Not really a good photo, taken while Sydney was jumping around, but I like it for the flying hair.

As folks may recall, last year “amptoons.com,” the domain that hosts “Alas, a Blog,” was sold to someone whose business is “optimizing search” results on google. (His clients are mostly porn sites. Details about the sale are here.)

The sale required “Alas” to remain on the “amptoons” server for at least a year. Although that initial year has passed, I’ve decided to keep “Alas” where it is. Staying on “amptoons” means the owner of “amptoons” will pay me $500 every three months. These payments will be donated to charity. (I’ve exchanged emails with my co-bloggers about this plan, and we’ve all agreed to it.)

I know it’ll disappoint some folks that we’re not leaving the amptoons.com domain. I’m not looking to rehash those arguments. I am posting about this decision publicly because I think the worse mistake I made, when I sold “amptoons,” was initially keeping the sale a secret.

I have recently received the first two payments in a $1000 lump (the next payment is due in March). The $1000 has been donated as follows: $333.33 each to Women For Women International, the American Domestic Violence Crisis Line, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Women for Women currently is advertising a matching gift program, so the $333 donated translates to $666 for them, in theory. They seem to do a lot of good work empowering women at a grassroots level, including (to relate it to current news) victims of rape in the Congo.

The American Domestic Violence Crisis Line is a non-profit that former “Alas” poster “Bean” works for; they aid American women living abroad who are victims of abuse. Many worthy organizations help victims of domestic violence, but ADVCL is especially appropriate because of Bean’s history with “Alas.”

And I assume that the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the leading anti-racist organizations in the US, is familiar to most “Alas” readers.

All of these organizations do crucial work, and I hope “Alas” readers who can afford it will consider donating to them as well.

(Update, April 27 2008: The next $1000 payment got to me late. It will be donated to charity in May or June, after I’ve had time to figure out which charities to donate to.)

Editor’s Note: I’m absolutely not going to let this thread turn into a discussion of how whites really aren’t racist, and people of color are really the problem. So if you want to leave a whiny comment about Al Sharpton or illegal immigrants or any other distraction, I’ll delete it.

I want to pull several seemingly unrelated posts together to make a point about contemporary racism. Yesterday, I read this post over at Racialicious. Carmen closes the post with the following sentences about Don Imus and Michael Richards:

The Richards incident started with the racist ravings of a white man, complete with references to lynching, but ended up as a public discussion of why black people keep using the n-word towards each other. The Imus incident started with the racist and misogynist remarks of a white man, but ended up as a public referendum on misogyny in hip hop.

It’s fascinating to me that all roads seem to lead back to discussions of how black people are supposedly oppressing themselves.

I am struck by how common this phenomenon is. The basic pattern that these discussion follow is:

1. White person makes incredibly racist statements.
2. Some people express outrage over those statements; others seek to downplay the statements.
3. Those who want to downplay the statements are able to win the “hearts and minds” of the vast majority of whites, who want operate by the anything but racism philosophy.
4. The conversation the turns to how it really isn’t racist or wasn’t intention of the person. Since this allows people to think it is not that person’s fault, they then proceed to the last step.
5. Blaming the real victims of racism.

This leads to sentiments like notion Don Imus called women nappy headed hos because of Hip Hop. Once we reach the 5th step the conversation is almost beyond repair. Whites are reframed as victims people of color (in particular blacks) are framed as the real source of the problem, and then the debate has totally shifted.

Professor Black Woman’s post here gives several examples of this phenomenon. In particular, she focuses on how Tucker Carlson discussed the Jena 6 case by discussing Carlson’s reframing:

In the “new” face of racism, two things have to happen: 1. acknowledge that the certain aspects of any racist incident are extreme (not unfair, extreme) or that the black community is acceptable to you & 2. then posit a racist overlaying narrative that essential reframes the discussion around the unfair and extreme behavior perceived to be experienced by white people.

After reading those Carmen’s and Professor Black Woman’s posts, I was reminded of the discussion we had here and at Alas about the Don Imus controversy. I put up very few posts about the Don Imus case, but the discussion generated in those posts two posts reveals how these contemporary racist tactics work.

Let me start by going through the discussion on Rachel’s Tavern. At Rachel’s Tavern, most of the people who commented on the Imus post are black, not everybody (but most). Dcase (who I really like; I promise) was the first person to bring Hip Hop into the discussion, which lead to a focus on Blacks not Imus. He said,

Moreover, there is some hypocrisy inherent here in that many of those who are up in arms about Imus referring to them as such but use such language everyday in their own speech and bob their heads to it from their music. This especially true among blacks: the hateful stuff that they commonly direct to each other is often worse than anything a racist could think up.

This statement unleashed criticism from most of the subsequent posters, many of whom pointed out the logical flaw that it is unfair to assume that the people who were upset were necessarily the same people who condone the use of sexist and racist language in Hip Hop. (It’s worth reading the whole thread.) I think Gandolf Mantooth’s post summarized it well:

I don’t understand the “so what blacks do it, too” defense. So, Dcase, if Imus had used the N-word on air, would you still have the same opinion? Moreover, I don’t think that if say, Chris Rock (since he seems to be one of the whipping boys of the moment) had called the Rutgers team the same thing on some chat show that there would not have been similar outrage. Perhaps some non-African Americans might have sat on the sidelines and watched, however there would have been a problem, and for him, it would have started at home.

What is even MORE baffling is how many people are trying to pull rap music into the discussion (not only coming from the White right, but from Black talk radio). It seems that lately, any time a White guy mouths of we gotta talk about hip hop.

What’s interesting to me about this is the underlying tone about how we approach women athletes in the public sphere

I replied:

Which is one reason why many reasonable and non-sexist black men don’t say that bullshit. These stupid pundits think Too Short and Two Live Crew represent that typical black men.

