So I actually meant to do this post, when we had the big “but why aren’t women exactly like men, only better” kerfuffle here (well, the latest one.)
There is a trap to feminism. Or really any ism. But Feminism was the one that set this off.
You see, I considered myself a feminist way back when, when women didn’t have the same rights under the law in Portugal. This made a certain amount of sense, since having the same rights under the law is kind of important. In another way, it was also totally unrealistic and naive, because you know if a society really is “racist, sexist” or whatever other “ist” changing the laws is really just the beginning of this. The rest of the work must be done under “winning hearts and minds” which, btw does not mean yelling at people, punching guys for opening the door for me, or you know, looking for ‘systemic sexism’ under the rug.
That’s something else completely different, and I’m not going to weigh in on whether Portugal is still sexist or not. My kids think it is, for a variety of little things that shock them beyond belief, but I simply don’t know the culture now well enough to know if it is sexist.
Back when I was growing up, it was. Amazingly so, to the point that teachers could make jokes in front of the class about how unlikely it was for a woman to be better than the men at whatever, from writing to algebra.
Note that it didn’t break me. Mostly I gritted my teeth and set off to show them. And mostly succeeded.
This is not to say there wasn’t sexism, or that society should be set up so that only those of a rebellious disposition can make it. That would be silly. It is, however, to say that well… some countries and probably some places in other countries (including here) really are sexist. But that if you’re equal under the law, you really can’t fight the remaining sexism with more laws. You must do it with much more difficult cultural work, and making yourself a cross between a lunatic and a big hairy screamer is not going to do it.
But that brings us to what’s wrong with all the “isms”. Well, a short, short list.
1- They usually seek governmental solutions to cultural problems.
2- They don’t understand that once the law is fixed, it’s time to put the movement away.”
3 – They are a wee bit crazy about the goals.
What do I mean by number 3? Well, you see, it’s really easy to get misled about what “x discriminated against minority can do if unleashed” if the minority is really discriminated against.
Say you’re a writer whose politics are to the right of Lenin and there is no indie. And suppose I start an ist movement “the Rightist Writer” movement, to demand equality for writers to the right of Lenin, and demand we be given parity in number of publications.
Looking at the writers to the write of Lenin who got published under the long dark night of leftism, whether it be past ones like Robert A. Heinlein (Who yes, started as a socialist, but he got better) or Jerry Pournelle, or current ones like John Ringo and Larry Correia, you could be forgiven for looking at their work and thinking: Wow, Writers on the Right are the awesomest. If we stop being discriminated against, they will sweep the field and produce masterpieces and all of them be multi-millionaires.”
Fortunately we have indie, and can go to the person who reads and downloads a ton of science fiction on the rightish side of the sphere: me.
So what’s the average of books returned after reading five pages? Why, the same as for writers of any other political stripe. Because writers to the right of Lenin are in fact just human beings. Thinking they’re all awesome is a part of a syndrome caused by discrimination against them. You see, only the best made it to publication, while on the left the system was way more open, so all sorts of people from pretty horrible to amazing made it in. A demand equal numbers of writers on the right be published would just mean that most of them would not be awesome and/or bestsellers.
Which then would convinced our “activists” that either the houses were purposely plotting against us by selecting less than stellar books, or of course the entire system was so corrupt that most of our delicate snowflake authors weren’t putting out their best work. Then I could write treatises about systemic racism, get lots of TV appearances, and clench my fist for the cameras looking grave and sorrowful and– what?
That sounds silly? well, of course. But it is what we’ve seen with feminism, with “anti-racism”, with every minority promoting association in the history of the US.
Because of exactly that process. When society discriminates against a category of people, particularly if it is in a highly visible field like art, writing, or law, education, those who make it through are the most driven, the most knowledgeable, the most capable people. They are so capable in fact, that they make it despite all attempts to stop them.
So the activists and all those who want to eliminate injustice look at those who make it and think “This is what all of x is like” and “this is why we must eliminate barriers.”
BUT once the barriers are eliminated, it turns out that most people are just…. people. And those who make it into the field/profession/whatever formerly closed off perform as average people. Or frankly below, if, as in the case of women in STEM there’s an entire educational industry pushing them into where they wouldn’t naturally go.
The activists then look at this and can’t admit “Well, we cleared the problem, so now it’s up to them.” So they come up with “Systemic ism” which is discrimination so sneaky no one sees it, but must be there because the “uplifted victim” is not performing like the rare individuals of the past did.
And then clown world sets in like the University of Colorado at one point saying that now that 75% of the graduates in chemistry are women, they are almost equal. Seriously?
The truth is that once you’re equal under the law it’s time to step back and let women, people of color, gay people, whatever just be themselves, and succeed or fail on their own merits.
Sure, there might still be prejudice against them in the culture, but again, the way to fix the culture is not to keep screaming about it, but to let it work itself out, now it can.
At some point screaming only sets things up for a massive backlash.
For me, for any future granddaughters: let women be women and succeed or fail on their own merit. The more you cast them in the victim mold and look for governmental solutions for their “plight” the more you set up a future that looks like the past, where women aren’t allowed to do much of anything without a male’s permission.
Because after a while people go “Wait, we perverted all our laws to give you an advantage, and you’re still yelling at me.”
And then things get ugly fast.
We’re heading into an ugly enough time, soon enough. No reason to stack the deck against us.
Let people be people. Let them climb down from that cross and stop being ritual victims.
Until you do, you are in fact an enemy of the only equality that counts: equality of opportunity.
The other day I was ambushed by an otherwise HIGHLY entertaining musical of Pride and Prejudice that had, as one of the four sisters of Elizabeth Bennet a young black lady. I was upset at it because it made the whole production bizarre. “Was Mrs. Bennett unfaithful? Is Mr. Bennett blind?”
A friend who does small production amateur theater told me “Look, it’s probably a small production, they go with what they have.”
Turned out she was right. It was a tiny theater company with a limited number of actors, explaining why Colonel Fitzwilliam is Asian and Mary Bennett is black. Fine. As I said, the musical, which was free on one of the ridiculous number of free-because-you-use-this-other-service streaming services we have, is highly amusing and entertaining.
But my friend also said that given she’s been turned down for theater roles for being too tall, too short, too white, she didn’t mind color blind casting.
A situation in which bog-standard Regency Romances had to be twisted and become a parody alternate-reality (in which in England before this period there was apartheid, as though England in the middle ages to the regency were the South Africa of the past. The most disquieting thing here, is that I think this is what the producer thinks.) to explain why half the nobility is of African origin, and most couples are bi-racial, and yet people get all bent out of shape if Ghost in the Machine casts a white Actress.
Look, it might be just a theater thing, sure. Arguably having a white person play Aida is (though we Mediterraneans are white, or consider ourselves so, some of us just of Latin culture. It’s sad to see my family retroactively thinking they’re as a race. Sigh.)
In a profession where girls can be boys playing girls playing boys, casting is a little loose.
But if it’s loose it must be loose across the board.
And we must not invent new histories to justify it. And historical figures should be played the race they were. I would no more approve of a white person playing Shaka Zulu than I approve of a black woman playing Anne Boleyn.
Mostly because you know there are a number of people who never read. Ever. And who assume whatever they were shown on TV really was the past. And next thing you know, we have scholarship like the libelous and poisonous 1619 project.
Want to have color-blind-casting. All well and good, but a) it has to be the same across the board. We just play silly buggers with every possible role: Henry VIII is a svelte 16 year old female. Anne Boleyn is a black woman in a wig, Cleopatra is a freckled redhead. Julius Caesar an Asian female.
No? Then it’s not color blind casting. It’s an attempt to corrupt and confuse history and people’s minds. It’s spinach and it can got to h*ll. (I like spinach, but I don’t eat it because of its being “good for you.)
Note small theater companies are exempted from this. After all, they have trouble enough filling roles. But big production companies? If you’re going to play fair, play fair. Heaven knows you have enough money.
No white washing. No black washing. No black face, and certainly no yellow/white/purple with polka dots face. Do as close a casting as you can.
