Going on and on and on and on and on, in fact.

A thing where Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann engage in rape apologism; a thing where Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown calls them on it, eloquently and beautifully and appropriately; a thing where it seems like half the internet has her back and the other half is shitting on her as hard as their tiny constipated interasses can manage.

It’s put me in tears twice. It’s important.

And if even one member of my tiny readership catches wind of it because of me, it’s worth crawling out of my pillow fort to write this post.

So go on. Read those links. I can wait.

I’ll see you on Twitter.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Oh Michael Hawkins no.

Please be warned that this post contains, and links to, discussion of rape. Read with caution. Thank you.

I’ll quote the exact paragraph that makes me want to beat my head against a wall:

And that linked post wants to make everything so black and white. No, rape isn’t usually done for the primary sake of sex. That doesn’t magically mean there are no sexually deviant individuals who suffer/are subject to conditions which compel sexual acts that have nothing to do with power.

Really, Michael Hawkins? Really?

I bring up the subject of rape and you immediately leap to defend the hypothetical people who might commit that crime because of a medical condition?

What medical condition, pray tell? And what compels you to think that the defence of this no doubt miniscule percentage of rapists is the first thing with which you should concern yourself when the topic comes up?

Oh, Chin Man. If you only had a heart.

But let me be clearer still. I don’t know if such a condition exists. If it does, it is surely a problem. But it is nowhere near the problem. The problem, Michael Hawkins, is people like you. The problem is a culture in which rapists feel comfortable raping because they are counting on that bizarre compulsion people have to defend them instead of, I don’t know, defending their victims. Here, I’ll even link you the original post.

Does that worry you, Michael Hawkins? Do you feel a little uncomfortable as you consider the possibility that the words you say might give a rapist good reason to think of you as a safe harbour? I fucking hope so. It should.

Drama! Horror! Delusion! Illogic!

Wait. Hang on.

I’ve seen that name before.

It’s the Chin Man!

Two things make me sad here. Okay, lots of things make me sad, because I ran out of antidepressants yesterday (which also explains why this post is low on polysyllables and high on exclamation marks), but here are two of them: first, that Michael Hawkins abandoned that long-ago discussion just when it almost seemed to be getting somewhere. And second, that he has clearly learned nothing whatsoever in the interim.

It’s worth checking back to every so often; when I looked just now it had doubled in size since the first time I saw it.

Any human with a decent approximation of sanity, and many a human without, is capable of resisting their own sexual urges. Yes, even if they are male. Yes, even if they are teenaged and male. Stop talking about the uncontrollable mating urge of the adolescent boy, or of the adult man. Both are figments of humanity’s twisted collective imagination. Neither exists.

We are not a species of sad little marionettes being trotted this way or that by our laughing genitals. This is one of those jokes that needs to go away and never come back.

Because there are people who believe this manure, and when somebody believes something like that, they’re often disinclined to test it for themselves.

This angry rant is brought to you by chapter four of Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Puppets. I hope nobody’s listening to him when it comes to sex anyway, because this is the same guy who gave us the heterosexual pedophile outraged to be mistaken for “a faggot”.

Apparently, science fiction is “very male”.

In fact, the entire opening paragraph of that post is a masterpiece of tragicomedy. I’ll quote it here:

Science fiction is a very male form of fiction. Considerably more men than women are interested in reading and watching science fiction. This is no surprise. Science fiction traditionally is about men doing things, inventing new technologies, exploring new worlds, making new scientific discoveries, terraforming planets, etc. Many men working in the fields of science, engineering, and technology have cited science fiction (such as the original Star Trek) for inspiring them when they were boys to establish careers in these fields.

Now, the thing is, when I read that I expected it to be the opening paragraph of a very different post. (I should learn to pay more attention to the author tagline on blog entries.) The fact that somebody could think male-dominated, male-centric sci-fi is somehow a good thing still strikes me as more than slightly fucked. So listen up, Pro-male/Anti-feminist Tech: this is the post that might have been.

Science fiction is traditionally very male-dominated. No, let me rephrase: science fiction is traditionally dominated by straight white able-bodied neurotypical conventionally “normal”-looking cis men, the same people who dominate every other fucking thing in our culture. Am I bitter? Yes. Why? I fulfil quite a few of those criteria; I’m welcome in the sci-fi club.

The thing is, science fiction should be a genre full of stories that explore what-ifs, that shake the status quo, that offer us glimpses of many possible futures and let us see our own lives from strange new angles. It should be wonderful: evoking wonder. It should be awesome: evoking awe. It should be new and exciting. It should be about the human experience, and maybe the nonhuman experience too.

Straight white &c &c male stories aren’t anything new. We’ve got bucketloads of them. They don’t, as a rule, make me wonder about anything except why the standard selection of protagonists in this field has to be so goddamn limited. And when yet another story about Heterosexual Cisgender Able Boringface McWhitepants manages to catch my attention, it’s because the author is good enough to write something that grabs me in spite of their uninspired choice of main character.

And it’s not as though there aren’t any women or queer folk or people of colour writing and reading and producing and starring in sci-fi. To a significant extent, this “no girls allowed” status quo exists largely in the minds of the Het Cis Able McWhitepants readers and writers and editors who think that sci-fi is and always has been and always should be their special little sandbox. But it’s a dangerous beast all the same, because some of the people who think this way have the power to decide what gets published in their particular sand castles.

