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rowynAnke wrote a Tumblr post on sexism in sf&f. I have complicated thinky thoughts related to this, and decided I should unpack them in my own post.
First, I want to talk about the broad spectrum of "arbitrary human prejudice". I'll define this as "any time a human makes an assumption about another human in one area based on information about them in an unrelated area". For instance: "You are old, so I assume you don't know how to use Instagram" or "You are a man, so I assume you can change a tire" or "you are gay, so I assume you have good taste in clothing" or "you like the Yankees, so I assume you are a jerk".
Humans make these kinds of correlations, both negative and positive, of "If you are X you are also Y", based on pretty much EVERYTHING. Not just gender/race/religion/sexual orientation/class but even more trivial and random, like whether they're fans of video games or sports, of Star Trek or Star Wars, of fantasy or westerns, of romance or action. Whether they like knitting or crocheting, what kind of clothing they wear, what kind of makeup they wear, how they style their hair. There is nothing that humans do that is so minor that somewhere, someone isn't making a connection between it and unrelated behaviors.
Making connections between seemingly unrelated things is what humans do. Some of these connections are highly usefu, some of them are highly annoying, and a lot of them are somewhere in between.
Beyond that, disliking people who are Not Like Us is also an innate human behavior, observable even in infants over something as trivial as food preference. (This is such a depressing study. I hope it turns out to be wrong or unreplicable or something.)
I am pretty bored with fiction that explores oppression based in gender/class/orientation/race/religion/etc. I wrote The Moon Etherium in part because I wanted to write about a society that did not particularly care about any of those things. But even they did not turn out completely free of prejudice; they just have prejudices along more esoteric and personal lines. And there are reasons why they don't care about the differences that matter to my society. (In most cases, "because we're all shapeshifters and if a given shape stopped us from doing anything we wanted to, we would just change".)
I don't particularly want prejudice in the books I read. But if an author presents me with a society that is "just like medieval Europe, but without gender roles or ethnic stereotypes", my first thought is "that's not going to be 'just like'." And if you write it as if it is, it's going to feel implausible, as if you're not writing about humans at all. If there are no ethnic stereotypes, why do the ethnicities persist instead of everyone just blending into one ethnicity? If they're highly dependent on manual labor, why are men and women doing the same jobs at the same rates regardless of whether their physiques are suited to it? I'm not saying these are unanswerable questions -- only that I want answers stated, or at least hinted at.
It's not that I want oppression because it's realistic. I read f&sf. I do not require realism. But I want my dragons and mages and unicorns to be internallly consistent and well-thought-out. Not just "dragons because dragons are cool!" but dragons who do X, Y and Z and have impacted society in ways A, B and C, etc. I want the causes and implications of an oppression-free society to also be considered. The human beings I know about from history and my world are pretty terrible at it. I'd love to know why they're better at it in a fictional setting.
OTOH, I don't give it any more consideration than I give the assorted fantastic elements of a story. When a movie or a short story happens to have a diverse cast with no visible prejudices, I don't care if it explains the why of it, because that format doesn't lend itself to explaining all the details of the backstory.
But I wrote an epic fantasy, Prophecy, my unpublished first finished draft, where I did lots of world building. But I literally never explained why there are basically no ethnic tensions or sexism. It's a low-tech world, reliant on manual labor, with no sophisticated forms of transportation or labor. This is not a situation where global open-mindedness has historically flourished. It feels sloppy to have gone "because I said so" on the topic.
I'm only giving fantasy examples because, eg, if the setting has good communication and transportation, where most work is intellectual rather than physical, then it makes sense to me that stereotypes that arose from distance and physical differences will die out. It's only when the society looks analagous to an Earth one that's loaded with discrimination that I will go "huh. Weird that you didn't get that here."
Still, overall, I am probably more inclined to overlook "because I said so" as the explanation for a bias-free society than I am to overlook other inconsistencies in a setting. I've read a lot about prejudiced societies and lived in one my whole life. It's refreshing to just skip all of it. But I still like it better if there are hints about how the fictional society managed to escape it.
First, I want to talk about the broad spectrum of "arbitrary human prejudice". I'll define this as "any time a human makes an assumption about another human in one area based on information about them in an unrelated area". For instance: "You are old, so I assume you don't know how to use Instagram" or "You are a man, so I assume you can change a tire" or "you are gay, so I assume you have good taste in clothing" or "you like the Yankees, so I assume you are a jerk".
Humans make these kinds of correlations, both negative and positive, of "If you are X you are also Y", based on pretty much EVERYTHING. Not just gender/race/religion/sexual orientation/class but even more trivial and random, like whether they're fans of video games or sports, of Star Trek or Star Wars, of fantasy or westerns, of romance or action. Whether they like knitting or crocheting, what kind of clothing they wear, what kind of makeup they wear, how they style their hair. There is nothing that humans do that is so minor that somewhere, someone isn't making a connection between it and unrelated behaviors.
Making connections between seemingly unrelated things is what humans do. Some of these connections are highly usefu, some of them are highly annoying, and a lot of them are somewhere in between.
