
"If this is the country, I don’t want to live in it. Fortunately the country they describe is no place I recognise. Now I must go and cook dinner because obviously (a) men cannot cook dinner and (b) no pre-prepared food is freely available in this country. *bangs head against wall*"
Good luck in the Middle East. Should be fair sailing.
Ironically, "radical lesbian" feminist Monique Wittig agrees with LRB: "For me, there is no 'feminine literature' – it simply does not exist for me. In literature, I do not separate the women from the men. One is a writer, or one is not a writer. One occupies a mental space in which sex is not the determining factor."
"Good stuff," indeed. But why? It's pretty clear the literature itself is subservient to intersectional ideology. So what's "good?" As for the double standard about what one side of this debate can do and the other not do, it's hard to know what to say about a culture of people too dumb to know what a baseball umpire does and the value of that. In American political terms it's called the United States Constitution, an apparently now irrelevant document to be cherry-picked for advantage, not respected for egalitarianism, and how it benefits all.
Though this PC culture reacts as if straight white men are doing what that Tweet above is doing, there are mysteriously no such Tweets to be found among the immoral racist patriarchal supremacy recommending stories featuring men and straight characters. Portraying a genre that started out as boy's adventure fiction and a global population where heterosexuals are at 96% as a supremacist ideology that needs a supremacist ideology to act as a leveler is hopelessly disingenuous at best and a straight up lie at worst. It is an excuse for bigots, identity narcissists and supremacists to fly under the radar.
The topsy-turvy result is that the ones advocating literature are the ones said to be bigots and the ones indulging in bigoted behaviors are the ones claiming to have an interest in literature. The degree of self-serving moral, artistic, and intellectual corruption and leaping through mental hoops needed to maintain that sort of double standard is rather staggering. It is a rejection of art and a rejection of literature, not to mention thought itself. The unprecedented success of the rights of women and PoC in America and SFF is only matched by radical activist voices complaining as if things are worse than ever.
Let me be clear on my use of the word "radical" in the context of this smotheringly bizarre intersectionalist ideology within the SFF community. I'm not talking about "radical" in the sense of heady eccentrics and iconoclasts living life on an edge that would be reflected in such real world experiences. The people in question I'm talking about are conformist middle class people who seem to live boring and uneventful lives. Intersectionalism within SFF is "radical" in the sense it is divorced from reality, not because it actually comprises cutting edge and progressive thought. Intersectional thought is "radical" is direct proportion to the relationship between its simultaneous naiveté and arrogance. Intersectional thought doesn't resemble any world I've ever seen. What it does resemble is hubris and closeted provincialism in combination with a keyboard and an internet connection. The so-called "radical" Left is a self-parody because the gap between the basement it lives in and real world solutions and history is an abyss only delusion can cross. The surest cure for an intersectionalist would be to give them a farm in Guatemala and the keys to the front door. They would then learn the true meaning of "privilege" and a "meritocracy," aside from having to eventually pay for the free lunch property if they survived the first couple of weeks of sun, rain and dirt. Rain and dirt doesn't know your sex and race any more than your cat.
What would occur is an intersectionalist would learn the two things closest to their heart - race and bent genders - are meaningless delusions that are synonymous with decadence in the sense of Jack Williamson's folded hands and E.M. Forster's stopped machines. And that's where the irony of a genre and literary movement that ignores its own lessons and past comes in, not least of which would also include Orwell's warnings about perceptual traps. The great perceptual trap intersectionalism resides in in terms of the SFF community is it cannot see that higher speculative expressions of SF were not written BY a thing like intersectionalism, but ABOUT it. Intersectionalism claims for itself the status of fending off The Long Night - the barbarians at the gates, but intersectionalism is the barbarians at the gates - a dictator thankfully without an army. The radical thought of intersectional feminism within the SFF community is not the outside-the-box thinking it promotes itself as but blunt stupidity.
There is no sense of self-parody within intersectionalism other than a vague sense it exists and is never intersectionalism itself. But what else could produce the gaping buffoonery of Rachel Swirsky's Nebula-winning "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" and take it seriously, let alone it imagine it is anti-bigotry and supremacy while being steeped in those very things? Reading the comments below Swirsky's story might lead one to believe civilization has fallen and that The Marching Morons is actually upon us. Imagine Mad Magazine not knowing it's Mad Magazine and you have the meat of it. The truth is that intersectionalism is the great insane drama queen that resides at the apex of a civilization relatively free from want and harm. What else could produce a thing like the cultish, upside-down and ignorant racism of "cultural appropriation" and the other gap-toothed "privilege" scenarios intersectionalism swims in?
If we think of intersectionalism within SF as a school of SF literature, what can we expect from such a school? Well, let me save you the suspense right there, because the easy answer is nothing.
Let's not soft soap what is being sold here or its source: what is being sold is a hatred of men, white people and heterosexuals. It is a paranoid delusion of a "imperialist White supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy." It is a disgraceful blend of racism, gender-hatred, heterophobia, self-pity, blame, complaint, and excuses. It is almost as common to see the term "white privilege" on an SFF blogger's site as it is on the blog or Twitter stream of a Third Wave black gay intersectional. The reason for that is the orthodoxy is one and the same.
As I mentioned earlier, the driving ideological force behind this politically correct Orwellian amalgam of anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual bigoted anti-bigot spasm of group defamation represents a direct line of evolution from Paulo Freire's Critical Pedagogy to Derrick Bell's Critical Race Theory to '60s/'70s radical lesbian feminist theory to Third Wave Black Lesbian Intersectional Theory with a heavy flavoring of anti-capitalist Marxism built in. Third Wave Intersectionality is represented by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Rebecca Walker (daughter of "The Color Purple" author Alice Walker) and bell hooks. Third Wave black gay intersectionalism rejects white feminist concepts of mere equality with men because a racist, class, and capitalist system of privilege and patriarchy remains intact; the entirety must be dismantled. In 2014, whether from a largely unconscious and blithe absorption or a purposeful Third Wave advocacy, the top echelons of SFF's institutions have adopted Third Wave Gay and black intersectionalism as its root ideology. In it's broader and more generic form, the whole is usually referred to as political correctness or identity politics. In the latter half of 2013 there was a noticeable split between white and black feminism globally though with little effect within the SFF community since intersectionalist thought there is on the same Third Wave page. Middle class SFF writers and bloggers like feminists Jim Hines and John Scalzi have employed this rhetoric like parrots for years, without a clue as to its origins (until it was laughingly thrown in their faces by critics), or the fact they themselves are its targets, and who will be on the wrong side of history the instant they stop being parrots. Hines and Scalzi will be tolerated just as long as they toe and promote the line, and not one second longer.
Intersectional activists like Suey Park retweet reminders like "Whiteness is only invisible to those who inhabit it" and "Feminist Theory would not exist had it not been for radical Black women (particularly Black lesbians). Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, Kimberle Crenshaw, Flo Kennedy, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Dorothy Roberts, Shirley Chisholm, etc. Never fucking forget that." And of course...
This post called "The Pitfalls of 'Merit'" by Rose Lemberg is an example of where people like Hines and Scalzi get their lunatic theories from. The post is full of factless and false assertions about SFF today and yesterday, is blatantly racist, and unsurprisingly comes to the conclusion that the divide within SFF is about "white supremacists and their allies," I kid you not. Read the whole thing for the full Monty, and realize it was passed around by other social justice warriors as wisdom. "A white, cisgendered, heterosexual man," "a white, cisgendered, heterosexual man," "white, cisgendered, heterosexual men," "white, male, and historically entrenched."
And there the usual nonsense about "a Western ideal," "power structures of the West" and "non-Western, non-cisgendered-male modes of thinking and communicating." What in blue blazes is Lemberg even talking about? Mysteriously, radical intersectionalists never say. It's just some presumed very nice El Dorado that exists only in their heads. Proof of that is where these folks live. Dah, dah!!!! The West. Lemberg ends with "I am closing comments because I have no spoons for trolls in this space." "Trolls" is always femspeak for "disagree," which they find unconscionable and even "feel threatened emotionally and at times physically." Cue trigger warnings and safer-spaces. "Trolls" are also always Men's Rights Activists for some bizarre reason, but I guess it makes a kind of sense in a world of paranoia divided up into men who hate women and men who've been taught not to by feminist compassion.
In my research I found intersectionalists frequently retweet this below to make it seem like pain doesn't matter to their invisible homophobic opponents who want to bring back slavery, steal women's rights and distress Muslims:
I also found they never - and I mean NEVER - bring up the fact men commit suicide at 4 times the rate of women. Social justice warriors are so transparent it's simply pathetic. I'm surprised they don't have some Orwellian hashtag like #AllPainMatters, since it is so clearly segregated. In fact, whether your pain matter depends. Breast cancer awareness is everywhere yet the equally deadly prostate cancer gets half the funding. That's what happens when you gerrymander justice so it includes more women. Idiotic feminists routinely laugh at the idea of Men's Right Activists, which in principle means they are laughing at themselves. God forbid men should have rights, cuz privilege.
Here's more Lemberg-style stuff in this post titled "Why We Should Care How Straight Allies Benefit From Their Support," which gives you a view on exactly how moral and spiritual supremacy works and how it is literally embodied in identity and not principle.
"...white people can work as anti-racist allies alongside communities of people of color, pro-feminist men can act as allies to women, and straight people can stand as allies alongside sexual-minority communities."
I'm starting to sense a trend here, and it might be that white heterosexual men, multiples of tens of millions across the globe, aren't well thought of in certain circles. Meanwhile, here's the kind of thing the "allies" are up to and some of it makes for unbelievable reading. A post called "Fandom and Bigotry" and a follow up called "Further Thoughts On Fandom & Reverse Racism" by Jonathan Woodward makes for an interesting glimpse into the thought processes involved. In the latter post we find "A more subtle message of Campbellian SF is "Men of Northern European extraction are the best!", since (per Asimov), Campbell actually believed that," but with straw scare quotes rather than real ones.
In the comments section, because these people are not at all stupid, someone links to "FOR WHITES (LIKE ME): PRELUDE." There some white folks yell something out a window at black folks and true to the principles behind law, all white people are blamed in a meeting, just like all black people should have a meeting held to hold them accountable for all black crime.
Some of the thought processes involved are so interesting I'd wouldn't have believed an adult capable of writing them, such as this post at Black Gate webzine called "Diversity in Fandom: Lessons from Worldcon." Just to let you know they aren't stupid either, the post starts with a disclaimer: "This post is for whites only," and then does a stop-and-frisk on all white men ("Muslim"s excluded).
The funny thing about these allies is they have had intersectional cant so successfully mainstreamed into them they are scarcely aware of it. Basically what intersectional allies do is the equivalent of the KKK convincing black folks they are a pack of n-words and promoting that idea in the public arena.
There are few things more amusing in the SFF community than watching middle-class straight white men denounce themselves to the central committee as members of an oppressive privileged racist patriarchy or cry out on Twitter about how an all-white table of contents is intellectually and artistically static and stultified by virtue of being white. Knowing the people who originated the cant they parrot like domesticated pets hate them makes it all the more amusing, as is the idea both intersectionalists and their allies parrot white supremacist racial theories.
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SF fandom and publishing lives in a world where the 2013 Hugo and Nebula nominee for best SF novel of 2012, Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, was first and foremost promoted and reviewed as a non-white novel in a non-Western setting written by an Arab and a Muslim who is in fact half Irish. Alongside it, N.K. Jemisin's Nebula-nominated The Killing Moon was promoted and reviewed the same way, never failing to mention Jemisin's race as black and gender as female. Only one of the six novels nominated for a Nebula for 2012 was SF. The Horror Writers Association has a scholarship only open to women and the Carl Brandon Society worships deceased black mid-list SF writer Octavia Butler as a genius and promotes non-whites only programs and on and on.
Ahmed claims "The law is made by rich, selfish, shitty people - mostly white, mostly men - with cockroaches for hearts. Fuck their 'rule of law.'" and is not shy about letting us know how easily he's amused, what literature takes a back door to, where his real interest lies, or pretending there's a glut of epic fantasy novels set in Iowa and that such a glut would be a tell-tale sign of KKK tracks:
Of course if your culture doesn't know who Jack Vance is you're hardly likely to understand how many fantasy novels in the last 100 years have been in non-Western settings, (about eleventy kabillion) unless you're looking for examples of immoral culture appropriation and Orientalism by Western white people. In that case they exist but are racist. Otherwise the result is to push back against pretty much nothing. But that was already obvious since pretending to geographic ennui while asking if a fantasy series is too white is pretty much tipping one's hand anyway. In that sense his use of quote marks possesses its own irony. For a guy who asks if Game of Thrones is too white without wondering what it sounds like to ask if the Arabian Nights too Arab, it's about what one might expect. And if you don't know your own literary culture's history, you're liable to either recycle Robert E. Howard without being aware of it yourself, or be aware of it and not have an audience which can grasp that.
Like all intersectionalists, Ahmed is addicted to scared quotes no one actually says:
However what people actually do observe is that in fact "all" of Islam's critics are not still alive. Some are in fact dead, and for doing nothing worse drawing cartoons. Reading through that thread is an exercise in willful delusion. Ahmed's statement that "'Talking about race proves YOU'RE the REAL racist' makes as much sense as 'Talking about a house on fire proves YOU'RE the REAL arsonist'" is a testament to his denial of his own habits. Ahmed doesn't talk about race. He attacks whites and simply calls it talking about race. And of course, more idiocy trails in the wake of that thread as well. Social justice warriors are identity addicts - literalists. They are incapable making simple, principled, accurate comparisons. They are experts on bias but possess no tools of self-criticism - no strike zone - to see their own. Here's proof of it:
The funny thing there is Ahmed's argument that publishing is racist is it is a white demographic... like the NBA is a black one. Since Ahmed's weird theories are based on white supremacy, there is no explanation why white NBA owners are not racists and white publishers are. It just doesn't make any sense. And don't balance any plates on your head waiting for Ahmed to demand diversity in the NBA... or anything non-white.
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The thing I love about the idiotic concept of cultural appropriation is how often the people who use the term are the ones doing it. My advice would be to invent something everyone wants to be a part of instead of always pining away for something that - by your own definition - you are barging into and appropriating.
Read the comments section at io9's list of Best-of SFF for 2012 which includes the Jemisin and Ahmed novels where people say... Really? That's what happens to art when diversity is pushed, prodded and promoted for its own sake - you have diversity so SFF can pat itself on the back. Meanwhile, art dies. Nominating each novel for Nebulas was a blatantly political act, not an artistic one. Artificial notions of diversity and art do not mix, any more than choosing "best novel" using photographs or the real world geographical inspiration of the novel would. Calling for more voices from outside the boring "Anglosphere" and making a place for them like some kind of participation award is yet another art-killing call for artificial diversity. You can't create or sustain an artistic movement by fiat by saying "here are the racial guidelines and regions." That works fine for world cup soccer because the best teams are still there. But when Brazil and Italy are replaced by the soccer teams of Malta and Iraq just for the sake of it, fans will quickly lose interest, as will current authors and prospective future authors thinking of entering the field. Most likely what would happen is a new league would be formed just to get back to normal.
Neither The Killing Moon nor Throne of the Crescent Moon rise to the level of the 1939 fantasy B-novel Flame Winds by Norvell Page, either in terms of experienced craftsmanship or as innovative re-expressions of Sword and Sorcery. If you can't match what your own genre produced 73 years ago, what's going on here? "Who is Jack Vance?" indeed. And Page was younger than either Jemisin or Ahmed when he wrote Flame Winds but with around 50 short novels already under his belt. Ahmed's nominated novel was his first and Jemisin's her fourth, although her debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was also nominated for a Nebula. If Jemisin and Ahmed spent as much time writing novels as thumbtacking their woes about racist America on Twitter, they might find privilege equals work.
Nebula nominee Kate Elliott writes "I am in a phase where I can't get past work that ignores women/PoC," and I ask what about art and why is it being put on a back burner in favor of an artistically and creatively empty combination of pie-charting identity-fiction, census-taking, quotas, affirmative action, and intersectionalism? And what proof does Elliott have that not present is equal to "ignores"? Surely a writer can deal with the English language better than that, aside from the laughable implication of a default conspiracy by white men, who are not present in her quote but certainly not ignored. Elliott's Twitter stream is a daily dose of too white this and too male that. DAILY - and she's not alone in that nonsense when it comes to the SFF community. It's like the droning of an insect. The idea that one feels an actual decided-in-advance connection with a generic depiction of skin and gender that is no more than skin deep is too bizarre to go into.
Yayyyyyyy! Only two more days!!! Run don't walk!!! We're destroying SFF with pie-charts tee hee hee!!!
Funny how the people who cry about diversity never quite measure up to their own paper-thin standards. Meanwhile they accuse others of doing what they do but which those others don't. Little confusing. I mean - okay. Diversity. Where is it? Someone else's yard, while your own yard remains heavily segregated? Exactly how does that work? All this talk about diversity is a smokescreen - a thing for someone else to do - to obey. In actual practice, it's pure bullshit to hide racial animus and narcissism. I could cite dozens of examples. Awards and anthologies the identity-PC can indulge in in the mainstream and others only they can. Nice set up, stacked deck - don't you do it. Then it's wrong.
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Meanwhile any time too many white men gather all in one spot complaint alarms go off and feminism spreads the word.
"Any list that includes Card and Asimov can go to hell."
"Natalie Luhrs @eilatan @damsonfox at least there's no heinlein"
They're talking about a post titled "The Sci-Fi Book Classics You Need to Read Before You Die," which in femspeak means books you should die before you read. The list is apparently "dudebro" heavy as opposed to fembroad. One person even used "Do Not Link" to show others the article, as if the post had the same effect as a cross to a vampire. I'm surprised they didn't sprinkle Holy Water at it, although there were the usual intersectional incantations to ward off evil.
The implication in delicate Ladyland is always the same: that men are purposefully doing... something. Apparently men are supporting mediocre SFF in order to accommodate mensworld. The problem is intersectionalists have no case to make other than citing the "patriarchy," which in the normal world of space and time is just men. On the other hand, it's pretty clear radical feminists in SFF purposefully exclude men from reviews, anthologies and awards. Liz Bourke at Tor.com has women-only reviews. The Book Smugglers SFF review blog is like the Temple of Venus and the stream of recommendations for and prodding to read women's' SFF is an endless stream on blogs and Twitter. There is nothing like that by men in SFF. There is no mens' movement in SFF. If anyone is willing to populate an entire genre with drudge in order to accommodate radical feminist theory it is the people complaining about sexual advocacy the most.
"fuck you popsugar. fuck. you."
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Alongside the many politically correct notions above, the most oft repeated refrain in the SFF community is the presumed desirability and even superiority of the "non-Western" viewpoint. What that viewpoint actually amounts to is never described because in fact corrugated tin roofs and trains you could sell on Ebay as antiques aren't all that compelling, but the way in which it is mentioned amounts to boring Western literature needing an infusion of racial and cultural diversity that will in some vague way enhance our perceptions and make our lives better. How that will occur is never described either; it is simply assumed an Indonesian brings as much to the table as a white belly dancer takes away, though engaged in the same act. I'm trying to imagine someone writing a blog post titled "Why I hate non-white SF." No one is, but the PC act as if they are. But - surprise - the PC actually do write such trash, and on a daily basis. White savior, go away. Black scoring the winning bucket - stay.