Yeah, we always have to bring up hip hop and ignorant black people as an excuse for whites’ racism.

Angry Independent joined in the Hip Hop criticism later in the discussion by asking me:

Surely you aren’t trying to make excuses for the Rap Community?

Why shouldn’t they be held to the same standard for doing far more damage than Don Imus on a daily basis?

This caravan of criticism & accountability shouldn’t stop with Don Imus… We should drive this thing all the way to the doorstep of Hip Hop, urban radio, the record executives, the rappers, BET, and all the rest.

To which I responded:

No I’m not excusing it, but I do think it is not relevant to Imus. Just because some sexist black men degrade black women by calling them hos doesn’t mean it’s Ok for white men to do it.
This is the classic condemn the condemners strategy. It’s like the guy caught on tape committing a crime, and the first thing he says is “Other people stold too.” But you’re the one on tape, you’re the one everybody caught. You’re the one on trial.

Sexist hip hop artists and sexist black men can get their trial on another day, but it is not relevant now.

Then Angry Independent said:

Whoa!!!
I think you might have misunderstood me. I am completely against what Imus did… just to make that clear. And I AM NOT saying that Imus should be allowed to get away with it because rappers do it.
I am basically saying almost the opposite…. I am saying that ALL should be condemned…and that the African American community has to look within at this same kind of behavior, which (in the Black Community) is far more damaging. Yet, I don’t see Sharpton and Jesse & others working as vigorously or with the same determination to organize boycotts, or to get people fired at these radio stations, record companies, at rap concerts, against BET, etc.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree on the issue of rap not being relevent to the Imus situation. IT IS VERY relevent. The two cannot and must not be separated. One has facilitated the other. One has desensitized the society to such a degree that someone like Imus thought that this would be O.k. or that it would blow over.

The two issues are inseparable.

Then I responded:

I don’t think you are saying this personally, but I think the outcome of always bringing up sexist comments from black men or attacking the character of blacks who note these racist comment allows white racists to feel better.

On the issue of blaming hip hop…..I feel sexism and the “whore” image of black women existed way before hip hop. Sexist rappers may have helped it along, and they should be held accountable, but they didn’t create the problem anymore than preachers, politicans, and other sexist men.

Do you think Imus was out listening to hip hop, and it influenced him? I don’t think so. White men have stereotyped black women as “hos” going back a long way…back to slavery. They used this as a justification for rape and exploitation. This started way before hip hop.

Now for the record, I do think Hip Hop deserves criticism, and I do think both Angry Independent and dcase mean well. I’ve read enough comments of theirs to know that, but the reason others folks and I were so frustrated at that line of reasoning is that it is used by many in politics, mass media, and academia to avoid discussing white racism. I agree that there is a time and a place for Black Americans, like dcase, Angry Independent or any of the other folks participating in that thread, to talk about Blacks who degrade other Blacks, but that discussion needs to happen not because a white guy like Imus degrades Blacks.

The thread at Alas was even worse. Since there is no way I can actually recreate the 216 comments, I’ll just summarize what happened. When one commenter focused only on the sexist aspect of the comments, I reminded her that “It also matters that the women were black.” To which Brandon Berg responded,

It’s not at all clear that it does, given that he then went on to say, “the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute,” and they’re black, too (as far as I can tell—the video clip isn’t very clear). His choice of whom to insult and whom to compliment was based on his perception of their attractiveness, not their race.

I responded to Brandon, by saying it was obvious that he would not have called a white woman nappy headed. I also noted that references Black women as “hos” were much more common than references to white women as hos, to which Brandon responded:

He called them hoes because they had tattoos. The perception of an association between tattoos and promiscuity and/or general trashiness is not something that’s limited to black women. For example, lower-back tattoos on white women are called “tramp stamps.” It wouldn’t strike me at all as unusual if a man were to call a group of white women with visible tattoos “hoes.”

I’m not sure what you mean about Google. “White hoes” gets slightly more googits than “black hoes,” and likewise “hos”. Are you talking about quantity or quality?

The only other time I’ve ever heard the phrase “nappy-head” was back in high school, when a Mexican boy called a Mexican girl with straight hair a nappy-head. I realize that one meaning of nappy is the texture of a black person’s hair, but it also means icky or unappealing, and is used as a generic insult. You can argue that the second meaning has racist origins in that it was derived from the first, but words tend to get divorced from their origins, and people use them without understanding where they came from.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that it wasn’t a bad thing to say. I’m just saying that I’m not sure race factored into it much if at all. Racism is one of the few things that’s more or less universally regarded as unacceptable in American culture, so as a rule non-nuts don’t say things which are clearly racist. Which is why most of the examples of racist comments that you post are ambiguous.

For the record, Brandon never met a case of racism that he actually thought was racism. This was part of an on-going tit-for-tat between he and I, in which I would put up a post about an event or practice that I felt was racist, and he would come in an say it wasn’t racism.

On the upside, there were several people challenging Brandon, but as the thread went along racism apologists started to outnumber (or it was at least equal) the people saying Imus’s comment was not racist. Then at some point the discussion ended up moving away from the original content, and the racism apologists helped move us to a discussion of what is racist and who is racist. They wanted to define racism so narrowly that almost nothing is defined as racist. Robert made this claim:

Saying so-and-so is a racist, in my view, is saying that they’re of a piece with the night riders who terrorized blacks, raping and killing to buttress an awful system of oppression and outright tyranny. That’s one hell of a serious charge to lay on somebody, so I’m reluctant to do it unless the evidence is unequivocal. Racism is evil, and racists are evil. I hate to put someone in the “evil” category if I don’t have to.

