Monthly Archives: August 2015

Hugo Awards Upset: Fans Say No To Sad Puppies

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Two years ago, Larry Correia started the Sad Puppies campaign with one goal and one goal only: to get himself the award he thought he deserved. He hadn’t exactly been snubbed by the science fiction community, but he never quite got that “it’s an honor just to be nominated” is more than just a platitude.

Last year, Larry—having realized that not only wasn’t going to work but didn’t play very well outside his most ardent fan base—decided he really didn’t want a silly award anyway and instead ran the Puppy campaign again with a slightly different goal: to poke a stick in the eye of the people he thought were responsible for denying him awards.

This year, he handed off the torch to Brad Torgersen, who tried to powerwash the evidence that the Sad Puppies was nothing more than a tantrum and gild it with a coat of noble paint. The Sad Puppies exist, he says, to bring freedom to science fiction fandom. They have always existed for this reason. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. We love Big Brad.

The Sad Puppies have come to free us from the people who tell us what we’re allowed to write, what books we’re allowed to like. The Sad Puppies have come to liberate the Hugo awards from the tiny clique of people who have organized in order to control it.

Freedom to write whatever we want, though, comes with a responsibility. It means we must not pander. Pandering is defined as writing anything other than what Brad Torgersen thinks is exciting. It means we must not give in to thought police. Giving in to thought police is when we put characters or themes in a story that Brad Torgersen does not see the point of. We can like whatever books we like, so long as they are good books.

If we like books that Brad Torgersen does not think are good, then we are either Commissars pushing an agenda by telling people what books to like, or frightened and cowed proles who need Brad Torgersen to free us from the Commissars.

And so, in order to liberate the Hugo awards from the small but powerful clique that seeks to control the nomination process, Brad Torgersen assembled a slate of nominees chosen in a transparent, democratic process where he picked the nominees himself, but each and every person involved could see that he was the one who picked them.

In order to make sure he sent a message to those people who would try to misuse the Hugos to advance their careers and prop up their cronies, he enlisted the help of internet rabble rouser Vox Day in getting his hand-picked slate onto the ballot, along with Vox, works published by Vox’s publishing house, and works by Vox’s protege writer.

Through the midst of all this high-minded liberating that was going on, Brad Torgersen said that his real goal was to shake things up and get more people involved in the Hugo voting process so it wasn’t just the same old people making the pick every year. He said that whether his picks won or lost, no result would please him more than to see more people voting.

Well, right away, it seemed like Mr. Torgersen was getting his wish. WorldCon voting memberships started selling like hotcakes. Torgersen et al had a lot of bold predictions about what this meant. Clearly, since the previous situation was that a tiny, insular clique that was out of touch with real people in the real world was manipulating things, the hundreds and then thousands of new people who were putting money on the line to participate must have been The People, Rising Up As One to re-take their award from the tiny, tiny clique that had subverted them.

But, Torgersen said, he would be happy no matter who won.

WorldCon took place this past weekend. The Hugo Awards were presented Saturday night. The truth is now known.

The truth is, Brad Torgersen got his wish in one regard only: there was a record-breaking level of both WorldCon attendance and Hugo voting.

Is he happy?

He told us he’d be happy if this happened.

I’m having a hard time telling from here, but I don’t think he’s happy.

Approximately 3,500 people voted for “No Award” over almost any of the works or individuals that the Sad Puppies rammed through the Hugo nomination process. This was not only a victory for No Award, but a landslide. While some Puppies have tried to spin this by saying that their “enemies” the “Social Justice Warriors” were “voting in lockstep” while they, free men and tokens of good conscience, were voting their individual will, the truth is that No Award didn’t just get more votes than any other option, it got more votes than all the other options.

The idea that those voters were marching in lockstep is also hard to credit. I’ve seen Puppy supporters saying, in so many words, “What else do you call multiple people voting for the same choice?” I’m not sure they understand how voting works, to be honest.

There’s a difference between bloc voting and a landslide, and this was a landslide. At the point where there are enough people for one choice in a field of six to capture a true majority, no trickery or politicking or procedural shenanigans or even much in the way of coordination is even needed. There’s a clear winner. There’s a clear favorite. At that point, it would take considerable cheating for the frontrunner to not win.

Now, the No Award option exists in part because the nomination process is not perfect and in part because the idea of the award is not just to recognize the best work in a year but the best work that is deemed by the Hugo voters as Hugo worthy. It gets invoked on at least some ballots in every category every year, as the instant run-off system the Hugos has used allows people to rank their choices in order. If you rank two out of the available five selections in places 1 and 2 and then put No Award in rank 3, you are signaling that the choices below that (or that you don’t rank at all), you’re effectively signaling that you found the first two works award-worthy and the other three not so.