It is assumed that the same idea in reverse, First World to Third World, is as undesirable as East to West is desirable. What the sum total actually amounts to in practice is a type of Edward Said's Orientalism, where all becomes inscrutably wise by some act of osmosis wherein race and geography are said to contain differences and levels of superiority they cannot in fact attain to. The proof of this is the fact that the people who cry out for the "non-Western" the most don't emigrate to the Third World or call for non-Western medicine. The PC hate the stereotype of the wise Charlie Chan and show that by showing all of East Asia is exactly like him - wise beyond the ability of the West's white "monoculture" to figure out.
The intellectual emigration into the non-West by the PC even while they revile the idea in reality is because forms of mandated diversity are not qualitative but quantitative. Diversity doesn't make science, science makes science. Racial and geographic diversity can not in their particulars be packaged and convey wisdom or perception or anything like it. Good stuff is where you find it, not where you want it to be. The fact that some goofy fly-by-night trend or fad causes you to not like where you find good things and success is meaningless. The only true way to experience such a perceptual shift would be to learn a couple of languages and travel multiple countries across the space of at least some years. Visiting a reverse-racist SFF web site and stating you want to read more foreign SFF by non-white authors will never deliver wisdom or perception. Wisdom and perception have their own meanings quite apart from such considerations. The PC will be the first to tell you old Charlie Chan movies are racist and yet are worshipping a modern version of him.
Ken Liu's 2011 short story "Paper Menagerie," was the first story to ever win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Read this "SFF" story and tell me what's been put in the backseat and what's been put in the front seat. Its fantastic element has been crudely shoe-horned in as an unimportant afterthought; its priority is plain. I'm not surprised it won the awards, any more than I'm surprised Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice has been relentlessly short-listed for awards; "Paper Menagerie" is a nearly perfect expression of the modern day politically correct "SFF" story. It is also identity-bait. It may be a nice story, but in real terms it has nothing to do with the genre, and it once again speaks to people dragging their luggage into inappropriate places, while dragging down a literary movement. It's not that I don't like catsup - I just don't put it in the gas tank of my car; the engine won't run on it. "Paper Menagerie" is firmly in the Aliette de Bodard school of woe-is-postcolonialist-me sub-genre of SFF, with its not so subtle digs at the West, ethnic Europeans, and America. Frankly, I knew what it was about before I even read it, and it is that predictability and lack of faith in the larger human spirit which makes such work so tiresome and so lacking in entertainment. If you like that sort of thing - and many people do - it's fantastic, but not in a genre sense. One has to wonder how large a market there is for pity-fiction.
In a 2012 post at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paul Kincaid addresses this issue of stuffing mainstream into SFF and the conformist exhaustion of the genre, although I don't agree that non-"Anglo-American" writers making "livelier" fiction is the same as literary merit. It amounts to nothing more than a faddist stunt one soon tires of in the same way one won't take up horseback riding to commute to work.
Creativity is a thing that must be addressed and cannot be shuffled off into flavor-of-the-week identities unless you wish to transform SF into Top 40. New sounds and new looks soon pall. Mid-century SF didn't eventually spill out into the world because others were fascinated with those nutty Americans and are now going to switch to those nutty SF writers in Chile or Jordan.
Add to this the self-righteous piousness and intellectual emptiness that allows SFF author Cory Doctorow to have the dead conformist epiphany that Tom Godwin's classic SF short story "The Cold Equations" is a "contrivance" rather than a documentary and Robert Heinlein a de facto fictional racist, while Doctorow supports the wonderfully idiotic and non-fictional intersectionalist racist theory of "white privilege." Further add in Jonathan McCalmont's absurd view of Robert A. Heinlein's "toxic influence on the history of science fiction" combined with McCalmont's remarks about "white guys" I quoted earlier and one feels like Ripley when she remarks that I.Q.'s have dropped, though I'll add with the replacement being smug and overweening moral I.Q.'s which have sharply risen into the stratosphere and where Napoleonic egos in one-bedroom apartments are common.
McCalmont's use of the word "toxic" is especially strange considering one might be hard pressed to exaggerate Heinlein's contributions to SF via actual literature while McCalmont's culture of political correctness probably can't be overestimated in terms of the harm its non-stop acts of non-fiction group defamation has done to SF in the space of only a few short years. There is no doubt in my mind that we are witnessing the devolution of SF literature because of shoving work in our faces based the author's race and gender or the storyline's race and gender.
In this world of the PC, fictional racists are real and real racist remarks are unreal. The upshot is that that the racialist PC always seem to assert they would've fought the good fight and have deserted Cortes and gone over to the Aztecs - because they're morally smart like that - using the Ansel Adams Zone System of morality.
If one is trying to kill art, all of this an excellent way to go about it. Different for the sake of different rather than worth is what killed fine art photography in a purge beginning in the '60s and lasting until around 1980. When it was done, only photography that was conceptual and produced by people who fronted a certain identity was left. In other words, photography was textualized and politicized into the ground and what was left didn't speak the specific visual language of photography at all but was done by the correct people. It was identity art - photography resided in the actual person of the artist, even when they were putting up a xerox in a gallery that said "No" or putting clever brass frames on photos of empty sections of sky, or presenting a tree branch in three photos and calling it a "triptych." In fact, the straightforward presentation of photography came to be considered a quaint intellectual and evolutionary cul-de-sac. It would've been different had the two been allowed to exist side by side, but they weren't - photography was quashed.
SF came under a similar siege in the '60s when the New Wave started. Like fine art photography, the new writers at times seemed as if they were ashamed of SF, which, like fine art photography, poses the question as to why they were there in the first place. In the end, the New Wave in SF wasn't an inbred community like the fine arts, which had no market forces to check the subversion of photography. Market forces acted to stave off a similar subversion in SF. Some of the examples of the New Wave were absorbed, others were rejected, and the New Wave more or less existed side by side with a now more edgy yet still traditionally entertaining hybrid form of SF perhaps best represented by Roger Zelazny or Larry Niven's Tales of Known Space series occupying the space in between. And then there were '60s writers who were their own wave and who unabashedly and unapologetically embraced the full strangeness of SF, like Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.
As I say, the same thing happened in the visual fine arts in the '60s and '70s. Cities across America gave artists fellowships based far more on what was outside the work than inside it; context was everything. That failed in SF because the consumer dollar ultimately ruled; there was no equivalent to what was essentially price supports and subsidies as was the case in the fine arts. That movement in the fine arts won; the so-called "conceptual art."
In SF today, that's all changed. The vast majority of social justice warrior writers only dream of ever making a living and they don't care about a consumer. They're holding on tight to their day jobs, teaching gigs, pension plans and health care and writing whatever drivel they want to.
In a exact analogy to what happened in the fine arts, much of the award-nominated work today isn't even fantasy or SF, so much has agenda and outside context come into play. In the visual fine arts, Tom Wolfe called this "The Painted Word" - the textualization of the visual arts. What was happening outside the work far superseded the work itself; the work became a conversation piece, not an end in itself. There was open collusion to intellectualize the visual fine arts and discriminate against and marginalize the merely figurative painter or merely straight photographer. The non-verbal power of each medium was destroyed and cast aside.
The same thing is happening today in core SF. The new hillbilly is the mere story-teller, straight white male and even heterosexuality itself, which is considered a quaint anachronism. Predictably, this is reflected in a passage in a bit of fiction by intersectionalist feminist SFF author Elizabeth Bear where "medieval horrors as dentistry without anesthetic, binary gender" are compared one to the other. Given that, it's no surprise gender feminists so often refer to straight white men as "dinosaurs," as if they are an evolutionary cul-de-sac or a quirky Victorian faddist ideology that never quite worked out.
It's no coincidence the gay Damien Walters who asked us to "Google 'intersectional'" would write an article at The Guardian titled "Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer." It's no coincidence that gay SFF intersectional gender feminist author and editor Alex Dally MacFarlane at Tor.com begins a post with "I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories." In intersectional ideology heterosexuality is deprecated like old HTML code or even "medieval horrors."
It's clear there is no room for heterosexuality in future science-fiction, or even room for science-fiction, which itself has been deprecated as too unwieldy to act as a suitable political conveyance for the cause. All those rocket ships and nebulas, or even dragons and sorcery act as a derailing mechanism when it comes to writing about lesbians fleeing the patriarchy ("Selkie Stories Are for Losers"), Jim Crow in mid-century Florida ("Wakulla Springs"), gay men rained on ("The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere"), or vibrant bi-sexual women in a medieval England (Hild) unfortunately still otherwise wrapped up in the "horrors" of "binary gender." Replacing the outmoded white male and his antique binary of heterosexuality is his provisional opposite: the gay non-white female - the new car in the 21st century showroom. That's why the two Tweets below are so common in the intersectional SFF community:
Not when you claim "toxic masculinity... is the dirty, diseased secret at the heart of so much of our culture."
Once again there is open collusion to discriminate against and marginalize, over-intellectualize and over-politicize the power of an art form, throwing the very genre aside in the act while mouthing maudlin phrases like "genre-bending." In the case of core SF, gender feminists are doing the same thing: essentially achieving the clownish act of textualizing text. The work becomes a mere conveyance for the more important social justice platform, which in this case is a kind of ditzy post-modernist or post-structural intellectualism passed off as racialized French Queer Theory. That's why merit-based work is of no interest to intersectionalists. You are either on the barricades or you are not, and in fictional terms that means a new intersectional sub-genre of racial (and sexual) revenge fiction.
Intersectionalists think they're themselves being marginalized anyway due to being women, PoC and gay. That's why I'm so baffled by so many readers who claim they separate a writer's politics from the writer's work. That works fine in traditional SF, because there is/was no club-like agenda per se aside from evolving the medium itself. But when entire bodies of work are being presented as the politics superseding the work itself, as is the case with today's Nebula and Hugo nominees, I don't understand the dissonance. The people writing and nominating the stories are certainly aware of their social justice messaging trumping art, craftsmanship and genre; they openly talk about it. The weird irony is that Heinlein was often confused with his work - wrongly in his case in my opinion.
It's one thing to have an insular group of influential writers have a large influence if they're something like elite connoisseurs. It's quite another if they have turned their back on the history of SF as did the fine arts its own history and burn the whole thing down at the behest of some daffy agenda. There is no doubt we are seeing a severe devolution of SF literature taking place. None of this included the red neckization of SF, which is the same cultural mechanism whereby country western types wishing they could run over people with long hair in 1970 transformed to having long hair themselves by 1980. Today SF has gone from laughing at blue-haired old ladies to being written by blue-haired old ladies... now with nose rings and tattoos. But they're still blue-haired old ladies. There was never a question of the presence of self-awareness or satire in either. At least the '60s blue-hairs weren't pretending they were iconoclasts. When old women actually embrace the idea of being Hell's Angels the cultural revolution and a literary movement has been hijacked. It takes a little more nuance than vomit zombies to address that.
What you have in intersectionalist rhetoric today mirrors the self-contradiction of a convention where 80,000 iconoclasts meet annually. SF is a refuge which has been unmasked by a 14 yr. old kid's 45 yr. old mother who's decided to put on a red vinyl mini-skirt and smoke a joint but throw out Jimi Hendrix for Pat Boone. That's what happens when one writes gender-bending challenging SF for the sake of change rather than for an actual reason. Sometimes the connoisseurs who begin to coalesce around a hobby and create a consensual benchmark are invaded but those benchmarks respected and carried forward. And sometimes they're not, and the originators are booted out. Then the macrame beer can hats come out. Variety is the spice of life and that is how it should be; there is no light without dark. And people won't even agree as to what actually is light and what dark. But I'll not read Wacky Races Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle SF just the same. I know the difference between liking Tex Avery and laughing at him as a straight white male. Tex is laughing right back.
Today SF is embracing its full potential for ever more bizarre modes of literature:
"The main characters in Kaleidoscope stories will be part of the QUILTBAG, neuro-diverse, disabled, from non-Western cultures, people of color, or in some other way not the typical straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied characters we see all over the place."
You would think they were applying disinfectant to a plague of woodticks. The specter of a transgender autistic one-legged Sikh in Amritsar who may also be overweight as frosting on the cake combined as it always is with dehumanizing language doesn't attach compassion to the idea of diversity but built-in mocking satire. "Neuro-diverse" is Newspeak social justice warriors use that means people with serious mental health issues aren't actually a danger to themselves or society or recognizes that this works and that doesn't. It's all good as they say, even when toxic madness is mainstreamed and institutionalized into the public arena.
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In some ways the year 1992 is the year zero in terms of political correctness. That is the year a 79 year old woman failed to hold a scalding cup of coffee in styrofoam between her bare legs and proceeded to absolve herself of any responsibility in the entire affair. That's wasn't the real problem as there has never been a global shortage of idiots. The real problem is when idiocy became officially institutionalized and a jury of the woman's peers decided a fast food franchise was 80% responsible for burning up the woman's legs, initially awarding the failed organic cup holder almost 3 million dollars in damages.
This was the time Kimberle Crenshaw started to promote the theory of feminist "intersectionalism," which year by year since then has become more and more the bedrock for what we casually think of as the insanity known as "political correctness."
1992 was also the year Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash, an unfortunate event from which SF has never fully recovered. Although Snow Crash didn't win the the U.K.'s British Science Fiction Award or Arthur C. Clarke Award for which it was nominated, it was soon realized by the SFF community to have been a seminal work of SF. In 2005 Time Magazine included Snow Crash as one of the "100 best English-language novels published since 1923."
Snow Crash itself plays off the seminal 1984 SF Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer is a young adult blend of Japanese manga/anime, Raymond Chandler, punk rock sensibilities, and the video game craze.
To me it's no coincidence that Snow Crash was published amidst the height of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze (including 3 feature films 1990-93) since that is what it most closely resembles. If you are amused by the ironical ironicalness of TMNT and swordsmen/pizza delivery drivers, then so too will you be amused by Snow Crash. What emerged in SF in the next 20 years has been somewhat less than amusing, and even worse if you consider pushing women's SFF for the sake of pushing women's SFF. Today's SF short stories and a good many novels read like endlessly reiterated fan-fiction of Snow Crash, but with no tongues in cheeks, and names changed to protect the conformist. Short SF seems to have no lack of enthusiasm for rust belt megalopolis dystopias and the clever, fey and fateful waifs which negotiate them like the Mario Brothers in rags, wearing 1950s pop-up toasters for hats and happily shorn of privilege because of unhappy postcolonialism. Add in thinly veiled and maudlin Vietnam War analogues, some pagodas, and consider your mind blown and opened.
Years later Stephenson wrote "It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them alone..." Well, consider SF obliterated by mom and pop channeling their interior blue-hair with real blue hair to emphasize the ironic ironicalness in case you missed the point. The nose-rings and tattoos are in aisle 12 and if you're lucky they might be on sale. In that piece Stephenson mentions Neil Gaiman fans lining up to have their books signed. One wonders if they held up forked fingers with tongues out and wore Freebird t-shirts and complained of and supported racially segregated spaces in the same Orwellian sentence. In regard to the former, one of Gaiman's fan Tweeted at him "How is this even legal?" My reply is: how is redneckery or intersectionalism even thinking?
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Other than the '60s, no real attempt at subverting SF occurred again until just a few years ago, and this time the subversion isn't taking the form of a heightened sense of real world politics as in the '60s but an ephemeral faddist notion of real world identities of race and gender envisioned as pedagogical vectors of morality. What's more pedagogical in the sense of race and gender than literally writing essays teaching your supposed opposite number in terms of race and sex how to see the world in a more moral and just way like you do, such as this insane notion of writing the "other," with your race and gender the literal conveyor of notions of morality and wisdom?
In a sense, it's not even the art of writing really, but of using one's self as the central art form - the entertainment as it were; not exactly exciting reading, but it certainly explains why an average novel about gender pronouns is best of the year or simply "best... ever." It also serves to explain why these new writers within SFF see the entire world and its history as being a battle of racial and sexual identities. To those on the outside it's about as entertaining as looking in the mirror, but to a narcissist, that's not only art, but the moral of the story, and a heady dose of wisdom on the side.
Once again market forces are rejecting the loss of a far more interesting combination of traditional craftsmanship, prose stylings, entertainment and fine art, but this time fewer people within the SFF community are listening. The reason for that is that the emotional investment of the writers in question is higher, often eclipsing SFF itself, and even reaching into a type of unwavering fanaticism. In contrast, their financial investment is far lower than in the past because their professional commitment is lower; the new PC writers virtually all have full-time jobs. There is no real motivation to compromise their own identity and meet the world halfway. It's an all or nothing proposition and, with so much personal investment on the line, it's no surprise you see so many public attempts in the SFF community at extortion, shaming and witch hunts taking priority over the literature itself. The writers themselves are the literature and they don't define themselves by what they do, but by what they are in the politically correct hierarchy of identity.
This is also the source of the latest craze to sweep the SFF community, the notion of "white privilege." Like the politically correct writers themselves, their foes are judged, not by anything they do, but by their politicized racial or sexual identity. In both instances, morality is pre-determined and permanent, embedded in one's race and sex. That is why, as in the case of the Jim Hines photo and notions of diversity, the mere lack of an identity is in and of itself immoral while a similar photo from a black boxing gym is without meaning.
The same thing that happened to fine art photography happened to painting, but years earlier: there was no parallel evolution but instead the disdainful extinction of one branch in favor of the wholly intellectual, which in fact had little to do with the act of painting. That's not to say the advent of conceptual art wasn't a fun and great thing; it was, but it didn't have to act as a cowbird. At least there, Van Gogh and Rembrandt weren't forgotten and thrown to one side because of their lack of a proper identity in favor of a terrible painter that possessed a victim narrative, although trust me, it is not from a lack of combing history today to find exactly that. I'm not any more interested in going to an exhibition of black and female painters than I am of white ones, and can scarcely imagine the satisfaction of knowing a painting on my wall was done by a white man or a woman with one arm or done on a tightrope or the SF novel I'm reading is by a gay black woman or written on top of a volcano. Of still less interest is in seeing the history of SFF literature as the toning down of one identity and the puffing up of another at the behest of mindless faddism; that is how a lean-to becomes a Parthenon, and it's not all that different from a cargo cult.
To show how stupid and/or willfully dishonest the PC are in their attempts at debate, consider how they react to the use of the following four words: censorship, racism, defamation, and free speech. When faced with their own deletion of comments, racial hatreds, group defamations, and intolerance for the views of others, the PC will almost always resort to pedantic overly technical definitions of these words, as if a group of writers have never heard of conversational english. In the case of all but "racism," the PC will default to government or legal-only definitions, as if their pedantry is fooling anyone. People obviously often use "racism" meaning hating someone because of their skin-color. When it comes to the PC giving us a glimpse into their true nature you get the "systemic" and "power structures" and other camouflage. Although there is obviously a thing called the Anti-Defamation League, use the word "defamation" and suddenly they're all courtroom lawyers. Similarly, there is no such thing as the spirit of free speech or censorship. Willful lying or stupidity - it amounts to the same thing.
