Barry will be appearing at Rose City Comic-Con this weekend!

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Ampersand

Hi!

I’ll be appearing at Rose City Comic-Con, in Portland, Oregon, this weekend. I’m sharing a table with Becky Hawkins, my collaborator on SuperButch. We’ll be selling copies of First Glance, and of course I’ll have copies of Hereville on hand.

If you’ll be there, please come and say hi!

rose-city-map

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 6 Comments  

Towards a Feminist Politics of “Male Survivorship”

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I have spent the last month or so writing a proposal for a fellowship that, if I get it, will buy me some serious time to write. The project I am proposing will allow me to go back into the prose I’ve written over the past nearly thirty years about manhood and masculinity and perhaps actually write the book I started back in the 1990s. Some parts of the proposal bear directly on discussions we’ve had here on Alas, and so I have revised them into this blog post, which I hope will be of interest. These discussions have been enormously helpful in clarifying my own thinking on these issues, and so I am interested to see how this post might move those discussions forward. What follows is the central argument of my proposal:

I came to see myself both as a survivor of childhood sexual violence and as a man committed to feminism after reading the essays of Adrienne Rich in the early 1980s, a time when, as far as I knew, no one was talking about the sexual abuse of boys. Rich’s polemic against men’s sexual violence against women gave me for the first time a language I could use to name as violations what the men who’d sexually abused my teenage boy’s body had done to me. The seeds of whatever healing I have achieved, in other words, are firmly rooted in the feminist vision of gender justice. Nonetheless, taking those roots for granted, as I did for many years, inevitably papers over some difficult tensions. For while feminism may have given me a language with which to name my experience of sexual violence, and despite a growing awareness among contemporary feminists that men are sexually victimized in much greater numbers than previously imagined, I have found little room within feminist discourse for who I am as a survivor of that violence.

In “Sexual Violence Against Men and Women in War,” for example, published in The Nevada Law Review, Valorie K. Vojdik addresses herself both to the frequency and brutality with which boys and men, soldiers and civilians, are sexually victimized during wartime, highlighting how invisible that violence has historically been within feminist discourse. Her goal, however, is not to illuminate the experiences of those boys and men as victims and survivors. Rather, she wants to make “masculinized violence against men” visible in order to deepen feminists’ “understanding of…the construction of certain male bodies as masculine and dominant, in both war and in peace” (952, italics mine). Vojdik’s focus, in other words, is on telling us more about what we already know, or think we know, i.e., that perpetrators’ bodies are male and that the goal of the violence these male-bodied perpetrators commit is to construct themselves as “masculine and dominant.”

Granted that deepening our understanding of how male dominance is constructed is important. Nonetheless, Vojdik’s analysis actually obscures more than it reveals about the boys and men who are the victims of “masculinized violence.” Elsewhere in her essay, for example, she writes that, “The rape of men [in war] turns the male into a powerless victim, a symbolic woman who is sexually violated by the perpetrator through rape” (945). Given this framing, whether she intends it or not, Vojdik implicitly proposes that the best way to understand men’s experience of rape is not to reveal what that experience might be, but rather to use women’s experience as a model. To put it another way, Vojdik does what feminists have long criticized male scholars for doing in fields as distant from each other as English literature and medical research: proceeding from the assumption that their gendered perspective is the norm that applies everywhere to everyone.

Adrienne Rich, along with all the other feminist writers whose work helped start me on my path to healing, proceeded from the same kind of assumption. In the world of their writing, sexual violence was committed by men against women, full stop. Indeed, I don’t remember any of them addressing even the possibility of a male victim, let alone a female perpetrator. The only way I could find myself in the world of this feminist writing, therefore, was to co-opt women’s position within it, to view my own experience through the lens of what men’s sexual violence against women meant to women. To carve out, in other words, a space within feminism not so different from the one to which Vojdik argues male perpetrators send their male victims—one where I was, symbolically, a woman.

The difference, of course, is that the society I live in, because it sees the violations I survived as unmanning by definition, has generally wanted me to occupy that position (though things are beginning to change). Feminism, on the other hand, doesn’t care that the men who violated me did so in ways that directly parallel men’s sexual violence against women; I am, in feminist terms, still a man in a society that licenses men to commit such violence. To presume to occupy women’s position in feminism, therefore, even symbolically, and even for reasons as sympathetic as mine might be, is still, when understood through a feminist lens, to exercise that license. To unpack this conundrum, to ask what it means be both a man committed to feminism in a world that privileges men and the sexually violated boy who grew up to be that man, is to ask what a feminist politics of “male survivorship” might look like.