What makes an individual work “award worthy”, of course, is highly subjective, which is why every member of WorldCon has the privilege to decide for themselves.

And last night, some three thousand people—the vast majority of members who cast votes—decided that none of the works that the Puppies had picked were award worthy, save Guardians of the Galaxy.

Now, for eight months, we have heard the Puppies shout about how there’s no rule against doing what they did, about how you can’t simultaneously say something is wrong while allowing it under the rules. Interestingly, this strikingly stark streak of legalism appears to have disappeared completely from the Puppy camps. They have, in the past 36 hours or so, managed to discover how something can be done within the rules and still be called unethical, unfair, and wrong.

“They didn’t even read the books!” they yell, never mind that some people made it their very public business to read everything before voting (there are reviews of the Puppy picks all over the web because of this) and never mind that there’s no rule that says they have to and never mind that objecting to their odious tactics and the numerous falsehoods and slanders they have used to excuse said tactics is a perfectly good reason to vote to throw a penalty flag.

Some people were assuredly voting No Award on principle (an idea which confuses the Sad Puppies, who are as sure of their moral superiority as they are their literary superiority), but some were voting on merit. All of them were voting as individuals acting their own conscience, which means they don’t have to answer for their votes to anyone.

Strangely, the Puppies—who speak of “commissars” they think want to control the vote—think they now have the right to call people to account for how they voted.

Strangely, the Puppies—who spoke of wanting to throw open the gates of participation, shake up a moribund sci-fi fandom, and get more people involved in voting for the Hugos—now see something sinister in the fact that more people came out to vote for this year’s Hugos than ever before.

All along, Brad Torgersen, Larry Correia, John C. Wright, and Vox Day have been talking about a “tiny clique” of people, a very small and very non-representative minority of the science fiction fandom, who have taken control of the Hugos through secret means, through coordinated bloc voting behind the scenes.

The fact that their campaign to stack the ballot succeeded so wildly with only a few hundred participants behind it strongly suggested that they were completely in error about this. The data from the nomination round shows us there was never any actual opposition for them to overcome.

Yet now they want us to believe that a “tiny minority clique” that couldn’t muster enough nominating votes to get anything on the ballot against the united camps of a couple hundred Puppies somehow managed to get 3,500 to turn out to vote in lockstep in the final ballot?

“Well, how else do you explain such an unprecedented outcome?”

The Sad Puppies created an unprecedented situation, and they have thus received an unprecedented rebuke.

From the beginning, Brad Torgersen’s premise has been that the Hugos have been awarding the wrong books for the wrong reasons.

“Such projection!” the Puppies howl. “That kind of mindset is what we’re fighting against!”

No, no. That’s been your cover story. There are no actual examples of books that won because some hobgoblin lurking in the cupboards at Tor whispered “make it so“. There is no actual evidence that people have been voting for anything other than what they thought was best.

There are only books that Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen don’t personally see the point of, thus, whose success must be illegitimate.

And, you know, it’s fine for someone to think that. It is. Tastes differ. Opinions differ. It happens.

What’s not fine is to take your own personal tastes, use the difference between them and other people’s as “evidence” that someone is lying or cheating, and try to force them on everyone else. This is what the Puppies have done. This is what they promise: as long as the phenomenon of people liking different things than they do continues, they will continue to fling accusations of corruption and steamroll over any attempts to recognize said works.

Puppies, months ago, someone gave you very good advice. David Gerrold, a remarkably even-tempered man whose insistence that the ceremony be held with the same grace no matter what any individual presenter thought of the choice was twisted by the Puppies into some kind of weird veiled threat, told you that no one likes the guy who comes to a party and does something nasty in the punchbowl. It’s not political. It’s not even really personal.

You just can’t behave atrociously and expect there to be no consequences.

Most adults know this.

I don’t know—and would not fathom to guess—to what extent Brad Torgersen believes the lines of bull that he’s been selling his followers for the past eight months, but at least one part of his narrative should be clearly exploded. If there is an “SJW infestation” in science fiction fandom, it is not a tiny minority that tenuously holds to power by operating in the shadows, and shining a light on the “rot” will not rally the people, “the real fans of real science fiction” against them.