Beyond that, disliking people who are Not Like Us is also an innate human behavior, observable even in infants over something as trivial as food preference. (This is such a depressing study. I hope it turns out to be wrong or unreplicable or something.)
I am pretty bored with fiction that explores oppression based in gender/class/orientation/race/religion/etc. I wrote The Moon Etherium in part because I wanted to write about a society that did not particularly care about any of those things. But even they did not turn out completely free of prejudice; they just have prejudices along more esoteric and personal lines. And there are reasons why they don't care about the differences that matter to my society. (In most cases, "because we're all shapeshifters and if a given shape stopped us from doing anything we wanted to, we would just change".)
I don't particularly want prejudice in the books I read. But if an author presents me with a society that is "just like medieval Europe, but without gender roles or ethnic stereotypes", my first thought is "that's not going to be 'just like'." And if you write it as if it is, it's going to feel implausible, as if you're not writing about humans at all. If there are no ethnic stereotypes, why do the ethnicities persist instead of everyone just blending into one ethnicity? If they're highly dependent on manual labor, why are men and women doing the same jobs at the same rates regardless of whether their physiques are suited to it? I'm not saying these are unanswerable questions -- only that I want answers stated, or at least hinted at.
It's not that I want oppression because it's realistic. I read f&sf. I do not require realism. But I want my dragons and mages and unicorns to be internallly consistent and well-thought-out. Not just "dragons because dragons are cool!" but dragons who do X, Y and Z and have impacted society in ways A, B and C, etc. I want the causes and implications of an oppression-free society to also be considered. The human beings I know about from history and my world are pretty terrible at it. I'd love to know why they're better at it in a fictional setting.
OTOH, I don't give it any more consideration than I give the assorted fantastic elements of a story. When a movie or a short story happens to have a diverse cast with no visible prejudices, I don't care if it explains the why of it, because that format doesn't lend itself to explaining all the details of the backstory.
But I wrote an epic fantasy, Prophecy, my unpublished first finished draft, where I did lots of world building. But I literally never explained why there are basically no ethnic tensions or sexism. It's a low-tech world, reliant on manual labor, with no sophisticated forms of transportation or labor. This is not a situation where global open-mindedness has historically flourished. It feels sloppy to have gone "because I said so" on the topic.
I'm only giving fantasy examples because, eg, if the setting has good communication and transportation, where most work is intellectual rather than physical, then it makes sense to me that stereotypes that arose from distance and physical differences will die out. It's only when the society looks analagous to an Earth one that's loaded with discrimination that I will go "huh. Weird that you didn't get that here."
Still, overall, I am probably more inclined to overlook "because I said so" as the explanation for a bias-free society than I am to overlook other inconsistencies in a setting. I've read a lot about prejudiced societies and lived in one my whole life. It's refreshing to just skip all of it. But I still like it better if there are hints about how the fictional society managed to escape it.
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Date: 2017-01-18 02:58 am (UTC)But now that I think about it, that's basically 'because religion'. Which is somewhat plausible even in a world with no magic.
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Date: 2017-01-25 01:44 am (UTC)I have recently read two books where there are genderless/sexless or semi-genderless societies! First was Ancillary Justice (and Sword and Mercy). The main character comes from a society where there are sexes, but no cultural gender. There is only one gender pronoun, and it happens to be "she". The second book is The Left Hand of Darkness where there is a (mostly) sexless and genderless society. I say mostly because the humans do actually go into a sexual period where they develop sex characteristics (once a month, I believe), and they can develop into either sex. But outside of those periods, they are completely neuter. This book uses the gender pronoun "he" throughout. When talking about these books, I will use the pronoun that the author used.
I really like the Ancillary trilogy, because except for a couple of people, I don't think you ever find out the sex of anybody in the books. I love the idea that the main character can't even tell by looking at people what sex they are, which she tries to do several times. She was never taught that men look like this and women look like that. There are other prejudices in the books, but I love that that is not one of them. I don't recall that the book goes into having children, but I may have overlooked it. I've read reviews where some people claim that all the relationships are heterosexual ones, which I find completely unbelievable, and which is why I wonder about the issue of children. But in a society without gender, it is hard to have prejudices based on gender. As far as division of labor based on physical characteristics, it seems like most of the heavy lifting is done by the Ancillaries, which are not human anyway (but the book does go into whether or not they are _people_). That seems to be the main prejudice, humans against ancillaries.
It is a little different with Left Hand. The main character comes from a gendered society, and he has a hard time wrapping his mental model around the people in this new society. He has to confront his own prejudices. I actually feel like it should have impacted his interactions with the other characters more than just him thinking, "Ew gross, he is acting effeminate." Of course, the sexless society also has a prejudice against the main character, they consider him a pervert for constantly having a sex. Again, I feel like their acceptance of someone who they consider to be a pervert to be a bit too blasé.
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Date: 2017-02-24 01:43 am (UTC)Have you read Too Like the Lightning? That one's set a few centuries in the future, and everyone uses 'them.' Except that the narrator keeps gendering people for Reasons. I found it very interesting, but am still not sure what I thought of it.
*Using the book's definition of 'civilized,' i.e. like the Radch.