To which I responded (you can click on this link for the full comment):

To Robert and everyone else,
The problem here is the very simplistic thinking. White racism runs the gamit from very virulent violence that can result in bodily injury to more subtle things like not feeling comfortable in a room where there are people of color or not listening when people of color give their points of view.

When we reserve the term racism for only the most violent acts, we ignore the cumulative affects of those more subtle forms of racism, which add up over time.

(To Robert) Take your early reaction to Angel H. She was clearly ticked off, and even though I don’t agree with her in theory, she was trying very hard to be heard. She was saying as a black woman I find this offensive, and then what happened? Rather than making any attempt to confirm her feelings or acknowledge why she was hurt and frustrated, you came in with your theory. In doing so, you dismissed her frustration, your dismissed her view, you dismissed her anger, and you dismissed her as a black woman. Because you were so fixated on being right and creating a good theory, but you did really seem to connect with her everyday experience. (I saw the same thing with pheeno on a thread about a month ago.)…..

But letting go of racism and privilege is so very hard for most white people. So rather than being able to serious engage Angel and acknowledge her feelings we have to go back to our precious worldviews. We just can’t let the focus be on the black women who were insulted by such language. No instead we have to insult black male leaders and go over what we think are their shortcomings, talk about really nice white guys, who help kids with cancer. Then we start to talk about the great freedom of speech principle, and on and on and on……Ok, white folks and men. It’s not all about us and our views all the time. Just take a minute to put yourself in someone elses shoes.

What was also disturbing about that thread was that all of the black women, especially Angel H. and Ann, were dismissed or ignored as if their perspectives weren’t important, which was incredibly insulting since the racist and sexist comments by Imus were directly at Black women.

That Alas thread was one of the most exasperating and annoying exercises in contemporary racist rhetoric I have ever seen. A few posters wanted to talk about Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (because every time white guys screw up we have to talk about both of them); another one wanted claim that there are basic genetic differences between whites and blacks; Michael wanted to talk about how black women are doing great because Oprah Winfrey is doing well, and an idiot called GET OVER IT admonished those of us complaining about Imus’s comments to:

FIND SOMETHING BETTER TO WORRY ABOUT. ALMOST ALL OF YOU COMPLAINERS OUT THERE ARE GUILTY OF DOING THE SAME THING ONE TIME OR ANOTHER. IF THIS WAS EDDIE MURPHY OR SOME OTHER BLACK PERSON THAT SAID THIS, NO ONE WOULD HAVE EVEN SAID ANYTHING.

It got so bad that Ampersand, banned 5 different people from posting on the thread, and we had a really long discussion both on and off the site about how we were going to change the comment policy.

Here’s what frustrates me: we need to talk about white people’s role in racism. We need to have a discussion about white racism that is not derailed. After all, Whites hold the vast majority of power in the US (and in the global political and economic institutions), and we have the most influence over racism. We need to stop pretending that Hip Hop, or Black criminals, or anyone who acknowledges racism is the problem. The analogy I have used for the past 10-15 years is the analogy of alcoholism. One of the basic tenets Alcoholics Anonymous is that a person has to acknowledge his or her alcoholism before he or she can get better. Well the same is true for white racism. No matter what people of color are doing. We whites don’t need to make an excuse, saying when Black people do better then we will stop being racist. First, it unfair to make glaring generalizations about how bad black people are based on the behavior of a select few blacks, and second, we don’t have to wait for every black person (Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, too) to be perfect before we stop being racist. If we want to stop racism, we have to acknowledge that the problem is ours. We need to have a conversation about ourselves where racism is at the forefront. We need to stop the distraction tactics, stop the victim mentality, stop the whining, and focus on what we can do better.

This pattern of behavior needs to stop. Just like alcoholism, white racism doesn’t need enablers, and it doesn’t need excuses. For racism to stop we need whites to acknowledge the problem and then to start working on it.

I first read “Amnesty” last week. It was the last new piece of Octavia Butler’s that I will ever read. I think I was unconsciously saving it as a kind of treat. I’ve been reading her novels since I was six or seven, and her short stories since I first got my hands on her short story collection.

This story was published in SciFiction after the edition I own of her short story collection was printed. I’d put it on the syllabus for the class I’m teaching because, this year, I’ve decided to teach only fiction that’s available online. I had previously read the other story of Octavia’s which is online, and it’s all right, but I wanted something that would hit the gut. I’d heard descriptions of “Amnesty” and knew it would fit the bill, which it does.

Octavia was probably the world’s first professional, black female science fiction writer. She wrote about race and biology. Many of her stories seem to ask whether human beings are redeemable. A common theme that appeared in her writing was the way that the bigotry and violence in human nature skew all our loving relationships, so the great loves in her stories tend to be things that seem off-kilter — for instance, in her story “Bloodchild,” the two lovers are a scorpion-like alien and the enslaved human child whom the alien has chosen as ahost for her eggs. Octavia wanted to write about a loving male pregnancy, she wrote, adding that the story was supposed to be about love and not slavery. For many in her audience, it’s the latter that comes through, which demonstrates the ways in which love and slavery distort each other.

Octavia Butler’s humans often find redemption only after being destroyed. Yet the agents of that destruction (often external and biological: aliens, alien viruses, alien alterations to human physiology) are never simple; they are not pure, but nor are they villainous. Sometimes they are morally ambiguous, and sometimes they’re amorally mindless. Usually, the worst evil comes from inside humanity. Here’s an excerpt,

Noah shook her head. “The only difference between the way they treated me and the way the aliens treated me during the early years of my captivity was that the so-called human beings knew when they were hurting me. They questioned me day and night, threatened me, drugged me, all in an effort to get me to give them information I didn’t have. They’d keep me awake for days on end, keep me awake until I couldn’t think, couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. They couldn’t get at the aliens, but they had me. When they weren’t questioning me, they kept me locked up, alone, isolated from everyone but them.”

