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.
How do guys who find nothing wrong with rape reproduce? I could imagine at least one way, and that has nothing to do with women liking them.
(His wife, who comments under the name Spacebunny, is a razor-tongued hater herself. But I won’t know if this made them a match, or if she became so from living with him. The chilling thing is that they have children and home school them. That could be many children, as he is big on the “right” kind of people having to out-populate the “wrong” ones, also known as “quiverfull.”)
Middle Eastern features maybe, but not Middle Eastern skin colour. The Dunedain were pale skinned with dark hair and grey eyes, for the most part – not so different in colouring from the Elves.
I said: “How do guys who find nothing wrong with rape reproduce?”
In all fairness, that should be, “How do guys who find little wrong with rape, and see most rape not as rape, reproduce?”
Um, not to be a nasty cynic here, but isn’t the answer to Retha’s question likely to be “via rape”?
About Mackney, I haven’t read the suicide letter because … ick … but people who have say he refers to his own psychosis and inability to get treatment and/or meds. He also apparently agreed to give custody to his ex-wife.
I do know that MRAs/AVfMers are positively gleeful over the fact that the note is available online for both his loved ones and complete strangers to read. Not only do they not give a shit that it will probably cause a lot of pain for his children to see that, they actually WANT his children to see it. And they have been trying to doxx his ex-wife as well, but I don’t know if they’ve been successful at that or if she’s actually being harassed and threatened.
So once again, MRAs prove themselves to be complete shits who view other human beings as nothing more than pawns in their terrible game. In other words, standard operating procedure for them.
RE: Anarchonist
For instance, I really hope they’ll end up with an Asian American playing Iron Fist in the movie adaptation.
Oh man, does this mean we’ll actually get a Luke Cage movie? That’d be awesome!
RE: Retha
In all fairness, that should be, “How do guys who find little wrong with rape, and see most rape not as rape, reproduce?”
Well, asides from cassandrakitty’s response, surely I’m not the only kid who grew up thinking that rape was a totally normal part of life? Seriously, I just took it as a given that if I wanted to be loved by someone, I’d have to have sex with them, regardless of my feelings about it. I didn’t realize there was anything unusual about this until I was nineteen, and it took me another couple years of hard work to really digest it.
So yeah, back then, I totally would’ve had kids with a rapist. To me, that was normal. Everyone who I could date was a rapist. It wasn’t even worth complaining about.
(Note to any MRAs, I stopped believing that when I discovered… yes! Feminism!)
LBT, that sucks. I’m glad you know differently now and I’m sorry you had to experience that
It’s okay, Skye. My husband is a total sweetie and helped me learn otherwise. But yeah, I still have those moments of weird dissonance where I’m like, “oh, right, I guess that’s not a thing with other people…”
LBT, I am sorry.
Vox Day actually, really wrote these words on his blog:
“If the definition of rape is stretched so far to include women who have not given consent, then I am absolutely a serial rapist. So, too, is every man I know.”
Okay. Vox sleeps with women/ a woman who have not given consent. Yet, he also encourage PUA “game”, which is about how (allegedly) he can get a woman to say yes.
If game really worked as well as he says, and he could get women to say yes by it, why would he need to sleep with women who have not given consent? And if consent don’t matter to him, why do he need PUA “game”?
Stretched *so far* as to include women who have not given consent? WTF? That’s the actual definition of rape. If you’re fucking a person who has not given consent, you’re raping them. Scumbag.
Aaand Vox Day provides today’s case of “surely that quote is grounds for arrest.”
katz: If he were in the States, it might be easier (though without a woman to file a complaint…) but he’s in Italy.
And in Italy, it would only be grounds to make you prime minister.
To be fair, it would depend on whether or not the women in question were wearing skinny jeans.
@kittehserf: Very true. And considering it’s been a long time since I read that comment, and that I can’t remember where, makes the whole thing a little iffy anyway. It could very well be that it was something Tolkien first thought about in his later years, around the same time he considered the possibility that an entire race of sapient beings (orcs) being inherently evil doesn’t make any goddamn sense, neither ethically nor ontologically.
