Are You Being Censored, Or Are You Just Being Unpopular?

There’s a behavior I call “dick-tionarying” someone, which generally involves hauling out the Merriam-Webster’s and saying, “Well, actually….” to tell someone why they’re wrong.
One of the most frequent dick-tionarying topics?  Censorship.  Because someone says some unpopular thing and enough people cry for their head, and the next thing you know they’ve lost their job.  And they say, “Well, that’s censorship!” and the dictionary gets unfolded and people say, “Actually, it’s only censorship if the government’s involved.  That’s just the free market.”
But the difference?  Pretty fuckin’ slim from the point of the person who just lost their job.  If you were a gay person in the 1950s, good luck getting your views published in the New York Times, and forget getting them on CBS.  If you were a vocal advocate of interracial marriage in the 1970s, well, you probably weren’t going to make it as a newscaster.  There’s no official term yet for “Being unable to get your opinion heard in the widest arenas because nobody wants to hear them,” but I’m pretty sure that a lot of my transgendered friends feel the lack of a voice.
The fact that there’s no law making this happen, just a bunch of people voting with their dollars, doesn’t make it less painful to the people affected.  I mean, Cheerios just got a lot of negative pushback from their commercial showing a mixed-race couple.  If enough people protest, Cheerios will not feature mixed-race couples in future advertisements, nor will other advertisers be likely to do so.  And there will be a lack of interracial families on television, giving the impression people who watch a lot of television as though interracial couples are rare and freaky things, and making it harder for those people to feel included in mainstream America.
But that’s not censorship.  That’s just people making their preferences heard.  And if enough of the Cheerios crowd want to see no interracial couples fouling their airwaves because it makes them unhappy, then those couples will be deleted.  An opinion will be messily removed, and the talk will proceed without them.
As someone who wants talks to have all sorts of inputs, those absences concern me.
Thing is, it works both ways.  There’s no censorship at play if Resnick and Malzberg lose their column in the SFWA Bulletin over their stream of offensive comments towards women and liberals.  That’s just straight-up market pressure from people voting with their dollars… and if you’re a conservative who agrees with the boys, well, maybe it’s not censorship, but you just got told to shut the fuck up, same as all the other liberal examples.  You annoyed the crowd, and you got booted.
Is that good or bad?  My take is that it doesn’t matter.  It’s merely a fact of life: piss off enough people and they will no longer want to hear you.  That’s a terror that people don’t like thinking about – that the world is basically a big game of Survivor, and you can get voted off the island, often by people you violently disagree with – but the blade that cuts your crazy liberal ideas out of the nightly news is the same blade that’s probably moving to cut Resnick and Malzberg down now.
So be aware of the blade.
When you speak in public, especially as a professional writer, it is your job to be aware of who you are offending.  Maybe you’ll choose specifically to offend people, as a way of speaking truth to power – with the very real risk of never being heard from again.  And if you choose to thoughtfully break those ties, I salute you no matter what side you’re on, as you’ve just made a statement of conscience at cost.  I may disagree violently with you, but you just put your voice on the line to say what you thought was true.
But what Resnick and Malzberg did, I feel, was to offend without thinking.  This column was their space, a place to pat each other on the back – note the way they recommended each other’s books as great books in a prior column – and make dinosaur in-jokes at everyone’s expense, all at eight cents a word.  They weren’t thinking about anyone else’s opinions because hey, we’re Resnick and Malzberg, we’ve been saying crazy stuff for years, who could possibly be offended by us stirring the pot?
One senses a thorough befuddlement in their writings, as though “How could this have happened?”  And that’s the stupid end of not-quite-censorship.  You should know what your audience consists of… and if you’re going to insult large portions of them, you should at least do so with a concise, compact argument and not a lot of Statler-and-Waldorf blathering.  Because in a sense, it’s more offensive to be insulted by people who barely seem to understand that you exist.
You’re always going to run into that potential of the crowd rising up whenever you speak offense.  So make sure you don’t insult people for stupid reasons.  Do it thoughtfully, purposefully, concisely, masterfully, logically, unassailably. Do it to make change.  Do it to change minds.
Because your public opinion is always, always, at the mercy of other people’s good will.  It’s a currency.  Spend it wisely.

