(1) GENRE RECAPITULATES ONTOLOGY. Damien Walter divides the audience into “The 8 Tribes of Sci-Fi”.
Calling sci-fi a genre in 2016 is about as accurate as calling the United States one nation. In principle it’s true, but in practice things don’t work that way. While crime, romance and thrillers all remain as coherent genres of fiction, it’s been decades since sci-fi could be comfortably understood by any shared generic criteria. What do Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Seas trilogy, the fiction of Silva Moreno Garcia and the erotic sci-fi of Chuck Tingle actually have in common, beyond being nominated for major sci-fi book awards this year?
The answer is they all belong to one of the eight tribes of sci-fi…..
The Weirds Most writers at some point play around with the effects that can be induced by engineering stories with internal inconsistencies, mashing together disparate metaphors, or simply being weird for weirds sake. The weirds take this as an end in itself. With China Mieville as their reigning king they were riding high for a while. However, with newer voices like Molly Tanzer’s Vermillion coming through, the American ‘bizarro fiction’ movement, and with authors including Joe Hill and Josh Mallerman rejuvenating the traditional horror genre, the Weirds are still among the most creatively interesting of the eight tribes.
(2) SILENT THING. According to Digiday, “85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound”.
Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in silence.
As much as 85 percent of video views happen with the sound off, according to multiple publishers. Take, for instance, feel-good site LittleThings, which is averaging 150 million monthly views on Facebook so far this year. Eighty-five percent of its viewership is occurring without users turning the sound on. Similarly, millennial news site Mic, which is also averaging 150 million monthly Facebook views, said 85 percent of its 30-second views are without sound. PopSugar said its silent video views range between 50 and 80 percent.
(3) YAKKITY CAT. Steve Davidson says an interview with Timothy the Talking Cat will appear on Amazing Stories this Thursday. I’m running neck and neck with Steve in pursuit of interviews with the hottest new talents in the field — he won this round!
(4) JENCEVICE OBIT. SF Site News carries word that Chicago conrunner and club fan Mike Jencevice died May 16.
Chicago fan Mike Jencevice (b.1955) died on May 16. Jencevice entered fandom in 1978, publishing the fanzine Trilevel and serving as the long-time president of Queen to Queen’s Three, a media fan club. He ran the dealers room at Windycon for more than 30 years and served on the ISFiC Board for much of that time. He was one of two associate chairs for Chicon 2000.
(5) VR. BBC News explores “How will virtual reality change our lives?”
Four experts, including Mark Bolas – former tutor of Palmer Luckey, who recently hand-delivered the first VR handset made by his company Oculus Rift – talked to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about the future of VR.
Mark Bolas: Out of the lab
Mark Bolas is a professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts and a researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies. He has been working in virtual reality since 1988.
VR hits on so many levels. It’s a real out-of-body experience, and yet completely grounded in your body. …
To find a way to make it low cost and still retain that field of view, we harnessed the power of mobile phones – the screens, tracking and processing – and we figured out a lens design that was extremely inexpensive.
It’s been really fun playing all these years, but there’s something more important now, which is making it a space that allows us to harness our emotions, our desire to connect with people.
I’m worried by our current computer interfaces. I watch people walking around like zombies with cell phones in their hands, and I have to manoeuvre a mouse to fill out little boxes on web forms in a horribly frustrating way. I think VR will allow us to transcend this.
I don’t worry so much about where VR is going, I worry about where we currently are.
(6) SHEER WEIR. By the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach: “Andy Weir, author of ‘The Martian,’ aims his pen at the moon”
Lots of people who are interested in going to Mars have been gathering this week at George Washington University for the annual Humans to Mars Summit, and the star attraction this morning was Andy Weir. He’s the author of the novel “The Martian,” which has sold 3 million copies, been translated into something like 45 languages and served as the basis of the blockbuster movie by the same name, directed by the legendary Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. So, yes, that book did well — remarkably so given that he originally published it in chapters on his website and later as an electronic book that could be downloaded for free.
Weir, whom I interviewed on stage in the summit’s opening session (you can probably find the video here), was scheduled to pop by The Post for today’s “Transformers” event and then visit Capitol Hill to testify before the House subcommittee on space. Busy day! He said he was going to talk about how an interplanetary spacecraft, such as one going from Earth to Mars, can be designed to spin to create artificial gravity. That’s a potential way to moderate the severe physical effects of weightlessness on the human body. Without artificial gravity, the first astronauts on Mars would likely spend many days just trying to recover from all those months in zero-g conditions.
But he’s also working on another novel, this one about a city on the Earth’s moon that features a female protagonist who is something of a criminal but still lovable, according to Weir.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born May 18, 1931 — Mad magazine cartoonist Don Martin
- Born May 18, 1930 — Fred Saberhagen
(8) THE REAL-LIFE GRINGOTT’S. The BBC tells where the gold is kept.
The largest by far lies in the Bank of England. It holds three-quarters of the gold in London, or 5,134 tonnes. Most of the gold is stored as standard bars weighing 400 troy ounces (12.4 kg or 438.9 ounces) – there are about 500,000 of them, each worth in the region of £350,000.
But the official reserves of the UK Treasury account for less than a tenth of this.
“Just 310 tonnes of the gold in the Bank of England is from the UK Treasury, the rest is mostly commercial,” says Adrian Ash of BullionVault.com.
The gold is held in a system of eight vaults over two floors under Threadneedle Street in the City. This is to spread the weight and prevent the vaults from sinking into the London clay beneath the bank.
“So no maze of caves bored into rock,” says Chip Hitchcock, sounding a little disappointed.
(9) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART ONE. Steven Saus relays “Reports of Harassment at MarCon 2016, including ‘The Chainmail Guy’ who harassed people at CONTEXT” at Ideatrash. (To refresh your memory, see File 770’s post about Context.)
