If anything, such controversies make me want to get a copy of said literature and read it at the first possible instance. Can I call it the Streisand effect? Maybe.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that this moral compassing at the institutional level (like the article mentions) has gathered more steam after the internet went into our phones and thus became highly accessible to the general public.
As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material.
There’s only one nytimes best seller that can exist about a Mexican immigrant, now do you want that to be written by a white author or a Mexican one? If the white author writes objectively better, why is that? Perhaps encouraging minorities to write about themselves is just one of the methods we can use to solve the social problems these factoids represent?
Oh no! White men can’t write from the perspective of groups they have historically dominated and ruled! Cry me a river!
"Black" was a label applied to persons of many different cultures in the context of colonialism and slavery. In some places, such as the USA, Black became a cultural identity because it was a legal one; these people and their offspring were governed by a separate set of laws and only legally allowed to raise families with each other.
"Asian" is too broad a term to be much use outside of geography.
"Latin" is a little more coherent, based on both geography and language. It's still pretty broad though; there are common threads but I don't know anyone who identifies simply as Latin.
"White" as a cultural identity is a relatively new invention. Personally I don't see much in the way of a shared culture here. It's problematic for many because in the USA it's been very prominently used by persons and groups who've been opposed to increasing civil rights for non-whites. It's distasteful to others because it represents a flattening of culture -- in my experience, white Americans will generally more readily identify with a particular subset of European heritage and/or with their own state or region. But this may be changing.
I’m not even sure there is a single “white” culture within the US. I mainly see the idea promoted by people who want to absorb some credit for the accomplishments of others. See some of the other comments here, about computers being invented by “my people”.
It's not arbitrary when black folk were specifically enslaved and segregated due to the color of their skin, and therefore developed a culture around that shared experience.
If we enslaved people based on their baldness for a few centuries and then kept discriminating against them for another century, I am sure they would have their own culture born from that shared experience.
See the hole in your argument is that not all Black people experienced slavery.
Southern Black people were the only ones in America that did.
Then if you expand that definition globally...the number of total black people experiencing slavery from white people during that time, was actually the very small.
It's like saying all White People share a culture because the Irish had a hard time during British or American repression.
Your using one definition to support your argument but then saying that definition also doesn't apply to other groups.
FJ Haydn spent the bulk of his working career in Hungary, toward the end of his career he went to France and England and received large adoring audiences, not as some kind of exoticism, but because he was/is a giant of European/white culture.
Why would anyone say “white isn't a culture” except to express animosity towards white people?
Arch, Debian, Suse, etc. are cultures, but gnu/Linux isn't?
You said it. European culture. PoC have lived in Europe for ages. So, no, you can't say 'European/white', as that erases huge groups of people and is factually wrong.
No, it isn't. British in India were colonizers who sought to divide and subjugate the Indian population. The PoC who live in Europe aren't there to colonize it. They are part of the population and therefore the culture.
>Why would anyone say “white isn't a culture” except to express animosity towards white people?
I truly believe the word "white" does not, in practice, describe a specific culture, or even a specific set of closely related cultures, and I have no animosity toward white people. I don't think that opinion comes anywhere near the "almost exclusively held by racists" category.
> As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material.
I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical. I do think there's some level of censorship happening here and I get inklings of book burning when I consider how difficult it is to get these books.
A few days ago they were one of the top torrents on a high seas themed site. I archived them if for no other reason than because I’ve been told that I shouldn’t.
Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children. I’m personally glad that you’ve helped preserve these once-beloved cultural artifacts. However, I’d hope that anyone would hesitate to give these particular books to children in 2021.
It would be one thing if the publisher just stopped printing them. As pointed out in the article they were banned from eBay (a dubious honour achieved not even by Mein Kampf), and removed from libraries.
In terms of giving these to children - I'd argue that this is the parent's decision to make and that there are far worse things we are seem to be ok exposing children to, like advertising or social media.
>Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them.
while technically true this is also essentially wrong, if someone stops selling something for moral reasons then they are strongly implying you are immoral for acquiring the thing they have stopped selling; and it is a necessary component of the immoral that one should not have the immoral, transmit the immoral, commit the immoral or otherwise partake of the immoral.
You’d need some rule voiding publication contracts and reverting rights to the author - otherwise unethical publishers might try to game the system to get works into the public domain to avoid royalties if something seems likely to be rediscovered due to a tie-in or another work by that author becoming popular.
The Seuss foundation is free to stop publishing the books. I don’t see how that creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to prohibit sale, nor for any library that was happily lending these last week to pull them from circulation entirely.
After all of this, it is considerably easier to procure the writings of Adolf Hitler than of Dr. Seuss. That is very strange and wrong.
Did anyone say it creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to ban them? Those companies chose to do so voluntarily under their existing policies, which used to be a thing conservatives supported.
The Mein Kampf comparisons also tend to leave out two key factors: most of Dr. Seuss’ books are intended for children and they’re presented without critical analysis. I don’t think you’d find much objection to the same kind of scholarly work discussing Seuss’ works in the historical context – Dr. Seuss Goes to War being a good example of what that might look like.
I wouldn't call myself a conservative. Obviously as private companies, Amazon and eBay are able to make rules about what they allow to be sold. I do think it creates a real chilling effect when both Amazon and eBay refuse to sell these books, since they are essentially an oligopoly in book sales.
It's actually the libraries pulling them from the shelves that seems so bizarre to me. I could understand them moving them from the children's section to somewhere else, but to remove them from circulation entirely, and then presumably put a bunch of other books out on the table for banned books week is just strange.
Public libraries have historically been a big institutional force for the rights of free speech and free thought, fighting in court to be able to loan out (and keep secret the names of borrowers) very controversial books. I honestly cannot understand sacrificing those principles and all of that history over Dr. Seuss.
It's less whether you're a conservative than that almost all of the people pushing this as a story are, and they're doing it with the intention of politicizing it so you really want to look for primary sources and make sure that critical details aren't being removed.
Librarians are generally quite opposed to banning books and I haven't seen any sign that this is different: some large systems (e.g. NYPL) have said they're keeping them in the general collection and others (e.g. Chicago) have said that they're temporarily removing them from circulation while deciding what to do long-term. I would bet that the major of local decisions will end up being along the lines of either not shelving them in the children's section or having some kind of contextual note for people who request it.
Well I'm not so interested in the meta-political aspect to this. What I think this shows though is that perhaps librarians aren't quite as opposed to banning books anymore as I thought they were.
It's easy for Chicago to say that they're figuring out what to do long term, but somehow these books were all fine (and in the children's section!) for something like 70 years, and now they're suddenly radioactive.
What this suggests to me is that there has been a shift in values among librarians, and when the publisher made the decision to take them out of print, this forced a reevaluation, and then we discovered that avoiding any whiff of racism is a more important value than free speech. I think that's really sad and depressing.
I've been trying to get a Hugo award winner and the paperback was selling for $400. Sometimes old books are just hard to find. Dr Seuss wrote 60 books, its no surprise that not all are currently publish. You'll find this is also true of Isaac Asimov
It's free marketing -- or at least, a marketing amplifier. Sell enough books and you can get your name in front of a bunch more people. Those people at least know that other people are buying your book.
That said, your link's observation that it's a curated list actually means that it is more of an accolade than merely sales. It means that somebody at the Times wanted the book on the list, which says more to its readers.
It's not much, but when you're trying to stand out in a crowded market, each little bit helps. Popularity has a positive feedback effect, and it's really slow going if you can't take advantage of it. At least for a cycle or two.
On the other hand, if you can sell the "5,000 to 10,000 copies in a week" that is the supposed threshold for getting notice from the NY Times, do you really need help selling your book? Selling books gets you on the list, getting on the list sells books. Which is the bigger effect?
Given the NY Times growing irrelivance in the market, the high-profile cases of having their list gamed more than once, their ongoing war against their own users with the 3rd party tracking and bullshit they pull over cancellations, I somehow doubt their list is having much of an impact on anyone.
I dunno. I do have an indirect personal experience: a podcaster wrote a book, and asked all of his followers to pre-order it in the hopes of getting on the NYT bestseller list. Which I did, and it did.
I don't know how much that helped, but the underlying logic makes sense. He had a medium-sized niche audience, but their word of mouth wasn't going to sell a lot of extra copies. This put the book out on a world stage. And it just so happened that this particular book (a nerdy exploration of the politics of pre-Caesar Roman Republic) might appeal to the New York Times readership.
That's what the list could be for at its best: a mechanism for breaking out of your niche. I have no idea how many extra books it sold, but it was a meaningful mechanism for trying.
That's the point, as far as I can tell. An elaborate flowchart is constructed and all paths lead to DON'T, but stated in different ways, so that you cannot see the trap.
Write characters that are not exactly like you: you cannot possibly do this right and have no business attempting it. Write characters that are just like you: where's my representation?
It just needs a speech synthesizer uttering the words "The only winning move is not to play" at the end. Thus, effectively silenced by your own conclusion, other people can take your place. If you point this out, well, hasn't your kind said enough already?
My local libraries used to have day/week events specifically to read banned books. I wonder if that's still a thing? If not, publishers/libraries should bring it back as it's a win/win for them.
It's sad that the people at Star Trek couldn't find any Klingon, Vulcan, or Romulon actors to speak with honesty. Pretty much every episode is filled with earth-born actors portraying some other planet's residents.
And it's not limited to the aliens. James Doohan pretended to be a native scotsman even though he was born in Canada. Canada!!
A Bugs Life is an abominable appropriation of insect culture. You're not an ant so you lack the authority to write or read anything that represents ant culture.
I know you are being sarcastic but if ants could communicate this is exactly what they will say. The movie represents nothing from their culture and makes shit up.
Who cares. If someone misappropriated my culture for an entire movie I'll be pretty mad, who cares if someone else also took offence.
I feel like this kind of argument only serves as distraction (not implying that's your intent). Do you not think ant culture would be absolutely offended by someone doing this?
come to think of it, Hobbits and dwarfs have also been grossly caricatured. As have goblins and those "swarthy men" from South (or whatever). Tolkien's in big trouble. He is alienating us from the whole of Middle Earth, no doubt.
> In March 2020, staff at the publishing house Hachette in New York, including employees of Little Brown and Grand Central Publishing, walked out over the planned publication of Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, because the film director was the subject in the early 1990s of a molestation allegation, for which he was twice investigated without charge. Hachette caved to employees’ demands and canceled the release, which Allen later published elsewhere.
I don't really think defending Woody Allen is a good example of any of the purity politics that was first opened up with, and its use makes me suspicious of the entire essay's goodwill otherwise. It's super weird to rope in "these people don't like white people writing brown protagonists" and "the employees of this company do not want to participate in publishing the nonfiction of a credibly accused child molester".
I think the essay is significantly weakened by conflating the two in any respect.
I disagree. Living in a free and open society means defending everyone's right to have a voice, and that means defending the free speech rights of those we despise.
No one is saying Woody Allen shouldn't produce his own memoir. I am saying its weird to conflate not desiring to purchase the nonfiction rights of a credibly accused child molester and then profit off of selling that same nonfiction to otherwise significantly more niche issues such as whether or not a white author should be writing black protagonists.
