The Mote

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

You will forgive me if this is not a very complete post, and also if it has nothing to do with Niven and Pournelle.

Today, I tried really hard to work, but did a grand total of about five hundred words, because the sinus infection – which is right now hitting older son full on – and which I had pretty much defeated, fell on me again.  I’m feeling better again, because I DID sleep most of the afternoon, but at the expense of actually working.

And I was thinking about arguments, particularly political ones.

I will admit that this was due to the incensed (and psychic) SFFWAan – presumed feminist  (a very low grade of troll this blog attracts, my apologies, but to be honest, the commenters’ tendency to chew, spit, and toss behind the fridge any unwary troll tends to discourage the more creative ones) who commented on the post That Ain’t No Lady.

Her/his/its/mutable comment began with a presumption of malice on my part, by saying “You know very well” – which, if true would mean I’d chosen to lie.  (In fact I don’t know very well, I still don’t know and the people who read the full article and reported it to me didn’t find this oh so very offensive mention of how women looked in bikinis – rolls  eyes.)  It also pulled this rather rambling accusation which somehow managed to yank Robert Silverberg and James Tiptree Jr. into the discussion (Woman – or man, or small animated dragon or steer, for all I care – what does Silverbob have to do with me?  The closest I came to a discussion with him was when he informed me it was no great feat to grow up speaking Portuguese, learn English at fourteen in a Portuguese public school,  and write for a living in English, because they are both Western languages.  This amused me. Note I don’t hold it against him. I don’t have a voodoo doll of Silverbob nor do I think he hates Latinas.  I simply found it amusing that he was sure it would be easy without ever having done the equivalent.)  And then it preemptively removed my legitimacy, in the unlikely event I could defend myself from such a carefully articulated thesis, by saying that I was probably prejudiced against women.

Take a deep breath ladies and gentlemen – consider that this person, who has never met me (to my knowledge) and never had any personal contact with me, can reach through the internet and know EXACTLY how I feel about women.  Why be a writer when you have that kind of second sight?  My lord, the lottery numbers, alone…

Ahem.  I had a point – oh, yeah, right here on top of my head. —  And we’ll return to the point in a minute.

Preemptively, though, let me assure you I don’t hate women.  I don’t hate men, either.  (I do have problems with lizards.  But since those aren’t human, I’m okay.)  I do hate specimens of either.  Mostly those who go through life making a virtue of envy.

Do I tend to assume that women are going to get into tizzies?  No, actually.  Only American women.  I’ve learned throughout my twenty eight years here to flinch when American women go hunting for male scalps for imagined “misogyny” because, oh, my Lord, do they watch commercials?  If American men chose to be offended over androphobia, they’d never shut up.  And they’d have reason never to shut up.

I will give American women that some men are stupid.  Some hate women.  Some hate men.  Some hate cats (unforgivable.  Into the outer darkness with them.)  Some even hate Heinlein (I shall strike them from MY book I wrote.)  Some men – oh, heck, let’s be daring – all men are human.  Which means some men are not very bright and some are brilliant, some are prejudiced against women and some aren’t.

I’m not sure exactly what the point is in bringing up individual cases where men were less than perfect to some women.

Let’s establish for the sake of argument that Robert Silverberg said something about how James Tiptree Jr. had to be male because only males could write that well.  (Lacking the verified quote and context I’m not willing to assume that is true – but let’s assume it is for the purpose of this discussion.)  And let’s assume James Tiptree Jr. is in fact the be all end all of female expression (not to my taste, but tons of writers, male and female aren’t.)  What would Silverberg’s words prove, other than that HE thought men wrote better than women? What would it prove about my thought?  Or Malzberg’s?  Or Resnick’s?  Or the guy playing his boombox next to my house RIGHT NOW?

To our purpose, nothing.  Silverbob’s opinions are his own.

The ladies (urk) of SFWA were talking about Mike and Barry being old white men and acting all prejudiced themselves.  Is that evidence of institutional prejudice? Is their opinion that of all women?   No.  Of course not. Women don’t have collective minds.  It’s evidence that these women have no clue that “projection” can apply outside the TV market.

