I do understand why the story is like that, and, to be clear, its fine for HPMOR to fail a feminist critique! Lots of fantastic stories fail feminists critiques: this will bug some readers more than others, and it might be useful for a particular author to consider that a particular choice might alienate some readers because of the history.
Yes, there are lots of great reasons for Moody and Dumbledore to be how they are, but McGonnogal is an order member, so could easily be different (and in earlier chapters, often is!) .
To be clear, I do think this story in general does portray women pretty well, but the bullying arc and this death feel like misfires because they embody certain tropes without, perhaps, intending to.
If it’s okay for something to fail a critique, doesn’t that kind of mean there’s something wrong with the critique?
And I think there is something wrong with the critique. You don’t quite seem to appreciate the point Eliezer is making in his response.
I take it as a given that it is perfectly legitimate to have the main character of a story motivated by the death of his best friend. It is a premise of the whole endeavor that the main character is a super-smart Harry. So now we have to find a friend. Who could that naturally be? Well, it so happens that the smartest student in Harry’s year in the original is a girl; naturally, she will now be the second-smartest student in the class, because otherwise we’d have to dumb her down. She has the brains and personality to be Harry’s friend—so unless Eliezer takes additional pains to move further away from the original, she is going to be that friend. And it just so happens that she is female, which is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed, one could also turn it around and point out that it’s a positive thing that the person smart enough to be such good friends with Harry that their death motivates him suitably is a girl. But that would be equally besides the point, because Eliezer never chose her gender. The character was already there, gender included, and everything just falls into place as it is. He would have had to distort the original even further to prevent this; which is not the point of such a derivative work, and also the same people who have complained now would then probably have complained about him putting a smart and important female character from the original into a different, necessarily less central role, or removing her altogether (like Ron, who was unusable).
So what exactly is it that people are complaining about? Isn’t this really a problem with their own pattern-matching, which in this case turns out to be inappropriate? Maybe it’s making them uncomfortable, but that’s their problem; it’s not something on the basis of which to critique the story, because we can objectively argue that the pattern-matching went awry. Issues are not a purely subjective thing.
Note that this takes care only of the alleged fridging issue. It does not address the S.P.H.E.W. arc, which is more suspect of being genuinely problematic. I found it at least weird.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn’t to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one’s past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.
Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.
Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:
However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic.
I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
These things seem to me to work like implicatures. “The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn’t, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.”. But if the author couldn’t have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn’t interesting.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can
attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn’t have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don’t think its bad to go “hey, this doesn’t work for me for x y and z reasons”.
From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying “randomly” unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than letting said character have a heroic moment then dying. I appreciate that this is deeply realistic, but the story lover in me rebels. This is, of course, a different issue from the one I’m approaching, but I wonder if it isn’t adding to some people’s reaction.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who’d do it and why, it’s an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
Well, you can of course argue that Hermione, being the second smartest first year student, is the obvious candidate for te role of the best friend who dies too early, do you think it’d be equally plausible if Eliezer had killed Neville? Neville should be able to stand just as close to Harry as Hermione did (since Harry has not hit puberty yet, and thinks girls are “icky”), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Neville’s death could have brought forth the same emotions both in Harry and in the readers that Hermione’s death did. Eliezer probably also knows this and thus chose Hermione to die.
Yes, exactly. Neville’s death would not have created these emotions, but the reason is not that he is male and Hermione is female. Neville should not be able to stand just as close to Harry. Neville is in no position to be anything as close to a comrade or equal as Hermione was. Neville is just someone who Harry has sympathy for and by whose development Harry was impressed. This is a very different thing from the “the two of us are different from the rest of the world” connection that he quickly developed with Hermione at the beginning (and which then faded off a bit, not least due to the questionable SPHEW arc).
I think this may be taking Harry at his word a bit too much when it comes to his views on Hermione. Just because Harry allways speaks in “rationalist” vocabulary, doesn’t mean he is allways rational or free of bias. He is often unfair to people when he’s emotional. And his blind spot for Quirrel is a mile wide. “It was the defense professor last year, and the year before that, and the year before that...” Someone actualy starting from priors and adjusting finds Quirrel very quickly, particularly when you factor in the sense of doom.
Harry thinks he doesn’t like Hermione that way, Harry’s dad is pretty sure he does. I think regarding Harry’s statements as the more objective one here may be a mistake.
Harry thinks he doesn’t like Hermione that way, Harry’s dad is pretty sure he does.
In my experience, relatives are pretty sure the kid likes any friend of the opposite gender that way if they get brought to their attention. At least, in the culture in my general area.
Harry seems to think of puberty as purely binary. It’s not; it’s a gradual process. I don’t know what deficiency in Harry’s education led him to think this way, but it fumbles all of his thoughts about puberty.
