Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Oh.  So it’s science fiction’s fault that boys aren’t entering the scientific fields, and not No Child Left Behind\pooly paid teachers\poor school districts\emphasis on sports over academics\lack of parental guidance\prohibitive school loans\etc.

How marvelously masculine to be able to pinpoint the very cause with such precision!  I am all aflutter . . .

I think many boys would go into science if they thought they could meet a chick like Starbuck.

Y’know, I was in the hospital a lot over the last two years and once I was watching a marathon of the original (and crazy sexist) BSG. My admitting DR said “When it starts to piss her off, she’s clear to leave.” Hours later, it started to piss me off, and they let me go.

That article reads like it was written by a whiny fourteen-year-old boy in the throes of homosexual panic.  Bleah.

I loved this Candy, thank you!  Your point 2 very eloquently expressed what is behind white male panic.  : )

You’re absolutely right it’s written from a position of fear. Hell, maybe even stark raving terror, because there’s certainly a fair bit of raving in there. Thing is, raving about SF/F is an attempt to shove back into the box what, in the real world, is halfway out of the box and not looking to take the shoving back. So, instead, shove down on the fiction—which isn’t a stupid way to do it, if you think of how much fiction (in all its formats) does impact our views of the world. If you can control the artists, the visionaries, then you can influence a lot of our perceptions about How Things Are (or even how things should be).

When a majority in power has to give up its special privileges, or when it has to share those same privileges with everybody else (therefore making it resemble a basic right, as opposed to a privilege), the majoritarian take is always to cast these losses of power as evidence of bullying, and the sharing of rights as the gaining of special rights by the other minority.

Nail. Hammer. Bang.

Reminds me of one my all-time favorite letters to the editor.

from LA Times

My 4-year old son, Ben, is a big fan of the space shuttle. We ate breakfast in front of the TV a couple weeks ago to see it take off, and Tuesday morning we watched a replay of the landing. We also watched some footage of mission control on NASA TV. The voice of mission control was a woman, and we could see her as she communicated with flight commander Collins up in space somewhere. I asked Ben if he would rather pilot the space shuttle or work at mission control and he said, “I thought only girls could do those things.” I found myself uttering words that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago: “No, Ben, boys can do those things too.”

People say this shuttle mission wasn’t much more than an expensive garbage pickup from the International Space Station. But the lesson it taught young girls across this country made it worth every penny.

TRACI MANN
Los Angeles

Candy, when I grow up, I want to be half as articulate and awesome as you.

Wow… First very well said Candy! Your verbal critique was well spoken, unfortunately I doubt that the writer of that ‘cough’ article will be able to read Smart Bitches, trashy books as it may threaten his masculinity too much.

I am stunned however at the collection of people complaining about women in Science Fiction.  They seem to forget that for years academics have divided Science fiction into “hard science fiction’ which deals primarily with the techinical aspects and ‘soft science fiction’ which serve as a ‘literary sandbox’ for exploring issues of race, gender, and relationships under various scenarios. Presenting in the Science fiction stories philosophical thought puzzles for the masses. These frontiers are just as valid and dangerous as any we as humans would discover in space, for they are the frontiers for our own morality.  But this author seems to disregard those stories as unimportant.

But back to BSG ,Starbuck was not just a character for young men, he was the hottie. Who cared if he could fly, he looked good. So I think it is great to have a female character to inspire young women, and young men.  And this country NEEDS, (heck the WORLD needs) young gifted individuals of both sexes to be inspired by science fiction to discover the limits of what we can do.  Thank you for tossing the current whirlpool of bigotry regarding gender in Science Fiction to my attention.

spam word dark65, (these people have been living in the dark since 19 err 1865.)

Well, at least now I’ve got an entirely putrid theory to underpin my “I should’ve been a sheik’s mistress rather than a scientist” lament.

If someone thinks that the young male will be turned away from science because, suddenly, he thinks that guys that do science get to discover, explode, *and* have sex, instead of just discovering and exploding, I suspect there is something broken about his model of male thought.

I’ve never thought that men were the cold, grunting, relationshipless loners that some men (and some women) seem to think they ought to be.  But hey, I only grew up reading men’s writing—all that “male” sci fi and fantasy.  And once you get beyond the dragons and armies of doom and spaceships, I think you’ll find that men and women are both romantics at heart.

After all, there’s a reason J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife have “Beren” and “Luthien” engraved on their tombstones.

Hoo boy, shades of an argument had with my FIL several years back when he was bemoaning the stats that more women than men were going to college.  Seems that all us edumacated females were going to take the good jobs from men who really need them, and also scare off men from going to college because it was becoming “girly”.  After scraping my exploded brain off the wallpaper, I informed him of how smugly happy the boys at my college were with the 3:2 girl-boy ratio because of the target-rich dating environment, and reminded him of his four granddaughters who might want to support themselves one day.  Jackasses abound.

Spot on, Candy.  I can smell the fear from here.

“As we know science fiction has inspired boys to pursue careers in science, engineering, and technology as men.”

And GOD KNOWS we don’t want girls to do any of those things! Their brains are too soft. They *want* to sit and pet kittens and wash my gym socks all day. No place for kittens in a intergalactic laser battle!

(And totally LOL at the roller derby!)

Awesomely ignorant link, awesomely smart and sharp critique. Love point 2 of your observations enormously - I have never been able to articulate this as succinctly and clearly as you have. I may even print that bit off and keep it in my purse to counter any anti-feminist arguments I encounter in the future (and there will be some, oh yes). Also, would like to point out that Dirk What’s-his-name was cast because he was a hottie, as was Richard Hatch who played Apollo. I work in TV, and I can tell you right now that that was for The Ladies, not the future generation of male scientists. The original BSG also had lots and lots of romance - sooo much, and I should know, I loved it and I write romance for a living - and a freaking-cute-as-hell robot dog and a little homeless kiddy.  None of these things strike these nostalgic scaredy-cats as being designed to appeal to The Ladies?