No more excuses. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
There is at this moment a road, once as familiar to me as my own hand, which I shall never walk again. There are faces I’ll never see again, voices I’ll never hear again in person. There are people alive and theoretically accessible to me in the world right now, that I will never see in person again, no matter how much I want to. And one of those might very well be the first person I remember being aware of loving.
Some of that is normal and natural, a consequence not only of our being ephemeral creatures, but of our being ephemeral creatures who move about a lot. I knew when moving to the US there would come a time grandma would go without my seeing her again. That almost for sure the last time I saw her would be without being aware it was the last. That it was entirely possible — and it happened — that at some point that most familiar of paths would be closed to me: into the little iron gate, through the tenants’ patio and the washing tank area, past the wood gate grandad made, and the grove of the orange tree, over the little bridge besides the workshop and into the big patio with calla lilies at the end, up the patio and into the open kitchen door.
It doesn’t really matter that I’d give a limb or years of life to take that path again and have tea with grandma just once more. And I knew that it wouldn’t last forever since that dream when I was eight, when I followed the path and went into the kitchen, and called, and grandma was gone and would never be coming back. It was a dream then, but I was smart enough to realize it would be true one day.
We can rail about the human condition — I do, most humans do — but it is what it is.
The problem is right now we’re experiencing that sort of splitting and closing off for no good reason. At the whim of people who are bent on destruction of everything that’s civilized, everything that’s human, and if given their head, probably everything that lives.
At the beginning of the fauxdemic — though later she became convinced, being elderly and having a TV in every room of the house — mom said “It seems we’re going backward for a time.”
We aren’t so much going backward as being shoved backward. Every place in the world is in ferment and revolt (you’re not alone. The media just isn’t reporting it) because the self-proclaimed elites, having seized power are carrying on a program of isolating, starving and killing those they have power over.
I’m not exaggerating, and there is no sane reason for this. It’s an insensate fury composed of anger at not getting the utopia they thought they were promised and not being worshiped as the godlings they think they are.
Generations were brought up being told that utopia was possible in this earth, and that they were the brightest, best educated, etc. ever to walk the Earth. Then they have to face they’re not. In the past most people realized they were not in elementary school, or when pitched against something really difficult. But these last few generations of the “elite” (these are almost all rich kids. The others hit their nose on reality sooner or later) have had everything catering to them, and their self -esteem burnished willingly by those hoping to profit from their largess or afraid of their litigious parents. And the media, which the left controlled, went on, calling them brilliant, wonderful, beautiful (remember when they tried to convince us Michelle Obama is beautiful, or Occasional Cortex is brilliant) and with the monopoly on the media, everyone went along. They were never told no. Ever.
As a result, they’re spoiled kids — even those who are in their ninth decade — and like all spoiled kids, they are unsatisfied, unhappy, purposeless and frustrated. They keep trying to distinguish themselves, thinking they’ll love their lives more, if only they can have privileges not allowed to everyone else. And not like flying first class while the serfs fly coach, no. They want to fly while the serfs aren’t even allowed to drive. They want to eat juicy steaks while the serfs have to eat bugs.
That was what the whole covidiocy (singularly ineffective at controlling ANY virus, but great to establish status) and the climate scam are about. None of it makes any sense otherwise. Eating bugs is not good for the environment (it’s not good for humans, either) because they eat more pound per pound than cows. Solar and wind energy are not only worse for the environment, they can’t subsist without oil (Seriously, how do you transport the panels, etc?)) And the batteries are way more toxic and polluting than even mid 20th century oil motors (which are not what we use. We’ve come a long way, baby.)
However, if you have to live in the dark, use candles, can’t drive, and have to shower in cold water, the “elite” will know they’re special. And maybe then they’ll be happy?
Spoiler, they won’t be happy. Right now there is still a branch that keeps thinking of more and more stuff to humiliate us, partly because we’re not obeying. Think of the rich, spoiled kid when kids on the playground ignore her, and you have their measure.
But the others are starting to realize not only don’t we obey them, but if we did it wouldn’t make them happy. Humiliating us won’t fix what’s broken in them. Eating steak in front of starving people won’t make them feel better.
So they’ve moved into “We just want you to die.” Almost everything now is designed to kill off vast amounts of humans. Their excuse of course is “population explosion” but most people know there’s no such thing.
They’re trying to do to us what PETA does to animals it claims to protect: kill them, because that’s the only protection. And because who wants those animals around, anyway.
They hate everything that loves man, even cats and dogs. And every domestic animal grown for man or in partnership with man.
They’re declaring off limits any source of energy that works, including hydroelectric and nuclear, because that enables people to live with a modicum of hygiene and dignity.
And part of what they’re doing is isolating us physically. Yes, I probably could go to Europe one last time. It’s still being debated, over here. Except I’m not ready to conform to nonsensical airplane mask rules (I have asthma. It’s very non-bueno.) And because I’m aware of the fragility of the whole edifice, I’m afraid of being stranded there. It’s part of the reason we’re driving everywhere.
The fragility of the whole edifice is because we’ve started ignoring/fighting back against the rich, spoiled toddlers who think they’re in charge. It’s more fraught than you can imagine. And could come down any minute. Will almost certainly come down, worldwide, once the scarcity of Fall and Winter hits, and that’s before they try to fraud elections here.
They can’t win. But as we plunge into whatever this is, as we go backwards for a time, I feel like people are still not aware of the intensity with which these elitists hate us. Us, the west. Us, all of humanity. Us, all of mammals. Us, every living thing.
They are unhappy and can’t figure out why, and so they turn their hatred outwards, and it must be the fault of everyone and everything that failed to be perfect and love them unconditionally. That is, everything.
Most of them aren’t even fully aware that is what they want, but they reveal it, suddenly, in looks of malice and glee when they are told of mass deaths, or losses of agriculture.
We need to be aware of it, because they must not be allowed to spread their poison or make it sound like they “care so much.”
Point out the inconsistencies in their practices. Rip the masks all the way off.
In whatever is to come (and yes, I’m still praying it passes us) we need to see clearly.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE. *Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying.– SAH*
NOTE: THE FUN WITH WORDPRESS TODAY IS NOT LETTING ME SELECT TEXT, SO IF SOME THINGS LOOK STRANGE THAT’S PROBABLY WHY. ALSO WHY THIS IS TAKING FOREVER.
The epic saga of the Faulfenza’s third messiah continues in the second volume of Zafiil, FireDancer’s Hand.
Journey with Zafiil to the borders of the Alliance in her search for enlightenment, dive into her recent history as a student at the Hearth and her difficult history with Daqan, the Voice of the God, and then return to Qufiil for the gripping finale of her story.
Are the Faulfenza prepared for the FireBorn, and the Others? And is Zafiil ready, at last, to face the role that will see her remembered forever in history?
Zafiil: FireDancer’s Hand brings the epic saga of the Faulfenza’s first contact with the Pelted Alliance to a stunning close.
As the destabilized Three Part Alliance totters, Igor, AKA Axel Vinogradov has to decide whether to shore up the edifice, or complete the collapse. In the meantime there’s a couple of cross dimensional raids, a kidnapped class of teenagers, marooned women on a cross dimensional Tropical Paradise .
Faustina Hartmann has led her army from Huntsville to Vicksburg, across the desolated Old South, to secure a rail line to allow her hometown, Knoxville, access to the uranium ore they so badly need.At the end of a thin, 400-mile supply line, she suddenly finds herself set upon by adversaries to the north and south, potentially cutting off and destroying her men.Taking swift action, Faustina rallies her four legions and leads them into battle. A battle fought not only on the ground but also in the Void, where her demi-human modifications and her alliances with thinking machines can be brought to bear.Long marches, bloody battles, but also clever diplomacy and even a hint of romance await Faustina as she continues her crusade to create her personal empire in the old US Deep South
Tinsel Rain returns us to the post-apocalyptic world of Cin City, glittering tinsel crown of the Kingdom of New California. When an old not-quite-friend of Shamus Tom Vargas is found dead, Tom gets pulled into a case of murder, magic, and mystery! Sinister archmages! Bodies in alleys! An actual high-speed car ride! And as many bad jokes as the author could cram in! Truly, you deserve to read this book!
They were trying to free the human genome – they built a spam filter that destroyed the world.
