If I were a writer, I’d avoid you like the plague. Wouldn’t want to think I’d offended you with all my silly little fantasy romance novels that apparently I am genetically programmed to write.

What I’m trying to get at is that, while women’s issues often remain very real (I obviously haven’t experienced them personally), it’s also easy to get offended by very minor things. I’ve witnessed this constantly from university on–people getting offended by minor issues in pictures. If I chose, I could work myself into a frenzy over romance covers. Why are men always buff and usually half-naked? Why no balding middle-ages guys? Why, for that matter, is it socially acceptable for a woman to see a man’s nipples in public, but men can’t see women’s nipples?

Witness the craziness of the 2004 superbowl half-time show (yes, you know the one, the infamous ‘wardrobe malfunction’). Of course, most of the world just laughed at US prudishness, but you have to admit that calling a barely glimpsed, tassled, female nipple obscene or disgusting, or even expoitation, as many did, while two men danced topless right beside her for the entire show is just hypocritical.

Moving on, I’ve personally read a number of female sci-fi authors recently: Justina Robson, Lauren Beukes, Jaine Fenn, Francis Knight, currently Stephanie Saulter, and yes, even Suzanne Collins’s famous series (considering I only manage 1 book/month, that’s not bad). Some are escapism, some deal with serious issues, and some have overused tropes… what was the point here?

As for stereotypes and social acceptance, I think I can compete with you there. 1) I’m an ex-research scientist. Do you know what it’s like to leave a profession like that and suddenly have everyone you know treat you like you lost 50 IQ points? 2) I’m a stay-at-home dad who’s rebuilding my career. So I do have experience with ‘the expectaions’ and the ‘how come you let your wife do all the work’ glances, and the ‘what kind of man are you, slacker’ views. And constantly figuring how to explain what you do for a living, because it’s not okay to be a stay-at-home parent anymore, especially if you’re a man.

It’s not only women that experience ‘issues’.

So, when there’s a ‘serious’ Mills and Boon book with a cover of a fat, balding, middle-aged, middle class guy being swooned at by the young heroine, I’ll consider complaining about the exploitation represented by pictures of generic fantasy women (the operative word in this phrase, by the way, is ‘fantasy’).

But seriously, chain mail protecting your loins and the most sensitive parts of your chest, or a fur diaper?

You in a chain-mail bikini would probably be an effective costume as your opponents would be too busy laughing to actually put a a decent defense!

The fact is neither outfit is practical. But if I had to fight in one, I’d take Red Sonja’s bikini over Conan’s diapers.

It isn’t the chain mail bikini, it’s the attitudes *that actually harm real people* that it represents.

Two things you might consider: have you actually read any female-authored sci-fi books lately? Because I don’t think you could make these comments if you had, knowing what’s out there.
And: the day you, metaphorically speaking, go out to fight a real battle in a world that thinks you should be wearing a chain mail bikini while you do it, your view of the validity of those viewpoints changes. Trust women on this one, because most of us have had that day and a thousand like it besides.

Conan is wearing leather, he has no access to chain mail. Conina is wearing chain mail, it just isn’t actually protecting her. She’s half naked in the snow – how is that a smart move?

Also – Conan is something guys want to be. Conina is something guys want to own. No one wants to be Conina.

Additional, Holly Hayden goes onward to supply advice
on doing exercises i. There are several remedies that can be used to quit hemorrhoids.

Is it really so much more absurd than so much of the other stuff that’s out there? I mean Conan fighting with only a loincloth? 100-year old vampires sleeping with 16-year old girls as a romance? Magic. The bible. Middle-age male characters who are not balding.

Do you really want that we censor things just because they’re absurd? Because everything is absurd to someone. If no one had said anything about the cover, then it would have died away with no concern to anyone. After all, is not everyone entitled to their opinion, their likes and dislikes, even if you disagree with them? Instead, this particlular controversy wastes a lot of time and energy for no real benefit and leads to greater censorship.