Candy, between you and Scalzi you’ve covered it all.  Thank you.

Oh thank God someone took that article to task (that would be you, Candy and the Scalzi) because I thought my head was going to explode when I read it earlier today.  My eyebrows began their journey to my hairline when I got to the sentence about the feminizing of the ‘SyFy’ channel.  Um, like the rest of us, including women, don’t think that was a dumbass move.  So he’s mad that Starbuck on the new BSG is a woman?  Wow.  Dude’s got issues.  And now this guy wants to blame women for all the evils in and around the current state of science fiction or the study of science?  I got to enraged that I missed the point he was trying to make.  Oh, that’s right.  He didn’t make one—just an ass out of himself.

Have you looked at the rest of that website? It creeps me out. It talks about empowering men but it feels like it’s at the expense of women. And.. the about page says the blog “combines the talents of some of the Anglosphere’s best bloggers on men’s issues” . Anglosphere’s??!

My IQ might have dropped twenty points just reading that drivel.

That is a guy who has never gotten laid. His prospects might look up if he would sully his bookshelf with anything that might give him some insight into heterosexual interaction. Fembot android sex doesn’t count.

Also, has he ever heard of Star Trek? The original series was misogynistic but always had a little romance. The spinoffs all have romantic subplots.

Sci Fi has always been the first place to have alternative characters, inter-racial dating, even inter-species dating. And here I thought it was ‘cause sci-fi fans were all open-minded and stuff.

Oh! Is anyone else reminded of Dwight Schrute?

There are so many ways I can pick apart that infantile rant, but instead I’ll just comment on one of the funnier notations:

The first slash fiction was about the original Star Trek series where women wrote stories about Kirk and Spock in a homosexual relationship.

When I was a wee young lass cruising about the intarwebs, long before Google existed, one of the first eye-gouging experiences was Kirk-Spock slash.

It was written by MEN, all of it. (Aside from the eye-gouging the writing was so poor I wanted to whip out the internet red pen.)

Went to read the article -holy crap -it’s an offensive site all around, and the links away are jsut as bad (try finding the “Feminism and The Economy” one.  I hope all the little girls that read scifi and grow up to be scientists find a way to leave these idiots on another planet.

And here I thought it was ‘cause sci-fi fans were all open-minded and stuff.

Well, many of them are.  Unfortunately, there are also a lot of “Nice Guys” that are into sci-fi, too.  “Nice Guys” can always be recognized by their mating call:  “Girls don’t want to date “Nice Guys”, like me—they just want some guy that treats them like shit!”  Of course, “Nice Guys” are never really nice.  They always expect a quid pro quo arrangement—they listen to your problems and act like your best friend and, as a woman, you’re supposed to be so overcome with gratitude, you become their sex doll.  When this does not happen as it did in their late-night Lora Croft fantasies, they get pissed off.  Instead of looking at their own behavior and misplaced expectations, they place the blame where it really belongs (in their secretly misogynist minds)—women.  “Nice Guys” tend to age into bitter, angry, openly misogynist losers, but it’s not their fault.  Just ask them.

From what I read that Candy quoted here, I can guarantee that this guy tells absolutely everyone that he’s a “Nice Guy”.

MightyGodKing did a brutal dissection of “Nice Guys” in this post:

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2007/12/16/the-internet-nice-guy-rears-his-ugly-head-once-more/

Oh yeah. Because shows like Star Trek: The Original Series were all about boys killing and blowing up shit and not at all about relationships and the human condition. And totally didn’t inspire millions of words of slash fiction. Nope. Not at all. *insert sarcastic eye roll here*

I find this funny, as does my husband. I’m quite proud to know that what I write is causing such a stir, that I’m “helping” bring about the downfall of “Real Men” in science. (insert eyeroll) So what? I’m a woman and I LOVE a good sci-fi film or TV show, whenever a good one rolls around. Why can’t women love science, too? And my 7y/o son is a scifi nut. Why does he love scifi so much? Because his father and I taught him to. It’s all about what the child is exposed to. He’s been around scifi more than the other three, so he’s the most into it.

I read the post by Dirk, and I hate to say it, but I agreed with some of what he said. He pointed out exactly what I didn’t like about the NEW BSG. I, personally, preferred the original, and though my husband watched the new (he only liked the actual science in it [ships]) I never paid it any attention because all it did was piss me off. I hated every character on it. I hated how dark it had become, how blurred the lines between good and bad turned.

It’s all about “men” who are afraid of a change that’s already happened and passed them by without their realizing it. They’re “behind” and it drives them crazy, so they have to toss out these asinine ideas and childish rants to make themselves feel “real” and “manly.” All it does is show how little they really know about the real world around them.

Spam word: Fear99, how appropriate. :)

“The Spearhead”?  Complete with an image of a spearhead?

Maybe I’ve been reading too much Judge a Book by Its Cover (very funny book cover blog), but I can’t help but think of Phallic Phridays.  Even their site design continues the whole scared, “men are men and women who can talk give manly men cooties” thing.

Courtney: But women like fantasy/paranormal more, which is why SyFy is showing more of it—because the network is going all girly!  Ergo, Lord of the Rings = girly.

Yeah, I think something just exploded in my brain a little at that.

Laurel: LOL.  “Bears.  Beets.  Battlestar Galactica.”

recaptcha: progress54.  The rest of the world has progressed quite a bit since 1954 but these guys stay firmly entrenched in 1950s fantasyland.

A general rule of thumb:

If someone (of either sex) feels the need to explain to you how “nice” they are, they aren’t.  Ditto for “tolerant”.  Or “generous”.

On the upside, I can’t see him enticing a woman to reproduce. Gotta love Darwinism!...wait…that’s science and now my poor girlie brain exploded.

