Women, Men, SFF part deux

[Grack21]

OK after reading the comments in that blog I'm lost. When did Watts say anything racist?

[Sci-2]

OK after reading the comments in that blog I'm lost. When did Watts say anything racist?

"Rabid animal" fits a theme against women and minorities, as someone who said they found Moon "toxic" noted.

Better if he had just said asshole or echoed Moon's "egocentric snowflake" line.

[Shryke]

Apparently "rabid animal" is now some sort of sexist or racist or something insult.

God knows where that came from but blogs on the internet said it so it must be so.

[Grack21]

"Rabid animal" fits a theme against women and minorities, as someone who said they found Moon "toxic" noted.

Better if he had just said asshole or echoed Moon's "egocentric snowflake" line.

If you say so. Thats not sarcasm, I just never heard of that one.

It gets to the point where I'm afraid to use nouns because it might offend someone.

Apparently "rabid animal" is now some sort of sexist or racist or something insult.

God knows where that came from but blogs on the internet said it so it must be so.

Good to know I'm not the only one.

[Sci-2]

If you say so. Thats not sarcasm, I just never heard of that one.

IT gets to the point where I'm afraid to use nouns because it might offend someone.

I never heard of it either, I figured the woman who called Moon "toxic" was a good enough confirmation.

Honestly I usually use stuff until I hear it offends people, then apologize and stop.

[thistlepong]

Lazily searching through Conrad: (1899)

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs.

I'm sure I could find examples, perhaps even specifically "rabid animal" in reference to female Thais, in the intervening years. But do I need to? Might it convince the willfully, er, innocent that dehumanizing PoC with that type of language has a long storied heritage?

[thistlepong]

double post

[Shryke]

Lazily searching through Conrad: (1899)

I'm sure I could find examples, perhaps even specifically "rabid animal" in reference to female Thais, in the intervening years. But do I need to? Might it convince the willfully, er, innocent that dehumanizing PoC with that type of language has a long storied heritage?

You probably do need something more then an incredibly vague reference from over 100 years ago that is applied to a minority anyone even knows is involved in the whole incident, yes.

[thistlepong]

You probably do need something more then an incredibly vague reference from over 100 years ago that is applied to a minority anyone even knows is involved in the whole incident, yes.

Oh, I thought the important part was to establish a precedent vis-a-vis colonial slurs.

[Shryke]

Oh, I thought the important part was to establish a precedent vis-a-vis colonial slurs.

Why would you think that?

[thistlepong]

Apparently "rabid animal" is now some sort of sexist or racist or something insult.

God knows where that came from but blogs on the internet said it so it must be so.

Oh, you know, 'cause of that.

[Arthmail]

Sorry, i just don't equate rabid animal with anything particularily sexist or racist. Not to get into the tone argument, but i find Moon's abusive language and stage rage to be just plain boring. Having been raised Catholic, i equate it to the hateful and vile sermons of a great many so called followers of faith. It allows confirmation bias, in that people who think one way are not going to climb the fence to take a look at the other side simply because they are slapped in the face by vitriol. I learned more from reading Tigerbeatdown and linking to other authors (some of the links on this thread have been good), than i ever have from ROH. For myself, personally, screaming and yelling and beating your chest is juvenile and stupid. I'd call a raving member of a religious order a rabid animal as much as i would anyone else. If you want to, you know, change minds, i find it helps to act like an adult.

Partly with that thought in mind i'll comment on Bakker. Someone mentioned earlier Bakker presents male readers with a sense of learning, that he can lead them into a better understanding of women's issues. I find such notions problematic because they are simply not true. For whatever reason, i think a majority of the reading public are not good with subtext. Reading between the lines has become a lost art. Take for instance Twilight. I have a good many female friends that like that series, women that are strong and independent, and are doctors and lawyers and engineers. But they like that shit. Until i asked them if they would let their daughters date a pedo creepster like Edward Cullen. Then their views changed on the matter.

Bakker has, and will continue to have, the same problem. He is actually almost right when he says he's too subtle. People are bad at subtext. We on this forum might not be, but then again i was once involved in an eight page argument about the physical impossibility of a dude fighting after his spine had been pulled out through his stomach. (Goodkind). We are suckers for this sort of shit. Many other people are not. So a great deal of what Bakker is trying to do becomes lost in people trying to understand how his new kick ass magical system works.

