- Amal El-Mohtar: Women Destroying Science Fiction: Texts in Conversation
- Rachael Acks: The Shrill Sound of Not Shutting Up
- E. Catherine Tobler: Dear Dave Truesdale
- Angela Highland: Well, that sure didn’t take long, did it?
- In Depth: David Truesdale Defines Tangent In Self Destruction
- Dave Truesdale responds to criticism made of him by a man! And is kind of gross while doing it (he keeps trotting out a story by Ellen Klages like it’s some sort of trophy). Here’s a pastebin of the comment in case the white on black at Black Gate makes your eyes bleed.
- How Not To Review Women’s Writing This is brilliant and amazing oh yes. Mallory Ortberg is a TREASURE.
- Wishing for Alternate Universes on the Nebulas Panel “Writing About Other Cultures”
- Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF
- A Clockwork Clarion (trigger warning: re-enactment of the rape scene from A Clockwork Orange)
- My mistake of silence (trigger warning: harassment, intimidation years later)
- Marion Zimmer Bradley Gave Us New Perspectives, All Right (trigger warning: child rape, enabling of same)
- Hatred of Publishing: A Conversation Between Industry Dropouts
- The White Male Reading List
- Writing about writing and place, performing Filipino-ness, thinking about industry
- A Time To Speak Up, And A Time To Shut Up (Apologies to Ecclesiastes)
- In Which I Invent Numbers
- Amazon, Barclays and the Dragon Tattoo bust-up
- BuzzFeed’s Native Advertising Is Nothing But A Confidence Game.
- The Case Against Author Solutions, Part 1: The Numbers
- Is it bad that of all the books reviews Marissa Lingen writes, that my favorites tend to be the ones she writes about books she dislikes?
- Can the Nervous System Be Hacked?
- This Is What It’s Like Arguing with Gun Nuts on the Internet
- Lessons From a Day Spent With the UCSB Shooter’s Awful Friends (trigger warning: massive misogyny of the MRA variety)
- 5 Uncomfortable Truths Behind the Men’s Rights Movement (trigger warning: MRAs)
- Straight White Boys Texting Hilaaaaarious (trigger warning: harassment)
- Abigail Nussbaum on The 2014 Hugo Awards: The Hugo Voter Packet
- Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx Spawns Offensive Instagram Photos (trigger warning: racism)What the everloving FUCK is wrong with people?
- From Best To Worst: The Mitfords
- All-Purpose Build Your Own Socially Liberal Christian Rant
- Post-Binary Gender in SF: ExcitoTech and Non-Binary Pronouns
- The Fanciest Genderqueer You’ll Ever Meet
- German Rocket Cats: A Meditation
- Love Is Better Than Hate Love this post from Ruthie Knox.
- This Guy Bought a Space Suit and Made a Photo Series About an Everyday Astronaut Eeeeeee!
- NASA’s Lost Satellite Just Made Its First Contact With Earth in 17 Years
- Slenderman Stabbing Shows That Youth Crime Isn’t Exclusive to Boys Hot off the presses! Girls commit crimes, too! But they’re FEELINGS-crimes!
- Jay Lake died this week. Fuck cancer.
Friday Links: Covid, Anger, Computers. And Decorative Gourds.
Three pieces about Covid, two about computers, and one about motherfucking gourds.
Wow… that MZB link…
Truesdale’s still digging, over at the Blackgate link. It’s getting really sad at this point.
The other commenters, though, are (mostly) very impressive. It’s one of the better comment streams I’ve seen on this topic.
@delagar: More like a toddler’s tantrum, actually.
I’m dismayed that i’m being used as Truesdale’s poster child.
Besides, his facts are wrong.
He did not pull my story from the slush pile. John O’Neill asked me if I’d sent him something, and I did.
And “A Taste of Summer” was never a Nebula nominee.
I was linked to the discussion over at BlackGate and one of the many things that leaped out at me in the multiple citations of Ellen Klage’s story was that he keeps calling her a female. I’m not sure he can use the word “woman” to save his life, but will have to check again (was reading at the site on a smartphone).
It was kind of creepy (not surprising, sigh). And the “not me, just because you’re sexist, I’m not , and I had NO power, I just read the slush pile!” was just ridiculous.
Did a quick cut’n’paste and used “find” to check the numbers:
woman: 0
women: 5 (2 from quotes, 2 involving “women and men” or “women and men”)
female: 9
female heroine? (1) As if there is a male heroine out there? Really?????
female protagonists(s) (5)
young female as the lead
female writers
“Taste of Summer” (Ellen Klage’s story) “written by a female”
So he only refers to a human woman once by female (which I continually tell my students not to do because it’s sexist usage), but the “female heroine” cracked me up bigtime.
“Female” as a noun is used for animals. For humans, the noun form is “woman” (Vocabulary101). I doubt Truesdale is unaware of this – it’s yet another nose-thumbing gambit.
>___<
Well, I tried. He's not operating in good faith, that much is clear.
This is quite the collection of links, and I have now gone down several rabbit holes. (But the Nussbaum link has no link.)
@kate: Nussbaum link should be fixed now!
@Jonathon: He’s wrong because he’s engaging in a false equivalency w/r/t romance and he’s subscribing to a very basic definition of sexism that doesn’t take structural inequality and power imbalance into account. Sure, romance may be mainly written by women for women (this is a big generalization), but it also gets very little respect in the mainstream for that very same reason.
That Matthew Lane guy at Black Gate is making my head hurt. I know he’s wrong, I just can’t articulate it well enough that I can hope he’ll shut up. Is he a known troll or something?
@Natalie
Ah, thank you! I thought it was that, but I wasn’t confident in my understanding.
And I thought if I suggested that romance was a disrespected genre, I might be making assumptions of my own.
Thanks again!
@Jonathon
Romance isn’t just treated disrespectfully by individuals, there are even structural inequalities. It’s hardly the equivalent of disallowing gay marriage or having separate schools, but it’s worth noting that the bestseller lists would be dominated by romance novels – if it weren’t for the fact that the newspapers and other organizations that create them deliberately skew the results. There are actual weighted formulas that exist to put romance novels at a disadvantage on such lists.
(at least, this was the case at one point, I’m assuming it still happens)