May 2nd, 2008
by
Yonmei
You all knew about homophobic Card, right?
Orson Scott Card is not a champion of fandom and fannish works. But in a recent essay in his “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything” series, which also included reviews of the Harry Potter movies, (via Avedon, thanks) he is apparently defending a fan’s right to take a fannish enterprise and republish commercially.
The essay is J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz, but it might as well have been called “Smack The Uppity Bitch”.
There a longer outline of the case here, but for a quick summary: back when the first Harry Potter book came out, a fan named Steve Vander Ark began to compile a lexicon. He wasn’t attempting to do criticism or review or analysis: he was simply providing an online resource, like a concordance, which took spells, characters, locations, etc, from the books, and defined them using quotes from the books: it was a searchable online resource, and it made SVA (so Harry Potter fans tell me) a very BNF indeed. As a commercial work, I think this couldn’t have been done without the copyright holder’s consent: as a fannish enterprise, it went ahead quite happily until SVA announced he had a book contract to publish the Lexicon. He had asked J. K. Rowling for permission to do this, she’d refused, and he’d decided to go ahead without her permission.
In the link above there is a lot of factual information about how Rowling and her publishers and WBA tried to get a pre-publication copy of the Lexicon from the publishers or from SVA to find out whether it was in breach of copyright – if in defence of her own intellectual property, Rowling would have to bring suit – and being denied.
Orson Scott Card mentions none of this in his flame of Rowling. He begins by claiming that Rowling was inspired by Ender’s Game (I think receiving the Margaret A. Edwards Award has gone to his already swollen head):
I can get on the stand and cry, too, Ms. Rowling, and talk about feeling “personally violated.”
The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender’s Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote.
He adds:
And don’t forget the lawsuit by Nancy K. Stouffer, the author of a book entitled The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, whose hero was named “Larry Potter.”
This is the kind of “argument” he used in his attack on same-sex marriage. He is counting on his readers sweeping over this as a “oh yes, so Rowling plagiarised too” evidence – when, as he must surely be aware (among the many places where this lawsuit was examined and shown to be valueless, his editor’s own blog, Making Light [Correction: my mistake. Card's editor does not blog at Making Light. Apologies for any confusion. Thanks to PNH for the info.]) this particular lawsuit is evidence of nothing beyond nutterie. He’s deliberately and nastily making use of an incident which does not say anything about Rowling: it says something about Stouffer.
Card goes on to say:
Rowling has nowhere to go and nothing to do now that the Harry Potter series is over. After all her literary borrowing, she shot her wad and she’s flailing about trying to come up with something to do that means anything.
Moreover, she is desperate for literary respectability. Even though she made more money than the queen or Oprah Winfrey in some years, she had to see her books pushed off the bestseller lists and consigned to a special “children’s book” list. Litterateurs sneer at her work as a kind of subliterature, not really worth discussing.
It makes her insane. The money wasn’t enough. She wants to be treated with respect.
Well, gosh, how dare a mere woman – and one who famously supported herself as a single mother by her writing! – want to be treated with respect?
Further, I have honestly seen nothing that indicates that Rowling is “desperate” for “literary respectability”. (I admit, I may have missed something. But Orson Scott Card doesn’t cite anything: he merely prefaces the above flame with “You know what I think is going on?”)
But I have seen a lot of Card’s writing about his own work that strongly suggests he himself is desperate for “literary respectability” – that it kills him that he, as a SF writer, is furious that his work is “sneered at” as “as a kind of subliterature, not really worth discussing.”.
And he doesn’t even make the kind of money J. K. Rowling made.
After wishfully hoping that Rowling will lose her suit and have to pay the other side’s costs, Card climaxes with a reference to Rowling’s post-publication outing of Dumbledore:
What a pretentious, puffed-up coward. When I have a gay character in my fiction, I say so right in the book. I don’t wait until after it has had all its initial sales to mention it.
And after that spunk-splatter, he’s done.
I knew Card was a homophobic git: now I know he’s a misogynistic wanker.
Look, I can’t say whether J. K. Rowling will win or lose her case against SVA/RDR (the prospective publishers of the Lexicon). But she absolutely has a sensible case – this is not Stouffer-land. (If you have several hours to spare, there’s a very long and very linky entry about Lexicongate at fandonwank’s wiki.)
Card is flaming Rowling not because he’s supportive of fannish enterprises: he never has been, and there’s no indication he is now. He doesn’t like Rowling because, a fellow-writer in “genre” fiction, she has achieved material success he can’t aspire to. I suspect he also doesn’t like her because by US standards she is a rampant leftie (by UK standards, a moderate liberal), and especially because by Mormon standards, she is a loose woman (married twice, divorced once). She is notoriously supportive of children’s and women’s issues – one of the things she did with her billions was found a charitable trust). He may like her writing – but he doesn’t have to like her. He’s an ugly, small-minded man, is Card: homophobic, misogynistic, rampantly disgusting.
—
Update: a lawyer points out that Orson Scott Card is conflating and confusing two separate legal issues.
