Puritan Barbarism

Lincoln Michel began his Art Should Be a Doorway, Not a Mirror with this subtitle: Some thoughts on Isabel Fall, social media criticism, and the puritan art police

Okay, I like the idea, so I read some more and then he mentions Isabel Fall. Becaue stuck inside this halfway house, I have not heard of this woman

If you don’t know the story, last week Emily VanDerWerff at Vox’s wrote an excellent and detailed article. Here’s the short version of the story, as I understand it: An unknown writer named Isabel Fall published a short story in Clarkesworld repurposing a right-wing meme about people identifying their gender as helicopters into a dystopian SF story that explores gender, violence, and militarism. Critiques of the story started to build online, perhaps initially from trans readers but quickly being taken up by cis writers—many of whom would later admit they never even read the story—and snowballed into a social media mob who declared the writer an anti-trans, anti-woman, right-wing bigot. 

The Vox piece was a bit more descriptive:

But first in Clarkesworld’s comments and then on Twitter, the combination of the story’s title and the relative lack of information about Fall began to fuel a growing paranoia around the story and its author. The presence of trolls who seemed to take the story’s title at face value only added to that paranoia. And when read through the lens of “Isabel Fall is trolling everybody,” “Attack Helicopter” started to seem menacing to plenty of readers.

“Attack Helicopter” was a slippery, knotty piece of fiction that captured a particular trans feminine uncertainty better than almost anything I have ever read. Set in a nightmarish future in which the US military has co-opted gender to the degree that it turns recruits into literal weapons, it told the story of Barb, a pilot whose gender is “helicopter.” Together with Axis — Barb’s gunner, who was also assigned helicopter — Barb carried out various missions against assorted opposition forces who live within what is at present the United States.

Why is it that science fiction which is supposedly so interested in the future, a different and better future fo the the most part, has such ugliness to it?

Back to Michel's article for this:

This positions art not as a space of exploration, challenge, and mystery—not a doorway to new spaces where we can grow and change—but instead as a mirror to perfectly reflect one’s values back to oneself.  

Historically, puritans start with claims of protecting children. From video games, from rap music, from heavy metal, from queer sex, from dark fiction, from etc. In books, of course, this means children’s literature and YA. There was recently an article from YA insider Nicole Brinkley on the toxicity of the genre called “Did Twitter break YA?” that’s worth reading....

I might quibble with the designation of puritan since reading Marilynne Robinson on the issue of Puritanism. W. Somerset Maugham would have probably called this sort of thinking philistinism, but the philistines were not as known for being as violent as those designated puritans. Which leaves me without any real quibble. 

 And perhaps above all it makes artists afraid to make art. So many artists I know—especially less privileged ones—experience what should be their happiest artistic moments, such as a publication in a great science fiction magazine, with dread. They worry about Twitter pile-ons and Goodreads one-star review bombs. And, sadly, many do scrub their work of its complexity and messiness. The upsides of a few Twitter likes and a small honorarium that won’t cover rent are hard to weigh against the risk of harassment that can destroy your mental health, career, or even life.

So less art gets made, and what is made is less vital. And consequently, there is less space out there for the weirdos and outcasts to exist in. The kind of art that Isabel Fall made, the kind of art that has always spoken to me, is a doorway to new spaces. It makes the world a larger place. Those who want to fence in art and patrol it and limit access to it are making it a smaller and smaller one.  

And what is left us how do want to write honestly? What I read and wrote up in another post about the need for writers to be heretics applies here.