Categories
movie rants thinking out loud

I am shocked that you think I wanted the thing I actively encouraged to happen.

This morning I found myself, perhaps weirdly, thinking of a particular scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It’s the Nazi book burning scene, so obviously imagery warnings here.

You get Elsa, the hot Nazi archaeologist, looking slightly teary-eyed and upset while all the book burning is going on. As she walks away, Indiana (undercover in a stolen Nazi uniform) grabs her and takes his father’s grail diary out of her pocket, growling that they didn’t want the book to be incinerated. Elsa acts so shocked–shocked!–that Indiana would think she’d do such a thing. She believes in the Grail, not the Swastika! Indiana gets this close to literally strangling her, and only lets go when she threatens to scream.

(Now, one can argue this scene gets a bit undercut later when the temple is falling apart and Indiana tries to save her, but let’s skip that for now.)

There’s a thread going around Twitter right now in which a correspondent from USA Today has realized he shared transit with the one fascist who got shot and killed (who is a conventionally attractive white lady, funnily enough, rather like Hot Nazi Archaeologist Elsa) and wants to take it as a moment to recognize that hey, those violent fascists are also people! This is a jaw-dropping extrapolation of “he can’t be abusive, he was always so nice to me” out into a group of white nationalists. But since I’m drawing parallels from reality to this film, I’ll just note: Indie fucked the Hot Nazi Archaeologist before he knew she was a Nazi. And his take away was ultimately shock, disgust, and “well, guess I’m not gonna cry about it when the temple eats her.” Not, remarkably, “Well, shoot, I guess all Nazis are also hot people I could fuck, really makes you think.”

The Indiana Jones movies are problematic as hell on a bunch of axes (and I love them anyway), but one thing they are relentless about is how much they fucking hate Nazis and have basically zero sympathy for those who claim they’re definitely not Nazis while happily riding the Nazi coattails to glory. In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Belloq gets exploded by the power of the ark. In this movie, Elsa gets swallowed by the temple as it destroys itself. They signed up with the Nazis. They don’t get to run away from that association. Elsa might not personally be advocating for the burning of books–in fact she might find it a bit upsetting–but she’s still standing there and doing nothing while it happens. She might claim she doesn’t believe in the Swastika, but she’s happy to wear it because it helps her get what she wants. Thus, she gets to share the fate of the other Nazis, and no one is sad.

So you can bet this sprang instantly to mind as I watched a bunch of Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, trying to backpedal from the white supremacist mob they unleashed on the capitol yesterday. They’re shocked–shocked!–that we could think they wanted that to happen, after all they’ve been doing is hanging around with these violent fascists and tacitly encouraging them either with mealy-mouthed words or strategic silence. I am not, of course, advocating for basing morality off a pop cultural artifact. But I’m saying in this case, Indiana Jones is very, very right.

You don’t get to run away from this. It doesn’t matter if you don’t, in your heart, believe what you’ve been cynically encouraging others to do. You signed up with the Nazis. When they go down, so should you.

 

Categories
rants wtf

I have no witty comeback for this racism.

So I’m biking along a mostly-deserted stretch of road north of Longmont and it’s hot as the Devil’s ballsack out there. I’m two-thirds of the way through my three liter camelback, and I’ve looped around to go back into town before I turn into a crispy strip of people leather on a bike. Another cyclists goes past me. Yells to ask if I’m going back toward Lyons, because he’s lost. Sure. I can point him in the right direction, since there are detours and things are a little confusing. We ride side by side for a while and talk about the things boring-ass adults do:

Training for something in particular? Nah, just riding for fun. You do triathlons, dude? Good for you.

What do you do for a job? I’m unemployed.

Oh, well, ever think about teaching? I’m not really looking to be a full-time teacher, but I’m thinking maybe I could get in as a substitute to help make ends meet.

Look at private schools, my new friend says. You could teach science or math. Yeah, teach one of those AP math classes. They’re full of fucking Asians. 

My brain is one giant record scratch. WHAT?

And my fellow cyclist, who until this moment had just been ye olde average slightly egotistical white dude, pedals away. I let him.

I wish I’d had the wherewithal to just ask him what the fuck he even meant, saying that. I’m not even asking for a witty comeback here. I’ve managed to kick myself into motion before, in a situation where someone in a conversation dropped a pointed comment about “oh you know, those people” and I looked him in the eye and said, actually I don’t know, why don’t you tell me what you mean by that. Funny how quickly the topic changed. But now? I am still kicking myself over the fact that I pedaled slowly along, sweat dripping in my eyes, and tried to wrap my brain around the fact that someone had just fucking said that, and thought it was an all right thing to drop in a conversation with a random stranger.

I know none of this is a surprise to anyone who isn’t so pale they glow in the dark. But I’m writing this out is for my best friend, who has two mixed-race daughters and keeps running across people who believe shit like this doesn’t happen in their happy city. Well, it does. This isn’t just your embarrassing relative that you can’t unfriend on Facebook because it would cause a stink. This is a total stranger thinking that this is a welcoming environment in which to be casually racist.

