Social Justice in SF&F

[Geralt]

Originally Posted by Rbneader

Why is everyone apparently incapable of going 'Nice try, troll' and moving on?

Because you are not allowed to call people trolls on MR.
I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

As a little aside, in german there is even a special word for only thinking in categories: "Schubladendenken".

Those Germans! Not only do they have a word for it, but it sounds delightful, too!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Geralt

One more thing and I'll stop.

If anyone can answer this that'd be great.

How can you enjoy any story, really get into it, forget everything around you and enjoy the pure blissfulness of being transported into another world, if you judge every paragraph, every word by your prism of gender issues or political correctness?

Simple answer...You cannot. If you read a book and have to examine everything in case there is something there that might bother you, you may as well stop reading.

To me, I read and if something bothers me, I try to let it go and go on. If I find that it bothers me too much or there are more things that bother me, I'll stop reading. But I won't examine every little thing. It has to be a pretty big thing. King Solomon's Mines is book I have read and did not like. I know it was written a very long time ago when things were different. But, I found I didn't like it. What was different back then was most of what it was I didn't like. I didn't go looking for things to like/dislike. It just was there.

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Geralt

One more thing and I'll stop.

If anyone can answer this that'd be great.

How can you enjoy any story, really get into it, forget everything around you and enjoy the pure blissfulness of being transported into another world, if you judge every paragraph, every word by your prism of gender issues or political correctness?

I agree with JSWolf - you cannot, and I doubt many people read that way. I read and enjoy books, but sometimes something makes me stumble out of that other world. It can be a clumsy infodump, or an anachronism in a historical novel, or the realization that I'm quite far into the book and haven't seen a woman speak or interact with the protagonist at all. If the book is good enough, I'll read on, but maybe notice more easily the next infodump, or anachroniscm, or continued lack of women.

Sometimes I'll only realise when I've finished the book and think back on it. Huh, there were only two non-straight persons in the book - and those were a gay man who preyed on young male servants, and a bisexual sadistic rapist. Not cool. *)
And sometimes I'll only realize when I read a review. Blatant anti-semitism? I read that book and didn't notice any. * Rereads * Oh, ouch. That evil moneylender character -- how did I miss all those ugly stereotypes? Ouch, ouch, ouch. And published as late as 1950? That's really disappointing. **)


Some years ago, I glanced through my children's schoolbooks, and skimmed a chapter on altruism in a book on religion and ethics. It had four mini biographies on admirable people who had made great sacrifices to help others. I noticed right away that all of them were Christians, and was mildly annoyed. They couldn't find any great altruists among atheists or people of other religions? How biased!
Later, I reread that chapter, and noticed that all these admirable people were white Europeans. I didn't notice that at all the first time I read it.
I'll leave as an excercise for the reader to guess whether I'm a Christian, and whether I'm a white European...


So, I'm usually not surprised when others mention that they don't notice bias in books, even when it's really obvious to me. And it is, of course, especially hard to notice something that's missing.


*) Gabaldon's Outlander
**) Heyer's The Grand Sophy

[meeera]

Well said hildea. If you're not noticing cringeworthy stereotypes and absences of vast swathes of humanity in your reading, ok, whatever, good for you. It doesn't mean that other readers are purposefully and only focusing on "looking for something to be offended by" while they read. I know that a number of ignorant disability stereotypes and the uncritical use of disability slurs will throw me straight out of a reading 'flow' with zero effort on my part, while people who share those particular ignorances are of course very unlikely to notice them at all.

And yes, some people do take on projects of studying fiction more broadly (not just any one specific book) and doing analyses based on gender, sexuality, race, disability, and so on. Good for them. It doesn't mean that they think you are Evil(tm) for reading and enjoying any one particular book. Their work doesn't affect you. Carry on, and enjoy your books.

[murg]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

As a little aside, in german there is even a special word for only thinking in categories: "Schubladendenken".

According to Google, we use the same word in English for the same meaning...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

To me, I read and if something bothers me, I try to let it go and go on. If I find that it bothers me too much or there are more things that bother me, I'll stop reading. But I won't examine every little thing. It has to be a pretty big thing. King Solomon's Mines is book I have read and did not like. I know it was written a very long time ago when things were different. But, I found I didn't like it. What was different back then was most of what it was I didn't like. I didn't go looking for things to like/dislike. It just was there.

And that's absolutely fair. That's entirely different to claiming that a book is "shockingly offensive" for the "crime" of having been written in a time when society was different to what it is today.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by HarryT

And that's absolutely fair. That's entirely different to claiming that a book is "shockingly offensive" for the "crime" of having been written in a time when society was different to what it is today.

