Tag: McRapey

Cannibal dreams and the SFWA

Laura Resnick, an SFWA member, waxed homicidal on SFWA President John Scalzi’s blog:

Laura Resnick says:
August 17, 2012 at 1:12 pm
Whever I think “alpha male”… my daydream quickly becomes a Sweeney Todd nightmare in which I’m serving the remains to my dinner guests, disguised as some sort of heavy-seasoned stew beneath puff pastry, because I wound up killing said Alpha Male in sheer exasperation before sundown and need to get rid of the body….

Naturally, being an alpha male as per Roissy’s definition, I felt a little uncomfortable reading this strange woman’s fantasies about murdering and dismembering me. Seeing as some of my recent comments at John’s blog, none of which involved violence, had been removed by John himself, I was a little surprised that Ms Resnick’s comments were deemed acceptable and asked for clarification.

VD says:
August 21, 2012 at 9:08 am
That’s fascinating, Laura. It appears your female daydreams about the cannibalistic murder of alpha males are perfectly acceptable to the SFWA President here. Are male daydreams about raping “alpha females” equally acceptable to you, John? Or do we have to kill them first? I suppose it’s technically not rape if they’re dead. I don’t know about the cannibalism, though, and you know, Laura is really making me uncomfortable here….

It is more than a little troubling that the President of the SFWA is not merely free with his frequent accusations of assbaggery and other hurtful terms, but is now playing host to the murderously cannibalistic fantasies of certain SFWA members. It tends to raise the question: is John Scalzi still fit for the SFWA presidency when he maintains an environment that is so openly and violently hostile to men?

It is a painful question to ask, as I was a public supporter of Mr. Scalzi’s candidacy. But his recent actions have rendered me a troubled and frightened former supporter.

UPDATE:

Why is Laura’s comment ok, but not The Deuce’s? I’m confused. Is this a gender bias thing?
Cuspidor says:
August 21, 2012 at 12:01 pm

John Scalzi says:
August 21, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Cuspidor: Because “slut” and “alpha male” are not equivalent terms in any number of ways. Making an argument that they are is an indication of a failure to understand language. Which is why this sort of word substitution is often neither useful, nor actually anything approaching clever.

VD says:
August 21, 2012 at 12:26 pm
They are equivalent terms in the most important way, John. They are both human beings. So, are we to conclude that you find the murder, dismemberment, and devouring of a certain subset of men to be acceptable, but the murder, dismemberment, and devouring of a specific subset of women to be unacceptable? Why do you find it acceptable for Laura to publicly fantasize about murdering, dismembering, and devouring men on your site, but it is not acceptable for The Deuce to do the same regarding women? For the purposes of clarification, is it acceptable for Laura to also publicly fantasize about murdering, dismembering, and devouring women? Would The Deuce’s comments have been acceptable if he, too, was fantasizing about murdering and cannibalizing men?

Which Mr. Scalzi, being the coward that he is, promptly modified: [Deleted because I don’t have patience for VD’s special brand of complete nonsense on this topic. Stay in your own pit of manstink, would you, Vox? There’s a lad — JS]

VD says:
August 21, 2012 at 12:32 pm
C-c-c-c-coward! I’ll be bringing this up in the SFWA forum, of course, Mr. President. Your behavior is wildly inappropriate for an official representative of our fine professional association.

John Scalzi still justifying sexism

And droidism. And racism. And homophobia.

In my piece on how not to be a creeper, I made a point that today I’d like to expand on just a little; I’ll explain why in a bit. Here’s the point:

2. Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeper to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creeping them out and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creep and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep” to “complete assbag.” Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.

This apparently has struck some to be dreadfully unfair, with the implication being that other people responding to folks (usually men) as creepers when in fact they’re trying to make an effort to be charming and witty and fun (or whatever) is some sort of special case in the interaction of human beings, and that such mismatches between intent and reception hardly ever happen in other situations.

To which my response is: you have got to be kidding me. Outside of the realm of possible potential creepiness, you don’t get to choose how other people respond to you, either. In any context. Indeed, regardless of your efforts to present yourself in a certain way, it is almost certain you will come across to some other people as not that way at all, and possibly the opposite of that way entirely.

On the one hand, Scalzi is absolutely right. We don’t get to choose how others feel about us or respond to us. John, for example, responds poorly to both this blog and its readers, referring to them collectively as “a feculent miasma of male self-regard”. That’s absolutely fine, it is simply his opinion, just as the idea that a woman who teaches Lesbianism in Hindu Film is convincing evidence that women are every bit as interested in the hard sciences as men is also his opinion.

