Another progressive blogger and I have had a few discussions about how we don’t see the word “lame” as really a big deal. However, we both concluded, it wasn’t really our fight and the stakes weren’t as high for us as they are for disabled people. So, that’s fine — we decided we were willing to believe disabled people when they said the word hurt them, and stop using it on the blog, and try to stop using it in real life.

I think I’m starting to get it now, courtesy of reading this occasionally frustrating thread at Pandagon.

The Pandagon thread is a consideration of safe space, or lack thereof, and what kinds of language are legitimately policed (everyone seems to agree there should be no pejorative use of the n-word) and what kinds of language are not legitimately policed. It was really, really starting to bug me that there (and in another location where the issue had been discussed) everyone’s go-to example for hypersensitive use of language policing was the word “lame.”

“Ugh,” said the aforementioned fellow progressive blogger to me over IM when I pointed out this dynamic. “If people are going to make an example of what’s oversensitive PC policing, maybe they should gore one of our own particularly feminist oxes, rather than picking on the language sensitivities of a related but not identical out-group?”

(Yes, I just paraphrased the fuck out of fellow progressive blogger, herein called FPB for short, which is why hir dialogue suddenly started sounding like my academic writing.)

So I started in from that point. But people’s constant defenses of I! Should! Be! Able! To! Use! The! Word! Lame! kept coming thick, fast, and with ever-more-desperate indignation.

Some of it came from people who themselves identified as “lame,” and you know, I’m not going to pick on them. If they want to change the character of disability rights activism, then that’s something they certainly have the right to do, and if the consensus ever shifts, I’ll re-evaluate.

But a lot of the arguers weren’t themselves disabled people. They just really, really, really wanted to be able to use the word lame. It’s fun, after all. And colorful. And also ACCURATE!

It’s not okay to call a coward a pussy, or a bad thing gay, they argue, because there’s nothing bad about having a vagina or being homosexual. But there IS something bad about not being mobile! In fact, it’s no fun at all, just totally miserable. All other things held equal, isn’t it better to be not-lame than lame?

(Yep, I’m basically paraphrasing someone, but because these arguments are very prevalent, I don’t think it’s fair to either quote them directly or name them. My purpose here is not to shame an individual, but to describe and argue against a common attitude, even though this individual did happen to express it at a particular time that was meaningful to me.)

And you know? I think I’ve made those arguments before, though I tend to do that kind of reasoning things out in private rather than on blogs because of my beliefs about what allies should and shouldn’t do. (I do not think it is a productive ally action to complain about tiny details that the ally has no particular investment in.) Certainly, I’ve heard these arguments. Recently, I was moderating a discussion in person, and someone made the comment that “writers shouldn’t cripple themselves by…”

I caught another audience member’s wince.

“Excuse me,” I interjected, “Can you rephrase?”

The gentleman did. Later, I caught up with him at a party, and said, “Hey, thanks for taking that in stride.”

And he started to argue with me — “Well, you know, we should be able to use that metaphor, because it’s accurate, it’s not a good thing to be crippled and–”

I interrupted, “OK, but even if that’s true, we know that it’s hurting the feelings of people who are in the community. And we don’t want to do that. Right?”

He nodded. I smiled. I moved away.

But while that was the logic I was using for a long time — that it didn’t really matter what the logic behind seeing this as an insult was, or if I disagreed with that logic, I still shouldn’t be an ass by using words that a number of disability activists have made clear are hurtful and perceived as ableist — I think I get the deeper logic now. Finally.

Let’s start with that point from earlier that it DOES suck — in this society — not to have the same freedom of movement an abled person. (Although of course, here, we’re already starting in with ableist assumptions, because a big portion of the reason it sucks is because society is set up for people with bodies we consider normal.) OK, so let’s rephrase. Having functional legs is useful. Therefore, the state of having legs which are not as functional as other legs is not as nice as the state of having normally functional legs. (Again, there’s some ableism around the concept of normal, but moving on.)

But even accepting that impairment to mobility is itself a sucky thing, MAYBE DISABLED PEOPLE DO NOT APPRECIATE BEING THE CULTURAL GO-TO FOR THINGS THAT SUCK.

And maybe — since people have been historically all-too-willing to relieve disabled people of the burden of having to live through all that suckiness — just maybe disability activists know what the fuck they’re talking about when they say that the constant condensation of visible disability with “suckiness” as a metaphorical cultural touchstone has real, concrete, and evil ramifications on the lives of people with disabilities.

Just maybe.

I think I’m starting to get it.

Hello everyone!

I believe that Tempest has posted the write-a-thon to Alas previously, as syndication from the Angry Black Woman site, but I — too — am participating in the Clarion West 2009 write-a-thon.

