Oh R Scott Bakker no

9 Comments

• 
  Jamie February 10, 2012 at 1:48 pm

  This is very much a side-issue to the main thrust of the brouhaha, I admit, but I am curious about the ‘nomad’ issue; does the word really have cultural connotations that would offend anybody?

  Oxford Dictionaries Online has the following two definitions:

  ‘a member of a people that travels from place to place to find fresh pasture for its animals and has no permanent home’

  and

  ‘a person who does not stay long in the same place; a wanderer’

  Is the second not a valid use of the term? It seemed to me that this was the use that Bakker was aiming for; is that an appropriation of (an)other culture(s)?

  I am aware that there may be problems with the word that I do not appreciate, so I apologise for any ignorance on my part.

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  • 
    Alex Dally MacFarlane February 10, 2012 at 2:09 pm

    Dictionaries are not objective bystanders, you know. They can contain appropriative definitions – they can reflect common usage, which is typically the common usage of the language-majority. In this case, definitely not nomads.

    I would argue that a lot of people using “nomad” in that sense think of nomadism as something like this image:

    

    Needless to say, this does not reflect the realities of nomadic life, which always entails hard work (whether a nomad continuing a thousands-of-years-old lifestyle or a person of our generation who has cut themselves away from sedentary life) and often entails persecution or mistreatment at the hands of sedentary people (the Roma are an example of peoples suffering active, continuing persecution, while a less violent example would be the treatment of ancient Central Asian peoples in many academic texts). It is a hard life, in many many ways, and it is often dismissed by sedentary peoples – or misrepresented – or taken up as some kind of magical ideal by white hipsters. You know, the way they might wear a Native American headdress and claim their great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee Princess? That sort of thing is an exemplar of the marginally less offensive (we’re not all appropriating Native honours) but nonetheless damaging attitudes perpetrated by a lot of people, especially throughout the West, where the main thrust of our culture involves the erasure of all other approaches to life; the result of such attitudes is a loss of cultural diversity around the world.

    I know one person throwing out the word “nomad” doesn’t look like much, but it plays into the above – such “little things” really do bear thinking about.

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• 
  Nic February 10, 2012 at 5:42 pm

  Thanks for this. Poor guy, lying awake for half an hour considering issues that some of us have to spend most of our lives dealing with.

  I’ve tried a couple of Bakker’s books (found one tediously self-involved, and one stodgy but thornily interesting), and met him briefly in person at a con (he seemed nice), but I find his online persona offputting in the extreme. Is he serious or just trolling? Not sure anymore. I would like to think anyone as smart as he appears to be couldn’t be quite so fixed in his assumptions (“of course, truly enlightened people understand that everyone is irrational and subject to the whims and weirdnesses of their brain! including me! except when people are disagreeing with me, at which point I am suddenly KING OF RATIONALITY AND YOU NEED TO PROVE SEXISM WITH, LIKE, EQUATIONS OR ELSE IT DOESN’T EXIST. and now I’m going to call my enemy ‘Dude’, because obviously the best way to prove you’re the rational-est is to get your name-calling on”).

  But then, as a woman you get pretty used to seeing men claiming a monopoly on rationality, don’t you, even when they’re having hysterical fits over the idea that something they like might perhaps be a teensy bit more problematic than they assumed it was? So maybe not that shocking. But I am surprised that someone with extensive academic training could struggle so much with the idea that not all readers will respond to texts in the same way, and that there’s more than one way to read a book, even if you loaded it up with so much philosophical noodling that it doesn’t really have a plot or characters to speak of.

  Also, yes on his ‘nomad’ nonsense. Quite apart from appropriation, it just doesn’t work as an analogy – sure, nomads tend not to spend large amounts of time living in fixed buildings, but it doesn’t mean they’re not embedded within networks of kinship (real or invented), exchange, and practices and ideas linked to cultural identity. Put another way, a nomad who wanders around not belonging to anything or anyone in particular is pretty soon a corpse on the steppe.

