Patricia S. Bowne

Last week I read a Facebook discussion about the Pronoun Issue. Someone chimed in to say that you didn’t need to know people’s preferred pronouns. When did you really need to refer to somebody by a pronoun? this commenter asked – a point I have myself raised on numerous fora.

The owner of the Facebook page reacted strongly. Anybody who asked that disingenuous question would be banned immediately as a troll! After all, what if you had to (gasp) introduce the person in question at a professional meeting?

My immediate reaction was that the commenter’s real sin had been to introduce reality into an otherwise diverting argument. But to be fair, I thought, what would I do if I had to introduce someone at at professional meeting and I didn’t know their preferred pronoun? I have written fiction about such characters with no trouble, but there I had control of the context.

I went in search of a sample introduction at the most recent Academic Minute. Here’s what I found:

John Cullinan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Program at Bard College. His primary research focuses on the intersection of Number Theory and Representation Theory, and he has recently begun publishing in the Mathematics of Voting. Dr. Cullinan has been on the faculty at Bard College since 2006 after teaching for a year at Colby College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2005.

Of course Dr. Cullinan probably wrote this for them, in which case there would be no call to mess with it. But if writing such an introduction for somebody else, could we convey all this information without the gendered pronouns? Of course we could! We are educated professionals.

John Cullinan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Program at Bard College, doing research on the intersection of Number Theory and Representation Theory which has recently been published in the Mathematics of Voting. Dr. Cullinan received the Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2005 and has been on the faculty at Bard College since 2006.

Now I need make no assumptions about Dr. Cullinan’s gender or preferred pronouns. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

So I say let us quit our bitching, pull on our grown-up undergarments, and just write our stuff without gendered pronouns. You might notice that I have been able to write this entire blog post without them. Or you might not have noticed, which is sort of the point.

My Facebook friends are probably tired of my posting links to Freddie deBoer pieces. I do it because he says exactly what I would say if I had his progressive street cred.  Here he is on the progressive takeover of criticism:

…it seems to me that the progressive takeover that Curtis describes in sports media has been, if anything, even more comprehensive and obvious in the world of art and culture criticism. This morning I was browsing The Atlantic and I was struck by the degree to which I just expect all of our cultural criticism to function as a checklist for socially liberal politics…”

“…This thinking seems to preclude several different points of view that strike me as legitimate and worth thinking about. Like

• That there are many people with left-wing or progressive political sympathies who recognize that art can be interrogated for its political beliefs but nevertheless want to read art and culture criticism that does not consist primarily of explicit progressive political complaints; …
• That there are conservative or apolitical readers who would like to read more cultural commentary that does not involve an explicit rejection of their politics and who have suddenly found the world of artistic criticism has dramatically shrunk; …
• That everyone already knows what the internet’s opinion will be on Miley Cyrus, on Jonathan Franzen, on Kanye West, on the Entourage movie, and sundry other pre-digested cultural artifacts, and so you’re left wondering why anyone bothers at this point;
• That after years of reading this stuff, it’s become incredibly boring. [emphasis mine]

I wish someone would nominate Freddie’s post for a Hugo so thousands of people would read it.

I honestly think that this is the real issue that has made so many people who don’t give a rip about the Hugos view the Sad Puppies with sympathy. Sympathy, I admit, that they are trying their best to fritter away from within their own ideological silo, but still sympathy. I want to read some literary criticism that is about literature. It’s a darned shame that what I have to choose between is yet one more article about sexism in Star Trek and a game of ‘who can be most outrageous?’ on the conservative side.

I have hope though, in the number of people in fandom who have stated their intention to actually talk about the books they like this year. Surely some of them will have unique and interesting things to say.

A few things I’ve been reading lately caused me to reflect on a double standard I hold regarding Women’s Work in fiction.

I’m a fan of Women’s Work, as behooves somene who grew up on Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls. I dearly love a character who excels in the Womanly Arts, but my view of those arts is pretty much pre-electricity. A Womanly character, in my mind, can build a fire in a woodstove and figure out how to adjust the damper. She can take a chicken apart and cook it, grow a garden full of vegetables and put them up for the winter, and shoot the occasional bear. And she always knows what’s edible in the woods and marshes.

In her spare time, she can make a dress or knit or crochet. She can also handle less practical handicrafts like quilling or making paper snowflakes, and she can make a comforting meal out of two old tomatoes and a straw hat. When the adventurers come home and find the table set, the kettle purring on the hob and copper pans reflecting a homey glow, I feel very happy both with the story and the homemaker, and it troubles me not at all that the homemaker is female in 99% of cases. I am way more impressed with her stew than I am with the swordswoman’s antics.

So basically, I appear to be OK with stereotyped female characters. But there is a stereotype that makes me snarl out loud, and that is Caregiver.  I do not admire heroines who interpret every nuance of expression, worry about how members of their battle team are getting along or whether the aliens understand the engineers. It drives me crazy when becoming a witch or a dragon rider or the best musician or the Chosen One ™ means the heroine spends the rest of her life as an amateur social worker.

