FA+
Shop
Say You Want a Geek Feminist Revolution
2 years ago
General
I've never really been that interested in the voice of the people -- after all, "the people" rarely know what they're talking about. I'll take expertise, and Kameron Hurley is very experienced at analyzing our gendered pop culture tropes and explaining why we can't take them at face value.
I like reading cultural criticism, despite its origins in the arch-snobbery of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Hurley's essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution (Tor, 2016) holds out the possibility of answering at least one of my questions, "Just what is a feminist, anyway?" (If you think it's someone who's busy "oppressing" self-pitying guys like yourself, you don't have any useful answers.) Perhaps we should start by looking at this book's real subjects: the business of writing, and creative freedom.
Hurley, who writes the kind of violent, postapocalyptic SF I don't read anymore, has a lot to say about writing for a living, and the most surprising thing may be how little talent's got to do with it. Having talent is good, but having perseverance is better. Perseverance isn't the road to success, it's the name of the road you stay on 'til you stop writing. Hurley has so many quotable lines, I'm gonna stop with that one, but perhaps my favorite quote is one she gleaned from a magazine interview with literary fiction author Claire Messud (Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write), who, asked why she doesn't seem concerned that her grim female protagonist "isn't someone the reader wants to be friends with," explodes:
"For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble."
Advertising, at which Hurley once made a pretty good living, is above all the art of manipulating people into buying things they're already convinced they need. We who work in the erotic entertainment business commodify bodies, real or imaginary, as our stock in trade; what we're selling is the illusion of ownership, the fantasy that this sexy character exists just for you, and unlike the actual people in your life, if any, won't let you down or annoy you by insisting on their own autonomy. It's our normative view of life, the default position -- that people are commodities (hey, how much is your data worth?) -- only slightly exaggerated. And feminism seems to be a way of noticing how fucked up this all-pervasive commodity fetishism is, and then saying: We don't have to live this way. Isn't that something?
https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Feminist-Revolution-Kameron-Hurley-ebook/dp/B015MP6VA0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1689571247&sr=1-9
I like reading cultural criticism, despite its origins in the arch-snobbery of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Hurley's essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution (Tor, 2016) holds out the possibility of answering at least one of my questions, "Just what is a feminist, anyway?" (If you think it's someone who's busy "oppressing" self-pitying guys like yourself, you don't have any useful answers.) Perhaps we should start by looking at this book's real subjects: the business of writing, and creative freedom.
Hurley, who writes the kind of violent, postapocalyptic SF I don't read anymore, has a lot to say about writing for a living, and the most surprising thing may be how little talent's got to do with it. Having talent is good, but having perseverance is better. Perseverance isn't the road to success, it's the name of the road you stay on 'til you stop writing. Hurley has so many quotable lines, I'm gonna stop with that one, but perhaps my favorite quote is one she gleaned from a magazine interview with literary fiction author Claire Messud (Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write), who, asked why she doesn't seem concerned that her grim female protagonist "isn't someone the reader wants to be friends with," explodes:
"For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble."
Advertising, at which Hurley once made a pretty good living, is above all the art of manipulating people into buying things they're already convinced they need. We who work in the erotic entertainment business commodify bodies, real or imaginary, as our stock in trade; what we're selling is the illusion of ownership, the fantasy that this sexy character exists just for you, and unlike the actual people in your life, if any, won't let you down or annoy you by insisting on their own autonomy. It's our normative view of life, the default position -- that people are commodities (hey, how much is your data worth?) -- only slightly exaggerated. And feminism seems to be a way of noticing how fucked up this all-pervasive commodity fetishism is, and then saying: We don't have to live this way. Isn't that something?
https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Feminist-Revolution-Kameron-Hurley-ebook/dp/B015MP6VA0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1689571247&sr=1-9
Your conclusion is the best distillation of anything I've ever seen. I also appreciate you have a seething contempt for the Frankfurt school for a reason other than antisemitism. I'm not saying they're not snobs, but they are dry. They have ideas, and not entirely objectionable ones. Just dull.
(My commodity fetish is not to own the OTM Girls, but they do look good being screwed by their fans, ideally when rendered by a sweet, kind Japanese guy with a love for rounded curves and shortstack cute ladies)