HOWEVER the media, education and oh my heavens Marxist analysis have managed to convince a large portion of the American womanhood that every man is out to get them.  This is of course, because then it can be assumed the government is necessary to stand between such poor aggrieved females and the mean, ugly men who would subjugate them.  (Actually it would be a very stupid man who would bother.  They’re already subjugated.)

So, while in the States, when a woman opens her mouth to go on a victimhood rant I go “uh oh.”  Which means sometimes I miss legitimate complaints.  Rarely mind.  And these LEGITIMATE complaints are NEVER by privileged middle class, college educated women whining that two articles read by maybe a hundred people have materially hurt their rights.

Listen, not-ladies, we used to know that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.  And if you come back and mutter something about fires and crowded theaters, I’m going to let my commenters ambush you behind the bike sheds after school.  Bikinis never hurt women either.  I used to have one that consisted of three tiny triangles.  I wish I still had the figure to wear it.  (Okay, maybe THAT hurts.  Just a little.)

So I am IN GENERAL prejudiced against the whining of upper class American females who are dead-set on their own victimhood (this does not apply to non-American or even to non-victimhood-craving American females, many of which I’m honored and privileged to call friends and not a few of whom post on this blog).  When I see one of them – ONE OF THE WHINERS – break a nail over their sisters who are treated like chattel and worse under Islam, I will consider that they might be concerned with the welfare of women and not with getting more benes for their own pampered selves.

Until then, I recommend they look to the mote in their eye when it comes to prejudice and misunderstanding of cultures, including, yes, their own.

You’d think they were created in vitro and have no fathers, no brothers, no sons, so that they imagine every man’s sole desire is to subjugate women.  You’d think they never read a book written by a male, never read genuine appreciation of female minds and modes in them.

And you know what?  I don’t think they have.  I think they hold the mote of Marxism between them and the world.  Having been taught they are oppressed they read oppression in EVERYTHING, including two gallant men talking about women they admired, and one of whom was exceptionally beautiful.  This is sad for them, because it robs them of the joy of life, not a little of which is derived from the rather glorious difference between male and female (which extends far beyond the obvious sex characteristics.)

Poor pitiful creatures, who can’t look at a cover with a beautiful female without thinking “exploitation” – I think “beautiful.”  Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus has graced my wall in one form or another since High School.

They prefer instead to embrace the certainty they are victims and the world has done them wrong: even when this belief robs them of joy and reason.

But ah, it demands nothing from them.  And for some sad, insecure creatures, that is enough.

79 thoughts on “The Mote”

  1. Beauty is a bad thing to Feminists. It allows one woman to be considered better than another. Plus, those unspeakable Men appreciate it, so therefore Beauty is Oppression (And Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace, and Freedom is Slavery), and yet, somewhere in the back of their lizard brains, they still want to be wanted, so they have the “Fat Acceptance” movement etc. They still rail against Beauty, but they also want it redefined to include them.

    Women can be really evil to each other. At a Con I once attended, a lovely young (18 or so) girl in a really tiny corset attracted a lot of attention of the male sort, and the cattiness that followed in her wake was enough to make me wonder if these were the same women who were friends of mine. They even want so far as accusing her of having had ribs removed to be able to wear that corset. (Yeah, right. Find me a doctor who would perform such a surgery, on a teenager, and in this country.) A word to the wise, men are not really all that attracted to your ability to try to bring down the “Competition”. (Besides, the girl’s attitude toward the appreciation heaped upon her was enough to ensure it was a one-time offering.)

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  2. Some thoughts.

    Firstly how come it seems like you have to eithr love someone(thing) or loathe it? And how come failure to express appropriate love for something these days appears to mean you loathe it – unless of course it’s something that all rightleft thinking people loathe, in which case your lack fo comment means you’re a secret sympathizer/supporter of this badness.

    There are things I loathe (female genital mutilation for example or gand rapes) but things like this storm in a b-cup gets me mostly going “meh”.