The end of the essay even focuses on the race aspect! I just completely do not understand trying to conflate the purchasing of a credibly accused child molester's work to excessive purity on writing brown/black people in fiction.
The "conflating" is addressed just a couple of paragraphs later:
>The above cases are each distinct. You may agree with how the book world responded in some instances, and disagree in others. But what these cases convey is how much the literary establishment is struggling with a dread of “harm,” related both to content and authors. It speaks to the spreading sense that it thinks of itself as carrying out a moral mission, whose standards are those of progressive activism.
I think saying that it's a "progressive activism" struggle to protest giving a credibly accused child molester money by purchasing his nonfiction is extremely weird, especially when it's being compared to something so innocuous.
It's about cancelling an author even without conviction.
Innocent until proven was once a progressive achievement but it got replaced by innocent until flame war. We are back to the of witch hunting where an accusation was tantamount to a conviction.
We live in an imperfect world and justice is imperfectly applied, but for all of us to have a shot at being treated fairly when it's our turn to sit in front of a jury, it's pretty important that we let the system do it's job.
Anyone who gets to the point of a criminal trial has been credibly accused. If the accusations weren't credible, the prosecutor would not bring the case. The standard for a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt" which is a higher bar than "credibly accused" (and rightly so).
The point is the essay conflates allowing all voices to be heard with being ok with credibly accused sexual offenders. More generally though free speech goes both ways. Are you arguing that you should be forced to amplify positions you find repellent?
WTF does it even mean to be "credibly accused"? It doesn't matter how one is accused if at the end they are not convicted. This is the whole principle behind a nation of law.
But like other people, say publishing house employees, also have freedom. Not actually familiar with this particular case, but also not sure that it’s particularly relevant. Plenty of things are not illegal or not provable while still painting someone in a pretty awful light and what your arguing is that the only moral thing to do in that position is to stand back
There's some conflation going on. "Being ok with" is not the same thing as "allowing to speak." What you do with credibly accused criminals of any kind is, you punish them to the full extent of the law. If they want to write a book or something, they can still do that.
Lots of other peoples voices go into writing a book. You are in essence saying that they should all be forced to lend their voices and help someone they feel has merely dogged responsibility. Laws are not the same as justice and never will be
>Laws are not the same as justice and never will be
If the laws in a democratic country aren't on the side of justice, then neither are the people, and if the people aren't on the side of justice, an auxiliary prosecution system formed of the people won't be either.
This is incredibly reductionist. The US alone has about 330 million people. There are many poorly worded or enforced laws, and not every single person is in a unified agreement about them. And the legal/justice system itself isn't perfect.
There are the legal courts, and then there are is the court of public opinion. Is it always -fair-? No. But you can't force a private publisher to publish someone's material either.
We have a strong solution available to each of us: a wallet. Don't support publishers that cave to the court of public opinion.. or do! I'm not your parent.
Wake me up when people are being arrested for speech, or laws are being passed to restrict free speech. I see neither of these things happening (in the USA) beyond the most extreme cases.
Woody Allen has every right to write a book, but he's not entitled to a publisher publishing it. He could easily self-publish it using any one of dozens of self-publishing platforms, or just put it on the web if he wants. Nobody can really stop him unless there's something civilly actionable in there.
All I see is private companies refusing to provide a platform to content that they don't want to support (often because it offends or just turns off large numbers of customers) or violates their terms. That's not censorship in the legal sense. You aren't entitled to someone else's platform.
Carte blanche access to platforms has never been a thing. Can you imagine walking into a newspaper office in the 1980s and demanding to publish a full page classified ad with any content you want in their newspaper and then screaming "censorship!" and "cancel culture!" when they said no? They'd send you to the psychiatric emergency ward.
The right historically defends the rights of businesses to act freely and would be defending platforms and publishers if it were not far-right content that were being dropped. Since it's far-right content, now the right has suddenly decided that access to large scale platforms is an entitlement that needs to be guaranteed by the state. The right has also done a complete 180 on the anti-trust issue... both only for tech companies that operate content platforms.
It's just so transparently partisan. They wouldn't give a crap if left-wing speech were being deplatformed.
There's one last WTF here. The right was always critical of the sexual revolution going all the way back to the 1950s. This #metoo stuff would be a golden opportunity for conservatives to sling a bit of "we told you so" shade at sexual libertines, pointing out that some sexual taboos may have existed to protect people from sexual predation.
Instead the right sides with accused sex abusers and even pedophiles, but only when the accusers are "libs." It's no longer even remotely about ideas. It's about winning for the sake of winning.
Nobody owes you a megaphone. You can write what you want but a publishing house doesn't need to be involved in selling a product that they and their customers may consider abhorrent (like defending Woody Allen).
Every example in the article is like that. There's way more things wrong with American Dirt than "these people don't like white people writing brown protagonists" and to present it that was is intellectually dishonest.
It would be “super weird” if what you put in quotes was a fair account of the stance of the author. In fact, the accusations against Allen are not credible, and that was part of the point.
Marcel Duchamps Fountain was one of my favorite pieces of art because it called out the art world for judging art based on the fact that it was made by a member of the accepted 'art world' but it was a frickin urinal.
I didn't think that was the point. I thought that the point was that, within certain flavors of philosophy, there is no such thing as beauty (that is, beauty has no objective reality), and therefore that anything could be regarded as being art. Duchamps' point was that this urinal was as good as the Mona Lisa; that is, Duchamps really agreed with this viewpoint (if I understand correctly). He got upset when critics called it "pretty", because that meant that they had completely missed the point.
I've been reading Alice Miller's book "For Your Own Good" this last week.
Big chunks of her book excerpt "Mein Kampf", which I previous hadn't read at all.
I have very little problem reading Hitler's text through my own critical lens, without adopting the authors intent. I have a very different view on the world than Hitler, and I have no problem at all saying that my views are less pathological than his and further, I feel like history has judged the dude rightly and quite harshly.
Is that a bad situation? And if not, how is this different than what you're describing?
You can never know what the author intended when writing. And every reader has a different subjective experience of a piece of literature or a work of art.
So it's actually fucking impossible to even judge a work of art or writing based on the authors or readers perspective or in any thing beyond the aesthetic.
Because what you think about something may not be what someone else thinks about it.
And every persons thinking is influenced by so many different experiences: cultural, personal, moral, etc.
So to attempt to create a concrete narrative about the intentions of a specific work of art or literature is impossible.
This applies to reality as well.
I've never read Mein Kampf, but I assume Hitle has good intentions for his country and wants peace and prosperity for the particular ingroup of people he identifies with. This is the same that everyone wants for their particular ingroup. Hitler did terrible things to accomplish that.
So your perspective on Hitlers work is affected by the genocide that he commited.
However, history is written by the winners and the present reality is merely one narrative, that the winners create.
AMERICANS and every single other country in the world have commited genocide and other horrible atrocities.(see Native Americans during settler times and 400k innocent civilians killed in the middle east during the past decade)
However, they won.
If Hitler had won WW2 I can't help but wonder if the Jewish Holocaust would have been as minimized as the Native American Holocaust, and pushed under the rug.
And Hitler would have gone down in history as a hero based on the news media spinning that narrative and nationalistic exuberance.
Narratives are the most powerful thing in the world but also the most untrue.
Everyone thinks that they're right (or on the right side of history, as it were). Things like book burning only become an issue when someone that they don't agree with is doing it.
You both raise some good points, but in your case you may at least understand what Hitler was trying to communicate when you decide not to adopt his view.
To answer your question, a bad situation in my mind would be something like this example: a few years ago a relatively bright friend who had worked for a famous national politician got into a disagreement with me when I referred to The Colbert Report as satire. He did not think there was satire or that Colbert was putting on another character for the show at all. I was a big fan of the show, but it was alarming to me how many people might not understand subtlety like satire in novels and movies.
Maybe there was never a golden area when everybody got it. In Voltaire's day, did the majority of the populace comprehend his meaning? Were the majority even aware of his messages?
I have always loved reading novels from an early age, and find them superior in understanding other people's ways of thinking. As advanced and educated as many people enjoy being in the 21st century, I fear too many might still not bother to dig deeper into the intentions of a writer to truly understand what they were hinting at. It's an excellent skill applicable to other areas in life, and with controversial topics it can really help to bridge the gap in a polarized debate. Hitler is an extreme, and I personally don't believe all writing is fundamentally good and edifying to your soul, but I do think effort should be made to understand an author, especially when the writing clashes with contemporary norms. You can still discard it after carefully weighing it, but if you discard it without giving credit to what the author was trying to say because you don't even understand it, that's a loss.
These zealous critics could apply their same logic to cancel my beloved Huckleberry Finn, a book that shed light on injustice more effectively than most even though the author did not come from the same ethnic background as Jim.
> I fear too many might still not bother to dig deeper into the intentions of a writer to truly understand what they were hinting at.
Of course, how can you do this when people's experience with writing is mostly 120-character tweets that are read and reacted to on first emotional impulse.
> When things are judged, not by how the author intended, but by the readers interpretation, it’s a bad situation.
I don’t know, I think there’s a very good reason to give significant priority in judgement of acts to their consequences, especially forseeable ones, not just their intentions. That’s as true of acts of artistic creation as any other action.
That’s on top of the fact that forseeable consequences are often a better indicator of actual intent than convenient and otherwise unsupported post hoc statements of intent when an action is criticized for its actual consequences.
This article is ridiculous. The current wave of book burning, censorship and denunciation is completely different from previous ones, because I support the positions of the mob. I know that this wave of book burnings, censorship and denunciation will lead to a brighter tomorrow.
I should point out that I don't support 100% of the positions of the mob, but I won't say which ones I disagree with because I don't want to be next. The differences I have are minor, and I'm willing to change them immediately if necessary.
This line of thinking has me gravely concerned for the future of liberal democracy.
I don't know where parent lives in the world, but from my perspective in the United States, I deeply fear that there are many Americans who would support an anti-democratic coup (or mob) in a heartbeat so long as it aligned with enough of their political sentiments.
Edit: maybe parent is a little too-secretly sarcastic, but even so I suspect many others think like this unironically.
When the entire tech industry, the one that controls all of the data people see, openly admits to ensuring the left wins, you have already reached that point
> This article is ridiculous. The current wave of book burning, censorship and denunciation is completely different from previous ones, because I support the positions of the mob. I know that this wave of book burnings, censorship and denunciation will lead to a brighter tomorrow.
> I should point out that I don't support 100% of the positions of the mob, but I won't say which ones I disagree with because I don't want to be next. The differences I have are minor, and I'm willing to change them immediately if necessary.
My tired brain can't figure out if this is a joke or not?
None of this will stop until people stop listening to these puritanical prigs and their endless pronouncements. People have to stop ceding the public square to the most shrill.
Unfortunately, shrill lunacy drives "engagement", so media and social media alike swarm around it.
I've noticed this too. The recommendations I'm now getting from my audible account are full of newly-published titles promoting wokism and other morally and intellectually bankrupt junk rather than the classic titles I typically go for.
Have you tried Downpour? Their customer service is excellent. Their selection is smaller, but if you're mostly interested in classics the two catalogs are probably more comparable.
