Friday, July 11, 2008

For the Record

This is my public statement that I heartily agree with the stances Paul Raven at Futurismic and Andrew Wheeler at Antick Musings have taken over the whole Willaim Sanders at Helix brou-ha-ha.

I would yank my link to Helix, except I never had one. I supported their first issue and donated my small chunk of change to the cause. Then I was reading their forums where Sanders reacted to criticism from a woman by denouncing her using offensive language. Figuring that I wasn't welcome, I stopped reading, linking and donating.

This recent flap doesn't surprise me. He and his defender, Lawrence Watt-Evans (whose books I enjoy and whom I will not be boycotting), claim that he can't be racist/homophobic/misogynistic because he publishes fiction by minorities, gays and women. However, I've seen many an engineer be perfectly fine hiring a woman, then proceed to marginalize her to the point where she quits. They can't imagine themselves as misogynists, but they are. These things are more subtle now than standing atop a desk yelling "Back to the kitchen with you!" (Man, I hope that this won't make me a hypocrite when I post my take on the recent gender debates next week.)

And even those engineers are a darn sight more polite than Sanders is. Racist or not, the guy is simply a jerk. We could do with fewer of those in the field.

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