You may understand if I tend to consider his opinion to be less than entirely dispositive.

So why am I objecting to what Scalzi is saying if I agree with it? Because he doesn’t actually mean it. Not only that, he doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t mean it. He is dimly aware that something is wrong, which is why he is attempting to “expand a little” on his previous point, but he still doesn’t grasp what it is. He’s appealing to a right in which he does not actually believe.

What Scalzi inadvertently did in his point two was to defend the right of free association. Which would be fine, only we know from Scalzi’s smug soft leftism that he supports absolutely nothing of the sort. Whereas he is absolutely fine with telling those condemned as “creeps” that they simply have to live with their rejection by others, I strongly suspect he is absolutely opposed to telling those condemned as “sluts” or “faggots” or “towelheads” or other behavior-based labels to do the same, much less those whose labels are purely identity-based.

And this is the point that he has resolutely evaded with his irrelevant forays into “false equivalence” and “unfairness”, even though his mention of droids indicates that he must have at least a vague idea of what he has done. Despite the fact that he has presented an argument that justifies all sorts of sexism, racism, and droidism, I don’t believe John Scalzi is actually sexist, racist, or anti-droid, he is merely a glib and inconsistent hypocrite who is willing to use an argument when it happens to suit him, then abandon it when it doesn’t. Now, I readily admit that it is possible I am wrong and Scalzi does support the right of those made uncomfortable by the presence of blacks, women, gays, or anyone else to expect those who make them uncomfortable to go away and leave them in peace, in which case I will of course retract the accusation of hypocrisy and inconsistency. I invite Mr. Scalzi to clarify his actual position on the subject.

As for the actual subject of “creepiness”, the problem is that as a gamma male, Scalzi simply doesn’t understand women or the socio-sexual hierarchy well enough to even understand what it is. As this aspect of the discussion is predominantly Game-related, I address it on Alpha Game.

John Scalzi justifies sexism

Mr. Scalzi attempts to defend female rejection of men as “creepers”, amusingly without realizing how perfectly it can be turned around and applied to male rejection of women in a manner that he would probably consider sexist:

Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeperstupid slut to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creepingpissing them outoff and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep”“stupid slut” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creepstupid slut and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep”“stupid slut” to “complete assbag”“complete bitch”. Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.”

Congratulations to John. He has managed to concoct a soundly sexist argument for simply banning women from DEFCON or any other predominantly male gathering. After all, if the dorks there don’t like women or want them near them, it’s just the way it is…. Men have precisely the same right to arbitrarily label women “stupid sluts” and treat them accordingly as women have to arbitrarily label men “creeps” and do the same.

Now, some men are genuinely creepy and I’m certainly not defending anyone’s right to behave in an uncivilized manner. But at the same time, it should be noted that women cannot be granted a right to free association that is denied to men.

UPDATE: Scalzi is either too lazy or too much of a pussy to think through his own arguments. He writes:

You know, I saw in a Google search that you wrote on this piece at your blog, and I thought to myself, “oh, great, now I go have to deal with some dumbass comment from him on the site.” And I was right! For your next trick of bad equivalence, why don’t you put the word “droid” in parentheses and congratulate me for coming up with a valid excuse for banning R2D2 from the Mos Eisley cantina?

If this is really what you’ve come to say, don’t really need to be on this thread, VD. Shoo. Everyone else, best to leave VD uncommented upon.

He also added this:

[Deleted because the point this jackhole was purporting to make was just an excuse for him to call women obnoxious things on my site. Hi there, trolls from VD’s site! Just because you wallow in a feculent miasma of male self-regard over there doesn’t mean you get to port it over here — JS]

It is fascinating to see that John Scalzi has devolved into such an intellectual pussy that he almost immediately concludes those who disagree with him must be trolls. And in support of my earlier charge of his sexism, what a sexist assumption to assume that all of the readers at VP are men! This is what happens when you run an echo chamber, you get sloppy, lazy, and eventually become unable to defend your opinions. It’s particularly embarrassing in this situation, because I am simply pointing out the obvious logical consequences of his statement, which can be easily understood by looking at the word “creep” as a variable rather than being distracted by his “false equivalence” defense.

The equivalence or lack thereof is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how Scalzi defines “creep” or to whom he applies the term. His argument works just as well for justifying the social stigmatization of “droids”, “negroes”, “homosexuals”, “girls with cooties”, or anything else that might make an individual uncomfortable. That’s not bad logic, and if he genuinely think it is, then I certainly invite him to identify the specific logical error or logical fallacy in it… if he can.

