Some excellent articles on the recent gender nonsense

I’m working on editing MHN today, and have a Sad Puppies Wrap Up tomorrow for the last day of the month, so I don’t really have time to respond to the hundreds of angry Yorkies yipping at the Saint Bernard, but if you check google you can see I’ve got the SFWA blogosphere all aflame at my hatey-hate. I am tempoarily more despised than Orson Scott Card. Achievement Unlocked! (insert guitar riff here)

The interesting thing is however, that I check the blog stats, and I’ve got a small uptick like I normally do whenever I get political, but from all the places bitching about me the actual number of visitors who bothered to read what I actually wrote is miniscule. So then I check out the libprog literati blogs (and before anybody from the No Labels crowd gets the vapors, what percentage of the people in question do you think voted for Barack Obama? 98%? 99%? I’m sure somebody voted for Nader) it is interesting to discover that the people talking about me either 1. Read what I wrote, kinda agree with the nuts and bolts of what I said, but I was mean about it, and therefore am a horrible person. Or 2. Didn’t read what I wrote at all, made up something suitably sexist or racist to rail against, and then hung my picture on it. Meanwhile, over on my FB feed me and my fans (including a bunch of transsexuals and gay folks) are laughing at the pretentious crusading douchebags.

So rather than waste time again trying to explain my opinion (since they’re just going checklist and Skim Until Offended and then Make Shit Up) here are some other interesting articles on the topic.

This is my favorite. Read it. Seriously. http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/01/restless-heart-of-darkness-part-two/

If I’m a tetsubo, this guy is a rapier. I’ve never read his fiction before, but if it is as good as his opinion piece, it should be impressive. This is one of the better articles on the topic of debating with the left that I’ve ever read.

Here is another science fiction writer who thought the original premise is bunk, only he says so in a far kinder way than I’m capable of: http://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/sci-male-utterings-on-gender-binarism/

And another science fiction writer debunks the silliness: http://madgeniusclub.com/2014/01/30/just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe/

And another successful sci-fi writer chimes in, not about the whole gender thing, but the underlying problems of pushing message fic on our genre’s dwindling audience: http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/blog/item/liberal-literary-sf-and-its-irrelevance  And this is coming from the successful science fiction author who probably has one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse, gender bending group of characters in sci-fi, who Hines also selectively quoted to try and make look like a hate monger.

Note… None of us have called for any of the “racist, transphobic, and cissexist” things we’re being accused of  (and I’m pretty sure they just made that last word up). None of us have warned writers not to write some type of character. We aren’t the ones demanding an end to anybody’s norms. We are the ones telling writers to write what they want. We are the ones who don’t expect our speculative fiction to have to conform to any group’s arbitrary standards. Our stories are diverse, but they’re not diverse for the right reasons, and to the Social Justice Warriors results aren’t nearly as important as feelings.

More Fun With Twitter!
Does my Cismale Hate Mongery Know No Bounds?! Responding to Jim Hines.

84 thoughts on “Some excellent articles on the recent gender nonsense”

    1. And Gandalf? I forgot how she had a great bushy beard. For crying out loud, the appendices already mentioned how it’s hard to tell between the two sexes of dwarves, all she had to do is change a few of the party’s gender and she could have had her tokenism in Tolkien. And doing the same thing to the Chronicles of Narnia just to avoid a made up controversy? I call bullshit

  1. One of Hines’ fans (I am not blaming Jim Hines), referred to me as “ultraconservative” and said I wrote books for “loony gun nuts.” And that Baen should distance themselves from that because it might be bad for sales.

    This is AFTER he read about the diversity in my books. “Ultraconservative.”

    I think that’s librulspeke for “likes guns.”

      1. George Orwell:

        “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”…In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”

        1. Thanks, Kristophr – Orwell’s definiton is far more accurate than mine was.

          The fact that Fascism was praised by the Left before WWII (“Nothing outside the state” sounds like their dream world) is one reason why they redefined it as “anyone we don’t like”.

