I am not Omega—you can call me the sum of torque and wavelength… that’s not even translating, is it—and I cannot see your source code. However, I will go ahead and offer you, epsilon upsilon, the following deal:
If you tell me that you flipped a coin to determine the current hero’s gender, then I will mail you a check for 100 USD, in support of this admirable method for overcoming bias. Other forms of ritual sacrifice to the Random Number God are acceptable, but not meditation—I can see your hardware, and your brain is not a proper temple of the Random Number God.
As a sovereign rationalist, you are free to reply to me or not, accept my deal or not, and lie to me or not. I await your reply or lack thereof!
Ha! I tried doing that, the generator came up female… and I realized that I couldn’t make Aerhien a man, and that having two “hers” and “shes” would make the dialogue harder to track.
Sometimes a random number generator only tells you what you already know.
(FYI, I was in an airport at the time, so I decided to close my eyes, look in a random direction, open them, and see what gender the first person I saw was… and even though they were both female, I then realized I had to discard the result.)
Why couldn’t Aerhien have been a man? Were you that committed to the “perfect eyelash” line? Would having a dead spouse be an uncompelling backstory for a male character?
Uh… I have to ask, at this point, if you’ve ever tried your hand at writing fiction. Some characters are male, some characters are female, some can be either. The hero might have been either-able. Aerhien wasn’t. She is the wise female council leader, not the wise male council leader. Galadriel and Elrond are not interchangeable. And besides, she was female in my mind and that’s that.
I honestly haven’t the vaguest idea. In the beginning I was visualizing Aerhien as having pointed ears, which made her light-elvish, but I decided against that. Generally I don’t give my characters a color unless they need an ethnic background.
You know when it comes to racism, people say: ” I don’t care if they’re black, white, purple or green”… Ooh hold on now: Purple or Green? You gotta draw the line somewhere! To hell with purple people! - Unless they’re suffocating—then help’em.
~Mitch Hedburg
Yes, I have. I guess you just didn’t communicate the essential female-ness of Aerhien very effectively (at least to me), because it didn’t seem to me like it was very important to what limited character development she got.
I guess you just didn’t communicate the essential female-ness of Aerhien very effectively (at least to me), because it didn’t seem to me like it was very important to what limited character development she got.
The background story that was alluded to came across quite clearly. Not only did the character emerge sufficiently that a sex change would have felt awkward, it left me grasping for the tantalising details that couldn’t quite be fit into the short story format.
The question of “what gender is”, when you strip away the purely anatomical, is a topic of great interest to me.
It seems to me that while Aerhien’s gender wasn’t essential to the story, there were certain aspects of her personality that hinted at it (and I’m not talking about the eyelashes) -- but I wouldn’t go beyond that; if she had been written as male, I don’t think I would have sensed any incongruity.
Without further biasing the discussion by mentioning what I think those personality aspects might be, I’m curious to find out what attributes other people thought made her essentially female—among those who hold this position, that is.
Are we arguing about some Platonic “essentials”, in that fictional characters “actually exist somewhere”? I believe that the fictional characters were formed in Eliezer’s brain as representations of certain archetypes (such as, as he noted, the “wise female council leader”) that he felt best represented the characterization he was intending to give them.
It doesn’t mean the story wouldn’t work if the characters were given different genders or other different characteristics. It means that the author would find it unfitting to his semi-conscious concept of the story and its fictional setting, which is unknown to us except for what’s revealed in the text, and is necessarily richer than the text. Or at least, I generously assume that this is what Eliezer was arguing—that “she had to be female” meant “I believe she worked best as female as the representation of my character role concept”, not a postulation of some fictional Platonism.
Some characters are male, some characters are female, some can be either. The hero might have been either-able. Aerhien wasn’t.
Yes, all fine and good — but why not? As Alicorn said, her sex hardly seems relevant to what limited character development she got. Aside from perhaps the eyelash line, and making the lover a woman if you wanted Aerhien to be straight, I struggle to think of anything in this story that would not work equally well if Aerhien were a man.
And besides, she was female in my mind and that’s that.
He could. I just would have been surprised to see it mentioned in a story. It’s rarely considered to bear mentioning in a work of fiction if a male character has perfect eyelashes and happens to bat/dip/flutter them, unless this is used as a way to lampshade some stereotypical notion of effeminacy.
And for the part of that story that would not sit well with feminists (1) , check out this excerpt :
The Confessor held up a hand. ”… Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?”
Akon wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace. “The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then—flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn’t take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far—”
...
