Late last month Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon wrote
G.D. wrote a post about how “Mad Men” deals with overt misogyny and not racism because the writers realize that you can sell a likeable misogynist more easily than you can sell a likeable racist.
Just the other day Yonmi of Feminist SF unearths another instance version of the general effect, this time for homophobia.
I have never been sure how Orson Scott Card justifies his homophobia to himself: I know he loathes being identified as a homophobe, because he would rather think of himself as a normal person with a normal distaste for and hatred of gay men who normally wants gay men to be kept in the closet, and chemically castrated or otherwise punished if they fail to keep themselves out of sight.
I’ve read very little of Card’s work. I put down “Ender’s Game” when I realized the situation (approvingly!) involved authorities having a very small child conduct a planet-slaughtering war by telling him he was just playing a video game. Whether the author suffered from cynicism, callousness, or naivete that kind of moral, ethical, and religious/spiritual lapse was a enough for me to turn my attention elsewhere. But if I’d read more of his work, Yonmi says, I’d have run into more of his homophobia including the proper degradation and death of otherwise patriotic, heroic, and war-effort-contributing characters who turn out to be gay.
Yonmi’s post includes a long pean to real-life British World War II cryptography hero, and computer-theory godfather, and mathematician Alan Turing who was outed for homosexuality, persecuted out of his job, and finally driven to suicide. Based on his body of fiction and non-fiction work, Card, nominally a science advocate and certainly a beneficiary of contemporary computer technology, believes the world would have been better a better place without Turing. (I’m sure a few surviving unreconstructed members of the Luftwaffe would agree.)
Anyway, yeah, racist is an awful word to use against affable people who just blanket hate people of other races. And misogynist is just such an awful label for likable guys who think the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to say “she’s going to make a wonderful mother for someone’s children someday.” And homophobe is an awful word to use against a guy who thinks it ought to be normal rather than disgraceful to hate gay people.
And I can see their point. Calling someone a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, or other kind of bigot just makes it harder to see they’re affable, likable, NiceGuys™ who just think they should be given jobs they’d deny to others, who should enjoy rights they’d deprive others of, who should benefit from the misery they’d rain down on others. Oh, and who, like Card, think they should get paid to pen scenarios where adults imperil small children’s immortal souls to advance their strategic interests.
Update: And from the Couldn’t Make This Up department of irony, according to the Wikipedia entry for Ender’s Game, the implacable alien foes children are recruited to fight are called “buggers.” What. Ever.
Update #2: From reader comments it sounds like if I’d continued reading I’d have discovered that Ender regrets his participation in planetary genocide and that Card spends multiple award-winning volumes dwelling on Ender’s redemption. They evidently don’t redeem Card’s homophobia though.
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-09-07 15:34.
Oh, and who, like Card, think they should get paid to pen scenarios where adults imperil small children's immortal souls to advance their strategic interests.
Is Card just the reporter or does he have a moral point of view of child soldiers. In any case shouldn't a writer be able to use this scenario as a plot, since child soldiers have been used in war for the past twenty years.
I have only read his series Homecoming and Lost Boys, both of which I liked. I did not get any incite into Card's personal character, so I am not commenting on his attitudes.
[Hi Five. I'm aware that child soldiers have been used since time immemorial. What bugged me about the premise is that real child generals are usually aware that they're killing enemies and ordering their own troops into harm's way. In the book this information is withheld from the child who's instead told he's just playing on-screen training games. The people putting him at the terminal might have had qualms about issuing such orders knowing the consequences. By putting the decisions in the hands of a child they absolved themselves. And imagined themselves all grave and stoic but heroic for it. I don't have much patience for it. Finally, the guy's writing fiction about an imaginary 23rd Century so he can't hide behind an "I'm just a reporter" excuse. *He* thought of it. He wrote it down. Which in my book anyway deprives his evident self-forgiveness for homophobia of all traces of moral foundation. --fl]
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-09-07 20:02.
Look I don't want to defend Card too much since he certainly has enough crazy homophobia over all but specifically regarding your comments on the Ender's series
1. If you read the whole series (Speaker for the Dead etc) the "approving" nature of the situation is made much more complicated if not completely removed. Ender's Game alone would possibly be more problematic (though even then not sure I think its clear one is supposed to agree that the adults are right - after all in children/young adult literature adults are often not right)
2. while they do get called the "buggers" they are insectiod - and so while its possible he meant some sort of crazy double meaning I generally assumed it had more to do with "bugs" i.e. insects than anti-gay slang.
[I get that you're playing devil's advocate here so please don't think I'm jumping on you, Rebecca. I'm sure the decision to make the enemy insects was based on prior "battle tech" science fiction like Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." With my lousy grammar skills I'd be the last to accuse anyone else of fractured syntax but as Americans didn't refer to enemies as "Germaners" during WWII nor do we call household cockroaches "roachers" I'm not sure how Card imagined the derivation of "buggers" for bugs would have evolved in standard English. But it could just be a random coincidence. As for the rest of the series, as I say I stopped reading when I became disgusted with the author's premise. I've never heard anything about the rest of the series that would revise my opinion. But I'm a curmudgeon about that kind of "inhumanity of war" porn anyway. Thanks. --fl]
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-09-08 01:04.
