(content warning: discussion of ableist terms, reference to other slurs)
I changed the URL and title of this blog yesterday, to remove the ableist slur 'stupid'. I apologise wholeheartedly for not doing this sooner and for failing to treat this issue with the gravitas it deserves until now.
The rest of this post is addressed to anyone who thinks this is making mountains out of molehills, or that I needn't have bothered making the change.
Let me start with the obvious: words matter. They have power. I'd be a pretty poor writer if I didn't believe that. And power is always dangerous - not necessarily always harmful, but always accompanied by the danger of causing harm.
Words can become harmful in lots of ways, but one of the most serious is when used to justify (or in the justification of) harmful policies. We rightly regard racial slurs like the n-words as harmful because of their association with governmental policies and societal patterns of slavery and segregation - policies and patterns with costs both measurable (in death and injury figures) and immeasurable (in lost human potential and complex, oppressive legacies).
Why, then, is 'stupid' harmful? It is, after all, a very common word, and one not normally connected to any great opprobrium.
The simplest answer to this is a direct comparison with racist language. Constructions of intelligence have sometimes been used as viciously as constructs of race to justify policies every bit as horrible. The eugenics movements of the early 20th century are the best examples of this - in the 20s and 30s, many 'developed' nations including Britain and America forcibly sterilised people who failed to meet certain standards of 'intelligence' (usually measured with IQ tests - the exact purpose and value of which remains controversial to this day). More famously, Nazi Germany sent people to concentration camps and even gas chambers on 'intelligence' grounds as well as racial.
It's generally good policy to not throw around as insults words that the Nazis used to justify genocide.
One final thing; I want to point out how easy it is to overlook this issue. When I started this blog, I was twenty-three, already in possession of a master's degree and well on my way to a doctorate - hardly able to claim general ignorance, and yet I had no idea that my choice of phrase (a reference to Bill Clinton's famous campaign policy from 1992) could be harmful. Worse, I was literally working in disability support for students at the time - none of my (actually quite limited) training had addressed this issue.
And it gets even worse than that, because a year or two later I was working with a student whose course included modules of disability studies and special educational needs. There were several lectures about ableist language, including specific problems with the language of intelligence, and I still didn't see a problem with my own blog title. It's very easy to dismiss issues when they require you to change.
Learning to rid my everyday vocabulary of words like 'stupid' - to put them in the procribed category where they belong - is not easy. But there are plenty of better words, both as insults and to refer to things that are strange/absurd. We can - and should - live without words that are imbued with such harm.
Here's a great resource for examining ableism generally, and here's their excellent collection of articles addressing specific ableist terms.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Monday, 9 March 2015
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
Video Games
When I'm not writing, and don't have chores of one kind or another to attend to, I spend most of my time playing video games. Gaming is a big part of my life and I particularly enjoy any context I can find that gives me reason to take a game seriously; one of the things I love about World of Warcraft, for example, is that playing with other people at a high level puts an obligation on me to play well, so as not to hold other members of my team back. Currently I'm also very keen on the Games Done Quick marathon, a twice-yearly charity event which has raised over $1.7million this year alone.
But I don't feel comfortable talking about video games here, so much so that I've often thought about starting a second, entirely separate blog just to talk about my gaming experiences. It feels to me as if discussion of video games 'doesn't match' the themes of an author's blog, despite the fact that, as a genre fantasy author, many members of my core target audience are likely to be gamers themselves.
I don't feel the same way about other media. I'm not as interested in cinema as I used to be, but I wouldn't feel uncomfortable blogging about a film that had particularly moved or inspired me, or about something that could be learned from cinema as a form. Similarly, I've often mentioned webcomics, and sequential art in general, to draw comparisons with the ongoing evolution of publishing.
Maybe I'm imagining things, but I feel as if, just because of the association with video games, any similar point I tried to make from them would be dismissed. Part of this is hangover from my childhood, when video games were regarded with considerably greater suspicion than they are now. It took a long time before my parents were willing to let me have much access to games, though they have subsequently admitted that their doubts about the form were misplaced.
