rowyn

I saw this article about how smartphones have turned us all into zombies who won't engage with the real world or the people around them boosted on Fediverse the other day. Independently, a friend linked me to this xkcd:

xkcd about life before the internet. Punchline: IT WAS SO BORING

Which was relevant to the topic, but less relevant than The Pace of Modern Life -- it's long, so I'm not embedding it, but it's a series of quotes about how technology has destroyed the fabric of society, dated from 1871 through 1915. And yet here we are, more than a century later, claiming that society still had fabric left to be destroyed in the last few years. Maybe it grew back.

Perhaps it is unfair, or unkind, to liken every complaint about smartphone etiquette to complaints made 100+ years ago about newfangled magazines or inexpensive postage or whathaveyou. But good Lord, it is tedious to read people waxing on about how Back In My Day, Things Were So Much Better.

Do you know what I did before I had a GPS in my phone? Well, thirty years ago, I would write down a list of directions from someone who knew the way. And then, when I got lost, I would look for a payphone and hope that I had their number in my little book of contacts and also that I had the little book on me, so I could call and we could try to figure out where I was and how to get where I wanted to be. If that failed, I might stop at a gas station and ask a stranger for help. They wouldn't know either. I had some gigantic intricately-folded maps that could never be folded again if you unfolded them. They didn't help much. Twenty years ago, I printed out directions from MapQuest and then, when I got lost, I would stop and call for directions and write those down. Repeat as necessary. This was a little easier because by then I had a cellphone so at least I didn't have to find a payphone and change and my contact list.

Do you know what I do when I get lost while using GPS on my phone? Yeah, I don't know either, I can't remember the last time I got lost. My phone could run out of power but I have a USB cable to plug it into in my car, so it's not likely.

Yes, today, I still have vague mental map of the area where I live. Yes, I still remember the routes I use to get places after going a few times. No, my mental maps were not better in pre-GPS days. I was bad at this then and I'm bad at it now and the big difference is now it doesn't matter because I have an assistive device to do it for me.

Do you know what I did before the internet? I watched network TV and read books. So much network television. So many commercials. About one-third of air time for every network program was commercials. As a kid, I spent several hours every day watching TV. Cartoons, syndicated shows, primetime broadcasts. Was this good TV? Absolutely not. I remember one fantasy TV show with a sword-slinging main character and a sidekick who talked to animals and it had so little to recommend itself that I can no longer find mention of it. Web searches on the theme turn up "best-of" lists. Dear internet, this show was not in the top 100 for anything, including "shows with characters who talk to animals". I watched it anyway. It was there, and I was That Bored. In 1988 I went to college, discovered the internet*, and my TV-watching plummeted.

Of course, I couldn't watch TV while I was out of the house. That's what books were for. Do you know what I did when I was on the bus, or walking down the sidewalk, or at a coffee shop, or during breaks between school classes (or during classes if I could get away with it), or at the gym between sets**, or literally just existing in any public space not designed for socializing? I read a book. I carried at least one at all times. Ideal purse size in the 90s: holds wallet plus two paperback books. Larger and it'd be too heavy. Had to make do with the book I was currently reading, plus a spare.

Do you know what I didn't do? Talk to strangers if I had literally any choice whatsoever. I didn't even talk to acquaintances if I could help it. Why would I do that. They didn't want to talk to me. No one is at the bus stop for the hot happening social action. We're there to catch the bus. If I wanted to socialize, I could go somewhere designed for that purpose and likely to have a people with common interests.

And you know what? You still today can go to places designed for socializing and guess what? People will socialize there! Lut and I used to go to the Warhammer store to play Kill Team, and I promise you, people did not bury their noses in their phones and ignore the world while there. They played games or talked about games, or painted miniatures, and generally interacted with the real world because that was why they had come. If you want to meet strangers or interact with people in the real world, please go to events at your local library or a dance club or a gaming night at a store or a knitting club in a coffee shop or whatever other pastime suits your fancy. The web will be happy to help you find any of these spaces meant for socialzing!

Stop being nostalgic for a time when you thought social norms made it acceptable to demand the attention of strangers in all public spaces. We didn't want to talk to you then, either.

I don't know if the author is right and the social norm has changed over the last few years, making people's reactions angrier at being interrupted in public by strangers. But if it has: Boo-hoo. So sorry your personal preference for a social norm has been replaced by the personal preferences of others. But it is their preference. The social norm did not change out of spite for you, personally. It changed because people wanted to be left alone and not coerced into small talk about the weather by randos every time they left the house. They're not ignoring you now because they have a phone to stare at instead. They're ignoring you because now they can get away with it.

*Technically, in 1988 I started using the university VAX to talk and play games with other students of the university using the same VAX. I could've accessed usenet but never looked at it. I didn't start using the internet until I got an account on FurryMUCK in 1990 or 1991.
**Yes, the guy in the article who occupied a gym machine while scrolling on his phone for 15 minutes was being rude. He would've been rude staring at a gym TV or reading a magazine, too. Phones did not invent rude people

Sometimes, when people talk about trans people in a "wow, there sure are a lot of trans people now" way, I think about how long I have known trans people.

I have been an extremely online person from the moment I got to college and had access to "online", in the late eighties. I created a character on FurryMUCK in 1990 or 91, played for a few weeks or months, and then left. I returned in '92, I think, and remained active there for some years. I also flitted between various other online spaces before/between/during my FurryMUCK years, but Furry is the space I remember best from this period.

MUCKs were text-based MMOs but without the "fight monsters and get loot" part. People built rooms and lands and worlds and characters out of text descriptions, and hung out there together to chat. Like Discord, but with a lot more atmosphere. FurryMUCK was -- is, it's still around -- a MUCK for furries. And furries have always been a queer lot. In the late 80s and 90s, people created characters with every kind of gender: male and female were the most popular, but neopronouns and nonbinary characters were commonplace. The last was often fetishized -- but not always. "Nonbinary" wasn't a term yet. Most of the enby characters labeled themselves as "hermaphrodites"; some of them as "neuter."

One of the many things that's changed about "online" in the last thirty years is the gender ratio online. In the late 80s and early 90s, most people online presented as male in person. It was so overwhelmingly male that even most people who presented as female online presented as male in person.

I don't really know how many of those people who played female or nonbinary characters on Furry were trans. It was undeniably easier to get attention with a female character. I rarely played male characters myself, not because I disliked male characters but because when I played one, I recognized how hard it was to stand out from the crowd. I knew several AMAB people who preferred to play female characters online but who, so far as I know, were cis men.

The first trans woman I met was in the early 90s: 1991, perhaps? She came to one of the periodic furry meet-ups that one of my friends hosted. She was older than most of my friends, although I do not know how much older; I'd guess she was in her thirties or forties, when most of my circle were in our early twenties. She was polyamorous and kinky and dated one of my friends who was perhaps twenty-one. I don't know how that relationship turned out in the long run, but they struck me as happy together. I hope they did well.

One of my closest friends on Furry usually played male characters. But she* played one character who was a water elemental and genderless. She used "it/its" for that character. At one point, she told me that character was the one she most wanted to resemble, but that she had a hard time playing it because it was too much her idealized self. She didn't feel like she could live up to that ideal.

*I'll use her present in-person pronouns for her.

Years later, she came out to me as a trans woman. To my everlasting shame, I argued with her over it. I didn't think there was anything wrong with being trans -- my logic was something like 'you don't seem especially feminine to me and you never played female characters so you can't be a trans woman.' (To be clear, this is complete nonsense and I had no idea what I was talking about.) I didn't argue for long -- it was one conversation that went roughly:

Friend: "I'm a woman"
Me: "what no you can't be"
Friend: "NO REALLY"
few more exchanges
Me: "...okay, I don't understand, but I do support you"

Later, she told me that she would have preferred to not have a gender at all. But getting recognized as nonbinary in the late 90s was basically impossible and transitioning to a woman was something cis people could wrap their heads around, and "woman" was much more acceptable to her than "man." That stuck with me, because it fit so well with everything else I knew about her. She had always been one of those feminists who'd thought the world would be better off without genders.

