Post: #1

I really do feel sorry for you guys:

Quote:Are you reading too many books by straight white men?

Imagine, if you can, the unholy furor that would erupt if a white male author penned an article where he implored his readers to put a complete ban on buying books by black, Jewish, gay or even female authors.

A lynch mob of social justice warriors would hound the author into obscurity, forever condemning him as a racist, homophobic, misogynistic pig who had no right to a public voice, let alone a publishing deal.

Yet the same thing is happening right now in reverse, as a growing online voice is imploring readers to stop buying books written by white, heterosexual men.
It reached critical mass on February 22, with a blog written by K Tempest, a little-known New York feminist writer hoping – and succeeding – to cause a stink (and no doubt get publicity for her own work), when she challenged readers to stop reading books by “straight white cisgendered male authors for a year”.

She said most books were “skewed heavily toward privileged voices” and some even made her “ragequit” reading them.



Perhaps predictably, Tempest’s message went down badly in certain quarters, drawing such scathing abuse that she compiled a blog featuring the most offensive tweets. She was called a “black supremacist” who was "intolerant, censorious, and an obstruction of the free exchange of ideas that is essential to freedom itself." One simply read, “I challenge you to throw yourself in a wood chipper”.
Tellingly, there was no such outrage from the white male authors singled out for censorship by Tempest.

Top of Tempest’s hit-list was British-born sci-fi author Neil Gaiman, a New York Times number one bestseller. He graciously tweeted a link of Tempest’s blog to his 2.19 million followers, saying it was “great” and that he didn’t “mind being the posterbook” for her contempt. He cleverly realised there was far more merit in allowing Tempest to dig her own grave than dignify her outpourings with a rebuttal.
Yet Tempest isn’t alone in suggesting we should eschew white male writers. Days before her outburst, Sunili Govinnage wrote in The Guardian of her own experience of reading 25 books in 2014, all of which were by authors of colour. This was a reaction to a perceived “inherent bias” in publishing.

Next up, in a blog entitled “The Great Internet Debate On Not Reading White Men” fantasy author Saladin Ahmed claimed: “The market itself is racist and sexist in all sorts of unseen ways” and then offered a helpful link to his own books for sale.

The We Need Diverse Books Campaign on Tumblr has taken things a stage further, supporting “diverse, non-majority narratives” in children’s books. It points out that children’s books have a lack of black, lesbian, gay and transgender role models. They also claim that sexism is rife in kid’s books, as while 57 per cent of kid’s books published each year have male protagonists, while only 31 per cent have female.

Of course, you could just say to these critics, who are hell-bent on having us stop reading books by white men: “Stop, already: we’re all free to buy the books we want”.

If Ms Tempest et al want to buy books by transgender authors, let them crack on, as long as they're aware that many of the rest of us don’t share their tastes.
But the big question is: do such outspoken attacks on white men (for the record, Tempest is a woman of colour) constitute some form of sexism – or even racism?
Some of Tempest’s more vocal critics have cried precisely that. Many others have pointed out that racism against whites can’t ever exist, because we have privilege and power and white people aren’t even oppressed.

But something odd is happening, and it has the beginnings of something altogether more sinister: white men are increasingly being singled out for abuse, especially on social media, precisely because they are white and male.

This bizarre trend even has a name: “punching up”, where it is OK to prejudice against white people (mainly men) – and because we’ve had it so good, for so long, we have absolutely no right to answer back.

It was curious this week, for example, that much of the criticism of Jeremy Clarkson centered on his maleness, whiteness and “privilege” and not just the fact he’d been a bit of an arse over an absent steak.

What’s even more curious is that, often, the white bashers are white themselves – and in a further bizarre twist, often it is liberal, middle-class white males doing the knocking. Are they consumed by a “white guilt” that fills them with a need to self-flagellate for the sins of their forefathers on Twitter, while approving feminists applaud?

We appear to live in an age where it’s fashionable, encouraged almost, to knock white males. Are white men becoming the last group it’s safe to knock? Is it just a timely revenge for generations of “privilege” that all white men have enjoyed, presumably even those millions killed in wars or rotting in prisons, or sleeping rough tonight.

Not to mention those young men, many of them white, who are four times as likely to commit suicide as women, nor the white, working-class boys who are now Britain’s educational underclass.