Spotify is doing stuff like that. I kept getting a bunch of podcast recommendations for things like "stop asian hate" and "navigating the workplace as a person of color". Over the summer I was getting recommendations for albums and songs called "Black Lives Matter" by no name artists. I ended up cancelling my subscription and switching to amazon music because the amount of space used to push woke political podcasts and music meant that new releases from artists I follow wasn't showing up.
Is it that, or are people suddenly becoming aware of these specific podcasts/groups due to current events? Which is more likely: spotify pushing specific agendas, or spotify employing a recommendation engine that recommends things that see a surge in listening activity?
Regarding your example of "stop asian hate"- the asian instagram community has been talking about it a lot in wake of current events. It is entirely unsurprising that people would be checking it out after being previously unaware.
It is spotify pushing an agenda. These aren't algorithmic pseudo randomness, because they're clearly labeled in manually described groups. Much of the black content was for black history month, and labeled as such, which isn't too different from google putting up a black history search page, imo. I would rate it as mildly annoying. I'm 100% for black lives matter, but I don't have much of an interest in mainstream black music channels that they were trying to promote.
Why is anything classifiable as "wokism" automatically morally and intellectually bankrupt junk? That sounds an awful lot like simply dismissing a broad category of opinions that may contain a reasonably moral/intellectual subset, much like the thing that wokism is being accused of right now.
Fair observation. But consider that proponents of "wokism" have busily engaged in censorship of thought and speech - showing no interest in a fair and open debate - while simultaneously demanding unquestioning fealty to its principles. For me, that speaks to an intrinsic and inherent moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
There is a more vicious form of cancellation going on.
- For example, only in 2003 was gay sex legal throughout the US. Is that a form of cancelling?
- It’s still legal to fire or not hire gay people. Is that a form of cancelling?
- US conservatives also fight for the right of any public official to follow the calling of Jesus by refusing to sign marriage licenses. Or the constitutional right to refuse business.
- Does one not remember the Bush Jr presidential race where a US constitution ban on gay marriage was the get out to vote issue for Christian evangelicals?
- We have doctors who cannot follow the prescriptions of their professional societies, such as the American Pediatric Society, because they are banned by law from advising youths on transgender treatment.
- There is a race around the country to make it harder for those over 65 to vote, or to reduce voting locations.
What is Cancellation? At the core of cancellation is the freedom of association. But freedom of association doesn’t make it so TX can prosecute gay men for having sex in a bedroom. Freedom of association means people either like you or don’t like you, and they will either associate with you or they won’t.
Any discussion of harmony must account for a history of cruelty.
Scott Alexander has an interesting post called Conflict vs Mistake which makes the point that fair and open debate might actually be a consequence of certain world views but not others.
> Why is anything classifiable as "wokism" automatically morally and intellectually bankrupt junk?
Because any one with minimum education in history can recognize wokism as the new cultural revolution being adapted for americans. It is not only junk it is also a vile ideology.
Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap". Classics are, at least in theory, better than that - they're the 10% that have proven over time to not be crap.
But of the "wokism" stuff, 90% of it will be crap - morally and intellectually bankrupt junk.
It's amazing to me, and my long-gone 18 year old activist self, that vocally supporting Freedom to Read week in 2021 would get me branded a right-wing bigot (if anybody cared to brand me at all, which they wouldn't.)
It's a depressingly common pattern for an oppressed group which begins to break its chains to be co-opted and weaponized by people who are more interested in revenge than justice and equality.
I think the author here misrepresented the JK Rowling thing quite a bit. The idea is not to "scour" her texts for hidden anti-trans sentiment. The idea is that Rowling makes money off of selling her books and has built an empire, and the resultant power is now used by her as a platform to propagate anti-trans speech. Quite a different issue and also quite novel (pun unintended). Death of the Author is a concurrently operating, but in my opinion separate, question.
> On June 6, 2020, Rowling retweeted an op-ed piece that discussed “people who menstruate,” apparently taking issue with the fact that the story did not use the word women. “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?
I'm still not convinced this is anti-trans. I mean it's reality so for people to want to cancel her over this is ridiculous (which sums up the woke-ideology pretty much).
This pulled quote, in isolation, might not be, sure. The question about this particular complaint is whether its meant exclusively or inclusively. Does a woman who has stopped menstruating stop being a woman? Is a woman who has never menstruated and never will, in fact, not a woman? What if these people feel in their person like women? How one reads Rowling's comment in light of these questions informs one's sense of her intent.
If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
> Does a woman who has stopped menstruating stop being a woman?
Equally does a man who wears women's clothes make them a woman? I'm happy for them to call themselves a trans-woman, and "she", but we have to have language that separates the sexes at the biological level.
> What if these people feel in their person like women?
The word "feel" in this context is extremely woolly. This is how we have gotten ourselves into this ridiculous situation where no-one can agree on anything to do with gender / sexes.
> If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
So you might be partly right on this - but given her contribution to literacy and the arts and woman's rights we know she is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate person. Given all her positive contributions to society the hostile reaction from the trans-side is telling really.
>Woman most commonly refers to gender. Very few people know the sex of most people they meet.
If one would do a general survey, most ordinary people would consider sex and gender the same thing. Most of them would also say that they know the sex of somebody they see for the first time. Which is statistically true, because people whose sex and gender don't match are truly a small minority.
>The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
For the pedantic I guess she should have said: women who are in their fertile age without health problems or taking medications which prevent menstruation.
>What sort of answer to your original question did you expect?
Guessing right most of the time isn't knowing. And people not knowing how sex and gender differ doesn't change the fact that they rely on gender markers lots and chromosomes never.
People who menstruate is much shorter than your suggestion.
>Guessing right most of the time isn't knowing. And people not knowing how sex and gender differ doesn't change the fact that they rely on gender markers lots and chromosomes never.
"gender markers" and "chromosomes" are the same thing for 99% of the population. So guessing really is knowing.
> People who menstruate is much shorter than your suggestion.
Women is even shorter and everybody in the whole world understands it.
The tl;dr of it is that she's commented about biological femininity as a real experience distinct from trans-females. That offends the ideological extreme of the trans movement which has labelled her a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist).
Excluding someone from a domestic violence shelter isn't just a way of thinking about something. Imprisoning people more likely to be raped with people more likely to rape them isn't just a way of thinking about something.
Cis and trans are opposites by definition. They existed long before they were applied to gender.
> Excluding someone from a domestic violence shelter isn't just a way of thinking about something. Imprisoning people more likely to be raped with people more likely to rape them isn't just a way of thinking about something.
True, but the relevance is not obvious because these aren’t problems caused by so called TERFs.
It’s also not true that censoring JK Rowling is required as part of solving them, either.
> Cis and trans are opposites by definition. They existed long before they were applied to gender.
Does that mean that you think that cisgender women are not in the same category as transgender women?
TE people advocate policies that create those outcomes. I've seen none support creation of separate but equal facilities for trans people. It's too costly for such a small minority they say.
Rowling hasn't been censored.
Cis women and trans women are in the category of women.
Trans exclusionary people advocate excluding trans women from women's shelters. This leads to trans women being excluded from women's shelters.
Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men. Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment. Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.
It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent. I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.
Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective. And don't play games. You asked a question. I answered.
Weird. The trans people I know and speak to have no problem with the acknowledgement of biological femininity. Actually they mostly factor that fact of world into part of what defines their identity..
I think this comment exemplifies the core of the issue. It’s not that many people actually have a problem with society holding famous people to account for their misdeeds. It’s that they simply don’t think they are misdeeds. They don’t find a problem with the things JK says and they feel like Woody Allen is probably a nice guy unfairly being attacked. Which like actually fine, that’s a legitimate position you can take which might actually be right, but it doesn’t really say anything about it being ok or not for the larger culture to sanction people
The other problem with this claim is that even if you do believe that J K Rowling's personal views are transphobic (and honestly, they probably are), she really doesn't seem to have been using her power to push them. The woke establishment that's been going after her, on the other hand, absolutely used their power to push transphobia in ways that actually mattered, including into UK law.
I mean we wouldn’t even be talking about this if she wasn’t you know a famous well respected author. I haven’t read her latest book, but my understanding is it has a character who is pretty close to the terf idea of what a trans person is which would seem like it’s using her writing to perpetuate her view
The concept that it is perpetuating her view seems very questionable to me.
Is it influenced by her view? Of course.
Does it perpetuate it? Surely that depends on how readers react to it. We are free to interpret works as we like.
My own view on this is complex.
The problems JK Rowling outlines are clearly real, but of course so are the problems of trans people in gaining acceptance in society. Both TERFs and Trans people are groups that face gendered violence.
If the mere writing of a character that holds a view ‘perpetuates it’, then don’t we need to burn all books written before the 1990s?
What do you mean? Rowling has absolutely used her power, i.e her visibility as a very prominent public figure, to write and share tweets and articles that prop up and reinforce the current transphobic discourse in the UK. I'm also not sure who you're pointing you when you say "The woke establishment that's been going after her", because as far as I know the people who have called out her transphobia have definitely opposed the various UK bills and motions you're referring to.
but it doesn’t really say anything about it being ok or not for the larger culture to sanction people
You can sanction Rowling, don't buy her books. You can criticize Rowling, you can publish books hating on Rowling, those are all great ways in a free society to show opposition. The problem is that activists want to destroy Rowling, erase her from public space, and deny others the right to buy and read her books. Rowling has enough power and stature where she isn't really threatened, but smaller authors are being "disappeared".
I mean I’m actually in a camp that this stuff can and has gone too far sometimes, but implicitly this is still almost always an argument about how bad the things said really are, because actually I’m pretty sure most people are fine with some ideas and people being “canceled”. They just think these particular ideas go too far. But the problem is that people then turn around and try to argue that really they’re just arguing for the free flow of ideas or some such
I think you're mostly right, but there are actually people who believe in the free flow of ideas. The liberals and libertarians believed it before the current spat of censorship started, and many people who just disagree with the censors this time are flocking to their banners in an alliance of convenience.
That is to say, I think there are actual true believers when it comes to free speech.
Edit: I just reread your comment and there's a "most" I missed the first time. Leaving this comment up, but safe to say I agree.
> The idea is that Rowling makes money off of selling her books and has built an empire, and the resultant power is now used by her as a platform to propagate anti-trans speech. Quite a different issue and also quite novel
People building fame in art and using that fame to advocate for causes, including the cause of preserving the marginalization of particular marginalized communities, is not novel.
This take sounds like Rowling had written Harry Potter to fulfill her dream of one day being famous and crushing transsexuals beneath her expensive heels. "When I am a billionaire author," she cackled, "I will show them all!"
Famous people are still people, and they still have opinions. Opinions you might not even agree with. Are we to exclude the famous from speaking their opinions? I would love to see how that would work, both legally and as kind of a sci-fi premise. Actors interviewed on late night shows offering only the blandest of reactions to what is said. No longer are musicians able to fund charities with their wealth, since donations are speech, as per the Supreme Court. Court battles are waged over how wealthy must be or how many Google hits are found for their name before someone is too famous to have opinions.
It lacks laser-guns and aliens, but as a very dry, Burgess-like exploration of government policy as a near-future sci-fi, it might be workable.
> This take sounds like Rowling had written Harry Potter to fulfill her dream of one day being famous and crushing transsexuals beneath her expensive heels.
