Trifecta of Neat Stuff Part I: A quote

Today, I'm going to post a trifecta of neat stuff in three short entries, staggered through the afternoon and evening.

The first thing is an entry about sex & sex work in science fiction, which is smart and interesting, but which is totally eclipsed by the cleverness of this quote/propsal. Thene writes on Aaru Tuesday,

I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.

Hear, hear.

*

But it would be unfair not to give you a taste of the smart, interesting entry, too. Thene's entry looks at sex & sex work in science fiction and fantasy. "There's a lot of supposedly 'speculative' fictions where it's still 1958," she says.

Summarizing one story that poses an SFnal frontier, she writes, "It's 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers' prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There's also, of course, this narrative about how 'vices' of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness."

She quotes the story to illustrate her point:

There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets. [...] There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell sex or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos... [emphasis hers]

And her smart analysis: "Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you're appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You're using the gender-neutral word 'worker' to mean 'man who pays for sex'? You're drawing lines between 'untamed' rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) 'corrupt' those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?"

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Ide Cyan at Whileaway)

He's Gay, and He's Native American: Rowling and Scalzi Claim Marginal Identities for Charcters After the Fact

Well, this is interesting. (Hat tip Lawrence Schimel)

On October 20, J. K. Rowling read from book 7 at Carnegie Hall in New York.

After reading briefly from the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love".

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. "Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down".

Three basic reactions:

1) Huh.

2) That fairly cool.

3) Well, damn it, why the hell couldn't you have told us that during the series?

Recently, there was a kerfuffle (has anything other than blog wars ever popularized that term?) on the popular blog of military science fiction writer John Scalzi. Scalzi, responding to discussions of how and when race is deployed in science fiction, revealed how he wrestles with the issue.

My way of dealing with spec fic's racial lopsidedness (on the writing side, at least) is somewhat passive-aggressive: I avoid making any sort of overt racial identifiers at all with my characters unless it's required by the plot, which for my books it generally isn't. This is not the same as actively specifying minority characters in my books, which is a point no doubt many will be happy to make, and they're right. But it's not excluding them, either, which is not trivial.

Scalzi went on to indicate that he had imagined a main character in one of his series to be non-white, although he had never left any racial markers on the page.

This is the moment when I say "I heart Scalzi" before launching into intense criticism. Kameron Hurley of Brutal Women summed it up well:

As a writer, you may write colorblind. You may pull out all the color and race and cultural tags for every single one of your characters, and thereby prove that they could be of any race!

Sure. Let's go with that. Nobody in your book has a skin color, or any sort of physical description at all.

You really believe your reader's not givng your characters a physical description? You think that one of the first markers they make, after size and gender, won't be color? Pigment?
...

The problem with writing in "race-neutral" (what is that? Gray? Beige?) terms is you get the same problem you run into when you write in gender-neutral terms. As people raised in a racist, sexist, society, we're going to norm a lot of stories, a lot of people, as white males. There are certainly ways you can code this differently, and every reader brings their own unique set of indicators to the reading experience, but I think the vast majority of people are going to sit down and code your world in whitewash unless they get some indication that it's otherwise or they bring something non-majority to the table.

We have a default setting we've been programmed with, and it's the default setting we've been pumped full of since birth: stories about bands of white brothers, fathers and sons, heroic male conquerors, Columbus, rich white presidents, men of Science, great white male writers; the men who run the world are white. The important people are white. We're reading about important people, right? Unless we're reading some kind of hippie women's story set in some jungle where people don't speak plain English.

As Kameron Hurley acknowledges, Scalzi has provided himself a little bit of an out here: he works in a far-future world which may no longer share our politics of race. (But really, do they have nothing to replace it? Nothing?)

Scalzi himself argues that he's not writing colorblind (because he knows what colors his characters are), but that readers are reading colorblind. He goes on to say that this doesn't of necessity reinforce a white default. As a first step, he says that while he envisions characters is novels as being "people like me," whiteness is not part of that profile. Honestly, I have a big problem accepting that -- but, let's accept it anyway. Scalzi's politically aware and not, IMO, given to lying to trump himself up. Perhaps, through deliberation or coincidence (I trend toward postulating the former, even if not on a conscious level), Scalzi has trained himself not to view race as a default.

The mistake he makes is in assuming that it's responsible for writers to assume that readers will be able, or willing, to do this. Scalzi:

Now, you may ask why I didn't just note all this [stuff about race] in the book; the answer is because I didn't want to, because it never came up as part of the story, and because I'd rather have people imagine Harry Creek to be who they were comfortable with him being. If they see him as white, that's their karma, although I will say I'm sorry that their default is white.

Kate Nepveu, who also wrote a separate post on the subject, responds in comments:

This entry is built around a big misunderstanding, to wit:

"The people like me" != "the cultural default."

The default in our culture is whiteness -- and, to get back to Rowling, heterosexuality. When sexuality and race are not mentioned, most authors mean to indicate whiteness and heterosexuality. Scalzi is not subverting this paradigm by refusing to mention race; he only plays into it. The world in which he's writing has certain politics, which certainly he needs to write to, but in other ways he acknowledges that he's working for his audience. As an author who belongs to the joking group the "New Comprehensible," Scalzi puts an emphasis on writing fiction that is accessible to the mass of our population. Our population has certain tools for analyzing texts. These include a white default as much as they include certain assumptions about nanotechnology -- the latter of which Scalzi overtly navigates. When he introduces the basic rules of his world in the first chapter of his novel, he exposits them. He exposits them because readers need to know. Why does he assume we don't need to know about race?

Perhaps because he says that readers should already know enough to know to vary their default. But then again, maybe they "should" know stuff about physics which he has to explain. We don't. He's stuck with the reading population he's got, and we don't live in a futuristic utopia.

Niall Harrison said something I thought was smart on the topic of writing about marginalized or non-default characters:

If “straight white male” is the default, then anything else indicates that a choice has been made — or at least, it implies that a more conscious choice has been made than the one made by Stanley’s author. Even if the motive behind that choice is, perfectly validly, “why not?”, the choice is there.

And when it's not textually present -- that choice is, in a real way, not there.

This scenario is even clearer with Rowling, who does not have a utopic science fictional world to pose as a hypothetical. It's neat that Rowling has a homosexual character, but could we have seen this in your series, please? Could we have seen Dumbledore with a real, living lover? Or, failing that -- if he spent his life pining -- why couldn't we have learned about that? We got to learn about the long flaming heterosexual torches, including much more twee whining about Snape and Lily than I was interested in.

Yes, I know Rowling has to deal with the reality of her audience, just as I said Scalzi does. And of course, writing for children means accepting certain boundaries. I can understand that she didn't want to ask for more textual trouble from Christian conservatives than she's already got. As the interview relates: "Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason."

Of course, that leads me to say: they hate you anyway. So, why pander to them?

Most texts only appear as themselves. Books are a finished form. We, as writers, are often told we have to send them into the world without our excuses, without our explanations. When we go to workshops where other people critique our manuscripts, writers are entreated to stay silent. Because our justifications don't matter -- the text becomes what the reader makes of it, a combination of their experiences and the tools you give them.

Neither Rowling nor Scalzi gave their readers the tools that they needed in order to pry this information from the text. It's an afterthought, left to discussion by only the most devoted fans, only the people who happen to read the blog. Why should it have to be the non-white characters and the homosexual characters whose marginal lives are illuminated not even in the marginalia of the text, but in the essays and justifications afterward? Once again, they get the short shrift.

For Rowling, there's one redemptive silver lining: the fact that her books have, outside her hands, a vital textual life of their own. As the article reports her saying, "Oh, my God," Rowling concluded with a laugh, "the fan fiction."

--

UPDATE: Several people of my acquaintance have mentioned that their central annoyance with Rowling’s reveal is not that she didn’t mention the gay character’s identity in the series, but that she is playing off of an old and poisonous stereotype that gay people are doomed to heartbreak.

