It’s not always good for readers to get to know what their favourite writers really think, but the other way around can be painful as well. Seanan McGuire found this out the hard way when one of her readers asked why none of her female characters had been raped yet:
My response: “None of my protagonists are getting raped. I do not want to write that.”
Their response: “I thought you had respect for your work. That’s just unrealistic.”
Verity is the bastard daughter of Dazzler and Batman. Toby is what happens when Tinker Bell embraces her inner bitch and starts wearing pants. Velveteen brings toys to life and uses them to fight the powers of darkness. Sarah is a hot mathematician who looks like Zooey Deschanel but is actually a hyper-evolved parasitic wasp. The unrealistic part about all these characters? Is that they haven’t been raped.
It’s the ultimate thriump of grimdark fiction: rape is no longer optional, but mandatory for a certain type of fan. It’s the inevitable consequence of the increasing use of rape as a cheap plot motivator, either to threaten or traumatise your heroine, or to get your male hero something to avenge, to make your mediocre urban fantasy extra gritty without having to think about it too much. Rape has become the modern equivalent of giving your private dick a knock on the head at a convenient point in the plot.
But of course rape is different from a knock on the head, because it so gender unbalanced, both in real life and (much more so in) fiction happening mainly to women, can be much more traumatic or triggering for readers, while there always is that prurient element that creeps in, that makes rape look glamourous or sexy.
Rape can be used as a plot element, but not if it’s done lazily, if it is now just a checkmark for your urban fantasy construction kit.
Of course Doctor Who is no more than it wants to be, light Saturday evening sci-fi entertainment for the whole family, glitzy and fun, good enough for the hour it takes to watch it. Worrying about whether it should be anything more than this, at this point in time, is useless; it’s pretty clear its creative staff isn’t really interested. Therefore this post is really only for my own amusement, a short examination of what’s wrong with New Who without any expectation that it will ever change.
Last night’s episode was emblematic of New Who’s failings. It had an intriguing premise (little black cubes show up in their billions all over the world simultaneously, then do nothing. The doctor is intrigued, then bored, buggers off to go gallivanting across the universe, leaving the Ponds to deal with Real Life as opposed to Doctor Life, then almost a year later Things Start to Happen and the alien invasion really starts, only it turns out to be more of a weeding than an invasion, with some new alien baddy wanting to get rid of the human plague. In other words, starts off interesting, ends up being yet another overtly complicated alien plan easily spoiled by the doctor waving his sonic screwdriver around for a few seconds.
It’s also fairly incoherent, as the promise made in the trailer above, of the doctor coming to stay for a year just isn’t true, while the plot depends on some fairly big coincidence (the human transmitter needed to boast the signal from the alien ship to the cubes just happens to hang around the very same hospital as Rory works) to resolve itself and some of the bad guys’ actions (kidnapping people into their ship) just don’t make sense if their aim was extermination in the first place. All the fx, banter, witty asides and clever touches do only so much to cover this up even when watching.
In that regard it’s almost the opposite of the old Who, which for the most part was stodgy rather than glitzy, with low budget wobbly sets and cardboard monsters being made up for by good writing and acting, as well as more room to tell a story, not having to depend on just a one hour show to tell it, but being able to take four to six half hour episodes instead. that way the suspense of the little black boxes could’ve been build up and resolved more gradually, more in the background while the doctor went on other adventures, dealing with life on Earth while waiting for them to do their stuff…
Don’t be; it’s the fall that kills you, but also don’t watch this video, of climbing to work on a 1700 feet height antenna tower. Everytime you think, this is not so bad, the horror gets kicked off a notch. An elevator ride 1600 fee tup? Not so bad. Climbing a ladder up from there safely inside the tower? A bit worse. Freeclimbing on the outside of the tower on a small ladder? Getting scary. Ladder stops and you have to climb the actual frame. Okay, I’m out. Whoops, you now have to climb the antenna itself, using an even flimsier ladder, the hoist yourself over the top and stand over 1700 feet high while trying to do your job? Whoa.
To cut a long story short: at Readercon Genevieve Valentine got (sexually) harassed by what turned out to be a high powered sf fan (don’t laugh). Readercon having a zero tolerance policy for that behaviour was supposed to ban him permanently, but decided to make it only a two year ban for reasons. Once Genevieve went public with the verdict and her disappointment about it, the inevitable internet outrage firestorm happened and it got changed to the lifetime ban it should’ve been in the first. In the process the problems fandom has with sexual harassement were highlighted once again, with various cons examinating their own processes for dealing with this sort of toxic behaviour. A good development all round, right? Perhaps, but it did take its toll on Genevieve, still dealing with fallout like this two months later:
You will find out that, seven weeks after a “sincerely regretful” admission of his behavior at Readercon, your harasser was put in a position of power at a con, overseeing volunteers. He cornered a woman to talk about how hard this has been on him; he spoke inappropriately to a woman while bartending a party, to the point that a stranger intervened.
You will see some people are wary of these reports, because they think that, having been named, the harasser’s behavior was under scrutiny. (That this should be an advantage of identifying harassers, or that any harasser could avoid censure by not harassing women, is, as of press time, not under discussion there.)
The fact that a known harasser can just stroll into another high profile voluntering position is depressing enough, but more so is the idea that so many people are wary of believing further accusations against him, for fear of, what, some sort of crusade against him, of women getting their kicks by inventing abuse and see him as an easy target? The first can be explained if nto excused by ignorance, the second seems more like a wilful denial, where it’s more important to absolutely exclude the possibility of a false positive than it is to believe the women coming forward with their own stories of harassement. I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, but not when they proven already they can’t be trusted and have done nothing to remedy that.
The more I learn (secondhand) about how sexism, but also racism or transphobia and homophobia, operates, the more it becomes self evident how important it is to believe the victims when they report harassement, or it continues. Fandom as a whole still needs to learn that, though it is slowly getting better (I hope).