So our old friend Vox Day – the proudly bigoted science fiction/fantasy writer and self-professed expert on all things “Alpha” – is in the news again. This time, it’s not for declaring most date rape imaginary or writing a racist diatribe against a fellow author. Nope! It’s because another of his literary efforts, a novelette entitled Opera Vita Aeterna, just got nominated for a Hugo award.
In other news, apparently it’s not that hard to get nominated for a Hugo if you have a coterie of hard-core fans who are perhaps still pissed that you got kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and you suggest on your blog beforehand that it would be cool if they voted to nominate you.
Anyway, there’s already plenty of discussion of the news amongst the science-fiction set, most of them understandably displeased that a racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole got a nomination. Here’s a bit more about the racist attack on black fantasy writer NK Jemisin (and misuse of the SFWA Twitter account) that got him tossed from the organization. If you’ve never seen what he wrote about Jemisin, I’ll just quote some of the more memorable passages again here, because, wow. I’ve bolded the best — that is, worst — bits:
It is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not… The laws [Stand Your Ground Laws] are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.
If sales of his novels ever dry up, Vox could definitely get a job as a speechwriter for the KKK.
On Bibliodaze, Ceilidhann is blunt:
There’s only one way to deal with people like Day, who see themselves as above basic human decency, and that is to cut them out of the community like a tumour. Shun them, ignore them, no-platform the hell out of them. Our conventions, our fanzines, our anthologies, our community is not open to people whose racist arguments could have come straight from the mouths of slave-owners.
John Scalzi takes a more conciliatory stance, writing that
the Hugo rules don’t say that a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit can’t be nominated for a Hugo — nor should they, because in that particular category at least, it’s about the work, not the person.
But he also goes on to note (hint hint, nudge nudge) that the ballot for the actual award includes a “No Award” option in each category, and that if enough people choose it,
it is possible to rank a nominated work below “No Award” if, after reading the work in question and giving it fair and serious consideration, you decide that it doesn’t deserve to be on the ballot and, say, that its presence on the ballot is basically a stunt by a bunch of nominators who were more interested in trolling the awards than anything else. Just a thing for you to keep in mind when voting time rolls around.
GeekFeminism makes the same observation, going on to note that in 1987, “No Award came in ahead of L. Ron Hubbard’s Black Genesis.”
If anyone is still trying to make up their mind about Mr. Day/Beale, here are some quotes from him taken from my previous posts about him here. I’ve bolded some of the most, er, contrarian bits. Click the titles for my original posts, which provide more context and links to the posts in which he said these things.
Women working is worse than rape:
The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so. The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse. Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized. Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable. History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted. Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.
[I]n light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.
Acid attacks on women may be worth it if they discourage female independence:
[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability.
We should emulate Iran by throwing women out of much of higher education:
[T]he Iranian action [restricting many fields of education to men only] presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.
For the rest of my posts on Vox Day — including the one in which he explains that his orc and troll fighting game won’t have any women in it, because that wouldn’t be historically accurate — see here.
EDIT: Added links to first paragraph, reworked third paragraph and added links, removed a link that was problematic.
I spent most of last year blasting through everything Le Guin has ever written, and I’m so glad I did. Aside from being an absolutely brilliant writer, her work is concrete proof that it is perfectly possible to write successful, award-winning, groundbreaking SF&F starring and featuring women, people of colour and queer folk without “compromising” the work for the sake of “political correctness”. Or, you know, whatever it is that indignant nerd bros complain about when someone suggest that maybe all character ever don’t have to be white and male.
Le Guin was vocal about the fact that she was deliberately steering away from the shockingly white palette of fantasy protagonists in the Earthsea cycle, and yet somehow that *gasp* conscious acknowledgement of diversity did not stop it from becoming a classic of the genre.
I admit, I don’t think about Vox Day every day, but when I am reminded of Mr. Beale and the viewpoints that he has owned, I am disgusted all over again.
In some ways, I’m glad that I forget about him between times, because I have better things to spend my mental energy on than the rantings of some Internet hater.
Preemptive brain bleach!
http://youtu.be/jf6uLMXbEn4
Actually, he was referring to the Neanderthal genes. Here’s his incoherent response: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/15/im-a-professional-biologist/
Does Vox Day think he is Magneto or something?
Actually, it seems it’s not even his fans who brigaded the vote, but rather that another author (of Baen-type mil-fic, which can have it’s moments, but tends to aggrandising violence because… well because it’s cool, and ‘The Right Sort” do all the killing and moral ambiguity is minimal) put up a list of, “sad puppies” who “deserved” to be nominated.
Of his list seven made the ballot; including one who had no qualifying works (and who made a great statement about not wanting the nomination).
So Teddy Beale can’t even seem to claim he’s really popular because he has a core of devoted fans willing to spend money to vote for him; he’s piggybacking someone else’s fame, again.
More likely, it was a copy of Mein Kampf that he swallowed. Teddy Boy’s “Christian Libertarian” views are straight-up cribbed from you-know-who.