Thanks for pointing out this article, Candy.  It was indeed “hilarious,” and the snarky responses really made my day.  Normally, this isn’t my kind of topic, but I was so incensed I had to blog about it.

Honestly, we can (almost) always use more “romance” in science fiction.  And character.  That helps, too.

Great post.

Having read the article and the subsequent comments, I have to say that those are some of the saddest, angriest, loneliest group of self-loathing misogynists I’ve seen in a while.  Wow.  Women just take everything good away from them and even use shaming language like, “You spend too much time on the internet” to keep them from finding like-minded losers from which to learn the Truth!  I knew I was powerful, but who knew that when I complained about my ex spending 15 hours a day playing WoW instead of finding a job, I was holding down the ENTIRE MALE GENDER!  Damn, I’m good.

In a truly inspired moment on the reference desk, I was explaining this blog post to my coworker when a patron across the room said “why are women ruining scifi?”  When I said they made it about relationships instead of engineering he said “Scifi has always been about relationships.  What a moron.”

known32—32 people in front of the reference desk have known scifi was always about relationships.

Thank you for this - I think you and John Scalzi are spot-on. While I’ve felt for some time that there are interesting points to be made about gender equality from both sides, and that the male side can sometimes be neglected, that site is absolutely horrific. I read a few articles and the accompanying comments (the sci-fi post is just the tip of the iceberg), and fervently wish I hadn’t. I can hardly believe that there are people who think like that. It makes me sick.

Yikes!!! Scary, sad, and truly frightening. But entertaining too :)

Tina C:

And here I thought it was ‘cause sci-fi fans were all open-minded and stuff.

I can’t tell for sure but I think you may have taken me out of context. My point was that as a fan base, Sci-Fi may be the most progressive, tolerant group out there. Many mainstream lit trends cropped up in Sci-Fi first. This jackass clearly does not fit in with that group and probably has no idea how many literary people respect Sci-Fi just for that open-mindedness but otherwise don’t read it. If he’s looking for the vehicle to move the Aryan race forward he picked the wrong one.

Also,

I knew I was powerful, but who knew that when I complained about my ex spending 15 hours a day playing WoW instead of finding a job, I was holding down the ENTIRE MALE GENDER!  Damn, I’m good.

That was awesome.

Don’t know why but after reading that article, I convinced myself that the writer is probably a big fan of John Norman’s Gorean series, http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/2H087IV8W69VG.

Now even that review/synopsis/overview is filled with the crazy so I just thought it would be a perfect manifesto for the anti-female sci-fi geek who wrote that piece.

I can’t tell for sure but I think you may have taken me out of context. My point was that as a fan base, Sci-Fi may be the most progressive, tolerant group out there.

Oh, I agree.  They are indeed all of that.  But coming from the perspective of a geeky, somewhat attractive female who has always been friends with and dated geeky boys (and been married to one or two), there are also the subset of the fan base that are self-proclaimed “Nice Guys”.  I’ve met more than a few and been friends with many of them.  Hell, even married one of them (and no, the rhetoric doesn’t change, which just proves that it’s a convenient excuse for, well, just about everything.)  I guarantee that they all consider themselves progressive and tolerant, even if we’re sitting here going, “Huh?”  Now this guy in particular may have some truly deep-seated racist, sexist, homophobic feelings that he’s trying to justify through a misreading of early sci-fi that simply doesn’t jibe with the truth of what was written—and that goes beyond even what I was talking about with the Nice Guy thing.  Still, I bet he does tell people about what a Nice Guy he is.

what a ridiculous argument!
“As we know science fiction has inspired boys to pursue careers in science, engineering, and technology as men.”
Really?  A lot of the guys I know who go into science, engineering, and technology don’t read science fiction as children or even as adults. 

“With women killing science fiction on television, the current generation of boys won’t have this opportunity to be inspired to work in these fields. “
So what?  boys can work in whatever fields they want to work in.  is it so necessary to have these fields be populated by mostly males?  Isn’t there a movement now to encourage females to join these fields?  don’t blame women in science fiction!

“However, many boys who would have gone on to make scientific discoveries and invent new technologies will not do so since they will never be inspired by science fiction as boys.”
Can’t girls make the same discoveries?  Maybe those boys will just become teachers and professors instead and educate our youth?  Or maybe they’ll become advocates for social justice? 

and aren’t there a bunch of famous sci-fi novelists decades back who were women but wrote under male pen names? 

anyways, love this blog entry and your dissection of the article!

Another reason to love Scalzi. (As if I needed one.)

Candy, I choked on the first line (!!!!) of the damn article: “Science Fiction is a very male form of fiction.” Gee, I guess no one informed my teachers, my librarians, or my older brothers and sisters, who all recommended it to me when I was just an innocent little girl. Shame on them.

That article is just so wrong, all over, and all the way through. And you are so full of right about the unexamined assumptions and baggage it’s based on.

Well said! While there is definitely something to be said for not engaging the crazies, I appreciate that there are so many others out there willing to mock them, and expose them for the idiots they are. The GeekaChicas bloggers are going after it, too. (Most of us are femmes with advanced degrees or who work in science-related fields.) The only downside is that the attention is getting that stupid site’s stats up.

and aren’t there a bunch of famous sci-fi novelists decades back who were women but wrote under male pen names? 

One of the commenters mentioned that fact, with a long list of names.  But apparently, the fact that scifi was never a boys only club is somehow beside the point.

I’m sorry, boys, that you find it so difficult to be inspired by the male based comic books, movies and TV shows featuring Summer Glau that cater especially to your prurient interests. I suppose the slew of women who will flock into this field (including myself) will just have to pick up the slack.

Honestly, if you don’t want us in there with you, you can go play in some other sandbox. I hear Westerns are dying off, they could use an influx of whiny, self-obsessed crybabies.

Actually got to this on my blog before I saw it here.

“OMG! Starbuck is a woman!” is so 2003.

