Re: SFWA Bulletin 202
Dear Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg,
I am not anonymous. I am not particularly young, either, so I guess I’m not one of the unnamed, insufficiently aged, Y-chromosome lacking horde you’ve created as a target for your smug, self-satisfied dialog in the latest issue of the SFWA Bulletin.
What I am is weary. Weary enough that I’m tempted not to address this at all, to point to Kameron Hurley's eloquent and impassioned response, or Catherine Tobler’s heartfelt resignation from SFWA, and say there it is in a nutshell.
Weary enough that instead I’m going to be rude. Women of my generation aren’t supposed to be rude to men of your generation; we’re supposed to be reasonable, understanding and respectful of all points of view, even those that seek to belittle us. And I hear you’re lovely people, supportive of women writers, great conversationalists, salt of the earth, and I’m sure in many ways that’s true.
Screw that anyway. I’m too tired to see your non-stop use of the term “lady;” lady writers, editors, publishers as anything but condescending, however gentlemanly it’s meant (and in #202, it’s so constant I can’t but suspect you’re intentionally trying to get a rise out of your soi-disant anons). I’m too tired to be anything but offended at your claiming that those who have the audacity to criticize you are trying to censor you, in a world where censorship means a girl getting shot in the head for daring to become educated, or a country trying to wipe all records and knowledge of an atrocity.
I’m tired because I sing in a choir where a man is offended when I suggest that feminists probably don’t laugh at his jokes because they’re not funny, rather than they have no sense of humor. I’m tired because my daughter won’t jog down her own street in broad daylight because men driving by harass her. I’m tired because my other daughter has had men pluck out strands of her hair because they have a fetish about the color, and a woman’s physicality is, by its nature, public property. Which is why talking about how nice Robert Silverberg looks in a suit - which you didn’t, by the way - is less problematical than talking about how beautiful a lady editor is.
I’m sick and tired and angry about your lowest common denominator whine about being that so-oppressed class, the Old White Guy; your implication that we can’t “handle” a bikini-clad woman warrior (we’ve been dealing with that all out lives; you can’t handle the trope being questioned); and especially your crass comparison of your critics to genocidal dictators (not to mention your not-very-clever Schiklgruber-the-painter dig).
I am not sure if I’m done with SFWA, which is more than its Bulletin and members with 1960s sensibilities. I have a few weeks to decide.
I am fucking done with being polite.
(I can't seem to insert a link to Kameron so here: http://www.kameronhurley.com/)