So let’s welcome all of the human experience to science fiction, not just the straight white able et cetera male experience. We need Octavia Butler’s Lauren Olamina. We need Lois Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan. We need KJ Parker’s Ziani Vaatzes. We need Elizabeth Moon’s Ofelia. We need Samuel R. Delany’s Rydra Wong. We need Isaac Asimov’s Susan Calvin. We need Jack Harkness and Toshiko Sato. We need Kara Thrace and Felix Gaeta. We need Charles Xavier. We need Nyota Uhura. And we need more people like them, not less.

As an aside: that website is called “the Spearhead”. Really. Hyuk, hyuk.

Here is something I need to say out loud:

When I do something that’s crazy, because I know it’s crazy, even though I don’t really feel like doing it, so that I can feel just that little bit more validated about how crazy I am, I am doing it because I’m crazy.

When I avoid doing something that’s crazy, because I know it’s crazy, even though I really really feel like doing it, so I can feel just that little bit less like I’m a freak who doesn’t deserve to live, I am avoiding it because I’m crazy.

They’re the same action. What matters is not whether I’m walking north or south on the road; what matters is that I’m on the road, and walking. And what I need to do isn’t head further south, or head further north, or (and this is much easier to do with your brain than with your feet) both at the same time; what I need to do is get off the fucking road.

Here is the blog that helped me to realize this crucial fact:

It is called Fugitivus, and although I can’t say I’ve enjoyed reading it, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

I haven’t forgotten about my last post, masterpiece of halfassery that it was. I’m just trying to figure out how to rewrite it so that someone might someday be inclined to follow its links.

I apologize for how utterly half-assed this post is.

Toaster and Marbles double-tagged me for some kind of book meme. Apparently you’re supposed to list fifteen books that influenced your mind in fifteen minutes.

Oh boy.

I’m not ordering the list, so if you want to check my compliance with the rules, you’ll have to count the damn things yourself.

• Let’s start with one I just finished reading: the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. Technically, this is four books. I don’t give a fuck. If you want, you can just take the last one, because it got into my head the hardest: The Rise of Endymion.
• There is no way I could ever make a list like this without talking about Robert Heinlein. Dude was fucked up, but he made a big impression on my growing hexagonal mind back when I was about ten or twelve years old. I’m thinking specifically of Red Planet…
• …and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress…
• …and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I am kind of ashamed of this one, but shit, it could’ve been worse.
• Terry Goodkind, specifically, is how it could’ve been worse. His Sword of Truth series sunk its hooks into my brain when I was too young to understand its many, many flaws, and left me with a lasting fondness for aggressive women in leather. That probably wasn’t something you needed to know. Wizard’s First Rule is the first book in the series and the one I will most readily admit to having enjoyed.
• What else, what else, what the fuck else? It’s been about five minutes, by the way. I’m going to turn around and look at my bookshelf and see what strikes my eye. Oh, hey, Steven Brust! The Book of Jhereg is another one that got under my skin in the best way possible. It is actually three books, but they’re bound in a single volume, so fuck it.
• I’ve gotten rid of about 98% of my Mercedes Lackey books, but I used to read them voraciously when I was about thirteen. I was a weird kid, okay? Let’s throw another trilogy on here: The Last Herald-Mage, specifically the first book, whose title I can’t recall at the moment. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this actually knows what it was about, shhhhhhh.
• There is no way on Earth I could make a list like this and not fill about half of it with Roald Dahl. When my age was in the single digits and I was very impressed with myself for being able to read books that hardly had any pictures in them, I lived in a world of Dahl. Boy, or whatever the one about his own childhood was called, stuck with me particularly hard. There were others, though.
• Namely, The Witches. I reread that book so many times I still remember offhand that the witches’ eyes were described as being like little flames burning at the heart of ice cubes. (If that reference ends up wrong, I’m gonna look like a dumbass, but that’s not news.)
• The Wonderful Tale of Henry Sugar, or possibly some other adjective that is vaguely synonymous with Wonderful, also features on this list.
• Matilda. This is the only book about which I’m willing to say that the film adaptation was easily just as good.
• You thought I was done with Dahl, didn’t you? Think again. George’s Marvelous Medicine taught a tiny hexagon what not to do when your parents leave the house.
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (wow, old Roald liked his intensifiers) was so good I’m going to track down a copy and read it again. Just because I can.
• I’m running out of time; I think it’s closer to twenty minutes than fifteen. Obviously I have not yet learned how to shut the hell up. Let’s go even younger, to that Dr. Seuss book, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. Did I get the title right? Whatever. It’s the gripping plotline that shines in my memory.
• Doing a total 180 from Nice Happy Childhood Stories (or, in Dahl’s case, Nice Slightly Twisted Childhood Stories), I give you 1984 by George “did you seriously need me to tell you his fucking name? Seriously?” Orwell.

I sure as shit hope there wasn’t a rule about not blathering on. I can’t talk books without blather. It’s a law of nature, kind of like gravity.

Now all I have to figure out is how in the name of fuck I managed to write that whole damned list without featuring a single Pratchett.