Sadly, I’m hearing from friends who attended MarCon this year that the stance about Chainmail Guy’s harassment – the one that some members of the board decided to destroy the con over rather than censure a buddy who was harassing people – was completely justified.
According to multiple accounts, he was very visible in the main corridor, apparently with a table displaying some chain mail. (Which is exactly the setup that spawned problems at Context.) Sure, he wasn’t a volunteer, but had a very prominent bit of real estate. And, much like the complaints at Context, kept inserting himself into private conversations, just as he did before.
Unlike Context, he was in the main hall – and therefore much harder to avoid.
As one person put it, “if you heard about the stuff about Context, you’d get the very clear opinion that MarCon was okay with all that.”
Sadly, this might just be the case.
There were reports (and these were forwarded to the con chair) of another guy suggesting he should “frisk” a young woman after earlier reaching out to touch her without consent.
A corset vendor walked the line between creepy and harassment by insisting their corset fit perfectly, and any impression otherwise was due to the person’s “body issues”. He told another person that “he needed to see me try on one of the corsets and not in a friendly way…in front of my kids.”
And this is just what’s managed to cross my awareness.
(10) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART TWO. Saus also published “A (Good) Response From One of the Security Team From MarCon about Harassment”. It is signed by JP Withers.
As a fan I really hate it when our community is damaged by harassing behavior. Inclusion is kind of the point of our thing to me.
Our security and operations folks need help making our space better for everyone, and that help is reporting stuff when it happens. I know there can be a lot of reasons someone might not report behavior, but if one of those reasons is a feeling we won’t take it seriously I can tell you that isn’t the case for anyone on my team….
(11) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART THREE. Ferrett Steinmetz, immediately after Marcon, published these generalized comments calling into question how some apply the principle that “A Person Is Innocent Until Proven Guilty By Law”.
…And all the complexity comes to a boil when we’re discussing how to handle missing stairs in a community – potentially dangerous people who have gossip swirling about them, but no definitive proof. (Because most consent violators are smart enough not to do terrible stuff in public with witnesses.) And what do you do to keep your parties free of dangerous players when the only proof you have is the equivalent of “She said Phil didn’t pay her back”? Do you ban people on someone’s word?
Maybe you think the court’s standards are worthy for any institution, which is a noble goal. There is a strong case to be made for “I will hold the people who would spread rumors to the highest of standards,” because yeah, the ugly truth is that there are corrupt cops and there are people who’ll trash folks they don’t like. Having standards for evidence is good, and though there’s no single True goal, having high standards when the penalty is “Banning someone from a party” is not necessarily a bad thing.
But stop extending that to the idiotic argument of “If something someone says has not been proven in a court of law, it is automatically untrue.” No. If that happens, you are adopting the court’s standard of, “We would rather have someone guilty attending our parties than risk ejecting an innocent person.”…
(12) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART FOUR. Reddit ran its own recap of the latest episode, the essence of which is —
But now a different Ohio convention, MarCon, has had a problem with a harasser… and it’s the SAME GUY:
It’s the same stuff different day syndrome at its worst. There is no way for cons in general to keep these people out since conventions don’t have any kind of shared governance… so even when “missing stairs” are dealt with at one con, they aren’t at another. 🙁
(13) UNPAID MINIONS. The Seattlish has screencaps of the legal papers — “Someone Is Suing Emerald City Comicon for Not paying Volunteers”.
A class action lawsuit has been filed by a former Emerald City Comicon volunteer—the organization calls them “minions”—alleging that the convention violates labor laws by treating their volunteers like employees, but failing to pay them.
The suit, filed in King County Superior Court on May 16 by plaintiff Jerry Brooks and naming ECCC and three members of the Demonakos family as defendants, alleges that as many as 250 people may be among the class.
According to the suit, the volunteers are expected to work essentially as paid workers would—performing functions necessary to the operation of the convention—but aren’t required to be paid for their labor or their overtime due to their volunteer status.
This suit could be hard to prove; the volunteers not only willingly enter into an agreement stating that they’ll work for free, but the culture of the convention fosters a competitiveness for the volunteer positions. A lot of people really like volunteering. In a blog post from 2013, a minion wrote that it “isn’t the kind of thing you do for money.”
(14) STORYBUNDLE. The Story Collection StoryBundle is available for another 15 days. Readers can choose to donate part of each purchase to SFWA. Curator Lisa Mason tells how the bundle was assembled here.
As always at StoryBundle, you the reader name your price—whatever you feel the books are worth. You may designate a portion of the proceeds to go to a charity. For the Story Collection StoryBundle, that’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (“SFWA”). SFWA champions writers’ rights, sponsors the Nebula Award for excellence in science fiction, and promotes numerous literacy groups.
The initial titles in the Story Collection StoryBundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:
- The Green Leopard Plague by Walter Jon Williams. Two stories in this collection won the Nebula Award.
- Collected Stories by Lewis Shiner. This extensive and multi-genre collection was prepared as an ebook for StoryBundle.
- Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand.
Those who pay more than the bonus price of $12 get all three regular titles, plus five more:
- Women Up to No Good by Pat Murphy. Two stories in the collection were nominated for the Nebula Award.
- Strange Ladies: 7 Stories by Lisa Mason Six Stories by Kathe Koja. The collection was created by the author for StoryBundle.
- What I Didn’t See: Stories by Karen Fowler. The collection won the World Fantasy Award and the title story won the Nebula.
- Wild Things by C.C. Finlay. The collection was prepared as an ebook for StoryBundle and has a brand-new Afterword. Finlay is the editor of F&SF.
(15) NEBULA CONFERENCE. SFWA President Cat Rambo has vivid memories of “Nebula Conference 2016, Chicago”.
