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Old 09-18-2010, 07:22 PM   #48
Worldwalker
Curmudgeon
Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
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Join Date: Feb 2010
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Welcome to MobileRead, Pandarus. You might want to look into some of the other threads, too, especially in our "introduce yourself" area.

Anyway, I think we're looking at things totally differently. You're looking at things strictly from a gender-based perspective: Something is men's stuff, something else is women's stuff, and the important thing isn't the stuff; it's what kind of chromosomes the person who wrote it has. Isn't that exactly what people are trying to get away from -- the whole idea that who someone happens to be is more important than what he or she writes?

Let's say, for example, that I'm a woman who writes military SF. Would it be right for Baen Books to prohibit me for writing for them, since they only buy military SF by men? Obviously that would be wrong (and besides, would you want to be the one to tell Elizabeth Moon that?). There would be, I think, a lot of people objecting to that. "She writes good books; nobody should care what she looks like." Yes, there are more male military SF writers than there are female ones. But does that mean that the market, and the authors, should be always and exclusively male? That they should celebrate only male contributions to the genre? That women should be made to feel unwelcome? I read military SF, and I want to read good military SF; they could take all the names off the covers and the books would still be good or bad or otherwise.

Let's say, for another example, that I'm a man who writes fanfic. Why does "The OTW is an organization created to advocate for female-dominated transformative media fandom and its artworks. That is its purpose" suddenly become a Good Thing? Why is it suddenly okay to make decisions based on someone's chromosomes, not their writing, when that someone is male? I would think that women, knowing what it is to be discriminated against based on who they are, not on what they can do, should be the last people to look at body form instead of actions.

This exchange is attributed (wrongly) to Winston Churchill:

Churchill to lady socialite: Would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Socialite: A million pounds? Well ... of course.
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: What kind of woman do you take me for?
Churchill: We've already settled that; now we're just haggling over the price.


That's what "reverse" discrimination is: haggling over the price. There is only discrimination. Either you take (gender, color, age, religion, whatever) into consideration, or you don't. Establishing quotas, set-asides, "safe spaces", or anything else based on some such criterion winds up with the same thing: Caring about what someone is, not what they can do. Either we embrace discrimination or we reject it. It's either right or wrong. If we try to say "well, discrimination is right some of the time," we're like the socialite, saying Mr. Churchill is acceptable at one price but not at another. Personally, I'm just going to say that it's wrong, and not haggle over the price.
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