"... nothing is real until a dude, preferably white, does it"
Here is a typical example of the utter lack of awareness and cluelessness of intersectional feminism when it comes to the cultural custom and practice that contributes to a thing like our Constitution. What you get is a Tower of Babel that stinks like an outhouse:
"roxane gay @rgay 'Identity politics'"
"Mallory Ortberg @mallelis @rgay I've never quite understood the use of 'identity politics' as a dismissal/pejorative"
"Mallory Ortberg @mallelis @rgay like 'oh dang your specific experience has informed your worldview? Well that's....real bad somehow'"
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Whatever one might think of science fiction and fantasy film and TV in 2014, they are far more influenced by their literary cousins than by their own screen ancestors. In turn, literary SFF is today is more influenced by screen SFF and even mainstream screen presentations than it is influenced by its own literary ancestors. In both instances, only the shallow trappings of the literary parent remains. What has gone missing in both cases is the sense of depth literary SF attained to around 1940 and which lasted until perhaps the early '70s. From 1940 to 1970, SF in its finest expressions was considered something of a fine art refuge from mere commercial pressures. That's not to say there were no market considerations, but that the pressure was low enough that experimentation and a sense of SF being allowed to be true to itself remained.
As a side-note, there is a bit of a small irony in the notion of fine art versus the mere commercial. As good a films as The Hurt Locker and most certainly Annie Hall are, it seems fairly obvious that both Star Wars and Avatar can be considered seminal achievements in cinema and that in each case that was known at the time the films came out. The idea of the fine art - however one defines that term - was instrumental in costing both Star Wars and Avatar a best-picture Oscar. I think where the problem comes in when thinking of such an idea is confusing the idea of sober and serious. There is little doubt both Star Wars and Avatar are serious expressions of film-making in their interior constructions. More irony comes in to play when one considers the ghettoization SF literature has traditionally suffered because it has been thought of as flighty rather than a serious application of serious themes. Content should not overshadow interior construction when it comes to artistry.
No one writing SF in the '40s and '50s ever thought they were going to get rich and have best-sellers; they wrote SF because they loved it. Editors catered to an insulated group of people who understood and appreciated the historic and artistic scope of their field. Today's editors cater to a similarly insulated group, but one that is hopelessly politicized. When famous 19th century military historian Carl von Clausewitz wrote "that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means," he might just as well have been talking about today's modern writer of SFF.
Writers of SFF still do love their field, but the truth is they are simply coming from a different place than old school SF did. Mid-century SF was born of the culture its writers were immersed in. What they wrote came naturally to them, and as they say, you can't go home again. It's why no one can really successfully mimic mid-century pin-up art or '40s film noir, try though they might. It's not that the culture that produced that art is old per se, but that it was never nurtured. Not only was it not nurtured, serious attempts to murder it outright occurred in the '60s. Much of that is a natural evolution of pop culture as well, but when you throw out too much it can be hard to recross that chasm.
Today's writers are similarly immersed in their own culture, but one that is obsessed with identity and culture wars, in complete contrast to the game of perception and principle, color and tone, mid-century writers were wont to address. For me it's the difference between sipping a fine wine and chugging an inferior wine straight out of the bottle. We're talking about a crowd today who will listen to audio presentations of literature while running errands or riding a stationary bicycle and they racially and sexually pie-chart art as if they are sorting nuts and bolts. (To me the idea of listening to Ray Bradbury while running errands is like smoking cornsilk and wearing a paper hat, as if Bradbury himself has become an errand to run.) I'm trying to imagine mid-century fans of SF proudly proclaiming they read 44.8% books by women, 13.2% gay, and 17.8% books by the bizarre racial construct known as "people of color" and I just can't imagine them being that densely stupid.
Get a load of this "2013 LGBT YA by the Numbers" for your politically pie-charted fiction. She's even won an award for it. Take note of that entire dreary list of awards for its full measure of inquisitions and witchhunts.
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There are a few voices in the wilderness, such as this review of "Writer's of the Future XXIX" by Dave Truesdale at sfsite.com. Truesdale writes:
"When such an inordinate percentage of science-fiction today is pervaded by liberal politics or viewpoints in any number of ways -- overt or subtle -- (whether the authors realize it themselves or not), from the theme of stories themselves to offhand comments by characters or tossed off one-liners in stories or novels -- from a purely literary standpoint these stories soon become trite, boring, and unimaginative. A single set of like-minded viewpoints on any number of contemporary issues, in the long run, does the genre no good. There's no spark, no vitality, no uncomfortable viewpoints explored or examined. Authors putting forth the identical politically correct viewpoints (by rote, like robots) time after time after time makes for very stale stories.
"And woe unto those who dare now question the accepted consensus, for they are vilified in print, stripped of honors or otherwise cast out as pariahs for saying or believing anything a vocal liberal minority deems offensive. The sort of events I've just described have actually taken place in the SF community, and is not only disheartening but alarming, for it portends ill-health for the entire field when voices are silenced and the fiction becomes tame and toothless."
I am no fan of conservatism and I disagree with a great many things Truesdale says and how he says them, but here I believe what Truesdale says is true, though I don't see this as a liberal vs. conservative issue. Just because people hide within liberalism doesn't mean they're liberals, or even political. This is flat out intersectionalism vs. heterosexual white men and nothing else. I don't want to put words in his mouth but I believe Mr. Truesdale is politely (not always true of him) saying he has no interest in reading the work of conformist bigots and that no art can emerge from a literary culture of bigotry. I would add that yet another idea, "diversity," has become a mere smokescreen for racial and gender animus.
No art can survive what's happening in SF today. SF's preeminent institutions have institutionalized conformity, racism, sexism and callowness, all the while stridently promoting itself as doing the exact opposite. For me, I don't read SF to see myself, but other possibilities I have never thought of. Not only that, I read SF to experience the minds of people smarter than myself - more clever - not stupider and more ignorant. Others read SF to see themselves, and state that right out on their blogs and in interviews. Where is me? Personally I can't think of anything more boring than the dial tone of a generic racial or sexual identity passed off to me as if it's an Ellery Queen-like plot in and of itself.
These are Orwell's children, not Heinlein's. The death of a literary genre is the result. Where I think Truesdale also misses the mark is in assuming content in and of itself is the deal-breaker. To me, it is not content alone but the presentation of that content that is the deal-breaker when it comes to SF literature as a fine art, just as Van Gogh presented the ordinary portrait in a way no one before him had. Big ideas are fine but when they are constrained by conformist and sensible writing devoid of style or a sense of authority, that becomes a problem. Jack Vance or Ray Bradbury could make buying a sandwich or standing in a telephone booth interesting. For me, it is the lack of story-telling ability that is the biggest difference between the old and the new, not some measurable writing ability. What is needed is a diverse range of unique artistry, not skin and sex. And it may also be said that the word-count of modern SF novels are twice what they used to be but without having twice as much to say. Boredom is built-in.
In every decade during the surge of SF literature in its early era, there has been a balance created by sheer chance consisting of a tripod of informed editor, author, and fan. In the teens there was Thomas Metcalf and Robert Davis at Munsey's All-Story Magazine with such authors as Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, Gertrude Bennett writing as Francis Stevens, and Abraham Merritt
.In the '20s and '30's there was editor Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales and authors H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. On the pure SF side of the ledger in the '30s there were a variety of editors at Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories who promoted writers like Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Stanley G. Weinbaum and E.E. "Doc" Smith.
The end of the '30s saw the beginning of the Campbell era at the re-named Astounding Science Fiction and then editors H.L. Gold and Frederik Pohl at Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine which published writers like Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, and Alfred Bester. Over at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Anthony Boucher (with the help of J. Francis "Mick" McComas) oversaw a wonderful line-up of writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Roger Zelazny, Robert Heinlein and Clifford D. Simak.
After that comes the '60s and then the tripod of fan, editor and author becomes unstable and falls. Nothing has ever arisen to take its place. Important editors such as Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey at Del Rey Books and Donald Wollheim at DAW carried the torch of the old traditions into the '70s and '80s with SF specialty imprints as publishers such as Ace Paperbacks were sold to clueless banks. Del Rey reprinted good old stuff (especially "best-of's") and a mix of good and bad new stuff, among them the inadvisable Sword of Shannara (1977) by Terry Brooks right out of the starting gate. The more traditional publishers and even last full gasp of the SF magazines still garnered the lion's share of Hugo and Nebula nominations through the '70s and into the '80s.
A lot of good work was published in the '70s and '80s and the evolution of SF as a literature continued, but at a much slower pace, as uncaring mainstream readers increasingly began to want to see a reflection of the more accessible work they saw on television and film, and subsequently even in Japanese cartoons. Ironically, Japanese anime are today producing some of the best SF films out there, which isn't the compliment it sounds. Again, as in the case of Star Wars, the nuance of those animated Japanese films is conveyed at the edges, not in the plots, which are fun but vapid. The exact same thing is true of the animated film, the sublime Wall-E. This is in direct opposition to the best literary SF where nuance and layering suffuses the stories themselves, the edges matching, filling out and complimenting the central story. No one is going to say the plots of "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester, To Live Forever by Jack Vance or "The Soft Weapon" by Larry Niven are stereotypical or vapid.
I have no idea what Heinlein, Vance, Asimov or Van Vogt would've done had they had access to blogs and a thing such as Twitter, but it is hard to believe they'd be as childish, maudlin and even hateful and racist as the current crop of politically correct, politicized and even radicalized writers. Endless Twitter attempts at wit without wit and humor without humor is reflected in the SF stories presented to decreasing interest and even less acclaim.
To be blunt, unless the endlessly complaining and rabble-rousing element is simply kicked out of science fiction, the genre has little hope of recovery. SF is not the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, a rape crisis counseling center, or the United Nations, and there is no need to treat it as such any more than it should be a volunteer fire department, arm of law enforcement or a furniture design school. Making the stunning announcement that one is against rape, racism, sexism and sexual harassment is a curious thing to do, since it purposely envisions people who are somehow complicit or in favor of such things and then targets them as an entire race or sex.
The inevitable result is a mechanism whereby sexism and racism is passed off as justice. Demonization theories like "white privilege" are meant to not only make racism a whites-only affair, but allow one to jump the gap from one white to all whites. Demonization theories like "rape culture" are meant to allow one to jump the gap from males who commit actual rape to all males. Dragging all of that into the arena of SF literature is not only inappropriate, it's crazy. It not only betrays an obsession one cannot let go of, but the intellectual failure of the anti-bigot bigot. The fact all of this nonsense by an amazing coincidence targets whites, men, and heterosexuals 100% of the time is still not obvious enough to people with third-rate intellects. Follow these theories back to the people who created and most advocated them and the agenda is as transparent as the other amazing coincidence that non-whites, women and gays suffer no such similar failures of morality.
The social justice attitude suffused the fine arts in America in the 1960s and co-opted both painting and photography and each died, essentially transformed from the language of the visual into text but with the same names plus an increasing social activism touted, not as an individual theme, but as fundamental to artist and the creation of art. In the case of SF, this is not a question of putting one's head in the sand and ignoring the world but one of subverting a literary genre and transforming it into a conveyor of gripe and hokum by politicized identities all fighting to advance the most sorrowful narratives.
If nothing is done to prevent it, SF literature will be transformed into nothing more than flavor-of-the-week idiotic treatises about "cultural appropriation," American genocides, post-colonialism, patriarchy, rape-culture, gender, and the hatred of PoC, homosexuals, and women, not to mention the ignorance and racism of anyone born before 1990. Historic and social awareness has long been a feature of SF, but not at the cost of the literature itself, and certainly not by pecking out the eyes of its own readership.
And how do you kick these people out of SF? Ignore them. Don't let them guest-blog or write articles. Don't interview them or review their books. Don't let them be on panels at conventions. Don't give them a platform to express their hate and bizarre world views, which in any event have absolutely nothing to do with SF literature. Spotting a bigot is not rocket science. When a person obsessively (daily to weekly) writes about a group they identify as gay, female, white, black, etc., and that rhetoric is negative about that group 100% of the time, that is a bigot. They have no place in SF. Ignore their excuses, ignore their mitigations, ignore their explanations, their logic. Forget their politics, their race, their gender. Use simple principle and look at the odds a group - any group - defined by what they were the day they were born will come up short 100% of the time. It is impossible for that to happen. That only happens in a sick and delusional crucible of hatred and disdain, bias and prejudice. And by the way, it would help to stop nominating such morons for SF's literary awards.
Over one hundred years ago, magazines such as The Argosy, with a significant SF presence in their pages, had circulations of up to half a million readers in a country of only 80 to 90 million people compared to the over 300 million we have today. That certainly reflects a mainstream interest in SF, but the work was presented on the terms of the writers and editors, and not pandered to public tastes. Sales mattered, of course, but SF - the fantastic - was introduced to the mainstream, not the other way around, as is the case today. The mainstream has nothing to offer SF, no more so than it does Henri Cartier-Bresson, Van Gogh or Jackson Pollack.
Amanda Green at the blog Mad Genius Club writes that, as writers "We need to educate ourselves on what the market is looking for. Basically, adapt to the times. Adapt to the market."
I say, "Why?" What joy does a writer have being nothing more than a xerox of someone else's mind? What if the market is looking for science fiction you have no interest in writing? This is how endless clones of Lord of the Rings get written, or Dr. Who and Star Wars novels. There may always be a place in the world for children's coloring books, but marketing them to 20-somethings may not be that place. If making a living is the issue, there are better ways to make money and better ways to spend your time than helping to wreck a genre you profess to love. If Green is going to be writing based on the white noise of the market, I won't be reading it, for the simple reason it almost certainly won't be worth reading. I want to hear the artist's authoritative and unique voice, not the voice of my cousin who posts pictures of her cat and sandwiches she just made on Facebook, compelling though they may be.
The market adapts to the artist, not the other way around - that is if you are interested in making art. Making art that forces readers to adapt themselves to you and making money are not mutually exclusive concepts. Ray Bradbury and especially Robert Heinlein of course cared what their public and editors thought, and shaped their work accordingly, but not to the point of entirely compromising their writing. If Heinlein and Bradbury had allowed their writing to be shaped by public opinion, we probably never would have heard of them. In fact, Bradbury felt writers should stay as far away from writing workshops as possible, and write intuitively. As for Heinlein, despite the pragmatic feel to much of his work, he was in fact a wild eccentric, artistically speaking. So was the often dreamy A.E. Van Vogt who, like Heinlein, was a brilliant story-teller in the early part of his career, though that deserted him in his final body of work.
And what about Jack Vance? His writing and story-telling was fundamentally sound and professional, and also amazingly eccentric. Yet Vance made a living as a writer. That's not to say Vance didn't think of what he could do to enhance sales. Late in his career Vance wrote the Lyonesse fantasy and Cadwal SF trilogies in an attempt to enter the young adult market. At the same time, in those novels, Vance did not suppress his native eccentricity or prose styling's. The Lyonesse trilogy (1983-89) is a flat out masterpiece, one of fantasy's greatest works and typical Vance, and the first of the Cadwal books, Araminta Station, (1988) has some subtle and great writing. The problem with each is that they didn't have that fundamental appeal to children that Harry Potter has. Vance's work was too adult and too eccentric, though that eccentricity is deftly maintained within the pragmatic framework of a really fine writer.
Great SF novels are not conformist or things that kowtow to a mainstream sensibility or market forces. Name just one all-time great hard-genre pulp magazine legacy SF novel that was marketed to or written with the general public in mind. It doesn't exist. Until the era of Star Wars, SF was marketed to its closeted fans. That would be true yet for a few years but a parallel coloring-book world of SF and fantasy novels based on movies, TV and games came into being and eventually merged. Fans who once retro-engineered Larry Niven's Ringworld now reconcile the various versions of Dr. Who or write about SF convention panels that are too white or too male. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote two SF novels that seemingly had their eye on a mainstream audience: Inferno (1976), and Footfall (1985). Each crossed the line from core fandom - being nominated for Hugos - and mainstream audiences, Footfall becoming a New York Times best seller. However each pulls back on a more dreamy take on SF, particularly Footfall, with its inadvisable elephant-analogue aliens, complete with mud baths.
One of the most bizarrely humorous off-shoots of intersectionalism's supremacist fascination with its own identities is the sense one gets there is an assumption that, from an artistic point of view, being gay, PoC or non-Western is in and of itself some innate protection from being a flaming conformist redneck. The idea that identity provides some ultra-cool and mysterious access to modes of perception unavailable to the straight whitebread male, who is a stodgy conformist by default. It never seems to occur to intersectionalists that type of thinking is a downpour of conformist thought, nor should it then surprise anyone that intersectionalists think of themselves as a mass of tattooed iconoclasts, itself an amusing self-defeating clause of redneckery. In reading the vapid literature intersectionalists produce, it's pretty clear they think if they do it, it must be right and bright, no fixes required, only themselves. Given intersectionalism's own obsession with cultural appropriation, it's pretty clear they have not learned one of the lessons of doing so is that dyeing your hair pink, wearing leather pants, body-piercings and strategically placed tattoos is not the Hell's Angels but a redneck perception of what a Hell's Angel did. Being gay, non-white or living in Mumbai for two years is no substitute for actual eccentricity either; it is a redneck's perception of what the new cool is.
This at least partially accounts for the habit of intersectionalists to constantly preach, constantly vie for the moral highground, even amongst themselves; that exclusive piece of real estate only the truly seeing and perceptive have access to. In the end, it's no different from keeping up with the Joneses and their two-car garage. It's serves no purpose, produces nothing and gets you nowhere.
Being "edgy" is somewhat a matter of perception. Then again beating people bloody at a party for amusement or breaking the law every day for 20 years in a row is a very real thing that very real people do. One can't access the trappings of that while avoiding ever actually behaving in such a manner. Intersectionalism's identity worship is a self-defeating proposition that throws writers into artistic spaces in which they don't belong, and have no access or right to. The idea of art emanating from diversity is yet another piece of dross to throw in that already supremacist and bigoted crock. You can put all the pink hair and tattoos on a donkey you want to, but it's never going to know what those lights in the night sky are nor ever truly have a real world understanding of what the Flitcraft Parable means. You have to walk it like you talk it, and that's no suit of clothes one chooses from a wardrobe.
*
Everett Bleiler in his earlier mentioned 1998 book Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years : A Complete Coverage of the Genre Magazines Amazing, Astounding, Wonder, and Others from 1926 Through 1936 disagrees with me about SF's origins when it comes to things like a colonialist mindset. Bleiler knows this material upside down and backwards but I don't subscribe to his interpretations. Bleiler writes about the early Gernsback era of magazine SF:
"Overwhelmingly present are evidences of xenophobia and colonialism, as Earthmen discover that nonterrestial or nonhuman intelligent life is commonly foul, nauseating vicious, and aggressive. - with an obvious remedy for all this. As the later saying went, 'The only good amoeboid is a dead amoeboid'
"Implicit in many stories is the 'manifest destiny' of the human race throughout at least the solar system. Mankind is justified in exterminating or subjugating lesser (or sometimes superior) breeds. Stories like... Edmond Hamilton's 'A Conquest of Two Worlds,' where unrestrained interplanetary colonialism and conquest are condemned, are very atypical - even in Hamilton's other work, where alien life is invasive and murderous.
