There may be many reactions when confronted with a lump of industrial-strength stupid early on a Tuesday morning, but mine was weariness. Biologists probably feel this way, when creationists engage them in what the creationist probably thinks is the first challenge to the biologist's worldview but which is more like the 85 millionth. But biologists find a way to go on, and keep on patiently explaining grade-school level science to smug people whose Fact Deflection Shields are fully engaged, and they keep doing this well after I'd have beat the cretins to death with a rolled-up printout of the talk.origins FAQ. And so shall I soldier on, for all the good it's likely to do.
Today's steaming pile comes to us from one of those sites devoted to the plight of the poor beleaguered middle-class white man, and is about how women have ruined science fiction.[1] It is a work of consummate asshattery, yes, but it has a sort of density or maybe a purity of awfulness to it: it's hard to know where to even begin. It's like trying to rebut an argument that we could solve world hunger by mining the moon for its cheese.
So I'll start with the first sentence:
Science fiction is a very male form of fiction.
Yes, it sure is. In fact, the very first science fiction novel was written by a man... wait, no. I mean a woman: Mary Shelley.
I encounter this sort of thing when I look at the history of my own academic field, computer science: everyone knows that computer science was 100% men until very very recently, when in fact the field was co-founded by a woman[2] and has had hugely important women all throughout its approximately 150 years of experience, and I'd go on in much more detail except that I'm getting a little off topic.
Back to the Invisible Woman problem--which, as it turns out, is a handy way into examining the unconscious sexism that lies at the heart of this argument and others like it.
Some folk have noticed that among the Issues guaranteed to drive me bananas is the widespread notion that women have just recently discovered science fiction fandom. (I posted last month that this meme may finally be dying out, but essays like this one make me lose hope.) As with the history of computer science, it's demonstrably false. Women have been active in fandom since its inception--there are female fans in this 1951 article on the nascent fandom subculture, and note the acknowledgement of female fans in this 1955 fanspeak dictionary, and here's a Wikipedia article on Bjo Trimble, the fan who organized the letter drive to save Star Trek TOS. But, as with the history of computer science, the factual wrongness points to something deeper and uglier: a systematic minimization and discrediting of women's contributions and women's achievements.
In a word, sexism.
This is the point where people usually go, "Uh, Nightsky... don't you think you might be going a little overboard here? Seeing sexism everywhere? In 2009, among fans--generally bright and educated and raised to see women as equals?"
Well, yes. There's sexism and there's sexism. Thank Ghod we do not have to tolerate--as my very own mother did--bosses who copped feels, or human resource people who won't hire a young woman because why bother, she'll have to quit work when she gets married. For this I am constantly grateful to the feminists of yesterday. But if we've won one set of battles, we haven't yet won them all, and sexism may be subtler but by ghod it's still there. I had college study buddies tell me, not a little resentfully, that I wouldn't have to worry about finding a job, because any engineering shop would JUMP at the chance to hire a woman.[3] They weren't woman-haters, they weren't bad people, and they weren't troglodytes; they were acting on a set of (sexist) assumptions they didn't even know they held and that I was too cowardly/lazy to challenge[4].
And so, just as I expect that the gigabytes of fanfic out there will be an unimaginable treasure trove for future linguists and anthropologists, we can glean much more about this author than he suspects--not because of what he says, but because of what he assumes. Because the same raft of sexist assumptions he has are alive and well and underpinning other essays out there, and other less-articulated grumblings, all across fandom, and it's time to stand up and call them what they are.
- Women are defective men. (This one underpins the rest, really. Man good, woman bad.)
- Science fiction is by and for men and boys. Women are guests in fandom.
- Only men are qualified to judge whether something is or is not science fiction.
- Old BSG is superior to New BSG. (This assumption... might be limited to him. To put it charitably.)
- Men do and create. Women don't.
- Men don't have any emotional attachments to other people. Only women have relationships.
- Works appeal to either men or women, not both.
- Media that appeals to women has less merit, intrinsically, than media that appeals to men.
- An increase in female viewership necessarily means a decrease in male viewership.
- An increase in female viewership means that the show must have been changed in order to appeal to women. (As opposed to, say, more women discovering it.)
- An increase in female viewership means a corresponding decrease in the quality of the show.
- It is more important that science fiction inspire boys than that it inspire girls.
- Women aren't suited for science.
- Men who disagree with the above are as bad as women. (Note the use of the term "mangina" applied to Joss Whedon.)
Lunch is ending, so I'll turn it over to you all to enumerate some of your own. Share and enjoy!
And finally, I'd just like to add that if the author thinks that Russell T. Davies was the first gay showrunner on Doctor Who, then he really doesn't know his Who. We'll leave aside the part about RTD inventing Captain Jack (he didn't; that was Steven Moffat, who is straight), because that's kind of obscure, but come on! Doctor Who hasn't had a straight producer since 1979.
[1] I know! I was surprised to hear about that, too, given that--as everyone knows--women only discovered science fiction about six months ago.
[2] Ada Lovelace. It's difficult to overstate her contribution to the field. Charles Babbage may have made the first calculating machine, but it only did one task. The idea of a reprogrammable computer, one that would execute any task, was Ada's.
[3] I didn't have the heart to tell them that actual employment statistics suggest otherwise.
[4] Which is another reason for the exhaustion noted above. Being a symbol means that you have to call the others on their shit, because no one else is going to, and silence implies consent. It gets old fast.
ames can be used interchangeably. Probably because they're so busy trying to keep their kids from watching the Lion King that they can't be bothered to open a book or perform a Google search.
world where humans are apparently non-existent, at first, the setting of 9 appears to have been spawned by Terminator: Salvation. After a bit of convenient exposition, however, the viewer is told that the "Brain" machine that started the mess was originally intended to be intelligent and to build new versions of itself for "peace." Unfortunately for humanity, what can only be described as a poorly-veiled version of Hitler decided to use the Brain for world domination. Politics and science of course equaled disaster, and presumably not-Hitler and his ilk were wiped out after placing all the blame on Misguided Scientist. 
Those of you who havebeen around here for a bit maybe acquainted with our resident purveyor of snarky movie recaps, Fluffy Bunny. You may not know that Fluffy (otherwise known as Lisa), besides having a great wit and writing for us here, makes her living as a self-employed artist. She is based in Orlando, and also has an internet shop, 
self-employed for years, and now pay more per month to ensure our family of four than we do for housing, and we've reduced our coverage every year. It's only by the grace of God (and the fear of losing our children's future to catastrophic illness and financial ruin) that we remain among the lucky insured.) 
that original ideas are hard to come by and all that, but nothing irritates me more when a better-quality original is overlooked because the "new" product is more well-known. Even worse, there are plenty of instances in which the original is later seen as the rip-off. For a good example from the music industry, see also: Mushroomhead vs. Slipknot, which is quite the beehive to poke with a stick and an extremely polarizing subject among fans. 