Seeking clarity and common ground here: what the author (plus or minus editing) wrote was "However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive." That's the only time "offensive" appears in the article. Headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, and are typically designed to be as clickbaity as possible.

I like it that she has applied the Bechdel-Wallace test as it is meant to be applied, to highlight the existence of gender imbalance in a collection of different works, rather than as a single 'litmus test' to decide whether a single work is or isn't sexist.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by meeera

Seeking clarity and common ground here: what the author (plus or minus editing) wrote was "However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive." That's the only time "offensive" appears in the article. Headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, and are typically designed to be as clickbaity as possible.

I like it that she has applied the Bechdel-Wallace test as it is meant to be applied, to highlight the existence of gender imbalance in a collection of different works, rather than as a single 'litmus test' to decide whether a single work is or isn't sexist.

That's fair enough, but does that fact that a book has a gender imbalance mean that it's offensive? Jane Austen's books all have female protagonists, but that doesn't offend me as a male reader. Why should I be offended if an author chooses to write books from a female (or male) perspective? That's their free choice. I may choose not to read such a book, but I'm not offended by it. The romance genre today is completely dominated by books aimed at women. I don't find that offensive. Why should a woman be offended at works of SF and fantasy targeted at a male readership?

[meeera]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's fair enough, but does that fact that a book has a gender imbalance mean that it's offensive? [...] Why should a woman be offended at works of SF and fantasy targeted at a male readership?

An individual book? Obviously not, and I didn't say it was, and I very specifically said that the B-W test is to highlight gender imbalance in a body of works.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: F/SF/horror is not a field that has an overwhelmingly male contingent of fans or writers. Women have been in the field from the beginning, in all sorts of ways. However their battle to be published, recognised, acknowledged (from existence as fans to contributions as writers/volunteers/etc/etc) has been uphill. It is still uphill, though less so, today (and FAR less so in Australia since the past three or four years, thanks to the tireless work and happy non-reactionariness and willingness to change of very many other folks).

It's a situation that continues to be challenged in a multitude of ways, this article being just one of them. Feel free to not be part of it, though to actively resist it I find a little strange. If you're interested in some non-fiction reading around the subject, I recommend Letters to Tiptree (for easy/quick reading), or The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (for more academic reading).

ETA: I'm not aware of a movement by men for increased recognition in the romance field. This is possibly because there isn't one, possibly because there is one but it's so tiny I haven't noticed it (I'm relatively in touch with the field, but not all over it), and possibly because when men do write romance, it's not pushed under the carpet, rather we end up with books like The Rosie Project, feted from here to kingdom come. If there were a movement focusing on the increased recognition of the role of men in the romance industry, I wouldn't be opposed to it, and I might be quite interested. For what it's worth.

[Cinisajoy]

I learned many years back, that if you go looking for something specific you will find it.
Now if I wanted to do a study of gender in books, I know you can't just do cherry picked books but would have to look at way more than 100 in whatever genre you picked.
I am thinking Military fiction would be highly male dominated and chick-lit would be female dominated.

PS: Are there sexual innuendos in the Peter Pan movie?
Yes, if that is what you are looking for.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by meeera

Seeking clarity and common ground here: what the author (plus or minus editing) wrote was "However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive." That's the only time "offensive" appears in the article. Headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, and are typically designed to be as clickbaity as possible.

I am going to assume the headline is exactly what she meant. At least, the article itself doesn't disagree. Witness:

[...] The fact that these were all supposed to be the best of the genre, was even more shocking.

In anger, after I read the first 10 books or so, I made my version of the Bechdel test, [...]

[...]I couldn’t like a character that raped someone. I couldn’t care less if the world was destroyed. How could anyone? Is this really the best the fantasy genre has to offer?


[...]

It was the repeated emphasis of the relative powerlessness of women, their status of objects or things to be won, that almost makes me want to write off the whole genre as a lost cause.

[...] Reading one or two over a year and you might not see the problem but after about 30, you start to look at the genre in disgust.

[...]

I’ve been acutely aware of the ferocious debate in the science fiction and fantasy community about representation [...], so I should have been somewhat prepared for this relentlessly depressing string of disappointing novels. But with the dogged determination of reading through the list, it really grinds you down.

[...]

Having spent many hours reading terribly sexist fiction, swearing and coming close to throwing books across the room [...]

The clickbaitiness of the headline is a mere lead-in to the clickbaitiness of the article itself. Not exactly an uncommon phenomenon, TBH.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by meeera

Seeking clarity and common ground here: what the author (plus or minus editing) wrote was "However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive." That's the only time "offensive" appears in the article. Headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, and are typically designed to be as clickbaity as possible.