Book Release and Review: Cassie Alexander's Shapeshifted

You may remember me reviewing my friend Cassie’s book Nightshifted a while back – and I did so very positively.  And why not?  It was a solid, fast-paced urban fantasy, with the kick-ass premise of a nurse working the “secret” shift at a hospital, fixing up broken werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifters.  The lead, Edie Spence, is a pleasantly broken sort, prone to kinky sex with strangers, self-sacrificing to a sometimes unhealthy bent, definitely an adrenaline junky.  And since Cassie is a real-life, honest-to-God nurse, the entire book felt very hospital-real.
It took me longer to read Moonshifted, the inevitable nurses-meet-werewolves sequel, but that has nothing to do with Cassie’s writing; I’m a doof and purchased it on my least-read format, the Kindle.  Some read ebooks freely; I read in the tub.  So if I don’t have a physical copy of it on-hand, I’m probably never going to read it outside of a long bus trip.  And since I’d purchased it in one format, I felt silly buying it again.
But thankfully, I did eventually lay hands on a paper copy of it, and lo, I was impressed.  Cassie’s got a lot of talent at keeping plot threads juggled and moving, and her attempts to diagnose the maladies of struck-by-car werewolves were fascinating, even as Edie is desperately trying to avoid getting caught up in vampire politics.  (Is it any surprise that vampires don’t like werewolves here, either?  Didn’t think so.)  The whole thing wrapped up with Edie quitting her job at the secret Y4 ward – which was not particularly wise, given that the mysterious Shadows that run the place are the only thing keeping her junkie brother from going nuts on heroin, but hey.  There were Reasons, okay?
So I was curious to see how her new book Shapeshifted would be, since Cassie’s zombies (normal-looking, suave boyfriend-types who can’t die and heal through eating other people’s flesh) and shapeshifters (crazed multiple-personality types trying not to go looney) were arguably the most interesting part of her mythology.  And since Shapeshifted promised to be about, well, shapeshifters, I was excited.
Except it wasn’t much about shapeshifters.  Instead, Cassie explores a newer and perhaps bolder world: The barrio.
Which makes the third book in this series very interesting, since it breaks the pattern.  In the previous two books, it was clear how things worked: as a nurse, Cassie stumbles across interesting plot and is pulled into it.  In this, she’s not employed by anyone fang-y at all, and in fact can’t go back to her old job… so what does she do when her mother gets cancer, and the only way she can save Mom is to go on the hunt for vampires?
It would have been easy to keep up with that comforting template, but this new plotline is more interesting.  Edie is challenged in new ways, and when clues lead her to a clinic in one of the poorer sections of town, the scary world of vampire politics is replaced – not all too differently – with Edie negotiating gangs and gang leaders.  It’s a much more active Edie, one who’s constantly making choices as she ping-pongs between various factions.  And yes, I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that the supernatural elements resurface.
It makes Edie a much bolder and deeper character, which only makes sense: when you want to know who someone is, take away what they love.  And having Edie try to balance a drifting family, a clinic under siege, and her rather tumultuous love life, then you get a novel that I burned through in about three days’ straight.
There are some gripes I have, though: considering that Cassie is very good at writing kinky sex, and writing it well, the seeming publishers’ limit of “One hot sex scene per book” is a little maddening.  Come on, let’s have some more random hookups.  Please.  (And also, my favorite character in the whole series – the sentient boom box who only speaks in German language tutorials – had a major plot twist in Moonshifted, then disappeared from this book entirely.  That was a letdown. as was the more permanent disappearance of someone I wanted to get to know a lot better.)
But this series is definitely going places.  You can tell it’s good, because the minute Gini saw both of them on the counter, she called dibs.  And I told her no, Cassie’s release date is today, and as such I had to prep my review of it.  But I’ll tell you clear: if you like urban fantasy, you should be buying Nightshifted, Moonshifted, and then Shapeshifted.  And if you liked the previous two, pick up Shapeshifted today.
 

Another Post On How Socially-Anxious People Can Rock The Conventions

A while back, I wrote an essay called “Surviving Cons: A Guide for Socially Anxious Writers,” in which I said this:

There are extroverts at cons who love to introduce people to each other.  If you can become friendly with one of those people, they will introduce you around, serving as your social lubricant, making your life far easier.  I myself recommend the services of one Nayad Monroe, but she may be booked.

Well, as it turns out, Nayad has a touch of social anxiety, and yet she never shows it at cons.  How?  Read her response post, “Why Enjoying Solitude Helps Me Meet Conventions Full of People.”  Good stuff.