…”It mattered more than I know how to tell you that this time my tormentors were my own people. They were human. They spoke my language. They knew all that I knew about pain and humiliation and fear and despair. They knew what they were doing to me, and yet it never occurred to them not to do it.”

I found the story moving — and of course, I am deeply saddened by the fact that I’ll never again have a chance to read a new stoiry that evolved from Octavia’s singular, amazing view of the world. If you can still read this story for the first time, I envy you. Read here.

The BBC reports new discoveries in the field of animal research:

The study found African elephants reacted with fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by men of the Maasai tribe.

Maasai men are known to demonstrate their virility by spearing elephants… The elephants also responded aggressively to red clothing, which is characteristic of traditional Maasai dress.

However, the elephants showed much milder reaction to clothing previously worn by the Kamba people, agriculturalists who pose little threat.

The psychologists said they had expected to find elephants might be able to distinguish among different human groups according to the level of risk they posed.

They said: “We were not disappointed. In fact, we think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorise a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues.”

It’s interesting that the article is focusing on the Massai as hunters, as Westerners have long held up the Massai as the quintessential “noble savage.” I don’t think the article or the study are playing into that, but it catches my eye to see them being used in the role of “fearsome hunter.”

Another thing I found striking: the elephants will run from any red clothing, but they’ll run farther and faster from red clothing that also carries the odor of Massai men than they will from red clothing that has been worn by members of another African group.

How do the elephants get this knowledge? Is it all experiential, or do they pass it down as they do knowledge about things like where mineral deposits that they need to acquire vitamins are?

And I had no idea that different ethnic groups had detectably different smells. Diet, I assume? And other lifestyle factors. I didn’t realize the divides in lifestyle were still large enough to produce that effect, although it makes sense, particularly in the context of something like one group’s continued tradition of hunting elephants.

Today, I’m going to post a trifecta of neat stuff in three short entries, staggered through the afternoon and evening.

The first thing is an entry about sex & sex work in science fiction, which is smart and interesting, but which is totally eclipsed by the cleverness of this quote/proposal. Thene writes on Aaru Tuesday,

I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.

Hear, hear.

*

But it would be unfair not to give you a taste of the smart, interesting entry, too. Thene’s entry looks at sex & sex work in science fiction and fantasy. “There’s a lot of supposedly ’speculative’ fictions where it’s still 1958,” she says.

Summarizing one story that poses an SFnal frontier, she writes, “It’s 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers’ prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There’s also, of course, this narrative about how ‘vices’ of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness.”

She quotes the story to illustrate her point:

There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets. [...] There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell sex or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos… [emphasis hers]

And her smart analysis: “Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you’re appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You’re using the gender-neutral word ‘worker’ to mean ‘man who pays for sex’? You’re drawing lines between ‘untamed’ rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) ‘corrupt’ those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?”

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Ide Cyan at Whileaway)

* * *

UPDATE: Check out this “Shortpacked” cartoon, which Myca pointed out in comments.

I’m too tired now to remember who sent me the link to this Reality Machine cartoon, so apologies for the lack of credit, because this cartoon totally rocks.

Well, this is interesting. (Hat tip Lawrence Schimel)

On October 20, J. K. Rowling read from book 7 at Carnegie Hall in New York.

After reading briefly from the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love”.

“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. “Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said of Dumbledore’s feelings, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down”.

Three basic reactions:

1) Huh.

2) That fairly cool.

3) Well, damn it, why the hell couldn’t you have told us that during the series?

Recently, there was a kerfuffle (has anything other than blog wars ever popularized that term?) on the popular blog of military science fiction writer John Scalzi. Scalzi, responding to discussions of how and when race is deployed in science fiction, revealed how he wrestles with the issue.

My way of dealing with spec fic’s racial lopsidedness (on the writing side, at least) is somewhat passive-aggressive: I avoid making any sort of overt racial identifiers at all with my characters unless it’s required by the plot, which for my books it generally isn’t. This is not the same as actively specifying minority characters in my books, which is a point no doubt many will be happy to make, and they’re right. But it’s not excluding them, either, which is not trivial.

Scalzi went on to indicate that he had imagined a main character in one of his series to be non-white, although he had never left any racial markers on the page.

This is the moment when I say “I heart Scalzi” before launching into intense criticism. Kameron Hurley of Brutal Women summed it up well:

As a writer, you may write colorblind. You may pull out all the color and race and cultural tags for every single one of your characters, and thereby prove that they could be of any race!

Sure. Let’s go with that. Nobody in your book has a skin color, or any sort of physical description at all.

You really believe your reader’s not givng your characters a physical description? You think that one of the first markers they make, after size and gender, won’t be color? Pigment?
…

The problem with writing in “race-neutral” (what is that? Gray? Beige?) terms is you get the same problem you run into when you write in gender-neutral terms. As people raised in a racist, sexist, society, we’re going to norm a lot of stories, a lot of people, as white males. There are certainly ways you can code this differently, and every reader brings their own unique set of indicators to the reading experience, but I think the vast majority of people are going to sit down and code your world in whitewash unless they get some indication that it’s otherwise or they bring something non-majority to the table.

We have a default setting we’ve been programmed with, and it’s the default setting we’ve been pumped full of since birth: stories about bands of white brothers, fathers and sons, heroic male conquerors, Columbus, rich white presidents, men of Science, great white male writers; the men who run the world are white. The important people are white. We’re reading about important people, right? Unless we’re reading some kind of hippie women’s story set in some jungle where people don’t speak plain English.

As Kameron Hurley acknowledges, Scalzi has provided himself a little bit of an out here: he works in a far-future world which may no longer share our politics of race. (But really, do they have nothing to replace it? Nothing?)

