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The Fake Geek Girl problem in WordPress

Over the weekend, at WordCamp Austin, I had a conversation that I think a lot of women in WordPress will recognize. I introduced myself to a male developer, and he asked if I was speaking later in the day. I said yes, and he asked about the topic of my talk. (All normal so far.) When I told him, he quizzed me about what I planned to say on the topic. In this case, it was a plugin roundup, so I gave a few examples of the plugins I planned to mention, and he actually said at one point, “That’s the answer I was looking for.”

I’ve been quizzed before — in fact, I had an almost identical conversation at the same event last year — but never so blatantly, and with so little offered in response.

Thanks to The Mary Sue‘s discussion of the Fake Geek Girl problem in science fiction fandom, I know that this behavior has a name: Microaggression. And wow, it’s really frustrating.

What’s probably going through the man’s mind is: I want to make sure the project/my work is accurately represented.

Here’s what the woman hears: I want to make sure you’re qualified to talk to me.

I had similar conversations with women and with men who weren’t posturing as gatekeepers to the community, and there are two key differences. First, there’s give and take. My conversational partner asks questions, and is no doubt evaluating me based on my answers, but s/he offers information in return (“I’m speaking too, on [___]“). And second, we congratulate each other on being asked to speak in the first place (“You’re speaking? That’s great! What’s your topic?”) instead of treating the opportunity as our due. These tiny conversational cues make a huge difference.

I had dozens of hallway conversations, of course, but this one stuck in my mind. If other women who are newer or less confident of their place in the community met with similar microaggression, I hope they, too, were able to brush it off and enjoy the rest of the event. I certainly found lots of more pleasant people to talk to, but I know all too well that having the gates of the community slammed down in your face repeatedly can make you decide that this group neither wants nor needs you, and your free time would be better spent on something else.

In case you were wondering, ladies: you are welcome here, and we definitely need you.

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Werewolves, wolf packs, and discredited science

The fiction I’m working on at the moment involves werewolves. I hadn’t revisited the premise in a while (this is a reworking of a very old piece), and I knew that I needed to look up modern views on wolf pack hierarchy because the “alpha wolf” notion has been discredited. It wasn’t a huge part of my plot — and had no bearing at all on the romantic aspect — but it was there in the subplot, and I wanted to fix it. Five minutes on Google gave me a wealth of information, which I’ve incorporated, and I think it improved the story quite a bit. Yay for research!

So I’m sort of amused that not one, but two blogs I follow published articles on this topic last weekend.

First, Foz Meadows wrote The Truth of Wolves, or: The Alpha Problem. It’s fantastic. She takes down urban fantasy authors not for perpetuating the old science — that part is, in her view, entirely forgiveable — but for using the alpha/beta/omega structure as an excuse to write romantic heroes who are sexist assholes.

More specifically, we get the Alpha Problem: endless tracts of sexism, misogyny, female exceptionalism, rigid social hierarchies maintained through a combination of violence and biological determinism, inescapable mating bonds, and a carte blanche excuse for male characters to behave like cavemen (and for female characters to accept it) on the slender justification that, as alphas, it’s both in their nature and what’s expected of them. And the thing is, I love urban fantasy, and I also really love shapeshifters. But it’s not often these days that I get to love the two things in combination, because apart from not being able to deal with the sheer profligacy of the aforementioned problems, I also can’t get past the fact that the logic on which they’re predicated – the logic of wolves – is overwhelmingly inaccurate.

A day later, io9 published a similar piece, Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong. This digs into the literature a little more and focuses entirely on the wolf packs, leaving it to the commenters to draw the connections to current urban fantasy.

The sheer alpha-ness of the alpha heroes is starting to overshadow my enjoyment of Patricia Briggs’s work. I adore the Alpha and Omega novella especially… but yeah, very much predicated on some discredited science. I’m amused to see via the io9 comments that Kelley Armstrong (whose series I haven’t kept up with recently) handled this by saying, more or less, “Yeah, but werewolves are different,” and moving on with the story. That’s an awesome retcon.

The question remains… was everyone else Googling wolf pack structure the same day I was?

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This kind of crap went on and on. It was exhausting. Exhausting to figure out how to respond to the relentless misogyny from men who are otherwise kind and educated, who would never think of themselves as chauvinist assholes. … A big pile of reasonably aware and well-intentioned people doing thoughtless shit creates a solid set of stairs for unreasonable, ignorant assholes to say and do what most of us (men and women alike) would deem shockingly destructive.

– KMA Sullivan, “Women are Bitches”

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Not surprisingly, seeing as writers lie for money, we lie to ourselves all the damn time. You start off pretending a project doesn’t mean that much to you, or that you’re writing it to learn, or that you’re writing it for art, or that you need to do something during your lunch break. You tell yourself that your book is genius, that you’re a genius, that if not this book, then the next one. You send stories or novels out and start getting in rejections, and that’s the icing on the lie-cake — maybe my protagonist looked like that editor’s ex-wife, maybe I formatted it wrong, maybe space opera isn’t in (again) this year.

Because on some level the self-denial does protect you, and you need it to survive.

– Cassie Alexander