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K T Bradford stopped reading books by cisgender, heterosexual white men. She wrote an article suggesting that other people should consider a year’s break from cisgender, heterosexual white men.
Heterosexual, cisgender white men were very offended.
(I am going to drop “heterosexual, cisgender” from now on, because I’m not satisfied that LGBT writers are actually underrepresented given our percentage in the population.)
Rod Dreher’s American Conservative article substantially seems to miss the point. Most writers are not successful, this is true. However, the writers that are successful are disproportionately white and male. Bradford cites the dismal statistics: of 124 authors that hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2013, how many were people of color?
Three.
No one seems to have done similar statistics for the NYT adult bestseller list and gender, but they did for YA (famously female-dominated) and it is a quarter female.
Now, it is true– as both essayists point out– that white men write very good books. However, presumably women and people of color also write very good books. Either one must claim that white men write much better books than women or people of color, or in addition to the selection pressure for good books there’s the selection pressure for a white male author. In that case, by the old “twice as good to go half as far” principle, the average female author or author of color is better than a white man of equivalent popularity.
It’s also true that white men can reflect a wide range of human experiences. However, imagine if 99% of the writers on the New York Times bestseller list had, at some point, lived in Florida. Floridians have access to all the experiences that non-Floridians have; Floridian authors are as diverse as non-Floridian authors, ranging from Carl Hiaasen to John Grogan to Stephen King. (White man, white man, white man. That was actually accidental.) And certainly there’s not any inherent Floridian-ness about Floridians that seeps through their writing. However, you might feel that there are perhaps, in aggregate, some human experiences that are being underrecognized in this hypothetical, like “seasons” and “not having ever been on a fishing boat.”
Daubney remarks that a boycott of gay or Jewish or black authors would start riots. That is true. But it seems to me that– judging from the fact that not a single black author made the 2013 bestseller list– we are already doing a national boycott of black authors. It seems a bit in poor taste to further encourage it. It matters less if the marginalized group is already overrepresented: a similar challenge to, say, not watch any musicals written by a gay or Jewish person seems fun and inoffensive.
Interestingly, both of the essayists critiquing Bradford included passages about their own taste in literature. Daubney writes:
If Ms Tempest et al want to buy books by transgender authors, let them crack on, as long as they’re aware that many of the rest of us don’t share their tastes.
Gee. Thanks.
I am somewhat puzzled about what Mr. Daubney’s objection to transgender writers is (uncharitably: “sometimes they portray trans characters as people and that makes me sad and uncomfortable, where are my man in a dress jokes? How can I live without my man in a dress jokes?”). But given that he has publicly stated his distaste for trans writers, he surely can’t object to Bradford publicly stating her distaste for white male authors. And as for the challenge… she didn’t say anyone was a horrible white supremacist misogynist for not taking the challenge. She didn’t say anything negative about people’s reading choices at all. She simply suggested that reading fewer white men is an option that might enrich your life and that you should try it out for a year– as Mr. Daubney appears to be implying not reading transgender authors is. Perhaps Mr. Daubney is offended on behalf of readers that they cannot figure out how to boycott white men on their own? That seems a bit silly.
In Dreher’s article, he positively quotes a reader who, among other points, comments negatively about books by “a polyamorous 2-spirit non-racially-identifying author.” As if not reading books by white men limits you to reading books by Tumblr denizens! You can pick up Chinese classics like Journey to the West or Story of the Stone, Japanese classics like Tale of Genji, or Indian classics like the Ramayana. You can read science fiction by authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, or Ted Chiang. You can read literally any mangaka. If you add the “LGBT” category, you get to appreciate older authors such as Plato or Catullus and newer writers like Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, or Walt Whitman.
There are female authors and authors of color for every literary taste!
But, really, every test requires a control group. So really we should do two challenges: three months of reading only white male authors; three months of reading only authors that are not white men. If the latter is easier (which it should be, given that white men are a minority of the English-speaking population), then you clearly have no problems and can wear your My Reading Choices Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist badge with pride. On the other hand, if the former is easier, then maybe you are part of the problem with underrepresentation of women and people of color.
Jiro said:
In order to be consistent on this, Ozy would also have to believe that affirmative action lets in less qualified black people to colleges.
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Robert Liguori said:
They tested this, I think, with the rise of blind auditions in orchestra music. According to Wikipedia’s cited studies, 30% of a 25% increase (from 10% female musicians to 35% over about 20 years) was due to directly-attributable bias.
I’m not quite sure what the best way to translate that into a pithy phrase is, but I’m almost certain it’s not a factor of four.
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Rauwyn said:
Less qualified than who? If there’s a fixed amount of bias towards all black students, and beyond that all selection is perfectly merit-based, then the black students now being let in due to affirmative action would be less qualified than the (exceptionally qualified in order to overcome bias) much smaller number of black students who were being admitted before affirmative action. They may still be more qualified on average than the average student! So I’m not sure why you think affirmative action is a problem here. (Also I am not endorsing this model of admissions, I expect even if there is a single value for academic merit admissions are far from purely merit-based + constant racial bias, but I hope it helps explain my argument.)
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multiheaded said:
Time to plug my weird edgy belief about affirmative action: it actually selects for highly useful candidates, because minorities have experience in Overcoming Adversity and all that jazz, and bigotry and prejudice don’t let society at large see and reap this benefit.
However, it might on the whole be a bad deal because it benefits society at large, employers and minority elites while being liable to cause an “evaporative cooling” effect in minority communities. Give those (excellent) people tax refunds or something for putting their skills and education to good use where they came from! Hell, I bet Obama could have done a lot more good for African-Americans as mayor of Chicago… Representation at the cost of actual UPWARD REDISTRIBUTION sounds like a raw deal to me personally. No wonder Nixon backed it.
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zz said:
Or maybe minorities who need affirmative action to get into college/get a job haven’t overcome adversity. For example, poor Asians tend, not affluent whites, make up a disproportionate part of the best high school in NYC, where admissions is determined exclusively by test-of-merit. In particular: admissions to selective high schools based on merit, rather than holistic measures, tend to produce a poorer student population. From this, we can infer that non-privileged minorities have a reasonable chance to succeed in absence of affirmative action. (Also notice how affirmative action has the ability to screw minorities who had otherwise overcome adversity: both in the poor implementation (letting admissions officers compensate for lack of student opportunities winds up screwing those very students) and the fact that the overcoming-adversity-quality seems to be much more common among Asian-Americans).
In reality, the “affirmative action to increase the number of people who have Overcome Adversity” and “anyone who has actually Overcome Adversity doesn’t need affirmative action” each are slightly right. I tend to favor the latter model, however: having spent an inordinate amount of time doing volunteer work among poor blacks, I haven’t seen appreciable amounts of “overcoming adversity”. On the other hand, this volunteer work has made me disturbingly amenable to the conservative idea of “if you lower the bar for [racial group], they’ll just work less hard to overcome it”, to the point where I’m mildly surprised whenever I encounter evidence to the contrary. I still think “different minorities have different cultures which greatly affects success” explains more of the success gap of said minorities than this.
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somnicule said:
Neil deGrasse Tyson had an interview where he talked about feeling guilty for entering astrophysics when other people he knew were going into law and the like to better represent black people. But then he got called up as an expert on the news regarding a solar flare or something, and realized it was the first time he’d known a black person to be called in as an expert, on a matter that wasn’t about race on some level, where he was respected for his expertise in the field rather than as a representative of the black community, and that that sort of representation was important too.
So I don’t know if it’s all that one-sided.
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multiheaded said:
zz: after reading the utterly disturbing, one-sided ways in which teachers (in non-minority areas) and mental health professionals frequently start reacting after long and hard selfless work for an “ungrateful” constitutiency…
….I have much respect for your altruism but very little sympathy for your self-justification. I’ve never been black, but I am still crazy, and I know how mental health professionals and fellow crazy people can treat us. And they often justify it with nice and sensible words, too.
In particular, the “lack of desire to work hard” thing makes me feel just a tiny little bit violent towards you.
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osberend said:
@multiheaded: Do you have peers who sneeringly describe working hard as “acting sane,” as though that was a self-evidently bad thing?
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multiheaded said:
osberend:
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8138739/acting-white-myth-debunked
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Jiro said:
It makes sense that white authors write “better” books, in the sense of writing books that sell more because more people prefer them. After all, most of the audience is white. You’d expect them to be better able to appeal to a majority audience, and therefore sell more books, than non-whites on the average. This doesn’t apply to women, but there are other explanations for that–for instance, nerds read more books, and tend to be male. This *does* apply to minorities, unless there is an explicit countervailing factor (for instance, Jews have a strong tradition of education, so I’d expect them to write more books.)
Ozy tries to sidestep this problem by referring to the “English-speaking population” and suggesting we can read books by Chinese authors who are translated into English. The problem with this is that the statistics showing that most people read white authors refers to the New York Times bestseller list. The New York Times bestseller list doesn’t measure sales to the majority nonwhite English speaking population of the world–it measures sales to American audiences, and that audience *is* majority white. (And cultural differences would mean that overseas Chinese authors appeal even less to American whites than Chinese-American authors.)
I also suspect that minorities in America read fewer books than whites, even accounting for percentage of the audience–the same reason we have “acting white” would lead there to be disproportionately few black readers.
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Harlequin said:
According to most measurements I’ve seen, women read more than men, and there’s no statistically significant difference between reading habits of white and black people (although they’re both generally a bit more frequent than the reading habits of Hispanic people). Here’s one example: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america-in-2013/
Now, that doesn’t necessarily imply that the book-BUYING public is equally distributed, since people with less disposable income are probably more likely to use the library.
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ozymandias said:
The typical woman reads nine books a year, compared to five for men. Would you like to try again?
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Jiro said:
I could take some more guesses, but now that I think of it I’m not sure it needs explaining. Whether the New York Times bestseller list has more of some group on it doesn’t depend just on how good members of that group are at writing, it also depends on how many of that group write. Do we actually know that the bestseller list has few women on it compared to the proportion of woman writers? (And specifically compared to the proportion of woman writers who write books in the fields where books become bestsellers?)
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Evan Þ said:
Hmm. There were some complaints a few years ago that the NYT bestseller list was under-counting conservative Christian books, because their sales statistics didn’t take into account explicitly Christian bookstores. If their counts are incomplete in that way, perhaps they’re incomplete in other ways as well that would under-count women?
But that’s just a guess. It’s at least as likely that the idea of a normal literary voice is biased toward male authors. Though is it really a matter of voice or of associations with the name? 150 years ago, Mary Ann Evans was publishing under a male pseudonym, and Jane Austin had published anonymously.
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shemtealeaf said:
Ozy,
I think the inclusion of women in this is detracting from the point. Women outnumbered men (by a very narrow margin) on the list of #1 NY Times bestsellers for the last two years.
There is certainly a very real under-representation of minority authors (at least in terms of their percentage of the population), but I’m not convinced that female authors suffer from the same problem.
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Patrick said:
You can’t use the NYT for anything political. There are some easy tricks used to inflate numbers- specifically, if your wholesaler and retailer will cooperate, you can invent a lot of technical sales that never put any product in a consumers hands.
I first became aware of this when learning about how conservative political screeds hit best seller lists even though no one buys them, but I wouldn’t feel surprised if others were up to it too.
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Jiro said:
I’m reminded of the quote about nobody voting for Nixon, at least nobody the speaker knows.
I’d expect that if you’re the type of person who posts things like this, the people you know don’t buy them (or don’t tell you they buy them), but the people you know are not representative of the general population.
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Patrick said:
Dude, I don’t know what to tell you except that entities affiliated with conservative authors keep getting caught making bulk purchases of the authors book, putatively for resales that never happen. Meanwhile, the author gains the fundraising credibility that leads to lucrative speaking arrangements.
“No one” was hyperbolic. I’m sure the number of real sales of the latest conservative political screed are non zero. But within the bounds of hyperbole and in the context of seemingly deliberate manipulation of best seller stats to inflate numbers, I stand by my statement.
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Ginkgo said:
“Ozy tries to sidestep this problem by referring to the “English-speaking population” and suggesting we can read books by Chinese authors who are translated into English.”
The best example of this – Dream of the Red Chamber, the most popular novel in the world, for my money the premier novel in the world – shows why merely counting the number of titles read – five versus nine – can lead to false conclusions. There are people who re-read this a chapter at a time, dropping in for a visit in particular chapters they especially like, for a lifetime.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
The New York Times bestseller list doesn’t measure sales to the majority nonwhite English speaking population of the world–it measures sales to American audiences, and that audience *is* majority white.
Exactly. The point of the “New York Times Best Seller List” being that it is the NEW YORK Times bestseller list. If a majority of the authors came from Florida, as Ozy points out, we’d say “Florida is not the entire English-speaking sphere”. A list of books that appeal to a certain strata of the population who read the New York Times is not hugely more representative, either.
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Rauwyn said:
I may be misunderstanding you, but I don’t think the New York Times bestseller list focuses specifically on New York, or even books they think readers of the NYT would like. Wikipedia says they survey thousands of bookstores, and I think it’s more or less nationwide? Which is still very far from the entire English-speaking population, but I think it does cover more than just New York.
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veronica d said:
To me, a challenge like “no white (cis-straight-etc) dudes for a year” sounds like a great way to broaden your perspective and encounter some stuff you otherwise would not. What is the downside?
The arguments are facile and kinda confirm that these critics are jackasses who *actively dislike* minority voices. I mean, the contempt in which they hold we queers is palpable.
*groan*
Anyway, like, there is literally zero-pressure on anyone to do this, so acting like, “OMG the liberals are trying to get me to read their socialist propaganda…!!”
OMG shut up! This is an exercise to broaden and deepen your perspective. Maybe you can look at it like eating your cultural broccoli. But actually, you’ll probably stumble on one or two writers THAT YOU OTHERWISE WOULD NOT HAVE that really change the way you see stuff.
Like reading Octavia Butler showed me how pernicious my own racism was.
Wanna know how? Wanna know what a fucked up racist I am?
As I read _Parable of the Sower_ (one of my favorite books ever), I kept picturing Lauren as a *white girl*.
No really. My inner-mind and my inner-woman — cuz whenever I would read about a woman character, I would always self-project big time [1] — could not self-project into a black woman!
What the fuck, veronica!!!!!!
Anyway, great book. You should read it. Don’t be like me.
(Unless you are like me. If so, try to become better.)
Anyway, yeah. Wanna some serious insight about trans women? Read _Nevada_. No seriously. Best trans femme book evar!
Then go read _Stone Butch Blues_, cuz the trans dudes deserve love too.
(Is that still the “go to“ book for trans masc stuff? I’m maybe out of the loop.)
Anyway, it’s a cool challenge and for most of us worth a year. After all, you (I very much hope!) have many other years. And I bet in those years you’ll most read white dudes.
[1] In trans discourse we call this a “clue.”
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Ghatanathoah said:
I’m not sure “inability to picture a protagonist as not looking like you” is “racist,” either in the strong sense of “hostile to other races,” or the weaker sense of “believes various stereotypes about other races.”
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multiheaded said:
“No really. My inner-mind and my inner-woman — cuz whenever I would read about a woman character, I would always self-project big time [1] — could not self-project into a black woman!”
Serious question here, not political mockery. (Come on, I know how it might sound, but you of all people please trust me.)…
…Isn’t that a bad presumptious thing to do, by today’s SJ standards? Being so full of hubris that you pretend to have identified with someone else’s ~lived experience~ from the comfort of your home? Like… blackface in your own mind?
(I do not endorse this line of thought whatsoever. Just trying to understand the political and moral norms of a certain recently waxing culture.)
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veronica d said:
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard today.
(And I get that you’re not really saying that.)
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Bugmaster said:
> To me, a challenge like “no white (cis-straight-etc) dudes for a year” sounds like a great way to broaden your perspective and encounter some stuff you otherwise would not.
From my heteronormative cis-oppressive perspective, the difference between saying “make sure to read some of these minority authors, because they’re awesome”, and “it doesn’t matter which authors you read as long as they’re not cis-white” is exactly the difference between broadening one’s horizons, and closing one’s mind.
To paraphrase the famous quote: “Beware of her who would deny you access to information, for in her heart, she dreams herself your master”.
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Nita said:
Meaning, you oppress cis people? Or… you oppress people on the same side as you? Or… ? Sheesh, these neo-identities keep getting more confusing.
How about “try reading some non-cis-white authors for a change, you might like some of their writing”? People often have very different opinions about books (see, e.g., the HPMOR vs The Great Gatsby discussion on SSC).
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veronica d said:
Oh heavens, it’s only a year. You guys are silly.
And really, if a year seems too long, then break it up. Whatever.
Good grief.