There has been more light shining on the Hugos this year than any year before. Brad Torgersen has had more eyes on his blog, I’m sure, than ever before. Every time he got media exposure and someone new showed up at his blog or in the comments of the blogs of one of his cohorts, he would crow about how even the negative exposure just swelled his ranks.

Now he knows: for every one or two people who were swayed by his words, there were scores of people who looked at what he was selling and not only didn’t buy it, but felt compelled to put their money down for a membership just to stop him.

I said on Twitter that I doubt very much all 3,500 No Award voters were liberals. I believe this to be true.

I don’t think a single end of any political or philosophical spectrum has a monopoly on not liking bullies coming in and telling people what to do. I don’t think conservatives have more patience than liberals with people who come in and say that they don’t like the way a game is going so they’re going to keep turning over the gameboard until we let them win.

While the Puppies’ rhetoric might attract more conservative sympathy on the surface and while it certainly has a tendency to repel liberals—both by design—I don’t think the ability to see through the rhetoric is the exclusive province of the liberal.

Strangely, the Puppies seem hellbent on painting everybody who voted down their agenda as members of that tiny, insular, ultra liberal clique they claim to be here to save everyone else from. They would rather believe that their designated enemies are innumerable than face the fact that the people have spoken against them.

Many have predicted that next year’s Hugos will be even uglier. I’m not making a definitive prediction, but somehow, I don’t think so.

I do think that we might see a bit more politicking and coordination during the nomination process, as people will understandably feel that the only way to have their voice heard post-Puppy is to join a bloc. In this respect, the Puppies have created the monster they claim to have come here to eradicate. Pending rule changes for the year after that will dilute the impact of bloc voting, if they are ratified at the next WorldCon.

But we have seen that the Puppies were not only wrong, they were exactly wrong. Their great big power play has revealed themselves to be the insular clique: small, out of touch with both broader science fiction fandom and reality more generally, yet feeling entitled to complete control of the playing field.

We know that the vast majority people see right through their nonsense, and are willing to stand up and counted to say, “No more, enough.” And while this has been a bad year for the award ceremony, I think history will remember it as a good year for WorldCon, because it did get more people involved, it did sell more WorldCon memberships, and it did spread awareness of how the Hugos are awarded and it did raise interest in the process.

If the Puppies, in their desperation for something they can claim as a victory, can’t find any solace in that, then I don’t know where they’re going to get it.

 

 

STATUS: Friday, August 21st

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

Well, I’ve been having a better day today than I have all week, and for some time before that. I’m looking back at the end of it at this point, though. I didn’t want to make too many plans in the morning because I didn’t want to overestimate myself, or undersell myself. That post I made yesterday was definitely a turning point. My improving physical health definitely helps (seriously, so sick of coughing). The intense rains yesterday also lowered the humidity a bunch and the temperature a bit for today.

The main reason I didn’t status post this morning is I wanted to see how I would do on getting a MU chapter up today, but didn’t want to make a prediction. Because I was starting from literally nothing.

I probably should have called it as “no”. It’s not that I’ve never written a decent thing in a single day, it’s that I can’t ever count on it, and even if I can do decent-in-a-day, I can improve decent if I sleep on it.

I just have this crushing awareness of how haphazard the posting schedule has been lately that makes me want to push on, kludge something together, and post it. But I’m never happy when I do that, and my thought right now is: I would rather be unhappy about posting nothing than be unhappy with what I’ve posted.

I don’t feel great that the day after I’m like, “I’m back, baby!”, I’m also like, “…I’ve got nothing in the tank.” But wallowing in guilt over it’s not going to help me next week.

The State of the Me

My latest summer cold has been getting better for three or four days, but “better” is relative. I have still had a few coughing jags today, but they are a lot fewer and farther between, and my throat feels pretty dang close to normal when I’m not coughing, which is a brand new thing. Last night I had the first really good night of sleep since I started getting sick, and probably a bit before that.

 

The Egalitarian In The Lunchroom (a parable)

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Recently, a self-described egalitarian tried to school me on his school of thought, which he thought I’d been unfairly impugning. He described egalitarianism this way:

“To use an analogy like you it would be more like one person has a vegetable garden and another person has apple trees. Egalitarians would say give them each a loaf of bread to have a nice lunch.”

He summed up what he saw my approach thusly:

“But, say the vegetable person got upset because they think it’s unfair that the other person gets both apples and bread. So they start a group to support other vegetable people. They petition you to not only give them extra food (like cheese) but also to stop giving the apple people their bread. You tell them they could just grow apples too but that offends them and they demand you still give them bread and cheese and they actually want bacon now too. They even demand you confiscate some of their apples to make it more fair.”