Depending on the measure you use, studies show that as many as 20% of men will—at the hands of both men and women—experience some form of sexual violence at some point in their lives. That we finally recognize these men as people who have been violated, rather than people who should learn to “suck it up” and move on; that we as a society have a growing awareness that this violation is a social and cultural (in addition to being an interpersonal) injustice; that we increasingly believe those who survive this violation deserve to heal, and that they deserve as well our compassion and our support as they do so–all of this is rooted in the work feminists are still doing to expose men’s violence against women as gendered violence and to establish ending that violence as one central goal of gender justice. I am, in other words, not the only male survivor who has a stake in feminism, though I do think feminists have largely and consistently, by omission if not commission, misrepresented what that stake might be.

Correcting that misrepresentation seems to me a necessary step in moving the feminist conversation about gender justice forward.

Cross-posted on my blog.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Men and masculinity, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 15 Comments  

Open Thread and Link Farm: Late Night Centaur Edition

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Ampersand

samantha-bee-centaur

  1. TV’s diversity problems go far beyond Stephen Colbert — and any single late-night host – Vox
  2. Mitchell: Rape case sends mixed messages on prostitution | Chicago Sun-Times This actual column written by an actual (and in some ways liberal, I’m embarrassed to say) columnist actually argues that it’s not actually rape if the victim is a prostitute. AAARGH!
  3. Oh Joy Sex Toy – Defective by Melanie Gillman A lovely short comic about being genderqueer and trying to become a parent. Melanie Gillman is one of my favorite new cartoonists.
  4. The Victim of a Scary Web-Shaming Speaks Out — NYMag
  5. Black children with appendicitis are less likely to get pain meds than white children | The Incidental Economist
  6. The Death Of Victoria Gray: How Texas Jails Are Failing Their Most Vulnerable Captives | ThinkProgress
  7. Into The Black Closet | Rock, Paper, Shotgun “For the trans woman who plays games like this or Gone Home there’s a melancholic note of nostalgia behind every move: a longing for the childhood or the girlhood you never had, all the while recreating it in digital pantomime to weave a sense of memory for a never-happened history.”
  8. Crumb, Racism, Satire, and Hyperbole « The Hooded Utilitarian “In that sense, racists who have embraced some of Crumb’s imagery aren’t confused; they’re not stupidly getting it wrong. They’re reacting instead to a failure of his art.”
  9. Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them? To do a test, we made the following game.
  10. Poldark-style six-packs ‘smack of vanity’, says Matthew Macfadyen | Media | The Guardian
  11. When your stupid wizard parents force you to make the bed.
  12. “I feel like a lot of frugality is very deeply intertwined with class privilege; you can get by with so little because you have social capital which was secretly very expensive to acquire.”
  13. Ben Carson Month Is in Full Swing | Mother Jones
  14. Hungary Shuts Borders, Refugees Left In Limbo | ThinkProgress
  15. Mike Huckabee (Apparently) Thinks the 14th Amendment Applies to Fetuses but Not to Black People
  16. The devastating argument against prescription drug cost shifting | The Incidental Economist
  17. Why concentrating on exactly what words are used is not the best or most meaningful form of pro-disabled activism
  18. I admit this photo is a mildly clever gag. But it’s also a way that Wil Wheaton tells me, a liberal fan of his who probably agrees with him on 99% of issues, that if he ever meets me I’ll have to wonder if he’s inwardly feeling contempt for me for the way I look.
  19. Identities Are Not Arguments | Thing of Things
  20. How to Manufacture a Statistic | SINMANTYX
  21. Millions of Americans have been married three times or more – The Washington Post
  22. The Katrina disaster that hasn’t ended
  23. McDonald’s and Franchising – McDonalds is trying to have it both ways – not being an employer when it comes to employee rights, but acting like an employer when it comes to employment conditions.
  24. Teachers’ unions do not hurt student outcomes. | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
  25. The most unrealistic thing about Hollywood romance, visualized – The Washington Post I’ll save you a click – it’s the age gap between male and female leads in movies.
  26. If You Disagree With This Post, You’re Joining A Bullying Lynch Mob | Popehat
  27. How lower family wealth means Black college graduates get fewer benefits from their degree than their white counterparts.
  28. “Replace girls with readers and nerd with conservative, and you have the entire Sad/Rabid Puppies issue in a nutshell.”
  29. Bartolo Colón is pudgy, the oldest player in the National League, and awesome:

Posted in Link farms | 41 Comments  

All the movies watched by Presidents Carter and Reagan

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Ampersand

Bedtime for Bonzo

Don’t know why I find this so interesting, but I do, so I might as well share it with you folks.

Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House

And

FILMS PRESIDENT AND MRS. REAGAN VIEWED (Chronologically Arranged)

It seems Carter was more eager to watch movies than Reagan, and more apt to watch older movies – which isn’t what I would have guessed, given Reagan’s background in show business. Maybe Reagan found it distracting to watch films starring his former associates; maybe he just enjoyed keeping current. (Don’t get me wrong, Reagan did of course watch some classics – Hitchcock films seem to have been a favorite – but Carter watched mostly older films plus some current films, while Reagan was the reverse. Although maybe it just seems that way because Reagan’s list doesn’t include the dates the films were made).

Of course, both of them saw many movies I’m fond of. No telling if they liked those movies – it’s possible that Carter walked out of Alien going “man, what a stinker!” It seems likely that any old classics they screened were favorites that they had seen before; in which case, Reagan and I both like Rear Window and Singin’ in the Rain, and Carter and I both like the Marx Brothers.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Reagan was into Woody Allen’s films, but Allen comes up often on Reagan’s list (Mid-Summer Night’s Sex Comedy, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, and Radio Days). Possibly more than any other director, although I’m not enough of a film buff to be sure (or any sort of film buff, really).

Both Presidents watched a number of musicals, and both watched at least a couple of Star Wars/Star Treks, in case you were wondering.

And Reagan did screen Bedtime for Bonzo once, I assume as a gag for his guests at Camp David – or maybe Nancy arranged the screening as a prank on her husband.

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | Leave a comment  

Cartoon: We Must Discuss All Possibilities… But The Most Likely One

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Ampersand

race-card

Remember, you can support my political cartooning on Patreon!

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

Panel 1

A close shot of a white woman in a striped dress. She is talking, although it seems a bit like lecturing. Let’s call her “Stripes.”

STRIPES: To have a real conversation about race, we have to consider all ideas in a neutral and calm manner.

Panel 2

STRIPES: For example, what if Black culture has made Black people lazy? We can’t refuse to even consider that!

Panel 3

WOMAN: Or… what if Blacks are born with lower IQs than whites? We should at least consider that, right?

Panel 4

The “camera” has backed up, and we now see that Stripes has been talking to a Black woman wearing a floral dress, who I’ll call “Flowers.”

FLOWERS: What if people who say Blacks are lazy and stupid are racist as hell? Shouldn’t we consider that?

STRIPES (yelling) ABSOLUTELY NOT! DON’T MAKE THINGS PERSONAL!

Panel 5 (a tiny “kicker” panel at the bottom of panel 4)

FLOWERS: Calling Blacks stupid isn’t personal?

STRIPES: It isn’t to me.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Race, racism and related issues | 28 Comments  

A List Of Musicals I’ve Seen Live

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Ampersand

So I was chatting with Myca earlier today, and he mentioned seeing Amelie The Musical and wanted to know if I’d like the Playbill. No, I said, I don’t collect Playbills; but the conversation made me regret that I haven’t made a habit of keeping playbills for the musicals I’ve seen, because now I’m sure I can’t remember all the ones I’ve seen live.

But anyway, the conversation motivated me to try to make a list of all the musicals I can remember seeing, in the hopes that this can replace having kept all those playbills.

