Latest brouhaha involving SFWA

[annathepiper]

One of the drawbacks about being non-traditionally published is that so far I’m not eligible to join writers’ organizations in the genres I write in. Even though I have two books out, the fact that one of them is published via a digital publisher and the other is self-pubbed (both digitally and in print) means I’m not eligible to join SFWA, the

Comments

[marzipan_pig]

Well and the thing is, all that in the 70s is primarily what kept me OUT of reading sf/fantasy when I was a kid (and much of why I don't much now either really). It's not like mainstream fiction was perfect or anything and YA has always been problematic. But I didn't WANT to read books with no/stupid/objectified girls in them and so I didn't bother. Ray Bradbury was worth it and I read some Harlan Ellison in college (mostly by way of of all things the essay Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled, which was for me at the timeeye-openly sex-positive).

Things changed and I feel bad for the people who had a hard time changing along with it, and still, I wish that they would shut up a little more. Who was it who had some awful essay about how more women in sf means There! Will! Be! Fewer! Male! Writers! (and why did I even have to see that essay in the first place?)

[annathepiper]

A lot of the names I see thrown around as the Big Classic Names in SF are ones I've never bothered to bring myself to read, yeah. I have never been able to muster enough giveadamn to look at Heinlein, for example, just because of all the rampaging sexism problems a lot of his later work's got. The fact that it's there at all has never made it worth it to me to try to read the stuff of his that is less rampagingly sexist, when there are so many other authors I could be reading who don't do that shit.

I feel grateful I have no idea what essay you're talking about, I think, just for the sake of my aforementioned blood pressure.