And summed up his defense of egalitarianism with:

“To say that the only way you can have equality is to be shown unfair advantages, goes against the very idea of equality.”

I have to confess, I found this very charming. Egalitarianism as a political philosophy defined as “Give everybody bread, and they can make a nice lunch out of whatever they have.” It’s such a great capsule description of… well… everything that’s wrong with it as an approach, and why exactly we need the more nuanced solutions that are inevitably reduced by their detractors to “showing some groups unfair advantages and calling it fair”.

It is in that spirit that I present:

THE EGALITARIAN IN THE LUNCHROOM (A Parable)

Once upon a time, an egalitarian was given charge over a school cafeteria and tasked with making sure that every child within it had a nutritious meal. This was a very important job, and the egalitarian was pleased to have a chance to show his dedication to equality by carrying it out in the fairest form possible.

“I shall give each child,” he said, “a SANDWICH. Each sandwich shall be exactly the same, consisting of delicious, fluffy, lightly toasted bread, a modest amount of mayonnaise, a slice of American cheese, nutritious lettuce and tomato, and a standard serving size of ham. All children shall receive this sandwich, and a carton of milk. All needs shall be equally met.”

When lunchtime came, the egalitarian went to the lunchroom to observe his ingenious system of lunchroom equality in action. The children were all lined up, and the sandwiches were all ready for them, one for each child, as the uniformity of the menu had resulted in a marvel of efficiency.

He watched as the first few children filed through the line.

Then one got to the front of the line and stopped.

“Is that real mayo?” she said. “I’m allergic to eggs. Could you make me one without mayo?”

The server looked at the egalitarian, who shook his head no. Didn’t this child understand equality? She was holding up the lines with her demands for special treatment.

“Every child gets the same sandwich,” the server said, giving her one. “That’s how you know it’s fair.”

But the special snowflake demands didn’t stop there. One child with sensitive gums had the gall to demand that the bread be untoasted. Several said they were lactose intolerant and could not digest the cheese, nor the milk that was served as a drink.

The egalitarian thought this one was a particularly transparent ploy to get special attention, as—though he did not see color—he couldn’t help but notice that most of the children who pulled it were racial minorities. Though he believed all races should be treated equally and he held not a single prejudiced thought in his head, it was his experience that some of those people did not believe this, and would use any excuse they could think of to demand special treatment.

“Everybody gets a sandwich,” the egalitarian said. “That’s a nice lunch for everybody. Look at all the kids who already have their sandwich and are happily eating it. This could be you, but you’re not happy to have the same thing everybody else has. You have to be special, so you’re holding up the line demanding we make something special just for you.”

Then one child claimed something called “coeliac disease” and asked for a sandwich with no bread at all. That ignored not only the definition of equality, but the definition of sandwich! One person said they couldn’t eat pork, because of a cultural tradition they were trying to keep alive.

“That’s your choice,” the egalitarian said. “I’m giving you the same opportunity to eat as everyone else.”

When an anemic student asked if there could not be a meal option that had some red meat, or at least some spinach, the egalitarian snapped. He’d tried to make everything equal, but if it would stop the grumbling for one minute…

“Fine!” he said. “Starting tomorrow we’ll put spinach on the sandwiches instead of lettuce! Will that make you happy?”

“Excuse me,” said another student. “I have a thyroid condition, and I’m not supposed to eat dark green vegetables.”

“Aaah!” screamed the egalitarian. “You see? I tried being nice, and do I even get any credit for compromising? This is what happens when you kowtow to special interest groups? There’s no way to win with you people! No way! If I take the bread off the sandwich, somebody will say they need the carbs! If I take away all the dairy to please the ‘lactose intolerants’ someone will tell me that they need calcium and potassium! The demands never stop with you people, which is why it was a mistake to bother trying at all! EVERYBODY GETS THE SAME SANDWICH! THAT IS WHAT EQUALITY MEANS!”

For reasons that are unclear, the egalitarian did not keep this job much longer, and soon after the school cafeteria went to a buffet model where children could select from several dishes, including things such as salads they assembled themselves and sandwiches assembled to order.

The egalitarian still visits the cafeteria from time to time and watches the children moving from station to station—not even the same stations—picking out their lunch. He watches the coeliacs taking unbreaded chicken and making salads from underneath signs reminding students how to avoid cross contaminating them, and mutters, “No one else gets signs just for them.” He watches the lactose intolerant students getting their orange juice and sneers, “I bet they feel really special with their yellow milk.” He watches a student peering at labels for kosher certification. “This isn’t equal food, it’s special food.”