Harry almost seems to be reasoning as follows:
I’m not sexually attracted to anybody.
Therefore, I haven’t hit puberty yet.
Therefore, I can’t possibly be romantically attracted to anybody.
Or, Harry is summarizing a wide variety of observations on the topic of puberty in a pithy and relatively un-embarrassing fashion. We don’t know Harry’s actual basis for claiming that he hasn’t yet begun puberty, but his comments on the subject are just a little too flippant to be the complete truth.
Quite true. My ideas at Harry’s age were actually very much like Harry’s, and I didn’t recognise my own first puberty-influenced romantic attractions (at, let me see, probably the age of 10, and at least two years before I felt any sexual attraction to anybody). I just expected Harry himself to know better.
Yet it is extremely out of character for Harry to fail to have conducted even minimal research on a phenomenon which will drastically impact his thinking and emotions as soon as it inevitably kicks in within the next couple of years.
What is “minimal research” on puberty when one is eleven-twelve?
Whatever “minimal research” is, he has vastly surpassed it in most areas where he’s done any research at all, from physics and rationality to transfiguration and potions. It seems nonsensical to expect less of him in one area than all the others without a very good reason.
Indeed. The point is with fridging is that it is not an inherently bad thing, but by repetition, and by being predominately women being fridged to motivate men, it begins to be unfortunate.
While we’re on the subject of bringing in larger context, I’d like to point out the context of your complaint: The SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) regularly goes off the rails over perceived instances of people not being politically correct enough. One recent incident involved the (female) editor of the SFWA bulletin being forced to resign over the following examples of “sexism”:
1) A column in the bulletin used the word “lady” to refer to women and complemented some of them on their appearance.
2) The same issue had a bikini-clad warrior woman on the cover.
This was enough to cause a huge controversy. However, the authors of said column subsequently published another column defending their previous column and pointing out how absurd the controversy was and in particular that “lady” is not a slur. This was considered completely beyond the pail and resulted in the above mentioned resignation as well as the bulletin being put on a six-month hiatus while the issue was being investigated.
I just looked through the articles you linked to and haven’t noticed anything that disagrees with my summary (I have also looked through many others you did not link to before posting my comment). Perhaps you could describe what specific additional information you think my summary is missing.
I’m not interested in having a discussion of the incident; I’m interested in directing readers of your comment to where they can find out more. Any particular sources you suggest?
Well, the sources you side are as decent as any in conveying the facts once one gets past the fact that they’re written as insane troll logic diatribes (or rather two are such diatribes and one was written by someone begging for mercy from said insane trolls). As for sources I’d recommend well Andrew Fox’s and Sarah Hoyt’s accounts are more reasonable, but they may come off as alarmist exaggeration until one realizes how common the insane trolls are.
One of the more obvious details noted in fubarobfusco’s articles is the complaints about how the articles about the female authors had much attention to female authors’ physical appearances. That was a major source of the complaints, especially in the context that one would not see similar such remarks about male authors. This isn’t the only difference, only one of the ones that jumps out.
One of the more obvious details noted in fubarobfusco’s articles is the complaints about how the articles about the female authors had much attention w [sic] to female authors’ physical appearances.
There’s a severe scale difference here in description. This wasn’t just complements but more strong language. Frankly, I’m inclined to think the whole thing did get blown out of proportion, although I suspect that the primary reasons for it had as much to do with the never ending internal politics of SFWA which seems to spend more of its time as a drama factory than anything else, as much as it had to do with feminism. But even given that, it still seemed like your summary downplayed the concerns.
Incidentally, I’m slightly curious if you downvoted my comment and fubarobfusco’s comment; both comments were downvoted within a few seconds of your replies. I don’t particular care much about karma one way or another, but it probably isn’t a great idea to downvote people one is having a discussion with if one is going to have any minimal hope of caring out a productive conversation. Among other issues, it can easily increase cognitive dissonance levels and make it substantially harder to accept an argument from the person one is talking to.
I’m not entirely sure what this has got to do with my comments, other than it is an issue related to feminism in science fiction and fantasy writing. I don’t really want to get into this argument, but would suggest simply that it this situation is perhaps more complicated than your post suggests.
Both arguments are based on the position that while something is not inherently bad (e.g., the frigging trope, complaining about aspects of a story that bother you), this instance of it is a problem because of the larger social context in which it is embedded.
I do understand why the story is like that, and, to be clear, its fine for HPMOR to fail a feminist critique! Lots of fantastic stories fail feminists critiques: this will bug some readers more than others, and it might be useful for a particular author to consider that a particular choice might alienate some readers because of the history.