I’m all for developing diversity in writing, especially sci-fi, which can get locked into certain tropes. I think the genre can only benefit from more people with different backgrounds and interests being involved. But that needs to be done through developing new authors and fostering the interests of the new generation, male and female, not through censorship.

Something else you might consider (although by no means a reason against diversity), awareness of female issues and increasing the number of female authors/readers in a genre does not guarentee higher quality or greater social equality of the work. It just changes the tropes to favour female fantasies (like in Twilight, Hunger Games and almost every other popular YA series, where readership is dominated by females. Not to mention the romance genre–I’m not the only one who considers it emotional p*rn).

1. How many women are in SFWA?

2. Did Jean Rabe have the power to kill an on-going column without going to a higher-up? According to Scalzi’s public account, she submitted the column to him, as publisher, and, knowing it was controversial, he approved it.

The Dancing Queen on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGfNSitVQFM

I was impressed by the mask.

The aforementioned RSHD ran for SFWA president in the last election, if that helps.

Yes, it’s depressing. Turn the depression into anger (men do this all the time) and use it to shove back against the pressure.

I know there are men in SFWA with no respect for women. I know there are men in SFWA with considerable respect for women. I know who I would, if I were as rude as the men with no respect for women, use my considerable Marine Corps-acquired vocabulary on, but I can annoy them (it turns out) by being excessively formal.

Emergency Medical Fund. From early on, SFWA provided loans to writers with critical medical needs. The EMF takes donations and holds charity auctions at several conventions a year. (Writers, as you probably know, have a heck of a time getting medical insurance.)

Emergency Legal Fund. SFWA provides loans to writers who need assistance in dealing with certain legal tangles relating to writing.

Writer Beware (which didn’t exist when I first joined): Writer Beware offers not just SFWAns but all writers information about scam agents and publishers and has provided data to law enforcement for successful prosecution of a few such.

Copyright issues: When the Author’s Guild was first capitulating to Google on Google’s rights grab (by digitizing works without permission), it was SFWA who filed papers with the court that led to the first settlement being thrown out. Since Google had digitized all of my books as “orphans” (despite their all being in print and for sale) and I had to spend almost a week fighting Google’s laborious “opt out” process, I was delighted that SFWA’s presentations were (along with others) sufficient for Judge Chen to come down on the side of copyright law and a writer’s right to control the copying and distribution of that writer’s work.

SFWA continues to be a front-runner in defense of copyright in the face of corporate invasion of copyright (and will be doing that again this summer as Congress considers altering copyright law. I’m on that committee.) I support my family with writing: copyright is a matter of bread, butter, housing, and the electricity bill. (It is for any writer who is now, or hopes to be, supporting themselves with writing.) Anything that threatens copyright directly threatens my income–and thus my ability to provide for my family. Google, Amazon, and other companies view “content” as valuable and will do anything to claim a reason it should be free to them. (The French government passed a law allowing digitization and reuse of everything published in France without compensation of the author–where some of my books are also published–and I learned about that from SFWA.)

Writers’ rights vis a vis publishers. SFWA has taken on the big publishers from time to time, most recently in dealing with very bad contract offers to new/unknown writers by several large publishers. Public shaming can work, and this time it did. SFWA members published by the publishers SFWA is criticizing are vulnerable to retaliation…but stand firm. We understand what’s at stake and do not want to see new writers victimized.

Naturally, these actions on behalf of SFWA members also benefit non-members…paying it forward is part of the ethos, at least in these areas.

On the informal side, SFWA members collectively share information about what’s going on in the industry. Yes, it’s now easier for non-members to access industry information–there are groups of SF writers who do the same. I’m a member of several online groups of writers in this genre who are not all (but some are) SFWA members. I find that usually SFWA alerts me to critical information faster. Most of my writer-friends are members of SFWA. While there are people in the organization I do not personally like (and not everyone in the organization likes me), and though there are changes I hope to see (and have worked toward), I’m in for the long haul.