For me, so much of the weekend was a reaffirmation of joy in our genre and the worlds that we love, worlds created by some of the best and brightest. Opportunity to talk with so many talented, kind, and outstanding members of the industry. A chance to stand by one of my heroes, someone whose work I’ve read most of my life and who has been one of my role models, and see her body of work recognized. A chance to be in a place where people treated each other with respect as peers and took pride in each other’s accomplishments, where there weren’t the sort of pettinesses that belong on the playground rather than among fellow professionals. A chance to tell people some of what SFWA’s been working hard at in the past year, and some of what’s coming down the pike.
And Liz Argall is still buzzing about Henry Lien’s Radio SFWA.
(16) CONVERT MADE. Say what you like about Seveneves, Bill Gates wrote on his website that it’s got him back reading sf.
“What Bill Gates says: “I hadn’t read any science fiction for a decade when a friend recommended this novel. I’m glad she did. The plot gets going in the first sentence, when the moon blows up. People figure out that in two years a cataclysmic meteor shower will wipe out all life on Earth, so the world unites on a plan to keep humanity going by launching as many spacecraft as possible into orbit.
“You might lose patience with all the information you’ll get about space flight—Stephenson, who lives in Seattle, has clearly done his research—but I loved the technical details. Seveneves inspired me to rekindle my sci-fi habit.””
(17) STAY INVESTED IN THE FUTURE. Helen Sharman speaks out — “First UK Astronaut calls for more Brits in space”.
Britain’s first astronaut has said the UK risks becoming a “backward nation” if the government does not pay to send more people into space.
Helen Sharman believes the country would lose many of the benefits of Tim Peake’s mission if a commitment to more flights is not made very soon.
Ms Sharman said that this was the UK’s “last chance” to be involved “in the future of the human race”.
She spoke to BBC News on the eve of the 25th anniversary of her spaceflight.
The government has effectively paid for one spaceflight, Tim Peake’s, according to Ms Sharman. After he returns to Earth in June, it is unlikely there will be more UK astronauts in space unless the nation makes a further commitment of funds at a ministerial meeting of European Space Agency (Esa) member states later this year.
(18) MR. ROBOT SEASON 2 TRAILER. The Hollywood Reporter summarized the preview video.
“This is what revolution looks like,” the text of the trailer reads. “Control is an illusion.”
Although they were successful in their hack, fsociety will face more obstacles in season two. “They need to know we haven’t given up,” Darlene (Carly Chaiken) says. “That we meant what we said about changing the world.”
However, the most worrisome image in the clip is Mr. Robot himself (Slater) as he puts a gun to Elliot’s head. “Our revolution needs a leader,” he tells Elliot.
(19) NEWS FOR HITCHHIKERS. “Towel Day” is coming on May 25, and Nerdist reports a candy store is readying its supply of babelfish.
The fandom of Douglas Adams and his writing is intense, to say the least, and has even resulted in a holiday to honor the late author. Every May 25th, fans around the world celebrate “Towel Day” which itself is a reference to what Adams thought to be the most important item you could have with you through your galactic travels.
As a way of showing their love of everything Hitchhiker’s, a candy shop in Florida that specializes in nerdy confections decided to celebrate by creating some Babel fish of their very own. Using an antique 19th-century drop candy roller, the folks at Public Displays Of Confection rolled out a serendipitous 42 bags of these fish shaped candies just in time for Towel Day, and we can only assume that they went with piña colada flavor because it’s just too hard to perfect the essence of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
[Thanks to Hampus Eckerman, Cat Rambo, Chip Hitchcock, Steve Davidson, Tracy Benton, Darren Garrison, Steven Saus, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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It’s okay to make judgements on subjective things. If you’re going to wait until you find an objective subject (which, you know, the irony of that is right in the name) you’ll still be waiting at the end of the universe. A sophisticated reader is not particularly hard to find, though. Do they look beyond superficialities? Do they understand that not liking something is not always the same as it not being good? Are they capable and willing to explore beyond their comfort zone? Can they accept new styles, new ideas, and new techniques, or do they whine like goddamn mules because an author wanted to explore an interesting image for a paragraph rather than just getting on with the plot already?
I am, because I am a professional critic, and I got work specifically because I wasn’t interested in that nonsense, and my editors were trying to clear out the cobwebs (this was, I should say, more than a decade ago).
But by the same token, the reason I abandoned fandom in my early 20s is because it became an utter cesspool of pointlessly nitpicky, rules-lawyering entitlement about who belonged and who didn’t, and what level of crazed obsession was truly necessary to be worthy of reading some stranger’s favourite author. Gamergate, Puppies, ‘fake geek girls’, all that horseshit was present under different names in the ’90s when I walked away, and it’s *why I walked away*. It’s this absurd sense of ownership and vitriol about something that doesn’t belong to you. Yeah, somebody was a snob to you, congratulations, you have now had the same experience as every other human being on earth, and something that every kid who wanted to read Emily Dickenson instead of Popular Mechanics had to go through day after day growing up as well (I went to an engineering university, interestingly enough, but studied literature… SF/F was extremely fashionable, and the engineers and computer scientists were–and still are, based on what I hear from friends who now work there–colossal bullies to anyone who wasn’t one of them or interested in the same things they were, to the point where even university administrators were fielding the kind of threats that GGers issue on the regular whenever they didn’t get their way). Did I have snobby teachers in high school and university? Yeah. But it has not once, ever, reached the level of contempt–even when it did actually become contempt–that I have seen from the other side of the pointless, stupid, arbitrary fence.
This is especially hilarious to me. Most of my friends actually write literary fiction, and the average advance they get is somewhere in the neighbourhood of about $500 for a novel. Nobody, and I mean *nobody* expects to actually be able to make a living writing litfic. That seems to be a peculiarly genre expectation, so the rage over not making enough is sort of hilarious to me. Remember when there was that controversy over The Singularity not paying? Like, hell dude, maybe one litfic venue out of fifty actually pays anything because they just plain old can’t. Nobody on the litfic end of it expects to get paid. Nobody.