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Yonmei at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Publishing, fandom, geek sexism, women writers | Comments (47)
Isn’t Rowling on record as saying she doesn’t read contemporary fantasy and SF? I’d be surprised if she’s even heard of Ender’s Game.
And as for the idea that academics look down on Rowling … I personally know instructors who’ve included HP books in their curricula, and there are plenty of academic papers discussing them as literature (not just as pop culture).
I actually do think Rowling is derivative, in much the same way George Lucas is derivative – both of them are steeped in certain material (British boarding school stories and folklore for Rowling, Saturday-morning serials and samurai movies for Lucas) and synthesize those elements into something that’s both new and comfortably familiar.
now I know he’s a misogynistic wanker.
Is this your way of saying you haven’t read Ender’s Game?
I actually do think Rowling is derivative
Oh goodness, yes, of course: she’s writing in the tradition of the British boarding-school story, with magic, and a good deal of folklore mixed in. There is no such thing as a new story in all the world, and I don’t think anyone’s seriously claimed that Rowling was writing works of dazzling originality.
Is this your way of saying you haven’t read Ender’s Game?
No. Are you unfamiliar with my previous writings on Orson Scott Card?
The tone of the piece made it impossible for me to seriously consider his points. He could have expressed the same arguments without being so nasty about it. I came away wondering why he’s so angry at Rowling. It has to be over more than the legal action. You suggest a few possible reasons, all plausible, but I guess only he really knows.
Are you unfamiliar with my previous writings on Orson Scott Card?
If you’ve written about sexism in Ender’s Game, could you link it? All I remember seeing by you about Card had to do with his homophobia.
EG goes beyond the usual underrepresentation of female characters, and casting female characters in secondary roles, to out-and-out claim that evolution has suited women for certain roles. So I can’t see why someone who’s read it would just now be learning that Card is misogynist, which is how the text I quoted reads to me.
SarahE: The tone of the piece made it impossible for me to seriously consider his points. He could have expressed the same arguments without being so nasty about it.
As far as I can see, he doesn’t really have an argument at all.
The piece looks very like something thrown together in a dreadful rush without any research beyond the most rapid skim through Google – the kind of thing that would find this (the Geocities site Card links to in his article: the page itself is down due to overload, but the Googlecache is visible) and the Stouffer lawsuit, without bothering to notice that there is nothing like what you could call evidence of plagiarism or derivative work on Rowling’s part in either case.
As Roger Williams notes in Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat, he notes that having listened to Card splutter about how the Hitler Hypothesis couldn’t be true,
The more Card comes out with this kind of wankerie when he is not being edited, the more I’m inclined – if not to believe that he didn’t write them – to believe that most of his stuff is this level of crap without a good editor.
Either that, or he’s the kind of vapidly evil person who thinks that once you hate someone, you’re entitled to lie as much as you like when attacking them.
TC: All I remember seeing by you about Card had to do with his homophobia.
So you were aware I’d read Ender’s Game, and it was a personal attack disguised as a rhetorical question. Okay. If you can debate politely, do: if you can’t, feel free to find some other thread.
So you were aware I’d read Ender’s Game, and it was a personal attack disguised as a rhetorical question.
No, I wasn’t. I read your piece on Card’s homophobia some time ago, when the issue came up, and hadn’t revisited it since for details. It really was a rhetorical question. I found the misogyny in EG to be very on-the-surface, and I wouldn’t have thought that anyone who’d read EG would be surprised to see Card making misogynist attacks elsewhere.
I found the misogyny in EG to be very on-the-surface, and I wouldn’t have thought that anyone who’d read EG would be surprised to see Card making misogynist attacks elsewhere.
Well, that would have been a better way to phrase your first comment, so shall we pretend that’s how you did phrase your first comment?
Okay.
Insofar as any writer’s character can be perceived via their fiction, I think that Ender’s Game comes across as a man barely past boyhood writing about boys playing wargames. I’ve read both the short story and the novel. Neither one comes across as particularly misogynistic given the culture in which Orson Scott Card was brought up and in which he lives.
The older Orson Scott Card is. the more splenetic he seems to have become about the values of his chosen culture: Right-wing American patriotic Mormonism.
Your argument appears to be that because a writer, living in a sexist culture, writes a sexist short story which becomes a sexist novel, it should then surprise no one that 23 years later he writes a splenetic flame of a very successful writer who is a woman.
Doesn’t work. There are any number of male writers, who in 1985 (or earlier, or later) published novels or short stories which were as sexist as Ender’s Game. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have now written a spiteful, acid-reflux flame directed at J. K. Rowling. If this were inevitable, most or all of them would have.
You could have started this argument with other short stories or other novels by Card and would have had a better case. (You could have started this argument in almost any other way and got me more inclined for thoughtful discussion.)
Indeed, you could even now recover this argument by actually commenting with substance: quotes from Card’s early work which you can justify as openly misogynist. Or perhaps you’ve already done this, somewhere else? If so, link.
The title of this post?
Complete understatement.
I especially love how he leaves the comment about Dumbledore until the end, as if that wasn’t what he was most steamed about (aside from her being more successful, anyway).