Lech Sen and his band of genetic computationalists are trying to open source the human genome, but somehow team gets side-tracked by 3,000-year-old Sumerian Urn data, recently unearthed but kept private by a power-hungry tech oligarch. Lech is mystified to find that the decrypted data contains much more than he bargained for, and decrypting it manages to transform Lech’s Wisdom-Of-Crowds spam filter into a villainous artificial intelligence, SpamKiller. To keep the data from SpamKiller, Lech encodes the data into his team’s JUNK DNA, unwittingly and unwillingly transforming them into long-lived super-athletes. After the near total destruction of humanity, Lech and the JUNK crew must band together again to overthrow SpamKiller. In turn, SpamKiller and his oligarch henchman create a set of death games, the Metrics, to force-evolve replacements for the missing scientists, all the while maintaining a deadly obsession with fighting spam.
Destroy humanity, or stamp out spam? Why not both?
Sheila Reilly, once a prominent research physicist aboard the Wells Explorer, now an American refugee living in China Harbor after the Millennium War destroyed America, has barely survived the last 5 years. Sheila’s very life may now depend on the secrets she keeps. Even from Yam, the man she loves and who has helped her eke out an existence for the last 2 years.
Discovery of the wreckage of the Wells Explorer sets in motion a chain of events wherein Sheila must come to terms with her past and is given an opportunity by the enigmatic ancient Lin Yi to change history, but perhaps at the price of losing everyone she now loves. Suddenly everyone in China Harbor is looking for her, from General Chen, the conflicted head of the often brutal People’s Guard and the villainous Colonel Kwan, who will stop at nothing to get the power he wants, to one mysterious stranger out of Sheila’s past, who started it all so very long ago. As Sheila races against time to save the past, no one in China Harbor who has touched her life is safe, from an innocent produce vendor to Yam’s young daughter who longs for Sheila to take the place of her dead mother.
Approx: 180,000 words (This would be the equivalent of 450 pages in a trade paperback. Average novel is 100,000 words.)
Snapshot42: Through the Texas Gate is an alternate history novel. In early November 1942, with World War II hanging in the balance, an invisible wall cuts Europe, along with parts of the Middle East and North Africa, off from the rest of the world. With the Allies running out of vital raw materials from the rest of the world, they look for ways through the wall. They find two gates to other realities. One leads to a still-independent Republic of Texas that still uses black powder weapons and is barely holding off fierce nomad raiders, while another leads to a strange land without people but overrun by still-living dinosaurs. Jim Bridger and Colonel Tillman need to buy oil and food to keep the allies in the war, but first they have to survive fierce new enemies in these new-found realities.
The Loard-Vogh were conquering the galaxy. They could not be stopped. When they got to Earth, they would conquer, even though it was known across the galaxy as The Planet of Terror.
The Loard-Vogh would win.
Humanity must lose.
But mankind has a secret weapon, one so sinister that no power in the galaxy can stand against it…
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new Introduction by D. Jason Fleming giving historical and genre context to the novel.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
A category mistake or category error is applying reasoning that’s valid for a type of thing to another thing for which it is not valid. That’s how you get errors that aren’t even wrong, they’re about something else completely different.
Often the trolls who come by don’t seem to realize that, and are arguing things that make no sense for what we were discussing, like that long ago French kept man who thought that the big question is “But who is going to be in charge of what news get published?” While we, basically, just wanted the government to stop using its power to stomp on people speaking the truth.
I mean, he had other — severe — mental issues, but that one was the biggest category error of all. For him it was necessary to have someone in charge of what gets said and published, while we, nurtured on the first amendment, want everything to be said, and let the individual decide what’s believable. Which btw was why the other side of science fiction saying we wanted to silence them was jaw dropping — besides the fact that none of us had the power to silence anyone, even if we wanted to. Saying something sucks is our opinion, not silencing anyone — because we very much want them to be heard. The more they write the more the crazy is visible. We, personally, meanwhile, just want the same privilege.
Then there was the troll we dealt with recently whose main purpose seem to be to demoralize us, but he had no clue where American morale lies, so what he kept saying: our president (Eh. “President”.) sucks, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster, and our political class is ruining the economy is all true. But that doesn’t touch what America is, only what is being done to it. (One can’t expect Russians to understand that.) So he was applying a category error, by thinking this blog would be the same as its equivalent in his homeland, and he could make us feel bad by saying what would make him feel bad about his country.
Or take the person who left me a comment (not approved, no.) saying he would contribute to my fundraiser if I promised to donate it all to my “beloved Ukranians.” (Yes, probably Reziac, [Reziac says it’s not him, and I believe him. Sorry to assume it was him without its being him, but the word choice was very similar. Anyway, it doesn’t matter much tot he point.] and I wonder what the heck is going on. Like so many people over the last few years, all I can say is “he used to be sane.) Apparently saying that Putin is a remnant KGB horror, bent on recreating the USSR and that he will continue to take over the former Russian sphere, if allowed to do so is the equivalent of “loving” the Ukraine, which we all agree, yes, is corrupt (All former communist countries are. It’s what it leaves behind.) This is not only a category error, but a philosophy error that consists of “If you don’t love a, you must love b” instead of “I don’t think we should fight on Ukraine’s side (or anyone’s side), we have problems of our own. I’m not comfortable with our massive financing of their defense (mostly because most of it isn’t even going to them, and what is going is not particularly coherent or well supervised. I mean, it’s probably better for them to have weapons than the Taliban, for whom we left weapons, but I’m still not comfortable beyond a bare minimum.) But Putin absolutely needs to be smacked on the nose, and he is a crazy person trying to recreate Russia’s past glory. (Heck, the EU is in the right on this, and this might be the only time you hear me say this about the EU. But I guess they feel the wolf nearer, and like Russia are sclerotic countries with low birthrate and high geriatric populations, for whom he is a much bigger threat.)
This is what RES often refers to as “Talking pussy while we’re talking bear.” (He meant the animal. Get your minds out of the gutter. Okay, fine, at least get them out of the ditch below the gutter.)
This morning, while I was trying to figure out what’s making my tomato plants not fruit (would you believe fungus? I finally figured it out.) I realized all of Marxism is a category error. This is not strange, since Marx came from a completely different society, and even there he was an odd duck who didn’t understand people, and privileged enough to not “get” human native intelligence and cunning.
I mean, even then it was a category error, even back then. While the class structure and the old/old families and fortunes of Europe seem powerful and forever immutable, they are not. That is just the surface they present, because if your entire system is based on “betters and lessers” with this being determined from birth, then you must pretend it is immutable.
But the fact is that the hemophilia that destroyed the royal families of Europe in the last two centuries came from a humble tailor in one of the German principalities. And the very blue blooded Princess Diana was distantly descended from a Shepherd (back in Shakespeare’s day. He became wealthy and married up, and then his children married up and then…. In three generations they were nobility, without this person ever having the kind of attainments that Shakespeare did, for that matter.)
It’s more common than anyone thinks about, even in the most hidebound society, even without involving things like extraordinary genius, or power, or a stroke of great luck, or even marital infidelity. (Though that too. It was said that the faces of Roman patricians often reflected those of famous gladiators of the past generation. I don’t know how true.)
This is because applying “classes” even to a hereditary “nobility and wealth” society is roughly the equivalent of applying something that works in categorizing wool skeins to live sheep. At best you get a temporary and static picture of something that is not even vaguely static.
Yeah, sure, humans inherit temperament as well as physical characteristics from their ancestors. But how that works out is not as clear as “tabby cats have a certain temperament.” We seem to toss out very deep throwbacks, so that a shiftless family with horrible work habits will throw out someone who is driven and with extreme abilities. (Let’s remember, though obviously ADHD as heck from his work history, Leonardo DaVinci was the son of the village bicycle and an accountant of no particular distinction, both of whom had numerous other children who left not a dimple in history.) And vice versa, for whatever reason, families of high achievement will every so often throw out someone who just can’t or don’t wanna.
I sniff at “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” because it is a gross over-simplification, it’s rarely THREE generations, and it is rarely the WHOLE family. Just a branch of it.
But the “essential tenor” of the ancestry does tend to assert itself, at least in a free market society. (Immigrants from highly regimented societies are different, and might be unleashed by living in a free market. Maybe. There’s a lot that goes into that, including nutrition.)
