SFFragette
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The 13th Doctor: It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
Carrie Fisher. Robin Wright. Gal Gadot. Daisy Ridley. Melissa McCarthy & Leslie Jones & Kate McKinnon & Kristen Wigg.
Jodie Whittaker.
It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, but it goddamn well does.
You know why I chose the women I did, up above? You know why I didn’t include Weaver & Hamilton & Theron on that list?
Because Ripley and Connor and Furiosa were given to us. They were put on the table by filmmakers who said either “it doesn’t matter if this character’s a woman or a man,” or who specifically chose a woman as the vehicle for the main story. Alien & Terminator were always ours. We didn’t have to ask, much less plead and beg, for Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. We weren’t looking for Furiosa, and Theron came out of nowhere the same way Weaver & Hamilton did.
But Carrie Fisher? Robin Wright? Yeah, Princess Leia & the Princess Bride were integral to their stories, but Buttercup was a pretty passive observer in her own story and Leia wasn’t there FOR GIRLS. She was there as the token female. The fact that she had an important role & agency is almost beside the point. I read something recently–maybe in Empire Magazine–where someone said something like “If you think about it, Star Wars is really Leia’s story,” and all I could think was WOULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN AMAZING IF IT HAD BEEN FILMED THAT WAY?
So General Antiope? General Organa? I feel like we *fought* for them. Diana? Rey? I feel like they’re from us saying “we want this so much, we deserve this, we hold up half the fucking sky, people.” An all-women Ghostbusters team? We kept saying “oh god please we want this this would be so awesome.” And so now, a female Doctor? It feels like another one we fought for.
And it shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t have to be pleading for 1/13th of the pie (or less). We shouldn’t have to be THIS HAPPY to get it. And yet I am.
And I’m also SO ANGRY that it takes so little, such a crumb, to make me THIS HAPPY, when it shouldn’t even be a conversation.
And none of that even STARTS to touch on how 8 of the 9 (or 11/12, depending on how you wanna count it) women I’ve talked about are white ladies.
I don’t want white women to be the only ones gaining ground here. I don’t want increments. We don’t NEED increments. The actors are there. Storm Reid proves it. Zendaya proves it. Hannah John-Kamen & Frankie Adams prove it. And I want to see women of color in all these big amazing roles and films too. I don’t want this to just be a moment for white girls and indistinguishable blondes.
I want more, god damn it. I want it all, for all of us. #GirlPower
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Good Guys & Responding to Womens’ Sexual Harassment
A friend of mine over on Facebook posted link to this article, Why Women Smile At Men Who Sexually Harass Us, which is a good article full of things that are tiresomely familiar to virtually all women and apparently continue to be surprising to many, perhaps most, men.
I think it’s a good article for men to read, because what prompted her writing it was how the author’s boyfriend, who is, by her estimation, one of the good guys, responded not only to her being harassed, but to her *reaction* to being harassed.
Here’s the thing. There are very few men of my acquaintance that I wouldn’t consider to be among the good guys. Men who would never dream of behaving in the ways described in this (or so very, very many other) articles, who find it appalling that anyone *would* behave in the way described. And that’s good. That’s great. That’s wonderful.
It’s also amazing how very easily they–these good guys, these men who are absolutely trying to Do Right–miss the mark in how to react when this kind of thing happens to a woman they’re with, or even when they hear about it happening.
Women respond the way we do because we’ve learned, whether consciously or not, what to do to ensure the most positive outcome for ourselves when we find ourselves in these kinds of situations, and honestly, women aren’t kidding when that #YesAllWoman hashtag trends. We have *all* found ourselves in a position of being harassed, and smiling uncomfortably and trying to ignore it and being polite when we’d rather scream or kick or run but there’s no one to hear (or listen) or help fight back (because we’re mostly smaller and mostly aren’t going to win a physical altercation) or anywhere to run to.
I came across this quote a few days ago and I think it’s hugely relevant to what I’m about to say here. It’s talking about cat-calling, specifically, but you ought to be able to see how it applies more broadly:
Because what gets me, and what gets me every time, is how enraged and how immediately prone to violent threats so very many men* become when shit like this happens. How they react by escalating, or thinking women should escalate. How THEY wouldn’t respond with a tight smile (except that’s not true, because almost all the time when we’re confronted with racist or sexist or homophobic or misogynistic behaviour that’s exactly what we *all* do), THEY would confront the guy–and how in that situation they sometimes do.
First off, that’s looking at the situation from the male point of view. It’s making it about the male friend’s (completely happenstance, because he’s not always going to be there) position in the scenario, and right there, that stops being helpful, even when a man is really, really trying to be one of the good guys.
But second, and more relevantly to what I’m coming at here, is that if men want to be any actual use in that kind of situation, they need to stay calm instead of getting snarly and confrontational. They need to say “this isn’t okay” without bringing on the aggression themselves. Yelling, threatening, puffing up, all of that is absolutely no use, because then you know what the woman who is being harassed has to deal with?
Two men who are behaving like shitheels. One of them is her harasser and one of them is nominally her friend but who is in that moment making the situation worse for her. Because now somebody is Trying To Defend Her, but doing so in a way that could in fact potentially bring on violence, and so instead of the tension of politely ignoring the first jackass, she’s now trying to defuse and manage a situation that’s been magnified, which is what she was trying to avoid in the first place.
Honestly, going silent is more helpful in the immediate than getting confrontational, because what people who act like this are *looking* for is a reaction. But in the long term, and I’m not just talking about street harassment but about general sexist(racist/homophobic/misogynistic) commentary, *by far* the most useful thing men (in particular men, because broadly speaking men listen to other men more than they listen to women) can do is say, “That’s not cool, why would you say something like that, I can’t stand here and listen to you talk that way about somebody,” in as casual a manner as possible, and do it every single time. Not when there’s something big at stake, but when it nominally doesn’t matter.