Yes, Orson, we know that you make sure we know when characters are gay. Since your reason for doing this mostly seems to be making sure we are clear on why they are suffering, many of the “us” that make up that “we” aren’t terribly impressed.
I especially love how he leaves the comment about Dumbledore until the end, as if that wasn’t what he was most steamed about
You reckon? I did a quick google to see if “Uncle Orson” had commented at all on Rowling outing Dumbledore, but couldn’t find anything.
Yes, Orson, we know that you make sure we know when characters are gay. Since your reason for doing this mostly seems to be making sure we are clear on why they are suffering
Apparently Card thinks of himself as terribly broadminded and tolerant because he does include gay characters (all men, of course!) in his fiction.
How much active work has Card done on behalf of charities that are for the benefit of children everywhere? How much actual money has Card donated to charities for children? How much of his own property has Card had auctioned off for these charities?
What a dorkdong.
But we always knew that.
And one more thing? Where in what worlds do Ender’s Game and Harry Potter intersect? Other than they start as kids?
Hey! In which one does the ‘hero’ end up ruling the world(s) and in which one does the hero end up being a good husband and father and yanno, and having a job?
Love, C.
I’m probably in the minority here, but I don’t see misogyny, per se, in Card’s post. Unwarranted unpleasantness and spleen, and downright frothing vindictiveness, sure. What appears to be professional jealousy, definitely. A rambling and poorly-constructed argument, certainly. Bizarre interjections that are completely irrelevant (the gay thing).
Plus, a number of comparisons of apples to straw-oranges. (His descriptions of his & Rowling’s plots; and his assertion that ideas & plots receive the same sort of copyright protection as specific textual creations.)
He does include an egregious amount of baseless speculation about her motives and interests. This, along with hostile and contemptuous language, (“crock”, “insane”, “let herself be talked into”, “ingratitude, her vanity, her greed, her bullying of the little guy, and her pathetic claims of emotional distress”; pretty much the whole last part of the essay) is the closest I see as something that is misogynistic, because some of the phrases he uses are gendered and otherwise unsupported (“vanity”).
I certainly can *believe* he’s misogynistic, but I wouldn’t get that from this essay alone. (I would infer a lot of *other* negative things about him from this essay, though.) The whole certainly constitutes a very personal and very hostile attack on Rowling, but I don’t pull misogyny out of it: rather, that he is an unpleasant person with a significant grudge. I can speculate that it is sourced in his likely misogyny, but I didn’t see it in the text–except in “vanity”, for instance.
Am I missing something, or do we have a difference of opinion about what constitutes misogyny?
What a pretentious, puffed-up coward. When I have a gay character in my fiction, I say so right in the book. I don’t wait until after it has had all its initial sales to mention it.
I laughed at the hypocrisy of this statement for five full minutes because yeah he has GLBT characters in his work, until they are castrated or killed or mutilated. And he wants to say she’s wrong here? really?
His whole rant stinks of jealousy and hypocrisy, and the title of this post could not be more appropriate.
Ugh, I hate to even seem like I’m defending Card, but I just have to put in a plug for William Patry’s brief analysis of the case (with more in the comments section). Patry is one of the most respected authorities on US copyright law; he just finished writing a 7-volume treatise on the subject. He’s inclined to think it’s fair use, so long as the published version doesn’t go beyond the kinds of stuff he’s seen on the web one–”I haven’t spent a lot of time on the site and so don’t know if there is other material that might be infringing, but I don’t see how a list of spells with this type of commentary is anything other than fair use.”
(Sorry to derail a bit, I’m just overly-obsessed with intellectual property issues! Love the blog, thanks again for turning me on to L.T. Duchamp’s books!)
Laura: He does include an egregious amount of baseless speculation about her motives and interests. This, along with hostile and contemptuous language, (”crock”, “insane”, “let herself be talked into”, “ingratitude, her vanity, her greed, her bullying of the little guy, and her pathetic claims of emotional distress”; pretty much the whole last part of the essay) is the closest I see as something that is misogynistic, because some of the phrases he uses are gendered and otherwise unsupported (”vanity”).
I think that pretty much all of this is gendered: I don’t think that Card would have automatically assumed (as it appears he did) that the author bringing suit against a fan was in the wrong had this been a male writer; and I’m absolutely certain he would not have attacked a male writer in these terms.
Naamenblog: I laughed at the hypocrisy of this statement for five full minutes because yeah he has GLBT characters in his work, until they are castrated or killed or mutilated. And he wants to say she’s wrong here? really?
You know, fanfic about what would have happened to Dumbledore had Orson Scott Card been writing Harry Potter does have a certain venomous charm…
Yes, there are a number of folks who’ve looked at the fair use aspects. The problem is a case from the same circuit on a trivia book based on “Seinfeld”, which found that it was *not* fair use. The district court will be bound by the Second Circuit’s ruling in the Seinfeld case, so unless they can really distinguish the uses, it’s a problem. If Rowling wins and it goes to appeal, the Second Circuit might distinguish the Seinfeld case, or it would be great if they would just outright overturn it. But I’m not holding my breath.
x.trapnel: I hate to even seem like I’m defending Card, but I just have to put in a plug for William Patry’s brief analysis of the case (with more in the comments section).