@John Seavey: “Just in case someone was making the same mistake I was: This is not MarsCon, in the Twin Cities, that’s being discussed. This is MarCon.”
Sounds more like MarredCon, from the reports… :-/
@Oneiros – I’ve heard there are 10 groups of people: those who can read binary, and those who can’t.
There is also a story for linguists in GigaNotoSaurus this year, “Polyglossia”, by Tamara Vardomskaya who is an actual linguist — in this story, unlike her others, she made linguistic work the center of the story and I love it. Good story in other respects too.
(I’m also, incidentally, a little baffled by the idea that there was EVER a time when science fiction was one easily identifiable genre with no radical differences between works. When was this legendary time? It sure wasn’t, say, 1940, which gave us a retro-Hugo ballot where Kallocain is going up against Gray Lensman and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is duking it out with The Stellar Legion.)
@alexvdl – Perhaps what you took away from the incident is different, but I don’t see that much difference between a campaign that was devised to allow for the groping of strangers in the context of “wouldn’t the world be grand if we could just touch all the hot people we wanted to?” and those who treat convention space as the realization of that “ideal” and treat women in con spaces as existing only for their personal pleasure and approval.
The project was not abandoned, as far as I can tell, because Ferrett realized that the core concept was deeply flawed, misogynistic and objectifying from the start, but because he felt others would “ruin” his idea by not doing it “properly” in the spirit of free love or whatever.
So no, I don’t think they are “very very different” as you said, the core concept of people existing only as sexual objects or just not real people with their own feelings and agency is the same, even if he found a few women who were on board with the idea for whatever reasons, which may or may not have been flawed as well.
Of course, it’s possible that I missed a later-posted article where he explained he now understood why his “project” was so horrible to start with, so feel free to link me if that’s the case.
@Oneiros – Oh ho! lol
Perhaps what you took away from the incident is different, but I don’t see that much difference between a campaign that was devised to allow for the groping of strangers in the context of “wouldn’t the world be grand if we could just touch all the hot people we wanted to?”
If said stranger wore a button that said it was okay to approach them. And if said stranger consented to being touched after being asked. The difference you are missing seems to be the idea of consent.
To be fair, Kyra, in the actual 1940 (as distinct from 1940-seen-from-2016) there wasn’t much overlap between the Doc Smith and Borges readerships*–and one component of “genre” is audience and the expectations audiences bring to a work. In 1940, Astounding and its competitors aimed themselves at a particular population of readers, who in turn bought magazines that offered what they were looking for. Genre SF/F is in part a construction/collaboration among writers, publishers, and readers. As is any genre in the non-literary-taxonomic sense. (There’s a whole discussion of the nature and operation of literary categories that is too pedantic to insert here, but it would support your sense that the SF genre is more complex than many readers would like to believe.)
* And not only because the English translations didn’t appear until much later. Borges’ was the kind of work that, say, Judith Merril included in her sense of SF/F, but I can testify that when she was doing so, mainstream SF readers were more likely reading the Pyramid paperback reissues of the Lensman books.
C.S. Lewis was writing about types of science fiction – four of them, in his view – in 1955.
Dr Tingle is interviewed by the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/may/19/dinosaur-porn-or-rabid-puppy-pastiche-the-strange-story-of-chuck-tingle
@Darren Garrison
Known as Gorilla Arm Syndrome. That Steve Jobs quote is gold. If Steve refused to include a technology despite it “giving great demo”, it’s fairly certain the drawbacks are real.
1) I lost count of the errors, misstatements, and failures of understanding less than halfway thru. It would take an entire blog post to do a proper smackdown on it, and he’s not worth the time and energy.
@Aaron – Devising an elaborate method to get consent to touch others does not undo the fact that you viewed them foremost for their physical attractiveness and focused your energy on creating a system that would allow you to touch them as quickly and/or freely as possible. I’m trying to think of a better way to describe how dehumanizing the whole idea is, that it would be great if conventions were spaces where sex-related interactions were something we women didn’t have to deal with as a default “it’s gonna happen” issue and that this project did nothing to help with that. Instead of this elaborate system meant to allow men to do “ethical groping” that we just not interact with women at conventions this way, and agree that it’s not the place for it. If I think a guy is cute and want to do stuff with him, i think it’s better done on a one on one “let’s talk and establish trust for meaningful consent” instead of this incident-waiting-to-happen idea that consent can be just given out to the public in advance, that’s a really problematic idea.
Devising an elaborate method to get consent to touch others does not undo the fact that you viewed them foremost for their physical attractiveness and focused your energy on creating a system that would allow you to touch them as quickly and/or freely as possible.
Except it wasn’t “freely”. If someone wanted to wear a red button, it meant “don’t approach at all”. If someone willingly participated (and despite the name, members of both sexes participated), they wore a green button and had to consent before anyone touched them. That’s not “freely” at all.
instead of this incident-waiting-to-happen idea that consent can be just given out to the public in advance
Where do you get the idea that this involved giving consent to the public in advance? If someone wore a green button it meant one could approach them and ask, not touch. They had to specifically consent to the person asking before touching could occur.
@Aaron – You are not addressing what I said about the larger implications of upholding the idea that women exist as sexual objects first and foremost. It’s hard for me to participate in a discussion of why this was a problem concept when you have brushed aside those big deal issues as if they don’t matter. There is significant social rhetoric around the idea that women should consent to whatever a man wants regardless of her own desires/feelings, that a system of buttons advertising any woman’s sexual willingness/availability is very problematic because it supports that system of women existing just for men and treats the system as positive/natural. Reducing any woman’s consent to a red or green button, in the context of making things easier for men to feel comfortable/secure initiating a sexual conversation in convention space, can you not see how inappropriate that is?
I’m finding it sociologically interesting how often, and in what circumstances, Chuck Tingle is referred to as “Dr. Tingle”. I have my own hypotheses, but I’m curious if other people have noticed this as well. One context for this observation is the fact that lots of SFF authors are entitled to the prefix “Dr.” for reasons that may or may not be directly related to their fiction. But there are often interesting patterns to who is accorded the honorific spontaneously.