    1. You are ultraconservative? Whoa… I wonder what that makes me… And I’ve still got serious liberatrian leanings… Holy shit. What does that make Kratman on Hines’ scale. 😀

      That’s okay though, one of his commenters said I should be banned from ever winning a Hugo and be kicked out of SFWA. Hines immediately swooped in and said “why, surely, this is satire! hur hur hur, you’d better shut up before you make us look bad. Larry is perfectly eligable.” Because everybody knows the proper SFWA way to sabotage other writer’s careers is behind closed doors. 🙂

      For the commenter, first off, that’s kind of the point of Sad Puppies. Part of me wants them to hate me so much that they have to committ obvious fraud to keep me out, so let’s show the world what libprogs are really like. Second, why the hell would I belong to SFWA in the first place? Hell, why would anybody want to? Maybe they should all kick in, buy me a symbolic membership, and then kick me out of their insular little club house. That would show me!

      1. I was about to ask, “Why did you even JOIN SFWA in the first place?”

        Glad to see the accountant in you realized that was a bad investment for you 🙂

    2. “Ultraconservative.”

      I think that’s librulspeke for “likes guns.”

      Jebus, what does that make me? Metaconservative?

  2. If anything, Larry, you understated John Wright’s little opinion essay. If you’re a tetsubo, he’s a precision laser scalpel. I really need to check out his works. This guy is excellent!

    1. Having read a few of John’s works (I can link to the reviews I posted on my blog for those curious), I heartily recommend him.

      In fact, I’ll make a small deal with Larry. If he goes and picks up a JCW book, I’ll go pick up and read one of his. (uh… once he recommends where to start)

          1. Oh, and awesome user icon. ;-D

            Thanks:-). You know, you’re the first person to ever notice it! Not a lot of Magic players hereabouts I guess:-P.

      1. Nate, I’ll echo the Grimnoir recommendation. As for link– look on the sidebar of this blog. All, or at least most of, Larry’s books are listed (including Hard Magic) on B&N and Amazon, for your shopping convenience.

      2. This is John Wright speaking. My dearest Mr Correia , I will make the same deal. You buy one of my books, I will buy one of yours. You buy mine in hardback, I will buy yours in hardback. Heck, I will even wait until Book Bomb day if you want my aid to spike your numbers.

        If your heroes kick as much ass-up-thru-skull as you do on Al Gore’s amazing intertube here, you will find me a firmly loyal fan.

        And, yes, I am also a role player from Wa-aa-ay back, you young whippersnappers. I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to roll my saving throw.

        1. Deal. I will hit Amazon. What book to you recommend starting with? For me, my personal favorite would be Hard Magic.

          And by the way, excellent work. Read Part 1 later. That reminded me of C.S.Lewis and that is a sincere compliment.

      3. Deal. I will hit Amazon. What book to you recommend starting with? For me, my personal favorite would be Hard Magic.

        Guess it’s time to put in my order too…

        So anyway, if you want a complete series, I recommend the Children of Chaos trilogy as it’s just plain mind-bending fun. (start with Orphans of Chaos, then Fugitives oC, then Titans oC)

        His current book series starts with “Count to a Trillion” though I warn you, waiting for the next book in that series might be interminable. 😉

      4. “And, yes, I am also a role player from Wa-aa-ay back, you young whippersnappers. I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to roll my saving throw.”

        Marry me.

      5. Mr Correia, I did not realize you have actually accepted my offer, and paid me a high compliment indeed.

        Which book of mine I recommend depends on your mood. If you like fantasy, I suggest ORPHANS OF CHAOS. It is the snarkiest. If you like space opera, I suggest COUNT TO A TRILLION. If you like libertarian utopia mystery fiction of the far, far future, I suggest THE GOLDEN AGE. I you like golden age author A.E. van Vogt, I suggest NULL A CONTINUUM.

        The deal is, I buy HARD MAGIC, and you buy one of the above. A word of warning: like my essay, I am prolix, and write stories by the trilogy and quadrilogy and quintilogy and Oh-No-Please-Make-It-Stop-ilogy. None of the titles above are self contained.

        So, one more question. Are we buying each other’s books in hardback or paperback? I am low on money at the moment, and, come to think of it at all moments.

        1. I’d say whatever format makes you happy.

          I need to do some shopping on Amazon anyway, so I’ll probably get a selection. I’m considered an urban fantasy author, but I almost never read anything considered urban fantasy. I tend read epic or heroic fantasy, and space opera style sci-fi often. I do like van Vogt as well though, so time to shop. 🙂

      6. DONE! I picked up a copy of HARD MAGIC in paperback today. My latest and greatest, JUDGE OF AGES is in the bookstores, but it is like book four in my six-book trilogy (which is entitled Why Wright Can’t Write Short) so I suggest buying PROSPERO LOST by my wife instead. She writes under her maiden name, L Jagi Lamplighter.