He watches them all: the vegetarians and vegans, the anemics, the kosher-keepers and the halal-observers, and he says, “This isn’t equality. This isn’t what equality looks like.  I gave them equal. I gave them fair. It was so simple, so beautiful. But the fools, the fools didn’t want to listen…”

He breaks down sobbing.

“Everybody got a sandwich.”

Confirmation Bias IN SPACE

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, there’s this episode of Star Trek TOS called “The Galileo Seven”. It’s not about a space probe Galileo VII, but seven people stranded in a shuttle craft on the surface of a planet while the Enterprise has lost all its sensors and has an ironclad deadline it must depart the system by in order to prevent a disaster elsewhere. The plot that gets these officers—which include several members of the ship’s essential personnel—onto the planet in order to create this situation is so absurd that I’ve incorporated it into my general dystopian Federation headcanon, but if it’s totally an excuse plot, it’s forgivable because the situation it sets up makes for a good story.

See, for the Enterprise to find the shuttle on the ground, they have to search the entire planet on foot. They have no way of finding it from orbit. And the planet is inhabited by space ogres, complicating things for both the search parties and the stranded crew. Spock, commanding the shuttle, fully realizes the futility of waiting for the ship to find them. His one goal is to get the shuttle into orbit, where it will the only thing in orbit, and they have a chance of signaling the Enterprise.

The time constraint and the Space Ogre attacks add a lot of tension in and of themselves, but there’s another element. As soon as things get tough, the crewmen of the week and Dr. McCoy resent Spock’s cold demeanor towards the situation at hand and the casualties they suffer. At every point along the way, Spock acts as though nothing concerns him except getting the shuttle off the ground and rendezvousing with the Enterprise. Which is a fair assessment, because that’s all he cares about. Except it’s not fair, because the survival of each and every remaining member of the party depends on that.

When it becomes clear how badly damaged the shuttle is, Spock calculates that they won’t be able to achieve lift-off with everyone on board. The humans immediately cry about how unfair it is that he (as commanding officer) gets to choose whether they live or die, and agitate for drawing lots. Spock insists on making the logical choice as to who gets left behind.

Now, this is a tangent, but I’m pretty sure that from the moment he made that announcement, he was planning on staying behind himself. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” was not yet an articulated part of the Vulcan ethos at that point, but the logic that leads to it is. None of the rest of the party seemed to consider it a possibility worth thinking about that the people on the shuttle could direct a rescue party to the coordinates they’d taken off from. Spock most assuredly would have, and would also have considered that his Vulcan physiology gave him a one-up when it came to surviving the harsh conditions of the planet and dealing with the locals.

The end of the episode is pretty brilliant except for badly misunderstanding what “logic” means. I know it’s decades old but I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. But spoiler warning: they do get off the planet.

The thing is, watching this episode for the first time as an adult, I noticed something that I’d never noticed before.

Scotty.

Mr. Scott.

Now, this is likely to be because his personality hadn’t really been that established much yet—this might have been the largest on-screen role he’d played in any episode at that point—but the thing is that for the entire episode, he is right there with Spock, working away with an even greater single-mindedness on the problem of fixing the shuttlecraft (which makes perfect sense, as he’s the one fixing it).

When a crewmember dies, he doesn’t stop to mourn any more than Spock does.

He’s the one who makes the determination of how much lift they’ll have, which is what results in the grim calculation of how many bodies they can carry aboard the ship.

He’s the one who comes up with the plan to use the power from the hand phasers to kickstart the shuttle’s engines, which results in the crew being disarmed.

Throughout the whole drama, nobody says a word against Scott. But for each of the points above, they blame Spock.

There’s a really deft point being made here, incidentally or not, about how confirmation bias intersects with just regular type bias.

Spock in this episode is cold, distant, and utterly fixed on the practical solution to the immediate problem at hand. These are seen as “Vulcan things”. When he does them, he’s “Acting Vulcan” in the eyes of the humans around him.

Scotty in this episode is also cold, distant, and utterly fixed on the practical solution to the immediate problem at hand. But that’s okay! He’s human. Nobody even notices it.