It comes down to this; I feel like there still isn't much of a casual audience for discussion of video games. There are specialist groups of various different kinds, including bona fide academic institutions and departments whose main focus is game design, but there isn't much outside of that. I can visit family and talk about my writing, even with people who aren't particularly interested in fantasy, or genre fiction, or even in fiction at all, but I wouldn't expect the same to be true for video games, despite them being an equally significant part of my life.
Maybe it's a bit different in business circles, since games are now one of the largest sectors of the entertainment market in the US and UK (I can't find a better source for the statistic, but I attended a lecture a couple of years ago by this guy, who made the claim that the video game industry is now larger than either film or TV in the US), but I'm not sure that's a discussion that would touch very much on game content.
The solution really ought to be for me to start talking about the stuff I'd like to talk about in a non-hardcore-gaming sphere and see if anybody listens, but I'm not quite willing to stick my neck out that far. If all else fails, time will doubtless do for games what it has done for all other forms of media - the average age of 'gamers' is now apparently 30, and the average age of game buyers is higher (though some of that will be parents buying - perhaps still with some reluctance - for their kids).
If you're a regular reader of this blog, and particularly if you don't consider yourself a gamer, I'd be very interested in your views on this; would you be surprised to see video game topics here? Would you read a blog post about video games (apart from this one)? Thanks for reading.
But I don't feel comfortable talking about video games here, so much so that I've often thought about starting a second, entirely separate blog just to talk about my gaming experiences. It feels to me as if discussion of video games 'doesn't match' the themes of an author's blog, despite the fact that, as a genre fantasy author, many members of my core target audience are likely to be gamers themselves.
I don't feel the same way about other media. I'm not as interested in cinema as I used to be, but I wouldn't feel uncomfortable blogging about a film that had particularly moved or inspired me, or about something that could be learned from cinema as a form. Similarly, I've often mentioned webcomics, and sequential art in general, to draw comparisons with the ongoing evolution of publishing.
Maybe I'm imagining things, but I feel as if, just because of the association with video games, any similar point I tried to make from them would be dismissed. Part of this is hangover from my childhood, when video games were regarded with considerably greater suspicion than they are now. It took a long time before my parents were willing to let me have much access to games, though they have subsequently admitted that their doubts about the form were misplaced.
It comes down to this; I feel like there still isn't much of a casual audience for discussion of video games. There are specialist groups of various different kinds, including bona fide academic institutions and departments whose main focus is game design, but there isn't much outside of that. I can visit family and talk about my writing, even with people who aren't particularly interested in fantasy, or genre fiction, or even in fiction at all, but I wouldn't expect the same to be true for video games, despite them being an equally significant part of my life.
Maybe it's a bit different in business circles, since games are now one of the largest sectors of the entertainment market in the US and UK (I can't find a better source for the statistic, but I attended a lecture a couple of years ago by this guy, who made the claim that the video game industry is now larger than either film or TV in the US), but I'm not sure that's a discussion that would touch very much on game content.
The solution really ought to be for me to start talking about the stuff I'd like to talk about in a non-hardcore-gaming sphere and see if anybody listens, but I'm not quite willing to stick my neck out that far. If all else fails, time will doubtless do for games what it has done for all other forms of media - the average age of 'gamers' is now apparently 30, and the average age of game buyers is higher (though some of that will be parents buying - perhaps still with some reluctance - for their kids).
If you're a regular reader of this blog, and particularly if you don't consider yourself a gamer, I'd be very interested in your views on this; would you be surprised to see video game topics here? Would you read a blog post about video games (apart from this one)? Thanks for reading.
Thursday, 3 July 2014
Blog Topics
I'm starting to run out of things to blog about. Or at least, I'm starting to struggle to think of new topics again. I have a couple of half-ideas knocking around, and if nothing else comes up I'm sure they'll see the light of day soon, for better or worse, but the reason I'm blogging today rather than a couple of days ago when a new post was about due is that a couple of days ago I realy didn't think I had anything ready to say.
I feel like I blog best when I blog about my own personal experiences pretty directly. At least, when I stick to quiet little stuff about how my life is going and what it involves, I incur far less scorn (and outright anger) from people whose judgement I respect. My hit counter has been climbing a lot faster since I started trying this approach, too: after generating less than 5,000 hits in the last quarter of 2013, I've had more than that every month in 2014, with June topping out at over 18,000.
