scarlettina | Entries tagged with geek culture

The more I read about the Hugos and the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies and all the rest, the more upset and depressed I get. It has disturbed my sleep and been the background noise in my head for days now. I don't think I ever realized in how much esteem I held the Hugo Awards until this whole Sad Puppies thing happened. And now all I can think is that the Hugo Award process has been tainted. I don't think the prestige of past awards has been affected, but I know for sure that, like in baseball, this year's winners will probably have asterisks next to them, reminding us all that 2015 was that year. Which will be hard for anyone who wins a 2015 Hugo who esteems the award in any fashion; their awards will always be considered with some skepticism. It's a certainty that we'll be dealing with this for at least another couple of years. That depresses me, too.

George R.R. Martin has been writing extensively about the whole affair in pretty thoughtful ways, providing history, context, and what I think is a pretty fair-minded approach. (See below for links to each of the posts.) I've read Larry Correia's response to GRRM's posts; he sounds angry and frustrated to me but mostly, he sounds like a disappointed romantic and, as a result, burning down the house he thought he would live happily ever after in. I honestly don't mean to sound condescending here. In some respects, I sympathize with his disappointment. I don't sympathize with his solution. At all. But when a response is so deeply couched in emotion, dramatic actions almost always result, dramatic action that has broader impact and makes a deeper rent in the Earth than the perpetrator expected--and so we have the Sad Puppies, their actions, and the fallout.

Vox Day's threat to nuke the site from orbit should even one No Award win the day is malicious hostage-taking. I'm going to vote the way I damn well want to, thank you very much. If that means deciding, after due consideration, that none of the nominees are Hugo-worthy, then that's what I'll do. My vote won't be goose-stepped to Theodore Beale's drumbeat. I recognize that his work with the Rabid Puppies is a separate campaign from the Sad Puppies, vicious and damaging and mean-spirited, but it's clear that both campaigns share supporters and, in some minds, are conflated. It can't be escaped at this point. That's unfortunate for Correia and Brad Torgerson, who assert that they don't wish to be associated with Beale (Correia in his blog, Torgerson in an exchange with Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook). But if wishes were horses, we'd have a herd the size of the Great Midwest.

As a pro and as a fan, like I said in the beginning, I find it all upsetting and depressing. I want WorldCon to be fun. I want the Hugos to represent what the fans think is best in SF. I believe we can make the former happen. I am fairly certain the latter is pretty much doomed for this year.

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It may just be me, but I think that today's XKCD quietly comments on the whole business without any explicit reference whatsoever.

George R.R. Martin's posts on the Sad Puppies Hugo situation:

Puppygate

Me and the Hugos

Tone

Blogging for Rockets

Where's the beef?

What now?

So, all those who care know that the Hugo Awards nominees list for this year was released yesterday at noon Pacific time. Like the kraken, it has unleashed its power upon the fannish waves. I heard about the Sad Puppies campaign last year but didn't pay much attention as I wasn't registered for WorldCon and therefore couldn't vote. This year, I paid more attention since I'll be attending Sasquan and am eligible to vote. I surveyed a number of recommendation lists. I did not review the Sad or Rabid Puppies recommendation lists because, honestly, when I did searches online for rec lists, they never came up. I read a bunch of stuff. I got my Hugo ballot in to the concom at almost the last minute. As it turned out, almost none of the works I chose for my ballot aligned with those on the Sad or Rabid Puppies lists. (The single exception is the long-form dramatic presentation ballot, which I suspect is true for most of fandom. The pickins is what Hollywood gives us and the choice is much narrower than it is for fiction.) That had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with which works I thought merited recognition in the field.

I spent yesterday ghosting Norwescon and didn't get to see the list of nominees until I got home late last night. And then I went to bed. And I slept badly. I woke up every hour or two. It might have been that the cats were traversing the bed in pretty adamant bids for attention. It might have been my cold plaguing me for yet another night. One thing I'm sure of: a lot of it was because of what I recognized in the Hugo balloting.

I send my congratulations to the nominees. My plan was to do pretty much what Scalzi recommends, well before I read his post, which is to try to read the nominees and vote according to my evaluation of the quality of same, including casting a "No Award" vote if I don't think any of the works rises to Hugo caliber. That's what every good Hugo voter should do. My vote is my own and it's private.