Broadway musicals my parents took me to when I was a kid:

  1. Annie (Dorothy Loudon, still the best Miss Hannigan ever. I can’t remember if the Annie was Andrea McArdle or if she’d been replaced by this point; but I do remember having an enormous crush on whoever the lead actress was, which occupied my thoughts for weeks afterwards.)
  2. Barnum (Jim Dale and Glenn Close) The main thing I remember is being amazed when Dale walked a tightrope.
  3. A Chorus Line
  4. Into the Woods (Bernadette Peters) At the end of Act 1, I thought the play was over, and my mom stopped me from walking off. Later on, they added the narrator telling the audience “To be continued!” at the end of Act 1, so presumably I wasn’t the only one to make this mistake.
  5. The Magic Show, with Doug Henning. This show is long-forgotten, but it had music by Stephen Schwartz, and I keep on meaning to find a copy of the cast album to see if it’s at least fun. David Ogden Stiers was in it.
  6. The Pirates of Penzance (Kevin Kline as the Pirate King)
  7. Tommy

Shows seen as a grown-up. A bunch are Broadway, some are local but professional productions (mainly in Portland), a few are school or college productions. There’s two or three here I’ve seen multiple productions of, but I only listed them once.

  1. 13
  2. The 25th Annual Putman County Spelling Bee
  3. A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (Nathan Lane again)
  4. A New Brain
  5. Annie Get Your Gun (Bernadette Peters again)
  6. Assassins
  7. Candide
  8. Chicago
  9. Company (Raul Esparza)
  10. Evil Dead The Musical (back row, so no blood spattered on me, sadly.)
  11. Falsettos (Mandy Patinkin)
  12. Fiddler On The Roof
  13. Fun Home (Probably my current favorite musical. Better live than on the cast album, and the cast album is amazing.)
  14. Guys and Dolls (Nathan Lane)
  15. Hair
  16. Hairspray
  17. Jesus Christ Superstar
  18. Kinky Boots
  19. Kiss Of The Spider Woman (Chita Rivera)
  20. The Last 5 Years
  21. Les Miserables
  22. The Life
  23. Lizzie
  24. Lost In The Image Machine (This was an original musical at Oberlin College, written and directed by a student named Tom Abernathy, who was a very talented musician and performer. Not sure where he is today, but I hope he’s having fun.)
  25. Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (Only marginally a musical, but they do sing, so…)
  26. The Mystery of Edmund Drood (I added this later, because I originally forgot to include it on the list. Which is kind of sad, because not only did I see this particular production, I drew the poster for it.)
  27. Parade
  28. Passion (Donna Murphy)
  29. Pippin (the revival with the circus acrobats. Purely spectacle, so much fun.)
  30. Rent
  31. The Rocky Horror Show
  32. Ruthless!
  33. The Scarlet Pimpernel
  34. Show Boat
  35. Side Show
  36. Spring Awakening
  37. Sweeney Todd (perhaps my all-time favorite musical. It’s a shame they never made a movie of it. Don’t correct me – THEY NEVER MADE A MOVIE OF IT! IT NEVER HAPPENED!)
  38. The Tap Dance Kid
  39. You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown

Musicals I’ve taken my nieces to see.

  1. Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (unauthorized live adaptation)
  2. Ivy & Bean
  3. James and the Giant Peach
  4. Seussical

So 49, or 48 if we don’t count “Mr Burns,” which perhaps we shouldn’t.

In addition to these, and in addition to ones I’ve forgotten, there are any number of shows I’ve seen on video or film but not live, some of which I’ve watched and listened to so much that I feel as if I’ve seen them live.

Altogether, a pretty nice list. Some were fun for the night but ultimately forgettable, but a bunch were (at least to me) spectacular, treasured memories. Given my tastes, it’s not surprising that I’ve seen more shows by Sondheim than by any other composer.

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 69 Comments  

On Right To Live vs Right To Autonomy; And Why Fetuses Aren’t People

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Ampersand

chair-as-person

This post is part of an ongoing discussion I’m having on Tumblr with “Sirwolffe.” I’ve edited the post before putting it on “Alas.”

Sirwolffe writes:

You are comparing the right to life with the right to refuse pregnancy. Isn’t it obvious that one is more important than the other? Life is the greatest gift we have, and the most important one too. How can your right to use your body how you wish override that?

It’s not self-evident that a right to life always overrides a right to bodily autonomy.1

Suppose I’m dying, and the only thing that can save me is being medically hooked to you for nine months, so your kidneys will take the poisons out of my blood.2 You are the only person in the world with the rare blood type necessary for this to work. The procedure carries a high chance of having permanent effects on your body, and a low chance of killing you.

In that circumstance, should the police force you to be hooked up to me for nine months, whether you want to or not?