I went on a wild tear on Twitter a while ago about one of the effects of bi-erasure that I really hated when I was married to a man–that random people would feel free to voice some very homophobic/transphobic stuff to me, because they assumed I was a straight woman and therefore on their “team.” I hated it in that context because then I had to make a snap decision over if I should out myself, or if I should let an asshole think that my stunned silence meant I agreed with them. I guess this is another thing like that, where certain people see that I’m a pasty motherfucker and assume that therefore I’m on the team. The only difference is instead of punching at me, they’re insulting my nieces and my friends and a whole enormous population of people who have never done anything to deserve this bullshittery.

I hate it. I hate that this guy on the road probably pedaled off thinking I was totally amused by his fucked-up “joke” because I couldn’t manage more than a strangled, disbelieving, “WHAT?” before he was out of earshot. But I’m also at a loss as to what I should do. It’s like walking into a glass door. Oh look, a random stranger just assumed I’d be okay with this and I have no good response because I’m still trying to process what the fuck even did you just say. At least if it had been at a bar, I could have poured my drink on him.

I still have no witty comeback. If I had that moment to do over again, I would have yelled, “No. That is not okay.” And then he would have fucked off, probably, or I would have spent god knows how long arguing with some random guy about how he’s Totally Not Racist It Was Just A Joke What’s My Problem Anyway. I don’t really think the latter makes anyone reassess their viewpoint, but I’d settle for getting him to shut the fuck up so my nieces don’t ever have to hear it.

Categories
rants

Brad Torgersen, I invite you to fuck all the way off.

Partial quote:

What sort of things were they saying before? No, expelling Correia or Torgersen is easy, but it’s not enough. Not enough! We have to investigate the entire science fiction field and the publishers, we need to find out how the field could have allowed an unsafe environment to thrive in which these cisnormative, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic authors could operate with impunity. I think, comrades, that we need to send a Hate Crimes commission to Worldcon. And to identify all the unsafe elements that may be present.

So, the field is essentially returning to its Marxist roots. But the starry-eyedness is mostly gone. Now we’re down to the raw hate of the thing: the vengeance-minded outliers and weirdos, determined to punish wrongdoing and wrongthinking and wrongfeeling. Which means, of course, smoking out all the wrongfans having all the wrongfun with their wrongstuff.

If they could clap us in shackles, put us into the boxcars, and send us to the icy wastes to die, they would do it in a heartbeat.

My friend Paul reposted that borderline incoherent comment from Brad on his own blog; read it in its entirety there.

Frankly, I am not interested in wading into the sea of strawmen and attempting to dismantle them. (Shaun Duke’s already taken a shot at it at his blog.) Nor am I at all interested in trying to present the positions of my “side” and offer gentle correction, as has been done nicely here.

All I have to say is this: how dare you, Brad. After you helped garner John C. Wright, a man who not-at-all-coyly talks about gay bashing as an “instinctive reaction” to “fags” a record number of nominations, how dare you project your paranoid fantasies of people wanting to harm you on us. How dare you wrap yourself in a blanket of imagined persecution when to this day transpeople are being murdered for simply existing. How dare you whip up false fears about people wanting you to die over a fucking literary award when right now black men and women are being killed by the police for simply existing. How dare you imagine yourself a second-class citizen when underprivileged women and girls are suffering because their male-run government has decided they have no right to bodily autonomy.

How dare you talk about people being shipped to frozen gulags when, today, gay and trans youth are still subjected to the very sort of reeducation you claim we want.

How dare you.

Real people are harmed every day by the positions those with whom you associate yourself espouse. Real people, who experience real pain, and real suffering, and all too often real death. The number of your faction that has been sent off to a reeducation camp is zero, and it will remain zero.

I’m sure if you dig hard enough, you can find some crazy, leftist asshole out there who says something in line with your beloved delusion. And then you can go ahead and compositional fallacy-it up if it makes you feel all warm and squishy inside. No one can stop you. But this insulting, despicable lie of yours will still not be true.

I’m tired of this. I’m tired of the paranoid fantasies. I’m sick of the pathetic attempts to play the victim in the same world where I suffer the real fear that one of my trans friends will drop off the internet and I will never know what happened to him or her because someone decided ignorance and hatred justified violence. Because this is the real world, you fucking asshole. This happens to real people.

So no, Brad. I do not want anything bad to happen to you. I never have. I have never wanted any harm to come to anyone. Even now, with my hands shaking with anger, I don’t. All I actually want is for you to take a step back, listen to yourself from outside your echo chamber, and understand how basically insulting this melodramatic persecution complex over a goddamn literary award is while outside, tire irons are not a coy little non-metaphor.

Failing that, I want you to fuck all the way off. Because that is an expression of my anger that suggests no action and has no power to do real harm.