On your first point, I think the hope is this: once you set aside white-dudes, you’ll still want to read *good stuff* — right? you do like to read good stuff? — so you’ll BY NECESSITY invest some effort in exploring the contours of non-white-dude fiction, which you might not have done if you’re still trawling white dude space.
And sure, you’ll likely read some duds. Inevitable. But hopefully you’ll find a path to something amazing.
Like, do you really imagine we mean to say, “Hey, go into the book store and ask the clerk for the lowest quality pablum she can find, but like make sure it was written by a black transgender lesbian. Just cuz!”
Yeesh.
Have you never in your life done something like, “I will deny myself X so I can enrich my experience with Y”?
Like maybe “Cut out television so I’ll do other cool stuff”?
Or “Stop buying snack foods so they are not in the house and then I will not eat them”?
These seem like common enough life hacks. This is the same sort of thing.
On the other hand, if you don’t *want* to read more minority fiction, then you don’t. Which wouldn’t surprise me actually. Whatevs.
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Bugmaster said:
@Nita:
> “try reading some non-cis-white authors for a change, you might like some of their writing”
As I said, I would be all for this proposition, as long as it came with a list of authors, and an explanation of why you think their writing is good. But then, as I said to veronica d below, the proposition is reduced to, “here are some great writers you might enjoy reading”; their sociodemographic status pretty much cancels out.
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ozymandias said:
Bugmaster: You will note an entire paragraph in the original post devoted to Lady Authors and Authors Of Color You May Enjoy. (Seriously though. Ted Chiang. Possibly the greatest science-fiction short story writer of our generation IMO.)
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Bugmaster said:
> “Hey, go into the book store and ask the clerk for the lowest quality pablum she can find, but like make sure it was written by a black transgender lesbian. Just cuz!”
No, I imagine that you’re asking me to say, “hey clerk, find me as many books by black transgender lesbians, I don’t care if they can write well or not, as long as they’re black, transgender, and lesbian”. Is that not what you’re saying ?
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Nita said:
I’m afraid that’s not how it works. For instance, HPMOR fans could explain what they like about it in meticulous detail, but that still wouldn’t help me enjoy it. I like Eliezer, I like his essays, but HPMOR… I’ll just stop now, or else I’ll start ranting.
Evidently, other people’s taste cannot be a completely reliable guide, and every person has to do some sampling on their own. I’d start with googling “best [adjective] writers”, though — a bit of universal pre-filtering can’t hurt.
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Held In Escrow said:
@Nita
If anything, I think the HPMOR vs Great Gatsby bit over on SSC shows that we all have blind spots. After reading that I realized how books like Twilight sneak into people’s minds as great reads; HPMOR is really nothing more than 50 Shades of STEM from a writing perspective, but it manages to hit upon just the right combination to sneak past most people’s defenses against poor writing. I figure the same stuff happened with Atlas Shrugged when it came out.
@veronica d
I don’t think that it’s anyone doesn’t wish to read more minority fiction. Rather, they want to read more good fiction. If the writer is a minority, that’s cool too. Doesn’t affect their read/don’t read algorithm. If you have a story that you think is awesome and presents a different enough idea palette that you think it should be bumped up on my reading list, go ahead and sell it to me! But using their background should be a way to talk about the book; “this person gets the voice of the trans* protagonist perfect, which is probably thanks to being trans* themselves” rather than “this book is good because the author is trans*”
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Bugmaster said:
> I’m afraid that’s not how it works. For instance, HPMOR fans could explain what they like about it in meticulous detail, but that still wouldn’t help me enjoy it.
Well, yeah, but it would help you figure out whether you’d enjoy it or not.
For example, one of my favorite books over the past few years is Constellation Games. I could tell you up front that it is a science fiction book that references quite a few video games, so if you are not a gamer (nor a science fiction fan), then you might not enjoy it. On the other hand, the plot is engaging, the protagonist has a lot of depth, the ending is very moving; and, in general, this is one of those rare books that instills in me a faint glimmer of hope that we humans might turn out all right in the end (*), and that true affection knows no boundaries. And I also love the way the author plays with concepts and context; every time I read the book, I find another little gem, like the bit about the Offshore Loop Platform #6 (blink, and you’ll miss it), or the ad copy poem.
I am not a writer, obviously, but I still think the mini-review above strikes a decent balance between “meticulous detail” and “an uninformative star rating”. I could be wrong, though.
(oh, I should mention, there’s a good chance that the author of Constellation Games is a straight white man, so read it at your own risk).
(*) Sorry, HPMoR, you don’t quite do it for me.
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InferentialDistance said:
Yes it is. He’s not asking you to explain why he should enjoy it, but why he might. Other people’s tastes aren’t completely reliable, but they’re a damn sight better than no information at all.
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stillnotking said:
I think the appeal of HPMOR is that there’s this wonderful, complex setting with lots of great characters, all of whom (in canon) treat magic with the same total lack of curiosity as most Muggles treat computer operating systems. It’s natural for nerds who read Harry Potter to wonder just what the fuck is wrong with these people! HPMOR scratches that itch.
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Held In Escrow said:
@stillnotking
But… HPMOR isn’t? It’s a bastardized version of the world made just to point out how much smarter the author is. This is a category of fanfiction; they’re called “bashfics.” HPMOR has little to nothing to do with the actual Harry Potter world or characters. It’s not a deconstruction because it utterly fails to meaningfully interact with the themes or values of Harry Potter books or their ilk. It isn’t an ode to science, because it’s blatantly anti-scientific thought (the main character has no real curiosity either so I don’t know why you bring that up) and rather jumps into the realm of the natural philosopher.
One of the main elements of Harry Potter is the wonder of magic; that it’s mystical and mysterious. HPMOR is like writing a fiction about how the badass hero Captain Ahab and his motley crew of vigilantes are going to finally take down the wicked white whale so that the seas are safe again.
Anyways, that’s all I’ll say on the topic; it was my introduction to fanfiction so I can’t hate it too much for that, but it isn’t something I’d call good.
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stillnotking said:
Wow. Did we read the same story? Eliezer announces his indebtedness to J. K. Rowling constantly; he’s not “bashing” her at all. EY’s Harry conducts a ton of experiments to try to figure out how magic works and how it might be hacked. Everything is mysterious until someone figures it out!
I have no idea where the Moby Dick stuff comes from. As for EY’s self-importance, yeah, we’ll take that as read, although, to his credit, he lampshades it a lot.
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Bugmaster said:
Yeah, I think that HPMoR is definitely very didactic. It’s less of a fiction book, and more of a vehicle for the author to champion his cause. But as far as didactic vehicles go, I think that HPMoR is right at the top of the pile, quality-wise. It is still very enjoyable to read — as contrasted with something like, say, The Word for World is Forest, which manages to completely drown out any of its merits with its sustained barrage of anvils.
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Bugmaster said:
@Ozy:
> You will note an entire paragraph in the original post devoted to Lady Authors and Authors Of Color You May Enjoy.
Same comment as before: is there a reason why you think I would enjoy reading Ted Chiang et al, other than that they’re female/gay/etc. ? You mentioned that Ted Chiang is “possibly the greatest science-fiction short story writer of our generation”, and that sounds intriguing, but you didn’t say that in your original post…
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ozymandias said:
Well, the rhetorical point is “look at the diversity of potential authors you can read” (in addition to the practical point of “here are some authors Ozy likes to get you started”), so describing what they’re like would diminish the rhetorical effect IMO.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects is a good starter story for Chiang.
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Matthew said:
Seconding that Ted Chiang is excellent. I can’t recall what else I’ve read of his, but Exhalation is worth your time.
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veronica d said:
But no one said anything remotely like that. Instead, we are suggesting this: if you force yourself to avoid white dudes, who will BY NECESSITY have to explore the contours of non-white-dude space — which *how* exactly you do this will depend on you, your tastes, your friends and contexts and resources, your Google-fu, on and on. For example, I actually kinda like some forms of queer fic, but actually I spend some time in a queer woman’s book club and like 90% of it bored my socks off. Just, not my taste. So if I followed this advice I’d start asking around about violent fantasy and shit with swords and stuff.
Like, I already have Jessica Amanda Salmonson to start with. I could re-read her Tomoa Gozen stuff.
Which is probably terrible cultural appropriate or something, but folks hadn’t really figure that stuff out back when she wrote them. So I’ll give them a pass.
Anyway, I’m sure I could finds blogs and stuff and post around on Twitter and ask my friends and — you know — do the normal stuff you do when you research.
I bet if you Google “fantasy by women” or “science fiction by black authors” and stuff you’d get lots of reviews. Easy peasy.
#####
Anyway, I notice there has been a metric fuckton of hyperbole and strawmen in this thread. I think I know why: the actual suggestion is really pretty unobjectionable. So you have to make up shit in order to object.
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Bugmaster said:
> But no one said anything remotely like that. Instead, we are suggesting this: if you force yourself to avoid white dudes, who will BY NECESSITY have to explore the contours of non-white-dude space…
I am still not convinced that there’s any value to “exploring the contours of non-white-dude space”, besides a). finding more interesting/entertaining/thought-provoking/etc. stuff to read, or b). maintaining some form of ideological purity.
Unfortunately, point (a) is entirely demographics-agnostic: great reading material is great regardless of the gender, skin color, and sexual preferences of the person who wrote it. In addition, (a) is entirely uncontroversial: I like reading, so obviously I’d like to read more great stuff.
As for point (b), I pretty much find it offensive, so no thanks. I am not obligated to fulfill anyone else’s dreams of mastery over myself.
> Anyway, I notice there has been a metric fuckton of hyperbole and strawmen in this thread. I think I know why: the actual suggestion is really pretty unobjectionable. So you have to make up shit in order to object.
If you really feel that way, then there’s no point for anyone to discuss the topic with you any further. After all, you have already determined that you are right, and they are wrong and also evil, so what is there to talk about ?
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ozymandias said:
Bugmaster: If you assume that people of color are not less good than white people at writing fiction, then there is some other factor X, unrelated to ability to write good books, that is selecting for white people, because of the massive overrepresentation of white people on the bestseller list. Therefore, at any given level of popularity, the people of color are probably better than the white people (because they managed to overcome factor x). Therefore, as a rational good-book-seeker, deliberately try to read more people of color.
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veronica d said:
But you keep saying we said stuff we did not say. Why are you doing that?
For example, your ‘b’, “ideological purity” — who said anything about purity?
The answer: you did.
Why? No one else is talking about that. No one here said, “Hey, to be a good social justice person you must do this.”
No one said anything like that at all. Not even close. Thus you are arguing with strawmen.
But on the other hand, if ideological purity really bugs you, then mix in exactly one white-dude book.
Yay! Purity avoided.
I still approve, cuz I care fuck-all about purity, but I think it would be great if more folks read more stuff by people who otherwise get ignored a lot. The “one year” thing isn‘t really the point. It’s just a pretext, a trick, a little nudge that the blog writer used to get her to read more non-white-dude books.
Maybe another nudge would work for you, since life-hacks ain’t a one-size-fits-all kinda thing.
So do it for six months. Or do it every other month for a year. Or one additional non-white-dude book to your reading list. Whatever.
Or don’t. I mean, your reading list probably is mostly white dudes — and if it ain’t then you shouldn’t really care about this at all — and if you kinda think it would be nice to even shit out, find some little trick that helps you even shit out. Or not. Your choice.
But you have been criticizing things no one said. That’s silly. Don’t do that.
I mostly read stuff by white dudes. Actually, I mostly read math books, so whatever.
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Bugmaster said:
> But you keep saying we said stuff we did not say. Why are you doing that?
It could be because I’m stupid, or because I’m evil, or because you’re not as good at communication as you think you are. Or perhaps for some other reason.
> …but I think it would be great if more folks read more stuff by people who otherwise get ignored a lot.
As I said before, I am always on the lookout for more stuff to read. If there are little-known authors out there whom I would enjoy reading, then of course I’d like to find out about them ! But, as I keep saying, I don’t care about their skin color or sexuality; I only care about their writing. If it’s good, I want to read it. If it isn’t, then I don’t.
However, this suggestion clashes somewhat with your next point:
> I mean, your reading list probably is mostly white dudes — and if it ain’t then you shouldn’t really care about this at all — and if you kinda think it would be nice to even shit out, find some little trick that helps you even shit out. Or not. Your choice.
You are implying that if my reading list actually is mostly white dudes (as I said before, I have no idea whether this is the case), then I have some sort of a problem that needs fixing. You further suggest that there’s some value to “evening shit out”, above and beyound the mere utilitarian concern of “finding even more enjoyable reading material”. So. What is that value, and what is the problem that needs fixing; and how is the action of removing books from my reading list based purely on their skin color and gender instrumental to achieving these goals ?
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Nita said:
@ Bugmaster
Thanks for the rec! But does it accurately reflect the experience of a thirty-year-old gamer dude? If so, I might read it to enrich my understanding 🙂
I’m not really joking, btw — I think fiction is the closest thing we have to a way to feel what it’s like to be someone else. And, you know the anime version of Christianity, where each church contains exactly one nun who’s in charge of it? A bit silly, right? I think if we only read books by people who are just like us we can end up with similarly wrong ideas about many things.
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osberend said:
Bugmaster: If you assume that people of color are not less good than white people at writing fiction
This seems like a non-obvious assumption. Even if one rejects a biological explanation out of hand, both cultural and socioeconomic factors could easily result in a larger fraction of whites than non-whites having the necessary combination of skill, interest, self-confidence, and dedication to produce great fiction.
Even more so, cultural factors in particular almost certainly will tend to skew the demographics of those writing great fiction in particular genres or subgenres, relative to the pool of everyone writing great fiction in general. For example, nostalgia for Medieval Europe and tributes to the glories of Rome both naturally tend to attract authors (and readers) who see those they honor (whether with historical fiction or fantasy pastiche) as their own forebears. I don’t think that has to be biological, but even in a cultural sense, white Americans tend on average to be more thoroughly assimilated into Western culture than non-white Americans. Since most people aren’t actually looking to read “fiction” but a particular subset thereof (even if that subset is “the stuff that just gets labeled ‘fiction’ without a more specific genre attached, because it’s serious literature“), this seems like a relevant consideration.
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Bugmaster said:
@Nita:
> Thanks for the rec! But does it accurately reflect the experience of a thirty-year-old gamer dude? If so, I might read it to enrich my understanding
No, it does not. Instead, it uses an art form (in this case, gaming) as a lens that shows the reader the best parts of him/her/etc.-self; and, by extension, humanity in general. That’s why the book is filed under “fiction”, as opposed to “autobiography” 🙂
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Bugmaster said:
@Ozy:
> Therefore, at any given level of popularity, the people of color are probably better than the white people (because they managed to overcome factor x). … Therefore, as a rational good-book-seeker, deliberately try to read more people of color.
Firstly, this post is titled “Should You Read Fewer White Male Authors?”, and not, “You should read more authors of color”, so it seems like you’ve switched to defending a different argument.
Secondly, I don’t care about popularity; all I care about is finding more writing that I personally will enjoy. In the past, I have enjoyed some mildly popular books (Name of the Wind), as well as some mildly obscure books (Chronicles of the Black Company, Soon I Will Be Invincible); I have also hated some popular books (Twilight), and greatly enjoyed some others (The Left Hand of Darkness). Popularity does not predict my taste in any useful way. Thus, once again, merely knowing that an author is black, or gay, or female, does not tell me anything about that author’s writing. So, if I care about writing (which I do), then the answer to your question — “Should You Read Fewer White Male Authors?” — is, in my case, “No, I don’t care what color they are”.
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ozymandias said:
Bugmaster: Unless you’re increasing the number of books you’re reading (which! great! do that!), reading more authors of color implies reading fewer white authors.
Unfortunately, I don’t have direct access to Bugmaster’s Ability To Enjoy Things, so I have to use proxies like popularity and critical acclaim. (Critical acclaim is also dominated by white people and the same argument applies.)
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InferentialDistance said:
Well, yeah, assuming the consequent does make your argument valid. How would you know if that assumption was wrong? Are there, perhaps, socioeconomic entanglements that would result in there being disproportionately fewer skilled writers of color, despite no bias from publishers or readers?
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Robert Liguori said:
“Don’t read books by these categories of authors for a year” is absolutely about purity. A positive challenge would be to come up with a list of oh, 50 books or so (including _Nevada_ and other listed examples) which will broaden your horizons. That would be helpful if the goal being sought to broaden understanding, and not to signal purity. Hell, a mixed reading list, with Marx on one hand and Dalrymple in the other, would do a lot of people a world of good.
