yo yall wanna see the CREEPIEST SHIT look at this poem written by the author of Ready Player 1 LMAOOOO

i just diarrhead

i had to google what he looks like and

Ernest Cline is a gross idiot

“Hi I’m Ernest Cline, I think the women in all the porno I watch are ugly and bad and not people, because they’re also stupid. That’s how you know I’m a sophisticated genius and a true progressive feminist. Don’t worry ladies, I’m VERY single, but I don’t know why”

Disclaimer (since they’re so fucking important): I speak here as an individual, not a representative of any company, industry, species, or whatever. Also, Chuck Wendig’s got a great piece on this. You should read it. Don’t, on the other hand, read the comments on the Tor piece, unless you have a strong stomach. 

Coming from the video game industry, with its overt, reactionary, enthusiastic, and proudly violent misogyny, I tend to think of the publishing industry as more genteel. I tend to think its intentions are better, and that the endemic sexism in SFF is a relic of earlier times, spurred by remembered love for pulp novels with sexy ladies on their covers. A soft sexism, if you will, in which women are prizes to be won and damsels to be rescued, and are thereafter expected to reciprocate with nights of grateful passion, but not the enemy. Not things to be ground under boots, punished for existing, battered into silence.  

Of course, that’s not true. SFF has its own slate of ardent misogynists and enthusiastic racists, and fairly recently, they decided that including women and people of color with, like, agency and main character roles and everything was just a bridge too far. So two groups of them, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, came up with their own slate of Hugo Award nominees, and mobilized social media to vote for those nominees, hoping to shut out anyone who wrote books with any sort of dreaded progressive agenda. 

Here’s what you need to know. The Rabid Puppies were started by Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day. 

Here’s a glimpse into how Vox Day feels about women: 

According to him, “female equalitarianism” is a greater threat to science than religion.^[15][16] In response to a blog posting by PZ Myers questioning how, exactly, many of the unsavoury aspects of religion benefited women, Beale suggested that honor killings, throwing acid in women’s faces and even genital mutilation benefited women because they prevent female independence and promiscuity, which he repeatedly referred to as social ills.

That’s right. This is a guy who advocates for honor killings and acid attacks to keep uppity women in their places. 

He’s also an open white supremacist:

He calls for the formation of a independence party to slow the “infestation” by non-whites, because there is no geographic escape from them anymore. 

This is the guy who called author N.K. Jemisin, who is black, an “ignorant half-savage.”

The Sad Puppies are a slightly less overtly bigoted counterpart. 

So, Irene Gallo, the creative director at Tor, posted the following on her Facebook page:

There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.

And Tom Doherty, founder of Tor, felt the need to post a piece on Tor’s site. In it, he talks about how the Puppies aren’t really that bad, and how Irene Gallo’s views don’t represent Tor’s, and how she’s been reprimanded for her post. 

Just to be clear:

1. A woman speaks up against a racist and misogynist hate movement.
   
2. Her male boss shuts her up.
3. Her male boss then goes public, reassuring everyone he’s shut her up and that he has no issues with the hate movement.
4. He also makes sure to call her out by name.

I don’t know if you’ve been on the internet lately, but in the current Gamergate climate, a man calling out a woman for talking about misogyny is a fucking bat signal to the worst elements of the internet. It’s basically painting a giant target on her back for harassment, threats, doxxing, and all the other methods misogynist mobs use to attempt to shut up women they don’t like. 

I didn’t expect that the publishing industry would have any more spine than the videogame industry did in standing up to this crap, but I didn’t expect to see them cheerfully throw a female employee to the wolves. (The ass-covering could have been done without naming her.)

HERE SHE IS, BOYS! THIS WOMAN, RIGHT HERE! GO GET HER!

You don’t get to pretend, Tom Doherty, that you don’t know what the potential consequences are for her. None of you men in games, tech, SFF do. 

You don’t get to pretend after like the 900th news piece about women getting harassed for being Industry Women Who Talk that you don’t know. 

I’m done with guys being all, oh, women in geekdom get harassed and doxxed and threatened when they speak up about sexism? I HAD NO IDEA. 

I don’t believe your ignorance any more. You are lying. You are lying because you don’t want to be bothered. Because the serial harasser you employed was a guy you kinda liked. Because, well, bitches be crazy, amirite? 