Categories
politics rants writing you need to do better

Why I parted ways with Authors United

As with so many blog posts, it begins thus:

Screen Shot 2014-09-17 at 4.09.49 PM

Storify: accomplished. Pissy blog post: engaged.

I haven’t made a big deal out of the Amazon v Hachette thing mostly because I do not have a LOOK HOW HUGE MY SALES ARE WHY ARE YOU NOT IMPRESSED BY THE SIZE OF MY SALES FIGURES BOW DOWN BEFORE ME dong to wave around, but back when the Authors United thing got started, I signed on to the first letter. Because I’m a slave to a corrupt and terrible system spineless sheeple teetotaler when it comes to Amazon kool-aide fucking human being who can make my own decisions, thanks. My reasoning is not the point of this blog post. (Really, just go read this thing Scalzi wrote or this thing Chuck Wendig wrote and basically yeah, what they said.)

The point of this post is why I ended up asking to have my name taken off the most recent Authors United letter. The letter you now see there is actually not the letter as originally conceived, which is what I read when I said no, thanks, I don’t want to be on this any more. However, after reading this new version, I still don’t agree, and I don’t put my name on letters with which I have disagreements.

The original point of contention was this line here:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to China. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on that book finding readers. This is the process Amazon is obstructing.

Which has been replaced with:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. But books are not mere consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to another country. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on his or her book finding readers. This is the process Amazon endangers when it uses its tremendous power to separate authors from their readership.

Courtney Milan wrote an excellent blog post about the yick factor of the original paragraph.  And basically: word, sister. Her post was actually what prompted me to go and read the letter carefully in time and ask to have my name removed.

Though I do want to be clear here, that while Douglas Preston and I obviously have some disagreements (upon which I will expound shortly) he is operating very much on the up and up on this thing. He sent everyone involved an e-mail with a link to the proposed letter in it so we could give feedback and ask to have our names taken off if we wished, and when I responded negatively to him he was very polite and didn’t fight me. I’m just such a lazy piece of shit I wouldn’t have gotten around to reading the letter if I hadn’t seen someone else set their trousers on fire first and gone huh, I should probably look in to this.

Shame on me.

Anyway, while I think the new draft of the letter is better, I still don’t agree with it, and I’m glad I asked to have my name taken off. My problem stems from the entire argument that books are not mere consumer goods because of the artistic struggle of the writer. (I’m also not a fan of that outsourcing writing to another country comment for reasons mentioned in Courtney’s post, even if we’re no longer specifically throwing shade at China.)

Now, trust me. I don’t for a second buy bullshit arguments that posit forcing book prices lower will cause people to buy more books. You know what’s stopping me from buying new books? Not having the time to read the ones I already own. I’m not going to consider two $9.99 ebooks interchangeable because they both have unicorns on the cover; they won’t be the same book. And let’s not forget that authors have followings; I’ll run out and buy something by Naomi Novik because I’ve read and liked her other books; I’m not going to pick up something with a dragon in the description just because it’s cheaper.

So books are arguably consumer goods that might resist quite the same models as toasters and candy bars, but they are still consumer goods. Writers, editors, and manufacturers produce the books so that consumers can buy them and read them. And we sure want to market them like they’re consumer goods, don’t we? It’s capitalism, man. Charge what the market will bear.

Arguing to a retail company that books should get some kind of free pass from their shitty, strong-arm tactics because books are special, artistic butterflies? You’re kidding me, right? Courtney Milan made this point in her post already, and better than I could, I think. I’ll just say in short that I think making a non-economic argument at a company that is acting purely out of economic self-interest (no matter what it claims) is a weak position that we’re ill-served by. And kind of makes us sound like assholes, besides. While I think art holds a unique and important place in culture, I’m really not comfortable trying to justify special treatment for books on the backs of the toaster makers. We all deserve to make a fair wage for our labor, whether we’re slapping “hamburgers” together behind the counter at McD’s or writing the Most Important And Transformative Novel Of This Century, and I will not support tacitly abandoning other workers under the suspiciously ego-wanky notion that my skill is way more special.

Anyway if you signed on to the original letter, make sure you read this one and see if you agree with it. It’s important, man. That’s your name on it. (And hey, if you read it and agree with Douglas where I disagree and are a published writer who hasn’t signed on to it, I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.)

I actually want to step past the entire Amazon/Authors United thing and address a much bigger issue, because this is really just another episode in the ongoing adventures of oh hey look we’re getting fucked by corporations again.

Being an artist in a capitalism-obsessed society like America kind of blows. Or really, no kind of about it. It blows. Even producing commercially viable art isn’t any guarantee of being able to make a steady living without a side job, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder to practice one’s craft. But frankly, appealing to the better natures of companies is not the way to fix this. Companies, with rare exception, don’t have better natures.

Now, I’m fond of pointing out that companies are composed of people, and run by people, and excusing corporate malfeasance by shrugging it off as “hey it’s a corporation, what do you expect?” is accepting the most banal sort of evil as part of life. We should expect more from our fellow humans. And hey, we know that it’s possible to have a successful company that doesn’t act like it’s run by total shitlords. (Hello, Ben & Jerry’s.)