Another person I knew on Furry in the early 90s played a shapeshifter character. Most often, I saw them* in female shapes, but they had male and neuter shapes as well. Sometimes changing little but the pronouns from one description to the next. (They used it/its for the neuter forms. I recall they had one exaggeratedly mixed-gender shape that existed solely to make fun of other people's fetishized/sexualized descriptions which gave prominent attention to three or more sets of genitalia.)

*likewise using their current pronouns here.

Years later, when I knew them much better, they told me that their preferred pronouns were it/its. Many years after that, they started asking people to use they/them, because they being treated as nonbinary was important to them and because too many people would assume that anyone using it/its would be doing so to be offensive.

Around 2016, as I was thinking about my next book, I realized that I had finished three books in three different settings, and none of them had an explicit trans or nonbinary character. I'd had friends since the 90s who were nonbinary, a fact I had long ago accepted. But I'd never put nonbinary characters into my work. Dragons and magical healing and prophecy: sure, those were reasonable elements to expect a reader to accept. But a nonbinary person? A BRIDGE TOO FAR.

...

Me to me: "seriously WHAT. What is up with that. Why are you writing books that don't include this normal component of your own life."

I decided, at that point, that I would never again write a setting that didn't include nonbinary people. Not necessarily as major or even minor characters, but: nonbinary people had to, at a minimum, exist in the world. Even if it was just as a throwaway mention somewhere. In two of my settings -- the Demon books and the Etherium novels -- I use it/its for some nonbinary characters and they/them for others. Because I had two friends who'd wanted to use it/its and never felt like they could in the real world, and I couldn't change that but what the heck, I could at least make a space for them in my fictional ones. In the Demon books, it was particularly important to me to use "it" for some nonbinary humans because the demons in the setting don't have sexual reproduction and the pronoun for all of them was "it". I did not want the book to come across as 'agender = evil'. x_x

The first trans woman I met wasn't someone I knew well or stayed in touch with. But the people who later came out to me as trans have been good friends for most of my life, at this point. Sometimes I think about all the other people I met on FurryMUCK who used nonbinary or genderfluid forms, but who didn't become lifelong friends. How many of them weren't cis, either? How many of them thought they were cis for years and only much later realized they didn't have to be?

Do I really know more trans people now, or do I just know more people who are comfortable being open about being trans?

Furry fandom was open to a variety of forms in a way that other online spaces weren't. I don't know if this is because there's something innately queer about liking anthropomorphic animals as "when your setting is all about nonhuman characters like dragons and bipedal cats and such, characters who aren't male or female seem pretty reasonable." But "AMAB people presenting as female online and male iRL" was commonplace throughout the internet, in every online space I saw. And I knew some women who preferred to play male characters for the exact reason I preferred female: they got less attention as male and they liked that. Having a medium where no one could see what you look like or hear what you sounded like made it easy to be whatever you wanted. To experiment.

And in an environment where it's easy to experiment, of course people will learn things that they didn't when it was almost impossible to do so.

I wrote a hypothetical about the future of machine learning and creative works a few months ago. I am still thinking about this subject. It's hard not to.

I received an invitation this morning to submit one of my books to Apple's new digital narration program.

My choice here, in one sense, is easy. These are the actual categories Apple is accepting:

Primary category must be romance or fiction (literary, historical, and women’s fiction are eligible; mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported).

I do have several titles where "the primary category is romance". However, all but one of them is also fantasy. My sole contemporary romance is You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99 but Really You Wanted To Be a Better Person. And this title is full of sections like this:

From afar, Jadarea says to Razgathak and you, “sorry”
From afar, Jadarea says to Razgathak and you, “couldn’t think what else to do”
From afar, you say to Razgathak and Jadarea, “It was a selfless and generous act on your part, Jadarea; by no means should you apologize.”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “Yeah”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “What Cae said. ty”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “That is. Thank you. Seriously, that was amazing. We should all be dead.”
From afar, you say to Razgathak and Jadarea, “Just so. Allow me a few moments to relog; I shall message as soon as I reconnect.”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “wait”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “Loot Cae’s corpse first, just in case.”
From afar, you say to Razgathak and Jadarea, “Oh yes. That would be wise.”

In text, it's a little awkward if you are not familiar with the conventions of MMOs and/or MU*s, but a reader is likely to catch on and skim the dialogue tags rather than reading them. But in audio form, it would be tedious in the extreme. Beyond that, it has many fictitious names, like Razgathak and Jadarea, that a digital narrator will not recognize or know how to pronounce. (This might be one reason sff is excluded from their initial plans, though that is pure speculation on my part.)

Even if I submitted a title, it's unlikely it would be accepted. If it was accepted, it would be unlikely to garner many sales. I will not submit a title at this time, and I give up very little in making this choice.

I listened to the audio samples for romance titles. Compared to the voice that gives directions on my GPS or that reads text messages aloud in my car, they're fantastic. They do not sound mechanical and they vary their emphasis on parts of a sentence in a generally sensible way. But compared to a human narrator: meh. They are clearly inferior to a skilled human narrator. In some ways, they're inferior even to, say, me reading aloud, and I have zero skill at voice narration.

At least one of my readers is blind. She reads my books via screenreader. I think about her when I think about digital narration, more than anyone else. The machine-learning image and text generators make it easy for humans who want to turn their ideas into images or text without putting in the time to draw/write it themselves. They are a benefit to the human creator who wants such a tool. The benefit to human audiences -- people who want to view art or read stories -- is much less clear. As an audience member, I find ML text to have negative value -- searches are more likely now to turn up machines spouting confident and unidentified lies. ML images are less annoying, but I still am rarely glad to have seen them, or feel that they have enriched my experience.

Digital narration, by contrast, has a clear case for improving accessibility to audiences who literally cannot read stories in written form.

Beyond that, if a book is written by a human and narrated by a computer, it is absolutely clear that the human author also owns the copyright to the resulting audio. There is no legal question that the human who wrote the words has done enough creative work to be entitled to copyright protection. By contrast, the legal question of "can you own the copyright on an image generated by a computer based on your prompt?" is not yet settled, but the Library of Congress is at present refusing to grant copyrights to such work. (For the curious, Legal Eagle did a video on AI and the law, with an emphasis on image generators and related lawsuits.)

It's possible that digital narration is subject to some of the same legal issues that afflict machine-learning image and text generation. I don't know how Apple trained their digital narrators or if human narrators would have grounds to claim infringement. It seems less likely; Apple is not using their digital narrators to cobble together the content of books based on a training set. At most, they are copying the style of human narrators, and 'style' (as Legal Eagle notes) is not something you can copyright.

That doesn't mean there aren't ethical questions here. I am a Luddite about ML image and text generation. I hate it. I hate the idea of it. Writing stories and illustrating are my hobbies. Computers can have my day job and may the world take much joy from the result, but I don't want a computer coming for my hobbies.

But I am very aware that, as a person who neither does voice narration nor listens to audiobooks, I have no such personal bias when it comes to digital narration. Audio narration is also an art form, if not as popular a hobby as writing or drawing. Is there a meaningful difference between asking a computer to read my book aloud so I don't have to, and asking a computer to paint a picture for me so I don't have to?

So my reasons for self-selecting out of the Apple offer are:

I have only one title that suits their criteria
That one title is a terrible candidate for other reasons
I am not familiar enough with the tech behind digital narration to know the legal and ethical issues, if any
I feel some solidarity with voice actors who hate the idea of machine narration

If Apple had said "we're looking for all romance, including fantasy", would my other two reasons be enough? I don't know. If I didn't have the last two reasons, I'd throw A Rational Arrangement or Level 99 at them anyway; no cost to trying.