Put in that context, does any of this petty, white man-bashing matter? Like anybody who still mindlessly attacks other people for having differently coloured skin or gender, should we just put it down to where it comes from: ignorance and stupidity?

Perhaps I’d better read up about it – so long as the book isn’t written by a white man, naturally.

Post: #2

Quote:They also claim that sexism is rife in kid’s books, as while 57 per cent of kid’s books published each year have male protagonists, while only 31 per cent have female.

And what about the other 12%?

On another note, I'm not surprised that this continues. It's being fueled further by the fringe theorists of our universities and thus, a new class of crazy graduates every spring, a tiny bit crazier than the last. I wouldn't worry too much though, eventually they'll reach a critical point where they'll self-immolate in protest of the White Patriarchy™ and the problem will fix itself.

Post: #3

Does the ban apply to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Hemingway too?

Shit, if you want to go after the real men you should start there.

Post: #4

Men write too many books and are oppressing women with their literature? Isn't one of the chief feminist arguments that men are stupid horny gorillas who need women to domesticate them?

Who drew and wrote on the original caves? Cavemen.

Who harvested and soaked the rough fibers of papyrus? Egyptian men.

Who polished tortoise shells and cut granite for the primitive printing press, and domesticated horses for tail brushes? Chinese men.

Who wrote the book on modern medicine, philosophy, governance, engineering, architecture and economics? Archimedes, Cicero, Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Anaxagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, Homer

Who died on a cross and whose book led to the invention of the mechanical printing press? Jesus H. Christ.

Who always lays there with their legs open and complains throughout all 12,000 years of history...

...Women.



With that being said, who is supposed to check their privilege?

Post: #5

Lol, this chick is a black female feminist. Luckily, I don't run into these types too much, but I will say what I always say: when you have a problem in the white community you have a full-blown disaster in the black community.

This chick is batshit insane.

People aren't reading enough in general, so if a guy picks up a book I'm happy; who gives a fuck if it's a white guy who likes women?

I read books because the ideas contained within are worth ingesting, not because the person is a tranny, woman or gay. Madness.

Post: #6

I'm offended that my eventual children (boy or girl) will be forced to read books and watch cartoons with such a disproportionate number of protagonists that are rabbits or mice.

Post: #7

(03-16-2015 03:59 PM)Game_Started Wrote:  It reached critical mass on February 22, with a blog written by K Tempest, a little-known New York feminist writer hoping – and succeeding – to cause a stink (and no doubt get publicity for her own work), when she challenged readers to stop reading books by “straight white cisgendered male authors for a year”.

She said most books were “skewed heavily toward privileged voices” and some even made her “ragequit” reading them.
.

[/quote]

   

Post: #8

This is exactly the same sort of SJW shit that kicked off GamerGate.

Privileged, preening, progressives crying like little bitches for special treatment because:

1) They're little bitches; and

2) They don't have much in the way of talent that anybody's willing to pay for.

Take K. Tempest Bradford, for example:


I'm guessing that's a cook book

Here's some background on the BBW who hates "privileged voices":

Quote:Privilege huh? From what I’ve heard about Tempest, she grew up in a rich family. Luckily one of my readers copy and pasted some stuff from her bio into the comments. She attended NYU—which I believe is the most expensive undergraduate program in America—to study opera. She then dropped out to attend the “Gallatin School for Individualized Study” where “There we had no “majors”, only “concentrations”. My concentrations were in performance, writing, the history of mythology, interstitial art (though we didn’t call it that, then), and the collective unconscious”

But wait, there’s more about what it means to live such a life of marginalized hardship: “After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous, I decided to throw it all away so I could attend Clarion West in 2003. I left my job, left New York, and left any notion that I’d be leading a normal life in the dust. After Clarion West I wandered around the country for a few years visiting friends, writing, and discovering that all one needs to survive in life is confidence, charm, and many well-off friends. In 2006 I returned to New York City and took up freelancing to support myself.”

I know when I think of marginalized lives, I think of mooching off your rich friends while playing tourist.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/2...a-fisking/

So, just like Zoe "Five Cocks" Quinn or Brianna "No Longer Has A Cock" Wu, Bradford is a spoiled rich kid who has never had to do an honest day's work in her life.