(Honestly, how do these repugnant freaks manage to reproduce? Can there seriously be women who don’t run shrieking away when they see them coming? And if there are, what the hell is the matter with them?)
Oh wow, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree this time, did it?
It doesn’t help that these are the guys who created WorldCon and the Hugos. Much ink has been spilled about WorldCon’s declining participation rate and it’s anybody’s guess whether the perception of the Old Guard dudes as racist, sexist and also shitty writers is a cause or a result of younger fans’ disinterest in the old-school con scene.
Also Kristen Cashore, who wrote the fabulous Graceling and its two sequel/companion novels. And Malinda Lo, best known for her lesbian retelling of Cinderella (Ash). And Libba Bray, who alternates between funny (Beauty Queens is both humorous and explicitly feminist, although I liked Going Bovine better) and dark (A Great and Terrible Beauty, The Diviners), and includes buttloads of characters who aren’t white/hetero/abled.
Sadly, it didn’t stop them from whitewashing the movie adaptation, either 🙁
@ Bina
“Can there seriously be women who don’t run shrieking away when they see them coming?”
Yes, there seriously are such women (obviously, given that some of these men manage to reproduce). The Christian manosphere, for example, is full of women whose misogyny is on par with that of MRA / PUA / their ilk. And they proudly present themselves as dutiful wives or wives-to-be.
“And if there are, what the hell is the matter with them?”
Self-loathing and desperation? Just one guess.
Vox self-identifies as evangelical Christian; his father is Southern Baptist who was deeply involved in those religious circles. It is most likely his wife, Teddy’s (poor) mother, was one of those self-loathing devout evangelical women who have been indoctrinated into biblically-based misogyny from birth.
P.S. I take my misguided sympathy for Teddy’s “(poor)” mother back.
If she is one of those evangelical women — and chances are she is; she would not be married to his father otherwise — she too is responsible for creating this monster.
V’s views on women are very much in line with those espoused by evangelical women themselves, and they include beliefs that women should not be allowed to vote (seriously) and that their education beyond elementary basics is a waste of time and resources (because women’s emancipation leads to destruction of family and is in violation of the God-ordained patriarchal order).
It is a fair assumption that this rotten apple did not fall far from its diseased tree.
I’m really uncomfortable with blaming women – especially individual women – for a given man’t misogyny. Do you think the children of feminist parents are magically free from misogyny? Do you really think a woman who’s been so brainwashed by patriarchal ideas that she genuinely believes in her own inferiority is to blame for not liberating herself and her child(ren)? That just doesn’t sit right with me.
Many folks in sci-fi have commented on the bleak irony of leftists in the community successfully lobbying to kick Jonathan Ross off Hugo hosting duties (which I personally felt was ridiculous*), only to wind up with Vox Day on the nomination ballot. Talk about the devil you know.
Le Guin has had all kinds of trouble over the years with illustrations and adaptations flat-out ignoring her descriptions of the characters. Google paperback covers for the Earthsea books, keeping in mind that every character except one group of bad guys is dark-skinned, and notice how many covers feature Caucasians. Editions of The Left Hand of Darkness, which emphatically has no “white” characters (it’s about an ambassador from an interstellar culture visiting an isolated planet, and the fact that he’s tall and very dark-skinned while the locals look roughly Inuit or Mongolian is one of the cultural differences they deal with), deal with it by just not showing any characters on the cover.
*From what I can tell, the anti-Ross thing was also spurred by the belief by some fans that he was some kind of cool kid who would make fun of science fiction and nerds (like that would be a bad thing). Which is even more ridiculous. I’ve seen Ross present at the Eisner Awards, and he’s always respectful and is clearly a big fan himself.
Shaenon:
I was researching for a blog post that talks about Le Guin recently and noticed this very trend! Not only the covers, but the conversations around those covers… eeeesh. So many people being like “Well, I always pictured Ged as white when I read the books so HAARRRRRUMPH!!!” as if that settles the matter. Or they’ll bang on about how race doesn’t matter because it’s fantasy and it’s ridiculous to bring real world race relations to bear on fantasy worlds. These are of course the same people who will have a conniption if you suggest that Gandalf could be played by a black man.
I think it says so much about how white-centric the genre is. When readers encounter a character of colour with numerous explicit descriptions indicating that their skin colour is red or brown or black or yellow but definitely not white, they literally just tune it out and replace him with a white guy. And are often genuinely surprised when someone points out that the text very specifically precludes the possibility of him being white.
Emily, I am not blaming an individual woman — V’s mother — for his misogyny; I am pointing out, however, that it is very likely she contributed to his peculiar psychological development. It was unavoidable.
There is much to be said about the brainwashing evangelical women endure in their formative years and beyond, and, as a recovering deeply religious person myself, I am sympathetic to that process and its effect on those who are subjected to it.