None of my books have audio editions. I have zero objections to audiobooks, but paying for professional narration of any of my titles would cost more than I have earned from any one title. The odds of making back such an investment are minuscule. And I am not interested in acquiring the skills and equipment to edit my own audio.

That last gets to what bothers me most about all of this. Half the work of audio narration is editing. I know multiple people who would be happy to record their own audio narration -- if only they didn't have to edit out all the pops and wheezes and mouth noises and weird pauses and whatnot. If I didn't already know how tedious and/or expensive it was to edit audio, I might be willing to invest the time in learning to narrate and record my own audio. Why are developers insistent on replacing the part that humans excel at and in some cases enjoy -- reading aloud -- instead of automating the part humans generally hate -- getting rid of extraneous noises? You don't hear people complaining that ProWritingAid will put proofreaders out of work because (a) it won't but also (b) hardly anyone likes doing proofreading anyway. Luddites are rare in modern times because most modern people are used to the idea that if their job gets automated, they'll find new work in another area, and very few of them loved the old work. Much of my professional career has centered on "I hate doing this, let me see if I can make the computer do it for me." I never worried that I would run out of things I hated doing to automate.

Tl;dr: dear innovators, please direct your efforts at having machines perform chores and not leisure activities k thx.

The purpose of 2D AI Art and co-writing engines like Sudowrite is to reduce the amount of human effort needed to create. A logical extension of this into the future:

Let’s say you want to watch a movie.

You go to NetJourn-E and start entering the kind of movie you want to see, based on tags/prompts. The tags can be anything: found family, royalty, queer, fantasy, hurt/comfort, mystery, actor names, character names, actors playing characters: whatever you think sounds fun. You can get as specific as you want -- “leading man is Chris Evans acting in the style of Humphry Bogart as directed by Francis Ford Coppola.” Or you can be general: “leading man is handsome.”

In response, NetJourn-E gives you options. First, some existing content that matches some of your tags. This includes analytics: percentage match on your tags, number of viewers for the content, average rating for the content. You can adjust sliders to determine your results: maybe you only want to look at results that got a 90% or better rating, or have 10,000 or more views, or have 100 or fewer views, or have a 65% or better match, or various combinations of the above.

Another option: create a new movie based on all of your tags. If you pick this, NetJourn-E generates a handful of trailers for films that include all your tags. You browse through the trailers, maybe watching them through, or maybe just a few seconds if they don’t catch your eye.

You can pick a trailer that you like and tell NetJourn-E to generate the film. Or you can generate another batch of trailers from the same prompts. Or perhaps try some new prompts, or pick your favorite trailer from the batch and iterate on that with new prompts.

Maybe you want to get into the weeds. Maybe you generate the film but then you want a new ending, or you don’t like how some of the scenes flow. You can fine-tune them with new instructions. You can write your own dialogue and have the computer-generated actors speak those lines. Tell the actors how to speak those lines, maybe perform them yourself as a demonstration and have the computer mimic that performance using the avatars of your choice. Change the lighting. Change the appearance of actors. Substitute one actor for another. Change the angle on shots.

When you’re done, you can save your creation. You can also make it public on NetJourn-E, or share it with your friends who use the service. Perhaps NetJourn-E sells a Creator license, which allows you to share your creations on other platforms.

You probably can’t make much money by doing this. You do it for fun and for love. Pretty much everyone involved in entertainment in this future does it because they love it. There are a few rockstar influencer/creators who have huge followings and make real money by creating/curating. Maybe they lavish a hundred hours on each film, polishing and perfecting it to match their vision based on what the AI churned out from a prompt. Maybe they’re just curators, known for their discerning eye in picking out good films from the morass of AI-generated content.

But there’s no need to personally involve hundreds of humans in making a single film, no reason to spend hundreds of millions on two hours of entertainment. The AI can generate a polished, professional-looking film on its own. Everything humans add to it is to match their personal taste, not to make it “objectively better.”

There are still films made entirely by human crews working with human-written scripts and human directors and human actors. There’s no money in this, no film industry, no deep pockets backing them. It’s entirely a hobby, viewed almost exclusively by the tiny audience that prefers it. Most people pick films that match their tastes exactly. They don’t care if an AI made it or a person did. And the AI can make a million films in the time it takes a team of humans to generate just one. It’s not that AI is objectively better -- it’s that there’s so much more of it to choose from.

And this is great, right? It’s the democratization of creation. When you have an idea for a film, you can just make it. You don’t need to find actors or scriptwriters or get funding or anything else. You don’t need to learn how to tell a story, how to act, how to direct. Just go to NetJourn-E, type in your idea, and poof: it’s real! And if it’s not exactly what you want, well, you can try again. You can poke it and prod and reshape it.

Probably you wouldn’t spend too long getting it right, though. It’s just a hobby. Just entertainment. It’ll never match exactly what you had in your head. But that’s always been true: filmmakers have always run into constraints of time, money, the conflicting visions of everyone involved.

And isn’t this so much better than laboring for years to make your vision come to life? Who wants to spend thousands of hours refining their craft, only to be a small part of a single film? Wouldn’t it be so much better if we removed all those unnecessary barriers to entry? If anyone, with no experience, background, training, or time investment, could turn their idea into a beautiful, polished film?

This is great, right?

And it’s still human-created, really. Humans are still supplying the ideas, and that’s what counts. Humans have always been assisted by technology. It’s like actors learning how to act by watching films, artists using photo references for their paintings, Michelangelo studying the anatomy of corpses to use in his sculptures. It’s a natural extension of the continuum.

AI is not just for films, of course. The same sort of technology makes every creative act easier: painting, sculpting, architecture, video games, virtual reality, role-playing: it’s everywhere. It’s even in education, for people who are still interested in learning skills, for whatever reason. It makes everything so easy, so effortless. It’s exactly what humans have always wanted.

Right?

I have a pretty straightforward take on the first amendment: I agree with it, and I agree with the general thrust of courts to interpret its protections broadly. The government should not stop people from saying things, and this includes things that are reprehensible and hateful. Many ideas are dangerous and harmful, and as a general matter the government should not prevent them from being expressed.

This is less because of my great faith in the marketplace of ideas and its ability to make the best ideas rise to prominence and the worst ones fade to obscurity, than because I have zero faith in the government’s competence at same. If you tell the government that they get to decide what “hate speech” is, they’re not gonna lock up white supremacists for threatening poor minorities. They’re gonna lock up twitter liberals for saying “eat the rich”. This will not work out the way you planned.

So most questions of “should the government stop X from saying Y” aren’t interesting to me because my answer is just “no” unless it meets a very high bar. Like “we should meet at [specific address] at [specific time] in order to murder [specific person]” probably rises to the level of true threat and the government can arrest you for that. But “[politician] deserves the guillotine” is tasteless and wrong, but not criminal unless, eg, you are standing in front of a working guillotine with [politician] next to you while you encourage a crowd to seize them and put them into it. But in normal contexts, it’s hyperbole. I find it offensive and obnoxious, but I wouldn’t want it criminalized.

The issue of private companies censoring speech is thornier for me.

I do not love private companies censoring speech either, especially ginormous private companies like Amazon Web Services. I do not love that we live in a world where a handful of technocrats control access to the vast majority of the American audience. One of the reasons I like the fediverse is that it’s a decentralized form of social media and therefore much harder for a single entity to decide what can and can’t be said there.

