gender roles – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Fantasy from A to Z: L is for Love

What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me…)

Seriously, though, what counts as “love” in fantasy these days? The romantasy subgenre is taking the field by storm, but much of it seems to be outright pornography, at least to me. Back when Twilight was all the rage, I at least understood the romantic angle, even if I didn’t particularly care for it. But now, there’s all this stuff about mate-bonding, consent/non-consent, something called “the omega-verse,” and a weird hierarchy of various forms of bestiality that I frankly cannot follow at all.

I should take a few steps back, and perhaps abandon romantasy altogether. I’m sure there are plenty of non-pornographic books in that subgenre—in fact, I’m fairly certain that one of my old college friends, Charlie Holmberg, was a pioneer in it. Everything of hers that I’ve read is pretty good, and also quite understandable, even to a dopey guy like me.

Outside of romantasy (and paranormal romance, which it appears that romantasy has more or less cannibalized), the love stories are pretty straightforward. Epic fantasy in particular tends to have at least a couple of romantic subplots in every book—which makes sense, considering how expansive the subgenre is trying to be. After all, if you’re writing a story where the world itself is a major character, you’ve got to have at least a few good love stories in there too.

But as the internet has continued to spawn narrower and narrower niches and subcultures, all existing in their own little subcultures, things on the extremes have gotten… weird. And as the gender divide appears to be widening with each subsequent generation, especially in areas like politics and culture, it’s beginning to seem like we aren’t even speaking the same language, even when it comes to something as basic and essential as love.

Now, male-coded romances are pretty easy to understand (though I could be biased… I am a man, after all). It starts with a boy who really wants a girl. Like, really, really, really wants a girl. He likes her so much, he spends the whole book trying to get her—and by the end, he either wins her, or he realizes that he doesn’t actually want her, he wants this other girl he met along the way. If things get spicy, it’s all very straightforward and everyone generally has a good time. If there are issues with rape or non-consent, those are generally separate from the romantic subplot

And often, male-coded romances don’t even include much spicy content at all. Even Robert E. Howard’s original Conan the Barbarian stories were pretty mild, in terms of spiciness. Yes, there was usually a scantily-clad female love interest, described in such a way as to increase Howard’s chances of getting his story featured on the magazine cover (and thus earning double the pay). But when it came to the actual, you know, kissing and stuff, Howard never went into graphic detail. The most he would do was hide behind euphemisms like “he crushed her in his arms.” All of the ejaculations in his stories were saidisms—as in, “look out!” he ejaculated, waving his hands wildly (and you would be shocked how often he used “ejaculated” as a saidism—seriously, I think there’s at least one in every classic Conan story).

(Side note: just because Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories were pretty mild on the spiciness scale, that does not mean that subsequent authors kept it mild. Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp tended to keep it more in the vein of the original, but Robert Jordan’s Conan was… let’s just say, it was too much for me.)

And it used to be that female-coded romances were pretty simple, too. An ordinary, boring girl somehow finds herself the object of attraction between two incredibly powerful (and incredibly sexy) men from the other side of fairy, who are positively obsessed with her. However will she choose between them both? Oh, look—now they’re fighting each other to determine which one gets her. Stop fighting, you sexy fairy men! But seriously, however will she choose?

Somewhere along the line, that morphed into a thing called “reverse-harem,” which (as I understand it) is where the girl throws up her hands and decides that she can’t possibly choose between them, so she chooses them all. Which meant, of course, that the love triangles quickly turned into love dodecahedrons—since if you’re going to have a harem, you might as well fill it up with as many sexy fair men as you can.