You are not addressing what I said about the larger implications of upholding the idea that women exist as sexual objects first and foremost.
You missed that the project applied equally to both sexes, and participation of any kind was entirely voluntary.
Reducing any woman’s consent to a red or green button
Except it didn’t do that. A green button was a necessary but not sufficient condition for any contact to happen. Are you even reading what is being written?
@Aaron – Men are not going to be subjected to the same expectations and pressures regarding their consent to being touched or talked to about being touched. They are not bombarded with sexual innuendo and significant unwanted sex-related attention in conventions (or anywhere really) the same way women are. This is not an issue that can be treated as an even playing field just because both women and men were invited to play. Men participating in such a project would have significantly easier and simpler time of it, because they have a significant social advantage when it comes to attitudes towards entitlement and sexual objectification. Women have a lot more landmines to deal with and if something goes wrong, they also have to deal with a significantly higher chance of being blamed for their own assault, should the consent issue be “misunderstood” etc. This project wants the world to be a utopia where the sexes are equal and just have fun and acts accordingly, which means it lacks proper support for women dealing with so much more baggage around these issues. Your attitude about women and consent seems to match, which I guess is why you don’t see the problems with this project. Which is disheartening to see, I mean I honestly expected people to go “oh well that happened ages ago, he’s changed” when I brought this up, I honestly didn’t expect anyone to actually defend the project. It was a hot problematic mess, start to finish.
Aaron, what you seem to be missing rather badly is that sexualized touching is never a gender-neutral context. “The project applied equally to both sexes”. This is very much in the vein of “millionaires are also prohibited from sleeping under bridges.”
The issue around red and green buttons isn’t that a green button was “a necessary but not sufficient condition” but rather that the existence and definition of the red buttons carried an inherent implication that the status “no button” did not default to “are you freaking kidding me? why would you think it was appropriate to ask about touching my boobs?”
existence and definition of the red buttons carried an inherent implication that the status “no button” did not default to “are you freaking kidding me? why would you think it was appropriate to ask about touching my boobs?”
Which seems to be the reason Ferrett discontinued it. But the point is that the actual execution as intended was nothing like Sunhawk has described it.
@Heather Rose Jones – Thank you, that’s what I’m trying to describe. The yes/no choice in itself is a choice that should never be a choice to start with.
I mean I honestly expected people to go “oh well that happened ages ago, he’s changed” when I brought this up, I honestly didn’t expect anyone to actually defend the project.
The problem is that you brought it up in a context by saying that being opposed to harassment and coming up with such a project was somehow contradictory. While one can see problematic aspects in the “Open Boob Project”, there is a substantial difference between coming up with something like that, which is dependent upon at least two levels of consent, and being concerned about an issue related to harassment in which there is no consent at all.
@Aaron – if you don’t see that there is a similiar underlying attitude of viewing women (and yes this was a project mainly aimed at touching women, why else call it the Open Source Boob Project?) as sexual objects, no matter how nicely it’s dressed up as “admiration” or they try to make it more acceptable by only objectifying the “willing”, then I got nothing for ya to convince you of it. I’m not saying one is as bad as the other, obviously actions lacking any sort of consent are much worse. I’m saying they come from the same place of entitlement and they are equally not acceptable, in terms of dismantling sexism and sexists attitudes towards women.
I’m not saying one is as bad as the other, obviously actions lacking any sort of consent are much worse.
And yet you then turn around and say that both are “equally not acceptable”. That is saying one is as bad as the other.
@August:
I’m curious how long before we’re allowed to whine?
My personal limit, back in the days when I listened to audiobooks on a substantial commute, was half a CD for a modern book. I figure if it takes 40 minutes for a reader to read your digression to me, you’re too enamoured with your own cleverness.
I’m not quite as extreme as this guy:
I make allowances for worldbuilding. Granted, I do prefer that whenever possible the worldbuilding be presented to me in a way that reveals character.
But if you’re going to wander off into a prose poem for a few pages, I’d prefer some warning before I start reading/listening.
@Aaron – Come on, I am not saying their level of unacceptableness is the same, I am saying they are both not acceptable period. Can you stop with the disingenuous nitpicking? I think my meaning was quite clear.
In terms of mechanics, I’m not exactly sure how the OSBP is any different than Tinder or Grindr, or any other dating service currently in existence. Or even the act of dating in the first place.
In the OSBP, you could choose to participate or not participate. An equal number of men and women participated. That was their choice. Then, after consenting to being part of the project (downloading, installing, and making an account on the app), someone has to contact them (Swiping right) Then if BOTH parties are agreeable further action can take place.
Is the argument that the project is inherently sexist? How?
Is the issue that women are frequently seen as sex objects? What bearing did the OSBP have on that fact? Especially when participation required consent of the individuals. They desired to be part of the project. They wanted people to ask them said question. Now you can argue about peer pressure, and internalized misogyny, and all of that, if you want. But choice is the inherent issue here.
The OSBP was about consent in multiple ways throughout. Chainmail guy was not.
I’m not saying that OBSP was a good idea. I’m saying that equating it to sexual harassment is ridiculous, even more so when you consider that it was a long time ago, he apologized, and you’re using it to denigrate someone who is trying to use his voice to speak up and say “Believe victims”.
I am not saying their level of unacceptableness is the same
That is exactly what “equally” means. If you didn’t mean equally, then you shouldn’t have used the word. You’ve been trying to conflate two very different things as being the same kind of thing since you gratuitously brought it up in this thread.
I read the original post about the Open Source Boob Project on theferret’s LiveJournal, where he also adds an update about why it may have been a fun idea amongst a small group of friends but was a No Good Very Bad Idea in the context of a larger group.