If people want to be grossly racist and sexist in their reading choices, that is their absolute right. However, I do reserve for myself the right to point out when people are being grossly racist and sexist.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
(1) Ted Chiang – I’m afraid that’s a resounding “Eh, he’s okay” from me. I find myself going “Ah yes, that’s very clever” with several of his stories, but that’s about it, and clever one-line concepts that the story is written around so it can incorporate them don’t do it for me.
(2) I think I figured out why HPMOR is not my cup of tea. Yudowsky is writing it as SF where the original genre is Fantasy, and as we all know, you don’t cross the streams 🙂
I finally get that he’s doing the classical skiffy thing of “How would this really work if it happened?” with things like “Suppose a woman changed into a cat – Conservation of Energy! Cannot violate this! Unless – ” and then ‘scribble scribble new laws of physics’. But had I read the Harry Potter books when I was 12, I would have neither known nor cared about the Conservation of Mass. Reading them when older than 12, I knew about it but didn’t care – I carefully turned off the part of my mind that went “Of course a woman can’t turn into a cat because what happens the extra mass! Conservation of Energy!” in order to take the story on its own terms.
(a) When Conservation of Energy (or other Real Scientific Laws) come head-to-head with Suspension of Disbelief, Conservation of Energy has to lose, or else you’ll drive yourself nuts nit-picking
(b) Don’t mix genres. I find myself going “Dude, it’s magic“, when people get their knickers in a twist about “But how does this work????” Rowling is writing a fairy story, and those have their own laws, which are important but are not necessarily bothered about Real Scientific Laws. In the fairy tale world, apples on a tree may be made of ruby, but it’s still important for young men on a quest to share their packed lunch with little old women in the forest of ruby apples.
Worrying about “But how can organic fruit be made of inorganic mineral? What would make that work?” is SF. “Don’t piss off your fairy godmother” is Fantasy 🙂
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
All right, let me try that link again.
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Susebron said:
@Martha
I think there needs to be a different set of words besides just SF/fantasy. There’s SF that is basically fantasy with a different aesthetic (e. g. Star Wars), and there’s fantasy that is very rule-based and analytical and borders on SF (Brandon Sanderson’s works spring to mind). There are hard and soft, but they mostly refer to SF.
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Nornagest said:
I’ve heard of hard fantasy, but it’s an uncommon term, yes.
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Nita said:
@ Martha O’Keeffe
But Rowling mixes genres herself. Is it fantasy, boarding school adventure, coming-of-age, mystery or social satire? Whimsical or epic? Cartoonish or realistic? It’s all of the above! I’ve grumbled a lot about Rowling, but I really appreciate her ability to smash together a bunch of different genre conventions and tropes and make it all work smoothly somehow.
Actually, I think that’s one of the reasons HPMOR is not as effective as intended. When you take a story that’s already playing with tropes and winking at the reader, and heap on even more deconstruction and winking, you end up in crackfic territory.
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Matthew said:
As I read _Parable of the Sower_ (one of my favorite books ever), I kept picturing Lauren as a *white girl*.
Seconding others, I don’t think this qualifies as particularly racist. I can’t really form mental imagery of imaginary people’s faces at all; I tend to skim physical descriptions of people in books, because I can’t retain it in any meaningful way anyway.
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Ginkgo said:
“To me, a challenge like “no white (cis-straight-etc) dudes for a year” sounds like a great way to broaden your perspective and encounter some stuff you otherwise would not. What is the downside?”
Exactly. What can it hurt? And the possible benefits are huge.
I’d take it a step further to not reading anything originally written in English. There isn’t a lot of cultural distance between an African-American writer and a Euro-American writer, especially a Southern one – at least not of the sort you are going to find reading anything by Lu Xun or Tanazaki, or God help, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
If you want some not originally written in English music, may I direct you to the Irish-Egyptian sean-nós singer Róisín Elsafty?
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Nita said:
Nevada [by Imogen Binnie, in case someone else wants to Google it] starts with dysfunctional kinky sex — this is very promising. Thanks, Veronica! 🙂
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Anon said:
I am curious what you think the mechanism by which people are discriminating against women / black authors is. I guess someone out there might be looking at the “about the author” page of books they were potentially interested in and going “Ah, a woman; women can’t write good books; better choose another”, but it’s hard to imagine that happening very much.
Also, a lot of other media – video games, say, or technical guides, or… – is subjected to exactly the same criticism, even when information about the race and gender of the creators in even less readily available. This strongly implies that “people ignore women / PoC” is not the sole cause of this effect.
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ninecarpals said:
Seconding this question. My guess – and this doesn’t contradict the directive in the OP, to be clear – is that it has more to do with the publishing and marketing side of things than the purchasing public. How much publicity a work gets ahead of time is going to have a massive impact on how well it sells.
We may also be confusing purchasing power with readership. Minority readers will, on average, have less disposable income to spend buying new books, which – if they are disproportionately drawn to books by minority authors – would suppress sales…which would be cyclical in discouraging publishing companies to support minority authors writing works targeted at minority populations.
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kalvarnsen said:
“If the latter is easier (which it should be, given that white men are a minority of the English-speaking population), then you clearly have no problems and can wear your My Reading Choices Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist badge with pride”
I have no idea what “easier” even means in this context.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
There is the notion that J.K. Rowling used initials at the behest of her publisher, to hide her name. It wasn’t that the public wouldn’t read books written by a woman, but the publishers believed they would sell less. I tend to think that industries, organizations, or other large groups of people are naturally slow to change versus the individual beliefs of the general population, so a publishing/marketing bias is a convincing explanation for me.
Another potential factor is the undervaluing of women’s work. See studies on how gender impacts hiring, where the same qualifications lead to different outcomes (see also what happens in cases where it’s possible to compare blind auditions to regular auditions). If there’s an analogous mechanism occurring in the general population, it could lead to people buying less books from women. Similar mechanisms might also hold true for PoC and LGBT authors. Buying books, in my experience, is rather whimsical anyways: a book might take anywhere from days to months to read, so we don’t have time at the bookstore to actually evaluate the book in depth on it’s merits. We’re going to guess and hunch our way through it, and unconscious biases may well have a greater impact there than they would otherwise have when there is a set list of criteria to meet.
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J said:
Minor point,
If somebody broadcasted that they were boycotting any musicals directed by gay people or jews I don’t suspect it would be interpreted remotely as kindly as you do. I do in fact suspect there would be a major backlash.
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ozymandias said:
I think it depends on how the author communicated that they were doing it. If they used homophobic or anti-Semitic stereotypes or were like “GAYS and JEWS are MARGINALIZING straight Gentiles in theater and we need to make an effort to signal-boost straight Gentile voices”, then probably people would be upset. But if it were played in a humorous way I’m pretty sure most people would be fine with it.
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kalvarnsen said:
I really can’t imagine how somebody could call for a boycott of Jewish musicals without using anti-Semitic stereotypes. And I’m a bit weirded out that you seem to think “humorous” is the opposite of “antisemitic”.
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
>But if it were played in a humorous way I’m pretty sure most people would be fine with it.
I don’t understand, is this “don’t read straight White dudes” thing supposed to be humorous?
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snailshellspiral said:
I would bet money that anyone who advocated a boycott of Jewish playwrights would be lambasted for anti-semitism.
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kalvarnsen said:
The fairly obvious rejoinder is that gay people and/or Jews are discriminated against in the wider culture in a way that white men aren’t.
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snailshellspiral said:
Those are both groups that are majority-composed of white men
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snailshellspiral said:
Wait, I take that back, obviously I’m ignoring ~50% of the jewish population.
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
I’m well on my way to completing this challenge, for I have read 0 books this year, so far.
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skye said:
“It’s also true that white men can reflect a wide range of human experiences. … And certainly there’s not any inherent Floridian-ness about Floridians that seeps through their writing.”
The problem is that many arguments for this challenge do reflect this alief. All the reasons you present here are very practical: expose yourself to more voices, and you’ll be a better-rounded person. I can’t argue with that, and I’m not holding you responsible for others’ shitty reasoning.
However, I think those who promote this challenge have to be very clear about their reasons. Are they doing to broaden their horizons and hone their sense of empathy? Or because there is some inherent quality to minority writers’ work that they feel is missing in mainstream media? The former is quite defensible; the latter invites a line of distinctly “othering” thinking: “they just don’t see the world like you and me.”
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skye said:
Also, I think it’s important to recognize that diversity runs deeper than the physical. If nonwhite nonmale authors are all you read, but every book you choose promotes the same themes and ideas, perhaps you’re missing the point.
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kalvarnsen said:
This is very worth noting. By the worldview present in Ozy’s post, reading Jane Austen is a deeply subversive act because she’s a woman, but reading Edward Abbey is reinforcing kyriarchy because he’s a straight white man.
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veronica d said:
I’m pretty sure they didn’t say anything remotely like that.
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Ghatanathoah said:
Excellent point. How about we change things up, so conservatives and moderates read more books by LBGT people, POCs, etc, while liberals have to read books by people with more conservative worldviews. I’d recommend John Ringo as someone who has such a worldview, and usually writes entertaining books.
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ozymandias said:
Ghatanathoah: Wait, the opposite of a person of color or an LGBT person is a conservative? That is going to be a really big surprise to black conservatives and the Log Cabin Republicans.
Conservatives take the Liberal Reading Challenge, liberals take the Conservative Reading Challenge, white people take the POC Reading Challenge, and people of color take the White Reading Challenge. Now that is fair. (…if perhaps a little easy for the POC.)
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kalvarnsen said:
@veronica: I think you mean “zhe didn’t say anything remotely like that”.
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Held In Escrow said:
I actually think more liberals should real PJ O’Rourke. I was exposed to him from a young age because my parents thought I should have a balanced view of politicians despite being super blue, and to this day he’s one of the funnier and easy to read conservative political writers. I have quite a few of his works next to my Al Franken books.
That and read some Christopher Buckley. He’s formulaic, but it’s a solid formula.
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anonymousCoward said:
@Ghatanathoah – “I’d recommend John Ringo as someone who has such a worldview, and usually writes entertaining books.”
OH JOHN RINGO NO!
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Vamair said:
If someone wants to broaden their horizons, isn’t a better idea to read foreign writers, especially not contemporary ones? The difference in (averaged) perspectives may be greater than the one between men and women of the same culture. The average level of writing should also be greater, as a foreign book should first be published _and_ translated, and that barrier is probably a stronger one.
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Tapio Peltonen said:
This post gave me an impulse to count the novels and single author short story collections in my bookshelf by author’s gender. Some are certainly missing (borrowed to someone or misplaced) but I think this is a representative sample.
Total: 215 books. 185 are by male authors and 30 are by female authors. A pretty damning ratio. Only 14% female.
I am a lazy collector but on my list of “authors whose books I generally buy” are almost as many women as there are men. Somehow that hasn’t translated into having almost as many books by women as by men.
Possible explanations:
Most books I have received as gifts are by men. Also, I kind of inherited part of a collection that was mostly by male authors. Some male authors that I buy have been extremely prolific. (Pratchett…) Generally, some books are easy to get and some need to be actively sought, and many times the books by women are in the latter category.
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Fossegrimen said:
After reading this yesterday, I did a rough estimate on my collection. I didn’t do anything remotely resembling an accurate count because the sci-fi section of my library is on its own around 2k books, but I think I did a passable representative sample and I found:
Sci-Fi section is overwhelmingly male.
Fantasy section is 60/40 female (and the only section without a massive bias either way)
Crime section is massively female (only guys there with more than a couple books are Michael Connelly and Ed McBain)
Classics are mainly male, but possibly not relevant. Finding female contemporaries of Cicero seems to be tricky.
Romances section is rather slim but female dominated.
Horror section is largely male.
All the non-fiction sections seem male dominated, possibly except social sciences.
This may be totally different if there is a skew in choices of pen names.
I have no idea what colours these authors are.
The explanation is most likely that I subconsciously pick gendered names according to genre when I buy books. Why my subconscious thinks female names write better crime and male names write better sci-fi is a bit more complex, but it is possible that this simply reflects reality.
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J said:
More major points,
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going a year without reading white or male or authors (in fiction) when your current set of authors is saturated with white men. (This is intentionally narrow, I think if you refuse to read news/opinion pieces by white or male authors you end up having to hyper-restricting the sources you get information from i.e. de facto not reading any major newspaper because many of the staffers are white or male) you will get very biased new and lose out on a tremendous amount of important context). I don’t think the argument from representation is quite the good one though. I’m not convinced that white people are being unfairly kept from basketball when really they’re better than their black colleagues. I don’t believe the jews have a cabal which keeps on letting their mediocre comedians dominate despite the overrepresentation of jews in comedy. (I’m pretty sure this is the case, if I’m wrong about the statistics here please tell me)
I’m also slightly suspect that the many people who are actively publicly taking this challenge are not going “oh shit, all my authors this year were white men” but instead were people who already sought out/were guided towards more diverse choice of authors because of their social mileu. The average american would certainly be better off reading more female or POC authors. This is far less obvious, at least to me, about the people who would deign to take this challenge. It’s there choice of fiction authors, there’s no need to be an asshole about it. But I have a strong suspicion that the people who take this challenge are often, at least in part, the people who will get the least broadening of their perspectives.
(Post script)
To avoid misinterpretation, I would guess the average celebrated book by a female or non-white author is, in some real sense, better than the average celebrated book by a white or male author.
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shemtealeaf said:
For the record:
Of the 31 authors who had #1 bestsellers on the NY Times list in 2013, there were 16 women and 15 men.
I wasn’t able to find really reliable data for the whole list, but there’s a GoodReads list of questionable reliability that seemed about 50% female.
Perhaps there’s a question of why there aren’t even more female writers, given that women tend to read more than men, but I’m not seeing much evidence that women are under-represented at the highest levels of writing.
Minorities certainly are under-represented, but I can think of many reasons why they might legitimately not be as good at writing popular books (as judged by an American audience):
– Most minorities don’t speak English natively. This could have an obvious effect on writing ability.
– Most minorities are, on average, more economically disadvantaged than whites. This means that they don’t typically end up as well-educated as white people. Furthermore, it’s possible that minorities with education and high intellectual ability are likely to go into fields that are more reliably lucrative than writing.
– Speculatively, minority authors might be more likely to write about topics that are primarily of interest to their particular minority. This doesn’t make them “bad” authors, but it means that they might be less interesting to everyone who isn’t a member of that minority.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I’m a tad skeptical of the assertion that reading fiction by nonwhite non-cis non-male authors is particularly mind-expanding. I’ve never really had any moments where I’ve felt like something I read could only have been written from a minority perspective. It’s always seemed to me like a white cismale could have pulled it off if they’d been willing to do a little research and show a little empathy.
I suppose this could partly be because the kinds of subjects I like reading fiction about tend to be about pretty basic human experiences (i.e. war, survival, exploration) that pretty much everyone reacts to similarly. If I read something about more nuanced social interactions the different perspectives might show up more.
But I suspect another reason people make this assertion is because of the common social justice trope that personal experience is everything, and that no one can understand the experiences marginalized people have without going through them themselves. I dislike this trope for two reasons. First, it is probably wrong, humans can be very empathetic. Second, in this instance it is self-defeating. If it’s not possible to understand these experiences without going through them, fiction isn’t going to be much help.
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multiheaded said:
” I’ve never really had any moments where I’ve felt like something I read could only have been written from a minority perspective.”
One possibly obvious correction: autobiographies and memoirs. Like, no white abolitionist ever really knew what it’s like to be a slave; it would not matter if they were an “objectively” better writer or sociologist than Frederick Douglass.
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multiheaded said:
^ am stupid, not noticing that the discussion is exclusively about fiction. Still, my point stands for the inclusion of autobiographical elements or themes in fiction.
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veronica d said:
@Ghatanathoah — All I can say is you’re flatly wrong. I can say for a fact that the trans female experience has *as a matter of fact* never been presented well by a cis author/producer/director [1], and that when I first began encountering trans female fiction written by trans female authors I was amazed by the stark contrast.
I say it like this: We all have more or less the same kinds of brains, so there is no reason the knowledge in a trans mind could not be knowledge in a cis mind. But as a matter of fact, it never really is.
And indeed this is about lived experience. But more, it is about subtle associations. You can learn the same dry facts as a trans person. I can explain to you the medical effects of spironolactone. Like, you could even maybe go take the drug. And you might even pick up the little things we trans gals discuss, like from time to time I’ll post on Facebook, “Hey, I refilled my prescription today and the flavor of my spiro is new,” and then a bunch of my friends will pipe up and say, “Me too. It’s minty now. Weird.”
Yeah, with enough research you could get facts like that.
Of course, cis authors pretty much never do. But anyway…
That’s not really the point. Instead, it’s about subtle associations. It’s not just a smattering of details, but a life awash in those details and how they relate.
Take _Nevada_. there is no way a cis author would ever think to write about Jame’s dress.