This seems, to me, to be a valid concern. However, in the context of the novels, it seems to me like Rowling is often eager to split up romantic and family relationships. I guess I’d read Dumbledore/lost-love as parallel to Snape/rejection. That doesn’t excuse the stereotype, though, since there are no positive examples of gay romance in the novels.

Still, my primary concern is erasure. From Kat Allen’s blog, I learn another thing Rowling’s said: “Rowling remarked that if she had known that (applause) would be the response, she would’ve revealed her thoughts on Dumbledore earlier.”

That kind of gives me the shivers. Gay people are only worth writing about if the reaction is applause.

Is Belief in Evolutionary Psychology Hardwired, or Is It Just a Biological Imperative to Cling with Death Grip to Privilege?

Well, that'll teach me to dash off my angry thoughts at 7am after pulling an all-nighter.

Because everything I said about some of the Pharyngula commenter's obsession with using evolutionary psychology to prop up their own faltering egos and desperate need to be viewed as intelligent -- Chris Clarke has said better, funnier, and pithier.

This just breaking from Creek Running North: Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says

The particularly brilliant beginning to the post:

Special to Creek Running North: Biologists have long assumed that evolutionary psychology, a controversial branch of psychology that ascribes many common social behaviors to genetics, is a muddled blend of half-understood evolutionary biology, selective data mining and resentment of women’s changing roles in society.

A new study, published in today’s issue of the German publication Unwirklichen Genetikjournal, does not challenge that assessment. But it does suggest that some men may be genetically predisposed to believe in evolutionary psychology, a finding that may well suggest future methods of treatment of the psychological malady.

Believers in evolutionary psychology maintain that feminism sets itself in opposition to millions of years of anthropoid evolution, and is thus futile and inhumane to men. Allegations made by believers include references to putative differences in math skills between men and women, a supposedly irresistible but entirely non-visually stimulated female attraction toward powerful and/or arrogant males, and the existence of a genetically preordained male right to multiple female sexual partners.

Many such men hold to these beliefs despite an absolute lack of supporting scientific evidence, says Dr. Ulrike Mann-Esser, chair of the sexual anthropology department at Universität Ulm and the study’s lead researcher. “But we had no way to determine why this was so until last year’s discovery of the locus taedius.”

I'd excerpt more, but the whole thing is too damn correct and funny to pull pieces out of. While it's written to mock evolutionary psychology's claims about sex and gender, it pretty much demolishes all the ridiculous "White dudes is the smartest and most civilizedest!" claims at the same time.

So go read over there. He even has witty illustrations, which proves that he carries the Superior Blogging Gene.

UPDATE: [Deleted]

A Conversation with Julie Phillips

Last summer I spent a couple of hours talking with Julie Phillips about her compelling and illuminating biography of the feminist sf writer, Alice Sheldon. The biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which more than a few people have characterized as being a page-turner, has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Locus Award, the Washington State Book Award, and the Hugo Award. Julie had just spent several hours talking to the screenwriter who’s working on a film of Alice Sheldon’s life, so the pump was well primed before we even began talking. Perhaps that’s why I failed to notice that I pressed PLAY rather than RECORD on my tape recorder? Only later, as Julie was preparing to leave, did I discover that the tape meant to record our fabulous conversation was blank. But all was not lost! Julie kindly essayed a reconstruction of the salient points of the conversation on tape for me, which I then transcribed. The reconstruction is a bit dryer and more focused than our live conversation; nevertheless it has much to offer anyone interested in the issues Julie tackles in her book.

Timmi: Although literary biography is a recognizable genre, in some sense it is still a hybrid of biography and literary criticism. I’m interested in what your take on the balance and interaction of these two foci were for your biography of Tiptree/Sheldon. Did you have a clear sense of it when you began the work, and did your sense of it change over the course of the decade in which you carried it out? Did you read all of Tiptree’s fiction before you began, or later? Did your understanding of the Sheldon’s life change your reading of the fiction? Did your reading of the fiction ever change what you made of Sheldon’s life?

Julie: The book started as a piece of criticism, a book review. So I had read almost all of Tiptree’s stories while I was writing that first review, and—you know there’s a lot to say about them, but when I started writing the biography, to me the stories were very subordinate to the story of her life. And I tried as much as I could to put them at the service of Alli’s life.

I had to include the stories to some extent if only just to show that she was going to become a writer, to foreshadow that a little bit. I would have liked to mix the stories through the book more, I would have liked to give it a more unconventional structure, but nobody knew anything about Alli’s life; I didn’t think I could pull it off. I thought it would be too frustrating narratively not to make it a straight story. You could get away with that, the way Hermione Lee does in her biography of Virginia Woolf, if it was a life-story where the outlines were known, but not where people didn’t really know anything about her life.

Obviously the stories aren’t autobiographical, and I didn’t see the fiction as a reliable guide to her life. But I do think that knowing something about Alice’s life helped me in reading the fiction. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” didn’t make much sense to me at first, because I kept trying to read it as an ugly duckling story. It was only when I knew more about Alli’s life that I began to feel that it was about the opposite experience, of growing up in a beautiful body that doesn’t feel like it matches the mind inside.

I did include some literary criticism. I had to do that, to explain to readers what Tiptree’s literary achievement was. And in some places I put in bits of literary criticism where I felt like I had come up with something that hadn’t been said before and I was just pleased with it.

But to me the book was primarily a story. And I don’t think that I would go back and write more about her fiction. I think actually that I’m a better storyteller than a critic, which surprised me, because I had thought of myself the other way around. I struggled with the lit-crit parts of it. They were very hard for me to write. I felt like they were some of the most boring parts of the book. I hope that there will be more criticism of Tiptree written because of my book, and I hope that other people will do it and not me.

Timmi: By the time I finished reading your book, I had formed the distinct impression that for all that Alli admired her mother and was anxious to establish professional friendships with women as well as men writers, at bottom, she was a male-identified woman. Do you think this is a faulty conclusion on my part?

Julie: I think that’s absolutely true, that she was a male-identified woman. I think that almost every woman of her period who had any talent was male-identified, because there weren’t that many opportunities for talented women. You can say “Oh well, you know but look at her mother,” but her mother’s only one example, and when she needed to separate from her mother in order to get her own life, there weren’t any other examples, there wasn’t anyone else that she could model herself on or attach herself to.

She wanted to like women and she was dying to find women with whom she could identify. They just weren’t there. She was very politically minded, very technically minded, and even now there aren’t that many women who are like that. There are still very few women engineers, for instance, or women computer scientists. Women aren’t necessarily encouraged to think that way, and women who do think that way are not believed and not given credit, and it was easier just to think of oneself as a man. Besides, Alli liked men and felt very comfortable in their company.

I think that Alli was very good—I said in the book somewhere—at defining women so as to exclude herself. I think that it was frightening to her to identify with women because if you were too womanly, that was a kind of a trap; but if you fell in love with women, that was also a kind of trap. To identify with men was very much off limits for Alli. As much as she wanted to be a man at some moments of her life, she was terrified of that desire and spent a lot of time trying not to feel that, and I think that probably had to do with her closeted sexuality. The more she admitted to herself that she wanted to be a man, the more it must have made her think of her generation’s image of a lesbian, and that must have been scary.

Alli was ambivalent about feminism too. She believed in it but, like a lot of women of her generation, felt uncomfortable with consciousness-raising. It was too emotional for her, too personal. And she thought younger women, like Joanna Russ, were naïve to think that they could get away with being so angry.

One of the interesting things about her looking back on having been Tiptree—because I don’t think she thought through why she had become Tiptree, and what it meant to her to be Tiptree, very much until after it was over. Charles Platt interviewed her, and he later told me that it was very hard for him to get her to admit that she had wanted to be a man. He thought that’s what the deception was about, and she didn’t want to say that. And I wondered why? To me it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to admit that she had wanted to be a man, because of course who doesn’t want a man’s privilege and a man’s literary opportunity? And in her journal, for instance, just after Tiptree was unmasked, she said that she had wanted to be a man. It’s possible that she had revised her opinion by the time she talked to Charles Platt. But I wondered if her sexuality, and her fear of not just of admitting but giving in to her sexuality, didn’t play a part in that reluctance.