This is how it goes in real life, with any group that suffers stereotypes and caricatures: people’s perceptions and memories emphasize the things that confirm their prejudices, while ignoring the same behaviors in people outside the stereotype. It’s not a conscious choice, any more than anybody from the shuttlecraft took an objective look at the situation and said, “Now, Scott and Spock are acting the same, but I’m going to give Scott a pass because he’s human and I don’t have any particular stereotype for my own kind.” But it happens.

And so even though Spock’s solution to the final problem of the episode is in fact eminently logical, it might be that he didn’t correct the impression that it was an irrational reaction that saved everyone simply because he reasoned it was better—safer—if people thought that his human side had saved the day.

The Rules of Comedy

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

There’s a debate on the internet right now that goes something like this:

“Real/good satire always punches up. Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.”

vs.

“Nothing is sacred, the only rule of comedy is to be funny.”

And let me tell you something that might shock a lot of people: I agree with the second sentiment. The thing is, though, that most of the people bandying it about are also completely in the wrong. They’re shouting something that is both true and completely irrelevant to the argument being made.

The rules of crossing a crowded subway station don’t say anything about not punching people in the face as you slide between them. I’ve never been to dental school, but I’m pretty sure there’s not a required course requiring not taking the dental tools and jamming them in patient’s ears.  And yes, there is no such thing as a rule of comedy that requires you to be a fundamentally decent human being while you’re doing it, but comedy is not special. We don’t need special rules of decency that only apply when comedy is done because the normal rules are not in abeyance.

“But comedy is about transgressing! Comedy is about pushing boundaries!”

Really? Really? You told me a minute ago that comedy is about being funny. Some of the greatest comedians in memory pushed boundaries, and yes, that’s part of how they became both great and memorable: because they managed to do something new, because they said something that someone else wouldn’t.

But they also had to be funny.

And just because someone said something no one else would and it was funny, this doesn’t make the act of saying something no one else would funny. Or to put it another way: the winner of a marathon is the first person across a particular line. This doesn’t mean you can pick any line, step across it, and declare yourself a marathon winner. It’s not the line-crossing that makes it a marathon; it’s the 26 miles and change in front of that line that makes it a marathon. No marathon, no winner.

Note that you also can’t win a marathon by following on the heels of the person who crossed the line in front of you. That race is already won.

So crossing lines isn’t in itself funny.

“There are no sacred cows” was no excuse for The Onion to “humorously” ask if Quvenzhané Wallis was “kind of a c***” when she, at the age of all of nine years old, was up for her first Oscar. It was not against the rules of comedy to talk about a child like that; it was against the rules of decency. Whether the joke was really about skewering the journalists covering the fashion/media and how we treat female celebrities and whether the joke worked better when directed at the most adorable and innocent person on the red carpet, as at least one self-described feminist claimed, doesn’t matter.

I’ll cede both those points. All they prove is that the comedians in question saw it as acceptable to use Quvenzhané’s innocence as a blunt instrument to bludgeon their chosen target, heedless of the harm done to her in the process.

Again, the problem isn’t that a rule of comedy was breached. It’s that a rule of decency—and what should be a rule of engagement for all media, satirical or otherwise—was breached. And the people who pointed out racism have a point. No, there wasn’t some white nine-year-old darling on the red carpet who was passed over so they could hit her, but still: would they have been so blasé about using a white girl in that way?

Of course, it’s not this two year old incident that prompted this post. I started with an older anecdote in order to show a pattern.

Recently, Difficult People, a show produced for Hulu by Amy Poehler, used Blue Ivy Carter (daughter of Beyoncé and Jay Z) as the prop for a punchline. I’m not going to repeat the joke. The defense of it that goes beyond “COMEDY: NO RULES, JUST RIGHT” runs that the character who makes it is supposed to be “hard to like” and the show shows people responding to it appropriately.

But none of that changes the fact that they—the real life people responsible for the show—made it.

They actually did use a real three-year-old girl for a joke about pedophilia and fetishes.

“What were they supposed to do? They needed a tasteless, awful joke.”

So? Even if your point is to show horrible people being horrible, invoking a real three-year-old person is not fictional horribleness. They could have made someone up. They could have altered the joke to be generic. If the point was just that the joke was too horrible to be defended, they could have simply not told the audience what the joke was that was so horrible. There aren’t a lot of rules for comedy, but if the point of the “joke” was actually to horrify the audience, we shouldn’t be asking about rules of comedy but rules of horror, and here’s one straight from Stephen King: no horror lurking unseen behind a door can be as horrible as what we imagine when the door is closed .

Cut away. Show people’s reactions. Let the real life audience try to imagine what could be so terrible.