That’s right keep ‘em bare foot & pregnant in the kitchen . Nice women don’t want the vote anyway. What year is this? 1900? No? Feels like it.

I have read some other parts of the said website, and they are completely bullshit. Some of them are hilariously bad, being written by ‘manly man’ men who thinks that they are superior to women and (actually) nice men because they can’t keep up with the world. Some entries are just plain annoying, and they even make me feel a bit worried since it seems like something that can be taken seriously by some impressionable youngsters or college douchebags. I know some guys who wouldn’t see anything wrong with the site and might even be ultimately impressed by the articles.

By the way, if seeing a girl in a sci-fi series turn a guy off from being a scientist, I don’t think that guy deserves to become a scientist in the first place. Isn’t science about being open minded?

I personally liked how Scalzi pointed out the possible first science fiction novel was a woman: Mary Shelley. Hah.

The commenter from the original article just summed it all up for me on how this guy wants his SF. Awesome imagery!

Obviously, in the future, only white-heterosexual men will be smart and brave enough to fly around space-ships. And green alien women or holograms/androids with DDD boobs and better-than-the-real-thing-vaginas will be available for every sexual and domestic needs. Those clean corridors and giant windows don’t happen by themselves.

Hubby and I discussed this, both of us finding it sad that trying to push women back into a box doesn’t give men everything outside the box to call their own, but it puts them in a different box. Saying ‘this is what a man should be’ is just as damaging to men as it is to say what a woman should be. (He also laughs as someone who watched both BSGs and searched for several minutes for a word for the original Starbuck before settling on ‘elfin’ and nowhere near that traditional definition of men, while the newer Starbuck could be described as ‘butch’ and nowhere near the traditional definition of feminine.

My point had been that traditionally “manly men” didn’t go into science. Science was something nerds did while trying to avoid getting beat up by the “manly men.” I suppose he’s talking about the fictional aeronautic engineers though. The space cowboys. Captain Kirk.

Giving these people more to look forward to than another hill to climb always made sense to me.

I personally liked how Scalzi pointed out the possible first science fiction novel was a woman: Mary Shelley. Hah.

  Um, that should say “written by a woman…”

The point about nostalgia for a time that we know about through TV is spot on, and marked in the spear boys’ complaint: the blog talks about SF generally but only gives TV shows as examples. One could argue that patterns in current shows have everything to do with instructions from people—ahem, men—like Robert McKee and Blake Snyder about how to write a blockbuster. Their advice is everything about personalizing the conflict, not technologizing it.

It is a source of heartwarming satisfaction to know that my very existence upsets these creatures, and that by *writing* and *reading* science fiction which actually contains *homosexuals*, I am subverting all they stand for. Oh yes, I am filled with glee :)

But one thing. Stop saying this bloke needs to get laid. Why should a self-respecting goat have her evening ruined just to keep him happy?

I think, as an act of charity, we should send the anonymous coward who wrote this drivel, a ‘man-size’ (heh) tube of lanolin. He must be chafed after all that wanking. An extra tube or five to Dirk Benedict. I hear he doesn’t have much else to do these days [/preferred Richard Hatch anyway pbbbt!]

This is a great article - much more eloquent than the article it’s critiquing! Thanks for writing it, and for the smart people commenting here. You’ve calmed my girlish nerves!

Of course the story has to be between characters who act like real people, but if the story is not influenced by it happening in space, why is it a story about space exploration? If you retell Arthur Hailey’s Airport on a space station, would it be good sci-fi? If you retell Greys Anatomy with the characters as astronauts instead of doctors, would it be good sci-fi?
Defying Gravity hilariously uses faster-than-light communications because the writers are either uneducated, lazy, or think their intended audience is uneducated and/or lazy. Trying to make sci-fi appeal to an audience that would normally not be interested in sci-fi often produces bad sci-fi. People seeing it might then think all sci-fi is bad.

Regarding gender roles, The Day of the Triffids was shocking to this 20-something male, and we’re long past that. I’m also against professional boys’ clubs, be them military or computer programming. But today’s men are confused by the conflicting messages, and girls should really tell a guy ahead of time whether they would be offended by the guy opening the door for them or by the guy not opening the door for them. I suppose in my grandpa’s time, he would know for sure what was the polite thing to do.

“If you retell Arthur Hailey’s Airport on a space station, would it be good sci-fi?”

Could be. Depends on what gets done with the premise. Star Trek is just a western in space (and in many ways, not really science fiction) but it had been tremendously influential in encouraging people to explore ideas in a sci-fi setting.

“Defying Gravity hilariously uses faster-than-light communications because the writers are either uneducated, lazy, or think their intended audience is uneducated and/or lazy.”

Dude *no*. FTL is one of those accepted impossibilities which makes the rest of science fiction *possible*. How can you seriously have stories set in space or on other planets, or with aliens, if you insist on restricting space travel to the physics we have now? I love a definition of science fiction I read years ago which went along the lines of “Fiction is asking ‘what if?” Science fiction asks, ‘My god, what if?’” What the hell is wrong with taking a concept which allows the settings to expand and the imagination to soar? If you’re going to limit science fiction to the strictly possible, then you’ll kill the genre stone dead.

I use FTL in my stories, knowing it’s impossible and I am neither uneducated nor lazy. Neither is my audience. There’s dumb science in so-called science fiction (Dr Who anyone) and then there’s convention.

“girls should really tell a guy ahead of time whether they would be offended by the guy opening the door for them or by the guy not opening the door for them.”

Why should men, who wrote the rules in the first place, be given special help because the society *they* dominate is changing, and so are social mores?

Is it so very hard to actually, you know, like *ask* women what they want?

I get the feeling you sympathise with Mr Spear Chucker’s post. You’re not likely to gain a lot of traction on a blog like this if you do.

I just love some of the comments. The one from the dude whose wife was a heinous slut who now hates all women. Priceless.