(I think we rambled on quite a bit about this question when we talked and I’m not sure I’m including all of the important bits. I know we were talking about women’s intellectual life and how women didn’t get much of it.) Alli wasn’t exposed to much of it. Maybe if she had gone to Vassar where the women were more intellectual she would have had an easier time, but she really deliberately turned her back on that, too. To please her mother, maybe? To spite her mother, maybe? To try to fulfill this promise of glamour that she had at an early age? To try to turn her back on the precocious child-prodigy-genius expectations that her parents had of her? I don’t know. Her choice not to explore her intellectual side until very late in her life was always a really strange one to me, because I started out with a very strong intellectual side and I couldn’t imagine anyone as brilliant as Alice who didn’t want to study, who didn’t want to learn. I came to feel that I understood it, or could accept it anyway, but that took awhile.

Timmi: In her review of your book, Elizabeth Hand characterizes Alice Sheldon as “a woman tragically born a half-century too soon.” She doesn’t say precisely what she means by this, although I think we are meant to infer that if Alice Sheldon had been born in 1965, she would have been able to have come out as a lesbian or else had gender reassignment therapy. (Quote: “Later, after Alli’s identity was revealed, [Harry Harrison] concluded that his friend had not been ‘nuts’ but ‘a woman was just being very female about it.’ Phillips refrains from commenting on Harrison’s observation, but I won’t. Why is behavior that would be considered ‘nuts’ for a man considered normal for a female? This is the crux of Alice Sheldon’s often tormented life, the disconnect between her projected voice—her stories—and her everyday self. She sometimes seems like a prime candidate for gender-reassignment therapy; at other times, a lesbian so deeply closeted that one’s instinct is to drag her into daylight and shout, ‘See? IT’S NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL.’”) & yet Hand also acknowledges that Alice’s childhood had a great deal to do with her problems as an adult. Is there any sense in which you would be able to agree with Hand’s characterization?

Julie: I certainly think she would have approached her sexuality and her sense of her gendered self very differently. But I could not possibly say how she would have done it. She’s so very much a person of her own time; who am I to say what she might have done in a different time? There’s no way I can know whether she would have been transgendered, whether she would have chosen for women or for men. The opportunities would have been so different for her. And the way she saw herself I think would have been really different.

Timmi: Hand ends her review by talking about the essential scariness of the human being who wrote could write that “finish[ing] the series with one about a man who kills EVERYBODY, that will make me feel better” and claiming that the reader encountering “The Screwfly Solution” or “The Last Voyage of Dr. Ain” or “The Women Men Don’t See” for the first time will feel “the same emotion, perhaps, that gripped that physical education teacher in For Des Moines, or Alice Sheldon’s husband when he realized, as Phillips suggests, that his wife was going to kill him: pure fear.” One person I recently talked to said that when they’d received a fan letter from Tiptree, they were wary and so did not respond. Another person who had a correspondence with Tiptree said that there was something “creepy” about certain questions Tiptree sometimes pressed on her. Do these responses surprise you? Or do they resonate with your own reading of Sheldon’s life?

Julie: Finishing the series about a man who kills everybody. Elizabeth Hand thought that was frightening. I don’t. There’s something to me very liberating about Alice Sheldon’s anger. I don’t think it was necessarily liberating for her—it certainly didn’t make her happy—but I’m always cheering her on when she’s angry, and wanting her to explore her anger and use it and use it to pry open the parts of her life that were hidden to herself. In the story Hand is referring to, “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” there’s also a promise at the end that killing off people will save the world, and that life will begin again. What I think Alli’s doing in that story is tipping over the chessboard, an act I find childish, unsatisfying, and exhilarating all at once.

Besides, some of Tiptree’s friends and fans, Mark Siegel in particular, saw her as this wise, compassionate figure, concerned with the world’s problems. Whereas I thought she used worrying about the world as an escape from her own problems, and that she ought to save some of her compassion for herself. So I was pleased whenever I got a chance to contradict that limited and, I thought, damaging, image of kindness and concern.

At the same time it disappoints me that Alli wasn’t able to finish her stories except by killing everybody. She was often able to explore more satisfying futures for women or imagine more satisfying futures for women, but she was never able to resolve those stories in any positive way. Instead she shut everything down. She didn’t dare, maybe, to allow herself to imagine a future in which she could be herself. No, I don’t think that her anger is frightening. I have mixed feelings about it, but I think it needs to be there.

I don’t think Alli murdered Ting, by the way. I don’t think he was very happy about the pact, but I think he went along with it. Peter Sheldon thought the same; I remember he told me (though I didn’t put it in the book because I couldn’t confirm it) that they had been found in the guest bed, not in their own. Rightly or not, he took that as a sign that Ting had lain down willingly in that bed.

People shouldn’t go too far the other way and make a scary monster out of Alli, either.

Timmi: What in your opinion is her best work?

Julie: I would say her performance as Tiptree in the letters she wrote as Tiptree. Other than that, of course, there are lots of stories I love. “The Women Men Don’t See” is one. “A Momentary Taste of Being” is another; it’s funny, it’s very gloomy, it’s incredibly psychologically rich, and I still don’t feel like I’ve got to the bottom of it. I just admire it incredibly for its depth.

Timmi: In an essay in Asimov’s SF reviewing your book, Paul di Filippo writes:

It seems to me that a cabin in Yucatan and a lodge in Wisconsin, among other perks, were necessary prerequisites for the exfoliation of Tiptree’s odd and extravagant personality, in a way that, say, having to support oneself scrubbing toilets would have precluded. I hesitate to call Tiptree a “drama queen,” since she was so often stoic and silent in her suffering, but perhaps you’ll take my meaning if I say that had Tiptree been born equally talented, but black and poor, or even white and lower middle-class, it’s hard to imagine she could have afforded such self-indulgence and often morbid introspection as she exhibited and was permitted. And although such counterfactual speculations are really beyond the pale of a biography, still it would have been nice to see more acknowledgment of the role Tiptree’s above-average economic freedom played in allowing her character to become so involuted.

Would you care to comment?

Julie: Paul di Filippo is not the only one who has wondered why a woman with all Alli’s privilege had such a hard time. He gives some of the answers himself: her brain chemistry and her relationship to her parents, which made it particularly hard for her to break out of their mold. (A book I drew on a lot in thinking about Alli was The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, which talks about how children who are enlisted in the project of comforting their parents can end up constructing a “false self,” which makes their own desires and emotions inaccessible to them.) To your point, that introspection and unhappiness are absolutely not limited by class, I would add that daughters of privilege, in Alice’s generation, led terrifically constricted lives. Don’t forget what happened to Alice’s talented, rich friends: they were married off or became alcoholics. If Alli had “economic freedom,” then it was of a very limited and contingent kind. The “economic freedom” of marriage, same story.

Besides, a lot of her free time to think and write came as the result of her not being able to have children. So it wasn’t exactly an unmixed blessing. *

I’m not quite sure what Di Filippo wants me to say. That she was spoiled and privileged? That her money allowed her to be arrogant about, for instance, not looking for a teaching job after she got her Ph.D.? I kind of thought I made that clear.

Timmi: I suspect he’s missing a context largely invisible to a lot of men. Perhaps he ought to read a few more biographies of twentieth-century women writers to get a clearer sense of what creative women have been (and to some extent continue to be) up against.

Thank you, Julie, for taking the pains to recreate our discussion. It’s always a pleasure talking with you.
________________
* Would Alice have been happy having children? I wonder. But that’s another story.

Possibly My New Favorite Quote

From Cara in this thread at Feministe:

Isn’t it funny how all of those so against identity politics tend to be white middle-class dudes? It’s almost like they share a political view that is shaped by a shared identity. WEIRD.

*

As a side note, the post at feministe that generated the thread is an example of particularly acute awesomitude shining in a generally awesome blog.

Pharyngula Commenters Prove Immorality Not Sole Balliwick of the Religious

I do love Pharyngula's P.Z., but he attracts some real low-lifes to his site. Prime viewing: this thread.