[I assume you haven’t read _Nevada_. Its main characters are Maria, a weirdo punk trans woman from NYC, and James, an in-denial trans woman living in a crappy small town in Nevada. They meet.]
I mean, a cis author might include something like his dress, but only *after* they’ve read _Nevada_, which means after they’ve cribbed, after they’ve filed it down to a safe-for-cis-preoccupation cliche.
I don’t really need for cis authors to spoon feed me cliches about trans people. Old hat. Been there, done that. Blah.
You’ll say, sure, but if cis author did perfect research they’d know about Jame’s dress — but actually probably not, cuz Jame’s dress is the real hard deep shit that most trans gals don’t even want to remember, and it took Imogen Binnie to pick off that scab.
And then there are his porn habits. But never mind.
But now of course _Nevada_ exists, so I suppose cis folks can copy it and present banality and cliche.
But more, consider the way Maria dissociates. I mean, that’s the real hard shit, and I dissociate the same way, for many of the same reasons, and I monologue the same way, and no doubt there is *something deep* about that. But I doubt a cis author would see this. They might pick up the speech patterns as a quirk, and even try to emulate them.
Of course, I’ve never seen a cis author even try. I doubt they even know there is something here they could try. Maybe they could pull it off. Possibly. But actually, probably not. I’d be surprised if they even noticed what they were hearing. Cuz it’s driven by something internal, and it took a genius like Imogen Binnie to share this truth.
The hypothetical cis author, with their handful of interview subjects — none of those subjects are likely to be Binnie, so these subjects are sharing what they think to share, with some author for whom they have marginal trust — and there is shit even my therapist doesn’t know about me. If I write a book, and if my talent is great enough, I might find a way to express those things.
There is something raw you get from a real artists, when they hold up a mirror to their own lives and give their truth to you. This looks very different from someone copying those facts and presenting them absent their significance.
[1] Which, I have not consumed every bit of about-trans-by-cis media ever produced. But I’ve consumed a fair amount and so far it’s been uniformly terrible. And I mean terrible.
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multiheaded said:
I mostly read porn and nonfiction these days. With notable rare exceptions, I prefer porn by women, about cis-het women. (And that’s about the least Problematic thing about my preferences.) So yes, that one’s covered.
Nonfiction: some of what interests me (social history stuff) is inherently better when done by minority voices because it’s about them. For other stuff, well, academic privilege matters a lot. If I’m going to read a history of women on the Eastern Front, I’d rather read one by a woman; if I’m going to read a more general work on the Eastern Front… well, I’d be hard-pressed to find a woman popular historian who’s as good at writing the stuff as the best of her male peers, and it’s not women’s fault.
(However, of course it’s highly important to raise awareness of good female writers in male-dominated nonfiction fields too… I’m just not going to give extra political points to a work by one. Doing so would clearly feel unfair and patronizing in itself.)
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Does it count if you don’t know the author you are reading is not white/het? I mean, back when I was fifteen and reading Samuel Delaney, I thought he was Irish-American (like R.A. Lafferty) because Delaney is an Irish name 🙂
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ninecarpals said:
“When I was fifteen and reading Samuel Delany”
Oh myyyyy.
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injygo said:
Today I learned that Samuel R Delany is black.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
It was a collection of short stories called “Drift Glass” so it was fairly mainstream 🙂 I still am kind of miffed that we’ll never get the second volume of “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” because forget the fate of the universe, what I want to know is do Rat Korga and Marq ever get together in a proper relationship (not ‘we have to be parted for the sake of saving the world’)? 🙂
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ninecarpals said:
Hahaha, I figured it would be something like that rather than the Delany works I’m more familiar with.
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Toggle said:
There was this one time that Delaney said that he was uncomfortable writing about heterosexual sex, because he’d only been with nine women. Which is, just, oh gosh.
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Ginkgo said:
“because he’d only been with nine women. Which is, just, oh gosh.”…. an indisputably small sample.
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osberend said:
@Ginkgo: Depending on the standard deviation of the characteristics of interest, and on whether one is aiming to characterize (a substantial fraction of) the full breadth of heterosexual experience, or merely a sizeable modal region. I’d think 9 randomly-selected women should be enough for the latter. Of course, they might not be randomly selected, but that just increases the probability that they’re clustered enough to get a good picture of the region surrounding some local maximum or another.
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Toggle said:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm
The median lifetime number of partners is a little over six, for his-at-the-time age bracket. At a guess, science fiction authors have somewhat less sex than the population at large. So he’s in the upper bracket of people, especially for people writing about sex- by his metric, most heterosexual authors are not qualified to write about heterosexual sex. Let alone famously gay ones such as Delaney.
The real funny there, of course, is in knowing the kinds of sex that he does write about.
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Protagoras said:
Toggle, do you find the claim that most heterosexual authors are not qualified to write about heterosexual sex implausible?
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Toggle said:
I do. A statistically valid sample size is necessary for some things, but not for the production of a compelling narrative. Recently, I read a particularly excellent (non-pornographic) sex scene, whose author was an asexual virgin- as a bonus, the author was female and the sex was between two men.
Sex isn’t a particularly special case here- Tolkien never threw any rings in to any volcanoes, Heinlein didn’t physically establish an anarchocapitalist utopia on the moon. Fiction authors are just necessarily speculative. Their skills won’t always produce realistic sex, and certainly not sex that is statistically representative of the sorts of intercourse that people are actually having, but neither of those is the goal of fiction or the criterion by which it is judged.
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Syntax Error said:
I feel quite strongly that K T Bradford should read whatever books she wishes to read. It sounds like she had fun, discovered some great authors, and walked away with a new perspective.
I’m also in favor of challenges like the 50books_poc initiative, which encouraged people to “read fifty books by authors of color in the course of a year.” I especially like group challenges which involve exploring certain writers and topics—I’ve discovered a lot of cool authors this way. And there are countless really cool authors who would benefit from this sort of focused investigation. I’m even sympathetic towards suggestions like that of C.S. Lewis’s, who recommended, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
Despite all this, though, I also feel quite strongly that nobody gets to tell me which books I shouldn’t read. The article says:
Thank you, but no. I reserve the right to read what I want, when I want. That right lies near the core of my personal autonomy. If I discover a cool new math book, or I want to re-read a favorite novel for comfort, I will do so. If somebody tells me I shouldn’t, I’ll get very grumpy and ask them who the hell they think they are. I refuse all challenges that limit my reading (as opposed to challenges that augment it, or incidentally displace some of it through sheer volume).
Perhaps I’m reading too much into that “should”? She probably didn’t mean it in the way I’m reading it. If I replace “should take” with “should consider”, that sentence doesn’t bother me at all.
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veronica d said:
I’m pretty sure committing to reading X books by minority writers would do as well as not reading white dudes. I mean, in the end you’re getting a variety of stuff, so potato/potah-to. It’s all good.
Myself, I’d probably go with “don’t read white dudes”, just cuz that might encourage me to branch out more widely, instead of just (for example) POC. But that’s me.
That said, I’d prolly just end up reading stuff by queer gals anyhow. So maybe I need a different version.
I understand her suggestion as a kinda cool no-pressure suggestion to help folks widen their scope. If you find a variant, such as “every other book from a non-white-dude,” I cannot imagine she’d object. That sounds like a cool big-step.
Have a good attitude!
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Bugmaster said:
Ok, so personally, I am mostly (though not exclusively) interested in science fiction and fantasy. Are there any “queer gals” (*) out there who write it ? If so, is their writing actually good ? By this I don’t mean, “does their writing promote the correct ideology”, or “are their protagonists sufficiently non-cis and non-white”, or even, “does their writing accurately reflect the experience of a trans/gay/etc. person”; but rather… is it good ?
The thing is, this question above is actually kind of a trick question.
If you answer in the affirmative, and point out some of the authors whose writing I might enjoy, then I’d gladly read them (time permitting). But then, it is their writing that acts as the primary selection criterion, not their race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever. The question is then reduced to, simply, “can you recommend any good authors ?”
If you answer in the negative, then why should I read those authors ? As some sort of literary self-flagellation, or what ?
And if you answer, “actually, it doesn’t matter how good their writing is, you should read them solely because of their demographic/ideological status”, then… well, I can’t say your attitude is unprecedented. I would advise picking up some history books (written by minorities, even !) to see how those types of proclamations tend to work out (spoiler alert: not well).
(*) Besides Ursula LeGuin, though she might be straight, I have no idea.
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injygo said:
@Bugmaster: C. J. Cherryh is a queer woman. Octavia Butler is a dyslexic black woman. James Tiptree, Jr is a queer woman. Nancy Farmer, Madeleine L’Engle, and Lois McMaster Bujold are women. Angela Carter is a radical, a woman, and one of the best writers I know. Shirley Jackson is a woman, and quite possibly the best writer I’ve ever read.
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Syntax Error said:
Thank you, veronica d! Your proposed versions of the challenge all sound very enjoyable. And I agree that anybody who wants to avoid (say) straight white males for a year should do so—it’s probably a very interesting experience, and I strongly support people’s right to read whatever they want. It’s just not the right version of the challenge for me, because I would be unhappy not reading certain favorite authors for an entire year.
Looking at recent books on my Kindle, I get 53 female, 18 male, and one wife-and-husband team. This is mostly because I went on an urban fantasy binge, which tends to skew heavily towards female authors. I can’t evaluate very well on race without doing some more research. As for sexual orientation, I’d guess mostly straight, because a lot of the urban fantasy had heterosexual romance subplots, but outside of that I don’t really know.
…
Bugmaster, I can’t help you much with queer female SF/fantasy authors, because I have no idea about anybody’s sexual orientation. But I agree that Cherryh and Tiptree have both written some very interesting stuff. As for female authors, without knowing your tastes, though, it’s hard to be specific. Bujold has written some good novels (and her short story Borders of Infinity is probably my favorite MilSF ever), or, if you tend to run more towards the conservative side of things, you might try Elizabeth Moon. Some of her best stuff is quite good.
One problem with deliberately focusing on single category of authors is that you often have to work hard to find first-rate stuff, because there aren’t as many choices to begin with. But when you do find something great, it can be a real joy—it’s always wonderful to discover a new “must read” author, especially in a place you would never have thought to look.
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Bugmaster said:
@injygo:
Yeah, I love Cherryh actually, and I totally forgot she was female. Go figure. I also know about Bujold. These others don’t sound familiar, though maybe I’ve read them before (like I said, I’m not too good with names):
> Octavia Butler is a dyslexic black woman. James Tiptree, Jr is a queer woman. Nancy Farmer, Madeleine L’Engle, … are women. Angela Carter is a radical, a woman, and one of the best writers I know. Shirley Jackson is a woman, and quite possibly the best writer I’ve ever read.
So, what kind of books do they write ? I get that they’re women, but as I said before, I’m not going to read their books just because of their gender. Of course, if you’re saying, “if you liked Bujold and Cherryh then you’ll like these writers too”, then that’s probably good enough for me 🙂
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Bugmaster said:
@Syntax Error:
Thanks, it sounds like I should at least check out Tiptree, seeing as both you and injygo speak highly of her. I’ll put her on my list for sure.
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injygo said:
@Bugmaster: I’ve only really read Madeleine L’Engle, Nancy Farmer, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jackson. I hear Cherryh is a detailed worldbuilder.
L’Engle is a serious Christian who writes about how to reconcile unearthly glory and human relationships. She wrote A Wrinkle In Time. I was a little disappointed in reading her because she is more interested in people and impressions than things and systems.
Nancy Farmer writes YA books about African and Norse mythology. She reminds me of Clive Barker or Neil Gaiman a little. Her books bring up ethical dilemmas, usually technological, and don’t solve them, leaving the reader to decide.
Angela Carter writes adult (and ‘adult’, hem hem) literature, mostly novels and novellas. It’s difficult to categorize her style, as it’s fey, dreamlike, and self-aware. Hallucination, symbolism, crisis, women’s power(s), defiance, the arcane.
Shirley Jackson is really good at putting words together. Example: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
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slatestarcodex said:
Most people aren’t aware of the race or sexual orientation of the authors they read, except for a few very famous people whom they may have seen pictures of (source: I can’t tell you the race of the author of the last few non-famous novels I read; I assumed they were white but black people’s names don’t always sound much different). So they don’t have an opportunity to deliberately discriminate.
Either people of color (gays, transgenders, etc) write about different things (or in different styles) than white people, or they don’t. If they do, then people should have the choice to read whichever group’s books they prefer. If they don’t, then there can’t be discrimination based on content either.
Since there’s not discrimination based on knowing the demographics, and there’s probably not discrimination based on content, it’s probably the same kind of “discrimination” as everything else – the entire pipeline, from birth to high school creative writing classes to literature postgrads leaks minorities for various reasons, but once someone produces a given book of a given quality, people are just as likely to read it no matter what race it’s by. Compare the constant complaints about discrimination against scientific papers by women and minorities, which didn’t change at all after the refereeing/publication process was 100% blinded.
If we were actually worried about this, the simplest solution would be to remove the “about the author” photo on books and encourage the use of pen names so nobody knew anyone else’s race or gender (even more so than that’s true right now).
I predict no one will be interested in this, because it solves the problem without an opportunity for conspicuous outrage signaling.
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Patrick said:
Umm. The article suggesting not reading white male authors for a year is explicitly about taking active steps to ensure that the “pipeline” effect you’re describing doesn’t prevent you from experiencing the wide array of viewpoints you would putatively receive if your reading wasn’t being influenced by that pipeline. Selecting books via a color blind process fails to address the specific criticism on the table.
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Fibs said:
It seems a little weird to argue from your own ignorance about authors you read in the same breath as you point out that most books include an “About the author”. Err. I guess, maybe, check the thing that tells you about the author if you don’t know about the author? You’ll probably find most of the authors you have read have been… astoundingly normal. That doesn’t make you a monstrous being of abominable evil, the entire point of the idea is that you wouldn’t notice because it’s just what happens.
Secondly, no one’s saying people shouldn’t read what they want to read. The question is asking them why they’re reading what they’re reading, and if they’d be interested in reading something they (presumably?) wouldn’t read normally. Then you ask: “Why not normally?” and the answer isn’t: “Because there’s no difference and we can’t change anything” but “Because the publishing industry is an industry, and as an industry they make bets as to what sells and what doesn’t sell, prefer re-publishing authors that have already proven they can sell and have editors whose job it is to edit books so they become more able to sell. If previous data indicates [books by white people with white people] sell, you tell me what’s more likely to be consistently published…”
People should totally have the ability to read the books they prefer reading.
But someone supplies that “ability”, because printing presses aren’t yet in our backyards, and this is why you can wander into a store and find quite a lot of books about vampire romances. Some of them are genuinely good. That doesn’t mean random optimization for profit and assumptions about market conditions haven’t already shaped 90 % of what’s on offer, what people talk about, what’s reviewed and spread about more and why books about the struggles of… I don’t know, transgender activists during the deep plague of Justinian fighting werewolves are less easily visible.
I mean, just the size of the initial print-run based on assumptions about interest can heavily shape what’s available, which feeds back into what becomes available. The “pipeline” is much, much shorter than everything from birth to creative writing classes.
The entire notion is about not defaulting to the basic script, which is what’s going to happen unless people make an effort to avoid it. Not because the basis script is inherently “evil” or anything, it’s just what happens by casual accident. That’s really it.
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slatestarcodex said:
You’re misunderstanding my point. I’m not complaining that I can’t possibly know about the author. I’m saying that since I don’t know about the author, my choices aren’t being shaped by their race.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
My objections to this exercise are poorly defined and more a matter of feeling than rational thought; it’s generally because (when I were a lass), reading the kinds of books where “Hey, girls, here’s a female hero!” made a point of being very loud about “Our hero is a GIRL. Did we mention she’s a GIRL? Here’s the bit where we talk about her being a GIRL. Isn’t it great she’s a GIRL? Here’s all the horrible boys being horrible to her just because she’s a GIRL/it’s the olden days and she’s a GIRL. Ugh, aren’t boys horrible? GIRLS are so much better!” and I was “I don’t care if she’s a three-eyed Martian from a species with nine genders, JUST TELL ME THE GODDAMNED STORY IS WHAT I WANT TO FIND OUT”.
So me deliberately setting out to find POC non-cis non-het authors would be a deliberate exercise in exoticism: oh, tell me your unique experiences in your carefully phonetically rendered regional patois and drench me in that local colour! Because otherwise, if I’m just reading about Jane who gets up and gets the bus to work and goes to Moondollars for a lunchtime sandwich like everyone else, except she’s POC lesbian, and there are no descriptions of hot lesbian POC sex between Jane and her partner written like a quasi-mystical life-altering experience that permanently raises your consciousness but we do get to read about Jane having to call the plumber because the kitchen sink is finally gone to the state that home repairs won’t cut it anymore, what is the point of reading about someone normal?