I think we can agree that, whatever the merits of J. K. Rowling’s case, Orson Scott Card’s attack on her has none.
Patry is one of the most respected authorities on US copyright law; he just finished writing a 7-volume treatise on the subject. He’s inclined to think it’s fair use
Yes, but apparently he bases that on one look at one entry. (Also, he appears to be unaware that SVA asked Rowling’s permission to publish the Lexicon, was refused, and went ahead anyway.)
From a comment in Dave Langford’s February Ansible, it appears that despite SVA/RDR having persistently told Rowling/Rowling’s lawyers that if they wanted to see a copy of the Lexicon, they should go to the website and “hit Print”, the intended-for-publication Lexicon has been cleaned up a lot.
Dave Langford says: “When I checked, the on-line Lexicon’s 1500 words on Albus Dumbledore had about 300 words of direct quotation from Rowling (which seemed risky) and linked to a page with some 3000 words of quotes (which seemed suicidal). The same entry’s book version, as seen in PDF proof, has less than 70 words of mostly fragmentary quotation.”
It could be that SVA was stalling Rowling’s requests for a copy of the MS until he actually had worked his online Lexicon into something that was legally publishable.
And a further quote from Dave Langford, this time from the December 2007 Ansible:
Laura: I agree with Yonmei that the whole thing is gendered. This bit is super-gendered:
“Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.”
Ide Cyan – yes, that quote is highly gendered & sexist. somehow i missed it. in light of that highly sexist set of comments, his more non-gendered spleen comments take on a different (and more sexist) light.
I like how he “us”es that, thinking that her actions disgust “us.”
As for what he predicts will happen:
* And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch. In his dreams.
* 2. Rowling will be forced to pay Steven Vander Ark’s legal fees, since her suit was utterly without merit from the start. Not in this country. Her case is by no means “utterly without merit”; it is a fair use case which is highly fact-intensive and hard to determine at the outset. At any rate, this claim is by no means so frivolous and abusive of the judicial system that it would merit awarding attorney’s fees. That’s more common in some EU jurisdictions but in this country it requires highly abusive & stupid litigation. He’s just bloviating here, with zero knowledge.
… as for the fair use stuff:
(1) asking and being refused permission neither directly hurts nor helps your case for fair use.
(2) If they’re basing their litigation on the contents of the website, and the paper version is substantially less, then this will probably settle as soon as that is resolved.
I was just reading about this on today’s issue of the Ansible.
http://news.ansible.co.uk/a250.html
It amused me.
The cartoon’s worth a look too. :)
Headed on over to the Ansible which pointed me to this post by Neil Gaiman. Infinitely more sane than Card’s gibberings. And undermines one of the bits of floatsam that Card picked up for his screed: Gaiman describes one incident in which Nancy Stouffer clearly misrepresented his opinions, and ended up describing her allegations as “not just astoundingly badly written lunatic conspiracy theory nonsense, but easily disproven creepy nonsense”.
That case was tossed out fairly quickly — it’s funny that Card chose to bring it back up, especially since the charges are fairly different (legally).
And undermines one of the bits of floatsam that Card picked up for his screed
Yeah, because obviously I couldn’t undermine it in any way. My references are less sound than Neil Gaiman’s, right?
That case was tossed out fairly quickly — it’s funny that Card chose to bring it back up, especially since the charges are fairly different
Not at all funny, as I noted and explained in my post: this is exactly the style of argument that Orson Scott Card uses.
If they’re basing their litigation on the contents of the website, and the paper version is substantially less, then this will probably settle as soon as that is resolved.
Which makes me wonder if the reason SVA kept telling Rowling that the Lexicon published was going to be the contents of the website, was primarily to cause trouble. Whether he supposed he would really get sued (a lot of the BNF in Harry Potter fandom have an extraordinary sense of entitlement…).
It’s definitely gendered when he says Rowling made more money than Oprah or the Queen. Why those two? She made more money than tons of men too.
If you divide it up by categories, Rowling and the Queen are both British, but Oprah isn’t. Perhaps you can call Oprah and Rowling both ‘entertainment’, but then that leaves the Queen out.
If you’re going to discuss her work, then it’s only fair to compare her earnings to other writers. She may be topranked there. I was having trouble getting Forbes’ site to cooperate with me.
Perhaps it just doesn’t sound so condemning to say she made more money than Dan Brown.
That’s a good point – that he’s comparing three high-profile women who are all very rich. If he were comparing writer-to-writer, comparing J. K. Rowling to other writers who’ve earned large sums of money. (In the UK, that would be (Sunday Times Rich List 2007) Barbara Taylor Bradford, Jackie Collins, and Jeffrey Archer.)
I think there’s something lurking here about how women especially don’t deserve great wealth – that a rich woman whose fortune is independent of her husband (which is true of Elizabeth Windsor, though in her case it’s not as if it’s not family wealth) won’t be able to cope or will go bad or something.