If you’re consistent in your belief that right to life overrides the right to bodily autonomy, then you’d have to agree that the police should force you to do this for me. For that matter, even if it takes nine years – or the rest of your life – you should agree to the principle that the police can force you to do this for me.

But in fact, no court in this country will force you. Because there is no legal or moral rule that my right to life always overrules your right to bodily autonomy. You cannot be legally forced to let anyone use your internal organs for their benefit. Because you have the right to bodily autonomy.

Pregnant people should have that same right.

* * *

Next, a fetus isn’t just human. It is both wholly human, and a live human. A brain-dead patient is dead, not living. An ear growing in a vat is not a whole human.

An embryo3 is not a whole and complete person, any more than a foundation of a building is a whole and complete building. An embryo is made, and there is a person making it, providing all the resources and doing all the work. The embryo is literally incapable of continued existence without a pregnant person filling in the gaps of the many ways it is not yet complete.

Your argument erases that pregnant person from consideration; your argument treats them like a non-person whose rights don’t merit a moment’s consideration. A baby doesn’t magically appear, whole and finished; it is made by a person. A person with rights.

Now, why isn’t a fetus a person? Because it can’t think or feel? It will surely develop those properties within several months.

Earlier in our discussion, you agreed that a brain-dead patient is dead – and that could be a difference of only a day. If you’re allowed to say that a difference of a day, during which a person’s brain dies, can nonetheless be a morally important difference, then why can’t I say the same about a difference of four or five months?

It doesn’t matter if the brain-dead patient was alive yesterday. If they’re brain-dead now, then they are no longer a person with a right to life. Because without a brain capable of sustaining some sort of consciousness, it isn’t a person with rights.

By the same logic, it doesn’t matter if the embryo or fetus will in theory be able to be a person four months from now. The abortion isn’t being performed four months from now; it’s being performed today, on an embryo. And an embryo isn’t a person, and a non-person cannot have rights.

A pregnant person is a person, who has consciousness and rights. An embryo is, at most, a hypothetical person; it has no more ability to think or feel than a brain-dead person does, or a chair does. Maybe in several months it’ll gain that ability – or, then again, maybe not. (Even without an abortion, there could be a miscarriage, it could be born brain-dead. Etc).

So what we’re weighing here, is the rights of a real, existing person, versus the “rights” of a hypothetical person who doesn’t exist and might never exist. When these things are in conflict, shouldn’t the rights of the person who exists take precedence?

There was a time when black people were not legally considered persons.

Regardless of what the law said, there’s never been a time when black people weren’t morally and logically people.4

Hey, what if I say chairs are people? And when you disagree, I imply that you’re being like a racist saying Blacks aren’t people. Is that a fair or logical argument? Or by making that comparison, am I assuming what’s at issue – that chairs are people?

I do agree with one thing you wrote: Being legal doesn’t make something moral. A pregnant person is a person, and morally they should have rights. Morally, you should not have the right to force them to be pregnant against their will.

Even if pro-lifers manage to create laws that treat pregnant people like slaves who don’t own their own bodies, that will just change the law. It won’t change that forced childbirth is immoral.

* * *

One last question: Imagine you’re in a burning building. There’s a hallway with two rooms, far from each other, so you only have time to run into one of the rooms and escape before the roof collapses.

In one room is an adorable four-year-old girl. (Or even a mean, grumpy four-year-old girl who hates puppies. Makes no difference to my example.) In the other room is a suitcase containing fifty petri dishes with one-day-old viable embryos, each of which has been assigned to a person who wants the embryos implanted in their wombs. So if you save those embryos, many or all of them will, six months from now, be babies.

If that were me, I would dash to save the four-year-old girl, and leave the embryos to die. No question at all. Would you really run to save the suitcase of one-day embryos, leaving the girl to die? And if you’d save the girl, aren’t you admitting that there is a moral difference between the life of a born human, and the life of an embryo?

Thanks for the discussion. I appreciate it.