“Compelled speech” is the legal term for forcing a private person or entity to say something whether they want to say it or not. The first amendment is considered to protect individuals against compelled speech as well. Just as there are exceptions to free speech like “it is illegal to make a true threat”, there are narrow exceptions where compelled speech is legal. But the broad legal principle is “the government can’t make A say X,” and this is, again, an area where I agree with the principle.

That means that whether or not I like the decisions Amazon Web Services makes about who to host, I also don’t feel that the government should compel AWS to provide hosting services to any given entity. But getting back to “a handful of technocrats control access to most people”: it’s still kind of a terrible result. The answer to “do I distrust Big Government or Big Business” is “yes”. But Big Business doesn’t have its own army or police force so it’s slightly less entrenched. I have a little more hope that market forces will help competition arise and/or induce existing businesses to wield their influence with restraint in order to avoid that.

I kind of feel like I should have a better answer than this, on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s just as unsatisfying as my response on hate speech so at least it’s consistent?

Maybe it's not so much thornier as "the older I get, the less I feel like principles actually work out in practice" and I don't know what to use if I don't use a principle. Like maybe the principle isn't as great as I'd hoped, but throwing it out feels like a guaranteed way to get an even worse result.

So scientific research shows that, on average, setting public goals isn’t constructive. In general, people who proclaim “I will do [X]” are less likely to do [X] than those that don’t announce their goals. It might be that saying “I will do [X]” gives the brain the same reward that actually doing [X] does. Having announced it, it feels like it’s already been done and therefore doesn’t require additional effort.

I started writing fiction at 14. By age 32, I had drafted one (very rough) novella, written one novelette and two short stories, plus four other short stories as class assignments. I’d started 10+ other novels. My total word count for fiction, over the course of around 18 years, was about 200,000.

Around age 32, I started posting my writing plans and goals on my blog. I continued to do so sporadically and in a few different fashions for several years, before settling into my current method of yearly lists of goals.

Now, about 18 years later, I have published eleven novels, one collection, one standalone novelette, one novelette as part of a shared-world anthology, written four additional novels that are not yet published, and written another 20+ flash fics/short stories/novelettes. My total word count for fiction was around 2,500,000.

It is, of course, unfair to compare my teenage self to my thirty-something self (although I wrote more fiction in some years as a teen than I did in some years in my 30s). There are many factors that intersect. My current productivity builds heavily on lessons I learned when I was younger and struggled much more to figure out what I was doing. It wasn’t a matter of “Setting goals is magic and as soon as I did that, I could write 12x as fast.”

But it’s also clear that announcing my goals helps me to achieve them. I feel an obligation to myself to do what I said I would. I take pride and pleasure in accomplishing a stated objective. Writing down a list of goals gives me something to reference when I’m bored and don’t know what I want to do: “I could doomscroll more? Or wait, let me look at my list of things I want to accomplish and see if any of that looks good.” I am writing this post right now because I put “write more posts” down on my goal list for 2021.

I am not writing this to prove that “those studies saying goals don't work are WRONG!” My own experience proves almost nothing about the average person.

But likewise: the aggregate experience of all people proves relatively little about me. Or about any given individual. Yes, there are a range of things that apply to literally everyone -- we all need oxygen, water, and food to survive -- but there’s a huge range of things where individuals vary dramatically. Take two humans of the same age, gender, height, weight, and activity level: will their bodies burn the same number of calories in a day? Probably not. If they each eat identical diets at identical times, will they experience identical levels of hunger? Probably not.

If a scientific study shows that something works or doesn’t work “on average”, that can be a useful starting point to guide your own decisions. But unless the details of the study show that there's almost no variance in results -- that it fails or succeeds for 99%+ of people -- it’s not a good end point. It’s more useful to pay attention to what works or doesn’t work for you, personally, than to assume that your own results will match the average. One way or another, most people won’t match the average.

And that is even more true for anecdote-based advice on “how to succeed in business” or “how to write a novel” based on the author’s own experiences. YMMV.

Which, of course, includes this post. You should definitely ignore this, if it doesn’t work for you.

I had a long online conversation with some friends about "Ask" and "Guess" cultures (link is to a random article on the subject for those who aren't familiar with the concept). I'm going to use "Hint" here, because one person pointed out that (a) "Guess" is a misnomer because most people who grow up with people who do this are not guessing, they know and (b) "Guess" makes it sound objectively worse, and this is not an objective subject.* I don't know if "Hint" is a lot better, but I'll run with it for now.

* In the clash of another cultural concept: I prefer to refer to people by name when I'm talking about things they said. But I'm not doing that here because I don't know if the individuals involved want to be quoted by name or not. I also don't have convenient Twitter or LJ handles to refer to, which makes credit more complicated.

There are some things I've thought about this concept since I first heard of it. Like most dichotomies, it oversimplifies. Most people may lean one way or the other, but they are not going to be pure "Ask" or pure "Hint" about all things. Also, people vary in what they are Ask vs Hint about. You might be Ask-culture when it comes to visiting friends: "Would you like me to come over so we can play games?" but Hint-culture about birthday gifts: "I love Scharffenberger chocolate!" Or you might be the reverse: "It's always so much fun when we play games at your place!" and "Here's my Amazon wishlist!" You might feel it's unreasonable to ask directly for someone to email but normal to ask them to call, or the exact opposite, or that both are appropriate, or that neither are. People's inner rules about "this is too much to ask so I can only hint about wanting it" vary a lot.

My family is probably more "Ask" than "Hint": we are good with words and somewhat oblivious in general. But there are lots of things that I won't ask for. For example, when I realized that I needed a car, one of my friends pointed out that shipping a privately-bought used car halfway across the country was cheaper than the premium for buying a used car from a dealership. My parents have two cars and they basically don't use the second one: my mother almost never leaves the house without my father. It occurred to me that I could ask to buy their second car, which is a nice car in excellent condition because it's rarely driven. But I didn't, in part because asking for their car -- even asking to BUY their car at full market value -- felt like an unreasonable request. I told them I was planning to get a car and if they had offered to sell theirs, I'd've taken it. But they didn't, and I didn't ask, and that's fine.

One of the reasons that I am aware of how much I am not "Ask" culture is that I know someone who is. This is the person who inspired Wisteria, my character who is congenitally unable to take hints. And once I start thinking about all the areas where I expect hints or try to interpret them, I realize how much I rely upon them. For example, I was working with someone on a project where I hadn't heard from them recently, so I checked to make sure I'd responded to their last request and I had. But I hadn't gotten a reply, so I wanted to make sure now that they'd seen my email. We were still well-within the agreed-upon time frame so it wasn't a problem yes, but if spam filter or something had claimed my email, it would become one. I reached out on a different channel and said: "Oh hey, just wanted to make sure you got my email from [X Date]. No worries if you're busy and haven't gotten to the next step in the project yet, just making sure my email got through. :)" I included the second sentence specifically because I would react to the first sentence as "I expected to hear from you by now and I am deeply disappointed that you haven't finished the next step yet, what is your problem?" So even though the first sentence is at most a Hint, I still want to make sure that it has the right Hint-culture connotation of "I really do just want to make sure you got the email and are not waiting on me. I am not resentful or rebuking either your work or communication rate."

"Ask" and "Hint" cultures both encourage different failure modes. The failure mode of "Hint" is "passive-aggressive". Properly-done, Hint culture is designed to save face by giving both parties a graceful way out of a request. If you are eating chocolate, and I say "I love chocolate", and you say "Isn't it great?" and finish your chocolate without offering me any, then I can think "well, I didn't ask so you probably didn't realize I wanted some" and you can think "she didn't ask me for my chocolate so it's okay that I didn't share." If I simmer with resentment that you didn't offer to share your food when I Hint that I want to try it, or if you simmer with resentment that I Hinted that I want you to share, then we are Doing Hint Wrong.