Yes, there are lots of great reasons for Moody and Dumbledore to be how they are, but McGonnogal is an order member, so could easily be different (and in earlier chapters, often is!) .
To be clear, I do think this story in general does portray women pretty well, but the bullying arc and this death feel like misfires because they embody certain tropes without, perhaps, intending to.
If it’s okay for something to fail a critique, doesn’t that kind of mean there’s something wrong with the critique?
And I think there is something wrong with the critique. You don’t quite seem to appreciate the point Eliezer is making in his response.
I take it as a given that it is perfectly legitimate to have the main character of a story motivated by the death of his best friend. It is a premise of the whole endeavor that the main character is a super-smart Harry. So now we have to find a friend. Who could that naturally be? Well, it so happens that the smartest student in Harry’s year in the original is a girl; naturally, she will now be the second-smartest student in the class, because otherwise we’d have to dumb her down. She has the brains and personality to be Harry’s friend—so unless Eliezer takes additional pains to move further away from the original, she is going to be that friend. And it just so happens that she is female, which is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed, one could also turn it around and point out that it’s a positive thing that the person smart enough to be such good friends with Harry that their death motivates him suitably is a girl. But that would be equally besides the point, because Eliezer never chose her gender. The character was already there, gender included, and everything just falls into place as it is. He would have had to distort the original even further to prevent this; which is not the point of such a derivative work, and also the same people who have complained now would then probably have complained about him putting a smart and important female character from the original into a different, necessarily less central role, or removing her altogether (like Ron, who was unusable).
So what exactly is it that people are complaining about? Isn’t this really a problem with their own pattern-matching, which in this case turns out to be inappropriate? Maybe it’s making them uncomfortable, but that’s their problem; it’s not something on the basis of which to critique the story, because we can objectively argue that the pattern-matching went awry. Issues are not a purely subjective thing.
Note that this takes care only of the alleged fridging issue. It does not address the S.P.H.E.W. arc, which is more suspect of being genuinely problematic. I found it at least weird.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn’t to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one’s past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/
When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.
Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.
Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:
I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
These things seem to me to work like implicatures. “The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn’t, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.”. But if the author couldn’t have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn’t interesting.
You appear to be saying that readers are unfair to authors. Well, yes, they are.
That sounds a lot like Conservation of Expected Evidence to me, by analogy if not quite literally.
The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn’t have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don’t think its bad to go “hey, this doesn’t work for me for x y and z reasons”.
From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying “randomly” unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than letting said character have a heroic moment then dying. I appreciate that this is deeply realistic, but the story lover in me rebels. This is, of course, a different issue from the one I’m approaching, but I wonder if it isn’t adding to some people’s reaction.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who’d do it and why, it’s an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
Whether this is a reasonable request depends very much on whether the readers in question are themselves reasonable in being putt off by the trope.
Well, you can of course argue that Hermione, being the second smartest first year student, is the obvious candidate for te role of the best friend who dies too early, do you think it’d be equally plausible if Eliezer had killed Neville? Neville should be able to stand just as close to Harry as Hermione did (since Harry has not hit puberty yet, and thinks girls are “icky”), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Neville’s death could have brought forth the same emotions both in Harry and in the readers that Hermione’s death did. Eliezer probably also knows this and thus chose Hermione to die.
Yes, exactly. Neville’s death would not have created these emotions, but the reason is not that he is male and Hermione is female. Neville should not be able to stand just as close to Harry. Neville is in no position to be anything as close to a comrade or equal as Hermione was. Neville is just someone who Harry has sympathy for and by whose development Harry was impressed. This is a very different thing from the “the two of us are different from the rest of the world” connection that he quickly developed with Hermione at the beginning (and which then faded off a bit, not least due to the questionable SPHEW arc).
I think this may be taking Harry at his word a bit too much when it comes to his views on Hermione. Just because Harry allways speaks in “rationalist” vocabulary, doesn’t mean he is allways rational or free of bias. He is often unfair to people when he’s emotional. And his blind spot for Quirrel is a mile wide. “It was the defense professor last year, and the year before that, and the year before that...” Someone actualy starting from priors and adjusting finds Quirrel very quickly, particularly when you factor in the sense of doom.
Harry thinks he doesn’t like Hermione that way, Harry’s dad is pretty sure he does. I think regarding Harry’s statements as the more objective one here may be a mistake.
In my experience, relatives are pretty sure the kid likes any friend of the opposite gender that way if they get brought to their attention. At least, in the culture in my general area.
Harry seems to think of puberty as purely binary. It’s not; it’s a gradual process. I don’t know what deficiency in Harry’s education led him to think this way, but it fumbles all of his thoughts about puberty.
Harry almost seems to be reasoning as follows:
I’m not sexually attracted to anybody.