The Clarion West Write-a-thon is a charity thing wherein people sponsor me to do marathon writing over the course of six weeks (at twenty hours a week), and then their sponsorships go to fund future science fiction and fantasy writers attending Clarion West. You can check out my Clarion West website here: clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/Rachel…

Why fund Clarion West? Well, for people who like fiction, this is a great way to get more of it. Clarion West is a training ground that helps writers get the finer points of publishing fiction. It’s also dedicated to helping more people from groups who haven’t always had access to the free time and training that writing requires — such as people of color, women, GLBTIQQ, and so on. The write-a-thon also helps fund scholarships for writers who don’t have the means to attend on their own — which is a big deal in terms of representation — since writing has often been for the leisure class.

Clarion West has also produced a very long list in the best writers working in science fiction and fantasy over the past thirty years — including my personal favorite, Octavia Butler.

When I attended Clarion West in 2005, Octavia Butler was one of my teachers. It was amazing to be in the same room with the woman who had written all the novels I loved, and won the MacArthur Genius Grant. She died the next winter, and I am forever grateful to have had the experience of learning from her.

Another incentive: the write-a-thon is fun, and you can make me do tricks!

The primary trick I’ll do is that if you donate $25 or more to the write-a-thon in my name ($4 a week, or $25 total), I’ll send you a pair of hand-made earrings. I make darn fine earrings. I’ll even take requests about what kinds of earrings you want. The earrings may well include semi-precious stones. You can give them away as gifts, or torture your cat with them.

There are lots of other writers involved, too, so if you’d rather sponsor someone other than me, check out: clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/2009

This cartoon talks about the perils of even trying to tell stories about the work that people do, at great risk to themselves, to help women achieve reproductive justice. Via silk_noir.

**

And this one — which is much more uplifting, and which I have now watched three times — is a video of a number of GLBTQQI (and allies?) teenagers lipsynching to Lily Allen’s “Fuck You Very Much” as a response to prop h8 being upheld. I particularly enjoy the use of phallic popsicles to create imagery that can be used as a weapon against bigots. Via ktsparrow.

UPDATE: Watching this second video a fourth and fifth times, it really grinds home to me how much the people in this video are the kind of people I consider “my people.” It’s beyond me how anyone can look at such joyful profusion, so much color and joy in the way they dress and act and exist, and see something threatening or disgusting.

Yet I know they do. When I was a teenager, my presentation — though abnormal for teenagers — was never enough to unsettle adults. In fact, I probably dressed in a more adult-friendly way than most teens. Long skirts, pseudo-professional clothes, often bizarrely formal for a high school student. But my friends didn’t.

There was one girl I spent a lot of time with. A pixie-like joy of a person, Dawna, who wore her blonde hair almost totally shaved, and strung chains on her jeans. People who saw her knew there was something unusual about her. They didn’t take joy in her oddness, in her willingness to sing in the middle of the street, in her humor, in her desire to leave strange and beautiful things in public places for strangers to find and puzzle over. They shouted “dyke!” at her from car windows; they deployed store guards to follow her around; they sneered and snarled.

When I was 17 and Dawna was 15, she went out with me and started acting very strange. “Is she on meth or something?” a friend of mine asked. I said, “I’m sure she isn’t” — but I was wrong. She was on meth. She called me that night, crying. She’d been taking a lot of drugs for a long time — to try to deal with the pain of her isolation, the pain of how people pricked and pained her, and othered her, and told her she was nothing.

I told her I’d help. I arranged for her to be transferred to my high school and set her up with the teachers who’d been best for me. Nothing worked; the teachers who were more than happy to deal with my casual attitude toward authority had no tools in their kits to handle a girl who was too depressed to go to class. I’d thought they would recognize in her, as they had in me, independence and intelligence. I suppose they did. But even if they wanted to, there was nothing they could do.

I always worried Dawna would die. I thought she would overdose or commit suicide. When I read a few years ago that she was dead, and the obituary hinted at a cause of death that couldn’t be announced to potentially scandalized ears, I knew I was right.

She was twenty-two.

Dawna lived twenty-two years in the toxic hatred of our homophobic, gender policing, joy-killing world. And then it murdered her.

When people stand with bigots to say that gay marriage is an evil to society — when they agree gay people should be excluded on the basis of their sexuality — when they doubt gay people’s goodness or morality — they contribute to the deaths of people like Dawna. Yes, I do mean you, individual Alas commenter who may be a good person in other ways. You participate in a culture that kills people like my friend, and “fuck you very much” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I hope that someday people will realize what they’re doing when they vote and act hatred. In the meantime, I can only be glad that there are still colorful, inspiring, joyous, unique people in the world, and try to give those people my love and support.

My friends, I would like to take these last few moments of stubborn close-mindedness to say that it’s been an honor to dig myself into this hole with you.s

The only quibble I have is that it isn’t three minutes of incoherent shouting that drives off the reasonable. It’s years worth.

