I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened

I read a lot of great books, is the short answer.

So, a few days ago writer K Tempest Bradford published this article, in which she challenged readers to stop reading white, straight, cisgendered male authors for one year. Sadly (and predictably), certain corners of the internet exploded in rage at the notion (she has assembled a lovely collection of rage-tweets here, if you enjoy that sort of thing). I won’t reprise their objections, which savvy interneteers will likely be able to intuit themselves, nor pass judgement on any validity those objections may or may not have. But it so happens that I recently spent the better part of a year doing something very similar to Ms Bradford’s challenge. From roughly November 2013 until late last year, I read only books by women(*), many of them women of color, others not cisgendered (two of the new favorite writers whose work I discovered are married).

I did so for my own reasons, both personal and (for lack of a better term) professional. On a personal level it was simply the realization that the vast majority of the books on my overstuffed shelves were by men. I fought it for a long time, that realization. I mean, these were great books, each easily defensible on the merits. I have, if I may say, damned fine taste in literature, and reading material in general. Ask any of my friends. I’ve been an obsessive reader since kindergarten, the kind of person who never goes anywhere without a book and hasn’t since he could carry one. But looked at en masse, the unconscious bias in my collection was (and is) painfully clear (in my defense, I actually am a cisgendered white male).

When I was younger, the notion of placing any kind of limitation on my reading material for a whole year would have seemed preposterous. Now comfortably ensconced in middle age, it didn’t seem like that big a deal. It wasn’t like I was going to run out of good books to read, and while it might mean holding off on some things in my to-be-read stack, it’s hardly without precedent for a book to be in that stack for years before I get around to reading it. Really all I had to do was rearrange the order, though of course I used it as an excuse to go book-shopping, which is one of my favorite things to do.

The timing that November seemed propitious. I’d started writing Continue reading “I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened” →

Things I Learned on the Internet This Week 8/8/14

Another week gone, and the internet (and the world it reflects, or possibly refracts) continues to fascinate. So, in my continuing efforts to excuse to myself the embarrassing amount of time I spend surfing the internet, here is a selection of highlights from my procrastinations this week:

Warren Layre, 61, told The Inquirer in an interview last year that the officers beat him with a steel bar and kicked in his teeth during a warrantless raid on his machine shop on West Sedgwick Street in June 2011. Speaking to a reporter two years later, he pulled back his lip to show the gaps in his teeth that remained.

According to Wednesday’s indictment, Liciardello reported less than $7,000 of the $41,158 they seized from Layre’s shop.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, as this story of six corrupt cops up on racketeering charges in Philadelphia attests. For ten years, these guys ran rampant through the city, shaking people down and sending people to jail on trumped-up charges and basically running a standover operation, and the only thing that stopped them was that one of them finally got caught and turned stool pigeon. If this was on TV, it’d be a huge hit, and I expect some day it will be. In fact, I think these guys are a natural extension of the portrayal of law enforcement in our entertainment culture, which I think has a lot of similarities to what happened (and continues to happen) between Hollywood and the Mafia.

Moving on to American law enforcement at the institutional level, we learn from the Washington Post that

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said.

For years, even decades, a team in the FBI crime lab misrepresented its results in order to secure convictions. Not unlike the situation in Philadelphia, the problem was known but institutional inertia prevented it from being attended to until outed by investigative reporter Spencer Hsu.

The review comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Worst of all, innocent people may have been executed. The first article in the series sums it all up pretty well, I think.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

And, just in case you weren’t yet fully convinced of the dysfunction in US law enforcement culture, here’s one more slug to the guts.

“I felt so vulnerable being laid out on a table, with all my clothes off and in a bag and all the swabs and brushes and combs,” she recalled. But at least, she figured, the police would use the swabs and hair samples to help catch the rapist.

They did not. Like hundreds of thousands of other rape kits across the country containing evidence gathered from victims, that of Ms. Ybos lay untested for years on a storeroom shelf.

(hat tip to Charles P. Pierce, one of my favorite writers, period, for this post, where I found most of the above)

Having gotten through all that, I think we could all use a break. Here’s a picture of the sunset at Second Beach, where I went camping with my girl and just the loveliest bunch of people you could ever want to hang out with last weekend. Continue reading “Things I Learned on the Internet This Week 8/8/14” →

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” →