It’s *incredibly* difficult. It’s so. very. hard. We’re trained not to make a fuss. Women are trained even more than men, but generally we’re all socially conditioned to keep conflict to a minimum and let it blow over while we maybe exchange uncomfortable looks, but that will never. ever. change. anything.
Years and years ago a friend of mine, who is generally an extremely good person but came from a culture where this was considered okay, used ‘gay’ as a slur. I called him out on it. Told him that wasn’t appropriate and I’d thank him not to use that term again my house or my hearing. We were both, frankly, mortified by me saying it. But a couple weeks later he said to me, “Ever since you said that to me I’ve had to think about EVERYTHING I say,” and that’s the point.
And that was with somebody who was a good guy. He was able to hear it from a woman and respond appropriately. Huge numbers of men can’t or won’t heed that kind of commentary from a woman, which is why we need men to say it too, all the damned time, in a calm and reasonable manner, until it stops being necessary. Which isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes, but it won’t happen in *anybody’s* lifetime if we just let casual sexism(etc) go because it’s more comfortable to not speak up in a calm, rational way.
I’m not saying anything new here. I don’t know that I’ve got enough reach for it to get out of my echo chamber. But it’s a thing that seemed important in the wake of reading the linked article, and if it makes anybody take a deep breath and reconsider whether they’re about to be helpful or not, it’s certainly worth posting.
I swear to God if I get one “not all men” on this I will drop an anvil on you.
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First SFF?
My friend Kari Sperring (who is one of those writers whose prose just makes me want to weep with envy) has been putting up terrific questions and commentary over on Twitter. Today’s question (which can be followed at the tag #1stSFFReads) is “What was the 1st sff book you read? The 1st by a woman? By a writer of colour?”
As it happens, the first SFF novel I read was *by* a woman: THE CITY UNDER GROUND, by Suzanne Martel. It was published when I was two; I read it when I was six. It made, obviously, a tremendous impression, although I found and re-read it in college and wow there was a lot of religious stuff in it I’d totally forgotten/had totally gone over my head, but aside from that it wasn’t a bad little book. It had an interesting girl character as one of the leads, which was one of the things I remembered from reading it as a child (well, more specifically I remembered that the people in the city under ground were all bald and the girl, who was from above, had red hair :)).
To the best of my knowledge/awareness, the first SFF novel by a person of colour I read was GORGON CHILD, by Steven Barnes, when I was about fourteen. I doubt that I knew the author was black (honestly, I don’t even think I assumed it until he wrote LION’S BLOOD, becauses I have a vague recollection of going hey, I bet this guy is black!), just that the protagonist was, but it’s still the first SFF novel by a person of colour that I’m sure of.
I do know that as a 14(ish) year old white girl in small-town Alaska where almost without exception the people of colour were Native Alaskans (and in Kenai, a great majority of the Natives are kinda gold skinned, blonde haired and blue eyed thanks to so much Russian influence, which makes them not *terribly* visible in a predominantly white community), I bought GORGON CHILD because it had a black person on the cover, rather than shying away from it as apparently book publishers still fear white readers will do.
I’m pretty sure that my thought process was something along the lines of, “Wow, they write fantasy novels with black people in them?!” because the ethnicity of the characters in the books I read had, I suspect, never really crossed my mind. They defaulted to white unless it was something like ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY or ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS (both of which I read before GORGON CHILD but neither of which are SFF), where the protagonist’s ethnicity is put onto the page as not-white. Which is really not how I want to say that, because it really shouldn’t be white by default/exclusionary in that manner, but argh, for huge swaths of fiction it is.
Anyway, this all made me think about what the *last* SFF novels by women and PsOC I’d read were, too. I’m in the middle of reading Michelle Sagara‘s SILENCE, and she’s both, but breaking it out–well, frankly, I’m fine on the reading SFF women front, (the most recent reads were Carrie Harris‘s SALLY SLICK & THE STEEL SYNDICATE and Beth Cato‘s THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER (both of which I need to write up commentary on), but the last SFF by a person of color that I finished reading (does it count if you bounce off something?) were Michelle’s CAST IN SORROW and Tobias Buckell‘s magnificent ARCTIC RISING last year. So I could do better on that front.
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SFFragette
Kari Sperring* introduced the utterly magnifient tag SFFragette over on Twitter a few days ago, as a term to embody the push-back against sexism in SFF. It now has a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and a blog.
These are fantastic places to follow the ongoing discussion. I ottally lack the spoons to link to all the great posts and talks that are happening, so if you’re one of my readers and have any interest in the topic, there’s your source for news.
That said, here’s a link I think says some important things: What we talk about when we talk about con harassment. It’s not a scintillating post title, but it’s written by a man, and largely directed at men. The thing that particularly stands out about it to me is his discussion of the of “I’d have broken that bastard’s teeth!” response when faced with a discussion or report of harrassment. (Note: this is not a men-only response by a long shot, but it does seem to be a nearly universal one among men. I am not trying to persecute anybody by bringing this up.)
I have seen several people say words to the effect of “but this is a problem throughout society, why is SFF being called out for it?” Someone–whose blog I didn’t save–essentially said, “Yes, but the SFF community is my particular pool, so this is where I’m choosing to expend my energies.” I think that nails it. Besides, in this context, the SFF community is freaking huge: the overlap with gaming, comics, cosplay, means the potential ripple effect is tremendous.
*If you like Carol Berg or Guy Gavriel Kay, you should be reading Kari’s books. I’m just sayin’.