The failure mode of "Ask" is "abrasive". This is the person who is "just being honest". The person who responds to "should I wear my blue dress or the red dress?" with "Those are both ugly". "Ask" culture is not a license to say anything because it's just words, and it's not a license to keep making the same request after being refused because "it doesn't hurt to ask." There is a point in Further Arrangements where Wisteria asks Justin to explain his reasoning, and Justin's reply amounts to "...because I'm an idiot." Wisteria doesn't accept this response: "My inability to follow your reasoning is my failure, not yours." This is an important facet of Wisteria for me: she can't properly participate in or understand Hint culture, and it frustrates her a lot -- but she doesn't believe Hint culture is innately inferior. It works for other people. It just doesn't work for her.

I have a lot of sympathy for people across the spectrum. I tend to assume the best about people, so if someone makes a request that I find too blunt, I think "they probably don't realize how it sounded and are not being pushy." If someone misses my hints, I assume they didn't notice them, because I know how often I miss hints. If I notice something that look like a hint to me, but I don't want to accede to the implicit request because I think it's unreasonable, I assume the hint was unintentional. Yo, guys, I am so bad at humaning. I'm gonna assume this is just as hard for the rest of you.

"You're so nice
You're not good you're not bad you're just nice
I'm not good I'm not bad I'm just right
I'm the witch
You're the world."
-- the Witch, from the musical "Into the Woods"

This stanza comes while the giant's wife is on a rampage through the town in "Into the Woods". She is hunting for Jack, who killed her husband. The witch wants to give Jack to her so she'll leave the rest of them alone. The townspeople refuse.

It's a powerful stanza, made more powerful by being delivered by the very talented Bernadette Peters. I first heard it in 1991; it is the first time I clearly remember hearing niceness disparaged.

"Nice" is not "doing the right thing". "Nice" is being pleasant and agreeable toward the people who are around you. Sacrificing your neighbor to the giantess is not nice, even if he did respond to her husband's threat to kill him by robbing her house and killing her husband.

On the other hand, is it the right thing to do, either?

Since then, decrying "niceness" has felt like a thinkpiece staple. Nice is getting along with people even when they're wrong. Nice is caving to peer pressure. Nice lacks self-confidence. Nice is for children. "Nice guys" aren't nice at all, they're entitled and manipulative. Nice is weak. "Nice", as a label, is an insult.

Nice is feminine-coded.

"Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice".

I aspire to kindness. "Kind" is not the same as "nice". Kindness is warmth, friendship, and compassion. Nice is pleasant and agreeable. Nice is Kindness's maligned younger cousin, accused of superficiality and fakery. Kindness can be cruel, but niceness never can.

I have long regarded this as an important distinction. When I talk about my aspirations, I am careful to say "kind" and not "nice". But as I get older, the distinction feels increasingly like splitting hairs.

The truth is, I don't think it is a kindness to tell a young artist "it's too hard to make a living in art, you're not that good and probably never will be, just focus on getting a regular job instead." It is not kindness to give unsolicited criticism to an author of their work, no matter how weak it is or how much I dislike it. Perhaps the former would be happier if they had a steady job and no dreams. Perhaps the latter would write better books with my advice.

Perhaps it's not my call to make.

I write fantasy novels and I can spin a million hypotheticals where the "right thing" is cruel or harsh or alienating. But in my actual life, interacting with actual people, I am hard pressed to think of a time where a situation was improved because someone decided to be mean. It's happened, I'm sure. I just don't remember it.

I do remember that one woman I worked with as a teaching assistant, who told me that all my co-workers hated me and wanted me to stop talking to them because I was clueless and rude, but they wouldn't tell me so because it wasn't "nice".

I am sure she thought she was doing the right thing.

I have many regrets in my life, but "I was too nice" has never been one of them. This is no doubt in part because niceness has never come easily to me. I don't mean to deride anyone who feels that they need to be less nice because people take advantage of them. I'm not going to say you're wrong if you think you have to take a stand against evil even if that means being unkind to some people doing the wrong thing. You do what you have to do.

I just think I'm done with making fun of niceness. Being pleasant and agreeable is hard work, too, and it makes the lives of the people around one a little bit better. I'm not going to sneer at that as "merely nice". The pleasant, agreeable, nice people of the world are not the ones making it a worse place to live. Quite the opposite, really.

A few nights ago, I got another comment on my Fake Bi Girl post, and as I was responding to it, I thought about how every comment had been positive about both the post and my decision to label The Moon Etherium as LGBT. And then I thought, "But that makes sense: comments are almost always supportive."

Followed by, "No, wait. LiveJournal comments are almost always supportive."

The first time I saw the "don't read the comments" meme, many years ago, I was actually confused by it. Comments were the main reason I blogged! I loved reading the comments! Why wouldn't you read the comments? Is it just me? Am I just lucky?

And I think luck is a factor, though less of one than my comparatively small audience and that I rarely post on controversial subjects. But Livejournal is, itself, a huge factor. Specifically, one of the factors about Livejournal that eventually made it a niche product with a small if dedicated audience: that Livejournal's basic concept was of people who not only kept journals, but who read each other's journals. That the Friends List was not named "Friend" by accident.

We used to complain about that word, "Friend", because it made the business of following and unfollowing LJs a lot more dramatic than it needed to be. But the truth is when I started on LJ fourteen years ago, it's because my friends were blogging here. I read Livejournal to keep in touch with my friends, and I wrote in it to keep my friends updated on my life. People have drifted away from LJ over the years for many reasons but I think the largest part of it is that mot people don't like to write the essay-style posts that the LJ environment encourages.

But the sense of community has somehow persevered anyway. People on LJ are less likely to hate-follow, less likely to search out things they dislike to complain about, than Twitter users. People on LJ are more likely to stay silent if they disagree than to leave a comment. The vast majority of LJ users treat blog posts as if they were written by other human beings. Elsewhere on the net, on Youtube and Twitter and personal-domain blogs, there is a much larger fraction of the community that treats posts as if they were written by content providers. By some thing, some entertainer who is not a real person or who will never actually see the comments or who otherwise doesn't matter, doesn't count, doesn't merit respect.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it's just chance or size. It's that LJ, having been used for so long as "a way to keep in touch with your friends", has held onto some of the corollary: "so of course you'll be kind to them, because they're your friends." Places that were designed as broadcaster-to-audience don't have that benefit. The audience feels free to heckle.

I'm glad this space still has that. I wish I knew how to export it. :/

I am a couple of weeks late for Bisexual Visibility Week, but I'm gonna write about bisexuality anyway. I don't think the point of the week was to have us all re-cloak when it was over.

I don't think it's a secret that I am bisexual*. I mention it now and again. I am, in some ways, perfectly comfortable with my sexuality.

But I noticed, during Bisexual Visibility Week, that I was not that comfortable about participating in it. For reasons that mostly boil down to "this is for Real Bisexual People, not you." It's weird to feel that way, after so long thinking I'd finally gotten over being defensive about my sexual orientation. But it bleeds into other things, too.

Ardent, the female protagonist of The Moon Etherium, is bisexual. At the start of the book, she's not in a relationship. Over the course of the book, she almost hooks up again with her ex-wife, and ultimately becomes romantically involved with the male protagonist.

Amazon asks for up to seven keywords for every book, and it's a good idea to use all seven because keywords are one of the main ways for readers to discover your book. One of the keywords for The Moon Etherium is "bisexual". Amazon chose to put it in two LGBT subcategories (one for fantasy and one for romance) and the Romance > Multicultural subcategory. I don't know what algorithm Amazon uses to figure out the subcategories to use; if I controlled it, I'd've listed it in three fantasy categories, not one fantasy and two romance.