You know, my ex was a lazy, useless sack of crap who was content to let me carry the entire load—financially and otherwise—while he played World of Warcraft 14 hours a day. Come to think of it, the only thing that’s changed is I’m not stuck washing his dirty socks. But does that mean I hate all men? Am I raising my sons to be man-hating castrati? Have I replaced Clive Owen in my fantasy Clive Owen/Me/Angelina Jolie sandwich with Scarlett Johansson?

Call me a pie-eyed optimist, but I still see something worthwhile in that ol’ Y chromosome. Less now, though, after reading that wank-fest…

Recently, I was at a literary science fiction and fantasy, and I ran across an online reviewer who spoke out against the rise of female protagonists & urban fantasy. He mentioned that he’s very sick of publishers sending him books “with another goth chick” on the cover. Later, I was told by my friend who attended the conference with me that during the “What you should be reading now” panel, books of that type (female protags in urban fantasy) were banned from inclusion. Hmm.

While I can understand a person getting tired of a popular trend, there seemed to me to be an undercurrent of something beyond fatigue happening there, a sentiment that sci fi/fantasy as a genre was being hijacked by women.

Later, a pair of young women asked me if I ever feel pressure to take the romantic subplots out of my stories in response to attitudes such as his. This actually echoed a question that I’d heard while on one of the panels as well. Inwardly, I sighed heavily. No matter how far we come, someone wants us to feel guilty and turn away from what we like to read/find entertaining. As you can probably guess, I told the young writers to write their stories the way they want to write them and I assured them that current trends in publishing prove that there are plenty of readers who will enjoy reading about romantic plots and subplots.

Anyway, thanks for posting this thread. I am sorry that some guys are frustrated and fearful, but no matter how much they rant or how tiresome I find it to answer their rants, we have to keep countering them. Otherwise theirs could be the only words some young writer hears.

**Pointing and laughing, as per Scalzi.**

@Tina C.:

I knew I was powerful, but who knew that when I complained about my ex spending 15 hours a day playing WoW instead of finding a job, I was holding down the ENTIRE MALE GENDER!  Damn, I’m good.

What?? We were married to the same man??!! Lazy, useless sack of crap, and a polygamist to boot!

You have to admit that the article makes a very valid point: no one has ever become a scientist without first being a reader of science fiction. Ever. If not for the genre, science as we know it would not have come to exist, and if we don’t stop screwing it up by letting the characters in it have feelings, people will stop caring about science now. We women are literally ruining the world.

Newton, Descartes, Galileo? ALL HUGE SCI-FI FANS. They wouldn’t have cared about science without it.

Wait, the first science fiction novel was published when? Damn. Well, there goes that theory.

How in the world could someone as intelligent and reasonable as the author of that article get anything wrong? I mean, my moronic, relationship-obsessed female brain only understood every other word he wrote, but I was sure someone who used such a persuasive and rational arguments would think his theories through.

I essentially see this as some jerks who are upset with the direction Sci-Fi television/film is taking and needing someone to blame it on. Fortunately for them, they have a little club that involves “anti-feminism” and so one decides that it must be the women who are to blame. As a whole. Oh, and the gays.

If you are unhappy with the quality of your sci-fi, let’s discuss it, as one adult to another. Don’t go pointing your finger at me like we’re in third grade and we’re debating who passed gas. This is a genre that many people love, and we should debate the future of it together.

I have some serious issues with the idea that genres should be created for one particular group of people only. Honestly, THAT is how art stagnates.

I would like to inspire boys to pursue careers in science, engineering, and technology as women. (As human beings, ideally. At certain times in my graduate life, I pursued science as a unbalanced, angry, passionately frustrated mess.)

What?? We were married to the same man??!! Lazy, useless sack of crap, and a polygamist to boot!

I know!  And with his internet porn addiction, it’s a wonder he found time to not have sex with us both!

Articles/blogs/posts like the one you are writing about always make me laugh. As the mother of 7, the first 5 of whom were all girls, I have my own perspective on science fiction and females.  My 7 year old daughter has, since she was 4, been a huge fan of shows like Dr. Who and movies such as Spiderman.  She even likes to play pirates (when she’s not pretending to be a princess).  My 16 year old is studying chemistry and physics, along with several math subjecs, because she wants to be “either a veterinarian or a physicist.”  My 15 year old wants to work in forensics for the FBI.  My 17 year old writes her own science fiction, and she’s good at it.

I learned early in life that assuming things about people based on gender roles is a very unscientific approach that is fraught with errors.

I read about this on Scalzi’s site yesterday. 

My response is to ask the author just how small his dick is, and if that’s why mummy didn’t love him?

Cause damn, that boy has insecurities and issues with girls that clearly go to his core.

I’d also like to reassure him that it doesn’t matter that boys are inspired to be scientists anymore, because we women are picking up their slack just fine!

I like to think the author’s problem was that he never got a puppy when he was widdle…

*laughs*

seriously, the fellow should get out of his mother’s basement and see the real world.

you know, the one *with* women.

I just need to say this before the comments get closed and as I am about to hit the hot tub I don’t have time to read the whole blog post or all the comments yet.

I am female, I am an engineer, I grew up on hard core SF (Herbert, Niven, Vinge, et al). I’m one of those older engineers from back when females in engineering were scarcer than hens teeth. I owe my career to none other than Scotty from ST:TOS. I thought he had the cool job. For the longest time I was” icked” out by any romance in SF novels because the guys didn’t know how to write it. Asimov even said (I think) that he avoided it because it made him nervous. (I’ll look that up sometime). Asimov’s venture into sex in one of this last Robot novels shows he was right to avoid it.  Some women can’t do it justice either (Katherine Kurtz comes to mind).

I figure SF (especially TV which really can’t be likened to “real” SF as in the book kind) is just going through a phase and hopefully in a few years romance and hardcore SF will have melded nicely into well rounded explosions of both the physical and physics kind.

Now I’m off to the hot tub.