I’ll read a book if the story sounds interesting. I’ll read good writing even if it doesn’t do much in the way of plot. But reading just for the sake of “how the other half lives” is an exercise that can veer into “slumming”, rather than “widen your horizons”.
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kalvarnsen said:
“So me deliberately setting out to find POC non-cis non-het authors would be a deliberate exercise in exoticism: oh, tell me your unique experiences in your carefully phonetically rendered regional patois and drench me in that local colour!”
Ding ding ding!
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Nornagest said:
I think this might be a matter of genre convention?
Strange as it sounds to those of us that grew up in the genre-fiction ghetto, there are entire categories of fiction that are almost completely disinterested in plot as such, and are rather about capturing the rhythm of the characters’ subjective experience. Or the author’s; these are often memoirs, journalistic pieces, or fictionalized versions thereof.
Because nobody cares about the subjective experience of some white guy working as an accountant in the burbs, this necessarily tends to involve a certain amount of exoticism. It also doesn’t hurt that the natural habitat of these books is cultural studies and contemporary literature courses in high schools and colleges, where exoticism is adaptive: the more miserable a given book is and the better its characters’ claim to oppression, the better its chances of showing up on a syllabus.
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Nornagest said:
My kingdom for an edit button. That should have been “categories of literature”, not “categories of fiction”.
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InferentialDistance said:
I knew being a massive weeaboo would eventually pay off!
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Jiro said:
I’m pretty certain that anyone who actually tried to respond to this by reading manga, or anything else whose authorship doesn’t match to a social justice in-group and isn’t approved by one, would be met with special pleading about how what they did didn’t really count or just used a loophole that was against the spirit of the request.
In this case, aside from the obvious route of “I only meant prose books”, the SJWs could use the dodge (invoked by skye above) that skin color isn’t enough and you need to read books that don’t “promote the same themes and ideas”. Furthermore, reading lots of manga goes against the spirit of the request if you haven’t included any blacks–see, you have to be multicultural and adding *just* Asians is insufficiently multicultural. (Of course, these will amount to isolated demands for rigor since they are never used against people who just read the favored authors of the in-group.
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anonymousCoward said:
Not to mention that someone who read only manga for the next year or whatever would most likely not be doing their grasp of Social Justice any favors. Japanese media seem a hell of a lot LESS congruent with Social Justice than any sector of mainstream western media.
Now that the gaming community has pretty well sorted itself along ideological lines, the next fight, and the really hilarious one, is going to be when Social Justice comes for the Weaboos. There is not enough popcorn available for that fracas.
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ozymandias said:
Please find me an example of someone claiming that manga doesn’t really count. I can find you an example of someone saying manga does count.
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Bugmaster said:
Ok, this is a stupid question, but what is a “weaboo in this context ? I thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure…
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InferentialDistance said:
In this context we’re using the softer version of “person who enjoys and regularly consumes Japanese media”. There is significant variation in the term, all the way from “liked an anime once” to “wakes up depressed every morning because they’re a baka gaijin”.
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veronica d said:
OMG. Like, Ozy *literally mentioned* Manga as a valid choice, but her comes Jiro pointing out how social justice folks don’t consider Manga is valid choice.
Manga is a valid choice.
And by the way, like that vast majority of my social justice friends are pretty keen of Japanese stuff would probably be totes okay with Manga.
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anonymousCoward said:
Veronica D – “And by the way, like that vast majority of my social justice friends are pretty keen of Japanese stuff would probably be totes okay with Manga.”
Jiro can defend his own point, but I find the idea that the Social Justice community thinks Japanese media are just downright dandy-o both profoundly hilarious and enormously telling. Hilarious because an awful lot of Japanese media is, to put it delicately, *profoundly problematic* by any social justice yardstick, and telling because either they’re unaware of that fact and about to be rudely corrected, or they know about it and somehow just don’t care.
Either way, the honeymoon can’t last. The fight over anime is coming, and likely soon.
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Patrick said:
It’s already starting, a bit. One of the slurs thrown at the gamergate crowd is associating them with anime. Can’t figure out why you’d need that when you have, you know, *gamergate* to associate them with. But then fedoras were a battleground, so what do I know.
The interesting thing about anime and manga is that it presents an alternate theory of inclusiveness that is antithetical to the western SJ crowd’s point of view. It will be interesting to see how that clash resolves.
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veronica d said:
Let me add, do you guys actually care what “SJWs” think of your reading choices?
Like, this argument is really wonky. “Let me see, someone on the Internet suggested I try skipping white-dude authors for a year cuz that will broaden my perspective about stuff I’m missing. So hey, if I do that the SJWs will like me, and that’s SUPER IMPORTANT TO ME, so let me try this no white-dudes thing and I bet they’ll all follow my Twitter and invite me to the queer dance parties! Yay!”
“Oh wait! They don’t like manga? Oh noes I failed to impress the SJWs and now they won’t follow me on Twitter and now I’m on the BlockBot and OMG I didn’t get invited to that queer dance party I’m literally dying I hate everything!”
*cough*
#####
Anyway…
The reason to do something like this is *for yourself*, to broaden your own perspectives, cuz you might notice how your own perspectives are shaped by a mostly white-dude media. Plus, it might give a smidgen of a boost to some worthy authors who currently get ignored a lot compared to similar white-dude authors. That seems like a good thing.
Of course, if you’re totes happy with things as they are now, then you won’t do this. Duh. And then I suppose the SJWs will hate you exactly as much as they hate you now. Or something.
This has nothing to do with SJWs. It has to do with you, your knowledge, plus the non-white-dude authors who can use a boost.
So if you want to do this and you already now read a ton of manga, then I guess just reading that same amount of manga would be pointless. It would add little. On the other hand, if you mostly read white-dudes and instead you replace that with a bunch of manga, that seems valid. Yay manga!
Of course a lot of us already do read quite a lot of manga, so adding more might have diminishing returns, so then you’d want to branch out into other stuff. Your choice. What is your goal?
Anyway, the point is, why do you want to do this? If you don’t, then no big. If you do, then why? If it’s for yourself, your perspective, your knowledge, and to give a boost to some worthy authors, then yay! Go you!
If it is to satisfy the stern judgement of the Twitter SJW crowd — well then you’re an idiot.
tl;dr — Reverse stupidity isn’t smart. Stop worrying about what SJWs say.
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Jiro said:
Ozy didn’t invent the idea; Ozy got the idea from someone else who Ozy took at their word. But things like this often *aren’t* meant to be taken at their word. It is likely that the person who Ozy took it from wouldn’t count manga, and even if they did, it’s a certainty that most of their cohorts who support that idea wouldn’t count manga.
Well, that’s the point of all this criticism–to point out that the SJWs are being nonsensical enough that we should stop worrying about what they say (unless they are doing real world things based on what they say, in which case you have a reason to worry.)
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Jiro said:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/heinous/2015/02/25/reading-diversity/ has a comment: “For anyone reading manga who is considering this challenge, don’t think most manga is going to work for it. Japanese men are the most privileged group in Japan, so something they produce from that position of comfort (manga and media made in Japan) will reflect the most privilege-blind position they have to offer. ”
But most of the time the giveaway is people writing paragraphs about this (or long lists of recommendations) without mentioning manga even once. Manga is written by non-white authors, but it doesn’t register in their mind as non-white author stuff; it so much doesn’t count that they didn’t even realize that their literal words would include it–if they had thought about it, they’d exclude it, but they didn’t think about it.
Also, this is tied to the love-hate relationship between SJWs and Asians. Asians are SJW in-group when they are marginalized, but Asians who do too well get excluded from “person of color”. That’s why you see articles about Google being white male that fail to count Asians. Likewise, manga is too popular for SJWs to count it as being written by people of color.
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
>Now that the gaming community has pretty well sorted itself along ideological lines, the next fight, and the really hilarious one, is going to be when Social Justice comes for the Weaboos. There is not enough popcorn available for that fracas.
It won’t happen, for the same reason that it hasn’t happened with movies, when the SJ people come marching in with their critical theory and their problematic implications, the people involved won’t care to listen, much less respond.
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Lambert said:
My Raymondian ‘show us the code’ instinct is telling me that it would be better to spend a year without learning the names of any authors I read. (of course, the corpus of works from which I select books would be a nontrivial thing to decide.)
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Bugmaster said:
This is pretty much what I’ve been doing all my life — simply because I am not terribly good at remembering human names. Oh, I know who Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are (and they are both straight white men ! The horror !), but other than that, if I want to know a book’s author, I usually have to look it up.
Little did I know that I have been doing it all wrong. I should’ve been carefully restricting myself only to the authors in the officially approved list. Silly me !
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jossedley said:
It seems the challenge would meet its criterial more effectively if it also excluded white women authors from the list – at a minimum, it seems that anyone whose current reading habits include substantial numbers of white women authors should exclude those as well, for the same reasons as they might exclude white men.
Regardless of politics, anyone who doesn’t affirmatively hate sci fi and who hasn’t read Octavia Butler should do so as soon as possible.
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Held In Escrow said:
I think part of the issue is that this whole campaign was phrased extremely poorly. Instead of “expand your horizons by trying out these excellent minority/female authors” it’s blatant tribalism. So everyone who would already have been convinced is still convinced and you aren’t even trying to get anyone else involved. So if the purpose was getting people angry at each other over the topic of books, well, good job? I’ll lock myself in during Novelgate while nothing of any value gets accomplished.
Actually looking back on my past year of reading, I probably hit around 50% female because I just tore through all of the Vorkosigan saga, but otherwise it’s mostly male. Probably because I read a lot of fantasy/sci-fi for my dose of fiction and those tend to be disproportionately male authors. Looking at my library, most of my mystery collection has female authors (may Elizabeth Peters rest in peace) while the rest leans male. I’d actually like to see a breakdown of the genders of authors by genre to see if this holds true and if so, which way the causality arrow points.
Anyways, it might be useful to put together a solid recommendation list of authors who fulfill these criteria across different genres and the books you should check out by them. The original article literally just throws out a bunch of names. It’s kind of worthless in that regard; sell me on why I should check out this book instead of spending my time on a Neil Gaiman short story collection.
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Patrick said:
Agreed. I went into the article expecting the usual passive aggressive social justice “I’m not really attacking you in a way that I’m courageous enough to admit to but I am strongly implying derogatory things about you” nonsense. But other than the title of the project, it was REALLY mild.
Checking my bookshelf wouldn’t help because I use this nifty life hack that let’s me get any book I want totally free. It’s called libel. Or liberty? Maybe it was Lye Berry? I can’t remember, something like that though.
But since my non internet and non technical reading is fantasy and science fiction excluding military sci fi, alternate history, and grimdark, I’m pretty sure that my author count is damn near equal in gender terms, and also 100% white.
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Held In Escrow said:
I know my local lying berry system lets you look at your checkout history online, so you can try that if you don’t just read stuff in the stacks.
For me once I had a Kindle and a job I didn’t really look back; it’s so cheap and convenient!
But yeah, the body of the article wasn’t even really dogwhistling hard, but you know that the greatest of outrage scientists spent months in the labs trying to figure out the best catchphrase to rile up the base and make an enemy to fight against (because you know that the counter-outrage machine is going to spin on up).
That said, I honestly am not sure if some of the authors I’ve read recently are LGBT or minorities; they’re mainly e-books so I never have a chance to accidentally run across a picture or bio of them unless I google their name (and even then plenty don’t have their pic show up on wiki).
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Patrick said:
I’ve moved four times in the past seven years, so that won’t work without far more effort than I’m willing to invest.
I rarely bother looking at author bios, so it’s theoretically possible that some authors are minorities and I didn’t notice. But I doubt it’s more than trace amounts.
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Susebron said:
Never trust libraries. They’re tools of the evil Librarian conspiracy to suppress all knowledge that doesn’t conform to their agenda. When was the last time you read a book about silimatics, or Nalhalla, or Oculators?
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jossedley said:
Recommendations:
Octavia Butler is an underappreciated sci fi gem. Her characters are well realized, her plots are inventive. The conflicts in her work are often highly informed by the experience of assimilating in a dominant culture, so they can be eye-opening or evocative, but they’re never preachy.
I also really like Walter Mosley. His mysteries and short stories are again, informed by his life experiences, but his work stands out for its effective creation of time and place and terrific characterization. And his more experimental stuff is even better, but not everyone’s cup of tea.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
What tickled my funnybone was her saying “Don’t read Neil Gaiman, read minority authors”, when Neil Gaiman is Jewish 🙂
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Me commenting on this is probably a bad idea.
Then again, about 95% of every choice I’ve made in life has probably been a bad idea, so why stop now?
My own personal reaction to this is to be cross that someone is telling me “Stop reading those books, start reading these books” because hell with you mate, I’ll read what I like!
And stating something negatively – “read fewer” is okay, but “don’t read” is prescriptive – makes it easier to present it as a bad thing, that you want to ban books or authors or something. Don’t read these writers because of the colour of their skin or their sexuality when what you are asking for is “These guys are plenty popular enough already, how about trying somebody from this pile?”
Personally, and this is only personal, I’d prefer “Read more of these authors here” than “Don’t read those authors there”.
You can pick up Chinese classics like Journey to the West or Story of the Stone, Japanese classics like Tale of Genji, or Indian classics like the Ramayana. You can read science fiction by authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, or Ted Chiang.
Well, some of us have been reading them when we can get our grubby little paws on them. When I was twelve, I fell in love with both Hanuman and Sun Wukong because of a Penguin (or rather, Puffin, its children’s imprint) anthology of folklore and mythology from around the world, which included extracts from the Ramayana and Journey to the West in English translations.
This kind of list, I am sorry to say, sounds to me like the “Eat your broccoli” of literature. I don’t see anything about “Read these because they’re fucking amazing writers” but “To get your Recommended Adult Daily Allowance of Right-On Diversity, try Monday – trans male author! Tuesday – nonbinary Polynesian author!” and so forth.
There are books and writers I’ll never read because they just don’t interest me. I’ve never read Ender’s Game not for any political or religious reasons, but because I don’t want to. I’ve never read any Sheri Tepper, ditto. No Lois McMaster Bujold because military SF (hard, soft or in-between) does not float my boat.
However, if a new translation of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” comes out tomorrow, I’ll probably be all over it, because I love that poem – not because I was told to read it as a Great Classic of the Western Canon, but because I stumbled across a second-rate English translation when I was fifteen and I was hooked and remain so since (I’ll cage-fight anyone on whether Dante or Milton is the greater poet; sure, Milton is a marvellous poet in the English language, but Dante is greater – and Chaucer will be my corner man on that one).
Don’t tell me I need more roughage in my literary diet. Shove a book into my hands because you can’t stop raving about how goddamn fantastic it is. Don’t tell me to stop reading Stephen King (though I fell away with his later books and have only hesitantly come back to his most recent ones because he’s getting better again). Tell me to read his latest, then this guy. Or girl. Or non-binary Polynesian author.
I think China Miéville is a good writer. I will also, on pain of having my eyes poked out, not willingly read China Miéville because I get sick, sore and sorry of the politicking shoved down my neck – capitalism and Western democracy in its modern day guise of crony politics is awful, yes, I got that the first dozen times in the text you mentioned it.
I think H.P. Lovecraft was horrifically racist and I disagree with his nihilist, materialist atheist philosophy, and also he was a hack writer. But I’ll re-read At the Mountains of Madness or The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath for the purple prose and Pelion piled on Ossa of the plot about unknown and terrible horrors beneath the veil of what we think is reality.
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Patrick said:
Re Bujold- all everyone talks about is her military SF, but vorkosigan is her weakest work. Try literally anything else. Her other writing isn’t military SF, and is, uh, sometimes quite good.
I’d personally recommend the Chalion books. They do something a little bit experimental, and I’ve read reviews that didn’t *get* them and hated them, but better a failed experiment than more same old same old, right?
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Held In Escrow said:
The Chalion books are just really weird. I can’t say I exactly recommend them unless you really want to try something experimental and enjoy angst.
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Bugmaster said:
I agree re: Chalion books. I could never get into them.
Also, Louis McMaster Bujold is apparently a “she”; I had no idea. *shrug*
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Patrick said:
“Lois”
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Rauwyn said:
I’d be curious to hear why you disliked the Chalion books; I really enjoyed them but couldn’t place what made them feel so different. I’m also a big fan of the Vorkosigan books, though.