Scalzi himself argues that he’s not writing colorblind (because he knows what colors his characters are), but that readers are reading colorblind. He goes on to say that this doesn’t of necessity reinforce a white default. As a first step, he says that while he envisions characters is novels as being “people like me,” whiteness is not part of that profile. Honestly, I have a big problem accepting that — but, let’s accept it anyway. Scalzi’s politically aware and not, IMO, given to lying to trump himself up. Perhaps, through deliberation or coincidence (I trend toward postulating the former, even if not on a conscious level), Scalzi has trained himself not to view race as a default.

The mistake he makes is in assuming that it’s responsible for writers to assume that readers will be able, or willing, to do this. Scalzi:

Now, you may ask why I didn’t just note all this [stuff about race] in the book; the answer is because I didn’t want to, because it never came up as part of the story, and because I’d rather have people imagine Harry Creek to be who they were comfortable with him being. If they see him as white, that’s their karma, although I will say I’m sorry that their default is white.

Kate Nepveu, who also wrote a separate post on the subject, responds in comments:

This entry is built around a big misunderstanding, to wit:

“The people like me” != “the cultural default.”

The default in our culture is whiteness — and, to get back to Rowling, heterosexuality. When sexuality and race are not mentioned, most authors mean to indicate whiteness and heterosexuality. Scalzi is not subverting this paradigm by refusing to mention race; he only plays into it. The world in which he’s writing has certain politics, which certainly he needs to write to, but in other ways he acknowledges that he’s working for his audience. As an author who belongs to the joking group the “New Comprehensible,” Scalzi puts an emphasis on writing fiction that is accessible to the mass of our population. Our population has certain tools for analyzing texts. These include a white default as much as they include certain assumptions about nanotechnology — the latter of which Scalzi overtly navigates. When he introduces the basic rules of his world in the first chapter of his novel, he exposits them. He exposits them because readers need to know. Why does he assume we don’t need to know about race?

Perhaps because he says that readers should already know enough to know to vary their default. But then again, maybe they “should” know stuff about physics which he has to explain. We don’t. He’s stuck with the reading population he’s got, and we don’t live in a futuristic utopia.

Niall Harrison said something I thought was smart on the topic of writing about marginalized or non-default characters:

If “straight white male” is the default, then anything else indicates that a choice has been made — or at least, it implies that a more conscious choice has been made than the one made by Stanley’s author. Even if the motive behind that choice is, perfectly validly, “why not?”, the choice is there.

And when it’s not textually present — that choice is, in a real way, not there.

This scenario is even clearer with Rowling, who does not have a utopic science fictional world to pose as a hypothetical. It’s neat that Rowling has a homosexual character, but could we have seen this in your series, please? Could we have seen Dumbledore with a real, living lover? Or, failing that — if he spent his life pining — why couldn’t we have learned about that? We got to learn about the long flaming heterosexual torches, including much more twee whining about Snape and Lily than I was interested in.

Yes, I know Rowling has to deal with the reality of her audience, just as I said Scalzi does. And of course, writing for children means accepting certain boundaries. I can understand that she didn’t want to ask for more textual trouble from Christian conservatives than she’s already got. As the interview relates: “Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.”

Of course, that leads me to say: they hate you anyway. So, why pander to them?

Most texts only appear as themselves. Books are a finished form. We, as writers, are often told we have to send them into the world without our excuses, without our explanations. When we go to workshops where other people critique our manuscripts, writers are entreated to stay silent. Because our justifications don’t matter — the text becomes what the reader makes of it, a combination of their experiences and the tools you give them.

Neither Rowling nor Scalzi gave their readers the tools that they needed in order to pry this information from the text. It’s an afterthought, left to discussion by only the most devoted fans, only the people who happen to read the blog. Why should it have to be the non-white characters and the homosexual characters whose marginal lives are illuminated not even in the marginalia of the text, but in the essays and justifications afterward? Once again, they get the short shrift.

For Rowling, there’s one redemptive silver lining: the fact that her books have, outside her hands, a vital textual life of their own. As the article reports her saying, “Oh, my God,” Rowling concluded with a laugh, “the fan fiction.”

–

UPDATE: Several people of my acquaintance have mentioned that their central annoyance with Rowling’s reveal is not that she didn’t mention the gay character’s identity in the series, but that she is playing off of an old and poisonous stereotype that gay people are doomed to heartbreak.

This seems, to me, to be a valid concern. However, in the context of the novels, it seems to me like Rowling is often eager to split up romantic and family relationships. I guess I’d read Dumbledore/lost-love as parallel to Snape/rejection. That doesn’t excuse the stereotype, though, since there are no positive examples of gay romance in the novels.

Still, my primary concern is erasure. From Kat Allen’s blog, I learn another thing Rowling’s said: “Rowling remarked that if she had known that (applause) would be the response, she would’ve revealed her thoughts on Dumbledore earlier.”

That kind of gives me the shivers. Gay people are only worth writing about if the reaction is applause.

From Mind Hacks:

As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the ‘fuck test’.

Simply insert the word ‘fucking’ into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the ‘fucking’ is the stressed syllable.

For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I’ve found so far.

Via Kate Harding, whose post I first saw on Shakesville, but who also discusses this on her individual blog, Shapely Prose.

I read about this a couple days ago, but I found it so gut-wrenchingly horrifying that it’s taken me a few days to be able to think about it without feeling that place of pain in my mind that I have to slide away from, in order to protect myself.

*

In Gloucester, England, a man called the paramedics when his two hundred and forty-five pound wife began having trouble breathing. When the paramedics showed up, instead of moving her, they began making jokes about her weight.

“They [joked about] getting her out through the window, which I thought was rather disgusting,” the woman’s husband is reported as saying.