And then somehow, things got really weird—and also, really toxic. According to Malcolm and Simone Collins (who know more about this subject than I do), some of the more toxic behaviors that romantasy normalizes include:

Fated or “mate-bond” relationships that override consent,
Extreme male possessiveness portrayed as genuine love,
Drugging and public humiliation portrayed as romantic tension,
Huge age and maturity gaps between partners,
Serial betrayal framed as female empowerment and playing hard-to-get,
Intentional miscommunication, with heroines refusing to talk through their problems—again, often framed as female empowerment,
Violence rebranded as safety, since the love interest will never really hurt the heroine,
Wish-fulfilment with serial partners, often framed as a justification for serial betrayal mentioned above, and
Lazy trope stacking (eg “rich-fey-boyfriend,” scent/marking, etc) without confronting the darker implications of coercive and non-consenting relationships.

Sadly, it seems that all of these toxic aspects of romantasy are reflections of the current state of modern dating and relationships. For example, in a world of online dating where ghosting and fading is all-too common, serial betrayal is a bit of a power fantasy, as is wish-fulfillment with serial partners, since if “true love” doesn’t work out, there’s always another one just a swipe away. Similarly, because women who have taken multiple sexual partners find it difficult to pair-bond with any of the later ones, the concept of “mate-bonding” may have arisen as a way to recapture that lost sense of bonding that comes with the “first time.”

Call me old fashioned or out of touch, but I preferred it when things were simpler, and the traditional boundaries around sex and relationships were still very much in force. There’s something charming about the love stories that were written before birth control and the sexual revolution, where men had to woo their women and get them to say “I do” before any of the bedroom gymnastics became a factor. Of course, I’m totally biased, because my wife and I both have a “body count” of exactly one.

I think romantic love is one of the greatest things in the world. I think that sex is also a wonderful and a beautiful thing, especially when it is used to fulfill its primary purpose: to facilitate lifelong pair-bonding between a man and a woman. In my experience, this is an even more important purpose of sex than procreation, though of course that is a very important (and very fulfilling) secondary purpose.

I don’t read or write romantasy, so you won’t find any of those tropes in my books. You will find a lot of romantic love, though, especially in my sea mage cycle books. Rescuer’s Reward is probably the closest thing I’ve written to a straight up romance, at least in the fantasy genre. The Widow’s Child also has a strong romantic subplot, though it goes a little further than fade-to-black. And of course, the Soulbond King books are going to have a lot of romance, since the magic system requires a man and a woman to become bonded in love in order to unlock their unique magical powers. Those books are going to be a lot of fun to write.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Interesting discussion of the ideal roles and partnership of husband and wife

I’ve been watching a lot of Malcolm & Simone Collins’s videos lately. They are a pair of super odd ducks, but they are both super intelligent and have some very unexpected insights into our world. On some issues (particularly the issue of Mormon fertility) I think they are off-track, but on others I think they are spot on, and earlier than most of the rest of the culture. They also love trolling crazy leftists—in fact, it’s how they built up their channel.

This is the best one I’ve listened to so far. You should ignore the clickbaity title, because what it’s really about is the way that men and women complement each other as husbands and wives, especially in our current post-industrial world where the corporate 9-5 job is becoming a thing of the past. I particularly enjoyed how Malcolm compares the role of husband and wife to the characters in the game Shovel Knight. Very geeky, and also very insightful. Worth a listen.

Why my pronouns are His Majesty / His Majesty’s

I am 90% certain that the views I am about to share are the reason that I was disinvited as a panelist from LTUE, Utah Valley’s local science fiction convention/symposium. LTUE used to be a fantastic convention, and I still have a lot of friends who are regulars there. But sadly, the convention has become increasingly woke in the past few years, and now appears to be entering the “go broke” phase of that process. It didn’t help that just a few weeks before the 2022 convention, they decided to require proof of vaccination from all attendees, and refused to offer refunds on memberships that had already been purchased.