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Bugmaster said:
@Patrick:
Sorry, non-standard spellings are tough to pull off on the phone 😦
My kingdom for an edit button…
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Bugmaster said:
@Rauwyn:
It’s hard to tell. It’d been a while since I tried reading them, but I found the writing boring and verging on impenetrable. Perhaps I just didn’t put enough effort into it, I’m not sure…
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Patrick said:
Boring is fair. Kinda. The experiment she’s up to in them literally requires that parts be boring. She’s trying to write books that depict transformative religious experiences. This requires that she create contrast between the mundane and the divine. So parts, particularly the beginnings, are intentionally dull, with slowly building angst and frustration. The payoff is supposed to be in the elevating and transforming experience later in the book.
Which does mean that half or more if the book is intended to be just interesting enough that you keep reading, but never satisfying. I understand people not liking it. But experiments like these fascinate me, and I’ll always forgive questionable implementation of something new.
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Bugmaster said:
@Patrick:
> But experiments like these fascinate me, and I’ll always forgive questionable implementation of something new.
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. An besides, just because I personally found the book boring, doesn’t mean that no one else should read it !
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kalvarnsen said:
“Tuesday – nonbinary Polynesian author!”
The Bone People is a pretty good book.
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ninecarpals said:
Oh man, seconding The Bone People. I should go reread that.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Keri Hulme! I loved The Bone People but yes, I could see why there was fuss over it winning the Booker. Yes, I read it when it was published over here first.
And being Irish, I found her Irish-background characters a little bit unconvincingly written, but hey, would I do any better trying to write about New Zealanders? 🙂
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stillnotking said:
Compared to what? 🙂
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Whatever the heck Chine Miéville thinks is better – don’t ask me, I never had the patience to disentangle it.
Same way I think the late Iain Banks was a very, very good writer but the Culture (despite the marvellous ship names) drives me nuts. It’s just as oppressive and hegemonic as anything it opposes, it’s simply nicer (for a very particular definition of ‘nice’) to its human pets.
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Bugmaster said:
> Whatever the heck Chine Miéville thinks is better
Yeah, I read some of his (her ?) books, and I can’t even tell what the hell is supposed to be going on half the time.
> but the Culture (despite the marvellous ship names) drives me nuts. It’s just as oppressive and hegemonic as anything it opposes, it’s simply nicer (for a very particular definition of ‘nice’) to its human pets.
Yes ! I’m glad to finally discover I’m not the only one who thinks so 🙂
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kalvarnsen said:
China is a pretty orthodox neoMarxist socialist, although the closest that he comes to depicting a post-capitalist state in his books is in “Iron Council”.
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Bugmaster said:
By the way, if you love Lovecraft, you should check out Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. Just to use one example, I think their rendition of Shadow over Innsmouth is actually better than the original — because of the way they handled the ending. And you should absolutely check out the Dreams in the Witch House rock opera. Because it is a freaking Rock Opera. It rocks. I listened to it on my way to work, and ended up air-guitaring all day.
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Bugmaster said:
Argh, forgot to close that italics tag… since my comment is in moderation anyway, perhaps someone can fix it ? Sorry 😦
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Bugmaster said:
Another perspective here:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/23/the-social-justice-warrior-racist-reading-challenge-a-fisking/
Admittedly, some of it went over my head, since I am not familiar with all of the institutions the author mentions.
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stillnotking said:
I don’t see a lot of discussion as to why such a large majority of mainstream-successful, contemporary authors are white men, but here’s my theory. Writers, like everyone else, tend to follow the path of least resistance. There’s a very large “ghetto” for women authors, romance novels, and a smaller one for minority authors, the overt racial polemic beloved of NYT literary critics and Manhattan coffee tables. While neither of these markets are “mainstream”, it’s considerably easier for women and minorities, respectively, to succeed in them than it is to succeed in the broader market. (Note: I use “ghetto” advisedly. Some books in both categories are actually excellent, and deserve more success than they get.) White men have no such “exclusive” category beckoning to them.
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stillnotking said:
Oh, and I should point out that romance novels are a much bigger market than many people realize. According to La Wik, 55% of the paperback books sold in North America in 2004 were romance novels. So “mainstream” is a bit of a prejudicial word.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
We could get into a real argument (or discussion) over what constitutes the mainstream; the classical ‘proper’ literary novel is a minority of everything that’s published, and genre snobbery makes me disgruntled. I’ve pretty much stopped reading “proper” novels, since I read one too many of what I personally call The Hampstead Adultery Novel: middle-middle to upper-middle class persons in the professions and/or academia having nice, quiet mid-life crises about their comfortable lives and the accompanying feeling of vague lack of accomplishment now they’re in their forties; often signified by the male partner of the couple having an affair with the au pair (or it may be the literary novel version of the Manic Dream Pixie Girl, one of his students if he’s an academic or a working-class girl at his place of employment if he’s a professional) and the female member of the couple may or may not leave and ask for a divorce, optional affair of her own.
No thank you, I couldn’t eat another bite.
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stillnotking said:
I completely agree; there should be more minority and women authors in the literary mainstream, and concomitantly fewer Hampstead Adultery Novels. It’s just my nature to be more interested in the descriptive than the prescriptive, or at least to prioritize it.
I strongly suspect the reason is not that readers have a secret antipathy to black lesbians or an overwhelming appetite for the next H.A.N., so I’m trying to come up with other plausible explanations.
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kalvarnsen said:
Some of the worst offenders in terms of writing “Hampstead Adultery Novels” have been women.
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anonymousCoward said:
I am starving, literally starving, for truly excellent media to consume. Sturgeon’s Law is a harsh master. “Truly excellent media” to me, though, means media that hit the contours of my brain in just the right way to throw off brilliant new sparks of creativity. Mignola and Nehei have done that. King did it, once upon a time. There’s a genre I’m addicted to that I don’t think even has a name, and I’ve been able to find less than a dozen examples of it. If you have a new one, *I WILL READ IT*, because I’ve been searching literally years for a fresh iteration (for those curious, it’s the genre of Roadside Picnic, Hinterlands by William Gibson, and Project Long Stairs).
Tell me why a piece is interesting to you, and I’ll learn some about you and probably have a fairly good idea whether the story is interesting to me as well. If it is, I will read it.
If the best you can say for a piece is to list identity tags of the author, I have better things to do.
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InferentialDistance said:
Are you perchance referring to Tsutomu Nihei, author of “BLAME!”?
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anonymousCoward said:
THAT IS EXACTLY WHO I AM REFERRING TO!
Apologies for spelling the name wrong. Reading BLAME! for the first time was one of a handful of times in my life when I could feel my brain changing, and knew that whatever I made from that point on would be fundamentally different.
For me, he was the fictional version of reading about Graham’s Number.
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InferentialDistance said:
Nihei is a gem, I’ve loved him ever since a friend gave me a copy of SNIKT! to read.
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LTP said:
I’m the same, though not with those books. I’m a ravenous reader… when a book really interests me. I’ve similarly found very few books that replicate my mysterious genre. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?
I get that there are people who read literally hundreds of novels a year, but I’m not one of them, so I’m not going to go out of my way to read non white male authors to fulfill some quota.
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LTP said:
Just to clarify, if I find an intriguing book by a non-white man, I will read it. I just mean I won’t deliberately seek them out to the exclusion of stuff by white men.
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Bugmaster said:
When you say “Roadside Picnic“, are you referring to the story by the brothers Strugatskiy ? Can you read Russian ? Because if so, rusf.ru is your oyster. If not, I think that Snail on the Mountainside (or however you translate “Улитка на склоне”) might still be readable in English. Krapivin’s Great Crystal cycle is completely different, and yet, somehow the same — but I’m not sure if it has ever been adequately translated…
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anonymousCoward said:
That’s the one, but sadly no, I don’t read russian. Looking up Snail on the Mountainside right now. Thanks for the tip!
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Matthew said:
It’s Snail on the Slope.
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Bugmaster said:
In this case, you may be interested in Hard to be a God (“Трудно быть богом”, what is it with these incompetent translations ?), followed by the Maxim Kammerer trilogy: Prisoners of Power (“Обитаемый Остров”, so I see they just gave up on translating the titles by then, because how hard it is to say “Inhabited Island” ?), Beetle in the Anthill (“Жук в муравейнике”, surprisingly not a terrible translation), and The Time Wanderers (WTF ?), a.k.a. The Waves Extinguish the Wind (“Волны гасят ветер”, so why didn’t they just say that the first time ?).
Strictly speaking you don’t need to read Hard to be a God, but IMO it sets up the gut-punch of Beetle in the Anthill perfectly. You could probably skip Prisoners of Power; it’s referenced in the subsequent books, but only somewhat peripherally… Though of course it’s a great book in its own right.
If you ever had any kind of rosy dreams about the Singularity (among other things), prepare to have them thoroughly shattered in that special way that only the Strugatskiy brothers can deliver. I am also compelled to note that, at the time when these books were written, the concept of the Singularity did not technically exist.
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Nita said:
Do you primarily think in Russian? In English, “inhabited” is just a regular word, not a quirky rarity / neologism. Also, “desert island” seems to be more a common phrase than “uninhabited island”.
Generally, translators of fiction strive to reproduce the effect of the original text, not to translate every word separately. There is a tradeoff between effect / comprehensibility and literal accuracy.
(I’m not a translator myself, I just have a love-hate relationship with this utterly impossible activity.)
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Psmith_in_the_city said:
“A Colder War,” Charles Stross.
The first couple of books in the Laundry files are sorta similar, but “A Colder War” is a lot closer to what you described.
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anonymousCoward said:
A Colder war is freakin amazing, and comes close. It’s just so goddamn short, and I hunger for more.
But yeah, the collision between humanity’s drive to understand and tame the world around them, and the existence of things that utterly defy understanding and control. Whether it’s the Zone, the Highway, or the Long Stairs, we just can’t let it go, can’t cover it up and walk away. We have to stick our fingers in the hole and feel around, even when the last guy came back missing his whole arm…
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Susebron said:
@aC
Have you read Ian Tregillis’s Milkweed series? It’s pretty similar to what you describe. It starts out as Nazi supermen vs. British warlocks, and gets more complicated from there.
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Psmith_in_the_city said:
I should have known that you’d already gotten to it. It’s a fantastic little universe
“It’s just so goddamn short, and I hunger for more.”
100% agree.
Y’all ever read any Tim Powers? I think at this point we’re straying a little from what aC had in mind, strictly speaking, but Declare and Three Days to Never work pretty well in this general vein.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
“Project Long Stairs”? Do you mean that RPG.net setting where nuclear bombs lead modern military into a fantasy world. Basically Stargate meets Dungeons & Dragons meets Apocolpyse Now?
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anonymousCoward said:
YES INDEED.
Its an amazing piece of world-building. I highly recommend it to anyone with some time to kill.
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?391379-setting-riff-Voices-From-Below-and-the-Long-Stairs
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Have you tried Gene Wolfe? His short story collections “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories” melted my brain in a good way, back in my teens.
Looking back, the amount of really good SF I managed to get my hands on through the library in my teenage years is astounding, considering this was Small Rural Irish Town – God bless you, Victor Gollancz SF imprint! The yellow dustjackets with bright red print were as basic and eye-searing as they came, but the contents were fantastic!
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Susebron said:
“So really we should do two challenges: three months of reading only white male authors; three months of reading only authors that are not white men. If the latter is easier (which it should be, given that white men are a minority of the English-speaking population), then you clearly have no problems and can wear your My Reading Choices Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist badge with pride. On the other hand, if the former is easier, then maybe you are part of the problem with underrepresentation of women and people of color.”
But surely it will be easier to read only white male authors than not read only authors who are not white men, simply because they’re so overrepresented already in mainstream fiction? Assuming that the number of books read is constant, reading only white men simply requires that you pay a bit of attention to who is the author to make sure that they’re not female or non-white. Reading only authors who are not white ior male requires that effort and also may require that you look harder in order to find the same number of books.
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Jiro said:
You have discovered the SJW trick of telling you that things which are perfectly normal should make you feel guilty.
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Toggle said:
So, one red flag here is that the post spends a not-insignificant number of sentences establishing that people who oppose this plan are Racist Transphobic Poopy Heads Who Don’t Respect Diversity Very Much. Not all of them, of course. Just, you know, some prominent ones who we’re going to quote a couple times. Not that everyone who disagrees is like that, I’m sure. But maybe we could look really carefully at people who disagree just to make extra sure that they’re not secret racists?
It is… disappointing, I guess is the word, to see a basically underhanded tactic like that being used here. It’s obvious that these guys aren’t making particularly strong arguments against the ‘don’t read white guys’ plan; I mean, if nothing else, the Daubney quote is nonsensical. So why quote them at all, in a post that is otherwise introducing the idea? If you want to discuss the merits and weaknesses, do so. If you want to find strong arguments that other people are making, or just work out a steelman yourself, those are both reasonable approaches. Don’t just try to tar opposition by association with bad arguments.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I don’t read books in order to signal political affiliations, and If I was going to signal like that, this is not the signal I would send.
I read books in order to be enlightened or entertained. The probability that the next Neil Gaiman book will entertain me nearly 1. The probability that a book randomly selected because the author was of a politically correct demographic will entertain me is… a lot less. I already buy books faster than I can read them, and thats almost all books that come specifically recommended. The idea that I should dilute my reading list with books randomly selected by author demographic is insane.
It is vulgar to make artistic criticism about politics.
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Matthew said:
I think other people have covered the “toxoplasma of rage” aspect of this.
I’ll just point out that it creates some weird incentives for signalling virtue:
Alice reads 50 books in 2015, of which 10 are by women and/or minorities.
Bob reads 5 books in 2015, all of which are by women and/or minorities.
But apparently Bob is the virtuous one? Because he’s managed to avoid reading anything by straight white men, while 80% of Alice’s reading was.
——-
Separately, I’d endorse (different) efforts to encourage people to read more diverse authors, but for completely different reasons. The “broaden your horizons” thing seems like bs to me. I mean, I oppose racism, but I attribute approximately 0% of my anti-racism to having been assigned to read Black Boy and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in school. Supposedly it works for some people, given what history claims was the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but I’m skeptical how broadly it works generally.
On the other hand, I do suspect there are supply side issues in publishing that effectively penalize minority groups, so I think encouraging people to give them a boost at the margin makes sense for economic justice.
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veronica d said:
I have a solution: If you do this, don’t tell anyone. Just read the books. Then the signaling nonsense goes away and you’re just exploring some cool material you might have otherwise missed. Easy peasy.
Also, I see no one linking this exercise to “virtue,” so that’s your own damage.
Plus comparing Alice to Bob misses the point cuz THIS IS NOT A CONTEST.
If Alice reads 50 books a year and switches to this program, and if she reads at the same rate, then she will (we hope) read 50 books by non-white-dudes. Which good for Alice. She’ll get to see much she would not have. Some authors treated poorly by the pipeline will get a smidgen more exposure. And next year the very best white-dude books will be there waiting.
But what if, by trying this, Alice turns into Bob?
On that, I’ll say this: If choosing to forgo white-dude authors somehow causes Alice to read *fewer* non-white-dude authors than she otherwise would have — well that would be a really weird outcome and I cannot understand how it happened. But anyway, if she starts doing this, and like a few months in she finds her rate of non-white-dude book consumption has dropped compared to what it was when she still was open to white-dudes, then she should discontinue the experiment. Or something.
Are these true rejections?
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Matthew said:
Also, I see no one linking this exercise to “virtue,” so that’s your own damage.
1. Just because the word “virtue” isn’t employed explicitly doesn’t mean the self-congratulation isn’t there. 2. I suspect I find attributing disagreement to other people’s “damage” a lot more offensive than you do; please don’t do that again unless you want an avalanche of hostility in response.
Are these true rejections?
Well, they’re certainly true. But not necessary for me. Because a)I flat out reject anyone dictating my reading choices, for any reason, and b)I’m uncertain about the ethnicity or sexual orientation of everyone I’ve read in the past couple years, but as far as women go, off the top of my head, just in the past two years I’ve read Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw and Among Others, all five of Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century books, the first two of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, and Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart. All of which I read because I had reason to believe they were good books, not because of author demographics.
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veronica d said:
An avalanche? Really? On an Internet forum? What does that even look like?
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Matthew said:
A stream of angry words that picks up size and momentum as it goes along. Not really a complicated metaphor, unless one is being deliberately obtuse.
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veronica d said:
Ah, yes. If you feel you need to do that, go ahead. I don’t think it will help much, however. I’m pretty unflappable.
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Matthew said:
I think it’s pretty telling that your response to a request not to employ phrasing that other people find upsetting is to 1)be snide and then 2)be smug.
Maybe we should intentionally misgender you for a while? It’s only words.
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ozymandias said:
FTR, intentionally misgendering people on my blog will get you banned.
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Matthew said:
It was a rhetorical question, intended to get Veronica D. to recognize that she is being an asshole, not a serious suggestion.
