It’s like this…
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character – because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned – and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character – Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him – this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo – enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.
No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.
Tell us again why equality in spec fic doesn’t matter. We dare you.
I’m crying tears of rage and joy. THIS.
This shouldn’t be to say that there isn’t a place for speculative fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale in which women are still unequal. Speculative fiction can be about showing us a better world, or it can make a point about the problems in our own world by amplifying them, drawing them out to their logical or perhaps most extreme conclusion. Sometimes it can do both, as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The problem is speculative fiction that simply assumes that women will always be unequal and does not regard this as a part of present life that should be changed.
I’m getting a bit annoyed by the attitude I’ve been seeing on the Tumblr Left that all speculative fiction should be utopian and if it’s not it’s regressive. This seems to be related to the attitude that there is little difference and/or that audiences cannot tell the difference between depicting something and endorsing it – an attitude that reaches its nadir of absurdity in the position of the anti-shipping and anti-kink mobs.
the thing is, spec fiction the way i understand it is ALWAYS about the present times, about the society the writer is living in, how it shapes their notions of normal, out of the ordinary, what utopian is, the priorities of the times. They reflect the world, either in a nightmarish or dream way. There are many things the author won’t even be aware he’s putting in. It’s the same shit about “there’s got to be rape and violence against women and no POC bc historical accuracy” shit we get in your garden variety GoT wannabe or videogame or whatever. it’s all about the assumptions of those times, either broadcast into the future, or projected into the past.
the problem OP pointed out is that as a woman you do not exist in those classic books of science fiction that made your dad and brother. Your interests and priorities never appear there. Your struggle to engage.
weeeell that happens to me with many books and films, but it’s also true that you CAN find yourself and see yourself in the struggles and needs of any gender, race, species, whatever, when it’s well done. it’s all about empathy. Provided the subject YOU know about and feel, such as, being a woman in the world, being a POC, are indeed represented in that world in a way that alienates you.
In short: in an Asimov story, for example, i can be absorbed and love any story so long as it doesn’t feature any women or address gender issues. Because I AM going to feel alienated, and there goes my chance at escapism.
I love Lord of The Rings, but man I struggle with Arwen, and I roll my eyes at the appearance of most female characters. I prefer to move on to when there isn’t any. Am I making sense? I totally understand that dissonance OP is talking about.
Equality and inequality both have a place in sci fi, utopian and dystopian can both make strong, insightful, brave, thought-provoking points about the world we live in. And anti-Tumblr and neo-puritan Tumblr and all that side of Tumblr, immature black and white and with a LOT of work ahead of them before reaching “we can now talk in equal terms” stage are not worth the time and i wouldn’t waste a minute of my day on the day’s bullshit. They just don’t know how fiction works. When they finally understand that, we can talk. In the meantime *shoo, adults speaking here*
Yeah, thanks, I got the point of OP’s post. I was making a further point about how “include the POV of people other than straight white men” has a tendency to slide into “don’t let anything bad happen ever to people who aren’t straight white men” around here. And yeah, I also get that that’s a response to a pattern of excessive sexualized violence against women, killing off token POC characters, and the “bury your gays” rule, but there can be legitimate reasons for showing violence against such characters even in speculative fiction. I don’t even object to fantasy worlds based on historical Europe, because often that’s what the author knows, and they’re playing a “what if” sort of game. They should certainly do better about portraying the racial landscape (the racial dynamics in GOT/ASOIAF make me a bit queasy), but just read Voltaire’s Candide and you’ll probably be convinced that there really was that much sexual violence in war-torn Renaissance Europe. Hell, take a look at any war-torn region around the modern world. Not all speculative fiction has to portray a world in which human beings are morally better than they in fact are.
I recently read a massive fantasy series by Robin Hobb (a woman) which depicted a world whose various societies gave varying levels of power to women, but it still ranged between full equality and women-as-chattel patriarchy. The closest it got to a matriarchal society was one in which women were landholders and men were wandering raiders, and inheritance and clan membership were matrilineal; but even that was based on historically attested systems (because there are perfectly practical reasons for matrilineal inheritance…). Yes, there was sexual violence perpetrated by men against both women and boys; there was xenophobic violence of various kinds. It was more socially imaginative than Tolkien or GRRM, but there were still people being horrible to each other in the ways that people have always been horrible, including in gendered ways. It wasn’t exactly dystopian, but it wasn’t utopian either. The author absolutely regarded women as full people, but not everyone in the fictional universe regarded them that way; and I was fine with that, because that does reflect experiences we still have.
(And don’t give me that “i wouldn’t waste a minute of my day on the day’s bullshit,” because you definitely do spend time arguing against the neo-Puritans.)
Loki is the Philosopher King 