"In this area of social thought, the inner picture of the science-fiction of the Gernsback era is not pretty. It has advanced beyond the frank kill-'em-and-take-it approach of dime-novel science-fiction of the late nineteenth century, but only by pushing things down below the narrative surface. If science-fiction is to be considered, as it is by some theorists, a means of opening mankind to the wonders of the universe it certainly failed badly during this period.
"Much of this xenophobia and colonialism is probably rooted in a general unarticulated, unconscious fear of the unknown that is represented in many different stories of different sorts."
First of all, mind-reading aside, what writer is going to be drawn to a genre who has a "fear of the unknown" as opposed to an outright attraction to the weird? Fans of SF don't read it because they fear the strange, but because they are thrilled by it. Secondly, Bleiler is confusing a purposeful ideological expression with meeting engagements between Earthmen and aliens as plot devices that need a bad guy. I don't agree mankind's penchant for war, conquest and conflict throughout all of human history can be interpreted as a colonialist ideology or xenophobia any more than the history of literature can then be, since it embraces the same struggles in different forms. A great deal of literature involves physical journeys and conflict. There is a big difference between that and championing conflict and therefore imperialism and colonialism. SF's natural penchant for off-world exploration makes it vulnerable to such accusations, but in fact SF only differs from mainstream literature in its plot points, in its particulars, not in principle. The idea that monsters equal xenophobia and turns into colonialism if in another locale doesn't carry much intellectual weight.
Early SF is no more colonial than The Odyssey is and Hamilton's example, which is plainly preaching, is in stark contrast to Bleiler's assertion that his stipulated pro-colonialist stories were preaching as well. When you read such stories it's plain they do not share the tenor of Hamilton's cited work, but instead are straight up adventure fiction, not propaganda advocating the conquest, oppression and killing of people of other cultures. The monsters are not indigenous people but the same monsters that inhabit human myths down through our entire history. In any event, if everything is colonialism and an ideology, than nothing is.
Amy J. Ransom echoes this in her book Science Fiction from Quebec: A Postcolonial Study (2009) when she writes "recent essays expose the fallacy of a simplistic logic which argues that if a novel depicts the adventure of space colonization then it must, by definition, adhere to a colonialist ideology."
An ideology pushing colonialism would look very like intersectionalism: an commonly held view by more than a few SF writers in their fiction and non-fiction with the specific shared vocabulary that would go along with it.
In attempting to arrange stories by theme, under "Colonialism, particularly flagrant examples," Bleiler lists 10 stories. Considering the hundreds of stories in play, that's not a lot.
Bleiler himself earlier writes about that era's SF "few stories are blatantly propagandistic. Where social and cultural material occasionally enters stories in large quantity, it is more a question of almost anthropological interest in unusual human or humanoid life ways.
"It is therefore no surprise that much of the world of the 1920s and 1930s does not enter on an obvious surface level into the stories of the Gernsback era. The most important event, the Great Depression and its concomitants, is significantly absent."
Golden Age SF authors were not stupid people. They realized that one could not overtly preach for two reasons: one economic and the other intellectual. The first is that boring people is death for a writer. The second is that in order to convincingly propagandize a thing, one must disguise it. Doing so means breaking it down to its constituent parts or, in other words, invoking principle vs. identity - hiding the identity of a thing. That very process is self-defeating because it throws whatever propaganda one is indulging in out into a human question rather than a narrow ideological one. Identity propaganda simply doesn't work in an SF context and there is no sign of it in SF's 1912-1960 timeframe.
It's no coincidence intersectionalist writers do the exact opposite, precisely because they are stupid people. They make no attempt to disguise their propaganda; how can they - it would defeat their supremacist purpose and throw moral failure into a human arena rather than one of race and sex. Intersectionalists also cost themselves money by boring people as well as being overtly hostile to a great percentage if not majority of their readers.
Bleiler later writes "In ethnic matters science-fiction pulps concord with the general pulp magazines in embodying a male, white Anglo-Saxon world. Orientals, when they appear, are usually treated with hostility, while Blacks are almost altogether absent, except for occasional ridicule or occasional villainous roles." Here again I disagree with Bleiler's implication about a "white Anglo-Saxon world." That demographic was no more an expression of white racial interest than Egyptian movies are an expression of Arab racial interest. There is a reason we call the KKK the KKK rather than simply label it all "white Anglo-Saxon"(s). Aside from the reality of marketing in an America which averaged almost 90% white throughout 1912-1960, I think SF writers, in keeping with their desire to entertain or hide messaging, purposefully adopted the most bland and generic names and ethnic groups they could, in a sense banishing ethnicity in order to more clearly get at the meat of what it was they were presenting. The idea of an alternate explanation involving a shared supremacist ideology doesn't hold much water. As for his comments about blacks and "Orientals," Bleiler doesn't quantify his assertion to give it context beyond the word "usually," not exactly an academic footnote.
Although analogues to colonialism are a persistent theme in SF's early era, it is only one among scores of themes Bleiler lists in his book. The claim SF is built on colonialism is a falsehood. Despite intersectional bleating about colonialism, Bleiler lists an ad in Astounding for work that says:
"'material that will interest the reader who enjoys good stories laid in the present or future time, and in which marvelous scientific devices, yet to be actually invented, play an important part. Much of the material we must have, therefore, will be akin to that written by such men as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells; stories dealing with invisibility, time machines, earth invasions, interplanetary adventures. the fourth dimension, and so forth. We require material that is not overweighted with scientific explanations to such an extent that the story itself suffers. Story values plot, physical action, conflict, suspense, human interest, a hero and heroine to sympathize with and a villain to dislike are equal in importance to the accuracy and convincingness of the science that underlies the story. We especially are looking for good interplanetary shorts;'"
There is nothing about colonialist or imperialist stories, though those words were not unknown nor is there any reason not to use them. For example the phrase "fourth dimension" is used in Bleiler's book over 170 times. Some variation of the word "colonial" is only used 22 times. The word "empire" in a military sense is used around 100 times, but more than half refer to non-Western or alien empires. The phrase "time machine" is used over 100 times. Even the word "invisibility" is used 86 times. No one would say American genre science-fiction was built on the theme of the fourth dimension, time machines or invisibility in and of themselves and there is no reason to say it was based on colonialism.
I just don't get this whole thing. Englishman act English in England; so what? What nation or culture doesn't do that? Why act like that's thumbing noses at someone?
There is plenty of room for debate here, but if one is going to make claims about old-school SF, one need only produce the stories to black up such claims. Intersectionalists could make a nice start by ceasing to write Orwellian sentences than might match Victorian Patriarchy.
*
Intersectionalist SF today is the type of literature white supremacists might write if they became interested in SF for some reason. The irony there is SF's modern feminists not only already believe all of Golden Age SF was white supremacist, but the reason the PC's own feminist doused SF exists is as a reaction to that. Old school SF wasn't supremacist or colonialist or racist or any of that nonsense. Within or without that old literature there is no sign of a cohesive shared ideology with the shared racial and sexual demonization theories and academic vocabulary the PC themselves use like a production line. The intersectional Third Wave feminism which is the heart of core SF can't make that distinction (or any simple comparisons really) because they are literalists - identity addicts. They are unable to think in terms of a philosophical or intellectual shared human space but instead can only think in terms of race and sex. That's the reason they invoke the completely meaningless idiocy called "Godwin's Law" whenever anyone probes too deeply into the supremacist and racist literature the PC are selling. In other words there will never be anyone LIKE a Nazi - only an actual Nazi.
It's clear today that that phrases like diverse and inclusive were nothing more than a shill, camouflage to hide the madness that intersectionalists push. It is notable that when intersectionalists talk among themselves they are not talking about diversity or inclusiveness but about doing away with sexual norms, the family, and allowing boys and girls to act like boys and girls, or indeed anyone do anything they want outside of the strictures of radical feminism. Even the very artwork that is at the heart of comic books and SFF magazine covers has been declared not fit for feminist consumption even while intersectionalists follow the lead of insane women who want to do away with taboos against incest."
'The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a sexist, sexually repressed society.'" - feminist Andrea Dworkin
Dworkin is by no means a lone voices in this regard. In her 1990 book Gender Troubles Judith Butler mentions "...feminist accounts of the incest taboo as the mechanism that tries to enforce discrete and internally coherent gender identities within a heterosexual frame."
Gender feminism is full of sly rationalizations for the perversion of incest for the same old reason the taboo is a socially constructed one rather than a visceral distaste founded in nature. All this academic gibberish can be seen as nothing more than transparent attempts to justify doing whatever you want to do on the de facto excuse that one's desires plus oppressed identity themselves constitute a moral ethos. Gender feminism has rationales for doing anything it wants to do, which is why gender feminism is devoid of principles; it is a cult of identity that has no real interest in what is right or wrong although it constantly talks about justice and equality. There can be no justice in such a world, and that explains the insanely bigoted comments by SFF's social justice warriors who themselves have wittingly or not substituted race and gender for principles we can all live by. In short, to have the wrong race and gender is to simply be wrong.
The truth is that when you see a thing like the issue of Christmas toys and "No Gender December," you don't know whether what's staring you back in the face is Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir or naive middle class folks who only see the mainstreamed far diluted end of it:
"Gender stereotypes limit children's imagination and development, also perpetuating inequality. I encourage every child's freedom to choose, to grow and develop, to be themselves without the damaging influence of gender stereotypes."
One can't simply assume all the folks signing that site's pledge are Butlerian disciples. However it does pose the question of who the Australian Greens senator Larissa Waters who is pushing this is and who the founders of Play Unlimited Thea Hughes and Julie Huberman are and who their role models are, a thing outside the scope of this book. Are they typical concerned parents or devotees of gender feminism?
Read this revealing passage by Judith Butler in the 1999 preface to her book Gender Trouble that exposes something of the ideological origins that lead to what Butler admits is trying to reconcile the perceived abnormality of lesbians and the normality of heterosexuality, leading to them essentially exchanging places in self-serving queer theory feminist thought. One cannot fault someone for wanting to belong. One can fault someone for devising an ideological contraption that concludes others therefore don't and their patriarchy must be torn down to "denaturalize" it. These ideological origins and theme of this reconcilement and the similar means to solve that by demonizing men are a fundamental constant of gender feminism from de Beauvoir to Butler, and one completely masked as this brand of feminism is mainstreamed into America under the fakery of equality.
"I grew up understanding something of the violence of gender norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically anomalous body, deprived of family and friends, living out his days in an 'institute' in the Kansas prairies; gay cousins forced to leave their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my own tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and homes. All of this subjected me to strong and scarring condemnation but, luckily, did not prevent me from pursuing pleasure and insisting on a legitimating recognition for my sexual life. It was difficult to bring this violence into view precisely because gender was so taken for granted at the same time that it was violently policed. It was assumed either to be a natural manifestation of sex or a cultural constant that no human agency could hope to revise. I also came to understand something of the violence of the foreclosed life, the one that does not get named as 'living,' the one whose incarceration implies a suspension of life, or a sustained death sentence. The dogged effort to 'denaturalize' gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of 'real' politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. What would the world have to be like for my uncle to live in the company of family, friends, or extended kinship of some other kind? How must we rethink the ideal morphological constraints upon the human such that those who fail to approximate the norm are not condemned to a death within life?
"'Normative clearly has at least two meanings in this critical encounter, since the word is one I use often, mainly to describe the mundane violence performed by certain kinds of gender ideals. I usually use 'normative' in a way that is synonymous with 'pertaining to the norms that govern gender.' But the term 'normative' also pertains to ethical justification, how it is established, and what concrete consequences proceed thereform. One critical question posed of Gender Trouble has been: how do we proceed to make judgments on how gender is to be lived on the basis of the theoretical descriptions offered here? It is not possible to oppose the 'normative' forms of gender without at the same time subscribing to a certain normative view of how the gendered world ought to be. I want to suggest, however, that the positive normative vision of this text, such as it is, does not and cannot take the form of a prescription: 'subvert gender in the way that I say, and life will be good.'"
Despite that disclaimer at the end, subverting heterosexuality is exactly the use Butler's text and the text of many other like her is being put to. In that way it is the same as white privilege. The PC can say all they want about the progressive and eventually healing nature of addressing white privilege. In fact the way it is used in the public arena all across America is as a bludgeon to silence, scapegoat and tar white Americans. That is also how gender feminism, in saying the "normative" is a moral question, is being used to assert heterosexuality amounts to little more than chattel slavery for women, and such feminists make no secret of coming right out and saying that therefore is the source of their "political agency"; it is a moral crusade against oppression.
The idea these folks can tear down the world of Mother Nature is a chimera, but that doesn't mean successfully mainstreaming this bizarre ideology under a false rubric of equal rights feminism can't significantly damage a society on the way to confirming its assured failure to change the nature of life itself. In truth the idea my gender is fluid therefore gender is fluid is childishly self-serving and willfully lacks faith in larger humanity. Gender feminism at its core is driven by sociopathy and resentment.
"But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who do the fucking." - Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987
*
Diversity is a funny thing in science fiction; do it right and it's just fine. Do it for the sake of doing it and it has a jarring effect. The casting of the original Star Trek TV show was a stroke of brilliance. Without saying anything it effortlessly conveyed backstory that Africa was now on an equal footing and the Soviets were no longer our enemy; that the world was far more united and on an even keel than in 1967. But this is fiction we're talking about and it relies a great deal on verisimilitude. Do diversity wrong, like having a Norwegian barber in Cairo, Egypt without explanation - just for the sake of some checkbox - and it'll wreck the story. If everyone in Harry Potter would've been black it would not have worked. The PC don't want to admit that obvious fact but they know it's true. Still, they insist on writing jarring nonsense too weird even for SF and it simply doesn't work. You'd think someone like Tor Books would ask themselves the obvious question why the most popular SFF franchises seem to escape them, seeing as how it's their backyard. But they don't. Predicting sales based on what 12 clueless racists say won't measure up to predicting sales based on what one million normal human beings say.
The dangers of literalism and identity addiction are self-evident and much worse when they are politicized, sexualized and racialized. In a PC atmosphere, if I were to compare the intellectual and philosophical space behind a thing like South African Apartheid to neo-Nazism, people would say, of course. Do the same thing with a local chapter of the KKK and it's of course. Do the same thing with intersectionalism and Godwin's Law swings shut like a perceptual gate, because PC is a perceptual gatekeeper that keeps incorrectthought out, no matter how correct and true it in fact is. Suddenly the idea of a philosophical space is booted out and the protection of identity kicks in. In point of fact that earlier comparison in PC terms are only able to be seen because a broken clock is right twice a day. Apartheid, neo-Nazism and the KKK all share "whiteness" and so of course intersectional eyes are wide open to the idea of the philosophical space. Take away that whiteness and there is no such thing; simple comparisons go back to unavailable, under the blanket racial and sexual identity protection of intersectionalist dogma for anything gay, woman or PoC. In the hands of an intersectionalist, concepts such as trust and art become meaningless. Trust in skin and sex and what you get is not trust but skin and sex; what else might occur is a crap shoot. Trust in art regardless of skin and sex and what you get is art.
Daphne Patai in her 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism writes about a sexual harassment conference where Andrea Dworkin claimed "'millions of men wanted to have a young woman at work to suck their cock.' Did anyone rise to contest such outrageous slander directed at all or most men? No one. On the contrary... It is hard to imagine any other group of people in the United States today who could he so crassly maligned in a public setting without arousing immediate protest."
Insensate radical lesbian activists like Andrea Dworkin and her entire '70s cadre have a psychotic phobia of straight men. That phobia, now new and improved by the black intersectionalist '90s version, is transmitted by proxy to mainstream middle-class women and their allies in SFF in a kind of a cool factor/street cred way like The Beatles doted on blues musicians as special people with special insights by virtue of being black. Ironically that's the same mechanism of skin privilege feminists talk about today. Today, SFF's analogy to the starry-eyed Beatles see gay, black and lesbian in the same cool cutting edge way. They feel if they adopt anything a black lesbian says they are unerringly adopting truth to power and the real deal about real life and real oppression by the experts, just like '60s black blues musicians were the real experts in heartache and pain. SFF's goofballs despise surface privilege at the same time they unquestioningly embrace it by becoming a large ear that listens and doesn't talk while claiming straight white men must then have even bigger ears and talk even less.
That is how the core SFF community has come to embrace race and gender rather than talent as a hierarchy. That is also why the core SFF community is a deprecated and irrelevant ruin on its way out the door. In intersectionalism, meritocracy and talent is considered a privileged shill and con game. Intersectionalists relabeled the gay feminist section of the bookstore "SFF" and it fooled people for a few years. That's all done. Any principled or fearless male SFF writer has long bolted for the exits and you'll see no new talent coming from that quarter. Any woman SFF writer who doesn't want to be tainted as either a nut or a traitor has done the same. What's left are silly middle-class redneck authors who cannot survive on talent fighting for credibility and the few miserable dollars of gay women and their PC allies.
The audience has also seen the con being played and they are long gone from an arena that went PC years ago and today is far, far worse when it comes to a failure to produce the entertaining, fun and sometimes literate fiction of the past.
Americans have to get over this silly and even dangerous con game being handed to them that everyone who is not a straight white male is speaking truth to power about oppressions and every straight white male is speaking in code to mask their homophobia, racism and woman-hatred. That is a deeply, deeply supremacist and bigoted concept.
No matter what you think of people in general, one must accept the reality that bigotry and racism knows no ethnicity or sexual grouping. Look at the free-fire zone of bald-faced bigotry I've shown in this book. One can write an unknown amount of that off to naiveté. After all, one need not be a gender feminist to buy into the idea of white privilege. But one must accept the fact there are gays who have a deep antipathy to heterosexuals, women for men, and non-whites for whites, just as it is true the other way around; such things are human failings.. To believe otherwise is to deny people their humanity, not to mention the proof I have laid before you. The inevitable riposte is this power/privilege "punching up" nonsense, which is a long con created by bigots to fuel the ability to reserve racism and bigotry for straight white males. You simply cannot make up invisible Jim Crow lines from a half-century ago in 2014 and misuse punching up, and terms like "systemic" and "institution."
*
What intersectional gender feminists mean by "equality" is the abolition of gender. Gender in and of itself constitutes sexism and so the only way to equality is to abolish gender. Let me reproduce this synopsis from earlier:
"Gender creates the differences between the sexes. It celebrates inequality and it glamorizes the subordinate status of females - therefore gender is the embodiment of sexism. Without gender, we’d be androgynous in terms of fashion, and it would be much more difficult to notice one’s sex at first glance. How do groups of people oppress other groups if they aren’t able to tell themselves apart from the other? Gender’s intended purpose is to clearly mark the subordinate class from the privileged class."
The case of Dworkian/Butlerian feminist Anita Sarkeesian who created Feminist Frequency and the core SFF community's alliance with her in her crusade against so-called sexism in video-gaming at once highlights the fake feminist Trojan Horse gender feminism rides in on as well as the SFF community's devotion to gender feminist ideology, a thing they swallow hook, line and sinker. Like the sea of SFF Freedom Riders she is closely allied with, Sarkeesian is the Sayyd Qutb of video-gaming. Instead of the Muslim Brotherhood slogan of "Islam is the solution," Sarkeesian's is Feminism is the solution. She defines herself as an "intersectional" feminist and her and other "gender equity" feminists openly admit they have no interest in equality. It's interesting how that changes when they speak about this to more mainstream audiences. Gender equity is not a legalistic concept, nor can it ever be. It is a social concept.
