The Geek Feminist Revolution, page 12
7. She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly.
The “singular woman” problem is … a problem. We often call this the “Smurfette principle.” This means that there’s only allowed to be one woman in a story with male heroes. You see this in superhero movies (there is Black Widow and … yeah, that’s it). You see it in cartoons (April, in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). And you see it in awards and “best of” lists, typically but not always written by men, who will list nine books by men and one book by a woman, and that woman is generally Ursula Le Guin, Robin Hobb, or Lois Bujold. The singular woman expectation means that when we do see more than one woman in a group, or on a list, we think we’ve reached parity. Studies have shown that when women make up just 30 percent of a group, men and women alike believe there are an equal number of men and women in the room. At 50 percent women—a figure we see so little in media representation that it appears anomalous—we believe that women outnumber men in the group. What this means is that every woman writer is given an impossible task—she must strive to be “the one” or be erased.
When we start to list more than one female scientist (“Yes, there was Marie Curie” tends to be the answer when one asks about women scientists), or astronaut, or race car driver, or politician, we’re often accused of weighting women’s contributions more heavily than men’s. Though my essay “We Have Always Fought,” about the roles of women in combat, was largely well received, most criticism of the piece rested on this accusation: that by focusing on remembering and acknowledging the roles of women in combat, I was somehow erasing or diminishing the roles of men. “Yes, women fought,” the (largely male) commenters would admit, “but they were anomalies.”
8. She wrote it BUT…
The experiences I write about in my fantasy and science fiction novels tend to be very grim. My work comes out of the tradition of both new weird—a combination of creeping horror and fantastical world-building—and grimdark, a label most often applied to gritty, “realistic” fantasy that focuses on the grim realities of combat and a nihilistic “everything is awful” worldview. Yet when my work hit the shelves I was amused to see many people insist my work was neither new weird nor grimdark. There was too much science fiction, or not enough sexual assault against women (!) or too much magic (?) or some other “but.” Watching my own work kicked out of categories I was specifically writing within was a real lesson in “She wrote it but…” And lest you think categories don’t matter, remember this: categories are how we shelve and remember work in our memory. If we’re unable to give those books a frame of reference, we are less likely to recall them when asked.
I am still more likely to find my work remembered when people ask, “Who are your favorite women writers?” than “Who are your favorite science fiction writers?”
And that, there, demonstrates how categorization and erasure happen in our back brains without our conscious understanding of what it is we’re doing. Yes, I’m a writer, but …
* * *
When you start looking at reactions to the work of some of your favorite women writers, you will see these excuses for why her work is not canon, or not spoken about, or not given awards, or not reviewed. I could read a comment section in a review of a woman’s work, or a post about how sexism suppresses the cultural memory of women’s work, and check off all of them.
The question becomes, once we are aware of these common ways to dismiss women’s work, how do we go about combating them? These ways of disregarding our work have gone on for centuries, and have become so commonplace that men are used to deploying them without challenge as a means to end all debate.
I’d argue that the easiest way to change a behavior is first to become aware of it. Watch for it. Understand it for what it is. And then you must call it out. I’ve taken to typing “Bingo!” in comments sections when these arguments roll out, and linking to Russ’s list. When we see sexist and racist behavior, the only way to change that is to point it out and make it clear that it’s not okay. The reason people continue to engage in certain types of behaviors is because they receive positive feedback from peers, and no one challenges them on their assertions. If we stop swallowing these excuses, and nodding along when people use them, we take away the positive reinforcement and lack of pushback that’s made it possible for them to use these methods of dismissal.
Because I write such dark stories, many people think that I’m a pessimistic person. But that’s not true. I’m a grim optimist. I understand that the road to a better future is long and bitter and often feels hopeless. Yes, there is a warm gooey core of hope I carry with me at the very center of myself, and it is the hope of someone who knows that change is difficult, and feels impossible, but that even a history that has suppressed and erased so much cannot cover up the fact that change is possible.
LET’S GET PERSONAL
Finding Hope in Tragedy: Why I Read Dark Fiction
In 2006, I woke up in the ICU, blood pouring down one arm from a line the doctor was desperately trying to get in my arm. He was down on one knee, like he was going to propose, my arm flung out in front of him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He kept saying it. Over and over. My girlfriend stood next to me, gripping my hand. I was in intense pain, but even so, I couldn’t understand why he kept apologizing. My brain was a muddled gray mush, but I understood this much:
The pain was necessary. Expected.
They needed to get a line in me, you see, because I was dying.
And I knew it.
* * *
I read a lot of dark books. I’m a fan of the weird, the creepy, the strange. I have a fondness for Jeff VanderMeer and K. J. Bishop and Angela Carter. I read H. P. Lovecraft only until it started to give me active nightmares. I’ve read everything by Christopher Priest, including the certainly not-at-all-upbeat Fugue for a Darkening Island. I devoured Melvin Burgess’s Bloodtide and Bloodsong like milky honey.