I'll second Rebecca's comment that calling Card's depiction of the child-soldiers approving doesn't match my memory of the series at all - finding out that the war was real was Ender's climactic and terrible realiziation of his deep betrayal by the adults around him, which I still remember from my first reading as a kid. And then he spends much of the rest of the series trying to atone for his part in the war/genocide. There are many things to criticise about Card's worldview and subsequent further-into-crazy political rants, but I really consider Ender's Game to be rather anti-war at it's core.
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-09-08 13:15.
The trouble is that you read Ender's Game at the wrong age. It's ideal wish fulfillment for gifted twelve-year-olds. "I'm really smart but I have no friends. Wouldn't it be awesome if I saved all their asses with my brains and then those girls that keep making fun of me would realize I'm cool and the hot guys would want to date me?"
Much like Ayn Rand. Less harmful, really, since it doesn't include a regressive social policy along with the wish-fulfillment.
The homophobia is troubling, though, and comes a lot in wish-fulfillment novels for that age group. Anne McCaffrey is apparently under the impression that getting raped with a tent peg would turn a man gay...
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-09-09 02:23.
On "Ender's Game", here's the lyrics to a great song that was inspired by the story:
Boy In a Room
While I can't comment on the story itself, I know that the song makes it clear that it is not approving - but it also makes it about the falseness of "hero" status ("To the people all around you you're a hero in their eyes / But the history books will paint you as a demon in disguise")
Another interesting take on the same kind of concept (but without the dodgy recruiting of child soldiers/generals, and arguably the exact inverse of the Ender's Game formulation) is in Terry Pratchett's "Only You Can Save Mankind".
Back to the what I understood as the main thrust of the post: n my view, people who hold hateful views (even if they consider that hate to be "normal") get to be called names that describe them as haters!
[Yup. If you're a homophobe then you're a fucking asshole if it hurts your feelings to be called one. Also, from the Wikipedia synopsis I'd probably be fine with the Pratchett book -- it's about a game that lets children practice moral decision-making in an artificial world rather than bypassing real-world morality by telling them its only a game. Thanks, SE. --fl]
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-09-09 02:26.
Anne McCaffrey is apparently under the impression that getting raped with a tent peg would turn a man gay...
What source is this from? I don't recall anything in the Anne McCaffery fiction I've read to suggets it (indeed, homosexuality is seen as quite normal among her Dragonriders, partly because lesser female castes of dragons would be "Impressed" by male riders, meaning when those female dragons mated with male dragons, the male riders would "mate" with one another).
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-09-09 10:59.
Spoiler alert (though probably a mute point at this point) I think for the discussion its also important to not that part of the big reveal at the end (in the part of the books you didn't read) it is made clear not just that the adults were wrong for what they did to the children but that the whole premise of the war and the hatred of the aliens was wrong. The aliens were peaceful and never a threat to humanity. The humans were the xenophobic aggressors.
Which means even if you are correct and "buggers" is a homophobic insult its one used by people who Card portrays as at best horribly misguided (the children like Ender) and more frequently power hungry, warmongering, stupid and most importantly prejudiced in their interaction with the insect aliens. Given this its a pretty big stretch to equate the beliefs of those characters to the those of the author.
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Thu, 2009-09-10 21:42.
The use of the "buggers" is varied. I never knew the term had anything to do with homosexuality until I was in my forties. Even though I had heard the word. Yesterday I heard it used by a coworker to mean "knuckle head."
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-09-11 21:29.
"What source is this from? I don't recall anything in the Anne McCaffery fiction I've read to suggets it (indeed, homosexuality is seen as quite normal among her Dragonriders, partly because lesser female castes of dragons would be "Impressed" by male riders, meaning when those female dragons mated with male dragons, the male riders would "mate" with one another)."
I never was certain if green dragons just preferentially sought out gay guys or if being Impressed by one was supposed to make you gay...
McCaffrey had plenty of other issues too, like the way she has men and women interact (some of the male characters got downright abusive at times, iirc, especially in the earlier books).
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-09-12 06:50.
I love the title of this post; I'm assuming it's tongue in cheek but I'm encountering this attitude for real. I'm getting smacked down and called 'confrontational' for naming people's behaviours as sexist, racist, homophobic, bigoted or abusive when that is, in fact, what they are.
I still haven't worked out if it's because they don't believe they are, or if it's because they know that admitting they are means they would be expected to change.
[Hi CG. I'd sort of thought through your first two reasons, and for the second it reminded me of that old joke about the difference between drunks and alcoholics is drunks don't have to "go to them damn meetings." What really struck me about what Yonmi said is that Card prefers a third possibility: that he's hateful but believes there shouldn't be a special word for it because he thinks it ought to be *normal* to be a homophobic asshole. Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 3189 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-09-12 19:42.
I can't find the interview I read-- must have gotten taken down or something. But here's a link to the quote.
http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=Anne_McCaffrey#McCaffrey_tent...