Supposing the lack of success of a family came from anti-success habits: laziness, lack of planning, etc. you can get the one member who “does good” and marries above (usually a female, but not always.) And you often see the children evenly divided, half staying at the level to which the member elevated her/himself and the other half falling. Or they hold on for a couple of generations, but in the third half of them revert.
And the same way, you can see someone who “falls” for no reason that’s discernible or because of say an alcohol habit, or an injury, but one or two of his grand kids rise.
Understand I’m not talking of eugenics, or of genes as immutable destiny. If I were, I might very well support Marxism or another form of socialism, to compassionately give to those who through no fault of their own, were born unable.
The left is forever going on about our concentrating “smart genes” in some families, but in the whole history of humanity this has never in fact happened. (The fact they use “ivy league degree” as a stamp for “smart” is another category error.) Because as I said, humans seem to have a very scramble-able (totally a word) set of genes, or at least the genes for character traits are given greater leeway than in other animals.
I’m talking about how human genetics are unfathomable and scramble in bizarre ways, that without even considering the side effects of upbringing and the times people live in, the effects of new industries, and other changes in the environment which humans continuously inflict on themselves.
Every change in technology destroys and creates fortunes, and elevates and plunges families through “classes” (in the Marxist sense of ranks based on income. Though in the sense of born to it, too, because rich people tend to marry up in “social class.”) And human technology (way of doing things) is always changing, even in what seems to us now stagnant or has been miss-characterized as stagnant, such as the middle ages.
So what Marx was trying to do: “Equalize the classes” is meaningless. It’s the equivalent of your coming to the kitchen, finding dishes piled on the sink and deciding you’re going to go into farming chickens.
Because there are no “classes” not even in class-based societies. There’s only humans, and we’re smart and fractious apes, forever going up and down and all around, world without end.
Are injustices perpetrated? Sure. We’re humans, not gods or machines (and machines can make category errors. Oooh, boy, can they. Depending on what they were fed.) But there are also injustices fixed. And more importantly, most people are free to at least “pursue happiness” — i.e. try to improve their lot — and the more free the society, the less artificial classification going on, the better chance to catch that happiness.
So, the entire adored theory of the academics is a massive category error. It might apply to machines, or to trees, or something. I don’t think it even applies to most animals. And it most certainly doesn’t apply to humans.
COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: We haven’t started fulfilling the pledges from the fundraiser, including the thank yous, because it’s still coming into the mailbox at a rate. We are told it’s coming in, but we haven’t gone to collect, so we don’t know if it’s the new-fun-mail delays, or people mailed late. (And the answer to that is still Thank You. People mail when they can.) There are also still donations coming into paypal, late but marked as part of the fundraiser (and again, the answer is Thank You. I took down the fundraiser so I didn’t bother people with it, not because I wouldn’t accept donations past it.)
At this rate, I will do the thank you post and start emailing and mailing things out the first week of August. Sorry for the delay. Best laid plans, etc.
Humans are strange creatures. Because of our extended childhood, where we absorb much of what we learn about the world, often by tales received from our elders, and our increasingly long lives which now often approach or exceed a hundred years, we are all time travelers. We’re people walking around 100 years later with a picture of the world acquired in very early childhood and often relayed by an elder whose view of the world was already outdated.
Now, the extent to which we are time travelers depends on how much we keep abreast of things, how much the change experienced in our life times has been processed by us, and how much those who transmitted their world view were aware of changes in their lifetimes.
In this I think we Odds have a bit of an advantage, because we often fail completely to get the idea of the world they were trying to transmit to us, and then go through the world like strangers, keeping track of everything that happens, with a sense of wonder and “oh, wow.”
But not always. In things that aren’t our specialty, or things that we actually care about. There we often internalize our early views, and never ever ever get rid of them.
I like to make fun of boomer women, because why not? when they say that their third grade teachers discouraged them from STEM, mostly because I grew up in a country where it made sense to assume a woman was the dumbest in group if everyone else was male, etc. Not that it was true, but that it was what the nature believed, and spoke about and made jokes about it, in public.
If I’m to understand it correctly, American women a little older than I believed their third grade math teachers knew everything. Or something.
But the truth is that their continuous claims of all the exploitation of women, particularly for bookish women were acquired in their pre-teens, probably by reading books, which might themselves have been ridiculously biased. (This also explains why most of them still believe in the great pre-historic matriarchies, all of which have been thoroughly discredited.)
But it is not only them, of course. My mother had issues with things I did growing up, because the world inside her head was the world she had survived to climb to relative safety and middle class life. Because those lessons had been hard learned, and she couldn’t just shrug them off.
And I’m sure I, myself have blind spots. Not as many, perhaps, since I was required to change countries and cultures, and then learn how to work with each wave of technology. And having kids also helped because it showed me how things were, for instance in school.
I’m forever shocked when people say things like “schools favor boys” because that hasn’t been true since I’ve been in the US. I’m equally surprised, when people say things like “I worked through college and kids today can too” ignoring that university costs ten times more, and the kids are required to do a lot more make work.
It’s always a bad idea, forty years later to say “I did blah blah and the kids can too” without looking into what’s actually going on, as a rule of thumb.
But beyond that, so many things we thought we knew and things we thought were established have been shaken loose by genetic information. For instance, if you haven’t read about Neanderthals or human origins in the last… 20 years, everything you think you know is wrong.
That’s partly what makes the current would-be elites so funny. They’re running — loudly — on outdated science while trying to force us all to live the way they thought would be ideal in the 70s.
Including you know trying to reduce human population, which is already being reduced by rapidly falling birth rates, and whose specter might always have been a mirage, conjured by over reliance in bureaucracy’s ability to count heads.
How do we solve this? How do we shake the picture in people’s heads?
I don’t know. Not conceding to “everybody knows” and demanding proof is one of those was. My younger son’s famous ‘question everything.’
The other is not being afraid to challenge great big “theories” that all the “smart” people believe. (I’m looking at you Global Warming.)
From Freudian interpretations of historical figures to the economic history of the United States, to our ideas of pre-history, if you learned it in school, actually at any time, it’s like an outdated or misconceived theory, since disproved.
Its time for those who can to study and become informed, because being time travelers might cost us the future.
Sometime in the middle of that loud argument — and you don’t have to tell me I was loud too — in the Two by Two post, it occurred to me what part of the problem is.
When I was a kid and in a fit of pique about how my 6 years younger (Hi, Valter! (Hey, look, he’s the only other one in the family who was trained in translation and I don’t think so, but he might come by)) cousin was being raised. I started giving my aunt instructions (!) on how to train him and make him better, and she said, “You know what honey? I know you know everything about child rearing. You should enjoy it now, because the minute you give birth, all that knowledge goes away.”
Yes, I knew she was being sarcastic, and I resented it like heck. (I was fourteen, I think.) But now? Oh, dear, she was right. (Ironically what I was yelling at her about was that my cousin refused to eat fruit and vegetables, which my parents — and me — were sure was because they didn’t make him do it. Meanwhile the kid said the texture made him throw up. Um… younger son outgrew it (I don’t know if cousin did) but it was actually a physical thing. He had extreme sensory issues when he was a kid, and in retrospect, so did my cousin. Younger son spent two years eating eggs. Just eggs. It wasn’t for lack of our trying.)
Parenthood is one of those dividing lines behind which everything changes. A singularity you could call it. Oh, you don’t change. Not more than you do with any other experience, like getting married or getting a job. But your understanding of the world and humans changes.
And it occurs to me part of that argument and part of the bloody stupid we see from our government is because these days parenthood is no longer a universal experience. (And it’s rarer on one side of the divide.)
Why should you listen, if you don’t have children and are past the age or interest in having them?
Well, because it really will change your view of reality, of political systems, and of humans in general.
I am very sorry that Leslie Fish, whose songs I like very much, and whose stories I’ve read sometimes with pleasure, and I hit each other’s soap-box spots HARD. It’s not all based on my having children, I think (though it’s impossible to tell, because well, the knowledge changes you) but also on my knowing a ton more about biology (As I’ve said before, Darkship Thieves is hard science on the biology, the rest is rule of cool) having biologists as friends, and having read my son’s books as he went through a BS in human biology and — Okay, I didn’t read his books in med school because he hid them, afraid I’d wander off with them. But I talked to him a lot at that time, as we used to walk miles a day together (in my case to lose weight.) –and therefore knowing a lot of what she was saying was impossible on the biological level.
