In the wake of the Amelie Wen Zhao controversy, I’ve decided I’m probably going to co-write with my partner, publish under a male name, and let him be the “face.”
I don’t want to be female in public. If I’m perceived as a man, my work doesn’t have to meet any particular purity guidelines. The bar for moral acceptability from male content creators is much, much lower.
Yes, I saw “Big Eyes.” We will draw up legal paperwork and shit.I’m not familiar with this controversy, but I’m moderately surprised by this - I would have expected the opposite. Maybe that only works on gender?
Well - from where I’m sitting - it seems like men actually have to get brought into a #MeToo scandal or say something *overtly* racist, sexist, or transphobic. They aren’t picked apart by their own constituency the way women are - but not being a man, I could be wrong, I probably have no idea how it looks from the male point of view.
From my point of view, it looks like men (especially men perceived as white and straight) are just straight up not allowed to have opinions on anything “woke” at all whatsoever… Unless they are Wokeman Beardson (who can get away with murder), but that requires Total Dishonesty.
Of course, you can just ignore it all, but that makes you an outsider and you can still get hit by some stuff.
I don’t dispute the “being picked apart” thing, though.
I’m not an expert in the field by any means, but…I think that the man/woman distinction, with regard to this particular horror, is disguising the actual distinction that is doing work. Which is literary genre.
Probably, all else being equal, a female author is less likely than a male author to be brigaded on account of Wokeness Failure.
But this isn’t about a “female author” in the abstract, this is about a female author of a YA fantasy novel. And, as far as I can tell, the YA world is way more immersed in the horrors of ideological policing than most other parts of the publishing world are. Like, orders of magnitude more. The tastemakers and influencers aren’t fashionable high-class chatterati (who in fact tend to be pretty chill unless they’re provoked, or are advancing a private social agenda); they are actual goddamn Tumblr kids, for whom fighting about ideological micro-issues is a way of life, for whom being righteous on these matters is a primary source of validation, and for whom perspective and charity are altogether beside the point.
YA is an overwhelmingly female world. Probably any men who venture in there are at even higher risk of getting brigaded than are their female counterparts.
(This is leaving aside the separate issue that is “men are probably more likely to dig in their heels and sneer rather than immediately folding, and many of these storms blow over fast if you’re prepared to weather them.”)