Take Five Minutes to Save the Internet

If you know what net neutrality is, then you know what’s at stake with the rule changes being considered at the Federal Communications Commission (which regulates the internet). It’ll create an opportunity for the service providers we all know and loathe to provide a two-tiered broadband service, offering those as can pay for it much faster download speeds. Basically, it takes what’s been a level playing field and tilts it towards the already well-off. I think we all know how well that tends to work out for the rest of us (see also, most of the rest of the economy).

If you are not yet aware of what’s happening, and what the stakes are, former Daily Show correspondent and host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight John Oliver has a helpful (and hilarious) primer here.

For once there is easy, effective action available to be taken. The issue is open for public comment at fcc.gov/comments. Of course your own words are best, but if for whatever reason you’d like to borrow some, here is a brief statement available to cut and paste and send to the FCC. Whether you use them or not, please do go and comment.

I am writing to express my strong endorsement of net neutrality, and my strong opposition to any rule changes which undermine it. Opening the way for a tiered system in broadband access will further undermine America’s already lagging performance in this basic twenty-first century utility. The broadband market is already a negotiated monopoly. Allowing service providers with minimal competition this kind of leeway in pricing and service provision opens up unacceptable opportunities for abuse and goes against not only the public interest but basic American values like fairness and competition.

Keep Net Neutrality.

There’s an opportunity to take meaningful civic action right now on an issue that affects everybody. It only takes five minutes. We all know what’ll happen if this gets turned over to corporations like Comcast.

Act now, before the internet as you know it changes forever, and not in a good way. Go to fcc.gov/comments and make your voice heard.

The Resilience of Tipping

Tipping is “confusing, arbitrary, discriminatory, and basically anti-democratic.” So says Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn, in a post on Esquire’s food blog that’s been popping up in my facebook feed since it went up on Friday. The article is basically a dual interview with Ethan Stowell and Tom Douglas, two prominent opponents of Seattle’s newly-passed minimum wage increase. The gist is they have no choice but to move to a more European service model, where what’s now a voluntary gratuity is added to the bill and then distributed by the house. Their front of house staff, it’s implied, are going to have to take one for the team.

Dunn suggests, perhaps hyperbolically, that such a move might signal (or cause) a sea change in the way restaurants work in the US.

Dunn is against the institution of tipping, and has many good reasons. Having worked for tips most of my adult life, I’m sympathetic with her arguments. Maybe I’m being sentimental, but I am convinced that tipping will survive Seattle’s wage increase just fine. Because for all its downsides, there are good reasons tipping has evolved its niche in the American economic and cultural landscape, and I think they’ll continue to apply as Seattle’s economy evolves in the coming years.

Let’s start with why we tip. Continue reading “The Resilience of Tipping” →

Five Great Speculative Fiction Novels by Women

I’ve been meaning for a good long while to set aside a period to read only women authors. It’s not that they’re unrepresented on my shelves or in my to-read pile. But if I’m honest, I’ve read way more books by men than by women. Having realized the disparity, I felt a certain compulsion to address it. But I put it off for a long time, for whatever reason I could think of when the disparity re-intruded on my consciousness. Again, if I’m honest, my resistance was rooted in discomfort, as much as anything at the realization that my personal pre-sets, left unchecked, had brought about the disparity in the first place. If I did something about it, well, that meant it was a real thing, a disparity between my aspirational and actually-lived selves.

All the more reason to do something about it, and so a few months back, I made a conscious decision to read mostly books by women for a while. And I am surely glad that I did. Not for some consciousness-raising epiphany about men and women and society and literature (though there surely was that), but because I’ve found a rich vein of work that tickles a personal and particular sweet spot that I had been previously unaware existed, and that I had fervently wished was out there. Turns out my pre-sets had just prevented me from seeing it (thanks, patriarchy).