First, my response was denying that the description was of a phenomenon which was in any way novel as the upthread poster claimed, it wasn’t my description.
Second, I don’t read it that way: it was simply describing that, Rowling achieved fame and then, having achieved it, used it to sell certain ideas. There was no suggestion that it was planned in advance as a strategy, or even that that use was especially prominent among her uses of the fame.
But why is it considered anti-trans speech, when a villain is "a male serial killer known to have worn a dress"?
Surely, in many other books the serial killer is a straight male. Why are their authors not accused of anti-heterosexual speech? Are we promoting some sort of discrimination against straight males? Are they the only ones allowed to be evil?
> But why is it considered anti-trans speech, when a villain is "a male serial killer known to have worn a dress"?
Mostly the cultural effects of the Hays code and decades of queer-coding villains as evil or sexually depraved in fiction and popular culture. A fictional male serial killer tends not to simply "have worn a dress," that specific detail, like all details in fiction, is intended to communicate something to the reader/viewer, and most of the time it's to present the character's non-heteronormative behavior as a symptom of their moral evil.
Technically speaking there's nothing wrong with depicting a Black person eating a watermelon and fried chicken but there's context behind the tendency to interpret it other than purely literal terms.
>Except the details of being white or male - those are not intended to communicate anything?
Not typically. Being white and male (and straight, and Christian) is considered so normative in Western society and culture that it's basically a blank slate, "default human." How often is a white character's race specifically mentioned, unless it's to form a contrast with some other non-white character's race?
It almost never happens, because white male characters are often just there. Every deviation from that norm has to be specifically mentioned and pointed out, and unless the author is part of the group or culture being portrayed, is usually done through stereotype.
If you're really curious about this matter, film analysis YouTuber Lindsay Ellis has an excellent video on the history of depictions of trans people (primarily in film) and puts Rowling's work into that context, tracing it back to Psycho and beyond.
Basically, there's a long and sordid history of the Cross Dressing Predator as a literary and film trope and this has been used against trans people heavily.
So it's not what she did, it's what other people did before her. Now, finally, we can call someone to task for it. Ah, this has so many parallels now with so many other things going on.
Being against the existence of trans people and criticizing the claims or actions of people that happen to be trans are two different things.
But the online trans community is extremely aggressive against any criticism, trying to slander whoever they consider their opponents and performing character assassinations.
Anti-trans speech may be perfectly fine. They're not saints and they're not perfect, why should they be beyond critique?
Yeah, I used to think the JK Rowling thing was just another example of Twitter activists blowing a celebrity's words out of proportion, then I watched the Contrapoints video on JK Rowling. Now I'm convinced she's not only a transphobe, but is intentionally manipulating a public which is largely ignorant of trans issues into thinking she's the victim. As you can see from plenty of the other comments, it's working.
This kind of response is precisely the thing that irks me to no end and it's something nobody will ever discuss. They'll just shun you or hurl a slogan at you as if you said something utterly ridiculous.
Let's broaden our time horizons a bit to something longer than the time it takes to read a tweet. When did you start to stand up for "trans" and oppose "anti-trans"? I'm asking a serious question, if only rhetorically. When did this become the obvious thing to do, the right thing to do, a matter of fact, and beyond discussion? Was there ever a discussion? Because all I can remember is that one day we were calling this gender dysphoria, a mental disorder, and the next day, a bunch of aggressive campus demonstrators were making demands and hurling accusations and trying to silence and bully people into going along. Then, all of a sudden, a new generation of college graduates started entering the workplace repeating these stock slogans verbatim. What are they, agents of the Komsomol?
What horrifies me is how easily people go along without question. It is truly horrifying. It horrifies me that they don't even seem to realize that that's what they're doing, floating downstream, wherever the current takes them. Milgram was crude child's play by comparison!
So when you condemn JK Rowling for disagreeing as if she had committed some crime against humanity, in light of how things actually transpired, in light of how viciously this program has been and is being implemented, I really makes me wonder.
I think that society has become so complicated that people have become detached with reality and started inventing useless solutions to rather minor problems. Now, if you so much as touch something that is problematic, you automatically become problematic, and the solution for this is just to complain about it as loudly as possible.
Correct or not, JK Rowling's thoughts about femininity are likely shared by the vast majority of the world. Exaggerating her beliefs by calling her transphobic and radical isn't going to progress trans rights in any way.
Note that this attitude is entirely monopolized by "woke culture." It happens in other spaces as well (e.g. encouragement to name and shame a company you had a bad interviewing experience with).
I simply do not understand the furor over the JK Rowling affair. I read what she wrote, and I did not see "hate", or "transphobia", and many other very extreme adjectives. When she seeked to clarify her statements she was accused of "doubling down". Fans of Life of Brian will remember the Roman amphitheatre scene when Stan wants to become Loretta:
I thought and still think it's funny, "Where's the fetus going to gestate Stan, are you going to keep it in a box?" But now I'm afraid to laugh or reference it in public. The movie is probably going to end up on a list, and its fans made to feel bad for being horrible people. I think I can both laugh at Stan, who's not real, and accept and support misgendered people, who are.
This extends beyond the contents of the book. Here a "white" (but really Catalan) man was fired from translating a poem because his identity didn't mirror the poet's.
Educating others, communicating events, and discussing these cultural touchstones is the beginning of the end for such things. It's a process (I think), and we're all collectively part of it. The end of this particular cycle may not have a definitive date though.
I want to stress that honest and open communication about opinions and a commitment to truth and the long process of fact-checking seems to be the best way forward, if not necessarily the easiest.
Funny you would mention Catalan when Catalonian public schools are trying to extinguish the use of Spanish on the basis that 60 years ago it was "the language of Franco and fascism". The amount of moral crusading in Catalonia against the use of the Spanish language is appalling.
Looks like this modern moralism really does extend much farther than publishing books.
I'm surprised more writers don't advertise with slogans like "read the dangerous book they don't want you to read."
It's also possible that the most interesting writing is happening in the self-published world, or the near-self-published world. That's where current classics like Lolita or Ulysses came from. Or much of D.H. Lawrence.
That’s what’s happening. Publications like Substack are letting authors escape the censors. Others still like Quillette, Aero, Spiked and more traditional ones like the Spectator have an anti woke consensus mission - and they represent the entire political spectrum.
I’m not sure about book publishers but the change is happening across media more widely. The progressive left keeps getting hammered in elections in Europe at least, but it seems certain institutions are going the other way, not least media.
I read a rambling self-published screed by what I can only assume is an alt-right man in his 20s called Harassment Architecture. It was really bizarre and like nothing I’d ever read. I couldn’t put it down, it felt almost pornographic him saying things that just aren’t allowed to be said. Like listening to circa 2000 Eminem in 2021. I’m honestly not even sure how I got the book, I think I was drunk and ordered it off of Amazon.
I wouldn’t say I recommend the book, but I think you’re right that there’s a lot of self published stuff now that is really off the wall.
I suppose the OP meant choosing (or being forced) to eschew mainstream publishers when publishing one’s book. Lolita and Ulysses both had to be put out by small presses in Paris where there was no censorship, though indeed this isn’t quite self-publishing because there was a publisher who took on the risk.
Letting a small publisher that was not your first choice publish your book isn’t just not “quite” self-publishing, it has nothing to do with self-publishing.
In practice, the concepts overlap more than you seem willing to admit, especially today. As a literary translator, I see this often: authors have a book they want to get out in a foreign language, but a mainstream publisher won’t touch it (due to the belief it won’t sell enough), so instead the author has to turn to a small press specializing in that kind of literature.
But here’s the thing: many of those small presses also double as vanity presses. Some of the manuscripts they publish they think are deserving literature and they take on the risk, but for other books they put out they simply accept the manuscript because the author is willing to pay them a few thousand euro (and in internal discussions with me as the translator, the publisher’s staff even admit that the book is author-funded crap). The ordinary consumer actually has no way of knowing which of the small press's books were published on literary merit, and which ones are vanity press. Also, due to the pressure on small presses to cut costs, both merit-published and vanity-press titles get the same lax proofreading and editing and poor typesetting.
That's been the primary manner of marketing a whole genre of books for decades. Therefore you can't use that slogan unless you're OK with being mistaken for that genre.
Alarmism over cancel culture is weird because cancel culture, which has always existed in one form or another, from one side or another, is what creates something to transgress against. The great, transgressive works of yesterday are so just because they caused controversy and challenge.
If transgressive works dropped without a squeek, they wouldn't be transgressive, would they? It's nonsensical to to try to preserve a space for challenging works by removing the challenge to them.
Much of the reaction is people who want to be transgressive but don't truly have the stomach for it. Especially if twitter chatter can break their spirit.
There are new conventions forming. Writers who want to break them need to learn how to put up their fists. And writing a medium article complaining about cancel culture is not how that is done.
What's actually happening: society is justifiably deciding that some things that used to pass without notice, because people were very racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever, are now recognisably and irreparably awful. And we should probably stop doing them because they are hurting people. Both directly, by being the constant micro-aggression wallpaper of marginalised lives, and indirectly, by sustaining a cultural environment that comforts bigots in their bigotry.
I don't expect HN to understand this. But it is fundamentally different from the various tirades of the Moral Majority and friends. This is not an attempt to impose a religious set of restraints. This is an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. And it is a good thing.
> I don't expect HN to understand this. But it is fundamentally different from the various tirades of the Moral Majority and friends. This is not an attempt to impose a religious set of restraints. This is an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. And it is a good thing.
But the Moral Majority was also an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. They just had different definitions of "kinder" and "awful" than you do.
If you don't like having it done to you (or viewpoints you like), then don't do it to others.
Every major publisher is a capitalist enterprise. Editors, et al., are merely devices to operate such enterprise in order to deliver monetary value to board members and shareholders. All decisions, one way or another, are toward that aim, regardless of surface appearance. Those who have a problem with the current situation actually, then, have a problem with capitalism but don't know or can't admit it. Capitalism is not a moral force (except unto itself) and just senses the wind and responds to it to perpetuate itself. The 'woke' stuff Disney used to make was Song of the South. Now it's (whatever they do these days).
I mostly agree with what you wrote, but "Capitalism is not a moral force (except unto itself)" isn't right. It absolutely is a moral force that has passed judgment on lazy, poor, and uneducated rubes who don't toil endlessly and retire unhappy to die early and not drain the system. Our society constantly shames people who don't buy the propaganda about our moral overlords, the Bezoses, Gateses, and Musks of the world.
That is what I meant by 'unto itself'. The only type of morality it allows for is what can be deployed as a defense of and perpetuation of itself. (Those whom God has blessed with riches, as the ancient tautology goes, are favored by God. Is there much distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the invisible hand of God? Did we finally invent a God that moves on its own?)
I wish the woke arbiters of what is allowed would come out with a handy color wheel that you could compare to your skin and it would tell you what you're allowed to write about.
... but for aspiring writers, there is a problem. On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences.
On the other hand, literature should be inclusive. That means including minorities, and not just as peripheral characters. We don't need more My Magical Gay Friend stories.
I haven't heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction. The only avenue that leaves is for straight white people to stop writing, and, y'know: No.