    Since I haven’t actually read the columns but merely seen the summaries and outrage I could be wrong here but it seems to me that “Ms X was a really good writer / editor oh and BTW wasn’t she a babe” deserves nothing more (f you feel like being offended) that “you dirty old man!”. What we’re seeing here (and ye troll is a goof example) is conflation of multiple different sexist* things.
    1) Some male “Big Name Authors” (and/or Fen) were (and a few still are) sleazy scumbags who are always hitting on women at SF Cons etc.
    2) Some males (set possibly intersecting with the one above but not identical to it) think that women authors are like dancing bears and should be denigrated if they ever have the temerity to appear better than male authors
    3) Some males think it’s cool that some female writes/editors fought their way through the problems caused by sets 1 & 2 to be successful anyway – oh and BTW they weren’t (all) hatchet faced harridans but (some) were quite pretty.

    when you write it like that I think it’s fairly clear that item 3 is radically less of an issue

    *sexist according to misc professional grievance studies people anayway

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    1. “female genital mutilation for example”

      Ok, I’m going to just toss in a hand grenade here.

      I see little to no difference between circumcizing a man for cultural reasons and, for lack of a better term, circumcizing a woman for cultural reasons. Both involve a cutting off part of a person’s anatomy for no good reason. And in the case of boys, it’s done when they are, for the most part, infants and cannot in any way consent to it. I have no idea when the girls are done, to be honest.

      So yeah. Both practices are barbaric and hideous, and have no place in civilized society. But I’ll make a big hoop and holler about the travesty that is female circumcision just as soon as I hear an equivalent protest about the male procedure too. Not holding my breath.

      Standing by for flames.

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      1. That’s not a hand grenade — simply dumb. Sorry, but circumcising a boy doesn’t make intercourse painful. Yes, I know all that the foreskin fanatics have to say on the issue, but it’s STILL not the same.

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        1. It is intellectually and logically on par with the people that argue that male circumcision is done to prevent masturbation, because you can’t masturbate without a foreskin. I have honestagawd seen males who admit to being circumcised make this argument on the internet.

          And yes there have been protests, to include some cities in California attempting to outlaw circumcision of minors, and make it chargeable as child abuse.

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          1. Any male unable to masturbate for lack of foreskin is the kind of jerkwad what can’t find his willy with both hands in the dark. It might — might — be possible to mount an intellectually coherent argument of diminished enjoyment, but the proving of the point relies too entirely on subjective evaluation.

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      2. two points
        1) male circumcision can be done at anytime and is usually done while the male is an infant. He doesn’t remember the pain if it is done without anaesthetic. Moreover it’s very minor surgery. FGM on the other hand pretty much requires the woman to be post-pubescent and it involves significantly more radical surgery since it cuts away her clitoris and much of her labia and replaces it with scar tissue (once it heals)

        2) “Traditionally” this butchery is done without any anaesthetic. Moreover the resulting scar tissue not only removes most pleasure from sex it usually makes it actively painful AND often leads to complications in a resulting pregnancy (go look up fistula).

        If someone hacked off the top of your penis without anaesthetic when you were 11 that would be roughly equivalent.

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          1. Parents of bouncing baby Texan are told they have a twelve pound boy. The next day the baby only weighed eight pounds. The parents were concerned and asked the doc.

            He said, “well we circumcised him and Everything’s bigger in Texas.”

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      3. “Hand grenade”? “Flames”? From that damp squib? Only for being an ignorant arrogant git who can’t differentiate between clipping the ear lobes and cutting the ears off. (Okay – for a Ferengi maybe the two are the same.)

        You would also, if you gave evidence of being worth the trouble, get taken to task for semantically laden but meaningless use of such terms as “barbaric”, “hideous”, and “civilized society” — terms which are so much a matter of perspective and unstated premises that their use calls to mind the 19th Century Chinese guidebook to Britain which advised tourists that the Brits had a peculiar fetishistic reverence for life, so extreme that they made an effort to maintain alive all infants, even those of their prostitutes.