See, I’m a bit of a rare bird in reader culture, or so it seems to me. I love and identify with both speculative fiction in most of its forms and with more highfalutin quote-unquote literary fiction, with all its inquiries into history, psychology, language, and well, you name it. I came up reading both, love both, and wish they got along better in public. As a writer I try and draw from both sources. As a reader I crave works that weave the two together. Despite the continued snootiness of the literary set and the flagellations of spec fic’s misogynist rump, the overlap between the two is growing, and the correlation with the increasing prevalence of women writing speculative fiction leaves little doubt the phenomena are connected.

There’s so much great work being done right now. It’s a really exciting time for a reader like myself.

In celebration of that, and in honor of Lightspeed Magazine’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue, here are five great speculative fiction books by women that I’ve read recently, and why I think they are awesome and you should read them, too, whatever kind of books you like to read. Continue reading “Five Great Speculative Fiction Novels by Women” →

On Being and Doing, and How They Relate to #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen

There are two kinds of people in this world, people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and people who don’t. I’m generally the latter, and generally suspicious of binary frames as anything other than analytical tools to be picked up and put aside as they are useful, because in the world of lived actuality things are always more complicated than that. You have to be careful with them, because like many tools they convert easily to weapons. But when handled properly they can be used to adjust one’s perspective in way not dissimilar to the way a wrench adjusts the torque on a bolt.

One pair in tension that has much occupied me in recent months is that between being and doing. One takes as its basis a sort of existential status, the other actions and their result. Both are widely applicable as conceptual frames, and I think their deployment in the #YesAllWomen conversation speaks very clearly to the underlying problem, the thing so many men just don’t seem to get (John Scalzi did this better than I’m likely to, but bear with me).

One needn’t look hard to find the protestations of men aggrieved to be lumped in with the Eliot Rodgers, the Pick Up Artists and their seamy underbelly, or the endless ticker of women in America assaulted, raped, and killed by men over their sexual availability and, more importantly, their exercise of agency over it. Not all men are like that, they say. I am not like that, they say, sometimes explicitly. Indeed, the very existence of the above is the proof of their virtue, because they are not like the bad ones, the ones who hate women and speak and act on that hatred in obvious ways. They are not misogynists. Because they are not misogynists, their actions cannot be misogynistic. So stop judging them. Some of these men even have the gumption to claim some victimhood for themselves.

Either way, by this point we’ve been completely diverted from the discussion of misogyny, rape culture, and the culture of masculine entitlement that makes life for women everywhere so much more difficult and dangerous than it is for men. One suspects this was the unconscious intent of the speaker in the first place. Continue reading “On Being and Doing, and How They Relate to #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen” →

A Suggestion for Heterosexual Men

It was in the boys’ locker room of my high school that I learned the true meaning of homophobia. I took a weightlifting class my senior year, and one day after I was standing around talking with a couple of guys I ran cross country with. The subject of homosexuals came up, and one of them said something that’s stuck with me ever since.

“I don’t want some guy looking at me the way that I look at girls.”

Even at the time, I thought that very telling, and have told the story many times in the decades since. A few years ago, reading something online (I wish I remembered well enough to find the link) written by a teacher, a similar story came up. A boy in class declared his homophobia, with the excuse that he didn’t like being looked at that way. The teacher asked the boy if his discomfort arose from being the object of unwanted sexual attention from someone who might physically overpower him and he agreed that yes, that was it precisely. The teacher then asked the class if anyone else had had a similar experience. Every girl’s hand went up.

It’s a tribute to the depth to which masculine privilege is embedded in our society that I missed that part of the lesson for so many years. I’m often a pretty bright fellow, though I felt pretty dim in that moment.

It’s said that though not all men harass women, all women are harassed by men. It can be difficult to grant that validity, or even conceive what it’s like if you haven’t experienced it yourself, which most men frankly haven’t.

There is, however, a corrective available, and I urge all straight men to avail themselves of it. Go spend some time in a gay bar. Have a couple drinks (they’ll be strong), make some new friends, be the object of unwelcome advances. Chances are it’ll make you uncomfortable if not outright ick you out. Stick around, see how long you can stand it. See if you can successfully shut down someone who won’t take no for an answer without resorting to violence or harming his ego so he does. Continue reading “A Suggestion for Heterosexual Men” →