Today we celebrate one of history’s greatest, the largely unheralded misogynist douchebag T.M. Zink, who managed to stick it to the ladies even after he died. As Time magazine reported shortly after his death in 1930:
At Le Mars, Iowa, the probated will of T. M. Zink, deceased attorney, revealed:1) His $100,000 estate is to be placed in trust for 75 years; 2) In A. D. 2005 the accumulated principal is to be used to establish, equip and maintain a library on whose shelves will be no woman author, on whose catalogs will be no woman’s name, over whose portal will blaze: “No Women Admitted”; 3) To his daughter went $5; 4) To his widow not 1¢.
As he explained in his will:
My intense hatred of women is not of recent origin or development nor based upon any personal differences I ever had with them but is the result of my experiences with women, observations of them and study of all literatures and philosophical works.
2005 has come and gone and sadly, at least from the point of view of misogynist bibliophiles, the Zink Womanless Library was never built. As a piece in The Guardian noted, his family successfully challenged the will, I’m guessing on the grounds of Quando podeces te regi eorum fecerunt? (“When did you become king of the assholes?“)
Making sure that one’s arguments are valid is high school stuff, Ion? If so, it’s definitely a lot higher than what you’re doing.
Ok, how many names from that list are recognizable by someone who isn’t a feminist or a women’s studies graduate? Thank you for making my point.
Mary Shelly and Jane Austen are far from obscure, dude. Plus, plenty of those other female authors sold hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies.
Ion: My what now? Are we starting this highschool debate team shit again?
Sigh… It’s not “high school”, it’s Logic.
You made a blanket statement. (I wrote about it in the last comment).
You didn’t qualify it as “I find female writers to be icky”, which would be sad, if predictable.
You said, “women authors write about “x”, male author’s write about “y”.
I might even have let you get away with that (because of the weak qualifier you appended), but since it’s a common trope (and a really common justification for female authors to be passed over for honors and awards) and you led off with that.
Well, you are just going to have to deal with the actual argument you proffered being taken up, on it’s merits. You can try to make special pleadings, but they won’t fly.
Because the issue isn’t the gamelike aspects of competitive debate: with it’s rules on flow, and not dropping arguments, and not being allowed to add to core argument in rebuttal, and scores, not on the actual facts, but the ways in which theories are kept coherent; in terms of structure. Yes, that is less than practical (I mean really, Advertising for Depends won’t lead to Nuclear War, but I’ve seen it win a debate [for those who are curious, in the late ’80s-mid ’90s, every debate topic had people who would string together a case for nuclear war]).
But the rules of logic aren’t silly. When NWO says, “the law makes it a crime to be a man”, that’s an appeal to authority. When you say, “x is because of y”, then you support it with, “and so and so says so’, that too is an appeal to authority. That authority, better be authoritative.
If you want to be the authority… you’d better have credentials. Worked in a bookstore, isn’t really a god one. My family owns a bookstore. I’ve been selling books since I was thirteen. I have lots of friends (personal friends, not passing acquaintances) who are authors (mainly in SF), and editors. I’ve got a book in print (on photography).
So I might be able to hold myself up as a minor authority on writing (I’m a much better authority on interrogation; that was my profession for 16 years, and I taught it, as well as working with interrogators from other armies).
But if I were to hold forth on All Authors, Everywhere, and Everywhen… I ought to be held to a higher standard, because that’s a large claim. I’d better have more than just my say so to back it up.
Just the same way NWO needs to show me a law which says the things he says they do.
You should be flattered, we are holding the both of you to the same standard; no special treatment, no Affirmative Action letting the weaker of you have a pass.
You know, equality.
Good god, man. Is winning arguments on the internet like a full-time job for you? If someone said Batman was better than Superman would you produce a five-paragraph essay with bibliography and citations to prove him wrong? You must be a hoot at parties.
Ok, how many names from that list are recognizable by someone who isn’t a feminist or a women’s studies graduate? Thank you for making my point.
All of them. I chose women who aren’t feminist writers, nor subjects of women’s studies.
They may not be widely known, but have you heard of John Keegan? What about Alan Seeger? Perhaps John McPhee? Harold Mcgee? Stephen Jay Gould? Paul Fussell? Steven Vogel? Thomas Levenson? Martin Heidegger? Curt Smith?
Or, for fiction, Steven Brust, Tim Powers, Joseph Conrad? Patrick O’Brian, Henry Fielding?, Dean Ing? Steven Barnes? William Golding? William Goldman?