Would one of these younger people be the…gentleman whom John Scalzi refers to as the RSHD? If there are more like him in the SFWA, I’m depressed.

I’m really weirded out by this whole fuss – it seems an awful lot like “you’re a girl? you must be the secretary, go take notes or get me some coffee.” There’s so much of that everywhere, but I thought it was going away. Now it seems like its all coming back. Sigh.

I’m not playing a game, either, though. It’s more that I was going off on an irrelevant tangent.

I’m quite aware that a Doc Savage torn-shirt cover is not equivalent to a chainmail bikini. I am not so certain about some Fabio romance covers, nor am I convinced that “the objectification of men is more a result of women being told that to desire or lust is something that only men do.” I think both sexes are entirely capable of objectifying the other for their own enjoyment, regardless of socialization.

I also realize that this doesn’t make anything equal, that the near-universal objectification and sexualization of women is a real problem.

I was replying to Brian’s asking how he would react to RWA using a sexualized-male cover by observing that they had indeed published at least one such cover. I had that magazine lying on my desk for a couple of years, back when, so I remembered it immediately when I read his comment. I don’t claim it’s relevant; it’s not.

I do think a flowing-hair bare-chested Fabio is more or less equivalent to Red Sonja in a chainmail bikini as far as being intended to be sexually provocative; I don’t think that remotely justifies SFWA’s use of such a cover.

You’re welcome to look on this as meaningless hair-splitting, if you like, because it pretty much is; I’m not interested in arguing any substantive issues here, as there are plenty of people here more competent to do so, and with more at stake.

I’m only posting here at all because I sympathized with Mary’s post. I’ll happily withdraw if I’m unwelcome.

Effie, what are the reasons you want to join? What benefits do you get for the membership fee? This is not snark – I genuinely want to know, since I am considering paying that same fee.

I’m going to assume you’re an adult, however, in which case you know perfectly well that a topless man and a topless woman are not perceived the same in society (or by law enforcement.) A partly clothed woman on the cover of a book mean something different than a partly clothed man.

On the old Doc Savage covers, Doc’s torn shirt revealed bulging muscles and showed him as the very active hero of the story. Genre military fiction and sometimes military SF used a lot of the muscley guy in torn-shirt-showing-muscles.

A torn shirt or blouse on a woman on the cover shows her to be a sex object (and, except in romance novels, not the hero of the story.) But also–anything other then full street clothing (in whatever era) shows a woman on the cover to be a sex object. A low-cut blouse, a zipper open to show cleavage, spike heels, a short skirt…all say “sex object.” (If she’s waving a gun, she might be an urban fantasy hero. Maybe.)

I suspect you know this. I suspect you’re playing a game. Quit. This is a serious topic.

Two of the reasons I planned to join SFWA is, in fact, for meeting people and for writing tips. It seems taht there are no writing workshops for members, and the meetings are for the birds.

Two more reasons not to pay up to join
So what are the actual benefits?

I’d prefer to live in a world where all things were equal in this, but we don’t. That’s what we need to be cognizant of.

I should probably have used the singular rather than the plural, though, as I really only remember the one. And I really hope this wasn’t my memory playing tricks on me and confusing RWA’s mag with something else, such as Romantic Times; I don’t THINK it was.

I also realize, in retrospect, that it being so far back does mean it’s probably irrelevant to the present discussion.

As for “half-naked,” the woman on the Bulletin cover was wearing slightly more than a bikini, she wasn’t topless, so I think it’s a reasonable equivalence.

I also want to point out that half-naked guy =/= half-naked woman. That’s false equivalency in our unequal society. For instance, a shirtless woman walking down the street will not be treated the same as a shirtless man walking down the street.

I enjoyed this post, and it gives good advice. At this point I haven’t gotten any hate mail for my fiction, but I have gotten some for nonfiction. In particular some comments in response to a negative review I gave to Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, one of which accused me of various things, at the core of which the conclusion was that I couldn’t possibly have “read it properly”, whatever that means. I found that comment hilarious.