The outrage does seem selective. I mean, one of the seminal classics of science-fiction literature on the subject of gender - and a very popular book among feminist readers - is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. And I've never heard anyone complain that she wrote a black protagonist, despite not having black experiences. But on the other hand, The Left Hand of Darkness isn't much about the black experience. It's more of a travelogue of a genderless society.
So maybe that's the distinction?
American Dirt isn't just about a Mexican, it's a story of the Mexican-American immigration experience. And maybe it's right that stories like that should be written by people who're closer to them?
I'm pretty sure, having seen some interviews with Ursula K. LeGuin, that something as transgressive towards our society's assumptions about gender as The Left Hand of Darkness would not have been written or published today, and certainly not by her or anyone who had the same influences and social circles as she did.
> I haven’t heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction.
The best way to reconcile it is to stop engaging in the fallacy of division.
Literature should be inclusive. Not every individual work of literature needs to be inclusive of every identity. Yes, a cis-het-male-Euro-American writer writing about unique experiences of cis-het-male-Euro-Americans (where characters of other backgrounds are seen only through the perspective of cit-het-male-Euro-Americans) might not speak to lots of people who aren’t cis-het-male-Euro-Americans. So what? It’s not a problem that such works exist, it is a problem when such works dominate available literature to the near-exclusion of other viewpoints.
Yes, but what do you tell a straight, white writer? Not the publishing industry as a whole that has been rightly lambasted as being too homogeneous historically.
What do you tell a single writer? Should they contribute to the problem by telling more stories about white guys? Exclusively focus on their own experiences?
Or should they try to learn from people around them and include those people in their stories to create more diversity? And if so, where's the line between diversity and tokenism? Between inclusion and appropriation?
> Yes, but what do you tell a straight, white writer?
“Do what thou wilt”
I'm not really into telling artists how to art, and the problem is not one that straight white artists are particularly poised to meaningfully contribute to solving through their art in any case.
> Or should they try to learn from people around them
I think this is a good thing for people to do as people, and if they happen to be artists it will inevitably have some effect on their art, but the solution to the problem of the world of any particular art being insufficiently inclusive of marginalized viewpoints isn't for artists from nonmarginalized communities to get to know marginalized communities so that the nonmarginalized artists art can speak for the marginalized communities.
Or mind your own business and let other people write whatever they well please. It's fiction not science. Don't let the intellectual midgets bully you about what you can or can't write about.
Great literature transcends culture. Take Fiddler On The Roof, for example. People in... I forget, Japan maybe?... were saying "We understand why it's popular here, but why do they like it in America?" If you can reach to that level, it doesn't matter that you're a cis-het-male-Euro-American, or that you're a trans-gay-female-black-African. It won't matter if you set your story in America or Nigeria. Your literature will speak to lots of people in lots of different cultures and situations.
But if you're just a run-of-the-mill writer, your stuff won't transcend anything. Still, you should try to include the real variety of people that your setting really has, and to do so with as much understanding of those people as you can.
Part of the resolution is to make characters' identities peripheral. The problem with the Magical Gay Friend story isn't that they're gay, but that they're in the story to be gay. What if you took some other character and just randomly decided, "The person he's married to happens to be named Tom". That's it.
Another part is to collect characters. This is something every writer is supposed to do. They meet interesting people and build their characters using the pieces of real humans. So instead of this being "the gay character", it's based on Mike, the drone flying, amaretto-sipping, former gas station manager who went into security consulting, and really hates San Diego but has to go there all the time because his stepmom lives there. Oh, and he met his husband Tom when he needed help pumping gas because he was wearing a tuxedo on his way to a friend's wedding and didn't want to pump it himself.
Your story about Mike could be anything. He uncovers a spy ring. He's unhappy with his new job and can't figure out what to do next. He tried heroin and really, really liked it. He and Tom don't have to be gay in this story. All they have to do is be people.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Le Guin is tolerated because so many people assume, on the basis of other female authors from mid-century who wrote similar gender-questioning books, that Le Guin was a lesbian. As both a woman and a member of the LGBT community, she would therefore represent intersectionality, and in the current climate much can be forgiven such a person. (In actual fact, Le Guin was happily married to a man for decades, it just doesn’t get talked about that much because her career flourished independently of him.)
AFAICT Le Guin was criticized by feminists of her day for her decisions to be a home maker and - until later in her career - telling mostly stories of young men doing heroic things. She was "tolerated," lauded even, by the greater SciFi and Fantasy community _because_ she told stories that matched the tastes of young men back in the 60s and 70s.
It was only later that she reconciled with feminism and began writing from the feminine perspective, and received a lot of criticism from her life long fans for it!
There are valid criticisms of Left Hand of Darkness from an LGBTQ perspective, but it's also viewed as revolutionary for its time. Today, she's viewed as a complex person who contributed greatly to feminist literature - despite not being perfect - based on her merits, not because of some mistaken identity.
> On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences.
To be a bit cynical, here's a quote from Goethe:
> No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
Just because you're the same ethnicity/gender/whatever as someone else, does it mean you're "entitled" to claim you understand them? Or is it just some assumption that you can only write from experience and everything else should be disregarded?
Many great works of literature contain a large breadth of characters coming from different environments, classes, genders etc. - should they be discounted automatically because the author could not have been "authentic" when writing them?
My response to this is: why should anyone care? Write a book about whatever you want. If people want a “more authentic rendition” then read the story by the Mexican American immigrant author. If the white author has a flair to the story you enjoy, then read that. There can be annoyance and criticism as well of course. The author shouldn’t be “punished” by institutions though. Simply don’t buy the book.
> I haven't heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction.
Both arguments are pushed by the woke on purpose, to both be able to complain if no minorities are in a story and to complain if there are.
The way to reconcile it is that no one should feel forced to be inclusive (this is how you get forced token characters) and "write what you know" is not a rule set in stone. Plus it's a terrible argument because minorities are not some hivemind. For example, I'm trans and just a trans person wrote a book, stars in a movie, etc, doesn't mean I'll agree with them and how they portray trans people. In fact in the current political climate we are far more likely to disagree (I don't believe in a hundred genders, I believe you need dysphoria to be trans, etc), and I often feel any representation is making a complete mockery of my condition.
And as someone else has already pointed out, both types of books can co-exist. Lets take the extreme case that someone writes a shitty portrayal of some minority, it's bad, filled with cliches (or my reality where I feel these are actually hurtful to how we're represented, etc). So what? I'd rather have the right to critique and ridicule them then not, while also retaining my right to write whatever the hell I want. The other side's argument against my views are after all, very similar, that my view is hurtful. Who's right? Who's to judge? Currently it's only the side complaining the loudest.
And let's go further. I'm not out except to close family. I'm also bi and not out due to the culture where I live. To anyone on the street/internet I look like a "straight white man". Were I to write a book with a character modeled after me probably no one would want to publish it because it's not pc, and if it was published many would try to cancel me. Another example, I might write something historically accurate with a minority character, but history is not pretty, it's racist and cruel, and whatever I wrote would probably have the same problem because context no longer matters. Is this really the world we want to live in?
There's passion, and then there's dirty fighting. Name calling and dismissiveness. A veritable army of straw men. Unwillingness to even attempt to understand an opposing viewpoint.
I don't disagree. But isn't calling anybody who disagrees even slightly with you a racist, or a bigot, or a xenophobe, or a hate monger, or any of a thousand other things, the very height of "unwillingness to even attempt to understand an opposing viewpoint." I don't hear critics of CRT and wokism calling their opponents the most reprehensible and odious names they can imagine. I see plenty of CRT advocates doing just that. Why is this okay?
I have the feeling that this movement has the potential of destroying our public discourse culture, to undermine free thinking and remold our societies to be more unfair, capricious and despotic.
We're seeing the modern equivalents of witch hunts and book burnings.
I always have trouble with stuff like this, because my inner teenage hacker is cheering that "information wants to be free!" while at the same time I'm cognizant of the fact that we have to treat information with a certain level of care.
Here's a take I don't necessarily believe, but is about as generous to the new left as I can make it: Ideas can be powerfully virulent, and we're especially susceptible to them when they support something we already suspect (confirmation bias). Under complete deregulation, people seek out information that confirms their biases, and our societal inertia continues unrestricted. The naive solution to me is something like we have now: introduce a friction factor. People are generally lazy, and if they don't have immediate access to something, they won't seek it out. If we make problematic media difficult to find but nevertheless available, we change the general cultural milieu without outright banning difficult texts.
This obviously falls apart when it comes to introducing new texts and ideas into the mainstream - if people are disincentivized to print anything that isn't playing by the rules, it's terrible for innovation and creates a whole new brand of inertia. It's also terrible in that it's an unstable equilibrium: if people care enough to keep their foot on the gas in terms of narrowing access to virulent media, it doesn't take much to convince them to go pedal-to-the-metal and start banning everything.
The "virulent" media these days is 280 chr tweets, videos of guys talking into their phone in their car, and Facebook groups. The idea that anyone today is radicalized by long-form prose is pretty out there. Instead, banning problematic books creates the perfect rallying cry for our generation's ideologues to recruit more followers on social media platforms and Youtube. Of the people talking about the recently discontinued Seuss books, how many have ever even read them? I know I haven't.
This is true, and another reason why I have problems with my "generous" take. However, I'd also suggest that the notion of a friction factor applies to new media as well: if Twitter makes it difficult to be casually racist on their platform, but there still exist sites which allow you to be casually racist, it spares the average individual from having their mental namespace polluted with those "virulent ideas" without eliminating free speech entirely. Whether this is a positive thing, or even an acceptable course of action is something I'm very dubious of, however.
This is all just my initial take on the topic though: I always have difficulty engaging with stuff like this and forming opinions constructively since it's just an exhausting concept to try to be productive with people on.
edit: I realize now that I misunderstood your point: I thought you were saying "new media can have a radicalizing effect" to which this comment was responding to by saying "light regulation works for new media as well". I now understand you said that "old media doesn't radicalize a significant number of people" which has the obvious endpoint "light regulation of old media isn't necessary". On balance, I definitely agree with that.
> Literature used to be a place for transgressive ideas, a place to question taboos, and seek naked insights into humanity. It no longer is.
Bullshit. It still is.
It has also always been a place where doing that provoked backlash, and the path of least resistance has been to avoid doing that and follow conventional morality; that, too, has not changed.
What has changed is that particular ideas which until recently have themselves been extremely transgressive have moved their way into conventional morality, at least in substantial sectors of society, so that the backlash once associated with transgressive ideas and approaches is now being experienced with what were fairly recently conventional, safe ideas and manners of expression.
> Critics, writers and publishers are today enforcing a new vision that treats books less as a vehicle for artistic expression than as a product to be inspected for safety and wholesomeness. In the past few years, this has only gained momentum, with much of what is written about literature, old and new, becoming a series of moral pronouncements.
Pay attention, this is how the book-burnings and the witch-hunts start. "Wokism" is the new Right Wing Authoritarianism of this age.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadI have an unsubstantiated theory that this moral compassing at the institutional level (like the article mentions) has gathered more steam after the internet went into our phones and thus became highly accessible to the general public.