        For the glorious cause .. wait. what are we standing up for anyway? Oh, yeah …. the glorious cause of getting the Nags to Shut their Nattering little Face-holes about what we are supposed to like reading!

        1. I hope you like it. My wife is the novel or two a week reader, so she actually just ordered. I think she got a selection. 🙂

        2. I’ve gotten my copy of Hard Magic too. Will start on it as soon as I finish “the Forgotten Man”.

          Oh and John, I’ll be getting Judge when I get paid this weekend.

          (actually… I might read Judge before Hard Magic since I’ve been anxious for awhile to see how the next part of the saga unfolds – I’m sure Larry will understand, right?)

  3. Knee-jerk reactions from the literati-twits- not at ALL surprising. I mean, who cares that you are right and all that. Being correct, that’s bad. They don’t like it.

    What you should have done was agreed with Alex’s incorrect statements because diversity means you never contradict someone who says something stupid.

  4. Found my way here from Vox’s link

    I worked on the publishing side of the genre for 11 years up to the mid-90s and gradually gave up reading SF over the years. I recently tried to delve back in and was appalled at the lack of quality of the stories and the writing as well as the message-story bullshit. Talk about lazy writing.

    I could start to see the writing on the wall even 20 years ago and I probably couldn’t work on the publishing side of SF/F again these days, and I’m politically pretty liberal. But seeing how they drummed Vox out of the SFWA (not that I agree with many or even most of his political and religious opinions, but I do find him an entertaining blogger and a promising novelist) and now this “eliminate binary-gender bias in SF/F” crap, I’m glad I got out when I did.

    I also used to speak somewhat frequently at writers’ conferences around the country (good events to wine-and-dine any of our authors who were invited outside SF/F cons, though I attended a lot of those, too), usually to groups of writers interested in the SF/F/Horror genre. And always stressed that the most important thing for a writer was story, story, story and nearly everything else was secondary. If you have a ripping story, it’s going to inform and improve how you approach characters, action, descriptive narrative, and make them all better. Compelling characters without a good story is an exercise for your writers’ group meeting.

    Instead of bemoaning the lack of “diversity” or whatever the cause of the day is on the internet, I would think that they’re time would be better spend actually writing fiction. But, then, what do I know, I’ve been out of that part of the business for a long time, and now I’m just a reader….

  5. I spend several years reading lots and lots of author blogs and becoming more and more depressed by the endless liberal drivel. Now the only ones I read regularly are this one and John C. Wright’s blog. I guess I just love HATE. 😀

  6. A character that might fit their themes and fit into the MHI universe. A transsexual is bitten by a werewolf and goes through angst, not by becoming a monster, but because the transformation back and forth heals the surgeries and converts the individual back to his original sex. It would have everything they want.

      1. He would go to the government for help, and feel horribly betrayed when Franks comes to kill him. I guess this story would have to wait until there’s a Republican in the White House to keep them happy…

  7. Also- thanks for the linkage. I am now following all of these blogs.

    Well, I was following Kate’s already but now I have more to read.

    Awesome.

    Also, also… was discussing this issue with a friend when I realized something. These people who hate you for things you didn’t say, it’s almost like they’re not happy unless they have something to be offended by. Ever notice that?

    Well, maybe happy isn’t the right word… temper-tantrums are rarely described as “happy” events.

    1. Being offended is a great way to feel morally superior without actually doing the hard work of living up to a moral system.

  8. The most telling comment I saw was someone who explicitly admitted they hadn’t read your post, but got a good enough sense of what you said from Jim Hines’ response to be terribly offended.

    1. That right there is your typical left-wing commenter. “[Insert name of left-wing idol] says this is true, so I don’t need to look any further at the issue.”

  9. Plug him into a gap in your fortificatons and nothing gets through – and that’s before he takes out the hardware and starts shooting.

    That made me laugh!