I did reply to that one, since it was on my own site, so I figured it would be an appropriate place for me to speak up for myself. I mostly kept it polite, though I did venture a bit into snark and asked for instructions for how I should read properly so that I don’t make similar mistakes in the future.

I very much like your advice to go out of your way to write fanmail. That’s something I’ve learned over the last few years. Often the reader’s reaction is that if they read something amazingly good, the author must be too important or busy to read correspondence. But the business of writing can be so unrelentingly depressing at times with low pay, almost-constant rejection, writer’s block etc, that getting the occasional piece of fanmail is enough to make all that other crap totally worth it. I don’t write fanmail for every story that I like, but if it blows my mind I try to write at least a quick note. Usually that quick note turns into a major document (much like this comment is becoming) as I follow the thought processes that the themes of the story took me down, but really that’s all part of what makes a good story good, that it makes me think about other things in different light. So far I’ve gotten responses to every fanmail that I’ve sent. Sometimes they’re brief but often the response includes a phrase along the lines of “You made my day”. And really, if I can make someone else’s day by writing an email that contains only my opinions, then it is totally worth the effort it takes to put the words in order and put fingers to keys.

When I’ve gone to conventions I’ve struggled a bit with finding a boundary between the roles of fanboy and writer, because it seemed to me that gushing over someone else’s work is unbecoming to the serious profession of writer. But I came to the conclusion that SF Writers are, almost by definition, all fanboys/fangirls of someone/something in the field. I mean, otherwise, why the hell are they doing what they do? It’s sure not for widespread acclaim and fortune!

And so far Ferrett Steinmetz has not told me to leave him alone, so I take that as a good sign…

best,
David Steffen

I’d like to think the Old Guard will die off before I do, but the problem as I see it is not just in SFWA but worldwide: the advances feminism made in the ’60s and ’70s have come under heavier and heavier attack, politically and socially, across national boundaries. Religious extremism (in multiple religions) has had a very bad effect, and has been taken up by politicians who know that religions deliver voters. Blatant sexism has also shown up in atheist organizations and in the British Socialist Workers Party. So it’s not unique to SFWA, though it’s certainly in SFWA as well.

Because of the international prevalence of sexism at all levels, it’s not just SFWA’s Old Guard we have to deal with, but those younger male SFWA members (who will probably outlive me) who–for reasons of either religion or the pure form of sexism, have no desire to see women as fully human–as deserving equal respect. They are the ones who will continue to whine about censorship and wave the threat of rebellion against PCness. They’re making just as sneering, just as condescending comments about women as the Old Guard. We cannot afford to think that because the Old Guard will croak in the next 20 years, that the New Guard won’t replace them with the same sexist bilge.

I was startled, when I joined, by the amount of sexism (including sexual harassment and even assaults) demonstrated by some of the male members–and that was in…um…1986, I think it was. I told myself that for men born 15-20 years before me, that may have been just normal and “they didn’t mean anything by it.” But of course they DID mean something by it. They meant that SFWA was their space–their private domain–and women were welcome only if the men could continue to do and say whatever they wanted. Decorative women–compliant women—were OK. Same as in the outside world, women who weren’t compliant, who didn’t defer just because some guy was a guy–or who weren’t decorative–were seen as a problem to be ridiculed, swatted down, sneered at and about. A few got grudging respect (but never complete, the same given to a major male writer.)

Nonetheless, I think SFWA is a worthwhile organization–I’m still a member, after over a quarter century, and have no intention of leaving. I’ve been involved, in a number of quiet backstage ways, with issues I think important (copyright issues, mostly.) Not going into that history (this isn’t about me; it’s about sexism in the organization and how that affects its ability to do the things it’s supposed to be doing.) I want to see the overt sexism dealt with so it’s obvious SFWA is what it actually is–an organization that works for its writer members and for the benefit of its core genre.