I know!  And with his internet porn addiction, it’s a wonder he found time to not have sex with us both!

Ooh, and when the WoW really started to take over…it’s sad to find yourself thinking, “I know there’s something seriously wrong here—he’s curtailing his porn.”

I just don’t know how he managed to juggle his WoW, the internet porn, that occasional part time job, AND find time to pick apart my housekeeping skills—AND do all the same things with another woman! Truly a Renaissance man.

At the risk of public flogging, and informing everyone here that while I have read Scalzi’s critique and this one, I have not read the original post, I’d like to add my 2 cents to this discussion.

I consider myself a fan of science fiction.  That is to say, I like Star Trek, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury and some Asimov.  I have even read a couple of older school science fiction books that I liked very much, including one called Lucifer’s Hammer though I don’t remember the author.  But, this is rather immaterial and here is why.

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about science fiction.  And woah did I get a lesson.  Just like in romance where there are quite a number of sub-genres, science fiction as an overarching genre has many sub-genres too.  There are space operas and speculative fiction, futuristics and scifi (an amalgamation of generally “soft” science fiction, all sorts of sub-genres but only one sub-genre is called science fiction.  And science fiction is defined by one aspect - the science.  The science of core science fiction has to be “hard”, i.e., backed up by real science.  So, for example, Star Trek does not qualify as core science fiction; it is Space Opera. 

My point in writing this is not to defend anything written, because I don’t know precisely what was written, but to give a brief description of science fiction as defined by readers and authors of science fiction as it was explained to me.  I say this because so often word choice (semantics) make a huge difference because different people have different definitions of things. 

Almost everything I enjoy as science fiction does not qualify as core science fiction under the classification rules explained to me.  You can imagine my surprise at learning that. 

Lastly, I feel I must add this disclaimer:  I have read Scalzi’s blog on occasion, I have never read any of his books.  I do not know how he classifies the genre.  What I have written above is what I was told, which I am simply passing on.

Hi, Monique. In this case, I think you do have to click through and read the original article being critiqued. If you really care to read a bunch of drivel, that is. I get the point you’re trying to make, but trust me, you are being much more reasonable about this than the Spearhead guy(s) in even trying to draw distinctions. He really made no such effort to distinguish between the variety of long-standing traditions in the SF and F genres, nor did he attempt to examine his (ridiculous) assumptions which blatantly ignore the history of the genre entirely. He is, in short, wrong; and easily countered by any rational 10 year old with a good SF anthology in hand.

While it is true that fans of SFF often distinguish between “hard” SF and everything else, the idea that “hard” SF is only written by or read by men (and only by manly man science-loving men at that) is patently idiotic. It would be idiotic whether applied only to “hard” SF or the genre as a whole. And the idea that SF written by women or even (gasp) for women, or written with women protagonists and featuring relationships that seem realistic and important to the plot, will somehow prevent boys from pursuing careers in the sciences is so beyond absurd a two year old would see the faults in logic. So no, Monique. No benefit of the doubt for these guys. Read the article and I think you’ll agree.

Oh, kind of a rant. Excuse my fervor, please. Apparently, this shit still ticks me off a day later.

(Okay, did I say “hard” enough times to be a manly manly man?)

Wow, color me stupid.

I know very well that I never agreed with ultra-feminists, but I had no idea that there was a counterpart in ultra-hetero-white-males. But I should have. After all, I live in a small town that is based in that culture.

And I cannot name one of those males that I met who ever read anything besides the sports pages. If even that. Most often they focused on the comics section.

Perhaps sci-fi would be better served with no female characters or writers what-so-ever. All the men could be amoeba-like and reproduce on their own.

But geesh, then they wouldn’t truly be he-men, would they?

word: include54 Include being the optimum portion

Can’t talk. Busy destroying an entire literary genre.

I’d be happy to let her know.  :)  As for your question about TV shows and hard SF, I cannot think of a single one in popular culture that would qualify.

I had first read about the Spearhead (snorf, giggle, gack) article in Whatever - The Scalzi’s blog, and I though HIS smackdown was particularly good, but Candy - girl - you are MAGNIFICENT.

I suspect that the author of that particular bit of dogpooh hasn’t actually read much science fiction, from the fifties or today.  I get the strong feeling that all he’s done is look at the overtly sexist and sexualized covers from ‘50’s and ‘60’s pulp publications - the kind featuring large breasted women clinging to spacsuited men either holding phallic-like ray guns or phallus-shaped rocketships in the background (or both), and never actually read anything inside the cover.

I don’t need to add that the really great Sci Fi from the so-called Golden Age was as relationship driven as it is today -  Asimov, Clark, Heinlein wrote about the human condition - not only about sciency-type things.  That’s what made it great, and lasting.  And it’s going to be the same for Science Fiction written today - David Brin, Sherri Tepper, Olivia Butler, Catherine Asaro, John Scalzi, etc. - their works succeeds not on the hard science, but on the characters - you want to care about these stories.  It’s the people that inspire - not the lasers and test tube and hot babes.

Oh, God. How many times were we forced to go through the “hapless native woman falls for Kirk” trope? Was there ever an episode where Kirk didn’t get some lovin’ even if it was from some triffids? Or the even worse “Uhura is slipped a mickey and suddenly can’t keep her hands off Spock” storyline. TV SF is chock full of that soap opera fodder, and if you don’t love to hate it, I’m pretty sure you’d find ALL of the SF ever aired pretty unwatchable.

If only the Chuckleheads,  er that is, Spearheads were arguing against those kinds of male fantasy relationships. But no. It’s the female or non-hetero fantasies they can’t handle. it’s just so pathetic. (pointing and laughing)

Yeah. That would be “tribbles” not “triffids.” Just for all the Trekkers who are pointing and laughing at me.

Sigh.

“Fiction is asking ‘what if?” Science fiction asks, ‘My god, what if?’”

That made my day.

Scalzi`s roller derby teams with spears also made my day.

