The Geek Feminist Revolution, page 21
But the truth was that unless we made a big fucking stink, people went back to the status quo.
Folks will always, always, always go back to the comfortable status quo, with its silent voices and lack of conflict, if you give them the chance.
“Settle the fuck down, you got your way” also doesn’t work after a fight is over, because though dudes may go, “Yeah, we get it, women blog,” unless you’re on it like a fucking train wreck, you’ll have the conversation again six months later.
They forget. They start rewriting the narrative.3
Calls for civility,4 as well-intentioned as they may be, smack to me of folks telling me I should have swallowed my tongue at the bus stop. After all, it’s not as if the men were physically harming the young woman. And I should have held my tongue when people said women don’t blog, because obviously if I wrote well enough, and shut up enough, and acted demure enough, people would just magically notice me, right?
Clearly, y’all have no idea how this works.
Oh. Wait. You do.
If I shut the fuck up, then all the people you quote, all the people who write the postnarrative, the big pieces that folks look back on to create the history and narrative of an event, even a successful one, will be made by the powerful, influential people who believe their hurt feelings at being called out as problematic somehow outweigh the concerns of an entire community of folks with no media pull and no platform whose voices have been marginalized their whole lives and who are now being reduced to a crazy, screaming, angry mob acting up out of nowhere instead of a passionate community of folks reacting to an event they see as existing on a problematic continuum.
We have a strange habit of falling back on “civility,” as if every social movement was entirely civil. Like unions didn’t bust up on scabs. Like Nelson Mandela didn’t blow shit up.5 Like MLK would tell us all to shut the fuck up,6 and women never chained themselves to the fences in city squares, stormed political buildings, or committed acts of arson and violence in an effort to achieve suffrage.
Surprise!
My specialization is in the history of revolutionary movements, and let me tell you, folks—being nice and holding hands didn’t get shit done. Or sure, it was one tactic. But never the only tactic. I wish a nice circle-jerk got shit done as much as the next person, but if it were so, history would look much, much different.
Change is messy. It’s angry. It’s uncomfortable. It’s full of angry people saying angry things, because they’ve been disrespected and forgotten again and again and again and again, and they’re tired of being fucking nice because it makes you uncomfortable if they act in any way that is not deferential or subservient to you and your worldview.
I’m sorry if we’ve interrupted your latest Kickstarter, or pin-up calendar, or the purchase of your million-dollar estate in California, and you’re throwing all your Hugo pins into Mount Doom in the hopes it will shame us into silence.
That must be really, really tough.
I’m sympathetic; I really am. Because I too know what it is to be comfortable and safe and pretend everything’s fine. I’m white. My parents aren’t poor, and I make decent money now. I get how annoying it can be, to get called out on that, and to have to listen to people who have problems you don’t. Real fucking problems and issues that exist on a continuum of shame, disrespect, and forced subservience they’ve had to deal with their whole lives.
For a community of folks who grew up reading comic books and farmers-who-become-heroes, we sure do balk when we suddenly go from farm boy to hero. Because that’s a heavy fucking responsibility, and it’s easier to pretend you’re still mewling Peter Parker, complaining about how no girl will fuck you. You may not feel like you have power or influence, but you do—as do I.
There are a few things we can do when we have power and influence.
We can take our toys and go home.
Or we can get the fuck up and fight for the people who are continually shit on, and act like a fucking hero would act.
I know which I’d rather do.
Why I’m Not Afraid of the Internet
My grandmother grew up in Nazi-occupied France. When she was nineteen, she and her friends found a Nazi boot containing a severed human leg while walking along the river. For every Nazi the French killed, the Nazis would kill ten French citizens. So how many would the Nazis kill, my grandmother thought, for a severed leg? She and her friends huffed the boot and its fleshy occupant back into the river and spent the next month waiting to hear how many of them would be shot in the street.
There’s nothing I experience online that can rival what my grandmother went through. I’ve been living loudly online for ten years, getting my fair share of abuse and threats, but—vastly more often—grateful notes for having the courage to speak boldly. My grandmother’s stories gave me a great deal of perspective—both on life and on the tactics of terror, and how silence serves a darker future. Unchecked hate can be insidious, and can creep up and consume whole swaths of a culture before they even know what’s happening. Which is why you have to keep speaking, and fighting for a better future.
I also have a unique perspective on life shared by many survivors of near-death experiences. When I came to in the ICU when I was twenty-six after nearly two days in a coma, the doctor told me that if they’d hauled me in ten years before I’d be dead. They simply wouldn’t have had the equipment to save me. Having a chronic illness like mine where you have to take medication multiple times a day in order to survive means death is always one miscalculation or mix-up away. Death hugs you close every day, whispering a siren song far more terrifying than any internet mob.