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Nita said:
It seems like Veronica was responding to the threat, not to the request. FWIW, the “threat” raised my eyebrows, too, but I decided to consider it a case of defensive posturing (“Kitty’s got claws”).
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InferentialDistance said:
…
*flat stare*
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veronica d said:
@InferentialDistance — Well fine. I actually think Ozy is wrong to frame it that way and I certainly would not.
On the other hand, I notice they and Scott use a kinda-similar argument on behalf of effective altruism: something like [paraphrase] “Give 10% and you can stand tall.” I guess that’s how they view things. Maybe it comes with the “scrupulosity” package.
Myself, I’ve never suffered even a shred of scrupulosity. So yay me or something.
Anyway, I would argue that *for myself*, I see the desire to broaden one’s perspective a matter of pure self improvement. I want to know more about the world, and since the human world is a social world, I want to know about people, and to know about people I like to listen to them.
Plus I suppose non-white-dude authors probably do get kind of a raw deal in the market. ’Cept perhaps women romance writers. They seem to do well. Or something. Gender has some strange fault lines, but race certainly does not.
Still, I bet a lot of you read mostly dudes.
I seem to recall something I heard from a black SciFi author, probably Octavia Butler, saying how her publisher didn’t want her portrait on the cover, if they were going to shelve it with SciFi, but *did* if they were to shelve it with black fiction. But she didn’t want to be put in black fiction, cuz ghetto, so she had no portrait on her book.
Which is probably kinda fucked up, but her publisher thought it would kill sales if readers knew she was black. I bet they were correct. In the past, plenty of women hid their sex. I think that latter thing is getting better, but recently.
Maybe it’s cuz feminism actually works.
######
Lemme give kind of a cynical analysis of this: I’m a fucking tranny. I don’t need to earn social justice cookies. I mean, I automatically win that game, as every little cis-SJ activist lines up to tell me how much they support me.
(It actually gets annoying sometimes. I went to see Janet Mock once, and the way the cis fangirls looked at me was just — well — weird. Like, I’M A PERSON AND NOT A TOKEN OF YOUR SOCIAL JUSTICE ACHIEVEMENTS! DON’T INVITE ME TO YOUR THING JUST TO CHECK OFF A BOX!)
Blah.
So anyway, maybe this “don’t read white dudes” sounds that way to you. And maybe it *is* to some degree. Fine. Social justice has all kinds of annoying and silly failure modes.
But be bigger than that. Reverse stupidity isn’t smart.
######
The zeitgeist prefers books by white-dude authors. Thus the market does. Thus the zeitgeist does. Thus the market does. (It’s a cycle, get it? We call this “structural.”)
Hey! A big social justice word!
Anyway, blah, blah, blah. I think I’ll start a new thread down below about *why* I think you should read diverse stuff. But for now let me say: it has value all its own.
Anyway, the zeitgeist, the market — if you *want* to find more diverse stuff, you probably have to kind of work at it. Which it too bad, and if you don’t want to do that work I’m not going to scream. I mean, I think it would help if more people did pursue more diversity, but if that’s someone’s worst flaw I won’t freak out.
I judge people on other stuff, like are they solid, are the loyal, are they honest, are they kind — if I OD’ed on drugs would they take me to the hospital or dump me on the side of the road? If they find a wallet, do they return it? That’s the shit I judge.
But I think pursuing diversity is admirable, the same way I think that running a marathon is admirable, or making a cool piece of software — or maybe just being super smart and fun to talk to.
But I ain’t giving out social justice cookies. Fuck that shit.
But yeah, diversity — it’s a worthy goal, and if you want to do it, you’re running against the grain of the zeitgeist — unless you operate in like radical left queer circles or whatever, but you don’t — so something like “don’t read white dudes for a year” is a life hack to *force you into making the effort*. That’s it. It’s like, “I won’t buy any snack food, so I won’t snack” — I won’t do *this* so I have to do *that*.
Myself, no way. I plan to reread Raymond Chandler this year, plus maybe Karl Edward Wagner. That dude rocked.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
“white men are a minority of the English-speaking population”
Citation needed, both for English as native and as second language, unless you’re referring to the slightly higher number of while women.
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ozymandias said:
If you count up all the people who speak English, about fifty percent of them are women. Of the fifty percent who are men, at least one is a person of color (citation: I am monolingual and I have spoken to at least one man of color). Therefore, white men are a minority of the English-speaking population.
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Jiro said:
That is both true and relevant only if you don’t keep shifting between talking about white males (who are not a majority for the reason you state) and talking about all whites (who are a majority). For instance,
shifts between “white male” and “white” between two adjacent sentences.
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ozymandias said:
Yes. And then I talked about women two sentences later, because the information I could find wasn’t broken down by race and gender and combining separate studies about separate samples is dishonest and bad statistics.
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kalvarnsen said:
It’s interesting that you use statistics about English-speakers, but then encourage people to read translated works to satisfy their non-white-man criteria (Genji, Ramayana etc were not written by English speakers).
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ozymandias said:
kalvarnsen: If you have access to better statistics, I would be happy to edit the post to include them.
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Jiro said:
Ozy: Doing it and admitting it two sentences later is better than doing it and not admitting it, but you’re still doing it. The two claims are different enough that evidence and supporting arguments for one fail against the other, yet you juxtapose them in a way which implies that demonstrates the other. Bradford’s statistics about people of color do *not* demonstrate that the writers that are successful are disproportionately white and male.
I even fell for this myself, until shemtealeaf showed that the writers in the NYT bestseller list aren’t disproportionately male at all.
And with respect to the New York Times list, it’s true that white men are a minority of the English-speaking population, but it’s false that whites are a minority of the English-speaking population Likewise, it’s true that whites are a minority of the English-speaking population of the world, but it’s false that whites are a minority of the English-speaking population measured by the New York Times bestseller list. It’s wrong just to mix these things up.
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kalvarnsen said:
@Ozy: I’m not really inclined to do the work of trying to make your argument more coherent for you, but even if I were, I don’t think I could, because I don’t get what your argument actually is, beyond “People should read less books by white male authors”.
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Nornagest said:
As long as we’re playing statistical pedantry games, I’ll just note here that gender ratio at birth tends to be skewed in favor of men by somewhere on the order of 5 to 8 percent. Women live longer, so in first-world societies there tend to be slightly more women than men still living, but a youth-heavy population can tip it the other way. I haven’t got a clue what that looks like for English speakers at large, but I do know that an awful lot of them are in places like India (which has a young enough population to be majority-male).
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Dirdle said:
I don’t think this is contradictory, but something feels. Not quite right? Sure, you can be part of a problem without being an awful *ist monster, but can you really claim to be motivated purely by rational desire to enrich your life if you’re also trying not to be part of a problem?
On the whole, trying to enrich your life by reading more broadly is probably a good idea (“People should be encouraged to consume content from cultures not their own, even if they would initially prefer not to” seems probably correct. The stronger force-people-to-read-broadly bullet seems too tough for my teeth, but not unbiteable), and deliberately buying works of minority authors to encourage publishers to encourage more minority authors is a good idea. Phrasing it as ‘read less of certain authors ‘ seems like an odd way to go about it. I’d expect people to feel like their tastes are being attacked even with caution made to note that that’s not the case. The question of phrasing has been explored in greater depth above, though.
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Walter said:
Hard enough to get new readers. Reading pool is poisoned by encouraging readers to flip to author bio and audit for proper skin color/ethnicity/religious believe/sexuality/handicapped status.
Instead of phrasing as “don’t read Jewish (sorry, whitemalecisgender) authors”, maybe phrase as “here are some great books by trans colored authors that I recommend”.
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queenshulamit said:
How the hell did you get “Jewish” from “white male cisgender”?
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Walter said:
Just a cheap rhetorical trick. Reader is supposed to think. “Hey, I’m not an antisemite!”, then, before they respond see the correction and have a thought corresponding roughly to “oh, no, its cool, I’m just an anti-dudebro-ite.” and then, ideally, they think “hmm, why is the one anathema and the other fine?”
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no one special said:
Walter: Oh, I am disappointed. I thought you went to look at the article, where she has a great big picture of herself(?) holding Neil Gaiman’s _American Gods_, with a big cross-out over it. Neil Gaiman is Jewish.
The illustrated example in the article is a Jewish author.
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Lambert said:
And wearing a Dr Who t-shirt. Guess who wrote numerous episodes for that?
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veronica d said:
Lists like that exist. In fact, they are commonplace. Here is one.
A similar list floats across my dash every few weeks. I assume there are tons I do not see. However, I bet if you Google “books by {black/trans/queer/minority/whatever} authors” you’ll encounter many such lists. I just Googled “books by trans authors” and the screen was full of them.
The point is, those lists exist now. They are common. Thus the media environment *right now* is what happens in the presence of such lists. The distribution between *books by white-dudes* and *books by not-white-dudes* is exactly what exists in the presence of such lists. Your reading habits are what they are when those lists exists. So saying “just link to those lists” is facile, since people already do that quite a lot.
I indeed support linking to such lists. It is a good thing. In fact, I got that link from Ozy’s Tumblr feed. So if you follow zir there, you saw it.
#####
However, what does one do if they still want more diversity, past what the presence of such lists has provided?
Consider, you read such a list. You find one or two books you might like. You add them to your Amazon wish list (or however you shop for books). Okay, but then your friend tells you about the new book by Joe Beltbuckle McStrongjaw, some cool thing about space marines fighting robot battle maids.
Well, that sounds awesome! Space marines are badass. Robot battle maids are HAWT! So you go pick up Mr. McStrongjaw’s latest. The trans books wait.
But then, as you are about to finish the space-marines-battle-maids yarn — where the lead character, Dirk, subverts the phallopatriarchy by helping the battle maid Elise hack her own programming to bring down the evil (but sexy) Queen Colander — or whatever —
(Note, I would probably do a bad job writing books about space marines and robot battle maids. I might fail to capture the quiddity of such things.)
Anyway, as you finish the book, your friend suddenly decides to run Call of Cthulhu using his 900 page labor-of-love homebrew RPG system, and you wanna play so you decide to reread all of Lovecraft —
And look, there is nothing wrong with reading about space marines or battle maids or even Lovecraft (but maybe you’ll skip over all the interminably boring dreamlands stuff; your call). But as I said above, the market and the zeitgeist are gonna keep feeding you white-dudes — and sure, it’s good stuff —
But maybe you really actually wanna read more diverse material and not for social justice cookies and not for status and not cuz guilt, but just cuz you wanna hear new voices from people who are super different from everyone else you read.
Then you might say, hey! no white guys for a while. Not forever. White guys (some of them) write great shit. But just for a spell, I’ll try branching out. The white guys will be waiting for me when I’m done.
That is all.
Folks on this forum make literally everything tribal.
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queenshulamit said:
This is way off topic, but since the eggplant argument happened I presume it will be allowed.
I could not read 50 books in a year.
There was a time when I could. Not now.
When I first became mentally ill aged 19, my ability to read got damaged and has recovered slightly but not completely.
I want to fix this.
I don’t know how.
Posting because maybe somebody in the thread has a solution.
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Held In Escrow said:
Have you tried audiobooks?
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kalvarnsen said:
If it makes you feel any better I think a lot of the people who brag about how many books they read are inflating their numbers because reading books is seen as an intellectually prestigious activity.
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ninecarpals said:
@Queenshulamit
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Rauwyn said:
Queenshulamit, can you elaborate at all on what it feels like when you try to read / what keeps you from being able to read books? Is it specifically a problem with reading or does it also apply to other things that require focus or concentration?
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ninecarpals said:
Well I just accidentally a comment. That’s embarrassing.
Anyway, I was going to say that I don’t know if you can call the eggplant deal an argument. There isn’t really an argument against eggplant, see.
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ozymandias said:
the argument against eggplant is that it is GROSS and you people are RIDICULOUS.
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ninecarpals said:
Tangential note: I think there’s a strong argument in favor of arguing about eggplant here, given how serious we can all get, and how valuable bonding over something silly can be when it comes to improving group dynamics.
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veronica d said:
I didn’t really follow the eggplant fight except I wanna say my g/f’s eggplant parm is like the greatest thing ever and anyone who disagrees (I humbly submit) is totally wrong (she says throwing down a gauntlet and preparing for a storm of furious outrage)
(which is actually kinda strange cuz what was veronica doing carrying around a gauntlet?)
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veronica d said:
Saying “Well I just accidentally a comment” was delightfully meta.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
The argument against eggplant is that its proper name is aubergine (as zucchini is courgette and cilantro is coriander) 🙂
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Susebron said:
Having an opinion on eggplant is morally and logically equivalent either to compulsory sexuality or homophobia, depending on what your opinion is.
1. Many things have two purposes, which can be summarized as business and pleasure.
1.1. For example,a pencil can be used to write down important information, or to doodle. Clothes can be used for protection from the environment, or for fashion. Computers can be used to apply for jobs, or to argue about eggplant.
2. Food and sex have the twin purposes of survival and pleasure.
2.1. Sex is basically group-level food.
3. Some uses of food/sex use one purpose, but not the other.
3.1. For example, eating stuff that tastes bad but is good for you fulfills business but not pleasure.
3.2. Gay sex fulfills pleasure, but not business.
3.3. All else equal, it is morally okay to fulfill only one purpose.
4. In your opinion, eggplant provides sustenance, but not pleasure.
4..4.1 Not eating eggplant fails to fulfill business, but does fulfill pleasure (because you don’t have to eat eggplant).
4.4.2. Therefore, not eating eggplant is morally and logically equivalent to gay sex.
4.4.3. As a result, opposing eggplant is morally and logically equivalent to encouraging compulsory sexuality.
4.4.4. Furthermore, supporting eggplant is morally and logically equivalent to opposing homosexuality.
My logic is impeccable. Everyone must now give up their opinions.
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Matthew said:
Arguments against eggplant:
1. The texture.
2. The taste.
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBYPLF0jDS0
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ninecarpals said:
By far the most valuable lesson my beloved college bioethics professor taught me was that well-meaning, intelligent people sometimes come to different conclusions about an issue, and that’s okay. I am a more compassionate, thoughtful person thanks to her.
Tolerance, however, only extends so far. Pistols at dawn, you anti-eggplant heretics.
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Matthew said:
That’s just silly. Why would you want to drive up demand (and therefore the price)?
In any case, the chances of you getting me to duel at dawn are about as good as you getting me to attend a seminar at dawn or go for a hike at dawn. The shooting can start at high noon when I am actually awake. Also, we should have a post at some point about how night owls are structurally oppressed by larks, and I’m not even kidding about that.
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ninecarpals said:
I can compromise with noon. I’m a reasonable person.
That’s actually super interesting. My instinct is to agree that night owls are looked down on and have disadvantageous when interacting with some institutions (school), but I’d like to hear more, especially around whether that dichotomy is even a thing.
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Nita said:
I used to dislike eggplants/aubergines back when I thought of them as the unfortunate, bitter cousins* of zucchinis/courgettes. But now I conceptualize them as one of those weird ingredients that are delicious only in a few specific dishes, and they’re OK in that role.
There, argument resolved. My opinion is the best 🙂
* In the culinary sense, of course — they’re not closely related.
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ozymandias said:
Bugmaster and Jiro have been banned for Making Ozy’s Comment Section More Annoying For Them To Read.
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davidmikesimon said:
Thank you.
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memeticengineer said:
I have greatly appreciated this place being a forum where social justice topic are presented, with the opportunity for people to freely discuss and potentially disagree in the comments. I hope that does not change to much! This blog, and in particular its relative comment freedom, is probably one of the top things that has made me feel relatively more pro-SJ and less anti-SJ.
(Posting this because it didn’t seem to me that they were particularly rude, hostile or offensive, so I am presuming their main offense was to disagree persistently. But I am pretty bad at interpreting social cues so I may have missed a way in which they were rude or otherwise did a bad thing. Your blog your rules of course! [Now that I think about it, commenting at all about moderation decisions is probably somewhat socially inappropriate but I guess I’ll do it anyway.])
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ozymandias said:
They mostly just annoyed me? Like, I noticed myself rolling my eyes whenever their names popped up, and it’s my comment section which I would like to be a pleasant environment for me. I have affectionate feelings for several persistent disagreers (hi, osberend! hi, sniffnoy!)– not to mention that that group includes several partners and ex-partners– so it seems unlikely to me that I would end up banning everyone anti-SJ-y.
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Sniffnoy said:
Hi Ozy! 🙂
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davidmikesimon said:
I can’t speak for why Ozy found them annoying, but to me it seemed that they persistently failed to read other comments charitably; that is, they seemed often to be responding to the SJ stereotypes in their heads instead of what was actually said.
That said, I tend to lean SJ myself, so I may be mindkilled in this assessment. However, I have noticed other commenters here challenging SJ memes charitably, so I do not think my standards are especially unreasonable.