You don’t get to pretend you don’t know what will happen when, as a man, you call a woman out for speaking up about sexism. 

You are lying because part of you kinda thinks she deserves it. 

I mean, it’s great that you feel the need to reassure your readers who kinda agree with Vox Day that you have taken care of the woman who said critical things about them. 

I note you didn’t feel the need to reassure any of the people who were harassed by your editor, James Frenkel, or to anyone who felt uncomfortable or unwelcome because of how long the SFF publishing community protected him.

You’ll publicly reprimand Irene Gallo for calling a hate group what it is, but a serial harasser?

James Frenkel is no longer associated with Tor Books. We wish him the best. (1/5)

— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh)

July 11, 2013

He gets a polite and discreet send-off. 

Your message is clear:

Women and people of color aren’t really part of the SFF community. Women can hang around the edges as long as we’re demurely quiet, as long as we prop up the men or hang admiringly on their arms like all those ladies on the pulp covers do. People of color can come through the door as long as they don’t make any trouble. But when it comes down to it, the guys who are really part of the community will always choose their own. 

There’s a saying in Spanish: dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres. Tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are. If you want to stand with Vox Day, so be it. 

I’ll be standing with Irene Gallo. 

Patel was accused of having a abortion by her doctor and he called the police on her. Patel is the first woman in America to be convicted of feticide. Miscarriages are natural, NO POWER on Earth can prevent them. Even if she did get an abortion, why should she be sentenced to 20 years in prison???!!! How does that affect society??? Jail rapists, not women who had miscarriages.

We need 88,830 more signatures by May 1st. Regardless of what your beliefs are, this is wrong. I have almost 120,000 followers, can you all please take 3 minutes to sign this petition and spread the message?

Click here to sign the petition to overturn Patel’s sentence and condemn Indiana’s feticide law.

All those lovely Disney mixes? Upular? Alice? Yeah. You know the guy. He’s a slimy fucking trashlord and I want everyone to know it. Nick Bertke hates women and thinks they should be treated like children (because they’re stupid, right?)

Here’s just some choice words from his blog:

"A lot of women you meet, feminists in particular, will preach that you are the source of their failures and womanly strife. This won’t stop them from playing powerless, and they’ll insist that you roll up your sleeves and rescue them from their mysterious bonds."

Here’s some more!

"I’ve always found that the more I treat a woman like a child, the stronger the relationship, the better the sex and the more often it happens. Discipline, reprimand and complete indifference. I think the feminine woman craves the attributes of a firm father in the man she enters a relationship with."

Yeah, so unsubscribe, delete his music from your iPod, whatever you need to do to make your point. Unacceptable filth. I am really disappointed.

I’m gonna depress the hell out of all of you. ready? ok go

so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”

nice idea and all

but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized,” and it becomes devalued.

as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.

observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind

so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable

but there’s a doozy and who the fuck knows if it’s ever happening in my life time

"observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field."

Personal anecdote time!  I’m in a biology graduate program.  An acquaintance wanted to introduce some guy to me because his son was thinking about becoming an undergrad science major.  When he found out I was in the biology department, he grinned and said, “Well, I guess that’s kind of related to science.”

I gave him what I hope was an icy look and said, “Isn’t it strange how men outside the field started saying that right around the time biology majors shifted from mostly male to mostly female?”

The guy got this look on his face like he was about to play the “just a joke” card, and then an older woman who had been standing nearby, talking to someone else, turned to me and said, “The same thing happened with real estate.”  She went on to explain that, over the course of the career, the male-to-female ratio among real estate agents had dropped, and the pay and “prestige factor” of that job dropped along with it.

It’s also interesting to look at fields where the reverse pattern happens, such as computer programming. Computer programming used to be a female-dominated field, but, in order to raise the prestige of the field, new entry tests and hiring practices were instituted to discourage the hiring of women. Because, naturally, there’s no way a field can be dominated by women and prestigious at the same time (reference: Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”).

I’ve argued this exact thing before! Biology was NEVER considered a soft science before women entered. And medicine is now losing prestige too because women are becoming doctors instead of staying in lower positions. Suddenly these mentally rigorous fields based on insight and analysis are “just memorization” or some other bullshit about how they’re not REALLY using “intelligence.”