Shrugging off corporate evil indicates a profound lack of responsibility and vision for society. It indicates either a conviction of helplessness or an unwillingness to expect better out of ourselves. But you know what? So does expecting corporations to fix our problems our of the goodness of their non-existent hearts. I don’t want to live in a world where corporations are our social conscience.

Capitalism is arguably one of the motors that run our society. But it’s not some kind of miraculous fix-all, and every time a politician (or anyone else) talks about how the magic of the free market is going to swoop in and save us (presumably while riding pillion on a unicorn with Jesus) I just really want to scream. And flip tables. And bite things. We’re not here to serve capitalism. It’s supposed to serve us, and we managed to lose sight of that somewhere along the way.

The real problem here is that we as a society treat artists like shit, and art like it’s widgets, and scorn what is ultimately skilled and important labor. Then those values get reflected back to us by the economy we supposedly own and we go wow that’s ugly could you please not?

Artists aren’t the only profession that gets offered either the shitty end of the stick or no end at all. We don’t even value what we claim to value, or else teachers, soldiers, and artists wouldn’t need government and community assistance in order to survive. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to be convinced that there is such a thing as a person who does not deserve to make a living wage, no matter what their profession.

Companies are not going to value us or our work as long as we treat it as a thing without value. This is our problem to solve, because we let this happen. When corporations shit on people, that’s not because they’re corporations and that’s just what they do. It’s because we’re too fucking cowardly and blind as a society to smack them with a rolled up newspaper and say NO. And asking a corporation nicely to please just stop shitting on people is like asking the doberman with diarrhea to kindly not poop on your rug.

We claim that science is important, creativity is important, that teachers are important, that soldiers are important, and they are. Art is important too. Art is the heart of our society. It’s time we started acting like it instead of effectively praying to Zeus for help and hoping he kisses us before he fucks us and ruins our lives.

Categories
filmmaking movie rants this shit is fucked up

Ridley Scott explains nothing, actually

Okay, someone hold my hat, I am about to come unglued here.

So yeah, by now you might have heard that Ridley Scott is making a movie called Exodus: Gods and Kings, which is based off the Bible story. Which takes place in Egypt.  Allow me to illustrate, briefly, where Eqypt is located:

Egypt: It's a place in Northern Africa.
Egypt: It’s a place in Northern Africa.

Okay? Now. Some people, including me, are kind of pissed off about some of the choices he’s made. Allow me to summarize why with a picture:

Notice anything, here?
Notice anything, here?

And here, have a bonus:

Even Christian Bale looks unimpressed.
Aw, they’re building a statue.

Just for reference, in reality land:

Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)
Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)

Now, if those don’t explain why a lot of us on the internet are breathing fire, just… tell you what. Go read this.

All right. We all caught up now?

So then Ridley Scott “explained” his casting decisions. Which he described as careful. (Hoo boy.) Like, to a certain extent I get, hey I like this actor and want to work with them and they are perfect for this role. Trust me, I now totally get that urge. And as many people have pointed out, if the casting seemed truly colorblind (Ken Watanabe as Nun! Benicio Del Toro as Rameses II! Viola Davis as Tuya!) I could go for it. I really could. But let’s look at the first ten actors listed on IMDB:

  • Aaron Paul – white (American)
  • Christian Bale – white (British)
  • Joel Edgerton – white (Australian)
  • Sigourney Weaver – white (American)
  • Ben Kingsley – non-white (British)
  • Indira Varma – non-white (British)
  • John Turturro – white (American)
  • Ben Mendelsohn – white (Australian)
  • Maria Valverde – white [spanish (literally from Spain)]
  • Emun Elliott – white (Scottish)

I would like to say, first, I feel gross and horrible after writing that list out, and awkward, and ugh. But I also feel it serves an important point, which is basically, out of the first ten people on the case list, there are two actors who could really be considered non-white (both Ben Kingsley and Indira Varma have an Indian parent) and Maria Valverde, who as an actual spanish person from Spain to my understanding should be considered white for the purposes of what we’re talking about. The point here is that the top listed actors are 80% white. If you go with the actors that are really being used to advertise the film, which would pretty much be the top five, you’re still at 80%.

In a movie. That takes place in Egypt.

Scott was not asked about the racial component of his casting decision, but he did answer a question about how he formed the international cast — which has been criticized for only featuring colored performers in small roles, such as servants, thieves and assassins.

“Egypt was – as it is now – a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe,” Scott said. “We cast major actors from different ethnicities to reflect this diversity of culture, from Iranians to Spaniards to Arabs. There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.”

Yeah, all different ethnicities. You know. American, British, and Australian.

If you want to actually see most of the different ethnicities Scott’s talking about, when you go to the IMDB page, click “see full cast list.” Most of them are hidden in there. Which indicates much, much smaller parts. But we kind of already knew that from the pictures, right?