The problem is, though, that 'my own personal experience' is a pretty narrow field at the moment. Life is good: I write, I play video games, and everything else is ordinary domestic routine. However good I am as a writer, I'm pretty terrible at writing about writing. And I have some awkward hang-ups about blogging about video games, at least to a non-gamer-specific audience (okay, I guess that will do for next week's topic).
There are, of course, plenty of topics in the real world that need talking about, but past experience suggests I'm not the one to be addressing them, at least in this kind of context. The legacy of spending so many years in academia is that I tend to write quite stiffly, even arrogantly, about 'big issues', and to cloud over my core message with either laboured humour or needless pedantry.
Another problem with the idea of me blogging about topical issues is how isolated I am from them. Cash-poor though I may be, my material wealth is considerable. My family provide a generous safety-net (which I am determined to never rely on again, but having it there does a lot to help my confidence and courage). As a straight, white, middle-class man in Britain, I sit in a position of considerable privilege; I can live my ordinary life and never experience discrimination, violence or hatred unless I seek them out.
That doesn't excuse me from thinking about them, but it does mean that my personal experience - the kind of thing I can blog about - is largely irrelevant to those issues. My engagement there should be founded in listening to the voices of others, learning from them, and doing what I can to boost their signals, rather than trying to add my own. The best I could do here, in a blogging context, would be to write about how I'm trying to change my behaviour to reflect what I've learned - and I'd have to be rather more confident that I'm on the right track before I could find the courage to do that.
I'm starting to worry that even this is too preachy - one of the things I have learned from listening to others, particularly people whose lives are routinely affected by injustice, is that my judgement about how the world does or should work, and about how I should behave, is profoundly unreliable. That lack of confidence in my own instinctive opinion is probably healthy (after all, I mainly write about men whose surfeit of self-confidence causes tremendous harm to those around them), but it does make sharing my views a little more intimidating.
I feel like I blog best when I blog about my own personal experiences pretty directly. At least, when I stick to quiet little stuff about how my life is going and what it involves, I incur far less scorn (and outright anger) from people whose judgement I respect. My hit counter has been climbing a lot faster since I started trying this approach, too: after generating less than 5,000 hits in the last quarter of 2013, I've had more than that every month in 2014, with June topping out at over 18,000.
The problem is, though, that 'my own personal experience' is a pretty narrow field at the moment. Life is good: I write, I play video games, and everything else is ordinary domestic routine. However good I am as a writer, I'm pretty terrible at writing about writing. And I have some awkward hang-ups about blogging about video games, at least to a non-gamer-specific audience (okay, I guess that will do for next week's topic).
There are, of course, plenty of topics in the real world that need talking about, but past experience suggests I'm not the one to be addressing them, at least in this kind of context. The legacy of spending so many years in academia is that I tend to write quite stiffly, even arrogantly, about 'big issues', and to cloud over my core message with either laboured humour or needless pedantry.
Another problem with the idea of me blogging about topical issues is how isolated I am from them. Cash-poor though I may be, my material wealth is considerable. My family provide a generous safety-net (which I am determined to never rely on again, but having it there does a lot to help my confidence and courage). As a straight, white, middle-class man in Britain, I sit in a position of considerable privilege; I can live my ordinary life and never experience discrimination, violence or hatred unless I seek them out.
That doesn't excuse me from thinking about them, but it does mean that my personal experience - the kind of thing I can blog about - is largely irrelevant to those issues. My engagement there should be founded in listening to the voices of others, learning from them, and doing what I can to boost their signals, rather than trying to add my own. The best I could do here, in a blogging context, would be to write about how I'm trying to change my behaviour to reflect what I've learned - and I'd have to be rather more confident that I'm on the right track before I could find the courage to do that.
I'm starting to worry that even this is too preachy - one of the things I have learned from listening to others, particularly people whose lives are routinely affected by injustice, is that my judgement about how the world does or should work, and about how I should behave, is profoundly unreliable. That lack of confidence in my own instinctive opinion is probably healthy (after all, I mainly write about men whose surfeit of self-confidence causes tremendous harm to those around them), but it does make sharing my views a little more intimidating.
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