When I talk about this online, I get a lot of pushback from people who think I don’t believe that internet threats are serious, that I don’t think there are people fully capable and enabled by the misogyny of our society to act on those threats. Quite the contrary. I believe it wholeheartedly.
There are men everywhere who feel that being rejected by women entitles them to murder those women. There are men who will single out you, as a public figure, for embodying everything they feel is wrong with women. You are the reason women laugh at them or won’t have sex with them, or you are the reason their girlfriend broke up with them. One of the things Gamergate taught us is just how far men are willing to go to shame and threaten the women who hurt their feelings, and how many other men think that’s all right. I know that stalker boyfriend who refuses to believe it’s over. And all those stalker boyfriends and potential stalker boyfriends have found each other on the internet, and they are looking for targets.
I hear people say, more and more these days, that they are fearful to say anything online. Fearful to have an opinion or a position that might be seen as “controversial,” even if it’s, you know, truthful. And that really bothers me.
The reality is that you’re more likely to get killed by a family member or an ex-boyfriend than by a stranger online. According to my friends, my ex-boyfriend called them up and described to them all the new and inventive ways he had come up with to kill me and then himself. He showed up outside my college classes and sent me horrifying emails. I know that’s horrifically sad, but it’s true. It’s the society we live in. Our fear of strangers has always been a stalking horse for the real threat, and that’s the people closest to us: our friends, our family, our lovers. Our discussions about the dangers of online discourse make the strangers of the internet into some kind of bogeyman, when in fact they are all simply specters of a broken and systematically misogynist world.
My grandmother often carried around a bullet that she said came from two planes that were in a dogfight overhead. She said you could tell which planes were German and which were American by the sound of the engines. A stray bullet from the dogfight grazed the side of her head and embedded itself in the wall behind her. If we asked, she would lift up a hank of hair and show us the long scar. She dug out the bullet and kept it with her all through her long journey from France to the United States. When we asked her why, she said it was because, as a lifelong Catholic, she believed that it meant God had spared her for greater things. She was meant to endure. She was meant to live.
So when you ask me if I’m afraid of the internet, and the self-entitled wanker of the day gaming awards, or the five hundred people who yell at me on Twitter, or some internet personality having a meltdown in my general direction, I think of my grandmother throwing that severed leg back into the river, and I say, “You’re kidding, right?”
There’s a future I’m meant to be a part of. We are building it one narrative at a time.
Yes, change is incredibly terrifying, and there will be pushback and threats and dudes on the internet loudly declaring that you are a big vagina as if that is the worst possible thing a human being can be. But this is not yet Nazi-occupied France, my friends.
Are there ramifications for speaking up? Sure. Muting people can get tedious. But you’re still more likely to be hit by a bus than shivved by a sobbing internet mob.
We are made of tougher stuff than we can ever imagine.
We Have Always Fought: Challenging the “Women, Cattle, and Slaves” Narrative
I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves—lemming-like—over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there.
Every story you hear about llamas is the same. You see it in books: the poor doomed baby llama getting chomped up by its intemperate parent. On television: the massive tide of scaly llamas falling in a great, majestic herd into the sea below. In the movies: badass llamas smoking cigars and painting their scales in jungle camouflage.
Because you’ve seen this story so many times, because you already know the nature and history of llamas, it sometimes shocks you, of course, to see a llama outside of these media spaces. The llamas you see don’t have scales. So you doubt what you see, and you joke with your friends about “those scaly llamas” and they laugh and say, “Yes, llamas sure are scaly!” and you forget your actual experience.
What you remember is the llama you saw who had mange, which sort of looked scaly, after a while, and that one llama who was sort of aggressive toward a baby llama, like maybe it was going to eat it. So you forget the llamas that don’t fit the narrative you saw in films, books, television—the ones you heard about in the stories—and you remember the ones that exhibited the behavior the stories talk about. Suddenly, all the llamas you remember fit the narrative you see and hear every day from those around you. You make jokes about it with your friends. You feel like you’ve won something. You’re not crazy. You think just like everyone else.
And then there came a day when you started writing about your own llamas. Unsurprisingly, you didn’t choose to write about the soft, downy, noncannibalistic ones you actually met, because you knew no one would find those “realistic.” You plucked out the llamas from the stories. You created cannibal llamas with a death wish, their scales matted in paint.
It’s easier to tell the same stories everyone else does. There’s no particular shame in it.
It’s just that it’s lazy, which is just about the worst possible thing a spec fic writer can be.
Oh, and it’s not true.