Within equal rights feminism, existing law is both the problem and the solution; it is a legalistic issue. Gender feminism is like Islamic sharia; it is its own law and way of life, a true ideology.
Gender feminism is the wellspring of SFF's anti-bigotry bigotry - a wrong-way cult of naive 1960s civil rights Freedom Riders who inadvertently end up advancing the cause of the KKK by virtue of sheer stupidity. There is nothing stupider than people who laugh at the censorship of the ignorant Ozzie and Harriet keep-women-barefoot-and-pregnant decade of the 1950s Comics Code and then turn around and try and institute such a code in video-gaming and SFF based on the exact same principle that looking at a woman's chest with the "male gaze" will turn us all into corrupt juvenile delinquents. The PC in SFF therefore undo the entire 1960s while at the same time claiming 1960s progressivism as its own.
Even though it comes with an R-rating, Australian Target stores stopped selling Grand Theft Auto V in early Dec., 2014 due to an online petition by activists.
Unsurprisingly, that is because the social justice warriors of SFF have no principles and are understandably confused and contrary about all things at all times. They have no ability to compare one thing to another because they use race and skin as principle, ethics and moral ethos. That's not taking into account the presence of simple bigots, whose target of course never wavers, though their rhetoric is splashed onto a wall at random as a distraction to see what sticks.
The PC don't really care about gay or women's rights for the simple reason they don't care about rights at all. Someone told them gays and women are good and that no one else has rights and must always listen. In PC jargon, my rights are "fee-fees," reduced to that because I oppress the fee-fees of others by using rape, heterosexuality and marriage to keep down women while also being a white homophobic supremacist who finds time to hate Muslims on the weekends. This wrong way stupidity is why imaginary white racist Tea Party militia are treated by the PC as if they fly planes into skyscrapers and radical Muslim Wahhabi ideology that actually does fly planes into skyscrapers is treated as an anomalous bunch of sad PoC kids who just want their fee-fees back that were stolen during the Crusades.
Anita Sarkeesian's cant and rhetoric perfectly matches that of radical gender feminism. Although each likes to style themselves as equal rights feminists, they are in fact anti-patriarchy feminists. They don't care about equality before the law but rather in enforcing gender feminist rules for sexist patriarchal institutions to follow.
Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu don't critique video games, they critique men. Not only that, they do so in a manner that results in unflattering stereotypes of men 100% of the time. This youtube video called "Stop the trolls: Women fight online harassment," includes Sarkeesian and actress Ashley Judd. Apparently they have not noticed the title of the video nor the fact they have segregated the concept of harassment in the exact same way social justice warriors in SFF do. When you see Judd talk about the "patriarchy" in the video, it's obvious they have not come to grips with why they are harassed. When you insult all men in America - if not the world - you are going to definitely find the crazies. If you legitimately critique a video game, nothing like that is going to happen. When Brianna Wu Tweets "All men benefit from structural sexism. Men bragging about moderate views doesn’t make them intelligent, it makes them unaware of privilege," one shouldn't be surprised at the sheer numbers which push back, nor the anger. For a woman against "using racist stereotypes," Sarkeesian seems more than willing to employ the same stereotyping against men.
Both Wu and Sarkeesian play off of demographic resentments. Neither produces their own high profile by simple talent.
Why wouldn't that be true when you claim secret special knowledge in contrast to what is nothing more than a nameless faceless demographic you withhold morality, insight and intelligence from by virtue of their identity vs. yours? Which of those in fact has bias and a lack of awareness - Wu or millions unknowns? And then there is the usual perfectly Orwellian sentence from a man:
Keep in mind that contradicts the Tweet just above 6 hours later that complains about a N.Y. Times article about transgender called "What Makes a Women" where Wu claims it's not true women know more about women than men who are transgender and who may have lived most of their lives not experiencing what women do "day in and day out." Anything is anything when your own body replaces an actual principle or moral ethos. It's a revolving door of illogic, dishonesty and stupid. The only claim Wu can make to being a woman is that his brain is wired differently, but if you claim the brains of men and women are wired differently you become a bigot and Larry Summers resigns from Harvard.
"Men don't truly understand sexism" - Brianna Wu. Bingo! At least outside the rabbit hole.
Being a gender feminist who parses the world through a fixation on human sexuality, the oppression of binary heterosexuality and gender equality rather than legal equality, Sarkeesian is following in the footsteps of some of radical feminism's most seminal figures who fought pornography beginning in the late '70s: Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon and Audre Lorde.
Sarkeesian's belief that problematic depictions of women in media should be abolished due to juvenile delinquency theories about trickle down cultural corruption puts her (and core SFF) firmly on the side of conservatives like the 1930-68 Hayes Office of film censorship, and others of the 1950s and 1960s who held the same views about violence and depravity in comics, film and TV and tried to get those abolished. This includes former vice-President Al Gore's own wife Tipper Gore, who wanted parental advisory labels for rap and rock music in the 1980s and later a woman who launched a crusade in 1989 against the TV sitcom Married With Children (1987-97) for its sexual content. In the case of Gore's activism, a hearing was held before the U.S. Senate in 1985. The PC can't figure out why the Hayes Office ended in 1968 or how they are therefore trying to end the 1960s gains in civil rights and artistic freedom.
For what it's worth, there's this. Make of it what you will: "Long-term study finds zero link between violence in video games and real life." No matter which side one comes down on I think it's safe to say the correlation is sufficiently complex that anyone who makes authoritative comments one way or the other is revealing more about what they want to believe than reality.
There is no greater contrast between gender and equal rights feminists than the revealing stupidity that gender feminists are on the side of conservatives who wouldn't let actress Barbara Eden show her belly button on the I Dream of Jeannie TV show which ran from 1965-70, a thing the bra-less equal rights feminism of the '60s sexual revolution was firmly against.
Even more revealing is the furor among gender feminists over "shirtgate," which occurred when a project scientist appeared on TV in a "sexist" shirt during the historic landing of a space craft on a comet. It's no coincidence the fem-offended images on the shirt are the exact same type of rather tame images 1950s cheesecake pin up model Bettie Page was famous for that got her main employer, Irving Klaw, raked over the coals by the Kefauver Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1957. Page was called to appear but never testified.
In fact shirtgate was the exact same thing as the SFWA's chain-mail-bikinigate. It is no different than kids in the 1960s who burned Beatles records on the theory such music would lead us all to hell and ungoodness. And as I point out elsewhere, biographer Tanya Avakian mentioning SF author and feminist icon Alice Sheldon's (James Tiptree, Jr.) "starlet's looks" to crickets while Barry Malzberg and Michael Resnick describing a "lady" editor as "beauty pageant beautiful" unleashes a "handy list of more than 50 authors who've written blog posts criticizing the SFWA for allowing a pattern of sexism in its quarterly Bulletin" violates equal fee-fees of the 14th Amendment. Gender feminists have no principles whatsoever, and the only rules one can appeal to involves ceasing to act like a straight white male.
That Kefauver subcommittee was the same one Fredric Wertham appeared before and used his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954) as evidence for his claim that comic books contributed to juvenile delinquency. This led to the voluntary self-censorship of the Comics Code Authority begun in 1954 which completely changed the content of comics, bringing to an end E. C. Comics, the most highly artistic and thought provoking comics of its day.
And then there's the new KKK: "The new Gamergate: Angry white men are trying to shut down diverse comics"
The underground comix scene which emerged during the counter cultural revolution of the late 1960s was meant as a challenge to such things as the Comics Code. Although SFF's progressive social justice warriors of faux Freedom Riders firmly place themselves within the sphere of the ascent of civil rights during this era, the truth is they are conformist conservative rednecks which underground comix artists like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson would've rejected, laughed at and satirized. The funniest thing about Scalzi's almost unbelievably nun-like blog post about gamergate is the idea these paranoid conformist rednecks who hector, censor and lecture others somehow see themselves as part of a hep culture in alliance with the goals of the counter-culture of the '60s.
In principle, Anita Sarkeesian and the SFF core community are claiming the same cause and effect with video-gaming as 1950s comics, and over the same type of material. In effect, the wheel has turned and we are once again in those 1950s. Sarkeesian's patter and indeed that of all gender feminists in regard to so-called sexist content directly reflects the language of the Comics Code: 3. "Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority." You only have to substitute the word "women" there to arrive at the Dworkian philosophies of Anita Sarkeesian. What is humorous is that under the code's section titled "Marriage and Sex," Sarkeesian's gender feminist doctrine is as in favor of "6. Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested" as her ideological ancestors are against "4. The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage." Same puritan game of censorship, different imperatives and rules.
"'Partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4" above the knee are not allowed."
You may remember that quote from the beginning of this book, taken from the PAX video-gaming guidelines about "booth babes" at their conventions. Here is Sarkeesian's list of 8 things video games should do to make them better. In principle things like "8. Include female enemies, but don’t sexualize those enemies" is the same nonsense we heard in the '50s.
On top of all that is the fact radical gender feminist Andrea Dworkin led a crusade against pornography in the late 1970s/early 1980s as an actionable civil rights violation based on the same theories of Kefauver and Wertham, but in this case the claim was that pornography led to the dehumanization and hatred of women. Unsurprisingly, we once again have a federal investigation, this time the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (the Meese Commission), ordered by friend to all social justice warriors, Ronald Reagan, before which "Dworkin testified for half an hour" in 1986. Remember this quote from earlier in this book by feminist Denise Thompson: "Pornography is the ideology of male supremacist masculine desire writ large and shameless. It is the clearest, most unequivocal expression of male supremacist ideology in existence."
If all of this doesn't convince you gender feminists and their social justice warriors have no principles whatsoever, nothing will. Their right and wrong is solely determined by race and sex, and is not a thing all Americans can benefit from. What is right on Monday is wrong on Tuesday; it all depends; social justice warriors have to look at you and your racial and sexual privilege first before they throw the 14th Amendment and equal protection off a bridge.
"Gamergate" is a sidecar to what has happened in SFF. To make a comparison regarding gamergate, in the 1950s and 1960s there was a debate in America about violence in comics and Hollywood films I've alluded to. The debate was framed in terms of a shared failure of American culture, on a human level. Now imagine that debate had instead been framed in terms of the failures of Jews, with the worst possible stereotypes of Jewish comic book publishers and Hollywood Jews thrown about, such as they don't care about death threats, bullying, and don't want diversity because they don't like women, non-whites or gay folks. As in SFF, video gaming is under assault by people who assert they are critiquing games but instead defame men, whites and heterosexuals 24/7. Not everyone is so easily gulled.
In addition, just as in all radical feminist critiques of pop culture, feminists don't care about violence against humans, just women:
"Feminist Frequency frequently addresses the depictions of sexualized violence against women in video games. It doesn't compare and contrast them with the instances in the very same games where men are victims of abuse as well. This sort of one-sided analysis can lead to a misleading depiction of a given game, which could potentially send the wrong messages to those who have never played that game, and frustrate those who have. For some men, the offence runs so deep that they feel like Feminist Frequency's method of analysis is erasing their experiences by focusing only on the abuse of women." - Liana Kerzner, "Why Feminist Frequency almost made me quit writing about video games: Part 1"
"I've always been uncomfortable with the way Feminist Frequency picks on the white (and Japanese), cisgendered, heterosexual establishment because any push-back can be easily dismissed as racism, sexism, or some sort of phobia." - Liana Kerzner
What people like Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu don't get is the difference between saying a black rapper has vulgar lyrics and saying look what vulgarity black people have introduced to American pop music. Naturally the pushback from the former will amount to nothing to compared to defaming 40 million black Americans. When you light up 100 million white men you'd better believe you're going to create mass anger and that among those millions are going to be a few nuts enough to leave threatening messages on the internet. And that's what feminists do - they say "look what straight white men have done to video gaming." When you obsessively do that in terms of a demonizing ideology that targets a sex or ethnic group, that's an analogy to anti-Semitic blood libels. Nowhere is it clearer that equal rights feminism has been hijacked by resentful, uncultured and jealous people.
The falsity of the intersectionalist view of gaming is like seeing one white man in a room full of white men doing something objectionable and saying "What's wrong with you white men?" Of course the entire room is going to object, giving the false impression they are defending the objectionable action when in fact they are defending their right not to be sexually and racially smeared and profiled.
That is essentially what is happening in SFF, tech and gaming. Radical feminists are asserting the failure in place is the moral and spiritual failure of Western men, whites and heterosexuals, while throwing about the worst ethnic and sexual stereotypes about "dudebros," racial privilege, whites, and the supposed endemic hatred white Western men have for women, gays and non-whites. This includes the supposition white men enjoy oppressing such groups and fear the loss of their white centrality and ability to lord it over others.
Although gamergate began as the equivalent of a People Magazine-style tell-all gossip by a jilted ex-lover followed by attacks on the jilter, it quickly showed itself to reveal the same mechanism that has overtaken SFF. In each case eccentrics enjoyed a closeted and insulated cultural expression that was laughed at by the mainstream as an intellectual ghetto for idiots trying to escape reality. The mainstream discovers intellectual ghettos are more fun than at first glance and they enter - conformity follows. Suddenly a break room in a Teamster warehouse has a dozen guys playing video games. Following close on the heels of that mainstream conformity is the flavor of the decade: gender feminism, its political correctness, and its penchant for group defamation and supremacy hiding as diversity. That's because PC as of today is centered around the legacy of lesbian feminism and Andre Dworkin, Charlotte Bunch, Joyce Trebilcot and Susan Brownmiller. The rest is self-explanatory, and the gulf between lies between diversity and the reality of racial supremacism and man-hatred, and that is the flint that stokes a war.
The anti-PC side of this is probably best summed up in this comment from a forum:
"GG comes down to some simple things. WE want respect from the ppl who are so called gaming journalists. In any other business, these guys and girls would have been fired as soon as they insulted their audience. We dont want games sanitized simply to fill quotas. We dont want game developers to be forced into changing their games to satisfy extremists"
Radical feminists are in fact indulging in supremacy and racism, not addressing issues, since those very same issues disappear entirely when applied to any precinct of sub-culture or nation seen to be occupied by women or gay and non-white folks. In other words the principles intersectionalists portray as being behind their concerns are a lie. Instead it is the targeted defamation of whites, men and heterosexuals that is in play. Basically gender feminists are asking their opponents in video-gaming to engage them in a dialogue as if feminists are posing gaming's problems as a larger human failure in a way that makes their opponents anger seem irrational. The truth is more like neo-Nazis asking Jews to dialogue about the failings of Jews. The revealing and damning thing is how often those taking up the feminist side use the word "white." There is absolutely no reason to use that word in relation to gaming or SFF any more than there is to use "Jew" in discussing Hollywood film violence. If film critics went after content based on the failings of actors, directors and producers as Jews, black or white folks, they'd probably start getting threats too.
One game developer portrays it as "When somebody calls people ugly neckbeard virgin nerds or terrorists, he shouldn't be surprised by rude response. It's the same as going to church during a mass and screaming that God doesn't exist at people. What do you think would happen?"
No one is leading a crusade as to what romance fiction can do to make it more inclusive of males. No one is leading a crusade to demand men are depicted in a healthier light, and no one is asking what women-oriented video games can do to attract more men. That's because the idea this is a principled argument based on logic is a shill. It is an unprincipled attack on straight white men by a culture with a phobia of them.
Robert Stacy McCain at his site The Other McCain has been doing lots of research into the feminists you don't see, to paraphrase SF author James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon). This is the hidden face of people who support intersectionalist dogma, of feminists like Anita Sarkeesian who don't talk about their notions of gender-fluidity on mainstream TV; when they do it's just about equality.
"'Male sexual violence against women and 'normal' heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . When a male sexually violates a female, he is doing work for patriarchy.' - Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (1994)"
As McCain points out in that post about silencing tactics and I show in this book, intersectionalists in SFF also hide from exposure by completely censoring debate on their blogs. They don't want anyone asking them why they have no race and sex-neutral definition for the words "harassment" or "sexism"; they want no uncomfortable questions they obviously can't answer.
Read these Tweets about the then current fall 2014 scandal in video-gaming:
Meanwhile if you're not a straight white male:
The response from Twitchy can be applied here to gamergate.
Those Tweets by Scalzi and Sarkeesian amount to nothing more than nonsense. They purposefully confuse guilt by association with guilt by ideology, a game intersectionalists win coming and going since they are an ideology attacking nameless masses of people. Guess when they'll start asking Muslims to get out of Islam because of terrorism or stop asking Catholics to condemn priests molesting children? Try never. Don't expect any mass protests of Muslims against ISIS chopping off the heads of kids either. This is a logic pit. Scalzi and Sarkeesian condemn video-gamers who show no sign of an ideology of not in turn condemning anonymous people who threaten others on the net as if those others are their family.
"Face it, dudes: 'GamerGate' is a toxic thing. You can't say you support WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women." - John Scalzi
"Excellent post about GamerGate. 'If you don’t step away… then you *are* part of a hate movement.'" - N. K. Jemisin
Thus do Scalzi and Jemisin condemn Islam in a few choice words of doublethink while they eat their own words about their most cherished smear tactics. Without a hint of self-awareness Mike Fisher at Vox eats his own politically correct movement by writing "... assuming the worst about a person just because of their identity — is the very definition of bigotry." Yes it is, Mr. Fisher, yes it is. More idiocy follows: "Bigoted assumptions are the only plausible reason for this ritual to exist, which means that maintaining the ritual is maintaining bigotry." BINGO! The openly ha-ha part is "This is, quite literally, a different set of standards that we apply only to Muslims."
Even months later, in the face of feminist journalists embarrassingly "reassigned," youtubers paid by companies, and a series of ethics policies put in place, Scalzi was still representing the fakery that Gamergate was never about ethics in video game journalism with dumb allegories that flew in the face of his earlier linking to articles that declared for Scalzi's view. That's not including the revelation or obviousness of the anti-gamergate journalistic collusion behind the fact "11 articles were published within the span of 24 hours." This is why all intersectionalists in SFF and Scalzi in particular are noted for deleting and censoring debate. It prevents them for ever having to be wrong.
Sarkeesian represents the same radical feminist movement that overtook core science fiction's institutions and is there supported by the man who did more to enable that than anyone else; a man who will smear groups and then say that's wrong on the same day, if not the same Orwellian sentence. It is also lost on these people that hate speech by way of a continual flood of ethnic and sexual slurs is going to invite hate. Violence in gaming is an example of an issue; being white or a man is not. Present the former and people will listen. Do the latter and there will be push back.
The sad stupidity this feminist movement won't allow for is the truth Gamergate (read anti-radical feminists) advocates are a coalition of voices such as Latino porn star Mercedes Carrera, gay Milo Yiannopoulos, the feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, as well as conservative Christians, liberals and people of every stripe.
Try and imagine men elbowing their way into romance fiction and calling women a bunch of men-haters and how they objectify men and basically telling everyone how to run a genre they created and demanding more male authors. The whole thing is just stupid. And who's going to push back from the world of romance fiction? Yes, it'll be women, not men. That doesn't prove women hate men or that men are nice.