        Any civilized society knows that excess children (and those of prostitutes are excess by definition) should be properly sacrificed to Baal. Just as all civilized countries kill sexual deviants lest they spread their perverted values and destroy the civilization as they did Rome.

        That’s the problem with ill-defined terms, don’chaknow.

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        1. Only for being an ignorant arrogant git who can’t differentiate between clipping the ear lobes and cutting the ears off.

          Well said– and I didn’t read this before I posted….

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      4. I have never given much credence to the idea that circumcision is traumatizing, if only because it generally hapens after the baby boy has been squeezed through a birth canal smaller than his head. Just my quibble.

        You have, however, given me the opportunity to quote the punch line, “I’m a moyel, what do you think I should put in my shop window?.”

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        1. ” o/~ When he’s doing a bar mitzvah/
          Now that you shouldn’t miss/
          He’ll always schlepp on over/
          For a wedding or a bris/
          They say he’s got a lot of chutzpah/
          He’s really quite hip/
          The parents pay the mohel/
          And he gets to keep the tip! o/~ ”
          [“Pretty Fly For A Rabbi”, “Weird Al” Yankovic]

          :)

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      5. Only if you would likewise hold that having one’s ears pierced as a child is the same as slicing the nose half-off to disfigure someone, or slicing the ear into strips.

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  3. Oh and it occurs to me that the chances are fairly good that at some point n the near future (it not today) many people whon’t undertsand the context of motes and beams.

    And for that matter many other popular quotes from literature and Christian works.

    Sadly the number of people under 30 who get the allusions and quotes in much of, say, PG Wodehouse is probably already really small but then PGW quotes from Church of England hymns, latin verse, the bible and various plays of Shakespeare.

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    2. [blockquote]many people whon’t undertsand the context of motes and beams.[/blockquote]

      On the gripping hand…

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  4. For 80% of the way through this post, I was sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out how you can write about a mote without it being about Niven and Pournelle. Oops.

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  5. Now I need to go see who chewed up the little trolly after I went to sleep. He/she wasn’t that much fun anyways, they didn’t have no fight in them, it was kind of like hooking a spawned out salmon, they flopped around a bit when first hooked, but then just lay there and let you reel’em in.

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  7. That this kind of crap is still going on – it was bad enough in the 70s and 80s, when there was some justification – but just SOME, and it had nothing to do with men so much as that we were going through the big wave of women hitting the work force, and there’s always a big downside to any social upheaval. I think I may blame the sexual revolution more – the current hook-up culture is alarming.

    Sigh – I couldn’t join SFWA now, but do I even want to? The only thing I can think of is that they are in a beholden-to-the-publishers mindset – which is really surprising considering SF is supposed to be the forward thinking genre.

    (Posting from me will be pretty sparse in the future – we’re blocked from work now. Plus major family crisis – your post on the homeless hit home, because we’re currently going through the almost impossible hoops to get my sister treated for schizophrenia, and if my parents weren’t paying for her living, she’d be homeless. She is currently finally in a hospital, but there’s still another hearing for forced meds, and there’s still the chance of some idiot activist blocking everything. (My sister, as a paranoid schizophrenic, of course thinks nothing’s wrong and the world is out to get her, and there are people who will fight for her right to not get meds.))

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    1. Laurie wrote: “The only thing I can think of is that they are in a beholden-to-the-publishers mindset – which is really surprising considering SF is supposed to be the forward thinking genre.”

      Because its leadership gets their income from those publishers. Scalzi bite the hand that feeds him? Ha.

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    2. Yep. I have a friend going through this with his son. Honestly, the twits who go on about “they just need some place to be and more money” make me want to throttle them.
      My condolences, hugs, and strength. It’s a horrible situation NONE of us wants to be in.

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      1. OMG, Kate has created another of us? How much more will the crazy lady from OZ be allowed to do? Will we all become characters in the Con universe? Inquiring minds want to know.