There’s only one nytimes best seller that can exist about a Mexican immigrant, now do you want that to be written by a white author or a Mexican one? If the white author writes objectively better, why is that? Perhaps encouraging minorities to write about themselves is just one of the methods we can use to solve the social problems these factoids represent?
Oh no! White men can’t write from the perspective of groups they have historically dominated and ruled! Cry me a river!
The wright brothers, carl benz, charles babbage, invented flight, automobiles, and computers respectively.
All very white dudes.
"Asian" is too broad a term to be much use outside of geography.
"Latin" is a little more coherent, based on both geography and language. It's still pretty broad though; there are common threads but I don't know anyone who identifies simply as Latin.
"White" as a cultural identity is a relatively new invention. Personally I don't see much in the way of a shared culture here. It's problematic for many because in the USA it's been very prominently used by persons and groups who've been opposed to increasing civil rights for non-whites. It's distasteful to others because it represents a flattening of culture -- in my experience, white Americans will generally more readily identify with a particular subset of European heritage and/or with their own state or region. But this may be changing.
There's no bald people culture.
Or innie bellybutton culture.
If we enslaved people based on their baldness for a few centuries and then kept discriminating against them for another century, I am sure they would have their own culture born from that shared experience.
Southern Black people were the only ones in America that did.
Then if you expand that definition globally...the number of total black people experiencing slavery from white people during that time, was actually the very small.
It's like saying all White People share a culture because the Irish had a hard time during British or American repression.
Your using one definition to support your argument but then saying that definition also doesn't apply to other groups.
FJ Haydn spent the bulk of his working career in Hungary, toward the end of his career he went to France and England and received large adoring audiences, not as some kind of exoticism, but because he was/is a giant of European/white culture.
Why would anyone say “white isn't a culture” except to express animosity towards white people?
Arch, Debian, Suse, etc. are cultures, but gnu/Linux isn't?
I truly believe the word "white" does not, in practice, describe a specific culture, or even a specific set of closely related cultures, and I have no animosity toward white people. I don't think that opinion comes anywhere near the "almost exclusively held by racists" category.
I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical. I do think there's some level of censorship happening here and I get inklings of book burning when I consider how difficult it is to get these books.
In terms of giving these to children - I'd argue that this is the parent's decision to make and that there are far worse things we are seem to be ok exposing children to, like advertising or social media.
while technically true this is also essentially wrong, if someone stops selling something for moral reasons then they are strongly implying you are immoral for acquiring the thing they have stopped selling; and it is a necessary component of the immoral that one should not have the immoral, transmit the immoral, commit the immoral or otherwise partake of the immoral.
Unless they donated the book rights to the public domain, they literally are telling you exactly that.
Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors, so the prices for collectibles are high. That's not unusual.
What are you proposing be done? Force the Seuss Foundation to publish books it doesn't want to publish?
After all of this, it is considerably easier to procure the writings of Adolf Hitler than of Dr. Seuss. That is very strange and wrong.
The Mein Kampf comparisons also tend to leave out two key factors: most of Dr. Seuss’ books are intended for children and they’re presented without critical analysis. I don’t think you’d find much objection to the same kind of scholarly work discussing Seuss’ works in the historical context – Dr. Seuss Goes to War being a good example of what that might look like.
It's actually the libraries pulling them from the shelves that seems so bizarre to me. I could understand them moving them from the children's section to somewhere else, but to remove them from circulation entirely, and then presumably put a bunch of other books out on the table for banned books week is just strange.
Public libraries have historically been a big institutional force for the rights of free speech and free thought, fighting in court to be able to loan out (and keep secret the names of borrowers) very controversial books. I honestly cannot understand sacrificing those principles and all of that history over Dr. Seuss.
Librarians are generally quite opposed to banning books and I haven't seen any sign that this is different: some large systems (e.g. NYPL) have said they're keeping them in the general collection and others (e.g. Chicago) have said that they're temporarily removing them from circulation while deciding what to do long-term. I would bet that the major of local decisions will end up being along the lines of either not shelving them in the children's section or having some kind of contextual note for people who request it.
It's easy for Chicago to say that they're figuring out what to do long term, but somehow these books were all fine (and in the children's section!) for something like 70 years, and now they're suddenly radioactive.
What this suggests to me is that there has been a shift in values among librarians, and when the publisher made the decision to take them out of print, this forced a reevaluation, and then we discovered that avoiding any whiff of racism is a more important value than free speech. I think that's really sad and depressing.
What now? That's not what's going on here at all.
| Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors
Why is that? Surely if both are well written/marketed enough they could both be bestsellers?
https://scribemedia.com/get-best-seller-list/
That said, your link's observation that it's a curated list actually means that it is more of an accolade than merely sales. It means that somebody at the Times wanted the book on the list, which says more to its readers.
It's not much, but when you're trying to stand out in a crowded market, each little bit helps. Popularity has a positive feedback effect, and it's really slow going if you can't take advantage of it. At least for a cycle or two.
Given the NY Times growing irrelivance in the market, the high-profile cases of having their list gamed more than once, their ongoing war against their own users with the 3rd party tracking and bullshit they pull over cancellations, I somehow doubt their list is having much of an impact on anyone.
I don't know how much that helped, but the underlying logic makes sense. He had a medium-sized niche audience, but their word of mouth wasn't going to sell a lot of extra copies. This put the book out on a world stage. And it just so happened that this particular book (a nerdy exploration of the politics of pre-Caesar Roman Republic) might appeal to the New York Times readership.
That's what the list could be for at its best: a mechanism for breaking out of your niche. I have no idea how many extra books it sold, but it was a meaningful mechanism for trying.
Write characters that are not exactly like you: you cannot possibly do this right and have no business attempting it. Write characters that are just like you: where's my representation?
It just needs a speech synthesizer uttering the words "The only winning move is not to play" at the end. Thus, effectively silenced by your own conclusion, other people can take your place. If you point this out, well, hasn't your kind said enough already?
My local libraries used to have day/week events specifically to read banned books. I wonder if that's still a thing? If not, publishers/libraries should bring it back as it's a win/win for them.
And it's not limited to the aliens. James Doohan pretended to be a native scotsman even though he was born in Canada. Canada!!
The difference is minority people can fight back.
I feel like this kind of argument only serves as distraction (not implying that's your intent). Do you not think ant culture would be absolutely offended by someone doing this?
You people make mountains out of molehills.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
I don't really think defending Woody Allen is a good example of any of the purity politics that was first opened up with, and its use makes me suspicious of the entire essay's goodwill otherwise. It's super weird to rope in "these people don't like white people writing brown protagonists" and "the employees of this company do not want to participate in publishing the nonfiction of a credibly accused child molester".
I think the essay is significantly weakened by conflating the two in any respect.
The end of the essay even focuses on the race aspect! I just completely do not understand trying to conflate the purchasing of a credibly accused child molester's work to excessive purity on writing brown/black people in fiction.
>The above cases are each distinct. You may agree with how the book world responded in some instances, and disagree in others. But what these cases convey is how much the literary establishment is struggling with a dread of “harm,” related both to content and authors. It speaks to the spreading sense that it thinks of itself as carrying out a moral mission, whose standards are those of progressive activism.
Shouldn't be a question. Anyone should be able to write whatever they want without involving identity politics/purity tests.
"Not Guilty" does not imply "Innocent"
If the laws in a democratic country aren't on the side of justice, then neither are the people, and if the people aren't on the side of justice, an auxiliary prosecution system formed of the people won't be either.
There are the legal courts, and then there are is the court of public opinion. Is it always -fair-? No. But you can't force a private publisher to publish someone's material either.
We have a strong solution available to each of us: a wallet. Don't support publishers that cave to the court of public opinion.. or do! I'm not your parent.
Woody Allen has every right to write a book, but he's not entitled to a publisher publishing it. He could easily self-publish it using any one of dozens of self-publishing platforms, or just put it on the web if he wants. Nobody can really stop him unless there's something civilly actionable in there.
All I see is private companies refusing to provide a platform to content that they don't want to support (often because it offends or just turns off large numbers of customers) or violates their terms. That's not censorship in the legal sense. You aren't entitled to someone else's platform.
Carte blanche access to platforms has never been a thing. Can you imagine walking into a newspaper office in the 1980s and demanding to publish a full page classified ad with any content you want in their newspaper and then screaming "censorship!" and "cancel culture!" when they said no? They'd send you to the psychiatric emergency ward.
The right historically defends the rights of businesses to act freely and would be defending platforms and publishers if it were not far-right content that were being dropped. Since it's far-right content, now the right has suddenly decided that access to large scale platforms is an entitlement that needs to be guaranteed by the state. The right has also done a complete 180 on the anti-trust issue... both only for tech companies that operate content platforms.
It's just so transparently partisan. They wouldn't give a crap if left-wing speech were being deplatformed.
There's one last WTF here. The right was always critical of the sexual revolution going all the way back to the 1950s. This #metoo stuff would be a golden opportunity for conservatives to sling a bit of "we told you so" shade at sexual libertines, pointing out that some sexual taboos may have existed to protect people from sexual predation.
Instead the right sides with accused sex abusers and even pedophiles, but only when the accusers are "libs." It's no longer even remotely about ideas. It's about winning for the sake of winning.
When things are judged, not by how the author intended, but by the readers interpretation, it's a bad situation.
> There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
In today’s highly polarized and tribal world, books must also be a way to signal virtue and tribe membership.
Marcel Duchamps Fountain was one of my favorite pieces of art because it called out the art world for judging art based on the fact that it was made by a member of the accepted 'art world' but it was a frickin urinal.
What actually MADE that urinal art was that it was made by a member of the artistic ingroup.
If I go hang a urinal in a museum as a web developer I will get arrested and it will be thrown out.
Big chunks of her book excerpt "Mein Kampf", which I previous hadn't read at all.
I have very little problem reading Hitler's text through my own critical lens, without adopting the authors intent. I have a very different view on the world than Hitler, and I have no problem at all saying that my views are less pathological than his and further, I feel like history has judged the dude rightly and quite harshly.
Is that a bad situation? And if not, how is this different than what you're describing?
You can never know what the author intended when writing. And every reader has a different subjective experience of a piece of literature or a work of art.
So it's actually fucking impossible to even judge a work of art or writing based on the authors or readers perspective or in any thing beyond the aesthetic.
Because what you think about something may not be what someone else thinks about it.
And every persons thinking is influenced by so many different experiences: cultural, personal, moral, etc.
So to attempt to create a concrete narrative about the intentions of a specific work of art or literature is impossible.
This applies to reality as well.
I've never read Mein Kampf, but I assume Hitle has good intentions for his country and wants peace and prosperity for the particular ingroup of people he identifies with. This is the same that everyone wants for their particular ingroup. Hitler did terrible things to accomplish that.
So your perspective on Hitlers work is affected by the genocide that he commited.
However, history is written by the winners and the present reality is merely one narrative, that the winners create.
AMERICANS and every single other country in the world have commited genocide and other horrible atrocities.(see Native Americans during settler times and 400k innocent civilians killed in the middle east during the past decade)
However, they won.
If Hitler had won WW2 I can't help but wonder if the Jewish Holocaust would have been as minimized as the Native American Holocaust, and pushed under the rug.
And Hitler would have gone down in history as a hero based on the news media spinning that narrative and nationalistic exuberance.