I will also say that I know that people have campaigned for Hugo Awards over the decades, some shamelessly, others quietly. The Sad and Rabid Puppies have taken Hugo campaigning to a whole new level. Does that bother me? Yeah.

I think what really bothers me about this whole thing is two-fold.

First, the Sad and Rabid Puppies campaigns have taken the evaluation of art and turned it into the evaluation of political alignment. They've made it into a conservative versus progressive contest, rather than a quality-and-popularity race to the top. Part of their argument is that authors who represent their values have not been adequately represented in the Hugo lists. This sounds uncomfortably like the "Christians are being persecuted" argument that we hear in mainstream politics so much, and that rings hollow to people of color, LGTB people, Jews and people of other faiths, lower-income populations and so on.

Second, presenting and blindly voting for a curated slate of candidates removes the personal, peculiar nature of Hugo voting. Abi Sutherland wrote a really good post about this over on Making Light, and I tend to agree. There's a group-think element to the idea of a curated slate of Hugo nominees that, while I can't speak for other fans and pros, really rubs me the wrong way and feels antithetical to what the science fiction and fantasy community as a whole tends to strive for.

As I consider it, the Hugos are a reflection of the core of science fiction and fantasy fannish culture and community. It has always represented what we're thinking about, talking about, wrestling with. As such, it's also always been representative of what the larger culture in which we function is wrestling with as well. Given the Conservative backlash against things like the Affordable Care Act, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and efforts to raise the minimum wage, the manifestation of a backlash against a more diverse Hugo ballot is not surprising. From my perspective, the explicitly-stated backlash against a more literary approach in the genre is representative of a resistance to more nuanced political thinking. And so the mundane invades the fannish with all the tentacles associated with a kraken.

As I said above, I'll do my best to read the nominees (I can't promise I'll finish them all; time is limited) and vote based on my evaluation of the works in question, including retaining the option to vote "No Award" if that seems appropriate. (I suspect there will be a lot of that, truth to tell.) And I'll hope that next year, I won't lose sleep over the Hugo nomination process. The trouble with tentacles is that they are many and have suckers that are hard to get free of. We'll see how it goes.

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Post-script: Adam-Troy Castro's comment on the whole thing is instructive in its way. Over on Facebook, he says "In 1970, the Best novel Hugo was lost, lost, by Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. That was the year BUG JACK BARRON by Norman Spinrad was nominated. Which didn't win because Ursula le Guin won for LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. I can offer no further commentary at this time." He links to Charlie Jane Anders' piece on i09 commenting on the Hugo balloting, which offers some history and context as well as her own, inimitable analysis.

Post post-script: It turns out that one of the nominees for Best Fan Writer has declined his nomination. He has written a surgically thorough explanation of his choice and an excruciatingly detailed analysis of the Hugos. It's long but it's fascinating reading.

So I spent some time this afternoon and evening thinking about the essay about The Big Bang Theory (TBBT)--a show I've watched more-or-less since the beginning--that's making the rounds on social media. The essay posits that this show about four super-brainy geeks is actually a show that makes fun of nerds, not a show that loves them. The essay posits that it's the ultimate manifestation of mainstream disdain for nerdy enthusiasm and social awkwardness, and that it further ghettoizes geek culture. It posits that the show's point-of-view character is Penny, the "normal" girl, and that the audience is supposed to laugh with her at the nerds, rather than laughing with the nerds at themselves. I spent a lot of time researching and starting to write a long exegesis analyzing all of this and then, tonight, realizing that I just didn't feel like writing the encyclopedic refutation I originally had in mind (three paragraphs in, I realized that if I continued, the resulting analysis would be worthy of--dare I say it--Dr. Sheldon Cooper*), I decided to approach it a little more simply.

I disagree with the essay at a pretty fundamental level. I don't think that Penny is the viewpoint character; it is clearly and obviously Leonard, the best-socialized of the four main male characters. He is Penny and the audience's facilitator into the geekier universe of Raj, Howard, and Sheldon, but he's also Raj, Howard, and Sheldon's facilitator into Penny's more mundane world. He's a person of both worlds and is befuddled by navigating them both. That's where a lot of the comedy in this show comes from.** When the audience laughs at a geek reference, it's partly out of recognition of something beloved and familiar; it's partly because we each in our own way identify with having a deep enthusiasm (whether it's which issue of a comics some character last appeared in or which baseball game was the last in which some player played for some particular team); and it's partly because each character is doing something so signally in character that it provides entertainment, delight, or surprise.