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          1. You say this like it’s a bad thing. Personally, I’m just waiting to see myself appear in fiction I didn’t know I wrote. More or less. Except it wouldn’t be me writing it, would it? Am I me putting fingers to keyboard and writing words, or is someone else sleeping with my wife? /slowpitch

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                  1. You didn’t notice her bragging about getting to read some of it in the Diner? She was positively smug about it. :-P

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  10. “It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.” – Musashi Miyamoto, Go Rin No Sho.

    Sometimes, the pen must be wielded in a cutting way.

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  11. I think they hold the mote of Marxism between them and the world. Having been taught they are oppressed they read oppression in EVERYTHING…

    IMHO “discovering” previously unknown forms of “oppression” puts one on the fast track to becoming a Deep Thinker.

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  12. The problem with thinking of yourself as a victim is that place the burden of change on everyone but you. And the world is not going to change for you. So you will have these expectations that will never be met and will end up angry and bitter. “The world doesn’t owe you anything. It was here first.”

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    2. For those embracing the burn that is a feature, not a bug. It allows them to avoid the hard effort of personal growth and character development. After all, if you are a victim you get to wallow in it and cannot be blamed. Look how well it has worked for President Not My Fault.

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  13. Argh! They aren’t telling the truth! Silverberg didn’t say that women couldn’t write as well as Tiptree; he said that he felt that Tiptree’s writing was as masculine as Jane Austen’s was feminine. (He also said a lot of fanboy stuff about Tiptree understanding men so well that he must be a guy, blah blah blah.)

    And as I’ve said elsewhere, I think the issue was that he was really reading the toughness of Alice Sheldon’s narrative voice as “masculine,” only because he didn’t realize she was older than him and had served in the OSS and CIA, and thus was toughminded and knew a lot of men. And yes, she did have a tougher voice than pretty much anybody from that period, male or female, in sf/f.

    Anyway, he made a bad guess. I’ve seen plenty of women make bad guesses about what’s behind men’s narrative voices, so who cares? For example, lots of women thought “Madeline Brent” had such a deep feminist understanding of women that they resisted knowing that she was that O’Donnell guy who wrote Modesty Blaise comics. Lots of men writers have written romance under female pen names, with nobody the wiser, and several female sf writers wrote gay male romances under male pen names, for that matter. Do we care? Are we supposed to be offended that this is possible in a free society?

    Are you going to treat the first computer to pass the Turing Test as some sort of mis-humanist insult against humanity, just because humans are gullible and fallible? Because that’s not news. Ask magicians and conmen.

    People make guesses on my sex that are solely influenced on whether they’ve read more Irish legends or more Marvel Comics. I don’t care. Maybe this sort of thing was a flashpoint back in 197x, but this is 2013 and we’re beyond that. One would’ve thought so, anyway.

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    1. What!!?? A Vile Prog mosquoting/misinterpreting something? NONSENSE! We all know perfectly well what he meant, even if he didn’t say that. At any rate, as demonstrated below, guessing an author’s plumbing is a mug’s game:

      Blackadder: Yes, I gave myself a female pseudonym. Everybody’s doing it these days: Mrs. Ratcliffe, Jane Austen–

      Baldrick: What, Jane Austen’s a man?

      Blackadder: Of course — a huge Yorkshireman with a beard like a rhododendron bush.

      Baldrick: Oh, quite a small one, then?

      Blackadder: Well, compared to Dorothy Wordsworth’s, certainly. James Boswell is the only real woman writing at the moment, and that’s just because she wants to get inside Johnson’s britches.

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  14. Are you going to treat the first computer to pass the Turing Test as some sort of mis-humanist insult against humanity, just because humans are gullible and fallible? Because that’s not news. Ask magicians and conmen.

    This is why I’ve always said that computers cannot pass the Turing Test — but humans can fail it.

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      2. I’m pretty sure there are days when I would flunk it. Especially when conversing in text, I miss so much sometimes that it’s ridiculous.