Oh and?

There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.

I did a little googling around because I was curious. And yeah, there’s controversy, most of it seeming to stem from much more openly racist times when people couldn’t handle the idea that someone who wasn’t snowy white made something white people think is awesome, like the pyramids. While at this point the science apparently boils down to:

There is no scientific reason to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged and evolved outside of northeast Africa.

While that’s no doubt an oversimplification considering yes, the area is a major crossroads, using that as an excuse to justify the vast majority of your principle actors looking like they didn’t mind the gap on the Tube and fell through a rip in space and time to land in ancient Egypt is pretty fucking disingenuous.

(Actually, that’s a bad joke on my part, since apparently London is ~60% white and thus would not be well-represented by Ridley Scott’s casting.)

I imagine when you’re a director of Ridley Scott’s caliber, you can end up getting a lot of your principle actors by just calling them up on the phone and telling them you have a script you want them to read. So it’s really on him to take a step back and ask himself why most of the people he thinks are the best man or woman for the job are white rather than doing elaborate mental gymnastics to justify it later.

Because I really, really am not down with the implication that somehow, the best actor for the job is almost always white. Because there are amazing actors out there who aren’t white, and I’d bet you anything even more amazing actors who are just waiting for a chance to shine, if people would just fucking give them that chance.

And it’s not hard to do, by the way. All you do is write a casting notice like this:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, non-white

Or if you don’t want to close the door all the way, fine:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, preferably non-white…

And trust me. You will get a response, from amazing actors, and I bet you anything one of them will be the right person for the job.

Categories
rants someone is wrong on the internet writing

Yeah, whatever happened to starving like a *real* artist?

Sameer Rahim, are you fucking kidding me?

I know people rarely get to write their own headlines, so I tried not to just punch my laptop in the screen when I saw this one: Whatever happened to writing for love, not money?

But the article isn’t any better.

I know they have to eat, but when did it all become about the money? The time when writers could live comfortably off their income was an anomaly of the Eighties and Nineties. These days, apart from a few big-money payouts for the next big thing, publishers are going back to being as cautious as they were before. And why shouldn’t they? Everyone else is tightening their belts.

I know you have kids and a mortgage, guys, but why should you expect to be able to make a living off a craft you’ve been perfecting for years? The art should be its own reward! Starving is awesome, it makes you all thin and waif-like and then maybe you’ll get consumption and it’s so romantic.

Call me a romantic but it might actually benefit a writer not to rely on books as their main source of income.

There is nothing in that sentence that I would call romantic. Because there is nothing in the least bit romantic about having to work a shit job to make ends meet while you attempt to write in your rapidly dwindling spare time. There is also nothing in the least bit romantic about working an awesome office day job like I do and then attempting to write in your rapidly dwindling spare time.

I would actually argue that there’s some good to doing a bit of work, volunteer or otherwise, outside your field at all times just because it gives you a chance to meet people and be in new situations and talk to others you wouldn’t necessarily talk to. That’s idea fuel right there. But trying to work two full time jobs is a good way to destroy your health and sanity and never have time to recharge.

Alternatively, I have heard it suggested that, rather as the bankers were bailed out by the, state so authors should be given public subsidies – the perils of which should be obvious. This isn’t China.

Yeah, I know man. Writers and dancers and sculptors won’t stop trying to crash the economy with their irresponsible gambling. (Also, special bonus for gross China reference. A+)

Luckily, the freedom offered by the internet offers a chance to resurrect the idea of writing for love, not money.

The notion was never dead. People have always been writing for love rather than money. The internet just makes distribution easier.

So far online self-publishing has been the preserve of fan fiction and erotica but it can’t be long before high-quality fiction starts to emerge.

Wow. Every time I think you can’t get more insulting, you do. Frankly, there is plenty of fanfic out there that is of publishable quality. And there’s also some damn good erotica out there too.

Right now there is a distressed writer sitting in front of her computer somewhere, worrying not about whether she’ll make enough money to give up the day job or how many copies she will sell, but obsessing over form and language, meaning and truth.

Yeah, and you know what helps the writer hone those skills that go into the art? Having some fucking time to practice them. If you’re working 40+ hours a week (and heaven help you if you have kids) your time to practice the actual craft of writing is severely limited. And then on top of it when more and more often you’re having to act as your own publicist? Eats up even more of that time. And what your readers want are books, regular as clockwork, and those books are damn hard to write and much slower to produce if they are not the main focus of your energy.

So what, people should only get paid for doing work they find hideous and agonizing? The only people who should get paid, then, are perhaps janitors, garbagemen, soldiers, and so on. Not politicians or professional athletes or scientists. Certainly not successful actors or dancers or fashion designers. Or are artists just the exception to the rule because we don’t actually produce something you deem personally worthy? Or is it just writers who are the exception, because we’re not real in our art unless we’re fucking miserable?

(This ignores the fact that being fucking miserable and depressed is not a good way to produce art.)