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  • 
    Alex Dally MacFarlane February 13, 2012 at 3:46 pm

    That he’s turned out to be so hypocritical doesn’t surprise me especially; I’ve encountered his type before. Genuinely intelligent and well-educated, occasionally thoughtful, but god forbid you suggest you’re more thoughtful. Add male, white privilege to the equation and you get a Bakker, simultaneously smart and really, really stupid. I wish his type were rare.

    And yeah, nomadic peoples belong to very tight kinship groups, ranging from immediate family to tribal, plus the effect of religious affiliations and bonds with other followers of a certain leader and so on. Just because they don’t have fixed houses doesn’t mean they’re not part of important groups. Exactly as you say – there’s no other way they’d survive in the often-harsh environments they inhabit.

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• 
  Mike Allen February 10, 2012 at 7:43 pm

  Late to this, but feel the need to say it somewhere. I was once part of a group discussion at ReaderCon in which Bakker was a participant. It was a panel where way too many guest writers had been included — it seemed like at least 10 writers were sitting at the table, with more of us in the audience — but I recall Bakker specifically because he stood out as someone who clearly loved to hear himself talk and and had no interest in yielding the floor to others or listening to them once they had it. It’s admittedly unfair to let a brief impression substitute for the whole person, but this latest internet kerfluffle looks like more of the same to me.

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• 
  Saajan Patel February 10, 2012 at 8:43 pm

  I think one of the things that is tripping people up is looking for some kind of middle ground in this discussion.

  Rather than everyone hashing out their opinions about this one review on Requires, I think the more interesting question is examining how to discuss the question of misogyny in a manner that engages women even if agreement isn’t reached.

  It seems that we as a global (though not inclusive) society are at the forefront of such discussion, given the realities of sexism and other prejudices that are still extant. So I guess what I’m asking is if I were to face an accusation of misogyny due to my works or my online persona, what is the appropriate reaction?

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  • 
    Athena Andreadis February 13, 2012 at 5:15 pm

    Saajan, this is a partial reply to your question. The main issue, of course, is Mr. Bakker’s works; attached to that, and indicative of his mindset is the fact that he chose to devote so many entries in his blog, so long after the fact, to the critique of Acrackedmoon — and that the entries are essentially convoluted, polysyllabic versions of “You’re mean to meee and my mom/wife/concubine thinks I am too a feminist!!”

    In my opinion, nobody needs to write another work that “interrogates” misogyny by having a heavy-duty, heavy-handed patriarchal setting — particularly not a white Anglo man who rather obviously has led a comfortable life and lacks any context for such a narrative. It has been done ad nauseam — still is being done by the Abercrombie crowd. Some writers have done it well: Sherri Tepper in The Gate to Women’s Country; Le Guin in several of her stories; Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.

    If Mr. Bakker cannot shape his material to convey his (purported) meaning, he’s a poor writer. Judging from the length, vapidity and navel-gazing of his blog entries, it looks like his ambition is to become the Ayn Rand of Neckbeards. I discussed this type of personality in Storytelling, Empathy and the Whiny Solipsist’s Disingenuous Angst. The fact that such people are over-represented in SF/F is not a good thing for the genre.

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• 
  Saajan Patel February 13, 2012 at 3:35 pm

  Bakker’s latest response:

  rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-halftime-show/

  I realize there might be some burnt bridges, but I think it’d be really healthy to get some women identifying as feminists to offer their insight.

  apologies for spamming your blog,

  Saajan

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  • 
    Alex Dally MacFarlane February 13, 2012 at 3:54 pm

    As far as I can tell from a quick skim, Bakker is congratulating himself on liking a feminist’s post, and is then being congratulated by his followers. It’s pathetic. And every time I see him talk about how he’s worried about his daughter or trying to make the world a better place for her, I gag. I wonder if he listens to her whenever she complains about him. (Sady’s post I will read at some point, though, when I have time. Precious magical time.)

    And you’re not spamming, so no worries. I’ll reply to your first comment when I’m not at work and can spare a little time to think. My basic thought is that there is no easy answer and there shouldn’t be – and there certainly shouldn’t be the criteria of it being comfortable for men – but I haven’t had a chance yet to chew that into an argument, let alone one with some actual details in it.

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