Tag: #YesAllWomen

Comics, Conventions, Sci Fi10 Comments

Yes, All Geek Men

Shawn Taylor

This culture of ours saved my life. This isn’t an exaggeration. If not for Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, comic books, Isaac Asimov, and Dr. Who, I would probably be dead. I grew up in a neighborhood where the idea of dreaming outside of the concrete, glass, and busted elevators that encroached on my every day was damn near forbidden — it could also get you killed. Dreaming above your station was discouraged as you didn’t want others to think you were better than them. If they were in the shit, so were you. So in secret, I visited fantastic worlds — these worlds kickstarted my dream machinery, inviting me to see beyond what I thought were my limits.

Fiction has a way of doing that. It forces you to imagine worlds so very different than your own — and want to live there.

As I got more into SF (my catchall designation for all the outré things we love), not just as a consumer but also as a creator, I started to see just how amazing this stuff ours is. The potential for SF to affect real world change was absolutely astonishing. But the thing is, most of these changes happen only in the realm of the object. Cellular phones, teleconferencing, mobile digital health monitoring — all these things delivered on the promise of SF. These were delivered in tangible forms.  What disturbed was that the human element stayed contemporarily human.

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Guest Post3 Comments

Feminism is our Superpower

Guest N.O.C.

by Marjorie Liu

What can I add that hasn’t already been said? Not much, I suppose. There’s been an amazing symphony of voices on the internet, keeping alive the reality, the truth, that so many would prefer to ignore: that misogyny continues to thrive in every corner of the world. It is reflected back on us women every day, in a million different ways, and while it’s easy to point the finger at other countries and say, “Look at the way they treat women!” we all must know, deep down, that here in America we put into practice the same patterns of hate and ownership, and entitlement.

A pregnant woman was just stoned to death in Pakistan for marrying a man against her family’s wishes — but that happens here in America, all the time, with just slightly different players. Google “boyfriend kills pregnant girlfriend” and you’ll see a list of unending deaths. We read in horror about how rapists in other countries are let off easy by “corrupt authorities,” but what about our legal system? It’s just as monstrous towards victims of sexual assault. Check out this imagined, but very real, conversation — what if mugging were treated like rape is in the eyes of the law — found at the @femusingsteam twitter feed:

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