First of all, that original post is all about touching boobs. And I find it problematic beginning right about here:
Now he says that they didn’t go around asking everyone, only those “dressed to impress”. Which I find a kinda skeezy sentiment, having to do with the difficulty of cosplaying as a woman. Much of the time the options appear to be “cosplay accurately and show off them assets” or “alter the costume so double-sided tape is not required”.
Then I got to this kick in the gut:
Did these women even want their breasts touched? Did they really? It’s impossible to tell. There’s a reinforcement of toxic beauty standards going on there, even if completely unintentionally.
The whole thing, though described as not tawdry at all, still reads as objectifying and skeezy. This was the genesis for the OSBP, not the Project itself, but I’m not sure anything good could have come out of a beginning like that.
@ULTRAGOTHA Thank you–that comment made my morning!
Rail on May 19, 2016 at 11:56 am said:
So Infinite Jest was right out… 🙂
@Rail: Everybody’s different, but it also depends on the writer and the book. I’ll give Ray Smith or William Gaddis an entire book (Gaddis only gets about two pages when he starts into dialogue, though). China Mieville gets about half a page when he goes to italics (because his stream of consciousness technique is very poorly developed), but I’ll give him ten or twelve pages if he’s writing about cities, and AS Byatt gets five or six pages as long as she’s writing about painting or pottery, though she tends to be most inventive when she keeps it to half a page or so. It’s a sliding scale. But honestly, I can’t understand reading for pleasure if you aren’t interested in letting people use language to do beautiful things. I love me some solid, no-nonsense, ‘workmanlike’ prose (a la the Martian, which is a book I quite liked), but if I couldn’t also have Faulkner’s thunderous biblical visions or Gibson’s gomi-inspired imagery or even the weird fragmentation of Stand On Zanzibar (which I didn’t much care for, but I admire the effort) I think my head would explode from the boring sameness of it all.
It is also worth mentioning, in the context of the…sigh…Open Source Boob Project…that by the second convention it was run at, women were already being harassed for not “choosing” to wear a green button, and women with no buttons were being sexually assaulted with the defense, “Oh, I guess I didn’t understand the button system.” The idea that this was some sort of fully consensual, opt-in sexual utopia lasted about two days before smacking into the real world.
Which isn’t to say it wasn’t an utterly terrible, sexist, dehumanizing idea to begin with, in which women were actively encouraged to seek the approval of their bodies from men through objectification–it is literally called the “Open Source Boob Project”, if you have to have it explained why it’s objectifying even when consent was ostensibly sought then you maybe should just go read the thousand-plus comments on the original post that explain it in no uncertain terms–but the point is that it turned into harassment so rapidly that it can’t legitimately be contrasted with harassment even if the original intent was something pure. Which it wasn’t, because the original description of it was self-evidently terrible and the comments on it make that perfectly clear for the terminally clueless.
FWIW I actually encountered the Open Source Boob Project while it was under way. I was a bit taken aback, but someone (possibly Ferret; I am very bad at faces and the person fell into the “seems familiar but I don’t know their name or where I saw them before camp” that so much of fandom falls into for me) explained what was going on. I said something like “I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” and they said that was perfectly okay. Not that I needed their permission but I did like that it made it obvious to anyone in the area considering participating that it was perfectly okay to decline.
It has been eight years. A lot has happened and I have learned a lot and am still learning. But it didn’t seem like a bad thing to me then. And given that it didn’t seem like a bad thing to me–and had I participated I would have been a “boob source” so it’s not like it’s self-interest talking–I don’t feel like I can get mad at the ferret for being similarly clueless.
Now I’m more of the “has it occurred to you that you are reinforcing the idea that women have sexy bits and men negotiate for access and maybe there’s a problem with the idea that this is a one way thing?” school of thought. But if it took me a while to get there, I’m not going to hold a grudge about someone not besting me in that department.
And disliking harassment doesn’t seem to me to be strange, coming from ferret; it’s consistent with what I’ve seen from him before.
[ETA based on what John Seavy reports and what I saw, it seems likely that I ran into the project in its very beginning…]
What fascinates me about the OSBP discussion is a question that seems to underpin the whole thing, yet isn’t really being talked about: the path from A to B. The path question is in no way limited to this subject, either; I’ve found it to be useful in analyzing several social or political proposals.
In a nutshell, the question is, “how do we get from the present situation to the proposed situation?”
With OSBP, for instance – let’s grant, as much as possible, all sides of the discussion. That means assuming that the originator was operating in good faith, that the participants were sincere, that they wanted the project to be open and inclusive, and that current society is not at all equal in several ways that affect those goals. In short, let us assume both the culture of objectification and the desire of the participants to be objectified.
Is there a way that the OSBP participants could have reached (or taken steps toward) their goal without being judged by others as “skeezy” or “sexist”? Further, to what extent do outsiders get a veto over the participants? At what point does their business become our business?
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen people complain about how obsessed Americans are with sex and nudity. It’s treated as shameful and perverse, and we should have healthier attitudes about it. Okay, fine – the same question applies. How do we get there from here without challenging mores and getting seen as “skeezy” or “sexist”?
There’s an acronym I know at least one other Filer will recognize: YKINMK, aka YKINMKBYKIOK in its fuller form. It’s an explicit recognition that while something isn’t “your thing,” it’s okay for it to be someone else’s “thing.” It’s the opposite of kink shaming, and I’m getting a serious kink-shaming vibe from this thread’s OSBP discussion.
Would I wear a green pin? Probably not. NMK.
Do I mind if other people freely choose to? Not at all.
Do I think anyone should be pressured into wearing one? Hell, no.
Do I think anyone should be pressured into NOT wearing one? Also hell, no.
tl;dr: I find there to be something really “skeezy” about judging people who freely chose to participate in OSBP as Bad and Wrong and Disgusting. I think it is of a piece with tut-tutting “that fat guy in the Speedo” or “that girl who’s dressed like a whore” – it’s just another form of objectification, but it’s “okay” because it’s prudish instead of libertine. If judging is bad, it should be bad on both sides of that coin.
