A couple of years ago, a male friend who wrote from a female POV got back a letter telling him this was unethical. Not just bad writing, mind – which knowing my friend it wouldn’t be – but wrong on a moral level. He couldn’t write women, because he wasn’t one.
This worried me because I’m one of those writers who writes preferentially as the opposite gender. There have always been half a dozen of them (Heinlein was about even) and in my case, when I started writing, I just didn’t feel comfortable writing as a woman. Part of this was that I was raised to be a tomboy and, having attended an all girls’ school for five years, know that I’m not only NOT a typical female, I have no clue how typical females work. But on top of that, I didn’t know how AMERICAN females worked. (Yes, they’re more different than males. Partly, I think because women are more “creatures of the group” by evolutionary design.)
However, when I looked further into this, I found out that the problem was not writing something you’re not – phew! Those of us who have written aliens ARE grateful – but this thing called “stealing victimhood.” You’re not supposed to write anyone who can be considered down the totem pole from you and “victims of society.” Yes, yes, for this they use the whole Marxist thought thing which, as you know, makes my teeth hurt (as the fangs come out.)
But let’s forget that for a moment, because if I start beating up on Marx I’ll be here all day and I have a book to finish.
Let’s just assume that they are right and that there is inherent “victimhood” in being female, “of color” (as opposed to those translucent people you see all around. Total yucko, them. Also, they get run over all the time because people can’t see them), gay or handicapped.
Okay, so there’s “victimhood”. And? What do they mean “stealing victimhood?” Is it points in a game that you collect and can convert into cash?
My dears, I know that it doesn’t make sense, but yes, in their minds – which means the minds of many recent college graduates, editors included – YES. Yes, there’s inherent value in being a victim. Yes, this will convert into mountains of cash.
Take a deep breath. What this means is that … Yes, yes, indeed… These people BUY BOOKS because of that. And I don’t mean just for their private consumption, but for selling to other people.
Now think about it, boys, girls and dragons, when IS the last time you picked up a book in the store or downloaded a sample from Amazon, for that matter and went “This book is about a deaf pacific islander lesbian! It’s a total buy!” Right. Unless for some reason I’m interested about the life of deaf pacific islander lesbians at THAT moment, then the book better have a lot more to recommend it. I suspect most people are the same.
Except possibly editors and glitterati. The books my kids are forced to read for school, which are a fair sample of what the “intellectuals” consider good are often exactly like that “oppressed minority gets oppress” IS the book.
And the fact they think that “victimhood” is something to steal just about tells you why the publishing houses are almost all scrambling on the verge of bankruptcy.
Look, kiddies, if I want to experience someone who gets victimized I can look at being a writer struggling to survive while everyone has their hand in your pocket. Only that’s not likely to be bought and would probably confuse the readers who know we’re all rich.
I write characters of all colors, including some that don’t exist in reality. I write characters of all sexual orientations, including some that don’t exist in reality (dragons turn them on. No, really. Um… I should release that story for kindle), I write characters from every possible origin and of some impossible genders (shape changing/gender changing elf.)
What I DO NOT write are victims. Oh, some of my characters are up against huge obstacles and some of them get crushed in the end, but they go down swinging. (Not usually that type of swinging, no. I get bored writing it, guys. Sorry.) If they lose, they lose with fists balled and yelling defiance to the world.
Why? Because I have no time for victims. And I PARTICULARLY, STRONGLY despise people who think being born something like woman or melanin enhanced or gay makes you a victim. It’s funny, but none of my friends in that situation feel that way. Oh, they’re sometimes annoyed at the way people behave to them – like, who isn’t? – but that’s part of being human. None of them lies down groaning and muttering “oh, the injustice.”
So, I’ll continue writing whatever and whomever I d*mn well please. If I do it badly, you can stomp me. But you CANNOT accuse me of “stealing victimhood.”
I didn’t do it, guv. Ain’t taken no victimhood. You won’t find it anywhere on me.