Beyond which, of course, she comes from a certain time and place (we’re all time travelers) and what she was taught was what she was taught, and she’s never been given any reason to doubt it. (I can also go into IN ANOTHER POST on why the inherent disappointment and rage of the Feminist and Anti-Racist movements, and why they had to invent “systemic” racism and sexism to explain the results. And no, it does not mean — which some people who claim they’re on the right (pfui) think it does — that women or people who tan are inherently inferior. It just means we’re human, not super-beings.) So she came from a place of anger at what she views as millennium-old injustices, while I sat there going “Biology doesn’t work like that. Humans don’t work like that. And children definitely don’t work like that.”
Then I remembered my kids hitting public schools head first and the years the older spent living on salads because every teacher told him he was too fat (he’s always had weight issues, mostly because I had pre-eclampsia while pregnant, but also, I’ve come to suspect, because the school restrained his movement. He was massive but not fat at home, when he could run around till he outran the ADD, then sit and read. We used to joke that sometimes we saw him as he was running a circuit around the house.) Or younger son got notes sent home that he was fat, when in fact you could count every one of his ribs until he was about 20. (He is overweight now, because he is all mine and eats his stress, and the last two years… well.) He was however very tall and…. well, both boys have a massive skeleton and are built on a large scale, something they probably get from sub-Saharan Africa and North Eastern Amerinds. As children both of them looked much bigger than their dainty North European friends, even while they were thin. But the schools… Well, let’s say that I’ve never heard anyone since the seventies tell any child to “eat hearty”. It’s all “Don’t eat so much, you’ll be fat.” To both boys and girls, and it will include things like denying meat to the boys, because “they’ll get big.” Then they wonder why sperm counts are falling.
Anyway, if it’s not obvious remembering this was not happy making. As wasn’t the memory of watching my boys excel and never be recognized, because girls must always have all the honors “to encourage them and level past injustice.” Or the horrific year younger son was bullied by a group of eighteen girls, and the school believed the girls, because “girls don’t bully.”
So, I was arguing from a place which was also less than calm. All of this is a big bolus and will have to be taken one at a time, because the “secret knowledge of parents” (snort giggle) is one part of it. The “We’re all time travelers, and the time in our heads is fifty to seventy years older than us”. And the other is “The war on boys” which is a result of people who aren’t parents (or whose ideology is stronger than their parenting) looking at the world in the light of what they learned seventy years ago, and which was old even then, and then trying to “fix” it. It has to be in multiple parts, because it’s overwhelming.
So, parents….
Husband and I — and I don’t think that’s unusual here — both felt like we were the cuckoo child in the normal bird nest, minus pushing siblings out. And it wasn’t that either of us came from nothing, but that the parent or parents who transmitted Oddness to us had suppressed theirs and thought it would be best to suppress ours.
In my case it was both parents, and dad suppressed his more thoroughly. It only came out in bizarre bits, like the fact he creates epic poetry at the drop of a hat; has read almost everything he can get his hands on; and knows history and remembers it more than anyone else I ever met. You get a sense he goes inside his head to be odd. But on the outside, you’d think he was a very regimented, never a thought out of place man.
Mom is wildly creative and probably the smartest person I know. But it’s all tied together with her growing up in a time and place (it’s always the places, you know? Pockets) where being female and smart was seriously discouraged. It took me till about ten years ago to understand some of the crazier things she did, like throwing ALL my books out the window into a farmer’s field were from a place of fear for me. The same with trying to moderate my vocabulary and get me to clean house more. (Well, guys, I wasn’t pretty. Well, I was as a matter of fact, but not compared to mom when she was young, and who was one of those rare and overwhelming beauties people see once and remember forever. So, in her head I wasn’t pretty. And I had too big a vocabulary. So the only way to convince a guy to marry me (“I pity the man who marries you.”) was if I was “a good housewife.” (It didn’t take.)) Mom was terrified of what the world would do to me as a smart, unmarried woman.
This was mental on many levels, because both she and my paternal grandmother and most of the women I knew had their own businesses and earnings that rivaled men. But she was coming from the past, from what she’d heard at her grandmother’s knee.
In husband’s case, my Father in Law was an Odd, but if his mom was she had buried it beneath everything. And she was a warrior for conventionality. She not only wanted you to keep up with the Joneses, but also down with the Joneses. You were supposed to submerge yourself completely into what your peers were doing. Except she was a feminist and “little boys are monsters.” So….
So, both of us resented having spent the time …. until we married (and still gluing each other together at times) being shoved, kicked and pulled into molds we did not in any way shape or form fit.
Of course, this meant we decided when we had kids we would force them into our mold.
It’s a good thing we were startlingly bad at it.
We were going to read to our kids every day, but when we had older son, Dan was unemployed and I was desperately ill for about a year and a half. And we moved three times in his first year. So… we read to him sometimes. I swear he spent most of his time till two following us around, book in hand, begging to be read to. And then when he was three and a half I found he not only could read, but had been tearing a path through our books. All our books. Including my research books on Rome.
And younger son? We read to him less, because by that time I was selling short stories, and the money actually helped and… He was a very — VERY — quiet child, and tended to play at my feet with his legos, while I worked. I didn’t realize he could read (and I worried a lot about it) until I found that all my mysteries were out of order, and when I started yelling at older son (like most self-taught readers they couldn’t alphabetize until much older) and there was a snickering from younger son’s room.
Ah, but at least I influenced what they read, right?
Ah! You’d think, wouldn’t you?
I had some influence. But not on purpose. While I was researching for the Shakespeare series, I spent my days, while doing anything, listening to Shakespearean plays (for the language rhythm. I still do this when I want a “feel” for a book. It’s the most assured way to get it.) So, by the time Marshall was four and Robert eight, we had a family game called “Give a Shakespeare quotation and the other people tell you play and scene.” This was not on purpose. We did it in the car, in lieu of counting red cars or whatever.
Also while they both read, their tastes aren’t exactly congruent with mine. Older son is a mostly fantasy reader (his generation, you know?) And younger son likes hard sf, mysteries, comics, and… well, a lot of history. A LOT.
And that’s the easy part, frankly. “Imparting your tastes to your kids” is easy. They see you enjoying something, and they want to try. (I should have gone for runs more and faked enjoyment. No, I lie, I did enjoy running a great deal at one time.)
Imparting personality traits, OTOH, might be impossible. Much less paths in life. When the inevitable 70 something (now) woman at an SF con tells me she would have been a brilliant physicist if her third grade teacher hadn’t told her math was for boys, I smile and nod, because only a fool or a sadist tells the unvarnished truth in social situations.
In “who you’ll be” nurture runs headlong into nature. And while you guys might say “so my kids will be like me” the biologists in the audience can tell you “Yeah, mostly, but sometimes not in crucial ways.” Because you get a lot of character traits from other generations. Genes are a huge pack of cards, and weird stuff surfaces. As far as we know, younger son is actually my father’s clone, even more than mine. (And even more than I am my father’s.) This influences everything including the inexplicable: his taste in women.
Older son… who knows?
But they are both very much themselves. You — and we — can’t look at them and go “They’re this way because they–“
We probably — probably? — gifted them the massive vocabulary, because we both love words. We probably have something to do with older son being very non-aggressive, because he was so tall and strong when he entered kindergarten we put the fear of us into him in respect to hitting other kids. I lived in fear he’d kill a kid by accident.
We probably have something to do with younger son not being a drug addict. What? Well, you see, both of us, and most of our families have wildly addictive personalities. We just do. I was lucky to get addicted to books early. The downside is, I don’t clean or even exercise unless I have an audio book clamped on my ears. Dan… it’s mostly math, really, but he goes through obsessions, at the moment with computer golf (cries. It’s lasted a year, and I can’t get him off it, and it’s eating his life when he’s not working.)
And we both have, in our ancestry, a lot of alcoholics and smokers. (And in his case prohibitionists, which probably was because of alcoholics.)