The OSBP folks are okay with letting certain people have a feel, and their circle of “certain people” is wider than the cultural norm. They’re choosing to take a step to de-mystify sexuality. So what?
Heather Rose Jones on May 19, 2016 at 11:08 am said: I’m finding it sociologically interesting how often, and in what circumstances, Chuck Tingle is referred to as “Dr. Tingle”.
Speaking as a non-academic whose initials are D.R., I am always enthralled when Nigerian zillionaires and compilers of the Big Book Of Important People Who Have On Some Occasion Farted address me with utmost respect as Doctor Langford.
@Rev Bob: I would once again direct you to the original LiveJournal post, freely available through a Google search, and to the thousand-plus comments that it accumulated before closing. The tl;dr version of that is that nobody is shaming the women who chose to be groped, they are shaming the men who very clearly created a system in which objectification would be rewarded, presented it to women in a manner that suggested that the approval of their peers depended on participating, and then rejoiced at having found a noble, pure way to combat objectification and grope breasts without guilt simultaneously!
Or, as several people said at the time, “Declaring that you’re fighting objectification while saying, ‘I touched fifteen pairs of boobs that weekend’ is a pretty clear sign that you’re sending mixed signals at best.” Trust me when I say this is a heavily-mined, already abandoned hill you do not want to take up defense of. 🙂
@ Aaron: You’re palming a card here. What Sunhawk actually said was: I’m saying they come from the same place of entitlement and they are equally not acceptable, **in terms of dismantling sexism and sexists attitudes towards women.** (emphasis mine)
By quoting only 3 words and ignoring the clause which defines the range of the term “equally”, you’re making yourself look both unreasonable and sort of dumb.
@ Rev. Bob: Well, one way that you don’t get from where we are to where we want to be is by pretending we’re already there, which it feels to me as if the OBSP was doing. The only possible suggestion I might have to make it work better would be to confine it to a specific space, with a large full-disclosure sign by the door and an ironclad policy for ejecting anyone who used “I didn’t understand” as an excuse to break the rules. And I’m not sure that would do it in any context larger than “smallish group of people who already all know each other pretty well”, which is where the whole thing came from in the first place.
Given other writing that I’ve seen from Ferrett on the topic of sexism and sexual harassment since the OSBP fiasco, I am willing to believe that he learned something important from the whole mess. People do that, if they are willing to acknowledge having been wrong; it’s not “flip-flopping”, it’s “integrating better data into one’s worldview”.
(How do you get bolding to work here? Or does it not work at all?)
Lee: How do you get bolding to work here? Or does it not work at all?
You have to use <strong> </strong> rather than <b> </b>.
@John Seavey: “I would once again direct you to the original LiveJournal post, freely available through a Google search, and to the thousand-plus comments that it accumulated before closing.”
Except that I’m specifically and explicitly talking about the discussion here, in these comments.
(EDIT: At least, I thought I’d made that explicit in my original post. That was my intent, anyway – “the OSBP discussion in these comments, as distinct from the other comments.”)
You’re palming a card here.
I don’t think so. This isn’t just about the one quote. Sunhawk has been claiming the two situations are identical since they introduced the OSBP into the conversation. I refer back to Sunhawk’s original post on this:
As a follow-up, Sunhawk then repeatedly misrepresented what the OSBP was and how it worked, claiming it was a “system that would allow you to touch them as quickly and/or freely as possible.” and that it was based on the idea that “consent can be just given out to the public in advance”, neither of which are true. Sunhawk has spent large amount so effort in this thread attempting to claim two very different things are actually the same thing, and has had to twist reality to even come close to making that argument work.
What Ferrett did was problematic for any number of reasons, but it wasn’t harassment, and as the block quoted text in this comment shows, Sunhawk started this conversation by claiming it was.
@Rev. Bob:
Pretty much entirely agreed. In theory I’m pretty ok with the idea. Some kind of “ask me if I’m okay with consensual touching for an agreed-upon amount of time in an agreed-upon location” signal. But I can see how that went really wrong really fast.
I will say that there was a time when I would have asked if my breasts were “good enough to touch” when I didn’t actually want to be touched. I’m not trying to shame anyone who was touched and had a good time, of either gender.
@ Rev. Bob
I’m a big fan of the general thought behind YKINMK / YKINMKBYKIOK, but I don’t think it is an acceptable get-out-of-jail-free card for social situations. Whatever your kink/thing/whatever is is perfectly OK, but other people should not be put in the situation of having to negotiate it in unrelated contexts.
What does this behaviour have to do with a shared appreciation of science fiction and fantasy media? Nothing? Then other attendees should’t be put in a situation where they need to deal with your kink.
And the people advocating this and defending it know that. There’s a reason that none of the advocates planned follow-ups at reunions or business conferences or in a public square. The fact they they felt that the Venn Diagram for “SFF Convention” and “It’s potentially acceptable for me to grab random women in public” had enough overlap to even suggest this is really troubling.
Yes, YKINMKBYKIOK, but that doesn’t mean that people going to SFF Cons should have the expectation of having to actively opt in or out of every other participant’s desires.
Wait, I think I worded that badly. I may have implied that I was trying to shame people who were touched and did not have a good time, which is epically not the case. I’m sorry. I’m actually not trying to shame theferret, because I read the LJ post and he apologized and appeared to learn something. Awesome!
I am trying to shame the objectification of women and some of the terrible messages to girls about their looks and anyone who used the button system to grope and then claim they were confused etc.