Achievement Unlocked: Women's Rights Advocate

When you do something very difficult in an Xbox game, you get an Achievement.  It’s a fizzy little thrill, not unlike winning a scratch-off lottery ticket: you vanquish a difficult boss and there’s a blip noise, then an alert at the bottom of the screen: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.
You’re told the name of your special Achievement.  It is added to your profile, and is yours forevermore.  Many people on Xbox size up their fellow players by how many Achievement points they have accumulated – or by the difficulty of the Achievements they’ve unlocked.  It’s a badge of honor to get, say, the Bladder of Steel Achievement, which involves playing all of the hardest songs on Rock Band in a row for six hours straight, without pausing the game.
Achievements are a brilliant addition to the game, for they make you feel warm and fuzzy for doing hard or tedious things.  You may have damn near wet your pants getting the Bladder of Steel award, but by God you’ve got a little icon on your profile to show off and a permanent gold star on your record.
The problem is, real life doesn’t work like that.
You can see people thinking that it does, particularly in the old-guard ranks of SFWA.  There was a kerfluffle this weekend regarding a series of female-unfriendly columns in the official SFWA Bulletin by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg (scroll down to read them), wherein they stood around befuddled that anyone would think they were sexist.  How could they be sexist?  They’ve supported women for years!  They worked with lady editors back in the 1970s, when practically nobody was a woman!
And you saw that with Harlan Ellison, too, when he was slagging off K. Tempest Bradford by reminding her that he marched in the 1960s equality rallies, and how dare she accuse him of being racist?  He was fighting the good fight before it was cool, man!
There appear to be a lot of feisty old dudes who think they’re awesome at this equality thing.
Here’s the thing: by 1970s standards?  I’m sure all of these gentlemen were enlightened.  Compared to the treatment women, gays, and blacks got from mainstream society at the time, these dudes were well ahead of the curve.  And at the time, they deserved all the credit for going above and beyond ordinary treatment.  Still do, in a certain sense.
The problem is, in their heads, they Achievement Unlocked.  They became Good To Girls, or Friend To The Negro, or Comfortable With Homos.  And that badge could never be removed.  Once they’d proven their magnificent tolerance in the crucible of the Issues of the Day, they never had to question their position again.
Problem is, the bar always changes.  Remember when smoking in restaurants was cool, and the three-drink martini lunch was standard?  Yeah, now you’re an inconsiderate drunk.  Remember good old Captain Kirk in Star Trek: The Old Series, the bastion of peace, equality, and liberal thought?  Now he’s a sexist warmongerer.
What women and gays and minorities of all stripes have come to expect has been upgraded over the years.  Just because no one complained at the time doesn’t mean that no one had complaints.  It just means that they weren’t in a position of power enough to request you stop.
Now they are. Will you listen?  Or will you be amazed by these annoying harpies, because dammit, you showed the ladies that you’re all for them back in 1972, when you did something nice for Marion Zimmer Bradley that one time?
There’s no “Women’s Rights Advocate” badge you can get and wear forever.  This is more of a co-op multiplayer game, where you band together with your friends to fight against everyone on the server, and are scored daily compared to how the other people did.  And every day, there are better players coming in, new strategies you must master if you wish to stay relevant, very smart people changing the game for everyone.  Every day, awards are given, and some people have a shitty day and fail, and others surprise you, and at the end of the day you have the knowledge that you were good for one day.
That’s it.  You still have to fight tomorrow.  Maybe you don’t feel like fighting.  But you know, the women and gays and minorities are trapped in the fucking game, forced to fight to the top whether they want to or not, so, hey, how much can you legitimately complain?
The point is this: all you old white guys? You probably fought the good fight at one point, and helped to get the world to this better place where all these people can demand even more of you.  I thank you for that.  But it’s time to stop thinking like the world froze when someone complimented you in 1982 and that “Achievement Unlocked” pop-up dinged in your brain.  You’ve got more work to do.   You’ve got to see that calling them “lady editors” is actually diminishing them, that women in chainmail bikinis may be a long tradition but so are grinning Negro lawn jockeys, that your pro-African writings were progressive in 1980 but look like a TRS-80 now, that there is a subtle difference between “censorship” and “saying such monstrously unpopular things that nobody wants to talk to you.”
You did good things. The question is, can you do even better ones these days?  Can you acknowledge, as men whose main profession is envisioning the future, a world where everything you knew was wrong?
We’re not trying to take your badge away, guys. We’re trying to point out that it’s a very old badge, and it’s time you stopped resting on that as your proof that you’re all for this women’s lib thing. Because damn, guys. At one point, you were helping us. It’d be so much easier if you started helping us again.  But to do that, you’re gonna have to look at what society expects of people now and actually position yourself ahead of that wave.
You did it once.  Now please.
Do it again.

Three Of The Worst Exercise Videos Ever, Or: Why Do My Friends Do This To Me?