“Um,” Akon said. He was trying not to smile. “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex—”
Yeah, I could almost hear the simultaneous clicking of the “back” button in all the web browsers of female readers who are now forever disenchanted with this site because of misogyny oozing out of this story.
Seriously, is there always a hidden meaning in subtleties like these? I remember a feminist one time (not Alicorn) criticizing Robin_Hanson on overcomingbias.com and being utterly confused by her points. She would spend long, boring paragraphs dwelling on such minor things as:
-the inclusion of Oxford’s emblem on the site
-Robin_Hanson’s failure to carefully distinguish sex (biological?) from gender (cultural?), which most women supposedly reflect deeply upon and are careful to distinguish.
-the supposed misogyny in the picture at the header of OB (Odysseus lashing himself to the mast to resist the sirens’ call) because it somehow implies that all women are evil temptresses. … Even though the sirens actually look male to me, or at least like very unusual females.
(Digression: I’ve seen numerous pictures of men doing mean things on pictures on web sites, but never felt that it was trying to say e.g. “All men are murderers” unless that was also found in the body of the website”. And in any case, other men would roll their eyes at me and my strangeness if I made such a criticism.)
But of course, after spending all that time on those issues, she never got to the actual substance of Robin_Hanson’s posts and what made them so anti-women. It seemed to be all about cherry-picking incidental background things such that Robin_Hanson could write almost anything and be classified as a woman hater. So what’s the point of trying?
To bring this back to your comment, Alicorn: You could very well be offended by these gender choices. Your entire social group could be offended. But that still wouldn’t justify adherence to the standards you seem to expect.
If people are expected to filter their writing through such a fine-meshed screen that they have to justify the gender of each and every character, and the presence of any artwork, or heuristic about women that is invoked, people may as well stop writing. Because they will never be able to make enough sense of the rules to accurately adhere to them. Instead, they’ll just throw a blanket self-prohibition on anything remotely close to violating the spirit of the rules, and end up either spouting vague pleasantries, or in perpetual editorial review, or just not writing at all.
And the behavior of women, including their admiration of those who flout these rules, will continue unabated.
I’m surprised—I hadn’t expected that you consulted, then disregarded, the Random Number God.
It’s your story, of course—but I note that Charles Stross got away with having multiple female characters and virtually no male characters (other than love interests and cardboard authority figures) in the first few Merchant Princes novels, and inversely for innumerable other authors. Of course, Stross could distinguish his characters by referring to this one or that one as an assassin princess (there are several of those, but the main character is not).
Also, I’m surprised that there have been so many other comments about Aerhien’s gender, but not about the hero’s—the “perfect eyelashes” line jumped out at me, but not as much as the fact that the “smart guy who figures out what’s going on” was a guy.
I hadn’t expected that you consulted, then disregarded, the Random Number God.
It’s also worth noting that the nameless hero started out male, and Aerhien as female, on account of those having been the applicable genders in the dream—this is a dream-inspired story, my first. I consulted the RNG to try and reassign the hero’s gender but discovered almost immediately that it would have been awkward.
The dream originally occurred from the hero’s perspective, btw, but from a writer’s standpoint it was obvious that the main character couldn’t be the hero.
My girlfriend also says the “perfect eyelashes” line gave her an ick reaction, which made me realize that the phrase is a cliche—associated from textual memory, not visualized. I’ve edited that line.
I’ve written fiction with highly intelligent female characters, thank you. Not published, but written, yes.
(And while we’re on the topic, I’ve written, though not finished, fiction in which the main character is female, the hyperintelligent characters are female, and female characters talk, to each other, about something other than a man, with no lesbian overtones whatsoever between any pair of them. Thank you.)
Does that make it harder to have them share your ideas? I suspect that irrelevant (to the story) similarities and differences between the characters and the author affect the process, even more than the relevant ones.
It could explain why you rejected the results of random selection. Her purpose was to see your ideas from the outside, and the relevant difference that she didn’t share them needed some irrelevant differences to prop it up.
My apologies if my comments seemed accusatory; it’s hard to bring up this kind of issue—which I think is fairly important—without sounding confrontational. I should mention that I found this story to be excellent, and I learned a new way of looking at things, that rarest of treats. I just noticed that Jeffreyssai, the ultra-badass Confessor, and the nameless hero were all male, and considered it sufficiently interesting to ask about.
Jeffreyssai and the Confessor are obtrusive, explicit rationalists—I’ve already written about that writing problem of mine, which is my own problem as a writer.
