Peeking into the rock

(I've been back almost a week, I have internet, but I am also jetlagged so I will only be gradually be catching up with reading everything you all wrote while I was having offline adventures, and also only gradually catching up on telling you about those adventures. Also, I have book news, but I will save that for later today).

I want to take note of, and respond to, a couple of trends I have noticed online the last week or so. Of course both of them have been around longer than that by a long shot, but now is when I want to talk about them.

The first one is this. A fellow, usually someone who makes their living from something publically geeky, will write about how he was doing something with his daughter and had a feminist insight. There will be some memorializing about how the activity in question resonates with his earliest and truest experiences as a boy and young man, how he dearly wishes to share this experience with his child, the degree to which he does, his deep love and admiration for his smart, strong, interesting daughter. There will be a crushing experience--no girl characters, someone saying something terrible to his daughter: the kinds of things girls experience in a gendered way (of course, I say pre-emptively, boys have crushing experiences, and even gendered crushing experiences, but it's not symmetrical, and that's the point). The father is appalled and furious that his daughter experienced this, and wants to let you know about this. Partly he wants to make a statement that he Gets It, partly he wants to speak to other men who might not get it and say "This is why I get it, and why you should to," and sometimes there's even a bit of "what is to be done," that is, a call for specific action or discussion.

The second one is a response. There are lots of different responses out there, many of which amount to "You lovely man! I am so glad you Get It now." But there's this other one that is "I am so tired of you men who only Get It when you have a personal stake in it. Where were you ten years ago before your daughter was born? All you're doing is posing to get praise. I don't buy it. You're self-absorbed, not feminist. I excoriate you."

Of course he's self-absorbed. He is a person who is writing about intimate personal and family experiences on the internet, frequently with adorable pictures of the daughter in question and/or his own smiling self. Seriously, that's not much of an accusation. And yes, of course he wants his readers to think he's brilliant and caring and forward-thinking. Again, not much of an accusation. But to say that his insight is worthless because it came on the heels of a personal experience is odd. Is it that his referencing his own family is to ignore the rest of the world of women and girls who suffer all these and more every day? Is it that some of us don't want fellows like him to stand over here with us?

I'm going to stop here for a second and wander down a side road in my mind. The very first man I heard day that any man with a daughter has to be a feminist was the fellow I married. He told people about looking at the world from this perspective, how he couldn't stand that people would limit his daughter's passage through the world. He was an imperfect feminist, too. He said things at times that he only later realized were awful. But I wouldn't say he suddenly became a feminist because of one of those experiences he talked about. He was developing into a feminist before I met him, and unlike many women I've known, wasn't reluctant to call himself one even around his most misogynist associates. I suspect that at least a large number of these men writing about their feminist insights with their daughters were like him, and the insight did not pop out of nowhere.

But that's a side trip. It's not the important thing. We're better off if the internet is chock full of conversion moments where men who Don't Get It become men who Get It and write impassioned personal pieces about it replete with cute photos and references to beloved cultural icons. We're better off if every self-absorbed man on the internet decides he's a feminist now because he has some shocking personal experience. These men vote: they spend money: they talk to other men: they even talk to men I can't stand to be in the same room with. No, you don't need to respect them more than the woman who has spent her life fighting the good fight at every turn and getting beat for it. But why spend your bile on them? We have actual enemies in this world, and they are better organized than to attack the person who wishes to give them support.

In the last few dayus ther have been a number of really quite wonderful posts all around the web about the representation of women (and people of color, and etc) in fantasy and historical fiction. I know sometimes writiers feel oppressed by this kind of discussion, because it makes them feel like they have a to-do list on top of their plots and their lists of characters and their lsits of elements to keep track of and and and . . .

Well. All of my friends, online and off, have heard me whining for months about the difficulties of writing about war and wartime, the constant anxiety about getting things right, the frequent discovery of things I have gotten wrong that mean rewriting scenes and restructuring chapters and oh my dog do I have to do this over again now?

But. Reading a few offhand sentences about questioning the role of women in wartime has had the opposite effect from discovering that I had gotten shrapnel all wrong.  Well, not really. It had a similar but more exciting effect.  When I discovered I had shrapnel all wrong I had to read more about shrapnel and whine a lot and then go back to the very beginning of the war part and check over and over for mentions of shrapnel and also for times when I ought to have mentioned shrapnel or its effects and hadn't, and correct or add or subtract or whatever many tiny little things you might not even notice as a casual reader (but somebody who knows something about it would throw the book across the room, I am sure, if I had not changed it and I am sure I still have things like that so I am going to have to make some people who know things read this book).

But when I stopped to think about how women had comopletely dropped from the narrative four chapters earlier and how weird that was, it sent me back through these chapters in a different way. Because it made me realise that I had also missed a whole big chunk of the landscape. I knew already that they hadn't been solely fighting across ruined, bomb-scarred meadow and wilderness, but seizing and defending villages and towns (and cities, but not Yanek), but the scenes I had written were all in trenches and countryside (which is okay, however . .  .) and I realized that addressing these things actually solved some of the problems I was having in visualizing the war.

No, I didn't go back and write all the times they were in villages. I didn't introduce a new set of characters. But I just wrote bits of scenes, windows into the life of the countryside during war, women doing their regular jobs and their war jobs, soldiers relating to women who were doing war jobs.  There's so many little issues that are actually solved by including this aspect of  -- what? realism? (is it ridiculous to speak of realism at all in a story one of whose pivotal characters is a talking sow? and whose main character has green pictures growing on his skin?)  It's a matter of paragraphs here, sentences there, and the whole thing is much more grounded in its world.  And much easier to write from here on out.  I'm going to get into the post-war world! I can see it coming!

So, like many other times in my life, I have cause to be grateful for feminists.  This time it's feminist spec fic critics (and writers).

Oh, a couple of links if you happen to have missed this rolling discussion:
Women in History (Tansy Rauner Roberts at Tor.com)
PSA:Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical (Foiz Meadows at Shattersnipe)

be sure to follow the links in each article, and spare yourself some time for it.