According to the BBC, the woman “had had a history of illness, including asthma and diabetes, and the steroid drugs she needed had caused her weight to balloon” to what we Americans would call two hundred and forty-five pounds. The paramedics spent two hours debating how to move her. From the BBC article:

They had tried putting her on an air mattress, but she had slipped off.

“If they’d picked her up, put her in a wheelchair, got her into an ambulance and got her to hospital, they might have stood a good chance of saving her. As it is, she passed away in the dining room.”

In her post, Kate Harding wonders “How does it take two hours to figure out how to move 245 lbs.? I guess it’s tough to stay on task when you’re busy telling knee-slappers about the fat chick. The dying fat chick.”

She concludes, “I don’t even know what to say.”

*

This incident reminds me of two things:

1) How fortunate I am to have been, despite my weight, insulated from the worst things people will do to others because they’re fat.

2) How much more it hurts to read about oppression when it is something that could directly affect your life, especially this kind of random, vicious action on the part of those who are supposed to help you. It’s so hard — for me, at least — to even think about the things that can’t be predicted or acted against, when there is no shield of anger on behalf of someone else. I am made more vulnerable by my own shame. My colonized mind whispers: perhaps you would deserve it.

*

I am locking comments to feminists, but what I really want to do is be locking comments to people who can respond to this post without trying to excuse the paramedics or blame the woman for her own death. I don’t want to hear justifications or diet advice or fat-shaming or “but you see, what really happened must have been…” conjecture.

So Ted Rall, who I quite like (he included me in an anthology he edits, and when I met him at Stumptown I thought he was smart and funny), drew a cartoon I really didn’t like (scroll down to the cartoon for September 27). The theme of the cartoon is, “why are people marching to support the Jena Six, when there are so many much more worthy victims of racism to march for?”

If you agree with Ted’s cartoon, let me recommend as a rebuttal this excellent post by Elle PhD:

Do you ever wonder why sit-in participants had to be so well-dressed, so calm, so “respectable?”

Well, of course you know. The people who would be the face of the Civil Rights Movement had to be virtually blameless. They couldn’t give white bigots fodder to dismiss them or the movement. They had to tread a line between being the human face of the movement while upholding super-human reputations and faithfully remaining non-violent.

It was a lot to expect, this demand for perfection, this unspoken implication that African Americans had to be more than human, had to prove themselves worthy of fair treatment, of justice. [...]

For people who didn’t know much about the Jena Six, suddenly you were awfully concerned about offenses for which Mychal Bell had been convicted.

And you focused on the MAJOR point of “was the slogan really effective/correct/what I would’ve chosen?” [...]

We’re still going to see and fight the injustice in the treatment of this child:

Whether you think he’s a hero or worthy of the effort or not.

And for the other five of our children that you’ve thrown under the bus–you know, the ones you’ve convicted even though at least two of them say they did not participate in the fight? The ones who you just know are guilty and that’s the other reason you “can’t get behind this?”

We’re going to press for justice for them, too. They deserve it. They are worth it.

There’s lots more, so please click through and read the whole thing.

And then go read “We Protest” at Afro-Netizen:

We protest because the boys of Jena 6 and their families need to know they are not alone.

We protest because the Jena travesty is not about a nooses that were hung on a now-felled tree, but the noose of injustice that remains around the neck of Black America.

We protest because few people know “state-sponsored terrorism” like Blackfolk.

We protest because Jena is not a rural Southern town, it is a state of mind — not from the 1950s, but of the here and now in every American town, suburb and city from South to North and sea to shining sea.

That’s just a teaser; the whole thing is worth reading.

In light of the articles passing ’round about a school that’s giving contraception to twelve-year-olds (for instance and this post and this comment thread), I have to confess that I’m really surprised at the level of vehemence in the liberal blogosphere against twelve-year-olds having sex with other twelve-year-olds.

I don’t necessarily object to individual parents being worried about their individual children. They understand the context of their own individual child’s situation. What I object to are remarks indicating that, without context, it is universally true and observable that any twelve-year-old child is too young to be enjoying his or her sex organs with another twelve-year-old, and which ground the argument in that supposedly objective truth.

Personally, I didn’t fuck until I was legal, but let me be the first to confess that there was some prudery in that. It’s not like I wasn’t having orgasms; I was just having them in private. At the same age as I was when my fingers and I were having an exclusive relationship, my fiance started trading oral. He licked his first pussy in his early teens, but saved the PIV until he was twenty. Is he less implicated in the prevalent tut-tutting because he restricted his activities to tongue and hands, or is he to be condemned for the bad decision of starting to cuddle up with his best friend’s slightly older sister?

At twelve, I wasn’t dating. I resented the slow encroachment of sexuality on my sheltered little life. I have a memory of viewing girls who wore make-up as traitors. Heck, even when I was sixteen — at which point I had started dating — I carried a strong prudish streak like a chip on my shoulder. My twenty-seven year old brother brought home a woman his own age who he hadn’t been dating very long, and they slept together in his bedroom. A few weeks later on a shopping trip, I observed to my mother, “I don’t disapprove of premarital sex, but I think people should know each other longer before they do it.”

She gave me a pitying look and said, “When I was a bit older than you, I used to think sex was a natural out-growth of conversation…”

Back to junior high: my parents would rent R movies, often videos that I myself had picked out because I thought the plot summaries looked interesting. We’d settle down to watch them together. My parents would get interested, and I’d get annoyed. I wasn’t disturbed by the sexual content. I was fucking bored out of my skull watching Jennifer Aniston and male lead trade innuendos, and so after half an hour of mind-numbing tedium, I’d go into my room and read a book.