Anyway, I find myself uncomfortable with having The Moon Etherium listed as an LGBT book. Sure, it's got a bisexual protagonist and, for that matter, nonbinary supporting cast members. But is that really what LGBT readers are looking for? Aren't they looking for MM or FF pairings? Perhaps MMF or MFF triads? Isn't that last the only way to be really bisexual? Because everyone knows monogamous people can't really be bi. They're actually hetero- or homosexual, depending on their partner's gender.

You don't need to tell me those last three sentences are BS. I know perfectly well that's garbage. I mean, intellectually, I know that. Emotionally, part of me believes that sexual behavior dictates sexual preference. Unless you're straight, of course. You can identify as straight without having dated anyone. That's fine. But if you identify as bi or gay, you have to prove that, by having sex with members of every gender you claim to be attracted to. No, no, just knowing that you're attracted to them isn't enough. And it doesn't count if you've only had sex with that gender as part of a threesome with someone of another gender. You might just like threesomes or something. And really, do one-night stands count? Or a short term fling? Honestly, if you were a real bisexual you'd have both male and female long-term partners. (We'll let you off the hook for finding nb ones. Maybe.)

For each "you" in that last paragraph, substitute "I", because I would never have the unmitigated gall to spew such hateful rubbish to anyone but myself.

I am so very tired of thinking these things about myself, but I do. Among my past and current lovers are ciswomen, transwomen, cismen, and nonbinary people, and my mind still thinks "you're just faking it". Really, brain? I'm 46. I realized I was bisexual over twenty years ago. Can we stop having this conversation yet? Can we at least not have it about my fictional characters? Can I at least classify Ardent as really bi even though she's not currently in a relationship with both a man and a woman?

No?

No.

I think part of why I wrote Ardent this way was, perhaps, to grapple with my internalized "fake bisexual girl" feelings. "Here, she was married for decades to a woman and now she's seeing a man and her sexual interest is just not tied to gender and she doesn't have to prove this to anyone". Maybe I thought I could fight for her in the way that I have not been able to fight myself.

I don't know if I can.

But I haven't taken the "bisexual" label off the book yet.

* I like the word "pansexual" better than "bisexual", all things considered. I am attracted to cis, trans, and nonbinary people of all genders, and I like the way the root "pan" suggests expansiveness. But bisexual is the more widely recognized term and most people seem to understand it as inclusive. I'm pretty happy to revisit using the label if people have arguments against it, though.

There's a curious phenomenon where talking about certain advantages and disadvantages is associated with guilt. For example, if I say "I was lucky, my parents had a healthy marriage", no one thinks I should or do feel guilty for having been born to a good family. But if I say "I have the advantage of being born white", a subset of people will think that I mean "I feel guilty because I was born white".

But I don't.

I was born into a culture that, like every human culture that ever was, makes a whole bunch of assumptions about how to treat individuals and how individuals should/will behave based on factors that are largely out of the individual's control. We make assumptions about what people will be like based on race, ethnicity, genitalia, socio-economic class of parents, the language they grew up speaking, the accent they have, physical attractiveness, and many, many more. We make further assumptions based on things that are somewhat within individual control but still don't necessarily mean what we think they mean. Like "if you're interested in math, you can't like makeup" and "people with a lot of tattoos can't have a professional work ethic" and "if you like sports you can't like D&D" and many other things that might have some correlation across a population, but certainly aren't 1:1.

My culture -- and this is a little unusual among human cultures, across the whole of human history -- has started to think that maybe pigeonholing its members is silly and perhaps we should think about stopping. We haven't actually STOPPED, mind you. Slowed down some. In some areas. Not all of them. Pigeonholing saves ever so much time over evaluating an entire individual each time, after all. And there are so many things one can leap to judgement on! Most of them we don't even notice, or think are perfectly justified. ("Of course all liberals are naive!" "Of course all conservatives are narrow-minded!")

This is too big a topic, which is part of my point.

I don't feel responible for the prejudices of my culture. I don't blame myself for being born white, female, middle-class, with educated parents, etc. It is a happenstance that mostly worked to my benefit, but I don't feel guilty about it, because it wasn't something I did or something I could have changed.

What I am trying to be is aware of it.

This is partly in the hopes of doing a little bit to change the massive ocean that is my culture (I've got an eyedropper! HERE I AM.)

But it's mostly about unlearning the habit of judging by my own experience. When I wrote about frugality last week, I wanted in particular to let go of faulting other people for their spending habits. To stop thinking "I managed when I was poor, so why can't everyone?" Other people are not me, and the reasons for their struggles are many and varied and mostly invisible to me. And maybe I can't learn to see those reasons (sometimes they are deliberately hidden, for that matter), but I can learn to assume such reasons exist.

I might sometimes make the wrong assumption there, too, but when I assume humans are all doing their best the world feels like a better, brighter place. Maybe all I have is this eyedropper against the ocean, but other people will wield their eyedroppers too! Things can get better.

I was talking to a coworker about this earlier today, and I'm not sure I ever talked about it on LiveJournal.

I took a philosophy class in Existentialism as an undergraduate, and one thing in particular stuck with me about existentialism: the concept of personal responsibility.

Which has been coopted by politicians now, and I don't want to use the phrase because of the baggage strewn on top of it. But I don't know what better name to use.

I need to distinguish this from "responsible behavior". There is a meaning of responsibility that is "doing what you said you would" or even "doing what you're expected to do". When I clean my room, or do the laundry, or go to work, or complete the report I said I'd do, or finish writing my novel by 12/31 so that I make the goal I set for myself -- I am behaving responsibly. This is not at all what I mean by "personal responsibility".

It is not about doing the right thing. It is about acknowledging that whatever I do, right or wrong, it is because of my choices. It is not my parents' fault if I'm in class, because I could have skipped it if I really wanted to. It is not my boss's fault that I came to work, because I could quit if I chose to. Sometimes those choices suck. I may not want to choose between looking for a new job and working late at my current job. For some people (not me), those choices may be really awful, like between getting killed yourself or killing someone else.

But for me, my choices have never been between awful things. I may be scared of the consequences, but when I think about them, the worst case scenario isn't "starved to death in a gutter" or "shot by an abusive ex" or whatever.

And I always found that idea of being responsible for my choices liberating. I was not in the thrall of teachers, parents, corporations, schools, managers, whomever. I am free to choose my own actions. Those choices may be constrained by various forces (the laws of physics for one) but I still get to make them. And within the space of those choices, I am free.

I don't know how to explain how much difference that made to me. Because I was not only free to drop out of school and be homeless and shiftless if I wanted, but I was also free to stay and learn. I was free to own the choices I had been making all along. Once I acknowledged that it was my choice, it no longer troubled me as much that I was doing it. It made all the difference in the world.

The little slice of the blogosphere that I watch has been writing about a quiz crafter by Lisa Morton, purporting to sort professional writers from hobbyists. In her commentary,

ursulav asked "Do professional accountants get this kind of crap?"

And this made me think about the areas in my life where my credentials have and have not been questioned.

Areas where I've been questioned:
* Am I a real woman?: This never happens in person and hasn't happened much if at all in the last 15+ years. But in the pre-Web days of the Internet, I got this all the time. I remember on one MUD where one particular guy asked every single alt I had, and then threatened that he'd try to get me banned for having alts when I commented on it. (Answer, yes, I am).
* A real geek? I don't even know what this means.
* A real comics fan? I used to be keen on the Marvel mutants, but I stopped buying comic books 16+ years ago. I still buy graphic novels on occasion and I read a number of webcomics. So this depends on what you mean by 'comics'.
* A real cosplayer? No, I just like to dress strangely at any venue with a reasonable tolerance for unusual attire. I don't costume in the sense of mimicking a particular character.
* A real gamer? Yes. I've even been known to drag my boyfriend to gaming events at times, although all of my SOs have also been gamers. Board games and mindless puzzle games are my favorites.
* A real writer? These are real words that I am really writing, so I guess so? I don't get paid for it and I am not a professional, however. This is my hobby.
* Really bisexual? Yes. Really.