I recognize that I probably wouldn’t have been disinvited from the convention if I’d just passively gone along with the preferred pronouns thing, staying in my lane and not making waves. But here’s the thing: because of my personal views on the issue, that would have been moral cowardice. And moral cowardice is, I believe, the root cause of much of the insanity happening in the world today. It’s the reason why those 19 kids in Uvalde, Texas are dead: because of the moral cowardice of the police who refused to do their damned jobs and stop the mass shooter. It’s the same moral cowardice that allows evil people in high places to silence their underlings, for fear of losing their pensions, or positions, or jobs, or whatever. It’s the same moral cowardice that allows groomers and radical ideologues to use social media to dominate the culture war, because good and reasonable people are afraid that if they say what they honestly believe, they will incur the wrath of an online mob and be canceled. I don’t agree 100% with Tim Pool on how to put this principle into practice, but I do agree that arguing “I have kids, I can’t afford to be canceled and lose my job” isn’t enough to absolve you of your moral cowardice. The only way to reverse the madness that our world is currently passing through is for a critical mass of us to stand up, be brave, and reject the moral cowardice that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. After all, it’s not like the nature of evil has changed in the last few years.

So I hope you’ll excuse the rant, but the things I’m about to say are things that would qualify me as a moral coward if I refused to say them. I believe them that firmly. And before anyone accuses me of “violence” (as we see so often from those who wrongly conflate speech for violence and violence for speech), I want you to know that there is no hatred or malice in my heart that is driving me to say these things: only a firm and unyielding conviction of the truth, as I understand it.

In the last few years, it has become fashionable for people to post their “preferred pronouns” on their online profiles, or to give their “preferred pronouns” when introducing themselves. The underlying idea is that it is wrong to assume a person’s gender, and that if someone considers themselves to be queer or transgender, we should all affirm their delusions. Indeed, calling transgenderism a delusion is enough to incur the wrath of the online hate mobs and get you canceled for being a “transphobe.” But here’s the thing:

I will not respect your pronouns.

I will never respect your pronouns.

“Preferred pronouns” are a form of controlled speech, and controlling people’s speech is how you control their minds. But I don’t want my mind to be controlled, especially not by people who I believe to be deluded at best, and malicious at worst. People who would like to see my views silenced and my person canceled.

You see, I reject the idea that gender and biological sex are separable. I believe that gender is innate, immutable, and biologically essential. Yes, I recognize that there are nuances to the biology of sex, like people who are born with XXY chromosomes or other intersex conditions. It doesn’t change my personal view that gender and biological sex are inseparably connected.

My views are rooted in my personal faith. In fact, my church’s teachings are very clear about the role of gender in our lives:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

So for me, the question of gender is not a small issue. It is central to my faith, which makes it a hill that I am absolutely willing to die on.

But here’s the thing: if you don’t share my religious views, I totally understand. I’m not trying to preach to you, or convert you, or force you to accept my views on this issue. We can agree to disagree and still get along just fine with each other, even if you believe in transgenderism and preferred pronouns.

I just want you to return the favor.

When you try to control my speech by insisting that I use your “preferred pronouns”–especially when you get all worked up about it–what I hear is “fuck your religion, fuck your faith, fuck your God, and fuck you. Bend the knee, you transphobic white supremacist, or I will put a target on your back and destroy you.”

No, thank you.

I’m not going to deny a central tenet of my faith. I’m not going to be cowed into affirming something that I believe to be wrong. I hold no malice toward those who disagree with me, but I refuse to live by lies or to bend the knee to the false gods of the woke regime.

And because of how important this issue is to me, I’m not going to be passive about it, either. That is why my “preferred pronouns” are His Majesty / His Majesty’s. I am 100% serious about that. And don’t forget the capitalization, you bigot.

“But Joe! How can you insist that people use your preferred pronouns when you refuse to use theirs? Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”

You need to familiarize yourself with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, my friend. Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Also, rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

When I started doing this, it was just a harmless joke. Intuitively, though, it just didn’t seem right to answer “what are your preferred pronouns?” with the blandly normal (and thus obviously discouraged) “he/him.” I didn’t go out of my way to make that joke, but in instances where I couldn’t avoid it, such as when the submission guidelines (or convention questionaires) required that I give my preferred pronouns, that was the answer I always gave.