  1. You said “your right to use your body how you wish,” but I’m going to shorten that to “bodily autonomy.” [↩]
  2. I’m swiping this example from Judith Thomson. [↩]
  3. I deliberately use the word “embryo,” even though Sirwolffe said “fetus,” to emphasize that abortions typically happen to either embryos or early fetuses. According to Guttmacher, one-third of abortions occur at six weeks into the pregnancy or earlier, and 90% of abortions occur in the first twelve weeks. 99% of abortions take place in the first 20 weeks. The biological structures needed for any thought or consciousness to exist aren’t in place until the 28th week. [↩]
  4. This is a side issue, but your understanding of history is wrong. [↩]
Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights | 82 Comments  

UPDATE: The Kim Davis Letter IS DEFINITELY A Fake

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Ampersand

UPDATE 2:

SamC in comments provided this link. The Kim Davis letter, and the associated Twitter account, is definitely a fake. Apologies to everyone reading (and also to Mrs. Davis, if she ever runs across this post, which is happily unlikely) for being taken in by the fake.

*********************

UPDATE:

I think I got taken in by a fake Twitter account. I assumed it was real mainly because many obviously Christian conservative Twitter users were following, praising and retweeting it.

However, Liz Lee writes:

But the second passage she quotes from the Bible is incorrect. In fact, it’s totally extremely BADLY incorrect. Like, it’s so incorrect that I have a hard time believing this is real. She writes:

“I ask that you read the passage from Luke 16:18 and think of me, ‘Consider it all joy, my bretheren when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.’”

However, that’s not the right passage. This passage is from James 1:2. So what is Luke 16:18? Here it is.

“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

OMG? Seriously? Please let this be real. Please. It can be my birthday present and Christmas present. I’m going to assume it’s fake. Considering she’s been married four times and conceived children by husband #3 while she was still with husband #2, this is way too good to be true. So, I’m going to assume it is fake.

Original post is under the fold.

Continue reading →

Posted in Homophobic zaniness/more LGBTQ issues, In the news | 14 Comments  

Please Stop Snarking About Kim Davis’ Four Marriages

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Ampersand

I’ve been seeing a zillion memes like this today about Kim Davis, the Christian Kentucky Clerk who is going to jail for contempt of court, because she’s refusing to do her job and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

kim-davis

1) First of all, Kim Davis only converted to Christianity four years ago. But her most recent divorce was in 2008, seven years ago. The claim that she’s being a hypocrite isn’t even true.

2) Secondly, this sort of attack is slut-shaming. And gleefully vindictive in a way that makes us look ugly. And worst of all, mean to her kids, who probably don’t want thousands of strangers posting about their birth dates, or to have that information broadcast to all their classmates.

3) It’s obvious that Kim Davis can’t win legally, and the end of the legal road here is that same-sex couples will be able to get marriage licenses everywhere in Kentucky. So nothing is accomplished by attacking Kim Davis personally, apart from making her even more of a martyr for her cause.

4) While we’re at it, if you see anyone attacking Kim Davis for her looks, please tell them to go fuck themselves.

UPDATE: Seriously, Kim Davis’ lawyer? Seriously? Lawyer representing Kim Davis compares her to a Jew under the Nazis

Posted in In the news, Same-Sex Marriage | 20 Comments  

Don’t Be Fooled – Kate Paulk’s Kinder, Gentler Sad Puppy Slate Is Still A Slate.

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Ampersand

puppies

The Hugo Awards – are we all sick to death of my posting about the Hugo Awards? Hell yes, you say? Well, can we can stand one more post on the subject? Okay, then! - are voted on in two stages. From the Hugo Award FAQ:

How are the results decided?

Voting for the Hugos is a two-stage process. In the first stage voters may nominate up to five entries in each category. All nominations carry equal weight. The five entries that get the most nominations in each category go forward to the final ballot. […]

Why do you have a two-stage system?

Hundreds and hundreds of science fiction and fantasy works are published each year. No one, not even the top reviewers in the field, can possibly read/see all of them. Other awards limit the field by restricting themselves to works of certain types (e.g. only fantasy), or by type of work (e.g. only books), or by where they are published, or by the nationality of the author. The Hugos attempt to cover the whole field. The voting system explicitly accepts that no one can have seen/read everything. It relies on the fact that many people participate to find the five works that are most popular (that is have been seen/read and enjoyed by most people), and then there is a run-off between them in the final ballot.

So the first stage of Hugo Award voting is a form of crowdsourcing, whittling down those “hundreds and hundreds” of stories to just five in each category.

For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%). At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.

Nippon_hugo_archive1And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work. 611 Hugo voters, acting as individuals, each nominate whatever short stories they think are award-worthy. From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.

Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of just 100 people who will nominate an agreed-upon list, instead of voting as individuals, that’s enough to completely overwhelm the much larger number of Hugo voters who are voting as individuals. 100 people voting for just 5 works will beat out 500 people voting from among hundreds of works.

In the case of the Sad Puppies, Brad Torgersen solicited suggestions on his blog, and then – either working by himself, or (as Larry Correia claimed) in consultation with Larry Correia, John Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and V*x D*y – chose five nominees.1

Next year’s Sad Puppies slate – although they’re not calling it a slate – will be run by Kate Paulk. On a podcast, she outlined some plans:

For starters the word slate is not going to appear anywhere. For second [Cross talk] I am not doing a slate, I am doing a list of the most popular works in all of the various categories as submitted by people who read on any of the various blogs that will have me. And I’m going to post ultimately the top ten of each, with links to the full list of everything that everybody wanted to see nominated, and I’m going to be saying “hey if you really want to see your favorite authors nominated your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list as opposed to the least popular.” That is going to be what it is. I don’t care who ends up on that list. I don’t care if David Gerrold ends up being the top of the list somewhere. That’s not the point, the point is that I want to see the voting numbers both for nomination and for actual voting go up above 5,000 up above 10,000, because the more people who are involved and who are voting the harder it is for any faction including puppies to manipulate the results.

Except this is manipulating the results. Because she’s telling the Puppies to vote strategically from a common list (“your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list”) instead of doing what they should, which is voting as individuals for whatever works they’ve personally read and consider the best.

This isn’t as blatant a slate as Torgersen’s was – but it’s still an attempt to consolidate the votes of the Sad Puppies, from hundreds of possible stories to just a handful of choices. By the time of the final Hugo vote, there appeared to be 400-500 Sad Puppies, about 100 of whom voted strict party line. If even half of those Sad Puppies strategically choose their votes from Paulk’s “top ten” list, while the thousands of non-Puppy voters, voting as individuals, split their votes among hundreds of stories, then bloc voters will once again be able to lock out the rest of us.

If Paulk sincerely wants to participate fairly, rather than running a slate, she should ask her readers to post their recommendations (like Scalzi and others do). And then – that’s it. Don’t consolidate, don’t list in order of popularity, don’t encourage strategic voting – just crowdsource a list of reader’s favorite choices, and tell readers to vote as individuals.

* * *

three-body-problemMany puppies are crowing that this year’s “Best Novel” winner – the excellent, if flawed, Three Body Problem – would not have won without a few hundred puppy voters joining with the majority of voters to beat out The Goblin Emperor (also excellent, also flawed).

That’s true, but it’s also true that Three Body Problem, which was not on either Puppy slate, would not have been nominated if Marko Kloos hadn’t honorably declined his slated nomination. In other words, it’s only because the Puppies screwed up that TBP was nominated at all.

Various leading Puppies have said that they would have nominated TBP if they had read it on time – but, as it happened, none of the handful of people (2? 5? Whatever) who made the decision had read TBP.

And that illustrates exactly what’s wrong with allowing slates to choose the Hugo nominees, rather than Hugo voters nominating as individuals. A crowd of hundreds of Hugo voters, voting as individuals, wouldn’t have left Three Body Problem off the list – but the Puppy slates did.

(Actually, Kloss wasn’t the only novelist to decline a Hugo nomination this year – Larry Correia, who founded the Puppies, made a big show of allowing himself to be nominated, and then declining the nomination. Ironically, if neither Kloss and Correia had declined their nominations, then this year’s Hugo best novel would have been Ancillary Sword, a novel the Puppies loathe.)

* * *

One more point. I’ve seen several Puppies argue that the “no award” vote was gaming the awards, equivalent to how Puppies gamed the nominations.

That’s nonsense.

“No Award” didn’t beat the Puppy nominees because a minority gamed the system and locked out the majority. It beat the Puppy nominees because that’s how the majority of Hugo voters voted. When the majority votes for an outcome, and that outcome wins, that’s not “gaming the system.” That is the system.

  1. It appears that Torgersen et al pretty much ignored the reader selections they solicited: “of the 16 written fiction nominees on Torgerson’s slate, 11 – more than two-thirds – had not actually been nominated by anyone in the crowd-sourced discussion.” [↩]
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