Scalzi's blog post on the subject is hilarious. He pre-harasses and bullies commenters and deletes any dissent. He even deleted this innocuous comment. Why he even troubled to do a post is beyond me. All that's really allowed is Yes, sir. May I have another? In the end the sheep go "baaah" and the cows go "Moooo" and over 300 echoes go bouncing around to no purpose or effect whatsoever. The idea these people are going to carry on the tradition of Bester or Zelazny is ridiculous. What they dote on is the vapid junkery of Dr. Who, Buffy and Frank Frazetta-free zones. Basically Scalzi is arguing Elvis shouldn't have swung his hips.
Somehow the people who want to tell you what should be in video games and epic fantasy or you're a bigot and heavily censor their blogs (See: Ta-Nehisi Coates) think they're progressive instead of like someone from the '50s who wants you to tuck your shirt in and won't explain other than to give off with "Because I said so." The PC routinely laugh about some '50s imaginary Ozzie and Harriet nation and I say "why?; the PC are just like that mythical conformist and authoritarian land. And like idiots Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, if you put glasses on the KKK the PC think they become Clark Kent.
Scalzi had other Tweets like "So stop standing with people who WANT you to be their useful idiots while they threaten women. You can't pretend you don't know anymore," and no he wasn't talking about Muslims and ISIS because intersectionalism's logic factory looks both ways before crossing the street. Intersectionalists will never - and I mean never - make a pronouncement or judgment of any sort with out first knowing the race, sex and gender expression of the persons involved. It's like a speed limit determined by visual profiling. It doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. Acting like that is justice is some bizarre Happy Meal KKK.
Scalzi asked us to "bone up" on intersectionality. Intersectionality defaults to its heroes like Andrea Dworkin and Audre Lorde. Lorde is actually quoted in the document Scalzi links us to. For Scalzi to use the term "useful idiots" demonstrates a level of unawareness that is rather stunning, since he is stipulating as solutions the insane radical lesbian paranoia of heterosexuality he has not only unwittingly taken up as his own cause but advocates we should all do. And remember, the ploy is always to say that being against these radical lesbians is to be homophobic or anti-equal rights for women. In other words no one can ever challenge their ideas, no matter how crazy, without defaulting to a bigot, reactionary, right wing and hater.
What the president of the SFWA forgot about in that Tweet is it also requires facts, not smearing 3.5 billion men, or a billion whites. It requires criticizing people who actually do a thing. And do I need to "JustListen" to feminist perverts and incest promoters and apologists like Andrea Dworkin and Lena Dunham on the theory if I don't I am a misogynist who lacks "compassion, self-examination, integrity, and... honesty?" How about the hashtag #IncestIsIntegritySFWA? Do I really have to listen to a daffy woman who claims children have the right to live out their own erotic impulses"? How about rape hoaxes? Gould is a man amazingly lacking in perception who asks us to just listen to a group of female supremacist ideologues who range from sociopathic to simple-minded. The lot of them together couldn't create the industrial base to make a Bic pen or safety pin let alone defend such a society.
The truth is Gould retweets nonsense by fellow SF author James S.A. Corey that begins "Dear guys everywhere..." and simply doesn't understand he never Tweets Dear women everywhere... The lack of self-awareness and principle by people who buy into intersectionalism and claim heightened awareness is stunning. For some reason, those simple comparisons are just beyond these folks, and yet it is the basis of all law. It's a great irony that the very culture which accuses everyone from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Robert Heinlein of such perceptual failures, of racism and sexism, are the very ones most attached to such failures. The proof is in the pudding. Compare the conformist, derivative and flat SF of Scalzi (1967 Star Trek parodies), Gould (Jaunting Jonny Quest) and Corey ("vomit-zombies") to the nuanced, literate and innovative work of Alfred Bester, Jack Vance, Robert Heinlein and Roger Zelazny and then tell me who has eyes.
These fools want me and "...guys everywhere" to "JustListen" to any words by a woman as if they are sacred. What if they are #JustWrong? What if they're nuts? What about judges, juries and law? Innocent by reason of feminism? I need to just listen to feminist Andrea Dworkin write "The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a sexist, sexually repressed society" and if I disagree with that the president of the SFWA declares me lacking in "integrity," "compassion" and "honesty?" Yes, I will explain life or feminism or anything to that crazy woman and I don't need Gould's moral stamp of approval or that of Jim Hines or John Scalzi.
Neither do I need Alex MacFarlane at Tor.com telling me we need to end "the default of binary gender in science fiction stories," or moral scruples for that matter. I don't need MacFarlane's moronic assertion "that gender is more complex than the Western cultural norm of two genders (female and male): that there are more genders than two, that gender can be fluid, that gender exists in many forms," as if the much more conservative non-West is full of Andrea Dworkin's.
I don't need Damien Walter writing at The Guardian that "Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer," as if the next century will have Mother Nature thrown down and be inhabited by billions of Joyce Trebilcot's, or him Tweeting "Google 'intersectional' and move on." If the SFWA and company are dumb enough to think those folks just want a place at the table, they're dumb enough to believe anything. Those folks are talking about re-making the table, and you're a reactionary bigot if you're not down with the plan to eliminate he-she, families, incest taboos and lord knows what other depravities.
In equal rights feminism, law is both the problem and the solution; it is a legalistic issue. Gender feminism is a way of life, a true blanketing ideology based on hate, and faith in that hate, and which opposes unbelievers. It is like Muslim sharia. You can live unmolested under feminism if you confess and become an "ally" to women. That means acknowledging your privilege and the existence of rape culture. That means never participating in a Table of Contents or panel discussion that is all male or all white. That means fawning over and acknowledging the oppression and superior wisdom and insights of women - especially women of color - and gays. That means submitting to the idea that gender is "performed" ala Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler and promising to not pink/blue color-code your children or genderize xmas gifts. It means acknowledging that artificial "performed" masculinity is toxic, oppressive and deadly. It means the end of the "male gaze" and seeing women as sex objects - no more Playboy or video games as we know them - the complete overturning of popular culture as we know it. Just as the Koran is a book dedicated to the spiritual management of one's own life and conquered populations of Jews and Christians, feminism is a supremacist ideology dedicated to one's own spiritual and sexual management and managing conquered populations of Western white heterosexual men to submissively exist under a feminist umbrella of lofty disdain.
Notice how in this Tweet Lena Dunham writes about the criticism of her autobiography's admission of incestuous perversion "Usually this is stuff I can ignore but don't demean sufferers, don't twist my words, back the fuck up bros." It is taken for granted only "bros" would see what she did as wrong. As in all things that disagree with bizarre gender feminism, Dunham claims opposition to her self-admitted behavior as a "predator" defaults to a "right wing news story." Any opposition automatically becomes men-only, "reactionary, and "conservative." "Whiny dudebro noise" is starting to actually look more and more like it defaults to common sense and anti-perversion all the time, especially since the possibility there is such a thing as whiny cisbroad noise is not only considered a mythical impossibility but misogyny. But then what else would you expect from people who re-tell falsehoods like Kameron Hurley's nonsensical factless claim about the "exclusion of female writers from the epic fantasy subgenre." Those last two quotes are from a fawning review of the next chapter in feminist SFF, the accurately titled Women Destroy Fantasy, though it would be more accurate to title it The Fellowship of Andrea Dworkin.
And this is what Damien Walter had to say about the Dunham dust-up: ""
In an astounding series of Tweets, the sister Lena Dunham claims she wooed as "a sexual predator might do," responds with radfem 101:
In fact it is third wave gender intersectionality that maintains that in their core ideology, not the state or the media, or Mother Nature for that matter. Drop intersectionalists on an island without patriarchy science and they die off in a single generation. That is "harmful," not birds and bees. Unsurprisingly, because one supremacy trumps another in the race/gender hierarchy of morality called intersectionalism, the authentic voices of intersectionality chime in and the cannibalization begins:
If a man had done what Dunham had, the SFF community would have lit up Twitter coast-to-coast and 50 blog posts would be written about it. Instead they went silent except for, ironically, their own racists. When you can get them and someone in the mainstream press like Laurie Penny to shut up by a tacit unconscious agreement, that actually speaks volumes. And let me remind you of how the mind of Penny works, here reacting to classic SF in a classic example of vacuous feminist art appreciation:
This is a net the SFF community has woven for itself by resorting to race and gender to sort out right and wrong instead of a moral ethos. It's no surprise they're tripping over each other with mindless attacks based on the same thing. People like John Scalzi and Jim Hines are only ever a skin's thickness from suddenly becoming privileged reactionaries, as Scalzi learned when he was excoriated for not being intersectional enough by a gender feminist who used the exact same oddball lingo like "straight cishet and able-bodied" which Scalzi himself promoted on his own blog. The same is true of Dunham and Sarkeesian. None of them has figured out the "white" in straight white male includes them, or what intersectionality truly means and is. Just ask Adele Wilde-Blavatsky. And because of intersectionalism's equally oddball doctrines based on rules of poker, while they complain about the white, Western, patriarchy, they find themselves in alliance with Middle Eastern Muslims that would reduce them to second class citizens at best and enslave them at worst.
The irony always close by sees the normal people who are reactionary conservatives agreeing with racists on this issue. That's because of the accidental intersection of a supremacist broken clock right twice a day and an actual moral ethos.
I might ask the same question if it was a "WOC," not that I truly understand this cult's bizarre rules. Remember: just listen, men - because cis-men can't define law. Only insane gender feminists and their big-eared male familiars can do that. Even the insane blog Feminspire threw Dunham under the bus. Oh, but because... "'white feminism.'" Anyone who's read Feminspire knows it's one of the stupidest and daffiest feminist/privilege blogs on the net. The fact a white women is making the sole distinction of Dunham's true feminism one of Dunham's color rather than principle tells you exactly what's going on there and in the SFF community. Like men, within the intersectionalism created by non-white lesbians, even white women must be an ear, except where men are concerned. Those are the crazy race-gender rules and laws of intersectionality, with the straight white man at the bottom, in permanent gaol.
And not one single word from Anita Sarkeesian, the intersectionalist who can be put on the wrong side of morality and demoted to "mainstream" feminist by virtue of skin in a heartbeat.
Sarkeesian did have time to confirm the intersectional Frazetta-free-zone in SFF by Tweeting a picture of a woman in cutoffs and a belly shirt with the remark "Note to video game makers: This is a perfect example of how NOT to include women in your trailers. #CallOfDuty." Actually the picture is completely innocuous, at least in the world of normal humans where Beach Blanket Bingo isn't oppression. The sum total is the same as no belly button for I Dream of Jeannie.
So much for Sarkeesian's nonsensical claims about "equality." She wants compliance with a world view that can only be termed weird. Again, she has no neutral definition of the word "harassment," since she clearly finds women blameless in all things, if not a superior life form of angels.
Sunil Patel, the Gunga Din for intersectional feminism in SFF and a new Authority in video-gaming (and not above jabs at white people), weighed in on the photo in a Fredric Wertham-like response to someone who claimed it was nothing:
Patel feels we're all headed for juvenile delinquency.
Showing good looking women corrupts America. Like I said: a Frazetta-free-zone - all of it, all of America. No cheerleaders, no James Bond, no pin ups, no nothing. What's amazing to me is how effortlessly useful idiots like Patel adopt the paranoia of Andrea Dworkin without a clue as to the source of this stuff. As you'll see later in this book, when Patel steps out of line himself, feminists slap him right back into it. His hilarious response is the same attitude as at Scalzi's site: Thank you ma'am. May I have another?
People like Gould, Jim Hines and Scalzi can't understand and won't accept the fact I want to be left in peace, not enrolled in a "Dear guys everywhere..." woman-hating KKK of hundreds of millions for the crime of waking up. Worse, they refuse to take their bizarre obsession with gender feminism into a more appropriate venue. Instead, they choose to suck the fun right out of a literary genre dedicated to fun, and turn it into a paranoid genderized Jim Crow. By insisting I just listen, Gould, Hines and Scalzi are admitting to not only unquestioning obedience of the most radical gender feminists, but that I must share in those insane delusions or default to an immoral reactionary bigot. Intersectionalism is awash in a sea of unreality. Gender theory ends where something like a car engine begins. There is no coulda, woulda, shoulda, privilege or excuses. Do what you have to or the car won't run. End of story. This is life.
The sad stupidity in play here is that the children of people who worked hard to marginalize things like a KKK or neo-Nazism are working hammer and tongs to ensure the toxic principles of such a thing are mainstreamed across America. Illusion and perception are powerful tools - as I point out about Orwell's doublethink again and again - and the truth is people willfully will not see people like Sarkeesian or Brianna Wu for what they are and what they are selling. They can't - they have no principles that allow simple comparisons and contrasts to be made; they are literalist identity addicts - they can see only hoods and crosses.
People minding their own business who are ethnically and sexually defamed because they don't measure up as human beings are not monsters nor waging any kind of war. "Diverse and inclusive" is the con game there since there is nothing in the world stopping intersectionalists from creating their own popular culture in whatever way they wish rather than invading that of others and claiming it as their own. Cultural appropriation is a one-way street in the daffy world of intersectionalist logic. The problem is that radical feminism finds it convenient camouflage to not separate itself from traditional egalitarian first wave feminism, except when it comes time to attack it as a tool of the privileged white patriarchy. Otherwise intersectionalists like to pretend to the world at large they are only about equality and diversity, which is a lie. They make no secret about their insane wish to overturn the entire structure of the world, with heterosexuality as the main target. And let's not forget Sarkeesian is a full-time professional paid feminist political activist, not a gamer, not a gaming journalist. She is essentially an outsider making demands on a community whose culture has nothing to do with male, white or heterosexual supremacy, no matter what Sarkeesian says, or what doxy intersectionalist bigots pining for racists say about SFF.
As I state elsewhere, the very people in the SFF community who harass men 24/7 not only don't notice they do it, Pew Research supports the fact they don't notice it:
"Some 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six types of harassment." - Pew Research
Whatever the truth is, that hardly reflects the lie intersectionalists spread about that women almost exclusively receive harassment online. And just as there is harassment and harassment, there are also sad assaults against women and funny assaults against women. Wiscon's "Statement of Principles" includes "'Feminism is part of a larger constellation of movements seeking social, political and economic equality for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, sex, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, creed, ability, status, or belief.'" That is self-evident nonsense, since, like convention harassment policies, they do not abide by those principles, but instead apply them in the direct opposite manner - according to race and sex. These Orwellians "believe in women-only" environments in an exacting relation to how much they despise and attack any hint of a male-dominated space, no matter how accidental. The intersectional definition of "principle" is words that mean anything at any time.
Given Elliott's Twitter habits, I find that hypocrisy and lack of awareness stunning but all too familiar with intersectionalists.
Read this extremely interesting comment by radical feminist Charlotte Bunch about why gender feminists consciously reject the principles behind law:
"U.S. society encourages individual solutions, apolitical attitudes, and reformism to keep us from political revolt and out of power. Men who rule, and male leftists who seek to rule, try to depoliticize sex and the relations between men and women in order to prevent us from acting to end our oppression and challenging their power. As the question of homosexuality has become public, reformists define it as a private question of who you sleep with in order to sidetrack our understanding of the politics of sex. For the Lesbian-Feminist, it is not private; it is a political matter of oppression, domination and power. Reformists offer solutions which make no basic changes in the system that oppresses us, solutions which keep power in the hands of the oppressor. The only way oppressed people end their oppression is by seizing power: People whose role depends on the subordination of others do not voluntarily stop oppressing others. Our subordination is the basis of male power."
People have to start connecting the dots and start to understand how much this insane ideology is catching on with a younger generation of people like Sarkeesian who can only be described as naive and troubled. As of today intersectionalism is arguably the biggest policy mover in the Dem Party, and they work that with the same shaming and fear tactics as in the SFF community. Here's a young woman at Feminspire, one of the nuttiest feminist pop culture 20-something sites there is. She is typical of the same rot in SFF and a true descendent of Charlotte Bunch, Audre Lorde and Andrea Dworkin:
"... gender dynamics are such that male attributes are often inherently toxic towards or come at the expense of women (aggressive and assertive men require submissive and complacent women, after all)... girls who get attacked by men for being feminists or diverting from their assigned gender roles as submissive, thin, able-bodied heterosexual future baby-makers... For me, feminism does not actually mean everyone’s favorite default 'equality'...
"I do not want to be afforded the right to climb up the capitalist ladder the same as men, I do not want to join the same violent, imperialist wars the same as men as their peer. I want us all to be freed from those constructed violent systems of dominance. I do not want people to 'no longer see me' for my race, gender, sexuality, expression, and experiences... I am not limited or made lesser by those part of me that are different from the white, cis, straight, male norm.
"Feminism for me means re-figuring a better, freer world that is so many things, like free of racialized prison and state and police violence, environmentally safe and sound for everyone, human and animal and plant alike, economically egalitarian, gender and sexuality-inclusive and free, happily provides livable wages and conditions for all, in every way non-violent, full of justice, community-oriented, and considerate."
Unsurprisingly, in another post, she mimics the typical theme you see so much of in SFF of whites who "appropriate Black female culture." Intersectionalists always always stipulate there is a de facto white male culture, but somehow it's just not SFF or anything they don't want it to be at the time and so no appropriation there. In other words lying and hypocrisy are as natural to a gender feminist as breathing.
Considering her attitude towards men as spiritually inferior beings, her use of the words "justice" and "considerate" is the usual Orwellian semantics I've come to expect from this insane movement. As always with these folks, their own shortcomings and delusions are buttressed with a meticulously constructed fantasy whose groundwork has been laid by the original activists and is now ready-made to be plugged into by anyone who has a beef with the way the world and nature works. It is always centered around the straight white male. Reading her words reminds one of a robot full of recorded buzzwords, not a human being capable of independent thought. And notice the Kafkatrap about "no longer see me." The more racist sexist you aren't the more you are. Racism and sexism's basically not a problem anymore? Just change the definition and reverse it out and bingo... you're back in business.
Intersectionalists have no problem appropriating white male culture.
Here's a brush with reality:
Even parody is robbed from you if you're the wrong race and sex:
It's hard to imagine anything more self-serving or convenient than those Tweets, which distorts the world into the typical fake power dynamic which doesn't exist and which always absolves intersectionalists from any wrong-doing. It's intersectional arithmetic. In any case, kids playing video games don't have the ear of the media, nor are "angry white men" endemically immoral for that matter. These are people who easily accept the idea that gays, Jews, Arabs and women get angry when they are targeted for defamation. For some reason when it comes to "angsty teenage caucasian men" "with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny" that becomes a "war on... women." And how serious am I supposed to take Sarkeesian about a "flagrant use of the male gaze."
Racial jokes like that photo are very common in feminist Twitter feeds. What is just as common is how forbidden it is to do that about an Arab, Asian or black person. The jokes don't bother me in the slightest. The fact I am told I can't make them does.
"Feminist Frequency @femfreq 'Gamergate is loud, dangerous and a last grasp at cultural dominance by angry white men' by @JessicaValenti http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/21/gamergate-angry-men-harassing-women …"
One Tweeter understands exactly what that means, that being "white" is neither here nor there and replies:
On top of that, Valenti would never in a thousand years use angry black men like that, or apply it to Islam. In fact in the U.K. it might lead to her arrest.