And I sincerely believe that it is the right answer. I didn’t choose this ridiculous regime, but if you’re going to force me to live under it, then I’m going to make you live by your own rules, dammit. That’s what you get for trying to control my mind by controlling my speech. And if you’re going to blacklist me, or disinvite me, or call me a “transphobe,” or otherwise excommunicate me from your society, so be it. I will not bend the knee.

A man is an adult male human. Pronouns: he/him.

A woman is an adult female human. Pronouns: she/her.

They/them is typically used to indicate plural, but can be used in some circumstances to refer to an individual when it is not possible to determine their gender. However, no one’s gender is inherently such that “they/them” pronouns are requisite in all cases.

If that offends you, get over yourself. I say that with all of the love in my icy cold heart. Seriously, you will be happier, healthier, and more fulfilled if you change your life to conform to reality, rather than trying to change reality to conform with yourself.

But I’m not going to force your speech. If you want to post your “preferred pronouns” on your profile, or introduce yourself with them, I’m not going to be offended or try to stop you. I just won’t use them.

As for my “preferred pronouns,” how you respond to those tells me everything I need to know about you.

“It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So I DNFed Timescape by Gregory Benford today. I didn’t like any of the characters, and the retro-future view of the 90s as a dystopian post-climate catastrophe wasteland was predictably bad. But this quote from the afterword got me to thinking:

Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth [sic], and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing.

For 70s science fiction, the idea of an imminent, inevitable, and nigh-apocalyptic environmental collapse was thought to be so ingrained in the genre that it was accepted as a foundational trope of the genre. As a consequence, 70s science fiction tends to age very poorly. Almost all of the “important” works of the era, like Timescape, are infused with this Malthusian nonsense, and accept as axiomatic that all of the big crises of the 70s would only get worse and worse.

In contrast, the science fiction of the 40s and 50s was all about how science could help us to overcome the crises of their time, not how those crises were fundamentally insurmountable. Small wonder, then, that authors like Heinlein and Clarke inspired us to put men on the moon and satellites into orbit. And what did the authors of the 70s inspire us to do? Certainly not to tear down the Iron Curtain, pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, or reduce global poverty at the most extraordinary rate in history. And yet, all of those things actually happened.

It makes me think of this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

So what are some of the current assumptions of the science fiction field that will make future generations of readers scratch their heads? What are the things that will make the “important” works of 2020s science fiction age rather poorly?

Racial essentialism is probably a big one. I sense a growing cultural backlash against the racism of the intersectional left, especially in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020. That’s why the term “white supremacy” is in vogue right now, because the word “racist” has lost all of its power through overuse. If Worldcon doesn’t survive the pandemic, then I suspect that at least a few future SF historians will draw a connection between the Hugo’s demise and N.K. Jemisin’s three consecutive Hugo wins in the 2010s.

Transgenderism is probably another. Laying childish things aside, a society that rejects the biological essentialism of gender is not even metastable, as we’re seeing right now with all of the rapes in transgender bathrooms and prison facilities, with the obvious social contagion driving LGBTQ trends in the rising generation, and with all of the ways that political correctness demands that we reject basic science, typified so perfectly by the pregnant man emoji. That doesn’t necessarily mean that gender norms will revert to what they were in the 50s—in fact, I tend to think that the norms of that era were only metastable at best—but I do think that there’s a major cultural backlash on the horizon.

There’s a lot of other low-hanging fruit: the cli-fi of our era will probably age just as poorly as the apocalyptic visions of climate catstrophe written in the 1970s, and books that are based on 20s feminism will probably age just as poorly as 20s feminism itself. But what about some of the more difficult things to predict?