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  15. It’s not exactly on topic, but I’d like to know why so called feminists assume that a woman answering the phone must be the billing department and not tech support. Do they honestly think that women aren’t capable of troubleshooting internet and computer issues? I get it at least once a week and I’ve been doing this for a long time now. I will say that women are more likely to apologize after screaming at me on the phone, but then they are more likely to do that than men are.

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    1. Yes. Popular perception is that the only women in tech support are so overweight and mannish that they sound like men, anyway.

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      1. That’s odd, I expect a woman to answer tech support, it is always either a woman or a furriner who speaks ‘Ingash’, usually both, that answers.

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        1. Odd, I either get older ladies in the South, folks with Indian accents or college boys who can’t freaking listen when I explain what steps I got and the results that came about. (And sometimes tell me to do things that are not possible with the computer’s setup. The “experts.” Drips under pressure, indeed.)

          Get more help from plain old “customer support.”

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          1. Eh, when you get the college boys, you’re probably getting the other end of that belief, just like the women who have been told things like their headlight fluid needs to be changed.

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          2. … who can’t freaking listen when I explain what steps I got and the results that came about.

            Are these level-one tech support people who aren’t allowed to deviate from their phone script? Or people a step further up in the chain, who are actually allowed to make suggestions not in the official script? Because if it’s the former, I’ve learned to just wait patiently until I get a real tech on the line, and then describe the troubleshooting steps I’ve followed. Generally that’s the level two guy/gal. In my experience, if the first person to answer tech support has an Indian accent, they’ve always been level-one support with a script to follow. Some might well be clueful, but they have to follow their script or they’ll get fired, so they’re not actually able to help me until they bump it up to level two. (If it’s on a level-one tech support guy’s script, I’ve probably already tried that.)

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            1. It’s the “experts”– in some cases, the supposed “chief expert.”

              With the folks on a script, unless it’s the same one that’s built into the computer’s UI, I do it again. Just in case.

              I’m no great computer expert, just the “tech support” for half of my family, so I should not have to explain three times in five ways that a fully re-formatted formatted drive doesn’t have partitions to try reinstalling a system from.

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    2. That’s funny, I mean funny-strange. I mind the time I called up the semi-sweety in the middle of the night for advice on my Win95 system. She was in bed watching TV, with no references handy, but walked me through about 20 or 30 steps to get the box working (click this, don’t click that) while mostly paying attention to the movie.

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      1. Well, people on this blog should understand already that when someone says, “Popular Opinion”, it doesn’t mean the majority of people here. I only know this because I worked on a helpdesk for 7 years, and while our greeting left no ambiguity that the person answering the call was answering the tech support line, the women still complained of frequently being treated like they probably didn’t know what they were doing.

        In the spirit of full disclosure, there were some men who got this same treatment, but that was AFTER a person had talked to them more than once.

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        1. Ah, but we also take any opportunity offered— no matter how strange– to talk and tell stories we think are interesting.

          Interaction! On the faintest of excuse!

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  16. Honestly, Sarah, I’m tired of arguing with people like that drive by fool. They aren’t interested in debate, and they aren’t going to be convinced by facts. What they will do is keep trying to dominate everyone around them, and punish those who refuse to be dominated. That being the case, why not treat them like any other slaver, and shoot the bastards?

    Leave me the hell alone or face the consequences.

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  17. I really wish your blog had a “like” feature of some sort. Then I could click the button to let you know I read and agreed/appreciated it, but had nothing material to add. Instead of leaving comments like this from time to time to let you know that, of course, I’m still lurking and reading.

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    1. Maybe you need to be logged in to WordPress, but if I click on a post (so I can see the comments), in between the body of the post and the first comment, I see a Like button. > >

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  18. And some people wonder why I’ve said, from time to time, my bucket list includes pissing on Andrea Dworkin’s and Valerie Solanas’s graves….

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  19. Pingback: IMAO » Blog Archive » Paging Sandra Fluke, et al.

      1. I was promised perfect. In writing. Three times:

        Present Perfect: I have seen it.

        Past Perfect: I had seen it.

        Future Perfect: I will have seen it.

        Is it any wonder I am tense?

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