Her books are the literary equivalent of "Depression Quest" or "Tranny Quest" or whatever the fuck Wu's game was called: unpopular, poorly made, vanity project garbage that Joe and Josephina Public doesn't have any interest in buying. So her only hope for a career in writing is through getting the SJW clique to polish her e-clit.

Ultimately this doesn't matter in the real world, because the olden days when publishing houses were the gatekeepers of the literary world are gone. Amazon is the new gatekeeper, and Amazon doesn't give a fiddler's fart about SJW agendas, Amazon only wants to sell you books. If you have the ability to write something that people will be willing to pay money for, you don't need a publisher - you can self-publish it on Kindle without leaving your home.

Publishing is dying, but books are more popular than ever, and some of the most popular names in fiction are women: JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, that hagbeast who wrote 50 Shades of Grey...

But what all those women have in common is that they give the public what they want - not lecture them about genderqueers or try to guilt-trip them about the plight of handicapable lesbian Eskimos.

Tempest Bradford fancies herself a science fiction author. Want to hazard a guess at what the biggest selling (non YA) science fiction book of recent times is? It's not by K Tempest Bradford or any of her SJW pals.

It's "The Martian", by Andy Weir.



Andy Weir isn't (or wasn't) a professional writer. He doesn't have an arts degree. Didn't join any of the SJW-approved writing cliques. He probably doesn't even check his privilege!

He's just a computer programmer who had a story to tell, thought people would like it, and didn't have any publishing or media contacts. So he self published it. It was a massive success, publishing houses scrambled to throw money at him, and now Twentieth Century Fox is making a film based on it.

Here's the sales ranking for The Martian:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#2 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Exploration
#3 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > High Tech
#7 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Science Fiction

Now let's compare that with K Tempest Bradford's latest novel. She's been trying establish herself as a science fiction author for 15 years, so she must have a few to choose from, right?



Ha ha! Nope. She hasn't published a single book in all that time. The best she's been able to do is contribute a handful of short stories to a few poorly selling compendiums. This is the sales ranking for the most successful recent one, "Diverse Energies":

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #404,457 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Ouch! That's got to hurt.


Don't worry, she likes it.

Post: #9

Might as well burn and ban them. Maybe that will help her frail feelings.

Post: #10

Larry Correia did a great fisking of one of her xojane articles last month:

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/2...a-fisking/

Quote:Pick any whackadoo Social Justice Warrior controversy in sci-fi/fantasy publishing over the last few years and you’ll find K. Tempest Bradford in the middle of it. She is perpetually outraged that someone may be out there, right now, having fun wrong.
Let’s start by analyzing this picture of Tempest giving America a good scolding.

Basically, Gaiman wrote a book called Trigger Warnings, which triggered SJWs. Now, Gaiman has offended these people before by saying that maybe they shouldn’t be so quick to form angry lynch mobs against innocent people, like when they attacked and slandered his friend comedian Jonathan Ross into resigning from being the Hugo MC because he *might* hypothetically, in the future, tell a fat joke.
For those of you just joining us, not I’m not making that up. SJWs are really that paranoid and vindictive.
But anyways, because he stood up against witch hunts, and was in favor of telling the truth about someone rather than the narrative, Gaiman equals Satan-Hitler.
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.

[…]

Quote:Then I thought: what if I only read stories by a certain type of author? Instead of reading everything, I would only look at stories by women or people of color or LGBT writers. Essentially: no straight, cis, white males.
I suppose that would make sense, if you’re a huge bigot blinded by irrational hatred.
Cutting that one demographic out of my reading list greatly improved my enjoyment of reading short stories.
Now just flip that “that one demographic” to Jews and see how much that sounds like a skin head.
That’s not to say I didn’t come across bad stories or offensive stuff in stories or other things that turned me off. I did. But I came across this stuff far less than previously.
So, Gay and Lesbian People of Color, you still offend Tempest, but not enough to cause RAGEQUIT. Don’t worry. Once all the White Cismales are gone, you will be reeducated so that there is no danger of you having fun in an unapproved manner and causing microaggressions.
Limiting myself in this way also made me aware of how often certain magazines published whole issues in which no women or POC authors made an appearance.
Fun Fact: Did you know that when you submit a story to an editor, there is no place on your query letter to tell them about your Race/Sex/Orientation?

Post: #11

What would we be left with if they banned all books by straight white men?