In the post itself, P.Z. quotes Dr. Watson, the egomaniacal co-discoverer of the double helix:

Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

I'm not going to spend this thread analyzing Watson's comments, because they've been so soundly and easily trounced, and I have different fish to fry. Educated individuals should already have an idea of the scientific evidence rebuting Watson's idiotic remarks. For those who want crib notes, P.Z. has the proper reaction. To wit:

our wanting to see our particular ethnic or racial group as superior to all others is not enough to make it so. There seems to be no environment on earth (except, perhaps, the coddled womb of the upper middle class lifestyle) where the average human being can afford to dispense with intelligence — and that includes Africa — and even where populations have been isolated for ten thousand years at a time, as in North America and Australia, we don't see powers of reason decaying. And of course, Africa is not significantly geographically or genetically isolated at all.

However, as often happens on Pharyngula, when some of the commenters sniff out the potential for misrepresenting the results of biology to erase sociological factors and make sure everyone knows that white men really are the bestest (they can't help it! they were born that way!), the racist and sexist comments fly. In this case, the commentariat trots out some of the most distinctly aromatic blatantly racist arguments. A couple stinky examples:

John Smith: Why is it unreasonable to suggest that black people might be intellectually inferior? Why does PZ consider this ludicrous and easily dismissible?

The "everyone is equal" philosophy doesn't always bear itself out. You can't expect it to be a universal law. Maybe there is a significant intellectual disparity between some races. Who knows? Watson at least has a point.

PZ is continually proving himself a faith-head, PC-fundamentalist.

*

robotaholic: . To my knowledge there is no conclusive evidence that all humans regardless of race have the same potential for intelligence. I think intelligence can be measured and so can physical fitness. There is the possibility that he is correct. Until there is conclusive evidence that he is wrong, I don't think so many people should scorn him. Just like Richard Dawkins says about the nice comforting idea of going to heaven or having a soul- just because it is comforting -that doesn't make it *TRUE*...

Now, there are at least an equal number of defenders of actual truth (instead of, "hey, I can't help being your superior, my shiny alabaster skin just makes me that way" truth) over there, too.

Unfortunately, some of them utilize a well-intentioned racism in their arguments, like this fellow who doesn't know a lot about modern Africa:

True Bob: "You see a gazelle, a zebra and a giraffe at a watering hole. Which do you select to kill?"

"Which will provide you better food value; 20 grubs, 24 millipedes, or a cobra?"

I appreciate that this guy is standing up to the other people in the thread, and trying to point out -- in what he sees as a humorous fashion -- the drawbacks of a concept like IQ.

IQ, as commenters here are probably aware, is a construct that was developed in order to test developmentally delayed students and determine who would need extra help. The inventor of the IQ test warned that it should never be used to rank children of average or superior intelligence, which of course resulted in the immediate use of the test ot rank children of average and superior intelligence.

The concept of IQ -- [omitted claim] -- may be real, but it's not real in the way that we want to make it real. It's not separable from cultural factors, and it can't be measured on a single dimension or as a single number. In fact, it probably can't be measured at all. We can measure approximations of it, but we've known for a long time that our tests are skewed by cultural factors. As several commenters on the Pharyngula thread point out, differences in IQ between Africa and the United States can be explained by sociological factors. On the one hand, there's the inherent skew of the tests themselves. On the other, there are factors like poor nutrition which affect early childhood development -- including, some studies suggest, intelligence.

But let's look back at this guy's comment, which gets at some of those important things through a couple lines of humor. What tools does it use to uncover those things? What is the basis of its humor? True Bob wants us to re-examine an American view of intelligence, so he constructs what he thinks will be an African view of intelligence. To do so, he represents Africa as an untamed wild in which people hunt and gather at a susbstitence level. For the vast majority of Africans, this description is wholly inaccurate.

Africa doesn't look like the United States, but neither does it look like the primitive collection of mud huts and jungles that inhabit our collective, racist imagination. As an anthropology student, I took a class on People's of Africa in which our professor often brought in slides showing Africans going about their normal activities. I remember clearly one photograph of an African man riding a bike through a city, clusters of bananas tied to his bike, a monkey clinging to his handlebars. I remember laughing. It was funny.

The humor derived from the tension in my mind between what I thought Africa was (monkeys) and what I thought modern life was (a bike ride through the city). Seeing them together made me laugh; what are modern elements doing in "primitive" places? Over and over again, this dynamic was repeated. The whole class laughed.

As anthropology students, we knew that Africa doesn't exist in some kind of bizarre state of Joseph Campbell savagery. But the cultural imaging of Africa as something backwards, where you survive by bashing a snake on the head and bringing it home for your family to eat -- and where you don't use toilet paper or know what a factory is or wear cast-off American clothing -- is an incredibly strong cultural icon.

And we have this guy using it here, in order to debunk racist ideas. Because, even as he struggles against its inevitable conclusions, he's been suckered in by the powerful American myths about Africa. Our cultural mythology creates a false dichotomy, in which Africa and the west embody opposite traits. All that is primitive and savage is constructed as being African, while that which is modern and civilized is constructed as western. Of course, this is the same construction that's leading John Smith and robotaholic to their conclusions. Because if the west is all that which is civilized and modern, then of course intelligence belongs on our side of the border.

Therefore, blacks are stupid.

Certain groups of scientists and atheists seem prone to this particular racist narrative. Of course, part of it's just the pervasive racism in the society. But I think there are certain aspects of an emphasis on rationalism as the only and best way of knowing which contribute to the ease of adopting these narratives, even though they are demonstrably false and in actuality are the opposite of the science and rationality which the speaker claims to be pursuing.

First, an emphasis on rationalism tends to denigrate other ways of knowing. We see that with robotaholic, when he derides the belief that all human races are equal by writing it off as comforting. (He fails of course to acknowledge that his own desire to believe in the intellectual superiority of what is likely his own race is also comforting.) If rationalism is being posed as in opposition to ways of knowing things emotionally and spiritually, then it's easy for people to take a simplistic, dichotomous view of the world. Is the only evidence for God that he's comforting? I serve a realer, grittier truth that is not about comfort. There is no good. Is it comforting to believe women are equal? Well, then they serve a realer, grittier truth about that too -- never mind that they're suddenly going against the evidence. The feel of the thing (telling a hard truth) has substituted the reason for the thing (rebutting arguments backed by poor evidence).

More than that, I think the ideas that are posed by the oppression of women and non-whites (particularly blacks) are particularly appealing to white, male people who ally themselves with rationality and science. They want to claim logic. They want to claim civilization. These are things which traditional myths assign to them, by way of moving all the opposite traits onto women and non-whites (particularly blacks). Men are logical. Women are hysterical. Whites are civilized. Blacks are brutes.

When you've made the mantle of rationality a priority in your life, it must be very seductive to be able to claim it without having to exert any work. When cultural myths about women and black people are in effect, these white men get to grab their desired mantle without having to do anything. They need to be scientifically logical, and they get to be scientifically logical, because women are crazy and emotional. They need to be smart, and they get to be smart, because black people are stupid.

This is so important to them -- they are so insecure about whether they could measure up if the competition wasn't ruled out by a technical foul -- that they're willing to exchew actual rationality and actual science. The racism and sexism become more important than real rationality, because they provide an illusion of it.

Now, of course, P.Z.'s also got a following of people who aren't racist shitheads. There are women and people of color who can't claim rationality through sexist/racist arguments, because such arguments leave them on the wrong side of the fence. And there are women and men and white people and people of color who are secure enough in themselves that they're not afraid of what could happen if they don't get to special just by virtue of their genitals and skin.

And my, they're lovely. I'll leave it to one of the good guys to sum up a reasonable reaction to Watson's blathering:

Julian:Jeez, some of you folks are dunces. If there was no essential difference in the capacity to reason between us Moderns and Europeans in the Middle Ages, even those who lived in Russia, the sparsest, most inclimate, least fertile, most predator rich section of Europe, and we have an entire tradition of literature ecclesiastical, scientific, and personal to prove that lack of difference, then how can you honestly sit there and smugly assume that sub-saharan Africans, who by the way, live in an infinitely richer environment that Saharan or Mediterranean Africans, are stupider than everyone else? Bigotry, thats how.