An important announcement, taken from the livejournal of my friend E. C. Myers:

28-year-old Nick Glasgow was just diagnosed with leukemia and has only weeks-to-months to live. He desperately needs a bone marrow donor but he’s a quarter-Japanese, which is a difficult racial mix for finding matching donors. I know several people with interesting mixed-Asian heritage and I hope one of us might be able to help–if not Nick then someone else. You can read about Nick’s situation and the difficulty involved with finding donors of mixed ethnicities, then if you can help I hope you will request a testing kit from the Asian American Donor Program. Kits are free for Asian-Americans and easy to use. Time is of the essence!

Reprinted with permission from Magistrate. The following is by former student of mine who is a science fiction and fantasy writer, as well as a generally awesome person.

*

On the obligation to educate the uninformed

There’s something I see a lot in discussion of race, of gender, of any sort of marginalized group, really – someone who isn’t part of that group will come up to someone who is and say “Wow, I didn’t know. Could you tell me more?” And the person they’re asking will say “No.”

And then it usually explodes.

I want to write out exactly what I see as going on in that situation, to the extent that I know it, to tell people why they’re getting that “No.” – and this is a lesson I had to learn after looking at posts by people who refused, and thinking Well, that’s unreasonable, isn’t it?, and really sitting down to try to understand why that refusal was happening. Why someone who was a victim of ignorance would refuse to educate others.

Yes, it’s counter-intuitive. But it’s not unreasonable. Here’s, to the best of my current understanding, why:

Educating others is an arduous and often thankless job, especially when you’re educating someone who may be skeptical of your point of view, especially when it’s topic which affects you deeply, personally, and emotionally. If you ask someone to put in the time and energy to educate you, whether or not (but especially if) you’ve given any indication that you might not agree with what they’re trying to explain, whether or not (but especially if) it’s a topic which is significant and personal to them they are not obligated to educate you.

On an issue like race, or sexuality, or gender, reams and reams of information have already been written. A little digging, at a decent library or on the internet, will give you a wealth of information on the topic – usually written by those who do sincerely want to educate others. By preferring not to sit down and discuss issues, people are not denying others access to that information. They’re saying that they personally can’t, won’t, or don’t want to teach it.

No, oppressed and marginalized people are not morally obligated to educate their oppressors or the mainstream. In fact, the constant need to defend oneself or one’s lifestyles is a symptom of oppression and marginalization.

I personally don’t find it offensive when people ask me to educate them. I may not always have the time, energy, or inclination to do so, and I may scoff at the notion that I am capable of speaking or qualified to speak as though I represented my entire demographic, but I generally assume (unless they indicate hostility or skepticism) that they’re asking in good faith. This doesn’t mean that I will always step up to educate them – as said before, it takes a lot of time and energy, especially emotional energy. And while I’d try to turn away people I didn’t want to educate myself kindly, hopefully with a few edifying links or directions on where to turn, were I in an emotional state, I can’t guarantee how that would come out. It might come out in a very hostile way – and if it ever does, I apologize.

The hostility. Not the refusal to educate. Because while I think that basic civility is a right of people in dialogue, having someone personally educate you is not. It is a privilege – yes, I said the P-word – and should never be demanded of anyone.

But, I hear someone say, people need to be educated, and if the marginalized and oppressed don’t do it, who will? Excellent question.

The problem here is that people think the marginalized and oppressed can be tokenized down into the particular marginalized or oppressed person they happen to be talking to. People do educate on this. People write, people manage campaigns. People take social and civic action. Yes, people both from and outside of the marginalized and oppressed groups take it upon themselves to educate others and to work for equality and justice.

This doesn’t mean that they, or other members of their community, have to work on the schedule of anyone who asks, or for anyone who asks, or because anyone asked. In the same way that you can’t just grab an unemployed person off the streets and say “You, write a letter to your congressman about the economy – well, come on, hurry up; it’s your responsibility!”, in the same way you can’t tell a victim of police brutality or even racial profiling “You, here’s a pen and paper, write a letter to the editor of the local paper because the public has to know!”, you should be aware that people have their own lives to live and their own concerns and their own apprehensions and hangups about stepping into that role and are not obligated to perform any civic duty to fulfill your sense of moral propriety.

And even asking that question reveals another one: why should it rest on the backs of the marginalized and oppressed? Pragmatically, yes, it usually does, but if you’re asking the question, that indicates that you both come from a position of privilege and recognize that there’s a problem that needs solving. Kudos to you, and that’s a genuine kudos; you’re ahead of a lot of people. The next step is to educate yourself.

You can do it. It’s not even that difficult. It’s the information age.

Educating yourself is likely to give you a much more solid grounding in the state of things, anyway, unless the person you’re talking to is heavily involved in social action or has a degree in the subject you’re asking about. People are great for personal touches and idiosyncratic experiences, but if you’re coming in as someone who knows nothing and wants to learn, you might want more than personal touches and idiosyncratic experiences anyway.