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Nita said:
On one hand, I think these commenters mostly argued in good faith, so I’m sad to see them go. On the other hand, I’ve judged Ozy’s moderation choices too harsh in the past, but I do like the resulting discussion-space, so perhaps I should trust their taste (and strive to be less annoying).
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Lambert said:
Were they given any kind of warning?
It’s your blog and you can do what you want but it is probable that some indication that some action is persistantly annoying to Ozy and continuation thereof will result in a ban will allow people to change their behavior accordingly.
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veronica d said:
As an aside, I just came across this article, about the differences between trans stuff written by actual trans people versus the “trans narrative” as given to us by cis authors.
A highlight:
OMFG yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes and a yes a thousand more.
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veronica d said:
[So it’s late, but I said I’d type up an argument about why I think folks should at least kinda care about diversity. So here it is.]
It’s about cliché.
Okay look, this will be partly an aesthetic argument, so I’m not really trying to say, “OMG this stuff is bad and only bad people like it” — cuz I love all kinds of media that has all kinds of problems. But still, I like to kinda know what those problems are so I can fit what I’m reading into my larger life.
So yeah, it’s kinda aesthetic, but it’s also about truth.
For example, have you ever seen a movie where the characters find themselves in a secret military base?
Like, of course. Obvi. Tons.
But here is the question: how do the writers and the director and the visual effects people have any idea what a real secret military base looks like?
Like, it probably doesn’t matter, but hear me out.
Okay, they probably don’t. So they can use their imagination and dammit it’s just a movie. Fine. But their imagination? Like do they dream up some totally novel base? Actually what a lot of them probably do is just kinda copy shit they’ve seen in other movies about what secret military bases look like.
And actually, this is smart writing, since no one in the audience probably cares much about actual secret military bases, and just like the writers, the audience kinda knows what these bases are *supped to look like in the movies*, thus the writers kinda need to present that sort of thing. That way the audience knows what it is seeing. There is instant recognition. “This is a secret military base,” the audience member thinks. Now the story can proceed.
In fact, it’s possible that portraying a super realistic base, supposing the writers knew what one was like, could confuse the audience, if they happen to look nothing like movie secret bases.
(I have no idea. I’ve never been in a secret military base.)
#####
How about movies with special forces badass guys? Seen any of those?
Yeah, me too. Tons.
Are special forces guys really like that?
OMG you could have the longest most stupidest debate ever if you ask a bunch of brodudes a question like that. Cuz like they’re all totally sure they know everything about fighting and guns and weapons and all of that. And they’ll start -splaining and none of them will agree with each other and it’s kinda weird.
Anyway, blah, blah, blah. Get brodudes talking about violence and then stand back — the ultimate trolljob.
When I was a teen, I worked with this former Green Beret who had served in Vietnam. Anyway, this guy FUCKING HATED the movie _Rambo_. Like, you wanna hear a rant! This man could rant! He could outrant a hundred SJWs recently exposed to slightly problematic media created by male nerds.
He thought the movie was bullshit and totally disrespected the American soldier.
Which, I don’t really have any grounds to argue the point either way. The man certainly had grounds for his opinion. He had *standing*. I was a dumb kid who didn’t know shit.
On this topic, I still don’t know shit. I’ve seen a fuckton of movies about special forces badasses. I have no tools to determine which are real, which are respectful, and which are crass macho bullshit. I can guess. But how could I know for sure?
I kinda assume most special forces badass movies are just clichés, which are copied from other special forces badass movies, which were copied from other special forces badass movies — on back through time.
#####
Much of what we see in the media is copies of copies of copies of copies — writers who know tons about what others have written, but maybe haven’t lived so much themselves. How far can this go? Is there a place where it breaks down? Just too much “quoting” and not enough truth?
(And before you mention it, I like stuff like Tarantino. That isn’t the point.)
Imagine someone writing about some very dramatic shit that they experienced. Imagine they’re a great writer with a lot of insight and a great sense of story.
Are they going to tell the full truth?
That’s a complicated question, since they are balancing *what happened* with *what makes a good story*. They have a ton of details, like tons and tons they might dredge up from memory, but narratives are built from salient facts, and they have to use their insight to select the salient facts. And plus, you know, maybe they embellish here and there, cuz storytelling. But still, they know what is an embellishment and what is not, and they have to balance these concerns. They must use judgement. We hope in the end they are showing us *a truth*.
Then other writers cash in, and they copy the original, but they can only see the salient points that others have selected, and they don’t see the full tapestry or know which were embellished, and how much, or which were amalgamations of fact, and why those facts were combined, and so on. So they copy, and they imagine, but their imagination is guesswork. They may have great judgement, but they lack the wellspring of *fact* that the author of experience has.
And this can make a really great movie. But then that stuff is copied, and more is copied, and more is copied. In time a false world is created, for example, the special forces badass that is more about what Hollywood imagines than what any real soldiers do.
This isn’t evil. On the other hand, I can kinda see how an actual special forced person might find it a bit silly, or even a bit offensive.
I dunno. Not up to me. Up to them.
#####
The American media created a figure called “the transsexual,” which is always a trans women. (Trans men, as far as our media is concerned, don’t really exist.) And there were a few actual trans women helping construct this model. For example, Christine Jorgensen made a career out of putting her experiences before the public. However, the big names in forming our narrative were people like Gore Vidal and Ed Wood, who produced sensationalistic garbage that had no relation to how we live. And this has not changed, as you can see in that article I linked above.
It is this: cis gendered people used us as a convenient blank-canvas onto which they paint their own weird social, sexual, and gender preoccupations. Historically, we had no power to fight back.
(Entire books have been written on this process. Vivian Namaste’s _Invisible Lives_ is one of the most complete. Joanne Meyerowitz’s _How Sex Changed_ also includes extensive examples.)
And now, when cis gendered writers come along and want to write about us they have a rich cultural tapestry that *literally has no relation to how we actually live*. It never did.
Just as the movie writers regurgitate clichés about what a secret military base looks like, they plaster the culture with shallow clichés about trans female lives.
#####
Do you even want to know the truth about trans women’s lives?
I mean, maybe you do not. I cannot force you to care.
No really. I cannot force you to care.
I’m serious. This is not some social justice guilt trip about how much you need to wear sackcloth and self flagellate on the alter of trans women of color. Blah.
But maybe you do care about our lives, enough to go watch a movie about us, or read a book.
So maybe you go watch _Transamerica_, and you have no idea how completely false the movie is. How could you?
Or maybe you really-truly don’t care, and thus never watch one of those “thinking movies” about us. Fine. They’re all bogus anyhow.
But then, you live in the world with us, and there are real political and social fights we are engaged in, and the only impression you have is stuff like Rocky Horror and The Crying Game and the endless movies about some sadsack trans women and her banal transition story, or Jerry Springer and his interminable “His girlfriend is a Boy!” episodes, and so on.
And that stuff is bullshit, so can you kinda understand how it offends me and how I wish people tried to do better?
#####
Is this true for other minorities? Is it true for disabled people, for the mentally ill, for survival sex workers, for autistic people, on and on?
What does our broad culture believe about autistic people? Where did those ideas come from?
Do autistic people get to speak for themselves? If they try, will you read their words?
Will you read the words of black people, their own words, what they say about themselves? Can you see how that matters?
You don’t have to. Your choice.
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stillnotking said:
Is Ed Wood in bad odor among trans folks these days? I had a trans woman boss once, back in the ’90s, who raved about Glen or Glenda and what a huge step it was for trans acceptance. She actually got me to think a lot more favorably of Wood — he was a terrible director in most ways, but he had a weird kind of genius that shone through every now and again.
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veronica d said:
Ask enough trans women and you will hear every sort of opinion.
My point is this, writers who want to write about trans women will turn to sources like that, and then mix in their own gender and sexual preoccupations, and then they create their book or movie. And then the next generation consumes those products. And then they mix in their own preoccupations. And they make their things. And then the next generation…
On and on, and real trans female voices are nowhere to be found.
Except well, in Hollywood these days they can pull in Calpernia Addams and Andrea James — which, those women get to have their opinions, but to my view they are creatures of Hollywood who have learned over the years to shape their views to match what the cis writers are eager to hear.
That’s my *kind* analysis of them. I have an unkind one, which I will keep to myself.
So even if _Glen or Glenda_ was *actually maybe okay*, given the standards of the day, given how little was known, and how there wasn’t a cultural avenue for honestly about us back then, it’s still rubbish compared to what we say about ourselves now.
For one thing, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves over the years. Like, each trans person walks their own path, but our community also walks a path. It’s hard to talk about gender, and English has no words to describe what it feels like to *occupy a kind of body*.
You know, a fish doesn’t know it’s wet — so how does a fish describe wetness? How does a fish caught on dry land say to its wet kindred, “Hey, so, this really sucks and here is why…”
The words run dry.
[I couldn’t help it.]
So in the old days trans women talked about “female souls” and “women’s organs nested in their bodies” and all kinds of other nonsense, but they had no better concept to try to understand what was happening to them.
Ed Wood, I’ll say flatly, had neither the tools nor the experience to show any of this. He was copying off people who barely understood themselves.
Do I understand myself? Well, I doubt I do perfectly, but on the other hand, I have Julia Serano. I have Susan Stryker, and Janet Mock and Natalie Reed and Zinna Jones. Plus I have science.
And I have Less-fucking-Wrong to explain how words work — maps and territories and what all that means when I think about my junk.
And _Nevada_ is about a crazy punk rock trans gal who lives in Brooklyn and likes the same music I like and goes to parties I go to and talks in my vocabulary and IS BASICALLY EXACTLY LIKE ME SO MUCH OMG IT’S UNCANNY!
She’s crazy the same ways I’m crazy. Like seriously.
And James is a messed-up shamefully cross-dressing pothead obsessed with bad Internet porn.
FAMILIAR TO ME!
These characters were absent from _Glen of Glenda_. Would a modern cis writer even imagine to include them?
######
At least Hedwig liked rock and roll.
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Matthew said:
I am confused as to whom the intended audience of this argument is. As an argument why John Q. Middlebrow would make life better by exposing himself to media by trans people or other marginalized groups, so that he doesn’t base his public behavior on crude pastiches of what those groups are like, it makes sense. But as an argument why people reading this blog and other blogs about social justice issues need to do so it makes a lot less sense. They’re already being exposed to that information — they’re reading your comments, among others.
Separately, I don’t think this argument is going to be very persuasive to the cluster of people on this blog that weren’t already persuaded (several of whom are now banned, so I’ll have to hope I am at not least not a huge outlier). I think I can explain how you might steelman your argument to better appeal to rationalist nerds, but first I have to back up and pose a different question at a higher meta-level. Why do we read? [here, I’m specifically referring to fiction; I’m not at all sure that diversifying the authors of books about physics or economics would necessarily address the points you raised above anyway]
I get the strong impression that people have really divergent reasons for reading fiction. I (and perhaps other people with a similar cluster of traits) look for one of two things when I read fiction (or both, where possible):
1. Escapism
2. A prism to examine the “big questions” from a novel perspective, or an intuition pump, or the like.
The real world is a… radically suboptimal place, and I’m confronted with that in nonfictional ways on a daily basis. (You coders are lucky. Unpleasant daily reading for you is like, I don’t know, segfaults or whatever the term is. Now think about what lawyers, or social workers, or diplomats are reading while they’re on the clock.) Also, my own life is pretty sucky in a number of ways, despite not being too structurally oppressed in the grand scheme of things. My leisure reading is supposed to let me not have to stare into the abyss for a while. The idea that I should also alter my fiction-consumption to make sure that I’m getting a really accurate sense of the daily travails of as diverse a group of marginalized people as possible is horrifying.
Furthermore, I tend to be interested in, for lack of a better way of putting it, “macro” plots. “Micro” plots — the quotidian details of ordinary lives, whether those of privileged or marginalized people — don’t hold much interest for me. A lot of the cishetwhitemale stuff I was assigned in school failed on these grounds too. I think this is where the “what’s so great about The Great Gatsby” debate comes in. It’s like the “Hampstead Adultery Novel” phenomenon mentioned above; my reaction to any sort of book that is basically “here is a slice of life with great versimilitude” is “yes, but where is the idea?” (I’m not impressed with the whole old money meets the noveau riche or the moral vacuity of the 1920s as ideas, as far as Gatsby goes.)
I’m not sure if you have the same thing in mind as the original xojane article, because she seemed to be arguing that one should focus on reading books by women/people of color/trans people, whereas it sounds like you are suggesting that people should focus on reading books that are not only by authors from marginalized groups, but that are specifically books about the experience of being members of marginalized groups. That’s a much more stringent requirement, and I honestly don’t think I can steelman that in a way that would appeal to people who read fiction for the reasons that I read fiction. The original suggestion (minus the clickbaity “don’t read men” spin), on the other hand, I would rephrase as follows to tailor it for the rationalist nerd audience:
“You know how group brainstorming sessions have been shown to be more effective if the group is diverse? Well, we might expect literature collectively to work the same way. You can get deep insights from literature even if your sample is not terribly diverse, but if you want to play the odds, you’ll get the most insight by reading a diverse group of people wrangling with similar narrative or philosophical question.”
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osberend said:
I get the strong impression that people have really divergent reasons for reading fiction. [. . .]
Closely related to this point but, I think, distinct from it is the issue of genre: veronica has presented a quite good argument in favor of reading Imogen Binnie instead of Gore Vidal. Okay, cool, but that’s not a choice I’m ever going to make, because I have no interest in reading Gore Vidal in the first place. At best, I might make a choice between Binnie and Glen Cook, to which some of the arguments in this thread are applicable and others aren’t. (Which is fine; a lot of those that aren’t are specifically directed at Binnie vs. Vidal type choices.)
But in fact, “read fewer [cisgender, heterosexual] white male authors” (or even its less clickbaity and far more specific cousin, “read more transgender authors”) won’t even get me to Binnie vs. Cook; it’ll get me to Cook vs. . . . Jessica Salmonson, I guess, based on a (long) bit of googling? (Side note: Trying to find transgender authors of fantasy by searching is a pain in the ass, for precisely the reason I phrased it that way.) And she may well be a great author that I should get to know, I have no idea. (Does anyone else?) But even if she is, the case for reading her over Cook would appear to be vastly weaker than the case for reading Binnie over Vidal.
Which strikes me as a reflective of a recurring problem among SJ types: Coming up with a theory that might or might not truly be right (I generally think not), but is at least a reasonable functional approximation of reality within a particular context and then wildly applying it to all sorts of other contexts where it’s not. Unidirectional “privilege” is a crude but (often) reasonably workable approximation to reality if you’re only concerned with income and wealth, but leads to all sorts of idiocies when you try to use it to understand social dynamics more broadly, especially in relation to gender. And “you should read fewer white male authors” is a crude but (often) reasonably workable approximation to reality if you’re only concerned with slice-of-life literary fiction, but falls apart when you try to use it to give advice about reading more generally.
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Fisher said:
So, I’m supposed to read Terry Pratchett, just not until 2016?
Seriously though, I don’t have a whole lot of time left. Anyone who unironically tells me I should limit my reading because of an accident of the author’s birth should find the largest, rustiest, barb-iest piece of metal they can find to fuck themselves with.
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thirqual said:
Today I learned:
– that Delany and Butler are black
– that Cherryh is a woman
– that Gaiman is Jewish
But then I’m quite thick about this. I learned that Robin Hobb was not a man halfway through her second trilogy, and that Dumas was the grandson of a black slave only after my several-months-long infatuation with his novels (if only I had known I was so ahead of the game when I was 9!).
I can’t help but notice that class is completely left out of the discussion. I quite understand it from KT Bradford, that would be shooting herself in the foot after all, but it should be noted that this is frequent in privilege-based discussions of merit and representation.
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osberend said:
Tangent: Dumas (somewhat) famously gave a truly delicious reply to a racist asshat that remains my favorite of the genre (so to speak):
The other fellow, noticing him entering the room, started going into a very learned (and insulting) discourse about the habits and characteristics of negros. Dumas doesn’t reply, or even really acknowledge his presence. Finally, the man turns to him directly and says “But of course, you must know all about negros, with all that black blood in your veins.” To which Dumas replies, perfectly calmly:
In english:
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thirqual said:
Note that he took liberties with reality there: it was actually his grandmother who was a black slave, not his grandfather (who was the slaveowner). He did not let the truth get in the way of a good quip.
About that, he was quite proud of his treatment of the past. There is a somewhat famous quote about violating history in his novels but giving her beautiful children circulating, but there are at least 3 different formulations so it is less certain what he actually said.
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Autism Candles said:
Reblogged this on Autism Candles.
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