The Inclusiveness of the SF/F Community
I had a “Duh” moment at ICON last weekend. We were talking about conventions and fandom and such during a panel – maybe the gaming panel? – and someone in the audience commented that overall, fandom tended to be pretty accepting and inclusive.
It’s a claim I’ve heard a lot, and I think we as a community tend to pride ourselves on our inclusiveness. Heck, I mentioned in my speech at Worldcon how finding fandom felt like coming home, how I felt accepted and valued here in a way I never did back in high school.
And therein lies the logical flaw, which hadn’t quite crystallized in my mind until that conversation at ICON. Because fandom is not a utopia of acceptance and tolerance. True, it’s a place where I found acceptance. But the fact that I as a straight white male geek feel accepted and relatively safe here does not therefore prove that this is a safe or accepting community.
After all, the other place I felt accepted growing up was in the Boy Scouts…
I love this community, and I think we’ve made progress, but we have a long way to go. Most conventions I attend are still at least 95% white. Women continue to get harassed while men stand around asking why people have to make such a big deal about sexual harassment policies. Awards and “Best of” anthologies continue to be dominated by western (particularly U.S.) names. Our book covers fetishize women and whitewash or erase characters of color. And people who speak up about feeling excluded are accused of being oversensitive, searching for reasons to be offended, and being part of the PC police.
Fandom is accepting of a different subset of people than most other parts of my life, and as a member of that subset, I’m grateful. But I also think we have a lot more work to do to broaden that acceptance.
Gray Rinehart
November 9, 2012 @ 9:59 pm
Jim, I appreciate your passion for the subject, and maybe I’m missing your point, but the contrarian in me wonders if the tree you’re barking up is empty.
You say the community has “a lot more work to do to broaden [its] acceptance,” which may be true, but you haven’t cited any cases of people being forced out of the community by non-acceptance. Nor would that be necessary or sufficient to support what I perceive to be your main point. I submit that a logical flaw in your post is its apparent conclusion that the SF&F community should not be considered safe or accepting because it’s not perfectly so. That seems as much of a logical flaw as arguing that it is safe because a solitary individual feels it is so.
Even in cases where people have been made to feel unwelcome by some segments of the community, they have surely found acceptance and soemtimes even champions such as yourself in other segments of the community. That’s the nature of communities, the nature of groups made up of people of different backgrounds: we will not all feel the same level of acceptance, and I think it’s overly idealistic to expect that we ever will.
Call me a pessimist (I prefer pragmatist, if not realist), but inclusiveness and acceptance will never be 100%. We can expect — and sometimes even demand — civility and common courtesy; in the same vein, we can refuse to accept rude or criminal behavior; we can extend invitations to those we think might enjoy the camaraderie; and we can hope for general acceptance of anyone with a desire to participate; but I submit that so long as we remain in our baser natures pack animals (or, if you will, tribal peoples), we will not achieve the ideal you seem to expect.
Of course, you and your other readers may feel free to dismiss my views, and even dismiss me as one of the unenlightened. It seems to me that doing so would, in the end, prove my point.
Best,
G
Jim C. Hines
November 9, 2012 @ 10:11 pm
We can hope for general acceptance of anyone with a desire to participate … or we could do something about it.
You seem to be simplifying my argument down to a desire for 100% acceptance of absolutely everyone, and condemnation when it doesn’t happen. What actually I wrote about was the myth of the SF/F community as a more inclusive and accepting place than it truly is.
I never said the SF&F community should not be considered safe or accepting because it’s not perfectly so. I do believe it should be considered what it is: generally safe and accepting of straight white male geeks, and relatively less so the further you stray from that category.
As for the examples you feel I need to list to prove my point … if you’ve been following my blog at all, you should have read about countless instances of racism and sexism and so on.
jennygadget
November 9, 2012 @ 10:26 pm
“You say the community has “a lot more work to do to broaden [its] acceptance,” which may be true, but you haven’t cited any cases of people being forced out of the community by non-acceptance.”
Are you under the impression that 95% of SFF readers are white? Or does “forced out of the community by non-acceptance” have to equal conscious, deliberate, and sustained shunning directed at specific individuals?
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little
November 9, 2012 @ 10:29 pm
My takeaway from this was not “100% acceptance utopia or BAD!” but rather, “Good job so far, but we shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back just yet. We’ve still got work to do.”