*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*
According To Hoyt 
It’s worse than you think. If you write about white protestant americans (IN SPACE!) they’ll get you for insufficient diversity. If you say okay and write about virtuous dark-skinned people (IN SPACE!) you’re “appropriating” their dark-skinned virtuousness.
It’s a scam. You’re supposed to feel guilty, and the way to absolve your guilt is to buy books by V.D.S. writers. Unsurprisingly, V.D.S. writers think this is a swell arrangement.
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Hi Sarah,
One thing you said particularly struck me: “Now think about it, boys, girls and dragons, when IS the last time you picked up a book in the store or downloaded a sample from Amazon, for that matter and went ‘This book is about a deaf pacific islander lesbian! It’s a total buy!'”
I think there may be a more interesting way to frame that question, which would be this: Sarah, as a person who grew up in a Western European culture, would you say that many of the books that meant a lot to you growing up just naturally happened to feature Western European people or fantastical analogues thereof?
Because I have to confess, as a white American, that when I look back at what I was reading as a teenager, there was a decided prevalance of books starring white American and British protagonists. I certainly wasn’t consciously seeking them out — they were just there. And I wonder what it would have felt like if, instead, almost none of the books whose stories I loved throughout my entire formative years had heroes whose cultural background looked like mine?
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Okay. As someone from a different background — it didn’t matter. No, SERIOUSLY. Trust me on this. What I was looking for was someone who did interesting stuff. I couldn’t care less if they were white, purple or pink. And if you think that Portugal is covalent with anglo-saxon, let me tell you you really don’t GET Portugal. (It is MARGINALLY Western culture. Though Africa has a strong claim on us culturally.) And… it didn’t matter. Not even the pious bizarrely stilted nineteenth century stuff where British equalled “correct” mattered. If it got too thick I rolled my eyes and went “yeah, okay. Typical fricking britts.” But I read for the story and the adventure.
Something Americans don’t seem to get is that chest-pounding is not limited to Americans or Britts. Ooh, lala, my French friends, they do it. And the Portuguese? Don’t get me started. So, when reading fiction from a culturally biased point of view you equate that to “background noise.”
The idea of “if I don’t see people like me I don’t want to read it” is bizarre and strange and upside down. It’s actually a weird form of racism — you assume the “other” is not only utterly alien, but could never identify with you. Hell, I devoured Captain Morgan adventures, and he HATED Portuguese. I confess the language of some Edgar Rice Burroughs puts me off, but that’s just because “the black men” are the villains and it keeps throwing me out of the book. But that’s LANGUAGE and can be adapted to. It too can become background noise.
I can honestly and with a clean heart say I NEVER picked a book because the protagonist was Portuguese. EVER. In my entire life. Actually the only books I read with Portuguese protagonists were for literature classes in Portugal. Would I pick one up with a Portuguese protagonist? Who knows? Depends on the book. The only one I came across ever was a mystery and the writing didn’t appeal to me, so I didn’t. Would I mind if people wrote Portuguese who weren’t Portuguese? Oh, for the love of Bob (Heinlein) — only if they got it wrong. And if they wrote all Portuguese as victims they would be full of miles and miles of wrongitude. Also, they’d write boring books.
To quote Eric Flint who is a bonafide Marxist (sigh. Nobody is perfect) “The oppressed class wakes up, the oppressed class gets oppressed is not a story. It might be a pamphlet, but it’s not a story.”
If anyone wants to write Portuguese and do it right, go for it. (Hint, Dan Brown didn’t do it. And not just because his Portuguese was a villain.) I can always use good books to read.
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Among the beloved books of my very early childhood were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five/Adventure and “Seven” books (I don’t remember what they’re called in English.) Uncle Remus Stories (notable only for all the Southern animals I’d never heard of) and the fairy tales of the Countess of Segur. NOT a single one of them was Portuguese or Portuguese-biased. Did it make me feel bad about myself? Heck no. They were GOOD stories.
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>>>What I was looking for was someone who did interesting stuff. I couldn’t care less if they were white, purple or pink.