I.Q. tests do a better job of exposing the inherent biases of those who write them than they do of registering the intelligence of the test taker; any psychologist can tell you that.

As to showing he is wrong, hundreds of studies have over the last 60 years. How many times do biologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians have to win this argument before you damned racists will pack up your crap and admit you're wrong?!? And why does Watson's opinion on this even matter? If he's such an expert of genetics then he'd be well aware that, bereft of an environment which encourages the use of traits, traits are not expressed in a life form. Genetics could be, at best, a predictive science of predispositions, but never one of immutable determinations regarding skill and ability, yet this is precisely how he treats it in his comments. By doing so he does not contribute constructively to the debate, as some posters here seem to think, but merely exposes his own ignorance of the advances made in genetic sciences since his partially stolen discovery over half a century ago.

Immolation

Another political blogger is thinking of quitting, not from disinterest so much as from continual abuse. If sie needs to go, sie needs to go. Sie is precious and important and should preserve hirself and hir happiness, particularly since sie has given so much. But I want to say to hir and everyone else:

Anger is valuable. Anger is incredibly, immeasurably valuable. Anger is incandescent. It’s consuming. Most of us feel the flame and gutter. Burning makes us uncomfortable. We avoid conflict. We go out. We find ways to soothe ourselves in comfort. We ignore injustice. We see the face of oppression, and we look away instead of igniting. We lack strength.

Those of you who burn and burn — you are a light for us.

Your blaze is not an obligation. Your blaze is a gift — a gift you’ve given us. It’s a gift you will always have given us, even if you only burned bright for a moment.

I cannot count the times when I say, “Not now,” when I say, “I don’t care,” when I silence the information that will disturb me. When I am so disturbed that I am growling with frustration, so often I lack the courage of confrontation. Another time, another hour, never at all. That person can hurt me — he holds power over my career — I have reason to be silent, and so I am. I can only begin to attack orthagonally, through the guise of fiction or poetry, when there is enough ambiguity between me and my interlocutor that we need not look each other in the eye, our conversation sliding into whispers and indirections.

No one has an obligation to burn, and certainly no one should burn hirself up for anyone else. All I am saying is I know my weakness, and I see your strengths — not just sie who I am addressing, but hir and hir and hir, scattered like stars across the blogosphere, across the streets, in groups of activists, sitting in the bar while refusing to be silent while that man calls that woman “cunt,” laboring in law offices to defend the homeless, in medical waiting rooms to dispense free innoculations, on phones to counsel rape victims, waiting by a fighting couple to be sure the shouts won’t become blows, helping the Mexican family across the street to clean up the rubble of a racist attack, marching for Jena, declaiming the white woman who wouldn’t hire you, declaiming the teacher who told you should shut your mouth because black girls are too stupid to stay loud, raising children who know the word heteronormativity, hanging a picture of her wife or his husband on hir office wall, transitioning despite angry fathers, helping friends through transition, shouting no and no at each oppressor who attacks one’s own weakest spot, opening themselves and caring and burning — and I thank you for those gifts.

Burning comes at a cost. We who fail to burn as brightly know that. We know that we do not pay the price you do. We honor you and thank you, but you owe us nothing. What you’ve given is beautiful.

You should never feel guilty. You should never feel ashamed.

Hour of the Wolf Interview

By Nancy Jane Moore

Back in May, while I was attending the Nebula Award ceremonies, I recorded an interview with Jim Freund, host of WBAI radio's "Hour of the Wolf," a program on science fiction and fantasy. The program airs from 5 to 7 AM on Saturday mornings, but for those who don't live in New York City (where WBAI is at 99.5 FM) or get up that early, the programs are available online.

My interview, which included a lot of discussion of feminist SF, aired along with an interview with Nancy Kress on September 22. It's available online here. Clicking on that link should allow you to open the show with iTunes or similar programs.

Here's the "Hour of the Wolf" table of contents for all shows available online.

Warrior Wisewoman Anthology Calls for Science Fiction Stories with Strong Female Protagonists

Norilana Press Books is calling for submissions for a new anthology of science fiction stories with strong female protagonists. The anthology is being imagined as a sister series to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress series, with the major difference that Warrior Wisewoman is science fiction instead of fantasy.

The anthology is paying 2 cents a word. Here's some text from the call, written by the anthology's editor Roby James:

"I am looking for stories that shed light on the truth of what it means to be female, that illuminate the wisdom and the strength of a woman, but not in cliché 'goddess' stories. I love action and adventure, grand space opera, thrilling discovery, and intelligent protagonists. Make the story thoughtful, wise, and surprising, not merely the same old metal spaceship hull filled with cardboard military uniforms with female names 'barking' orders and firing at aliens. In addition, the stories in the anthology should appeal to genuine emotions, suspense, fear, sorrow, delight, wonder. The science can be part of the background and the characters foremost, or the science can be central to the story, as long as the characters are realistic and appealing.

"This is science fiction, but I also welcome stories of spiritual exploration, looking at the bond between the scientific and the divine. I want to see how a woman survives tragedy and disaster, overcomes impossible odds, achieves her true potential, or goes on to thrive in a marvelous universe of so many possibilities, using what is inside her, as well as what she finds in the laboratory, the alien planet, or space itself.

"The stories should contain the question of 'what if' on some level. And they should have a woman answer it."

The description of what the editor's looking for rubs me a bit the wrong way, but I think this is probably overall a good thing for the genre. Sword and Sorceress put women's faces on fantasy stories written in extremely traditional modes, perhaps Warrior Wisewoman can do the same for traditional SF.

Yes, Fat Lady, You Too Can Be Objectified: Examining the Objectification of Fat Women Through the Lenses of Feminism and Fat Rights

I haven't been blogging much, but here's my latest contribution to Alas, a Blog. It doesn't have to do with science fiction, but it's got a hefty dose of feminism.

On October 3 (oy, I take a long time to write posts), Shakespeare's Sister wrote a post about an offensive ad for playtex, which uses the bodies of fat women and women of color to create an impression of being woman-friendly while in fact marketing what Melissa MacEwan calls "the new misogyny."

Here, take a gander at the ad itself:



Here's an excerpted transcript of the salient bit (taken from Melissa):

"What do I call them?"

"Boobs, breasts, knockers…"

"Are you asking me if I have a nickname for them?"

"It's a guy thing to name parts of your body!"

"Betty and Jane."

"Titties! Boobies!"

...

"I've been asked to shake the moneymakers on the subway a few times."

"Back up for a second," writes Melissa. "I've been asked to shake the moneymakers on the subway a few times?! Giggle giggle ha ha. And that's exactly how smoothly and coolly the new misogyny can minimize the seriousness of sexual harassment."

In this ad, Playtex is expecting fat women and women of color to be so awed by their inclusion that they don't notice the misogyny inherent in the way that they are included. Melissa's not falling for it. She writes:

Of course I want to see more images of fat women and women of color (and disabled women and dwarf women and birthmarked women and tattooed women and women of every shape, size, color, age, and circumstance). But I'll be damned if I want their presence used as a diversionary tactic while my skull is pounded with messages like "Breasts are toys!" and "Sexual harassment is flattering!" by companies who then expect me to genuflect in desperate gratitude because this something is ostensibly better than the nothing of the status quo.

This reminds me of another item that recently showed up in the feminist blogosphere, a photograph of recording artist Beth Ditto posing naked for the cover of a magazine. The Feministe article on this photograph seemed relatively uncritical, although they noted some assinine questions that a reporter, trying to pit one woman against another, asked Beth Ditto about Kate Moss. Twisty of I Blame the Patriarchy, on the other hand, was more critical. She laughs at the idea that sexy pictures of fat women are transgressive.

1. Porn isn’t transgressive; it’s de rigueur. No one in Western culture has drawn a porn-free breath in decades. This means it’s the norm.