I’d like to say here that I personally don’t think there’s anything inherently offensive about asking someone else for their opinions or for the basics, so long as you respect them and their right, if they choose so, not to tell you. I have to amend a caveat, though: in saying this I am very much not interested in being used as anyone’s marginalized friend in an argument such as “oh, well, draegonhawke says se doesn’t see anything offensive about it.” Do not tokenize me. My opinions are what I think, not what every person in my situation thinks or should be expected to think. If you ask someone and they’re offended by it, apologize and don’t ask any more. If they rip you apart for asking and apologizing, maybe that’s not someone you want to talk to about this subject. It happens.

Disclosure. I am a member of marginalized groups. I’m biracial, asexual, non-cisgendered. I am also a member of privileged groups. I’m college-educated, American, able-bodied. Most people are combinations of privileged and non-privileged – this discussion, as with most discussions of privilege, applies to people acting on both sides, and should be considered in this light.

“In the boy scouts, they came first for the homosexuals,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual;
And then they came for the atheists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an atheist;
And then they came for the fat people,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a fat person;
And then… they came for me…”

If I ever have the “pleasure” of having a pro-life individual in my house for lunch who won’t stop using the word “child” to refer to fetuses, I fully plan to serve everyone else apples, and give them an apple seed, and tell them that since they can’t tell the difference, I figured they wouldn’t mind.

Grumble. Internets. Someone wrong on. And so on.

PhysioProf, guest blogging at Isis the Scientist has a post up called the Handy-Dandy Guide for D00dly Commenters which struck both me and Ampersand as being similar to his How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism: A Guide for White People (Amp notes that he would use different wording were he writing the post today).

Here’s an excerpt:

(1) If you are leaving the first comment to a post, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(2) If you are using the words “men”, “boys”, “fathers”, or “sons”, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(3) If you are using the words “should” or “useful”, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(4) If you are telling people that talking about this, that, or the other issue is fine, but also asking them what they are doing about this issue, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(5) If you are complaining that by being “mean”, people that might be allies are being turned off, you are almost certainly fucking up.

Seems worth reading through.

I Blame the Patriarchy has a discussion of the piece (with worthwhile comment thread, I thought). Twisty wrote:

While it is always hi-larious to read what expert dudely readers of heartwarming nature crap blogs have to tell their less-enlightened brethren, it’s also maddening and, if you like, ironical, since such a post can only be written from the patronizing position of male privilege. It’s a kind of double-privilege, too: “Unlike you, Grasshoppah, the feminists have accepted me, for I have been to their savage death island and live to tell the tale.”

These guys are veteran ethnographers doing a field study, warning the new grad students: “The natives have curious, unpredictable ways. Approach them with caution or they will prong you sure as shit with curare-dipped spears. Oh, and we’re meeting for beers later at Chip’s tent.”

Hardy har, because implicit in these man-to-man, how-to-walk-on-eggshells-around-a-feminist tracts is an ingrained sense of the inconsequential status of women in the feminist heartwarming nature crappism blog community. It’s comical somehow, that feminist women — women who are widely considered to be the hairy minority, the kill-joy joke-butts of the internet whose blogs are often described by dudes as “lame” or “parodies” — are so aggressively protective of their trivial little sectarian colonies on the web that men need special training and travel visas to avoid blogular deportation.

As well as other things.

Twisty, as far as I can tell, respects PhysioProf as a feminist. She’s just calling him out on this particular dynamic.

This is one of those many areas where I don’t agree with Twisty exactly, but I think she’s saying something interesting. I think that PhysioProf’s post is interesting, and has some potential to be practically useful (although I disagree with some of his points; for instance, here at Alas, a male commenter probably isn’t fucking up by commenting first on any given thread. We’re also a little bit more comfortable with personal life sharing, I think, than the blogular culture at IBTP. But nevertheless, there are a lot of good points, and I think the way PhysioProf is analyzing his own privilege could be usefully generalized to other areas — for instance, white commenters who are trying to be genuine allies to poc, or cis commenters trying to be genuine allies to trans people, etc.).

However, Twisty is correct — in order to make a post like that, written in the language of the privileged, you have to be *exercising* your privilege.

It’s a good thing for privilege to be exercised in this way, I think. Certainly, I think on the whole, Barry’s post about how not to be insane when accused of racism (a guide for white people) has on the whole been useful, and it seems to be useful to POC activists as well. I note that ABW links to it periodically when she wants white commenters to be able to go read something that they’ll understand, and stop bugging her.

I think that one of the more important things allies can do is to help express things in terms of their privilege, specifically so that they can help preserve the valuable time of people like ABW who do not need to be dealing with that 101 shit when they’ve got better things to do. Allies who are privileged can do this without committing the same emotional reserves (it hurts — in my experience — to have to defend your basic rights against privileged people, and is not so personally painful when you’re defending others), and to some extent without committing the same amount of time, because the privileged language will click with the other privileged language in a way that the privilege-poisoned party can hear and acknowledge.

