Feminism

Actually, fuck it, I’m ranting

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Every now and then publishers I respect a lot go and do something stupid, and this makes me a little sad. This weeks’ case-in-point comes courtesy of the writer’s guidelines for Ticonderoga’s latest anthology, which I read through and had a complete WTF kind of moment when I stumbled across this.

A masculine tone will be favoured but not sought exclusively (i.e. avoid becoming bogged down with intricate descriptions and fancy window dressing in your world building; save your word count for a solid scene – or 2 or 3 – of conflict, action, aggression, etc). (see the addendum below)

I mean, yeah, seriously, what the fuck?

Setting aside the fact that anyone’s daft enough to phrase their preferences like this in an online world where x-fail has become part of the dialogue and there’s a new generation of readers (and writers) sensitive to gender issues, I actually found this kind of disappointing because it runs up against one of the things I really like about Ticonderoga – they’re a left-leaning press whose anthologies have tackled issues such as work choices/industrial relations reform and the cultural identity of immigration. They’re the press that published short fiction collections for  Angela Slatter and Kaaron Warren – two writers I’d argue do intricate description and fancy window dressing that will fucking blow you away as a reader rather than bogging down – and they’re setting up to publish a bunch of other writers who do the same in the coming year (see the forthcoming collection by LL Hannett, for example). If you’d ask me to find three words that described Ticonderoga, progressive would have been high on the list. So would awesome.

To see them resorting to some pretty blatant gender stereotyping in their writer’s guidelines is rather disappointing and incongruous. It’s like going out for a drink with the head of your local Greenpeace chapter and hearing them start going off about all those damn women coming in and taking over the workplace.

I get what they’re trying to say here, I really do, but the phrasing of it terrible and contains all sorts of implied value judgement (compare the implied frippery of the “intricate descriptions” and “fancy window dressings” that will get your story “bogged down” to the “solid action scene”). It hearkens back to the bad old days of literature when men were men and wrote terse, masculine,  Hemmingway-esque fiction of worth and women were safely quarantined to the flowery world of romance . It even nails the implied passivity of the feminine writing as a contrast to the active, aggressive nature of the masculine. It may not be intentional, but they’ve slipped into a nice comfortable misogyny with very little effort there, and devalued a whole bunch of work that don’t fit into the narrow guidelines set out. This is not a statement that says “please send me action-oriented horror stories”, it’s a statement that falls into the old trap of saying “girly writing sucks, boy writing rocks.”

And I say, heartily, FUCK THAT SHIT.

You want your submissions to consist of terse, action-oriented horror stories full of aggression? Then how about this – take away the word “masculine” and say “we’re looking for terse, aggressive, action-oriented horror stories.” There’s no real need to gender the distinction, nor to hang shit on the opposite side of the gender dichotomy you’re setting up.

So, in summary: I like Ticonderoga, I own a bunch of the books they publish and would love to own more if finances stretched that far, but these writer’s guidelines make me fucking sad (and, lets be honest, look like a gender-fail flamewar in its nascent form).

Addendum 1(25/1/11): So it looks like Ticonderoga has taken down the guidelines and made steps towards addressing the concerns above, to which I can only say bravo. This is the step of the Ticonderoga I know and love, and gives me hope that the problems were a one-off thing that are destined to be quickly corrected.

This post contains swearing

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So this is something of an addendumto yesterday’s post, and it’s written because every now and then I see people I really like get in trouble because they don’t yet grasp the realities of white male privilege until it’s too late. I had this conversation with a friend the last time this issue raised its head, but I don’t think I ever put it together as a complete post, so I figured I may as well have it handy. Be warned that I’m going to swear a lot. Be warned that you’re probably not going to like hearing it, especially because it flies in the face of the way we wish the internet could be.

Call it the two-word rule you need to wrap your head around before you launch into a discussion of feminsim online as a white male.

It goes a little something like this: Fuck civility.

I say this as someone who’s a fan of civility, who dislikes confrontation, and who comes pre-loaded with all the privilege that being a university educated white male delivers in contemporary Western culture. Lets face it, I can be an articulate and moderately well-read guy when I put my mind to it. My first response when confronted with an internet flame-war is to recoil in horror at the chaos and raw emotion on display. On 99% of topics, I’m all for calming down and having a civilized argument.

But for the purposes of talking about feminism, or racism, or any other kind of ism that exists as a barrier to equality in contemporary culture, fuck civility. The moment you insist on the civilized discussion of the issues you are a fucking arsehole who deserves everything you get, and I will come along and revel in the schadenfreude of watching people kick your virtual corpse to the curb. I will literally sit down at my computer with a large slice of cake and laugh at your fucking misfortune. The moment you call for civility, or close down the argument because it’s getting too heated, there’s pretty good odds you’ve lost. Why?

‘Cause the moment you bust that sort of phrase out, you are an arsehole whose part of the problem.

When you get right down to it, civility is a means of oppression. It’s a means of taking someone’s voice away because they don’t articulate on a particular level. Civility was the tool of the white male upper class, based on the assumptions of individual responsibility and rhetoric, and it was a way of demonizing those who didn’t meet the standards of eloquence and education that made one white, male, and upper class. Handily, they could do this because the White, Male and Upper Class had a death grip on those standards, which means the call for civilized discourse is one of the most fucking cowardly abuses of white male privilege that you can get.

“We’ll talk about this when you’re less hysterical,” is one of the classic put-downs of the angry female voice for a reason. It reinforces the cultural divide that male privilege is built on, whereupon men are the rational and educated and the concerns of women come from an emotional place that isn’t to be engaged with for it’s icky and unfounded in logic. The message here is simple – until you can talk about this like an educated and rational man, your voice and opinion isn’t really valid.