Narratives are the most powerful thing in the world but also the most untrue.
To answer your question, a bad situation in my mind would be something like this example: a few years ago a relatively bright friend who had worked for a famous national politician got into a disagreement with me when I referred to The Colbert Report as satire. He did not think there was satire or that Colbert was putting on another character for the show at all. I was a big fan of the show, but it was alarming to me how many people might not understand subtlety like satire in novels and movies.
Maybe there was never a golden area when everybody got it. In Voltaire's day, did the majority of the populace comprehend his meaning? Were the majority even aware of his messages?
I have always loved reading novels from an early age, and find them superior in understanding other people's ways of thinking. As advanced and educated as many people enjoy being in the 21st century, I fear too many might still not bother to dig deeper into the intentions of a writer to truly understand what they were hinting at. It's an excellent skill applicable to other areas in life, and with controversial topics it can really help to bridge the gap in a polarized debate. Hitler is an extreme, and I personally don't believe all writing is fundamentally good and edifying to your soul, but I do think effort should be made to understand an author, especially when the writing clashes with contemporary norms. You can still discard it after carefully weighing it, but if you discard it without giving credit to what the author was trying to say because you don't even understand it, that's a loss.
These zealous critics could apply their same logic to cancel my beloved Huckleberry Finn, a book that shed light on injustice more effectively than most even though the author did not come from the same ethnic background as Jim.
Of course, how can you do this when people's experience with writing is mostly 120-character tweets that are read and reacted to on first emotional impulse.
I don’t know, I think there’s a very good reason to give significant priority in judgement of acts to their consequences, especially forseeable ones, not just their intentions. That’s as true of acts of artistic creation as any other action.
That’s on top of the fact that forseeable consequences are often a better indicator of actual intent than convenient and otherwise unsupported post hoc statements of intent when an action is criticized for its actual consequences.
I should point out that I don't support 100% of the positions of the mob, but I won't say which ones I disagree with because I don't want to be next. The differences I have are minor, and I'm willing to change them immediately if necessary.
I don't know where parent lives in the world, but from my perspective in the United States, I deeply fear that there are many Americans who would support an anti-democratic coup (or mob) in a heartbeat so long as it aligned with enough of their political sentiments.
Edit: maybe parent is a little too-secretly sarcastic, but even so I suspect many others think like this unironically.
The point is to demonstrate utter obedience and submissiveness to the hivemind.
Imagine that you are 6 years old and your mom is a psychotic, occasionally violent, control freak. It's a bit like that.
What drove our society to this height of neurosis?
My tired brain can't figure out if this is a joke or not?
Unfortunately, shrill lunacy drives "engagement", so media and social media alike swarm around it.
duuuuude.
Regarding your example of "stop asian hate"- the asian instagram community has been talking about it a lot in wake of current events. It is entirely unsurprising that people would be checking it out after being previously unaware.
- For example, only in 2003 was gay sex legal throughout the US. Is that a form of cancelling?
- It’s still legal to fire or not hire gay people. Is that a form of cancelling?
- US conservatives also fight for the right of any public official to follow the calling of Jesus by refusing to sign marriage licenses. Or the constitutional right to refuse business.
- Does one not remember the Bush Jr presidential race where a US constitution ban on gay marriage was the get out to vote issue for Christian evangelicals?
- We have doctors who cannot follow the prescriptions of their professional societies, such as the American Pediatric Society, because they are banned by law from advising youths on transgender treatment.
- There is a race around the country to make it harder for those over 65 to vote, or to reduce voting locations.
What is Cancellation? At the core of cancellation is the freedom of association. But freedom of association doesn’t make it so TX can prosecute gay men for having sex in a bedroom. Freedom of association means people either like you or don’t like you, and they will either associate with you or they won’t.
Any discussion of harmony must account for a history of cruelty.
Because any one with minimum education in history can recognize wokism as the new cultural revolution being adapted for americans. It is not only junk it is also a vile ideology.
But of the "wokism" stuff, 90% of it will be crap - morally and intellectually bankrupt junk.
Possible after a time something enduring will precipitate out of recent thought.
There is no shame in confessing having sold "wokism" short, should it prove other than so much folly.
It's a depressingly common pattern for an oppressed group which begins to break its chains to be co-opted and weaponized by people who are more interested in revenge than justice and equality.
I'm still not convinced this is anti-trans. I mean it's reality so for people to want to cancel her over this is ridiculous (which sums up the woke-ideology pretty much).
If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
Equally does a man who wears women's clothes make them a woman? I'm happy for them to call themselves a trans-woman, and "she", but we have to have language that separates the sexes at the biological level.
> What if these people feel in their person like women?
The word "feel" in this context is extremely woolly. This is how we have gotten ourselves into this ridiculous situation where no-one can agree on anything to do with gender / sexes.
> If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
So you might be partly right on this - but given her contribution to literacy and the arts and woman's rights we know she is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate person. Given all her positive contributions to society the hostile reaction from the trans-side is telling really.
Those are biological females (women).
>And many women don't menstruate.
What is your point here?
The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
What sort of answer to your original question did you expect?
This is false.
> The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
It was until it was high jacked.
If one would do a general survey, most ordinary people would consider sex and gender the same thing. Most of them would also say that they know the sex of somebody they see for the first time. Which is statistically true, because people whose sex and gender don't match are truly a small minority.
>The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
For the pedantic I guess she should have said: women who are in their fertile age without health problems or taking medications which prevent menstruation.
>What sort of answer to your original question did you expect?
A possible medical breakthrough.
People who menstruate is much shorter than your suggestion.
"gender markers" and "chromosomes" are the same thing for 99% of the population. So guessing really is knowing.
> People who menstruate is much shorter than your suggestion.
Women is even shorter and everybody in the whole world understands it.
People who menstruate is more accurate.
It’s not. Its TE (or racist, or whatever) to have a TE (or racist, or whatever) opinion.
Or is it only ‘TE’ within the theoretical framework of Trans activists?
Trans people exclude CIS people from the category of Trans.
Do we call them CIS exclusionary?
Just saying someone else is exclusionary is meaningless.
Cis and trans are opposites by definition. They existed long before they were applied to gender.
True, but the relevance is not obvious because these aren’t problems caused by so called TERFs.
It’s also not true that censoring JK Rowling is required as part of solving them, either.
> Cis and trans are opposites by definition. They existed long before they were applied to gender.
Does that mean that you think that cisgender women are not in the same category as transgender women?
Rowling hasn't been censored.
Cis women and trans women are in the category of women.
This just isn’t true.
> I've seen none support creation of separate but equal facilities for trans people. It's too costly for such a small minority they say.
TERFs don’t say this. People controlling budgets do. They are are the ones withholding services from trans people. Not TERFs.
> Cis women and trans women are in the category of women.
Only according to certain trans perspectives.
You have clearly agreed there are two kinds of women. It is reasonable for them to not see one another as members of the same category.
Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men. Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment. Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.
It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent. I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.
Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective. And don't play games. You asked a question. I answered.
There are many more than 2 kinds of women!
Yes, but being allowed into women’s shelters is not the only solution to violence against trans people.
> Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men.
Do they? And if they see them as men, isn’t that their business?
I am not aware of TERFs arguing against services being provided for trans people.
> Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment.
So TERFs in general do not.
> Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.
Yes, agreed, and this is a terrible outcome but lack of services for trans people is not a consequence of TERFs.
> It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent.
This irrelevant statement to anything either of us have said so far.
> I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.
What do you mean by ‘start hedging’?
> Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective.
Of course not, but that doesn’t make it universal.
As far as I can see your argument is just based on there not being enough money for trans services.
That’s absolutely correct, but has nothing to do with TERFs.
Is it influenced by her view? Of course.
Does it perpetuate it? Surely that depends on how readers react to it. We are free to interpret works as we like.
My own view on this is complex.
The problems JK Rowling outlines are clearly real, but of course so are the problems of trans people in gaining acceptance in society. Both TERFs and Trans people are groups that face gendered violence.
If the mere writing of a character that holds a view ‘perpetuates it’, then don’t we need to burn all books written before the 1990s?
You can sanction Rowling, don't buy her books. You can criticize Rowling, you can publish books hating on Rowling, those are all great ways in a free society to show opposition. The problem is that activists want to destroy Rowling, erase her from public space, and deny others the right to buy and read her books. Rowling has enough power and stature where she isn't really threatened, but smaller authors are being "disappeared".
That is to say, I think there are actual true believers when it comes to free speech.
Edit: I just reread your comment and there's a "most" I missed the first time. Leaving this comment up, but safe to say I agree.
People building fame in art and using that fame to advocate for causes, including the cause of preserving the marginalization of particular marginalized communities, is not novel.
Famous people are still people, and they still have opinions. Opinions you might not even agree with. Are we to exclude the famous from speaking their opinions? I would love to see how that would work, both legally and as kind of a sci-fi premise. Actors interviewed on late night shows offering only the blandest of reactions to what is said. No longer are musicians able to fund charities with their wealth, since donations are speech, as per the Supreme Court. Court battles are waged over how wealthy must be or how many Google hits are found for their name before someone is too famous to have opinions.
It lacks laser-guns and aliens, but as a very dry, Burgess-like exploration of government policy as a near-future sci-fi, it might be workable.
First, my response was denying that the description was of a phenomenon which was in any way novel as the upthread poster claimed, it wasn’t my description.
Second, I don’t read it that way: it was simply describing that, Rowling achieved fame and then, having achieved it, used it to sell certain ideas. There was no suggestion that it was planned in advance as a strategy, or even that that use was especially prominent among her uses of the fame.
Surely, in many other books the serial killer is a straight male. Why are their authors not accused of anti-heterosexual speech? Are we promoting some sort of discrimination against straight males? Are they the only ones allowed to be evil?
That's not what OP is referring to. Go read her Twitter feed and blog.
Mostly the cultural effects of the Hays code and decades of queer-coding villains as evil or sexually depraved in fiction and popular culture. A fictional male serial killer tends not to simply "have worn a dress," that specific detail, like all details in fiction, is intended to communicate something to the reader/viewer, and most of the time it's to present the character's non-heteronormative behavior as a symptom of their moral evil.
Technically speaking there's nothing wrong with depicting a Black person eating a watermelon and fried chicken but there's context behind the tendency to interpret it other than purely literal terms.
Except the details of being white or male - those are not intended to communicate anything?
Not typically. Being white and male (and straight, and Christian) is considered so normative in Western society and culture that it's basically a blank slate, "default human." How often is a white character's race specifically mentioned, unless it's to form a contrast with some other non-white character's race?
It almost never happens, because white male characters are often just there. Every deviation from that norm has to be specifically mentioned and pointed out, and unless the author is part of the group or culture being portrayed, is usually done through stereotype.
https://youtu.be/cHTMidTLO60
Basically, there's a long and sordid history of the Cross Dressing Predator as a literary and film trope and this has been used against trans people heavily.
But the online trans community is extremely aggressive against any criticism, trying to slander whoever they consider their opponents and performing character assassinations.
Anti-trans speech may be perfectly fine. They're not saints and they're not perfect, why should they be beyond critique?
This kind of response is precisely the thing that irks me to no end and it's something nobody will ever discuss. They'll just shun you or hurl a slogan at you as if you said something utterly ridiculous.