Normally, I’d save the best for last, but I’m afraid you’d miss it. This is, by far, the greatest exercise video I have ever seen. And perhaps the greatest comedy video I have ever seen. I don’t wanna oversell it, but I literally had to jab myself in the stomach to stop laughing so I could breathe in. This thing is the YouTube equivalent of Joker Gas.

If that’s not enough weirdness for your day, I sent this one to a friend, who had the sound off, and she wondered: “Why is Ferrett sending me a picture of a gay guy in drag swanning about?” But no. You’d think this crevasse-like cameltoe would be enough of a clue, but this Prancercizing is pretty amazing.

(Comments are disabled for that video? I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY.)
Then Clodia_risa shot me this video, which crosses post-traumatic stress disorder, a mugger with panties in an unlikely location, English lessons, and… kind of exercise. It’s rather hypnotic, really.

It’s been a weird day.

What Privilege Is

A female friend of mine was debating whether she should post pictures of herself on her blog. She’s a pretty girl who thinks some shots of her daily life would add some flair to an otherwise-texty page, but also had some concerns about strangers knowing what she looks like.
And I almost said – almost – “That’s silly.  I’ve posted pictures of myself all over my blog, and I’ve never had issues.”
Then I thought about being a guy vs. being a girl on the Internet.  As a (pudgy) guy, I’m highly unlikely to have creepers coming after me, but that happens for women.  As a guy, I’ve had people make personal insults about me based on my looks, but rarely had my whole blogging career judged on whether I’m handsome (“what an attention whore!”) or ugly (“can’t get a girlfriend, so whores it up on the Internet for affection!”).  I have had to fend off very few unwanted dates, have had zero rape threats, and very few unflattering Photoshops.
So just as I was about to offer one-size-fits-all suggestions, I swallowed it back and went, “Oh. Yeah.  That could be an issue.  How good are you at dealing with mouthbreathers?”  And so I attempted to be genuinely helpful in solving the issue.
That’s all you really need to do with privilege, man.  You don’t have to rend your shirt and spill blood to make up for the inequities of the universe.  What you have to do is occasionally stop, realize that your lifestyle shields you from bumps that other people have to deal with, and consider your words a little more carefully before weighing in with advice.
It doesn’t mean you should shut up.  It means you should think a little harder before speaking if you’re attempting to be helpful.  Which, you know, generally?  Not a bad thing to do.

People Who Need Certainty Are Stupid And Ruining The World

Here’s a reason the world’s tumbling into ruin: if you want to be a popular pundit, it’s far better to be certain than accurate.  That’s right; more people will listen to a person who is factually wrong but confident over a guy who’s accurate but honest.
There are days I despair for the world, because our tiny monkey brains are forever seeking out shit that’s bad for them: sugar. Sex.  And certainty.  Basically, it’s a terrifying thing to think that this universe is full of so many factors that no one, literally no one, can predict what’s going to happen next with any confidence, and so we’ll happily listen to awful pundits who fill us up with the lie that yeah, someone knows, and it’s me.
And we never care.  Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise has a whole chapter on how horrifically bad television news pundits are at predicting things, and why do they stay on the air?  Because people like hearing confident people make interesting calls.  Does it matter whether those calls are wrong?  No.  As long as they’re firmly expressing bold and wretched predictions, they’re interesting.  They have made us feel like we’re witnessing something worthwhile, not some namby-pamby hand-wringer who’s saying, “Well, could be this way, could be that way.”
The reason our political system is so fucked is that this is our discourse.  The general populace doesn’t want the leaders saying, “Well, this has a good chance of working” – hell no!  That reminds them we live in chaos, that no approach is guaranteed to succeed, that literally the smartest people in human history have been wrong a staggering amount of the time.  We want our leaders to be godheads, infallible… and the price we pay to get that illusion of fallibility is forever ignoring all the times they fucked up.  This time.  This time they know how it’ll work.  All those other failures?  Not their fault.
And so, because a willingness to look at the best way we as humans have to interact with the universe – which is to say, odds and risks – seems uninteresting to our primitive brains, we constantly listen avidly to fools.  We hire fools to lie to us, with them knowing full well that the only way they can possibly get elected is to lie to us, and then wonder why they seem so contemptuous of us.  Why should they respect us?  They know how things really work, and know that largely we’re revulsed by the idea.  So wave a flag!  Speak boldly!  Pronounce it as if it’s all but done!
Our world would be solved by now, if only we could get people to stop thinking that the loudest voices are the best voices.
You know.  Like the tone I took in this essay.