Sexually, I grew up slowly and out of step with my peers. When I was twelve, I clearly wasn’t ready for sex. So I didn’t do it. All the birth control opportunities in the world could never have changed my mind. As a matter of fact, I had as much opportunity as I needed: I’d been told that when I wanted to become sexually active, I was to inform the parents and be given birth control. My reaction to this was along the lines of, “Ugh, no thanks, I don’t plan to have sex in high school.”

Which was a resolution I kept to. It wasn’t until I got to college and decided I was done being self-righteously virginal that I started fucking.

I was chaste and judgmental, but certainly not morally superior to my happily-sucking and -fingering fiance. We grew up differently. Neither of us made bad decisions. We made the right decisions for ourselves. He was ready for phsyical intimacy with another person his own age, and I wasn’t.

Not every child has the benefit of making the right decision for himself or herself. As people have pointed out on these threads, the likelihood of young girls having their first sexual experiences after being coerced into sex by older men gets higher the younger thant the girls are. This is a tragedy. Other children make errors about what they want. Maybe they think they’re ready for sex when they aren’t and they end up doing something they regret. Some children undoubtedly pressure and exploit other children, and this is also a really big problem that stems from our culture’s fucked-uppedness about consent. But it’s exploitation or making the wrong decision that’s the problem. Clinging to virginity, or slipping early into sexual exploration, are not themselves the indicators of either a good or bad decision.

Two enthusiastic twelve year olds pressing together their sticky bits? Let me sum up the depths of my not caring. Help them be safe and let them make each other happy, and then do what I did when my parents were watching an R-rated movie: go read a book.

Huzzah for my hometown! Portland, Oregon, wooooooo!

So a man was videotaping the police searching his next-door-neighbors property.

Without warning, cops charged at Waterhouse, ordered him to put down the camera, and then shot him with a beanbag gun and a Taser as he was video recording them. As a result, the officers issued criminal citations against Waterhouse, although he was acquitted of all charges.

One of the cops justified the attack in a report by writing “He had refused to drop the camera which could be used as a weapon.”

Waterhouse is suing for $30,000. I’m sure that me and other Portlanders can feel that paying off citizens who are attacked by cops for pretending this isn’t a fascist country is a very good use of our tax dollars.

For approximately a jillion weeks now, I’ve been working on a post about why I believe BDSM can be (and is for me) feminist. For some reason, work has been slow on it . . . I’ve got so many ideas, and I’m having trouble reconciling them and laying them out in a coherent form.

Bleh.

Anyhow, one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is the origin and nature of BDSM desire, spurred in part by a number of really excellent posts over at the Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces blog.

Of course, I’m interested in where my desires come from . . . and I want to understand BDSM desire more completely, but the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s sort of irrelevant. We get turned on by what we get turned on by, and whatever the reasons are, I don’t think that we’re necessarily able to change it.

Does that mean that we shouldn’t examine our desires? No, not at all, but . . . well . . . well, let’s just say that Trinity puts it far, far better (and snarkier!) than I ever could:

WHAT CAUSES VANILLA?

How long have you been vanilla?

Are you sure that you’re not simply too nervous to submit or dominate because past traumas make you too nervous to relate to others on a truly intimate level?

Have you ever really examined your vanilla desires?

The vast majority of sexuality depicted in the media is vanilla. Are you sure your desires now don’t stem from not seeing alternate models much in the media?

How can you experience true intimacy with someone if you’re afraid to share erotic pain with them? Aren’t you missing something?

It’s really a shame that our screwed up vanilla-normative society ruined you like that.

Oh, I’m not telling you what to DO. I’d never do that. But it’s such a shame that you HAVE to.

Oh, I’ve been involved in some vanilla things myself, but I’m better than the rest because I realize that when the SMers say we should question, they’re right! I try not to get too involved.

I’m not trying to diss those who want to create egalitarian relationships for themselves, but it’s so played out and socially normative. I’m going to go create my own communities wherein we strive to create truly hierarchical relationships. It really saddens me to see people stuck invested in the same old eroticization of sameness.

When people tell me that I’m just saying all of this because my own proclivities are sadomasochistic it makes me so SAD. Don’t they see that this is BIGGER THAN THE PERSONAL?

Even I have vanilla fantasies now and then. It’s impossible not to in a society like this one. I’m not the enemy!

;)

This is the point.

I don’t mind examining the dynamic behind polyamory or BDSM or whatever, but when it’s asked from the outside, and when the subtext is, “oh, you poor dear, have you tried to figure out how you got broken?”

Well, then . . . screw you. I’m not broken. How about you open up your life to public critique, hmm?

This is a bit awkward for me, but people have responded so positively to the “My Daughter’s Vagina” series–which I will get back to as soon as my work schedule permits–that I hope what I want to ask will not seem unjustifiably self-serving.  I have a book of poems out called The Silence Of Men. (The link will take you to the publications page on my web site, from which you can click to read the Foreword to the book by Yusef Komunyakaa and some sample poems.) The poems in the book take on questions of gender, sexuality, sex and masculinity–or at least I think they do–similar to the ones raised in “My Daughter’s Vagina.” In response to this, Elizabeth Wood, the woman who blogs at Sex In The Public Square and who founded the community web site by the same name has offered to feature a review of The Silence Of Men on the Sex In The Public Square web site. It needs to be, however, a review that explicitly takes on the gender and sexuality aspects of the poems, and since those are issues central to this blog, I thought I would put out a call here to see if anyone might be interested in writing this review. I am not looking for a puff-piece about how wonderful the book is; Alas seems to me a place where there might be a reviewer who would be sympathetic to the questions, etc. that I am dealing with, while also giving the book a rigorous and critical read. If anyone is interested, please go to the contact page on my web site and fill out the form so I can send you a copy of the book. (I don’t mind sending out one or two review copies, but please understand that I can’t afford send more than that. The copies come from me, not the publisher.) By way of introducing the book, and perhaps whetting some appetites, I’d like to share with you the title poem. If you’d like to buy the book, it is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other online bookselling sites, though–if you can afford the extra couple of bucks it’ll cost to pay full price for the book ($16), I would urge you to buy it from the distributor, UPNE, which not only helps promote small, university and other independent presses, but also helps my publisher, CavanKerry Press, a small, New Jersey-based press that is working very hard to publish really beautifully produced and important books of poetry. Anyway, here’s the title poem:

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apartment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writing. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phallus begins to waltz to music
I cannot hear, its scrotum a skirt;
its testicles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this disfigured
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflating
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of shallow blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

Well, that’ll teach me to dash off my angry thoughts at 7am after pulling an all-nighter.

