{"id":712,"date":"2009-08-09T22:54:11","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T03:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=712"},"modified":"2019-12-15T15:18:33","modified_gmt":"2019-12-15T20:18:33","slug":"is-it-something-in-the-water-or-me-tarzan-you-ape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=712","title":{"rendered":"Is It Something in the Water? Or: Me Tarzan, You Ape"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"heman\"Several decades ago, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) wrote a story in which aliens eyeing the lush terrestrial real estate introduce something in the water or the air that makes men kill women and girls systematically, rather than in the usual haphazard fashion.\u00a0 Recent events have made me wonder if a milder version of Tiptree\u2019s Screwfly Solution<\/em><\/a> might be affecting the brains of self-defined \u201ctechnoprogressive visionaries\u201d\u2026 in which case we\u2019re doomed if not to extinction, at minimum to a future that will make Saudi Arabia seem paradisiacal.<\/p>\n

Exhibit 1: The upcoming Singularity Summit, exclusively a white boys\u2019 treehouse, about which I wrote more extensively in Girl Cooties Menace the Singularity!<\/a><\/p>\n

Exhibit 2:\u00a0 The upcoming Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Science Fiction<\/a><\/em>, modestly subtitled The 21 Finest Stories of Awesome Science Fiction<\/em>.\u00a0 I know two of the authors in it personally, and consider one a friend.\u00a0 Nevertheless, all the stories are (rewind tape) by American or British white men.\u00a0 When called on this, the editor of the collection explained that stories by women didn\u2019t peg his mindblowing meter, because \u201cwomen write more about people and their feelings\u201d.\u00a0 Oooh, these nasty girl cooties again!\u00a0 Not to mention that if there are no people in a piece of writing, it\u2019s called a manual.<\/p>\n

Exhibit 3: The Lifeboat Foundation<\/a> discussion list which, unfortunately for anthropologists and cartoonists, is not public.\u00a0 In it, self-identified visionaries agree (in harmonious accord with fundamentalists) that the scarcity and silence of women in most mindblowing places are natural outcomes of such proven attributes as \u201calpha male rape genes\u201d and women\u2019s \u201cwired for coyness\u201d brains.\u00a0 These people are not even remotely acquainted with biology, but feel completely entitled to pose as experts because they\u2019ve written clunky science fiction and now collect speakers\u2019 fees as futurists.\u00a0 I discussed another aspect of this in On Being Bitten to Death by Ducks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Intrinsically, these occurrences are as worthy of attention as the whining of a mosquito swarm.\u00a0 However, one reason that Pod People come to mind is that the excuses have been identical in all three cases. The litany goes as follows:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We can’t have population quota representation, because this is all about superior quality\/qualifications that non-males and non-whites simply lack.
\n2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Would you rather we included token women and minorities?
\n3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My wife\/girlfriend\/mistress\/concubine is a feminist and\/or non-white and she agrees with me.
\n4.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Your humorless PC hysteria alienates those who would support you if only you were polite.<\/p>\n

\"flingpoolmao\"Of course, parity is not even remotely demanded — a mere one or two representatives often suffice as a sop (to such lows have we fallen). The bleatings about qualifications and tokenism are absurd, given the vast, stellar non-male non-white talent pool.\u00a0 The excuses sound even lamer (if not malicious) when one scans the predictable, often mediocre, rolodex-friend picks actually made in cases 1 and 2 above\u2026 and in more instances than I care to recall at other times.<\/p>\n

In the vast majority of cases, non-male non-whites are overqualified for whatever position or role they are chosen to fill.\u00a0 The tokenism excuse has been obliterated countless times no matter how often the goalposts move, particularly when evaluations are made truly blind.\u00a0 Whenever musicians audit behind screens, or names are removed from manuscripts and grant or college applications, the number of women and non-whites skyrockets.\u00a0 As soon as Harvard adopted blind admissions in my junior year, the girl to boy ratio went from 1:7 to 1:3 in one year, just from the incoming class.\u00a0 This was immediately followed by shrieks of rage by alumni, who whined that more girls would lower Harvard\u2019s standards as well as its reputation.\u00a0 These, by the way, were mostly legacy admissions that had scraped by on gentlemen\u2019s Cs.<\/p>\n

So what we have here are people so embedded in their privilege that pointing it out to them instantly strips away the progressive veneer and elicits poop-flinging that would make a baboon blush.\u00a0 Women and other Others are still furniture \u2013 and though furniture is useful and can be decorative, it\u2019s not supposed to move, dammit!\u00a0 From there it\u2019s a short jump to the transhumanist vision of a world where, as the Sad Children cartoon says, \u201cbeing white and rich will be even more awesome\u201d \u2013 and where all others will be either properly docile courtesy of happifying pills or outright extinct in favor of infinitely malleable cyborg dolls.<\/p>\n

I think that true equality will come when non-white non-males can be as mediocre as white men.\u00a0 And when that time comes, I guarantee you that the quality of mindblowing anthologies won\u2019t budge.\u00a0 In the meantime, we\u2019ll have to make do with the overqualified Others that occasionally squeak past the endless hazing gauntlet \u2013 if the stuff in the water doesn\u2019t get us first.<\/p>\n

\"obama-sotomayor\"<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Graham Sleight reviewed Ashley’s collection<\/a> in Strange Horizons<\/em>… and his mind was decidedly underblown.\u00a0 A fellow traveler of feminazis?\u00a0 Objective pundits should investigate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several decades ago, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) wrote a story in which aliens eyeing the lush terrestrial real estate introduce something in the water or the air that makes men kill women and girls systematically, rather than in the usual haphazard fashion.\u00a0 Recent events have made me wonder if a milder version of Tiptree\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-history","category-science","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}