What bothers me most about this piece, which is so full of bullshit the stench will never leave my keyboard, is the idea that you should be happy not getting paid for work so long as it’s work you enjoy. Work is work. It requires time and energy and a big chunk of the limited lifespan you have on Earth if you want to be any good at it. And this same argument has been used for years to try to justify things like keeping the wages of teachers severely depressed. Yeah, you teach because you love it, right? It’s so irresponsible of you to want to make a decent living. The smiles of children and the glow of a job well done should pay for your housing and the clothing of your own children.

Tell me, Mr. Rahim, did you write this piece for free?

Categories
fandom rants

Disappointment fajitas before cannibalism

I find this disturbing on a multitude of levels.

I will lay this out here first: I have not read the fic in question, any of the writer’s other fics, and I am not part of either of those fandoms; don’t care about Persona, and while I listen to WTNV, I don’t participate in the fandom in any kind of meaningful way. I am completely uninterested in the fics in question or debates about their relative merits. Got it?

(And good thing, since apparently I might have a rough time reading the fics in question now.)

So let me explain why this whole thing disturbs me.

  1. Writers, whether they are writing fanfiction or original fiction, write disturbing shit all the time. All the fucking time. Hell, my best friend writes horror. I once beta read one of her stories and sent it back with “WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS” as my only comment. This idea that whatever a writer puts down on paper is somehow must be a true reflection of their deep-seated beliefs and desires is wrong, and frankly, dangerous. My characters are not me, any more than the characters an actor plays are him or her. The stories we tell might have some meaning to us and a myriad of different meanings to other people. Do not assume that you know what a writer thinks or believes just from the fiction they have written.
  2. Go read this, in which a marginalized young adult makes the case for all that unsavory sex, drugs, and violence that has people these days clutching their pearls about YA fiction being too “dark.” Underage pornography is bad. But work with explicit sex (or violence) that involves underage characters is also not automatically pornography.
  3. This is yet another example of fanfiction being used as a way to try to embarrass or attack a fan. Or the fact that someone has written explicit material of some sort as a way to attack their other activities—including careers. This also perpetuates a stigma that is generally only used to punish women.
  4. Whenever this kind of shit happens, I take a long look at everything I’ve ever done as a fan and seriously contemplate burning it to the ground. It’s not hard to connect my real name with my fan works. And I’m pretty much the only person in the English-speaking internet that has my name. The only reason I don’t let the paranoia get to me is that I really doubt my company gives a flying fuck that I used to write, say Gundam Wing fanfics. And they googled me pretty thoroughly before they hired me; I think they knew what they were getting. But this is an incredibly privileged position I’m in as an employee, and few people enjoy my level of security. As long as this sort of thing keeps happening, there are a large swathe of people who are going to get scared right out of the fandom because they’re afraid some shithead is going to go after them for whatever reason and try to ruin their career. Which I guess is only a problem if you think people in professional career tracks like teachers and doctors should be allowed to be in fandom. (Which I do.)
  5. The original post comes from a blog that at the time of this writing literally has only three posts. This sort of thing happens all the time, since social media accounts are easy to create, largely anonymous unless someone wants to do a lot of digging that can be easily foiled, and generally disposable. And this is not necessarily a bad thing, since anonymity can be used to expose some real, very ugly problems. But I’ve seen this method used far more often to attack someone spuriously, and that makes it all the harder to draw attention to those aforementioned real, very ugly problems.
  6. Which brings me to my final point, which is far more expansive: I am really fucking tired of fandom cannibalism.

I don’t know if that’s the entirety of what’s going on here. Perhaps I’m characterizing it unfairly. But I’ve seen this happen enough, and to close enough friends that it’s setting off all the same damn warning bells. Because it generally goes like this:

  1. Fan A (who is invariably a woman) has something awesome happen to her. Could be a book deal. Could be getting to do something cool and special. Could be just some kind of online recognition being given to her by a creator/writer/actor.
  2. Fan B takes exception to this for mysterious reasons, which ultimately seem to boil down to jealousy.
  3. Fan B, rather than dealing with jealousy in a healthy way, starts a smear campaign that normally involves newly created social media accounts.
  4. Other people in the fandom (at first those who are friends with Fan B, but then expanding out into basically bystanders who may be well meaning or quietly gleeful to see Fan A get torn down or anywhere in between) start spreading whatever dirt Fan B came up with.
  5. Drama ensues and perpetuates. Fan A, often for the sake of her sanity, gets as far away from the fandom as possible.

I have seen this happen again. And again. And again. And I’m fucking sick of it. Because when you come down to it, I am so goddamn tired of watching women (because yes there can be men or genderqueer individuals involved but it’s most commonly people who identify as women) tear each other down. I am so goddamn sick of watching women turn on each other over what is often nothing more than scraps.

And I am so. Fucking. Sick. Of women buying the bullshit lie over and over again that the success, however small, of one woman somehow means there is less left for everyone else. My successes, no matter how big or small, do not in any way diminish your life.