Therefore, I haven’t hit puberty yet.
Therefore, I can’t possibly be romantically attracted to anybody.
Puberty doesn’t work that way.
Or, Harry is summarizing a wide variety of observations on the topic of puberty in a pithy and relatively un-embarrassing fashion. We don’t know Harry’s actual basis for claiming that he hasn’t yet begun puberty, but his comments on the subject are just a little too flippant to be the complete truth.
Real adolescents are often stunningly ignorant of how puberty works, despite all efforts to educate them otherwise...
Quite true. My ideas at Harry’s age were actually very much like Harry’s, and I didn’t recognise my own first puberty-influenced romantic attractions (at, let me see, probably the age of 10, and at least two years before I felt any sexual attraction to anybody). I just expected Harry himself to know better.
Yet it is extremely out of character for Harry to fail to have conducted even minimal research on a phenomenon which will drastically impact his thinking and emotions as soon as it inevitably kicks in within the next couple of years.
He clearly knows about hormones and etc., he just doesn’t know the details of the process.
How much hindsight bias are you operating under? What is “minimal research” on puberty when one is eleven-twelve?
Whatever “minimal research” is, he has vastly surpassed it in most areas where he’s done any research at all, from physics and rationality to transfiguration and potions. It seems nonsensical to expect less of him in one area than all the others without a very good reason.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, keep in mind that tropes are not bad.
Indeed. The point is with fridging is that it is not an inherently bad thing, but by repetition, and by being predominately women being fridged to motivate men, it begins to be unfortunate.
While we’re on the subject of bringing in larger context, I’d like to point out the context of your complaint: The SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) regularly goes off the rails over perceived instances of people not being politically correct enough. One recent incident involved the (female) editor of the SFWA bulletin being forced to resign over the following examples of “sexism”:
1) A column in the bulletin used the word “lady” to refer to women and complemented some of them on their appearance.
2) The same issue had a bikini-clad warrior woman on the cover.
This was enough to cause a huge controversy. However, the authors of said column subsequently published another column defending their previous column and pointing out how absurd the controversy was and in particular that “lady” is not a slur. This was considered completely beyond the pail and resulted in the above mentioned resignation as well as the bulletin being put on a six-month hiatus while the issue was being investigated.
Edit: Here are Andrew Fox’s and Sarah Hoyt’s articles on the subject.
Your description of the incident does not seem to be very complete or accurate.
Fortunately, others have written about it — such as E. Catherine Tobler’s open letter, this io9 article … and, of course, SFWA president John Scalzi’s statement.
I just looked through the articles you linked to and haven’t noticed anything that disagrees with my summary (I have also looked through many others you did not link to before posting my comment). Perhaps you could describe what specific additional information you think my summary is missing.
I’m not interested in having a discussion of the incident; I’m interested in directing readers of your comment to where they can find out more. Any particular sources you suggest?
Well, the sources you side are as decent as any in conveying the facts once one gets past the fact that they’re written as insane troll logic diatribes (or rather two are such diatribes and one was written by someone begging for mercy from said insane trolls). As for sources I’d recommend well Andrew Fox’s and Sarah Hoyt’s accounts are more reasonable, but they may come off as alarmist exaggeration until one realizes how common the insane trolls are.
One of the more obvious details noted in fubarobfusco’s articles is the complaints about how the articles about the female authors had much attention to female authors’ physical appearances. That was a major source of the complaints, especially in the context that one would not see similar such remarks about male authors. This isn’t the only difference, only one of the ones that jumps out.
Um, I noted that in my summary.
There’s a severe scale difference here in description. This wasn’t just complements but more strong language. Frankly, I’m inclined to think the whole thing did get blown out of proportion, although I suspect that the primary reasons for it had as much to do with the never ending internal politics of SFWA which seems to spend more of its time as a drama factory than anything else, as much as it had to do with feminism. But even given that, it still seemed like your summary downplayed the concerns.
Incidentally, I’m slightly curious if you downvoted my comment and fubarobfusco’s comment; both comments were downvoted within a few seconds of your replies. I don’t particular care much about karma one way or another, but it probably isn’t a great idea to downvote people one is having a discussion with if one is going to have any minimal hope of caring out a productive conversation. Among other issues, it can easily increase cognitive dissonance levels and make it substantially harder to accept an argument from the person one is talking to.
I’m not entirely sure what this has got to do with my comments, other than it is an issue related to feminism in science fiction and fantasy writing. I don’t really want to get into this argument, but would suggest simply that it this situation is perhaps more complicated than your post suggests.
Both arguments are based on the position that while something is not inherently bad (e.g., the frigging trope, complaining about aspects of a story that bother you), this instance of it is a problem because of the larger social context in which it is embedded.