Right. I understand that. I felt and feel exactly the same way. Grew up a big Star Trek fan, which cultivated a lifelong commitment to “Hooray, All Humanity” — or, better yet, “Hooray, All Sentient Beings Across the Cosmos!” We’re all part of the same universe. I’m with you. My point is: When I look back, I realize that it wasn’t actually very challenging for me to accept a message of diversity from Star Trek, because the Enterprise represented a diverse, multiracial, multiplanetary society that was nonetheless portrayed as culturally derived in a straight line from middle America. Roddenberry gave humanity a harmonious future, which was incredibly inspirational… but he had to do it by skipping over all the messy details of how the hell we could possibly get there from here.
>>>The idea of “if I don’t see people like me I don’t want to read it” is bizarre and strange and upside down
And it’s not what I said. What I said was: In retrospect, it has occurred to me that a majority of the books I read when I was young featured protagonists who looked like me. Whereas I’ve heard plenty of African-American sf fans say, “Yeah, I grew up loving those stories too, and I really wondered how come black characters were so rarely front and center.” So, yeah, I see what they mean, because I wasn’t in the position of having to consider the converse.
>>>I can honestly and with a clean heart say I NEVER picked a book because the protagonist was Portuguese. EVER. In my entire life.
And I can honestly say I never chose a book because the protagonist was American. Or white. Or male. And I wish I could feel good about that honest fact, but as an adult living in a diverse community, I see what I failed to notice as an adolescent suburban nerd: namely, that hanging out in the science fiction shelves in the ’80s, most of the books being touted as the Hot New Epic had covers depicting white heroes and multicolored aliens, white heroes and multicolored fantasy creatures, etc. It never occurred to me while I was in the middle of it. But after the fact, with the benefit of perspective, yeah, it seems pretty obvious.
Was popular SF all I read as a youngster? Of course not. Did it loom large as the fun stuff for many formative years? It sure did.
And other people had their own
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Stephen,
Unless I’m more caffeine deficient than should be possible given how strong my coffee is… I just have two things to say:
1: See a doctor and have them check your blood oxygen levels.
2: As Mark Recchi of my beloved Boston Bruins has been telling his team mates: Get out of your comfort zone.
XOXO,
A melanin enhanced American
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Mike,
I wish I could have you deliver that message to my fifteen-year-old self, who did indeed need desperately to get out of his comfort zone. It took me a while to do so.
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I’d climb down from this one, Stephen.
First off, it’s going to lead you down Bruce Sterling’s old and odd notion that SF ought to be writing about characters that we can’t understand, because
Come the Revolutionafter the Transhumanist Singularity, which will happen Any Day Now, humans will have changed so much that we won’t be able to conceive of what it’s like to be them. The flaw here, of course, is that fiction is primarily focused on characters, and a character that can’t be comprehended can’t be sustained for more than a few thousand words.Second, as Sarah’s already beaten you with, a white American protagonist in a future or other culture is alien to many readers. In my case, as a Choctaw Hungarian Buddhist Aspergers geek growing up in a bilingual Spanish/English household at 8000 feet altitude on a cattle ranch, reading about someone playing baseball on a grassy ball field in New Jersey was an alien environment and culture.
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>>>reading about someone playing baseball on a grassy ball field in New Jersey was an alien environment and culture.
Charlie — that’s exactly the point I was trying to make. My apologies for having failed to communicate it clearly.
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Hi, Stephen,
You probably have no idea how amazingly US-centric that viewpoint is. I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t. See, the US is kind of the elephant in the room here – it’s so culturally dominant in so much of the world, and so insular because there really isn’t any need to pay much attention to what’s going on elsewhere that there’s this built in assumption that everyone is either like mainstream US culture (which is a misnomer in itself – which mainstream US culture. I’ve lived in two US states, and it’s like being in two different countries that just happen to mostly speak the same language) or incomprehensibly alien and – often – weirdly virtuous as a result.