Put another way: “Well, of course *I* feel included – as a straight white cis-gendered man! Maybe, rather than congratulate ourselves, people like me should check our privilege and investigate how inclusive our community is to women, POC, LGBT — y’know, people in demographics who traditionally suffer exclusion.”
The internet conversations taking place around the predatory behavior of Rene Walling at Readercon made it clear to me that A) we *have* made a lot of progress, and B) we *still* have a long way to go. Everything you said about getting called “oversensitive” and “looking for reasons to be offended” rings depressingly true, Jim. Thanks for your constant awareness and clear speaking on these issues.
(Your panel on cover art at World Con was hella fun, too, btw!)
Chelsea Beningo
November 9, 2012 @ 11:24 pm
Gray, I really think you did miss the point. The problem isn’t that the group lacks, as you say, 100% acceptance. The problem is the systematic ways in which the group may tend to single out specific types of people. I’m not dismissing your views or even calling you unenlightened, but not being able to think of any examples off the top of your head where this type of exclusion is occurring will seem to put you into the category of the accepted groups, where you may be too close to see the whole picture.
As a woman, I definitely experience some kinds of exclusion from the SF/F community. I don’t mean total exclusion, because I’m still here, but I’m treated differently. There are stereotypes that go along with being a “geeky” female, just as there are those about male “geeks.” Maybe the real problem at the heart of this discussion is not conscious exclusion, but the preservation of stereotypes that alter the way one group of people thinks about another.
Anya @ On Starships and Dragonwings
November 10, 2012 @ 8:02 am
If it makes you feel better, the sci-fi/fantasy club at my college was probably the most accepting group on campus. As a bisexual white female, I felt very comfortable, and we had many openly gay, lesbian and everywhere in between people (some even met their significant others in the club :D). The other minority that I was always really proud of us for being very accepting towards were disabled people. We always worked very hard to make sure that people with panic disorders, social disorders, and speech impediments, as well as the more “typical” physical disabilities, felt welcome and comfortable coming to hang out at our gatherings. A lot of the people that joined our SFF house said it was the first time they had had close friends in their entire lives. That being said, our entire campus was very white, so our club was still a victim of that, but at least in some small pockets, I’d like to think the community is making progress.
This is of course no reason to rest on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back, since when I dress up to go to a convention, I’ll still get stared at. But progress has to start somewhere right?
Sylvia Sybil
November 10, 2012 @ 3:17 pm
I attended a con panel on sexism recently where one of the panelists said this particular con was great because it accepted everybody and everyone felt welcome there. …This remark came after I said I’d had a guy ask me if I knew anything about sci-fi (at a sci-fi con), another guy tell my sister that “Settlers of Catan is so easy even girls can play it”, and multiple guys making rude, sexual comments on my friend’s cosplay. The panelist’s words bothered me more than any of the other unwelcoming comments, because the panelist’s statement implied that the other comments didn’t count. To say that this con welcomes everybody, when at least part of it clearly doesn’t welcome women, says that women aren’t part of everybody. It says that this con isn’t interesting in working to be more welcoming, because they have already achieved “welcome” for everyone who matters. Not me. Not my sister. Not my female friends. We don’t count. We aren’t part of “everybody”.
This is the attitude I see in a large part of the SFF community. “The status quo is great. Don’t rock the boat. I got mine.” Not all of it, I’m happy to say. There are parts that actively working to make geekdom a better place (my hope is to attend WisCon someday). But a large part of the community seems to think that “accepts me” is the same as “accepts everyone”.
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2012 @ 7:24 pm
I agree with both of your points about the Readercon discussion – both that it’s a sign of progress that the conversation happened at all, and that parts of that conversation make it very clear that we’re not done yet.
And thanks! Glad you enjoyed it! 🙂
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2012 @ 7:26 pm
If you don’t mind me asking, was the panelist who made this rather ignorant comment a white male, by chance?
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2012 @ 7:27 pm
I do agree with you that we’re making progress, and some groups do better than others. Over on LJ in particular, someone pointed out that cons continue to do a questionable job with accessibility and accommodations for those with disabilities. I wonder if your SFF group would offer consulting services to some of these cons…
Joseph Baum
November 10, 2012 @ 7:31 pm
Yeah, I’ve noticed similar problems in my neck of the SF/F and gaming woods. So many people are completely willing to spout their universal acceptance of everybody — so long as they don’t have to act on their words.