I am not Omega—you can call me the sum of torque and wavelength… that’s not even translating, is it—and I cannot see your source code. However, I will go ahead and offer you, epsilon upsilon, the following deal:
If you tell me that you flipped a coin to determine the current hero’s gender, then I will mail you a check for 100 USD, in support of this admirable method for overcoming bias. Other forms of ritual sacrifice to the Random Number God are acceptable, but not meditation—I can see your hardware, and your brain is not a proper temple of the Random Number God.
As a sovereign rationalist, you are free to reply to me or not, accept my deal or not, and lie to me or not. I await your reply or lack thereof!
Ha! I tried doing that, the generator came up female… and I realized that I couldn’t make Aerhien a man, and that having two “hers” and “shes” would make the dialogue harder to track.
Sometimes a random number generator only tells you what you already know.
(FYI, I was in an airport at the time, so I decided to close my eyes, look in a random direction, open them, and see what gender the first person I saw was… and even though they were both female, I then realized I had to discard the result.)
Why couldn’t Aerhien have been a man? Were you that committed to the “perfect eyelash” line? Would having a dead spouse be an uncompelling backstory for a male character?
Uh… I have to ask, at this point, if you’ve ever tried your hand at writing fiction. Some characters are male, some characters are female, some can be either. The hero might have been either-able. Aerhien wasn’t. She is the wise female council leader, not the wise male council leader. Galadriel and Elrond are not interchangeable. And besides, she was female in my mind and that’s that.
What I want to know is if any of them are black.
I honestly haven’t the vaguest idea. In the beginning I was visualizing Aerhien as having pointed ears, which made her light-elvish, but I decided against that. Generally I don’t give my characters a color unless they need an ethnic background.
Make her octarine. That would be eminently appropriate.
You know when it comes to racism, people say: ” I don’t care if they’re black, white, purple or green”… Ooh hold on now: Purple or Green? You gotta draw the line somewhere! To hell with purple people! - Unless they’re suffocating—then help’em. ~Mitch Hedburg
Yes, I have. I guess you just didn’t communicate the essential female-ness of Aerhien very effectively (at least to me), because it didn’t seem to me like it was very important to what limited character development she got.
The background story that was alluded to came across quite clearly. Not only did the character emerge sufficiently that a sex change would have felt awkward, it left me grasping for the tantalising details that couldn’t quite be fit into the short story format.
The question of “what gender is”, when you strip away the purely anatomical, is a topic of great interest to me.
It seems to me that while Aerhien’s gender wasn’t essential to the story, there were certain aspects of her personality that hinted at it (and I’m not talking about the eyelashes) -- but I wouldn’t go beyond that; if she had been written as male, I don’t think I would have sensed any incongruity.
Without further biasing the discussion by mentioning what I think those personality aspects might be, I’m curious to find out what attributes other people thought made her essentially female—among those who hold this position, that is.
“Essential” in what sense?
Are we arguing about some Platonic “essentials”, in that fictional characters “actually exist somewhere”? I believe that the fictional characters were formed in Eliezer’s brain as representations of certain archetypes (such as, as he noted, the “wise female council leader”) that he felt best represented the characterization he was intending to give them.
It doesn’t mean the story wouldn’t work if the characters were given different genders or other different characteristics. It means that the author would find it unfitting to his semi-conscious concept of the story and its fictional setting, which is unknown to us except for what’s revealed in the text, and is necessarily richer than the text. Or at least, I generously assume that this is what Eliezer was arguing—that “she had to be female” meant “I believe she worked best as female as the representation of my character role concept”, not a postulation of some fictional Platonism.
Yes, all fine and good — but why not? As Alicorn said, her sex hardly seems relevant to what limited character development she got. Aside from perhaps the eyelash line, and making the lover a woman if you wanted Aerhien to be straight, I struggle to think of anything in this story that would not work equally well if Aerhien were a man.
See now, that’s a rationale I can get behind.
My guess is that Aerhien was inspired by a specific character from another story.
Either that, or Eliezer simply liked the name. But, yeah, that’s a good question.
Actually, I was reminded of the immortal empress in Harry Turtledove’s novel “Noninterference”.
Why couldn’t a man dip his perfect eyelashes?
He could. I just would have been surprised to see it mentioned in a story. It’s rarely considered to bear mentioning in a work of fiction if a male character has perfect eyelashes and happens to bat/dip/flutter them, unless this is used as a way to lampshade some stereotypical notion of effeminacy.
He was suddenly very aware that he hadn’t checked his lipstick in three hours.
And for the part of that story that would not sit well with feminists (1) , check out this excerpt :
Interesting discussion follows in the comments.
