January progress and more on the Realms of Fantasy thing

[bodlon]

January continues apace. I took it easy(ish) on Sunday and took last night off entirely because I’d managed to run myself into the ground and needed an extra hour or two of sleep. That means I’m a day behind on prompts — I’ve got 31 for the month of January that I’m banging around with — but I figure I can get that sorted at the weekend.

It looks like the matter of the Women in Fantasy issue over at Realms of Fantasy has developed somewhat, with Douglas Cohen posting an apology and a new call for submissions, and with Shawna McCarthy’s new online presence. (Note: it looks like she’s posting both there and at the RoF site, but the LJ blog looks to be the most up-to-date. If anyone wants to point me to a preferred link, though, I’ll be glad to change it.)

I think that I’m supposed to say that the editorial staff’s shift in position is encouraging, but aside from being pleased that Cohen was receptive to a friend’s good advice on how to speak of women using terms which describe them as equals, not much has changed. There has been no about-face, and no real change in direction. The issue is still problematic for many of the same reasons people have been citing all over the place (namely that one issue on the topic doesn’t represent any kind of sea change, and that the execution is problematic), and while I am cautiously optimistic that some consciousness got raised, RoF still has a hell of a lot of work to do.

For the record, I don’t think that anyone at RoF spends time sitting around in a darkened room with steepled fingers dreaming up new and exciting ways to oppress women. I believe Cohen when he writes that he didn’t intend to offend anyone. I also believe that when someone says something insulting without meaning to, it is because they’re missing a crucial bit of data somewhere in their worldview. Sometimes more than one.

It’s that unconscious bias — that gap in knowledge — that’s so insidious because when we fail because of it we don’t mean to. We think we are being good people, and having our failures pointed out to us is both painful and comes out of nowhere. It’s hard to listen when that happens, or to change, because it can challenge some pretty fundamental things that we carry in our heads.

So, you know, credit where credit is due. Just not ‘job done’ just yet.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com