Areas where I do not get questioned:
* Am I a real artist? I am not. I am not sure why I see a lot more "real writer" cred-checks than "real artist" ones. I don't know if illustrators (the sort of art and artists I see a lot of) are less hung up on this thing than writers, or if it's just that I'm not diligent about drawing even as a hobby, so no one asks.
* At my actual job. Despite not being qualified for half the stuff I end up doing at the bank (sure, I'll write and maintain your VBA code! why not?), no one at my job ever questions my ability. If I really can't even fake doing something, I always have to tell them because they won't ask. I have no idea why this is.
* A real furry? Technically, I can remember one person saying I wasn't, but he wasn't serious. I've never had a furry try to exclude me. (I am at the periphery of the fandom these days but still a furry).
* Really polyamorous? I don't know why 'poly' gets less doubt than 'bi', but it does. (Yes, I'm poly.)

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I thought it was interesting to reflect on what parts of my life inspire sufficient disbelief that some people feel a need to question me about it. I don't even know what the difference is, really; it all seems quite arbitrary. What do you get cred-checked on?

haikujaguar wrote a post about different kinds of listening a couple of days ago. One of the things that struck me about it was that she contrasted "listening to feelings" with "listening to ideas", and I've seen more often a similar-but-different dichotomy, between "offering validation/sympathy" and "offering advice/solutions".

To some degree, this is the stuff of social anxiety --"ZOMG I am LISTENING WRONG I didn't even know you could screw that up. D:" But it's particularly interesting to be conscious of the different response styles when you're the speaker: "when I am saying something, why am I saying it? What sort of response do I want?"

Frequently, I write about things where I don't have a strong need to receive or avoid a particular kind of engagement. If I write about what I did on my staycation or post a book review or my exercise routine, my purpose is to chronicle my life for my future reference and to share bits of me for the entertainment of my friends. Any response to these that's well-intended will be fine. I am not going to be upset if someone disagrees with my review or offers cleaning advice or suggests an alteration to my biking habits. I may not agree or accept the suggestions, and I wasn't looking for them, but I am perfectly happy to have them offered.

But sometimes I write something specifically to get advice: "why can't I get this database to do X?" and in those cases I'll stipulate I want advice: "Suggestions welcome!"

But when advice isn't welcome, like if I'm whinging about going to my day job or because I got poison ivy, and all I want is sympathy and not suggestions on how to save more money or poison-ivy-avoidance strategies (step 1: stay inside and avoid all greenery), I don't usually put up a disclaimer "not looking for advice".

... actually, a lot of the things I don't want to hear advice about, I just don't *write* about. Many of the things that I'd like my ideas to be heard about, I don't write, either. Religion. Politics. Finance, even, to a lesser degree. Topics so fraught that it's very easy to trigger defensive reactions in the listener, or to have a response trigger the same in me. Sometimes it's not even that I mind listening to contrary responses, but that I often don't have anything to add in reply. I don't start the conversation because I don't know how to end it. "Agree to disagree" doesn't seem to work as well as I might hope.

Anyway, I am wondering now if it's feasible for the person who introduces a topic also to define what they hope to gain from talking about it. Explicitly, instead of implicitly, via the dozens of social rules and cues we imperfectly share across our culture. This seems, perhaps, more achievable in blogging -- "my journal, my guidelines" -- than in normal conversation. It does seem a bit awkward, but maybe less so than 'I'm never going to talk about this at all.'

"What women want" is one of those perenial topics that always make me cringe inside. So does "what men want", for that matter.

It's not that the answers to the questions tend to be particularly stupid, or that gender differences are nonexistant. Sometimes people write things on the topic that are insightful and reasonable, or at least, not ridiculous.

But the question itself seems so profoundly misguided. It's existance implies that you can make useful generalizations about three and a half billion people, generalizations that you can or should use to guide your behavior in interacting with them. Worse than that, it sets women and men up as alien species, as if we had fundamentally different desires and that the gender differences -- the stereotypical gender differences -- were crucially important. "Women want respect" -- as if men don't! I don't think I've ever seen a "what (gender) wants" article that was both (a) reasonable and (b) not equally reasonable if applied to the other gender.

What people want is to be treated as individuals, and not the current representative of their gender. Does it really matter if 75% of women like chocolate as a Valentine's Day present, if your girlfriend doesn't? Does it matter that most men don't care about anniveraries, if your husband does? We are not cultivating a relationship with half the human race, but with particular individual members of it. Just treat them like people. Whatever tendencies they share or don't share with their gender are things we need to determine on a person-by-person basis, just like everything else about them.

I read this article by Kristine Rusch about writers and pay. I like Ms. Rusch's business writing quite a bit: she's generally sensible, knowledgable, and well-researched, although her math and assumptions are sometimes overly simplistic.

This particular essay was one of those where her assumptions struck me as especially ... peculiar. Her chief assumption is that the goal for all writers is to maximize revenue from their writing. The implication is 'If you are writing, and you are not maximizing your revenue from writing, you are clearly an idiot.'
And I find myself imagining a World of Warcraft goldseller writing a rant about how these crazy people who are playing WoW and not selling the gold their characters earn! What kind of idiots are they? Don't they know that their efforts are worth money? Don't they realize how many hundreds of hours they're throwing away for nothing?

Or a professional actor railing about the foolishness of amateur theatre: how could anyone perform in a production for free? Don't they realize that acting is a business?

Do you suppose landscapers marvel at the ridiculousness of people who choose to tend their gardens for free? Or movie critics are astonished that people pay to see movies, and then tell other people what they thought of the film for nothing?

I'd guess that the average American devotes more than half his waking hours to activities that he doesn't get paid for and doesn't care about getting paid for. There's nothing inherently foolish about doing something for free, and the fact that other people do get paid for the same activity doesn't mean you're an idiot. Your circumstances and goals may just be different.

ETA: lt's a bit unfair of me to single Ms. Rusch out on this -- she is, after all, writing about "writing as a business" and assuming that her audience is interested in making money by writing is fairly sensible -- that's her target audience, really. Still ... it's worth examining assumptions, sometimes.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

This idea has been stuck in my head for a while now.

Yesterday, I was reading an article about DC's latest reboot; they now have only two women working on the 52 DC Universe titles (one author writing two titles, and one artist doing one cover). That's out of 209 artists/writers/cover artists.

The sole female writer called on DC to hire more women, and one of her fellow creators was unhappy about that. His argument, albeit not in so many words, was 'which of the us do you want to get fired for this?'

And this seemed like entirely the wrong question. DC and Marvel's superhero comics are read by, I dunno, maybe a couple million people. Out of the seven billion people in the world, these giants in the field are reaching maybe a thousandth of a percent. And it's not that people don't like superheroes: I'd guess that at least ten times as many people watched Captain America as read even one superhero comic in 2011.

So this guy is saying 'I don't want to lose my job to some woman just because she's a woman and there aren't enough jobs for everyone'. Which is totally understandable. Except that it ignores the ability of people to MAKE MORE JOBS. It ignores that maybe if the DC Universe wasn't a No Gurlz Allowed club, maybe it would appeal to more people. Not just women, but men too. Maybe if you weren't so jealously intent on protecting your little bitty pie from anyone else getting a slice, you'd find out that you could make a much bigger pie.

But it's not just this one little thing. It's so many things where I feel like we as humans are totally misguided, where we act as if resources were not just finite but narrowly bounded, as if there's a fixed amount of wealth in the world and there can never be any more so we have to grab as much of it as we can and keep anyone else from getting their hands on it. We can't let immigrants into our country and steal OUR JOBS. We can't let people get rich because that should be OUR MONEY. We can't be happy for a friend's successful blog because those should be OUR READERS.