(1) ETA: Or me, or most people in general.
Yeah, I could almost hear the simultaneous clicking of the “back” button in all the web browsers of female readers who are now forever disenchanted with this site because of misogyny oozing out of this story.
Seriously, is there always a hidden meaning in subtleties like these? I remember a feminist one time (not Alicorn) criticizing Robin_Hanson on overcomingbias.com and being utterly confused by her points. She would spend long, boring paragraphs dwelling on such minor things as:
-the inclusion of Oxford’s emblem on the site
-Robin_Hanson’s failure to carefully distinguish sex (biological?) from gender (cultural?), which most women supposedly reflect deeply upon and are careful to distinguish.
-the supposed misogyny in the picture at the header of OB (Odysseus lashing himself to the mast to resist the sirens’ call) because it somehow implies that all women are evil temptresses. … Even though the sirens actually look male to me, or at least like very unusual females.
(Digression: I’ve seen numerous pictures of men doing mean things on pictures on web sites, but never felt that it was trying to say e.g. “All men are murderers” unless that was also found in the body of the website”. And in any case, other men would roll their eyes at me and my strangeness if I made such a criticism.)
But of course, after spending all that time on those issues, she never got to the actual substance of Robin_Hanson’s posts and what made them so anti-women. It seemed to be all about cherry-picking incidental background things such that Robin_Hanson could write almost anything and be classified as a woman hater. So what’s the point of trying?
To bring this back to your comment, Alicorn: You could very well be offended by these gender choices. Your entire social group could be offended. But that still wouldn’t justify adherence to the standards you seem to expect.
If people are expected to filter their writing through such a fine-meshed screen that they have to justify the gender of each and every character, and the presence of any artwork, or heuristic about women that is invoked, people may as well stop writing. Because they will never be able to make enough sense of the rules to accurately adhere to them. Instead, they’ll just throw a blanket self-prohibition on anything remotely close to violating the spirit of the rules, and end up either spouting vague pleasantries, or in perpetual editorial review, or just not writing at all.
And the behavior of women, including their admiration of those who flout these rules, will continue unabated.
I’m surprised—I hadn’t expected that you consulted, then disregarded, the Random Number God.
It’s your story, of course—but I note that Charles Stross got away with having multiple female characters and virtually no male characters (other than love interests and cardboard authority figures) in the first few Merchant Princes novels, and inversely for innumerable other authors. Of course, Stross could distinguish his characters by referring to this one or that one as an assassin princess (there are several of those, but the main character is not).
Also, I’m surprised that there have been so many other comments about Aerhien’s gender, but not about the hero’s—the “perfect eyelashes” line jumped out at me, but not as much as the fact that the “smart guy who figures out what’s going on” was a guy.
It’s also worth noting that the nameless hero started out male, and Aerhien as female, on account of those having been the applicable genders in the dream—this is a dream-inspired story, my first. I consulted the RNG to try and reassign the hero’s gender but discovered almost immediately that it would have been awkward.
The dream originally occurred from the hero’s perspective, btw, but from a writer’s standpoint it was obvious that the main character couldn’t be the hero.
At least, not without changing the tone of the story to something resembling StarkRavingMad’s Boatmurdered updates.
My girlfriend also says the “perfect eyelashes” line gave her an ick reaction, which made me realize that the phrase is a cliche—associated from textual memory, not visualized. I’ve edited that line.
I’ve written fiction with highly intelligent female characters, thank you. Not published, but written, yes.
(And while we’re on the topic, I’ve written, though not finished, fiction in which the main character is female, the hyperintelligent characters are female, and female characters talk, to each other, about something other than a man, with no lesbian overtones whatsoever between any pair of them. Thank you.)
Does that make it harder to have them share your ideas? I suspect that irrelevant (to the story) similarities and differences between the characters and the author affect the process, even more than the relevant ones.
It could explain why you rejected the results of random selection. Her purpose was to see your ideas from the outside, and the relevant difference that she didn’t share them needed some irrelevant differences to prop it up.
My apologies if my comments seemed accusatory; it’s hard to bring up this kind of issue—which I think is fairly important—without sounding confrontational. I should mention that I found this story to be excellent, and I learned a new way of looking at things, that rarest of treats. I just noticed that Jeffreyssai, the ultra-badass Confessor, and the nameless hero were all male, and considered it sufficiently interesting to ask about.
Jeffreyssai and the Confessor are obtrusive, explicit rationalists—I’ve already written about that writing problem of mine, which is my own problem as a writer.