* * *
As somebody with more than a passing knowledge of history, I’m passionately interested in truth: truth is something that happens whether or not we see it, or believe it, or write about it. Truth just is. We can call it something else, or pretend it didn’t happen, but its repercussions live with us, whether we choose to remember and acknowledge it or not.
When I sat down with one of my senior professors in Durban, South Africa, to talk about my master’s thesis, he asked me why I wanted to write about women resistance fighters.
“Because women made up twenty percent of the ANC’s militant wing!” I gushed. “Twenty percent! When I found that out I couldn’t believe it. And you know—women have never been part of fighting forces—”
He interrupted me. “Women have always fought,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”
I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate women’s history courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.
Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.
I just watched a reality TV show about Alaska bush pilots where all of the pilots get these little intros about their families and passions, but the single female pilot is given the one-line “Pilot X’s girlfriend.” It wasn’t until they broke up, in season two, that she got her own intro. Turns out she’s been in Alaska four times longer than the other pilot and hunts, fishes, and climbs ice walls, in addition to being an ace pilot.
But the narrative was “cannibalistic llama,” and our eyes glazed over, and we stopped seeing her as anything else.
* * *
Language is a powerful thing, and it changes the way we view ourselves, and other people, in delightful and horrifying ways. Anyone with any knowledge of the military, or who pays attention to how the media talks about war, has likely caught on to this.
We don’t kill “people.” We kill “targets.” (Or japs or gooks or ragheads.) We don’t kill “fifteen-year-old boys” but “enemy combatants.” (Yes, every boy fifteen and over killed in drone strikes now is automatically listed as an enemy combatant. Not a boy. Not a child.)
And when we talk about “people” we don’t really mean “men and women.” We mean “people and female people.” We talk about “American Novelists” and “American Women Novelists.”1 We talk about “Teenage Coders” and “Lady Teenage Coders.”2
And when we talk about war, we talk about soldiers and female soldiers.
Because this is the way we talk, when we talk about history and use the word “soldiers” it immediately erases any women doing the fighting. Which is why it comes as no surprise that the folks excavating Viking graves didn’t bother to check whether the graves they dug up were male or female. They were graves with swords in them. Swords are for soldiers. Soldiers are men.
It was years before they thought to even check the actual bones of the skeletons instead of just saying “Sword means dude!” and realized their mistake.3
Women fought too.
In fact, women did all sorts of things we think they didn’t do. In the Middle Ages, they were doctors and sheriffs.4 In Greece they were …5 Let’s just put it this way: if you think there’s a thing—anything—women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong. Women—now and then—even made a habit of peeing standing up. They wore dildos. So even things the funny-ha-ha folks immediately raise a hand to say, like, “It’s impossible women did X!” Well. They did it. Intersex women and trans women, too, have fought and died, often misgendered and forgotten, in the ranks of history. And let us remember, when we speak about women and men as if these are immutable, somehow “historical” categories, that there are those who have always lived and fought in the seams between things.
But none of those things fit our narrative. What we want to talk about are women in one capacity: their capacity as wife, mother, sister, daughter to a man. I see this in fiction all the time. I see it in books and TV. I hear it in the way people talk.
All those cannibal llamas.
It makes it really hard for me to write about llamas who aren’t cannibals.
* * *
James Tiptree, Jr. has a very interesting story called “The Women Men Don’t See.” I read it when I was twenty, and I admit I had a difficult time understanding what the fuss was all about. This was the story? But … this wasn’t the story! We’re stuck for the full narrative inside the head of a man who does very little, who’s traveling with a woman and her daughter. Like the man, of course, we as readers don’t “see” them. We don’t realize that they are, in fact, the heroes of the story until it’s over.
This was the man’s story, after all. That was his narrative. It’s his story we were a part of. They were just passing objects, some NPCs in his limited landscape.
We didn’t see them.
* * *
When I was sixteen, I wrote an essay about why women should remain barred from combat in the U.S. military. I found it recently while going through some old papers. My argument for why women shouldn’t be in combat was because war was terrible, and families were important, and with all these men dying in war, why would we want women to die, too?
That was my entire argument.
“Women shouldn’t go to war because, like men do now, they would die there.”
I got an A.
* * *
I often tell people that I’m the biggest self-aware misogynist I know.
I was writing a scene last night between a woman general and the man she helped put on the throne. I started writing in some romantic tension, and realized how lazy that was. There are other kinds of tension.
I made a passing reference to sexual slavery, which I had to cut. I nearly had him use a gendered slur against her. I growled at the screen. He wanted to help save her child … no. Her brother? Okay. She was going to betray him. Okay. He had some wives who died … ugh. No. Close advisors? Friends? Maybe somebody just … left him?