Because everything I said about some of the Pharyngula commenter’s obsession with using evolutionary psychology to prop up their own faltering egos and desperate need to be viewed as intelligent — Chris Clarke has said better, funnier, and pithier.

This just breaking from Creek Running North: Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says

The particularly brilliant beginning to the post:

Special to Creek Running North: Biologists have long assumed that evolutionary psychology, a controversial branch of psychology that ascribes many common social behaviors to genetics, is a muddled blend of half-understood evolutionary biology, selective data mining and resentment of women’s changing roles in society.

A new study, published in today’s issue of the German publication Unwirklichen Genetikjournal, does not challenge that assessment. But it does suggest that some men may be genetically predisposed to believe in evolutionary psychology, a finding that may well suggest future methods of treatment of the psychological malady.

Believers in evolutionary psychology maintain that feminism sets itself in opposition to millions of years of anthropoid evolution, and is thus futile and inhumane to men. Allegations made by believers include references to putative differences in math skills between men and women, a supposedly irresistible but entirely non-visually stimulated female attraction toward powerful and/or arrogant males, and the existence of a genetically preordained male right to multiple female sexual partners.

Many such men hold to these beliefs despite an absolute lack of supporting scientific evidence, says Dr. Ulrike Mann-Esser, chair of the sexual anthropology department at Universität Ulm and the study’s lead researcher. “But we had no way to determine why this was so until last year’s discovery of the locus taedius.”

I’d excerpt more, but the whole thing is too damn correct and funny to pull pieces out of.* While it’s written to mock evolutionary psychology’s claims about sex and gender, it pretty much demolishes all the ridiculous “White dudes is the smarterest and most civilizedest!” claims at the same time.

So go read over there. He even has witty illustrations, which proves that he carries the Superior Blogging Gene.

—

*As we all know, quoting funny, pithy blog articles in full is a sure way to make people stomp around whining about all that unfair, extra publicity.

–

UPDATE: While I bow to Chris Clarke for being more cogent than I am on this issue, I do have to point out just one last ludicrous comment from a new Pharyngula thread about Watson’s remarks. Writes a commenter called Christian Burnham: “It seems that [another commenter] is now suggesting a genetic basis for the apparent variation in IQ between different groups. That may make him/her completely wrong- but it still doesn’t make him/her a racist.”

Here we have yet another perfect example of how people squirm to make sure that even the most blatant, obvious racism is denied the label. For me, reading that thread, it also becomes an example of how [many of] the mostly white, mostly men are inured to anything except the abstract ramifications of what they’re saying. [Some c]ommenters [admonish] those who endorse the ev-psych viewpoint to [substantiate their viewpoints with evidence, not because they're making ridiculous statements, but] due to the controversial nature of the topic, while decrying anyone who reacts [to the black people are just dumb meme] with anger. The[se commenters] seem to have no real [understanding] that the asshats [who they suggest should not be lashed at angrily] are talking about real, flesh and blood people, and that what they’re saying has stakes. After all, it [probably] doesn’t have stakes — except po[tentially] beneficial ones — for them.

A gay white male friend of mine — Perverse Adult of Ejaculations of a Perverse Adult, the sexiest blog since blogs came to blogtown — wants to get a t-shirt that would reflect the way his feminism is inspired and influenced by black feminists.

We’ve agreed “This is what a black feminist looks like” would not be the right thing.

He poses “This is what a multiracial feminist looks like.”

I pose “This is what a third wave feminist looks like.”

Neither feels right.

Maybe something like “White boys also want to smash / your patriarchal white supremacy?”

No, no, he says. It’d have to be a bigger mouthful: “White boys also want to smash / your patriarchal white supremacist capitalist imperialist heteronormativity.”

Okay, so maybe, “This is what a feminist looks like / Inspired by Cathy Cohen, Angela Davis, and Patricia Hill-Collins.”

Or maybe something else.

We agree that “This is what a femimist who has spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to reconcile Black feminist theory and the better parts of White male Queer Theory looks like” is way too much text.

What do you think my friend should put on his t-shirt?

From Melissa at Shakesville:

So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.

The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

Words fail me, but the title of Skemono’s post — “Prostitutes aren’t people, after all” — seems to sum it up. But it’s worth mentioning that after being let go by the judge, this man raped another woman (also a prostitute, raped in the same manner) four days later.

But later today I’m still going to try to write a letter: Mike in the comments at Feministe posted a link to the Complaint form for the Pennsylvania Jucidial Conduct Board.

Or you can contact Judge Deni’s office directly (curtsy to Rotten Word).

Echidne writes:

The case also makes me wonder what all the sins are that we collectively assign prostitutes. There is an assumption that prostitutes have somehow consented to be abused and perhaps even murdered and that therefore the society is not responsible for awarding them the same protection other citizens deserve.

See also posts at Group News Blog, Reclusive Leftist, Lawyers Guns and Money, Young Philly Politics, Quizlaw, Anonymous Law Student, Angry Grrl, and Vomit Comet.