@LBT: Let’s hope so! Still, the Iron Fist movie has been in production for who-knows-how-many-years, so it’ll probably take a while. Interestingly, the ones who most vocally defend Danny Rand’s whiteness are the ones who think his relationship with Luke Cage wouldn’t have the same impact if Danny was anything but white. Because apparently only white people can be clueless and have class privilege, all other races have inherent mystical wisdom about the world.
So sorry about what you’ve gone through. I have no words.
@Retha: That blog post. What. The. Actual. Fuck. Obviously the guy is an asshole, but that he’s so unapologetic about it, too. Maybe, instead of blaming the definition of rape, he should wonder if he only hangs out with rapists?
This blog is a tonic. There was a time when I was confused enough about human relations to believe what Vox said…
… and it hurt. I don’t want to go into detail, but I had to do lots of research and prayer to get to realize that this is not how most men are or how life is supposed to work. But discovering the “Vox Day” label on this blog, this weekend, was the first time that I directly heard that Vox Day is an a**hole (apologies to the very necessary body parts that are at the end of our digestive systems).
RE: Retha
“If the definition of rape is stretched so far to include women who have not given consent, then I am absolutely a serial rapist. So, too, is every man I know.”
*eyeroll* I suspect that he is imagining consent to be this weird unnatural shit performed by Lawyer Robots. Cliff talked about it a while back. Signing of contracts with appendices and footnotes and shit.
Unless he isn’t, in which case I’m horrified. Part of me wonders why people act like consent is so complicated, but I shouldn’t, since I already know the answer.
RE: Anarchonist
Interestingly, the ones who most vocally defend Danny Rand’s whiteness are the ones who think his relationship with Luke Cage wouldn’t have the same impact if Danny was anything but white.
Are you kidding? I’d LOVE to see some friendships where neither person was white. I’m sick of hearing how EDIFYING friendships are for white people. It’s boring as fuck. Luke Cage is awesome enough to run a movie all by himself!
RE: Retha
There was a time when I was confused enough about human relations to believe what Vox said…
… and it hurt.
I been there. It sucks. You have my condolences.
LBT, my first exposure to Luke Cage was his encounter with Doctor Doom. I can’t link, but if you’re not familiar with it, it’s fewkin’ great.
I just want a fuckin’ Black Panther movie already. I was flipping tables when that Marvel exec said it would be too difficult to make the fictional country of Wakanda. BUT THE FICTIONAL WORLD OF ASGARD IS NO PROBLEM AMIRITE
OMG, those poor children. I hope they all run away as soon as they’re able. Parents like those, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. (And my worst enemies are flat-out fascists, so that’s really saying something.)
To be honest, I think “game”, in these guys’ twisty little world, means “any method or means by which rape can be made to seem like not-rape, so you don’t get arrested and sent to jail.” But then again, these are PUAs we’re talking about, and some of them have written entire treatises (and even tomes) on an exotic blood sport known as (I shit you not) “rape game”. So I think they’re well aware that their “game” is not kosher, and in any case, there’s only one player, and it’s not the woman. Their “challenge”, as they see it, is to make it kosher, skirting law and social convention so closely so that the victim doesn’t see herself as a victim and thus doesn’t seek any legal or social recourse against him. It’s less about “turning a no into a yes” than it is about disregarding yes or no altogether, while still having the plausible deniability of “well, she didn’t SAY no…” or “she said no with her lips and yes with her eyes”, or some such rot. Anything to count coup on women, but then not be accountable for it, in short.
Vox’s peculiarity here is that he proudly claims “rapist” as a title, making himself look like one seriously messed-up piece of shit when he’s trying to posit himself as Alpha Dog and King of the Mountain. Most of them are a lot more weaselly and evasive about it than that. I have to wonder just how much of that is real, and how much is empty braggadocio.
How the fuck is teddy married anyway? It’s so bizarre. Yes I’ve seen the spacebunny stuff. I just Have trouble wrapping my head around it!
The RationalWiki article on Robert Beale contains some info about Teddy’s mother: she divorced his father and cooperated with the Feds when they pursued him for tax evasion.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Robert_Beale
No wonder Teddy doesn’t speak of her. She’s one of these damn independent women.
(Seriously, good for her. I’d love to hear her story.)
Wow. That takes my opinion of Ma Beale up several notches. Thanks, Lady M!