Why does SFWA have a velvet rope?
This is an honest question.
Why does SFWA have the membership requirements it has? I mean, I understand the theory. If you're an organization of professional writers, you might want to make sure that the members are all professional writers. SFWA offers some pretty good things to its members, and some would get unweildy if offered to just anyone (the legal services and Emergency Medical Fund spring to mind).
BUT.
There are two other large writers' organizations that cover the other two major "genre" fields: RWA (Romance Writers of America) and MWA (Mystery Writers of America)*. Both of these organizations have open membership for non-published authors. Yes, they have higher tiers of membership for which one must prove eligibility with publishing credits, but at the general level, they do offer membership and benefits of various sorts to anyone who applies.
This came up because I notice the SFWA Bulletin is only available to people who meet SFWA's eligibility requirements, whereas the equivalent publications from RWA and MWA are available to all members, who can be anyone. [ETA: Whoops, anyone can subscribe to the Bulletin.]
I realize that on some level SFF fandom fulfills a lot of the role that the associate/general membership of RWA and MWA fills. SFF doesn't need a special organization to tell its aspiring writers where they can go to meet their favorite authors. And yet apparently a lot of younger people aren't getting the memo--they're creating parallel fandoms and having different adventures and not engaging with the Old Guard living in their cloistered garden.
For example, Romance and Mystery may not have as large a fanfic audience, and I'm sure they don't embrace the fanfic community in the way some SFF folks do, but neither do their pros put up an explicit "Keep Out" sign; and so fanfic writers have gone off and created their own spaces, and some of them become pros and don't bother with SFWA because it's not relevant to their interests, as a cat would say.
I always thought SFWA would be a cool thing to join, a kind of "Hey, once you're published there are all new things to deal with, and we'll help you," kind of organization. There seemed to be plenty of available outreach for the unpublished in SFF fandom, so that was fine and made sense.
But then someone posted commentary on the rest of the recent issue of the Bulletin (not sure of the link; there have been a lot of links and through-links), and basically it summed up as not actually fulfilling the official purpose as stated by SFWA. No market news, no discussion of professional concerns. The description of the articles really did sound a lot like a fanzine: gossip and light discussion of things not directly pertinent to the life of a working writer.
So from the outside, having seen the curtain pulled back on the Great and Powerful, the whole thing looks kind of...high-schoolish.** Junior high even. People's reaction of "Are you 12 years old?" to some of the incredible stupidity ("Waah, we're being censored!") is staggeringly accurate. And this leads to the perception that maybe some members of SFWA want to keep the gate locked not because they're trying to get stuff done that will only be distracted by a bunch of folks whose needs are different, but rather because they don't want to let those kids sit at their lunch table.
Even when those kids*** are published authors, with advances and royalties and publishing contracts from Big Six companies.
It makes the whole thing look like a bunch of people who used to be the popular kids trying desperately to prove that they're still Prom King and this actually means something; even though everyone else is grown up now, and most of them didn't go to prom anyway because they went out clubbing or to the beach or to a good movie instead.
So, yeah, to me these two things--the exclusivity of SFWA membership and the resentment of some members for new ideas--seem related. And I can't help wondering if there is a causal relationship.
*Yeah, America. I'm not going to address the issue of whether or not people from overseas can join any of these organizations except to say I don't see why they aren't. But I'm not running these circuses, so maybe there's a reason.
**And by this I mean "high school in a bad teen movie," because in truth my high school didn't have Mean Girls or Popular Kids, just different groups of friends, most of which had overlap with other groups. I understand other schools aren't so great.
***Note that "kids" is not meant to indicate age, but rather to continue the student-cliques metaphor, a shorthand for "Everyone who doesn't agree with us."