So we gave Marshall the opportunity to become addicted to non body endangering things like games, comics, books. (And sometimes had to pull him out of deep addiction to a game by the scruff of the neck.)
But apparently the most influential thing we did — and I never did it, not as he remembers it — was telling him to question everything. This is what — without talking much to us. He just doesn’t talk much — turned him into someone who agrees with us on politics and largely religion.
So…. how, if I never said it? Well, the bumperstickers “Question Authority” were all over the bumpers of his teachers, when he was in elementary. Also, I hate driving. These two things are important. Parking lots of schools at kid-picking-up-hour are as chaotic as the universe seconds after the big bang. There are a million women in there, none of them minding the rules (most women don’t. Rules are for the other people) and each of them hopped up on progesterone and guilt of having let the darlings out of her sight and used the public school as a babysitting service.
Now throw an incredibly nervous writer who hates driving, and two mouthy kids into that mix and….
Younger son, in kindergarten, and just learning to read “Question Au-tho-ri-ty” (Yes, I knew he read. I just didn’t know he read well enough to enjoy books till he was 8.)
Sarah, terrified, angry, and just wanting to get home to write, “Yeah, isn’t it funny that they put that on their bumpers but they get furious if you question THEIR authority? If you’re going to question, question everything. Put everything to the test.”
And there you have it. The moment that formed my son. Said out of irritability and sweat and wanting to go home and finish writing a fantasy novel.
Now, part of it, of course, is it fell in fertile ground. He was already a devious and suspicious little bastage, so this clicked with him. I have nothing against the results, but did I expect it, or carefully plan it? Oh, dear. No.
What the Bard said in comments yesterday is right. Kids are black boxes. You put in x and you get back y or p or porcupine or avocado jelly. And you never know what you’re going to get.
Daily life is complicated. You can’t control every interaction the kid has, even when you’re his whole world (which we were inadvertently for older son, in a house with no TV and moving around so much he had no friends.) There are things you’ll do and things you’ll say when you burn yourself in the kitchen. (My sons both have a fluent command of Portuguese swearing.) There are conversations about a friend’s kid that they got all wrong, extracted a conclusion from, and ran with it. There are books they read, and extrapolate wrongly from. (This is normal, because kids have limited experience to extrapolate from.) And. And. And.
I was talking to friends about Hunter Biden and I said “Something horrible must have been done to that man” and they pointed out there are wonderful families that throw out a Hunter. Which I should have realized, because well, yes, this is true. And because I know families where all the kids were raised alike, and one, inexplicably went down that path. (Which is why I found the “Trump raised good kids, he’ll be a good president singularly unpersuasive. Though in the Bidens case… well. There’s a lot of not-right there.)
Even in the most regimented of institutions — say an orphanage in Portugal in the mid thirties — some kids will turn out wildly successful, and some will land in the gutter. (My mom dated the product of such a place, before dad. He went on to be Mayor of Porto and wildly wealthy. Need I say the other kids aren’t all like that?)
Kids are not only tabula rasa. Kids are by and large incomprehensible. You don’t know what will influence them. You don’t know what they’ll want to do.
The only thing I can say is that if you raise them the Jordan Peterson way — don’t let your kids become someone you hate — by curbing their most obnoxious habits and never letting them bully you, you have a good chance of ending up as we did: with adults we don’t fully understand (as you don’t fully understand anyone else) but whom we’re glad are here and happy to call our friends. (That wasn’t our goal. We wanted them to be functional adults, and this implied setting boundaries NOT being their best friend. In fact, being your kids “best friend” i.e. making yourself their peer is the most guaranteed to have bad results. Not always, because kids aren’t predictable, but the most likely.)
And this is good, because the thing that most surprised me in the whole parenthood thing is that you can’t help loving the little SOBs (I know their mother, okay?) It is really, as a facebook friend posted “like having a piece of your heart running around in someone else’s body forever.” Even when they’re big, hairy and very much adult.
And it’s much easier to love them if you also like them, and they’re people you enjoy hanging out with. Not that you have much choice on that love thing.
Oh, and it’s all worth it. For all the frustration, and the fact you can’t control them, you’d never not-do-it if you had the chance to go back.
I suspect this is partly because they’re not tabula rasa. You can’t fully predict who they’ll be. Every day a challenge. And every day a delight, as one of them will do something you can’t do, or never thought of doing.
You acquire tastes from your kids. Older son convinced me to like elephants (without trying.) Younger son has infected me with memes and the lingo of his generation, and made my interest in space exploration a million times stronger.
What they aren’t is little widgets. You can’t plan to dress them all alike, treat them all alike, and voila, in the end they’ll be all alike. (Imagine my mom’s old boyfriend was the pattern. Could Porto have that many mayors at once?)
What you can do, and we did, is let them explore their interests (we bought so many art materials and took so many trips, and signed younger son to a Greek course online, because he wanted to learn Greek, and–)
Discourage the things that will hurt you or them (this requires paying a lot of attention.) Like, you know, drug addiction.
And then let things run their course and pray for the best. (I pray a lot more than I did when I was not a parent.)
But input–> predictable output is null program with kids.
My dad is mad on sports, but he not only never convinced me to practice (two left hands, two left feet, and the two don’t talk to each other) he never convinced me to watch (ADD, no patience. It has to have a narrative, and even then–) My mom actually put me in seamstress training for a summer at 12, and from things that I learned recently, I suspect if I’d taken to it, she’d have taken me out of school and just put me in the training program. I MIGHT have taken a summer to hem a skirt. Which got me classed as irremediably lazy. (I wasn’t. I was plotting novels in my head, and then I wrote over night, which also explains why I was half asleep all day.) Turns out I enjoy sewing and making things. But it was never going to be my main love. (Kind of like younger son feels about writing. He’s admitted he wants to do it, and is doing it a bit, but it will always be a hobby, as it is for husband.)
They’re not yours to shape and mold. They’re yours to guide and help. It’s kind of like getting a mysterious seed in the mail and planting it. It might be a normal plant, it might be an exotic and fragile orchid, or it might be a Venus Flytrap. And you won’t know till they start showing it. (And your job is to make them the best Venus Flytrap ever!)
What this did to me as a human being was make me doubt forever all planned economies, and any system that relies on “we’ll convince people to–” or “We’ll train people to.–“
That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of it works. If parents can’t fully control who their kids become, how are you going to control that many adult strangers?
All totalitarian regimes are failures. Some of them just persuaded us to keep them alive by making us think they could destroy us. And no totalitarian regime knows what’s actually happening in the country. They think they do, because they control information. Outsiders think they do for the same reason, but it’s all a lie.
The difference between these countries and America is that America doesn’t even pretend. We — bless us one and all — glory in being ungovernable.
Humans are black boxes. And no matter how much you pound the 2+2 keys, you’re very likely to get back kumquat.
I almost titled this post “I’m not a woman” but the speculation would be insane. For the record I’m not “a woman”. I’m not “A man” either or “A mammal” for that matter.
I’m me.
I’m getting somewhat sick and tired of being lumped all in a group, and having things said about me that go something like “Women think” or “Women want” or heaven forbid “Women hurt most.”
Yeah, I know I often refer to women or men as a group. Sure. What I mean by that, in that instance is “A statistically average woman” which is a bit of a mathematical fiction. (Though not as much as a perfectly spherical cow, of uniform density, in a frictionless vacuum.)
Which is why I tend to talk about groups. The social mode of women comes out when there’s a majority of women in a work place or an industry for instance. It doesn’t tell us anything about a particular woman in that industry or that place.
So, why have I got that bee under that particular bonnet now?
Well, it’s not a bee. It’s probably a cicada, because it’s really noisy, but–
It’s the whole “drive to make everyone equal.” It drives me a little insane. I’m starting to suspect for some people — at least those who aren’t just stupid and insane — the drive is because of some perceived, (and perhaps real) injustice and mistreatment in their childhood from which they never recovered. At least I’m puzzled at “feed them and exercise them alike” in the comments on “two by two” referring to males and females, and that’s the only explanation I can find.