2. Pictures of naked women empower nobody but the men who pimp’em out and the voyeurs who consume’em. A woman may elect to reap the benefits of her capitulation to her oppressor, and she can even call it “empowerment” when she does it, but that doesn’t mean she’s not full of shit, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s doing any other women the least bit of good.

3. Dude Nation is already well aware that fat women exist. And I guaran-fucking-tee that they’ll continue to hate fat women just as much as they hate skinny ones, no matter which pop star shows up weighing how much on what magazine cover.

Girls, the dominant pornsick culture is crapping on you. Get hip to this: the ability to titillate men is not a high moral purpose. Being sexually manipulative is not a high moral purpose. Posing naked on the cover of NME isn’t empowering, its emposeuring.

I agree with both Twisty and Melissa on this. We as feminists should be deeply skeptical of a culture that offers absolution to fat women by granting them a shadow of the objectification which plagues skinny women.

Fat women and skinny women are played agaisnt each other abominably in this debate. It's a hideous catch 22, which I realized several months ago when chatting with a gorgeous friend of mine who is routinely trailed by cars when she walks down the street, misogynists leaning out the window to hoot at her body and offer propositions. When she told me this, half my brain went, "Assholes." The other half went, "That never happens to me and this is a sign of my failure and inferiority."

Either way, women lose. We lose when we're harrassed. We lose when we're not harrassed. We're objects of sex, or we're objects of disgust. Either way, our sexuality is framed around the imagined desires of a "default" male. Allowing fat women to be sexually objectified is far from ideal -- it is not a radical movement that will lead toward women's equality.

But there's another analysis I want to bring into this, and that's a fat rights analysis. As a fat woman, I can say that the damage done to my psyche through years of being told I'm revolting is really, really bad. In a fatphobic society, a society that's more afraid of women's fat than men's, I, as a fat woman, suffer more than a thin woman who is otherwise situated like I am.

I share most of the disadvantages that thin women have in this society. Like thin women, I still need to fear for my safety late at night. I am still a potential target of hate and violence. Simultaneously, I am culturally denied the ability to view myself in one of the primary (and problematic, and limiting) roles of acceptable, western-constructed female sexuality and identity.

Twisty suggests that access to sexual objectification for fat women and women of color is no benefit at all, but only an admission into a club full of misogyny and problems. This is true, on one level, but I think that it's important to look at the ways in which the axis of being fat affects women's lives.

One thing that's missing from Twisty's analysis (or perhaps is implied in point 3, but not expanded on as much as I'd like) is that fat women are *already* objectified. We are objectified as objects of revulsion or disinterest. We are taught to view ourselves as repellant. Others are taught to view us this way, too.

Being treated like an object for collection, an object for consumption -- something beautiful and desirable -- sucks, because it involves being treated like an object. However, being treated like a treasured object is still better than being treated like an object to be thrown away.

Melissa's position is closer to mine, and I think her emphasis is right on. We shouldn't allow the fat woman's or brown woman's body to distract us from seeing how despicable a naturalization of sexual harrassment is. Still, if fat women and brown women growingly have access to being able to move out of the molds in which patriarchy has placed them, that will make our lives more liveable in some (limited) ways, even if that change is expressed in reprehensible and misogynist ways.

Ideally, everyone would be treated as fully human. However, while fat women are more oppressed than thin women, changes which alter our status will benefit us -- even while they play into the misogyny that oppresses all women, fat and thin.

The Calculus of Light in Seattle

The gift of sleep is again mine! After two nights of sleep, I’m dancing around the house with energy and joy, feeling again up to the challenges of my To Do list. Twice a year the calculus of light in Seattle takes it from me, and each time I fear my congenitally melatonin-deprived body will never again remember how to lose consciousness. I float night after night, utterly relaxed, in a kind of limbo, screening one hypnagogic image after another, occasionally hearing a snatch of unrelated words that marks the beginning of my lateral slide into REM-sleep—only to be jolted back into consciousness either immediately or after one sleep-cycle, usually the only one of the night. Who can be surprised that after a few nights (and mornings of this) I begin to wonder whether my body might have permanently forgotten the art of sleeping?

This year seemed ominously different when the fall episode of my malady struck a month early. Had something new developed in my postmenopausal brain chemistry? (There’s nothing like going through menopause to teach one just how mysterious are the workings of hormones.) But last weekend I realized that the cloud cover this year has been more like a typical November’s than a typical October’s. And I also recalled how the worst case I’ve ever had of my semi-annual insomnia ended with a three-day family visit in Arizona. So I began watching for moments of solar breakthrough and would run outside and stand in patches of sunlight (despite the warning label on one of my meds that tells me to avoid direct sunlight and never to use a sun lamp), soaking the light into body, confident it would make a difference. Did it? Or was it a placebo effect? Does it matter? Not to me!

So now I’m catching up. Here are a few items worth noting:

*Niall Harrison appreciates the short fiction of the talented Rachel Swirsky, who often blogs here and was my student at Clarion West in 2005.

*Jeff VanderMeer appreciates Kelley Eskridge’s Dangerous Space.

*Richard Labonté says in his review of Dangerous Space in his column Book Marks (distributed through the Q Syndicate): “This is the kind of art that the word "queer" fits perfectly. The stories aren't specifically lesbian, and they're not specifically gay, but they render any sexual preference wondrously possible.”

*The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and Free Press unveils evidence that, despite mounting pressure from the public and the Federal Communications Commission, television stations continue to air fake news.

*The National Lawyers Guild calls for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques, including simulated drowning known as water boarding, exposing detainees to frigid temperatures, and head-slapping. Yes, I know this will lead exactly nowhere---for the moment. But we have a desperate need of voices willing to speak truth to power, to insist that the methods, values, and objectives of the Bush Administration are both unconstitutional and morally unacceptable.

*In another story, a despicable piece of work who used his role as priest to assist the Junta’s torture and murder of dissidents in Argentina’s Dirty War has been sentenced to life in prison. This is a cautionary tale for all the many people (including psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, and chaplains) actively contributing to the US’s torture programs: times can (and usually do) change, and when they do, the impunity of power seldom outlives the change in regime. If you haven't read Jane Meyer’s “The Black Sites: A rare look inside the CIA’s secret interrogation program” in the August 13, 2007 New Yorker yet, I urge you to do so now.

Finally, Doris Lessing Wins the Nobel Prize

By Nancy Jane Moore

Doris Lessing has won this year's Nobel Prize in literature. It's about time. I've been waiting to hear this for years.

I began reading Lessing when I was in college and have read her ever since. My favorite of her books is one I haven't seen mentioned yet in the news about the prize: The Four-Gated City. For years I would bring up this book in conversation no matter what subject we were discussing. "Oh, yes," I would say, "Doris Lessing wrote about that in The Four-Gated City."

And she did -- The Four-Gated City gets at the heart of politics, of mysticism, of racism, of men and women, of the Sixties (even though she was a generation older than that), of just being alive. It even touches on the fantastic, presaging her later SF series of novels, Canopus in Argos. The Four-Gated City is usually cited as the final work in the Children of Violence series, but it stands on its own. The first four books introduce you to Martha Quest, but in The Four-Gated City Martha shows us the world.

It's been years since I last read it, but I just dug out my battered paperback copy so I can re-read it once more. Here's the last sentence, which I recognized immediately:

Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else it been, ever ...

By the way, Lessing says she writes science fiction when she does, which is refreshing.

I recall when Shikasta came out, the New York Review of Books had Gore Vidal review it, presumably on the assumption that she was a literary writer who had dipped into SF and so was he (if you define literary very loosely, at least when he's writing fiction). Vidal, predictably, completely missed the point and trashed it. I haven't taken his work seriously since. Of course, Vidal hasn't won the Nobel and while I often find the Academy's choices puzzling, I doubt he will. (If you want to read this review, it's available for three bucks here, though you can probably tell all you need to know about it from the nasty first paragraph, which is at that same link for free..)