Not that this is surprising – you can see the flaws in your own culture, where someone else’s culture doesn’t start showing the cracks until you’ve lived in it for a while. Usually, anyway. Some are just so noxious it’s obvious even from the outside when they’re putting on their best face. Also, unless you’ve lived – several years, by preference – in another culture – you don’t notice your built in biases. It’s human nature.
I grew up not in the USA, in a time and place where the ideal skin color was dark bronze. Pale skin meant “unhealthy”. I don’t think anything I read involved protagonists from any culture that was familiar to me – a lot of British, a teensy smattering of US, talking animals, mythical critters, people who’d never seen my world and wouldn’t survive a day in it if they did end up there.
Honestly, the US in general needs to stop getting its collective knickers in a knot over melanin deficiency, and stop assuming that anyone who isn’t currently on the top of some arbitrary hierarchy must be a victim. Yes, the US has had an unfortunate history when it comes to melanin enhancement. Continuing to harp on that and assuming that someone who was on the winning side isn’t capable of imagining what it was like to be on the losing side is just ridiculous. Everyone’s been victimized at some stage. Most of us grow up and get over it – but telling a group of people they “own” their victimization and are victims is the most patronizing and – yes – outright racist things you can possibly do to them. That’s saying that these people aren’t capable of competing on equal terms with the winning side, so they’re going to get all kinds of concessions, like no-one else is allowed to write from their point of view.
Oy. Now I’m heading into a nasty rant, just because you hit a serious hot-button of mine.
I’ll finish off with this little tidbit – I was raised in Australia. You hear noises occasionally about how the place is horribly racist: it isn’t. All it takes to be accepted is to give as good as you get, and pull your weight. The language… It’s all part of the culture. You throw casual insults at the people you like, and someone you don’t like gets politeness that makes the polar ice caps seem hot.
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Whereas to me sci-fi is the one genre where I don’t expect the US-centric WASP population and am not shocked to not find it. Of course this could be laid to my recent Alastair Reynolds binge, where some of the humans are barely so.
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This reminds me of the time your son was told to write a paper about his “native culture” where the teacher was hoping for some exotic rural Portugal story.
I seem to recall that your emotional response was similar.
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I have a two word answer for that type — it’s the only appropriate one, in my not-so-very-humble opinion. It’s not “Happy Birthday.”
M
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That’s really kind of funny, Sarah. Not only have I been complimented for being able to write male AND female genders quite authentically (down to internal dialogue), but I wonder how these people would feel about the book I co-authored with an older gentleman and which featured a woman of Vietnamese descent as the protagonist. She was strong, intelligent, and capable, and (as a result of the aliens, who had THREE genders) became even more so by the end of the book, and established a cross-planet relationship in the end…
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It seems to me that if victimhood can be stolen, then it has value, which means that it could be traded on the victimhood market, thus increasing everyone’s wealth.
Sarah says: “when IS the last time you picked up a book in the store or downloaded a sample from Amazon, for that matter and went ‘This book is about a deaf pacific islander lesbian! It’s a total buy!’ ”
The average school district thinks this way. And at the same time, they also think that the average adolescent is only interested in settings and stories that are completely familiar to him.
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Stephen,
Actually I DO like to read about different. I don’t care who writes it. I Just don’t like VICTIMS as protagonists. I love the Judge Dee mysteries, for instance even though they were “chronicled” by someone from Holland. (Actually possibly a good thing, since China by Chinese almost feels like another world to anyone not from there. Through western eyes it gives us “entry” into the sheer alienness.) I also loved Hughart’s trilogy and can only hope at some point he’ll feel like finishing it. Other, for instance Japanese medieval mysteries, left me cold, simply because I didn’t like the characters. That could happen to any book, set wherever. As a kid I was particularly fond of adventure stories set in other continents. (Yeah, often with British main characters.)