The weird thing is, this seems to be the aspect of stereotypical femininity that authors discard last. Lots of fiction ‘liberates’ women by taking them out of the kitchen but still leaves them saddled with the emotional work of the novel.

I was discussing this with a friend today and she asked how a writer could possibly create a sympathetic character who wasn’t a caregiver. Write her like a male character, I said. Like 90% of the male characters out there.

Months ago, before the enslatening, I posted in support of the Sad Puppies. It wasn’t because I read their kind of fiction, or cared who won the Hugos, or wanted less diversity in the field; it was because something about them made me feel I could breathe again.

Unfortunately, the air became more and more toxic as the summer progressed. But I still feel better than I did before the puppies, and it’s still for the same reason; I now know more about the range of opinions in SFF. It no longer feels like one uniform echo chamber.

There certainly are echo chambers out there, on all sides, and it’s obvious that many people therein are more interested in pleasing their own partisans than in having even the slightest appeal for outsiders. People say horrible, foolish, unforgiveable things in echo chambers. As an outsider, I’ve noped out of a large percentage of the SFF discussion venues I poked my nose into this summer. But before this summer, I didn’t even know that there were multiple echo chambers in SFF. That discovery alone gave me a big sigh of relief.

And then, I found people who were trying to maintain non-aligned spaces where folks were welcome no matter how they felt about the puppies. I saw efforts by conservative and progressive authors, self-published and mainstream, from different countries and races and religions. I discovered that some other people had been as unhappy as I about feeling trapped in an echo chamber, and that feeling that way – or being willing to pay attention to people who felt that way – didn’t mean you were a reactionary, racist misogynist.

I know what I want from SFF now. I want to hang out in places where that person you just answered could be religious or atheist, conservative, libertarian, or progressive; so you’d better make your statements as if the people who disagree with them are human beings, not stereotypes and the butts of echo-chamber quips. And I now know those places exist and there is nothing wrong with me for wanting them.

So whatever good or ill the Sad Puppies did otherwise, I will always be grateful.

I had an attack of angst about my WIP. Who’s going to fall in love with these characters? Who’ll turn the page just to find out how their problems get solved, make up fanfic about soothing their fevered brows, etc. etc.?

Now, I’m not even sure those are all appropriate questions to be asking about a YA novel. I’m not particularly anxious for people to be shipping Simi/Lord Cembel or Paio/Farriman. But this is the only model of fan appreciation I have to work with. I need to read something fans find juicy, I said to myself, and bought a book I saw some fen raving about online.

Wow. I’m about 5% into this thing and the protagonist has witnessed an execution-by-torture, lost his only friend, been tortured himself, and put himself in danger of even worse because of unresolved guilt over somebody else’s death by torture.

I have to admit, it grabbed me. I compared the beginning of this book to the beginning of my WIP, and there was simply no comparison for speed, intensity, and identification of the protagonist’s issues. I love confident writing, and this makes mine look really tentative. But I foresee that by 10% in I will be hoping for someone to put the guy out of his misery.

However, I have been inspired to put a little more oomph into the WIP, and have just discovered that plot events suggest a little baby is under a curse. I’ve never seen anyone write fanfic about a cursed baby, but we take what we can get.

Lots of talk in fannish circles this year about big bad message fiction, and how it’s either corrupted the field or always been embedded in the field. Talk about fiction in service of a message (BAD), as opposed to fiction where message elements are integrated with stuff like characterization and plot (GOOD).

Personally, I love me some hard-core, high-octane message fiction. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Atlas Shrugged, Malcolm, Martin Eden, That Hideous Strength, Pink and White Tyranny. I love message fiction from all different angles, if its message is convincing. I’ll happily read a well-argued novel advocating a message I hate – though after I’ve read such a book, I probably won’t hate the message as much as I thought I did. Other times I’ll hurl a book that ineptly supports my deeply held beliefs, and find that I’ve hurled part of my support for the cause with it.

I like my message fiction to be full of message. I have no time for critique fiction where nobody gets to work out their message, because all they ever do is point out how the world doesn’t agree with it. I want a message that’s integral and integrated, its consequences for those who buy into it worked out in passionate detail. In Ayn Rand and Dickens even the scenery is invested in the message, and that suits me just fine.  I’d rather be steeped in abhorrent values than mince around the edges of OK ones.

But what I cannot abide is poorly argued, secondhand message fiction. I want to see why characters believe what they believe. I am not satisfied to fill in the reasons for myself, if the author just sounds a dog-whistle; and I am most familiar with the dog-whistles on my own side of the political spectrum, so that’s the side that irritates me the most. I feel personally insulted when an author introduces a current hot topic — one that I feel requires some serious message fictional analysis and support — as if I will salivate on cue.

It’s no mistake that most of the message fiction I love was written by people who came by their messages honestly, from living through stuff and thinking hard about it. Real message fiction requires that you have a message, not just a bunch of received opinions, assumptions shared by your social set, and things other folks said on the internet. That’s why there’s not half so much of it out there as people think.