The only reason to let the real-life audience hear the joke is if you want them to laugh at it, and at that point it’s no longer a “fictitious” joke but an actual joke, which you have performed for the amusement of others.

I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but if there was a way to have an impartial all-knowing entity adjudicate it without relying on people’s recollections and alibis, I’d bet $5 or $10 someone wrote the joke, thought it was hilarious/clever but impossible to use, and then looked for an excuse to put it in something anyway just to get it out there.

Because that’s the only reason to actually put an actual joke out there instead of leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination: because you want it to be heard. Some humor does have a point beyond itself, which is what the “punching up” people are talking about. But the world did not need to hear this joke as much as someone needed it to be heard.

As for the response? Well, in the show, the line in question appears as a tweet the main character makes, which sets off a social media backlash. So everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing. They wrote a joke that they knew to be the sort of thing that people have a hard time living down, and they put it out there, and now they’re having a hard time living it down.

Who’s fault is this, exactly?

The same people going around saying “There’s no rule of comedy that says they can’t.” like to tell people to “Grow up!” You know what grown-ups do? They accept the consequences of their actions. Thinking “I WAS JOKING IT WAS A JOKE LIGHTEN UP!” eliminates the action is not a mature reaction.

I’m not speaking much to the racial element of this because that’s not my wheelhouse. Other people have done that better and are continuing to do it.

But I know a thing or two about funny.

And I can tell you that no, there’s not a “rule of comedy” that says it’s wrong to tell jokes about sexual predation on real-life toddlers.

There doesn’t need to be.

It’s wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with funny.

 

 

Negative Feedback Loops

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, I’ve been pretty quiet here. And I haven’t been writing much. These two facts are related, insofar as they share a lot of the same causes, but also insofar as the two things cause each other.

This summer… this summer has been one of the worst summers of my life, in big ways and little ways that I’m not going to get into. It might have actually been helpful to have been blogging more of it along the way, but I doubt it’ll help much to go back over it. The things I did blog were my initial bout of respiratory problems back in late May/early June, and my computer dying.

I lost more than I expected when that happened. I do pretty much everything on the cloud now, or on a cloud… I have multiple clouds. The problem is that at some point before my computer gave up the ghost, a lot of my Word files got locked up in the kind of weird existential crises that seem to afflict files on Microsoft’s One Drive. Every once in a while I’d go and resolve the conflicts, but I hadn’t done that lately, and as a result I lost a lot of work on both Angels in the Meanwhile and the last part of the volume 1 MU Omnibus.

It’s… not as bad as it sounds, on a practical level. In both cases, what I lost was mainly formatting. I have the MU source material. I have the source material submitted for Angels. But it was dispiriting to lose those things, along with a number of more personal projects.

By itself, that probably wouldn’t have been a big deal. It just came at a bad time, and the hits have kept coming.

And in the midst of it, I have found myself stuck in a couple of (too familiar) negative loop. Not writing because sick/tired/stressed meant it was harder to write, meant more stress and less writing, meant harder to write. Falling behind on things made me anxious about posting about them or answering emails about them, which prevented me from having any kind of accountability on them, which made me fall farther behind. I stopped blogging or tweeting about anything personal because I didn’t want to acknowledge how deep the hole I was in felt, but that made it harder to blog about anything substantial.

Every day in August, I have woken up and said, “Today’s the day I’m going to straighten things out.” I’ve come in and sat down at my computer, and had this thought cycle that goes something like, “But I can’t post about A because I haven’t done anything on it, so I’ll start with B because I can handle A…. but if I talk about that without acknowledging A, it’s going to look so weird… I’d better move onto C. But I can’t do C, because then I’m ignoring B and A.” and just spiraling farther and farther down… and each day of very little accomplishment has just contributed to the feeling that

And as I’ve become more aware of what’s happening and looked for ways to break out of this, it’s hit me that in a lot of ways, I have made myself smaller online, how much I’ve been censoring myself. And while part of that is more personal than I want to get into, part of it has to do with how my professional outlook has changed over the years.

When I was starting out, I was no one and I knew no one. And that was terribly freeing. I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes, because I did… but boy howdy, did I feel free to make mistakes. There was no one for me to compare myself to, no one to hold up as an example to measure myself against.

And I achieved things I’d dreamed of, and things I’d never dreamed of.