As a teen, I had people try to get me to read Terry Pratchett and Piers Anthony, but it just never took. I was getting something out of dark fiction, some catharsis, that I wasn’t getting from other books with lots of laughs or tidy, upbeat endings.
“How can you read all that stuff?” people would ask me.
Life is fucking depressing enough.
* * *
I’m learning how to hot-wire a car. Or, rather, start one without a key. It’s twenty below zero and it has been dark since 3:30 p.m. I’m huddled in a van that technically isn’t stolen but technically doesn’t belong to either me or my buddy. The owner admitted herself to a local institution after trying to kill herself, and supposedly, my friend says, handed him the keys so he could have access to the car. But he lost the keys. So we’ve busted open the panel covering the steering column and taken out the metal ignition cover. It turns out hot-wiring an old van like this is actually pretty easy, because there aren’t any hot wires involved. You just bust open the steering column and use any old key to turn the broken ignition switch.
Voila.
Of course, it also means you can’t lock the car. So it’s a good thing we’re college kids with nothing worth stealing.
A group of us pile into the van and race out into the middle of some fucking field, not far from campus but, you know—in Fairbanks, Alaska, you don’t need to go far to find yourself in the middle of nothing.
The northern lights are out. A lot of people are drunk.
I hang out the side of the van, wind in my face.
I’ve never felt so alive.
* * *
The truth is, life can be painful. It can be a horror. When I got laid off from my job in Chicago, six months after the ICU trip, I didn’t have any savings. No safety net. Because of U.S. health insurance laws at the time, I had to continue paying for health insurance or risk becoming uninsurable even under an employer plan. Health insurance then, without a job, cost me $800 a month and didn’t actually pay for a dime of the $500 a month that my new medication cost.
Chronic illness is a fucking piece of shit, like getting hammered upside the head with a fucking shovel. They tell me it’s an immune disorder, and there’s nothing I could have done to prevent it. So sorry for you. Too bad. Could be worse. There are worse illnesses.
I started trying to stretch out my medication doses to last longer than they were supposed to. In no time at all, I was living on expired medication whose efficacy was constantly in question. Would today be a good day, or would I pass out somewhere?
Death had never felt so close.
* * *
Life is fucking dark, sometimes.
The trouble is, when you’re pressed facefirst into shit, all you can think about is trying to stay alive. It’s all you do, when you’re really desperate—you try to live. There’s no time to emote, no time to figure it out, no time to sit on the bed and cry and feel sorry for yourself. When you’re faced with your own problems—real, tangible, I-could-fucking-die problems—you have to deal with them.
But a fictional problem?
Somebody else is dealing with that. You’re just along for the ride.
It means you get to spend the whole ride actually feeling things, instead of buttoning it all the fuck back up so you can live.
This is the story of my life: getting called a monster because I do instead of feel, because I act instead of emote.
* * *
My week back at the house after the ICU visit, I saw blood every time I closed my eyes. My arms were filled with needle marks, covered in bruises. The pain was so bad, and I was so weak, I couldn’t even prepare my own meals—I didn’t have the strength to wield a knife.
I’d lost a tremendous amount of weight the last year, and more in the ICU. It was like I lived in someone else’s body. I felt disconnected.
At night, I’d lie in bed, and when I closed my eyes I’d jerk awake again, haunted by sounds and smells and that blood—that blood gushing from my arm, pooling on the floor. I could smell the hospital antiseptic.
My week in the hospital, I was hooked up with a catheter. They took my blood every three hours. At one point I had an orderly throw a wet towel at me and tell me to wash myself. My period started. The catheter leaked. I spent a day lying in my own blood and urine.
It came back every time I closed my eyes.
But I couldn’t process what had happened to me. I had thousands of dollars in medical bills. Rent had to be paid. I had to get back to work. I didn’t have enough PTO time to miss work. I had to get back to work. Had to get back to living.
Gotta go. Gotta move.
I pretended I wasn’t broken, because if I let myself be broken, I wasn’t going to make it.
* * *
I’m not actually sure when I started writing dark fiction. I know I started writing God’s War the year I was dying. I was losing a lot of weight and drinking a lot of water, but nobody could figure out what was wrong with me.
It certainly started out as a dark little book; a war-weary world, a world-weary protagonist. But after I got back from the hospital, after I started measuring out my life in medication, something changed.
Because I realized something then, looking at all the medical bullshit keeping me alive:
Every life is a tragedy.
We are all going to die.
There is no other ending, no matter the choices you make.
* * *
My first hospital visit after getting out of the ICU, I walked into the hospital bathroom and had a panic attack.
It was the strangest thing. One minute, I’m totally fine. I’m cool and collected. I’m just seeing my doctor, to deal with this bullshit illness.
But when I went into the bathroom and washed my hands, I smelled it: the antiseptic soap.
I’d first smelled it in the ICU, during that bloody horror show of a week.
