The anthology in question did not just contain the 10 best short stories in SF written. It actually commissioned some stories to be included, as well. That's three leaps and a trans-Atlantic flight away from what your hypothetical anthology is. So the two situations are not entirely comparable, and the imagined response to one should not be simply grafted onto the expected response from the other.
Second, I get what you're saying about the tone of voice adding to the negative emotional response for someone who already started reading the topic on the other side of the line, so to speak. I get that.
But consider this: this is not the first time that this person has had to explain, justify, and defend her position on the inclusiveness of SF/F literature. I think we're each one of us allowed some time to be fatigue over the constant, incessant, and rather repetitive job of expounding on this issue. I know that when I talk to people on gay issues, I used to worry a lot about whether I can convince them to "my side." After a while, I just got too tired to care. Somebody thinks that homosexuality is the same as pedophilia? Well, if I'm in a good mood, I'll engage, and if I'm not, I'll just mock and ridicule. At the end of the day, it's not my fucking job to get them to be better human beings. Yes, I know, to make headway, we have to get more people convinced and allied on our side. I really do know, and most of the time I try very hard not to call those stupid ignorant troglodytes for what they are to their ugly faces. Still, once in a while, I'm just so fucking tired and irked that I *still* have to convince someone that being gay is not the same as fucking dogs. You know?
Third, I think if your hypothetical anthology is about the 10 most influential SF short stories, you might have a chance of defending the absence of women (I'm more skeptical of the absence of PoC). I think if the criteria is "best written" or "most entertaining," I think it'd be odd to not see a single author deviating from the mold of the straight white men.
Finally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to become suspicious of your own metrics of evaluation after someone else points out the possible blinders that you might have on in your selection process. If, after due consideration, you really do believe that the 10 best SF short stories do not have one that was written by someone other than a straight white man, then you can enumerate your reasoning and show others the steps you took in your evaluation. That way, people can see your deliberation and if your reasoning is sound and your evaluation subjective, others can see how you get to your conclusion without being affected by sexism or heterocentrism.
In essence, this is the same challenge for managers or college admissions offices: as long as they have an objective procedure that they follow and that the procedure is tested for absence of biases, then if the end result is the exclusion of minority, then they are not attacked as unfairly biased. The monkey wrench in this, two of them actually, is that literary criticism is difficult to set up objective standards for. The proliferation of argument amongst literary critics on one work or another is proof of that. And the second problem is that for some people, even these precautions are not enough. There'll always be a few who are indeed unreasonable in their expectations, and it's impossible to please them. As long as you start the process with a well-reasoned protocol that you strife to keep free of biases, then you can feel justified in your defense of the outcome. That's the best you can hope for.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 01:53 am (UTC)The anthology in question did not just contain the 10 best short stories in SF written. It actually commissioned some stories to be included, as well. That's three leaps and a trans-Atlantic flight away from what your hypothetical anthology is. So the two situations are not entirely comparable, and the imagined response to one should not be simply grafted onto the expected response from the other.
Second, I get what you're saying about the tone of voice adding to the negative emotional response for someone who already started reading the topic on the other side of the line, so to speak. I get that.
But consider this: this is not the first time that this person has had to explain, justify, and defend her position on the inclusiveness of SF/F literature. I think we're each one of us allowed some time to be fatigue over the constant, incessant, and rather repetitive job of expounding on this issue. I know that when I talk to people on gay issues, I used to worry a lot about whether I can convince them to "my side." After a while, I just got too tired to care. Somebody thinks that homosexuality is the same as pedophilia? Well, if I'm in a good mood, I'll engage, and if I'm not, I'll just mock and ridicule. At the end of the day, it's not my fucking job to get them to be better human beings. Yes, I know, to make headway, we have to get more people convinced and allied on our side. I really do know, and most of the time I try very hard not to call those stupid ignorant troglodytes for what they are to their ugly faces. Still, once in a while, I'm just so fucking tired and irked that I *still* have to convince someone that being gay is not the same as fucking dogs. You know?
Third, I think if your hypothetical anthology is about the 10 most influential SF short stories, you might have a chance of defending the absence of women (I'm more skeptical of the absence of PoC). I think if the criteria is "best written" or "most entertaining," I think it'd be odd to not see a single author deviating from the mold of the straight white men.
Finally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to become suspicious of your own metrics of evaluation after someone else points out the possible blinders that you might have on in your selection process. If, after due consideration, you really do believe that the 10 best SF short stories do not have one that was written by someone other than a straight white man, then you can enumerate your reasoning and show others the steps you took in your evaluation. That way, people can see your deliberation and if your reasoning is sound and your evaluation subjective, others can see how you get to your conclusion without being affected by sexism or heterocentrism.
In essence, this is the same challenge for managers or college admissions offices: as long as they have an objective procedure that they follow and that the procedure is tested for absence of biases, then if the end result is the exclusion of minority, then they are not attacked as unfairly biased. The monkey wrench in this, two of them actually, is that literary criticism is difficult to set up objective standards for. The proliferation of argument amongst literary critics on one work or another is proof of that. And the second problem is that for some people, even these precautions are not enough. There'll always be a few who are indeed unreasonable in their expectations, and it's impossible to please them. As long as you start the process with a well-reasoned protocol that you strife to keep free of biases, then you can feel justified in your defense of the outcome. That's the best you can hope for.