  10. In 1994, a movie called “The Flintstones” appeared in theaters. It was panned by the critics. My only comment back then was, “It’s a movie based on a cartoon A CARTOON, PEOPLE! WHAT ARE YOU EXPECTING?” Well, somebody besides me must have liked it for what it was, because six years later they made a sequel. My point is very much the same as yours. They are STORIES. If you don’t like what a story is saying, read something else. Don’t try to take something designed for Brain Entertainment and make it into something it isn’t. I am hooked on your stories, and I have turned my son into a Larry Correia addict, as well. We don’t enjoy your books because they make a political statement about guns or gnomes or the differences between men and werewolves. We listen to your books on audio because we enjoy THE STORY. And we plan to keep doing it, as long as you keep delivering. 🙂

  11. You know what Larry, Thanks a hell of a lot! Here I sit working on an engineering degree for a second career and here you come with a grand slam Fisk that sets the interwebz on fire. Now not only do I need to find the time and extra cash to buy and read all the books Mike, John, Tom, Dave and you write, I also have 3 new authors with blogs that need reading (backlogs and all. I Really like The Mad Genius Club) and no doubt a bunch of great Sci-Fi to read as well. I’m finally going to have to buy a Kindle or a Nook! I’m running out of places to put them all.

  12. I am mostly amused at all of this, because although a lot of Tumblr wants me to feel OMG anger and OMG hate at the meaniepants cisgendered evil man, I have instead found a really awesome author with views I agree with, who writes really awesome books (I picked up Hard Magic today, and am loving it!). So…I guess that backfired.

    1. I’ve found that for every person who gets super offended, they probably wouldn’t like my stuff anyway, and then I pick up two others who agree with me.

  13. Huh. I signed up at LonCon, but I haven’t been emailed a PIN and member ID for the Hugo vote. Hopefully I get it before tomorrow!

  14. I will say… I’m not a leftist or a gender studies major by any stretch of the imagination, but I do find the gender studies concept of “Gender”, separate from sex, to be a useful one.

    At least, gender as the self-identity that is formed by the combination of your physical nature and the cultural roles you were raised in. Because in the specifics, those *are* different. What society expected of a man and a woman 100 years ago and what they expect today are very different, and those expectations change who we consider ourselves as people. Two hundred years ago, wigs and high heels were manly… you can’t call that an innate difference.

    Forcing an old dictionary definition of a word when you know darn well what someone means by an alternative definition is just being pedantic.

    That said, I agree 100% with the main thrust of the rest of your article. I just think that particular line of argument isn’t useful.

    1. “Forcing an old dictionary definition of a word when you know darn well what someone means by an alternative definition is just being pedantic.”

      No, it’s not being pedantic. It’s not allowing the other side to steal a base. It’s telling them, and all the bystanders, that they don’t get to win the argument by simply redefining words. Frankly, I wonder how much of this dishonest use of “gender” as a sleight of hand goes on in languages that ARE gendered. Has the near total elimination of gender as a linguistic paradigm from the English language made us more susceptible to this BS?

      No, it’s not being pedantic. It’s not allowing the other side to steal a base. It’s telling them, and all the bystanders, that they don’t get to win the argument by simply redefining words. Frankly, I wonder how much of this dishonest use of “gender” as a sleight of hand goes on in languages that ARE gendered. Has the near total elimination of gender as a linguistic paradigm from the English language made us more susceptible to this BS?

  15. Why is it whenever you write “literati”, I read it as “illiterarti”? It’s weird, I know. It’s weirder that it’s almost appropriate for those commenters that admit to not reading your work, but feel free to dislike it anyway.

    1. Probably because ‘literati’ is a derivative of Illuminati (and literate, although, as you point out, the literateness of some of the literati is debatable). Whereas the Illuminati is supposedly this super-secret world-ruling organization, the epithet ‘literati’ is generally used ironically or sarcastically to imply that the left-wing-literary-fiction-English-degreed types are attempting to rule published fiction by some sort of Illuminati style organization– they just fail at it in a big way. Illiterati is often a more appropriate epithet, but it doesn’t see the same popularity in usage. =)

      1. Tam’s the Queen of Snark. You can almost ALWAYS assume that there’s a sarcasm tag. Sometimes her sarcasm tags have sarcasm tags.

  16. Good afternoon, Mr. Correia. Mr. Wright left this comment on my blog:

    “I did not realize that the fine Mr Correia had actually accepted my offer, and paid me a high compliment indeed. Someone tell him to tell someone else to tell me which book of mine he should read. I suggest ORPHANS OF CHAOS. It is the snarkiest. “

    1. Gee, for a bunch of people who all believe that discriminating based on race is wrongbad, Leftists sure get wound up when someone refuses to discriminate based on race.

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