Then again, your point wasn’t, “no one reads women writers,” it was “women writers aren’t as good as men because they don’t write about, ‘universal themes’.”
On both counts, you’re wrong.
“Good god, man. Is winning arguments on the internet like a full-time job for you? If someone said Batman was better than Superman would you produce a five-paragraph essay with bibliography and citations to prove him wrong? You must be a hoot at parties.”
Hey, now, Batman IS awesome. Don’t make me pull a list of citations on you. 😀
Ion: Good god, man. Is winning arguments on the internet like a full-time job for you? If someone said Batman was better than Superman would you produce a five-paragraph essay with bibliography and citations to prove him wrong? You must be a hoot at parties.
No.
No.
Yes.
I was going to list a bunch of bestselling women writers who write about a vast array of themes from the personal to the universal. (But wait, since the personal issues affect all of us, aren’t they inherently universal?) But what’s the point?
I will note how hilarious it is for you to mention Kate Beaton and then complain that female comedians only talk about dating and periods. Kate Beaton — a female humorist if not literally a comedian — does comics about a vast array of subjects, many of which deal with important historical and literary figures (albeit often in completely surreal ways). She’s possibly the most “universal” cartoonist I’ve ever read. I’m pretty sure Scott Adams doesn’t do comics about Marcel Duchamp, Herodotus, Disraeli, Elizabeth 1, Ada Lovelace, the Bronte sisters, Chopin, etc etc etc.
http://www.harkavagrant.com/archivecat.php
Ion, we get it, we’re all just a bunch of big nerds who think too much. Thank goodness you have enough time to take out of your busy schedule of doing cool things and hanging out with cool people to come and tell us that.
While you’re at it though, maybe you could spare us another moment and explain to us why, if you Real Men™ are so superior to women and all of us guys who are their “mangina lapdogs”, why is it you’ve lost so much ground? Thanks in advance.
“Good god, man. Is winning arguments on the internet like a full-time job for you? If someone said Batman was better than Superman would you produce a five-paragraph essay with bibliography and citations to prove him wrong? You must be a hoot at parties.”
Way to dodge the argument dude. XD
That’s what gets me, MertvayaRuka: wouldn’t a truly cool person be too busy doing, you know, COOL STUFF in order to even be bothered with people who are “uncool”? Or does Ion honestly believe in those “popular but jerkass jock” sterotypes that high school movies/tv shows pump out all of the time?
I mean, has he learned nothing from Degrassi? The roles people play aren’t always so clear cut. 😉
Ion, that’s in the nature of a real explanation, for which I thank you. Still, it doesn’t account for everything. You give a pretty good description of what’s in the YA section of most bookstores, along with a nice inventory of the kind of stuff that used to be called “Romance” and now is called “Chick Lit” (what the official designation for it is in bookstores these days I don’t know). But you overlook the acres and acres and acres of books by female authors in the Fiction & Literature section, many of which subpar, no doubt, and none of which are Moby Dick, but all of which indubitably take up space—lots of space. I’d bet money that the greatest bulk (I hesitate to use this expression but do not wish to re-type) of books by female authors in any bookstore are to be found in Fiction & Literature, not in the YA section or the Romance section, if only b/c the Fiction & Literature section is usually a lot bigger than either of the other departments. And yet, you say (you who worked in a bookstore) that you noticed no books by female authors outside the YA, Romance and Fantasy departments (IOW, Twilight and Harry Potter).
“Most female authors I saw were either in the tween or romance section, SatC knockoffs and the like, and of course Twilight and Harry Potter in the fantasy section. That’s about all I saw.
Most mainstream literature written by women is probably pablum (I say this because it jibes with my impression of most mainstream literature written by men; it always remains true that 90% of everything is crap). That isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist. It does exist in the sense that it’s a real thing in the physical world, especially in the physical bookstore world. Now it isn’t as though this might not form the grounds for a whole different rant by you—a malediction against all those misconceived testosterone-starved works whose only function is to anticipate the trip to the pulp mill which is their proper due. But, for some reason, you don’t write that rant because you don’t notice the existence of those books. Why don’t you? Once again, what’s up?