Children's books.

Post: #12

Archeological discoveries are also mostly man made. We have to do something about it to make things more fair.

Post: #13

Post: #14

SteveMcMahon....... Dude is on FIRE lately.

Post: #15

Yet she obviously has no problem eating all that food produced by straight white men.

Post: #16

I wonder if she would support Roosh's books... He's cis-gendered (read normal) but he is of middle eastern ethnicity.

Post: #17

How is that martian book? I was thinking about renting it.

Post: #18

Whatever race you are, McMahon, write a fucking book.

I'd buy it in an instant.

Post: #19

(03-16-2015 06:26 PM)Pontifex Maximus Wrote:  Who drew and wrote on the original caves? Cavemen.

Who harvested and soaked the rough fibers of papyrus? Egyptian men.

Who polished tortoise shells and cut granite for the primitive printing press, and domesticated horses for tail brushes? Chinese men.

Who wrote the book on modern medicine, philosophy, governance, engineering, architecture and economics? Archimedes, Cicero, Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Anaxagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, Homer

Who died on a cross and whose book led to the invention of the mechanical printing press? Jesus H. Christ.

(03-16-2015 07:04 PM)kbell Wrote:  Might as well burn and ban them. Maybe that will help her frail feelings.

I'm going to write a parody article that agrees with her and argues that since all the classics are written by men and we don't have any classics written by women, we should ban all of the classic altogether to create a level playing field.

Post: #20

(03-16-2015 09:06 PM)Old Fritz Wrote:  How is that martian book? I was thinking about renting it.

I picked this up in the book store and then put it back on the shelf.

I didn't know it was popular. I thought it was some bargain bin special.

I felt like I was reading a long reddit post that had been drafted on some obscure thread and then copy and pasted into a book.

It reads like that.

Too much pussy-footing protagonist who's not sure of himself. People write these characters because they themselves lack confidence to write characters with balls. Pass.

Post: #21

(03-17-2015 12:26 AM)memcpy Wrote:  I felt like I was reading a long reddit post that had been drafted on some obscure thread and then copy and pasted into a book.

It reads like that.

Yeah, that's because it was written on a blog, post by post. He was simply writing it down and others found it over time and showed it to their friends. They then asked him to put it all in a book and I figure he just took each separate blog post and stitched them together.

Post: #22

There are too many inventions created by straight white men.

We should boycott all straight white male inventions e.g. antibiotics, internal combustion engines, the internet, constitutional democracy, etc, etc. etc.

She does make one point I kind of agree with though. I wish there were more female protagonists in children's books, particularly female protagonists that reinforce traditional gender roles. I read to my daughter a lot and notice very few female characters.

Post: #23

I took a couple of Speculative Fiction and Feminist Lit courses (and emerged unscathed - with a few collected notches in fact). A bunch of back-patting, penis envying bullshit centered on an 'empowered' woman and there's always - without exception - some depiction of rape, incest or transgenderism, in EVERY book written by a female author that the syllabus covered, or sex as being somehow 'empowering'. It wouldn't shock me if every book written by a woman in the last 20 years had these.

What's worse is that I think in any literature course it's required to have books by female authors. I took a Lit of the American South course. Included were The Color Purple and To Kill a Mockingbird...



...and Their Eyes were Watching God (notable exclusions: Light in August, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Confederacy of Dunces)



And if it's not this it's narcissistic 'woe is me!' crap (The Bell Jar) or really, really terribly written (50 Shades).

Of course I do have great respect for the works of a select very few female authors (Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Maya Angelou, Charlotte or Emily Brontë etc,.), but 98% of the time if I see a female name as the author I pass.

Why didn't I read The Hunger Games? Female author.
Why didn't I read Twilight? Female author (also not a 12 year old girl).
Why didn't I read The Girl with the ...? Female author (wait...it was a dude!? Oh, Swedish, right...)

You get it.

Post: #24

BBW black woman angry that she can't get that good white dick Blames patriarchy.

Post: #25

These SJW are totally missing the point:

Reading books written by women and non-whites is not enough to eliminate the white male privilege.

ALL books should be burned because books are inventions of white males. Otherwise even if you read a book written by a black lesbian midget you are still subjecting yourself to a patriarchal frame by using letters/paper/printing/Kindle all of which are inventions made by men.