One of the more subtle ways that our current science fiction may age poorly is the complete ignorance of worldviews that clash with the established narrative. I would say that there’s a refusal to engage with contrary narratives, but it actually goes much deeper, as many writers are so deep in their own echo chambers that they don’t even know that contrary viewpoints exist. This has less to do with partisan politics and more to do with all of the ways that social media has re-engineered our society. Future generations will probably see the effects of this re-engineering much more clearly, and will wonder that the science fiction writers of our age were so unaware of how it affected them—both on the political right and on the political left.

Another less obvious thing is our generation’s lackadaisical and often schizophrenic attitudes on the importance of the family. When the chaos of the 20s is finally in the rear-view mirror, I suspect that there’s going to be a major groundswell of public interest in forming, cultivating, and maintaining strong families—largely because I suspect that’s how we’re ultimately going to find our way out of all this chaos. There’s a reason why Augustus Caesar, founder of one of the greatest empires in world history, placed such an emphasis on the importance of the family. Much of today’s science fiction takes it for granted that “love makes a family,” which was never true in any age—not even our own. It also takes for granted that found family is an adequate substitute for the real thing. With mutual commitment and great personal sacrifice, it can be, but that isn’t usually expressed on the page.

Does this feel a bit too much like wishcasting? How am I wrong, or what are some of the other things that I’ve missed? It’s probably just as difficult for us to answer this question as it is for a goldfish to comprehend what water is, but it is an interesting exercise, and hopefully a useful (or at least entertaining) one.

Trope Tuesday: A Man is Not a Virgin

I’m back from vacation, but I’m going to take a break from the Hero’s Journey trope posts to talk about something that I really feel passionate about. I hope you’ll forgive me if this turns into a rant, but I think this is an important issue that has some very dangerous implications that need to be explored.

In modern fiction, there’s a very prominent trope that a man is not a virgin. The basic idea is this: if the protagonist is an adult male and he hasn’t yet had sex with a woman, there’s something fundamentally wrong with him. Of course, because of his adventurous lifestyle, he can’t be tied down in a committed relationship–that would spoil the story. But he can’t be holding himself back, either, lest his manhood come into question. And most of the time, he doesn’t really want to, anyway.

This trope has a whole host of unfortunate implications, though, all of which serve to reinforce constrictive gender roles, disempower both men and women, drive a gulf of misunderstanding between the sexes, and emasculate true manhood and its role in our society.

To demonstrate this, let’s take this trope to the logical conclusions that our society seems to have come to.

If a man is not a virgin, then sex is a rite of passage, and it isn’t rape if it’s female on male.

In fiction, the sex as rite of passage trope is often seen in stories about angsty teenagers trying desperately to get laid. These are not typically stories about love–they are stories about peer pressure, objectification, and power. By equating sex as a rite of passage in this way, it actually divorces sex from any concept of love or commitment, and turns any form of physical intimacy into a caricature of itself.

It doesn’t stop there, though. If sex is a rite of passage, then it’s only reasonable that the young novice should have an older mentor to help him through the initiation process. Thus we get the professional sex-ed trope, where the boy’s mentors or guardians help guide him through his first sexual encounter. The implications for pedophilia and underage sex are more than a little disturbing.

We can see this trope in action in the way we treat female sex offenders. If a 30-something male teacher has sex with one of his female students, he gets a lengthy prison sentence and spends the rest of his life stigmatized as a predator. If a 30-something female teacher has sex with one of her male students, she gets a slap on the wrist and TV spot. She’s not a sexual predator–she’s just having a personal crisis.

Needless to say, this double standard is extremely destructive for the victims of such abuse.

If a man is not a virgin, then men cannot help themselves. Therefore, all men are perverts.

If a true man is not a virgin, then a true man doesn’t say no to sex. Even if he can say no, he won’t because that’s just not what men do. Therefore, being a man is functionally synonymous with being a pervert.