It’s honestly really hard to tell with this whether Orson Scott Card is being stupid or smart. He’s widely supposed to be very smart, but mentioning Stouffer as an example of past plagiarism on the part of Rowling was not a smart thing to do – even if (as Laura Q evidently wasn’t) you are entirely unfamiliar with the incident, a brief examination of Stouffer’s presentation of her case tells you that it’s worthless.)
Did he pick out Oprah and the Queen as comparators with careful thought about how the mention of two very wealthy and very famous women would set up assocations with Rowling? Or did he just pick those two because that’s the way his mind works – he resents Rowling for being rich like he resents Oprah? (I find it hard to believe that an American would care enough about the Royal Family to resent the Queen. I do, of course, but then I’m British. Being anti-Royalist is sort of a passion.)
I suspect that at one point he saw some list or news article about the richest women in the world and that’s what stuck in his head.
I don’t like this sort of negative comparison with Oprah or the Queen. It’s saying that writers aren’t worthy of making more money than other entertainers or people with inherited wealth.
It’s disparaging to all writers if there’s the connotation that she _only_ wrote some _children’s_ books, so doesn’t deserve all that money for them.
okay, i take it all back! i had thought that this was mostly card just being a jerk but now i see the misogyny as well. in my defense i can only say that i have a miserable virus & my reading comprehension is sucky right now. so i had more of a gestalt impression of nastiness than any particular details.
honestly, i don’t know why i do this kind of thing. if i *know* someone is, in fact, a misogynistic homophobic wanker (and i was never disputing that he was, just not sure this article showed it), then why am i quibbling about whether X shows it or not? lawyerly training or internalized patriarchy? my partner complains about this nitpickiness of mine all the time. anyway sorry that i was a nitpicky ass. let the righteous bashing of orson scott card resume.
as for this: Yeah, because obviously I couldn’t undermine it in any way. My references are less sound than Neil Gaiman’s, right? — yonmei, are you being pissy with me? or am i mistaking your tone of type? at any rate, i didn’t follow the making light link because those threads are always so damn long. but, i didn’t doubt your reference, and i didn’t doubt that it refuted the plagiarism thing. i *did* go to the neil gaiman thing because i hadn’t seen it before, because i don’t regularly read it, and he sometimes has interesting things to say about copyright.
back to steam.
Laura, I hope you feel better soon. Drink plenty of liquids and get lots of sleep!
Yes, I was a bit pissy with you, but I appreciate that viruses do not make for good reading comprehension. Take care. Get well!
Several Fantasy sites that review, offer interviews, free books, etc. immediately jumped in to echo their 100% agreement with OSC. These sites are run and created by males, and whether boys are the largest number of their readers, their largest number of commentators by far are male. To be fair, an occasional male voice has protested too.
However, I will no longer read those sites — and one in particular, because I’m so tired of his a$$ki$$ing of certain male fantasy writers and his joy in finding anything negative to post about a woman who is connected with fantasy.
The playa hatin’ that Rowling has had to endure from so many directions is kinda tiresome too. It’s not only males, to be fair, who have expressed some of that. So many have seized on the Dumbledore revelation as their socially sanctioned excuse for doing so, and that is worse than tiresome. That is creepy.
So few writers who have made the sort of profits she’s earned from her writing have given back as she’s done, so much in terms of donations of time, energy and actual money. Or so it seems from over here.
Love, C.
The interesting thing to me is that Card’s rant was slashdotted, and the commenters on slashdot seem to have figured out at once that, regardless of the merits of Rowling’s legal case, Card is talking through his arse.
Yeah, Yonmei, we can definitely agree that OSC’s rant is hateful trash. Sigh.
“his editor’s own blog, Making Light”
Someone is confused; Beth Meacham, while a friend of ours, is not a blogger on Making Light.
Running an editorial department is not the same as being a particular author’s editor.
I would far rather attack Card for being a hypocrite in his quasi-misogynistic (although probably more geek populism) demagoguery, than ever put myself in the unenviable position of defending Rowling. Someone who, lets be clear, is taking action to both legitimize and direct state coercion in defense of utterly immoral and reprehensible law.
I should be able to call Rowling “scum of the earth” for living in a mansion and not say, using her riches to buy AKs for the poor of England or attacking the bourgeoisie with her bare hands, without being immediately accused of misogyny. That there are almost certainly WORSE people than Rowling in this world should make little difference, in that her prominence and the vociferousness of her defenders makes a critique of her actions all the more necessary. Much the same way that Obama deserves some serious verbal thrashing although, granted, he’s far better than most other democrats.
My worry is how quickly people jump to “can’t a woman make good without men attacking her” without first investigating whether the attack is motivated categorically or specifically. Obviously Card is a colossal dick, for uncountable reasons. And his attack is both shallow, specific, and tinged with the rampant misogyny that infects everything else he’s ever done. But. The slapdash way in which you respond to him threatens to leave the impression that his points are generated mainly through misogyny. When he can be a petulant self-aggrandizing asshole without it being centrally rooted in sexism. And come on, I think just about everyone on earth rolled their eyes when Rowling announced Dumbledor’s homosexuality in an out-of-text aside after she’d made her cash and already sealed the HP cannon.