I like it that she has applied the Bechdel-Wallace test as it is meant to be applied, to highlight the existence of gender imbalance in a collection of different works, rather than as a single 'litmus test' to decide whether a single work is or isn't sexist.

The author decided to read this particular list. Then:

"What I hated, and dreaded the most as I continued to read through the list, was the continued and pervasive sexism - even in seemingly progressive books for their time. I devoured science fiction and fantasy when I was younger - the idea that I was also devouring patriarchal and sexist ideas made me deeply uncomfortable. The fact that these were all supposed to be the best of the genre, was even more shocking."

It seems that works of the type she had enjoyed when younger now offended her. It seems she is angry because she now feels that these works were indoctrinating her with "patriarchal and sexist ideas".

Enter the B-W test, as modified by the author for books:

"In anger, after I read the first 10 books or so, I made my version of the Bechdel test, adapted for books. I thought I could ask for a bit more than films because there is more time for exposition and exploring complex ideas."

Why bother? Society was very different at the time most of these books were written, which is of course reflected in their content. Though she attempts to draw a conclusion about Science Fiction and Fantasy in particular, I wonder if the results would be any different if applied to a general list of similarly aged books.

I also found many of her complaints when discussing individual books, and there were a lot of such complaints, often totally misconceived. Whether she planned this "hit piece" from the beginning or worked herself up to such a state of anger during her reading that it degenerated into the state in which it was published I do not know.

She then refers briefly to the Puppies controversy, characterising the Puppies as defenders of the status quo "when its so obviously awful", apparently confusing the past with the present.

Then, again ignoring the age of the books and the social conditions at the time that they were written, she concludes:

"After reading so many of these books, you can readily see that there is a problem with science fiction and fantasy novels when it comes to representation of women and minorities. What those people defending the lack of women or minorities are doing is advocating for a genre to remain stagnant. They are defending nostalgia. They’re trying to ingrain a conservative strain in a genre that was radical when it started. They’re arguing on the side of repetition, terrible storytelling and awful characterisation."

Unfortunately I can only conclude that the Headline, despite probably not being written by the author, is representative of this hit piece. As clickbaity as possible.

I still love some of these old works, and i class myself as fortunate that those I have re-read since childhood I still enjoy. I too can sometimes have my enjoyment of a book ruined by some element I find incongruous. I recently read a very good mystery which was somewhat spoiled for me by an element of the plot which I found totally unbelievable and thought did not fit well into the story. Or, to use an example from the Cinema, I never liked the movie of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest because after reading and loving the book I could just not see Jack Nicholson as McMurphy. These incidents are peculiar to me. Others may or may not see things the same.

I can accept that the author of this article can no longer enjoy these books, for reasons peculiar to her. Some others certainly feel the same. Others are able to continue to enjoy these books even though aspects may conflict with their adult ideals. The author has in my opinion confused her own feelings with objective fact, and then sought attention for her very flawed views in this article. She has every right to not read something she is offended by. It would be better if she had left it at that.

Fortunately, one of the really great things about self-publishing is that there really will be something for everybody. Now the gatekeepers have been overthrown diversity and different views and voices are exploding into e-ink (and POD books etc). Personally, I applaud this. The more choice the better.

[Kasper Hviid]

Originally Posted by darryl

Why bother? Society was very different at the time most of these books were written, which is of course reflected in their content. Though she attempts to draw a conclusion about Science Fiction and Fantasy in particular, I wonder if the results would be any different if applied to a general list of similarly aged books.

I think you misunderstood the foundation of the article. She didn't just criticize a random bunch of old sci-fi novels. What she talk about is a 2011 vote based list of "Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books".

I think it makes sense to criticize which books a majority of readers chooses to place at the top 100. What she aims at is not the old books themselves, but the preferences of readers, present time.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Kasper Hviid

I think you misunderstood the foundation of the article. She didn't just criticize a random bunch of old sci-fi novels. What she talk about is a 2011 vote based list of "Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books".

I think it makes sense to criticize which books a majority of readers chooses to place at the top 100. What she aims at is not the old books themselves, but the preferences of readers, present time.

A good point, although a couple of things occur to me:

Firstly, the extent to which the vote reflects readers current tastes. Often people will cite 'great' books in such surveys but they may not have read them for a goodly while. Also, a great many of these "top 100" surveys that get bandied about are often a pre-selected list that the voters effectively put into order.

Secondly, a list of "top 100 general fiction" would presumably have some equally problematic books. It would be interesting to see whether the proportion was higher, lower or about the same as SFF.