For those who’ve never raised kids, even in Portugal, which is a for-real sexist country, and was more so when I was little, sure, you might send your daughters to the village school, and your boys to the private school, for reasons of the boys making contacts that would help them in later life, mostly, but you didn’t refuse to feed the women/feed them less, or exercise the boys more than the girls. Heck, till I went to the all-girl school, we had gym with the boys. Also, until puberty, I could beat them all at rugby. Then testosterone gave them an unfair advantage.
Boys and women eat and exercise differently (boys tend to prefer more violent sports. Not all boys, of course.) because the hormones pumping through their veins and dictating their development are different since before they’re born. It’s not how we treat them, it’s what they are.
Which then brings us to making all women alike.
Recently I got yelled at (which is why my posts are going to be at weird times, until things stabilize) for my bizarre sleep-hygiene. Apparently — clears throat embarrassedly — while you can learn to sleep just under 5 hours a night and function fine for years, it’s like the joke my mom told about the Spaniard’s donkey “Just when she learned not to eat, she died.”
So I’m under strict orders to get off the net two hours before going to bed (backlit screens in general) and…. other stuff.
Why does this have anything to do with making women equal to men, or women equal to all other women?
Because the reason I got into this predicament was that I really, really — REALLY — wanted to write stories. And that meant that I had to steal sleep somewhere, so I could raise the kids, refinish the furniture, cook the food, and break into publishing, then keep up a more-active than normal writing life.
Look, would you impose that on any other woman? Even another woman who wanted to be a writer? I wouldn’t and I did it. I just really, really, really wanted to be a professional writer. And a mother. And the lack of enough hours in the day (or night) had to be overcome somehow.
On the other hand, I know women who spend two hours every morning (or evening) on their “beauty routine.” I never had patience. I don’t even remember to slap on moisturizer most of the time.
To force all of us to behave according to one or the other pattern would be painful, and probably stupid, not to mean lethal, if you mean my routine, because it is, as I’ve been assured “Killing yourself on the installment plan.” (I’m trying to fix it, okay?)
So.
“Women want!”
I don’t know about you, but I want a lot of things, and very few have anything to do with the equipment between my legs, or the hormones in my veins.
Yes, I wanted to have and raise kids, but so did my husband, which is why we went through infertility. That I was the one who’d bear them, was just the situation. I mean, no, he couldn’t do it.
I wanted to stay home with the kids, but it also was more convenient, because it was easier to steal sleep from that than from a conventional job, and I go a little bit loopy when not writing. But also Dan had better prospects, period. So I was the one who stayed home.
But I wanted a career, so I broke myself working for it.
Look — I’m me. I’m not “a woman”. I am physically weaker than most males, true. But for most of what I want to do that doesn’t count.
And intellectually I have more in common with Dave Freer than with most women, even my female friends. Because we both know what it’s like to want people to write our stories. And we’ve both worked crazy stupid hours to do it. And we both have the experience of trad pub. And–
Why is it that the promoters of equality are literally that. They not only want to make men and women EQUAL and believe that’s possible to a level it biologically isn’t, but they want to make everyone equal.
Poor sleep and crazy work times for everyone!
Only, of course, I wouldn’t be allowed to write. To strike a blow for equality, I should absolutely be an engineer, or at doctor, or at least a high powered lawyer.
Because …. women aren’t allowed to want to do things that don’t prove they’re as good as or better than men.
All animals must be made alike. Particularly if they don’t want to.
Meh.
I’m not a widget. I’m not part of any lumpen group. I’m not following any group I’m forced into.
I’ll be over there, doing my thing.
And the equalizers can learn to leave me and those like me the heck alone.
There is a reason that when I sat down to create a “future history” (I thought it was needed. Look, also shuddup. I was green as leeks and twice and dumb) I had it start with people going hog wild for bio improvements. (Also for having kids created in factory style batch lots, including by gestating them in animals, particularly in China and Russia, because, well…. Population crashing. Let me tell you how many times i got stories rejected in the 80s and nineties for that assumption. (Laughs in looking at the facts not the fads.))
Why? Because given a chance, humans would absolutely do all this.
Like pimply teenagers, we look in the mirror and think “If only.”
And every time we have attempted — every single time throughout history — it ends in tears.
From the early Christians trying to live in perfect communitarian religious communities, to the weird experiments of the puritans, to the kibutzim, and before that, and undoubtedly after, time out of mind either way, humans have engaged in the equivalent of body modification, only often what we’re trying to modify is the spirit.
And what is difficult about that is that we’re not spirits, floating mid-air. (This, honestly is very annoying to me, as half the time I forget I have a body, even when it’s having a massive skin eruption) but spirits tied in to the body. You can’t just change the mind, without taking in account the body and where it comes from, and what it wants.
One of the most brilliant illustrations of this, btw, was PTerry’s when he has the auditors take human bodies. Form dictates function, so they start becoming human despite themselves.
Because again, humans aren’t pure spirit.
No matter how much humans want to make us to order, we keep beating our heads against the ape body.
My position, of course, was that remaking the body would be even worse, but that’s something else again. (I do know, thank you so much, the curse of what many people think is desirable like high intelligence, or other abilities that are out of the ordinary. If we really had naturally occurring super powers we wouldn’t because people would kill themselves in the first generation.)
Yes, humans are social apes, but we are not infinitely plastic.
The little thing we ran into in the “Two by Two” comments (no, not the incredibly chauvinistic one, where women don’t know what turns them on, but the other one, where humans are infinitely malleable) is part of the whole “Teach men not to rape.” and what the #metoo project was really all about. (It wasn’t about rape, because it was supposed to be something all women have experienced, so either the organizers are even more delusional than they sound — possible, granted — or it was about causal sexism which kind of like “structural” racism is supposed to be everywhere and invisible. What it accidentally revealed is that fields infested by leftists are rape-town, because most of these are seventies leftists, which means they were taught on Freud pap, and to refuse sex at any time and with anything — male, female, floor lamp — meant you were repressed and would eventually go on a mass-murdering spree.)
You can teach men not to rape. In fact we do. With an astonishing rate of success, if you look back on the rather sketch history of the human race and how many rapes of opportunity occurred almost casually even in historical times, so how many must have occurred in pre-history. And how many occur in our animal cousins close to us.
What we can’t do is make sure NO MAN commits rapes, ever. (Any theory that begins and ends with “if only everyone” is evil.) Because the poor dears are sperm delivery systems on legs, and if they aren’t taught and socialized to be mindful of what women want, they’ll be like dolphins (and bonobos. BTW you might want to read up on what bonobos REALLY are from rape to casual killing. Which, to be fair, is fairly representative from the — thank heavens very short lived — female lead cults and society-lets we know about.) I.e. they’ll screw anything that lives or even waves in the wind. Any hole in a storm and never mind consent.
It’s time to lay to rest now and forever the stupid idea of Rousseau’s that unschooled humans are “noble savages.” We have plenty of examples of modern primitives and regressed societies. We even have examples — waves at China, not to mention every communist “utopia” ever — of erasing and making it illegal to teach the past, down to fairy tales. They are horror stories, by and large, not utopias.
Humans are made or built by evolution — I don’t really care which you believe — from the clay of the Earth, meaning on the frame of an Earth animal. Our closest relatives seem to be chimps (though not that close, TBF) and someone recently came up with some study about how we actually more resemble gorillas, but I didn’t do a deep dive, and now I don’t remember where it was, so I can’t swear it makes any sense. Most of these social science things are irreproducible anyway.
Probably what has affected us most is our size dimorphism. Men are much larger than women, but more importantly they’re ridiculously strong compared to women. In a time and place where survival wasn’t guaranteed and everything wanted to kill you, men had a huge advantage over females. The females also had a huge advantage over men. You see, we have a super power. We can produce babies. INSIDE OUR BODIES. The creatures that make the present worthwhile — the future of us — are just mysteriously grown inside women. Men wanted that, but they also wanted to make sure the babies were theirs. Every variation of marriage, rape, conquest, our entire complex society comes from these two facts. As do the different — INSTINCTIVE — responses of males and females.
Look let’s be real. We now know there were humans on the Earth a quarter of a million years ago, and there’s suspicions of much, much older. That’s…. a very long time, in terms of human generations.