I was just looking online to see which of Lessing's works were still in print -- The Four-Gated City apparently isn't -- and was amazed at how many books she's written. I think of myself as someone who reads Lessing, and yet I doubt I've read half of them. I should snap up some used hardbacks quick online, before the prices go up.

Of course, The Golden Notebook is always mentioned when Lessing is discussed. It's a brilliant book, but very painful: I read it twice some years ago and recall reading faster and faster to get through it because I hurt for the characters. I should chase down my copy of that and re-read it, too.

She turns 88 next week, and according to Wikipedia, she's the oldest person to receive the Nobel.

A Reuters story, published on The Washington Post online says she's the 11th woman to win the literature award, which has been given since 1901. (34 women overall have received Nobels, according to the article.) I won't bother to discuss here how absurd that number is; I'm just going to enjoy the fact that a writer whose work made a lasting imprint on my life won the Nobel.

Feminist Futures from deep in the heart of Europe

W.I.S.E.R. . .shouldn’t we be? Women In Education, Science And Research Conference, Maastricht, 4^th-5^th October. I got an invite to this, on the strength of "Life", my Aqueduct Press novel. I decided to go along, and found a mass gathering of young and old feminists, beside the Maas, for two sunny days in October. Here's my report:

Stand we at last...

I got turned away from the opening foray, on the grounds that I don’t speak Dutch and the Jankerk was stuffed: which was a bust. It was the one with a slide show, academic tradition on females in science held up to sarcasm, and the choir singing Ethel Smith’s March Of The Women, audience participation encouraged. That’s a rave from the grave, thinks I. I went to look around the Basilica of the Redeemer instead (much restored. I liked the Paradise). Got into the next item, which was pretty entertaining. Such a crowd! Several hundreds of academics, all ages, usual sex ratio reversed, a lunch counter with coffee. The Minister (m) made his opening address. In which he derided Larry Summer’s immortal line, “a different availability of aptitude at the high end”, & then went off to have lunch with the celebs, while the rest of us —and a platform of female profs and politicos, including the Spanish ministry delegate, the Norwegian Minister (who lives in a different world), and Miet Smet, Belgian Minister of State & long time women’s rights defender, who knew a lot about how to get things done, & how it’s never easy or simple— debated four propositions, on how best to make Netherlands academia (and/or the world) treat women and men as equals:

Legislation: making obligatory 40% women or men on any decision-making body; 60% maximum, either sex.

Visibility: What we need is a massive media campaign, changing public perceptions, especially children’s and the short-span masses, of women in science, education, and research (especially science).

Psych-it: The numbers speak a clear language (the present sex ratio of top end academic jobs in the NL is very poor indeed) The women are missing. Raise women’s expectations, student expectations, daughters’ expectations. Change from within!

Gender Mainstreaming: Stop trying to fix women so they’ll fit into academia, or whatever other setting.Change the culture of academia, identify and change the gender thinking and discriminatory practices embedded in the organisation. Have an Equal Opportunities police with the right to walk in anywhere, and nail sinners.

Blair’s Babes, I’m thinking. Blair’s Babes (referring to the massive increase in female MPs, in Tony Blair’s 1997 government, achieved by Labour Party initiatives not unlike the proposals above). Did they really love Tony? Nah. They loved being in power though, and Tony soon made it clear that they served the One Man, or they were career-dead. Doesn’t matter what you do. The thing about women is that they really are no different from other human beings, as corruptible and malleable as any brother. . . But I love this sort of thing, and waved my coloured cards (like in Ready Steady Cook, you know) like a good ‘un. At first I went for yellow (Image), but then I wavered, and thought I should go for red (Quotas), but then some bright spark says, I think they’re all essential, and I don’t want to choose, & everyone thought this sounded fine, & practically all of us held up all four colours.

The Minister's Minions (young and female, did you guess?) who’d been left to our mercy were teased, gently, with some radical suggestions from the floor. What would the Minister’s response be? They couldn’t possibly comment.

& then later, I got worried the object of the exercise was supposed to be to identify one of those four propositions to present to the Minister, as is traditional in these affairs. He's already getting a list of 95 essential points. Fourmore ideas is at least three too many. Ah, well.

Miet Smet made a point of saying one other thing: Women should distance themselves from “Diversity”. Don’t get bundled up with Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered etc etc. May seem righteous, but it does not further political equality. Women are not a minority group. Moves addressing women’s needs in academia, in the workplace or in politics are not special measures, special treatment. Discuss.

So then we were asked to leave quietly, and we would get a surprise as we went out the doors. The surprise was that we were issued with orange whistles (with a transfer of a soccer ball on them, one more indication that the frugal organisers had not wasted any funds on decorative trim for this con) by a corps of stewards in labcoats, bootees & hairnets, & armed with klaxons, and we were to march. Shouting a Dutch slogan which I didn’t quite catch, but I gather it said something like More Women On Top Now! People smiled. Especially the young teens, who had been issued with the extra whistles. Everybody gives you a whistle, these days. It’s from all those whacking big clubs, people getting lost, is it the same everywhere, I wonder.

Couldn’t get into the critique on male leadership in academia in the Derlon Theatre, so I milled around a bit on the 1992 Plein, the actual birthplace of the EU in its current form. Not so strangely, there is a lack of municipal sculpture on this momentous site. Nor are there any tourist kiosks selling fridge magnets featuring the Flag of the Union, or anything of that kind. There is only the river Maas, also known as the Meuse, and the Moselle, with the barges gliding along it, beautiful and calm under the brilliant blue sky. The same river that runs through Rimbaud’s home town, and causes the Netherlanders no end of vigilance and expense at the delta.

I went along to Science a la Carte at the Bonnefantenmuseum, and caught Averil MacDonald, Professor of Physics at Reading University UK, giving a presentation called Living The Fairytale. “I celebrated my 40^th birthday as plain Mrs MacDonald, soon to be divorced mother of two. I will soon celebrate my fiftieth with a whole new life opening up before me...” An irrisistible success story, with an award to prove it, Woman of Outstanding Achievement In Science. Awards are great, she says, they open doors, they make the Vice Chancellor listen. Any questions? “Did you meet any enemies?” I asked. I am such a clown, so juvenile.

When I’d failed to get into the Leadership epilogue, and was sitting on the Plein 1992 eating my second lunch roll, Averil came and sat down next to me, and sparked up a conversation. . . She says she didn’t recognise enemies, only obstacles, and found a way around them. That’s the spirit.

Good Utopian/Bad Utopian

Finally got into the Derlon Theatre, for the “NL2020” item, another debate, a show organised by the Dutch Network of Female Professors, using the results of a consultation exercise. First, we got two views on the situation in 2020: the reforms have been instituted, what changes do we see? Good Utopian/Bad Utopian.

Good Utopian (Saskia Keuzenkamp: Women’s Emancipation Studies) is having a wonderful time. Her meetings are virtual, her hours are flexible, she gets to nurse her PhD students without leaving her desk, like everyone else on faculty she has her own PA, so she doesn’t spend her whole time on paperwork; she’s just been assessed (transparently) and given a great new job on a global masterclass programme. Oh, and the Dean is always around (this got a laugh), popping in for a chat etc.

Bad Utopian (Jenny Dankelman, Medical Engineering) says, grumpily, well, at least I don’t feel so out of place, and since I’m NOT the only woman, I can get some work done. I’m not continually being dragged off into meetings because they’re obliged to have a token female. . .

We were asked to vote, electronically, on fifteen statements from the consultation exercise, and the Good Utopians got some surprises, among the most notable being:

It’s 2020. The percentage of women in higher positions in universities has grown tremendously. What conclusions can be drawn?

Culture, Statement 2: The academic culture has become nastily competitive.