But it’s still kind of icky that these things are necessary. And the use of privilege, even for good purpose, still involves othering, as Twisty points out with her savage island metaphor. Thus even though the privilege is being used to ease one problem, it adds wrinkles to another by reinforcing the voice of privilege as the voice of authority, in contrast to the othered voice of the oppressed group.

Now that I think about othering: interesting that Twisty’s metaphor for feminism as understood by the privileged dialogue was a “savage island.” Interesting that we get back to colonialism and to race. I wonder what that speaks to. (I don’t think it’s just white privilege, although that’s probably part any metaphor like this; there’s a long history of using “savage island” imagery to refer to feminist-only groups, such as amazons, and even the ways in which female only groups are described in old SF and fantasy, both female-positive and female-negative. Is it easiest for us to imagine women’s liberation in terms of geographic separation? And do we culturally have a tendency to map the ‘primitive’ nature of white women with the ‘primitive’ nature of all people of color, as Victorian scientists did, when postulating the white male brain as the only civilized one?)

[And finally, as someone else who likes to mix high-falutin' language with teh crassness, I offer this tribute to PhysioProf: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckpants.]

I’ll be there. Will you? Shall we meet up?

(ABW, we better meet up. :) Ditto you, Nojojojo, if you’re going this year.)

Ampersand and I have periodically discussed the issue of ableist language. We’d both like to do better about purging some of the words that infest our vocabulary. In particular, the word “lame” has a tendency to creep into our statements, probably because it’s part of the sort of casual geek slang we both have a tendency to use.

We’ve made a pact — my husband is in on it, too — to try to note to each other when we slip and use the word without thinking.

Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with fun replacement words, particularly because I know that then I’ll be looking forward to opportunities to replace the ableist word with something fun. Cuz I’m a word dork.

My candidates (which don’t really work) are: Xander, as in “That’s so Xander,” and “I can’t believe you would say something so Xander,” because I really dislike Xander from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Obviously, that’s too in-jokey to pass real world muster.

My other candidate comes from the nerdy front: a friend of mine was recently reading some Victorian translations of medieval texts and coming across frequent usage of the term “brast,” which means burst or shatter, often with amusing faux-archaic add-ons, such as “to-brast,” e.g. “the spear went all to-brast.” Here’s an example of the term from Spenser: “Dreadfull furies which their chains have brast.” Another similar, out-of-usage word is “frush,” and its silly add-on “to-frush.” For instance from Shakespeare, “I like thine armor well; I’ll frush it and unlock the rivets all.”

None of these are particularly good replacements, even though they amuse me. But luckily Deborah at The Hand Mirror has an admirable list:

flimsy
inadequate
insufficient
unconvincing
weak
unsatisfactory
inept
pathetic
deficient
hollow
meagre
perfunctory

So, next time you have the urge to use inept ableist language, put aside your pathetic ableism, and be deficient no more. Don’t be Xander; don’t let your vocabulary go to-brast. Find another word.

(via Shakesville)

Racist cartoonist Donna Barstow, who is here seen being responsible for racist cartooning on the subject of swine flu, has unsurprisingly dabbled in racist cartoons before.

In the following cartoon, she shows herself as unsavvy about race politics affecting African Americans as she is about race politics affecting the relationship between the United States and Mexico:

As we all know, the only real, good hair is the hair possessed by white people — smooth, silky, shiny, straight, lushly falling whitey white hair. Hair possessed by black people is funny. It’s not like hair at all. It’s like plant growth!

Of course, it’s been well-documented by many bloggers of color that the politics of hair are used to suggest that black people cannot maintain a decent or professional appearance if they wear natural hair, that their hair is something abnormal that needs fixing, and that their appearance is deviant in comparison with the white default. Black people are sometimes charged more for styling their abnormal, so-not-white hair. Kinky, nappy hair is ugly and insulting. And of course, black-looking hair is “bad hair” and white-looking hair is “good hair.”

But I’m sure the observation that our first African American president “looks like a Chia pet” is totally race-neutral, and nothing to do with making fun of him for looking so blatantly non-white, just like all those other totally non-racist visual dog whistles.

Mandolin is on board with laughing at him.

My (non-Jewish) father told me about this story over the weekend. I wasn’t surprised to see PZ critiquing it.

Here’s the argument, as quoted by PZ:

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”

The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

I had basically the same reaction to my father’s summary of the article that PZ did, though of course PZ probably said it better than I did off the cuff in the car:

My first answer would be to consider that they are a sub-group isolated by a history of bigotry from the outside, and strong cultural mores from the inside that promote inbreeding. These are variations amplified by chance and history…

Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage.

Ashkenazic Jews may simply be susceptible to many genetic diseases because those diseases didn’t sufficiently interfere with our breeding that they were erased. They don’t have to have given us a benefit. That’s not how evolution works.

My other question about the article revolves around the idea of “smarter.” There are certainly a lot of cultural ideas floating around that Ashkenazic Jews are somehow smarter than people of ethnicities — and these are old enough that when Goddard tried to push his flawed IQ tests as proof that Aryans were smarter than other peoples, he specifically mentioned what he felt were myths of Jewish intelligence.