Let's broaden our time horizons a bit to something longer than the time it takes to read a tweet. When did you start to stand up for "trans" and oppose "anti-trans"? I'm asking a serious question, if only rhetorically. When did this become the obvious thing to do, the right thing to do, a matter of fact, and beyond discussion? Was there ever a discussion? Because all I can remember is that one day we were calling this gender dysphoria, a mental disorder, and the next day, a bunch of aggressive campus demonstrators were making demands and hurling accusations and trying to silence and bully people into going along. Then, all of a sudden, a new generation of college graduates started entering the workplace repeating these stock slogans verbatim. What are they, agents of the Komsomol?
What horrifies me is how easily people go along without question. It is truly horrifying. It horrifies me that they don't even seem to realize that that's what they're doing, floating downstream, wherever the current takes them. Milgram was crude child's play by comparison!
So when you condemn JK Rowling for disagreeing as if she had committed some crime against humanity, in light of how things actually transpired, in light of how viciously this program has been and is being implemented, I really makes me wonder.
Correct or not, JK Rowling's thoughts about femininity are likely shared by the vast majority of the world. Exaggerating her beliefs by calling her transphobic and radical isn't going to progress trans rights in any way.
Note that this attitude is entirely monopolized by "woke culture." It happens in other spaces as well (e.g. encouragement to name and shame a company you had a bad interviewing experience with).
https://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/ayshames/Python/LORETT...
I thought and still think it's funny, "Where's the fetus going to gestate Stan, are you going to keep it in a box?" But now I'm afraid to laugh or reference it in public. The movie is probably going to end up on a list, and its fans made to feel bad for being horrible people. I think I can both laugh at Stan, who's not real, and accept and support misgendered people, who are.
This extends beyond the contents of the book. Here a "white" (but really Catalan) man was fired from translating a poem because his identity didn't mirror the poet's.
I want to stress that honest and open communication about opinions and a commitment to truth and the long process of fact-checking seems to be the best way forward, if not necessarily the easiest.
Looks like this modern moralism really does extend much farther than publishing books.
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2020-11-05/la-comision...
It's also possible that the most interesting writing is happening in the self-published world, or the near-self-published world. That's where current classics like Lolita or Ulysses came from. Or much of D.H. Lawrence.
I’m not sure about book publishers but the change is happening across media more widely. The progressive left keeps getting hammered in elections in Europe at least, but it seems certain institutions are going the other way, not least media.
I wouldn’t say I recommend the book, but I think you’re right that there’s a lot of self published stuff now that is really off the wall.
But here’s the thing: many of those small presses also double as vanity presses. Some of the manuscripts they publish they think are deserving literature and they take on the risk, but for other books they put out they simply accept the manuscript because the author is willing to pay them a few thousand euro (and in internal discussions with me as the translator, the publisher’s staff even admit that the book is author-funded crap). The ordinary consumer actually has no way of knowing which of the small press's books were published on literary merit, and which ones are vanity press. Also, due to the pressure on small presses to cut costs, both merit-published and vanity-press titles get the same lax proofreading and editing and poor typesetting.
If transgressive works dropped without a squeek, they wouldn't be transgressive, would they? It's nonsensical to to try to preserve a space for challenging works by removing the challenge to them.
There are new conventions forming. Writers who want to break them need to learn how to put up their fists. And writing a medium article complaining about cancel culture is not how that is done.
I don't expect HN to understand this. But it is fundamentally different from the various tirades of the Moral Majority and friends. This is not an attempt to impose a religious set of restraints. This is an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. And it is a good thing.
No. It’s an ideology of the elites.
I really don't expect the woke communists to accept a free society though.
But the Moral Majority was also an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. They just had different definitions of "kinder" and "awful" than you do.
If you don't like having it done to you (or viewpoints you like), then don't do it to others.
... but for aspiring writers, there is a problem. On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences.
On the other hand, literature should be inclusive. That means including minorities, and not just as peripheral characters. We don't need more My Magical Gay Friend stories.
I haven't heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction. The only avenue that leaves is for straight white people to stop writing, and, y'know: No.
The outrage does seem selective. I mean, one of the seminal classics of science-fiction literature on the subject of gender - and a very popular book among feminist readers - is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. And I've never heard anyone complain that she wrote a black protagonist, despite not having black experiences. But on the other hand, The Left Hand of Darkness isn't much about the black experience. It's more of a travelogue of a genderless society.
So maybe that's the distinction?
American Dirt isn't just about a Mexican, it's a story of the Mexican-American immigration experience. And maybe it's right that stories like that should be written by people who're closer to them?
Both books should be able to exist simultaneously.
The best way to reconcile it is to stop engaging in the fallacy of division.
Literature should be inclusive. Not every individual work of literature needs to be inclusive of every identity. Yes, a cis-het-male-Euro-American writer writing about unique experiences of cis-het-male-Euro-Americans (where characters of other backgrounds are seen only through the perspective of cit-het-male-Euro-Americans) might not speak to lots of people who aren’t cis-het-male-Euro-Americans. So what? It’s not a problem that such works exist, it is a problem when such works dominate available literature to the near-exclusion of other viewpoints.
What do you tell a single writer? Should they contribute to the problem by telling more stories about white guys? Exclusively focus on their own experiences?
Or should they try to learn from people around them and include those people in their stories to create more diversity? And if so, where's the line between diversity and tokenism? Between inclusion and appropriation?
“Do what thou wilt”
I'm not really into telling artists how to art, and the problem is not one that straight white artists are particularly poised to meaningfully contribute to solving through their art in any case.
> Or should they try to learn from people around them
I think this is a good thing for people to do as people, and if they happen to be artists it will inevitably have some effect on their art, but the solution to the problem of the world of any particular art being insufficiently inclusive of marginalized viewpoints isn't for artists from nonmarginalized communities to get to know marginalized communities so that the nonmarginalized artists art can speak for the marginalized communities.
But if you're just a run-of-the-mill writer, your stuff won't transcend anything. Still, you should try to include the real variety of people that your setting really has, and to do so with as much understanding of those people as you can.
Part of the resolution is to make characters' identities peripheral. The problem with the Magical Gay Friend story isn't that they're gay, but that they're in the story to be gay. What if you took some other character and just randomly decided, "The person he's married to happens to be named Tom". That's it.
Another part is to collect characters. This is something every writer is supposed to do. They meet interesting people and build their characters using the pieces of real humans. So instead of this being "the gay character", it's based on Mike, the drone flying, amaretto-sipping, former gas station manager who went into security consulting, and really hates San Diego but has to go there all the time because his stepmom lives there. Oh, and he met his husband Tom when he needed help pumping gas because he was wearing a tuxedo on his way to a friend's wedding and didn't want to pump it himself.
Your story about Mike could be anything. He uncovers a spy ring. He's unhappy with his new job and can't figure out what to do next. He tried heroin and really, really liked it. He and Tom don't have to be gay in this story. All they have to do is be people.
It was only later that she reconciled with feminism and began writing from the feminine perspective, and received a lot of criticism from her life long fans for it!
There are valid criticisms of Left Hand of Darkness from an LGBTQ perspective, but it's also viewed as revolutionary for its time. Today, she's viewed as a complex person who contributed greatly to feminist literature - despite not being perfect - based on her merits, not because of some mistaken identity.
To be a bit cynical, here's a quote from Goethe:
> No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
Just because you're the same ethnicity/gender/whatever as someone else, does it mean you're "entitled" to claim you understand them? Or is it just some assumption that you can only write from experience and everything else should be disregarded?
Many great works of literature contain a large breadth of characters coming from different environments, classes, genders etc. - should they be discounted automatically because the author could not have been "authentic" when writing them?
Both arguments are pushed by the woke on purpose, to both be able to complain if no minorities are in a story and to complain if there are.
The way to reconcile it is that no one should feel forced to be inclusive (this is how you get forced token characters) and "write what you know" is not a rule set in stone. Plus it's a terrible argument because minorities are not some hivemind. For example, I'm trans and just a trans person wrote a book, stars in a movie, etc, doesn't mean I'll agree with them and how they portray trans people. In fact in the current political climate we are far more likely to disagree (I don't believe in a hundred genders, I believe you need dysphoria to be trans, etc), and I often feel any representation is making a complete mockery of my condition.
And as someone else has already pointed out, both types of books can co-exist. Lets take the extreme case that someone writes a shitty portrayal of some minority, it's bad, filled with cliches (or my reality where I feel these are actually hurtful to how we're represented, etc). So what? I'd rather have the right to critique and ridicule them then not, while also retaining my right to write whatever the hell I want. The other side's argument against my views are after all, very similar, that my view is hurtful. Who's right? Who's to judge? Currently it's only the side complaining the loudest.
And let's go further. I'm not out except to close family. I'm also bi and not out due to the culture where I live. To anyone on the street/internet I look like a "straight white man". Were I to write a book with a character modeled after me probably no one would want to publish it because it's not pc, and if it was published many would try to cancel me. Another example, I might write something historically accurate with a minority character, but history is not pretty, it's racist and cruel, and whatever I wrote would probably have the same problem because context no longer matters. Is this really the world we want to live in?
I have some pet theories, but they're really speculative, and I'm not very confident in them.
Let's call that what it is. It ain't "passion."
We're seeing the modern equivalents of witch hunts and book burnings.
Here's a take I don't necessarily believe, but is about as generous to the new left as I can make it: Ideas can be powerfully virulent, and we're especially susceptible to them when they support something we already suspect (confirmation bias). Under complete deregulation, people seek out information that confirms their biases, and our societal inertia continues unrestricted. The naive solution to me is something like we have now: introduce a friction factor. People are generally lazy, and if they don't have immediate access to something, they won't seek it out. If we make problematic media difficult to find but nevertheless available, we change the general cultural milieu without outright banning difficult texts.
This obviously falls apart when it comes to introducing new texts and ideas into the mainstream - if people are disincentivized to print anything that isn't playing by the rules, it's terrible for innovation and creates a whole new brand of inertia. It's also terrible in that it's an unstable equilibrium: if people care enough to keep their foot on the gas in terms of narrowing access to virulent media, it doesn't take much to convince them to go pedal-to-the-metal and start banning everything.
This is all just my initial take on the topic though: I always have difficulty engaging with stuff like this and forming opinions constructively since it's just an exhausting concept to try to be productive with people on.
edit: I realize now that I misunderstood your point: I thought you were saying "new media can have a radicalizing effect" to which this comment was responding to by saying "light regulation works for new media as well". I now understand you said that "old media doesn't radicalize a significant number of people" which has the obvious endpoint "light regulation of old media isn't necessary". On balance, I definitely agree with that.
Bullshit. It still is.
It has also always been a place where doing that provoked backlash, and the path of least resistance has been to avoid doing that and follow conventional morality; that, too, has not changed.
What has changed is that particular ideas which until recently have themselves been extremely transgressive have moved their way into conventional morality, at least in substantial sectors of society, so that the backlash once associated with transgressive ideas and approaches is now being experienced with what were fairly recently conventional, safe ideas and manners of expression.
Pay attention, this is how the book-burnings and the witch-hunts start. "Wokism" is the new Right Wing Authoritarianism of this age.