The danger here is that it reduces men to their basic animal urges. If being a man means finding a warm, inviting place for your penis each night, then you might as well go out to the pasture and eat grass. Whatever happened to self control and delayed gratification? Do you think anything meaningful would ever have come out of our civilization if we couldn’t keep our pants on?

And yet, both men and women seem perfectly willing to believe that it’s not only unmanly for a man to control his animal urges, it’s impossible. On the Kindle Boards forum about a month ago, there was a thread on erotica and marriage and one of the members posted this:

I used to work as a forums admin on a large women’s forum (over 100,000 members) and the relationships forum had a lot of heated discussions on this topic. I won’t of course refer to any specific threads, but the discussions went a lot like this:

One woman concerned that her husband was spending too much time watching porn
A massive amount of women telling her that it’s ok, that ‘all men watch porn’
A small amount of women saying either they don’t agree with it or that their men don’t view it
A percentage of women saying their men are addicted to porn and would rather watch it than go to bed with a willing wife
A percentage of women saying it’s not the porn itself that concerns them, but the type of porn their husbands watch
Another group of women saying they either watch it themselves, or watch it with their husbands
Yet another small group of women who either were or are prostitutes/strippers/involved in amateur porn (who are either for or against based on their experiences)
A very vocal percentage of women saying that if your man says he doesn’t watch it, he’s a liar
A heated discussion ensuing….

How does it possibly empower men to tell them that they cannot control their own sexual impulses? It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, which harms not only men but women as well. If all men are perverts, then women can’t afford to wait for a decent man and should settle instead for a deadbeat porn addict.

But that’s not even the worst of it:

…and if all men are perverts and all women are prudes, then men and women are two entirely different species that are completely incapable of understanding one another.

This one really gets to me. I hear it everywhere, even from people who don’t consciously buy into the logic behind it. I used to buy into it myself. It’s the idea that women are so complicated that they are impossible to understand, whereas men are as simple as an on/off switch.

In my experience, men and woman are both human. Both of them are equally complex and equally emotional. Yes, they are different, but in such a way that it’s equally difficult (or equally easy) for the one to understand the other. Generally, women tend to externalize their complexity, whereas men tend to internalize it. At least, that’s what I’ve found.

Our society takes this to the next level, however, and teaches men that they should just swallow their emotions. If they don’t, they risk being seen as weak or effeminate (never mind that equating weakness with femininity is a whole other can of worms in itself). And after a lifetime of living this way, it can be hard not to believe that that’s just the way men are.

But this is perhaps the most insidious danger of all. It’s the falsehood that real men don’t cry, or show emotion, or have any capacity for compassion or tenderness. It’s the fallacy of equating strength with violence. It’s the destructive belief that men will never rise above the lowest common denominator of their hormones, and should never even try. And because men are so obviously different from women in this regard, any attempt to understand them would be futile.

But how can you have a committed relationship with someone you can’t understand? How can you possibly hope to make the necessary sacrifices for each other to make the thing work out? And if you can’t reach the understanding necessary for a committed, loving relationship, how can you ever hope to raise a family together?

So yeah, sorry for the rant, but this trope REALLY gets under my skin. It doesn’t help that one of my favorite authors, David Gemmell, is a big fan of it. I tried to get into his Rigante series, but this trope was so strong that I couldn’t finish the first book.

I should also clarify that the thing that irks me isn’t just the trope, but how much our society has bought into it. By themselves, tropes are neither good nor bad, but when something like this becomes so prevalent that it defines the entire operating system on which our society is based, that’s when someone needs to speak out.

And for the record, I am a 28 year old single male who is not ashamed to say that he is still saving himself for marriage. Am I gay? No. Has it been difficult? Yes. Am I anything less than a man because of it? Hell, no. In fact, I would argue that the wait has made me more of a man than I otherwise would have been, and I’m sure that my future wife will agree.

Real men aren’t defined by their hormones or their sexual history. They’re defined by the way they treat the people around them, especially the ones who are most important in their lives.