But what is this coming from? Do we really have data to prove it? Remembering, of course, that minor fluctuations in IQ tests are easily explicable because of the ways in which upbringing informs interaction with standardized tests, I’m unwilling to take the 7 point difference they find between Ashkenazic Jews and other ethnicities too seriously. However, if — if — Ashkenazic Jews are performing meaningfully higher than average on IQ tests (in a way that suggests they actually have a higher narrow-and-problematic-thing-that-IQ-measures rather than just a better facility with standardized tests), have we ever done anything to try to confound environmental factors? Why does it have to be genetic?

When I first went to college, I attended a school with something like a 40% Jewish student body. I hadn’t been around so many Jews before. Many of my childhood friends were Jewish, and of course I’m ethnically Jewish, but I hadn’t had the experience of being in social groups that were predominantly Jewish.

I remember commenting to a friend of mine who had attended a Jewish private school in Chicago that my experience was that Jews were smarter. The Jewish friends I’d had in high school, I said, were all intelligent and academically capable. Therefore, I concluded, Jews were smarter than average.

My friend lowered a skeptical gaze at me, and said, “Believe me. Jews are just as dumb as everyone else.”

John Klima, the editor of Electric Velocipede, is having a little financial trouble.

Consequently, he’s redoubling energies toward selling some of the back issues of Electric Velocipede, as well as some of the chapbooks that he’s printed through his small press.

People who enjoy my work can find the original printing of my story “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth” (later printed at Escape Pod and in Best American Fantasy 2) in Electric Velocipede #13 for $5.

Though I haven’t read it yet, I just ordered and am looking forward to “An Alternate History of the 21st Century”, a chapbook of stories by William Shunn, whose story “Colin and Ishmael in the Dark” we featured on PodCastle this Halloween.

Other available magazines feature work by authors like Cory Doctorow, Karen Joy Fowler, Jeffrey Ford, and Hal Duncan.

Electric Velocipede has a reputation for publishing the quirkiest available in science fiction, fantasy, and other fiction of the weird. John Klima likes to publish the weird and wonderful, stuff that you won’t find anywhere else.

John Klima has a strong, unique editing voice. Check out his catalog and see if anything strikes your fancy.

So, I’m talking to Ampersand, and he says that he’s chatting on a mailing list, having a frustrating conversation about some political hot topic, and I respond,

“Bleagh. You really like debate, don’t you?”

Well, of course he does.

Me, though? I hate it. I would MUCH rather read the positions of people I disagree with, or listen to them talk without having to respond. (And then if I had to respond, do it all in one chunk, and then meander off.) The back-and-forth “No I’M right” “No I AM”… ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh.

I associate debate with power games, attempts at manipulation, and a confrontational mindset. Is this gendered? Well, maybe — I’ve noticed that 90% of the people who have attempted to wrangle me into debates and refused to let me stop talking about the subject even after I’ve expressed my clear desire to stop… are men. Often men who are around my age, who say they’re delighted to find someone articulate! political! and informed! The mere fact that I’m capable of debating means I must want to listen to their theories on Ayn Rand or… whatever. And then rebut them! Rather than ignoring the argument I’ve heard 100 times and talking about cute graphics on Animal Crossing, which isn’t any less productive, certainly, and doesn’t make my heart pound or make me think the other person is a jackass.

And especially in verbal debates, where there’s no recourse to the internet… oh, ugh. “Semi-colons are used just like colons!” says College Guy I barely know, who has asked me to proofread his essay because I’m a professional writer, and is now repaying the favor by arguing stridently against my critiques. “Um, no, semi-colons are properly used in two ways…” But College Guy Must Be Right.

But the dynamic can’t totally be gendered. Mike and I are at Thanksgiving this year, and my aunt is talking about how lazy poor people are. Mike is melting into a pile of goo, because these arguments hit home for a guy who grew up eating from the dented can store. “Please, can we change the subject?” I ask. “We’re really uncomfortable. You’re really hurting our feelings. Maybe this isn’t the best time or topic.” But no — we just don’t understand because we don’t have EXPERIENCE of the world, there is no such thing as a hard-working poor person who can’t make ends meet.

And besides, it’s not that Amp is somehow socialized to be more comfortable with debate than I am. His interest in debate, and my disinterest, cannot be explained by the differences in our sex.

There are a lot of kinds of political discussion I *am* interested in. Conversation, negotiation, mind-stretching, talking about things, and talking things out. But as soon as the confrontational comes in, the sense that it’s me AGAINST you, instead of me AND you trying to work out an idea? I’m gone. Strong disinterest.

Which is probably why I have no particular interest in chatting with people with whom I have irreconcilable views. There’s no way for me and a person who believes gay people are going to hell to work out an idea of how gay marriage should work as a cooperative exercise. We’re always going to be in opposition. How tedious. How fruitless. How obnoxious. I’d rather be talking to the radical queers who want to abolish marriage in the first place, to discuss whether there’s anything salvageable in the Western family structure (I’d probably say yes) — we disagree, but there’s a basic level of respect.

