The Blog Post that Lost Me Half My Audience by kameron hurley
Oct 10, 2013
Back when I first started this blog in 2004, I grew an audience
that was primarily and deeply feminist. My regular traffic was about
400 visits at day, which – at the time – seemed like a whole lot of
people. Then I wrote a post about “women-only” forums that pissed off a
whole lot of people, and my readership fell in half. Obviously things
have changed since then, but at the time it was a really big blow. I had
made a lot of people angry, and I couldn’t understand why.
What was I saying that pissed people off?
I was musing about the fact
that feminist women in conversation with other feminist women was great
for stuff like consciousness raising, and getting events organized and
having in-depth discussions outside of “feminism 101” but if we really
wanted to change things, we were going to need to have everybody talking
about feminism, not just women. Because let’s face it. Women are
considered a minority group. Things like having healthier babies and
pregnancies (making more people!) and trying to improve poverty rates
and gender discrimination in schools and workplaces isn’t important to
people (even a lot of women) unless men are talking about it too. Not to
mention the fact that the term “women” itself in this instance was
being applied in a very exclusive way that I didn’t agree with – you
had to have been categorized as a woman from the time you were born
(trans people didn’t count, which is the dumbest thing I ever heard),
and also “feminist” which could mean all sorts of things. Are you a
feminist if you believe a man should always make more money than a
woman, but believe in abortion rights? Are you a feminist if you think
women are biologically inferior to men but should still be accorded the
same legal rights and protections? Or do only radical feminist
women-born
women who are ready for bloody revolution count? (talk about
echo chamber)
But what I recognized then, and what has been proven as it’s played
out since then, is that unless men were talking about something as being
important, or women did some bloody revolution thing, folks were going
to tune it out as unimportant (women and men alike. We’re all born in a
misogynist society. We all default to prioritizing men’s voices over
women). Women had to raise feminist sons, and educate other women and
their partners. Then those generations of folks all needed to get
together and say, “This is fucked up.” And together, epic sea tide of
change, happyville, etc.
It’s great to sit around and talk about feminist things in feminist
spaces. A lot of work gets done there. But I also need to make my
presence known outside of feminist spaces. I can’t just get shuttled off
onto the “Women in…” panel at every con while not getting offered
anything else. I can talk about religion and worldbuilding and character
and creating conflict and military SF/F and a lot of other things. So
while I’m happy to do a “Women in…” panel, I have to do it alongside
something else. I’m not going to get pigeonholed as the person folks
come to to talk about “Women in…” because let’s be fucking real – women
are in worldbuilding and religion and military SF, too, and we should be
talked about in all those “general” fiction and fandom panels, not
relegated to the “Women in… “ track. Want an inclusive general panel,
then put me on it, because I’ll strive to talk about everybody, not just
the same four dudes we always cite. I knew I had to work harder to keep
from being pigeonholed. Men could talk about strong female characters
without only ever getting put on the strong female characters panel. But
I had to be a little more careful.
I thought this was a great idea right up until I was surfing the
internet yesterday and saw somebody ask who they should talk to if they
were writing an article about sexism in SF/F. The answer from one of the
commenters was “Jim Hines or John Scalzi.”
Yes, really.
I about shit myself. The whole point of having these inclusive
conversations was so that stuff like sexism would be taken seriously
(and that’s working, hurrah!) but holy shit, to watch women and their
opinions removed from the dialogue entirely was really bizarre, and a
testament to how difficult it is to change the narrative of how we talk
about things that are important. How wonderful it is that sexism is now
deemed important to talk about… but why are we only recommending male
“experts”? Why are all the women who championed and participated in
these very public conversations (some of them for many, many years) –
folks like Genevieve Valentine, Elise Matheson, Liz Henry, Cherie
Priest, Amal El-Mohtar, Tansy Raynor Roberts, Nicola Griffith, Foz
Meadows, NK Jemisin, Delilah Dawson, Cheryl Morgan, Mary Robinette
Kowal, K. Tempest Bradford – and so very many others, very rarely
quoted? Why aren’t they the first folks that come to mind (to women and men!)? Are people scared of them? Do they forget them?
Maybe, I thought, they weren’t quoted because, like me, they got
tired of getting put in a box. Maybe they *were* being asked and were
like, “Fucking A, you fuckers, ask me about being a fucking WRITER! Not a
fucking LADY WRITER!!” Or, at the very least, make it an inclusive
conversation.
But more likely, folks just forgot. They forgot that the whole surge
of anger in SF/F about representation of women, queer folks, and people
of color was actually started by women, queer folks, and people of color.
Of course, the reason we forget is the very thing we’re fighting:
sexism, racism, discrimination of all sorts, the type that values one
group’s narrative over another.
I should not gnash my teeth, as this was just what I talked about all
those years ago, the very thing folks got angry with me about. Because
now that dudes are talking more about sexism, and white people are
talking about whitewashing, and hetero folks are talking about lack of
queer characters, well, now we’re starting to see the publishers
make a note in their submission guidelines that they’re open to
“diverse” stories. And now folks are taking the whole, “Maybe it’s
easier to be a white dude in the industry” thing seriously.
I should not complain. And for the most part, that’s not what this
is. Instead, it’s a post about mourning the narrative. It’s a post about
living long enough (it only takes 10 years) to be utterly erased from a
narrative, and watch it happen, while the same old group of folks is
handed over credit. Straight people will be applauded for “allowing” gay
people to marry in history books, just as white people are celebrated
for freeing the people they enslaved (how progressive they were!).
Women got the vote, after all, because men just felt sorry for having
such a backward notion, right? The protests, the uprisings, the
rebellions, the screaming, the fighting, the digging in, the sacrifices,
the toil, the bravery, the hardship – all of that is forgotten.
What’s remembered, what we’ll write about, what we’ll teach our kids,
is that one day a few folks magically woke up from their privilege, and
benevolently freed us all from their own tyranny.
When I went through the comments on my old post about women-only
spaces, and other blog responses to it, I couldn’t help but sigh over
the reasons folks gave for keeping women-only spaces. “If we invite men
into these spaces, they’ll take over the conversation,” folks said.
They were not wrong.
But I have to believe that an inclusive conversation will get us
further than an exclusive one. I have to believe in the progress I’ve
seen, though everyone keeps saying we have the same conversations every
ten years. I have to believe that now that we’re making progress, it’s
up to us to be aware of the narrative we tell, and the way we frame this
story, as we continue to fight.
No comments :
Post a Comment