:headdesk” @ article

I’d just like to say that the article is totally craptaceous

::headdesk::
Sheesh, I have to wonder how this guy got this far in life, as a movie/TV SF fan, and never saw Star Wars. Or did he just cringe every time Leia shot someone or took charge?

Hi Candy!

SF has been ruined, but not through “feminization.” A lot of short fiction suffers from SERIOUS FICTION Wannabe Syndrome. Epiphany fiction. Epiphanies have no place in SF (2001 A Space Odyssey notwithstanding) in my arrogant opinion. SF should be all about entertaining stories that push the envelope of the possible and ideally have at least a little wow factor to them.

Anyway.

As for television SF, it’s been the pits for a long, long time. Think Lost in Space, the original Battlestar Galacticrap, even a lot of the old Star Trek episodes which I dearly love but which were NOT good SF. The Prisoner was a good series. Old Star Trek had its moments, as have some of the later Trek incarnations. Blake’s Seven, Firefly, and Lexx were all pretty good. But there has still been an awful lot of crap.

Sometimes I wonder if the stuff I consider good SF is really all that commercial. Thinking about SF blockbusters like Star Wars, aren’t these just glorified Westerns?

Which, *umm*, is what you just said. :)

The blog got some attention over at io9, which made a viable point:

Let’s not start patting ourselves on the back because we can recognize rank sexism when we see it written by an anonymous guy on a radical right wing opinion blog. We can celebrate how far we’ve come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies. And when the next big, blow-em-up spaceship movie is written and directed by a woman. Until then, we have a lot of work to do. Work that involves challenging people who actually have the power to alter the course of SF as a genre. Work that is a lot harder than ridiculing an anonymously published blog post.

All I know is that my 12 yo son watched Men In Black and saw the part where Will Smith shot at the cardboard girl holding the Quantum Physics books, and said he wanted to be a quantum physicist. He didn’t know what it was but he liked the sound of it. 6 years later he’s in the military studying…quantum physics. If Men In Black can inspire…ANYTHING can. LOL

I’ve been reading the comments at other blogs, and I only wish I could remember the name of the commenter (or the blog) where someone wondered if the people at The Spearhead know that their blog title would be the best gay bar name ever.

What most bothers me about that article is how the author’s blatant misogyny obscures the underlying valid point. One of the most effective ways to hide the truth is to argue for it from obviously wrong premises.

Here’s what Ursula K. le Guin has to say on the unique value of science fiction as opposed to mainstream fiction.

“If I give my spaceships FTL speed, I must be aware that I’m contradicting Albert Einstein, and accept the consequences—all the consequences. In this, precisely, lies the unique aesthetic delight of SF, in the intense, coherent following-through of the implications of an idea, whether it’s a bit of far-out technology, or a theory in quantum mechanics, or a satirical projection of current social trends, or a whole world created by extrapolating from biology and ethnology. When such an idea is consistently worked out in material, intellectual, social, psychological, and moral terms, something solid has been done, something real: a thing which can be read, taught, and judged squarely on its own terms. The ‘sense of wonder’ isn’t a feeble perfume, it’s build right into a good story, and the closer you look the stronger the sense of wonder.”

(From “Escape Routes”, in the volume _The Language of the Night_.)

I do, in fact, feel like Syfy has abandoned the real substance of science fiction in favor of general fiction with a sciencey veneer, but I wish these people wouldn’t insist on dragging their ridiculous gender prejudices into it. They’re setting up a false dilemma between good science fiction and good feminism. Oh, and lumping the virtues of good science fiction together with the Golden/Silver ages’ blatant sins against competent writing.

Oh, and the BSG remake is awesome.

Hi everyone,

I was rooting around Amazon.com and came across this:http://www.amazon.com/tag/science fiction/forum/ref=cm_cd_dp_rt_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxWK0QNW07Z4M7&cdThread=Tx22TYF0NXGDW2S

Essentially this idiot, Jeremy W. Marshall believes there are too many women authors crowding the sci-fi shelves. Perhaps his most incisive comment is this: “I used to read mercedes lackey when she first published, I really liked them but after a while they all sounded alike, and it seemed everyone was gay, ( not knocking gay ppl ) but it seems like most main characters are all gay or elves or gay elves , or gay elves on motorcycles.”

Gosh, reading this stuff—even his title—is like a punch in the gut. Would that someone punch HIM in the gut.

The Spearhead article is an extreme example of misogynist tripe and both your and Scalzi’s takedowns were right on the spot.

However, the attitude behind the article is not that uncommon in the SFF community. Because there are a lot of people in the SFF community (and not all of them are male) who have serious issues with the changing genre landscape and particularly the influx of female fans and writers.

That sort of attitude rears its ugly head every time some blogger or reviewer complains about all those urban fantasy novels with female protagonists taking over the bookstore shelves and crowding out the “real” SF and fantasy and horror and claims how all of those urban fantasy novels are just “vampire porn” anyway, even the ones that don’t even feature vampires, and they know it’s all crap, because they read Laurell K. Hamilton once, only cause they accidentally got her mixed up with Peter Hamilton, of course. And such posts are inevitably followed by a lot of male fans nodding in agreement and/or helpfully posting lists of urban fantasy authors who are actually good and free of “that romance crap”. By some miraculous coincidence, all of those good urban fantasy authors happen to be male, with maybe one or two women published by micro smallpresses thrown in for good measure. And heaven beware one of those good female authors actually dare including love or sex in a work, then she immediately crosses over to the “vampire porn” side.

It rears its ugly head every time another genre anthology containing only stories by straight white men is published and when someone takes exception, the editor inevitably claims that he was only looking for good stories and for some reason only straight white men submitted good stories. Oh yes, and he also asked every female writer he knew to contribute and both of them refused.

