Well, If *I* Was A Lady Writer...

If you've been in the SF/F blogosphere lately, or anywhere near it, you know we're having yet another round of the ever-amusing guy-SF-writer says something stupid about women SF writers & gets called on it & doubles down & everyone explodes / takes sides...

Sometimes, as a variation, this is played out as White-SF-Writer says something stupid about SF writers of color (continue as before).

What's really ironic (or sickening, choose your own adjective) about these very nearly annual events is, well, that they're taking place in the science fiction world.  What attracted most of us to the genre of science fiction was the fact that it looked to the future -- that it promised us progress.  That hope of a progressive mindset was a bait many of us could not resist.  I know it was (among other novels) Joanna Russ's The Female Man and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed that made me a lifelong addict.

So this -- and again, this is only the latest iteration of shit like this -- it's rough.  Over and over, when I'm teach feminism to my students, especially my male students, at the university, I explain very carefully to them how feminism is not about hating men.  But sometimes, yeah, wow.  Guys like this make it hard.

Here's a post from Athena Andreadis, over at her blog, Astrogator's Logs, saying it more clearly and more dispassionately than I am managing to:    "So Where Are The Outstanding Women of X?"