So, I suppose this is the place where I could go into an uplifting message about how we’re all in this together and we owe it to each other to be supportive and each other’s best cheerleaders, and don’t be jealous! Well, no. I also am aware that we’re goddamn human beings. Jealousy is part of the human condition, an ugly part no one likes talking about. Well, I admit it. I’m jealous of the amazing things my friends do all the fucking time. But like all emotions, you can’t necessarily help that you feel that way, but you can damn well control what you do after.

You want to be annoyed and talk about how someone’s writing is total shit and they don’t deserve their book deal and you never liked that person anyway? Fine. But that does not give you the right to shit on them and everything they love and try to destroy their career.

Eat your goddamn disappointment fajitas and knock it the fuck off.

Categories
politics rants

Incredibly disappointed, entirely unsurprised. BTW, our healthcare system sucks.

The ruling for the Hobby Lobby case has come rolling downhill from SCOTUS, like a giant turd. (PDF here, dissents start on page 60, thank you Elise.) A couple of months ago and after a Facebook kerfuffle, I had a nice in-comment chat with a friend of mine who is a lawyer. And he explained to me why he thought the ruling would probably go the way it did today, and it made sense. Ultimately it was about the letter of the law and the way it applies, rather than the principle that has us all foaming at the mouth. You know, that whole “women are people and your boss has no business making your medical decisions” thing. Yeah. That doesn’t really matter so much.

Not a lawyer. Not going to try to rehash my very smart friend’s point. Just saying now that I am still incredibly disappointed, but thanks to Aaron, I am entirely unsurprised.

Rather than railing about SCOTUS and the way this country seems set on just fucking over women at every opportunity, I think there’s another important take home here:

Being forced to depend upon employment and the good will of your employer for your access to healthcare is a shitty, shitty system.

The reason I’ve come to believe that healthcare is a human right is because it’s about survival, and about control. Someone else controlling your healthcare, your decisions, puts them in no small measure in control of your life. Well, America is supposed to be all about “freedom.” We’re so about freedom we got freedom coming out of our goddamn ears. And there’s this unending drumbeat talking about about how freedom is destroyed by dependence on the government. Keep your government hands off my healthcare!

So tell me, what kind of freedom is it to have your healthcare in the hands of a corporation? How is having your ability to get healthcare and, it seems, even some of the decisions you make completely controlled by a corporation better? (And don’t give me that fucking line about “don’t like your job? find a new one!” have you even looked at the fucking economy for the last five years? IF you’re even lucky enough to have a job!) You don’t want to be dependent on the government, great. Why the fuck do you want to be dependent on a corporation? An entity whose sole driving force is making a profit.

When I worked for AT&T and was still in my conservative phase (yes, I did have one, I have the humiliating voting history to prove it), even then I’d get taken aback by some egregious abuse of corporate power against employees or the environment and get told: well, you can’t blame the corporation. It’s just there to make money. Just doing what it has to do to fulfill that purpose. (Which even then made me ask and deregulating that is a good thing how? But that’s another song and dance.)

But fine, if all corporations do is make money and fuck everything else, why the fuck do you think it’s a good idea to put someone who literally only gives a shit about money in charge of your health? In charge of your life?

The government ain’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But at least I can pretend I have a tiny voice, a sliver of input, a crumb of power in a democracy. Maybe YA has missed the boat, with its ceaseless totalitarian government dystopias. At this point, I’m far more concerned about the benevolence of our corporate overlords.

Categories
rants someone is wrong on the internet

Only YOU can prevent fires.

I remember firefighters coming to my elementary school. They showed off all their cool gear and even wore their SCBA units so that we’d know what they look like in a fire and not be scared of them. They taught us stop, drop, and roll. They taught us to call 911. And they also drilled us on one other very important thing: don’t set fires.

What do you do if you find matches or a lighter? Give it to mom or dad or your teacher!

What do you do if you see someone playing with fire? Tell an adult!

Are matches toys? No!

Are lighters toys? No!

This is what fires do, kids. They hurt people. And you can stop fires from happening by not setting them. And you can stop fires from happening by not letting your friends set them. And you can stop fires from happening by getting help if you see a stranger setting them.

So of course, this isn’t actually about fires. It’s about rape. And apparently self defense is a fire extinguisher. Don’t blame me, man, I’m not the one who came up with that metaphor. If you’re in the mood to grind your teeth, here is a do-not-link-ified link of Larry Correia being a jerk about the “naive idiocy of teaching rapists not to rape.” Instead you could just read Jim C. Hines’s response, which is quite succinct.

I went off on a Twitter rant about this last night, and it’s still pissing me off, so I’m going to get it all down here.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to equate rape and surviving a fire. The experience of assault and being caught in a fire are two very, very different things. But maybe there’s something to be said about the concept of prevention.