I'm not saying that every joke on TBBT is good-natured. Some things are funny because they're mean; that's the nature of comedy, and there's not a single sitcom on television that isn't cruel towards its characters, whether the jokes are about weight, about how long someone has been single, about baldness, and so on. (My God, the jokes about obesity on Roseanne were legion, and yet the Connors' obesity was one of the things that made them most identifiable to the audience. I don't think many fat people objected to the jokes--or if they did, they didn't watch, and missed a key pop-cultural moment in television.) But most sitcoms, including TBBT, are also loving toward their characters. There is a balance. (Howard's character has been treated with real love in the development of his relationship with Bernadette; he's clearly grown and changed.) It should also be noted that the mean jokes aren't just as the expense of the geekitude. There are mean jokes about Leonard's height, Howard's mother, Penny's relative lack of education and her attempts at acting, at Bernadette's astonishing vocal resemblance to Howard's mother. The show is an equal-opportunity insult machine. But also? It does--like the best sitcoms--get at some fundamental truths about being human and being an American in this time and place. Comedy comes from--and leads to--that as well.

In the end, here's the thing: if we can't find a way to laugh at ourselves (in the guise of Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard), then we're kind of missing the point--which is that everyone is socially awkward in one way or another. Everyone is super-geeky about one thing or another. Everyone has had moments of social humiliation along with personal triumph, moments of desperation in dating, cluelessness in friendship, and painful yet transformative growth. I think the original essay writer betrays a sensitivity about his own geekitude in his refutation of TBBT, and that's OK. But I think that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the show by viewing it through a broader lens than he's viewing it through. And I think that geeks who turn off TBBT, while certainly within their rights to do so, are missing something key about the entire TBBT phenomenon: it wouldn't be happening if we geeks weren't a cultural force to be reckoned with in the first place--and that's something that, as geeks, we have always wanted and that we--no question--have achieved.

* For example, the author posits that TBBT is the first show to feature geeks front and center. I started to research the truth of this assumption, since I disagreed with his disqualification of other shows that I thought plainly punctured it. The Lone Gunmen came first. And Chuck premiered the same year TBBT did. 'Nuff said.
** I should note, upon reflection, that Penny is Bernadette and Amy's facilitator to the guys' world and, often, the guys' facilitator to the women.

twilight2000 held her annual white elephant gift exchange last night. The company, as usual, was quite fine. The gift exchange was, as usual, entertaining. I came home with the lemon of the evening, a doll so ugly that it will not pass "Go" or collect $200; it will go directly to Goodwill. But I'm the only person I know who can go to a White Elephant party with a $5 salsa bowl and come home with a Wilton Armetale serving platter, as I also did last night. One year I came home with a Lenox dish. Another year, a collectible teddy bear. And another a pair of gloves that I wear to this day. One person's white elephant is another person's gold.

2) An essay about The Big Bang Theory is making the rounds on social media, specifically about what the show is and isn't when it comes to nerds and nerd culture. I have a lot of thoughts about this, which will comprise another post, possibly later today, but I wanted to post the link here now so that if people are curious, they'll have context for when I go off about it. :-)

3) Zeke is growing like crazy. He is now, to use

davidlevine's description, a small cat rather than a large kitten, and he definitely has a mind of his own. I've resorted to using a squirt bottle to keep him off of counters and the craft table. I kind of hate doing it, but it's apparently the only effective deterrent. The nearly imperceptible stripes I noticed on him as a kitten are showing a teeny bit more as he grows, but he still looks like a completely dark-gray cat. Must post more recent pics of him.

4) I have an enormous To-Do list and, as I look around the house, I find myself despairing a bit. While I know that creativity, whether it's writing, jewelry-making or photography, is more important than housekeeping, sometimes housekeeping helps keep one sane and provides comfortable space for the creativity. I get myself into such a prioritizing spiral about this that often nothing gets done. I need to fix that, most probably with incremental, alternating task completion; I suspect it's the only way to make any progress toward any goal right now.

5) I spend far too much time on social media. I need to unplug for a couple of days and just get stuff done. Must schedule this. Hm.....