I’m sorry, but the idea of writing by the numbers, or reading by the numbers drives me nuts. As does the idea that culture is genetic. If it were, we’d all still be living in the fertile crescent and speaking whatever they spoke when they first started poking seeds in the ground. Weirdly, I CAN see a future where humanity works together. We just have to get past some of the disgusting bits first and some cultures — not necessarily our own partly because we’re already a blended and ecumenical culture — will need to get a reality check. (No, seriously. We’re not the worst. Not even close.) But in general humanity has been moving towards a better future and I believe we’re still headed there. With… er… bumps on the road. But heaven help us if we ever stop having bumps. Bumps keep us competitive. My friend Les Johnson says there is unlikely to be aliens in the cosmos. I believe him, of course. He’s the scientist. But what if there are, and they find out we’ve gone soft and they can kick our butts?
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Sarah — I am with you on all these points.
It was, specifically, your one sentence that I originally cited that struck me as out of tune — because that one sentence seemed to imply that since you didn’t find anything inherently compelling about the fact that a protagonist might be a deaf lesbian Pacific Islander, then those traits shouldn’t be inherently compelling to anyone else either. That idea is the one I was trying to address, by pointing out that a deaf lesbian Pacific Islander might be really, really excited to find a book starring such a character.
Please, forgive me if I misunderstood the point of that sentence.
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Hi Stephen,
I am not Sarah, but I think the point was that regarding a deaf lesbian Pacific Islander as a more inherently ‘worthy’ protagonist than someone without quite so many ‘victim points’ so to speak is the dumb thing. Not the deaf lesbian Pacific Islander per se.
Oh, and Sarah? WHICH Pacific Island? There are hundreds of the bloody things and they all have quite different cultures. I mean, a deaf lesbian Tongan is going to be quite different than a deaf lesbian Easter Islander, who will be different again from a deaf lesbian Bougainvillean, to name a few.
Well, except that most of them are probably narrating from the grave because of the conditions there – ooh! Another victim point! An UNDEAD deaf lesbian Pacific Islander! Is she a zombie or something else?
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Actually, Stephen, speaking as a Portuguese born and raised woman from a part of Portugal rarely depicted, the deaf lesbian Pacific islander would probably cringe before opening the book, because it might be written by those OTHER dlpi’s who would make her sound like a twit. She would certainly be pissed off if it was about her being a victim. (I WOULD. Let me tell you my reaction to “oh, you’re from Portugal. So, you’re a peasant who came here because she was starving!” It’s only slightly less aggressive than to “Oh, you’re from Portugal and you came here to teach us your old and wise ways.” Both bring out the evil in me and lead me to be rude.)
I do challenge the idea we look for books with characters like ourselves. The ultimate of this trend would be everyone reading ONLY autobiographies. I do think you grew up in a time when the US was culturally dominant (from what I’ve seen, it still leads in translations in Portugal. Weirdly, mostly vampire books) and so you read mostly about people like yourself, but that was incidental. Oh, I don’t know, some number of people might prefer that. It might be an introvert/extrovert thing. Most sf/f readers/writers, though, seem to be fascinated by the “weird” so that sells better. But weird is not necessarilly race/culture. Heinlein’s moon was weird though (with modified bits) mostly anglo-saxon. Would I like a book about a feisty Portuguese-American woman with an ability to piss everyone off and an inability to keep her mouth shut? Possibly. What are the other elements? And Kate, I don’t read zombies.
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“You should read this story because the protagonist is black” is as pernicious an idea as the statement “You should not read this story because the protagonist is black.”
A story is good or it isn’t. Special pleading based on feelings of racial guilt won’t change that.
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I feel somewhat late to the game here on the post. It’s still June, however, so I’m not completely necrocommenting.
Sarah, you touched on the foundations of politics and I wish you would have just gone for it. The common root of what your friend experienced is simply mascot politics.
Mascot politics, of course, is wrong and and is insidious as it is vile. On one hand, it cheapens what actually happened by collectively lumping real victims with people who had not been victimized. On the other hand, it cheapens innocent people who had nothing to do with the particular crime in with the criminals based on some arbitrary label such as gender, economic background, etc.
This is a cottage industry, especially in the United States. However, the internet rallies against this form of collectivism by giving connections to singular voices, which are not so easily manipulated. One could go so far as to examine the current political landscape and point to the beginning of the decline of mascot politics.
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