This is a not a war between conservatives and liberals, men and women, gay and straight or whites and non-whites, but between racists and sexists who use identity as a moral ethos and claim the opposite, and those who use principle like law and our Constitution. After a school shooting in Maryville, Sarkeesian gave us this in two Tweets:
"We need to seriously address connections between violence, sexism and toxic ideas of manhood before boys and men commit more mass shootings. Not a coincidence it's always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture."
The oddball dissonance there is how acceptable it is for Sarkeesian to use a term like "toxic masculinity," whereas a man who flaunted phrases like toxic femininity as a centerpiece of a social justice initiative might be rightly considered borderline insane.
What routinely defies the perceptions of radical feminists as opposed to egalitarian feminists is how much they don't care about violence in gaming, just violence against women. Imagine if our Constitution concentrated on murders against women while claiming equality under the law for all. That is the shill intersectionalism sells: the perception of equality but the reality of supremacism and narcissism. Egalitarian feminists want equal rights and are not bigots; gender feminists want special rights, are sexual narcissists and despise men and heterosexuality. That shill is typified by this Tweet referring to a TV appearance by Sarkeesian from a frequent commenter on the SFF community and one who has asked us to "Google 'intersectional', Damien Walter. The quote is what Sarkeesian actually said.
Walter repeats what he clearly knows is false in this Tweet as well:
@average_ape Feminists aren't "SJW". They are people who believe women must be treated equally. Do you believe that?
— Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) November 10, 2014Too bad that's not what Sarkeesian is selling; that's not what she's selling at all. In this youtube video of a panel discussion in Australia called "How To Be a Feminist," which included Germaine Greer, Tara Ross and others, Sarkeesian says straight out she has no interest in equality with men and refers to the "oppression of patriarchy." Sarkeesian says "we don't want equality within these oppressive systems." Of course that brings us to patriarchy and the failings of men and the truth that Sarkeesian can't figure out the difference between critiquing art and instead critiquing the artist because they are a greedy Jew or "toxic" masculine male. From there it only follows Sarkeesian and someone like Brianna Wu cannot understand the nature of the pushback against them since it is the same pushback that created the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and GLAAD. The people against Wu and Sarkeesian are not misogynists but anti-defamation. They are defending their right to wake up in their own skin and not be lumped in with tens of millions of others with that same skin. Since intersectionalists have proven over and over again they have no interest in law, due process or our Constitution, that poses the question about what would replace what gender abolitionists would tear down.
As you can see from these Walter articles, writing about "playing out female gender roles," innuendoes that "white male authors" have tacitly conspired to keep control of SFF, and asserting "the future is a queer" is one thing, and equality for gays, non-whites and women another. Supremacy Is Equality has that rancid Orwellian ring to it all intersectional thought does when posed as an aphorism. In researching this book, I can't tell you how many times I run into the lie being pushed that always runs something like "feminism is the radical notion that women are people." No one is arguing they're not or treating women that way and intersectionalism is certainly not about mere equality. The idea a shirt can express the idea women are not human and "demeans" women is how you arrive to the insane straw men intersectionalists push in a world where heterosexuality itself is "oppression," "that heterosexuality is crucial to maintaining male supremacy (Charlotte Bunch - '72),"that women are not people.
Online harassment is not only obviously immoral but against the law. That poses the question as to why the Sarkeesian side of this think people not doing that are in favor of it. Must everyone against gender feminism make a blanket disclaimer they are against murder? Must every Muslim do so, and apologize for terrorism, or even leave Islam? As is always the case with the PC, it is not their penchant for targeting whites, men or Christians that is the issue, but how conspicuously they leave women, non-whites and Muslims alone, which amounts to a self-indictment. This book wasn't motivated by what intersectionalists say as much as by what they never say. Were Sarkeesian and intersectionalists egalitarians I'd have nothing to write about.
In that Colbert interview on his comedy show, it's no coincidence Sarkeesian won't name games and wants to talk about the industry as a whole, because in intersectionalism it is not individuals that are the problem, but straight white men. What intersectionalists refuse to understand because everything is a conspiracy to them, is that modes of diversity in cultural interests decide their own accidental and unpredictable presence. The equation is simply that when its time for such a thing it happens of its own accord. You can't go into boxing or romance fiction and change the demographic. If you try, especially with accusations of bigotry, people are going to get really angry. But intersectionalists would never accuse non-whites or women of a tacit conspiracy to maintain their own centrality within a cultural expression. That truism yields another dopey aphorism that women attacking men is men attacking women. It's the same old intersectional argument: oppose a black bigot and you oppose blacks. Somehow opposing the KKK is never opposing whites. The irony there is intersectionalists simply oppose whites anyway. Why focus on the KKK?
The silliest thing about Sarkeesian's appearance on The Colbert Report is that radfems declared victory although Colbert did an excellent job of satirizing Sarkeesian's position. Predictably, Sarkeesian and her supporters were unaware they'd been taken to the cleaners. There is no satire or irony in intersectionalism, though they are aware of those words; they just don't understand how they work.
As in gaming, when it comes to a shooting Sarkeesian not only smears men as an entire group of known wolves, but essentially denies them due process and makes them an accessory after the fact. But if you saw a woman's head off in Oklahoma, you're a lone wolf, not an Islamist. As is typical in intersectionalism, demography and ideology trade places, determined by a racial/political agenda. In Sarkeesian's actual and real ideology, Islamists disappear and all men in principle become Islamists in a bizarre hierarchy of race, religion and gender. Only the PC truly understand the rules involved. Since the shooter in Maryville and the killer in Oklahoma were both men, one can guess being black and Muslim in the latter case is the trump card over the native-American shooter in Maryville. And somehow a man holding the decapitated head of a woman never quite crosses the line between my Islamophobia and misogynistic ideology assigned to me at birth by intersectionalists and an actual ideology of hate, murder and women-hatred.
This is what happens when radfem bias makes "taking extraordinary stories as representative" and representative stories as an anomaly; it is lying. It is how morons Tweet about the "Sydney siege: Flag displayed is not that of Islamic State" just before the terrorist asks for an ISIS flag. In this hopelessly compromised ideology, eyes never quite meet reality. The idea no Christian or woman can be the president of Egypt amounts to 90 million lone wolves is too stupid to entertain, or to entertain that changes with a plane ride. The idea all men are rapists in a predatory woman-hating ideology that by mere coincidental convenience perfectly matches the exact paranoia of radical feminism can be contrasted to how obvious ideologies and historic events end up in radfem memory holes. In intersectionalism, things like lightning strikes, anomalies and odds literally have no meaning.
When it comes to the unknown number of anonymous people threatening Sarkeesian they are mysteriously seen as part of an ideology rather than lone wolves and furthermore, if you oppose Sarkeesian you become part of the violence in way blacks never do with crime or Muslims with terrorism. There are simply no rules, only Sarkeesian's innocence by virtue of womanhood and the presumed opposite of "toxic masculinity": benevolent femininity. It's supremacy anyway you cut it.
Sarkeesian simply ignores the fact men do pretty much everything on a societal, technological and civilizational level. It makes no sense to cherry-pick the bad and pretend the good isn't also then rooted in something specifically male. How can you separate the two? Why "Make gender -- specifically the idea that men are gendered beings -- a central part of the national conversation about rampage killings" and not do the same thing for gothic cathedrals, fractal geometry and space exploration? This obvious and typical double standard shows where intersectional supremacy creeps in and Sarkeesian herself makes no secret of her interests:
That is doctrine straight out of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. The dead giveaway there is her use of the word "performed." That is very specific Butlerian and gender feminist semantics particular only to that ideology when it comes to issues of sex. If you're a proponent of post-structuralist French Theory, then you are certainly going to see how women are depicted in media as a self-fulfilling prophecy, whether for good or ill. In that dogma, repetition is reality in a way Wertham never thought of but nevertheless came to the same conclusions about.
"Jonathan McIntosh @radicalbytes Jun 11 Fantasy & reality are not separate, it's a cyclical relationship. Media creates & reinforces culture. Culture creates & reinforces media." At the head of his Twitter feed McIntosh identifies himself as "Producer and co-writer on the Tropes vs Women in Video Games YouTube series" Sarkeesian is known for.
Yeah... no thanks. And do you think Sarkeesian or any intersectionalist in a thousand years would point out a "pattern connected to ideas" when it comes to Islam? Keep dreaming; lone wolves come and go, attached and detached from ideology according to an agenda. More double standards and hypocrisy that are naturally endemic to a racist, sexist supremacist cult that worships race and gender rather than law, principle and our Constitution, the Constitution written, bought and paid for in masculine blood by feminism's own logic. And this part here:
That's the same bullshit camouflage intersectional bigots have been selling in SFF. It's no coincidence so many in the SFF community are giving gamergate their attention or exchanging Tweets with Sarkeesian. Like all intersectionalist rantings, Sarkeesian's Tweets verge on hysteria. It's amazing how intersectionalists can have such an obvious disdain for men and completely deny that possibility to themselves. These are not the sharpest people. According to their own stated positions and definitions, they are racist, sexist and supremacists.
There was more: famous Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu and now self-described "feminist anti-racist" has parlayed his fame into writing racist anti-white articles about gamergate's "angry privileged white man," aside from retweeting stuff about "white dudebros." Then there's his Tweets about "whiny white cis scum misogynerds & the jerk PoC & women who support and enable them." Charming.
Emily Yoshida at Grantland, on absolutely no evidence, writes "...there will always be Gamergaters, just like there will always be a market for Confederate flags somewhere." Game developer Brianna Wu is quoted at The Guardian as saying "'I think there is a war on women in technology... It's not like I’m advocating that we ban Call of Duty or anything silly like that, I’m asking is for companies to look at their hiring practices, to hire more women... and make sure they portray women in their games in a socially responsible way.'"
Who decides what is "socially responsible": radical feminists? What right do they have to set themselves up as moral arbiters? And why should I listen to a woman who would retweet this extraordinary bit of doublethinking racism:
No. I'm not listening to racists. Jubbal is yet another in a long line of folks who think they have a free-fire zone. Just for starters, he displays the typical intersection ignorance of history:
"Veerender Jubbal @Veeren_Jubbal · These folks do not read, and look at history, whatsoever."
That would be about 1100 illegal homicides a year, far in excess of even legal homicides. Whenever a social justice warrior speaks, turn it upside-down and you'll find the truth. Of course, here is the ultimate when it comes to a lack of awareness, irony, or what hate speech is:
When it comes to Wu or Sarkeesian, the idea either would ever call for more white scorers in the NBA is simply stupid. That right there reveals their true target and agenda; race is a permanent part of intersectionalism, which is a melding of Critical Race Theory and Second Wave Lesbian Activist Feminism. The general principle of inclusion and diversity within a specific cultural activity they claim is a falsehood. One had only to go onto PC anti-gamer forums to see the degree of resistance to any idea that invoked the principles of law or fair play. There was "mansplaining" but never Arab or blacksplaining. You see, they believe that's wrong. Everything about intersectionalism is Orwellian and there is no one who dumps on their own cult in a more convincing manner than intersectionalists themselves. While they cry for diversity in video-gaming the idea anyone would ask for such a thing in middle-weight boxing gets blank stares, as if to say, "who'd be stupid enough to try and pie-chart culture?" Yes, who would be?
It's these pointed blind spots that highlight the lie that is this so-called "feminist" movement. People like Wu in gaming and Shanley Kane in tech are constantly asking for more female representation but when it comes to more female forklift drivers in 15 below zero supermarket distribution warehouses America's feminist are unsurprisingly no-shows and more than happy to let that remain a 100% masculine field of endeavor and the simple reason for that is women want nothing to do with such jobs.
And true to its Orwellian nature, there is no lack of the unawareness and double standards that dogs this cult like a swarm of flies:
That comes from a cult that worships the sound of their own voice and treats it as if it is a moral ethos, no matter how hypocritical. The voice itself, the identity, becomes a substitute for right and wrong. I can't detect anything like that from a cult which treats disagreement with its own daffy aggressively bigoted orthodoxy as sexism, racism and homophobia. There is nothing stupider than saying "men" are this or that and then claiming sexism is wrong and feminists like Wu don't indulge in it when their ceaseless negative profilings they apparently can't read and understand are so stark.
In that one Twitter thread alone there is "men who will expect you...", "men are socialized to believe...", "a reflection of their own fear", "them". Unsurprisingly, there is never a positive opposite to those profilings. They are inevitably 100% negative. When is obvious obvious?
And it's no surprise the imbecilic multiple award-nominated water-carrier for intersectionalism, SFF author Charles Stross, is there to act as a representative of the intellectual and artistic destruction of SF literature.
And then for Wu to mention "unconscious sexism" is such bald-faced stupidity it alone would comprise its own explanation for what really dogs Wu's career. Multiply that thread of actual quotes by a million and then compare it to tens of millions of faceless men with straw man fake scare quotes put in their mouths and you have just defined failure and where it lies. And that thread was retweeted by the Hugo-winning SFF author and unthinking and daffy gender feminist Kameron Hurley.
The idea a simple white male demography is a war on women is daffy. Everywhere you turn, any negative reaction to the insane bigotry of intersectional gender feminism is called a war on women, as if skewed demographies are hate groups, but only the right skewed demographies. Using Wu's stupid logic, the skewed field of romance fiction is not only a war on men but proof men want in by their mere absence. In fact by this logic, any sub-set of culture with a skewed demographic anywhere in the world is a war on somebody. But somehow, in the daffy world of intersectionalism, they never get taken to task unless it's straight, white, and male.
I am always dumbstruck by how stupidly revealing it is to admit to seeing misogynistic white privilege everywhere while treating misandry as some impossibility. There is nothing that tells one more about the racism, supremacy and bigotry of intersectionalism than that. Intersectionalists continually make racist and bigoted comments about straight white men and think if they keep calling their KKK-like activism anti-racism and anti-sexism no one is going to notice what hateful idiots they are nor how they've destroyed the core of a literary movement in less than a generation by sucking it dry of entertainment, talent and fun. Again and again in my research I ran across Tweets of women laughing off misandry as if one was talking about flying saucers. The problem there is such an assumption resides on the same level of stupid as does the idea only blacks commit crimes.
Naturally Jim Hines has his say about gamergate and one doesn't even have to read his post to know where he stands; all Hines needs is a race and sex. Like all intersectionalists, Hines acts as if he is a member of law enforcement, but he can't figure out the difference between people who make threats and those who don't. Imagine Hines and his insane gender feminists as prosecuting attorneys and then imagine the end of all law. In the same way one doesn't even need to read a Hines post to know the verdict, in an intersectionalist culture, courts would serve no purpose. One's racial and sexual identity would become law. That's hardly surprising since intersectionalists talk about straight white men as if they are not only a single person but a criminal. That's the reason any anti-gender feminist gamers are talked about the same way and default to the worst of them; millions distilled down into one single criminal who threatens women. The truth about that in gamergate terms looked more like this; not a thing feminists and their supporters want to acknowledge for obvious reasons: it takes their toy away. As is typical, intersectionalists not only have no race or gender neutral definition of "harassment," they don't even know when they're doing it.
"Sam Biddle @samfbiddle Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission""Sam Biddle @samfbiddle Bring Back Bullying"
Nothing sexist, racist or harassing there - just move along. Biddle and Ryan are both writers for Gawker Media, Ryan at Jezebel and Biddle at Valleywag.
It's amazing the hoops we have to run through to come to the conclusion that people are people, but then KKK-like entities have lots of hoops.
There will be a price to pay for the blatant double standards that get the president of the Professional Golfers Association impeached for using "Lil girl" as an insult while Rose Fox at Publisher's Weekly, Arthur Chu and Jessica Valenti insult men and whites with impunity. The price paid will be one where people don't know what or who to trust anymore. In this game there are no consistent rules that act like law does but two separate rules in the public arena for men and women, gay and straight, white and non-white that work outside the law to punish people and end careers. It works fine in the short run for the so-called oppressed but in the long run the erosion of public trust will do more to create Sarkeesian's "sexist monsters" than anything else. People forced to swallow that sort of humiliation and unfairness may keep their heads down but they won't forget, and discrimination can be created where before there was none and it can be very quiet if necessary. Why can they do something I can't is supposedly at the heart of the women's movement and they are abusing the concept. They are forgetting that rhetorical question is a very fundamental and powerful thing. The bottom line is that if you won't treat people fairly I guarantee you they'll treat themselves so whether you like it or not and in the end they'll bide their time and get their pound of flesh. You cannot institutionalize unfairness and crow about it without consequences that will act to undo a half-century long battle for equal rights. The disappearance of people who know how to think, reason and argue critically can and will destroy a nation of Marching Morons.
Given the complete opposite scenarios of law vs. public outcry over the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, from here on in questions of discrimination will indeed be exactly that: which came first: the chicken or the egg? The answer is be careful what you wish for. I mention it several times in this book: the PC do not believe in the principles behind the U.S. Constitution nor are they capable of maintaining such a thing. They exploit and cherry-pick it in a way that will eventually leave behind nothing but rotting fruit and it will be each man for himself in a Tower of competing Babels, and with no women and children first into the lifeboats. As in the case of people being ousted from the SFWA, it's not a question of whether the president of the PGA should've been ousted but who should be keeping him company in the boondocks, and you only have to read the comments in the ESPN post to see that pound of flesh will be had.
What does that remind you of more: beer-garden propaganda and smear tactics or the U.S. Constitution, the one where those who do a thing are taken to task for it, not those who don't? Say all you wish, silence is not a quote. It's a typical tactic by gender feminists to make all men complicit in what the worst of them do. The bottom line is there is an ocean of difference between the mad-hatter supremacist sexual doctrines of radical feminism like Andrea Dworkin and feminism for equal rights. People need to stop portraying insults against bigoted daffy feminists as being a contempt for women.
"Feminist Frequency @femfreq · Transgender women are women. End of discussion."
In intersectional-land, anything is anything as long as they get their way, no matter how nuts, racist, sexist or contradictory it is. End of discussion, even if it means a tree is a river. But that's not the point. I don't personally care if a man wants to call themselves a women. Intersectionalists will tell you gender is a social construct and then call you a bigot for repeating that. It's the defamation and double standards that are the issue, not falsely portraying people as being against inclusion or tolerance. I have tolerance for transgender. I have no tolerance for those that negatively profile me in the exact same way they claim to do against them is wrong."
The amount of plain lying when it comes from those who oppose gamergaters is astounding. That's no surprise since you have to do an incredible amount of lying to back up the idea millions of white heterosexual men are immoral slugs out to get you while presenting their mere race and sex as proof of that. Read this post titled "Sorry Media, Crash OverRide Network is Not an Anti-Harassment Campaign." It asserts the woman who provided the spark which lit gamergate is more a harasser than harassed. That really shouldn't be a surprised. As I've shown in this book, feminists have no neutral definition of the word "harassed." They are as eager to end it as they are to indulge in it, meaning, they literally are the cause of their own harassment. As I've said, the reason Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian get the amount of pushback they do is because they critique a neighborhood's potholes by calling most everyone in that neighborhood an n-word. When you engage almost everyone based on racial and sexual stereotypes because of the sins of a few, one shouldn't be surprised at the anger. Deal with what causes the potholes - and who.
