In Which My Neuroses, Bred By Meta-Commentary And Cultural Relativism, Become Evident

[lowkey]

So first off, when it comes to Artistic & Fannish Thoughts On The Internet, I really do try to ascribe to Moff's Law. I've internalized said internet law as "I should aim for meaningful and good-spirited engagement with artistic stuff", and even if I don't always live up to that ideal (because, man, sometimes someone is WRONG on the internet), I generally try really hard to be nice. Unsurprisingly, the men* that best adhere to Moff's Law -- the sterling posters over at Threat Quality, which includes the eponymous Moff -- are basically the internet posters I want to be.

Anyways, I was just saying that as a sort of disclaimer. Not that I'm immediately going to abandon it and say "check out these here intarnet opinionzzz." It's just that I really wanted to post about this whole Sady Doyle thing, but I also wanted to make it clear that I really don't have a horse in this race.**

You might ask, what is this whole "Sady Doyle thing"? Well, apparently, Sady Doyle is a journalist/outspoken internet personality, who writes for The Atlantic, on top of running a blog, Tiger Beatdown.

She wrote a piece calling George R.R. Martin out for, among other things, being a sexist prick.

George R. R. Martin is creepy. He is creepy because he writes racist shit. He is creepy because he writes sexist shit. He is creepy, primarily, because of his TWENTY THOUSAND MILLION GRATUITOUS RAPE AND/OR MOLESTATION AND/OR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SCENES.

I didn't read the whole thing -- which automatically disqualifies me from commenting, really -- because I've not read the series; I really can't add anything meaningful.

But she, uh, also had some bitting comments for internet fandoms in general:

Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you!

So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.

ANYWAYS, I didn't know anything about this internet debate until owlmoose's post on the matter alerted me to it, and also to what is apparently the internet retort par excellence, a post by Alyssa Rosenberg over at ThinkProgress.

This thread of the debate is easier for me to follow, because it doesn't rely on intimate knowledge of or strong opinions about A Song of Ice and Fire. Because Rosenberg's main contentions are with how Doyle structured her argument.

BUT THEN ALSO Chris Braak at Threat Quality posted an ambivalent defense of A Song of Ice and Fire, which amounted to "Sady, I think we should be on the same side, but you've sorta definitionally excluded me from being your ally." AND THEN you should check out the comments, because Doyle posted a comment, and Braak responded.

And one more thing to take away from this: when Doyle criticizes internet fandoms, she knows what she's talking about. Take, for instance, her recent piece criticizing gender and race in Moffat's season and a half of Doctor Who***, and the comments it received. I think (?) many of the worst comments have been deleted, but the point stands: internet people suck, and in her piece on ASoIaF, Doyle preemptively called the Internet and Internet fandoms out. But where does that leave people like Rosenberg and Braak, or hell, me -- people who are fans but want to, you know, follow Moff's Law?

Anyways: the long and short of it is -- thanks to this, I learned what MANSPLAINING is.


* I said men because, to the best of my knowledge, the contributors at Threat Quality really are all men.
** Even though a claim to neutrality is still a choice. And also, a slightly ungenerous reader might note that, as a white male, my "neutrality" is a vote for the status quo. But it isn't as if Sady Doyle needs Internet Male #63587 (i.e. me) to come to her rescue; that's completely antithetical to the kind of position she wants to argue. So... I just don't know? I think most everyone involved in this has really valid opinions?
*** For the sake of full disclosure: I'm a white male, and I really like Rory Williams. It's unfortunate that Amy's character development has suffered so that he could become awesome (in my opinion), but also: the season isn't over yet. Case-in-point, there was a good half season of Castle where I felt Rick was basically completely useless, but the show's come a long way since then. Anyways, this is a post for another time.

Comments

[owlmoose]

Thanks for the Chris Braak link; what an excellent critique of both the content and tone of Doyle's post. He really hits it, with his comments about how GRRM is, in fact, attempting to write a realistic medieval fantasy setting rather than the standard airbrushed one, even though he doesn't always succeed.

The thing is, for all I've criticized her piece and her responses, I do feel Sady Doyle here. Speaking very, very, generally: Nerds -- particularly the stereotypical middle-class white male nerd we tend to think of as the classic sci-fi/fantasy fan -- do tend to feel oppressed for their nerdom, and they do tend to be very bad at acknowledging and examining their own privilege. Which can be an explosive combination when they try to engage with criticism. Fans can get ugly, and they've gotten ugly at her more than once lately. I don't blame her for lashing back.

But that doesn't change the fact that, in many times and places, nerd culture really *is* marginalized. No, nerds aren't going to be winning the Oppression Olympics; they probably shouldn't even enter the race. But that doesn't make their marginalization less real. It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge that. And lately, I've been getting the feeling that Doyle is poking at the nerdrage hornets' nest on purpose, starting at least with the Harry Potter piece (another one that I found somehow reductionist and unsatisfying, even as I was hard-pressed to argue with many of the details). That's been bothering me, too.

[lowkey]

I'm in this ambivalent spot, where I am -- by virtue of my birth and upbringing -- a stereotypical middle-class white male nerd. In no way am I saying this to "turn the tables" on you and be all like "owlmoose, I am totally an oppressed minority, how dare you." I bring up this point only to point out: my "class" has a lot of really icky cultural baggage, and that class more often-than-not employs said cultural baggage in very specific, offensive ways (and I use offensive in both meanings of the term).

This applies to both fandom, but also -- and please believe, the following aside really does have a point -- academia, where I happen to work. Academia -- and let's take history here, because that's the field I'm intimately familiar with -- has really been a white, middle- to upper-class ball game for a long, long time. And that it's evolved into something more than that is because minorities -- non-whites, women, the poor (and the last isn't really a minority, but you get the point) -- have stood up and spoke Truth to Power.

But to "speak", to effect real change, you really need to have two things going for you, at least in the field of history: evidence, and a voice, i.e. the ability to project your message. If you can increase both, you increase the weight, or the gravity of your message. But let's face it, historians often have just one or the other: we have a really well-researched but boring argument, or we're totally iconoclastic, often at the expense of hard-and-fast evidence. (And that isn't saying that controversial arguments, by default, have no evidence. But it is a tacit admittance that the "archive" we historians draw on is a socially- and historically-constructed conceit that reflects the power dynamics operating in the real world. Boiled down: we don't preserve evidence that tells a story contrary to the Story.)

So what ends up happening is the most influential works are often not that well researched, because they are actually calls for more research. Take Orientalism, for instance. Hella important, with hella alot of problems.

Anyways, what does this have to do with Doyle? I really respect that she, in essence, said "Internet, and ASoIaF fans, there are some serious problems with how these books deal with the issues of gender, and rape, and women. And we need to talk about these this, because I believe that not facing these problems makes all of us a little less human."

Okay, the last part was my own, but you get the point. There's something heroic about the lone gunslinger who walks into town and says "I'm calling you out!"

But the problem with all of this is: this is the Internet, where anyone can tune in and anyone can tune out. And when you construct an argument with vitriolic and found it on the premise that the people you're talking down to are incapable of self-critique, it's like blood in the water, and Really Terrible People come out of the woodwork to "engage" with it. And the more intellectual types -- well, at least me -- get turned off by such theatrics.

Aaaaaannnnndddd yet... if Sady Doyle had worded her argument nicely, and had been forceful but understanding and thoughtful and empathetic, would be talking about her now? Probably not.