Feminism – Peter M. Ball

Smart Advice from Smart People

All Writing is Political

I’m about to commit a metric butt-load of white-male-privilege sins by being a white-male-guy whose linking to another white-male-guy saying sensible things about writing and feminisim, but just this once I’m going to be okay with it. Chuck Wendig wrote a post about Sexism and Misogyny in Publishing. It got some responses, ’cause Chuck knows his shit when it comes to building an audience on the internet, and so people link his posts around. Then he wrote a response to the responses, and called out this particular piece of bullshit in a way that had me punching the air like a madman. “BUT IT DOESN’T SERVE THE STORY!” Worst excuse ever. I hate this excuse. I hate it like I hate the DMV, hemorrhoids, airline travel delays, and bad coffee. I hate it because it suggests that writers are not in control of their own stories, that they are merely conduits for some kind of divine unicorn breath, some heady Musefart that

PeterMBall 12/06/2013

Big Thoughts

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

There are days when I feel insufficiently geek. Don’t get me wrong – I do plenty of things that are geeky as hell – I play, on average, 1.5 face-to-face RPG sessions a week, have a semi-regular influx of graphic novels appearing in my mailbox, and the staff at my local Fantasy, SF, and Crime bookstore know me on sight. I can just about make it through an entire week of wearing shirts with pictures of C’Thulhu on them without having to do laundry. When I run out of Lovecraft inspired T’s, I’ll move on to my collection of web-comic shirts without missing a beat. That should keep me going for a month or so before it’s time to hit the washing machine. Two of my favourite TV shows are Justice League: Unlimited and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. I just dropped a whole buttload of cash on the reprints of Larry Hama’s classic GI JOE series from Marvel in the

PeterMBall 19/11/2012

Gaming

Guest Post: Get the MESSAGE with Steve D.

It’s relatively rare that I turn this blog over to someone else to make a guest post, but for the last few months my friend Steve has been putting together a thing called The MESSAGE. Given that he’s tackling one of my personal bugbears – the tendency towards misogyny among gamers – I wanted to amplify his message and asked him if he’d be interested putting together a blog post explaining things. With that, I’m going to hand things over: My name’s Steve. I’m the creator and co-director of the MESSAGE. That’s an acronym that stands for Men Ending Slurs and Sexist Attitudes in the Gaming Environment. We’re a world-wide online-based campaign group dedicated to encouraging, supporting and educating men in order to make all types of gaming more welcoming to women, and other minorities. You can find us at www.gamermessage.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Please do – the movement can only work with lots of support.

PeterMBall 07/11/2012

Big Thoughts

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

I recently answered a bunch of questions for the 2012 Australian Spec Fic Snapshot project, a semi-regular interview series that surveys the Australian SF scene and presents the interviews in a week-long flurry. I don’t know if my particular snapshot will be online by the time this post goes up, but it’s coming and in one of my answers I mention the rise in feminist discourse taking place within SF over the last few years and how happy I am to see that happening despite the fact that my engagement with feminism is haphazard at best. And I’ve been thinking about that phrase, a lot, since I sent off my snapshot response. My initial intention with that phrase was to acknowledge that I’m basically white, male, university educated, and middle class. I am white male privileged incarnate and get to play life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, and even as someone who tries to be aware of that, even as someone

PeterMBall 06/06/2012

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

I frequently find myself watching The Big Bang theory, finding it funny, then hating myself for it. I mentioned this on the twitters and facebook yesterday, which immediately had a group of people saying, in essence, why, dude, it’s actually funny? And, yes, it is. There are times when it’s absolutely smart and entertaining, and I watch it for these moments because they’re a kind of humor that makes me happy and speaks to me as a man who self-identifies as a geek and enjoys being part of an active geek subculture. It’s a show that’s very, very good at doing that, creating little in-jokes among the broader strokes. It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry. The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of

PeterMBall 16/03/2011

Smart Advice from Smart People

International Women’s Day, Redux

Right, so, by this point everyone’s more-or-less seen this, but for the small percentage of you who haven’t:

PeterMBall 08/03/2011

Big Thoughts

Actually, fuck it, I’m ranting

Every now and then publishers I respect a lot go and do something stupid, and this makes me a little sad. This weeks’ case-in-point comes courtesy of the writer’s guidelines for Ticonderoga’s latest anthology, which I read through and had a complete WTF kind of moment when I stumbled across this. A masculine tone will be favoured but not sought exclusively (i.e. avoid becoming bogged down with intricate descriptions and fancy window dressing in your world building; save your word count for a solid scene – or 2 or 3 – of conflict, action, aggression, etc). (see the addendum below) I mean, yeah, seriously, what the fuck? Setting aside the fact that anyone’s daft enough to phrase their preferences like this in an online world where x-fail has become part of the dialogue and there’s a new generation of readers (and writers) sensitive to gender issues, I actually found this kind of disappointing because it runs up against one of

PeterMBall 24/01/2011

Big Thoughts

This post contains swearing

So this is something of an addendumto yesterday’s post, and it’s written because every now and then I see people I really like get in trouble because they don’t yet grasp the realities of white male privilege until it’s too late. I had this conversation with a friend the last time this issue raised its head, but I don’t think I ever put it together as a complete post, so I figured I may as well have it handy. Be warned that I’m going to swear a lot. Be warned that you’re probably not going to like hearing it, especially because it flies in the face of the way we wish the internet could be. Call it the two-word rule you need to wrap your head around before you launch into a discussion of feminsim online as a white male. It goes a little something like this: Fuck civility. I say this as someone who’s a fan of civility, who

PeterMBall 21/10/2010

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Female Appreciation Month

So the erstwhile editor of Twelfth Planet Press, Girliejones, has dubbed this month Female Appreciation Month in response to the all-around sausagefest that was the Triple J Hottest One Hundred of all Time*. Being a fan of female musicians in various genres, my immediate thought was “sure, I’ll be in that” and I went and pulled about thirty-odd albums out of my collection to serve as my listening for the coming month. All involve either female singers or female songwriters. Being the utter High Fidelity loving nerd that I am, I’m trying to resist the urge to blog at you about the absolute awesome of every single album on this list with top-five lists and random gushing. I may well break at some point. Until then, you’ll probably see a theme running through the Friday Youtubery posts. And I should be rocking out with a month full of XX chromosomal goodness. *This list, incidentally, has completely cured me of this lingering desire

PeterMBall 14/07/2009

Big Thoughts

SF and Gender

There’s been a bunch of debates about Gender and SF of late, all of which seem to end up with someone defending themselves with a variation of “I filled all the spots on project X with men because I was choosing on the basis of quality, not gender.” This answer flummoxes me every time it’s trotted out; not because the people who use it are not bad people or knowing oppressors, but just because it often reveals itself as a blind-spot in the approach of someone whose work I’d otherwise respect. And, to be honest, I just don’t get how people can’t question that statement, since SF itself has often been denigrated and ignored using the same excuse. Think about that moment that all SF fans seem to share – that moment where you’re talking to someone who doesn’t read the genre, and you reveal that you do, and their response is a muted “oh” followed by a look that

PeterMBall 27/02/2009

Tag: Feminism

All Writing is Political

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

Guest Post: Get the MESSAGE with Steve D.

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

International Women’s Day, Redux

Actually, fuck it, I’m ranting

This post contains swearing

Female Appreciation Month

SF and Gender

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