I started to shake.
I went back into the bathroom stall and sat down. I burst into tears.
No reason.
Just the smell. The panic.
I’d been a body on a slab; a thing, subhuman.
Wash yourself.
* * *
I just finished playing a game called Mass Effect 3, the third in the Mass Effect franchise, naturally. It has a really contentious ending. The galaxy is being destroyed by an evil alien force.
It’s clear from the opening scene that you’re basically fucked.
No matter what you choose, you’re fucked.
I knew this from the very start. Right from the opening. I saw what was coming. I saw we were all fucked. And I played that game faster than any game I’ve ever played, because I could feel the urgency—yes, we’re all fucked, but we’re going to save the galaxy. I’m going to get there. I’m going to save it.
It’s a relentlessly dark game, but it’s just a game, right?
Yet I found myself playing this game and crying the whole way through it. I cried through the whole ending, because I knew. I knew from the very beginning. I knew how it would end.
We’re all going to die.
But it was different, when I played the game. When I played it through in the game, it wasn’t like in real life, when I had to keep moving, I had to keep sucking air; gotta find a job, figure out how to pay insurance bills, pack up my shit, move to a new place.…
When I played the game, it was the character taking all these hits. It was the character who was letting people down. It was the character who had to keep moving.
And that freed me up to actually feel something.
I could actually roll through all those terrible emotions—the broken despair, the horror, the fear, the rage, the sorrow. I didn’t have to muscle through. I could spend forty hours of game time emoting, and not feel bad about it.
When I got to the end of the game, it was perfect, for me.
Because I knew from the start we were all going to die.
The challenge was having the fortitude to keep going when you knew you were going to die, when you knew it was all going to end.
For the character. For the fake galaxy.
For me, eventually.
And all of us.
* * *
I’m not sure where I picked up this relentless way of muscling through things without stopping to process them. I think it’s a survival thing. My mom does this too, during times of great stress. The whole world bleeds away, and I get this laser focus. It means I’m incredibly good during times of fear and panic and crazy, but it can be days or weeks before I actually bust down and process what happened.
Reading tragedies, I realized, connecting with characters who persevered in the face of grim odds and certain ends … was actually comfort reading for me.
All you have to decide, as they say, is what you do with the time given.
Public Speaking While Fat
My body has always been a place of battle.
When I was younger, it was personal, self-inflicted strife encouraged by schoolyard taunts of “water buffalo!” and “pig!” supplemented by family matriarchs who were permanently obsessed with the width of their own asses (and, very often, mine and that of my siblings) despite advanced degrees, working-class jobs that soon became high-powered ones, and increasing awards and honors.
Near-death helped me put my body project into perspective. Three or four hours of exercise a day to maintain a still pleasantly plump physique seemed overkill. Hating myself when death had been so close, now that I had a chronic illness, seemed the worst sort of irony. So I gave up hating myself. It was weirdly liberating.
But giving up on one’s self-inflicted angst does not magically erase the pressures of a society that hems you in from all sides.
I admit that looking at pictures of myself the last couple of years always involves a bit of dissonance. Since my first novel came out and I switched to a job that no longer requires me to bike into work every day, I have—as has happened to many writers—put on about seventy pounds. This is easy to forget when you work at home a lot and don’t go out much. There are perfectly good reasons for this gain, as my metabolism is superefficient; I come from a long line of overweight people with a host of immune disorders who could, however, survive famines quite well. Folks often ask me how I can hold down a day job, freelance, and write a book a year. The answer is quite simple: I roll out of bed and I write. I am sitting in bed, right before I go to sleep, and I am typing away. My life has become a constant war with deadlines, trying to maintain momentum during book releases.
I’ve worked at hacking the fitness of this—I’m writing this article right now from the comfort of my treadmill desk—but the hard-core two hours a day I used to do is just something I’m not able to do and still write the 1500 to 3000 words of fiction-related work and associated blog posts I do every day. I hope to find that balance eventually, but the last few years have been hard.
The funny thing that people don’t get when they see me living it up at writing conventions is that I have, in fact, always been considered fat. From the time I was five years old, people told me I was fat. I was a size 14 in high school, and people told me I was fat. I was working out two hours a day when God’s War came out, eschewing ALL THE CARBS, and at 220 pounds, I was, of course, fat. And the thing is, when you’re fat at 220 pounds, you’re still fat at 290 pounds. There’s not a whole lot of societal difference. You maybe get hit on a little more at 220 than at 290, but that’s about it.
I have done a lot of broken things trying to get back to that 220, including calorie counting, which ended disastrously. I lost twenty-five pounds, sure, but the minute I stopped, I gained it all back plus thirty pounds, which is what’s put me over the edge with those airplane seats; my time at the treadmill desk and indoor bike desk is all about fighting to keep me under the weight at which I can no longer fly. I knew better than to calorie count like that, but was feeling the societal pressure to punch back down a size. That was a mistake.