Shocker: Brianna Wu is lying to you. pic.twitter.com/glAEwTKSTS
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) May 22, 2015Demonization — Anyone who directly criticizes feminism, per se, or who contradicts the preferred feminist narrative of some contemporary issue, is vilified, demonized and scapegoated as a Misogynistic Enemy of Women's Progress. This is where the Alinsky Rules for Radicals tactics are employed to marginalize and discredit the critic with ad hominem slurs and unsubstantiated accusations of mala fides ('bad faith'). No actual evidence of your hateful motives is needed by feminists to justify these attacks, and what they offer as 'evidence' is irrelevant to the validity of your criticism, but by their coordinated, ruthless and persistent campaign of character assassination, feminists will turn the targeted critic into a Demonized Scapegoat whom all feminists are obliged to denounce. During the Cold War, the pro-Soviet defenders of Marxism did this to a succession of their critics and opponents — Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan, to name a few — and feminism's totalitarian kinship to Communism is demonstrated by their predictable use of Soviet-style propaganda tactics to impugn their enemies." - Robert McCain
Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart writes "Jonathan McIntosh, the writer behind far-Left feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian's videos, says that: 'The core value of patriarchal masculinity is control.'" That cant could've come straight out of the mouth of any of the craziest radical lesbian feminists of the '70s and it shows what is really going on here. Whether a devotee or not, Sarkeesian is a Butlerian/Dworkin gender-fluid feminist to the hilt. In intersectionalism "diversity" always means white male racism and sexism. "Diversity" in these hands is not a wish but a weapon, and the weapon is hate speech and group defamation based on the psychotic rhetoric and phobias of gender feminism. Who's more likely to hate and fear the opposite sex, 3.5 billion people or a dozen or two dozen influential lesbian academics with a shared psychosis and ideology? And remember this: in gender feminism, men as an entire group default to an ideology, a patriarchy of supremacy bent on controlling and oppressing women.
"Far from being 'natural', phallic sexuality is a moral and political activity." - Denise Thompson, Radical Feminism Today (2001)
Without a hint of irony Damien Walter Tweets "The current theme of the internet seems to be 'wow there are a fuckload of very stupid men in the world' #Gamergate #PUA #MRA." What Walter is unwittingly conveying is not any truth about men but the truth of how his small slice of ideology targets them with hate speech.
How is Anita Sarkeesian and our intersectional nuns who've banned Frank Frazetta and Robert Heinlein from their anti-male antiseptic spaces any different from Dr. Fredric Wertham and his anti-violence morality crusade against comic books in Seduction of the Innocent (1954) in the 1950s? The answer is, they're not. They're no different from Tipper Gore and her crusade against pop music lyrics. Predictably, people like Scalzi and his intersectionalist crowd despise and make fun of Wertham and Gore. That's because hypocrisy, a lack of self-awareness and tools of self-criticism is baked right into intersectionalism. The goofy thing is the PC whine about Gamergate and other things as if there are a substantial number of American, straight white males, who are actually in favor of crime. That's why the PC posture so much and make loud pronouncements that smear their opponents as being in favor of threats, rape and divulging personal information. It's the usual lone wolf/not a lone wolf that completely changes according to whether you're black or white, Christian or Muslim, man or woman, gay or straight. There is no principle involved, only a set of identities stacked next to the puerile notion intersectionalists believe in blind justice. In fact it is a completely corrupted cult.
In short, men are sexist against themselves too... and probably Jews and blacks
What Sarkeesian is saying there is that whites and men have no equal protection under the 14th Amendment and that race and gender will now replace law. Intersectionalism is a like a gyroscope or compass of hate that always rights itself and always points to true white male North no matter what words or arguments are used. That's how bigotry, sexism, racism, supremacy and demonization theories work.
Keep following Sarkeesian's ideological ancestry back and it inevitably brings you to Andrea Dworkin and Judith Butler, and note how this same self-serving gibberish is employed by Daphne Patai where she quotes Adrienne Rich in Patai's The Orwellian Mystique: ''I feel in the work of the men whose poetry I read today a deep pessimism and fatalistic grief; and I wonder if it isn't the masculine side of what women have experienced, the price of masculine dominance.
''Patai adding "The history of the twentieth century clearly led to bigger and better killing machines" contains a clear implication that a woman's touch would end all that and therefore contains the seeds of the very artificially constructed ideological identity supremacy Patai claims is a part of men's natures but never proves, other than to suggest a female black widow spider is an ideologue. In short, Patai is observably more guilty of the thing she claims Orwell is than Orwell himself. There are indications that Patai herself later disavowed many of these feminist notions. Reading a list of Patai's published books betrays an increasing awareness of horror at the monster she herself helped to create.
Fourteen years later in her book Heterophobia, Patai writes:
"... Dee Graham, a psychology professor who claims to be able to explain the very existence of heterosexuality in women by invoking what she calls the 'Societal Stockholm Syndrome.' In a 1994 book entitled Loving to Survive, Graham expounds her theory in minute detail. As in the famous Stockholm bank-hostage episode in 1973, in which four hostages bonded with their captors and came to see the police as their common enemy, women - so the argument goes - are eternally held hostage to men by the four 'interlocking' conditions identified as the Stockholm Syndrome: threat to survival, isolation, inability to escape, and dependence on the oppressor's kindness. According to Graham's scenario - a version so fantastic it assumes mythic proportions - male abuse of women, in all its forms, is the reality of everyday life. Only 'radical feminist theorists have recognized the centrality of men's violence to women's lives.' The point of all male behavior is domination (women, by contrast, 'as a group abhor violence'). Heterosexual behavior thus becomes a 'survival strategy' for women, as do 'feminine' characteristics, which result from women's need to ingratiate themselves with their 'captors.
'"How does Graham sustain such an extravagant claim? She does so by citing primarily extremist arguments and feminist scare statistics concerning women's sorry plight. Her discussion of mass murderers is an example. '[V]irtually all' are male while their victims are mostly female, we are told, which leads to the comment: 'These findings indicate that women's survival is threatened by male violence,' and to the opening sentence of the following section, on wife abuse: 'Even women who are not murdered by their battering partners find their survival continually threatened.' Thus does the exceptional become the typical. The torture of women in Latin America and the burning of witches in Europe hundreds of years earlier are all brought in to teach the same lesson.
"The latter example incidentally serves to show up the kind of spurious scholarship on which Graham's thesis rests. Graham repeats the long-discredited fable about the '9 million victims of the European witch-hunts over a three-hundred-year period,' further noting that as some scholars say witches were persecuted for six hundred years, the real number of martyred women may actually be twice that high. By contrast, Robin Briggs, in his recent meticulously documented Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, tells us that the best-informed recent estimates of the total number of executions for witchcraft in Europe are 'between forty thousand and fifty thousand, of whom about 25 percent were men.' The 9 million figure, so beloved of feminist writers (Graham is hardly alone in this vast exaggeration), is an overestimate by some 18,000 percent! But this is no accident. Graham refers to witches for precisely the same reason she discusses male mass murderers: Women are in dire peril of their lives. 'This piston [of witch persecutions] and others like it in other parts of the world should leave no doubt in today's women's minds that men are capable of killing women, of using violence for the social control of women, and that men will settle for the flimsiest reasons as rationalizations for the killings.'
"Such rhetorical excess, however, has its own logic. Any woman who contests Graham's interpretation, who insists on the authority of her own experience (not to mention of her own reading) to argue that Graham's view is slanderous and that the men she has known are no worse than are the women, who affirms heterosexual desire as a good thing, not the terrorized adjustment of it prisoner - any such woman is, by that very insistence, demonstrating that she is in thrall to the Stockholm Syndrome. In the preface to her book, Graham warns her readers that they will need to 'work through their initial shock and resistance' to her argument. As with other such inflammatory writing, Graham's thesis makes it impossible to distinguish in it meaningful way between situations of genuine abuse and the ordinary life of heterosexual women. And that is precisely the point. Men are women's captors. Women are men's hostages. Heterosexuality is the form of their subjugation.
"Like Robin West, then, Dee Graham is part of the current trend to redefine heterosexuality along extremist feminist lines. Increasingly, heterosexuality is presented as deviance, a kind of mental illness, a state of mind produced by terror. And this frame of reference is then used to reconstruct heterosexuality across the life span, representing it as 'coercive sexuality,' as explained in a recent article by Wendy Patton and Mary Harrison. Their project, the authors say, 'is concerned with documenting a broad continuum of unwanted sexual experiences, including those that appear "normal'" within the dominant heterosexuality discourses,' in women's lives from childhood to adulthood. The point of the term 'continuum' is clearly spelled out: 'The concept of a continuum assists women to identify links between typical and aberrant behaviour, and enables women to locate and name their own experiences.' Thus, just as consensual becomes 'consensual,' alarmingly set off by scare quotes, so the concept of normal sexual interactions is transformed into 'normal' sexually intrusive behaviors."
By an amazing coincidence it also follows the usual feminist patter which ascribes all things negative to males while either ignoring the positive or throwing the positive into the natural arena of femininity, though there is no such women's touch to Gothic cathedrals, Rembrandt, the Magna Carta, or U.S. Constitution. To me it's laughable to pass off this obvious bias as an exercise in neutral intellectual observation. The latter part of Patai's passage goes thus:
"New concepts, new models, throw light on Orwell's work, so that today we can understand both his inability to see a solution and his responsiveness to the conditions of life implicit in a sexual polarization in which the masculine is defined in terms of destructive patterns that are justified as, or believed to be, facts of nature. Orwell's uncritical embrace of misogyny and his hostility to feminism are among his most serious shortcomings as a moral witness to his times. But they explain his despair. Clinging to an inherently dangerous and presumably inescapable notion of the masculine, while aware of its deadly potentiality, Orwell can see no way out. In his adherence to a conventional notion of manhood, he cannot discern that the characteristics he laments and the ones he promotes are united by the demands of the male gender role. Instead, he is left puzzled and driven to despair by the possible causes of bullying and power worship, which he considers typical of 'human beings.' Orwell cannot imagine any possibility for social progress because he views the "other" as lacking in consciousness and hence incapable of action."
That is supermacist feminist gender cant 101 and explains why they have no use whatsoever for a thing like the U.S. Constitution, a view which, ironically, ensures that the more successful they are the more they ensure their own eventual destruction.
This represents the sharp divergence between gender feminist and equal rights feminists, and perhaps explains why the former so often pretend to be the latter. Gender feminists believe the entire structures comprising 6,000 years of human civilization must be sacked and torn down, including the very nature of heterosexuality itself. That extends to Susan Brownmiller's mad thesis that men use and benefit from rape as a means of frightening women into line.
Equality feminists want equality before the law and in cultural custom and practice. They don't see themselves as a cohesive identity other than one that has been discriminated against. Equality feminists see themselves as a diverse group of individuals, with more in common with men than not, since they define what they have to offer more in terms of a shared intellectual space all humans can and should have access to, e.g. science, the arts. They are under no illusions of female supremacy or that dampening male masculinity will end all war.
Once again you see a cult that has no neutral definition of gendered hate speech; in its place is a simple lie asserted as truth. It furthermore asserts Jews responding to targeted anti-Semitic attacks are engaging in gentiled hate speech. This type of beer-garden logic probably sounded better in the original German. The factory that produces cant ever convenient to itself never stops.
The sleight-of-hand there is always the same: some version of distorting words like "systemic" and "institution." What Sarkeesian is doing there is taking a regional historic truth like Jim Crow, smearing it all over America, and dragging it into the present, as if "connected" is some science one can measure the same way one can measure a law in a Jim Crow county. She does the equivalent with women's suffrage on the right to vote as well. In the absence of actual institutions and laws, "connected" can mean anything you want it to mean. But the false equivalence between hardened institutions like a law and cultural currents is a shill. Ironically, Sarkeesian is taking personal prejudice and transforming it into an institution and changing the very meaning of words so that a pin-up drawing of a woman becomes "misogyny," actual woman-hatred.
SF blogger, Readercon panelist Natalie Luhrs: "Man, so great seeing all these white dudes talking about how fucking awesome they are for standing up to G----Gate."
If Anita Sarkeesian and John Scalzi have their way, we'll be back to having a Comics Code Authority, but instead of not being able to write bad things about the police, intersectionalists will substitute the opposite of the straight white male for protection plus Muslims and the Third World. Whites, men, heterosexuals the West and Christians will be a free-fire zone of unbridled bigotry. In other words intersectionalists would duplicate their scouring of SFF and extend it across America; a Comics Code for America. And let's not forget the cult of intersectionalism calls everyone else racist and yet routinely brag about fewer whites in America or Tweet how great it was how few men or whites were nominated for such and such a come-one-come-all literary award while having awards men and whites aren't even eligible for. Intersectionalists routinely call that scouring and segregation "diversity."
In intersectionalspeak, over 200 million white Americans are not only either racists or benefit from their racial privilege, but them wanting to be left alone is a war on women, gay folks and non-whites. And that speaks to the ridiculousness of thinking there are two sides to this crime. Go ahead and treat it as a crime. Who did what to who? What did the gaming community do to anyone? Not hire women? Not follow Brianna Wu's virtual command to "make sure" women are being treated in a "socially responsible way"? What the hell does that even mean, and who decides? So the crime of the gaming community of people who aren't even a cohesive group is some imaginary crime of omission. On the other hand that community is being treated as if it is one white women-hating man and being attacked by a demonstrable cogent and formal ideology with its own personalized academic vocabulary that targets men, whites, and heterosexuals as morally inferior. There's your crime and there's your aggression. Anita Sarkeesian should stop making youtube videos defaming men as an entire group and start making the games she wants to see.
The hypocrisy of intersectional thought is stark: every shooting by a man is "masculinity" incarnate and a sign of male "privilege" and male supremacist and misogynistic ideology. Every shooting by a demonstrably ideological Muslim is a "lone wolf," including 20,000 members of ISIS selling women and chopping heads off in Iraq. People chopping heads off become an anomaly, and unknown threats on the internet become a million white "dudebros."
Black crime statistics disappear into the same memory-hole where Ottoman and Arabic colonialism become mythical "Easterlings" that are a figment of Tolkien's and Vienna's (besieged in 1529 and 1683) racist imaginations. The anomalous shooting of Trayvon Martin turns into a racial trend in reverse of actual facts and the shooter, George Zimmerman, turns into a white man for ease of application. Reality turns upside-down and folds back on itself. Threats by an anonymous few within Gamergate are neither anomalous nor lone wolves, but a thing smeared onto anyone who doesn't like Sarkeesian. Threats from the other side are simply ignored. And all this is decided, not by reality and facts, but by race and sex.
The truth is the Southern Poverty Law Center which did such good work suppressing neo-Nazis, the KKK and other white supremacists needs to get to work on the racist supremacist cult that is intersectionalism. Intersectionalists are committed to the idea there is only white racism, heterosexual gender phobias and male sexual hatreds, which is the same thing as a hate group maintaining only Jews are greedy, gays sexual perverts and blacks which commit crimes. Maintaining men, whites and heterosexuals in 2014 profit by their own racism and bigotry is the most vile sort of hate speech, and speech the core SFF community's institutions are unfortunately committed to supporting right to the hilt. Just as unfortunately, readers and potential writers are going elsewhere. You can see from the quotes in this book that brains and a penchant for eccentric thought are not high on the list of today's core SF writers. In truth they are about as conformist rednecks as they come.
*
Delving into the origins of radical lesbian feminism reveals a fake ideology that is a mixture of male phobia combined with clever arguments to justify perversion and hatred. It does this by wrapping up the entire package as one of anti-oppression, whether by reason of that phobia or purposefully. It attaches itself to a thing like Jim Crow or women's rights in order to garner compassion and credibility. While there is truth to the idea there is discrimination against homosexuals, it is also true some people just hate, and institutionalize and rationalize that hatred as best they can. That blurred line between discrimination and radical feminism's own bigotry is one radical feminism has exploited to the max.
When discrimination is present, there is no need to claim a Gulf of Tonkin as if all heterosexuality is oppression and that men use it and also rape and the incest taboo to control women; those are non-events.
People just cannot get it through their heads that the human failure that drives a neo-Nazi can be expressed in other identities. The fact Nazism also once claimed oppression, demonized the fundamental identity of its opponents and had its own Gulf of Tonkin in Sudetenland to disguise naked aggression should make more lightbulbs go off. There is nothing to account for the sheer hostility of the quotes in this book since they are virtually never addressing an actual event but rather the state of the world in general and portrayals of tens of millions of men, whites and heterosexuals at a go. When there are events, the even more hysteric tone and reaction to something like a vulgar slang term motivating donations to rape crisis centers as in the Larry Correia affair or the SFWA bulletin affair which stipulated actual woman-hatred and racism on the part of Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick is so over the top that the entirety resembles an ideology of sociopathy, much it by proxy because it is embedded in the rhetoric no matter who uses it. When someone says America is an apartheid state their is a limit to the value of an opinion and it reveals more about the innate hostility of the person employing it than America.
It's probably accurate to say that the vast majority of the Twitter social justice warriors documented in this book range from broken and traumatized people with psychiatric disorders desperate for attention to others who are simply kooky fringe lunatics who find the intellectual whirlpool of post-structuralist rhetoric a soothing place where anything can be anything as long as it makes their least little resentments against millions of people plausible. Others who seem to be simply monumentally naive appear to enjoy the moral high ground in a way that is obsessive. In a world full of wonder and beauty, it takes a special type of person to wallow in filth they've mostly made up out of their heads buttressed by fake statistics and pre-packaged arguments of memory/logic holes where power/privilege theory is a get-out-of-jail card in which they are never wrong, and all of it based on one's sex and race. This is a hate movement, not a social justice movement.
*
Timeline of controversial incidents in the core SFF community:
April 2012 Saladin Ahmed's Is Game of Thrones Too White post
May 2012 John Scalzi's White Privilege post
May 2012 First Anita Sarkeesian gender tropes in video games Kickstarter
Sept 2012 N.K. Jemisin accuses fandom of being "racist as fuck"
March 2013 Adria Richards Donglegate sexual harassment hoax
April 2013 John Scalzi attacks men in "geekdom"
May 2013 SFWA Bulletin "lady"/Red Sonja cover incident
May 2013 Kameron Hurley's eventually Hugo-winning post about women erased from military history
June 2013 N. K. Jemisin Australian Continuum Guest of Honor Speech
July 2013 Mary Robinette Kowal Dear Rabid Weasels Please Shut the Fuck Up post
August 2013 Jim Hines makes racial innuendoes over photo of WorldCon chairs
January 2014 Alex Dally MacFarlane calls for an end to binary gender in SFF
February 2014 Feminists on Twitter swarm Waterstones Bookstore male book display
March 2014 Jonathan Ross hounding out of hosting the Hugos begun by the resignation of an intersectional gender feminist
April 2014 John Scalzi asks us to bone up on intersectionality
April 2014 Damien Walter future-is-queer piece at The Guardian
May 2014 Mary Robinette Kowal Tweets "only one award went to a white male" after the Nebulas
June 2014 Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter released by Lightspeed Magazine
Aug 2014 Gamergate