One blogger called it 'slottiness', when aspiring writers would get jealous of another being published, as if that author had taken their slot. But we do it with so many things. It seems like common sense to think that if one person gets X, the next person can't.

But it's still wrong. There's so much that we can create. Life is not zero-sum. We don't have to make sure someone else loses in order for us to win.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Sexist pseudoscientific crap.

This just pisses me off. Biology is not destiny. Whatever problems you have or create are not an inevitable product of your gender that you “just can’t help”. Fine, I can believe that there are certain traits which are more common to one gender than another in my society. Making that leap to “and they always have been and always will be” is utter nonsense. What my cultures is training people to do today is different from what was inculcated two hundred years ago and different from what cultures on the other side of the world are doing, and I find it very difficult to believe that your little list of anecdotes and small studies generalize to the global population from now to infinity.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that I get so tired of the little gender-based insults and excuses. What exactly is this accomplishing, anyway? -.-

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

"What are you talking about?" I asked the co-workers who were chatting near my cubicle.

The two women laughed. "Jerry* asked us a question, but he doesn't like our answer."

Jerry looked at me. "How many men would you say -- just in general, not specific ones you know -- are scum?"

I considered. "I dunno ... 5%?"

The other women giggled, while Jerry gestured to me. "See, there's an optimist."

"I said 50%," Michelle told me.

Lee offered, "65%."

I stared. "Really?"

"I'd say about the same for women," Michelle added. Lee's estimate on women was a bit lower, 50% or so.

"What about you, Jerry?" I asked him.

"I don't know. 30%? Hmmm. Maybe 2 in 10," he decided. "For both sexes."

*

I'm not sure if the wild variations in our estimates are because I'm generally kinder in evaluating people (it is awfully hard to make me feel like a person is actually bad or malign) or because they had a different idea of what was meant by scum. What about you -- how many people do you think are scum? And what qualifies a person as scum or not?

* No real names used here.

A couple of weeks ago, gender differences were all over LJ. I had some things I wanted to say about the topic, and didn't. Maybe because it didn't seem worth the trouble of writing down, maybe because everyone else seemed to have said it all, already.

Except that I never did read some of the things I most wanted to say, so maybe it hadn't all been said.

Some of what I saw a few weeks ago felt like it was aimed at making men feel ashamed for being male.

That bothered me. A lot.

I've always considered myself a feminist, in the sense of thinking "all humans are created equal and should be treated accordingly by law and society". In the sense that biology is not destiny, and that individuals should be judged by their abilities and actions, not their gender. That's what "feminist" meant to me as a kid: that women and men are equals. Maybe not "identical", but generally worth treating similarly in the absence of any other distinguishing information.

I don't know what "feminist" means to other people. To some it seems to mean "one who believes that women are victims of male oppression" or "one who thinks there's an evil conspiracy by the patriarchy to dominate women" or "one who thinks women are better than men". I don't think any of those things. (At least, not about modern American society. In some other cultures "male oppression" is a lot more applicable.) If that's what you think feminist means, then I'm not one.

I don't feel oppressed. I don't feel like a victim. I never have.

I'm not saying prejudice isn't out there, or that it doesn't affect other women in negative ways. Or even that it hasn't affected me. I don't feel it and I don't think about it, and that makes it less real to me but not less real.

At the bank where I work, at least 90% of the employees are female. At my branch, out of about twenty-five people, two are male. My department is loan operations; we do all the back-office support for loans -- preparing documents, processing payments and advances, booking loans, etc. There isn't a single man in loan operations, out of twenty-plus people. Among the sixteen loan officers, who are substantially better paid than loan ops, one is a woman. She works in collections and has no lending authority.

I don't think this is an accident, or coincidence. I don't think gender has nothing to do with it.

But I don't think it's because the bank won't hire women as loan officers, or men as loan processors. I don't think it's because men are trying to keep us down, to maintain "male privelege". I'm not even sure it is privilege, because being a loan officer is a sucky high-pressure job. The bank couldn't pay me enough to do it, and even if they did I'd be terrible at it.

I don't know what exactly causes the disparity, whether it's subtle cues lingering in the way we treat each other, or part of genetic propensity or what. But one thing I'm pretty sure of: it's not a male conspiracy against women. It's not men saying "women are too stupid/weak/incompetent" to do this job. I don't even think it's men at all, not anymore. Women are also complicit in accepting what's expected of their role. Men are complicit in accepting their roles, too.

These roles aren't imposed for the benefit of either gender above the other.

If I'd been born a man, I think I'd be a computer programmer now instead of a bank employee with an English degree. If

koogrr had been born a woman, I think she'd be an artist now instead of an engineer. I think I'm happier as a bank employee and a wannabe author than I'd be programming computers. I think Koogrr would be happier as a starving artist. That's where gender roles got us. Is it a privilege? For which?

Am I privileged to have been encouraged to place my happiness and the people I love before my career and material wealth? Is he privileged to have been encouraged to pursue material wealth and judge his worth based on his financial success?

I don't like gender roles. I don't like one-size solutions. But I don't dislike them because they screw my gender. I dislike them because they screw people. Men and women. Anyone who doesn't fit in the right box gets shafted. Stay-at-home fathers and career women, male kindergartner teachers and female loan officers. Women who don't want children and men who cry when they're upset. Women who dress for comfort and men who want to be beautiful. It doesn't matter how you don't fit in, all that matters is you're swimming against a current of expectations. Silly expectations.

haikujaguar wrote a good post on comparative pain -- the point being, it does not compare. I don't know if she was thinking about this when she wrote it, but I was when I read it.

That men get falsely accused of rape does not compare to women being raped. That women get locked out of high-pressure jobs does not compare to men dying young from the stress of high-pressure jobs. That men get judged by the size of their wallets does not compare to women being judged by the size of their chest. The one does not justify the other. It is not okay.

People seldom want to hear about the problems of others when they are weighted down by their own. Don't tell me my problems aren't real. Don't tell me they're insignificant compared to yours, or someone else's. Don't tell me it's all in my head. Don't tell me the things I see can't be real just because you don't see them. It's real to me.

Our problems are real to all of us, and we're all in this together, doing the best we can to rise above them. That's the important thing.

I'm rambing. What I want to say is this:

Most of my friends are male. This isn't because I like men better than women. I just happen to like a lot of male-dominated hobbies so I mostly meet men.

I do not feel patronized by men, or devalued, or objectified, or looked down upon. I can't imagine thinking such things as characteristics of my friends. My friends generally have more respect for my intelligence than I do. It pisses me off to see people write these things about half of the human race, about my friends, to look at men as if they need to apologize for being male, for existing, for having gotten stuck with a gender role they never asked for.

I didn't ask for my gender role either, but you know what? Mostly I'm grateful for it. I'm glad I can cry when I'm unhappy and hug my friends and say "That's a nice dress" and be sexy when I want to and all the other things I got with the Female Package Deal. When I look at the kinds of problems men have to deal with, I think, "I'm so glad that's not me."

I'm sure it works fine for plenty of men, of course. It's a pretty roomy box in America and it fits a lot of men fine.

Still.

I just want to say, to all my friends, that your gender isn't anything you need to apologize for.

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rowyn

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Entries tagged with philosophy

Everything Old Is New Again

Gender and the Internet

Machine Learning and Audio Narration

AI Art

Free Speech and Compelled Speech

"Goals Don't Work" and the Utility of Experimenting on Yourself

"Ask" and "Hint" Cultures

In Defence of Nice

Read the Comments

Fake Bi Girl

Unlearning

Responsibility

Cred Check

Knowing What You Want

"What Women Want"

Writing as !Business

The Size of the Pie

"We Just Can't Help It"

Scum

The Difference