Fuck civility.

And for that matter, fuck your desire to debate things one on one. Fuck your rhetoric about people being unfair because they swarmed over your half-baked and ill-conceived arguments like rabid ants. Fuck the desire to argue things without the issue getting headed and devolving in a mob. Fuck your bullshit about wanting a rational discussion of the issues, because you don’t – you want to wield your privilege like a fucking club and feel superior to the “bullies” who embody all that traits once associated with the lumpenproletariat – the weight of numbers, the use of force over intellect, the collectivism that seems abhorrent in a culture that idealises the singular.

There’s nothing particular smart about decrying “group-think” and “massive mobs”, ’cause it’s really fucking easy to make the side with the superior numbers look like the bad guy in western culture.; We want to believe in the myth of the brilliant individual. We like the idea of the singular genius. And we like these myths because said “brilliant individuals” were often white, male, upper-class fuckers rather than the swarming masses of uneducated labor who actually got shit done. And it’s not like this shit is a new concept, it’s been kicking around since Marx put together the first communist manifesto, and if you can’t wrap your head around the concept it’s time to admit you don’t have a place in this discussion until you’ve done your fucking research and actually attempted to be half as “civil” and engaged in “intelligent discourse” as you’re claiming you’d like the discussion to be.

And honestly, we still get back to the same thought: fuck civility.

It isn’t exactly a secret why the holders of white male privilege fear groups. I mean, the privilege is the result of the myths inherited from educated upper class, and those fuckers got themselves beheaded in France when the uneducated masses got their shit together and stormed the Bastille. Complaining about group-think and bullying is largely just falling back into classist bullshit, trying to take away the one weapon the underclasses had as a means of confronting their oppressors – weight of numbers. Therefor, all your calls for civilized one-on-one discourse is just another means of asserting control.

Fuck civility.

And man, yeah, it’s tempting to bust the calls for rationalism out when people start threatening your privilege. It’s easy to be afraid of the large mob of angry people who appear. I say this as a man who has used civility as a club in the past. I’ve done it in arguments, I’ve done it in relationships, I’ve done in day-to-day life. And odds are I’m going to keep doing it, because I’m white and male and I have the luxury of doing so. I know exactly how fucking easy it is to use, exactly how bad you cab make someone feel, and exactly how good it can be to think of yourself as the rational one, the civilized one, the respectable one. In fact, right now I’m acutely aware of how good it feels, ’cause this post post is me doing exactly that. I spent years at university teaching undergraduate courses that touched on issues of race, gender and class. I argued this this sort of thing for a living, and I feel no real compunctions about busting out the clue-stick every now and then.

If you’re serious about engaging in the discussion, resist that urge to call for civility. If you’re not, you deserve the pounding your going to get.

Fuck civility. It has no place in these discussions.

If you’re seriously interested in having a debate, in proving yourself to be an intelligent being of the modern world, then learn to control your impulse to decry the emotional, the mob, the bullying, the inarticulate responses. Don’t dismiss anger, try to understand where it’s coming from. Try to hear the voice of the mob rather than reeling in horror at its presence. And, most importantly, try and resist the impulse to be all “let them eat cake”, ‘cause even though that was just propaganda during the French revolution, I’ve seen people be just that fucking stupid in arguments about feminism and the like.

Fuck civility. It doesn’t make you better than the people your arguing with, it just makes you a fuck-knuckle who refuses to accept that the world doesn’t just belong to the rational white male gentlemen anymore. ” Civilization” was one of those ideas old white fuckers used as an excuse to dominate the rest of th world.

There’s no simpler way to say it: Fuck civility. ‘Cause if you really want to be civilized about things and engage with the issues, you’d leave your club at the door before the discussion got started. If you’re not willing to do that, it’s time to step the fuck away and accept that you’re part of the problem. ‘Cause, more often than not, the discussion of feminism I see online are actually a) articulate, b) intelligent, and c) full of diverse opinions, at least until some fucker with the chip of privilege on his shoulder starts wading in and bullying people with the call for “civil” discussion.

Female Appreciation Month

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So the erstwhile editor of Twelfth Planet Press, Girliejones, has dubbed this month Female Appreciation Month in response to the all-around sausagefest that was the Triple J Hottest One Hundred of all Time*. Being a fan of female musicians in various genres, my immediate thought was “sure, I’ll be in that” and I went and pulled about thirty-odd albums out of my collection to serve as my listening for the coming month. All involve either female singers or female songwriters.

Being the utter High Fidelity loving nerd that I am, I’m trying to resist the urge to blog at you about the absolute awesome of every single album on this list with top-five lists and random gushing. I may well break at some point. Until then, you’ll probably see a theme running through the Friday Youtubery posts. And I should be rocking out with a month full of XX chromosomal goodness.

*This list, incidentally, has completely cured me of this lingering desire I’ve developed to get a radio for the house. Not simply because of the overwhelming majority of men, which I’ve come to expect from such things, but for the general trends the list shows. I mean, I know he’s recently dead and all, but when you’re voting two Michael Jackson songs into the 100 best songs ever of an national alternative and youth radio network, you are all fucking dead to me. Hell, you were all dead to me the moment Elton John appeared on the list. Billie Jean I could probably live with, even if I appreciate far more when being covered, but seriously – Thriller? Tiny Fucking Dancer? WTF, people? I know I’m in danger of turning into a cranky old man and all, but seriously: Dead To Me. All of You.