However, I will say that there is some hope. I’m Jewish, although not really practicing (more on that in a moment) and I’ve honestly felt more acceptance in my local gaming and SF/F circles than I ever did back in the community that I grew up in. That being said, I grew up with a scientifically inquisitive mind in a fundamentalist religious community. This state of affairs ended up with me being called a heretic to my face by a couple of rabbis, ostracized by my peers, and me pretty much giving up on my ancestral religion as being populated by hypocrites and bullies. However, regardless of that, my Jewish heritage is still important to me, I make no apologies for being a Jew, and the one time I met a raving anti-semetic gamer, the other gamers around me took him to task for his views, and made it abundantly clear that they weren’t going to stand back and accept by silence, much less ignore, the pure hatred and racism he was spouting.
But, as Jim pointed out, acceptance won’t just happen; as in my own case with the anti-Semite, it requires us to be proactive and to speak up when we see these situations, to actually have the gumption and the intellectual integrity to stand up for what we say we believe in — and that, I think, is what is lacking primarily. Most people lack the courage to speak up and actually follow through on these things when it comes right down to it, I’ve found.
To illustrate that last point, I was once at a con where this creeper was hitting on a female attendee and people were just ignoring his behavior, and kept doing so until I told him to back off and leave her alone–and from the way that some of the other guys in the area reacted, you would have thought that I was the one in the wrong! But by standing up for her, I apparently gave her the courage to get a little more aggressive in telling the creeper to back off, and a couple of other people joined in in telling him to back off. We ended up reporting him to security when he kept persisting and he was thrown out.
So, yeah, to finish this ramble (and get back to my NaNoWriMo story; 28k words and counting!), there is still an implicit double standard in gaming — several of them, really, including gender, race and religion — but things are getting better. But they won’t get better on their own; we need to proactively participate in making them better.
In related news, I saved an article on exactly this topic, “Women In Gaming: Saving Throws For Half-Cooties” that I found a few years back. I rescued it from being lost to the death of Geocities. If anyone’s interested in reading it, the link to the article (in my Google Drive) is my website link for this post. (I didn’t write it, but I didn’t want it consigned to the dustbins of the Internet either)
Ms. Elise
November 10, 2012 @ 7:57 pm
I’ve gotta say, for me personally, lack of acceptance isn’t what has kept me out of SF/F and other nerd circles. I can deal with misogyny and racism as long as my critiques are heard. But having every critique I made treated like a burden, unwanted and completely unnecessary? That’s what really drove me away. Even one of my good friends, the friend that’s the most involved in nerdy circles, regularly dismisses any critique I offer, such as my tentative, “I wish there were more than one woman and zero people of color on that panel, because it was so awesome otherwise.”
When people have the courage to offer ways to improve an experience at a con, or at your gaming group, or whatever, it’s worth listening to. Especially if you happen to not experience the oppression that’s been identified. And if you’re in a privileged group, please, speak up when you see sexist, racist, ablist, homophobic, transphobic, or other bigoted stuff going down.
Sylvia Sybil
November 11, 2012 @ 12:10 am
Close – a White woman. This panel on sexism didn’t actually have any men on it.
Saruby
November 11, 2012 @ 2:23 am
It’s a process. One positive thing that I believe helps is the number of LGBT and female protagonists in recently published SFF. That helps set a tone for acceptance. But it is just the first step. We must all work to be aware and to speak up. In terms of cover art, in the 1970s a woman might carry a sword, but she would be all but naked. I see a lot less of that. But I don’t see a lot of cover art with people of color. I would also like to point out that non-acceptance is in the eye of unaccepted. By which I mean that straight people may not see themselves as unaccepting, but that doesn’t mean that the gay person who walks into the room feels safe. This is equally true for any traditionally excluded group. So, outreach is important, too.
Athena Foster
November 12, 2012 @ 5:44 pm
I was on the ICON panel with Jim on “Why Do We Game?” and may have kicked off the conversation, because *I* have always had positive experiences in fandom. Gaming and sf/f cons have been where I’ve met some of my very best friends ever, and I never felt like I was being judged for being smart or into games.