I tell Amp this, in shorthand, and he replies that in debates there’s often less politics of the interpersonal at stake than in other kinds of conversations. I can’t say I totally understand this, since my instinct is so strongly against competitive conversation, but maybe some of y’all do.

Again, I like being exposed to opposing points of view — at least within my Overton Window of acceptability — but I’d much rather be exposed in such a way that does not involve direct, personal confrontation and power games.

So, the conversation made me wonder how other people who read the blog might feel. How do you feel about debate versus collaborative argument?

I’m only opening this post to comments from people who accept the inherent dignity and worth of all people. I’m sure that the rest of y’all have interesting points on the subject, but… another time, another place. Hopefully, if I’m involved, in a collaborative way.

Via Pandagon, this link on what may be behind the Easter Sunday reveal of a corporate policy that makes absolutely no sense:

Writes tehdely:

Now, let’s just put ourselves in Amazon’s shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist. Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as “adult” content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

It’s obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as “adult” after too many people have complained about it. It’s also obvious that there aren’t too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly “objectionable” materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question.

This was more or less my question when I started reading about the phenomenon, thanks to our guest poster. Why would Amazon do something like this when it seems to make no business sense? In order to accept this is a deliberate corporate policy, we have to accept that there’s a significant portion of the Amazon audience that is offended by feminist, pro-GLBT, and survivor literature that simultaneously is not at all offended by Playboy and sex toys.

Sure, there are anti-feminists whose tastes run that way, but I strongly doubt that they constitute much of an influential audience segment. The conservative Christians who liberals might suspect of wanting to get rid of pro-LGBT material in favor of books that tackle the topic of how to prevent your kids from catching gay… really also dislike a lot of the other things that aren’t being banned.

Like the author of this LJ post, I suspect this is some sort of programming error which we’ll probably hear about from the company fairly quickly.

Tehdely goes on to suggest that there may be some kind of trolling going on, wherein people are (possibly deliberately?) creating difficulties between Amazon and its target audience, in ways that have been seen on the internets before:

Now let me backtrack for a bit, and talk about a similar event that happened to my own company, Six Apart, back in 2007, called Strikethrough. Here’s how Strikethrough worked:

• Somebody enlists Warriors for Innocence, a “To Catch a Predator”-like organization (but significantly more fundie and batshit) in the battle against “pedophile” content on LiveJournal
• Warriors for Innocence brings down holy Jihad on Six Apart, consisting not only of complaining directly to 6a, but also threatening to involve the media, as well as directly threatening companies like Google, which advertised on LiveJournal, to pull their ads, lest they be viewed as supporters of pedophilia
• Six Apart, faced with a sudden and unexpected and multipronged attack, reacts rashly, and in an unannounced and unexplained policy change bans thousands of accounts from LiveJournal for listing certain sensitive keywords in their profiles, without the chance for appeal, and hopes that WFI will leave them alone
• The ban ends up targeting mostly fiction writers, and is so sweeping that it includes communities for discussing famous works of literature, rape and incest survivor communities, and more. The collateral damage is massive
• Butthurt users rise up en masse and create a shitstorm the likes of which Six Apart hadn’t seen since the “Boob Nazi” debacle
• With its tail between its legs, Six Apart backpedals. Not too long afterward, LiveJournal is sold to SUP, who quickly roll back many of the more objectionable policy changes

That, my friends, is pure Bantown. What is Bantown? Some things Bantown is not:

• A trolling organization
• A group of people (at least since 2007)
• An IRC channel

Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations.

Tehdely also points out that “Cleverly as well, this troll was perpetrated on a weekend AND a holiday, when Amazon’s customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation.”

This is certainly an interesting theory.

I suspect we’ll hear from Amazon in the next day or two. And if we don’t, well. I’ll certainly cancel my newly acquired Prime account. But since there’s something in the equation “1) piss off a large segment of your consumer base without actually making a larger segment happy, 2)…, 3) profit” that doesn’t quite add up for me, I’m going to go ahead and operate with the benefit of the doubt for a few days.

Last night, a concerned GLBT activist wrote and asked if we would post about Amazon. I told her that if she wrote a guest post about the subject, I would be happy to post it. Here it is.

UPDATE: Thanks, LindaH!

*

Amazon.com is promoting homophobia

On April 10 Mark Probst, who writes gay fiction for young adults noticed that two newly released high profile books suddenly had no sales ranking on Amazon.com. The writers of gay fiction wondered what had happened. The next day, they discovered that hundreds of gay and lesbian books had lost their sales rankings. The authors couldn’t figure out why this had happened, so they started contacting Amazon. Amazon responded to Mr. Probst’s question saying.

