This week in SF/F: sexual harassment and ongoing sexism

[annathepiper]

Surfacing from my day job being exhausting this week to find that while I’ve been distracted, the SF/F genre is continuing to be exhausting as well.

Some of today’s high level of activity is extremely necessary and valuable conversation about what to do if you’re the target of sexual harassment at conventions. I’ve seen a guest post from Elise Matthesen go up on John Scalzi’s site here and on Seanan McGuire’s LJ here. Cherie Priest has chimed in here.

And I’m seeing a lot of activity over Twitter, including naming of the individual that Matthesen reported. I applaud her for her speaking up, and all those who are speaking up in support of her as well. Because yeah, reporting this kind of thing takes a lot of bravery. I’ve been there and I’ve done that. It’s exhausting and it can have ramifications that impact you for the rest of your life.

Hand in hand with this I’m also seeing a lot of furor over a particular author’s being up in arms as to why women are criticizing him for having his female characters admiring their own breasts in a mirror. Foz Meadows pretty much says everything I can think of to say on the matter, right over here. Tricia Sullivan speaks up over here. And James Nicoll and his regular readers have all sorts of pithy commentary over here.

Here’s what I can think to add.

During my days on the various MUSHes I played, nineteen times out of twenty, you could tell when a female character was being played by a male player–because she’d be the character spending most of her @desc on the size of her breasts and her other sexual attributes. These were classic examples of the male gaze being applied to the character, presumably without the player even thinking about whether other people interacting with that character might in fact not be heterosexual males.

For the record: speaking as a female reader here, yo, male writers of the world? If I see you arguing with your female readers about how you know more about what women would plausibly do than they do, you’re going to guarantee I’ll never read a word you write in your life.

And speaking particularly as a breast cancer survivor, I’m here to tell you: you know what I’m really, really not interested in? Multiple paragraphs of a female character ogling her own breasts. You want to know what thought processes I usually have about mine, these days? Let me give you a sampling.

“What bra can I wear to hide my scars?”

“How much acetaminophen do I have to have today to make the muscles all around my rib cage stop bitching at me?”

“Is this going to be a day where I can lean over to the right without pain?”

“Can I even begin to think about wearing a swimsuit this summer?”

Somehow, I ain’t holding my breath that this is going to show up in a commercially published SF/F novel any time soon.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[maellenkleth]

**hugs**

yeah, exactly what you said, Sister!

[annathepiper]

*hugs!* Thank you. :)

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Oooh one of the comments I saw that I really like is that right, even a woman admiring her body (which happens) will often then focus on what she DOESN'T like too. I will sometimes admire my own rack esp if it looks particularly good, but like, as a special thing and then if I'm honest I probably then notice that I'm fatter than I'd like. It would be strange to have a woman perseverate on HOW hot she looks with no other context.

[annathepiper]

Yes. This.

Practically every single woman I know, online and offline, reacts to their own bodies way more negatively than positively. Weight is a huge part of it, to be sure.

And I certainly won't say that no woman ever admires herself in a mirror at all--because I agree with the commentary I saw elsewhere, which is to say, it's not a question of the act per se. It's all about how the act is described and whether or not the author has fallen out of giving me a useful depiction of the character and into language that's clearly designed to arouse straight boys.

(It would be amusing to see lesbian authors handling the 'character admiring herself in the mirror' schtick.)

[maellenkleth]

:laughs ^_^

**this** Lesbian author's always been more interested in describing what her protagonists think about the other characters, and how the inner dialogues might or might not match up with the percieved motivations of others. About the only time that breasts are relevant to the narrative are when a) Baby breaches the "don't bite Mummy or you're going on solid food!" or b) Mummy's day job involves archery.

Now, my attitude about **my** breasts? Got 'em, mistrust 'em since they've got demonstrable tendencies to go wrong, and (ahem) "attention all men: that's not where my ears are located!"

Mostly when I look in the mirror it's in a context of "damn waistband doesn't fit!".

----

On another note, my Lesbian opacity field generator must be working because I haven't had any straight boys trying to hit on me in, mmm, 43 1/2 hours. That may be a personal record.

More hugs, of course,

Mevs

[rmd.livejournal.com]

yeah. i've got some experience with differentiating 'men pretending to be women' from 'women', and the approach to and vocabulary used around body self-descriptions is a huge part of it.

[annathepiper]

We got a lot of this on Two Moons MUSH back in the day. I saw quite a few character @descs when doing sweeps through purging idle characters from the database.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Have you read Rees' actual books? I fear they are not quite as well-crafted as his essay.

[annathepiper]

I was aware of their existence, having seen them get promoted on tor.com when the first couple of them came out. I remember checking out the Goodreads reviews at the time and thinking 'yeaaaaah I'm probably not going to enjoy those'.

I'm not feeling inclined any time soon to try to prove myself wrong, I must admit.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

This is definitely making me review several scenes from a novel I'm working on. In the story, multiple characters - male and female - are thinking both about being judged by appearance, and examining themselves in a mirror. (The reason for all this being that the story includes multiple physical transformations.)

The novel is only to about 70k words and not ready for beta readers. However, I'm now thinking I should ask you (Anna) and some others privately to read those scenes.

[annathepiper]

Rod, thank you for being willing to give your own work a second look and to ask folks to doublecheck you, that's awesome.

Please to note: as I said to maellenkleth up the thread, and as was said in commentary elsewhere, the problem is less the act of looking in a mirror per se--and more about the language being used to describe the scene.

If you haven't already, I recommend you check out this article that I linked to in the original post.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Linked page examined and bookmarked.