But at the same time I recognize that most of that success comes from acting as if I was to be treated equal and not ignoring anything I viewed as slighting. Being a white female, I also know that I don’t know much about the receiving end of racial discrimination.
As far as it pertains to the organized gaming community (RPGA, OWBN, TGN), what I suspect (without any evidence but my own experience) is that the place where we are failing is in inclusion as opposed to acceptance. I have never seen anyone turned away or treated horribly due to race, gender or sexual orientation (not to say it hasn’t happened, just that I haven’t seen it). What I think we’ve failed to do is reach out to people that are really different from ourselves. I know it’s my biggest failing; I tend to identify with people who are middle class, well educated, exceptionally literate and lean to the left. So those are most of my friends and who I hang out with.
Having just done programming for ICON, I can say that who gets to be on programming is frequently a matter of who we can convince to do programming or who volunteers. I put out panels and asked for volunteers from our guests and other professional attendees, and people who had done programming for us before. When I had more programming than volunteers I conned people I knew into doing it or “volunteering” people they knew. The biggest thing to remember is if you know people that can bring something to a discussion, let the person doing programming know. I was always happy to add more people to the panel (within the limits of the seating), and I would have been ecstatic to have more people that wanted to do programming. I don’t think it’s a matter of exclusion/inclusion but of communication and availability. Again, we go with what (or who) we know.
Just some thoughts to add to the discussion…
D. Moonfire
November 13, 2012 @ 11:18 am
The science and programming fields have the same problems, I think, in that aspect. It is dominated by mostly white and mostly male, but there is a pretty big push to get more women and non-whites into those fields. And it is working, but it takes time. A lot of time because as the community gets larger, inertia makes it just that much harder to move so many opinions.
I think it is also generations. As the older generations roll off, the new ones bring their own tolerances. In that aspect, I think it mirrors our culture in the US. Acceptance of GLBT is much higher for those under twenty than those over forty. Same with non-white males in power.
I think to encourage it, we have to make the community (sci fi, gaming) inviting. Not just non-exclusionary, but encourage others to get into it. Ursula Le Guin created Ged as non-white (though she was subtle about it) and she had a post about how disappointed when the movie creators whitewashed her characters. But, I think it is a good idea. I think writers should write in non-monochromatic worlds, but not have the entire story about “hate the whites!”. Ditto with gender splits. Having stories were females are equals also puts a little bit of pressure to change the culture.
Covers are a harder things. Part of it is that writers don’t really control their covers. I think self-publishing will do wonders for that; I have no doubt Le Guin would have put a reddish-colored Ged on her cover if she had a choice. And looking at some of the books on Kindle, I noticed it happening there too. People are putting covers that they envision on the front of their books and I’m seeing more non-white and non-sexual covers.
It just takes little steps. Ideally, conscious and subtle steps without being overbearing. But, when you look at the covers from the books from the 70s compared today, you can see it already happening.
Oh, Fandom and Your “Inclusiveness”
November 14, 2012 @ 4:41 am
[…] after Jim Hines posted about the false inclusiveness of SFF fandom, this happened.
Gray Rinehart
November 15, 2012 @ 12:31 pm
I didn’t feel you needed to list examples, Jim; I actually said they were unnecessary.
I wonder if we have different operational definitions of “general acceptance,” but I have to believe that we are not so far apart on its importance as it might seem.
Best,
G
Gray Rinehart
November 15, 2012 @ 12:42 pm
Poor choice of words on my part. I meant removing from a difficult situation, not undergoing “conscious, deliberate, and sustained shunning” or anything of the like. My apologies.
I would imagine that the demographics of SF&F readership mirror the general demographics, so no, I don’t think I’m under the impression you present.
Thanks,
G
Gray Rinehart
November 15, 2012 @ 12:49 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I have no illusions about and freely admit that I am in one of the “accepted” groups, _most_ of the time — but each of us moves from acceptance to non-acceptance as situations change. I think you alluded to such in your second paragraph, in referring to “some kinds of exclusion.” I am not enough of an idealist to think we will ever reduce instances of exclusion to zero, but I maintain a charitable view of the SF&F community that it has done (and is doing) well — not perfectly, but well — at being generally accepting.
Best,
G