Publishers, Market Forces, and Feminism

[leahbobet]

(Okay, we're pulling out the Alan Moore icon again. Baby, why you make me do that?)

I have had an interesting shot of perspective this afternoon, brought on by coalescent's straw-poll/count of women's names on the front of the upcoming Night Shade Books anthology Eclipse and the response over at jlassen's. The chain of thought goes thusly:

1) "Huh, that is true, there are all boys on that cover."
2) "Oh, that is a Night Shade book, they are good guys and likely not participating in sexism."
3) "Okay, this is upsetting me because good people are being wailed on, and they are clearly becoming upset, and the methods of argument being used here are no-win ones."
4) GVG says "welcome to the club" and thus we get our perspective.

Now, this may just be a flaw in how I've been conducting things with regards to The Revolution. However, I'm putting it out here because I suspect it's a flaw in the discourse, or if not, it's turning into a flaw in the discourse.

I suspect that there is an element in the LJ feminist discourse where we sit around doing the Man Comes Around thing: we take names, decide who to free and who to blame, etc., and everybody won't be treated all the same. I think a chunk of the discussion around making SFF a more egalitarian place on grounds of gender has taken a turn into labelling people as sexist or not-sexist: on our team or the other team, and then it stops there.

Where do I derive this? My copious internal struggle in this case -- dealing with people I know -- versus my lack of said struggle in the case of the F&SF and sexism discussion -- dealing with people I know less well or don't know. I had people in the Good! box and am asked to move them to the Bad! box, which is harder than moving people from the Neutral! box into Good! or Bad! boxes. I think that's what we do. Move people into and out of boxes.

This is a bad thing. Here's why:

Because it trades on personality, and ultimately stunts any real change.

I'm back to the whole placebo activism idea again. I think yelling at people and then feeling better about yourself because you put them in the right box doesn't really accomplish much. Remember, sexism, racism, classism, etc. are systemic issues. If people keep saying it's the market, sure, that could be an excuse for their inaction. I suspect it's not an excuse because of that systematizing of prejudice that's reflected in other aspects of life (why's it one or two guys here if it's systemic elsewhere?) and the really fucked-up ideas we have in publishing of who has power over the whole apparatus.

We all work in the framework of the market. If the market is sexist, business decisions will carry that flavour, because otherwise those companies will go broke. Systemic prejudice doesn't just punish the people with boobs or that one drop of non-white blood. It punishes everyone who lives under it. Everyone has a role. Nobody gets to step out of line.

---

Here's my question then, because this shot of perspective and a small chain of logic have led me to what might be more effective to change the face of SFF. Yes, it's harder. I'm starting to think if it doesn't require some serious fucking thinking and a truckload of work, it might not actually be activism.

How do we change the market?

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Well--I don't see this as being a case of putting people in boxes. I see it as talking about behavior and choices made. Which, sure, to some extent you can't divorce who somebody is from what they do. But you can say, "So and so is a good person, and this thing they did was bone-headed." And you can say, "So and so is basically a good person, but has a blind spot right about here." And so on.

I think we change the market by encouraging what we want to see and discouraging or not encouraging what we don't. Slow process, but in time...

[chibibluebird.livejournal.com]

How do we change the market?

You mean to say that a significant proportion of SFF consumers refrain from buying books by female authors because they're by female authors?
I find that very hard to believe, but there are probably analyses you could do (using sales figures from both genders, but you'd have to control for things like the books' subgenres, amount of marketing, etc.)

[catrambo.livejournal.com]

One thing that I strongly suggest people interested in this issue to (and I'm not the first person to suggest this, much smarter people have preceded me) is make award nominations. If there's a story you like that you think might get overlooked and you're a SFWA member, nominate it for a Nebula, for example. I'm not saying only nominate stuff by women -- but if people want to see more stuff by women on ballots or ToCs, they may want to start exercising their own power to influence that.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that online, activism seems to be getting confused with a system of yelling in outrage for five minutes that's somewhat closer kin to throwing a tantrum (or trolling).

Actual activism (political/social etc) is harder work -- for every Greenpeace 'stunt' there's the back-up of fundraising, educational outreach, letter campaigns, boycotts... the whole 'raising awareness' thing that's topped off by carefully planned direct action.

The thing that actually changes people's attitudes isn't the stunt -- it's all the gruntwork stuff behind the stunt. The stunt is mostly to draw media attention to the issues, it's the gruntwork stuff changes the world. And the organisations who do too much screaming and finger-pointing... often just find themselves famous for screaming and finger-pointing and nothing else, even if they're right to be outraged.

How to change the market? Gruntwork, education, doing your bit, and all those quite things that aren't as much fun as witch-hunting or burning flags.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My general perception of the matter, not having read all the way through it yet, is that way too many people who get onto the internet have NO NOTION that their internet behavior reflects on them as people no less than their in-person behavior.

Another way too many people, who may or may not overlap, have NO NOTION that their every verbal utterance reflects on them as crafters of language, whether it be in bound volume, flimsy zine, or internet posting.

If I don't have a personal relationship with So-and-so, what they say on the internet may persuade me not to even try.

More thinky

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

2) "they are good guys and likely not participating in sexism."

The other thing is, and this sort of fits into the "personality" (as opposed to actions) thing, is that my immediate response to that is: "Then presumably they WANT TO KNOW if they appear to be participating in sexism".

I was posting something somewhere else about 'splitting' that I think it sort of relevant to this:

Lynn Truss says something about this in Talk to the Hand that I found sort of lighbulbish.

Roughly (my copy is on loan), she says that apologies require a splitting of self (This part of me did something. This part of me can see that it was a bad/foolish/careless thing to do, and wishes to acknowledge that, and to reconcile myself with the world, and knows how to do so) that used to be entirely normal, and that people are now taught to resist fiercely.

With the result that apologising is regarded as a form of self-immolation.

I apologise quite a lot, and people keep telling me I need to stop it. This is, you understand, people who like me and wish me well. We'd talk about it and they'd say, you know, you don't have to apologise all the time and I'd say yeah I know that, so what?

It puzzled me horribly until I came across this idea of splitting.

I think not getting the notion of splitting is a basic problem on both sides': how do we talk about behaviour w/o talking about personality? And at the same time, how do we call people on MAKING it about personality when their behaviour is called into question?

Because I feel like it's this twitch everyone has, that logic doesn't really touch. I mean, we all know that sexism is a social blight, not a personality flaw, but we all fall for it at least some of the time.

How do we get off that level and stay off?

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with the debate in question, but I wanted to let you know that I've friended you because we're both Toronto-based SF people, and Nickle says we'll probably get along. :)