It is amusing to see him talking about “bad logic” as there is a reason I tagged this under “trainwreck” in the first place. Of course, this is the genius who once cited a female professor teaching “Lesbianism in Indian Film” at the University of Minnesota in order to defend the idea of female interest in the hard sciences.

A failure in condescension

In which SFWA President-for-Life John Scalzi’s misguided attempt to curry favor with the non-white, non-male portion of the population is shown to be conclusively wrong by his very own selected metrics:

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Now, let me first point out that John is not a bad guy. He’s actually remarkably low on the obnoxious left-liberal scale for a science fiction writer, much less a successful one, and there is no question that he means well. That being said, he’s about as socio-sexually Gamma as it is possible to be and still be straight, and for someone whose communication skills are quite high, he’s uncharacteristically oblivious to what a condescending little fuck this post makes him appear to be. But it’s only an illusion, as the reality is that Scalzi is actually engaging in a brilliant subversion.

This will, of course, escape most readers. I suspect the average straight white man who actually works for a living rather than sitting around making up stories primarily for the benefit of obese middle-aged women aren’t terribly inclined to be lectured by an overweight, educated, soft-handed little man about how easy they have it. Let’s look at his metaphor of the difficulty setting, which as a gamer, game producer, and game designer I am rather well suited to examine.

First, I note that he is clearly referring to a snapshot in time. Straight white men didn’t have it any easier than, for example, straight brown men back in the age of the Pharoahs, nor will they have it easier should China defeat the USA in 2050. So, the metrics have to refer to today, now, not what life was like in 500 BC, 1850, or 2050. Having established that, let’s look at the measures he specifically notes and see how many of them are true:

1. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower.
2. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly.
3. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for.
4. The game is easier to play, automatically
5. When you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

1. This is clearly false. There is copious evidence showing that Scalzi has it completely wrong here. Who is permitted to graduate from high school or college while doing sub-standard work, a black individual or a white one? Who is permitted to skate in the workplace more often, men or women? For whom are the standards reduced more often, white men or non-white men?

2. This is also generally false; Scalzi’s perspective here is likely skewed from his professional involvement in the literary and Hollywood worlds, where connections matter far more than experience or achievement. But unless your father owns the cleaning company, the average white male janitor or white male sales guy is not going to level up any more quickly than anyone else, in fact, there is considerable statistical evidence that proves women are promoted much more quickly than men in corporate America. One need only look at news broadcasts to see an example of this; one never sees a twenty-two year old man reading the news. Note that the median age of female newscasters is 26, six years younger than male newscasters.

3. This is true, but irrelevant and misleading. Scalzi simply ignores that white men created the desirable parts of the map where everyone wants to go. There is no straight white male privilege in Zimbabwe because their existence is strongly frowned upon… and what was once the wealthy colony of Rhodesia is now a third-world hellhole. Scalzi has his causation backwards here, it would be more relevant and historically correct to say that white men create more desirable parts of the map than others. If he seriously wishes to dispute this, I suggest he move away from his lily-white Midwestern exurbia into a more vibrant community such as South-Central Los Angeles, downtown Detroit, or post-Apartheid Yeoville. It should come as no surprise that straight white men happen to be better at playing the game of Western Civilization than anyone else. They’re probably less naturally accomplished at the Grass Hut Game, the Aesthetic Stasis Game, or the Naked Savage Orgy Game.

4. Is the game easier to play or are the players intrinsically more skilled? Scalzi simply makes a naked assertion without offering any support for it. Since the game is the same and the rules are the same, logic favors the idea that any quantitative advantage to the straight white male in this regard stems from the way in which the characters points are distributed more efficiently rather than the game setting.

5. This is obviously untrue. The research on the male inclination to ask for, and accept, help clearly demonstrates that it is women who find help much easier to get. The ease with which women and minorities are permitted to exercise free association while white men are not proves that help is much harder for them to get than for others.

So, ironically enough, subversively enough, Scalzi not only fails to make his case, but by his own chosen metrics, winds up demonstrating that it is women who are playing on the lowest difficulty setting, not men. One would think that was obvious, given how they live longer, work less, and have far more options open to them. As for the straight question, that’s not even relevant, since homosexuality is not the equivalent of a difficulty setting, but rather, being left-handed and choosing to play with your left hand on a right-handed controller. It’s understandable why someone might make that decision, but the controller is what it is and it works a lot better if you simply use your non-dominant hand.