Bakker's books are problematic in a number of different ways. And one of those is tone. This issue of women, or people of colour or gays and lesbians, in literature was something of a non-entity for me for a good while. Even after i had read Bakker, the most that really struck me was that his treatment of women in his books was ludicrious, and i wondered how women could enjoy having to put themselves exclusively in the shoes of a bunch of sexually abused women. (I mean for myself, identifying with a character often involves imagining, at least on some level, myself as that character. I'd rather be a squirt of shit than a women in Bakker's world). The tone of his book is bleak, unrelentingly so. There really is no human dynamic in his books. (Of course, he does not suffer from this alone. I have often lamented that there are so few true friendships in books, at least ones that i believe. I mean, Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly are fine, but give me Andy Dufresne and Red from Shawshank anyday.) His natural cynicism towards humanity corrodes fucking everything, making the position of women in his world that much worse. In fact, they are worse off than in our own world. (As a side thought, certain ancient societies had women of strenght, i wonder why authors adhere so much to how our history progressed. In a Greek themed world, if the women had become powerful through oration, learning and debate, the outcome of history could be altered in an interesting manner.)

But i've learned more from reading these threads, and doing some hunting myself, than i ever would from Bakker's book. And i think a great many others are in the same boat. I can read subtext, but until i became more aware of the problem of how women are presented in books, i was not aware how deep the problem was. Didn't know what i didn't know and all of that.

Another aspect of this that i have come to view differently, at least to some degree, is men as feminists. I'm really not sure its entirely possible. I think, and i could be entirely wrong headed on this, but i think its sort of stupid. Just as i won't give lectures to mathmaticians on Game Theory, i find it hard to concieve of men viewing themselves as feminists. I think there are simply some experiences that many men can never know (unless of course you choose option number 3, and have a human-synthetic hybrid, in which case Mass Effect 3's ending just became awesome because it solved the problem of gender). I will not and will never say the world privilege, because i think its an intellectual cop-out, but the fact of the matter is that no matter how hard i try the most i can become on a subject is aware. Educated. But i will never know, intrinsically, what it means. For some reason i am reminded of Joss Whedon, who claims he is a feminist, but who i have honestly long thought of as sexist. I mean, TVtropes has Waif Fu pretty much made around his idea of strong women. They are all slight, and pretty, and kick ass...but none of them seem entirely plausible. Ripley from Aliens was a far better representation, in my mind, than anything that Whedon has created, of a women of strength kicking ass. (This is not to say that male, or female, authors should not try and approach difficult subject matter in the hopes of including it in their books. Far from it. But sometimes an author of perhaps questionable ability needs to consider if they are they one to do so, and if by doing so are they just walking down the same tired path thats seen a thousand feet before).

And circling back to tone, Bakker has done it poorly, as has Moon over at ROH. Performance rage is tiresome, its anti-intellectual, and it should be an anethma to thinking people who are busy trying to understand as much of the world around them as they can. I've learned more from Tiger Beatdown, and members of this thread, than most of anything that comes from Bakker or Moon. For while they might have good points, hidden amidst his endless philosophy or her ridiculous need to use derogatory terms, i'm not going to parse through the bullshit to find the core of it, because someone is saying it far fucking better somewhere else.

I only have to look for it.

[Shryke]

Oh, you know, 'cause of that.

Uh huh.

Yeah, you still haven't explained how "rapid beast" is any sort of sexist or racist or what have you slur.

[Shryke]

Sorry, i just don't equate rabid animal with anything particularily sexist or racist. Not to get into the tone argument, but i find Moon's abusive language and stage rage to be just plain boring. Having been raised Catholic, i equate it to the hateful and vile sermons of a great many so called followers of faith. It allows confirmation bias, in that people who think one way are not going to climb the fence to take a look at the other side simply because they are slapped in the face by vitriol. I learned more from reading Tigerbeatdown and linking to other authors (some of the links on this thread have been good), than i ever have from ROH. For myself, personally, screaming and yelling and beating your chest is juvenile and stupid. I'd call a raving member of a religious order a rabid animal as much as i would anyone else. If you want to, you know, change minds, i find it helps to act like an adult.

That's the schtick. People like that live off "righteous outrage" the same way some people live off offending internet fan groups to generate page views.

[Arthmail]

That's the schtick. People like that live off "righteous outrage" the same way some people live off offending internet fan groups to generate page views.

It's honestly the Fox effect. Find problem, insert rage. Perhaps some people need to be bludgeoned to death with a book, but for me, it simply does not work.

Shit, i can see sciborg 2 and Kalbear reading this topic. I feel like i have a double barrel shottie pointed at my head now.

[Happy Ent]

Ent, I differ because I do not see it solely as a function of biology. To me it is fairly clear that we are learning machines, and much of our behavior is determined entirely as a facet of the biology combined with the learned behaavior. Other factors such as environment come into play too. I think Bakker is far more into biological explanations. As are you, come to think of it.