And those successes brought exposure, and contacts. I went places. I met people. I went from being someone who had everything to prove but no one to actually prove it to (which was sort of the best imaginable ratio of motive force vs. obstacles) to someone who has more nebulous things to prove and a lot of people (in my mind) to prove it to. I went from feeling like I didn’t need the keys to the kingdom as long as I had a pair of boots to kicking it down to feeling like I’m organizing an anthology that has people I have no business even sitting next to, and I haven’t known what to do about it.

But the thing is, none of the people I’ve met on my journey have asked me to prove anything to them. One of those people I feel like I can’t live up to did sit next to me on panel in May, and said she was glad I was there because she learned a lot.

And I know I’ve gone through this before. And I know I’ll go through it again, both because life is a process and because depression is a cycle.

But I feel like I dealt with it better, back when I wasn’t comparing myself to others. And it’s not like I made a clear, simple decision to start doing that, so I doubt it will be as easy as deciding to stop.

But these are my resolutions for today:

  1. This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I’m going to post in it when I have something to say. If I have feelings to work through, it’ll be my emotional workbook. If I am super excited about something, I will talk about it here. If I am super critical about something, I will talk about it here. If I am super excited about something and super critical about it, I will talk about it here. If people don’t want to read it, no one’s forcing them to.
  2. I am Alexandra Erin. I made crowdfunding work for me before there were tools for it and at a time when conventional wisdom said that it couldn’t be done. I have nothing to prove to anyone, but my game isn’t over yet and I still have plenty of time to rack up a high score.
  3. I started out with the attitude that I would do exactly what I wanted, exactly the way I wanted to, and if it didn’t work out, that would be fine because it wouldn’t be worth the upheaval of committing myself to a creative career path if I wasn’t doing what I wanted. I have drifted away from this idea, despite the fact that historically I have done better in every way when I do what I please. I write more stuff, more frequently. The stuff I write resonates better with its audience. It brings in more money.
  4. Also historically, censoring myself in one area leads to everything damming up. It doesn’t matter how many separate streams I divide my consciousness into, they all come from the same source, and when I think I’m cutting off one, I’m actually lowering the pressure across the board.

So… this is my semi-demi-annual “WTF am I doing?” pep talk. Maybe I should try to do these more often so they can take more the form of an enthusiastic affirmation more than an after-the-fact castigation.

 

A weird recollection.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

It’s taken an embarrassing long time to realize that some of the earliest, most bizarre critiques I got as a writer posting things on the internet were actually guys hitting on me. It was mostly seeing this (NSFW, though it’s all text) post floating around the internet that made it snap into place for me.

The guys who started out by saying that I was a promising writer or even a good one but who then attacked everything I was doing. The ones who acted like they were doing me a favor reading and commenting on something I hadn’t solicited feedback on. The guys who felt the need to tell me how I could make my female protagonists more likable, or even what kind of writing they thought was “attractive” for a feeeemale to write.

I don’t think they were specifically negging. I think the thought process was more like, “Better let this girl know I’m interested, so I should say something nice. Oh, but I don’t want her to get too full of herself.”

I feel like if I had realized that these and all the implied and explicit mentorships I was offered were come-ons and had told the comers-on that I wasn’t actually looking for male companionship, I would have gotten replies along the lines of “What are you doing posting stories on this fiction website if you’re not looking for a date?” Those would have been leavened with a healthy dose of the the typical responses women get online for turning down unsolicited attention, which fall into three categories: “stuck-up”, “you’re ugly and no one wants you, especially me”, and “you are stuck up and ugly and no one wants you, especially me”.

When we talk about the harassment women face online, I think this is one facet that gets overlooked. Not just the hate, but the assumption that if we’re there and identifying ourselves to the world as a woman, that it means something, that we’re signaling… and that if someone responds to those signals and we aren’t grateful, we’ve sent mixed signals.

Call it the love interest angle. Every person has a story in their head that they tell about their lives. In so many of the stories that are put out in front of us as examples, if a woman appears, it does mean something. She’s the love interest. She’s there to have a connection with a male character.

The sorts of guys who scoff at any talk of systemic bias or sociological trends are going to read this and go, “That’s ridiculous. I see women everywhere I go and I don’t just assume they’re there to be my love interest.” Sure. You pass hundreds, thousands of women every day, most days, and don’t think any such thing. And so do millions of other guys in situations similar to you.

But it doesn’t have to be every guy to every woman to be a thing that happens often enough to be worth noting. If I get just five, or three, or two guys messaging me on a site thinking that because I’m there it’s suddenly OKCupid, that’s a weird thing. Even one guy would be a real weird anomaly, if it was an anomaly. If it was just that one site. If it was just me.