We were supposed to disagree strongly; we agreed, weakly. Our voting was displayed, and we were quizzed on it. The younger members of the audience said: women can be nasty, as nasty as men. It’s competition that makes people nasty, and the international competition is bad enough now. In 2020, everything will be more globalised, more people chasing fewer posts, more frantic, it doesn’t make you a nice person—

Working Practices, Statement 1: Working part time is the norm for both men and women

We were supposed to feel strongly that this was a positive development. We were quizzed on our rather strong feeling that it was not. ‘This is about child care’ said one respondent, tartly. ‘I don’t see thirteen years making much difference to male attitudes to parenting.’ (And I recalled the Minister, speaking wistfully of his gut feeling that mother ought to be there, when the children come home from school. . .) Other respondents said, yeah, we know that one: part-time pay, full time work. Neither futuristic nor an improvement. And yet others said, you can’t do lab science on 20 hours a week. The people who resist this change will still be doing the great work and getting the good jobs. We want to be driven, we want to forget all else, we are creative scientists.

It’s always about child care. (And it takes two, thinks I. If men won’t change, it’s because their wives and partners have let them know, one way and another, that they don’t have to.)

Second thought: the old guard are out in force, but many of the younger women at this conference are not at all sentimental about Women. They aren’t here to sing Stand We At Last, they’ve been raised in a world where women in science have been colleagues and bosses, not a few historic inspiring heroines. They’re here because their lives, their careers, their dreams, depend on reforms of a mightily unfair system. They don’t expect Utopia. Just a better chance.

And then it was my item, A Writer’s View On Academia, with Joke Hermsen, a PhD in Philosophy who quit her department in some disgust a few years ago, and is now principally a novelist; Gwyneth Jones (University of Life); and moderated by Maaike Meijer, “one of the voices of Dutch feminism in the seventies” (it says here, a modest tag that no doubt covers a wild career). I can’t really tell you what happened as I was not taking notes, but Joke Hermsen, Virginia Woolf scholar among other things, read an essay on Granite and the Rainbow, about biography; and I read a bit of “Life”. Good house, & seemed like a positive response. Anna Senoz’s career, and naïve mistakes, really seem to strike a chord with the young, gifted and female science & research contingent.

Ah, say the delegates, with one voice, when they meet me, all through the con. Science fiction! Woman On The Edge Of Time! Wonderful book, Marge Piercy, have you met her? Ursula LeGuin, have you met her? For some reason, nobody seems to have heard of The Handmaid’s Tale. Couldn’t possibly comment.

Municipal drinks and nibbles in a municipal hall, where an Alderman spoke movingly (in English, of course) about his long ago experiences on a literacy aid programme in Nicaragua. If funds are short, and you want to make a lasting impact, what do you do? You concentrate on the girls, he told us, with the force of long-ago revelation. Educate the girls! You’re educating their children, and their children’s children. Ah, Mr Man, what are you saying? Are you saying that your own people, your own kind, are shiftless selfish layabouts, and spending money on them, in the hope of giving the people a better life, is pouring water into the sand?

Here I met up with Bernie Williams, Liz Faye, Averil again and the rest of the SET UKRC crowd, some of whom I’d met in Hay on Wye last year. We went off and had a meal together in the Holy Virgin Plein, & then, I’m afraid, we persuaded each other it would be a good idea to come back and go to the WISER disco. Ah, well. You’re only young once.

Friday, 5^th October

I spent the morning sightseeing, bought some tulip bulbs (orange); paid my respects to the Star of the Sea, along with a constant stream of Maastrichters popping in to light an e.60 candle. The Basilica of the Holy Virgin is tenth century, on the site allegedly of the first Christian church here, founded by Bishop/St Servaas, 384. He killed a dragon, I think. The statue, pliant curve in her red & blue robes, her gilt crown, is sixteenth century, originally. Couldn’t leave her out, could I? Not here, where the blue flag with the gold stars was anointed. I do not worship the Goddess, but I thoroughly respect her ducking and diving skills, her capacity for survival, after all, somebody has to hold up half the sky.

In the afternoon I went to JIVE, the UKRC event, which was mostly Powerpoints about data collection, employment research practice, and the problems faced by returnees. The star of this show was undoubtedly Maggie Aderin, a remarkable young woman. She’s “the UK’s only black, woman rocket scientist, she’s conquered dyslexia, and she has chosen to get into science education.” Could she tick more boxes? Actually, she’s an astronomer not a rocket scientist, that’s just press release talk. What she does is build custom instruments, novel instruments for big, big, telescopes. She showed us a video she’s made for UK Teachers’ TV, in the Cape, where she was visiting SALT (South African Largest Telescope) —an astonishing installation, 10 metre mirror, brand new (2005), standing alone in the empty Karoo. She joined a Scifest over there and talked to ordinary kids. She talks exactly like Patrick Moore, fast, explosive, enthusiasm bursting out of her. Fantastical, dazzling, romantic, end note.

But in JIVE, probably because we were all speaking the same language (second language conversations tend to be effusive, polite and sunny), I heard the hard things said. Small hard thing: returnees feel they’ve not got a leg to stand on when partner is earning more. His career has to come first, it’s a quality of life issue. So, women (back) in science yes. High-flyers, no. Or not until the children are reared. Other hard thing: women are interesting now, because of the ageing/declining population problem (not in England, but in other UK nations, and throughout NW Europe). The loss of female graduates is a drain industry can’t afford. But what about when the economic crash bites? It doesn’t have to be the end of the world, just a normal recession. All women's rights agendas will be dropped, instantly.

And the hardest thing, the one we still hope will just go away. Isn’t it a beautiful day, teeshirt weather in October, where are we right now? Balmy California, I suppose. So, where will we be in 2020? Could be somewhere rather less idyllic. And the 10 metre telescope in the Karoo will still be there, but where will those kids be? Who’ll be living in Sunderland and Grahamstown?

In the Bonnefanten Museum there was a show by Mai Thu Perret, Swiss artist, a multimedia presentation called Land of Crystal. “Mai-Thu Perret has been writing a fictitious story entitled The Crystal Frontier since 1999. Employing part imagined and part annotated diary fragments, letters and texts from handbills, she sketches a kaleidoscopic image of a group of women who have retreated, disillusioned, from the city and from Western, i.e. capitalist, society. They pick up their lives again in the desert of New Mexico but on a different footing with work, nature and themselves.”

Ha! This is where I came in! Girls like a pack of wolves, sorry we disappointed you, nobody gets mothered here, I didn’t linger. I’ve read Les Guérillères: not when it was written but long time ago, in the second wave. So there’s an end to another fly on the wall, or chameleon on the wall, visit to an academic/science/feminism conference. Events like this are really useful to me. Utopians, talking, arguing, trying out ideas, getting things wrong, getting things right, speaking the language a writer of Utopian fiction must know. Oh, you thought I was a fem-sf writer (or ex-fem-sf) You didn’t know I wrote Utopian fiction? Is that a job that only a male writer can do? Hm.

Back home on the Eurostar, massive queues at Brussels Midi, for the Thank God It’s Friday train to Waterloo. I wouldn’t mind, but the placards on the UK passport control raised my hackles a bit. “You’ll find it rather more difficult to get into the UK, from September 2007” As if that was something to be proud of. Not a word of apology.

Treats!

*Crystal has made a 5-minute video--- "Where Am I?"--- of a scene from Octavia E. Butler's Dawn that's available through You Tube. The physical appearance of the ooloi doesn't quite do it for me, but I don't suppose any visual representation would match the one created by my own imagination. (Link thanks to Ide Cyan, on the Feminist SF Blog.)

*Suzette Haden Elgin has graciously made her novel, The Communipaths (Book One in the Coyote Jones series), available online here. (Link thanks to Liz Henry, at the Feminist SF Blog.)

Nancy's New Blog: Taking Care of Ourselves

Nancy Jane Moore has started a new blog: Taking Care of Ourselves: The Smart Person's Guide to Self Defense.

The subjects discussed on the blog will primarily come from material I'm developing for a book on self defense, but I'll also be responding to self-defense-related current events. I bring 28 years in the martial arts -- primarily in Aikido -- as well as years of thought to the subject.

It's likely that I'll occasionally venture into discussions of fiction and movies on Taking Care of Ourselves, since fictional portrayals of women who can't protect themselves bother me greatly. And I'll be glad to field questions.

Please drop by and add your comments.