To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road.
Ursula K. LeGuin in the Left Hand of Darkness
This is a quote I often go back to when I’m arguing or pontificating. LeGuin’s character uses it to explain how the people of Winter step sideways from the “battle of the sexes” in a way people on Earth never managed to.
The people of Winter have no male-vs-female sexism because their biology contains both sex organs, choosing which to present arbitrarily when they are in their mating cycle. Since anyone can be pregnant, pregnancy is supported like it ought to be, and everyone gets their “period” off from work! Obviously, they have other problems, and other problematic sorting of humanity – for example, having a concept of perversion.
LeGuin isn’t saying the solution to our tensions between the male and the female is to change our biology. She’s saying … let’s look away from direct conflict. If we view sexism merely as a binary, as promoting women at the expense of men, that way lies MRA activists and TERFs.
To me, a “sideways” solution to sexism might be the rise of nonbinary identity – the acknowledgement that we are all, in some ways, both male and female, subject to natural physical variance, not to mention the mental product of male and female influences, mentors, idols, companions.
This is not a blog post about sexism. I’m just using it, in a generalized and simplified way, to talk about the difference between the opposition that maintains and the opposition – the stepping aside – that may help dismantle problematic structures. To simply blame one side or the other is to get them to double down, to create the Macho Man and the Real Woman. The MRA and the TERF.
It’s human nature to double down. Psychologists call this “The Backfire Effect.” When your beliefs are challenged, you don’t re-assess them, rather your belief gets stronger. Yes, even you dear reader, enlightened and thoughtful person that you are.
Writers are somewhat complicit in the misconception that force and opposition work. We want to have conflicts resolve, we want the “good guys” to win. We want the catharsis of simple solution, of winning because the hero did the punching better than the villain.
Hey, sometimes that feels good. I write pulp, too.
But these days, when the world feels beset on all sides by unsolvable problems, I wonder what side-steps I am missing. End-runs around corporate pollution. Feints against nationalism.
One of the truly great things about speculative writing is that we get to try things out in a test world. I’ve recently begun writing the next Galactic Hellcats sequel, tentatively titled “Hellcats go to War”, wherein they confront the Evil Queen at last, and I find myself wondering: can they? How do you satisfactorily confront a powerful evil? I suppose this is why fiction loves monarchies – it’s so simple to solve an evil monarch by replacing the monarch. One easy step!
However… usually? New boss… same as the old boss. Even an enlightened person, given authoritarian power, becomes a douchebag. This is another of those unhelpful human psychological traits. “Power Corrupts” isn’t just an adage; it is verified phenomenon, a subject of interest and study among psychologists – like in this paper. The solution is to avoid as much as possible any concentration of power. More democracy, more distributed modes of consensus.
So, perhaps, instead of pulling the queen from her throne, they make her a figurehead? Just snowballing. I don’t have it all figured out, but I do know that there might be some side-step I’m missing. What is the nonbinary sexuality of political systems?
I digress. If I have anything to shout to the void today it is simply this: whatever you are fighting, whatever you oppose, look for that unexpected side-step.
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