It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe that the author of the James Tiptree stories is male…
POSTSCRIPT–THREE YEARS LATER
Just before Christmas, 1976, came a letter in the familiar blue-ribbon typing, hesitantly confessing that “Tiptree” is the pseudonym of Dr. Alice B. Sheldon… What I have learned is that there are some women who can write about traditionally male topics more knowledgeably than most men, and that the truly superior artist can adopt whatever tone is appropriate to the material and bring it off. And I have learned–again; as if I needed one more lesson in it–that Things Are Seldom What They Seem.
–Robert Silverberg, always a class act
That settles it. I declare this my all-Tiptree week on Manboobz. I vow to comment only in Tiptree and Tiptree-related quotes. The stars have so aligned.
redlocker, I see this kind of crap all the time from trolls, usually from the white supremacist or homophobic ones. “We’re better than you! We’re smarter! We’re stronger! And we’re going to keep telling you that until you believe it. DAMMIT START BELIEVING!”. And none of them can explain why all these inferior mongrel freaks they’re always railing about keep getting one up on them. The other dodge is that they claim they’re essential to the blogs they plauge, that if they vanished all conversation would cease. Sorry kids, “Huurrrr, derp derp wimminz iz stoopid derp durrr” is not nearly as vital to stirring discourse as you’ve led yourselves to believe. Dave lets you in here because it’s amusing to bat you and your flimsy arguments around. The moment you step over the line that’s been defined for you, you’re gone and the blog will continue to tick along quite well without you. Likely we’ll pick up some other intellectual heavyweight or five that can do the same tricks you can within a day or two, or you yourself will go through the trouble of finding a proxy so you can slink back in here without anyone realizing how much more you need us than we need you. 🙂
I for one, am not here to prove my intellectual superiority. I know what I’m good at and arguing on the internets ain’t it. I don’t have this whole “debate” thing down that well and I don’t care to (I could probably get better at it if I tried but that’s now where I choose to ficus my efforts). I’m here for the lulz plain and simple.
Well, ok, some of it is because I enjoy thinking “someone is WRONG on the internet! … oh, someone else already told them, ok, I can go to bed :)”
Though, really, that’s just another brand of lulz 🙂
I’m in it for the laughs and more importantly for the people who are reading and need to know that someone out there is on their side.
Plus I like giving douchebags a rough go of it.
Definitely in it for the lulz. As if anybody had failed to notice.
In it for the lulz and for the debates. It helps a lot with figuring out how to debate, how to make points concisely, how to find fallacies or errors in the other side… Plus if things get crazy there are always the lulz. Practicing finding good sources for your arguments is a plus as well.
I do it because 1: I’m good at it.
2: I like argument (not to be confused with fighting).
3: Someone has to do it. Elstwise the Marcs, the Ions, the NWOs, the EWMEs, the Mellers f the world will not be replied to.
How I do it, that’s a matter of style. I am not bad at it. I know what makes for good argument. I have some talent at rhetoric (if a slight tendency to digression). I’ve been engages in public debate since high school, when I was a columnnist. I I did columns in college. I did APA-hacking.
I am tolerably well read.
The amusing thing ( to me) is the amount of effort it doesn’t take. Marc and the claims of “toy guns get less punishment than real guns took longer to type than to find refutation for (one search string, “toy gun robberies” was all it took).
See, this is the problem with Ion’s comments: to quote yet another female author of some note, there’s no there there.
Ion probably just hates Kate Beaton because she stated rather than politely requested to not receive unwanted non-asexual attention. Even non-MRA guys can’t stand such “uppity” behavior from women. Makes me ashamed of my own gender, sometimes.
While it is arguable that she used a weak example to make her case, I prefer to think that the point is precisely that when a woman asks you to not speak certain things to her, it should be respected even if you think it’s not a big deal, so why aren’t they doing as she asks?
Off topic, I just thought of one of the worst double standards that many men seem to hold:
If a woman shows active interest in men, she’s a slut who just wants to ride the alpha cock carousel and get diseases, since that’s all women seem to want to them.
But if a woman is more inhibited and doesn’t want to be approached in a non-asexual manner without her express permission to do so, they say she’s a man hater and “thinks that just looking at a woman is rape.”
Old stuff I know, but I find it useful to reframe things in slightly different ways for greater understanding.
@Captain Bathrobe who originally said that? 😮 I only know the term from Bob McCown using it on Primetime Sports (he’s MY hero xD )
Whenever I say Steven Brust I still can only think of him as the Earth-3 double of Stephen Brunt (my favourite author evar xD but he writes non-fiction sports) :3
Actually, it would have been more accurate to call that a catch 22 instead of a double standard.
*whenever I see
not say xD