But reading evangelical blogs written by women, as well as evangelical women’s comments on Christian manospheric blogs, I’ve come to realize how eagerly these women, brainwashed as they may be, support the misogyny that permeates religious fundamentalism. When I read seemingly intelligent and mature American women — mothers, no less — rant about the urgent need to take away women’s right to vote, or asserting, proudly, that women are at their core amoral beings lacking agency, I, as a mother of grown children myself, will hold them responsible for their views and their effect on others around them, particularly their children.
Yes, I realize how brainwashing works; but there comes a time when an adult human person is held responsible for their beliefs and actions that result from them.
On the topic of 2014 Hugo nominees that weren’t written by assholes, I just started reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, and it seems excellent so far.
The narrator is from a society that doesn’t consider gender an important distinguishing trait, so in the text she refers to everyone using feminine pronouns. When she speaks to people who do use a gendered language, she has difficulty finding the correct forms of address because the physical traits that we use to differentiate genders aren’t obvious to her.
I haven’t read far enough to find out if this stuff is just for flavour or if it’ll get addressed in more depth later on, but either way the book is definitely following the feminist science fiction tradition of future societies that don’t use our traditional notions of gender. If it wins the award (and it seems very popular, so I’d say it has a solid chance), it’d be the perfect “fuck you” to Vox and friends.
That goes double for a skidmark like VD, so maybe stop blaming his mommy?
Personally, I was thinking more along the lines of pollutants in the air, water and food supply than brainwashing. But yeah, there’s that too.
Those sequels are named Fire and Bitterblue, just in case anyone is interested. They’re quite good. I liked them! Much applause.
I will also add a recommendation for Kate Griffin’s Midnight Mayor series ( Madness of Angels, The Midnight Mayor, The Neon Court, The Minority Council, Stray Souls, The Glass God ) which I found quite enjoyable and will finish up actually writing a blog post about any one of these days. Everything from fairies to tax systems to beer bottles.
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie, is lovely and has some neat… stuff with pronouns, I guess is possibly the easiest way to put it.
And Tamora Pierce is good, as mentioned. The Lioness Quartet is lovely.
THere’s another book series that I am reminded of that that I believe was written by Trudi Canavan which I remember as being all right called the Black Magician series (and having a nice little side of decently written interactions between people). But I’m not entirely sure that was it?
Oh, and I recall enjoying the Imager’s Portfolio by L.E. Modesitt – but Wiki tells me has written a lot, and that is the only thing from him I have ever been able to find in my corner of the world. And I guess I enjoyed it mostly because a fantasy protagonist literally taking time out of his schedule to go have dinner with his parents and just…. talk about their family stuff was so mind-blowingly different compared to everything else I was reading at the time. OKay, so there were people who conjured up everything by drawing or dreaming it and bullets and revolutions and fires and murder and conspiracies and towers toppling and steampunk-ish-ish battleships and economy and democracy and republics and so on and so forth, but at some point the main character sat down and had dinner. WIth his family. Of which both the mother and the father were perfectly well alive. And they just… talked for a bit.
It was fucking amazing, that was.
vs
… I think Robert Phillips expressed that a little better than I could.
Given that it appears that none of us have any idea who Vox Day’s mother even is or was, I for one am not comfortable speculating that Vox Day’s horribleness is the least bit her fault. We know literally zilch about her. She might not have even been alive to raise him.
I have a post up about the Hugos, and what people can/should do about it.
About the Hugos
“That goes double for a skidmark like VD, so maybe stop blaming his mommy?”
Of course. Evangelical misogyny affects everyone steeped in it. If we assert that fundamentalist women are not responsible for their misogynist views because of brainwashing, we could as easily make the same assertion with respect to VD, who too is a product of this environment.
My general point is that we should not do that — i.e., that adult individuals, including evangelical women, are ultimately responsible for their beliefs and actions. And it is not a stretch to acknowledge that those beliefs and actions affect others around them.
But bottom line is that, as grumpy reminds, we/I don’t know who VD’s mum was and what she did, so yes, it is all speculation.
How is this protozoic scum still breathing? HOW?
Guys, girls, others, otters, cats in suits, ferrets guffawing or not, With as much respect as possible: chill the fuck out.
Vox Day is horrible – yes.
His writing is turgid and bad – yes
His proclamations are hilariously odd and wildly ashistorical and just straight up terrible, but
He does not deserve death by axysphiation nor accidental blame heaped at the feet of her mother.
Please; Can we not pretend that
“it is a fair assumption that this rotten apple did not fall far from its diseased tree”
and
“Emily, I am not blaming an individual woman — V’s mother — for his misogyny; I am pointing out, however, that it is very likely she contributed to his peculiar psychological development. It was unavoidable.”
somehow means
“My general point is that we should not do that — i.e., that adult individuals, including evangelical women, are ultimately responsible for their beliefs and actions. And it is not a stretch to acknowledge that those beliefs and actions affect others around them.”?
It is just speculation. How he keeps breathing is probably by the same process as how every other human does it.
I’d prefer if we didn’t go there.
If Vox Day’s mother shows up somewhere and says or does something bigoted, then yes, we can absolutely hold her to that.
Until that time, let’s not make assumptions about who she is or what she did or didn’t do.