It rears its ugly head every time the shortlist for the Hugo awards is dominated by male authors once again and every woman who dares to say something about that is shouted down with “But maybe women just didn’t publish any good books/stories this year” and when given a list of eligible works by female authors have never heard of any of them.

It rears its ugly head every time some male fan states that he never reads books by female authors, because they’re all just Harlequin romances in disguise. And when asked if they have actually ever read a Harlequin romance, they inevitably reply that they read one, back when they were thirteen and spending the summer holidays at grandma and read their way through the collected works of Heinlein or Asimov (nothing against either author, I love both) too quickly and had to resort to plundering grandma’s bookshelves. Besides, everybody knows that Harlequins are crap, cause they’re written to formula.

It rears its ugly head every time someone states how he hates “Insert popular SF TV show here”, because it’s all just relationship drama these days and the science/technology content is just background and bad science besides. Extra points if that someone is an SF writer whose novels contain characters so cardboard and relationships so unbelievable one cannot help but wonder if writer had ever interacted with real life people before.

I was initially drawn to SF, because SF offered not just a whole lot of cool stuff (spaceships, robots, aliens, time travel) but also had the strongest women. Princess Leia, Susan Calvin, Uhura and Tamara Jagellowsk were my heroines as a young girl. I eventually left SFF fandom behind, because I’ve had the arguments above or arguments very much like them one too many times. And because I was sick of being insulted for reading the wrong books and watching the wrong TV shows.

Oh yes, and the Spearhead guy obviously never watched the original Battlestar Galactica, because that show was all about the characters and their relationships. Whereas the new version was basically one long, thinly veiled analogy to current US politics with lengthy political discussions and zero excitement. Oh yes, and women in the new Galactica were only there for sex (but of course the sex in new Galactica was not porn at all, but deep and philosophical because the characters talked about religion while doing it), having babies (and of course abortion is evil and wrong), being raped and/or tortured or getting breast cancer. Because women are basically a set of walking wombs and breasts, hence all of the prominent Cylons were sexbot babes.

I’m thinking the “hard core” sci-fi was all about pushing the boundaries of human reality rather than explaining the intricacies of a warp-core engine.

Even alien culture had to be explained and filtered through simple human concepts so readers wouldn’t just stare stupefied at the page.

Perhaps it’s just my crazy female relationship brain but androids, aliens, AI, and whatever else crawled across a sci-fi field all struggled to understand the concept of BEING and FEELING.  Not just accelerating their knowledge.  And the ones that DID were, more often than not, the evil villains without care or compassion.

Silly man.  It’s OK to let women play in your sandbox!  We promise not to pee on your space ship!

my word - getting75 These battles of the sexes are getting old and I want to start slapping people around with a carp who bring them forward.

Here’s a thing I’ve been noticing lately:  if I’m on the fence about buying a book in the speculative category (what the hell is it called now, anyway?  SFF?) and I notice the author’s name is masculine, I don’t buy it.

I love to sink into a big epic full of angst and quests and personal transformation, but with a few exceptions, I find that men just don’t pull it off.  They get the angst and tortured soul, and they win the big battle, but they never get out of the bitterness.  Their heroes face big betrayal and overcome all obstacles, and never learn anything except that they’re alone in the world and everybody will betray them.  The power they gain is all about staying in power and maintaining their emotional isolation.

The successful (imo) male authors always include romance, or some kind of positive emotional relationship, in their stories.  Louis L’Amour’s westerns endure because they were about people.  Heinlein’s space operas are classics because they were about people.

Here’s a thing I’ve been noticing lately:  if I’m on the fence about buying a book in the speculative category (what the hell is it called now, anyway?  SFF?) and I notice the author’s name is masculine, I don’t buy it.

I’ve been immersed in the genre for a while and if I know a male author and know I can expect the human drama to be as compelling as the worldbuilding. However, if a male author is new or unknown to me, he probably has a harder time being picked up by me, unless I have a recommendation from someone I trust. Because in the past few years, I have been burned several times by picking up a new, highly touted SF or fantasy novel by a new (male) author only to be disappointed by a story with great worldbuilding and cardboard characters.

I love to sink into a big epic full of angst and quests and personal transformation, but with a few exceptions, I find that men just don’t pull it off.  They get the angst and tortured soul, and they win the big battle, but they never get out of the bitterness.  Their heroes face big betrayal and overcome all obstacles, and never learn anything except that they’re alone in the world and everybody will betray them.  The power they gain is all about staying in power and maintaining their emotional isolation.

The bitter, tough loner hero with the tortured soul and no friends or loved ones that do not betray them is unfortunately en vogue at the moment. A certain subset of the SFF community, consisting mainly of emotionally insecure young men, adore these books and consider them gritty and realistic, because that in their opinion, depressing and dark is how the world really is and everything that offers a glimmer of hope let alone a happy ending is consolatory fiction that lies to the reader.

Once upon a time I smiled patiently at those deluded souls with their gritty and realistic books and thought that given time, they would grow out of it. Unfortunately, most of them never did.

Science Fiction has never been about misogyny.  Anyone who thinks that, isn’t a true fan of the genre.

PS:  Dirk Benedict is just angry that he got out-acted so effortlessly.

To be fair, the original Battlestar Galactica includes Dirk Benedict’s finest acting moment, the only time I actually believed in his character.

@Cora I…I think I want to have your (mutant squid) internet babies.

That comment was awesome.  It should be a blog of its own.  I want to print it out, laminate it to a finely carved wooden paddle, shellac said paddle to a high-gloss sheen, and carry it around every time someone brings this up…and use it every time they bring up the romance argument, too, except I’m already slapping people with the Heaving Bosoms (the book! the book!)

Thanks for that, and thanks to Candy for nailing it shut yet again.

As a scientist and a writer, I encountered such naked knuckle-dragging in several self-labeled “progressive” groups.  Here’s my take on it:

Is It Something in the Water? Or: Me Tarzan, You Ape
http://www.starshipnivan.com/blog/?p=712