Humans were selected according to the different pressures on the sexes.
And yes, we know — heck, every animal breeder knows — character and basic traits are inherited.
Men were selected for being protectors, for being dominant, for being good at passing on their genes (the rapists you shall always have with you. It’s an unorthodox form of reproduction, that obviously worked) and women were selected for being able to attach to the man who would keep her kids safe, and bullying the other women enough that her kids were looked after preferentially.
Spare me the great matriarchies, which even some libertarians believe in. That’s bullshit on stilts, a feminist retelling of the Garden of Eden projected back on a time when no one can say for sure if it existed. But we can. Everyone of the “great matriarchies” as we find out more end up not only not being that, but being horrifically, bizarrely bad for women. Like… yes, Sparta. (Who in heck thought that was a great Matriarchy. I guess people older than I, because by the time I got to school no one even tried to sell me that one.) Or Crete. Or any of those.
Also we know — WE KNOW — that none of the modern primitives are matriarchal. Some are matrilineal but if you think the Zulus are a great matriarchy because the male in the household is your oldest uncle, I recommend you go and have your head examined. There are others, where the women are agricultural while the men are still hunters which moderns try to interpret as “the women own the land, the women rule.” This might be more stupid than men thinking women are more visual in regard to sex, or that we’re always ready to have sex with anything: men, women, small reptilian creatures.
There have been societies that worshiped goddesses, yes. If you think the Phoenicians were better for women, you haven’t read much about it.
But, Sarah, you’ll say, nowadays we don’t need to have strict marriage arrangements to know the paternity of the child. And we have guns, so women being smaller and weaker is not a big deal.
Sure. But go look at at least a quarter million years of evolutionary and breeding pressures shaping humanity’s deep drives.
Call them instinct, call them what the heck you will, inate drives cannot be overwritten in a generation or two. There’s some idea that they can’t be overwritten in a millenium or two.
We are what we are. Jumped up great apes.
Sure, you can raise women and men to think they’re absolutely equal. Dress them the same, give them the same haircuts, enforce the same rules on them.
Believe it or not it’s been tried, again and again, including with sects that tried to suppress the very idea of sex by not showing la difference. (No, I don’t have references to hand, because my fargin library is still packed, and I am over fifty and can’t remember titles and names off the top of my head.)
It works “great” every time, until the kids hit puberty, utterly unprepared for it.
I know of these experiments, because LEFTIST anthropologists used to point to them as the reason Freud was right and the worst thing possible was the repression of the sexual drive. (Even when that wasn’t exactly what was being repressed.)
And yes, experiments have been tried, particularly in the seventies, where you just slept with everything in sight. That also ended in tears.
Humans are humans, formed from deep evolutionary pressures.
To raise kids as though they were angels, just leaves them defenseless as they become adults.
To raise girls to be boys “You shall have all the sex. The most important thing is open competition and career” gives you deeply unhappy women.
It is better to raise kids as though they were individuals. You do of course teach them what you believe, but you don’t make them live it from the earliest age, which is why religious orders no longer take oblates.
Will some people be perfectly happy living in completely equal circumstances? Well, we have religious orders.
Will some people like living in free for all sexual communities? Some people do. Fewer successfully than in religious orders, because when sex rears its interesting head, it’s much harder to share and share alike.
Does either of these work for the majority of people? Oh, for the love of Bob. No. And attempts to enforce it always become horrors.
We can’t remake humanity overnight.
We are remaking ourselves, in a way, with stuff like guns, the contraceptive pill, antibiotics.
But the result will take ten thousand years to work through.
Attempts to force it early will only destroy humanity.
Keep the dreams in science fiction. When they get lose in real life, they suck real life dry.
Humans are not play things or widgets. Each of us carries the impulses and temperamental tendencies of ancestors long turned to dust. Different for everyone, of course. It is from our differences that society is born, and achievements too.
Forget grand plans. Let individuals be individual.
I think the biggest complaints people get about their fiction these days is, “Why aren’t there more LGBTQ characters in it?”
And you’re probably trying your best. Maybe you’ve made every main character and every secondary character LGBTQ and the only straight character left is the villain (who is closeted gay), but it still just doesn’t feel inclusive enough.
Well, I’m here to help with tips to cram even more LGBTQ characters into your story. I mean, the last thing you want to hear is some reader say, “There are only eight gay people in this story? What is this? Victorian England?” before chucking your book into the fire. But you won’t have to worry about that if you follow my advice.
HOW TO ADD MORE LGBTQ CHARACTERS TO YOUR FICTION
Fill any empty space. The easiest way to add more LGBTQ characters to your story is to simply add more characters. You might say, “But my story can’t really use any more characters.” Well, if you’re putting your story above inclusivity, you’re part of the problem.
For instance, maybe you have the protagonist being chased through an empty warehouse by the killer. Sorry, but that’s just not going to do; that’s a wasted opportunity. Instead, fill that warehouse full of people who are all LGBTQ. That will change the mood of the scene a bit, but it’s what’s needed.
Now, the challenge is quickly establishing all the people in the background are LGBTQ. If you just write, “He ran through a crowd of people in the warehouse,” for all your readers know, those could be straight people. No one wants that. So you’re going to have to go through and describe each person and make it quickly clear they’re LGBTQ. And you’re going to have to be careful here not to rely on stereotypes. And you probably can’t just have everyone making out; maybe some could be wearing various flag shirts to make it clear what they are. Also, a character or two could shout something out like, “I love being a bisexual!” (this was similar to the method used in the 1990 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to make it clear the main characters were turtles).
Other things than people can be LGBTQ. So you’ve got every scene in your story chock full of LGBTQ people, but it still feels you can do better. Well, what about any animals mentioned in the story? Can’t they be LGBTQ as well? Like if you mentioned a squirrel running through a park or fly buzzing by — you can make them LGBTQ as well. It’s a bit harder to quickly establish an animal is LGBTQ, though, since they can’t shout out, “I love being bisexual!” — except for parrots. Actually, that’s probably the best solution there: Have lots of talking parrots flying around.
And what if you have a chapter where you describe a tree, can the tree be trans? I’m not sure how that would work, but it’s worth considering. There are usually lots of plants around everywhere, and if it can all be LGBTQ, the better.
And what about inanimate objects? Can buildings, rocks, and fire hydrants be LGBTQ? I’m not sure how, but if you can crack that you’ll have great fiction.
Make your words LGBTQ. Okay, so now you’ve made absolutely everything mentioned in your story LGBTQ. It starts with a dark and stormy night, and you made it clear the dark is a lesbian, the night is bisexual, and the storm is non-binary. Still, it feels you can do more. Well, how about making the words you write be LGBTQ.
This is trickier. You could just say, “Well, could I use a gayer word than this one?” — though I won’t go into specifics there. But here’s another option: When I was a kid, we often used the word “bad” to actually mean “good.” That’s basically a trans-word — a negative word identifying as a positive word. Use lots of words like that; it might make your prose confusing, but again, think of what you gain in inclusivity.
—
And there you have it. Follow all that advice, and your story will be so inclusive that people’s eyes will melt and progressives will cancel themselves in shame compared to your glory. You might have to jettison some plot and coherency for all this, but that isn’t what today’s audiences want anyway.
Sarah here: You guys might want to check out Frank’s Superego Betrayal, now in audio!
Terrorists. A ruthless criminal syndicate. A warmongering dictatorship. And those are just Rico’s allies.
With the civilized universe conquered, it’s up to the uncivilized to fight back. Rico prefers working alone, but this time, he’s leading an army against his two greatest enemies, who both have one thing in common: Rico’s own DNA.
Fighting a personal battle on a galactic scale, Rico enlists thieves, murderers, and malcontents (plus one space princess) to help him save the universe from tyranny.
And considering Rico’s new associates, it’s not a question of whether he’ll be betrayed, but when, and by whom.
STILL SARAH SPEAKING: Also, I want to thank Frank for finally making me understand why the left hated my book A Few Good Men (the title is a nod to the world building. Never mind) and kept claiming it wasn’t gay. Before I reissue it, I shall add lots of gay parrots. Will need to be lots of them, because Nat Remy will shoot them down as soon as they open beak. you know it, and I know it.
According To Hoyt 