I should be able to call Rowling “scum of the earth” for living in a mansion and not say, using her riches to buy AKs for the poor of England or attacking the bourgeoisie with her bare hands, without being immediately accused of misogyny.
Actually, Anon [Anarchas], I think that kind of ignorant hostility to a woman who is extremely wealthy is exactly rooted in misogyny. I say “ignorant hostility” because informed hostility would let you know that Rowling lives in Scotland, not in England. (Nor does the house she lives in look like a “mansion”, I have to say. Just a regular Edinburgh house, admittedly a large one.)
Comments such as “That there are almost certainly WORSE people than Rowling in the world” likewise suggest that your hostility to Rowling is rooted in testeria rather than actual thought: and “utterly immoral and reprehensible law” …good heavens, we are still discussing the issues of copyright/intellectual property, rather than torture, the death penalty, and genocide?
The slapdash way in which you respond to him threatens to leave the impression that his points are generated mainly through misogyny.
Uh huh. The slapdash way in which Card wrote his attack on Rowling confirmed for me that he was more concerned in flaming a materially-successful writer: the style of attack was misogynistic: your own slapdash response here, and your own ignorant hostility to Rowling, leaves the ugly confirmation that you are one of the misogynists who liked seeing Card write a “review” to “smack the uppity bitch”.
Further comments from you on these lines will be disemvowelled.
I was trying to reveal:
1) it’s possible to be hostile to someone ENTIRELY based on say class lines as opposed to gender lines
2) it’s alright to be horribly angry and dismissive of someone who is, in fact, less evil than 99.999 % of the rest of the world.
I persist in asserting that there’s more than enough righteous anger to go around. And that considering Intellectual Property “utterly immoral and reprehensible law” in no way inherently detracts from even more strenuous opposition to, say genocide.
Furthermore your presumptions are an attack upon the very idea of radical politics.
To posit a similar case, minus the class lines and the idiotic Card diatribes… consider Ursula K Le Guin. One of my main heroes and idols since pretty much forever and certainly a pretty damn successful author. I learned, much to my shock and surprise a year or so ago, that she’d used IP law proactively in some case or another (I forget the details), whereupon I felt deeply disillusioned and wrote some nasty, personally hurt, words about it.
Clearly Le Guin remains an extraordinary writer with far better politics than almost every other SF author or regular person out there. But she stopped being “a good person” to me on that day.
Is that “smacking the uppity bitch”? Or just having high standards?
But whatevs. Nevermind that I’ve pretty much called Card every vile name in existence and spent days systematically deconstructing his atrocious writing and attacking his character. Nevermind that I could theoretically be morally opposed to ANYONE possessing wealth.
If I claim a rich woman is behaving atrociously and throw down a few nasty words about it, I MUST hate all women. Geeze.
When I first heard about this lawsuit, my gut reaction was that it was frivolous – but then my brain kicked in and I realized that Rowling wasn’t filing the case in US court.
So it seems that you forgot “androcentric” in the title. Not only a misogynist homophobe – but one who thinks the world begins and ends in the US.
When you said Card claimed HP was inspired by Ender’s Game, I was confused. Because, what… They both have boy heroes? Who are… short? I had a hard time seeing the parallels. So I followed the link to try and figure out what parallels HE was seeing…
A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world.
…You are kidding me. You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.
Okay, one, quickly, HP is not ABOUT quidditch, and the life of the characters is not “dominated” by it except to the extent that any adolescent’s life is dominated by the preferred pastime (football, hockey).
But seriously, is… Is Card claiming to have invented the Oppressed Orphan archetype, the Chosen One archetype, the Wise Old Man archetype, and WORLD SAVING?!!!
…Okay, apparently like ninety percent of all fairy tales, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, comics, manga, and all YA fiction ever written is based on Ender’s Game. I did not know this. I wish Card luck in his impending lawsuits against the Grimm brothers and Charles Dickens.
Dani, the real absurdity of Orson Scott Card’s “parallel” between Ender’s Game and Harry Potter is that he’s off in the wrong park completely, and if he’d paid any attention at all to the case he used as an excuse to flame Rowling, he’d know that.
Rowling’s case against encyclopedia guy isn’t that he wrote a book that looked as if it might too strongly resemble Harry Potter: it’s that he produced an online resource that consisted mainly of direct quotes from Harry Potter, and told Rowling he was going to publish it.
It isn’t a question of “inspiration” at all – Naomi Novik’s dragons are fairly clearly inspired by Anne McCaffrey’s dragons, but McCaffrey is not about to sue Novik for picking up the idea of a soulbond formed at hatching between dragon and rider.
It is a question of “fair use” – is it legitimate to take lengthy quotes from someone else’s work and republish them without that person’s consent? Probably the online version – which was what Rowling had been told was to be published – wasn’t fair use. It appears that the actual version to be be published may well fall inside the “fair use” line, but neither the publishers nor the author were prepared to show Rowling the version they intended to publish until they were taken to court.