Bob, my understanding is that most people in the kink community will not engage in play in the presence of people who have not consented to be part of the scene. As in, the con attendees who find it dehumanizing to watch women reduced to red-and-green “my boobs are open source” flags, or to be inspected themselves for a button they’re not wearing. (Let’s be honest, if there are red and green buttons on some women, every woman is going to have her chest checked for a button, out of sheer curiosity if not interest. Women in the vicinity of the OSBP know they’re all being treated as a pair of potentially available boobs, whether or not they play. And John’s description of how it panned out is incredibly predictable from the basic premise of the project, because that is what women know happens when the people around them are encouraged to think of them as sexual bodyparts with prudish gatekeepers not letting other people have fun with them.) How is playing out that kink in public any different from holding a public humiliation scene in front of the general public that didn’t consent to be a part of it? How is making people who didn’t consent to be a part of it deal with the same initial overtures fair?
If they want to play out a sexual kink, that’s fine. It’s when they do it in public that it becomes everyone else’s business. And it’s when the fallout lands on other people that it really becomes everyone else’s business.
I’m sure they could have done a lot of things to make the project more acceptable. How about a gender-neutral name that didn’t play into about the crassest fratboy stereotype of objectification or explicitly single out the body part for people to focus on? “The Sex-Positivity Flag Project”. How about visible flags that were not literal stop-and-go stoplights? Blue for sex-positive and open to inquiries to play, orange for sex-positive but not looking. A social event designated for the purpose of wearing them and getting to know people, like a party, and asking people to chill a little in public, rather than turning the entire convention and all its attendees into unwitting participants in a hookup scene. Also, how about an intro to the project that did not read like a dude writing the most ridiculous, insultingly objectifying PUA negging in chivalrous m’lady phrasing instead of an intro that actually has any interest in women’s sexual desires? (‘“My breasts,” they asked shyly, having heard about the project. “Are they… are they good enough to be touched?”’ You must be joking. That’s not demystifying sexuality. That’s straight-up old-fashioned “women are shy and don’t have sexualities except when men want them sexually” Victorian nonsense with a few nice-guy fedoras on it for style, as written by someone who can’t quite imagine what women sound like when they speak. And it’s absolutely a soft-pedalled version of plain old PUA negging strategy, aimed at every woman reading about the project.)
Re. Walter and his tribes: his definitions may be somewhat arbitrary and maybe even a bit silly, but at least he’s noticed that not every SF fan has exactly the same tastes or preferences. Which is a concept that some folks do indeed seem to struggle with. And, on the bright side, when he’s out there trying to fit SF fans into arbitrary categories, that means that he’s not out there telling people that they just have to wave a magic wand to banish any and all puppyishness. 🙂
I actually found his categories amusing and food for thought. I may not agree with them, but they seem like an interesting way to start a discussion.
The part that irritated me was his dismissal of other genres. Romance, if anything, probably comes in more flavors than SF does. And crime fiction? Heck, mystery is a notable subcategory of crime fiction (no, the two are not equivalent), and mystery alone can be divided into many categories. And non-mystery crime fic can cover a range from Ocean’s Eleven (the Caper) to Natural Born Killers. And somewhere in there is the Police Procedural, which can either be mystery (find the killer) or not (catch the killer).
@Dawn:
Assuming the OSBP is happening somewhere, the green pins have definite value. “I’m aware and have opted in.” The red pins also have merit. “I’m aware and have opted out.” No pin should definitely be taken as “I’m not aware and/or not interested,” and I would suggest that anyone taking it upon themselves to make a no-pin person aware (a) be very polite in doing so and (b) offer a red pin if the person is uninterested, so the person won’t get asked again. Attempts to persuade or pressure people to change their pin should be strongly discouraged, to the extent that such a person gets ejected (at least from the project) for possible harassment. I think those are the minimum requirements for the project to run safely.
There is just enough there that I’m curious but reluctant to ask.
I will venture the opinion that such a project shouldn’t have “good enough” arbiters, at least for “donors.” (The other side – “takers”? – is more problematic, and some screening there strikes me as prudent.) If someone understands the rules and wants to volunteer to be touched, sign ’em up. Nobody has to accept their offer.
@Aaron: “What Ferrett did was problematic for any number of reasons, but it wasn’t harassment, and as the block quoted text in this comment shows, Sunhawk started this conversation by claiming it was.”
Except that it was. It wasn’t intended as harassment, perhaps, but in any group larger than two, the group dynamic is going to function in such a way that harassment is inevitable. Basically, if you have a mixed-gender group in which someone brings up the idea of groping as acceptable behavior, it’s pretty much inevitable that not every single woman in the group will agree. But once the first woman says, “I agree and freely consent to that!”, it creates a social pressure on all the remaining women to go along with the group consensus. No single person intends to pressure the remaining women, but that pressure is nonetheless real and documented.
And it gets worse with each woman who does go along. By the time you get to the fourth or fifth woman, even if she really doesn’t want to do it, she’s questioning her own instincts, she’s asking if she wants to be the one prude in a group of people who clearly think uninhibited behavior is normal, she’s trying to decide whether everyone means it when they say that nobody will be mad if you say no, and in the end she decides that it’s not worth the stress in exchange for a few moments of unwanted touching. So she goes along with it, even though she is not comfortable with the situation.
Perhaps you could say that nobody engaged in predatory behavior, but there are women who were present at the time who will say that the original OSBP was much less of a consensual-touch utopia than originally presented. Again, I really am surprised that there are people who will jump up in favor of an almost-decade old embarrassment that the original presenter has apologized for, here.
@John,
I’m surprised that people would use an almost-decade old embarrassment that the original presenter has apologized for to throw shade on that original presenter for standing up and saying “We should believe victims of harassment and assault even if the Courts have not.”
OBSP was a dumb thing. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. Even if you think it was a good idea, it was poorly implemented and poorly administered. So I’m not sure who you think is “in favor” of it?
@Rev. Bob:
What I feel comfortable saying is that I was raised in a shame-filled environment and was considered a joke by my peers for quite some time.
I have cosplayed exactly once, and wasn’t comfortable with the constant attention and requests for photographs. In an ideal world I would want to dress as Witch Hunter Robin.