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Included in this “adult material” were titles like the highly erotic Heather Has Two Mommies, and When Your Spouse Comes Out. Also excluded are classic works such as Brokeback Mountain and The Price of Salt. In addition, none of these books can be found if you search Amazon from the all departments page. You have to go to the Books search page to find them. Meta_writer is compiling a list of titles that have had their rankings removed. Interestingly, you can find some of these titles on Amazon if they happen to be part of the Kindle database. After all, Amazon wants to sell those machines!

This is not limited to Amazon in the United States. England and Germany have also had the rankings removed, although according to this post in Germany only the English versions have been purged. The titles that are written in German still remain.

There are some campaigns that have been started to protest this. Smart Bitches Trashy Books has started a Google Bomb campaign. Hilangel has a list of protest sites here and there is an online petition.

Do not think, however, that Amazon simply put in a filter incorrectly. You can still put homosexuality as a subject on the start page and pull up titles. They are edifying titles like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality; You Don’t Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is and Can Homosexuality Be Healed?

This is censorship by Amazon. I have already emailed them, Google bombed them and signed the petition. Tomorrow I intend to call Amazon to express my outrage at this policy.

This is an outrage and disgusting! The only way to fight this is to let Amazon know that we will not tolerate this. We need to fight this battle now, before Amazon decides other things are so “adult” that they have to be hidden from the public. Please help fight this now.

UPDATE 2: LindaH has received the Amazon form letter in response to her complaint. It follows:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

…as it does in this Pandagon post, I wonder whether anyone else felt like my husband and I did — that having rings was a tangible reminder of each other’s presence and love, even when we weren’t in the same place. I was living alone in Iowa when we got formally engaged (we’d been informally engaged for a long time before that), and it was nice to be able to put on my ring as a reminder of him. We got him an engagement ring, too, which I understand he wore (more often than I did) for the same reason.

I like gifts of jewelry for this reason. My best friend gave me a seahorse pendant with an aquamarine eye (my engagement ring features an aquamarine because we were not about to do diamonds, cuz no fucking way) that I wear to remind me of her. I still wear the $20 shell pendant my husband gave me when we started dating. And I make my own jewelry as memorials, for instance the blown glass pendant filled with suns and stars that I wear to commemorate the writing workshop where I decided I was going to be a professional writer.

I make jewelry for people that I hope will serve the same function. It’s really fun to sit down with a collection of stones and crystals and glass and try to figure out how to capture a friend’s tastes and personal style, as well as some of your affection for them, in an attractive, material object.

Then again, I know that other people are interacting with the cultural symbols of engagement and wedding rings differently than we did — simply from things like the scandalized and angry reactions we had when we went shopping for engagement rings and told people we weren’t going to buy diamonds. Several jewelers told us we HAD to. And then we left. It took a while before we found a small family-owned store where someone said “oh, how European!” and sat down and helped us decide on what we wanted, an aquamarine center stone with two violet sapphires around it, all of the colors supposed to wash together like the gray-blue of the sea on a cloudy day, which is both my favorite color and a very prevalent hue in the city where my husband and I met and left our hearts.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that consumer choice (I have a pink ipod instead of a green one! A relatively inexpensive aquamarine ring instead of a wow-expensive diamond!) is a true expression of individual identity… but I always figured the only reason to follow any of the wedding traditions would be if it was fun. And for me, finding relatively-inexpensive relatively-non-bloody jewelry was fun. And it gives me a tangible and shiny symbol for when I want my husband with me and he’s not there — or when he is with me, and we want to share memories and emotions or just look at pretty rocks.

A few years ago, I set out to write a poem that was cute and funny and rhyming. It doesn’t seem to have a home in the current market, so I thought I’d post it here instead.

Mother’s Remedies

by Rachel Swirsky

Kitchen bare, the children’s stomachs ached
rumbling with involuntary fast.
“Hush dears,” mother called. “No need to fret.
Elves have come to cook us a repast.

“They warbled love songs to the pantry
’til water coyly boiled hot.
Potatoes spiced and diced themselves.
Carrots swooned into the pot.

“With tears of joy, onions peeled their skins.
Thyme and basil jumped in to swim laps.
Leaves of cabbage lined up single file
and dived inside like girls in bathing caps.

“Not to be outdone a fleet of gnomes
bubbled up a brine of salt and wine,
moonlight, mumbled prayers, and tangled hair,
socks and rocks and clocks and dusty twine.

They attached a pulley to my spoon.
Ho heave ho, they yanked it to and fro.
Flash! Smash! Crash! and look, a gourmet roast
golden flesh alchemic’ly aglow.

Cupboard pixies in a baking pan
fixed a ten-tiered cherry cake so sweet
just a slice would make the meanest grump
grin and cheer and dance along the street.”

Mother beamed. “Can’t you smell it all?
Bubbling broth, fresh apples, bread and cream?
Recall the scent as you drift to sleep
and let it fill your bellies with sweet dreams.”