The point of fire prevention is that it’s a multi-pronged approach. Laws make arson illegal. Regulations require every day objects to not spontaneously combust, be less likely to burn, etc. Fire extinguishes, sprinkler systems, and smoke detectors can stop fires before they get bad, or help people escape. And early education plays an important role. When firefighters aren’t off saving lives or training, one of their other major duties is public outreach and prevention education.

Because this is the thing: the best way to fight fires is to do your best to keep them from happening in the first place. And a big part of that is telling people to not fucking set fires. And to not let other people set fires. And to call for help immediately if you see a fire.

So let’s go with self defense being like a fire extinguisher. (And yes, Mr. Correia, I do agree that it would be incredibly silly to trash one’s fire extinguisher because they’re not effective against forest fires.) Are private citizens expected to carry fire extinguishers on them at all times? No. It’s awesome if you’re prepared, but you don’t have to be. If an arsonist burns someone’s house down, doe the victim get harassed because they couldn’t put the fire out on their own? Are they asked repeatedly if they’re sure they didn’t do everything they could to stop their house from getting burned down? Do they get publicly shamed because they couldn’t afford to have a sprinkler system installed? Does the arsonist who burned their house down get a sympathetic media portrayal because this has ruined their life? No. (Well, maybe if they’re a football player in certain sectors of the country.)

(By the way? The above is basically part of the “rape culture” that Correia dismisses out of hand.)

I think you get my point.

If you want to get self defense training, that’s great. (I’m not being sarcastic.) I actually do agree with Correia on the point that there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting self defense training, and people who advocate for it shouldn’t get shit on—at least up to the point that advocacy turns to preaching or shaming. I know that there are some excellent courses out there. There are also some incredibly shitty courses. And there are miles of difference between a self defense course that’s aimed exclusively at rape defense and martial arts classes that claim to be for self defense, by the way. A good self defense course is going to be focused, specific, and involve a lot of rote practice and paired exercises.

You never know how you’re going to react in a terrifying situation until you’re there and it’s too late. The point of training is to turn techniques into muscle memory, so even if you can’t think, you can still react. Sometimes self defense training can work really well. Sometimes even if you’re scared out of your mind, you’ll remember one useful thing, and that will be enough.

Sometimes, people never get to that point. They might not mentally be in a place where that works. They might not have time for that kind of practice or the money to pay for it—make no mistake, these are skills that can take time to develop, and free time is something of a privilege these days. Sometimes you bring your fists to a gun fight. Sometimes the person who hurts you is someone that you love and thought you could trust. There are people who cannot defend themselves for a multitude of reasons, such as disability or infirmity or the existence of an insurmountable power differential. And that’s okay.

And don’t tell me that the solution is for all women to carry guns. (Thanks MoJo.)

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.

Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.

• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.

• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Statistics aside, fuck you. Not in my house.

So is self defense training wrong? No. There is no single solution to a big problem, and there will always be bad people out there. But self defense is also a last resort to be used when everything else has failed, not the first and only solution. It should be our undying shame as a society if violence is treated as the optimal answer while the entire concept of prevention by education is dismissed. Not when people stand by and turn a blind eye to assaults. Not when people admit to rape as long as you don’t call it rape, or think rape is okay under certain circumstances. Education may not change the mind of evil people who like to rape, just like education doesn’t change the minds of bad people who like to set fires.

But it does take away their unwitting accomplices.

Don’t set fires. Don’t let others set fires.

Don’t rape people. Don’t let others rape people.

Categories
rants

Art Matters

So there’s something that’s been getting on my tits for a really long time (basically ever since people started really loudly pointing out the dearth of people of color and women in mass media) and I think I finally figured out why. It’s that common refrain of “It’s just a stupid action movie/comic book/pulpy novel/badly written TV show, why are you getting so uptight about it?”

I’m not even going to touch on the idea of representation being important. Hundreds of other people have talked about this much better than I ever could. No, what’s bugging the shit out of me is this attitude of “It’s just crappy mass media, it doesn’t matter.”

Well, let me tell you a thing. It does matter. Of course it fucking matters. Because art matters.

Maybe there’s just some kind of weird disconnect where people don’t quite get that mass media is art. But art doesn’t exist in some rarefied isolation that’s confined to museums, or only if it’s deemed worthy by some sort of cabal of people with excellent taste.  That’s not how it works. Most of the art we’re going to interact with throughout our lives will be mass media, in all its often cheesy or shittastic glory, because that’s what’s out there, and easy to get, and frankly fun. Fun stuff is also art, you know? 

Popular art is still art. Art you don’t like or don’t get is still art. Deliberately pandering art is still art. Mass market paperbacks are art. Comics are art. Movies are art. And while that means, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey is art, so is (god help us all) Sharknado. It was still created by us, and consumed by us, and says a hell of a lot about who we are as human beings whether we like it or not.

So yeah, when someone says that I shouldn’t care about Movie X because it’s just the crapulent summer special effects tentpole, what I hear is: “God, shut up, it’s not like art matters.”

No wonder I get so pissed off. Because art does fucking matter.