The whole “But I could claim Harry Potter was inspired by Ender’s Game blah blah blah!” is either Card being very, very stupid, or Card using deliberate misdirection to get his readers confused about Rowling’s court case.
Anonymous at 141.140.120.183 [Anarchas] – your comment was held in moderation because the other admins were aware I was away on holiday, and as my thread, it was mine to deal with you.
You claim: it’s possible to be hostile to someone ENTIRELY based on say class lines as opposed to gender lines
Oh yes, it’s possible. But irrelevant here, since Orson Scott Card is patently hostile towards Rowling because she’s a rich woman. It’s also possible to have white tigrons, too, but that’s not relevant to this argument either.
2) it’s alright to be horribly angry and dismissive of someone who is, in fact, less evil than 99.999 % of the rest of the world.
Of course. Orson Scott Card is not the evilest person in the world, but I’m angry at and dismissive of him nonetheless. Who argued otherwise?
I persist in asserting that there’s more than enough righteous anger to go around.
Still not seeing the relevance here. No one argued for any shortage of “righteous anger”; but flaming a woman for being a rich writer is hardly a “righteous rage”.
And that considering Intellectual Property “utterly immoral and reprehensible law” in no way inherently detracts from even more strenuous opposition to, say genocide.
If your argument here is that any writer who claims that they own their own words – that what a writer writes belongs to them – is “utterly immoral and reprehensible” then Orson Scott Card is more deserving of your ire than J. K. Rowling. Card has been venomously unpleasant about fanfic in the past: Rowling has in fact been reasonably pleasant and supportive.
The “intellectual property” law was invented because the simple law of copyright – “what I create, belongs to me, and I get to say what’s done with it” was not sufficient to allow big corporations to possess what other people created while working for them. Your assertion that a writer’s defense of her ownership of what she herself wrote is “utterly immoral and reprehensible law” is, to put it mildly, bloody nonsense.
Furthermore your presumptions are an attack upon the very idea of radical politics.
I have to admit, I was tempted to leave your comment lingering perpetually in moderation, as I’ve left a racist’s demand she should be allowed to call black people racist names without their being allowed to take offense: but this claim of yours allows me to link to one of my favourite essays by George Orwell, In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse. It’s about a completely different situation, of course – Orwell is writing in 1946 about a foolishly reprehensible action of Wodehouse’s in June 1941 – but Wodehouse was flamed for it at the time, and since, and the quote that relates to why Card is attacking Rowling and not Warner Brothers, who are a party to the case:
Or, in short – it is your presumptions that are an attack on radical politics. Flaming wealthy writers for being materially successful is not “radical” any more than, to quote Dr Greg House, it’s “nonconformist” to tattoo a Chinese character on your wrist, you wicked free thinker.
To posit a similar case, minus the class lines and the idiotic Card diatribes… consider Ursula K Le Guin. One of my main heroes and idols since pretty much forever and certainly a pretty damn successful author. I learned, much to my shock and surprise a year or so ago, that she’d used IP law proactively in some case or another (I forget the details), whereupon I felt deeply disillusioned and wrote some nasty, personally hurt, words about it.
…which, since you comment here anonymously, you obviously can’t link us to since that would spoil your anonymity, so we have no idea what you’re talking about. But I suspect that this is your confused recollection of your confused understanding at the time of the Cory Doctorow thing.
Clearly Le Guin remains an extraordinary writer with far better politics than almost every other SF author or regular person out there. But she stopped being “a good person” to me on that day.
Is that “smacking the uppity bitch”? Or just having high standards?
It suggests to me that you are the kind of person who easily thinks badly of successful women, since you admit you have no particular recollection of the details of the case, but you continue to think of Ursula K. Le Guin as “not a good person”. People with high standards for themselves don’t do this: so, yes, given the two options, you don’t have high standards, so your confused readiness to denounce Ursula K. Le Guin for something you neither understood at the time nor properly remember now, is far closer to “smack the uppity bitch”, even if you lack Card’s verve and eloquence. (Card probably claims to have “high standards”, too.)
But whatevs. Nevermind that I’ve pretty much called Card every vile name in existence and spent days systematically deconstructing his atrocious writing and attacking his character.
And no doubt among your fellow freshers at [private undergraduate liberal arts college], you are very well known for this. But again: you’ve chosen to comment here anonymously. The only thing we know of you here is your slapdash, ignorant, confused comments and that you log in from an IP address registered to [private undergraduate liberal arts college]. Your assertion, therefore, that you have a history of flaming Orson Scott Card is kind of pointless.
Nevermind that I could theoretically be morally opposed to ANYONE possessing wealth.
You could, but as you’re a student at a private liberal arts college, one would guess that this “moral opposition” really is purely theoretical. (You could be on the faculty, but I’d hope they have more sense.)
If I claim a rich woman is behaving atrociously and throw down a few nasty words about it, I MUST hate all women. Geeze.
Fortunately, having spent so much time deconstructing your nonsense, for this last I can point you to the Feminism 101 blog, and in particular, a post on the use of misogynistic language.