No objection.

Just to make sure: the fundamental dogma of biology (according to me) is that genes are expressed in environments. Nobody could ever claim that something is “entirely biological” or “nurture plays no role”, because it’s like clapping with one hand.

What we can societally engineer is which environment our biology expresses itself in. Kellhus is an example of such an agent of societal change. The best thing we can do, perversely, as a society, is to engineer a situation where variance explained by genetic factors is 100%: in a perfectly egalitarian society, biology explains everything.

[Datepalm]

i find it hard to concieve of men viewing themselves as feminists. I think there are simply some experiences that many men can never know

I think this is...nearsighted. I'm a woman, i'm a feminist. And you know what - i've never been raped. I've never been trafficked, or denied an abortion, or beaten by a partner. I've never been refused a job, or a drivers license, been paid less than a man, been denied a divorce, been told what aspirations to have...etc, etc. I'm more or less middle class, of roughly the local ethnic majority, in a place that largely enshrines womens equality in law. Oh, some stuff happens to me - I've gotten harrased, i've gotten whistled at in the streets, i've had that queasy only-woman-in-the-room feeling, i've been patronized and condescended to on basis of gender, but really, I sometimes think - big fucking deal. Its not awesome, but really, my life has only quite marginally been shaped by my gender, (and then mostly in the ways that I choose, as personally fulfilling rather than imposed.) So can I not be a feminist? There are lots of things I will never know and that I never want to know. Gender affects me because it affects everyone. Yes, men too.

[Lummel]

...I'm sure I could find examples, perhaps even specifically "rabid animal" in reference to female Thais, in the intervening years. But do I need to? Might it convince the willfully, er, innocent that dehumanizing PoC with that type of language has a long storied heritage?

But dehumanising and demeaning people by caling them mad dogs, attack dogs or some other type of angry animal is a pretty much universal form of abuse - its not in any way unique to how non-whites and women are talked down to.

... And circling back to tone, Bakker has done it poorly, as has Moon over at ROH. Performance rage is tiresome, its anti-intellectual, and it should be an anethma to thinking people who are busy trying to understand as much of the world around them as they can.

I agree, I mean that tone and style of addess does nothing for me, at least not in the context of this debate and its not going to win over the opposition but i think thats missing the point. That style of address is all about rallying the troops, creating dividing lines and aiming to create a public debate (a mass debate if you will). It's not an approach designed to win people over or to persuade it is deliberately prevocative with the aim of spreading the debate. They are effectively saying 'this aggression will not stand'. Or if you prefer it is suffragettes rather than suffragists.

[Arthmail]

I think this is...nearsighted. I'm a woman, i'm a feminist. And you know what - i've never been raped. I've never been trafficked, or denied an abortion, or beaten by a partner. I've never been refused a job, or a drivers license, been paid less than a man, been denied a divorce, been told what aspirations to have...etc, etc. I'm more or less middle class, of roughly the local ethnic majority, in a place that largely enshrines womens equality in law. Oh, some stuff happens to me - I've gotten harrased, i've gotten whistled at in the streets, i've had that queasy only-woman-in-the-room feeling, i've been patronized and condescended to on basis of gender, but really, I sometimes think - big fucking deal. Its not awesome, but really, my life has only quite marginally been shaped by my gender, (and then mostly in the ways that I choose, as personally fulfilling rather than imposed.) So can I not be a feminist? There are lots of things I will never know and that I never want to know. Gender affects me because it affects everyone. Yes, men too.

But i suppose my point is that it can happen to you. You've been uncomfortable as the only woman in the room. I suppose in a way i've felt uncomfortable at the male posturing that is the lead up to imminent violence, a sort of alpha-male idiot ritual, but i wonder if it is the same thing.

Yet your life has, however marginally, been shaped by your gender. Mine never has. At no point, or at least none that i can think of. Nor is it likely to. And gender effects everyone, sure. But as much as i am aware of it, i've never experienced it. I can support the notion of feminism, but i think intellectually i cannot accept male feminists because they can never experience the world as women have. Not that women are all delicate flowers or anything, but i simply cannot gain firsthand experience. I just can't help but think that as much as men try to be feminists, they will somehow get it wrong.

[The Marquis de Leech]

I think it comes down to one's definition of feminism. Personally I regard it as the notion that men and women are equal, an attitude that strikes me as broadly uncontroversial.

(Yes, I know, there are an assortment of different flavours of feminism. Frankly, I think they're overcomplicating something that should be fairly simple).