Short version: Author Genevieve Valentine attended Readercon and was repeatedly harassed by a big name fan called Rene Walling. Readercon has a publicly-stated zero-tolerance policy for harassment, and anyone guilty of harassment is supposed to receive a lifetime ban from the convention. Readercon has enforced this policy strictly in the past. In this case, after a two-week investigation, they've announced that they're banning Walling for only two years.

Yep, they failed. Completely failed.

Predictably they are getting spanked pretty thoroughly by the fannish community. Didn't I just say something about waiting for the community to mature? Oh right: "Social growth and change take iterations of transgression, dialog, and healing. Sometimes helping someone grow up takes the infliction of a spanking. Spank away, internets. The culture needs it." Apparently the community continues to prove that spanking is needed. What a shame.

I had an exchange with an author on Facebook about all this, who asserted that neurology (men are helpless before evolution and neurology, and someone will always transgress as a result) and fannish politics (if the transgressor is a BNF, he'll get off with a slap on the wrist because other BNFs want to retain their social cache) mean that harassment and inappropriate responses to same by concoms would always perpetuate an unsafe environment. I asserted that perhaps this heirarchy of status over safety was screwed up and could be changed; he persisted in his assertion that there was nothing we could do to change it. After a while I decided the debate was fruitless and walked away. It's that kind of thinking that will perpetuate such an environment.

What impressed me about the FB exchange is that it was all very civilized, nuanced, and sophisticated--we were talking, after all, about neurology and sociology. That makes it all so reasonable. But it's the Peacock phenomenon all over again (see the spanking link, above): I have demonstrated that I have brains therefore I couldn't possibly be wrong. And Readercon took what they thought were reasonable actions and made a bad decision anyway.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Someone, someone show me evidence of positive social evolution please. I need a little reaffirmation of positive change on the front of a discussion rather than in hindsight.

A day or two ago, a friend posted a link on Facebook that went to Alli Thresher's rebuttal to a blog post about "fake geek girls." I read it and then went in search of the original piece, written by Joe Peacock and published on CNN.com, Booth Babes Need Not Apply. A more well-intentioned but misguided thing I have rarely read. Go ahead, go read for context--start with Peacock and then go back to Thesher. I'll wait.

Google searches revealed that Peacock's piece has spawned not only Thresher's response, but a plethora of carefully-thought-out and well-written (not to mention occasionally delightfully snarky) rebuttals like these at DoctorNerdLove and Forbes.com (which always but shouldn't surprise me with its geek savvy), among others. (ETA: John Scalzi's response is the king of all responses, with thanks to

oldmangrumpus for the pointer.)

I am not in the least surprised that we're still dealing with this kind of sexism and purity testing. I'm not surprised that it's still the "POSER!!" accusation wrapped up in nuanced argument and published in the context of a reputable news outlet (though the idea of a reputable news outlet these days seems to be one that's fading fast and becoming a relic of another era). Mainly what I am is disappointed.

Geek culture is supposed to be about acceptance and joy. The oblivious sexism in Peacock's discussion is its own damnation. Purity testing makes it no different than the kinds bullying geeks have dealt with our whole lives by bullies who didn't find us straight enough or mainstream enough to socialize with. And so here we are, our own worst nightmare wrapped in TeeFury geekitude*, wielding the Light Saber of Truth and a Patronus Charm against girl-geek wannabes. ::sigh::

I hope for the maturing of geek culture to the point where these conversations don't happen any more. Based on the patterns of other cultural tribes (I'm thinking of certain male-dominated sports fandoms, mainly), I'm not convinced we'll see it any time really soon. I am, however, comforted by the rebuttals and the discussion taking place. Social growth and change take iterations of transgression, dialog, and healing. Sometimes helping someone grow up takes the infliction of a spanking. Spank away, internets. The culture needs it.

* (Note: For the record, I am the proud owner of two TeeFury tees--they are awesome.)

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Sad puppies continue to make me sad
Release the kraken: on awards, puppies and politics
That Big Bang Theory thing
Five Things for the First Saturday in January
Observing the Readercon situation
Observing the "Fake Geek Girl" Discussion

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Scarlett Letters

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Sad puppies continue to make me sad

Release the kraken: on awards, puppies and politics

That Big Bang Theory thing

Five Things for the First Saturday in January

Observing the Readercon situation

Observing the "Fake Geek Girl" Discussion