Finally: you may feel it’s “unfair” that I revealed your IP address and pointed out that I know where you’re a student. I do too, a bit, but I have to say that I find anonymous comments really completely annoying. It is not that much trouble to adopt an Internet handle, set up an e-mail address, and use it consistently – and presto! you are blogging/commenting with an identity that other people can refer to. While I have to admit that further comments by you will be ignored (or, if rude, disemvowelled) I will certainly re-edit your comments to add an Internet handle if you contact me to let me know what it is – and, if you prefer, to remove references to your college.
If it had not occurred to you till now that if you provide only your IP address, people will look up your IP address, let that be a lesson to you…
IP: 2) it’s alright to be horribly angry and dismissive of someone who is, in fact, less evil than 99.999 % of the rest of the world.
Yonmei: Of course. Orson Scott Card is not the evilest person in the world, but I’m angry at and dismissive of him nonetheless. Who argued otherwise?
Just FYI, I understood the commenter’s comment to refer back to Card’s contempt for Rowling — i.e., while Rowling isn’t the worst person in the world, it’s still okay to be angry at Rowling.
To that extent, I agree — There’s nothing wrong with picking and choosing our targets, and of course, sometimes we pick targets that are “less evil” than other targets along various axes.
But the commenter is still missing the point, because the question is, based on what criteria do we pick our targets? Are we truly picking targets based on “evil-ness” or are we picking targets based on some less savory quality, e.g., the target’s race or gender?
Yonmei et al have convincingly made the point that gender is a very, very large factor in Card’s choice. This is identifiable as sexism and misogyny.
The intellectual property commentary – I feel I have to weigh in here.Yonmei quite properly points out several key pieces of analysis that are essential to radical analysis of IP.
(1) Ownership and transfer of ownership to corporations / employers;
(2) the class of creators. Creators are, in this sense of having wealth but not necessarily being fully class-privileged, are very much like athletes & entertainers. The athlete & entertainer analysis should be familiar to anyone who looks at the intersection of class, wealth, and race. [One key distinction, not relevant here but I don't want to ignore it, is that writers generally have a higher class-of-origin profile than athletes.]
And I’ll add two others, because I think that the commenter should complexify their analysis of IP issues:
(3) While some kinds of IP disputes might be clear, bright lines kind of ethical issues, which we IP activists like to champion, that’s only some kinds of IP disputes. There’s usually a lot more to the dispute than the simple issue that gets media attention or even added to the court documents. By far most IP issues that make it to litigation are morally much greyer and have the character of business disputes. It is silly to, for example, simply assume that the plaintiff is always evil in an IP dispute. Litigation is a late step in a long dispute that often involves wrongs on both sides, and moreover, the “sides” are typically business interests.
(4) Even when parties to a dispute are truly individuals, not simply business interests, it is also silly to black-and-white characterize people based on one position in one instance. You don’t generally know the full fact situation; and you don’t know their other positions.
For instance, Le Guin was one of the writers on a writers amicus brief arguing against copyright term extension, a much better copyright position than 99% of successful SF writers. For another example, some writers have been “fine” with fan works until they were forced by various exigencies to take a more limited approach, and the available limitations are not always within the writers’ control.
(5) Finally, even when a case has free expression issues, it is absolutely silly and reductive to assign moral judgments to the parties based on the implications for free expression / fair use case law. As I said above, there is usually a lot more to the dispute than you know; the parties usually involve significant business interests of corporations, not individual interests and free decisions; and the individuals involved likely have a lot of ethics and personal beliefs they have balanced to come to their actions.
Update: The anonymouse agreed to be identified as “anarchas”.
You’re mistaken he is not homophobic, you need to read his books to understand his fantastical Greek visions. He loves boys and girls, the delightful fancy of his Ender’s series is naked children warriors floating in zero-G to relax without shame, weeeeeeeee
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What part of it was mysoginistic? I just thought it was that he thought she sucked for being her, not for being a woman.
I also agree with the comment about her choice of outing Dumbeldore. I mean yeah, OSC is a homophobe, but he has a point. Even after rereading HP i dont see any real reason to think he was gay, atleast not anymore so than any other old wizard charecter in any other book (saruman or gandalf). I think it was cowardly to not have it more clear just to avoid controversy.
Lastly I think it remains true that there isnt much in Rowling ouevre other than HP.
I apologize in advance for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors
Sohail What part of it was mysoginistic
This is discussed in more detail in the above thread: suggest that you read the discussion.
I think it was cowardly to not have it more clear just to avoid controversy.
I don’t know if Rowling did it just to avoid controversy. I don’t know why Rowling never let Dumbledore come out (or even be outed after his death) in the novels, rather than leaving it subtextual and “open to interpretation”.
Lastly I think it remains true that there isnt much in Rowling ouevre other than HP.
It’s true that writing Harry Potter is what seems to have eaten up all of J. K. Rowling’s attention since she became a published writer. I rather hope in years to come (especially after reading this Commencement Address) that we’ll find out what else she may write. That comment came from pure professional jealousy on OSC’s part – exacerbated, I don’t doubt, that a mere woman was the one to write the children’s bestseller of this generation.
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